Conflux, Pt. 7

@Steelcarbuncle

Absolutely terrifying.

Conflux, Pt. 6

“Is that…is that your starship?” Stormy asked, her voice giddy as she clapped her hands despite their circumstances.

The Commander nodded with a small smirk.  “Yeah, she can hear us.  That’s good…”

Anafenza tilted her head in confusion at this.  While the Commander tried her communicator again, she turned to Stormy.  “’She’ can hear us?  That sounded like a man on the other side?”

“She meant the ship can hear us.  Ships are always girls.”

“Ships…are always girls.” Anafenza blinked a few times but shrugged.  “I assume this is an Earth thing?”

Stormy shrugged.  “I suppose it is.  Sorry if that’s confusing.”

The Commander groaned in frustration.  “There’s too much interference here, and we can’t get far enough away from the tree to cut through.”

The other two women turned to look.  Sure enough, as the Commander had implied, the cavern was smaller now, an odd gray nothingness taking the place of the stone walls around them.

Stormy snapped her fingers, then beckoned for the badge.  “Gimme.”  The Commander and Anafenza hesitated, not understanding what she meant.  Stormy huffed, beckoning for the device again.  “It’s simple, right?  How do you cut through interference if you can’t build a better transmitter?”

The Commander squinted, her thoughts racing.  “Change the frequency?”  When the other woman simply nodded, as if coaxing her to keep trying, the Commander shrugged and shook her head.  “Um, more power? I don’t –“

Stormy snapped her fingers again and grinned, interrupting.  “More power!” She held the device in her hand, and Anafenza saw threads of electricity start to wrap around her arm, snapping and crackling as the woman manipulated the environment around them.  As she watched, a thick fog began to form above them.

Stormy looked up to the Commander.  “Ready?” When the other woman nodded, Stormy grinned.  “Here we go!” She concentrated a burst of electricity right into the device, then tapped it, eliciting the chirp again.

The Commander practically leapt forward, enthralled by the woman’s powers and forgetting for a moment to speak once the device was activated.  “St. Peter to Rafale!  How do you hear us now?”

There was a curse on the other end of the transmission.  “Prophets! LOUD and clear, Commander, how do you read?”

“Same, Rafale! I’m trapped in a collapsing pocket dimension with two other people, are you able to locate us with the signal from my commbadge and my tricorder?”

“Standby…”  There were more voices in the background now, as more people began to talk over one another.  Anafenza struggled to hear them all, until finally the first man came back onto the channel.  “We’re locked onto the tricorder now, but there is still a large amount of interference. Whatever you labeled it when you scanned it – ‘aether?’ – it’s masking your signal.  Sensors are picking up three faint life signs but they’re all registering as you.”

The Commander shook her head.  “Yeah, it’s a long story, but you’re picking the three of us up just fine.  You can’t transport through the interference?”

“We’re having trouble getting a positive lock…”

Anafenza shrieked then, pointing.  “Jess, look!”

Both women looked up, then to where the auri was pointing.  The Commander gasped.  “Rafale, we have a problem!  The dimension is collapsing faster than before!”

A female voice broke through then.  “I just picked up a massive disturbance in your tricorder readings, Commander!  The link we created here is punching a hole through your dimension and causing it to destabilize at an exponentially faster rate.”

“You can’t get a lock, Nizeri?”

“Negative; M’Ral is coming up with a plan but we can’t make it happen in the next ten seconds. Cut power; use your tricorder to send data bursts.  We’ll send you a message when we have a good idea what to do on our end.  I’m sorry, ma’am!”

The Commander looked at Stormy, then swatted the communicator badge out of her sparking hand.

The grey Nothingness slowed its progress consuming the cavern, and the women all let out the collective breath they’d been holding.  Stormy shook her head.  “Now what?”

Anafenza spoke up instead, certain of the answer.  “We come up with a way to get out of here.”

The Commander nodded. “Boosting the signal definitely helped, but we need a quick solution.  While they work on a way to lock onto us, it would help to make it easier for them.”

“A beacon of some sort,” Stormy said, and the Commander nodded.

Anafenza looked at the other women.  “If the aether is causing the interference, what if we gave your ship a way to better navigate the flow of it to find us?”

“Not just a beacon, but a map?”  The Commander tapped her chin and nodded.  “How would we do that?”

“My linkpearl.” Anafenza brought her hand up to her horn, feeling for the small jewel embedded there.  “It uses the flow of aether to communicate; your ship could use the flow the linkpearl uses to break through the conflicting aether here and find us easier.”

“That just might work,” the Commander said.  “Alright…let’s get to work, ladies.”

