"Huh?" the Faceless Man turned around - and ate an incendiary pellet directly in the fucking face. His cloak ignited into a roaring inferno, and his skeletal arms flew to his hood as they charred black. He screeched and wailed, shaking the ground and windmills all around them, dropping to what could be assumed was a knee, pushing against the fabric of his cloak.
Cuppy giggled. "Bullseye!"
Crocus stood straight up again at once and shook off the flames, literally and metaphorically fuming.
"Miserable fecal green smear, how dare you assault ME?!" the Faceless Man bellowed.
"Watch this, I'm going to do it again." Cuppy answered, sticking his tongue out.
Jumping in the air with athleticism he hadn't yet really shown off to his friends, Cuppy performed a backflip, pulling his slingshot string back and letting loose another napalm-filled capsule, grinning ear to ear as he landed in a squatting position to watch the effects a second time.
"Are these windmills? You some kinda closeted green energy freak, reaping souls to lessen the carbon footprint?" Cuppy said, probably over the sounds of Crocus's agony in the background.
Crocus snapped his fingers, and the flames went out. "These are merely nostalgia. Why should global warming concern me, when the whole of existence will begin anew? That you are here amazes me, I'll admit. How much did you see, hatchling?"
"Pfft, nostalgia?" Cuppy stifled a laugh. "Nerd." At Crocus's question, Cuppy's childlike expression of laughter and mockery faded all too quickly into a face far more serious than anyone his seeming age should have. His voice was almost a growl, and his knuckles were white.
Trailing metal strings hovered above his childlike silhouette, the ends making metallic whip cracks and flailing like the tails of some distressed beast about to charge. "I've seen everything. And when I wake up, I'm gonna ruin your party."
Crocus folded his arms.
"You're more than welcome to try."
A shadow fell over the World of Forms as something immense took up the sky. Looking up, Cuppy saw what looked like a burning orange moon, shrouded in atmospheric reentry flames, plummeting toward the field.
Cuppy whistled at the heckin' extinction event - he was staring into the cataclysmic barrel of the meteor that ended the rule of the dinosaurs in Earth's prehistory.
"You mad?" Cuppy asked.
-
CLEAR! Cruciform Striga announced to itself, and gave their shared heart a final electric shock.
-
Cuppy disappeared from the Faceless Man's domain a second before impact.
-
He woke in the arms of Cuppet, who gave a relieved smile.
"Hey bro. I had a good nap." Cuppy gave a peace sign. He stood up and stretched. "That was kinda close."
The puppet helped his brother to his feet, wiping a bit of dried blood off Cuppy's hoodie. He saluted, then folded himself into Cuppy's backpack.
Cuppy was sore, considerably so. Heartburn, like he'd just eaten a bucket of hot wings and washed it down with melted butter, then been punched in the sternum by Mike Tyson.
Still, he plastered a smile over a slightly pained grimace as he shouldered the bag and began to walk home. "If anyone asks, it's ketchup." Cuppy says, glancing at the bloodstains on his hoodie.
He whistled as he began to walk out of the alley behind the Institute, blending into the small crowd of pedestrians in case there were cameras watching for him. Once sufficiently far from the facility itself, he took the needed turns and detours to end up back at the neighborhood.
-
That's it! Richie realized.
"Frey, quit grooming yourself, get in here. I figured out why this hunk of junk -" he kicked the wrecked tracer - "was unnerving me."
The wampus cat gave a throaty meow.
"Yeah yeah, I'm getting to you, just hang on a second."
"The tracers me and Cup ran into down in the sewers were like angry holograms. Couldn't touch them but they could definitely touch you. This thing is still a tracer, in a sense, but they built it into a shell. Downgraded tech. Why would whoever's cranking these out-"
Cuppy interrupted, having slipped in through the open front door. "The Institute." he said, shutting it behind himself.
"Right, thanks Cup, why would the Insti-wait a minute!" Richie blinked at the messy haired Cuppy, eyes scanning over the boy's bloodsoaked hoodie. "The hell have you been?!" he said, his voice failing to conceal his relief Cup was okay.
Freyja tackled Cuppy into a matronly mamma wolf hug, burying him into her mane of black lycanthropic hair.
"Don't you ever scare us like that again, young man!" she coddled the puppet moppet.
Cuppy smiled despite the strain this put on his clinched magnum hole, and he scratched behind her ears.
