“We will save you.”
That can’t be Ariel, I thought as I stared with wide eyes at the… thing on the ground, as it said those words.
There was blood, but there wasn’t nearly enough. It certainly looked real—I would know, having seen it more than once in Brooklyn—but given the amount of damage Octavia had inflicted on Ar—on whatever this was, there was surprisingly little leaking onto the paved ground. Shards of what should have been its skull but seemed more akin to an inner shell were strewn about. The open view into its inner workings laid bare the absolutely alien nature of it all.
“We will save you.”
The body began to melt. Elle buried her face against me, and I held her tightly as I continued to watch, completely aghast and unable to tear my own eyes away. The body’s flesh leaked away at an alarming pace and evaporated shortly after, and its strange, foreign insides set me on edge. Caught as I was with my gaze helplessly fixated upon it, I could not help but try to define it, to put words to what I was beholding in an effort to understand it. A machine? I could feel no metal within, and I didn’t know of any machines that had no metal at all. A cyborg or android or whatever the right term was? Only the exterior actually looked human. Everything inside, though often close in appearance to what I might have expected to see inside of somebody, had some aspect of it that was off and dispelled the illusion of humanity. The bones shortened and lengthened like pistons, the muscle fibers were a slate blue instead of red and wrapped around the bones in a different way I could not place, and there were far fewer organs, all with textured surfaces that looked almost woven together.
Elle trembled against me, and the wetness of her tears was beginning to soak through my blouse. “It’s not her,” I whispered, comforting her as much as I was myself. “It’s not her.”
I tried to convince myself the words were true. Knowing what had laid within, it was difficult to ascribe humanity to it, but all the same it had looked, sounded, acted like Ariel just a few minutes ago.
“We will save you.”
From what?
Bard seeped out of Octavia and said with urgency, “We should leave.”
Almost everyone in the area had long since fled by now, but I could feel where someone was hiding in the bushes nearby, holding up in our direction what was almost certainly a phone. I crushed it with a negligent flick of my powers before looking to my friend and nodding. “Yeah, definitely,” I agreed. “Someone was recording us, but I trashed their phone. We should… move…”
Wait, friend? It was true. Bard was my friend. It was the sort of obvious fact on par with ‘the sky is blue,’ but… why had we become friends? I remembered meeting at Druid’s show earlier, but what exactly had led to us becoming so friendly?
“Good, that’s good,” Octavia said, seemingly not noticing the way I had trailed off. Her tone was a mixture of relief and uncertainty. At a guess, she was relieved to not be dead, since several bullets had hit her before I could stop Ar—The cyborg? Going with cyborg—before I could stop the cyborg. As for the uncertainty, I imagined she was right there with me, unsure what to think about what had just happened. “Yeah, c’mon everyone. Bard, call Monk and tell him to get the car started and meet us at the entrance to the lot.”
By that point the cyborg had all but disappeared into a puddle of chemicals that had already begun to stain the empty pile of clothes and shoes on the ground. Jean overalls were among them, and I recognized them from the day Elle, the rest of the crew, and I had met Ariel.
“We will save you.”
I felt a chill crawl down my spine, and I did my best to not shiver as Elle carefully tugged away and we moved to follow our friends to the parking lot. “Who’s Monk?” I asked, trying to keep Octavia busy while I sorted out what was wrong. It felt important that she not know I was bothered, but I couldn’t place my finger on why.
“He’s part of my Octahedron!” Octavia gushed as we all hustled along. “I have Bard, obviously, and I just got Druid. Monk’s waiting in the car, and I also have Artificer, Sorcerer, and Paladin. You’ll meet them all soon, then you can show off your powers, and I’ll decide whether I’m going to keep you two.”
We didn’t run into any more employees on our way out, but that made sense in a way. I doubted handling capes or people with guns was covered in their orientation. We eventually reached the car, which I was surprised to find was a new, expensive sedan. That meant there were six of us, which was one too many for the vehicle, but Bard had clearly already thought of this and jumped back into Octavia, who moved to the shotgun seat and said, “Get in the back, you three.”
