Speed on the Desert Sands

Despite my speed and evasive maneuvering, I was certain I was done for when one of the Dazdi ships hurtled through the desert sky straight towards my hovercraft. My doom was averted by the near-deafening crack of thunder beside me that sent the metal shell spinning off past the horizon.

My overzealous passenger's tattooed arms were held out stiff as planks, cradling a vulgar work of gleaming metal.

".44 Desert Eagle! Sweet Push, yeah?"

"Oh please don't let this make it to the journals..." I muttered.

I was distracted by a roar of machinery behind us. In my rear-view mirror I glimpsed a wall of crimson stretch out behind us like a ribbon. Bishop sat up in the passenger's seat (he hadn't heeded my advise to strap himself in, of course) and scanned the the featureless sands behind us. I watched the Founder's new squadron of Digital Knights exchanging beams of searing light with Baba Yaga's fleet from their two-wheeled wonders with a speed and precision that made my defensive driving seem positively oafish!

Ash's light-cycle rode up beside my sandskimmer. He turned his helmeted head to glance at us once, then veered far too close! I had to swerve to keep from hitting the wall of energy his craft generated!

I flipped the switch on my Marconi transmitter to ask him what the blazes he was up to. I heard one of the female Knights dictating orders in a metallic monotone. What did this code mean? "G-6?"

When my passenger started bobbing his shoulders in time with the oscillations while he shattered holes in the light-wall large enough for us to jet through with his pistol, I realized I was in fact listening to one of those horrid songs that pass as entertainment on the mainland! Bishop, this ignorant fool, had obviously been fiddling with my transmitter while I was watching the Elder's conjurations!

"YOU IDIOT!"

There was no way I could recalibrate the equipment in the middle of a high-speed chase! I was tempted to knock him out of the 'skimmer myself, but...

The red light-cycle crushed in on itself from the force of Bishop's bullet and disintegrated. In the mirror I watched in horror as the rider tumbled and rolled helplessly over a sand dune until he lay still.

I glanced in murderous fury at the imbecile who had far, far outstayed his welcome. I held back the bile in my throat as his pink loincloth flapped madly from our rate of speed. Wait...pink loincloth? Even for a testosterone-driven savage like him that was a rather outre'...

The theatrics dropped the moment he lowered his aim at me. I felt the heat of the pistol's smoking muzzle a mere centimeter from my temple.

"Bishop's three to Knight's one."

I kept my eyes straight forward.

"Checkmate, dear brother. Checkmate." I never could beat him at three-dimensional chess.

But then again, the chessboard never came equipped with an ejector seat. The instant he started to lift, he fired and devastated the steering column instead of my cranium. I instinctively covered my face with my arms to protect myself from the shower of sparks and the imminent impact as the hovercraft rocketed at full speed towards the the city of Cala Mondrago that loomed on the horizon!

Bifrost

I continued to watch from my sandskimmer at a safe distance. The mainland tourist who made himself comfortable in the seat beside me had slumped over minutes ago for snooze. Thank goodness for small favors. I could not let anything distract me from what transpired.

It was a breathtaking sight. The sands shook from the thunder of the radiant velocipedes as they roared from the shining column of silver. Twenty-four of them stopped in unison in tight formation as the column from which they escaped blinked out of existence, leaving a momentary trail in the eye like a bolt of lightning that struck close-by.

Instead of opening their vehicles, they dissolved into light and then nothingness around them as they stood. Most of them had black outfits, save for a few of the visibly attractive ones who were clad in white. But all of them had veins of energy in primary colors coursing over their clothing, matching the vehicles they had driven. They also had glowing discs fastened to their backs, which I conjectured were their power sources. The one with the crimson suit stood taller than the rest. Before he lifted his visor I recognized him as my creation.

Bloodwing had created an image of himself in the center of where the aperture stood. Even though he was in fact disassembled and spread around where the aperture had been. All of the newcomers, including Ash, knelt before their liberator.

"Welcome to Earth, brave Digital Knights! I shall graciously..."

I was distracted by a blast of cold air. Huge snowflakes pressed to my skin and stung as they melted. But we were in the desert of Cala Mondrago! What sorcery was this?

One of the knights stood and turned away from the Elder, and drew a baton that crackled with power. "Recognizers spotted!", he shouted in a voice so modulated it was barely decipherable.

What on Earth was a Recognizer, I thought. The tourist woke with a start and pointed upwards.

"Dude! Spaceships with giant chicken legs and laser guns!"

I flipped the switch on my console, engaging the twin Tesla turbines in the rear of the sandskimmer with a flash and a hiss.

