#medium:fic

It'd been his home for as long as he could remember, and he knew every nook and cranny like the back of his hand - much to the Old Guards' displeasure when he decided he didn't want them to find him. It didn't happen often, but it always exasperated Toman when he hid and the faces he made while he lectured Tag about not doing it again were almost worth the trouble of doing it again - but only almost. Tag didn't like to cause too much trouble, not when the Order Parallel had been so good to him.

Today, though, hiding was the last thing on Tag's mind. Normally he wasn't allowed to watch the parallels-to-be train with their elements, but Secundus had promised to show him the newest trick the older almost-parallel had picked up from one of the vids from the Lightning planet - Secundus' home planet. Apparently, if you were clever enough, you could modulate the heat-frequency of lightning and make it play music! The thought made Tag wish, for just a moment, that he could control the lightning too - but he pushed the thought away. Toman always said he had more growing up to do when he asked about what magic he could do, even though Stephano always told him he didn't have magic at all, and it was all very confusing.

Still, watching other people use magic was almost as cool as using magic himself, and he was very excited to see Secundus' new trick. Tag picked up a little more speed into a sort of half-jog - there was no running in the corridors, they weren't wide enough to accommodate more than two people across as if he ran that wouldn't leave space for other people. According to Toman, anyway, and he always seemed to have the best answers to whatever questions popped into Tag's head. Still, half-jogging wasn't running and it got him to the Lightning practice room that much quicker.

Each element had their own specialized practice room in the monastery, designed specifically to contain any kind of magical accidents that happened inside of it. The Lightning room had a little bucket outside for people to leave anything metal they might be carrying, and a big copper rod stuck firmly into the solid stone of the floor. Tag hurriedly rifled his pockets, nearly hopping from foot to foot in his impatience as he made absolutely certain he hadn't accidentally left a fork or something in one of his pockets. But the only things in there were a cool stone he'd found on the grounds and a small, equally interesting flower he'd found near it - he wanted to show them to Toman later, but they shouldn't mess up any Lightning magic so he hurriedly shoved them back where he'd pulled them from and pushed the door open.

Secundus looked up from his lotus position on the floor and smiled when he saw Tag. "Tag! I'm glad you made it. Much longer, and I'd've had to start without you - I could only get the room to myself for so long on account of Blayze and Accalia wanting to practice their lightning spears today too."

With a spry wiggle, Secundus unfolded himself from the floor and gestured to a corner of the room most notable for the heavy woven mat that rested on it. "You'll have to stay in the observer's corner - the bolts can get a little unpredictable when I modulate them."

He looked very apologetic and Tag shook his head vigorously enough to flap his ears a little. "No, no! I'm so happy you're letting me watch today, I don't mind standing somewhere safe."

To prove his point he ran over and jumped onto the mat - though the one inch of extra height it offered above the floor didn't warrant such an exaggerated motion. Still, it was worth it to see the worry clear off of Secundus' face and the parallel-in-training threw back his head to laugh.

"Well! With an attitude like that, I guess there isn't much point in waiting any more! Just remember, stay on the mat. No matter what, okay?"

Tag nodded energetically, and Secundus laughed again. Without another word, the older boy turned to face the copper lightning rod and raised both his hands in front of him. Cyan sparks flickered between his fingers, and the stench of ozone filled the air as all the hairs on Tag's head stood on end. He giggled at the feeling, and Secundus glanced at him inquiringly - and did a double take at whatever he saw, fear in his eyes.

"No-!"

Tag blinked, Secundus' terrified face swimming into view not four inches from his own.

"I'm thirsty," he said, and Secundus burst into tears.

Tag only had a dazed moment to think I can't drink that before the door behind Secundus burst open and Toman sprinted inside, followed by a worried-looking Accalia and Blayze. He looked weird like Secundus looked weird, swimming in and out of focus in front of Tag even as the older man rushed over and pulled Secundus off of him. Blayze grabbed the sobbing boy and pulled him in close, patting his back awkwardly as Secundus soaked his tunic shoulder with tears.

Tag blinked. That, that wasn't right, Secundus shouldn't be crying, he'd only been- he was only going to-

"How many fingers am I holding up?" Toman demanded, blocking Tag's view of Secundus with his hand.

