Killswitch Kid vs. The Doctor, Act 1

His forces hadn’t been decimated, so much as grotesquely cannibalized.
Eric Flynn watched the carnage unfold before his wide, unblinking eyes, and cursed the day he began trusting his own opinion as infallible.
Artificial intelligence, his inspired brain had cried, is the future of crime.
Mechanical humans, it had continued, are unstoppable, unswayable, unbeatable.
He ducked just in time to avoid being struck squarely in the face by a severed combination arm/plasma-cannon, leaking coolants macabrely.
The undead eyes of his nemesis’ creations were now locked on him.
He could do little more than bolt, recalling the events of the last two days.

“He’s a ghost in the business, kid.”
Eric rolled his eyes and adjusted his intentionally disrespectful posture on his throne.
“I didn’t ask whether or not his operation was breathing, Kently, I want to know if he can haunt me. God, listen to yourself. You leave your watertight assurances wide open for me to poke holes in them.” He shook his head, due more to neurosis than disdain. “It’s too easy.”
Kently sighed. “He’s a corpse.”
“Ever heard of zombies?” Eric’s brow went up. “No. Of course you haven’t. You’re far too bohemian.”
“He’s nothing.”
“There we go.” Eric grinned, revealing a mouth bristling with an unusual amount of prickly teeth. “Tell me about Mr. Nothing, then. I want to be sure he’ll stay nothing until I’m burning him in his bed.”
“Not to sound ignorant, Mr. Fly-“ Beneath Eric’s sudden glare, he reconsidered. “Killswitch, but why do you need to bother the old man, after all?”
“He’s on my land.” Eric breathed, rubbing his nails on his parka experimentally. “I claimed the whole district, and he’s doing his vile work on my property.”
“Vile work, sir?”
“Just rumors, but I’ve been hearing quite a few.” Eric chuckled. “Necromancy.”
Kently took an understanding gulp of air. “I see. And given your aversions to-“
“I have no aversions, Kently, only sensibilities.” Eric snapped, sitting up in his throne. “Now unless you’d like me to have the palace drones scatter your entrails to the winds, you’ll quit with the judgments and scram.”
The manservant bowed, gazing through the panel of plexiglass that separated them. He paused before turning fully. “Are you planning on attending the slaughter in person, sir?”
“Perhaps.” Eric shrugged. “Now scram.” He narrowed his eyes after the manservant. “Scram faster. God in heaven, they told me the British were punctual.”
When the man had gone, Eric rose from his throne and made his way towards the lower rooms.
The throne room was the only chamber in the palace that possessed a separator. Out of the forty-five rooms, Kently was permitted in four. The other forty-one were glimpsed only by Eric Flynn and whatever inventions he saw fit to bestow sight upon.
Kently communicated with him through intercoms, a priviledge that Eric often thought the butler abused.
He hadn’t killed his family and caretakers simply to be pestered by one more human insufferably interested human.
Eric collapsed into his favorite office chair before scooting expertly across the room and smashing the play button on his radio.
Music, free of human voice, filled only by action.
He worked with music, supplying the lyrics in the form of the to-do lists that papered his enormous workspace.
The first verse documented the slasher-tron-3b’s various necessary tune-ups.
By the second bridge, he was musing over whether or not to double-plate the Crush-95-XV’s proton cores.

He should have double-played the Crush-95-XV’s double proton cores.
They had a nasty habit of exploding after being ripped from the robots chests and hurled into the ground.
The blast knocked him down, flattening him against the loose sand of the eastern dunes.
Eric attempted to scramble to his feet but slipped on the terrain. He could only crawl, scrambling with desperation so as not to slip back towards the hordes of oncoming Revenants.
A pair of brown loafers were staring at him smugly.
He snarled and clawed at them. They did not retreat, adding further insult to his current circumstances.
He glanced up, following the bony ankles that protruded from their tops up to a pair of corduroys in a sort of vague light brown, a blue sweater, trimmed in with a fluttered, long white labcoat, until a pale neck and head appeared at the very top.
The adversary did not seem to care enough about Flynn to glance down.
His vibrant blue eyes, nearly lost behind his thick glasses, were locked upon the battle ahead. His full lips were curled into an appreciative smile, his hands were buried in his coat pockets.
He looked like a man watching the sunrise.
He should have been old.
Eric clenched his teeth, clawing again at the man’s shoes, daring him to notice.
Kently said he’d be old.

“Well, how old is he?” Eric turned away from the intercom, but his voice would still carry through successfully as he bent over his newest project.
“Older than me,” Kently replied. “Fifty, say, sixty years?”
Eric snorted. “And he’s still alive, after all this?”
“He was quite a villain in his younger days. Some might even compare the two of you.”
“And some might be idiotic beyond a genius’s comprehension. Powersaw.” He snatched the tool from the arms of the assistant bot and lowered his welding goggles before setting it to the metalweave.
“Master Killswitch, I really would appreciate it if you’d warn me before you flood the radio with that screeching.”
“Kently, I’d appreciate it if you’d set the oven on high for my dinner and crawl on in.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence on the manservant’s end. “Will that be all?”
“No,” Eric replied, frowning thoughtfully. “What’s his name, one more time?”

