Work Text:
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Shale taps the Regulator against her workstation as she scrolls back up to the top of the file again. Two days ago over forty Regulators, and a corpse - and a near corpse - had come into Oblivion’s care, and under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have allowed herself to spend so much time on a single one.
Under normal circumstances she wasn’t handed the Regulators of the dead, and so many of them at that, to deal with at all.
She also had time to burn while waiting to hear from the lead party that had descended beneath Alexandria that morning, and it was work to be done. To see if a missing soul had jumped to another one. To see if the activity of a man who had become hollow, and then hivemind of scattered memories, could be tracked. To see.
To see.
“-More tests must be done to stabilize the soul of a beast inside of a human body - less the body and soul and mind split irreparably-”
The line, inside of a missive that had been no more than a paragraph long, made her glance again towards the storage area where the body of one Augustus Odbody still remained, then to conversation had months before with a woman who still spent most of her time unconscious behind a door several yalms away.
“Psychonekrosis, mayhaps…”
She glanced at the name attached to the missive, the origin of the message, then at the Regulator in her hand.
Maybe she’d wait before she mentioned this to either of them.
—-
"Going to check in on Rets?"
The question was meant to soothe Aletris’ heart, which still leapt to fearful places too easily now - it had been weeks since The Incident, and weeks more since she’d been allowed to sleep in the comfort of her own bed. With him. With her head against his very beating heart and his very warm and alive arms around her. But those very warm and alive arms were currently throwing on a jacket and boots and already her mind, which still flashed images of him gone from her world and worse, was trying to convince itself he was going off to die on the frontlines.
"Somethin' like that, yeah." Jasper, perhaps sensing this mood that had plagued her ever since they’d both been changed in ways that would take longer than they’d spent with them to get used to, moves to kiss her temple, careful to not disturb the pride of cats that were all curled up with her and the blanket she was tucked under. Still, Missy lifts her head with a noisy slew of meows that Jasper has to pet out of her system until Aletris’ fingers slip in to take over for him.
"Say hi for me, if you think he'd like t'hear it..." His angry face twists in her memory even as she says it and her own mouth twists along with it.
“Mmmm,” Jasper’s own mouth twists, his eyes soft and attentive upon her, and he takes a moment to brush her hair from her face. It is as though he’s thinking particularly hard about something before he simply says, “I'll see ya later, a'ight?"
She pulls his palm to her lips, kissing the scar upon the heel of it before she relinquishes him, trying to balm that thud in her chest. "Not too much later, I hope."
He only smiles before he’s out the door.
----
Most of what had been broken in Aletris had been massaged back into proper shape by the kind of healing that was beyond most of Alexandria after spending centuries and some change wearing holes into the fabric of itself and draining stores that would take twice as long to recover. Most of what had not been fixed would not be put back into shape by magic. But Aletris and Sphene had gotten into a rhythm over the last few weeks, even before she’d been allowed to return home with Jasper, and the two sit in the Back Rooms together now.
“All we can do for the weakness is focus on rebuilding your strength, I think,” Sphene says, holding one of Aletris’ trembling hands steady while she traces the tendons up into the wrist. Aletris’ entire face scrunches, the soreness also filling her limb with a certain ease when the Queen squeezes down upon it.
“I just hope it doesn’t take another twenty years to get back where I was,” Aletris confesses and Sphene smiles.
“If that were the case I’d be spending hundreds of years to be myself again, no?”
But Sphene persevered in trying to grab onto who she was in the world she’d woken up to, in the Alexandria she’d woken up to, and Aletris can’t help but smile at the reassurance in those words.
"Is that why you didn't go with him?"
Shale, busy at work at her console, suddenly glances from her work for the first time since she and Aletris had greeted each other, and both she and Sphene look her way.
“I should hope that I don’t need that much strength to face Retsarra,” Aletris half laughs, “At least not physical strength…”
The Cruiserweight Division had come to a close three weeks before Aletris had finally been allowed to go home, and she’d missed both the match with Sugar Riot and Howling Blade. She’d missed-
Your friends could have - should have - protected them too!
"Rets- oh, did Retsarra go with him?"
Aletris glances to that empty place at her side where Jasper had sat so diligently, where her heart selfishly wished he was right then. But the two needed their time, as long as Retsarra would give it to him. And yet-
“You keep saying ‘go’.“
“Oh.” In almost the same moment, Shale looks with pointed purpose back at her work. Not quickly enough, as Aletris now turns fully in her seat, staring across the room at her.
"Oh?" Aletris repeats, her voice sinking in pitch, hands grasping into fists that don’t clench as tightly as they once did. Not threatening, but pressing.
"He didn't tell you."
"Didn't tell me?"
——
Everkeep looks so small from the other side of the lake.
In spite of being on a timer, Jasper cannot keep from lingering there on the shoreline as the watercraft that had ferried him over vanishes back towards the tower, taking in the view of his entire life at a distance. It wasn’t the farthest from home he’d ever been, he’d walked so far from darkness hand in hand with her that he’d discovered sunlight, this distance was different in a way he wasn’t quite sure he could articulate.
Better get moving.
