Indra and April
AND WHO SHOULD WE FIND AT LOU’S HOUSE BUT THE RAIN BIRD!
Hm. Writing in all caps doesn’t really have the same feel as wailing at the sky like it might hear my complaint that this is not fair. It’s not like the gods seem to be around anymore, and they mostly didn’t care about fairness even before Steve and Lily. Anyway, I should probably explain from the beginning.
The village was dark when we arrived, with nobody on the streets. My first instinct was that this was normal, since it was nighttime and everyone must be asleep. Except that nobody needs sleep anymore. Then I noticed there were streetlights, but none of them were lit. There was no artificial light anywhere, just the moonlight and the occasional flash of lightning from Jacqueline’s cloud.
Oh right: when we had taken out the power plant, we had also taken out the nearby villages’ electricity.
“We left some of them alive,” Otto offered. “Maybe they’ll make repairs.” It was obvious he thought the mission had been a success, and knocking out the power was acceptable collateral damage. Or maybe a worthy blow against the power plant mons’ cause, whatever it was.
“Will they make repairs?” Clarence wondered. “Do we even want them to? That whole network of power stations makes me nervous.”
“And did they require the leadership of the Parasonico?” Otto added. “Most of the plant staff were Monitors, and we saw it direct them to attack us. From what I’ve heard, nobody’s seen mons cooperating, so maybe Parasonico was the one in control of everything.”
It kind of made sense. For the sake of the village, I hope it isn’t the case, and the power will come back on tomorrow. Or in the next few days. We blew up rather a lot of power plant for them to make repairs that quickly, even with the hundreds of Monitors in the walls of L3.
Lou, who had been sitting on the lawn gazing at the sky, stood up when we parked the cloud outside the mayor’s hemispherical house.
“Oh hey, you’re back,” he said, seeming pleased to see us still alive. “Where did you get that cloud?” Then he noticed Citrine. “By the Barbed Wheel!” he swore. It still feels weird that people swear by Steve, instead of normal gods.
“Hi!” said Citrine brightly.
“You—that—” Lou looked terrified, like he was on the edge of diving behind a tree to get away from us. From Citrine?
“We went to the power plant and some weird shit happened,” Clarence explained wearily.
“And we made a friend.”
“I’m the friend!” clarified Citrine unnecessarily.
“You know what that is, right?” Lou burst out.
“At a guess, a hybrid between a human and a Chrystalis.”
Lou looked around, taking in the empty streets. “You’d better come inside.” He pulled us across the street and opened the door of another hemispherical hut. “Wait—you’re safe, right?”
Safe?
“Yes,” said Clarence firmly.
Lou ushered us inside and closed the door, then lit a candle for light before closing all the window shades. The light flickered creepily over his features, making him look more like the old man I suspect he is. “Okay. The thing is, when you summon something but you’re out of energy, it’s a terrible stupid idea… anyway, you’ll do what’s called a Perfect Summon. Instead of being controlled by you, the mon just goes loose and starts smashing things. If you Perfect Summon a Chrystalis, it hatches and becomes a moth.” He turned to Citrine. “I didn’t mean to offend you, it’s just a very distinctive thing, you know. But you seem alright.”
Clarence looked thoughtful. “What happens when you Perfect Summon a Damn o’ Klees?”
“I think all the armor melts off.”
“And one of its arms is a sword?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Lou shrugged. “I’ve never seen one in person. Why?”
“We found one in the power plant. I’m pretty sure it was a human-Damn o’ Klees hybrid. It looked like it had been dipped in lava, and one of its arms was a sword.”
“And they found me in a tank!” Citrine added helpfully.
“Sorry about the power being out,” Clarence apologized once the awkward pause had gone on for too long. “We kind of… messed up the power plant.”
Lou waved a hand. “This happens all the time. They usually fix it pretty fast.”
“It will probably take longer than usual. We did… a lot of damage. Mostly by accident.”
“Oh?”
“He stabbed the wall,” I explained. “We were trying to destroy the lightning generators. Why didn’t you tell us about the lightning generators?”
“Lightning generators?”
“So anyway, we kind of blew up the wall.”
