"Finally!" Jessica exclaimed. "I was wondering if we were expected to journey down to the center of the earth!"
In a rounded out cavern in the bottom of the chamber the walls were blank and utterly bare of any sort of doorway or opening at all, there was only a strange inset on three sides of the circle in a perfect triangle with a spherical niche carved out of them and a strange design on the smooth stone floor, glowing softly with a mixing of green, blue and pale purple light. It was a picture of a large three-axis grid with a number of intersecting nodes. No, when Vash looked at it more carefully, it was three axis grids layered one atop the other, green then blue then violet. It looked almost labyrinthine from his point of view above it. The center of the grid where the Source node usually was, was glowing a soft white light. Jessica curiously scuffed at it with the toe of her boot to see if it would rub off. Vash jerked her back behind him at the proceeding flash of light.
He froze for a long moment, every sense and reaction in his body poised to fight and defend, but nothing more exciting happened than a white beam of light shooting up into the darkness was surrounded by three glowing balls of light, one blue, one green and one purple hovering a shoulder height to Jessica. They didn't do anything more harmful than hover there for a moment so after a small time, the ever-inquisitive Doc approached it with some of his sensory devices to see if he couldn't get anything to read or examine about them. Vash too, out of curiosity, and to protect his old friend, approached the lights.
"Hm..." Milly said, also approaching.
Before Vash could cation her to be careful, Milly had already reached out and taken one of the balls of light into her hand, plucking it from out of the air. The green colored one, perhaps because green seemed to be her favorite color.
"It feels warm," was all she said.
Vash breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if he should scold her for taking unneccessary risks. He was still debating when she turned toward the wall and walked over to one of the little insets in it with the tiny carved-out shere-shaped niches and pushed the light-sphere in. There was a soft pulsing glow in the niche for a moment then a strange little picture made of a soft smoke-like glowing light wrote itself in the air before the sphere and hovered there for a moment then pulsed again and was gone.
A half a heartbeat later the sign on the floor with its muted glow suddenly lit up a brilliant green and the circle that surrounded the layered grid lit up and then disappeared taking a section of the until-now solid floor with it. This left behind a platform hovering by itself in the air.
Jessica, not at all afraid hoped the short distance onto it before anyone could think to caution her the platform stayed steady as a rock. Shrugging, the Doc, Milly and Vash followed suit. Vash started a little when the platform began to glide downwards like an elevator. A few moments later of staring at bare smooth rock in the strange green luminescence provided by the now brightly glowing sigil on the floor the lift slowed to a gentle stop opening out on another chamber that was perfectly circular with a glyph on the floor.
The glyph on the floor was much simpler than the one from the chamber above, having only one three-axis grid instead of a number of grids with three axises layered on top of one another. The circular chamber had three perfectly round archways leading to tunnels branching off from it. None of the further corridors were lit but at the entrance of each archway was a smokey glyph made of light hanging like a curtain in space between the round chamber and the tunnels beyond. When Vash approached the glyphs for a closer look he found that the pale, glowing sigils in the air were in fact grids. Blank ones.
Vash looked down at the round sigil elevator which had brought them to this new round chamber beneath it then quietly merged with the stone floor. The central node glowed green, but all of the other nodes spiraling off into the axis spreading out from it were a dead grey.
"Hn. You are here," the Doc noted dryly.
"Seems that way," Vash agreed.
He examined the grid glowing on the floor carefully. Figuring that it had worked so far already, Vash touched the glowing node on the floor with the toe of his boot and a wide, spreading circular beam of light shot out of it. He jumped back by reflex but nothing more harmful that that appeared. Withing the beam of light, out of the ground appeared three small glowing balls of soft green light light, floating lazily in the air at about shoulder height. Vash approached the orbs and noted that instead of being simple spheres with a glowing nimbus of light at its heart and a glassy shield around it, these spheres were made of long strings of glyphs and symbols wrapped around themselves like a ball of yarn.
