CPG A/N: Hey guys. Remember this fic? Don't worry, neither do we. I blame Bramblepool. Here's some words from her.
Bram A/N: Heeeeeey, everyone. I kind of suck, don't I? It's been what, two, three years since we updated? Anyway, know that this somewhat overdue update is entirely my fault and CPG is amazing and fantabulous. Also, since it has been like 2 and half-three years, my writing has changed quite a bit. I tried not to change Apocalypsia too much, but it's hard for me to tell. So, yeah, if you're still here, I suck, this is my fault, Apocalypsia prolly seems different and thanks for sticking around!
CPG A/N: So yeah, here's the chapter I've been asking Bram for for a year and a half. Hope you guys like it, we'll try to update soon (though the next one's also Bram's chapter so no promises :P) and hopefully you guys haven't given up on us.
Disclaimer: We own nothing except Kara and Apocalypsia and all those weirdo OCs.
Please review!
Chapter Eleven
Apocalypsia Pandemonium sighed softly as she watched the ground hurtle by at a break-neck pace. A flutter kicked in her stomach. What would it be like to hit that ground? Painful probably. Unless…yeah, it would be painful. She shivered, not liking that rather painful place her thoughts had gone and began to entertain herself by mentally dropping kumquats off the top of the Empire State Building.
The bitter smell of ozone made her look up from her mental fruit massacre. Golden fingers of lighting darted about the dark ominous clouds that loomed in the distance. With a frown, Apocalypsia realized that she should probably be in a bit more of a panic about this, considering the whole "lightning is the natural enemy of an airbeast" thing.
This in mind, she dropped one last kumquat and watched in fly downwards until it hit the ground with an entirely satisfying splatter.
When she looked up again, she saw that the dangerous clouds were beginning to part, revealing a clear blue sky. A moment later, Apocalypsia realized something about her current state. "Hey! When'd I get all wet?"
"You've been wet this entire time, you useless ninny," Deryn replied drily.
Apocalypsia looked at Deryn then smirked. "Well, Miss Smarty-Pants, bet you didn't realize that you're just as wet as me! Ha!"
"Of course I know I'm soaked," Deryn scoffed.
"Yeah?" Apocalypsia slipped off her boots, wringing some of the water out of them. "Well now I'm dry."
"No, only your boots are…"
"DON'T YOU USE YOUR SCHMANCY LOGIC ON ME, MR. SHARP!"
"But—"
Apocalypsia cut Deryn off. "NOW, WHAT DID I TELL YOU!?"
Deryn frowned. "Well, you said—"
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOURE DIONG TALKING BACK AT ME MR. SHARP?"
"But you asked me—"
"GO TO YOUR ROOM!" Apocalypsia shrieked.
"What're you—"
"DO NOT MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF, MR. SHARP!"
"Okay! Fine!" Deryn squeaked, just wanting Apocalypsia to stop yelling at her.
"Good," Apocalypsia replied, a smug smirk on her face. Worked every time.
Deryn frowned. "Wait, what just happened?"
"You were working on talking that beastie of yours down."
"Are you sure—"
"Yup!" Apocalypsia chirped. "Just continue."
"Oh. Alright then. Oi!" Deryn shouted. "You there!"
Apocalypsia chuckled to herself. This was going to be fun.
"Beastie! I'm talking to you!" cried Deryn at the Huxley above her.
No reaction.
Deryn scowled. An hour ago the Huxley had been so easy to spook! Perhaps one annoyed lassie's cries didn't amount to much after the terrific storm.
"You're a big bloated bum-rag!" She shouted, swinging her feet to rock the pilot's rig. "And I'm getting bored of your company!"
She heard Apocalypsia sniff. "Well. I see how it is. I thought we were friends, but that's cool too, I guess, you over-inflated eggplant."
Deryn sighed, tipping her head back to stare exasperated at the beastie above her. "I was talking to the Huxley, you daftie."
"Oh. Well, maybe I was talking to mine."
"Right. Of course you were."
Passing through another patch of sun, the Medusa made a soft sighing noise, expanding its airbag to dry itself.
Deryn felt herself drifting higher, and a quick glance showed that the other Huxley was following along.
She groaned, looking at the blue skies ahead. She could see all the way to the farm lands on Surrey now. And past that would be the English channel.
For two long years, Deryn had wanted nothing more than to go aloft again, like when Da had been alive—and here she was, marooned in the sky, with a girl no smarter than the beast that was marooning her. Maybe this was a punishment for acting like a boy, like her mum had always warned.
The wind steadied, pushing the beast towards France.
