In which Ghost writes home and Nicole is met with another thing she's no good with.
Detour.
Dear Traveller, he recorded to himself in private while he floated at hip-height in the footsteps of his quiet Guardian. Today, my Guardian almost got me killed. Not just once, either. Twice. See, there are a few things she doesn't quite know how to handle. Guns, for example. And without guns, whatever were we going to do against a pack of Fallen? So we ran from them. We ran from a small pack of Fallen. Like, not even ten of them.
I'll be honest: I don't know how to feel about that.
An eery silence surrounded them, save for hushed birds and the soft crunch of her footsteps startling the local grasshopper population. The clouds overhead had cleared out, picked apart by winds that'd left them in a shredded disarray against the backdrop of a gradually darkening sky. He didn't need to tap into the City's weather broadcast to know it'd be another cold night. Which he couldn't right now anyway… because he was out in the no-where that was the European north, Scotland to be more precise, and every single com relay was just out of reach.
But she found her Light! So that was exciting. Except I wasn't around to see it because I spent most of that time catatonic in a ditch. Where a fox tried to eat me, by the way, and I swear I am not making that stuff up. Hold on— hold on— that means not only has my Guardian almost gotten me killed twice today, she also almost had me eaten,too. Fun. Then, when I was around to see her use her Light, she set herself on fire. And me almost along with it.
Ghost set his eye on his Guardian's slouched shoulders. She did that a lot. Slouch. Hm. What were the chances she'd smack him if he told her to straighten her spine a little? Astronomically high, he figured. So he chose not to and watched as she kept walking and walking and walking without saying a word, halfway falling over hillocks and rocks and whatnot and ignoring any and all paths that'd make her hike easier. Like that overgrown road they'd passed earlier, which she'd stubbornly disregarded and walked across without even looking left or right. You'd have thought asphalt— cracked or not and with rusted cars on—would have been easier to follow than over and around the stuff wilderness came made of. Her pace had slowed though, and a quick read of her vitals after he flicked a sneaky scan over her back showed exhaustion making itself at home.
Guardians may not need as much rest as the Lightless did, but they could still burn out.
Same with Ghosts. Especially ones with their shell shot half to ruin, to the point where he had to admit that if he had legs? He'd probably be limping.
. . .
Definitely limping.
But he didn't stop her. Or try to convince her to pick any other— possibly easier and safer —direction. There were any number of shelters around he could nudge her toward, but instead he kept an eye on their path, throwing it over maps in his databases. A nav point he'd recorded before they'd started running from the village (the trap) pulsed steadily at forty-two degrees south-east (closer with every step), but while he kept that in the back of his mind, it was her impossible destination that convinced him not to protest.
Dear Traveller, he continued. She's coming right at you. No, I'm not kidding. After I rezzed her (which she didn't like, not even the second time around) and she started walking, she put herself on a path that'll end right under you. I mean it. I did the math. Literally right under you. Dead centre. If she could walk over the North Sea, anyway. And gets around the Black Sea, a corner of the Caspian one, and all those mountains, and and and and—
Look, what I'm trying to say is that it's almost like she has a built-in compass and the needle on it is pointed right at you.
He squirmed. Made his busted shell snag and grind together. The sky had gotten a little darker and his Guardian's stubborn march had found them the edge of a ruined group of farmhouses, with half of them sunken into wooded tideland that'd crept closer over the centuries.
Dear Traveller, I'd really like to know what's going on with my Guardian. Why she remembers who she was. How she knows where you are. Oh, and how she made grass grow.
Love, Ghost.
It still followed her around; the memory of that never-ending and dark forever dotted with whispering Lights. Like the taste of liquorice after you'd accidentally bit into something that'd come without the mandatory biohazard warning. Except exponentially worse, since this aftertaste? It'd latched on to her soul, not just her tongue.
Ghost was still here too, of course. Didn't need to turn and look, she could hear him well enough, even if he'd quieted down considerably, his subtle chirps and whirrs good as lost to the breeze.
