New Cthonic: Chapters 1, 2, 3

AN: Sometimes to refill my creative JUICE, I like to work on other projects. I finally edited these chapters in order to prepare for a potential JUICE BREAK. I'd definitely like to expand on this story and world, but I'm committed to focusing primarily on Play Test for now.

Summary: The story begins in the heart of forgotten Appalachia in a town stifled by economic devastation and the threat of several ten-thousand pound mountain lions, where a boy is about to become a living dungeon.

Content Warning: This will be a darker story than Play Test. Eventually will contain transformations, corruption, dub-con, monster sex, though there's none of that yet.

New Cthonic

I

Salem Cooper had too much energy to do anything. He was pent up, worried that he might explode into a massive ball of fire. It had happened before though not to him of course. But there had been that girl who turned into a giant mythical phoenix and burnt down the Mall of America. 

 He tapped his foot, refreshing the page again on his laptop. Consensus on this forum was that it was a government op, but what choice did he have at this point? Every few minutes a heartbeat would feel so violent and hot that he thought his blood would burst from his veins like red seafoam. 

Topic: [Help] [Urgent] Do I have superpowers or am I dying?

There’s something wrong with me. I feel feverish and I’m in pain, but I’m also wired. I didn’t sleep last night and I doubt I’ll be able to tonight.

 For the past few days, I’ve been seeing different bizarre vistas when I close my eyes a lot. It used to be every few months or something, but now it’s almost more often than not. To me, my friends seem to be acting strange, but logically, when I think about it, considering that they all are being weird in the same way it seems more likely that actually I am the strange one. Although one of them has definitely changed – she went from courageous to acting like a 1930’s Adventure comic.

 Also, I got sent home from school yesterday because I kept saying things to people that I couldn’t remember. No one would tell me what I said either, but the way they looked at me, they 100% think I’m cursed. This is the country so they’re prone to that way of thinking, but still.

 I’m eighteen, so I know there’s a lot that it could be. Or I could just be going crazy? Anonymous 2007/03/04 11:00:43

The first post had been less than helpful and had almost brought him to tears.

I’d hazard your going through a strong psuchic awakening. Gigahertz described something similar in his autobiography. You should probably isolate yourself from all people until you get your powers under control because iot kind of sounds like you did mind crimes.

Anonymous 2007/03/04 11:02:15

Had he mind-controlled Ginny Ennis to be bolder and slightly more manic, or was he being vain in thinking it was related to him? Maybe she had lost her mind on her own. Her father was the voice of the second most popular shortwave radio Appalachian news specialty station in the country. All that fame was sure to get to someone’s head.

 Why did this have to happen to him now? He had just started to get consistent commissions for art. Granted, they were all, tasteful, fursona portraits, but it was reliable, paying work, the end goal of every artist. 

 Salem refreshed the page again, doing so every few seconds now. It was dawning on him, as the vertigo mounted and the visions of the spectacular began to linger after every blink, that things might not be okay, and that he might be, in fact, about to die.

 He was saved. A verified user and a Licensed Special Responder had replied to his post.

Hi, don’t panic. Lift-Off here, Stunt Actress, LSR, and Bridge to specifically the air part of the Elemental Plane. You are 1000% a Bridge. I don’t know to which Meta-Plane, but we all pretty much go through the same thing. You didn’t do any “mind crimes”, you were speaking a tongue local to your particular Plane – it can sound very jarring if you don’t speak the language, but it's not harmful. Also, that girl might just be going through it.

 You don’t have to isolate from all people forever, but you should get clear for now. When I ‘Bridged’ I blew the roof of my parent’s house off, when the Satrap Nasramin ‘Bridged’, to the same Plane, she kicked up millions of tons of dust into the upper atmosphere.

 You’re going to be fine, this happens to 1-6 people a year. You don’t usually hear about it because we’re rare among Supers, and don’t generally cause that much fuss. Last year a Bridge summoned a few million butterflies over Madrid and didn’t escape the local news cycle except to our small circle.

 If you want to DM me some personal information, I can try to help as discretely as I can in case anything does go wrong though. 

 Welcome to the family!

Lift-Off (Verified, LSR) 2007/03/04 11:05:39

He was thirty minutes into the State Game Lands before he realized he didn’t need to be running full bore. Salem had never been an athletic youth; his body was meant for perching in front of a desk or hunching over a sketchbook. Yet he felt fine, if anything the half-hour sprint through uncleared bush had leveled out his other symptoms. His thoughts were clearer than they’d been for days.

 The woods were quiet as he slowed to a walking pace apart from the crunching of dead leaves beneath his sneakers. With only two roadways in and out of Dudlin, Pennsylvania, the quiet came quick once you were in the woods proper, and the sounds of civilization were lost to the Appalachian wilderness.

 Hopefully whatever superpowers he was coming into would give him some means of finding his way, because he was very lost. Salem had made for the woods nearest his house, but that meant very little in Dudlin. The forest was making a concerted effort to reclaim the once-thriving rail town. He could’ve been anywhere this side of the river – there were even roads he could have crossed without noticing, ones so far gone to disrepair that entire sections had been washed away by torrential rains years ago.

 He was shivering. While he may not have felt the strain, his body had still drenched itself in sweat and the early March chill was biting. After reading the post from Lift-Off, he had the forethought to make a pack before running off. Unfortunately, his panic meant that all he had brought was a single change of clothes and two granola bars – no water, no jacket, no boots.

 With a sigh, he trod on. A powerful headache was beginning to crest up his temples where it weighed him down, forcing him to stare at the ground. He noticed his steps looked like they were stumbling. 

 A little valley between two hills or a crook between three would be perfect. The earth could soak up anything he might be about to do, like nature’s bomb shelter. 

