Genia

Actually, that's a noun phrase...

*runs and hides*

I repeat my admonishment from a much, much earlier thread on the Virtue forums; you are only permitted to type in dialect if you manage to spell it out in IPA notation.

Also, the American equivalent of Cockney is a Brooklyn accent. If you really wanted to know.

Define "space influenced".

... My linguist's ears have crmbled to dust, and my eyes have wilted from seeing this horror.

See that - and by 'that' I mean this thread and its corrolaries - is why I don't participate in forum mass-RP. Well, and my inability and disinclination to read a wall of text (or, should I say, a complete maze of little walls?).

Honestly, for me, everything that's been written down regarding my characters is "canon" or perhaps events inherently important with a lasting significance and implication. Certain variants of RP in game, on the other hand, are substantially more mutable. I do not precisely see my main going out to clear Clockwork warehouses, or, indeed, robbing banks on a free Sunday.

But this is merely an aside.

Personally, perhaps because of my penchant not to involve myself with large, multiplayer threads, I find it a pity that the Unionverse stories and characters will be kept completely separate. What sense does it make to add in new blood - or, I suppose, to fuse together two bodies - if they on the whole choose to ignore each other? No one benefits and we all retain the disadvantages we had previously, while at the same time gaining more confusion and chaos.

I confess, my stories are all part of character development and events that will affect my characters, period. So if I conceive of a thread as being unsuitable, I would not participate in it.

I suppose that, as with many other things (including location) I am an exception in the American servers. Perhaps it's the European mentality filtering through?

Chapter XLVI
In Which An Expedition Is Gathered Up

When we reached our little wadi, I left Rostov to handle the three now somewhat calmer horses, and went ahead on my own. I slid down the little crevice which, just a few hours before, we barely negotiated, and quietly went through piles of rocks and trees towards the slight whisper of running water.

The moon was slowly dipping west.

“Lorenzo,” I called softly, and stepped through crackling, swishing underbrush.

He was leaning with his back to a scraggy acacia, holding a pistol casually in one hand. The casualness was deceptive; he was fully attentive to the direction from which the noises came. I hoped, for his sake, that he was not standing there like that since I left. Gaarent was seated with his knees drawn up, still draped in Lorenzo’s coat, staring – well, not really staring, but appearing to – off into space.

“Madam,” Lorenzo dropped his arm and stuck the gun back into his pocket. “Finally. We were getting worried.”

“I had a detour,” I said apologetically, and went to kneel in front of Garent “I see you’re awake.”

He shook himself like a man coming out of a trance. “Yeah. I woke up a bit ago. Lorenzo said you went to get Rostov. You brought him, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes,” I grinned, addressing both men. “I brought him. And breakfast. And transportation.”

“How—“ Lorenzo cut off when the sounds of three horses trampling through dry thorns became audible. Rostov was taking it slow, pulling them out into the area where the three of us were, and the horses were prancing nervously. “Goodness.”

“Hey!” Garent dropped his hand to the ground and blinked. “Horses? Where did you guys get horses?” I gave him my patented ‘good pupil’ look.

“Courtesy of Herr Auer and his minions,” I said smugly.

“And what are these minions doing now?”

“Swimming,” Rostov smirked. “Pretty bad at it, too.”

Lorenzo was unaffected by our enthusiasm, though Garent seemed happier. He shook his head, eyeing Rostov with a frown that could indicate concern, displeasure, a slight headache or a combination of all three. “Was this your idea, Mr. Kushan?”

“Sofia’s.”

The displeasure rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

“The supplies are a good idea,” I pointed out. “Food, uniforms, ammunition. Coffee, Lorenzo,” I added breathlessly. “They had coffee.”

Brought from the future, obviously, since the nearest coffee beans to us were about a continent away, somewhere in central Africa. I will point out one thing, to dispel any misconceptions. While the majority of modern men are coffee addicts, I am not; I actually don’t like the stuff. I am a tea person. Yet I was acutely aware of the blue circles forming, once again, under my own eyes, and was seeing a sort of sagging weariness in all the others’ faces. Caffeine was a stimulant we could hardly do without.

All right, so maybe I am also a caffeine junkie.

In any case, that notion made even Lorenzo look a little happier. I guess he was just as tired as I, and was not altogether anticipating the upcoming day. “Well, I trust you were circumspect.”

“That is why they are in the river.” I shrugged the obvious.

“Well, picket these horses somewhere. I don’t suppose they come with horse feed as a package deal?”

Rostov smirked. “It’s a one-time special. Kill three Nazis and get three horses, free. But the horse-chow costs extra so we didn’t include it.” He poked with a booted toe at the straggling tufts of spring green grass, hedging out from underneath rocks and struggling valiantly in a losing battle against thorns and bare ground and more rocks. “But I bet they’ll graze.”

“I suggest we take a bit before the sun rises to make use of that coffee, have breakfast, get warm,” I advised, and there were no disagreements. Rostov, who dumped some of his arsenal out onto the space blanket still spread on the ground, and was cleaning his pistols, pulled out a large, curved knife from the top of his boot. I knew that knife; in its time, it was a highly magical item – a sort of dangerous demon-slayer knife, capable of killing immortal creatures. Now, it was simply a large piece of good steel with a nice handle, and Rostov used it ruthlessly to chop off branches.

I stood up and left Garent to help with the fire, moving, conveniently and unobtrusively, out of his telepathy range. Which was, so far as we knew, practically zero; I tended to keep a hand on his shoulder or something along these lines during conversation, to make the nigh-onto-impossible merely very difficult. I circled to where Lorenzo was carefully arranging branches into a triangular, well-ventilated shape.

“How has he been?” I nodded towards Garent, a slight, almost invisible gesture while picking at a large clump of dry thorns – I wiped the blood off my hands on my skirt clandestinely – with my own small utility knife.

“As you see.”

“Ow,” I winced. Garent was never what one would call bounding with enthusiasm or pep, but this listlessness was certainly new. I carried the easily flammable brambles and stuffed them between the longer-burning branches. “All right, who has the matches?”

“Um…” said Rostov helpfully. Lorenzo and I looked at each other and exchanged rueful looks. The absence of matches was bemoaned earlier the same night. We both looked at Rostov rather accusingly. “But we could rig a flare.”

I laughed. “That seems like overkill.”

“Okay, we can go hungry until we find the nearest matchbox, you’re the boss.”

“No, no,” I chuckled harder. “We’ll do it your way, and then perhaps remember to put our hands on a flint. Come on, Garent,” I snapped with renewed energy, anticipating the small comforts of rough outdoorsy camping with explosives. “Fold up that blanket you’re sitting on, pick up everything that’s still on it and we’ll move out while Rostov blows things up.”

“Are you serious?” Garent stared at me – or at least in my general direction - with vacant eyes.

“Totally serious.”

“Fine.” Garent grumbled, but moved off the blanket and started carefully fishing for bits of plastic and paper before folding it up. He was slow, of course, but he was moving of – more or less – his own incentive, and spent the time muttering under his nose rather than staring into space.

The bang was spectacular as usual. The fire crackled away merrily, caught the dry thorns and consumed them while we were still gathering warily about the place, all – including Garent – rubbing our ears with pained expressions. Rostov, for whom this was the second close-range boom of the night, did not look pleased. The horses were positively frantic. The 5th obviously did not have to do much shooting, if they managed to retain such skittish animals.

We crowded up about the fire like primitive man who had, for the first time, been grateful for the lightning; it was a similar effect, after the cold and miserable night, the crack of the flare going off and then the warmth and the platonic idea of cooked food. With that platonic idea we had to content ourselves, because the reality was a little more meager. Most of the things the 5th left in their bags were much too much effort to cook and serve, but I did make Rostov race to the stream below and, while refilling every plastic bottle and hollowed-out gourd we had – grab water for our coffeepot (literal pot, made out of clay) and to mix with the flour.

I made pitot; basic, blending water and flour together to make coarse dough which I flattened and tossed on a heated surface of a rock, without even salt. Nevertheless, they were the first sandwiches, and nobody complained, not even Garent who chewed the piece I put in his hand with an expression of suffering.

“So,” Rostov said after we settled down to a rather haphazard breakfast of items that normally do not go together in any cuisine. “What’s the plan?”

“We go to Shubat Anshar,” Lorenzo voiced the obvious, “and find a way back. Preferably after finding Victor. I assume we have a few days before the rest of the 5th Column realizes we were here and have taken some of their uniforms.”

“Less,” I said, waving a piece of bland cheese around casually. “Perishables.”

Lorenzo was the first to catch on, as was appropriate to a man who spent the first part of his life with domestic mechanized refrigeration only then coming into use. Rostov nodded shortly afterwards, only Garent, the true child of modernity among us, remained confused. “Without refrigeration, nothing keeps,” I explained. “But here we are, eating cheese. Which means supply convoys, maybe as often as every day. If we are lucky, every two days. So we have… today, and perhaps tomorrow, or the day after – depending on how fast they were expected to return – before we have Auer on edge.”