Nicole pinched the bridge of her nose. Hard. Even the headache persisted. It'd dulled to a hollow throb, yeah, but it was still there, sharing space in her skull with her thoughts zipping about uselessly from one impossible truth to the other. Honestly? She kind of wanted to just lay down. Right here. On the mossy path between the crumbling remains of walls of what might have been stables for ponies once. Or maybe inside the remnants of the silo over there, which, by now, was no more than a round stub made of red brick.
But then what? Walking was the only thing that kept her grounded. Chasing that pull on her heart, that voiceless siren song that'd followed her out from the Dark? That was her track. She was the train. And no telling what'd happen if she got derailed.
Nicole sighed. And froze.
Something wasn't right. Granted, nothing was, including the bit with her being alive and breathing, but this was a different sort of wrong. Like she'd forgotten to put her backpack on before heading out. Or the air conditioner stopped working at the office, leaving behind a sudden silence.
Nicole turned around.
Ghost. He was gone.
He didn't like leaving his Guardian.
It was the exact opposite of what he was meant to do, made to do, and what he wanted to do. But here he was, on his lonesome, breaking off from her to sniff after that nav point he'd picked up at the settlement.
Not like she'll be hard to find again, right? he mused. She'd be steadily trudging on towards the Traveller. And probably not even notice I'm gone.
He hummed quietly to himself as he picked a path around knobby branches, the farm no more than a landmark at his back. Hoo-boy, this place was… swampy.The trees were gnarly things, their trunks bent and thin and halfway covered in moss and lichen, if not whole mushroom colonies. And their roots? Tricky, apparently. Not like he'd know, he wasn't the one with the legs.
"Shite."
Ghost whirled around, right as his Guardian stumbled through the trees after him. His core tickled. Not because she'd slipped on one of the roots, why-ever would you think that. Nor because she had her foot ankle-deep stuck in the soggy earth and a look of domestic distress on her face. Though, admittedly, all the above probably contributed. A tiny bit. So, go on ahead and keep thinking it.
"Where are you going?" she asked while pulling her foot up. It came free with a loud squelch. "Ugh."
No. Most of the tickle came from how she'd noticed he'd been gone and then decided to come after him.
Ghost dipped a little lower and swung back and forth, looking from her to the route he'd plotted through the muddy forest. He could get giddy later. Right now he had a job to do.
"Remember when we were warned about the Fallen?"
She grimaced, but there was a nod in there somewhere while she balanced from one reasonably dry spot of ground to another.
"I pinned the location before the signal died."
She came up next to him and threw him a sceptical look.
"It's close by," he added. "So I thought I'd take a look."
"What if it's another trap?"
"Then I'll be in and out so quick they won't have any idea I was even there." He gave his shell a theatrical shake, vanished, and popped back out a second later. "Just like that."
"Right," his Guardian said, not sounding onboard at all and with her eyes fixed to the ground under him. "You dropped something."
"What?"
She hunkered down, and when she came back up she held a scorched bit of… ah… him. In her palm. Not him him. His shell. The cracked corner which'd been hanging on by no more than the Traveller's grace. His Guardian quirked a brow.
Well.
That wasn't embarrassing at all…
"That— that— that's fine. I don't need that," he muttered and set his eye back on the path, the nav point taunting him with the promise of maybe being a trap after all. Preferably, since how else was he going to end the sudden feeling of core-crushing embarrassment? "You should stay put. I'll go."
But when he floated off, he heard it right away: Squelch — Slurp — Squelch and a side of heavily accented curses. His Guardian wasn't staying put. Nope. Not at all. There she was, following him still, her lips drawn in a thin, pensive line.
"What happened to it maybe being another trap?"
"You've got bits falling off you. What happens when they all go?"
. . .
"They won't all go," he protested before pushing a careful scan out in front of them. "And what's that got to do with anything?"
She opted not to say and went back to being quiet. Even her footfalls shushed when they made it out of the swamp and onto more solid ground.
Five minutes and twelve seconds after he'd dropped a piece of himself, and Ghost caught a trace of life on yet another pre-emptive scan. Nothing big enough to cause alarm though or startle his Guardian with. Most certainly human, too.
So he took off to scout on ahead.
Ghost zipped up a rocky incline without warning and dipped out of sight. An incline she had to climb, which added more strain to her already tired legs and made her knees ache. Honestly, she'd never walked that much in her entire life. Ever. Especially not in a pair of stupid, soaked shoes. She should have just kept going, back at the ruined farm, but no. Instead, she'd decided to go after the wink of tarnished white she'd seen flit into the trees. Like the absolute loon she was.
