Chapter 2: Curiosity

“Alright then”, Elaine said as she looked between her two charges for the day, Abigail and Cassie. “You two ready for some action?”

“Yes, ma'am”, Cassie replied enthusiastically.

“Sure”, Abigail said quietly.

Elaine hated how subdued Abigail was but there wasn't really anything she could do about it. She knew she needed to try and get along with the gorgeous singer but actually doing so was hard. Abigail had said some very thoughtless things and while Elaine had forgiven her it had still driven a wedge between them. She knew that Abigail's Bond Level lagged behind the others and thanks to her Supporter's Reward ability that low Bond Level was currently holding Abigail back more than her EXP, given that she had plenty of those she couldn't allocate for lack of available abilities.

Elaine knew she needed to make a conscious effort to make time for Abigail but she barely managed to juggle her three girlfriends, let alone others. Elaine knew it wasn't an excuse but she was only human and spending time with gorgeous women who wanted her all over them was simply more fun than spending time with a gorgeous woman who didn't and with whom she had nothing in common.

Even now Elaine felt herself much more drawn to Cassie, who seemed genuinely excited to be part of Elaine's team and of this mission in particular. And holy crap was Cassie cute. He'd told them all that he was in fact a guy but looking at him it was still hard to believe. His face was prettier and more feminine than many of the women Elaine had met so far and the voice didn't sound particularly masculine, either. The silhouette he struck in the suit of tight-fitting body armor was more ambiguous but he still had hips that didn't exactly look like they belonged on a man. Only his shoulders and the hint of an Adam's apple gave it away.

She shook it off as the three of them made it out of the airlock of Base 15 and towards the hangar that held the little Gospel, a super advanced aircraft kindly donated from Heaven.

Without anyone having to ask Abigail made her way to the pilot's seat of the vehicle and sat down in it.

“Gotta say, it's super convenient that you can pilot these things”, Elaine said with a smile. “Otherwise we would have had to ask Prudence for help.”

Abigail gave her a soft smile. “I really don't get why everyone's so shocked by it. These things are easier to pilot than a car.”

Abigail was gorgeous, to the point of being self-conscious about it, and had a voice that was meant to woo millions around the world. And yet in this group she felt like the weakest, most useless member.

“Don't sell yourself short”, Elaine said. “It's yet another thing you can do that we can't.” Then she turned to Cassie. “Speaking of, I probably should have asked this sooner, but can you handle those guns Jeanne gave you?”

Cassie grinned and when he spoke it was with a noticeable Texan accent: “Sure can, ma'am. Pa dragged me off to the shootin' range evry other week fer years.”

Elaine snorted and even Abigail smiled.

“Seriously though”, Cassie said, again in his normal accent, “I can handle a gun. I won't slow you down.” He paused, then corrected: “Well, I'll try not to slow you down. If I understand this leveling thing correctly I'm way behind all of you.”

“It's okay”, Elaine said. “We're not going anywhere dangerous. Prudence said there's only a light Outsider presence in Knowlesville. This is basically just a team-building exercise that may involve a little wholesome extermination.” She frowned at her own words and then said: “You know, it's good that we all know the things we're fighting are monsters that want us all dead, or that sentence would have been pretty fucked up.”

That finally got a genuine chuckle out of Abigail.

“So, how long until we reach our destination?”, Cassie asked.

Abigail's eyes flicked down to her systems and then back to the windshield. “About fifteen seconds.”

“Are you serious?”

“These things are crazy fast”, Abigail said. “It could probably go supersonic if we didn't mind alerting every Outsider within a couple dozen miles to our presence. And that's not even mentioning the warp drive function I've found.”

“Warp drive?”, Cassie asked. “That sounds exciting.”

“It sounds fucking terrifying”, Abigail countered. “I won't even consider touching that until I know exactly what it does.”

“I'm with Abigail here”, Elaine said. “I have a lot of negative associations with the idea of 'warp travel'.”

“Yeah, that's fair”, Cassie said and his mind supplied the iconic line:

Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

Just at that moment Abigail managed to land the craft, which had taken almost as long as the flight itself. The three of them got out in the town of Knowlesville, New York. The place was small town America at its finest, all widely spaced white-painted wooden houses and a little church in what could generously be called the center of town.