“Then we start out early, and go quickly. We have three horses,” Lorenzo eyed the animals for a moment with the same expression Rostov and I had displayed earlier, “Madam, you will take Mr. Ward with you—“

“Um,” I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. “Better not.”

Lorenzo raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I’ve been on a horse a dozen times… if you count in binary. Let’s not put some innocent bystander with me in charge, shall we?”

“I couldn’t ride even when I could see where I was going,” Garent added, comfortingly. “Fly yes: ride – no.” We ran the options quickly. With all our packs on the third horse, the human cargo should be distributed more or less evenly.

In the emerging light, before the sun had even thought of climbing over the river, we packed our camp. All our worldly belonging now fitted with relative comfort onto the back of a single mangy horse. The animal did not seem overburdened. Our little refuge for the night displayed nothing of our presence – I made everyone pick up even the smallest trace of garbage – except for the wide circle of a blackened out earth where the fire’d burned. It was time to leave.

Rostov grabbed the bridle of one of the horses, and leapt into the flat pad the 5th Column named a saddle. The accommodations, of course, were extremely primitive – though far beyond what the natives would have – as bits, bridles, stirrups and other tack items were millennia away from being invented. Then Lorenzo swung Garent up to him.

Rostov caught him effortlessly, and plunked him in front of himself, wedged at the edge of the saddle, wide-eyed and slightly panicky, clinging to the horse’s neck. Then it was Lorenzo and my turn. Our lives were a little more complicated. For one, the difference in weights was not nearly as significant, nor was his strength cybernetically enhanced. He could not simply lift me off the ground and catch me in mid-air. For another, the bad knee made his life difficult and, though he would not admit it, he was not ‘getting used’ to the pain as he so brashly claimed he would.

I grinned, amused, as he winced apologetically, and knelt to give him a hand up. He was fast, to my infinite gratitude, and my cupped hands only hurt moderately badly. I dusted off my red, swollen hands, and the hem of my skirt. The calf-length, high-quality fabric was rapidly turning from brown into gray, acquiring the same tint as my blouse.

I stared at the folds of cloth, imagining myself riding a horse in a skirt not at all fitted for it, with a man looking over my shoulder. My brain could not decide, for just a split second, whether the idea made it swoon with anticipation or embarrassment.

“Sidesaddle,” I muttered to myself. “Definitely sidesaddle.”

Then Lorenzo leaned down and helped pull me up.

Chapter XLIV
In Which Soldiers Go For A Swim

I hissed, much too pressed for time to explain, and grabbed Rostov’s pistol, rapidly checked the cartridge, turned on my heel and fired at the approaching rider. The latter, still struggling to bring his rifle to bear from his position in the saddle – thankfully the 5th were not trained as cavalry, nor were they, it appeared, particularly expert riders – was, for the moment, defenseless.

I had, of course, missed.

The soldier was now rapidly dislodging his rifle. It must have been already prepped – a sensible measure – and the magazine inside, because all he had to do was aim and pull the trigger. I dove under a rain of automatic fire, but the soldier was a better shot than I, and his bullets would have flown true if he had not forgotten that he was sitting, not a jeep with a trained driver, or even a plane, but a skittish, half-wild horse.

The animal reared and went into a frenzy, dancing around. The bullets rained at my feet, around my head, whistling horribly right by my ear. I dropped, crouched, waited for a brief interval in the endless stream of bullets, then rolled away and sheltered behind a boulder, peeking out and preparing to fire again. Probably just as unsuccessfully.

I did get my point across, though. There was a crack, the whoosh of a bullet over my shoulder – almost nicking my ear – and the rider was slumping in his seat, grabbing for his stomach. I fired again, catching him in the leg. Another shot from Rostov, this time squarely in the head, brought him dangling off the horse. The frightened animal galloped frantically back and forth, buckling and shoving, trying, in its half-wild panic to dislodge its rider. The body came loose and the horse, tangled in its own bridle and the corpse, fell over heavily.

I lunged for the animal’s bridle before it could hurt itself or, worse yet, us.

Don’t get me wrong; I like my animals about one eighth my size, cuddled on the rug in front of the fire, or on my knees, and purring for what they are worth. In short – I am a cat person, not a horse person. But animals are animals, and I tend to do well enough with most (snakes are not pertinent to this story, thank goodness, so we will leave them out of this). I grabbed the bridle, and pulled with all my strength, yanking the horse’s head towards me and staring it in the eye. After a few minutes it slowly calmed down, and could be gotten up to be examined. A quick survey of its legs determined that it merely stumbled, but wasn’t lamed.

I dropped the reins, breathing hard.

“Hey, not bad,” Rostov said, loudly enough for me to cringe. “Pretty good shot too. Um... Which way were you aiming?”

I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just get their uniforms, shall we?”

“What?”

“Uniforms!” I raised my voice, and started tugging off the Columnist’s extremely tight outfit before he had time to stiffen. “And everything else. We can put it on the horses.”

We stripped the soldiers bare with brisk, cool efficiency. At least, with Rostov, I would not have to hear complaints about robbing bodies, touching corpses or otherwise taking possession of what belonged to the dead. All the more convenient because, frankly, I was not altogether satisfied with the corpse-robbing myself. There is something genuinely disconcerting to all humans in the disgracing of their dead. But, at least in certain cultures, there is in humans a far greater respect to the idea of not becoming dead.

I was rather a partisan to that.

After that, we spent the time collecting bags of goods, torches and pre-cut hemp, and ammunition and weaponry. The whole collection, including the stripped-off uniforms, was packed away and put on the backs of the horses.

I couldn’t say the food seemed appetizing though I did not eel the urge to complain; there were sacks of milled grain, beans and some sort of dried mushrooms (which, I hoped, were not hallucinogenic), not much else. Potatoes, the staple food of all camping trips and main dish of soldierly diet, I reminded myself, had not been invented yet. A small stash in a tin can (brought, obviously, as reserves from our time) in the corner revealed a treasure box of modern dry goods, carefully wrapped off and sealed.

“Ooh, whisky,” Rostov declared happily, examining a bottle. I tolled my eyes; the man had some alcoholic tendencies, curbed by his discipline and, perhaps more so, his metabolism. For a brief instant I considered telling him to put the beverage away, or accidentally breaking it, but was forcefully reminded of Lorenzo’s curbed night sleep. Perhaps sufficiently intoxicated he could sleep through anything. I waved the contents of the box in their entirety into a larger, roughly woven bag.

Now all we had left was the ring of burnt ground where the fire used to be, some sticks used for torches, and the bodies of three soldiers.

Rostov looked around. “I guess we’re done.”

“Not quite,” I indicated the bodies. “I want those,” I transferred my finger slowly to the left, where the moon and stars shone off of a large, sleek river, “over there.”

Rostov groaned, but picked one of the bodies by the armpits, and started descending with it to the riverbank. I started slowly, and with considerably more effort, dragging another soldier by his feet in the same direction. Soon, three splashes and a slight noise of running water were all that was left from our erstwhile enemies.

It was a small deception, barely worthy of its name, but worth our while, perhaps. With the bodies drowned, nobody could hope to distinguish between wounds made by arrow tips and wounds made by bullets. I snatched a torch up again and, while Rostov was beginning to haul supplies – sometimes muttering disappointment at the contents – I knelt down and carefully picked up bullet casings, grenade shards and telltale pieces of metal armour.

When I was done, rubbing my strained, tired eyes against the flicker of torchlight, only a very attentive forensics expert could have said for certain that the deed was done with modern firearms.

Certainly not a perfect crime, but I would go down trying. Even though, I strongly suspected, Auer would not take long to see past the deception. That, however, assumed Auer would come down here personally, or bother to act instantly. And that last I felt inclined to doubt. Surely, we were not the only ones who had to deal with the rigours of the time.

I eyed the horses warily. I’ve actually been on a horse before… once, maybe twice. These animals were not exactly like the horses I was used to seeing; a quick mental comparison brought forth the conclusion that they were smaller, shorter – though still slim – and did not seem nearly as strong. These were not beasts of burden as we knew them, and they did not seem at all comfortable under the weight of a saddle. They made me wary and nervous all at the same time.

“They are kind of pitiful,” Rostov agreed, contemplating his mount with a dubious expression. Rostov is a heavy fellow. “I’m kind of surprised the 5th didn’t get anything better.”

“I am not,” I put a hand on the horse’s flank, and it quivered. “Horses haven’t been invented yet. Like potatoes.” Rostov stared at me. “Nevermind. These are almost wild horses, with no generations of domestication behind them. If our time estimates are right, they weren’t even used for riding until the 5th came. Just for meat.”

Rostov looked disgusted.

“I think perhaps we’d better lead them, for now.”

The way back took, not surprisingly, longer than the way there had. The horses, tugged along by their primitive harnesses, half the time seemed more inclined to bolt for their lives than to follow the humans. I could not imagine, poor rider that I was, managing one of them on my own.

We walked back to the campsite, with me leading the way. I did give Rostov a synopsis of where we were – or thought we were – and what the vortex did – or we thought it did. That made the matter with Victor self-explanatory.

Mostly, though, I was tired and severely deprived for caffeine, and feeling childishly cranky after a long day without sleep. So the way back passed in relative silence.

