Level Thirteen: Omens
There exist many unfortunate aspects of the Outer Rings. Setting aside the pure malevolence of some of its occupancy, the landscape itself is not only incomprehensible to creatures of fewer dimensions, but outright hostile. To say nothing of the fauna, the flora, if one could call it such a thing, Is of such a disposition as to not only survive in such a dangerous environment, but thrive in it. Needless to say even some of the local ‘wildlife’ knows better than to go into the jungles.
Should one find themselves in the Outer, and find a way to evade the things that live there, there exists a much more dire problem, especially for meager carbon-based lifeforms such as humans: the very air is so drastically different from our own that, should any soul be unfortunate enough to take it in, they would not only die (which may be the gentlest response), but the alien components of such an atmosphere run the risk of reacting violently with our own organic composition that the results are nothing less than Cronenbergian in wretchedness and Biblical in scope.
Of course, barring all of that, the greatest contender for ‘Most Inconvenient Aspect’ may not in itself be the most dangerous, but is certainly the most unpredictable. Time, in the Outer, is nearly incalculable from our world. In fact, the only law it can be found to follow is Murphy’s, in which it seems to have a Master’s Degree from whatever prestigious university lay outside our realities.
So trying to pin down something as specific as an Eleven O’Clock deadline is not only foolish, but dangerous. Which is one of the many reasons the students at CHS deigned it necessary to prepare several hours ahead of time. The Outer is nothing if not unpredictable. You would think this would mean it great fun at parties, but alas.
“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” groaned Dusty, staring dejectedly at a wall some feet away from him.
Bones, the only other person at the table, was looking in the opposite direction, at the crowd.. He’d found out after a couple of hours that not only did his date have much more energy than he did, but was in danger of depleting whatever reserves he might need for later on that night. That girl could dance. “I don’t know, Dusty, I can’t say I find the wall as interesting as y-ack!” he cried, as Devil grabbed him by the top of the head and forced his gaze in the same direction. He blinked. Then blinked again, multiple times. “Well, I don’t know what you think it is, but that looks like blood. In the wall.”
“I told you NOT to tell me that, Bones,” DD grunted, releasing his captive and standing up to further investigate the phenomenon. Indeed, it seemed as if the wall had suddenly engorged itself with blood. Not in the ‘bleeding walls’ trope, of course. No, that would be slightly easier to stomach. Instead, the poorly decorated wood paneling of the gym appeared to have developed deep, pulsing veins of a dark blue hue. Dusty imagined that if he stood close enough to it, he could hear a pulse. Not that he had any such plans. “That is seriously gross.”
Bones groaned, pulling out his cell phone. “It’s also seriously bad.”
“How so?” Dusty asked over his shoulder, in a tone that not only suggested, but demanded no one answer that question.
A demand that went wholly ignored. “Because if the walls are mutating, it means they’re getting weaker. Not just the physical walls of the building, but of reality. Multidimensional phenomena are surprisingly metaphorical.” Bones dialed a number in his phone, and held it up to his ear as it rung.
Dusty turned all the way back around. “You’re telling me the universe actually does have a sense of humor?”
“More like poetry. Really bad poetry.” Spooky held up a finger to silence Dusty’s reply as the other end of the phone picked up. “Hey, Rubble? Where are you? No, I can’t see you, that’s why I asked. Well, come back to the gym, far corner from the punch bowl. Yes, the one with the ‘sad people’ tables. Because we’re starting early. Wha-NO I CAN’T PUT IT ON HOLD. JUST GET HERE,” Bones shouted into the phone. Either through the increasing volume of music and people, or just pure frustration, was anyone’s guess. Although, should the guesser know Rubble for any length of time, the latter was the safest bet. He pressed the hang-up button on his touch screen with a rather aggressive finger. “God I wish they made a mobile phone you could slam.”
“They do,” Dusty pointed out. “But you can only do it once.”
Bones raised an annoyed eyebrow as a small group of students approached their table. “Hey, guys!” cheered Sonata. Flanked by Treble and Adagio, the group fanned out briefly to pull up chairs. “What’s going on?”
Bones and Dusty exchanged a look that Treble caught instantly. “What? What is it?” he asked, again suggesting he’d rather not know.
The other two boys pointed at the wall. Treble and the girls leaned closer to get a good look, then recoiled quickly, almost falling out of her chair. “Oh, my god,” groaned Adagio. “I think I’m going to be ill.”
Spooks rolled his eyes. “Then you might want to check out now. In our experience it only gets worse from here.” He thought for a moment. Then, his face lit up in alarm.
Treble flinched, as if seeing the wall for a second time. “Ooooh, I know that face. That’s the ‘I just had a thought nobody’s going to like’ face.”
Dusty groaned and stomped off, disappearing into a closet nearby. “Um, where’s he going?” Sonata asked.
Bones didn’t bother looking to answer. “We stashed some of the weapons in there. And yes, I did have a thought. Remember how the Tragedy Nexus was an inward spiral?”
Treble hated when he started explanations with a question. “Yesss?”
