Tall Woods
Sig-Mar is probably dead, but it still seems prudent to gather the remaining Chaos Emeralds before she can return. April first, or the Tall Woods? Neither seemed appealing, until we thought to check something: how did a Tall Man’s vision-o-vision react to being looked at by another Tall Man?
It turns out that Tall Men quite enjoy being looked at by others of their kind. Including those which are being worn by a human using a transformation medium.
“So maybe I wasn’t totally nuts to hug that Tall Man that one time,” I mused as we walked up to the entrance of the forest. We could walk smoothly here, among friends. It’s only when they’re being observed by outsiders that Tall Men move jerkily and with the sound of cracking branches. “The problem was that I wasn’t a Tall Man at the time.”
I could tell Otto was giving me a look even though he didn’t have a face. It was very pleasant; I felt deeply that we were allies, and knew I could count on him to help me murder people. Wait, no, we were trying not to murder people. It was kind of hard to remember that while being a Tall Man.
We glided between the trees, a band of five Tall Men of exactly the same four-meter height. No one taller than the other, and all bound by unity of purpose. Other Tall Men peeked out at us, also exactly the same height as me, and they felt safe and familiar, cousins and friends rather than my small band of siblings, but kin nonetheless. The trees stretched up towards the sky much taller than any species I’ve ever heard of. Many of them had hollowed-out slits in them; most were empty but some were covered by an amber membrane protecting the half-formed Tall Man inside. Little cousins, soon-to-be allies. As we walked farther in, I felt peaceful and happy, as if coming home.
There were people in the forest as well, which was odd. Only a few, but the outsiders were very noticeable amid the comforting presence of family. I could feel them looking at me, wondering what we were doing here. I saw a Tall Man grab one, but instead of breaking their neck as would have been so easy, she covered the man’s eyes so he wouldn’t gaze upon us. I really can’t figure out why they’re there, though—surely it would have been more convenient to keep everyone out of the woods.
An hour’s walk into the forest was an enormous tree, maybe a hundred meters wide and ten times as tall. Much, much bigger than any normal tree could be, especially one less than three centuries old. And this tree had a golden ring attached to it, about ten meters up. Our family beckoned us closer, and we teleported to the mouth of the portal and entered.
The space inside was very different from the dimension of can-openers we had seen in Roto-Mar, although it was hard to tell much about it at first because of all the fog. Venturing further inside, we found ourselves in front of a house. A normal-looking house behind a lawn of neatly trimmed grass and a white picket fence. And next to it was another normal-looking house, with a car in front of it. I looked down. I was standing on pavement, smooth and unbroken. The portal in Roto-Mar had led to a realm of can-openers, and this one led to the realm of… suburbia?
We passed more houses and reached a corner. Finney and Bachman Road. Was it the first intersection we’d gotten to? I couldn’t remember how long I’d been walking, and the golden ring we’d come through wasn’t visible through all the fog. That wasn’t good. I was glad Citrine had insisted we hold hands so as not to get separated, although it was easy to keep track of other Tall Men.
“Is that a crab store?” Jacqueline asked, pointing.
It was a crab store, according to the sign. “Weird,” I said, shrugging. Locator told me the emerald was to my right and slightly ahead, but which way was the exit? I had gotten turned around in the fog already.
Jacqueline tugged on the line, forcing us to follow her up to the crab store. “It must be important,” she insisted, dropping Clarence’s hand to tug open the door. There was nobody inside, but a radio on the counter played a bouncy tune I half-remembered from somewhere. A map beside it showed the town of Silent Hill, scattered around a lake. A resort town, I remembered, but how did I know that? I didn’t think I’d been here before but so many things about it were strangely familiar, and yet not quite right. Maybe this was the pocket dimension of nostalgia, or faulty memory.
