Chapter 249: Lucid

Chapter 249: Lucid

“Can you please at least acknowledge how unfair this is?” Rain asked, pacing back and forth in their bedroom. “You get your father, and I get a crazy old witch who’s trying to murder me from beyond the grave.”

“I never said it was fair,” Ameliah said, watching from the sofa. “And she’s not your guide, so it’s not a valid comparison. She’s a completely different kind of construct.”

“Bah,” Rain said, waving a hand. He didn’t have his armor summoned, instead wearing a simple pair of cotton pants and a tight-fitting shirt, his rings threaded through a cord he’d hung around his neck. With how many meals he’d worked through lately, he should have been a walking husk. Instead, every bit of him seemed to glow with health and power. Watching the interplay of his muscles as he prowled side to side like a caged wildcat was a good distraction.

“Not helping!” Rain said, pointing at her without looking. “I am not sexy when I’m distraught, damn it!”

“You are, and what else do you want me to do but notice?” Ameliah asked. “You want me to think about something else? Think about you never coming back and what that would do to me? You want me to think about it so you can feel me thinking about it and start thinking about how you’d feel, having hurt me by abandoning me like that, never mind the fact you wouldn’t be able to think anything at all with your brain mulched?” She sniffed, then waved a hand. “No, no thanks. I’m good on that.”

“I—“

“You’ve got this,” she interrupted, rising from the sofa and walking over to him. “You had this a week ago when you finished your paling. All this practice for your little plan is just procrastinating.” She placed her hands on his shoulders. “Hells, even Velika says you’re almost as good with your domain as she was, and she’s only heard you underselling yourself through that anchor. She doesn’t even know about the runes, does she? The Warden’s not going to know what hit her.”

“She was in my head, Ameliah!” Rain said hotly, using a move from Bear Kata to break her grip, though without any real force behind it. “She knows exactly what I’m capable of! She’ll have prepared for it! She’ll have predicted all of this!”

“She’s not a god, Rain,” Ameliah said flatly, crossing her arms. “Stop worrying and get on with it.”

“But—“

“Is there anything more you can do?”

“I, well—“

“Is there. Anything more. You can do?” He started to respond, but she didn’t let him. “Anything reasonable. Do you honestly think you’ll be able to figure out the rank thirty-one pattern and raise your cap without finding a blue? Do what centuries of people have failed to accomplish, not for lack of trying, just because you found what you think is a slightly more efficient way of pounding your skull against the wall?”

“...No.” Rain sighed, then slumped onto the bed. “We could find one, though. A blue.”

“And Kettel could become a poet if he put his mind to it,” Ameliah said, teasing a weak smile from him as she sat beside him. “The Warden didn’t say you’d need to raise your cap. She just said you needed silver essence, and you’re way past that.”

“I know,” Rain said with another sigh, then summoned his armor and laid back. “I’m just...afraid.”

“Congratulations, you’re human,” Ameliah said. She summoned her armor as well and settled beside him, snaking her arm through the tunnel formed by the pillow and his neck. On another plane of existence, she hauled on the bond between them, forcing their palings into contact against the outflow from their overstuffed souls. A thrill ran through her as her awareness of him redoubled. “I’ll be right here. If she hurts you, I’ll mess her up.”

She felt his smile as if it was her own. “Thanks.” There was a brief pause. “Dozer says you’ll have to get in line.”

Ameliah laughed. “Kick her ass.”

Grannybrain, Grannybrain, Grannybrain!

“Ooph!” Vatreece wheezed as she landed on her backside, rebounding from the unexpected barrier blocking the backdoor access she’d left into Rain’s soul as his call echoed in her mind.

Well then, she thought.

Actually thought.

The unnamed mind blender contingency and the Thought Shell were dissolving and flooding her with energy—enough to spark true, if temporary, mentation. She was the contingency now, and the test had already begun.

“Not bad, kid. Not bad. Didn’t expect you to find that one. Means I can’t talk to you, so I hope you’re as ready as you seem.”

