#could those have just flown by themselves around like big metal birds?

[roseofhybrids]

A thought occurs-

so, the solver sent the disassembly drones to copper 9 with the task of killing all the "rogue AI" to make them easier to eat later

did that bus count as a rogue AI?

Like, it was definitely more animal-like than the worker drones, but it did still move all on its own. Presumably due to some sort of autopilot program? That was set loose, just like the workers, when the humans all died So, did some of the murder drones have to hunt down a bunch of smart vehicles?

What I'm saying is, I want to see a disassembly drone fight a bus

[gumnut-logic]

Gentle Rain (Part Eighteen)

Title: Gentle Rain

Warm Rain Series

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven | Part Twelve | Part Thirteen | Part Fourteen | Part Fifteen | Part Sixteen | Part Seventeen | Part Eighteen

Author: Gumnut

28 Feb – 1 Mar 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: Sometimes it is so gentle, you don’t realise it is happening.

Word count: 3119

Spoilers & warnings: Virgil/Kayo, Scott/OC, Gordon/Penelope, spoilers for Warm Rain up to this point in the timeline.

Timeline: Six months after ‘The Proposal’, almost a sequel.

Author’s note: For @scribbles97 ​ Oh, this was fun to write. It may be called a trope, but I don’t care, it was fun :D Nutty got to blow something up, mwhahahahaha! I hope you enjoy it.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

She eased herself slowly back into her life. She worked through a list of shocked friends, the necessary sympathy regarding her latest injury, questions about where she had been, how she was and what she was going to do next.

There were catch up lunches, new clients and Uncle Crispin.

He cornered her as soon as he could, which considering the state of the Siberian gas fields, wasn’t anywhere as soon as he would have preferred. He finally made it to her house two weeks after her month of seclusion.

The fact he actually visited the house was an indication of how worried he was. He hated the place, given all the memories of the family he had lost echoing through the hallways. His relationship with her deceased grandparents probably didn’t help either.

He hugged her the moment he saw her.

“How are you, honey?” He was the only person she would allow to call her ‘honey’.

“I’m getting there.” She smiled.

“What about the Tracy boy?” Sure enough, straight to the point.

“What about him?”

“You seemed pretty set on him at Christmas.”

“Yeah, well, that was Christmas and a lot has happened since.”

“Sally says Virgil is doing well.”

It took her a moment to connect the dots. Sally was Grandma Tracy. “As long as he gives himself the time to recover, he should be fine. It was close.” She shifted in her ‘scoot. “So, what’s the deal with you and...Sally?”

She couldn’t help but grin at the shy smile that spread over his face. That was the thing about Uncle Crispin. He was all tough adventurer on the outside, tough as nails, but on the inside, he was really just a soft, goofball.

Life had been as hard on him as it had been on her and his demeanour reflected that.

Sally had obviously wormed her way under his leathery defence system.

“She and I...Em, she makes me happy.” He grinned. “And I like to think I make her happy too. I can’t really ask for more than that.”

That sparked off a little self-reflection. “No, that’s exactly how it should be.”

Her uncle frowned. “Do I need to go park some dynamite under his ass?”

“You and your bloody dynamite.” An exasperated sigh. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Sally says he’s pretty messed up.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Some big effort to decentralise International Rescue, expand the service somewhat and take the strain off the Tracy family. He’s not sleeping and not talking. She’s worried about him.”

A stare. “He took my advice?”

“Your advice? No idea. But the man is obsessed. Sally reckons you should check on him.”

“She does, does she?” She eyed her uncle. “What do you think?”

“Em, I’m with you. Whatever makes you happy.”

Whatever makes her happy? She had a list, but only a few of those listed things were entirely in her power, so she would focus on those.

“I’m going to give it time.” The words were said quietly and slowly.

His hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed.

Uncle Crispin inevitably couldn’t stay long. It was a reminder of how close his job was to that of International Rescue as he was called out to Siberia yet again. She missed him, but it was necessary. Besides, she had her own life to get back to.

She closed up the house in Margaret River, moved back to Perth and back to work.

It was a lunch date with a colleague that saw her on the pedestrian bridge right at the moment it exploded.

-o-o-o-

Scott hit the comms room at a run. “Report!”

John’s hologram was in the centre of the room. He had only returned to TB5 three days earlier after an extended training session with his extremely small team. Gordon had snorted loudly when Scott commented on the personnel involved. He must remember to ask him about that.

“There has been an explosion on a pedestrian bridge across the Swan River. Em is on the bridge.”

“Explosion? How do you know that Em is involved?” He felt like grabbing his brother and shaking him.

“Kayo, put a tracker in her hoverscoot.”

“What?!” This came from both himself and Virgil behind him.

“Regardless, the bridge has been destabilised at one end. We’re needed.”

Scott didn’t hesitate, heading towards his chute. Virgil didn’t either and that was enough to bring him to a halt. “Virgil!”

“You’re going, I’m going.” And he didn’t stop moving.

Damnit! “John, get Alan and Gordon to Thunderbird Two.”

“Already on their way.”

He yanked the fake light fittings down just that bit harder than usual just as Virgil tipped up backwards on his painting and disappeared.

Fear churned in his gut.

Em.

-o-o-o-

Virgil’s chute, by the nature of its design was rough on his body. It had been at least a couple of months since he’d flown down it, so along with the adrenalin that always accompanied the ride there was a pleasant sense of accomplishment when it didn’t actually hurt.

His feet hit his ‘bird’s deck with a reassuring thump and no pain ricocheted anywhere. His heart was thudding and his breathing had spiked, but that could be considered normal.

Slipping into his seat, he automatically started pre-flight, the sequence so familiar, he didn’t even have to think.

The selector trundled out the modules and TB2 settled on the familiar Four. Moments later he heard Alan and Gordon rise up into the cockpit.

Kay sat down beside him in the co-pilot’s seat. What?

“Before you say anything, my presence is non-negotiable.”

Her eyes pinned him. “Okay.”

And his attention was taken with the launch. Thunderbird Two rolled out of her hanger and he opened the runway to let her through. Her familiar rumble vibrated through his bones, the adrenalin still pumping, his heart-rate matched her thrum.

Loaded onto her ramp, he pointed her towards the sky.

The clunk of external machinery.

An indrawn breath.

He fired her thrusters and she leapt off the platform, clawing her way into the blue.

-o-o-o-

There was a flash of light and a wall of sound hit her.

Her ‘scoot slid sideways and the people around her screamed as the bridge beneath her suddenly tilted sideways towards the water below.

At the far end of the metal and concrete structure a cloud of smoke was rising into the air.

Dust and debris rained down around her. Time froze in shock.

It started again as a woman to her right suddenly went down with a scream, clutching her arm. More screams erupted as the walkway wobbled again.

The only escape route was the other end of the bridge.

“Move! Move!” And she was grabbing people and pushing them in the direction of land. Em lowered herself to the woman who had fallen. There was blood pouring down the sleeve of her dress and she was terrified, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it. She got her to her feet and hurried her across the paving. “Run!”

The bridge shook again and there was an almighty screech of stressed metal as one of the spans arching over the structure broke off at its base. The sharp ping of support wires snapping and the massive arm of steel pendulumed, swinging down and along the edge of the walkway. The concrete groaned and cracked under her ‘scoot.

“Move!”

They ran.

It was a busy bridge in the middle of the day, even more so because a local market had been set up along the length of it. There would have been at least a hundred people walking across or browsing the stalls. As the walkway tilted further, craft items and marquees began to slide across the paving. Em used her ‘scoot to her advantage. It had grip where feet may not have had and her arms were strong.

She sped up, darting to grab a child falling towards the railing. She hustled people along, supporting them if they fell. As a whole the crowd moved at a frantic pace down the length of the bridge.

Until the other end of the bridge exploded.

She couldn’t help it, she screamed.

The whole structure shuddered and a large portion holding many of those fleeing people collapsed into the river below.

“No!”

She struggled to keep her ‘scoot steady as the walkway shuddered and tilted even further. She looked behind her. Both ends of the bridge had been destroyed. There was no way off the structure.

A man not far from her slipped and fell, the tilt of the bridge saw him slide all the way to the railing. He screamed as his foot caught in the grill and twisted, taking his weight.

Her hoverjets whined, struggling with the heavily angled surface.

Only to be joined by the sudden roar of rocket engines.

Thunderbird One tore up the Swan River, screaming to a halt above the bridge. Her underbelly opened and a grapple shot down and caught the walkway as it teetered further. VTOL roared.

And she heard his voice.

“Please keep calm. International Rescue is here to assist.”

-o-o-o-

His heart leapt into his throat.

The bridge had been decimated. Two explosions, one at each of the main pylons had mangled the steel spans that supported the bridge. The pylons themselves were fairly secure, but the walkway was swinging loose, its structure never designed to take its own weight without the support spans.

Wires were snapping and springing apart.

Human figures were falling into the water below.

“John, tell me what caused this.”

“Initial results still coming in.” A pause. “Incendiary. Likely a bomb or a series.”

“Shit.” A breath. “Tell me there are no more.”

“In depth scan in progress.”

“I need that information now.”

“Working on it.”

He bit his lip as numbers spun across the space between the bridge and the Thunderbird in orbit.

“No further explosives detected. Eos is repeating the scan as we speak.”

“Thank you, John. Advise the GDF. Thunderbird two, we need you here now.”

“On approach.”

And she was. The great green behemoth swooping low over the river, her VTOL churning the surface below. She came to an abrupt halt and released her module. She waited long enough for Thunderbird Four to dart into the river, before gathering the module back to her belly once again. She was going to need it. A flare of VTOL and she rose up and over the bridge.

“Virgil, deploy rescue rafts and stabilise the walkway. Gordon, you’re on victim retrieval. Watch for falling debris. Alan and Kayo, send down TB2’s grabs and start picking people off the bridge. I’ll be doing the same once you have the walkway stable.”

Virgil’s baritone followed by the rest of his family’s voices were a chorus of FABs.

Thunderbird Two quickly dropped a series of large self-inflatable support rafts onto the surface of the river on both sides of the bridge, before deploying her grapples to secure the walkway. The whole structure straightened under the strength of the Thunderbird.

“Scott, it’s too heavy for Two. We lose much more structural support, it’s going to drop.”

“FAB, Thunderbird Two.” Time was crucial.

The green ‘bird lowered her nosecone grapples geared with her rescue rig. The small figures of Alan and Kayo leapt off and started gathering people.

Scott disengaged his grapple and began deploying harnesses. As he was working, he couldn’t help but ask. “Where is she?”

John answered without hesitation. “On the main walkway, near the centre. She appears unharmed.” A hologram flashed up and there she was, her ‘scoot shooting back and forth gathering people and ushering them towards Two’s rescue rig. Something in his gut clenched. “Keep an eye on her.” And he resisted the urge to swoop down and grab her immediately.

“FAB.”

And the rescue effort began in earnest. Fly down grab a victim, reassure them, assess for urgent injury, harness them, transport them to one of the rafts, make sure they are secure, grab the next one. It was simple pick and grab. Thunderbird Two was filling Module Four with rescuees, Alan and Kayo darting across broken concrete and gathering people to the rig.

Gordon had the hardest job. The majority of persons who had fallen off the bridge were injured, and there were a lot of injured.

Fortunately, some more help arrived.

“International Rescue Australasia Oceania reporting for duty.” They arrived in a GDF flyer, but they had their uniforms and suddenly there were more hands to help. Gordon was joined by several of the aquanauts he had been training on the other side of the continent just the previous week. Figures supported by jetpacks not unlike his own darted out from the carrier’s underbelly and began snatching survivors alongside him. Field Commander Davis flickered up on his holographic display. “Commander, thought you could use a hand.” She didn’t smile, she was too professional for that. “IR AO is supplemented by several of our other recruits so we have more hands. Your orders?” The grey of her baldric sash shone dully in the holographic light.

Scott, however, couldn’t help but smile. “Pick and grab, Lauren. We’re on a time limit, so make it fast. Thunderbird Two can’t hold the bridge forever.”

“FAB.”

It was odd hearing that response from a voice outside his family.

The rescue sped up after that.

But not enough.

“Scott, we just lost a crucial support! It’s going to go!” Virgil’s voice wasn’t panicked, but it was damn close. Far above him Thunderbird Two’s VTOL screamed as his brother desperately attempted hold so many tonnes of bridge.

“Slave TB1, use her grapples.”

“FAB.” It would give them a few more minutes at least.

They almost had it. As John called the final evac, the rafts had been dragged to a safe distance, there were only a handful of people left on the bridge, several of them IR personnel attending to victims with life threatening injuries...

Em.

He caught sight of her just as Virgil swore over comms and Two plummeted several metres, the bridge sagging.

One of the support wires near her snapped under the sudden strain and whipped around... “Em!”

He was moving before thought, but still it played in slow motion just out of his reach. The wire slashed through the air, missing her, but catching her hoverscoot. A spray of sparks and she was flung sideways and over the edge.

-o-o-o-

It became a blur of terrified people.

When the rescue rig landed on the tilting deck, she took only a moment to acknowledge Kayo and Alan. Both attempted to evacuate her, but she knew she was useful where she was and refused. There were others who needed help more than she.

That didn’t stop them from trying several more times, each person she delivered to that rescue rig was accompanied by a visual plea from Kayo. Perhaps she had suspicions why, but this wasn’t the time to think about it.

The Thunderbirds above were joined by a GDF flyer and suddenly there were more IR personnel on that bridge. Her heart leapt as a man in blue swooped in to land, but it wasn’t Scott. He wasn’t even a Tracy and she realised that this was the embodiment of Scott’s strategic plan.

She handed him a baby along with the boy’s mother and she darted off to grab another child clinging to a crumpled market stall.

More and more terrified people were airlifted away. Soon it was down to the critically injured, those who couldn’t be moved without further injury. She and another IR operative had a teenage girl showing all the signs of a spinal injury when Kayo called out for final evac. Far above, even Em could hear the sudden strain of Thunderbird Two’s VTOL as the bridge trembled.

The concrete beneath her shifted and fell and her ‘scoot lost traction for a split second. She grabbed for purchase, but her fingernails scraped useless across the pavement. A screech of metal, movement, and she was thrown sideways. A blur of bridge railing, the world spun...

And she was falling.

Fast.

She may have screamed, but the rush of air stole it from her throat.

Her hands clawed at nothing. There was nothing, nothing-

She was surrounded by blue fabric. Warm, strong, breathing and, oh god, so familiar. It enveloped her, slowing her plummet, saving her.

She gasped and it came out a sob.

“It’s okay…okay, I’ve got you.”

She looked up and there were those eyes. Those gorgeous blue eyes that haunted her dreams.

Furrowed in fear.

“Scott?”

He didn’t answer, just pulling her in closer as if he was clinging to her as much as she was to him.

-o-o-o-

He caught her mid-air, his arms wrapping around her, pulling her close, slowing her spin and her fall. Oh god, he had caught her.