“You blew up the wall??”
“The building is still there,” Clarence assured him. “I just shut off most of the plant.”
Lou sighed. “It was nice, siphoning power off the one mon power station. Oh, well…”
“About that...” Jacqueline said. “There’s a lot of them, actually. This one’s substation 46, and there’s others.”
“Hundreds of them. We saw a map. They’re all over the place.”
Lou looked shocked. “I thought this one was just an anomaly! This is actually extremely worrying! Tell me more!” He opened a cupboard and started rummaging around. “I think I’m going to need some tea. Would you all like some?”
“Actually, I’d like to work on the power armor,” said Clarence. “I got a metalworking spell that I think is just what we need.”
“By all means!” Lou opened the door. “We’ll bring it back here. The tea can wait, Indra’s coming by in a bit and he’ll want to talk to you. He always likes tea, brings me some whenever he visits.”
Clarence transformed back into Parasonico to carry the armor in his tentacles, and we brought it back to Lou’s hut and piled it on the floor. It took up about half of the room; the huts are tiny.
“Vampires,” Lou muttered darkly when he noticed the undead Monitor following Jacqueline around. (It had somehow survived our encounter in the elevator, despite only having one hit point.)
“You can’t prove anybody’s a vampire,” snapped Jacqueline. “Not unless you get me in the sunlight, but I won’t let you.”
Lou harrumphed. “And what’s with the cloud? It’s disturbing.”
(I had to agree with him. Stormnimbus has way, way too many eyes, and none of them blink.)
“It’s a spell that lets us fly,” Otto said brightly. “I figured that since we’d already pissed them off, we may as well take any handy goodies that weren’t nailed down.” Otto is still a little too energetic, even though it’s been more than three hours since he cast Anathema.
Lou looked like he was going to complain about something else, but Clarence interrupted. “Hold on, this thing is a medium.”
“What?” said everyone else.
“Those—” he gestured to the suit of armor he was carrying, “are showing up as mediums. They have capacity of 4 and energy of 4.”
“But you said you’d tried them on and it didn’t work.” I tried to work it out. “They didn’t work because you didn’t have the brain interface. I still don’t get why you would even need that, mediums just require contact with your blood, right?”
“We had no idea,” said Lou. “We thought they were just hitting people with swords because, hey, power armor. They weren’t summoning anything, just waving swords around and yelling a lot.”
“Maybe it’s a medium that just works for spells or something?”
“We can find out once we repair it.” Clarence shifted the armor to get a better grip on it and continued to Lou’s hut.
Lou did not take the news that there was a whole network of power stations very well. Or the news that mons could apparently cooperate. Or the information that the power station had several levels, and a sacrifice machine, and a lot of failed human-mon hybrids in tanks. Basically we were punching holes in his worldview and he was not happy. We were having a whispered discussion about whether to further destroy his peace of mind by informing him that the Rain Bird was secretly a person with pink and blue hair, when Pink Blue Hair Guy walked in the door.
“Oh hey, Indra,” said Lou. He didn’t see the looks of shock plastered across all our faces because he was getting another mug out of the cupboard. “This guy is fixing the armor.”
“Hi,” said Indra, alter ego of the Rain Bird. He was wearing a long black coat reminiscent of April’s white labcoat, but flowier and with a hood.
We stared at him. I wished I was still transformed into a Monitor so he couldn’t read my face. Or maybe my face would be showing an exclamation point or something. In any case, I’d untransformed before we arrived to minimize Lou’s alarm. Which hadn’t exactly worked.
“You have really cool hair!” I blurted in an attempt to cover up the awkwardness. “Wow!” Well, at least I hadn’t said something truly stupid, like “Admit that you’re secretly the Rain Bird, we all know it’s you!”
Indra shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, revealing that he wore a Gauntlet Launcher. “It’s just like this. People always ask me what I do to make it this way, but a better question is what I could do to make it not.”
“Yep!” said Clarence too-cheerfully. He was squinting at Indra like he was trying to figure something out.
“You’re fixing the power armor, huh? Been a while since we got it from the Penitents, it’ll be nice to be able to strike back next time they come missionarying.”