Tag squinted. "Three. No, four. Two? Stop putting them up and down," he complained, and watched Toman's face darken with worry.

"Go tell the infirmary to prep for serious electrocution," he said, half-turning to address Accalia, and the girl paled and gulped before vanishing out the door. Toman turned back to Tag and put a gentle hand under his shoulders.

"I'm going to pick you up, and I'm going to take you to the infirmary, okay?" he said seriously, looking Tag straight in the eye.

Tag nodded. "Okay." Then a thought occurred to him. "Don't be mad at Secundus, okay? He was just going to show me how they make music on the Lightning planet, it's not his fault, I begged him to show me."

Toman shook his head. "He should have known better - rules are in place for a reason." He held up a hand to forestall Tag as the boy opened his mouth to retort. "We can discuss Secundus later. Right now, you need to get to the infirmary. I'm going to lift you on the count of three. One, two-"

Amelia Cosaint suppressed a sigh as Millie's owner, Maegan, went off on a vitriol-filled rant about the long-suffering plaintiff standing across from her - a tall man named Ivor. They'd been summoned to court today so that Amelia could hear both sides of a complaint filed by Ivor that Millie had gotten out of her pen and eaten two of his best moonberry bushes. The charge was a serious one; the Fire planet boasted very few species of plants that could live on its surface, and fewer still that bore fruit, and moonberries were by far the most sought-after. Ivor was among the best growers of the fruit, and he could only maintain fifteen smallish bushes. If the goat had indeed eaten the bushes, it would be cause to award serious damages.

"...And so there! Millie didn't eat those bushes, your own incompetence caused them to die!"

Ivor's expression didn't change, but he looked like he'd rather be literally anywhere else. Amelia took a deep breath and drew on the grounding coolness of the Water planet, so recently rejoined to the Continuum. Without the stabilizing presence of Variq - no matter that the man himself had become so unstable in recent months - it was that much harder to hold on to her temper, and Maegan was a trying person at the best of times. The return of the Water planet had ben an unlooked-for boon, one Amelia took advantage of shamelessly. Water banked the heat of a Firey temper, and the flow of cool blue allowed her to ground the rising red of her ire at these petty squabbles. She really missed Variq at times like this, for all she didn't regret his final fate.

It wasn't until he was gone that Amelia had really appreciated exactly how much Variq used to take care of in day-to-day administrative tasks. Suddenly, instead of the neat summaries of current affairs she used to receive every morning, her desk was covered in handwritten notes and complaints, bills of lading, births, deaths, marriage licenses - all the things Variq had used to intercept and organize for her, she now had to do herself. In addition to that she had to hold court for the more serious issues such as the one she was hearing now, and organize the dismantling of whatever the hell Variq had been building, and re-establish diplomatic communication with all the Tine on the planet, and a thousand and one other little things that went with running a planet.

She was exhausted in more ways than one, yet she couldn't let her people continue to suffer from what Variq had done. It was up to her, as their Summoner, to find the strength to deal with the problems at hand, and if that meant missing a little sleep and drinking coffee made from Variq's personal stash of the stuff, well. She buckled down and did it. Besides, it wasn't like this state of affairs could last forever; she'd already sent a notice to the Order of Parallels to inform them of Variq's death, and while they hadn't responded yet Amelia was certain they would see about sending some possible parallel candidates in reasonably short order. It wasn't like them to leave a Summoner without one for long, though what with everything going on she wasn't sure if they'd be able to get off planet or not; the little moon they lived on may have suffered the same fate as the rest of the planets and she would never know.

But for now all she could do was draw on her reserves of patience and the cooling influence of the water planet - and a brief brush the bond with Bryn, who was coincidentally on the water planet currently - she smiled and spoke diplomatically.

"Thank you, Maegan, I'm sure Millie's a perfectly lovely goat. Ivor, if you would please give us your part of the story?"

Ivor set his jaw but nodded, drawing himself up to his full height before he began. "I been keepin' care o' my moonberry bushes for more'n forty year, and I inherited 'em from my mother before me, and I knows how t' take care of 'em. Now, I know a goat's a goat, but if you've a goat the way I figure it is that you've a responsibility to make sure the goat don't get out to do what goats do where they hadn't ought to be doing it. I'm askin' for water enough to get a few new bushes started, comin' out o' her allotment, and no more 'n that."