He turns away and to the path that leads up from the lake and into the mountains just beyond, eyes sweeping through the trees that all but grow right to the coastline, as if fleeing from something farther up. As if their dark tangle of branches were a cage holding something in, the faint flash of something bright and purple speaking of something beyond their boughs. That weaving stone path upwards is packed down by travel, rather than carved with intent. Several rods that bring to mind the open plains of Heritage Found, catch the bolts from the sky that still come tearing down with regularity, running through cables which connect them, traveling off towards the unknown - the only certainty being that there will be tech to power there.
The purple pulse from within the trees answer each strike, the nature of it plain once he crests the trail as he follows the cables, the order of trees parted for the disorder of man’s touch. Earth and stone and tree has been cleared away by machinery that remains, rusted and hollowed out by time, exposing pillars of purple crystal which spark and sparkle in the electrified air.
Raw Electrope?
He briefly tries to recall modules from schooling long passed to confirm this, but even his phone seems to be out of range to check.
Doesn’t matter, need t’not waste time.
Not that this was a particularly time sensitive task he’d taken upon himself, but he’d timed it out - boat ride was less than half an hour, if he could get in, take a look around to see if there was anything of interest, then get back out, he’d be back to Aletris in less than two hours at most.
For the glory-
A screeching sting of a noise sends Jasper’s heart into his throat as quickly as it crackles out, his head spinning towards an old post, barely still upright, with several speakers hung upon it.
Another post in the distance soon crackles to life, trying to repeat the same message, and Jasper takes a deep breath.
Must be automated. Still running.
The lightning rods spire above and around the site, and he follows them.
His way forward continues ever upwards as the cables are integrated into a long staircase that soon splits off into various courtyards and paths, ending in various buildings much like those of the Outskirts.
The distinct difference, however, is the village is empty.
He’s not sure why the state of the quarry hadn’t cleared him of the idea people still lived out here. He’s not sure why he still expects to see gathering places with any sign that they had been used and suddenly abandoned. He’s not sure why, when he steps through the few doors he can pass through, he expects to find signs that people had lived there until they didn’t.
Instead it is sterile. Gutted. Like anything that had been a sign of a life lived within the borders of that place had just been removed, bit by bit.
Jasper drags his fingers over a dust encrusted table when a sudden crash - not like lightning, but heavy and solid - from outside has him sprinting to the door.
From above something comes barreling down the stairs, its large, heavy body smashing the once carefully laid stone steps to pieces with every footfall. Unsteady, as though it has not been able to truly stretch its legs in some time, it sways, crashing into every turn the stairs make and wailing a horrible sound.
He kneels behind the front wall of the house, peering over it to try and size up what it is - porcine, with tusks and horns that he certainly can’t afford to meet right then. A quick scan of the courtyard in front of the cluster of houses, he sizes up the closest flight of stairs that would take him up and away from the beast.
If I come back messed up she’ll know-
It is as though it knows he’s there, suddenly turning to tumble down the pathway that leads to the house behind him. In the split second it takes him to consider moving, he ducks back inside of the house, to the room furthest away from the road. The entire structure shakes as it crashes against the front. Then, silence. Then, it shakes again. And again. The dust on every surface doesn’t even budge for the rattling.
Scanning the room, he spots a glassless window on the back wall, and quickly climbs through it.
If I had to I could probably…he sizes the beast up, mentally holding it up next to the creatures that had been underneath Alexandria. Sizing them up to opponents fought within the Arcadion. Sizing them up to a match against Asteria Arkwright when she’d indulged him after their trek beneath the tower, her small stature without axe in hand, tossing him around more handily than even her daughter ever had.
Couldn’t I?
The house suddenly sways as the front of it collapses in and onto the beast, bringing him back to the present moment where his best course of action was to run first. Down the stairs, towards a landing that forks off and up another direction. When he can only barely hear the shuffling of feet amongst shattered adobe he pauses for breath.
-More tests must be done to stabilize the soul of a beast inside of a human body - less the body and soul and mind split irreparably-
If that message from Shale hadn’t implied otherwise, he could have pretended that this village was just a village and there was nothing to be found there. Go home, hold his girl, go about his life.
His new life. One that others he knew may not get to have unless-
The crunching of heavy footfalls shakes the ground. It is again as if the creature simply knows where he is, rounding the corner upon him before he can even move to higher ground, or to hide. It doesn’t hesitate as it rounds the corner upon him, the edge of a tusk snagging the space between his torso and jacket and sending him through the air with a jerk of its head.
He doesn’t land far, and it descends again, tusk nearly brushing his torso when a sudden sharp song through the air makes it jerk, stumbling back and away. A second follows and it slides down several steps as he moves to sit up.
I might be in more trouble now-
In the moment it took for him to process where the creature was and that he could breath for a moment, another figure had moved onto the path, standing at the top of the unsteady stairs, dressed in the familiar garb of a hunter. Her father’s axe in one hand and a gun in the other, Aletris is a sight to behold. The offending tusk that had brushed him is shattered, the pieces scattered at her feet from a blow he didn’t see come, but can picture the arc of, likely swung as she forced herself into the path of danger which she now stands firmly in. It is a blessing that will be short lived that she is not looking at him then, focused on her quarry that stomps and swipes at her with the now single tusk that she, practiced in the ways of combat with beasts, moves out of the way with practiced, but stiff, ease.
It was slower than lightning, at the very least, and her feet still glide over the uneven ground as she guides it to look away from him. She makes no attempt to strike with her axe, even with it so close by. Her focus is only on maintaining the right amount of distance from it - to keep its attention on her while not letting it get within reach.
