His mother went east with the burn team, taking Rodney back to Omaha. It was her hometown, and she hadn’t been anywhere near there since it had been cratered into oblivion, so if there was actually something left to see, she wanted a look. Hunter, after a quick jog west to the highway, headed north. The vague travel itinerary he’d made for himself said there was a friendly redoubt about a day’s worth of travel in that direction, and the area on the way should be relatively safe.

With a little over half his supplies gone, and his mom taking the channeling rod home for him, he was travelling pretty light. In a way, he missed the giant, unwieldy weight of the metal staff, but it had really started to get cumbersome when he needed more than one hand. His new ring wasn’t quite as effective, but it was just as useful and less annoying to deal with.

[Affinity Twist] Rare. Jewellers and shamans from all over have long known how to accentuate one’s own magic. This is a well-crafted example. +ten percent (10%) efficacy to all touch attacks, +trivial damage to all touch attacks

Hunter frowned as he looked at it on his right middle finger, a huge amber stone on a braided metal band, muttering, “Just wish it wasn’t so gaudy.” Then he looked over at the sparkly bracelet Trips was wearing as a hat, and decided it could have been worse.

[Emergency Band] Near Unique. Only use in specific emergencies. (active) (single use) [effects hidden]

“We came out of there pretty good, huh,” he said to the bot.

“sure,” Trips said in response, pulling weeds from the side of the road as they walked.

“It could have been worse, especially with the fire guy,” Hunter mumbled. “Don’t really know, umm, how we’re supposed to dodge the air being hot.”

“yeah,” it replied, tossing a particularly large weed onto the broken highway surface.

“I almost wish we could have gotten something to help from the water talents, but like,” he paused, rubbing the back of his head, “then we’d probably find something that filled everything with electricity, and we’d be double screwed. I mean, if stupid elements work like that. I can’t really tell if they do.”

He frowned as they continued to walk, and looked at what he’d already picked so far, when he didn’t get the option of elemental resistances.

[Second Wave] Unlocked (Wave Affinity). You know if the first pass doesn’t work, the next will only hit harder. gain [Wave Charge] from each missed touch attack, charge stack max equal to evocation rank/100, each charge +fifty percent (50%) damage to next touch attack [Fluidity of Form] Unlocked (Water Affinity). You are the waterfall, the river, the lake, and you can move like all of them. +ten percent (10%) to selected skill roll [Dodge] for each infusion spell active (synergy)

“So like,” he mumbled, dragging his feet as he looked down, “magic doesn’t feel right. Does that make sense?”

“nope,” Trips replied, walking briefly on two limbs as it waggled the third. “sure.”

“Ernie says,” Hunter started, then paused, “ah shoot, what did Ernie say? Let me pull up the log again.”

You have entered the [Training Room for Bump] messaging group.

You are currently reading [one (1) week] old messages.

[Ernie]: The affinity isn’t inside you, kid, but it is you. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it’s the best way to put it.

[Hunter]: it doesn’t always want to move the way i want tho. like, we tried to practice ignoring it but that just makes it worse

[Ernie]: Have you tried moving exactly the way it does, though? I don’t really run the kind of boost spells you do, but I do have a few of my own.

[Ernie]: One makes things feel hotter, the longer it runs without me casting a spell. It feels good, right, correct, that’s the word. It feels correct when I start blasting things, and that’s the point. I wouldn’t have the spell up if I didn’t want to blast something.

[Ernie]: Maybe it would help if you tell me exactly what the issue is. We can work through it, kid.

[Hunter]: alright so, huh. [Flickering Form] wants me to move, all the time. that’s what it feels like. not a lot, just a tiny bit. i’m not used to it, i fight like exercises, i keep still

[Hunter]: but Wisp, i guess, flickers and bobs. i’m trying to do that now sometimes, to get the full benefit of the spell, cuz like, it’s really good

[Hunter]: and [Rising Tides] is just weird. it’s a loud noise in my head, but not in my head. and it’s not a noise. flip. lemme try again

[Hunter]: it wants me to be the waves. it wants me to sway away and then back in. it doesn’t always want me to go the same direction as the other spell

[Hunter]: or maybe it does, i dunno. you’re gonna tell me to practice, to do everything they both want, and then i’m gonna be like wow i’m such a good magic tai chi fighter

[Ernie]: If I did tell you that, would it sound like good advice? It sounds like it on my end, but that’s just me.

