- A Stark Divide
The morning sun streamed in through the windows, warming the inside of the store like a greenhouse. The residual cool of the Bonepicker had been banished completely. Sweat and restless dreams woke Char to a building headache and a dry mouth. Sitting up, she rubbed the grit from her eyes and looked around, trying to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there. It wasn’t her first time waking up and trying to remember what state she was in, but those times had all been in the familiar sleeper berth of her truck.
She stretched as her brain slowly caught up with the rest of her and memories returned. The inside of her mouth tasted like something had died under her tongue. Lulu whined, and Char stood to see over the counter. The dog was scratching at the shelving unit in front of the door, her tail wagging hopefully, and her rear paws desperately restless. Char hurried over and slid the shelves aside. She had to dig out her pocket knife and cut the zip-ties to open the door. As soon as she did, Lulu hurried out.
Char followed her. She didn’t want to risk something happening to Lulu if she was out there alone. The morning was warming up, but a gust of frigid air hit her and made her shiver. It reminded her of the Bonepicker, and she shivered again at the memory. She kept her eyes on the woods and her head on a swivel as she waited for Lulu to do her business.
Once they were back inside, Char grabbed a tall glass votive candle with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from one of the shelves and went to use an actual toilet for the first time in days. She used some of her bottled water to brush her teeth and wash her face, and felt almost civilized for the first time since everything had gone to hell.
She added a stack of twelve votive candles with assorted saints to her inventory. It was odd. They all stacked, even though the art on them was different. Again, she wondered how the system decided what would stack and what wouldn’t. She wondered if she could stack filled storage tubs if the tubs were all identical on the outside, even if they had different stuff inside. She didn’t think it was likely, but it was a potential cheat worth checking out. If she could find some storage tubs.
She wasn’t a religious person, but as she packed away the votives, she paused on one with an image of the Archangel Michael on it. If she remembered right, he was a guardian, or a patron of warriors… something like that. She didn’t know much about it, but she figured the human race could use all the help it could get. She lit the candle and set it on the counter to burn as she worked. “I don’t know if you’re real, or if you’re listening, but any help you can give would be great.”
While they had the relative safety of four walls around them, she pulled everything out of her inventory and got to work. Smaller items went into bags, and she stripped her food of bulky packaging to make more space. She cleared up as many slots in her inventory as she could.
There were two [Flesh Affinity Stones] and a [Life Affinity Stone] that she’d nearly forgotten about. The Flesh stones felt warm in her hand. She didn’t remember them feeling that way before. When she examined one of the [Flesh Affinity Stones], she was surprised to get an option she hadn’t had the first time:
[Flesh Affinity Stone}
Consumable
Can be used in crafting, or absorbed to
Increase a Domain Affinity.
Would you like to absorb [Flesh Affinity Stone]? Y/N
She almost clicked ‘yes’, but stopped herself. What if this were more useful for crafting something? What if this power she was getting came with some hidden cost? What if too high an Affinity was a bad thing? Would it turn her into some sort of amorphous, pulsing flesh blob if she kept going? An electric flesh blob? She snorted at the mental image.
She turned her attention inward to the burning ember in her center, that indefinable space where her Core sat. The feeling was subtle, and sometimes she thought it was only her imagination; a psychosomatic sensation created by her desire to have some power in a world that made her feel powerless.
No. It was there. She’d pulled mana from it to cast her Mend Flesh spell. She could feel the differences in the places where it was attuned to the Flesh Domain and the Lightning Domain; the warm, organic feeling of Flesh, and the frantic crackle of Lightning. She could even feel the empty space waiting to be filled with other types of power.
Aliens had changed, had completely rearranged her world. They’d brought magic, monsters, and were somehow in her head with this ‘system’. Their message had been about joining the greater society of the universe, but it hadn’t given them any choice. It had been arrogant, demanding that they ‘prove themselves worthy,’ whatever the hell that meant. Who the fuck were they to judge us? To come to our house and start rearranging the furniture and deciding we had to change to suit them?
The magic she could feel burning inside her was proof that the rules of reality weren’t what humanity had thought they were, but how much of the truth was humanity being allowed to see? Would absorbing this power put her farther under the control of the Aldevari, or would it be a tool she could use against them? It might be too late to ask those questions. She’d already absorbed two Domain Cores.
