Wow. A whole week's already gone. Time certainly flies, doesn't it? Well, I just spent some of the last days of summer cramped in a classroom for driving school. Yippee. Anyway, here's the next chapter! --Lady PhoenixDagger *//.^*
*****
The next morning was hot. Moreover, it was almost unbearably stifling. Trowa squirmed uncomfortably in his chair, his brand new bullet-proof body armour barely shifting on him. A trickle of sweat crawled slowly between his shoulder blades, making him squirm even more. The kitchen was crowded and the air was rank with sweat.
What was it again that Misty kept telling him? Ah yes. "If you don't like the weather in Canada, just wait a minute."
"Stop wiggling!" Cathy sniped. She shoved her sweaty hair from her face and resumed brushing back Trowa's bangs. "Hold still." Something slimy and shockingly cold was slopped onto Trowa's head, momentarily chasing away the oppressive heat. He grimaced as the gel was dragged through his hair and the whole brown, gooey mess was secured at the back of his neck with an elastic band.
"Oh, Trowa…" Quatre gasped at his now bang-less friend. "Your face is so…there."
"Don't move, Quatre. You'll end up getting goo in your eye." Relena paused in dragging the soft black pencil through his eyebrow. The raid was to take place later that day and the boys were getting ready. This raid, like any other, was going to be risky and Dulcet had insisted that the boys be as unrecognisable, in case some of the cameras at the base were still in use. Thus, to the Gentle Noble's chagrin, Quatre's hair had been previously dyed a cheap midnight black and Relena was just putting the finishing touches on his eyelashes and brows.
The ex-pilots, Relena, Cathy, Kari, Dulcet, the Broman family and Belle were all at the Broman home, crammed into the tiny kitchen. The air seemed almost tangible as everyone in the room tried their best not to breathe it.
"Nooo!" Duo shrieked, sprinting around the kitchen table, Belle and Marrigan Broman racing after him, bathed in sweat. "Nooo! I am not going to dress in drag!"
"Is he always like this?" Marrigan lunged for Duo's braid and missed. The Broman siblings' mother was a smallish woman with wine-red hair darker than that of Walker and her daughters. A warrior by trade, even at rest, she looked more than ready to kill or maim something.
"NO! I'm not wearing it!!!"
Calm down, Duo." Ali Broman paused in daubing makeup around Wufei's eyes to hide his telltale ethnicity. The Broman patron looked comical doing it, a seven-foot tall Arab man patiently painting away with a brush that looked like it would snap in his hands. His other hand cupped Wufei's chin with surprising gentleness, showing his Druidic calling and the way the brush make perfect stroke after perfect stroke showed he was an artist by trade. (AN: Just like me! Except for the seven foot tall male Druid thing…) "Wufei is sitting still. If you run around then you'll just get sweaty and the makeup will be all the more difficult to get on."
"Nooooo!!!!!!"
"Duo, get your lily ass over here!" Marrigan shouted.
"Nooooo!!!!!!"
"Just wait until he passes out from the heat and paint him then." Heero walked in from the bathroom, his face and hands done up with wicked scars.
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
With a gusty sigh, Misty paused in the middle of helping Kari get her torso armour on and lunged as Duo dashed by, grabbing him around the waist in a hard hug that knocked them both over.
"NOO-"
"Please, Duo?" The red-haired bard pouted with tears welling up in her eyes. "Please? I'd hate for Black Hood to recognise you and hurt you. Pretty, pretty please? For me?" She shot him point blank with the puppy dog eyes. "Please?"
Duo squeezed his eyes shut, but the pout seemed to bore it's way through his eyelids. "Argh…shit…damn…okay." He sat up and sighed, turning his face up. "Fine. Ladies, make me into a girl." The Great Shinigami didn't seem happy to say it, but at least Misty had stopped pouting at him.
"That was evil," Cathy accused with a smile. "How did you do that?"
Misty grinned back. "I'm the baby of the family. Puppy eyes are like survival tactics to me." She stood and made a show of brushing herself off. "Besides, it was that or chop off the braid."
