"Folks, if you would direct your attention to the overhead you will see that the seatbelt light has come on. We are due to experience regular turbulence as we enter Nieflheimr's atmosphere. . ."
Amongst a flourish of movement elsewhere in the cabin, Nathan Explosion merely gripped the armrests as resistance held the astroplane at bay. Then, following a downward lurch, their free fall ended with a stiffened diaphragm.
No matter how many times Nathan experienced it, he still hadn't accustomed to that particular sensation. A few others in the cabin passed out, a common problem, and someone's kid started crying. Nathan adjusted quickly, automatically taking the deep breaths he'd been trained to since his job compelled him to so frequently jump planets. Landing was never as bad as taking off, at least. The boost into outer space when gravity finally relinquished still forced him on occasion to reach for a puke sack.
The characteristic snow Nathan assumed he'd been looking at ever since Nieflheimr came into sight turned out to be clouds. Frost spread like eager fingers over his window as they dropped through, then the darkened world within opened up with the glow of city lights beneath. The speakers crackled again: "We will be landing shortly in Hvergelmir. The time is 18:30 p.m. and temperature on the ground is -52º. We hope you enjoyed your flight with. . ."
Nathan adjusted his watch. It used to bend his mind that every thirty-one space marks resulted in a lost second, but he'd long grown used to how space, speed, and time interacted. He had to, for work. Deadlines became a lot trickier when nothing remained absolute.
The light feeling he associated with Nieflheimr caused him to bounce slightly as he walked. Now came time to pull his jacket taut. Arriving from Musplheimr—which was in the full swing of summer—subjected him to a temperature drop of over a hundred degrees. He hated that logic dictated Niflheimr as the best kick-off site for intergalactic travel. What did it matter, once he, his new co-captain, and the crew they led boarded their flotilla and slipped through a wormhole? But then of course, law prohibited them from creating one within the Yggdrasil System, and head office frowned upon wasting the extra fuel necessary to bump them from any other starting point. . .
The latest dip in temperature drove everyone to the subway. With breath barely visible and the walls of ice glistening, Hrimthursar—the native residents of Nieflheimr—distinguished themselves from the crowd by peeling off their jackets and flapping their hands at flushed faces. To contrast, heat radiated from Nathan's skin. As an Eldjötnar—native to Musplheimr—his internal thermostat worked the opposite way. It kept others at a distance as the underground train brought him to his stop, then created a path as he headed for the base he considered his second home.
"ID, please?" The young woman working at the check-in desk smiled as Nathan searched his pockets. She tapped his card against the countertop after scanning it through her computer. "There's a message here for you. Crozier and your crew are already at Dock 12. They're hoping for a 20:00 send-off."
"Thanks."
Riding the YICA line offered a view over the city, seemingly abandoned at the surface. Not even those acclimated dared go out beyond their need, and with the pinprick of a sun disappeared beyond the curtain of snow and cloud ceiling above, Nathan didn't blame them. Hvergelmir, usually breathtaking, tapped his mood. Hopefully the place assigned to him was less depressing than this.
Crozier and the Hrimthursar Nathan assumed would be his co-captain were the only two people stationary while everyone rushed around them to make the projected departure time. They both stood with their arms crossed, watching the action. If this was indeed the final rush to get all the last details into place, then they might be able to get out of here early. Nathan became restless if he had to sit around too long.
"Good, you're here," Crozier grumbled when Nathan announced his arrival. "Have you met Skwisgaar before?"
Along with his height, Skwisgaar resembled the majority of his people with fair skin, hair, and eyes. His fatigues boasted similar schematic, primarily white with traces of grey and blue—the colours of Nieflheimr. He maintained an air of boredom as he extended a hand. His grasp cooled the Eldjötnar's palm. "I don'ts t'ink we has work toget'er before, but I knows who you am."
Crozier handed an envelope over. "The planet in question is Alpha Nero 7, located in the Andromeda Galaxy."
"Hm." A solid quadrillion space marks away, by Nathan's memory. "What are we looking for?"
"The scout's information is in here. Do with it what you will. I trust you to collect most if not all of what she reported. I'll see you in a couple weeks."
These bureaucratic types weren't much for conversation. Judging by Crozier, whom Nathan worked under for his entirety at Yggdrasil Imperial Collection Agency, the pencil pushers intended to close the cultural gap between Nieflheimr and Asgård, their system's administrative centre. One tradition Asgård kept alive, more for its practicality than anything else, was choosing one person from each Nathan and Skwisgaar's planets to captain the pillaging missions. Fire and ice, when projected outwardly into the universe, accomplished great things.
