She tried not to look too worried as she sloshed her canteen from side to side. It was already lighter than she wanted it to be, despite her controlling herself with a will of iron. There hadn't been that much to start with, just whatever she'd been able to scrounge from what was left in the bottom of the emergency rations before they'd abandoned the half-steamer by the side of the cliff. She wasn't sure how much Remembrance or Angelina had left of their water rations but she was sure that it couldn't be much. They wouldn't be able to make it through the desert on under two liters of water, they still had days of foot travel left to go.
"What are we going to do about water?" Remembrance asked in an echo of her thoughts. She had probably seen Meryl testing her canteen and finally found the courage to voice the concern that was probably weighing on her own mind.
"I don't know," Meryl said with reluctant honesty. "I don't know of any wells or springs near here, and even if we were to find one there's no guarantee that, this close to the Mcllilian Mineral Flats, it would be drinkable water."
"Will we be able to find help in under three days?" she asked next.
The two of them held thier conversation in spurts as they guided around natural trails in the rough terrain, climbed over rock formations they couldn't go around, and navigated paths that a mountain goat would have hesitated to take on. All of this in the blistering oven-like heat of air superheated by the suns rays striking on the ground.
"No," Meryl said, still being honest, even though she really didn't want to.
It was just one more instance of the truth hurting.
"We're out in the middle of no-where, and there's not a trace of civilization around for miles."
"What about nomads?" Remembrance asked hopefully.
"Better hope that we're the only people we run across. The kinds of people who are likely to inhabit this sector are people we don't want to have to meet, if you catch my meaning."
"You mean, like bandits?" Remembrance said.
"Or worse," Meryl replied.
"We're out in the middle of the desert, running out of water... why?" the young woman asked, clearly tired and worried and at the limit of her patience. "I only have your say-so that those people we escaped from meant us any harm at all."
"And the fact that they kidnapped you and locked you in a kennel," Meryl snapped heatedly.
She could have just left her there, but no, she does the right thing and wakes her up and helps not only her but her winged companion escape and now she's being complained at about it.
"I'm just saying that you don't know what their plans were and didn't bother to find out. And now we're traveling through the desert with no hope of rescue, running low on water with no way to resupply. We'll die if we don't find a new source of water which is more than I can say for what might have happened to us in the care of the ones who took us."
"There are things that are worse than death," Meryl muttered darkly. "I don't have the inclination to play the blame game with you, if you want to go back, turn around and head back to the steamer, I'm sure the hunt will be more than happy to pick you up. I'm going to keep going."
"You say that now, but you just admitted that don't know how to find water, you'll die of thirst."
Meryl debated saying something dramatic about how she'd rather die free than live in chains but promptly checked the urge, instead she settled for a simple
"I've survived situations just as bad as this. Remember that even if it is volcanically active, the dune-sea near here has a trickle of the water table running under it, that's how they get geysers. We'll find a way to harvest that water."
:One way or another: she promised silently.
Even if it meant using her powers to freeze and condense what was probably nothing more than sand-laden steam, if that was what it took to survive then that was what she would do.
:We're an odd team to try and cross the desert,: Meryl thought to herself.
Out of the three of them she seemed to be the only one who knew what she was doing. Miss Remembrance didn't seem to know anything about the desert at all which led Meryl to wonder about her origins. Was she city-bred? If so she would have mentioned which city by now. Was she from some weird religious commune? There had been a number of them to spring up in the first two or three decades after the Great Fall so it wasn't impossible, some of them were the definition of isolationist but Meryl didn't think that was it either.
:Maybe she's been hiding under a rock her whole life,: Meryl dismissed it with a shrug.
Either way, Miss Remembrance clearly knew nothing about life in the desert and what it took to survive. That was just great, she was stuck on a nasty survival hike with a wet-eared greenie. Just great.
:And if that wasn't enough I have to put up with Angelina and that awful vibe she puts out!: Meryl thought, irritated all over again.
It was maddening! And she couldn't get away from it!
:It feels like someone grating their nails over a chalkboard... only its all over me!: Meryl thought, twitching again.