"Okay, I get it," he muttered. "Sort of."
"Looks like another sort of puzzle," Doc said cheerfully.
Of course he could be cheerful, he didn't have his short girls life hanging in the balance of getting this right so he could get that stupid keystone.
Vash plucked one of the glyph spheres from the air and walked over to the nearest glowing sphere hanging in the air. Curious, he tested the barrier first, wondering if there wasn't a way he could just walk through it. It wasn't a palpable sensation but when his hand hit where the barrier was it just wouldn't go any further. Shrugging, Vash pushed the orb into the center. The glyph pulsed once, the orb dissipating in his hand as the light from it spread out like a ripple onto the glyph. The Glyph itself disappeared but spiraling out from it flying up and around his head were five smaller spheres of light, the exact number of nodes in the blank grid for that section. After the barrier disappeared, the floor of the tunnel leading away from the circular central chamber lit up with a soft pale green light.
Okay, he got it. Walk along the tunnel, fill the nodes and solve. Right. Vash tried not to be unsettled by the strange floating crown of green spheres that seemed to have attached itself to him. No, this wasn't strange at all.
"Okay, let's go," was all he said.
Wordlessly the group followed into the tunnel after him. it curved round soothly as all the channels on a proper grid would and after a few minutes Vash came to a round little spot with a stone pedestal sticking up out of the floor of the cave, little shereical niche like a half-moon waiting for him.
"Which one do you pick, mister Vash?" Milly asked.
Good question, there was more than one sphere hovering about his head and all of them had incomprehensible glyphs in them. Well, that wasn't entirely true, the glyphs were familiar to him, it was the same symbol language used to create function nodes on the grid. The identifier sigil for the node hovered in the heart of the spheres with strands of the functions written out in strings of circles like rings of ice-crystals orbiting a planet. And he thought he recognized the grid from the ones he'd filled out at the entrance. Well in that case this shouldn't be too hard. Vash collected the sphere featuring the identifier sigil he remembered using for this spot in the grid when he'd solved it outside and placed it in the pedestal. The tunnel which had been unlit after the pedestal lit with more of the soft green light and the part continued onward to the next node.
It was fairly boring, there was nothing to look at and it was quiet and just a little eerie looking with the green light and all. Doc was immersed in his reading so Jessica and Milly struck up a conversation and Vash listened with half an ear.
"So what's she like?" Jessica asked.
"You mean sempai?" Milly replied. "Oh she's really great! my little big brother calls her a stick in the mud, but he always was a bit wild. Meryl's not a stick in the mud at all. When that guy was dragging me away Meryl came after me and jumped on that mans back hitting and clawing and made him let me go..." Milly trailed off awkwardly and finished.
"But that just meant that she got taken instead of me."
"Oh," said Jessica awkwardly. "So you've been traveling together for a while then, you two and Vash?"
Vash mentally quirked an eyebrow. She was fully fishing for information.
"About three years off and on," Milly said candidly.
Vash knew what she meant by off and on though. Meryl and Milly had traveled with him for a year and a few months before the incident at Augusta, and there had been a period of about a year, maybe a little less, where he'd apparently dropped off teh face of the planet. He'd been hiding with Lina and grandma Sheryl at their house near Carcasses. After they'd been reunited on the sand steamer, they'd been traveling together ever since, but with the rest of the Guns and the discovery of the empty towns and... Legato, it hadn't seemed very long, however now that Vash thought about it, another year had almost flown by without him noticing.
To be honest, Vash tried his best not to notice time as it passed him... if he did and he thought about the passage of time in a human way; one year to the next, celebrating significant dates, he would surely notice how much time there was. So he drifted, partly as a way to keep from being found and partly as a way to not notice that the people around him were getting older and older as time went by. If he had no real permanent attachments then that meant he didn't have to watch them fade like flowers while he lived on, unchanged and unchanging except for a new scar written on his body here or there. He'd tried not to let himself dwell on how lonely that made him feel.