The only thing dearer on the Fire planet than food was water, and it wasn't a small demand Ivor was making - but it was a fair one, and less than she might have awarded him if she'd had to come up with damages herself. Amelia leaned over to make a note on her now-ever-present tablet and nodded to Ivor. "That seems fair, given all the facts submitted in evidence. Additionally -"

Something tugged at the back of her mind, and she stopped abruptly. Something had changed, somewhere far away, something important. Maegan said something but Amelia ignored her; this was too important. Something was wrong...with Bryn?

Her heart turned to ice and she turned her full attention to her bond with Bryn - or rather, where her bond with Bryn should have been. All that was there now were some fading embers and an impassable gulf.

"No."

No, this couldn't be happening, not here, not now. Her daughter, her kind, beautiful, willful daughter couldn't be - couldn't be dead. It was as unthinkable as the Continuum going out or the moons rising in the North; it was wrong. It couldn't be, she wouldn't let it be. Bryn was just a little bit out of reach, was all, Amelia would just have to reach a bit further. She grabbed power from the Continuum and stretched and felt...nothing, there was nothing to feel her daughter was dead. 

Amelia rejected that notion a second time, and threw open her connection to the Fire planet with a grim determination; Bryn had to be alive, it would just take more power to reach her.

Amelia was dimly aware of the screams echoing in the throne room as the Fire of the planet surged through her and across the room - some of those screams may have been her own for all she knew - but she couldn't spare the attention for that now, not with all her will bent on finding Bryn, on reaching Bryn, getting closer to Bryn. She could feel the Fire of the planet begin to consume her, as it would consume all Fire Summoners, but she didn't care; she was getting nearer to Bryn she could almost feel it. The closer she got, the hotter the Fire burned. Closer, she was nearly there -

And then light bloomed across the connection and Bryn was back, back where Amelia could reach her without assistance, back where she belonged, and Amelia released the Fire in her hands without a second thought - and never mind how it had blistered and burned them, and the throne room around her. Her daughter, her Bryn, was alive.

Professor Baxter Brautigan suppressed a wince as the robotic pilot C-NACK88 threw them into a hard turn, narrowly avoiding the spray of Void bolts one of the pursuing ships had just fired at them. The turn had been hard enough that the gyrostabilizers had lagged and jarred his bad knee against the bulkhead, and even through the brace it was letting him know in no uncertain terms that it did not appreciate the treatment. Fortunately, their pursuers hadn't expected the move and overshot, allowing C-NACK88 to finally begin an approach to the Void relay they'd been intending to use the entire time.

Baxter leaned back and rubbed his sore knee. He wasn't the best at reading people; even on a planet with fifteen trillion inhabitants, he'd been able to count his friends on one hand as a kid and he'd just never picked up the knack. When he'd been offered a position at the Company, he'd thought it was a dream come true - a chance to travel to other planets and continue the experiments that lit up his brain like fireworks. He should've known better; sure, that's what it had been in the beginning - but then he'd caught a lab assistant copying files. He'd reprimanded them and sent a report off to the Company, and had never seen that assistant again.

He'd played it a little closer to the chest after that, keeping his files encrypted. Encoding his notebooks. It was still a grand adventure of science that made his heart race with excitement, of course, but some of the shine had worn off. Then, too, there had been the Company's insistence that he try live subjects - he'd tried to keep those experiments to a minimum, but he'd had to know if the first one was a fluke or not. His process worked perfectly every time, and the Company had been very impressed - impressed enough to give him a special assignment.

And that was really the kicker, wasn't it. He'd been told to retrieve critical research from the Bloom planet; what he hadn't been told was that it was his research. Baxter wasn't an arrogant man, he just knew with a stone-cold certainty that his research was the only such research to have successfully crystallized magic. He'd heard tell of some rituals that could do it too, but he'd dismissed those stories as the unfounded rumors that they clearly were. So the only natural conclusion to finding an enormous Bloom aeryx on the Bloom planet was that someone was using his research without his knowledge or consent.