"Shoulds we board?"
"Might as well." Nathan led him toward the Mustakrakish, the ship he'd used for the past eleven years. After so long, it was difficult to forget sometimes that it didn't actually belong to him. "The first room's always mine, if you want to dump your shit and meet up on the bridge."
The Mustakrakish and other such captain's ships were dwarfed in size by their cargo-carrying counterparts. Even then, the majority of space within was dedicated toward the technology necessary to get their party from one end of the universe to the other in a respectably short period. Having done all the necessary maintenance on it before his off-month and certain it'd been looked over at least twice in the meantime, Nathan forewent inspection and reacquainted himself with his usual seat. The cleaning crew could make his bed and shine the floors, but they could never get rid of the groove his ass created here.
"So what ams dis planet we goes to?" Skwisgaar flung a leg over one armrest when he joined Nathan. "I nevers heard of it."
"Me neither. Must be a new discovery. I've been to Andromeda a couple times." Nathan unsealed the envelope and rifled through the papers. He took the initiative on planning their route, setting the coordinates and getting the ship to search for the nearest spot where they could rip a wormhole into space. Seven space marks outside the boundary of Yggdrasil wasn't bad at all. "Lots of stars, lots to look at."
"I can'ts remember if I beens dere or not." With that, Skwisgaar fell silent. He thankfully mirrored Nathan's belief that they shouldn't speak everything worth saying before they'd even left the ground.
"Hey Pickles, check it out. I fuckin' got one."
With his brother distracted, a redhead with dreadlocks rolled his eyes. "Good fer you. 'N' stop callin' me thet."
"How come?" Seth's fish flopped against the surface of the Wisconsin River. "Dude, look at it. Fuckin' huge."
"Yeeuh, whetever." Pickles grew tired of explaining why he couldn't be referred to by that name anymore. Seth was the only one that still did. Even his parents, when he returned to their home in Tomahawk to lay low, accommodated his wish to go by his birth name. If they weren't so far from Mordhaus, and Murderface's iron fist in kind, Pickles might be a bit more forceful toward Seth. Not that they hadn't come to blows over it, of course.
"Mom and Dad are literally gonna shit when they see this." Seth grinned crookedly as he took a bonker to his catch's head. "Hey. Y'ever think about what life would be like as a fish? You're fuckin' swimmin' around, then bam, one day you're fuckin' gasping for air and some guy's killing you."
"If you rilly wanna figure it out I'd be happy t' show you."
"Ha, Pickles! You always make me crack up."
There really were days when Pickles would be more than happy to fulfill that threat. Maybe returning to his childhood home was a mistake. Not that he had much choice about where else to go. In relation to any sort of administrative importance within the metropolis of Mordland, his family was at the bottom of the barrel. Obscure. Pickles reminded himself several times throughout the day of the alternative, should he have stayed after the mutiny that ended both Charles' rule and life, in order to keep himself sane.
"Couple more, and we can go home." Seth tossed his fish into the bucket. "Starting to get colder, huh?"
"'Magine thet, winter's comin' again."
"Dude, why're you so miserable?"
This time of year always had that effect on Pickles. No matter how far away he'd snuck from Mordhaus as Murderface's disorganized reign of terror commenced, he could still hear the clatter of metal on metal as the incoming and outgoing rulers of Mordland struggled against one another. In hindsight, Pickles' confidence seemed incredibly naive; nobody expected the blade that preserved their race and planet from enslavement to shatter against an over-calcified face. No matter how many autumns passed, the shocked hush that followed haunted Pickles. When he picked up the pieces afterward, he held the remnants—the symbol—of Charles' shield against discord.
And did they ever need that back.
"Hey. You fuckin' ignoring me, or what?"
"Yeeuh. Shut the fuck up."
"Whatever. You're so fuckin' moody." Seth yanked on his line when a floating stick jostled it. "Did you see that vandals were in Tomahawk last night?"
Pickles shook his head.
"Yeah, more of the same crap. You'd think they'd explain what the fuck they're doin', not just write some guy's name everywhere. Otherwise, what do I care? A name's just a name, right?"