When it lunges for her, she moves, side stepping and raising her gun to fire, catching the beast in one eye, the pain making it shriek as it twists off to one side. That brief moment is when she moves in, slower than he’s used to her moving in a fight, bringing her axe swinging upwards to catch it right beneath the jaw. The handle slides in her grip, making the blow land light. Enough to draw blood, but he can tell from her face and the way she fights her hold on her axe that it isn’t what she’d envisioned with the motion.
If she wasn’t six weeks from having nearly broken her entire body, it would have been a heavier strike.
It swings its head back around and the tip of its tusk snags her jacket just below her chest as she jumps back and away, the brief struggle as the fabric rips almost making her stumble. Instead, it steals the distance she should have gotten from her, and when it swings its head back around, that tusk catches her just under her ribcage and sends her rolling off the other way.
She hasn’t even landed before he’s up, heat gathering in the vent at the base of his neck and spreading down one arm. His skin barely feels the burn as flames flicker off his skin, then go out.
Dammit.
He knew the fire was there, the flame was there, but it was hard to grab with purpose. To hold onto. But the heat that lingers has to be enough, he has to make it enough as he closes the space between him and flesh. The lingering flame in his flesh is enough that when the creature, seeing his movement, turns to look at him, he makes contact with that good eye, where the fluid inside of the beast’s eye hisses and splatters.
It shrieks in agony, throwing its head back before she’s there again, axe in both hands swinging up to meet where her first blow had landed with a meaty thud that is wet when she pulls away again. He pulls his arm back as the creature stills, then slumps.
His relief lives for as long as it takes for her to take in the state of the creature, then for her eyes to settle upon him with a laser focus. Both gun and axe are replaced into their holding straps as she moves, not quickly but purposely, like he is prey that would not escape her even if he had the wherewithal to run from her approach. Which he doesn’t, for more reasons than lacking self preservation.
"Let-" he barely says when she stops in front of him, eyes intense but a pointed distance between the two of them.
"Hector."
He flinches at the sound of that name in her mouth, spoken in sharp, bitten syllables that bring back the memory of when she, four months into a beautifully blossoming friendship that had stirred far more into him with time, had found out he had a whole name that was his and he’d not told her. It isn’t anger.
"Shale told you-"
"Shale told me!” She interrupts, her voice pitching up a fraction. Just enough to crack. “Alone!” She points at the downed beast not even three fulms from them, “Alone!!!"
"It was jus’ meant t’be a quick thing,” he doesn’t raise his voice, nor does self defense enter his tone, his eyes following her hand to linger upon the body that validates her own sharpness.
"Just a quick-“ she runs her pointing hand through her hair, her other moving to the place below her ribs where she’d been snagged and flung. “What if I hadn’t gotten here-"
"What if. Let, I didn’t even know what I was expectin' t’find out here-" It sounds stupid on his tongue. He feels stupid, meeting her eyes as her brows raise in opposition to the slight dip in her chin as she looks up at him with a disbelief that makes his heart ache.
It brings to mind the tears that come in her sleep with his name on her lips, a secret kept between him and her slumber.
"All the more reason you should have told me - instead of making me think you were safe in Everkeep!" The crack in her voice wavers open, more pronounced now and something wet wells into that space, making him reach for her with both hands. She allows him to pull her into him, to dam up the tears that she won’t let come.
"Hey - hey, I'm sor- I'm alright, see?" He attempts to assure her, but she doesn’t lean into him. She’s solid and stiff in his arms in a way she’s never been before.
"You're not alright - you're stupid!” She pulls away now, jamming a finger into the middle of his chest as she turns on a heel to start up the wreckage of the stairs. “You're so stupid!"
"Hey..." he follows after her, giving her the space she enforces with her stride.
"Why didn't you ask me to come with you?" Her voice is soft, wounded, and he pretends he doesn’t hear it over the shifting stone beneath their feet.
——
“She’s asleep - finally.”
Jasper doesn’t look up from Aletris, three weeks broken, three weeks better, slumbering fitfully in what has become an unfortunately new normal. If he could have stayed with her every night, he would have. But that evening, all he could do was stay until she was truly asleep.
“I’m not here to wake her, if that’s your concern,” Shale says, lingering at the opening between panels that in spirit, was a doorway - even if no door had ever been intended to live there.
”Then wot d’ya need?” He asks, carefully brushing Aletris’s hair from her face as an excuse to brush his fingers against her temple. Her entire face scrunches, then relaxes, his heart echoing the motion.
”I’ve found something that may be of interest to you - if you intend to help with the search for a cure for Psychonekrosis still.”
It was a condition that no longer plagued Jasper and his irrevocably changed being, but he could picture someone dear to him that likely sat over a bed just like this one, just as torn, just as needing for her to get well again.
How was it fair for Retsarra to try and focus on his upcoming match in the Cruiserweight Division when Eutrope needed him?
”Wot about it?”
”A message from a server I can’t access - from a man who lived in a little place just on the other side of the lake. I can search Everkeep to see if there’s any mainframe here I’ve missed, but-“
”It would help ya t’see if maybe there’s somethin’ over there.”
”Right.”
He’d have gone then, if the week following hadn’t ripped a chasm between him, his best friend, and the women they each loved.
