After watching Shaela disappear into the underground elevator's station, Kael and Gus moved to wait a block away, alongside Chanelle and Huey. They had stopped at a confectionery at Chanelle's behest, and were now seated just outside, around a table.
Huey looked around with wide eyes, fiddling with his new coat, while Chanelle ate sweets almost non-stop, though the gum never left her mouth.
The passing crowd paid them no mind.
"So," she chewed, "you two work with Shae, huh?"
Gus clasped his hands as he leaned over the table, not liking how she said Shae's name. "We're close, yes."
Chanelle raised a brow. "Uh-huh." Another handful of candy entered her mouth, seemingly vanishing. "I'm just wondering how you all got tangled up with Jacoby, of all people."
Gus continued before Kael could spill anything too personal to this woman. Even if she 'worked with' Shaela, she also apparently had connections to the revolutionaries - and being associated with Alex didn't seem conducive to anybody's health.
"Tangled up?" His finger tapped the table. "We have jobs. Nothing wrong with that, is there?"
"Jobs. That's what you call it?" She shook her head sadly. "What have you done outside his say-so, before today, huh?" Her head idly tilted up, angled toward one of the runways sticking off the spire. "From what I hear, you live where he put you up, you work where he told you to work... and he just 'happened' to save you from a tricky situation, didn't he?"
Gus' hands clenched. "That's not how it happened."
"Right." Another handful disappeared. "I'm just saying, it's good to have options. Debts have power, and you three look pretty indebted to me. To one of the biggest sharks in the pile, at that."
"I think you might've mixed up your metaphors there," Kael interjected, to Chanelle's deadpan look. "And besides, I don't think he's done anything bad." He briefly looked to Gus, "We messed up, and Jacoby seems like he's done right by us. Besides, it wasn't even him that put us on track to meet him, anyway."
"Oh?" She blew a bubble with her gum.
Gus raised his fingers from the table, in a half-aborted plea for the conversation to stop. He changed the topic. "Could you stop chewing on that candy, so much? That can't be good for you."
Chanelle smirked at him. "I'm just getting in as much as I can, while I can. Won't be able to taste this once the fun starts."
It was Kael's turn to raise his brows. "You think pulling out refugees is going to be fun?"
She countered, "I don't think that's the only thing that's gonna happen." She turned to Huey. "Huey, how've things been around here?"
Huey jumped in his seat. "Uh, good! Great, today. Ever since Shaela started stopping by, really. Helped a lot with the, uh, problems."
"Problems?" Gus was curious.
Huey nodded rapidly, "Yeah, the shiners've been tighter recently... and people keep disappearing. Not as many safe places anymore."
"By shiners you mean..."
Huey pursed his lips, then pointed right at the station. "Those guys."
The group could see several guards moving just outside the station, possibly changing shifts.
The idle conversation continued, with Chanelle leading it where she wanted it to go, and keeping Gus thinking.
Kael mostly worried about the upcoming operation. He wouldn't be able to use any clouds, after last time. He'd been working on smaller scale uses of his Aspect in the labs, though, so he'd have at least some means to defend himself while staying relatively discreet. Bringing too much attention down on them today would be a death sentence.
He overheard a passing pair. "...This is the place, yep." A young man with bright eyes spoke to his larger companion, who had a hunched back under his coat, and seemed to waddle as he walked.
The two passed by the confectionery, barely giving their group a glance as the kid - about their age, really - looked at everything around him with wonder.
When they reached a corner, between Kael's group and the station, the younger of the two slowly raised his arm at a diagonal, almost drawing a line between his current spot and the station entrance. His raised arm then slowly swept 30 degrees to the right. His head turned to look at his companion.
The larger man began plodding that way, at a slight angle across the street. Somehow he never got in the way of traffic.
When they had crossed, the younger man charted a new angle, and they repeated the process, until they had made several crisscrossing lines, and attracted stares from a few guards and passersby.
They returned to the corner, bringing them back into Kael's hearing range. "When we're done here, let's go that way," The younger man threw his thumb over his shoulder, pointing opposite from the station. "It's a bit out of order, but that should be fine. We have a bit of time left."
Kael tuned back into the table's conversation at Gus' tightly contained voice, "...why would we risk what we have for some nebulous cause? It's ridiculous."
Chanelle shrugged. "They could use someone with a good head on their shoulders. And Shae's ideals seem to align with theirs in a lot of ways..."
When Gus seemed about to raise his voice in response, Kael brought up his own concerns. "You know, we never set up a signal for if Shaela needed us to go down there, only to prepare for her to come back up."