“Uh-huh!” said Clarence again.
Indra looked around the room again, taking in the rest of us. “And I see we’ve also got a hatched Chrystalis here who isn’t trying to kill us.”
“Hi!” said Citrine, waving her mug of tea. He waved back. “I’m a hybrid!” she added helpfully.
“Apparently some mixture of human and mon, we don’t know how it works yet,” Clarence explained.
“We saw one die and it was concerning!”
I was watching Indra’s face throughout this and he didn’t seem surprised. About any of it. Well, of course he knew about the experiments, we’d seen a video log of him in a meeting with the Monitors where they brought in one of the tanks. But he should have been more surprised that one had escaped. Oh, and he was in league with the power plant mons, he was probably not going to be happy when he found out what we’d done. But he couldn’t be very upset in front of Lou, not without ruining his human guise.
Luckily, it didn’t look like Indra was here for long, as he’d just stopped by for tea. We managed to keep Lou from telling him too much about the destruction we’d caused at the power plant, but it would only be a matter of time before he found out. Lou would mention it since Indra is his friend, or the mons would tell him since he’s working with them. They might even find the voice recorder I lost in the power plant, and tell him a lot more than just that we were responsible for the damages. He’d also know what capabilities we all have, and that Clarence and I are from before the Cataclysm and are looking for April, and that Jacqueline can raise the dead.
Once he had left and Lou was busy washing the tea mugs, Clarence told us that Indra’s heart is a medium of some sort. Which explains how he can turn into the Rain Bird. The Gauntlet Launcher is just a decoy, since you can’t use more than one medium at once.
At this point, we don’t really know anything about Indra, besides that he’s a courier like Terrence. Well, not like Terrence, he’s not gloomy and he turns into the thing that Terrence is so gloomy about. It’s a pretty good excuse for traveling, at least; must make being the Rain Bird in various places much more convenient.
Jacqueline wants to talk to him and get more information. Please no. I don’t want him to kill us.
“We could just ask him about sometimes being the Rain Bird,” Clarence said, looking thoughtful.
“Or we could not.”
“Why not?” Citrine asked me.
“Because him being the Rain Bird is a secret! If he knows we know, he might want to kill us to keep it that way.”
“Unless he doesn’t know he’s the Rain Bird.”
In which case, what do we even do about it? I’m not sure what’s the ethical thing to do, and I’m not sure what we can do any way. I think he knows about it, though. We know he’s working with the mons, and we know he’s working with April. He doesn’t seem like a pawn that doesn’t know he’s being used.
I don’t know what we can do at this point, besides try to leave town before Indra finds out too much about the power plant, and comes after us. Maybe this record is to tell whoever needs to know about the danger of Indra in case he gets us. Maybe it’s what gets us in trouble since he reads it and figures out we’re on to him. Probably worth it, anyway. Just so there’s a chance that even if Indra gets us someone else will find out the truth about the Rain Bird and be able to do something about it.
We have a Chaos Emerald locator spell. It’s just called Locator, but it shows eight arrows and one of them points at the toolbox of stabilization oil. The arrows show directions, not distances, but one of them moved to point in the direction of the toolbox whenever we moved it, so it’ s pretty clear what it’s pointing at. And there’s two arrows that seem to be pointing to the mountains where April’s castle is, and we know she has at least one emerald. So it’s probably a Chaos Emerald locator.
“Someone went to the trouble of making a spell for this,” said Otto. “Therefore they must be pretty cool. I think we should go after them.”
Even though we don’t know what Chaos Emeralds do, or what they are, or why anybody would want them. Besides their being giant gemstones, I mean. Oh, well, it’s not like we had a better plan besides running after April, or trying to find out about the network of power plants, or hiding from Indra. I’m not sure if those sound like better plans, or worse ones.
Otto and Clarence did some math and figured out approximate distances for the arrows, so we’ve got general locations. Besides the one in our toolbox and the two April has, there’s one in the desert, probably in Vidriot, the city there; one farther east across the Chasm; one likely in Penitencia; one southeast in the forest; and one far north in the ocean, hopefully on a boat and not the ocean floor. Eight in total.
