[Author's Notes] Aside from further thanks to the reviewers (this is probably my most successful fic ever, review-wise) and thanks to those who are going to review as soon as they read this, I'd like to ask for opinions: those of you who've read Shining in the Darkness, is there any interest in a sequel? (Those of you who haven't: go read it, then answer the first question!) As for the questions… all shall be revealed in due time. On to the chapter!
Chapter Three: Mudshipping
"What?!" shrieked Core, one of the younger Djinn. He wasn't the shrieking type, really, but he did tend to lose control of his voice when he got freaked, which the other Djinn made fun of him for in the generally approved fashion.
"She said something's blocking our Psynergy!" Corona spluttered back, amidst the snickering of most of the other Djinn.
"Oh, shut up," Core growled in his usual, significantly deeper voice.
"But… we're Psynergy creatures, aren't we? Shouldn't we be vanishing or something?" asked Cannon, looking around to see if any of the Djinn disappeared as she spoke. None of them did, and just to be sure, Cannon jabbed Steam with her foot.
"Douse!" Steam yelled, with the usual calm and collected attitude of a Mercury Djinni annoyed by one of Mars, which was to snap like a twig under Boreas' foot. Nothing happened.
"What do you think?" asked Balm, quietly.
"I'm betting that when the Adepts tried to go into this field, if it's inside Lunpa too, and that would make some sense out of what's going on, what with the strange separation and everything-"
"You're getting to the point, right?"
"I think," Gale continued, annoyed, "that we were pushed out, because inside the Adepts, we are just Psynergy. We were too powerful to be destroyed, so we were just left out, and now that we've taken physical form we can get through, but we lose our Psynergy, too."
"Are we screwed?" whispered Fugue, loudly, apparently thinking that Gale and Balm weren't exactly being stealthy.
"Not as long as I'm alive!" Bane growled.
"So we've got until what, six o' clock?" asked Luff.
Tinder shook her head and looked around the pre-apocalyptic group, hoping to find another Djinni to back her up. One with slightly more sense than a wolverine on a sugar rush. Seeing none readily available, she went to the old Mars fallback of being extremely assertive, which, as far as she knew, meant getting people to choose between doing what you say and being deafened by shouting.
"EVERYONE CALM DOWN OR I'LL PERSONALLY GIVE YOU ALL A SOLID THRASHING!"
Once the echoes died away, the tunnel was absolutely quiet and still. Eventually, Mud spoke up. "This is the second time Tinder's had to intervene, and we haven't even got inside the city. There's got to be something we can do so that the Lunpans don't just hear an argument coming their way."
"What's your brilliant plan, then?" asked Blitz, sarcastically.
"Well… we could split up a bit. Like… four groups of eighteen, maybe," said Mud, looking around for some support.
"No," said Squall.
"Well I don't hear any brilliant-" Mud began.
"I mean," Squall went on, "that eighteen's too much. Six groups of twelve, three Djinn of an element in each one, and someone senior to be an advised leader for each group. I'm thinking Bane, Torch, Luff, Dew, Gale, and Spring."
"I never thought of you as a strategist, Squall," Mold commented.
"That's the sort of thing you should never tell me," Squall told the Venus Djinni, sweet as a scythe. "And don't look at me like that, Tinder. You're completely unsuited to leading a battle charge." Tinder, without doing much of anything, appeared to grow twice her size and develop the kind of shadowing that ought to herald the approach of Death.
"Smooth," muttered Mold.
Squall was unfazed. "See? You'd terrify your own side. We need you at the front to get them to give up without a fight."
The Djinn set out, slowly making their way through the darkness, and this time the walls echoed with the sound of the polite verbal warfare that was the four elder Djinn (plus their two 'assistant elders', as they kept calling them) discussing their groups.
"I intend to keep Crystal where I can see her, thank you," grumbled Bane.
"Your sister-" Dew began.
"She's not my sister any more than Breath is your great niece," Bane interjected.
"I take offence, dear brother," said Crystal.