His breath hitched as she let out a frightened sob. “It’s okay...okay, I’ve got you.”

As he shifted into a hover, she looked up, ice blue eyes fixing on him. “Scott?”

Such hope and fear in his name.

He didn’t answer, just pulled her closer, holding on so tight, he felt he may never let go.

“Scott! Get out of there! It’s collapsing and I can’t stop it!” Virgil’s voice in his ear was drowned out by a roar and the shadow of the bridge above fell towards them.

Shit!

Holding Em close, he accelerated away from the tangle of falling steel and concrete. The shift in air pressure threatened to drag them in as the mass gained speed as it fell. Scott spun, darting to avoid the steel span that was following the walkway into the river. Em clung to him and he wished he’d had chance to harness her to himself.

He had never held anyone so tight.

Thunderbird One loomed, no longer attached to the falling bridge, her hover unaffected by the now churning river below. Flying through her open hatch, he was finally able to draw in a breath as it closed behind him.

He lowered her gently to the passenger seat. “Are you okay? Are you injured?”

Em didn’t answer and he realised she was trembling. He crouched down, his gloved hand reaching for her.

She stared at him for a moment, but still didn’t say anything, her hands going to the harness holding her to the ‘scoot.

Her fingers fumbled with the buckles until he reached in to help. Without a word, she slid herself free and he lifted the dead piece of equipment away.

Something dark glistened in the empty seat.

He spun back to find her staring at a spreading red stain on her skirt.

-o-o-o-

End Part Eighteen.

[loadphilly478]

Arc Strike

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Fifty years ago, I, along with the 5,000 Marines enduring the siege at the Marine forward airbase at Khe Sanh, came to know the power of the B-52 intimately. But not as “intimately” as the NVA who were the targets of these unbelievably powerful bombing runs that were called, “arc lights.” Before I arrived in Vietnam, I spent a week on Okinawa. The Marine base there is right next to the Kadena Air Force base where some of the B-52s who flew over Vietnam were based. They would take off and land over our barracks. Their size and the power of their engines was already deeply tattooed into my memory banks before I saw them in action near Khe Sanh during the siege.

It is hard to describe what one of these arc lights looks like, sounds like, or more importantly, feels like. One comes up against awe, or something that feels otherworldly in the presence of one of these “arc lights.” Depending on your proximity to one, whether you were being protected by it, or were the target of it, you experienced it as a revelation of an almost divine power, or the imposition of a demonic one. The power that they unleash is overwhelming and violent in terms of exponentials. You will get a visual sense of this in this video, but it is nothing like—being there. Nothing at all.

B-52s began almost unlimited operations around the besieged Marine base at Khe Sanh from the beginning of the siege in January of 1968. Those missions were carried out throughout the entire siege in ever increasing numbers. At first these arc lights were being dropped further out from the base at around 3,000 meters. The NVA, though, were smart. Final fantasy type 0 iso. They figured this out and moved closer to the base thinking that the Americans would refrain from dropping their payloads too close to the Marines on the base. But by the end of the siege they were dropping those heavy arc light strikes to within a thousand meters of the base.

You’ll see toward the beginning of this video, the kind of destruction they could unleash. Toward the end of the video you will see what the bomb load looks like leaving the bomb bays and wing pods of a single B-52. It looks like the stream of bombs will never end. Most arc light missions included three B-52s, each one dropping up to 75 huge bombs onto the enemy and the terrain below. These strikes bring destruction to the enemy on a mind-boggling scale.

Toward the end of the siege, we, like the NVA themselves, would become aware of a strike only when the bombs began exploding. You never heard the B-52s. They were flying at 30,000 when they dropped their payloads. Then we would see the clouds of dust and debris rising several hundred feet into the air in the long, progressive lines of exploding 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs. Then we would hear and feel the heavy impact of the percussion waves rushing over us. Those sound waves were powerful enough still, coming at us from that thousand-meter distance, that you felt them in your chest and they could cause you to take a few steps back. One cannot imagine what it must have been like for the NVA to be directly under one of those arc lights. That kind of encounter would change anybody.

For those of us holding that base, surrounded by three to four times as many NVA than there were of us, who had been enduring 77 days of endless artillery bombardment and mortar fire, wondering when they were going to attack us with their overwhelming manpower, those B-52 arc light missions were seen as one of our greatest defenders. We cheered them every time we heard them. Yet, at the same time, we all secretly within ourselves, thanked heaven that it was not us under that terrible onslaught. It was bad enough enduring the steady, destructive impact of incoming from the NVA’s big guns day and night, but being under an arc light has no conceivable comparison.

The B-52 is still an important element of American air power. The Veterans Site wishes to thank all those who have flown or been crewmembers on B-52s, and those who service them, then and now. You are a force to be reckoned with.

Void Zephyr Strike. Void Agni Strike. Void Poseidon Strike. Void Jeanne d'Arc Strike. Void Nidhogg Strike. Volcanic Chimera Strike. Ebon Chimera Strike. Tempest Chimera Strike. Tidal Chimera Strike. Luminous Chimera Strike. Wyrmprints: Beautiful Nothingness. I can't see a reason to use this ability as it costs too much, and does so little. Burning hands is a cool spell when you can cast it at minimal cost, but for monks, at low levels 2 ki points is a LOT, and by the time you can spend 2 ki points, the foes you're up against are either immune/resistant to fire, are one big foe so the spread doesn't matter, too dexy to get caught by it, or just.

The weather often wreaks havoc on our nation's power grid. From tornadoes to hurricanes to winter storms, the elevated power system is particularly vulnerable to damage from any number of weather-related forces. When damage to power lines occurs, intense arcing and power outages usually result. The highly visible, bright arcing from a damaged power line is often referred to as a 'power flash'. Power flashes can light up the nighttime sky, and as a result sometimes look like lightning. This article will examine the causes of power flashes and how to distinguish them from lightning. Paltalk messenger for mac.

In This Article: - Exploding transformer? The causes of power flashes - Appearance of power arcs - Responsible weather phenomena - Lightning or power flash?

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Exploding transformer? The causes of power flashes

Power flashes are almost universally referred to as 'exploding transformers'. However,

'exploding transformer' is an incorrect term, as transformers are rarely the source of these arcs. A 'power flash' is simply an arc caused by a shorted-out power line. These short-circuits can occur anywhere on the power grid where live wires are allowed to contact each other, grounded objects or the earth itself. While power flashes sometimes do occur at an actual transformer, they are typically not associated with one.

Right: Fig. 1 - A small arc occurs above a transformer in Carolina Beach, North Carolina as Tropical Storm Ernesto makes landfall. The presence of the transformer was coincidental, as the arcing was caused by wires above it touching in the high winds.

There are three ways power lines can contact each other or the ground and cause a short circuit and resulting arc:

Damage or collapse of the wires' support system (telephone poles, insulators or crossarms) due to external force (wind, ice).

External forces (such as strong wind) causing wires to move and touch each other.

A conductive foreign object (such as a wet tree branch, bird or squirrel) resting across two live wires.

Below: a tornado produces a power flash as it damages lines near Spearman, Texas

Appearance of power arcs

Power flashes are most visible and dramatic at night. They appear as an intense, sometimes pulsing glow emanating from a source on the ground. The color is usually a combination of blue, green, turquoise and orange - and the colors can change rapidly as the arcing continues. Power flashes can illuminate an entire cloud deck from underneath, which often results in it being mistaken for lightning. The arcing usually lasts for around one second or less, and the sound produced is usually that of a loud gunshot, a loud buzz, or both. Below: Fig. 2 - Video frame sequence of an intense power flash in a St. Louis neighborhood during the major ice storm of December 2006. Note the shifting colors as the arc continues. Watch a video clip

The power distribution system is designed to automatically detect such short circuits, and large breakers will normally cut power to the affected circuit quickly - limiting the duration of the arc. Since the cause of many short circuits are momentary (such as a lightning strike or a squirrel walking across wires) most of these circuit breakers (called reclosers) are designed to re-energize the lines several times before they completely cut power. If the cause of the short circuit remains, this re-energizing of the lines may result in two or three more arcing events before power is cut fully.

Below: A severe thunderstorm causes a power flash in Chesterfield, Missouri as lines touch in the high winds:

Power arcs are extremely bright, hot and intense, involving up to tens of thousands of amperes of current. They are very destructive to power equipment and are able to melt or burn any material they contact, including metal. Wooden telephone poles and trees are frequently ignited by arcing.

Below: Fig. 3 - Power flashes light up the sky in Melbourne, Florida as Hurricane Frances makes landfall. These power flashes ranged in color from blue, green, red and orange. (click images to enlarge) WATCH VIDEO CLIP: Blue/green and red/orange flashes from arcing power lines during Hurricane Frances.

Responsible weather phenomena

While power flashes can result from human-caused incidents (such as a car striking a utility pole), it is the weather that is by far the most prolific producer of damage that results in arcing and power outages.

Tornadoes, Hurricanes & Strong Winds Wind is the most frequent culprit in causing damage to power lines. Wind can damage lines directly or indirectly. Falling trees and branches can easily topple wires and poles. Airborne debris can lodge in wires, causing a short circuit. Power flashes frequently illuminate the funnels and debris clouds of tornadoes, as the intense winds destroy power lines and equipment.

Developing tornado damages power lines near Rozel, Kansas

Lightning Lightning is another frequent trigger of short circuits and arcs, but in an unusual way. Lightning striking an energized power line can cause a flashover, which is simply the breach of an insulator by an arc. The lightning channel itself acts as a 'starter' for a cross-insulator arc, which continues after the lightning flash is over. These flashovers are common during frequent lightning storms in urban areas. More detail can be found in this article on flashovers.

Video clip of lightning-triggered flashover Windows Media, 157KB

Ice Ice storms are very prolific producers of power flashes and widespread outages. The weight of the ice can bring down power lines and poles directly. Ice-laden trees often collapse onto power lines, bringing them down.

VIDEO CLIP: Arcing power lines in St. https://loadphilly478.tumblr.com/post/655925835092639744/dvdfab-93-20. Louis ice storm

Snow Heavy snow can indirectly cause power arcs when snow-laden trees and branches fall on lines. Early-season snowstorms that deposit heavy snow on fully-leafed trees are especially known for their potential to produce tree damage and power outages.

Earthquakes Shaking during an earthquake can cause widespread power line arcing from moving or collapsing power lines. These are contributing to a myth of so-called 'earthquake lights' often seen during larger quakes, particularly ones that occur at night.

Lightning or power flash?

Power flashes can often be very similar in appearance to a lightning flash. Adding to the confusion is that lightning itself can trigger a power flash (flashover), causing both to occur together. The following tips can help the observer visually identify the two.

Observe the color: Color is the most reliable indicator of a power flash vs a lightning strike. Lightning is never green or turquoise in color, so any flash in the sky of that color will indicate a power arc. A flash that changes color is a telltale signature of a power arc.

Observe the duration: Power flashes usually glow and 'linger' while a lightning strike will flicker rapidly.

Observe the location: Power flashes usually eminate from a single point on the ground, while lightning will illuminate the clouds more evenly.

Observe the sound: There will be no thunder associated with a power arc, unless a lightning strike was the cause. A loud buzz or gunshot noise indicates a power arc, although the sound of an arc usually cannot be heard more than a half mile away.

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Jimjeran- Chapter 6:  Night Noises

The nights on Arno are really quiet. Until they aren’t.

Audio Book Version of Chapter 6

Click Here to Hop to the Table of Contents

At night in Boston, the sounds we would hear were city sounds: cars and buses, sirens, machinery, and music.  And when he was asleep, but I wasn’t, I would hear Frank’s gentle snore.

     Frank and I still lived in the townhouse we had been able to afford on his teaching salary.  Though we now made more as nurse practitioner and professor than nurse and adjunct, we had worked to pay off school loans, assuming when we married, we’d permanently commit to a home as well as each other.

    It wasn’t an expensive townhouse, and yet it effectively muffled those city sounds with double-paned vinyl windows, venetian blinds and drapes, carpeting to curb echoes, and always a fan or white noise machine to cover up the sound remnants that made it through.

    There was no such barrier on Arno. For one thing, the only source of cooling was the breeze off the iar, so the louvered windows were opened, especially at night, to let the air in. Even when closed, louvers did little to block sound.  

    The first night as I lay in bed, I was struck by the eerie lack of the sounds of civilization.  No cars or public transportation, no music, save for the random child carrying a guitar down the road, nothing in the house powered by electricity—no refrigerator humming, no fan, no pumps or toilets running.  In the silence I started to hear other, softer sounds: the lap of small waves on the lagoon shore, palm and pandanus branches rustled by the wind, the low murmur of my nearest neighbors talking.

    My brain worked to catalogue unfamiliar sounds: the high-pitched whine of a mosquito buzzing around my ears, the random crack and creak of my unfamiliar apartment.

    One strange sound I could not place, though.  It sounded the the chirp of a small bird, and it was coming from the rafters above my bed.  From a similar location, I heard a strange slapping.   It seemed to follow a pattern: Chirp, chirp, cheep, cheep, slap-slap-slap-slap-slap.  

    Finally, my curiosity piqued, I went and turned on the light. It didn’t illuminate the rafters entirely, so I added the beam of my flashlight. When I found the source of the noise, I laughed.  Two huge amber-colored lizards were mating on my rafter.  They would chirp and cheep, sweet talking each other, and then the slapping was caused by their tails beating against the metal roof as they lost themselves in the throes of gecko passion.  

    I turned off the lights, reassuring myself that while they might drop little offerings of poop down (so that’s what I’d found on the table at supper time!) at least they’d be up there catching mosquitoes.

    It had gotten easier to fall asleep in the past week.  The sounds were becoming familiar, and the lapping ocean waves were the best white noise machine I’d ever had.

    I was currently lying in bed trying to think through the events of the past six days. I had flown out with Laura on Sunday, moving my stuff into the apartment and clinic, watching Laura leave, and then cleaning and unpacking.  

    On Monday, I had met Sharbella and done well-child checkups in the morning. In the afternoon I’d had my first emergency case when Jamie had arrived with his corrugated tin boat wound.

    The following night, Tuesday, I had taken food to the Peace Corps boys at the Ine school.  Jamie had walked me home, and I’d made my first friend out here.

    On Wednesday, I had focused on re-organizing and familiarizing myself with everything in the clinic. I spent some time sanitizing the surfaces, and then read up on tropical climate skin ailments and treatments.  That was most of what I saw: people dealing with rashes, boils, burns, cuts and scrapes; and I also noticed that some wounds developed keloid scars, particularly on patients with darker skin.  What I discovered from my research was that while keeping wounds moist in other climates can aid in healing, the level of humidity and the varieties of bacteria in the tropics can actually impede healing.  The general consensus was that you should use an antiseptic, and then something to block bacteria from entering the wound.