Chapter XLIII
In Which We Light A Fire, And A Firefight

“What was that all about?”

Rostov shook off thorns and leaves and bits of grass. His vest and high boots were, on the whole, more conducive to the environment than my classic, European, urban dress. I had little excuse for destroying some of my best apparel; I had, in my bags, stuff that was more appropriate for walking across mountains and running around dense briars, though I had not expected to need such things. But then we had, literally, jumped off our plane and stumbled across a campful of soldiers in the desert... Time to dress was not a luxury I had, unfortunately.

“It was about not getting killed, if you must know.” I finished brushing off my own clothes, for the Nth time, as best I could.

“You always fret,” Rostov grinned at me. “There were two soldiers, on horses. Big deal...”

“Rostov,” I said evenly, clamping down on my anger. “Try a spell.”

“What?”

“Try a spell. Anything. Shadow tentacles, pulling the life force, anything. Try it on me, right now!”

Rostov blinked, and raised a hand, as if to pull something out of the ground. He frowned. Tried again. As I expected, nothing happened, and his brows drew in a frown, his eyes getting an odd, inward look. Searching, I supposed, for his demon. There was nothing so overt as a gasp, but even the unflappable mercenary's eyes widened a little when he had, apparently, found nothing there to answer him.

I could not quite quench the small stab of self-satisfaction. Without the terrible shock that Garent's condition induced, and the inability to muster any sort of malicious glee at his situation, I allowed myself the momentary vengeful feeling. Not charitable of me, perhaps, but only human. I spent most of my late life surrounded by people who, by sheer, raw power, were magnitudes over my head, fighting for equality and approval. Which was different from the first half of my life hardly at all, though perhaps in a different context.

I had contested my ability in an uneven field, and contended against blasé attitudes, erosion of caution and people whose conception of danger was practically nonexistent. They relied on their abilities completely, and these abilities never failed.

Now it did, and my dismissive friends were finally learning the lesson. It should have brought me far more unholy joy, but for some reason, it didn't.

Rostov was scowling. “What the--”

“No more rapid healing,” I told him, a little smugly. “No more mists, no more fear spells, no more immortality. Garent had a nasty shock.”

“Damn,” Rostov pronounced thoughtfully, contemplating, I hoped, just what this meant for his vitality. And comparing the decision versus the two soldiers and their rifles and horses. His face hardened into something not entirely unfamiliar but, on the whole, not often seen. Rostov always prefers levity to seriousness; now, some measure of that levity was gone. I imagined I was seeing the younger Rostov – the person who had gone out to the desert, and returned bearing a demon with him.

“And, to add to the joy,” I said nastily, though my ire was not, at this time, aimed at him, “we are not going to find infinite ammo for your guns anywhere. What we have is what there is, period.”

“Until we get back.”

“That's right. Right now, Rostov, we have no resources beyond what we carry, no food, no water beyond what we find, and no weapons beyond what we already had.”

rostov rubbed his chin thoughtfully, staring after the two departing soldiers with a languid expression. “But they do.”

“Pardon me?”

“They have resources, right? Food and water and uniforms and, heh, guns...”

I caught onto his intentions quickly, the practical details of our situation have been a tremendous concern to me for the last twelve hours and Rostov, in possession of a practical mind intent on survival, surely was disposed to view matters in the same light as myself. If our enemies had possessions, and we had not, it only made sense to summarily relieve them of such, and, in the best Russian tradition, repossess them for ourselves.

“Eh, it’s probably not worth it. I didn’t see any city lights for miles; I bet the Column’s stationed too far for us to bother with.” Rostov looked around at the dark night with vague discomfort. Like most people in our times, he was entirely used to the constant background of electronics, and its absence disconcerted him somewhat. I thought to the realities of the time, the distance to the city, and shook my head.

“I think you are wrong. I think that if we hurry, we shall find their outpost… somewhere by the river.”

Rostov blinked.

“It only makes sense, to guard the largest waterway in the area,” I pointed out to assuage his mercenary, strategist’s senses. He nodded at that. “And it occurs to me that they must have been expecting us to come after them, realizing, perhaps, the same thing we did concerning the time vortex. The spacing out. I’ve… no real notion,” I added warily, “of how accurate their calculations must be, but surely they have an estimate.”

“Right,” said Rostov, shrugging slightly, and we started walking.

We caught up to the 5th Columnists after about half an hour. Caught up, of course, was something of a relative term; we could hear, in the distance, the sound of low voices, and see the glare off of many torches’ fires. An obvious flattening of the ground indicated, even in the dark, that we were hitting a small valley, or perhaps even coming out to the banks of the river – the Euphrates, I corrected the indefinite absently – and encountering ground perfectly situated for a campsite.

We perched above it, and a little to the side, well beyond the rings of torches and light the soldiers have set out around the perimeter of their post. The horses – two of them, looking, at least in this light, rather dispirited and ill-groomed – milled about on the edge, tied to stakes in the ground.

“Damn. This is smart.”

I nodded. The rings of light would make sneaking up directly to the three soldiers sitting warily by a small fire almost impossible. The horses, picketed on the outside, would also serve as a sort of impromptu alarm. “May God grant me stupid enemies.”

“Heh.” Rostov pulled a set of light binoculars – nothing more than some lenses in a cylinder, I felt sure – and pressed them to his eyes. “Oh yeah. Dinner in the good, fresh air… I could go for some myself.”

“Here,” he handed me the binoculars. “You watch for anything funny. I’m going to go deal with our two nice friends, there.”

“What, just like that?”

“Yup.” Rostov discarded his rifle at my feet, and stripped himself of a few more items of weaponry, variously distributed throughout his vest, and was fitting a silencer onto his pistol. “No reason to get complicated. Complicated plans get messy.”

“Fine,” I stared at him for a while,, holding the binoculars in one hand. When no explanation followed, I sighed in exasperation. “And?”

“And what?”

“What do you intend to do, and what am I doing while you are doing it?”

“Sitting here, watching for trouble. Not,” he added, “that I think there’s gonna be any. We saw two guys, and here they are. I’m going to just walk up to the fire, and shoot them both while they aren’t looking. Got everything right here,” he tapped the side of his temple, indicating not, unlike what one would think, his mind but the cybernetic implant in one of his eyes. I rolled my eyes in exasperation; no matter how many years we’ve been acquainted, I could never get it through his head that I had, indeed, seen war… from the losing end. I suppose two alien invasions do not count for ‘combat experience’ in his eyes.

I shrugged and pressed the binoculars to my eyes, examining the packs, the two men, and the picketed horses. “Don’t damage their uniforms, we’ll want them.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He vanished off into the dark. The binoculars, not being supplied with night vision filters, were not helpful in spotting him move quietly along the road. Occasionally I could catch a sort of whisper along the path, but even I could not truly determine whether it was Rostov moving forward, or perhaps some leaves on the dirt. Rostov really was good.

There was a light clap, and one of the guards fell down. The second, still very much alive, grabbed his weapon and turned, firing wildly into the darkness. There was no outcry, so I assumed Rostov survived. The second guard, realizing that the torches have become from a ring of protection into an impediment, rapidly tipped over the line nearest him, sinking the place into darkness and rolling away. I thought, in the last glimmers of the torches, that I saw him reach towards his helmet.

Rostov’s infra-red will most likely be messed up by the residue from the burning torches, but this guy had night vision.

Lovely. I dropped the binoculars and slid off my rock, landing on the path with a light thump and a painful twist of the ankle. Then I ran off towards where the sounds of shooting were occasionally very much audible.

I grabbed one of the still remaining torches and, crouching low to the ground in a well-considered attempt to actually stay alive, dove for the row of extinguished wood, where I thrust the flame at hemp clump after hemp clump. The night lit up again. I spotted Rostov appearing momentarily from behind the shelter of a wide rock, pulling something out of a vest pocket, and then the oily gleam of the Columnist’s uniform a little to my left. Prudently, I dashed out of the way, still clutching to my torch.

Rostov pulled a fuse, drew back and let go of something round that sailed through the air to land in the middle of the lit circle.

I covered my ears, and screamed for all I was worth; equalizing the pressure in my eardrums a second before the flashbang went off. I think I must have passed out for a second, because I found myself on the ground, ears ringing wildly, momentarily disoriented and dazed. I hoped, when I regained my sanity, that the soldier was suffering a similar reaction, and that Rostov was not.

They both were, I saw, when I picked up my torch and crawled to light it again, but Rostov had come about first.

Now the soldier lay on the ground, a hole through his neckguard which had severed the artery, and Rostov was sitting nearby, grinning like a madman and shaking his head. He wouldn’t be hearing anything for an hour or so.

Like these hoofbeats, coming rapidly down the road.

That, as well as the type/theme of VG you're looking for (if there is any).

Chapter XLII
In Which Brotherly Loyalty Is Tested, and Caution Must Be Exercised

I stared at the orange light, thankful for the brightness, thankful for the painful colour of it. It did nicely to hide my eyes, my face, from further scrutiny. I blessed the heavy dark and the young moon, and blessed my seemingly unending control of my voice.