I didn’t see any problem with going for a ride with friends, especially since we needed to get out of here before any heroes arrived. Druid had already climbed in behind the driver seat, so I pulled my backpack off and slid into the middle from the opposite side while keeping my bag in my lap. I started to buckle my seatbelt but paused when I realized Elle hadn’t climbed in. She was standing near the open door with a glazed look in her eyes, and I immediately realized the problem.
It’s a damn shame she got her into her bad space so quickly, especially since we were enjoying a nice day out with friends. “Elle, get in the car and close the door.”
Octavia twisted around and gave us a funny look but didn’t say anything. Monk, the driver, had their brown hair pulled back into a low ponytail, and their frame was so scrawny I couldn’t quite decipher whether they were presenting as a man or a woman. Even their voice was centered in a nebulous range, as I noticed when they commented with a strong southern twang, “And here I was thinkin’ y’all were just gettin’ the one. What’re y’all’s names?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but Octavia cut in, saying, “Asian one’s July, and blondie’s… eh, I can’t remember.”
I bristled at that. “My name’s June!” I bit out, “and she’s Elle.”
Octavia turned and fixed me with a dark glare then demanded, “Raise your right hand,”
Monk breathed out a, “Hoo-boy!” and pulled out of the space as I raised my right hand.
“Everyone else stay calm, especially you,” she looked to Elle briefly before returning her gaze to me. “Look at your hand. Now slap yourself. Hard."
Goddammit, June, that was really rude of you just now! I slapped myself across my right cheek with enough force to shock a gasp out of myself. You deserved that!
“And you know what? Until I tell you otherwise, your name is July now, got it?”
“That’s not my name,” I muttered. My cheek burned, but my defiance burned hotter. “You’re my friend, Octavia! Choosing my name was really important to me, and you should respect that!”
The brunette had been in the midst of angrily opening her mouth to say something but stopped short and stared for several seconds in surprise. “Huh? What do you mean you chose your name?”
I blinked before remembering that despite becoming fast friends, I hadn’t told Octavia about my past yet. “Right, hadn’t gotten around to telling you. I’m trans.” She was still visibly nonplussed, so I added, “You know, transgender?”
“What, you wanna be a guy or something?” she asked, still palpably confused.
“No way,” I shivered. “I’m a girl.”
Monk glanced at me through the rearview mirror in surprise and whistled. “And a lovely one at that. Ain’t nobody gonna look at you and think you ain’t a belle, that’s for damn sure.”
Druid also seemed surprised, but neither of them held a candle to Octavia’s shock. “You… but… What?!”
I flushed a bit at the attention. “T-That’s why I stuttered when you asked my name. I almost said my deadname—twice! It’s weird… I haven’t used it in a couple months, so I dunno why I almost slipped.”
Elle laid her head down on my shoulder and murmured in a distracted voice, “June…”
I turned to her with a smile that quickly morphed into a frown when I realized I had forgotten to tell her to buckle her seatbelt. “Buckle up, Elle.”
She distractedly reached out to grab the seatbelt with her right hand, and Octavia frowned again. “What’s wrong with her?”
I hesitated somewhat, since I didn’t really know Monk. Still, Octavia had asked, and she, Bard, and Druid were good friends with Elle and me, so I pressed ahead. “She’s been through a lot, and her powers… they affect her. She slides back and forth between being able to talk and do things for herself and being nonverbal and needing to be told to do things,” I explained. “We call them ‘good days’ and ‘bad days,’ because it usually takes bad days a while to come over her.” I maneuvered myself a bit until I could get my arm behind her then tugged her into a one-armed embrace. “She was having a good day today too. Normally it takes something really awful to push her into a bad day that quickly. I dunno what happened…”
“We will save you.”
It took everything in me to not react visibly when it occurred to me something may be wrong with Octavia. I knew she had powers, but I had respected her wishes for privacy when she never explained how they worked. Did they affect her like mine did? After all, if I hadn’t done testing with Faultline and Newter, then I never would have known about my altered state. It might be something similar with her, but I didn’t react that well at the idea until they proved it. It’s probably best to not say anything until I can find a way to prove it.
Druid spoke up in the silence, “So, um, I guess I’ll address the elephant in the room.” He chuckled, and I rolled my eyes at the animal powered cape’s pun. “But what the hell was that back there?”
