20060516

No, I'm not back, not officially. This idea is from last year, but nothing was written down. The fire's gone.

Btw, I'm making a gap-leap. SIAT was meant to be non-linear after a certain point. This happens after all the chapters that I've written so far, but they've had some adventures that I never thought about.

"Are you sure it is wise to leave without Vorador?" Janos questioned.

"It's a house of ill repute, one that caters to unusual needs," I answered. "He probably couldn't be happier."

"That's not what I mean," Janos insisted. At my blank look, he added, "If we split up, how are we to find each other again?"

"We'll all end up where we need to," I assured Janos. "Besides, places like Lovecraft's and The Mystic Bordello are..." I hesitated, unable to adequately explain. "We'd be able to find our way back to them if the situation calls for them."

Kain and Raziel were waiting when we reached the brothel's front gate. One of the gateposts was an intricately carved writer's block, the other post was a normal stone carved to match.

"Where do you suppose the next plot hole will take us?" Kain asked, a hint of impatience creeping into his voice.

I sighed in resignation, "I doubt that this time will be the one."

We had been hopping through plot holes and wandering across worlds for long enough that I had lost track of time, (though my sense of time was so poor to begin with that only a week might have passed.) I sensed that the vampires were getting tired of it. I imagined that they wished, through all our adventures, that we would end up somewhere useful. I couldn't be sure if Dorado was really leaving us for that reason, or if he was just temporarily distracted by the temptations of the flesh.

I yelped in surprise as I emerged from the plot hole into thin air. It took me a brief moment to realize that there was no gravity. In the time before Janos realized this, he had already tried to counteract gravity with a powerful stroke of his wings, causing him to hit the ceiling hard enough to knock himself unconscious.

We were floating in a long metal hallway. Raziel had the fortune to rest against the wall. Kain, however, seemed to be genuinely uncomfortable with his inability to touch anything solid. With a bit of stretching, I was able to hook the wall with my foot and propel myself into a more stable position.

"Get me down," Kain demanded. Though there wasn't anything approaching fear or panic in his voice, his tone had lost its assured edge.

"There is no down," I told him as I launched myself at him.

I pulled my arms and legs in to protect myself, but my teeth still rattled as I collided with Kain's solid body. By a stroke of luck, I had used just the right amount of force; Kain came to rest against the wall while I slowly drifted after him.

"What is this place?" Raziel asked as he cautiously worked his way along the wall.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I'd guess that we're probably in outer space."

Janos groaned as he drifted back into consciousness. This time, he figured out that he was not actually falling, and therefore was content to simply drift in midair. I explained what little I knew about micro gravity and how to move around in it. With a bit of practice, we all figured it out well enough to explore.

The corridors were featureless, and so I drew on the wall at every junction. It was meaningless graffiti, except that it gave each explored hallway a distinguishing mark. Eventually, we came upon an airlock. I pushed myself to a tiny window in the hatch and stared out.

The darkness of space stared back at me. The stars shone with a hard, unwavering light. Scattered among the backdrop of the void were odd objects. It took me a moment to realize that they were exactly like the places that we had been wandering.

It was a disconcerting sight, islands of reality hovering isolated from one another. It reminded me of the few instances in video games when the character would end up outside of the level. I drew back from the window so that the others could have a look.

There were times when I was almost convinced that I was made of polygons, but those usually happened after playing low-res games for more than six hours at a stretch. I stared at my hand for a moment, then at my three traveling companions. Everything looked real. I pushed that train of thought away, as I figured that someone who was actually made of triangles wouldn't have the ability to tell.

Kain turned away from the porthole and asked, "Does this tell you how we are supposed to get home?"

I drifted back to the window and stared at the surrealistic scene. "We're going to have to wait for another plot hole, or something even more convenient." I focused on the backdrop of stars and examined the direction in which they seemed to be drifting. "Whatever we're in, it's spinning. If we head away from the center, we'll at least be able to walk around, unless you like floaty-time."

We did eventually make our way to where the centrifugal force was enough to hold us to the floor. Luckily, I still had my backpack with its never ending supply of blood bags. At some point, my backpack had also gained juice pouches, though I sipped at mine hesitantly with the paranoia that one would contain blood or something equally unpleasant.