    I had stitched up the hand of one man who cut himself with his machete attempting to split coconuts. Sharbella had explained that the one cash crop in Arno was copra—the smoked meat of coconuts, which was processed and made into coconut oil for suntan lotion shampoo, and other toiletries. The men would pick the coconuts, strip off the husks, split the shells by holding them in one hand and giving them a sharp blow with the blade of their machetes, and then stacking them on the smoking trays.  This man had gotten distracted, the blade had slipped, and he had a deep cut in the pad of his thumb.

    On Thursday Plu Rose had brought Sinana back because the boil had come to a head from the daily salt compresses. I lanced the boil as close to her hairline as possible, drained it, and then applied a sterile dressing with a warning not get it dirty or wet.

    Jamie had also stopped in on Thursday for a new bandage. He had worried that the wound was seeping clear fluid and wanted to make sure it wasn’t infected.  The wound seemed to be progressing nicely, but Jamie was a little bummed to be banned from swimming for another three days.

    But now it was finally Friday night, and after an exhausting week, I was looking forward to not having clinic hours on Saturday—of being able to sleep in, explore the island, brainstorm some better meals, and possibly do my laundry. I was feeling a little anxious about that process, having never done laundry completely by hand before.  I had the big round red tub, the washboard, and the scrub brush, plus a laundry line and clothes pins for drying everything.  I would need to draw water from the well, and then it would just be an investment of time.

    I had fallen into bed mentally and physically exhausted, with the sweet sense of anticipation knowing I would get rest and relaxation the next day.  I was almost asleep when I heard a new sound, one that instantly made my heart rate increase and my muscles tense. Outside the window right next to my bed I heard quiet footfalls and a rustling sound.

    And then I heard singing.  Sort of.  It was a tune so distinct, I could plunk it out on a piano if I needed to.  It was in a sweet voice, singing a sweet tune, but it made me feel more like I was hearing the haunting little kid voice singing a nursery rhyme in a horror movie trailer.

    “Miss Peachay, I want to talk to you,” sang a heavily accented male voice.  “Miss Peachay, I want to talk to you…”   I froze in my bed, the throb of panic in my chest, breathing shallowly.

    A voice came closer, nearly in my ear, just speaking this time, softly, enticingly.  “Miss Peachay, do you want to go to shungle with me?”

    Go?  To the jungle?  I lay in my bed, petrified.  

    “Miss Peachay! Que lukuun likatu!”

    “Miss Peachay! Que konaan bwebwenato?”

    My troubadour began serenading me again.  “Miss Peachay, I want to talk to you…Miss Peachay, I want to talk to you.”

     I didn’t want to say anything.  What could I say?  Go away?  I don’t want to go to the jungle with you?

    I was about to announce that I had no intention of talking to them or going to the ‘shungle’ with them when I heard another voice.  A deep, resonant Scottish brogue, hearty, confident, and calm, speaking fluent Marshallese.

     “Enana kaiṇṇe, Abner.  Miss Peachay ejab kōṇaan etal ippām.  Ta ṇe kwōj jerbale, Samson?  Quejjooko ñe ej kadek.”

    The other men answered, talking back and forth.  I heard all of the voices retreating, traveling farther and farther down the road toward the Peace Corps school, and then it was silent.  I listened to see if Jamie was coming back, but I heard nothing.  I couldn’t understand why I was disappointed.  I had already gone to bed.  I hadn’t wanted the company of the men outside my window.  Why would I want Jamie?

    I was just relaxing, on the edge of slumber, when I heard a different noise.  The crunch of gravel, then rubber slapping on wood, paired with a creaking sound.  Flip-flops?  On my steps?  A long moment of silence, then a creak and a rattling sound.  Someone was on my doorstep, and he was trying to turn my doorknob.  I was almost certain the door was locked.  I knew I’d locked it when I came in from going to the bathroom before bed.  Hadn’t I?  Frantically, I thought over everything I owned.  Did I have anything in here that would be a good weapon?  Sundresses, shoes, a towel?  A book.  A frying pan!

    I sat up in bed, ready to run if I needed to.  Where would I go?  Could I run a mile to the Peace Corp school?  I threw my feet over the side of the bed and crept across the floor, scrabbling for my zories at the door.  I was panting, nearly hyperventilating.  “I can’t run in flip-flops!”  I whimpered to myself, not realizing I’d actually spoken out loud.

     “Ripālle?”  The deep voice came through the door.  “Claire, is that you?”

     “Jamie?!!  Dammit, Jamie!”  I exclaimed, opening the door.  “You gave me a freakin’ heart attack!”

     “Sorry, lass,” he chuckled, stepping away from the door.  “I escorted yer drunk friends away, but thought I should check your door to make sure it was locked in case any of them tried to bother ye again tonight.  I thought ye were asleep, and I didna want to bother you.”

     “I’m quite awake,” I said, looking around.  “Do you want to come in?”

     “Sorry, Ripālle,” he said. “I think ye should close the door.”

     I moved to come outside, and he shook his head.  “No, Claire.  Wi’ you on the inside, and me on the outside.”

     “What?”  I asked.

     “I dinna want the island men to get the idea that if they just stick around longer that they’ll get invited in.”  He reached for the door knob and started to pull the door closed.

     “But Jamie, my heart is still pounding.  I’m not going to be able to go to sleep.”

     “Ye dinna need to be afraid.  I’ll make sure you’re safe,” he said reassuringly, as he inched the door the rest of the way closed.  “I’mna going home yet. I will sit on yer doorstep awhile ‘til I’m sure they won’t come back. ”

    I stood inside my apartment with the door closed in front of me for a frustrated second, and then I turned around, leaned against the door and slid down until I was sitting with my back against it.

     “Why were they here?  What did they want?” I asked.  For a moment I wondered whether he’d be able to hear me, but quickly realized the door was hollow faux wood, with a gap at the bottom—and the two louvered windows to either side were completely open to the night air.

     “What did they say?” Jamie asked.  The door moved slightly against my back as he sat down on the other side.    

     “They said they wanted to talk to me or go to the jungle with me,” I said.  “They asked nice, but it freaked me out.”

     “Both mean about the same thing…” Jamie said. “And I’m sure you can guess what that is.”  I could guess, and I could also feel the door vibrate from his husky voice.

     “What did you say to them?” I asked.

     “Dinna remember, really.  That what they were doing wasn’t good.  That you didn’t want to go with them.  And I told them they make poor choices when they’re drunk.”

     “They were drunk?” I asked.

     “Most definitely,” said Jamie.  “They wouldna be bothering ye if they were sober.  Abner and Samson are decent enough men.  They came stumbling by our house and told Rupert they were going to visit ye.  I didna want to confront them if they decided better, so I walked along the beach, matched their pace, and came out here when it was obvious they werena leaving ye alone.

     “Thank you,” I said. “That was weird.  I hope that doesn’t happen again.”

     “Well,” said Jamie, slowly.  “I canna promise that.  I’m surprised Laura didna mention the nighttime visitors.”

     “That happens a lot?” I asked, stunned.  “What do I do next time, when you aren’t here to send them away?”

     “Do ye want to learn some Majol?” Jamie asked.

     “Okay,” I responded agreeably.

     “What do ye ken already?”

     “I know ‘eh jab ma lay lay,’” I said.

     “Okay.  ‘I don’t understand.’ That’s helpful, but not here.  What else?”

     “Um.  Kway shu tal non yah!”

     “Hmmm.  Excellent, if you want to ask them where they’re going, though they already announced they would like to go to the jungle,” he laughed.

     “Okay, then what should I say?” I asked.

     “Ejab kōṇaan is pretty easy,” Jamie said.  “That means ‘I don’t want.”

     “Eh jab coe non,” I repeated.

     “Kwō etal wōt means ‘you should go away.’”

     “Quo eh tal watt.”

     “Good,” Jamie said.  “But you should say something, even if you say it in English.  They’re kind of persistent.”

     “So, let me get this straight.  I can’t walk alone at night, though now I’m pretty sure I don’t want to, but guys can just come to my house and try to seduce me through the window?

     “Or door,” said Jamie.  The door shook; I could feel him laugh.  “I’m just joking, Ripālle,” he murmured.

     “You called me that again,” I said.  “Isn’t that the word that means selfish white person?”

     “Aye, Ripālle.”

     “Rrrri pol´-lay?” I repeated.  “You’re really going to call me selfish white person?”

     “I dinna mean it that way,” he said.  “And are ye saying ye arna one?”

     I scoffed.  “Well, maybe I am, but why call me that?”

     “It’s a pretty word. I get to roll an ‘r’ at the beginning.”

     I laughed from a sudden realization.  “That’s why you Scots feel so at home in the Marshall Islands,” I said.  “You’re the only two cultures I know that roll their ‘r’s’ so often!”

     I heard a huge yawn from outside.  “Well, Ripālle,” he said.  “I’m tired.  What are ye doing tomorrow?”

    “Laundry, I think,” I said, his yawn contagiously spreading to me.  “And you?”

     “Can I come visit ye in the light?” he asked.

     “That’d be nice,” I said.  “Goodnight, Jamie.”

     “Goodnight, Claire.”  I got up from the floor, and listened to the sound of Jamie’s flip-flops crunching in the gravel, my young protector heading home.

Young Geckos in Love

On to Chapter 7 : Dirty Laundry

Jamie and Claire get better acquainted

[smcadam]

Changeling 2.

Her world was no brighter waking up than it was when she had fallen asleep. A small room of thick fabric and leather held Morgan’s form as she lay still, eyes and mind slowly adjusting to her predicament. Her hand entered her field of view, still a claw of dark red armour, like little natural gloves that silently opened and closed. The same covered her feet, though the rest of her body was bare of protection, covered only by grey skin and the strange black material that she had wrapped around herself.  

 Aside from her minute size, those two shadows were the strangest part of the change she had been subjected to. She could control them, contract them to curl tight around her form like a crude toga, or stretch them out like stiff boards jutting from her shoulder blades. If she even focussed Morgan found she could curl them like folding a rug away, though when relaxed they show their true shape- long ovals, longer than she was all with three points at the far end.  

 She stood slowly and turned on the spot, letting them contract and stretch, then rise to their fullest extent and come down behind her. The resulting force was enough to throw her off her clawed toes and wheel her arms for balance, before lifting them again and repeating the experiment.  

 “You’re my wings,” she found herself smiling somehow as her fingers crushed against the shadowy appendages. Even the words felt right, and with the picture of a tiny winged girl came another word for her predicament. “You’re my wings, and I’m apparently a fairy. Or tripping balls on some awful French fries.”  

 The jibe amused her less as she searched around her prison- the interior of that madwoman’s rucksack. Thankfully the frame was such that it wasn’t collapsing on her, but even the fact that she could stand within a horizontal bag set her heart beating like the clappers. She was tiny, small as a doll, and locked away within a bag being taken somewhere! She could feel the vibrations of some vehicle, the occasional blare of cars and traffic, and logically the rucksack wouldn’t be carried if it was horizontal. Nor could she open it from inside- while she could pull the innards of the zip around, there was some tie or lock holding the zip together on the outside so that the hole between was too small for any escape.  

 Did she even want out? The image of that woman, that evil Morgan looming over her like a titan filled her mind and the fairy flinched and curled her wings around her. She was practically an insect, any creature in the world would tower over her. Cats, people, cars, birds, even dogs and babies would be hazards to such a tiny creature! What were her odds of surviving? The other Morgan might as well have stabbed her rather than leave her to be slain by a toddler.  

 She quivered and choked, releasing a pained sob as tears slipped down her cheeks. When was the last time she had felt safe? When she got her phone from the reception of the hotel? Thinking back that must have been stolen from her by the girl so that she could prepare her ambush. How long had she been followed? A memory swam in her head, a curly black haired woman staring out from a bus they passed in the motorway days ago. Was it the same one? Just lurking and waiting until she was alone?  

 Her wings tensed and Morgan shot up with a flap, punching and kicking at her prison as a terrified scream broke from her lungs. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right! The overwhelming vulnerability was too much! She should have fought back more, weathered the pain while she was still big and taken those scissors and… and… and made sure that maniac couldn’t do this to her! She clawed the canvas wall, opening a small rip through which the wind whistled. Her other hand lashed out, small chitinous fingers splayed to slice at the bag again, and then again before her long foot lashed out to kick.  

 Cold air met bare bony toes, and she pulled it back out, breathing hard as she inspected the tear. It was smaller than her head, but enough that she could peer out, revealing a couple of other suitcases and vibrating metal in the dark with an occasional orange flight from overhead. She rocked on her heels, indecisiveness pounding in her breast. The bag was safe for the moment. The outside was unknown.

 But she had had enough of letting that freaky doppelganger have her way! She tensed and shoved her claws into the cut, pushing with all her might to widen the rip. It strained each tiny muscle, but little by little she felt it give, threads and stitches breaking in this one patch. When it was about there she pushed with her head, squeezing dark hair and feelers through as wind suddenly whipped her face.  

 The rucksack was in the back of a truck, a pickup with a mess of scattered bags and accoutrement in the rear. Overhead streetlights whizzed by, creating a dizzying flashing effect and Morgan screwed her eyes closed and struggled, freeing her arms and shoulders on either side and then her chest and wings. Her hips gave a little trouble, for a couple of moments she lost balance and waved her legs in the air frantically within the bag. Then she heaved her wings and arms together and toppled out, a tiny fairy surrounded by enormous boxes.

Morgan gasped and pushed herself up off of the cold, somewhat grimy metal and pulled her wings tight around herself. A glance up towards the rear-view of the pickup’s cabin showed the back of two heads faintly, one bald and tattooed and one with curly black hair. That was enough for her to hurry in the opposite direction, ducking under a handle and clambering over a suitcase until she reached the back of the cargo bed and scrambled to peer over.  

 The sea was gone. Its scent, its light and its roar were all absent now, replaced by a dark countryside of rolling hills and small villages. Her captors drove down a quiet A-road constantly, so fast that she had to tense to avoid being thrown from the vehicle by the wind, and her locks rippled and lashed about her face. How much time had she spent sleeping, sulking and fearing? At a guess it had been most of the night, and sure enough there was a hint of violet dawn light tinging the horizon ahead. That meant they were driving east too.  

 Her deductions were interrupted by the vehicle braking. Her grip loosened and she found herself thrown from the edge of the cargo bed, thudding onto a turquoise case where her claws dug in for dear life. Then they were stopped. Morgan bolted upright and scanned around, they had hit a crossroads with lights, nothing more, and a lorry was thundering up behind them, looking larger than anything she had ever seen.  

 Shaking her head the fairy turned left and leapt into the air, throwing herself up and up, over the edge of the cargo bed and over the road. Her wings unfurled and tensed into their great oval form as Morgan suddenly remembered she was in Europe, not Britain. Instead of dark grass and turf and the edge of the road ahead, she was falling towards another lane and beyond that another entire side to the motorway with rushing cars.  

