I guess I call it a drama because half my stories have to do with the people around me. That’s how drama works. Guest stars babbling about their emotional hate is more important than explosions.
I guess I call it badly written because the plot feels hackneyed. I mean, anything involving mole people is barely sane to begin with. While they were a reoccurring monster type in my world, they were so pathetic.
Truthfully, real life reflected television shows. Ask Ted about it one day. He’s got this long-winded rant about how daytime soaps shaped what people think for years, and those people in turn shaped the next generation of shows. It’s a giant feedback loop.
Anyway, Clinton suggested strongly that we meet up with the others. Why they didn’t just bail, I don’t know. Kids and their weird ass desires to do the right thing never made much sense to me. Which we both know is borderline hypocritical because I wouldn’t be here helping them if I didn’t want to do the right thing myself.
We returned through restaurant and back to the food storage. A few minutes later the door back to mole land opened and WhiteWash came through. After that, the three of us ventured forth through the portal in time to see Kennedy and Leticia arguing. Not that Leticia arguing with anyone came as a surprise.
Kennedy crossed his arms. “I vote that we just drop the copy of the mothership’s engine or whatever, and let it partially blow this part of the planet up. Maybe mole people’s swiss cheese rock here will collapse in on itself some and be less of an issue.”
“We can’t. That’s stupid,” she responded. “There’s something huge here. Something that can alter reality. There has to be or we wouldn’t feel it!”
WhiteWash nodded then became downcast. Midnight’s forehead wrinkled tightly.
Leticia waved at the other two girls. “Look at us! We’ve got to keep going until we reach the heart of this planet. It, and whatever’s drawing us forth are in the same direction.”
He frowned then his lips puckered tightly. “You sure came around quick,” Kennedy said after his pause.
Clinton shook his head. “Adam came up with a good enough plan. We’ll sabotage these links, one by one, then you and I will stay on Earth to take down the last door. The girls can go where they”- Clinton got cut off as Kennedy literally whined.
“We came to help,” Kennedy stuttered.
Clinton put up a finger to his boyfriends lips. Kennedy shushed instantly but still managed grade-A puppy dog eyes. The speedster said, “We came to help them come to terms. They have. Whatever happens next, we can’t be involved. You can’t be. All this fighting, using your powers like this. It can’t be good,”
Here’s where I tuned out because they whined at each other for a good ten minutes while I ate popcorn. Or I would have eaten popcorn if I had any. I didn’t. And really, it wasn’t actual whining. They were both much gruffer and more steadfast than I make them out to be.
Or maybe you think it’s different. You may find Kennedy weak willed. I’d seen him rip out monster’s blood from their beating hearts and hurl solidified chunks of essentially buckshot into his comrades eyes. Seeing him go from “minor murder god” to all soft in the knees at his boyfriend’s touch made me head spin.
I glanced at the other students. They were in their little pairings discussing life’s grand plan. At some point, they’d received clean clothes. A cardboard box sat to one side with plastic wrapping everywhere. The girls looked almost human and we even had small lamps. Real lamps that meant we were relying on Flux or the girls day-glow effects. Leticia’s hair was wet from water and had zero gunk in it. All around the students were looking better.
I assumed Wilhelm had left them care packages. Ones that were noticeably better than my worn secondhand shirt and cup of broth. Don’t tell anyone, but I kept the cup.
“Look, how long would it take to blow up the doors?” My brain did some quick calculations. Which is to say I stood there with my jaw slack and completely forgot that my earlier grand plan was utterly impossible. “I guess we’ll have to get them all from this side. Then you two can flee through the last door out of here. Assuming we don’t cause some unstable interdimensional rift to swallow you all whole and scatter”) I drifted off because their eyes were going wide.
“Shit,” Clinton muttered. “I got too focused on breaking the link. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Even if we could break them all, what would happen to everyone on this side?” He looked at the girls. “Could you survive it?”
They took turns meeting each other’s eyes before Midnight shook her head in denial. She didn’t think they could. The others probably felt the same way but didn’t want to say it.
