The train ride from DC back to Mayfield flew by and before he knew it, Warrick was back on home soil.
One of his homes at least; he would never disown Brooklyn where he’d spent most of his life. He’d been born in Florida and lived there until he was four, but he didn’t remember much. Brooklyn held the bulk of his memories, even if Mayfield held most of the best ones.
His thoughts rambling as he tried not to think about what was really weighing on him, he left the train station, bypassed the commuter pod station, and started walking.
Late September saw Halloween decorations going up. Some years before Warrick and the others arrived in Mayfield, the Chamber of Commerce had convinced local businesses to sponsor scarecrow displays on downtown street corners. Over time, it became a matter of pride to sponsor the most memorable and elaborate display every year.
Here, a pair of straw-stuffed boxers were locked in pugilistic combat. There, a scarecrow doctor loomed out of an alley with a bloody hacksaw. At a major intersection, a headless straw horseman on his straw horse held aloft a pumpkin wreathed in holographic flames.
Warrick took out his palmtop and started taking pictures of them. He and Cyn had made a game of it the previous year, trying to beat one another to discovering the best of the best.
Then he turned a corner and saw it: A full eight feet tall, the scarecrow hung in the air from the bottom of a sky-walk with the help of a web of wires. From head to foot, it was sheathed in plastic armor that was painted to shine silver. One arm pointed upward and a sleek, metal tendril extended from it to wrap around the entire sky-walk while the other arm was pointed forward. A second tendril leapt from that hand, it’s leading edge shaped into a harpoon.
He stopped and stood stock still on the sidewalk, looking at it.
It was always an odd moment when something reminded him that he, or rather Alloy, was famous. He knew how he reacted to The Whitecoat, or Zero Point, or Majestrix, but it rarely occurred to him that there were people out that felt the same way about him.
But he was just a guy, wasn’t he? Strip the armor off and give him a day without criminals and there was just Warrick Kaine, an average college student with average problems. He hung out and played videogames, holed up in the library to study, and hated his suitemate.
Were they all like that, he wondered. Did the Whitecoat end the day by throwing off his namesake coat and maybe heading to a bar with friends? Did Juniper’s parents sometimes just stay in and watch TV?
It boggled him that it never really occurred to him before. No matter how many people contributed the bits and pieces of knowledge they gleaned about their favorite heroes on PrelateWatch, they didn’t actually know the people they idolized.
What would all the people on that site’s Alloy board think if they knew their hero gooned out and missed helping the team fight Morganna at Mary Washington because he pigged out at a seedy barbecue place the night before and got food poisoning? Or just how uncomfortable they made him when they wrote their fan fiction pairing him and Darkness in often graphic scenarios?
What, and this was when his mind betrayed him, would they say if they knew that Alloy was wandering downtown in a funk because he missed Renaissance?
And there it was. He’d been doing so good too, but now the doors were open and he was actively thinking about it and all the uncomfortable what ifs and maybes emerged.
How long would it be before he saw her face again? Smell the gentle hints of cherry blossom from her shampoo? Hear her laugh?
Just be close to her?
Yes, they were going to keep in touch. Yes, she was going to mirror across on special occasions. Yes, he’d already reserved a ticket to give her a surprise visit once she got settled.But in between all that, there was still a whole damn ocean between them, keeping them from being close whenever they wanted.
He tore his gaze away from his scarecrow likeness and headed off in a random direction. Thinking things through just seemed to make them more complicated, and he’d been trying to sort those things out for more than a year.
What was he even really upset over anymore? The alternate future he’d seen was now surely averted, so there was no reason for him to think that things would end up like they did then. And Tink had just told him that she’d had the same anxieties about adequacy and separation as he had, so it felt unjustified to keep feeling them now.
Was it really just the distance? The felt preposterous too, because he had friends online from all over the planet. Hell, his guild leader in Repetitions of Immortality was from Reading, which he thought was probably an even farther away part of England than Cambridge.
Of course, he didn’t enjoy kissing his guild leader, or holding, or having said forty-seven year old mother of three fall asleep with her head on his chest. So maybe it was a bad comparison.
Groaning to himself, he stepped into an alley. He needed to clear his mind.
