IrateRapScallion
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Chapter 107
🕑 Added 2021-03-08 07:07:02 +0000 UTC[This is the last chapter before my break. Going to rest up and come back strong in April. See y'all around!]
The Flying Toaster gently swayed back and forth as the air currents buffeted its gargantuan form. The oscillation proved just enough to make Blake mildly seasick, which he would normally have remedied the same way he used to deal with car sickness back in the day: by staring out at the distant horizon to steady his stomach. Unfortunately, though he sat within feet of the airship’s helm, there was no horizon in sight right now. Normally, a span of windows ran from the back left of the cabin around the front to the back right side, providing an expansive view in two hundred and seventy degrees. For this flight, however, those windows were coated with a film of opaque tucrenyx, partly out of consideration for the wellbeing of his passenger and partly for the wellbeing of his floors.
Over the course of several trips, Gabriela Carreno had single-handedly made Blake grateful he’d never gotten around to installing carpet throughout his precious zeppelin. Given how much work it took to clean her copious vomit on these metal floors—and that didn’t even consider the smell—he couldn’t imagine trying to get it out of a thick, luxurious rug. That was why he’d consented to her request to block all the windows for this trip. It wasn’t like he needed the view to pilot, anyway. A single viewscreen hooked up to a swiveling camera placed on the ship’s bow did the job well enough for the moment. He just liked the view.
Gabriela did not. Even with the windows sealed off so she could best pretend that they weren’t floating a thousand feet in the air, the woman looked to Blake’s eyes to be barely holding herself together. Blake had never dealt with somebody confronting a severe phobia head-on like this before, and he honestly didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t even know why she was here. He knew from experience that she could easily outrun the airship, even if he threw every last bit of power into its engines. She could have just sprinted north and relaxed for a while until he caught up.
Perhaps the reason she’d decided to ride along pertained to the third person in the cabin, though Blake often failed to think of the Many in that way. It was so easy to forget that they were human, given how... inhuman their presence felt. They were more like statues of living flesh, barely breathing, much less moving.
As was the plan, he’d brought a Many along, just in case Sofie appeared during this trip. Given how heavy-handed in his life Murphy’s Law seemed to be since the transfer, that meant that she’d definitely show up. And, whether or not his foolish idea worked, Gabriela would need the Many to communicate with the others on the way back.
So far, the Many remained as motionless as ever, seemingly unfazed by any rocking, swinging, swaying, or assorted turbulence that they came across so far. Blake idly wondered how often they had to eat, or how long before they would need to poop. He hadn’t brought any Many handlers along, since nobody could know about his current even-worse-than-normal condition, so if anything happened, it was up to the two of them—meaning Gabriela, while he provided moral support—to take care of any issues.
It wasn’t that he was totally useless right now; he could still manipulate metal, create circuits, and operate preexisting technology without issue. Heck, even the fiery pain, which assaulted him every time he entered Hyper Mode since Sofie’s attack, had gradually faded with each passing day to the point where it now was just a bad case of heartburn. But all that said, he still could barely even move his arm, the vile foe known as gravity always there to thwart him.
Back on Earth, Blake had treated his body like crap. More so, he’d taken it for granted. Getting a new and improved body upon arrival on Scyria hadn’t helped; even when he’d lost part of his left arm to Jarec’s obsidian blade, he’d largely shrugged it off. But after his encounter with Sam, everything had changed. It turned out, shockingly enough, that having half your body suddenly stolen away really made you appreciate what you’d once had.
Now, he was experiencing that same feeling all over again. Lacking the ability to even lift his one remaining arm, he found himself pining for the days of mere partial-paralysis. If, through some miracle, he ever regained a functioning body, he swore to cherish it like the priceless treasure that it was. A proper diet, exercise, yoga, coffee enemas... the works.
To manage that, however, he needed to survive the upcoming year. Or month. Or week, to be honest. That was why he had decided to powered-wheelchair his ass directly in front of a dragon’s maw.
Some would say that willingly bothering a dragon, especially one with which you already have bad blood, is pure suicidal stupidity. Some had said it, straight to his face. But Blake’s options were limited at this point; If the Stragmans wouldn’t help him, he only had two remaining: kidnap their healer or find another one.
The former option was more a pipe dream than a real possibility, sadly. There were over ten million Stragmans in their massive migrating city, and he had no idea where they were hiding the one person in there who could help him. They probably moved the healer around, too, to make it harder to find them. And even if he did manage to locate them, extracting them would still pose a heavy challenge. A super-dense rainforest was practically kryptonite to complicated machines like skitters. And even if he succeeded, what guaranteed that the rescued Stragman healer would even be willing to help him?
