"Something?" Richie asked. "Like, other than personified angst ghost things?"
"It's always something." Freyja fretted.
"Uh, fellas?" Cuppy tried to raise a finger, a gesture shortchanged by his engagement with the countless strings.
His feet slid forward a bit, and he rooted them to the ground with more sprouting cables. "He's tugging!"
The surface of the black pond was boiling like angry magma. Richie felt a terribly familiar chill go down his spine, and the circle of fading sunlight around them all seemed to darken unnaturally. It felt like a dozen or so of the empty husks of shadow were consolidated into a single howling mass. As he and Freyja moved to support Cuppy, he fell back on his ass, several bundles of twine severed beneath the surface. The bubbling stopped and the corrupted pond went still before a great, gangly pale arm with two many joints, emaciated like a starving man's, explosively burst up from the fetid pool. It pierced the center of the strainer net, and unfurled a grotesque corpse hand of fingers that ended halfway down in gleaming, bony talons. The splayed, spidery hand was exquisitely uncanny, and hauntingly familiar, the shafts of edged bone looking more like long white blades than any animal claws that appeared in nature. The arm arched out of the pond a dozen feet, seeming to go on forever down into the lightless depths, warping and distorting, stretching like chalky rubber. The nails flexed and curled, seeming to stare at them.
Then, the hand lunged forward, claws pressed together in a single deadly bundle of blades. Air was cut through clean with the elegance of a surgeon's scalpel. The blades were aimed for Cuppy's gut, eager to plunge into him full-bore, fingertips punched through out his back. Richie saw a bloodcurdling vision of this play out before his eyes, and he broke his spell in an instant. Inches from Cuppy's stomach, the stretching arm was stopped dead in its tracks, Richie's fingers clenching the wrist like a vice. The arm deadlocked against Richie, flexing its claws as it struggled to break free, but Richie was standing to the side of it, out of range of the deadly talons. As the limb struggled to push forward, straining, Richie tightened his grip like a hydraulic press until he felt the crunch of wrist bones, registering with the sound of a sickening snap. More bubbles came from the darkened pond.
Chikita was there then, katana raised over the arm.
"Perfect, hold him right there!"
The blade came down, swooshing, in a vertical stroke.
Inches from the target, it stopped, as a radius of infectious fear exploded from the pond. Richie visualized the intense bloodlust as an expanding sphere of eerie crimson energy, engulfing everyone. Both he and Chikita were paralyzed by overwhelming terror. Chikita's sword held back, and Richie's grip laxed. So did his ass-clench, and he nearly voided his bowels. Freyja, for her part, foamed at the mouth and was knocked out altogether, while Holly had fallen onto one knee, shaking, nearly passing out as well.
Slithering like a retreating snake, the waxy limb retracted into the black pond, tips of the claws disappearing beneath the surface with a few lingering ripples.
"What the hell was that thing?" Chikita sputtered. Yukihana scoured the depths of his memories, attempting to find something similar. "It's demonic, or very close to demonic, though not any type I've encountered before." He said. "There is a great deal of envy radiating from it."
Chikita glances at her sword, nodding slowly. "Fair enough." She gulped, sliding the blade back into its sheath. Richie growled at himself. "Stupid! Why did I freeze up like that?!" He said through his teeth, berating his body's fear response in what was almost a life or death scenario.
Cuppy's eyes were wide and stared blankly into the void of the lake in a daze. Fierce clicking of wooden gears signaled that Cuppet was pissed. No one attacks his bro like that and gets to slink back away into their little hole without facing his fury. He sprinted towards the lake, front flipping into the mire and beginning to swim to the bottom of the lake, his carved eyes sparked with enraged flame to illuminate his warpath amidst the eldritch black.
"B-Bro? Bro, no!" Cuppy jumped back onto his feet and plunged his hands into the pond, trying to catch his descending brother by his ankles. It was like liquid nitrogen with leech teeth. His hands screamed with cold pain, and he retracted them with a grunt, at first red and inflamed, then turning waxy and pale, bits of skin cracked like glass. Cuppy sank his strings into the pond next, trying to net the marionette back up from the deep like a fishing trawl hauling in a big catch, but the feedback from his strings was scrambled and psychotic as he tried to probe and search. More color began leeching out of his hands, spreading up the wrists and arms the longer it took, like Cuppy was a draining vessel. The strings snapped, throwing Cuppy backward again. He cast his fishing line in instead, lashed and weighted down with a heavy rock, and edged the bank, fishing for his sibling.
