Florida had air like breathing in soup.
The decision to go to Florida sounded like a pleasant alternative to Alabama, but then they'd landed their spaceship in the midst of a brutal, lingering heat-wave that drove sweat out of Delilah's pores and made her regret being born a mammal. Every hour she sweat out what she estimated to be a fifth of her body weight, and it didn't save her from the dragging heat, driving lethargy into all of them at every moment they were outside of the Den.
And since they were landed here with nothing more than rumor and half-remembered conjecture to go off of, their landing in Florida was a prelude to a lot of research and investigation. One didn't seem to mind nearly so much, but Lu was right with Delilah in being uncomfortable in such muggy, miserable heat. And Hare? Well, Hare was Hare. Trying to get any sort of sensibility out of him was like pulling teeth or pulling up on your bootstraps and flying away. Which was now a difficult but possible proposition for Delilah in particular, so it changed the way that term had to be used in her mind, these days.
The Den was a different beast than it had been when she had been introduced to it after her Integration. Though still boring through the swampy, waterlogged dirt of central Florida, it no longer seemed nearly so large. There was no dedicated place to stay, no dedicated place to sleep or to cook, and only a single, one-person bathroom for all four of them. Meanwhile, there were rooms with vast machines that oscillated and vibrated to alien frequencies, lenses that magnified rays of darkness, and computers made of a crystal that emitted waves of frosty condensation slowly but regularly, as though breathing in and out. There were laboratories with every manner of scientific goo-gaw she could name and many she couldn't. There was The Blackroom, which freaked her the fuck out and nobody would explain what it was used for. And then there was a hallway that was being used as an arsenal, because no other space existed for it.
It was so very ad hoc. Even though it was obviously and distinctly built-for-purpose, it was like somebody was trying to squeeze efficiency out of something which barely worked to begin with.
"Yo, Delilah," One said as he rounded the corner and spotted her, sitting on a crate of reloads for One's carbine. "Hare just made a roast beef. I don't even know where he got the thing; he ain't been out of the Den since we landed here."
"He probably whipped it up out of dirt and skinks, knowing him," Delilah noted.
"Eh, maybe," One said. "Y'know, I thought you'd be used to this kinda heat. Since you're, ya know…"
"Pakistani?" she asked, turning a flat look at him again. She hadn't Reset out of her body from Greece, but neither had One. Since Hare and Lu could do it as they pleased, they did it much more often.
"Yeah, that place has gotta be Satan's armpit durin' the summer time."
"I was born and raised in Winnipeg, One," she said. "I'm used to forty C below, not forty C above."
One was taken aback by that for a second. "Forty below? Fuck me. What's that in real measurements?"
"Forty below is the same for both Celsius and Fahrenheit," she said, recalling the one quirk she recalled of the measurement system that she otherwise never had to interface with.
"That's goddamned cold," he noted.
"Yes it is. I'm Canadian, One. Shithead was Pakistani. I just have half of his genes," She said. She took a sniff of the air. She could actually smell the distinct odor of the cooking beef somewhere else in the Den. "What about you? Where do yours come from?"
"Joysey, all the way back. I think my Ma's side was some of the first people to settle near Boston. Dad's type came from down Virginia way. Don't know too much about that, cause Dad didn't talk about his folk too much," One said. Delilah, now tempted by the smell of good, homemade food was tempted off of her seat and started drifting in the direction of both One and the food in the offing. "I think it's cause Grandad beat Dad so bad that it left him half-crippled. My old man walked with a cane since the day I was born, on account one leg was shorter and twisted."
"Jesus. I'm sorry to hear that," she said. Guess her own father wasn't the only shitty dad out there.
"Eh, Dad was a good guy. Did what he could, didn't wallup us the way his dad to him and my uncles. I miss him, ya know?"
"We can't talk to them. How could we explain what's going on with… this?" she gestured between the two bodies that neither of them had been born with.
"Wouldn't help anyway. He took a stroke a couple years back. Ain't been able to talk or understand what's said to him since," One's face was downcast for a long moment. "When I was workin' for the government, I'd always wonder if there was some other department that had a medicine or a surgery that could fix him, and how I could find out. I dug up a lot on other parts of the government, tryin' to see. Didn't find much."
"He sounds like a better father than most get," she said, trying to swallow the bitterness of her own paternity.
"He was a hell of a man. If I was half what he was… shit man, I don't know," One trailed off. The aroma trail they were following led to a particular laboratory which had what looked like a glass box with heating elements at its bottom sitting on a research table, while another box, this one opaque, rattled gently beside it. Hare was sleeping in a chair, his back to a corner and vaguely facing the glass box with its levitating, rotating roast of beef in its center. Lu was likewise sitting to one side, but though she had a certain drowsiness to her, she was still coherent enough to give them both a nod and to point at the plates and cutlery that had been piled willy-nilly on the table.
"How long has he been like that?" Delilah asked quietly, gesturing to Hare.
"He fell asleep not long after he put the beef on," Lu answered with normal voice. Hare didn't so much as twitch. "He's been running himself ragged, as usual, so he probably won't wake up until the alarm goes off."
"Good for him," One said with a shrug and took one of the stools nearby to perch himself on. Delilah did likewise, facing Lu.
"Did we get any news out of Greece?" she asked. Days had passed, and as far as the internet was concerned, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was happening in northern Greece. Lu shrugged.
"Beyond some encrypted radio chatter, it's out of our hands for now. We're going to have to trust the locals and the vampires to keep a lid on Greece until you two are ready to kill the Ruinous Apostle," Lu said.
"Us two? What about you and Hare?" One asked.
"I'm not a fighting type," she said with a warding gesture. "And frankly, neither is Hare. He's got some big sticks he can break out, but once he's used them out, he'd be essentially helpless. You two, conversely, can fight all damned day. And that might be what killing the Apostle will take."
"It doesn't feel right, leaving a city to face an undead horde while we fuck around in Florida," Delilah noted.
"It's good that it doesn't. That feeling means you're still human," Lu said.
"I guess," One said. He glanced from Hare then back to Lu. "So what exactly are we down to face here in Florida? I know Hare mentioned something about ugly bitches; what's that about?"
"Right. The Hag Star," Lu said. "I've done a bit of reading on them, since they're kinda hell-adjacent. So Abyss synergy, live aquatic lives, and tend to hunt humans for their skin."
"Why do they want our skin?" One asked.
"Couldn't figure that out. I know they have a society of sorts, with hierarchies and trade. Most of the trade they do is with other Abyssals, though. Meat to the Cradlemakers, spinal cords to the Witch Pods. That sort of thing," Lu said. "I also heard that they have some of the more weird ways of fucking with people. Hare says that their deep connection to the Dark alignment means that they can directly attack your mind."
"And how are we gonna know these ones?" One asked.
"Well, where we're going, you'll be hard pressed to mistake them for anything but Hag Star," Lu said, leaning over to the roast and checking its slowly rotating thermometer. She turned back. "To be less glib; have you ever read Shadow Over Innsmouth?"
"No," Delilah said.
"Yeah," One offered.
"Deep Ones," Lu said.
"Oh shit. We're goin' into the deep end on this one, ain't we?" One said, shaking his head slowly.
"Quite literally. We're going to need to rent a submarine to even find the things," she said.
"We're going to fight a submarine menace with what? Our bare hands?" Delilah asked. "I still breathe air, Lu. That's going to be something of a stumbling block."
"Just be glad that these ones are on the continental shelf and not down in the Mid-Atlantic Trench," Lu said. "They usually stay a lot deeper than this. Hare thinks something's wrong."
"Something's always wrong with Hare," One groused.
"And he's been right," Lu said. She glanced between the two of them. "I've read Mussa's journal; all of the Noumenon we've faced since I've gotten brought on board have been acting really, really strangely. Out of eight distinct flavors I've seen and read about, seven of them are higgledy-piggledy. Only the Cognoscenti are still acting like Cognoscenti."
"Do you think this might have something to do with the presence of Heaven and Hell?" Delilah asked.
"...I mean, it might?" Lu could only shrug. "I don't have enough information to even offer a guess. But eventually we will. And when we do, maybe we'll start getting answers."
The beef let out a cheerful ding, and instantly Hare released a snort and his eyes shot open. He blinked a few times, as though confused as to where he was, but that fled quickly when he saw the levitating, rotating beef in front of him. "Ah. Perfect," he said. He got up and picked the beef out of the 'oven' with his bare hands, plopping it onto the table and then turning his attention to the opaque box. When he opened that one, the delightful smells of root-vegetables slow cooked hit the air, along with the metal bite of something foreign but not objectionable. When Hare lifted the two ceramic pots out of it – again using his bare hands and not seeming to mind the heat, he set them down and began to ladle slow cooked potatoes, turnips, carrots, and another very pale blue root that she didn't recognize onto each of the four plates. "Peas? Corn?" he asked.
