Issue #67 – Emet
Part 2
“Wow.” JC said. He was sitting in his computer chair, looking down at Warrick who was sprawled on his back on the rug that covered the open space in their room. His friend had just told him his situation. His entire situation, which included a crash course in an alternate future that had been successfully averted. “Your life is about six hundred percent more confusing than I every expected.”
“Thank you for your wisdom.” said Warrick, an arm across his eyes.
JC shrugged. “What am I supposed to do? Give sage advice from my years of experience with having future wives who aren’t going to be my future wife anymore? By comparison, driving up to Fredricksburg on the weekends so my girlfriend can meet with her wizarding circle is pretty mundane.”
He was silent for a moment before the question that had been fighting for attention in his mind fought to the forefront. “Why the hell did you talk to her after class for anyway? If you ignored her and she thought you were a rude jerk, you wouldn’t be a confusion-blob on my rug now.”
“I can’t just be a jerk to someone for no reason.”
“That’s not part of the hero code and you know it. ‘Thou shalt not kill’: Yes. ‘Thou shalt not be an ass-weasel’: not so much. Otherwise, One-eye from Mission Delta-Five would be so on the outs.” JC said.
Warrick moved his arm to give his best friend a look. It was wrong to be getting a lecture on how a hero conducted himself from his only completely ordinary friend. Plus, One-Eye was a horrible example. “Mission Delta-Five is a Martin Baker book. Everyone he writes is an ass-weasel at best.”
“Point still stands.” JC shook his head and rolled over to his computer. “You don’t have to be nice to her.”
“I just didn’t really expect to ever have to deal with her.” Warrick admitted. “I didn’t get desperate and propose to Tink out of desperation at her going to England and that was supposed to be it: timeline averted. So why…”
From his desk, JC made a rude noise. “Man, I know I’m the one that lost my head this summer over how things are supposed to go in superhero stories, but now I think you’re reading too much into time travel plots. You’re thinking like it’s a TV show.”
“Say what?”
“Look: on TV when you see a time travel plot and there’s an alternate future, pretty much any character you meet in that future never shows up again, right?” Warrick nodded and JC continued, “But that’s because they’re played by guest stars. No one expects them back and unless the fans really, really wanted them back, there’s no point to writing them in.”
“I’m following you so far, but I don’t get how that applies here.” Warrick dropped the arm back across his eyes.
“Everything man.” said JC. “Because this girl wasn’t created by events in the new timeline, she was already here, you just hadn’t met her yet. And seeing as you still met her in college—this college—it makes perfect sense that you would still meet her, only now you and Tink are still together, so you two aren’t going to end up getting married in the prime timeline.”
Warrick raised his head and moved his arm. “Did you just call this the ‘prime timeline’?”
“Just because it’s dorky doesn’t make it correct. And hey, you told me her arm’s on the wrong side, so there’s a good chance the timeline you saw isn’t even the future of our world.” JC typed something on his computer then grinned. “So really, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Okay, so if you’re right, that still doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
JC started typing more seriously and rolled his eyes. “Whatever you want. If you liked her enough to marry her, she’s probably pretty cool to hang out with—and our gaming group is down one most nights with Tink on the other side of the pond.”
“That’s an absolutely awful idea.” said Warrick, sitting up fully and crossing his legs under him.
“You hang out with Cyn. You’ve kissed Jun.”
“For a play!” Warrick said much too loudly.
JC turned to look at him again. “And you haven’t even touched Schrodinger’s Wifey, so what’s the problem with being friends with her. Um… as long as Tink is cool with you having new female friends, of course.”
“Why wouldn’t—“
“I meant tell her about your new friend (omitting alternate futures) instead of trying to hide her like a bad teen drama is all.”
Warrick would have responded, but his palmtop started warbling Scenes From the Violence Museum (The Fight Song) by Violence Museum from the top of the dresser where he left it.
“Hero sign.” JC grinned as his friend scrambled to check what was being communicated to him. He’d heard the song long enough to have a Pavlovian response to it; already setting his computer to find news footage of whatever the Descendants were fighting this time. “Whatcha got?”
Taking a second to read the text Codex had sent and decipher to code she used, he sighed. “Robot attack. God bless Machine City for all the inventors with a poor grasp of both security protocol and AI programming. I’ll be back in like an hour tops after I puddle these things. Later, man.”
***
The Mayfield marina wasn’t a place where the Descendants often wound up fighting. Aside from boats, there wasn’t much to steal in terms of the high dollar, high stakes items that powered criminals loved. And besides that, being adjacent to the yacht club meant that there was a high police presence for all the non-powered criminals. Even the new powered armor division had patrols past it, so the city’s superheroes gave it a pass.
