I'd refuted us helping the only person who was there, it seemed an imperial vanguard remained and a vampire had found him, because he'd called out for help the moment he saw us. The reason was simple and obvious, for all of our appearances he was the only one whose duty and training were on parr with killing it, we should seem to him nothing more than some too young for any intense experience.

I'd never even faced such a threat, a real vampire, not like the very different somehow living mutations that my party had chosen those that were the best and worst of at once, this was one whose instincts alone were enough to take out towns alone even if most it's own head were cleaved off. A cowardly, desperate vanguard who wanted a distraction for an edge that might leave one of us dead could die.

I had no qualms about it, his life was in his own hands, and desperation for himself made him a threat before we ever even needed wonder if he was. In one fell swoop and instinctively but without meaning to, this man had revealed selfishness that was fully unbecoming, and so he revealed the tune his heart could not carry on for itself through his voice. Panic, fear.

He was a threat to himself alone. I would not have him become one for us also.

"Just leave him, he is more than capable of surviving, but he fears getting close enough to suffer any miasma in order to use his ki and kill it swiftly. We don't want to deal with anyone who'd have us risk ourself for their ease, not someone whose job it is to protect people by being capable, and though he is alone now it is no reason to start making calls like that. If he lives, it's fine, just as long as he leaves us alone.

"I know he won't blame or come for us after, he just didn't think about it right away and it's human nature to be weak and seek others strength where you lack it, but here in this world that quality shouldn't be a part of him as a vanguard. It would have been culled out of all heavy-cavalry by his age, so, he was either able to hide it this long or unlucky and never caught."

"Alone. It reminds me of that last couple of days when we were home, Alyssa."

"Don't remind us Marguete, I thought we were alone because a nuke or something was on its way, and the roads were too blocked with no phone or internet to call anyone for help so we were just dead. I figured an awful storm or tsunami, earthquake, or such was possible. That California was about to set to surf on out to the ocean or, that yellowstone was going up even crossed my mind."

"You're too dramatic Alyssa, but we were in Hollywood so I guess I can't say you're over dramatic there. It is clear in retrospect they disappeared too, but that we were just too scared to admit it out loud. We all knew it."

"True enough, we had our reasons and I didn't want to scare you three but at the time I wouldn't have ever considered they literally disappeared that way. You hear that phrase, 'Dropped everything and ran.', enough and there us a sure sense in it when that's what you see."

"Not car-seats for babies though, not photo albums and family heirlooms, but most of all not cell-phones and wallets or purses. Maybe we didn't find any clothes where people had been standing in them but the signs were there if you looked Ally."

"I'm glad you didn't share, I wouldn't have believed you though."

"That's what we all did anyway too scared to talk about what was going on, at a time when it was more important than ever to try and put words to what happened. We just went around through peoples houses for two days, but I was the only person looking for answers the majority of that time.

"Everyone else just more or less decided what you did, disaster was coming, not that it came and went."

"What about me? I told you guys when I found those odd things I did, and they were all most of the strangest." Catherine asserted it like the whole world was on a fulcrum, and Marguete would decide whether it went her way or not. "Yeah, that's true too you did, Catherine wasn't numb to things she noticed. She wanted to share with the others." Marguete agreed readily.

It hadn't pleased Catherine but she had no displeasure in it, although if it had taken longer her feelings might have all gone unbalanced both ways."We couldn't, the others weren't worried and it would have destabilized them if we made them think about it too much, besides they were discomforted and confused as us already. Most went straight for drugs anyway after."

All three stilled a bit, looking only outside to calm, before Marguete began to clear up what they'd experienced for the rest of us anyway and naturally, Paige seemed to give levity to their insider discussion by asking the question on mosts mind. "What happened?" She asked clearly, like what they were suggesting could be cleared up by them.

They were talking about an unknown, so at best, all they could do was point to effects rather than shed levity on any causes.

"We don't know what, we just know that there was an after for us, but before that everyone else was more or less leaving together somewhere. They didn't 'Poof' though, they all had head for some direction, and wherever they were going almost nobody was going the other way." Marguete answered quiet and thoughtful, remembering with a straight but distant look that seemed to loom over the others.

"Didn't 'Poof', they didn't disappear into thin air? I thought you said earlier-."

"I said it reminded me of it, but if they really vanished we can't say. Wherever the majority were going I don't know either, but you didn't want to head that way at all. None of us looked that way, faced that way, and we couldn't even keep our back to that way though all we wanted to do was go straight away from it you couldn't.

"Not just a bad vibe, rather than a lone obscure sensation, everytime your back faced that way you felt like your heart was haunted and every sense had an unmentionable reaction to a direction. A friggin' direction. But when you can't walk a straight line, you have to zig as often as you zag to try and go straight as possible.

