Because the last time she'd seen her father he had been mediating three feet off the floor in his den, when the doorbell rang Triana got up to answer it. She was a little perplexed to see who was on the other side. Hank and Dean Venture never came around to her father's residence in one of the empty wings of the former Venture Enterprise manufacturing plant. She was about to say something catty when she noticed how pale and sweaty they looked.
"We need an adult!" Dean blurted out.
Triana considered that for a second. "I'll get my dad," she said.
"No, wait!" Hank interrupted. "You can't tell your dad. He'll tell our dad, and he'll tell Gary and all hell will break out. You've got to help us."
"I'm hardly an adult," she started to say before realizing how dumb that was. She was nineteen, old enough to vote, drive a car, and was going to junior college (albeit a secret junior collage for magic users). She was an adult. "I'm your age!" she finished instead. "What do you need my help for?" Actually she sort of had an idea. Even though Hank and Dean were nineteen, like her, at least according to their driver's licenses, they were hopeless incapable to dealing with most anything. At times it was like they were a couple of six year olds.
"We lost Venturestein," Dean said.
Triana rubbed her forehead for a moment. To her surprise the nagging headache she had for the past week had gone away. She wasn't hearing the voices of a dozen anguished souls screaming for surcease. The souls of the death whose bodies had been ripped apart and sewn together to form the resurrected creature called Venturestein.
"Isn't that a good thing?" she finally asked. To her it certainly was.
"Gary will have a fit if he comes back and finds out that we lost his friend." Dean said.
"I thought we all agreed that Venturestein must die? Triana argued. She knew that the boys wanted her help in finding the unholy abomination. And she knew that eventually she'd give in and help them, but she wasn't going to make easy before then.
"But Gary left him in our care. We're responsible. If we lose Venturestein now he'll never trust us with anything ever again. We've got to get him back!" Dean was looking consumed with guilt. Even Hank, the most boisterous of the pair was looking downcast.
"I'm going to regret this but, alright. I'll help. How long has he been gone and which way was he heading?"
"We were hoping you could tell us," Hank said.
Triana sighed. Five seconds in and she was already regretting agreeing to help. "I'm not a fortune-teller," she told them. "I don't do crystal balls. How am I supposed to find him?"
"You say you hear the voices of spirits crying when you're around him, right?" Hank asked.
Triana nodded.
"Well, maybe you could listen for those voices and point out which way they come from."
Triana noticed that Hank had on his fedora. Oh, dear. He was going into his noir detective cosplay again. Bad enough that Dean still thought of her as his girlfriend but Hank in his detective play was almost unintelligent with his weird cant.
"Ok," she said. She thought about leaving a note for her father. But what kind of note could that be. "Out looking for an abomination from hell" wasn't going to placate her father's anxiety. Even "Out with Hank and Dean" was going to alarm her father. Better not to say anything at all.
She stepped through the doorway, closing the door behind her. "Ok, let's do this thing," she said as she lead them out to small patio by the entrance. There were some concrete benches there. She sat down on her favorite bench and, noticing how the boys were crowing in on her, said,."Spread out. Give me some room to think." As she waited for them to move off Triana noticed how many cigarette butts were littering the patio. She had started smoking because it calmed her down from all the stress she'd built up from dealing with her mother's new husband. The Outrider may be well intending but he wasn't her father and didn't have the right to tell her how to live. Of course her father spent a lot of time telling her how to live, too, which was just as annoying. What had started out as the occasional cigarette to calm frazzled nerves was turning into a filthy habit. She had got to cut down. Or at least clean up the patio better.
She shook off the thoughts, closed her eyes and tried opening her mind to the sounds of the other world. With the gate to hell in her bedroom closet only a few yards away it was all kind of noisy. She found herself thinking that maybe it was time to go back to her mother's and take up going to college again. Maybe even visit her erstwhile boyfriend, Raven. She'd barely thought about him all the while she was here.
She tried to shake off those thoughts. When they wouldn't leave she opened her eyes and spotted a cigarette butt lying on the cement at her feet. She focused on that. Not on what it felt like sucking in that harsh cloud of hot smoke but the stubbed out remains. Soon it was all she could see. Thoughts of her mother, her step-father, her boyfriend were all gone. She started to feel a little light-headed. She wondered how her father could concentrate so intently on his meditations that he could forget about gravity and just float there in the air. It took a lot more concentration than this. When he mediated he became so focused that he wasn't even aware of mediating. She closed her eyes again and slowed her breathing until each exhale seemed like it took an hour. She could feel her heart beating in her chest. Soon she could feel not just her heart contracting but the little shudder that passed through her body as the pulses of blood rocketed through her arteries. Then all at once she seemed to fall right thought the beating of her heart into a silence, vast and profound. She opened her mind's eyes into an infinity of white. She was aware of a sense of calm like she'd never felt before.