Duo shot her a hurt look and pulled his sweaty braid close, even as the makeup-wielding Belle and Marrigan closed in and pounced, brandishing powder puffs and lipstick like petal pink swords of doom.
"Ooh, this violet eye shadow is so you!" cooed Marrigan.
Belle giggled girlishly. "Stop frowning! You'll smudge your lipstick!"
"Damn, the sweat's ruining his foundation!"
"Are you nutjobs enjoying yourselves?!"
"Why yes, thank you, dear."
"AAARGGHH!!!"
A tiny breath of cool air escaped into the stifling kitchen as Walker pulled a Sprite from the fridge. "Quit yelling, Duo," he said, wearily twisting the cap off. "The long hair is more recognisable on a boy than on a girl and we don't know enough about how your body'd react to magic to try cutting and regrowing it later."
Duo shot him a murderous look as Belle gathered up his hair to make a half ponytail. "Easy for you to say. You get to stay male."
"Quiet, Duo." Ria sighed and placed her own ice cold Sprite to her sweaty forehead and tossed another to Ryu, who had just come in the side door, already wearing his body armour and a long leather trenchcoat. Opaque black sunglasses covered his disconcertingly red eyes. Despite his layers of clothing and the heat, he didn't seem to be sweating, or even mildly uncomfortable. "Ooohhh, that feels good," Ria sighed again. "It's too hot to listen to you whine. So be good or we'll break out the control top pantyhose. Ma'am."
Ears twitching away an enquiring fly, Dulcet stood, his fur damp with sweat. There was scalpel in his hand, which he turned over and over with practised ease. "Enough banter. We have a job to do." He looked the boys over. All were now radically different than when they first came in. Trowa with his brushed-back ponytail, Wufei with his wide eyes and loose hair, Heero with his scarred face and hands, Quatre with his raven tresses and Duo with his pouty, painted face and his half-ponytail. Marrigan had even taken the liberty of tying it with a simply precious little pink ribbon. Dulcet gestured to Tama, who was leaning by the fridge, basking in the sweet chill whenever someone opened the door. "Go and get the box, please. I left it on Walker's bed."
Tama nodded and went into small room off the kitchen.
"So far we haven't told you boys too much of what we're going to do during this upcoming raid." Dulcet's yellow eyes glinted in the brassy sunlight while the scalpel shone steely in his hand. "The storage bunker –our target- is located in the Gobi desert directly below a fake government research centre some fifty miles in or so." The lynx man paused and tossed an opalescent dream drop into the air. A floor plan appeared in the air. "This," Dulcet began, pointing to a wide chamber deep in the centre of the compound with his scalpel, "is where the clones are being stored. There are about fifty of them in independently operating holding tanks, though there could be more. Black Hood has been smart lately: the compound is completely unmanned. No human casualties, no witnesses. Our mission is to go in, lay explosives, blow the place to hell and back and then get our asses out of there. In a perfect world, we could just get in, use magic and get out, but Black Hood has discovered a way to block magic use in their facilities. In other words, they use shields to block out magic just to screw us all over, so we have to do it the old fashioned way." He paused to mop at a trickle of sweat running between his eyes. "There'll be genetically mutated watchdogs hybrids in there, no question about it. We haven't been able to uncover what they may be this time, but there have been signs that Black Hood is reanimating their dead. If any of you want back down, I totally understand. This is your last chance, after this there's no running away. Are there any takers?"
None of the newly-disguised boys backed off. They simply nodded slowly, letting all this new information sink in.
A huge cardboard box wandered into the room. "Here you go," Tama said from somewhere behind it. She set it down on the kitchen table among tubes of makeup and hair gel and fake scars.
"Thank you." The cat man opened the box and reached in, pulling out several pairs of sunglasses. Carefully, he inspected each one and separated them into two piles. "These sunglasses are a very important asset to our mission." He tapped a small bud attached to the rim of one. "This bud lets the boys back here see and hear everything we do. The lenses aren't tinted on your side of the glass, but they'll hide your eyes to some extent. Ryu, come here."
