Arisia 2017 - First Impressions

I've been convention-adjacent before, but never to one.

I saw the armored dog.  I saw Rey waiting to get her picture taken.  I saw Kylo Ren from a distance but he's boring and I didn't care.

I learned about using tarot cards to help you overcome artistic blocks in your writing.  I got a Rogue One: A Star Wars Story poster which I carried around all day with only "Rebellions are built on Hope" visible making me think of various other, better, foundations on which to build rebellions.  Only at the end of the day did "Some walls are made of fear; some are made of wall material" pop into my head and I haven't quite figured out how it goes.  Maybe, "Some rebellions are built on hope; some are built on rebellious acts," but that doesn't quite capture it.

My biggest take away came from a panel where an author said something to the effect of "A story that goes, 'The character wants soup.  The character goes to the corner store.  The character buys soup.  The end,' is not a good story."

Now I was good and respectful and quiet when presenters were speaking all of the time before and after that, but at that point I broke my silence, turned to the person beside me (whom I did not know) and said that it could be a good story if it were in a war zone with aliens.  Her friend on the other side said that she was thinking a killer clown on the loose could make it a good story, and then the question of what other factions might want that soup came up, and the note I ended up writing in my notebook was (word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark):

Random observation: everyone in this room
has come up with a kick ass awesome story
that follows the plot:

Character wants soup
Character goes to corner store
Character buys soup.

Is the hard part getting the money?  Getting to the corner store?  Buying the soup?  Is there rationing?  Danger?  High stakes negotiation?  Space monkeys?  A horrible natural disaster?  (Add "during a Tornado" and I think you've just come up with the next SeeFee original movie: Soup Run: Skies of Terror.)

Is the corner store being robbed when Agent Coulson arrives intent on buying soup?

Who knows?  But what everyone does know is that you can make an interesting story out of the journey to the corner store to buy soup.

I heard that one time Conan went to the store to buy soup as part of a coming of age ritual and he returned not only with the egg in his mouth unbroken, but with the decapitated heads of an entire band of marauders.  Plus Cambell's chicken noodle, of course.

-

I didn't have much time at Arisia, didn't see what wares were being peddled, but it seemed a nice enough place.

And we're all waiting for the next breakout novel about getting soup at the corner store.

-

Reviewing the pictures one, fact is beyond any doubt: my camera is fucked up severely.  I mean I knew I had to smack the fucking thing to stop it from randomly cycling modes long enough to take the pictures, and I knew the built in lens cap didn't open all the way bar jostling, but this is someone graciously standing quite still so I can photo, and the blurring is severe enough that the color from her irises bleeds into the color of her hair (it's worse at full resolution)

So, that kind of sucks.

Incomplete things

In draft form I have starts on five different things in the shared super person universe, one primer on exotic materials to be found in the outer realms and liminal spaces of my Four Reams setting, a partial start on chapter two of With great power comes . ? ., a partial start to an installment of my guide to game design that you all know nothing about because I've never posted an installment.

I have no idea when, if ever, any of these things will be done.

It is also the case that writing a new installment of Forgotten Seeds has been at the top of my writing to do list for ages and I have absolutely no progress to show for it.

So that's where things stand creatively right now.

I have great interest in the "almost" part of "almost always"

So I was looking up something on feral horses and a bumped into a word I didn't recognize, which caused me to take a look.

It turned out to be a word that means "donkey" in Spanish and Portuguese but means "feral donkey" in parts of the US.

So having stumbled upon donkeys (which I like) I read the article and something jumped out at me.

Donkey-horse hybrids (mules and hinnies) are almost always sterile.  Why the fuck has no one ever told me this before?  That "almost" matters.  That almost is intriguing and worthy of great investigation.

As it turns out, a non-sterile male mule or hinny has never been confirmed.  Females are different.  In the past 500 years there have only been sixty confirmed cases of female mules reproducing (and just the one female hinny), so it's rare, but this really happens.  Horse-donkey hybrids can produce offspring.

The only known case of one producing generations was one where the donkey side of the equation seems to have been bred out and the various fertile descendants seem to be, outwardly at least, all horse.

So rare, doesn't seem to take on the second generation baring de-hybridization, but that might be just because we basically never try since we assume they're all sterile.

Having an odd number of chromosomes tends to fuck with a reproductive system like whoa.  Horses and donkeys have a different number of chromosomes, thus the the hybrids have an odd number and things don't usually pair up right.

