If Max could sum up his first impressions of Haliki island in one word, he
would have put 'dull' to use. 'Dreadfully', had a second phrase been
permitted to the exercise, would have been included as a precursor to
'dull'. As he watched the dinged up old fishing boat that had transported
him pulled slowly away from the shoreline, a lump of sinking metal began to
materialize in his stomach. The dock was deserted. Not a single person
greeted his arrival, nor were there signs that anybody had put it to use in
quite a while.
Looking back at the beaten, dusty path that presumably led towards town, Max thought to himself, "What in Spira have I gotten myself into now?" Sighing, he hefted his suitcase over his shoulder – it was a truly unique suitcase in that he had done away with the handle and attached a strap instead – and started treading his way up that same dusty path.
Though dull, it seemed like a nice place: the perfect spot for retirement. The entire island seemed absolutely free of Fiends. The jungle which surrounded him could hardly be called forbidding, either: the tress, though numerous, were parted in such a way that a jaunt through the brush was hardly uncalled for. Despite it all, however, Haliki did not strike Max as the kind of place a young man like himself would thrive in. Dull, dull, dull.
That dullness managed to dispel itself as he approached town. Perhaps half a kilometre from the outskirts, Max suddenly found himself amidst a fairly large group of armoured and armed individuals, few of whom looked particularly pleased that Max had popped up.
One garbed in red rather than the standard green approached him. "Halt, right there. What's your business here?"
Max, ever prepared and seldom flustered, snagged his Gazette VIP badge from out of his pocket. "Reporter from the Lucan Gazette, sit. I'm here to check up on the situation that's occurring on this island."
The soldier pursed his lips and frowned, sliding his rather long broadsword neatly and firmly into the dirt. "Reporter? There's nothing to report about here, son. Move along."
"Oh yeah?" Max was hardly one to be dissuaded. Not when he was so close. "Then what's with the stony reception, eh? I heard about this place on my way here, from a bunch of sailors: it's supposed to be a really nice little Yevonite community, full of peaceful, pious old people. Not soldiers."
The soldier remained adamant. "Just a routine patrol, kid. Warrior monk affairs. Nothing huge."
"Oh yeah? That's good. Then you won't mind if I go in the town, right?"
This drew a deep silence. "C'mon, man, open it up to me. If there'r monks here then it must be something big, and if it's big, then the people need to know."
The monk looked around at the other soldiers. Some avoided his gaze; others merely shrugged. None of them offered their superior any help. He sighed.
"Ugh, fine. . . listen up, though, kid: no touching anything, alright? And I don't want to see any biased bullcrap popping up in your paper when I read it, or we'll be having words. We're just here doing our jobs."
Max grinned jubilantly. "I'll tell it like I see it, my good man."
The soldier grimaced. "Yeah, well, you won't be so happy when you see what we're doing here. I guess it's probably for the best that people on the mainland find out what's goin' on, though."
---
Max could have embellished the truth. He could have coated it over finely, with his fine phrasing and knack for the rhetorical: he was a damned fine writer, and although he didn't know as much, that was the reason why Donebert often relegated his place to the office.
"The kid makes words just plain work. It's some kind of gift he has. Only problem is he's not much in the manners' department, and a reporter needs to keep it cool in order to get the info they need. They need to insist, yeah, but they gotta do it politely." In short, Max lacked the social graces needed to be a successful reporter. Or by Donebert's standards, anyway.
So he could have embellished. He could have glossed over what he saw with every nicety he could muster. But the plain fact of the matter, as he would later write, was that each and every last person in the small religious community was dead.
No, strike that: they were butchered. The town was now a bloody wasteland. Most of the buildings had been destroyed or at least scorched by a now extinguished fire. It was a miracle that it had not spread to the trees and set the entire island aflame. The walls, the grass, and even the small fountain in the centre of town, all of them sported a wide range of bloody stains, from tiny blots to huge, voluminous splashes. Several times as he walked through the town with the soldier in red, max noticed monks scratching the blood from the walls with their gloved fingers, as though entranced by the sheer amount of gore they saw. Often, too, this spellbound state would snap, with the spontaneity of a bursting soap bubble, and the soldier would run off into the trees, remove his helmet, and wretch violently.
Because it was not only blood. There were bodies, too. Oh, were there ever bodies.
They were strewn everywhere. Some were flung over walls, as though tossed by an incredible force: others simply lay prone on the ground, mouths wide in chilling horror. A few were heaped at the entrance to their tiny huts, as though the fire had overcome them before they could fully escape. Three, apparently, had nearly escaped the town limits before whatever had done this caught them, and pierced them on the large, iron gates that had once greeted every visitor to the town. Max had vomited at these three, for one of them was a little girl that looked to be no older than ten.
