Chapter 122
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Sofie Ramaut had felt fear many times since that fateful day when the ancients’ machine had plucked her from the library and dropped her inside a dark and dusty underground room, but this time felt different.  This wasn’t the cold spike of terror that she was now all too familiar with, that adrenaline-tinted fright that accompanied those moments of sudden heightened peril.  No, this was closer to a suffocating dread combined with murky hopelessness, like how she imagined she might feel if her doctor had told her that she had manifested a fatal and incurable cancer, except in this case the doctor couldn’t say just how far along the process was or how much time she had left.

“What do we do?” she muttered into her hands.  “What do we doooooo?”

“I don’t know,” Blake admitted.  “I’ve been trying to think of something but...”

He shook his head wearily.  “I got nothing.”

Gabriela let out a long breath and rose to her feet.

“Gabby?” Sofie asked.  The look of grim determination on the woman’s face was like a shining lighthouse beacon piercing through the pouring rain of their despair.

“Blake, go get some rest.  You won’t be any more help as you are now.”

The man nodded silently.

“Sofie, I’m sorry, but I need to be able to read everything you both read,” Gabby continued.  “Can you help me?”

“You’re right,” Sofie sighed, “but I can’t speak Spanish.”

“Then you’ll have to read it all to me and I’ll write it down.”

“Give me a moment and I can make something for you to type with,” Blake offered.

“Fine, but then you go sleep, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.  But, and I cannot stress this enough, no word of this leaves this room.  If this got out, it could cause all sorts of problems.  That means no telling Arlette, Sofie; no telling your hot friend, Gabby.  I’m not even going to tell Sam.  Got it?”

“Wait, so you don’t have any answers, but we also can’t look for help from other people?” Gabby protested.

“Letting anybody else know right now is too much of a risk,” Blake argued.  “Even Arlette might tell her elf boyfriend; she trusts him too much and he might tell anybody if he gets drunk enough.  If the public learns about this—or even just the ministers, for fuck’s sake—I don’t even know what might happen, but it wouldn’t be good.”

“What am I supposed to tell Chitra, then?” Gabby objected.  “We ran all the way back here together; she’s going to want an answer.”

“Lie, then,” Blake replied.  “Or just tell her that you can’t tell her—whatever you need to do, as long as you just don’t tell her the truth.  If she’s really your friend, she’ll understand.”

Gabby scowled, clearly frustrated.

“Look,” Blake reassured her, “I’m not saying we don’t tell anybody ever, just not yet.”

“...Alright.”  

Not long after, Sofie found herself sitting in her chambers with her notes in her lap and a Mexican woman typing furiously beside her.  Gabriela’s gaze shifted back and forth between the screen and the keys with a near-myopic focus, her twin pointer fingers roving the keyboard for their desired targets.  Sofie found Gabby’s two-finger-search-and-destroy typing method absolutely adorable, and the sight made her want to giggle despite the tenor of the situation.

“Let’s break for a little,” she suggested.  “I need to get some water.”

Gabriela leaned back and nodded, letting out a tired sigh.  “Just for a bit.”

Sofie wandered into the small kitchen that she’d convinced Blake to add to her rooms.  As convenient as it was to have others make your food all the time, she enjoyed the act of cooking.  It helped take her mind off things—usually, at least; she didn’t see it working much for this particular “thing”.  She didn’t know what in the world, other than hard drugs, perhaps, would be able to take her mind off this omnipresent, crushing feeling of vaguely impending doom.

Taking a recently cleaned cup, she filled it with water and took a sip, letting the cool liquid restore a measure of vitality to her parched mouth and throat.  Thinking twice, she pulled out a pitcher and filled it, then grabbed a second glass before returning to the main chamber with both cups and the pitcher in her arms.  If Gabby noticed her arrival, she did not show it as she pored over the Spanish words on the screen like they contained the secrets of life itself.

“I can’t understand how you can be so... driven, I suppose, given what we just learned,” she confessed to Gabriela.  “It all feels so hopeless.  I just want to curl up in a ball on my bed and never move again, you know?”

The woman hesitated for a moment, Sofie’s words bringing a deep frown to her face.

“Never mind, it’s none of my—”

“When I first came to this world, I allowed myself to be overcome with despair, and it led to nothing but tragedy,” Gabriela cut in.  “I let myself feel hopeless and helpless.  I let it control me, and... those feelings ate me alive.  I made terrible choices, ones that I should have known better than to even consider, all just to make that terrible feeling go away.