I think the obvious ones to go after are the ones in April’s castle. If we can catch her, maybe we can ask what she wants with them. And anyway, we have a general idea of what the castle looks like.
What we know about the area past the chasm is that there are probably vampires there. Also people with secret knowledge, Lou doesn’t know what kind of secret knowledge because it’s secret knowledge, silly. They use prayer-bead mediums which stamp shapes onto nearby surfaces. This seems ironic given the rumors about vampires, but as we’ve been told, vampires don’t actually care about religious iconography. This is good for Jacqueline given Otto’s running around in a suit of armor covered in religious symbols.
What we know about Vidriot is that it has a glowing green ziggurat, and a library with a lot of secret knowledge. This sounds slightly more credible, because at least you’d expect there to be knowledge in a library. Also, they have card-based mediums, and are pretty into dueling.
Another option that’s being considered is visiting Lluvia City, which also has a pretty good library. The one drawback to this plan is that you have to go through inspection upon entering the city, and we don’t know what this will mean for Citrine. They also check that your medium is chipped to prevent Perfect Summoning or overly dangerous spells; Clarence and my breastplates predate chipping by a long time, and I’m pretty sure Otto would get in trouble over Anathema. I’m not sure how it got around the chip on his gauntlet but I still think any inspectors would not be happy to let him keep it. Technically we could fly in on our cloud, but somehow this seems like a bad plan; they would probably notice, and arrest us once we landed.
I’m trying to write down all the options to consider them, so here’s the other ones. We could go after one of other emeralds I haven’t already mentioned, like the forest one or the ocean one or the one in Penitencia (we do after all have some power armor, so it’s possible we could infiltrate them and steal it). We could (perhaps more sensibly) focus on learning more about Chaos Emeralds and why they might need to be kept in stabilization oil before we try to get any more (which means going to Vidriot, Lluvia City, or across the Chasm). We could track down more mon power plants and try to find out what’s up with them. We could go talk to the vampires and out what Jacqueline can do, only I’m not convinced they would let us leave. We could try to investigate Indra and hope he doesn’t rain on us.
None of these feel like very good ideas. But I’m pretty sure that whatever else we do, we should probably find out more about Chaos Emeralds before we go looking for more of them.
Jacqueline and Citrine wandered off for a bit. Jacqueline bought some sun-protection clothes including a thick cloak and a veiled hat. And then they went off to do some spying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked a surprisingly unexcited seeming Citrine when they came back.
“Everyone is scared of me. They keep running away like I’m going to hurt them!”
“Most of them would,” Jacqueline clarified. “The ones that stuck around long enough for her to say hello were confused enough to stay, and then realized she isn’t dangerous. But most people would just run away screaming to warn the others.”
“One of them tried to hit me with a wheeled thing!” Citrine complained.
“They said it was an AngerCycle after I was done yelling at them.”
“Oh dear,” I said, trying to think of what to do about the situation. But running away from a hatched Chrystalis is a good response to have in pretty much every other situation, I can’t really blame them for not wanting to die.
“At least Indra didn’t run away from me.” Citrine was weaving her tentacles together unhappily.
“Indra?”
“We were following him around, trying to get information,” Jacqueline explained.
“I… see.” That sounded like a terrible plan! But at least it had been Jacqueline doing it and not me. I would definitely have given something away; Jacqueline is more at ease with people and has a better chance of concealing information without looking incredibly suspicious.
“He didn’t say anything that interesting when he was talking to other people, but eventually he noticed us and asked if we wanted something. So I asked about what it was like being a courier.”
“Okay…” I figured the ‘eventually he noticed us’ had gone more like Indra immediately noticing them due to all the screaming, but deciding to continue talking to people for a bit because he felt like it.
“He told us a bit about it, you have to apprentice with a senior courier for a while, tagging along with them to make sure you know how to get places, and how to deal with all the mons you can run into. So then I asked him about the Rain Bird.”
“You what!?”
“Not about being the Rain Bird, just about if it gave him any trouble, what did he know about it, that sort of thing. He says all the couriers have to memorize maps of where the shelters are, so they can map out routes that keep them close to safety. You’ve got a couple minutes to find one before the flooding starts, and the Rain Bird can basically come out of nowhere.”