"Wow that's a long time," Jessica said. "When I was a girl he used to come and visit the ship often and play with us kids there, but he never stayed for very long."
"Oh, that's nice," Milly said, probably having nothing else to say to that.
"Where's that man who was here the last time? He helped save my life."
"What man?" Milly asked, requesting clarification.
"Last time Vash came to New Sky City he brought along a guest," Jessica explained. "He was about as tall as Vash with dark hair and a huge cross he carried around on his back. Most of the others didn't want him there because they were afraid he'd bring violence with him to contaminate the peaceful settlement, but really, it was already there we just didn't know it. Vash's friend helped us find the bad puppet-man who'd snuck on board and kidnapped me."
"Oh!" Milly exclaimed, understanding at last whom Jessica was referring to.
"That's um, that was Mister Wolfwood..." she trailed off, smiling brightly. ?"He's uh... he's not..."
"Oh, I see. I'm sorry," Jessica said. "He and Vash certainly seemed to get along well."
"They did, didn't they?" Milly said cheerfully.
To Vash's ears the cheer rang just a bit hollow, but he commended her for trying.
"Not like him and Brad anyway, of course, Brad always did have a chip on his shoulder about Vash..." Jessica trailed off again.
:I'd have a chip on my shoulder too, if the girl I was in love with liked another guy who was never even there with her for years at a stretch,: Vash thought sparing a pitying thought for the poor departed man.
Brad, Wolfwood... who knew how many others, all notches on a long running tally Vash kept on the people his brother had killed just to get to him going all the way back to Rem. Vash was absolutely detirmined that Meryl's name was not going to be added to the list. He quickened his pace a little, deciding to listen to the impatient little voice in the back of his head that said hurry, hurry, hurry. Hurry or Meryl would get hurt, hurry or Meryl might die.
"He's been awful quiet lately," Jessica whispered to Milly, assuming that Vash couldn't hear them just fine.
"Mister Vash is just worried about Sempai," Milly murmured back. "I wonder if she went nuts on him or not."
"Went nuts? Is she crazy?" Jessica asked, and it sounded like there was a note of hope in her voice.
"Only in the usual way that people always go crazy," Milly replied.
Vash heart leapt up a little at this revelation that he was probably not supposed to have overheard. By that point in time Vash had gotten adept at interpreting Milly-speak, and if he was interpreting correctly the "usual way that people went crazy" was love. Did that mean that Meryl...?
Vash immediately reigned himself in before he could get his hopes up too far. It was obvious by the lengths she went to help him that she felt something for him beyond a working-woman fulfilling her duties, but love? How could she possibly love a man who always seemed to drag her along with him into trouble?
:And come to that how can we possibly have a future together?: Vash thought, his shoulders slumping downward.
On the way out to fight his brother, his heart, while heavy with the recent events that still weighed on him, had been light with the thought that once he had faced the demon that plagued him, he might possibly have a future of his own choosing afterward! He could have those things that he'd always wanted but had feared to grasp for himself, he could have that quiet, peaceful little house, and the wife and the kids running around the yard. It might not last forever, but it would be something to hold him in the long, dark time of lonliness afterward.
:You just got selfish,: he recriminated himself. :And now look what happened.:
Meryl taken by his brother and being treated who knew how well or how badly... her finger cut off. If she'd liked him even a little bit before, she probably didn't now. He wouldn't blame her. For her own sake he hoped she decided to cut and run while she was still mostly in one peice. Once he had her safe away from his brother he'd send her back home.
:But what if she won't go?: a part of him argued and Vash chose to ignore the fact that the voice in his mind was blatantly hopeful that she wouldn't leave him.
If she wouldn't go on her own, he'd just have to find a way to make her. These were dangerous sands that he walked. He didn't want her hurt any more than she already was.
:She'd be in danger anyway,: the little voice in his head insisted.