Yes, all he had to do was find a little nook and then he could rest.

A bed of moss to lay down on.

Let it swallow him into the loam.

Down, into the ground.

Down.

````

 A six-foot cube cutout of the forest floated on its own in a vast dark expanse. He recognized the rocky ditch as where he had collapsed moments ago, though it was sans his body. 

 Salem was sans his body too. As far as he could tell, he was nothing but the total comprehension of this particular cube of space as it hung motionless in time. Beyond ‘moving’ the angle with which he was observing the space, he couldn’t seem to do anything at all. He hoped something would change soon because he could already feel the monotony of this current existence.

[Tutorial 1/5]

1.      You have formed a Bridge to the Origin Axis, Ovum Mundi, the Egg from which all realities were born. Your mind has constructed this Game-like system to parse these new alien sensations.

 

In your parlance, you have become a Dungeon, a physical location through which the power of Creation and Change flows into this world. Within that broad constraint, you are free to design yourself as you see fit. This tutorial will teach you the basics of building yourself and maneuvering through life as a Living Location.

 

To do anything, you must expend energy. You will naturally draw in energy from the world around you over time. By affecting change in your surroundings and bringing the world more in alignment with the Origin Axis, you’ll be able to draw power directly from the other side as well. Anything that dies within you will also grant you whatever spiritual and physical power they may have possessed as well.

His world shifted in an instant to include a floating series of menus and information placards, the time of day, and a little map of the six-foot cube for example. 

 Without human hormones flowing through his brain, Salem was finding it hard to panic. He could feel his mind trying to click the switch on, however. Out of habit, he assumed.

[Tutorial 2/5]

Let’s get started on making your new body. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to redesign and rearrange everything we’re about to do at any time you aren’t being observed by a sapient intelligence.

 Start by making your entrance. This can be a cave, a root tunnel, an old mausoleum entrance, etc. Until you gain more power, this will determine what kinds of creatures and treasures you can create though, so choose carefully.

Salem felt the mental equivalent of a deep exhale. There were worse fates than playing a base-building sim for the rest of eternity. It killed him though, to know that he would forever be stuck less than an hour’s hike from his hometown. Maybe he could worm a tunnel out toward State College given time. Not exactly his idea of a destination town, but at this point, he’d take what he could get.

 At least his powers afforded him a tremendous amount of creative freedom. As he flickered through designs in his head, they appeared instantaneously, translucent in place before him, like perfect 3-D models at the speed of thought. 

 The most energy-efficient entrance was a cave. The least was a root tunnel, but only because it suddenly expanded his awareness to include a copse of old growth trees that framed the opening.

 He went with a cave entrance, modified to include an excavated entrance complete with enormous, carved stones keeping the way wide enough for the average man to pass with a comfortable stoop. Salem hoped they would transfer an element of mystery to what lay inside, make a visitor ask, ‘Who made this, and why?’. For the hell of it, he included thousands of differently sized eyes carved into the walls.

 The moment he finalized it and made it real, another room appeared just beyond, empty save for a ten-foot-tall glowing, red crystal shard.

[Tutorial 3/5]

Well done. You’ll notice that you automatically created a Heart Room. This contains the vital magics keeping you alive and is the only way through which to truly harm you.

 Make a few rooms to put between your entrance and your Heart. Again, you can always rearrange these later.

Time was frozen, but Salem was curious to finish the Tutorial. For now, he focused on a framework he could fill in the details on later. 

 The first room was made of more stone, to be made into a little temple to some long-forgotten god, he was thinking. At the far end was a crack in the wall leading into a tall but narrow tunnel, tight enough to tear at clothing. That in turn ended in a natural cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. Amidst the spikes was hidden a sheer drop thirty feet down into his Heart Room. Just those two relatively small spaces used up a surprising chunk of his starting energy.

[Tutorial 4/5]

Now it’s time to populate your halls with life. To do so, you must design a creature, and designate a space as its spawning area. Creatures will spawn at a rate that depends on how much energy is required for their creation. 

 There are many ways to increase the spawn rate for your creations. Granting them the ability to sexually reproduce, or to corrupt visitors into monsters, as examples.

 Currently, you are limited to designs that could feasibly be found within the animal and plant kingdoms and can only imbue sub-sapient intelligence. But as you grow in power and your mind gets better acclimated with the alien extremes of the Origin Axis, you’ll be able to create truly fantastical beasts and servants.

 If your creatures expand to fill your space completely, they will wander out into the world to fulfill their natural desires. This can be a great way to affect Change and gain energy from the Origin. However, they won’t naturally want to leave your expanse until they’ve filled the space.

 The lives taken by your creations outside of your halls also go directly towards generating more power as well. Conversely, people who kill your creations gain a small amount of their energy, growing stronger – much like experience in an RPG.

Was he the bad guys? His powers sure seemed to incentivize havoc. 

 Well, if Salem ever wanted to amount to more than a hole in the ground, he would have to play the game.

 Plus, before all his friends who played moved away, he’d spent most of ages nine through fourteen designing monsters for his favorite collectible card game. Some of the better later sketches were what had gotten him his first commissions.

 Again, he marveled at the speed and ease with which he could freely develop his creations. He quickly translated an old monster of his into the game-like, mental library, the first of potential beasts he could start spawning, titled ‘Tunnel Wolf’. The concept had come from an old drawing in which a creature looking like a mix of a moray eel and a weasel was dragging a knight’s body into a crack along a cliff path. It was a long, lanky thing, capable of whipping itself around to attack at any angle with a long, viscous maw, or strangling its prey like a python.

 Salem placed its spawning location amidst the stalagmites and watched in awe as two living creatures appeared in a bed of dead leaves and old bones. His menu system said they would spawn another every day, and two juveniles every week for every breeding pair of adults. The juveniles would grow into adults a week after spawning. In many ways, his creations were closer to video game summons than actual living organisms, but perhaps that could change in time. 

[Tutorial 5/5]

Almost done. Just three more basic fundamentals you’re capable of making. You don’t have to have all of them to be complete, but each can go a long way to making sure you’re successful in the long term. 

 First, Traps. Traps use energy to create, place, and to reset after being triggered. Currently, you’re limited to Traps that rely on mundane, terrestrial physics. Your own created beings won’t be in any danger of triggering your Traps.

 Secondly, Lures. This broad category of additions increases the rate at which you draw attention to yourself and how much energy you passively draw from Ovum Mundi. These can be anything from a gold vein, rare herbs, salt licks, and more. Currently, your only limitations on Lures are your imagination and how much energy you have to spend.

