Quintessence
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or anything at all to do with Gold Digger et al. They all belong to the awesome Fred Perry and Antarctic Press. Thank you guys for so many years of fun! I hope my having fun does your world even the tiniest bit of justice. That said, I don't want to make any money off of this. It is just for personal enjoyment!
I highly recommend going online and checking out the 'Antarctic Press Library' if you want to refresh your memory with the old, out of print comics.
A/N: This story is me just having fun for myself, and, as such, some of the characters will be changed, OOC, or missing entirely. I will try to stick with the overall timeline and adventures of the Diggers clan, but things head AU from before page 1 of issue 1, so you take your chances following me down the rabbit hole! This entire thing is written, stream-of-thought off the top of my head with no Beta or heavy editing/proof-reading, so I apologize if it seems rushed.
Chapter 1: Copper
Genn:
Time is difficult to measure without a frame of reference. You could spend what feels like a minute daydreaming and lose hours, but you could also spend what feels like ages waiting for something to happen and have only moments pass. Unfortunately, no matter how good you are at passing the time and no matter how quickly it seems to pass, a few thousand years is a long time, indeed.
Genn was pretty sure it had been a few thousand years anyway, best case scenario, since she got locked into this gilded cage. The worst thing about it? She helped design her own prison!
Seriously.
She was not a very powerful mage, but she was exceptionally skilled at enchanting when she had the energy to make it stick. An Earth-realm king had contracted her to build a secret vault, filled with traps and rooms and magical cages to keep any thieves stupid enough to steal his treasures. It took many years and a lot of work, but she considered it to be a masterpiece. A minor daemon was caught early on and shackled into being a guardian, ever-hot lava pit traps were filled and devoured interlopers, and so on.
It was her finest work ever.
The problem is that, when you build an impenetrable secret lair, you are in on the secret and the guy who asked you to make it doesn't like that. Then he decides to spring one of your own traps on you when you are tired and drained after completing your work and you no longer have the energy to break free and you no longer have the means to regain the energy in your perfectly designed magical cage.
It was a very nice cage. She made it herself! It even had a theoretically unending, but tightly restricted, well of ethereal power to make sure a magical creature such as herself wouldn't technically starve to death. The furnishings were permanently enchanted and very comfortable. The space wasn't claustrophobic-ally tight, as large as a stadium once the interconnected rooms are accounted for.
But, holy shit, thousands of years. Alone, trapped. It is enough to make nearly anyone crazy.
Genn liked to think that she was a little stronger than that. As a Rakshasa, the exceedingly rare magical offspring of two genies, she had imagination to spare. It was what made her so good at designing things like the mage trap she herself got stuck in. She was able to entertain herself, meditate, hibernate, design tiny objects, write long works, and so on. Unfortunately, that tightly controlled well of energy that was just enough to keep her from dying? That was all the energy she had. Any attempt to draw more weakened the enchantments holding her and threatened to spring the second layer of the trap: a death snare that would collapse the space into itself and turn her into a smeared piece of goo. Any attempt to hoard energy and use it only fed the cage and made it stronger and harder to break.
She truly was stuck, and she hated it.
The first few years weren't so bad: She had hope she could figure her way out or that someone might find her. The first few decades after that were worse: she had less hope of being rescued or breaking free and became more and more resigned to living out her life there. There was a surge of hope after the first century or so: She found a way out of her cage… and into the cage next door, the one where the much, much more powerful daemon lived that she would have had trouble beating at full power.
You would think that if you were a few thousand years old, you could handle a few more thousand years of solitude. Her parents had done it as genies (part of how she had known do design such a trap: she had a hand in creating a few genie vessels), and Rakshasa, with the ability to shapeshift and control magic so well can keep themselves pretty entertained. However, with very little power to hold a form different than hers for long, and no stimulus other than her own mind, even she started to crack after a few eons. You see, unlike genies, who had great power but could only use it to benefit others and not themselves, Rakshasa had no inherent power of their own, but could use power they did gather it how they saw fit. The problem? They could only get such power, ethereal energy, from other living beings. As such, everything about Rakshasa is tied to others: energy from close (intimate) contact, telepathic abilities to read their minds and memories, and shape-shifting forms to gather the energy from others.
Even a relatively reclusive Rakshasa like Genn withered without contact after a while, and she was well and truly rotting from the inside out by the time she finally got her first visitor. Starved, wasting, and half-mad from loneliness, she could be forgiven for not putting up her best first impression.
At first she thought it was (yet another) hallucination from her overly detailed but slightly atrophied imagination. But no, there had been a noise like the cracking of a large stone, making the enchanted walls trembled with the force of it. Shortly after was an oozing, bubbling, hissing sound in the far distance that took her a moment to place.