Delilah shook her head. Peas were Satan's dingleberries, thank you very much.
One lacked her abstemiousness and had a big slop of peas and corn added to his platter. "So," Hare finally said. "What did I sleep through?"
"Gave them the run down of the Hag Star situation," Lu said.
"Great. So yeah, this one is going to be another Recon mission, like Bangor was until circumstances changed. No heroics. Just get the information and get out. There's no need to engage in a life-or-death struggle with those fish-heads down there."
He was already carving the meat, which was unwise because it'd lead to the meat drying out, but she couldn't gainsay because she was hungry and that beef smelled delicious. "Tell me something, Hare," she said, as she accepted a few thick slabs of roast beef onto her platter. "Why is it you actually go through the effort of cooking all this stuff, if that hive of yours can just," she made a magical gesture with her fork, "nanomachine it into existence?"
"Why do we go to museums when we can sit at home and stare at a wall? It's not the same experience, Delilah," Hare said. "Well? Don't just sit there like lumps. Eat my food!"
No matter the insanity of the world, Hare could always be trusted to be Hare, it seemed.
Helldiver VI
Reconnaissance; Hag Star; Florida
As before, with autumn creeping into place, one should have expected a reprieve from the stifling, suffocating mugginess of the Florida bayou. But Florida was not so kind. Instead it doubled down, being even more unpleasant just out of sheer seeming spite, ignoring the pressure of cold air threatening Texas to the west and just pounding sweat out of people as long and as hard as it could. If there was one thing which Delilah could use to point to the base malevolence of reality, it was Florida weather.
"Oh stop being so dramatic," One said as he handed her yet another cup of iced coffee. "It ain't that hot."
"I'm melting away, One. I will shrivel up like a raisin in the sun and die, One," she bemoaned.
"You little drama queen," he turned and walked away. They'd moved up to the eastern edge of Orlando in the last day, trying to find the clearest path to the Hag Star. It felt so utterly flailing to Delilah; since she couldn't see any of the mechanics by which Lou and Hare were narrowing down their target area from 'the entire east coast of Florida' to 'somewhere between Melbourne and Daytona Beach north-south, and somewhere between the shoreline and the Bahamas east-west', it all had an air of randomness about it. As though Hare were throwing darts at a map and declaring 'we'll look there next'.
It was a strange thing, to know that Disney World was just over the horizon toward the setting of the sun. She'd never gone there as a kid. Shithead had been too cheap, and to 'religiously pure' to allow his 'corruptible' daughters to be surrounded by such worldly influences. Jokes on you, Shithead. Judith managed to become a bisexual dominatrix without Walt Disney's help. She might have to go there someday, to Disney World. When they weren't neck deep in saving the world, at least. After all, Disney was open to both kids, and kids at heart.
She just needed to find where that kid was hiding in her heart and she'd be ready to go.
The current venue for the four of them was a coastal town called Titusville, which was by mapping definitions 'a riverside town' that separated it from Cape Canaveral to the east. That 'river' was suspiciously salty, though, and suspiciously nautical; though hemmed in by America's Launch Pad, Titusville was a stone's throw from the Atlantic. Likely the only reason they were here was because it raised fewer eyebrows than skipping around where NASA hung their hats.
"So, enlighten me. What's a Deep One?" Delilah asked, trying to use the iced coffee as a cold-pack to her forehead.
"Fish man," he said.
"Wait, that's it?" she asked. "I though it'd be something a lot worse."
"Try gettin' that described by ole' Lovecraft and see if you still hold that opinion," One noted. He turned to her, then to the 'river' that separated here from Cape Canaveral. "I can't say I'm big on the t'ought of goin' under the sea. I got problems with tight spaces."
"Claustrophobic?"
"Eh, kinda?" he said with a shrug. "I just don't play with havin' no room to move around. It's why I had a standing desk and why I did all that field-work. I ain't a sittin' kinda guy."
"That's just not being a seat-sloth," she said. "For what it's worth, I completely sympathize. I can't stand being forced to do desk-work any more than apparently you can."
"Here's to bein' shiftless bastards," One extended his cup of coffee (hot in his case) to clack against her own, then took a sip. "So what's your take on Hare, now that you had some time with him?"
"Pushy," she said.
"No shit," One said. "The guy who threatened to pitch us into a meat-grinder unless we promised we weren't Nazis is 'pushy'."
"He wouldn't have," Delilah began, but One shook his head.
"Oh, he would'a," One countered. "I had a guy with DHORKS, an old guy. Think he was in Gulf War One. Saw some really nasty shit, got ordered to do some nasty shit. And by the time he landed in my lap the guy was on the edge of bein' fucking nuts. Really racist. Violent at people what pushed him wrong. But it was all comin' from a place where he got hurt in the wrong way at the wrong time. If you pushed him wrong, there was no tellin' how far he'd go."
"What happened to him? Did he make it out before… well, what happened?" she asked.
"No. Robby gacked it when that little red shit trashed our Joysey office," One said, draining the half-cup of coffee he had in a massive pull, just so he could throw it into the garbage pale that had been left outside some guy's yard and not have to carry it further.
"So you think Hare's like Robby, in that he got hurt the wrong way at the wrong time and is now going off at anything that even close-to-resembles what hurt him?" Delilah asked.
"That sounds about right, really," One said, pausing at the crosswalk of the road that, as an artery splitting into capillaries, dumped cars into this residential subdivision within a stone's throw of what nobody wanted to admit was the ocean. "Whatever happened between him and those 'Loug's that he talks about, I figure it had to be at least Robby levels of bad."
"It would explain a lot," Delilah began.
"But it don't excuse shit," One noted. She turned a look at him. "I don't know 'bout you, but I don't much like the prospect of bein' roped into a job I can't say no to, against my will, and then havin' my life threatened by the guy what done it."
"...That was an asshole thing to do," Delilah noted. Maybe she was simply looking at her world through comparatively rose-tinted glasses when it came to Hare. The first thing Hare did to her was save her from a police checkpoint. Weeeell, technically the first thing he did for her was repair her car radio. But the checkpoint came not long after. She didn't have long to establish goodwill with Hare before that little lashing in the Swarm Controller, but she had a shit tonne more than One had gotten. She took a deep sip of her coffee. "So what are you planning to do about it?"
"Not much. Unless he starts tickin' me off again. Then I might let him have it," One said. "I can accept one piece of shittiness. Everybody's got bad days. But I won't lay down and let him do it twice."
"Fair enough," Delilah said. She could see Hare and Lu up ahead, loitering outside an equipment rental office. This one had a sign showing a bunch of manatees and semi-tropical fish, along with the name of the owner. While it was unlikely that this guy would have a submarine, per se, perhaps he could point them all in the right direction. It turned out that of all the designs that Hare knew how to build, he could build dozens that operated between having one atmosphere of external pressure and having zero. He didn't have any that could work when the pressures were higher. So barring a lengthy 'education' in the fabrication of modern submersibles, he was just going to barter, borrow, or steal one.
"Have you ever thought about talkin' to your sisters? Since all this started, I mean?" One asked.
"I couldn't bear to bring them into this. They worked hard, in their ways, to get out from Shithead's grasp. Let them enjoy the lives they've built for themselves," she said.
"And you haven't?" One noted.
"...shut up, One," she said.
"Hey, you can't rib on me for not talkin' to my folks if you ain't equally ribbed for not talkin' to your darling sistahs," One said.
"Taken. Under. Advisement," she said. Hare had made it clear under no uncertain terms that talking to people of your old life was utterly verboten. But he said a lot of things. And she had to accept that not all of them were sensible.
"Yo," One said as he reached the edge of the lot. The sun was still rising over Florida, and the heat was still barely bearable. Fuck, it was going to be nasty once the sun had spent any amount of time in the sky. Lu gave a nod, whereas Hare paused in his pacing and turned to her. Again, Hare had changed, now a woman again, because variety was apparently the spice of life.
"You two are late," he said.
"It's quarter to seven in the morning, and I'm already covered in sweat. I needed to get something cold," Delilah made her point. Hare turned her gaze to One.
"Bagel, bro. Gotta have that breakfast 'a champions."