Kael pulled out the switch, which still displayed a red light.
Gus shook his head, "We can just use your tap code, like we did during Aether's games."
Chanelle's eyes drifted up in thought at the name Aether - she thought she might've recognized it from somewhere?
Before she could ask, the switch on the table flipped to yellow, drawing the whole group's attention.
They stood up.
A nervous excitement plagued Kael and Huey's stances, while Gus and Chanelle showed nothing but calm.
As they approached the station, however, an explosion rang out. In the opposite direction.
They, along with almost everyone on the street, turned toward the sound, several blocks away.
It was followed by another, near the first, and now they could see smoke and dust rising over the rooftops.
"Should we go and help?" Kael flexed his fingers, but realized a moment later that Shaela was still waiting on them.
Chanelle replied anyway, "Not your job, kid." She shook her head. "Don't worry about it."
While everyone was turned away from the station, the light within the building dimmed for a moment, before flaring with a prolonged brightness. Nobody outside the building noticed, however.
Kael nodded after a moment, and they resumed their walk. Nobody stopped them as they entered, crossing the ramp that adjusted their sense of gravity back to the planet's default.
The tube was similar to the one the boys had taken above, fairly broad around, and surrounded by a catwalk strewn with runes.
It was somewhat smaller than the main shaft, however, as it didn't need to accommodate as many vehicles, or passengers. The stone and metal gathered from below was sent to specialized dumbwaiters, elsewhere.
Huey climbed a diagonal support beam by forming handholds with his softening facet, and began his work on the ceiling, infusing the facet into the wrought stone above, while the other three kept lookout for any approaching guards.
Now that they were deep inside the structure, they noticed the light seemed to fluctuate from below, and faint rumbles could be felt through the ground.
Several guards shot up from the bottom of the pit, riding the upward wave of gravity, and frantically disembarking across the circle from their group.
None stopped to deal with them, instead running outside, hoping to convey their information to someone important.
They got their wish soon after, when a woman bounded through the doors.
Similar to the usual guards, she wore half-plate, though hers shone bright silver, rather than the dull iron of the grunts' armor. She also wore a helmet, with draconic wings swept back along its sides. Underneath it all, she appeared to be ensconced in some kind of wrappings. They covered her arms and hands, as well as most of her visible face.
The captain barely gave them a chance, "You there! Stop what you're doing immediately, and you won't die where you stand." Her voice was slightly muffled, but echoed well in this interior.
Before they had even taken a step, the captain decided she had given them long enough. She launched a thin line from her finger, which near instantly extended to the ceiling of the station, and held fast, just in front of Huey's face.
He jerked his head back in a delayed response, and suffered for that delay. The woman shot another thread - this time from the side of her boot - which latched onto the wall next to her at knee height. Her foot quickly raised, revealing the other end of the line had stuck to the floor, and stepped onto its center.
The new thread stretched taut beneath her, and sprung back up, launching her along the outside rim of the circle as she swung by the thread still attached to her finger.
Unfortunately, this carried the razor wire through Huey's nearby head, severing it cleanly, before his body slumped and fell into the pit.
Kael's eyes widened, and he immediately extended his arm. He pulled from the air, yanking his arm back and cupping his hand, now full of water.
He swung his hand forward sharply, launching several droplets at a very shallow angle. The further they were from a straight drop, the weaker their force, though they still held enough at a near horizontal to penetrate flesh, after Kael's recent practice.
The woman's free hand pointed upward, shooting a new thread and yanking her above the drops, barely slowing her approach as she discarded the string behind her.
As Gus stepped in front of the remaining pair and shifted fully to metal - the same shade of red as the ingots they had acquired their first day in Scithio - the thread-shooting woman launched another.
Her pinky - on the same hand she to swing - fired another line, which anchored itself just in front of Gus' feet.
Gus took another step, over the new string, and nearly lost his foot for it, regardless.
A nearly invisible thread had actually hitched a ride on the first string's ascent, and the most recent string's launch. It was anchored between each end of the strings still ni the woman's grip, forming a tripwire that Gus would have run right through, had Chanelle not grabbed him by the collar.
She hissed in Gus' ear while she fiddled with her pocket, "That's Arachne, you moron."
Chanelle yanked him back, saving his foot, though blood gushed from the cut through his shin. The blood loss ended up being minor, thankfully, as it closed rather quickly. The thin opening was sealed by the metal skin's shifting - Gus putting his own lessons to use.
Kael sent another volley, which Arachne merely intercepted with a well-placed cat's cradle of wires, extruded from her other hand.