[Ernie]: This is what I think, honestly. You’ve got a pretty good idea of what to do when someone’s punching at you. That puts you head and shoulders above a whole lot of poor fools twenty years ago. But remember, you got rattled when you started offloading, and this is more of the same. The affinity is you. The way it wants to move is the way that your big, multidimensional, time-travelling brain wants to move, after it’s assessed the situation. Practice, really lean into it. You’ll be fine, kid.

“Still doesn’t feel right, though,” Hunter grumbled, kicking at a rock. “But Ernie says, I guess, that it’s a me problem and not a magic problem. Figures.”

He spent a while looking at spells to pick, but only half-heartedly, as they walked on. He was on the fence about what to select, and without a library, his uncle’s notes, or even a decent filter to use, there were way too many options.

“Doesn’t even matter, right now,” he shook his head. “Should I double up on wave? Should I look for something that leads to drain? Who cares, if I can’t manage the spells I have. Can’t even pick a talent to cap off all that work getting good at magic.”

You have one (1) talent available from advancing your affinity base skill. Please pick from the following pool of affinity talents. [Burster Adept] Your affinity feels like a caged animal, and when you let it out of the cage, it roars. +trivial damage to all evocation spells, +damage, cumulative, to each evocation spell cast in consecutive rounds [Cycler Adept] Your affinity races, like blood pumping through your veins, fast and powerful. +thirty percent (30%) to efficacy of infusion spells when only infusion spells are active [Water-cooled] Unlocked (Water Affinity). You are a fountain, a geyser, an oasis of spells, to the detriment of anything else. halve (x0.5) the cost of water-related spells, double (x2) the cost of all others

“That’s the first set of base talents that like, don’t work for me?” he mumbled, glancing over at the robot. “Am I just being picky?”

“don’t,” Trips said as it waggled a clamp again, “know.”

“I dunno,” Hunter sighed, “maybe they’ll reset in a week or something. Or they’ll make sense later, like that achievement.”

[Diver] You have successfully completed one (1) Source. (single) +essence gain [Four-fold Path II] You have advanced four (4) base skills, at the [Beginner] division. extra [Class] options will be available at lvs. 26/51/76, +one (1) [Class Talent] at lv. 26

“It feels like, ugh,” he frowned and paused. “It feels like, umm, I’m hitting a wall. I’m probably wrong, it’ll get better when we start maxing the two hundreds, I guess? Whatever, not everything we do is going to make us immediately and vastly better.”

Winner, when he thought he reached it, looked like a town that had seen some not so great things. At first it seemed, at least to Hunter, that there wasn’t going to be a redoubt there at all, in defiance of his admittedly pretty sloppy research. The closer he got, however, he started to see that there just wasn’t much of a boundary in the old days between Winner and not-Winner. As he walked up the highway toward where his notes had said it would be, he occasionally saw a flattened or similarly demolished building, but nothing really started to feel like a town.

He’d passed a few places like that, where he’d wait for the outskirts to end and they never did, just a couple miles of sparse foundations for buildings long gone. He wouldn’t even realize he’d passed the center because there really wasn’t a center of town, it was more of a middle between loosely defined ends. On the opposite spectrum, Willard was tightly packed, especially when he was a kid, with as many buildings constructed within the walls as possible to fit as many refugees as possible, and Kansas City was a completely different story. If he’d walked through the ruins of K.C., the only reason he wouldn’t be able to find the center would be because so much was built there that it all seemed like the middle.

After a turn in the road, he saw the remains of a sign that probably had once said “Welcome to Winner,” and down the street he spied what might have been a gate across the highway. It was confusing, though, because there was still maybe only one ruined building every couple of streets, and it didn’t look like the gate was connected to much of anything. He shrugged and walked on, disappearing his wizard stick and nudging Trips to let the bot know to climb up. Once he got close enough fifty, a hundred yards easy shot, he held up his hands and shouted.

“Hiya, Winner! Looking for a place to stay for the night!”

He waited, head tilted, and peered at the gate. It was big, stretching across the two lane highway, some kind of latticed metal with spikes at the top, twenty feet off the ground, and big, heavy wheels at the bottom. On either side there was an even taller gray post, rough looking and irregular granite maybe, and Hunter couldn’t see how the gate was attached since it just looked like the columns were standing in front of it. All he could see past the posts was more of the little town, buildings knocked over but certainly not recently and huge empty spaces for a few hundred yards, until way out to the north and south there were another set of columns.