Conflux, Pt. 1

Ana’s eyes were glued shut, her expression pained as she dreamt.

Dreaming, of late, had been a whole new level of fantasy for Anafenza of the Ejinn.  Some nights she was in her own memories, which was nothing out of the ordinary.  Some nights, she was in front of the dark tree and hearing the mournful, enraged notes of the Dragonsong – she’d started having these dreams after she’d killed the elezen Jessika while she was brainwashed (but that is a long story for another day). But now, her dreams began to bleed into the wondrous: she’d dreamt she was flying, calling wind and rain and it obeyed her!  Or that she was commanding a group of people bustling around some sort of control center, the floor shaking beneath them as explosions rocked them and she stared out at an endless sea of night.  She’d even had a few where she and the other two “hers” interacted with one another, before she was jolted awake.

And then the dreams of everlasting light – a field of pink flowers, with child-like giggles floating on the breeze around her.  There was no warmth, no sun in the sky – just light glaring down upon her, and voices.

“Aenc tyr,” they’d say. And another, “Open the gate.”

  But this…this dream was new.  It was a memory, but not her memory.  As Anafenza looked around the small room as she paused her frantic packing, she knew it was not her own.  The simple wood hut; the longbow leaning against the wall by the door; the roiling sky, filled with the great red light of the falling moon...

The falling moon… She quickly went to the window to look up and gasped.  She had seen Dalamud in the sky as it fell years ago when she was still living in Othard, and her people had seen it as an ill omen.

"Quickly, Jessielle, quickly!  Get your bow, come, come!"

Ana turned around, confused, before moving to the satchel of personal effects on the bed, nearly crammed full of trinkets and clothes she was trying to protect.  Her family had finished ensuring the last of the villagers who were seeking shelter were in the catacombs, Anafenza thought, though she wasn’t sure how she knew this.

Once the last few villagers trickled in, the family returned to their own home to prepare.  She assumed it was to gather what they could and hide as well, so she was in her private room, gathering mementos of her life, when her father came barging into her room, shouting her given name.

Anafenza froze, realizing the knowledge she’d just come to know.  Father?  Jessielle? These are Jessika’s memories!  But why…am I in them?

There was a loud crack outside, and Ana and Jessika’s father turned to see, out the window, a plume of fire where a chunk of the moon had fallen.  "Come Jessielle...there is not much time," he said, his crisp and proper Ishgardian words flowing gracefully out, despite the urgency.

"Père, what..."  She heard herself saying, before finally looked at him, noticing the man was clothed in heavy, black leather armor, armored gauntlets with intricate gold and blood-red patterns winding over them.  His legs were clad in armor as well, the same gold and red filigree snaking up the armor like ivy.  "Père, what are you wearing?"

Her father – Jessika’s father – rolled his eyes and, picking up her bow from near the door with one hand, grabbed her arm with the other and pulled her out of the room. "There is no time to explain. Come, come!"

He pulled her through the house and outside, his armored fingers digging deep into Ana’s wrist. She squirmed a little, biting her lip to keep from yelling at him as she stumbled along behind as he guided her to the center of the small village.

"Jacemont, what took you so long?  The time is approaching!"

Jacemont Saphir finally let go of Anafenza’s wrist, approaching the woman waiting for them there. She wore long, flowing robes of dark fabric, completely black except for a blood-red design up the right side.  It wound up from the hem of the robes to the collar - an intricate, winding design like ivy, with leaves and thorns.  She turned her head to look at them, her eyes cold and dark.  "Jessielle, what were you doing?"

Before she knew what she was doing, Anafenza dipped her head in deference. "Mère," she greeted her, realizing this was Jessika’s mother.  "I was gathering my things...why aren't we in the catacombs?  What are you and Père doing out here?"  She motioned to the descending moon, meteorites flying off it and impacting the ground in the distance.  "We need to take shelter!"  Anafenza looked around, realizing she wasn’t in control.  She was watching the memory unfold, taking the role of Jessika in it. Even with the knowledge that she was in a dream, she couldn’t take control and change the course of it.

The mother – Raechelle, Anafenza realized was her name – shook her head ever so slightly and turned back to look at Dalamud.  "We are sheltering.  Jacemont, stand with me.  Jessielle, come here."  She motioned to her left and right sides; Jacemont stood to his wife's left, looking up at the sky.  "Something is happening."

As she said the words, there was a loud crack, and the three of them watched as Dalamud began to fracture. Fire peeked out through the fissures, and enormous wings appeared at the top of the hulk.  The surface of the moon roiled and shook.

"Gods preserve," Jacemont whispered, his eyes wide in horror.

