"This place." Finley holds up her hands, indicating the room they're in. "Have you even thought about how weird catacombs are?"
"No," Junpei replies.
"The Grim Reaper comes for the dead," Finley muses. "Ghosts don't leave bodies. We're told that at one point they did, but no one can say why or when that change occurred."
"Grim didn't come for me."
"You didn't die right..."
"Maybe the Grim Reaper is a robot. He harvests the elderly before they become too weak and miserable, and takes their life energy to power the grid."
"Oh, you," Finley laughs, though for once in her life she can't tell if it's a joke.
"I mean... it is creepy, looking at a skeleton. A person can't live through having their skeleton removed. Therefore. It had to be there since the before times. Unless it's fake. Did you check and see if it's plastic?"
"I'm not touching it..."
Alex has a computer upstairs. It needed a good dusting and some love, but it still works.
"It's set up just like my old one," Chet says, meaning her parents' computer in Riverview. "Wow. The future is really lame. I thought we'd be in space colonies by now. Or at least we'd have all the Internets in the world connected."
"We had that," Riko says, from behind her. "Not while you were gone, but before you were ever born. We have parts of it archived, and you can still access them as static records, but you're now only connected to your sector. Sometimes only to your town. So new content only comes from local sources, or through government-screened updates."
"Oh."
"And people just accept this, for some reason."
Junpei's first instinct, upon emerging from the walls and rubble, is to gasp for air.
Even though trying to breathe won't do any good until his body is completely free of the objects it's phasing through, and he's returned to a normal physical state.
The candlebox on the wall here is lit. Junpei won't have to create artificial light to explore this area. This could be a good sign or a bad sign. It all depends on who lit the candle.
Junpei waited for most of the others to fall asleep, then went searching through the catacombs. Since Winona was rightfully suspicious of him, and wouldn't try to help him find Faraday, Junpei had to take matters into his own hands. He's hoping the sight of something down here will trigger a sense of deja vu and he'll know where to go. So far, no luck. Every brick looks the same as the last. Junpei is lost.
It crosses his mind that he may not make it back before Finley wakes up, and she's going to be pissed. But he's not a child, he tells himself. He can put himself in danger if he wants to.
After finding this corridor to be a dead end, Junpei places his palms flat on another random wall, and pushes himself through...
Junpei was expecting more dark tunnels and stale air. Instead he's found the oddly-red-lit exit: the mausoleum up top.
"Odd technique," Faraday comments. "Re-spacing one's physical makeup in order to be complementary to another object and pass through it. The students of Nolrynil were taught to do this, but their order is long gone. How did you learn?"
"A book," Junpei says, once his rationality catches up with the panic and recognizes this as the person he was searching for, and not someone more threatening. "A book I found in an old castle."
"A lot of apprentices died, trying to do what you're doing."
"Y-yes, I understand the dangers of failing to control one's center and falling down into the ground and not finding one's way back to the surface in time. It's kind of-" Junpei suddenly shakes his head. Why are they talking about something so trivial? "Hold up. I've been looking for you. I know who you are, you're Faraday, and I need to ask you something."
"I don't know you," Faraday says.
"Did you really need to smell my face to figure that out?" Junpei complains.
"Yes," Faraday answers, without sarcasm. "I assume you're the human mage Winona has mentioned. This is the secondary reason I am here, to speak to you. The primary reason was the question I've already asked. Your answer only raises further questions. Human magery is a subject I've always had an interest in. It's something of a lost art. And I like lost art. I collect information."
"Me reading a book is not an interesting tale," Junpei says. "I have a better one though."
_______________________________
"That's madness," Faraday responds, after patiently waiting for Junpei to finish his story. "So it must be true."
"Do you know where Chet is now? Or Loki?"
"I see why you needed to tell me about your experiences. If you'd have asked me about Loki Archer out of context, I'd have thought you were a number, told you I had no idea where they were, and also tried to bash your skull in with a wrench or whatever else is handy."
And he's got a wrench handy. Good to know.
Faraday seems oblivious to the fear the sudden brandishing of a wrench brings. "However. I honestly do not know where either of them are. We haven't spoken since Loki came here for the artifact."
Junpei fights the urge to facepalm. He thought for sure, this was what he was supposed to do. But maybe seeking out the characters from his nightmares wasn't the logical thing to do after all. "What about... a place called Moonlight Falls? Or do you know anyone named Zoke?"
"I do know of one Zoke."
"Can't exactly be a common name."
"Zoke brought Johann to us." Faraday studies Junpei's face, though has long since learned to not rely on a person's expression to read them. "None of your dreams contained anything about Johann Drang? Well, we couldn't help him, so he's probably irrelevant to the task at hand."
