The town of Evergreen continued to stymie them at every turn. Days continued to drag by, with Delilah and One wandering around under the pretext of job-hunting (not that there were many jobs paying more than seven dollars an hour were available) trying to find whatever it was that was the source of Hare and Vera's paranoia. Lu joined them from time to time, but since her episode in the pharmacy, she seemed on edge in the town, never letting her guard down and always distracted because of it.
"What's the word from the homebodies?" One asked.
"Not a peep," Delilah said. "Have you been putting pressure on Hare?"
"What? Why do you say that?" One asked, blinking at how she swerved the conversation.
"You've made it pretty clear you didn't like the way he talked to you. And it's also very clear that the two of you could strike sparks under water. So what's your gripe this time?" Delilah asked. If there was one good thing that all of this insanity had imbued into her it was that it was distinctly increasing the utility of her observation skills.
"There's no gripe. Everything's fine," One said.
"And I don't need to be Lu to know when you're lying, either to me or to yourself. What did he say to you now?"
"It wasn't…" One began, but she gave him the flattest of looks as she stopped in front of a store which they only knew used to be a jewelry store because of the absences left by the letters of its signage. "Fine. We had a row when I should'a been keepin' my eyes peeled."
"And when was this?" Delilah asked.
"The crash," One said. Delilah sighed and tweezed the bridge of her nose.
"You've kept this hidden since all the way back then? One. Come on," she said.
"I didn't think it mattered," One said.
"What was this row about?" she pressed on.
"How he threatened to kill me the day he met me, for one," One said.
"Uh huh," Delilah said. She let One just linger there, expecting more of an answer and leaving him off balance.
"Well he did!"
"Hare is a shell-shocked veteran of a war we can scarcely imagine. It doesn't excuse his behavior, but it explains it," Delilah said. "The problem isn't that he did it. The problem is that you keep bringing it up and holding it against him."
"What? I'm s'posed to just pretend it didn't happen?"
"Once he apologizes, yes, yes you are," Delilah said.
"That's bullshit. What's to say he won't just…" One said.
"The man is our coworker, and the source of most of our information on the people trying to destroy our world. And, I'm sure you'll agree with me on this, we're rather attached to it because we live here," Delilah said. "So when he apologizes, drop it."
"Since when do you order me around?" One said, looming down at her. She wasn't short by any means; she was as tall as an average man; it was just that One was reedy and tall for one.
"Since it's starting to get in the way of us doing our job. You keep getting yourself worked up into a snit about something you don't want to do anything about, just so that you can forever be justified in being angry. I've seen enough of that behavior in my childhood that I don't want to put up with it now. Grow the fuck up, One."
One looked like he wanted to say something truly mean-spirited, but stopped himself, growling and kicking a chunk of concrete away. It hit the side of an ill-maintained Pepsi machine with a dull gong.
"Are we calm?" Delilah asked. One hung his head for a second.
"Yeah. Yeah, we're calm," he said, his voice ragged as though he'd just run a marathon while screaming.
"Good. Now. With that particular thing out of the way, what's your opinion on this part of town?"
"Ah! There's my devotional friend from somewhere out in the country," a familiar voice cut in, causing Delilah to flinch and turn; One did likewise, reaching for a gun he didn't have, and turning to face a nebbish and retiring looking middle aged man with large spectacles on his face and a laundry hamper in his arms.
"Yo… who's this?" One asked, eyes locked on the interloper, who happened to be Bobby Corff without his regalia.
"Somebody I ran into a few days ago," she said without much emotional input. "What are you doing here?"
"Laundry, obviously," he said, pointing past them to the laundromat which they had passed without Delilah consciously noticing. "And who is this friend of yours? And come to think of it I don't even think I got your name when we last spoke."
"This is Brian," Delilah said, before One offered his preferred name which was unacceptable because it was also a number, while also pointedly not giving her own. She turned to One. "Mister Corff is a local pastor with some… weird habits."
"Weird how?" One's brows drew down.
"The people of Evergreen and its surrounding area require a certain level of performance with their sermonizing," Corff said with a lopsided smile. "You should come by. We're having a bible-study at the community hall this evening. A bit of time together really helps us shed the anguish that our paths have put to us."
"No thanks. I don't think I'm your kind of evangelical," One said.
"My personal practice encourages certain a heterodoxy. It serves to cement the surety of our paths, if we are able to clearly see others which are clearly in error," Corff said. "Community hall; six PM. All are welcome. Go in sanity."
And with that, Corff walked past them with his hamper of laundry and moved toward the laundromat. Delilah turned a look toward One.
"What?" he asked.
"I was thinking that since this is obviously turning up nothing maybe we should go. See what the locals we aren't running into are thinking and what they're like. One of them might be our thread to the Icon," Delilah said.
"That's a pretty thin wire to cling to," One said.
"Do you have a better plan than wandering around the town and hoping?" Delilah asked.
"No. Fuck me but I don't," One said. He pointed an accusing finger at her. "But if I end up givin' this weirdo cult all'a my shit and take out a suspicious life-insurance policy with them as the beneficiary, I'm blaming this on you."
"That's fair," Delilah said. She turned away from the abandoned, disused, and underutilized buildings that they were pounding the pavement of, and began the saunter back toward the trailer-home that they were hiding out in. "Do you think we should bring Lu into this?"
"I mean… probably? She can't be a worse choice for a third than that fuckin' Hellspawn is," One answered.
"Why do you keep calling her that. She has a name," Delilah asked.
"The first time I found one'a those shits they killed like a hundred of my guys!" One said with a wild gesticulation back into his personal past.
"And this one is working for you. I fail to see how the difference isn't the most obvious thing in the world," Delilah said.
"She don't work for me. She works for Hare," One pointed out the distinction in that difference. "And she ain't even human. How do we know what sort of plans she's got cooking in that brain of hers?"
"Asking her couldn't hurt," Delilah said. While she had certainly taken a hit to the faith in her own instincts, her gut told her that Vera was very much on the level, in that she was enjoying her freedom from her own kind ten times more than she was enjoying the luxuries that she was being paid in. And those she enjoyed very much. "But you're right in that we can't bring Vera. That would just be thumbing our nose at the enemy a bit much for even my tastes."
"So what do we do until six?" One asked.
"...Don't know," Delilah said. There was about a minute of silence between the two of them as they walked back toward The Den. "Tell me something…"
"What?" One asked.
"Regarding Hare's Rule 3," Delilah said.
"The don't-be-a-horny-loser rule? What about it?" One asked.
"Does that mean that Hare had sex with all of those people he hero-worships that we're badly replacing?" Delilah asked. One blinked a few times as though the though was only now being delivered to his brain.
"Wow. I mean… probably?" One said.
"How goddamned horny were those people?" Delilah shook her head.
"I know! It's goddamned unprofessional!" One said. "Don't dip yer pen in company ink. It's an old sayin' for a reason goddamn it!"
"Thank you! I was worried I was the only one thinking that!" Delilah said. "And with Lu essentially being a nun of her own volition, I figure we're probably the most chaste group of us that ever was."
"What do we call what we are anyway?" One said.
"Hare calls us Oedipeans, but that's both a mouthful and doesn't mean anything to me," Delilah said.
"Well? What would you call us?" One asked. Delilah gave it a bit of thought, and her mind went back to her particular incident which set all of this in motion.
"Considering the solution to this world's problems likely lies in Hell… why not call us Helldivers?" she asked.
"I like that. It's soytenly easier to spell than whatever the fuck Oedipean is," One gave a laugh.
Helldiver X
Base Siege
The community hall was already fairly well peopled at half-past five, a gaggle of folk that One had seen on occasion thoughout the town, but never ran into during his cover. As though the people running businesses were too set-upon by the travails of small town Americana to bother catching a slice of religion. One didn't have a strong opinion either way, honestly, but there was certainly something of a stereotype that the further south you went, the tighter people gripped their bibles. So why were the workers and the randoms the people of the hour?
"That's a fair few people," Lu noted, and One gave a nod. They were still standing outside, not yet plunging into the deep end, but that changed when Delilah finally rounded the corner and came into view. Parking was a bear, as the center's parking lot was partially torn up, with road-equipment parked and perhaps even abandoned inside the cordon. Of the people here, only the six earliest or luckiest were able to park in the lot; the rest had to find a spot where they wouldn't get towed, of which those were shockingly few.
"I really hope we don't need to run for our lives," Delilah noted as she approached. "That was not close by."
"We'll be fine," One said. He had a new gun riding his jacket, collapsed as the old carbine had been. He'd gone to Hare in the intervening hours of the day, finally asking for him to replace what was broken, if such was even possible.
"What do you mean, if it's possible?" Hare had said.
"I mean… this was a fancy, space-age super gun. I can't imagine you can make a million 'a these things," One had answered, holding up the scrap of the broken carbine that they'd dug out of the mud.
Hare blinked at him, then. "I absolutely could," he'd said. "One… how advanced do you think this gun is?"
"It can literally change how far it penetrates into people in real time with no input from me. That seems pretty fuckin' special," One had answered him.
"Hare, the S-46 was not special," Hare had said with a laugh. He pointed to a screen, which minimized what it had been showing to reveal a boxy gun with obvious radiators marching along the sides of its barrel. "This is the PXL51 'Balor' personal energy weapon. It fires a deep-gamma ray laser with such coherence that it's effective range in-atmo is line-of-sight, limited only by human reaction times and steadiness. It is directly charged by the Numen of the wielder, which collects in a Sync-tech interface-battery allowing it to fire from at the minimum a 100 kilowatt level more than a dozen times for every mote we put in, and capable of maximum single-shot output of 1.6 megawatts. Which as far as I can tell in the modern age is only available through room-sized devices used in laboratories."
"Okay, so it's a wonder-tech laser gun. What's yer point?" One had asked.
"There were, last I checked, 1,200 PXL51s in circulation. And that is with the notable limitation of being Sync-tech and requiring Integration to even fire the fucking thing!" Hare stressed. He then showed another picture, of something called the New Delhi Mustered Soldiery parade-marching several thousand men down a street. And of the thousands of people, every single one of them had one of One's old gun swinging as they stomped their way along. "Your gun is… what's the best way to describe this," Hare had paused, thinking back. Then he raised a finger. "Aha! Yes, the AEGIS S-46 is about on par with an AK-74 Kalashnikov, by my way of thinking."