Raechelle reached behind her, her hand grasping at the air behind her head.  She raised her arm, and Anafenza watched in awe as woman lifted a large, black sword with gold-filigree into the air, pulling it out of thin air. Shadows and darkness seemed to pour out of it and fall off it, like fog off of an ice crystal.  She spun the blade down and screamed, thrusting the sword into the ground.

There was deafening boom, and Ana fell backward as the moon was blasted apart, fragments flying into the ground with enough force that it shook all around them.  A few homes were ripped apart as fragments slammed into them, fire and debris exploding into the air.  The ground shook, and Ana fully expected to feel fire consume her.  She was going to die, she knew it...

So when, after a few more moments, she was still alive, Ana opened her eyes, feeling the memory of Jessika’s confusion even though she knew what she was going to see.  She looked around and heard herself gasp.

Raechelle was holding the hilt of the sword still, gritting her teeth.  All around them, extending out several meters, was a swirling cloud of black mist and smoke, shadows flying through the cloud around them with such speed that Anafenza couldn't get clear views of them.  The cloud enclosed them and much of the village like a bubble, the outside just barely visible.

Jacemont cursed loudly. "It's a dragon!"

"It's not a dragon, it's a god," Raechelle corrected, gazing in equal horror as her husband.  Ana clambered to her feet, watching as the beast - which took up much of the sky - began to fly quickly around, flares of fire shooting from its body and striking the ground, causing more earthquakes and explosions.  It soared overhead with a scream, releasing a volley of fire at the village below.  Far in Othard, she remembered seeing the moon drift below the horizon, but this…

This is the Calamity everyone speaks of.  Kami, what hell…

"Jacemont! Now!"  Raechelle screamed.  Anfenza turned in time to see the man reach up and behind him.  He clenched his hand and, in the same way as she had seen the woman, pulled a large sword out of nowhere, thrusting it into the ground as well.  There was a pulse of energy that she felt push through her, and the bubble of shadows grew darker.

The beast's fire slammed into the shield, and Jessika's parents shouted in surprise, both of them faltering slightly, as if a great weight just landed on their shoulders, pushing them downward.  They held onto the hilts of their swords, struggling to straighten back up.

Anafenza looked around, the memory of terror rising in her as Jessika watched.  Another memory crept into her thoughts, an earlier time that she’d seen this happen, but she didn’t focus on it.  Anafenza had seen this cloud of shadows before as well – the day she killed Jessika, it had exploded around her, swirling around and subduing Ana, as the curse fell upon the auri girl.

Raechelle shouted, and Ana looked up to see the dragon approaching again, circling back around for another indiscriminate attack on the land below.  "Jessielle, we need you!"

Anafenza blinked in surprise.  "What?! No!  I...I don't know what's happening!"

Jacemont staggered again, falling to one knee but still holding onto his sword.  "Your bow, child!  Your bow!"

Ana shook her head, staring at the wooden longbow in her hands.  "I don't...know what you want from me," she said, still confused, though the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle.

"Strike the ground!"  He called again, pulling himself back up to standing.  "Strike the ground and defend your home!  Your friends!  Your family! Defend those you love, protect them from this!"  He looked at her, and she noticed his eyes were pitch black, shadowy energy flaring out of them like two dark fires.  "You know what to do, child!  Now, stand with us!"

Anafenza looked at the two elezen, then back at the bow in her hands.  She looked up, seeing fire rain down again.  Panicking, she did what Jacemont told her, lifting the bow in the air and striking the one end of it to the ground.

Ana felt another pulse of energy radiate out, and the shield grew darker still, swirling faster and further out so that it protected most of the village.  She felt as if her feet were rooted to the ground, and her hands locked in place, wrapped around her bow.  Her vision darkened as she heard the fire slam into the shield, felt the impact of the fireballs on the shield as if a heavy hand were shoving her to the ground.  She fell to one knee, her hands unable to release the bow, gasping for breath.  The familiar sensation of being choked by the darkness came to her, the same choking she’d felt when Jessika had died. Her eyes were playing tricks on her: in one moment, she could see the bow clear as day, but in the next the weapon appeared like a great sword, similar to the ones the elezen were wielding.

Similar to the sword I’ve pulled from my aether, she realized, recognizing the weapon she’d come to know as “Bloodthorn.”

The attack continued for what felt like hours, or maybe it was only a few seconds.  The three of them were screaming in defiance and pain as the ground shook around them.

Then, the world went dark.

I got a thing!!  Thank you so much @mirror-apple, I love it!

Magus Musings - Reflection

“Wicked white, Angan, not again! I told ye’ already, we don’ ‘ave no berry fruits ye be after!”