Not that Angelina wasn't pretty, even beautiful, in a weird kind of way. Her face was beautifully formed, perfectly symmetrical; even, smooth features of palest marble as though carved by a master craftsman on the search for True Beauty... but there was just something so alien about her. Her perfect features were a little too perfect, there were no flaws, no character. Her eyes had no irises and pupils but were instead rounded slits in her face filled with blue-white light. Her skin glowed, ever so softly, even in the light of day, with a soft white luminescence, like she'd swallowed one of the moons and it shone out through her body. And her wings... they were beautiful. Folded neatly over her back they fell in a cascading curtain of feathers of the purest white that Meryl had ever seen. It was a white so pure that it seemed to take all the light that surrounded it and reflect it in a silvery-white aura, a majestic purity that made one feel almost humbled to be in its presence.
Meryl would have been far more pleased to be in the angels presence if that presence were not so annoying. The constant tingle-burn under Meryl's skin was maddeningly distracting and it put her in a constant state of irritation. It made what would have other wise been a merely grueling trek across the open wastes into something that was akin to torture!
"How far away is the dune sea?" Remembrance asked next, obviously making an effort not to sound plaintive.
Meryl approved of her attitude, she was no Milly, but Remembrance was made of some good stuff, Meryl could tell. She was just, for some inexplicable reason, unfamiliar with the terrain and dangers she found herself faced with.
"Two nights travel," Meryl said. "I'm only traveling by day now to get some distance. We'll grab a rest near the second suns setting, and wake up at third moonrise. That should give us enough time to recharge a little and we won't be taking too great a slice of time out, and if we're lucky, the air will have cooled off by then."
"Are you sure we can travel at night?" Remembrance asked, looking around them.
The crags and bends in the rocky basaltic earth folded up in ridges like someone had carelessly bunched up a blanket and left it to lie there. The ridges weren't nice rounded folds either, there were cracks and splits and seams with sharp edges in the dense crust that were certainly no picnic to try to manuver over. And then there were the rocks and loose gravel, to say that it was rough was an understatement; worse than sandpaper, you could probably use a basalt stone to strip the paint off aluminum siding. The gravel was sharp and jagged, not quite as bad as glass but not smooth as sand either. Remembrance had already discovered that one catch on a stumble in this terrain would leave the heel of a hand stripped of the upper epidermis and bleeding.
"Three moons will give off plenty of light to see by," Meryl reassured her. "And besides, traveling the basalt Valley in the daytime will only increase the amount of water we sweat out. At night, it's cold enough to where you don't sweat as much because you're trying to retain heat and your body has a much easier time conserving water."
Remembrance must have seen something in Meryl's face, for she grabbed her arm and turned her to face her.
"Alright. What is it?" she demanded flatly.
Meryl had managed to be unobtrusive through out most of the day, keeping a weather eye on the horizons around her, her senses alert to the tell-tale change in pressure and temperature, and ears open for that slight shift in the pitch and direction of the winds as they whipped across the basalt formations. She hadn't really wanted to tell Remembrance this but her long experience as an insurance disaster investigator told her that there was another reason why a volcanic hot-zone (normally a place ripe for colonization because of the abundance of minerals, raw materials and most importantly, geothermal energy) had no people in it was because of the unique coincidence of the terrain features thereabouts.
Air that had been super-heated over the basalt valley met with the relatively cooler air from the nearby desert and mountains... creating ideal conditions for the mother of all storms. The other thing that particular area was known for was the ferocity of its sandstorms, they were called The Midnight Kamiseen. Black sands whipped up by the winds into a cloud so dense that they litterally blocked out the sun, the world was blanketed in a darkness to thick that it was as if it were nighttime. That wasn't all. The sand-laden winds of the Midnight Kamiseen traveled at speeds that could strip concrete. Any poor unfortunate soul caught out in them would find thier skin quickly flayed from thier bodies, if they didn't suffocate first that was. The sand in the air was so thick and was whipped around so quickly that even wrapping up in a cloth to filter the air had little effect. And there was ablways the chance that if you weren't flayed alive or suffocated by the winds, you'd get buirried by the wind-borne sand.
Meryl reluctantly reported to Remembrance these details in her usual straightforward manner and then added on that she thought there was a good chance that a storm might be on its way.
"Oh... that's just great," Remembrance said, looking a little faint again. "Is there any other good news you want to share with me, or is that about all of it?"
"There is good news in that we aren't undergoing this in the middle of the desert," Meryl added quickly to forestall her panicking. "In the desert there's nothing you can do in a sandstorm but hunker down, cover your mouth and pray. Here in the basalt flats at least we have shelter from the worst of the winds. If we can find a cave or even a good sized hollow to hole up in and use our cloaks to shed the sand off us, we'll be able to get by just fine."