That left a highly violent and angry dragon as his only option. Blake knew full well that this was indeed crazy, reckless, and tantamount to jumping from a plane without a parachute. But his calculus had changed since the last episode, and the sensations he’d felt from his body since had only confirmed his original decision as the right one.
Not for the first time, Blake found himself wishing he had a Scyrian body. He had always been jealous of the remarkable healing ability Scyrians exhibited. Given that it was apparently normal not just for humans, but for elves and beastkin as well, he didn’t believe it to be biological in nature. According to Arlette, the theory most widely believed in Scyrian academia—or at least, most widely believed two decades ago, when she’d last learned about it—was that Scyrians had a form of subconscious Feeling going on at all times. In the back of their minds, they knew what their body felt like, and they unknowingly would revert themselves back to what they felt to be “right” and “normal”.
It explained why injuries like lost limbs couldn’t be healed, while other heavy wounds could be completely recovered from in a matter of days. Losing a body part would be enough to shock a person and recompile their subconscious feeling of what their body’s “normal” was. After all, it would be hard to maintain the old “normal” when you can’t see or feel or use your arm anymore. Blake would know.
It also explained why such a filthy world wasn’t rampant with disease. In fact, there seemed to be almost no disease at all, with the only known ones being both incredibly strong and incredibly rare. He could only surmise that anything under a certain threshold of deadliness would simply be no match for the combination of an immune system and that subconscious healing.
Sadly, since Earthlings in Scyria couldn’t Feel or Observe like Scyrians could, they couldn’t heal like Scyrians either. They were, however, superhumanly tough. This, he could attest to personally. A normal Earthling would have died from the aftermath of losing an arm, but he hadn’t. The knife to the back, as well, should have done him in. The others had corroborated his thoughts. Even Sofie, the weakest physically of the three of them, had been able to soldier through extended periods of little to no food, water, and sleep without breaking down.
But even a superhumanly tough body had its limit, and it seemed that Blake had found it. He was little more than a mind in a lump of meat at this point, barely able to breathe, let alone move. Once-simple acts he’d always taken for granted were beyond him now. Ever since waking up from his Sofie-induced slumber, he’d lacked the physical strength to effectively talk. Despite his hopes, his body had not regained the strength he needed for full-throated speech; the opposite had happened, in fact. Only Scyria’s strange but fortuitous “meaning transferal” allowed him to communicate efficiently now through a smattering of wheezes, sighs, weak coughs, gasps, and grunts.
He heard a small gasp behind him, the sort he’d grown to recognized as a Many roughly emerging from their stupor.
“Hello? Is anybody there?” a meek and muffled female voice called out. Blake swiveled his chair around to find a half-size Sofie projected in midair, her voice, face, and body language combining to make her the personification of contrition. He immediately noticed the grey metal collar around her neck and felt a flash of satisfaction. He’d trusted that Arlette would follow his command in this matter, and she had justified his trust in her.
The bulky collar, more than two inches thick and over an inch tall all the way around her neck, looked almost comical on Sofie’s slight frame. Nothing could be done about that, sadly. He’d needed that much metal to house and protect the cantacrenyx crystals needed to power the device’s different functions, especially the choking one. That was one of the limitations of crystal tech: the size of the crystal often dramatically impacted the forms of what they powered, sometimes for the worse.
The rest of Sofie didn’t look anywhere near as well-off as his shiny new restraint collar. The younger woman looked worn out and beaten down, her face sunken in and her body thinned out. The puffiness around her eyes told him she’d been crying heavily not too long ago. Looking closer, he felt confusion at what appeared to be a large quantity of cloth stuffed into her mouth.
The illusory Sofie was focused on Gabriela, who had been lying right in front of the Many. Blake, being farther away and off to the side, was outside what would be shown on her end. For the moment, he decided to stay out of view. Who knew what the girl was capable of, and how unstable she might be? Better to wait and see for now. He wouldn’t survive another incident.
“Sofie, you’re back!” Gabriela exclaimed, sitting up in a flash. Climbing to her feet—or to one foot, to be more accurate—she hopped over to the Many and pulled aside the veil covering the face to let Sofie see her. “What happened to you?! You look terrible! What’s that thing around your neck? And is that a cloth stuffed in your mouth?”
“It’s a long story,” Sofie deflected. “I’m sorry, Gabby. I’m sorry for hurting you and for everything else. I won’t ever do it again, I promise.”