 She squealed and moved her wings frantically, a black blur that caught the heavy winds and flung her through the night like a shuttlecock. The world span, cloudy night sky’s giving way to tarmac then to dark fields and then to the starless sky once more. More to the left? She tensed one wing over the other and spun more before beating both together and throwing herself upwards. The dazzling orange bulb of a lamppost hurtled past and she cast herself in its direction, wings throwing her back to flip onto the metal with a painful thud. Her claws grabbed onto the bulbs canopy before pain could register, and hunkered down against the worst of the wind.

 Moments passed before Morgan found herself coming to from the shock. Her back felt painful and bruised, wings tingling and shuddering, tears rolling from her eyes like dew, and a mad giggle shaking her body. She had wings! She had flown! SHE WAS ALIVE!  

 Admittedly, a more rational part of her mind said, she had perched herself on a lamppost in the centre of the motorway as opposed to reaching either side. But it was progress! The red taillights of her captors were receding into the distance, and with them went a modicum of fear. She had height now, and wings- just like her skydiving had been supposed to go.  

 Adrenaline surged through her body as she gathered her legs once more, released her grip and rocketed into the air. Morgan turned a little, feeling the southwards wind before she stretched her wings and caught it. Again the effect was immediate, but this time she had some intention and stayed straight as the roaring gale carried her with it across the motorway, above a van, past another lamppost, over a slope, above a fence! She flapped again and again, rushing above a field the size of the amazon. With effort she found she could rise in the air, enough so that a couple of lonely trees and bushes whipped by below her, and a thousand dazzling orange stars illuminated the path the roads and towns about this place.  

 She flew towards those, not particularly by choice. Turning against the wind seemed to only invite a spiral into disaster, and even maintaining this course was complex enough. For several minutes it was simply all she had, the wonder of passing above the world, above all of the horrors that would stand above her. Yet pain and weariness could not be outrun that easily and she discovered that even her shadowy wings began to ache and tire.  

 “Falling is the easy bit, just stick the landing,” Morgan breathed, watching the terrain.  

 For now it was pasture, but that ended with a copse of trees beyond which town lights glimmered. If she fell too slowly then she would meet a wall. Too quickly and the ground would be no more welcome.  

 Teeth bared themselves in a nervous grin and the fairy spread her arms and softened her wings, letting them rise up into a V. Sure enough she began to fall, and flapped them gently to catch herself, then lifted them again and slid down through the sky. All the while the trees and lights drew nearer and she dropped down lower, before flapping her wings in a flurry like birds seemed to do to land.  

 Her flurry sent her spiralling to hurtle into grass face first and roll what felt like a hundred metres in a ball of limbs and wings before the sickening tumble finally ended.  

 “So close. That was the bit to not mess up,” Morgan groaned and slowly unfolded herself. She hadn’t done terribly. Nothing seemed broken, just muddy and messy, and simply being on the ground brought back her sense of dread. Anything could be skulking out here, big enough to treat her like a light snack, apart from where humans dwelled. Not that humans weren’t big and scary, but they had spare rooms, food, and she could speak to them.  

 “Sprechen sie englisch?” she spat bitterly in German. No, they couldn’t be spoken with. This was Spain or France, probably the latter given her previous bearing, and neither was a language she could speak adequately.  

 With a deep sigh she rubbed her messy hair and trudged towards the trees and light, several paces needed for every single foot of ground. By the time she reached the small barrier of trees, Morgan had to stop and lay against some monstrous roots to regain her breath, thankful that she was either too small, or toes too tough to struggle walking barefoot.  

 A tall black shape was there when she opened her eyes once more. Shaggy dark blur blended with the shadows, rendering the dog an indistinct mess, save for the orange eyes that peered down.

 “Aah.. ah hello doggy…” Morgan squeaked, tensing with her back against the tree. The dog was even bigger than anything she had expected, some wolfish breed with sharp ears and a long snout, no collar on its neck. The ears twitched at the sound of her voice and it took a step forwards, planting great shaggy paws before her.

 “No… no… don’t eat me, I’m just a fairy passing through. You know. Usual stuff. Fairy hitchhiker. Must get us all the time.” Morgan snorted and stood, flinching as the beast darted a step to her left. “Yeah...oh well I’m really a human… no, no, what the heck am I doing? Taking to dogs? Of course you can’t understand me. You’re French. Uh… joom apple Morga- ah!”  

 She toppled as it stepped close and thrust its muzzle down towards her, folding her legs and arms defensively before her. A cold wet object pushed into her forearms and Morgan swallowed as the hound sniffed at her. It was better than being eaten in any case, and she nervously pushed back, petting the nose with small hard hands, “There, there, that’s a good boy. A bueno doggo. Just back up a little there, that’s good, you’re not so bad, better than some of the freaking humans I know.”  

 Its eyes blinked with a flicker of intellect and it stepped back with a low growl, perking its ears up as if to listen for some other voice. Once more it glanced to her, and then padded off, vanishing silently amidst the other trees and bushes.

 “Alright, mercy then,” Morgan breathed and stood once more, tracking its movements up the tree before hurrying towards the buildings beyond. A fence supposedly separated a parking lot from the small woodland, but she walked underneath easily and jogged across the empty carpark. It was still night, overcast by heavy clouds, even long after seeing the hues on the horizon. No, that must have been sunset; she had a lot of night-time left.  

 Night time was time enough to experiment a little. As she worked her way forwards, she began to use her wings more and more. With a couple of flaps and a jump she could make it atop a decent wall, and from those she scrambled onto a car then a fence, then onto her first rooftop. From there she rested and watched- a few people were still about at this hour, but how could she know if they spoke English?  

 Her solution was simple, elegant, and primarily involved screaming “ENGLISH” at the top of her lungs to see how people reacted. Most glanced about in abject confusion, or called out in Spanish, and were unhelpful albeit entertaining to observe.  

 Yes, it was hardly the best plan but it certainly better than stalking conversations hoping to hear fluent English. So Morgan continued hopping and gliding towards the centre of this town, periodically screaming the word at the top of her lungs.  

 The rain surprised her. The first drop was as big as her fist and soaked her hair and feelers, sending her spinning in search of some fox or monster drooling over her. Then another drop wet her left wing, and another plopped beside her, and the fairy was sent rushing to the nearest bush for cover where she crouched, soaked and shivering. She had never imagined dying to a simple rain shower, but the prospect made even that blasted rucksack hold some appeal.  

 Morgan shook her dripping her and pulled her wings overhead like an umbrella. There had to be somewhere open, a home or a door or a business that was warm and dry inside, she just had to find it, if her wings even worked wet.  

 “HELLO? ENGLISH?” a male, deep bullfrog voice called out amidst the rain. Morgan tensed, ears pricked and scrambled out onto the pavement. There was a figure up ahead, a big man in a heavy coat with black cap on. “GIRL, ARE YOU OUT HERE?!”  

 From the ground, the human stood seemingly hundreds of times her size, a colossus greater than a building. The fairy froze, locked as fear and desperation warred within her, the urge to flee such a gigantic threat struggling against her hopes for help. Her wings lashed and played, shaking themselves almost dry before her muscles tensed.  

 “Hello? Tch…no es que importe,” He croaked, turning to open a car door with a shrug. That was it. Her legs stretched, she leapt up and lashed out with her wings, flying up in a great arc that landed on the bonnet of the car with a ping.  

Wide eyes stared down at her from a face halfway through getting into the car. It was a big face, round and red cheeked with a grey handlebar moustache and thick lips, a cap with a golden badge covering what seemed to be wild white hair. Morgan pushed herself to ignore the temptation to disappear and giggle at his expression, instead pulling her wings around to cover her body and call up.  

 “You speak English?”  

 “Haaaaaa…” A long croak came from the old man’s mouth. He leaned on the roof of his car beside a siren, rubbed his eyes with his sleeve, looked back at her and raised a hand to his ear.  

 “I said, DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!? Charades isn’t good enough!” Morgan squeaked and stomped hard, almost losing her footing on the rainsoaked metal.  

 “Yes, hoi, yes, don’t stamp on the car, little thing! It’s, it’s very very rude, you understand?” He coughed and stepped out around the door, frown turning to embrassment, “Hoi, don’t be scared, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t snap, you’re not going to, ah, get hurt by me.”  

 Morgan blushed slightly, folding her arms, “Sorry for stamping. I need help. You’re police, right? That’s perfect.”  

 “Well, yes and no. I am going home for tonight, and my sergeant, he called, and he say there is a crazy lady shouting English words at people on this road and making them afraid. That was you yes? You have no espanol?”  

 “Ein bissen.” Morgan muttered sarcastically, before shaking her head, “I think I might be a fairy.”  

 “Hmm. You do look like a fairy. That’s what I was thinking. So you are a little English fairy looking for someone you can speak to?”  

 “I’m not English! I’m Scottish- and I’m human- or I was human but someone turned me into this and made me tiny and now I’m lost and she took my stuff and everything’s giant and I can fly and-“  

 “Hoi, oi, take it easy, you’re all mud and cold, that can’t be good, get in the car and we talk..” He reached a hand, palm up awkwardly and Morgan jumped onto it, clinging tight, “Ah, gentle, those are sharp fingers little…?”  

 “Morgan. My name’s Morgan Fells.” She slipped from his hand onto the dry passenger seat, “Thankyou mister, what’s your name?”  

 “I am Ernest. Officer Ernest Bordia, it’s good to meet you Morgan, provided I am not dreaming.” He chuckled and stepped into the car, pulled the door shut and turned it on. A radio sprang to life with some music and warm air turned on as he fiddled with dials, before leaning back and pulling on a seat belt. “Now. I might be dreaming. So, here is my idea, so I do not seem like a crazy man to the rest of the police. Or more of a crazy man, eh? I am off duty, been a long day really, so I shall go home and you may stay there and pull yourself together. Then in morning if you are not a figment of my imagination, then we shall show to the other police that you are a woman needing help, and I am not a crazy man, yeah? And if you are a figment of my crazy mind, then hopefully I will stop hallucinating by then.”  

 “That’s better than any of my ideas,” Morgan said, not wishing to admit that meeting even more humans might terrify the life from her just now.

 “Very well, we will get this sorted out somehow, I am sure, do not worry!” He cheered and began to drive, one hand fumbling to give her a packet of tissues to help dry herself. Then he picked up a radio and called some Spanish into it, some brief conversation to a supervisor about the incident that Morgan didn’t understand a word of.  

 As it was she almost dozed off before the car stopped and the door opened, Ernest stepping out before a modest white villa surrounded by hedges. She hopped across the seats and onto the driveway as he opened the door, hurrying under the eaves to escape the rain.  

 “Where di- ah there you are, welcome, welcome go on into the kitchen,” He said jollily, locking the car behind before following her down a hall to a wooden panelled kitchen where she perched on the table.

 “Now. That is shelter and warmth eh? I’ll boil some water- what do you need, Miss Morgan?”  

 “Some food would be nice- and something that could cover me if there’s anything you could think of,” She admitted, adjusting her wings across herself in their crude toga curl.  

 “Ah hoi, I’ll have a look- ah, there are some clean little divvies and cloths in the cupboards, and a couple of cushions that might serve as a comfortably bed, yes. In the meantime,” he lifted over a bowl of fruit- grapes and apples mainly- and a couple of biscuits, “You eat what you want, enjoy.”

 She went for the biscuits immediately, breaking off a chunk and scoffing it down quickly, almost quivering with joy at the sweet taste soothing her stomach.  

 “Ah but maybe be careful, that is quite a lot for you, don’t eat too fast.” Ernest chuckled, brewing a kettle.

 “Sorry, but this feels like the longest I’ve got without chocolate since I had teeth,” Morgan wheeled the rest of the biscuit over and set to work as if it was an enormous pizza. Even then she barely managed half of it before tiring and moving onto the slippery subject of grapes that left her sticky fingered.

 A clink came as Ernest set a mug of coffee down beside her, his cap and coat hung up to reveal a balding pate amidst wispy white hair. “Feeling better? Do you feel more up to talking?”  

 His other hand held a pen at the ready on a notepad, and Morgan scoffed slightly as she imagined how hard writing would be for her now.  

 “Yes… so, I’m meant to be a human and I was coming here on holiday with some friends,” She smiled as she described Kyle and Jennifer and speculated if they might even be engaged by this point, then explained her plan to head to Barcelona after skydiving.  

 “Well you did get to fly, yes, that is one bright side eh?” He laughed heartily.  

 “It was hard, I’m no good at landing! Stop giggling.”  

 “Alright alright, serious faces.”

 “Yes so I stayed at the hotel, a place called the Sirena near the airport, and a woman stole my phone. I think she hid it at lost property to get me out of my room, and then when I went back upstairs, she jumped up from behind my door, hit me in the head with something and tied my arms together- like this.” She bent her arms behind her back as if to demonstrate, and took a deep breath, “Then she injected me with something and cut a bit of my hair off. My arms started to turn into these and I got tiny and grew wings and she threw me into a rucksack. I managed to squeeze out eventually and found my way to you.”  

 “She… injected… something, there we go.”  

 “Why are you writing notes in English?”  

 “Because you are speaking in English, these are quotes, I write them down before translating, not after, you see? To ensure they are, uh, accurate, yes.” He nodded and scribbled some more, before picking up a biscuit and dunking it into his coffee. “Did you see what she injected? Or what did with the hair?”  

 “No, but that’s not even the weirdest part! Well, turning into a fairy was, but also she looked just like me and said she was named Morgan Fells too and was reclaiming something. Oh but her hairs curl, and she had dark blue eyes!”

 “And she was not a fairy? She was a woman?”  

 “Tch, yes, like five foot six, that was my old height- what do my eyes look like now?”  

 “They are black all around with yellow dots in the middle. So she assaulted you, said she was trying to take back something and all this time with the changing and the being hit, did you not scream? Did she gag you?”  

 She shook her head and swallowed a new chunk of grape, “She said no one could hear us but there was no gag. I screamed a lot, I was yelling at the top of my lungs but it was if the room was soundproof…. The hair she took is probably in my suitcase and bags. She only had a rucksack and she emptied it out to put me in it, and was rearranging my luggage.”  

 “So she takes your things, this is interesting. Not anything I have heard of before though- especially not the injection. Was there anything special you saw about the syringe she used? Did it look alien or radioactive or peculiar at all?”  

 “No... no, just plain- oh but she had weird drawings! There were little chalkboards with yellow circular writing on them, and a couple of cards with green writing too! There were yellow ones scattered around in each corner like a voodoo ritual or really weird feng shui.”    

 “These drawings…” Ernest frowned and scribbled something, before turning the piece of paper to show a circle with a knotting X shape through it and small stars within the quadrants, “They look like this sort of thing?”  

 “Yeees, like that but a little different- wait, have you seen one? She might be nearby!”  

 “Ah, well, I do not think this lady is around,” He lifted his spoon and tapped it against his mug a few times, before holding it behind Morgan, “I think that she left one on your back for some reason, see?”  

 The fairy strained and twisted, managing to catch a warped reflection of herself in the spoons curved head. A strange spindly grey skinned figure with feathery antennae sprouting from her head, deep black wings curled around herself. Across her back was a smudged violet version of the same rune.  

