Disclaimer: I do not own the Inheritance Cycle Thanks to Regal Eagle from the Dis-cord server for beta reading.
Chapter 24: Just your friendly neighbourhood armoured dragon
By the end of the day, we'd got back to Alagaësia, Skölir glinting in the light of the setting sun. We'd grabbed our- now much smaller- bag of stuff, another bag to keep our new armour in when we weren't using it, and the signal transponders and bug that Spanners had made for us. Those were currently hidden in the bag we had our MultiForm in.
We'd Rifted with Amara leading, so we popped into Alagaësia where she'd left; in the middle of the sky. It was a bit of a surprise, but since we usually flew through the Rift anyway, we weren't too phased.
"Why did we pop out in the middle of the sky?" Kevin asked.
"It's all flat earth below us." Amara said, pointing at the ground. "There's a forest a few days to the west, but there wasn't a place down there for me to open a portal without the chance of being spotted. I didn't want to risk it."
"Good thinking." Driscol said.
"So where are the others?" Kevin asked.
"Probably that way." Amara said, gesturing north. "Come on, they're probably having dinner."
"We ate back in Locostral." Driscol said. "Have you tried Darius's spaghetti and meatballs yet?"
"Nope. Should I?"
"They're sooooo goooood." Kevin moaned wistfully. "It makes your taste buds want to explode."
"I'll have to ask him if he could make them for me then." Amara said.
"Why just you?" Sparta said suspiciously. "There are other dragons around here that love our resident volcano's cooking."
"You know what?" Driscol said teasingly. "I bet they're going out."
Amara rolled her eyes. "No we're not. Although he is a nice person, and he is... kinda... handsome."
Kevin adopted a sing-song like voice. "You have a crush on Darius! You have a crush on Darius!"
"Oh, shut up guys. I don't take the mickey out of you when the others suggest you three are in a relationship with Saphira."
"There's nothing to that argument now anyway." Sparta said indifferently. "There's three of us in here, and that killed off any possible chance of having a relationship."
"Says you." Amara countered. "Love is weird."
"You've got that right." Kevin agreed. "But I seriously don't see us in a relationship. Like, ever."
Amara shrugged, but she let the matter drop.
Landing at camp was fun. Amara went first, landing next to Saphira. Then it was our turn.
Flipping down our visors, we went into a dive. The world was tinted green, and a heads-up-display or HUD appeared over our fields of vision, a digital clock in the bottom right corners, the reading of the altimeter in the bottom left, and two circular icons in the middle of the bottom of the screen. We could blink at those to turn the night-vision on and off, but we didn't need to use them right now.
Concentrating on the altimeter, we pulled up at the last second, leveling out so the rocky ground was only a few meters below us. We watched it whip passed before we gained a little height and turned towards where everyone was watching us. After doing a roll just for the fun of it, we spread our wings as wide as they went, completely killing our speed. That dropped us to the ground with a resounding ringing noise from Skölir.
Flipping the visors back up, we smiled. "Sup. What did we miss?"
Eragon sadly smiled back at us. "Just a few days of travelling. Where did you get that armour?"
"You're not even surprised that we have armour?" Kevin said, crestfallen. "We thought we'd get to see you pull another face of awestruck shock."
Saphira let out the coughing growl that was her laugh. "No. We aren't surprised. You three do and say so much that we think is strange, we are used to it by now."
Sparta mock-glared at Eragon. "No, you will give us a surprised face or suffer our wrath!"
The young rider smiled again, though this time, it seemed a little happier. "Try Murtagh instead. You can scare him all you want."
"Now wait a minute!" Murtagh spluttered, as our minds started whirring.
We shrunk down to human size, the golden edges of Skölir's plates glowing orange as we did so. Murtagh yelled in shock, and everyone else chuckled at his expense.
"You never told me he-" Murtagh started.
Eragon interrupted him. "They. Ghidorah's consciousness somehow triplicated, so he's a they."
Murtagh looked from Eragon to us to try and see if we were messing with him. We nodded to back up Eragon's statement before pointing at each of our heads and writing their names in the dirt for Murtagh's benefit.