“Doctor Shyam,” Eric croaked, snagging his fingers on the cuffs of the man’s corduroy pants, “I’ve beaten you.”
“Your plan was ingenious, I must admit.” Dr. Shyam replied without glancing down. “Who would have thought that all this time, you wanted to have your creations devoured before your very eyes?” His expression remained unchanged, despite his evident sarcasm. “I would have never guessed.”
“You think you’re so much more intelligent?”
“I think the answer should be obvious.”
Eric snarled again, trickling mucus and saliva into the sand. “You think you’re better?”
“Once again,” Shyam sighed. “Rhetorical.”
“You said I wanted my troops consumed.” Eric breathed.
Shyam finally met his gaze, brow raised. “I did.”
Eric’s grin was slick with conceited victory. “You’re half right.”
He slammed his hand down upon the wristband of his other hand, pushing a barely raised button.
At first, there was nothing.
And then the pops.
Too small, at first, like glass baubles underfoot.
Then louder, a whole host of helium balloons, exploding in the heat.
The carnage was incredible.
As the robot’s half-digested forms combusted within a revenant’s belly, the entire creature was consumed in a gleeful burst of bright red.
They were occurring all across the battlefield, staining the sand with gore and metal, mixed.
And still, Shyam was smiling.
Eric rose fully to his feet, throwing aside his façade of defeat, and did his best to look the doctor in the eye. The eight inches of height the man possessed over him did little to benefit his efforts.
“As I said before, Doctor,” Eric giggled. “Beaten.”
He then took great satisfaction in delivering a suckerpunch to the man’s grinning face.
Eric hated touching humans, but when such a small interaction could produce so great an amount of blood, he considered the disgust a worthwhile price.
Shyam’s nose was streaming, his glasses smashed. He lay upon the ground, struggling slowly to rise.
Eric slammed his boot into the doctor’s narrow chest and held the position, smiling down at him.
“They said you were a great strategist, doctor, and of that I have no doubt.”
Shyam’s open mouth was filling with blood, dying his teeth pink as he bared them in pain. Eric was prompted to deliver another blow, cracking several of the man’s ribs.
“You strategized, but in the end were outsmart. And now, you forfeit.” Eric shook his head, consumed by deep, odd chuckles, not unlike retching. “You’ve never learned to defend yourself, always hiding behind your silly little puppets. It’s an outdated game. My generation has no such weaknesses; we cover our flaws with work, train our bodies and our minds. We watch our backs.”
“Not very well.” The woman’s voice registered in Eric’s ears seconds after the sudden blow knocked him several yards forward, somersaulting over Shyam’s collapsed form and crashing face-first into the sand.
When he opened his eyes, she was standing over him.
Young, beautiful, and becomingly proportioned, the woman made him feel utterly hopeless.
He hated girls. They always seemed to make him stupid.
He couldn’t find the words to say.
The woman’s smile was a perfect agony. “There’s a difference between weakness and reliance, kid. The doctor makes the monsters, deals with your pathetic little toys, and, when it’s all over and you’re so sure of your victory, I protect him. I’m the guardian, Mr. Flynn,” she placed a stiletto-heeled boot on his chest, mirroring his previous postion. “And I do a damn good job of it.”
She allowed him to mentally formulate a reply before delivering a deft blow across his head, felling him to unconsciousness.
She was at Shyam’s side a split-second later, helping him to his feet.
He leaned forward, spitting a gob of blood and saliva towards the sand before he attempted to speak.
“Did you finish him?”
“Can you breath?” She asked, gently tracing his ribcage with an open palm.
“I’m a doctor, in case you miraculously forgot. I’d know if I had a collapsed lung.” He let out a deep, shuttering cough. “It’s punctured at the worst. Ah.” He let out a cry of pain, keeling over.
“You operate every single day of your life, and yet you nearly faint over cracked ribs.” She sighed. “Really, darling, I expected better.”
He nearly fell, supported only by the woman’s calm grip. It was a moment of shallow breathing before he could must his next comment. “We all know you’re the strong one, dear.”
“Let’s just get you home.” She replied.
“You didn’t answer my question.” He said, coughing again. “Did you kill the nuisance?”
“You’ll be glad next month.” She replied.
He groaned. “Darling, please.”
“You’re going to have to rebuild your army, and I know you can’t possibly avoid procrastinating with new projects unless you’ve a real reason.” She justified. “Besides, think of how much he has to learn. By the end of this, you might harvest some decent cranial matter.”
“I seriously doubt that.” He snapped. They were silent for a long while. “You do have a good point about the army, though.”
“I know.”

The Warning.

Leonard Laufland was, quite possibly, the least skilled writer in existence.

However, as the man was in possession of a somewhat functional brain, a laptop computer, and a renown publisher’s hand in marriage, this did not deter him whatsoever from topping the bestseller charts week after week.

“My next novel,” he announced one morning to a fairly rabid crowd of fans, “will center around the question: Why Oxygen?”

The applause was deafening.

Some called him a prophet, others, a demi-god, sent to grace the planet Earth with concepts so simple and standard that they must have waltzed into our world from beyond.

Others called him what he truly was.

“Leonard Laufland is an inarticulate perpetrator of literary injustice,” the bohemian writing majors would cry from the rooftops, balled fist thrown skyward and shaking with overcaffeinated rage.
”His newest action novel features a main character named ‘Brawn’. No surname, no nickname, just- ‘brawn’.” A critical young woman stated in a sidewalk interview.

“I’m sorry,” Leonard Laufland responded when the report graced his 103-inch plasma screen. “I can’t hear you over the wild exultations of my four million fans.” With that, he turned the television off and made for the enormous house’s colossal kitchen, in hopes of acquiring yet another fancy beverage.

He never reached the room’s heated stone floors.

Something very solid and swift hit him in the back, knocking him clean off his velvet-slippered feet. Laufland crashed into the wood floor and had only a moment, which he used to divulge a very sincere groan of pain, before the same object crushed down upon his chest, knocking the wind out of him.

When he cracked his eyes open, there were two figures standing over him.

“Leonard Laufland,” one said, addressing him from behind a black ski-mask, and brandishing the crowbar that had so damaged his morning routine, “We are here to carry out the punishment elicited by your heinous crimes against modern fiction.”

“Crimes?” He laughed heartily from the floor, still a bit too fearful to move to his feet. “I am modern fiction, my dear. Have you even seen the responses for the preview of my upcoming novel-“

“Steeled Brawn, we know,” the other intruder replied. She was obviously female. “In fact, that’s the reason we’re here. There comes a certain point in a criminal’s life when his crimes begin to outweigh the tolerance of normal people, and in that moment, normal people become exceptional.”

“’Steeled Brawn’, as a title for a book in which the main character, still called ‘Brawn’ is kidnapped? Really?”

“It’s a pun. You’re a little young to understand, I think-“

The male intruder let out a strangled cry of frustration and raised the crowbar.

Laufland shut his eyes, but the blow never came.

The female had stopped her partner’s arm, and when Laufland looked upon them next, she was restraining his would-be killer with significant effort.

“We can no longer stand idly by and allow you to ‘fill the pristine river of our souls with the slick, oily corruption of your darkest intentions, smothering out the dear, fuzzy aquatic mammals that house our innocence’.”

Laufland paused, staring at the girl. “That’s- that’s really good.”

The boy let out another strangled cry, and nearly succeeded in breaking from the girl’s grip and bashing in the man’s head.