And these bodies were mutilated. Many of them sported wide, ripping gashes, running down their sides and gushing forth unmentionable objects that had dried in the glazing sunlight. A few were charred from blazes long gone. Several were devoid of body parts, most of which could be found several feet away. The entire town smelt absolutely horrendous. Max fainted on his first tour through it, and had to be carried to a nearby first-aid tent for resuscitation.
Propped up on a cot, facing the soldier in red – who had now removed his helmet, revealing a man in his mid-thirties with shortly-cropped brown hair and sad grey eyes – Max quickly choked down a proffered canteen of water, and spewed it out across the tent as memories of the sights he'd seen came flashing back.
The soldier steadied him. "Whoa, easy there, kid. Not too fast."
Max gasped. "Dear Yevon. . . what the hell happened to them all. . ."
The soldier shrugged with a sort of frustrated nonchalance. "No clue. All we know is that most of it was done with a sword, and some of it with really, really strong fire magic." He sighed and plunked himself down on the bottom of the tent, a metallic clank reverberating throughout the interior of it. "This isn't the worst of it, either. There's one house we checked, and the guy in there. . ." He shuddered, seemingly unable to continue. "Well, he's not much of a guy anymore. Could only tell he was in the first place by the fact that his. . . genitalia, were hanging from the ceiling."
Max's eyes bulged. He thought he might vomit again. "Holy. . . this is. . ."
"A bit much, I know. When we first got here, a few days ago, it was worse. Everything was still a bit more fresh." The soldier licked his lips. "Frankly, we're a bit edgy about moving the bodies. This is more than we ever bargained for."
"You're not kidding me," Max replied, slowly gaining a tiny modicum of control over himself. "Did anybody survive? Anybody at all? And have you sent any of them yet?"
The soldier seemed slightly more upbeat at this. "Yeah, we sent 'em. One of the first things we did was call in a Summoner. I bet you can imagine how much trouble he had doing it, the poor guy. But, anyway, yeah, we think there's one more survivor, but we're not really sure about that."
Max gazed at him in confusion. "Wha? How's that work?"
"Well, so far as we can tell, there's a small cottage out in the woods: problem is, it looks like there's a magical barrier set up around it. You can go in, but, can't come back out again. We've sent for an expert in this crap to get rid of it for us, but he's still a week in coming." He gazed outside the tent, watching his men as they continued to prod about the ruins, avoiding bodies as much as possible. "Frankly, kid, I doubt that anybody in that thing has a clue of what happened out here. Once you're in a barrier, you can't really get out, or so I'm told: but, hell, maybe whoever's in there can give us a hint or something."
Max's mind began to percolate at this. "You say you can go in, but not back out, right?"
"Yeah. That's why I haven't sent any soldiers in yet: dunno what we'll find. Hell, for all I know, the murderer could be in there, and we wouldn't know it. Barrier spells are usually set up for a reason." He cocked a wary eyebrow, eyes studying Max. "Kid, you're not thinking of. . ."
Max gulped. "Well, I don't think I'll be able to report on what's out here. I. . . I can't look at it, frankly. It's too much. I've seen enough anyway. But, if there's somebody in there, maybe I could get an exclusive, or something. . .?" He shrugged weakly.
The soldier gazed at Max in dismay. "I don't think that's a good idea. You have no clue what's in there. Like I said, what if whatever did this is in there? You'd be stuck with it."
Max closed his eyes. "Yeah, I know. But news is news."
---
Max could see the glowing luminescence of the barrier peeping through the trees, throwing forth a faint mist that hypnotically pulled in the eye for a closer inspection. Walking alongside the soldier – whose name Max now knew to be Alan – he squinted, trying to see beyond the barrier. In the faint distance, a cottage was waveringly visible, though any detail of it was lost in the strange green light.
Alan took one look at it and shivered. "Damn bizarre. I've never liked magic, personally." He placed a hand of caution on the young reporter's shoulder. "You positive, kid?"
"It's Max. Get it right by the next time I see you." Was all that Max replied with, a slight smirk playing over his face. Alan couldn't help but laugh despite the situation.
"Fine, fine. You get back out here in one piece, you hear? If I find out a week from now that you got split in half or something, I'll be tempted to just let you turn into a fiend."
Max grimaced at the thought, totally sobered. "Yeah."
They approached the barrier, skirting the edge of it by mere feet. Alan scratched his unshaven chin absentmindedly. "If I've been told right, you really have to push hard to get in. Sort of a safety device to make sure outsiders don't go wandering in without noticing."