She decided to wait, to learn more first. She might be delaying strength that she could use, but that was better than making yet another irrevocable decision without enough information to know for sure if it was a good choice. She tucked the stones into a side pocket of her shower bag.
Now that that was taken care of, she turned back to the store. She wasn’t about to pass up this windfall of food, since it might be the last modern Earth food she’d ever find.
When she had everything repacked, she started sorting through the food in the pile. She grabbed all the beef jerky she could find and an almost full box of her favorite candy bars. Then she looked for high-energy, high-nutrient foods. Trail mix, dehydrated mango slices, peanut butter, those were the best. More cans of dog food for Lulu. Many of the items were labeled in Spanish, and she had to go by the pictures on the packaging to figure out what they were. When she pulled more bottles of water out of the cooler, she discovered that the maximum she could stack in one slot was 40 items.
She packed in as much as she could, even several cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes. Those would be valuable as trade goods or bribes. She left a few slots open for loot. The system automatically put anything she looted into her inventory, and she wasn’t sure what it would do if there was no room. She didn’t want to miss out on anything good because she was out of space.
What she couldn’t take with her, she moved into the drink cooler. Since the front door wouldn’t latch, she didn’t want to leave it all for wild animals to ruin. Most of it was shelf-stable junk food, it would last for a while. She might need it in the future, or there may be other survivors who could use it.
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By the time she was done, the sun was high in the sky. She’d lost half a day, but she felt more secure knowing that she had plenty of food and water for the two of them, and a supply stash to fall back to. She made herself a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and fed Lulu. Then, they set off again, still heading southwest.
She practiced with her new Arc spell as they walked, trusting Lulu to alert her to any danger. The Mend Flesh spell had been complex and slippery, but this one bucked and jolted like a live wire. The harder she held it, the faster it zipped away from her grasp. She didn’t start making progress until she remembered that electricity was a flow, like water. She didn’t need to hold it; she needed to give it a path. She wasn’t there yet, but she was getting close.
The day was a warm one, and her armored vest was making her sweat. The occasional frigid gust of air felt good against her skin. It was odd, though. A cold gust on a hot day was usually a sign that a storm was moving in, but the sky was clear.
The Bonepicker’s description had mentioned that it was a creature of tundras and ice fields. How had it ended up in a temperate forest? She mulled it over for a while, but, in the end, she abandoned the question as just another oddity of a world that had been shaken and stirred.
A few hours into her hike, she got her answer.
The woods stopped. They didn’t thin out or gradually transition; the trees ended in an abrupt line, as though someone had taken a craft knife to the world and sliced it into bits, and then put it back together randomly. Even the ground was different, and the place where they joined didn’t match up, leaving tiny cliffs of bare soil where the two biomes met.
Between one step and the next, she went from a warm day in a temperate wood into the bone-biting cold of a windswept tundra. She stepped back into the warmer zone of the trees and looked out. Cold gusts carried the tang of ice and dry grass into the woods. Her heart thumped in her chest, and her blood rushed in her ears as she tried to make sense of the impossibility. The cars and the mercado had been one thing. They were small. Compared to this, even the factory had been small. She could almost wrap her brain around them having been transported. But this? An entire ecosystem? It took her breath away.
Dry, brown grass and scattered, lichen-covered rocks stretched for as far as she could see. The ground rolled away in low hills and wrinkles, dotted here and there with scraggly clumps of brush and patches of purple wildflowers. It had a sort of stark, frigid beauty, but she didn’t like the idea of trying to cross it. Especially if that was where the Bonepicker had come from.
Instead of venturing out into the tundra, she opted to skirt its edge. She stayed just inside the tree line and followed the line of change, going almost due south. She gave up on practicing her new spell for now. The unnatural divide made her uneasy. Better to stay alert. The Bonepicker had been a higher level than the changed animals of the woods. If it was representative of the sort of creatures in the tundra… that thought caused a mental hiccup and a lost step that brought Char up short.
Is that what this was? A higher level zone? Had the Aldevari divided things up into zones like an old-school MMORPG? Why?
As she stood there, one hand on a nearby tree, thoughts swirling, she slowly became aware of a sound. Lulu was already on alert, looking out onto the tundra. Char turned to look in the direction Lulu was staring, her sword coming to her hand. It was a complex blend of sounds — a low, insectile drone mixed with the tinkle and clash of glass wind chimes. Then, there was a scream. A very human scream.
