Lillene
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Chapter 778 - Impossible
🕑 Added 2023-06-30 02:25:06 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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“Oh, they’ll believe it,” Bethany countered. “They’ve seen it before. They just won’t care; their position will be that we’re whatever helps them the most. I also know our allies aren’t the people who matter here. I’m much more worried about who our people are and how they’re likely to treat us. Do we need to be on guard against attempts to kill us?”
As she spoke, Bethany nodded exaggeratedly at her son. He took that as a warning; no matter what Carl said, he needed to be on his guard. There was a good chance that even people who were supposedly on their side might well not have their best interests at heart. That wasn’t anything new, but it was an unpleasant reminder of Vengeance’s life.
“They’re the people we had that were closest,” Carl admitted. “Which means they’re Coast Guard. They were close but fortunately not needed; that made them available.”
Serenity blinked, then made the connection. A Coast Guard ship was probably near A’Atla because of the upwelling while it was rising! They didn’t know what was happening, but there could easily have been someone who got into trouble. Serenity hoped it hadn’t happened, but there was nothing he could have done to avoid it. Once he’d realized the potential issue, it was already too late.
Bethany seemed to relax a little at Carl’s words. “Where are they? We should go meet them.”
“I’ll have someone send you their coordinates.” With that, Carl hung up.
Bethany turned to look at her son, husband, and Blaze. “Is there really any point in continuing to look around? Everything’s covered in mud; this will be a lot easier when it’s had the chance to dry out. There’s still a lot to look at inside, too.”
“Probably more than out here,” Serenity admitted. “We’ve been out here all day. I’m willing to head back in.” He paused and pulled up the message again.
[The Lost Vault was damaged in the events that sent A’Atla to the sea floor. Beware lest the secrets it holds doom the future as they once threatened the past]
[The Godswar had odd effects on parts of A’Atla’s mountains. Travel to the peak and you should know why YOU must go there]
[It will take many people to truly discover the secrets hidden in A’Atla. There are ways to find those who have been marked by your opponent. Find them before he places too many of his people where yours should be]
The peak wasn’t an immediate goal. He wanted to go, but it wasn’t the point of this trip; he could go to the mountain after he knew which one to go to. The maps of A’Atla he had didn’t go into that much detail; they showed several mountains but they were more notional than exact. He wanted an actual map before he headed out. He’d start at the highest peak and work his way down.
No, what he wanted to find now was the Lost Vault. He didn’t expect it to be in the area they’d searched so far; they’d stayed away from the old damage.
Yes, the message was what he’d remembered. There was nothing in it that he could obtain on this trip, which was more of a familiarization trip than anything else.
Bethany’s phone buzzed. Her expression was disgusted as she looked at the message. “Why don’t we head towards the Coast Guard instead?”
They were less than halfway there when Lex directed Serenity and Blaze to wait inside A’Atla’s interior instead of meeting them outside. He didn’t expect problems from a small group of Coast Guard, but it was better to hide their presence if he wanted people who might well be dangerous to not find out.
Serenity insisted on providing armor for his parents before he carried Blaze back inside to avoid footprints. It was a little harder to shift his additional forms into something that could pass as modern body armor for someone else than he’d expected, but it was still fast enough to work.
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Serenity listened to the conversation from a nearby room. They were close in case they were needed, but that had the benefit that Blaze could directly hear the conversation. Serenity heard it from three different locations.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave the island? Not even for the night?” One of the four Coast Guard sailors asked Serenity’s father. It was the fourth time he’d asked. Serenity still didn’t know what he looked like, but he was definitely the one that spoke the most.
Lex shook his head; Serenity expected he also smiled but that wasn’t something Serenity could tell from the armor’s feedback. “We’re fine here. I fully expect that this place will be quite comfortable in the next few weeks; it’s not that bad right now. We’ll see you in the morning.”
With that, Lex ushered the sailors out of the A’Atla underground and closed the door. The rest of the evening was quiet, somehow more somber than the eagerness of the morning.
“Should we really stay?” Lex turned to his wife. “I wanted to explore, to find out where my family came from. This isn’t that. And yet…”
Bethany nodded. “And yet. This seems more …” She paused as if she wasn’t sure what the next word would be.
“Interesting? Important?” Lex sighed. “It seems both. This is the real, hidden past of everyone, not just mine. Even if Grandfather didn’t come from Earth, the rest of the family did. Yours, as well.”
Bethany nodded. “I think this is more my past than yours. Grandfather had the best stories. I’m beginning to think they weren’t just stories. They were about the long past; he was there for a lot of history, at least in his stories. They weren’t always the way the history books said, either.” She paused, then chuckled. “Serenity inherited his wings. Not the colors, but the shape; they’re just like Grandfather’s. He couldn’t fly, either, even if he did in his stories.”
“I’m learning!” Serenity wasn’t sure why he felt like he had to defend himself. His mother knew he was trying.
“Were any of the stories relevant to A’Atla?” Blaze interjected.
