Standard disclaimers apply. The divider button doesn't appear to be working on my document editing page, so I have divided up the chapter as best I could. I hope this isn't a bother.
x x x
Four.
'Uh. I know your guess is as good as mine here, but do you really think this is the way we should be going?'
'Don't ask me, man, she's the one leading.'
-x-
It's never been this hard to get to the carnival before.
But then again, Sparx has never had to walk it. A full two Kryillian Miles. In an energy storm which made Cape Doom look like a good spot for a family picnic. The volatile power being flung all over the place would make steering something like the Lightning Flash damn near impossible, even for a pilot like her. She probably won't be able to keep the damn thing airborne. The only other option is to walk it.
Right through the earthquake, into the carnival, and safety. A… what was it that Chuck said once? A cakewalk? Yeah, that's it.
Whatever. Sparx isn't actually deluded enough to believe that and now that she thinks about it, it's kind of embarrassing how unused she is to walking. At the moment, it's hard enough to move, never mind get an anti-gravity craft in the air.
There's another problem, too (besides the fact that it's hard to keep her footing, and the energy waves keep sweeping within touching distance overhead and the storm keeps throwing stuff at them.) Everything looks so… different from down here. Sparx is normally so used to having a Knight's-Eye-View. Routes that were easy enough to follow from the air looked more like mazes down here. Like the Garden of Illusion all over again, only more… rocky. How the Garden might've looked if Random had designed it.
…Not that this is the time for thinking creatively. Sparx hates thinking creatively, anyway. It's not her style. Life-or-death battles are her style. Fighting against Kilobyte and Lord Fear and that disgusting little rat is her style. Fencing, kick boxing, turning loops are all her style. Sightseeing through a quake-wreaked Conestoga Hills? Nuh-uh.
'Uh, you're gonna have to help me out here, boys. Which way are we supposed to be going?'
Stupid Kilobyte. Stupid carnival. Stupid Ace and his stupid Zoar-damned ideas. "Get out there and get to the carnival, Sparx, you'll have to go without me!" Easy enough for him to say. Obviously he had momentarily forgotten that the whole of Conestoga Hills is shaking and shooting off energy like a Lightning Mole with a bad case of Hypofleas.
Sparx remembers seeing a whole Collective of Lightning Moles once back at the Academy. They invaded the grounds after an evil resettlement forced them out of the Nevershine Mines, and started shorting out power sources and generally wreaking havoc. You couldn't even take a jog around the track route without tripping over one of the Zoar-damned pests and getting static shocked. Random had had some dumb idea about scaring them off by releasing a home-bred swarm of Hypofleas –harmless to Lightning Knights and mortals, but a total pain for the fur covered, static charged Lightning Moles– on the Academy grounds.
Good idea, in theory. Or at least it had been until the Moles had caught on and started trying to shock the little pests off, which had ended up with them letting off even more energy and causing even more havoc than they had been before.
That was just what it was like, and that's just what she feels like now. Like a Hypoflea, stuck on some huge Lightning Mole's back, hoping the shocks don't catch her.
…And why the living Oblivion is she wasting time reminiscing when she's this close to being ripped up by a stray energy trail? Damn it. All this fluxing power must be playing with her programming.
'Sparx, uh, I hate to state the obvious, but we probably shouldn't be here,' Chuck reaches out and grips her arm. 'I mean we're right besides a building, if the thing falls we're gonna be squished like a bunch of pancakes. All the survival guides say that you should stay as far away from buildings as possible, man!'
'Great. Useful advice, Chuck, thanks,' Sparx mutters, sarcastically, brandishing her hand at the street, filled with broken glass from smashed in windows and upturned trash cans and heaving concrete. 'So whereabouts here aren't there buildings?'
'I. I'll get back to you, there,' Chuck fights for his footing on the shifting floor. 'And what the hell is happening to the roads?'
'What, you mean sidewalks don't do that around here when there's big trouble?' Sparx frowns, looking at the stone, undulating somewhat beneath Chuck's feet.
'Oh, ha ha. Very funny, Sparx, but this is so not the time!'
Sparx bites her tongue before eventually decided maybe to just let Chuck keep thinking she was joking. Humans are weird like that.
'Well. If anyone's got a plan for when we get in there, this'd be a good time to let it rip,' her voice was met with silence. Well, silence except for the wild grumbling of the quakes and the screaming of the energy beams. '…Anyone?'
'I think you mean… if we get in there,' Mark answers, eventually. Weird, though. He sounds funny. He looks funny, in fact. He's got his back to the wall; the way they all have trying to keep from falling over but… his face is a weird colour. Or it has a total lack of colour, might be a better way of putting it.