"I'll keep an eye out," Remembrance promised, obviously trying to put the best face on things.
"Good," meryl said, nodding in approval.
A long period of silence stretched on as the three of them helped each other navigate the treacherous terrain together. Meryl fell into the old habit she'd developed to help her cross the hot, expansive wastes of the desert, pick a feature some distance ahead of her in the direction she was going whether it be a certain sand dune or a rock feature and focus her gaze on it, inwardly promising herself a sip of water once she reached it. It wasn't much, but it psychologically helped her get through the suffocating heat, the maddening wind and the ever-present hammer of the suns, and on this journey, helped her to ignore the myriad of other things that seemed to be wrong with her. Her left hand was throbbing painfully, even though she had her thumb looped through the shoulder strap of her backpack to elevate her hand over her heart, the place where her left pinky finger used to be (before she'd gotten kidnapped by Knives' henchmen) hurt abominably. It pulsed and throbbed painfully in time to her heartbeat and Meryl was, truthfully, afraid to unwrap it because she didn't want to see the sight of a bloody stump where her finger used to be. As amputations went, it was a mild one, hardly even worth mentioning, but it didn't feel at all mild. And she still had a lingering headache from whatever it was she had done to use that new ability of hers earlier that day. All in all, she was less than happy, and there was one more difficulty... Meryl looked over to where the angel traveled in thier group and tried hard not to glare at her.
Angelina, as usual said nothing, simply moving silently and with a preternatural grace that made it clear to any observer that there was something special about her. Meryl was happier the further away from the angel she was, she had nothing against her personally, it was just that the woman gave off a subtle humming vibration that was nearly maddening. It was like... like the feeling one gets from pressing ones tongue on the dual heads of a battery, feeling the mild currant pass through flesh, only instead of being confined to one area it was all over her body in whatever direction Angelina was nearest to her.
It was more than distracting, it was nearly maddening. The oppressive heat of the suns was bad enough to make her irritable but that strange tingle-burn that buzzed just under her skin was driving her slowly crazy! She'd tried putting as much distance between them as she could and that helped but only a little. She'd tried putting her mind on other things but it was always there in the background and irksome little itch that she couldn't alleviate.
:That's odd,: Meryl thought coming across a discrepency she hadn't thought of before. :I never had this same problem with Vash.:
Certainly she'd been annoyed and frustrated by him, and at times puzzled by his actions and the reasons for them, but despite every hint that she'd had (that Milly had seemed able to pick up on, but Meryl just seemed to overlook) she'd never detected anything truly out of the ordinary from him. If, like he'd said, he was in fact a plant angel like Angelina definitely was (because how many people had wings sprouting from out of their backs?) why had she never sensed any of the odd sorts of sensations she was constantly, and annoyingly, subjected to when in the presence of Angelina? Was it because Vash was independent? Was it because Angelina was a female? Was it because of some other factor? Meryl had no way of knowing, and that ignorance bothered her. She knew where she might find some answers though.
Meryl looked over at Doctor Remembrance and sighed internally with resignation. The only stupid question was the one she didn't ask, she supposed.
"Miss Remembrance," Meryl said, breaking into her thoughts.
"Yes?" she asked pleasantly.
"Supposing, hypothetically that is, that I would have run across another plant outside of a bulb..."
"Another plant?" Remembrance said, gaze looking at her sharply with interest.
Meryl got the odd feeling that the interest on her part wasn't entirly scientific. Meryl reacted automatically to protect her friend, she had no right to betray his secrets just because she was a little curious.
"Hypothetically," she hastened to reiterate. "Just supposing."
"Ah," Remembrance said, sounding disappointed. "Okay, hypothetically then.
"Yes, hypothetically would this plant give off the same kind of vibe I'm getting from Angelina here?"
"No, it would be much, much, worse," Remembrance replied immediately. "Angelina is bonded, no matter how much you dislike the fact. That Bonding stabilizes her Psi-wave and gives her an innate ammount of sheilding no matter how far away from her bondmate she is. An ordinary unbonded plant, pulled from out of the bulb without a potential bondmate nearby to stabilize the wave-output would probably incinerate everything within a mile radius once taken out of the containment sphere."
"Really?" meryl said, trying not to sound skeptical. Aside of the instance at Augusta, Vash had never demonstrated any of the characteristic for which plants were noted, in specific their ability to output energy greater than the sum of the energy they consumed to create it.
