by Sean Davies
“So, there’s a normal car in here?” Connie asked, eager to get a move on.
“Not by your standards,” Stitches smirked. “Baz stole this during the revolution. You’re going to love it.”
They placed the luggage on the floor nearby and Constance helped her friend lift the rusted garage door, ignoring the unhealthy screeching noise as they slid it up to the uneven ceiling. A messy interior was revealed, filled with broken wooden crates and empty paint cans that had been claimed by oversized colourful spiders and other menacing creepy-crawlies. A brown and yellow blanket covered something large in the centre of the garage; Constance assumed from the outline that it was the car, and was surprised at how normal it looked by the Gloom’s weird standards. She went to enter, but Stitches quickly held out a hand in warning.
“Believe it or not, it’s actually safer out there than it is in here,” he advised.
Constance looked over to the front of the house and saw Baz on his hands and knees eating sweets off the floor, while his two dogs were sat upright glaring at her with their orange eyes. She then looked into the depths of the garage where two spiders covered in thick green carapace, each bigger than Connie’s hand, fought each other over an empty tin to call home.
“I’d say it was about even,” Connie replied dryly, running some magical fire around her finger tips for comfort.
Stitches approached the blanketed car and zapped a shiny black hornet out of the air with a tiny green lightning bolt that leapt from his fingertip. The hornet had glided down from the ceiling stealthily, and been heading towards Connie with its four-inch syringe-like stinger primed ready for injection. The Book Wielder had only noticed it when Stitches had fried it with his Gloom magic.
“It’s really not,” Stitches said, correcting her.
“Point taken,” Connie conceded, watching as pink poison trickled out of the fallen hornet’s stinger.
Stitches whipped off the sheet and revealed a rust-encrusted black and silver state car, with a large iron front grill fitted with thorn styled barbs. It was opened-topped and no longer had any form of windshield remaining, but it still had relatively intact black leather seats with only a few tears, and a thick iron steering wheel. Its tires looked dangerously worn, but luckily for the two friends none were flat. A horde of dark purple rodents rushed out from underneath the vehicle and swarmed out of the garage door, causing Constance to cringe and stiffen with discomfort until they’d passed.
A thin metal film on the car’s round headlights peeked open like tired eyelids, revealing the glowing green witchlight beneath. The mechanical eyes assessed Constance and Stitches lazily at first, and then opened fully into an eager expression. Under its curved hood a powerful engine stirred in anticipation, and the unstable brick garage wobbled as the car revved excitedly.
“I thought all your cars had legs, or tracks?” Connie asked Stitches over the loud engine.
“Most of them do,” he replied, “but this is Lonix, one of the Commodore’s old state cars. The top slavers liked their automobiles to have wheels, to further set them apart from the rest of us. It used to be a lot better looking, you know, when Glutonix’s Demon magic was in effect…”
Lonix narrowed its headlight eyes angrily and made a growling noise from behind its barbed grill.
“I mean, Lonix is still nice looking. Very nice looking, beautiful in fact!” Stitches blabbered apologetically.
“Hi Lonix, nice to meet you,” Connie said with a small wave and a smile. “Fancy taking us back to my place?”
The car calmed down and revved an acknowledgement, before opening its own creaky doors and inching out of the garage towards Constance. After loading up the trunk with luggage, Stitches hopped in the driver’s side and Connie took the passenger’s seat. Thick pungent fumes erupted from Lonix’s twin exhausts as it tore out of the yard, churning up dirt and swerving to avoid the demented rodents and Baz’s two savage hounds that were chasing the swarm down. They hit the road, and Lonix slowed down slightly when they approached the entrance to the cul-de-sac to make navigating through the Alt town less suicidal.
“Good thinking, Stitches,” Connie said as she got comfy. “This was so much better than getting the bus. Lonix could get us to the ferry, too—then we’d have loads of time to spare!”
The car beeped its horn happily and rocked its passengers playfully.