After all, Knives knew about her now (if he didn't before) and worse still, he knew that he could use her to make Vash do things that he wouldn't ordinarily do.
Vash sighed heavily. It was quite a conundrum; was Meryl safer as far away from him as he could get her, or would she be safer with him where he could protect her from the wrath of his brother? Both options had their dangers, if she was far away from him Vash would be counting on the fact that she was out of sight meaning that she would be out of mind as well, and with the far-reaching memory his brother possessed that was far from a guarantee. But the other option was as bad in its own way, if she stayed by his side, she'd be dragged in too, the very same problem that he'd warned her away from before the events at Augusta.
"What's the matter?" Doc asked glancing up with his recording device.
So Vash told him, ending with
"So what do you think? Should I make her leave or let her stay?"
At which the Doc snorted.
"It's been my experience that the choice isn't really yours to make. Cats and women will do as they please. And that goes double for the stubborn, independent sort. No boy, best you talk it over with the lady other wise you'll probably find yourself in entirely new and difficult kinds of trouble."
"What's that mean?" asked Vash.
"A woman like that won't take kindly to having her choices made for her, even if the events are really beyond anything she can understand or control."
"Wouldn't she be happy, I mean I'm only trying to protect her..." Vash mumbled.
"Does she seem the sort who'd go looking for protection?" the Doc countered.
Vash thought about it for a minute. Granted she was an ordinary enough, office-girl sort of woman, (most of the time) but she didn't seem to have any difficulties with tossing aside that city-girl part of her to go gallivanting off into the wild, untamed outlands to chase down outlaws and stop steamer raids either. No when he thought about it, Meryl Stryfe, instead of screaming or running away from danger the way an ordinary girl might went running straight into danger all of the time.
He recalled very well their first ever encounter with each other, the two insurance girls had managed to get away (along with him) from that weirdo with the mohawk and that Loose Ruth fellow and were riding to warn the town about the danger of Vash the Stampede when she'd reigned the beast around, given him ten double-dollars to go and warn the town then rode straight back into danger. "It's part of the job, it's what we do," she told him simply in a voice filled with determination. And there were other examples of her not being afraid to face things that he would happily have run away from if she felt it was the right thing to do. Lots of examples.
"No she doesn't," Vash was forced to concede.
A big strong man to protect her seemed to be the last thing that one Meryl Stryfe was looking for.
:Is she only with me because she feels sorry for me?: Vash wondered momentarily, dismayed the thought.
In all the time they'd traveled together she'd seen all the troubles that his life and fame brought to him. heck she'd seen what his body looked like (Vash was still shocked that she hadn't been the one screaming instead of him) it wasn't unreasonable to think she might pity him. How deep did that pity go? vash felt depression settle in.
:After all, what do I bring to the relationship?: he thought, besides a whole mess of trouble that was.
He didn't have a job or any means to support them, Meryl did all of the work, what could he possibly offer her that would make it worth her time to stay? Nothing. And on top of his having nothing to offer her, he had less than nothing because his brother rode his back like his own personal demon and was detirmined to make not only Vash miserable but to ruin the lives of anyone who'd ever met him.
"I'm not saying you shouldn't perhaps think of a way to try to keep your lady friend out of harms way," Doc continued, oblivious to the depressing turn that Vash's thought had taken.
"Just don't be surprised when she bites your head off for trying," the Doc finished. "She sounds like a temperamental creature."
"Oh she is," Vash said fervently, recalling the numerous times that her temperament had been unleashed upon him.
If the thruth be known howerver, he'd sort of enjoyed himself a little bit. She was stunning when she was angry and whatever she felt, she felt completely. He'd also noticed that trying to distract her or placate her or change the subject once she'd taken the bit between her teeth on something was an excersize in futility. She would not be swayed would not be placated would not be turned aside from her purpose once she had decided on it.