'The lava trap!' She thought. Her cage was actually damned close to the entrance, but the shaft that lead up from the front of her prison was capped by a pool of ever-hot magma that was activated by pressing the tempting button thieves would press.
What? Curiosity was the easiest way to get someone caught, and a big shiny 'press me' button caught so, so many.
She didn't know how many times that trap had gone off since it had been made so long ago, but that noise meant it had by bypassed, broken, and was spilling lava down the long, hollow shaft by the entrance. She fumbled and tripped a few times trying to scramble into an upright position, limbs stiff from disuse for she couldn't remember how long. She took a gasping gulp from the ethereal energy fountain, a pathetic trickle that kept her living and moving but always starved for more, and shuffled her way toward the chamber entrance, several safe steps back from the invisible barrier that kept her inside. She learned the hard way how painful and debilitating it was to touch it and had learned to sense its draining influence from a short distance away.
It is very difficult to measure the passage of time without a frame of reference. You could spend millennia trapped inside a dungeon and have no idea how much time had really passed. Or you could, after eons alone, wait just a few minutes for your first glimpse of another soul. In this hell of her own making, straining to see anything, anyone, finally allowing the tiniest of breath of hope to fill her being with long-suppressed emotion, Genn could not tell you which timeframe felt longer, or had been worse to suffer through, waiting.
There was a soft sound, the barest whisper of cloth moving, and a woman stepped into the light in front of her prison cell.
Genn wept.
OoOoO
Brittany Diggers:
"Stupid nerdy sisters. Stupid dungeons. Stupid lava traps. Stupid sand in my fur!" Brittany Diggers mumbled angrily to herself. "I could be sitting by the ocean in Hawaii right now with my stud-muffin, but noooo! Gina had to go and discover an old tomb to raid."
"Oh, Brit, you lazy Cheetah," she mocked to herself in a higher-pitched voice, shifting into her much smaller human form to make the imitation more accurate. "You promised you would be my bodyguard and protect me!"
Brittany 'Cheetah' Diggers then shifted back to her hybrid form, that of a half-woman/half-cheetah. At seven feet tall, three hundred pounds, and the body of a furry Amazon from someone's perverted wet dreams, it was an impressive sight. And a scary one with the face she was making as she continued to rant about her 'big' sister, Gina, a smart, but relatively mad scientist with a penchant for adventure and getting herself into trouble. Sure, she had promised her adoptive parents and her oh-so-human (though she had her doubts the busty little blonde wasn't part bad luck charm) sister she would protect her, but this was ridiculous. Armed gunman in Iran, guarded caves, ancient lava pit traps, and giant holes in the ground!
"This place is as mad as she is!" She grumbled, pulling Gina's 'borrowed' Indiana Jane hat down lower on her forehead as she continued to trudge forward into the darkness. Thankfully, she could see just fine with infravision, and Gina, who had taken the other branch of the tunnel, had plenty of gadgets to light her way. Of course, light her way to what, Brit wasn't sure. There was nothing down here-
Spoke too soon. There, up ahead at the end of the passage, was a suspiciously simple archway that led into a large, lighted chamber that looked like something out of a harem movie with pillows and silk curtains and such everywhere. And there, in front of it all, a few steps away from the chamber entrance, was a… girl? About the same size as Gina, but nowhere near as curvy, she had dusky-bronze skin, pale lavender hair, and two small, swept-back horns just above her large, elf-like ears. She was wearing a few worn scraps of silk that barely covered her small, unhealthily skinny form. And she was crying, sobbing in a way that made Brit reaaally uncomfortable.
"Uh… Hey? You ok?" She tried awkwardly, warily moving forward. Brit stopped in her tracks immediately though, for the girl looked up at her, red, teary eyes brimming with a mix of emotions Brit really couldn't figure out. Her coppery eyes were watery and naked with need and it honestly scared Brit into taking a half-step back with the intensity.
The girl? Woman? Yelled something in an incomprehensible language, obvious fear taking over her features. At first Brit thought it was a reaction to her admittedly scary (but darned sexy in her opinion!), muscular, feral appearance. But no, the woman was making almost grasping, pleading motions with her hands as she knelt there on the cold stone floor. So Brit made calming gestures in return, which seemed to settle the other woman slightly. That was undone shortly after when Brit turned to look behind her and call out for her sister. The other woman yelled again and rushed forward, panic in her eyes.
SNAP-CRACKLE-POP!
Cheetah winced sympathetically as the other woman was caught in some sort of force-field and zapped back violently to land in a crumpled heap in the same spot she first appeared. 'Well,' she thought to herself. 'That explains why was staying back in the first place. Must be some kind of prison.'