“I understand why you feel the way you do.  A part of me is with you, no matter how much I don’t want it to be, but I can’t let that part win.  Not now.  Too much is at stake.  So, I’m just going to keep plowing forward while I still can.  I’m going to open every door and chase every speck of hope until, Lord willing, I find some sort of answer before these feelings catch up to me.  Once was one time too many.”

Tears in her eyes, Sofie put down the water, reached out, and pulled Gabby into a tight hug.  “You’re right,” she sniffed.  “It’s too early to give up, isn’t it?”

“I just hope I can find something.  I know I’m not the smartest person around, not like you or Blake or Chitra.”

“Stop thinking like that!  You’re something better: you’re determined,” Sofie told her, pulling back and grabbing her by the shoulders so she could stare her in the eyes.  “No matter how many times you get knocked down, you never stop until you achieve your goal.  And there’s nothing we could use more right now than somebody too stubborn to know when to give up.”

A hint of an embarrassed smile flickered onto the woman’s face before she looked away, avoiding Sofie’s gaze.  “...Thanks,” she finally said, “but we should get back to it.”

“Right,” Sofie agreed, her spirit bolstered by a small piece of Gabby’s willfulness.  She sat down and picked up her notes.  “Now, where were we?  Oh, right...

Well, this is somewhat embarrassing.

Despite my certainty, it seems that my demise is quite late.  The townsfolk were just as surprised as I when they arrived to find me still breathing.  Aytra cried for over a day and refuses to let go of me.  She is currently sleeping by my side as I write this.

I do not blame myself or the others for what we expected.  I was in a truly bad shape when they left and, by all rights, should have died.  I would like to think that being in the tree’s presence is what got me through to the other side of the Withering, but that is likely just [emotion-flood-drown-reason—I’m going with “sentimentality”] speaking.

Strain 7 continues to grow at a downright unnatural rate.  It is now easily more than three times my height and appears to be beginning to send up new, secondary trunks from the extremities of its root system...

Together, the pair continued through the rest of the text, the clicking of the keys Sofie’s voice’s only accompaniment.  The process was not a quick one, but as the day grew old, they ran out of words to translate.

“That’s it?” Gabriela asked, studying the journal with a skeptical eye.  “Isn’t there more than a third left?”

“There is, but it’s not writing,” Sofie informed her.  She turned the pages to reveal page after page of detailed sketches of plants and plant parts with bits of notation scribbled around the images.  One particular species dominated the collection: a tree, strong and sturdy-looking with a thick trunk and a wide canopy.

Gabby leafed through the last portion of the journal, stopping finally on a page featuring a large drawing of the full tree from the base of the trunk to the tip of the highest leaf.  The image covered nearly the full page, with only enough room beneath it for a single note: “Strain 7”.

“This tree... isn’t it...” Gabby wondered.

“Yeah, I think so,” Sofie replied.  “You can see in his notes the results of his tests on its durability, its growth rate... it all fits.  Plus, given where I found the journal and how he says that he planted it to the south, that would put it in the middle of where Stragma is now.”

“And it looks just like it, only smaller.”

“Yeah.”

Gabby leaned back and rubbed her eyes for a moment.  “It’s hard to believe that something like that was made by people like you and me,” she admitted.

“I know how you feel.  It’s funny, though, how often he laments his inadequacy compared to his friends when he created a tree bigger than a mountain, though I guess he didn’t know what it would become at the time.”

“Yeah... it really makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?  I might be the strongest person to ever live, but I could never do something even close to as incredible as what a small group of ordinary ancient scientists accomplished.”

Sofie hummed her agreement.  “Did you need anything else?  I’m feeling pretty wiped.”

“No, I have what I need now.  I think I’m going to rest for a little while, too, before I start going through all of this again.  Thank you for helping me.”

“Of course!  I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make a translation for you from the start.  I had been planning on learning Spanish before I ended up here, but I just never got around to it.”

“Every one of us had plans and dreams and important things that were left behind,” Gabriela glumly reminded her.  “Given all that’s happened, I would say that you have done rather well for yourself.  Better than I have managed, at least.”

