The reservation was about twenty minutes away, provided there wasn't much traffic. Since fifteen miles was a ridiculous distance to walk, Sarah suggested they take the subway to save a couple dollars on parking. The others agreed. A half an hour later, once they'd finally gotten off the Red Line at Quincy Adams Station, Sarah suspected the worst they'd have to contend with was soapy brickwork sticking to the bottom of their shoes. Instead, an immense crowd crawled through the beleaguered terminal, trading feet for minutes at best.
"You know, I expected this place to be deserted," Pallsburg mused as the mob shuffled closer to the train. "Maybe I'm biased, but this seems like the sort of situation where most people would call out sick from work. Who decides to sell coffee when they're getting DMs from another dimension?"
Sarah eyed the tired barista Pallsburg was already studying. The man in question was dressed in a white polo shirt with a black apron underneath, and he had the words 'Dunkin Donuts' plastered across the ballcap on his head. She rubbed the back of her neck. "Schizophrenics?" she offered distractedly. "The working poor? I don't know what you want me to tell you. We've already had one panic attack over the incipient apocalypse: perhaps Covid got it out of our system."
Pallsburg hummed, unconvinced. "Maybe. I just find it a little weird is all."
Was it truly that strange? Sarah had been living with the invasion for so long that it felt like flunking a test she'd never bothered to study for. She wouldn't go so far as to say she was happy the Offal Sea was on its way, but its arrival wasn't unexpected, either. "How are you handling it?" Sarah asked her.
Pallsburg shrugged. "When Amanda told me her cousins were dropping by the magical internet became a lot less urgent. How about you? Does it bother you that I know what's going on?"
Sarah chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Yes and no. Every time someone gets read in, there's always a huge debate. After a while, the argument becomes a bigger pain than whatever point was being raised."
Pallsburg would be the fifth human the Boston cell had welcomed into the fold. There'd been a couple of others over the years; however, not many of them still lived in the area. Hell, it was unlikely anyone even knew about the first four, save for Kennedy, Hayes and herself. Once Timothy had moved to Ohio with the rest his family, that ship had largely sailed. Now, the only one who was still around was Paul Easom, and common courtesy kept his name out of her mouth. Given the attitude of the younger generation, Kennedy and Hayes had followed suit.
"I guess what I'm saying is, 'don't worry about it,'" Sarah finished awkwardly. "If it seems like I'm annoyed, the frustration doesn't have anything to do with you. Amanda said you're fine, so you're fine. That's all there is to it."
...Well, okay, maybe there was a little more to her discontent than Sarah was willing to admit. Her bugaboos weren't Pallsburg's business, though. They also weren't her problem. If Amanda's girlfriend was going to rat them out, then she would have done so by now. There was no reason the woman's eyes should feel like a brand on the back of her neck.
And yet, somehow, they pulled and pinched at her nape as the bustle of the terminal gave way to more suburban roads. Soon, even those winding avenues were replaced in turn by copses of hickory and oak. The reservation had a couple of well-publicized entrances, down near the highway; however, most of them were miles away, and no one wanted to walk that far. Instead, the three of them entered the park near Chickataubut Road, where a few neighborhood kids had already blazed a trail through the brush.
Dead pine needles shifted beneath their feet as they weaved between the branchless trees. The sun was low, casting thick shadows over the hilly terrain, and the distant leaves provided little relief from the glare whenever Sarah turned her gaze west. Since this was the direction in which they were headed, she spent most of the hike shielding her eyes with her hand. "Alright, I admit it," Amanda huffed irritably. "We may have timed this wrong. A morning ascent would have been easier."
Sarah grunted softly in agreement while Pallsburg appeared unperturbed. The most physically active of their ill-conceived trio, she had thought to snag her backpack from Amanda's car before following them into the subway. It was from within this bag that she now withdrew a water bottle and took a long sip. She offered the plastic container to Sarah, when she was finished, only to have the blonde wave it away. "The climb's not so bad," Pallsburg disagreed while her fingers tightened the cap. "The slope's gentle, and there's very little rock. If you trip, it's going to be a gentle landing."
