Gus
Justice RIDES AGAIN!!!
AEGISverse: Some Assembly Required
1/27/40
Classes at 108 had been canceled yesterday and today to accommodate ongoing investigation of Wednesday's 'incident' and Aaron wasn't sure what to do with himself. He decided to go for a walk, and found himself wandering in the direction of North Point State park. He stopped at the Bay Shore Bar and Grill, just to check the place out. He wasn't hungry or anything, it just seemed like a good place to start getting to know the local culture. He was perusing a brochure for the Black Marsh Trail system from their foyer when it occurred to him that the waitstaff had been eyeballing him suspiciously for some time. Guiltily, he ordered a local IPA microbrew, downed it quickly, and then ducked out. The beer wasn't bad per se, but Aaron was no drinker. Lately, no eater either...
In the parking lot, he paused to examine the map on the brochure. The head of the trail system was just a little way south from here, maybe half a mile. He folded up the map and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He was just crossing Miller's Island Blvd when something glimmered in his peripheral vision, just at the edge of the tavern parking lot. When he looked directly though, he saw nothing. Odd. He shrugged, and returned to his original plan. As he walked south, he let his mind wander. The desolation of the surrounding terrain seemed well suited to the current situation at work. This was clearly farm country, which seemed odd, so close to residential areas. In the spring, no doubt, it was verdant, but it was now the depths of winter, and the fields were stark and barren, much like the mood at 108. There would be major PR consequences for Klaus's meltdown, not to mention the disastrous results of having told Victoria to use her power. Nonetheless, Aaron remained fiercely optimistic. Like these fields, 108 would lie fallow for a while, and inevitably, better days would return. Impossibly, nobody had been hurt, and that was the main thing. Collateral damage, he well knew, could and would be fixed. Death was the only thing that could never be taken back. Everything else would turn with the seasons. This too, shall pass. As he was coming up to the crossing with the North Point Spur, he saw a familiar figure approaching from the west. He stopped and waited for her to join him at the crossroad.
“Morning, Ms. Higgins! Out for a walk? I'd say 'nice weather for it' but I suppose it would be a lie, however sociable. I was heading down to check out Black Marsh, for lack of anything better to do today. Care to join me?”
The assistant physical discipline teacher gave Aaron an appraising look, smiling faintly, as if something about him amused her. She gave a slightly exaggerated shrug, her shoulders moving in that faintly elastic way that few human beings could match apart from the most skilled circus contortionists. Not that any of them could hold a candle to what she could do; she could show up their very best tricks if she chose. Overextending, for Wolf, was hardly a stretch. So to speak. She fell in alongside him, stretching her legs almost imperceptibly to match his stride. After a while she spoke.
“So how was your class? I'm feeling a bit guilty now, in retrospect, for letting Danny walk out of ours. Can't help thinking how things might have been different if I'd challenged him more.”
“Ah, well. I was just thinking on that myself. The main thing is he suffered no permanent harm. Which is kind of a miracle, if you consider the facts. Teamwork saved him, and I consider that a real win, that we could work together so well in an emergency. Hell, even Penny helped, when the chips were down. Have you met Penny? She's a sweet girl, I think, but deep down. Very deep down, both figuratively and literally. All in all, I am more worried about the impromptu 'work' done on the Francis Scott Key Bridge. That's on me, mainly. Ultimately though, I think that while there will be plenty of blame to go around, it will largely blow over. We should be back to classes tomorrow, weather permitting.”
Wolf shrugged again, her head tilting one way and then the other in a 'maybe so, maybe not' sort of way, and they lapsed back into silence, walking south. Eventually they came to a heavy wooden gate by the entrance to the park. Loitering by the gate post, smoking a cigarette and trying to look like she wasn't trying to make it look cool, stood Alexis Devan. She looked up to see two of her 'special' teachers looking at her and instinctively stubbed out the cigarette in her palm, a practiced gesture no doubt acquired by long habit in regular public schooling. After a beat, she appeared to reconsider whether she gave a shit what AEGIS teachers thought of her and the cigarette made a miraculous reappearance and lit itself. After a long drag, she blew the smoke off to the side and asked truculently, “So what... ...you guys the truant brigade or something?”
Aaron and Wolf looked at each other in amusement. They each started to speak, stopped to allow the other to continue, then started again. Wolf took a half step back to definitively yield the floor. Aaron frowned, unsure now what to say.
