The Eastern corner of the world was once the place where you could find the great capital of the fey. Once it was moved by the queen, the site of the capital was now no more than a large crater in the ground. Over the lip of the crater, one could still see the lush forest that stood around it. In the distance, to the north-east and south-east, two perpendicular walls of light energy could be seen just barely over the trees. These walls met at a near 90 degree angle directly east of the great crater that was once the site of the capital.
In the center of this crater, five figures could be seen, bound by a wooden material that came up to their waists, and also bound their arms into an out-stretched position by vines that went into the ground some distance away. All five sat inert, almost as though they were asleep in this up-right position.
To the far right was a man who appeared to be in his mid 40s. His dark hair was cut short and his face showed a 5 o-clock shadow. To his left was a girl who appeared to be in her early 20s or older teens. In the middle was a young man easily in his mid 20s. Next to him was a boy very clearly in his late teens. And, finally, a woman in her mid 30s at the far left side of the line-up.
All of them had a distinctly modern Earth look to their faces, and seemed very out of place in the fairy robes and it made the butterfly-like wings growing from their back seem almost as if they were a piece of a costume.
As they sat quietly, the youngest, the teen boy began to stir.
“Hey, do you guys feel that?” He asked, getting no response from the others. He looked over at them, a little annoyed at being ignored. He knew none of them actually needed to sleep since they’d become fairies. In fact, in this time they’d been here, they had discovered it was not even possible for them to sleep. However, just closing their eyes and tuning out the world had been the method they’d been using to cope with the long amount of time they’d been held prisoner in this place, bound with these wooden materials in the middle of this crater.
He knew they could hear them, but they were tuning him out, just like they’d started doing with everything. Annoyed by this behavior from them, he focused his senses and tried to get more information about what he was feeling.
It felt like there was something powerful in the forest, and then he felt several of the tickles of energy he’d learned to identify as their watchers suddenly disappear.
“Guys! Seriously! Something’s happening!” The boy said and looked from side to side at the people around him.
“Gaaaah! Evan! For the love of God! What the hell is it this time!” The next youngest in the group responded as she pulled herself groggily from her imitation sleep.
“I just felt something going on in the forest back there!” He said.
“Gah! Seriously? Not this again! You can’t just magically sense things going on with some energy-sense stuff! Get real already, before you drive us all insane!” The girl tore into him.
“Gahhh… would you two please stop it!” The older man in his 40s growled over, seeming to be directing a particularly strong edge of his ire against the girl. “Honestly Cristie. You really don’t have to just be mean to people all the time. You’re the main reason nobody can talk to each other in this group just because you like to harass and degrade everyone about everything they try to say. We have to live with each other, so stop making things so damn unlivable already, would you?”
“Well would you look who’s talking?” The girl shot back. “I don’t think you have any room to talk after you just said all that crap. It’s just because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You think me being a woman and sticking up for myself makes me impossible to live with, is that what’s going on here?”
“You were needlessly cruel just there, Cristie. David’s right.” The guy in the center had his eyes flutter open as he addressed the girl as well. “Besides, I just heard a tree or something breaking from the same direction Evan was talking about.”
“Hmph. Yeah, I see how it is.” The young woman said. “I got David and Jeff ganging up on me here. It’s a nightmare being stuck between you two guys. It’s just impossible! This would be far better if me and Evan could switch places and I could be over next to Veronica.”
“You can stop bringing me into these fights, if you don’t mind.” The woman on the far end rebuked. “Besides, I also think that you are the one making this whole thing worse here.”
“Didn’t you just say you didn’t want to be in this one?!” The younger woman raged.
“Yes, but you brought me into it. So now I’m telling you to stop being an insufferable bitch.” The woman said, without even opening her eyes.
“Uhh… guys!” The youngest, Evan, said as he was looking sharply up to his right. “Guys! Look! Up there!”
