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Ruby Haze [Archie Sonic SI]
- Thread starter weredrago2
- Start date
Ruby Haze ORIGINS Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
weredrago2
"KABOOM!"
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- 548
NOTE - Rather than a new chapter, the following is an extensive rewrite of the first chapter of the fic. My reasonings for this rewrite (and why I made it as a new threadmark instead of just replacing the first one already) are included at the end of this post.
The chapter notes also contain an update on a new Friend Insert I've been working on with over 10,000 words in the bank, so please take a look for that as well.
---
Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
♦ 100
For the first time in my life, it seemed as though I'd finally achieved some measure of greater perspective of my place in the universe. Not by deeply diving through my issues, reaching a significant breakthrough needed to better myself as a person. That would've been a long-term project. No, this was accomplished by gazing down at an alien planet, and being unable to reconcile how small I felt in comparison to it. That was before factoring in the dozens upon dozens of little moons that rotated around the sphere, each one a different size or shape moving along at its own pace. They may have been only dwarf moons, but I was left speechless at how they dwarfed me.
They called this sense of wonder the overview effect, and I had to admit: This was the most beautiful, terrifying photograph of the Earth from space that I had ever seen. Even if it got the finer points wrong. Europe was scrunched-up. Africa was set askew until it poked South America and India. Australia was a rough, circular patch of terra firma set in the Pacific. Most bafflingly, it seemed as though somebody missed the memo about Southeast Asia having many islands and haphazardly glued them to the Eurasian landmass.
It was an unusual circumstance, dreaming of an oxygen-starved void far beyond any atmosphere. Taking in all of the little, tiny details of a world that resembled my own in the same way that a chicken resembled a turkey. I hadn't been facing the right way to see what the New World looked like, but I imagined it would've been as screwy as the old one.
Regardless of whether air was abundant out here or not, I felt my chest rising and falling. The heart beating in my chest as fast as ever. Not really things associated with dreaming.
Am I dreaming?
I didn't dream often. Well, I figured I dreamt as much as your average person, and only sometimes remembered them. I didn't lucid dream very often, so much as I had the infrequent dream where I was aware enough to be helpless as the action unfolded in front of me. It was a good night when I was too exhausted to have any dreams, and a decent night when any nightmares wouldn't bother me any further than the rest of the morning.
The more I thought about the little things, the clouds and what few pinpricks of light I could make out on the night side of this Not-Quite-Earth, the more I couldn't ignore that what I was seeing was too consistent. There weren't any sudden fits or starts, no flights of fancy that would shift it into something new that would mark it as a dream. There was no way this could be real, but I was a bit too awake for this to be my imagination.
It couldn't be a dream, but it had to be.
Right?
♦ 99
I felt a sudden rush of heat and a heavy sense of dread, the weight of both focused on my left hand. Turning in that direction, I saw that my left had been pierced with a glass or crystal stud. It almost looked like an accessory attached to a black glove, but it felt like a piece of silicon wedged between sensitive nerves and tissues. Belatedly acknowledging the presence of the black glove, I then saw that the clothes I'd fallen asleep in the night before had been replaced by a black bodysuit with magenta highlights.
"What?"
It was the first thing I'd ever said in space. Hardly the most eloquent thing I could've said, but it got the idea across. My mind flooded with questions. Besides the obvious answer of being in orbit, where was I? How did I get here? Who took my glasses?
What was that crystal, and who put it there?
♦ 98
Deep in my bones, I felt it. Like a grain of sand falling down in an hourglass, or a timer ticking down. The crystal on my hand became almost imperceptibly cooler than it was seconds ago, and it was cooling off while I was floating around in space without a helmet.
Oh.
…
That isn't good.
I was working on very little information, but I could put two and two together. People weren't supposed to survive in space, so, assuming I wasn't having my first lucid dream, this crystal was the only thing keeping me alive.
My heart rate quickened, trying to figure out how I'd get out of this situation. If the gemstone was a battery, then what was it powered by? What was actively draining the charge? My life support, for one. It was also anchoring me in place. Radiation shielding?
I thought I felt the sun on my back. Without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's rays, I reckon I'm taking it full-blast.
Another mystery solved. What else?
♦ 97
This is too much.
I brought my hands to my head to massage my temples, inadvertently bringing the foreign object closer to my face than I strictly wanted it to be. My thoughts were, for reasons that should've been rather evident, in complete disarray.
"Is there somewhere I can land?" I said aloud, not caring how far my words carried. Or if they ever reached past my lips and ears at all. I just talked aloud sometimes to get my head back on straight. "Europe, I guess?"
It was a bit silly to quibble over landing zones, when anywhere with oxygen beat my current predicament. For some reason, my mind rationalized that I should prioritize an English-speaking nation, or one that was on decent terms with the United States. The human brain liked its routines, but those didn't always react well to stress.
In this case, the delay caused me to waste time I didn't have to lose. During my deliberations, a large shadow passed over my body.
"Huh?"
Shadows getting between me and the sun during the day were never a good sign. I thrust my arm around, to force my body to flip, when I realized that shouldn't work. Nevertheless, I had the thought of turning around, and my whole body swiveled to face the ceaseless expanse of the stars dancing across the blue planet's horizon.
It was breathtaking..
Then I kept turning, to face a massive hunk of rock threatening to bowl me over!
It couldn't be a meteor, because it looked way too big to burn up in the atmosphere. The khaki-colored, craggy sphere was too small to be Luna, and what were the odds that I'd be stranded out here at the same time as a solar eclipse?
Why not? Nothing makes sense anyways.
I hissed out a swear of alarm, and tried to 'swim' away from the oncoming planetoid, but it merely drifted away, making me realize that it was in a stable orbit. Not a threat to me at all, save that it was a reminder that I was completely out of my depth.
I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the reflective fragment of a solar panel whizzed past my nose like a bullet.
♦ 96
Taking a hurried glance to the left, I could see the rest of a broken satellite the size of a bus making its way towards me.
My mind jumped to a particular phrase that described what that satellite would do to me.
Kessler syndrome.
Ah, yes. It was about to Kessler me.
"No, no!"
Oh, come on! This isn't fair!
My mind awash with indignation, I extended my arms outwards to block the oncoming projectile. The gem on my left hand glowed with an intense magenta radiance, a colorful bolt of pink rocketing out of the extremity and shattering it on impact. In its wake, a harmless haze of glittering dust was all that remained.
I took a moment to examine my handiwork.
That was a laser. A genuine laser!
"Wow."
What else was I supposed to say?
♦ 91
That sense of wonder was brief, as I felt how much that attack took out of me. The running number in my head was an abstraction of some kind. An abstraction that was at a little over 90%. It sank in that, unless I found a way to recharge this thing, I didn't have a lot of power to burn. I didn't want to find out what happened when it went dry.
Once that thought had sunk it, it occurred to me that it wasn't the only thing sinking. Firing off that energy blast disrupted the careful balance of my own orbit, causing me to tumble downwards into the atmosphere.
♦ 90
"Ah! AH! Slow down, SLOW DOWN!"
I felt bile rise in my throat as I maintained a downward spiral towards the planet below. The sky was green, the grass was blue, and the malformed globe spun faster and faster; it was more accurate to say that I was the one that was spinning, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was on fire.
♦ 88
Friction. It was a killer. The only surprising part was that it hadn't killed me yet. My entire body was burning, surrounded by a bright corona of flame.
♦ 86
…Which, now that I had time to think about it, should have ended things then and there. Instead, I was still falling.
…
I had, years back, watched a video of a skydiver launching themselves off the stratosphere in a pressure suit. Some kind of promo for Red Bull. They got there in a helium balloon, and the jumper took a good ten minutes to land back to Earth. About five or six minutes of freefall, and the rest was done with the parachute.
♦ 84
At a guess? I was falling from a lot higher than that. As someone who wasn't a fan of heights, and neglected to bring a parachute with them into lower orbit, I was really hoping that this was a dream again. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Mostly because it felt like I was falling way faster than I should've been.
♦ 82
"Come on, come on! Fly! It isn't that hard!"
I was flailing around midair, trying to come up with something that would stop me from going splat. If this thing on my hand was supposed to let me fly, then I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. There wasn't a built-in instruction manual, either. Falling through the clouds and quickly reaching a terminal end point, the land below appeared to be rural woodland… when I had the chance to look down. I still hadn't stopped spinning, giving me the verdant view of an evergreen forest every other second.
♦ 80
"How about happy thoughts, eh?! Happy thoughts! Just think happy--!"
My head tilted down towards the ground again. Before I ever found the magic words to give myself wings, one side of my face made an earsplitting impact with a lake. The water might as well have been concrete, for all that the surface tension did to break my fall.
♦ 70
I felt my entire body reverberate. Bones snapping from the force of impact, and then unsnapping. The right side of my body was wracked with pain, and it felt like a jet of water sprayed up my nose to jab straight through my brainstem. I was somehow alive, but I wasn't going to go out on a limb and call it a miracle yet.
As if my morning couldn't possibly get any worse, I was starting to drown. Water was rapidly filling my lungs, and bright motes of light were flooding my vision.
♦ 80
I was far too deep in the water to grasp for the surface. My power might've let me breathe underwater if I was more composed, especially since I could breathe in a vacuum, but I was hardly in a state to do that.
Not… like… this!
Unable to reach for air or latch on to anything solid, the gemstone on my hand started glowing again, drawing in the light that had pooled at the bottom of the lake bed.
♦ 85
The stone illuminated the dark depths in a sea of red light, and I was launched straight through the top of the lake to freedom.
My flight plan was erratic. Less floating, and more flopping. There were multiple times where I risked hitting a tree or sheer cliff and breaking my neck. Focusing my jittery jumps into concentrated movement took effort, driven by desperation and adrenaline. Coming to a complete stop was even harder, but in that moment, I would have taken stable ground under my feet over bouncing around like a pinball.
♦ 84
Once I reoriented myself, regaining a sense of up and down, I dropped to the ground and vomited. I was utterly tapped out. Physically, mentally, and, for the record, existentially. Launched out of space, and nearly splattered. I needed time to unwind, decompress, and, ideally, wake up from this nightmare that I clearly wasn't going to wake up from.
At some point, I did lose consciousness before being dragged back to wakefulness. It could have been a rest for a few minutes. It could have been more. I wasn't keeping track, but I did know it was darker out when my eyes fluttered open a second time.
More than that, I could barely feel the texture of the dirt as my fingers dug into the soil, but that was because of the dark gloves that I'd been wearing since I'd awoken. What were they? Leather? Latex? I couldn't place the material.
"Stupid gloves," I muttered, between sputtering out copious amounts of fluid from my body.
When I spared the idle thought to wish them away, the gloves disappeared. I crawled back to the water's edge in an exhausted stupor, stumbling over gnarled greenery that nicked my exposed hands. It hurt a bit, but not enough to bleed. Besides, I didn't think I would be ready to stand for a while.
I was at the shore of a lake, in the clearing of a forest. A lake in a forest, in what might've been Europe, assuming that this might've been Earth. That was a tenuous leap in logic at best, but it was all I had to cling on to.
I carefully examined my reflection in the water. My eyes were dark, sunken pits, with red rings around black pinpricks for pupils. The light brown curls of my hair were a wet mop that crowned a gristly, disheveled expression. My nose was about the same as when I last checked it, but it was swollen with a bold streak of blood running down both nostrils.
Was that from using the gem, or the crash?
Does it matter?
Either way, I looked terrible. My body and the immediate area around it were bathed in an eerie, ethereal light. I washed my face in the clear lake, something to keep my hands busy while I thought over what the hell I was going to do next.
♦ 86
The awfully conspicuous icosahedron had cooled off somewhat from the dunking, though it still glowed faintly. I couldn't see all sides of the thing with it plugged into my hand, but I recognized a D20 anywhere. I tried to caress my left palm with my index finger, to feel the other end of the stone poking out; it felt like nothing was there. It was surreal, without the fabric covering where one end connected to the other.
"What the hell happened to me?"
"Stand and deliver, varlet!" a voice from behind me declared in the most jarringly Shakespearean English accent I could possibly imagine.
The sudden noise had me spooked, then strongly bewildered. Who was that? What were they saying? Was I going crazy? Crazier? Fingers through my hair, hands trembling as I addressed what might've been one part of a greater stress-induced episode.
"Hey. Hey. Shut up. I need a minute here."
My voice was hollow and shaky. I didn't even have the strength to turn around.
The hallucination, which spoke like a British teen LARPer, sounded flabbergasted at my irreverent response. He faltered slightly as he pressed onward.
"I shall grant ye no moment of respite, sirrah! As the guardian of Deerwood Forest and rightful steward of yon sacred waters, I command ye to make thine intentions known or face the consequences!"
Exasperated, I turned with a long swing of my arm.
"Alright, alright! What're you…?"
I turned around, and felt my heart plunge in shock.
Straight ahead of me, perched on a stump atop a short hill, was a rodent of unusual size. Standing at about a meter tall, I almost thought he was a child, but his head was way too big. Made up too much of his build and mass. The humanoid's Lincoln green head and body were concealed in a brown cowl and tunic, leaving big green eyes and a stern scowl peering back at me from the shadows.
"What are you?" I asked, dumbfounded by the odd being in front of me.
The creature--
I struck the line of thought, because he was very clearly talking to me. Calling the guy a creature was rude at best. If he was civilized enough to wear hiking boots, he was civilized enough for me not to call him a 'creature'.
The, erm, fellow was pointing a wooden bow at me, an arrow nocked in the direction of my heart. A recurve bow, by the shape of it? The bow stood as tall as he was, giving it a strong pull if he chose to fire. However, as someone who wasn't in a rush to be shot, even after all of that up in space, I was sobering up to the fact that I hadn't made the best first--
--The fact that his mouth started moving a few seconds ago.
Wait wait, what's he saying?
"…trespasser. For what being of Walkers' make could stand there and question mine own nature, whilst acting unperturbed by the sting of a broadhead's point?"
"A broadhead?"
Wasn't that an arrow shape?
I looked down, trying to focus on the narrow spike of an arrow nocked on his bow. Unexpectedly, looking down also caused me to notice the long shaft ending in colorful feather fletching that was already sticking out of my chest.
♦ 85
Then came the pain of being shot in the chest.
"You shot me!" I seethed in accusation. That was somehow the least extreme thing to happen to me thus far, but still. It hurt! "Why did you shoot me with an arrow?!"
The short mammal took a step back, looking only slightly less confused about the whole affair than I was. He took a step off the stump, nearly falling on his rear in the process, but his hardy bow was able to hold his weight and spring him back to his feet.
"Lackaday, spellbinder!" he exclaimed defensively. "That was merely meant to be a warning shot!"
"What was the warning? Wear armor?!"
My first instinct was to yank it out, but it hurt to pull at, and my attempt to jostle it loose only made it hurt more!
"I merely meant to query thee in order to determine thine alignment! Whether thou were friend or foe, when ye turned swiftly without nary a warning of intent!"
I pointed to the offending projectile with a gloved index finger. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding, but that might've just been my black suit covering it up.
"You know, I don't think friends do this to each other! I've had a real long day, and I don't see a great friendship foundation going on here!"
My eyes were, last I checked, awfully red. I hoped my anger got across loud and clear. If that didn't, then the renewed glow the gemstone on my left hand was making certainly did.
He put his bow back up, for whatever amount of good that'd do for him. I still had the gem, and I felt I could defend with it. Modulate the output and go for a non-lethal blow, if I could.
I… didn't appreciate being shot, but maybe I was the one in the wrong here?
"You descended from the sky as a fiery, baleful phantasm unto the bed of Never Lake! Am I not to assume you sought to violate and despoil its serene beauty to fuel your dark magicks, Overland warlock most foul and unseeming?"
He called me what now?
At that moment, my logical brain stopped proofreading the words coming out of my mouth.
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm not going to be talked down to by a funny animal that doesn't wear pants!"
The rodent drew closer, standing atop his bow so he could get up in my face. He could only get so close to me without poking the arrow he put there.
"Sheathe thine sharp tongue, you plague-marked mage of ill repute!"
If that was the game we were going to play, I knew just the way to escalate.
I bit my thumb at him.
His furious scowl widened.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he asked angrily.
"I do bite my thumb, sir."
They called Shakespeare's works the classics for a reason, and the reason was applicability. I appreciated my psychotic episode for going along with the bit.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he repeated, angrier still.
Gregory wasn't here, so we had to skip his lines.
"No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir--!"
"HALT!"
Neither of us were able to get another word in. The prior atmosphere was utterly disrupted by the arrival of three steel goliaths from out of the woodwork. They were all nearly twice my height and fairly uniform in construction, seeming right at home on the budget of a shoestring sci-fi production. Built with a minimum of moving parts, the giants were covered in heavy plates of armor that bowled over pine, stone, and shrub. Each was armed with thick bars of metal that functioned as crude clubs in their weighty hands.
A trio of blood red, cyclopean visors glared down at us, followed by a litany of the local equivalents of the Miranda Rights projected through cheap voice synthesizers. If they had accents like the shrew, then they were mangled by the modulator.
"ROB O' THE HEDGE AND UNIDENTIFIED COLLABORATOR. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO NOT RESIST THE WILL OF THE HIGH SHERIFF. I REPEAT. DO NOT RESIST."
"Are those robots?" I squealed out in incredulous, barely-restrained indignation.
Not at all drones. Robots.
This whole day that had been panic, terror, screaming, and agony. One crisis after the other. Now? Even more confusion. All questions, no answers. I was so fed up with all of this, so lacking in context that I couldn't even begin to compartmentalize all of these mental stress fractures in my head. It was a dam about to burst, and I didn't know where the water was going next.
The teal humanoid -- Rob was what they called him -- lept away from me and stood in a combat position atop a tall stone. I couldn't tell which part of those things would be vulnerable to a humble arrow, at a glance. The eye, perhaps?
"Verily!" he replied, switching out the broadhead for one with a round, threaded head from his quiver. "These mechanical miscreants are the shock-troopers of the Sheriff! I know not your intentions, pilgrim, but surely you can recognize the need for--"
I growled, and the gemstone projected a conical ray of light. The ray coalesced into a large, translucent left hand, which wrapped itself around the body of the robot nearest to me. With a thought, I clenched the giant fist, crushing everything encased beneath it into scrap metal and glitter dust. The robot's head spun straight up into the air before landing on the refuse pile.
"…Cooperation."
♦ 82
The two that remained started blankly at their very destroyed comrade, before raising their metal clubs and slowly ambling towards me.
"UNIDENTIFIED MISCREANT IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ENGAGING WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."
What did that guy call me? A warlock?
I didn't know if what I was doing was some kind of magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, but whatever it was, it was working. For my next trick, I focused on a rough circle around the two robots, and set it ablaze with iridescent flame. Pillars of fire rose above the robots, freezing in place and solidifying as a jagged crystal cage that surrounded them on all sides.
♦ 80
"Now that's what I'm talking about!"
The rest of this trouble, I could do without, but the power? No complaints thus far. Since he recognized them, I looked around for where Rob went, to see if he might be able to explain more about where these things came from. For better or worse, they may have been able to point me in the direction of civilization.
My celebration was short-lived. There was a loud clatter like shattering glass, and the two robots used their iron clubs to smash free from their sparkling prison. I'd clearly underestimated their speed, because they closed the gap into melee range in under two strides. Their sudden blitz threw me on the backfoot, but I had enough time to raise a barrier of pink light between me and the wrecking force of their blows.
♦ 78
Fragments of that interposing wall scattered over the ground, as I was tossed reeling into a sheer stone wall. It felt like they'd knocked something loose with that heavy blow, and it wasn't a stronger tolerance for pain.
"Would you cut that out?!" I called out to them, nearly breathless, but with enough air left to loudly complain.
There was a pause in their combat routine. A stall, as the two robots neared closer. If one blast worth five 'points' was enough to take out a satellite, then I should be able to beat them, but what if I wasted too much power doing it? On the other hand, could I afford to wait until they called for reinforcements from that Sheriff guy? Could I afford to risk being tagged by someone who might like enforcing high taxes with killer robots?
Eventually, the robots formulated a response.
"REQUEST DENIED."
They readied their blunt instruments, to pick up where they left off, when the path of the farthest one was intercepted by an arrow striking its foot from the trees. It was the round arrow from before. Instead of piercing armor, it exploded into a bundle of twine that got caught between the giant's lumbering limbs and caused it to tumble to the ground with a heavy clunk. Another arrow with a red tip flew out from the forest and detonated on impact, scattering the robot's head and shoulders across the clearing.
Well. I took back what I said about the arrows being ineffective.
With that robot down, I was forced into close combat with the last one. It swung its rebar beatstick left, then right, causing me to flinch and propel myself away with long, unbalanced jumps. Being yanked around on invisible wires was the closest thing I could do to flying while under duress.
I hadn't been in a fight in well over a decade. Not a real one. For that, I was grateful. Nevertheless, there were moments where you were glad that the human body was always ready to make cortisol. For moments where keeping your blood pumping was the priority, and common decency went out the window.
For what it was worth, I lost that fight. This time, I wouldn't.
Kicking off against a rocky spire, I rocketed off towards my next victim with a left hook that exploded into a shotgun blast of pressurized pink mist. The wave of vibrant energy bowled the machine over, a spiky layer of magenta crystal forming over the head and trunk in the shape of a frozen splash.
"Ha! Try breaking out of that, you tin-plated git!"
♦ 76
The robot's thick fingers dragged coarsely across the surface of the crystal shell, too stiff to hold on as it futilly attempted to scrape free. Not wanting to risk whether it could actually accomplish the deed, I conjured a broad cylinder of solid light and drove it straight down on the robot's head. The result was a total flattening and a satisfying crush where a mechanical brain might've been. Brain or not, the body stopped functioning when its head was squashed into a solid disk.