 Finally, Treasures. You have very little control over your independent Treasures to start. These are vessels or small areas that you’ve created to draw in various forms of metaphysical energies, Life, Lust, Ki, Magic, etc., and call on the Origin Axis to transform those energies into incredible, miraculous items and boons. A stronger one of these getting into the outer world is a guaranteed huge source of Change, and just the knowledge of their existence escaping could be monumental.

 Place one of these three to finish your Tutorial.

Creating the Tunnel Wolves and their spawning location had used almost all of the energy he had remaining, leaving him little he could do. Anything that could be found in the local area normally seemed to cost him almost a negligible amount of energy though, so he settled for adding a salt lick at his entrance. He could also designate a crack of a certain size as a Black Widow spider hotspot Trap, which he added to both the tunnel going back into the Stalagmite Forest as well as interspersed between individual stone spikes.

 And then time resumed, and Salem was alone, save for his two new tunnel wolves, contentedly grooming each other as though they hadn’t just popped into existence a second prior.

II

 Mary Cooper was going to shoot the Sheriff. She didn’t care that he was her cousin. Swear to Christ, she was going to rip the damn pistol off his damn belt and put two between his eyes if he saw fit to roll them at her one more damn time. 

 “What, Jimmy, what,” she spat, “is so damn funny about all of this.”

 He tucked his thumbs into his pockets with a smirk. Her Cousin Jimmy, or Sheriff Murphy to the rest of Dudlin, was a handsome and naturally charming man, infuriatingly so. Mary had watched him grin his way through life, failing upward at every step. Now the entire town was cursed to have the Murphy clan’s prettiest, most empty-headed buffoon as its lead law enforcement officer.

 “Mare, are you kidding? I said your boy’s probably at a girl’s place, and you said, ‘No, Jim, sum’ins afoot. I’m telling you. He left here with only one change of clothes and a few granola bars.” He chuckled. “I mean, listen to yourself, woman.”

 She grit her teeth. “No, I said—”

 Jimmy continued, interrupting her. “And by the way, I’d hate to say it, Mare, but the kid’s probably been doing this for a minute, because the granola bars? Let me tell you, that’s a pro move, right there. I mean, my man’s brought snacks.” He laughed loudly. “He might be a Cooper in name, but he’s a Murphy when it counts!”

 She clenched and unclenched her hands in rage. Dale, her sweet husband, had the presence of mind to speak up, saying calmly what she couldn’t.

 “Sheriff, Salem – he, he doesn’t do this. His room looked like he’d left in a tornado, the kitchen cabinet was still open, the front door was unlocked. This is a kid who’s read a book called Organizing for Creativity twice. He has a job on the internet. I mean he makes near as much as Mary does full-time at the diner. He’s more a man than a boy, really. And he’s definitely not the sort of man who’d run off like this.”

 “Dale,” said Jimmy, “you were the most boring teenager I ever met, and at Salem’s age, you’d already knocked up my cousin.”

 Mary started crying. The sobs bubbled out surprising her with their force, racking her thin frame with spasms as she tried to fight them back. Dale tried to wrap her in a hug but she had other plans, lunging for a vase to throw at her bastard of a cousin.

 Jimmy caught the vase out of the air with ease even as he jumped back in surprise. “Woah, woah! I’m sorry, alright, I’m sorry. I crossed the line, that’s my bad, alright? I get it, your son is missing. You know I love that boy.” He awkwardly set the vase down on the floor. “I didn’t know he was making money on the internet. That’s sick as hell.”

 She let Dale pull her into him, almost going limp against his barrel chest. 

 “But it is nighttime, there is still a State of Emergency, and I am sheriff for the whole town, not just my kin. Now, my boys will be rolling around checking up on curfew anyway, and they will know to be on the lookout for Salem.” Jimmy’s reminder that there was an active State of Emergency hit her like a punch to the gut. “Uhh, and uh, you know,” said Jimmy, floundering in the face of a crying woman, “if he’s not back tomorrow, say, noon – you know to give him time to wake up late and get breakfast – we’ll do a big, proper search party.”

 It took two or three minutes Jimmy-free, weeping into the floral print of their couch to calm down enough to function. Dale had dutifully been rubbing her back, kneeling alongside her the whole time. Her sweet man, he deserved a better woman.

 “Dale, it’s only 6:30. I’m not waiting for noon to do something.”

 “Okay,” he said in his even keel. “What do you want to do?”

 “We called everyone we could in town,” she said. “Dale, what if he ran into the woods?”

 Dale thought silently for a moment. “The closest Helcat sighting was 150 miles from here. The Hunting Lodge would have noticed if it was near.”

The blood fled her face. She looked through him, into the middle distance. Dale had no idea what she was talking about. And he never would.

“The Hunting Lodge…they must have ways of finding people who got lost,” she said.

Dale nodded. “I know they keep dogs. Couldn’t hurt to ask.”

Mary watched him as he got ready. She could barely contain the contempt as he took the time to properly lace up his boots. He had lost his sense of urgency after Jimmy’s banter. It was unbelievably disappointing.

She waited until they were in the car to say sharply, “He has an online girlfriend.”

“Hmm?” asked Dale. 

The streets of Dudlin were all but empty and the town near pitch black. Once upon a time, Penn State University had operated an observatory atop a nearby hill and paid the town to not use its street lights. The University had long left, but Dudlin remained dark. Someone had done the estimates on how much it would cost to modernize the gas lights and that had been the end of that.

 “Salem has an online girlfriend, so what Jimmy was saying was completely ridiculous.”

 “Really?” he said, surprised. “Salem is dating? Who is it?”

 “Another artist he met on a forum. And our son’s not a cheater, so—”

 “Ah.” 

 Dale let on the gas some more, accelerating to ten above the speed limit, a sprinting pace for the man. “Sorry,” he said. “Fucking Jimmy.”

 Mary laughed. Dale swearing could always get a titter from her. “It’s okay.” She petted his arm to let him know she meant it.

 “He told you about this?”

 “I asked him who he talked to for two hours every day at the same time.”

 “Oh. Ha, yeah.” Dale coughed. “Did he show you a picture of her? Is she…pretty?”

 “Dale!” she scolded with a smile. He laughed.

 They sat in companionable silence for the rest of the drive. Oak Crescent Hunting Lodge was a hundred years old, a grand estate once the summer home of a steel millionaire. It sat perched upon a ridge, one side overlooking Dudlin and the river, and the other a view of the vast Game Lands and State Forests, and the rolling hills of Appalachia beyond. 

 After a hundred years, it remained one of the few profitable businesses left in the area to still be growing. As the folk of the country crowded into major cities, the desire to escape back into the peace of it grew. The Lodge provided a way for rich men to embody a fantasy in an idealized version of the woods, where they could partake in traditionally masculine blood sport with talented hunters to ensure the trip was worth its exorbitant cost. 

 Mary grew worried at the sight of the place, looking so much prettier than everything around for miles. She had heard stories of the sort of work this place offered young women in the surrounding county. The sort of things they expected from their staff – it was why she’d never tried waitressing for them.

 Dale reassured her as they neared the wealthy retreat, parking a few spots down from an Italian sports car worth more than their home. 

 “I know the man who trains their dogs, Mary. He’s a good man, whip-smart. He’ll find Salem. I know it.”