“Did you... Were you not around for Wednesdays classes, Alexis?”
“I showed up. I didn't like the music spewing out of MD classroom when I went upstairs so I bailed. Yesterday I had to take care of gran. Today I just didn't feel like it. So what? You gonna sick Klaus on me now?”
“Uh... No. Klaus will not be involved in 108 affairs for the foreseeable future.”
“We actually have a few days off, and we were thinking of checking out the trail system for something to do. Meeting you here was as much a coincidence as meting each other. Want to join us? We can fill you in on the latest school gossip. You missed some juicy stuff!”
A series of complicated emotions crossed Alexis' face in rapid succession, settling on puzzlement.
“You want to go for a walk. In the woods. With me?”
“Sure, why not? We never did get to finish that discussion about heroes vs villains. And as Ms. Higgins indicated, we have some new data to bring to that discussion. What do you say?”
Unsure how to respond to this, Alexis shrugged indifferently, and smoked the last of the cigarette in one last powerful drag, flicked the butt into the bushes, and stepped back from the gate, bowing low and gesturing elaborately as if to say, after you, honored teachers.
“Holy shit monkeys. Danny's ok though? Not that I care or anything, just... wow. To think of all the shit I've given Klaus before... I mean, he seemed tightly wound, but fuck!”
Aaron smiled ruefully. Colorful language aside, Alexis certainly had a way of summing things up efficiently. The trail was proving to be a delightful walk. As desolate as the farmland had been, the marsh in winter was truly fantastical. Skeletal vines wrapping dead rotting trees jutting out of iced over wetlands, all frosted with snow, it gave one a feeling of exploring an alien landscape, inhospitable and cold yet strangely elevating. He was glad he'd decided to check it out; later in the spring, he wasn't sure the ground out here would be solid enough to hold him up effectively. He was leaning down to push aside a fallen log obstructing the trail when Ms. Higgins snaked up between him and Alexis, drawing them both in close with one elongated arm. She pointed out over the marsh as if to draw their attention to some interesting feature but spoke in a fierce whisper.
“Don't look around, but I think someone is following us. That's the third time I have heard underbrush crunching, behind us but I don't see anything back there.”
“You're paranoid, rubber band!” Alexis whispered back, shaking off the arm like a pesky python. Nonetheless she looked rattled, and waves of nervous heat rolled off of her, causing the dry undergrowth nearby to smolder.
Aaron turned, in spite of Wolf's warning, remembering the slight glimmer he'd seen earlier in the parking lot of the tavern. He saw nothing, but that was probably because he had closed his eyes. Photons could be disrupted any number of ways. Gravitons, not so much. The trouble was they were so damned faint. For a person sized mass, it took all his concentration to suss them out. Among the barren tree trunks, he was unsure whether he could at all; there was just too much clutter... but there was something odd happening. Not on the trail behind them but in the frozen over marsh before them. The water was draining away under the ice, disappearing into a vast open space that seemed to yawn open, a great rift in the earth spreading out now to the edges of the marsh. Right up to the edge of the trail. His last thought before the ground gave way under his feet was that it was odd there was no accompanying earthquake. Then he vanished down a steep slick trench of mud, slipping away into the depths of the pit at a ferocious speed.
Wolf's left hand shot up and back to wrap around a nearby tree trunk as an anchor, saving herself from Aaron's fate. Her other hand stretched out for Alexis, but needlessly; she was hovering over the pit, having instinctively deployed her fire wings as the ground started to give way. She glared down into the pit as if it's very existence offended her. Or perhaps she was irritated with her teacher's apparent inability to take care of himself, for in the torrent of abuse she poured down the hole after him, it was possible to discern the words 'fucksake' 'useless dumb douche-canoe' and 'what I think makes a hero is NOT HELPLESSLY TUMBLING INTO A GIANT GODDAMNED HOLE!' With this last bit of inventive invective, she fell silent and looked to the other teacher, hoping to see some ideas or the glimmerings of a plan. Wolf was just staring down into the darkness in horror, which rattled Alexis far more than she would care to admit. Her natural bluster saved her, however, and she flew up close, snapping her fingers before the teacher's face.