Getting to her feet, she dusted herself off, then looked around. Her mental construct was in the very outskirts of Rain’s mind, right where she’d left it, but the scenery was vastly different. In fact, it was Scenery. Instead of floating in a nebulous cloud of half-defined thoughts and memories, she stood in a mountain village, breathing thin air as a goat blinked at her blearily. Further away, she spied a few townsfolk with indistinct faces going about their business, and beyond them was...the mountain.

To say it was impressive was a gross understatement, and that was coming from someone who’d seen Ter’Karmark. It dominated the landscape, other details fading to inconsequentiality against its massive, horizon-consuming enormity. Looking at it, she sensed that the clouds veiling the sheer cliffside only marked the beginning of the ascent.

That was the Narrative.

She was supposed to climb. There would be a fortress—because there was always a fortress—and to even start breaking in, she’d first need to get there. Annoyingly, she couldn’t fly. Flying was against the rules.

“Hmph.”

She stomped, finding the dusty ground solid. A second look at the village showed that it remained almost entirely unchanged. Perhaps one of the buildings had moved by a finger’s width, but this was a Dream, the simplest and most basic defense of the mind, and such changes were expected. That Rain had managed to make one wasn’t remarkable. What was remarkable was the quality of the Scenery and the startling degree of Continuity already on display.

“Let’s test that. No way am I climbing a damn mountain.”

Vatreece cracked her neck, then bounced on her toes, limbering up. She was actually starting to feel excited—as much as an artificial, disembodied mind could feel excited, anyway. She didn’t exactly have the glands to make happy chemicals, let alone a brain to bathe in them.

Drawing on her precious reserve of Mental mana, she closed her eyes and began to spin. When she whirled to a stop, the Dream had changed.

Instead of in a mountain village, she now stood in a bustling metropolis, faceless salarymen and women pushing past her on the sidewalk as sleek cars zipped by. Across the street stood a massive building, all glass and chrome, extending far, far into the clouds. Not scraping the sky so much as puncturing it.N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

Vatreece harrumphed, crossing her arms. “First the mountain, now this. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was compensating for something.”

“You there, citizen!”

Vatreece turned, her eyebrows shooting up as a woman dropped out of the sky. The newcomer wore a red cape and a set of blue tights that did basically nothing to hide her athletic physique. Spandex. That was the word. A red ‘S’ stretched across her chest hinted at an identity the Warden knew she should recognize, but her original had only left her the vague idea of what a ‘superhero’ was, there being no room for specifics.

Shoving the Carten Actor away, Vatreece shot into the sky, ignoring the Narrative’s protests about flight as her passage shattered hundreds of windows. Outpacing the breaking glass, she rocketed up the side of the megacorp monolith, her ever-increasing speed soon carrying her above the steam and neon of the city behind her.

And still, she climbed, the tower rising up and up and up in defiance of physics and common sense. The air began to thin, but she merely removed her need for it, focusing on a shining star that swiftly grew into a massive station above the spire’s peak.

There’s always a fortress.

Against a real opponent, she wouldn’t have slowed. As she didn’t actually want to kill the world’s best hope of stability, she instead blunted her assault, and so when she slammed hard into the invisible barrier that formed in front of her, it merely deformed from the force. She was sent screaming off into space, feeling actual pain.

What?!

The explosions that buffeted her in the moments that followed were mere annoyances by comparison, explosive shells lobbed by the station’s turrets no more threat to her than the Actors had been. She ignored the fire and the heat, sending herself zipping through the maelstrom, right up to the energy barrier. Clamping onto it, she pushed with her will, only for a blue box to appear before her eyes.

Access Denied

Defenses Engaged

The Warden ground her teeth, snarling at the co-opted system dialog. It was obvious, now, what the Custodian had done. This shield was a reflection of his paling. Nothing else explained the strength of the barrier, reinforced by the structures he’d built in his soul.

How thick did he make that damn thing!?

Wait...

This being here means everything so far has just been his domain, which is impossible. He couldn’t have that much control. Unless...

Unless he went to the Delving and spied on the Illuminators. Okay. Okay, it’s possible, just EXCEEDINGLY unlikely. Even as a Dynamo, he shouldn’t have had enough time to do all this. He didn’t actually get them to TEACH him, did he?

