[Player Log Start!]
[Log Holder: Benedict Carrey]
[Level: 2]
With Michael gone, the group was sent hurtling to the ground.
Verity, or whoever had taken over her body, moved quickly, twisting around and splaying her arms and legs wide to slow herself down some. Feathertooth flew overhead, tugging on Ben’s side to try and slow her descent some.
It took a moment for her to get her body back under control, trying to mimic the pose of skydivers she had seen in the past. Below, there were deep blue waves roiling, with an island just slightly to the side.
They were nearly half a mile up from the surface of the Earth. And they would die the second they hit the ground, she had no doubt about it. Unless the squids came back to pick them out too. But after a few more seconds of hurtling down, she had to accept that they were only there for Michael.
Which left them hanging high and dry.
“Anyone have a plan?!” She asked, shouting through the rush of the wind.
“Yeah!” Not-Verity replied, “Land in one piece!”
“Something more comprehensive!” Ben yelled, her mouth feeling dry from the wind rushing around.
Not-Verity weaved slightly as she hit an irregular current, “That’s the plan! We aim for the ground, and if nothing falls off, then we activate our Healing Abilities!”
That was… something that might actually work. Ben angled herself to the side, letting the swirling winds carry her closer and closer to sandy, solid ground, promising pulverized bones for them both. Nothing Ben could do about it other than hug her arms close to her and desperately activate her Self-Healing Ability like a prayer mantra.
Ben didn’t see when the ground hit her. But she felt it. Pain blazed up her legs, tearing skin and blood vessels, snapping bones and muscle in a split second. Her body landed heavily on its side, chest heaving, and yet nothing seemed to be going in.
It hurt. It all hurt so much. She could barely think outside of the all-engulfing pain.
But she had to remember. She had to remember to heal. That had been the only reason she had survived the initial impact. And now, she had to do that again, to fix the remaining damage. She screwed up her eyes, forcing herself to apply Healing as strongly as she could.
[Applying Self-Healing…]
Repairing herself was a painful process. Bit by bit, cells and sinew knitted together. Blood flowed back inside her body, and gashes in the skin sealed up. Her guts were shifting inside her, pulling themselves into the position where they originally were. The moment her vocal chords were back in shape, she opened her mouth and let out a pained groan.
“Impressive.” Feathertooth cawed from above her.
“Shut up, you useless feather pile.” Ben snapped back, aches and pains ebbing through her as she forced her body to stand up, and stumble around, looking for Not-Verity. She was already standing, alert and ready, and that didn’t surprise Ben in the least.
“We need to pick out a name for you.” She sighed, walking up behind her, “You got a name, Not-Vera?”
The girl shrugged, perched on the side of the island they were on, her eyes glaring into the murky depths, as if she could pierce right through and see what lay beneath. For a second, Ben thought she wouldn’t respond, until she said, “I used to be called Lucinda. Some decades ago. The cocoon changed me. I mixed too much with all the others, so they rubbed off on me some, so I don’t feel much like Lucinda anymore.”
“Is Verity in that soup of consciousnesses?” Feathertooth asked, but whether out of curiosity or care for Ben’s teammate, it wasn’t clear.
She shrugged, “We aren’t all mixed up, but she’s there. In the background. Maybe we can switch back, but there’s something strange about how she feels in my mind that makes me think it won’t be safe for you. She feels… wild.”
The memory of Verity’s snarl and bloodthirsty eyes flashed in Ben’s mind. Verity was a Harbinger. She was meant to destroy the world. It was programmed into her mind, to the extent that no amount of counter-programming could erase it. The shock she had gone through had probably thrown her into turmoil, grasping for blood and chaos.
Yet Lucinda was standing in her body, not looking at all like she was holding back a tidal wave of killing intent. Was the programming imbedded in her soul, perhaps? In that case, there was the possibility that Lucinda didn’t count as a Party(Main) member. She would have to look that over, once they got Martin out of the squids’ grasp.
“I think I can swim down and scout some.” She offered, “Your teammate, Verity, has an Ability called Resource Conservation. It should allow me to swim underwater for prolonged time periods.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
No one else could traverse the ocean depths. This was the only option they had. Even though last time… Last time did not have a good outcome. The amount of oxygen needed for moving around underwater couldn’t be combated by Resource Conservation. But Michael needed them. She made the call.
“Do it. And come back alive.”
She nodded, shucking her jacket and trousers, diving into the water with such speed that she immediately vanished from Ben’s line of sight.
“Great. Now we’ve lost both of our strongest assets.” Feathertooth clicked against its beak.
“You, shut it.” Ben growled at the raven, “I’m sick of this shit. We are in the middle of a crisis, and we need all of our allies together. Not contemplating leaving one of them behind.”
Feathertooth met her eye unsympathetically, “More than half of your party has vanished, looking for something that we have received no further reports on. This was a crisis long before the remaining two were kidnapped by the deceitful octopi, you simply refused to acknowledge it, Benedict.”