Angan tilted head to the side, staring at the hume merchant in confusion. “But I haven’t asked for any berries, Varden. I was just coming for the daily supplies like always, for the Spagyrics. What is this about berries now?” The young drahn woman shook her head, her mop of unkempt black hair falling over her shoulder. This was the third time today on her daily rounds through the Musica Universalis that someone had been exasperated with her for some reason or another.

The hume pointed a fat finger at her. “An’ another thing, how the bleedin’ ‘ells ‘re ye changin’ yer hair so damned fast like? It ain’t natural it ain’t! Ye look a sight better now than ye’ did just a bell ago, tha’s fer sure.  Bleedin’ bright pink as a pixie, as if we didn’ ‘ave enough bright colors ta stare at in the sky! But the answer’s still ‘no,’ so don’ think of addin’ – “

“Berries to the order, no, I got that. Pink hair? Me? Have you been drinking again, Varden? It’s only the eighth bell in the morn!” She took the sack of vials with an annoyed “thank you” and turned to walk away, shaking her head.

All morning, her usual rounds had led to one odd encounter after another. Pink hair. Barely dressed. Smelling of seaweed and “wet” – whatever that smelled like – and always, it seemed, just a bell or two ahead of her.

It was difficult in a town like the Crystarium to be mistaken for someone else. Sure, the occasional dwarf was hard to tell apart, and the zun all looked alike anyway, but there were so few people left in the world to begin with…well…it was difficult to find someone that would look or sound so similar to you that people you’d known for years could mistake you.

“What bloody sinner is going around acting like me,” Angan wondered aloud, making her way to the next stall. She paused, thinking her route again. The imposter was further ahead of her by at least a bell; what if she cut her off at her final stop?  Angan hurried out of the markets to the aetheryte, then down the steps to the Horotorium. It was usually her last stop, so she could go to the library for a new book, and then take the aetheryte back to the Exedra. She hurried down the stairs, her powerful tail swinging behind her.

In the Horotorium, no one seemed to notice anything amiss with her presence, other than noting how oddly *early* she was. “And you’re sure, there hasn’t been another drahn that looks like me down here” she asked the botanists.

“No one except you, Angan. Is something the matter?”

She shook her head, scratching behind her horn a moment in thought. “Thanks anyway,” she replied, turning away. She approached the Cabinet of Curiosity, deciding she could at least get her new book while she was down here, and then return to her daily errands.

The doors of the great library swung open in front of her, and she looked up in time to see –

She blinked.

She saw herself blink back at her. At least, it could have been her, if she had decided to put a flower in her hair and color it bright pink. Or if she had decided to dress as if she were cavorting on a stage in Eulmore.

Angan raised a finger, pointing at the other woman. “You!” She took a threatening step towards…well, herself. “I have been looking all over for -!”

The other woman went wide-eyed, then made a dash for the nearby aetheryte. Her hand reached out and she was gone in a flash, just as Angan managed to hustle to close the gap with her. She cried out in frustration; the woman could be anywhere in the Crystarium now, or even leaving.

But there had been no mistaking that face…those horns…the tail even. Her eyes had been ringed yellow, like Angan’s…the patterns of scales covering her. The woman could have been her twin, had Angan not known better.

“Who the hells do you think you are,” she said to no one in particular. “How did you…wicked white…”

At that moment, Angan thought it may be wise to finish her errands in the markets – the sooner she finished, the sooner she could enjoy a much-needed drink.

do not ask me to calm down; storms were literally born to rage.

Color Quiz!

Thanks for the poke on this one, @little-purple-thundercloud.

What’s funny is...I didn’t cheat this for Ana, either...

Got her favorite color...wow.

Conflux, Pt. 3

“So let me get this straight.  You’re me…from the future?”

The elder Jessica – who, it had been decided upon by the three women, would be called “Commander” – shrugged and nodded, as if that wasn’t the best explanation.  “Future Earth, yes, but I’d wager I was from a different universe, too.  I have no idea if a ‘Paragon City’ even exists in my universe, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have living comic-book heroes in my world.”

The younger of the two – who asked to go by her hero name of “Stormscream,” but settled for “Stormy” when the other two women refused – shook her head.  “I mean, sure, we have comics too, who doesn’t?”  She ignored Ana raising her hand at this.  “But you pretty much leapt right out of the television screen of one of my favorite science fiction shows!”

Anafenza struggled to keep up with the women, who spoke of a whole different world they both knew well: Earth.  It was a planet, which she likened to her own Hydaelyn, though the majority of people there were “humans;” the Commander had called up a picture of one on the hand-held device she carried, and Ana had recognized the Hyur immediately.