But sometimes.  And what then?  Other than that one stallion born to a mule mother, what would happen if the "almost" hit a second generation?

A third?

Is there a point at which a stable species would emerge that was neither horse nor donkey but some combination of the two.  If we bred for that "almost" with the same obsessiveness we breed purebred dogs that look nice but have familial relationship weirder than Oedipus and massive life-living problems galore, is it possible that something new could walk upon this earth one day?  A stable horse-donkey hybrid that was its own species?

Maybe it's not.  I don't know.  But the almost leads me to wonder.  If the first generation can breed, why not the second?  And if the second, why not the third?

Admittedly we're talking about something that would be a massive endeavor because you've got to get enough "almost"s in the first generation to also get "almost"s in the second, and so forth.

But for longer than history we've been breeding horses with donkeys to produce evolutionary dead ends, and we show no signs of stopping, so if we've been fucking with them for thousands of years, and will likely continue to fuck with them for thousands more, why not latch onto the ones that aren't dead ends and try very hard to see where that road leads.

Maybe it inevitably leads to a situation where one side is bred out of the equation and all of this work chasing near impossibility just brings us back to where we started.  Or maybe something new arises.  But we'll never know if we don't try and we don't try.

This is only one of many almosts that interests me.  Almosts call out and ask us to wonder what makes them different, and where they could take us.

Lots of people have code names, it's not that weird (super person universe)

[Ok, so, superhero names are hard.  Ditto for coming up for a way to make your fire-power haver distinct from other fire-power havers.  Thus this came into my head.  I have a headache, so the execution could suck.  You've been warned.]
[Mishap was described here, and previously appeared in this story.]

If this turns out to be my old team again, Mishap thought, it definitely means they're following me.

It was almost a relief when Mishap saw that the cause of the commotion was just an ooze monster the size of a three bus pileup.  Cracked patches of asphalt that had once formed the street amounted to armor plating over its oily looking form.  She doubted it was real oil,  She didn't know of any decent crude reservoirs in the area, and for some reason a lot of things went for the oily look without being oil.

Besides, setting it on fire would be too easy.  Things like this were never easy.

Mishap was about to leave the area, and thus leave the problem to someone else, when she saw the ooze monster form a mouth in the general direction of children.  They couldn't have been old enough to have reached middle school, and they definitely should have had parents in the vicinity.  Besides, wasn't this a school day?

It didn't matter, targeting the weakest first suggested either the rudimentary thinking of a simplistic predator, or sadism.  Neither would be good for the children.

Mishap charged the thing, used the shattered remains of a really nice looking car as a springboard, landed with as much force as she could on a vaguely Mishap-sized patch of asphalt.  One thing she knew about ooze monsters: you don't even touch the ooze directly.

Hopping from asphalt to asphalt she crossed the monster and landed between the mouth and the children.

"They're under my protection ear-less monstrosity," she said to the mouth, noting that its "teeth" were formed of shards of broken glass and bits of broken metal.  Apparently it didn't have any hard bits of its own with which to chew

"I would run now," Mishap said to the children over a shoulder, then scanned the situation.  She found what she was looking for in a transformer that was barely holding onto its pole.  It took just the slightest nudge to make it fall, and when those things went wrong they had a tendency to pop, at least in Mishap's experience.  She made sure it did just that as soon as it hit the ooze.

Hardly the unflinching hero, she reflexively ducked, made her body as small as she could, and covered her ears, even though she knew the explosion was already over.

The ooze monster gurgle-screamed in pain, then gurgle-growled in anger.

"Got your attention ear-less?" Mishap asked.  She didn't expect an answer.  It was, after all, ear-less.

It did, however, respond to the changed events.  The mouth she had been facing dissolved and when she looked to see where the attention had been redirected she saw the kids.  Again.  Didn't the young fucks know that when you ran away from something you ran away, not along its side?

Beyond the obviously financial benefits to being a thief, this was a large part of why she never considered being a hero.  Not the largest part, but it still ranked in the top ten.  Quite simply: saving stupid people was the kind of job that couldn't be done in one fell swoop because their stupidity almost guaranteed they'd need to be saved again.

Still, they were kids.  One did not stand by when children were in life threatening danger.  It simply wasn't done.  Lesser dangers could be ignored, but Mishap wasn't going to let these kids be killed by a combination of her inaction and their stupidity.

The question was how to save them this time.

