Teen, 18, Missing, Presumed Dead Outside Dudlin, Mysterious Cave to Blame?
By: The Mountain Prophet Editors 03/10/2007
The Mountain Prophet grieves for its neighbor, three-time magazine cover contributor, and dear friend Salem Cooper, aged 18, of our Little Town by the River, in the Gentle Rolling Hills of Pennsylvania, missing since March 04, 2007. Our hearts go out to him and the Cooper Family. The Prophet will be hosting a silent auction for all three of Salem’s original watercolor covers on its website: here, with all proceeds going to the Coopers to cover funeral expenses.
Tragedy struck Dudlin, Pennsylvania on the first Friday of March, when Dale Cooper came home from working at the mill to find his front door partially open and his son nowhere to be found….
Marina stared at the words “Presumed Dead”. Her news app hadn’t appeared to have made a mistake. The article hit all the criteria: Dudlin, PA, check; Salem Cooper, check; Special Response, check. But, “Presumed Dead,” no, that must have been a mistake. The Bridge couldn’t have died. His symptoms were in the top 1% for pre-Bridging shock responses according to Dr. Morris. The researcher had said over the phone when consulted that she’d correlated those responses with a category of effects she labeled ‘visible-over-1000-kilometers’. Both of them had been excited to see what his first power use would be. Dr. Morris had suggested buying stocks in nearby companies, citing evidence of powerful economic resurgences following the introduction of empowered individuals in depleted, poverty-rich regions.
The article didn’t even connect superpowers to the boy at all. According to them, Salem had wandered into the woods in a fever haze, fallen into a mysterious cave, and been attacked by its monstrous residents. There was no mention of his reaching out online for help, nor anything about his use of a Meta Language the day prior.
And they thought he fell in a hole and died? Preposterous, he would have been on par with Satraps and Zaibatsu Kensei – No, she would confess that she hadn’t considered he lived in the country nor how dangerous telling someone experiencing hallucinations to go outside alone could be, but she certainly had not sent him to die in a cave. Right?
The aforementioned ‘Special Response’ only appeared in the article at the end:
Zachariah Troyer owner of the Oak Crescent Hunting Lodge, has paid to expedite a Special Response Bulletin for further information on the mystery cave and the beasts that lurk within, and has sworn not to operate any hunting trips until it is settled. Mr. Troyer has additionally attached a bounty on the creatures that badly maimed his employee and are suspected of killing Salem Cooper, of $10,000 for a pelt.
Five grand was about the average amount of money she made on an SR Bulletin for a thirty-six-hour shift of forest fire rescue. She was obviously going to go investigate anyway, she owed it to the young Bridge, but it would be nice to make ten thousand dollars without spending three days fighting superheated gas and smoke.
Her phone started to blow up with more news notifications. Other outlets were picking up the story now, all recycling the same information included in the Mountain Prophet. Why had it taken so long for the information to get out anyway? She scrolled through the rest of the website looking for more information.
Ah, the website only updated every Thursday. Jesus Christ, so if something happened in Central Pennsylvania on a Friday, it took the rest of the world six days to find out about it. How was that still possible in America in 2007?
Marina shoved the laptop off her in a huff. She should have just hopped on the first plane over the next day after he didn’t respond to her DMs. How much good was she going to be almost a week late?
She did a lap of her apartment. It didn’t take very long. This was the nicest place she could find while also saving up to buy a place outright. Banks didn’t include Special Responder pay when calculating mortgage loans; the mortality rate was too high. And if Marina was forced to rely on her income from stunt acting she’d still be living in the same size apartment, but in a nicer neighborhood. Although, what was a bad neighborhood to a Licensed Special Responder? She was legally allowed to throw a mugger through a wall, as established by court precedent.
God, how she wanted a penthouse. It didn’t matter where or how tall, but she really thought she deserved permanent rooftop access. She was Lift-Off! She could fly! She’d worked almost seventy fires since she’d started six years ago, and put in well over a hundred of those thirty-six-hour shifts. And she was still a few hundred shifts away from even a modest penthouse apartment. What did it say about the American Dream, if one could work in both Hollywood and Super-heroics and still be struggling to break out of the middle class?
Plus, if she tried to take off on her current balcony, she’d shatter her and the neighbors' sliding glass doors, and she knew from experience that renter’s insurance didn’t cover those damages.
Marina stepped out on her balcony, stucco railing covering up the fact she was wearing only panties below her tank top, and lit up Throne Medicinal’s newest line of artisan herbal cigarettes. The company promised the equivalent of a forty-five-minute deep-tissue massage over a five-minute smoke and had managed to deliver, but at the cost of $600 for a pack of ten. A benefit of living in a roach-ridden vice-den far beneath her means was the ability to spend money guilt-free on exorbitant luxuries.