“No,” the girl replied through her teeth, still keeping the boy back, “It’s not, Mr. Laufland,  because you wrote it. Dead and Brawn, published last November-“

“You’re clearly readers of my work,” Laufland said, holding his hands up in piteous defense. “What if we could strike a bargain- what if I wrote a couple of characters into Steeled Brawn, and we call it even?”

The girl was nearly speechless in incredulousness. “You honestly think that’s what we’d want?”

“Well, it’s not too difficult. Writing is, indeed, just a portal into the ever-changing mind of a great individual- and writing two more characters into the novel shouldn’t be too hard. Characters are just the frosting atop the luscious confection of a scintillating plot of unmatched intrig-“

The girl could either no longer restrain her partner, or lost all will to defend his victim. At any rate, the crowbar came down on Laufland’s chest with monstrous result. He coughed, sputtering several times before finally breaking into sobs.

“You’re going to kill me for offering the world an expression of unmatched creativity?”

“We’re not going to kill you,” the boy snapped, throwing the crowbar aside. “But we are going to ensure that you never, ever create such a corrupting, vomit-induced excuse for a novel again.”

“I’m not sure a string of threats and an overblown heart-to-heart can stop me from producing what I feel; I am but a vessel for the-“

“That’s why we’re not just having a heart-to-heart.” The girl snapped. She was holding a serrated hunting knife in her hand. “More like a ‘metal-to-muscle’, as Brawn might say.”

Before he could scramble away, the boy had dropped a knee to Laufland’s chest, pressing him into the ground and obliterating any hop of escape. He seized the man’s wrists, and pressed one forward against the wood floor, in the girl’s direction.

“Please,” Laufland sneered, rolling his eyes. “This is overly cliché.”

“Than I suppose it’s a fitting end for a career such as yours,” the girl said, before setting the knife to the man’s hands.

It took Laufland three weeks to be discharged from the hospital. The wounds on his hands were bandaged and cleaned within the first two hours of his visit, but the constant hounding with which the author tortured the nurses was so severe that he was called in for not one, but five separate information sessions on the unfixable nature of his mutilation. Fingers, once severed and disposed of, could not be reattached; another’s hands could not be used to replace the missing parts of his own. After this finally sank in, Laufland claimed he had fallen into a deep depression, and committed himself the hospital’s psych ward.

He was, in reality, not depressed, but more terrified than he had been for some time.

If the loss of his fingers had not deterred him from ever setting words upon a page, the unshakeable memory of the intruders would have done much to silence his creativity forever.

Despite his constant attempts to communicate his ideas for fiction in an auditory manner, Laufland found his prose haunted by themes of dismemberment, and the constant reoccurrence of two very distinct characters, masked and partnered, severe and focused.

For all his loss of creativity, only one idea truly stayed with him, corrupting his mind with hypothetical questions and ragtag attempts at fictionalized answers.

What had they done with his severed fingers?

Miles away, the now unmasked couple celebrated their achievement, and the arrival of their newest household decoration. Upon their dining room table now restest a cast bronze centerpiece, featuring the truncated forms of ten upright, outstretched fingers.
The bronze placard beneath the sculpture had been engraved with only two words, but every time the couple looked upon them, they couldn’t help but smile.

It read: “The Warning”.

For James Patterson,
Love, Stephanie

Aethernata: Crew

There were very few fundamental basics of life upon the Zeppelin formerly known as Opal 32-PC71.
Many of them concerned things that should not be attempted, under any circumstances.
One would be cautioned against ever entering the engine room after the hours of ten in the morning; grievous personal injury, incapacitation, or harassment may occur. The same rules were applied to the starboard lavatory with greater emphasis.
One should not ever mention the ship’s rechristened name. If the zeppelin must be referred to by a non-deprecating term, than it would be wise to utter only its former military classification.
All other issues that fell into the category of avoidable could be foreseen and dodged by engaging in a hazardous and unsavory study, that of the crew’s preferences and persons.
Rastu was the first mate and occasionally pilot, and was by far the most even-tempered of the crew. His frequent, fiery outbursts lined the walls with food, shattered glass, and any displaced bodily fluids only a few times a week. When queried in reference to his remarkably well-maintained composure, his only response was to smile and swear that his preoccupations with love far outshined his preoccupations with fighting. This was untrue, though he often attempted to alter his romantic circumstances, despite being constantly reassured of his exception undesirability.
Cassidy was expected to man the engines, but often saw to other, more pressing matters, such as the unbloodied state of any of Shaw’s newly purchased shirts. His trainee, Ashdown, was often left with the responsibility of priming and maintaining the integrity of four of the most ornery and complex engines the Royal Military could get their hands on. Complicating matters was the fact that the engines were over forty years old, and Ashdown was under ten.
Ashdown’s mother, Hester, was the ship’s navigator, and social correspondent. She was often told that her voice inspired confidence. Her half-decade of training in the Crown’s unnamed assassin camps inspired results.
Wrenly was the medic, and was completely capable of saving lives, considering his patients or employers could locate him. After studying basic and alternatives medicines for most of his life, he was still incapable of finding a working solution for his narcolepsy, sleepwalking, tendency to cram himself inside unreachable compartments while unconscious, or his resulting claustrophobia.
The tall, blond gentleman was often referred to as Jack. He didn’t do anything, but upon any questioning would sincerely profess his invaluable service of psychological analysis. He seemed to do little more than watch and pejoratively scrawl notes in a book that looked suspiciously similar to a pastel colored Franco the Cat flip-diary with the cover brutally torn off.
Candice bit people and hid in storage units. She occasionally validated her usefulness on the ship by finding Wrenly, but for the most part just leaped out at people when they were trying to work and made a terrible mess of things. Still, Aridia staunchly maintained that she will not be harmed or removed from the crew.
Aridia was the ship’s captain and primary pilot. She said little, did much, and had no tolerance for shenanigans, hijinks, or any other fun words describing rampant foolishness. She was tall, brooding, and proportioned and featured not unlike the title character of an old TV Program called “Gretalyn: Spartan Princess or Blushing Flower?” Aridia’s tolerance for this comparison, much like the show, was short-lived and followed by decimation. She was cold, fiercely competent, and unlikable to a near-arsenical extreme. She would be possessed by no one.
Juin, on the other hand, was possessed by everyone. One of Aridia’s employed mercenaries, Juin had regrettably loose morals and saw little wrong with dating several different men at the same time, as her history aboard the zeppelin would suggest. After the initial explosive duel between Cassidy and Wrenly, halted only by Rastu’s suspiciously emotional intervention and Wrenly’s unconsciousness, Aridia decreed any non-preexisting crew relationships utterly illegal. Juin had yet to find a loophole in the three pages concerning proper relational etiquette in Aridia’s rewritten employment contract.
The remaining crewmembers make up the only married couple aboard the Opal 32-PC71. Vesper Shaw handled supplies and minor repairs. His wife, Jericho, had few skills besides her suspiciously first-rate hand-to-hand skills, and was therefore expected to delegate chore schedules and dramatically describe finer details that Jack, as a newer member of the crew, may have missed during any heated exchanges between other crewmembers.