“Right. Who here is an expert in worm holes?” I asked.
“Not a class we took.”
“Well then,” I brightened, “You’re in luck! As a road werry traveler I can confirm a few things. One, the more you get popped around, the easier it is to feel when something is going to teleport you. I guess you also get a sort of feel for where you’re being moved to if you’re been thrown around enough.”
It only took a few hundred abrupt relocations to get this far. I’d met one guy, older than shit and twice as foul, he explained that you could even start to shuffle yourself around. Simply because you’d been teleported all over. He also implied I”d have to be bounced around a few years in a row every day to do that. And not find my atoms scattered across the universe.
Joke’s on him. I spent three weeks in some sort of spaceship translocation buffer being partially rematerialized then beamed to the next pod over. The other two stuck with me didn’t survive full reentry and turned into mush.
Clinton shook his head. “Okay?”
“I’m fairly confident we can break all these doors and I can warn you before it goes south. Then you two go through the last door and the girls can do their thing.”
“What about you?” WhiteWash asked. Her voice nearly broke at the idea of me sacrificing myself to deal a major blow to all the millions of mole people that clearly cared about these larder doors. You know, since so many people had come down this tunnel in the last day or two while we camped around the corner.
I shrugged. “Something clever will happen, I’m sure.”
No one had any better ideas. It was this, or walk on and ignore the whole mess we’d found ourselves in. If it mattered that much, one of them should have had a note with one of their fresh sets of clothing. Something from Wilhelm saying, “breaking these doors will turn you into a toad”.
We had no such note. Or at least, no one had mentioned it and I hadn’t really cared enough to ask. Wishing for Wilhelm to hand out answers qualified as an exercise in frustration.
The plan got approval from the group. Mostly because none of them had better ideas but we also didn’t want to walk away and leave these connections. There’d been thousands of mole people and their numbers showed no sign of slowing. Keep in mind that there their meanest members were being distracted by my parent’s army.
The five whatevers picked two whatevers to be in charge of doorway breaking. Leticia went first. She fired up her lightbulb arms and grabbed either side of the frame. Her shoulder muscles were intense, especially in the tight top Wilhelm had provided.
She hesitated briefly and looked at their leader. “You sure? This could be bad. Maybe it’s a sealed portal.”
Clinton signed heavily then rubbed his forehead. “It can’t be. The door is the key, or else the portal would work when the other side’s open. Rip it out.”
For the laymen, they were saying yanking this door off might suck everything into an uncontrolled black hole. Which never happened. Portals are a lot like leaf mulchers. One end, a poor defenseless leaf. The other end, a bad. They get clogged then the engine burns out.
While I thought about power tools, Leticia’s muscles tightened. Veins popped as she pulled at the door. The dirt around them fought for a moment before giving way. My stomach soured and a hint of pepper assaulted my nose. Blackness behind the doorway swirled briefly then went away, leaving a small hole in the wall that looked like every other inch of dirt on this planet.
Leticia shook her arms briefly then went to the next door. Clinton looked at me. My stomach quickly returned to normal so we were probably not in danger of ripping up the local reality. I nodded.
“Should be okay. I don’t feel any stranger than normal.”
Kennedy crouched over the two discarded doors. “These are weird. I mean, they look like wood. They feel like wood. Not a hint of metal. But they make a portal? Is it a totemic system?”
Clinton nodded as a third door flew onto the growing pile. “Makes sense. Mole people are basically low-level psychics. Their collective belief is what makes the magic happen.”
Leticia had dozens more to go and I had yet to see how Kennedy might help. The red energy around her spun and mixed with a sort of green slime. Her shoulder forward posture implied the next door would be rammed.
“You mean their spaceships work, because they think they work?” Kennedy stared up in thought. “That makes sense. Back when we were fighting, they had nothing resembling an engine. None of the normal gears you’d find under a car hood. They basically had boxes strapped to boxes strapped to cones that fired out rocket fuel.”
I could have explained that they creatures were dumb. They had underground drilling machines that never worked for anyone else. Except the occasional mad scientist I suppose.