“Hey! Dodge-ball! We gotta get him outta there somehow! You're the teacher, even if it's just gym. You got a plan or what?”
Startled back to herself, Wolf nodded shakily.
“Right. Melt away the ice and let's see how big this hole really is. First thing is to get a sense of the scope of the problem. Maybe we can help him out, maybe we'll need to go get help.”
Glad of something to do, Alexis immediately turned her fiery attentions on the ice, rapidly melting it away to nothing. That done, she flew back over and alighted beside Wolf on what was left of the trail along the edge of where the marsh had been. In its place was a hole in the earth nearly 200 feet wide, descending steeply in a more or less northeasterly direction, with a deep groove cut into the near side, marking Aaron's passage toward parts unknown. The massive tunnel bent slightly to the east as is dropped, disappearing out of sight about 3000 feet away, perhaps 1000 below the surface. Even with the massive opening cleared, the thin winter sunlight did little to illuminate the tunnel that far down. As they stared in disbelief, a disembodied feminine voice from nearby said quite clearly, “Well, shit.”
Alexis's hands erupted into flame as she swung around searching for the source. Wolf's arms and legs burst out of the ends of her sleeves and pant-legs, extending her height and reach to an impressive 20 feet or more and assuming a sort of martial ready stance, reminiscent of certain Chinese style animal forms. Neither of them could get bead on the source of the voice however, and after a moment, she spoke again from somewhere out over the vanished ice.
“Alright, look you two. While I understand this is nothing to do with you, but I am going to need your help here. I am tasked with keeping an eye on that lunk down there, and I am asking you please, at the least, not to do anything rash when I reveal myself ok?”
“No promises!” Alexis shouted, maintaining her flaming fists and taking to the air again. Wolf nodded in vigorous agreement, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling and her arms weaving around to threaten the general direction of the voice.
“Fair enough. I am sorry for startling you. Please understand I am only breaking cover because I need to make sure Aaron is ok. I represent an organization that keeps an eye on guys like him for signs of trouble. I'm sure you can understand that we don't always get reliable data if we observe openly. Ultimately though my job is to make sure he doesn't get in over his head... Which he obviously has done. I am going to make myself visible now, ok?”
Out near the middle of the space where the marsh had been, seemingly standing on nothing, a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt with short cropped brown hair appeared. Almost instantly, Wolf's right fist snaked out across the space, joined by a quick succession of fireballs from Alexis. Both stopped short of their target, bouncing off of empty air. The newcomer sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, as they drew back to prepare another attack.
“Honestly! What is Hunter Ward teaching over there these days? When I was at 108 we showed a little more restraint than this. Swan would be horrified.”
“Yeah? Well, bite me! You go skulking around in the shadows and then pop up right after my favorite teacher has dropped out of sight down a bottomless pit, you don't get the benefit of the doubt, and name dropping proves precisely fuck all!”
Wolf hesitated, squinting at the mysterious newcomer. She extended her arm over to Alexis, holding up a hand to quiet her. To the other woman, she said, “Batel? Is that you?”
Now it was the interloper's turn on the back foot. She looked lost for a moment and then sudden realization dawns and she lights up. “Wolf Higgins?! Oh, I should have known it was you from the stretching! I just assumed you'd have moved on by now I guess, so I didn't make the connection! Are you still at 108?”
“Yeah, I just segued from student to teacher. Always seemed like home to me. What happened to you though? You totally disappeared after you graduated. Literally, I guess. That's a pretty neat trick.”
Alexis rolled her eyes as loudly as she possibly could, but it was not nearly enough to break up old home days, so she pulled a trick out of Mr. Mallory's book and tried using words instead of setting either of the older women on fire.
“Ahem! Hello?! Sorry! Hate to interrupt, but there's a guy at the bottom of that mudslide who might be hurt. So what exactly are you two sorority girly girls going to do about it?”
“Good question. How fast can you fly with those wings?
“Faster than you can run, little miss disappear, believe me.”
“Well we're not running, we're sledding. Down the hole and after him. I can make a makeshift mud-sled with my forcefields, Wolf will be the drag chute, to stop us going out of control, and you get to fly ahead and generate hot air to help us slow down. Think you can handle generating a massive amount of hot air, hot shot?”
Alexis opens her mouth to retort, but then closes it again, mildly impressed. That was a pretty sick burn actually. Seethroughgirlgotskillz. She reignited her wings, and swooped down into the pit.