"Shit, this is better than sex," she thought and with the thought, like a house of cards, the serene whiteness collapsed into a cigarette butt between her feet. But before the whiteness totally disappeared she sensed the screams of tortured spirits. She raised an arm and pointed towards the screams and held it in place until she can totally out of her trance.
"He went that way," she told them. She saw that she was pointing slightly west of north, over the low mountains in that direction. From where she was sitting it didn't look like a particularly logical route to take since it seemed to go straight over rough terrain. Venturestein was making a bee-line to somewhere. Triana wondered what could have taken over his mind so totally that things like hills and valleys didn't matter.
"Thanks, toots," Hank cracked in the gravelly voice he used when he was fully into the noir detective cosplay. "I knew ya'd come through."
"What's better than sex?" Dean asked, envy coming through his simple question.
Triana wasn't sure how to answer that. She was embarrassed that she had even said it out loud. Totally too much information for someone who thinks he's still her boyfriend to hear. But more than that, what was the realm of whiteness she had reached? "I think I touched Nirvana," she whispered, suddenly frightened by how far her mind had gone.
"Let's go Dean. Come on, doll-face," Hank ordered.
"I'm not "doll-face," Triana told him, "and I don't plan to hiking all over those mountains looking for that creature."
"Who's hiking? We'll take the hover bikes."
Triana had seen the boys riding around a couple times on spindly contraptions but had never seen them up close. She still didn't plan to go off with them to drag back the runaway horror but it would be interesting to see what a "hover bike" was, up close.
The bikes were in a locked room in the now empty hanger for the X-1. Even when the X-1 was parked inside there was always an enormous amount of free space inside the hanger. It made one wonder if something else had been housed here before the X-1, maybe a blimp or something.
The hover bikers looked like some kind of free-form art collection of metal tubes but after a moment she could see as kind of looking like a sharply curved banana. The front ended in a large bulb that sprouted a set of handlebars, with a headlight covering the entire front. The banana then swooped down and sprouted a couple of foot rests. On the underside of the tubular footrests were gimbaled cones which apparently projected whatever force it was that made them hover. The cones seemed to shift back and forth on their own to maintain the balance of the bike. The banana then swept up, sprouting a long bike seat with a back rest slightly higher than the handlebars in front. Another set of tubes extended from the banana near the bottom with another pair of projectors. Watching Hank and Dean maneuver the bikes out of the room taught Triana all one apparently needed to know about the bikes. One pushed forward on the handlebar to go forward, pulled back to slow down or stop. Pushing up on the bar made the bike hover higher off the ground. While pushing down on the bar caused it to sink down. Pulling on one handlebar caused the bike to turn in that direction
Since there was only the two bikes and the seats were clearly intended for one person Triana turned and started back to her father's residence. "Come on, Triana, you can ride with me," Dean called. She turned and saw him patting his thigh.
"Yeah, doll, er, toot, er..." Hank ran out of nicknames for women that Triana hadn't already disapproved of. He dropped back into his normal voice, "Triana we're going to need your help once we get closer to Venturestein."
Triana opened her mouth to say "No way" but somehow "Ok" came out instead. Well, this would be more interesting than most days here. As she climbed onto Dean's lap she said, "don't get any ideas, Dean. I've already got a boyfriend."
"Yeah, a cripple," Hank laughed.
Triana fixed him with a stare. She wasn't using the Evil Eye as such since it was a form of cursing. "Don't forget, he's a warlock. I wouldn't make fun of him if I were you."
Hank looked away guiltily, then pulled the brim of his fedora down, "Let's burn rubber, bro," he snarled and sped out of the hanger at a thrilling 15 miles per hour.
Speed was apparently not among the bike's attributes but it easily jumped from the paved road onto the grass and brush covered hills outside the fenced-in Venture Compound. They flowed up the first ridge and down into the valley behind, slide across a small creek without splashing up any water, then began climbing up the next, slightly higher ridge. The bikes traveled with only a slight hum.
