Voidhearts Chapter 7: Fledgling
Alicia ventures into the void for the first time. The scavenge is mediocre but the experience is unmatched.
Alicia breathed deeply as she approached the roughly human-sized crystal whose sharp points seemed to poke at her brain. She hadn’t liked looking at the thing the first time she saw it, and so far the experience of seeing it again had not been too pleasant either. The other people that were with her, Scavengers the lot of them, did not seem bothered, so either familiarity dulled the edge of the things unpleasant geometries, or no-selling how much it sucked even thinking about that thing was an important intergroup performance. At her side was Ade, still every bit the massive presence, as well as a motley group whose names Alicia was still memorizing. There was Logan, a human who dressed like some sort of fashion-aware pirate, Beth, whose method of dress seemed approximately traditional Vietnamese, and Tag'lor, who could’ve been from earth, even though his energy was of the quietly hyperactive, like an unmedicated bouldering type. They were all wearing a Void Pearl on their lapels.
As best Alicia understood it, the Void Pearl was in fact the host of a quite complex mix of spells and other magical effects. She wanted to have Lex have a look at it to try to get a semblance of an idea how what exactly was going on with the small sphere, but she also had the feeling that the Scavengers would very much prefer to keep the pearls in house. They were fiercely protective of the little things, and when she heard what the pearls did, she couldn’t really blame them. In short, it was a bit like a “wireless” space suit, providing not only permeable containment field around it’s wearer and the air that filled it, but also instant communication between each wearer of a bead. There was a maximum range, but Alicia was ensured that the range was wide enough to reach from one end to the other of any debris field they’d ever encounter. As for how it did do for contacting Thereafter if the situation should arise, the assurances were still there, if not somewhat less convincing given the sheer number of ‘we assume’-es in there.
“Alright rookie, you ready for your first flight?” Ade’s voice was playful, but there was a note of warning in there, like she wanted Alicia to know that everything would be fine but that cutting and running was still a better option if she was going to be a scaredy-cat about this whole thing. Alicia wasn’t sure how much of this was genuine concern and how much of it was some kind of hazing, but she filed it away for further analysis all the same.
“I’m ready,” Alicia said, borrowing bravado from her influencer persona. The Alicia that existed in vlogs an instructional videos would love this shit. The fact that said version didn’t really exist outside of said vlogs and videos was immaterial. Whether Alicia was this particular version of herself or not, she could invoke that vibe at times. It wasn’t quite faking it until you made it, Alicia preferred to think of it as a full body possession by some sort of chill entity. Granted, the “entity” in question was arguably herself under slightly different circumstances, and perhaps that wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but Alicia didn’t care. She had fought grown men and killed them by the time she was 14, she had part in killing a whole-ass dragon, and here she was in her thirties doing fantasy Mad Max. Under these circumstances Alicia figured that what “good mental health” looked like surely would have to be up to interpretation.
“Ok kids, gather round the impossible crystal, c’mon,” Ade said, waving the group into action. “Join hands or touch shoulders or whatever you prefer. Physical contact is mandatory to this thing.”
“How’d you figure this out anyway?” Alicia asked. “And how did you get them out there?” She nodded toward the sky-void?
“We figured them out because there was a guy from the world they came from that survived the Cataclysm by teleporting around a lot. As for how we got them out there, heh, we went the slow way of course.” Ade explained. “With the home crystal here set up we could travel almost 24 hours provided you brought enough food and then just teleport back once you place down the away crystal. When pickings are getting slim we’ll daisy chain it, letting each Scavenger carry for as long as they can before placing it down and tagging out. When we have someone real strong or with some ability to accelerate out there we can cover a lot of ground in just a few hours.”
“Huh, sounds like a solid system,” Alicia said as she put one hand on Beth’s shoulder and the other in Ade’s massive rough hand. “As long as you don’t lose the crystal.”
“Don’t go jinxing us now new girl,” Tag’lor winked at her as a faint hum started emanating from the crystal.
“Don’t go getting superstitious on us flyboy,” Alicia said in reply. She hadn’t intended to come off as flirty, but judging by how Logan averted his gaze it had perhaps happened all the same. Alicia wasn’t really looking for more partners at the moment or she’d thought nothing about it. Being as she was in a state where clarifying that she had a partner wasn’t really the soft no it used to be, Alicia was struggling somewhat to adapt. The polycule felt right and good. She couldn’t really imagine life in Thereafter without it, but that wasn’t to say there weren’t some teething issues to sort out.