Seth kept on, but Pickles stopped listening again. His brother really didn't get it. He'd never left Wisconsin—or Tomahawk, for that matter—so his scope on how the world worked was severely limited. In a sense, Pickles envied him. Life must be so simple in ignorance. Seth never witnessed death, never lost a loved one, nothing like that. He didn't have to come crawling back home after ten years and play nice with his parents so that he had a place to rest his head at night. Did he even know what dissatisfaction felt like?
"See, right there," Seth needlessly pointed the graffiti out as they later headed for home. "I don't get it. Is it fuckin' rhetorical, or somethin'? If so, whoa, mind fuckin' blown."
Took him long enough. Whether or not this person actually existed somewhere on Earth, Pickles saw the name as more symbolic than genuinely meaningful. Whispers on the grapevine stated that all the people disappearing nowadays weren't sucked into Murderface's machine, nor were they squished beneath it. Fed up, people simply elected to head out into the Wastelands in search for something better.
"Mitch and Bobby say they heard he's powerful enough to take down Murderface. What do you think?"
"I'onno." Yet another wall ahead got tagged with the insistent question. "Depends: who is Toki?"
To the victor goes the spoils—in the three years since assuming his position, those words became a personal motto to Murderface. He lived by them decadently, with women, drink, wealth, and food. Whatever he wanted, he got it. . .which made it very difficult to accept that the blade responsible for the ugly scar across his left cheek and nose wasn't currently in his hands.
The process through which he attempted to find it annoyed him, at best. He had the means and influence, and yet. . .no sword. Today might be different, though. For the first time since Mordhaus' subterranean prison came under his name, the men he held onto for further questioning finally made themselves useful. Murderface, as a result, held his head high as he swaggered toward the cell containing his most valuable prisoner.
The heavy door clicked loudly as it came unlocked. Light spilled over the floor and illuminated an emaciated figure tucked away in the corner. For the thousand or so days Charles remained here, nearly that many methods to make him talk had been utilized. They starved him, shoved food into him until he threw up, left him in darkness, gave him light, withheld human contact, and so on, and so on. Just when Murderface poised to give his men the command to remove his head, someone else decided their limit toward the torture had been reached.
Murderface took a seat on the floor, catlike grin unsuppressed. "Scho. I heard a little schtory about a man named Picklesch."
He completely expected Charles to react, given that it was true. Considering the cuts attempting to heal in the webs of the man's hands and feet—the most recent technique to make Charles' mouth work—a rise of his head equated victory.
"He made that schtupid schword for you, didn't he?"
"Can't be that stupid if you're still. . ." Charles paused to cough, a weak sound with no force behind it. "If you're still looking for it."
"Where isch he?" Find the man, find the sword, as his informant implied.
"How should I know? Haven't seen him since you locked me up."
"I'm not schtupid. I know he'sch schomewhere in Mordland. He'sch not in the Waschtelandsch because if he wasch, he'd be with Toki. And he'sch not, becausche I haven't been attacked yet."
"Toki—?"
"Never mind. I'm the one aschking queschtionsch around here," Murderface cut him off. Broken or not, Charles still managed on occasion to turn the interrogation around. The new Governor needed to watch for that. "Scho I want you to think really hard about thisch. If Picklesch wasch going to run off with that schword, where would he go? What'sch hisch real name? Where'sch he from?"
Charles' chin rested against his chest again with a quiet chuckle. "Why would I tell you anything? I have nothing to lose by keeping that to myself, and I don't care what I have to gain otherwise. You'll never find him, not unless he wants to be found. So go ahead: torture me all you like. It won't help."
"It doeschn't matter what you do. I'm going to find him."
"Then I'm going to make it harder for you."
Rather than give Charles the satisfaction that he'd pissed him off, Murderface left the cell. Further down the hall, when he could be sure that the prisoner wouldn't hear, a kick to the wall landed amidst a frustrated scream. He hated Charles' confidence. Hadn't he been stripped of that yet? What did it take? Why couldn't he beg for his life like the rest of them, and give up whatever information he had? He must know something important. Or he simply didn't care. Either way, Murderface had enough. His patience ended today. Time for drastic measures.
"Schend out an order," he told one of his hooded henchmen. "I want you to queschtion everyone in Mordland. Bring in anyone who knowsch anything about Picklesch, or who could possibly be him. I'm not playing thesche gamesch anymore."
"Yes, my master. And what of Charles? Would you like us to kill him?"
"No. I'll do it myschelf when the time comesch. Before that, though. . .I want him to schee that I've got Picklesch. I want him to losche all hope before he loschesch hisch life."
