by R. Atlas
Then, from the corner of his eyes, Red saw the sea of muck beginning to take form like a liquid filling an invisible container. “It’s alive!” he heard Magnus scream from far above them. “It’s alive!” The ooze splattered against the spire as it climbed the cavern with a hideous speed, spreading bits of itself all over the air.
“Go! Go! Go!” He could hear Magnus scream. I’m already climbing as fast as I can he thought, but somehow managed to speed up his pace anyways. Once all five of them had gotten to the top, they began taking turns jumping to latch onto the ceiling.
“Do you have energy?” Raven asked. She seemed delirious, not her usual self. Something about her was off, like she had been deeply disturbed. It reminded Red of what he looked like after a nightmare. For a second he felt like there was something he needed to ask her, but couldn’t remember what it was. “A regular jump won’t cut it, we’ll need to combine it with a propulsion cast.”
“Yah, I feel fine,” Red answered, surprised that he actually did feel fine, and not exhausted. Somehow he still had a good amount of energy leftover after his cast. She returned a curious look before pointing upwards. What is it that I need to ask you? The thought wouldn’t leave Red’s mind despite the blitz of the moment.
“Okay, I’m jumping last,” she replied.
Butz, Magnus, and S went ahead of Red, each spacing their jump only a second apart from one another. Butz carried Linx on his back and went first. Red followed behind S, but nearly missed reaching the ceiling. Butz extended a hand that he grabbed onto, saving him from having to jump a second time. Raven had no problem closing the gap with her leap, and they began climbing towards the hole they entered through as soon as she came up.
“No, follow me,” Raven replied, as she went towards a different direction. When they reached an alternate gap in the ceiling, they rushed through it as fast as they could. A moment before Red went in, he glanced back down at the caverns and saw the ooze spiraling around the bladed man like a tornado and then collapsing onto him in a violent splash of slime. Finally thought Red. Please let that be the end of him.
The chute they climbed through led to a horizontal tunnel where mini toadstools scuttled back and forth as the five of them crawled across. Despite being far and away from the chambers down below, no one seemed inclined to take any chances by slowing down. Eventually they reached a tiny room where Red saw several fast moving currents at the center, twisting the air around them like channels of energy. Geysers.
“This is near where I first landed,” Raven began. “I had to climb back down through that other chamber to get through to you guys — that’s when I got caught staring at the crystal. How far up do you think this goes?” She asked, turning to Magnus.
“I don’t know, but the wider the geyser, the further towards the surface it’ll take us,” Magnus replied. They spent a few minutes comparing the width of each of the geysers until a soft rumbling interrupted their calm.
“It can’t be…” Butz whispered.
The floor exploded in green as the ooze popped up from underneath them, gushing into the tiny chamber as though it were being pumped from below. Raven used a cast that eviscerated the floor with plasma while Red poured as much of his energy as he could into a cast of flames. He had never seen Raven use plasma before, at least not in a fight, and suspected it had something to do with watching Wren use it in her dreamscape. Magnus and Butz, who relied primarily on physical combat, were useless against the slime. They helplessly skittered across the floor with S, attempting to dodge the goo whenever it seeped to their feet. The two of them shoveled the ground around her to keep the goo from getting to her, and for a second, Red thought they were simply being kindly protective until he realized they were trying to fix their positioning. At Crest, it was drilled into their heads over and over again that positioning in a fight was always the key to victory — where your healers, warriors, casters, and everyone else was in relation to each other and the enemy. Because the slime was flooding the floor in a haphazard manner, S had no where to remain calm and focused. If your healer was neutralized in a fight, the position was called curative-atrophy — the kiss of death for any squadron.
“GO!” Raven shouted furiously at the four of them. “ What are you doing? Don’t bother fighting it. Just go through one of the geysers, any of them. Before the slime takes shape.” Just as she had finished her sentence, the goo began stacking on top of itself in loud plopping noises to create a totem-like creature that continued to burgeon as it collected more slime.