"Doesn't matter how often you do either, only that you more or less make each one equal so distance and time match your effort and space. You can only guess how often we had to experience that direction, but we did not shy from fear of it, not when we knew it was better to do that often to stay as straight away as possible."

"Okay. I'm lost here, all I hear is crazy logic. I was home around the time you are talking about, of course everyone was gathering, there was a world fair where every culture had their own traditional fair and market. It had a universal bazaar, a literal world yard sale, all sorts of people were going to be there with individuals selling cheap and even businesses were going to be more competitive all in one place."

"Paige let them speak, nobody here was worried about a world fair on the first day it opened. I don't know if any of us had plans to go, but I avoid the first and last days of such things. As well I'd rather think of all the foods and the spectacles and events or rides, the circuses and animals. I want to know what they saw more now though."

Eleanors curiosity won out over Paiges doubt, making her patient enough to be curious herself about what they'd have to say. Marguete went on a few moments after Paige nodded to her with some show of slight but genuine remorse at her impatience. She went from their unbiased early perspective.

"We were.. our father was wealthy and travelled, our mothers were all different because he had a habit of attracting the most confused but generally good hearted women. Mostly. When he died and our uncle ended up with all his wealth and holdings, because our father never got around to moving legalities around we were sent to live with him.

"The long and short is that he knew we'd be able to get it back, what he didn't know or believe is we had no designs on it because we didn't know it and only him telling us damned us. That's how we wound up forced into lives as prostitutes but don't think we took that lying down literally.

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"The thing was when we killed our first johns, they couldn't exactly go to the police about it and we'd left them no choice but to kill us or find an alternative to have us make money. We became slaves in a game, instead of prostitutes in the real world. There was a market for mercenaries, but mens habit of having pretty faces near was quite a lucrative function for profit.

"Warrior-courtesans who get to act and be treated like princesses really won over forced drugging and being beaten and raped everyday, left only to a mans care such women don't live long though, and so our madame was a typical partner already in the organization we were still slaves to. Typical in that way surfaces are.

"We were making a bit of money, from the game that protected us from any real violations anyway we were paid through tips of ours she split equally for us, she was only atypical of what people think of pimps and confuse for madames. Men without care or impulse control make terrible ones, but all the johns and pimps are like that.

"Wealthy businesses and corporations, plus tycoons or celebrities and their kids meant we were not going to fall into the trap set for us. We were not always even going to be escorts, but since we weren't we were not foolishly thinking ourselves going to be let free anytime soon, all we could do was be the prisoners we were until we were made partners.

"By the time we were all eighteen, we were also citizens and high school graduates enrolled in online courses for degrees, so we would more naturally fit in when we went to California we weren't subjected to even minor discomforts. We had trust we wouldn't break, they were holding murders over our head, we were holding huge profit over theirs.

"What is it, stockhold-syndrome?"

"Stockholm." I offered. "Stockhold is a better word for your situations though, it does reflect the captors purposes better but it still pays homage to the original where in just a short period the captors and captees empathize, thereby mitigating or eliminating risk to either. Except your situation was more permanent."

"We had stockhold-syndrome then, and there are a lot more of us in every city and large town than anyone knows, even in the smallest you can find us. Kept like livestock, to be milked for money the despicable find in making people desposable, and if you do not give milk then they'll take blood or even your life. They'll replace you, and you live knowing that if you die, they'll be replacing you with someone else who doesn't deserve it.

"When we woke up and the madame was gone, it was more terrifying than anything but the dire direction. Facing either way between the two was what we did, and we'd all been asleep with our backs to it dreaming when we woke at once. It wasn't like we got it fast, but we didn't understand slow either. The sense was too strong.

"After an hour we figured there might be trouble, but after two we'd walked out of the complex of condos and there was only a dozen others like us around. A few weren't who came near, others around our age mostly. It was a retirement community, and an old partner with a prosthetic foot was the man who was our 'Relative' and legal guardian."

"I have to correct one thing, I woke because my bed was burning in my dream, and you'll recall it was smoking." Alyssa stated it plainly.

"I remember, it was. And we almost destroyed our room completely until we faced towards the wall that our door was on. We were lucky to walk straight out, but then the road where we headed was on our left. It wasn't until hours later a first few followed us, and the first three had a guy hollaring how we were feeling the poles shift.

"It took us a few minutes to convince him that magnetism alone wasn't enough to account for what we felt. Maybe you do feel them somehow, but nobody could say they made your other senses tingle altogether. You could hear, feel, see, and while it did not alter taste or smell, those three senses made no sense when you faced away from that direction towards the other.

"You saw inside yourself physically, your own bones, nerves, and arteries with all else in you black. The crimson of blood, liquid like, the white-violet of nerves arcing like lightning and bones the darkness. If you could control it you could have looked further into any part of your body, as if your eyes had x-ray vision backwards into itself.

