Chapter 4

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A/n: Sorry for the delay

"Fucking hell,"

The two of the cursed as the truck came rounded the hill and came upon the city below them. They'd seen the fires from the bomb range, but it was something else to see it in person.

"You see anything in particular Prince?" Rose asked as he steered the truck through the winding switchbacks downhill.

"Airstrikes. Indiscriminate ones by the look of it," She commented as she peered through the glass, "Though that might have something to do with what's doing this."

"Which is?"

The twinkling lights under Prince's brow narrowed.

"Bombers. Old ones. Looks like Vals. I can only spot a flight of them hanging around right now, but that sounds suspiciously low given everything else that's happening."

"Vals?"

"Japanese dive bombers, circa World War II. Real pain in the ass."

Rose pressed his lips together tightly and rubbed a free hand over his stubble. "The whole plane?" He asked as his mind spun through possibilities.

"Like I said, a whole flight of them." She paused, twisting her head as if to get a better angle. "But...I think they're something...demonic...going on with them."

"Yeah, because that clears things up," Rose snarked, "What, we talking black ghostly forms with azure flames? Planes made of slick black metal and pulsating red blood? Skeletal riders and howling banshees on their tail?"

"Bit of column A, bit of column B," Prince answered. "It's...hard to get a fix, really. They're pretty far away, and the pitch black skies aren't helping anything."

"Well...fuck," He ground his teeth together in frustration. A dozen possibilities came to mind, each one worse than the last. "Could be a projection while something else happens. Could also be spirits repossessing old stuff out for vengeance. Could even be Shades from the old war bubbling back up."

Rose shivered, remembering old events he'd tried to put in the past. "I hope it's not Shades."

He glanced at his partner for some semblance of comfort. "Got any theories yourself?"

"Hmm…" Prince said distractedly. "Nothing solid."

"None of us do, if we did we wouldn't be caught with our pants down and a fat log halfway out our ass." He groused. "Now come on, this is a team effort. Spill."

Prince was tempted to roll her eyes and huff, but held herself back. Rose was speaking with a tension and edge she was long familiar with. Part of it irked her, but she knew it was just the normal human response to things spinning wildly and suddenly out of control. Stress and fear were pushing him, and pushing back wasn't going to help anything. She had to roll with his punches, just like he did with hers.

Just like always.

"You know that fog earlier?" She began "How it was steeped in dark aether?"

"Yeah. It kinda disappeared right about the time you got blasted by the sky, which is currently looking more like a demonic lake."

"Got a theory about that." She continued, twisting in her seat to face him. "It felt like the two worlds were merging, right? The Ethereal in the Material?"

"Yeah, Convergence." He nodded, then froze as what she was considering struck him. "You saying it feels like we're undergoing that right now?"

Prince took in a deep breath from the air around her and processed. She held it in what passed for her lungs and felt the air, really felt it, breaking it down and all the little sensations it caused as it passed through her body.

"...Yeah...yeah it definitely feels like it. The air is absolutely flooded with aether. I don't think Mater and Aether ratios are quite at balance, but there's a helluva a lot more magic in the air than there should be for this plane. And that matches up with what we know about Convergence, the spiritual and mortal worlds combining and all that." She explained. "It's a natural cycle, coming in and out like the tides. Tide goes out, the worlds are far apart and magic is weak in our world. Tide comes in, and the mystic parts of reality swell in strength until they become as integral as the dirt, sea, and sky."

"Except," Rose countered, "that's a very long and methodical cycle. An hour ago, we were hovering around the lowest tide possible. It should have taken nearly two millennia to gradually shift back to high tide, increment by increment. Convergence doesn't just happen all at once overnight."

"Well, whatever we're looking at, it's- ARG!"

Rose glanced at Captain Prince from out of the corner of his eye. The truck bounced as he sped over a pothole.

"You alright?" he asked.

Prince grunted and sat up in her seat, "I'm fading in and out."