“Don’t worry ‘bout him” Logan said, his affect sounding like a long-suffering boyfriend of some sort. Perhaps worrying about these things were a bit premature. Then again, Alicia reminded herself, having a partner didn’t have to mean much re: flirting. There was something kind of ‘tighter than friends, looser than lovers’ over the Scavengers, and Alicia was still trying to puzzle out. “He likes messing with new recruits, don’t you flyboy?”
“No crime in that, is it?” Logan asked. He did a decent job of faking a nonchalant yet adventurous glance at the deep void, but now that Alicia knew to look for it she could spot the blush.
“And that’s the last flirting we’ll be doing on this particular foray,” Ade said. “Look alive everyone, we’re porting.”
The high-pitched humming of the crystal didn’t grow louder as much as it shifted in Alicia’s perception, briefly disrupting her ability to focus on the world around her. When the world around her vibrated back intot focus, they were somewhere else entirely.
Ade let go of her hand and motioned to this new vista. She could contain the chuckle she wanted to let escape, but only barely. “Welcome, Alicia Thorn, to the Void.”
Alicia had adapted reasonably well to living in Thereafter. So much so that she almost forgot at times that she was living in a city built on a man-made planetoid hurtling through what was essentially deep space. Such a thing was impossible to forget in the void. In a word, it was dark. In two, it was Dark and Big. They had emerged on a medium-sized uneven chunk of some world or other, whatever it had been part of before it was mostly blasted rock now. In front of them, a dense field of detritus had formed, caught up in each other’s scant gravity and the coincidence of collisons and counter-collisons. The sky, no, void behind it was black, but not all the way. A strange Aurora Borealis-like light danced across the void.
“We go through this area a lot,” Beth explained, “So we got some lights to make it easier to spot clusters. The light doesn’t go out that far, on the scale we operate on out here anyway, but we figure out it’s better than nothing.”
“Mind your step,” Ade said. “There’s a bit of gravity around the crystal, but you’ll basically be weightless after a step or two. Some people find the change hard to adapt to.”
“I can imagine,” Alicia said, mostly to herself as she stepped out onto the rocky surface of the realm chunk.
“Must be extra challenging for an explorer of your… caliber Ade,” Tag'lor jeered. Alicia was about to speak up on Ade’s behalf when the rhinofolk woman snatched him off his feet by grabbing his shoulders and tossing him towards the debris field. As she finished the motion, Ade flew backwards for a bit before she extended her legs to stop the extra momentum.
“I make do,” she said, putting her hands on her hips in a way that made Alicia pretty sure Ade knew exactly how cool she seemed that very minute.
“Woa, your aim really has gotten better,” Beth said as she followed the trajectory of Tag'lor with her gaze. “There’s hardly any spin to him this time.”
“This time, huh?” Alicia said. “Is this a common occurence?”
“I don’t do it every time,” Ade said. “But when I know… uh, when it’s safe I do like to respond to anyone sassing me, it’s usually Tag'lor, by giving them a bit of a flight.”
“Will he be ok?” Alicia asked, noting to herself that she wouldn’t be entirely too broken up if the answer turned out to be ‘probably’ or ‘I don’t know.” Tag'lor seemed nice enough on the surface, but Alicia was instantly wary of anyone who got shitty about people’s weight as a default reaction. This approach had earned her few friends in the fitness community, but Alicia would much retain her principles than sacrificing them for clout.
“He’ll be alright,” Ade said. “Ain’t never seen Tag'lor in trouble he can’t tumble his way out of.”
“I have,” Logan said with a wink, “but that’s a story for later. Let’s go scavengers!” and with that he leaped off the rock, a solid bound freeing him from what little gravity the world chunk had, sending him towards the debris cloud.
What followed was a brief, but hectic chase of a race. Alicia had little trouble getting used to the low gravity, but what was worse was the physics of it all. In short, she discovered the laws of motion in a way she was not accustomed to. Newton’s third law of motion in particular turned into quite the challenge, as leaping off one debris rock onto another sent the first rock flying the other way, and while that usually wasn’t a problem, Alicia found herself worrying, perhaps unduly, that she was setting up some terrible chain reaction.