“It was an accident,” Gabriela replied like a mother comforting a child.
“You’re really not mad at me?” Sofie asked with a sniff, puzzled but hopeful. “Arlette is furious at me right now.”
“I know what it’s like to make big mistakes and then have to live with them,” Gabriela said softly. “I wouldn’t hate you for something you didn’t do maliciously. But please, tell me you know a way to let me stand properly again.”
“I... I don’t know if I do,” Sofie admitted. “I thought I found something that worked, but then it didn’t work for Arlette, so I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I was hoping you would let me try and figure out what’s happening.”
“Please, you have no idea how annoying this is.”
“Okay, here goes. I hope this works through a Many...” Sticking her fingers in her mouth, Sofie pulled out what looked like two balled-up socks. She seemed to collect herself as she took a long, deep breath. “I forgive you.”
Blake couldn’t help himself and let out a long scathing wheeze—as scathing as wheezes could be, at least. “Excuuuuuuuuussssssseeeeee me?! You what?!”
Sofie’s pensive expression twisted into a scowl. “Blake?! Were you here this whole time? I should have known! Show yourself, you asshole!”
“You forgive her?!” he repeated mockingly as he wheeled himself into view, pulling up so he sat at Gabriela’s side. “Of all the self-righteous bullshit you’ve spouted, this takes the cake!”
“Fuck off, Blake! It’s not like I chose to make it work like that!”
“Sure you didn’t,” he scoffed with a roll of his eyes. “You’ve never been one to judge others. Not Sofie, paragon of virtue!”
“Oh stuff it up your butt!” Sofie snarled, throwing him double deuces before turning her attention back to Gabriela. Taking the two socks, she furiously shoved them back into her mouth until she almost looked like a chipmunk. “You want to know why I’m talking with these socks in my mouth? It’s because he and Arlette made me wear this!” She pointed to her neck, and the thick, powerful safety device wrapped around it. “All it takes is for me to say ‘don’t’ just once by accident and it strangles me! Or it might explode! This is the only way for me to not kill myself! So you can eat shit, Blake!”
Catching Gabriela adding her own glare to Sofie’s, he met them with contempt.
“What? You’re already on her side? Don’t give me that look!” he hissed back at the scowling Mexican. “After all that she did, you think I’m going to let her back into my house without some protection?!”
“You know I didn’t do it on purpose!” Sofie spat. “Now I have to wear this stupid uncomfortable piece of crap everywhere just so I can see my friends again. It’s bullshit! It’s hard to move my neck and it gets sweaty on the inside and I can’t even imagine what it’s going to feel like to try to sleep with it on. Even your code phrases are bullshit! Only you would have somebody say ‘crunchatize me, Captain’ to make this thing stop choking me.”
“I needed something that nobody would ever say in a conversation,” he told her.
“What the hell does it even mean?”
“It means I miss eating a part of a complete breakfast,” he replied with an extra layer of snark and a roll of his eyes. “Enough with the bitching. There’s nothing I can do from here, regardless. Now, did your forgiveness work or not?”
“It’s not my-” Sofie shook her head. “You know what, forget it. Yes, I felt something happen. Try putting your leg down.”
Slowly, gingerly, Gabriela lowered her leg until her foot hovered just a fraction of an inch above the floor. The whole leg trembled slightly for a moment before the sole crossed the final gap and pressed firmly against the metal. Everybody seemed to tense, waiting for something to happen, but it soon became apparent that nothing had.
“It worked!” Gabriela chirped happily.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Sofie sighed. “Did anything feel different or something?”
“Yeah, it felt like there was a lot of resistance, like my body didn’t want to move my leg,” Gabriela said as she lifted herself up on the balls of her feet and lowered back down. “Especially the last few centimeters. I had to really fight through it.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to Arlette?” Sofie wondered aloud. “I should go talk to her again...”
“Not before you fix me, too!” Blake cut in.
“I should just leave you as you are, jerk,” Sofie replied.
“Meaning confined to a wheelchair, unable to move? Too weak to even speak properly?”
Sofie paused, his question sinking into that thick head of hers and making some. She swallowed weakly, worry quickly overtaking her anger. “Is... is it that bad? That’s why you’re... talking so weirdly?”
“Did you think I’m doing this for fun?” he hissed. “You made me bleed out so much that everybody’s amazed I’m even still alive.”
Sofie paled and he got a front row view as her anger towards the indignity he’d forced upon her and her guilt as what she’d done to him wrestled for control. Guilt won. “I’m sorry-”
“I don’t want your apologies,” he cut her off. “I want you to fix me. Free me so, at the very least, this won’t ever happen to me again.”