The alley was disappointingly empty; if it had been a comic book, there would have been a mugging taking place that he could use as a valve for his frustration. Then again, if his life was like the comics he read, he’d have a best friend who was an alien and would have probably have died two or three times in the past few years.
What he did find was a recycling bin full of cans, which he promptly put to work. By now, local recycling centers were used to finding collection bins full of nothing but paint flecks and the wax applied to the inside of some soda cans, and they understood that, in a way, the metal was still getting recycled.
Seconds later, Alloy swung out from the top of a building bounding the alley, making his way toward the river with the help of Isp and Osp.
“No, I’m not depressed, or malnourished.” Alloy replied to them, too distracted to remember not to talk out loud. “You don’t even know what malnourished is.” A pause. “No you don’t because you used it wrong, Osp.”
He tried not to be too harsh on them. The wins cared about him like the closest of brothers, but their understanding of most things was equivalent to a five year-old’s, and their understanding and empathy for organic problems was nil.
They considered emotional turmoil an organic problem and refused to acknowledge that their anger at him getting hurt, or their pouting at being unsummoned were emotions too and therefore, emotions were not wholly organic.
Still, going on their limited knowledge and based on what they enjoyed, they offered their own kind of solution.
“Not right now, guys.” Alloy sighed. “I kind of think hunting down baddies to kick around because I feel bad is probably one of those karma things that will bite me on the ass.” He rolled his eyes inside his visor. “Okay, sure; later we can find some guys for you to beat up. Right now though, I… well I need to just go somewhere and breath, you know? And there’s places Alloy can go that Warrick Kaine can’t.”
***
Not many people got to see the view from the top of the West Truman Bridge’s southern tower. It was a shame too, because it was one of the most awe-inspiring in the city.
Straddling the river that split the city in half, the tower afforded a clear line of site for the entire panoramic skyline, from the docks, to the expansive homes at Riverside, to the carbon extractors rising in a line near the industrial sector, and far in the distance, the Hills and Freeland House.
The artist in him made Alloy take out his palmtop and take some pictures, knowing full well that he’d have to make up one hell of a story explaining how he got them.
He saved them to his private folder, then, after some thought, sent them to Tink too.
Feathers rustled and wings fluttered. Suddenly, he wasn’t alone on the tower.
“Hey Fax.” He didn’t turn around. “How’d you find me?”
“I’ve got today marked in my calendar as your optimum angst day.” She said and walked over to the edge where he was sitting. “Figured that since when you’re feeling down you like to go up high, DC wasn’t going to cut it for you, so you’d come back here. Once I knew that, I just checked PrelateWatch, and it turns out that ‘omg u guys! Alloy just buzzed my car on the W. Truman!’. At least that’s what Summoner8059V said.”
She plopped down beside him and kicked golden legs idly off the edge. “So: our specials today are a lovely golden shoulder to cry on, my treat at the arcade, or even going to one of those boring science things if you’re feeling nostalgic. Anything you want: I only had the one morning class, I told Ollie something important come up, and so, I have the entire day wide open just for you.”
He looked at her, and despite his eyes being hidden, she could guess his expression and laughed. “Hey, best friend here; if I can’t go all out to make you feel better, what use am I? Besides, I wasn’t here most of the week because of Chicago, so I owe you.”
“Nah, you don’t owe me anything.” He said. “But… thanks. It means a lot.”
A devilish grin came to her face. “Any time. And if you’re really feeling lonely…” Her wings retracted and the gold lost its luster before becoming pale and freckled. A green breast plate, kilt and oversized gauntlets seemed to grow on her, and a green cowl formed around her eyes, just below sprouting red hair.
Alloy choked. “Okay, that’s not funny.”
Renaissance/Facsimile laughed and flicked his visor with her finger. “No. What’s not funny is that now that it’s in your head that I can do this, it’s about to hit you that you have no idea how many times I’ve done this before.”
“You didn’t.” He said quickly, but his tone was doubtful. “You wouldn’t…”
She crab-walked away from him and the edge, laughing all the while. “Oh, you’re so sure. But you don’t know do you?”
He couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Even being who she was, Cyn would never do something like that to him. But that wasn’t the point and both of them knew it. He took the bait and let Isp and Osp stand him up so he could pursue.
“Don’t play with me, Fax. Tell me you never did anything.”