Richie's paralysis broke, and he moved to Cuppy's side, grabbing him around the waist and leaning back as an anchor as the line pulled taut and nearly dragged Cuppy in as well.
"I've got him!" Cuppy strained, face turning first red, then purple.
Richie channeled the blue glow of his runic dragons again, and the fetid pool hissed and recoiled a bit.
They gave a final monstrous tug, and Cuppet finally exploded out of the pond, flying twenty feet high.
When they recovered the shaken puppet, they found that his torso had been raked with four distinctive claw marks. Somehow, eyes that had already been doll-like seemed even more distant. It wasn't immediately obvious how much trauma had been the hidden attacker, and how much had been the black rain.
Richie glanced over at Cuppy, eying the bleached skin of his hands and forearms. He silently hoped it wouldn't have any corruptive effects, and that it'd wear off soon. Holly stood up and joined the others gathered around Cuppet, kneeling beside him. "Brave as that was, I don't think we'll be able to fight this thing in its own turf. I can try blasting the lake with these and see if that flushes it out." She says, twirling her microwave pistols. She cranked the power output as high as it could go, which would increase both the radius of the blast and the recoil, turning towards the lake and taking aim.
The first shot sank into the surface of the lake, forming a huge inverse dome-shaped depression in its surface and causing the black rain to foam and hiss, clearly not fond of this form of attack. Cuppy ambled over to the KO'd Freyja on shaky legs while Holly continued firing on the lake, attempting to triangulate the location of its gangly inhabitant. Cuppy crouched, nudging the sleeping wolf with his elbow. "Wakey wakey, we've gotta beat the lake monster." he says.
"No." Richie said, spreading his arms wide and pushing Holly back. He inadvertently blocked her aim and took a microwave shot through the shoulder.
He didn't even seem to notice.
Cautiously, Holly stepped back and everyone stayed put.
"We barely just got rid of that pissy lion, and it took everything we had collectively. I don't know about you, but I'm running on fumes. If we pic another fight like that, someone is going to die. Stick to the plan. We exercise the pond and cut off its access point. Then we fortify and hole up in the apartment. We need rest."
He was trembling.
Freyja stood up, clutching her pounding head.
"Holly, take me to the power tunnel underground. I'm going to torch its circuits." Freyja said, her entire body racked with deep chills. "You can find it, can't you?"
Swallowing, Holly nodded.
Richie rotated his shoulder cuff. "Cuppy, get that net back up. I'll get rid of that junk."
Chikita clutched her stomach and hunched over, vomiting a sudden splash of blood that pooled at her feet. Her gums were pale, her eyes dark.
Damn, I aggravated my wounds.
Cuppy looked torn between filtering the pond and sewing Chikita's insides back together.
"Do it." she said, nodding toward the black pond.
Cuppy rolled up his sleeves, revealing the pale blotches that snaked up his forearms from touching the black rain, reconnecting his string network to the net. He clenched his fists, and the net was drawn tighter, each square dilated to make it as fine as possible. Cuppy began to haul it upwards, using the trees as supports for the incredibly heavy mass of ooze he was set to filter out. The net rose from the lakebed slowly, and as it finally began to make its way towards the surface, the top of a great mound of shadowy ichor appeared, carried by the net out of the lake and into the open air. Finally, the entire net breached the surface, and the entirety of the black mass was revealed, pulsating and slimy like a severed, still-beating heart.
Richie cracked out his neck and his knuckles, then pressed his forearms together. They coated over in flickering azure scales, wavy with airy flame. The glow intensified as he thrust up against the underside of the net, jutting rays of light through the pinholes like a million spears. They struck and aggravated the diseased heart of contamination, making it quiver like jelly. It rapidly expanded and contracted, roiling and screaming with a thousand forsaken voices. Richie pictured his dream of clinging to the sun against the void. Darkness rolled in wherever light was extinguished. It was inevitable. But that darkness was indefinitely displaced and cheated so long as new stars were born. He would relight the stars, Richie thought in his bones.
Freyja would have really liked to stay and watch how this played out, but she had her own job to do. For her part, she tugged Holly out of her amazed stupor, clamping onto the hem of her skirt with wolfen jaws.