“Whatever it was, it said something to you two at the end,” Octavia pointed out, fixing Elle and me with a look.
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“I… I dunno,” I answered honestly. “I would’ve thought some kind of robot, but I couldn’t feel any metal in it. It was all… um, what’s the word…”
“Organic,” Druid supplied.
“Yeah, that. It… Well, it looked like a friend of ours, Ariel. But she couldn’t be that… that thing.”
“How do you know?” he intently pressed. “Did you notice something in particular that distinguished it from your friend?”
Everyone but Elle looked to me for answers, and put on the spot, I sputtered, “W-W-Well, it was a cyborg.”
“Not a cyborg,” Octavia interjected. “A cyborg is a human with robot parts. That thing was more like an android.”
“I thought cyborg and android were interchangeable,” I admitted. “What’s an android then?”
“It’s a robot made to look like a human.”
That does fit the bill… It was so real…
“Back to the original question,” Druid said, the gleam in his eye making his interest in the subject clear. “Do you know your friend wasn’t an android? It was so realistic that I never would have questioned it, but for having seen inside it!”
I shifted uncomfortably. “I… I guess I don’t…”
If that was Ariel… Did I just watch her die?
Elle whimpered a bit, and I tightened my grip around her. Unlike earlier, I couldn’t comfort her with assurances it wasn’t Ariel.
“Well!” Monk said with forced brightness. “Ain’t gonna be but another five minutes or so ‘til we get there.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Octavia blurted. “I need foooood!”
Monk chuckled and asked where she wanted to go, but I couldn’t focus on what was being said as I idly rubbed my sore cheek. Was something wrong with Octavia’s power? Was Ariel an android? Was she… dead? Had she ever been alive?
Had… had one of my friends killed another friend?
“We will save you.”
Ariel…
----------------------------------------
I glanced around with interest as Elle and I walked hand-in-hand behind Octavia and the rest of the gang deeper into Woodlands Cemetery. Absolutely ancient graves were assembled all around us under the aegis of also ancient trees, and an air of tranquility hung over everything. Elle’s gaze was distant but swept slowly over it all as we moved along, and I made a mental note of it. I had known she loved the park, but I hadn’t realized she liked graveyards as well. She had told me once she was a fan of old architecture, especially when it had been overrun by nature to the point they had mixed together into something more. Nothing here was at that level—presumably the cemetery had a caretaker—but the stones standing in silent sentinel over our progress still obviously caught her eye.
We came across very few people on our journey into the cemetery, so when a group of three people loitering around came in sight, I knew we had reached our destination. The costumes and gear lying about served to make it all the more obvious.
“We’re baaack!” Octavia called out, waving cheerfully to the three of them. They waved back, and I eyed them curiously as we got closer.
“Got a few extra, did you?” a short guy with sandy brown mohawk asked as he closed the distance to us. He was wearing leather pants and a matching leather, sleeveless jacket over a white tunic, and the brass goggle pushed up onto his forehead looked peculiar because of the magnifying lenses attached by spindly little arms. He barely even looked at Druid, likely having expected him. Instead, he looked to Elle and me inquiringly.
“Yup yup,” my wavy haired friend responded with a wide smile. “They have powers too! And speaking of!” She whirled to face us with palpable excitement and jabbed a finger at us. “It’s time for a power demonstration! Go go go!”
I chuckled awkwardly and gave Elle’s hand a squeeze before letting her go. “I’ll go first, since Elle’s going to need time for her power to soak into the area.”
Octavia was veritably bouncing on her heels as I pulled off my backpack and unzipped it before dumping my coins out on the ground. She blinked at them in confusion, as did everyone else. That confusion vanished when some of the coins shot up to cover my limbs and belly, and I took off into the air as fast as I could with the rest of the coins following after me. Some laughter bubbled out of me as I felt the air rush past my face, and I some of the coins to swirling around me in a ring while the rest spun and twirled through the air. Down on the ground Octavia cheered loudly, and Druid and the person in leather clapped.