"Cup. What's up?" Richie asked. "I sent you to go get recon on if the power outage was localized or not, what took you so long? Holy hell man, you've got blood all over you."
"Just ketchup." Cuppy said.
"What? Why? Richie scratched his head.
"Getting in touch with my feminine side." Cuppy non answered.
Richie looked to Freyja, who shrugged. "Don't ask me."
"But I've got more important scoops." Cuppy said.
"The Institute's head honcho, at least here in the city, Miss, er, Holly's real boss, is kinda an unstable wreck." he said, scratching at his wound absentmindedly. "He's the one running the tracer-making. The hard-shell ones are probably being made 'cause of budget cuts, from what I gathered." Cuppy said, digging in his bag for a bunch of rolled up files he'd swiped from the office before his unfortunate bullet catching game.
Freyja's acute sniffer detected that this red substance on Cup's hoodie was not the delectable tomato paste she'd probably never admit to chugging a bottle of at one point in time, but the much more close-to-home smell of dried blood. Her lupine brows furrowed.
"Based on what we saw in the red tunnel, I'll bet the hologram ones are what's sucking up all of our electric power." Richie said.
Freyja startled. "That reminds me, this place isn't even supposed to stand in the first place, let alone have salvageable utilities and a fish farm." Freyja's ears perked up.
"What do you mean?" Richie raised an eyebrow.
"You asked what I was milling around doing in the junkyard during my scrap hunts. I found some very concerning out of date news articles."
"What have you seen?" Cuppy asked, already suspecting the answer.
"This complex was burnt to a charred husk, a ruin, a while ago. Some kind of scandal involving corruption and mafia fronts. Yet, here we are, making our best unmolested, and without opposition from other tramps or low-profile crooks on the run. Doesn't that seem impossible to you?"
"Yeah, come to think of it, I don't know how I got here in the first place. It was like my thoughts came into their own and drove my legs across the rooftops. Incense was burning somewhere in this complex. How and why? It's been abandoned, and according to you, reduced to scorch marks."
"Then I showed up, mind blank." Cuppy said. "Here. Not there, or in Kansas - Here. Right when you needed helping freezing out closet gators."
"I had a dream about us. All of us, I mean. I saw you-" Richie pointed to Freyja. "hand the US military and a giant murder chicken their asses so hard it blew your back out, and your body into the Backyards."
"The Backyards at our tails now." Cuppy thumbed to the forest.
"What do you mean?" Richie asked.
"Freyja didn't read some false reports. This place burnt down. I saw something while I was out in my own little world though. Something that adds everything together. You told me about the phantom pain, Richie."
"An empty cycle of memory without insight." Richie nodded.
"Imagine a cycle of memory so powerful it retained human form, soul or otherwise. Now recall the fissures into the Backyards, which I think we all agree are some kind of dreamy hub between worlds and possibilities. Why is it that each of us start to think of those temporary doorways as wandering corridors?"
"It's..." Freyja said, "Because they wander."
"Yes. But they don't pop up just anywhere. They drift, like anything else in a tide. The causality of one world had its own web of currents, like the gyres of the world oceans. Fissures - which only the astute can perceive - flow in and out of specific ranges in Station Bay. The jester can't just slip into his nightmare world at will, he still has to be in the right range. Certain conditions might broaden or restrict those circles, but he can't force the gateways to bind to one spot."
"But?" Richie asked.
"But, maybe a powerful enough memory can." Cuppy said.
"What was your vision?" Freyja asked Cuppy.
"I saw a small town on the west coast called Riverview. It had superficial similarities to Station Bay. Similar park areas, proximity to water and islands - but, namely, the Misty Glen housing company complex designs, the very same that ended in flames here. A boy I saw in that vision - Dares - was some kind of psychic prodigy. The Faceless Man targeted him in particular. He lived in a Misty Glen unit, until the pajamas jerk burnt it down, kidnapped his friend, shot him through the heart, and left him buried under burning rubble."
Freyja and Richie recoiled, remembering their own childhood traumas.
"Somehow that didn't kill him," Cuppy said, "but his own despair did. He threw himself into the river and drowned - and the Faceless Man took his soul."
Freyja folded her ears and whined.
"But what does that have to do with us?" Richie asked.
"I think the Dares kid left behind a phantom pain - banked on it, to carry out revenge. I think we're the instruments of that revenge. A spirit I spoke to in my vision told me some hippie ripple jazz about a river never dying, even after the bed runs dry. Its memory endures. Its will is inherited."