"We might have different standards for crash mats; I think I'd kick myself if I fell." Sarah dug her toe into the packed dirt and heard a low chime. It sounded like someone had struck a ride cymbal with the head of a wooden mallet. The warspawn recognized it as coming from her interface and opened the pane with a thought. [Task: 'Find a Mana Field' (complete)], the window read. There was no reward listed, but the fact that she didn't have an additional alert was illuminating in and of itself. The field they were passing through must not be very dense along the outer edge; if it had broken four mana an hour, she'd have finished the second task.
Sarah paused by the trunk of a fallen conifer before taking a deep breath. She'd never gotten the chance to practice the techniques they'd been taught on Deravan, so it took her a moment to recall exactly what she was supposed to do. 'Draw the ambient mana in through your feet and cast it out through your nose. Make sure none of the energy lingers in your neck after each cycle.' If she wasn't careful, residual motes could clump together in her throat, creating a crude construct close to her fins. Without the heightened resistance conferred by her host's greater mass, it wouldn't take much to turn her myelin deposits into ash.
Fortunately, the odds of such an outcome weren't very high, given the anemic strength of the field. They'd need to find far richer stomping grounds before the ambient pressure could overwhelm her fine control. In the meantime, it was possible to minimize her peril even further by actively limiting her intake. The only problem? It was incredibly difficult to distill an alignment using such half-hearted methods. If this excursion was going to prove fruitful, she'd have to engage with the forest directly.
Motes of esoteric energy began to rise up along her esophagus. Sarah let them play across the receptors, lining her tendrils, in order to take a snapshot of the area's composition. The mana tasted like... wet earth and pine sap. She then felt the sharp bite of winter and an oily film, which made her skin feel soaked with sweat. The purity couldn't have been more than twelve percent. The throughput was also just shy of three mana an hour. Altogether, this meant the field was too weak to be of much use.
"Do you want to pause here?" Amanda asked when she noticed Sarah testing the currents.
The disgruntled warspawn spat, hoping to clear the synesthesia from her tongue. "No, the band's too thin. We'd be kicking our heels all night."
Most mana fields had a lot of variation in terms of their arcane output. Technically, any expression beyond the local ambiance could count as a separate band when determining its potency; however, most people only drew distinctions between statistically significant peaks. This meant that instead of splitting the data into countless, incremental phenomena, researchers would frequently delineate broad ranges throughout a prospective field. Each of these would then be labeled with an approximate magnitude, which rose as you approached the center. If this particular specimen followed the usual trends, it should only have three or four sub-sections with the third stretching a few hundred feet.
Sarah dragged her teeth across the inside of her bottom lip. "I never asked: how close did you get to the terminus?"
Amanda squinted into the sun as she considered her answer. There was a hint of concern in Sarah's tone, and Amanda was clearly trying to assuage it without explicitly lying. Finally, she settled on the truth. "Within a couple of feet. I overestimated the field's size and almost tripped over the skein."
Pallsburg glanced at her girlfriend's carefully blank face. The two of them had been together long enough for her to know when her partner was being evasive. "I feel like I'm missing something. Does anyone want to clue me in?"
Sarah struggled to remain calm. "Do you want the cliff notes version or the whole spiel?"
Pallsburg hummed as Amanda began to sweat. "Give me the latter."
"Alright, it goes a little like this: mana isn't native to Earth. This means that the Network's initial outlay had to be introduced to the environment via an external source. Typically, the Light handles this by seeding a planet with what are essentially feeder zones in order to supply everything automatically. Then, to ensure these foundries aren't destabilized or destroyed, it protects each entrance with a barrier, known as a 'skein.' Broadly speaking, it's a semi-permeable dimensional wall; one built to block or shred any foreign matter, which attempts to access the other side. Now, with that being said, the barricade's far from perfect. If an intruder weighs less than five hundred pounds, they'll usually slip through the cracks. Usually. Your survival's not guaranteed. It's also pretty dangerous within the seed itself, so even if you live, it's imperative you stay on your toes."
Pallsburg's frown inched lower at the news. She turned towards her girlfriend, hoping for a rebuttal.
"She's exaggerating," Amanda reassured her. "The skeins are designed to allow native fauna to come and go as they please. Mana is produced by living organisms, so the Light works fairly hard to ensure you'll be able to survive traveling through the terminus. The part about there being bounds, baked into the skein's code, is true, but not even Hafþór would run afoul of the limits. You'd need to be heavily modified before it ever became an issue. We're talking enraged Bruce Banner or Darth Vader after he fell into the lava. As for the danger..." Amanda trailed off. "Well, the seed is like the Tardis: it's bigger on the inside. The chance of running into anything is fairly slim."