"It would really help me out here if you'd stop calling me that," growled the oldest Venus Djinni.
"I got used to it," said Crystal, simply. "Three and a half millennia can do that."
"Your sister-" Dew tried again.
"I know there was a bit of a gap between Venus creating you and Quartz," said Bane, "but that's no reason to keep calling me brother when there are so many of us and the age differences are hundreds or thousands of years."
"A bit of a gap?!" repeated Crystal, disbelieving. "It was thirty-five hundred years! That's a bit more than a coffee break!"
"Your sister-" said Dew, losing her temper, but before she could get any angrier, some new information became apparent and the sentence changed rather a lot. "Your sister's about to be eaten by a Ghoul!" The smell, sound, and (in the absolute faintest light) silhouette of a Ghoul had just registered in her mind, putting together a mental picture that was going to be very unpleasant and possibly informative, depending on how interested anyone in the area was on the inside of a Djinni.
Mud didn't even think. There was a deathly drawing of breath as the ghoul prepared to lash out, and then the whole world -as far as the elder Djinn could feel- became thick and heavy. There was a moment of quiet, except for the thrashings of the trapped Ghoul, as everyone figured out what had happened.
"Jupiter protect me!" screamed Luff and Gale, realising that they had been flooded with mud.
"What happened?" called Fog from the front of the horde, where he was helping lead the way.
"Mud just blasted a Ghoul… with… mud," Core reported, trailing off as he realised what had happened. "But we don't have Psynergy, and in any case I've never heard of a mud attack."
"Except when Mud gets unleashed," Char finished. Everyone considered this.
"Hold up!" called Bane, and nodded at Haze, who had some kind of hero-worship thing for the ancient Djinni, and leapt atop the Jupiter's head to get a better speaking position. "Everyone feel this? Feel the atmosphere, the texture of reality? Remember it! This is what it feels like when the universe follows along with dramatic tradition. Things can happen that shouldn't work. And things can go right for the good guys just when everything looks worst. If you want to be successful in helping heroes, these are the times you have to keep an eye out for, because that's when everything turns on a single moment, and you've got to make sure it turns the right way."
"Stirring oration, sir!" Haze wheezed, straining with the effort of essentially holding up a Djinni with his ears.
"I wish he didn't do things like that," groaned Flint, locked in the eternal embarrassed state of the young forced to be in the same proximity as the old, and it doesn't get better when they start making speeches to sixty or so of your closest friends.
"Quiet," said Torch, nudging Flint with her foot. "Bane knows what he's talking about. We've all seen it happen plenty of times in our lives. Even you've seen it a few times. Remember Venus Lighthouse, when Isaac cast Revive for the first time in four hundred years, when it had only ever been possible after a lifetime of study and training even then? Remember Mars Lighthouse, when Felix turned the-"
"Yes, yes, we remember!" said Mist. "But back here in the present, we just saw Mud do something that shouldn't be able to happen, and I think at a time like this it's worth thinking about that sort of event." The Djinn looked among each other and generally agreed with this statement.
Well, most of them. Cannon was more of an action-oriented Djinni, and she had spent the last few moments concentrating. If it worked, well, it probably worked a lot like Psynergy, didn't it? Djinn were good at Psynergy. But it might have been useful to have some experience unleashing Djinn, too, and possibly for the first time ever -not counting the many times when she had wished for hands- Cannon was envious of the Adepts.
Fortunately, it seemed that she got things more or less right, because before anyone could say much more than 'yep' and possibly make a 'Yepp' joke, Cannon smashed into the tunnel's stone wall, glowing red and surrounded by a bright glow. There was an explosion of flames that weren't quite normal, and Cannon was left standing in a blackened alcove that hadn't been there moments before. The stone clicked as it cooled, and a few Djinn shook warm stone fragments off themselves.
"It works," Cannon reported, grinning widely at the prospect of bad things happening to bad people in the near future.