Char was running into the frigid grassland before she’d consciously made the decision, Lulu on her heels. She could hear shouting as she got closer. A grunt of pain. The sound of glass shattering. A commanding yell, the words too garbled to make out. Then, she crested a low rise and looked down on a scene of chaos and horror.
Around two dozen people were fleeing from a swarm of crystalline insects the size of vultures. Mosquitoes of translucent glass with abdomens the size of volleyballs, red with stolen blood. Their wings were like prisms that cut the light into rainbows, sending a dance of festive color across a scene from a horror movie.
Two people lay, unmoving, beneath perched monstrosities. The creatures’ hypodermic proboscises plunged into the bodies, sucking out the blood. A tall, broad-shouldered man helped a woman in nurse’s scrubs to her feet and got her moving. His arm was covered in blood, and he waved it at the others, urging them to keep running. A lanky young man picked up a rock and threw it at one of the mosquitoes, and missed. Another mosquito was buzzing in to skewer a young woman who was running with her arms wrapped protectively around her head.
Char kept running, but she wasn’t going to get there in time. She raised her left hand and drew the pattern for her Arc spell, not trying to control the wild electric mana, but letting it flow into the path she was creating for it. She had come so close earlier; she was sure she could do it now. She had to do it now.
The young woman tripped and fell. The crystal insect dove for her. The spell snapped into place in Char’s hand, and she released it.
Blazing blue-white light arced out, crackling as it burned through the air. The bolt struck the mosquito mid-flight, and the creature detonated in a bloom of glass shards. The woman screamed as the shards peppered her, leaving shallow cuts in her arms and back. Char winced at the unintended wounds, but they were better than being skewered and drained dry.
She kept running, yelling at the people now that she had their attention, “Go. That way, into the woods!” Then, she was past the mass of survivors and into the front of the mosquito swarm. The broad-shouldered man repeated her words, urging them onward, but he didn’t run with them. He joined her at the back of the group. He held a rifle by its barrel, ready to swing it like a baseball bat. “Here, this is better,” Char tossed him her crowbar, and he took it with a grin and a testing swing.
“Yep, that’ll do.” He waded into the swarm, his rifle vanishing into inventory.
Char swayed to the side to avoid a diving bug and swung her sword. The mosquito’s abdomen shattered, sending out a needle-sharp spray of crystal shards. Char used Assess Foe on the next one to dive at her, even as she slashed sideways to kill it:
Glassine Bloodseeker
Level 18
Fast and agile, but individually weak, the Bloodseeker’s
strength is the strength of the swarm. They bring the blood
they collect back to their queen to feed her brood, ensuring
the growth of the swarm.
“Since when do mosquitoes have a queen?” she muttered, but she didn’t have time to ponder the mysteries of alien bug biology. The flying horrors gave her no time for anything but dodging and killing. Every successful blow killed a Bloodseeker, but it also sent out a spray of glass shrapnel that left shallow cuts on her and her new ally.
Whoever he was, he moved like a man who’d been in fights before. He was calm and efficient, and he didn’t flinch.
They retreated as they fought, staying behind the fleeing people, but unable to stop lest they become surrounded by the swarming insects. Char fired off another Arc, but the spell was expensive; it drained her mana quickly, and she needed to keep some in reserve for healing.
Lulu stayed with the fleeing people. She couldn’t do much against a flying foe, but she could play sheepdog, nudging the fleeing crowd along, and pausing to guard any who fell. She leapt and snapped at any mosquito that came too close to the fleeing humans, driving them away only to dance away from becoming a victim herself.
It was a chaotic retreat, but no others fell. Char and the broad-shouldered man took out many of the Bloodseekers, and they were both covered with small cuts and dripping blood by the time they reached the tree line. A few of the mosquitoes followed them across the invisible border, but there was something about the warmer air that they didn’t like. The ones that didn’t die to sword or crowbar buzzed back into the tundra to rejoin the swarm. They hovered and buzzed, their wings making an enchanting chiming sound at odds with the horror of their blood-filled bellies.
Char watched and panted, trying to catch her breath. She held her sword ready, but the Bloodseekers didn’t seem inclined to pursue them into the woods. When she was sure they weren’t about to be swarmed, she turned to the man. Out of curiosity, she Assessed him.
Human
Level 16
The info she got was less than helpful.