Okay, this is a product of me trying to write at least 500 words every day and this being the only idea for a fic I had. Please let me know if you'd like me to continue. (For those who know RPGs, this is a rough Person of Interest/Mage the Ascension fusion.)
Shaw scowled as the lights flickered in the apartment building. She switched her ocular implants to display EM radiation, and the current-bearing wires in the building flared into view.
CHANCE THAT SURGES ARE DUE TO REALITY FLUCTUATION: 67% her onboard computer helpfully told her.
Yeah, she thought. Figured as much.
It cheerfully continued, despite her sarcasm. BREAKDOWN -
ECTOPLASMIC ECHO: 32%
REALITY TERRORIST: 19%
EXTRADIMENSIONAL ENTITY: 11%
UNCLASSIFIED/UNKNOWN: 15%
DO YOU WANT TO LOG THIS INCIDENT WITH CENTRAL FOR FURTHER CORRELATION?
No, she told it. And is there a way I can tell you not to ask me that again that you'll actually understand? Central and her weren't exactly on speaking terms these days.
ACKNOWLEDGED it said, blithely ignoring her second clause. SUGGEST LOADING ETHERIC ROUNDS.
And if I had any, that'd be just dandy. If she had any of the equipment she was used to, she'd feel a lot better about this.
She'd ask someone to get her computer a good adjustment. Preferably a complete cleanse and replacement Unfortunately, the only people who could do that were the people she was on the run from.
Some sour vibration jangled her nerves as she approached the target apartment. "Something doesn't feel right, Finch," she said.
"I concur, Ms Shaw," came Finch's voice from a rat scurrying along beside her. "The spirits of this building are most disturbed."
REALITY TERRORIST PRESENCE DETECTED, the computer informed her, highlighting the rat with a square on her optics.
Tell me something I don't know. If the sound of a human male coming from the rodent wasn't enough of a clue, the fact that it had human-like eyes set in its head would be a subtle hint. She'd gotten over the days when her job was hunting down and killing reality terrorists. She had yet to quite get over the fact of how used to working with them she'd become.
She approached the apartment door cautiously. She couldn't hear anything - not even with her onboard audio filtering software - but the tacky feeling of something wrong with the local substrate of reality only increased. One cybernetically enhanced kick later, she was in the apartment.
"Beautriu Savall?"
No response, so she entered the apartment anyway.
It was small, but neat, and had a sizeable amount of books - always a danger sign in Shaw's experience. No people. There was a large bloodstain on the living room floor, though Switching to thermal revealed there was still some residual heat in it - it couldn't have been spilled more than five minutes ago.
ESTIMATED VOLUME OF BLOOD: 1.26 PINTS
Survivable then, assuming someone had since stemmed the blood flow. The patch was flat at one end, like some kind of obstacle had initially blocked it from going any further - an obstacle that had since been removed. An obstacle. Or possibly a doorway.
She resisted the urge to groan. She really didn't like where this was headed.
"Finch," she said, as she ducked down and placed a cautious finger in the drying blood. Microsensors in the tip reported the blood type as B+ - Beatriu's blood type. She couldn't confirm that - Beatriu's DNA wasn't on record. "Get in here and take a look at this." The rat cautiously scurried in and peeked around the corner. "Tell me this isn't what I think it is."
"Oh dear," the rat said. "It looks like a portal to the spirit world has recently been opened here."
That was what she had been afraid of.
"Excuse me" the rat said, then exploded into a mess of viscera that formed itself into a misty red circle hanging vertically in the air. Shaw could feel reality crumpling around it's edges.
OPEN EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED
"It's always blood and death with you, isn't it?" she said. Oh for the days when, if she had been sucked into this kind of situation, she would have at least have been transported by nice, clean, mostly reliable technology.
The mostly intact rat's head, levitating at the top of the circle, managed to look at her reproachfully. "Sacrifice is a well understood principle of travel between different realms. Your old masters just prefer to cover the cost up, hide it behind smoke and mirrors and chrome."
'My old masters would prefer it if there was no extra-dimensional travel," she said dryly, and stepped forward through the circle. As always, alerts sounded inside her skull, declaring that her heartbeat, her brain-waves, her blood pressure and every other measure of how alive she was had zeroed out. The second time she'd gone through one of Finch's portals, after the cacophony that had accompanied the first, she'd silenced the alerts.
Never again.
She'd rather cling to the sounds than have nothing distract her from the silence of feeling like she was dying. Shaw wasn't normally much one for emotions, but Finch's portals were… unpleasant. Fucking death cultists. Finch probably found this edifying or enlightening or some such.
The sensation passed and the alerts stopped. The apartment now had walls of shining light, and the book collection was even more impressive this side, though the titles shifted and changed even as she looked at them. A bright circle was etched into the centre of the floor, with symbols inscribed around the end. Not that this necessarily meant anything. It could be that Beatriu was an actual reality terrorist. It could be that she had a fondness for rituals of the completely harmless kind. It was just as likely to be something else - in Shaw's experience this dimension, as experienced through Finch's abilities, enjoyed being excessively allegorical at her.
The important thing was that this circle, no matter how it had come to be, hadn't exactly done anyone any good. The blood trail started there, and continued up through a large gash carved into the ceiling.
Shaw tensed her legs and leapt - the enhanced musculature in her legs made jumping up and through the gap simple - onto the next level, which happened to be the roof. A roof which, in this dimension, happened to be sprouting a large, leafless, blood-red tree. A large, leafless, blood-red tree on which Beatriu was hanging, impaled by various branches. Still dripping blood, which was either a good sign or a very, very bad one.
