Well, I feel like I've been gone way too long… Hey all, welcome to part three of this little adventure. As always reviews are more than welcome, even ones that tell me if I suck, so go right ahead. A couple of things you should know; A lot of this is told from OCs' points of view, so you might want to go read Same Old Story and Twins before getting all confused as to who Ronnie and Lucinda are, but beyond that you're good to go; just bear in mind that I'm a really bad uploader. So, I, Earthcat123, proudly present Demons in the Dark.
CHAPTER ONE:
Subtlety had always been Ronnie's area of expertise, and Lucinda Demourney had that fact at the forefront of her mind as she sped forty over the limit across the desert. If Ronnie had been with her they would have timed it perfectly so as to reach Zeke's Diner just before closing time, stocked up on that delicious pie, and then carried on to the Spectra Motors garage to arrive at some ungodly hour of night.
If Ronnie had been with her, though, Lucinda would not have been driving out to Spectra at all. As it was, the sun was only just setting and she barely looked up as she passed the Diner's signature towering plastic pizza.
She found the hangar with ease and shifted the heavy surface door aside to reveal the dusty and neglected shop floor beneath, adrenaline and a strange sensation that she identified as genuine fear giving her body strength beyond what it normally contained. She looked about the garage, watching the atoms of dust play and dance in the streaming beams of the sun setting through the Western windows. She realised that she hadn't thought out this part of her plan. Find the Hub, get the team to help; that was about as much detail as she'd gone into. But she hadn't even found the Hub yet. It was below her, right under her feet; she could feel the energy that powered it humming gently through the soles of her boots, only present to those who knew to pay attention to it. How to get inside was something else entirely, a trick Ronnie had never revealed.
With a shrug she decided to just hope that someone was down there, and settled for the fool proof tactic of banging on the walls and screaming at the top of her lungs. Subtlety, after all, had always been Ronnie's area of expertise.
Satisfaction didn't even register when a panel of wall on the far side of the hangar slid sideways, revealing the elevator to the Battle Force Five's secret underground base. Secret underground base… despite everything, Lucinda allowed herself to grin at the notion.
She flipped the keys to her bike around her fingers impatiently as the cabin descended.
The light when she stepped out was dazzling compared to the shady darkness of the garage above, yet at first glance her terror mounted as she considered the possibility that no one else was around. The Team's oh-so-conspicuous vehicles were not in their usual parking spaces, and Sage the Glowing Blue Alien wasn't at her usual post before the holographic computer. The whole room, as vast and chasmic as it was, resonated with an emptiness that made her shiver. What if they weren't there anymore? What if Vert had moved on...?
"Oh, get a grip Lucinda," she muttered out loud, listening to her cold voice echo across and bounce off the walls in front of her. Of course they hadn't moved on. Even if they had managed to find somewhere else remotely suited to hiding a covert alien-hunting task force beneath its foundations, Vert would have had this place dismantled and the ground filled in, leaving no evidence at all of its existence. No, they were still here. And besides, someone had to have let her in just now.
Unless she was too late and they were already dead. She tried not to think about that in too much detail.
She looked around for any signs of life, and was hit some fifteen minutes later by one of those strong waves of emotion that causes a person to wonder how humans had ever managed to evolve whilst maintaining the ability to be so darn stupid; surely that should have been one of the first things to go in the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing. Because slap bang in front of her, looming like a sleeping bear, was the Gearslammer. Its blue-and-white paint job sort of blended in with the Hub wall behind, and it was so big that she had stupidly assumed it was part of the Hub's structural supports. Because heck, the whole thing was so alien to her she had no idea what was what anymore. But the Gearslammer gave her a sense that someone was somewhere around, and a grin somehow managed to spread itself back across her face.
"Hey, AJ!" she called into the air. Her voice rebounded back to her, shockingly loud in the still silence, and made her falter. For the most nerve-wracking of moments nothing answered her, and she wondered again if indeed she was too late in her arrival. And then the thunder of boots running on shiny tiled floor reached her from a corridor and two figures emerged into the light. One was AJ, the friendly Canadian she had thought so adorably gullible on her last visit. And the other was Zoom, cheery happy little Zoom, to whom she had taking a rather unhealthy liking. Actually he wasn't so little; they were the same age, and he was only half an inch shorter than she was. She supposed the phrase had stuck since she'd heard Tezz refer to him as such so often.