"So you're sayin' that the gun I've been babying is your equivalent of a Kyber Pass Kalash?" One had asked, incredulously looking at the miracle of ballistics he was holding.
"You don't need to feed it with your Numen to shoot it, and it only requires Sync-tech to build. If you want something nice, I can make you something nice. I've got the materials for it, now," Hare had said.
And a new, miraculous gun did a lot to mend cracked fences.
He had spent the rest of the time after Hare whipped it up in couple of minutes just using it to shoot shit out in the brush, since their Den didn't have a shooting gallery. What the S-46 had in simplicity, this thing had in audacity. It looked pretty weird, more like a FN P90, with its top-release 'ammunition block', which was literally just a chunk of anything containing iron, but came in two and a half pound slips for easy use that apparently were feed-stock for several hundred shots, and separate batteries that each had about 60 shots worth of juice in them. And these batteries could be recharged if he pushed his mojo into them.
And oh-gawd the accessories.
He could make this gun set your ass on fire from a foot-ball field away, or freeze you like a TV-dinner.
"You're smirking, One," Delilah said, pulling his attention back to the matter at hand.
"Yeah, I was just thinking 'bout stuff," he said.
"You were thinking about your fancy new gun, weren't you?" Delilah asked.
"Ixnay the ungay," Lu muttered as the three of them started toward the doors of the community hall and entered the gathering. There was an array of dishes set up on one of the tables; this whole affair had also turned out to have been a pot-luck.
A few people turned to them as they entered, but they didn't give the creepy hillbilly stare that One was more than half-way expecting. No, they were just seen as unexpected but utterly allowed, and then people returned to their own conversations. One, though, furrowed his brow as Delilah said something and drifted to one of the tables. The people here were all carrying simple masquerade masks, either ones on little sticks that they could hold up to their faces or dangling from bead-chains from their necks. The masks were all black, their nose pronounced to the extent that it was pointy.
"Hey Lu?" One said.
"Yeah?" she said.
"What's up with that?" One gave a nod toward one as the two of them headed toward the pot-luck table. It would give the two of them an excuse to not talk for a bit, to just stand back with something in their hands and watch.
"A devotional item, maybe?" Lu asked.
"I don't know too many churches that ask you to put on masks. Hell, that was most of the bitching they did two years back!" One noted, as he took a scoop of one of the three potato-salads available to him and put it onto a paper plate, before moving on to the heating tray that had sauce-slathered strips of beef-steak in it. If he wasn't concerned about poison or drugs, he would be distinctly tempted to partake in that. It looked fuckin' delicious. Still, he put some on his plate that he would push around with his fork but never eat.
"I will admit, this place does have a strange air to it," Lu admitted, her own plate lacking any of the many home-cooked meats that were on offer. Maybe she was still feeling bloated after that fucking-well-early Thanksgiving that Hare whipped up. "She wasn't just being paranoid, I know that much."
"So is this them kinds of weird, or just Alabama weird?" One asked.
"I think we're going to find out soon," Lu answered. One saw the form of Robert Corff as he finished giving a brief hug to an older woman. The effete older man spotted One spotting him, and gave a nod, heading in their direction. "Is this a problem?"
"Just be careful," One whispered to her as Corff approached. "Hey there, mister Corff. Y'didn't tell me this was a potluck!"
"I didn't want you to think your first time would be predicated on you bringing something for everybody," Corff said. "I saw that friend of yours coming in. What was her name again?"
"Yeah, she's already had dinner, no surprise she didn't come to the table," One managed to deflect. He wasn't sure what Delilah's play on not giving so much as an alias was, but he had to figure she'd tell him when it became relevant.
"Still, showing up nice and early shows a degree of respect I was concerned I wouldn't see out of her," Corff noted.
"Why?" One asked, forcing himself not to narrow his eyes.
"Hrm? Oh, no reason," Corff said. Great. So the local padre was a racist. But since this was Alabama, that was pretty common. More than half the town was black or something near it. And despite that, a good four fifths of the people looked like you could wash them with bleach without ruining something. "So tell me, Brian. What wild meanders did your path take to bring you to this room this evening?"
"The fuck are you talking…" One began.
"Language! There are ladies present!" Corff said with scandal in his voice. One grumbled and tried again.
"I have no idea what you mean," he said.
"All of us have a path that we've walked through life," Corff said. "A path that, though it sometimes even seems random, was ordained from On High by Almighty God. So what difficulties did God place before you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, buddy. I'm here 'cause of the choices I made, not 'cause somebody magic'd me here by some prophetic nonsense," One said.
"Hrm. So you haven't seen it yet," Corff said, his expression shifting from god-struck to somewhat pitying. "Don't worry. There's always another day to learn where we are meant to be. God is in Heaven, and His world is Perfect. What about you, young miss?"
"Eating," Lu said with a full mouth, which pointed out the flaw in One's tactics. All the trouble to get the food and then didn't bother eating it. Come to think of it hold on, Lu! How do you know that shit ain't drugged? But a glance at her plate showed not potato-salad but mashed potatoes.
Nobody here was offering mashed potatoes.
Why in the fuck did Lu just carry a bag of leftovers from that early Thanksgiving around with her?
Well, whatever the case, it bought her time, but Corff was relentless, in that he waited, bespectacled eyes watching her with slightly disconcerting intensity, until any reasonable masticator would finally swallow. "Sorry. Caught me at a bad moment," Lu finally said. Corff had cornered her.
"And your name?" he asked.
"Louise," she said. Cutting it a little fine there, weren't you, Lu?
"Welcome to my bible-group, Louise," Corff said. "What about your path? Do you still believe from your hair to your toenails as Brian here does that you could have ended up anywhere in the world, become rich and famous, or become the President?"
"No," Lu said, lowering the plate in her hands until it was essentially at her waist. "I never had much choice at all. I just took what options I had. And they weren't ever good ones."
"Then your path has been a hard one. A crucible, that fired you into the form you now stand here before us today, an anvil and hammer that shaped you and made you strong. That is the power of embracing the path, Louise. It is being free to release our regrets and despair of what we believe might-have-been, or even should-have-been! You showed your strength to reach this point, along a difficult path. That is not something to be bemoaned; it is to be celebrated!"
"You don't know what I've seen on my path," she said flatly.
"No. Admittedly I don't. But you aren't the only one who's lived a hard life, who's walked a hard path," Corff gestured vaguely toward a group of young-ish women who somehow nevertheless looked like the had years drained from them, subject to wrinkles and thinning hair long before their old age. "Some of the people here are former – or even current – drug abusers. Sobriety is a difficult journey and not all have it on their maps. But still we cannot simply turn them away for what was never meant to be; that would simply be cruelty for no good purpose. If we are true to the Good Book and to the God which bade it written, we must embrace those even as they struggle. Even as they fail. That is what Charity means."
"Right," Lu said, but she seemed dutifully suspicious.
"And Delilah! You finally join us," Corff said, as the woman in question finally rejoined them. "Did you have a nice chat with Bill Williamson?"
"We had some words," Delilah was non-committal. "So… what exactly is this? I don't see a lot of bibles in hands right now."
"The bible is but one means of passage from the base flesh to the Will of God," Corff said, dipping his head in a pious gesture for a moment. "But there are many others. I don't claim to own the sole lock-and-key to the spout that God meters out grace from. There are innumerable directions by which one may approach the glory of God. Biblical scripture is simply a very common one, and one that is dear to many hearts."
"So you're holding a bible-study without bibles," Delilah said.
"Masonic lodges hold meetings not related to erecting buildings," Corff said with a wide grin.
"It just seems a bit… I don't know…" Delilah said.
"Sacrilegious," Lu provided for her. Corff sighed.
"Many narrow-minded believers often say as much. But the world is vast and wide, and spending some time in it would do wonders to widen your view. It has certainly widened mine. But if you'll all excuse me, I see Missus Perkins beckoning me. Enjoy the offerings, and Brian I strongly urge you to speak to some of your fellow guests. Their viewpoints might be illuminating to you," Corff said, giving them each a respectful nod, then parting and heading across the room to where a large woman was waving at him.
"Am I the only one who finds him really fuckin' weird?" One said.
"No. No you're not. Delilah?" Lu said. Delilah was looking askance at both of them.
"I don't know what you two are seeing. He just looks like your standard fundie-zealot to me," Delilah said.
"And you have a lot of experience with those?" One asked.
"If only you knew, Brian," Delilah said with a surprising bitterness. Right. Her childhood. She didn't expound to any length about what drove her to the police-department, but the fact that she was staunchly atheist and refused to refer to her father by any term other than 'Shithead' probably was the source of that.
"Delilah… they all have masks," Lu said, as though trying to explain something to a child.
"So?" Delilah asked. And then when One looked up, he had a moment of confusion. For just a second, he could have sworn that the guy he was looking at was wearing the mask rather than just carrying it around in the same hand that held up a plate. But a blink showed the truth. He was just a fat white guy with a five-o'clock shadow.
"Yeah, they do. What are you thinking, Lu?" One asked.
"I don't know. Not really. Not yet," Lu admitted. "There is no chapter in Mussa's journal about the Heterax. I only know what Vera and our local Turing have told us about them. And it feels like there's something critical that they'd know that's right in front of us and we're not seeing it."
"This is just another religious…" Delilah began. But she cut off when she locked eyes with Lu, and One felt a really weird surge buzz through him, as though he'd just gotten a stern static shock, but without a clear sense as to why.
"Delilah, take a look around now," Lu said, her gaze now stern and lacking any of the unease she'd had before. "Tell me what you see."
Delilah looked around the room, a visage of dread coming to her face.
"We need to leeee~eave," Delilah said airly.
"What? What's going on?" One asked.
"I agree, we should go," Lu said, grabbing One's sleeve and pulling him toward the doors. The clock above the doors said that they meeting hadn't even properly started yet, so this was probably going to be noticed.
"Are you leaving already?" a motherly woman with greying blonde hair asked, not quite barring their way but making it look like she could with very little effort.
"I forgot to feed the cat," One said, grasping for any reason why he could walk out right now. "If I don't give that little guy a full bowl, Imma hear about it later."
"Well rush on back, sug', we're always eager to see new faces 'round here," the older woman said.