But that wasn't why Abigail had chosen this place to land. The reason she'd done so was because of the swarm of Thralls shambling through the streets.

“That's off-putting”, Cassie said. The voice should have been muffled through the helmets they'd all put on before disembarking from the Gospel but thanks to the CARDs they all wore Abigail and Elaine could understand him perfectly.

“That's right”, Elaine said. “You never got to see any of these things. This is what happens when people get corrupted by Shub-Niggurath without embracing it.”

“So you're saying those fucked-up goat cultists who kept us in a cage were the good end?”

“Pretty much”, Elaine said. “Killing these people is the biggest kindness you can give them.”

“Awesome”, Cassie said in a voice that suggested he found the situation anything but.

“Oh”, Elaine said, “and both of you, don't forget to scan them so they count for the encountered enemy types achievement.”

“Thanks”, Cassie said and willed himself to scan them.

While the two were busy reading the scan results Elaine took a closer look at the Thralls. They looked... off. Now, Thralls always looked off, being people liberally covered in mismatched goat parts and cancerous growths, but these looked weird even by those fucked-up standards. Their human parts – what few were left – looked emaciated, as if these people should have long since starved to death but weren't allowed to, as if the cancerous growths were keeping them in some semblance of life even though their bodies had long since succumbed. It would go a long way towards explaining why the horde had approached rather than run from the aircraft full of trained soldiers.

Elaine wondered if maybe these things, if starved for long enough, might turn into wendigos or maybe even skinwalkers. It was a disconcerting thought, especially when she considered that this might have been the plan all along, to use small villages like this as a sort of hatchery. Make a whole group of Thralls and wait until they starved themselves into becoming something scarier, at which point they would eat the rest and grow even stronger.

But wouldn't that imply a level of intelligence nobody had as of yet been suspecting the Outsiders of? Sure the cultists were intelligent and the way that head cultist had talked to the Shoggoth had implied a certain level of intelligence, but if these monsters were capable of acting with that kind of foresight humanity might be even more screwed than Elaine had expected.

She really hoped her theory was wrong.

“Game plan, boss?”, Cassie asked as he aimed his assault rifle at the very slowly approaching shambling horde.

“Shoot as many as you can, I'll deal with the rest”, Elaine said. “Abigail supports.”

Abigail couldn't stop a small sigh from escaping her but then summoned forth her lyre and started playing a driving song. The lyre shifted to the sound of an electric guitar and after a few seconds of playing a phantom bass and drums pitched in to support her and soon a red haze permeated the area, her Song of Courage making her allies faster and stronger while her Musical Barrier created a shield bubble to keep her safe.

She knew why it had to happen like this. If Elaine killed something her teammates would gain 100% of the EXP. If Cassie killed something he would gain 100% of the EXP while everyone else would gain 50% of the EXP. But for Abigail it was more advantageous if she didn't kill anything as she gained 50% bonus EXP of any kill she didn't score thanks to Supporter's Reward. Of course it would have been even more efficient if Elaine simply killed everything herself but part of the reason for this outing was to get Cassie used to fighting.

But Abigail hated being sidelined like this, which was ridiculous because for most of her life she'd wanted to attract less attention, not more. But something about the way Elaine disregarded her irked her.

Oh, she was well aware that this was entirely her own fault. She'd been a cunt to Elaine and though their leader made an effort to include her in everything there was only so much she could do. On top of that Elaine had three girlfriends and Cassie seemed rather interested in her as well, so there was absolutely no reason for Elaine to want to spend much time with her instead, but still. Abigail was used to people paying her too much attention and somehow not being the center of attention felt weird to her.

Cassie lined his sights up and fired a tight burst of three rounds into the pulsing canker on one Thrall's chest. This wasn't some amateurish spray-and-pray fire. Cassie knew damn well how to shoot a gun, he hadn't been lying about that. His father had been continuously disappointed with Cassie for not being manly enough and had kept trying to force manly activities on him. Cassie had excelled in all of these but had refused to become any more manly. He'd gone through boot camp without running for the hills. He was the best shot in his family. Before he'd been locked away in a cage for three months by some fucking cultists he'd had a defined six-pack underneath his cute clothes, but he still prided himself on being mistaken for a girl, still had a voice high and feminine enough that many a trans-woman regarded him with seething jealousy, and was effortlessly pretty even without make-up.

