Confused understanding hits me like a rogue wave. The Preservation… made this place. They knew it was dangerous. And instead of destroying it, like someone that actually wanted to preserve humanity would, they tried raising it for some forsaken reason. I… just… wow.
I knew the Preservation weren’t exactly the saints they tried to pass themselves off as, but this is something else. And they’re on the way here right now. When the krarig’s somewhere between a few hours and a few days from waking up.
“Fleur. Get all the info here and give it to Mercenary and Architect.” I say before my brain can catch up to my resolve. “They’ll make sure all the right parts come to light. Architect, for now, find a use for the things we found with all the symbols on them.”
March makes a strangled little noise in her throat. “Gambler, I know you’re good, but Mercenary–”
“Listen to her.” Ursula cuts in. “She’s got a good eye for this stuff.”
“Uh, sure! I can do that.” March says… eagerly. Like being told that I’m trustworthy makes her happy. “Gambler, can you go back to the waterfall room? I’m seeing some weird things happening to the map, and I’m pretty sure the Preservation haven’t gotten in, but I want to be sure.”
I nod to myself and flick my fingers. My awareness stretches to touch each of the coins I left behind–at the base, in the waterfall room, and in one heart. There’s a few more places I want to leave coins in, but for right now, I’ve got what I need.
“On my way.” I confirm and push relocation into two more coins. “Fleur. When you’re done here, put these coins in each of the hearts and leave them on the ground. And this one, too.”
A third coin appears in my hand, and once again, relocation fills it. I extend it to Fleur before the others, and she accepts it emotionlessly. Relocation accepts her as the target, and I quickly swap out the one coin for the other two. Fleur looks at me for a second, no expression crossing her strange face, and turns to go back to her work.
“For safety’s sake?” Ursula half-asks, half states.
“Mmhm. Mostly ours, but a little bit not.” I toss Ursula a relocation coin. She catches it, then tosses it back a second later. “Good luck. Find some incriminating evidence we can use for blackmail.”
“Ha! You really are a girl after my own heart.” She laughs as she waves for me to get going. “Don’t have much time before the Preservation shows up. And when they do, I want you to stall the hell out of them. Lie to ‘em, lead ‘em on a wild goose chase; hell, even lead ‘em in the right direction and Fleur will close up the hole we made. Just make sure they don’t have something to get complete control of this place.”
“Find their contingency plan. Or their plan A, depending on how asshole-ish they are. Gotcha.” I salute with two fingers, then focus on the strand of awareness in the waterfall room. “Yell if you need a relocation.”
Ursula repeats my crappy salute, adding a recoil-like head tilt in the opposite direction. “Knock ‘em dead, Gambler.”
My awareness flares, and the world swaps for a slightly different one. I take a step back from my landing point and kick off into the air, feeling the salty mist coil around me like a warm blanket. It’s… really different than before. Something still feels like it's watching me, but now it feels familiar.
Exactly like Fleur.
I shake my head with a sigh. “She’s way more powerful than she’s letting on. But hey, at least it looks like she’s on our side.”
At least until the Preservation shows up. I… keep that last little bit to myself, but from how my jaw clenches and my brow furrows, someone with a good lock on reading body language would know something’s up. That’s not Fleur. It definitely is Pearl.
She nods vigorously in agreement, then desperately mimes for me to be careful. I don’t need her to tell me, but it’s nice knowing she’s always looking out for me. Deep rumblings in the air set me on edge. So many possibilities roll through my mind, and absolutely none of them are good.
“Architect. Point me to the weirdness.”
“Turn to the right thirty degrees and keep walking forward.” March says along to the clacking of keys. “There’s been a bunch of weird terraforming happening in that direction.”
“Gotcha. Tell me if something bursts out of the ground.”
“You’ll see that before I do.”
I chuckle and start walking as thorns whizz by me. They emanate discomfort and pain, but it’s an infinitely weaker aura than before. Whatever Fleur did to lessen them, she’s still doing it now. That’s a point in the ‘not going to betray us’ column.
As I walk, I take a moment to survey the landscape. From up here, nothing much has changed. The waterfall’s still disgusting, the forest’s still huge, and the fountain’s… uh… not there. I stare at the flat nothing under where it used to be; no flowers, no salt, just a stretch of rusty metal.
“Architect?”
A confused, yet cute, hum ricochets around my head. “It’s gone. But it wasn’t all at once. The salt disappeared and reappeared somewhere else in the rig. So that’s how it worked.”
“How what worked?”