The huge man strode forward, not sweating despite the oppressive heat. Dulcet reached up and tapped the arm of his glasses, tipping them forward a bit to reveal a thin, black wire plugged directly into the big man's temple. "These sunglasses" –he pointed to a pile- "are for the survivors. We're fitted with internal plugs all over our bodies. The one here" –he tapped his own head- "goes directly into the brain, so our information is a bit more thorough. Hence, my scalpel here." Dulcet grinned widely, baring fanged incisors and held the shiny metal instrument up before setting it down again and reaching back into the box. This time, he pulled out a long, black leather trench coat. "This, aside from looking really cool with the sunglasses, is also important for the mission. These babies are the brainchild of Keown and Pinney in the research labs of the Keep. They're completely slash proof and flame retardant, plus they hide the body armour and your body shapes quite effectively."
Darien spoke up. "We're also going to arm you guys to the teeth." He pulled back his own trench coat to reveal weapons strapped to every body part. Two guns were strapped to each leg, four at the waist, two in side holsters, and a double row of throwing knives strapped crosswise on his chest. His sword, the Black Dragon, was strapped to his back, the hilt poking out from the collar of his coat. Heaven only knew what was strapped to his arms, which were still hidden in his sleeves. "Like this."
Five big scary grins grew on the boy's faces.
"Maybe we'll just arm you kids a little bit later," said Dulcet, taking notice of the freakish smiles. "Anyway, our progress will be monitored by the wizards on a set of screens back at the Keep. You can talk to them via a mic on the bridge of the sunglasses and they can talk to you via a tiny speaker in the arm by the ear piece." There was a pause as the boys shrugged on their new coats and slid on their new sunglasses, which buzzed with the sounds of tinny wizards voices.
"Testing, testing, one, two."
Silently, Ryu produced another box, this one full of weapons. Dulcet, Walker, Kari, Ryu and the boys strapped them on in silence, almost listlessly in the oppressive heat. With his scalpel, Dulcet carefully uncovered the neuro-plugs in Darien, Walker, and Kari's heads, working quickly to avoid letting the incisions heal around the scalpel, and plugged the glasses in. Walker did the same to Dulcet and all was ready.
Walker stood, daffodil eyes shrouded in tinted glass, the slender wire leading into his temple. He had his coat open and when he walked, it flapped sluggishly like the wings of some great, disaffected bird. From where she sat, Relena noticed curiously that there were vertical slashes on the back of his coat, two long ones beginning at his shoulder blades and one shorter one at the base of his spine. She asked what they were for.
Grinning slyly, Walker flexed his shoulders. Abruptly, a pair of leathery, nine-foot batlike wings burst from his back and a long, smooth, serpentine tail slithered from his spine with a dry slithery sound. Languidly, he beat the air with his wings, filling the room for an instant with blessedly cool air.
"Mmmm… that feels nice." The red-haired Lord of Alaryan's Keep stretched like a cat and snapped his tail to work the kinks out, cracking the air like a whip. He shot a cheerful look over his shoulder at the gawking crowd behind him. "I've ruined many a good suit that way, you know."
*****
"The Gateways of Alaryan's Keep were created in 1590 AD by a team of seven necromancers who wanted a new way to travel between worlds without encountering the Bond. So, they built in the annals of the Keep one and twenty doorways, each leading to a certain place: seven doors to the necromancers' respective homelands, thirteen go to uninhabited areas we use for agriculture, fishing or hunting.
"But the twenty-first Gateway was created differently. It was created to lead basically everywhere else, anywhere the user wishes to go." Darien's voice bounced off the low stone ceiling of the tunnel-like hallway deep below Alaryan's Keep. Quatre shivered at the echo. The oppressive heat above ground was now replaced with a dank, damp chill that clung like a clammy manacle clamped on bare skin.