The music abruptly cut off, the radio blaring static, as something crashed through the window. The large pink bird with no hit point bar opened its mouth and vomited a gem-encrusted mass of flailing limbs. Both of which tried to kill us. Our response to these non-Tall invaders was swift and effective. Once the bird was dead, the radio switched back to its music. Huh, so it was actually a monster-detector. Jacqueline fiddled with it, trying to find a station she liked better, but apparently the only one available here was Elevator Music Daily.
Next door to the crab store (which had no crabs in stock) was a bookstore which had been ransacked, judging by the empty shelves and haphazard piles of books on the floor. We looked for time travel, history, and warp magic, but mostly found books on lobotomies and the psychology of fear. An odd combination.
The bookstore was clearly pre-Cataclysm, or at least the most of the books were from before Steve and Lily showed up. What was weird is that none of the books looked very old, even though they’d been published over 250 years ago. It was as if an entire pre-Cataclysm town had been plucked out of time and placed here, frozen. That theory was supported by the poster on the wall of the chainsaw store (why was there a chainsaw store? Otto didn’t question it, and instead scooped up armfuls of them and put them in Jacqueline’s box), which was faded but not ancient, and dated 09/08/889. Nearly fifteen years before the incursion. The latest date I saw on anything in the town was 893, eleven years before.
Better supplied, we set off around the lake in search of the emerald, which was somewhere near the southern shore. As we got closer, it became clear that the emerald was on an island, or rather below it. After stealing a boat and climbing down an irritatingly long ladder, we found ourselves in a metal hallway leading to a door with three keyholes: a heart, a beetle, and a brilliant-cut gemstone eerily like a Chaos Emerald. A map taped to the wall next to it had three locations marked. Yet another puzzle?
“It’s on the other side of the door,” I said after checking again. “But Tremorsense can’t pick up anything in there, it’s like that room just doesn’t exist. We could try knocking through the wall, I guess.”
“Hmm.” Clarence scanned the door. He had switched from being a Tall Man to Parasonico after we realized there weren’t any other Tall Men in here to fool. “Spatially locked,” he said. “Whatever that means. I vote we don’t fuck with spacial anomalies when we’re in a pocket dimension, especially this far from the exit.”
Which was a fair point. We had taken more than half an hour to get here, and I wasn’t sure we would be able to find our way back to the portal at all. If we collapsed the pocket dimension, we’d have less than a minute to get out.
So we would have to solve the puzzle the way it was intended to be solved. Or at least mostly—the skeleton key could fit one keyhole, so we would only have to retrieve two of the items. The three keys were at the Blue Creek Apartment Complex, Alchemilla Hospital, and the Lakeside Amusement Park.
“Not the amusement park!” Clarence insisted immediately.
“Why not?” I countered. “Maybe the Ferris wheel still works.” I had a feeling Citrine would like Ferris wheels, although the dense fog would diminish the experience.
“Haven’t you seen horror movies? We are clearly in a horror movie, so if we go to the amusement park we’ll get attacked by evil clowns! Or it will be full of monsters and—”
“And the hospital won’t? Doesn’t a hospital sound like the perfect place to be overrun with unethical experiments which escaped from the basement, or filled with the victims of a horrifying plague? Not that I’m the expert in horror tropes, but—”
“Does anyone object to the apartment building?” Jacqueline interrupted me. Nobody did. What could possibly go wrong with an apartment building? Besides being full of monsters and dead bodies, which it was.
We found the Blue Creek Apartment Complex to be a surprisingly nice building a couple blocks away. Well, it would have been nice, except for the skittering sounds we heard from the second floor. And the fact that it was in Silent Hill, an increasingly concerning town full of creepy mist, which may or may not be in the pocket dimension of horror movies.
The first floor was fairly uneventful, until we found a dead body with what appeared to be a Chaos Emerald sticking out of his head. But it didn’t register on Locator, and Analyze revealed it to be a Fakestone (Nightmare remnant). Nightmare? I wondered, then got distracted thinking about whether we might be able to fool April with the Fakestone. She didn’t have a Locator, but maybe the utter lack of color in this emerald would tip her off.
