SAGN: Chapter Eight - The Clever Girl free porn video

Chapter Eight: The Clever Girl Day Six: 1000 hours The hood of the protective suit that Jim was wearing was far more bulky than he expected it to be. Having never worn one before he'd needed the assistance of one of the men that issued it to him to even don it properly. Each movement he made came with the faint creaking sound that the protective fabric made as it came into contact with and moved against itself. The respirator that concealed all of his face except for where his eyes were visible behind the protective lenses was suffocating in some ways. Unless he was actually sick or there was some other reason for why he should be aware of it, he wasn't usually conscious of the mechanics of just breathing. The respirator changed that. Each breath passing through the filters that he inhaled through required a little extra effort as did each exhale that followed. He could see the interior diaphragms mounted just below eye level across the bridge of his nose on the inside of the mask flutter with each breath. Breathe it, see it flutter up. Breathe out; see it pulled back against the mounting. As long as that diaphragm was moving he knew he had a good seal on the mask. Mentally Jim knew that they didn't need all of this equipment. The respirators, the protective suits that they had donned in the annex to command area were all part of the cover story as much as the suit wearing patrols that maintained the quarantine around the Grove itself were. But there was something about just wearing the gear itself, hearing his breath as it moved through the filters and seeing the diaphragm flutter that made his heart rate increase anyway. He knew that he was not really in any danger of contagion, but a lifetime of seeing these suits worn where there was that danger had left its mental mark on him regardless and he couldn't help but notice the difference in how he felt after he was smothered beneath the weight of a full suit. "How long do we have to wear these things?" he asked Singh after he keyed his headset. "Ideally we should continue to wear them the entire time we are there," Singh replied. "The quarantine may be very effective at keeping others out physically, but there is no guarantee that will be the case one hundred percent of the time. There is always the chance that someone could get past the patrols and over the wall physically, but we are fortunate so far that this is such a small area to monitor. Smaller area, easier control of access. But that's not the main concern at this point." "It's not?" Jim asked. "No, it isn't," Singh continued. "Even if anyone were to get past the patrol screen and over the barrier wall all they would see is a team in suits like these. They might see a glimpse of the contaminated area that they are trying to excavate, if they get close enough they might even see what it is that they are excavating. If we were to walk into the area not similarly equipped it would be a rather glaring contradiction. Unfortunately that isn't even the most pressing issue with an operation of this scope." "It isn't?" Mitch asked. The problem isn't with physical penetration of the perimeter, Detective Travers, it's technological. Even should a resourceful individual manage such a feat, all they would see what we want them to see, but we still have to deal with other factors that make our attempt to conceal this matter more difficult. Agent Fitzhugh has already informed me when I spoke with her that they have already captured and confiscated over a dozen drones." As it to punctuate Singh's words a deep buzzing moved overhead. Jim reflexively looked up to track from where the sound was coming from and saw a wide bodied drone moving overhead from where it lifted off just behind the command tent. It was larger than most of its kind that he had seen. A flat broad bodied beast with a light absorbing matte black finish. The four counter rotating propellers on each end of it allowing it to skip as nimbly as a dragonfly along the patrol path its controller in the command tent was following. Jim could see two cameras as it hovered over them momentarily. One mounted forward, presumably for guidance and another that rotated in a three hundred and sixty degree radius beneath it. Mounted on each of the long axis points were retracted claws that looked like, when they were extended, they could reach well beyond its body. Rounding out its onboard equipment was a nasty black barrel protruding from a fat ammunition pod secured to its belly. Mounted alongside the barrel, moving in tandem with it, was a slender needle shaped rod with a cone flaring out near its base. Some sort of remote control jamming device, Jim assumed. The drone made a slow circuit of the command area. Probably the operator making a systems check, Jim thought, before streaking away to assume its assigned patrol path. "That few?" Mitch said his voice still raspy but slightly muffled by his own respirator. "I would have thought that there would have been more." "There are," Singh replied. "The ones that they captured were ones equipped with night vision cameras." "Why those ones specifically?" Jim asked. "Why not all of them?" "Even commercial night vision cameras use infrared sensors. They would see right through the glamour that Jacen and M'Tehr have established in the heart of the Grove. Anyone who matched that film to what the regular daytime camera equipped drones have recorded would see glaring discrepancies. And we can't afford for that to happen at all." "Have they actually shot any of them down yet?" Jim asked imagining the screams of outrage that would rise from the owners of those drone, especially if they belonged to one of the news services baying for more information outside of the quarantine zone. "Not as of yet," Singh said, "But the longer this situation persists the odds against that happening shrink exponentially. "They should go after all of them, or at least take down a few that don't have night vision," Jim said. "If they figure out that those are the only ones being taken out of commission someone is going to smell a rat pretty quickly." "That's a splendid notion, Detective Brighton. I'll suggest it to Agent Fitzhugh upon our return. But at the moment we have more pressing business to attend to," Singh answered. "So suits on the whole time then," Mitch said. "Unfortunately so," Singh said. "We will need to remove our respirators to verify our identities when we pass through the airlock to go into the Grove, but that will be the only time we will be able to remove them until we conclude our business here." "Let's get it over with then," Mitch said. "Wearing this ape suit is making me hotter already." "It'll be better after we get out of the sun," Jim said. "The tree cover will cut half of the heat right away." "Won't help the humidity none though," Mitch answered. "This masquerade was your own suggestion you'll recall," Singh said. "Don't remind me," Mitch said. "I should have thought of something that didn't require environmental suits. Remind me not to do this again." -------------------------------------------- Of all of the things that Jim could have expected to see when the three of them re-entered the Grove containment area after the electric cart ferried them to the edge of Magnolia Circle, the makeshift wall that ran around the entire zone in front of them was definitely on the list. The surprising thing for him was not the wall itself, it was that the area encompassed by the Grove now stretched the full length and width of the woodlot between Magnolia Circle and Magnolia Street. Jim knew that it was possible for plants to have explosive growth; he'd seen it countless times before, but this surge of growth was something that would not have been what he would have imagined if someone asked him to consider it. Singh was leading the way back into the heart of it, with Jim and Mitch trailing just behind him. The two men were walking slightly abreast of each other and a person was looking at them from above they would have seen that the three men in bulky protective suits were walking in the shape approximating that of a ragged wedge. Already as they approached the boundary, they could see where the vibrant plant life had exploded around the edges and had taken over almost all of the empty rental units that dotted the Grove's border. Looking down the street anyone could see at a glance which places were occupied before the dryad had awoken and which were either empty or just between renters. The former's boundaries were still respected if that was the right way to say it and the latter were being rapidly subsumed under a crush of greenery that it seemed was visibly growing thicker by the moment. Everywhere that someone had not been living the roots and vines and branches had slithered and burst through what boundaries there were and claimed the space as their own. Some of the homes, like the one whose yard they had entered the Grove initially, had been swallowed entirely by the forest and if you looked carefully you might still catch a glint of window glass behind the vines or see a flash of faded paint peeking through the leaves. Of the trail that they had followed the last time they were here there was no longer even the slightest hint of a trace of its existence. Just a solid wall of green. Looking at the swath of branches buried beneath the thickest crop of leaves Jim had ever seen on a set of trees, he was hard pressed to connect what he saw now to what he had seen here only a few days before. The wood itself was quiet in comparison to the city around it. Not completely so of course, since there were the sounds of animals