NANOWRIMO

Riftworlds.
That is all.


p.s.

The Beast.

[Author's note: Yes, I updated twice in one day, but keep your readerly pants on. Don't read and comment on this unless you've read and commented on THIS. Kayfanks.]


Traveling in the snow is not so very terrible as it may seem. Traveling for hours upon hours in the snow is worse.

Dragging your aching legs through the endless tundra by night, that’s a different story entirely.

Especially when you’re the only one who realizes you’re being watched.
By the time we saw them, they were right on top of us.

It is a keenly unsettling thing, stopping to listen for the alien voice caught in the wind and realizing that the shadow a few feet away that you’d assumed was part of the night sky had eyes.

Bright blue eyes, that blinked at me and stared as if not quite believing my existence either.

I peered into them until the moment Jakell roughly grabbed my arm and forced me behind him. Attempting to see the figures was useless, in the pelting snow, but Jakell obviously intended to be prepared for their assault. His one hand flickered out, an ancestral bone needles clasped between his index and middle finger; the other formed a circle of the thumb and first finger. He was preparing to channel an energy thread through the eye of the needle, but for what purpose, I wasn’t exactly sure yet.

A woman appeared very suddenly before us, wide-eyed and vacant-faced. Her fur hood had been lowered, and her dirty blond tresses were whipping all about her pale face, each strand burdened with sticking snow. In one hand, she held a knife. The other was held up, the palm facing towards us, in a sign of submission.

She said only a few words, but the wind graciously carried them to us.

“Please. He’s trying to kill us.”

Jakell stepped towards her and they conversed quietly for a second. He turned back to me, smiled, and pulled me along after the woman. A couple minutes of trudging passed before the landscape dissolved into a strangely comforting, hollow darkness.

“Where are we?” I asked in a whisper; it echoed all around me, sending fingers of sound resonating up and down the path we trod.

“She says there’s a cave in which we can find some shelter.” Jakell murmured back to me. “Very small, but that’s where they’re hiding.”

“From the storm?”

“Sure.”

We moved suddenly into a place of light.

My eyes adjusted with fidgety reluctance, slowly taking in the sight of the fire and the light that flickered back at it from the ice walls enclosing the small room.

Two men set beside the fire, and both turned to glance at us as we entered. They were both wrapped in blankets. The first man was large, imposing, and dark, and wore on his head a red cap. The second was much younger, of about my years, and wore a white kerchief. He smiled at me.

“I found some help out in the blizzard,” the woman announced, smiling. “Apparently we aren’t the only ones roaming this godforsaken ice cube after all.”

The dark man’s eyes hungrily roamed over the double-sash slung around Jakell’s chest and the single across mine, each bearing the Mender’s Star, the symbol of our profession.

“Menders.” He astutely formulated, raising one thick eyebrow.

The boy beside him stared, his mouth falling open a bit. “From the outpost? You survived?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Jakell said, “We were jumping in from Serenec for a training week and missed the entire outpost by what looks like three days.”

“We were passing through from Kand.” The woman said, shaking her head. “We’re colonists, the lot of us, and we were just hoping to find some work. Lucky we thought of bringing our gear or we’d have joined the sorry souls out at the base.”

“How long ago were you there?” Jakell asked.

“About a day or two back.” The boy answered, “We didn’t see the damage done, but the embers were still lit when we got there.”

“And a piece of the raid followed us home.” The man grunted, spitting into the fire.

Jakell set his pack on the ground and rummaged inside for a moment. As he searched, he said, “I believe that’s what this kind lady here told me.” He removed a blanket, and without prompting, tossed it around my shoulders and pushed me towards the fire. I struggled subtly, but submitted as the heat washed over me.

I sat across from the boy, whose dark, perusing eye I continuously caught.

“It was only a few hours ago that I realized he’d tracked us out here. There’s only one, I’m sure, but he’s unbelievable. He would have had Nicholas dead if he wasn’t so intent on playing games with us first.” As she said the name, she nodded at the boy. His glance didn’t leave my face. I felt the warm, sickly pangs of discomfort under his gaze.

“Likes to hide.” The man said. “Likes to sneak up at the very last moment and tap your shoulder before his sinks his bloody teeth into your cheek. Show them, Sylvie.”

The woman turned, and pulled her long hair away from her right cheekbone.

A fresh bruise, the shape of two crescents joined at the tips in a oblong circle, marred her face, and dried blood crusted inside each. The unmistakable bite of the human jaw.

We sat together for several hours more, exchanging information and comfort, and sharing a pack of rations from Jakell’s bag.

“We’ll have watches.” The man said after an impressive yawn. “Two sets of eyes for one hour of the remaining night each. That’ll make sure the filthy lunatic freezes out there.”

“I’ll go first and second.” Jakell said.

“As will I.” Said the woman, her eyes fixed on the fire.

“I’ll take third and fourth.” Nicholas said.

“And I’ll watch alone for the fifth.” The man said, “Leaving the apprentice to help Nicholas.”

I caught his gaze again and smiled weakly. “Sounds great.”

We laid out our sleeping bags a small ways away from the three acquaintances. I quickly clambered inside mine, weary and frigid, and more than content with two hours of sleep. Jakell woke me what felt like only moments later, but the fire was low.

“Lauriel,” he whispered, “are you awake?”

“Yeah. Oh, god, is it my turn already?” I fumbled about in the bag, attempting to rise. He pushed me back down with a steady hand.