"In most cases," Remebrance said.
"Most," Meryl pounced on it. "But not all?"
Remembrance momentarily had a look on her face that said she'd gotten caught out at something she'd had no intention of admitting to.
"Er..." Remembrance temporized, obviously trying to think of a good excuse.
Meryl was treated to another realization. This woman Knew! Remembrance knew about the other plants, maybe not Vash in particular but she certainly seemed to be aware of the fact that there were other independant Plants out there. Or maybe Meryl was just reading what she wanted to read into it. The burden of a secret could be a heavy thing she was coming to discover, and when Meryl was already feeling so very lost with everything else that was happening to and around her, she might just be wishing for someone she could talk with about it all. Milly wasn't there, and Meryl was coming to discover how very much she had come to rely on her friend and partner's good sense, advice, upbeat manner and unflappability.
:I'm probably just imagining things,: Meryl thought to herself, deciding against saying anything further.
The conversation lagged into silence, each woman keeping to her own counsel as they threaded their way through the rough, labyrinthine folds of the basalt valley with agonizing slowness.
Meryl had thought fist off, of using that mysterious new grid ability to try and just make more water when they needed it. After all, water was simple stuff, two hydrogens and an oxygen. She knew innately however that recombining enough of the molecules (probably literally out of thin air) in the kind of mass needed to supply water for them to drink would require too much energy for her to supply it innately.
"Hey," Meryl asked next, coming across an idea. "If Angelina is a plant, cant she just make water like a normal Plant can?"
"Angelina is Bonded," Remebrance replied. "Even ordinary Plants require machinery to channel the energy they supply into usable functions. If Angelina's Bondmate were here he'd easily be able to use his channels to make up as much water as he pleased but Angelina can't do it on her own."
Well that made sense, she'd never seen Vash able to anything with his plant abilities other than supposedly speak mind to mind with his brother (and she'd never actually seen that herself) and blow up a city. She imagined that if he'd been able to "magic things up from nothing" effectively, he'd have probably used that ability to give himself a lifetime supply of donuts. And booze. And possibly women.
Then another thought occurred to her. However clumsily, Meryl could use her Channels. She'd already done it twice, four times if you counted using them to knock out the bad guys. She could just use it to make the water they needed! It couldn't be that hard.
:And it'll hopefully distract me from that damned vibe Angelina gives off,: she grumbled to herself.
Absently guiding herself over the crags and rocks of the basalt valley Meryl turned her focus inward, mapping out the function nodes in her mind and spinning a grid. It appeared in the formless air in front of her, a grey spiral of nothingness that reminded Meryl of the spidery writings of the smoke from a single stick of incense, making little dragons in the air before it dissipated. A smokey-grey, flat spiral spread out before her little circles weaving themselves at regular intervals like planets in orbit around a sun. She mentally tallied the different kinds of function nodes she was going to need, one to isolate out the hydrogen molecules, one to isolate the oxygen molecules (since it would probably be easier to work with what was already in the air) another to resonate and electron bond, another for temperature and time and space. She added a Gate node into the center of the grid once she had all of the function nodes worked out and tapped that node into her own Source.
Bam!
A flash of bright light was all she saw.
The next thing Meryl knew was blue. All she could see was blue. A shadow fell over her and she vaguely came to realize that she was looking up at the sky... from her back. How had she wound up on the ground? She didn't remember laying down for a nap. her throat was dry and scratchy and suddenly as if triggered by one sensation of discomfort, the headache waiting off in the wings descended upon her with all the shrieking fury of a Midnight Kamiseen. Her head did more than merely throb, it felt like it was trying to come apart at the seams. Her eyeballs pulsed and her temples seemed to explode outward with every beat of her heart.
:Oh, God, just let me die: she thought.
She couldn't even contemplate doing anything about it. Right then the idea of moving even her littlest pinky finger was simply incomprehensible to her. She whimpered in pain.
"Thank-god you're awake!" Remembrance exclaimed.
Meryl gave a strangled noise of agony at the sound as her headache, impossibly, increased. Was the woman a sadist? Meryl took back everything nice she'd ever thought about her.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked.
"Tell your identical twin to get out of the way so I can count them," Meryl whispered in agony, her vision seeming to blur and grey out at unpredictable interludes.
"This is bad," Remebrance muttered. "You have heatstroke. I'm sure of it."