````

 Salem was delighted to find that he could freely speed up his perception of time. Or slow it to a crawl or a halt should anything interesting happen, as unlikely as that may have sounded to him at the moment. He had extended little air cracks out to surrounding hills to stimulate a breeze, with the hope it would carry the smell of salt to some nearby deer. It was just a waiting game now.

 Perhaps sensing his boredom, his tunnel wolves took turns hopping over one another, playing tag through the stalagmites. It was cute, but could hardly hold his attention. Sped up, at least, they looked like spiraling blurs, making an entrancing pattern. 

 If he wanted to, he could experience time millions of times faster than normal, and let entire years pass by in a blink of an eye. It made sense, he supposed. He was a place now, after all. In kind, however, accelerating time too much made him feel inhuman, and made the world feel too much like a video game.  An hour of real time in a subjective ten minutes was the most he felt comfortable with at the moment. 

 He had spent the remainder of his energy ‘carving’ an elaborate statue of Samiah, his girlfriend, and turning it into a Lure. Salem had realized shortly after completing the Tutorial that he hadn’t remembered to message her what was going on before he ran into the woods. He’d forgotten to leave anything for his parents as well, but they could feasibly figure out what happened on their own. Samiah lived in Tehran. 

 Hence the statue; if he could get a lifelike replica of her to go viral on the internet then she’d have to know he was still thinking of her. She knew where he lived, it would be impossible for her to believe it was just coincidence. 

 Salem felt confident the Lure built into the statue would make waves. From her eyes flowed a small but steady stream of water, dripping down her face into her cupped palms and then into the cracked earth at her feet. Where the water touched, it left a visible golden streak, fine dust in enough quantity that it looked like paint at first glance. 

 Gold drove people insane. He had lacked the energy to add in a full vein, but this pittance every day was within his budget and people had still killed for less. It had also increased his daily power draw by over five percent. Salem didn’t understand why making himself more valuable increased how fast he accumulated energy, but he was happy to oblige his new ‘biology’. If he had to be a cave, he wanted to at least be the coolest one. 

 Two dogs at his entrance snapped him out of idly sketching scenes into the walls of his cave through cracks in the rocks. They were hunting dogs, he’d seen enough growing up in the area to know that, and wore tear-away collars. Each stopped for a moment to lick at the mineral crystals spread about the entrance, but quickly moved into the cave, sniffing with a purpose.

 That was odd. Dudlin was exactly the sort of place to have hillbillies who’d leave their dogs out unattended or locked up at night, but he was a way out from the town and publicly available land. Maybe someone was out here poaching – he had no idea when the hunting seasons were.

 Salem briefly contemplated setting his tunnel wolves to ‘Subdue only’, the best he could do to limit their violence, but a Dungeon had to eat, and they weren’t his dogs. Besides, if he ever wanted to communicate with his family again, he needed to race to unlock higher-level intelligence in his creations – and that meant obliging his new nature.

 The dogs ignored the statue completely, tentatively sniffing at the crack at the far wall. They were low enough to be able to ignore the dense field of webs that clogged the top half of the crack. 