"I wish I knew what the task at hand really was. Should I even ask about this Johann?" Junpei is beginning to wonder if everyone in the world is connected and in on this. "Or do you know where Zoke is?"
"Zoke was our contact to a community of supernaturals known as Moonlight Falls." Faraday pulls idly at one of the buttons on his coat. Always fidgeting. "Johann was a teenager suffering from the corruption. He'd been dabbling with dangerous magic, but it shouldn't have been dangerous in that way. Healers trying to fix him grew sick. They didn't know what was going on. So he was brought to us. We determined he was a genetic fluke. Too much human blood had lowered his innate resistance to the corruption. He came from mostly elemental ancestry, so it shouldn't have a problem, yet it was. Bad luck."
"What happened to him?"
"The corruption progressed rapidly. One day he snapped, killed some of us, and ran off. Supernatural Control caught him before we could, and then they came after us." Faraday wonders if he's answered anything at all. "Oh, they put Johann in a cell and watched, puzzled, as he died. They cut a few bits off of him before it was too late, for their experiments."
"A precursor to stuff like what happened to Loki."
"He really hated that name," Faraday muses.
"Seems like he's taking it seriously now."
Something is wrong.
Junpei senses a stab of alarm from Finley, then silence. Unconscious. This cuts his chat with Faraday short, as Junpei decides to sink down through the floor and immediately make his way towards his sister.
Scrambling in the dark, he doesn't notice the odd smell in the corridors.
Until it's too late to counteract.
He's conscious when he falls over. Conscious enough to know there will be some nasty bruises on his arms where he tried to catch himself. Junpei detects an unfamiliar presence up ahead, no, two, three, maybe five or six of them.
There's a noise in the tunnel. Someone's coming this way.
Junpei's world fades away before he can react further.
"What are you doing?" Faraday asks.
"I think someone's trying to contact us."
"Contact? Us? That's bad. We're in hiding."
"Not necessarily. They want to speak to someone called Kehri."
"Isn't that one of Loki's false names?"
"I think you're right. Go fetch him, will you?"
"Fetch?"
Ripley flinches. "Sorry. Poor word choice."
"I am busy!" Faraday snaps. "I am busy analyzing the water samples we acquired in Riverview! Too busy for your nonsense! Go fetch things yourself!" With that, Faraday stalks away.
"This is the place he asked to meet us?" Faraday examines the set of standing stones, and eventually comes to the conclusion that the only one worth staring at is the one that's different, the one with symbols worn into it. "And these can function as a portal?"
"To those who have the key," Loki responds, intentionally cryptic.
"This place is soaked in magical energy!" Rain announces. "I feel stronger here!" Junpei knows her name is Rain, and she is traveling with the others because she's desperately curious about her heritage. Something about her is familiar to Junpei. Perhaps she's been present in dreams forgotten.
"What do these designs mean?" Faraday asks, ignoring Rain.
"They mean you should remove that icky tail."
"Would you shut up about my tail?!"
"No! You just show up in public with a tail, it's conspicuous."
"You want my continued expertise and assistance, or not?"
While Loki and Faraday argue about this, Rain continues testing her limits.
"You should be careful," a high-pitched voice warns her.
"Oh my!" Rain gasps. "It's... it's a mini-me! It's a little bitty blue person! It's adorable! But it's an ice elemental, isn't it?"
Faraday groans. "Archer, she's making us look like idiots. Idiots by association. Why did you let her come along?"
"Zoke?" The man in the red and black shirt recognizes the short one. "Is your mother alright?"
"Xalira of Aknrelorvari is well, thank you, and extends her apologies for not being able to meet with you in person." Zoke has been trained to not overreact when outsiders behave as though he's a child. Or when they continue to treat him like one, even after finding out he's been a child for an entire human lifetime, and may begin to look like a teenager in another lifetime more. "She sent me, to send you, a person. Of interest. He was attempting a spell too advanced for him, and it backfired in a curious way. It's left him marked. Changed. The healers that attempt to treat him are themselves harmed. My mother thinks your research team may be capable of helping us unravel this conundrum."
"Yes, yes, I can unravel anything," Loki stifles a yawn.
"It doesn't sound like a mystery so far," Faraday points out. "You know the cause and the effect."
Zoke is quiet for a moment, watching Rain. He's trying to figure out what she is; she's not one of his kind, nor is she fae. Yet she's blue. Finally Zoke offers Faraday a response: "We know the cause and effect in a juvenile sort of way. Imagine I step on your foot, and you feel pain. Now imagine I have no understanding of why that happened, because I know nothing of your nervous system or how it works. Worse, your foot won't stop hurting. I don't know why. None of the healers in the village know why, either, because this has never happened before. No one has seen anything like it. How do we help you?"