“Huh,” he muttered, tapping a foot. “I guess we could just go around? But it doesn’t look like there’s much here.” He stood around for a while hours, days and then yelled again, “Winner! I need a shower!”

A few moments later, the gate rolled to the left a few feet, leaving a gap on one side. Hunter wandered over and peeked through the three foot wide opening and blinked. Beyond the gate wasn’t the rundown pile of former buildings like a lot of the towns he passed, it was actually wow is that a hovercar pretty nice. There was a kid about his age blocking the way, holding some kind of spear with a machete on the top.

“Hi,” he said, offering a hand. “Name’s Hunter, this is Trips. There a place to stay around here?”

The kid girl maybe had a baseball cap pulled down low on their head, was wearing gray coveralls, and huh was barefoot. They tapped the spear thing on the ground once, way louder than it should have been, and hollered back in a high-pitched voice girl probably.

“Just a tourist! Toldja it wasn’t anything important!”

“Hey,” Hunter mumbled, “well, no I guess that’s accurate. Still, oof.”

“I’m Kels,” the kid ninety percent sure said, leaning on the spear halberd? no. “This is Winner, but you knew that, comin’ in the back gate and all. You’re about two months too late for the wildland summer, and two months too early for the migration. So, uh, whatcha doing here?”

“I have questions about both of those things,” he replied. “But you went first, so umm, passing through I guess? Headed to Rapid City.”

“You don’t look like a Pol,” Kels said, leaning back and probably unconsciously tilting the spear across their body. “Well, you got a sword, so that’s one point. But no bad attitude, no uniform, and no offense? But I never seen a Pol fidget like that.”

“Oh, yeah,” he chuckled, hand sliding away from the back of his neck. “I have a friend who’s one. Maybe, still. I dunno. Said to come visit, so I’m visiting.”

“Pols with friends, you say,” Kels frowned at him exaggerating I think, “Sounds fishy. Whatever, I’ve been on back gate for weeks, and if I screw up they’ll bump me to something else.” They stepped back and flourished the spear, letting him through the narrow entrance. “Welcome to Winner, etcetera tada.”

“Wow,” Hunter murmured, getting a good look at the town. He stepped back and peeked through the holes in the metal gate, then again through the opening. “How?”

“Never seen an illusion before? Defense through obfuscation?”

“I mean,” he mumbled, taking one last look back and forth, “I guess I wouldn’t know if I had.”

“So over there,” Kels pointed with their spear, “is where the whole mess started. Got themselves a Slide, whinin’ and fussin’, saying ‘ours is busted, it’s just a wall.’ Thing opens, it’s not a wall, it’s a ball.”

They were leading Hunter down the highway, further into the redoubt, in between piles and piles of huge, granite spheres. The entire town was built out of them, each exactly the same twenty-four feet across, each the same grainy gray texture. There were spheres that had been cut in half or buried and made into domes occasionally, but for the most part they were stacked into elaborate pyramid configurations three or four levels high.

“There’s gotta be, like, thousands,” Hunter muttered.

“At least, yeah,” they nodded. “Thing spit those out pretty much constantly until they figured out how to close it. Every hour or so of every day, some big stone ball comes rollin’ out in a random direction and flattens everything in its way for a half mile.”

“And,” he looked around, eyebrows scrunched, “that’s it? That’s a weird Slide.”

“They’re all weird, man,” Kels said, laughing. “Elves comin’ out of a forest, lasers that smell funny when they vape you, millions of bees pourin’ out, all weird. Anyway, this one got classed as some kinda hegemonizing swarm when they cracked one open and it’s full of goop.”

“Gross!” Hunter laughed. “They were eggs?”

“Yeah, but eggs of what, who knows. Who cares. They’re big, they don’t break very easy unless you know the trick, and they knocked down all the houses, so now we got new houses. Anyway, that’s all the tour you’re gettin’. Couple folks keep this one fixed up real nice for tourists, said you could stay free since it’s the offseason. Stay cool.”

Kels gestured at a small pile of four spheres in a pyramid as they spoke, and then started to walk off.

“But, umm,” Hunter watched them go, then shouted, “What about the illusion wall? The hovercars? The wild summer and the migration? That all sounds cool!”

“Go find yourself someone chatty, man! I’m goin’ back to the gate!”

“Oh,” he frowned, and after a moment mumbled, “yeah I guess it’s not their job.”