Taking a deep, chemically relaxing drag, Marina called her agent. Danielle handled both her acting jobs and Special Response Bulletins. Enough people with superpowers moved to Hollywood that every major agency offered the service.
“Danielle,” she said.
“Lift-Off!” came the cheery reply. “Congratulations on landing the new Holzhauser film! Are you excited? Flying in the Alps! You’d better take me some pictures.”
Her heart skipped a beat. She’d heard the director was filming his next billion-dollar action extravaganza but didn’t even know when they’d be starting. “Wait, what? This is the first I’m hearing about that.”
There was a long silence on the other end. “Um,” said Danielle, very stilted, “never mind. What did you want to talk about?”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
The awkward attempt to move on offended her. “No, no,” said Marina. “Why did you think I’d gotten a job on the Holzhauser movie?”
“Sorry, I’m really sorry about that,” said her agent quickly. “I can definitely see why you’d be upset by that.”
“Danielle. Why did you think,” she repeated slower, “I’d gotten a job on the Holzhauser movie?”
She heard a deep breath on the other end. “It’s nothing. I just – another of my clients got – and I got mixed up, but—”
“Which client?” she cut in.
“Miss Serova, I am so, so sorry.”
“Which client, Danielle? Who do you represent that could also take a job flying in the Alps?”
“Uhh…I’m not supposed to tell you,” she said meekly.
“Danielle.”
“Jane Take’emUp!”
A gust surged up around her, only the threat of losing her $60 cigarette kept her from allowing it to grow stronger.
“You. Traitorous. Bitch.”
“I am so sorry—”
“How long?”
Dejected and audibly on the verge of tears, Danielle replied, “Four months. Sorry. They said it made the most sense and wouldn’t hear me out.”
“How is that not a major conflict of interest?!” she shouted. No wonder work had been slow.
“It is. It obviously is,” said Danielle.
Marina continued to vent. “She’s just me but younger and worse at flying!”
“Yes, I know.”
“And her black belt is in Taekwondo, which is just worse Karate!”
“Well, I’m not super familiar—”
“And she’s not even a natural blonde!” Marina paused. “How much is she making on the Holzhauser job?”
“Miss Serova, I don’t think this is healthy.”
“Healthy?! It’s legally actionable, you bimbo! What do you think is going to happen when this hits the trades?”
Danielle was wholesale crying now. “I-I-I don’t know what to say.”
Marina took a deep drag, the physical effects on her tense muscles doing a great deal to calm her down as well. She sighed. “You’re lucky I’m smoking a massage at the moment.”
She heard a sniffle. “Wh-what? Oh, the Thrones. Do they work?”
“Yes,” she said tersely, taking another hit. “Tell you what, after you find a way to make this up to me, I’ll buy you a pack.”
“Make it up to you? Yes! Of course, thank you, Lift-Off. I will, I swear. I’ll find a way to make this right.”
“Good. You’ve got some time, I’ve got something to do on the other side of the country,” she said. Marina had little confidence that the woman was capable of putting their working relationship back together, but she didn’t have the time to get another Special Response agent.
“How easy is it for you to assign me a Bulletin in another State?”
Danielle returned to her normal cheery self. She’d probably gotten used to being yelled at and threatened, reasoned Marina, being a useless cunt and all. “Not very, we use them to promote book tours all the time. I’m surprised we never set you up with a little paid vacation job. There must be fires in Hawaii, besides the volcanos, which I suppose are very large fires, when you get down to it.”
“Great. I need you to look up a job in Dudlin, Pennsylvania.” Marina heard the tapping of keys. She wondered if the woman was by her computer at home or still trapped at the office at nearly eight at night.
Endless high-rise apartment blocks stretched on until the haze obscured horizon, each light in the sea of smog most likely a family or group of people splitting rent, none of whom were saving up for a penthouse. She hoped she wasn’t being a diva about all of this. All told, she still lived a vastly superior life to most people. Oh god, she was absolutely being a diva about this. Marina took a long drag of the cigarette.
“Okay!” said Danielle. “It looks like we have lots, wow! Would you look at that, most of these are Bounty Bulletins. Wow, when the news tells you the countryside’s getting more dangerous you don’t expect this. There’s a loooot of escaped supervillains and monsters in the woods it turns out.”
“Huh. Forward me that list. But, I’m looking for something specific—”
“Op! I found it. Yeah, ‘Exterminate hostile creatures and investigate their source. Potential Body Recovery. Spelunking.’ One hundred thirty thousand dollars, not bad.”
“Not bad! That’s outrageous. Why is it so high?”
Danielle listed, “Spelunking. Body recovery. Extermination. Monsters. It’s also flagged for the Occult and venomous spiders. And then it gets its rural multiplier.”