Belle had been tutoring Quatre at home -it still amazed him that he already thought of it as home- every day, showing him how to use his gift and to control it. Already, he was getting better at turning his empathic powers on and off, so to speak. Tentatively, he reached out to Kari's mind and brushed against it.
Stop that.
Quatre blushed deeply. Sorry, he apologised. I'm still new at this.
Doubtless. You're as clumsy as a new born colt. Stay loose. Don't assault the mind. Flow into it. Kari grinned suddenly. Like this.
To Quatre's horror and slight amusement, Wufei whipped himself around with a loud porcine snort and began slapping himself repeatedly in the face.
Want me to make him scratch his ass?
"Kari, stop it," Dulcet snapped over his shoulder. "You'll ruin his disguise."
Wufei stopped slapping himself in the face and cast a bewildered look at the coyly smiling girl.
"How much longer?" Duo whined. With his gift, Quatre noticed a tiny mote of embarrassment in his irritation. "My fake boobs are getting all lopsided on me."
Walker sighed. "I'd fix them for you, but I think all the men here would agree it would be just a little hard to explain if someone suddenly came down the corridor. You'll have to do it yourself, Miss."
"Shut up."
"Make me, girlie."
Duo looked sideways at Walker's muscled form, obvious even under layers of armour and clothing. Carefully, he shut his mouth and sidled slowly away.
"We're here." Darien's voice echoed loudly through the low hallway. They had come to a huge archaic wooden door fully twice his height with what looked like words written in some sort of archaic script. He grasped the giant door handle and pulled, its well-greased hinges swinging slightly. Everyone trooped in.
The Chamber of the Gateways was the medium in size and made of stone like the rest of Alaryan's Keep. The floor was worn smooth by the passage of many feet. Racks of well-greased farm implements lined the walls, shining brightly in the light flung from torches hanging in the rings around the room. Walker set his own torch in a vacant ring and strolled to the middle of the room, absently fingering the hilt of the dagger concealed in his sleeve. Abruptly, Quatre realised that he hadn't seen anyone light the torches, save for Walker's. The Gateways stood in semicircle, twenty-one simple wooden doors set up with nothing behind them. Most of the doors had something on them. Seven doors had crude pictures on them, thirteen had the same strange lettering as on the chamber door. The last Gateway had nothing on it.
"Those pictures are the signets of the seven necromancers," Zach buzzed in Quatre's ear. "See? That eagle was the seal of Deliraeal, and the door leads to his homeland." Tiny crosshairs honed in on the door in question, mute testament to the four wizards at the controls topside in the Keep. The crosshairs moved to a door with the sign of a fox on it. "That one's Azraeyaal's land. Horrid place. All snow and ice; I haven't the faintest idea why he opened a Gateway to it in the first place."
"The writing here is called 'Ancient' the second official language here, other than English," Walker said, running his fingers over the carved letters of one of the Gateways. "This one leads to the tanneries. Stinky place." He pointed to another. "That's farmland and that" –more pointing- "is prime hunting grounds. Nice, fat coneys there. Harts, too."
Rabbits and deer. Kari sent out the thought to all five rather confused ex-pilots. Walker's system needs to digest raw meat on occasion, so he hunts a lot.
Quatre felt the turning of four stomachs, plus his own. "Raw meat?"
Mmm-hmm. Kari nodded, speaking again to all five boys. He was fed only raw meat by Black Hood when he was little, so his stomach has trouble digesting other things, like chocolate. She grinned wolfishly and licked her pouty lips. I don't, though.
The back of Trowa's neck turned beet red.
Walker opened the unmarked door. "Come on. We had a Jeep put out there for us and that Gobi desert sun'll heat it until it fries you to the touch if we don't get out there soon." With a wide grin, he opened the door and stepped through, not coming out the other side.
Bleakly, Dulcet grinned, baring fanged incisors at the others. "Up and away! If I die before you do, you each owe my corpse a Coke."
*****
Thanks for reading and don't forget to review!
Ja ne!
L.P.D. *//.^*