"Oh of course. Just tell Corff I'll be a bit late to the actual doin's," One said.
"Oh I'll do just that. Go on and skip on then. There'll be seats a-plenty for ya when you get back," she gave a smile that on any other day and in any other circumstance would have been disarmingly genuine. Now, though, One was nervous, and those nerves were on the edge of having him damn the torpedoes and bolt full speed ahead.
The chill in the air didn't part until they were on the sidewalk outside, and even then, One felt as though unseen eyes were on him the entire time. "Okay, would one a' ya's ladies fill me in?"
"They were all wearing masks," Delilah said, her tones clipped and quiet, as though she felt the same surveillance on them.
"What d'ya mean? They all had masks, but they wasn't wearing them," One pointed out, glancing to the building again. And for just an instant, he could have sworn he saw a black-beaked mask looking through one of the upper windows at him. But a blink removed such figments; the window was empty, and positioned as it was could only have been opened by a long pole with a hook on the end. There was no way for a person to have been up there.
"They were wearing them," Lu said.
"...is this a thing like those fishy-assholes in Florida?" One asked.
"I think it might be. They have a perceptual filter on them. They only allow us to see them in the ways they want us to see them," Lu said.
"Then why did I suddenly see the masks?" Delilah asked.
"You had some schmutz on your Perspecta that was making you credulous. I wiped it off Backstage," Lu said, with offered little to no explanation at all.
"So tell Hare?" One asked, trying to be pulled back into the loop on at least something.
"Obviously!" Delilah said. "Corff is at the center of that. I don't know how, or why, but he is."
"That was what the schmutz was doing, keeping you from suspecting him. Now that it's gone, you can see clearly," Lu said. She turned to One. "What's that look on your face?"
"I still feel like there's a part missing here," One said, still pitched low, as he still felt himself deeply and intrusively surveilled. "Hare says that the Heterax are a bunch of destructive suicide-bomber types, right?"
"That is how he described them to me, yes," Lu said.
"So why ain't there been any attacks here… ever?" One asked. Delilah scowled, rubbing at her chin with her thumb.
"That's a good point," Delilah said, pausing as they turned a corner and finally came within eyeshot of their van. It was still a bit of a walk, though. "No mass-shootings either here or in this county since 2011. And considering this gun-obsessed nation averages two shooting sprees a day…"
"What if, and stop me if I'm completely off of my tits here," One said, "but what if, the Heterax are the reason why this part of Alabama is the way it is? Low crime, practically nobody homeless…"
"I want to say you're off your tits, but because all I know about the Heterax is hearsay from a PTSD war-veteran and a literal demon, maybe the two of them are overlooking some aspect of the Heterax that their own Perspecta are blinkered against."
"What? That the Heterax are good guys?"
"They hate imps, which makes sense since they're demons," Lu said, raising fingers to mark her points as the van grew close. "Hare hates them, but he's an unreliable source of information. Maybe there's more ethical grey to the Noumenon than he lets us know."
"That is the kind of talk that he's not going to appreciate," One noted, finally opening the door and pulling himself into the passenger's seat.
"But if there's a chance we can strike off the Heterax from our shit list, I think it's probably safer if we do it," Delilah said, getting behind the wheel. "For once it'd be nice not to have to end a mission covered in gore wondering if we're even on the right side."
"Yeah. It would be nice," One said, reaching for the seat belt. And he couldn't find it. He blinked, looking back there.
There was no seatbelt.
He looked down.
There was no passenger seat.
Just a folding plastic chair.
"That's your anger speaking, young Delilah," Corff's voice came to One, and he snapped his eyes up, sweat beginning to push out of his pores as he saw that he was not in the van. He was sitting in a circle of chairs, with Delilah on one side of him, and Lu on the other. And Corff was talking to Delilah right now. "You don't need to forgive your father for the cruelties he inflicted upon you. He is already a part of your path. What happens now is immaterial. Your path will either take you to him again, or leave you cleaved apart from him. But that is for God to decide."
Oh sweet Jesus. He never left the room.
The three of them didn't even make it out of the fucking room.
"But I have so much hate at him, for all the things he took away from me," Delilah's voice was drifting and ethereal, nothing like her usual brusque and no-nonsense tones.
"Exactly. That was his God-appointed role in your path. To singularize it," Corff said. One blinked at him, and each time, just before his eyes shut, he could have sworn the man was suddenly wearing a leather raven-mask, and wearing a cloak of black feathers. But when his eyes opened again, Corff was bare-headed and wearing his accountant-gear. "To pare away the unnecessary extremities that would have only caused still-more heartbreak and dismay. To put you on the path you now walk, in accordance to God's Perfect World and the extrapolations of God's Testament of History, the Prophecy. You have no freedom, Delilah. None of us do. All is as it must be. And in that bondage to the Will of God, we are all uniquely and unimpeachably blessed."
Corff rose from her, turning and spreading his arms wide. For just a moment, One almost started as he beheld something like a broken, piece-meal halo burning with cold light above his head, held together by fine metal wire. But then the instant passed. No, focus, goddamn it. He's gotten the dames. It's up to you.
"Blessed shall ye be who hath no choice," the Raven Minister intoned.
"Blessed shall ye be," the Raven Ministry answered, in call-and-response.
One glanced around. They were all wearing their masks now; even though he knew for a fact what they had been wearing a minute ago before that weird snap-back, they all blended into a sort of depersonalized mass, like somebody with bad eyesight knowing that a bush was green, but not that it had hundreds of leaves making it that way.
This was bad. With Corff facing away, he had an opening. So he reached for his new gun, called by Hare the PoD X-7. Before the crowd even had a chance to shout for Corff to duck, to react in any way at all, he pulled the trigger.
"And what path has brought you here, Mister Sears?" Corff asked, facing him wearing his raven mask.
One blinked. He distinctly remembered shooting this guy in the back. Only not, because he was still sitting here, and he could still feel the X-7 digging into one of his shoulder-blades. This was going to keep happening, One realized. It would keep happening, keep snapping him back to a place where he was at disadvantage.
"I needed to find out the truth," One said. Buy time to save the girls. There were three others in raven masks, if ones that weren't nearly as ornate as Corff's, and they wore black feathers as a stole wrapped 'round their necks, whereas Corff's went from neck to floor. "And every time I though I found the end, it turned out that was just the beginnin' of something deeper."
"And you were compelled," Corff said with a nod. He turned, gesturing to the others in their lesser garbs. "This is the path of a righteous man, who once he finds his way, is determined to follow it, no matter its grim ends."
One tried to flick his machete out of its holder inside his coat-sleeve, to activate it and drive it into Corff's ribs in a single motion. He felt the handle hit his hand, felt his thumb turn it on and heard the whirr hit the air as the blade began to blur with hypersonic vibrations, and even felt himself lash forward.
The hand that should have had a machete in it was now having a raven mask pressed into it, the attack outright undone. And though he could feel on some level it would be so much easier if he just stopped fighting and stopped propping up his paranoia to stratospheric heights, he knew deep in his gut if he put this mask on, he'd never take it off again.
"No," One said.
And then, finally, FINALLY, there was a blink of confusion from the Raven Ministry underling. Of something not going according to design and plan. And since One had a lot of proof in his own eyes that attacking the Ravens right now was worse than pointless, he still had a few other tricks up his sleeve. A glance to Lu told him that she was staring hard at him, sweat pounding down her face, as though terrified at what she saw. She practically shook with something like relief when he returned her gaze. He then turned to Delilah.
She was lifting a Raven mask toward her face.
So without hesitation or warning, One lashed out with his fist. Not at the Raven Minister standing before her, nor at Corff who was still grandstanding for the rest of the Ministry, but directly at the side of Delilah's face.
It hurt like a bastard to punch Delilah in the jaw. Both because One wasn't best adept at throwing bare hands when he had other things he could use in their stead, and second because Delilah was just built different. But the impact seemed to shake her out of her reverie, to see the mask in her hands, and to throw it away with a yelp. Instantly, her skin flashed to that metallic blue, and her wings sprouted from her back with a crack of metal unfolding. She looked at the thing that One saw, the straits they were in. She then sprawled over both One and Lu, grabbing both and dragging them out of their seats and into her crushing embrace.
Then there was a sickening dislocation, the entire scene changing in an instant, followed by a drop in One's stomach. He looked down, and saw the ground dozens of meters under him, held aloft by Delilah's light-belching wings.
"HOLY SHIT WHAT JUST HAPPENED?" Delilah demanded, as though she hadn't just teleported them into the sky.
"We need to get to Hare! Now!" Lu shouted at her. Delilah blinked and nodded. The three of them ignored the incredulous looks that the people of Evergreen gave the trio as they descended toward the van. "What? Aren't you just going to…" Lu gave a sort of popping gesture with one hand.
"It doesn't work like that. Trust me, I played with it a lot to figure it out," Delilah said. One got into the driver's seat this time, not even bothering with the keys until he confirmed that there was, indeed, a seatbelt here. When there was, he gave a shudder. He still didn't know if he'd broken the loop, but he'd have to take this at face value because he had no better option. The instant that Delilah flopped awkwardly into the back seat (it was harder for her to maneuver with those fucking wings), One threw it into reverse, and peeled out. He didn't care if he got a cop on his tail right now. This was bigger than being secretive.
They'd all gotten made. And those assholes would be coming for them, now.
The whole drive back was a blur to One. All of his attention, all of his very being was poured into getting back to the end of that shitty road to that shitty trailer-home and getting the fuck off of the surface. He knew it was a cowardly play, but he knew that what he'd just witnessed warranted a bit of cowardice.
It arrived faster than he feared but slower than he'd hoped, skidding the van to a halt just past the thicket of front yard that the trailer used as camouflage. But the noise was not unnoticed; One spotted the imp leaning around the edge of a window to see them, brow drew down in concern.
She was quickly out of the door. "There you are! There has been a development!" she said.
"GET BACK INSIDE! THEY'RE COMING!" One shouted, almost body-slamming himself into the dirt because he tried to flee the van before unbuckling himself and the seatbelt did it's best to end up either with One strangled or in a pile. Only his cat-like reflexes kept him on his feet and unchoked. Delilah extracted herself, still looking like a metal-skinned angel, and Lu hustled ahead of all of them, having had no such issues in egress.