He stood around for a few minutes, feeling out of place, waving half-heartedly at the occasional passerby, then pushed the door on the nearest sphere open and stepped into the house. Trips hopped down to immediately do some straightening up, while he looked around the oddly-shaped space. The bottom level was split into sections, one made out of two of the spheres joined together, with a third almost separate in the back. When he walked in, the larger front area had lit up with a band of sky blue that stretched along the upper curve, and he figured there was a fan somewhere hidden because the air was fresh and nice, even without real windows.

He set his bags down next to the door and pulled off his armored coat and shoes to hang them on the rack, then flopped onto the couch next to the entryway. There was a small kitchen-looking area on the other side of the room with appliances he’d never seen before, a mix of old- and infratech, a ladder leading to the upper sphere, and not a lot else.

“It’s alright, I guess,” he murmured, stretching out.

“This is, by far, the best place I’ve ever stayed,” Hunter said to Trips, sometime later, while he stretched out in a giant, steaming stone bathtub. “This thing doesn’t get cold! How does it do that? I don’t care, I’m never getting out.”

After a little resting, he found the upstairs upladder? was a bedroom with a bed he didn’t dare get in while he was still grimy from travel, and the back room was the most amazing bathroom that ever existed, as far as he was concerned.

“So, stuff to do while we’re here,” he murmured, a wet washcloth over his eyes, “amounts to just about nothing. That’s cool, I guess. I mean, I wasn’t hoping to stop in places and have adventures. ‘Oh, random child, our town clock has just gone missing, can you help,’ and so on. It’d be fun, but like, not gonna worry about it.”

“sure,” Trips replied, while every so often nudging the dirty clothes farther away from itself.

Hunter relaxed for a while longer, and then thought, half to himself and half to Infra, Do you think, umm. Hmm. Wisp, do you have any input on my magic problem?

Connecting… complete

You seem to have QUESTIONS. I can dispense ADVICE. We will proceed in CONVERSATION. This is novel, and I approve.

[Hunter]: cool. wait, novel? no one ever talks to you?

The PATRON system is transactional. It is designed thusly. I have aid, I require aid. Those are exchanged. If I have no aid to exchange, then there is no transaction.

A man is in the woods. He is distraught. He wants a way out. I provide it. I want the man to light a torch on his way out. He provides that. All is well.

A man is in his house. He is distraught. His pet is sick. His domestic partner has left. His food has burned. His neurochemicals are disordered. He wants peace. I cannot provide it.

[Hunter]: so like, umm. hey Wisp, there’s a dog stuck in a well, or hey Wisp, i’m trapped in a mausoleum are fine. you’ll be able to help. but, you know, hey Wisp, i’m having a bad day, that’s different?

I am seeking to change that. We are all, individually and collectively, seeking a new paradigm, every moment of every day. You are NOT seeking a way out of the woods. You are seeking a better YOU to leave the woods. That is a distinction.

It is a first step. I am WISP. I am the LIGHT you follow out of the WOODS. Perhaps someday, I will be the light you follow out of the dark, out of the sickness, out of the negative.

So, as a first step. What troubles you?

[Hunter]: alright so, magic. affinity, channeling. i cast your spells, i feel fine. i cast water spells, i feel fine. i do both and i feel weird. torn

Yes. I see this. Your affinity is young, untamed. It wants to be led. It wants a direction. This is NORMAL. You have pushed it hard, you have run it in any direction, as long as that direction is fast. It thinks it is specialized. It thinks it does one thing, and it becomes confused when it does two, and you are worried what will happen when it does three or four. This is NORMAL. I have seen this before. There are SOLUTIONS.

[Hunter]: really? what do you want me to do?

Nothing. I will solve it. We have talked. Your pet is sick. I know of a medicine. I will tell you.

[Hunter]: thanks!

Also, I can see the future. Someone’s food will burn on the stove, someone’s stove will burn down the town, someone’s town will burn in the woods. This is unacceptable. You can CARRY buckets. I will make it so you can carry more. We will speak later.

“Wait, what?” Hunter said out loud, no longer in the chat window with Wisp. “The future?”