Suddenly Shaw was thrown forward by a crushing impact to her back-
Rewind
The wounds on Beatriu's body weren't neat - they were jagged, tearing, as if, rather than being impaled neatly, she'd been propelled onto the branches at a great velocity. Propelled *downwards* at a great velocity, as if she'd been…
Suddenly Shaw was thrown forward by a crushing impact to her back-
Rewind
Shaw filtered all the background noise she could from her audio pickup, searching for the sound that she *knew* had to be present. *There* it was, an almost inaudible whistling noise that slowly got louder until-
Suddenly Shaw was thrown forward by a crushing impact to her back. For a moment, everything went static. Then the reports started coming in.
FOUR RIBS FRACTURED
TWO RIBS BROKEN
PARTIAL DEFLATION OF THE LEFT LUNG
MAJOR CONTUSIONS TO THE BACK
FOUR SHARP FORCE INJURIES TO EACH SHOULDER
And she was also now flying. Correction, being dangled by claws digging into her shoulders as she was hoisted up, up, up by what resembled a man-sized bird with grey plumage with black and white highlights.
Even without conscious thought, her biomechanics systems had acted to limit the amount of pain to useful levels, and to counteract the shock, and already blood-borne nano-machines were clustering around her lung and her damaged bones in a frantic effort to repair the damage.
Of course, none of this helped the fact that, with every beat of its wings, she was being lofted higher and higher by the bird-thing.
"This is going to suck," she muttered as she grabbed onto the thing's legs with her hands, and swung her legs up to clamp around its neck. The pain inhibiters meant that she could actually feel her broken bones tear further through her chest and her lung, and one of her fractured ribs snap, all with an icy, disconnected clarity that seemed like it was happening to someone else.
The thing had just enough time to let out a strangled squawk before her legs tightened around it's neck, snapping it. And then she travelling back down towards the rooftop, at a far higher velocity than could be considered optimal. At least by disentangling herself from the bird-thing and pushing it away, she was no longer hurtling towards the tree.
"This is *really* going to suck," she had time to say before t=0 hit, and so did the ground. Just before the impact, she activated her body's kinetic converters, and hoped for the best. There was a jerk and then a bright white light as they overloaded and finally a crunch as she impacted the ground with her residual speed. Even through the inhibiters, she could tell it hurt. A lot. But she was still conscious, and that had to count for something she figured.
Cancel alerts, she thought before they had a chance to get going. She just lay there and let her body's automatic repair routine get to work. When it felt like she could get to her feet without causing too much more injury for her beleaguered reserves to deal with, she did so and staggered over to Beatriu's body. Which was still, somehow, breathing and bleeding. Looking into her eyes, she even seemed to be conscious, though minimally responsive to anything outside the massive trauma she was currently suffering.
Shaw still was sure whether this was a good thing or not, but Finch could handle determining that.
Collect 50 mg of nanites in left little finger, she told her computer. Designate collection Alpha.
COLLECTION ALPHA ASSEMBLED
Isolate blood supply of left little finger.
BLOOD SUPPLY OF LEFT LITTLE FINGER ISOLATED
Reprogram collection Alpha to repair to human baseline.
COLLECTION ALPHA NOW REPAIRS TO HUMAN BASELINE
She retrieved a knife, cut her left little finger and let it bleed into Beatriu's wounds. Hopefully that would keep her alive as Shaw removed her from the tree. The actual removal was a slow and painstaking process in an effort to cause as little further damage as possible, but finally Beatriu was laying on the ground, every trace of the tree removed from her body. Still breathing, no longer bleeding, and the necklace that had caused all of this safely in one of Shaw's pockets.
"Well done, Sameen" breathed a voice from behind her. A familiar voice. "But what about her friend?"
What? some disconnected part of Shaw whispered, but the rest of her spun around to see Root standing on the roof behind her, a small smirk on her face.
"You're dead," Shaw said.
"Like I'd let a little thing like that stop me. Remember, though - what about her friend?" she said.
And Shaw woke up.
After she finished swearing, she got her smartphone and knife out, jabbed her finger on the point of the knife, and wiped the blood on the surface of the phone, which sunk in without a trace. Finch claimed that calls made like this were completely untraceable, even to her former employers, but Shaw took it as just more evidence of his haematophilia,
"Ms Shaw?" he said when he picked up.
"We've got a problem," she said bluntly. "I was replaying today's mission…"
"You were dreaming," he interjected.
"Central believes that undirected dreaming is a waste of resources that could be spent more productively," she replied sententiously, mainly to get a rise out of him. And she had no intention of letting him know that the main reason she'd gone through it again was that she was still irritated the bird-thing had gotten the drop on her.
From the harumph that emanated from the phone, she'd say that she'd succeeded, on both counts. "Carry on," he said.
"After I removed Beatriu from the tree in the replay, I encountered Root. Which did *not* happen the first time around."
There was a pause. "We always knew that this was a possibility," he said. "What did she do?"
She connected with the smartphone, and downloaded her memory.
"Well," Finch said thoughtfully. "It seems we're going to have to investigate Ms Savall's friends."
"What about Root?"
"I'll make a dreamcatcher for you. Other than that, I imagine we'll just have to wait."
Shaw resisted the urge to sigh. Root had been irritating enough when she'd been alive. She couldn't imagine how much more annoying she'd be now that she wasn't.