TWLA 12

King put the storage bag to good use. Very little of the best and most beautiful of the soft blue chalcedony was left behind when it was time to go. There were a few things preserved from Earth stashed away inside the bag but not much.

Back outside and on their way, Jeremy asked Rainmaker, "Why didn't you store the journals away? It's obvious how much of a big deal real magic is."

She sighed. "No matter when or where, copying it over would be necessary. The nature of magic formula and magic models makes it slippery to the mind and requires a lot of time to make your own. We were safe and alone here. There are too many prying eyes and talents at a base if we wanted to wait until a purifying device would make the journals last a while longer.

"You aren't a true purifier. Your talent doesn't seem to extend much preservation to purely mundane objects. And no matter the content, the journals were just journals. Besides, the discovery of the bag was... later."

Caesar keyed into the conversation long enough to donate, "Yeah, you were moaning in your sleep when a weird metal water bottle popped out of the wound on your chest. It turned all rusty and dropped a little purple stuff on you. You started getting better really fast all of a sudden... King thumped you once real good to see if anything else would pop out before the wound closed."

Turning sharp eyes on him, Rainmaker tried to warn the leafy crowned guy silent with a stern stare but he gave her a defiant look in return. "You flashed like a lot of different colored lights and then that bag came out with the journals. There was a couple of other things but I didn't see them because King blocked my view."

Rainmaker looked up at the sky and took a slow breath. "He was worried something might get stuck inside your healing wound, Blue Jay."

Jeremy frowned. "And tried to keep the things he took, a secret from the person who spit them out... Those journals were written neatly, not the work of a little kid and not the kind of work you'd give a little kid. I'm beginning to think they were sent to me."

King looked back at them and said, "Pick up the pace... And what of it? It's my job to insure the safety and security of our group. I'm the first to fight and the first to die if it all goes sideways... Me and Rainmaker have already told you how things would be.

"You don't have to like it and you don't have to stay with us either. If you do stay, you'll get a fair cut but the one who stands in front gets first pick. That's the way it is. It won't be any better with anyone else and it can be a whole lot worse. Believe that."

Caesar said. "It sucks but it's gospel, Blue Jay."

Jeremy held back the bulk of his anger and said, "Well, I am part of your group and that bag isn't something you or we found on the ground. In this case, the difference between first pick and outright stealing from a teammate is paper thin. Look, I'm not going to thrrow a useless fit over it and we share too many secrets for me to walk away even if I wanted to. I just hope you can understand what this looks like from my side of things."

King seemed like he was fighting some kind of internal war and then said, "After we unload these gems at the base, I'll show you everything. It's not the grand treasure you might be thinking it is... Before you open your mouth and say anything that's going to make me braid it shut, you might want to wait a few and see what I do and don't understand."

Glum silence hung over the group for the rest of the day. Remembering his own rough adjustment to a set of more primal rules, Caesar wasn't even completely immune. And the world, in endless small ways, continued to kick Jeremy while he was feeling down by reminding him that he wasn't even on Rainmaker's or Caesar's level.

It wouldn't always be that way. If he could live long enough, his own power wouldn't allow him to remain a weakling, much less what he could seize for himself with effort. He was already moving and enduring half again better than what he could when he first arrived. Jeremy wasn't consciously aware of it yet but Rainmaker and Caesar were already sharing a few mildly astonished glances over noticed improvements.

Things were different on the inside, however. If anything, he was worse. Or, at least, that's the way it felt. Everything was all cracked and scoured. Not on the physical but on the supernatural side of things. His talent was working overtime trying to find the resources to fix all the countless little wrongs all over.

Most of his channels were temporarily collapsed as a defense mechanism to keep from constantly sucking corruption out of the air. The vague sense of inner nature discovery was completely gone, reset to a preformed state similar to when he had been in the secret facility. The only good news was the complete absence of a sense of wrongness from it.

In a chill of late realized dread, he got the impression that the operators were doing a lot more than controlling what kind of talents people awoke to. They were fiddling with the very thing that let certain people survive in the twisted lands he found himself in. He had to know for sure. If he did and it turned out that the operators had been paying mad scientists with them, then his talent was going to be a lot more beneficial than it had any right to be.

"Ooh, grass! Like, real actual local green stuff!" Caesar exclaimed as they finished half walking and half climbing up a steep hill.

More grim than usual, King said, "And more of everything else you don't want to see. Local wildlife will stop avoiding us too. Back on the plains, they knew my scent and would steer clear... Make sure to get a good rest in this Hush. It'll be high alert til we reach Fort Tesla. Maybe even after."

Searching around for a bit, the tyrant found and unburied a stone hatch he could only lift after donning his gold armor. After ushering everyone inside, he let the stone fall jarringly. He had carefully piled mounds of dirt for the sole purpose of shaking it into loosely falling over the hatch.

Rainmaker let out the first full smile Jeremy had seen since they'd met. "I didn't know if King would bring us here but I had hoped."

The man shrugged. "Short britches asked for some honesty and I figured some was due... Caesar, I think we reached a good understanding while Blue Jay was taking his two Hush nap. Don't let me down."