'Uh. Mark I have to be a buzz kill here, but…' she points at Mark's shoulder, which was pretty much covered in whatever that red stuff was that he'd started losing after he got his by that flying metal back in the junkyard. '…Ew?'
'Yeah,' Mark's voice is shaking when he talks. 'Yeah, my thoughts exactly.'
'Oh, crap,' apparently it's the first time Chuck has noticed the state Mark's in since the junkyard and now he's staring at Mark in abject horror. Whatever that stuff is, the loss of it is clearly just as effective as the loss of binary code. 'Dude that is so not gonna be good for you…'
'No kidding, I mean. Chuck, you mind telling me how much of you mortals' bodies' is composed of liquid?' Sparx bit her tongue. First she's reminiscing about Academy days, now she's talking science? Her? She scowls, clinging to the wall and wondering what in White Hot Oblivion is wrong with her.
'Enough,' Chuck's face looked a little like Mark's did now. Perhaps a little greener, though. 'Mark what… you must've severed an artery or something. Wed better find some way to cut that off or you're gonna lose your arm or—.'
Whatever else could happen, Sparx doesn't get to hear about it, because all of a sudden she's yelling "down!¬" and they're ducking beneath a particularly low flying wave of violet energy, creeping like coloured water over their heads, breaking down a lamppost in a cascade of sparks. Sparx grabs hold of the first thing there –which just happens to be Chuck, clinging on until the tremor subsides. Which takes a while. In fact, she's pretty certain just the shock of the thing alone knocked her power down two percent.
'Whoa…' Mark murmurs, and Sparx doesn't disagree.
'Zoar damn it,' she says. 'Look, are we going to get to the carnival before we all get shish-kebabbed or what?'
'Sparx, trust me, more walking is not a good idea,' Chuck wasn't having to yell any longer, now that they were a little further away from the junkyard, but his voice was still pitched kind of above normal for some reason. 'I mean, guy losing blood here? A lot of it? It-it's not as easy to replace as the stuff in your power gauge. The more he moves the more he's going to lose.'
'Look, kid, you've got Chuckdude there worried about this,' Sparx said quickly, and me, she thinks without saying aloud. 'What the heck happened to you?'
Chuck's frowning. In fact, he looks almost as terrified as he did the first time Sparx ever saw him, back in the Sixth Dimension, when faced with a troupe of Killer Show Monkeys. Only this time it's somehow… worse. This time she can't just blast away the problem.
'N-nothing,' she can see Mark swallowing the pain, directing his eyes away from his shirt where the red is seeping through. 'It's nothing, not right now.'
'This is your definition of nothing? Dude, you've been playing this game way too long!' Chuck looks back at Sparx, seeming more decisive than Sparx has ever seen him in his life, 'he can't go.'
Sparx feels her frown widen. She clings to the bricks behind her with both hands. 'You don't honestly expect me to go in there alone, right?' She frowned… okay, so she was hardy able to believe what she was saying here. It looked as if her program was the only thing making any sense right now. Hell, she wants nothing better right now that to
'I don't think you have a choice, man,' Chuck shakes his head.
'I never said it was up to you, Chuck!' Mark snaps, which seems to surprise Chuck more than anything, because he flinches a little.
'Mark…'
'Sorry, I-I didn't mean…'
Great. Just great. The world's blowing up all around them, and the boy's are having a spat. They do not have time for this. They do not—
Sparx's trail of thought is interrupted.
A single, gleaming rod of energy.
It starts suddenly, and forms way too fast, cutting through the air like a knife and hurtling upwards for… for just about forever. It reminds her of a Sword of Jacob, piercing the sky, only about a thousand times bigger and a million times more dangerous. Same colour, too. That isn't what worries her, though. What worries her is where it's coming from. And everyone else is also staring in horror as they realise it, too.
The junkyard.
Exactly where the Junkyard was.
Ace.
Sparx hears herself swearing. Feels herself starting to turn back in that direction, running against the shaking roads. But then there's a hand on her arm pulling her back. 'Let. Go!' she cries out before she can stop herself and the hand hangs on, even though Sparx can already tell it's a weak one. She could rip it away easy as anything. Somebody is yelling Ace's name, and another is yelling hers.
Then she realises whose hand it is. 'Sparx, don't, man, you can't go back there!'
'No, it's Ace! Chuckdude, he's back there we can't, I—'
'Sparx!' Chuck is swallowing now and really not looking like himself. This is so… bizarre, that he's the one in control now and Mark's obviously barely holding it together and she…
…She just wants to track something so bad. If Ace is back there. If he's been…
'Uh… okay. Okay, that's definitely the junkyard, isn't it?' Chuck's already weird coloured face is turning an even darker shade of green.