"That remnant," Richie said. "If the Faceless Man was bound to this Riverview place, then he took that remnant and used it as an anchor. He knew that the complex here in Station Bay was a dead ringer for that kid's home, and he somehow put the phantom pain and a corridor together. He bound a wandering corridor here, and the power of the Backyards rebuilt the ruins in this guy, Dares's vision. Is that what you're saying? That we're actually sort of in the Backyards right now?" Richie asked.
"So it's not a wandering corridor at all. Just a corridor." Freyja said.
"Leading us all to meet here, letting us find each other through his backdoor from Riverview - why? What does the boogeyman get out of letting us know all this?" Richie folded his arms.
Cuppy shrugged. "He did call it a game, didn't he?"
Richie dropped into a cross legged thinker pose.
"I wish to see the next stage of evolution, and have a hand in its dawning." he paraphrased what the Faceless Man had told him inside the unit.
"Sounds like an egomaniac." Cuppy comments, brushing his hair out of his face. Freyja hummed. "Murderers often leave hints and clues, actually want to be found out. Fits the bill for ol no-face." she said, borrowing a wrench from the tool bag to use as a back scratcher. She got to work, one of her feet tapping involuntarily as the sweet itch relief consumed her lupine side.
Richie nodded. "Ego's always a part of the bad guy trope. I'm betting the good director's got buckets worth." He says, staring at his reflection in the shiny surface of the dead tracer's shell.
"Mrap!" the wampus cat complained.
"He's getting indignant." Freyja thumbed over to the over-limbed feline.
"Oh yeah, Cup, that reminds me. Think you can work your magic sewing our old frenemy there back into shape?" Richie alerted the puppeteer to the crippled folkloric predator.
Cuppy ambled over to the mummy-wrapped cat and waved. "I remember you. How're the third degree bum-burns?"
Upon seeing the face of his oppressor, the wampus cat erupted into a shrill, bloodcurdling symphony of terrified, PTSD-fueled wailing.
Cuppy simply snapped his fingers and sewed its mouth shut.
"Don't be so melodramatic." Cuppy frowned. "You attacked me, remember? Don't tell me you've never become the hunted before?" Cuppy clucked.
Seeing that great web of fate strings within the Abyss had stirred something in Cuppy, an innate sense that was further dredged up to the surface by his abrupt rebirth into this world. He felt like he had some kind of holistic, total knowledge that was just there at his grasping fingertips, like he could see the dangling threads of a patchwork quilt of reality. The mental evolutions he had rapidly undergone within the memory of Riverview cemented some esoteric wisdom that everything was bound together. As such, it followed that he could sew anything and everything.
Soon, it would be time to put that theory to the test, and suture the poop-spewing furrows within the pond bed closed.
Meanwhile, Freyja's ears folded, and her nose wiggled. "I smell something minty."
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Cuppy looked around a bit too before tending to his involuntary patient. "My strings feel vibrations too. Underground."
Richie stood up and stretched. "Alright, well, this tech is beyond me anyway. I'll do a perimeter check while you catch up. Been on my ass too long anyway."
Richie's dragons sensed something coming too, but kept this to themselves for now. They were also debating, now that the truth of the black rain and the shades was soon to be illuminated, if they should tell their host of his forgotten venture in Tide Town yet - and of his declaration of war on the soulless scourge.
None of them realize... the twin dragons thought in unison. The Adversary we are against - he is their king... Entropy doesn't need to hide its hand. The end comes to all.
The footfalls were the first thing that defined the vague feeling of darkness into a physical presence. Quadrupedal, if one was inclined enough to listen to the pattern. Big, bounding steps that thundered through the treeline.
Freyja sniffed the air harder, closing her eyes to isolate the scent. "Smells like a big cat. And...dead bugs? No,....yes! Bug blood. Sounds like a fuckin' rhino stomping around..." She growls, opening her eyes and focusing through the tall pines that stood sentinel across from the neighborhood. "All those things together make no sense to me." She adds, whimpering slightly. She glanced over at Richie. " 'Bout you?"
Richie was clutching his head, swaying drunkenly on his feet. "I don't feel so good." he moaned.