 “Now do not panic, don’t scratch with those claws there, we will just wash it off, yes?” Ernest stood and poured some of the kettles steaming water into a bowl, added a little soap and placed it on the table with a couple of dishcloths. “You have a little bath, and I shall go and find something to wear and sleep with, yes?”  

 Morgan blinked and breathed hard, tearing her eyes away from the yellow gaze of her reflection. “What if… do you think, if it goes away, I might turn back?”  

 Ernest frowned and shrugged, “This is basically magic or something, I dunno. I am not a magic police man. But if you do turn into a human then you are sleeping on the couch, you understand? I am an old man, I need my bed or my back hurts like hell in the morning. Just see what happens and scream if it’s anything bad, I shall just be across the hall.”  

 Morgan giggled as the big man rose and closed the door behind him. It was a fair point. Getting her hopes up would disappoint her, while if she just viewed this as a bath then it was a welcome fragment of normality amidst this madness. She hopped into the water and lay for a moment, before dunking her head underneath and setting about the task of washing off accumulated dust, grime, muck and of course the purple chalk on her back.  

 Underneath a slightly healthier fairy showed. Her claws and toes had a red tint she hadn’t noticed before, and her hair felt much lighter and fluffier. Even her skin was a little closer to a beige brown as opposed to an alien grey colour, though her wings remained as black and featureless as ever, leaving a silvery powder in the water when she vacated it. Only her eyes remained as menacing, golden sparks surrounded by darkness reflected in the spoon. She tilted it and ensured that not a smudge of purple was left on her back then dried herself off with clothes. Her wings left more powder on it, and so she shook the dry instead, hopping up into the air for a brief flight that sent droplets scattering all around as her wings dried off.

 “Are you done Morgan?” The old man’s voice called from the door with a gentle knock.  

 “Yeah, thank you so much!” She called and dropped down to land clumsily on the cloth and pulled it up around her.  It was pleasantly fluffy so a tiny part of her hoped he hadn’t found a better alternative for clothing. With a couple of holes cut, the tickly material could make a very cosy nighty. “You can come in.”

 A thump and a crash came from the hallway behind the door.

 “Ernest?” Morgan’s antennae tensed and she stood, claws kneading the fluffy material nervously.  

 Another impact shuddered, a cry of pain in a deep bullfrog voice echoed and she leapt off the table.  

 The door loomed over her, but another leap with a few beats of her wing brought her up to grab the handle. Her full body weight barely shook the bar, and she swung in frustration a couple of times before clambering on top, bracing her shoulder and arms down on it and pushing downwards with her legs. Finally the handle dipped, and the door swung out into the hall.  

 Morgan’s surge of pride extinguished itself instantly. She hadn’t opened the door at all. Of course not. A pale man held the other side of the handle, his coppery hair swept back and coming down to two vibrant sideburns. Watery blue eyes stared at her under confused caterpillars of eyebrows, then he reached into the waistcoat of his suit.

 “Well well, bugger me this is a surprise! Whats happening ‘ere then?”  

 Behind him, Ernest lay on the floor, his head bruised and bloody with a hissing groan from his lips. “Mor…an…he…l….”  

 “Eh? Wuzzat? Oh dear oh dear this is a right proper mess- you stay put right there miss!” The eccentric looking man chuckled and span on his heel and pulled an empty syringe from his waistcoat, along with a small vial of amber liquid.  

 Morgan almost buckled as the door handle released and thudded up under her. Her grip loosened and she slipped to land on the floor, “What’s happening- WHO ARE YOU! No, leave him alone!”  

 “Introductions later dustbrains,” The man clucked and sat down on Ernest’s back before reaching down and tugging the old officer’s sock free. Pale fingers lifted the syringe and stabbed it into the vials lid, filling the tube with orange. Morgan shook her head and leapt, flapping her wings as she threw herself at the back of the man’s head, grabbing and tugging at hair and ears.  

 “Get off him, get off him! Don’t you dare!” She squealed, claws gathering blood from the minute cuts and tears.  

 “Cheeky little wench!” His other hand flew up and slapped into her, sending her entire body tumbling through the air to bounce towards the open front doorway. “I said I’ll deal with you in a moment! For now…”  

 The foot he was holding lashed out and collided with his knee, followed an instant later by Ernest’s elbow to his side. Wind rushed from his lungs like a depressed bellows as the older, bigger man rolled from under him and swung a great fist for his belly. But his gut was gone, the red haired man ducked back and sprung to his legs, kicking into Ernest’s extended arm before dodging another blow.

 “Cripes you’re a crazy old fellow! And about to get that much crazier!” White teeth glittered as the skinny man grinned and grabbed Ernest’s next punch and stabbed the syringe into the veins of the big man’s forearm. His smile faded slightly as the other arm socked him in the nose to release a spurt of blood. “OUCH, that one was frankly uncalled for!”  

 He coughed and ducked backwards, kicking the officer in the side as he wiped blood from his nose. “Now then, you wanted my attention you little minx? You have it!”  

 “Ernest! Ernest are you…” Morgan watched in horror as the old man fell back and grabbed a wall for support, only to slide down it. The fingers of his right arm spasmed and drummed a beat against the floor. His back arched and tensed and he slammed his head back against the wall with a thunderous bang and a whoop of delight from the red haired man.  

 Ernest winced and croaked something, eyes fixed on the opposite wall before repeating it, some Spanish phrase as he pulled his legs up close to his chest. “Erika… oi, Erika…tengan cuidado al cruzar la calle Erika!”  

 “He’s not changing?” Morgan tensed, but there was no sign of red blots or changes in the man’s fingers like she had had.  

 “Changing? Oh no, just the usual.” The red haired man cackled and bent, spitting a wad of blood at the old officers head before stepping over him, “Now, little girl, what’s your name and what in Mab’s name is goi- oi don’t fly away when I’m talking to ya!”  

 Morgan spun and leapt up, her wings catching her and propelling her through the doorway into the night. A hand as big as her body swatted mere inches from her left, and she buzzed her wings harder to rise higher.  

 “Bad fairy! Very very bad- fine I’ll go first I’m Donnovan! Now what’s your bleeding name!?” Her pursuer was barely behind her, sprinting in his three piece suit at a tremendous pace. He had to contend with obstacles though, scramble over a wall and stumble through a flowerbed, and she seized the moment to change direction and throw herself towards Ernest’s car. There was a radio there, if she could use it then she could at least call the rest of the police that something was wrong with Ernest.  

 More curses followed as she swooped over the car and fell to a rolling landing across the lawn than completely undid any progress her bath had made. But it put her on the driver’s side, and she gathered her legs and bounded towards it.  

 A pitch black leg slammed down in front of her, ending in shot white claws. The next hit her from the side and knocked her down properly. Morgan screamed and found herself looking up towards orange eyes surrounded by black fur as a familiar black hound peered down at her.  

 “Uh… good doggy?” She bent her legs and slowly stood up.  

 “Bad fairy.” The voice was a savage gravelly growl that stunned her with its menace. White teeth flashed and with a single bite Morgan found herself ripped from the world and cast into the dark emptiness within the beast.

[mermaeids]

shelter (chapter one)

Life during the years after Praimfaya.

CHAPTER ONE UNDER THE CUT.

Bellarke & Sea Mechanic (alternating chapters)

 AU after 4x08.

WARNING: This fic is based in part off of the leaked pages of the Season 4 Finale. I filled in a lot of the blanks, but DO NOT READ if you don't want to read possible spoilers. You have been warned.

read on ao3

*

Chapter One: Let The Morning Come

*

And so, farewell. All our sweet songs are sung, Our red rose-garland's withered; The sun-bright day - Silver and blue and gold - Wearied to sleep. The shimmering evening, like a grey, soft bird, Barred with the blood of sunset, Has flown to rest Under the scented wings Of the dark-blue Night.

                                  — Roland Leighton

*

He thought she was dead. For months, he thought she was dead. Then months soon turned to years, and years turned to scars down his heart because she is dead, she is dead.

They tried to keep busy, up in space again, waiting out the promise of certain death below them. Bellamy, Raven, and the others tried to forget the people they’d left behind, the struggles they’d faced. But the metal walls closed in around them, reminding them that they had tasted freedom—the trees, the rain on their arms, the dirt under their feet—only to leave it for this: the hum of machines, the heavy air, the big black void of space.

Up here, without the birds and the glowing butterflies and the constant missions to save them all, Bellamy’s thoughts consumed him. I left her behind played like a mantra in his mind. I left her behind, and now she’s dead.

She died with the earth and all they had worked for, after all the sacrifices they made. It all came to nothing, because here he was, alive and without her, stranded in space without an anchor, without nuts scattered along a path to guide him home.

He stared at the floorboards of the room he shared with Monty and thought of Octavia. He stared at the planet below them and thought of Clarke.

A few months ago, he’d asked Raven about her.

“Could she—could she have made it?”

“Bellamy,” Raven had said, eyeing his expression before answering honestly, tears strangling her voice, “there probably isn’t even a body left.”

Bellamy didn’t speak for five days after that. He couldn’t stop picturing it. He’d witnessed other people perish in radiation, but never the death wave. If Raven was right, there wouldn’t even be any bones for them to bury, no death rituals for the commander of death herself, the princess of earth. There would be nothing left of her.

It all came to nothing.

/

It was a summer day—or at least, Emori said it must be summer on earth by now—three years since Praimfaya. All seven of them were in the measly little excuse for a mess hall, feasting on rations and trying to distract themselves. Raven was always looking for something to fix, but on days like this there wasn’t a wire nor gear left on this station for her to use to get her mind off of her loss. She didn’t show it as much as the others did. Bellamy didn’t know exactly the depth of their relationship (though he suspected it had been deep, romantic), but she sometimes called out for Luna in her sleep.

Raven came to sit next to Bellamy, sighing once the weight had been lifted from her leg. On the floor of the room, Monty, Echo, and Emori had started a game of cards, while Bellamy, Raven, and Harper passed around a bottle of moonshine.

“Not today,” Harper said when Bellamy offered her a cup.

He gave her a puzzled look. “Come on.” (Often, they found quite a lot of fun in making a drinking game out of watching their friends play cards. The bar for what they consider entertaining was at an all time low in this cluttered space station.)

“I… I wish I could,” said Harper.

Bellamy didn’t understand why Raven suddenly beamed.

“Seriously?” Raven said to Harper, her smile lighting up the room.

Harper nodded, and Raven surged forward to envelope her in an emphatic hug.

“What am I missing?” asked Bellamy.

Harper smirked. “Remember when you joked about our duty to repopulate the earth?”

Bellamy understood. To his surprise, the rapid rush of happiness—and something like hope—overcame him. “Are you sure?” he asked Harper as he briefly hugged her.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I think I’m about a month in, but there’s no way to know for sure. Maybe if we had a doctor up here—”

The happiness dimmed when they all felt the hollow space in the room.

Bellamy shook it off. This was supposed to be a bright moment. “That’s good. That’s so good, Harper.”

She placed a hand on her stomach. “I think it’s a boy,” came hesitantly from her mouth. “But Monty’s set on having a little girl.”

Raven said, “I’ll bet you the skin off my back that you’re right. Mothers are always right about this stuff.” She swallowed a gulp of moonshine, barely wincing, then raised her cup to Harper. “The future of the human race is looking pretty good.”

*

Clarke knew they were alive. For years, Clarke knew they were alive, and it was enough. It was enough to get her through the unbearable isolation, the silence, the sterile solitude of Becca’s lab. She had to ration her food, leaving her emaciated and weak. Sometimes she hummed to herself. Other times she slept through the day, hoping that it would make the time go faster.

Five years. The only thing she seemed to be aware of was time. She marked every day in her journal, cataloguing the dates and making sure that she kept up with the countdown on the whiteboard. Every morning, she woke up and wrote the number of years, months, and days until her friends would come home.

This wasn’t like those three months after the mountain, when she had craved the seclusion. Back then, she had wanted to be alone. But now, all she wanted was to be with them. She wanted Raven’s laugh, Monty’s wit, Harper’s hand on her shoulder.

She wanted… she wanted Bellamy. All of him. His arms around her, his heartbeat against her cheek. She wanted to trace every freckle on his face with her fingers. But he was among the stars, and she was on the ground, and sometimes she’d wake up in the dead of night with his name on her lips, and her hands would reach out for him but meet only air.

Her heart called out to him. It was as simple as that, she realized now, pacing the floor one afternoon a few months after the death wave. The simple fact was that her heart called out to him, and all those things that had kept them apart while they’d been on earth together now seemed meaningless. Her heart had wanted to run to him like she’d done that one cloudy day long ago, but she had kept it locked in a cage. After Wells, Finn, and Lexa died, the loss had been too great. She had never wanted to feel that way ever again. But even though she hadn’t opened her heart to Bellamy, even though she hadn’t let herself realize the depth of her feelings for him, she still felt that same loss now. She had done everything she could to prevent it, but here she was crying in the middle of the night, just like after Finn. Here she was reliving every memory and trying to picture them as if they were happening before her eyes, just like after Lexa. Here she was, still hurting over Bellamy as if he were dead. For him, her heart bled like a dying star.

/

The night before Praimfaya, he had come to her room in Becca’s mansion. She’d been sick with radiation poisoning for days, burning and coughing and waiting for death. Even after injecting nightblood, she was the slowest to recover.  

So that night she was laying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying not to accept death. She would not die. She couldn’t die, not after all this time, all this struggle. It had to have been for something.      

“You doing all right?”          

There he was at her door: the something.          

She sat up in bed. “Come here,” she said, ignoring his question. They both knew she wasn’t all right.          

He took a few steps with his bare feet on the cream-colored carpet, as hesitant as he was eager. Clarke saw the conflict in his eyes—should he keep going, or should he back away?

He chose to keep going, until he was at the foot of the bed, a question still lingering in his stance, his tilted head. She patted next to her on the mattress, giving him the last push he needed to climb in beside her, just close enough that she could touch him if she reached out, but too far away to soothe the aching in her chest.          

He settled against the pillows, gazing at her from under dark eyelashes.          

“Clarke?” he said quietly, a slight question hidden somewhere in his tone.          

She leaned closer to him. “We don’t have much time left.”        

“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said. “We have to believe that we’ll get through this. Raven and Monty will get the rocket ready in time. This time tomorrow we’ll be in space. We’ll be safe, and we’ll be together.”          

A smile teased at Clarke’s lips. “Out of the two of us, I’m usually the optimist. Do you know how many times I’ve had to assure you that we wouldn’t all die?”          

Bellamy laughed and reached to a stray hair away from her face, and she couldn’t ignore the way his knuckles lingered against her cheek for a moment too long. He caught himself and removed his hand. Bellamy glanced at the ceiling, as if suddenly unable to meet her stare.          

“We keep each other centered,” he said, matter-of-fact. “If you’re the pessimist for a day, I become the optimist. It’s how we work.”          