“No, but I need you to listen very carefully to what I have to say. Don’t fall asleep on your watch. Promise me that.”

“What?”

“I might be gone for a moment, but while I’m out, you must not fall asleep. Alright?”

“Jakell, I’m not super cognizant right now, but isn’t that the point of a watch?”

“True. I won’t leave until it’s your turn.”

“Where’s the woman?” I asked realizing for the first time that Jakell and I were the only awakened individuals.

“She’s down the tunnel a ways- I told her I heard something down there, but I just needed a second alone.”

“What’s wrong?”
“You just need to stay awake when it’s your turn, okay?”

“Okay.”

I didn’t remember falling back asleep, but the next awakening I received was at the hands of Nicholas.

I rose, rubbed my eyes, and climbed regretfully out of my bag. I donned my parka quickly, and sat motionless besides the boy for some time.

He continued to stare.

“Where’s Jakell?” I asked, realizing I hadn’t seen him.

“Oh, he went a little ways down the tunnel,” the boy said, still staring unblinkingly. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

I turned and surveyed the room around me. I could make out only one sleeping form, too big to be anyone but the man.

I returned my attention to opening at the cave’s front.

“Maybe we should rekindle the fire.” I suggested blandly, attempting to fill the silence.

“I’ll get it.” Nicholas said. He didn’t move.

I slowly turned towards him; he was still staring with his huge dark eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, now catching his gaze with a ferocious exasperation, “but is there something particularly interesting attached to my face, currently? Or did you simply never learn that staring at a person for an hour, interrupted only by unconsciousness, is rude?”

“Hours.”

“What??”

“I’ve been looking for hours.” He corrected me, smiling politely. “I didn’t sleep, I just watched you.”

“Look, I know I don’t exactly look like much, but I am in fact an assistant mender in my eight year. I could pop your little weasel head off your shoulders with my mind.”

He laughed, and for the first time, looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

“It’s just that I never, ever get to see girls with black hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“I only ever run into blondes and brunettes and whatnot- redheads are okay, I guess, but it’s not everyday that you see a girl with black hair. On top of that, the freckles-“ He was staring again. I wanted to vomit. “They’re unusual. Striking and captivating, but unusual. Not to mention the blue eyes.”

I gagged, turned away, and replayed what I’d write in my mender account of the mission as a distraction.

However, the concept of blue eyes resurfaced as I remembered what had happened only hours ago.

“Nicholas, you said you don’t see blue eyes very often?”

“No, not at all.”

“Doesn’t your mother have them?”

“The woman’s not my mother, she’s just my supervisor. But no, hers are all wretched and brown.”

“And the man, how about him?”

“Darkish green.”

My mouth went dry. Then the face, out in the tundra, the eyes that had been so close to my own, must have belonged to the zealot.

And he hadn’t struck.

This thought clouded my head for the next hour. As time drew on, I realized not the weight on my eyelids, or the way that as I grew ever wearier, Nicholas crept ever closer.

I woke up screaming.

I had dreamed very briefly, but in my dream, a beast of the night had stolen up to me, pressed its paw against my throat, and set its tongue to my cheek.

My hand was at my face instantly, and came away wet and hot; my fingers were coated with red. I felt the wound and cried out; what felt like an enormous gash ran, somewhat semicircular, around my cheekbone.

Nicholas was at my side, pressing a cloth into my hand and shielding his eyes from the wound.

“Oh, god, girl, I think we both dozed off and he got in.”

“What?”

“I think he bit you.” He dropped his hand, unshielding his face, and the only thing I could notice in the dull light was the blood streaming from his mouth, and the filed points, just barely visible from behind his curled lip.

I didn’t need much more than that.

I repelled myself forward with a burst of energy and hit the ground running. So stupid. How could I have been so stupid?
Jakell said not to fall asleep, and what did I do?

And a group of colonists, but not a family? Oh, it was too impossibly obvious.

And the obscured male heads?

He said he liked my freckles. My hand was at my face, tracing the line I knew the speckles of pigment took; across the middle of my nose and the higher parts of my cheekbone- right were he’d sunk his teeth.

He was screaming down the tunnel, and I could hear his footsteps behind me.

“Girl, wait- please, please, please wait, blue eyes-“

I was out in the tundra before I even realized what I was doing. I fell face-down in the snow and kept on thrashing forward.

An attack. I needed to go on the defensive, now.

I buried my hand in my pocket searching for something, anything-

A feather totem brushed my fingertips and I clawed it out, holding the thing in my hand.

Totems are the main study tool and aid for the student mender. When one hasn’t yet developed a signature mending style, we use tools to focus our energy into more concrete objects.
The feather totem is a simple enough object- a jade tube with a feather tied to the back with a beaded string.

I threw it into the air, focused my energy, and held it vertical above my hands.

And I waited.

It was only a matter of seconds before Nicholas the Zealot came charging after me, and I was prepared.

The energy arrow flew straight and true, striking him in the left shoulder and sinking all the way through to the other side. The totem, now useless, zipped back to my hand, and I pocketed it on the run.

The ensuing screams were lost in the wind that separated us.

I’m not sure how Jakell found me, but he managed. The sky had lightened considerably, and our visibility had returned somewhat, but the feat still seems impossible.

But he was there, pressing a fresh bandage to my wound and clucking his tongue.

“You fell asleep, didn’t you.”

I answered him by leaving my arms hanging at my sides, dropping my head, and burying my face in the front of his parka for the second time in the last thirty-six hours. His gloved hand rubbed my back soothingly.

“Lauriel, I hate to remind you of our imminent danger, but we should probably find some cover.”

I mumbled my disagreement into the fur, but the comment was lost.

“Lauriel, we really should- oh, sneck.”

His soothing hand at my back curled into a clawed grip. He tossed me into the air, caught me, and raced forward into the snow.

“Put on your goggles.” He whispered. I obliged, and a moment later, was airborne.

We both landed in enormous snowdrifts.

Fortunately, too, for within a minute, all three of the zealots were within fifteen feet of our hiding places. The males had removed their hat and kerchiff, and the Zealots’ signature shaved heads, with the exception of a short topknot, were visible.

Religiously pure and regimented, morally monstrous, as always.

They sniffed the air about them, trying to catch any scent of us.

