Chapter 3
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"Alright, Prince. We're here."
Rose pulled on the parking brake and the truck jerked to a stop inside the depression filled with bare dirt. Surrounding the depression in the earth was a bare field, the Alameda bomb range. It wasn't a grand place, nor was it explicitly the best place to field test classified equipment, at least from a material perspective.
From that of the ethereal, however, this place was steeped in energy. And that had it's own uses to people in his line of work.
He turned the truck off and pulled the keys from the ignition. "You ready Prince?"
Prince just nodded, her mouth stuffed with another fish taco.
Rose gave her a dry look. "Really Prince?"
She shrugged as she took another meaty bite. Her pearl white teeth ripped through the meat and bread of the tex-mex staple, juice dribbling down the side of her powerful jaws as they ground the meal into pieces. In spite of the messy food, her clothes were still just as immaculate as always.
"And you call me a glutton."
She scowled, swallowing the mouthful with a large gulp. "You can't blame me, I'm a spirit of glory. Stuff like this is my bread and butter. You should have known this was going to happen."
"Oh, I did," Rose grinned teasingly.
Prince groaned and stepped out herself, bringing an entire bag stuffed with empty taco wrappers. "Look, do you have any idea how hard it is for a spirit like me to get a good meal? Like, an actual good meal?"
"Yeah, I'd say I've got some idea." Rose snarked ashe started unlatching the containers in the back of the truck. "Kinda why I brought it up."
"I mean," Prince continued on in her rant, waving around a half-eat fish taco like it was a baton, "I need aether like you need mater, Rose."
The burly man sighed, resigned to getting another lecture from his partner. Instead, he worked to open up all their supplies and get everything arranged for them.
"And the only thing that makes aether are living souls. You guys leave that stuff all over the place," She gestured to the expanse around them with her half eaten meal. "But the less involved you are, the less there is. The less you give a fuck about what you're crafting, the less of an imprint you leave. The shit I get from most restaurants or grocery stores is either made from passionless assembly line cooking or full on automated food factories."
"Either way," She waved the taco in Rose's face to accentuate each point, "Most stuff tastes like formless gruel to me."
"Yep," Rose grunted as he hefted open the gun locker's door. "It's why I did it." he repeated.
As he dug through the locker, searching for something in particular, Prince finished off her last remaining taco.
"Didn't mean you had to turn into a pig though." He commented, "especially after giving me lip for 'wasting all my hazard pay on food'." Rose shook his head teasingly, "What a hypocrite."
"Yeah, well, at least you can get something out of Mcdonald's." Prince grumbled. "It's been at least a year since I've had a good meal. Plus, it's not like you're batting 1000."
"Eh, fair. Last place was a bust." Rose admitted, pulling out a revolver complete with a shoulder holster from the locker. "Here you go," He said holding it grip first out to Prince with one hand while the other rustled through the locker for the ammunition.
"Thanks," She accepted it, strapping the holster in place under her jacket, "and I feel like that's an understatement."
"Heh," He let out a chuckle as he pulled a box out of the bottom of the container, "I wonder how the chef of that restaurant would react if he knew he got arrested because a spirit could taste the pedophila in his food. And catch." He said, tossing the box her way.
"Probably nothing, 'cause then we'd have to kill him, or mind wipe him." She pointed out while catching the box with ease. She opened it up, inspected the specialty rounds inside, before stuffing it in her other jacket pocket.
"Yeah, probably," Rose agreed as he pulled out a highly customized lever action rifle with gold plating and intricate checker pattern grip along with an accompanying belt of ammunition in the other hand. He wrapped the rifle's strap across him and let it hang from his shoulder, then tied the belt along his waist. After that, he pulled out another large box and hopped off the truck.
Prince shot him a look.
"What?"
"Where's mine?"
"I just tossed it to you," He said, gesturing to her side where she'd stored the revolver.
"That's not what I meant, and you know it."
"You mean your giant fuckoff huge box?"
"Yeah."
"Fuck that, you do it," Rose said, walking off.
"What, are you too much of a baby to pick it up?" She teased him.
"I only have so many hands." He shot back, wiggling the box in his hand.
"Excuses excuse." She shook her head with a wry smile.
Rose scoffed and his arms.
"You're soft, Rose. You need to bulk up, you know? Put on some muscle string bean." She joked as she lightly punched him in his melon-sized bicep.
"Yeah…" he said drily, "I'll get right on that."
Prince hopped up onto the truck to get her box while Rose walked into the middle of the pit.
He set down the in the center and opened it up, revealing a wide array of advanced sensors and computing equipment. That, and a few deceptively simple objects, such as a pair of gold divining rods, a silver knife, and round bronze mirror. Using the knife, he started scratching a simple runic circle around him.
While he was finishing up on that, Prince walked up beside him with her container slung over her shoulder. She let it slide off and thump to the ground, the box so heavy that it managed to dig itself an inch or two into the soft soil.