His words were like a slap in the face, and she visibly flinched before deflating slightly, tired and defeated. “Alright, fine, I forgive you,” she sighed so softly that Blake barely caught it.
“Alright, we’ve all been hurt by this, but it’s over now,” Gabriela said in an effort to mediate. “We can’t let mistakes tear us apart.”
Sofie’s attention moved back to the other woman and she froze, her gaze stuck on Gabriela’s lower half. “Um, Gabby?”
“Hm?” Gabriela replied, confused.
Blake looked over and immediately understood Sofie’s concern. “You’re standing on one leg again.”
Gabriela glanced down in surprise, finding her foot and leg—the other one this time—raised high. “Oh, I am! Whoops!” With a loud clang, she brought it back down. “I don’t know why I did that.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Sofie moaned in frustration. “Maybe it’s because it’s through a Many? Please let me know if anything else strange happens later. Or better yet, turn around and come pick me up. You’re going to try to get Pari again, right? I can help.”
“We are going up there again,” Blake admitted, “which is why you definitely can’t come along. Ol’ Grandpappy might be more reasonable without you around.”
“But-!” She let out a sigh. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know how, but he could tell that I’d put geasa onto Pari. Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to get her back this time, alright? Please?”
“I’ll be ready for him this time,” Gabriela assured her. “We’ll get her back.”
“Thank y-” Sofie began before halting to let out another sigh. “Your leg is up again.”
“Wha? What is with this?” Gabriela let out a grunt and her foot shot down to strike the floor hard enough to send tremors through the airship.
“Hey, watch it! Don’t hurt my baby! She’s fragile!” Blake chided.
“It just feels... normal to have it in the air,” she stated with some frustration. “My leg keeps going back up when I’m not thinking about it.”
The already small Sofie seemed to shrink in on herself a little more. “I... I should go. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s-” Gabriela tried to say, but Sofie was already gone, the Many slumping down into their usual stupor. She walked forward and readjusted the veil to cover the Many’s face before rounding back to Blake with a frown of discontent.
“Do you two have to squabble over everything like petty children?” she asked.
“Yes,” Blake succinctly replied.
“Ugh,” Gabriela said with a shake of her head as she retreated to a nearby wall and leaned her back against it. “How much longer until we’re there?”
“Another full day, at least,” he told her.
“Ugh!” she repeated. “I hate being up here.”
“I don’t know why you even decided to come along for the ride,” Blake said, putting voice to his earlier musing. “I know you can run faster than this thing can fly.”
“I haven’t been able to push myself like that ever since we fought. I don’t know why,” she admitted. “I told you before, I don’t have the same energy I used to. Everything is harder now. Even if it wasn’t, how would you like to sprint full-throttle for a full day? Does that sound enjoyable to you?”
“Not normally, no,” he agreed. “But, if the second option was to have a prolonged panic attack, then I’d run my tail off. I can’t help but notice how little ‘enjoying’ you’ve been doing in here.”
“Well, I also wanted to be here in case Sofie did appear. I didn’t think the chances of it happening were very high, but now I’m glad I did. You don’t know how annoying that one-foot thing was. And fighting like that? Fighting a dragon is hard enough without a handicap.”
“Yeah, about that,” he replied. “I have bad news for you.”
Gabriela looked down and let out a loud groan at the discovery of her right foot hovering in the air. Frustration flashed in her eyes and the foot returned to the floor.
“It really is like it’s become your new normal,” he observed. “You keep subconsciously returning to it when you aren’t paying attention.”
The sight brought with it worries. What did Gabriela’s issues mean for him? Was there some restriction that he didn’t know about, still messing with his thoughts? He didn’t feel any different, so he could only trust Sofie’s word that she had cleansed him. He didn’t think she was the type to lie about these sorts of things, especially not while swamped with guilt, but still, having to rely on the promises of another concerning something so intrinsic to his very being bothered him.
“Maybe it will go away soon?” she wondered, more pleadingly than anything else.
“I hope so. We’re going to need you at full power, or as close to that as you can get now, in just a couple of days.”
“Do you have a plan?” she asked.
“I have a plan to get into his lair and a plan for what happens next, but they’re both pretty much shots in the dark,” he admitted. “We just don’t know enough to make any surefire strategies.”
“Then why the rush?”
Blake paused and mulled over his answer. He hadn’t told anybody yet, but strangely enough, he felt like she, his once-sworn nemesis, deserved to know. He hated to show weakness, but she was here to ride into battle with him when nobody else was.