Hare sighed, tweezing the noticeably freckled bridge of her nose. She was now as dark as Delilah natively was, with hair standing out in a barely-contained black cloud and her eyes the color of a chocolate fountain. "I suppose there's worse places for you to be in Florida. I keep expecting to trip over an Apex Infestation, and am pleasantly surprised when there's no such thing in this reality."
"Apex?" Lu asked. The team really was mostly girls today. Lu also took a more local visage, appearing somebody with mixed black-and-latino background, sun-tanned and black haired, though her own was simply hanging straight down her back.
"You know how Venus Fly Traps are plants who woke up and chose violence?" Hare asked.
"Famously," Lu said.
"Apex makes every plant wake up and choose violence," he said.
"That's a nasty trick for the Noumenon to play in a place with kudzu," Lu noted.
"Oh it wasn't the Noumenon who made Apex. It was us. Just showing that we're still dumb apes banging rocks together," Hare said with a shake of her head and a chuckle.
"Why?" Delilah asked.
"They thought it would make wheat grow faster," Hare said with the flattest of possible tones.
"...Do we deserve to be wiped out?" Delilah asked.
"Some days. Ah, for the days when the most dangerous thing to a human was another human," he said. And then he paused as a half-clapped-out car trundled into the parking lot, disgorging a middle aged man with hair that was obviously dyed because what rode his head was five shades darker than what beetled his brow. He blinked at having for people in his business before he even opened it, then plastered on the most obvious 'I intend to sell you a lemon' smile onto his face. Delilah didn't sneer at him, but it was a near thing. Used equipment salesmen and politicians were amongst the worst of people in her eyes.
"Well howdy folks. You're here bright and early!" the owner said as he trotted forth, a hand extended. Hare put on a smile every bit as greasy as the owner's and gave the hand a shake. "What's got you all so eager on this fine, sunny day?"
"Got a little expedition planned," Hare said, tilting her head toward the coast over yonder. "We're from in-land, and want to get a look at the beautiful coasts while the vacation's still on."
"You going boating?" the owner said with brows raising. "'Cause I can walk us over to our other lot if that's your heart's desire…"
"Please, I can go boating on a lake," Hare said with a roll of her eyes. "No. I want to go somewhere I haven't been. I want to go under."
"Under? You want a sub?" the owner said. "Well it's lucky you came to Gordon Trout then, isn't it? What about you, sir? Are you the one splashing all the money on these fine ladies?"
One blinked at him. "Don't look at me, bro. I'm just makin' sure they don't all drown," One said.
Gordon's brow furrowed a bit. "I'm sorry, but that isn't the voice I expected out of you. Are you from Jersey by chance?"
"What about it?" One asked.
"I've got family up in Newark. They're good people. Still have stars in their eyes and think they can make it in old NYC," Gordon puffed out a wistful sigh. "Eh, they'll end up down here eventually. You ever hear of an Evelyn Baker?"
"New Jersey's a big place," One said, but Delilah caught the somewhat concerned look that came to his face after Gordon shrugged and turned to the other women again. Who was Baker to One?
"So who's carrying the wallet today?" Gordon again flashed that big-money smile that sat on his face like a mask over a carcass, and was about as convincing. Delilah gave a glance to Hare, who likewise received a glance from Lu. "So you, ma'am. What kind of 'expedition' are you planning on? Just looking at the local flora and fauna? Or are you trying to pick over the wrecks off of Canaveral? Because I am legally required to tell you to that salvaging derelict is against maritime law."
"And off the record?" Hare asked.
"Bring me back something nice and I won't tell anybody you even saw me," Gordon said with a cheeky wink.
"I think something can be arranged," Hare said. Gordon laughed.
Delilah recoiled as she finally smelled his breath. It reeked of tooth-rot, coffee and cigarettes, and instantly drove a shudder out of her, for just a moment she felt like she was a small child, having a giant leaned down in her face roaring at her for things she didn't understand, having to stay still and silent when foul spittle laced her face with every third word.
She turned and took a step away as Hare began to talk with Gordon, heading into the office. One followed Hare, but Lu, having gotten a look at Delilah, paused before doing likewise. She moved to where Delilah found herself breathing like she'd just finished a cardio set, and sweating even harder. This time she could not blame the heat for it. Lu looked her in the eye. "What's going on?"
"I can't stand that guy's breath," she said, not elaborating on the wherefores and the whys. Lu gave a suspicious look at her, but turned to join the others in the office. Delilah just caught her breath. What the hell had brought that out? It'd been years since she shared a room with Shithead, and then the slightest whiff of halitosis puts her right back there again? She shook her head. It was obvious she was carrying around baggage from her childhood. Everybody did. It was just a question of how much and how heavy it was. Maybe it was just kismet that she'd gone this long without tripping over a bag and spilling shit all over herself. She puffed out a final, purging breath, the sweat suddenly cold on her body and finally sapping some of this stifling heat.
One was right. She should talk to her sisters some time. If nothing else, to see if they were handling the garbage Shithead handed them all better than she was, and if so, to compare notes so that she could do likewise. It was almost five minutes that she spent out in the parking lot, all told, before she, in her biased opinion, had her shit together and went in with the rest of these idiots.
"Oh no. I don't trade in those iron-lung abominations. If you're going to go under the water, you're doing it in style and comfort!" Gordon expounded, turning his computer monitor so that Hare and the others could see the 'submarine' in question. It was a vivid orange, and slightly bigger than a panel van, with viewing ports running along its side and a big glass dome at the front where it was piloted. "For the four of you, you could do a lot worse than the Sanbourg and Forrester."
"What's its specifications?" Hare asked.
"Oh, you won't have to worry about that. It'll get you where you want it to take you," Gordon dismissed. One cleared his throat with a displeased look on his face.
"How about you don't belittle the one which is actually payin' the money and probably knows more about submarines than you do?" One said.
"I didn't mean any offense," Gordon said, but even One wasn't blind to the fact that he'd outright presumed that Hare was just a pretty face and an empty head. Fuckin' Boomers…
"So talk the nuts and bolts. That's how you can show respect," he said. "How many seats that bitch got? How fast does it go? How much air? All that shit!"
"You'll have to forgive Adam. He gets protective sometimes," Hare said, reaching back to pat One's knee. Now you stop that. "But yes, I would like to know exactly what this piece of technology is capable of. I don't want to rent something which is going to crumple under is if I lean on it wrong."
"Right. Well," Gordon paused, as Delilah entered the room. She was practically shiny with sweat. Man, she really couldn't handle the heat. "So nice of you to join us."
"Eyes on the prize, mister Trout," Hare said snapping her fingers most sassily. "Displacement, speed, power plant, everything that Adam mentioned and more, please."
One leaned back to where Delilah had pulled her chair a bit further away from where Gordon was going on at length. She was watching Gordon with a sharp look in her eye. "Hey," One whispered. "Anything I should know about?"
"...no," she answered quietly. "Just got a bad whiff of something."
"If you say so," One muttered.
He turned to the conversation ahead of him.
Gord's skin writhed at the corner of his eye.
One flinched, clutching at the armrests of his chair.
He narrowed his eyes, looking at Gordon's face as he continued talking turkey with Hare, and scrutinizing that little stretch of his body. How Gordon's face stretched and squashed as he went through his overdriven expressions, trying to keep Hare on the hook. Though there were all kinds of wrinkles there that make-up wasn't doing a great job of hiding, it was just skin.
He puffed out a breath. Bein' around Hare this long was starting to make him paranoid.
The last time he saw skin writhe like that was when one of his DHORKS agents was being infested. He'd seen it enough times, and on enough heartbreakingly familiar faces that it was now burned into his memory, and he couldn't even afford to look at Delilah when she did her calf-exercises because it was too goddamned similar. The look of something slimy and grasping slithering under a layer of flesh.
Calm your goddamned self, One, he chastised himself. Even if it wasn't just a trick of perspective and lighting, Two was far away from here. DHORKS didn't have any field offices in either Georgia nor Florida. But even as he tried to calm himself with that rationalization, he had to admit that it would take them very little effort to just fucking walk here. Since One's rescue from Maine, they'd been to Cuba, Venezuela, and Greece. That's plenty of time for even a slothful whatever-the-fuck to shift his ass south into the land of peaches and citrus.
The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed.
In fact, now that he wasn't actively lying to himself, it was an almost certainty that Two had some sort of presence down here in Florida. Something that was that adept at slithering under the skin would likely do on the macro what it did on the micro; extending its grasp insidiously as far as it could reach. He turned a look to Delilah, but she had a distracted look on her face, her finger and thumb tucked up against her nostrils as though trying to prevent herself from smelling something.