coming from the wild area now where there had not been before; but not in any overwhelming way. Still the contrast to the streets around the area could not be more complete. It was an oasis of silence in the sea of murmuring sound that made up even a small sleepy southern city like Stafford. Looking at the sea of green in front of them. The breakwater that they were going to have to brave in a moment, Jim couldn't help hearing the teaming soundtrack of every movie jungle he had ever seen echo in his imagination just by looking into that shadowy bower. It was no longer possible in his opinion for them to just walk into the area. The growth was just too thick and from his experience here before when it was not so pronounced he would have hesitated to do so today uninvited. That didn't mean though that there was no way left to gain entry. With all other ways in now smothered beneath the thick growth looming in front of them there was still a way in and that was what they were making their way toward at the moment. Against the slash of feral wood that had sprung into being had been erected what Jim could only describe as a kind of border check point. The looming gateway that marked the only way in or out of the Grove proper had been hastily built between two houses, but it was, from all appearances solid enough. It reminded him to a degree of one of the border checkpoints in Berlin that he had seen pictures of before those had been torn down in the aftermath of reunification. Realistically he didn't know why he should have expected to see anything different considering what the area contained and it made perfect sense that it should be somewhere. With something like this, once it had been sealed off, there needed to be something like this to control egress. Now that the dryad who was directing the development of this place was rational, the wild unpredictable nature of its expansion and growth had slowed and appeared to have almost halted. But that appearance was deceptive. The vines may no longer be flowing like rivers that had jumped their banks and the roots may not be exploding from the earth but that didn't mean that the advance of this place had ceased. It had just become less obvious to the watching eye is all. The F.R.T. and the state police had taken over the checkpoints and the blockades established by Stafford P.D. and seeing them again without the darkness and the rain and especially through the haze of pain and exhaustion that had dominated his recall of their first night facing this massive undertaking, Jim was still struck by how much effort was needed to contain what was here and more importantly keep the awareness of it's true nature was from being generally known. Not far from where they had first escaped, where Pantra had been struck down there had been an entrance of a sort constructed. It looked like it was intended to be temporary, but even temporary was surprisingly solid. There was an open sided tent enclosing a cube of clear plastic walls. The tent over the airlock was like the one that they had occupied that first night but that was where the similarities ended. This tent fly was in place more to provide shade to the station beneath it, under which the agents in full protective suits not on watch sat around on folding chairs with a folding table between them. There were two points of entry to the clear walled off area, one leading into the airlock and another leading out to the gate that barred entry to the Grove itself. Tall flat red plastic barriers had been set close to each other in a thick row four layers deep that ran the length of the gap between the two houses that were there. The area between the plastic walls had been filled in with gravel and braced to keep them from buckling outward. In every gap between all of the other houses a wall of the same material stretched from house to house to encompass the entire Grove contained within. The doors facing the street had been sealed shut with similar heavy panels, there were heavy shutters affixed to the windows and over all of them bright yellow tape had been affixed to give notice at a glance if anyone were to break the seals. Jim could only assume that any entry points on the side facing the Grove were similarly barred. The only homes that had not been incorporated into the hastily assembled wall were those that had been overrun by the Grove itself. Those rental houses that he had seen buried beneath a heaving sea of green. Around those houses, or what was left of them the wall had veered away from the line of homes and doglegged toward the street itself. Pairs of agents, also in protective suits were patrolling the perimeter and on the suit radio Jim could hear the chatter of their communications like a constant rumble of surf in his earpiece. The wooden privacy fence that had been there before was sandwiched now between the water filled plastic wall and the gravel buttress. A section of the fence had been removed to make an entryway and the wooden section that had been removed had been repurposed and placed like a roof over the entranceway that had been created between the walls of the barrier and the wild looking forest just beyond it. It was supposed to be temporary and everything except the fence that had been incorporated into its construction said it was. But Jim didn't get that feeling at all when he looked at any of it. The feeling that he got instead was that this was just a temporary measure that was in place for the time being until something else more permanent replaced it. Looking on it he wondered if his grandfather on occupation duty in Germany had felt the same feeling he had now as he watched the Russian troops opposite him begin to clear the space for what would become a wall stretching across Berlin. The sign leading into the airlock instructed them to enter one at a time. Singh went first since he was in the lead and neither of the two detectives thought anything of it when he did so. For the most part this was Singh's show now and they were along for the ride. As Singh entered the plastic umbilical the outer door shut and they could see a blast of pressurized air impact his suit from head to toe from all sides. He waited until the lock cycled and the interior light flashed green. The inner door slid open and they saw him enter the main body of the airlock. Mitch went next and Jim last. Once he had entered and the outer doors were secured the agent inside gave the three of them the go ahead to remove their protective hoods and respirators. The two agents inside the clean room were the only ones not either looking at the Grove itself or keeping a careful eye out for civilians who would try to slip in and find out what was really going on here. The two men were big even beneath their protective suits. Both of them had MP-5's close at hand. The one that was checking them through had his slung across his chest with the weapon hanging to one side where he could snatch it up quickly if he needed to. The other stood a pair of steps back and while not deliberately aiming his weapon at them, could easily do so if there was need for it. The one with his weapon slung was the one that had indicated that they could remove their masks and respirators. He watched as they doffed first their hoods and then broke the seal and removed the masks. Jim took a reflexively deep breath once the mask was clear of his face. The air in the clean room smell strongly of the chemical disinfectant that had bathed them all upon entry. The man looked at each of their faces slowly. His gaze lingered on each of them as he marked their physical attributes and once he was satisfied that he had entered each of them into his mental file he reached for a slim binder on the folding table and opened it. From where Jim was standing he could see that the first page was a list. The agent's eyes ran down the list quickly before they rose to meet them again and only then did Jim hear the man ask to see each of their identifications. Jim was not surprised to see that the list that the man was checking them against was extremely short. It was, in fact confined to a single sheet of paper and at a glance he didn't think that there were more than a dozen names listed there. The papers behind that sheet were thin in number as well. The bulk of the material in the book itself was more of a binder for identifying those who could enter by image. The guard flipped open the book to the page matching each of them and scrutinized their features against the record before removing a thin plastic card from an envelope attached to each of their bio sheets and handing them off to the next guard. As they turned to him the first agent moved his MP-5 to a similar position as the other agent while that one allowed his weapon to drop and hang from the sling. While they waited under the eyes of the armed guard, the agent who took over examining them verified their identity again by inserting the plastic cards into a small satellite computer on the other table. The machine made soft whirring sounds as its processers reached out and connected not only the police I.D. database that it linked to, but to other secured sources as well. Photos of them that matched the photos contained in the access binder itself flashed on the tiny screen. Once he had completed his protocol the agent told each of them they had to remove their glove and lay their hand on a portable scanner to verify their fingerprints against that database. Jim thought about making some crack that they hadn't changed their appearance in the last few minutes or so when he realized that with the existence of beings who could create a glamour at will it may be very well