“Fleur’s ability. She’s teleporting the salt around, then manipulating it. Not actually making it on the fly. I think she can still do that, but for some reason, teleporting the salt around is less intense than teleporting big bunches of it.” March… theorizes, though it sounds a little too confident to be a theory. “I bet she can only do it in the krarig, though. Perfect environment for it and all that.”
Hm. Weird, but sure. “Why the fountain?”
“I dunno. Maybe it was the most flowery.”
That… somehow actually sounds right. Maybe we’re missing a little context, sure, but it seems spot-on. “Is this the only difference?”
Another rumble visibly shakes the ground. March lets out a startled yelp, even though she’s not the one seeing it in person, then lets out a distant ‘blurgh’ of pain as a fleshy impact thuds through the connection.
“You alright?”
March groans, and the squeaking of wheels accompanies her voice getting louder. “Yesh, I’m okay. It’s coming. They’re coming.”
“It? They? Is that the same–”
A massive apocalypse-twisted monstrosity of metal and salt erupts through a crystal wall. As massive chunks of crystal spin weightlessly through the air, I grimace at the similar features I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to see again. Wheel wells transformed into armor that covered massive limbs. A cabin repurposed into a head. One huge hunk of grease and metal that makes a good enough semblance of a gigantic reptile’s body.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
And a dump truck bed turned into the thing’s three-horned crest, standing way too tall for the things I’d seen at a museum. It’s almost as long as the rest of the dumpceratops’ body, and it’s so caked in salt crystals that it looks like it’s trying to finish one last delivery.
Hydraulic fluid and grease spray into the air in equal parts as the salt landscape digs deep into it, and the dumpceratops lets out a bellow that sounds like a mixture of an eighteen-wheeler’s horn and a cacophony of back-up warning beeps. I instinctively take a step back from the apocalypse-touched monster overtaken by salt, completely overwhelmed by its absurd presence.
“Shit.”
I turn and grit my teeth as I try to formulate any way I can kill this thing. Unlike the dragonjet, it’s built to take a massive beating. And it's about a hundred times bigger than the vendigator. Projectiles will only take me so far, since there’s no obvious weak points to abuse, and I’m not even sure I’d be able to penetrate its armor.
“Hey.” I say slowly.
“You think you can do it?” March asks.
The question slaps me across the face. I feel a vein in my neck start to pulse in time to my heartbeat, but after a second, it dies down. Because I know I can’t kill the thing. It’s annoying as hell, and for a moment, something bubbles up in my gut.
Inadequacy. Not just any inadequacy, either; the kind that comes from someone else pointing out one of my flaws. It feels like when Ursula assumed I couldn't deal with the vendigator. But… I know March doesn’t mean it like that. Ursula has more firepower than I do. And we’re… a team.
“...Architect, tell me the truth. Can Ursula kill this thing?”
“Oh, yeah.” March says easily. “She’s good at this kind of thing. Anyway, you have to deal with the Preservation. They’re at the helicopter right now.”
I blink in disbelief at the news. “You’re shitting me.”
“Why would I do that?”
Damn it, she’s right. “Okay. Tell Mercenary I’m bringing her here. And that she’lll be in midair when she arrives.”
I flip Ursula’s relocation coin into the air. It spins around three times before I get the okay, and I activate it as I pull the blank mask from my inventory. She takes one look at me, then focuses solely on the dumpceratops.
“Fleur’s getting all the info together. She’ll send it to Architect when she’s done.” She says without turning to me and holds out a hand. I flick another relocation into it, and she flicks it right back. “If it comes down to it, don’t hesitate to kill them all. They’re the dipshits nurturing a krarig, so they deserve whatever comes to them.”
“I’ll keep that as a last resort.”
I raise the mask to my face. Tendrils of awareness reach out and latch onto it, pulling it tight to my face. The world goes black for a second, then starts to… unfurl from riht around me. It feels–and looks–like I’m seeing everything through my awareness. I can see the side of rocks facing away from me, the back of my head, and literally everything in a specific radius around me.
But not further than that. Even though I know the waterfall’s off in the distance, and I can hear it, it’s not there. Nothing beyond the range of my awareness is. The sensation’s strange as hell, but it’s also… normal. Just another way to see things, I guess, that I’ve never really had to look at until now. I flex my fingers and ‘watch’ Ursula fiddle with her suit and weapons.
She’s not worried. And, somehow, neither am I. Pearl gives me a bright smile of confidence with two thumbs-up as I latch onto the coin at home base and let relocation take me.