Without hesitating, Magnus jumped into a geyser and Red saw him cannon upwards with the draft. Butz and Linx followed behind him, then S, and then Red. The sensation was almost the same as falling, except he could feel two forces sandwiching his body — the air propelling him upwards and gravity pushing him downwards. In a few seconds he traveled to a higher level of the caverns, where the geyser threw him on top of his team. Butz, Magnus, and Red were all piled on top of S, who somehow ended up at the bottom.
“You’re crushing me,” she squealed as they rushed to get off.
“Just makin’ sure the healer’s safe,” Butz replied.
Somehow when Raven came through she was able to maintain her tact and landed gently next to them on her feet. The chamber they landed in was large, but nothing like the one with the ainmosni crystal. A single geyser protruded from the floor of this one, and hundreds of rocks, perfectly weathered into elliptical shapes, were collected among large pools of umbriel. They took their time catching their breath while Magnus and Butz hopped over to study the rocks. Red was about to join them when a rumbling noise interrupted them just like before.
“No…no…no…” Red whispered. “I thought we left the nightmare.”
“How? It’s impossible. We must be a tezra or two higher than the first chamber,” Magnus replied. “It can’t be chasing us this far.”
But just as it had done twice already, the floor began to crack and a green ooze leaked into the room. S swore at the thing before jumping into the geyser. They all followed right behind her, jumping in pairs of two this time.
“We can’t stop,” Raven said, as soon as they had landed in the next chamber. “Don’t stop going until you’re at the surface. Following her directions, they climbed through 4 consecutive chambers without stopping, always on the look out for the slightest hint of a rumble. The last room they ascended led to a vast chamber with waterfalls — not made of umbriel — and from the holes on the ceiling in this one, Red could see the faint trace of starlight.
“We made it…” S breathed. “And there’s daylight… solstice is over?”
“There’s a geyser there,” Magnus pointed. “We don’t even have to climb the walls.”
They ran for the channel of air and took it straight up to the surface, where the sudden surge of light made Red feel like he had cleansed himself of a deeper evil from down below in the caverns. They landed atop a shallow dune, and Red noticed that behind him, the sliver of space they had popped up from disappeared underneath the sand. Odd, thought Red; it looked as though the space was timed to close right after they had exited through it. The five of them panted breathlessly while stretching their combat suits over their mouths to protect themselves from the wind. Solstice had given way to torid, and already, the season’s notorious sandstorms had begun tearing across the desert.
“We must have been asleep for longer than we thought,” Magnus finally shouted, breaking the silence between them. The howling of the sandstorm made his voice barely audible.
“Time distortion in the dreamscape,” S shouted back. Butz let himself fall and rolled down the hill of sand they were sitting atop, either laughing or crying as he went; Red couldn’t tell. Linx jumped along behind Butz, letting the slope of the dune carry him to the bottom.
“I can’t believe we made it,” Red beamed as he finally caught his breath.
“Let’s save that for when we’re back in our beds,” S said. “I’m sending a message to the control
room right now for an exfil. We can’t walk back to Echidna from where we are.”
“At least we’ll have an interesting debrief after all this is over,” Magnus laughed.
Red looked at Raven to ask her if she was okay but saw that she had walked over to the same spot they had emerged from, seemingly dumfounded by the disappearance of the hole just as he had been. “Is everything okay?” He shouted.
“Fine. We should head over to the extraction plant, we’ll be safer around there until we get picked up,” she replied, pointing over to the purple beam of light in the distance. Cron extraction plants looked like gated microcities, and were indistinguishable from normal settlements except for their ‘Cron Prisms,’ beams of purple light that extended from their centers. The beams were a result of the excess energy given off from hyperproxification. While it was unknown exactly how much energy was wasted in this way, MegaCORP made a point to make sure that none of it was redirected towards a free pool of energy.