♦ 75
"Aha! I got 'em all!" I pumped a first out in the air, but once the deed was done, all that remained in the forest was an eerie silence. "Hello? Anyone still out there?"
With nothing else to fight, and everything seeming to calm down, the adrenaline started to bleed out of my body. The gemstone still had most of its power left to burn, but I sure as hell had run dry. I fell to my knees, exhaustion returning to wreck its vengeance once I'd run out of targets. Worried about falling on top of it, I yanked the broadhead out of my chest with all of the force I still had to muster.
It was a drastic act of delirium, which caused me to pass out from shock. The last thing I saw was the ruby-red glaze of the arrow, smeared across my hazy vision. After I collapsed, the last thing I heard was a distant voice murmuring poetic in my ear.
"At ease, overlander. Any foe of the Sheriff is a friend of mine."
---
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: CaptNameless, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
The chapter notes also contain an update on a new Friend Insert I've been working on with over 10,000 words in the bank, so please take a look for that as well.
---
Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: In Mercia Res
♦ 100
For the first time in my life, it seemed as though I'd finally achieved some measure of greater perspective of my place in the universe. Not by deeply diving through my issues, reaching a significant breakthrough needed to better myself as a person. That would've been a long-term project. No, this was accomplished by gazing down at an alien planet, and being unable to reconcile how small I felt in comparison to it. That was before factoring in the dozens upon dozens of little moons that rotated around the sphere, each one a different size or shape moving along at its own pace. They may have been only dwarf moons, but I was left speechless at how they dwarfed me.
They called this sense of wonder the overview effect, and I had to admit: This was the most beautiful, terrifying photograph of the Earth from space that I had ever seen. Even if it got the finer points wrong. Europe was scrunched-up. Africa was set askew until it poked South America and India. Australia was a rough, circular patch of terra firma set in the Pacific. Most bafflingly, it seemed as though somebody missed the memo about Southeast Asia having many islands and haphazardly glued them to the Eurasian landmass.
It was an unusual circumstance, dreaming of an oxygen-starved void far beyond any atmosphere. Taking in all of the little, tiny details of a world that resembled my own in the same way that a chicken resembled a turkey. I hadn't been facing the right way to see what the New World looked like, but I imagined it would've been as screwy as the old one.
Regardless of whether air was abundant out here or not, I felt my chest rising and falling. The heart beating in my chest as fast as ever. Not really things associated with dreaming.
Am I dreaming?
I didn't dream often. Well, I figured I dreamt as much as your average person, and only sometimes remembered them. I didn't lucid dream very often, so much as I had the infrequent dream where I was aware enough to be helpless as the action unfolded in front of me. It was a good night when I was too exhausted to have any dreams, and a decent night when any nightmares wouldn't bother me any further than the rest of the morning.
The more I thought about the little things, the clouds and what few pinpricks of light I could make out on the night side of this Not-Quite-Earth, the more I couldn't ignore that what I was seeing was too consistent. There weren't any sudden fits or starts, no flights of fancy that would shift it into something new that would mark it as a dream. There was no way this could be real, but I was a bit too awake for this to be my imagination.
It couldn't be a dream, but it had to be.
Right?
♦ 99
I felt a sudden rush of heat and a heavy sense of dread, the weight of both focused on my left hand. Turning in that direction, I saw that my left had been pierced with a glass or crystal stud. It almost looked like an accessory attached to a black glove, but it felt like a piece of silicon wedged between sensitive nerves and tissues. Belatedly acknowledging the presence of the black glove, I then saw that the clothes I'd fallen asleep in the night before had been replaced by a black bodysuit with magenta highlights.
"What?"
It was the first thing I'd ever said in space. Hardly the most eloquent thing I could've said, but it got the idea across. My mind flooded with questions. Besides the obvious answer of being in orbit, where was I? How did I get here? Who took my glasses?
What was that crystal, and who put it there?
♦ 98
Deep in my bones, I felt it. Like a grain of sand falling down in an hourglass, or a timer ticking down. The crystal on my hand became almost imperceptibly cooler than it was seconds ago, and it was cooling off while I was floating around in space without a helmet.
Oh.
…
That isn't good.
I was working on very little information, but I could put two and two together. People weren't supposed to survive in space, so, assuming I wasn't having my first lucid dream, this crystal was the only thing keeping me alive.
My heart rate quickened, trying to figure out how I'd get out of this situation. If the gemstone was a battery, then what was it powered by? What was actively draining the charge? My life support, for one. It was also anchoring me in place. Radiation shielding?
I thought I felt the sun on my back. Without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's rays, I reckon I'm taking it full-blast.
Another mystery solved. What else?
♦ 97
This is too much.
I brought my hands to my head to massage my temples, inadvertently bringing the foreign object closer to my face than I strictly wanted it to be. My thoughts were, for reasons that should've been rather evident, in complete disarray.
"Is there somewhere I can land?" I said aloud, not caring how far my words carried. Or if they ever reached past my lips and ears at all. I just talked aloud sometimes to get my head back on straight. "Europe, I guess?"
It was a bit silly to quibble over landing zones, when anywhere with oxygen beat my current predicament. For some reason, my mind rationalized that I should prioritize an English-speaking nation, or one that was on decent terms with the United States. The human brain liked its routines, but those didn't always react well to stress.
In this case, the delay caused me to waste time I didn't have to lose. During my deliberations, a large shadow passed over my body.
"Huh?"
Shadows getting between me and the sun during the day were never a good sign. I thrust my arm around, to force my body to flip, when I realized that shouldn't work. Nevertheless, I had the thought of turning around, and my whole body swiveled to face the ceaseless expanse of the stars dancing across the blue planet's horizon.
It was breathtaking..
Then I kept turning, to face a massive hunk of rock threatening to bowl me over!
It couldn't be a meteor, because it looked way too big to burn up in the atmosphere. The khaki-colored, craggy sphere was too small to be Luna, and what were the odds that I'd be stranded out here at the same time as a solar eclipse?
Why not? Nothing makes sense anyways.
I hissed out a swear of alarm, and tried to 'swim' away from the oncoming planetoid, but it merely drifted away, making me realize that it was in a stable orbit. Not a threat to me at all, save that it was a reminder that I was completely out of my depth.
I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the reflective fragment of a solar panel whizzed past my nose like a bullet.
♦ 96
Taking a hurried glance to the left, I could see the rest of a broken satellite the size of a bus making its way towards me.
My mind jumped to a particular phrase that described what that satellite would do to me.
Kessler syndrome.
Ah, yes. It was about to Kessler me.
"No, no!"
Oh, come on! This isn't fair!
My mind awash with indignation, I extended my arms outwards to block the oncoming projectile. The gem on my left hand glowed with an intense magenta radiance, a colorful bolt of pink rocketing out of the extremity and shattering it on impact. In its wake, a harmless haze of glittering dust was all that remained.
I took a moment to examine my handiwork.
That was a laser. A genuine laser!
"Wow."
What else was I supposed to say?
♦ 91
That sense of wonder was brief, as I felt how much that attack took out of me. The running number in my head was an abstraction of some kind. An abstraction that was at a little over 90%. It sank in that, unless I found a way to recharge this thing, I didn't have a lot of power to burn. I didn't want to find out what happened when it went dry.
Once that thought had sunk it, it occurred to me that it wasn't the only thing sinking. Firing off that energy blast disrupted the careful balance of my own orbit, causing me to tumble downwards into the atmosphere.
♦ 90
"Ah! AH! Slow down, SLOW DOWN!"
I felt bile rise in my throat as I maintained a downward spiral towards the planet below. The sky was green, the grass was blue, and the malformed globe spun faster and faster; it was more accurate to say that I was the one that was spinning, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was on fire.
♦ 88
Friction. It was a killer. The only surprising part was that it hadn't killed me yet. My entire body was burning, surrounded by a bright corona of flame.
♦ 86
…Which, now that I had time to think about it, should have ended things then and there. Instead, I was still falling.
…
I had, years back, watched a video of a skydiver launching themselves off the stratosphere in a pressure suit. Some kind of promo for Red Bull. They got there in a helium balloon, and the jumper took a good ten minutes to land back to Earth. About five or six minutes of freefall, and the rest was done with the parachute.
♦ 84
At a guess? I was falling from a lot higher than that. As someone who wasn't a fan of heights, and neglected to bring a parachute with them into lower orbit, I was really hoping that this was a dream again. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Mostly because it felt like I was falling way faster than I should've been.
♦ 82
"Come on, come on! Fly! It isn't that hard!"
I was flailing around midair, trying to come up with something that would stop me from going splat. If this thing on my hand was supposed to let me fly, then I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. There wasn't a built-in instruction manual, either. Falling through the clouds and quickly reaching a terminal end point, the land below appeared to be rural woodland… when I had the chance to look down. I still hadn't stopped spinning, giving me the verdant view of an evergreen forest every other second.
♦ 80
"How about happy thoughts, eh?! Happy thoughts! Just think happy--!"
My head tilted down towards the ground again. Before I ever found the magic words to give myself wings, one side of my face made an earsplitting impact with a lake. The water might as well have been concrete, for all that the surface tension did to break my fall.
♦ 70
I felt my entire body reverberate. Bones snapping from the force of impact, and then unsnapping. The right side of my body was wracked with pain, and it felt like a jet of water sprayed up my nose to jab straight through my brainstem. I was somehow alive, but I wasn't going to go out on a limb and call it a miracle yet.
As if my morning couldn't possibly get any worse, I was starting to drown. Water was rapidly filling my lungs, and bright motes of light were flooding my vision.
♦ 80
I was far too deep in the water to grasp for the surface. My power might've let me breathe underwater if I was more composed, especially since I could breathe in a vacuum, but I was hardly in a state to do that.
Not… like… this!
Unable to reach for air or latch on to anything solid, the gemstone on my hand started glowing again, drawing in the light that had pooled at the bottom of the lake bed.
♦ 85
The stone illuminated the dark depths in a sea of red light, and I was launched straight through the top of the lake to freedom.
My flight plan was erratic. Less floating, and more flopping. There were multiple times where I risked hitting a tree or sheer cliff and breaking my neck. Focusing my jittery jumps into concentrated movement took effort, driven by desperation and adrenaline. Coming to a complete stop was even harder, but in that moment, I would have taken stable ground under my feet over bouncing around like a pinball.
♦ 84
Once I reoriented myself, regaining a sense of up and down, I dropped to the ground and vomited. I was utterly tapped out. Physically, mentally, and, for the record, existentially. Launched out of space, and nearly splattered. I needed time to unwind, decompress, and, ideally, wake up from this nightmare that I clearly wasn't going to wake up from.
At some point, I did lose consciousness before being dragged back to wakefulness. It could have been a rest for a few minutes. It could have been more. I wasn't keeping track, but I did know it was darker out when my eyes fluttered open a second time.
More than that, I could barely feel the texture of the dirt as my fingers dug into the soil, but that was because of the dark gloves that I'd been wearing since I'd awoken. What were they? Leather? Latex? I couldn't place the material.
"Stupid gloves," I muttered, between sputtering out copious amounts of fluid from my body.
When I spared the idle thought to wish them away, the gloves disappeared. I crawled back to the water's edge in an exhausted stupor, stumbling over gnarled greenery that nicked my exposed hands. It hurt a bit, but not enough to bleed. Besides, I didn't think I would be ready to stand for a while.
I was at the shore of a lake, in the clearing of a forest. A lake in a forest, in what might've been Europe, assuming that this might've been Earth. That was a tenuous leap in logic at best, but it was all I had to cling on to.
I carefully examined my reflection in the water. My eyes were dark, sunken pits, with red rings around black pinpricks for pupils. The light brown curls of my hair were a wet mop that crowned a gristly, disheveled expression. My nose was about the same as when I last checked it, but it was swollen with a bold streak of blood running down both nostrils.
Was that from using the gem, or the crash?
Does it matter?
Either way, I looked terrible. My body and the immediate area around it were bathed in an eerie, ethereal light. I washed my face in the clear lake, something to keep my hands busy while I thought over what the hell I was going to do next.
♦ 86
The awfully conspicuous icosahedron had cooled off somewhat from the dunking, though it still glowed faintly. I couldn't see all sides of the thing with it plugged into my hand, but I recognized a D20 anywhere. I tried to caress my left palm with my index finger, to feel the other end of the stone poking out; it felt like nothing was there. It was surreal, without the fabric covering where one end connected to the other.
"What the hell happened to me?"
"Stand and deliver, varlet!" a voice from behind me declared in the most jarringly Shakespearean English accent I could possibly imagine.
The sudden noise had me spooked, then strongly bewildered. Who was that? What were they saying? Was I going crazy? Crazier? Fingers through my hair, hands trembling as I addressed what might've been one part of a greater stress-induced episode.
"Hey. Hey. Shut up. I need a minute here."
My voice was hollow and shaky. I didn't even have the strength to turn around.
The hallucination, which spoke like a British teen LARPer, sounded flabbergasted at my irreverent response. He faltered slightly as he pressed onward.
"I shall grant ye no moment of respite, sirrah! As the guardian of Deerwood Forest and rightful steward of yon sacred waters, I command ye to make thine intentions known or face the consequences!"
Exasperated, I turned with a long swing of my arm.
"Alright, alright! What're you…?"
I turned around, and felt my heart plunge in shock.
Straight ahead of me, perched on a stump atop a short hill, was a rodent of unusual size. Standing at about a meter tall, I almost thought he was a child, but his head was way too big. Made up too much of his build and mass. The humanoid's Lincoln green head and body were concealed in a brown cowl and tunic, leaving big green eyes and a stern scowl peering back at me from the shadows.
"What are you?" I asked, dumbfounded by the odd being in front of me.
The creature--
I struck the line of thought, because he was very clearly talking to me. Calling the guy a creature was rude at best. If he was civilized enough to wear hiking boots, he was civilized enough for me not to call him a 'creature'.
The, erm, fellow was pointing a wooden bow at me, an arrow nocked in the direction of my heart. A recurve bow, by the shape of it? The bow stood as tall as he was, giving it a strong pull if he chose to fire. However, as someone who wasn't in a rush to be shot, even after all of that up in space, I was sobering up to the fact that I hadn't made the best first--
--The fact that his mouth started moving a few seconds ago.
Wait wait, what's he saying?
"…trespasser. For what being of Walkers' make could stand there and question mine own nature, whilst acting unperturbed by the sting of a broadhead's point?"
"A broadhead?"
Wasn't that an arrow shape?
I looked down, trying to focus on the narrow spike of an arrow nocked on his bow. Unexpectedly, looking down also caused me to notice the long shaft ending in colorful feather fletching that was already sticking out of my chest.
♦ 85
Then came the pain of being shot in the chest.
"You shot me!" I seethed in accusation. That was somehow the least extreme thing to happen to me thus far, but still. It hurt! "Why did you shoot me with an arrow?!"
The short mammal took a step back, looking only slightly less confused about the whole affair than I was. He took a step off the stump, nearly falling on his rear in the process, but his hardy bow was able to hold his weight and spring him back to his feet.
"Lackaday, spellbinder!" he exclaimed defensively. "That was merely meant to be a warning shot!"
"What was the warning? Wear armor?!"
My first instinct was to yank it out, but it hurt to pull at, and my attempt to jostle it loose only made it hurt more!
"I merely meant to query thee in order to determine thine alignment! Whether thou were friend or foe, when ye turned swiftly without nary a warning of intent!"
I pointed to the offending projectile with a gloved index finger. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding, but that might've just been my black suit covering it up.
"You know, I don't think friends do this to each other! I've had a real long day, and I don't see a great friendship foundation going on here!"
My eyes were, last I checked, awfully red. I hoped my anger got across loud and clear. If that didn't, then the renewed glow the gemstone on my left hand was making certainly did.
He put his bow back up, for whatever amount of good that'd do for him. I still had the gem, and I felt I could defend with it. Modulate the output and go for a non-lethal blow, if I could.
I… didn't appreciate being shot, but maybe I was the one in the wrong here?
"You descended from the sky as a fiery, baleful phantasm unto the bed of Never Lake! Am I not to assume you sought to violate and despoil its serene beauty to fuel your dark magicks, Overland warlock most foul and unseeming?"
He called me what now?
At that moment, my logical brain stopped proofreading the words coming out of my mouth.
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm not going to be talked down to by a funny animal that doesn't wear pants!"
The rodent drew closer, standing atop his bow so he could get up in my face. He could only get so close to me without poking the arrow he put there.
"Sheathe thine sharp tongue, you plague-marked mage of ill repute!"
If that was the game we were going to play, I knew just the way to escalate.
I bit my thumb at him.
His furious scowl widened.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he asked angrily.
"I do bite my thumb, sir."
They called Shakespeare's works the classics for a reason, and the reason was applicability. I appreciated my psychotic episode for going along with the bit.
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he repeated, angrier still.
Gregory wasn't here, so we had to skip his lines.
"No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir--!"
"HALT!"
Neither of us were able to get another word in. The prior atmosphere was utterly disrupted by the arrival of three steel goliaths from out of the woodwork. They were all nearly twice my height and fairly uniform in construction, seeming right at home on the budget of a shoestring sci-fi production. Built with a minimum of moving parts, the giants were covered in heavy plates of armor that bowled over pine, stone, and shrub. Each was armed with thick bars of metal that functioned as crude clubs in their weighty hands.
A trio of blood red, cyclopean visors glared down at us, followed by a litany of the local equivalents of the Miranda Rights projected through cheap voice synthesizers. If they had accents like the shrew, then they were mangled by the modulator.
"ROB O' THE HEDGE AND UNIDENTIFIED COLLABORATOR. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO NOT RESIST THE WILL OF THE HIGH SHERIFF. I REPEAT. DO NOT RESIST."
"Are those robots?" I squealed out in incredulous, barely-restrained indignation.
Not at all drones. Robots.
This whole day that had been panic, terror, screaming, and agony. One crisis after the other. Now? Even more confusion. All questions, no answers. I was so fed up with all of this, so lacking in context that I couldn't even begin to compartmentalize all of these mental stress fractures in my head. It was a dam about to burst, and I didn't know where the water was going next.
The teal humanoid -- Rob was what they called him -- lept away from me and stood in a combat position atop a tall stone. I couldn't tell which part of those things would be vulnerable to a humble arrow, at a glance. The eye, perhaps?
"Verily!" he replied, switching out the broadhead for one with a round, threaded head from his quiver. "These mechanical miscreants are the shock-troopers of the Sheriff! I know not your intentions, pilgrim, but surely you can recognize the need for--"
I growled, and the gemstone projected a conical ray of light. The ray coalesced into a large, translucent left hand, which wrapped itself around the body of the robot nearest to me. With a thought, I clenched the giant fist, crushing everything encased beneath it into scrap metal and glitter dust. The robot's head spun straight up into the air before landing on the refuse pile.
"…Cooperation."
♦ 82
The two that remained started blankly at their very destroyed comrade, before raising their metal clubs and slowly ambling towards me.
"UNIDENTIFIED MISCREANT IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ENGAGING WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."
What did that guy call me? A warlock?
I didn't know if what I was doing was some kind of magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, but whatever it was, it was working. For my next trick, I focused on a rough circle around the two robots, and set it ablaze with iridescent flame. Pillars of fire rose above the robots, freezing in place and solidifying as a jagged crystal cage that surrounded them on all sides.
♦ 80
"Now that's what I'm talking about!"
The rest of this trouble, I could do without, but the power? No complaints thus far. Since he recognized them, I looked around for where Rob went, to see if he might be able to explain more about where these things came from. For better or worse, they may have been able to point me in the direction of civilization.
My celebration was short-lived. There was a loud clatter like shattering glass, and the two robots used their iron clubs to smash free from their sparkling prison. I'd clearly underestimated their speed, because they closed the gap into melee range in under two strides. Their sudden blitz threw me on the backfoot, but I had enough time to raise a barrier of pink light between me and the wrecking force of their blows.
♦ 78
Fragments of that interposing wall scattered over the ground, as I was tossed reeling into a sheer stone wall. It felt like they'd knocked something loose with that heavy blow, and it wasn't a stronger tolerance for pain.
"Would you cut that out?!" I called out to them, nearly breathless, but with enough air left to loudly complain.
There was a pause in their combat routine. A stall, as the two robots neared closer. If one blast worth five 'points' was enough to take out a satellite, then I should be able to beat them, but what if I wasted too much power doing it? On the other hand, could I afford to wait until they called for reinforcements from that Sheriff guy? Could I afford to risk being tagged by someone who might like enforcing high taxes with killer robots?
Eventually, the robots formulated a response.
"REQUEST DENIED."
They readied their blunt instruments, to pick up where they left off, when the path of the farthest one was intercepted by an arrow striking its foot from the trees. It was the round arrow from before. Instead of piercing armor, it exploded into a bundle of twine that got caught between the giant's lumbering limbs and caused it to tumble to the ground with a heavy clunk. Another arrow with a red tip flew out from the forest and detonated on impact, scattering the robot's head and shoulders across the clearing.
Well. I took back what I said about the arrows being ineffective.
With that robot down, I was forced into close combat with the last one. It swung its rebar beatstick left, then right, causing me to flinch and propel myself away with long, unbalanced jumps. Being yanked around on invisible wires was the closest thing I could do to flying while under duress.
I hadn't been in a fight in well over a decade. Not a real one. For that, I was grateful. Nevertheless, there were moments where you were glad that the human body was always ready to make cortisol. For moments where keeping your blood pumping was the priority, and common decency went out the window.
For what it was worth, I lost that fight. This time, I wouldn't.
Kicking off against a rocky spire, I rocketed off towards my next victim with a left hook that exploded into a shotgun blast of pressurized pink mist. The wave of vibrant energy bowled the machine over, a spiky layer of magenta crystal forming over the head and trunk in the shape of a frozen splash.
"Ha! Try breaking out of that, you tin-plated git!"