Clarke sighed. “And we work well, don’t we?”          

“We’ve made it this far.”          

She reached for his hand and gripped it with her own. “And we’ll make it so much farther, Bellamy. Some part of me believes that.”          

He grinned. “There’s the Clarke I know and love.” The confession slipped from his lips without meeting resistance, almost as if second nature.        

Her breath caught in her throat for one wonderstruck moment. Bellamy’s smile faded once he realized what he’d said. His jaw clenched. He tried to let go of her hand, but she held onto him.    

“Bellamy.” Her voice splintered around the name.          

His eyes were deep enough to swallow oceans. Tears sprung into her own.

“I love you,” Bellamy whispered into the silence of the heavy night. The words wrapped around Clarke’s throat and when she closed her eyes all she could see was a noose around his neck, carrying him up into the sky. Her love was a death sentence.                      

“I don’t expect anything from you,” he said. “But you had to know. Before the world ends tomorrow, you had to know.”

“I can’t say it back yet,” she murmured, resting a hand against his cheek. “I said it to Finn before I plunged a knife into his heart. I said it to Lexa before pulling the kill switch. I need to believe that you’ll live through this. I need you to live. And in order for that to happen, I can’t say it back.”          

“Clarke,” he said, his voice wavering. He clutched the hand that was against his cheek like a lifeline. “No matter what you might think, you loving someone doesn’t kill them. You aren’t that person.”        

“I am Wanheda, Bellamy. Wherever I go, death follows. I can’t lead it to you.”

/

That night, Clarke had been too afraid to fall asleep. She remembered watching Bellamy’s breathing even out as sleep quietly stole him from her. He looked so much younger, so peaceful.

The next morning, they had woken up, squared their shoulders, and tried to survive.

The next night, he was in the stars and she was on earth.

*

[ericbarkman]