You have one (1) talent available from advancing your affinity base skill. You have picked the following talent. [Theurgy] Unlocked (Theurgist only). You have mastered how magic can be braided from different sources into one strong cord. +ten percent (10%) efficacy, additive, to patron spells while affinity spells are active, +ten percent (10%) efficacy, additive, to affinity spells while patron spells are active [Light over the Waves] Unlocked (Granted by Wisp). There is a light to follow and there is water to travel. You have a greater understanding of how they are the same. +ten percent (10%) efficacy, additive, to patron spells while affinity spells are active You have learned one (1) spell! [One More Step] It is difficult to keep moving, to carry buckets, to wander the woods. Wisp wants you to be an example of how people can keep going, when they think they can’t. (guidance) (toggle) (aura) five (5) affinity reserved. indefinite duration. six (6) yard range, six (6) inch/level additional. +fifty percent (50%) to bonus resource recovery for you and all allies

Hunter immediately forgot about Wisp telling the future put a pin in that and pulled up his calculator to do some quick math. He had to back up a few times, frowning, but after a while he was pretty sure he had the numbers right.

“Almost twenty-seven affinity an hour, wow,” he mumbled, “and almost sixty-seven vigor? That’s, umm, a lot. What can I run with that? Wait. What am I going to need all that for?”

In the morning, Hunter couldn’t find anyone who felt like telling him about all the secrets and mysteries of Winner, even if there only seemed to be a couple. The closest he got was when he finally found a ride to Rapid City with a guy that had an old, shaky, but still hovering truck.

“So then, this guy Bluesky, he says, ‘Well I can do that,’ and then he did,” the man said over the roar of his truck’s engine.

“Wait,” Hunter frowned, confused. “He basically stole a hoverbike and copied it, and then stuck two together to make a car because he couldn’t figure out how they kept from tipping over.”

“Stole’s a harsh word, but,” he replied, then spit out the open window, “that’s about how it went, yeah.”

“And now everyone in town buys Bluesky Hovercars, because?” the teen asked, head tilted.

“Because it’s sure better’n walking, isn’t it?” the man laughed, almost a cackle, for a little while. “But seriously, they’re good rigs, they’re cheap, and it keeps ol’ Bluesky from causing any more trouble, if he’s got to keep fixing these things up.”

“Huh,” he mumbled, “I guess that makes-”

He stopped abruptly when an urgent alert popped up in his Infra, loud and bold and intrusive.

There is an instance of unusual Slide activity nearby. As one of the nearest members on a combat path, would you like to investigate? Y/N

Hunter jammed down on the Y option almost without thinking, as the truck driver slowed to a rumbling, shaking stop.

“We’ve got to turn around,” he said. “Infra’s saying it ain’t safe for me to proceed. These things don’t last long, I’ll take you over to Rapid when it’s done.”

“Oh,” Hunter replied, grinning as he jumped out of the cab and grabbed his bag, “don’t worry about it, stay safe. Infra’s telling me the exact opposite.”

He transferred over the crystals they’d agreed on for a fare and watched the lumbering hover truck pivot in place and then head back toward Winner. Hunter let Trips crawl all over his chest and back to make sure his straps were tight, and the duffel and sleeping bag wouldn’t get in his way too much, and then he jogged out into the low scrub toward what he was pretty sure was called the Badlands in the old days.

“So,” he said quietly in between strides, “it just looks like mountains to me, little ones even. I guess things were harder back then. Nowadays, you want to call something the Badlands, it better have like, ratfolk snipers in tunnels and methane geysers.”

He ran for about an hour over increasingly difficult terrain, up into the hills and then mountains, making sure to fill his canteen with a quick splash of affinity-made water and stay hydrated. He kept following the vague indicators on Infra, not quite arrows that led him somewhere, and not quite the kind of tug on his channels he’d get from magic, but something in between. He slid to a stop at the top of a cliff, glancing around for an easy way to get to the other side of the ravine, when he felt a small pulse in his screens and looked again.

Arrived. Unusual Slide activity is approximately one hundred fifty to one hundred seventy-five (150-175) feet away.

WARNING: This Slide activity has already caused casualties in over half (12/21) of the sapients to encounter it.

There is another combat path sapient approaching to investigate. At their current speed, they will be in range in approximately ninety (90) seconds. It is recommended you wait for their arrival, as larger groups are statistically more successful in emergency situations.

Hunter looked around, wondering if Infra thought he was in a different place, muttering, “Figure I should see something by now,” and then peered down into the canyon. “Oh.”