All five of their microAIs lit up simultaneously to confirm their exfil in twelve hours — which Red noted was an abnormally long time. The notification suddenly reminded him that he hadn’t checked his progress for the field test since their first night on the desert. “Our scores!” Red yelled. The pace of everything that had happened nearly made him forget why he was here in the first place. Taking out his microAI, he quickly opened up his field test progress to see how he had done.
“No way…560!” he exclaimed.
“What!” Magnus choked as he ran over to see it for himself. Not believing that it could be accurate, he checked his own score, which ended up being only 10 points lower. Butz and S scored 530 each, and Raven had a 600, which they suspected was a result of initially landing at a much lower level through the whirlpool.
“What does this mean?” Butz asked.
“It means we’re going to Areopa,” Red sighed as he collapsed once more on top of the sand, suddenly feeling like everything had been worth it. He could see the backdrop of the Cron extraction plant as he lay down, the silhouette of a tiny city, and imagined how pleasant it would be to finally return to his own bed at Echidna. After resting for a few more minutes, they took to finding a spot near the extraction plant to make camp until their exfil.
“Do you think he’s gone?” S asked, looking back towards the direction they had come from.
“It looked like it,” Magnus replied. “I’m surprised your cast didn’t kill him. I’ve never seen you do that,” he added, turning to Red. “Didn’t know you could.”
“I’ve never seen myself do that, and I didn’t know I could either,” Red laughed.
He caught Raven’s eyes glaring at him from their peripherals, but pretended not to notice. There was something about everyone that had changed now, although he couldn’t put his finger on it. Not on the surface, but something inside had changed in Butz, Magnus, S, and Raven. In everyone except for Raven, it seemed to be a change for the better. In Raven, he sensed something more complicated. Even her energy flow felt different — more powerful, but more raw. I’ll ask her about it later, he thought, in private. He had wanted to ask her about The Evil Eye as well, the term used by the shaman, and something else that had slipped his mind but he hoped would come back to him.
“The bikes are gone…” S said as they trekked through the desert. “Ugh we’re going to have to pay a fortune for losing them.”
“Well, maybe we’re in luck. Let’s see how much we could sell this for,” Butz replied, taking out a giant shard of blue crystal he hid underneath a piece of cloth so no one could look at it clearly.
“What? How? When’d you get that?” S asked.
“Linx must have swiped it while we were asleep, saw it in his mouth when we were climbing up,” Butz smiled proudly.
“Wow…Like owner…like familiar…” S replied. The five of them shared a laugh, thinking back to the dream. Red wondered what Linx would sound like if he really could talk.
“Good thing we made it out alive,” Butz sighed.
“Did you ever have a doubt?” S asked.
“At one point, when the steaming umbriel came out.”
“The umbriel?”
“Yah, umbriel is highly explosive if mixed with methane. I was dying to fart that whole time.”
They made camp at the mouth of a cave a few tezras away from the extraction plant. It took them hours to find shelter, but without their TPs, they had no choice but to seek an enclosure to protect themselves from the sandstorm. It was Raven’s turn to keep watch. The winds had died down from earlier, and Red struggled to keep himself awake amidst the quiet of the desert. He was waiting for a chance to discuss everything that had happened in the dreamscape with Raven. The longer he waited, the more of the dream slipped his mind, vexing him with a growing impatience. Butz and Magnus were sound asleep, only S was still awake. He suspected that the snoring of the other two was what was bothering her. It occurred to him that he didn’t know exactly why he was trying so hard to keep the other three from overhearing — but he had a strong feeling that it was the right thing to do.
“She’s asleep,” Raven said. “She’s just shifting in her sleep.”
“Oh. You knew —”
“I always know what you’re thinking or when you’re talking to yourself.”
“You’re not reading my mind are you?” Red asked suspiciously.
“No,” she smiled. “I can just tell.”