She got up from crab-walking without going through all the necessary steps a normal person would have to thanks to shapeshifting. “Tell you what, tinhead: if you can catch me, I’ll tell you.”
That said, she turned and ran off the side of the tower, transforming back into her golden form in the process.
“Hey! Get back here!” Alloy stormed after her. Isp shot out and grabbed one of the bridge cables to swing him forward. The chase was on.
And he would be good and distracted for a good, long while.
***
Madison, Virginia. Just off Route 29
Two days later
In defiance of the constant development up and down the eastern seaboard, the main highway route into Mayfield remained largely scenic with great stretches of woodland; some untouched by man, some replanted in conservation efforts.
In one of those stretches, just out of view of the highway, a mist was gathering in the twilight gloom. Coalescing from the air, it glimmered unnaturally, sending flickers of blue light across the trees and grass, and refused to cling to any of it as dew.
Slowly, it crawled down hills and washed through gullies, seeking a natural depression in the forest floor where it collected and swirled like a witch’s brew. And as it swirled, the blue light grew from glimmers to flashes within the eddies of the strange mist.
Electricity filled the air, and starting from the heart of the mist, small sparks began to earth themselves.
The depression overflowed and the mists stacked up atop one another, gaining height as the light became a steady brightness that filled it. Tiny forks of blue lightning struck nearby trees without doing any harm.
As the light reached the apex of its intensity, it seemed to draw away from the mist, pulling back into the heart of it. The mist stopped swirling, and for a moment, silence and stillness returned to the forest and then the light burst forth, driving the mists away, along with all the air in the depression until there was hard vacuum there, enforced by blazing, blue light.
It only lasted less than a heartbeat, but when it was over and the light was gone, something new had been added to the forest scene.
Standing in a ring of flattened undergrowth were two figures; one human, the other doggish, but the size of a horse.
The former was holding up a peculiar mechanism: a thumb sized, white opal suspended by wires, now hissing red with heat, between the tines of a six inch long, metal tuning fork. The fork was, in turn, duct-taped to what appeared to be the handle of a tennis racket and trailed insulated wires down its length, looped over the figure’s arm, and connected both to a bulky, square box in their other hand, and to a port in the segmented, aluminum belt they wore.
The last of the blue light was coming from the opal, which moments later erupted into a shower of blue sparks, smoked, then cracked in half, dropping to the ground.
“Aaand now we’re stuck here, Shuck.” The figure said and sighed at the device. She wore a black, leather vest with zippered pockets over a form fitting turtleneck of indeterminate material that was an extremely dark red. With it, she wore soft, fingerless gloves with red metal studs on the knuckles, black pants the same material as the turtleneck with just as many zippers as the vest, and combat boots with red metal plates welded over the toes.
One half of her head was shaved, leaving the other half to be split between auburn bangs and a braid that reached her waist. She had a stud in the side of her nose, two barbells in her right eyebrow, and five studs each in her ears. She also wore a set of slim goggles with small dials on the side.
After examining the broken device a bit longer, she shrugged and tossed both it and the boxy thing in her other hand aside before disconnecting the related wires. “Not like we didn’t know that already, but it would have been fun to prove them wrong.”
She turned and scratched the other figure’s jaw.
It was a massive wolf with a jet black coat. Armor, glinting with a slight golden hue, was strategically strapped along its spine, legs, and as a champron fitted over its head. In spite of its gigantic stature and hellish, red eyes, it whined like any other dog at its master’s loving attention and panted contently.
She smiled at the beast. “So from here on out if we want to go back, we’re gonna have to take the Long Path. Stupid laws of physics.” The last part was muttered, then she cleared her throat, “But yeah; this’ll be an adventure!”
Reaching up, she touched the side of her glasses, instantly overlaying a display onto her vision. “Step one: figure out the GPS system here. Step two: Find Uncle L, because I have a feeling he’s the only one that’ll know where to hide you. And finally, and most importantly, step three: beg him for some dinner.”
She settled down with her back leaned against Shuck’s side, and set to work on her tasks, all the while wondering what the next few years had in store for her.
Landon Porter is the author of The Descendants and Rune Breaker. Follow him on Twitter @ParadoxOmni or sign up for his newsletter.
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