possible for someone to do just that and instead of speaking, he kept his comment to himself and complied with the agent's directives. Once the agent had satisfied himself that the three of them were who they said that they were, he nodded, handed them back their papers. The guard standing behind them relaxed and moved to a less alert posture. "Do you require replacement weapons sir?" the agent asked gesturing at the rack behind him. "I verify that none of you have any currently on your persons." "Thank you agent, but that won't be necessary. We checked our sidearm's at the command tent in accordance with the containment protocol," Singh told him. "What is in there will pay little attention to firearms anyway." The agent nodded and waved them through without speaking to anyone except Singh. They donned their gloves, respirators and hoods again and prepared to leave. They repeated the process they had passed through when going through the entry umbilical. Step in, wait for the disinfectant bath, and wait for the green light and then exit. It was a laborious and time consuming process compared to just walking through a door, but it was necessary if only for maintaining the illusion. Once they had exited and resealed the umbilical, the inner door in front of them opened. It slowly slid to one side and remained open just long enough for the three men to enter the enclosed area contained within the barrier itself. This door wasn't made of water filled plastic. It was heavy gauge metal and only the balance of its frame allowed it to move with a silent ease that belied just how heavy and solid it truly was. Once it had slid silently into place once again behind them, they heard a buzzing from the magnetic lock of the outside door. Singh pushed against it and it creaked faintly as it moved outward. Mitch hadn't said anything yet, but Jim was almost certain that the level of security they were seeing here was beginning to remind him of his navy days. They paused for a moment waiting for it to buzz again indicating that the door had a seal before proceeding. "Gentlemen," Singh said, "note the markings on the gate itself." Jim looked back at the steel facing of the door a moment before they heard the harsh buzzer sound letting them know the gate was now secure. There were groupings of symbols in four points that Jim didn't recognize. "What are they?" he asked Singh. "Rune based wards," he answered, "in conjunction with the amount of cold steel in the gate itself and scattered in strategic locations throughout the barrier it is intended to halt the spread of the Grove. When the gate is locked into position it links the entire wall that has been constructed into an anti-Fae barrier. It's like an electric fence in that regard if that helps you grasp the concept better." "Will it do any good?" Jim asked. "In the short term yes, but it is at best a stopgap. It would not hold out for long against a concentrated assault by a determined aggressor, especially one with sufficient power." He looked into the wall of green in front of them. "We need to be going gentlemen," Singh said. "The answers we seek are in there and we are expected. We should not keep our hosts waiting." On the other side of the magnetic door the indication that this was going to be a permanent feature was reinforced even more strongly in Jim's mind. The trees, bushes and vines had grown thickly almost up to the edge of the occupied property itself, but leading into the Grove's interior now they could see an area that was in the process of clearing itself of anything more than thick grass almost as smooth as a golf green. Seeing the foliage moving to make way for and form that path was an eerie sensation for Jim. He watched as the grass shifted and stabilized into a walking path that curved and wound around the bulk of the forest growth and disappeared out of sight only a few meters away. They were being invited in it seemed and all at once Jim wasn't sure that he wanted to accept the invitation. Jim looked carefully at Mitch. He had seen it too and Jim was just as certain that his partner had grasped the implications just as solidly as he had. Everything that he was seeing here at the moment was making it very clear to anyone with eyes to see that this Grove was not going to be going anywhere. Jim didn't know how he felt about that, but he knew that others with more decision-making ability than his would not be happy about this in the slightest. But what those consequences were going to be hadn't manifested yet. He took a deep respirator moderated breath and moved onto the path. The light from the early morning sun vanished quickly into a cool gloom that prevailed and predominated now that they had entered the Grove proper. Not only did the light overhead fail to pierce very far into the forest canopy above them, but the temperature had dropped slightly there as well. It was a bit of a relief, once the rain had finally stopped, the summer had resumed its customary warmth and Jim had accepted that the sticky humidity that had taken the place of the rain was just another part of what was all around him. It was summer after all. Summer as he had grown accustomed to it being, at least a variation of it anyway. But stepping into this shadowy place he couldn't help but feel a slight chill and shivered as he moved into the cooler area. The thing was he couldn't tell if the chill came from the absence of sunlight falling down on them or knowing what was waiting for them at the end of the path they were walking. The last time they had come here it had been a struggle to make their way through the thick and twisted undergrowth. It had taken them so much time to even navigate the small section that they traversed that he could not help but feel some small amazement when they entered the clearing around the elm only a few minutes after entering the densely wooded patch of land. The tall elm tree that towered over them seemed to have increased its height and girth. At least Jim thought it had. It was hard to remember how closely that particular specimen of tree matched the one they had fled from when the mad dryad had emerged from it the last time they were here. Even if it was much the same there had been changes taking place in their absence. Where before the dominant elm had stood simply as a larger specimen among others of its kind, now it stood apart from the others. Trees, bushes even close growing scrub growth had pulled back away from the tree and left an open space covered only in grass with a few varicoloured flowers scattered in the green that spread around its thick trunk. Usually the space beneath king trees like this tended to be clear of most forms of undergrowth anyway. The shade from their own canopy acting as discouragement to any other plants who might try to claim and colonize any of the open ground beneath its branches. That was Jim's experience anyway and even in cases such as that there was always the forest litter that gathered beneath a king tree's branches to contend with. The humped detritus of seasons of fallen leaves intermingled with shed branches and twigs. Detritus that added new layers each season and generated the mulch and new soil that the forest created. But there was not any evidence even of that when they stepped into the clearing. As far as Jim could see the forest litter had been cleared away as well and in doing so it had set this part of the forest that bound the area beneath the elm's branches apart from the rest. The clearing that the path widened into, except for the longish grass, seemed little different from the manicured carpet of some of the city parks that Jim occasionally had reason to visit. Looking at what lay spread out before them Jim realized that he needed to redefine the phrase natural clearing in his mind. The places that he thought of as deserving that description before didn't really. Not anymore, not after he had see what a true naturally created clearing was. He found it hard to match his memory of what had been here the last time the three men had passed this way. The thick grass waved and moved against their ankles as if a wind had somehow penetrated into the depths of the clearing, but there was no breeze to be felt against the confining plastic fabric of their suits and Jim felt his anxiety levels rise just a bit realizing that the movement of the grass was not caused by the wind at all. At the centre of the clearing, what Jim could only recognize as a throne seemed to have risen from the earth itself. As he got a closer look it was obvious that was exactly what had happened. He could see where the roots and vines and branches had reached up from the earth and down from the elm itself. They met and moved together, twisting and melding, forming their materials into a massive shape that loomed over them and dominated the area. Leaves sprang from the branches and coated its frame in greenery, while small varicoloured flowers blooming along the vines that added their ropy forms to the seat softened its appearance with dashes of colour. The entire mass of the seat was raised just high enough that its presence forced visitors such as them to look upward at the occupant seated there. For a moment Jim was so occupied taking in the sight of the sheer mass of the throne that he failed to pay much attention to the small pale skinned woman seated upon it. Before he could give her more attention though M'Tehr stepped out of the shadows behind the throne and moved silently to take up a position to the right of the massive seat. There was movement on the left and Jacen too stepped from the shadows and took up a position paralleling M'Tehr's. Jim couldn't help but