She looked back once more for her sister, even more wary of getting involved without backup (that was usually Gina's job), but a pitiful whimper from the crumpled mess of limbs a few paces away made the decision for her. She couldn't just leave this girl after seeing how damned lonely she must have been to charge into a painful force-field at the merest hint she might be alone again. That has gotta suck.
"Ok, girlie," Brit whispered, though she was sure the words were just as much gibberish going the other way. "Let's get you out of there. But if this is a trap, I will come back from the dead to haunt your scrawny ass."
It only took her a few dozen steps with her long legs to get to the spot she had seen the (likely magic?) barrier had flashed into existence, but felt nothing other than the tiniest tingle on her fur, even when she stuck her hand through the space. The woman on the ground, who had been frantically, if pathetically weakly, waving her off stopped her protests at that point and watched in wonder as the were-cheetah casually sauntered forward with a smug smirk on her face.
Her inner victory dance didn't last long as, close up, she noticed the girl looked even worse than she had first glimpsed from a distance: she was nearly emaciated, looking like the poster child for eating disorders, and was in dire need of some beauty treatments on top of that. But still, the teary smile Brit received when she went to pick her up positively transformed her gaunt, haggard appearance and showed the girl had once been beautiful under the mess.
Ah, she was crying again and it was wetting her fur. Great.
"Me and my stupid, stupid soft heart." Cheetah grumbled. At her voice, the girl stilled and stared. It was kiiiinda creepy. And just then, Cheetah, the powerful, strong, mighty, legendary last child of her race, gasped in sudden and intense discomfort as her ribs creaked under an intensely strong grip. "What the hell girlie?! Let me-ack-breeeathe…"
The grip slackened a little, but the girl was holding on as if her life depended on it, which, from the looks of things, it might. There, on the back wall, was a massive tapestry. Woven into that tapestry were thousands, possibly millions of hash-marks. The old ones were worn to the point looking like they would crumble from the slightest touch, and the newer ones were increasingly more jagged and knotted, nearly unraveling as they crisscrossed over each other in rambling lines.
She knew a prisoner's calendar when she saw one, and this one was a doozy.
Brit looked down at the girl in her arms. Despite the age she must be if the calendar was anything to go by, she looked unbelievably small and childlike, vulnerable with that pitiful, fearful, needy expression. Honestly, it brought out some primal, protective instincts she had only ever felt towards her 'big' sister before. She half-wondered if this is what her father had felt like when he found her as a child, lost and alone when her clan had been slaughtered.
Uh-oh.
"Well, shit. I just got a new sister, didn't I?" Brit smiled ruefully. The girl's clueless, curious head-tilt was cavity-inducing. Ignoring the issue for now, she stepped forward to have a good look around the 'prison'. Honestly, it looked like a pretty neat place to stay if you were visiting for a week: a nicely-sized library of parchment in various states in one alcove, a comfortable (if dirty) well-lived-in bedroom that was basically a small pool of pillows and silks, some relatively bare storage areas, and a pretty massive bare-bones workshop of some type. She couldn't imagine being locked in here for any length of time, as even a pretty cage was still a cage, but at least it wasn't a small pit.
When she passed what looked like a small, odd fountain that gave her the heebie-jeebies when she realized it was some sort of wispy smoke roiling around the basin instead of water, her passenger tried talking again. It was still gibberish, but Brit wasn't the undefeated family charades champion for nothing! So she brought the girl over to the creepy little bowl of condensed vapor and tried to control her giggles (it made her furt itch!) as her passenger hastily inhaled the few strands of the smoky substance, all without releasing her iron grip.
And that made Brittany stop giggling. Suddenly the girl in her arms had stopped the nearly imperceptible shaking she only just now noticed and regained a tiny amount of color. 'Is this the only thing she had for food?! No water, nothing solid, no TUNA?! Just a few wisps that of ethereal energy, less than what she saw her dad throw around casually when casting spells? Oh, you poor, poor thing!'
Brit grabbed some of the nearby, new-ish looking silks and practically waddled the girl into a little cocoon that she then strapped around her torso. She had seen something similar at the mall a few weeks back when a mom was carrying around her toddler and it worked pretty well given the current size difference. The girl, who had only protested a little when she lost contact for a second, was snuggled in tight against her body and the arrangement allowed Cheetah to use her hands again.
"Time to blow this popsicle stand. What do you say, girlie?" Brittany smiled widely, showing an impressive amount of teeth. The girl responded in kind, if a little weakly.