“Ha!” Sure it could come out of nowhere, if nowhere meant Indra’s human form.
“Oh and nobody knows exactly how the Rain Bird kills you. Drowning doesn’t make sense, since we don’t need to breathe. One theory is that the rain is survivable, but the floods pull you towards the Rain Bird and it kills you itself, somehow.”
“And then we played checkers,” Citrine finished happily, apparently distracted from her worries about scaring everyone she met by a new and exciting game to think about.
“Terrence played checkers as well,” I remembered. “Maybe it’s a courier thing.”
“Indra apprenticed with Terrence,” Jacqueline said. “Several years ago. He hasn’t been a courier long, he’s only about 30.”
“But the Rain Bird’s been around for ages, more than a hundred years.” So Indra is lying, or someone else used to be the Rain Bird, or there’s multiple of them. I guess there’s lots of explanations.
Jacqueline shrugged. “It’s what he told me. Oh, and he’s heading for Lluvia City tomorrow, he invited us to come along when I hinted. Not sure if we want to, though, it sounded like you and Otto were leaning towards Vidriot?”
So we’re not going to Lluvia City tomorrow if I have anything to say about it. Traveling with Indra might be a good way to get information, but it’s way too risky.
I’ve been wondering, what happens if someone with a become medium like Clarence or I does a Perfect Summon? Not that I’m going to try that. But when a person with a summoning medium does one, they summon a mon just like normal only it isn’t bound to them. So what would happen to me? Would I summon a wild mon separate from myself? Would I turn into a mon? Would I become a hybrid?
Someone’s got to have tried it. I’m not stupid enough to do it myself, and we had to take enough ethics classes at science school that I know that only a Bad Scientist would trick a random person into trying it just to see what would happen (although points for it being a random person, now we just need to find another random person to not trick into Perfect Summoning, and they can be the control group. Wait no, we were not doing this experiment). But there has to have been someone who’s curious enough, or a Bad Scientist who was even mildly curious and in the presence of gullible townspeople. I should really just start asking everyone, so I stop being curious and tempted.
I just realized something. That log we found of April and her castle and Indra turning into the Rain Bird was recent. Probably. She was holding a cyan gem just like the one Terrence delivered to her last week. So unless she’s got more than one cyan gem, this was in the time since then. And somehow I feel like the eight Chaos Emeralds are all different colors. We’ve seen one green, one cyan, and one red, so they’re not all the same color. No idea what the significance of the colors might be, maybe there isn’t one.
But that’s impossible, isn’t it? We haven’t had rain since right when we got out of the time-bubble. Maybe the gem was the green one from the facility, not the cyan one Terrence delivered her. The video was pretty distorted, and I’d forgotten about the green gem until we started thinking about the emeralds as a group. Maybe the gem allows time travel, and now that she has it she can be whenever she wants to. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Ugh. This is why I write everything down, so I won’t forget again. But that means condensing information using the framework of things I know about the world right now, and part of the framework is wrong only I don’t know which part, so I’m going to be sure that April was using a cyan gem since that matches an object I already knew she had. Oh no. Is this what it’s like to be Jacqueline?
I may have to admit that it’s possible April is actually a victim here, and not the cruel mastermind behind the doom of everyone. She might be in league with Steve though, I’m not giving her a pass on collecting the Chaos Emeralds for nefarious purposes.
We were about an hour into walking towards Vidriot when I remembered that spell we’d found in the flesh-spiral guy’s arm. Oh right: we had Clarence Analyze all the things we stole. Besides the Chaos Emerald Locator and Leviazizmoth, there was another mon, Negative Man. Negative Man is pretty much useless at fighting, except to draw all the attacks since he has so many hit points. But he’s incredibly ineffectual due to being extremely slow, and extremely depressed. I made the mistake of trying him on, and I do not want to do that again. I’m starting to think Clarence and I should be more careful about what we put in our mediums, the mental effect of being some of these mons is surprisingly strong, even if it ends as soon as you transform back to human. There was also a Healy Doodad, which heals you, and a Glamour spell, which we gave to Citrine so she can stop scaring people before she’s had a chance to talk to them. Clarence modified a gauntlet work with one of her tentacles, and while she’s got half the capacity or energy as a someone wearing a regular Gauntlet Launcher, it works well enough for the purpose of disguise.