“There’s a reason. A reason I haven’t told anybody,” he told her. “I don’t have much time to gather information anymore. I think I’m dying.”
Gabriela gasped.
“Ever since I got to this world, my body has taken hit after hit. First, I lost my arm. Then, I lost the use of my lower half. That injury started giving me attacks where I would seize up in tremendous pain. Then, you nearly put me into a coma. Then, Sofie did put me into a coma. She put me on a precipice, and then one last attack pushed me over the edge.
“I realized it last night. I can feel it. My body is losing what little vitality it had left and everything is getting harder and harder. At some point, just breathing will become too taxing for this sad excuse for a mortal shell, and that will be that. The only question is how much longer I have left... unless I can convince the one being on Scyria who might have the biological know-how to heal me to do so before that time runs out.”
“How much time do you think you have?”
“I don’t know. Two weeks? Three? Could be less. Who can say, really? Maybe I’ll nosedive tomorrow and that will be that.”
“That’s... I’m so sorry,” she said, seemingly not sure what to say to a man declaring his own demise.
Blake didn’t blame her. Being the one to talk about your own death felt no less awkward. “Yeah, well... I’m not dead yet,” he said flatly with an attempted air of dismissal. It didn’t seem to work.
“Why haven’t you told anybody?”
“Who? Sam would probably take joy in the news. Arlette would start obsessing over stuff she can’t control anyway. And Sofie would take it personally, and I just don’t see the point in driving that stake through her heart. She’ll just blame herself for it all and fall apart even more. Remember what Pari’s death did to her? She didn’t even have anything to do with that and she fell to pieces.”
“But she did make you like this,” Gabriela pointed out.
“Yeah, but maybe I would have still been fine if you hadn’t wrecked me last spring, or if I didn’t take a knife to the back a week after my arrival, or whatever. She was just the latest in a long parade of punishment that began when I got here, really. And more so, unlike the rest of you, she didn’t do it on purpose.”
Gabriela averted her gaze, uncomfortable with the current topic, as Blake pushed on.
“When I first got here, I didn’t know I had superhuman strength. So on the second day, I shoved a woman so hard that I caved her head in on a stone pillar. I mean, she was trying to kill me, but still, I hadn’t meant to murder somebody at the time. So, personally, I’m trying to rationalize the anger I feel about Sofie right now by reminding myself that she almost definitely didn’t know what she was doing.”
Gabriela continued to stare off to the side, but he could see the troubled memories replaying themselves in her mind. “The first person I saw when I arrived here died to my hands. I don’t think I even made it a minute before it happened.”
“A minute... wow, really?”
“I didn’t know where I was and my children were suddenly gone, replaced by these strangely dressed people. I panicked. I only meant to grab him by the shoulders, but it was like squeezing dough through my fingers. He was dead before I even knew what was going on.”
“Yeesh.”
“I tell myself that I didn’t know, and it makes it a bit easier. But that excuse only works for that one man, not the other people I’ve hurt and killed, like you.”
“If you’re going to say you’re sorry, don’t bother,” Blake cut in. “We were two people fighting on opposite sides. That’s how it works. You tried to kill me, I tried to kill you. I did kill you, kind of, dozens of times. I don’t blame you for what you did.”
“Really? I didn’t expect you to be so forgiving about me and everything else,” she admitted.
“I know I’m generally a bitter, spiteful asshole, but I just don’t see the point in being petty right now. Maybe it’s the whole ‘on death’s door’ bit messing with me. As for you, you drove me up the wall when we were foes, but once the war was over, the war was over.”
“I would have killed you if Sofie had not appeared. That’s a fact. I never expected that you would be willing to let me live in your castle.”
“Yeah, well, Sofie had a hand in that at the start,” he conceded. “Still, of all my unwanted guests, you’ve been the best. I’d say we’ve gotten along since then far better than anybody expected, given the whole killing each other thing.”
“It’s because we understand each other better than we do the others,” Gabriela remarked.
“How so?”
“We’re the two loneliest, most miserable people in the entire city,” she stated with a pained smile.
Blake let out a forlorn, wheezing chuckle. “Shit... we are, aren’t we? Even Arlette found love, somehow. Fucking hell.”
“You swear too much,” she told him.
“Swearing is fun!” he shot back. “And it adds needed emphasis to my words!”
“It’s vulgar and disrespectful.”
“Fine, I’ll tone it down a little for your delicate Christian ears. Christian, right? Catholic?”
“Catholic,” she confirmed with a frown.