“And how the school was the center of the spiral?” Spooks added. He started rummaging through his pockets, finally pulling out a familiar map of the town.
“Also yes,” DT added. “Now stop doing that thing that you do where you ask a bunch of questions waiting for us to catch up with your big-ass brain. What IS it?”
Spooks rolled his eyes over the map. “Well, if we’re seeing weird shit here, at the center-”
The closet door flew open, striking the wall. Dusty strutted out, no longer in his tux, instead having opted for jeans, an A-shirt, and his skating pads, which the boys had no doubt he was wearing underneath the entire time. “Then there’s gonna be all kinds of bad shit outside this room,” Dusty finished, tossing a jury-rig flamethrower to Treble.
Treble caught it with all the grace of a fish on land, but he caught it. Giving it a once-over to make sure his fumbling hadn’t broken anything important, he rested it on the table.. “So what your saying is this ‘eleven o’clock’ stuff was total bullshit?”
Bones rolled his eyes till they reached the ceiling. “Well, I’m sorry if my watch doesn’t set itself to multidimensional time zones!” He stood up with a huff, tucking the map away again. Dusty handed him a couple of grenades, which he disappeared about his person with a flourish.
Adagio leaned against the table with an elbow, resting her head in her hands. “This is the part where things stop being fun, isn’t it?”
The boys looked at each other, then gave a resounding “Yes.”
“Well, that depends on your definition of ‘fun’,” said a deeper male voice behind them. The group turned as one to see Rubble and Aria stepping up tho them, Rubble having ‘changed’ into his favorite military fatigues, jacket, cap and all.
Treble looked at both Dusty and Rubble indignantly. “Did both of you psychos wear combat gear under your tuxes?!”
The two accused traded glances that said ‘No duh.’ “Of course we did,” Dusty replied. “Didn’t you?”
“I don’t have a ‘Designated Fighting Outfit’, thank you!”
Bones shrugged, undoing his string tie. “Your loss.” In a few moments he had removed his own suit to reveal a black undershirt that matched his slacks, and a black face-shield that he pulled up over his nose. Combined with the black silk gloves that came with the suit, the only patch of white on the kid was the bit over his right eye above the mask.
Treble looked around. “Oh, come ON!”
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The sirens, to Treble’s relief, did not have ‘Designated Fighting Outfits’. Instead, they had opted for formal wear they could actually move freely in, hence the slit down the side. The lot had gathered in the large hallway leading to the gym, garnering panicked expressions from onlookers. At least, the ones who hadn’t up and ran away at the sight of them.
It didn’t help they were each carrying a weapon of some kind. Dusty had distributed flamethrowers to each of the girls, who reacted more like children on Christmas than soldiers on a battlefield. DD was grateful he was on their side, given their level of enthusiasm. Rubble had unsheathed his knives, and pulled a set of knuckle dusters from somewhere. Even after having it pointed out to him that punching and stabbing was the least useful thing he could be doing right now, he wanted, in his own words, “To be prepared for the event that your giant birthday candles get blown out.” Treble also had one of these ‘birthday candles’, and had also stashed a few explosives in is pockets. Though they were easier to notice in his pockets than Spooky’s. No one was even sure where he was keeping the stuff, let alone pulling out new stuff. Dusty himself had opted to be on thermite duty, carrying a satchel filled with the stuff over his shoulder, and a rather large, unnervingly sturdy metal pipe in one hand. Of course, he had since popped the wheels in his shoes, which the other boys had noticed he had worn instead of dress shoes.
The hall itself didn’t look anything special, besides the bright decorations and the few remaining students who either lacked the common sense to leave, or had grown so accustomed to the strange happenings at their school that they were simply waiting for someone to tell them it was over. The connecting hallways, however, were a slightly different story. As the group marched down the hall, they reached a three-way intersection, opting to split into two groups. Treble went with the girls in the direction of other people, as the other three boys took to the increasingly abandoned sections of the building.
Dusty looked around the darkened hallway, uncertain if the light pulsing he saw in the walls and lockers was his own eyes, or the increasing reach of the building’s newly acquired circulatory system. He liked to imagine that the pulsing he heard was his own heartbeat. He tried not to imagine what kind of heart would be pumping blood to a mess like this. “If someone finds anything more Looney Tunes than plaster with high blood pressure, feel free NOT to let me know.”
“You mean like that?” Bones responded unhelpfully, pointing down what should have been a dark hallway.
Dusty took one look, then glared at his friend. “Do you ever listen to anything I fucking say?”
“All the time. Then I promptly disregard it.”
The hallway in question, which should have had little to no light, instead pulsed with an unhealthy purplish glow. The walls pulsed with the same sickly veins they’d seen in the gym, though much more prominent and in greater numbers. The ceiling and walls merged at sickening angles, meeting in soft, fleshy angles instead of the sharp ninety degrees they had once done.