"How astute. Please put on your seatbelt."

I floored the accelerator. Mr. Bishop was trying to make another observation at the top of his lungs, but I was too busy weaving madly through metallic claws and angles of burning light to ask him to repeat.

end of line

The digital readout in Ash's helmet focused on the squadron of Recognizers hovering in the distance.

"Twenty. Closing quickly." He turned to face the exhausted warriors behind him. "Resistors! Rezz your cycles! This shall be our last..."

The column of light that pierced the sky and bore into the unformatted, broken ground interrupted them.

"The aperture! The Founder has heard us!"

The Resistors activated their batons, and the components of their vehicles formed around them, save for one.

Ash approached the sole User in their midst. His power suit gleamed with emerald circuitry and his breastplate was emblazoned with a symbol foreign to the Grid.

"Ryder. Please join us."

He shook his head.

"Your world isn't mine, Ash. I belong in the 21st century, not the 19th. Besides..."

Ryder lifted his hand and clenched his fist. His ring began to flicker.

"...if there's still even one ISO hiding somewhere in the Grid, I need to keep CLU-less from finding them. Also, someone needs to keep those Recognizers back before the aperture closes. You don't want a new digital menace in your quaint steampowered world would you?" He smirked.

"You have no battery to recharge your ring."

"I found a workaround. Now go."

"Ryder. I..."

He nodded slowly. "I know." He gestured towards the aperture.

Ash looked back once more as he stood at the head of the formation. With a flick of his wrist he powered up his baton, and crouched into the vehicle that now encased him.

"Resistors! To the Steamlands! Your second life awaits!"

Ribbons of color flashed like lighting towards the column, gradually fading behind them.

Ryder knelt and pressed his ring to the ground. Emerald cracks opened in the jagged surface in the shape of the symbol of his Corps as he drew raw power from the Grid itself.

"Through photon pulse of static night

defense against corrupted might

I purge now Evil's viral blight

by the power- GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT!"

pardon the interruption

I'd been asked to keep my distance on this one. So there I was watching Qli and Koen through binoculars from the safety of a sandskimmer. They seemed to have the situation well in hand...

"Are you a real Scientist?"

By the Founder! I was so busy watching watching my children build the portal I hadn't noticed the half-naked, tattooed savage from the Mainland who just plopped himself down in the seat next to me!

"Do you always climb into other people's vehicles without asking?"

"There's no ban lines, Dude."

It took an extraordinary amount of will to keep my proper composure. We're supposed to set the example for these primitive folk, are we not? We were all Mainlanders once, weren't we?

"My name is Dr. Darien Mason. And you are?"

"Bishop-Three" is as close as I could pronounce it. He couldn't be "the third" of anything. He certainly didn't dress like a bishop.

"Do you play chess?'

"Yeah, how'd you guess?"

All right, perhaps he has some potential.

"Doc, what are those two doing in the next sim with all those GUTS?"

"How...how can you see that from here?"

"I cammed over. It's a trick on the new Viewer..."

I interrupted him before his vulgar dialect made my head spin even further.

"They're..." Oh how do I explain this?

"They're arranging my demonic ancestor Bloodwing's still living components around the blast site so my neko son Koen...the one with the red fur there.. can use his Void Alchemy to establish an anti-aether conduit to the Digital Grid from the coordinates embedded in Bloodwing's quantum signature...thereby permitting my android daughter Qlippothic..."

"Dude! She's..."

"Ahem."

"Oh she's your daughter? Never mind, keep going."

"Certainly. So Qli will energize the conduit with a galvanic tesseraction burst, creating a dimensional aperture to allow my other son Ash to make his way back to the Steamlands, apparently with a collection of refugees."

After an extended pause, he spoke up again.

"So this is some kind of art project? Are you using Machinima for this?"

I felt a migraine coming on.

"If I give you a card with the location of free merchandise, will you vanish abruptly as your kind are so fond of doing?"

falling to pieces

"I must admit, I have never seen an organic repair himself quite like this."

Bloodwing did not respond to Nova's observation. He had the sinew pulled taught with his teeth as he drew the needle over the last stitch of the surface of a deep, jagged wound and pulled it shut.

"Once we reach the homeline, I'm sure Doctor Mason can..."

"No." The narrow ribbon fell from his lips as he gathered it and meticulously tied a thick knot at the end of the stitch. "I must never lie on his table. No Spark must reanimate me again. I only require mend..."

Bloodwing froze as he watched the new stitches pop one by one and dissolve. He heard the rending as other stitches he had placed on a dozen other wounds likewise shred apart. No longer able to support himself where he sat, he collapsed against the bulkhead of the Sixes and Sevens.