“I find it nuts that you would still stick with religion after everything that’s happened,” Blake grunted. “Just the existence of another universe should be all the evidence you need to drop that crap in the garbage where it belongs.”
Her frown deepened. “My faith is none of your business,” she said flatly.
“Oh, come on! You said it yourself: we’re the two loneliest people in Wroetin, and now we’re all alone for an extended time with nothing to do. Why not open up a bit, get to know each other better, and maybe push ourselves to the fifth and sixth loneliest people? It’s not like we have anything better to do. Plus, I would note that you’ve been too distracted since we started talking to freak out about being a thousand feet off the ground.”
Blake winced as her fingers dug into the wall behind her. Perhaps he shouldn’t have reminded her about that last part.
“Fine, I’ll start,” he continued. “I first became an atheist when I was five. I went to my first day of Sunday school and heard the Christian creation myth from the Bible for the first time. Even at five years old, I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to believe a book that was written by people who weren’t there’. It just seemed stupid then and the arguments others gave me throughout my life only made me more convinced that all religion and spirituality was a bunch of bunk. So you might imagine my surprise one evening when I was suddenly pulled off my toilet and dumped here.”
“You were on the toilet?!” she laughed with an amused grimace.
“I’m just glad I’d wiped before it happened,” he chuckled. “But yeah... I was so sure I knew what the world was really like. No gods, no afterlife, just a bunch of intelligent meat living on a rock floating through a mostly empty void. Then his place comes along; magic is everywhere and souls are real. Just a total stake through the heart to my belief system.”
“Sounds like you could use some of that religion ‘crap’,” came the snarky comment.
“But it’s not like any religion is right about this, either,” he countered. “No, I’ve fallen back to my backup worldview, the coward’s atheism: agnosticism. If there is some great truth to this life, we meatbags sure aren’t going to be able to figure it out. It’s far beyond us, and no old books written when people thought humours were a thing is going to magically have the answer.”
“That sounds terrible!” Gabriela remarked. “These questions aren’t some pointless mysteries. They give meaning to our lives, each and every day! How can you live like that, just stumbling around blind with no light to guide you?”
“Better no answer than a wrong answer, in my book,” he told her with a shrug of his eyebrows. “People are bad at dealing with uncertainty, but you can learn to live with it. Especially for the more esoteric questions.”
“They don’t feel so esoteric anymore,” she commented.
“That’s true,” he allowed. “Okay, your turn.”
“I never agreed to anything,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Hey, I am opening up and baring my soul here. It’s only fair that you reciprocate,” he argued.
Gabriela sighed with resignation.
“To put it simply, I know He is real because I have felt Him for my entire life, from childhood to today. His love warmed my heart when I was growing up without a mother or father to love me. He lifted me up when I was down, and He guided me when I felt lost.
“When you are an orphan child, the lack of a family eats a hole inside you and leaves you hollow. When I look back now, I can see how He and the Church filled that void for me and so many others at the orphanage. There is a supreme comfort in knowing that God loves you and brought you into the world for a reason. His presence was unmistakable.
“Yes, I didn’t know what to think when I arrived here. I didn’t know what any of it meant. Why would He send me here? What did He require of me? Why did He leave my children behind? Was this some sort of punishment? I kept searching for meaning, but I never found it. At this point, I don’t really do that anymore. I guess I just decided that I would find it naturally, or that I don’t need to know. But I still believe. Even when I had nothing, I had my faith. It is a part of who I am, and to throw it away is to throw myself away.”
“And you don’t see anything wrong with any of it after all the things you know now?”
“Maybe it is all true, but only back in our home dimension,” she reasoned. “Perhaps there is a different truth for each world. The details don’t matter as much as the fact that the Lord loves me and has a plan for me. I have faith in Him above all.”
“‘The details don’t matter?’ Watch out, that line of thinking is the dreaded slippery slope towards becoming an agnostic.”
The joke brought an amused snort from his conversation partner. A hint of a smile crossed her face, the first he’d seen in a while. It lasted just a moment before fading, blanketed by dark thoughts.
Blake could guess the thoughts going through her mind, as they were going through his own. Any mention of Earth threatened to send waves of memories and emotions cascading through him.
“Sometimes, when I’m all alone, I start to wonder about what’s happened back there since the transfer,” he said to the room. “What’s the latest hot video game? Who’s the President now? Have we finally started to slow our unending march toward global climate annihilation? Is Earth better now than it was when I was last on it?”
“What about your family? You don’t think about them?”