——
Visitors from Alex-
A shriek in the air makes Aletris fire towards the sound before she’s placed it properly in her head, the shot piercing through a speaker hung off of the side of a building as the crackling and cracking voice that comes in and out of existence moves to another speaker far off in the distance.
“Fucking hell,” she curses, standing at the top of a ruined flight of stairs, rubbing her hand over that sore place on her ribs, pressing it enough to test that it is at least not broken for the blow to it. The entire village hummed, a lower, quieter tone than Everkeep, but enough of one that her instincts were on edge.
It sounded like a place alive, though devoid of expected sounds of wildlife, and she looked into empty windows as they navigated up the wrecked stairways. Up, following cables and lightning rods that moved further into the mountain and trees. Even in the distance she can see the red lights that blink along their posts, marking them in darkness that doesn’t quite exist there.
She offers Jasper a hand up the last rise, relinquishing their hold on each other two heartbeats sooner than she actually wants to. The hurt that beats in her chest has yet to allow the love that should be nestled in next to the fear a place to be and the two feelings are in the midst of a slap fight about it.
The ruined staircase becomes a neatly made, if a little overgrown, stone path that leads farther up into the mountains that look over the lake. Up and up the pair go, Aletris allowing the silence to settle between her and Jasper.
“Listen, Let-”
When he speaks up she picks up her pace, just enough to not be a jog, but enough to put space between them. To keep him from pushing that fist fight inside of her in one direction or another yet.
There was an awful lot of wiring coming up the mountainside still, and she focuses on it in order to ignore him, in order to let that raw spot in her chest fester for a little longer. She’s not ready for the feeling to go away yet.
The path flattens into a pavilion at the top of the rise filled with crates and cages outside the front door - carved straight into the mountain’s face where it stands open and expectant. The panels set into the front of the facility glow with the thrum of Electrope thru them, several generators sitting out front as if in reserve for a power outage, while machinery meant to transport things far too large for a normal person to carry are parked off to one side, near a landing pad that almost feels like it’s still maintained.
Like someone still expects to see it used.
It brings to mind a Castrum not far from Mor Dhona, where she and her mother and brother had walked many years after the fall of the Praetorium. It still stood there, well into her adulthood, the means and time to tear it down just never having aligned.
“Hey Let-“
Aletris allows herself to look at Jasper now, standing just outside the open doorway with a lean to his shoulders that makes her draw her gun. A small twange of pain moves under her chest for the movement, but the weight of it in her hands doesn’t make her question her grip - or lack of, when she goes to him.
While the outside of the building is arranged with intent, the inside is dark, fixtures disturbed from their housings and shattered to pieces across a floor covered in both dark fluid and papers. Scratches line the walls and floor, slicing through those dark stains, while monitors flicker with what appears to be recent damage. She draws her gun into her hand as she steps beyond the threshold, taking in machinery that had once been used to transport the cargo that sits outside pulled apart and on its side, along with cages in various states of-
“Ugh-“ Aletris covers her nose out of habit when she realizes at least one flipped crate contains something that has so long since rotted it doesn’t even smell anymore.
”D’ya think this is where…”
”Maybe?” Let answers as he trails off, continuing her scan of the hallway until she lands on a blinking red light along the ceiling trim. Her eyes narrow upon it, staring it down as though she can make out what it is in the low lighting of the building.
“Security camera, I think,” Jasper says, giving the hall his own wary look over before he crosses the room, some sort of intake station, to a desk with a still lit monitor on it. Aletris only looks away from the camera to see if there are any more in the hallway - she can spot at least two - before she follows him behind the desk to where an array of drawers live. While they are mostly filled with papers and bottles of chemicals she could never pronounce the names of, she finds a keycard that’s held onto the inside of the drawer by the mere memory of tape that has long flaked away.
Kanilokka.
She turns it over a few times, then tucks it into her front pocket.
Welcome to -
There is no shriek as a speaker that has not been worn down by the elements starts up, only making Aletris jump a little bit in surprise this time, before she dismisses it as she had the last one.
“Last date I can find on anythin’ on this is almost ten years ago,” Jasper says while Aletris looks over one of the many files. Time has faded much of the ink, and what little she can make out means very little to her.
She tosses it back into the drawer she pulled it from before circling back around the desk.
"Wot’re ya doin’?" Jasper says, already moving to follow after her, pausing only when she looks at him sharply.
"I’m gonna go take a look around, just t’be safe." That red light still blinks ominously at her, and the faint flicker of a light down the way calls to her.
"Let, I don’t think ya should go alone-“
She turns on him so quickly that his flinch flinches before he can, a flicker at the edges of his expression. "Oh, you're allowed to go miles away from Everkeep but I can't go look around a corner.”
"M’not th’ one who-"
"The one who what?" She squares up her hold on her gun across her chest, standing tall. She’s not certain the hallways are wide enough for her to swing her axe well, and unless her paranoia brought a horrible beast into being just to chase them down the gun would surely be enough.
"Let-"
"Hector.“ The anger in her heart punches the love it has been at odds with as she nips at the name with her front teeth, then turns to leave him there before he can protest any further.
——
It really sounded wrong whenever she called him Hector - only Retsarra called him that anymore, the only person from a life when that had been the only name in his heart.
Not that Retsarra was calling him anything right then.
Yer doin’ great at bein’ at odds with th’people y’care about right now, Jasper- he sighs to himself as he fumbles with the device in his ear - a little something Shale had given him so he could both reach out to his ride, but also her in case he needed anything.