Chrono Hustle #46 Pocket Sliders

     “We’re back,” Melinda Summers said as she walked up to the lake on the planet that would one day be named Trantor, along with her team.  “Ohm?”      Ohm laid the body of Jack Masterson on the ground right by the edge of the lake.  Mary Bishop, Imhotep, and the Ghost of the temporal duplicate of Jack Masterson made up the rest of Melinda’s team.      The lake stood up and took a vaguely humanoid form.  “I see that,” Nu said.      Imhotep immediately bowed.      “So, we’ve brought you the body, Nu,” Melinda said.  “Now you’ll help us find and save our friends.”      “Of course,” Nu said.  “It won’t be easy for you though.  I can send you to pocket universes, but I don’t know which is the right one.  So, I will send you to one, and after a set amount of time, you will be sent to another.  Anyone that is in physical contact with any of you will join you on this trip.”      “How long will we have in each pocket universe?” Ghost Jack asked.      “How much time do you want?” Nu asked.  “We won’t be able to communicate, so you’ll have to decide a length of time now that you will spend in each.”      “And what about when we’re ready to return?” Mary asked.      “If you are all in physical contact with each other, plus any others that have joined your journey, then you will all be returned here,” Nu said.  “Otherwise you will continue to be sent from pocket universe to pocket universe.”      “And if one of us dies?” Ghost Jack asked.  “I mean, if another one of us dies.”      “If someone dies, they will no longer be considered part of the group,” Nu said.  “So if eventually only one remains, they will be brought back here on the next jump.”      “Right,” Melinda said.  “Let’s do this.”      Meanwhile, back at their base in the Cretaceous, Abigail Esau was reading Merlin’s journals.  She had already made her way through everything that was written in English, and was now slowly making her way through those in French, using a mixture of what she remembered from school, and a translation program when necessary.      There were only a few in French though, and after that she was going to have to move onto another language that she would have to fully rely on translation programs for.      She just finished reading a spell that seemed fairly simple, so she tried it out, and made a heart appear on the ceiling with Mary and her initials in it.  It looked like if it had been scratched into a tree, despite the ceiling being metal.      Nu created the portal, and Melinda stepped through, with her team following in behind her.      “Four hours,” Nu had said.  Four hours in this pocket universe, and then off to another.      Melinda looked around at the place they were in.  It was a lush rainforest.  The air was thick with humidity and there was the sound of wildlife all around.      “Are we sure he didn’t just send us to the Amazon?” Ghost Jack asked.      “Can you fly up and get us a bird’s eye view?” Melinda asked.      “On it,” Ghost Jack said.      Mary was looking at the ground, checking for tracks.      “Finding anything?” Melinda asked.      “Plenty of stuff has been through this area,” Mary said.  “I’m not seeing anything indicating Humans specifically though.  Could be, but could just be animals.”      “Imhotep?” Melinda asked.      “This whole place is filled with magic,” Imhotep said.  “Very old, very powerful magic.”      “A Progenitor?” Melinda asked.      “I would assume that’s who created this,” Imhotep said.  “I could not tell you which though, and I don’t know that they are currently here.”      Ghost Jack came back down to the ground.  “Well, pocket universe is right, I could see the edges of this place as soon as I flew above the canopy.”      “How big?” Melinda asked.      “It looks to be spherical, I’d estimate a few kilometers across,” Ghost Jack said.  “I don’t think we’ll have enough time to explore the whole place, especially with how thick this foliage is, but hopefully we can get a decent amount done.”      “Okay, Ohm and I will go one way,” Melinda said.  “Mary and Imhotep you go the opposite way.  Jack, you’re the fastest of us, and can fly, so you can do your own thing.  Let’s go.”      Doctor Jeri Quill entered Harkon Smith’s office.      “Good day, Doctor,” Harkon said.  “What can I do for you?”      “Sesla’s clone body is complete,” Jeri said.  “I know you’ve been putting off that decision for a while, but unless you want Ghost Jack to lie to her next time he enters her dreams…well, you know.”      “As long as Sesla remains in her coma, we don’t have to worry about her turning on us,” Harkon said.  “If we transfer her mind to a clone body, she could become a threat.”      “Like Deanna.”      “Yes, I know Sesla is a thousand or so years older than when she was Deanna, and a lot changes in that time, but it’s still something to be considered.  On the other hand, if we don’t do this, and she wakes up on her own somehow, that might lead to her to turning on us.”      “Which means you should probably make the decision soon,” Jeri said.      “Well, Ghost Jack is on a mission right now, so I at least have until he gets back,” Harkon said.      Melinda pushed her way through the foliage as Ohm followed after her.  They had yet to find any sign that any Humans had ever been here before.  There was something else that Melinda was realizing they had not seen yet.      “Ohm, have you seen any animals yet?” Melinda asked.      “I have not,” Ohm said.  “I am hearing them, and I’m seeing tracks indicating that they have been here, but I have not actually seen any yet.”      “I wonder what that means.”      “Many animals are good at not being seen unless they want to be.  The fact that everything here is like that is worrying.”      “Sensing anything?” Mary asked as she checked the ground for tracks.      “Nothing new,” Imhotep said.  “Are you finding anything?”      “Nothing helpful.”      “Wait, stop, we’re being watched.”  Imhotep pointed up at one of the trees.      Mary looked up where he was pointing, and saw a creature that looked like a mix between a jaguar and a monkey.  Mary gripped her energy shotgun, as it just continued to watch them.      “There’s more of them,” Imhotep said.      Mary glanced around, and noticed that the trees were full of them.  They were surrounded by at least a dozen of these creatures.  “How long have we been here so far?” she asked.      “About an hour,” Imhotep said.      “Mary to Melinda, we’ve got a problem.”  There was no response.  “Oh great, comm interference or something.”      One of the monkguars jumped down to the ground in front of them.  Its teeth bared, and claws extended.  Mary shot it with her energy shotgun, and it dropped to the ground unconscious.      This caused the others to stop their silence, and start whooping as they jumped down to the ground as well.  Mary started shooting as many as she could, as fast as she could, while Imhotep put up a magical barrier around them.  The monkguars bounced off of it, but that just made them angrier and louder.      With the protection the barrier provided, Mary was having little trouble dropping them, one after another after another, but as she was doing so, more kept arriving.  There had been a dozen at first, and now there were already two dozen unconscious around them, and another twice that still attacking.      “I can’t hold up this barrier forever,” Imhotep said.      “Well, then hopefully they run out of reinforcements soon,” Mary said.      Ghost Jack had flown up to the top of the sphere that was this pocket universe.  The edge of it was a physical barrier, beyond which was a seemingly infinite emptiness.  He flew back down towards the rainforest, looking for any breaks in the canopy, but it was like a sea of green.  Even if there were breaks, it would be green there too, and he was not going to have enough time to do a thorough search of everything while they were here.      He flew back down below the canopy, as the bird’s-eye view was not helpful if he could not see anything on the ground.  Not that he was seeing much down here either, other than an astonishing amount of plant life.      More and more monkguars were continuing to try and attack Imhotep and Mary.  It seemed like for every one that Mary shot down, another two seemed to show up.      “I can maybe hold up this barrier for another minute, at most,” Imhotep said.      “We’re going to be overwhelmed if you drop it,” Mary said.  “Do you have any other magic you can use in this situation?”      “Maybe, but you’re not going to like it.”      “What is it?”      “I can maybe do a mass sleep spell on the area.  So anything and anyone within about ten meters of me will fall asleep.”      “That sounds good,” Mary said.      “It’ll include us,” Imhotep said.  “And I don’t know for certain if it will affect these things.  It affects most animals, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like these before.”      “I don’t see that we have much options,” Mary said.  “Let’s do it.”      “Melinda to Mary, you guys finding anything yet?” Melinda asked over the comm.  There was no response.  “Melinda to Imhotep?  Jack?”      “Something wrong with the comms?” Ohm asked.      “I guess,” Melinda said.  She took out her computer pad and ran a diagnostic on the comms.  “Hmm, looks like the comms themselves are fine, but there’s some interference in the area.”      “Is it just a problem with this pocket universe, or all pocket universes?” Ohm asked.      “I guess we’ll find out in another two hours or so…maybe.”      “In the meantime, should we check on the others?”      “Hmm, maybe just in case,” Melinda said.  “Although if this is a standard aspect of pocket universes, we’re going to have to get used to not always being in communication with each other.”      Ghost Jack continued flying throughout the rainforest.  So far he had not found much of use, although he had finally started seeing some animal life.  It was strange though.  He had seen some creatures which looked like a mix between snakes and parrots, and another that looked like a mix between a spider and a frog.      The sprogers were especially creepy, although the snarrots were pretty close.  And there were others that he could not even identify if they were supposed to be a mix of something else, or something entirely new.      Then, as he was flying, he came upon a small clearing.  Within that clearing was a small hut.  He flew over to it, up to the roof, and stuck his head inside to get a peak.  There was no one inside, but there was a small cot, and some cooking utensils.      He looked back outside, and saw a small fire pit, although it had not seen use recently.  Whoever lived here, possibly the person that had created this pocket universe, was seemingly long gone.  Or perhaps this belonged to someone that had been trapped here.      He looked at the ground, trying to find footprints, but had no luck.  Maybe Mary would be able to do better.  He tried the comm, but there was no response, so he took off to find the others.      Back in the regular universe, Philip Wilson and Dorian Winters were aboard the timeship in orbit of the planet Trantor.  Dorian was at the piloting console, while Philip was in the captain’s chair.      "So, how long do you think it’ll take them?” Philip asked.      “Who knows,” Dorian said.  “Melinda said they’ll be spending four hours in each pocket universe, and who knows how many there are and how long until they’ll get to the correct one.”      “And until then, we’re just stuck here waiting.”      “I mean, we could use the time in other ways,” Dorian said.  “We do have the ship to ourselves.”      Ghost Jack was flying through the rainforest, when he suddenly found dozens of unconscious monkguars.  They were surrounding Mary and Imhotep who were similarly unconscious.  And there were more of the monkguars coming in, but as soon as they got within about ten meters of Imhotep and Mary, they too feel unconscious.      He also started hearing energy weapons firing, and flew over to the source of it, where he found Melinda and Ohm, trying to hold off yet more monkguars.      “You guys need some help?” Ghost Jack asked.      “Anything you can do would be much appreciated,” Melinda said.      Ghost Jack flew down to where they were.  “Close your eyes, and we’ll see if this works.”  As soon as Melinda and Ohm had their eyes closed, Ghost Jack sent out an explosion of light to try and blind the monkguars.  And it seemed to do something, as they stopped coming at the group, and were pawing around in confusion.      “What did you do?” Melinda asked.      “Well, after realizing that i can glow in the dark when we had that power outage, I started experimenting with that,” Ghost Jack said.  “Hadn’t quite done anything like this yet, but I’m glad it worked.”      “Have you seen Mary and Imhotep anywhere?” Melinda asked.      “They are just over that way,” Ghost Jack said.  “I’m guessing Imhotep used a spell to put everything to sleep, as they are unconscious, as is every monkguar for about ten meters around them.”      “There’s more coming yet,” Ohm said.      “I found a hut over that way.”  Ghost Jack pointed.  “I’ll grab Mary and give her to you to carry out there.”      “And Imhotep?” Melinda asked.      “I don’t know if the spell is centered on him, or on the location where he cast it,” Ghost Jack said.  “But I’m immune.  So, I’ll carry him and find out, and if it’s centered on him, I’ll have to leave him a distance from the hut.”      “Sounds like a plan,” Melinda said.  “Let’s do it.”      After bringing Mary to Melinda and Ohm, Ghost Jack went back and picked up Imhotep.  He initially went over towards the blinded monkguars, while being careful to not get too close to Melinda and Ohm.  Sure enough, the blinded monkguars starting falling unconscious as he got within about ten meters of them.      That was potentially going to cause problems, but for the immediate time it was actually useful.  Ghost Jack started flying around in circles, knocking out any monkguars getting too close to his friends.      Ohm carried Mary, while following after Melinda.  Ghost Jack had pointed them in the right direction, and he was pretty sure they were getting close.      After a few minutes of walking, they got to the hut, and Ohm put Mary down inside, before coming back out.  Melinda was looking over the campsite.      “What do you think?” Melinda asked.      “I don’t think this was made by our friends,” Ohm said.  “This is a very old campsite.”      “Chronos is a God of Time.  So it being old doesn’t really tell us much.  But I do agree that I don’t think this was made by them.  I also don’t think this pocket universe was made by Chronos.”      “So then we just wait until we move onto the next?”      “It’ll be another hour so until that,” Melinda said.  “We should be able to hold out that long.”      As Ghost Jack saw that the others had made it to the campsite, he started circling around it with Imhotep, but keeping his distance.  There were monkguars coming from all directions, so he was not able to keep them all out, but he was at least able to deal with some of them that way.      He was really curious as to where they were all coming from.  Based the size of this pocket universe, there was no way it could sustain this many of them.  Possibly they were part of a security system, just being created to deal with the intruders.  It was hard to say for certain though, who knew what kind of rules were really in place in this place.      Mary woke up, and looked around.  She was in a hut, and her energy shotgun was next to her.  Ohm and Melinda were by the door, and they were both shooting out at a mass of monkguars that were approaching.      “Where are we?” Mary asked.      “Ghost Jack found this hut,” Melinda said without turning around.  “We’re using it to try and last long enough to escape this universe.”      Mary looked at her watch.  Just another few minutes left here.  She picked up her energy shotgun, and joined Melinda and Ohm at the door, and started firing at the monkguars.      Ghost Jack was continuing to circle the camp with Imhotep, when he noticed the monkguars near them were no longer falling asleep.  He was briefly wondering if that meant they were becoming immune, before Imhotep started waking up as well.      “What’s going on, where are we?” Imhotep asked.      “Still in the pocket universe,” Ghost Jack said.  “Just trying to survive long enough to move on to the next.”      “How much longer will that be?” Imhotep asked.      “Should be any second now,” Ghost Jack said, and suddenly they were underwater.      Ghost Jack was fine, not needing to breathe, but Imhotep did.  Ghost Jack looked at him, and he was holding his breath, but as they had not been prepared for this, there was no telling how long he’d be able to hold it for.      Ghost Jack looked around.  He had no idea which way was up, so he grabbed Imhotep, and chose a direction, and started moving that way.  After a few seconds they hit a solid surface, so they went in another direction.  They hit another solid surface.  A third direction led to a third solid surface.      Mary was still firing at monkguars, when all of a sudden the monkguars were gone.  And she was no longer in a hut in a rainforest, and Melinda and Ohm were no longer next to her.  She was on sand.  She looked around and saw more sand.      She was in what looked to be cubic room, a few yards across.  The floor, walls, and even the ceiling looked to be made of sand, but not packed together, which made her wonder how it was staying suspended.      Mary reached down and picked up some sand of the floor, and sure enough, it was really loose.  She tried the wall, and it was the same.  She tried digging a bit, and came upon a solid surface after about half a foot, but as soon as she removed her hands, sand flowed down to fill in the hole.      What was this place, she wondered.  And where were her friends?  She had been next to Melinda and Ohm, but clearly they were not in this room.      Ohm was in a cubic room as well.  His had grass growing out of the floor, walls, and ceiling.  The strange thing was that there was no soil for it to grow out of.  It was coming out of a solid surface.  He grabbed a handful, and pulled it out, but more instantly grew out of the spot he had pulled from.      He tried knocking on the walls, and then listened but did not hear anything.  He tried his comm, but it was still not working.  He checked his handheld scanner, but it did not show anything beyond the walls.      And in yet another cubic room, Melinda was considering her surroundings.  The floor, walls, and ceiling of the one she was in were coated in mud.  The fact that the mud was not dripping down from the ceiling, or even going down the wall, was interesting.      Melinda tried stepping onto the wall, and it was as if gravity shifted as she did so.  What had been a wall, was now the floor, as far as she was concerned.  Melinda then tried moving to the wall she had originally considered the ceiling, and that now became the new floor, from her perspective.      She wondered what was the purpose of this pocket universe, and who had created it.  And she wondered what kind of situations the others were in, and if they were all okay.      The sudden appearance in water had surprised Imhotep, but once he realized where he was, he used a spell to create a bubble around himself with air in it.  As he created it, Ghost Jack entered it.      “You okay?” Ghost Jack asked.      “I believe so,” Imhotep said.  “Where are we?”      “Some kind of cubic room, filled with water.  Looks to be a few meters wide.  I don’t see any obvious exits, although I can of course just go through the walls.”      “Assuming there’s no magic in place to prevent that.”      “True, but I should probably at least check to see if I can find the others.  If this pocket universe is just a series of room like this, filled with water, they won’t have magic to save them.”      “Right,” Imhotep said.  “Hopefully that’s not the case.”      Mary was pacing back and forth, trying to figure out what to do.  Near as she could tell, her only option was to wait until they jumped to the next pocket universe.  There was nothing here but sand.  She had already tried digging holes in multiple locations, but they all filled in almost immediately.      As she was pacing, she suddenly noticed something emerging from the floor.  It was Ghost Jack.      “Oh good, you’re not underwater,” Ghost Jack said.      “Were you?”      “Imhotep and I were, he still is, but with a magic bubble.  I’ve been going through a few of these rooms that make up this place.”      “And?”      “And honestly it could have been a lot worse than underwater.  One of the rooms is filled with lava.”      “Have you found Ohm or Melinda yet?”      “Not yet.  I’m hoping that they’re close to here though, since the three of you were near to each other when we were teleported here, right?”      “Yeah, we had all been next to each other, shooting those creatures.  Do you know how long Imhotep can maintain his air bubble?”      “Long enough, although this does now make me wonder if we should have brought environmental suits or something,” Ghost Jack said.  “I mean, I’ll be fine pretty much regardless of what we encounter, but the rest of you might not be so lucky.”      “Well, we’re going to have to make at least one more jump, unless we can find a way for the rest of us to travel between these rooms.”      “Oh, and did you figure out the gravity thing?”      “Gravity thing?” Mary asked.      “Try stepping onto the wall.”      Mary walked to a wall, stepped onto it, and suddenly gravity shifted for her, and the wall was now the floor.      “Pretty cool, right?” Ghost Jack asked.      Ghost Jack returned to Imhotep after searching dozens of rooms and finding Melinda and Ohm.      “Is everyone else okay?” Imhotep asked.      “Yeah,” Ghost Jack said.  “Looks like you were the only one that got unlucky like this.”      “That’s good.  What about Tesla’s team?  Did you find any of them?”      “No such luck.  I searched around pretty far, but nothing.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t here though.  We have no idea how big this place is.”      “Yeah, and unfortunately you’re the only one who can explore it.”      “I’m going to head back out, and do that for the rest of our time here, just thought I would give you an update.”      Melinda was counting down the time until they made their next jump.  Ghost Jack had shown up twice, once to check in on her, and a second time to let her know everyone else was okay, but he was unlikely to return again, as he would be spending as much time as he could on the search.      She was really hoping their people were not here though, as according to Ghost Jack each of the rooms was about the same size, and it seemed unlikely that all of their missing people would be able to fit in one.  And since Ghost Jack was the only one that could travel between the rooms, and they needed to make physical contact to bring others with them, they would be unable to rescue them all if that were the case.      Melinda checked her watch.  Just ten seconds left.  Not knowing where she would end up next, she took a deep breath, just in case.  The room disappeared, and she appeared in a large throne room.  She exhaled as she took it in.  There was a woman with a crown on the throne, and about two dozen guards with swords.      “What is the meaning of this?” the woman demanded, as the guards surrounded Melinda.  “Who are you, and how did you get in here, and why are you getting mud all over the carpet?”      Imhotep suddenly found himself a few feet above the ground, and his bubble collapsed as he fell  those few feet.  He looked around.  He was in a town, full of stone-brick houses.  He was on a dirt road.  And there were other people around, who looked very surprised at his sudden appearance, but no one made a move to approach him.      Looking around, the town did not seem too large, but there was a castle on one end of it.  The opposite end led to a forest.  He walked over to the nearest person.  “Excuse me,” he said.  “I’m not from around here.”      The person just stared at him for several seconds before responding.  “Okay,” she said.      “Do you know if there are any other recent arrivals here?”      “No, everyone here has always been here.”      “Hmm, okay, thank you,” Imhotep said.      “Sorry, sorry,” Ghost Jack said as he flew out of the library he had appeared in, amongst the screams of the people inside.  As he went outside, there were even more screams, so he went down an alley, landed on the ground, and made himself appear fully tangible.      He left the alley the opposite way he came, and he was still getting weird looks from people, but no more screams, so that was good.  The people here were dressed simply, and they looked like they were from medieval times, although noticeably cleaner.  The buildings also looked to be from that era.      He looked up, and the sky looked normal.  Either this pocket universe was bigger than the first one, or its size was just better disguised.  If it was larger, that would be a major problem.      “Excuse me,” he asked a random person on the street.  “Can you help me out with a few questions?”      “Um, what kind of questions?” the person asked.      “How big is this place?”      “Well, the town ends over that way with the castle, and that way before the forest, and…”      “No, not the town, umm, how far do things extend beyond the town?”      “I don’t…why would anyone leave the town?”      “No one leaves?”      “Of course not.  Nobody has ever left, and until now, no one new has ever come here.”      “Hmm, right, thanks,” Ghost Jack said as he walked off.      