While the leafy headed guy nodded his agreement, Jeremy breathed in deeply and let out a shuddering cough from the hitch in his chest. "The air's stale but clean. I mean, there's a little corruption but there's a lot more that's... clean, still chaotic but clean."

Rainmaker turned her beaming smile towards him. "It's our own private little base. In the back, there's a ring of runes that's a smaller copy of the one at the bottom of Lake Tesla. The lake set's how the operators learned how to make the purifiers... according to Rusty."

Her smile faded. "It was stupid what they did. The operators thought after a few generations of purifier devices, it was alright to dismantle the lake ring and bring it back to Earth. They were wrong, nightmare wrong. That was before my time, though."

"And mine too but when Rusty told us about it, he wasn't story telling. He didn't drink that rotten garbage whiskey he could make here when he was storytelling. He was spilling old pain that Hush," King said.

As Rainmaker led the two around, King took a light trance. Jeremy wasn't aware until Rainmaker filled him in. But, the man and Caesar had taken out a pack of nixed that had roamed close enough by their geode to get curious. King had needed to chase down two of them to keep them from calling back up, possibly nightmare backup.

Seeing Blue Jay's look of surprise, she said, "Caesar's actually my superior in physical combat. That wasn't why King chose him to go but that's how we found out. No one's more surprised than I. It was a slight blow to my confidence... It was strangely beautiful to watch."

The leafy headed guy blushed a little and said, "Gramps let me take a dancing class but I had to take martial arts too. That was his deal."

Putting on a rough tone he mimicked, "I don't give a damn if you're a fudge packer, boy. But, I'll BE damned if your going to be a limp-wristed sissy! My old battalion buddies would blow a hole through my wallet in booze and fishing trips to keep from laughing my a** out of the VFW."

Jeremy said, "Sounds like your grandpa was worried you'd get picked on and came up with a lame excuse to get you to learn self defense. I looked into taking a martial arts class. They're not cheap."

Caesar's eyes grew distant with a watery smile on his face. "Maybe. Then again, this is the same man who said he needed to hurry up and get to hell to keep his wife from cheating on him with the devil... He had a weird thing about clean and dry socks too. Said, germs would eat holes in the bottoms of your feet. I never really did figure him out."

Rainmaker ended the tour of the surprisingly comfy underground apartment by showing them the cistern. In a sub-basement area, a large pool of clean water surrounded a circular stone gate looking device. From a dim distortion at its center, a stream of water and trace amounts of different 'clean and bright' energies were released from it. It only took a moment for Jeremy to realize that he was the only one who could see the distortion or tell the difference between the ambient energy and what the circle was releasing.

"Arcane essence, life essence... the stuff we think of as corruption... I think it's what the journal called eldritch essence. The stuff in the air outside is just partially spent and still carries the imprint of what it was called on to do.

"I think that was a lot of different things. Whoever lived on this world before, I think they used this eldritch essence a lot more than magic, arcane essence. The corruption is like waste pollution. It's lots of different types all mingled together. That's why it twists and corrodes stuff."

Caesar said, "You get all that from looking at this stone wheel!?"

Jeremy shook his head. "I get it from seeing what the 'Purity Gate' is doing and from reading this plaque underneath."

Rainmaker and Caesar looked to where he was pointing but only saw a granite step. After having it pointed out, he realized he was seeing a lot of things with his black and white vision that they weren't. It was like two nearly identical versions of the space were overlapped seamlessly.

A couple of tests later and it was determined that it was not an illusion. Jeremy was seeing an actual phased out copy of the same space that existed over its physical counterpart. He strained his sight to see as much as he could before nausea and vertigo temporarily overwhelmed him, making his head feel 'wrong'.

While he pieced together what he saw, Caesar asked, "Is this plaque thing in English or something?"

Jeremy slowly shook his throbbing head. "And I can't read but maybe half of it. From what I can understand, the other side is completely underwater. A good part of the reason this side is so bad is because the other side filtered its garbage to this one and stole the 'good stuff' for theirs. I'm thinking these purity gates used to be used by them to do pretty much what the operators sent us here to do, pick the place clean of anything else worth taking."

Rainmaker said, "Is it possible for us to use this... Purity Gate to go there?"

Jeremy shrugged. "Probably. But, we shouldn't even if we could. We'd die."

"Why's that?" Caesar asked.

"The cistern on the other side is much bigger. There's a few sets of bones near the staircase hatch. And, a few more pieces of some are scattered around the edges of where I can see. The ones that weren't killed and dragged off to be eaten, drowned trying to open the hatch. There are other reasons why I think it's suicide but they're just theories. I can't really say for sure if they're true or not.

"The density of 'essences' on that side are strong enough to be a threat, if not life ending, for one. I'm pretty sure gravity there is stronger too... I can't even imagine. How much do you think it would take to steal enough stuff from one world to make crushing gravity on... Water! It's underwater! And this side... is so dry... was dry. It's probably a lot better than it was a long time ago."

Rainmaker grew thoughtful. "It's hard to notice but gravity here is already a little stronger than on Earth. Your theory tracks if they drained ocean. My god, the sheer amount of power to do that... I wonder what kind of people they were?"

"Crazy. Crazy and dead." Caesar announced sagely.