Monk abruptly turned and dashed towards a nearby tree before running up it until they got to a branch. With a nimble flick of their body, they launched themself up to a higher branch, then a higher branch, and as they neared the top, they shouted, “Give me so platforms, sugar!”
That’s a bit familiar of them, isn’t it? I thought, but I obliged nonetheless, diverting chunks of the twirling coins to form several platforms at rising intervals of height and some distance apart. Oops, those are probably too far apart.
Monk had already leapt to reach the first one, and as I began adjusting the following ones to be a bit closer, they yelled, “They can be further apart, it’s gravy! My power can take it, so you ain’t gotta give me the kiddie gym!”
Despite their assurances, I stuck to forming platforms here and there that let them bounce to and fro, and below us, Octavia shouted out, “Make an obstacle course for them!”
Well, if Octavia’s sure, it must be safe, I reasoned as I diverted all the coins I wasn’t using to stay afloat towards Monk and began shifting them into rough approximations of bars, window frames, pillars, and more platforms.
“Woah,” I breathed out in awe as Monk abruptly picked up the pace and began to dance, for lack of a better word, through the hodge-podge obstacle course. I knew all about freerunning, since Jess had been into it back in Brooklyn, but this was something else altogether. This is their power? Monk grabbed a hold of a bar mid-jump and used it to redirect their fall towards a platform hanging sideways at an angle, which they used as a jumping pad to launch through a floating circle off to the side and do a roll landing on a different platform. The movements were all familiar enough, but Monk’s speed, jumping strength, and reaction times were all obviously ramped up to above-human levels.
“Come down now!” Octavia called out a minute or two later. “I want to see blondie’s power!”
Playtime’s over, I wryly thought as I formed the coins into a staircase down for Monk and dipped down myself. I alighted next to Elle and gave her a smile as I ran my hand through my windblown hair to get out some of the knots that had formed. “Let’s show them… Do the hut and the tree, Elle. I know you like that one.”
The other two capes, a man and a woman, had come over to watch from closer up by that point, and as the ground swelled up into the form of an old, worn stone hut with a gnarled tree growing up through its rough, I turned to examine them both. The guy was tall, towering over me really, but he looked friendly enough. His tousled black hair and dark skin offset the gleaming silver of his armor well, and I couldn’t help but admire the sturdy sword and shield sheathed at his belt and back. The lady didn’t look nearly as friendly—a bit severe, really, with her bright blonde hair cropped closely in a way that accentuated her thin face. Unlike him, she looked somewhat out of place in her relatively plain brown dress with its cloth belt and pouches, though I couldn’t help but admire the obviously hand carved rock that was the focal piece of a necklace made of leather straps.
I was pulled away from my observations by Octavia’s excitedly asking Elle, “Can you make anything? Tell me, tell me!”
“She can’t, right now,” I reminded her. “She calls it her mind’s eye. When it’s wide open like this, her power is really strong and it doesn’t take as long for the area around her to saturate with her control, but she loses self-control.” Even as I said those words, Elle, who had long since finished crafting her tree and hut, had begun to twist the graveyard all around us. Some of the gravestones grew larger and more monolithic, while others crumbled and swathed in vines and moss. The cracks in the stone path we had walked to get here grew larger and more hazardous with weeds rising to fill the vacant space, and sharp, ominous metal fencing burst forth to frame the path. A few gates littered the fencing, but one gate overshadowed the rest with irregular patches of rust coating its otherwise ornate, sturdy frame and harrowing spikes that looked more fit for the business end of a weapon than the top of a fence. There, beyond the menacing, metal portal laid a grave that had grown far beyond the rest into an imposing stone mausoleum with pillars covered in vines and heavy stone doors sealed shut with an intricate lock made of a polished black metal that shone darkly.
Rather than being frightened by the dark atmosphere, Octavia was positively giddy. She loudly squealed with excitement and fervently demanded, “Skeletons! Make the dead rise!”
Immediately the earth of each grave began to disturb, and hands and arms of of chipped and worn bone started to burst forth from them soil. Rotting flesh clung to some of the limbs in torn, bloody strands and limp, sagging pockets, and I gagged a bit at that sight. Everyone but Bard and Octavia did, really, but Elle reacted worst of all. She began to whimper and roughly fell to the ground, catching herself on her palms and knees. Though her jeans protected her knees from the rough, cracked ground, her hands likely didn’t come out nearly as unscathed.