While part of her wanted to just run toward them, she knew that she wouldn't reach them in time.  She needed--

A small ball of fire hit the new-formed kid-focused mouth, and someone called out, "Over here Tim Curry."

She had a distraction, she had more time, and she had a seeming non-sequitur.  What more could she ask for?

She again used the remains of the road as stepping stones to run across the monster, and landed at the side of the newcomer.  Random guy with a sling made from, apparently, shoelace, and a marble in his hand.

The marble burst into flames as he put it into the sling.  He didn't spin up the way some people did, he released after half an arc and the flaming marble flew off to hit the ooze monster in the new mouth.  As Mishap guessed earlier, the monster did not appear to be prone to being set on fire.

"Hi," she said to the marble guy.

"Hi," he said back.  "You wouldn't happen to have a plan, would you?"

"You in the market?"

"More window shopping," he said ans he lit another of his marbles and launched it at the monster.

"So," Mishap said, "no plan of your own, and nothing to pay with."

She looked at the next marble closely.  Though she found it a nice color, there was nothing special about it.  The fire must have been coming from him.  She commented on the color.

"It's mermaid green, I'm told," He said as he lit it.  "And my plan ran out after 'get its attention away from the kids.'"

"That's barely even a premise," Mishap said.

"Seemed to be your premise as well," he said.

"I'm no hero," Mishap said.  She noticed that the creature's attention did seem to be turning in their direction.

"Hey, I'm apolitical too," he said.  "It's just that--"

"There were kids."

"Yup."

At least they understood one another.  That didn't make up for the lack of plan though.

"How much fire can you make?"

"Never tested it," he said.  "Not much more than my own surface area, I imagine."

Mishap dodged a tentacle of ooze that came their way.  The marble guy simply lit himself on fire on the tentacle side.  The tentacle recoiled, then retracted, in pain.

"I get the impression you're safer than I am," Mishap said.  Marble guy shrugged.  "Anyway, two surefire ways to deal with ooze monsters: dry them out, which you can't make enough fire for, or dilute them."

"I haven't noticed any massive water powers on your part," he said.

"Not a jot, but the infrastructure around here is corroded all to Hell," Mishap said.  "If you can distract it for a while, I can get the water."

"I didn't come prepared for a fight," marble guy said, "You've got twenty shots left to do whatever you're doing."

He lit another marble, and Mishap tried to figure out where the water main was hiding.  It was more difficult than it should have been because all of the underground pipes were in deplorable states of disrepair, and tended to feel rather similar.

* * *

The ooze monster defeated, Mishap went to regroup with marble guy.  She found him reaching into the muck where the ooze had been and retrieving his marbles.

"You've got to be kidding," Mishap said.  "They were pretty, but they cost, what, a buck fifty?"

"Three dollars and fifty cents, in fact," marble guy said.

"Doesn't seem worth the effort," Mishap said.

"Is anything?"

Mishap shrugged.

"You got a name?" she asked.

"Jake," marble guy said.

Mishap rolled her eyes, "I meant a handle.  Most people with powers have another name."

"Like Desdemona?" Jake asked.

"Beings that aren't from Earth usually don't have fragile human families that could be exploited, and thus forgo the usual practices," Mishap said.

"Who says I have a family?" Jake asked.  "I'm used to being alone."

"I know the feeling," Mishap said, "and my recent stab at being part of something larger than myself didn't exactly go well.  Still, unless you want people to think you're a demon, which isn't always a bad thing, you should have a name."

"I was unaware that 'Jake' was an insufficient name," Jake said.  Apparently done retrieving his marbles, he stood up and wiped his hands off on his jeans.

"I'm just telling you how these things tend to be done.  I'm Mishap, for what it's worth."

"Fine," Jake said.  "I'm 3.14-Plastic."

Mishap's first response, "Wha--" didn't even last for a full word.  Three point one four was an obvious reference to pi, and while 'Plastic' was harder to place once she thought about it in terms of mathematical constants named after greek letters everything snapped into place.

"Oh," she said, "Pi-Rho," which sounded like 'pyro', "For the person with the fire.  Cute."

"You're the one who wanted me to have a code-name, Mishap," the newly christened 3.14-Plastic said.

"Just telling you how it's done," Mishap said.

"Thought you weren't a hero."

"I'm not," Mishap said.  "But someone who stands aside and lets children die isn't a thief anymore, they're a monster."  After a pause she added, "The scary kind, not the ooze kind."