"How slim?" Pallsburg pressed with a wrinkle stretched wide across her brow.
The two warspawn exchanged a look. "Worse than winning the lottery?" Amanda offered.
"Maybe if it was the pick four. A minor seed should only be about ten miles in diameter. Since the guardian has to be large enough to contend with the nobility, it comes out to less leeway than you'd think. Plus, there's the wildlife to consider as well. We're still in the early stages, so it wouldn't surprise me if feral dogs have begun to congregate inside. You could run into trouble pretty quickly."
"They're still just dogs," Amanda denied before spinning on her heel in a huff. "Don't let Sarah scare you; you've got better odds of being hit by a car."
In other words, about one in five thousand. Amanda's argument was a lot more convincing the less you knew about the math.
"In that case, let's not malinger. You said we needed to head in deeper?" Pallsburg picked up her pace without waiting for an answer and soon took the lead as she scaled the low hill. This caused the two aliens to realize they could either stand there and bicker or attempt to chase after her. Amanda chose the latter, proving how little credence she gave her own claims. Sarah followed in her wake after choking off a quiet curse; she hadn't believed the sojourn was safe to begin with and resented the urge to rush. It'd be better to take their time; a lack of care was why Amanda had nearly trip over the skein in the first place.
The pair caught up to Pallsburg as the faded detritus gave way to richer loam. By this point, the displacement of the towering pines had grown more forgiving, causing them to develop branches lower on the bole. Ahead of their party, there was a small clearing, which had been cut into the center of the copse. A stone path led towards the more established trails, along the eastern flank, while a wide variety of flowers had been planted throughout the grass in order to create an artificial meadow.
Sarah glanced at a large, bronze monument, erected beside a bed of purple yarrow. The light was just bright enough to make out a dull plaque hanging from the eastern face. 'In Memory of Linsey Deirdreson,' the sign read. Sarah ignored the poignant quote which followed and tasted the field's mana. "Feels like we're in the second band. Maybe the third. Since the fourth would be the terminus itself, I suggest we stop here."
"That's fine," Pallsburg agreed. "I need to check my notifications." The brunette summoned her interface with a flick of her fingers while Sarah did the same. There had been a muffled chime when they'd reached the lea, and chances were the Light was letting them know that they had met the requirements for one of its milestones. Sure enough, when Sarah studied the glowing pane, a message was pinned to the top of the screen.
[Task: 'Increase your passive intake to .065 mn/min' (complete)] [Reward: 5.035 mn / 20 minutes, purity = local, alignment = local] [Time before automatic activation: 4:49]
Sarah hissed as the seconds ticked down towards zero. She'd need to pick an alignment to focus on or she'd lose an hour of easy progress. More irritated by the time limit than wasting the opportunity, Sarah scanned the clearing for inspiration and finally settled on the perennials by her feet. 'Fuck it,' she thought, 'flowers it is.'
The Light chose to interpret her decision as assent because it abruptly canceled the countdown. In its place, a surge of mana began to spew forth from the soil between her feet. Sarah was lucky; if the Network had aimed a little higher, she would have been boiled alive. As it was, her body felt unpleasantly toasty, and she had to contort her shoulders to shield the back of her neck.
Sarah cursed the Light's impatience once this failed to have much effect. Pallsburg, having heard the fear in her voice, began to run over. "No - stay back!" Sarah screamed as she waved off the woman's concern. "If the Light triggers another font, then the density will compound from the pressure. Just... give me some space. I think I'm good."
Or rather, she had fucking better be. Her training had implied that these rewards were survivable, but the nobility had never been too interested in retaining useful talent, merely the invasion as a whole. If the fatality rate happened to be forty percent, they'd happily eat the casualties. On the bright side, Amanda had already made the cut, so it shouldn't be too close a call. She just needed to stay calm. Well, that and get a move on: she was losing mana.