Wolf looks doubtful, but unwilling to let a student go into the unknown alone, she clamps onto Batel's shoulders and twines her ankles around her friend's calves. Secured, she says simply, “Go.”
Batel closed her eyes and brought her hands up near her face in something approximating an attitude of prayer, except with fingers bent and oddly splayed. She dropped her wrists, and then her hands popped apart and spread out palms down, as if defining a volume of space below her. Then she simply pointed down. And down they went.
Wolf whooped in excitement in spite of herself. It was like base jumping into hell, complete with the odor of smoke and sparks from Alexis's wings rocketing ahead of them. She relaxed into the ever increasing wind and allowed her arms and legs to pay out her body behind the invisible mud-sled, expanding her torso outward to catch more and more of the warm air rising from below. The curve came up with dizzying speed, and Batel leaned into the turn. Wolf let her right flank go slack, flapping in the wind and letting out enough air to help steer their mad descent. As they came around the curve, daylight faded rapidly until there was nothing but the light from Alexis's fire wings. Wolf's eyes were not adjusting fast enough, and she began to worry they might come upon an obstacle before they were aware of it. She was about to shout something to Batel when the other woman flicked her fingers and a bright flare shot out and stuck to... nothingness. The sled ought to be covered with mud, by rights. Wolf certainly was. But somehow the sled remained stubbornly unseeable. Only the flattened underside of the flare gave any sense that there was anything solid under Batel's feet. As she was contemplating this, they at last began to slow down, the tunnel's slope gradually leveling out in a sort of mud-field that extended off into the distance, beyond the reach of their meager light. Of Aaron, there was no sign, other than a deep furrow cutting through the muck, straight as an arrow, off into the deeper recesses of the cavern...
Alexis looked cross. Not that she often looked cheerful, but just now she was looking especially cross. The most obvious reason for that would be that 'stretch' was clinging to her ankles while the 'unseen-queen' clung to hers. But there was more. She was thinking. As she flew on, towing the useless deadweights behind her, she rolled the invisible bitch's nickname around in her mind. Unseen queen? She could do better. It wasn't quite right. Not... quite insulting enough. But what went with invisibility and forcefields? Nothingness. How did you hit that? There was nothing there. Little miss nothing there? Like the air? Oooh AIRY FAIRY! Perfect. Now she just needed to wait for a chance to drop that all casual, like it just came to her. She grinned, satisfied, and flew faster, following the light up ahead.
They almost ran over him before they saw him, not that he'd probably have noticed.
Batel extended her invisible 'floor' forward along side the supine super to save them from walking through the mud. She knelt beside him as Wolf pulled herself back together, and Alexis touched down next to them, prodding the unseen surface with her toe suspiciously. Batel waved a hand over his face and chest, and the seemingly permanent blur that surrounded him clarified itself, revealing the man beneath in the strong light of her flare. Her beard theory was proved true; Anthony was going to owe her a beer, this time. His eyes were shut, but after an anxious moment he stirred, taking a long shuddering breath. He stretched and sat up.
“I would like to register SEVERAL complaints with the front desk. Starting with: that waterslide was much less fun than advertised, I didn't order a wake up call, and... um, I can't see clearly?”
Batel flicked her fingers and Aaron's usual blur returned full force. “Ah, that's better. ...where are we?”
“You'd be better able to tell than us, according to your file. At a guess though, I'd say about mile and a half out to sea, perhaps 2000 feet below the bottom of the Atlantic?”
Aaron nodded, slowly. That would explain the strange feeling of ponderously shifting weight, near overhead, so unlike the sky; he'd never felt the tides flowing from underneath before, but that had to be it. He looked a little more closely at the young lady who had spoken, and suddenly placed her. “Batel, right? We met in an alley a month or so back; somebody was trying to mug you. I didn't get your last name.”
“Nor will you, I'm afraid. I am not supposed to make contact with any of my subjects if it's avoidable. Dropping down a mile long mudslide makes for a hell of a special circumstance though.”
Aaron shrugged. “Fair enough. Speaking of mile long mudslides, though, somebody ought to put up some caution cones though, don't you think? Who do you suppose dug all this out anyway?"