“Elle!” I cried in alarm as I hurriedly took a knee next to her. I gently maneuvered her to lie on her hip instead and made note of the gravel and dirt in the rough cuts covering her palms. I’ll have to clean them out.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and almost jumped out of my skin as I whirled around. The guy in armor rubbed his hair sheepishly, which explained why it looked so tousled, and he said, “Didn’t mean to startle you. Let me take a look at her.”
“What’re you gonna do?” I guardedly asked, shifting myself so I was between them. I instinctively latched onto his armor, ready to throw him away if necessary.
He noticed my defensiveness and raised his hands placatingly. “Heal her.”
I blinked in surprise. A healer? That’s really, really rare. I glanced back at Elle’s knee and winced at the sight of her palms weeping dirty blood. I turned back to him and fixed him with a steady look. “If you hurt her, I’ll crush you in your armor, got it?”
He actually chuckled to my surprise. “Well since I’m only gonna heal her, that won’t be problem, eh?”
A stream of light began to pour out of him like a brook that flowed through the air to wash over Elle’s hands. I did my best to watch what was happening, but my eyes began to tear up after a only few seconds, and I had to look away. When it eventually retreated, I hastily checked on her hands and breathed out a sigh of relief on finding them healthy and whole. “Thank you,” I said, some of the tension washing away.
“No problem,” he replied with a smile as the light seeped back into him. He laid his hand on my shoulder again. “I’m Paladin. This is the kinda thing I’m good at.”
I looked askance at his hand before shuffling out from under it and closer to Elle, who I wrapped my arm around. “Right. Cool.”
His eyes flicked between us, and if anything, his smile widened. “Oh ho, I see. The pretty ones are always already taken.”
I flushed at that, but he wasn’t wrong, so what could I say to that? In any case, Octavia drew our attention back to her when she cheered, “This is amazing!! Yes, yes, yes! I am so keeping you!” A horde of skeletons stood almost unnaturally still all around us, waiting on Elle to direct them. It was a harrowing sight to be sure, but apparently it was right up Octavia’s alley.
“What class will she be?” Bard far more sedately asked from beside her.
“Class? No, no, she’s better than a class! If she can create all of this, then she has to be the Dungeonmaster!”
“And what about the coin girl?”
That brought her up short, and she turned to consider me, tapping her finger on her chin. “I do like your power, but what class would you be?”
“I don’t really know anything about D&D,” I cautiously admitted.
“Is controlling coins the only thing you do? How does your power work?”
She can’t figure out what class I am if I don’t explain. “No. I can feel and control all the metal with a couple blocks of me, I can reshape and meld it to an extent, and I can make one object at a time unmovable.”
Octavia’s lips started to tug up. “Can Dungeonmaster make weapons and armor?”
I tilted my head, unsure where she was going with this. “Sure, but once they leave the area—or she does, for that matter—they’ll eventually fade away.”
“But that means we can give you a test drive,” she declared, beginning to get excited once more.
In short order, Elle was conjuring up some basic armor and a pair of greatswords under Octavia’s direction. “I, um, don’t really know how to use these?”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said, giving me an intense look. “If you’re not good with them at first, then you’ll practice until you’re the best.”
I turned to look at them again and shrugged before leaning over to pick them up. Well, how hard could it be? Besides, she’s right—I can always practice. They were heavy, far too heavy for me to ordinarily wield in one hand or maybe even two, but with a casual flex of my power, I lifted them as if they were no heavier than butter knifes. I casually tossed one up into the air in a spin that prompted Paladin and Druid to back away warily. Again, it was a simple matter to get the large weapon’s grip to slap into my hand, and I sliced it through the air. I’ll need to make it heavy again before just before hitting anything, or it won’t have the same impact.
Octavia clapped at my little display, and I felt a swell of pride as I lifted the armor from the ground and pulled it apart and around my chest and limbs before fusing it back together. “Yes. From now on, your cape name is Dungeonmaster,” she said to Elle.
“And you—you are Fighter.”