I wondered what Lorenzo thought it had been like, on my end. As though I could not see, or figure out, on what had been quietly going on inside his head. A fool’s hope, in many ways; the fear and grief and pain were almost palpable. When they had become unbearable, I had shaken him awake. Unable to allow, as I should have done, the nightmare to run its course. For a moment, I thought, it was all about to burst like some great worn-down dam… then I was at arm’s length again, struggling against the urge to shake somebody into oblivion.

I had no idea how long I could stand it.

Rostov’s flare had gone off in a convenient moment, truly, and I stared at it thoughtfully, trying to estimate the distance from which it had come. Distances were never my strong suit, and I turned to Lorenzo with a questioning look in the orange light.

“Perhaps a few kilometers from here,” he responded after some thought.

I nodded, and knelt to shake Garent out of his uninterrupted sleep. Our conversation, as well as the bright light of the flare, was lost on him entirely. I reached out to touch his shoulder, then thought better of it. “I think… perhaps only one of us should go fetch Rostov.”

The assumptions were obvious. Flares, after all, were ubiquitous, never carrying the identifying mark of their sender. In all likelihood, our flare-source was indeed Rostov… but that was only in all likelihood. While not normally tending to attribute this devious a trap to our current enemies, I had sufficient proof already to establish that they were operating in a manner we were not accustomed to. What if this was a trap?

And even if not, the flare was an obvious sign, written plainly across the night sky. Perhaps the native would consider it a light of the Gods, but the 5th Column would know perfectly well what it meant. If we were to be ambushed along the way – tired and weak as we were now – who knew what would happen? And, clearly, Garent could not be left alone, to die of hunger and thirst, completely helpless. I saw the considerations unfolding in my mind’s eye, and I was sure he saw them as well.

“I think that might be wise,” Lorenzo sighed and got up, “I shall return shortly.”

“Oh no,” I hopped to my feet, intercepting the unplanned escape. The idea of sitting around, not knowing what, if anything, was going on, with free time in plenty to brood about pointless things… No. “When I said ‘one of us’, I meant I should be the one to do that.”

The amount of sardonic disagreement a single well-placed “really, madam,” can convey is quite astonishing.

“Really,” I waved my hands in defensive denial. “I am the steadiest on my feet – ironic though that occasion is. It only makes sense.”

Lorenzo snorted wryly. “Perhaps you can run, madam, but I can shoot.”

“Which is why,” I said, very quietly, “you should be the one to stay. If something were to happen... Garent should have with him the person most able to get him out. Not someone whose idea of a weapon is a kitchen knife. I know you’ll do it,” I added sincerely, not just for this instance, but for all the unpleasant moments which were sure to follow. “Fulfill my responsibility for me.”

For a moment, he looked as though I slapped him, then his expression changed to something else; somewhere between amazement and discomfort. Ah, so it was that kind of dream. I knew the type. I’ve participated in the same kind of show, in dream and while awake. Trying to accomplish something impossible, by any standard, failing and then promptly blaming myself that I had failed.

“I will return shortly,” I said and ducked into the thorny shrubs,

I did not suggest he try and get some more sleep.

Rostov’s flare came from below – in the direction of the river – and a little to the side. Not quite precisely where we’ve predicted, but close enough to allow me to guess that our estimates were more or less correct. Which was both comforting and disheartening; comforting, because not all our assumptions have been turned into smoke, and disheartening because… well, because of everything else.

I angled towards Rostov’s flare, trying as best I could to memorize the way I took. It would be a sad eventuality, if we were to be separated into different groups by my inability to find my way back. I looked up at the sky, where the orange glare was rapidly fading, and the moon and starts slowly shining through the haze, to try and orient myself. I saw little in the way of familiar stars or constellations, which, in truth, meant absolutely nothing. I have never been much of an astronomer; my ability to recognize the sky map limited to the Orion belt – not present in view at the moment, perhaps occluded by a cloud – and the Big Dipper – a little less recognizable in these parallels and, at this time of year, sliding toward the horizon.

Lorenzo was sure to be able to orient himself in the night sky. He could probably also tell whether, and how much, it had been changed from the sky we know.

I broke out onto the trail shortly after I had abandoned the bushes, and climbed onto the level ground outside the depression in which the little clump of bushes and trees surrounded a tiny rivulet and we found our shelter for the night. The trail snaked between mountains, taking the path of least resistance – or, in this case, the levellest – and compensated for the length of it by the relative ease of walking which it had afforded.

Rostov sat on a boulder about twenty minutes' further walk, playing with his old silver coin. It glinted in the moonlight.

He looked very ordinary, though decked out with a large amount of firearms – comparative to, say, Lorenzo's one pistol and my absolutely nothing – and he had one of the guns across his lap, and another one laying on the ground next to his right hand. The gun across his lap was picked up immediately as soon as I made appropriate noises of scuffling, stepping and leaf-rustling, and aimed my way.

“Right,” I said aloud. “You're really you and I won't have to kill you from ambush.”

“Wow, Sofia,” he put his gun down and beamed at me, sharp canines and all. “You sure can sneak.”

“I did it on purpose, you dolt,” I approached steadily, not believing for a moment that the lowered gun could not be picked up in an instant, or the other gun snatched instead, and stood before him to examine him warily. The lack of magic altered Rostov subtly, though unmistakably; his eyes no longer glowed in the dark. I wondered whether he noticed anything, yet, but he seemed relaxed and at his ease, so, clearly, not.

“Okay, if you're offending me, I guess you are not your evil clone, either,” Rostov looked around. “So where's everybody else? And where are we?”

“Well... Garent and Lorenzo are back a ways.... Resting. We decided splitting up would be wise. As for where we are... we rather have a few guesses, but we're not altogether, proof positive, certain.”

“Garent and Lorenzo? What about Vic?”

Rostov was nothing if not loyal, and his responsibility to his younger brother transcended into the realm of the paternal. His was an odd, rather ruthless sort of parenting, alternating between fierce protectiveness and outright indifference, and, sometimes, active tough love to the point of danger, but it was no doubt Rostov felt responsible for his little brother, and intended fully to see that he turned into his not-so-little brother. I shook my head sadly, regretting to be the bearer of bad news to him.

“We think he will have been elsewhere. Appearances seem to depend on the position one was in when one left, and Victor, if you recall, was on the other side of the room.”

Rostov swore. I gathered up my patience, and did not attempt to shove a rag in his mouth, telling myself that such a reaction was understandable, and, perhaps, even laudable. And did not last very long. I opened my mouth to utter some dry, pointed remark, then cut off in mid-breath. Rostov did the same in mid-word.

There was the distinctly audible sound of hooves on dirt. Which is far less distinctly audible than hooves on stone, or concrete, but nonetheless can be identified as a sort of thud. The hoofed animals were moving at a walk – which rendered them quieter still – and were slowly approaching us from behind a curve in the road.

I grabbed Rostov's arm and dove for the nearest likely shelter.

In the dark, it was a mound of rocks obscured partially by more thorns. The second half of our shelter decided to avail itself of the bare flesh of my lower arms, hands and face, as well as insinuate itself under my skirt to gnaw at my ankles, but it was preferable to dealing immediately with the danger on the road.

“Hey! What--” Rostov did not approve of being dragged and hidden. “Why are we hiding?”

Magic unavailable, psionics curbed to a fraction of its power... We did not, as yet, test the effectiveness of gunpowder and grenades, but this was not the appropriate time to discover whether or not they worked. Not if discovering meant a hole in Rostov's hide he could not repair.

“Just stay low.”

The riders passed in front of us, moving slowly and deliberately. I had to smirk a little at the absurdity of the sight. The 5th Column soldiers rode a pair of rather runty-looking horses, their sleek, high-tech uniforms shining far more than the animals' coats or gear in the scant light. They carried torches inside close lanterns of thick, coloured glass, and looked immensely displeased at the notion. They also carried a set of ultra-modern rifles. Incongruous didn't even begin to cover this.

They never slowed nor stopped by our boulder. Carrying torches in this sort of night was not, actually, very wise; they were blind to everything and anything outside of their circles of light, and the shadows and darkness concealed us well despite my white blouse (or perhaps because at this point it was more gray, or brown). After a few minutes, the clap of hooves almost disappeared in the distance, and Rostov and I emerged out of the brush.

Woooah, Okay. Just noticed somethign else. The text for editing/deleting a post (at least on the Villain) theme, is practically invisible - White on gray!

As an addendum to my previous list of points, a list of minor issues of lesser importance:

-Sticky threads are not distinct enough from regular threads.
-Links are the same colour as the rest of the text, which makes them more difficult to find. I liked it when they were distinct and stood out. (Yes I know they are underlined, but what fi someone simply chooses to underline plain text?)
-Underlining function is either not in UBB Code, or unavailable. Perhaps because of the link issue. That seems oddly unnecessary.

I am going to broach an issue here that hasn’t been touched upon yet, probably due to the small numbers of the specific demographic which I represent. Specifically, I am going to attempt to draw your attention to the issue of accessibility.