What was happening now wasn’t a typical crime. In fact, even for Mayfield, where rogue science experiments happened often enough that the local news providers had a special graphic to put in the corner of such stories, things were strange.
And that would be thanks to the giant, clay men. They were walking up out of the water via the boat ramps, climbing up onto the piers, and boarding boats. And they were wrecking anything in their path.
Superficially, they did look like robots. Standing at eight and a half feet tall, they had round heads with sunken, eyes that glowed white, symbols etched into their brows, and thick, articulated jaws on visible pivots. Their bodies were like ornate plate armor made of curved, clay slabs that overlapped and slid easily over one another for articulation. These included masses of plates that formed things like ball sockets in the shoulders, knee caps, and abdominal in the torso. Everything about them was bulky, from their outsized fists with knobby protrusions over the knuckles, to their great, flat feet with all the toes fused into a single appendage.
Chaos, Darkness and Facsimile were already on the scene, trying to stymie the flow of clay monsters where they were coming up from the boat ramps or across the piers. A blue flash told him that the last of the team’s fliers, Zero, was out at the boats, evacuating people who boats were being smashed apart by clay giants.
Alloy announced himself by launching off the top of a boat rental business, swing around a light pole, and on landing, sending Isp out to rake through three of the creatures chests while shaped like an eagle’s pounces.
The clay was strong, but not as strong as high quality ceramic, and more brittle to book. Sizable chunks of the giants’ chests shattered, revealing a maelstrom of white energy roiling inside them.
He nodded to Facsimile, who had her orihalcite claws out. “And here I was complaining that someone finally made a ceramic robot just to screw with me, and it turns out that they’re just clay golems like in Deathgate: strong, untiring, but stupidly vulnerable to gouging and battering weapons.”
As if to illustrate his point, Darkness sent a bolt of black heat into one that shattered its center completely sending its top half clattering to the ground in an explosion of white energy and flying pottery.
Facsimile rolled her eyes. “Wait for it…”
“Wait for…” Alloy was already looking for his next target when he was what was happening. The white energy swirled out in gleaming tendrils, questing for and finding the broken shards Isp had torn out of the three golems. Where it touched them, the pottery disintegrated and a corresponding broken section of the golem regrew as if someone were adding more clay by hand. The same thing was happening to the one Darkness had completely smashed.
“Oh now that’s completely un—“ Alloy started, but the golem directly in front of him had plodded forward and sent a ponderous fist into his center. He was sent flying back across the arena to slam into the cinderblock wall of the rental shop.
Facsimile leapt to his defense, lashing out at the one that his him with her claws. Backed by her enhanced strength, the incredibly hard, sharp claws broke through the thin’gs kneecaps, shattering them and sending the golem crashing to the ground.
But even as she fought that one, the ones on its right and left advanced, slow but implacable. The one on the right swung its arm and sent its fist right through the light poll Alloy had use don his arrival. And as the poll spat a cascade of sparks the other golem reached the rental shop and began hammering the wall with fists the size of watermelons. Chunks of cinderblock flew as it made steady progress breaking through.
Osp snaked out and wrapped the golem’s waist. Taking a moment to brace itself against the ground to prevent putting the strain of the thing’s monstrous weight on Warrick, the tentacle flung the animated clay statue back and into another that had gotten by Facsimile.
Both golems went down with a sound like a crafts fair in an earthquake, shattered to bits. But as ruined as they were, the white tendrils of power still flew out and within moments, they were both being reconstructed. And while they did, two more reached the rental shop and started punching the wall in eerie synchronicity. The wall started to crumble and collapse after only a few hits, and the golems finished it off with powerful kicks that opened holes for them to walk through.
The hapless owner came tearing out of the front door, screaming and looking back as the sounds of destruction emanated from the interior. He was a man in his late fifties with a graying beard and bald head. The first sight to greet him on the outside was another golem bringing two gigantic fists down on the marina’s transformer, which exploded into a blinding shower of sparks. Stopping short, he tripped and fell to his knees—directly into the path of two more golems.
He was saved from being trampled but uncaring feet by a burst of orange light and fire the exploded between the things, obliterating their heads and shoulders while also throwing them to the ground. On the verge of passing out, he looked up to find that the rest of the Descendants: Ephemeral, Hope, Codex and Occult (who had thrown the fireball) had arrived.
Hope dashed forward to see to him, sending calming emotions washing over you. “Are you alright sir? It’s alright; we’re going to get you out of here.”
“M-my shop.” He shuddered as his anxiety and terror were forcibly smoothed out of him. From behind, there was a mighty crash as the two golems in the rental shop were forcibly ejected, one via golden tiger that had cannoned into its center.