“I’ve spent my time in Scyria surviving on little more than the goodwill of others.  I wouldn’t call that managing well.”

“Well, at least you managed to hold on to who you are through all of it.  That’s more than some of us can say.  Thanks again, Sofie.  I’ll see you later.”

Once Gabriela had left, Sofie found herself pacing, her mind awhirl.  Despite the small injection of aimless hope Gabriela had given her, the day’s revelations were just too terrible and weighty to shrug off so easily.  Thoughts of death and misery and extinction-level catastrophes looped through her head without end.

This wasn’t going to work.  She needed something to soothe her roiling spirit.  And so, before she even realized it, Sofie found herself outside the door that connected her rooms with Pari’s.

Though it was late, she knocked on the door; she knew the beastkin was still awake.  Pari made sure to always say goodnight before going to sleep, and she had not yet done so this night.  In reality, the child’s visits were more of a poorly disguised attempt at getting Sofie to agree to let them sleep together for the night like they used to when on the road.  Though Pari’s bed-hog ways made it harder for anybody else nearby to get proper rest, Sofie found herself acquiescing to the girl’s unspoken request more often than not.  Growing children needed to be well-rested, after all, and her sister was used to sleeping with the warmth of another, be it human or something else.

The door slid aside, revealing a sleepy-looking Pari dressed in her nightgown.  She rubbed her bleary eyes.

Sofie gasped.  “Oh no!  I’m sorry, sweetie.  Were you sleeping?”

Pari hummed an affirmative.

“But you didn’t say goodnight!”

“Pari not want bother Sofie-sis and Gabby-friend.  Pari not know why but Sofie-sis and Gabby-friend very serious, and Pari not want to bother, so Pari just sleep.”

The child’s words melted Sofie’s heart and she struggled to not tear up.  What a considerate and mature thing to do!  Her little cutie-pie was growing up before her eyes!

“Sofie-sis want to say goodnight?”

“Well, I was hoping I could maybe sleep with you tonight.”

Pari’s face lit up and, grabbing her by the hand, she practically yanked Sofie through the doorway.  The girl was stronger than she looked—she had to be, to be able to lug that sack of equipment around on her own.  Before Sofie knew what was going on, she found herself horizontal on Pari’s bed with the catgirl snuggling up against her chest and purring up a storm.

While Sofie prepared herself for an extended soul-soothing cuddle session, the child’s rumbling faded just a minute or two later.

“Sofie-sis still upset even after Gabby-friend left,” she stated with some concern.  “What wrong?”

“It’s complicated, Pari,” Sofie replied.  While she didn’t entirely agree with Blake’s desire for secrecy, she had agreed to his prohibition for the moment and had no intention of breaking her word.  She wasn’t sure that she could trust Pari to keep it a secret, anyway.  While the child had a proven track record of keeping her dragon grandparent’s secret for years, Sofie wasn’t sure she could get the same level of commitment out of the beastgirl.  Signs of growing maturity aside, Pari was still a child, and a fairly young one at that—mentally, at least.  In her limited experience, children were fairly hit or miss when it came to reliability.

Plus, if Pari were to decide that it was okay to tell somebody, it would be Samanta.  If Samanta found out, Sofie had no doubts that Leo would know before the day was over, and from there, who could say how far and fast it would spread?  Either way, it would be too late to contain at that point.

“Sofie-sis still smells upset and afraid.  Don’t feel afraid, Sofie-sis!  Pari here!”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, but even with you with me, I can’t help it.  I’m very scared right now, and I’m at a loss as to what to do.”

“Grandfather told Pari that if Pari ever got too scared that Pari should just run away.”

Sofie giggled.  “Like how you ran from the ancient’s robot vacuum cleaner?”

“No!  Sofie-sis liar!” Pari insisted, her ears folding flat against the top of her glistening dark hair.  “Was not cleaner, was super bad meanie!  Pari super scared!”

 “Oh, for sure, for sure,” Sofie agreed, mollifying the indignant child with some precision behind-ear scritching.

“It true!  People laugh but people not understand meanie truth!”

Sofie decided to drop the touchy subject and return to the original issue at hand.  “So you would just run away, would you?”

“Yes, Pari would run away until Pari not scared anymore.”

“But what if you were scared no matter where you ran?  Would you just run forever?”

“Then Pari would just run home to Grandfather.  Pari not scared when with Grandfather.  Grandfather super strong.”