The new forums are extremely, exceptionally unfriendly to people who are visually impaired. I honestly don’t know how many of these play CoH on a regular basis, but I am certain there’s at least one – to wit, me. I am normally operating with something like 18% of normal average eyesight, photophobia and colour sensitivity, eyestrain, fatigue and so forth.

I use a computer with a large monitor without aides, so I get to see the forums in their “natural state” so to speak. The factors I generally consider when deciding upon the ease of my user experience are icon sizes, colour contrasts, font colours, clear outlines and easily accessible forum functions presented as text labels rather than as icons.

So far the new boards have been an almost textbook example of how not to do it. Allow me to list some bullet points for you to consider:

• New Messages: With the removal of the colour change on new, unread threads, and with the only markup being bolded subject texts, they’ve become literally impossible to find. I open a forum, and have no idea where the new stuff is, beyond remembering which threads were not at the top before.
• The arrows marking going to new posts are much too small. I have, in fact, not found them ‘till my husband pointed them out to me.
• Font colour (white) upon the new blue-gray of the background is considerably more difficult to read. On the whole, half-tones and shades are much more of a mess than clear base colours, and this one especially seems not to contrast with the thinner white font sufficiently.
• Colour gradient: the change between blue-gray and darker blue at the end of the reply box is not conducive to ease. (Incidentally, if the dark blue were to be the base colour, readability would improve significantly).
• Fonts: The font size is smaller, and the font face is Arial (a sans-serif font which is notoriously difficult and seems to enjoy a certain bad reputation on the ‘net).which is thin and narrow. Sans-serif fonts are sometimes clearer, but serifed fonts are more easily parsed.
• Small icons with overloaded graphics: make it impossible to find anything on the forum.
• General graphics overload: On the whole detracts from the ability to focus on the text, hinders rapid responding and makes scanning a forum for new information completely impossible.

These things are important. Perhaps a skin looking more like the old forums, which were, on the whole, very easy to read, would be advisable?

I really dislike these forums. They can literally serve as an example of how NOT to adapt forums and web pages for people with impaired vision.

Ugh.

Finally! My (completely standard and appropriate) 'o's and 'u's no longer feel so lonely.

Chapter XXXIX
In Which Matches Are Sorely Needed

When we were home – or, at least, on the same special-temporal plane as home – the moon was waning slightly, it had been a week or so after the middle of a lunar month. Over here, or over in this time, which seemed to my senses to be the more likely, it was waxing, and would reach its fullness in perhaps another week. Its light was barely sufficient, in any case and the night, just as I’d predicted, was incredibly dark. There was no light pollution, no glowing cities on the horizon, no sparkling dots of airplanes and satellites drifting across the sky. That was the hypothesis I posited to the men while we were resting, breathless and drooping from boneless exhaustion, after our trek down.

“Or it could be a dimension like my dad’s,” Garent said. “Where technology is pointless.”

“Hence the highly convenient non-existence of magic,” I said drily. “To make life ever so much easier.”

“Your point being?”

“That technology doesn’t stagnate in dimensions where magic isn’t all-prominent,” I said with exasperation. “Humans like their hot baths and their rapid travel and their antibiotics.”

Lorenzo and I grimaced at each other over Garent’s head, looking at our grubby clothes, dusty hands and subnurnt faces, probably thinking the same thing; that we wouldn’t mind a hot bath, rapid travel and, perhaps, even some antibiotics. Out of the appealing list, I only had the latter item, and even that in woefully short supply.

I groaned, lurched to my feet, and went off toward the sound of running water.

The campground – if one could call three people sitting down with nothing around them a camp – was rocky and sported a large amount of thorny bushes which tore at my skirt. It did, however, had trees to hide us from the rising wind, and a convenient small little streamlet that, at least in the dark, appeared relatively clean and supplied a decent amount of cold water. It certainly was not enough to wash in – it wasn’t even enough to wade in – but I did make a point of rubbing the dust and grime off my hands and face, and filling up my water bottle to bursting.

I helped Garent wash his face, and poured water for Lorenzo as well. We all felt better once we were marginally clean, though we were still gray, with dark circles under our eyes, and the look on Garent's face was downright disconcerting.

Then I busied myself tallying and treating the damage from our descent. We all three had cuts, scrapes and a couple bruises which would turn into spectacular sights in a day or so. About the latter I could do little – I pressed a cold, wet bandage to an especially spectacular one on Garent’s elbow – but I was occupied for a while cleaning and drying out dirty scratches.

“I still say that a parallel universe is not as good a possibility,” I announced, grabbing hold of Garent’s wrist and swabbing the back of his hand with alcohol. “We know when the gem of Shubat-Anshar served its purpose; why search for some implausible hypothesis just to make our lives complicated?”

“So that we don’t make mistakes, obviously.”

“Instead,” I said with soft, biting anger, “we won’t come up with a working hypothesis at all, and find ourselves without plans, without means, and without an estimate of what we’re up against. That does not strike me as productive.” I moved on to Lorenzo, reaching up to clean a thankfully shallow cut on his arm.

“The river—“ He hissed momentarily when the alcohol touched the wound. “Could very well be the Euphrates. The map of the region fits, vaguely, with the features of the land. If it is indeed the Euphrates then we are currently in the small mountain ridge to the east of it, with plain all the way to the Syrian mountains – which are too far to see – and Lake Tharthar to the south. We saw a body of water, of sorts.”

“Which makes the city we saw Shubat-Anshar. Probably in all its ancient glory.”

I pulled down his sleeve, and tilted his head gently to deal with a scratch on his cheek from a sharp outcrop of rock he encountered on the way down. I had a matching one on the other side of my face from where I rapidly pulled Garent back – and overbalanced. In the moonlight, he was practically gray with exhaustion, and seemed on the edge of his nerves; not close to snapping, surely, because people like him did not snap, but likely to withdraw so deeply into himself that there would be no dragging him out.

Lorenzo was never an easy person to have as a friend – or to be a friend of, I wasn’t sure which. I never knew quite where one stood with him, how much he cared for my company, and how much he simply tolerated my presence because I was too rude to leave him alone, and he was too polite to tell me to do so. It – whatever it was, in our case – only worked out because we respected each other’s privacy as much as we respected each other’s confidence. Or, I should say, I respected his privacy and confidence, and he occasionally indulged mine. Nevertheless, there was a limit to even such a respect, and I was deeply worried that trying to stoically contain everything, as he was both taught and inclined to do, would do him more damage than even his resilient psyche could handle.

Or perhaps, truthfully, distance him further than my psyche could handle.

I said nothing. We had, unfortunately for my tired eyes and aching feet, miles to go before we sleep.

The business of setting up camp for the few hours we would spend in that place proved simpler than we’d anticipated. Not for lack of wanting, but for lack of resources. Between the three of us we had, perhaps, six pockets, including the ones in Lorenzo’s coat. Most of these contained the professional tools of the mage that he was – or had been where magic was useful – which he extracted, ruefully examined, and then discarded. My own pockets held a folded-up stack of tissues, some pocket change in various international coinage, and a pen. Not precisely what one would call a survivors’ dream. I wished for more daylight to scavenge around and acquire food – I was beginning t feel the lack of dinner the previous evening (though I could not quite estimate how many hours ago that had been) – but the darkness, and the scarcity of fruit at this time of year, if indeed it was spring as it appeared, prevented me from even trying seriously.

“I think the stream must have fish in it,” small, thin fish with no taste to speak of, I did not add. “I suppose I could fish some.”

“I suppose I could snap off a branch for a fishing rod,” Lorenzo made to get up. I pressed him down again, firmly.

“You stay seated. A fishing rod would not be fast enough, or efficient enough. Considering the size of this puddle, I’d want something that I could simply use to scoop the fish out. Perhaps,” my eyes lighted in speculation, “if Garent were to loan me his t-shirt…”

“Uh oh,” Garent hunched down protectively. “Oh no, I don’t like where this is going at all.”

“I cannot very well be expected to provide mine,” I said acidly, and was rewarded with a – rather misplaced, I thought – collective shudder. I decided to ignore it in favour of poking through my bag. “It’s a moot point anyway, because while there is kindling in plenty, I have no matches, alas.”

“Ah,” Lorenzo patted his pockets ruefully. “Nor do I. Madam, you don’t think you could…?”

The question hung in the air treacherously. At one point in my life, I had been a pyrokinetic. I was not of impressive talent – for the truly magnificent displays of fireworks one required a far greater deviation from the normal than my brain presented – it was my skill and imagination, rather than my strength, that had allowed me to dance circles around my foes, and leave them wounded, or dead. Nothing is without its price, however and my sojourn in the sphere of global events had not left me unscarred. I still suffered nightmares and occasional reversals to my injuries. My brain had been battered into a pulp more than once. It was a wonder that I had still had a sense of self not to mention all my memories and intelligence. I will forever walk with a cane, but I was, on the whole, grateful.