Cuppy gave a brief glance at his friends, but decided to leave observation duty in their hands as he tended to the wampus cat. Long, fine silvery threads unfurled from his fingertips and burrowed their way into the cat's body, glistening like slick gristle. "I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I feel like I've gone up a few grades." Cuppy made small talk with the horrified wampus cat. Cuppet absentmindedly fiddled with the feline's twin tails.
Cracked, slipped discs realigned themselves and burnt, lacerated flesh began to weave itself back together.
"I really should have realized it sooner. If eating plants allowed me to make root threads, then eating meat should help me recreate nerves, tendons, and flesh, strip by strip. Still though, I'm no doctor."
Of which I'm painfully aware Cruciform Striga thought silently. Who do you think restarted your little hummingbird heart?
"We should probably get a doctor sometime." Cuppy wandered off in thought. He accidentally sewed a rock to the wampus cat's ass in his ineptitude. The cat smacked Cuppy as if to chastise his dopiness and get him back on track. The mention of meat had also set its mind fixated on the goal that got it crushed in the first place - a meal. Its ribs pushed out against thin, sallow skin.
Cuppy's strings felt the cat's stomach growl.
"You know, I would have fed you if you just asked. Sheesh. It must be awful to be part of the food chain." he pat the thing's head. "Richie, feed the pussy!"
Richie nearly landed on his face.
"Yeah Richie," Freyja chuckled. "feed the pussy."
"Would everyone just shut up and focus?!" Richie demanded, bright red.
He looked into the distance again, his dragons coiling and silently growling.
Richie resumed sniffing, aided by his runes. "I can't smell anything under this obnoxious peppermint. Its searing my sinuses."
Moments later, it was made clear why.
Chikita, plus Holly, hugged around her waist, burst out of the brush astride Chinokiri, who was now the size of a Siberian tiger.
"JESUS!!!" Richie jumped his height and smacked the top of his head on the underside of a low hanging bough.
Freyja blinked rapidly. "Chikita? And the oily secretary? What are they doing here?" she pointed to the grass beneath their feet.
"Yo." Chikita waved, panting, and slumped.
Holly looked sickly green from motion sickness multiplied by exposure to the vampiric cloud in the form of a kyuubi, and summarily fainted off the back of the beast.
Then, Chinokiri herself laid down, paws folded, and fell a facsimile of asleep, her sides heaving rapidly.
"Crashing with you guys for a minute, things got dicey out there." Chikita laughed weakly.
Richie scratched the top of his struck head while Cuppy waved without looking away from his veterinary work.
"The more the merrier." Cuppy said.
"The hell it is!" Richie growled.
He rolled his sleeves up. "You've got a lot of nerve throwing yourself on our doorstep after multiple passes on my life, and knocking me out!" Richie growled.
"Ice under the bridge." Chikita shrugged. "If it's any consolation, I'm a bit busted up." - she then collapsed.
Richie noticed the bruised, bleeding wreck that was her body, and turned pale. "Yeah you are. The hell happened to you guys?"
Holly, speaking intermittently through temporary fits of asthma, wheezed "bad... thing... sewer..."
Richie exchanged a look with Cuppy, picturing a feisty O'Gravy rotating his knobby fists.
"Yeah, what else is new."
The wampus cat mewled pathetically, flopping its head to the ground in dejected resignation. Cuppy paused his amateur surgery, skipping over to Chikita to check her wounds out. When his strings pierced her skin, he shuddered slightly. "Huh. Cold Blooded?" The boy muttered, starting to suture and stitch what he could, tongue sticking out as he focused intently on the task.
Curious, Freyja cautiously approached the sleeping Chinokiri, sniffing at it and resisting the urge to cough. "Smoke...fox?" Freyja tilted her head, wondering if she'd accidentally put magic mushrooms in the spaghetti she'd made yesterday.
Richie knelt beside the fallen Holly. Not really sure how to help directly, he just sort of stared expectantly. >:|
Chikita regarded the small blonde thing stitching her together, her eyes tracing up the strings to the determined face of their pilot. "How are you doing what you're doing?" She asks, tilting her head up to watch his work.
The boy shrugs. "Cuppy is Cuppy. Haven't always been able to, but I don't really remember when I couldn't very well." He says. Cuppet pokes out of his backpack, waving enthusiastically at Chikita.
Uttering an involuntary yell of surprise, she rolls away from Cuppy and the sentient jumpscare puppet. "The fuck is that?!" She says, pointing for a moment, the pain of her still-tender wounds lagging a bit to register. Once they did, she winced and reluctantly rolled back towards Cuppy, making sporadic eye contact with the puppet. "That's my bro, don't worry, he's friendly."