“I think that’s settled then,” Stitches said cheerfully. He had his hands on the wheel even though the car was driving itself.
As Lonix navigated towards the bridge, Constance watched the Alternatives going about their strange lives and wondered what it was that marked the divide between classes in the Colonies.
“Stitches, why were you a slave?” she asked awkwardly.
“Whatever do you mean?” he asked in confusion.
Connie sighed, realising that she’d worded the question rather poorly. “Like, what made you different from the slaver Alts? How did they become the ones in charge?”
Stitches frowned in thought. “Their clothes were different… it was just the way it was.”
Constance looked puzzled. “Clothes? How does that determine anything? I mean, couldn’t you have just swapped or stole theirs?”
“It doesn’t make any sense, and yes, in hindsight we could have done,” Stitches shrugged sadly. “To be honest, we didn’t really think about much at all until Winston began closing the gap between our worlds. You may have noticed that not much about the Gloom makes a great deal of sense. We were just the corrupted reflection of you, and that’s why I like things from your world so much—everything seems to have a purpose. Even the most mundane objects do something, or have meaning to someone.”
Constance reflected on his words about her world and noticed that she’d never paid much attention to her own existence in much detail, or her place within the grand scheme of things. She began to imagine herself as a gear in a vast unknown machine and tried to determine her own purpose within it. Connie was shocked when she began to feel as though she knew what that reason was, as though her daydream had become startlingly vivid, but Lonix’s engine roared as they reached the bridge and knocked her from her chain of thought.
“Do you think the Alts on Desem will rebel too?” she asked as the car sped across the bridge.
“The Pollutia tech-heads?” Stitches chuckled. “Not a chance. They consider too much time off to be a punishment, and even when they’re on a break they usually occupy themselves with a different form of work without thinking twice about it.”
“I’m never going to understand you guys from the Gloom, am I?” she smirked.
“It’s best not to try, believe me,” Stitches laughed.
The gate structure soon came into view, and Lonix hooted its horn and roared its engine so hard that smoke poured out of the seams of the hood. The steel gates, however, remained stationary. Lonix came to a reluctant halt, making an irritated and impatient ticking sound from behind its grill.
Connie smirked and hopped out. She approached the gate’s touch panel interface and tapped the ‘open’ button, causing the mechanisms to whirr into action. As she waited, she tapped the interface again, this time selecting the communication icon, and spoke loudly.
“You two need to put each other down and get back to work,” Connie said jokingly.
A few seconds later Ling answered, sounding exhausted. “Sorry, Connie, we didn’t hear you,” he lied meekly.
Constance sniggered. “Uh huh, if you say so.”
She got back into the Gloom state car, and it bounded through the gates as soon as they were an inch wider than its chassis. Lauran and Ling waved awkwardly as they drove by; their power armour was in a neat pile beside the entrance, and their uniforms and hair were ruffled.
“Have fun, you two!” Connie called. “You might want to get a room though!”
“Yes, have good sex!” Stitches shouted and waved cheerfully.
Constance rolled her eyes and laughed. “Smooth, Stitches�
�� real smooth.”
“What? I hope they do,” he replied obliviously. “When are you going to have sex?”
She went bright red and punched him on his fabric shoulder. “Dude, that’s not something you just ask!”
“Why not?” he asked innocently. “From what I’ve read, most adolescents have done so by your age. Do you not like the idea of it from your experiences of fooling around?”
Constance bit her lip in embarrassment and frustration. “You just don’t ask, not out of nowhere… and I’ll take that step when I’m ready. Book-Wielding first, love later,” she said flatly. Her relationship track record was diabolical at best. “Anyway, when are you going to have sex, hey, Stitches?” Connie said, trying to twist the line of questioning around, before realising that it may not even be possible. “I mean, can you? How do you… you know?”
“You don’t want to know,” Stitches answered plainly.
“You’re right, I really don’t,” Constance said, trying to push the weird images of puppet coitus as far from her mind as possible.