They all turned to see the way Evan’s head was pointed, and then turned to follow his gaze just in time to see two small figures charging at each other. They clashed briefly, and then one of them fell out of the sky. The other hovered briefly, and then began flying down toward them.
As all of their eyes were on the one who was approaching them, all of them had their attention suddenly drawn by the sound of the soil shifting in front of them. This time, it was Veronica who noticed first, being in the best position to visually notice what was going on.
“Wow!” The older woman shouted. “Umm…”
It didn’t take the rest very long to realize something was off now with their companion’s behavior, and their eyes were quickly drawn away from the approaching flying figure, and they turned to see a small girl with matte grey hair, looking to be somewhere around 5 years of age. She was wearing a simple dress of the elven style, but her neck and sleeve seemed to be coated in thick blood, and her skin was an almost sickly shade of grey.
If this were back on Earth, where the supernatural was relegated to folk-lore and horror movies, they might assume this child had encountered some form of horrific event. However, since coming to this world, they had all seen a lot of strange and fantastic things. For this reason, thoughts of ghosts and vampires flashed very quickly through all of their minds.
“Wh… what are you!” Evan was the first to ask, relatively unrestrained by the rules of tact. The child simply tilted her head toward him, and then turned to face toward the other figure who was approaching them from the air. Of course, all of them knew. This girl probably hadn’t even understood what Evan just said. Nobody else in this world actually speaks English aside from those who had been transported here from Earth.
The other individual landed a moment later, and his eyes immediately zeroed in on the girl.
“You take out the other one already?” The man asked.
“Yes.” The girl said. “You might want to end your illusion spell now. You will not be able to use your rapport with these people looking like that.”
“What?! You speak English?!” David, the young man in the middle, spoke up in astonishment.
The man who had just landed in front of them turned to look, and then he sighed.
“Yeah, just a sec. It should be clear enough after you see this.” The man said, and then seemed to focus on something for a second. After that, the white clean-shaven and long-haired fairy man had his appearance distort, and suddenly he turned into a black man with a short well-trimmed beard and short curly hair. What’s more, all of them actually recognized this man.
“Mat! What the hell!” The man in the center shouted out. The rest of them in the group looked pretty shocked as well to see this man.
“What do you mean, what the hell?” Mathew Adderson, otherwise known as Terri, demanded. “This is a rescue, what does it look like?”
“A rescue? About damn time!” Cristi said bitterly.
“Dude! We’ve been here for like, it felt like it must have been years!” David said.
“It was years,” Veronica said. “I was counting sunsets, there were more than 500, I’m pretty sure.”
“Yeah, three years.” Terri said. “Sorry it took me this long, but that was what it took to get what I needed to take on the queen’s minions guarding this place.”
“I knew it! I knew there was someone hanging around here! There were 6 of them, right?” Evan asked with an excited starry-eyed look.
“Yep, spot on. You’ve been sharpening your spirit senses it looks like.” Terri said.
“Wait, umm… it was Mathew, right?” Veronica asked. “Just what is going on here. This is all going to fast. And, umm… why did you bring a kid like this here? Is this someone you found nearby?”
“Hah!” Terri gave a surprised choke of a laugh and covered his mouth, then directed an amused conspiratorial look over toward the little girl. “Oh man, well… that’s a long story. Suffice it to say, she’s a lot older than she looks, and I’m not talking the typical elf older here either. She’s the one who taught me all about magic, and she’s a far better teacher than any of those damn stuck-up fairies ever were.”
While Terri was talking, the little girl made her way over to one of the vines binding Veronica to the ground and placed her hand on it. She closed her eyes in a look of concentration for a moment, and then her eyebrows furrowed together.
“The spirit in these vines is awake, and it is refusing to take any orders from me. It seems quite strong willed. Maybe Asaren could overpower it, but I’m not going to be able to convince it to do anything for me. Our only option is going to be cutting it.”