"What?" Vera asked. Then she gave a yelp as Lu scooped the tiny woman up and dragged her inside the building.
"What was that?" Delilah demanded.
"Why are you holding that?" One countered, pointing at her clenched fist, which still somehow had a raven-mask in it. She gave a clipped scream of alarm at noticing it an instant later, and dropped it like it was red-hot. She turned a deeply fearful look up at One, and One just jerked his head to one side, motioning that they get as much distance between themselves, it, and the thing which gave it to them as they conceivably could.
By the time Delilah, the last of them to squeeze through the door, entered their bolt hole, the door to the laundry room was thrown open, and Hare, looking as humorless as One had ever seen him, was moving into the rest of the trailer home. "There's a massive causality wave that's popped in Evergreen. Report."
Well, that was certainly unlike him to talk like that. But considering his body language was not 'obey me' but rather 'holy shit holy shit holy shit', One didn't feel his dander rise and instead did as was requested.
"It's a guy named Bobby Corff. I don't know if he's their leader or if he's the Icon or whatever, but he's definitely involved."
"People can't be Icons. They can carry a Precious, but Icons are objects," Hare said. He continued to look through the hole in the blinds at the space on that side of the trailer, that side of it which was arrayed toward the town. "How bad is it?"
"There had to have been thirty… maybe even forty people," Delilah said.
"They wore masks of Ravens?" Hare didn't look back as he asked.
"Yeah. Tried to make us wear them too," Lu said.
"That means they have an entire established Raven Ministry down here. Which isn't the worst case scenario but it's still really fucking bad," Hare said. Then he tensed. "They tried to make you put on masks?"
"Yeah," One said. "I had a bad feeling. If I put it on, I'd be one 'a them. Like, honestly and whole-heartedly."
"Just when I think they have every nasty advantage they have to mutate and invent a new one," Hare said. He clicked his tongue, then turned away from the window with a look of utter solemnity. "Everybody, into the Den. They'll be looking for us, and if they find us, they'll attack."
"Could they really have taken us over?" Delilah asked, no doubt thinking of how close she'd gotten to losing that war, let alone battle.
"Maybe. They can't suborn Integrated where I'm from. But Creation is constantly telling me I don't know a tenth of what these fuckers are capable of. Underground, people, and keep things quiet. We are the mice, and we've just caught a whiff of a cat."
To be in the whimsically named Exploratorium was to be bombarded with information both mundane and inscrutable, to have innumerable graphs and statistical models portrayed on screens or else free-floating as hard-light projections. The chamber itself wasn't large. Only large enough for two people, or three if they were very friendly with each other. That meant that two people and an imp still had a bit of room for elbows.
"Give it to me straight," Hare said, his voice barely above a whisper. Ordinarily, it would have been swallowed whole by the various noises of the Exploratorium simply going about it's job of reaping vast swathes of raw information from the world around it with its many, strange machines. Now, though, those machines were silent. The Info-dome and the War Room beyond emitted only a faint buzz of electrical current. It was as though they were standing in the waiting room for oblivion itself. "What did you see up there?"
"Shouldn't we ask One and Delilah…" Lu tried to deflect, but Hare made a shushing gesture while shaking his head. Even Vera couldn't tell why they were being so quiet.
"Delilah's got a good head on her shoulders and she's been pretty tough in the face of mind-fuckery in the past, but she's something of a blunt instrument in this matter," Hare said quietly, managing to moderate his volume so that it was only just barely above the thin electric buzz, which itself was so quiet that only the singing absence of the other noises made it known. "And One has got some kind of problem with me, so I'm saving him for last."
"It's because of the 'threatening to throw him into the Macerator' thing," Lu said.
"Why is he clinging to that? I was just pointing out that I wasn't going to put up with any incarnation of those pseudo-French psy-op'ed shitheads," Hare gave his head a shake, as it was clear he was getting dragged off his point. "Look, you're the first feed. So tell me what the hell happened up there."
"The amount of magic that bloomed through Evergreen was terrifying in scope and scale," Vera said, keeping her own tones low in keeping with Hare. "If I were a more foolish woman, I would say that an Archangel had turned Evergreen to a pile of dust and salt, over and over again."
"It's bad," Lu said. "They have access to Retcons."
Even the electric buzz seemed to mute at that, so that the silence was suffocating. Hare looked as though you had just replaced his brain with a roast-ham and then revealed the prank to him, flabbergasted and horrified.
"Hare?" Vera asked. "What is a Retcon?"
"An impossibility," Hare said, his pallor edging toward grey. "Even Icons of Annihilation don't have access to Retcons. They must have a something new, something worse than even the worst case…"
"If what I saw is right, It's an Icon of Atrophy," Lu said. "I didn't see the icon itself, but the aura of it left people dogmatic and rigid-thinking. Orthodoxy above all else, even sanity. Even death."
Hare blinked at her, then sat against a currently-inactive panel. "Icons of Atrophy don't have access to Retcon powers. They just make you… well… atrophy, mentally. This doesn't make sense. The Heterax only have access to Retcons at their highest levels, with the Noumenon Unbound," his face pulled into a sneer. "But of course the moment I land here in Creation everything goes ass-over-tit. Why shouldn't Creation have an Icon which can Retcon, just to fuck with me?"
"Don't catastrophize," Vera said, putting what she presumed was a comforting hand on his hip. "Your understanding of things is accurate, Hare; Heterax in this realm do not have this 'Retcon' power which you have thoroughly failed to explain. It is their other powers which make them mortal enemies to the imp."
"Hrm? Right," Hare said. "Retroactive-continuity. The ability to cut off the current reality and install one where things were different to the current moment, and then have reality lurch down the new path that you put into place."
"So to rewrite history as though it were burned away by Infernal Talc," Vera said, pounding her fist down into her palm. Hare gave a confused shrug. "It is a fiendishly, suicidally dangerous substance that Alchemists occasionally produce, which burns so infernally hot that what it afflicts is destroyed not only into the future, but backward into the past, recoiling away from the flames as a thread is consumed by a candle and dragging history backward as long as the burn continues. Lives have been dis-ended by use of this gamble-in-being."
"A substance that can Retcon, that anybody can use?" Hare's face was pure horror.
"It is not often used, because as I said, it is suicidally foolhardy to create and deploy. It reacts violently – nay explosively – with contact to metal, water, sand, air, oil, any amount of heat, or cold, or even naked vacuum. The most common victim of the Talc is the one who creates it," Vera said.
Hare swiped some of the sweat off of his brow. "That's one less thing to worry about then, if it's a problem that most often solves itself," he muttered.
"So this Retcon is a conscious application of what the Infernal Talc does with idiot-causality?" Vera asked.
"Yes," Hare said. "One of the highest Endeavors that the Downfall ever produced before their abandonment of the day-to-day doings of our enterprise was something that can produce a Retcon, even just a minor one, and make it stick. And even then, once it's done, that's the only Retcon that Reality will take for a while without rebelling."
"Oh," Lu now had a chance to look horrified. "How… long… between uses, did you say that was?"
"Hours, sometimes days," Hare said. He turned to her, and saw her dread. "Lu… what did you see?"
"I can't see the Retcon itself. I don't know what they actually changed, not really… but I can tell that a Retcon was there," Lu said. "It's like running a string through my fingers. I can feel where somebody's tied a knot, but not why."
"And how many knots did you feel? Two? Three?" Hare asked with a wince growing at his liberal guess.
"Twenty eight," Lu said.
Hare stared at her. "That can't be right. That simply cannot be…"
"Two for Delilah," Lu continued, still speaking soft. "Three for One. Twenty three for me. I know what they did for me. I can remember them. Everything I tried to do to get out of that Ministry they had an answer to. I tried taking One's gun and shooting Corff, only to have reality erase the attempt. I tried to start a fire. Reality said no. I punched a grandmother. Reality said no. Everything I could think of, Reality was having none of it."
"Twenty eight in one hour?" Hare was aghast. "Continuity would unravel!"
Vera, though, narrowed her eyes. "What was their catechism? A summary of their words-of-faith?" she asked.
"What?" Lu asked. Vera repeated herself. "They… ah… said that this world was perfect, and that they were all on paths that were perfect and ordained by God. That there was no choice to be had and…"
"Oh, Oh I see," Vera said. She felt her mouth pull into an expression of strong distaste. "I bring tidings, Hare, for I know what caused this 'Retcon' event you so fear. It was not the Heterax. It was God's Testament of History, The Prophecy."
"What?" Hare asked.
"It is a story I have heard from my good-sisters hailing from the wring of Wrath," Vera said, pulling herself up onto a control panel so that she was closer to being at eye level with these inconsiderately tall humans. "That God at His Creation of first Hell, then Heaven and this world we now stand in, imbued into it a Destined History. He declared all that was, is, and must be into a tome, which not only outlines the past from the beginning of Time here above the Abyss, all the way to time's end."
"And?" Hare asked.
"And as The Prophecy was made by God's very hand, it has the ability to control what transpires, with a few exceptions. I am one of them."
"Because you're a chaos-mage?" Lu asked.
"Because I am an imp, darling," Vera answered.
"Why would that matter?" Hare asked.
"Because unlike the rest of Creation, we were not put here, either in our entirety or in our fundamentals, by God to any degree whatsoever. The Prophecy knows that there are imps, but cannot predict what any one of us will do. God is in his Prophecy blind to what I or those like me will do." Vera said proudly.
"Is this known, or is it folklore?" Hare asked, rubbing at his brow.
"It was told to my forebearers directly by the Ars Goetia Stolas the Prince of Flowers. There is no destiny for the imp. And destiny is toothless against the imp," Vera said.
"Then if what you're saying is true, you're probably the best shot we all have of separating the Icon from whatever is allowing it to make Retcons. After that, we can handle the rest," Hare said.
"Question," Lu said. Both turned to her. "How exactly are we supposed to find it? Evergreen is crawling with that Raven Ministry by now, along with anybody that Corff has convinced to back him."
"We know where the Icon is," Hare said. Vera tilted her head. "Its Retcons would have had to have been within its aura, or this room would have gone fucking nuts instead of just slightly nuts. And since the Retcons stopped when you got well away from that community hall…"
"The Icon is somewhere in that building," Lu caught his meaning.
"Until they move it," Vera pointed out.