“I think,” the woman said, sampling the air again, “that they’re just east.”

In our hiding places just west, both Jakell and I relaxed.

They moved in their expected direction, and the snow began to die down.

The zealots stopped, and looked at one another.

“Do you hear that?” Nicholas asked.

“Yes-“ The man said, and took another step east. Nicholas stepped in front of him and stooped down towards a large snowbank before them.

“Ohhh, blue eyes- we’re going to spend a little more time together.” He crooned.
At first, everything stayed silent.

The eruption of snow and ice started a moment later, spewing from the mound as a form launched itself high into the air.

I could just make out the figure’s excellent combat form and what I could only assume was a sword before the weapon was embedded about five inches down through Nicholas’s shoulder muscle.

The newcomer was decidedly male, obscured from head to toe in winter gear, and shrouded in a black face kerchiff and a pair of heat-seeking goggles.

He removed the knife from the screaming boy’s shoulder and allowed it to dance past his neck, just barely nicking the jugular was an intense result. Nicholas collapsed to the ground leaking astoundingly.

The stranger turned his attention to the remaining adult zealots, and made quick work, this time going so far as to remove limbs and inflict multiple stab wounds with the ice-climbing spikes affixed to his boot tips before ending all with the same deft little slice to the jugular.

I had to turn away at certain parts, but Jakell watched the entire time, his face set with focus.

When everything was all finished, the stranger removed a black bag from his pack and picked up a couple severed limbs, dropping them into the satchel before returning it to his back with the nonchalant absence of a Sunday shopper.

I even thought I heard him humming.

He then dragged away the bodies of the woman and Nicholas.

It took him a few minutes to come back for the man, but return he did.

As he stooped over the body, his gaze fixed directly upon our hiding spot.

He froze for several minutes, before cocking his head.

Jakell sent me a sidelong glance, steeped in his ‘don’t panic’ expression.

The stranger was rising slowly now, and stepped over the corpse with a spiked boot and moved very slowly towards us.

I could tell without looking that Jakell was holding the ancestral needle, but in the end, it was unnecessary.

The figure stopped a few feet away and simply looked.

He then slowly removed his goggles, squinted at our snowy, whited-out forms, and turned.

A moment later, he was dragging the man’s body away, and was completely out of sight.

But the piercing blue eyes I had seen just over the black mask were not yet out of my mind, and linger there still.

“Zealots eating other Zealots,” I chuckled dryly as we rose from the snow twenty minutes later, “what are the new worlds coming to?”

“He wasn’t a Zealot.” Jakell said plainly, removing a compass from his satchel.

“Why not?”

“Did you see his head? Buzzed, not shaved. Man had hair.”

“So maybe it’s a new sect.”

“Definitely not. He was also wearing a pilfered Mender’s sash.”

“Seriously?”

“Kept his knife sheath on his back. Mender’s star looked like it had been cut and gnawed out. Also,”

“What?” I asked, removing my snow-caked goggles to see his face more clearly.

“The woman zealot’s bite-“ Jakell sighed, running a finger down his cheek. “Bruising showed a natural bite. No files, old-school incisors still included. The man’s something else.”

“Any idea what?”

“Whatever a man who kills three zealots and makes off with their limbs without so much blinking an eye can be called.” He looked westward, after the blue-eyed man. “A badder beast.”

Snowblind.

We were walking at an unbelievably sluggish pace. Even Jakell, obscured slightly as he was by the snow that flew before (and occasionally into) my eyes, strode with long limbs burdened by the ever-changing landscape around us.

We were moving across one of the Pale Lands, the violent, unmapped tundras that made Northeastern Ivvk the ideal prisoner’s resort. Nothing but white, whipping expanse for as far as the eye could see, melding with a barely distinguishable white-grey sky that seemed to be ever falling into one’s eyes.

With an exasperated, but relieved exhale I remembered my goggles and pulled them over my eyes with numb and aching fingers. Now sheltered from the unsympathetic elements, my lids were suddenly filled with tears- not the result of physical aggravation or irritation, but the unquenchable suspicion of true and imminent ruin. Hidden in my hood and behind the eighth-inch of tinted plexi-glass lenses, the beads of salty water rolled down to the top of my cheek and lingered, trapped, inside the frame. Jakell turned, perhaps sensing my dread, and gave me one of his immense grins. Framed by his fur parka and accented by his similar, but insect-like orange goggles, the sight was as keenly unsettling as it was ridiculous. The more disturbing fact was that he was smiling it all, given what had transpired in the last four hours since we had arrived on Ivvk.

We’d jumped through a charted rift on Serenec.

As we had approached the massive pool of impenetrable black, silhouetted by the planet’s renown fields of golden wheat, I was clammy with sweat and childish with discomfort.

“I mean, my god, Jakell, can’t we just suit up when we get there?” I whimpered, stumbling forward with cumbersome, furred boots. I let out a long, particularly resonant exclamation of distress.

“You’ll lose too much body heat in your normal uniform. Trust me, you’ll be better off in the winter gear.”

“But Jakell-“

“You will thank me,” he snapped, turning and giving me a pointedly annoyed look, “when we. Get. There.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” I mumbled inaudibly “you look like old roadkill that got flattened down the middle.” The statement was fairly truthful; Jakell’s brindle-brown fur parka was somewhat matted and when added to his tall, gaunt frame, he took on the appearance of a tire-mashed cat.

We approached the brink and stood, motionless, at the very edge, toes fixed over oblivion, heels grounded in the existent.

“Got everything?” He asked, still somewhat patronizing. “Picks, extra insulation, rations, climbing gear?”

“I’m sure they’ll lend us their stuff. We are heading to a Mending Outpost, right?”

“Do you?”

I grumbled, slapping blindly at the huge back fastened to my back and listening for the clinking and rustling over the various items. “Yes,” I said after an intentionally long while.

“Alright. Since you’ve never been to Ivvk, you’ll be leaping first.” He said, tugging leather snowgloves onto his hands.

“What?”

“It’s a good learning experience. You’re not always going to be able to leap through after an escort, or first into an area you’re familiar with. Look for the golden reflective circle.”

“…Not if I go administrative.”

“What’s that?” He said, still not looking.

“Not if I run the administrative track.”

“You’re not going administrative, Lauriel, you’re going into the solo core. And if you don’t I won’t write you a recommendation.”

