It took some convincing from Nolan to get the two families barricaded inside the house to come out. Their concerns were not unreasonable considering the house sized mound of moving mud stationed just outside.
Slowly they began to calm down, and seeing that the elemental outside clearly had no ill will towards them, trickled out from the front door.
Roy leaned against the garage door as he marveled at the being called Metapelon. The surface of its body shifted and rippled like a liquid, yet it didn’t lack cohesiveness as demonstrated by the great force it could put into its movements. Earth shaking footsteps and whooshing undulations of its extra appendages being just some of the things Roy had seen it perform.
Roy took in several deep breaths as he gathered up his courage, the elemental was probably from the other world and it would be silly of him not to take this opportunity to learn a bit more about the fantastical.
“Hey, uh… Metapelon right?” his eyes darted from side to side, unsure of where he should be looking when talking to the headless elemental.
“You are correct,” Roy could feel the garage door vibrate underneath him.
“So, you were here to help the people inside the house, right?” he was unsure of what to ask, but that seemed like a good starting point.
“It is my duty to help the lost find civilization,” it leaned over, the holes on its torso facing Roy. They probably functioned as some sort of sensory organ to Roy decided to look at those for lack of any better idea.
“Were you gonna take them somewhere?”
“There is a camp some distance to the east where the lost have gathered, I will bring them there,” it seemed that the elemental wasn’t planning on handing the refugees over. It was probably a good thing too considering their food supply was limited and their living conditions was abysmal. Then again the rescued themselves might not see it that way.
To them the group of humans was infinitely more preferable to the giant talking ball of earth. Could they count on human good will from something distinctly inhuman? In fact it would be irresponsible for them to hand the people they had promised to protect over to an unknown entity. Then again, the elemental could probably crush them all and take what it wanted by force.
The fact that it had not resorted to that course of action was a good sign that the elemental wasn’t going to abduct strangers and use them for nefarious ends.
Regardless of any of that, the decision was probably out of Roy’s hands, “The camp, in the east, how are things like there?” That didn’t mean he couldn’t find out a bit more though before moving onto another topic.
“They number two-hundred and fifty-four. I have constructed some inadequate dirt dwellings, and hunted various wildlife to supplement the stock of foodstuffs,” the way the elemental put it made it feeling more like a report than a conversation, Roy’s incessant questions probably didn’t help any either.
“You’re having issues too huh…” a safe haven like the world that had passed by was probably too much to ask for.
“Living here poses several challenges, we are prepared to move south with the Students once I have passed on one of my duties.”
“The ‘Students’>” was it talking about his classmates, or…
“You call them The Goblins,” connecting the dots together Roy realized that the elemental was going to bring its band of people along for the goblin’s migration.
“I see, so you're waiting to go, huh,” he would be lying if he said he wasn’t somewhat jealous. He had the opportunity to leave, but the group he had committed to helping lacked the will to make that decision.
“Your people will stay, and so I will pass on my duty and leave.”
“What?” the elemental probably referred to the responsibility preventing him from leaving with the group in the east.
The elementals voice rose and now the ground trembled with every word it spoke, it was a miracle that nothing dangerous had been attracted so far. Or it could be that the presence of something so powerful had scared the regular denizens away.
“The One Who Calls Forth the Thorned Abominations walks these lands and seeks the Empyrean Fragment. Its success must not come to pass or great evil shall be realized,” time seemed to pause as everyone gathered around the house turned their attention to the elemental.
“Hold on a second, that’s way too sudden, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” though Roy was quite certain they were thinking about the same Empyrean Fragment. The ‘One Who Calls Forth the Thorned Abominations’ part was less clear.
Unfortunately, Mato didn’t seem to think so. The quiet man who had been swinging around a staff in the Task Force room suddenly stepped towards Roy, “Evil?”
“That is correct. An artifact as powerful as the Empyrean Fragment must never fall into the hands of those who seek to do evil. It is said that one can step closer to godhood through the use of the Fragment.”
“Sounds serious, we’ll do what we can,” the man lifted his hammer in a weighting motion, as if he were prepared to ready to smash evil this instant.
“Hold on, we’re not ready for that, we haven’t even talked to uh…, Nolan, or… Owen, yet!” how could Mato accept such an important sounding task so easily, the elemental was level 125, who knew what stopping the ‘One Who Calls Forth the Thorned Abominations’ entailed.
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“We are not born ready, but must become ready,” the things profound sounding one liner certainly weren’t helping.
“First, you gotta tell me about this Thorned Abomination Caller, right?” it didn’t sound as if they could shirk this ‘duty’, but at the very least they could drill out a bit more information.
“It is chaos, it is the embodiment of evil, and it can take many forms. It prefers to appear as a human dressed in green, but with the horns of a demon,” horns, those would definitely stand out.
Before anything else could be said, heavy footsteps sounded from the inside of the house, followed the appearance of Nolan, “What in the world have you been up to out here!”
“None of your business old man,” Mato retorted as he walked off to the side.
Luckily one of the other bystanders had the decency to fill Nolan in, the man’s face was a slideshow of emotions. Anger at Mato, turned into relief, turned into regret, turned into confusion. It took a long while for Nolan to take everything in. Meanwhile the rest of the survivors in the house gathered around outside.
“You wanna take these folks to your camp?” Nolan pointed at the group of survivors.