Even still, when he opened fire on those Thralls he mowed through them. After each burst he made sure to breathe in, adjust his aim, breathe out, and only then did he fire again. The gun had less recoil than he'd expected, or maybe this weird futuristic armor did something against the recoil, but he found it even easier to aim than the guns his father had trained him in. As a result, none of his shots had missed their mark and Elaine only had to help when his magazine had run empty.

**

Evelyn made her way towards the mess hall at the glacial pace the Lieutenant General had saddled them all with and kept going until she found the person she was looking for. She'd seen Samantha Cole a couple of times during the first two weeks and she'd seemed like a nice girl but ever since they all had to split off to join the Awakeners she hadn't had time to talk to anyone but her teammates. So she approached the woman with some trepidation and asked:

“Samantha?”

Samantha Cole was a good-looking, sporty blonde with a ponytail and she'd been in an animated discussion with two of her teammates. “Yes?”, she asked as she turned around. “You were... Evelyn, right?”

“Right”, Evelyn said.

“What's wrong?”, she asked. “Trouble in paradise?”

Evelyn shook her head. “Nothing like that. I was just wondering... the Professor said you'd worked with him?”

Samantha blinked in confusion, then nodded. “Yeah, that's right. What about it?”

“Ah, yeah”, Evelyn said awkwardly. “He made me a similar offer and told me I'd best ask you about it.”

Samantha's eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, yeah, got it. Sure, I'll fill you in.” She took Evelyn by the hand and found the two of them a quiet corner. “Oh, and, it's Sam, got it?”

Evelyn smiled. “Sure, Sam. So, he said he ran some tests on an ability of yours?”

“That's right. It's called Farsight. It lets me move my point of view elsewhere, so I can look at things that should be outside of my field of vision. The Professor wanted to test how far he could stretch that, had me look into solid rock and inside machines and stuff. It was interesting.”

“Nothing worse?”, Evelyn asked. The Professor always struck her as kind of creepy.

“Nope, just that.”

“And what did he pay you?”

“A couple hundred credits”, Sam said with a shrug, then leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “That wasn't the real prize, though.”

“Oh?”, Evelyn asked, smiling.

“So, he told me of a morgue east of here and he mentioned that a place like that may or may not be full of zombies. We went there and there were a couple Yellow Wraiths around the building. Did you fight some of those yet?”

“Yeah”, Evelyn said but Sam already continued:

“Nasty pieces of work, but lucrative. So, after we're done with those we walk into the building and they have these... fridge things? The ones where you pull the bodies out of?”

Evelyn nodded. She didn't know the term but she did know what Sam was talking about.

“So each of those holds a corpse and each of those corpses is a zombie. So we just pull one out, stab it to death, move to the next one. Again and again. By the end everyone in our team had over a hundred EXP more and it was basically no work at all.”

“That does sound amazing”, Evelyn said. A hundred EXP didn't really sound like much to her anymore after her last mission had paid out over four hundred but it was still a hefty chunk for other people.

“Right?”, Sam gushed. “So yeah, best deal ever. I learned a lot about how my new ability works and we all got a chunk of credits and EXP out of it. So, what ability do you have that he's interested in?”

“Ah, right”, Evelyn said. “It's called Akashic Knowledge. I haven't bought it yet, but apparently it makes my CARD's scan function better. Don't ask me how.”

“Interesting”, Sam said.

“I'm more interested in what he's so desperate to find out.”

“What do you mean?”, Sam asked.

“Think about it”, Evelyn said. “Your ability lets you see things you shouldn't be able to, mine gives me information I shouldn't have access to. What does the Professor need to know so badly that he needs these abilities?”

Sam bit her lip. “That's not a bad question. Who knows, maybe he's trying to find out how to beat back those Outsiders.”