♦ 76
The robot's thick fingers dragged coarsely across the surface of the crystal shell, too stiff to hold on as it futilly attempted to scrape free. Not wanting to risk whether it could actually accomplish the deed, I conjured a broad cylinder of solid light and drove it straight down on the robot's head. The result was a total flattening and a satisfying crush where a mechanical brain might've been. Brain or not, the body stopped functioning when its head was squashed into a solid disk.
♦ 75
"Aha! I got 'em all!" I pumped a first out in the air, but once the deed was done, all that remained in the forest was an eerie silence. "Hello? Anyone still out there?"
With nothing else to fight, and everything seeming to calm down, the adrenaline started to bleed out of my body. The gemstone still had most of its power left to burn, but I sure as hell had run dry. I fell to my knees, exhaustion returning to wreck its vengeance once I'd run out of targets. Worried about falling on top of it, I yanked the broadhead out of my chest with all of the force I still had to muster.
It was a drastic act of delirium, which caused me to pass out from shock. The last thing I saw was the ruby-red glaze of the arrow, smeared across my hazy vision. After I collapsed, the last thing I heard was a distant voice murmuring poetic in my ear.
"At ease, overlander. Any foe of the Sheriff is a friend of mine."
---
I've been at this for a while, huh?
The first chapter of Ruby Haze was put online in 2020. Which, geez, was years back! I was much less seasoned as a writer, and it showed. It's kinda difficult for me to go back and read my old stuff… which is why I kept putting off the inevitable rewrites for later.
You see, due to me often being split between other obligations over the past couple years (mostly work, but also other writing projects that demanded my attention more than Ruby Haze did), my writing skill has greatly outpaced my ability to actually, well, write this. As such, the quality of the earlier chapters and those that came later can get pretty jarring. Talking to my friends about how rough the beginning was compared to my later output was enough to convince me that I'd put off doing rewrites for the earlier chapters for long enough. It was an uphill battle to read my old work and get this new Chapter 1 out, but I can easily say I'm proud of it as a refurbishment of Ruby Haze's opening.
I put this up as a new threadmark so people could judge the quality for themselves before I did a full-on replacement of the original first chapter. If there's approval, then I can do the switch-up and leave a link to the old one in the author notes.
My game plan is to do one rewrite for every new chapter of Ruby Haze, until the quality of the older chapters reaches parity with the rest. Which might take a couple for me to be satisfied, but the good news is that you get touched-up versions of the start.
Additionally, my friend and I started work on a collaborative Friend Insert in which he is inserted into Archie Sonic as a Metal Sonic. Please keep an eye out for Dead Metal in the future, because we'll start posting when the backlog is further along.
The first chapter of Ruby Haze was put online in 2020. Which, geez, was years back! I was much less seasoned as a writer, and it showed. It's kinda difficult for me to go back and read my old stuff… which is why I kept putting off the inevitable rewrites for later.
You see, due to me often being split between other obligations over the past couple years (mostly work, but also other writing projects that demanded my attention more than Ruby Haze did), my writing skill has greatly outpaced my ability to actually, well, write this. As such, the quality of the earlier chapters and those that came later can get pretty jarring. Talking to my friends about how rough the beginning was compared to my later output was enough to convince me that I'd put off doing rewrites for the earlier chapters for long enough. It was an uphill battle to read my old work and get this new Chapter 1 out, but I can easily say I'm proud of it as a refurbishment of Ruby Haze's opening.
I put this up as a new threadmark so people could judge the quality for themselves before I did a full-on replacement of the original first chapter. If there's approval, then I can do the switch-up and leave a link to the old one in the author notes.
My game plan is to do one rewrite for every new chapter of Ruby Haze, until the quality of the older chapters reaches parity with the rest. Which might take a couple for me to be satisfied, but the good news is that you get touched-up versions of the start.
Additionally, my friend and I started work on a collaborative Friend Insert in which he is inserted into Archie Sonic as a Metal Sonic. Please keep an eye out for Dead Metal in the future, because we'll start posting when the backlog is further along.
♦ Want to support my work? ♦
PATREON | KO-FI
♦ Join the W2 Workshop Zone for previews and updates! ♦
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PATREON | KO-FI
♦ Join the W2 Workshop Zone for previews and updates! ♦
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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: CaptNameless, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
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Chapter 33: Chaolaxing
weredrago2
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Ruby Haze
Chapter 33: Chaolaxing
After spending less than a week on Angel Island, it actually felt good to return to Mercia. For all of the terrors I and everyone else had to endure there, the occupied land had become something of a known variable. I knew the snow-covered expanses of Deerwood Forest, and had been in Hideaway and Sylvania Castle long enough to call them my second set of homes. Places I could feel safe to let my guard down. The situation in Eurish wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it was steadily changing for the better.
I tried to keep that slightly outdated thought in mind as Fiona landed the biplane down in the charred expanse of blackened stumps where Deerwood Forest once stood.
"Fiona, stay with the plane," I ordered, and she didn't argue. "Figment, with me."
My familiar flew out from an aperture in Null Space, scouting around what was left of the landscape. The air was sharp, hazy, and acrid, stinging my nose and his beak with faint embers. Wood smoke. Toxic runoff.
"No, no, no…!"
Roasted meat.
"This isn't happening."
I tried to open my awareness, searching outwards for signs of life, but all I could sense was the opposite. Searching for the cause of this devastation, even though it should've been fairly obvious, led to similarly dead ends.
"It was only a few days," I hissed out. "How did this happen?"
It didn't.
I whirred around to Fiona, who was mumbling something under her breath.
"What did you say?"
"I said I don't know!" she yelled, fear clear on her face. "The High Sheriff wasn't supposed to be able to mount this kind of assault for weeks! Maybe he called in extra help from Robotnik, or he had a secret weapon saved up, or--!"
This doesn't add up.
"It doesn't add up," I said, feeling the color drain from my face.
My voice was cold. My tone, rational. Almost clinical. I was trying to come to terms with everything, or stow it all away so that I could turn the knot of thoughts in my head into action. There was no use in denying what I was seeing, was there?
Everyone was dead. Or most of them were dead, following a raid that was initiated between my last contact with Hideaway and when we arrived to check on everyone. The celebrations from our victory against the High Sheriff were cut short with extreme prejudice, as anyone that hadn't fallen in the initial slash and burn was rounded up for the roboticizer. Plain and simple.
The Crazy Kritters were gone. The Maquis were gone. Clan Argyle were gone.
The Mercian Freedom Fighters were over, and I was left behind.
This, right here, John. This was why you didn't want to get attached to people.
It all felt too real. The distant, fading fires were even more distant, increasingly faded. How long had they burned for?
Fire is my element.
Fire was one of the four elements I'd been experimenting with. The one that came the most naturally, followed by water. Air and earth were the only fields I'd stalled in, to the extent that I'd considered dropping them entirely to focus on the other two.
Where was I, again? Oh, right.
Everyone was dead.
I extinguished the lingering flames with a wave of my hand. Less distractions in my visions as I picked through the ashes for anything that could tell me what I'd missed.
Honestly, there wasn't much left. Tattered huts. Shattered weapons, scattered across what remained of the battlefield.
I picked up a round, white shape that caught my eye. A stainless skull, and one that felt instinctively like it belonged to a friend. Like it belonged to Rob.
Is that my new power? Identifying skulls by touch?
Well, he's the only guy I know with the hedgehog head shape, it's a bit too small for--
I dropped the skull, letting it tumble to the ground.
"This isn't happening," I repeated. "The Sheriff wouldn't let a high-value target like the former king be burnt up with the rest of them."
I heard the loud cracking of glass, and saw that it was followed by a spider web of branching fractures over the smoggy sky above.
"This. Isn't. Happening."
My memories were becoming clearer. Fiona was parking the plane near Sylvania Castle when we returned from Angel Island, wasn't she? Why were we so close to Deerwood now?
Looking around, I really was alone. Where had Fiona and Figment gone? Were they ever here at all? Someone mentioned this not adding up before, and I had to agree.
This had to be a trick. An illusion. How? I should be able to see through those with the Phantom Ruby.
Was there something I was overlooking?
What if it was a--?
♦ !!
"--in there, sleepyhead?"
My magenta eyes flashed open, causing Amy to stumble back in surprise.
"Ah! There you are!"
I blinked.
"Hmm?"
I looked around, trying to reestablish my bearings. I was still in the power ring grotto beneath Sylvania Castle, where I'd taken Amy to meet Merna the Merhog. The day trip was to make up for the fact that I didn't take her along the first time I came here, back when it was a lot more dangerous. The merhog made a habit of passing through the underground rivers connecting the Sylvania Castle to the Central Sea when she could, and the two of them really hit it off without me. I saw no issues with closing my eyes to meditate for a few minutes while they chatted about old myths and stories.
When my vision was more clear, I saw that the pink hedgehog girl and the half-hedgehog, half-fish woman were looking at me. They were relaxing by the large pool of the grotto, watching for my response.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"We were getting worried about you, Mister Wizard," Amy explained. "You kinda dozed off, but Merna didn't wanna wake you up."
The merhog merely nodded. While Amy sat next to the pool, Merna lounged in it. She could survive outside the water for brief periods of time, but doing so too long would cause her to dry out. Standard merperson fare, with the added feature that she could hop on her tail like it was a particularly stiff pogo stick.
"When Amy mentioned how busy you'd been with your arcane studies, I thought it better to let you rest."
"I was just meditating," I said, waving off her concern.
"Meditating for nearly an hour?" Merna teased, a knowing smile crossing her turquoise face.
That long?
"It was a deep meditation."
I didn't mean to fall asleep. The Phantom Ruby meant I could replace some of my body's typical needs with magic. It'd only been a couple weeks since I got back from Angel Island. After a well-earned rest, I made the executive decision to cut sleep back to a couple of hours per night. Mercia had been relatively quiet, like Fiona said it would, but time I spent sleeping was time being wasted. The High Sheriff would be using this time to prepare for another plot, or a renewed offensive, and I needed to use that time to continue unravelling the mysteries of the Ars Ixia. There were far more opportunities for me to experiment with my powers, now that I finally had an emerald shard to fuel them.
The more lore I absorb from this musty tome, the easier the Phantom Ruby will be to handle. Cut through the Old English, and that's more or less what the book says about 'crystalline magic'.
Did I need to read a specific passage on the subject to find out if mixing low sleep and chaos energy was a good idea? No, obviously not, but my time budget was running on margins that were razor-thin. Maybe the lack of sleep and my recent doubling-down on occult research were why I was dreaming about fire?
Fire, chemical fumes, and… a skull?
The details eluded me, and I didn't care to remember the rest. It wasn't like my dreams were ever pleasant.
"I hope your meditation was fruitful all the same," Merna acquiesced. "Are you ready to visit the chao garden?"
I got up and stretched, giving the horse-sized sea turtle I was leaning against a friendly pat on the shell. The snoozing aquatic reptile was one of Merna's friends that came along with her, after I made the flooded tunnels more stable. Now that we were in a better position to properly restore Sylvania Castle, the last thing we needed was a structural collapse beneath it.
"I'm good to go. Amy, do you have everything?"
Amy turned around so I could see her big rucksack. Gray. Military surplus. Waterproof. A bright splash of magenta sprayed over the Overland emblem on the back gave her Christmas present a personal touch.
"Yep!" Amy shouted. "Let's go see the chao!"
"See you soon!" Merna said, splashing into the water.
Amy held my hand, and I formed a hollow bubble of water around us. It held steady as I kicked the stone floor and bounced the bubble into the depths.
♦ 70
A water shield. It didn't just keep out excess water as Amy and I walked through the flooded catacombs. This sphere of water magic worked as an arcane set of gills, drawing in oxygen from the estuary and filtering out carbon dioxide. After I pulled off the fire shield against that super badnik, my frequent visits down here made the water shield a logical follow-up.
"It's so pretty down here," Amy beamed, using her flashlight to illuminate the castle ruins and the flourishing river life that claimed it.
A variety of colorful fish swam past us. Striped trout, yellow eels, salmon salmon, and even a green largemouth bass. I didn't think the last one was supposed to be swimming in a Europe-esque body of water, but the Central Sea was much smaller and closer-knit to the adjacent continents than the Atlantic Ocean. An argument could be made for draining these tunnels so they'd be put to more 'practical' use, but I wasn't going to make it.
"Yeah, it's nice. I wish I could explore places like these more often. Could solve another mystery or two from those books of yours."
"You think we can do that?"
"We met a merhog, so I don't see why we can't try for another."
Maybe, if my life went another way, I could've been an archaeologist. Or a historian. I liked learning about history and going to museums. Not so much when I was younger, but definitely later in life. After the child and student discounts expired, of course.
Needless to say, fate didn't seem to have much of either in my cards anymore. It was a shame that I wouldn't be seeing the Ringling again any time soon. Only went there a couple of times, even though I spent my whole life near the damn thing, and now…
Amy disrupted my darker ruminations with a non-sequitur.
"You know, when I have a bad dream, Cousin Rob says it's okay to talk about it," the hedgehog girl commented.
"That's solid advice, Amy. He knows what he's talking about."
"When I talk about my bad dreams, I feel better about them," she continued.
"Are you having any bad dreams you want to talk about?" I offered.
"Never mind," Amy said, sighing in apparent resignation.
I shrugged, stopping our bubble when I saw our exit. A lifting gesture with my hand took us upwards and back towards the surface, where I popped the elemental barrier with a thought. Diverting the path of the trickling waterfall, I revealed the path to the chao garden.
"Alright, we're here."
Amy gasped at the sight.
"Wow!"
The place hasn't changed much since my return from that perilous 'vacation' to Angel Island. It was enclosed in a broad, shallow cenote, surrounded by tall trees and patches of moss that clung to the cavern walls. Baby blue chao with green or yellow highlights frolicked around the garden, hovering around trees and swimming in the basin.
By the time we arrived, Merna was tending to a shrine she put together to bless the garden and protect it from danger: A short, boxy structure of blue and beige stones that the chao gathered around to sing cheery songs with her.
It was saccharine, but I wasn't gonna complain. I could use more saccharine right now.
"What do you think, Amy?" I asked.
"They look just like the fairies in my book! Which ones are yours, Mister Wizard?"
I searched around. Some of the chao got skittish when I approached, while others were more friendly, but otherwise paid me little heed. They were too busy enjoying their simple lives, without need or worry. The only ones that had gotten really attached to me were those two eggs I saw when Merna showed me this place. They hatched during one of my visits to spruce up the place, while I was in the process of adjusting their placement to reduce the risk that they might fall over. Both chao came out of their eggshells in my color and imprinted on sight, so that made them my responsibility.
I wasn't aggressively fishing for an excuse to keep them. Really.
…
I only spent, what? Hundreds of hours in the Chao Garden in SA2 over multiple save files? Not counting the one in SADX and the Tiny Chao Garden, of course.
"They have to be around--" I spotted a pair of crimson, two-tone chao getting into a wrestling match over the same orange fruit. In a garden that regularly produced more of them by magic. "Errol, Vivi!"
I flew over and broke up the feuding water babies, scooping them up into my hands. In my left hand was Errol, with his usual half-lidded eyes and dopey squiggle of a smile. To my right waited Vivi, whose eyes were wide, and her shark-like rictus grin was wider.
"Really, guys? There's enough to share!"
Errol cooed and wriggled in my hand because he wanted to cuddle, while Vivi went straight to biting, because her version of cuddles involved teeth.
Naturally, the two troublemakers were mine. Or in this case, my problem.
"Want me to hold them for you?" Amy suggested. I turned, and she got a better look at how Vivi had latched herself onto me like a lamprey. "How about just the left one?"
I handed her Errol, who proceeded to crawl out of Amy's hands and explore around her arms. She giggled.
"Errol's got a lot of energy, huh?"
I was very relieved that Vivi was disinterested in expressing her affection towards her fellow chao in the same way that she did towards me. Holding her steady in one hand, far away from my other one, I popped out a sharp, black talon from my index finger.
"You kids don't even know what scarcity is," I muttered, as I sliced the orange fruit in half for them. After hovering one chunk within range of Vivi, she became content with chewing on that instead. "You're welcome."
I passed the other half to Amy, who passed it along to Errol. With that, the yellow emotion balls bobbing atop their heads turned into hearts, and both my chao became much easier to manage. We set them back on the ground, and I was able to watch them eat in the grass with minimal intervention.
"Are they always like this?" Amy asked, sitting down on a cool stone next to me.
"Only when they're awake," I clarified.
With the unique way that chao absorbed traits from the creatures they were in contact with, I knew there were signs to watch for. Unlike the other chao in the garden, Errol and Vivi developed darker complexions and more prominent crescents on their soft bellies each time I visited. Merna insisted that the twins would be heartbroken if I never returned, but when I first saw them changing, I was worried that the negative energies of the Phantom Ruby made me a potential bad influence.
…No, wait, Figment was left unattended with them a couple times until I found a replacement chao sitter. I could pin some of my current predicament on them observing and hugging my avian familiar to absorb his bad habits. That'd explain the feathery tuft on Vivi's head, too, but not Errol's horns or whiskers--
I paused, noting the lack of said whiskered sitter.
"Vivi, Errol? Where's Brie?"
My chao knowingly laughed. They were both done with the fruit, so while I took out a cloth and cleaned off their messy faces, Amy opened her bag and handed out toys to any chao that wanted them. They were her old things that she hadn't played with in years. Stuffed plushies. A rattle. Crayons. Stuff like that.
She already donated most of them to the younger children in Mercia, but there was still a lot left over. Only so many kids her age or younger survived for us to distribute them to.
"Who's Brie?" Amy asked, as she rolled Errol and Vivi a striped ball they could chase around the garden.
"One of my new familiars."
Amy tilted her head.
"What happened to Figment?" she questioned, concerned about the safety of a feral bird that could rip the power cell out of a SWATbot by the beak.
"Figment's fine. He's been helping me scout the skies and pick off badnik patrols. Brie helps me out with other stuff."
Her expression brightened.
"Oh, okay!"
Namely, Brie helped me out by having an even temper and positive attitude. I wasn't exactly fluent in animal speech, but I didn't need fluency to tell me that Brie was much better with kids and at keeping a lower profile than Figment ever was. After I saved the poor girl from being caught by the neck in a Robotnik-branded mousetrap, she'd been eager to help me with stuff that Figment turned his beak at. Mostly reminding me of my daily errands via our telepathic link, but her paws meant she could hold things, too.
Inspecting the other side of the palm tree my chao liked to congregate around, I saw a footlong mobini rodent with dark magenta fur and glassy black eyes like a doll. Her head bore a pair of ruby spikes, which ran down her back and along her tail.
"Brie, you alright?"
The micky let out a squeak of defeat. My first Phantom Ruby-mutated familiar of the Rodentia order was tied to the base of the tree with colorful string. The skill behind the knotwork meant that Brie had only mostly chewed herself free, in spite of the fact he could now gnaw through metal. One claw swipe against the bark cut Brie the rest of the way loose.
"Take five, girl."
Brie promptly collapsed onto the soft grass for a nap.
I felt bad, because watching Errol and Vivi for me was supposed to be her light duty. Lighter than spying on troop movements or sabotaging the High Sheriff's foresters, which was what Figment was doing. The less mobini he could round up for Robotnik, the fewer badniks powered by animal batteries he'd receive from Robotropolis. After a few incidents, I imagined he might've gotten suspicious about the sudden attacks from mixed flocks of flying critters led by a demonic flicky cast in shades of red.
That was to say, he would've gotten suspicious if I couldn't turn them all invisible at a moment's notice. The only thing funnier than seeing badniks armed with nets get mobbed by a horde of animals was when they couldn't see them back.
Heh. Gotta get my kicks where I can.
It'd be an exaggeration to say I was eager to make more 'ruby mutants', but thanks to that emerald shard, I also had the juice I needed to perform more consistent animal testing. Find out if what I did to Figment wasn't a one-time thing.
A few dead mobini later, I got my answer. There were intangible factors at play besides how much mental focus or chaos energy I put behind the process that determined if the animals survived the mutation… or didn't. It almost felt crazy to ask for the consent of an animal or try to prioritize doing the spell on animals that were on death's door anyways, but some mobini were smart. If I could communicate, then why not try?
Besides, they had a closer tie to nature than mobians. Or me. Not one of them turned down the opportunity to survive after being given it, even when warned of the risks. To those scant few that made it, the deal was simple: In exchange for their power up and exemption from their usual obligations to the food chain, they worked for me while I wrote down any side effects that cropped up. Sloppier than how an actual scientist might do it, but until a legion of lab rats fell off the back of a truck, this was the best I could do.
Figment and Brie were two of the success stories.
I only wished more of them were.
The jumbo raccoon and the Cluckatrice, I'm still on the fence about.
Remaining stumped on where those knots came from, I checked my chaos' stumpy arms for fingers. As well as hidden weapons, while I was at it.
"Merna?" I called out.
The merhog turned her head away from the singing and dancing chao.
"Hm?"
"Are chao supposed to be able to tie knots on their own?"
She shook her head.
"The arts and crafts supplies you dropped off have made for great enrichment, so I taught them how to do basic knots. Why do you ask?"
Oh boy. I started to gesture with my hands.
"So, uh, how do they--?"
"Patience," Merna answered simply.
"Just checking."
I settled down on a blocky stone next to Amy, pulling out my spellbook to continue where I left off. Making sure that Errol and Vivi never strayed further than the corner of my eye. Having already acquired a stronger grasp of fire during my brief time as a dragon and the further practice afterwards, I cracked open the aged pages, removed my crystal bookmark, and returned to the ancient grimoire's section on the element of water.
If fire was sharp and subtle, then water was blunt and dense. I wasn't able to make much sense of those terms at first, when I let the Phantom Ruby do the heavy lifting for me. The gemstone was still on my left hand, holding the book secure, but I deliberately avoided calling upon its power for these exercises. My right arm was extended forward, a crystal chalice in hand as a focusing tool, to draw a sputtering stream from the central pool into a continuous fountain.