 He could see everything within him perfectly, as though it was lit flawlessly at all angles, but the dogs were operating in total darkness. The first cautiously navigated the crack, narrow enough to traverse with ease but blind to the danger lurking within. 

 His tunnel wolf had propped itself between the stone walls at an angle, holding its body almost completely vertical to the ground. The moment the dog wandered underneath, the monster lunged down, snapping its maw around the animal’s neck, and dragged it upwards into the crack until its torso was lodged trapped between two jagged, jutting rocks.

 Its dying whines and wails were horrifying. Once it was fully caught in the stones, the tunnel wolf, a not exceptionally hardy monster, was quick to disengage from its thrashing prey. The sound of its extended agony was soon drowned out by frantic barks and yips from its companion. It began to sprint back and forth through Salem’s tunnels and out from his entrance, trying its best to summon help.

 Salem watched as his tunnel wolf began to devour its prey while it was still alive but too tired to fully resist. He was filled with a mix of horror at the event and pride for his creations, who could do no wrong in his eyes. It wasn't their fault; he'd designed them to hunt like this so that human adventurers could conceivably rescue their friends. This was an unintended consequence.

 That said, he did have to speed up time until the dog finally died after almost ten minutes of agony. The burst of power from its death was far greater than he had expected, almost ten percent of everything he’d spent the whole day. It was more than enough that whatever discomfort he felt over the creature’s death was quickly lost to the fun of planning out further expansions for himself. 