“Tasty!” said Citrine, holding a suspiciously blood-free stone she had pulled from the man’s head. Her Tall Man’s face showed no sign of the blood she must have just absorbed. I’m not sure if this was the Tall Man’s instinct for licking up blood, or Citrine’s innate delight at trying new foods.
On the third floor, we found the Nightmare, hanging out in apartment 309 along with three corpses which were stuck to the ceiling. It was a human-sized kobold wearing a trenchcoat, with empty eyesockets and three cigars sticking out of its mouth. An ostentatious broach in the shape of a brilliant-cut gem was pinned to its lapel: the key we were looking for. Its right arm was a tentacle, with five more Fakestones embedded in it. Unlike the pink birds, or presumably the stomping things we’d hidden from on our way around the lake, this creature had visible hit points: 200.
We learned several things during that fight. If the Nightmare’s eyes start glowing, something is going to explode in short order. Hitting the Nightmare’s Fakestones with a crowbar is surprisingly effective. If you order your zombie army to jump out a third story window, most of them are going to break their legs because they can’t teleport. And we should really remember what our goal is—when the Nightmare threw its gemstone broach to the floor and jumped out the window, Citrine of all people was the only one to think to grab it before jumping out in pursuit.
One key down, one to go. We checked out some of the stores while discussing which of the two remaining keys to go after. The grocery store yielded a perfectly normal first aid kit, some energy drinks (which interestingly restored medium-usable energy), a syringe of “healthy juice”, and and the most concerning drug I’ve ever encountered. The liter bottle vibrated like it was about to blast off, and claimed to be a 500-hour energy drink. “Sugar-free!!!” I read, wincing at the proliferation of exclamation points. “Blackout-inducing!!! That’s really not what you… Safe for most kidneys? Scrambling, manic, crackheaded energy NOW!!! Oh dear. What’s in this stuff?” I turned the bottle over and read the ingredients. “Oh, it’s made of methamphetamines and poison, how reassuring. Do you think it might explode if we threw it at someone?”
Nobody knew the answer to this, so we very gingerly put it in Jacqueline’s box, which was much emptier after the loss of several zombies and the removal of most of the chainsaws so we could use them. Then we stole a car (surprisingly easy when you have a skeleton key, but we had to wait for Clarence to hot-wire it anyway, like he’d seen in a movie) and headed for the hospital (harder, because we kept getting lost and being attacked by pink birds; but on the bright side, we found a mix-tape of incongruously cheerful music from the 70’s so Clarence, Citrine, and I attempted a dance party in the back seat while Otto and Jacqueline pretended to be dignified in the front).
It was clear that something was wrong from the outside of the hospital: most of the ground floor windows were boarded up, as well as some of the ones on the upper stories. Strangely, the automatic sliding doors of the entrance still worked. Passing through the waiting area, we found ourselves in a badly-lit hallway. The first door yielded a blue metal plate with the image of a turtle on it. Clearly part of a puzzle, we just didn’t know what Lily wanted us to do with it yet. The second was empty, and the third was a conference room containing a lot of chairs and a familiar and very spiky device: a Sacrifice machine, like the one in the basement of the power plant.
But this time, we had Analyze. So now we know that if you bleed on it, it will move you and some of the people nearby into the dark world. To come back, you need to use another Sacrifice machine on the other side. We still didn’t know anything about the dark world so we wouldn’t want to use it, but it might be a good backup plan for if we needed to get out of the collapsing pocket dimension…
We had just finished levering the Sacrifice machine into Jacqueline’s box when our discussion of whether to use it was interrupted by the radio, the burst of static announcing the entrance a pair of nurses sporting neshamelon-sized lumps attached to their left shoulders. One stepped forward, spraying a viscous red liquid at Jacqueline. She and Clarence knocked her over and tried to remove the mysterious lump using their chainsaws, with Citrine joining in. This obviously didn’t work, because chainsaws are not meant for surgery and adding more of them does not improve their efficacy. While they did succeed in removing the lump, they also removed a lot of other pieces of the nurse’s body.