“Home, huh... wait, here isn’t home?”

“Here is other home,” she stated like she was saying that the sky was blue.  “Home where Family is.  Sofie-sis stop thinking now.  Sofie-sis always thinking too hard.  Sofie-sis hurt own head.”

Sofie chuckled.  “You know, you’re probably right.”

“Of course.  Pari knows best!”

“Yes, of course,” Sofie agreed, her hands stroking the child’s long, smooth hair, setting her purring again.  “How silly of me.”

Sofie pulled her sister close and the two hugged in silence.  Thoughts of what would happen to Pari should the worst come to pass entered her mind.  The image of the poor thing stranded in a wasteland of snow and ash was more than she could bear.  Yes, Pari was far more resourceful than most children—most adults, even—and yes, she had a giant protective murder lizard that could keep her from harm, but Bazzalth was on the other end of the continent and sometimes resourcefulness just wasn’t enough.  What if—

No, she had to stop.  Pari was right, she was thinking too much, and it wasn’t doing her any good.  There was a time and a place for everything, and this time and place was not for thinking—it was for loving and appreciating and maybe even sleeping, if she could manage it.  As she lost herself in the sensation of the beastchild’s soft rumbling against her chest, she found that she could, in fact, manage such a feat, if only for a little while.  Before she knew it, a hard and long day’s worth of weariness overtook her, and as she drifted off to sleep, Sofie’s last semi-lucid thought was the realization that she had forgotten to brush her teeth.

*     *     *

The next morning, after a quick breakfast with Pari, Sofie decided to stretch her legs for a little bit.  Walking through the fortress’s hallways, she caught the sight of a familiar face stepping out of their room ahead of her and walking towards the elevator at the end of the hall.

“Arlette!”

The Scyrian heard her and slowed down for her to catch up.

“How are you?” Sofie inquired as they came to a halt by the elevator doors.  “I haven’t seen you in a few days.”

“I’m fine, you?”

“All good here,” she lied.  “You sure you’re okay?  Blake said you’ve been acting weird—running out of meetings, staring blankly into the wall, that sort of thing.”

“I said I’m fine.  Don’t worry about it.  It was just a little personal business and I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, that’s all.  What about you?  Scuttlebutt is that you, Gabriela, and Lord Ferros were holed up together for hours last night.  Wasn’t Gabriela supposed to be off somewhere out of the country?  What’s she doing back so soon?”

“Oh, uh, she finished what she set out to do faster than expected, I guess.  You’d have to ask her,” Sofie deflected as she quickly searched for a convincing explanation.  She hadn’t realized that their conference on its own would be notable enough to generate rumors.  “It’s nothing.  We were just reminiscing about Earth and stuff last night.  We all get homesick once in a while and it helps to share with each other.”

The doors slid open and they both stepped inside.

“Haven’t you ever gotten homesick, wandering around Scyria and all?” she wondered.

Arlette shook her head.  “Not particularly.  I miss my family, but all that’s left for me is my birth mother, and she’s across the Divide.  That is, if she’s even still alive.”

“You have no idea what happened to her?”

“I haven’t seen her since I was a child.  I wasn’t able to go home because of Sebastian, and there’s no real communication between Nocend and Obura outside of strict official channels, anyway.  Even if I could have contacted her, letting her know I was still alive would just have put her in Sebastian’s sights.  There was no other choice.”

“But what about now?  Sebastian’s gone, Arlette.”

“The Ubrans still hold Redwater.  There’s no way to get a message through the Divide.”

“You have access to an airship that can just fly around the Divide.  That’s not an impediment anymore.”

Arlette looked away.  “I... he wouldn’t—”

Whatever she was going to say was lost as the elevator reached the ground floor and the doors slid open to reveal the snarling faces of Simona Jumala and Zigmars Vietnieks.  It seemed that, just as their conversation had been interrupted, so had some sort of vicious argument on the other side of the doors—that, or this was how they flirted; with these two, it was hard to say for sure.  Whatever it was, Sofie didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

“I’ll see you later,” Sofie told Arlette as she ducked out.