They could be closing in on the four of them right now. Two's people would have spotted One in a heartbeat; while One could change his face a thousand times, the voice that came out of his mouth was still One. Changes in tone and timbre didn't alter the way he spoke nor the local patois he'd grown up with. As soon as one of them heard him open his big stupid fucking mouth they'd have him nailed. And the moment they had him, it'd just be a matter of calling in the cavalry.
Three fucking days they'd spent here, creeping around and asking after random bullshit, all the while the noose was getting tighter and tighter. Was he the only doomed motherfucker in this room that could even feel it? Was he the only one who wasn't entirely goddamned blind?
Another glance to Delilah, who had started shivering even though she was awash with sweat. Her eyes were unfocused, and her complexion looked a bit greener around the gills than it once had. One could only see the back of Hare's head, hear the beads on her wrists rattling with frustrating volume with every tilt or shift of her gesture. He looked to Lu. Lu sat still like a statue, staring at the owner of Trout's Transport and Tours.
She wasn't blind. She saw it too.
Instantly he felt vindicated. He wasn't being paranoid. Delilah was distracted with whatever bullshit was going on with her body, that was on her. But Lu? Lu always saw something. She'd seen the writhing. She was watching for it to come again even now.
One was glaring now. 'Gordon', if that even was his real name, seemed to be a bit on edge, seeing two pairs of drilling eyes on him, but he didn't break character. Not yet. No he'd be careful. This had to be one of Two's guys. Why else would it have taken Gordon so long to arrive at his own fucking business? That was when they grabbed him, just outside of his house.
Hare clapped loudly, and One's hand jumped to his jacket where the S-46 was waiting to listen to him. "That sounds like excellent, exactly the kind of thing I need. You've earned yourself a rental."
"Excellent, excellent," he said. Repeating himself. Echolalia seemed to be one of their tells. Any time Two said something to one they'd always repeat it back. Word for word and tone for tone. Like children first stumbling their way around a language. "We accept American Exceptional and Vista Card."
"I do all my business in cash," Hare said, pulling out a thick wad of bills which she'd counterfeited on their first day here during a 'bank visit'. The fact that 'Gordon' didn't remark on this marked him. He was just spending their precious time while the rest of Two's monsters showed up. One's teeth were grinding as Hare flicked out the 'down-payment' and laid it onto 'Gordon's desk. This was all bad. He kept looking around the office. There weren't any doors to other areas, just the bathroom door which stood askew and revealed the toilet within.
Another glance through the glass of the door. There was a car coming in. Three passengers. Four total. Were they wearing black?
One turned to Hare, who was extending a hand to shake. 'Gordon' mimicked the gesture, but One's eyes snapped to his fingernails.
They totally squirmed.
They squirmed and formed blades.
Not willing to wait one more instant, One ripped the S-46 from his jacket, pulling it up to his shoulder even as it unfolded. 'Gordon's eyes shot wide as One seemingly produced a rifle out of fucking nowhere. But he offered no complaint other than the gasp before a scream before One fired a burst of hyper-velocity slugs into his chest, neck and skull, before dropping to one knee and lining up a shot on the car. They didn't react to the sound. Trying to play it cool? Not gonna work. He fired again. The windscreen became opaque as a slug shattered it, exploding the head of the driver. He twitched to the passenger, who would be the first out of the door, and fired again, to another hole through the windscreen and another shower of gore.
He felt something grab his shoulder, to try to throw his aim. Had 'Gordon' survived? It didn't matter. He had to even the playing field while he still could. One shrugged out of his jacket, leaving it in the grasp of the one behind him, kicking his way through the office door and just lacing the rest of the car with slugs of ferro-nickle.
He had just emptied his clip and his battery when he felt something fast and mighty slam into his back, driving him down prone to the pavement. He tried to twist his carbine around, but found a dark hand clamp shut on it and throw it away. "WHAT THE FUCK, ONE!" Delilah roared into his ear from her place pressing his chest to the concrete.
"They're comin' for us! I ain't got time for this we gotta goooo!" One said, trying to writhe free of Delilah's deluded grasp. But she was able to clamp him in place while Hare skidded to a halt trying to look both into the office and at the car full of monsters that had rolled up on them.
"Oh. Oh fuck me. Fuck me the Hag Star know we're here," Hare said, her pallor growing grey.
"HARE! Get Delilah off'a me! They're coming!" One shouted.
"Delilah, lift him," Hare said. Delilah was not gentle, holding One hunched forward so that he was at eye level with Hare. "They got One bad. Delilah, have you noticed any strange memories or impulses hit you in the last hour or so?"
"I… I thought I smelled Shithead's breath," she said.
"I'm not even going to attempt to unpack that, but I presume that's really fucking traumatic for you?" Hare said, pointing past One's shoulder.
"What the fuck are you doin', Hare? Come on let goooo of me!" One again struggled.
"You could say that," Delilah said over him.
"They're already attacking," Hare said. "They're going directly after our minds."
"He's one a Two's!" One shouted. Delilah, though, dragged him over to the car, flattening his face against the driver's window.
And showed that within were not squishy, amorphous black-suited monsters. It was a pair of middle aged, slightly pudgy men, and a pair of teenaged girls in the back seat. All of them shot to shreds.
One's blood went cold, as reality resumed and his paranoia broke.
He'd just killed civilians. And he had done it on the most specious reasoning that he had in him.
Oh fuck he was gonna yarf.
Since One was now vomiting and not randomly opening fire on random passers-by, Delilah let him go so that he could land on the concrete of the parking lot holding himself up by one hand with the other laced into his hair. She turned to Hare. "Hare, explain."
"Hag Star have Arrangements in the Distortion Synergy… too high brow; Hag Star have a bunch of voodoo bullshit which can directly and remotely attack sanity," Hare corrected himself when it was clear he was going to lose her. "How long ago did you smell that thing you smelled?"
"A couple of minutes ago. Why?" she asked.
"Damn it, there's no telling how long they've had us fingered," Hare grumbled. "I'm presuming that the one you called 'Shithead' still gives you nightmares? Be frank with me, this is important."
"...yes," she admitted.
Hare nodded. "But not the worst things you've seen? You could think of worse things from your past, that you've seen or experienced," Hare stressed.
"Maybe?" she offered.
"They're doing a psychic artillery barrage, and they have our grid coordinates," Hare muttered. She turned and grabbed Delilah by her shoulders. "We need to find out which direction the Hag Star are in, and then run the opposite way until we're out of their range."
"So we run west, obviously," she said. Hare blinked at her and then hung her head as though she only now realized how much overthinking she was doing.
"It's really goddamned lucky we actually no I'm not even gonna say it in case they've got scrying up," Hare cut herself off. She then looked away from Delilah, and her face grew slack. "...where's Lu?"
Delilah looked around, and couldn't see the fourth of their tetrad out here amongst the corpses.
"Did she stay in the office?" Delilah offered, pointing behind them to the office. She turned.
Instantly, she was assailed by the smell of blood and ejaculate, and a dead woman – a girl really – split open with her legs chained to a bed. Delilah recoiled, clutching at her head and forcing herself not to see the most infamous crime in Halifax in the 1990's, thrust in front of her face as though she hadn't been a baby when it happened.
"Again?" Hare asked.
"Bad murder case," she hissed through grit teeth. Hare narrowed her brow, then stooped to pick up One. One was quivering. And his facial features were twisting and sliding. Oh. Oh that wasn't good. The last time she'd seen that, was when Hare 'Unwound' back in Moncton. "I'm guessing he's out of the fight."
"We need to grab Lu and start moving. We… we…" Hare turned to the office with Delilah, just in time to see the air seem to shatter, a great pane of What Is breaking and shifting out of its seat. The office on the lot, viewed through that broken chunk of reality did not show the fish-festooned sign of Gordon Trout's Transport and Tours, but instead something called 'Enterprise Rent-a-Car'.
"What the hell?" Delilah took a step toward the building.
"GOD DAMN IT! What is wrong with me?" Hare shouted, stomping the concrete. "Of course the Hag Star are fucking with her too!"
"What is this?" Delilah cast her hand toward the madness before her.
"Remember how Integration aligns you with a Synergy?" Hare said, starting to pull One toward the shatter of reality. "Well, ours is a bit sloppy. It lets you hold onto whatever other Synergy you're next-best aligned with. Empyrean in your case. And for her… I don't even know what the fuck synergy she's got."