gape as they did so. Intellectually he knew who they must be but this was the first time he had seen either of them without the glamour they had customarily adopted when they ventured out from their own borders. M'Tehr was slightly taller than she presented herself as when she masked her appearance he realized, but even without the glamour she used to hide her true face he could see traces of it in the smooth wood like skin that sheathed her natural form. The indentions that marked where eyes normally were on a person were smooth and her cheeks fell straight down in a thin angular fashion. Her slight form seemed scoured clean of any of the human features that they had seen her display at their first meeting and to his surprise he saw that she only had three elongated fingers accompanying her thumb. Her form was as smooth and cleared of all but the barest hint of humanity that they could see, however Jacen was the opposite in his natural appearance. He was, if anything even taller than he had allowed them to see when they met and he was broad where his glamour had shown him as slender. He was heavily muscled and nearly covered in a thick pelt of hair that shined with a deep glossy umber colour. Long thick horns like those of a ram curved back along his skull and plunged down along his neckline flaring out slightly at the tips. One would have thought that with attributes such as these he would have had a face as bestial in appearance as some ancient illustrations claimed his race owned, but this was not the case. Jacen's face was if anything cleaner in appearance than that of a fastidious man. Whether he shaved to achieve that appearance or whether it was his natural condition Jim couldn't tell. His facial features were rugged and strong and if he had seen him in passing Jim would have had to admit that this was a handsome example of a man, but what struck Jim most was the eyes. Solid black orbs that nested beneath his high brow and rather than exuding menace they instead made Jim relax slightly. There was something in his gaze that made whoever connected their eyes with it instinctively understood that there was no threat waiting in the one that owned them. Singh hesitated for a moment as they took in the scene. "This is an unexpected development gentleman. Follow my lead," he whispered and started slowly walking toward the three fae. As they approached, Jacen waited until they were a bare half dozen paces away from the foot of the throne and stepped forward half a pace. As he did M'Tehr brought her staff down on the soft soil. Somehow when she did that there was a sharp echoing sound that punctuated Jacen's movement. The three men stopped and waited half a breath. Jacen folded his heavily muscled arms across his chest and fixed each of them with his gaze. And then the satyr spoke. "Who comes? Who enters this Phar'," he demanded, his rumbling voice boomed louder because of the silence than it would have anywhere else. That was a deliberately chosen effect Jim decided. It was deliberate and it was still impressive to him regardless of being obviously staged. "One who enters in friendship, an honoured guest," Singh responded. The short squat man drew himself up to his full height as he spoke and fixed Jacen's gaze with his own as he did so. "Then come in friendship, honoured guest," Jacen responded and allowed his crossed arms to fall and drape by his side as he did so. He stepped back from them and as he resumed his position M'Tehr's staff lashed downward and struck; another sharp booming punctuation to mark his movement. "I am Jacen, Protector of the Beasts that nestle in the sanctuary of this Phar. Now stand you before she who was and she who is again. Hamadryad of this Phar'. Come forward in peace and heed her words." Jacen's voice thundered toward them and at the same time Jim wasn't certain that he had spoken that loudly at all. Singh advanced the last few paces and halted nearly at the base of the throne. Jim walked quietly behind him and only looked up and fixed his gaze on the dryad that was seated there once all of them had ceased walking. He was curious to get a better look at this nymph who remained seated high above them. But it was not really an easy thing to do. At the moment that Jacen's voice had boomed out his challenge, Jim had, without consciously thinking about it, averted his gaze from her. There was something about this whole arrangement that had encouraged him to do so and that was probably the point of this entire display. And then there was the added factor that he had to look up to even get a clear look at her. The height of the throne was such that standing where they were it was hard to see her from this angle. The one thing he could say for absolute certain was that this was turning into the absolute strangest interview he had conducted in his time as a detective thus far. And given the events of the last few days that was saying more than a little something. There was a creak of wood in front of them and when Jim looked again he could see the seat of the throne crawling closer to the earth. As the roots withdrew into the earth the wood connecting it to the tree limbs above groaned and creaked as well as they extended downward. The platform the nymph was seated on finally drew even with their eyes and the sound of the adjustment being made ceased. It was much easier to see who was seated there now and as he looked directly into the seat of the throne, Jim honestly expected to see someone much like M'Tehr herself, a creature who would radiate age, authority and experience in some fashion; but all he saw when he looked into the flower draped bower that made up the seat of the throne was a frail looking, slender and very pregnant young girl leaning against one arm rest with her legs together and drawn up in front of her half seated half leaning form. Perched in the centre of the wide chair the woman didn't look like any of the ways Jim had been imagining her to himself before now. In truth what she looked very much like, more than anything was a frightened runaway teen at the moment. Jim blinked and looked again at her face a little more intently. Perhaps more intently than he should have. The young woman saw him looking her over and while he couldn't be certain that it was so, he thought he saw her suppress a giggle before she returned his gaze and started watching him as intently in return. It didn't last long. She seemed almost as if she were making a game of it and then remembered her role in this and looked instead at Singh. Although Jim couldn't be certain it seemed to him that she seemed to squirm a little under his gaze, but she focused on him to the exclusion of the others and held his eyes with her own. It must have been her chiding herself inside her own mind for doing so because having been given something to focus on her faint tremor slowed and stopped. Jim had interviewed a lot of people over the years since he became a cop. First when he was a rookie in black and whites and then later when he was in plainclothes. There were so many of them over the years that he was half certain that he had spoken to almost every age from four to ninety so far and what his instincts had gathered from all of those contacts over the years was telling him now was that whoever this dryad was, something she was not was experienced or fully in control of herself yet. It was clear what the three of them intended for Jim and the others to see. Their form of sovereign regaining her rightful position, but in his eyes all he saw at the moment was a nervous and frightened teen that was compelled by circumstance to present herself in this manner. And he saw something else as well; doing this was something that frightened her. Or perhaps it could be that there was something else that frightened her. Jim couldn't tell just which it was yet. Singh exhaled slowly into his respirator before he spoke. He extended both of his hands away from his body palms facing outward while he half bowed at the waist in response. "It is good of the Hamadryad to grant us this boon," he said gravely. "May her graciousness be returned to her tenfold for her indulgence of us in this, our time of need." Singh was speaking more formally than he usually did and considering that he routinely spoke in that fashion his attitude now was an underscoring of the situation to Jim. "Honoured Lady of the Grove, I am Armin Singh, a shaman of Earth, a mind speaker of the third grade serving as a special detective in the Stafford police department. Stafford being the name of the human city that holds authority in this part of the Mother's lands. I am given authority by those I speak for to bind and to loose in all discourse that falls under the auspices of the Concord in this matter." Singh's hand waved to indicate first Jim and then Mitch. "With me today are Detective Jim Brighton and Detective Mitchell Travers, my colleagues in the Stafford police department. We have been engaged in an investigation that is of the utmost importance and by fortune's turn the path of that investigation has led us to this point. We pray that you will be able to assist us in this search as only one of the oldest of noble Fae races can." "May it be so," the young woman said in a quavering voice and tried and failed to sound commanding and only sounded grateful that her part in this was almost done. "Be welcome in my Phar'. May you find within this refuge what it is that you seek." Her voice was sweet and musical. Like delicate bells swinging in the soft breeze. When she spoke those last words of greeting, roots burst through the earth and knotted and gnarled just behind their heels. Jim tensed and had to