I owed it to them to try, at least. I extracted out the small bottle of ethyl alcohol I used as a disinfectant, and uncapped it, smelling the wafting fumes. Ethyl has the lowest flash point of all liquid fuels; a run of the mill psionicist should be able to make it burn, even under the circumstances. I, however, could feel nothing, and grasp nothing. I tried to reach out a mental hand and will the liquid to burn, but it simply sat there, inert and stinking. I placed the cap back on the bottle firmly, preserving the alcohol for more beneficial uses.

I still could deal with world conspiracies, global threats and interdimensional demigods… but I could not light a fire.

By this point, I am sure, Lorenzo was mentally kicking himself, regretting ever having asked. In truth, I am not overly inclined to feel sad or even consider this a disability; ninety-nine percent of people cannot make fires with their heads, and for the first thirty-something years of my life, neither could I. this was no different. I grimaced annoyance at the notion of spending a night in the cold, however, especially since Garent was looking like he was barely keeping himself from shivering. I could tell, with my hand resting on his shoulder as it was to make conversation easier.

“Unfortunately, this is not our lucky day in the firestarting business,” I said lightly, and saw Lorenzo’s frown disappear.

“That’s too bad,” Garent was commenting, not complaining. “I didn’t realize deserts get cold at night.”

“Deserts are very... deceptive.” Lorenzo picked up his long, heavy coat, and draped it around Garent’s shoulders neatly. I pawed in my bag for a while, and came up with the tiny, folded space blanket that I used to treat shock victims and hypothermia, which I spread on the ground for all three of us to sit on. That was, more or less, the sum of what we could do for ourselves at the time. Daylight might bring more optimal solutions – I certainly hoped so.

Garent drooped quietly in his spot, and yawed. I figured on his tiredness; he was expending immense energy just to stay in touch with me, not to mention the tiring job of moving around without seeing the path. It was no wonder that now, when he was warm, he couldn’t stop himself from falling asleep. I would follow his example if I could afford it.

“Why don't you take a nap?” I advised him. “We'll wake you if anything interesting happens.”

“You--” he yawned, “think I should?”

“Most definitely,” I and Lorenzo asserted at almost the same moment. He sighed, and curled on the blanket like a child, huddling in Lorenzo's coat. Within moments, his breathing softened into the rhythm of sleep, or at least shallow slumber, and only two of us remained, scanning the horizon hopefully for Rostov's flares.

Chapter XXXVII
In Which Many Questions Remain Without An Answer

By the time we had reached the top of the hill, I was wiping off sweat discreetly, and breathing hard. Garent wasn't; but then, he was not doubling his labours by contending with unsteady feet and the necessity of seeing for two people.

The sad part about it all is that I am, really, quite physically fragile. I am no longer young, and even in my youth I was not known by my stamina and sportsmanship. The Chernobyl catastrophe, and the severe damage I took – less than my husband's, to be sure, but nonetheless not negligible – contributed little to my well-being. It was no good news for our little company, and for the suddenly complicated situation we found ourselves in, that I was already dragging myself on sheer willpower.

Garent had no reason to know this, however.

The hilltop proved mildly windy, and the heat which was slowly rising with the (noon, I grimaced and adjusted my internal clock) sun was less oppressive when one stuck to the shade. Lorenzo was leaning on a rock, staring out to the horizon, looking tired. He turned around to the sound of gravel crunching underneath our heels.

“Ah, madam. I see you've... handled the situation, somewhat,” he eyed Garent, attached to my arm, seriously.

“Oh, hi, Lorenzo,” Garent supplied his own solemn reply. “Yeah, I'm better now.”

Lorenzo's brows shot up.

“Hah,” I said with bitter satisfaction, “so we both made the same assumption. Telepathy,” I informed him, “works.”

“If you can call this working,” Garent grumbled. “It's like a mad scientist's invention; it explodes in my face two times out of three.”

“Still, we must be grateful for small favours,” Lorenzo sighed, whether in relief or in simple exhaustion I was hard-pressed to tell. “I, too, have some news for you. look over there,” he pointed behind his back, to the panorama opening underneath our little hillock. I gently detached Garent's hand from my elbow, placed it on the rock outcrop and went to stand beside Lorenzo.

The panorama opening from our hill was complex, and indubitably strange. The land underneath was a lush, fertile valley, albeit set in a hot climate. It reminded me of the Jezreel valley, with its geysers of hot water and wide, open fields; the land of kibbutzes and little villages as almost nowhere else in the Middle-East. Yet this was very clearly not the familiar little strip of land. For one, it was much bigger; it stretched out and out until it was lost in the blue haze of the horizon, merging with the sky. A river, rather large and full of water at this time of year, at least, coiled through it, and irrigation channels, sparkling in the sun, streamed away from it into the fields. There was the hint of mountains beyond the horizon, and another hint of a large body of water – perhaps a lake, perhaps a sea cost – further to the south. It was very beautiful – I actually smiled in pleasure – and very disconcerting.

I saw what he meant at once. “Fields,” I murmured. “And terraces. And... a road?”

“So I surmised. And a city, as well... though, I confess, my vision is not sufficient to say much about it.” He pointed to a brown blur. I squinted at it dubiously. Vision has never been my chief sense; I have the singularly keen hearing, capable of picking tiny distinction, characteristic of my profession, but my eyesight is... average. Still, I thought that I could make out the cityscape beyond the fields, blocky against the blue horizon. Blocky meant construction. I pursed my lips, wishing for binoculars or a telescope.

I turned around slowly, processing more of the view. The hills were very green, positively verdant, and the fields were obviously fertile. Olive groves too early in the year for fruit, I thought, considering the colour of the leaves, and maybe grapevines.

“Civilization of some kind. Either very rural, or very ancient, but civilization nonetheless.”

It did not take a genius to see where this was going, and we both understood it. The key, and the gem, were together a magical focus and an artifact of climate control. Or had been... sometimes in the days of the Akkadian empire. The land about was vastly different from what we have seen... then, I concluded reluctantly. Remove all the plants, add several millennia of harsh desert erosion, and the lay of the land would change drastically.

“Two possibilities,” Lorenzo echoed my thought. “Either we have gone to some alternate dimension or to a time and place where the gem was still active.”

“The key seems to have affected time, as well as space. Which speaks for option A… but one would not wish to be exclusive.” I whirled. “Garent. How much time passed between the vortex and your being here?”

There was no answer. “Garent?” I touched his shoulder.

“Hm. What?” He blinked and shook himself awake from an apparent daydream.

“I, uh... guess you didn't catch the question.”

“I didn't hear anything,” he confirmed. “Were you guys saying something?”

I stared at him for a moment, figuring this out. When he said he had no power or range behind his telepathy, I suppose he truly meant it. I resolved to stand very close to him next time I was inclined to have him participate in our conversations, and repeated the question.

“Time? None. I was there, and you were grabbing my hand and then I think I blinked and I was... here.”

Lorenzo and my palms hit our foreheads at the same moment. I dropped down to my knees, clearing a patch of ground hastily with a hard. Lorenzo followed to better see and, I strongly suspected, get off his hurting knee. “If this is indeed our focus then we showed up here,” I marked the epicenter and a second spot. “And Garent…” I put a third spot down. “Here…”

“About an hour later,” Lorenzo said quietly, completing my thought.

I drew over the dots gently; first concentric circles, then a rapidly expanding spiral, dots falling onto its arms. Tighter rings by the centre which widened as they went. “It fits. I would bet that, if we had more data, we could graph the correlation. Dammit.”

“Okay, I lost you again,” Garent was bemused. “Why is this a bad thing?”

“Because, Mr. Ward,” Lorenzo elaborated, “the people who were nearest the center were Auer and his soldiers. That implies.” He added after a look at Garent’s still confused expression, “that they must have landed over there – in the city, that is,” he shook his head ironically at his pointing finger, “and must have done so much earlier.”

“How much is much?”

“That is impossible to say. A day? A month? A year? I would give much to know.”

As would I. Time was… in time travel, time was everything. And I was growing almost deathly certain that time travel was, indeed, what we were faced with. It would explain the queasy sensitivity I had for the effects – the almost material sensation of weight which, in this case, was nothing but a metaphor, yet was interpreted by something… my mind? My soul? – and the drastic change in surroundings, the odd skip from night to daytime without the memory of anything but the briefest of bouts of unconsciousness. My brain has been shooting off little bells of alarm in that direction – I am sure Lorenzo’s was, too – but I had been far too cautious of unbased hypotheses to venture a premature guess.

“By this time, they could do anything,” Lorenzo was saying, ruefully. “Set themselves up as gods…”

“Surely not,” I objected mildly. “Your friend, Auer, did not seem a fool. Godhood tends to backfire.”

His eyes flashed momentary anger. “Heinrich Auer is not a friend of mine.”

I acknowledged my error with a defensive gesture, palms out, “I do apologize.” I meant it. My apology was not only for the nature of the jibe itself, but also for making it. I knew Lorenzo well enough to know what sort of associations his rival – our rival – would bring up in him. It was part of our arrangement; certain things – a number of things – were never implied.

“I’m sorry, madam. You of all people I should not be angry with. Nevertheless, while the god stratagem has a finite limit, Auer might be planning for a middle-term goal. He may consider this ploy to suit his ends. Whatever they are.”