Blinking a few times, Cuppet hops out of the backpack, unfolding his legs so he could introduce himself, shaking Chikita's hand. She began to ease up, seeing that it was indeed friendly. "Uh-huh." Chikita says, laying her head back and squinting as she pondered how the hell that made sense.
"This thing looks familiar." Freyja poked the fox with a stick.
Richie regarded Freyja, his hand clasped over his mouth and nose, Chinokiri's ambient particles searing his dragon sniffer. He could feel grains of his soul trickling out, into the innocent-looking vulpine vapor.
"This thing picked my pocket and helped leverage me into paying for Ice-Cunt's-" he pointed to Chikita - "-lunch the other day. Only it seems she had a growth spurt."
Chikita chuckled. "I was surprised myself." she said, standing up and checking herself out as Cuppy snipped the remaining loose threads. "I think four eyes gave her a boost somehow. How is the smarmy stalker, anyway?"
Cuppet ambled over to Holly, who had gone still and silent. He leaned over her and felt her neck, then looked up at Cuppy and made wood noises.
"Oh, I see." Cuppy nodded. "Bro says Miss Yule has no pulse."
Simultaneously, Richie, Freyja, and Chikita smacked him angrily - Richie's heel fell on the top of his noggin, Chikita's kneecap in his side, and Freyja's uppercut in his tummy.
"THEN FUCKING DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!"
Cuppet took the liberty of pressing his foot to Holly's chest. She heaved, and a great sputter of liquid smoke splashed out of her mouth like a tall white fountain. She shot bolt right up, coughing and screaming.
"Holy shit!" she cursed, wiping her mouth. "I saw a beautiful stone pyramid in the lush jungle." she trailed off, wistfully.
"First time?" Cuppy asked - seemed everyone was getting trendy near death experiences these days.
"Morning." Chikita waved to Holly.
Holly responded by football-punting Chikita through the window of a vacant unit.
"STOP BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU!" Holly roared, then coughed weakly and fell down again.
Chinokiri smiled in her sleep as the expelled toxic mist rejoined her cursed mass and nourished her.
"But it's so tasty." Chikita quipped, licking her lips as she lay in the shards.
Some of her surface-level stitches came undone, but by this point the Cuppy Bros were preoccupied, jumping up and down on the bouncy smoke fox like a fluffy trampoline. The mythic yokai opened one eye and gave an aggravated murr.
Holly pulled herself into a sitting position and cracked out her sore ligaments.
"Did I overhear you being concerned for my well-being, helhound?" Holly asked Freyja.
Freyja chucked a fireball just past Holly's face. The extraterrestrial anthropologist's eyes widened as they tracked the projectile's path, and she felt the flash of heat roll across her face.
"Don't get the wrong idea." Freyja glared. "I hate your guts. I just need you vaguely alive to answer some questions. Like what you did to bulk up Chikita's pet, what these tracers are and how they work, and what the two of you were doing in our territory."
"Oh, is that all?" Holly adjusted her glasses, then grimaced as the cracked lenses fell out.
She heard a feeble meow and looked over at the wampus cat.
"And this is?" she asked.
"Another one of your victims." Freyja growled.
Cuppy tilted his head. "Actually, that was-"
Richie dropped a shushing elbow on the top of Cuppy's skull, making him literally bite his tongue.
Cuppet's wooden hands went to his hips in an irritated stance at the bonking of his bro, and he plucked a pinecone off the ground, softball throwing it at Richie so hard that it whistled, nailing him right in the forehead where it shattered gloriously with a satisfying crunch. It juggled another between its hands, shifting its weight from foot to foot.
The dazed Cuppy began to stumble in a daze towards the house Chikita'd involuntarily inspected the windows of, tongue lolling out of his mouth as he muttered something about ice cream. A few minutes later, he'd be dragging Chikita's limp form out of the house back to the rest of the group, having been careful not to slide her across broken glass.
"Why you little-" Richie threw himself at the freaky horror prop, erupting into a great dusty scuff ball of violence. Chikita laughed her ass off, while Chinokiri grumbled about the sleep disruption, and shrank back into its vessel, curling up for a nap in her silent chamber.