“I'm certainly no expert, but I'm guessing that those guys might be good bet to start for asking questions,” said Wolf, her voice betraying barely a hint of trepidation. Batel glanced up sharply, scanning the area around them, raising her flare up to try and see better. Aaron couldn't see much, sitting in the bottom of the trench he'd cut, but he could feel the terrain shifting for hundreds of yards in every direction as more and more of... whatever they were, wriggled out of the muck and shook themselves off.
“What the actual F---”
In the parking lot, he paused to examine the map on the brochure. The head of the trail system was just a little way south from here, maybe half a mile. He folded up the map and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He was just crossing Miller's Island Blvd when something glimmered in his peripheral vision, just at the edge of the tavern parking lot. When he looked directly though, he saw nothing. Odd. He shrugged, and returned to his original plan. As he walked south, he let his mind wander. The desolation of the surrounding terrain seemed well suited to the current situation at work. This was clearly farm country, which seemed odd, so close to residential areas. In the spring, no doubt, it was verdant, but it was now the depths of winter, and the fields were stark and barren, much like the mood at 108. There would be major PR consequences for Klaus's meltdown, not to mention the disastrous results of having told Victoria to use her power. Nonetheless, Aaron remained fiercely optimistic. Like these fields, 108 would lie fallow for a while, and inevitably, better days would return. Impossibly, nobody had been hurt, and that was the main thing. Collateral damage, he well knew, could and would be fixed. Death was the only thing that could never be taken back. Everything else would turn with the seasons. This too, shall pass. As he was coming up to the crossing with the North Point Spur, he saw a familiar figure approaching from the west. He stopped and waited for her to join him at the crossroad.
“Morning, Ms. Higgins! Out for a walk? I'd say 'nice weather for it' but I suppose it would be a lie, however sociable. I was heading down to check out Black Marsh, for lack of anything better to do today. Care to join me?”
The assistant physical discipline teacher gave Aaron an appraising look, smiling faintly, as if something about him amused her. She gave a slightly exaggerated shrug, her shoulders moving in that faintly elastic way that few human beings could match apart from the most skilled circus contortionists. Not that any of them could hold a candle to what she could do; she could show up their very best tricks if she chose. Overextending, for Wolf, was hardly a stretch. So to speak. She fell in alongside him, stretching her legs almost imperceptibly to match his stride. After a while she spoke.
“So how was your class? I'm feeling a bit guilty now, in retrospect, for letting Danny walk out of ours. Can't help thinking how things might have been different if I'd challenged him more.”
“Ah, well. I was just thinking on that myself. The main thing is he suffered no permanent harm. Which is kind of a miracle, if you consider the facts. Teamwork saved him, and I consider that a real win, that we could work together so well in an emergency. Hell, even Penny helped, when the chips were down. Have you met Penny? She's a sweet girl, I think, but deep down. Very deep down, both figuratively and literally. All in all, I am more worried about the impromptu 'work' done on the Francis Scott Key Bridge. That's on me, mainly. Ultimately though, I think that while there will be plenty of blame to go around, it will largely blow over. We should be back to classes tomorrow, weather permitting.”
Wolf shrugged again, her head tilting one way and then the other in a 'maybe so, maybe not' sort of way, and they lapsed back into silence, walking south. Eventually they came to a heavy wooden gate by the entrance to the park. Loitering by the gate post, smoking a cigarette and trying to look like she wasn't trying to make it look cool, stood Alexis Devan. She looked up to see two of her 'special' teachers looking at her and instinctively stubbed out the cigarette in her palm, a practiced gesture no doubt acquired by long habit in regular public schooling. After a beat, she appeared to reconsider whether she gave a shit what AEGIS teachers thought of her and the cigarette made a miraculous reappearance and lit itself. After a long drag, she blew the smoke off to the side and asked truculently, “So what... ...you guys the truant brigade or something?”
Aaron and Wolf looked at each other in amusement. They each started to speak, stopped to allow the other to continue, then started again. Wolf took a half step back to definitively yield the floor. Aaron frowned, unsure now what to say.
“Did you... Were you not around for Wednesdays classes, Alexis?”
“I showed up. I didn't like the music spewing out of MD classroom when I went upstairs so I bailed. Yesterday I had to take care of gran. Today I just didn't feel like it. So what? You gonna sick Klaus on me now?”