Baxter was careful with his creations, and the aeryxes he made. He'd made sure to keep them for defensive or utilitarian uses as much as possible, no matter how much the Company had pushed him to make weapons. In addition, he was very careful about the sources he used to make them; aside from the living subjects, he tried to take only from things that occurred naturally or in abundance. He'd sunk years, decades of his life into this research, and he rubbed his hand over the heavy metal gauntlet that represented the culmination of those decades as the thought weighed on him. He had done his damndest to make sure that his research and experiments were conducted responsibly and ethically as much as was possible.

Whoever had taken his research to Bloom had had no such compunctions.

The gauntlet creaked as Baxter involuntarily clenched his fist at the memories, and he absently made a note to check the integrity of the joints and oil them later. The death of Summoner Langorium had only been the tip of the iceberg; he hadn't known the man - or any other Summoner, before that trip - personally, but he'd seemed well-liked in the town by his people. Choking to death on his own blood in the middle of a laboratory seemed like an ignominious way to go, an insult to the work he'd done for his people. More even than that, the Company would want to reclaim as much as possible from the laboratory - the pleasant little meadow that Langorium had released into the world with his death would like be trampled underfoot if it wasn't meticulously collected for analyzing in some other cold lab later.

The real sore spot there had been the missing workers. Even the memory of that room made Baxter gag slightly; he'd certainly never forget the way the corpses had been carelessly butchered to make room inside of them for the scorpion’s spawn. He'd heard, vaguely, of some species of insects that laid their eggs in corpses so their young could take full advantage of an abundant food supply - life sciences hadn't really been his thing, except where they intersected with magic - but he'd never really considered what that meant. Especially when said insects were the size of small shuttles and equipped with toxic stingers. The thing had hunted down, killed, and slaughtered hundreds of people - in a facility where the Company had apparently trapped and caged it to bring about an enormous Bloom aeryx.

Baxter may not have been the best at figuring out other people, but even he could connect those dots. His research, his technology, his contributions to the Company - his fault.

So he'd cut his ties to the Company in more ways than one, and run for it. He'd gotten away from Haven clean, with most of his equipment and the samples he'd managed to acquire of that strange black stuff that had infested the insect life on Bloom, but he'd made a mistake not too long ago that had lead to the most recent predicament of two Company ships on their ass and gunning for them.

In his defense, he hadn't had much of a plan when he'd fled Haven. It mostly involved not being incarcerated on a tiny moon and forced to go through the motions of lab work for the rest of his life, however long that actually ended up being. He'd managed to take out the Problem Solvers in his way and grab C-NACK before the robot had been decommissioned for parts, but once they were out of the system his well of ideas had run somewhat dry. By sheer force of habit, he'd grabbed his tablet and pulled up his email and calendar; unfortunately, it was his work email and work calendar, which had given away his position immediately.

It had paid unexpected dividends, though; in addition to the expected 56 mB message from his father and 47 increasingly hysterical messages from his mother, there'd also been one from the cousin he hadn't heard from in years. It had contained nothing but a picture of some kind of grassland at night, with the caption "Your eyes are open and you are not alone." He'd only begun to decipher what it could possibly mean when the Company ships had started shooting; he'd ended up downloading the thing to a quarantine tablet and jettisoning the tablet he had been using out the waste disposal airlock; C-NACK had managed to connect to the Void relay to prep it for a random jump, and now all they had to do was get there.

Warnings blared as they approached the relay; missile lock. Baxter cursed under his breath and leaned forward to tinker with the console. If he could just coax a little bit more speed out of the countdown to jump, he could -

Normally, she hated making such a spectacle of herself. The little book she carried around - the one she'd won off a piss-poor loser of a cardshark in Boston almost a decade ago now - had warnings about what folk would do if they caught you sharpin' the edges of reality. Dealin' with the devil for power was more intoxicating than any whiskey, but overindulging meant worse than a headache in the morning.

Still, it was late, and dark, and the monsters flittering about the place had driven the townsfolk into their homes if they were wise. For the few citizens of Varney's Landing who weren't wise, the monsters had already made a meal of them. Of course, the monsters looked a little less impressive in the daylight that shone from the card she held. Their pale faces, nasty teeth, and clawed fingers looked ridiculous in the light of day, like some cheap fella with too much time on his hands and less art than sense had simply tacked on whatever he thought sounded scary.