steel himself not to run since the last time he heard that sound was under circumstances that still woke him each night for the last few nights in a cold sweat and probably would continue to do so until something else equally terrifying supplanted that memory in its intensity. Singh visibly relaxed now that the protocols were satisfied, but he remained standing while he spoke rather than sink into the proffered seats that had risen from the earth behind them. "I see that we didn't go completely formal this time, M'Tehr," Singh said in his slow deep voice backing off of his more formal mode now that he was speaking to her. "Since you did not do so, may we ask the name of the prime dryad and how we may know her home?" "As much as I would desire to do so this is a thing I cannot do so just yet, friend Singh," M'Tehr replied. "Her name is not mine to speak. She has not shared it with me as yet. Just as she has not spoken the name of her Phar'." Jim thought that he heard disappointment in the visiting Hamadryad's words. Maybe because, by not being able to do so, that absence perhaps weakened their claim in some way. "Still this was a bit formal for the purpose of assisting us in our inquiry of the matter at hand," Singh responded. He gestured at the clearing surrounding them. "This too is perhaps a bit more than expected. And maybe a little more than necessary as well." M'Tehr let a ghost of a smile waft over her smooth features. "It is as necessary as it needed to be," she answered. "No more and no less." Singh didn't choose to challenge M'Tehr on the point. He merely grunted quietly to himself and gave the three Fae a curt nod before seating himself on the stool of earth and wood that had formed behind his heels. Jim and Mitch followed suit behind them and shifted around for a moment to get comfortable before they began. "Laying it on a little thick there weren't you Singh?" Mitch whispered to him. "An unavoidable requirement of the protocol needed for the situation at hand," Singh whispered back to him. "Are you certain that she is able to participate in this inquiry?" Mitch said in his strained slightly raspy voice. It was a good question in Jim's opinion. The woman looked like she was far along in her pregnancy and if it had advanced so much in just the short time that had elapsed between Jacen entering the Grove and now then Jim didn't find it hard to conceive that she would need to give birth sometime in the next few hours, even though she had only been in control of herself for just under a hand span of days. "The Lady of the Grove has assured me that she is able to do so and that moreover, it is of great importance to her that she does so, but your concern for her well being is noted and appreciated Detective Travers," M'Tehr replied to Mitch. Jim allowed his eyes to travel over her body in a long lingering gaze before he began the interview. In other circumstances he would have not even tried to do what he was doing right this moment. His eyes might linger just now, but there was nothing sexual implied in the curt intense gaze he subjected her to. For what was about to happen, he needed to see her, to really see her so that when he began to question her he would be able to know on an instinctive level if her words matched the story that her body would be telling to him while she spoke. The problem was that this time, such a simple technique was complicated from the first moment. The woman was young and at times seemed more girl than woman. Like M'Tehr when she adopted her glamour, her age seemed to shift each time your eyes slipped away from her, but in her case the range of difference only varied between the few years of late teens and early twenties. A further complication was that unlike M'Tehr when she donned her glamour, this woman was completely naked and Jim had to work hard to make certain that his intent observation of her wasn't misread as him ogling her body, rather than evaluating her body language before an interview that was going to be a challenge to put it mildly. And the obvious pregnancy was another factor that was completely unexpected. Not in the least because it presented itself as so advanced. That was something that Jim couldn't easily explain and had a hard time comprehending. It would have to be discussed, obviously if only with Singh and until there was understanding about it there would be distraction caused by its presence and that was something that he wanted to avoid. "Lady of the Grove, I realize that you are new to the circumstances caused by your recent awakening, but we need for you to answer the questions that we have for you as completely as you can. Any detail that you can mention will be of great assistance to us," Jim said to her slowly with as much of a gentle tone as he could project into his voice. There was something about her that made him want to speak to her slowly and precisely; like she was a small child or a senile elder or even just a foreign visitor. But even as he made the comparison in his mind, he reflected that those examples might not be so far from the truth if what Singh had been told was correct. "Conversely, Lady of the Grove, any attempt to hinder our purpose will not be treated lightly. We need full disclosure on your part to bring our investigation to a conclusion and for that we will need your full cooperation," Jim heard Mitch say as he shifted her focus momentarily on to him. Mitch had moved into bad cop mode now that they were here for the interview. Something he did more often than Jim since he was better at projecting that sort of image than Jim was. Jacen leaned forward and seemed to bristle at the suggestion that the Lady of the Grove would be anything other than honest, but he ceased his protestation when she looked in his direction and nodded in agreement. The woman, the girl or was she rather some kind of creature seated on the throne just over topping them didn't seem to take offense at Mitch's words. Rather her nodding acquiescence was more reflected in her hint of a nervous manner. She indicating that they were both understood clearly enough though, although Jim wished he could be certain of that. The thing is what he really wanted to know right now was the source of her obvious nervousness; it couldn't be from fear of having to face any repercussions over what she had done in her feral state. Jim would have to ask Singh to be sure, but he was fairly confident that the Concord that Singh had referred to repeatedly in their discussions so far must have some sort of provisions in place to exempt a Fae woman like her from some of the consequences of what her actions wrought when she was going through an episode of what could only be described as the Fae equivalent of not guilty by reason of insanity. There had to be a reason for it though and without asking Jim could identify several tentative possibilities. She could be still suffering from the aftermath of her feral state and thus not really ready for an interview at all; she could be confused and insecure due to waking after so long in suspension; she could be confused over her elevation to her present high position and she could be nervous because of her rapid pregnancy. All were possibilities that could explain the messages that her body was passing along to him about her; because one thing that he was certain of so far was that her body was telling him that she didn't really want to be doing this and was only doing so because she had no other choice. And then there was the possibility that she was intending to lie to them. Perhaps in a large single area or in many smaller ways that would add up to the same result. If she was inexperienced like she seemed to be, as her form suggested, she could very well be lying and not aware that her body was actively betraying her. That could be an advantage for them if that was the case. Jim cut his eyes to Mitch and they exchanged a long glance before he resuming speaking with her. Mitch was running through the possibilities in his mind as well Jim knew without asking if it was so. And one of those possibilities included the idea that she was such a skilled liar that she had figured out how to make her body lie as well. Jim had only met a couple of those types before and he hoped that the last option was not going result in him adding another to their number today. --------------------------------------------- Day Six: 1015 hours She slipped out of the trance that M'Tehr had been teaching her to use and felt a moment of disorientation as her perception shrank from what she had just been experiencing as the totality of the Grove back to the limitations she felt now that she was reliant once again on only her own senses. Ever since she had begun to regain her sense of self all she had known had been compressed down to a few things. M'Tehr questioning her about what she could remember of how she came to be here, trying to spur her recall of just what had been done with the remaining man that the others insisted had to be here and this. This most of all it seemed. There was some reason of importance attached to why M'Tehr had been pushing her to develop her abilities in so many different ways, but she was still finding it hard to grasp exactly why that should be so. The ability that she was experimenting with just now for instance was the melding her conscious mind with all of the life contained within her Grove. Each tree, each blade of grass each leaf functioned as one of her own senses when she immersed herself in them. It wasn't that she didn't desire to learn what M'Tehr was insisting on teaching her. In fact it was a heady feeling to experience so much all at once. The first time she