Connie’s hair blew in the wind as Lonix picked up the speed, and she hoped that it wouldn’t be totally ruined by the end of the journey. She still intended to look breath-taking to the people on Central Isle. She looked out at the beautiful isles, white sandy beaches, and the blue and turquoise waters. Connie remembered her brief conversation with the strange fisherman and considered telling Stitches, but decided against it as it sounded completely insane. Looking back, she wasn’t even sure if the ghostly experience had actually happened. Instead, she asked him about something the man had mentioned.
“You know more about human history than most humans,” she began. “Have you ever heard of a ‘serpent god of the tides’? I thought my history was top notch, pre-merger speaking, but someone mentioned it and I’ve never ever heard of it.”
“I have, but only in the Archipelago’s scrappy ancient history,” Stitches replied. “It was an account written by an anonymous Supernatural documenting the arrival of the Church of the Twin Goddesses’ missionaries, and of course the original inquisitors of the witch hunters.”
“Really?” Connie said, stifling a gasp; the fact that there was some legitimacy to the eerie verbal interchange sent a shiver down her neck.
The Alt nodded. “By the sounds of it, your people used to worship a divine serpent of the sky and a serpent of the sea, who were said to be both lovers and immortal enemies that blessed you with calm skies and seas when they were smitten, and turned the skies and tides sour when they were fighting. However, all the temples were demolished stone by stone, and all the literature was put to the torch during the reign of the Imperian Emperor Hagen the Holy. The missionaries replaced the original religion with the Church of the Twin Goddesses, which of course was proved to be more or less factual in the end.” He paused to smile at the misinterpreted actions of the twin Archmages that opposed the tyrannical Archmages of the Omni. “At the same time, the inquisitors tried to destroy the Supernaturals dwelling on the isles during the subtle yet cataclysmic Shadow Wars.”
Constance was completely speechless. In theory, she had spoken to a man in the far flung past, and the emblem she always marked her book with had a twin serpent motif, but she was still unaware of where she’d ever seen it.
“I think there was some record of western Rura, around the Tidussex region, sharing a similar religion but that was long before the Imperians took over the whole continent,” the Alt went on to explain.
“That’s interesting,” Connie replied, trying to sound attentive. Her mind was racing with worry, and she did her best to focus on what she did know rather than what she didn’t. “So, Conclave, here we come!” she cheered bravely.
Stitches and Lonix joined in the cheer in their own respective ways, and they zoomed to the Lee residence. They saw a silver and white airship flying in the distance, which wasn’t unusual except for the fact that it came to a stop near to Connie’s house. It hovered in the air, completely still like a falcon ready to swoop down on its foe, before finally drifting towards the ground with its landing struts extended.
“Isn’t that your house?” Stitches asked warily.
“Yeah… I wonder what’s going on,” Constance replied nervously, wondering just how much strange stuff could befall her in one day.
The Airship had landed on a large green opposite Constance’s house, and on closer inspection the sleek chassis was also decorated with a pink floral pattern and marked with Azalea’s five-petalled flower. It was also raised out in areas, indicating dormant unmanned drones and heavy weaponry hiding beneath the decorated hull, and Connie thought of the savage thorns on a beautiful rose as she lost count of the concealed armament slots. The main passenger ramp had been lowered and soldiers in elaborately decorated power armour, including fine gold and silver work incorporated onto and around the joints of their armour plates, and draped in long white and pink cloaks, were guarding it like a bunch of colourful immobile statues.
“Those are the royal guard!” Stitches gasped as they slowly drove past.
Constance saw one of the soldiers was watching them, and cringed when she saw him touching the communication link on the side of his plumed helmet.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Constance muttered.
Her feeling of dread curdled with confusion when they pulled up near to her house, as they couldn’t proceed any further due to a small crowd of people blocking their way. More alarmingly, the Queen of Tropica was standing beside her front door, surrounded by a loose semicircle of her royal guard who were keeping the crowd at a respectable distance. Azalea, who relished any opportunity to mingle with her subjects, was allowing people to approach her in small numbers so they could take pictures of themselves with the Queen, either on their cameras or new-fangled mobile phones that featured a low-resolution camera built into the device.