It was going to be a long day.
The words "Staple," "Billy," and "flaming street sign" drifted to Deryn's ears. It seemed Apocalypsia was having another argument with her Huxley.
It was going to be a very long day.
Deryn's Huxley noticed it first.
The pilots rig jolted under Deryn, like a carriage going over a pothole. Shaken from a catnap, she glanced over at Apocalypsia, who was waving her arms in circular motions, humming an extremely discordant tune.
"I'm going to die of dehydration," Deryn croaked. Her lips were parched and her bum was very, very sore.
"You do that. I think I'll decline though," Apocalypsia said thoughtfully. "That sounds a little unpleasant."
"I don't suppose you've got anything for dehydration in that backpack of yours?"
Apocalypsia scoffed. "Don't be silly. That would be logical, and you know how I detest logic."
"Brilliant," Deryn groaned.
"Oh, hey look, a whale!"
Deryn rolled her eyes. "Oh, and look, there's a crumpet too! All we need is some tea and we can have a tea party with it!"
Then she saw the tentacles curling around her.
"What is it now?" She moaned, though she'd have welcomed a flock of birds attacking them, as long as it brought the beastie down. A bumpy landing was better than hanging there till she died of thirst.
Deryn scanned the horizon and saw nothing. But she felt a trembling in the leather cords of her pilot's rig and heard the thrum of engines in the air.
Her eyes widened.
A huge airbeast was emerging from the gray clouds behind her, its reflective silver topside glistening in the sunlight.
"Really? You wanna have a tea party with it? I didn't think you really liked stuff like that, but that would be fun!"
The thing was gigantic—larger than St. Paul's Cathedral, longer than the ocean going dreadnought Orion that she'd seen in the Thames the week before. The shining cylinder was shaped like a zeppelin, but its flanks pulsed with the motion of its cilia, and the air around it swarmed with symbiotic bats and birds.
The medusa made an unhappy whistling sound.
"No, beastie! Don't fret!" She called softly. "They're here to help!"
At least Deryn assumed they were. But she hadn't expected anything so big to come hunting her down.
Apocalypsia chuckled darkly. "Are they really, Mr. Sharp? Are they really?"
The airship drew closer, until Deryn could make out the gondola suspended from the beastie's belly. The foot-tall letters under the bridge windows came slowly into focus…Leviathan.
She swallowed. "And barking famous these friends are."
The Leviathan had been the first great hydrogen breather fabricated to rival the Kaiser's Zeppelins. A few beasties had grown larger since, but no other had yet made the trip to India and back, breaking German airship records all the way.
The Leviathan's body was made from the life threads of a whale, but a hundred other species were tangled into its design. Countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch. Flocks of fabricated birds swarmed around it, scouts, fighters, and predators to gather the food. Deryn saw message lizards and other beasties scampering across its skin.
So, in one way or another, Apocalypsia was somehow right. It was a giant whale.
According to her aerology manual, the big hydrogen breathers were modeled on the tiny South American islands where Darwin had made his famous discoveries. The Leviathan wasn't one beastie, but a vast web of life, in ever shifting balance.
The motivator engines changed pitch, nudging the creature's nose up. The airbeast obeyed, the cilia along its flanks undulating like a sea of grass in the wind. A host of tiny oars rowing backwards, slowing the Leviathan almost to a halt.
"Daaaaaang," Apocalypsia observed. "This is one heck of a whale."
The huge shape drifted slowly overhead, blotting out the sky. Its belly was all mottled grays, camouflage for night raids.
In the sudden coolness of the huge shadow, Deryn shivered.
Deryn stared up spellbound. This vast, fantastic creature had come to rescue her. Well, technically, Apocalypsia was being rescued too, but Deryn was sure that the ninny of the girl wasn't their primary reason.
The Huxleys shuddered again, wondering where the sun had gone.
"Hush, beastie, it's nothing but your big cousin!"
"I would probably call it more like an uncle or something," Apocalypsia mused. "Or maybe great uncle."
Deryn heard calls from above, and she saw movement. A rope tumbled into view, unrolling past her. Another followed, then a dozen more, until Deryn and Apocalypsia were surrounded by an upside-down forest of swaying ropes. She stretched out for one, but the width of the airbeast's bas bag kept the rope out of reach. Deryn swung the pilot's rig to get closer. Her motion made the Huxley's tentacles curl up tight, resulting in a sickening jolt downwards.
"Wheeee!" Apocalypsia cried gleefully as her Huxley jolted down as well. "It's like a roller coaster!"
Deryn frowned in confusion. "What's that?"