successfully did so she was nearly overwhelmed by the massive rush of sensory information that was suddenly available to her. She almost felt as if she were drowning in a vision pool that she had no idea how to control and it was not as liberating in her opinion as M'Tehr made it out to be. Now that she had done it several times though it was starting to lose some of the intimidating aspects that had swamped her the first time she attempted it. Her mind it seemed was becoming more agile more accustomed to processing the vast flow of information that she gleaned in this fashion and she was having less trouble managing it now. M'Tehr looked at her expectantly as she came fully out of her trance. She was waiting for her to say something. She often did that the neophyte dryad thought. She allowed you to start the direction of the conversation but she was quick to intervene and redirect once the topic threatened to escape the path of discussion. The visiting Hamadryad could be remarkably stifling in that way it seemed to her, but she also could understand that her sister felt she needed to be this way for now. Whether that was a character trait of hers or whether it was something that was thrust on her by these circumstances was something that she hadn't determined just yet. "I saw three men approaching from the checkpoint that the men have set up beside the Steubens's house," she said slowly. She was still feeling the effects of her senses shrinking and it seemed to her that this was something that she suspected that not even M'Tehr could fully do as well. It certainly seemed so to her. M'Tehr had only talked her through doing this and even as she did so it struck her more that she was functioning as a conduit for another rather than speaking from knowledge she had acquired firsthand. She didn't even speak in the same way when she was endeavouring to talk her through the steps to expand her mind until it occupied the length and breadth and width of the Grove itself. Comparing how she was while doing that and what she said before when she was speaking of other things she got the distinct impression that it wasn't all M'Tehr's doing. Not entirely and now that she had demonstrated that she could do this she didn't venture to show her any more than she had when she first broached the subject of her learning about and using her Grove to widen her senses and fine tune her control over what lay within its boundaries. "And what is it that causes you to notice these three men out of all of their kind that swarm around the border of your Grove?" she asked her voice using that steady neutral tone she had adopted when speaking with her and feeling the need to instruct her in some Fae aspect that she seemed to have forgotten in her sleep. "I know them," she answered. "I don't know from where, but I know them. I'm certain of it." M'Tehr wished that her sister could have progressed enough in her abilities to be able to just share the image as her other sisters did in Morleth' Phar, but she was not up to doing anything of the sort just yet. And even more alarming she had not spoken mind to mind with M'Tehr since her initial contact. Instead she seemed to have stubbornly insisted on speaking verbally in place of the more elegant and precise mental communication that other dryads commonly used. *Patience sister. She is progressing remarkably well in light of her circumstances.* M'Tehr heard her sister's words echo in her mind. *The guidance of our prime, it seems, has had much to do with her been able to do this much even in this small amount of time.* *She needs more time. She has only begun and already just preparing her for her role is beginning to conflict with what needs to be done to secure this Grove.* M'Tehr thought back to them. *The men coming here to speak with her can still move to Wither this Grove if they are not satisfied and if they so choose. Already they have ringed the life here with cold iron.* *Time is a luxury we do not have sister. And her actions today will do much to secure the future of the Grove. Go through with the ritual as we have bid you. Have our sister stake her claim now before the men can claim dominion over this Grove. Once she does that, the full force of all our sisters is there for her to draw on and the cold iron will be removed.* *She is not ready but it will be done.* M'Tehr responded and withdrew into her own thoughts for a moment. The ritual that they would begin the meeting with as laid out in the Concord would establish her sister as a member of the Grove network and she would be protected. On paper. The thing that some of her sisters did not truly grasp she mused was just how fragile a foundation paper made. "Describe them to me," she said. "Who are these men? Paint their image for me with your tongue." She started to describe them but she had only given a few details when M'Tehr nodded in recognition and told her that those were the police detectives who were coming here to speak with her today. "What you do when you first meet with them is important," M'Tehr reminded her again. "They have shown patience in waiting for you to recover what you can of what was lost, but we have to tell them something that will satisfy their questions. Their presence will be of use to us as well. What we do when we meet with them has to proceed in a certain manner to safeguard not only your person but the very Grove around you." "It still seems so pretentious," she answered. "It makes me feel like I'm pretending to be something I'm not." "Pretention is an illusion. Your position is demonstrated by the reverence of the Grove around you. What further need have you of more accolade that that? That is not pretence. All that you are doing by your actions today is establishing this fact so that others know it is so. You must trust me in this matter sister. This is what must be," M'Tehr stressed. "The men of this place have already made no secret of their desire to remove you from here and to let your Grove Wither once you are gone. What you do next is an important step that you must take to place this Grove firmly under the protection we all claim under the Concord." She felt the need to bristle slightly at being reminded again over this, but she controlled the urge, Even though she did so a few of the nearby plants sensed her irritation and their colour darkened to reflect their understanding of her mood. "I'll do as you say," she said. "Everything is just so strange to me right now. I only half know who I am and I barely know what I am. So of course I'll trust your guidance when you say I need to go through with this ceremony but that doesn't change that I know who these men are," she said to her. "What does it matter?" said M'Tehr. "They are only men." "What I mean when I say that I know them is that I know who they are and at the same time I don't know where I know them from and that knowledge bothers me." M'Tehr closed her eyes and half bowed to her in acknowledgement of her clarification. "These are the men you fought when you were lost in your nature," she said to her. "These are the men who are responsible for bringing me together with you. In a way these men are directly responsible for you standing here today free of your nature's rule." "I didn't know those would be the ones that they were going to send," she said quietly. Now that M'Tehr had confirmed it she matched the glimpse she had of their faces while they were inside the clear room the men had built as part of their gate. Even now that they had disappeared beneath the protective masks again, some of the images she had that she snatched from her madness matched what she saw moments ago vividly. She had only a dim recollection of what had happened to her while her nature had swirled unchecked by reason and now that she had her reason again, she wasn't sure what she should do when confronted by those who had borne the brunt of her mindless need only a few days before. Especially their leader, the short squat man with the moustache and the iron grey hair. "Should I send them away?" M'Tehr asked. "It is still possible to put this off for another day. Perhaps in that time you would recover more of what it is that you need from yourself." "No, I think I need to speak to them," She answered as more fragments in her mind clicked into place fitting and filling out the gaps in her memory. That had been happening with greater frequency today. It was one of the reasons that she had readily agreed to meet with the detectives after they had requested doing so days ago. "We should prepare then," M'Tehr said. "Speak to your Grove now and let what we discussed take shape. Let form follow function. She concentrated and felt the forest around them respond and shift about. The winding path opened up at the edge of the forest and extended to the gate that the men had constructed. It led in a spiral through the forest itself and ended in front of her elm. She still had difficulty thinking of it as a Phar' ador. For some reason the word just seemed so alien to her and it was one of the things that made her question some of what it was M'Tehr told her about being a lost sister. The problem with that feeling of dislocation was that she couldn't deny what else M'Tehr had told her about herself nearly as easily. One of the clear memories that she had from her time of madness was M'Tehr speaking to her, calming and comforting her and telling her that they were the same. Something about that statement still calmed her even though, just by looking at the two of them it was clear that physically they were not the same at all. It was a constant puzzle to her to reconcile what she knew with what she had been given to