“Of course I do,” he said defensively, “but we already had a pretty separated relationship. They lived three time zones away from me and I only saw them maybe twice a year. And they have other children to care about. I’m sure they’re devastated, but it could have been much worse. It’s not like... well...”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence.
“Would you like to know a secret? Since you told me yours?” she asked softly, her voice barely audible above the noise of the airship propellers.
“Sure.”
“Part of me is afraid to go back,” she whispered. “What if I go back and they don’t recognize me anymore? I don’t know if I would be able to take it. It’s been so long already. I’m missing so many important things in their lives.”
That was, if they even were alive. Blake kept that thought to himself, but he knew that she’d thought it as well. Neither of them had it in them to say it aloud.
“Well, it’s complicated,” he said instead. “We don’t even know if there’s time dilation to factor in. It’s possible that time here is moving faster than it is on Earth, and if we went back today, only three months will have passed back home.”
“Really? You think that’s possible?” she asked with sudden hope.
“It might be. It’s equally possible that time moves slower here, and we would return to find six or more years had passed on Earth. The only hint I have is Othar, who seems like he was from ancient Greece. But the histories here are too ruined to tell if he arrived here three thousand years ago or ten thousand, nor what century he was from on Earth. It could be anything.”
“Othar was like us?!” she gasped.
“Yep,” he confirmed. “Makes you wonder if there were others like him back then, too.”
“Probably,” she said with a bit of thought. “I think the Sword of Eternity might be related to an Earth person back then. It’s the only thing I can think of to explain what it is. There’s no way the Ubrans made it, and if it was the ancients, then wouldn’t there be more than one?”
“Yeah, you might be right. I tried examining it back in the day, and it seems nearly impossible. I couldn’t get readings on it, and nothing would pierce whatever material it was made out of.”
Gabby sighed and looked up towards the ceiling wistfully. “Ugh, none of this makes me feel any better.”
Blake grinned cheekily. “It’s just more uncertainty to learn to live with.”
“I hate you.”
“Good, I have a reputation to maintain. Also, please don’t break my airship, but your leg is in the air again.”
The clang of boot striking metal echoed through the entire gondola.
* * *
A fine drizzle floated down from the overcast sky of northern Kutrad, but Blake didn’t mind. He wanted to experience as much as he could while he still had the time, including such things as the feeling of mist falling on his face as the afternoon sun peeked through the thin clouds above. He had never been one to leave the house more than necessary—air conditioning existed on Earth for a reason—but for some reason, this time he found himself enjoying the sensation. It left him feeling refreshed and, for lack of a better word, alive.
It helped that cantacrenyx technology didn’t have to care about water in the slightest. Were he stuck with Earth electronics, his task today would be a nightmare. Instead, he could create with his mind at ease, which was good because he had enough to deal with without the environment making it all harder.
With a series of beeps, the tiny spy skitter sitting on his lap began initialization, moving its joints all around as it checked for faulty parts. Finding everything in working order, it skedaddled down to the forest floor to join its many brethren.
Blake let out a tired breath. Hyper Mode didn’t make him want to scream anymore, but it still felt uncomfortable and left him feeling even more exhausted than normal. Still, he didn’t have a choice. He needed this small army of tiny skitters for the first half of his desperate plan.
The biggest downside to traveling by zeppelin was the limit to what you could take with you. The Flying Toaster, though a marvel of engineering, still had a weight limit. He could carry only what he could fit in the cargo bay, which usually he filled with large skitters for his own protection. However, this time he needed a large number of cantacrenyx crystals and tucrenyx with which to create his two new armies. Unwilling to leave his defense to Gabby alone, he’d decided to split the difference and take half a bay’s worth of guard skitters while filling the rest with raw materials. That was nowhere near enough to complete his plan. The rest he would have to dig up, but with Hyper Mode, he knew he could find what he needed quickly enough.
“Food’s ready,” Gabby said, walking into his vision from behind him with a bowl in both hands. She put one down on a nearby stump and bent down with the other to be near his level. Pulling a spoon out from who knew where, she scooped up a spoonful from the bowl and held it out to him. “Come now, if the Many can eat, you can eat.”
“Soup again?” he groused.
“Better than more solid foods for somebody in your state,” she flatly told him. “Open up.”
“Soup is so blah,” he said as he reluctantly opened his mouth and accepted the liquid nourishment.
“Well, get used to it, because that’s all you’re eating as long as I’m making your meals,” came the chilling response.
Blake was helpless to contradict her and could only grumble his dissatisfaction.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea to have the airship so far from us?” she asked after a few spoonfuls of flavored water.