His thoughts and maunderings had taken the party, stopping along at even intervals to place one of the glowing green orbs floating about his head like so many planets orbiting the sun into a pedestal int eh path and lighting thier way to the next section, back to the original three-way intersection that they had caught the elevator down to. Vash plucked another sphere from the beam of light and pushed it onto the barrier of another passage way, and just as with the first, the sigil on the barrier disappeared and the original sphere was divided into a halo of five glyph spheres circling about his head. Vash tried not to sigh with annoyance as he and the rest of the party trudged down the second twisting pathway.
It would be a while in the solving, but Vash was determined that he would get it done. Meryls life depended on it, and he wouldn't fail her again.
The up-jutting basalt craggy-rock formation poked sharply at the sky, like a church steeple and it was a more identifiable landmark than Meryl would have wished, but the main body of teh rock formation was just what tehy were looking for. A tumble of rocks protected on the leeward side of the wind and carved out by nature into a hollow ledge, they could shelter comfortably in it and wait for the storm that was coming to pass.
"And with any luck," Meryl thought out loud. "The storm will utterly cover our tracks. It should definitely kick up enough sand for that."
"Do you think we'll be safe in here?" Remembrance asked in trepidation, clearly eying the shallow shelter offered by the hollow in the rock face nervously. If the mixed sand and air on the wind came from the wrong direction there was no-way it would offer enough protection to keep them from breathing sand, even a newbie could see that for herself.
"Under ordinary circumstances, no," Meryl replied bluntly. "But..."
she held her hands before her and a smoke-grey grid wove itself into the air before her.
"I think that with the power these stones give me I should be able to do something that'll increase our odds of survival."
She'd been practicing enough for the last two days at it, both with the sight and with the pulling power into her channels, grounding and centering it then releasing it back into the stone, it was about time she tested the fruits of her self-imposed training. The least all that work could do was do them some good, and be useful.
Meryl closed her eyes and visualized her goals clearly, what was she wanting to accomplish, and what was the best way to go about it? She wanted a good, tight, secure shelter from the storm, one that wasn't immediately noticeable as such. She looked at the ground of the tumble of rocks before her consideringly. It would be easier to use what was already there than it would be to make new, so...
:If I just reshape the rock...: she thought, almost of their own accord the smokey drifting, purposeless, peweter-grey channels hanging in between her meridians wove themselves into a grid. The symbols for substance and the formula for the rock and the place values for the area before her wrote themselves in symbolic language in the opening nodes of the grid.
:It would be better if it were underground, at least partially,: she decided.
The grid functions changed themselves accordingly.
:The rocks should also form to cover the entire area and not just part of it.: A large sub-grid with secondary and tertiary functions wrote itself and tucked into the following node.
:And the cracks and crannies on the inside of the rock overhead were sealed up so the sand and wind can't get in.:
The grid functions for reshaping the rock added a modifying sub-grid.
:And the entrance were able to be sealed up, but opened easily, perhaps on a hidden pivot.:
Another sub-grid.
She caught a whiff of her scent, which after four days of traveling in the burning heat of The Forge was... really something. Meryl immediately decided that while she was reshaping rock and making someplace safe to hole up in, creating a stone hollow and some water for a bath wasn't a luxury... it was a necessity! They were going to have to sleep near each other in an enclosed space, if they did it after not having bathed in three days the smell would kill them all.
:Water and some way to heat it,: another sub-grid.
Meryl looked at the large, multi-layered grid hanging in the air before and was momentarily daunted by it. She wasn't certain exactly how she had known to write it, she knew that all of that couldn't just be explained away as repressed memories or somesuch, she knew deep down without knowing how she knew that there was something else going on. The thought made her more than a little nervous.
:Nothing for it,: she thought with wary resignation.
:I have to use what I have, no matter how I came to have it.:
For once in her life she had no choice but to just go with what she could do her best and hope that in the end it was all going to make some kind of sense.