"I'm not a thief," 3.14-Plastic said, "but more or less the same reasoning."

"I'm not looking for a partner, and I definitely don't want to form a team," Mishap said, "but do you want to hang , 3.14?"

"I'm hungry," he said.  "If you're buying, I don't turn down free food."

"I'm not exactly flush, but crime certainly pays," Mishap said.  "I can buy."

-

[Shared Superperson Universe Index]

Warmth

So I got the oil the day after I got back because delivery was mercifully speedy.  There was some trouble at the beginning of the day because after much searching and frustration I realized that I had left the Christmas money out of state and so would fall short of what I needed.

Having found a five dollar bill I didn't know I had, and change to pay for the after the decimal point part of the bill, I found myself exactly 42 dollars short.  No amount of searching my house helped because I've kind of already used up all money that can be found that way.

I did, however, eventually realize that it's the beginning of the damned month and I've been too distracted to do any real bill paying.  Meaning there was money in my bank.  (The money I left out of state can be conscripted to pay for the other bills the money in the bank would have.)

My bank is helpfully located across a street from me.  Not across the street, but rather across the street that one will come to if one walks to the end of the street (by which I mean my street.)  Directly across said street because staggering side-streets (such as the one I live on) is a way to stop stupid people from speeding across Main Street without checking to see if they'll end up in a T-bone-ing accident.

So I got the 42 dollars (which took two tries because the ATM ate my ATM card in spite of belonging to the same bank as the ATM) and had the money for oil without needing to impose on my stressed-the-Hell-out family. Which was good since I'd already ordered it and was really worried that the oil would come but I wouldn't be able to pay.

Eventually the oil did come and the house got heat.  The house slowly heated, my toes did not.  Past cold, mostly skiing but walking two hours to and from university multiple days a week for years on end likely didn't help, has fucked up my toes.  Possibly my chest as well, but that has the advantage of being located core-adjacent and so doesn't suffer from the heating and circulation problems that toes do.

And thus I took a shower.  Warm to hot water can do wonders.

Trouble is, in all of this I managed to fuck up my scheduling.  As mentioned, if I'm not sick, and not so sleep deprived to be on the verge of passing out, I wake with dawn and stay up through the light.

That means that if I get to sleep late I don't compensate by sleeping late, I just end up with not enough sleep.  So I've been a bit fucked up on account of that, which is why I didn't have a post two days ago saying, "Yup, I've got heat now."

Of course my post three days ago saying I didn't have heat did mention that I had already secured money to pay for oil, so hopefully no one was unduly worried.

It is by oil that I set my heat in motion.
It is by burning carbon that the water turns to steam.
The water turns to steam, the radiators commence their warming.
It is by oil that I set my heat in motion.

I know warmth.

Coldness

The problem with waking up at dawn is that you need to get to bed at a time many would consider absurdly early to get a full night's sleep.  It's not that I really want to wake up at dawn, it's more that barring illness or piles of sleep deprivation I can't sleep when there's light.

So, anyway, as I type this I really should have been in bed an hour and a half ago, but, you see, I kind of fucked up.

I sort of live in two places these days.  The places I want to live are in Maine, the people I want to live with are in Massachusetts.  I go back and forth a fair amount.  I was there for about a week.  I meant to turn down the heat because it only needs to be warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing as that happens to be warm enough for the cat (cats are hardy things) and the gecko has a heating pad on 24/7 and a lizzard light on 12 hours a day every day (through the magic of a timer.)

That would have stretched my oil until sometime next week, probably early next week, which (to be honest) probably wouldn't have helped me that much.  It would, however, have been better than the current situation in which the oil ran out sometime while I was away and the temperature of the house has already dropped a fair bit.  Hopefully the oil company can deliver before the weekend.

To avoid wasting gas and person-hours the oil company has a minimum order for their normal price, anything below that will have added fees.  The minimum is a hundred gallons and though the price of heating oil isn't bad ($2.01 per gallon) combining cash I got for Christmas with everything in savings only got me around half of the way to one hundred gallons.  So I reached out to family because it's cheaper if purchased by cash or check than it is if done on credit.

That's never fun, but we're four and a half months into hellfire raining down on my sister and hitting the rest of us as collateral.  I'm getting hit least of all, everyone else is sort of frustrated to the edge of sanity (not that we were ever the most stable bunch to begin with) which made the whole reaching out to family thing physically painful.