“Uh... No. Klaus will not be involved in 108 affairs for the foreseeable future.”
“We actually have a few days off, and we were thinking of checking out the trail system for something to do. Meeting you here was as much a coincidence as meting each other. Want to join us? We can fill you in on the latest school gossip. You missed some juicy stuff!”
A series of complicated emotions crossed Alexis' face in rapid succession, settling on puzzlement.
“You want to go for a walk. In the woods. With me?”
“Sure, why not? We never did get to finish that discussion about heroes vs villains. And as Ms. Higgins indicated, we have some new data to bring to that discussion. What do you say?”
Unsure how to respond to this, Alexis shrugged indifferently, and smoked the last of the cigarette in one last powerful drag, flicked the butt into the bushes, and stepped back from the gate, bowing low and gesturing elaborately as if to say, after you, honored teachers.
••••••
“Holy shit monkeys. Danny's ok though? Not that I care or anything, just... wow. To think of all the shit I've given Klaus before... I mean, he seemed tightly wound, but fuck!”
Aaron smiled ruefully. Colorful language aside, Alexis certainly had a way of summing things up efficiently. The trail was proving to be a delightful walk. As desolate as the farmland had been, the marsh in winter was truly fantastical. Skeletal vines wrapping dead rotting trees jutting out of iced over wetlands, all frosted with snow, it gave one a feeling of exploring an alien landscape, inhospitable and cold yet strangely elevating. He was glad he'd decided to check it out; later in the spring, he wasn't sure the ground out here would be solid enough to hold him up effectively. He was leaning down to push aside a fallen log obstructing the trail when Ms. Higgins snaked up between him and Alexis, drawing them both in close with one elongated arm. She pointed out over the marsh as if to draw their attention to some interesting feature but spoke in a fierce whisper.
“Don't look around, but I think someone is following us. That's the third time I have heard underbrush crunching, behind us but I don't see anything back there.”
“You're paranoid, rubber band!” Alexis whispered back, shaking off the arm like a pesky python. Nonetheless she looked rattled, and waves of nervous heat rolled off of her, causing the dry undergrowth nearby to smolder.
Aaron turned, in spite of Wolf's warning, remembering the slight glimmer he'd seen earlier in the parking lot of the tavern. He saw nothing, but that was probably because he had closed his eyes. Photons could be disrupted any number of ways. Gravitons, not so much. The trouble was they were so damned faint. For a person sized mass, it took all his concentration to suss them out. Among the barren tree trunks, he was unsure whether he could at all; there was just too much clutter... but there was something odd happening. Not on the trail behind them but in the frozen over marsh before them. The water was draining away under the ice, disappearing into a vast open space that seemed to yawn open, a great rift in the earth spreading out now to the edges of the marsh. Right up to the edge of the trail. His last thought before the ground gave way under his feet was that it was odd there was no accompanying earthquake. Then he vanished down a steep slick trench of mud, slipping away into the depths of the pit at a ferocious speed.
Wolf's left hand shot up and back to wrap around a nearby tree trunk as an anchor, saving herself from Aaron's fate. Her other hand stretched out for Alexis, but needlessly; she was hovering over the pit, having instinctively deployed her fire wings as the ground started to give way. She glared down into the pit as if it's very existence offended her. Or perhaps she was irritated with her teacher's apparent inability to take care of himself, for in the torrent of abuse she poured down the hole after him, it was possible to discern the words 'fucksake' 'useless dumb douche-canoe' and 'what I think makes a hero is NOT HELPLESSLY TUMBLING INTO A GIANT GODDAMNED HOLE!' With this last bit of inventive invective, she fell silent and looked to the other teacher, hoping to see some ideas or the glimmerings of a plan. Wolf was just staring down into the darkness in horror, which rattled Alexis far more than she would care to admit. Her natural bluster saved her, however, and she flew up close, snapping her fingers before the teacher's face.
“Hey! Dodge-ball! We gotta get him outta there somehow! You're the teacher, even if it's just gym. You got a plan or what?”
Startled back to herself, Wolf nodded shakily.
“Right. Melt away the ice and let's see how big this hole really is. First thing is to get a sense of the scope of the problem. Maybe we can help him out, maybe we'll need to go get help.”