Leticia slammed into the fourth door. It buckled as green energy lanced through it. Cracks formed along the panels. They spread until the entire door turned to sawdust.
The boys kept talking. Kennedy fiddled with his metal bits and practiced tearing at the three doors Leticia had left on the ground. They were making short work of the metal but not as quick as Leticia’s battering ram technique.
WhiteWash interrupted with a fresh line of thinking. “I don’t understand any of this. Why do they need these doorways when they farm their own materials? Are they larders or invasion points? I mean,” her eyes drifted downward. “They always show up from parks or sewers. Not restaurants.”
I stared at WhiteWash. Her question made perfect sense and pointed out a flaw I’d never stopped to consider. We’d watched them farming. We’d also killed a lot of mole people down there as we fled toward the planet’s heart. Food problems were likely non existent for this race. With how fast Clinton said they bred, any overpopulation would simple mean it was time to invade the Earth again.
Clinton provided an answer. “It’s got to be reserves. Based on that mush we saw before, they probably don’t like our food. All these doors, it’s the like that food that sits at the bottom of your fridge until it’s bad. You never eat it, but maybe if you’re desperate”- he was cut off.
“Or drunk,” Kennedy stated. “Or desperate. Or think that somehow mashed potatoes and cream cheese will go good together.”
Clinton’s gaze went up and to the right and his face reddened. “One time, one time I tried it,” he mumbled.
We destroyed two more doors before Midnight made the next brilliant statement. “Walker would have left us a note if we needed to do this. Or if it was dangerous.”
“Unless he wanted us to kill ourselves,” Leticia retorted. Her body flared Christmas colors then her body collided with the next doorway, shattering the wooden panel. Blackness of the portal beyond faded away as the shards turned into powder.
They considered that while I discounted their theory. Wilhelm didn’t care enough to kill people who already existed. I mean, maybe he had some plot where he let people life until they’d completed some crazy tasks then he’d off them after that, but I doubted it. Honestly, I didn’t really understand Wilhelm’s goals in life.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
He hated me. I hated him. Mostly because he was a smug know it all, and I presume his beef with me was my existence in general. But even now I’m not entirely sure what his grand goal is. Living for so long, through the same thousand years repeatedly, trying to micromanage impossible powers, well it had to wear on his brain.
Maybe his goal was the perfect pizza.
Another door fell apart and Kennedy stopped to take his turn. His small pellet sized bits of metal sunk into the dirt then pushed the door out of its position from the inside. It fell on the ground, cracking. My stomach twisted a bit tighter than before and my nose itched viciously.
Clinton stared at me. I shook my head and pretend the last door hadn’t upset me. It could have been tied to a possible special issue. I mean, when you go through hundreds of them you learn to recognize the smaller signs. Nearly every teleportation problem started with my stomach. So did irritable bowel syndrome.
I shook it off. Kennedy moved onto the next door while I dared start a smarter line of thought. “If there was a quiz on good questions to ask, you’d all get at least a B.”
Clinton snorted. “Why not an A?” he asked.
“Because none of you have considered the really important questions.”
His eyebrows lowered as the young man glared at me. I shrugged. “There’s a giant war. Supposedly Lady Alexandria is out there barreling around, while we’re over here vaguely sneaking in to drop this planet crusher. Right?”
“We’ve been over this.”
“We’ve also murdered a small city worth of dirt rats, and we’re not exactly sneaky. You all glow in the dark and smelled foul. Yet we’ve been here in this hallway fiddling around for a day. Nothing’s shown up to stop us.”
“Okay,” he drug out the response.
“Either this really doesn’t matter, which is why Wilhelm didn’t leave a note about it. Or he knew we wouldn’t be able to finish once we started.”
“You were in on this idea too.”
“Sure. Anything that bones a mole,” my eyes drifted up briefly as I registered how wrong that sounded, “anything that screws,” my second attempted sounded worse and my head shook. “I’m all for destroying this place. But what are the odds that they know where we are and simply decided to bring in some really dangerous monsters to ambush us?”