Before she finished closing on the trio, Chanelle pulled out a small bottle. Runes glowed under the edges of the wrapping, which read "For Emergency Use Only."
She popped the cap and took a sip as if it were a shot glass, but she didn't swallow. Instead, her face creased in disgust, before her bubblegum rapidly inflated out of her mouth. The bubble, now possessing a silvery-blue sheen instead of the usual pink, quickly grew until it was taller than Chanelle.
The bubble expanded over both boys, encompassing the three of them just as Arachne finally swung past.
Her strings wrapped around the bubble, but slid off the top, rather than popping it. The captain began to fall into the pit, stopping herself by shooting more out onto the ceiling so she hung in place, staring at the three in their dome of safety.
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The bubble then began to roll, with Chanelle directing the boys to work with her.
Arachne made several more attempts to wrap the bubble in a tangle of thread, but it all slid off, unable to hinder its progress.
Kael turned back to the pit. "Wait! Shouldn't we be going down there?!"
Arachne narrowed her eyes at his exclamation, and began rapidly firing threads around the elevator, sealing the way down behind a web of razor wire.
Chanelle yanked him back on track. "Nope! We're getting out of here. I am not fighting the fucking weaver captain in an enclosed space, and neither are you."
Gus spoke up, but kept walking toward the exit of the station. "And what if she goes down there?"
Chanelle eyed Arachne. "She won't. It's outside of her jurisdiction."
Arachne finished webbing the elevator, and pulled herself to the back of the room, where a specific panel of enchantments stood.
"And besides, there's another captain down there already."
"Shit." Gus cursed.
While Arachne used her authorization to disable the elevator's channel of reversed gravity - cutting off that avenue of escape for any in the underground, until another captain could arrive to re-instate it - their bubble finally reached the exit.
The three of them re-emerged to find chaos in the streets.
"Huh, and there's this, too." Chanelle added in a flat voice.
Somehow, the fighting in the distance had spread to this area as well. Random civilians - some of whom Chanelle recognized as missing locals - were fighting the guards.
Their bubble popped, the effect finally expiring.
The three of them sprinted across the street, hoping to put as much distance as possible between them and the captain, until they could regroup and find an opportunity to rescue Shaela.
Arachne burst out of the station before they had even crossed the street.
Mid-leap, a line of elaborate circles lit up on the surface of the road. Each was less than a meter wide and held the pattern of a footprint in their center.
Just after appearing, the line curled upward, like a trap being sprung.
The circles wrapped around Arachne like a chain, restricting her body completely. She fell straight to the ground, unable to move, but tumbled on impact, her body rolling off to one side.
When her roll slowed to a stop, another line of footprints appeared beneath her.
She blinked.
This line shot her straight up from the road, which sent her flying off of Scithio's pillar until she escaped the horizontal gravity of the city. Luckily for her, they were in the lowest district, close to the surrounding grassland, so the fall might not kill her!
The fighting resumed around Chanelle and the boys. Several participants had paused on seeing captain Arachne, though none reacted quickly enough to interfere in the springing of the bizarre trap.
A group of guards split off to detain the trio, having seen them come out of the station ahead of the captain.
Chanelle pulled out another bottle, this one without any visible enchantment. From it, she pulled out a stick with a ridged loop on one end. Soap stretched across the opening, and she blew.
The bubbles began to clog one side of the street, temporarily closing that avenue of approach.
Gus, still in his metal form, charged into the fray, sharpening his limbs as he went.
Kael launched volleys of droplets from his hands into the approaching guards, keeping several of them at a distance to prevent Gus from being overwhelmed. He began considering the merits of alerting the rest of the city to his presence with clouds.
Among the civilians fighting the guards, Kael noticed that several of them seemed to wear identical clothes. At first he dismissed it as irrelevant, but over time he saw more and more of them engaging all around the trio.
Whenever one of the identical fighters was 'killed,' its body would burst, unleashing a bunch of small animals, who briefly attempted to maul the killer before fading away.
Enough of the clones were present that several branched off to attack the trio, not distinguishing between friend or foe - if they were ever friendly at all.
With the situation worsening, Kael resolved himself.
He had tried to fight with just his handheld water, but it wasn't working, and the situation was out of control anyway.
Buildings burned up and down the street, clones were looting the stores, and the guards were losing. They continually received reinforcements, but this just meant piling more bodies into the streets, as they were unused to such a wild melee, with unknown facets on every side.
If this chaos didn't warrant full attention from the factions of the city, then nothing would. He'd bring down the rain and bring the fighting to an end.
Kael gathered clouds above the streets, expanding the coverage out from the station, and wrapping them around this section of the pillar.