"You… you can write!?" Murtagh asked a little hysterically. "You can write, so you can read too, and you can also do that strange growing and shrinking, as well as shooting lightning instead of breathing fire… Is there anything you can't do?"
We smirked and wrote 'Make waffles', which got a laugh out of Murtagh.
"Still, where did the armour come from?" Eragon asked us.
"We're not going to tell you… yet." Driscol said. "But apart from a little help, we made it ourself."
"It's also resistant to magic." Kevin added happily.
"Really?" Eragon asked. "Can I test that?"
"You can if you really want to." Sparta said. "Just don't do anything like jierda, as you won't be able to break this plating. Lifting it will be a strain too."
Eragon nodded. "Ignasia!"
Huh, 'glow'. Not a bad idea for a test. His palm lit up, showing the magic was taking place, but our armour remained stubbornly non-glowy. Eragon released the magic after a few seconds, sweating and panting.
"You weren't lying. That armour wouldn't have glowed even if Saphira was helping me."
"You gonna be okay?" We asked him.
"Yes. I just need a few minutes to recover. How did you make it so hard for magic to act on it?"
"First off, this material is naturally resistant to have magic cast on it." Driscol explained. "And then we got it enchanted with an anti-magic spell, which was tricky because of the metal's normal resistance to magic interfering with the new spell."
"Who enchanted it for you? How did they do it? Are they part of the Varden?" Eragon asked, going into his rapid-fire question mode.
"A bunch of wizards, they put some kind of ward over it, and no. They aren't part of the Varden, the Empire, or Surda." Kevin answered.
"Are they elves or dwarves then?"
We smiled. Eragon's curiosity was one of the reasons that we liked him so much. And the fact that we were very similar people in our experiences helped. We'd been uprooted from our regular way of living, and thrust into a world that we were trying our best to deal with.
"No. They come from where Amara and we disappear too every seventh day. But we aren't going to tell you about that until we're ready to."
Eragon sagged. "Very well."
We patted him on the shoulder before turning to Murtagh and writing out 'Spar?'
"Spar?" Murtagh echoed.
We nodded at him and drew Omen, going through the process that extended the blade to full length. Murtagh gaped at us. We had to shake him before he returned to his senses.
"You want to duel me?" he asked us.
We gave him a thumbs up.
Murtagh shrugged, chuckling slightly. "This will be at the top of the list of strange things I've done."
We smiled, and tossed Omen to Eragon for him to put a block on it for us. While he was doing that, we took off Skölir. We needed practise, and sometimes pain was the best teacher. Besides, we could quickly regenerate whatever was damaged. Speaking of making this realistic…
"Don't put a block on Murtagh's blade." We ordered Eragon.
"Why?" he asked, looking at us like we'd grown a fourth head.
"We want this to be real. If we get hurt, we need to feel it. Pain is a good teacher."
The young rider shrugged, but did as we requested, relaying what we'd said to Murtagh. He grimaced, probably reminded of something that his father had done to him when he was younger, but he readied himself and raised his sword.
Trying out one of Omen's functions, we said "Omen, come to our hand!"
The sword must have understood what we meant, as it shot through the air and into our outstretched hand as we stood vertically. Murtagh's eyebrow rose, but he didn't comment on it.
"Ready?" He asked us.
An hour later, both Murtagh and we collapsed in exhaustion, our swords lying in the dirt beside us. Oddly, though we were fairly battered, we weren't gasping for air like Murtagh was. He was a formidable swordsman, and even though our defence had been strong, we had some large, silvery bruises, and a few small, already healed cuts.
There had been a few moments in the fight when we'd felt something strange. Our world had blurred, something in our heads sparked, and we'd found ourselves in a different place, or a different position, our sword having blocked a strike that would have done us considerable damage. After asking the others about it, we were surprised to find that they hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary.
So that was a mystery for another day. At the moment, we were watching over everyone as they snoozed. And we were about to implant Murtagh with a bug. Fortunately, he was utterly spent from our swordfight, so he didn't even twitch as we pricked a small hole in his neck, slipped the tiny, pill-shaped device in, and put our hand over his neck to stop the bleeding.
"Can I drink his blood?"
Driscol and Sparta turned towards Kevin, perfectly synchronized. As plain as day, their faces read 'Are you ****ing stupid?'