Still, they'd done a good job tearing through the townsfolk they'd gotten hold of, no matter how silly they looked without the dark to hid them. And, from the sounds of things going on in the hotel nearby, the "responsible" party members who'd chosen to turn in early had their hands full with even more of the things.

Battle was decidedly joined, and it was going on decidedly longer than Verity cared for. She had one more ace up her sleeve, one more little trick the Devil'd taught her. Granted, she'd never tried it before but she'd been listenin' to the Devil all night, and it seemed like a great idea right this second. And she might not even regret it in the morning.

She shuffled the cards she habitually kept in her left hand and took a deep breath. While normally she'd give a little side glance into that other place where the Devil lived, only take a few instants to gather her hand, this was something bigger. Something that would blow up in her face if she messed it up. She released her breath slowly and Looked directly into that Other Place.

The Devil was standin' there and grinnin', a deck of cards held in their hand. Just a standard poker deck on the faces, but the backs had real flames that flickered and danced under the Devil's fingers. Her own deck in the real world was a static imitation, but she wasn't about to try and gamble for the real thing. That kind of stupidity is what got inveterate gamblers like herself caught and lynched.

"What're you reachin' for this time, Verity?" the Devil asked, polite as you could want through the leer that twisted their face up into something mad.

Verity flashed her own polite smile. "I do declare, an end to this-here conflict. It's quite givin' me the vapors."

She fluttered her eyelashes and the Devil laughed.

"I have no doubt, Miss Langridge, that you could end this battle even without my particular brand of assistance. Still," they held out the deck in a silent invitation, guile dripping from their lips with every word, "I was never one to waste a conversation, and neither are you."

Verity laughed, the sound a little more mad than usual as it fell from her lips, and drew five cards. She spread them, smiled, and rearranged them just so between her fingers before showing them to the Devil.

"Straight flush."

The Devil laughed and laughed and laughed. That laugh followed Verity as she returned to the battlefield, straight flush still held in her hand. She grinned, expression reckless and power-drunk beneath the empty of the new moon.

This would be fun.

She looked down at her cards, and felt her sunlit card drop to the ground as her form changed and expanded. It was painless, and yet fully the strangest thing she'd ever felt - like going to a taffy pull, only for the taffy to pull back. She stretched and stretched and stretched until she towered over the battlefield. Armor thicker than railroad ties formed up along her flanks, and dozens of tentacles sprang from her newly-formed maw.

She stretched her new bulk up and up and up. 150 feet from maw to tail-tip, a mojave rattler was exactly what they needed to end the fight right here and now.

"Oh boys," she called, not thinking too hard on how a 150-foot-worm with tentacles instead of a tongue managed to speak English, "I think I've had just about enough of y'all."

Snarti was good at running. Snarti stayed alive by running. Snarti had to keep running.

She could hear them, behind her. The ticka-ticka-ticka of their chitinous legs running across the metal floors was not far enough behind her, and the hooked metal grappling hook she held in her off hand would do nothing to them. If they caught her, she was dead.

But if she didn't distract them, her friends were dead.

It was a simple choice, really.

Snarti lashed out for the third time without slowing and hit the wall beside her with a resounding CLANG!

"Come and get it!" She yelled at the top of her voice as her friends tripped on the uneven flooring and struggled to keep their feet.

Bugs were dumb. Bugs were so stupid, they thought loud noises meant bigger prey - and Snarti, 100lbs when she was soaking wet, could make a hell of a lot of noise.

Again she clanged her grappling hook on the wall and kept running. Ticka-ticka-ticka went the legs behind her, drawing in closer. She didn't bother looking back to see how close the swarm was; if she lost any speed now, she was dead either way. The only way she lived was by running forward.

The sounds of her friends grew fainter; good, they'd live to see another day. Snarti rounded a corner at a dead sprint, only just keeping her feet underneath her. The swarm followed, ticka-ticka-ticka, bug legs and bug feet having to problem with the corner even at the speed they were traveling. This was a long stretch of corridor, longer even than the one they'd started the chase on; that was fine by Snarti, and she didn't bother wasting breath or momentum to make more noise. However much of the swarm was following her would follow her now no matter what.