Like a waterfall flowing in reverse, the liquid cascaded upwards, and then collapsed gracelessly back into the pools. I struggled to keep the pressure consistent, because the molecules of water felt much more cumbersome than the embers of fire. Fire was far more reactive to my thoughts; it always hungered for something to burn, and being fed made it behave exactly how it was supposed to. Burning oxygen to make fireballs, a fire shield, heat beams, and so on. Forcing water to move where I wanted it to go, instead of where the tides and gravity pulled it, felt like trying to swim against the current. Both elements were described as being mobile, a commonality that kept me anchored.
Then there were the other two. Air had subtle aspects to it like fire, blunt aspects like water, and was a third mobile element, but air felt so intangible that I could barely grasp it. It was so ephemeral as to feel incomplete. The opposite held true for the element of earth, which was a solid wall I couldn't breach. It stubbornly held fast until I'd all but beaten my head against the stones to make them budge. I knew that I could get better with those elements if I kept using the Phantom Ruby as a crutch, but I'd already been spreading myself dangerously thin. Worst of all, I couldn't figure out how to make shields for them! With my time in high demand as it was, I'd seriously considered cutting my losses and focusing only on what the Ars Ixia prescribed for the elements I favored.
Huh. Deja vu.
Amy tore her eyes away from the fountain to stare back at me.
"I almost forgot! Congratulations, Mister Wizard!"
"Congratulations on what?" I asked in confusion.
"John, look out!" Merna cried, pointing back at my fountain.
Amy picked a less than ideal time to pull me away from my spellwork, because that was when Errol and Vivi's ball went floating into the fountain. Which had somehow reached a much higher pressure as my chao went zipping through it!
"No, stop!"
I dropped the book and expanded the fountain outwards, extending the scant gallons of water under my control into a frozen menagerie of icy chutes and slides!
♦ 66
They rode along the slides, until the final one sent the chao gently tumbling back into my arms, none the wiser to the danger.
"Please, let's not do that again?" I pleaded.
"Baa!" Errol answered gleefully.
"Woo," was Vivi's simple reply.
The chao yawned, and promptly crashed. My concentration wore out, causing the water construct to fizzle away into bubbles. All of the commotion caused Brie's ears to perk up. She awoke from her own nap and scurried to attention. Taking the chao out of my hands, one at a time, Brie found patches of grass for them to lay in and put them to bed.
"What were you congratulating me on again?" I whispered tiredly.
"Whatever that banquet Rob and I got invited to is about," Amy said quietly, so as not to wake them up again.
"Banquet?"
"The one being held in your name next week. They said you'd be the guest of honor?"
Brie shook her head, projecting sensory data into my via our psionic link. She was getting better at this. Magenta stripes, geometric patterns, odors of burnt hair gel, coffee beans, incense…
"You mean the Cult of the Ruby Flame?" I hazarded.
Amy nodded enthusiastically. She went rummaging through her bag and took out a gray, bezeled talisman carved in a hexagonal shape. Two striped feathers stuck out of one side.
"They're big fans of you, and Miss Benzina gave me this neat charm. I think I'll put it on my headband, but what do you think?"
Crap, did I forget about that again?
Brie brought a hand to her face.
What? I met with them and had a couple drinks with the hyenas when I got back, but I forgot to do the follow-up! I have a lot going on right now!
Brie threw in a rather creative image of me being tossed into a boiling pot with carrots. As if I needed the reminder as to why I was the 'guest of honor'.
Alright, alright! I'll talk to my cannibal cult now and get it over with.
"I think I need to go over there and sort out the finer details of my role at the banquet. Can you hold this for me?"
I passed Amy my spellbook and made a portal to my cult's compound, which grew out of the motorpool they made from stacked containers and welded scrap metal in the vicinity of Sylvania Castle.
♦ 63
"Huh?"
"I'll uh, be back in a few? Brie, you're with me."
Brie scampered up the tree and hopped onto my shoulder. We stepped through the portal to resolve what I hoped would be a simple theological difference.
Those things that have, historically speaking, always been simple and never caused horrific amounts of bloodshed.
Fingers crossed?
- - -
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: Argidoll, CaptNameless, C-Moon, and Dredloki!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
Chapter 33: Chaolaxing
After spending less than a week on Angel Island, it actually felt good to return to Mercia. For all of the terrors I and everyone else had to endure there, the occupied land had become something of a known variable. I knew the snow-covered expanses of Deerwood Forest, and had been in Hideaway and Sylvania Castle long enough to call them my second set of homes. Places I could feel safe to let my guard down. The situation in Eurish wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it was steadily changing for the better.
I tried to keep that slightly outdated thought in mind as Fiona landed the biplane down in the charred expanse of blackened stumps where Deerwood Forest once stood.
"Fiona, stay with the plane," I ordered, and she didn't argue. "Figment, with me."
My familiar flew out from an aperture in Null Space, scouting around what was left of the landscape. The air was sharp, hazy, and acrid, stinging my nose and his beak with faint embers. Wood smoke. Toxic runoff.
"No, no, no…!"
Roasted meat.
"This isn't happening."
I tried to open my awareness, searching outwards for signs of life, but all I could sense was the opposite. Searching for the cause of this devastation, even though it should've been fairly obvious, led to similarly dead ends.
"It was only a few days," I hissed out. "How did this happen?"
It didn't.
I whirred around to Fiona, who was mumbling something under her breath.
"What did you say?"
"I said I don't know!" she yelled, fear clear on her face. "The High Sheriff wasn't supposed to be able to mount this kind of assault for weeks! Maybe he called in extra help from Robotnik, or he had a secret weapon saved up, or--!"
This doesn't add up.
"It doesn't add up," I said, feeling the color drain from my face.
My voice was cold. My tone, rational. Almost clinical. I was trying to come to terms with everything, or stow it all away so that I could turn the knot of thoughts in my head into action. There was no use in denying what I was seeing, was there?
Everyone was dead. Or most of them were dead, following a raid that was initiated between my last contact with Hideaway and when we arrived to check on everyone. The celebrations from our victory against the High Sheriff were cut short with extreme prejudice, as anyone that hadn't fallen in the initial slash and burn was rounded up for the roboticizer. Plain and simple.
The Crazy Kritters were gone. The Maquis were gone. Clan Argyle were gone.
The Mercian Freedom Fighters were over, and I was left behind.
This, right here, John. This was why you didn't want to get attached to people.
It all felt too real. The distant, fading fires were even more distant, increasingly faded. How long had they burned for?
Fire is my element.
Fire was one of the four elements I'd been experimenting with. The one that came the most naturally, followed by water. Air and earth were the only fields I'd stalled in, to the extent that I'd considered dropping them entirely to focus on the other two.
Where was I, again? Oh, right.
Everyone was dead.
I extinguished the lingering flames with a wave of my hand. Less distractions in my visions as I picked through the ashes for anything that could tell me what I'd missed.
Honestly, there wasn't much left. Tattered huts. Shattered weapons, scattered across what remained of the battlefield.
I picked up a round, white shape that caught my eye. A stainless skull, and one that felt instinctively like it belonged to a friend. Like it belonged to Rob.
Is that my new power? Identifying skulls by touch?
Well, he's the only guy I know with the hedgehog head shape, it's a bit too small for--
I dropped the skull, letting it tumble to the ground.
"This isn't happening," I repeated. "The Sheriff wouldn't let a high-value target like the former king be burnt up with the rest of them."
I heard the loud cracking of glass, and saw that it was followed by a spider web of branching fractures over the smoggy sky above.
"This. Isn't. Happening."
My memories were becoming clearer. Fiona was parking the plane near Sylvania Castle when we returned from Angel Island, wasn't she? Why were we so close to Deerwood now?
Looking around, I really was alone. Where had Fiona and Figment gone? Were they ever here at all? Someone mentioned this not adding up before, and I had to agree.
This had to be a trick. An illusion. How? I should be able to see through those with the Phantom Ruby.
Was there something I was overlooking?
What if it was a--?
♦ !!
"--in there, sleepyhead?"
My magenta eyes flashed open, causing Amy to stumble back in surprise.
"Ah! There you are!"
I blinked.
"Hmm?"
I looked around, trying to reestablish my bearings. I was still in the power ring grotto beneath Sylvania Castle, where I'd taken Amy to meet Merna the Merhog. The day trip was to make up for the fact that I didn't take her along the first time I came here, back when it was a lot more dangerous. The merhog made a habit of passing through the underground rivers connecting the Sylvania Castle to the Central Sea when she could, and the two of them really hit it off without me. I saw no issues with closing my eyes to meditate for a few minutes while they chatted about old myths and stories.
When my vision was more clear, I saw that the pink hedgehog girl and the half-hedgehog, half-fish woman were looking at me. They were relaxing by the large pool of the grotto, watching for my response.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"We were getting worried about you, Mister Wizard," Amy explained. "You kinda dozed off, but Merna didn't wanna wake you up."
The merhog merely nodded. While Amy sat next to the pool, Merna lounged in it. She could survive outside the water for brief periods of time, but doing so too long would cause her to dry out. Standard merperson fare, with the added feature that she could hop on her tail like it was a particularly stiff pogo stick.
"When Amy mentioned how busy you'd been with your arcane studies, I thought it better to let you rest."
"I was just meditating," I said, waving off her concern.
"Meditating for nearly an hour?" Merna teased, a knowing smile crossing her turquoise face.
That long?
"It was a deep meditation."
I didn't mean to fall asleep. The Phantom Ruby meant I could replace some of my body's typical needs with magic. It'd only been a couple weeks since I got back from Angel Island. After a well-earned rest, I made the executive decision to cut sleep back to a couple of hours per night. Mercia had been relatively quiet, like Fiona said it would, but time I spent sleeping was time being wasted. The High Sheriff would be using this time to prepare for another plot, or a renewed offensive, and I needed to use that time to continue unravelling the mysteries of the Ars Ixia. There were far more opportunities for me to experiment with my powers, now that I finally had an emerald shard to fuel them.
The more lore I absorb from this musty tome, the easier the Phantom Ruby will be to handle. Cut through the Old English, and that's more or less what the book says about 'crystalline magic'.
Did I need to read a specific passage on the subject to find out if mixing low sleep and chaos energy was a good idea? No, obviously not, but my time budget was running on margins that were razor-thin. Maybe the lack of sleep and my recent doubling-down on occult research were why I was dreaming about fire?
Fire, chemical fumes, and… a skull?
The details eluded me, and I didn't care to remember the rest. It wasn't like my dreams were ever pleasant.
"I hope your meditation was fruitful all the same," Merna acquiesced. "Are you ready to visit the chao garden?"
I got up and stretched, giving the horse-sized sea turtle I was leaning against a friendly pat on the shell. The snoozing aquatic reptile was one of Merna's friends that came along with her, after I made the flooded tunnels more stable. Now that we were in a better position to properly restore Sylvania Castle, the last thing we needed was a structural collapse beneath it.
"I'm good to go. Amy, do you have everything?"
Amy turned around so I could see her big rucksack. Gray. Military surplus. Waterproof. A bright splash of magenta sprayed over the Overland emblem on the back gave her Christmas present a personal touch.
"Yep!" Amy shouted. "Let's go see the chao!"
"See you soon!" Merna said, splashing into the water.
Amy held my hand, and I formed a hollow bubble of water around us. It held steady as I kicked the stone floor and bounced the bubble into the depths.
♦ 70
A water shield. It didn't just keep out excess water as Amy and I walked through the flooded catacombs. This sphere of water magic worked as an arcane set of gills, drawing in oxygen from the estuary and filtering out carbon dioxide. After I pulled off the fire shield against that super badnik, my frequent visits down here made the water shield a logical follow-up.
"It's so pretty down here," Amy beamed, using her flashlight to illuminate the castle ruins and the flourishing river life that claimed it.
A variety of colorful fish swam past us. Striped trout, yellow eels, salmon salmon, and even a green largemouth bass. I didn't think the last one was supposed to be swimming in a Europe-esque body of water, but the Central Sea was much smaller and closer-knit to the adjacent continents than the Atlantic Ocean. An argument could be made for draining these tunnels so they'd be put to more 'practical' use, but I wasn't going to make it.
"Yeah, it's nice. I wish I could explore places like these more often. Could solve another mystery or two from those books of yours."
"You think we can do that?"
"We met a merhog, so I don't see why we can't try for another."
Maybe, if my life went another way, I could've been an archaeologist. Or a historian. I liked learning about history and going to museums. Not so much when I was younger, but definitely later in life. After the child and student discounts expired, of course.
Needless to say, fate didn't seem to have much of either in my cards anymore. It was a shame that I wouldn't be seeing the Ringling again any time soon. Only went there a couple of times, even though I spent my whole life near the damn thing, and now…
Amy disrupted my darker ruminations with a non-sequitur.
"You know, when I have a bad dream, Cousin Rob says it's okay to talk about it," the hedgehog girl commented.
"That's solid advice, Amy. He knows what he's talking about."
"When I talk about my bad dreams, I feel better about them," she continued.
"Are you having any bad dreams you want to talk about?" I offered.
"Never mind," Amy said, sighing in apparent resignation.
I shrugged, stopping our bubble when I saw our exit. A lifting gesture with my hand took us upwards and back towards the surface, where I popped the elemental barrier with a thought. Diverting the path of the trickling waterfall, I revealed the path to the chao garden.
"Alright, we're here."
Amy gasped at the sight.
"Wow!"
The place hasn't changed much since my return from that perilous 'vacation' to Angel Island. It was enclosed in a broad, shallow cenote, surrounded by tall trees and patches of moss that clung to the cavern walls. Baby blue chao with green or yellow highlights frolicked around the garden, hovering around trees and swimming in the basin.
By the time we arrived, Merna was tending to a shrine she put together to bless the garden and protect it from danger: A short, boxy structure of blue and beige stones that the chao gathered around to sing cheery songs with her.
It was saccharine, but I wasn't gonna complain. I could use more saccharine right now.
"What do you think, Amy?" I asked.
"They look just like the fairies in my book! Which ones are yours, Mister Wizard?"
I searched around. Some of the chao got skittish when I approached, while others were more friendly, but otherwise paid me little heed. They were too busy enjoying their simple lives, without need or worry. The only ones that had gotten really attached to me were those two eggs I saw when Merna showed me this place. They hatched during one of my visits to spruce up the place, while I was in the process of adjusting their placement to reduce the risk that they might fall over. Both chao came out of their eggshells in my color and imprinted on sight, so that made them my responsibility.
I wasn't aggressively fishing for an excuse to keep them. Really.
…
I only spent, what? Hundreds of hours in the Chao Garden in SA2 over multiple save files? Not counting the one in SADX and the Tiny Chao Garden, of course.
"They have to be around--" I spotted a pair of crimson, two-tone chao getting into a wrestling match over the same orange fruit. In a garden that regularly produced more of them by magic. "Errol, Vivi!"
I flew over and broke up the feuding water babies, scooping them up into my hands. In my left hand was Errol, with his usual half-lidded eyes and dopey squiggle of a smile. To my right waited Vivi, whose eyes were wide, and her shark-like rictus grin was wider.
"Really, guys? There's enough to share!"
Errol cooed and wriggled in my hand because he wanted to cuddle, while Vivi went straight to biting, because her version of cuddles involved teeth.
Naturally, the two troublemakers were mine. Or in this case, my problem.
"Want me to hold them for you?" Amy suggested. I turned, and she got a better look at how Vivi had latched herself onto me like a lamprey. "How about just the left one?"
I handed her Errol, who proceeded to crawl out of Amy's hands and explore around her arms. She giggled.
"Errol's got a lot of energy, huh?"
I was very relieved that Vivi was disinterested in expressing her affection towards her fellow chao in the same way that she did towards me. Holding her steady in one hand, far away from my other one, I popped out a sharp, black talon from my index finger.
"You kids don't even know what scarcity is," I muttered, as I sliced the orange fruit in half for them. After hovering one chunk within range of Vivi, she became content with chewing on that instead. "You're welcome."
I passed the other half to Amy, who passed it along to Errol. With that, the yellow emotion balls bobbing atop their heads turned into hearts, and both my chao became much easier to manage. We set them back on the ground, and I was able to watch them eat in the grass with minimal intervention.
"Are they always like this?" Amy asked, sitting down on a cool stone next to me.
"Only when they're awake," I clarified.
With the unique way that chao absorbed traits from the creatures they were in contact with, I knew there were signs to watch for. Unlike the other chao in the garden, Errol and Vivi developed darker complexions and more prominent crescents on their soft bellies each time I visited. Merna insisted that the twins would be heartbroken if I never returned, but when I first saw them changing, I was worried that the negative energies of the Phantom Ruby made me a potential bad influence.
…No, wait, Figment was left unattended with them a couple times until I found a replacement chao sitter. I could pin some of my current predicament on them observing and hugging my avian familiar to absorb his bad habits. That'd explain the feathery tuft on Vivi's head, too, but not Errol's horns or whiskers--
I paused, noting the lack of said whiskered sitter.
"Vivi, Errol? Where's Brie?"
My chao knowingly laughed. They were both done with the fruit, so while I took out a cloth and cleaned off their messy faces, Amy opened her bag and handed out toys to any chao that wanted them. They were her old things that she hadn't played with in years. Stuffed plushies. A rattle. Crayons. Stuff like that.
She already donated most of them to the younger children in Mercia, but there was still a lot left over. Only so many kids her age or younger survived for us to distribute them to.
"Who's Brie?" Amy asked, as she rolled Errol and Vivi a striped ball they could chase around the garden.
"One of my new familiars."
Amy tilted her head.
"What happened to Figment?" she questioned, concerned about the safety of a feral bird that could rip the power cell out of a SWATbot by the beak.
"Figment's fine. He's been helping me scout the skies and pick off badnik patrols. Brie helps me out with other stuff."
Her expression brightened.
"Oh, okay!"
Namely, Brie helped me out by having an even temper and positive attitude. I wasn't exactly fluent in animal speech, but I didn't need fluency to tell me that Brie was much better with kids and at keeping a lower profile than Figment ever was. After I saved the poor girl from being caught by the neck in a Robotnik-branded mousetrap, she'd been eager to help me with stuff that Figment turned his beak at. Mostly reminding me of my daily errands via our telepathic link, but her paws meant she could hold things, too.
Inspecting the other side of the palm tree my chao liked to congregate around, I saw a footlong mobini rodent with dark magenta fur and glassy black eyes like a doll. Her head bore a pair of ruby spikes, which ran down her back and along her tail.
"Brie, you alright?"
The micky let out a squeak of defeat. My first Phantom Ruby-mutated familiar of the Rodentia order was tied to the base of the tree with colorful string. The skill behind the knotwork meant that Brie had only mostly chewed herself free, in spite of the fact he could now gnaw through metal. One claw swipe against the bark cut Brie the rest of the way loose.
"Take five, girl."
Brie promptly collapsed onto the soft grass for a nap.
I felt bad, because watching Errol and Vivi for me was supposed to be her light duty. Lighter than spying on troop movements or sabotaging the High Sheriff's foresters, which was what Figment was doing. The less mobini he could round up for Robotnik, the fewer badniks powered by animal batteries he'd receive from Robotropolis. After a few incidents, I imagined he might've gotten suspicious about the sudden attacks from mixed flocks of flying critters led by a demonic flicky cast in shades of red.
That was to say, he would've gotten suspicious if I couldn't turn them all invisible at a moment's notice. The only thing funnier than seeing badniks armed with nets get mobbed by a horde of animals was when they couldn't see them back.
Heh. Gotta get my kicks where I can.
It'd be an exaggeration to say I was eager to make more 'ruby mutants', but thanks to that emerald shard, I also had the juice I needed to perform more consistent animal testing. Find out if what I did to Figment wasn't a one-time thing.
A few dead mobini later, I got my answer. There were intangible factors at play besides how much mental focus or chaos energy I put behind the process that determined if the animals survived the mutation… or didn't. It almost felt crazy to ask for the consent of an animal or try to prioritize doing the spell on animals that were on death's door anyways, but some mobini were smart. If I could communicate, then why not try?
Besides, they had a closer tie to nature than mobians. Or me. Not one of them turned down the opportunity to survive after being given it, even when warned of the risks. To those scant few that made it, the deal was simple: In exchange for their power up and exemption from their usual obligations to the food chain, they worked for me while I wrote down any side effects that cropped up. Sloppier than how an actual scientist might do it, but until a legion of lab rats fell off the back of a truck, this was the best I could do.
Figment and Brie were two of the success stories.
I only wished more of them were.
The jumbo raccoon and the Cluckatrice, I'm still on the fence about.
Remaining stumped on where those knots came from, I checked my chaos' stumpy arms for fingers. As well as hidden weapons, while I was at it.
"Merna?" I called out.
The merhog turned her head away from the singing and dancing chao.
"Hm?"
"Are chao supposed to be able to tie knots on their own?"
She shook her head.
"The arts and crafts supplies you dropped off have made for great enrichment, so I taught them how to do basic knots. Why do you ask?"
Oh boy. I started to gesture with my hands.
"So, uh, how do they--?"
"Patience," Merna answered simply.
"Just checking."
I settled down on a blocky stone next to Amy, pulling out my spellbook to continue where I left off. Making sure that Errol and Vivi never strayed further than the corner of my eye. Having already acquired a stronger grasp of fire during my brief time as a dragon and the further practice afterwards, I cracked open the aged pages, removed my crystal bookmark, and returned to the ancient grimoire's section on the element of water.
If fire was sharp and subtle, then water was blunt and dense. I wasn't able to make much sense of those terms at first, when I let the Phantom Ruby do the heavy lifting for me. The gemstone was still on my left hand, holding the book secure, but I deliberately avoided calling upon its power for these exercises. My right arm was extended forward, a crystal chalice in hand as a focusing tool, to draw a sputtering stream from the central pool into a continuous fountain.