She held up a hand in front of herself, gazing at it with starry eyes. As she moved it around, it left an afterimage of greyscale in its wake. It was as if just beneath the surface of her skin, another ghostly form pulled from the reels of a black and white film existed.

"I think I've been…" She shivered, the multifaceted nature of her existence spinning around itself, "I'm out of sync."

"Out of sync?" He asked.

"Yeah," Prince said, curling her fingers and watching the ghostly after images trail through the air. "You know how I'm the gestalt spirit?"

Her thoughts felt sluggish and distracted. Every idea branched off into a thousand more, every memory spinning into its own swan song. She felt crowded, like she was alone in her body.

"Well, you're a spirit of glory, but yeah?" He answered. "You saying the central tenants are becoming untethered?"

"No...maybe...I don't-NO", Prince shivered violently as she felt something pass through her.

Rose glanced over and saw a half dozen ghostly forms writhing on top of her, each form slightly different and overlapping with one another. Each one screaming, some in agony, some in horror, and some in rage.

"Dammit! Prince?" He cursed, patting himself down to try and find something to stop it.

Just as soon as it started, Prince snapped back into place as her normal self. She shivered in her seat, soaked to the bone and dripping all over the interior of the truck.

Rose winced, his experience with his partner allowing him to empathize with her pain. "Looks like you're getting ripped apart."

"More like pulling myself back together," She answered with a hoarse voice, brushing her dripping wet hair out of her face. "It's gonna be hard for me to do anything major with aether like this."

"Alright, no magic." Rose summarized. "Got it."

"It's more complicated than that" Prince hedged. Then she pulled her revolver from her holster and checked it over. A wave of soft radiant blue light ran over the gun, then dissipated into the air. She grimaced. "But I'm definitely not at100%. I can barely even sync up with my gun."

She holstered the revolver with a huff, angrily crossing her arms as she glared out the front window.

"So what do we do now?"

"Try and hook up with the Bureau. Can you call them up?" Rose asked.

Prince sighed but pulled out her phone, only to discover it had no bars.

"No signal," She explained, "Gonna try for the network."

She put in the digits for the backup system in place, the one that held a basis on more ethereal laws. She managed to get a connection, which lifted her spirits. Putting it to her head, she waited for the operator to pick up.

When the first twisted, screaming, syllable hit her ear, she crushed the phone in her hands into twisted scrap.

Rose flinched at the loud action, "Christ Prince!" He glanced at her from the corner of his shades and noticed the disturbed look on her face. "...That bad?"

"Communications have been...corrupted." She said with a worried tone. "I...honestly I doubt most mortals could listen to it without going insane or getting subverted. Possibly becoming hosts."

Rose opened his mouth, but wasn't really sure what to say to that.

"Ah…"

Prince brushed it off, her mind spinning to lock on to what she could use. "Communication's fucked for us, so it's probably fucked for everyone. Which means no help coming anytime soon."

"...Well, some people will probably take notice of San Francisco suddenly dropping off the grid, but I get your point," he agreed, "doubt anyone will be getting the word out anytime soon. Kinda makes sense if your whole Convergence theory holds up."

Prince frowned, pondering that, then nodded. "Yeah, as the normal laws of physics start having to contend with the laws of aether, some things will probably get weird. Radio waves and wireless communication probably aren't robust enough to deal with that. Even if they are, they probably line up too closely with basic precepts and tenants of various spirits floating around."

"Not to mention the ones trying to kill us all," Rose cut in, "I bet those guys are responsible for the screaming. Wouldn't even be surprised if it's on purpose, as a kind of ethereal electronic and psychological warfare."

Prince cupped her chin and pursed her lips, eyeing the burning Oakland scenery in the background.

"I don't know about that…"

"You don't? Makes sense to me."

"But you forget, spirits aren't creatures of logic. We're creatures of feeling." She gestured a hand to herself, "I'm fortunate in that one of my tenets is about thinking things through instead of just acting, but I doubt that's what these things are feeling. Given what I'm seeing, it's more likely it's something like blind rage and they're just screaming at everything, and it just so happens that some of our stuff has the misfortune of picking it up. Either way, I'd be surprised if these things are doing it intentionally as a strategic move."