"We noticed," said Mud, weakly. His attention was then drawn away by a strange rushing sound, which turned out to be Gale doing her best to get rid of the mud he had used to quick-bury the Ghoul. Speaking of the Ghoul, it had just managed to claw its way to the top in an inspiring metaphor for the inevitable victory of the work ethic when Serac froze it solid and shattered it into tiny bits.
"Good," said Tinder. "We're not quite as weak as we could be, then."
"Could be? We're way past Psynergy!" said Blitz, excited. "We took that Sentinel apart with just our Djinni powers, and now we can use them at will?"
"Y'mean Felix?" asked Sleet, quietly, and laughed at a comforting memory involving catapults.
"We don't know what the costs are, though," said Dew. "And personally I hope that I'm not going to be useful any time soon, but I just might be. This is going to be dangerous. There are going to be injuries."
"Who cares what happens to the bad guys?" asked Forge, innocently.
"You Mars Djinn-" Dew began, but today was apparently a day for cutting her off.
"No," said Fog, and when he looked around, the others were agreeing with him. "All of us. Our Adepts are in danger." He grinned, not often getting a chance to say things like this. Maybe Bane had a point with the dramatic-reality thing… "It's time to unleash the fury of the Djinn."
"Sweet. Where?" asked Fury.
The cell looked exactly the same now, despite the passage of time. Felix still sat hunched in the corner, sinking deeper into whatever depths his mind had conjured up this time, glowering at the bars and perhaps faintly hoping that they could be destroyed by sheer hatred, in this place where Psynergy didn't work.
Ivan and Sheba were still talking in the back, and it was anyone's guess what they spoke of.
The only thing that marked the passage of time, though Jenna still figured it had been at least a year since they were thrown in there (Mars Adepts are not known for patience) was the slow, strange, and not exactly happy dance that she was watching as Isaac tried to figure out what was wrong with Mia.
Mia divided her time between checking up on Garet, who still hadn't woken up, and Picard, who still had a projectile that wasn't supposed to be in him in him. Mia had commented once, quickly and efficiently, that it was caught on something, and she was likely to cause more damage trying to get it out than it would do sticking out of his chest.
Isaac was, to put it bluntly, hovering. He managed to be looking over her shoulder far more times than any human should be capable of, just when she happened to glance backwards. This didn't improve things.
He was also trying to engage in conversation, in a manner Jenna quickly declared the best capable of ensuring its own destruction. Something was seriously disturbing Isaac, obviously. There was no other earthly way he would have spontaneously jumped in with 'So, how long have you been part of the Mercury Clan?'
Thankfully, Mia didn't seem to be interested in even acknowledging his existence, though if Jenna hadn't known better, she would have sworn that the Mercury Adept flinched at that remark. Not out of annoyance or disappointment, but perhaps out of sympathy.
Ah ha, thought Jenna. You've gone into one of those Imilian modes with the stubborn silence, but it's getting to you. I've got your game ticket! You want to say something, but you think it'd be wrong. Jenna was aware that this wasn't the usual voice she thought with, and wondered if it had something to do with not needing to think about what the other nine voices expected from a Mars Adept…
The meaning of the obvious silence slammed into Jenna like an iron sledgehammer against a mountainside.
The Djinn were gone.
"Shine?" called Jenna, tentatively.
"She's caught on," Ivan whispered urgently.
"Grab her, but don't attract attention," Sheba replied.
"Fugue? Are you- hey!" Jenna protested as she was latched onto by what seemed to be a large blond ant, in that it moved surprisingly fast and dragged her from the middle of the floor to the back, which endeavoured to be even shadowier than the rest of the dark cell. "Look, I wasn't interfering with Isaac and Mia-"
"That's not the problem," Sheba replied, evenly. "Ivan and I don't know what's happened any more than you, but we have been talking about it, and we're sure we don't want to tell anyone outside this room anything they don't already know."
"Do they know what I'm going to do to them when I get out? Because I'd really like to tell them," said Jenna, nastily, but she consented to whispering, as Sheba was doing.
"How's Garet?" Isaac asked eventually, winning a prize for finally finding a realistic topic.