Like a waterfall flowing in reverse, the liquid cascaded upwards, and then collapsed gracelessly back into the pools. I struggled to keep the pressure consistent, because the molecules of water felt much more cumbersome than the embers of fire. Fire was far more reactive to my thoughts; it always hungered for something to burn, and being fed made it behave exactly how it was supposed to. Burning oxygen to make fireballs, a fire shield, heat beams, and so on. Forcing water to move where I wanted it to go, instead of where the tides and gravity pulled it, felt like trying to swim against the current. Both elements were described as being mobile, a commonality that kept me anchored.
Then there were the other two. Air had subtle aspects to it like fire, blunt aspects like water, and was a third mobile element, but air felt so intangible that I could barely grasp it. It was so ephemeral as to feel incomplete. The opposite held true for the element of earth, which was a solid wall I couldn't breach. It stubbornly held fast until I'd all but beaten my head against the stones to make them budge. I knew that I could get better with those elements if I kept using the Phantom Ruby as a crutch, but I'd already been spreading myself dangerously thin. Worst of all, I couldn't figure out how to make shields for them! With my time in high demand as it was, I'd seriously considered cutting my losses and focusing only on what the Ars Ixia prescribed for the elements I favored.
Huh. Deja vu.
Amy tore her eyes away from the fountain to stare back at me.
"I almost forgot! Congratulations, Mister Wizard!"
"Congratulations on what?" I asked in confusion.
"John, look out!" Merna cried, pointing back at my fountain.
Amy picked a less than ideal time to pull me away from my spellwork, because that was when Errol and Vivi's ball went floating into the fountain. Which had somehow reached a much higher pressure as my chao went zipping through it!
"No, stop!"
I dropped the book and expanded the fountain outwards, extending the scant gallons of water under my control into a frozen menagerie of icy chutes and slides!
♦ 66
They rode along the slides, until the final one sent the chao gently tumbling back into my arms, none the wiser to the danger.
"Please, let's not do that again?" I pleaded.
"Baa!" Errol answered gleefully.
"Woo," was Vivi's simple reply.
The chao yawned, and promptly crashed. My concentration wore out, causing the water construct to fizzle away into bubbles. All of the commotion caused Brie's ears to perk up. She awoke from her own nap and scurried to attention. Taking the chao out of my hands, one at a time, Brie found patches of grass for them to lay in and put them to bed.
"What were you congratulating me on again?" I whispered tiredly.
"Whatever that banquet Rob and I got invited to is about," Amy said quietly, so as not to wake them up again.
"Banquet?"
"The one being held in your name next week. They said you'd be the guest of honor?"
Brie shook her head, projecting sensory data into my via our psionic link. She was getting better at this. Magenta stripes, geometric patterns, odors of burnt hair gel, coffee beans, incense…
"You mean the Cult of the Ruby Flame?" I hazarded.
Amy nodded enthusiastically. She went rummaging through her bag and took out a gray, bezeled talisman carved in a hexagonal shape. Two striped feathers stuck out of one side.
"They're big fans of you, and Miss Benzina gave me this neat charm. I think I'll put it on my headband, but what do you think?"
Crap, did I forget about that again?
Brie brought a hand to her face.
What? I met with them and had a couple drinks with the hyenas when I got back, but I forgot to do the follow-up! I have a lot going on right now!
Brie threw in a rather creative image of me being tossed into a boiling pot with carrots. As if I needed the reminder as to why I was the 'guest of honor'.
Alright, alright! I'll talk to my cannibal cult now and get it over with.
"I think I need to go over there and sort out the finer details of my role at the banquet. Can you hold this for me?"
I passed Amy my spellbook and made a portal to my cult's compound, which grew out of the motorpool they made from stacked containers and welded scrap metal in the vicinity of Sylvania Castle.
♦ 63
"Huh?"
"I'll uh, be back in a few? Brie, you're with me."
Brie scampered up the tree and hopped onto my shoulder. We stepped through the portal to resolve what I hoped would be a simple theological difference.
Those things that have, historically speaking, always been simple and never caused horrific amounts of bloodshed.
Fingers crossed?
- - -
Chao time!
This is a chapter I've been looking forward to writing ever since I decided Sylvania Castle would have a chao garden. Then came the names and descriptions of Errol and Vivi, which took some time to finalize. I wanted to use the chao garden as a way to ease into how things would be going in Mercia after the major arc with Enerjak.
In short? Things are gonna be changing.
This is a chapter I've been looking forward to writing ever since I decided Sylvania Castle would have a chao garden. Then came the names and descriptions of Errol and Vivi, which took some time to finalize. I wanted to use the chao garden as a way to ease into how things would be going in Mercia after the major arc with Enerjak.
In short? Things are gonna be changing.
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PATREON | KO-FI
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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: Argidoll, CaptNameless, C-Moon, and Dredloki!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
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weredrago2
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Howdy! Based on some reader feedback I've received, I went back and made some significant revisions to Chapter 33!
CHAPTER 33 CHANGELOG:
As an additional update, I will be working on Chapter 34 next. The Ruby Haze Origins update for Chapter 2 can be after that, but I already have some good ideas for how I'm doing 34. So why not strike while the iron's hot?
CHAPTER 33 CHANGELOG:
- +450 words total.
- Flipped the italics on the opening sequence, providing a better clue on what's going on.
- I started doing this for other stories years back, and will go back to do this to prior chapters with similar dream/flashback sequences to denote when they are occurring.
- The amount of time that had passed since the SI's return to Mercia has been made more clear, and more elaboration has been given to how that time had been spent.
- Added descriptions of fish to the Sylvania Castle depths, because I felt that more description would help there.
- Expanded on how the SI adopted his chao and why, with the "why" being "I love chao!"
- Added additional context on Brie and the other ruby mutants John Scarlet has made since we last saw him. Which is to say, while there are more than two, there aren't a whole army of 'em.
As an additional update, I will be working on Chapter 34 next. The Ruby Haze Origins update for Chapter 2 can be after that, but I already have some good ideas for how I'm doing 34. So why not strike while the iron's hot?
John Scarlet by Adam Bryce Thomas
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weredrago2
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Here's a new picture of John Scarlet done by Adam Bryce Thomas!
Yes, THAT Adam Bryce Thomas! I saw him at Magfest and got a comm! Real cool guy!
Yes, THAT Adam Bryce Thomas! I saw him at Magfest and got a comm! Real cool guy!
Delta/Soul
Versed in the lewd.
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Here's a new picture of John Scarlet done by Adam Bryce Thomas!
Yes, THAT Adam Bryce Thomas! I saw him at Magfest and got a comm! Real cool guy!
Does Adam have any other comics that he did or is working on right now?
Billbo baggins
Not too sore, are you?
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Only one question since I don't see a SFW nor an NSFW. Smut or no.
I feel like this is something that I would like to know before going further into this story 
I feel like this is something that I would like to know before going further into this story
weredrago2
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Mostly Sonic, but he's doing the art on an indie science fantasy comic called Drogune and is slated to be the penciler on the upcoming DC/Sonic crossover.
This fic remains SFW for the time being. The thread was made in the Creative Writing section and not the Creative Writing NSFW section, so I'd need to make a new thread there for that. Correct me if I'm wrong on how the process works.Only one question since I don't see a SFW nor an NSFW. Smut or no.
Billbo baggins
Not too sore, are you?
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I can't really correct you on that since I don't know myself. The only thing I know is that NSFW is meant for serious violence or explicit smut. So unless you have plans on showing the MC mutilating someone or going into detail on him getting Fellatio you won't need to worry about making it NSFW.
As for changing or moving a story to NSFW I believe your best option is to ask a administrator to move it for you.
Chapter 34: Powers for Algernon
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weredrago2
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Ruby Haze
Chapter 34: Powers for Algernon
A micky needed to be clever to survive in the deep woods of Mercia, and even more clever to find food in the places where they weren't supposed to be found. They were rodents -- vermin -- small and weak, in a forest that was full of danger for mobini that were small and weak. Being smart had been, by some metrics, their claim to fame.
Then there was Dull Eyes. The runt of her litter, if only in the wits department. She wasn't good at noticing things as they were happening, or figuring details out on her own. Or telling what food was safe to eat until some time after she ate it. The nest wasn't able to store enough food in the autumn, so Dull Eyes was one of the mickies cast from the safety of their burrow to forage. They didn't expect her to find much on her own, but Dull Eyes was determined to prove them all wrong.
Going alone was a mistake, which Dull Eyes made a lot of. The first issue that the rodent ran into was that it was the dead of winter. Her choices were limited to dull pine needles, dreary roots, and icky weeds. While she gathered whatever she could carry, Dull Eyes wondered what happened to the mobians that would leave out tasty scraps for her to feast on in moons past. Crumbs of bread, bits of meat and cheese that would vanish if they were left out overnight… so long as there weren't any cats around.
Dull Eyes let out a shiver, as her fur only did so much to keep out the chill. The big nests and colonies of the nearby mobians had become silent some time ago, and she didn't know why.
Where did they run off to? Didn't they know that the mickies needed to eat, too?
With hands that were full of plants that probably weren't poisonous, Dull Eyes was prepared to return to the home when a strong odor crossed her nose. A scent that was familiar, and mesmerizing. She dropped everything and pursued the scent with all of the effort her little body could muster.
Dull Eyes strayed further from where she was supposed to be foraging, but she had to follow the scent. A quick scurry across the snowy forest floor took her to an abandoned mobian burrow -- house, another micky once called it -- so she crept across a pine branch and jumped inside to follow her quarry. Dull Eyes clambered and crept around the interior, until she found what she was looking for: A big block of cheese, fresh for the taking!
The micky salivated at the chance to gobble up the cheese, then and there, but she knew that if she could show it to the other mickies, then they'd have to stop chittering about how dim she was behind her back. If Dull Eyes walked up to the wooden platform that the cheese was standing on and took it, she'd prove that she could be clever, too!
Her stomach rumbled, and Dull Eyes remembered that she hadn't eaten in a while. She didn't need to share all of it, did she? She told herself that she was going to take one bite piece for herself, and share the rest later. As Dull Eyes took the cheese into her arms, she thought that she was lucky to find the pristine slice of cheddar before any one else could.
That was when a big jaw flipped out of the platform and swung towards her head!
The mouse let out an alarmed squeak, as the iron vice bit down on her neck with a snap. Following the sudden spike of fear, came the pain, as the pinching metal forced her mousy head down against the wood. Dull Eyes couldn't understand what was going on, but the evil jaw refused to let her go free. She flailed wildly to escape, to no avail.
It took until she calmed down to remember the word for what she fell into: Mousetrap.
How was Dull Eyes supposed to know that the cheese would be a trap? It was cheese! Cheese was good! Dull Eyes continued to struggle against the horrible device that made it hard for her to breathe, trying to force the wicked thing off her neck. Then Dull Eyes squeaked for hours, in the hopes that another micky would help her. The rodent would weather any mean things they'd have to say about her foolishness, so long as she could be there to hear them.
After a day, Dull Eyes lost hope that anyone would find her. The metal bar dug deeply into her neck, and the hunger gnawed at her so much that Dull Eyes didn't think she had much energy left to push against it. She let out a final, forlorn squeak, from a tiny throat that was squeaked too hoarse to keep fighting.
This was just how things went, she knew. A micky needed to be clever to survive, and Dull Eyes wasn't a very clever micky at all.
The very sad death of Dull Eyes, fated to be forgotten and unmourned, was interrupted by a pink flash of light appearing in the corner of her eye. She could twist her head just enough to see the intense light coalesce into a flicky with magenta, white, and black feathers, perched at one of the openings in the mobian nest.
Flickies were supposed to be joyous birds, but the dour flicky in front of Dull Eyes had the steely-eyed gaze of a raptor hawk, with a white, zig-zag of a scar that ran along the left side of his face. Dull Eyes froze up out of instinct as the flicky approached the micky's body, tilting his head down to appraise her sorry state.
"Look what we have here," the strange flicky crowed. "Still alive, rat?"
Dull Eyes let out a terrified whimper, which sabotaged her attempt at playing dead.
"N-No?" the micky squeaked out.
She wasn't the best actress in her nest, either.
"Shame," he answered dryly. "I'll just tell Wishbone he was too late to save you."
"Who's Wishbone?" she asked weakly.
The flicky turned around, trotting across the cool stones towards the window.
"Nothing to worry about. He only works with live ones. Mostly."
"Someone was going to save Dull Eyes?"
"Oh well. He can't save everyone."
Desperate to survive, the micky used her last reserve of willpower to shout to the bird before he flew away.
"Wait!" she cried out.
He whirled back towards her.
"What is it?" the flicky barked testily.
"Help Dull Eyes!" she coughed. "Please!"
The flicky stared her down with eyes that had seen things, but Dull Eyes couldn't say what. He came to a decision, and then spoke.
"Fine," he cawed tiredly, before letting out a harsh call. "Wishbone! I found another one!"
The main entrance to the burrow opened with a loud creak, and Dull Eyes heard a strange voice, followed by a flush of magenta light.
"☞︎
︎
︎❍︎
︎■︎⧫︎?"
Dull Eyes was already regretting her decision, but it was too late for that.
"Over here!" the bird tweeted, his voice ringing around her ears as he circled overhead.
Eventually, the beast that the flicky called the Wishbone came into view, and it was different from anything Dull Eyes had seen. A huge, lanky thing, with a loose hide of magenta and black. Its head was crowned with broad, rosy petals that curled around a gnarled horn. The monster's face was almost naked, with bundles that were brown like her fur. Then there were its glowing eyes, which, combined with its flesh-covered beak, reminded her of a--
"OWL!" Dull Eyes squealed in a blind panic, wriggling around with what little mobility she had left and screwing her eyes shut. "BIG OWL DON'T EAT ME!"
She could feel a tremor rumble across the floor, as the giant crouched to approach her.
"Don't be afraid," the Wishbone said softly, and the words were soothing to her. Dull Eyes could actually understand some of what he was saying, having overheard mobians repeat specific things while sneaking into homes like this. "My ■︎
︎❍︎︎ is ☺︎□︎
︎■︎. I'm ︎□︎■︎■︎︎ try to ︎︎●︎◻︎ you, okay?"
Dull Eyes remained still, in spite of her fear. It wasn't like she could go anywhere. The micky expected the worst when she opened her eyes again, but she wasn't expecting the being to extend his paw to free her from the trap. Dull Eyes was free, but when she tried to run, scurry, or simply rise up from the ground, she discovered that she couldn't move her legs outside of sporadic twitches and spasms.
"
︎︎︎⧫︎," the Wishbone uttered in his strange, mobian tongue. "The bar got her ⬧︎◻︎︎■︎︎."
The micky didn't understand. She couldn't understand.
Wishbone brought his left paw forward. On the back side of it was a glowing red rock covered in a pitch black spiral, which drew the eyes like blue cheese did to her nose as its glow intensified.
"I'll do my best to fix the damage. Just, ah, think happy thoughts?"
"Happy thoughts?" Dull Eyes repeated, but Wishbone didn't explain.
"It's his catchphrase or something," the figment said boredly. "Might even help this time."
"Help with what?"
The suggestion had an effect on her, if not the one that was intended. Regardless of whether the thoughts were happy, Dull Eyes did a lot of thinking as she was bathed in ruby light.
- - -
"Hey, Brie?" Sir Scarlet slowly waved his fingers in front of his newest familiar's face. "How you holding up in there?"
Brie the Phantom Micky blinked, as though clearing her black eyes would dissipate the lingering phantasms of her past. Which was easier said than done, because the most important event of her life happened mere weeks ago. The magenta micky was still coming to terms with her new status quo, but the red coat and ruby spikes were accompanied by an intellectual blossoming beyond anything Dull Eyes could've ever imagined.
"I'm quite alright, milord," Brie answered effortlessly. "Merely a temporary lapse in my concentration. It shan't be repeated."
Alas, for all of the improved dictation and etiquette Brie 'procured' from Villa Stellan finishing school textbooks, her master only heard something to the effect of "Squeak squeak squeak".
Brie was again focusing on the present, but her thoughts effortlessly drifted back to the moment she became irrevocably tethered to the overlander that Figment referred to with his derisive nickname of Wishbone. She thought Master was a more professional term of address. A title befitting of the wizard's superior status over them, but her fellow familiar didn't think John Scarlet would approve of her suggestion. The flicky also resented the implication that he was anyone's inferior, a complex she was ill-equipped to safely disentangle. Better to drop it, then.
Very well. I'll just have to keep searching for a better one.
"I'm gonna take that as a yes," the overlander said, lowering his hand. "Ready to roll?"
"As you command, my liege."
She was now a very clever micky indeed.
With a faint gesture from the sorcerer who walked a left-handed path, a magenta vortex opened before them, and he stepped through to the other side. Sir Scarlet had brought his new rodent familiar with him to a variety of locales, from the secluded village of Hideaway to the far-flung Outlands, but this eclectic realm defied any conventional explanation. An alien dimension composed of giant rubies floating in a void, above and below an eternally-pink twilight. In the absence of a sun, the sky was lit by luminous thunderclouds scattered across an endless horizon.
"There are more things in Heaven and Mobius, Horseratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," quoted Brie. "William Shakesdeer."
"This is Null Space," Sir Scarlet explained vaguely, alluding to the ceaseless abyss that surrounded them. "It's the pocket zone where I keep my stuff. Try not to wander off?"
She looked around at the lack of a floor in Null Space, and determined that staying with Sir Scarlet was a fairly sensible choice. A segmented path of translucent rectangles appeared below the warlock's feet, and he walked down the crystalline stairway towards a rough ruby block the size of a castle. Scrutinizing the fortress more closely as they approached, Brie could identify that there was a structure hewn from harsh, umbral metal beneath the crystallized surface.
Once he pushed his way past the large, steel doors at the entrance, they were greeted by narrow walkways of steel, glowing pools of molten metal, and hissing vents of steam. The vast interior of the floating building was lit by dim electric lamps that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. In the long shadows, Brie could make out tin heads and limbs dangling on ghoulish racks along the high ceilings.
Everything was covered in scant traces of ruby dust.
"Prithee, what manner of vexing place is this?" she asked.
Unexpectedly, the main thrust of her statement actually reached her master's ears this time. That, or he was already planning to elaborate on the situation when they entered, regardless of what Brie was actually saying.
"This was a factory created by a crazy echidna god guy named Enerjak." The latter was starting to seem more likely as he pressed onwards. "His real name was Dimitri, but it's complicated. Anyways, when this place was at full functionality, it'd produce these 'mechanauts' robots. They were different from the badniks made by Egg-- er, by Robotnik. The factory's the biggest freestanding thing I have in here, so I've been using it as a jumbo storage locker."
The doors to a co-opted side room were left open, revealing a room that contained an assortment of random objects in her master's possession. Assortments of weapons and armor stored in locked cabinets. The Ars Ixia, set on a wooden shelf across from a pink crystal ball. A red board decorated with the iconography of a winged beast. Sir Scarlet's new scepter of gnarled, petrified oak, the head of which housed a brilliantly green emerald. The long stave was left leaning on a thick, silvery disc, the shape and depth of which reminded Brie of a giant wheel of cheese.
As much as she was still delighted in the taste of cheese, Brie wasn't going to get distracted by an object that only resembled it in the loosest of senses. Rather, the fidgeting micky hopped off Sir Scarlet's shoulder because she was drawn to a loose stack of golden halos that gleamed like sunlight.
"Uh, Brie?" her master called. "The tour's going this way… unless you wanted to do a detour?"
Brie nodded enthusiastically, excitedly pointing to the rings in the room.
"Oh, those are my backup rings," the wizard said, not providing quite as much information as she would have preferred. "They're all-natural charges of magic I can expend to all sorts of stuff."
"But what manner of things?" she begged to know, before recalling that Figment and Sir Scarlet had once described a way she could more directly ask for herself.
Bringing her dexterous hands to her temples, Brie tried to project her questions towards her master in a way that he would be better equipped to comprehend than squeaks alone: Through the power of her thoughts!
"Brie, what're you--?"
Q̷̴ͬU̴̵ͥE̴̷ⷫᵍ̸R̷̶̾R̸Y̷̴̾:̴̷ͪ ̸̵ͥW̵̴ⷫH̸̴ⷱA̸T̶̴ͬ ̶̶ͥA̶̴ⷫᵍ̷R̵̴̾E̵ ̵̵̾T̵̴ͪH̵̵ͥE̶̸ⷫS̵̶ⷱE̵ ̶̷ͬC̵̶ͥU̵̴ⷫᵍ̴R̷̸̾I̸O̷̴̾U̴̵ͪS̴̷ͥ,̶̸ⷫ ̷̵ⷱB̷R̷̶ͬI̵̸ͥL̴̷ⷫᵍ̷L̷̷̾I̶A̷̶̾N̶̵ͪT̵̴ͥL̴̵ⷫY̵̵ⷱ-̷G̶̵ͬL̶̴ͥO̷̶ⷫᵍ̷W̷̷̾I̶N̷̷̾G̷̷ͪ ̸̸ͥR̸̷ⷫI̶̴ⷱN̸G̶̸ͬS̴̶ͥ?̸̶ⷫᵍ̷ˢ̷
Sir Scarlet stumbled, spontaneously losing his footing as his eyes forcibly screwed themselves shut in pain. The scepter that was resting on the ground suddenly bucked forwards, flying towards his grasping hand. A flash of green from the staff's head, followed by a flash of magenta from the ruby on his glove, and the wizard was able to use the former as a crutch to keep himself standing.
Brie scurried around him in worry.
"My word! Sir Scarlet, art thou well?"
The overlander massaged the bridge of his nose with his free hand.
"Okay, let's try not to get ahead of ourselves with telepathy. Couldn't get any of that. Baby steps, alright?"
"Of course, milord!" she affirmed.
Brie tried again, with a much smaller mental probe.