Holly squeaked. "Eek! Don't do that! Huh?"
Freyja threw off the grate cover to the sewer and tapped her foot impatiently, pointing into the putrid catacombs of waste.
"Uh, let me just send Bob to-"
Freyja grabbed Holly and jumped down the shaft.
Richie formed the plasmid orb, grinding against the congealed orb of imposter elixir of life, wrestling like opposing celestial bodies. Many shade hands rose out and tried to push back, but disintegrated on touch.
"Suncore, overdrive: Solar Flare!" Richie proclaimed.
The light consolidated into an ethereal, blueish-white column that pierced the sky, engulfing and enveloping the void-sludge entirely.
With a final scream, it was annihilated into faint wisps of black smoke, until those too disappeared.
Cuppy's net fell apart, disintegrating with the refuse, and Richie's dragon glow subsided. He doubled over, panting, then fell to his knees.
The pond was a clear blue again.
Cuppy perked up.
"That's my cue!" - he dove into the purified water and swam to the bottom, rooting himself to the ground. He saw the furrows in the bed, which had wept continuous shade sweat from the sewer network below. As if they were hydrothermal vents that had gone dormant, or perhaps with their purpose served, the trickle had stopped. Either way, Cuppy wasn't risking dealing with this tomfoolery twice. Working his magic, he threaded the frayed ground and sewed it clamped tight back together, good as new.
The pond was theirs again.
Meanwhile, Freyja and Holly had reached the inner depths of the sewers, Holly having thoughtfully provided her lupine comrade with a clothespin for her nose. "We gettin' close?" Freyja asked, voice sounding a bit funny on account of the clothespin. Holly nodded. "I think so. This place almost looks different than I remember..." She didn't want to consider the possibility they'd stumbled into yet another backyards realm, but the thought lingered in her mind. Coming to a wider portion of the sewer network, the venerable fecal highway spread from a one lane to a six, with high-set grate walkways lining either side.
A strange sound echoed through the tunnels, like white noise that grew louder and louder until stopping abruptly, leaving nothing but the ambience of dripping and flowing wastewater. Freyja cast a glance at Holly. "That's the focusing tunnel. We might have company spawning nearby. Tracers too. If Mason's still deep in his own bad habits, he probably hasn't taken the time to remove my administrative command over them. Any we run across should obey a stand down order. If not, things might get hairy." she said, drawing her microwave pistols.
The tunnel suddenly screamed, vibrating like the throat of an angry beast, and a trio of shades came flying down its length out of the masking darkness. Their bodies were black, torn cloaks whose moldy tatters trailed behind them, deadlight eyes pouring out of their darkened hoods, and skeletal arms held out straight, seeking and grasping. Another surge of that hateful energy ripped toward the girls, who grew dizzy. The effect seemed stronger down here in the dark.
A trio of red pellets flew past Freyja and Holly from behind, striking the goons head-on and causing them to burst into howling flames, bodies crinkling like newspapers in a fireplace. Cuppet pocketed his brother's slingshot and flew past the girls in his autopilot mode, steam bursting from his joints. He grabbed them in either hand and threw the girls up onto his shoulders as he covered huge tracts of ground, awaiting Holly's directions.
"Can you guys hear me?" A static-y Cuppy voice said, playing through a walkie talkie duct-taped to Cuppet's chest. "Yeah, loud and clear." Freyja nods. Holly hands Freyja one of her two microwave pistols and the two begin firing backwards at the pursuing shades, the gun-inexperienced Freyja still managing to score a few hits.
Damn, these are actually fun! she thought to herself, grinning.
"Heh, you sound funny Frey. Anyway, once you get the tunnel kaboom'd, we're gonna flip the power switch in the complex, just to make sure everything's in working order. Sounds like return trips would be risky." Cuppy replies. "Hard right pup!" Holly called out, and Cuppet veered rightwards, the rusty bulkhead door of the focusing tunnel coming into view at the end of the long stretch of sewer pipe. "We're almost to the tunnel, get ready to torch it!" Holly calls. Freyja nods, handing back the microwave pistol and inhaling deeply, her chest beginning to glow like hot coals. Cuppet kicked the door open, sprinting into the tunnel and slamming it shut behind them.