And then I talked about it.

And then someone helped out by donating money.  And now if I combine what they donated with the rest of my savings and the money I was given for Christmas . . . I can actually afford to pay for oil.  If they can deliver it soon.  If I have to buy a stopgap that might change, and it will require dealing with the person whose mind is most frayed because my sister is the one who knows about stopgap oil.

But anyway, I can pay.  Yay.  Depending on exact details I can either make it so family doesn't need to go through the extra stress of getting involved with the oil entirely or I can make it so they'll be paid back for the check they write almost immediately thus keeping it from being a financial burden.

So, what does this have to do with being up too late?

Well, you see . . . I've sort of been living in two places these days taking greyhound buses (and the Boston T) between them.  Which means I don't always catch my mail right when it arrives.  Which means that when I got sent a new debit/ATM card I didn't get it.  Which means that when the year changed (I'll have a post or two on that, by the way; I got a squid hat) my old card expired without a new one being in my possession.

Which meant an hour and a half tearing my house apart trying to figure where that one bit of mail containing the new card was.  (Wouldn't be a problem if the people who helpfully bring in my mail when they check on the cat would pick one fucking spot in which to put it.  Sometimes help is less helpful than no help.)

Which means instead of being huddled under a blanket my toes are going numb.

Which in turn meant I felt a need to vent.  Thus this post.

But, on the good side, money with which to pay for oil.  Yay!  Assuming it can be delivered in a timely manner.

TPC - Ge, Prologue: Quake

[I mentioned that I have in my mind a series of stories in which super people turned to stone are turned back.  Ge is the only one I've touched on before, but the story of her being restored to life starts with someone else, thus this a prologue rather than Chapter 1.  I've cut out a fair amount that isn't relevant to Ge's story.]

The Petrification Chronicles - Ge

Prologue: Quake

Reality shattered just long enough for Des to pass through, she pulled her head into her right shoulder, narrowly avoiding being hit by the ground, converted her momentum into a half roll, and landed hard on her back.

She cursed shadow dimensions in various languages even though she knew that it was safer dealing with the horrors there than it would have been to travel here via earthbound routes.  She took a deep breath, slowly stood up, and said, “This better be worth it,” to no one in particular.

Then she began her trudge to the mine-shaft where she'd meet the others.

* * *

Before she got to the chamber where she was supposed to meet everyone, Des saw Quake.  All other concerns were forgotten.  She said, “Id Tech,” as something between a greeting and an exclamation and rushed at the girl.  Quake responded with, “Demon Breath!” and ran to meet Des halfway.  They collided into a long hug.

When Des finally disengaged she looked around, spotted, Echelon, and said, “I thought you were going to wait for me to get here, Esh.”

“We are,” Echelon said.  “She's not our Quake.”

Des looked Quake over and then said, “Whose Quake is she?”

“It's an inter-dimensional thing,” Particulate said.  Des knew of no dimensions that would have their own Quake, but when Particulate said something like that you didn't argue with him.  He'd be the one to know.

“I know you're not my Desdemona,” Quake said, “but may I hug you again?”

Des looked at not-their-Quake.  Hope and sadness weren't just in her eyes, they radiated from her.  The sadness was stronger.  Des nodded.

Quake hugged her again.  This time she spoke, “This won't mean anything to you but: I missed you so much, and you were always my friend, and there's no truer love than that, and I wish I could have saved you.”

Then Quake released her.

“If that pointless gesture is finished,” Particulate said, he always could be counted on to deliver a romanticized perspective, “we should work as quickly as possible.”

Particulate led the way to Quake's chamber, and yes-their-Quake still sat frozen in stone, both hands on the rock beneath her, her face a picture of strained concentration.

Substrate was setting up equipment.  She looked up at the sound of their footsteps.

“Almost done here,” she said to Particulate. “It'll be all yours in a second.”

Des surveyed the equipment.

“These are all sensors,” she said.  “How are you actually planning to bring her back?”

Echelon pointed to not-their-Quake.

“We've tried earth elementals before,” Des said.  “No results.  It failed on Ge too many times to keep track of years before Quake went stone.”

“We've tried other elementals,” Echelon said.

That was when Des finally realized why not-their-Quake had merited enough hope to call her as an observer.  “You think that since she's the same person--”

“Technically ninety seven point three percent the same person,” Substrate said.

“That's impossible given the number of chromosomes human beings have,” Des said.  And then she immediately realized the answer: “Homologous recombination.”