Hope winced at seeing the golems’ exit tearing new holes in the side of the building, which didn’t seem like it was going to take much more. “We’ll… do everything we can to save i—Gah!” She threw the man back to the ground and landed flat on top of him as a huge clay fist went over her head. The two fireballed golems were back up.
In the next moment, Codex ha come to their defense, bringing her bo staff down hard on one of the creatures’ knee cap; pooing it out and causing the thing’s leg to buckle. She reversed her strike and turned it into a thrust into the second, which was timed to coincide with it lifting its foot to walk. Overbalanced by the blow, the thing went over backward to crash to the wooden pier.
“Get him out of here.” She ordered Hope, who was quick to pull the shopkeep to his feet and retreat with him. Even as that was happening, she watched the golems regenerating. “Oh, that’s definitely magical. What are we dealing with, Occult?” She had the comms open so the rest of the team could hear as well.
Occult summoned her staff and stepped up beside the older woman. “Some kind of golem, I’m guessing.”
“Hey, I was right.” said Alloy.
“So how do we make them stay down?” asked Chaos.
Swinging her staff down to smash the head of one of the reforming golems, Occult shook her head. “It’s not that easy. Golems are a kind of homunculus and the Books have about a dozen recipes for them. And they’re customizable based on what you want them to do; you can stack spells on them like programs and skins on a palmtop. We need to know more.”
A burst of black hear smashed another group of the things, but there were now at least thirty golems in the marina and some had started a march for the concrete stairs up and out of the relatively contained area. “Anything we can so to slow them down would be nice.”
“Working on it.” Occult pulled Codex back and dropped the butt of her staff hard on the pier. “Crystalline Reign!” Clear, beautiful crystals began to grow out of the surface of the wood, starting at the point where the staff came down and rushing out and accelerating in their growth in a wedge shape. Soon, the growth overtook the two golems, locking them into place.
Both women breathed a sigh of relief and Occult reached down to her belt where her palmtop was and activated speed dial.
“Hey.” She said, breathless as another golem trundled toward them. “I hope this isn’t a bad time, because I need some research.”
On the other end of the line, Kay Greycloud snorted. “You mean the major badness that pinged my newscrawler five minutes ago? Yeah, I totally skipped class knowing you guys might need help.” There was the sound of typing. “Seeing if the Magi Club is available to help too. What’s the topic?”
The Magi Club was a group of college students they’d met over the summer who’d gained access to one of the Books of magic, as well as some lesser sources, and started practicing. Occult helped them in their studies, as well as the supernatural weirdness their college and its now-active leyline attracted, and they returned the favor.
“Golems.” said Occult. As she watched, the third golem stomped over and swung hammer-blows down on the crystal encasing its compatriots. “Smart golems.” She said, “Not Manikin level, I don’t think, but they can come back from being shattered and have a sigil on their forehead. I’ll get you a picture when I can.”
One last powerful blow broke through the Crystalline Reign and now there were three golems bearing down on the pair of heroes.
“Okay, I’ve got Feral Elle online. We’re going to work now.” said Kay.
“Thanks. And… don’t mind the shouting that’s about to happen.” Occult reached into her pouch and came up with a slightly curved piece of glass. “Levanto esta pared!” She bellowed and forced the spell out through the glass focus.
A shield unfolded into the space in front of the golems; pentagonal planes of translucent, red force overlapping into a tower shield eight feet across and six high. It was a refinement on her earlier shields, more resilient and energy efficient. Like everything else with a discernible structure, the golems attacked it with gusto, battering it with their massive fists and slamming their flat feet into it.
An angry huff was heard over the comms. It was Darkness. “This is getting us nowhere fast. Zero, are all the boats evacuated?”
“I don’t erm… see anyone on any of the boats.” Zero replied, “But I do see more of those things under the water. There’s probably sixty or so in all.”
“Just smashing them is useless.” said Darkness, reasoning the situation out. “The important thing right now is keeping them contained so they can’t spread out into the city. Zero, lock them in: freeze the marina entrance on the sea side—all the way down into the mud and as thick as you can make it. Everyone else: fall back to the stairs and fight them form the high ground until we figure out how to stop them.”
Alloy sent Isp and Osp to smash two more so Facsimile could break away from them before complying. But something in his lifelong training in smashing golems in videogames bothered him. “Golems don’t just ‘happen’. There’s got to be a mad wizard or something.”
“Yeah?” said Facsimile.
“So where is that guy?”
***
Warpstar walked easily through the doors of the student union of Dayspring College and sat down at one of the many campus information terminals available to visitors.
With his new understanding of technology and the internet, things were much easier than before: this time he didn’t have to follow the ebb and flow of magic coming from the Book of Passions. This time, he just opened the student directory.
And looked up Augustus Roe.
About Vaal
Landon Porter is the author of
The Descendants and
Rune Breaker. Follow him on Twitter
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