 First thing to do was prioritize luring in more visitors. His appetite had been whet. 

````

 Ever since the Forestry Service had adopted their experimental ‘radio perimeter’ around the Helcat’s assumed range; the Hunting Lodge’s satellite phones had been worth their weight in shit. Why the government didn’t just take everything they spent on the year’s new bullshit tech and put it fully into the Special Response Bounty, was beyond him. He guessed relying on superheroes was considered too Ottoman now. 

 Moose didn’t even disagree with the principle; he didn’t want the state to rely on one person with weather powers for irrigation. But a truck-sized mountain lion? Surely that fell squarely under the Special Response System’s purview.

 He cursed and contemplated winging the bulky metal box into the dark woods, right off the hill he’d hiked up to try and make a call. But the Coopers needed to know he’d found their son’s backpack. Next to a knee print in the mud as well, a sign it had been dropped out of exhaustion. The kid had been sent home from school with a fever and for ‘saying strange things’ yesterday – had temporary psychosis driven him out here?

 Damn, there was nothing for it, he was going to have to climb a tree. He sighed taking off his shirt and twisting it tight like a rope. They had made him do something similar in the Army, and the Rangers had even made them practice at night. That said, not like he was fucking nostalgic for those times.

 “Mr. Troyer – ah!” he said, catching himself before he fell. He had managed to prop the phone between his chest, his arms occupied by pulling around the tree for leverage. 

 “He—” Static cut in and out. “…you alright?”

 “I’m up a tree,” he said gruffly.

 “—see. What…you found? –a ping earlier.”

 “Good, it came through. Those were the coordinates where I found the kid’s backpack. We need to get those to the Forest Service.”

 There was a pause before Troyer said anything. “Are…sure that’s wise?”

 Moose had known Zachariah Troyer to be a cold, pragmatic man, since the day they’d met, but he wasn’t seriously suggesting they’d cover up a teen’s disappearance, was he? 

 Howling echoed through the trees and leaf-covered hills. Moose quirked his head. They had found the end of the trail. One of the dogs, Welly, was dead. An ambush predator. 

 “The dogs found something. I have to go.”

 Moose didn’t think very highly of his superpower most days. Generally, dogs had very little to communicate that they couldn’t effectively do with just their normal behaviors. Being able to talk to dogs was a bit like being able to say ‘fuck you’ in any language – when you got down to it, most people could effectively do the same thing.

 He’d found it so underwhelming that sometime in his late teens he’d made the decision not to confess it to his girlfriend at the time and had never bothered to change his mind on ‘coming out’ ever since. As far as anyone else was concerned, Moose was an ordinary man who happened to be quite good with dogs.

 What a bad idea, he realized now, in the middle of running as quickly as he could towards Decker, his still living companion. He probably should have insisted on bringing dogs with him to every mission he ever went on as a Ranger. Decker was better than night vision if you had the time to parse his panicked barks. 

 The dog bounded up to him when he crested over the ridge hiding the cave they’d tracked the scent to. He was shaking and near to crying, clinging to Moose’s legs for comfort. Poor thing was a bird-hunting dog, meant to rouse and retrieve, not to tangle with predators. 

 “Shh,” said Moose. Instantly, the dog stilled, all business again.

 Snapping on a headlamp and pulling out his handgun, the woodsman made his way down into a crook between hills. To his disbelief, massive carved stones framed the entrance to a cave large enough for two or three people to enter standing abreast. It was one thing to have the place described to him by a dog, and another to see it in person. 

 The statue of the girl inside was so lifelike that it gave him a start. Without a living smell, he supposed it hadn’t stuck out to the dogs to be worth mentioning. But by god, it was beautiful. Even knowing the threat the cave contained, Moose couldn’t stop himself from running a finger through the golden lines on her face.

 “Gold,” he muttered to himself with a mental sigh. People were going to lose their minds over this. And the whole thing reeked of the dark arts.

 Ignoring the probably cursed statue, Moose leveled his gun at the crack in the wall his dog was whining at. Spider webs shone in the headlamp. There were no signs of a struggle, no trail of blood leading into the tunnel. If the kid had entered the tunnel, then he still had the wherewithal to crawl under the worst of the webs, which were unbroken starting two feet and up. 

 He got close enough to verify the type of spider, before taking two huge steps back. Of course, they were black widows. 

 “Hey, kid,” he shouted. “Salem!”

 Moose waited for a reply. There was silence and then a quiet chitter that grew louder and higher pitched, almost mocking to his ears. Decker whined, taking a step behind him. He clicked the safety on his pistol off. The chittering stopped.

 The sensible thing to do would be to leave and return in the morning with help, but if the kid was still injured, still alive on the other end of that tunnel…

 Taking his shirt off for the second time tonight, he stepped forward and whipped it down and through the dense webs, clearing the worst of them before flinging the shirt away. He used a trick he learned as a Boy Scout, lowering his headlight so it was level with his eyes. Spider eyes reflected straight back at the source of light, twinkling helpfully for him. 

 He stomped the worst of them away and pulled a flare from his belt. The spiders fled from the light – the best he could do with what he had at the moment. Holding the torch forward, he swapped his gun for a knife and started to carefully make his way forward. The smart thing would have been to send Decker in first, but Moose couldn’t bring himself to make the dog suffer like that. 

 A shadow rapidly shifting under the red light of the flare gave him just enough notice to yank his body back, ripping bad gashes across his abdomen, but saving him from the furry eel-like creature from dropping down onto his skull. Instead, it caught his arm holding the flare on his forearm and immediately started to yank him forward into the crack.

 Moose tried to stab the creature, but it kept his arm between it and the knife. It wasn’t that it was stronger than him, looking at it now, it couldn’t be much larger than his hunting dogs, but it had all the leverage in the world while he was fighting just to keep from falling forward on his stomach. 

 He dropped the knife and pulled his gun out again. Placing the muzzle against his arm, he aimed through himself into the beast’s maw and unloaded, shooting through his own flesh and bone.

 The first shot deafened him completely, the fifth, its muzzle flash almost pointed straight at his face in the melee, blinded him. After that it was a panicked rush to get out, a mindless scramble back and away from the danger.

 When he came to, he was on his back at the entrance of the cave. He could hear Decker’s pained whines from inside, the occasionally heightened yip as something bit into it, eating his good boy while he was still alive. There was a noticeable series of pinpricks on his neck he was all but certain were spider bites. 

 He sat up, the distant flare light from within the cave was the only real light anymore. A hint of gold shone in the dark, two streaks that he knew belonged to the weeping girl statue inside. Where he had run his finger through could be seen in the negative space, as dark as the rest of the statue’s face. 

 Moose made a note to not disturb the gold next time – bad luck, clearly. 

 There would be a next time, that was for sure. It was personal now; he had two dogs and a kid to avenge.

III

Teen, 18, Missing, Presumed Dead Outside Dudlin, Mysterious Cave to Blame?

By: The Mountain Prophet Editors 03/10/2007

 

The Mountain Prophet grieves for its neighbor, three-time magazine cover contributor, and dear friend Salem Cooper, aged 18, of our Little Town by the River, in the Gentle Rolling Hills of Pennsylvania, missing since March 04, 2007. Our hearts go out to him and the Cooper Family. The Prophet will be hosting a silent auction for all three of Salem’s original watercolor covers on its website: here, with all proceeds going to the Coopers to cover funeral expenses. 

 

Tragedy struck Dudlin, Pennsylvania on the first Friday of March, when Dale Cooper came home from working at the mill to find his front door partially open and his son nowhere to be found….

Marina stared at the words “Presumed Dead”. Her news app hadn’t appeared to have made a mistake. The article hit all the criteria: Dudlin, PA, check; Salem Cooper, check; Special Response, check. But, “Presumed Dead,” no, that must have been a mistake. The Bridge couldn’t have died. His symptoms were in the top 1% for pre-Bridging shock responses according to Dr. Morris. The researcher had said over the phone when consulted that she’d correlated those responses with a category of effects she labeled ‘visible-over-1000-kilometers’. Both of them had been excited to see what his first power use would be. Dr. Morris had suggested buying stocks in nearby companies, citing evidence of powerful economic resurgences following the introduction of empowered individuals in depleted, poverty-rich regions.

 The article didn’t even connect superpowers to the boy at all. According to them, Salem had wandered into the woods in a fever haze, fallen into a mysterious cave, and been attacked by its monstrous residents. There was no mention of his reaching out online for help, nor anything about his use of a Meta Language the day prior.