know. She was more certain of the answer to it though. The problem was that M'Tehr was not as open to that as a possibility as she was. That was a concern for later though; right now she had to focus on what it was that M'Tehr wanted her to do. She closed her eyes and focused. She felt her request being acted on and opened her eyes to watch. The grand throne that M'Tehr had helped her call into being rose up from the earth into the centre of the clearing and once it had reached enough of a form for her to use she stepped her way carefully up and seated herself on it. It was not an easy task for her. Over the past few days while M'Tehr had pushed her as much as she dared to try to excavate what fragments of memory she possessed and teach her the things she needed to know to control her path here in the middle of the revived Grove, she still had to cope with the changes in her body brought on by the rapidly advancing pregnancy she now found herself undergoing. She looked down at her swollen belly and knew that it wasn't right. It was too much, too soon. I shouldn't be like this she thought to herself. I shouldn't even know I'm pregnant yet. She shifted in the seat trying to get comfortable and even that didn't seem right to her. Intellectually she knew she shouldn't even be feeling the way she felt right now. She should be feeling wrong in so many ways. She should be feeling bloated and distorted and uncomfortable and off balance, but there was none of that. I'm not like Tonya she thought to herself as she leaned back. It's not the same for me as it is for her. And that was the crux of it she realized. Thinking of Tonya had linked another broken shard of memory in her mind and as if fitted into place somehow spurred her to understand what the difference between them really was. She understood and she thought she knew just why that was. She would have to speak with M'Tehr to be sure, but for some reason she was certain of what it was that M'Tehr would say to her when she broached the topic. It could wait she decided. First though she had to go through with this display and then the interview afterward. "Is this really necessary?" she asked her sister again. "Does it have to be done the way you told me?" "It does," M'Tehr assured her. "There is a form and a function that must be followed in these matters and for the future of your Grove this must take place in this manner." "Then by all means we do what we need to do. Whatever it takes so long as it is over with." Now that it was on her doorstep she was eager to get the whole thing over with and sitting there waiting for them she realized something else. She had much more to tell them than she thought she did. ----------------------------------------- "Lady of the Grove, We are looking for a missing man," Jim said to her evenly. "We think that this man may have come into contact with you while you were unaware of just what it was that you were doing. He may even have been the one to wake you. Whichever the case may be it is important to us to find this man." "A lost man has been returned to you as I understand it," she answered. "Is this not so Jacen?" "A man has been returned to them, Lady of the Grove," Jacen intoned. "Lady M'Tehr placed him in this one's hands not two days ago. He indicated Singh with a flick of his chin as he spoke. "One man has been returned," Jim acknowledged. "But there is still another that we are looking for. The first one in this area to go missing. He has not been returned. He is the one we wish to speak with you about finding today." The dryad on the throne looked at Jim and it seemed to him that she was warring within herself the moment that the subject of the missing Mr. Barnes had been raised. As he watched her mull over what he said he was almost one hundred percent certain that the next words that came out of her mouth were going to be a lie. "There is no longer any need for you to concern yourself with the whereabouts of this specific man," she said finally. Before Jim or Mitch could interject that what she was saying was just not true she continued. "The man you are looking for has been found," she said simply without further elaboration. The short squat man, the leader that identified himself as Singh, raised his head sharply upward upon hearing what she had said. She felt his dark eyes bore into her and even from the distance between them she could feel the force of his personality exerting itself on her. She remembered this man well. He was an Earth weaver, a shaper of stone and an ally of Fire. She remembered the earth rising to do his bidding. She remembered him raising a wall of soil and rock to crush against her vines and roots and branches. She may command the flora that dominated life within this Grove, but he commanded the Earth that flora sprang from. Even filtered by her madness she remembered him and knew what laired inside of him. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow now, but she had seen him when he was shorn of his pleasantness and she had no desire to see that sight again. "Can you tell us where he is then Lady of the Grove? We will of course need to speak with him to verify his status. And the state of his health is of great concern to us considering what is happening with the other man that was returned," the shaman asked, not waiting for either of the other detectives to pose the same question to her. "So if you would be so kind Lady of the Grove. Where is Cecil Barnes?" "Cecil Barnes is no longer your concern," she repeated. "You were the ones tasked with finding this man yes? The detectives nodded. "He has been found. Has this man committed some crime against your law then that you need to seek him wherever he might go?" she asked. "No he has not. Lady of the Grove," Singh answered her. "But by the same token we cannot simply accept your word for it that this man we seek is as you say he is. There is an obligation that we are under as officers investigating why he disappeared. We must know not only that he is safe, but what has transpired since he went missing." "It is not enough then to know that this one is no longer lost?" she said. For some reason Jim had the distinct impression that this woman was playing with them. That there was something that she knew, he was sure of it and now that he was, he intended to find out regardless of whatever position she was supposed to hold. "With all due respect Lady of the Grove, I'm afraid that we just can't see it that way," Jim said slowly and deliberately, choosing his words carefully. "And neither will our superiors. We are going to have to ask you to explain what you mean when you say that Mr. Barnes is no longer our concern. As long as he is missing, we will have to keep searching for him. So, he is very much still our concern." "Cecil Barnes is not missing Detective. Cecil Barnes belongs to the Grove," she said in her sweet measured manner of speaking. "You're going to have to explain what you mean when you say something like that, Lady of the Grove," Jim said. "Because it sounds very much like you are keeping him as a prisoner," He could feel beads of sweat starting to form on his brow. Jim eyed the roots and vines around them. If it was the case that Barnes was being held by this woman for some reason then this visit to the Grove may prove even more dangerous than their last one had been. Then they were only dealing with the elemental equivalent of a madwoman. Strong and ruthless in her method of attack, but undirected by reason or anything more complicated than overwhelming her prey by sheer force; if she became violent this time they would be facing all that they had before but directed by a conscious mind making deliberate choices and there was no Pantra here for them this time.. "Are you holding Cecil Barnes for some reason, Lady of the Grove?" Mitch said in his quiet hoarse voice. "Has he done something to offend you? Some accidental insult or injury?" "We are not holding him," the dryad said evenly. "Cecil Barnes is not being kept here. He is not restrained from leaving. He is not even hidden. We are him and he is a part of who we are." Whatever he expected her to say to them that was not what Jim expected to hear. While he reassessed what he should say next there was a moment of silence. It didn't last very long though. She watched the detective in his silence and realized that she had gone too far. M'Tehr standing beside her was staring intently at her and was almost quivering with the need to speak to her over this. She wasn't sure what impulse it was that welled up inside her that encouraged her to speak to these men in this fashion. They had done nothing that merited her speaking to them like this and in all likelihood she might have done more damage than she'd anticipated. From the way M'Tehr was distracted it may even be more than that. But she couldn't help herself, for some reason when she opened her mouth to just admit what she knew she felt a mischievous impulse seize hold of her. It wasn't even the first time she had felt this kind of impulse either, ever since the fragments of her memories started slipping back into place she had found herself being gripped by strange impulses and until now she had been able to keep herself from acting on them. But something about this whole situation had triggered her to respond in this way just now and now that she had gone this far it would probably be wise to find some way to smooth over whatever damage her words might have done. She had already let slip some of what she needed to tell them, even though it was delivered in the sideways manner she had never used before. She had already been the object of Singh's attention even before