The glow in question came from the floor. Unlike the veiny walls and ceiling, the floor seemed almost translucent. Not quite see-through, it had taken on the appearance of thin skin, as unearthly lights and formless shadows moved beneath it. Had Rubble not stormed down the hall with the kind of abandon usually reserved for serial killers and idiots in horror movies, the boys would not have any trouble believing you could simply fall straight through the floor.
Rubble’s steps echoed through the hall as if it hadn’t changed at all. The sound of heavy rubber on linoleum echoed down the corridor just like it had every other day, and Bones noticed, and pointed out to Dusty, that a small circle had developed around Rubble, nearly restoring the appearance of the hall to its original mass-produced school setting.
Dusty blinked “Ok, either I’m actually losing it, or that is the weirdest thing I’ve seen all day. Or, you know, EVER.”
Bones shook his head. “It actually makes sense, kind of.”
Dusty rounded on him. “HOW?!”
Spooks leaned away from the yelling, plugging one ear with a sense of nonchalance. “Because it’s not actually there. I’m pretty sure this is either a psychic attack or a psychical manifestation. It’s just an illusion. Either we’re looking at a distraction, or our brains are trying to make sense of something they can’t quite process. Either way, this isn’t actually what’s going on.”
“So how is Rubble walking through it like a cheap haunted house?” Dusty asked, now following his battle-ready best friend.
Bones kept pace. “Because to him, it probably is a cheap haunted house. Or he wants it to be. I’m not a hundred percent, but it’s possible that he just doesn’t believe what’s going on around him, and that disbelief is dispelling the illusion around him.”
After a second of thought, Dusty let out an impressive sigh. “So what you’re saying is that our buddy is so stubborn and, to put it bluntly, stupid that these kind of mind games are literally above him?”
Bones mimicked the sigh. “Yeah, pretty much.”
Dusty had a disturbing thought. If one had been looking at his face, they’d seen an expression that nearly mirrored Bones’ own when the ghastly boy had realized the implications of the manifestation in the gym. “So what happens when it stops being an illusion?”
The two boys traded panicked glances, then tore down the hall after their friend. “RUBBLE!”
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Treble led the girls down the hall with a sense of bravado that, even though he didn’t believe a word of it, he broadcast it so intently that one might be convinced he fully intended to find the Beast himself, have a few stern words with it, and send it packing home with nothing less than a well-placed boot firmly lodged in its arse.
The girls followed behind with a mixture of misplaced faith and novice enthusiasm one usually sees in fresh recruits looking to their staff sergeant for the first time.
Well, mostly. Aria wasn’t quite so easily impressed. Although she wasn’t about to let her sisters know that she was more than a little disturbed by the recent developments, and so her own bravado shone nearly as brightly, of equally as false.
They marched their way through a few hallways, clearing out people when they found them, either with some urgent words or raw intimidation, until the only people they could be sure had remained behind were those in the gym and immediately outside it (their reckless friends excluded.) It wasn’t until they’d turned a corner leading to the science labs that they met their first real scare.
“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” Treble and the girls screamed, in equally high-pitched voices.
“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” screamed Pinkie Pie and Twilight, in slightly higher-pitched voices.
Once the screaming subsided, all collected clutched their chests and gasped for breath. “What… what the HELL are you two doing out here?!” Treble demanded, in a voice much higher than he intended. He coughed, cleared his throat a few times, and lowered his octaves to a slightly moe respectable range. “We’ve been clearing people out before the shit hits the fan!”
Pinkie recovered from her jumpscare much more impressively. “Well, I was telling Twilight about how my jawbreaker went all BAKOOM and blew that super-icky meat thingy all over the cafeteria, and how you guys were saying we needed to be all FWOOOOSH with the fire and stuff, so she dragged us down here to make all kinds of big flammable stuff in the science labs!”
Treble’s eye twitch, and he brought a hand up to knead his temple. “Ok. And you couldn’t do this, you know, earlier?!”
Twilight spoke up, in a much more reserved voice. “Well, I had to wait until the lab was unguarded. They usually don’t let students handle the sodium on their own, so I had to break into the chem locker.”
Sonata tilted her head. “What does salt have to do with anything?”
Aria raised an eyebrow at her sister. “I don’t know if I’m more impressed that you know there’s salt in sodium, or more concerned that you don’t know what sodium does on it’s own.”
Treble said nothing, not wanting to indicate that he was in exactly the same boat as the youngest siren. Fortunately, Twilight was more than happy to answer. “Well, if you introduce raw and pure sodium to water, it produces a rapid exothermic reaction.”
Sonata’s head tilted the other way. “What?”
This time, Treble actually knew the answer. One of the quirks to having a friend who used four syllables when one would do. “Water plus sodium equals explode.”
The blue-skinned girl smiled widely, now that she got it. “Oh, ok! So… where’s the sodium?”
Twilight twisted, pulling a backpack Treble hadn’t noticed until now in front of her. She unzipped it and reached a hand in, then pulled out a large crystal of white mineral.
“Jesus,” Treble whispered, whistling appreciatively. “That’s the size of a baseball.”
Twilight smiled the same kind of mischievous smile that Rubble usually got when someone did something punch-worthy. “That’s the idea.”