*     *     *

That afternoon, Sofie sat on a bench in the pockmarked inner courtyard, watching Pari and Samanta have a grand old time across the way.  Sometimes, she worried that Samanta’s exposure to Pari would warp the Otharian child into some sort of crazy pyromaniac or something, but she had yet to see it.  Sure, Sam often helped Pari with her alchemical shenanigans, but she didn’t seem driven to travel down the same path on her own.  The projects that she pursued with Pari’s assistance were things like oils, soaps, and other stuff far less likely to explode than Pari’s usual output.  Well, there had been the acid incident, but...

Perhaps drawn by the youthful atmosphere, Gabriela wandered in.  She looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept well—or at all, most likely.  Wearily, she sat down next to Sofie, her body language suggesting little good.

“I hope you slept at least a little,” she offered.

“Not much, but some,” Gabby answered.

“...any luck?”

“I combed through everything four times, and... I want to be able to say that he’s wrong, but I can’t.  There’s just too much to support his theory.  I’ve spent all day trying to come up with an idea for what to do but...”

“You’re coming up as empty as I did.”

“Yeah... I don’t know what to do.”

They sat there, together, and watched the children play for a good span.  All the while, the burden of knowledge bore down upon them with unbearable gravity.

“I envy them,” Sofie admitted eventually as she watched Sam chase a fiercely giggling Pari around the yard.  “They have no idea, but even if they did, I feel like they wouldn’t let that stop them from having fun.  Not like us.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

Sofie chuckled.  “You know what Pari told me last night?”

“What?”

“She could tell that something was wrong, so what I came up to tell her was that I was afraid and that no matter where I might run, I wouldn’t be able to escape it—which is, you know, technically true.”

Gabby grunted.

“And she looks at me and says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world, ‘I would just run home to Grandfather, because he’s super strong.’”

Gabby blinked.  “Just run home?”

Sofie laughed.  “I know, that simple, huh?”

“Just run home...”

Gabriela stood up suddenly, her face alight with purpose.

“That’s it!”

“Gabby?”

Gabby spun to face her, her gaze that of a woman who just stumbled upon an oasis in the middle of the desert.  “Just run home!”

Without a single word of explanation, Gabby took off, racing out of the courtyard.  Sofie ran after her as best she could.  Though she had no chance of keeping up with the superpowered woman, that was alright.  She had a good idea where Gabby was headed.

Sure enough, she arrived at Blake’s door just in time to catch Gabriela slipping past the opening door.

“What’s gotten into you?” she heard Blake say several rooms away.  “Thought you were going to break the door in!”

“We have to go home!”

“What?”

“It’s the only way!”

“Sofie!” Blake called out as she rushed in, finding him in the same spot they’d left him the night before.  “What the hell is she talking about?”

“We’re balloons, right?” Gabby pressed.

“Kinda?  More like bombs, but—”

“Balloon-bombs, then!”

“I mean—”

“Gabby, calm down!” Sofie told her as she tried to wrest the overly-excited woman into a nearby chair.  “You’re not making any sense!”

“If you want to stop a balloon-bomb from exploding or popping from too much pressure, what can you do?” Gabby asked.  When the others responded with little more than dubious stares, she answered herself: “You can disarm it or you can move it somewhere where the pressure isn’t a problem anymore.”

“I mean, duh,” Blake finally replied.  “You’re not saying anything we don’t already know, and you’re saying it weird, too.”

“Can we be disarmed?  Can you get the energy out of us?”

Blake paused.  “I don’t think it’s possible, no.  That’s the problem.  First, I have no idea how to detect this energy.  Second, even if I did, I have no idea how to get it out of us.  It’s possible that by trying to do so, I’d just release it by accident anyway; or, maybe the energy is actually held at bay by a second energy and I remove the wrong one and we explode; or—”

“So, no, then,” Gabby interrupted.  “That leaves moving us.  We need to pull ourselves back down to where the air pressure is greater, so we don’t pop.  We need to get back to Earth.”

Blake sighed.  “Give me a break.  We talked about this, don’t you remember?  It’s literally the reason you’re here and not pillaging Eterium or whatever.  We can’t go home!  It’s not possible!”

“You don’t know that,” Gabby insisted.  “We just spent hours yesterday talking about false assumptions.”

“She’s right,” Sofie realized.  “Blake, you even admitted to being wrong—something I had long decided was impossible.  Who says the impossible can’t happen twice.”

“Fuck you, Sofie,” Blake shot back.  “This is serious.”