When Alicia finally landed on the large-ish rock the race apparently ended at, she hadn’t exerted much more force than a light jog around the block would have back home, but her brain felt like she had run a marathon. It wasn’t just that she’d worried about what kind of mess she was setting off, the feeling of traveling in zero G, or something close to it was entirely different than travel at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, or the magically simulated version of the same in Thereafter. Alicia had told herself that she wasn’t going to push herself to make any kind of point, and if the void stuff got too heavy, it got too heavy.
“You doin’ alright Rookie?” asked Beth. It wasn’t a challenge like it’d be if Tag'lor said it, and Alicia was glad he and Logan were both busy with some kind of harebrained acrobatic stunt.
Alicia found herself both lying and breaking a promise to herself at once. “I’m doing great,” she said in reply. It wasn’t entirely a lie, though, this was very exciting, and an adrenaline rush could do for genuine joy in a pinch, as long as you made sure the bad time didn’t outlast the effect of the hormone.
Once Alicia had rested from the jaunt, it was on to the order of business. The group split into two-man teams, with Ade going solo as the final team. To her relief, Ade seemed to pick up on the general vibe of the group and paired Beth with Alicia. They explored, relative to their starting position, above and to the left of the starting point. It was difficult to tell directions at all in the vacuum of the void, and the first couple of times Alicia lost track of her relative orientation to what she had come to call the meeting rock, she fought back panic. Beth, fortunately, both had more of a sense of 3D direction than Alicia did, and either the memory or empathy to know how quietly debilitating it could be. Without being prompted, Beth started sneaking in the occasional nod or gesture in the direction of the Meeting Rock, especially after they emerged from any rooms or other covered spaces where Alicia’s sense of direction was especially challenged. Alicia was a little self-conscious that she needed the help, but she would accept it. She was proud, she maintained, not stupid.
Pickings, overall, were slim. The rock fragments and bits and pieces of buildings didn’ strike Alicia as a fertile field of scavenge even at its absolute peak. The days of this field’s peak, however, were solidly in the past. For every potential find the two could discover using the light from their void pearls to navigate, it seemed half of them were false matches. Barrels that used to hold something, rocks that looked suspiciously organic until you got closer, empty wine skins, and the occasional stripped bone. This wasn’t, however, to say they found nothing. Together Alicia and Beth found a few partially full barrels of some sort of cereal crop, a bottle of what might be wine, and a few chunks of dried meat that looked somewhat alien to Alicia’s eyes.
“It’s not going to be a feast exactly, but once we get to duping this stuff it’ll multiply up nicely,” Beth said in a tone that might be intended to encourage as they bundled up what they had found. “The wine is especially exciting. There’s something to the duplication spell that gets weird with alcohol, so we don’t generally waste the effort to dupe anything alcoholic.”
“That’s a shame,” Alicia said, “although I guess that’s as good an occasion as you’re likely to get for dropping those empty calories.”
“Oh, we’re dropping them, into our bellies that is,” Beth said with a sudden sly smile.
“Huh?”
“I mean, we can’t dupe it,” Beth said matter-of-factly “but we do end up producing a lot of cereal crops like barley, and our sugar supplies are unlikely to run out any time soon, so we make our own. It tastes like wagon wheel grease, but it’ll get you there y’know.”
“Right,” Alicia said, she faintly remembered tasting some sort of alcohol that fit the description, although she also remembers remembering very little past that point of the night.
Once they got back, Alicia was relieved to realize it wasn’t just them that didn’t find much. Pickings had, or so it seemed, been slim all over, although Logan proclaimed his group the “winner” of the scavenge for having found two bottles of liquor. This statement was met with the gentle but firm reminder from his fellow scavenger that this wasn’t a game nor an activity one could win as such. As such things are want to do, the discussion ended with the parties agreeing to disagree. There were, after all, a more tedious but important job left over.
“So why are we doing this now?” Alicia aske as she helped Tag’Lor pour a half barrel of grains into another half barrel. “The lack of gravity… oh come ON” she shook the barrel in frustration “does make things difficult, I was about to say.”
“It’s a bit unintuitive out here,” Ade conceded, she was busy with her own pair of barrels, “but storage space is such a premium in Thereafter that we’d rather get the sorting and whatnot done out here.”
“Ok, but what do we do with the empties?”