I mean, mole people came in all sorts of flavors. There were undead ones somewhere. Those were nasty. A human zombie is bad enough but a mole person zombie is foulness squared.
Our illustrious leader’s face went pale. His body blurred and a rush of wind went flying past me, down the corridor. Leticia stared at me. Kennedy stopped in front of his third door and also stared. I shrugged then pointed down the long line of remaining portals back to Earth.
“Better get those doors while you can. High speed. Chop-chop. Only fifty more to go.”
“But it might become unstable if we go too fast.”
I shrugged. “There’s been no signs of problems so far. Or you could all”-
Clinton’s body whooshed into view with a cloud of dirt chasing him. “You heard him!” he resumed high speed, rushing down the long door-filled tunnel toward the far end.
Kennedy and Leticia sped up. WhiteWash and Midnight tried to pry one of the doorframes out off the wall but couldn’t make it work. For reasons beyond me they weren’t using their joint reality altering powers.
My gaze narrowed briefly as I studied the pair. They were still close together but not holding hands. Their hair hadn’t changed too much from the day prior. Midnight’s black hair had white tips with bits of color streaking through. WhiteWash was much the same but in reverse. Maybe they’d talked about their impending mindless merger last night and were trying to slow down the progress a little bit.
It made sense. Superpowers may have their own goal, but the people involved needed time to process. I felt bad because they probably wouldn’t get anymore if they continued to hang around me. Plus, they had zero way of knowing what this thing they were resonating with might do. Maybe it’d kick their powers up a notch, remove them, or allow them a form of control.
I put the thought of my head. They were tearing off doors quickly and Clinton continued to scout. He came back to our group four more times. Each return his face lost color and eyes were wider. Whatever he saw out there, he didn’t like.
As far as I knew, there were no escape routes out of this place we’d found ourselves in. It went left and right with a few dead in tunnels, such as the one we’d packed in last night. Plus, I felt sicker each time they pulled out one of the larder portals.
“We’re going too fast,” I said slowly. My stomach flip-flopped.
“Fuck!” Clinton came out of high speeds with his hands wind milling. He tumbled then rolled along the ground. He cradled his foot and rocked. “Twisted. Twisted. Son of,” he continued to curse.
It didn’t impress me. I’d heard masters at work.
Kennedy stopped with the doors and ran over. He stared at the foot then turned to WhiteWash. “Can you?”
She was already moving.
“Remember,” she started to say but Clinton cut her off.
“Just because I can’t feel it, doesn’t mean I should be speeding around. I know.”
I nodded, mildly impressed. In less than five minutes they’d destroyed a bunch of doors, scouted, gotten hurt, sort of healed, and went back to breaking down doors. Not that Leticia had ever stopped. She smiled each time she battered into one of the portal covers.
“So?” I asked, wondering if I’d been right about the pending ambush.
“They didn’t bring armies,” Clinton said between gasps for air. “Small scouts. Some sort of black furred ones that move almost as fast as I do. One nearly got me on the last trip.”
My head tilted to one side. I didn’t remember mole people ninjas. Most of them time they had scouting parties in their digging machines. That marked yet another new type, to go along with the barbarian worn rider and that giant dopey one digging people out of muck.
“How long do we have?” Kennedy asked.
Clinton’s head snapped to the side as something caught his eye. I turned too but couldn’t tell what he stared at.
He stood up smoothly, putting most of his weight on the undamaged foot. “Not long enough,” he said. “How many more?”
I ignored the unseen ninja moles and tried to count what remained. Our unspoken answer seemed to be “too many”. Leticia snorted, shook her head, then battered down another door. The row continued on into the darkness that existed beyond her glow’s reach.
Clinton looked around then shook his head. “Fine. We abandon this and run.”
“What about”- WhiteWash asked then Midnight grabbed her hand and shook her head. I found it interesting that neither of them glowed any more than usual as a result of the contact but they clearly shared thoughts.
“This way,” Clinton said then ventured down the far end of the hallway.
Leticia eyed her latest door, smashed it, then motioned for the rest of us to move ahead. Given our last few encounters, she likely intended to cover our retreat.
