Fifteen people in uniforms makes for an imposing sight, gathering around the front of a combined shop-and-residence. We’re five stories up, up two sets of ladders and a quick and terrifying run across the skyline of a city, and now that we’ve stopped I’m not sure I’m ever going to have the guts to start moving again.
“Crawling with the Vigil,” we’d overheard someone say, which allows us to at least know what to call these people. Ten of them are armed and armored, chain and a shield with a baton that glows an electric blue to my Visor; stun batons, maybe, to paralyze and take down in a plausibly non-lethal manner. The other five are clearly mages of some sort, and they have what are clearly spellbooks chained to their waists or held out in front of them.
“Most of the mana swirling around them tastes like… ash, ice, and the guttering of a candle. Zidanya, is that Void mana?”
“Close as will come.”
“Counterspell, then. They’re worried about wizard trouble from inside?” She nods, and I keep scanning, slowly and carefully, the surroundings. “Do you see what I see about the couple loitering to our left, and that one fellow over on the right?”
“I saw the two, but not the one.” Amber sounds impressed.
Zidanya just snorts, and I smile at nobody in particular. “Did you see any others, dear Ranger?”
She practically chokes at that for a moment. “The nerve of youth… look you some twenty feet towards the lone man, in the second story window, and just past the lady so swiftly packing her cart’s food to sell somewhere, anywhere else; fourth story.”
“Not enough resolution on the Visor,” I say quietly. “But this is a major operation. What’s -”
There’s a flare of mana, and a sharp crack of a sound that echoes across the street. The woman at the food cart, hurriedly packing the last of her unsold goods, drops to the ground and curls into a ball, and I barely stifle a scream. The flare of mana hurts through the visor, hurts like someone turned a floodlight on when I was peering in the darkness, and I reflexively dismiss it, whimpering, my hands over my mouth, eyelids closed and my vision nonetheless white and red.
When I regain enough sight and sensibility to engage with the situation, it takes Zidanya pinning me to stop me from doing something extremely rash and emphatic. Amber’s torn between fury and concern, but she’s not about to stop me; her hands are clenched and white, and every line of her body is ready for action.
Five stories up and three buildings over isn’t so far that we can’t hear the screams and the pleas. My imagination doesn’t have too much trouble filling in the details I can’t hear, and I can feel most of my emotions start to fade, to slide into the box I stashed them in for the two grueling weeks I’d spent in the Temple before Amber. If I could move, I could be at the edge of the building in about three seconds. There’s a ledge and a lip, so I could drop part way and then part way again, to the third story roof, and then I’d only be two buildings over and at the same level. There’s an entry point to the building from the roof, and there’s only two Vigil standing there, swords out.
Zidanya has me pinned, and I can’t move, and she and Amber are having a conversation. I don’t join it; I just conjure three orbs. Just a few seconds to conjure three more, and then it’d be Empower, Amplify, and fire, because those people need to burn, and Zidanya grabs one of them out of the air with a deeply unhappy glare.
“Adam.” Amber’s voice takes the fight out of me. “Please. These aren’t people. You know they aren’t.” Her voice continues on, but I can’t hear her words; there’s a roaring in my ears, and I can’t focus enough to make sense of them. Her voice is still there, though, and it anchors me enough that I don’t do anything particularly emphatic.
My orbs wink out as I reclaim as much of their mana as I can. Zidanya eases off the pin and I breathe deliberately, slowly, as the Vigil squad works its way through the building. I listen, staring blankly as the two guards on the top do their part in making sure the purge is properly thorough, and I watch through the Visor, resummoned, as spellwork rises and shatters under the focused counterspells of the - wizards? Mages? Spellcasters? - left outside.
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“I object,” I eventually say when I’ve worked through the shakes and rinsed my mouth out to get rid of the taste of bile, “to a very large number of things in this scenario. I object to whoever thought it was a good idea, or appropriate.” I pause for a moment. “I would like to tear this scenario apart, please, and make a point of my displeasure, since I don’t think I get to kill the person responsible, not in any permanent or lasting way.”
“It’s a bit… heavy handed.” Amber is, I think, furious, but differently than I am.
“Meant to make a point, in certain-sure.”
“It’s meant to traumatize and brutalize. It’s meant to traumatize and brutalize me, personally, right now.” I hold up a hand. “I know, it’s probably a canned scenario that’s been used to traumatize and brutalize others in the past, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t deliberately picked out of the range of available scenarios.”
“And yet will you be so foolish, Magelord, as to insist that you be among those who goes to investigate that building when the Vigil is fully departed?”
I shudder. “No. No, no, I’d rather take -” I cut myself off. “Heh, I did take an unanchored dive in a Worldship. Alone.” I think about it for a few moments. “Yeah. I’d rather take an unanchored dive, alone, again, than walk into that building. Even if it resets. Void beyond, I’m an idiot but I’m not that much of an idiot; I’d like to be able to sleep again, ever.”
“I should think to stay here with Adam. If you will have my company, my lord; Taveda Medah, you do not need me for this.”
Zidanya pauses for a few moments, and I think she’s maybe taken aback, possibly by Amber’s formality. “You’ve the right of it, girl.” Her voice is a little thicker than usual. “It’s this and worse I’ve seen a hundred times over. Any harm I was to take from it, I’ve long since taken.”
She’s gone a moment later, five steps and a smooth drop down what I knew to be two full stories’ worth of smooth wall. I don’t bother worrying about her; she knows what she’s doing, and she presumably either is fully aware of her physical limitations or we’re all dead.
It’s the former. I see her flitting across the sight-lines to the roof where the two Vigil squad members stood until just recently, and then she’s gone, inside.
“Ah, Adam.” Somehow, Amber has shifted to have my head in her lap when I wasn’t paying any attention. I feel a pang at that, since I generally try to properly attend to people around me, but it’s not like I don’t have genuine cause to be distracted. “What are we to do?”
“I thought I said.” I close my eyes, staring up at the presumably-notional sky through closed lids. I can see the light through them of the equally-notional sun that I haven’t spotted yet, occluded as it has been by the buildings, or maybe it just doesn’t exist in this scenario. “We tear this scenario apart. Break it at its hinges, shatter it across its fracture points.
“I’ll tell you what we don’t do: we don’t engage with it in good faith. It hasn’t earned that. It can’t earn that, because this kind of… of shock-schlock is just unacceptable. So we refuse to engage with it in the ways it wants us to, and we engage with it in all of the ways it doesn’t. I just don’t...” My eyes open, and my brain starts working again, maybe in self-defense at the thought that it can’t. “No, actually. I know what the first and second things I want to do are.”
“My lord.” There’s a note of relief, I think, in Amber’s voice, but mostly she’s got this purring, growling joy to her words. “Welcome back.”
“First off.” My grin is probably savage. That seems, for once, appropriate. “I need to figure out how that this-isn’t-important mana thing works. I want to copy it to use it myself, and I want to figure out how to unravel it.”
“And second?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.” I’m feeling the itch to get moving, not the berserk rage that Zidanya kept me from acting on but the solver urge, the itch that comes with having figured out the entry-point to the next stage of the puzzle. It feels almost profane, to feel that at a time like this, but forward is forward. “You’ll like it, I think.”
I twist in Amber’s lap, catching the smile on her face. It’s a glorious thing, trusting and fierce and beautiful. “I think,” she says, softly, “that I will enjoy seeing this scenario destroyed by your hands, having wounded you.
“I will enjoy that very much.”