"I do not, this is just stupidity and overconfidence," she grumbled trying to think of how she was supposed to be able to pick herself up and keep moving when she couldn't stand the idea of budging and inch. Just the thought of trying to stand up sent a new wave of agony slamming through her head, and she only had herself to blame.
:See Meryl?: she told herself. :This is what happens when you mess around with things you don't really understand.:
"What happened?" Remembrance asked next.
"I got the brilliant idea of just trying to use this weird new thing I can do to just make up more water," Meryl said.
Miraculously enough, her headache seemed to actually be fading steadily. Apparently once the lesson was learned the effects didn't linger for very long.
"After all," she continued an a slightly more steady tone of voice as she contemplated actually sitting up. "I reasoned that if I could use it to freeze metal and knock people unconscious, it had to be good for something useful. I figured I'd just use it to make the water we need."
Remembrance looked at her for a long quiet moment and Meryl, holding her head, tried to lever herself up to a sitting position. At last, Remembrance said quietly
"I can't fault your logic, but there's two things you didn't take into account. One, you're not Bonded so accessing your Source will drain your own personal supply of energy. And two, you're not Transitioned over. Your body as it exists now is incapable of Channeling a lot of energy all at once."
Meryl felt chagrined at her ignorance and annoyed at the same time. How the hell was she supposed to have known that? A week or two ago she'd just been a regular insurance worker, working part time at a diner to help pay the rent. Now all of these weird things were happening not only around her, but to her. The things happening around her were fine by her lights, but the things happening to her were not acceptable. She was normal dammit! Normal! Or at least she'd thought she was. She'd been so much happier in that state of blissful ignorance that came with not knowing there was something unusual about her. Now she had strange things she had to worry about, like being Bonded and having a Source and just exactly how much energy she could Channel when she wasn't Transitioned over.
Deciding that she was going to ignore how very strange her priorities had gotten all of a sudden, Meryl gingerly raised herself to a sitting position and discovered that it brought only a slight throb to the dull ache hanging round her temples. Carefully she raised herself all the way to her feet and tested her balance and coordination. Her knees felt kinda weak and her body felt like it did when she'd gone too long without eating, but other than that... and the slight empty-pit feeling in her belly that was telling her that she was more than starting to get hungry. The effects of her combination of ignorance and overzealous experimentation seemed to be fading quickly with few lingering effects. Except the hunger and exhaustion. She'd have liked to have curled up for a nap, but there was so much more she needed to do yet.
She signaled to her companions that she was well enough and that they should get moving. To be perfectly honest, she didn't feel well; she felt tired and hungry, but none of those were debilitating and they could stop for a rest after they'd found a safe place to hole up for a little while. It worried her a little, more than a little, that they hadn't found any signs of someone pursuing them. Perhaps the captives were nothing more than a convenience of Knives' part and not truly important, and so therefore not worth pursuing. Maybe he was content to "let them die out in he desert" and wash his hands of them.
:And what are we going to do about water?: she wondered to herself.
She'd already found that trying to use her own Source to create it from out of thin air exceeded her threshold, so that left finding another Source to use. Her eye fell on Angelina and she got a notion.
If she could get Angelina to give her some of her plant energy, Meryl could use it in place of using her own Source (as she'd been momentarily tempted to with those four unconscious enemies back on the steamer) and make water with it. Having learned from her previous mistake, Meryl thought she'd gather a little information before she tried anything else with her new abilities.
"Miss Remembrance," Meryl began, breaking the silence of their sslow steady travails over the rough terrain of the basalt crags. "Since my own Source isn't strong enough, and Angelina can't use her powers without a channel, is there any way she can just give me a little of her own power to use?"
"If she were a normal plant, yeah, probably," Remembrance said, warming to her subject. "But Angelina is Bonded. The very Bonding that stabilizes her Psi-wave and shields her, enabling her to live in the outside world, also protects her from outside telepathic or other kinds of interference. Not even another Plant could resonate with her because the bonding with Marcus would prevent any outside resonance. Only her Bondmate can access her Psi-wave."
"So, then... no," Meryl thought in disappointment. Dammit.
She also felt a little relieved at being prevented by necessity from using her new abilities. For one thing, being out of the ordinary, now that she was consciously aware that there was something unusual about herself, made Meryl extremely uncomfortable and in truth, just a little unhappy. Strange occurrences were fine as long as they happened to other people. Men like Vash were used to having weirdness in their lives and knowing that things weren't always exactly what they seemed. the very real notion that not only was the unknown in her life in the form of a very close frined but now it was infecting her as well... Meryl was very much less than happy about it.