God was she hungry. Tired. Cranky. All those things that called for a hot bath and maybe a Netflix binge.
She grimaced. Where the frelling hell had Ghost gone?
Down the slope, sat a tent. More of a lean-to, really, made of tarp and sticks, with a fire pit full of ashes in front of it. An iron pot lay tipped over in the ash. Plastic and metal scraps littered the ground, and opening up on the other side of the camp was a narrow path carved through the forest. Like a deer trail. For very large deer.
Or for that thing parked next to the tent. Nicole squinted at it as she slid down the steep slope. It looked like a… no, it didn't look like a motorbike. Motorbikes had tires. If anything, it resembled a swoop bike right out of Star Wars. Somehow, that didn't surprise her anywhere near as much as it probably should.
The bike-thing was beat up, the paint on it chipped and worn and its seat covering mostly peeled off. But it had her attention, beat up or not, and if Ghost hadn't suddenly backed out of the tent, she might have gone to take a closer look.
"It's alright," he said, sounding oddly subdued. He kept his back to her. "We're not going to hurt you."
Curious and wary, Nicole frowned and leaned to the side to peer under the tarp, where she found a child staring back at her. A girl. Hip-sized, at best, with dirt caking her face and a muddied mop of straw-coloured hair. She knelt on a sleeping bag and held a small, black box clutched in her lap.
Next to her, propped up on the tree the lean-to had been built against, laid a body. Dead. A corpse. Nicole could tell, because his skin was pasty grey, his mouth agape, and his eyes wide open.
Her stomach did a quick and violent somersault.
The girl said something — words Nicole didn't catch between taking a step back, swallowing down some bile, and not having the slightest clue what language she'd said it in.
Ghost wasn't deterred though. He swung his eye from the girl to her and back, before replying with a nonsense pile of words of his own. They were kind words, though, said softly and with a singsong lilt.
At the mention of something-something-værge, the girl's eyes snapped to Nicole. Didn't take another second and she was on her feet and rushing out of the tent. While Ghost dipped sideways and out of her path, Nicole wasn't anywhere near that lucky, what with how she stood there, staring dumbly as the girl ran right into her to wrap her little arms around her hip in an almost vicelike grip.
Okay. So he'd found yet another thing his Guardian didn't know how to cope with. Next to her Light, guns and Fallen and the whole dying bit. Kids. She stood motionless with her arms awkwardly lifted, a look of absolute terror on her face and her mouth working on a convincing fish impression. Open, close… Open, close…
It took a few seconds before her arms hitched lower, like she wanted to pat the kid's shoulders but didn't quite know where to start. So they kept hovering.
"What— what'd you tell her?" she asked, voice brittle at the edges.
"That she doesn't have to be scared any more, that sort of thing. And— ah—" He paused and filled the moment of hesitation with another sweep of the camp. Supplies. A radio (currently pressed to his Guardian's back because the kid held on to it for dear life). A sparrow.
I can totally work with that. We are going places from here on out.
"And," he added, sheepishly. "I might have mentioned you're a Guardian."
Her jaw jumped. Though at least she finally rested her hands on the kid's back. Baby steps, right?
"What? Little ones love Guardians and she's already feeling better knowing you're one. See?"
She didn't seem reassured. In fact, Ghost didn't like the look on her face one bit. The one she got when her eyes cut to the tent and then back to him. It was all manners of dark and… what? Guilty? Was that guilt of all things, really? He sunk an inch. His shell snagged again when he tried to fold it inwards, jamming uselessly.
"He was the one who warned us, I think. I mean, I am pretty certain. Him and the kid were either survivors who made it out of the settlement, or they ran into the same trap as we did and managed to escape. Either way, he got hurt. Broke his leg, couldn't treat it properly, and it got them stuck here. Until, well— ah—"
"He died."
"Yeah. Look, we should load whatever we can on the sparrow and get out of here."
"Sparrow?" She looked at him, startled, and he could almost hear the gears in her head turn. If she had gears, anyway, which she obviously didn't since she was human, but it wasn't his fault humans of old had come up with the weirdest sayings. Visionary ones, if you thought about it. But weird.