Nova leaned over the pale demon. She pulled a device from her belt and peered at the swirling colors in the lens. "Bloodwing, magic isn't my area of expertise, but your entropy levels have spiked..."

"A curse..." The demon tipped over on his side, crushing a wing stripped down to bare bones. "The hag's magic must be reflected..."

"So we need to find a practitioner of the Arts similar to Baba Yaga's tradition to counter the curse? Lady Darkling, perhaps?"

He smiled wistfully. "She has gone to raise a son."

"Madame de Brauerhoff?" His neck trembled as he attempted to shake his head.

Nova arched a brow. "Surely you don't mean Mrs. Underby?" she asked doubtfully.

"Fauve." He whispered. "Fauve..."

Nova stepped back as Bloodwing collapsed and fell to the floor. She calmly called out to the helm.

"Six? We need a rather large container..."

The android looked down to survey the twitching components of the exiled demon prince.

"...and a mop.""

from the belly of the beast

For the past week I had been excavating the inside of the vehicle that Koen destroyed in Cala Mondrago. I set up a protective dome over the craft for protection from the elements, and to keep the "chicken-hut" as my son calls it trapped inside. (Koen's sudden surge of power is alarming in and of itself. We must contact Erebus...)

The mummified operator of the machine turned to dust after Qlippothic destroyed it. The hollowed out stone it was perched in seems completely mundane.

First observation: This device is of the same origin as the claw fragment we recovered from where Ash and the Founder disappeared. Metallurgical analysis revealed industrialized techniques beyond Steamlands technology. Off hand it would be something I'd expect to find on the Sixes and Sevens. But these monstrosities are not from the Twentieth century. They are centuries old. When Aleister Mason was still living and hobnobbing with the geniuses of the Renaissance, these devices were somewhere in deep storage.

The astounding technology on the outside is stark contrast to the unabashedly medieval interior inside. A stone fireplace? An iron cauldron? A crude alchemical laboratory? All very curious to say the least!

I found a codex in an upturned cupboard. Inside were Old Russian runes for an introduction:

and there did Baba Yaga find the fallen star
and wrest the secrets from the strange goblins therein:

When I separated the wooden blocks that counted for pages, a holographic projector embedded in the artifact began shine images of advanced technical diagrams. So that is what we are facing: a coven of undead witches using captured alien technology in tandem with horrific enchantments!

I also found in the cabinet another item of interest. Have you ever known a witch that didn't have a crystal ball? I made an attempt to scry with it. The image that manifested over us horrified me beyond description!

Bloodwing was chained to a rack. He was...there's no other word for it...he was being tortured. The anger in the Founder's face far eclipsed his pain. Suddenly, he noticed us...and laughed.

"These fools think I'm Ash!"

A shriek, and a desiccated talon covered the orb at the other end before the transmission was lost.

"The transmission was just long enough to verify their location," Qlippothic said coldly as she unzipped the chronal transmitter from its protective canvas wrapping. "I'll contact the Sixes and Sevens to intercept."

derezzing flags to purge your souls of shame

In a sunless realm where energy coalesces to form, a construct from another world witnessed the slaughter of innocents, and felt no choice but to intervene. He came from a different world than the Creator Flynn. One where Programs walked among their Users and were treated as equals. To the ISOs and the Programs who joined the Resistance, ASH became their champion.

Over many cycles, the Resistance dwindled, but ASH never tired. His disc could not be broken. His light-cycle could never be intercepted. When all hope of liberating the Grid seemed lost, he gathered the surviving ISOs he could find and took them to the edge of the Grid, in a blind search for a passage back to the Steamlands.

At the rim of the digital world he stood with two dozen exhausted warriors, a half step from the edge, gazing into the oblivion beyond. He did not see it as desperation. It was a last move of unknowable results at the end of the line.

And I believe that I'll retrieve
the aperture to heaven
The User Grid, the promised land
a fortitude of hearts and minds
Until I free the ISO Hive
I'll format Void into the Light
Enlighten minds!
Now Program, run
until the day of Liberation,
Bloodwing's Son!

The call echoed through the space between spaces and the time between times, where it reached the demon from which he was created. Despite the pain inflicted upon him by his captors, the prayer gave him the strength to break his bonds. By the time the Sixes and Sevens cut open the hull, Bloodwing stood alone among the crushed and charred remains of the long-dead Daughters of Baba Yaga. All he asked for as Nova and Six carried him through the air lock was a needle and thread, to sew himself back together.