“I know some people in the main division on Dwi. Maybe I won’t even need you.”

“Yeah, okay,” He murmured, before glancing sidelong at me. “But you’d never survive my letter of disapproval.”

“You wouldn’t.” I said matter-of-factly, staring down the rift. “You don’t have it in you.”

“Concerning Lauriel Falenn,” He began very loudly, speaking in his deeper letter-reading voice, “I, Ja’kyellinus, decorated mender of the solo division, teaching division, and recommended potential elder, disapprove Lauriel Falenn for any position in the administrative divisions for multiple reasons.”

“You wouldn’t!” I said again, attempting to drown him out.

“For besides being unbelievably emotional and girly, she is absolutely insufferable in high temperatures, is insubordinate, and is quite possible neurotic to a psychopathic degree.”

“JAKELL.”

“To allow her to continue on her desired path is to put everyone on Dwi in jeopardy of her girly wrath. For these reasons, and many others, I disapprove of Lauriel Falenn in all conceivable respects. Sincerely, Jakell.”

We stood in silence for a second.

“I hate you.” I whispered.

“I know.” He answered, before planting a furred boot in my back and kicking me off the rim and out over the rift. I barely time to fix my gloved hand into the galactic symbol of condemnation before the darkness took me.

Jumping into rifts is a strange action; because of the abnormalities in gravity, mass, and basic physics, most individuals will linger for about a half-second above the blackness before being pulled down into the void at an unbelievable velocity. All light is absorbed at four centimeters beneath the black. All sound is fully dampened at six.

Therefore, it was only too believable that Jakell never heard my initial screamed curses, or much more genuine and short screams of genuine panic as the blackness and void cleared and dropped me above a white and whirling horizon.

Most charted and rimmed Rifts have receiving zones and arrival zones. You will enter on one world, through the fixed rim, and will come through a large hole in the other world’s sky, about four hundred feet above normal ground level. The tear of the arrival zone usually appears as soon as the traveling object is totally immersed in the darkness of the receiving zone.

I had never arrived alone before, and I had never even arrived on Ivvk.

I couldn’t see anything for the first thirty seconds of falling.

The first thing a mending student learns is how to discharge energy and slow your fall. You’re supposed to keep your eyes trained on the ground and consciously repel yourself upwards, canceling out most of your speed and slowing in relation to the ground.

I went from the frigid black of the void to the blinding white of Ivvk’s sky, and the ground was nowhere to be seen.

I panicked, thrashed, and broke the second arrival rule; don’t compromise your feet-down position. When you lose your heading, you can’t control your energy output towards the earth. I entered a wild spiral, turning and turning in the solid white that surrounded me on all sides. The screams and sobs that flew from my mouth were stolen by the whistling wind, the same air that pulled my parka from all sides, tormenting me further as I hurtled what I could only assume was earthwards.

I couldn’t be sure of how long I fell, but it took enough time for the tears streaming from my eyes to form icy crystals at the tips of my eyelashes.

I could never forget the wash of sensation that enveloped my when his arms were wrapped around me. I couldn’t remember the impact of the motion, only the consequential force; I was crushed against his narrow chest, curled up and confined comfortably in his grip. It was impossible, through the layers of fur and fiberweave armor, but I swore, in that moment when we flew, tumbling through the white nothingness, that I could hear his heart beating.

I’m still unsure of how exactly it happened.

Jakell told me later that he jumped through nearly right behind me, but because of the size delay, he arrived a few seconds later and caught a glimpse of my thrashing form disappearing in the sea of white. He flipped, flying head-down and propelling himself towards the ground, and caught up to me in a matter of seconds, wrapping his arms around me and kicking into a topspin. He then sent out a storm of alternate energy, stopping us dead for a moment, before allowing us to drift slowly the rest of the way down.

And there was no gold circle.

As we landed, lightly, my face was buried in his parka, and I emerged wiping the half-frozen tears from my eyes. I didn’t want him to see me upset.

“Y’know, Lauriel, I think you’ve got something in the bag, and yet-“ He clucked his tongue playfully, consciously averting his eyes as I composed myself. “You never fail to amaze. Or fail. It makes teaching you a very demanding job.”

I had never felt so thankful for his feigned lightheartedness. The truth of the matter was that if he had arrived a few seconds later, missed me by a moment, or failed to catch me twenty feet before the surface, I would have been dead by my own hand, and not a single person would have blamed Jakell.

“I aim to amuse.” I mumbled, cracking a trembling smile and thumping my fist at his chest. He took this as an opportunity to set me down softly and glance around.

“So, where is this outpost supposed to be?” I asked, stooping and tying a loose leather strap on my boot. “You think they’d be more considerate, given that their sole charge in this godforsaken location is to aid any student-teacher teams or ambassadors passing through.” I stayed crouching and let out a small chuckle. “You were very right, by the way; I’m more than grateful for the snowgear. I assume you’ve made the trek to the station before?” I glanced up at him and noticed for the first time the concerned furrow between his eyebrows and the uneasy set of his lips. “Jakell? Which way?”

“Here.” He said, turning and glancing around.

“What?”

“It should be here.”

I rose and glanced about; the flying snow obscured most of my vision I could only make out vague shapes. “Are you sure?”

He moved a few feet forward and drew something white and frost-covered out of the snow before returning to my side. I looked up at him. He was staring east with a display of anxiety I had never seen in his maroon-brown eyes. “Wait for the wind to die.”

It took a minute or two of peering about, eyes straining against the whirl of white and grey, blinding paleness and soft shadow.

The howling slowly dissolved into a soft growl, and as the snow fell, more sparse and passive, I was granted a glimpse through the sheets of falling specks.

We were standing in the center of a ruin.

The only color initially visible to my eyes was the striking brown-black of the decimated structures around us; buildings, rising in low, square, and unimaginative half-existence, marred to the edge of recognition. Yawning holes in the walls, made by the bursting flames of several days past, exposed the rampaged furniture and facilities inside. Tables were overturned, couches and chairs were ripped and ruined, and papers, strangely unaffected by fire, were blown here and there by the gusts still confined inside the structures. It was not until a minute later that the snow was still enough that I could make out a new color; the reddish black of blood that covered everything around the decimation, the simple pale beige of forms, small and large, male and female, stripped naked, lying in pools of this deep crimson,

I stood staring, unable to make the slightest sound or motion.