"Erm…Look! Stuff's happening!"
The airship's engines changed pith again, and the dangling lines reappeared, still out of reach. But then, the engines overhead set up a grinding pattern, on, off, on, off, and the ropes began to sway in rhythm with the sound.
That was one clever pilot up there. The ropes swung closer with every pulse of the engines. Deryn stretched out one arm as far as she could. Finally, her reaching fingers caught hold. She pulled the rope in, knotting it to the ring over her rig, next to Apocalypsia's then frowned. Were they going to hoist them into the gondola? Wouldn't that flip the beasties upside-down?
But the line stayed slack, and a few moments later, a message lizard made its way down. Its tiny webbed hands cupped the rope, as if it were a thin tree branch. The lizard's bright green skin seemed to glow in the shadows below the airship. It spoke with a posh accent, the deep voice uncanny coming from such a wee body.
"Mr. Sharp, I assume?"
The lizard let out a throaty chuckle.
"Hey!" Apocalypsia cried, indignant. "I'm here too!"
Gobsmacked as she was, Deryn almost answered. Of course, the message lizard was only repeating what one of the officers overhead had said to him.
"Greetings from the Leviathan," it continued. "Our apologies for the delay. Bad weather and all that."
It made a noise like a man clearing his throat, and Deryn half expected the lizard to raise a tiny fist to its mouth.
"But here we are at last. We'll be taking you in on the dorsal side, of course. Standard procedure."
The lizard paused and Deryn pondered what "dorsal" meant.
"Ah, yes. I'm told you're just a sprog. Well done getting lost on your first flight."
Deryn rolled her eyes. First a bag of gas and insect guts had carted her halfway across England, and now she was getting cheek from a barking lizard.
"I expect you don't know standard procedure. Well, it's quite simple, really. We'll drop below you, then bring you in with a dorsal winch. Any questions?"
The message lizard stared up at her expectantly, blinking its wee black eyes.
"No questions, sir. I'm ready." Deryn said, remembering to use her boy voice.
"Excuse me," Apocalypsia interrupted. "But my name is Apocalypsia Pandemonium, and I just wanted to let you know that I exist. Thank you, end message."
The lizard then scampered back up the rope to repeat their words to whoever was at the other end.
A minute later, the other ropes were all hoisted away, but the line attached to her pilot's rig was given more slack. It looped down almost out of sight, a quarter of a mile of rope, it looked like. Then the airship's idling engines sprang to life again.
The huge shadow pulled back against the wind, to that the sun broke out from behind its nose, blinding Deryn. The airship dropped then, venting hydrogen with a sound like rushing water, steadily descending till the officers in the bridge windows were dead even with her, only twenty yards away.
One smiled and gave a crisp salute, and Deryn returned it. Apocalypsia meanwhile, gave them a bitter glare, sticking her tongue out to show her annoyance.
The Leviathan dropped still farther, and the Huxleys whined a bit when one huge eye drew level with them.
"Don't you give me any more bother," Deryn murmured.
Apocalypsia was staring hard at the massive eyeball, eyes wide with wonder, previous transgressions forgotten. "Whoaaaaaaa…it's a whale eyeball…a flying whale eyeball…that's even better…"
When the Leviathan's silver expanse slipped beneath her, Deryn saw that the other end of her rope was now attached to a winch on the creature's spine.
So "dorsal" was just service-speak for "backside."
The winch was small and aluminum, made as light as possible, like everything on an airship. Two men cranked it in, drawing up the slack quickly enough. Soon, Deryn, Apocalypsia, and their Huxleys were descending towards the Leviathan's silvery back.
A few minutes later, a half dozen crewmen grabbed the tentacles of the medusas and hauled them down. Deryn found herself released from the pilot's rig and she stumbled and fell, causing the flank to make a most satisfying "whump" sound.
"Jeez, Mr. Sharp, Apocalypsia drawled. "Graceful."
Deryn felt her face redden slightly with humiliation.
Another similar sound showed that the girl had probably just done the same thing as Deryn. A weak "I meant to do that," floated into Deryn's ears from Apocalypsia's direction.
Deryn tried to stand up straight, but pain shot down her spine. She wriggled her toes in Jaspert's boots, trying to erase the pins and needles in her toes.
"Thank you, sir," she managed to the nearest man.
"Long flight, eh?" he said.
"You have no idea," Apocalypsia groaned, while Deryn returned with a salute.
The man was smiling at least. All the crewmen looked rather jolly as they checked over the medusas. Deryn supposed it wasn't often they were called upon to rescue recruits from the sky.