Even limping, he moved fast. His foot stayed in one place while the rest of him blurred too fast for me to keep up.
Then the ninja kingdom attacked. Or black blobs that were barely illuminated leapt toward Clinton.
His arms moved quick. One shadow vanished as it rebounded toward the wall. Metal glinted in the distance and Kenendy’s arms went up. The gleam hit a wall before I even registered what had attacked us. A second later two dozen cobbled together shirkens were floating around Kennedy, ready to be launched at the attackers.
Our slowed member finished beating down the last door and searched around for something to fight.
“They have ninja stars!” I shouted. “Who gave them those?”
Nothing prepared me for the level of twisted awe I’d feel at seeing mole people ninjas. They had swords. They had headbands’. Their clothing matched. They were slim and I swear were more like otter people rather than moles. Sleek black fur. Sables maybe.
They’d faded away after their initial attack failed. Leticia huffed while searching for one to fight.
“This way,” Clinton shouted from somewhere ahead. “We can’t stay here.”
“Ninja stars!” I responded. “Mole people aren’t ninjas. This planet is insane.”
My face couldn’t figure out if it was frowning, smiling, or barfing. The others stayed on alert but a second attack wave didn’t come.
Clinton lead us off, down the long enough of the larder tunnel and one step closer to the planet’s core.
The tunnel’s illumination barely helped. Those ninja moles could have been waiting around any corner, but they never showed up. Clinton kept us moving as fast as his busted foot would let us. The entire time they kept at the ready, watching for enemies that seemed to have fled.
The narrow tunnel opened into a wide cavernous highway of some sort. Complete with paving and dotted lines to separate traffic. In it sat an entire army.
“Out of the frying pan,” Clinton mumbled. “I hate this planet.”
“I’ve hated this whole trip,” Leticia responded.
WhiteWash’s eyes turned all puppy dog sad at that. Midnight clasped her hand and they shared a glance. Leticia didn’t look back at the others but I could see a part of an exaggerated eye roll.
“Turn around?” I suggested. “Ninjas or an army.”
At their forefront sat an oddly well-built mole man wearing a Romanesque helm of some sort. His mount must have been an earth worm mixed with two dire wolves on steroids. I did a double take on their leader because he was almost human. At the least, he had far less fur than his companions.
He lifted a flaming sword and cast it forward with a shout, “Fire the goo!”
Dozens of catapults flung their loads forward. I stared at them and wondered who’s bright idea it was to bring siege weapons into a tunnel.
“To late,” Clinton shouted.
The rest of them were already moving. I couldn’t figure out where they expected to hide. There were no defensive locations anywhere near us. Only routes away.
Our foes volley arched into the air, hit the ceiling, and tumbled to a stop well before even reaching us. The goo piles sizzled as their acidic content destroyed the flooring. I stared at it and wondered how they could be smart enough to build a catapult, but too stupid to understand arcs and ceiling height.
“Thwarted!” their Roman leader shouted. “Calvary, form ranks!”
Before he could announce his next attack, we fled down one of the paths connecting to this wide tunnel. They chased, forcing my students to fight on the run. By now you should get the gist. Mole people. Gibbering. Lasers, worm mounts, and whatever other nonsense mole people had continued after us. Sadly, there were no more ninjas.
The others would turn and fight off a batch, murder dozens at a time, then we’d run again. Every time we found a safe haven, they’d assault us. Only the next time they were mole people wearing medieval knight armor that consisted of stolen pots and pans.
Then we’d battle our way through those. Mole knights were replaced by musket bearing soldiers, who then turned into cave men a few miles away. It went on, and on, and until we finally outpaced our pursuers and found a place to take stock of our current situation. One that lasted more than a few minutes. Taking stock proved easier than expected since it boiled down to the students being utterly exhausted and me hating the grimy clothes.
Exercise really brought out the sweat smell from it’s former owner. Which clearly had been Wilhelm’s intent. After a few hours rest we explored and found another fucking row of doors. New doors. No one knew what the word meant on these ones and WhiteWash didn’t move forward to translate it. That confirmed it for me, after last night they must have decided to take their time with the joint power usage.