"Sparrow, yes. This—" He swung over to where it lay dormant on the ground. A cursory scan of the electronics and machinery told him it was still in working order. Sort of. "It's missing most of the onboard electronics, but it has breaks, throttle, and steering. What else could we possibly need?"
His Guardian's eyes flicked left and right.
"I don't know. Maybe new shoes?" She glanced down at the kid. Or her feet. Or both. It was all kind of adorable. "Yeah, new shoes."
Nicole didn't get new shoes or even socks, but she did get help with gathering up whatever Ghost thought would be useful. Literal help. One moment a pack that'd been lying in the tent (which she didn't want to go anywhere near of), the next he… projected dancing motes of blue-white light over it. And it vanished.
Yep. Vanished.
It was gone.
She stared, her mouth probably hanging open, and one hand lamely holding on to the sparrow's steering handle. Humming a quiet, purposeful tune that tickled at her with a hint of familiarity, Ghost zipped over to the back of the sparrow — and the pack reappeared out of the same flood of light, slotted neatly in place atop the gear and whatnots she'd already strapped to it.
"Allright," he proclaimed, cheerfully, and turned to look at her. When all she did was stare, he froze. "What? I didn't drop something again, did I?"
"No. No, but… how did you…" Nicole pointed at the pack. "Do that."
"Oh. Transmat! Without an active storage link I can only buffer smaller items and my capacity is limited—"
"Holy shit," she blurted, interrupting him mid eye-flicker.
Ghost, all hushed now, leaned to the side, looking at the little girl standing close by, that box (a radio, she'd learned by now) still in her hands. When he looked back at her, the top of his scorched shell tipped forward in what resembled a scolding frown.
Nicole blushed.
"Aaas I was saying: transmat," he continued while moving up and around the sparrow, more light flicking over it. "Pretty neat stuff. With a big enough buffer we can even transmat people. It's how we get our Guardians to and from their ships."
The sparrow shuddered. Whined up a pitched noise like a car engine trying to whistle— and sprung a few inches off the ground. Which was brilliant and all, but had he just said they had beaming?
"Can you do a Scottish accent?" she asked, putting on hers as thickly as she could while her mind spun off in tiny, fragmented loops. The headache was gone. Fantastic. But now she was dizzy from all the impossible shit laid out in front of her again. Like beaming and swoop bikes being an actual thing. At the same time.
Bunch of hundred years ago she'd have been thrilled.
"Wha— what? I mean. Maybe? Sure." He twisted around to face her. "Why?"
She opened her mouth and promptly closed it again when someone tugged on her coat. Yeah, alright. Maybe right now wasn't the best time to go on about Beam me up, Scotty, no matter how tempting and how much she wished she could stop thinking about the dead body so very, very close by. Or about that orphan who'd attached herself to her coattail. Literally.
With a sigh, Nicole stooped down enough to grab the girl around the waist and hoist her up on the sparrow. "Hang on tight," she said, which Ghost readily translated and the girl immediately did. Thought she never let go of the radio. Nicole frowned. The girl was a scrawny mess, no more than skin and bone and hair and puffy clothes. But not a single tear and maybe that was what twisted her heart the most.
"What language is that anyway?"
"Scandi," he said. "It's— ah —a mix of old Scandinavian languages, like Swedish and Finish and Norwegian. Came together after the Collapse. So, uh, you should probably push the sparrow out of here. Lots of trees."
Nicole scoffed and leaned over the steering handles to set her hands against them. "Way ahead of you. I'm good only dying twice." When she started pushing, carefully, the sparrow slid forward with almost no resistance.
And that was how she spent what was left of the day. Pushing a sci-fi bike through a forest and trying her hardest to ignore the tug on her heart that wanted her elsewhere.
Oh, and in her awfully soggy shoes.
Taffer Notes: I'm very likely taking weird liberties with my interpretation of what Ghosts can do. From what and when they can transmat, to what they can create for their Guardians. The system in the game always puzzles me a little, and I like to make sure that Ghost can't simply create things or transport just about anything for Nicole since it feels like it'd remove the potential for tension.