I’m pretty sure something is messing with our judgment. It might be the Chaos Emeralds we’ve been carrying around. But this time, it could also have been the time spent as Tall Men, or even an effect of the pocket dimension. I don’t know, and we don’t have time to stop by Gotita and ask Dr Mila.
We were a lot more careful with the second nurse, and Jacqueline and I managed to manhandle her into a position where Otto could carefully remove the lump with his sword. Still not a traditional surgical tool, but a lot more precise than a chainsaw. She was bleeding and unconscious, but we had a first aid kit and plenty of bandages. The lump was, according to Analyze, a parasite in its adolescent form, until Citrine stomped on it, smearing blood and insect-bits onto the concrete. This was probably a good move—the radio stopped its monster-alert static as soon as Citrine squished it.
The nurse woke up a couple minutes later, extremely confused. “What? Who are you? What are you doing here?” She paused, looking around. “Oh. Are you with the military?”
“I don’t think so,” said Citrine uncertainly.
“If we were, would we know it?” Jacqueline asked.
“I’m an officer from a foreign country,” Otto added. “But we’re not invading or anything!” he hastened to add. “Just visiting. And also confused.”
Sometimes, we are exceedingly unhelpful. This would be a great advantage, if we could do it on purpose.
“…..I just work here,” said the nurse, looking around again and finding us no less confusing. We had not thought to turn back to human, so Otto was the only normal-looking one around, or at least as normal as a large man in an extremely spiky suit of power armor can be.
“What do you do?” I asked, trying to appear calm and friendly despite being a large stone dragon. “What’s with all the books on lobotomies?” One of the drawers was full of them. “Is that what this place is for? Or is it a normal hospital, with, you know, medical ethics?” We later learned that Fakestone is grown from chunks of brain, so the lobotomies made some sense, in a complete-lack-of-medical-ethics kind of way.
“I think we have medical ethics?” the nurse said, incorrectly. She shrugged, stopping partway through it as the bandages on her shoulder pulled tight. Blood had started to soak in patches. “What is this?”
“You had a horrible lump,” Citrine explained, gesturing to the mess on the floor. “But it’s gone now. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I—” she frowned, then stared blankly into space for a few moments. “It was! It was big and red and there were too many eyes and—I thought it was just a rumor….” She started hyperventilating.
It took a lot of coaxing, but we finally got the story of what had happened to the hospital. A few years ago, people had started reporting strange noises around the hospital. There was something crawling through the vents, they said. They would catch glimpses out of the corner of their eyes. Nobody was sure what to believe, but then people started disappearing. There was an investigation; they tore up the floorboards and opened up the walls and found nothing. And it was the only hospital around for miles, so they had no choice but to reopen. But the strange sights and sounds continued, and people kept disappearing. Presumably she had been taken too, though she didn’t remember anything coherent about it. The parasite seemed important, we guessed, but its squished body didn’t offer much information.
Clearly, we would have to hunt down the mysterious monster who kidnapped people and gave them parasites. Clearly. I’m not sure whose idea this was. We stowed the green piece of metal the dead nurse had in her pocket (it was the Plate of Hatter, evidently, and had the image of a man in a hat) and headed upstairs to carefully remove the lump from the nurse I could sense hiding up there. He, too, had a panic attack, so we dosed him with tranquilizers and left the two nurses in the storeroom with Otto’s clone to guard them in case the mysterious monster came back. Checking the second floor, we found more drugs of dubious usefulness, a yellow plate with a cat on it, and video evidence that a Nightmare had been kidnapping patients and nobody noticed. I supposed the nurse could have mistaken Fakestones for eyes, but it still didn’t explain the parasites.