“Have we got time?” Leticia asked. She’d been bringing up the rear so if anyone knew, she should.
I didn’t say that but there you have it. She asked a stupid question then went to destroy a door anyway. Apparently she didn’t care if we had a time limit. I started clapping her for getting right to the important part of smashing these monster’s belongings.
As Clinton shook his head, my stomach tightened. The world blurred as purple lines dashed through like television static. Both arms fell mid clap to cradle my stomach. I coughed repeatedly then fell on the floor.
Clinton stood over me and wrinkled his forehead. He didn’t offer me assistance in getting up, which made him sort of an asshole in my book. Instead he asked, “Instability? Now?”
“Nope. This isn’t”- the soup I’d eaten abruptly leapt up to my throat. I swallowed against it to keep from barfing on Clinton. “You’re,” the second attempt went worse.
Clinton sped away as everything escaped from my stomach. I stayed ground-bound, bent at the middle and gasped for air. The soup tasted far less attractive a second time. That’s one fact I’m rather sure of. Nothing ever tastes right coming back. Nothing.
“I don’t feel anything,” Kennedy said. “I should feel a bit if we’re verbalizing.”
I caught my breath then stood up slowly. The sickening sensation had gone away. My belly felt firmly in place, for now.
“What happened?” Clinton asked.
I coughed weakly and banged on my chest. “Failed teleport.”
My vision blurred as something hooked around my guts and pulled. Muscles tightened at my jaw. Both eyes closed but still a flash of purple zapped through.
“Again,” I said.
The girls finally noticed. Their hands linked. Black and white swirled together with a hint of Leticia’s kaleidoscope rainbow. The pulling sensation hit again, harder.
Grey light approached me, but not quick enough. I knew that the force pulling me across the universe would finish well before they could travel twenty feet.
My chest heaved to get one last bit of advice out, but my mind came up blank on what to say.
“Good luck!” I shouted. Leticia’s mouth opened to shout something suitably angry at me, but I couldn’t hear it. The roaring sound filled my ears.
Then they were gone. Or I was.
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Character Dossier
Name: Brittany Millard
Gender: Female
Age: 20 Earth Standard Years
Generalized Ratings as Follows
Strength: 3 (Personally weak)
Intelligence: 6 (Forced to Learn)
Agility: 2 (Broken legs)
Luck: 3 (Adam’s sister)
Attitude: Adventurous, High-Energy, Forced peppiness
Items of Note
Parents are cyborgs. Part cyborg herself. Body has a bunch of nanities that she hasn't figured out how to reprogram. Got a free spaceship as part of the package. Forced to live with her parents. Hates dark chocolate. Wants a kitten.
Powers
Brittany doesn’t have any personal powers, aside from being reasonably hard to kill. Her actual powers come from an alien space craft from a dying race of cyborg people. Her body, and her parents, was implanted with the planet’s legacy. Which only rated a 7 out of 10 on the technological marvel scale, but it was enough to give her family some serious juice.
Her body houses numerous nanites that form into predefined shapes, most related to war and battle. Part of them become armor. Other parts enhance her reactions when aiming weaponry. Between that and her battle steed, she flies through space waging war against all things mean and rude.
When forced to, she works as a contracted law enforcement specialist for several planets. Being contracted involves no training. It only means when she shoots someone, it’s legal.
The pink color scheme is a personal choice.
Fun Fact
Brittany doesn’t remember much about her legs being damaged. She does remember a few nights before that event, when she stumbled to the bathroom one night and heard her brother moaning. Prepared to close the door she instead found a creature hovering above his bed and grinning. Said creature had too many teeth and eyes that didn’t exist within the confines of reality.
Brittany abruptly screamed then passed out. The creature vanished. Her brother woke, and the ensuing family drama carried on. Since then, she’s had weird dreams where creatures that aren’t human occasionally provide useless details such as “chocolate after midnight goes to your hips” and “Kittens are plotting world domination”.
The dream creatures are often right, meaning she’s technically an oracle.