"Lucinda Demourney!" Zoom cheered, bounding over. Lucinda refrained herself from hugging him; it would have been inappropriate under the circumstances. "What brings you to our neck of the woods?"
"I need to talk to Vert and Tezz, like, right now," she blurted. Well, so much for the plan to be cool about the whole situation. "Seriously, the fate of the Multiverse or whatever isn't nearly as important as this."
"Every time you and I encounter one another, Lucinda, you seem incapable of grasping the seriousness of Battle Force Five's operations."
Lucinda cursed under her breath as Sage drifted around a corner and into her field of vision. The Sentient had never taken a liking to her, and for her part, the feeling was entirely mutual.
"Look, Sage," she pleaded, realising that out of the three available before her she was the one most qualified to help. "I know they're probably in the middle of restoring the balance of life or whatever it is they do, but this is so much more important than that."
She remembered Ronnie saying once that Sage didn't do emotion very well. From the death-defying glower she was getting, it would seem that her friend had been quite wrong.
"If you must know, they are conducting a rescue mission on Planet Vandal that requires the utmost delicacy..."
"What is it Luce?" Zoom cut her off by stepping in between them. "What's going on?"
"It's Ronnie," Lucinda confessed, and then sat heavily down on a table. "Look, Zoom, as soon as I try and explain this I'm gonna go crazy, so I'd really rather only have to do it once. Can you get Vert in here, Tezz too? Or just put me through to them on coms if it's that much of a problem."
It surprised Lucinda to see AJ amble over towards the computers before she had even finished speaking and begin tapping in commands. Sage turned her glare onto him.
"The Vandals don't have their technology anymore, Sage," he consoled her in that soothing voice of his. "The worst thing the guys have to worry about is the wildlife. Vert and Tezz can be spared if Zoom and I swap in for them."
With a harrumph so accurate to human expression that Lucinda was sure that she had been practicing, Sage floated off deeper into the Hub, positively emanating annoyance and leaving an awkward gap in the atmosphere of the room.
"Come again, AJ, I only got half of that," Vert's voice resonated from AJ's computer before Sage was even out the door.
"Sorry dude, but we have a little problem back here. Lucinda's just shown up wanting to talk to you and Tezz right away. She says it's about Ronnie, and she says it's important."
"We are currently in the midst of an extremely precise rescue attempt..."
"We'll be there in twenty seconds." Vert cut off Tezz's thick accent as if he had never spoken. "AJ, you and Zoom mount up and prepare to take our places; Agura will fill you in on the plan."
And that was it. In just three brief exchanges she was getting what she wanted. But Lucinda was fuming; she had always known that Tezz's highest priority wasn't his relationship with Ronnie. She had never quite trusted the Russian, although until now she had had only her gut instinct for proof. Beside her, Zoom winked and tried to convince her to smile.
"It'll be okay," he whispered, and then ran off to his bike before she had a chance to answer. It wouldn't be; she had a gut instinct about that too.
When Zoom and AJ left her alone in the Hub she began to count down from twenty, just for amusement's sake and to try and prove that Vert wasn't as perfect as he was always made out to be. Halfway down, somewhere near nine or so, she realised just how much she disliked Ronnie's other friends. Not just the Battle Force Five, but everybody else she had known before moving to the city and had kept in contact with. Her friend Stacy from grade school who came up at some point or another during every vacation to whom Ronnie always gave free pizza if she paid for drinks and desert. Marty O'Neill, who she didn't even know but had a strange distrust towards nonetheless, and Tommy Saunders, who had actually been Lucinda's friend too before she and Ronnie had even met; she didn't talk to him anymore. She told herself that she was concerned that they would hurt her best friend, but as she sat there counting down from twenty she began to wonder if really it was because she was jealous that one day, her best friend would choose them over her. She resolved to be nicer to them all next time she saw them, and to not speak scornfully of them around Ronnie. If she ever saw Ronnie again, of course. Then she turned her thoughts to wondering why she was being so sentimental all of a sudden.