There had always been a large gap between civilian technology and that of the military and government, a divide that had been created partly because of Mydia’s war-torn history, and partly as a deliberate measure to keep the people in power firmly in control. After the dimensional merger the gap was gradually closing, but Constance knew that the technology belonging to the ruling factions of Rura, Desem, and Tropica, along with the Conclave and Justiciars, bordered on the realms of science fiction. Thankfully for the people of the newly restored planet, the quality of medical treatment had surged dramatically with the introduction of innovative technology, magic, and Alchemy, which was essential in a world that held as many new magical dangers as there were wonders.
Connie got out of the car and gestured for Stitches to stay put. As she neared the throng of people they began to take notice of her, and Constance’s neighbours and several others from her road all informed her, rather pointlessly, that the Queen was on her doorstep. Connie smiled politely and pushed her way through, feeling butterflies in her tummy as her mind raced to figure out Azalea’s intent.
‘Whatever does the Queen want with me?’ she thought both fearfully and slightly annoyed. ‘Why the fuck is all this weird shit happening on my first day?!’
Queen Azalea, the once shy and reserved Inquisitor General, was dressed to kill in a translucent fuchsia pink dress covered in a fitted golden bodice armour that was covered in brilliant floral engravings, and managed to cover and flaunt her modesty simultaneously. Her long pink hair had been skilfully styled into bouncy waves and decorated with little golden flowers that matched her small crown of golden roses. Her heart-shaped face was amazingly alluring, and defined to the fullest with expertly applied makeup, pink lipstick, and eyeshadow that matched her single magenta eye, making her other crystal blue one stick out like a sore thumb. Her skin was pale but had a faint shine to it as though it had been oiled ever so slightly, but Connie was sure she could sense a magical enchantment or alchemical effect in play.
The naturally pink-haired half-Mage was one of the rare few people that had been born from a human and Supernatu
ral partnership, but as she was orphaned during the Great War no one knew for sure what side of the family her magical side originated from. Either way, it had been a Tropican Werewolf Shaman called James—who was now her husband and the King—that had accidentally awakened her Supernatural side with his healing magic, and assisted with her charismatic rise to power.
Azalea spotted Constance struggling to make her way through the crowd, and coughed deliberately. “My apologies, good people of Tropica, but my duty calls. If you’d please be so kind as to disperse, Constance and I have places to be,” she said charmingly.
The crowd were clearly disappointed but left without making a fuss, and many eyed Constance as though she were a celebrity, offering her their giddy praise before departing. With the road clear, Stitches and Lonix slowly drove closer to the house and stopped directly outside.
“Your Majesty,” Connie said, clumsily attempting a curtsy.
“Nice try,” the Queen chuckled, “but please, just call me Azalea.”
“Okay… Azalea,” Constance began awkwardly; addressing her ruler so casually seemed wrong. “Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand out to the Queen, unsure of what else to do.
Azalea took Constance’s hand in her own, but instead of shaking it she leant over and planted a long kiss on it. Connie felt lightheaded and giggled excitedly, before turning bright red and biting her lip.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Connie,” Azalea said, batting her long eyelashes at the embarrassed Book Wielder. “May I call you Connie? Your friends in my Tropican Military Forces said that was your nickname.”
“Yes, of course, that’s fine,” Constance stuttered.
With one simple gesture, the Queen had turned her into a flustered wreck. Connie didn’t have a preference between genders—although after so many fortnight-long relationships throughout school and college had gone up in flames she had pretty much sworn off both sides indefinitely—so her attraction to the Queen wasn’t at all surprising to her. However, the overwhelming presence radiating from the woman was startling, and from experiencing Azalea’s famed natural social charms for herself Constance wasn’t surprised that she’d united the nation and styled herself as its Queen so easily.