Glad of something to do, Alexis immediately turned her fiery attentions on the ice, rapidly melting it away to nothing. That done, she flew back over and alighted beside Wolf on what was left of the trail along the edge of where the marsh had been. In its place was a hole in the earth nearly 200 feet wide, descending steeply in a more or less northeasterly direction, with a deep groove cut into the near side, marking Aaron's passage toward parts unknown. The massive tunnel bent slightly to the east as is dropped, disappearing out of sight about 3000 feet away, perhaps 1000 below the surface. Even with the massive opening cleared, the thin winter sunlight did little to illuminate the tunnel that far down. As they stared in disbelief, a disembodied feminine voice from nearby said quite clearly, “Well, shit.”
Alexis's hands erupted into flame as she swung around searching for the source. Wolf's arms and legs burst out of the ends of her sleeves and pant-legs, extending her height and reach to an impressive 20 feet or more and assuming a sort of martial ready stance, reminiscent of certain Chinese style animal forms. Neither of them could get bead on the source of the voice however, and after a moment, she spoke again from somewhere out over the vanished ice.
“Alright, look you two. While I understand this is nothing to do with you, but I am going to need your help here. I am tasked with keeping an eye on that lunk down there, and I am asking you please, at the least, not to do anything rash when I reveal myself ok?”
“No promises!” Alexis shouted, maintaining her flaming fists and taking to the air again. Wolf nodded in vigorous agreement, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling and her arms weaving around to threaten the general direction of the voice.
“Fair enough. I am sorry for startling you. Please understand I am only breaking cover because I need to make sure Aaron is ok. I represent an organization that keeps an eye on guys like him for signs of trouble. I'm sure you can understand that we don't always get reliable data if we observe openly. Ultimately though my job is to make sure he doesn't get in over his head... Which he obviously has done. I am going to make myself visible now, ok?”
Out near the middle of the space where the marsh had been, seemingly standing on nothing, a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt with short cropped brown hair appeared. Almost instantly, Wolf's right fist snaked out across the space, joined by a quick succession of fireballs from Alexis. Both stopped short of their target, bouncing off of empty air. The newcomer sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, as they drew back to prepare another attack.
“Honestly! What is Hunter Ward teaching over there these days? When I was at 108 we showed a little more restraint than this. Swan would be horrified.”
“Yeah? Well, bite me! You go skulking around in the shadows and then pop up right after my favorite teacher has dropped out of sight down a bottomless pit, you don't get the benefit of the doubt, and name dropping proves precisely fuck all!”
Wolf hesitated, squinting at the mysterious newcomer. She extended her arm over to Alexis, holding up a hand to quiet her. To the other woman, she said, “Batel? Is that you?”
Now it was the interloper's turn on the back foot. She looked lost for a moment and then sudden realization dawns and she lights up. “Wolf Higgins?! Oh, I should have known it was you from the stretching! I just assumed you'd have moved on by now I guess, so I didn't make the connection! Are you still at 108?”
“Yeah, I just segued from student to teacher. Always seemed like home to me. What happened to you though? You totally disappeared after you graduated. Literally, I guess. That's a pretty neat trick.”
Alexis rolled her eyes as loudly as she possibly could, but it was not nearly enough to break up old home days, so she pulled a trick out of Mr. Mallory's book and tried using words instead of setting either of the older women on fire.
“Ahem! Hello?! Sorry! Hate to interrupt, but there's a guy at the bottom of that mudslide who might be hurt. So what exactly are you two sorority girly girls going to do about it?”
“Good question. How fast can you fly with those wings?
“Faster than you can run, little miss disappear, believe me.”
“Well we're not running, we're sledding. Down the hole and after him. I can make a makeshift mud-sled with my forcefields, Wolf will be the drag chute, to stop us going out of control, and you get to fly ahead and generate hot air to help us slow down. Think you can handle generating a massive amount of hot air, hot shot?”
Alexis opens her mouth to retort, but then closes it again, mildly impressed. That was a pretty sick burn actually. Seethroughgirlgotskillz. She reignited her wings, and swooped down into the pit.
Wolf looks doubtful, but unwilling to let a student go into the unknown alone, she clamps onto Batel's shoulders and twines her ankles around her friend's calves. Secured, she says simply, “Go.”
Batel closed her eyes and brought her hands up near her face in something approximating an attitude of prayer, except with fingers bent and oddly splayed. She dropped her wrists, and then her hands popped apart and spread out palms down, as if defining a volume of space below her. Then she simply pointed down. And down they went.