'Yes, Chuck,' Mark should be yelling, only his voice is dragged out and slow sounding. 'Yes that's definitely the junkyard.'
Mark wasn't the only thing who looked messed up. Everything that wasn't being smashed up was warped out of shape. Like…
…Like something being sucked into a portal.
Sparx felt her mouth dry out. Oh. Crap. She can't move, and yet she feels something shuddering, way, deep down in her program. Something telling her that she knows what this thing is, that she's seen it before. And it that memory too, there's someone clutching her arm, holding her back from running into something that looks like a hellfire. The only difference is that in the memory she was struggling, and she's not struggling now, because her Knight hand-to-hand combat training isn't designed for people she doesn't want to hurt, so she just lets Chuck hang on and…
And she knows this has happened before. She doesn't know how she knows, but she does.
Intuition, maybe? That thing Ace had told her about?
But that can't be right, can it?
Hell, you'd think she'd remember something like this happening second for second, but it's nothing more than a faint sense of… of deja….whatever way down inside of her deepest hidden program. Something she'd never dreg up fully if she thought about it for a lifetime.
'Random was right,' she breathes, even though she's not all that sure exactly what Random was right about or what, if anything, Random even has to do with all of this at all, she just knows that he was.
And that doesn't make any sense either.
'Sparx,' Mark whispers, and she whirls to face him again, even though a part of her doesn't really want to. She's never seen this happen to a mortal before and, to put it briefly, it's freaking her out.
'I um, I think I'm going to go with Chuck on this one. I'm kind of… I'm having trouble feeling my arm. Add this to the fact that that's my shooting arm and… I'm no good to you out there. Chuck,' Mark looked in Chuck's direction. 'You can go with me or Sparx—' Chuck's opening his mouth now and Sparx just knows he's going to argue. 'and Sparx needs you to give her directions to the carnival. Look, we're not that far from the surgery. There's no point you hanging around if they need you. Wrist cannon, in there.' He pushed the bag over his shoulder in Chuck's direction, wincing as it brushed against the energy bleed, or whatever it was. Chuck's hands are shaking as he finds the cannon buried in the rucksack.
Sparx knows that she's seen Chuck freaked out of his mortal mind so many times, but she's never seen his hands shake before.
'I… what about you?' Chuck asked.
'Like I said. Surgery. Believe it or not, we're not the only people left in Conestoga,' Mark says. And… damn he really means this. There really must be something wrong if he's insisting they go on without him this way.
'Uh, right, and while you're doing whatever the heck you're supposed to do now,' Sparx has to point out. 'What exactly are we meant to do?'
'Just… go with the plan, okay?' Mark says. As if that's supposed to mean something to her.
'Plan?' Sparx has to grimace 'Tell me when we ever actually had a plan, Mark! This whole level is falling apart and we're going even deeper into this –just the two of us, because you're in no state to go anywhere and Ace is…' she swallows. 'And we're walking right into the heart of it. That's not a plan, it's a… a… Okay, I don't know what it is, but it's not a plan.'
Mark makes a thin smile in her direction, which disturbs Sparx slightly; maybe because it reminds her of the way Ace smiles at her when they're in a no-win situation with no escape.
But then, they've been in a lot of no-win situations with no way out. Ace always found one before. 'So it should be right up your street, then, huh?' Mark says.
Sparx can't actually help but smile back a little. Even through the pain in her stomach at the thought of something bad happening to Ace and against the thought of going into this all alone, she has to smile at the thought that he still thinks they can do this.
Yeah. Now that she thinks about it, he's right. This is her kind of place. Her kind of chaos. She's handled worse before, and if her memory banks are anything to go by, then she must have survived something like this once before, right?
Maybe just through total blind luck. But there's no such thing as a one-off lucky event in Sparx's files. 'Why not again?'
Chuck is forcing the Wrist Cannon onto his arm with hands that're still shaking as he stares uneasily in the direction of the lancing beam of purple light. But then he looks at Sparx and somehow –Zoar knows exactly how– he manages to smile. And says something like 'we'd better get extra bonuses for this, man,' which Sparx doesn't get, but it doesn't matter anyway. At least he's smiling. At least he's not just running away like he did back in Googler's Big Top.
Behind them against the wall, Mark hasn't moved.
Next stop the Carnival. Right.
Sparx couldn't help grinning slightly as she turned back to face the storm. Her kind of chaos.