The two girls dismounted their wooden steed and Holly began blasting the thin interior wall plaster off with her microwave pistols, exposing the massive coil of copper that encircled the entire section of tunnel and the hexagonal tracer cells as well. "Alright, tear it up!" She says, giving Freyja a thumbs up.
Freyja shifted into full hellhound form, chest bulging with a swell of demonic flame, rippling abs practically pulsing under her belly fur.
What am I even doing here anyway? she wondered. I've more than paid back my debt by now. Now that I have an idea of how to pry the Backyards open, I should really return to them, where I belong. I'm the same as the shades to this world, a creature of darkness shunned by the light. I have no business walking among humans, wasn't that what called Hraesvelgr down on me? As if Heaven itself declared war on my birth. The cries of broken hearts filled with bottomless anger that are trembling throughout the underground, poisoning the city. Does it paralyze me with fear merely because of my canine senses? Or is it just a reflection of what's already inside?
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Freyja whined so softly it was hidden under the surge of fire gathering in the back of her throat.
The little girl lost to the devil. It took Richie's intervention to bring me back to my senses. I killed my own parents, and then lashed out at everything else. That jester pervert and I are cut from the same cloth. Lost children disguising crying as roaring. I'm a danger. If something makes me snap again...
she pictured Richie's and Cuppy's mangled, gnawed-on bodies, and the apartment burning down again.
The feral proteins in Holly's clinging suit trembled, echoing the closeted bloodlust they sensed in their cousin. Vengeful whispers trickled into Holly's ears, and she felt incredibly heavy.
Is this the weight they carry? Holly thought, horrified.
The shades seemed to grow larger, fattened on Freyja's fear.
They circled the group, fluttering and cackling, waxy fingers probing and eager to impale the subconscious.
How can I help? Holly thought. How can I appeal to your humanity?
This was the critical junction.
Don't give up now, she wanted to shout. They were so close to restoring power. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, after all this time.
The shades were closing in on them, tightening the circle, drawing the very life out of the area all around them. Cuppet was gradually being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, even as he hacked and slashed with dual scissor blades as hard as he could go, filling the putrid air with flutters of black scraps. The fire began to weaken and recede into the back of Freyja’s throat, her eyes going blank. Holly gripped the infernal wolf’s back, trying to shake and jostle her back to her senses, but her words and movements were unnoticed, and soon, she began to feel sluggish.
Perhaps if it were Richie or Cuppy, someone Freyja actually knew and trusted, they could have pulled her out of her slump. Holly was the evil secret police who helped the Director murder innocent animals and threatened Freyja and her friends with extermination for their opposition. She was a pitiless opportunist only after recovering her lost treasure, not to be trusted. She had duped one group already, infiltrated the Institute, what was to stop her from using and throwing away someone else when they had nothing left to give? How could Freyja even believe that Holly had been on the right side of the civil war to end human sacrifices to false gods?
If only she could step into Freyja’s mind and show her, merge minds long enough to break lingering suspicions and share the universality of sentient understanding. If only she could show her that her suffering wouldn’t last forever.
What could she do? Her powers only worked on objects, not people.
Her suit began to calm and speak to her through her nervous system and veins. It was a lingering grudge that understood the rage of Freyja, the shades, and the wayward ferals rampaging for power. Foreign beasts, slaughtered en masse and harvested to power the armor of their oppressors, bound together beyond the food chain in a shared yearning for the newly learned human concept of justice. The tendrils of the fallen beasts embedded in Holly’s flesh beneath the suit made the seeming secretarial outfit a second skin, a part of Holly herself, sharing in her mind and inclinations, and she in its.
Tell me how to help her. Holly said. No, not said. She did something she would have never, something that went against her principles.
She prayed. Prayed, for the sake of a demon, to an unknown force. Faith had been the cause of the Mayan’s ruination, their darkest before the dawn, when the false gods posing from on high demanded blood payment for the gifts of the sun and longevity. Religion had continued to divide the mankind of earth for all time too, since the day they had the capacity to deify the distant sky. What she prayed to was not a god. Truly, she didn’t know what she prayed to. It was more a hope, or a wish, thrown into the world and looking for a wall to bounce off of like an echo. A shot in the dark.