It hums once before she answers.
“How’s it going?”
“Well I’m lucky Let didn’t kill me ‘erself.”
“I didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Nah, she…I should’ve told ‘er. S’on me. But that’s not why I reached out.”
“No?”
“There’s a whole facility out here, Shale. Something was happenin’ here for sure. Tech on par with Everkeep.”
There’s a silence and for a moment, Jasper wonders if he’s come so far out of range that he’s lost connection.
“That tracks. Anything working?”
“There’s still power enough for lights and at least a computer. Not a whole lot on it, tho. Not wired into anything.”
“Hmmm…If you can find me a terminal that actually connects to a system, I can talk you through getting me access to it so I can scour it.”
“Got it. I’ll take a look around, then.”
It’s an excuse to follow after Aletris. He follows the way he’d seen her go, towards a hallway of green lights and observation chambers separated by glass and scattered with more empty cages and broken bottles of substances he only looks at enough to see if the floor has turned to a toxic pool he should see if his girlfriend has been dissolved into so he can jump in after her.
Isn’t that why she’s mad at you right now?
It still doesn’t feel like a real thing that happened to him. Happened to them.
He pulls himself from both the floor and his thoughts, looking through the glass of the chambers and feeling his heart clench in his chest at the sight on the other side of it. A room of glass pods, containing people. People frozen in time behind multiple chemical - or other fluid he doesn’t want to think about - splattered panes of glass. There are panels near those which still have bodies inside of them, though their screens are as darkened as the rest of the building has been.
His pace picks up when she’s not in the hallway beyond either, quietly grateful for the blocked hallways that force a path of least resistance as he circles another corner to a hall of doorways. Some half ajar, and he can make out some sort of procedure station in each one as he peers in just long enough to see if she’s inside.
He finds her standing in the room just beyond.
It’s a large, circular chamber, with a raised central platform and encircled by a lower ring that has what looks like was previously observation equipment on it. It’s hard to tell entirely when it’s been broken so, and he only glances over it as he passes by on his way to her side. Aletris stands just to one side of that raised section, gun held inertly in front of her as she looks up at the walls - and for the first time, he really does too.
Rows upon rows of pods line the walls, much like the ones he’d seen in that observation chamber, reaching so high he can’t make out which are empty or not near the top.
But only one holds her attention - there’s a man inside, middle aged, maybe older, Jasper realizes he doesn’t have an eye for age really. How many people above a certain age had faded from his memories because of the now inert Regulator on his temple, worn out of habit rather than need. But this man’s hair is black and peppered and his face has character to it that feels rare within still existing memory.
Aletris takes something from her chest pocket and holds it up to look at it side by side with him. It’s an ID card.
“He must’ve been important,” she says softly.
“Maybe,” Jasper agrees, watching the card disappear back into her pocket.
“Did you see the others?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think they’re alive?”
Her lips twist and he can see a story he was not present for playing behind her eyes, a recollection of some sort.
“Makes me think of Zot.”
“Wossat?”
“A place I can never show you. It’s gone - rightly gone - now. Horrid place. Horrid…horrid place.”
Her lower lip quivers ever so faintly, and he reaches for her, taking one of her hands - and feeling his heart ease when she allows it, squeezing him before she tears her eyes away from the wall of pods.
—-
There was only one door that actually responded to Aletris’ keycard by opening. While every single one they could get to on that floor had lit up with affirmative beeps and little green flickers, it was clear that the age and disrepair of the building was what held them shut. This one, however, was more like a cage door than those which were glass and metal and electrope, and the simple mechanism only needed a little persuasion to click out of the lock and swing open.
“Hopefully we won’t have to try and force anything else open.”
“We can hope. Wot I wanna find shouldn’t be in the middle of examination rooms, I’d think,” Jasper’s voice sounds more hopeful than certain, but Aletris doesn’t mind stacking her hope into the same end as the mostly darkened corridor rewards them with an elevator.
“Oh, I don’t trust this,” Aletris says as they step in, Jasper hitting the single button inside. It lurches once, twice, four times. He pulls her to him and she goes willingly into his arms when the shaky start goes hurtling. Up? Down? She’s not certain, nausea gripping her senses well before the ride stops. The elevator seems to consider if it’s actually stopped or not for too long before the doors open again, letting the pair off at a room that is very much the opposite of the clinical floor they’d come from.
“Hello-” Jasper takes a sweeping look around as they off the elevator. The room has several stations in it, each with its own monitor. While many are darkened now, its clear power still pulses thru the room, and when Jasper moves to investigate the state of each one - Shale, we found something - Aletris’ attention is drawn to the largest of the screens on the far wall.
It’s split between an observation window, and -
“The cameras in the building still work, at least,” Aletris looks at a split series of views that mark doors that are inoperable, and darken what lay beyond them, leaving anybody who stood where she did now a clear view of anybody’s activity as of-
As of right when they stepped foot into the village below the facility.
When did the front door close? She wonders, looking at it on the small square of camera feed pointed upon it. She almost expects to find the seat in front of the monitor warm when she puts a hand on it, but it’s dusty in the way the rest of the building has been.
“Watched by ghosts of the past,” she murmurs as her eyes turn to the other half of the screen. She’s not entirely certain what the camera on it shows, pointed out at what seems to be a dust storm on the other side of the mountain, with a bar across the bottom displaying what she surmises are vitals.