Mary had appeared outside the town, in the woods.  The first thing she did upon appearing was check her comm, which still did not work.  It was seeming more and more likely that whatever was causing the problems with the comms was an effect of these pocket universes in general.      She also quickly realized that something seemed very off.  There were no sounds of animals in the forest.  No wind either, for that matter.  The only sounds she was hearing were coming from the town.  She checked the ground, and there were no tracks of any kind.  That was curious, so she decided to start searching, and going in the opposite direction from the town.      Mary was walking for about five minutes or so, when she hit an invisible wall.  It did not feel like a forcefield though, it felt like an actual physical wall.  She started moving alongside it, to see how far it continued.  She quickly discovered that it was curving around, which meant that this place was probably domed like the first pocket universe, just in this case the dome had the illusion of the world continuing.      Ohm had appeared in a cave.  There was some sort of glowing moss on the walls giving off enough light to see.  It was a tunnel, and it extended as far as he could see in either direction.  He picked a direction at random, and started walking in that direction.  He was walking for a bit, before realizing that the moss was getting thicker, and the cave brighter in this direction.  He was unsure if that was a good or a bad thing, so he continued on.      Eventually it opened up into a larger cave, in the middle of which was a small house.  To one of the sides of it was a garden, which was being worked on at the moment by a young looking woman.  She looked over as Ohm approached.      “You’re new here,” she said.  “That’s fascinating.  There hasn’t been anyone new here in over four hundred years.”      “No?”      “No, when I created this place, I brought the amount of people I would need, no more, no less, so there’s never been the need for new people.”      “So, you created this pocket universe?  Then I assume that this is not where Chronos put our people.”      She laughed.  “No, although I am curious as to how you managed to come here.”      “I don’t really understand the processes myself,” Ohm said.  “But we’re just jumping from pocket universe to pocket universe, trying to locate our kidnapped people.”      “Fascinating.”      In the castle, Melinda had been thrown in the dungeon.  A very clean dungeon though, much cleaner than would be expected based on the medieval look to everything here.  The guards also seemed unsure of how exactly to treat her, as if they had not had any prisoners in a long time.      They eventually decided on placing one guard outside her cell.  She looked out the barred window on the back wall of the cell.  There was a mountain range just a kilometer or two away.      “So, you don’t get many visitors, do you?” Melinda asked the guard.      “We don’t get any visitors.”      “No travellers, nothing?”      “Why would anyone travel?”      “So, what’s going to happen to me?”      “I don’t know.”      The conversation was interrupted when another guard came up, and whispered something in the first guard’s ear.      “Something happen?” Melinda asked.      “How many people came with you?” the first guard asked.      “What do you mean?” Melinda asked.      Out in the town, Imhotep and Ghost Jack had just found each other.  They were still getting weird looks, but no one seemed to want to approach them.      “I am fairly certain that if our people are in this pocket universe, they are not in this town,” Imhotep said.      “I agree,” Ghost Jack said.  “These people are not used to outsiders, and we are clearly the first in a long time.”      “Have you seen the rest of the team?”      “Nope, no sign of them.  Possibly in the castle, possibly in the forest, possibly somewhere else.  I have no idea how big this universe is.”      “So, where do we start?”      “Might as well check the castle first,” Ghost Jack said.  “It’s possibly where whoever created this is anyway.”      Melinda was brought back before the woman on the throne.  She had been told that this was Queen Rebecca.      “I have been informed that you are not the only intruder in my kingdom,” Rebecca said.  “There are two strange men that have been seen in town, and talks of some sort of ghostly figure.  What is your purpose here?”      “We are only here searching for our friends, your majesty,” Melinda said.  “And we will be on our way shortly.”      “What manner did you use to travel here?”      “That’s…complicated.”      “Do you think it is beyond my understanding?”      “Honestly, I don’t really understand how it works.”      “And who would understand how it works?” Rebecca asked.  “One of your friends in the town?”      “No, they don’t really understand it either.”      Rebecca looked around at her guards.  “Leave us,” she said.  Without question, they all filed out of the room.  “My people and I have lived here for centuries, ever since we were brought to this place.  We do not age, or need food or drink or even sleep.  No one even remembers anything from before we were brought here.”      “Okay?” Melinda asked.      “Except for myself.  She who brought us here was unable to erase my memories.  It’s why she made me queen.  Give me some power, so I don’t question that I am trapped here.”      “So, you want to leave?”      “I was content with my lot in life, but if there is a way out of this place, I want to take it.”      “Who created this place and brought you here?”      “We don’t know her name, or what she is, only that she is very powerful.”      “Powerful enough to track us down if we take you with us?” Melinda asked.      “You haven’t told me your name,” Ohm said.      “What’s in a name?” the woman asked.  “That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.  Not that I expect you to get the reference, being a Neanderthal and all.”      “Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare,” Ohm said.  “I do read.”      “My apologies, good sir, although now that I think of it, you never mentioned your name either.”      “I am Ohm.”      “A pleasure to meet you, Ohm.  You can call me Lucy.”      “Nice to meet you, Lucy.  I don’t suppose you can help us locate our friends.”      “Travelling to pocket universes you are unaware of is very hit or miss, which is how you got here,” Lucy said.  “I doubt I’d be able to be any more helpful than whatever method you are currently using.  Although I can give you some advice.”      “Okay.”      “Be very careful.  Pocket universes have been created by a great many people for a great many reasons, and there are untold dangers you could encounter.”      “That we have already been learning.”      Ghost Jack flew through the castle, searching around, and came upon the throne room, where Melinda was talking to someone that looked like a queen.  He flew down to the floor and became visible.  “Hey Red, what’s up?”      “Who is this?” Rebecca asked.      “This is my friend Jack,” Melinda said.  “Jack, this is Queen Rebecca.  Have you seen the others?”      “Imhotep is outside the castle, but we decided it would be easier if I searched it myself,” Ghost Jack said.      “What are you?” Rebecca asked.      “Oh, just your average Ghost of a Demi-God,” Ghost Jack said.  “Anyway, haven’t seen Mary or Ohm, and we’re reasonably certain our people aren’t here, at least not in the town.”      “The town is all there really is,” Rebecca said.  “The forest only extends a short distance, beyond which it is just an illusion.  As is the mountain range behind my castle.” “Are you the person that created this place?” Ghost Jack asked.      “No, that’s someone else,” Melinda said.  “But she does want to come with us.”      “Does she now?” Ghost Jack asked.      “Yes, I do,” Rebecca said.  “Being the leader in a cage still leaves you in a cage.”      Melinda and Ghost Jack had left the castle and met up with Imhotep.  They explained the situation to him.      “I can understand the desire to leave,” Imhotep said.  “But if we bring her with, we might anger whoever created this place.”      “And we don’t even know who that is,” Melinda said.  “We also don’t know why these people were brought here.  For all we know this is a prison, and she should be kept here.”      “I mean, it’s pretty clearly a prison,” Ghost Jack said.  “But we have no reason to assume it’s a prison for criminals.  And even if it was, they’ve been here for centuries.  I think she’s more than paid for any crimes she may have committed.”      “What about everyone else?” Melinda asked.  “Should we take them all with?”      “She is the only one we’ve encountered that wants to leave,” Imhotep said.  “The others don’t even remember their lives before they were brought here.”      “Because they were mindwiped,” Melinda said.  “And that’s another sort of prison.  Imhotep, back when we were first dealing with the TDD, they had replaced some of my memories with fake ones, and you were able to restore my original memories.  Would you be able to do that for the people here?”      “Possibly, but we’d only have time for a few,” Imhotep said.  “And, if you’ll recall, you were asleep for some time afterwards.  We will be gone from here by the time we’d be able to see the results.”      “Hmm, yeah,” Melinda said.  “That’s not really an option.”      Ohm checked his watch.  It would just be another few minutes before they jumped again.      “Leaving so soon?” Lucy asked.      “We will be leaving shortly,” Ohm said.  “Our people are still out there, somewhere, and we need to find them.”      “I wish you luck in your endeavor,” Lucy said.  “I don’t suppose you’ll be back again.”      “I do not know, but it seems unlikely.”      “Then perhaps I will have to visit you sometime.  I do still go to Earth from time to time for business.”      “What kind of business.”      “Nothing super interesting, but I do have obligations that I have to attend to on occasion.”      Melinda, Ghost Jack, and Imhotep returned to the throne room.      “So, what have you decided?” Rebecca asked.  “Will you take me with you, or are you leaving me trapped here?”      “We don’t want to leave you trapped here,” Melinda said.  “But we do have reservations about angering whoever it is that created this place.  We already have a lot of powerful enemies, and it may not be wise to create yet another.”      “On the other hand, she may already be angered by your intrusion, for all we know,” Rebecca said.  “And this wouldn’t make things any worse.”      “Maybe, but we don’t know that,” Melinda said.      “We also don’t know where we are all going,” Imhotep said.  “At the moment we are jumping from pocket universe to pocket universe, at random.  In the previous one I would have drowned without my magic.  Coming with us may prove dangerous.”      “I am fine with danger,” Rebecca said.  “It is better than this tedium.”      Melinda checked her watch.  Half a minute remained.  “There are also other complicated aspects to it.”      “You’re stalling, so that means it’s almost time isn’t it?” Rebecca asked, right before she ran over to Melinda, and placed her hand on Melinda’s shoulder.  And then, they all disappeared.      Mary disappeared from the forest, and appeared in empty space.  She fought the urge to panic as she looked around at her surroundings, and exhaled her breath.  In the distance she saw a large metal structure, like a space station.  She could also see a few other people floating in space, but they were too far away for her to tell who.      She knew she did not have long out here, so she did the only thing she could think of.  She took her energy shotgun, and starting firing in the opposite direction of the space station, which started propelling her the towards the space station.  It was far too slow though, and she knew she was going to lose consciousness any second.      Imhotep also appeared in the vacuum of space.  He immediately created a magic bubble of air around himself.  After his near drowning, he was prepared for situations like this.  Looking around, he saw Melinda and Rebecca close by.  He used magic to propel himself over to them, and brought them into the bubble.      “Still think coming with us was the right decision?” he asked.      “What is this place?” Rebecca asked.      “Space,” Melinda said.  “Are the others out here too?”  She was already looking off into the distance to try and locate them.      “I see Jack over there,” Imhotep said as he looked out as well.  “But he’ll be fine.  Looks like there’s someone off that way.”  He pointed.      “And someone else the other way,” Melinda said.  “Jack is closer to the one you noticed, hopefully he’ll go for them.”      Ghost Jack looked around at his surroundings.  He could see a group of three in one direction, and another person further in that direction, and the group seemed to be heading towards the individual.  He assumed that meant Imhotep was there, and had things under control.      He looked around some more, and saw the final member of their team, so he flew off towards them as fast as he could.  It quickly became clear that it was Ohm, and that he was in distress.  As Ghost Jack continued flying towards him, he looked around.  The other group of his friends were pretty far away, as was the space station in the distance.      As Ghost Jack arrived at Ohm’s location, Ohm was already unconscious.  Ghost Jack grabbed him and started flying towards the others.  They were actually slightly further than the space station, but he had no idea if he would even be able to find a way to bring Ohm inside it.  He just had to hope that it was not too late.      Mary was on the verge of unconsciousness when she suddenly felt enveloped by air, and started breathing again.  This had been worse than that time she had almost drowned, and she hungrily took in the air as she looked around.  She was in a bubble of some sort with Imhotep, Melinda, and someone she did not recognize.      “Who’s the new person?” she asked as soon as she was able to talk again.      “Mary, meet Rebecca,” Melinda said.  “Rebecca, meet Mary.”      “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Rebecca said.      “Right,” Mary said.  “So, what are we supposed to do here?  Wait out in space until our four hours are up?”      “There’s a space station over that way.”  Melinda pointed at it.      “And where’s Ohm?” Mary asked.      “Jack has him,” Imhotep said.  “They are flying towards us, and now that we have you, we are flying to them as well.”      Ghost Jack looked at the remaining distance to the others, and even now that they were coming towards him as well, he did not think it was going to be fast enough for Ohm.  He was at the limits of his speed though, so he had to think of something else.      That is when he hit upon an idea.  As a Ghost he was unaffected by the vacuum.  He also did not need to breathe, but he did have air inside him.  He enveloped Ohm, surrounding him completely to protect him from the vacuum, and then he released the air stored inside him into the bubble he had created with himself.      It was not much, but it seemed like it just might be enough, as they got closer and closer, and eventually got to the others.  As they did Imhotep enlarged the magic bubble he had created to make more room as they entered.      Imhotep looked over Ohm.  “Hmm, he’ll be okay, but that was a close one.”      “So, I guess now we head over to that space station?” Ghost Jack asked.      “Seems our best bet,” Melinda said.  “Imhotep, can you get us moving over in that direction?”      “Yes, right away.”      Back at base, Abigail was continuing to experiment with the magic she was learning from Merlin’s journals.  She had figured out a translation spell, so she could read the non-English ones just as easy as the English ones.      She was currently reading one that was written in Atlantean, and was reading about an invisibility spell.  She knew Sesla had similar spells, although this one seemed to be true invisibility.      Abigail cast it on herself, and was instantly blinded.  Right, she thought, true invisibility meant light passing through you, which meant not only would you not be seen, but you would also not see.  She removed the spell from herself, and went back to reading.      It took about five minutes for the group to get to the space station, and another five to find a way in.  There was an airlock on the far side of it.  It took them a bit to figure out the mechanism of it and get inside.  Ohm had woken up by this point, and they started looking around.      “I’m not sensing any magic here,” Imhotep said.      “What does that mean?” Mary asked.  “That this place wasn’t made with magic?”      “Perhaps,” Imhotep said.  “Or it may be old enough that there has simply been no magic used here in a long time.”      “The construction of this place isn’t like anything from Earth,” Melinda said.  “It’s not like anything made by Humans or Gods or anything else there.”      “It kind of reminds me of our ship though,” Mary said.  “The one we took from the Palore.”      “Hmm,” Ghost Jack said.  “The style is reminiscent of them.  I’ll go look around, see if there’s any of those bastards around.”  He flew off.      “If this is a Palore space station, what does that mean for us?” Ohm asked.      “I don’t know,” Melinda said.  “But whatever it means, it can’t be good.”      Abigail rang the door chime on Harkon’s office.      “Come in,” Harkon said.  He looked up as Abigail entered.  “What can I do for you?”      “Well, I’ve been looking through Merlin’s journals, learning a bunch of the magic in them,” Abigail said.  “And I know we were waiting until Ghost Jack got back before transferring Sesla’s mind to her new body, but if you want to do so sooner, I may be able to.”      “Thank you, but we know his methods work, so I’d prefer not to use experimental methods if we don’t have to.”      “Understood, just letting you know there are options.  They have been gone for a while.”      “I’m sure they are fine.”      “I suppose there’s nothing saying that pocket universes can only be created by magic,” Melinda said.  “And the Palore are the Palore, so if anyone can pull it off, they’d be a decent bet.”      “I’m just wondering what the purpose of this place is,” Mary said.  “So far we haven’t seen anyone, so that could mean this place is abandoned.”      “Or it could mean that they just don’t keep it regularly staffed,” Melinda said.      “Guys, can you hear me?” they heard Ghost Jack saying over the comm.      “Yeah,” Melinda said.  “I guess comms do work here.  What’ve you found?”      “I’ve found what seems to be a command center of sorts,” Ghost Jack said.  “There’s a bunch of computers here, and what look like teleporters, but I can’t read anything on the computers.”      “It’s too bad we don’t have Abigail or the original Jack here to help with translating,” Melinda said.      “I have been spending a bit of time studying the Palore language,” Imhotep said.  “I’m not exactly fluent in it, but I’ll be able to manage a bit.”      “Which way?” Melinda asked.      Ghost Jack waited for a few minutes until the rest of the team caught up to him.  Imhotep went straight to one of the computers and started looking over the information on screen.      “So, your highness,” Ghost Jack said to Rebecca.  “What do you think of all this?  It’s a bit more advanced than what you’re used to.”      “It’s all very impressive and yes, I have never seen anything like this place before,” Rebecca said.      “The first time I left my home, it was a similar situation,” Mary said.  “I was a simple farm girl, then I went from that to a space station, and yeah it definitely was not something I was expecting.”      “I was even simpler,” Ohm said.  “From a simple hunter-gatherer society, although I also only found myself on a large metal boat, not a space station.”      “Hmm, this is really quite interesting,” Imhotep said, looking at the computer screen.      “Did you find something?” Melinda asked.      “We’ve been wondering how the Palore got back to the Cretaceous,” Imhotep said.  “Their ships only allow them to jump about 212 years at a time, but I think this is the answer.”      “Go on,” Melinda said.      “Each of those teleporters are linked to a different time, somewhat similarly to our time doors,” Imhotep said.  “One is the Cretaceous, one is even further back, one is 2017, and the final one is approximately eight billion years in the future.”      “Eight billion,” Ghost Jack said.  “Eight billion years.  That’s ridiculous.”      “Does this place have a self-destruct?” Mary asked.  “I mean, we have to destroy it, right?”      “The bigger question is if there are other places like this,” Melinda said.  “If this is the only one, destroying it would be a great idea, but if there are others, which I assume there are, it would be pointless.”      “I’m not sure,” Imhotep said.  “I’m not seeing anything about that here, but I think this is mostly just about the operation of this one.”      “Why 2017?” Ghost Jack asked.  “Like why use a time teleporter to link this to 2017?  Because isn’t this in 2017, just in a pocket universe.”      “Because the rules of time are somewhat different with this pocket universe, if I’m reading this right,” Imhotep said.      “I understand that your friends want to borrow the ship,” Harkon said.  “And I understand that we do owe them for there help in dealing with Deanna, but we’re still waiting for out team to get back.”      “It’s been months, sir,” Abigail said.  “And don’t get me wrong, I’m not ready to give up on them either, but how long are Philip and Dorian just supposed to sit around waiting in orbit?  Our team does have long range communicators on them, so they will still be able to let us know when they return.”      “I’m surprised that you’re not more worried.”      “Of course I’m worried, but there’s nothing we can do to help our team other than waiting.  My friends back home though, they actually need the help.  And I’ve been looking into the historical records, so I know that they shouldn’t even be where they are, and isn’t it our job to protect the timeline?”      “Hmm.”      “How different are we talking here?” Ghost Jack asked.      “It seems like a few months will pass in the regular universe during our four hours here.”      “Is it just this pocket universe, or all of them?” Mary asked.      “Near as I can tell this is just talking about this one,” Imhotep said.  “But that doesn’t mean the others don’t have the same issues.”      “It doesn’t change our mission though,” Melinda said.  “We still need to find Tesla’s team.  A few months shouldn’t make a big difference, and if the other pocket universes are worse, we’re time travellers, so if we are too much out of sync with our people, we’ll just use time travel to get back into sync.”      “We can pretty much assume this isn’t where our people are though,” Ghost Jack said.  “Unless Chronos and the Palore are working together.”      “Yeah, that seems unlikely, and somewhat terrifying to even consider” Melinda said.  “But while we’re waiting out this one, there is still the question of what we do about this place.  Imhotep, you said those time teleporters work similarly to the time doors.  Does that mean there are teleporters on both ends?”      “I believe so,” Imhotep said.      “Can we send something through to the Cretaceous, a beacon of some sort?” Melinda asked.      “Yes, can manage that,” Imhotep said.      “I see what you’re thinking,” Ghost Jack said.  “If the Palore have a base back then, we can let our people know where it is.  And if not, they at least know that we are okay.”      “Maybe,” Melinda said.  “The problem is, do we know when in the Cretaceous it is connected to?”      “I’m not entirely certain how the dates in here relate to our own,” Imhotep said.  “It is definitely close, but I can’t say exactly how much so.”      “So then we’ll put a timer on our beacon, so it doesn’t alert our people too early,” Melinda said.  “Imhotep, can you make the beacon invisible, so they don’t see it?”      “I can certainly try,” Imhotep said.      Harkon’s comm beeped.  “Yes?” he answered it.      “Sir, it’s Jeth Simpson, we just picked up a signal from the Moon.”      “What kind of signal?”      “It’s a beacon from Agent Summers’ team,” he said.  “They are okay, and apparently they are in a pocket universe that the Palore are using, and they say the beacon might be coming from a Palore base in this time.”      “Then it’s a good thing Abigail’s friends got our ship back to us in one piece,” Harkon said.      After their time in the Palore pocket universe was done, Melinda, Mary, Ghost Jack, Ohm, Imhotep, and Rebecca jumped once again.  Melinda was unable to look around, as the room was incredibly dark, but it started lighting up as Ghost Jack started glowing, and she saw that all six of their group were here, but they were not alone.      “Tesla,” she said.  Nikola Tesla, ERK-147, and the rest of their missing people were here.  They were in a large cubical room.      “Miss Summers, it is good to see you again,” Nikola said.  “Although I hope it is not the case that you are trapped here as well.”      “No, we have a way out of here,” Ghost Jack said.  “Is Chronos around?”      “We have not seen him since he sent us here,” Nikola said.  “Do you know why he did that?”      “Jack, the original Jack, and I went to talk with Chronos, and as soon as we mentioned the planet he got pissed and disappeared,” Melinda said.  “Since then we’ve been doing what we can to find you, but it’s been difficult, and a lot has happened.”      “Well, we certainly have the time to start filling them in on it,” Mary said.  “We’re going to be here another four hours, after all.” To be continued…