⌾?
"Definitely got a migraine," her master groaned.
Sir Scarlet stood up and walked towards the shelf storing his grimoire, swallowing two green pills from an amber-tinted bottle. When he set the container down, Brie saw that it was labelled Wes Weasley's Terrifically-Holistic Catnip. He made a beckoning gesture to the ring pile, and a pair of glowing rings flew towards his hand. Their glowing intensified as they shifted size and shape, sliding onto his index and pinky fingers in a more literal interpretation of their namesake.
"Remind me to show you what I can do with these later?" the sorcerer bargained. "I've got a tight schedule today, and frankly, you never know when I'll need them."
Brie nodded, returning to Sir Scarlet's side.
"Atta girl."
He kept walking, until they stopped at an open area where a group of fully-assembled automatons busied themselves with a variety of tasks. Assembling weapons. Smelting scrap metal. Putting together more of themselves, one piece at a time. Brie even spotted one performing clerical duties, taking stock of everything that was being made. The ceaseless sentinels stood even taller than her master, with gleaming red mono-eyes that bore no souls behind them. Like the factory and various surfaces inside it, every work of artifice had heads and shoulders that were anointed with ruby crystal.
"I managed to swipe this whole setup, and got the mechanauts busy on the grunt work to help the resistance. Problem is, I'm not as all-powerful as I was when I pulled off the--"
He was interrupted by one of the machines breaking ranks from its peers, lashing out at random workers and infrastructure in a wild frenzy. Pointedly, this mechanaut didn't have any crystals on it at all.
"Praise to Lord Enerjak!" the rogue mechanaut declared.
"It's always something," her master muttered darkly.
His grip on the arcane staff tightening, the wizard bombarded the robot with magenta rays, sealing it in a ruby finish.
"Let's try that again," Sir Scarlet said, in a tone more firm than she'd ever heard him use against a living thing. "I am John Scarlet. Who do you obey?"
The machine spasmed, its defiance beaten down with each word until it was brought to one knee.
"Lord -BZZT- Scarlet. This mechanaut -BZZT- obeys you."
"Cool. Groovy, even. Join the rest and get to work."
He watched the mechanaut rise to its feet wander off towards the other working units, before letting out an exhausted sigh.
"Another trick I picked up on Angel Island. Or maybe something I could do the whole time. It's a real game-changer, and one that I can't be reckless with. Can't afford to let the High Sheriff know I have this ace up my sleeve."
"Turning the tools of our foes against them is a most cunning stratagem, milord!" Brie praised.
The micky pondered to herself how the mystical conversion was undertaken. Was it because the machinery was inorganic, as the Ars Ixia determined her master's crystalline magic would grant him dominion over all things not of the flesh, or were there other underlying processes at play? Her master did not specifically forbid Brie from reading his grimoire, and as such, she happened to peek at the words over his shoulder. Occasionally giving a subtle, telepathic nudge when he took too long to turn the next page.
A thin thread of light snaked out of Sir Scarlet's ruby, ensnaring itself around a crystalline chair construct for him to sit on. Brie resettled on a nearby stack of pallets, where she could face him at near eye level.
"Sorry if this is a lot to take in, but I wanted you to have the full picture of what you were getting into as my new helper. We're arming up for whatever the High Sheriff's dragging out next, because it's the only way we're making up for the… unexpected shortage of manpower. Know what I mean?"
Brie hadn't the foggiest clue what he was referring to, so she remained silent. A flash of light formed in Sir Scarlet's palm, and he passed her a small block of cheese.
"Right, this was before I found you. I was coming back from Angel Island, and was relying on a few mercenaries who had my back during that to stick around afterwards."
"I see," Brie mumbled between nibbles.
The wizard didn't sit still for long. He went from sitting to standing, and from standing to pacing.
"I knew it'd be a hard sell, sure, but I thought I ironed out a good contract for them to stay on retainer. A regular salary, extra hazard pay. Funds set aside for retirement. Who else is offering them that kind of sweetheart deal, huh?"
Mickies were rarely content to sit still, so Brie began pacing around the pallet to match the overlander.
"Bean and Bark were useful, sure, but I knew from the second that Fiona identified the Phantom Ruby as the source of my powers that she was someone to watch. She was clever. Creative. Resourceful, too. Not always a straight shooter, and I had a decent idea that she was only hanging around to steal the Phantom Ruby from me--" As Scarlet revealed this, Brie let out a scandalized squeak of shock. "--but I could use the help making sense of the Ars Ixia, and… the Phantom Ruby is always recording."
He gazed into the red gemstone in his hand, examining its striped surface. The micky felt that she was still missing context, but, by attempting to focus on what her master was thinking of, the image became more clear. She closed her eyes and saw Sir Scarlet speaking with a cherry-red red fox with blue eyes and a yellow bow on her head. They were standing on the grounds of Sylvania Castle, exposed to the moonlight.
"This offer's way too generous," the girl in Brie's mind's eye said flatly. "What's the catch?"
Sir Scarlet accepted the contract that had been thrown back in his face with an annoyed frown.
"I wouldn't call it a catch, but fine. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise."
"The Hooligans don't run on surprises, we work for mobiums. Out with it, Scarlet."
"Whenever you're ready, you can start learning magic from me as my new apprentice."
The girl was taken aback, the hot wind taken out of her angry sails.
"What?"
"I have a book on magic. My skills would be improved if I had somebody to teach, and you're the only person I know who has the right mindset for it."
Fiona's tail flicked anxiously, then angrily.
"I don't--?! UGH! Are you bent in the head?! You know I tried to betray you, and now you want to offer me this?"
As Brie experienced the memory, her master continued to speak in the present.
"It doesn't go as far back as I'd like, but I was able to see what Fiona saw when she touched the Phantom Ruby."
His memories were intermixed with a recording from further back in time, the Fiona of the past overlaid with an impression of the Fiona she wanted to be. One of false bravado, and the other of hard-earned confidence.
The power of the ruby made her completely untouchable. With but a wave of her hand, anything she wanted was within her grasp.
"Feel what she felt when it showed her what she wanted, and why she wanted it."
Then there was a third Fiona. The little girl who spent her childhood behind bars. Stolen away by a grotesque, rotten egg of a man, the fox was subjected to tortures that even now the enlightened micky had yet to conceive of.
Perhaps some knowledge was better left unknown. She hadn't meant to pry.
Never again to want. Never again to need. Never again to feel pain, or fear, or spend her nights being afraid of getting hurt again.
The Phantom Ruby showed Sir Scarlet how alone Fiona felt, and how something in her broke when she was abandoned to her fate.
Never again to be powerless. Forgotten. Left behind.
"Giving her the benefit of the doubt was a risk, but instead of cutting and running when the chips were down, she…"
"You saved my life, Fiona. That matters to me. You don't have to say yes, but promise me you'll think it over?"
"Fine. Give me a day to think it over."
Fiona snatched the contract out of his hands and walked away in a trance.
"She said she needed a day to think about it. Come the next morning, I found out that Fiona and her 'Hooligans' ditched Mercia long before sunrise!"
Sir Scarlet punched a crystallized pillar, his knuckles rapping the surface with a hard clack that severed Brie's mental perusal of his memories. If the warlock noticed her unwitting intrusion, he made no external indication of it.
"Fiona made her choice," he stated, shaking off the pain in his hand. "I wish I could've steered her away from making that stupid choice, and one that was very inconvenient for me, but she and her friends aren't my responsibility."
The communicator on his belt started beeping.
"She wasn't my responsibility," he repeated quietly, before checking his alarm. "Crap, I gotta go see those hyenas again. They said something about an offer I have to check out."
Brie's whiskers flicked up and down.
"Milord… As a being of great reverence to the Cult of the Ruby Flame, didst thou finally discuss in length the nature of your relationship with your followers? Establishing proper boundaries and reasonable expectations?"
Sir Scarlet made another portal, this one leading to his chao garden. He then twirled his emerald scepter and sent it back to his storage locker in the deeper confines of Null Space.
"How about you hang out with Figment and Bandit for a couple minutes? This shouldn't take long."
The micky sighed.
"Ave, imperator. Thy will be done."
Brie scampered through the portal, taking her to the cool, grassy cenote that radiated peace and tranquility. In addition to the fruit trees and water fairies that belonged here natively, Brie saw a fuschia flicky and enormous red raccoon.
"Hail and well met, my fellow familiars!" Brie exclaimed.
The big raccoon rose onto his hind legs, making him stand taller than Sir Scarlet and his mechanauts. A standard mobian could stand comfortably in this behemoth's paw prints, leaving him too big to exit the chao garden without occult assistance. He was so incredibly fat that Brie was convinced that no mobini like him could ever exist in nature.
"Hey, Brie!" the raccoon called out, blissfully ignorant to Vivi gnawing on the flesh of his back. "Did you bring Bandit any food?"
Brie supposed that there was too much padding there for him to notice, though it wasn't like Vivi could break skin. If not from a lack of trying.
"Only a mere morsel of cheddar," she confessed.
Bandit turned his whole body towards the much more miniscule micky.
"Give to Bandit?" he pleaded in a small tone. "Pwease?"
"If you insist," she acquiesced, tossing what was left of her block into Bandit's awaiting maw.
Between all the portal transit, Brie had lost her appetite.
Bandit descended to the ground, sending a faint tremor throughout the garden. An orange fruit tumbled out of the nearest tree, and Vivi started teething on that when the fruit landed on the resting raccoon's back. The mutant flicky, for his part, had been using one wing to keep overly-touchy Errol at bay.
"Wishbone still hasn't done it yet, has he?" Figment remarked, a thin piece of straw balanced precariously in his beak.
The familiars had been discussing the Ruby Flame on and off, having had more encounters with the Sir Scarlet's acolytes than Sir Scarlet himself. Well, Brie and Figment talked about them; Bandit wandered towards their compound when he was hungry. Which was fairly often.
"Not yet," Brie answered. "Our sorcerer appears to be uncomfortable with the subject."
Figment scoffed.
"He's digging in his heels. You're his new minder, so go bite him if he puts that off again."
Brie blanched at the notion. Acknowledging that Figment was the last mobini that anyone should go to for affection, she extended her arms and let Errol bowl over her for a hug.
She tried not to get distracted by the fact that Errol was growing whiskers.
"Bite the master? Surely, you jest!"
Figment's beak clipped the straw, and the flicky flicked it away.
"You wanted a role in this flock that Wishbone was putting together, and I wanted a break from the guy's whining. If you can't keep him on task, then he's gonna pull me out of the sky to do stuff like this when I could be securing our territory!"
Brie gave Errol a gentle tap and pointed, sending the chao crawling in the direction of the monolithic raccoon.
"Are you still harping on about territory?" Brie chided. "We have a royal decree over this land, and the High Sheriff can't even detect us here!"
Figment glared, causing Brie to take a step back.
"Don't get comfortable. They haven't found us yet, and that can change if I-- If we let our guard down. If you ever think you're safe, then you're already another beast's meal."
"Meals are nice," Bandit articulated.
"Even Bandit gets it," Figment said. "Wishbone made you smarter, but he pared back the wild parts that had to hunt to survive."
Brie was never a good hunter, so she was pretty sure that Figment was projecting. The micky pointedly didn't bring up all of the times Ms. Rose fed the flicky by hand, because she preferred her naturally black eyes without any additional blackening.
"Why do you insist on calling the master 'Wishbone'?" she interjected.
"You pick through a lot of bones, rat?"
She shook her head.
"I can't say that I have."
Figment let out a self-amused huff.
"When it's doing what it's supposed to do, the wishbone holds up the chest and shoulders. Keeps everything from falling apart in flight. I'm just not sure which way this one'll go when he snaps."
Figment kept his distance after that, allowing Brie to take over in regards to handling Errol and Vivi. Bandit had fallen asleep, same as the chao eventually did. He wasn't going to be of any help, but unlike Figment, Brie knew not to expect any ego-driven issues out of him. Bandit was merely content to be fed, and that was all it took to convince him to become a ruby mutant in the first place.
Minutes passed, and another vortex opened before them. Sir Scarlet's silhouette appeared in the lit gateway, carrying a clucky in his hands.
"Hey guys! I uh, brought that offering back home."
He set the clucky down on the ground, where Brie and the others could see that it wasn't quite a clucky anymore. The rooster was a normal specimen from the neck up, magenta comb and waddle notwithstanding, a sharp dividing line marking where the more extreme mutations began. After that, the more feeble features of domesticated poultry were overtaken with a pair of billowing bat wings and the sinisterly sinuous tail of a serpent. The only feathers to be seen were on its head, the rest giving way to reptilian scales and mineral flakes that were more akin to crystals than anything that belonged on fish or fowl.
"There was a miscommunication on what I was looking for when I said I needed mobini, so this guy was a bit of a rush job, but I think he's gonna pull through!"
Figment's beak fell open, speechless.
"By Scarlet," Brie swore.
"Food?" Bandit asked, only staying awake long enough to confirm that it wasn't the case.
"Cluck," the clucky clucked.
Sir Scarlet patted the mutant clucky on the head, his hand perceptibly shaking.
"I-I'm thinking of calling him Mort. What do you guys think?"
Mort blinked. The rooster's eyes were transmuted into red orbs with yellow rings, which Figment took as his cue to leave entirely. Before Sir Scarlet started introducing them to any more 'friends' he reanimated on the way to his next appointment.
Brie took a mental tally of everything her 'master' still had yet to do, using his own short-term memory as a starting-off point, and realized that this side diversion was going to put him further behind schedule.
"I'll think I'll have to start taking Figment's suggestions under advisement."
- - -
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: C-Moon, Dredloki, N'Oni, ShatteredSky, and Teron!
Thank you all for the continuing support!
Chapter 34: Powers for Algernon
A micky needed to be clever to survive in the deep woods of Mercia, and even more clever to find food in the places where they weren't supposed to be found. They were rodents -- vermin -- small and weak, in a forest that was full of danger for mobini that were small and weak. Being smart had been, by some metrics, their claim to fame.
Then there was Dull Eyes. The runt of her litter, if only in the wits department. She wasn't good at noticing things as they were happening, or figuring details out on her own. Or telling what food was safe to eat until some time after she ate it. The nest wasn't able to store enough food in the autumn, so Dull Eyes was one of the mickies cast from the safety of their burrow to forage. They didn't expect her to find much on her own, but Dull Eyes was determined to prove them all wrong.
Going alone was a mistake, which Dull Eyes made a lot of. The first issue that the rodent ran into was that it was the dead of winter. Her choices were limited to dull pine needles, dreary roots, and icky weeds. While she gathered whatever she could carry, Dull Eyes wondered what happened to the mobians that would leave out tasty scraps for her to feast on in moons past. Crumbs of bread, bits of meat and cheese that would vanish if they were left out overnight… so long as there weren't any cats around.
Dull Eyes let out a shiver, as her fur only did so much to keep out the chill. The big nests and colonies of the nearby mobians had become silent some time ago, and she didn't know why.
Where did they run off to? Didn't they know that the mickies needed to eat, too?
With hands that were full of plants that probably weren't poisonous, Dull Eyes was prepared to return to the home when a strong odor crossed her nose. A scent that was familiar, and mesmerizing. She dropped everything and pursued the scent with all of the effort her little body could muster.
Dull Eyes strayed further from where she was supposed to be foraging, but she had to follow the scent. A quick scurry across the snowy forest floor took her to an abandoned mobian burrow -- house, another micky once called it -- so she crept across a pine branch and jumped inside to follow her quarry. Dull Eyes clambered and crept around the interior, until she found what she was looking for: A big block of cheese, fresh for the taking!
The micky salivated at the chance to gobble up the cheese, then and there, but she knew that if she could show it to the other mickies, then they'd have to stop chittering about how dim she was behind her back. If Dull Eyes walked up to the wooden platform that the cheese was standing on and took it, she'd prove that she could be clever, too!
Her stomach rumbled, and Dull Eyes remembered that she hadn't eaten in a while. She didn't need to share all of it, did she? She told herself that she was going to take one bite piece for herself, and share the rest later. As Dull Eyes took the cheese into her arms, she thought that she was lucky to find the pristine slice of cheddar before any one else could.
That was when a big jaw flipped out of the platform and swung towards her head!
The mouse let out an alarmed squeak, as the iron vice bit down on her neck with a snap. Following the sudden spike of fear, came the pain, as the pinching metal forced her mousy head down against the wood. Dull Eyes couldn't understand what was going on, but the evil jaw refused to let her go free. She flailed wildly to escape, to no avail.
It took until she calmed down to remember the word for what she fell into: Mousetrap.
How was Dull Eyes supposed to know that the cheese would be a trap? It was cheese! Cheese was good! Dull Eyes continued to struggle against the horrible device that made it hard for her to breathe, trying to force the wicked thing off her neck. Then Dull Eyes squeaked for hours, in the hopes that another micky would help her. The rodent would weather any mean things they'd have to say about her foolishness, so long as she could be there to hear them.
After a day, Dull Eyes lost hope that anyone would find her. The metal bar dug deeply into her neck, and the hunger gnawed at her so much that Dull Eyes didn't think she had much energy left to push against it. She let out a final, forlorn squeak, from a tiny throat that was squeaked too hoarse to keep fighting.
This was just how things went, she knew. A micky needed to be clever to survive, and Dull Eyes wasn't a very clever micky at all.
The very sad death of Dull Eyes, fated to be forgotten and unmourned, was interrupted by a pink flash of light appearing in the corner of her eye. She could twist her head just enough to see the intense light coalesce into a flicky with magenta, white, and black feathers, perched at one of the openings in the mobian nest.
Flickies were supposed to be joyous birds, but the dour flicky in front of Dull Eyes had the steely-eyed gaze of a raptor hawk, with a white, zig-zag of a scar that ran along the left side of his face. Dull Eyes froze up out of instinct as the flicky approached the micky's body, tilting his head down to appraise her sorry state.
"Look what we have here," the strange flicky crowed. "Still alive, rat?"
Dull Eyes let out a terrified whimper, which sabotaged her attempt at playing dead.
"N-No?" the micky squeaked out.
She wasn't the best actress in her nest, either.
"Shame," he answered dryly. "I'll just tell Wishbone he was too late to save you."
"Who's Wishbone?" she asked weakly.
The flicky turned around, trotting across the cool stones towards the window.
"Nothing to worry about. He only works with live ones. Mostly."
"Someone was going to save Dull Eyes?"
"Oh well. He can't save everyone."
Desperate to survive, the micky used her last reserve of willpower to shout to the bird before he flew away.
"Wait!" she cried out.
He whirled back towards her.
"What is it?" the flicky barked testily.
"Help Dull Eyes!" she coughed. "Please!"
The flicky stared her down with eyes that had seen things, but Dull Eyes couldn't say what. He came to a decision, and then spoke.
"Fine," he cawed tiredly, before letting out a harsh call. "Wishbone! I found another one!"
The main entrance to the burrow opened with a loud creak, and Dull Eyes heard a strange voice, followed by a flush of magenta light.
"☞︎
︎︎❍︎︎■︎⧫︎?"Dull Eyes was already regretting her decision, but it was too late for that.
"Over here!" the bird tweeted, his voice ringing around her ears as he circled overhead.
Eventually, the beast that the flicky called the Wishbone came into view, and it was different from anything Dull Eyes had seen. A huge, lanky thing, with a loose hide of magenta and black. Its head was crowned with broad, rosy petals that curled around a gnarled horn. The monster's face was almost naked, with bundles that were brown like her fur. Then there were its glowing eyes, which, combined with its flesh-covered beak, reminded her of a--
"OWL!" Dull Eyes squealed in a blind panic, wriggling around with what little mobility she had left and screwing her eyes shut. "BIG OWL DON'T EAT ME!"
She could feel a tremor rumble across the floor, as the giant crouched to approach her.
"Don't be afraid," the Wishbone said softly, and the words were soothing to her. Dull Eyes could actually understand some of what he was saying, having overheard mobians repeat specific things while sneaking into homes like this. "My ■︎
︎❍︎︎ is ☺︎□︎︎■︎. I'm ︎□︎■︎■︎︎ try to ︎︎●︎◻︎ you, okay?"Dull Eyes remained still, in spite of her fear. It wasn't like she could go anywhere. The micky expected the worst when she opened her eyes again, but she wasn't expecting the being to extend his paw to free her from the trap. Dull Eyes was free, but when she tried to run, scurry, or simply rise up from the ground, she discovered that she couldn't move her legs outside of sporadic twitches and spasms.
"
︎︎︎⧫︎," the Wishbone uttered in his strange, mobian tongue. "The bar got her ⬧︎◻︎︎■︎︎."The micky didn't understand. She couldn't understand.
Wishbone brought his left paw forward. On the back side of it was a glowing red rock covered in a pitch black spiral, which drew the eyes like blue cheese did to her nose as its glow intensified.
"I'll do my best to fix the damage. Just, ah, think happy thoughts?"
"Happy thoughts?" Dull Eyes repeated, but Wishbone didn't explain.
"It's his catchphrase or something," the figment said boredly. "Might even help this time."
"Help with what?"
The suggestion had an effect on her, if not the one that was intended. Regardless of whether the thoughts were happy, Dull Eyes did a lot of thinking as she was bathed in ruby light.
- - -
"Hey, Brie?" Sir Scarlet slowly waved his fingers in front of his newest familiar's face. "How you holding up in there?"
Brie the Phantom Micky blinked, as though clearing her black eyes would dissipate the lingering phantasms of her past. Which was easier said than done, because the most important event of her life happened mere weeks ago. The magenta micky was still coming to terms with her new status quo, but the red coat and ruby spikes were accompanied by an intellectual blossoming beyond anything Dull Eyes could've ever imagined.
"I'm quite alright, milord," Brie answered effortlessly. "Merely a temporary lapse in my concentration. It shan't be repeated."