Triana found herself rather enjoying the journey, except for Dean's boney knee. She'd have like to squirm around till she found a more comfortable place to sit but didn't want to disturb his concentration. Dean was staring ahead intently, hands rigid on the handlebars, body stiff as a crowbar. At first she thought the sweat on his brow was from the intensity of his concentration. Later she realized that he was just over-excited about having her sit on his lap. Dean was like having a St. Bernard puppy. It was sweet and meant well but at the same time was large and clumsy and demanding. She was more of a cat person, unfortunately. She liked people that didn't demand your every moment, didn't call every hour to see what you were up to. And didn't break into a sweat just because you happened to be touching them. Raven, for example hadn't called her in the two months she's been at home.
Two months? What the hell! What kind of a boyfriend was that? She suddenly thought. He couldn't have been bothered to call her once, to express a certain amount of loneliness because she was gone? She was on the verge of getting pissed at her "boyfriend" when a sharp spasm swepted over her body. She started, knocking Dean's arms and nearly plunging the hover bike into a tree.
Dean pulled back sharply, braking the bike. "What is it?" he asked. Triana pushed off his lap, stepping onto the grass and nearly collapsed to the ground.
"It was like a bunch of people were suddenly screaming in my head, then they all shut up."
"The Jedi's are going to hear about that one," Hank drawled.
Triana looked at him blankly, "What?" she asked, annoyed.
"You know, when Alderon was destroyed in Star Wars. Obi-Wan could hear the voices cry out then ceased to exist."
"And you wonder why you never had a girl," Triana said. She sat up, instinctively pulling her skirt down between her legs. 'Anyway I think this is more like 'Lassie,' you know, Timmy's in the well."
"I had a girl. I had more than a girl. I've had sex!" Hank insisted.
"Sure, you did. With who?"
"Ah-h-h. I don't know, but I left a message to myself that I had sex, and it was fantastic."
"Yeah, It was so fantastic he had his mind erased," Dean laughed.
Triana considered the first time she had had sex. It had been hurried, sordid and surprisingly unsatisfying. And at such a young age that she hoped her father would never find out. Still she would never voluntarily wish that memory away. She couldn't imagine what kind of sex Hank could have had that he'd want to both remember and forget all about. it.. What was it Gary had said? living with the Ventures was like living in the center of Weird.
She stood up and dusted off her skirt. "Well, let's get going. Venturestein is still straight head, but I got the impression that the voices were startled because he was falling . Maybe he fell into a well, or off a cliff or maybe he stepped into a cave. He can't be that much farther ahead." She climbed back onto Dean's lap and they slowly took off.
Topping the next ridge presented them with a conundrum. Rising from the base of the little valley beyond was a sheer rock face rising maybe a hundred feet. As they got near they could see a numbers of scratches, fresh broken off pieces and such to show that Venturestein had gone this way, straight up the cliff.
While the cliff rose at about a 50 degree angle, difficult but not impossible to climb, it was too steep for the hover bikes to ascend and too tall for the bikes to rise over. Dean could get his bike to rise maybe twenty feet off the ground but that was it. At that height the bike was sufficiently wobbly that Triana had to close her eyes and just trust to fate.
Hank pointed off to one side where, maybe a quarter mile beyond where the cliff looked a little more broken up. They drifted down there and found a series of ledges and ramps that they could climb up. It was slow work and at times Triana considered - and even offered - to get off and walk when the trail looked too narrow to go on.
Once above the cliff they found a wide meadow of lush tall grass. A streak in the middle running as straight as a ruler showed where Venturestein had gone. The trail of trampled grass ended abruptly in the middle of the field. They cut across the grass, aiming for where Venturestein's trail ended.
It ended in a sink hole, maybe seven-eight feet across. Soil had washed away around the hole leaving a ring twelve feet wide surrounding it. It would have been hard for anyone to have just falling into the sink hole, anyone other than the monomaniacal minded zombie. He'd march straight out of the grass and into the hole.
They parked the bikes at the edge of the grass and cautiously approached the hole. The ground seemed solid enough around the hole so they peered over the edge. Venturestein was at the bottom of the pit, maybe twenty feet below them. He was busily trying to climb up the far side but the walls were too smooth, with too few handholds. He'd get a few feet off the ground, fail to find a place to plant his feet and after a moment's scrambling would fall back to the dirt littered floor. Where he would just pick himself back up and try again.
"Hey, Venturestein!" Hank called, "how are ya?"
"Ha-n-n-k friend. Cocoon - home," the patchwork man answered. He didn't even pause to wave as he scrabbled at the pits side.