"Whatever the hell they are," Rose added, half jokingly.

The corner of Prince's lip twitched.

"Yes," she agreed with a slow and deliberate nod, "whatever the hell they are."

"Well, I-"

BOOM

A deafening blast of air crashed into them, a feeling not unlike a sledgehammer slamming into their chest and forcing the breath from their lungs. Rose fought to control the truck as the world violently shook around him.

"What the hell was that!" he shouted, glancing around frantically to try and catch a glimpse of what had just happened.

"I don't…" Prince began, head on a swivel as she fought to push her ego's down and find out what happened. "I think...Fuck!"

He flicked his eyes to her for a half second, seeing her twisted around in her seat, head out the window, and staring at something behind them with a grimace.

"What?"

"They bombed the range where we just were."

Rose breathed in sharply.

Above him he could hear the ominous hum of propellers, like the droning of a biblical plague hovering just above them, waiting to crash down like a wave. It set his teeth on edge. He tried to swallow but found his mouth dry. He let out his breath and forced his grip on the wheel to relax.

"They're following us, aren't they?"

"Me, Rose. They're following me." She said solemnly.

Then she went quiet.

"Damn Nip bastards" a voice growled.

Rose's head snapped to the side in shock, and found his partner replaced by the grey apparition from the field. Her face was pulled into a rictus of rage. All teeth, fire, and fury. She twisted around in her seat, pulled her revolver from her deathly pale officer's coat, and aimed at something behind them with half her body hanging out the window.

"Burn in-!"

"PRINCE!" he shouted, cutting her off.

Her form stopped and stuttered, like a program glitching in and out of the fabric of reality.

Rose seized the fleeting moment he'd stolen, taking one hand off the wheel and desperately digging through his various pockets for something, anything that could help, all while he did his level best to keep the truck safe and moving on the road.

"Fuck fuck fuck," He muttered to himself as he tried to juggle several trains of thought at the same time, all equally important to keeping him from to a violent end in the next couple seconds.

Finally, after feeling a solid lump in his shirt pocket, he found it. He pulled out a lump of metal that had been melted and warped into something vaguely resembling a star. He held it tight in his free fist and brought it up to his mouth. He wasn't a mage, not by training anyways, but one didn't survive for nearly 20 years in the BPRD without learning a few tricks of the trade.

Rose whispered her name, her true name into the lump of metal and squeezed it hard enough to draw blood from his hand.

Prince's body gave a violent shudder and Rose looked away as reality twisted into impossible shapes in the corner of his eye. When he looked back, Prince, back in her jacket and jeans, was leaning forward in her seat, head in her hands and gun on her lap. She heaved deeply, her whole body trembling for a moment, before going unnaturally still.

She looked up, her teeth grinding together, and the shadows covering her eyes seemed deeper.

"...Sorry about that." Prince let out. "..Thanks for bringing me back, Rose."

"No problem," Rose said, even as put the warped star away and flexed his sore hand. "Just trying to look out for you. You gonna be alright?"

She sucked in a harsh breath through her teeth. Rose could see the tension in her body. He couldn't see the afterimages anymore, but that was more because she wasn't moving anymore than she had to. She wasn't even keeping up the facade of breathing like she normally did, her entire body was held still by her will alone.

"...no." She shook her head, "no, I've been rattled good. You being here is probably the only thing keeping my psyche in the present, and not spinning back to the old days."

Rose grimaced, "so you think I can expect to see more of Halsey's old girl?"

Prince closed her eyes and let out a harsh breath, "...yeah...maybe...probably. All this," she gestured to the general chaos and darkness around them, "isn't helping. That blast scrambled me, and even though your presence is pulling my spirit back to the present, this whole shit show is a damn strong reminder of the past."

"It just makes me want to...want to...WANT TO…" She bared her teeth, her form flickering with warped greyscale again.