Freyja's ears twitched at the frantic rough-housing sounds, and she gave Richie and Cuppet a death glare.
"C h i l d r e n" she said in a warning growl.
Richie and Cuppet stopped, faced her, and quietly sat down. Richie pat Cuppet's head.
"That's better." Freyja nodded. She turned back to Holly. "Now then-" she snapped her fingers, and a demonic arm of flame burst from the ground beneath the wrecked tracer, spinning it around like a toss ring, before passing it over Holly's head. Freyja caught the sentry weapon and pointed to it, like a big ominous hula hoop. "What are tracers, how do they work, and where do they derive their power source? We've had an annoying prolonged blackout here, and I have a funny feeling you asshats are why."
Holly grimaced and sighed, crossing her arms. "Don't count me among them anymore, I'm pretty sure I'm fired, if not earmarked for summary execution. Oh, what the hell, we all have the same enemies now anyway. I'll tell you everything I know. You kids do the same, yeah?"
Richie cracked his knuckles and smirked. "Finally. About time we nail down exactly what's going on. But first-"
He gave an accusatory pointer finger to Holly. "Your skirt is way too short!" he growled, blushing.
Holly's eye twitched. "Who cares?!"
Cuppet sat on Chikita's shoulders in a piggyback position, massaging her scalp idly. Despite the wooden digits, it was oddly relaxing. It patted her head gently, clearly trying to lower the group blood pressure and raise the cohesion one person at a time. The blue-haired warrior was initially tense, but relaxed into it, catching onto the puppet's intentions. "Alright, everyone take a shot of sake, mellow out so we can distribute what we know with minimal inter-bitchery." She said, pulling a large gourd from her hip and popping the cork.
She passed it to Richie first. Sniffing the stuff, he nearly passed out. "Fuckin' christ, that's strong." He said, amping himself up for a bit before taking a rather wimpy sip.
"Weakling." Chikita quipped. Cue irritable Richie noises. Next was Freyja, who took a full gulp, passing it on wordlessly. "Damn. I guess you kinda drink for two, with your wolfy side 'n all huh?" Chikita said, reluctantly handing the gourd to Holly, who sniffed at the liquid as well. "Ick, I'm more of a cider gal." She said, begrudgingly taking a sip.
Chikita, being an import from feudal Japan and having no qualms about giving alcohol to toddlers, handed the gourd to Cuppy without a second thought. Cuppet pulled her hair and lightly slapped her forehead, shaking his head emphatically. "Oh right, none for the halflings. Stupid nanny legal system." Chikita huffed. "Alright, now that everyone's a little lubricated, who wants to go first?"
The wampus cat, sufficiently healed to hunt for tiny game, dragged a mouse into the center of the circle, strutted around it proudly, then gnawed on it awkwardly.
Cuppy, seeing the two-tailed, six-legged predator struggle with its prize, opted to carve the mouse like a tiny roast chicken. The wampus cat shook a little, its amber eyes betraying a frozen thousand yard stare on impact with Cuppy being anywhere near it, before it vacantly resumed its meal.
Freyja shrugged. She wasn't in any hurry to let on more information than she needed to just yet. She had no proactive bones in her body, being a potato sharing space with the boys. If Richie and Cuppy wanted to coordinate with these guys, that was their call, and she'd speak when spoken to. Instead, the speaking stick flopped inelegantly in Holly's hands. She scratched the back of her neck and steeled herself to cross the whistleblower line of no return.
"As you've seen, tracers are a defense response created by the Institute, designed to lock in on invading entities from other worlds, dubbed foreign bodies. The ones considered threats are marked ferals, and because Director Mason fears them, that means all foreign bodies are ferals. The primary tracers were intended to obliterate these creatures before they could fully materialize. Mason and the city at large are unaware of the Backyards, which seem to be a collective, maze-like hub between different realities, drawing on the mental imagery and associations of each person subjectively experiencing it. For everyone else, their only insight into other worlds are the ether fog emissions, clouds of primal substance, neither fully matter or energy, that ferals are materializing through. Thus far, we've barely covered these up as gas leaks, but that ship is sinking. Best anyone could theorize, the clouds are far more violent and sudden than the subtlety of the Backyards. It may be that those using them to bridge worlds aren't carrying their true physical bodies over, at least not in full. This is why they've been likened to miniature big bangs - sudden bursts of the power of creation itself. It would also explain why most of the invaders have limited memories of their origin, and allow primitive instinct to take over. As for the mechanics of the tracers themselves, the preemptive units sense these unique energy signatures and bind to them, disrupting the synthesis of proteins."