 And they thought he fell in a hole and died? Preposterous, he would have been on par with Satraps and Zaibatsu Kensei – No, she would confess that she hadn’t considered he lived in the country nor how dangerous telling someone experiencing hallucinations to go outside alone could be, but she certainly had not sent him to die in a cave. Right?

 The aforementioned ‘Special Response’ only appeared in the article at the end:

Zachariah Troyer owner of the Oak Crescent Hunting Lodge, has paid to expedite a Special Response Bulletin for further information on the mystery cave and the beasts that lurk within, and has sworn not to operate any hunting trips until it is settled. Mr. Troyer has additionally attached a bounty on the creatures that badly maimed his employee and are suspected of killing Salem Cooper, of $10,000 for a pelt.

Five grand was about the average amount of money she made on an SR Bulletin for a thirty-six-hour shift of forest fire rescue. She was obviously going to go investigate anyway, she owed it to the young Bridge, but it would be nice to make ten thousand dollars without spending three days fighting superheated gasses and smoke. 

 Her phone started to blow up with more news notifications. Other outlets were picking up the story now, all recycling the same information included in the Mountain Prophet. Why had it taken so long for the information to get out anyway? She scrolled through the rest of the website looking for more information.

 Ah, the website only updated every Thursday. Jesus Christ, so if something happened in Central Pennsylvania on a Friday, it took the rest of the world six days to find out about it. How was that still possible in America in 2007?

 Marina shoved the laptop off her in a huff. She should have just hopped on the first plane over the next day after he didn’t respond to her DMs. How much good was she going to be almost a week late?

 She did a lap of her apartment. It didn’t take very long. This was the nicest place she could find while also saving up to buy a place outright. Banks didn’t include Special Responder pay when calculating mortgage loans; the mortality rate was too high. And if Marina was forced to rely on her income from stunt acting she’d still be living in the same size apartment, but in a nicer neighborhood. Although, what was a bad neighborhood to a Licensed Special Responder? She was legally allowed to throw a mugger through a wall, as established by court precedent. 

 God, how she wanted a penthouse. It didn’t matter where or how tall, but she really thought she deserved permanent rooftop access. She was Lift-Off! She could fly! She’d worked almost seventy fires since she’d started six years ago, and put in well over a hundred of those thirty-six-hour shifts. And she was still a few hundred shifts away from even a modest penthouse apartment. What did it say about the American Dream, if one could work in both Hollywood and Super-heroics and still be struggling to break out of the middle class?

 Plus, if she tried to take off on her current balcony, she’d shatter her and the neighbors' sliding glass doors, and she knew from experience that renter’s insurance didn’t cover those damages. 

 Marina stepped out on her balcony, stucco railing covering up the fact she was wearing only panties below her tank top, and lit up Throne Medicinal’s newest line of artisan herbal cigarettes. The company promised the equivalent of a forty-five-minute deep-tissue massage over a five-minute smoke and had managed to deliver albeit at the cost of $600 for a pack of ten. A benefit of living in a roach-ridden vice-den far beneath her means was the ability to spend money guilt-free on exorbitant luxuries. 

 Taking a deep, chemically relaxing drag, Marina called her agent. Danielle handled both her acting jobs and Special Response Bulletins. Enough people with superpowers moved to Hollywood that every major agency offered the service.

 “Danielle,” she said.

 “Lift-Off!” came the cheery reply. “Congratulations on landing the new Holzhauser film! Are you excited? Flying in the Alps! You’d better take me some pictures.”

 Her heart skipped a beat. She’d heard the director was filming his next billion-dollar action extravaganza but didn’t even know when they’d be starting. “Wait, what? This is the first I’m hearing about that.”

 There was a long silence on the other end. “Um,” said Danielle, very stilted, “never mind. What did you want to talk about?”

 The awkward attempt to move on offended her. “No, no,” said Marina. “Why did you think I’d gotten a job on the Holzhauser movie?”

 “Sorry, I’m really sorry about that,” said her agent quickly. “I can definitely see why you’d be upset by that.”

 “Danielle. Why did you think,” she repeated slower, “I’d gotten a job on the Holzhauser movie?”

 She heard a deep breath on the other end. “It’s nothing. I just – another of my clients got – and I got mixed up, but—”

 “Which client?” she cut in.

 “Miss Serova, I am so, so sorry.”

 “Which client, Danielle? Who do you represent that could also take a job flying in the Alps?”

 “Uhh…I’m not supposed to tell you,” she said meekly. 

 “Danielle.”

 “Jane Take’emUp!”

 A gust surged up around her, only the threat of losing her $60 cigarette kept her from allowing it to grow stronger. 

 “You. Traitorous. Bitch.”

 “I am so sorry—”

 “How long?”

 Dejected and audibly on the verge of tears, Danielle replied, “Four months. Sorry. They said it made the most sense and wouldn’t hear me out.”

 “How is that not a major conflict of interest?!” she shouted. No wonder work had been slow.

 “It is. It obviously is,” said Danielle. 

 Marina continued to vent. “She’s just me but younger and worse at flying!”

 “Yes, I know.”

 “And her black belt is in Taekwondo, which is just worse Karate!”

 “Well, I’m not super familiar—”

 “And she’s not even a natural blonde!” Marina paused. “How much is she making on the Holzhauser job?”

 “Miss Serova, I don’t think this is healthy.”

 “Healthy?! It’s legally actionable, you bimbo! What do you think is going to happen when this hits the trades?”

 Danielle was wholesale crying now. “I-I-I don’t know what to say.”

 Marina took a deep drag, the physical effects on her tense muscles doing a great deal to calm her down as well. She sighed. “You’re lucky I’m smoking a massage at the moment.”

 She heard a sniffle. “Wh-what? Oh, the Thrones. Do they work?”

 “Yes,” she said tersely, taking another hit. “Tell you what, after you find a way to make this up to me, I’ll buy you a pack.”

 “Make it up to you? Yes! Of course, thank you, Lift-Off. I will, I swear. I’ll find a way to make this right.”

 “Good. You’ve got some time, I’ve got something to do on the other side of the country,” she said. Marina had little confidence that the woman was capable of putting their working relationship back together, but she didn’t have the time to get another Special Response agent. 

 “How hard is it for you to assign me a Bulletin in another State?”

 Danielle returned to her normal cheery self. She’d probably gotten used to being yelled at and threatened, reasoned Marina, being a useless cunt and all. “Not very, we use them to promote book tours all the time. I’m surprised we never set you up with a little paid vacation job. There must be fires in Hawaii, besides the volcanoes, which I suppose are very large fires, when you get down to it.” 

 “Great. I need you to look up a job in Dudlin, Pennsylvania.” Marina heard the tapping of keys. She wondered if the woman was by her computer at home or still trapped at the office at nearly eight at night. 

Endless high-rise apartment blocks stretched on until the haze obscured horizon, each light in the sea of smog most likely a family or group of people splitting rent, none of whom were saving up for a penthouse. She hoped she wasn’t being a diva about all of this. All told, she still lived a vastly superior life to most people.

Oh god, she was absolutely being a diva about this. Marina took a long drag of the cigarette.

“Okay!” said Danielle. “It looks like we have lots, wow! Would you look at that, most of these are Bounty Bulletins. Wow, when the news tells you the countryside’s getting more dangerous you don’t expect this. There’s a loooot of escaped supervillains and monsters in the woods it turns out.”

“Huh. Forward me that list. But, I’m looking for something specific—”

“Op! I found it. Yeah, ‘Exterminate hostile creatures and investigate their source. Potential Body Recovery. Spelunking.’ One hundred thirty thousand dollars, not bad.”

“Not bad! That’s outrageous. Why is it so high?” 

Danielle listed, “Spelunking. Body recovery. Extermination. Monsters. It’s also flagged for the Occult and venomous spiders. And then it gets its rural multiplier.”

“What’s the rural multiplier?”

“Oh you know, they have to pay people more to want to move out there. I mean, just consider the ratio of Special Responders to threats. They must be desperate.”

“But I fight fires in the middle of nowhere all the time. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars is what I made on all of those fires last year!” 

Her agent laughed nervously. “Well, you know, there’s, um, not a small amount of Special Responders in the area willing to work for mostly publicity, so naturally the market adjusted…”

“We need to unionize,” she grumbled, throwing the pack of smokes under a chair before she had another. “Anyway, tag that Bulletin for me. I’m headed there tonight.”

“Are you sure? This is really out of your comfort zone. A part of my job is making sure you don’t get yourself killed.”

“Danielle,” said Marina sharply, “I am a Bridge to the Elemental Air. I know the Words to the Song of Storms. I have spent literal days flying people through superheated columns of smoke, I can handle a spooky cave.”

“You’re right. Haha! What’s the worst that can happen?”

Marina didn’t respond, opting for steely silence. The audacity of this bitch.

“Alright, you’ve tagged it. Is there anything else? Other than the forwarding you the—”

“No, that’s all. Goodbye, Danielle.”