Having the grid written out before her, Meryl let it hang there for a moment and then set it aside to use after she had pulled power from the stone and made it into a Source. She closed her eyes, mentally preparing herself.
"I've never done what I'm about to do," Meryl said solemnly. "The grids I used before used power from my own Source and not from that hard, stinging lightning-power in the stones. And secondly, judging by the values required in the grid, i've never pulled as much power as i'm going to need to use from a Source before."
"Can you do it?" Remembrance asked, seroiusly.
"I'm going to have to," Meryl replied.
:No more stalling.:
The Source stone she'd chosen hovered before her, glowing a soft iridescent white. Meryl took a deep breath in and let it out, trying to mentally focus herself enough to endure what she knew was probably going to be something of a painful ordeal for her. That power stung. A lot of it really hurt. Despite all of ther practicing over the last two days she hadn't taken in as much as she was about to.
Meryl sunk her weight and made the pulling motion of reeling silk energy, bring her hands around in a smooth flowing motion to cup the air, top and bottom, before her her belly. A soft glowing nimbus of power, like a cloudy little star with swaying tendrils of power looping and weaving aimlessly in and out of it grew there between her hands. Meryl slowly started to expand the area between her hands, pulling power gradually from the stone and channeling it into the little Source she had started between her hands.
The Source, shielded and centered between her hands grew steadily, as did the level of discomfort that came from pulling power from the stone. At first it started out as barely an itch, the mildest sensation of pain one could feel, then it graduated slowly to a sting, then to a greater string and then to a burn, like whiskey along her ephemeral senses. Then it lost its warming sensation and became a painful burn, like touching an ember. The burn branded itself along her channels feeling like liquid lightning flowing through her. It was painful, more painful than anything she had ever endured before but it was also somehow strangely exhilarating! The power rode through her like a live wire with the force of an erupting volcano behind it, but there was a small part of her that wasn't curled up around herself screaming in agony that delighted in the feeling of controlling so much sheer power.
The Source crystal glowed from a pure iridescent white that had all of the colors of the spectrum within it to a soft violet down into indigo then onto a blue-white light like she had seen in teh incident at Augusta. And still she hung on, pulling her hands apart to suck more of the power from the Source stone into her channels and feeding it through to create the glowing nimbus of Souce cupped behind a shield between her hands. She gritted her teeth as the color changed from blue to blue-green, to green. She gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing in pain as the power that rode her grew in power and pain. Green to golden yellow, yellow on up to ruddy orange then to vemillion red, the color of the sky as the world fell down. Meryl screamed as the scarlet power burned through her, but grasped the lightning with a will and determination that would not be broken, bent or turned aside from her purpose. She was Meryl Stryfe dammit! And she was stronger than this.
Finally, when she swore she could take no more and that the force and pain of the power flowing through her would make her fly apart at the molecules the stone she was pulling power from dimmed and went a dead grey-black. Holding on by grit and determination alone now, Meryl grounded, centered and shielded the Souce again by habit and the dint of drill and careful repetition then junctioned the power into her grid. There was a rippling flash along the grid as the power burst into it like a crescendo-ing sand-slide, but she knew no more after that.
When I posted the first time I just clicked on the post button figuring that you'd all want it sooner rather than perfect... I guess not. I almost always go through and do a last minute edit to clean up all the spelling and grammatical errors before I post a new chapter but i didn't have time this session. Keep in mind that I have one or two other stories I'm also editing and posting as well as this one and I do them all in one session... that about ten to twelve thousand words on average. If anyone wants to volunteer to beta and take some of the work load off, that's be great! Anyone? Well anyway, sorry about all the "teh" (I went back and counted at least ten of them, geeze, I must've written this one late at night) here, I fixed it.
BTW I hope I'm not the only one that wants to sing "down in the underground..." (Yeah, Labyrinth is my all-time favorite movie). Oddly enough, the underground bit was actually inspired by Final Fantasy 10 though, all those damned Cloister of Trials challenges you have to figure out.