"I've probably seen something like it," Loki says.
Whatever Loki and the others expected their research subject to be like,
Johann Drang the sullen teenager was not it. The way he moved and
talked and looked at them, it was all unsettling. He spoke in mumbles,
and shuffled about slowly. Just moving hurt. It was as if his
body had died and turned uncooperative, and some mean-spirited god was
cruelly pulling the puppet strings anyway. The telepaths in the room could see Johann's thoughts were unnaturally violent; it took all of his mental energy to control them.
"You think you can help me?" Johann glances briefly at each of the people in front of him.
"We'll figure it out," Ripley promises. "I actually still have a medical license."
"My hair didn't always have these black bits in it," Johann mutters.
"Introductions then, shall we? My name is Doctor Ripley Kyel. I'm a healer as well as a traditionally educated doctor. These two are Riko and Parsley." Ripley stopped short of identifying them as siblings. "Riko has psychometric powers. It's more helpful with stuff than you'd think."
Loki knew what the black marks meant straight away, but it was no reason to give up and send the kid back home to die. If he kept combing through the past, perhaps he could find someone, somewhere, who had removed the corruption.
Ripley and Rain busy themselves watching over the child, documenting his worsening condition and trying out different methods to stop it from progressing. They spend the most time with Johann, and feel terrible about what's happened to him. Such is their nature: Ripley, as the caring healer sort of stereotype, and Rain, as the wide-eyed innocent magical girl just learning about the paranormal herself. She can sympathize with Johann's mistake; all he did was fail to contain a spell properly, and it turned on him. Seems like a thing that could happen to anyone.
Faraday is quick to point out that it wouldn't happen to just anyone, and that's what makes Johann interesting enough for research.
"What you've done hasn't cured him," Faraday criticizes. "And I think it's dangerous to fuel the energy inside of him. He's already very unstable."
"What'd you do this time?" Loki asks distantly.
"I had an idea that since full-blooded elementals aren't affected..." Rain begins.
"The potion we gave him to boost his natural elemental spark, no pun intended, did seem to stall the disease," Ripley defends against Faraday's criticism. "And what Johann needs right now is time. Time for us to come up with a cure."
Faraday grimaces. "He won't be able to keep fighting it off. And then, you will be regretting this. You've made him more powerful and more dangerous. Tell them, Loki."
"Let them try," Loki says, irritated by the argument.
"How are the violent tendencies progressing?" Faraday demands.
"He tried to punch Parsley this morning, but it didn't end well for him," Ripley answers.
"Lashing out." Faraday's tail puffs up dramatically. "It begins."
"He's a teenager! They all lash out once in a while," Ripley says.
"No, I'm glad they don't talk to me," Johann told her. The subject of his parents made him cry; Rain felt foolish for trying to get him to talk about them. "They don't know why I tried to kill myself. I was scared to tell them it was because. I was starting to go nuts. I saw my little sister playing with magic... just... with her toys, you know. And I. I wanted. To kill my sister."
"Wh... why, Johann?"
"I don't know! The weirdest, most mundane stuff was setting me off. I wanted to break everything. And everyone."
"Did seeing her cast magic upset you in some way?"
"I don't know. I don't wanna know." He shivered, having trouble sitting upright. "My brain's really foggy."
"I think you're very brave, to resist breaking everything," Rain said. "But hurting yourself isn't the answer."
"I'm not brave!" he yelled. The bulb in the lamp on the nightstand shattered. The room turned dark. "I'm terrified."
"If I'm gonna die, I wanna die as me. Not as some rabid animal."
"You're not going to die. What has my cousin been telling you?"
"Huh?"
"Riko," she clarified.
Johann's eyes closed. "Nothing. He hasn't told me anything. I don't need a research team to tell me I'm in a Kafka short story."
"I don't know what that means." Rain was distressed, to hear a young person talk in such a way. "But I think you should have more hope. And I think you should forgive yourself. Everyone thinks about, uh, bad things, sometimes. What matters is we don't act on them."
"The kid doesn't eat or sleep. The corrupted energy is all that's keeping him alive. He's in a lot of pain. We should put him out of his misery. I'm appealing to you, Florian, since you are the nice one and they will listen to you."
"We can't decide something like that."
"Then who can? You do realize Johann already tried to make this decision himself? He didn't fail to commit suicide because he's afraid, he failed because it wouldn't let him."
"You all agreed it wasn't some sentient force."
"It's not, that's true, we're not dealing with any sort of possession. But it still follows rules."
"Faraday. Settle down, and drink some coffee or something."