"So, basic detection setup?" She asked. "Aim for the mirror, right?"
"Eh, sorta." He answered as he applied the last touch to the circle. Getting up he tossed the mirror to her. "If you can go ahead and put it in a good spot, I'll finish setting up over here."
"Sure," She shrugged, then gestured to the circle, "You think that'll be a decent enough privacy screen?"
"It's a start," He said, wiping off the knife.
Then, with a swift move, he used it to slice open the palm of his hand. Carefully measuring his movements, he placed a drop in seven specific equidistant points in the circle. When the last dollop of blood fell into the array carved into the dirt, the air shifted.
It was a subtle thing, if one wasn't listening for it they might not notice or pass it off as something else. To the attentive, however, the world grew both distant and close all at the same time. It was not dissimilar to dipping one's head underwater, if much less intense.
"There we go," Rose said, flashing her a smile as he flipped the knife with his good hand. Catching it, he used it to gesture to the box again, "Now I just gotta get everything else out here."
"Well, let me help you out a bit." Prince said before walking into the center of the array.
Rose raised a brow, "You sure about this Prince? With all this dark aether around…" he said, gesturing to the fog.
It was lighter out here, miles from the coastline. It was far from gone, though. They could still pick up thick whiffs of the stuff swirling around them.
"It's fine, Rose." She brushed his concerns off as took her stance in the center. She raised her arms up slowly, opening them wide to either side of her and turning her head to the sky as if she was giving praise to some sun god.
Rose sighed as he felt the familiar buzz of static slowly fill the air. Tiny blue sparks began to dance along her arms as the wind picked up. The fog around them was pushed out to the edges of the field and Rose could hear a thousand distant whispers at the fringes of his hearing.
It was all what had he expected.
He flinched when he felt something wet hit his cheek. Running a hand it, it came off with something slick and black. Frowning, he looked up to the sky above them.
What he found was an ocean of rippling darkness hanging over their heads.
His eyes widened, "Princ-!
BOOM
The air around Rose snapped with a blast of deafening thunder. Lances of light stabbing painful spots into his vision even through his sunglasses. A hammer blow slammed into his gut, knocking him off his feet and the wind out of his body.
For a moment, he just sat there. Then his mind finally rebooted, and he got up slowly, gasping painfully as he tried to get his breath back. Holding his chest tenderly as pain burned across his body, he took stock of his surroundings.
The skies above them were still black as night. Storm clouds hung overhead, fat, black, low hanging things filled with something far darker than mere water. Lightning strikes flashed across the landscape, each shooting knives into his vision.
On the ground, however, was a more immediate problem. The circle was now scorched into the ground, smoke rising from the runes. The delicate sensor equipment sent scattered around. No doubt most of it had been fried, but some of it might have gotten something. The Mirror was fine, but the divining rods were little more than melted scrap.
And in the center of the circle was a woman in a long, pale grey military dress on her knees, blankly looking at nothing with star-filled eyes.
Rose's heart clenched and his throat tightened.
"Prince!" he croaked.
She didn't react.
Cursing, he picked up the silver knife up from the ground and threw it at the side of her head, then immediately dove to the ground.
Not a second after he heard the knife clink against her skull, than did the mound of dirt behind where he'd been standing explode. More followed, pounding out deafening blasts and tearing holes in the field around them. Piles of dirt were thrown into the air, fire rained around him, and the howling winds threw it all about.
Rose opened his mouth to scream her name over the roar of cannon fire and thunder.
BOOM
Then it all came to a deafening stop.
Peeking out of the corner of his eye, he saw her blink dumbly. Then, a moment later, her entire body stuttered. Space folded in on itself, unfathomable lights and colors flashing in a way that made his brain painfully contort itself into a pretzel in an attempt to understand just what it was seeing.
A moment later, Prince sat there, jeans, shirt, and jacket all how they'd been not minutes ago.
"...Prince?" Rose repeated cautiously.
"...yeah…" Prince said absently, her voice carrying a disturbing echo, as if a small chorus followed her every word, "yeah...sorry about that. I just…"
"Dark lightning tazed your system?" Rose grunted as he got up.
"...yeah...sounds about right." She responded, still sounding a bit different. "Give me a minute to pull myself together, Rose. I'm a bit unwound at the moment."
"We don't have time for that, Prince."
She frowned ever so slightly, tilting her head to the side. "What do you mean?"
Rose gestured up to the stormy sky. The lightning striking across the landscape. The raging winds. The soft glow of distant fires. And the dark shapes flitting about in all too familiar twisting formations.
"Well fuck."
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A/n: Sorry this is late. Finished this bit up, and I kinda felt like I needed soemthing more to make a it a chapter, but it's also a good stopping point.
Plus it was hard for me to think of a good place to take it next within the confines of a chapter.
So here you go.