Max nodded. Tentatively, as though the barrier might scald him, he ran his fingers across the smooth, misty surface of it. The barrier felt of solid and liquid simultaneously, nearly throwing Max's senses into a bewildered overdrive. In spite of his confusion, however, he pushed harder, and gradually, his hands sunk into the bizarre surface. His body, perhaps elated by his success – or not wanting to be suddenly separated from the hands via less than pleasant means – plunged in soon after.
Max felt as though he was being bodily thrown as soon as he passed within the barrier. A thousand angry, invisible hands pushed him several feet into the brush, and Max landed face-first in a large, twiggy bush. He cursed violently and rolled back onto the path, wiping leafs out of his face and gradually gazing back at the barrier.
It had become a solid wall of abnormal green, slicing trees in half and yet keeping them whole. Nothing beyond it – not Alan, not the forest, not a single thing – was visible. He didn't even have to inspect it closely to know that he was stuck until help came.
"On to business then, I guess," Max murmured, and rose, brushing himself off. His eyes travelled towards the nearby cottage. No longer eclipsed by misty green, he saw it in the full light of day: it had become rather dilapidated, collapsing on one side. The front door had been replaced by a large, ungainly plank of wood, hanging lamely off rusted hinges and ready to drop off at a moment's notice. Both of the windows in the front were boarded up. The porch sported rotting boards, and several holes. Surprisingly enough, the roof looked largely intact.
Max approached it with the utmost degree of caution. His suitcase hung lamely from his shoulder, and he brushed it aside with mild annoyance. His feet, slow and wary, carried him towards the house, ready to run should danger present itself. But. . . run to where? The barrier kept him inside. No level of prudence would assure Max's safety.
Yet he couldn't help himself. The going was slow, no matter how he rationalized the issue. And even when the old man appeared at the door, waving Max forward with a grim lack of worry, the young man still took a good five minutes to get himself planted on the porch.
He was a wizened old figure, with hardly a straight part to his frame: Max was certain he'd never seen a more crooked back, or more knobbly knees. His greyed flesh hung in sagging droops off of his bones, giving the man an appearance that could not have been less threatening. And his voice, that poor, broken, accented voice, could not have sounded less old had it tried. It was with this voice that he called out to Max from the aged porch.
"Don't worry about making it fast, lad, I'm sure you're a wee bit frightened of the whole situation. I've been here for thirteen years now; old O'aka can stand to wait a minute or two more."
Looking back at the beaten, dusty path that presumably led towards town, Max thought to himself, "What in Spira have I gotten myself into now?" Sighing, he hefted his suitcase over his shoulder – it was a truly unique suitcase in that he had done away with the handle and attached a strap instead – and started treading his way up that same dusty path.
Though dull, it seemed like a nice place: the perfect spot for retirement. The entire island seemed absolutely free of Fiends. The jungle which surrounded him could hardly be called forbidding, either: the tress, though numerous, were parted in such a way that a jaunt through the brush was hardly uncalled for. Despite it all, however, Haliki did not strike Max as the kind of place a young man like himself would thrive in. Dull, dull, dull.
That dullness managed to dispel itself as he approached town. Perhaps half a kilometre from the outskirts, Max suddenly found himself amidst a fairly large group of armoured and armed individuals, few of whom looked particularly pleased that Max had popped up.
One garbed in red rather than the standard green approached him. "Halt, right there. What's your business here?"
Max, ever prepared and seldom flustered, snagged his Gazette VIP badge from out of his pocket. "Reporter from the Lucan Gazette, sit. I'm here to check up on the situation that's occurring on this island."
The soldier pursed his lips and frowned, sliding his rather long broadsword neatly and firmly into the dirt. "Reporter? There's nothing to report about here, son. Move along."
"Oh yeah?" Max was hardly one to be dissuaded. Not when he was so close. "Then what's with the stony reception, eh? I heard about this place on my way here, from a bunch of sailors: it's supposed to be a really nice little Yevonite community, full of peaceful, pious old people. Not soldiers."
The soldier remained adamant. "Just a routine patrol, kid. Warrior monk affairs. Nothing huge."
"Oh yeah? That's good. Then you won't mind if I go in the town, right?"
This drew a deep silence. "C'mon, man, open it up to me. If there'r monks here then it must be something big, and if it's big, then the people need to know."
The monk looked around at the other soldiers. Some avoided his gaze; others merely shrugged. None of them offered their superior any help. He sighed.