The ticka-ticka-ticka was getting louder, the further she went along the corridor, and was joined by the thunka-thunka-thunka of something - somethings - larger. Snarti remembered the 14-foot insect that had grabbed Brett - Greg - by the waist and tried to bisect him; she poured on the speed, and it seemed for a moment like she was pulling away from them.

But Snarti was running out of corridor.

Desperately she cast her eyes left and right; if she'd passed any doors or cross paths so far, she hadn't seen them, and there weren't any more that she could see between now and the corridor's terminus - a place where the ceiling had collapsed. She skidded up to the wreckage, panting, and immediately began scrabbling to try and find a way through. Ticka-ticka-ticka, went the legs behind her, thunka-thunka-thunka.

Her scrabbling grew more frantic; she clawed at the wreckage, sharp edges and frayed wires cutting into her fingers and making her leave red streaks painted criss-cross on the flat panels that made up the majority of the block. If she could just shift this big one a little, she could -

Ticka-ticka-ticka, went the legs right behind her, thunka-thunka-thunka.

Crunch.

Snarti sat up with a gasp, eyes wild as she took in the big canvas tent she'd appropriated for a combination of office and living quarters. It was too big, and too empty - her friends had found places to sleep elsewhere. Jeeves was there, but he hadn't been there, hadn't been in that awful race that had ended with a bug bigger than a lizard killing Illyana just because she was helping them. He didn't know, couldn't understand.

Snarti curled up under her covers and sobbed as quietly as she could.

A red flash of light, and the message cut out again and Bryn bit her lip, glancing over at the chronometer. Once Rex had replaced Shavanaugh as the Company representative on the ship, they'd gotten underway towards home as fast as they could. Unfortunately, that didn't feel very fast, not with her mother - her mother-

Bryn restarted the message and watched it play again.

"Bryn, honey, I'm sorry I missed you..."

Bryn watched the message play out again - the same as it had the last four times she'd watched it. Her mother wished her well, hoped she was having a good meeting with Summoner Langourium, some trouble with Variq, seismic activity and power troubles, Variq-

"Bryn, if you can hear me-!"

Red flash. The message cut out once again and Bryn tapped the desk. She wasn't usually one given much to nervous fidgeting, but right now, she couldn't keep her hands still if she tried. The message had been waiting a month - a whole month! Who knows what could have happened to her mother in that time.

Plus, it'd said something about Variq. Bryn didn't remember her real father very well, but throughout her childhood Variq had always been there for her. He'd answered her silly questions with a patience only surpassed by her mother, he'd come and fetched her when she tried to run away again, had as a general rule been a sort of substitute father slash confidant when she needed it. She couldn't imagine something being wrong with him; was he sick? Had he been poisoned?

She reached out and played the message again.

"Bryn, honey, I'm sorry I missed you..."

Bryn watched the message play out again, eyes straining for any clue she might've missed. She could hear Tag shifting uneasily from where he'd stood himself by the door, but he didn't interrupt her and that was all that mattered right now; it was the fifth time she'd watched the recording all the way through in the last half an hour. Again it played out in exactly the same fashion, with no new details jumping out at her as she watched her mother - Light above, she looked tired - talk about her troubles, the picture wobbled -

"Bryn, if you can hear me -!"

Red flash. Nothing. Bryn glanced at the chronometer again, and found the hands hadn't moved at all. She gave the direct line to the Captain a considering glance, and there was a soft rustle of fabric as Tag moved up to stand beside her.

"Bryn -"

"What is it Tag?" She snapped, and he flinched away a little before drawing himself up again.

"Calling the Captain won't help. We're traveling as fast as we can."

Bryn glared at him and his stupid, apologetic face. "Well, as fast as we can's not fast enough! My mother is in trouble, and this message has been waiting almost a whole month! There's no time, we should've been on the Fire planet a month ago!"

Tag put a hand cautiously on her shoulder, and she allowed it even as she glared at him mulishly. "Bryn, you and I both know there's only so fast the ship can go, and Captain Matt Vancil is pushing it already. We will get there soon."

Bryn twitched her shoulder out from under his hand and turned back to the screen, flicking it back to the start of the message again.

"Bryn, honey, I'm sorry I missed you..."

As fast as they could wasn't fast enough. Her mother, pillar of her young life and bulwark in troubled times, was in very real danger.