A man in a coxswain's uniform clapped her on the back.
"Your Huxleys are in pretty good condition after a storm like that. Except the one of them that's got that bullet hole. How'd that come about?"
Deryn frowned, opening her mouth to speak, but Apocalypsia cut her off. "That, sir, is top secret."
"Really, lassie?"
"Yup!" Apocalypsia chirped confidently.
The men were running the Huxleys back up, towing them in the Leviathan's wake.
"Not many middies—and civilians—spend their first day aloft," The officer said.
"Not a middy exactly sir. I haven't taken the test yet." Deryn glanced longingly around the topside, praying they would let her explore the ship before they took her back to the scrubs. She'd be ready to walk again in a few minutes, and that would certainly work to distract Apocalypsia from breaking anything and everything.
The coxswain laughed.
"Solving a few aeronautics problems shouldn't be too hard after free ballooning in a Huxley. And with trouble brewing, I expect the service will be looking for a few more lads."
Deryn frowned.
"Trouble, sir?"
The officer nodded.
"Ah, yes I suppose you wouldn't have heard. Some Austrian Duke and Duchess have gotten themselves killed last night. There may be a bit of a ruckus on the continent." ((A/N: Understatement of the century.))
She blinked.
"I'm sorry, sir, I don't understand."
The officer shrugged.
"Not sure what it's got to do with Britain myself, but we've been put on alert. Now that we've got you sorted, we're headed straight over to France, in case the clankers try to start something."
He smiled.
"I expect you and your friend'll be with us for a few days. Hope that's not a bother."
Deryn's eyes widened. As sensation returned to her legs, she could feel the rumble of the engines in the airbeast's skin.
From the spine of the Leviathan, its silver flank sloping away into oblivion, the sky was huge in all directions.
A few days the man had said. A hundred more hours in this perfect sky?
Deryn saluted again, trying to hide her grin.
"No sir, no trouble at all."
Apocalypsia followed Deryn rather dejectedly, as she was shown around the ship by one of the officers. She could now locate the middie's mess and the middie's cabins. Theoretically. A thought popped into her head, so she spoke to their guide. "Hey, Mister Dude, where am I supposed to sleep?"
The man turned about, looking surprised that she was even there. "Oh, um…" he frowned, thinking. "Well, I suppose you would stay in the cargo bay. That is usually where we keep…um…" he coughed. "Extra luggage."
As Deryn stifled laughter, Apocalypsia stopped dead. "Wow. I feel insulted. You know, I thought you were a pretty cool dude," she huffed. "But apparent ally not."
He opened his mouth to say something, but Apocalypsia silenced him with a glare. "Don't even bother. I'm going to bed now. Good night. I don't love you two cuz you're meanie heads." She then turned on her heel, marching off.
After a few moments, she turned around. "Actually, how do I get to the cargo bay?"
"Second hallway on your left, two flights of stairs down, first door on your left," the man replied.
Apocalypsia nodded firmly, then took off, knowing already she was going to get lost.
Approximately 6.34 hours later, Apocalypsia found herself at last in the cargo bay, surrounded by various sketchy boxes and crates. She dropped her backpack on the floor with a solid "clunk" and took a better look around. "Home sweet home," she murmured sarcastically.
After deciding to save renovations for the next morning, she dropped to the floor, almost immediately passing out asleep.
Apocalypsia woke up at four in the morning to a blinding flash.
She sat bolt upright, eyes flicking about as they adjusted to the heavy darkness that filled the air. She was able to see a girl with long, blonde hair and eyes more black and empty than a cloudless night sky.
"Joe!" She cried happily.
Joe sighed deeply. "My name is not Joe, you imbecile."
"Suuuuuuure, Joe."
"Anyway," she breathed, "I came to tell you that you surprisingly did a pretty good job keeping Deryn alive yesterday."
"I really did, didn't I? Anywho, why, if Der-chan's alive and well right now, am I still on this giant flying whale?"
"Because Koscher—I mean someone is probably going to try to kill her again."
"Wait," Apocalypsia narrowed her eyes. "Who's Koscher-I-mean?"
"Look, unicorn party!" gasped Joe, pointing excitedly.
"WHY WASN'T I INVITED!?" Apocalypsia shouted, looking around with wide, frantic eyes.
There was another blinding flash and Apocalypsia was left alone.
CPG A/N: Rereading after three years made me really happy. I really hope you guys stuck with this fic, because reading this reminded me that Bram and I have a lot of plans for it. Anyway, hope you liked the chapter, next one will come soon (I'm glaring at you, Bramblepool). Please review!