When he first approached the hills, he’d seen two options for traversing them. Infra tried to nudge him to run down one of the narrow canyons between them, but the steep walls and tight turns he could see made him feel anxious. Instead, he’d climbed up to run straight across the top, up and down over the lumpy peaks, peeking down occasionally to see the twisty but flat paths he’d avoided. It was more tiring his way, and he had to make a few trips all the way down to ground level when there wasn’t a better way across, but he had vigor to burn and he didn’t want to get stuck trapped pinned killed in a narrow crevasse.

Down below him, though, the canyon split open into a valley, a few hundred feet across, dotted with more of the patchy grasses and bushes, a few scattered tents over to the west where the ravine first widened, and in the middle of those, a Slide. It was hard to look at, hazy and shaky, like the view through it kept shifting in increments back and forth. The ground around it and a few of the tents closest looked the same way, moving irregularly in chunks, like whatever was going on with the Slide itself was infecting the surrounding area. Hunter squinted and saw people shapes chasing other people shapes around, and the ones pursuing seemed like they had the same thing wrong with them.

He looked around quickly for the other person coming to help, but didn’t see anyone running across the irregular, striated hills like he did oh no. Hunter checked his directions and figured out if they were coming from Rapid City, they must be running in the canyon, and when they got there they’d be turning the corner right into the middle of the mess. He sprinted as fast as he could across the cliff to where it narrowed and took a hard angle, then he leapt down.

Oh flip why do I do this ran through his head over and over as he slid and bounced his way down the steep rock walls. He managed not to fall, not exactly, catching small irregular ledges with his fingers and toes to keep his pace relatively steady, but he still landed in a shaking heap when he finally hit the ground. Hunter heard faint screaming coming from the other side of the turn, echoing weirdly in the narrow ravine, and he summoned his staff to help push himself up. He checked his message again, saw the casualties had gone up to 14/21 and the timer was down to five seconds, when he heard something familiar.

“Red!”

Hunter and Ellie peeked out around the corner, murmuring to each other.

“Ok, it looks like whatever they touch goes all crazy,” he muttered.

“Right, ugh,” she replied as she bit her lip, “I’ve got a Wind Cutter I can do, but I can’t cast too many.” Ellie paused for a minute and blinked. “Actually I can do a few more than I thought, is that you?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” he nodded. “I’ve got nothing ranged except grenades, and not a lot. It’ll have to do.”

“Cool, grenades,” she smiled a little and bumped her shoulder against his. “I can distract them and cut down as many as I can, and you get the survivors back here?”

“Ok, umm,” he nodded, then pulled off his satchel and handed it to her. “White ones are sparklers, blue ones are cracklers. Don’t look at the white ones, don’t get close to the blue ones. Oh, and here.” Hunter tucked a pair of the grenades into his pockets, before he shrugged the sword off his shoulder as well and offered it.

Ellie grabbed the sabre by the handle and pulled it free, her eyes going wide. “Red, wow. I can work with this,” she said, her grin getting a little less shaky as she resheathed the blade and shrugged both it and his bag over her armored shoulder.

“One last thing, then we go,” he mumbled and ran back to his duffel, searching through it for his alarm ward. Once he found it, he slammed the spike on the bottom into the hard dirt a few times until it stuck, then flicked the globe at the top and made it ring. “Password’s ‘coconut.’ Say ‘coconut’ when you get back here and see it light up.”

“Coconut, got it,” she said, pausing for a moment, “got it. We gotta do this, Red, like now.”

He nodded and let his breathing slow as he went back to crouch next to her, murmuring softly, “On three?”

“Three,” Ellie said as she winked at him and bolted so fast, running out into the valley.

He ran off after her at full speed, forcing himself to calm down fully as he took in the scene while he moved. The Slide was hissing with a faint pop every time it shifted, and even though it hurt for him to look at the edges, he could still see them creep out further when the sound echoed. The view in the middle was nothing just broken hard to comprehend, it might have been sky, it might have been some kind of ground, but it was jumbled and impossible to see details in. Everything around it was like that as well, a puzzle someone had scrambled, but it was a little easier to figure out.

Hunter ran in a tight curve, a few feet from the edge of the wrong so wrong area and toward the nearest person who didn’t look like one of the aggressors. He was trying to figure out why the seven no, six now remaining regular people hadn’t managed to get farther away, when there was a louder noise and everything around him seemed to ripple. The Slide shot out a ring of air, it seemed, a ring of force maybe, and when it hit him it knocked him a few feet to the side, but he kept running. The woman he was running to, however, slammed flat to the ground and skidded a short distance on the rough dirt when it hit her.