'In through the feet and out through the nose. In through the feet and out through the nose.' Sarah silently repeated Harlan's instructions as she felt around for the most botanical motes in the field. Fortunately, there were a couple of baneberry bushes growing near the back of the meadow, so she had a convenient point of reference should she grow confused. If she had to do this blind, it would have been far more difficult to root through the eldritch stream. Sarah's sense of taste was amazing; it also grew less precise anytime there was a gap between her tendril and her target. When combined with her general inexperience, she was often left scrambling to identify a specific wavelength, even as she shunted the best bits off to the side.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
In short, the entire process was a pain in the ass. Sarah would need to check her interface to say for sure, but by the time she was finished, she'd probably lost around forty percent of her gains, due to easily avoidable mistakes. If she'd been serious about developing her foundation, it wouldn't have been remotely acceptable. Since she couldn't give less of a shit, she decided to pat herself on the back.
'Now, what do I do about the impurities?'
Sarah bit her lip and brushed her sweat-soaked bangs aside. Most wizards would have ignored the unwanted mana, on the grounds that it'd be easier to remove the motes once they had finished aligning with their bodies. Of course, most wizards were also highly resistant to the Light's presence, so they didn't need to worry about killing themselves via their own throughput. Sarah didn't think she'd run into any issues, since most of the particles were located in her thighs; however, the idea of carting around microscopic pools of poison definitely weighed on her mind.
When put like that, maybe she had her answer. If she began purging the worst patches immediately, she wouldn't have to worry about them growing dense enough to form a second core. The busy work might also keep her from panicking about the bomb she'd lodged in her gut.
Reminded of the invisible orb, Sarah pointed a tendril at her groin. The mana smelled of rose and citrus. The subtle bouquet was nearly astringent to her delicate senses, and it left her with the vague impression that she was holding a pool of nectar. ...Or would a thimble full of honey be a better analogy, since the energy had been refined? Sarah shook her head; no, the potential applications were limited by the core's nature, so there was no point in being charitable. It was a pool of nectar. One capable of many things, up to - and including - subverting another's will.
The only question was if she wanted to develop a bunch of abilities, designed for a femme fatale. When everything was said and done, the premise felt rather gross. It'd be like she was succumbing to the lewd accusations Danielle had lobbed her way. Maybe, it'd be better to impress the mana with a suboptimal purpose, provided it was more suited to her temperament.
'Hallucinations, then?' Sarah wondered soberly. 'Or some form of self-enhancement?' Both ideas had rather broad utility; they were also tricks she could use in her day-to-day life. If Sarah had any aspirations, it was for no one to discover that her host had been supplanted. A certain level of candor was required to placate her suspicious peers; however, she'd prefer it if no one knew the truth. Being able to gaslight the unwary could help dismiss a number of gaffes.
'Let's start with something small,' Sarah decided. 'A scent, maybe. One already associated with flowers.' In other words, her perfume. Conceptually, the two were linked, so she shouldn't have to perform any complex transformations to get the result she was looking for. Instead, she simply needed the mana to dissipate through the air in a very specific form. The hardest part was going to be not spending more energy than she needed to.
You see, there was a reason why mana was always measured in discrete units, despite accumulating at a fractional rate. While there weren't any strict limits to the energy's minimum size, it preferred to congeal together, once enough of it was in one place. This encouraged people to adopt water metaphors with the most popular emphasizing droplets. 'One mana' was like a bead of rainwater glistening on top of an anvil; you could cut it in half - or parcel it out - but when left to its own devices, the globule would always assume a specific form. This meant that in order to make use of the energy, Sarah would have to induce it to separate or risk losing the rest of her reserve. Fortunately, this was easier done than said; mana mirrored the properties of its environment, after all, and the current ecosystem could be best described as 'Sarah's body.' Thus, by taking the Light's effluvium into herself, she'd automatically begun converting it from 'Flower' mana into Sarah's 'Flower' mana. This distinction may have been minute at her current level of refinement, but it ultimately enabled the control that made all of this possible. She simply had to be careful; her immaterial dexterity would improve as she continued to impress the energy with her presence; however, these were still the early days, and she only had a fraction of her full control.
'Scatter,' she cajoled the orb softly. 'Disperse into mist. Spread throughout the field and make sure you smell like this.' Sarah focused on 'Blind Luxury,' the synthetic extract of coconut and vanilla, she'd dabbed on the side of her neck. If she'd dedicated her life to the Light, then her mana might have been self-aware enough to take the command to heart. As it was, her words created a hypnotic invocation, which subconsciously guided her intent.