Vert pulled into the underground garage before her mental count had reached two.
"What's going on?" he demanded as he vaulted over the Sabre's body. "Where is she?"
Lucinda took a breath, but at her hesitation he carried on. "The two of you do everything together, where is she?"
"Alright, alright!" Anything was easier to say than the explanation for her impromptu visit. She faltered again as Tezz slowly climbed out of the Splitwire and joined Vert, moving with that easy grace that had always unnerved her.
"So, last Wednesday Ronnie and I were supposed to be going up to Arkansas for a show; we had to leave at, like, four in the morning or something, and we agreed to meet at the McDonald's by the highway for breakfast before heading off."
"Get to the point, Lucinda," Vert growled.
"I am. Look, you're going to want to know all this eventually so I may as well tell you now. So I was there at four, like we agreed, and I waited. And I waited some more, and then it got to four thirty and she still wasn't there, so I started to panic because Ronnie is never late for anything without giving out a heads up first. So I call her and she doesn't pick up, and this goes on for another twenty minutes until I run my phone credit right down, and we seriously need to be going, so I figure I'll go by the restaurant and just check if she forgot to set an alarm or something."
She stopped again and took a deep breath. She could feel the tears coming; she had so far managed to keep it together but she knew that as soon as she got to the important bit she would break. She just had to tell them as much as possible before that happened.
"When I got there… the whole place was empty. I didn't expect anyone to be in the restaurant, but then I went upstairs and there was just… no one there. But it wasn't like they'd upped and left in the night; it was like they'd just vanished. I looked around, and the TV was still on in the living room, Jeremy's desk light was on and Ronnie's bike was still in the garage. She doesn't go anywhere without that bike, she can't. If she had gone somewhere, she would have taken that at least, but nothing was out of place. Except… them."
Acutely aware that her voice was getting progressively squeakier as she went on, she stopped and tried to hide her face as best she could behind her hands while she regained her composure. When she looked up again through tear-stained eyes Vert's jaw was set in a terrifying square and Tezz was staring at him with a due mixture of concern and trepidation. He had taken a step away from him, too. Lucinda mentally slapped herself; this wasn't just about Ronnie for him. She'd forgotten that the people she was talking about were his whole family.
"You have a minute to tell me everything you know." His voice was low, as if he was threatening her with unlimited pain if she held anything back, and he pointedly kept his gaze on the floor. Lucinda swallowed.
"I... I called the police right away, and it's taken them until this morning to come to the conclusion that they have no idea what happened. Like I said, nothing has gone missing; nothing has changed from where it should have been. One of the officers kind of jokingly said it was like they'd been abducted by aliens, which is when I thought to come find you guys. If something like that had happened - and twenty months ago I sure as Hell wouldn't have believed it - then surely if anyone can find it you can, right?"
"Can you make an estimate as to when precisely this happened?" Tezz spoke up for the first time, distracting Lucinda's attention from Vert who was now pacing the Hub with an expression suggesting he wanted to kill someone.
"Well, their Mom always stops watching the TV at eleven thirty because she says there are never any good shows on after then, and Jeremy works at the Subway two blocks down now so he does his homework later at night... He tends to give up around eleven. And I left at half nine that night to go home, so it must have been between then and just before eleven. I've asked their neighbours, no one went in after they closed at ten. And they must have closed at ten, because the sign had switched over and the door was locked."
"So we have a window of less than an hour," Tezz muttered, stroking his chin as he went to the computer. "Sage, were you listening?"
"I was," the Sentient replied, making Lucinda jump; she had come in behind her without making a sound.
"Any theories?"
"None. I would need more data before coming to a conclusion; there are several species capable of doing this, but I would need atmospheric readings from the area in question before I could say assertively."
"Agura, what's your status?" Vert barked, slamming his hand down on a panel. The hunter's voice came back startled but nonetheless efficient.