"Ugh, fine. . . listen up, though, kid: no touching anything, alright? And I don't want to see any biased bullcrap popping up in your paper when I read it, or we'll be having words. We're just here doing our jobs."
Max grinned jubilantly. "I'll tell it like I see it, my good man."
The soldier grimaced. "Yeah, well, you won't be so happy when you see what we're doing here. I guess it's probably for the best that people on the mainland find out what's goin' on, though."
---
Max could have embellished the truth. He could have coated it over finely, with his fine phrasing and knack for the rhetorical: he was a damned fine writer, and although he didn't know as much, that was the reason why Donebert often relegated his place to the office.
"The kid makes words just plain work. It's some kind of gift he has. Only problem is he's not much in the manners' department, and a reporter needs to keep it cool in order to get the info they need. They need to insist, yeah, but they gotta do it politely." In short, Max lacked the social graces needed to be a successful reporter. Or by Donebert's standards, anyway.
So he could have embellished. He could have glossed over what he saw with every nicety he could muster. But the plain fact of the matter, as he would later write, was that each and every last person in the small religious community was dead.
No, strike that: they were butchered. The town was now a bloody wasteland. Most of the buildings had been destroyed or at least scorched by a now extinguished fire. It was a miracle that it had not spread to the trees and set the entire island aflame. The walls, the grass, and even the small fountain in the centre of town, all of them sported a wide range of bloody stains, from tiny blots to huge, voluminous splashes. Several times as he walked through the town with the soldier in red, max noticed monks scratching the blood from the walls with their gloved fingers, as though entranced by the sheer amount of gore they saw. Often, too, this spellbound state would snap, with the spontaneity of a bursting soap bubble, and the soldier would run off into the trees, remove his helmet, and wretch violently.
Because it was not only blood. There were bodies, too. Oh, were there ever bodies.
They were strewn everywhere. Some were flung over walls, as though tossed by an incredible force: others simply lay prone on the ground, mouths wide in chilling horror. A few were heaped at the entrance to their tiny huts, as though the fire had overcome them before they could fully escape. Three, apparently, had nearly escaped the town limits before whatever had done this caught them, and pierced them on the large, iron gates that had once greeted every visitor to the town. Max had vomited at these three, for one of them was a little girl that looked to be no older than ten.
And these bodies were mutilated. Many of them sported wide, ripping gashes, running down their sides and gushing forth unmentionable objects that had dried in the glazing sunlight. A few were charred from blazes long gone. Several were devoid of body parts, most of which could be found several feet away. The entire town smelt absolutely horrendous. Max fainted on his first tour through it, and had to be carried to a nearby first-aid tent for resuscitation.
Propped up on a cot, facing the soldier in red – who had now removed his helmet, revealing a man in his mid-thirties with shortly-cropped brown hair and sad grey eyes – Max quickly choked down a proffered canteen of water, and spewed it out across the tent as memories of the sights he'd seen came flashing back.
The soldier steadied him. "Whoa, easy there, kid. Not too fast."
Max gasped. "Dear Yevon. . . what the hell happened to them all. . ."
The soldier shrugged with a sort of frustrated nonchalance. "No clue. All we know is that most of it was done with a sword, and some of it with really, really strong fire magic." He sighed and plunked himself down on the bottom of the tent, a metallic clank reverberating throughout the interior of it. "This isn't the worst of it, either. There's one house we checked, and the guy in there. . ." He shuddered, seemingly unable to continue. "Well, he's not much of a guy anymore. Could only tell he was in the first place by the fact that his. . . genitalia, were hanging from the ceiling."
Max's eyes bulged. He thought he might vomit again. "Holy. . . this is. . ."
"A bit much, I know. When we first got here, a few days ago, it was worse. Everything was still a bit more fresh." The soldier licked his lips. "Frankly, we're a bit edgy about moving the bodies. This is more than we ever bargained for."
"You're not kidding me," Max replied, slowly gaining a tiny modicum of control over himself. "Did anybody survive? Anybody at all? And have you sent any of them yet?"
The soldier seemed slightly more upbeat at this. "Yeah, we sent 'em. One of the first things we did was call in a Summoner. I bet you can imagine how much trouble he had doing it, the poor guy. But, anyway, yeah, we think there's one more survivor, but we're not really sure about that."
Max gazed at him in confusion. "Wha? How's that work?"
"Well, so far as we can tell, there's a small cottage out in the woods: problem is, it looks like there's a magical barrier set up around it. You can go in, but, can't come back out again. We've sent for an expert in this crap to get rid of it for us, but he's still a week in coming." He gazed outside the tent, watching his men as they continued to prod about the ruins, avoiding bodies as much as possible. "Frankly, kid, I doubt that anybody in that thing has a clue of what happened out here. Once you're in a barrier, you can't really get out, or so I'm told: but, hell, maybe whoever's in there can give us a hint or something."