"The Icon is active. If they move it, it'll shut down and the power it gives them will temporarily shut off," Hare said. "They won't take that risk, both to themselves and the object of their devotion."
"So instead, we need to punch through them and fry the Icon," Lu said. "That's not going to be easy."
"Fighting the Heterax never is, Lu," Hare said.
Everything was quiet in the Den. Any machine or furniture that would cause a noise had been powered down, and the air was becoming thick and starting to stink. Delilah knew that they wouldn't be able to stay down here forever; if they turned off the air circulation, then the carbon-dioxide was building up, and would eventually reach poisonous levels, even in the lack of other problems.
"Why is everything shut down?" Delilah finally asked Lu, where she was standing in front of the crystal pillar which could, at its discretion, transform itself into what One called 'the evil bathtub'.
"We don't know what sensors they have," Lu said, eyes still pressed shut and voice pitched low. "For all we know they have access to lithographic sonar, and any noise we make will give us away."
"So… what do we do?" Delilah asked.
"Take the right moment and fight back," Lu said. She removed her hand from the pillar, her flesh vibrating and cascading, changing her entire being as a cascade of biology from a dumpy young woman to a forgettable middle-aged man. "Hare's making plans with Vera. She's probably going to be the lynchpin of this."
"Is it smart to have a demon involved in this?" Delilah asked. Lou gave a shrug.
"If what Vera's saying is true, then it's dumb, but the best idea we've got," Lou said. The two of them moved out, into the almost black corridors toward where the others could be found. One was waiting there, sitting with his back to one of the walls with his new gun in his lap and his machete laying across it. As they approached, he perked up, as though having been caught half-in-a-nap, and pulled himself to his feet.
"Tell me we've got a plan," One said.
"Not a great one," Lou admitted.
"Explaaaain?" One said, falling in with them as they moved slowly through the halls so they didn't trip over something (like Smudge, who was currently doing the zoomies in the dark here in the wee-hours of the morning, as he was wont to do) in their paths.
"Presume for the sake of argument that destiny is actually a thing, okay?" Lou said.
"I don't like making that presumption," One said.
"Well, just presume," Lou stressed. "And presume that destiny allows some things to happen and refuses to let other things happen. So far so good?"
"I feel like I'm gettin' talked to like a kid, Lou," One sounded annoyed.
"I have a feeling that destiny said that neither you nor I are allowed to attack Robert Corff. You said you tried to shoot him, right?"
"Yeah, and stab him," One said.
"Then you can probably guess what I spent a lot of time doing, and every single one of them ended up outright negated by destiny."
"I didn't attack him," Delilah pointed out.
"You don't remember attacking him?" she asked.
"No," Delilah said. "Although frankly I'm having difficulty remembering exactly what happened between showing up and when One slugged me in the jaw."
"Then there's a chance you aren't destined to fail to attack him," Lou said.
"I'm havin' a lot of trouble keeping up with you on this. It sounds like a lotta wild guesswork on yous' parts," One gestured between the two of them.
"I tried a dozen ways to harm Corff, and they all failed, erased from history. How else would you describe that as destiny snapping back at somebody trying to buck it's path?" Lou said.
"That's what they meant," Delilah said. "That's why they keep talking about how there's only one path for people to walk! It's because they're controlling it!"
"Or because God is controlling it and they have a piece of God's handiwork empowering them," Lou said.
"Don't tell me we're gonna have to beef with God, now," One muttered.
"Presume, One. Continue to presume. And while you're presuming, yes, there's a chance that we will," Lou said. The three paused at the iris door to the Exploratorium. Delilah wondered if One was unwilling to go in because of his personal beefs, and if Lou was unwilling because of her own toothless performance against the Raven Ministry half a day ago. Either way, it was Delilah, hesitating the least, who opened the thing.
Inside, the Exploratorium was operating on quiet, but showed video streams from the entire 'neighborhood' of trailer homes on this strip of run-down roadway. And immediately Delilah's eye was drawn to the screen that both Hare and Vera were currently staring at. It was a camera that Hare must have installed looking down Houston Lee Street at some point during their month-long mission here. It was watching as a pair of people were walking up along the side of the road.
Both wore raven masks. One wore black feathers as a stole.
"They're close to us," Hare said, not glancing back to the others. "And getting closer with every hour. It shouldn't be surprising. They're Harmonious; they've got ways of figuring shit out that they have no right to."
"We're going to have to act soon, so we don't end up surrounded," Vera pointed out.
"We're already surrounded," One said. Hare gave a look over his shoulder at him, then followed One's point to another camera, that had been secreted into the brush between here and the town-proper along the path that Delilah had often walked to get her jogs in. And through the brush, she could see another raven-masked person walking through the greenery.
"Well, shit," Hare said, his expression getting grim. "We can't let them inside. We don't have anything else we can cannibalize; if they damage anything we have… we might lose everything."
"So we have to face them on the dirt," One said.
"While surrounded, outnumbered, and with literal destiny conspiring against us," Vera noted.
"Any chance we can just close shop and fucking book it into the woods?" Delilah asked.
"If they are in the woods, and any of them find us, we will be swamped under their numbers in short order," Vera noted, marching around to look at other screens, often finding other Ministry members when she bothered to look.
"And that's beside the point, because it takes time to shutter the Den," Hare said. "Time that we would be not just vulnerable, but immobile, waiting for the Controller to package up."
"Is there anything they can use to trace us to this lot in particular?" One asked.
"I de-fabbed the Van and burned that mask that was on the driveway. I just hope I did it before they traced it," Hare said. Delilah felt her stomach drop.
"Did I lead them here?" she asked.
"This isn't the time to assign blame," Hare shook his head. "It doesn't do us any good and it doesn't help us get out of this alive."
"There will be time enough for acrimony later," Vera agreed. She pondered for a moment, playing with the hair that hung before one of her eyes. Hare asked what she was thinking about. "That I am small and you all are loud."
"I thought it wasn't time to assign blame," One chided.
"No, I am referring to the fact that as someone immune to the whims of destiny, I am also of physically shorter stature and no slower for it. While they are combatting the likes of you, I can easily steal into that building and destroy the Icon with Darkning."
"I wouldn't say it's going to be easy, because they'd have to be stupid to have all of the Ministry out here looking for us," Hare said. "But it's a kernel of an idea. It'll keep them from following us… but how would we rendezvous?"
"Await me where you took the Battle Bus to pieces," Vera said. That spot was on the literal other side of Evergreen from here. It would certainly keep her out of stray fire.
"Then what about us?" Lou asked.
"You're packing up the Den," Hare said. "By your own admission, destiny's pretty comprehensively turbo-fucked you and won't let you do anything fun. Get the thing boxed up. The three of us will keep them from stabbing you in the liver."
Hare looked nervous, though, no, more than that; he actually looked afraid. As though he weren't sure that he was up to this. "Come on. They're just people. And we've got super-powers," Delilah said.
"Not just people. They'll be as tough as you, maybe even as strong," Hare said. He sighed, rubbing a hand down his face as he summoned a last whit of surplus will, then nodded. "Get ready. When the violence starts, it's going to be loud and chaotic."
He wasn't lying. They went upstairs, leaving Lou down in the Den to close up shop. Vera had already slipped from the trailer-home and was out into the world as Hare had One post up by the Venetian-blind-bearing windows at the end of the building, while he and Delilah took spots in the hallway that the doorway opened into. And she heard One gave a sharp inward hiss of breath after less than two minutes. They were coming down the lane. She didn't see them, but One's posture told the story well enough.
"Don't open fire until we ambush somebody coming in…" Hare whispered as loudly as he dared. One didn't look back, merely nodding, and pointing his new gun toward the obscured windows.
Delilah, though, pressed her ear to the wall. She heard a wooden creak, as the dissolving patio that had not been renovated announced that somebody was standing on it. Another creak a moment later, from a slightly different direction. Two of them. She heard a quiet grunt, followed by an inquisitive murmur from the second throat. Then, silence. A glance to Hare showed him barring his lips with a finger. No fucking kidding.
The creaking began again, and sounded of them coming closer to the doors which still stood darkened and ostensibly locked. The tobacco-stained class was so opaque that even had Delilah been stupid and stood in front of it, she still wagered the two of them might not have seen her. She looked at Hare again. He mouthed 'don't look at their eyes', and she nodded, though she didn't understand why. And then there was a sudden, metal shriek as a pair of arms burst through the wall around Hare, clamping shut around him, and dragging him out of a rupture in the trailer-home before he even had a chance to yelp.
One needed no more warning to open fire, loud cracks and the shattering of glass filling the air, while Delilah herself shoulder barged straight through the compromised structure and smashed the second figure on the patio off of said patio, leaving her to roll along the dirt on the ground. The one holding Hare had a black feather stole, and Hare had a look of alarm and panic on his face, as though he were being crushed. She tried to drive an uppercut into the Minister, only to have to abort as the Minister swung Hare into her path. She instantly pivoted and tried to swing out a hook, but the Minister used Hare to ward that, too. God damn it, why was he so goddamned good at using a human shield?
So she focused on the thin space behind the Minister and felt an electric surge up through her body until the world collapsed in front of her before popping her out on the Minister's back-side. She instantly swung a brutal backward lariat that because she slightly misjudged the distance ended up crashing her fist into the Minister's head.
It was like punching a massive marshmallow.
Her fist barely even hit the masked-head of the Minister, having been massively slowed down before it could impact. Hare, finally able to capitalize on the Minister's distraction, was able to hurl himself out of the grasp of the Raven Minister and hold his arm out. But he snarled, trying to move to get a direction on the Minister, unable to as it kept side stepping so that any line he tried to describe necessarily included Delilah.
She reset herself and drove a pair of deep body-blows into the Minister, feeling how the coils of her Elohim Array exploded with ruinous power, only to have it utterly deadened before she could reach the enemy's flesh. "TURN OFF THE COILS!" Hare finally shouted, seeing her failures. She then felt something slam into her back, a gunshot hitting the air. She didn't even flinch, nor react to it. Her skin and the armored bodysuit she was wearing over it would protect her, even if it did sting just a little bit. Another gunshot, this one hitting the back of her head, seemed to hurt even less. Why would she turn off the coils that made her hit with explosive force? But if Hare gave this desperate advice, it was desperate for a reason.