“Lunipyati,” she reads, near a timer that is counted in hours, minutes, seconds.
105120:12:2
“How long do you think one hundred and five thousand hours is?”
“A bazillion years,” Jasper answers from a door on the far end of the room, making her turn her head. From the faint light beyond, she can make out two large servers that he is doing something with. He seems to have it under control, however, so she looks back at the screen in front of her.
There are rabbits in my belly.
“Oh good, that system still works up here,” Jasper comments and Aletris laughs - at least until the shape in the middle of the screen she’s looking at suddenly twists and an alert flashes across it.
Containment Failure: 20%
Surrender your souls to….King Zoraal Ja-
“Jasper-”
Containment Failure: 40%
“Jasper!”
There is a scramble in the corner of her vision and she can see him quickly plugging something in and murmuring into the linkpearl in his ear.
”Jasper—!!”
“I’m almost done in here-” he shouts at her and she looks back to the screen in front of her.
Welcome, visitors, to my home. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.
Containment Failure: 50%
The entire building begins to scream with alarms as the shape on the screen continues to twist and lurch from its confines, a large, furred and clawed hand reaching out of the heart of the storm. The earth itself upsets, shaking and making the entire building quake.
“Shale, d’ya have it?”
Containment Failure: 80%
“Jasper!”
“Okay! Go!” he drops his hand from his ear and Aletris waits only long enough until he can take her hand before they’re running to the elevator, crashing against the back of it as he slams his hand into that button.
The jerky start from their previous trek is now a sudden fall downwards, like there is no friction in place at all to keep it from landing, and she leans into him, his arms encircling her out of instinct and habit, rather than thought, as she braces for an impact that doesn’t come.
Come back, dear souls-
The entire building pulses alive for a moment, electric and buzzing in her ears so familiarly, and when the elevator door opens she briefly wonders if they’re on the wrong floor. The scratched and mangled walls pulse with an energy that brings even dead monitors to life as suggestions of something that had once been alive crawl along them, the faintest blue and electric outlines hinting their presence against the flashing red of alarm above them.
The entire mountain seems to shake them from the elevator, and Aletris grabs Jasper’s hand again as she navigates to the door, pushing it open. At the far end of the hallway, just around where the wall of pods had been, a shadow lumbers through the too-small doorway - clawed and furred and leoprine, Aletris ducks to the hallway of the observation room.
“Call the driver, we have to run for the lake.”
“Let?”
“Jasper I’m in no condition to fight a Vidraal alone,” she hisses to him. There’s a look that flashes across his face she can’t quite identify in the heat of the moment, and when a snarling shriek comes from behind them, Aletris doesn’t think about it at all.
—-
She wasn’t alone.
Jasper doesn’t have time to argue as Aletris pulls him into a sprint that is faster than he’s ever had to keep up with towards the front door - when had it closed? She slams into it, then moves back, releasing him as she scans the inside of the door for the release button.
It doesn’t respond when she hits it and the hallway shakes when the lumbering creature pushes thru another too small doorway and rounds the corner, a handful of yalms at best between them now. Aletris swears, fumbling for the keycard in her pocket again.
I won’t let these precious samples escape…
The speakers crackle and the beast lunges down the hallway, knocked from a clear arc when the shaking earth topples one of the many stacks of furniture in the hallway.
Fuck, is the server even going to be useable now?
It’s only a brief thought before she has his hand again, the door open just enough that the two can squeeze through it to the path beyond. He squeezes her hand tightly as the mountainside becomes a blur. Down, down, down to the wrecked staircase that hadn’t even been on his list of seriously bad things that could have happened for coming out that far.
They step into a courtyard just beyond the wreckage of the beast they’d fought earlier when Aletris suddenly brings them to a halt, a large chunk of stone erupting from the earth, then another.
Discard the flesh…extract the soul the speakers that line the village crackle in round, starting from the bottom of the stairs and moving up towards them as the words crackle out of unison.
“Fuck,” she curses, already moving up towards one of the houses. He follows after as she circles around it, away from the stairs, forcing a climb down, down, into trees and craggy stones where visibility is blocked by dark brambles.
Already, Aletris fumbles for something in her own gear, cursing when she doesn’t find it.
He can hear the cracking of wood as they’re pursued between the trees, and he squeezes her hand to keep from losing hold of her. From losing her. She squeezes him back.
She circles them back to the dig site below the village - ‘If the path around it leads back into the mountains we can’t guarantee we’ll have a straight shot to our meeting place on the lake, Jaspr’ - and when they step into the graveyard of machinery Aletris allows herself a brief moment to double over and catch her breath, one hand going to that spot below her ribs where she’d been snagged earlier. How long had it been? A few hours at best?
“I dunno if it’ll stop at the lake-”
“I dunno if he’ll be ready for us when we get there, Let-”
She doesn’t curse, but he can see her mind working the same way it would when they were watching a video of an upcoming opponent. Would she have gotten rusty if she hadn’t been working with him?
Would she have belonged to someone else right then?
“No cameras pointed into this Quarry when I was looking. We may be able to hide and..” she glances back over a shoulder before he takes her hand, leading her deeper into the swathes of machinery.