Commander St. Peter had catalogued it as another similarity between the three women.  The list was, admittedly, small.  More was in common between the two Jessicas beyond their appearance, they discovered; both were orphans, both were adopted by a man named Jason, both loved the rain, they had similarly-named lovers.  It was far too fantastic to be pure coincidence.  Now they were comparing differences.

Commander St. Peter came from a future Earth, where she served in an exploratory service called “Starfleet” as a ship’s captain.  She was an alien, adopted by a human, and was currently in command of the starship Rafale, a spaceship.  Before waking in the cavern, she had been in her office on her ship, going over recent scans of a nearby system.

“Stormscream,” meanwhile, was nearly ten years younger, and already a registered hero in her home city, on a version of the same planet nearly four centuries earlier.  She was a hyur, but what they called a “mutant” in her world.  Anafenza listened with great interest and delight to discover it was this Jessica she’d dreamt of flying through the city and holding command over the weather; the girl was able to control the weather at will, and used her ability to call forth lightning to power her gauntlets and turn the energy into powerful blasts of sound.  Unfortunately, the girl had just laid down to sleep herself as well; she was dressed only in loose cotton pants and shirt, without her armor and gauntlets.

Then it was Anafenza’s turn to talk.  She swallowed hard.  “I’m Anafenza, like I explained.  My tribe is the Ejinn.  I come from a world called Hydaelyn, the continent of Eorzea.  I…am not anything really special,” she continued, and noticed both women eye each other skeptically.  “Honest, I’m not.  I bake, I clean, I love to swim, I can hold my breath for over a quarter bell, I love my friends but I can’t do anything to protect them…and for the past few weeks I’ve dreamt about both of you.”  The other two just nodded at this revelation, taking the wind from Anafenza’s sails. She looked at the two of them in confusion.  “You don’t…seem concerned by this?”

The Commander shrugged apologetically.  “Truth be told…I was having dreams as the two of you, too.”

“Same,” Stormy admitted, blushing a little.  “Which is why I thought this was still a dream.”

“Maybe it is,” Anafenza replied with a shrug.  “Maybe we’re just figments of each others’ imaginations?”

“So who’s the dreamer?” Stormy asked.

Commander St. Peter sighed and shook her head.  “Before we go in-depth in the psychological analysis of this, let’s just assume we’re all awake and here with one another…”  She tapped the device in her hand – a “scanner,” she’d explained, and frowned.  “It’s still pulling information from my ship’s computer…fascinating…”

Ana leaned towards Stormy. “Computer?”

“Yikes…you don’t have much technology where you come from?”

“Only the Garleans and ancient Allag…most of my people rely on magic and aether.”

“The computer is a piece of technology that can store, recall, and display information,” the Commander explained.  “It’s a library, but it’s all stored in…energy, basically, instead of books.”  She bit her lip, still reading her scanner, before snapping it closed.  She tapped the arrowhead on her chest, eliciting a small chirp from the gold and silver brooch.  “Oh, that’s a good sign.”

“What is,” Anafenza asked, confused.

She tapped the brooch again, and another chirp came out.  “No error sound.”

Stormy snapped her fingers. “Your ship is still close enough to be received.”  She pulled a black rectangle from the pocket of her pajama pants and tapped the front of it, making it light up.  She blinked. “I…have a signal too, on my phone. It’s roaming, but I have a connection.” She looked up in confusion.

“Curious.”  The Commander turned to Anafenza.  “You don’t…have anyway to communicate with people on your world, do you?”

Ana tapped her horn, where a small pearl was embedded in the scales.  “Linkpearls.  They let us talk over distances with one another.”  She tapped the pearl again, hearing it ring as it activated.  She shook her head quickly in surprise.  “Gods…it works!”

“How are all three of us still in range of wherever it was that we came from,” Stormy asked.

Commander St. Peter shook her head.  “The only thing I can thing is that we’re somehow trapped in some sort of…pocket dimension.  That exists simultaneously near all three of our starting points in time and space.”

Anafenza shook her head and huffed.  “Speak plainly, please?”

Stormy giggled.  “Pocket dimension, kinda like the nightclub?  The Pocket D?”

The Commander and Anafenza both stared at Stormy; she lowered her head in awkward silence.  “Apparently not…”

Commander St. Peter shook her head.  “I have no idea why or how you could build anything in a pocket dimension.  They’re highly unstable and short-lived.”

Anafenza didn’t like the sound of this.  “Meaning?”

“Meaning, we only have a few hours, if even that long, to get out of here before this dimension collapses in on itself with us still inside.”

There was a stunned silence in the cavern, until Stormy cleared her throat.  “Well, shit…”

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