"Prince," Rose cautioned.

Prince visibly worked to reign herself in. Closing her eyes and centering herself, she managed to focus on Rose's presence and anchor herself to him again.

"Yeah, right, sorry." She said, shaking her head from the nightmares of her past. "But you get the idea."

"Yeah...I do…" Rose frowned, putting both hands back on the wheel and trying to think about what to do next.

The Bay Area had been dragged into a hellish nightmare of World War II, they were on their own with no support, and Prince was fighting an internal war with the vengeful shadow of herself. What the hell was Rose supposed to do about that?

He forced himself to calm down, telling himself that he'd been through worse before. That incident in Japan, in particular, came to mind. Prince and him had made it through that, mission accomplished and alive, they could make it through this.

Although, he couldn't help but think, back then, we were going in there for a mission. We knew what we were getting into. We were prepared, we had support, we had information.

Right now, we got jack shit.

He bit the inside of his cheek and forced the doubts from his mind. They wouldn't help him now. He didn't need more doubts, he needed answers and directions. They were running aimlessly now, they needed something to guide them. A mission, a goal.

Well he thought to himself, I suppose the first step of any good op is information gathering.

"Prince," he said sharply, the disparate threads of a plan beginning to come together in his mind. "Do you think you can send up some recon?"

He saw his partner bite her lip and the lights buried in her shadowed face twinkled in thought. "...maybe."

"I'm going to need better than maybe, Prince."

She clicked her tongue in irritation, but Rose could tell it wasn't really directed at his so much as it was aimed at the fucked situation they found themselves in.

"I might be able to send something up," She admitted, "but even if I do, I can't be certain it won't be noticed by the air cover already up there. The Eye in the Sky doesn't exactly have much staying power in contested airspace, not on its own anyway, and in my condition, I don't think I'll be able to manage much of an air fleet."

"How much do you think you can hold in the air at a time?" Rose asked.

"Hmm...depends on what I send up, and how. Maybe...3 birds? I could probably pull more if I pull from the older or more iconic stock. You know, stuff I have a better connection with. But then I run the risk of losing myself in the past." She explained. "If I want more power, then I'll have to stop fighting my instincts and go with the flow, which means basically no control. If I want more control, I'll have to fight myself the whole time and that means barely any actual power getting out there."

"Well...that all sounds like shit…" He sighed, running his sore hand through his hair,

"If we'd brought Betty, this'd be a hell of a lot easier." Prince pointed out, just barely on this side of 'I told you so'.

Rose rolled his eyes so hard they almost fell out of his skull. "Yeah, and if we were back in Pearl this shit wouldn't be a problem at all." He shot back.

Prince paused at that, a pensive look flickering upon her face. "You don't think that...maybe Pearl's being attack too?"

Rose blinked. "That's a scary thought."

"For who?"

"...Probably everyone."

"...Point."

Rose shivered at the thought of what could happen if Pearl Harbor was attacked again, especially like this, and instead focused on the here and now. "Alright, it ain't much, but we're going to have to work with what we got. And the first thing we need is information. Without that, we could make things worse, be working against ourselves, or blunder into a trap. The best way to get that is to have the Eye in the Sky, preferably without drawing any more attention to us."

Prince frowned and leaned back in the passenger seat as she tossed around the problem. She picked up the revolver in her lap idly, running her hands along the classic make of the gun.

"...I might be able to send up a small drone. We don't need much in the way of fancy equipment, right? Just a general vibe on what's happening?"

"Yep. We can save the instrumentation for later, right now we just need to know the basics." He confirmed.

"Then...yeah, a drone would work. Small, low power, quiet, high altitude." She nodded to herself and flipped the gun into her waiting hand. "I can make it work."

"Good, do it," Rose nodded seriously as his mind shifted, focusing on how to deal with their other problem.

Prince leaned out of the open window again, aiming her Peacemaker into the sky as Rose thought. There was a bang, more muted than normal, as the gun went off in her hand. Rose didn't see the arc of white steam and courtesies as the round arced through the sky, but he'd seen his partner do it enough times to know what to expect. A second later, there was the distant pop that he'd been waiting for, followed by a quiet buzz that was soon drowned out by the rest of the violence outside.