:It may well be useful, but I'm not sure what the risks are that are involved, other than the fact that if I Bond off, I'll end up like him.:
A momentary flashback to a time when she'd sat by her fathers bed holding his hand and trying to reassure him that everything was going to be okay, while she had resonated helplessly with that deep, dark, soul-sucking chasm of emptiness and despair that was the wreck he'd become after the death of his Bondmate. Meryl shuddered, goosebumps raising on her arms and up her back at the merest thought of it. No, she was much happier the way she was accustomed to being. Her uncle was right to warn her off from it. These powers might seem like something really wonderful, but in the end the cost for them might just be more than anyone had bargained for.
Still, right now she had to concern herself with survival. Remembrance was right when she said that their chances of not making it through this insane escape plan (the words "out of the frying pan and into the fire" never rang more true) were not exactly good. Having access to a supply of water would be more than good.
"Is there any other kind of Source I can use, like could I access regular energy and use it that way?" Meryl wondered aloud.
Remberance stopped and looked over at her, the expression on her face both surprised and intrigued at the same time.
"I... I honestly don't know," she said after a short pause.
"My father used to do it that way," meryl continued, slowly trying to accept the idea into the fabric of her reality.
These powers were hers and always had been whether she'd remembered them or not. it was her responsibility now to use them or not use them for good or ill. Right at this moment there were three of them in the desert alone, running out of water and if she could use the grid to make more water then she would do so in order to survive.
"Of course," she added a moment later as her mind fed her the rest of the memory. "Drawing off from an inorganic Source is less than comfortable. The more you take in, the more painful it gets."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"But what about your threshold?" Remembrance pointed out. "You just tried to take in enough energy to make a drinkable amount of water and it laid you out flat."
Meryl was brought up short by this and paused for a moment, considering.
"Good point," she conceded. "I don't think it'll be a problem however if I just do it in little bits. IfIi can make it work at all that is..."
Angelina, who up until that point had followed along pretty much dociley, content to follow wherever the two of them led her, abruptly stopped and veered off to the left, scrambling quickly over the various crags and boulders of the black wasteland they found themselves in. Exchanging a look of bewilderment the two women scrambled after her calling out entreaties for her to wait up for them. A mad dash and a few minutes later and they caught up to Angelina hovering over a strange sort of rock formation, a crag in a cliff- face that led to a crevice. The crag and crevice glittered in the light of the suns. The crag was lined with a fine moss of glittering tiny crystal formations about the size of a cold 45 bullet and the crevice held larger spars of crystal, some of them as large as a handspan in width and with a diameter approaching four inches. The deeper part of the crevice marbled into a vein of some shiny black glassy substance that resembled obsidian to Meryl eyes.
Angelina pulled off her pack and cloak and stood before the cliff-face, her gaze direct and attentive for the first time that Meryl had ever seen her. There came a soft trilling noise from her throat as she spread her wings wide and gave off a soft humming noise and it seemed to Meryl that she blurred around the edges. The crystal inside the crags and crivices gave off a high-pitched, tinkling, resonating hum and started to glow! Angelina's own skin started to light up softly a pale white, like moonlight shining from out of her skin and the hummin became even more intense. The crystals in front of her glowed even more intensely, slowly pulsing with light and begining to change colors as Angelina moved up the scale of that strange humming trilling noise she made. The stones first glowed a dusky red and then pink then orange traveling up the scale right into brilliant yellow, green, blue-white then at last a violet-white with every change of note. meryl wasn't sure how she could tell, but she just knew that Angelina was somehow imparting some of her own power and energy into them. Apparently done charging them, Angelina moved into another high trilling note and the crystals started to shivver and then to snap off one by one, but the ends were sheer and perfectly cut. The solid mass of black crystal deep in the crag looked like it moved. It seemd to flow a little like black ink, take a shape as Angelina's trilling intensified (and it seemed to Meryl almost as if there was more than one singer coming from her throat) and then the strange rock solidified into the shape of a large oblong of crystal.
Angelina stepped away from the cliff-face and motioned Meryl forward. Puzzled, Meryl did as she was bid and bent to pick up some of the fallen crystal spars and bead-sized heads of crystal. They glowed softly in her hands and Meryl could feel the power radiating off from them as others might sense heat or cold, though the stones themselves remained cool to the touch.