And another Sacrifice machine. There were a lot of them around here. In a way, it seemed like a sign that we should use them. I always thought the premise of literary analysis where every detail has to mean something was silly, but living in the same world as Lily tends to makes you think that way. But there was no way of knowing that we could get back if we did use a Sacrifice machine. We had one in the box, but that didn’t give us as much flexibility as we’d like. Otto and his clone might have two separate boxes if he used the spell, but doubling our storage wouldn’t make much of a difference. Could we fly one out on the cloud? But the cloud had so many eyes, it was sure to enrage the Tall Men.
“We could cover it in a bag,” Jacqueline suggested. “Block its vision.”
“We’d have to put you in a bag, too,” I pointed out. “And what about the nurses, do we put them in bags, too? Hm, that might actually work. Sounds like a kidnapping cliche, though.”
“We should check whether they even want to leave,” Clarence pointed out.
But when we went to ask them, the two nurses, as well as Otto’s clone, were gone. We ran back downstairs to the security cameras and found that the nurses had led the clone into a room on the third floor which contained yet another Sacrifice machine. The female nurse had placed her hand on the spike and all three had vanished.
Well, that settled the question of whether we were going to visit the dark world.
The lights were off in the room where we arrived, the only light coming from Otto’s slowly charging hyperbreakers. He immediately called up his clone on the armor’s radio.
“I’m in the morgue with the nurses, who seem to be out of the mind control,” the clone reported. “The enemy is in the air vents. Repeat, it is in the vents. I have wounded it and I sent a cloud of poison gas after it.”
Opening the door, we found that we were in the same room we’d come from, only missing a Sacrifice machine. The other rooms appeared to be in the same places, though the walls were rusted in places and spattered with blood in others. We made our way quickly to the first floor by blowing holes in the floors using Otto’s hyperbreakers and my lava, and encountered a ball of blood-red tentacles and insectoid legs, with six pulsating orange spheres mixed in. So there was the mysterious monster! It dropped one of the spheres on the ground, and scuttled into a vent.
“That’s an egg,” Clarence reported helpfully after Analyzing it. “Kill it! Kill it before it lays eggs! Wait, it’s already an egg. Kill the egg! Before it hatches!”
I smashed the egg and we chased after the thing, which was quite fast on its many legs. The thing feared electricity (though it wasn’t damaged by it), so Jacqueline used the dark world’s version of the security system to electrify different sections of the vents in an attempt to herd it towards us (I’m not sure why the security system has this feature). Instead, the thing used its superior speed to lead us on a chase around the entire hospital, periodically dropping eggs to either delay or kill us (we opted for the delay option, and smashed them thoroughly).
I caught up with it on the third floor to find it in the elevator, frantically pummeling the up-button. Blood was smeared across the floor, showing where it had dragged its mass of tentacles. I tossed my crowbar through the closing doors, hitting it on the head, and it went limp just before the doors closed completely and the elevator started upwards. Upwards, to the secret fourth floor, because of course there was a secret fourth floor in the dark-hospital. Upstairs, we found a red metal plate and a door, which we used the plates to unlock. Inside was a mannequin containing a beetle-shaped key.
Finally. Now we could get on with things, and get out of Silent Hill before it killed us in a suitably horrifying fashion.
But before we went to retrieve the emerald, we decided to check what was outside in the dark world. Tremorsense couldn’t see anything outside of the walls, but there had to be something outside the hospital, right? So Clarence drilled a tiny hole in one of the outside walls and threaded a tentacle through it, displaying the camera feed on his screen. The world outside flickered red and staticky and everything looked very far away. Miles away, even though this entire town was less than a mile across. The landscape was blank but for an enormous cube, a slowly-rotating Ferris wheel which loomed despite its distance, and a cylinder which towered over everything, seeming to reach past the edge of the sky. There were no living creatures outside, at least as far as we could see. We decided not to venture out, and quickly closed the hole.