As Prince did her thing with the drone, Rose tried to think of a way to leverage their problems as best as possible as well as where to drive next. They needed to keep moving, or else the enemy, whatever the hell they were, would pin them down and bomb them into oblivion. He also didn't have any illusions about who'd have to do most of the work here. If it really was Shades from WWII that were causing this, then Prince would be their best bet for taking them out.

Hell, that's usually what Prince does. He thought grimly, Prince is the magical muscle, and I'm the crafty brains of the operation. If Prince can't bring that magical might to bear properly, then we're in a rough spot. Especially if ti's even half as bad as it looks.

So how can we leverage what she's got properly? How can I get her to pull out her maximum potential?

"Problem," Prince said in a clipped tone, pulling Rose from his thoughts.

He saw the dark frown on her face and cursed internally. He'd been hoping for any kind of good news, but it looked like it just wasn't that kind of day. "What do we got?"

"Ships in the bay, looks like a fleet of Shades straight from the old days. They're all bristling with guns, teeth, and hate."

"Fuck."

"Yep."

Rose rubbed his face, wiping the sweat from his brow and trying not to devolve into a stream of cursing. It'd feel nice, but it wouldn't help.

"Where are they?" He asked.

"Sitting offshore of San Fran. Looks like they're bombing it or doing some kind of invasion. Nothing good."

"How strong is the fleet?"

"What you're really asking is 'can I take them like this'," she correctly guessed, "and the answer is no. Not like this, anyways. I could launch some birds and I might be able to take down some of the smaller ships. Maybe a destroyer or cruiser here and there, but they've got a couple battlewagons and a flat top."

"And…" The twinkling lights of her eyes narrowed, becoming a focused line of glittering stars where her eyes should have been. "It looks like they have something special."

"Special?"

"Big bitch. Kinda looks like it could be a named spirit." She cocked her head, "Actually...I might recognize her."

"A named spirit?" Rose resisted the urge to throw his hands in the air, "Fan-fucking-tastic. That's all we needed."

"Yeah, I don't think I'll be able to do much damage with a handful of birds. I'd need a massed strike to make a real dent, and I don't have a firm enough grip on my Aether to do that."

"To make a real dent…" Rose muttered.

Something about that struck him, and he wasn't quite sure why.

"Isn't that what missiles are for?" He asked.

"Yeah," She shrugged, "but they'll probably only put down the smaller ships, like I said. The big ones are the real problem, and I can't guarantee that I'll be able to hit hard enough with the handful of spit and harsh language I can pull together to take them out. I'm not even sure they'll scratch the paint, some of those old girls are tough."

"What I really need is a fleet."

"Or…" Rose said, gears turning in his mind. "A really big hammer."

Prince shot him a puzzled look. "Huh?"

"Well," Rose shrugged, actually feeling something approaching hope as things started to click into place. "There's two values of worth here. Quantity and Quality. Since we can't hope to match them in the former, we'll just have to play to the later."

"Yeah, but…" She frowned, "The best I have for that probably isn't good enough. Not if the level of dark Aether floating around is any indication of their strength. I'd need something stronger than a couple of Harpoons to take any of the big girls down."

"Something stronger…" Rose smirked, the idea crystallizing. It was a long shot, but...

The lights on Prince's face blinked out and her jaw dropped as the same idea struck hit her.

Rose flashed her a hungry smile.

"We still have to do our weapon trials, don't we Prince?"

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A/n: Sorry again for the delay.

I've kind of had a lot of stuff on my plate, that and I've been sick about 3 times in the past month.

Fun times.

Anyways, things are picking up, dunno when the next chapter will be out, but this'll probably become a once-a-month kinda thing unless something changes.

Which could always happen, I make no promises about anything.

Hopefully, though, this chapter isn't a massive disappointment or anything.