He debated how to go about the conversation, and then decided to jump right in. He wasn’t fully sure what he intended to ask or find out, but he had a feeling she did. “Do you remember what the shaman mentioned? The Evil Eye?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember anything about it. From my childhood I mean. I remember him mentioning it before, but none of the context.”
“It’s a part of that story you mentioned —”
“The sign of Ikb’Sept. Yah, but I already told you everything I knew about the story, just the part about the Kyrons.”
“Is that the entire story? But what’s Ikb’Sept then?”
“It’s a who — and I don’t know,” she sighed. It sounded genuine, but Red had a feeling she was lying, or at least omitting a small detail. Oddly enough, he also had a feeling that she knew that he could tell she was lying.
“Well is there anything you could tell me about the dreamscape? I remember falling into a second dream and…swimming through my own mind. I can’t describe it, and I forgot most of what I went through, but I know it’s something I want to remember. I don’t know if I forgot what had happened, or if my mind just can’t make sense of it now. I feel like…it was the happenings of my subconscious and somehow…I was able to go down there myself.”
“Want to see something cool?” She said casually, getting up to walk out of the cave.
“Are we leaving them here?”
“I left a shield cast above the area a few hours ago, it should still hold strong. Either ways, I’ll sense it if it breaks.”
“I still want to talk about the dreamscape, there’s something about it at the tip of my mind that I keep trying to remember but I can’t,” Red protested, suspicious that she was trying to change the subject. “And, somehow everything feels different. Everyone feels different I mean. Butz, Magnus, S, even you. I feel it. Especially you, actually.”
“I didn’t say we weren’t going to,” Raven replied. It irked him how calm her tone was, not for any particular reason, but because of its disparity with his own sense of urgency. He realized it was nothing new, he felt this way often — it was the same when he tried to tell her she belonged in WEAPON even if he didn’t make it, and when she stubbornly insisted that they had a punishing practice session only a day before their field test.
Outside of the cave, he could hear the distant whir of the extraction plant skirling against the quiet of the wind. They attached their microAIs over their heads as vizors to keep the sand from getting into their eyes. The storm had stilled itself enough to limit the need to stre
tch their combat suits, but its breeze still carried bits of metal sand with it. The fabric of combat suits were made out of Noirtex, an elastic dark grey material that could be stretched into new shapes. If they ever needed to, they could stretch the hem of their necks over their entire heads to create a makeshift hood or a face mask.
“Where are we going?” Red asked, although Raven didn’t respond. “We can’t go too far from the cave,” he relented after a few more minutes.
“Right there,” she said, pointing to a dune nearby. When he got to the top of it, he could see the expanse of barren land surrounding the extraction plant. A single Ignot Gila roamed the desert a few tezras away from them, stranded from its drove. “Have you ever tried looking at the sky with your vizor in its fermi mode?”
“No. The sky is irrelevant, it doesn’t affect my life,” he replied, hoping the irony of his response would catch on to her.
“Do it,” she replied. He reluctantly followed, wondering what she could possibly want to show him. The sky was empty, just like the desert, except for the glimmer of its stars. And there’s no Ignot Gila, he mused to himself. That’s something Butz would say. “Put it on magnitude 9, and then look this way,” she said, gesturing towards a familiar constellation. He did; the cover of black disappeared into what looked like a rainbow cloud. He zoomed in further, magnitude 10. The cloud turned into a splash of colors, an assortment of every dye painted against a canvas of stellar constellations.
“What do you feel, looking at it?” Raven asked.
“I don’t know…awe?” Red replied.
“Just awe?”
“Yah. I Guess, what else? What am I looking at?”
“It’s the birth of a super nova.”
“Is it happening now?”
“What you’re looking at happened 130,000 years ago. The light just takes that long to reach us.” It was amazing, he thought, but his mind was too occupied to fully appreciate it. “I first saw it when I went to Areopa last year. I had nothing to do during the qualifiers, and star gazing is a famous hobby in their city,” she added.