Slowly, the parasite could feel her core shave itself away. The power would be lost until she refined more from the field; however, the motes expelled through her pores, soon grew into a rolling cloud. Her mana drifted twenty - maybe thirty feet away - before she halted the process. Any farther and her control would be co-opted by the meadow's abrasive presence.
Pallsburg's nostrils flared as she sat in the cold grass. "Is that us?" she asked, refusing to open her eyes.
Amanda hovered behind her, quietly whispering instructions. "Yes, ignore it. I want you to focus on the mana that's moving throughout your body. Cycle it: in with your breath and out again after every exhalation. With each revolution, there's a cloud forming. One with more of you in it. More awareness - more control. When you feel like you can sense it, I want you to rotate the wisps around your head; then, shuffle the parts, which feel the most comfortable, into your abdomen. Good. Hold them there. You need to keep those motes in place while we begin again from step one."
Sarah listened with half an ear as Amanda walked her partner through a more human-friendly exercise. Unlike the two infiltrators, Pallsburg didn't have enough sensitivity to simply strip the stream in one pass; instead, she'd need to guide it in a closed loop until she could twist the mana's alignment. Some women might have been discouraged to learn they'd be working with a significant handicap. Based upon their conversation, Pallsburg didn't strike her as one of them. If it took her five years to hit the big leagues, then she'd put in the time. It was better to do things right than to kill herself by trying to rush.
...Speaking of slow suicide, Sarah poked a mental finger at the flickering orb lodged beneath her diaphragm. It was down to about one and a half mana. The shallow core could either stink up a bathroom or replace a third of her make-up kit. It wasn't exactly 'the might of ages,' but the tiny construct wasn't worthless, either. All in all, Sarah thought she could find a use for the stupid superpower in the days ahead.
It convinced her to keep plumbing the field as the sun sank below the horizon.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
An hour passed. The light pollution from the city of Quincy was too severe to permit many stars, but the moon hung low in the sky and shed an unsettling, crimson radiance over the loosely curated meadow. In the forest behind her, the Blue Hills were alive with the sound of animal calls as the crows turned in for the night and the coyotes took their place. Ostensibly, the three of them were trespassing, since the reservation closed at dusk; however, the interior was under-policed, and it was easy to avoid the rangers. So much so, that the lack of supervision was becoming a problem for the rest of the city. Last year, the police blotter had been chock-full of young teens getting arrested for screwing around in the brush. After the third couple had misplaced their clothes, the local council had finally had enough. A petition went around; there'd been talk about putting up a fence. Sarah didn't think it would come to that, since the Offal Sea would render the issue moot, yet the ongoing drama had created a wave of apprehension that left most kids afraid of missing out. Even their older relatives weren't immune to the mounting pressure.
"It's been a while," one such libertine mused as he hiked up the winding trail. "Do you remember when Denis got drunk and took a shit behind Tammy's tent. Somehow, he managed to pop a squat over the only badger hole in a two-mile radius, and the damn thing bit him on the ass. Poor animal must have had to swim through thirty ounces of rancid Jack Daniels before Denis was convinced to piss off."
A woman laughed, her voice drifting through the open field. "I do. He was a surprisingly good sport about it. When Halloween rolled around, he bought a fursuit off craigslist and dyed it chestnut brown. I heard he was going to tape a bottle of Old Number Seven to his hand until the vice-principle caught wind of the plan."
The pair broke through the treeline seventy meters away. Both of them were in their late twenties, and each was carrying a flashlight, so they wouldn't get lost along the trail. The man was holding his carelessly while he swept the shaft from left to right. The woman was more cautious and kept hers focused on her feet. Between the two of them, it was the man who saw Sarah first, since his spastic flailing caused the beam to dart further ahead.
"Shit," he muttered when the pasty glow revealed the pair had company. "Someone beat us to the punch." He ran a hand through his shorn hair and adjusted a woolen overcoat, so it wasn't sitting quite so askew. His partner, a gangly, young woman with a pair of crystal hoops in her ears, hastily re-fastened her blouse until you could no longer see her bra.