“And just what are they?” Garent asked curiously.

“I still cannot tell you that. Beyond the generic notion of restoring a world order which was doomed in the first place.”

We all contemplated this for a while. Each of us must have had his own visions. I don’t know what Garent saw – most likely, infinite darkness, stretching forever – but Lorenzo and I surely had the same visions. He had seen them happen in reality; I had them ground into my marrow and blood. A different history and a different humanity. It was not impossible, though it was not pre-determined. Nothing was ever pre-determined, but that, after all, was the entire point of mankind as I saw it, and the very thing Auer must have sought to change. I believed I began hating him, then, though in reality I hated him much earlier…it simply took me a while to see it as truth.

“So what do we do now?”

I rubbed my eyes. “We still have to find Rostov and Victor and, I must point out, resources. Food and water will become highly pertinent issues in a few hours. Speaking of which,” I drew a large water bottle from my bag, and proffered it. “Drink.”

“I don’t need any…” Garent was waving me off.

“Yes, you do.” To my surprise, Lorenzo was the one who came to my aid. “You no longer have your magic to support you through dehydration, Mr. Ward. This may not be the Arabian Desert anymore, but the climate is still Middle-Eastern. We cannot afford you collapsing or going into seizures.”

It was, I observed as Garent dutifully drank his share of the water, convenient to have company who knew the region as well, if not better, than I. after Lorenzo had also taken his turn, I pocketed – well, bagged – the remainder of the precious little we had left again. The physical load on my shoulders lightened considerably; the metaphysical one grew only heavier as time went.

“I don’t believe that I can do much regarding resources quite yet,” Lorenzo commented. “But it seems to me that finding Rostov won’t be quite as hard as we think. I am not the mathematician your husband is, madam…” we stared at the spiral together, each running, I was sure, through the same set of mental approximations, “but it occurs to me that he would be somewhere behind us, since that is where he stood. If we crest the ridge to the opposite side from the city, and wait, we might see him appear.”

Chapter XXXVI
In Which We Make Do With What We Have

I fought down the sheer, incapacitating terror that, justly, gripped Garent at this very moment. It was a difficult and bitter pill to swallow and it constantly attempted to rise again, together with the deep fear-nausea. I could hardly afford to fall apart now however. Most especially not now. And I had to play this carefully… carefully. For all Garent knew, he was still surrounded by enemies and that they had not killed him yet – did he realize that he could be killed? – might be entirely a trick to amuse their sick urge for sadism.

A few steps from Garent I stopped hesitantly. His initial panic had withered away quickly – Garent was never the panicking kind – and turned into a sort of limp despair tinged with a nervousness so high-strung that it was about to snap. He huddled in on himself, hands still covering his face, and an occasional, slow tear slipped down between his fingers. I gulped and, astonished, tasted salt in my own mouth.

By then, Lorenzo caught up with me and stood, leaning on his cane, staring down with an expression of deep sympathy and awkward embarrassment. “What…” He hesitated. “Can I be of help in any way? Without my magic, alas, I am not much of a healer.”

“I confess,” I bit my lip to keep my voice from trembling too obviously, “I am altogether out of my depth. Here, hold my bag.” I pulled the strap off my shoulder and handed it over. Then I knelt in front of Garent and, careful not to exert too much force, or startle him, I pulled one of his hands away from his face and into mine.

He tended nervously. “Wh-who’s that?” his other hand moved forward tentatively. I tilted my head, draping my ponytail over my shoulder for him to find. “Oh… Sofia? I… this is not very good…”

“You could say that,” I murmured, more for the benefit of my sanity than his.

“Did we get caught?” he frowned, looking around, squinting futilely at the captors he couldn’t see. I shook my head, signaling a negative, and some of the tension ran out, only to be replaced by a deeper sort of depression. The change did not seem beneficial to me in the least. Almost anything – rage, more tears – was preferable to this despondency. I couldn’t stand to watch.

I turned away momentarily, to see Lorenzo, a pitying expression which he entirely failed to hide on his face, looking away, still holding up my bag, twisting the cord helplessly. “You can put that down now,” I told him gently.

“Oh.” He dropped the heavy item down with a thud. Garent shuddered. Lorenzo put a hand on his shoulder in a gesture both of comfort and apology. “I rather thought, madam, that, to save us time, I should continue up the hill, and take a look around.” It was a more than understandable retreat; Lorenzo, like me, fled into action when all else failed. I could not begrudge him that. And I did not blame him. I nodded my understanding as well as my assent, and he trod off slowly.

I frowned in worry at his retreating back. There was another basketful of problems for me to sort, and this one required even more delicacy than Garent’s. I covertly examined the road, to ensure that it was not about to get rougher and make his climb… interesting. It seemed mellow enough – no worse than it had been previously – and he was, sensibly, taking his time about the climbing. Not, I smiled cynically to myself, necessarily because he took pity on himself but because he wanted to give me as much time alone with Garent as was possible and feasible.

I watched until he vanished behind a curve of the track.

I extracted some tissues out of one of my bag’s seemingly bottomless pockets, and carefully wiped off the tear streaks on Garent’s face. He sighed, and leaned his head on his knees. “I’m useless, you know,” he mourned, his tone funereal. “Completely useless. I’m just going to tag around after you all, not knowing what is going on, until we all die.” I winced, at a loss all the more because, to an extent, his fears were true. Nevertheless, it would do him no good to sink this way into a mental breakdown… I milled about uncertainly.

“Useless, useless…” he chanted under his breath.

I slapped him.

I did it very lightly; even a full blown slap of mine doesn’t do any real damage, perhaps doesn’t even hurt significantly. I don’t have the upper body strength to deliver anything close to the sort of cinematic, ringing blow to the face which is remembered so fondly by the watchers of soap operas. In any case, what was the point? I was not interested in causing pain; I was merely interested in delivering a quick, unequivocal message. And I had no doubt that Garent would recognize it, and know what it means.

He hiccupped and stopped.

“Oh…” He rubbed his cheek, bemused. “I know that one. That one goes ‘stop this self-pity, Garent. You are not helping’.”

I chuckled softly because, of course, he was correct. And then, because he was still curled up and shivering and frightened I did something which I generally avoid doing at all costs; I wrapped my hands around him, and pulled his head to my shoulder.

Let me tell you this; pity is a horrible emotion. It is corrosive, destructive, it demolishes any good thing it touches, wreaks havoc upon any genuine affection, pollutes the kindest of relationships. Pity is the worst emotion in the world. It, and not the circumstances, makes a cripple. It, and not the universe, created condescending inequality. I have been pitied, and I’ve sworn to myself that I would never do it to another person, ever again. But at that time I was struck by the realization that – between the bravado and the guts and the bulky mage robes – I’d forgotten just how small Garent truly was.

Now, huddled in his slightly oversized t-shirt and jeans, head resting on my shoulder, I saw again that in reality he was barely taller than myself. Almost two decades my junior, and looking younger still.

I kept myself from bursting into tears only by the knowledge that, if I do, they will likely drip straight to the top of Garent’s head. And that, of course, would do either of us little good. I let him get it all – or as much of it as one could under the circumstances – out of the system. The timing was as good as some, and better than most; we were alone, no one was shooting at us, and the sum was not yet edging noon, keeping the weather from being sweltering. Garent sniffled for a little while longer, then went quiet.

“Sofia,” he said piteously after a while, “please stop dodging me.”

I blinked. “What?”

“You’re doing your usual dodging thing… Well, you aren’t anymore – I can hear you now – but you were.”

“Oh…” My jaw dropped. I am, officially, one of the worst telepaths the world has ever seen. Other people’s thoughts, for me, remain strictly in their proper place – in the heads of other people. And I am content to leave them so. I am not, however, without defense in the face of the overwhelming number of psionicists and mind-readers about. I, as Garent so aptly termed it, dodge. Without noticing or conscious will.

Garent, on the other hand is a psionicist as well as a mage. And, while magic contributes the majority of his powers – as well as the all-important compensation for birth defects that had now failed him so miserably – there is a small minority that is, as such things can be considered, innate.

“I had assumed,” I said cautiously, “that all powers were gone with the magic.”

“So that’s what happened.” Garent rubbed his eyes. “That would explain… this. Everything is really fuzzy,” he complained. “It’s like I hear you over a phone with really bad reception. Sometimes everything cuts out. Ugh.”

“I won’t dodge you anymore,” I promised.

“Thanks. Uh… Just what happened to us, anyway?”

I quickly reviewed the events for his benefit, the few of them that there were, leaving out – to spare Lorenzo’s pride – the description of the condition he was really in. Otherwise, I omitted nothing, though it might be said that I did not have much to omit. It seemed foolish, in any case, to attempt to sugarcoat anything for some obscure “comfort” or “lack of stress”. I do not believe in such measures in any case, and Garent was likely to have valuable insight to contribute.

“We found out magic was gone fairly quickly,” I sighed, “But we did not think to check for anything else. Nor could we, really…” I refrained from kicking myself mentally for the (relatively small) delay that caused Garent so much anguish. Even if I had known that telepathy, in some small measure, still was available, I could not have taken the initiative to establish that sort of link. Regardless of what was my fault – and dragging Garent into a situation so frightfully dangerous to him surely had been – this was not.