Alas, for all of the improved dictation and etiquette Brie 'procured' from Villa Stellan finishing school textbooks, her master only heard something to the effect of "Squeak squeak squeak".
Brie was again focusing on the present, but her thoughts effortlessly drifted back to the moment she became irrevocably tethered to the overlander that Figment referred to with his derisive nickname of Wishbone. She thought Master was a more professional term of address. A title befitting of the wizard's superior status over them, but her fellow familiar didn't think John Scarlet would approve of her suggestion. The flicky also resented the implication that he was anyone's inferior, a complex she was ill-equipped to safely disentangle. Better to drop it, then.
Very well. I'll just have to keep searching for a better one.
"I'm gonna take that as a yes," the overlander said, lowering his hand. "Ready to roll?"
"As you command, my liege."
She was now a very clever micky indeed.
With a faint gesture from the sorcerer who walked a left-handed path, a magenta vortex opened before them, and he stepped through to the other side. Sir Scarlet had brought his new rodent familiar with him to a variety of locales, from the secluded village of Hideaway to the far-flung Outlands, but this eclectic realm defied any conventional explanation. An alien dimension composed of giant rubies floating in a void, above and below an eternally-pink twilight. In the absence of a sun, the sky was lit by luminous thunderclouds scattered across an endless horizon.
"There are more things in Heaven and Mobius, Horseratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," quoted Brie. "William Shakesdeer."
"This is Null Space," Sir Scarlet explained vaguely, alluding to the ceaseless abyss that surrounded them. "It's the pocket zone where I keep my stuff. Try not to wander off?"
She looked around at the lack of a floor in Null Space, and determined that staying with Sir Scarlet was a fairly sensible choice. A segmented path of translucent rectangles appeared below the warlock's feet, and he walked down the crystalline stairway towards a rough ruby block the size of a castle. Scrutinizing the fortress more closely as they approached, Brie could identify that there was a structure hewn from harsh, umbral metal beneath the crystallized surface.
Once he pushed his way past the large, steel doors at the entrance, they were greeted by narrow walkways of steel, glowing pools of molten metal, and hissing vents of steam. The vast interior of the floating building was lit by dim electric lamps that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. In the long shadows, Brie could make out tin heads and limbs dangling on ghoulish racks along the high ceilings.
Everything was covered in scant traces of ruby dust.
"Prithee, what manner of vexing place is this?" she asked.
Unexpectedly, the main thrust of her statement actually reached her master's ears this time. That, or he was already planning to elaborate on the situation when they entered, regardless of what Brie was actually saying.
"This was a factory created by a crazy echidna god guy named Enerjak." The latter was starting to seem more likely as he pressed onwards. "His real name was Dimitri, but it's complicated. Anyways, when this place was at full functionality, it'd produce these 'mechanauts' robots. They were different from the badniks made by Egg-- er, by Robotnik. The factory's the biggest freestanding thing I have in here, so I've been using it as a jumbo storage locker."
The doors to a co-opted side room were left open, revealing a room that contained an assortment of random objects in her master's possession. Assortments of weapons and armor stored in locked cabinets. The Ars Ixia, set on a wooden shelf across from a pink crystal ball. A red board decorated with the iconography of a winged beast. Sir Scarlet's new scepter of gnarled, petrified oak, the head of which housed a brilliantly green emerald. The long stave was left leaning on a thick, silvery disc, the shape and depth of which reminded Brie of a giant wheel of cheese.
As much as she was still delighted in the taste of cheese, Brie wasn't going to get distracted by an object that only resembled it in the loosest of senses. Rather, the fidgeting micky hopped off Sir Scarlet's shoulder because she was drawn to a loose stack of golden halos that gleamed like sunlight.
"Uh, Brie?" her master called. "The tour's going this way… unless you wanted to do a detour?"
Brie nodded enthusiastically, excitedly pointing to the rings in the room.
"Oh, those are my backup rings," the wizard said, not providing quite as much information as she would have preferred. "They're all-natural charges of magic I can expend to all sorts of stuff."
"But what manner of things?" she begged to know, before recalling that Figment and Sir Scarlet had once described a way she could more directly ask for herself.
Bringing her dexterous hands to her temples, Brie tried to project her questions towards her master in a way that he would be better equipped to comprehend than squeaks alone: Through the power of her thoughts!
"Brie, what're you--?"
Q̷̴ͬU̴̵ͥE̴̷ⷫᵍ̸R̷̶̾R̸Y̷̴̾:̴̷ͪ ̸̵ͥW̵̴ⷫH̸̴ⷱA̸T̶̴ͬ ̶̶ͥA̶̴ⷫᵍ̷R̵̴̾E̵ ̵̵̾T̵̴ͪH̵̵ͥE̶̸ⷫS̵̶ⷱE̵ ̶̷ͬC̵̶ͥU̵̴ⷫᵍ̴R̷̸̾I̸O̷̴̾U̴̵ͪS̴̷ͥ,̶̸ⷫ ̷̵ⷱB̷R̷̶ͬI̵̸ͥL̴̷ⷫᵍ̷L̷̷̾I̶A̷̶̾N̶̵ͪT̵̴ͥL̴̵ⷫY̵̵ⷱ-̷G̶̵ͬL̶̴ͥO̷̶ⷫᵍ̷W̷̷̾I̶N̷̷̾G̷̷ͪ ̸̸ͥR̸̷ⷫI̶̴ⷱN̸G̶̸ͬS̴̶ͥ?̸̶ⷫᵍ̷ˢ̷
Sir Scarlet stumbled, spontaneously losing his footing as his eyes forcibly screwed themselves shut in pain. The scepter that was resting on the ground suddenly bucked forwards, flying towards his grasping hand. A flash of green from the staff's head, followed by a flash of magenta from the ruby on his glove, and the wizard was able to use the former as a crutch to keep himself standing.
Brie scurried around him in worry.
"My word! Sir Scarlet, art thou well?"
The overlander massaged the bridge of his nose with his free hand.
"Okay, let's try not to get ahead of ourselves with telepathy. Couldn't get any of that. Baby steps, alright?"
"Of course, milord!" she affirmed.
Brie tried again, with a much smaller mental probe.
⌾?
"Definitely got a migraine," her master groaned.
Sir Scarlet stood up and walked towards the shelf storing his grimoire, swallowing two green pills from an amber-tinted bottle. When he set the container down, Brie saw that it was labelled Wes Weasley's Terrifically-Holistic Catnip. He made a beckoning gesture to the ring pile, and a pair of glowing rings flew towards his hand. Their glowing intensified as they shifted size and shape, sliding onto his index and pinky fingers in a more literal interpretation of their namesake.
"Remind me to show you what I can do with these later?" the sorcerer bargained. "I've got a tight schedule today, and frankly, you never know when I'll need them."
Brie nodded, returning to Sir Scarlet's side.
"Atta girl."
He kept walking, until they stopped at an open area where a group of fully-assembled automatons busied themselves with a variety of tasks. Assembling weapons. Smelting scrap metal. Putting together more of themselves, one piece at a time. Brie even spotted one performing clerical duties, taking stock of everything that was being made. The ceaseless sentinels stood even taller than her master, with gleaming red mono-eyes that bore no souls behind them. Like the factory and various surfaces inside it, every work of artifice had heads and shoulders that were anointed with ruby crystal.
"I managed to swipe this whole setup, and got the mechanauts busy on the grunt work to help the resistance. Problem is, I'm not as all-powerful as I was when I pulled off the--"
He was interrupted by one of the machines breaking ranks from its peers, lashing out at random workers and infrastructure in a wild frenzy. Pointedly, this mechanaut didn't have any crystals on it at all.
"Praise to Lord Enerjak!" the rogue mechanaut declared.
"It's always something," her master muttered darkly.
His grip on the arcane staff tightening, the wizard bombarded the robot with magenta rays, sealing it in a ruby finish.
"Let's try that again," Sir Scarlet said, in a tone more firm than she'd ever heard him use against a living thing. "I am John Scarlet. Who do you obey?"
The machine spasmed, its defiance beaten down with each word until it was brought to one knee.
"Lord -BZZT- Scarlet. This mechanaut -BZZT- obeys you."
"Cool. Groovy, even. Join the rest and get to work."
He watched the mechanaut rise to its feet wander off towards the other working units, before letting out an exhausted sigh.
"Another trick I picked up on Angel Island. Or maybe something I could do the whole time. It's a real game-changer, and one that I can't be reckless with. Can't afford to let the High Sheriff know I have this ace up my sleeve."
"Turning the tools of our foes against them is a most cunning stratagem, milord!" Brie praised.
The micky pondered to herself how the mystical conversion was undertaken. Was it because the machinery was inorganic, as the Ars Ixia determined her master's crystalline magic would grant him dominion over all things not of the flesh, or were there other underlying processes at play? Her master did not specifically forbid Brie from reading his grimoire, and as such, she happened to peek at the words over his shoulder. Occasionally giving a subtle, telepathic nudge when he took too long to turn the next page.
A thin thread of light snaked out of Sir Scarlet's ruby, ensnaring itself around a crystalline chair construct for him to sit on. Brie resettled on a nearby stack of pallets, where she could face him at near eye level.
"Sorry if this is a lot to take in, but I wanted you to have the full picture of what you were getting into as my new helper. We're arming up for whatever the High Sheriff's dragging out next, because it's the only way we're making up for the… unexpected shortage of manpower. Know what I mean?"
Brie hadn't the foggiest clue what he was referring to, so she remained silent. A flash of light formed in Sir Scarlet's palm, and he passed her a small block of cheese.
"Right, this was before I found you. I was coming back from Angel Island, and was relying on a few mercenaries who had my back during that to stick around afterwards."
"I see," Brie mumbled between nibbles.
The wizard didn't sit still for long. He went from sitting to standing, and from standing to pacing.
"I knew it'd be a hard sell, sure, but I thought I ironed out a good contract for them to stay on retainer. A regular salary, extra hazard pay. Funds set aside for retirement. Who else is offering them that kind of sweetheart deal, huh?"
Mickies were rarely content to sit still, so Brie began pacing around the pallet to match the overlander.
"Bean and Bark were useful, sure, but I knew from the second that Fiona identified the Phantom Ruby as the source of my powers that she was someone to watch. She was clever. Creative. Resourceful, too. Not always a straight shooter, and I had a decent idea that she was only hanging around to steal the Phantom Ruby from me--" As Scarlet revealed this, Brie let out a scandalized squeak of shock. "--but I could use the help making sense of the Ars Ixia, and… the Phantom Ruby is always recording."
He gazed into the red gemstone in his hand, examining its striped surface. The micky felt that she was still missing context, but, by attempting to focus on what her master was thinking of, the image became more clear. She closed her eyes and saw Sir Scarlet speaking with a cherry-red red fox with blue eyes and a yellow bow on her head. They were standing on the grounds of Sylvania Castle, exposed to the moonlight.
"This offer's way too generous," the girl in Brie's mind's eye said flatly. "What's the catch?"
Sir Scarlet accepted the contract that had been thrown back in his face with an annoyed frown.
"I wouldn't call it a catch, but fine. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise."
"The Hooligans don't run on surprises, we work for mobiums. Out with it, Scarlet."
"Whenever you're ready, you can start learning magic from me as my new apprentice."
The girl was taken aback, the hot wind taken out of her angry sails.
"What?"
"I have a book on magic. My skills would be improved if I had somebody to teach, and you're the only person I know who has the right mindset for it."
Fiona's tail flicked anxiously, then angrily.
"I don't--?! UGH! Are you bent in the head?! You know I tried to betray you, and now you want to offer me this?"
As Brie experienced the memory, her master continued to speak in the present.
"It doesn't go as far back as I'd like, but I was able to see what Fiona saw when she touched the Phantom Ruby."
His memories were intermixed with a recording from further back in time, the Fiona of the past overlaid with an impression of the Fiona she wanted to be. One of false bravado, and the other of hard-earned confidence.
The power of the ruby made her completely untouchable. With but a wave of her hand, anything she wanted was within her grasp.
"Feel what she felt when it showed her what she wanted, and why she wanted it."
Then there was a third Fiona. The little girl who spent her childhood behind bars. Stolen away by a grotesque, rotten egg of a man, the fox was subjected to tortures that even now the enlightened micky had yet to conceive of.
Perhaps some knowledge was better left unknown. She hadn't meant to pry.
Never again to want. Never again to need. Never again to feel pain, or fear, or spend her nights being afraid of getting hurt again.
The Phantom Ruby showed Sir Scarlet how alone Fiona felt, and how something in her broke when she was abandoned to her fate.
Never again to be powerless. Forgotten. Left behind.
"Giving her the benefit of the doubt was a risk, but instead of cutting and running when the chips were down, she…"
"You saved my life, Fiona. That matters to me. You don't have to say yes, but promise me you'll think it over?"
"Fine. Give me a day to think it over."
Fiona snatched the contract out of his hands and walked away in a trance.
"She said she needed a day to think about it. Come the next morning, I found out that Fiona and her 'Hooligans' ditched Mercia long before sunrise!"
Sir Scarlet punched a crystallized pillar, his knuckles rapping the surface with a hard clack that severed Brie's mental perusal of his memories. If the warlock noticed her unwitting intrusion, he made no external indication of it.
"Fiona made her choice," he stated, shaking off the pain in his hand. "I wish I could've steered her away from making that stupid choice, and one that was very inconvenient for me, but she and her friends aren't my responsibility."
The communicator on his belt started beeping.
"She wasn't my responsibility," he repeated quietly, before checking his alarm. "Crap, I gotta go see those hyenas again. They said something about an offer I have to check out."
Brie's whiskers flicked up and down.
"Milord… As a being of great reverence to the Cult of the Ruby Flame, didst thou finally discuss in length the nature of your relationship with your followers? Establishing proper boundaries and reasonable expectations?"
Sir Scarlet made another portal, this one leading to his chao garden. He then twirled his emerald scepter and sent it back to his storage locker in the deeper confines of Null Space.
"How about you hang out with Figment and Bandit for a couple minutes? This shouldn't take long."
The micky sighed.
"Ave, imperator. Thy will be done."
Brie scampered through the portal, taking her to the cool, grassy cenote that radiated peace and tranquility. In addition to the fruit trees and water fairies that belonged here natively, Brie saw a fuschia flicky and enormous red raccoon.
"Hail and well met, my fellow familiars!" Brie exclaimed.
The big raccoon rose onto his hind legs, making him stand taller than Sir Scarlet and his mechanauts. A standard mobian could stand comfortably in this behemoth's paw prints, leaving him too big to exit the chao garden without occult assistance. He was so incredibly fat that Brie was convinced that no mobini like him could ever exist in nature.
"Hey, Brie!" the raccoon called out, blissfully ignorant to Vivi gnawing on the flesh of his back. "Did you bring Bandit any food?"
Brie supposed that there was too much padding there for him to notice, though it wasn't like Vivi could break skin. If not from a lack of trying.
"Only a mere morsel of cheddar," she confessed.
Bandit turned his whole body towards the much more miniscule micky.
"Give to Bandit?" he pleaded in a small tone. "Pwease?"
"If you insist," she acquiesced, tossing what was left of her block into Bandit's awaiting maw.
Between all the portal transit, Brie had lost her appetite.
Bandit descended to the ground, sending a faint tremor throughout the garden. An orange fruit tumbled out of the nearest tree, and Vivi started teething on that when the fruit landed on the resting raccoon's back. The mutant flicky, for his part, had been using one wing to keep overly-touchy Errol at bay.
"Wishbone still hasn't done it yet, has he?" Figment remarked, a thin piece of straw balanced precariously in his beak.
The familiars had been discussing the Ruby Flame on and off, having had more encounters with the Sir Scarlet's acolytes than Sir Scarlet himself. Well, Brie and Figment talked about them; Bandit wandered towards their compound when he was hungry. Which was fairly often.
"Not yet," Brie answered. "Our sorcerer appears to be uncomfortable with the subject."
Figment scoffed.
"He's digging in his heels. You're his new minder, so go bite him if he puts that off again."
Brie blanched at the notion. Acknowledging that Figment was the last mobini that anyone should go to for affection, she extended her arms and let Errol bowl over her for a hug.
She tried not to get distracted by the fact that Errol was growing whiskers.
"Bite the master? Surely, you jest!"
Figment's beak clipped the straw, and the flicky flicked it away.
"You wanted a role in this flock that Wishbone was putting together, and I wanted a break from the guy's whining. If you can't keep him on task, then he's gonna pull me out of the sky to do stuff like this when I could be securing our territory!"
Brie gave Errol a gentle tap and pointed, sending the chao crawling in the direction of the monolithic raccoon.
"Are you still harping on about territory?" Brie chided. "We have a royal decree over this land, and the High Sheriff can't even detect us here!"
Figment glared, causing Brie to take a step back.
"Don't get comfortable. They haven't found us yet, and that can change if I-- If we let our guard down. If you ever think you're safe, then you're already another beast's meal."
"Meals are nice," Bandit articulated.
"Even Bandit gets it," Figment said. "Wishbone made you smarter, but he pared back the wild parts that had to hunt to survive."
Brie was never a good hunter, so she was pretty sure that Figment was projecting. The micky pointedly didn't bring up all of the times Ms. Rose fed the flicky by hand, because she preferred her naturally black eyes without any additional blackening.
"Why do you insist on calling the master 'Wishbone'?" she interjected.
"You pick through a lot of bones, rat?"
She shook her head.
"I can't say that I have."
Figment let out a self-amused huff.
"When it's doing what it's supposed to do, the wishbone holds up the chest and shoulders. Keeps everything from falling apart in flight. I'm just not sure which way this one'll go when he snaps."
Figment kept his distance after that, allowing Brie to take over in regards to handling Errol and Vivi. Bandit had fallen asleep, same as the chao eventually did. He wasn't going to be of any help, but unlike Figment, Brie knew not to expect any ego-driven issues out of him. Bandit was merely content to be fed, and that was all it took to convince him to become a ruby mutant in the first place.
Minutes passed, and another vortex opened before them. Sir Scarlet's silhouette appeared in the lit gateway, carrying a clucky in his hands.
"Hey guys! I uh, brought that offering back home."
He set the clucky down on the ground, where Brie and the others could see that it wasn't quite a clucky anymore. The rooster was a normal specimen from the neck up, magenta comb and waddle notwithstanding, a sharp dividing line marking where the more extreme mutations began. After that, the more feeble features of domesticated poultry were overtaken with a pair of billowing bat wings and the sinisterly sinuous tail of a serpent. The only feathers to be seen were on its head, the rest giving way to reptilian scales and mineral flakes that were more akin to crystals than anything that belonged on fish or fowl.
"There was a miscommunication on what I was looking for when I said I needed mobini, so this guy was a bit of a rush job, but I think he's gonna pull through!"
Figment's beak fell open, speechless.
"By Scarlet," Brie swore.
"Food?" Bandit asked, only staying awake long enough to confirm that it wasn't the case.
"Cluck," the clucky clucked.
Sir Scarlet patted the mutant clucky on the head, his hand perceptibly shaking.
"I-I'm thinking of calling him Mort. What do you guys think?"
Mort blinked. The rooster's eyes were transmuted into red orbs with yellow rings, which Figment took as his cue to leave entirely. Before Sir Scarlet started introducing them to any more 'friends' he reanimated on the way to his next appointment.
Brie took a mental tally of everything her 'master' still had yet to do, using his own short-term memory as a starting-off point, and realized that this side diversion was going to put him further behind schedule.
"I'll think I'll have to start taking Figment's suggestions under advisement."
- - -
With this chapter, we can now say a proper hello to Brie! Her brief introduction in Chapter 33 was meant to be sudden, to springboard into this one. 34 also serves as a recap in regards to all of the pies the SI has been sticking his fingers into, which is part of the reason he needs Brie around now. His familiar count is rising to meet his familiar workload!
As for Fiona, Bean, and Bark? Them up and quitting with no notice has been in the works since before the Enerjak arc. Hence why Bean was saying goodbye to the audience when he last "saw" you all at the end of 23. I was saving it here because I was waiting for that to be revealed from a fresh pair of eyes, and Brie was the perfect match.
If you don't remember Bandit, he's the same raccoon from Chapter 17 that was guilting the SI into giving him food! He has since bargained himself into a permanent position with the Phantom Friends in exchange for all of the food.
As for Fiona, Bean, and Bark? Them up and quitting with no notice has been in the works since before the Enerjak arc. Hence why Bean was saying goodbye to the audience when he last "saw" you all at the end of 23. I was saving it here because I was waiting for that to be revealed from a fresh pair of eyes, and Brie was the perfect match.
If you don't remember Bandit, he's the same raccoon from Chapter 17 that was guilting the SI into giving him food! He has since bargained himself into a permanent position with the Phantom Friends in exchange for all of the food.
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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: C-Moon, Dredloki, N'Oni, ShatteredSky, and Teron!
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The Phantom Friends (and How to Make One!)
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The Phantom Friends (and How to Make One!)
The "Phantom Friends" are a friendly euphemism referring to the various mobini altered by John Scarlet into ruby mutants. Not wanting to be careless with who is selected for the process, the ruby wizard has Figment and others search out critters willing to accept the consequences of a fatal reaction to black magic. For those animals already on death's door, the alternatives to a chaotic life in his service are rather grim.
Any mobini that survive the process are irrevocably changed, with flesh and souls reforged into new forms possessing supernatural abilities. The mutations and powers derived from them are determined not only to the fickle whims of the Phantom Ruby, but the dreams and desires of the subjects involved. It's more an art than a science, and an art that John Scarlet has yet to work all of the kinks out of. As familiars remade by the warlock's hands, Phantom Friends are subject to a two-way telepathic bond, though some mobini have been more effective at using it to communicate concepts and share senses than others.
John Scarlet doesn't know what would happen if he tried to "befriend" a mobian, and hopes that he never has to find out.