“We can’t risk Grandfather noticing it floating about. If he gets even the slightest inkling that we’re nearby, that could ruin my plans entirely. That’s also why we’re hiding here in the western forest instead of setting down where we did the last two times,” he explained. “Besides, if he were to come south enough to find us, at that point the Toaster would do us no good. He’d just rip it to pieces. It’s extremely fragile, you know?
“It’s just three large, thin chambers, each holding a near-vacuum, with a shell wrapped around them for aerodynamics and looks,” he admitted. “Most of the design and the strength is focused on keeping the vacuum chambers that provide the lift from collapsing under the air pressure. Physical duress is not its strong suit. I had enough trouble just keeping it light enough to float and still carry enough extra weight to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
He thought about telling her more, that he had to conduct routine maintenance on the tanks to keep them from buckling, but decided against it. She had a hard enough time riding the thing as it was.
“So then, what, exactly, is this plan of yours?” she wondered. She looked over the assembled tiny robots, each about a foot long. “I don’t see how those little things are going to take down a dragon.”
“They’re for recon,” he explained, pointing with his prosthetic at a screen off to the side. A series of small video feeds played in the window. “I plan on putting one near every peak in these southern mountains, all the way to his lair. They’re going to stay inconspicuous and relay their feeds back here to me, and we’re going to watch and figure out his patterns. Ideally, he leaves his lair every day and we can track his flight path and everything. I already have some of them working their way north now.”
The screen changed to an overhead map showing the estimated positions of the skitters. The map lacked detail and he couldn’t vouch for its accuracy in the areas he and his skitters hadn’t been to yet, sadly, but he had limited information to work with. It wasn’t like satellite imagery existed here. Still, certain parts were much more detailed, and he spotted one skitter approaching a notable area just at that moment.
“Check it out,” he told her. “I sent one to check the place the dragon ambushed us. Remember, before all this crap happened, we were going to go get your sword from the pit you dropped it in?”
“I remember.”
“Well, let’s see what we have here.”
Pockmarks dotted the mountainside, marking the scene of the struggle. Blake couldn’t help but notice, with some worry, the complete lack of broken skitters in the area. He’d been in too much of a rush saving the lives of his companions to clean up all the destroyed robots. The plan had been to retrieve them and Gabby’s sword at the same time, once the dragon was less likely to be in the area. Then stuff had gotten in the way.
“There, that crater,” Gabby said a moment later, pointing at a hemispherical hole in the rock and dirt that had to be at least forty feet wide and deep.
“I thought you dropped it in a hole,” he said.
“The gas was eating away at everything, the sides included,” she explained. “It wouldn’t be like the hole Pari made. That’s it right there. Has to be.”
“Well, let’s check it out then,” he said as the skitter neared the lip of the crater and peeked over the edge. A nearly perfect bowl-shaped hole could be seen on the screen, clearing Blake’s doubts instantly. Only that matter-destroying gas could have created something so smooth and uniform. There was only one problem.
“I don’t see it down there,” he observed.
“Yeah...” she agreed.
He directed the skitter to enter the crater for a closer look, but after several minutes of looking about from all angles, they could not deny reality any longer.
“It’s gone,” he said. “Do you think it’s possible the gas destroyed it too?”
“No,” Gabby answered with an emphatic shake of her head.
“Then he must have taken it,” Blake sighed. “Damn, that’s going to make phase two a little trickier.”
“What is phase two?” she wondered.
“Breaking and entering, of course,” he said. “We sneak into Grandpa’s lair when he’s out and prepare for his return.”
“This whole idea seems sketchier with every word,” she stated as she resumed feeding him. “I thought you wanted to talk to him, but instead you’re just going to make him angrier.”
“That’s what my phase two skitters are going to be for. Later, I’m going to make a bunch of what can best be described as walking bombs. When he returns, he’s going to find enough of them crawling around the ceiling to bring the whole mountain down on all of us. Plus, you should hopefully have your giant sword back, if it’s really in his hideout. Really, the entire crux of the plan is just to make him hesitate long enough for me to establish a dialogue. Once we manage that, I think there’s a decent chance the two of us will be able to come to some arrangement.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because that dragon, behind the fire and the scales and the giant, pointy teeth, is without a doubt a total nerd. I know a dork when I see one.”
“That’s what you’re betting your life on? A feeling?”
“It’s the best shot I have.”
“It’s not a very good one.”
“I know,” he admitted. “Also, your leg is up again.”
“Still?! You have to be kidding me! ARRRGH!”
The tremor from the resulting stomp could be felt over a mile away.