So she did what she seldom did of late. She let the massive coils of overwhelming force that let her punch straight through tank-armor shut down, and then drove a hard one-two into the guts and head of the Minister. While the Minister was able to lean out of the way of the gut-shot, the blow to the head landed with all of its usual, if unaugmented, violence. With the Minister staggering and finally not able to keep a line with Hare and Delilah, Hare was able to deke to one side, hold out his fingers in a 'C' shape, and cause a pillar of blinding heat and light envelope the Minister from neck to ankles.
And the Minister came through the other side without even so much as singing its clothes.
"Oh you've got to be fucking kidding me!" Hare shouted.
The Minister then opened his hand, and a strange, lightless flames that slammed into Hare's face and seared at him as he stumbled backward and fell back into the trailer-home. The raven-beaked head turned to Delilah, and when Delilah tried to drive a haymaker into him, his body shuddered and seemed to split into two, as though he were dodging the blow both to the left and to the right in the same moment, flickering inconsistently between the two. Delilah drove a testing blow at the left-hand specter, showing that the one on the right was the real one, and her lightning-fast drive went to catch up on it. But even as that blow flew, the Minister split again. She sent out a flurry of blows, her fists launching almost as fast as the gunfire she heard coming from One's gun. And to every blow, either a specter collapsed to nothing or caused another one to be born, splitting off from a target, until there were nearly a dozen of them in an arc in front of her.
Another bullet hit Delilah, which she continued to ignore, followed by a gun hitting her as it was thrown at her. She snarled and grabbed a rusty, defunct barbeque and grabbed its propane tank, swinging it through all of the flickering images before her, collapsing all of them, until another split away, a step further than her swing could give. The illusions were all gone, and the Minister held his hands toward her as though offering something.
That something turned out to be an explosion.
The blast of it loosened the teeth in her face and sent her rocketing backward, impacting the other goon behind her, and not giving her the respite of hitting the ground until she had crashed through a stand of poplar growths, sending her rolling into the scrub.
She got to her feet, feeling the ache in her chest, and then looked down to see that her clothing was still actively on fire. She quickly stripped off the jacket, which was burning away, leaving her in just her tank-top, jeans, and the grey bodysuit under it. She turned a glance to one side, and saw in an instant the mask of a Raven Minister over there. With less discipline and more panicked action, she lashed in that sideways-direction fist first into the minster's face; Delilah felt the woman's jaw crumble under Delilah's ever increasing strength, and she fell to the ground with a cry sounding more like the squawking of a crow than the pained shouts of a human.
It was sheer luck that her posture was hunched just so, that a stream of lightless fire raced where her face would have been were she standing upright and instead consumed a tree, uncannily consuming its bark and wood without producing either smoke or light. And the one at her feet was trying to get back up. So Delilah grabbed the nearest solid thing she could see – a mud-encased cinder block, and with one hand ripped it from its durance of muck and in a single swinging movement slammed it down into the skull of the rising, mask-wearing middle aged fat woman. With her head's shape now having to accommodate a cinder block, the lesser Minister flopped back to the dirt and didn't try rising again.
She turned only to have a bolt of that lightless flame strike her, causing her to recoil back as the feather-stole'd Minister advanced, summoning the smokeless flames in its hands and then casting them out toward her. And it was fortunate to Delilah that whoever was under that mask wasn't a dedicated baseball pitcher, because her ability to dodge and weave meant that only one more of the next six bolts of flames hit her body, searing her flesh painfully and pulling agonized grunts out of her. Delilah tried to close distance, to get her hands on the Minister, but the foul flames kept her at a distance so she wouldn't be scorched to death by them.
She didn't think she was likely to win this one on her own. That was why it was so wise to bring a gun to a fist-fight; if they couldn't close distance, they were effectively toothless.
She turned, hearing something coming through the brush at her, and she managed to lash out in a rocket-punch the instant that a black mask came out of the greenery at her, then used the stunned fool to block a pair of un-flames. The stunned one let out a blood curdling shriek as her adipose tissue was ignited and burned, oily and smokey.
Before Delilah could even think of what to do next, the Raven Minister who was bombarding her stumbled forward in the moment of a loud crack in the air; strange frost covered half of its masked face and neck. A moment later, there was a much louder crack, and the head shattered, half in frozen shards, and half in cold but still thawed gore.
One and Hare came out of the woods, with Hare's face looking utterly gnarly, with his mouth sagging and his nose burned shut and one of his eyes missing entirely; he didn't seem to care much. As long as he had one eye and a way to breathe, he would keep on. One? Besides the chunks of thawing dead human on his suit, he looked fine. He snapped a burst of shots into the head of the one Delilah was holding, which was telling that only the third of the hypersonic bullets managed to cause the head to burst and send brains across Delilah's shoulder.
"We've cut a hole in the fuckers! Let's goooooo!" One shouted.
"What about Vera? And Lou!" Delilah pointed out. But the latter question was answered when a moment later, Lou joined them, holding an attache case which contained, in one form or another, their entire Den, with one fist, while the other held a cat-carrier with a very irate looking Smudge.
"She's got our rendezvous! We'll hook up with her there!" One shouted. And then, the four of them started to run through the scrub.
The community hall was a shockingly familiar structure to Vera. It called to mind the Hold House of Drevisté, a building used for not only religious devotions but magical rituals, and other, of-late-less-important social events on a much more sporadic schedule. She had stolen in with little real effort, because the humans of this town were currently staring to the southwest, where her employers were currently engaged in a running gunfight. Those locals not directly involved still knew that gunfire was not a thing to be ignored lightly.
The building essentially had four rooms of significant size, and two of the smaller of them were in the 'basement', which was a semi-inlaid foundation with windows set high in the walls that allowed slivers of outsight light in through windows that, from without, began at her shoe-sole and ended at her calf. And it was down here that she could sense the pall of the aura growing thick.
While she was not a trained infiltrator, she was an imp. And getting into places were others didn't want you was almost a prerequisite for imp-hood. She, lacking subtle means of entry, used Darts of Un to melt locks so she could simply pull doors open. There were no people in the upper floor of the building. But as she descended toward the 'basement', she could hear somebody down there.
"But if we move it, it will shut down the protections," a woman's voice came.
"Were this a simple altar to our faith, I would agree. This is something more dear by far," another voice came, this one causing the fine-hairs on Vera's arm to rise up in alarm. The voice was human, or nearly human, at least. No, what caused her vexation was that when the voice spoke, there was a harmonic in it, as though this were the voice of an Elder Devil perhaps a tenth as powerful as Satan Himself.
A tenth of nigh-infinity is still an extraordinary amount, after all.
"We would be consigning them to death," the woman said.
"That is their path. They had no choice to walk it. And you have no choice but to take the Altar and flee," the resonant voice said.
"They will come. Their killer is already in this building," the woman said.
"Then your path is one of haste, Sister Crow. Remember the secret lore I have taught you. All will be well. There is no way it cannot be."
"...I won't see you again, will I?" 'Sister Crow' asked.
"Go," the resonant voice said.
Even as Vera crept toward the room that the voices were coming with, she found herself flinching as the aura collapsed, vanishing as though it had never been. Vera quickly glanced around, and spotted a drinking fountain that was set out from the wall; it wasn't the best concealment she had, it was merely the only concealment. So she darted behind it just in time for a glance showing a human woman in a raven mask and a black-feather stole to walk away, carrying something with an almost blinding intensity of magic before her. Even though her body blocked it entirely from Vera's sight, her magical vision seemed to bend and lens around the retreating Raven Minister, so impactful was the device which she took away.
She edged deeper into cover, as there was a set of leather shoe'd footfalls onto tile, followed by the sound of the door closing.
"I know you are out here. And I know that I will stop you from destroying our connection to The Great Inevitability," the resonant voice said. "Destiny is not on your side. Come out. I can show you the truth, the true path. I can free you from regret and doubt."
Vera was silent, and waited until she heard fancy shoes tapping down onto tile progressively further from her, and she leaned out from the fountain.
She had heard Corff described before, as an effete and unimpressive human. She now doubted the sanity of those who described him such. Corff stood with his raven-masked head almost brushing the ceiling tiles, his body swollen wide as a refrigerator under the black feathers of his cape. And with each footfall, the world shook in response. This was not a human being. This was an Avatar of Inevitability made manifest, Destiny Incarnate.
She, however, was an imp.
And imps didn't give a shit about destiny. She glanced up again, narrowing her eyes at the tiles. Oh, of course. A drop ceiling. Silently, she slipped out of her shoes, leaving them beside the fountain, then, when Corff's attention was far enough away from her, she quickly scampered up the fountain, up the wall and sign next to it, and pushed herself up past the panels and into the infrastructure and gap that held them.
It would have been claustrophobic for a child, but she was an imp, and this dress had low-level spells keeping it from getting filthy. She didn't need to look directly at Corff to know that he heard her shifting the panel, so she quickly crabbed her way along the ceiling, staring at the magical pillar that Corff embodied as he walked toward where she had been. He paused, seeming to lean down.
"...O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that dasheth thy little ones against the stones," Corff said. "You are not an evil thing, child. You are merely afraid. Come with me. Look upon the Shard of Prophecy, join us in the Ministry. You need not follow false rulers any longer. You need not ape the movements of foolish parents. You can have a new family in us."
So he thought that she was a child-soldier? That was mildly insulting, frankly. As he rose, she had an inkling of something, and let her eyes pool with blood. Revealed at last was the thing which no doubt gave him such gravitas; above his head was hovering a caged fabrication made of broken shards of angel halos. That was a shocking thing to find, because most halos vanished when the Angel bearing them died, a consequence of Flaring Out. So those must have been from angels who, at the very least, were alive when they had their halos shattered. It was something as grotesque as cutting off an imp's horns and tail, to shatter an angel's halo. Even angels being angels, it was a depth that Vera doubted she could plumb.
How and why this human had the crown of the power of broken and likely dead angels, which would likely have been passed from hand to hand for the ten thousand and more years since Lucifer's invasion of Hell, was not a question she was going to be able to answer. But she knew that as long as Corff had that thing, not a single one of her employers nor she herself was likely to get out of this alive.