Substrate nodded.  “Best guess.”  She turned to Particulate, “I'm done here.  Your turn.”

Particulate started to set up sensors of his own while Substrate moved toward Des and the others.

“If this does work,” Substrate said to Des, “do you think we'll be able to learn how to reverse the process without a duplicate from another dimension?”

Des thought it over.  “That depends a great deal on how it works.  We know next to nothing about petrification.  There are only eight confirmed cases and no confirmed reversals.”

“Eight?” Quake asked.

“There are a total of four girls, three boys, and one neither,” Des said.  “One of the other girls is a close friend of mine.”

“I don't even know if I can save your Quake,” Quake said.  “I don't want to give false hope for any of the others.”

“I've been trying to save my friend for seven years,” Des said, “more or less.  At this point I will take any kind of hope.”  She looked around.  “But, before that, I need to take blood.  It'll need to be willingly shed from three different hosts.  I make one.”

“Not it,” Particulate said without even looking up from what he was doing.

“It's not like we have many options,” Echelon said with overtones of disturbed resignation.  “We don't want Quake at less than a hundred percent and--”

“We could--” Substrate said.

“No, I'm not that squeamish,” Echelon said.  “I'll give.”  Then she locked eyes with Des and said, “Just make it count.”

“That is the plan,” Des said, looking at the chamber floor, trying to work out the ideal symbols and placements.  “There is something more to think about before you agree.”  Des started laying down a large circle of salt.  “The knife we'll need to use is special.”

“Of course it is,” Echelon said.

“It will slow down the healing process significantly,” Des said.  Circle almost done she started looking to where lines would need to be drawn.  “The process isn't dangerous provided you remember to keep disinfecting the wound until it is well and truly closed,” she'd want a seven pointed star that wasn't quite symmetrical, a pentacle touching the concave vertices.  “It will, however, be extremely vexing.”

“Still in,” Echelon said, “and you know that Sub didn't even have a second thought.”

Des looked at Substrate and saw Echelon was correct.

* * *

Someone else, a girl that Des vaguely recognized as being from some League-sanctioned young adult team or other, came in about a minute and a half after Des had completed the magical preparations.  Apparently she wasn't going to be used until later, something about repaying not-their-Quake by saving her world.

It didn't involve trying to free yes-their-Quake from her stone state, so Des didn't care.  Soon she wouldn't have the attention to spare.

Not-their-Quake announced she was ready, and so Des called for blood.  She cut her left palm with the special knife, then gave it to Substrate who did the same.  Echelon followed suit.  All bleeding, Des and the other two made their way to spots she had shown them earlier and let their blood drop on the floor.

Soon enough blood had been given and Des moved to the center of the circle while the other two went to a waiting med-kit.

Not-their-Quake said, "Ok, here goes," and Des gave the pulse of magic necessary to start the prepared spells.

* * *

Seeing magic was a rare gift, one which Desdemona had not received.  Seeing it in such detail one could understand exactly what happened and, hopefully, replicate it afterward required a sprawling complex of spells that altered almost every part of how one sensed and interacted with the outside world.

The visual acuity to see minute interactions, the scope to see the overall picture, a strange and twisted relationship with time needed to be able to process all that happened, being able to see all sides of many objects at once, the ability to--

Des collapsed to the ground from sensory overload the moment not-their-Quake started to work, though the ground took a very long time to actually make contact with her.  Her eyes instinctively squeezed shut, but it made no difference, she still saw everything.  She saw it all, and the seeing hurt.

When she forced her eyes back open a second pair opened with them.

Control.  She needed control.  Only four eyes, not six; she hadn't lost control yet.  A glance down showed her fingers didn't end in talons.  She had no sense of color right now, but her skin didn't feel red.

She cursed herself for diverting her attention to her body.  There was something more important for her to watch.

Dirty tendrils with a vaguely peat-like wisp extended from not-their-Quake to yes-their-Quake.

There were words.  What was sound, really?  Was it even real?

Sounds.  Words.  They might matter.  Desdemona forced herself to interpret these strange and foreign things.  So unlike all else that existed right now.

They were fast, or was that slow?  She couldn't translate them.  There was no sense.  Sound was a lie.

There was no sound.  Only magic.  Air, and the disturbance thereof, was a distraction from the earth magic she needed to watch.  But still: sounds.  Words.