"So this is…" Delilah began, then there was a loud crack sound, as the pane of unreality outright collapsed away, no longer simply showing the sign of a business she'd never heard of before but an entirely different office, one larger and much less shady but more inhumanely corporate.
"Lu is Fracturing. Delilah, since you still have most of your mind still intact, you need to go in there and get her out."
"Out of what?" Delilah asked.
"Out of the Fractures, obviously!" Hare shouted, pointing at the world which emitted another loud crack, and the 'Enterprise' sign was again twisted into a sign in Cyrillic for some fucking reason. Hare wiped a hand down her face, forcing some composure back onto herself. "If the Hag Star have already Unwound One, they're gonna start trying to drive him into Desync. I need to get him out of here. Delilah; I'm depending on you. Go into the Fractures and pull her out. She won't want to come, but you're gonna have to force her."
"Fine," she said. Then there was a deep rumble as the entire area shuddered, a veil of unreality passing across her as the concrete lot they were standing on turned into asphalt and tarmac, the empty spaces filling with small, ugly, cheap looking cars.
"Then start moving. Good luck, Delilah. And God help us all," Hare said, and began to pull the Unwinding One with her away from all of this.
She tried to open the door to the office, only to find it locked. So she simply booted the glass pane, shattering it. "Məni incitmə, xahiş edirəm!" the teenaged girl behind the desk exclaimed, and Delilah's mind actually lagged a bit to translate it to something like 'please don't hurt me'. She was holding her hands up in a surrendering posture. Delilah quickly glanced at her. She had hair just as black as the obviously dyed coif of Gordon Trout, but on her it seemed a more natural shade. And right there was a large, middle aged and shaved-headed man who was trying to pull a gun from a coat-pocket and having it snag. Delilah grabbed the nearest chair to her and hurled it at the man, hitting him in the head with it and stunning him, dropping him to an awkward sit on the floor causing the gun to land on the floor near his feet.
Delilah scooped up and shattered the shitty pistol as she walked, otherwise ignoring the both of them. At the far end of the room, near where the bathroom had been, there was another cracking sound, and the door flickered and warped. She shoulder barged through it, and felt a wave of could pass along her, as the real was replaced with the unreal for a moment.
She looked up and saw that the signage here was in French, such that even without that thing in her brain she could have read it. 'Employees only'. The air was a-whir with the noise of heavy machinery, and she kept walking, trying not to think about how she had left a rental place trying to get their hands on a recreational submarine and was now inside a goddamned factory, without ever leaving the lot.
She ignored the people who were in the corridor with her, but they certainly didn't ignore her. She wasn't sure where exactly she was going. Only that things were feeling very weird and her skin was crawling the further away from the place she came in that she went.
"Excuse me, miss, you can't be here," one of the workers said, getting into her face with a stern expression. His breath stank of cigarettes, tooth-rot, and stale coffee. Delilah recoiled slightly, forcing her involuntary panic spike down. So that was your best shot, you Hag Star motherfuckers? Can't come up with something more original? Contempt managed to defeat fear today. Maybe she would be able to install it in a more permanent basis, but for the time being, she ungently pushed the interloper out of her path.
"You couldn't stop me if you wanted to," she promised.
There was the sound of a shotgun clacking shut that came from behind her. She turned a look over her shoulder, and saw a worker holding a partially completed double-barrelled shotgun at her back.
"Miss, if you don't leave at once, we will defend our premises!" the shotgun wielder said. How the fuck did some guy just get his hands on an uncompleted gun? She was about to say something when there was another loud shuddering of the world, another cracking of the real, this one sweeping through her as though a pane of broken glass were falling to crush her.
It passed her swinging down and through the ground without stopping, and in its wake the building was changed. She instantly was punched in the chest by something painful and loud, sending her staggering to one side, as she fell against a pallet wrapped thick in plastic and stacked with boxes, marked with a symbol for something called 'Last Chance'. She swung her head around, and saw a bunch of werewolves engaged in an open firefight with horned demons, one of whom was wracking its shotgun to send another spray of buckshot into Delilah.
Operating on sheer instinct, she felt her Numen flow and saw her skin turn from brown to cobalt blue, and when the next shot hit her it didn't shred clothing and penetrate flesh, but instead spanged uselessly off of her skin.
Delilah growled, as she didn't have time for this. She rushed the little fiend and tackled him as he tried to get another shot sent into her, tearing the firearm from his grasp and then smashing him in the face with it with such violence and power that she felt bone collapse under the impact, and had black blood spray up and onto her face. There were more gunshots, some of them hitting the concrete of the pillar where the small horned demon had been huddled, and Delilah had to scoot around, trying to get the shotgun situated properly in her hand, only to find that no matter how she tried, she couldn't get her finger between the trigger-guard and the trigger itself. Her fingers were too large, or else the shotgun was too small. She actually paused to look at it, as concrete dust sprayed with more bullets hitting near her. The thing had to be chambered in .410. That was why the first shot didn't kill her.
She growled and instead bent the shotgun into uselessness; if she couldn't use it, she could at least make sure it wasn't used against her. She waited for a lull in the incoming fire to glance around the pillar; the fiends over there weren't shooting at her right now. And when she turned back she could see why. One of the werewolves had managed to use the bedlam to get close to her, grabbing her by her jaw and lifting her against the pillar while a second ran in with an unmounted bayonet in her hand. Equal opportunity monsters, it seemed. Delilah wasn't having any of this. She swung the ruined shotgun into the side of the head of one lifting her, which dropped her back to her feet when he collapsed in an unconscious pile. And while the stab of the bayonet into her collarbone hurt, it hurt as though Delilah had been punched, not stabbed. Delilah slammed her fists down in a double hammer-blow on the she-wolf's shoulders, feeling the left one crunch as the bone gave way, before she flared her hands out and slapped both palms over the wolf woman's ears.
The werewolf fell beside her male counterpart, eyes glazed and reaching through a stunned mein toward her own head, which now bled from her ear holes.
Delilah looked around the pillar again. There was another shivering in the air, another subtle fracture in the real, and it was on the other side of a small army of those freaks and fiends. If she had to go deeper into this maelstrom of madness to get to where Lu could be found, then that was the way she would have to go.
She took a moment, to focus on that first clipping shotgun wound she had, focusing her power on undoing it. She felt small, sub-deer-buck sized led balls fall out of her injury. They were using birdshot? Fucking sloppy.
A part of her mind told her to just go back. To not bother with this. But the fact was, to go back right now was kind of out of the question. The fracture that had deposited her here was now potentially tumbling toward the center of the earth. The only way out was forward. So forward Delilah went. She erupted from cover, feeling her wings snap into place and emit golden light if not so strongly as to lift her off of her feet. The display, along with the roar from the bottom of her lungs, gave the demons over yonder pause, and prevented any werewolves from trying to get into her path.
She charged with a sprinter's form, covering the fifty meters in the blink of an eye. The schism that she was looking at was right in front of her now. There was just a single demon woman standing in her way, who was gesturing broadly and speaking words that even with the thing in her brain operating overtime Delilah could not comprehend. Well, if she wasn't going to get out of the way, then she was going to be gone through. Delilah launched herself in a spearing tackle, one that impacted the nearly four foot tall horned red woman and sent both of them careening through the break in reality.
Noise and light became wind and darkness, as the two women – at least Delilah presumed that it was a woman – rolled to a stop on what felt now like marshy land.
Delilah pushed up, ignoring the small fiend who looked remarkably like the one she'd had sex with, and took a look at where this newest breach had deposited her. The wind was wet and warm, but not nearly as hot as it had been before. The sky was a strange orange color. And when she looked to the east and to the sunrise, she beheld the sun being consumed by some strange machine that was visible even for 150,000,000 kilometers of distance, no longer glorious and golden but faltering and orange.
"What the fuck?" Delilah asked. She looked around. The plants were all withered and dead, and bones littered the land, as though this were a world dead for the need of sunlight, and she had just walked in on the corpse of a planet, its air thin and growing thinner, as though she were breathing the last oxygen that this world had to offer.
She was about to push that out of her mind, as this wasn't real and didn't really matter. She just had to find Lu. But before she could do anything that would have brought her closer to her comrade, there came a mind-ripping agony that shot through all of Delilah's body as one, as though every sensory nerve in her entire body was set on fire, dipped in acid, rubbed in salt, and had its mother insulted all at the same time, over and over again. There was no elegance or defiance in the scream that came from Delilah's mouth as she fell to the dead dirt and curled up in a fetal ball.
The pain ebbed slowly, finally allowing Delilah to stop screaming and to begin breathing again.