“What’s the rural multiplier?”
“Oh you know, they have to pay people more to want to move out there. I mean, just consider the ratio of Special Responders to threats. They must be desperate.”
“But I fight fires in the middle of nowhere all the time. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars is what I made on all of those fires last year!”
Her agent laughed nervously. “Well, you know, there’s, um, not a small amount of Special Responders in the area willing to work for mostly publicity, so naturally the market adjusted…”
“We need to unionize,” she grumbled, throwing the pack of smokes under a chair before she had another. “Anyway, tag that Bulletin for me. I’m headed there tonight.”
“Are you sure? This is really out of your comfort zone. A part of my job is making sure you don’t get yourself killed.”
“Danielle,” said Marina sharply, “I am a Bridge to the Elemental Air. I know the Words to the Song of Storms. I have spent literal days flying people through superheated columns of smoke, I can handle a spooky cave.”
“You’re right. Haha! What’s the worst that can happen?”
Marina didn’t respond, opting for steely silence. The audacity of this bitch.
“Alright, you’ve tagged it. Is there anything else? Other than the forwarding you the—”
“No, that’s all. Goodbye, Danielle.”
```
Lift-Off picked the lock to the roof with a wave of her hand. She had opened this particular door so many times it was an effortless expenditure of will. Outside, Los Angeles was muggy and warmer than usual for early March. Smog hung stale and stagnant over it all, especially cloying at this altitude.
Marina lifted a hand to her hair and shook it out, imagining little fairies falling out of the strands. It was the same ritual she’d used to summon her Breezes since she was a child. One by one, sprites fell about the cape of her neck and began to dance about, invisible to most, churning the local air, making it easier for her to manipulate. Simple elementals with no greater than animal intelligence, they clung to her out of affection and devotion, utterly pleased to do her every bidding.
Once her team had banished the smell of brake dust and stale fryer oil, Marina fell backwards into a current and let it carry her straight into the sky. Off the ground, she was all but silent, enveloped in a tightly wound bundle of hyper-dense air. This was the power of a Bridge – the air around her was as much a part of her as her flesh and blood, and she could wield it with the same casual dexterity as the muscles in her hand. Others, elementalists and the broad category of ‘wind users’, could spend their lifetimes working to achieve her level of control and never do so.
Los Angeles stretched like a sea of stars past the horizon, endless concrete and cracked asphalt as far as the eye could see even from two thousand feet high. Twenty million people crammed into a city only kept from crumbling through the use of commercially available super science, unevenly distributed between the rich and poor.
Marina hadn’t intended to stay so long when she moved back. She would stay with her parents for a year or two, save up, and get back to traveling the world. The plan had been to fly north into the deep wilderness of Alaska and across the Bering Strait to Asia and beyond. The journey was to be a great test of endurance, meant to push her powers past the limit into new strata. Now here she was, six years into two moderately promising careers and a connoisseur of, legal, high-end recreational pharmaceuticals.
Why had she badgered that poor woman? She didn’t give a shit about stunt acting; her only marketable skills at the time had been Karate and acrobatics, and her superpowers let her walk onto the job. It had been as much about proving to her parents she didn’t need to go to college as it had been about the work.
The talent agency had suggested picking up fire rescue work – it tested well across all demographics and was a guaranteed in with daytime news shows. Marina had nearly died four times during her first three-day, and had saved fifteen people, six cats, and eight dogs. She had felt like an angel diving down upon hell flying through those billowing black clouds of burning ash.
The experience was somewhat soured now that she knew the State of California was taking advantage of her clout-hungry peers to lowball her out of a reasonable paycheck. What really stung was knowing she was no different than them. Looking down at the city like this it was easy to pretend she was above the hustle and grind, but the moment she had moved into her own place instead of setting out on her travels, Marina had been the same as any other ambitious and insecure C-list celebrity she disdained.
Twenty-year-old Marina would have left for Dudlin the moment she got Salem Cooper’s DM.
She flew straight up. At about five kilometers she could safely enter the Elemental Plane without fear of rattling windows or disabling commercial aircraft. More importantly, every occultist and wind user in East LA wouldn’t know her coming and going by her spiritual ‘wake’.
Gradually, a cyclone formed around her, hitting a gentle speed and staying there. She bundled the winds about her like blankets, the air growing thicker. As the cyclone shrunk, she floated first in pudding, then in silk, and finally the smoothest of wood as the pressure increased past anything that could be found naturally outside of a gas giant. Then with a great bang, wreathed in a protective layer of hyper-dense air, she punched a pin-prick hole in the threads of reality and entered the Elemental Plane.
By the time the echoes of her exit reached the city below to be lost amidst cacophony, Marina Serova was far, far away.