"Pretty badly hurt," Mia replied, and the only emotion in her voice was concern for a wounded friend. "He got caught up in the tide, like Felix, but Felix was at the edge of the Mist Potion's cloud and wasn't too hard to take down –it wasn't your fault, Felix, don't look like that. Anyway, they had to hit Garet a lot harder to take him down."
She was right. Isaac had only seen Garet so badly hurt a few times before, and all of them had required Quartz or another Djinni just to make sure he lived. As it was, in this cell, with their Psynergy mysteriously kept beyond their reach, Isaac was faced with the thought that this time the Mars Adept might not be that lucky.
It was a sign of how scared Isaac was, and with good cause, that he didn't think about the Djinn again. "What about Picard?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure he should have woken up by now, but it's probably just to do with his Lemurian blood. There's no sign of any other damage, and he's sleeping easily enough," Mia answered. Then she looked back at Garet, and sighed in frustration. "Psynergy's not coming back any time soon," the healer decided. "I'll have to do what I can without Ply."
"I'll help any way I-" Isaac started.
"No, thank you, I think I can do this on my own!" snapped Mia. Her voice echoed a bit off the rough stones of the wall, breaking the delicate and dark silence.
"I just wanted to-" he tried again.
"You don't think I can handle anything myself, do you? I'm quite capable on my own, Isaac, I thought you understood that!" she raged on.
"Mia, what are you-" he asked, but Isaac was having Dew's luck today.
"You actually dropped your sword. The Sol Blade, most powerful of all the weapons on Weyard, and you dropped it and gave up the fight because you thought I needed protecting. So, is this new, or have you always just pretended to have confidence in me? I guess this explains Mars Lighthouse in a whole new what do you think you're doing?!" This last comment was directed at Isaac as he lunged forward and hugged Mia tightly.
"I think he's attracted to angry women, myself," Jenna commented from the corner.
"I was afraid it was something serious," Isaac mumbled, taking heart in the fact that Mia hadn't forced him away or even broken his arm. Deciding not to push his luck, Isaac let go and looked into her eyes (thought doing that and focusing on what he was saying wasn't easy).
"It is something serious," Mia growled, but a bit of uncertainty was in her voice.
"No, it isn't," said Isaac. "Reason being, you think I surrendered because it was you. Mia, we were losing that fight. It wouldn't have mattered if I kept hacking or not. But if I did, and they did kill you, then I'd have lost twice, and that wasn't worth it."
"How wasn't it me, then?" Mia demanded.
"It could have been anyone. Garet, Jenna, Sheba, Picard, even Commander Give-My-Life-For-My-Cause by the door over there," said Isaac, nodding at Felix, who just might have smiled for a second. "I knew we couldn't win then, and it wouldn't have been worth risking anyone to see how long I could last out there. You just happened to be the one in the way."
Mia was silent as she took this in. Jenna, Ivan, Sheba, and Felix (who wouldn't have admitted it unless Jenna waved a very pointy stick at him later) watched with rising anticipation, wondering what she'd say, if it really was the end of those two as that couple…
…But it didn't exactly surprise them when Mia grabbed Isaac by the back of the neck and pulled him back over for a kiss. "They do well together," Ivan commented to Sheba, quietly.
"It did seem to me that you dropped the sword a bit faster than you might have done for the kind of heroic drama you seem to enjoy," Mia remarked, winding a bit of his orange-gold hair around her finger.
"Maybe a bit," Isaac agreed, grinning.
"As is appropriate for a situation involving the safety of the love of your life," Mia went on.
"Quite appropriate."
"I mean, yes, it'd have been the same for everyone, but there was a little more urgency to it."
"A little."
They were stopped from giving Ivan anything else to bug Isaac with later on by Jenna's sudden worried gasp. "Garet's stopped breathing," she hissed. Mia spun to the prone Adept and quickly checked his vital signs.
"Still planning to help?" asked Mia.
"I was going to whether you told me what was wrong or not," Isaac replied.
"Then get over here and we'll see how good we really are, Venus Adept."