The hikers had clearly gotten handsy on their way up the hill. Sarah looked away from the disheveled couple to spare them the embarrassment of her gaze. The chance encounter wasn't her fault, and there was no reason she should feel self-conscious, yet her mind had always been eager to misappropriate guilt, and this time was no exception. An apology sprang to her lips. Sarah managed to bite her tongue before it could become fully voiced. "Park's closed," she hollered, instead. "You're going to have to take your happy ending somewhere else."
"You sure?" the man called back. "My hands are pretty quick. I could be in and out before you know it." The woman elbowed him in the stomach, eliciting a muted grunt. "I guess that's a no. I suppose it's just as well; not all of my memories of high school have gotten rosier with time."
His partner's cheeks were flushed as she moved to cut him off. "Enough, Justin." The woman cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the meadow. "Are you decent? I don't want to have to yell."
Sarah glanced over at Amanda and found her sharing a word with Pallsburg. The blonde wiggled her eyebrows to ask if the smaller warspawn wanted company and only got a shrug in return. Great: now, it was Sarah's decision. She briefly wrestled with their visitor's request before realizing that there wasn't a good reason to say no. When faced with the increasingly awkward silence, she decided to give in and agree. "...Yeah, we're decent. Come on up."
It was only after the two of them had passed a wilted bed of wood sorrel that Sarah realized her response could be misinterpreted as the three of them needing time to get dressed. Sarah didn't mind the confusion, per se, but it did make her match the other woman as she fought to conceal her blush. "Good evening," the parasite greeted them, her cheeks painfully warm. "I... didn't think anyone would be in the area."
Justin smirked and let his eyes roam across the field. His gaze lingered a little overlong on Pallsburg, and Sarah feared he was checking the flowers to see if this hypothetical orgy stopped at three. "There's been a lot of that going around," he joked lightly. "Nice night; no rain: it'd be a shame to spend it indoors. Say, you wouldn't happen to know if there are any other stargazers around, would you? Up by the lake, maybe?"
He pointed north with his thumb, where another empty trail cut through the swaying foliage. The soft rustle of the dying leaves made it hard to tell who was carousing nearby until you were in danger of tripping over their dick.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Sarah admitted, wishing he'd just shut and leave. "I want to say it's a bit too cold for anyone to go for a swim, but I'm sure you've seen your friends make stupider decisions. I -"
A low chime caused Sarah to pause mid-thought. She checked her interface, only to realize the message hadn't come from her. When Amanda and Pallsburg saw her confusion fail to dissipate, they brought up their own menus. A brief scramble followed as a ring of glowing panes was summoned.
Justin's paramour coughed and sheepishly raised her hand. "Sorry," she announced. "Looks like it's mine. I thought I canceled this earlier, but the system must have glitched."
Sarah bet the woman had ignored the alert, so she could continue to fondle her boyfriend. The Light could be fairly insistent about its announcements, and it'd ping you every fifteen minutes until you picked up the phone. Based upon the quick look Sarah had snuck at her screen, 'Britney Dermith' had increased her passive intake enough to clear the second task. Now, the Light was springing a mana surge on her, whether she was ready for it or not.
The warspawn took a large step back. The field's density spiked and then redoubled in a blistering rush. The bleed off was intense, even if there wasn't much of a lightshow, and Amanda gingerly sampled the overflow before telling Pallsburg to take advantage of the opportunity. As for Dermith... well, she didn't seem to realize what was happening. The woman simply waved the screen away and hoped everyone would ignore her faux pas.
Sarah took vindictive glee in refusing to spare her dignity. "Oh, are you not going to help with the milestone?"
Dermith blinked in confusion. Sarah gestured at the empty space where her interface had briefly hovered. "It's like a mobile game. You show up, complete the challenge and get a prize once enough people have participated. I think the current goal is to [Condense One Billion Mana]."
The two of them laughed, Dermith awkwardly and Sarah like a bitch. "No. No. That's... really not my scene," the macilent woman insisted. "I don't even play Farmville with my aunt."
She said this as if it was a source of great shame. Justin was more ambivalent. The fact that he wasn't being bathed by his own invisible halo meant he'd experimented with the Light before. Whether he'd actually gotten anywhere with his core was harder to say; the same unnatural resistance which made humans such great hosts also made it difficult to determine the state of their foundation. He could've been sitting on five hundred motes of 'Fire' mana just waiting to break free; he might have also stuck his thumb up his ass and picked his nose like a boob. There wasn't a good way to tell.