We retreated downstairs and poked a hole in that wall, too, for comparison. Everything was still farther away than it should have been, but the air was clear and dark, patches of ground illuminated by the sweep of the lighthouse beam and a few scattered streetlamps. The landscape was recognizable despite the sharp-edged buildings, metal grates in place of streets, and giant many-legged creatures whose footsteps echoed. We could see the edge of the world, too, the place where Silent Hill had been broken off from the rest of reality. It looked like… I don’t think I know the words to explain it. It’s probably not important anyway, I just thought I should try to write it down in case we need it later. In case this is a clue to a puzzle we haven’t found yet.
And here I was worrying about our judgment being clouded with regards to violence. Clearly it’s Lily who has insinuated her puzzle-obsessed mindset into my thought processes.
There were a couple of options. “We could go through the dark world to get the emerald, we could go through the red world to get the emerald, or we could leave the emerald here and take the keys to make sure April can’t steal it,” Clarence summarized.
“I hate to suggest this,” said Otto reluctantly, “but we could do the puzzle the way Lily meant us to and get the emerald in the normal world. Just so April doesn’t get any ideas,” he hurried to add.
So we drove back to the other side of the lake, stole another boat, and arrived once again at the door to the room containing the emerald. The skeleton key finished its slow morph into a heart shape and the door slid into the ceiling, revealing a large cylindrical room ringed by catwalks. A few floors below the catwalk we were on was a pool of bubbling goo, and arising from the goo was the Tallest Man. We were level with its chin, and its forehead passed the next level of catwalks above us. It had a streak of red splashed across its front, like a grotesque necktie or the bloody remains of a meal.
“Kin,” said Citrine, who was still transformed into a Tall Man. She shuddered. “This is not a friend. It doesn’t like me at all.” Jacqueline, also a Tall Man, nodded in agreement.
That was when we realized two things: the goo was rising, and the door was closing. This had been a mistake. But now we couldn’t leave, because Kin brought up a massive hand to block the quickly-shrinking gap between door and floor.
So we fought, climbing against the pace of the rising goo and attacking whenever we had anything to spare. Citrine threw a chainsaw, Clarence attacked with electricity and almost got hit by a giant hand’s slow slap. Otto’s clone was thrown into the goo along with most of Jacqueline’s Nullified, while Jacqueline herself fed her blood into the medium she’d borrowed from Kaine and turned into a Nightmare. I scrambled up and up until Kin decided that Plaguelock’s bombs were too effective and slapped me back to human. We had worn it down quite a bit when Jacqueline hit it with a gemoctemy, which should have killed it.
Instead, she vanished. Analyze said that she was inside Kin, inside the Nightmare World, still fighting. I saw Otto and Citrine raising chainsaws to cut her a way out and then Kin’s head split open and I was standing in a large room next to a pile of my own corpses.
I recognized this place: it was the arena in our lab. But that was over two centuries ago. The last time I had seen it, it had been full of our corpses, too. Me, Clarence, Aaron, and… April. We had a bunch of April’s corpses here, surely there was something useful we could do with one of April’s corpses—
“This way!” Jacqueline called, sprinting out the the room on reptilian legs whose claws clacked against the wooden floor. “We’ve got to find Kin!”
I made to follow her, taking a detour to take just one of April’s bodies (Leviazizmoth is strong, it would be no problem to carry), and pulled up short when I saw who was standing next to the pile.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Ace as he punched me. I shouldn’t have been surprised—he was here the last time as well, so why not now? I picked up two Aprils and turned back to Ace to find that he was summoning a tall blue cat instead of answering my question. Typical Ace. Otto appeared, looked confused, and then rather sensibly shot the cat.