"Just making a joke." Our left head murmured dejectedly.
The next few days, the seven of us skirted around Urû'baen. Far around. The three of us had decided that we weren't willing to go any closer to it than having it as a dot on the horizon, so we'd forced everyone to take the long, long route around. However, there was a small problem in the fact that the slower we went, the shorter Arya's timetable to live would be.
We saw no alternative to the problem except flying, which would have put us in plain sight of Galbatorix. As on now, that was a death sentence for the others, and a realm of pain for us. So, unfortunately, we were stuck with walking.
We did pass various towns, where Eragon and Murtagh would go in for supplies. Well, Murtagh would go in for supplies, while Eragon went in to search any jails or prisons for Arya. We knew because of the signal transponders. Murtagh was quick and efficient, going in, getting supplies and getting out. Eragon took much longer, hardly moving for long periods of time, showing that he was either incredibly interested in something, was reading something, or was checking through loads of prisoners to try and find the literal 'woman of his dreams'. He still hadn't mentioned it to us, so we decided not to bring up the matter.
In the meantime, we'd realised that we were a little lacking in some areas. The biggest of them being combat, since we'd only properly fought Felix, and we had been running on instincts. Zapping Urgals into dust didn't count. We needed physical experience. Therefore, we'd asked Amara to start fighting us, so we could both get up to speed on how to go up against an enemy dragon.
We'd also asked Islingr to start spontaneously testing our mental defence. She'd happily obliged, and had taken to setting her, Amara, and us in three-way mental battles. This was perhaps the most powerful benefit we had of being three consciousnesses in one body. We could multitask like a god.
Kevin was the most eager of us to launch into mental operations, and he'd severely bulked up our mindscape. We had shifted our mental fortifications from Helm's Deep to Locostral, as it was the place where we felt the most secure. We'd installed a force field, engaged wards, had set up hundreds of all-purpose turrets that would fire wherever a target was on the ground, in the sky, or floating in orbit, and we'd surrounded the entire thing with spaceships intended for destruction. And if all that failed, we had a Death Star sitting in mental orbit, a teleporter ready to beam us up on command.
As for physical combat, Islingr served as a referee and an advisor. She told us where our weak point would be, such as our wings, necks, and tails. Well, they were more 'weak points' for Armara than us, but still, it was good information to know for attacking an opponent. And speaking of attacking an opponent, Amara could go all-out, since we could regenerate. We had to be careful not to accidentally kill our cousin.
However, our battles did give us some interesting insights into our abilities. For example, our gravity beams held a balance of being able to char things into dust and being able to move stuff around. The more power we put in to kill something, the less we could move it. The opposite was also true. The more we moved something, the less we harmed it.
Surprisingly, we were somehow immune to Amara's poisonous gas, which we found to be odd. It affected everything else we tested it on, which were only animals like deer and other forest critters. Even Amara herself wasn't immune to it's effects. But we were. Strange.
It was night of day six. The stars were out and twinkling down on us. Amara and we were still awake as the others slumbered.
"Do you think that there's anything up there?" Kevin wondered. "The multiverse says that 'we are not alone', but do you think that this universe has aliens?"
"Do we not count?" Driscol chuckled.
"I wouldn't say so." Amara whispered. "We're more like… I don't know. Something a little closer to home."
We were quiet for a while, a cool and gentle breeze blowing.
"Do you think there'll be more multi-headed Plainswalkers?" Sparta asked.
"Probably." Amara said. "Infinite multiverse, infinite forms. Why?"
"We could form a group." our right head explained.
"What brought on this bout of madness?" Driscol asked.
"Yeah! That's my job!" Kevin complained.
Sparta shrugged. "We'd be united by being stuck in weird bodies with multiple heads. We could meet up, complain about it, yell at each other, and generally have a good time."
Amara smiled from all five of her heads. "You and I have a very different idea about what a good time is, Sparta."
We shuddered slightly. While we had separate names to differentiate each of us, we still thought of ourselves as Cade or Ghidorah. Sparta, Driscol and Kevin were just placeholders. Admittedly, we liked them- except Kevin- but they didn't have the sense of belonging that our original or taken names had. We were all Cade, and we missed our name. We missed being whole. And we still missed our home.