“It’s not just magic,” Garent pinched the bridge of his nose with the effort of concentration. “Magic is… gone. Just isn’t there, like it never happened. Everything else is… sluggish. Like swimming through jelly or something.”

“A pity,” I said sincerely. “That incapacitates Victor – at least partly – as well as Lorenzo and you.”

“At least Vic can maybe make a… a fire ping-pong ball,” Garent grumbled. “I’m completely useless.”

I shook him slightly. “I thought we’d already had enough of that. You are not useless,” I informed him firmly. “You will just have to be useful in a different way.”

“You mean as cannon fodder?” He inquired sweetly.

“Won't work. You're much too short,” I retorted, and the world was back in its regular axis.

Chapter XXXIV
In Which We Get More Than We Bargained For

“Come on, hurry.” I tapped my foot impatiently on the dirt as the men gathered their wits. Auer had absconded through a small, but convoluted, series of passages, into the very heart of the temple. That in and of itself was seriously ominous; there were few good things in the hearts of ziggurats, and this was, so far, less than promising. To compound that bad feeling I had in the pit of my stomach – fear takes me that way most of the time, making me nauseous – the entirety of Auer’s not-insignificant army absconded with him.

That could only mean bad news for us, in my personal opinion.

Auer and his troops had gone down, all the way down, into what felt like the heart of the temple itself; the passages twisted around themselves, and all slowly converged upon the same spot. The labyrinthine little out branches and dead ends lessened, and the passage we were running along – or stumbling, in my case – grew slightly wider. Enough to accommodate two people side by side. With what I knew of abandoned temples, the room Auer has chosen as his refuge was simply bound to be the Room of Doom.

Apparently, the rest had come to the same conclusion, because the men quickened their pace, leaving me to shout directions from behind.

We ran down the passage, taking a left where I had dropped my umbrella, producing a convenient road sign and pointer. I picked up the plastic-sheathed handle and strapped it back onto my shoulder as we went, struggling with the light in my other hand. By the time I had finished, the passage ended, as well. “In here.”

We peered around the corner cautiously. As before, the room as rather full of 5th Column soldiers. Auer was standing in the center, in front of a slightly raised dais. When I left to retrieve the men, he had been extracting an object out of a case; now the object was held aloft in his hands. Through the dim light of the room, I examined its shape curiously. It was made of… some material I could not quite pinpoint, and I had to squint in order to look at it at all. Attempting to trace the direction of its curves, as well as the beginning and end of them, gave me a rapidly escalating headache. A non-Euclidean artifact.

“The key!”

Lorenzo was staring at Auer, aghast. It was not precisely fear, but, certainly, consternation, as though Auer were taking an action only a madman would. It made a certain amount of sense; the key was a magical item, but we had no real notion just what it activated. The notion of simply inserting part A into slot B, as Auer was wont to do, seemed utterly insane to anyone remotely familiar with anything magical, even if the familiarity was, as mine, purely theoretical.

“Oh, hell,” I groaned.

The room inside was dimly lit with two spotlights placed on the wall. In the middle, as the centerpiece of the room, was a large, square alter. The key in Auer’s hand, with its odd, evasive geometry, was meant to fit into the centre of the altar. Or so I assumed with the dim light and the strange nook that seemed to be its intended position.

“We must prevent that. We have no real idea what these artifacts do, or are capable of… and in the hands of the—“

Garent waved his hand, and a thin trickle of water cascaded from it to the floor.

“Let’s see if we can get through to him before he gets his act together,” Rostov declared, and pulled out his rifle, taking aim.

“Careful,” Garent cautioned. “Don’t blow the key to pieces.”

“Relax. Some of us can actually aim.”

Rostov nudged his rifle gently a fraction of a centimeter to the right. Auer lifted his hand over his head and, with a triumphant grin, lodged the key squarely in its slot.

“Oh no!”

Lorenzo, Garent and I moved forward almost simultaneously. Victor gasped with horror, and tore off into the room so rapidly his contours blurred. He dodged through the soldiers who were turning this way and that, trying to figure out where the disturbance came from. Someone fired; Victor dodged neatly, but overshot the altar entirely, and appeared in a puff of fire on the other side of the room. “Victor, come…”

The world began swimming.

I felt it at first as though the oxygen were drawn from my lungs, then violently stuffed back. I hissed and tried to scream while gasping for air, but failed miserably. It seemed like an uncannily placed attack of claustrophobia – completely petrifying, and entirely personal – because nobody else appeared to notice the effect. The sensation was recurring. Over and over again the world pulsed, as though someone were rapidly throwing – and then just as rapidly removing – a thick down blanket over me. I flung out my hand to fend the thing off, but it was no use.

The dizziness hit a fraction of a second later. The room was lifting off the ground, moving about in slow, graceful waves, each one coordinated with the pulse of the invisible blanket. I stumbled and fell to a knee as my vestibular apparatus fought a losing battle against the impending oddness and disorientation.

“Madam, what’s wrong?” Lorenzo dropped next to me, grabbing me by the elbow. It didn’t help.

“It’s all… swimming…”

That was when the others began to notice the changes too.

“Uh oh,” Garent was staring around warily, balancing against the tide of swirling chaos on the balls of his feet. “She’s right. It really is swimming.”

“We must get to the—“ Lorenzo was slowly making to get up, having let go of my head, reaching out with his hand, perhaps for a spot of levitation. Garent waved the commentary off, and sprinted for the key and the altar.

The earth dropped from under our feet.

The universe swam. A huge maelstrom of colours, voice and people. Stones ground off and moved with a shudder and the walls themselves appeared to turn into a swirling animation as the colour leaked off of them and spun separately. Garent was fighting for balance just a little ways off. I lost sight of Rostov and Victor entirely; they had been spun off to the side and vanished beyond the ability of my overwhelmed, nauseated head to track. I felt a crushing weight land on me, then lift, then land again. Ebb and flow, like a monstrous, unnatural tide…

Timing the seconds, just as soon as the unbearable heaviness let off again, I twisted around, grabbing Lorenzo’s elbow with rubbery fingers, dragging him down again with as much force as I had. He tried to get loose, but I shook my head vehemently, pinning him down by hooking my elbow through the crook of his and snatching up the swordstick with the tips of my fingers. The headshake was sufficient to send me into a fit of dizzy dry-heaving; I swallowed back vomit and bile and whispered, “Garent…”

“What?”

I gulped for air, “Garent!!”

He turned around. Struggling against the artificial gravity I stretched my hand out as far as it would go, and leaned forward. Garent reached out and grabbed. Then the maelstrom caught us, and lifted us up into impossible vertigo, tossing us around. I closed my eyes and grabbed desperately. For a second, we thudded against something hard, then we were picked up again and the forces that drove the spin forced us violently apart. I felt Garent’s hand slipping out of my own just as Lorenzo leaned in and locked his other arm around my waist. My entire world narrowed down to the spin, and to not letting go.

Then there was one last, violent jerk, and Garent’s fingers slipped out of mine. I opened my eyes – a grievous mistake – to a chaos of colour and form that looked nothing like the world, and then my head had enough.

Everything went black.

I could never RP on a voice chat. It would break any suspension of disbelief I may have. I've never managed to sit through a tabletop RP session without wanting to laugh, frankly.

The OOC stuff and the parentheses? Don't bother me at all. I simply separate the conversation into two parallel tracks - if I am inclined, more. I can easily be having an RP session on one tab, and a friendly chat OOC with the same people on another, and it doesn't break immersion.

The tendency to pull Dei ex Machinae or otherwise finagle with basic realism? That breaks my immersion instantly. I make sufficient room for throwing fireballs around - barely - I have no space left for a godlike entity with perfect morals.

Now, because this sort of thing annoys me, I must add this:

[ QUOTE ]

Do I play a 17 year old kid who just found his abilities,reading comics his whole life he wants to be like them and live by a better standard then jabbing a blade in someones eye,or shooting someone in the crotch,Sure he is barley keeping a D average in school,drools at ever big busted female toon.And should it come up great.But we are not reading a comic here we are playing a MMO many of us with limited time so forgive me if I don't have the ex-junkie,abused, car stealing,Hellion bangin kid who get his powers and now wants to be the world's Supra bad [censored].If that is your perception of realism have at it!!


[/ QUOTE ]

Pardon, but how is time or lack of thereof relevant? Do you suppose that more time online somehow correlated with more angsty characters? or, perhaps, with realistic approaches? I confess, I am confused. I never managed to spot the tendency you speak of. In fact, I am a little upset that you seem to imply those of us who want to stick to realism simply "don't have a life".

Secondly, consistency of comic universes has nothign to do with realism. Not that I read comics - I don't, due to disinclination and inability (yes, I am a literati snob) - but I do know they are created by a dozen authors and a score of artists over decades. Even a single author with one series cannot be completely consistent. How do you expect twenty to succeed?

What, you mean not everybody's character is just some person who happens to shoot fire...?

Oh, wait...