She realized that her second skin was an object she could absorb history from, as had been the basis of her inherited distrust of the Institute and the shades alike, as had been the satellite dragonflies. The mere fact that one of the bugs could be absorbed Chikita and still report back to Holly through the assassin’s eyes brought a sudden question to the surface of her mind. What was the boundary between life and lifeless? The shades spawned infinitely from that enigma, while Holly, a scientist at heart, had intuned long-lost stories from the soil and relics of ancient times without so much as a second thought. It had just been a given to her, like the tides and the gradual drift of the continents, or the twinkling of countless stars. Now though, if put on the spot, she couldn’t give the scientific explanation for how she did this. Her suit had a collective will. Perhaps other, ordinary clothes did too? The trees, rocks, the planet itself may have had a single ‘voice’. Was Holly’s psychometry nothing more or less than the perception of that voice? A willing ear lent to hear the stories the ground beneath her had to tell?
What separated her from the understanding of the voice of fellow, separate mortal souls was not an impassible wall, but merely the distance people put between themselves by virtue of their differences. Individuality was a hell of a puzzle to solve, perhaps one with more missing, scattered pieces than even the history of the world itself. Holly, who had been left alone on this planet with no way out and no leads except by throwing in her lot with an emerging fascist power like so many of her ilk had before to justify themselves, was so much more content to bury her head in the past. It was her job. But there was a future too. It wasn’t an illusion. The key to the true history of the world lay in the future, a time when she could reclaim what the Faceless Man had taken from her. But even if she did that, what did it matter if there was no one to share the true history with? If she came out the other side as someone she hated?
Now here was another person caught in the vortex of self-loathing and the weight of a bloody past. How could she bypass the wall between them?
Cuppet’s string found its way into Holly’s grip, and she looked down, realizing that she was clutching it. She looked over at Cuppet, dogpiled under many shades. His doll’s eyes seemed suddenly vivid then and there. This puppet Holly had assumed was merely a robot; it truly was Cuppy’s brother. It was a person. It was alive, as was everything else. And it threw her a literal lifeline from its other hand before it disappeared under the tackling, congregating wraiths.
Holly looked at both lines, one in each hand, and then she plunged the needle tip of one into her chest, threading the hole left by the manticore’s spike that had nearly pierced her heart. The living flesh of her powersuit clenched around the wire and merged with. The other, she looped around and plunged into Freyja’s chest, hugging her tightly around the neck.
Through the medium of the ‘inanimate’ Cuppet, Holly and Freyja’s innermost beings were linked.
-
Freyja was fourteen, her grungy clothes more torn than they had been when she bought them, her lower lip split and swollen, a black eye pushing her upper lid down. It was dark and cold out, flooded with low-hanging mist off of the sea somewhere over the park hills. The steel bench was hard and unwelcoming. It was late, perhaps midnight or so, and Freyja knew it was best even so not to go back home tonight. Instead, she took a meandering, meaningless stroll across the park. There must have been days before this? Days when she had been happy?
She sank beneath the grass, rippling like water, and plunged through murk, light growing fainter. She regressed, aging backward until she was the little girl she had once been again, the same avatar that Richie had encountered in the Backyards. The angel on one shoulder, while the black wolf had been the devil on the other, when the Great Eagle descended. She was a cursed child. It was all her fault.
Her fault…
Then she was on a soft beach of white sand. It was twilight, a beautiful sunset… sunrise? She couldn’t tell - coloring the tranquil, flat surface of the ocean. There were steps behind her. Freyja turned around and saw a little girl her age, wearing a bob cut and a colorful toga-like outfit that reminded her of Cinco De Mayo parades.
“Hi.” Holly waved shyly, one hand her back and a nervous smile on her face.
Freyja pouted and plopped herself down on the sand, drawing a circle around her with a sudden stick she had in her hand.
“What do you want?” Freyja asked.
“Can I sit with you for a while?” Holly asked.
Freyja looked away glumly.
Holly looked up and saw the clash of the sun and its absence, painting the horizon like a great mystic canvas.
“Light and Darkness are sisters, you know?” Holly chirped, walking over to Freyja and paving over the isolating circle with her foot.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Freyja asked, bristling.
“The stories I grew up with personified the sun and the moon.” Holly said. “Did you know it gets really hot the closer you get to the equator?”
“So what?” Freyja’s ears laid back.