—-
She should have checked it sooner. Aletris looks over the mark on her lowest of ribs, not black at least, but red and angry and sore. A proper task for Sphene to stretch long dormant healing muscles upon when they returned to the Back Rooms, at the very least. But the very aether in Alexandria is thin, and Aletris had never been very inclined towards Conjury even in a place as dense and giving towards her as the Shroud.
His eyes move from that half-bruise, up to her face, soft yet stern in their worry and she shakes her head.
“Don’t give me that. It’ll be fine. We just have to wait until our ride is here and then we go.”
“Right…” he doesn’t sound convinced, and she likely is not convincing, sitting there in the gutted remains of some sort of digging machine with her father’s axe across her lap, fingers trembling as she tries to keep her hold upon it firm. He reaches out and she gives him her shooting hand, allowing him to smooth his thumbs between the knuckles and along the tendons on the back of it.
“It could’ve been worse, y’know,” she says softly and he glances up at her, then back down at her hand.
“Yeah?”
“You could’ve been alone.”
He manages a laugh, pulling her knuckles up to his lips to kiss, even through her glove. But a sudden shudder of the earth makes him release the ginger grip upon it, and as the machine sways, she’s up to her feet, scanning the area as he pulls her up into his arms to drop from it. He lands, heavy for her extra weight, and the earth starts to rise around them.
No, the machinery is sinking, she realizes as he sets her on her feet just in time for a hissing whistle to come tearing through the air.
“Get down!” she moves to throw Jasper to the ground, landing on top of him just as a second howl of a sound fills the air, wind carrying the rending of sharpness through it and across the back of her thick hunting coat. It spares her skin even as the top few layers of fabric split open in its place.
But Jasper grabs her, rolling to pin her underneath him when a third, and then fourth strike come, his less battle ready attire like paper by comparison.
The desire to curse him dies in her throat as he pushes himself up onto his knees, shedding the outer layer of his attire. His undershirt is shredded, showing off that vent on his neck which flickers between alight and not- and open, bloody gashes beneath it - as he forces himself up straight on his knees.
He’s barely upright when a howl forewarns of the impending tackle, her ears ringing even as she, still on her knees, draws her gun to point it at the Vidraal that comes down upon them. It’s eyes are intelligent in spite of the bestial body and she barely has time to aim for a proper blow, but a mouth full of teeth is as good a target as any, and one of those mighty fangs shatters as the shot rips through the lip, the Vidraal twisting before it lands several yalms from them.
But it doesn’t turn to lunge again immediately, instead pacing in a wide circle and looking between them.
Sizing them up.
Why not serve a greater purpose? The King of Resolve’s purpose….
She tears her eyes between it and Jasper, moving to look over his back even as she feels at the edges of Alexandria’s thin aether. No, it isn’t thick enough here for her to get a hold of it. The anger in her chest blooms, and she dips into that reserve instead. Rage that begs for blood retribution, spread over those splits in his skin. A bandage at best.
It won’t pull the wounds together, but it’ll hold them together long enough.
”Let, wot-“
She doesn’t have time to listen as the blood price that kept a berserker going must be met and the distance between her and Lunapyati is closed in an instant by instinct, axe in hand before her small body slams into it, seemingly taking the creature by surprise. The contact sets that undercurrent in her body alight, moving through and then out of her - and she knows into Jasper, based on the way his posture changes. It swings, and she steps out, claws snagging the edge of her coat before she’s in again, forcing a tight grip from her shaking hands as she brings the axe around to snag the flesh before that arm.
She’s rewarded with blood, which sends her aether singing. Her synapses sing and she takes a deep breath before she forces the bond between the two parts of her aether apart. She’d paid the due, but if she let her senses go now-
It jumps from her when she spins to strike again, putting several yalms between them as it stumbles down onto all fours.
I must-
The speakers are half garbled now as large swathes of the dig site are pulled into the earth below them, giant holes opening as the beast fumbles and struggles to point itself back towards her. It tilts its head, as if trying to focus itself and Aletris briefly can see Jasper, his chin against her chest, eyes unfocused as he fades from her for just a moment.
“Oh…” it’s almost a sigh as it strikes her, familiar.
There’s only a moment before it is gathered again, and with another ear-splitting shriek that makes her ears ring and her head briefly flash white, it jumps again. The earth splits and spits up one of the previously swallowed machines at her yet the world moves slow as Aletris scans the area, instinct moving through her as she picks the best route to move and her body follows just on the heels of the thought.
She lands right in the path of the Vidraal’s jumping arc, raising her gun to point at it - but it is pulled off arc by fire and steel.
—-
One. Two. That was how many blows it had taken for whatever Aletris had done to him to numb the agony in his back, giving him the focus he needed to get back up to his feet as she danced around the Vidraal that was too large to hit her with any solidity.
Aletris’ eyes are on the excavator that has been thrown from the earth, but Jasper’s are on the beast which leaps to intercept her, fire moving between his two hearts and through him before he’s even thought about what he wants to do with it.
Chain Deathmatch.
The chain has become the most familiar, however, its length moved by will rather than his own motions, and it swings readily thru the air, once around the beast’s neck, before the end sinks deep into that flesh, where it instills demand. Had it not been airborne, he may not have been able to throw it off balance like he does with a firm pull, making it land on one side as it slides across the ground, large swathes of fur and blood left like a smear across it.