Droplets began to fall.
The initial patter intensified, drumming the ground until the sound of one drop was indistinguishable from the next. The hissing overwhelmed the roar of the nearby flames, beginning to douse the out-of-control blaze.
Kael wished to sap the energy out of the fighters, incorporating his concept of dampening and suppression into the rainfall, targeting those enacting the most widespread destruction.
Precision drops fell like needles on the nearby fighters, removing a dozen clones from play in the first moments, and relieving the pressure on Gus and Chanelle.
The fighting slowed enough for Kael to call out to the two of them over the sound of the rain and clashes of steel, "I think maybe we should try to head underground?!"
Before either Gus or Chanelle could respond, a voice spoke up from right beside Kael.
"But why would you want to go down there?"
Kael turned in a panic, not having felt anyone standing in the rain nearby.
He saw the visage of a woman, with short, spiky hair, and her hands resting in her pockets.
However, it was as if Kael was looking at her through a transparent pane of glass.
Now that he was focusing more on that spot, and redirected the nearby droplets to fall at a slight angle, he was able to feel that it was a square of some sheer material, though it felt slightly less real than other surfaces around him. Though he could see the woman through it, he did not feel her on the other side.
The woman stepped forward, until she kicked through the glass. It shattered outward, and several shards cut into Kael, leaving faint scratches on the arms that had protected his face, though the cuts quickly faded under his rain's rejuvenating touch.
Once she had stepped through, Kael felt her body standing there in the rain, now apparently here in truth.
She picked up where she had left off. "Up here is where the party is. Down there..." she removed a hand from her pocket to gesture to where the pillar extended down into the ground of the continent, beneath their feet and far off to the side.
"Down there is just rats scurrying around in the dark, and a flashlight swinging around like a kid with a new toy." She shook her head in mock sadness.
Her hand then swung around at chest level, "Up here is where the Aspects are gathering. There'll be more here, soon."
"I need to get down there." Kael prepared a volley of needles above, willing to hear the lady out, as she hadn't been explicitly hostile, yet, and she might've implied she was an Aspect.
"Hmm, I heard you're not supposed to go down there yet, though." She twisted a finger in her ear. "And I really feel like sticking it to Jacoby, so I think we'll have some fun here, instead!"
Suddenly two large glass panes appeared on either side of Kael.
Through one, he could see Gus continuing to fight, though the view was warped, so Gus appeared to be much further away from Kael than he was. On his other side, Chanelle was much the same, knocking people away, or trapping them in larger bubbles, but at a great distance from Kael.
When Kael sent a needle droplets through each pane of glass, they shattered easily enough, but the warped distance shown through them became the real one, and Kael was now isolated.
He let loose several needles, holding more in reserve in case she avoided them.
She didn't need to. A pane of glass appeared above her head, bringing the rain that hit it to a full stop.
"You know, windows usually keep the rain out." She mused, while observing her nails.
He sent more droplets, angling several to come beneath the shelter above her, but she merely placed more glass around her sides, as needed.
Apparently she hadn't trying earlier, because these windows were nearly impossible to shatter, unless he spent time compressing the drop into a wound spring of tension, and maybe layered in concepts of erosion for good measure.
When he let up on the barrage for a moment, she raised a brow, looking around before turning to him in expectation.
He let the hammer fall.
From the low height of the clouds wrapped around Scithio, there was no time for her to react.
The bolt shot through the window above her, carrying through into her person and the ground below.
When the dust cleared, Kael saw her standing in the same place as before, unharmed.
"Oh, sorry, did you think I was standing there?" She reached out a hand, pressing against the window between the two of them. The window swung open, as if on an invisible hinge.
When it had moved out of the way, Kael saw it had distorted his view of her position; she was merely a step to the side, meaning his strike had missed completely.
Well, not completely. It did succeed in shattering one of the panes of glass. He took the consolation, then began preparing more heavy bolts, while she refashioned the window above her.
In the meantime, he decided to try focusing more on the conceptual side of the rain, focusing on erosion. Among the regular droplets falling toward her, he directed more and more toward a single point, not bothering to add extra momentum, as doing so hadn't helped until the most recent attack.
These seemed to have some success, forming a small crack in the window, which expanded over a few seconds, until it shattered once more. he immediately followed up with a small volley of needles, endeavoring to cover the entire area around her.
As they approached, she merely stepped through one of the remaining windows to her side, causing it to shatter as well. He lost track of her, not detecting her anywhere in his rain.