None of these are Chet's memories, Junpei can't help but notice. They must be Loki's, looking back into the past and wondering where the fatal mistake was.
Johann is startled when Rain teleports into existence right next to him.
"There you are!" she exclaims. "I was worried when you wandered off."
"You use electricity too?" he asks.
"Oh? Oh, that... it's harmless. Just a visual representation of my magic. I think I'm supposed to teleport in a puff of smoke, but I can't get anything right!" She blushes. "Our magic may have the same root, somewhere. Lo-..Riko told me your lightning elementalism actually came from elf magic."
"Elementals are elves?"
"Of course not. But they did give your people their magic."
"'...Why?"
"Well, I don't know. Maybe they needed your help. You're less fragile than them."
"I shouldn't have been able to get corruption-sick, you mean?"
"Y-yes. That's part of the theory."
"So my whole race are pawns but nobody knows what for anymore."
"I bet my sisters wouldn't laugh at me for being a crappy elemental now," Johann changes the subject. "Look... I can just... grab lightning out of the sky."
The clouds outside churn and twist, and spark unnaturally.
"Doesn't look like much, does it?" Johann giggles humorlessly. "But one touch, and it'll throw off your whole day."
Rain backs away. The electrical currents hit the floor, searing it black. "Your eyes..."
Johann is unaware of the change to his face. "My eyes?"
At first, Rain thought his eyes were glowing. Upon closer inspection, it's the energy collecting in front of his eyes that's glowing. She's not sure how he can see through it. Maybe he doesn't see; maybe at this point, his perception has moved outside of normal senses. "They're... um... pretty."
Johann stops with the electro act, and lowers his arms. "I feel numb," he tells her. He doesn't move when Rain reaches over to stroke the side of his face. "I don't feel your hand."
Junpei struggles to pull himself out of the murky unconsciousness induced by accidentally-inhaled chemicals. Everything feels dull and unreal. It takes at least a minute for him to comprehend his surroundings.
He's in a tacky stone-facade room with no apparent exit. Winona is sitting near him, not because she likes him but because their cell is just this small. The only other person in here with them is Meela. She's still unconscious.
Finley is nowhere to be seen, but Junpei can feel her presence. She's on the other side of the wall, awake, and as pissed off as he thought she'd be.
"What happened?" he asks Winona.
"Her parents said they did that for her own good."
"Did what?"
"Injured her!" Winona grumbles impatiently. "If she doesn't get blood soon, she'll be dead. That's why they threw you in here with us. They told her if she'd behave like a 'real vampire', they'd let her live. But the amount she needs to heal herself is more than you can spare, so she wouldn't do it."
"What?!" There's no good response to that one, so Junpei asks his next questions: "We were captured by Meela's parents?! Where are we?"
"Some cheap dungeon? Where does it look like we are?"
"Well I don't know, I've never seen a cheap dungeon before!"
"She doesn't seem hurt too bad. I don't see a mark on her." Even as Junpei announces this, he feels dumb for doing so. Meela's breathing is uneven, and though she won't respond to him, his psychic senses tell him she's not unconscious. She's dying. She was expected to murder him to save herself. How could someone play such a cruel mind game with their own child? Do they seriously intend to let her die? "Meela? Meela, can you still hear me?"
At that moment, he's stricken by a strange thought. It goes something like this: Meela is very pretty. I never really looked at her before.
Winona scoots over to them. "You aren't looking in the right place." In one rough, unceremonious movement, the older vampire grabs the edge of Meela's sweater and peels it back, exposing her midsection. The wounds are big white gashes, bled almost completely dry.
"I wouldn't have looked there," Junpei admits.
"Hmph," is Winona's reply. She pulls the sweater back down.
Winona looks up at Junpei when he stands. "What are you doing?"
"Trying something."
Junpei meditates, trying to recapture the moment he healed himself, inexplicably, after Chet cut into his throat with the knife. He didn't understand what he did, at the time. Now, he thinks he understands. His soul contains a sort of life magic. All he's got to do is... pry it open.
Winona recoils, remembering the sunlight spell he used on the vampires they were fighting. But this spell can't be the same. He's not making the same motions or using the same words. In fact, he's not moving at all.
________________________________________________________
Etc.: My Bridgeport save self-destructed, and I mean it blew the heck up, it went kaboom sky high (during the scene where Junpei talks to Faraday), and it took several sims with it. I had to find a way to write around that. So, SUDDENLY, everybody gets captured and relocated. I have a rough plan with the narrative, but I also am just kind of winging it.
Rain is a genetic cross of Scarlett and Greta (from my Barnacle Bay legacy), meant to be one of their granddaughters. That's why she's blue. And why she teleports. And why she is Loki's cousin.