Outlines and darkness spill around me, and less than a heartbeat later, my awareness sketches my surroundings into my mind. It’s weird ‘seeing’ everything without colour, and now that I look closer, it’s really hard to make out writing. And all the screens are perfectly black, even though I know Ursula’s got stuff running on them. The windows, too. However my awareness is helping me see, it apparently can’t help with things that are one uniform texture.
“Wonder if I can get better at this.” I mutter to myself, reaching up to adjust my mask out of anticipation. “Alright. Architect, you think they’ve been tapping our communications?”
“I have no proof that they have, so watch for any context clues. If they haven’t, don’t mention the resort.”
I nod in agreement. “We’re just private contractors hired to get a rich woman her coins. They’re the ‘good guys’ here. Hopefully they want to keep that image alive.”
Salt stings my arms as I step outside. My ‘vision’ radius moves with me like a living bubble, revealing what’s in front of me at the same time as it obscures what’s left behind. It’s unsettling not being able to see the Preservation from where I’m standing, but right now, I need to play the part of a shaken employee.
“Hey! You!” A voice, strong and clear, slams into me with tangible force. I turn towards the source, but it’s out of my radius. “You own this gaudy piece of junk?”
Whoever they are, they sound… annoyed. Not angry or desperate, which is exactly what I want. I take a deep breath and step onto the slope, letting the slick metal carry me down as the swarm of elementals starts to close in.
As I slide down, some things come into view. The helicopter, for one, but there’s someone standing right next to it. Definitely the source of the voice, but they’ve got a full-face covering helmet on. And a suit of futuristic armor connected to the rest of it, just like those two I saw in the wormhole with the massive mech.
This one… doesn’t quite look like those two. Not the right body shape, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous as hell. I hit the bottom of the ramp and roll into an awkward landing, overplaying my clumsiness by grabbing onto my head and pretending to wince for a good ten seconds.
The armored Preservationist facepalms and sighs in annoyance. “Great. Just… great. Get over here and explain yourself.”
I hiss through my teeth to play up the pain. They don’t bother moving, and instead, they cross their arms and tap one foot like an impatient teacher. Still haven’t heard another voice join theirs, and nobody else has moved into my bubble. Either they’re alone or they ran ahead of their group.
“Sorry, sorry, ouch…” I groan and struggle to my feet, all the while judging their response. I laugh awkwardly and give an apologetic shrug. “My employer didn’t tell me the Preservation was coming. Is the krarig really that close to waking up?”
“That’s classified information.” They sigh. “Now I’m only going to repeat myself once, and you’re going to answer me truthfully; is this gaudy hunk of junk yours?”
Something like a nip of electricity flicks me in the chest. Mana radiates from the point of impact, and in my awareness, I see myself connected to the mystery figure by an extremely thin thread. Is it a lie detector? A truth spell? Or is it just a weird spell they’re going to use if I stay quiet?
I hold my hands up in a show of surrender. No point risking it. “My employer hired a bunch of us to come here. Most of us are already dead, and that helicopter belongs to one of them that’s still alive.”
The figure doesn’t make a move. “Who is your employer?”
“The… person who owns the krarig.” I say with real confusion. “Isn’t that why you’re here? Didn’t she call you in to deal with it?”
All at once, the armored figure’s entire demeanor changes. “Yeah, of course we are! I just wanted to make sure you were one of the employees, you see.” They say so casually it sends a shiver down my spine. “And since we’re all friends here, why don’t you show us how much progress you’ve made? It’ll be such a wonderful help for dealing with this monster.”
Okay, I don’t like this person. Can’t let that come through in any way. I plaster on a smile, even though they can’t see my face, and gesture towards the entrance.
“Sure, I’d be happy to! You’re one of the higher-ups, right? Is the krarig really that dangerous?”
There’s a slight twitch in the armored figure’s left shoulder. “Yes, I am, and yes, it is. I am Call, a speaker for the Preservation. Who are you?”
“Isla.” I say without giving it much thought. “Nice to have you here, mister Call.”
Call huffs under his breath, then turns his head and waves off into the distance. I keep myself from showing my confusion, and a second later, people swarm in. Dozens and dozens of people each wearing the uniform of the Preservation, but no others with the full-body armor that Call has. My mouth goes dry at their numbers; I’d prepared myself to kill one asshole, not slaughter fifty people.
Then, just as the last few come pouring in, I can’t help but snap my ‘vision’ to two people who step up at the exact same time. I only saw them twice. But that means they saw me twice. Without the mask, they’d recognize me in an instant.
Diane and Razi wouldn’t forget my memorable introduction, after all.