"What did you do to me, Angel?" the demon said, her clawed fingers holding a wailing orb of grey smoke as she held Delilah by the Torq which produced her clothing in her other hand. Delilah must have taken a few restorative breaths too many, because the demon gave her a shake. "Answer me! What vista of emptiness have you dumped us in!"
"I… didn't dump… not…" she panted, finally managing to suck in a deep, deep breath.
"What do you mean you didn't? We were winning that fight until you showed up! Were you working with the Hellhounds? How in the sweet fuck did they hire an Angel to do security?" the she demon gave Delilah another shake. Delilah, though had had enough. She grabbed the hand holding the roiling black grey smoke with one hand and clamped down hard. She then took the she-demon by her jaw and lifted her off of the ground as she rose to her feet once more. She turned and pointed to the first fracture she saw, which was between a pair of what looked to be unhorsed wagons.
"Do you see that?" she asked.
"What, that thing the drunk human made?" the she demon said. Delilah scowled at her.
"Did you see who made that thing?" she asked.
"Ah! The truth reveals!" the she demon relaxed her other hand, allowing the smoke to dissipate. "You are hunting a human sorceror. By all means, do so away from here," she said. She then glanced around. "...how do we get back?"
"The only way out is forward," she said.
"Wait…" the woman said, her jaundiced red eyes narrowing. "If I were to bring you to this rogue, mad wizard, would you be willing to make me… disappear?"
"In a manner which doesn't require killing you?" Delilah said.
"Obviously!" she said.
"Not a fan of the people you worked for? I think it might be arranged," she said, she dropped the demon to her back.
The she demon popped back to her feet quickly, wisking some of her black hair away from a tattoo that dominated most of her brow, and she extended a hand. "Vera Dravisté, of the Clan Cruac of the Imps of Lust."
"Delilah," she took the 'imp's hand and gave it a shake. "We have no time to lose."
"Indeed not. I am fair sure this is a dying world and I see no reason to donate my bones to it," Vera said. She looked around, and pointed to a piece of the sky which was slightly bluer than the sky around it. "That one. That one has more magic in it, whereas that one is far deader, likely leading to a more grim world even than this one."
Delilah didn't bother questioning it, turning away from the obvious tesseract of space and reality, scooping the 'imp' under her arm and running toward the lesser one.
"What are you doing, you distempered catamite of Heaven? Put me down!"
"Your legs are short and we're running out of air!" Delilah said as she ran toward the schism ahead of her. As she approached it, she saw it turn, and then looked up to see its edge descending toward the ground. If she wanted to get through it, she had to dive. So she dove.
The two of them skidded to a halt onto concrete again, this time to sirens in the air and squad cars both upright and flipped onto their roofs. People were running in the streets, screeching and mad, hurling bricks and molotovs at police officers, who sometimes fell, but sometimes got right back up and shot them dead.
There was no dialogue, no orders from the officers to the rioters. Just killing on sight, as though this strange iteration of Florida had decided one-and-all to go to war against law enforcement. Delilah felt something punch into the back of her head, which hurt a lot, but when she turned she saw that there was a police officer in matte black armor who was advancing on her with a bolt action rifle. "I'm not one of them!" she shouted.
"Omae wa shinderu!" the officer shouted, cycling the bolt and then firing another shot at Delilah's face. The bullet, like the one before it, deflected off of her transformed skin but still felt like somebody'd taken a ball-peen to her cranium. Vera squirmed free and spoke a word that seemed to strip the air of vitality and anger, and then she cast out a hand. There was a stunning silence that ripped across the sky, as a stygean blackness, darker than the grasp of the deepest cave, raced out as a perverse inversion of a lightning bolt. When it struck the officer, it served to slice him into thirds, then cut the squad car he had advanced from in half as well. Delilah finally looked at the car, and saw that the lettering was all in Japanese. She turned, and saw that one of the shrieking rioters had something like an American Flag (there were certainly less than fifty stars) tied around his neck like a cape.
"We are not best served to stay here. Come, Angel! Leave these humans to human deaths!" Vera said.
Delilah didn't feel like correcting the imp, because this was going crazier by the second. Vera was quick on her feet, darting around the cars and up to the side of a building which was actively on fire, but that just meant that there weren't any of those oddly Japanese police nearby. Delilah looked around, and couldn't see anything. "Which way is it? I can't see the path."
"You're not going to like it," Vera promised.
"...it's inside the building, isn't it?" Delilah asked.
"Such a pity that your kind are not proof against the flame, as mine are," Vera said with a smug grin. She scrabbled up the bullet-holes and then pulled herself through a broken window. God damn it, Hare, she thought to herself. She didn't even have a particularly good reason to blame this on Hare, but it just felt cosmically right to blame him for these circumstances. She let out a growl and punched the wall, her fist crashing through the mediocre construction and tearing the wall out of her way. The heat instantly hit her in the face, and she could feel it starting to smolder her hair. But if the fracture was in here, then it was in here, and in a moment so would she be.
Delilah crawled along the floor, just trying to stay out of the billowing smoke. This building, a duplex, looked to have been deliberately firebombed. She could see Vera blithely crouch-walking though an active gasoline fire, not seeming to care in the slightest, the flames not even affecting her clothing. Well that spurred some envy in Delilah. Her own were already starting to catch. She pulled the closest thing she had – the kitchen table, and flipped it so it was top-down, sliding it onto the gasoline so she could quickly crawl across its underside before the flames melted it.
The smoke was blinding as well as suffocating. She was coughing deeply just trying to keep up with the imp, who had at least the decency to pause by the door leading to the other unit. Well, not exactly decency; the door was boarded shut on this side, and it was likely the imp didn't have the might to unfix those things holding the portal closed. "Would you please?" Vera pointed at the boards, wafting away the worst of the smoke, which at its very worst seemed to mildly irritate her eyes.
Delilah sucked in a breath, which hurt like a motherfucker because it was so hot, and held it as she stood and grasped blindly at where she knew the boards would be. It took little effort, but precious time, to rip them from their moorings and throw them aside, and she had to blindly quest for a third one which had been lost to the smoke and tear that down as well. Finally with the boards out of the way, she grabbed the door and pulled hard.
The door came out of its frame, followed a moment later by a flash-over which hit Delilah in the back and sent her hard into the door she'd extracted, a combination of of a blast of incredible heat and face-smashing impact that might have loosened some teeth, and left her landing on her ass in the heat. She tried to breathe, but the effort seemed stymied, as though all the sucking in the world couldn't feed her lungs. Vera blinked, as though merely momentarily blinded by the flash-over as the intense heat of this unit was briefly fed by a glut of oxygen from the other. The next unit was now also quickly smoldering and catching flame. But there was a twisting in the air in it, just the slightest edge of a fracture to guide them.
Vera snarled and grabbed Delilah's arm, dragging her so she'd start crawling out of the first unit of the duplex and into the second. She still couldn't breathe. Had she burnt her lungs? She forced her Numen to flow, and instantly, the suffocating feeling she'd experienced lessened, as the vital structures of her lungs were uncrisped enough to let her continue aspirating. Now with breath in her lungs, she staggered up to a hobble, able to keep up with the imp. She turned back to Delilah. "I don't know what you expect to find in this break-in-the-real, Angel, but this is the end of the line. Whatever it is you seek, you will find it there."
"Here's hoping," Delilah croaked. She looked to her shoulders, and found that her hair was indeed currently burning. She swatted it out, and did likewise to her clothing, before she sucked in a deep breath, and then walked through the break.
The sensation of the room changed. Instantly it was cool, and all of the heat and burns on her skin started to ache and sting. She looked to the window, and saw the sun was setting in the west over Orlando in the distance. It was the same duplex. Vera emerged from the twisting unreality, looking around and scowling. "This is not what I expected to find at the end of a path marked by broken worlds. I am disappointed."
"Hey, I'm just as surprised as you are. I didn't know this could happen at all half an hour ago," Delilah admitted.
"And yet they send you after this reality-deviant in ignorance. Good to see that Heaven is as broken in its leadership as Hell is," Vera said with a chuckle. Delilah looked around, crossing the room and into the kitchen, which was mirrored from the one she'd entered the building through. She could see the shadowed streets, bereft of rioters or Japanese police. All was quiet. All was calm. She saw a pair of boys bicycling down the street, lazy and slow, as though they had no rush to be anywhere and all the time in the world to get there.