“That is correct,”
“Fine by me, in fact, we got some more who might want to leave, you care to take them along too?” their leader’s bold statement didn’t receive the warmest reception as the newly joined members of their group protested against the decision.
“It is my duty to gather as many of those who wish to leave as I can,”
“You mind if we go and take a look at your camp first?” Nolan’s gaze alternated between the survivors and the elemental, while his face was creased into a frown.
“You may,”
---
The next half hour was hectic as they tried to persuade the survivors to give the elemental a chance and check out their camp. It didn’t help that the two brothers had their own reservations regarding the multi-story thing of mud. In the end they managed to convince the survivors to at least go and take a look by stating the conditions of the grocery store in no uncertain terms.
From there on out, the journey was smooth. With the elemental in the lead no monster impeded their progress and half a kilometer trek was a breeze, metaphorically. The humidity and heat certainly made Roy wish for a breeze.
As they turned the final corner a few lumps began to from out of the mist. Small blocky building in the middle of a field off to the side of the road. The ground had been elevated and formed into a plateau so that it peeked above the water and kept the few figures walking to and fro the structures dry.
“This is where we have made camp,” the elemental announced, his voice rooted the figures in the distance into place.
Their approach was silent and as they began to climb the hill a figure separated from the rest who had gathered outside the makeshift houses. As he approached, Roy recognized the person as Mr. Brown, their assistant principal.
“They're are the survivors you found at the house?” Mr. Brown looked from one member of their group to the other, eyes lingering on the several guns they carried.
“They are,” the elemental gestured at the survivors, “The rest are Guardians.”
“Guardians, so they do the fighting I presume?”
“I have passed my duty off to them so now we may leave.”
“Sounds good, I’ll go tend to the new arrivals,” Mr Brown hurried off towards the survivors they had gathered up, and at his animated insistence they followed him towards the temporary settlements.
“Wish our people were as excited about leaving as they are,” Nolan grumbled as he led the Task Force into the settlement and looked over the conditions there. They would go back to the grocery store and ferry over the minority who wanted to leave the town.
However, the fighters would have to remain behind and guard those who wanted to stay. Roy resented them, it was unfair that he should feel obliged to give up this opportunity because some couldn’t change their mindset fast enough.
At the center of the settlement lay a small plaza, people meandered around as they chatted in subdued tones. There were students there, people Roy recognized from glimpses in the hallway, which meant it was possible there would be familiar faces here.
“There’s quite a few people her, you think we should look around?” Dan voiced Roy’s thoughts as he stepped into the clearing.
“Sure, don’t see why not. You got a list of people we should be looking for?” he remarked as his eyes went from one face to another, evidently he was already preoccupied with that task.
“Well shoot, guess the guys back at base are out of luck. I’ll be looking around with Karl then,” with a subdued nod from the other brother, the two marched off and disappeared into the crowd.
“We meet back here in half an hour!” Nolan raised his voice so that the two head starters could hear from wherever they had gone off to. The shout earned them glances from the others gathered around the plaza.
Nolan stumbled off after that, followed by Lucy, leaving Roy and Madelyn standing between the mud huts that lined the avenue leading into the plaza. The tidy and squat looking building ringed around the gathering place, each exactly like the others with its rounded edges and conical roofs. If it were not for the earthy smell and course grain of the walls, Roy would have thought they were shaped from plastic poured into molds.
Circular, porthole like windows dotted the houses, and from within poured soft white light reminiscent of the radiance of the sun. Something that had long been buried away by the fog. Curious, Roy peeked into a window, conscious that of the social norms he was breaking in the process.
His eye hovered around the room, noting the chairs and tables made out of stone before he came upon the source of the light. A smooth piece of rock shaped into a sphere was embedded into the ceiling. It shone as bright as a light bulb, but it didn’t sting the eye, instead it felt like a soft caress that drew him in like a fly to a flame.
“Mooom, there a strange man at the window,” a boy in suspenders pointed at Roy with one chubby finger.
Roy reeled back from the window and backed away a safe distance, good thing it was a toddler and not someone older. Hopefully they would forget by tomorrow, or of course the strange man at the window could haunt the child’s every sleeping hour for the foreseeable future. His features twisted into a nightmarish abomination by the machinations of a pliable mind.
“He called his mother huh?” Madelyn butt in as Roy righted himself from his hasty withdrawal.
“Yeah, I mean, what were the chances?” they were probably not in Roy’s favor, there was no school and no work to occupy the people's time so if they weren’t loitering around in the dreadful mist, they were at home.
“Well, there goes your reputation as a man,” she shook her head in a dejected manner.
“Hold on a second, it can’t be that bad right?” if anyone asked, he was just curious about the light, nothing more.
“A shifty looking stranger, a prepubescent boy, and a cry for help. I’m afraid it's terminal Mr. Stone.”
“Wait, that’s not…”
“Aren’t you going to go look for you friends or family,” she cut in, taking the topic out of the gutter.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, right, I was just gonna go, what about you?”
“Let me see, Lestrat’s in his office and my parents are dead, one for quite a bit longer than the other. So no, I don’t have anyone on the ‘to look for’ list,” she checked off with her fingers as she talked, all while maintaining an unsettlingly neutral expression.
“Well, that’s umm… I’m really sorry for your loss, I’ll go and give you some space then…” unsure of what to say, Roy made to leave, but before he could take more than a few steps the girl's response caught up.
“Don’t be, we learn from our losses,” this time her voice was mellow, almost dreamlike as it flitted around in the mist.