The Successful Ones
Figment the Phantom Flicky
A foul-tempered flicky whose cardinal red feathers have molted away, leaving magenta stripes and a white scar that won't heal. Once a daring bird that flew too close to the sun and saw his whole flock burn for it, Figment alone rose from the ashes as a brutal phoenix.
Super Flicky: Figment is much faster and stronger than a flicky should be. By performing a Drill Dash, Figment can strike with enough force to pierce armor.
Paraloop: When he flies, Figment leaves sparkling trails of energy. Figment can complete a loop to damage targets, trigger an updraft, create a portal, or trigger other effects.
Brie the Phantom Micky
This micky wasn't born with a good head on her shoulders, and a bad experience with a mouse trap almost took it! Ashamed at her past ignorance, Brie redeveloped her brain into the picture of intellect, and is continuing to stretch her new mind's untested limits.
Cranium Rat: Brie is super bright! Her mental powers are still being explored.
Jaws of Life: This micky's bite has been strengthened, and she can chew through metal.
Bandit the Phantom Raccoon
For such a tiny critter, this racoon's bottomless gluttony made him willing to accept the tiny risk of death in exchange for being fed forever. Having grown to a scale that matched his appetite, it remains to be seen who got the worse deal out of this arrangement.
The Big One: Ruby mutation caused this mobini to balloon in size, until he was nearly seven feet tall and weighed over half a ton! While ponderously slow, Bandit is strong enough to pull a cart and tough enough to take a hit. As a raccoon, Bandit's more clever than he looks.
Mort the Phantom Cluckatrice
This clucky has seen things that clucky was not meant to know, and returned to tell the tale. Not that he would, as Mort only seems to say "cluck", "caw", or "cock-a-doodle-doo" to his peers. Unlike the fabled Chanticleer, who greeted the sun at dawn, Mort's crows herald the maddening moon and the bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Snake Eyes: Mort can paralyze any singular individual that enters eye contact with him at his time of choosing. He can maintain this effect as long as he doesn't blink.
Thousand-Yardbird Stare: Mort doesn't need to blink.
How to Make Your Own
Want to make an abomination in the eyes of the Ancient Walkers, too? Here's how!
The Rules
With that out of the way: Have fun! No deadlines on submissions for Phantom Friends, so just kinda do it whenever you want.
Please ping me if you decide to make one, so I don't lose track of them.
The "Phantom Friends" are a friendly euphemism referring to the various mobini altered by John Scarlet into ruby mutants. Not wanting to be careless with who is selected for the process, the ruby wizard has Figment and others search out critters willing to accept the consequences of a fatal reaction to black magic. For those animals already on death's door, the alternatives to a chaotic life in his service are rather grim.
Any mobini that survive the process are irrevocably changed, with flesh and souls reforged into new forms possessing supernatural abilities. The mutations and powers derived from them are determined not only to the fickle whims of the Phantom Ruby, but the dreams and desires of the subjects involved. It's more an art than a science, and an art that John Scarlet has yet to work all of the kinks out of. As familiars remade by the warlock's hands, Phantom Friends are subject to a two-way telepathic bond, though some mobini have been more effective at using it to communicate concepts and share senses than others.
John Scarlet doesn't know what would happen if he tried to "befriend" a mobian, and hopes that he never has to find out.
The Successful Ones
Figment the Phantom Flicky
A foul-tempered flicky whose cardinal red feathers have molted away, leaving magenta stripes and a white scar that won't heal. Once a daring bird that flew too close to the sun and saw his whole flock burn for it, Figment alone rose from the ashes as a brutal phoenix.
Super Flicky: Figment is much faster and stronger than a flicky should be. By performing a Drill Dash, Figment can strike with enough force to pierce armor.
Paraloop: When he flies, Figment leaves sparkling trails of energy. Figment can complete a loop to damage targets, trigger an updraft, create a portal, or trigger other effects.
Brie the Phantom Micky
This micky wasn't born with a good head on her shoulders, and a bad experience with a mouse trap almost took it! Ashamed at her past ignorance, Brie redeveloped her brain into the picture of intellect, and is continuing to stretch her new mind's untested limits.
Cranium Rat: Brie is super bright! Her mental powers are still being explored.
Jaws of Life: This micky's bite has been strengthened, and she can chew through metal.
Bandit the Phantom Raccoon
For such a tiny critter, this racoon's bottomless gluttony made him willing to accept the tiny risk of death in exchange for being fed forever. Having grown to a scale that matched his appetite, it remains to be seen who got the worse deal out of this arrangement.
The Big One: Ruby mutation caused this mobini to balloon in size, until he was nearly seven feet tall and weighed over half a ton! While ponderously slow, Bandit is strong enough to pull a cart and tough enough to take a hit. As a raccoon, Bandit's more clever than he looks.
Mort the Phantom Cluckatrice
This clucky has seen things that clucky was not meant to know, and returned to tell the tale. Not that he would, as Mort only seems to say "cluck", "caw", or "cock-a-doodle-doo" to his peers. Unlike the fabled Chanticleer, who greeted the sun at dawn, Mort's crows herald the maddening moon and the bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Snake Eyes: Mort can paralyze any singular individual that enters eye contact with him at his time of choosing. He can maintain this effect as long as he doesn't blink.
Thousand-Yardbird Stare: Mort doesn't need to blink.
How to Make Your Own
Want to make an abomination in the eyes of the Ancient Walkers, too? Here's how!
The Rules
- The submitted animals must be of a species that could be reasonably encountered by the SI during their regular duties.
- A succinct list of animals that'd count as mobini in this story can be found HERE or HERE. There are other non-anthro animals that might still count, but if you want that list, you're searching for it on your own.
- "Could be reasonably encountered" means it's an animal that passes the sniff test for something that you could imagine wandering around Mercia & Eurish. Mercia's based on England, France, and Europe in general, though the close proximity of the continents on Mobius gives you a bit of wiggle room. Soleanna is based on Italy, but it has giant lockies (eagles) that we'd normally associate with North America. Dogs and cats yes, unicorns no.
- Most Phantom Friends get one "major" power or two "minor" powers as a consequence of their mutation.
- The powers/mutations a Phantom Friend can have are rather open-ended. Look at what John Scarlet is capable of, or an extant character trait that's been showcased in the franchise. Break one of those off, and you have a viable trait for a Phantom Friend. Getting really big, shooting eye beams, or growing bulletproof wool would be considered "major". Anything less than that (like having longer claws or a third eye) is "minor".
- Figment and Brie have two major powers because they're special, and are not the baseline. Bandit has one major power. Mort has two powers because I wanted to break them up into a joke with a setup and a payoff.
- The name of the Phantom Friend should be something the SI would come up with on their own. Nothing too mean, but it may contain wordplay or a reference.
- If you aren't sure if John Scarlet would pick a given name, just ask me since this is an SI fic.
- I am not under any obligation to use your suggestions, use them right away, or use a suggested Phantom Friend exactly as you present them. I'm trying to pace myself with how many characters trickle into the fic at a time.
- Due to recent events, John Scarlet officially only attempts the ruby mutation process on live mobini. The five-second rule does not apply here.
With that out of the way: Have fun! No deadlines on submissions for Phantom Friends, so just kinda do it whenever you want.
Please ping me if you decide to make one, so I don't lose track of them.
SirKel
Getting some practice in, huh?
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I like how this implies that there have been unsuccessful ones. Or maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention to them
weredrago2
"KABOOM!"
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It came up briefly in the second draft of Chapter 33. There have been failures, but I don't want the story to dwell upon them too much. It's enough to make it clear that the process isn't easy or without risk.
zecorezecron
Know what you're doing yet?
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I feel some trepidation at adding so many new characters. Archie sonic already has a pretty bloated cast, especially pre SGW, so adding more might not be the best narrative choice.
weredrago2
"KABOOM!"
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A completely understandable concern. The comic's cast could get unwieldy, to the extent that they had to thin out the echidnas like three times. I've tried to be rather sparing with OCs for that reason, but sometimes you really do need to make a new character. Especially as I explore the parts of Mobius that the series didn't.
In regards to the Build-A-Phantom-Friend-Workshop, I don't plan on implenting every suggestion I recieve, and I imagine the ones that I do use will end up in bit roles. Actual additions to the Phantom Friend count are going to be gradual. Speaking lines are gonna be practically nil unless I do another mobini POV chapter.
In other words, this mostly serves as a fun thread exercise to get folks participating in discussion and getting creative. This fic is crossposted in other places, so occasionally I see something new I hadn't thought of as an idea for a Phantom Friend, or I have a chuckle when I see someone had the exact same idea I did.
Magical familiars and animal companions are characters, though in fiction, they're normally characters with smaller parts to play than the main cast. 34 was me casting the spotlight on the familiars as I revealed the SI was gathering more of them.
John Scarlet’s Powers & Assets
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weredrago2
"KABOOM!"
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John Scarlet's Powers & Assets [As of Chapter 34]
Our Self Insert has a lot of powers at his disposal, and picked up a lot of things on his journey, so I figured I'd make a thread-sharable version of the document I'd been using to keep track of it all in my notes. Enjoy!
NOTE: This writeup contains light spoilers for Chapter 35, primarily in regards to the SI's new scepter. Anything divulged for that here will be reiterated there when 35 is posted.
[
] The Phantom Ruby
By John Scarlet's reckoning, the Phantom Ruby functions as a reactor for negative chaos energy. Any power goes in, and black magic comes out. Instead of producing chaos energy, the Phantom Ruby must ravenously consume power to work. In a matter of months, the Phantom Ruby had transformed John Scarlet from a complete novice in the long-lost "Ixian Magicks" to a capable adept. (Among other things it turned him into.) As a tradeoff for the great magical strength it offers, long-term exposure to the Phantom Ruby is hazardous to the body, mind, and soul. Permanent side effects may vary.
] require the Phantom Ruby. Powers marked with [
] can (theoretically) be performed with any kind of magic stone, but would be much more difficult because the Phantom Ruby is what John Scarlet is used to.
…
[
] Phantom Friends
See the Phantom Friends post for details.
[
] Permanent Mutations
The power of the Phantom Ruby has as many rewards as it has costs, depending on how you run the numbers. One man's debilitating, trauma-adjacent reminder of the humanity he has lost is another man's neat side perk.
[
] Assets
Mobiums can't buy you happiness, and they can't buy you love, but they can buy you stuff like this. Then, where mobiums can't take you, there's always the Phantom Ruby!
[
] Modes & Transformations
When nothing else will cut it, there's special modes and transformations to kick things up a notch. Each of these has their own requirements for activation.
I'll try to keep this updated as the story continues.
Please let me know if I missed anything! Thanks in advance.
Our Self Insert has a lot of powers at his disposal, and picked up a lot of things on his journey, so I figured I'd make a thread-sharable version of the document I'd been using to keep track of it all in my notes. Enjoy!
NOTE: This writeup contains light spoilers for Chapter 35, primarily in regards to the SI's new scepter. Anything divulged for that here will be reiterated there when 35 is posted.
[
] The Phantom RubyBy John Scarlet's reckoning, the Phantom Ruby functions as a reactor for negative chaos energy. Any power goes in, and black magic comes out. Instead of producing chaos energy, the Phantom Ruby must ravenously consume power to work. In a matter of months, the Phantom Ruby had transformed John Scarlet from a complete novice in the long-lost "Ixian Magicks" to a capable adept. (Among other things it turned him into.) As a tradeoff for the great magical strength it offers, long-term exposure to the Phantom Ruby is hazardous to the body, mind, and soul. Permanent side effects may vary.
- [] Ruby Illusions: The Phantom Ruby can project realistic and fantastical illusions that fool the mind and trick the senses. The effectiveness of the illusions are dependent on the scope of these projections and the amount of power poured into making them "real". Minor illusions that affect one or two senses are much cheaper than grand spectacles that influence them all.
- [] Ruby Delusions: Foregoing illusions entirely, the John Scarlet can mesmerize others to obeying his commands. Unwilling victims can resist the mind hex, though most "non-heroic" characters will crumble under the weight of the Ruby's power.
- [
] Elemental Magic: A system of codified "elements" John Scarlet can influence when they're near, or alter the local conditions for them to manifest. He can form defensive shields and barriers out of elements he has a Medium affinity or higher.- [
] Fire: HIGH Affinity. Heat control, igniting fires, forming mirages, and hurling fireballs. Fire Shield with a Red Hot Kick attack. - [] Water: MEDIUM Affinity. Shifting tides, making bubbles, and freezing water into solid constructs. Water Shield with a Bounce attack.
- [⌾] ???: MEDIUM Affinity. Establishing rapports with power rings, ring divination, and binding ring tethers. Magenta-toned Barrier.
- [
] ???: MEDIUM Affinity. Absorbing electricity, short-circuiting tech, and communicating with robots via extrasensory uplink. ??? Shield. - [
] Earth: LOW Affinity. Softening earth, digging, and raising stones. - [
] Wind: LOW Affinity. Gusts of compressed air, levitation, and holding breath for extended periods of time.
- [
- [] Crystalline Magicks: The "fifth element" (ignore the other ones) that grants dominion over crystals. Requires a magic stone to access.
- [] Crystal Ray: Laser beam that coats targets in crystals on impact.
- [] Ruby Constructs: Crystalline constructs that can be shaped into myriad forms. Weapons, spikes, hands, domes, force fields, etc etc.
- [] Crystallization: Inorganic materials covered in crystals become susceptible to direct magical influence, with vulnerability proportionate to the surface area covered. Applies especially to robots.
- [
- [] Flight: In defiance of gravity, John Scarlet can fly at subsonic speeds.
- [] Null Space: An arcane pocket zone linked to the Phantom Ruby. Access to Null Space (or escape from it) without John Scarlet's consent is nearly impossible.
- [] Ruby Warp: John Scarlet can warp spacetime, allowing travel over long distances. Thus far, he can only go to places he's already been to.
- [] Ruby Portals: Magenta vortexes that go from Point A to Point B, determined at the time of activation. The surface area, the amount of mass passing through, and the duration the portals are kept open determines how much energy these portals cost.
- [] Ruby Snap: A teleport that is faster than a Ruby Portal, if less flexible. Can carry passengers.
- [
- [] Healing & Mutation: After much trial, error, and deliberation, John Scarlet discovered that he can heal injuries, whether moderate or severe. However, without anything to flip the Phantom Ruby's negative energy into positive energy, the target runs the risk of becoming a ruby mutant.
- Or dying.
- [] Conjuration & Enchantment: A lesser-explored field of his magic, John Scarlet can shape Phantom Ruby-generated matter to enchant items or create them wholecloth. This is where his outfits come from, new gloves whenever he rips them, and fresh hats whenever he loses them.
- [] Cantrips: Lastly, John Scarlet can perform minor "magic tricks" and mend broken objects at a minimal expenditure of power. Anything fixed this way has a red, pink, or magenta finish to indicate it has been touched by the Ruby.
] require the Phantom Ruby. Powers marked with [] can (theoretically) be performed with any kind of magic stone, but would be much more difficult because the Phantom Ruby is what John Scarlet is used to.…
- [𓃥] Ø: Prestidigitation and card tricks aren't really the last thing that has to be said about the Phantom Ruby, is it? For a long time, John Scarlet knew that the damn gem had a mind of its own. Something that would take over and make decisions for him when he was pushed to the brink unless he wore a power ring to suppress its influence. A being that only spoke in "I", and only scarcely acknowledged that he wasn't alone in this body he was seizing. The voice was stirred to near-coherency by Enerjak, and worked with John Scarlet to defeat him, but afterwards? Silence.
- Who is he?
- Why can't he remember his face?
[
] Phantom FriendsSee the Phantom Friends post for details.
[
] Permanent MutationsThe power of the Phantom Ruby has as many rewards as it has costs, depending on how you run the numbers. One man's debilitating, trauma-adjacent reminder of the humanity he has lost is another man's neat side perk.
- [
] Power Type: John Scarlet is far stronger than your average human. While not exceptionally muscular in appearance, his raw physical strength and endurance are in the range of Olympic athletes. - [
] Elastic Ring Barrier: As much a consequence of his exposure to rings as it was the Phantom Ruby, John Scarlet's body became much more flexible, durable, and elastic than the human baseline. He can stretch his limbs to extend his reach. - [] Elemental Resonance: Even when not using the Phantom Ruby, John Scarlet can influence the elements he has an affinity for at a much weaker scale.
- [
] Ruby Eyes: John Scarlet was cured of his former vision issues, and can see in low-light settings as though they were illuminated in shades of red. - [
] Claws & Fangs: Unnatural natural weapons extend from his hands and mouth, durable enough to rip concrete. He can use the retractable claws to climb walls, and the fangs to bite his tongue whenever he forgets they're present. - [
] Emerald Radar: Over time, John Scarlet developed a sixth sense for chaos energy, akin to the mental radar possessed by Knuckles and Rouge. The range extends no further than line-of-sight.
[
] AssetsMobiums can't buy you happiness, and they can't buy you love, but they can buy you stuff like this. Then, where mobiums can't take you, there's always the Phantom Ruby!
- [
] Morglay: An enchanted sword with a wicked edge. Also known as the Death Brand, Morglay cut a crimson swathe through Mercia during the reign of King Arfur. The sword and the red knight who wielded it were eventually slain, cast into the murky depths beneath Sylvania Castle by Sir Peredur, but not before taking several members of the Hound Table with them. [Obtained in Chapter 8.] - [
] The Door: Dense door of silvery oricalcum, which protected a wellspring of power rings beneath Sylvania Castle. John Scarlet has been lugging it around as a blunt instrument because it was the strongest thing he knew of, and has been trying to smelt it into something more useful ever since. [Obtained in Chapter 8.] - [⌾⌾⌾] Ring Stock: A stockpile of power rings from the vault beneath Sylvania Castle, which John Scarlet has been using to charge the Phantom Ruby or expend for other purposes. Unlike the Lake of Rings used by Knothole, or the one on Angel Island, these rings are of a limited supply. [Obtained in Chapter 8.]
- [
] Crystallized Robians: Mercian victims of the roboticizer that have, until such a day comes that they can be restored, been entombed in Null Space. Storing them in crystalline caskets is hardly an ideal situation, but this indefinite fate is far kinder than leaving them in the High Sheriff's clutches. [Obtained in Chapter 10.] - [
] Red Chimera: Lengthy, cruising extreme gear that doubles as a robust shield. Heavy weight and high top speed, but poor handling. [Obtained in Chapter 12.] - [
] Weapons Arsenal: A surplus of Overland-made small arms and light weapons (SALW) allegedly left over from the Great War. From the humble 1911 to far less humble Javelin. One might wonder where Wes Weasley keeps finding these things, but if John Scarlet did that, then they might stop appearing for cheap. Best not to look a gift pasha in the mandibles, eh? [Obtained in Chapter 14.] - [
] Crystal Ball: John Scarlet's scrying aid. When he loses one, he can remake it with the Phantom Ruby and use the orb to search around. [Obtained in Chapter 16.] - [
] Ars Ixia: An occult grimoire containing many spells and secrets from the long-dead "Ixian Order", of which only fragments of memories remain. How Amy of all people had this is in her home library was a mystery that had, with everything else going on, slipped beneath John Scarlet's notice. [Obtained in Chapter 17.] - [
] Cult of the Ruby Flame: We'll uh… get back to this one. [Obtained in Chapter 16, but John Scarlet didn't know about them until Chapter 21.] - [
] Mechanaut Factory: An occult installation that conjured into existence by Enerjak III, which he used to produce combat and labor drones called mechanauts. The entire structure was stolen by John Scarlet while he was still in his Phantom State (see below), but as the creation of a super echidna and super genius, there's only so many things a mortal warlock can tamper with before he runs the risk of breaking it. [Obtained in Super Scarlet Special 1.] - [
] Emerald Scepter: Powered by a cast-off shard of the Master Emerald, this petrified oaken staff is a safe way for John Scarlet to recharge the Phantom Ruby. While its power is as limitless as a complete Chaos Emerald, it is not inexhaustible. The Emerald Scepter becomes colorless after being drained, and must remain stored in Null Space until it recovers. [Obtained in Chapter 31.]
[
] Modes & TransformationsWhen nothing else will cut it, there's special modes and transformations to kick things up a notch. Each of these has their own requirements for activation.
- [
] Disguises: Need to skulk through enemy territory? How about avoiding an awkward conversation, or sidestepping centuries of awkward racial strife? John Scarlet's glamours are an easy way to blend into a crowd, and he's able to improvise a cover story to go with his new face as needed. [Introduced in Chapter 12.] - [
] Mania Mode: John Scarlet can push the Phantom Ruby into overdrive, pulling the safeties off the gemstone and allowing for a burst of "infinite" power. When Mania Mode ends, the Phantom Ruby is left with minimal energy, and John Scarlet may suffer additional permanent consequences. [Introduced in Chapter 15.] - [
] Weredragon Scarlet: When the Phantom Ruby's careful balance of negative energy was thrown into disarray by Enerjak, this monstrous metamorphosis erupted to the surface. Driven by fear, anger, and other suppressed emotions, Weredragon Scarlet exchanges fine spellwork for the sheer, primal force of an elemental beast. The "Curse of the Weredragon", while currently dormant, was able to emerge in the presence of intense geothermal activity (such as a volcano) and the absence of natural sunlight. [Introduced in Chapter 24.] - [𓃥] Phantom Scarlet: When supercharged by seven Chaos Emeralds and fifty rings (or the Master Emerald), John Scarlet can achieve a state of unity with the second entity inside the Phantom Ruby to become Phantom Scarlet. As Phantom Scarlet, the boundaries of the gemstone's powers over illusions are crowbarred off, giving them broad authority over what is "real" and what isn't. Reality, physics, and gravity are what they make of them, until the transformation threatens to tear the two conflicting personalities apart at the seams. [Introduced in Chapter 30.]
I'll try to keep this updated as the story continues.
Please let me know if I missed anything! Thanks in advance.