"And I can use these?" Meryl asked, looking over at Angelina, who had already seemingly lost interest in the concern she had stirred up and was busy preening her feathers. Meryl was inundated with a feeling of assent as well as a little impatience... Angelina had drank the last of her water and she was thirsty!
"Your wish is my command," Meryl grumbled.
In reply Meryl got the image of her snot-nosed little brother making a face at her. Sh smiled a little at that, yes, if he were here that's exactly what he would have to say about it.
Meryl sighed, took out her canteen to try the experiment, and held it before her. She carefully mentally mapped out the same grid she had tried to use earlier, the one to recombine the molecules of Oxygen and Hyrogen into water in large quantities, and wove it out in front of her in that ephemeral dragon-smoke curling spiral with intricate spiral-patterns nodes woven into its pattern at regular intervals. The Source node this time was a little different, she wrote it to take in power at only a specific rate, one that wouldn't harm her though it would be slow going.
:Here goes: she thought a little nervously as she cleared her mind and reached out with her channels to tap into the enrgy source inside the stone.
It felt nothing like when she had accessed the Source energy of her own Source, or even when she had tapped into the Source of another. With them there had been a sort of warmth to it, a feeling of power that was mild and tamed down for a purpose, it had felt a little like dipping her hand in a pool of warm water and drawing some out for her to use. Tapping into the raw power inside the stone was nothing like that; it stung and it was colder somehow. It was more like dipping her hand into the path of a pressure hose set just above freezing and it felt to her inner senses like she'd scraped sandpaper across them just hard enough to draw blood and then poured saltwater on it. Her channels tingled and stung from the contact.
Determined to master it, Meryl resolutely got a better grip on herself and narrowed her focus, condensing down the "gate" that the energy would have to travel through and with the motion of Reeling Silk, Meryl pulled the energy from the stone into her channels, and centered it. Keeping it isolated from her own Source, she fed it directly through her channels, bypassing her meridians, and channeled it directly to the Grid she had created. The Source Node of the grid, to her relief, accepted it as easily as it had accepted the power from her own Source that she fed into it. The grid lit up in a steady spiral, the grid nodes blinking into full wakefulness. Meryl could almost feel it begin working.
"Ummm..." Rememrance said a little hesitantly, pointing downward. "It worked, but I don't think that's what you had in mind."
Meryl looked down to where Remembrance was pointing and to her annoyance there was a small cloud of mist gathering about her feet.
"I guess I have to give a specific location," Meryl muttered. She un-Junctioned her Grid from the Source and sealed off the Source while she went back and adjusted the grid, giving three locations for the water to collect, specifically inside their canteens over a perdiod of time until the canteens were full. She then tapped again into the Source-crystal, hissin gin a breath in pain and annoyance at the stinging sensation traveling within her and she drew off and centered the new source power. After a little time though, she found that the shocking sting settled into a mild, if annoying, current-feeling; certainly it was no worse that what she was having to put up with in the presence of Angelina, so Meryl decided that she could bear it.
"I don't see any difference," Remembrance said, looking at her canteen and trying not to sound disappointed.
"It takes a while," Meryl said a little shortly. "I have to work within my own limitations."
"You wouldn't have to if you'd get a bondmate," Remembrance said.
"Yeah, that's not going to happen," Meryl replied trying not to sound as hostile as she felt towards the idea. "I'd sooner slit open my own stomach and stake myself out into the sand dunes for the scavengers to eat out my innards... alive."
"You certainly seem to feel strongly about it," Remembrance remarked.
"You would too if you'd seen what I've seen," Meryl replied.
Even intense love could be twisted over time, no way was she going to risk bonding off and having her bondmate go crazy. After all, look at what had happened with Knives and Vash. And then there was what had happened to her father... Meryl shuddered, no way. It was far too dangerous for anyone with any sense to contemplate.
"So, now we have water. That's one worry down, only half a million more to go," Meryl said cheerfully as she gathered up the rest of the stones.
The crystal she was using as a Source was one of the smaller bullet-sized ones and having it power her grid wasn't hardly making a noticeable dent in its reserves of energy. It hadn't even changed colors.
"Let's get moving," she said. And resumed in the direction they'd been traveling.
Sheesh," Meryl heard Remembrance mutter to Angelina. "What's this woman made out of?"
ooops, sorry about the mix up. Thanks okami for pointing it out. Here's the chapter I meant to post.