“So, we had to tan, or the sun would burn our skin bubbly. It would get so hot and muggy some days, you’d sweat a gallon and pass out. Can you imagine laboring in those conditions? Try moving tons of stone to build pyramids when it's sweltering. Look!” Holly showed a patch of discolored melanin on her back, pulling the collar of her outfit down.
“Does it… still hurt?” Freyja asked.
“Sometimes, it almost feels like, even if I’m just imagining it. But, we learn from it.” Holly said.
“Sunscreen?” Freyja asked.
Holly laughed. “Let me show you something.”
The sun overtook the twilight and blared in Freyja’s face, making her eyes clench tight and weep uncontrollably. It triggered a sneeze response too.
“Hey!” Freyja grunted. “It’s too bright!”
“You’re right.” Holly said, and waved her hand.
The panorama rotated, and then they were under an ethereal sea of stars set against a tapestry of infinite space and nebula vapors. Freyja’s eyes were moist as she looked up, seeing a veil of purple cloak the stretch of beach they sat on where the stars were brightest. A comet streaked blue across the night time sky, and a beautiful moon glowed proudly like a giant smooth pearl.
“The night is beautiful.” Holly said. “If it weren’t for darkness, we couldn’t sleep after a long day of hard work. Our sun beaten skin was relieved when the sun set and we could rest and dream. But we were still happy when the sun rose again, and we could work towards our future once more. Fire can burn you or it can provide warmth and cook your food. We can take a refreshing drink from a clear lake, or get swamped by a huge wave. The lightning that streaks the sky may set fire to the fields and hit our houses, but if you capture it in a bottle, you can power thousands of lights and machines. The elements that make up our world are part of us too. Our bodies are recycled from the same dust that settled over the ancient world after the earth’s formation. We breathe the same air the dinosaurs did, and the genes we pass on are scrolls continuing our story. History and the future are one, linked by the present moment. We inhabit those moments, telling our story, and we find each other, because the campfire is warmer when more people throw in their kindling. You aren’t evil.”
Holly drew closer to Freyja, a campfire suddenly flickering in front of them. Freyja hesitantly leaned forward a bit, yearning the warmth she could never feel, even under the power of her own hellfire. The warmth that could sear wounds closed still never reached her heart and soul. The loneliness never melted away.
“Light and Darkness are two sides of the same coin.” Holly smiled. “They may not agree, might bicker and fight, so they take turns every twelve hours, compromising on who has influence over the world. If either remained in power forever, life as we knew it would not be. But, even if they have their differences,” Holly raised her hands again, and the sky was twilight once more, a beautiful, hypnotic orange, not unlike the orange glow of the embers in the campfire. “they still meet at dusk and dawn to hug.”
Freyja looked at Holly with eyes that were tearing up. “You aren’t afraid of me?”
A great hellhound shook the ground before them, looking down at Holly and growling, bearing teeth, its hackles raised.
“No.” Holly said.
She opened her arms wide, and the hellhound whimpered, uncertain.
“But I wasn’t supposed to be born… I’m cursed… I…” Freyja huddled up and started crying. “I don’t deserve to exist.”
Holly touched her shoulder. “Says who?”
Freyja pointed up to the sky. “God.”
“Well,” Holly shrugged. “Fuck him. Who controls the sky? Not God. Just the sisters… Light and Darkness.”
She leaned in and hugged Freyja tight to herself. After a few moments with wide eyes, Freyja hugged back, tightening the grip, and sobbing into Holly’s chest as the Mayan pat her back comfortingly. Then, in Freyja’s core, she felt it - warmth.
Holly’s chest began to glow as though her heart were a violet orb, and Freyja’s mirrored it as an orange orb. The two auras expanded and engulfed the girls, swirling together, and the conjoined energy flew up and out of the beach as it dissolved.
That warmth in Freyja’s chest ballooned until it became a great heat.
…
Freyja’s eyes rolled back out of their sockets, glimpsing a shade standing before her, in between her and the target she had to fry. On her back, Holly was hugging her tightly, a motherly smile on her face. Shade tendrils had whipped her prone back over and over again, leaving it torn and bleeding, her living clothes grunting under the strain. Still, Holly didn’t relinquish the embrace.
“Thank you, Holly.” Freyja said, shaking off the angst. There was no way she could feel cold in this heat.
She surveyed the shades, the soulless enemies of all life who stopped at looking like shadows and forgot the stars. Pretenders. Posers.