```

Lift-Off picked the lock to the roof with a wave of her hand. She had opened this particular door so many times it was an effortless expenditure of will. Outside, Los Angeles was muggy and warmer than usual for early March. Smog hung stale and stagnant over it all, especially cloying at this altitude.

Marina lifted a hand to her hair and shook it out, imagining little fairies falling out of the strands. It was the same ritual she’d used to summon her Breezes since she was a child. One by one, sprites fell about the cape of her neck and began to dance about, invisible to most, churning the local air, making it easier for her to manipulate. Simple elementals with no greater than animal intelligence, they clung to her out of affection and devotion, utterly pleased to do her every bidding. 

Once her team had banished the smell of brake dust and stale fryer oil, Marina fell backwards into a current and let it carry her straight into the sky. Off the ground, she was all but silent, enveloped in a tightly wound bundle of hyper-dense air. This was the power of a Bridge – the air around her was as much a part of her as her flesh and blood, and she could wield it with the same casual dexterity as the muscles in her hand. Others, elementalists and the broad category of ‘wind users’, could spend their lifetimes working to achieve her level of control and never do so. 

Los Angeles stretched like a sea of stars past the horizon, endless concrete and cracked asphalt as far as the eye could see even from two thousand feet high. Twenty-five million people crammed into a city only kept from crumbling through the use of commercially available super science, unevenly distributed between the rich and poor. 

Marina hadn’t intended to stay so long when she moved back. She would stay with her parents for a year or two, save up, and get back to traveling the world. The plan had been to fly north into the deep wilderness of Alaska and across the Bering Strait to Asia and beyond. The journey was to be a great test of endurance, meant to push her powers past the limit into new strata. Now here she was, six years into two moderately promising careers and a connoisseur of, legal, high-end recreational pharmaceuticals. 

 Why had she badgered that poor woman? She didn’t give a shit about stunt acting, she never did; her only marketable skills at the time had been Karate and acrobatics, and her superpowers let her walk onto the job. It had been as much about proving to her parents she didn’t need to go to college as it had been about the work. She was supposed to be flying around the Empire by now, a happy vagrant, not a miserable actor.

 The talent agency had suggested picking up fire rescue work – it tested well across all demographics and was a guaranteed in with daytime news shows. Marina had nearly died four times during her first three-day, and had saved fifteen people, six cats, and eight dogs. She had felt like an angel diving down upon hell flying through those billowing black clouds of burning ash. 

 The experience was somewhat soured now that she knew the State of California was taking advantage of her clout-hungry peers to lowball her out of a reasonable paycheck. What really stung was knowing she was no different than them. Looking down at the city like this it was easy to pretend she was above the hustle and grind, but the moment she had moved into her own place instead of setting out on her travels, Marina had been the same as any other ambitious and insecure C-list celebrity she disdained.

 Twenty-year-old Marina would have left for Dudlin the moment she got Salem Cooper’s DM. 

 She flew straight up. At about five kilometers she could safely enter the Elemental Plane without fear of rattling windows or disabling commercial aircraft. More importantly, every occultist and wind user in East LA wouldn’t know her coming and going by her spiritual ‘wake’. 

 Gradually, a cyclone formed around her, hitting a gentle speed and staying there. She bundled the winds about her like blankets, the air growing thicker. As the cyclone shrunk, she floated first in pudding, then in silk, and finally the smoothest of wood as the pressure increased past anything that could be found naturally outside of a gas giant. Then with a great bang, wreathed in a protective layer of hyper-dense air, she punched a pin-prick hole in the threads of reality and entered the Elemental Plane.

 By the time the echoes of her exit reached the city below to be lost amidst cacophony, Marina Serova was far, far away.

AN: Fun fact - Ovum Mundi is canon in Play Test as well.