And there was the Farseer spell. I’d forgotten about it after putting it in my medium, since it somehow took up no space. And cost no energy. Now that I remembered it existed, I was suspicious it might have something to do with the Chaos Emeralds, and the name implied it might let me view the location where they were. That seemed useful, so I decided to try it.
This was a mistake.
I was standing on sand instead of dead leaves, and it was cold. Really cold. I looked around and the others were there, too, and the sand went on for a long ways, occasionally interrupted by tetrahedral pyramids looming tall. The sun was directly overhead, and glowing too redly and too dimly to be anything but ominous.
“Oops,” I said unhelpfully. “I really didn’t expect that to happen.” I looked around again, hoping for an obvious way back to the forest we’d been walking in. “I’ll just cast Farseer again, see if that takes it back. Oh. Huh. The spell’s vanished. That’s unfortunate.”
“Where are we?” Clarence demanded, looking quite understandably upset.
It was a fair question. I turned on the Locator Spell to see if I could locate us relative to the emeralds. Otto could probably figure something out with the angles. All eight arrows pointed in the same direction, towards the nearest pyramid. “All the emeralds are over there!” I pointed. “Wait, what about the one we already have?”
Clarence held up empty hands. “It’s gone! I was holding the toolbox just a second ago and… it’s just gone!”
“I’m cold,” interrupted Citrine, shivering. Her skin had turned a bluer shade of its usual green. The frigid temperature was probably hitting her harder because she doesn’t have as much clothing, just a pair of pants Clarence got for her to make her look less scary, whoever heard of a wild Chrystalis wearing pants? Also, pockets. A shirt wouldn’t easily work with her wings, so we’d left it at that. Jacqueline was looking rather toasty in her thick cape and hat, and I kind of wished I also thought I was a vampire so I’d be adequately dressed for the weather.
“Let’s go,” said Otto decisively, heading off in the direction of the pyramid containing the emeralds. His power-armored legs sank deep into the sand but the armor’s increased strength let him keep walking. The rest of us waded behind with difficulty. Walking got even harder as the full-body shivers started. What was this place and why was it so cold?
We reached the pyramid and jogged up the steps, finally free of the squishing, shifting sand. As we stepped through large arched doorway, the temperature shot up to that of a mild summer day. Weird. But handy, I could feel my fingers tingling and was pretty sure we’d have been in danger of frostbite if we’d stayed out too much longer.
“Okay, seriously,” said Clarence, looking around. We seemed to be in an entrance hall, long and lined with doors. “What just happened?”
“Still have no idea, but the emeralds are up there.” I pointed up and towards the center of the pyramid.
“What, they’re at the top of the pyramid?” Otto asked.
“I don’t know, I just get a direction. They’re some amount above the ground.”
“Let’s get them!” Jacqueline started walking towards the end of the hall.
“But we don’t know what to do with them!” I protested, walking after her, then speeding up as she tried to evade me. “We don’t know how to make stabilization oil, or what it does, or if it’s—”
I pulled Jacqueline to a stop when we reached the end of the hall and I saw what was in the next room. “It’s April!” I hissed.
“That’s April?” Jacqueline asked. “You didn’t say she was giant. Or that she has 800 hit points.”
“She’s not! She doesn’t! I don’t know why she’s like this!” She was way too big to function, there was no way her heart could keep up with all that blood to pump around. And her bones! Even with all the weirdness that is post-Cataclysm human biology, how was April not collapsing under her own weight?
“Are you sure it’s April then?”
“Aaagh! April! What’s she doing here?”
“See, Clarence agrees with me. Now, we shouldn’t go into that room because April might wake up and notice us and—oh come on!”
Citrine had skipped past us and continued into the central room. I waited for the sound of something terrible happening, but there was silence. Well, a slight humming that I was pretty sure had been going on the whole time we’d been in the pyramid.