Raziel was out of luck as far as getting sustenance from my backpack. Instead, he had to hunt for himself. It was easier for him once he had learned how to get out of the spectral realm with only his force of will. The trade off was that it taxed his energies to return to the physical realm in that way.

Almost immediately after Raziel dropped into the spectral realm, Kain's eyes grew wide in panic. "Something is wrong," he snapped before running towards the nearest airlock.

"He's out there," Kain hissed as we caught up with him. His breath steamed against the airlock's window as he stared through it.

Though my eyes weren't as good as Kain's, I could just make out a patch of blue against one of the asteroids that was part of the space station.

"I'm going after him," Kain said as he pulled at the hatch that held the airlock closed.

"You can't go out there," I yelled at him. "Your fluids would boil."

I grabbed a spacesuit off of the wall and began trembling. There was no way that it would fit Kain, and for Janos it was out of the question. I would have to go. I began whimpering as I realized that I didn't know anything about safety checks on a spacesuit. With all the other possible dangers, going out there would be suicide. But even if I could dismiss my conscience about leaving Raziel in the cold nothingness of space, Kain would not let me back down.

As I wriggled into the suit, reality seemed to shift slightly around me. Suddenly, the part of me that was afraid seemed very far away. Walking in space seemed as mundane as walking in a park. Kain stared at me, strangely calm considering the situation.

"I am not going out there simply to retrieve a dead body," I insisted before buckling on my helmet.

My assuredness dissolved as I stepped out of the airlock. I was alone with the void. The sheer scope and silence was overwhelming, yet at the same time I had to cope with the claustrophobic tightness of my suit and the deafening loudness of my ragged gasps.

I remembered that I had been calm only moments ago, confident that I could do this. 'Panic will kill you,' I told myself. I focused on Raziel's crumpled form, now more distinct as I drifted towards him.

Raziel was clinging to the asteroid, his talons firmly wedged into the rock. His wings were crumpled and useless in the vacuum, and his body was covered with a phosphorous blue frost.

I called out to Raziel before I remembered that he wouldn't be able to hear me. I came to rest against the rock and gently tried to pull him away. Raziel's body was stiff, like a dead thing. His eyes were frozen shut and he didn't respond to my touch.

I cradled his head against my helmet and said, "Raziel, I have you. Please let go of the rock."

He seemed to be beyond hearing. I had been so sure when I said I wasn't going out to retrieve a body, like a divine statement. I tried again to pull Raziel away from the rock, but he was stuck firm. Slowly, I reached to my belt and pulled off a tool. I didn't know what it was meant for, but it was sturdy. I struck Raziel's claws, shattering them and releasing him from the rock.

The airlock wasn't even fully pressurized when Kain wrenched open the inner door. He rushed to Raziel's side, anxious about the state of his son. Raziel's joints were already softening in the relative warmth of the airlock, allowing him to lay limp and lifeless on the floor.

Like a gathering storm, Raziel started to rise into consciousness. Then his scream resonated through the entire space station.

Raziel thrashed in agony at the fire in his abused nerves. It took Janos and Kain all of their strength to hold him down. I backed away and held my hands over my ears to block out the sound. There was nothing that any of us could do.

After he had stopped screaming, Raziel lay exhausted in Kain's arms for a long time. It was strange, seeing Kain crouched in concern over his weakened son. The luminous blue substance that served as Raziel's blood had smeared everywhere as he struggled, but now it slowly it faded into nothingness.

"What happened to you?" Kain quietly asked when he judged that Raziel was strong enough to answer.

"This place doesn't exist in the spectral realm. I was falling," Raziel whispered hoarsely. "I don't remember what happened afterwards."

Kain fixed me with a hard stare. "Why didn't you warn him that this could happen?"

"I didn't know," I insisted.

"I think that you know far more than you are telling," Kain snarled.

Our argument was cut short as a plot hole swept across the room, ripping us away and into a new scene. I think that was the first time that a plot hole actually snuck up on us.