Moaning softly, we flopped onto the ground in sadness. Amara looked at us oddly, then in understanding as she looked into our eyes.
"Oh Cade…"
We started tearing up. We had no idea why. Perhaps we were just overstressed, overworked. Making Skölir was supposed to have given us a break from all this, but… Well, we didn't really know what the problem was…
Amara picked us up and gave us a big hug. "Shh… It's gonna be okay, cuzes. I got you. Let it out."
As we silently cried into our cousin's scales, we could only think about how lucky we were to have her with us.
We had a dream that night. Not of Shadows, though. Instead, we were watching through a glass wall as a ruined city burned. It was on Earth, and as the city receded, the shattered fragments of the Golden Gate Bridge told us it was San Francisco.
"Terrible what the Shadows are capable of, isn't it?" A voice said from beside us.
That voice… that voice was practically dripping in power. It was a voice that would read fate like it was a book. A voice that would dictate life and death itself. A voice of a being much, much more powerful than we were.
Turning, we saw a feminine figure that was about three meters tall and consisted of fluctuating, orange light. She had long, flowing hair that reached down to her waist, small currents of light flowing through it. She didn't have a face, just a blank front to her head, but it served to show where she was looking.
"This isn't a dream, is it?" Driscol guessed.
"Nope."
"Then is it the future?" Sparta guessed.
"It's a possible future. As for whether it will happen, that's mainly up to you Plainswalkers, kid. Or kids, if you prefer."
We scrutinised the… well, we guessed she was a woman. She had implied that she wasn't a Plainswalker, but she didn't like the Shadows, and she knew us.
"Who are you?" Kevin asked.
"And how did you get inside our heads?" Sparta said suspiciously.
The woman chuckled, waved her hand, and the view changed to one overlooking a large, friendly-looking robot travelling through a city. "I'm not willing to disclose who I am yet, Cade. Ask your Elders about the Great Two tomorrow. You have a Gathering tomorrow, right?"
We nodded, dazed. Who was this… person? How did she know so much?
"And you three are the ones who are in my head. Sort of. You're one of the ones out for my heart, after all. And you're the strongest one so far."
Driscol shook his head. "I'm sorry. The more you talk, the more confused we get. How do you know our collective name?"
The woman laughed. It was a wonderful sound, a graceful harmony of humour. "Don't worry about it Cade. Or Driscol, Kevin and Sparta. I'm not just on your side. I am your side. I'll meet you again soon."
"In person?" We asked. "With proper answers?"
"No and yes." The woman said cryptically. We could practically imagine her smirking. "I won't be able to meet you in person in any realm. My power draws the attention of my dark counterpart, but it was your link to me that brought you three here. And by the time we meet again, yes. I'll be able to give you proper answers."
With that, she waved her hand and we shot to wakefulness, feeling like we were made of pure energy and wondering what the heck had just happened.
Snapshot 4:
"Well… ****."
Ragnar didn't care which of his crew said it. This was going to be a nightmare.
"Am I being a problem?" The new Plainswalker asked hesitantly. "I'm sorry! I'll make it up to you!"
The Elder tried to calm down the newest addition of their ranks. "Kid, it's not your fault. It's just you're… huge."
"Will he even fit in the Infinity?" Gipsy wondered.
Ragnar did the calculations and nodded. "Just. It's getting him in there that's the problem."
"Yeah." The five voices of the Megazord said. "Could we lower the ship over…"
"Billy." The new guy said nervously.
"Over Billy so he could just hold on as the blast doors close under him?" The Megazord continued.
":I'd like to point out that's a piloting nightmare.:" GLaDOS said over the comms.
Ragnar pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm not too concerned by that… It's Cade who's going to be the problem."
The entire crew shivered slightly. Memories flashed through their process. Losing an arm. Being drained of energy. Having a tail smash into their torso like a wrecking ball would squash a fly.
"Oh God…" Omega Supreme said, completely dropping his vocal filter.
"Yeah." Ragnar said. "We'll have to break it to them slowly, and show them that Billy isn't hostile. After all, I don't think that the Monsterverse Ghidorah could take on Godzilla Earth."