Like it is falling apart. Both the body, and the chain that threatens to lose all power behind it after only a few moments.
It stumbles up to its feet, swaying there like it takes great effort to regather itself and he moves to take advantage of that weakness, forcing himself to focus heat through that connection with his second heart, second soul, and the vent on his back that keeps it from cooking his insides. With another yank, he pulls the Vidraal from its feet and to him, where it meets flame and fist and the connection severs for the condition of a blow being met.
Someday that power would stop slipping from his grasp, running over the edges of his fingertips only when desperate enough to have it handed to him.
But right now the Vidraal is there, within arm’s reach of him, and he realizes he may have been better simply letting Chain Deathmatch fizzle and fade when it raises a clawed arm to strike him, something garbling over a speaker system that is half buried in the uneven earth below it. The swing comes, but before it lands the distance is closed by the quickest moving body even amongst uneven ground.
It strikes meatily into the edge of Aletris’ axe, which shifts in her weak grip even in both hands and Jasper reaches out to grab along the handle above her hands, pushing it back up and into the meat of the clawed hand, which splits too easily beneath the force.
The earth shifts unsteadily beneath them again as it swings, again, again, Aletris’s back against him forcing him to move back as she guides him with her body.
This is…—. Your souls…you could —-! ——power!
The speaker the voice comes from is consumed by the earth, which begins to sink inwards all at once. Like the consuming sand beneath Everkeep had consumed all that fell into its flow, the earth devours machine and the monster alike, the control that had to have come from the Vidraal fading from its grip as even it is swept into that flow.
Aletris’ leg goes down into it, but Jasper grabs her, already moving as the earth around the dig site begins to move to fill in the newly emptied space. As the entire mountain almost seems to collapse in upon it, and all he can do is run, holding the only thing on the entire rock that had any value to him. Towards the lake.
Towards anywhere but right there.
It would be best described as a landslide, the trees around the lake holding up the worst of it. Jasper and Aletris are nearly twenty yalms into the lake when it all stops, the coast now roughly four yalms farther from where it had been when they’d each made landing earlier that day, and the water is still angry when their ride finds them that far from the shore. Jasper hefts Aletris up onto the boat first, then climbs up after her, the pair immediately sinking into the seat in the back, weight slumped into each other.
“D’ya think it’s dead?” Jasper asks softly once the craft hits calmer water, carefully peeling one of Let’s gloves off so he can link his fingers with hers, actually feel her skin as the faint tremor in her palms passes between them.
“I don’t think being eaten by the earth killed it,” she says softly, squeezing his hand. “But..”
“But?”
“There was a human soul in there.”
He looks down at her, her eyes closed as she rests against his shoulder with a tired sigh. “What makes y’say that?”
“I think it was dying of Psychonekrosis before it even awoke. It…” she breathes hard just to string together a proper thought. “I saw in it things I have seen in you. Saw in you. Before.”
Before.
Before.
He squeezes her hand, before letting the water and the rumble of an electrope engine fill the silence.
—-
Sphene has many words for both of them, even as the state of both of their injuries gives her much excuse to put her healing muscles, still being stretched back into place the same way Aletris’ for combat would need to be, to the test. In one session, the worst of Jasper’s flesh is knitted back together.
”In a few days I can keep it from scarring, so you’ll need to come back, but you’d do better to not get hit so hard, y’know-“ Sphene says, her tsk’ing light as though Jasper hasn’t already had an earful of it.
Aletris’ wound, for its part, only needs a little tending. Nothing broken horrendously and the soreness is gone with a night of sleep. A night of sleep blissfully in his arms. But not there when she wakes, leaving that well of fear to dig itself open and desperate as she has to right the state of the world again, to remind herself that she’d woken day, day, day again and he’d been there and one morning without him was fine.
But what if he’d gone-
The door hums open and she nearly sobs as he passes through it, met with a choir of cats all thrilled at his return. But they are forced to wait as he crosses the apartment to her, fraught in the doorway to their bedroom. She must wear it, as he pulls her into him and she feels all her fears collapsing her into him. Unfounded, that day, but -
“I got ya something,” he says, but doesn’t move to relinquish her from his arms. Not until that fear is drained from her enough to push the visions of her nightmares away for another day. Another hour.
What he hands her is a piece of equipment she’s only somewhat familiar with, something clamped in the hand.
”S’used to strengthen yer grip,” he explains and she gives it a rudimentary squeeze, feeling her entire hand struggle with it. Her lip quivers once and he takes it from it, adjusting something on the handle, then offers it for her to try again. A little easier this time. He takes her hand in both of his, lifting it to his lips.
”Let, I need ya t’do somethin’ for me.” His eyes are soft and she meets them, letting love push back the fear nestled by it into a corner.
”Only if you promise you’ll not go off on your own like that again.”
The corners of his eyes crinkle.
”Y’got me there. I…want to be someone who y’don’t have to be afraid for, Let. Ya did it fer me once, so I want’cha t’do it again.” He squeezes her hands before he holds them to his chest. To his heart. To his second soul. “Make me strong. Make me strong enough that ya don’t think yer alone against danger when I’m by yer side.”
She gives the clamp in her hand another squeeze.
She’d made him a Champion once.
”Okay,” her voice is soft and she feels that knot in her chest tighten, loosen, tighten, loosen. “Become my perfect partner, then.”
To him, there was nobody more perfect to be partner to.