Since Citrine had walked into the room containing April without incident, the rest of us followed, finding ourselves in a vast, triangular room. The walls slanted in as they rose, stopping before reaching a peak to leave a hole to the sky. The center of the space contained April, standing with her eyes closed. She looked like a perfectly normal April, aside from being about the size of those twisted towers in the ruined city back in Lluvia. The left sleeve of her flowy black shirt had the cuff undone, revealing an arm almost entirely covered in flesh-spiral.
“Left Helix, final stage,” said Clarence unhappily. “I don’t like it. Oh, and it’s definitely April. Analyze says it is.” He glanced around. “Doesn’t say who any of you are, though, what’s with that?”
“Oooh, pretty!” said Citrine, staring up at April’s left hand. No, at the eight gemstones orbiting her hand, looking like peas in comparison. I checked: yes, these were the Chaos Emeralds, all eight of them in one place and out of stabilization oil. And attached to April. This couldn’t be good.
“Guys?” Otto sounded worried. “The clock in my armor is misbehaving. It’s been pretty reliable so far, but now it says the date is a bunch of nines.”
“We time-skipped again?” I grumbled.
“If we manage to get back somehow, is this our future? Can we stop this? What do we even do to stop it?”
“That sounds like a problem for later,” I decided. “It doesn’t matter if we can’t get out of here.” I looked around for something useful
“Hmm,” remarked Jacqueline, staring through the hold in the ceiling. “The sun is behaving unusually.”
“What’s it doing?” I asked, checking. “Apparently it’s normal for it to turn into the Steve… into the Barbed Wheel if you stare at it for too long.” Then the Steve-sun came into focus. “Why is Steve sucking up light from the ground? Is that why it’s so cold?” The silvery streams of light were coming in from all sides, converging on April’s hand, and then shooting up the spiral and out the top of her head towards the sun. Light rushed in through the hallway we’d entered through. I blinked a few times to clear the effect because it was disorienting, seeing the invisible wind.
“So this isn’t normal? Wait, who’s Steve?”
“No!” Clarence was now staring at the ceiling. “The stuff that’s getting sucked up into the sun is labeled ‘soul’. The sun is… eating the soul of what? The planet?”
That couldn’t be good.
“Do you see anything useful?” Otto asked Clarence, who wrenched his gaze away from Steve devouring the world to check the rest of the room.
“There’s something in orbit with the emeralds, it’s smaller than them and it’s moving too quickly to see that well…”
“I’ll get it!” Citrine began scrambling up the scaffolding next to April that had gone unnoticed, quickly climbing the ten or so meters to reach April’s hand. “Which one did you want?” she asked Clarence.
“The small fast one, it’s called Time,” Clarence called up to her, squinting in concentration.
Time?
“Got it!” Citrine snaked out a tentacle and suddenly we were back in the forest. The toolbox was sitting on the ground next to Clarence like he’d dropped it upon vanishing, and it reassuringly still contained a Chaos Emerald. The other seven were likewise where I’d left them.
And Citrine was balancing a small shining thing on the tip of one tentacle. I can’t get a better description than that, since it turns out that Time is hard to look at. You point your eyes in the direction you know it is, and you somehow find yourself glancing away and looking at something else, rather than confronting that small, shiny mystery. Citrine shrugged and put it in her pocket.
So we’re back, and we’ve got a tiny piece of Time, whatever that means. We have seen the future, and April becomes a giant and Steve sucks out the soul of the planet. Neither of these seem good. But they also don’t seem good for April. If she was conscious and doing things I would be more convinced that she’s the villain. But standing there unconscious while Steve sucked out the soul of the planet through her didn’t seem as much like she was a willing participant. She might have chosen to do this, but it’s also quite possible that she didn’t.
There’s still Clarence’s questions, of whether this is a preventable future, and what we can do to prevent it. These seem like important questions. But I have absolutely no idea how to answer them. Maybe step one is to talk to April if we find her, instead of running away or immediately attacking. Although I’m not going to dismiss running away.
One other thing. Don’t try out random spells you don’t know what they do. We should have already known this from Anathema. But now we really, really know: don’t try out spells unless you know what they do.