“Or he wants to find who brought them here in the first place”, Evelyn said.

“What do you mean, 'brought'?”

Evelyn frowned. “Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

“Outsiders can't just come into our world”, Evelyn said. “They need to be summoned. Somebody caused the Invasion. Deliberately.”

“Ah fuck”, Sam said. “Yeah, I'm gonna ask Marcus about that.”

“He should know”, Evelyn said. “Elaine was the one who told us about it.”

“Urgh, he probably did know, he just forgot to tell us”, Sam said. “He's a great guy, clever, handy in a fight, and not hard on the eyes either, but damn does he have a memory like a sieve.”

“To be fair”, Evelyn said, “it's not as if this knowledge changes anything about what we need to do.”

“True enough”, Sam said. “So, what other abilities do you have? I just realized you're the first Shard Bearer I've talked to that's not from my team.”

“Lightning magic”, Evelyn said. “I have passives that make me stronger and faster and I have a back-up healing ability.”

“A bit of everything, then?”, Sam asked. “What god?”

“Indra”, Evelyn said. When she noticed Sam's confused look she added: “Hindu god of thunder.”

“Oh, got it.”

“So, what about you?”

“Right”, Sam sighed. “I've got a shard of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt.”

“That explains the Farsight skill”, Evelyn muttered.

“Yeah”, Sam said. “I got that, a magic bow and one really filthy ability called Antares Shot that lets me shoot down a burst of starlight anywhere in my field of vision. Except, thanks to Farsight, my field of vision is basically anywhere I want.”

Evelyn's eyebrows rose, but then the corners of her mouth followed. “So, what about the virgin thing?”

Sam rolled her eyes. “I have this ability called Strength of Purity. It gives me a massive boost to all stats so long as I stay a virgin.”

“Wow, that's gotta suck”, Evelyn said. “Especially with a guy like Marcus around.”

Sam smirked. “And here I thought you played exclusively for the other team. You certainly seem smitten with Elaine.”

Evelyn blushed. “I thought I was straight before I met her, but Elaine is just so...” She trailed off.

“No need to justify yourself”, Sam said. “Anyway, it's not as big a sacrifice as you think.”

Evelyn's eyebrow rose in a look of extreme skepticism.

“I'm from the Bible Belt, girl”, Sam said. “And thankfully that skill has the same extremely specific definition of virginity as the people I grew up with. Trust me, my sex life is very fulfilling.”

Evelyn blinked as the implications sunk in and then blushed. Apparently Sam and her beau only had oral and anal sex. All she could say to that was: “Hot.”

Sam looked around, blushing a bit herself, before she said: “Yes, yes it is.” Then she paused and gauged Evelyn's reaction.

The redhead just held her hands up and said: “Hey, I won't judge. It's hot and it works for you. You don't judge me, I don't judge you, it's only fair.”

Sam smiled. “Good. So, what about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, everyone's wondering. An entire group of hot girls and your Awakener has that hot lesbian thing going on. So, spill.”

Evelyn's cheeks felt like they were on fire. “Well, Alexis, Ophelia and I are all sort of dating Elaine.”

“Just the three of you? What about the super model?”

“Abigail?”, Evelyn asked, then shook her head. “No, she's not interested.”

“And what about that waitress you guys brought back from that mission in Albion?”

“Cassie is interested in Elaine, but hasn't told her yet.”

“So, no great big lesbian orgies?”

Evelyn blushed scarlet. She knew about Ophelia's plan for tonight. “Nothing like that.”

“Yet”, Sam said.

“Yet”, Evelyn agreed before she could stop her traitorous tongue.

“You're too easy, Evie”, Sam said with a chuckle as Evelyn stewed in her embarrassment. “Oh relax, I just told you I'm Marcus' butt slut. We're even now.”

“So...”, Evelyn said, peering up. “You... actually do that?” The concept was intriguing to her. Evelyn had spent a large part of her youth reading Yaoi manga, reading about hot guys hooking up, so of course she always had a certain curiosity about anal, but she'd never had a partner she trusted enough to explore it. Until now.

Sam smirked. “Curious?”

“A little...”, Evelyn admitted.