So she moved, silently with the sinews of her feet pressing on the infrastructure so it wouldn't click as it would have against her 'toe-nails' (Lustlings being the only imps which had toe-bones, even if they didn't necessarily have distinct toes). She got into a spot that was near the head, as Corff continued to swing his head to and fro, the halo lagging behind only an instant from its location above his masked head.
She likely only had one chance at grabbing it, so she would have to be precise, be dexterous, and above all else be lucky. Corff was saying something right now, something that probably was some exegesis from a holy book she didn't care about. His attention was looking through the walls, trying to get a feel for her magical signature as much as she had for him. Maybe his senses weren't as acute as hers were. Maybe just being a sneaky little shit of an imp worked against paranatural senses as well as it did natural ones. But he walked past the place where she was waiting. Though she couldn't see his body, she could sense the blob of his magic, and that told him that he wasn't looking up, never guessing her exact spot.
Speed, precision, dexterity, and luck.
The instant that her gut told her to, she withdrew all of her limbs from the frame holding up the tile, and put her weight onto the tile itself. Now party to another fifty pounds of weight, it plummeted free of its seat, slapping Corff's beak on its way down and dragging his head toward Vera so that she could grab the halo with both hands, then kick off of his face with both feet and dive through a doorway.
An instant later there was a massive blast that pulled the air out of the room she had landed in, and half sucked her into the hallway that was raining down rubble from whatever power Corff had unleashed after her. She wasn't about to reveal herself now. She picked herself up and darted toward the corner of the room that was drizzling down dust at her, to an air-conditioning vent. She was up the wall and squeezing into the duct out of sight more than a half second before she glanced back and saw the magical blob that was Corff entering the room after her. And it took little effort to push open the next vent and slide out into the next room.
"So you want to be the prodigal son? Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel which smoked with bloody execution." Corff's voice still had the terrible timbre to it, so that likely the halo which was searing painfully into her palm may not in fact be the source of it, "We're oft to blame and this is too much proved, that with devotion's visage and pious action, we do sugar o'er the devil himself. SPARE THE ROD."
She flapped her hand, seeing how there was already a pale stripe of dead skin against her proper crimson hues. But the halo still had power. So Vera turned a look toward the blob that was Corff, and then smirked. And then holding the halo up with stinging fingers, she pooled the power, and spoke the word of power. "Bāku," she uttered, and there came the stunning silence that lashed out from her other hand, until it reached the gap in the heart of the halo. Then, the silence was inverted, a blast of calamitous scope that that blasted not just the wall but the man beyond it as well, lifting him from his feet and hurling him away until the wall began to collapse down throwing up blinding grey dust.
Vera blinked from her new place, laying on her back in the dust in the crumbling building, smelling sizzling and smoke. That smoke was from her hand's skin searing. She barely even felt it. She pulled herself up and quickly limped to the door, diving horn-first through its glass. A moment later, there was a 'fwoosh' and the room she had been in was now played at by strange grey-white flames that flickered with ethereal screaming skulls.
The imp narrowed her vision. She couldn't win an honest fight against somebody like this. But honest fights were a thing of prestige in Clan Cruac, of standing on equal ground against an opponent and proving that you were either more skillful, or failing that more powerful than your opponent. Such things were only offered between imps, though. Corff was not an imp. He earned no such niceties today. She was just going to kill him by being an awful little shit and never letting him see her.
She darted back behind the fountain as Corff emerged from the room, his black feathers shaking dust off with every shuffle of them in their place on his cloak. She whispered another word of power, a simple thing, perhaps even a party trick, that dragged the shadows around her and hid her scarlet within a cloak of black. Corff stomped right past her.
Vera gave a glance around, and smirked anew at the amount of anguish that this building had been party to. Addicts struggling against their vices had made a home in one of these chambers, and their lingering hurts now infested the space as a fungus or a clot. So without a word said, she began to draw out the pain. She drew it out, seeing it swirl above her hand as a coruscating tumult of grey-black smoke that seemed to shriek silently every bit as much as those impossible un-flames which were beginning to eat their way out of the room that Corff threw the door open to.
With a broad grin, Vera cast her hand out, and the Pain Elemental she concocted raced out, catching Corff unawares and drawing a howl of agony from him that dropped him to his knees. His head swung toward her, and she felt his eyes land on her with almost ballistic force. She didn't give him time to do something to check her, though. She spoke the word Un, and cast out the dart of corrosive misery that Corff managed to jerk an arm up in front of. Instantly, the shirt on his arm dissolved away, and the flesh underneath it began to boil and slip from his meat after it. Vera was already moving, though. She ran toward him, counterintuitively, but then darted into the passage that led toward the stairs, managing to clear the hallway just in time for another sound of hellfire being released, and the entire place filling from floor to ceiling with grey, skull-screaming un-flame.
She didn't have much time, but she had enough. Even as she backed toward the stairs, she spoke the Wyrd of Delay, creating a blob of time which moved treacle-slow, and into that blob, she let out another bolt of Darkning, which hit the blob and then stopped being essentially an immediate rake; it halted in its flight, arrested for a few seconds in distorted time as she turned and fled up the stairs.
Behind her, she heard Corff shout at her, and saw some sort of threads racing toward her from all directions as though some very industrious and incredibly ambitious spiders were trying to snare her. But even as she tried to figure out what they were and how she could counter them, the first of them touched her, passing through her as though she wasn't there. The moment of gap from Corff told her that he hadn't expected that any more than Vera had. So when Vera finally reached the top of the stairs, she turned and hurled herself in a backward dive, trailing a rude gesture behind her as she vanished from his sight.
The instant she lost line-of-sight from her Wyrd of Delay, the magic of it collapsed, and a blare of silence followed, followed by another crash as the Darkning was released from its 'holster', and impacted Corff once again.
Vera quickly rolled to her feet, just in time to see a shocked looking fat human with a raven mask on his face descending into the sound of loud whining alarms with a fire-extinguisher in his hand. Vera looked at him, then at the extinguisher, and the flicked her finger at the top of the thing, lashing out another Dart of Un which hit the device and caused it to fail structurally, blasting slivers of degrading metal, Un-matter, and a pneumatic fist of carbon-dioxide to the little Raven's face. Whether the hit rendered him merely unconscious or actively dead was of no concern to her. She saw a pistol in a holster at his side, and with a grin, she put the halo in her teeth for a moment – which she instantly regretted because she could smell her teeth burning – to pull it out and scarper up the stairs. She immediately turned and scampered back, to steal the man's belt and loop it over her neck after threading it through the halo. Now she wouldn't have to touch it to keep carrying it.
She could hear the sound of leather on tile that seemed to cut through the fire alarm and the sound of the building shuddering under its damage with a shocking clarity, as though all other noise had agreed to go quiet so that Corff's movement dominated the sound-scape. The revolver now in her hands was bulky and obviously not intended for the likes of her. But she knew how such firearms worked, and had Wyrds she could use with it. Delay, of course, was one of them.
Vera formed another blob of snail-slow time around the gun that she pointed at a spot just past and above the body that she'd pilfered it from. She then pulled the trigger, before tugging the pistol back and then out of the blob, leaving the explosion locked floating in the air. She didn't understand that the bullet would have a fraction of its proper velocity, as it had an effectively barrel length of zero, but the noise of the gunshot was currently held in escrow, and she took the moment to dart into the nearest office, looking up at the mirror on the ceiling that could see down into the stairwell from this particular angle, as opposed to its intended use to keep carts from hitting each other around the blind corner.
And the moment that Corff entered what she estimated to be the line of fire, she released the Delay, causing the gunshot noise to sound and Corff to reach out one black-gloved hand. The bullet dug into his palm, but didn't penetrate. He turned his eyes up, but Vera was already ducking into the office and looking for another way out.
"I'm growing tired of this, fiend," Corff's voice came, but this time the words had a bit of ragged edge to them. Vera ignored him, not answering as he no doubt desired that she do, but instead looking for the glass pane that overlooked a hallway. Another horns-first leap and she landed amidst shards of glass which stung her feet and palms as she pushed herself up and then darted into the largest of the rooms, which had seating built into its far wall and then stowed away for space. And the slap of leather sole against tile still sounded, clear as gunfire despite the many other noises around her.
Vera leaned out of the door for a moment, at the corridor that lead in. There was a shadow that just started to leak into the junction, so she quickly lashed out with both the Wyrd of Delay, an a trio of Darts of Un. She was starting to gas out; she knew that much, but she had to find some way to put this shitheel into a box. Just knowing he was a willing servant of the monsters who had massacred so many imps throughout history set her blood to a seething boil. And if she could reduce their numbers by even so much as one, it would do her lineage proud all the back to Alysian Drevisté, the founder of their family.
This room was broad and vast, compared to the piddly ones in the basement. There was a final room, smaller than this, which looked to have been added to the complex later, not part of its boxy structure but a tumor of low-quality construction abutting it. All of this was low quality to her eyes. She wagered that one measly natural disaster would cause the whole thing to collapse. That was what she was betting on.
"The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons," Corff intoned. "So said Timothy, so I see in the world. Your kind are a foulness that should be wiped from existence for the sake of greater purity, of greater stagnation, of perfect stillness. Such teeming filth has no place in a perfect world."
She was watching the blob of his magic through the wall as she crept, quieter than the most paranoid mouse, toward the other door that lead into this broad chamber which had a collapsed in hole in its heart that emitted thick, choking smoke from the fires burning below. He was clearly following the signs of her passage, thinking perhaps that she was an idiot and could be baited into an honest fight. There was no such thing as an honest fight against something like this. And more fool he for believing that there was.
Corff kept talking, calling her all things under the sun except for a sexy beast, and making claims that he was somehow holy for trying to kill her. Fuck you and your attitudes! Many people killed far more imps than you ever did and were still filthy both body and mind. Still she opened the other door, careful to not let the metal crash-bar clack at she teased it open and leaned out. And with her vision now given clarity that her Magesight lacked, she could tell he was a step past where the Wyrd of Delay was laying in wait. Exactly what she could have wanted.
She knew how fast he was. Fast enough to catch a bullet meant fast enough to launch himself at her in a fraction of a second. So she focused on not allowing him that advantage. She flicked a final dart of Un, one that she drew out into a line and splatted the whole width of the floor. The sizzle caused Corff to straighten, then whip his head around toward her. Even through the mask, she could sense his outrage and fury. She quickly finished her spellbinding, a simple trigger that once released was out of her hands. "From Hell's heart, I spit on you, Outsider thing! Cling to your atrophy somewhere else!" Vera shouted.