I’m serious,” she shot back.  “You claim we can’t go home, but you’ve been wrong plenty.  Why can’t you be wrong about this?”

“Because this is different.  This is about machines.  I know what I’m talking about.”  He let out an exasperated breath.  “Think about it like this.  Imagine, like... a... a municipal water tower, right?  A big tank of water way up there, a hundred feet in the air—lots of water pressure.  That’s Earth.  The machines are like... a harpoon gun, a funnel, and a bucket.  They shoot a harpoon up and pierce the tank and then the water flows out on its own.  The funnel catches the water and it flows into the bucket.  Maybe it’s more like a hose than a funnel and the water flows out of the tank and through the hose into the bucket, but whatever.

“Either way, the point is that the machines make the hole and collect the energy, but that’s it.  They’re just letting the forces of nature work their magic.  They’re not water pumps.  They don’t control the flow and they sure as hell can’t fight the pressure and go against it.  It’s just not what they’re designed to do!”

“Then we have to build something that is designed to do it!” Gabby argued.

“Just build it, huh?  You got a dimensional physicist or two hidden away somewhere that you forgot to mention until now?”

“You’re acting like Pionmi hasn’t already done half the job done for us.  We have a way to pierce through the dimensions and the machines already seem to connect to Earth, since it took people from there twice now.  We already have the harpoon—as you put it—and the hose, and they’re already aimed right where we want.  All we need to do is build the pump.”

Blake leaned back with a groan and rubbed his face for a moment.  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.  This is nuts!”

“Well, I think she’s making at least a bit of sense,” Sofie offered.

Blake rolled his eyes.  “You would.  You’re not the one who would have to actually build this proposed miracle device. Look, I’m confident in my ability to create almost anything I can think up, but I do not have the knowledge, experience, and maybe even straight-up intelligence to be able to invent something like what she’s talking about.  It’s nice to be able to say that the work’s halfway done, but getting halfway into orbit is no better than being unable to get off the launchpad.  Worse, arguably.”

“Why would it have to be just you?  What about your best bud Bazzalth?”

Blake looked at her like she was delusional.  “Sofie, after everything we talked about yesterday, what in the world makes you think tipping off the dragons that we know of their plot would be a smart idea?  Isn’t the whole point of this discussion to look for ways to not die?”

“Not ‘dragons’, just him.  I mean... he wouldn’t have something to do with this, would he?”

“Bazz?”  Blake paused for a moment.  “I would like to think he doesn’t... but it’s possible.”

“Really?” Gabriela interjected.  “Everything I saw of him would make me think he wouldn’t accept something so risky and destructive.  Not with Pari out here and all the data he would lose.”

“It’s more complicated than that, though,” Blake explained.  “I don’t think his personal thoughts are what matter here, not so long as his older sister exists.  Look, you guys didn’t see her, so I get it.  You wouldn’t understand, but she’s a whole ‘nother level past Bazz.  She’s an absolute unit of a dragon—makes him look like a newt in comparison.  And there’s just... something about her that is terrifying in a way that is hard to describe.  When she was near me, my brain was just absolutely screaming at me that if she so much as heard a single breath I took, I’d be snuffed out like a candle blasted by a fire hose.  So yeah... when it comes to the two of them, she’s the one who wears the pants in that relationship.  She says jump, Bazz says ‘how high?’—and honestly, I don’t blame him one bit.

“The problem is, from what I’ve seen of her opinions concerning us crawlers, I’d put very good odds that she’s involved in this plot in some way.  If I reveal any of this to Bazz, there’s too much of a risk that she would find out somehow—and then we’d all be up shit creek.  I could contact him and try to be as abstract and tangential as possible or something, but it’s way too risky and I’m not ready to cross that bridge yet.”

“So then, what bridges are you willing to cross?” Sofie pressed.  “We’ve all spent hours pondering our options, and I think Gabby’s got the right of it: either we remove the energy from ourselves before it bursts out on its own, or we remove ourselves from this environment where the ambient energy is too low.  That’s our choice—unless you’ve thought of a third option?”

Blake sighed.  “No, not yet.”

“You said that your dragon buddy was able to measure your soul energy or whatever, right?  Would he know how to remove our excess energy?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Blake told her.  “He’s not even measuring it directly, from what I understand; he’s measuring the ‘vibrations’ or ‘frequency’ of something or other.  It’s all very second-hand—or third-hand, even—like measuring the size and speed of something under the water by tracking the ripples on the surface.”