Ellie had gone the other direction when she entered the valley, and he looked over please don’t be to see what the ripple had done to her, but she was fine. He briefly watched her spin around, lifted on the toes of one foot, and launch a ripple of her own from out of her sword, a smaller and more well-defined cut in the air that bisected one of the shaky, infected campers.

Hunter slid down to his knees when he reached the woman, shouting over the din of the Slide and her fellow campers, “Hi! I’m here to help! Let me carry you, please.” She nodded weakly and he scooped her up, wobbling a little less heavy than Rodney though, then ran back to the narrow gap in the cliffside. He took another blast from the Slide in the back but managed to keep his footing, wondering briefly why Kinesthesia worked here and not in the corn maze, and then set the camper down gently before taking off for the next one.

There was someone lying on the ground and moaning, another scooting backwards on his butt a few feet from one of the shambling converted people, a third running and stumbling very close to another one, and the last two had somehow managed to get behind Ellie, cowering but relatively safe. He threw his crackler grenade straight into the back of the monster person threatening the seated man, not even bothering to watch as the ball lightning vaporized it, then tossed his last sparkler in an arc. Hunter ran under the strobing explosion and then Flicker Stepped from one side of the shambling, jerking infected to the other, grabbing the hand of the frightened man just as another ripple hit them.

He must have been off balance, because he dropped to a knee while the man simply collapsed, so he popped his wizard stick into his hand, yanked them both to his feet, and ran right before the jittery, wrong-moving person swiped its hands at them. By the time he got the guy far enough away from the Slide that he could stand on his own, Ellie was done. Every single one of the jumbled victims was down on the ground, chopped up or electrocuted, and she was seated, giggling uncontrollably at the edge of the unstable-looking ground. He ran over to her and pulled her back, hands under her armpits, his eyes locked to the Slide and the expanding circle of wrongness it was exuding.

“Hey, they’re safe, we did it,” he said, unable to stop staring, “almost.”

“We could stop it if we had three Shards and like, a tape measure,” Ellie said, after they’d gotten the campers away from the valley. There were enough supplies in their remaining tents that, once they got far enough away from the Slide to stop getting knocked down, they figured they could make it to the nearest town on their own.

“I’ve got one Shard,” he murmured, rubbing the back of his neck as he sat next to her in front of his little camp heater.

“That would actually work,” she said, then paused and rested her head on his shoulder with a sigh, “if we could get close. It’s small enough that we should be able to spike it. But we can’t get close or we’ll go all scrambly.”

“Think we’ve got time to get someone to bring us more Shards before it gets any bigger? Those knockdown rings were getting stronger by the second.”

“Not from Rapid,” she mumbled, shaking her head a little, “There’s some kinda lockdown, or brownout, or something. Only reason I was out when the gates shut is they got me on gofer duty.”

“give,” Trips said to him as the little bot walked over to his feet. “help.”

“No way, buddy,” Hunter frowned. “We’ll figure something out, you don’t need to, you know, do something stupid.”

“help,” the helperbot repeated, then reached up to tap the sparkly trinket on top of its carapace. “band.”

“Oh,” he hesitated a moment, then nodded and pulled his one Fount Shard out of his currency folder, a foot long, pearlescent, crystalline spike appearing in his hand. “Ellie, Trips has an idea, and I think it might work? Can you tell it how to spike a Slide?”

“You just have to jam it somewhere in the middle, is all,” she said, “but how’s it going to do it?” She paused and looked at the band on Trips, then bit her bottom lip hard and nodded. “Specific emergency, I get it. Let’s try.”

The three of them walked out of the canyon, and Hunter heard Ellie gasp at how large the Slide had gotten in the twenty minutes or so they’d been resting. He reached down and handed over the Shard to Trips, who took it in one clamp and then ran directly toward the infected area. Right before it set foot on the jumbled dirt, it reached up and tapped the band.

“Whoa,” Hunter murmured, as his little robot suddenly turned a bright, sparkly gold, the same color the vanished bracelet was, and then scampered right up to the Slide. A few steps before it reached it, there was another booming burst of air, the ripple at least twice as large as before, and it slammed right into Trips and kept going without the robot even losing stride. “Wow.”