"We have retrieved Tromp and are heading for the Kharamanos home world portal. ETA fifteen seconds."
"Change of plan, bring Tromp back to the Hub."
"Vert?"
"I said bring him here. I need him for something."
"Understood. We'll be right with you."
"Between you and Tromp, do you think there is enough knowledge to identify what happened to my family?" Vert's expression softened for Sage, but only slightly.
"There will be a greater sum of knowledge, yes," the Sentient confirmed. "But Vert, it is entirely possible that the cause of their disappearances is unknown to both our races."
"I know, I know. Programme a Battle Key for..."
"Hang on, hang on." Lucinda cut in. "You can't just open a glowing blue portal in a busy Downtown street. It's four in the afternoon; if somehow you don't cause a major traffic accident, your whole secret operation will be blown out of the sky."
Vert pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath, reminding her just how similar he and Ronnie actually were; she did that when she was stressed out too. There was silence in the Hub for an uncomfortable number of seconds. "Yeah, you're right. Okay, uh..."
"Vert," Tezz placed a hand on his shoulder. He said nothing for some time, bringing the tension in the room back down to a bearable level. "We will find them."
Lucinda frowned; it wasn't like Tezz to be anything other than bluntly realistic about any situation, so what did he know that she didn't? What had he worked out already from only what she had said?
"Yeah," Vert agreed, although the look in his eyes rather suggested that he didn't share Tezz's confidence.
Lucinda wondered how the Russian could be so calm when he had just been told that his girlfriend had disappeared off the face of the Earth with no trace left behind.
Their little tableau was broken up by the rest of the team emerging through the underground tunnels, and for the briefest of moments Lucinda could almost have convinced herself that nothing at all was wrong.
"I hate that planet," Stanford cursed, storming out of the Reverb and pacing dramatically into the centre of the Hub. "Honestly, now that we've taken away their technology and rescued Tromp, please can we never go back there ever again?"
"You've made your point, Stanford," Spinner complained. "You never have to set foot on Planet Vandal again as long as you live."
He sounded like he had made that promise many times on the way home.
"Unless of course something else comes up," Sherman countered, all the makings of an evil grin emerging on his face. He crossed to the Reverb and reached in through the roof, and pulled out a small figure encased in a dirty metal shell with a single wheel at its base. Lucinda tried not to stare and failed catastrophically. Stanford squawked with rage and fumed in the direction of the rec area, but Vert stood in his way and put a hand on his chest to stop him before he had taken three paces. Stanford glared up defiantly, and then saw the look on his leader's face. In the unexpected silence everyone turned to watch Vert, and suddenly the atmosphere clouded over yet again.
"We have a problem," Vert stated matter-of-factly. "Stanford, Tezz, Sherman and I are going to drive to the city; do what you need to do to clean up quickly, we're leaving in twenty minutes."
"Vert, what's going on?" Agura stepped up to Vert with her arms open, the softness of her voice suggesting that she was prepared to have this conversation in private if he needed to. Vert looked around his team, meeting each eye, before glancing at Lucinda and turning away from them all.
"Sage will fill you in," he muttered, and left the Hub. Nobody spoke or moved until the doors had slid shut behind him.
Twenty minutes later Vert re-emerged. During that time Tezz and Sage had given the team a brief synopsis of Lucinda's story while she had gone and wiped the red smudges from her face, and she had come back to the Hub to find the alien called Tromp plugged in to the central computer. As in, literally, plugged in. A cord stretched from his midsection to the central support structure that Lucinda had never even considered was actually the computer's core. She had a feeling she was going to be seeing some very strange things before all this was over and done with.
Vert was significantly calmer when he joined them, and almost cracked a smile at their determination. "We'll take the Reverb and Splitwire," he informed them, "as they're our least conspicuous vehicles. Lucinda, you're coming too. Sage, we'll relay what information we can find back to you here, and see where that takes us. Are there any questions?"
Resounding silence and shaking heads met his question, and his eyes brightened.
"Then let's go."