“Don’t call me out like this.” She scoffed, sitting down on the sandy beach and watching for any unnatural ripples in the waves. It was silent here, far removed from the bloodbath happening underneath the water, and the flocks upon flocks of fleeing corvids in the skies.
She felt alone. Empty and tired, with her chest feeling like it was about to cave in on itself. Without Tench, Ben had been left as the sole adult of the group. No one else had acknowledged it, but the dynamic was obvious to her. She wasn’t equipped to help them. She was just a vet.
The others might die, and she wouldn’t know. Just waiting above for them to surface. If they were ripped apart, would the blood resurface? Or would it be too dense?
“You are the head of operations, are you not?” Feathertooth asked, fluttering down to sit on Verity’s abandoned jacket, “What will you do? We have no need for medics, we need soldiers.”
“Who can traverse water.” Ben reminded him, “I’m ready to fight, but the lack of air can’t be beat.”
“Then it is fortunate that I have developed a pity for you.”
“What?” Ben asked, “Wait can you breathe underwater?” She thought she had remembered everything she knew about ravens, but if they were a subspecies of waterfowl, then that changed the whole game-
“No.” Feathertooth shut down that train of thought immediately, “But in the time that we separated, I took the time to make connections with my peers. Sent some words around. Discovered how deep my alienation from the upper flock went. It was… disheartening, perhaps, but it gave me the time to send some reinforcements for my non-corvid ops unit.”
“Is there a corvid ops unit?” Ben asked, “Because I don’t see any ducks flying up to the rescue and I really need a pun to make me feel better.”
Feathertooth clicked its tongue disapprovingly, “There is a team whose title literally translates to corvid ops unit, though I don’t see why that’s an object of hilarity. Also, the corvid ops unit is out to murder all you humans, so they will make you feel objectively worse if they show up.”
Ben sighed, turning her eyes back to the seas, where ripples were passing over the surface in a peculiar formation. As if something was moving underwater. Multiple things, or maybe just something really large. And moving closer to them. Ben grabbed a gun from Verity’s abandoned arsenal, aiming for the moving waters, daring the squid to surface.
What came out was not a slimy, wriggling, tentacle. It was a sharp curve of a bird’s bill, followed by a head where water slipped off its hydrophobic body. It opened the beak wide, and squawked.
Ben let out a hysterical laugh. Penguins. These were penguins.
“You called out penguins?!” She asked Feathertooth. It cocked its head and shrugged, moving to converse with the waterbound bird as it pulled itself out, followed quickly by five more penguins, who all lumbered onto land, standing heads and shoulders above Ben.
One of them looked at her and squawked inquisitively. She had spent enough time around birds to know that they were trying to communicate something to her. But she couldn’t quite parse what they meant.
“I- I can’t speak… Penguin?” She stumbled.
It squawked again. Feathertooth fluttered over to them, cawing something, before moving to tell Ben, “They don’t have the brain capacity to create a language of their own, let alone learn another. Not that they can vocalize the human English.”
“But they’ll listen to you?” She asked skeptically.
“Yes. We have worked out an understanding. Their less than average intelligence is hard to get around, but the corvids have worked out a way to communicate with them. It’s miss and hit most of the time, but they can search for Verity – or Lucinda – underwater. Just in case she’s in trouble.”
Ben felt a weight lift off her chest, “Okay. Good.” She agreed, “Find them, alright?” She asked the penguin armada. She would’ve patted their flippers, but one of her former colleagues had worked in a zoo before, and she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of those bills.
One by one, they all dove back in, just seconds after shaking themselves dry. Ben sat there nervously, counting the seconds. It was just half an hour of Lucinda/Verity being under the waves. Resource Conservation or no, she was going to drown at this point. And Michael was almost certain gone, with no way to breathe underwater.
By the time the forty-minute mark began ticking near, it was only then that the familiar ripples of the water from the penguins’ swimming formation started approaching them. Instead of coming out one by one like the first time, the penguins simply stuck their heads out and dumped a pale bundle of clothes onto the heaps of sand. No, not a bundle. A kid. Topped with short black hair instead of Michael’s white and Verity’s long hair.
No, this was Jared.
Ben cursed, rushing over to start performing CPR on him. What was he doing here? Where were the others? And of all of the others, why did it have to be Jared who was here? Even if he was lucid enough to answer her questions soon, she couldn’t trust the answers he gave her.
Her hands were firm against his ribs, pumping rhythmically until he jerked up and coughed sharply, water spilling out of his mouth.
Jared gasped, his stomach clenching as he tried to breathe in, only to choke on more water still stuck in his respiratory system. Ben patted him harshly on the back, “Cough it out, you’ll be able to breathe soon, just hang in there.”
“Is this your revenge?” He asked weakly, once the coughing died down.
“Kid, if I wanted vengeance, I wouldn’t have stopped you from drowning.” She replied, even though she still didn’t like his deception.
Jared’s eyes flicked over to the people around him, “Are these fucking penguins?”
“There’s a lot to explain.” Ben had to break the news to him, “Also, Verity’s slightly dead.”
He slammed his head back on the ground.
[Player Log End!]