"I'm a bit surprised," Amanda said while keeping an eye on her girlfriend. "Your earrings are citrine, right? I figured the crystal crowd would've been thrilled at an opportunity to legitimize their craft."
Dermith lifted a hand towards her ear. "Oh, are you a Wiccan too?"
The warspawn shook her head. "No."
The couple paused. Amanda's response was much more unfriendly than they had been led to expect. Between her size and her outfit, Sarah's ex gave off a very airy first impression. What's more, her gentle demeanor only emphasized the image of a kind and wholesome girl. To put it another way, she was the last person you'd suspect of hitting you with a hard consonant. Beating a word against your head was the quintessential action of a thug, and no part her mien strove to convey such vitriol.
Sarah blamed their childhood for the spite. There were simply too many similarities between the obeisance demanded by the nobility and the religions here on Earth. Questions about dogma, sin and righteousness didn't even enter into it. You could chase your tail for hours, trying to nail down your relationship with God, and still feel pretty shitty because of the parallels you'd invoked. The situation left most of her species aggressively agnostic. They weren't non-believers - they just had a lot of difficulty processing their emotional baggage. Some made an effort, despite knowing they were headed for hell. Amanda wasn't one of them. She had given up on 'salvation' after being harangued by her last congregation. These days, she continued to maintain a low opinion of the church and tried to avoid the topic whenever it came up.
Justin took her curt answer as an easy excuse to dip. "...Right. Well, it was nice meeting you all, but I believe there's a celebration with our name on it down by the golf club. Good luck recreating Woodstock."
He began to guide his date towards the north end of the field. After a moment of hesitation, Dermith followed along behind him.
Sarah merely raised her hand in a silent farewell while Amanda made a show of talking to Pallsburg. Finally, once the pair were out of earshot, the younger infiltrator slumped. "I fucked that up, didn't I?" she asked.
"Eeehhh." Sarah held the syllable until it sounded like a drawn-out groan. "If it's any consolation, I've said a lot worse. I wouldn't waste my time dwelling on it."
"No, not that," Amanda corrected irritably. "I was talking about the skein. I should have warned them not to poke around near the terminus, unless they wanted to fall through."
Sarah shrugged her shoulders. "What are the odds they even see it?"
Amanda glared at her like Sarah had just made their chances worse.
"It's gotta be nearly one in a million," the blonde continued blithely. "I'm sure they'll get there fine. They'll only be at the lake for a couple hours. What's the worst that could happen?"
The vivacious warspawn huffed. "Are you trying to jinx them?"
"Maybe. Is it working? I think there's a couple of expressions I might have missed."
For some reason Dermith really got on her nerves. It wasn't anything the woman had said; she simply emitted a certain vibe. Simon had once captured the essence of her animosity when he described his roommate as having a very punchable face. Sarah didn't want to think of herself as a particularly violent person; however, she knew she wouldn't lose any sleep if the rangers caught them with their pants down.
Amanda tried to choke back a sigh. "You're going to make me go check on them if you keep this up. I'll have to chase them down, and it'll be super awkward."
"We can really just leave them be," Sarah insisted stubbornly.
Amanda began to pace back and forth. Her feet crossed a three-meter stretch of turf before turning back upon the loosely trampled rut. "No, I'm doing this, and you're coming with me. It's your fault, so you're going to help me fix the problem."
"What about Pallsburg?" Sarah argued. "Are we really going to leave her alone? What if her core deviates and she suffers a backlash?"
"Juliette can take care of herself," the subject of their discussion informed them before casually flicking her wrist. "Have fun storming the castle."
'What castle?' Sarah blinked at the non-sequitur, but the words must have meant something to Amanda because she gave her girlfriend a kiss. "This is a huge waste of time," Sarah muttered petulantly.
"Just shut up already." Amanda grabbed the edge of the parasite's blouse and tugged her around a flagpole.
Sarah begrudgingly complied. Mostly because the crack about Pallsburg had honestly been an accident. "At least, give me time to curse them with the rest!"
Amanda did no such thing.