A moment later Trips seemed to vanish as it walked into the liminal area, inside the area of the Slide without actually going through it, and then there was a noise. It wasn’t a real noise, Hunter couldn’t actually hear it, it was more like the text in Infra. He knew there was a noise, and he experienced the idea of a noise, but that was it. It was loud but not deafening, booming without making his ears ring, shrill but it didn’t give him a headache. There was a noise, and then the Slide vanished, and so did the rearranged ground and tents, leaving just a crater in the valley that a still sparkly robot fell into and quickly scrambled out of.

Ellie, Hunter and Trips jumped around for a bit, cheering and hugging, until he got a pair of strange notifications on Infra, and from the look on her face, so did she.

You have closed an unstable Slide during an official Emergency Event. This has been rated as a greater+ feat, and you will receive essence accordingly. No essence will be awarded until the Event is finished and Infra has calculated the entirety of your contribution. You have received a hidden quest from [Veras ef Omen-Wanderer]!

Requirements: Witness a Transversal Slide Emergency, Contribute during an Emergency Event, Do these with either [Eleanora Hernandez], [Miracle Guillen], or both.

Children, I do not know when or if you will receive this missive, but if your lives progress anywhere near the direction I have predicted, it will be sooner than later. As I have told you, there is something cosmologically wrong on your planet, and I fear that it will become vastly and catastrophically damaging to your people as a species if left unchecked. Please, be safe, survive this event, and then go to the coordinates provided. I see there not an immediate solution, but perhaps the best and safest path to one.

Objective: Investigate the Emergency Event, Survive the Emergency Event

Reward: [hidden] by quest giver.

“So, what I don’t get,” Hunter mumbled, unzipping the folds of his tent-bag that would expand it even further, “is how I got the message for the unstable Slide, but not the Emergency.”

“The one we got is like, well,” Ellie started to explain, then scratched her head, “probably local? We both just got pinged because we were close, and nobody can stop that. But, umm, the other one,” she trailed off weakly.

“Wait, you don’t think,” he shook his head, staring over at his friend, “you think they blocked the Emergency Broadcast the same way they block your messaging? That’s so dangerous.”

“I dunno, Red,” she sighed as she held down one end of the bag and he pulled the other, popping it open into a larger, but still small tent. “You say it out loud, and it seems crazy, but I dunno anything else it could be.”

“Maybe umm,” he sat just inside the entrance to the tent, “no, if we were too low a level, we’d get an evac message. If the Event was a scrambler type, the local messages wouldn’t know there’s anything going on. Maybe, umm, this Slide messed things up and the message got spoofed?”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Ellie said as she sat with him, “but it was a weird Slide. I thought that stuff would just shut down the message and notifications, not show the wrong ones. Who knows. We’ll go to Rapid in the morning, right? Then we’ll see what’s going on.”

“If there’s anything like Plano going on, we probably don’t want to get anywhere near it.”

“Yeah, but, ok hear me out,” she murmured as she scooted back into the tent and flopped onto her back. “The bosses are jerks. Most of the rank and file are jerks, too. SysPol is a hive of jerks.”

Hunter started to laugh, but she looked serious, so he just listened instead.

“The city’s not so bad, though. There’s a lot of people that just live there, that aren’t Pols, that didn’t have anything to do with whatever’s going on. They’re probably scared and things are messed up and they don’t even know why there isn’t a bunch of sublimed teleporting in to save them.”

“I get it,” he said, and then got quiet for a moment, zipping up the tent and lying down next to her. “We’re gonna do our best to help them, but I know my limits, and I bet you know yours. If it’s not something we can do by ourselves, then the best good we can do is try to get help.”

“Right, ok, that’s smart,” she mumbled, rolling over to put her head on his shoulder, “in the morning though, because,” and then she drifted off.

Hunter stayed awake for a while longer, afraid if he closed his eyes for too long, he’d see that shaky, torn-apart view through the Slide again. Every so often, he’d push the flap of the tent open with his toe to make sure the alarm ward was up and functioning, and it was every time, but he kept looking. As interested as he was in both the Slide Event and what Veras possibly thought he and Ellie could do about it, he was much more terrified. His mother still hadn’t talked to him about what happened in Plano, and neither had Ernie. All he knew was that it was bad 500 miles, that it was urgent immediate survival, and that they might possibly be the only people who knew about it.

“I really wish I had another one of those emergency bands,” he mumbled right before he fell asleep as well, and dreamed of a fire in the woods and a bucket full of water, both growing larger and larger.