Some part of Desdemona knew that words had meanings, and meanings governed intentions, and intentions shaped magic, and magic was real.  Magic was all that there was.

She forgot the sounds and sought out meanings.  This she had inherited.  If she could find the source of the meanings, then she merely had to look and the meanings would be clear.

Not-their-Quake.  Not-their-Quake was spouting meaning.  It took only a fraction of Desdemona's attention to feel the failure, the sadness, the anxiety.

Was it failure?

Dirty peaty tendrils connected the two Quakes, and in yes-their-Quake something hummed in response.  Something more than a soul trapped within a stone.

Some part of Desdemona felt triumph, but the tendrils were weakening and the humming grew softer.

Meanings.  Failure.

The meaning was a failure, believed but not actually real.  She had to change the meaning or the magic would stop.

Pain.

Such great pain she felt Athena might burst forth from her skull.

She had to words, but there were no words.  There was no sound.  How did one words? Meaning.  All flowed from meaning.  Meaning was existence.  Meaning shaped intention, intention shaped magic, magic shaped reality, reality was meaning.

Meaning was "stop".  Meaning had to be "go".  She had to words.

Another wave of pain.

Sounds in order.  Words were sounds in order.  She had to produce sounds in order but it hurt to think of sounds.  It hurt so much.  Sounds in order.  Air pushed from mouth.  This was possible once.  A moment ago?  A thousand years?

She pushed through the pain and tried to transmit the meanings using sounds in order by pushing air.  “Don't stop.  Working.”

The tendrils grew strong again.  The pain subsided as Desdemona stopped trying to understand strange things like sound and words.  All was magic.  All was seen without light, heard without sound, smelled and tasted without molecules, felt without touch.

Ages passed and she stopped being Desdemona.  She was an observer without self.  She was the magic, the bodies, the tendrils, the change, the stability, the humming.

And she was becoming two people where once there had been but one.  Earth gave way to quintessence as a body became soft and animated.

Like a glacier the change would not be deterred and all that opposed it was ground into oblivion.  Quake and statue became Quake and Quake.

The tendrils withered and died.  One of the Quakes collapsed.

The spell ended.

* * *

She was Desdemona again.  She saw light, she heard pressure waves in air called 'sound', she smelled and tasted molecules, she felt contact.  She had a headache that she could never hope to describe.  She wasn't even looking in the direction of the Quakes, but a flop over showed that they were both flesh and blood.

She would need to meditate on what she had experienced, need to learn if it could be reproduced, but for now she had a largely unrelated sentiment: “Ow, pain.”

“Are you alright?” Substrate asked while rushing to her side.

“I'll live,” Desdemona said.  “How is Quake?”

“Her vitals are good,” Echelon said, “It'll be a while before we know anything more.”

“Whatever the outcome,” not-their-Quake said to Des, “it's as much your doing as mine.  I was going to give up.”

Particulate said, “Woo!” in the flattest voice he could manage --which Des thought fell short of a proper deadpan-- and then added, “We really do need to hurry if we want to go to her dimension,” he pointed at not-their-Quake, “liberate her world, come back, and close off the rift before there's irreversible catastrophic instability.”

“This is what you're here for,” Echelon said to the one who had come just before they started.

Substrate helped Des to her feet.  Echelon looked at Des and asked, “Can you get Quake and yourself to our infirmary?”

Des nodded.  She stumbled to yes-their-Quake, allowed herself to fall to her knees beside yes-their-Quake, and opened a portal just as she heard the one she didn't know, the late comer, call someone to say she might be a while.

* * *

Des stayed until yes-their-Quake was awake.

In that time not-their-Quake's world was liberated, sort of.  From what little Des had bothered to pick up, the totalitarian regime was extremely centralized, all that was needed to topple it was the removal of a single individual.  Picking up the pieces afterward would be the hard part, but they'd closed the rift and thus not-their-Quake and her world were on their own on that front.

Particulate said it would be a year, at least, before the dimensional barrier was recovered enough to risk opening another rift.  If not-their-Quake was still alive then, there was a planned reunion.  Des would look forward to that, but she had other matters of greater import than the fate of a world.

What she had observed while the one Quake had restored the other would take strenuous analysis, and she had no way of communicating the raw data she had collected to anyone else; it existed only in her memory.  It would require long meditation to form into coherent knowledge.

The data collected by Substrate and Particulate would likewise require much analysis before it could be of any use.  At least they could share it with others.