Mad at the failure of her modeling more than anything, Vatreece released a primal scream, her will overriding the Narrative’s insistence that there should be no sound in space. She plunged her hands through the barrier, then began to tear. She couldn’t worry about conserving power now. If she couldn’t get through, she wouldn’t be able to guide the Custodian through what came next. He’d passed her test and then some, but she refused to leave him to navigate global politics without at least some direction. A simple warning to stay away from Kev wasn’t enough. She had to get through.

Access Granted

Proceed to Dock 1

Excuse me, what?

“This is wild,” Rain said, his voice crackling from an earpiece as a helmet shimmered into being around Vatreece’s head. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? Are you real? Wait, am I real? Filth! Don’t wake up! Don’t wake up!”

“No way! NO WAY!” Vatreece yelled, tumbling through the now-open barrier in her brand-new spacesuit.

“Damn. Okay. I can’t get in there, and I can feel myself slipping, but I’ve got a plan. I’ll have Tallheart bring you through.”

“I have her,” a deep voice rumbled through the earpiece, and Vatreece spun to see an enormous metal hand close around her. Before the fingers blocked her view, she got a good look at the antlered face of the literal mech the Actor was piloting. Or perhaps it was a Gundam, what with them being in space. She wasn’t clear on the difference. Regardless, it didn’t matter at that moment, as she could already feel what Rain was trying to do.

“Stop! You can’t bring me in like that! I’m mana! MANA! You can’t bring mana into your soul! Give me half a second, and I’ll project—”

“Sorry...can’t...hear...” Rain’s voice warbled in and out, the Dream beginning to fray around her. “...losing it again. Hang on...”

“Stop, you imbecile!” Vatreece railed, finding that, despite her dissolution having never been in question as a construct, she didn’t want to die.

“Shit, system’s mad at me,” Rain’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Yeah, yeah, call your admin. See how far that gets you.”

Desperate, Vatreece drank deeply from her dwindling mana reserves, knowing she was only buying time. She’d spent too much on the barrier, and he was too strong. Her original hadn’t planned for this—hadn’t left her enough power to fight a rank-thirty idiot who’d made his soul as solid as his skull. In her last moments, she decided she would take vindictive pleasure in knowing the Custodian had ruined his own chances of getting her to answer so much as a single one of his endless questions.

But her last moments didn’t come.

Instead, the immense pressure she was under found an outlet, and she felt herself move. The feeling was disturbing, like her mana-built mind was being sucked through a straw.

And then her mind was made from soul.

The construct in which she’d been anchored was shaped to resemble her old, withered body, floating in a tank of refined potential. The inefficiency of its design and the clash between the Custodian’s imagery and her own saw it trembling under the weight of her mind, swallowing potential in a flood just to hold itself together.

With all her might, she reached out to the foreign will that had captured her and gave it a little nudge in the right direction. The Custodian responded to her guidance, reacting to her touch in real time, correcting his errors, plugging the leaks as potential poured into her at a rate that would have drained any reasonable silver dry in seconds. Slowly, she began to stabilize. The flood of essence dropped to a trickle, forming an internal reservoir of power from which she could fuel herself.

“I’m not...finished with you...yet,” Rain panted, dissolving the glass tube of her pod and freeing the excess potential to splash across the floor and a plume of chaos to spill into the air. “Can you hear me? Did it work?”

Vatreece coughed weakly, blinking him into focus. This wasn’t possible. Clearly, her mind had been damaged. “How?” she gasped.

Rain grinned, though he looked exhausted. “A little guesswork, a little help from Ameliah’s dad, some reverse-engineering, long hours watching an Essence Slime do Essence Slime things. You know, normal stuff. Also, practice. A whole lot of practice.”

“Bullshit...” Vatreece said, her eyes flickering closed. She could feel herself fading toward an unconsciousness from which she wasn’t sure she’d wake. “No way...you did this. If you did...it was...luck.”

Rain snorted. “Well—and trust me, I’ve been waiting to say this—fuck you too.”

With the last of her strength, Vatreece managed a single, wheezing laugh.

And then there was darkness.