He checked around him once more. When he turned his head behind him, he spotted another pane of glass to his back, which the woman peeked through with her hands raised to her face. "Boo!"
The glass shattered more forcefully than before, scoring deep cuts along his legs and forearms.
While they healed, the woman sighed. "You're starting to bore me. Maybe I just need to push you harder?" She trailed off with a finger to her chin, looking around.
Kael saw her gaze pause on Gus, and he panicked, "Wait!" But she had already stepped through another window, disappearing from his sight.
Suddenly, a smaller pane appeared in front of Kael's face, but it shined bright light through the frame, nearly blinding him.
"Gah!" He flinched back, holding his hands over his eyes, but he still maintained focus on the rain, as he waited for her to show herself again. He sent a series of eroding droplets into the window, removing it from play.
When his sight recovered, he looked to Gus, who he had felt continuing his fight with more clones.
Gus swung his fist at another, preparing to impale it with his sharpened knuckles, but a small window appeared in his fist's path. His hit shattered it, indicating it was likely not meant to survive the blow.
Kael was sure it hadn't been when lava began pouring out of the opening in the moments before the shards faded away. It coated Gus' forearm, and he cried out, attempting to shake it off.
"They're Windows to another place! Hahaha." The woman giggled from a window next to Kael once again.
Looking at her more closely, Kael noticed she actually had shallow cuts and scars across her own forearms and face. Perhaps she took damage from her own ability? Windows aren't meant to be stepped through, after all.
He considered the new information as he sent another forceful drop through the nearby pane, breaking it while he waited for her next move.
Before she showed up again, however, Kael felt something fly through the rain in the distance, rapidly crossing the streets. It slowed only momentarily to dip down, before rocketing forth once more, without ever actually touching the ground.
He prepared more drops, and called out to the reovering Gus, whose forearm was still intact, but stinging quite badly, and lacking much sensation. "Gus! To Chanelle!"
Kael had a suspicion about who was closing in, and ran to Chanelle, who had better odds than himself of resisting whatever Arachne would do to them when she got here.
As Kael passed by each building, the woman spoke up through their windows, her image following him as he went. She held her chin pinched in her hand. "Yes, the spider is coming, isn't she? I wonder what she'll do to you when she gets here? She looks a bit upset... hmm, hmmmm."
"Chanelle! The captain is coming back!" Kael cried out, still running her way.
"Tch." Chanelle abandoned her current fight, blowing out a wall of bubbles, before turning and heading toward Kael.
Arachne came back into sight before the three had rejoined. Chanelle was still digging through her pockets for a bottle that'd keep them alive, while Gus was on his way to the pair.
The captain took in the situation, and shot toward Chanelle, recognizing her as the greatest threat from their previous encounter.
As Arachne plummeted toward Chanelle, however, she suddenly jerked herself to the side, abandoning the effort and throwing up a maze of wires before her.
The reason for her sudden retreat became obvious as a blur darted through where she would have been in but a moment.
As the blur landed near Kael and his companions, the captain pulled herself down and expanded her web, cutting off various avenues of approach - though she'd be able to traverse the nest without issue.
Kael took in the newcomer, both with his eyes and senses through the rain. The man stood to his full height, taller than even Gus, with broad shoulders, and he seemed to possess claws and... cat ears?
Kael could also feel a droplet occasionally hit what seemed to be whiskers.
"Hello, everyone." The man called out in a chipper tone, turning his head and ears to analyze the situation further.
"Um, hi. Who are you?" Kael spoke, accepting the man as a likely ally, since he had probably just saved their lives.
"Let's just say, you're not the only Aspect under our mutual friend's employ." The man replied to Kael without looking, his eyes instead darting around the environment in search of his prey.
Arachne narrowed her eyes from behind her web, in recognition at the newcomer. "Alan? So Jacoby truly is in the business of busting out slaves, now?"
A bit put out at his name being revealed so easily, Alan decided to play dumb. "Eh? I dunno what you mean." He waved his hand toward Kael. "I'm just here rescuing my junior from a hostile Aspect. He's gotten caught up in this tragic mess down in the lower levels, is all."
"Oh yeah!" The dreaded voice returned, drawling in amusement. Kael heard a window shatter, then turned to the roof of a nearby building, where the woman now stood.
The window lady turned toward the captain and cupped her hands around her mouth. "You hear that, Captain Arachne? We're all innocents, here."
Alan's head snapped toward the Aspect of Windows, before he crouched and leaped faster than Kael could see, only detectable by the gap left behind in the rain. His pounce caused her to shatter once again.
Arachne muttered to herself from behind her wires, "Where the fuck is the commander when you need him?"