Bethany shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Too bad.” Blaze didn’t sound all that upset, maybe a little disappointed but that was all.
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The door wasn’t open. How was she awake?
Amani knew that was wrong. She knew the prison; when the door closed, the next thing she’d expected to see was an open door as someone came to check on the prisoners. If she was lucky, they’d be checking for anyone who fled as well, but she didn’t really expect anyone to come look before then; very few people had a way in. The decadal inspection would be soon enough. It was only a couple of years off.
The prison was her design; she’d never expected to end up in it. Never until she ran and hid, at least. She wasn’t a fighter, she was a builder!
The prison was no longer sealed and she was inside. That was even more terrifying than the fighting; she had no idea who or what was in here. Yes, she was in the entryway and they would be in secure containers, but that didn’t make her feel any better. She had no way to fight anyone who would rate storage in the prison and some of the items could be worse. There was a reason it existed, after all!
She could - she could do the inspection. Yes. She’d done it before, she knew what to do. Then she’d know if anything was trying to get out, if anything already was out. Maybe everything was safe, maybe it was only the outer room she was in that wasn’t properly sealed.
Amani pushed the intrusive thought that the sealing wasn’t separated that way away from herself. There were protections between the main room and the individual chambers; she’d designed several and knew that more had been added for each resident.
She remembered the check cycle, didn’t she?
The original version came to mind first. She’d designed it even before the prison was completely built. It wasn’t what she needed now; it was designed for a nearly empty prison with only the Akkila Spear stored away. That hadn’t been the case for at least thirty years.
She dredged the correct check cycle out of her memory and used it. It felt strange, but that was almost certainly the difference between managing the cycle with the door open and the door closed. Had she accounted for the altered interference effect?
No, she was pretty sure she hadn’t. Amani restarted the check cycle from the beginning, but this time she made certain to use a closed-form base instead of the opened cycle base. The results were subtly different but the overall results were the same and were equally impossible: they said there was nothing wrong with the prison.
Amani didn’t believe that so she ran the check cycle twice more, looking for anything odd. Everything was completely normal and undisturbed. She still couldn’t believe it; she had evidence something was wrong. She was aware of the passage of time. That meant she needed to dig deeper into the prison’s construction. It was a good thing she had her tools with her; this would have been impossible without the tools she’d created for herself when she first learned the Great Art.
At first, they gave essentially the same result as the simplified check cycle. Oh, there was some minor damage in a few places, but it was all well within tolerances. She still hadn’t figured out how to manage a true self-healing enchantment like the ones the Grand Buildings had, but she could deal with some damage. That had naturally been built into the prison. They were weak points but they weren’t a real break in containment.
It wasn’t until hours later when Amani got into the really esoteric checks that she found a likely cause: the mana levels were all wrong. They were far too low; she’d never seen results that low, not on A’Atla. A’Atla was the greatest magical concentration anyone had ever seen; you couldn’t drain away enough magic to get results like that if you tried.
Amani knew that for certain. She had tried. If it had been possible, she’d have incorporated it into the prison design; low magic levels would have made most of the prisoners far easier to contain, even if it would have interfered with the suspension.
No matter how many times she ran the test, though, it came out with far too low a level. The composition was correct, this was A’Atla’s external mana, but the level was wrong. It was odd; for the first dozen tests, the level slowly declined each time she tested. There was no way she was using up enough mana to make that kind of difference. Even if the prison wasn’t being supplied with external mana, the tests didn’t use that much.
The first few could be dismissed as normal variation, but the fact that it declined every single time was not just normal variation. Something was wrong. Either her tools were broken, which was unlikely, or the readings were real.
It was honestly more likely that her tools were broken. A’Atla’s mana level hadn’t changed in centuries, at least not as far as anyone knew. Oh, there had been small drops and small increases, but she’d seen more of a drop in this set of a dozen tests than had been seen in the Great Art’s history, and that went back over a thousand years!
That was true from the first time she tested it. Even then, it was far lower than it should have been.
Amani paced around the small room that was the entirety of the area she could safely be in. None of this made sense, but she only had one strange result; everything else was normal or at least lined up with the weird result. If she assumed her tools weren’t broken, what did that mean?
It meant the lowest priority enchantments wouldn’t be getting enough power. The lowest priority enchantments were the ones she’d added to keep everything calm by making nothing happen inside the prison. They were the ones that were broken whenever the door was opened, by design.
They’d still have some, since they were functional, but all they’d do is slow everything down instead of stop it.
Amani stopped moving. How long had she been here, then? Decades? Centuries? Longer? There was no way to know. Maybe it had only been a year and the next check would happen soon, but she doubted it. Even at low mana levels, the prison was far enough out of the reality bubble that a year should pass in minutes, maybe even seconds, and it felt like she’d been here for a few hours.
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Author's Note: It's been a long time since Bethany's grandfather was mentioned. She doesn't seem to feel any need to look into his past, unlike Lex and his family.