"You still saw normal too at the same time, but the sense you were feeling everything with your eyes would overwhelm you. Nobody looked the other way more than once, everyone did however, and when we had as the others did then a third time we noticed how slow they became. It took them an hour to slowly get back to normal, just the hour never happened for them, and we'd have missed it.

"If I hadn't remembered what they last said, we might have doubted there was danger in looking back, but they'd talked about how great things seemed that way and after the hour asked what we thought about it. All that time Catherine had been the only one trying to bring them to attention most, while Alyssa and I were deciding what we saw she'd turned them towards us.

"But their minds didn't catch up, and their bodies had moved so slow despite the effort to move them, which you couldn't do effectively. It was easier to face your head near the direction, but your torso facing it was the bigger problem, so it took far longer to get someone to turn. You couldn't just put them on your back.

"We had tried it, you couldn't even knock them down, most of what you did do merely seemed to make them slowly turn our way as if from stone. So we waited, because they were turning, and by the time they asked what we thought we had already been talking about how time may have slowed for us less since we'd only been turned that way a short while the once.

"Alyssa was annoyed they asked that after all this time and seemed normal, we didn't know they'd spent more time looking that way and had looked more than once, but it seemed most reasonable given that they'd said things looked great that way and all we wanted was to go the other way.

"Catherine was bored, and exhausted from spending so much effort getting them to look that way, she was ready to leave then and there. We'd decided what we saw, and they'd decided what they had. Alyssa said it was likely a tiny neuron star. If it had been a black hole that large like I thought, logic was on her side in that we'd not be walking away from it."

"That big only would have not only been almost impossible to cause, it would have rapidly gained mass, and I don't know any specifics but an exponentially increasing gravity that opposes traditional gravity just does not seem like something you'd miss." Alyssa added, butting in anxious then.

"There wasn't anything we saw the other way, but that was when those two started the criss-cross zigzag jog away from it, only I stopped to figure out they'd only looked that way three times and only for a few seconds by their shared reckoning. They'd noticed that time passed only this time, because the sun was over their heads and now at their back all at once for them.

"I told them we thought somewhere that way scientists had made a sun in the atmosphere, and the other way was safe because who wanted to be heading towards a sun in their atmosphere, people could feel it and were instinctively heading towards disaster by some ill-fated instinct to go towards the gravitational anomaly instead of away from it.

"So we all went, and I didn't need to say anything else, nobody wondered why the power, phone-signal and internet were gone among us. Sure - the birth of a sun in your atmosphere might have such affects, and no nobody wanted to go towards a sun."

"Down here. Sorry to interrupt, this is where we're going to live, or at least this is where I'm going to block off easy access to us from all but one easy and small direction. There are over a hundred escapes scattered and some larger ones crisscrossing out, through these mountains and under them as well as their rivers, and caves, but just one footpath in. I'm gonna collapse the tunnel we go through, after we pass it in a few days."

"Days? Can't you teleport us there?

"No. The excercise is valuable, and we won't get to see the wonder of this place if I do that, I've never seen it myself and teleporting is a risk we won't take if it isn't minimal. It's too dangerous, everyone here will be teleporting here from all over, and if two teleport to the same place none will survive the three-way-disaster."

"Three - oh, the two teleporting are also linking the two places they are in to a third centralized location. Yeah I can only imagine, two at once is pushing it, two twice at once and you get flung away from the line you cross instantly." Paige reasoned it out enough.

"It'll be worth it, part of the wonder is each of these cities are spread across all of this world and very isolated, but their shared capital and central location across layered sections as you go down also layers graduating levels of increasing illusions and defenses. We may never have to fight here, at least not in the last and most remote section, Revenians only made the effort to conquer one land.

"It's the valley that these mountains naturally defend, like a navel, one great circular chain cradling that valley and the other longer but shorter spiraling out from around it. The inner circle mountain range is collectively called the Chalice mountains, the coiling one the Arm mountains. As for the valley, it's called Thirsty-Valley even though it is a lake for a good reason."

"What, you can't drink the water or is it salty?"

"You're closer than you are far. You can't drink much of it, and there are plentiful salts in it, I'd compare it to an IV solution only it comes natural and since it has moderate mounts of everything beneficial with nothing in excess it's even better. It's nothing too different, the heavier elements are too much for considering it an alternative to water, but drinking some everyday is better than taking vitamins.

"Doesn't have bad bacteria in it, and nothing lives or grows in it but bacteria that are good for you, besides the fact it radiates small amounts of beneficial mana and miasma. The mana in it nurtures you some, the miasma will be detrimental to ailments you have.

"There's an old keep there built in the midst of the waters that rises out from beneath. It was hewn from the one big rock protruding from beneath the waters and out, while the only bridge in is upon rafts, and only the Revenant know the manner of getting in. I was awarded this and other knowledge by them, for a disservice, but one made with an honest and earnest mind.

"We should be alone there, safe most of all, and I'll have time to prepare you all for worse."