“Well then, that leaves us with a simple choice,” Sofie continued.  She started to tick things off on her fingers.  “Option one—removing the energy from us—would require a wealth of knowledge that neither we nor potentially anybody in this world possesses, might not even be possible, and also might end up backfiring and killing not just us but the entire world as well.  Option two—getting back home—is based in a field that was once actively researched, with existing and easily available machines that we can study and possibly documents we might be able to discover; its implementation is already partly complete; and if it backfires, it might just kill us in transit instead of taking reality with us.  The choice seems pretty clear to me.”

“That’s like saying it’s better to take a shotgun blast to the face than be vaporized by a nuke.  If those are our options, I’m not ready to pick either.  I need more time; maybe I’ll think of something.”

“Then think, but I see no reason why we should wait,” Gabriela insisted.  “It’s not like we’re stuck with our decision forever.  If we come up with a better solution later, we can just change to that.”

“She’s right, Blake.  Our decision isn’t eternally binding, it’s just something to work towards.  We’re not going to get anywhere by sitting around and moping all day every day.  We need a direction.  Hey, for all we know, researching this will reveal something better we can jump to.”

Blake placed his head in his hands and sighed again, louder and heavier than before.  As Sofie watched, it was like the man deflated as the air left him.  “Fuck.  Fuck!

“Glad you finally see things our way,” Sofie smirked, victorious, though the victory felt hollow.

“Alright, then,” Blake said.  “If you’re both so gung-ho about this, you can handle the research and planning and all the rest, since I’m going to be too busy trying to pull a technical miracle out of my ass to do anything else.”

“Research?” Sofie repeated, puzzled.  “Aren’t you the one who needs to study the machines and stuff?  What would we have to research?

“Everything!” Blake shot back.  “There’s so much we don’t know besides the technical stuff.  For example, it would probably be very useful to know just what triggered the last group’s self-destruction, so we might have some idea of how close we are to blasting this place to smithereens.  Is it just time and we’re ticking clocks?  Or is it something else, like how much we use our abilities?  I imagine that fighting dragons every day would have caused them to use their abilities constantly.  Or, maybe it’s something that happens when we die.  Anything you might be—”

Blake cut off as Gabby began coughing so hard that Sofie could feel it through the floor.  The two of them sat there for a few moments, watching as her fit died down.

“You alright?” Sofie asked when it was over.

“I...”  The woman seemed to withdraw into herself, her voice quiet and weak.  “It... it doesn’t happen... when you die.”

“Well, yeah,” Blake began, “but you’re a special case—”

“I’m not talking about me.”

The room went quiet for a long, cold moment.

“You didn’t...” Sofie gasped.

Gabriela looked away.

“Huh.  Well, that’s good to know,” Blake stated nonchalantly, stroking his chin in thought.  “Though Bazzalth told me that souls persist after death for at least a few years, so maybe it’s not the death of the body but the destruction of the—”

“Blake, how can you be so blasé about this?!” Sofie cut in.

“What?  How is this any different than all the other people she’s killed?”

“Well... I mean...”  Sofie paused.  Why did she feel so appalled about Gabby’s admission?  She’d known of the woman’s appalling body count for months and had come to terms with it long ago.  Yet, somehow this struck her anew.

“Deal with your crisis of conscience on your own time,” Blake told her.  “As I was saying, there’s plenty of research you could do.  But, as Gabby just reminded me, there’s more important work for us: we gotta get the band back together.  Or... get the band together for the first time, I suppose.”

“That’s right, we can’t leave the others behind,” Gabriela nodded.  “Both for their sake and this world’s!”

“So wait, we have to find a way to bring both the Mother of Nightmares and that man in Stragma to Otharia somehow?” Sofie gulped.

“Yes, and find any other people from our world that we don’t already know about,” Gabriela added.

“And, since souls persist and it’s highly possible the destructive energy is stored in the soul, we can’t let whoever Gabby killed stay dead either,” Blake concluded.

“Wait, you’re serious?” Gabriela asked.

“Why, is something wrong?”

“Um, well, if you think it’s necessary to save everybody, then I guess it has to be done, but...”  She paused, some unpleasant memory replaying behind her eyes.  “...you’re not going to like him.”

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