"You need anything from here?" She gestured to the large stack of scrolls and a few crudely bound books along the wall. The girl nodded and it only took them a few moments to grab a few carefully selected bundle of the older scrolls and stash them in a small copper chest. It seemed to satisfy her for she made no move to get anything else and just stared up at her savior. "You know, we really gotta get you a name, girlie. But first! Escape!"
Brit brought them back to the entrance and stared at the walls cautiously. The girl shivered in fear and dug into her hide like a tick, but didn't voice any protest as the much larger woman took up a racer's stance. She wasn't a genius like her dear sister, but it was pretty easy to figure out this prison was keyed to the girl and didn't have a problem with her furry hide. Solution?
"Cannonball!" Brit shouted her warcry and shot out of her crouch like a bullet from a gun.
She was a mystically enhanced hybrid of human, relatively fast two-legged animals that had wonderful stamina, and cheetah, the fastest land animal in the world. This meant she could achieve sustained straight-line speeds faster than most cars without breaking a sweat. In a hundred meter dash she was pretty sure she could someday crack the sound barrier. So she ran as fast as she possibly could, hurling herself through the air at the last moment and tucking herself tightly around the precious cargo shivering against her belly.
.zzZ-SNAP!-PLE-FIzzle…CRACK!
"...ow." Stumbling to her feet, Brit took stock of things. Her glorious, lustrous fur was standing on end and frizzy as all hell... She probably looked like a spotted Yeti that had stuck its finger into a light socket. The barrier had snapped into place a little too late to stop their passage, but had shaved off the top corner of Gina's hat (which would probably piss her off) but it was a worthy trade-off. For there, still wrapped tightly in her bundle, was the girl, crying, again.
"Now-now, calm down. You are safe! How about a name, girlie?" Brit asked, rubbing her sore butt from the rather inelegant 'landing' against the far wall. She waited a moment for the girl to collect herself and look up with uncomfortably worshipping eyes before trying again, pointing at herself. "Brittany."
"Brrrd-dneee?"
.
..
...eyebrow twitch. "No-no, honey. Brittany. BRIT-TA-NY. Brittany! Now you."
"Brrd-t-nii?"
"Brittany!"
"Bird-tanny?"
"Are you doing this on purpose?" Brit asked, only to be met with the most painfully innocent expression that she honestly felt like either gagging or spontaneously giving birth. "One more time. After me: Brit-"
"Brit!"
"Ta-"
"Ta!"
"Ny."
"Ny!"
"Brittany!"
"Bird-tinny!"
Brit sighed in fond exasperation and turned down the second path that her sister had gone down earlier. It was going to be a loooong day. She was pretty sure the girl was just having fun with her, too happy to be free to let herself be serious. She could practically feel the joy radiating out of her slight form, bubbling to the surface with the occasional giggle as she snuggled into Cheetah's soft fur. She could play the game for a little while. "And you? What are you called?"
"Djinn!"
"Genn?"
"Genn?" The girl mused aloud, brows furrowed for a moment before a new smile blossomed on her face as she pointed to herself. "Genn! Genn! Bird-ninny! Genn!"
"You are doing that on purpose!" Brit yelled.
Genn giggled and snaked her hands around Brittany's neck for hug, rubbing their cheeks together. Brit huffed and kept walking, finally seeing a familiar light up ahead in the tunnel.
OoOoO
Genn:
Fuzzy-kitty-girl was the best thing ever! She was big, and strong, and brave, and kind, and sexy, and soft, and fuzzy, and sexy, and snuggly, and warm, and muscley, but soft in all the right places-
"Hey! Watch those hands!"
-and she saved Genn from untold years of imprisonment and solitude. Right there, to herself, Genn took a fervent vow to devote her life to this girl and make her happy, no matter what. It was a bit reckless considering the nature of magic and her heritage to talk like that, even in her own head, but she was dead serious despite the joy coursing through her. All the activity was seriously tiring her out, but hopefully her new master would supply her with energy after enough, er, close contact.
Oh, shit.
'Master?' Genn mused, the tiniest thread of concern worming its way into her addled mind. 'Did I just call her master in my head? Ugh. My mom would kill me if she know I had just formed a near genie-bond with someone, no matter how wondrous and sexy and nice and awesome. She was gonna give this woman all the best snuggles and loving she could-'
"Brittany!" Yelled a somewhat overly curvaceous little blonde woman in glasses. "There you are, you lazy bum. Where have you been?"
'-right after she killed this interloper.'
A/N: And that is it! This attacked me a while ago and wouldn't let go. Finally wrote it all down last night. I have no set upload plans other than trying to get out a chapter of similar length once every week or so. Classes are starting again soon, so that might stretch. It is wonderful to get back to writing after such a long time away.