Jakell was not so confined. He silently gripped my hand in his very long, gloved fingers, and spoke in a voice just barely more audible than the sobbing wind. “Northeast, Lauriel. We must reach the next outpost before them.”

I turned and squeezed his hand, staring up and speaking as a broken, terrified child might. “Who?”

“The ones who killed these people, burned the facility, and cooked their dead flesh over the embers.” He extended his other hand, showing me what he had retrieved from the snow. It was a child’s hand, smaller even than my own; the side was gone, the only traces of cause left indented at the red-pink sides of the exposed interior.

Teeth marks.

Human incisors, sharpened to a sinister purpose.

Bite molds I had been asked to study for years, with little result.

I glanced up at Jakell, and my mouth formed the shapes my breath could not flow through, but Jakell’s could.

“Zealots.” He said, as I mouthed the word.

Homecoming/DeadOnArrival

[Author's Note: Just a little Riftworlds blurb, separate from my other posts.
I'm thinking about rewriting my intro for the plot- I've sort of written myself into a corner, as I'm prone to do.]

There are few rules pertaining to proclamation of death in the Mender’s Core.
The most widely known and accepted statement on the subject is this:
If a Mender cannot be confirmed as living, they must be assumed dead.
My mentor and constant companion, Jakell, has returned to a cleaned-out residence five times in the last year.
As I checked the height of the sun out of the south barrack’s window, I wondered what he’d do for the sixth time.
“Ms. Falenn-“ I glanced back towards the front of the classroom. The class instructor glared up at me from her seat at the class’s head. “Perhaps you’d find the enviroment of this learning session more conducive to education if you would direct your attention to your studies rather than the weather.”
I curled my lip far up over my gums in an exaggerated smile and returned to the tattered book spread before me.
He had been missing in action for seventeen hours. He was supposed to have returned five hours ago and caught a few hours of rest before setting off with me for another training session. It was almost unbelievably typical of Jakell to miss an appointment, but I still felt the cold pangs of worry deep in my gut. What if he didn’t return for days? Was I supposed to continue with supplemental studies until the semester’s end?
“Ms. Falenn!” I realized my gaze had drifted back out towards the landing platforms and I snapped my head back down towards my textbook. “Thank you.”
Supplemental studies were for the forgotten.
I glanced subtly about, taking in the faces of the cowardly and unremarkable and sickly assistant menders that surrounded me.
When unfit or unable to carry out field studies, all assistant menders were expected to hit the books in a classroom setting, feeding our understanding in the styles of the old world.
My book was open to page 150, the second chapter of cityscape reconnaissance. The bottom left of the page sported a graphite sketch from a glorified mender’s field journal; the greatest observation points were circled and labeled. The drawing was over 27 years old. I yawned, propping my head on my left hand.
He was probably dead.
Lying somewhere in a grassy field, head bashed open, blood streaming down those black, linear tattoos he took great pains to obscure- burgundy-brown eyes staring vacant at the sky, mouth hanging ajar and undignified.
The image brought an odd sense of relief to my clenched frame; the concept of a deceased Jakell was so unreal that it couldn’t even terrorize me.
No, he was probably just mortally wounded.
Two rows behind me, someone screamed.
The whole class, myself included, swiveled in our seats to stare at the disturbance.
A young assistant mender, blond and frail-looking, was staring out the window and shrieking.
We all, in turn, followed her gaze.
I was the first one out of my seat, but not the first to the door; it was a struggle to pry my way through the sudden wall of bodies and throw myself down the hallway towards the exit.
By the time I could once again see the arrival platform, Jakell had removed the limp body from his shoulder and handed it off to the medical team.
If not for his distinctive gangly frame, I might not have recognized him- the normal prickly nature of his blonde hair was compromised by the unsettlingly scarlet mess that covered his entire body. Before I could reach the platform, he was traveling towards the northern barracks with long, buoyant strides.
“Jakell!” I shouted, with little result. I tried again; my mentor still refrained to turn. I was closing in on him now, sprinting with little regard for composure. “JAKELL.”
He didn’t realize I was behind him until I tripped on an upturned piece of slate and collided into him. Despite gravity’s best efforts of pitching us both to ground, he remained curiously upright, instead grabbing my forearm and pulling me about to face him. His grip was sticky with half-congealed blood. In spite of being absolutely doused in the deep crimson ooze, his expression was cheery and detached as usual. As I stared at him, mouth open a bit, he grinned.
“Ah, Lauriel. How’s school?” He began walking again, pulling me along with every enormous stride.
“School is- Uhm, school is fine. Where the hell have you been? Whose blood is that? What the hell happened on Dwi?”
“Do you have any idea if the bathhouses are running this early? If I have to go home and sleep like this, I’m gonna get everything all icky and red.”
“Jakell.” I said again, clawing at his grip. “Are you going to answer any of my questions?”
“I’ll bet they are. What’s the earliest you’ve gotten into one?”
“JAKELL.” He sighed and glanced down at me, suddenly quite somber. “Jakell, what happened?”
“Nothing on Dwi, so no need to worry about the motherland.” A smile crept back into his voice before promptly vanishing. “We hit Kelyar instead. The disturbances on Dwi have been linked back there through an unlicensed wormhole. Apparently, the more hardcore activists have been doing blind jumps all the way into the city, doing the dirty work, and escaping back to Kelyar.”
“Kelyar and Dwi are linked?”
“Not anymore. We had to sew up the rift- it was too unstable.” We were at the Northern barracks now, and Jakell was scanning his keycard before dragging me inside. I wondered if he even remembered he was cutting off the circulation to my left hand.
“And the blood-?”
“Rebel resistance. Had to do some ripping and defensive work; Brinse got an old-world-style bullet to the neck and I had to carry him home.”
“So the rebels are-“
“You know what? You’re not supposed to be here.” Jakell mused, as one of the male barracks-dwellers passed by in little more than a towel. “Uhm- Why don’t you head back to the school and we’ll catch up when I’m a little less repulsive, how ‘bout that.” As he spoke, he pushed me down the few steps and out the door. “Yeah, that sounds good. See you later.”
Before I fully realized what was happening, I was standing outside the northern barracks, half-covered in blood and still consumed by questions.