With a war-cry that seemed to come from somewhere on the wrong end of reality, Corff abandoned use of powers that she had comprehensively proved she could avoid, and blurred with motion to simply lay hands on her and wrench her to bits. But there was one thing which waylaid him. Unlike Delilah, who had functional wings that could even bear her aloft, the feathers on Corff's long cloak were merely decorative, not flight-ful.
So when he tripped the 'wire' that she had set up with magic, it released the other three Darts of Un to finish carving out a two-by-two meter square of the floor; the instant that his weight fell on it, even for an instant, it collapsed under him. His forward momentum became diagonal-down, and he managed to catch himself in the ribs against the edge of the plummet down into the fire once more. Vera smiled wide, pulling the halo around and twisting the power along her fingers in a barest moment of braggadocio, before she fired off the bolt of Darkning through the Halo, and had the power of this profanely holy instrument invert it, slamming the power into Corff's face and hurling him down into the basement amidst ruble and ruin. The entire building began to make sounds of great distress; the wall that Vera was hurled backward into gave a loud split and broke shifting downward and off-set.
The whole building was coming down under their combined violence.
"Good riddance," she said, unsure if she were actually rid of Corff permanently or merely temporarily. Whichever it was, he would be delayed long enough that she could leave the building, and then slink through the town.
Nobody tried to bar her path within the building that shuddered and had chunks of the ceiling plummet down into dust and ruin; outside was another story. There were a pair of people in the dark blue of the local analogue to Sallos' Peacekeepers, talking to a tall, slender man who was wearing a black mask. Nobody around seemed to even notice, or else not care, that there was a man playing masquerade in front of them. The masked one turned as Vera threw herself clear of the doors, and let out a hateful scream at her. She pulled the pistol she'd acquired from the last goon who tried to stop her, and shot him in the chest.
The two Peacekeepers stumbled back and clawed for their guns, but Vera was already running, diving into a bush so that when their gunfire started, they could only take a vague guess as to where she was. This wasn't a victory, not really; the Icon was still out there, and they definitely had some sort of Angelic interference on their side. But she managed to steal the halo and lacking much else hindered their leader. Once the sound of gunshots above her back and behind her feet trailed off, she crawled through the dark and spiky guts of the rose bushes until she reached the edge of the flower bed. There was an alleyway directly forward from here, and if she got to it, she'd be all but free to flee. But that was a lot of open space between here and there.
"Let's see if this can stop lead," she whispered, and cast out her hand, creating a prismatic wall, visible if barely for the thinness that she made it, that covered the distance. Almost immediately, there was a shudder in it and a crash as a car she hadn't accounted for had crashed into it and crumpled into uselessness. Well, no better time to do this than now. She broke out into a sprint, diving up and over the ruined car, hearing a few panicked shots being sent in her direction. Whether it was by her magical craft, or by the shooters' bad aim, she felt no tearing pain and ripping wound. She simply rolled to her feet and started running.
"Bottom link of the Chain of Being my pert, scarlet ass," Vera said to herself in satisfaction. Then as only an imp could, she had the darkness eat her, so human pursuer would see her again.
Hare had taken a new face, which wasn't surprised considering how damaged his last one had become. "That could have gone better, but I'm just glad it wasn't worse," Hare summarized. The clearing that they had chosen, well outside of Evergreen.
"Do the Heterax always get away like this?" One asked, pushing his fingers through a few holes in the jacket he held in his hands.
"The Heterax are not the most dangerous enemies I've faced, but they are by far and away the most annoying," Hare admitted. "Yes, they often do get away. And it's frustrating as hell every time it happens. They're so fucking good at hiding that an extermination like we pulled in Florida is very much the exception, not the rule."
"So… that's just it? We pull up stakes, better luck next time?" Delilah asked.
"That's the fucking Heterax," Hare said with a grim nod. He then perked up as he turned the goo-gaw that Vera brought him. It was a halo, obviously, but one that looked like it was being held together by chicken-wire. "But this? This might be exactly what I need to finish a project that started when I found you."
"You believe that is the key to the Hell Gate?" Vera asked, from where she had her badly burned hand submerged in a discarded ice-cream tub that was now filled with aloe.
"I'll have to run some experiments, but it's looking likely," Hare said. Then there was a strange 'bwip' that occurred both audibly and visibly, as the halo vanished form his hand. He stood, and walked to the clearing's edge, holding up his hand, and slowly expanding out of nothingness as though a skin of non-existence were being peeled back from its surface came their bitching spaceship. It took almost a minute for the engines to finish appearing. "And I really don't want any assholes sneaking up on me, so we're going to do this where, in this time period, there's literally nobody who can follow us."
Delilah perked up. "Are you saying…?"
"Yup. We're going to built a portal to Hell on the moon," Hare said, turning around as the hatch on the vessel's side opened and the collapsing stairs extended out from it.
Delilah jumped to her feet and punched a fist hard into the sky. "FUCKING YES!" she declared.
"Calm down, it's just the moon," Hare said as Delilah did her First-Woman-On-The-Moon dance. One, though gave him a querulous look. He leaned toward Delilah.
"For what it's worth, I'm on your side on this," he said.
"I thought you might be, mister 13th man to stand on the moon," Delilah said.
"Ouch. You wound me," One said with a shake of his head. He turned a look at Hare, but it was a layered one, one that Delilah didn't have the social wherewithal to penetrate more than a few layers of. With the meaning left unsaid, he started up and into the ship, with Lu pausing before joining him. She reached for Delilah with one hand, but then seemed to decide against whatever it was she was going to say, and then got on next.
"So all of this misadventure and we have only a ten-thousand year old mangle of the halos of untold dead angels. I hope your missions have better outcomes than this per their usual," Vera said, as Delilah started to pick up the last of their things that they had to scavenge from their old infiltration site well outside of Evergreen, and throw them into the open bay that had mechanical arms moving things into particular parts of the cargo hold.
"I wasn't lying when I said we are usually batting about .360 on missions succeeded versus the ones we have to either abort or get run the fuck out on," Hare said. He tutted his tongue, staring at the SSTO that would take them to the moon in a very short time. "I don't like that it ended like this either. I wanted closure, damn it all. And now one of the Noumenon know their names."
"And my face," Vera said.
"So it goes," Delilah said. She pulled herself up, and the last two joined her a moment after.
"Alright, I'll get us out of atmo in a couple of minutes, and then it's a fairly rugged burn until we're set on our three day trip to the moon," Hare said, sealing the hatch behind him.
"Why not simply thrust the whole way?" Vera asked.
"Two reasons. One, we'd run out of fuel long before the first hour was up, and two, without any fuel, we would have no way of stopping ourselves from impacting the moon at a velocity of around 8,000 kilometers per second," Hare pointed out the tyranny of spaceflight.
"The wings would surely arrest us," Vera pointed out, and Delilah almost gave the imp an 'are you stupid' look, but then remembered that while Vera was thoroughly educated in magic, treachery, and survival within a cruel hierarchy, she likely had little knowledge of astrophysics.
"No air on the moon, no lift for the wings. Trust me, we'll just float around like tourists for a couple of days, then we'll be onto the one-sixth G that rich idiots pay big money for," Hare said. "Of course, you could put on a Bitch Belt, but why would anybody do that?"
Delilah didn't go into the back, not this time; this time she sat in the co-pilot's chair, because she was going to the MOTHERFUCKING MOON. Vera sat in the third seat, which faced a wall of instrumentation instead of the windscreens that showed blue sky.
"It seems there is much about the human world I need to gain an education of: Hell's primary moon up in Pride Ring has thicker air than Pride! Cleaner too!" Vera pointed out.
"Well, we'll see first hand soon enough," Hare said.
Vera paused, though, and leaned to one side, looking at the side of Hare's face. "You are tense. I can see it in your jaw."
"Just disappointed, is all," Hare said.
"I can think of a few things that might ease your mind," Vera pointed out, as Hare hit the last few buttons, and the thrust of the engines began to push Delilah into her seat as they bade adieu to the ground.
"Such as?" Hare asked.
"Have you ever fucked an imp?" she asked.
"Obviously not," Hare answered.
"Would you like to?" Vera asked. Delilah looked over her shoulder. Oh fucking hell she was serious.
"...Well, I know what I'm going to be doing for the next two days," Hare said brightly.
"Two days? Are you serious?" Vera asked, expression gaining some nervousness.
"I'm rusty, give me a break," Hare griped. Vera turned to Delilah, looking for solidarity among women.
"Welcome to the Helldivers," Delilah said, as the blue of the sky slowly gave way to black, and to the stars of the daytime.
Annihilation
"Death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. From the moment you were put under the metaphysical knife and came out Integrated, there is a new depth that you can reach if things go badly enough, one a lot worse than just you feeding the worms. You see, as you damage your integration through brain-dead stunts like the one you all just pulled, you start to stack up Desync. Desyncronizing from the synergies which now allow you to live, and make it possible for any of us to live in the world that's been born in the wake of the Syncronization Collapse.
And as you Desync, your Amplitude nose-dives; as your Amp goes down, your Tuning goes down, and all of that shiny Sync Tech that you've fought tooth and nail to get your hands on now becomes more of a liability than an asset, rebelling against your grasp with every trigger-pull. And that's not even the worst of it. No, if you tank your Amp to a swamp of Desync or just getting greedy with your Engines, you are not the only one who will die.
That's what Annihilation is, people. It is dying so badly that every other version of you throughout all of existence, every instance of you from every universe in the Stack, they all die too. There will be nothing left of you! Your Echo will be nothing but a tatter that can do nothing but shriek as it watches all of the potential you's that could have been being unraveled and ejected from reality because of your FUCKING STUPIDITY! There's no coming back from Annihilation because it shreds Reality and erases any mention of you so thoroughly that even the Founders and their impossible power could not devise a Resurrection Protocol that could bring you back.
Your lives aren't the only ones that you all are throwing away. Better to just be dead and beyond help, like our old comrades in Poland, than to be Annihilated. At least with them, there's a chance we might find some echo of them out there in impossible infinitude. After Annihilation, all that's left is silence."
-Tirade by Jordan Ashe regarding AEGIS Security Unit 718, 2079