Elsewhere, Jacqueline killed Kin. The room wobbled, and the walls started melting. Ace melted, and the floor melted, and I was covered in red goo. I wiped my eyes and found we were back in the tower, but it was only three stories tall and there was a floor that was not covered in boiling goo, but in water and a large pile of corpses smeared with a red substance. Me, Clarence, Aaron, April, and a lot of people I didn’t know. Was that an elf? I didn’t think there were elves, anymore.
“That was quite a strange sight,” remarked Otto’s clone. He later explained that we had burst out of Kin’s head, along with a flood of goo, but couldn’t quite say where the rest of the tower had gone. He prodded Kin’s body to ensure it was dead, then followed what appeared to be roots to a small wooden door. Nearing it, I could feel the echo of an enormous heartbeat, which stopped as soon as we opened the door. Inside, we found an unconscious woman with an emerald in her head, Kin’s roots wrapping around her body and seeming to merge with her skin. Was she dreaming this place? Had Kin been dreaming it? I wasn’t sure. But we couldn’t take the emerald out of her brain without killing her, and we couldn’t take her anywhere else without collapsing the pocket dimension with us inside.
Until Clarence remembered something we’d thought of while discussing how to take more than one Sacrifice machine out of here. How did Otto’s clone spell interact with the box? As it happens, Otto and his clone have the same box. It makes sense—after all, the box is really storing things in your soul, and they are the same person. But with two of them, the box becomes a portal: we could get the emerald out of Silent Hill without having to run back to the exit with the dimension collapsing around us. It would just collapse around Otto’s clone, who was disposable.
So we turned into Tall Men, blindfolded the original Otto, and headed for the exit. On the way, we checked for anybody who might want to leave through the box before we destroyed their world, but found only wooden statues. Even the nurses we had left at the hospital had turned to wood. Had they always been wood, animated by Kin’s will? If so, had we just killed them by defeating Kin? It didn’t really matter, since we were about to collapse their world. We left Otto’s clone next to the pile of corpses, along with everything else we thought we wanted to take before destroying the dimension.
The Tall Men outside were standing perfectly still, staring at the tree with eyeless gazes. We weren’t mourning Kin, but there was an awareness that the world had changed. I was almost surprised when they let us leave, but apparently our killing the Tallest Man hadn’t made us any less their brethren.
I felt a bit sorry for them. When we passed the emerald out through Otto’s box, the dimension would collapse and everything inside it would come pouring out of the ring on their central tree. An entire town worth of stone and wood and water. But the emerald was unguarded now, and we couldn’t afford to leave it where April could easily get it. And the Tall Woods had never been friendly to humans.
Sally Lynne was astounded to see us when we got back to the Ranger station. “You’re not dead??” she asked in confusion. “Why are you not dead? What did you do?”
“Should we bring out all the corpses now?” Citrine asked. If it was anyone but Citrine, I would suspect she says these things to deliberately unnerve people, but there was no hint of it in her face.
“Sorry, what?” Ranger Lynne asked as Otto opened the box and poured out a dead drow and three dead Clarences. “Wait, is that a—why are there three of you? Three dead of you! And what’s that?” she demanded as we hefted out the second load containing a Sacrifice machine.
“Don’t hurt yourself on it, it’ll take you to a bad place,” Citrine offered helpfully.
“That doesn’t explain anything! Why do you have so many corpses? Why!? You know what, don’t tell me. If you tell me, I’m sure I’ll have to do even more paperwork. I’ll have to invent some paperwork as it is!” And she walked off.
“Should we tell her we’re going to blow up the Tall Woods, or will it be less paperwork if we she doesn’t know in advance?” I wondered as Jacqueline started Nullifying the first of the corpses. We tried reviving a few of them earlier, but pre-Cataclysm people become Cured as part of the revival process, and having your blood volume double in the space of a few seconds looks unpleasant, to say the least. So Jacqueline is Nullifying them, and they will come back to themselves eventually.
In a couple minutes, she will have finished, and Otto’s clone will send us the emerald. And then the Tall Woods will be destroyed.