Delilah blinked. They boys were still there, still biking. And the world stolidly refused to change. This, it appeared, was bedrock. No more twisting breaks into other could-have-been worlds. Just the gloriously boringly ordinary. She checked a few of the other rooms in the unit, finding them all bereft of personal touches, as though this were an unrented time-share. Which come to think of it it probably was. She then paused, looking at the once-more-intact door between the units. Going backward to go forward would be just in keeping with today, she figured.
She turned the handle, finding the door unlocked. As soon as she opened it, she could hear tinny music and slightly distorted speech coming from deeper in. Delilah gave a glance back to Vera, who looked like she was about to say something, and made a shushing motion. The imp seemed to grasp her meaning and decided on stealth instead.
With Delilah's sneakers slightly molten, there was no noise but a faint creaking as she walked carefully toward the small living area that overlooked the back yard. And there, she found two people.
One of them was a woman, maybe around Delilah's age, with shining black hair and eyes so green that they seemed to burn in the approaching darkness, features so fine that even Delilah, who was not given to envy in any realistic amount, found herself comparing herself against them and in every way falling utterly short.
The other was a man, who was asleep in an armchair which was pointed at the television. He was middle aged, overweight, blond and balding, unshaven and wearing vacation clothes. And the woman was looking at him as though she was trying very hard either to not kiss him, or not weep.
"...Lu?" Delilah hazarded, as the imp looked around the corner and scowled in confusion at what she beheld. The woman sighed and covered her mouth with her hand. "Lu? What's going on?"
"It's not him. Not really," Lu said. Now that she was speaking, the woman was clearly Lu. She stared at the man as though she wanted nothing more than to touch him, but feared nothing more greatly as well. "I thought… I thought maybe there was a place…"
"What's going on, Lu? Come on, talk to me," Delilah said, staying quiet because it was clear by Lu's low tones that waking up the middle aged balding fat guy was not to be permitted.
Lu leaned back, and tears began to pool out of her eyes, as she managed to outright weep without making a sound. Delilah stared, agog and completely unsure of what to do, at the spectacle which she now beheld before her. Until this point, the imp had simply watched the whole goings on with a sort of schadenfreude-laden joy of watching a particularly bad car-accident that wasn't going to slow down your trip to the liquor store. But seeing the other woman cry, and cry silently, that seemed to slap the imp in the face.
Delilah went over to Lu, still taking care not to be noisy. Who the fuck was this guy to her?
The questions warred in Delilah's mind. Between GTFO-ing and understanding. And in the end, empathy won today. She squatted down next to Lu, pulling her into a quiet hug that the other woman practically melted into. Vera looked from Lu to the sleeping man, then back to her, and then her brows rose quickly, mouthing the word 'oh'. 'Oh' what? Lu stayed there, against Delilah's shoulder, managing to emit a proper crying jag's worth of tears but in utter silence.
Delilah finally looked to Vera, then forced a significant glance at the guy on the armchair, then shrugged in her obvious confusion. Vera nodded, moving closer, and speaking quietly. "He is someone she lost, and lost a greater part of her self in the losing," Vera said quietly. "I am somewhat disappointed in the sorcerer I find at the end of this tunnel. I had expected world-shaking power. Not helpless weeping."
"I'm as in the dark as to how this all happened as you are. Come on, Lu," Delilah said. Lu gave a snort, and nodded, being guided to her feet. She turned to the man one last time.
"No matter how much it looks like it, that's not Sam. Not my Sam," Lu said.
"Let's leave him alone," Delilah said. They quietly left the unit by its front door, which left it unlocked but as none of them had telekinesis as far as she was aware there was no relocking them from the outside. "You don't ever talk about your past," Delilah finally said as they reached the curb and Lu sat down on it, her feet curled so that they were under her crossed knees. "I'm guessing that's a big part of it."
"His name was Sam Scailes," she said.
"Not is?" Vera asked.
"No, he died and… Delilah? Why is there a tiny demon next to you?" Lu asked.
"This is Vera. She was in the way so I kinda dragged her into whatever this all is," Delilah gestured around them.
"A reality where things were different," Lu said.
"Reality travel? That is folly; there is no power under Heaven that can amount to that!" Vera contended, crossing her arms before her.
"It's easier than you think. I was doing it for most of my life. Albeit not willingly," Lu said. "What are you, little… woman?"
"I am a thaumaturge!" Vera proudly declared.
"I meant what kind of creature are you?" Lu clarified, rubbing at reddened eyes.
"I am a Lustling Imp, a Maven of the Family Drevisté, mother of an annoying creche of irritating shitlings, and master of the arcane arts!"
"Why would a master be involved on the ground in a turf war in Florida?" Delilah called her on her obvious bullshit. Vera flinched.
"...Okay, journeyman of the arcane arts," she perhaps more correctly defined herself. Vera then approached Lu and took her chin in her long, red fingers and turned it this way and that as though getting a closer look at her. Lu looked a touch alarmed at this, but a glance to Delilah seemed to mollify her. If Vera tried something stupid, Delilah would stomp her like a bug. "You do not lie, not in that at least. There is a fracture inside your mind, one you carry with you even now. How shocking! Have you oft gone on journeys into the worlds of What-May-Have-Been?"
"...kinda?" Lu answered uncertainly.
"Come on, hands off my comrade," Delilah said, pulling Vera's hands off of Lu's face and pressing her slowly a step back. "Lu, have you got that jag out of your system?"
"I think so," Lu said nodding with a distant look in her eye.
"Lu…" Delilah said with warning tone.
"I do. I do," she finally focused on things nearby, nodding.
"Good. How the fuck do we get back to Hare? All of the fractures that brought us here are… well… I don't see any," Delilah pointed out the obvious.
"I was going to say when you found this strange human, but it seemed the wrong moment," Vera noted.
"I don't need them to go back to my homeland. I just need to follow the Echo of Rage," Lu said, getting to her feet. She paused, then looked at the Imp. "When did you find her? Was it before or after you started following me?"
"During," she said. Lu winced at that.
"Oh. Oh that's… I'm sorry, Vera. I don't think there's a way to get you back to your own reality. At least… I haven't learned how to, yet."
Vera blinked at her, silent and mulling, before she rose a finger as though summoning up a thought. When she finally had it articulated in her mind, she gave word to it. "So you are saying," said Vera, "that through no fault of my own I am permanently separated from the spawn I detest, the rapists who bid me spawn them, and the undying whore Ruut Nuckelavee's control over my natural-born gifts?"
"You could choose to look at it that way, I suppose," Delilah offered.
Vera's grin grew a little deranged. She then started to thrust her middle fingers toward the sky. "FUCK YOU, YOU THRICE UNDEAD CUNT!" she roared to the sky. "Fuck all of your Nuckelavee dipshits that fell out of your twat! Fuck you Simeon, you weak, pathetic runny-egg in imp-form! AND FUCK ALL YOU LITTLE SHITLINGS FOR GIVING ME STRETCH MARKS!"
Delilah turned to Lu, who was staring at the display before her with open mouth, obviously having never seen the like of this before Delilah simply nodded.
Vera turned with a loud clap of her hands. "I don't care where you take me, I want to go there."
"Do you think Hare will allow this?" Delilah asked Lu while leaning slightly down to the shorter woman.
"Oh I don't care at this point I want to see how he reacts to this," Lu said with the first thing approaching actual humor. She offered her hands to each of the ersatz-Angel and the diminutive imp. She puffed out a breath, and when as Delilah flinched, she felt the whole world shudder, then crack, then rotate her out of this reality so completely there was little proof they'd ever been there at all.
Eventually the boys came biking back, as the sun slipped away and the dark took hold, and they returned to the building that all the hullabaloo had been had in. One of them tried to unlock it, but blanched when they found the door already unlocked.
"Oh shit did we not lock it?" the older of the two asked.
"Uncle Sam is gonna be pi~ssed…" the other said, as the two slipped into the vacation home, joining a sleeping man who hadn't died of gunshot wounds in a Halifax apartment.
One felt sick.
Like, really, really sick. Not just in his guts and his stomach, though that was clearly an issue in that he sometimes found himself retching up bile or a strange detergent-blue substance. No, he felt sick because he'd gotten so up his own ass he actually lit up a care full of innocent people.
If there was one thing that he prided DHORKS on, it was a distinct lack of external collateral damage. He'd operated the department for four years, and only once did somebody outside the actual target even end up in the splash zone, and even then they were able to set things right on that front, even if One had to do it out of his own pocket and off of the clock.
And then, with just some spiraling thinking and hideous paranoia, he threw all of the legacy that he'd worked for when DHORKS was still DHORKS, and did it by his own hand.
Did this make him a bad person?
Or just a fucking stupid one?