Still, someone had finally been freed from stone.  That was progress.  It had been recorded in three different ways.  This was the most hope for saving Ge and the others that there had been in what seemed like forever.

Des' initial assessment of yes-their-Quake, after she herself had succumbed to and recovered from exhaustion, was that her physical state appeared to be similar to power exhaustion.

When yes-their-Quake woke up, the assessment seemed confirmed.  No memory loss, no unpleasant side effects, just extreme fatigue which the testing of her power exacerbated.

With that information in hand, and some kind words to various people, Des headed home.

*
* *
* * *
* *
*

Ok, so, stuff that got cut out because it wasn't part of this story:

The team featured is in super-unfriendly territory.  They remain free as long as they remain useful.  One of the perks is that they get to oversee how their villains are treated.  Under law super people have no rights in this area, which means that the team is the only thing standing between the bad guys and stuff that no one (including bad guys) should ever have inflicted upon them.

They're also the only ones standing between good and neutral people and such things, but they have to be more circumspect about that.

The cis-dimensional Quake falls into the villain category.  She was a traitor who was working for someone who believed that only death could bring an end to suffering, and life was a mistake that should be removed from as many as possible.  She was convinced at the last minute to avert the catastrophe she'd been causing, but it took all of her power and she ended up stone.

Since the team can oversee how their villains are treated, and their Quake is classed as a villain, it's in their power to simply forgive her and not punish her at all.  Which is what they do.

The team is:

Raptor - Not present in this story since the mine would have triggered nem badly.  Ne's the leader.  Ne has wings.  The right wing ends at the "elbow" because ne was born that way.  Everything else that separates nir body from "normal" is a result of growing up in a place that doesn't believe ne has a right to exist.

In public Raptor presents as female because it's not safe to be genderqueer and ne does lean towards feminine.

Echelon (Esh) - She's part human being and part distributed AI.  Often times she doesn't have to hack computers because a piece of her is already on them.  Bits of her are on nearly every networked computer in the team's territory.  Plus some bordering regions, just in case.

Substrate (Sub) - Chemist, amateur mundane scientist in as many relevant areas as she can muster, and able to turn her body into any material she touches.  She keeps samples of various useful materials in her pockets so that she can touch them when the need arises.

Particulate (Part) - He studies exotic physics, the more it seems to contradict the world known to science, the more interested he is.  Amoung other things this has allowed him to build a suit that gives him short range teleportation, inertial weakening, and stuff like that.

Quake (Id-Tech, FPS) - Four people was always a small team, especially since Raptor's past trauma forces her to sit some missions out.  An earth elemental was a very welcome addition.  The team didn't ask many questions, they're not the sort to talk about the past.

She was working for one of the team's most persistent enemies, a nihilist who believes that killing is freeing people from an unjust world.  It wasn't hard to convince her of the unjust part.

The other members of the team were her first friends, and when she did make more it was through the team.  Even so, she almost went through with the plan.  The amount of power needed to stop the plan at so late a stage, combined with her belief that as a traitor she didn't deserve to live, resulted in her turning to stone.

- - -

The other individual who showed up but went undescribed is Melissa from this story, she's necessary to the liberating the other world plan because the plan is basically this:

Wait, no, background first.

Other dimensional Echelon took over her world.  As a highly sophisticated AI distributed across every computer on the planet, she has the power to micromanage everything, and she does.  That makes her indispensable to her regime and means removing her removes the entire command and control structure of the regime.

The plan is for cis-dimensional Echelon to take her on in the electronic realm and force her into a limited geographical area which trans-dimensional Quake can then destroy.  The massive flaw with the plan is that the moment the other Echelon recognized the threat she'd isolate the compromised parts of the network.  Melissa can override all necessary electronics and thus stop cis-dimensional Echelon from being locked out.

- - -

If previous interactions between Des and Raptor were actually written, it might be notable that this is when Des finally surrenders in an argument they've had every time they've met.  Des wants Raptor to take her team somewhere where they'll have rights.  She sees staying in dangerous territory as a stupid and unnecessary risk.  Raptor won't consider leaving (though if any members of her team wanted to wander to safer pastures, she wouldn't stop them.)

Raptor does help get other people to safer territories.  She always tries to make sure that visiting heroes from states or nations where super people have rights, like Des, take ordinary people --who are persecuted for having powers-- with them when they leave.

- - -

In her demonic form Des has red skin, six eyes, and so forth.