Wolf whooped in excitement in spite of herself. It was like base jumping into hell, complete with the odor of smoke and sparks from Alexis's wings rocketing ahead of them. She relaxed into the ever increasing wind and allowed her arms and legs to pay out her body behind the invisible mud-sled, expanding her torso outward to catch more and more of the warm air rising from below. The curve came up with dizzying speed, and Batel leaned into the turn. Wolf let her right flank go slack, flapping in the wind and letting out enough air to help steer their mad descent. As they came around the curve, daylight faded rapidly until there was nothing but the light from Alexis's fire wings. Wolf's eyes were not adjusting fast enough, and she began to worry they might come upon an obstacle before they were aware of it. She was about to shout something to Batel when the other woman flicked her fingers and a bright flare shot out and stuck to... nothingness. The sled ought to be covered with mud, by rights. Wolf certainly was. But somehow the sled remained stubbornly unseeable. Only the flattened underside of the flare gave any sense that there was anything solid under Batel's feet. As she was contemplating this, they at last began to slow down, the tunnel's slope gradually leveling out in a sort of mud-field that extended off into the distance, beyond the reach of their meager light. Of Aaron, there was no sign, other than a deep furrow cutting through the muck, straight as an arrow, off into the deeper recesses of the cavern...
••••••
Alexis looked cross. Not that she often looked cheerful, but just now she was looking especially cross. The most obvious reason for that would be that 'stretch' was clinging to her ankles while the 'unseen-queen' clung to hers. But there was more. She was thinking. As she flew on, towing the useless deadweights behind her, she rolled the invisible bitch's nickname around in her mind. Unseen queen? She could do better. It wasn't quite right. Not... quite insulting enough. But what went with invisibility and forcefields? Nothingness. How did you hit that? There was nothing there. Little miss nothing there? Like the air? Oooh AIRY FAIRY! Perfect. Now she just needed to wait for a chance to drop that all casual, like it just came to her. She grinned, satisfied, and flew faster, following the light up ahead.
They almost ran over him before they saw him, not that he'd probably have noticed.
Batel extended her invisible 'floor' forward along side the supine super to save them from walking through the mud. She knelt beside him as Wolf pulled herself back together, and Alexis touched down next to them, prodding the unseen surface with her toe suspiciously. Batel waved a hand over his face and chest, and the seemingly permanent blur that surrounded him clarified itself, revealing the man beneath in the strong light of her flare. Her beard theory was proved true; Anthony was going to owe her a beer, this time. His eyes were shut, but after an anxious moment he stirred, taking a long shuddering breath. He stretched and sat up.
“I would like to register SEVERAL complaints with the front desk. Starting with: that waterslide was much less fun than advertised, I didn't order a wake up call, and... um, I can't see clearly?”
Batel flicked her fingers and Aaron's usual blur returned full force. “Ah, that's better. ...where are we?”
“You'd be better able to tell than us, according to your file. At a guess though, I'd say about mile and a half out to sea, perhaps 2000 feet below the bottom of the Atlantic?”
Aaron nodded, slowly. That would explain the strange feeling of ponderously shifting weight, near overhead, so unlike the sky; he'd never felt the tides flowing from underneath before, but that had to be it. He looked a little more closely at the young lady who had spoken, and suddenly placed her. “Batel, right? We met in an alley a month or so back; somebody was trying to mug you. I didn't get your last name.”
“Nor will you, I'm afraid. I am not supposed to make contact with any of my subjects if it's avoidable. Dropping down a mile long mudslide makes for a hell of a special circumstance though.”
Aaron shrugged. “Fair enough. Speaking of mile long mudslides, though, somebody ought to put up some caution cones though, don't you think? Who do you suppose dug all this out anyway?"
“I'm certainly no expert, but I'm guessing that those guys might be good bet to start for asking questions,” said Wolf, her voice betraying barely a hint of trepidation. Batel glanced up sharply, scanning the area around them, raising her flare up to try and see better. Aaron couldn't see much, sitting in the bottom of the trench he'd cut, but he could feel the terrain shifting for hundreds of yards in every direction as more and more of... whatever they were, wriggled out of the muck and shook themselves off.
“What the actual F---”