"Oh thank Christ finally some good news," Hare said. She rubbed at her face in annoyance and dismay as they waited on the side of the road not far outside Orlando's expansive city limits. "I just got a text from Delilah. She's getting something called an 'über'. Which means she's heading for me, apparently."
"Hare… why did I do that?" One finally asked, now that the retching had ended. He still felt weak as a kitten, and about as senseless as one as well.
"That wasn't entirely your fault," Hare said. "The Hag Star are terrifying specifically because they have ways to directly attack your mind. Usually they just use terror to make you flee or bow down to them. These ones seem to have learned a trick to attack your Integrity."
"I don't feel like I got any a' that left, after what I pulled," One moaned.
"You're half-right," Hare said. "Sanity is a function of Integrity, the stability of your Integration. As the stability is damaged, your mind starts to go haywire in response. I haven't known Hag Star to have attacks that went after people's sanity directly, but it makes a sick kind of sense. Tell me, One: Did you feel as though your mind was careening out of control before you pulled that gun?"
"Yeah. Like everythin' was coming apart at the seams like a bomb was goin' off," One admitted.
"A modified Thought Spiral, then," Hare said with a scowl, leaning her cloud of hair against the door of the car. "I killed my first civilians on purpose. I don't even have your defense."
"What?" One asked.
"It was Cascadia Arcology, or the bits just outside it at any rate. The old town… Medford, I think it was… it was getting encroached upon, and the Arcology wasn't accepting any more new mouths to feed while it had to purge its wet-farms because of sabotage. That left about four thousand people completely shit out of luck," Hare said, her eyes growing sad and she paused as a car zipped past, bearing out-of-state plates. One gave his head a shake. Keep your mind off of the crazy, he ordered himself. Maybe he'd even follow that order. Time would tell. "Now, it wasn't our job to save them. The Cell that Integrated me was in Cascadia to rout out some people… you know, let's just call them 'Numen sympathizers' because you're not going to care about the specifics. So it wasn't our job to look after those four thousand people."
Hare was quiet for a time, playing with the bangles and bracelets on one arm. "I started to hear them screaming up the air-pipes. Begging for somebody to help them. Just echos of echos, but I had to go. Me and Giles left the Arcology and went into the town, and the whole place was just… it was alien, One. It didn't look like planet Earth anymore. Grass crushed under mycelial fibers that sapped and sucked at anything organic they could find. Animals dead and stripped of their skin and bones, leaving disorderly piles of meat, usually surrounded by piles of meat and feathers from the carrion birds who thought the meat a tempting target, only to fall prey to the same thing which killed their feast. And the screaming just kept going," Hare shuddered.
"That sounds bad," One offered.
"I've stood in the ashes of annihilated Old World cities, been cooked by radioactive fallout, and had to feed a VIP my arm to keep them from dying while we got to somewhere less awful. And still, despite all those horrors, I still remember that town. To stand there and know that this is what our future looks like if we lose. No humanity. Nothing Earthly at all. We saved some. A couple dozen, about, but… We found all the rest still left bound together in the biggest 'pod' I've ever seen. It was the size of a building, One, made of the melted-together flesh of thousands of people. And they just never. Stopped. Screaming."
"So you burned the 'pod' to the ground," the last DHORKS in the world said. Hare merely nodded.
"If I'd gone out a week earlier, I could have brought back two thousand instead of two dozen. But I didn't. I waited. That fire… It might have been a mercy. It still felt like murder," Hare finished.
They were quiet for a long time after that. One's stomach finally, after a near hour and the sun rising into the sky, settled, though he still felt weak and scattered. And eventually, another car which was zipping toward them on the 528 and pulled over just past where they sat half on the hard shoulder and half on the soft. One frowned slightly when the hottest woman he'd ever seen in his life stepped out of the back of the Uber along with a plume of smoke, but was placated somewhat when the next one was Delilah, whose clothing seemed to have been created anew from her Torq because that wasn't what she'd been wearing last One saw her. She beckoned the others to come up. When the passenger window opened, it emitted a billow of grey smoke, and it was clear that the back seat had been little better.
"What's the story, Delilah?" Hare asked, as she and One both went to the side of the criminally baked driver, who looked at them with bleary pink eyes and a complete lack of coherence, before tapping his phone and indicating a price, perhaps too high even to speak. Hare sighed, looked at them, then reached into her back pocket and pulled out her wad of counterfeit money. "You accept cash, friend?"
"Whut?" the driver asked.
"You're getting cash," Hare said. The door opened again, hitting One in the side as he was about to open his mouth and ask what the fuck happened to Lu, if this was in fact even Lu. He was forestalled by something short, red, with long black horns and black hair that swept forward to conceal one jaundiced ruby eye staggered out of the car, panting and holding itself off of the grass of the margin by long-clawed hands.
"WHAT THE FUCK?" One demanded.
"What torture did you inflict on me, human? What foul, skunkish gas was that?" the demon demanded, her voice having a very distinct accent that was alien to One but managed to pull facets from both old Semitic languages and Creole French.
"That's wild, man. Where can I take you?" the driver asked.
"Nowhere. I just paid you," Hare said.
"Really? Where am I?" the driver asked.
"DELILAH THAT'S…!" One pointed at the demon.
"An imp, yes," she said. "Seeing as I kind of kidnapped her, she's our problem now."
"What are you saying?" One demanded, trying to take Delilah by her shoulders, but even in her currently smaller form, Delilah was obviously much stronger than One's usual might, let alone his currently reduced form.
"The air is savor-sweet here. Black Blood and blasphemy I'm hungry," the 'imp' on the ground said, finally unsteadily rising to a stand. She looked at One, blinked a few times and then grinned. "Well aren't you a tall one? It's been a while since I climbed an oak. How many branches do you have?"
"Don't make me get the spray bottle, Vera," Delilah said. She turned to One. "Forgive her. Apparently everybody's learning she's frisky-high."
"The shit…" One muttered. The car drove away, with Hare watching it depart while shaking her head. "What's the problem, boss?"
"Just envious," Hare said. "I can't remember there ever being a time where it was safe enough to travel the countryside, for any distance, while inebriated out of your mind."
Hare then turned. Then tilted her head down, blinking in confusion at the presence of the imp.
"Is this your harem, tall one? Is there room for one more? I promise I don't take up much spa~ce," the imp said with a purr in her voice that made One flinch whole-body away from her.
"Guys?" Hare asked.
"Yeah, Hare?" Delilah said, as Lu produced a pop-tart from a pocket and consumed it in two bites.
"What the FUCK is that?" Hare asked, pointing at the imp.
"…surprise!" Delilah said with a pathetic little flourish. What a perfect way to end the fucking day.
Arrangements
"I get the difficulty of understanding it; hyper-real actions tend to require a bit of hyper-real thinking to fully grasp. So let's try again from the top.
Everybody who matters has got a Synergy. Even the Legacies, paltry though theirs is. And from that Synergy we get access to certain Arrangements of Hyperreal powers, arranged because we're human and arranging stuff is kind of how humans work. Everything has to have a box. Even if the box is borderline nonsensical. So within each 'box' or Arrangement, there is a running theme of similar powers which interact with a different underlying mechanism of the greater reality.
Don't interrupt me, Cleiborn, I'm the one with the clicker right now. The fact is that no, you cannot in fact know every kind of Hyperreal power that each Synergy has. Not unless you're one of the Founders, or able to tussle on their level. Because of the mechanics of Resonance and the process of building Integration, you have to build up your understanding of Endeavors not instance-by-instance, but theme-by-theme. When you're at your level, you might have two Arrangements that you can meaningfully interact with at any given time, three if you're lucky. Once you get to my spot, that number expands slightly, but still that will leave gaps in the swathe of Endeavors which are superficially available to you, simply because your Integration doesn't have enough room to juggle that Arrangement along with the ones you already have.
Again, I'm talking here, not you. It doesn't matter how much 'homework' you do, or how much extracurricular study you put in to learning Endeavors from outside the Arrangements you understand. There is no amount of bitch-work that will circumvent that fundamental law of how Arrangements work. You've got two to play with. By the time you're on par with the Paragons, you might have four. Pick wisely which Endeavors to install into yourself. While it's not as drastic as an Engine, Arrangements are one of those few things which once you ring that bell, you can't un-ring it.
I don't care what you think 'your friend Jordan' did, you daft cunt! Changing Arrangements like that is impossible. Simple as. I'm done talking to you idiots! I'm going for a fucking smoke..."
- Angus McDuff, Integration counselor for Pax Legio, 2084