"There's two kinds we've run into, hologram-y and impossible to physically hit, and the hard shell donut of doom kind." Richie said, pointing over his shoulder at the wrecked tracer they'd saved the Wampus cat from.
Holly nodded. "The holographic kind are masses of focused radio and light frequencies, they're dependent on cell towers to form and function, so they operate mostly in urban areas. The hardshells were mostly made due to budget cuts, but they have the advantage of being able to go pretty much anywhere. They use magnetism and sonic frequency to move, and embedded sensors to detect anomalies. Downside is, they can be killed. Only way to fight the pure-energy tracer is to delete the tower powering it."
Richie nodded slowly. "That makes sense. We've only really run into them in the city. I'm guessing there's a certain component of the cell tower dedicated to powering tracers, right?"
"Right," Holly said, kneeling on the ground and drawing a shape in the dirt resembling a vertically stretched hexagon. "There's a unit on the towers that looks like this, usually unmarked, white, pretty unremarkable if you don't know what you're looking for. If you disable enough of them in the city, the tracer force would be limited to physical deployments, which introduces a lot of detection risk from the citizenry. Granted, so would not stopping anomalies from coming through, which would also happen if there were no tracers. As I said though, that ship is sinking anyways- detection without sufficient excuses or official explanations is coming. We'd better just figure out where they're coming from, if we wanna stop all this." She added.
Cuppy held his chin. "What about the power tunnel extending underground you told that cover story about when you were my teacher? Richie and I ran into one of these little guys down there, emerging from the fog. The place was all lit up red, and we watched one of those hologram types spontaneously appear and constrict around the critter."
"Who you saved." Richie sighed. He saw the wampus cat looking at him. "No offense." he waved.
"Can these towers be laid on their sides? Is the red tunnel some kind of early prototype?"
"We think that's where this lump of string-" Richie pointed to Cuppy, "came from in the first place. He was racing with some other beings to get through a threshold, best he can remember, before a big red flare blasted him into my trees. Can I assume he got tangled up in one of those ether fog gates and grazed by the automated response?"
Holly sighed. "This is so classified." She took a deep breath, glancing at Chikita. "Can I have some more of that stuff?" she asked. Blinking at her a moment, Chikita nodded, impressed by Holly's alcohol tolerance, obligingly handing over the gourd. Holly took a sizeable gulp, wincing at the strong taste before handing it back. "Stuff's intense." she muttered.
Cuppy chuckled at his nickname. "That's pretty accurate actually." His dopey laughter was cut off though, as his eyes widened, shifting towards the trees where his pupils dilated. He sent an array of copper strings into the ground, trying to get a better sensory read on whatever he was sensing. "Hey, wolfy!" He whisper-yelled, making a knot of copper wire at the end on a long strand and fluffing it through Freyja's hair. "Something's up, you feel it too?"
Freyja glanced over curiously, and she craned her head towards the treeline, following Cuppy's moon-eyed gaze, her brows lowered with concern, a chill running down her spine. "Feels like someone's watching us." she said, shifting her eyes to their canine form to get a better look in the dark.
Entire flocks of birds exploded out of the trees, taking wing to the sky in a shower of flung feathers, escaping the coming storm. Thunder echoed through the forest as the tread of something incredibly heavy moved toward them. Trees went down in the wake of the horror stalking toward the complex's backyard strip. Two massive paws flattened the ground as the manticore lurched out of the shadows, nostrils flaring.
"I can track a drop of blood from a hundred miles away. Did you think you'd lose me in the rotted wood stench of this miserable hovel?"
The scorpion tail quivered obscenely, venom hissing like a living, bloodthirsty thing. Drops of the stuff trickled to the grass, instantly wilting it, in time with the starved drool issuing forth from the monster's slobbery lips.
Sparta? Richie thought for a brief moment, before wondering what the hell he was thinking about.
"Wow, would you look at that?" Cuppy commented.
Chikita's eyes widened. "Oh. Oh shit sandwiches." she knocked on her pipe, beckoning her familiar back out into the open.
Chinokiri poked her miniaturized head out, sniffed toward the manticore, and promptly hopped back into her vice vessel.
"What the - hey! Get your ass back out here!" Chikita shook her pipe.