Max's mind began to percolate at this. "You say you can go in, but not back out, right?"
"Yeah. That's why I haven't sent any soldiers in yet: dunno what we'll find. Hell, for all I know, the murderer could be in there, and we wouldn't know it. Barrier spells are usually set up for a reason." He cocked a wary eyebrow, eyes studying Max. "Kid, you're not thinking of. . ."
Max gulped. "Well, I don't think I'll be able to report on what's out here. I. . . I can't look at it, frankly. It's too much. I've seen enough anyway. But, if there's somebody in there, maybe I could get an exclusive, or something. . .?" He shrugged weakly.
The soldier gazed at Max in dismay. "I don't think that's a good idea. You have no clue what's in there. Like I said, what if whatever did this is in there? You'd be stuck with it."
Max closed his eyes. "Yeah, I know. But news is news."
---
Max could see the glowing luminescence of the barrier peeping through the trees, throwing forth a faint mist that hypnotically pulled in the eye for a closer inspection. Walking alongside the soldier – whose name Max now knew to be Alan – he squinted, trying to see beyond the barrier. In the faint distance, a cottage was waveringly visible, though any detail of it was lost in the strange green light.
Alan took one look at it and shivered. "Damn bizarre. I've never liked magic, personally." He placed a hand of caution on the young reporter's shoulder. "You positive, kid?"
"It's Max. Get it right by the next time I see you." Was all that Max replied with, a slight smirk playing over his face. Alan couldn't help but laugh despite the situation.
"Fine, fine. You get back out here in one piece, you hear? If I find out a week from now that you got split in half or something, I'll be tempted to just let you turn into a fiend."
Max grimaced at the thought, totally sobered. "Yeah."
They approached the barrier, skirting the edge of it by mere feet. Alan scratched his unshaven chin absentmindedly. "If I've been told right, you really have to push hard to get in. Sort of a safety device to make sure outsiders don't go wandering in without noticing."
Max nodded. Tentatively, as though the barrier might scald him, he ran his fingers across the smooth, misty surface of it. The barrier felt of solid and liquid simultaneously, nearly throwing Max's senses into a bewildered overdrive. In spite of his confusion, however, he pushed harder, and gradually, his hands sunk into the bizarre surface. His body, perhaps elated by his success – or not wanting to be suddenly separated from the hands via less than pleasant means – plunged in soon after.
Max felt as though he was being bodily thrown as soon as he passed within the barrier. A thousand angry, invisible hands pushed him several feet into the brush, and Max landed face-first in a large, twiggy bush. He cursed violently and rolled back onto the path, wiping leafs out of his face and gradually gazing back at the barrier.
It had become a solid wall of abnormal green, slicing trees in half and yet keeping them whole. Nothing beyond it – not Alan, not the forest, not a single thing – was visible. He didn't even have to inspect it closely to know that he was stuck until help came.
"On to business then, I guess," Max murmured, and rose, brushing himself off. His eyes travelled towards the nearby cottage. No longer eclipsed by misty green, he saw it in the full light of day: it had become rather dilapidated, collapsing on one side. The front door had been replaced by a large, ungainly plank of wood, hanging lamely off rusted hinges and ready to drop off at a moment's notice. Both of the windows in the front were boarded up. The porch sported rotting boards, and several holes. Surprisingly enough, the roof looked largely intact.
Max approached it with the utmost degree of caution. His suitcase hung lamely from his shoulder, and he brushed it aside with mild annoyance. His feet, slow and wary, carried him towards the house, ready to run should danger present itself. But. . . run to where? The barrier kept him inside. No level of prudence would assure Max's safety.
Yet he couldn't help himself. The going was slow, no matter how he rationalized the issue. And even when the old man appeared at the door, waving Max forward with a grim lack of worry, the young man still took a good five minutes to get himself planted on the porch.
He was a wizened old figure, with hardly a straight part to his frame: Max was certain he'd never seen a more crooked back, or more knobbly knees. His greyed flesh hung in sagging droops off of his bones, giving the man an appearance that could not have been less threatening. And his voice, that poor, broken, accented voice, could not have sounded less old had it tried. It was with this voice that he called out to Max from the aged porch.
"Don't worry about making it fast, lad, I'm sure you're a wee bit frightened of the whole situation. I've been here for thirteen years now; old O'aka can stand to wait a minute or two more."