After saying this, the child reached for the wooden bracelet that was on her wrist. It morphed and transformed into a sword. She lifted this sword up, and then in a motion too fast for the eye to see, she brought it down hard on the vines.
The blade managed to cut part of the way through one of the coiled vines, but the rest supported it as the entire band bounced under the impact of the strike, ultimately only managing to wrench Veronica’s arm about. A moment later, the cut vine quickly knitted itself back together.
The child’s brows furrowed even more furiously.
“Terri. I would like you to try it with that new spell you developed. If that doesn’t work, we are going to have to resort to some rather drastic measures I would rather avoid.” She said.
“Right, guess it’s my time to show off then.” Terri said and gave the rest a nod as he went over to take the child’s place.
“Spectrum focus, 550 nanometers. Stable set, 1 kilowatt.” He chanted.
This was a fairly versatile spell he had developed. It was designed to fire light of only a single electro-magnetic frequency, which he could specify during the chant of his spell. He could also choose between two settings, pulse set and stable set, and also specify a power output for the spell.
If he chose pulse set, it would release all the power he specified in a fraction of a second. With the other setting, stable set, it would release the specified amount of power over the course of an hour.
After making the initial chant, he could use this spell repeatedly until the mana he had stored for it was fully depleted. Through experiments, he had discovered that a full mana charge for this spell covered for 7 kilowatts without recharge.
He had already expended 3 kilowatts in the fight earlier, so that meant that he could power the stable setting of the spell for 4 hours at the 1 kilowatt setting.
If it took that long to get through this, then they were probably not going to get through with this method at all.
He extended his index and middle fingers toward the vine, and sharpened his gaze. “Laser.” He said the final triggering word, and a solid green beam extended from his fingers and seared the vine. He swept it down across the width of the vine, hoping the brief exposure would be enough. When it was revealed that it had only singed the surface, he brought it back up and did his best to keep it steady on the same location, but the human hand was not a robot arm. It was physically impossible for him to prevent it from shaking or shifting, and having to start it’s work over in a different location from where it started.
With a look of seeming frustration, the little girl came over and supported his wrist with both hands. Terri also used his own free hand to support his wrist as well.
This combined effort kept the beam a lot more stable than before, but it still shook a little. And, by now the plant began to respond. It seemed the burning was preventing it from simply healing the way it had before. To compensate, it was making new-growth over the locations that were being burned. This new green growth had a much higher water content than the old growth they were burning earlier. This would make it more tender and likely easier to cut, but on the other hand it was a lot harder to burn. Maybe they could hack at it with a sword to scrape off the new growth, but it would be near impossible to re-focus on the same location they were burning through by that point. It might even be in the process of slowly healing it right now.
The girl sighed. “Great. Drastic measures it is then. Terri, I need you to go back to where we had our first skirmish and retrieve the bodies of two of the guards. The ones you took down with your laser would be preferable for what I have in mind.”
At these words, Terri looked to the vines and then he looked to the places they were attached to the arms and waists of the people.
“Oh shit! When you said drastic measures, you seriously fucking meant god-damn drastic measures!”
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Oof. Traumatic surgery incoming!
Also, why use a green laser on a plant that is reflecting green light? Pick red, blue or something near UV if you need a high powered laser.
Oof! Yeah, now that you point that out, that was pretty dumb of me. I just saw the green light range was the frequency often used for cutting lasers in my research, but that's something that I did not think of for whatever reason.
Thanks.
@Jemini If you are seeing Nd:YAG, that doesn’t necessarily mean green. Naturally those lasers are 1064 nm, and then frequency doubled to 532 nm. They use them as green lasers for pointers, but most of the cutting lasers will be infrared.
@XRF Hah? Is that what was going on? Alright, thanks for the info.
I don't know why but all I can think of is how much more terrible that spell would be as microwave with a perfect wave guide powered by magic.
Hey just noticed you said "came up to their wastes" guess you meant to say waist. :)
Err... right. Well, I just made the correction anyway. Thanks.