“That’s my favorite part!” Beth interjected, sounding somewhat giddy. “We light them on fire!”
“… how?” Was all Alicia could think of asking. “There’s no air out here.”
“Wait and see…” Beth said in a sing-song voice.
“It actually took us a while to figure this out,” Ade explained as she broke an empty barrel by bear-hugging it until it shattered. It was one of the hottest things Alicia had seen in her life, and Ade had busted the thing to smithereens like it was nothing. “That’s why there’s so many empty barrels out there,” Ade nodded to the debrs cloud. “We haven’t had the manpower to do a cleanup but be assured it’s on The List.”
“I like to think we keep those barrels around like a mascot of sorts,” Logan contributed before resuming to hack at a barrel with an axe.
“Yeah? I figure they’re part of the Barrel Reserve, just in case we run out one day,” Tag’lor flew from one bundle that used to be a barrel to the next, gatthering them up into a disorganized pile.
“At this rate I don’t think that’s a risk,” Beth said, she was busy fiddling with what seemed like a spare void pearl.
“You just say that because you love doing this,” Tag’lor interjected.
“So what if I do? Can’t a girl have hobbies?”
“Yeah,” Alicia found herself coming to Beth’s defense, but it seemed the conversation had come to a close.
Once they were done assembling what looked suspiciously like a bonfire, Beth clapped her hands. It sounded strangely tinny through the connection of the void pearls. “It’s time!” Beth announced. “Step back everybody, you know the safety rules with this stuff.”
Alicia stepped back, she didn’t know the safety rules, but figured she could grasp the most important bits.
Beth stepped up to the floating tangle of wood and placed the void pearl-looking stone on it, Alicia noticed now that it was black, and not the pale white of the regular void pearls. Beth stepped back, and seconds later, smoke started emanating from the spot where the pearl touched the wood. For a little bit, Alicia was just fascinated by the smoke, how it flowed out of the bundle in all directions until rebounding off the invisible walls of the air field the black void pearl apparently provided.
Once she noticed the bundle again, it was on fire, only it didn’t look like she was used to fires looking. In the lack of a better vocabulary, the fire was rounder, expanding in all directions equally, only occasionally disturbed by a slight turn created by water in the wood turning into steam and escaping its former home, producing minuscule rotational thrust in the process. It was captivating viewing, like the instinctual fascination with fire that humanity most likely had nourished since the early days of the species got caught up with this strange directionless conflagration and watched it like it might a wild animal acting upredictably.
Once the fire started dying down, the oxidization having done its job, the trance broke. Alicia had no idea how long had passed. It had gone relatively fast which made sense to her, with nowhere to go the heat had to be get pretty intense, but still, she surely hadn’t been staring slack-jawed at this fire for the entire duration, had she?
“It’s quite the sight, isn’t it?” Beth said, there was a dreamy quality to her voice. “The pearl needs a minute or so to absorb the heat energy, but once it’s done we’ll have it retract the field and scatter the ashes and we’re good.”
“So the pearl…what, contains the heat energy?”
“As best as I understand it yeah. This particular pearl is made especially for that kind of thing. I don’t know the underlying magical theory, but apart from the soot it’s no worse for wear, and we can use it to heat water or whatever else back home.”
“Huh, yeah, soot,” Alicia said, every bit as baffled with the explanation as she had been wthout. “I suppose that makes sense.”
With the burning of the leftover barrels over and done with, the expedition was apparently over, and Alicia helped get everything in place to port back to Thereafter. Despite the many new experiences and ideas she had experienced this day, she still had one more thing she needed to do. She hadn’t been sure it was needed until helping with bundling up the barrel parts. Now, though, she was sure, and sure that this called for action on her part. It was just a question of timing it right.
Author’s Note: This is one of those chapters I would’ve loved to make longer. I’d love to get into what Tag’Lor and Logan got up to, more banter between Beth and Alice, more Ade just in general, and so on. That said, I am here to tell you a story, and so I THINK I’ve paired this huge scene down into a digestible, if not somewhat lengthy chunk of narrative that fits into the story I want to tell. We’re getting into the Weird Space (Void) things now, so things are going to get both weirder and wilder from here on out.
Catch you next time when we get a closer look at the world of postapocalyptic moonshine, and also an old norse tradition that we totally should start doing again.
VSD