“You aren’t Darkness.” Freyja growled at the wraiths. “I…” her throat filled with crimson hellfire as she stood on her hind legs. “am the FUCKING DARKNESS!!!”
Freyja's inferno was the stuff of nightmares, dragon-like in its sheer intensity and volume as it carved the shadowy husks into pale ash, Holly guarded from the intense heat thanks only to her biosuit. Cuppet slunk out from under a pile of soot and kept his distance, back pressed up against a far wall, not wanting to be immolated right now. "Sounds like things are getting spicy in there. Still no power over here yet." Cuppy chirped over the radio. The sound of the little moppet's voice was soothing for Freyja, and brought her back into focus, reminded her what she was fighting for. She turned to face the walls, hands casting balls of napalm-like gelled fire at the copper superstructure and the network of tracer cells, the shimmering wire blackening and warping under the sheer heat. The tracer cells popped and threw sparks as their drab grey shells dripped off in sheets and the fragile electronics within fried.
"That'll do it, now let's get the hell out of here!" Holly shouted. Freyja slowly reverted to her human state, nodding to her newfound friend.
Meanwhile, at the institute, red warning lights and a droning alert tone sounded off, the flatscreens in many of the facility's offices flashing in bold crimson text. "Fire detected in Focusing Array!" Mason nearly spat out his coffee.
"What?!"
Freyja stopped at the threshold.
"What's the hold up?" Holly asked.
"They'll try to fix this place. I don't feel like letting that happen. Let's be thorough. Got anything in your secret service stash?"
Holly nods. "Brought these in case there were better fire suppression systems added since the original installation." She says, pulling a large satchel from her shoulder and grabbing a few bricks of C4 from it. "We've probably got a response unit of tracers headed this way, so we need to be quick." She says, quickly mounting each adhesive-backed brick to the ceiling of the tunnel and wiring them together. "We'll set it off as soon as we're out of the radius. Ready to book it?" Holly asks. Freyja shifts into her wolf form for max agility, nodding.
"Good. I can almost guarantee we're gonna run into the hardshell tracers. My guess would be they've developed some new prototypes, so we need to be as careful as we are fast. We'll leave through the first manhole we see." She says, gripping the door handle. "Go!"
The duo sprinted through darkened tunnels, the emergency klaxon lights above painting eerie shadows on the walls between their flashes of blood red light. They came to a fork in the path, and Holly picked up on the sound of pursuing tracers. "Shit. They're behind us." She says. Looking down the left fork, the distant droning of yet more tracers was audible, and the right fork was an almost sheer drop into pitch darkness. "Guess we'll have to take our chances." Holly muttered, sliding down the rightward fork. Frejya follows after her, her canine night vision kicking in. The tunnel eventually straightened back out into being mostly level, and Holly and Freyja came to yet another intersection. Something was off though.
Like some abstract painting, the tunnels that connected to the one they stood in arced and bent in outlandish directions, like some sort of wonderland drug trip had overtaken the civil engineers. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" Holly asks the black wolf at her side. "Looks like backyards trickery." she nods, ears folding flat against her head. "Let's hope it works in our favor..." Holly says, stepping through one of the tunnels.
...
Cuppy's water wheel turned full-speed, and the generator surged. First a flicker, then a few, then the lights came on altogether. A plugged microwave beeped, testy. Richie surveyed the apartment in awe as if he were looking upon the Garden of Eden. Giddy, he pumped his fist into the air.
"We did it!"
He grabbed Cuppy under the armpits and spun him around gleefully. "Fuck yeah! We win!"
...
Boom!
The ground shook.
Richie dropped Cuppy on his tailbone. "The fuck?!"
They rushed back to the lawn and surveyed the dark square hole in the ground where the grate had been lifted. What was that shockwave? Were there more shades and monsters down there?
He held an anxious boxing stance while Cuppy unfolded his fishing pole.
Then! - three forms flew out of the dank pit and landed on the grass - Freyja, Holly, and Cuppet.
Richie dropped his fists and felt the twinge of a blooming grin tug at the corners of his mouth.
Freyja, panting, looked up - and smirked, giving them a thumbs up.
"Thank fuck!" Richie threw his arms around Freyja in a great big bear hug, joined by the Cuppy Bros, around their wastes.
"Richie," Freyja pat his head. "I can't breathe."