she spoke those words, but now that they had flown from her tongue and were beyond hope of unspeaking them, she felt she now had not only his full attention but no other choice other than to continue as well. "Lady of the Grove," Singh said slowly, "Perhaps you should elaborate further on just what it is that you are saying. "Cecil Barnes is not missing," she said restraining another impulse to play with them verbally. "He is not injured, nor is he being held prisoner in some fashion. You don't need to fear for his safety or his welfare." She closed her eyes for a moment. To the men watching her it must have looked as if she did so to gather some inner control before she ventured to speak further, but in truth she was making an effort to throttle another playful impulse to drag this out with more wordplay. "I am Cecil Barnes. I was the man you are looking for," she said after she gained control of herself and behind the face masks the three men wore she could see that her words both surprised and disturbed them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Her words could not have been more striking she thought if she had spoken them any other way. Whatever it was that any of them expected her to say to them that was not it. Singh immediately asked to withdraw so as to confer with the other two men over this and she told them that they should take as much time as they needed to before resuming the interview. Although from the way it had been structured since their arrival she supposed that audience was a more accurate term than interview. Perhaps that is what had brought that particular set of impulses out of some deep recess inside of her. She would have to watch that and keep control over it if she could. The three men withdrew a short distance away from Cecil, M'Tehr and Jacen. They went only as far as the edge of the clearing near the pathway that led into the open area around the elm. Cecil had felt that it was a reasonable request and that both groups would need a moments break to absorb what she had told them. So they might have some form of privacy she concentrated and opened a direct path back out to the edge of the Grove in case they should want to remove themselves far from her home while they spoke among themselves. They had not chosen to do that though, instead they withdrew just out of range of being overheard if the person listening were doing so with their ears alone. "Sister I understand that you feel you need to tell them who you believe you are, but are you certain that you should have revealed this knowledge in this fashion? You are committed now. When they return, they will demand to know more. Are you ready to give them the answers they will be seeking? And what if you are wrong in this interpretation as I have suggested?" M'Tehr quietly said to her. "Do you think it will be so bad?" she asked. "I know you do not agree with what I know but I know who I am now. I know more than I knew a few days ago and I am remembering more about it even now. Why should I hide this from them? You yourself said that resolving this would go a long way toward easing matters with them." "That was when they were looking for a missing man. Now they are looking at something else altogether. This done in this way eases one pressure and increases another. Instead of an answer you have given them another question. And they will have to answer it. They will have no choice; it is in their nature. Theirs is an inquisitive race; knowing the answer to the question is part of what drives them and they will not simply accept what you have told them without further inquiry. What you have done may even have been necessary, but it may not have been wise to have chosen this moment to do so. We know so little about what has happened as yet and the answers that we can provide them now may be viewed with greater suspicion because of it. Were the same answers given with more fact to support them they would be accepted much more easily when given over to them at a later time." "I think I know my people," Cecil said. "The answers we have will have to suffice. You say to me that telling them this now will cause greater suspicion. But I'm telling you that passing this on to them later will do the same thing. If I didn't tell them now and opted to tell them later it would look like we are trying to hide something. You tell me that we need to safeguard the Grove and I believe you. I can't help but believe you when I feel my own connection to it getting stronger by the moment. But we can't do that if the men we have to speak to, the men we have to work with gain that security have a reason to distrust what it is that we say to them." "We have nothing more that we can do and you have told me repeatedly that my absence is causing more friction the longer the reason for it goes unresolved. Holding this information to ourselves would be more damaging in the long run than admitting that we don't know as much now." "They are not your people, Sister," M'Tehr cautioned her. "Not any longer if they ever were. I know you have come to think this is what is, but you haven't offered us anything more than scraps of memory, memories that may not even be your own, to show that is indeed so. You know my thoughts on this. When you told me this idea I suggested that you show caution and let more of your true recollections come to the surface. The scraps of memory that you base this idea on may be nothing more than fragments that you gleaned instead." "And this is what I have done," Cecil answered her. "I have let my memory guide me as you told me to do. This isn't something that I have latched onto to try to explain away what you can't explain. I have been remembering more and more and because I have, what I can tell them is more important than you think." Cecil looked at M'Tehr. She could see that the Hamadryad still strongly objected to her doing this and she had cautioned her against speaking of this too soon when she first brought up the idea, but Cecil knew she was right. The problem was she hadn't told M'Tehr just why it was that she knew she was right and her sisters were wrong. She hadn't done so because the memory was new and fresh and still jagged. And she had not had time to show M'Tehr the truth of it. "It may be as you say," M'Tehr finally admitted, backing off of the topic slightly. "It may be that you have indeed grown from the seed of who you think you were but they will not see the seed. They will only see the sapling." "That may be true," Cecil answered her. "But if they listen then to what the sapling tells them why does it matter if they see who I was or who I am? I am still the one who holds this Grove. You have been telling me that since I could think straight and I think that this is the best course for the Grove even if you don't agree." M'Tehr eventually acceded to her desire but Cecil could tell that the Hamadryad did not yet agree with her. She needed to show her what it was that made her so utterly certain that she was the one that was correct in this but there wasn't enough time to do so. She needed to show them all, but she was not certain she had the strength to and there was no time. The men had finished their discussion and now they were walking back towards Cecil -------------------------------------------- "How can she be Barnes?" Mitch asked when they were far enough away from the three fae. He wasn't asking anyone in particular. It was just a question that was directed to all and open for any to answer even though he knew that it was not likely that any of them could do so. "That is the keystone of all that has happened here I think," Singh said slowly. "All the information that we have gathered thus far has lacked a central means of tying it together until now. We are looking for Barnes and it appears that now we may have found him, albeit in this altered form." "So you believe her when she said she was Barnes?" Mitch said. "Not completely Detective Travers, but I can also tell that she is not intending to mislead or deceive us when she gave us that answer." "You could read her then?" Jim asked. "Not fully," he admitted. "She has a strong natural shield for her private thoughts. Most dryads do as part of their nature, but I can't sense any intentions on her part that seems in any way malevolent right now." "So what was that act she put on for us just now? She sure seemed to go about telling us this in a roundabout way don't you think?" "I think that was also her nature coming into play," Singh said. "Dryads tend to become playful around humans. It's something they just do. They can't help themselves from giving in to it. Some survival mechanism I think." "M'Tehr doesn't seem to give in to that temptation," Mitch observed. "M'Tehr is an exception. Dryads in her position need to interact more frequently with humans and they have cultivated greater self discipline. Just because you don't see her behaving in the same fashion does not mean that she is not prone to the same impulses. This dryad though is freshly emerged from a period of madness. Whether she is Barnes as she claims to be or something else I think that, for the moment, she has even less control over the playful aspect of her nature than the run of the mill dryad. " "So what does that means for us? Do we take her at her word and that's the end of it?" Jim asked. "Because I'm not really inclined to do something like that." "Hardly, Detective Brighton. The truth is that our objective in coming here has not changed even with this new development. We still need to explain how and why Cecil Barnes disappeared, we need to explain the appearance of this Grove and now we need to explain how the man Cecil Barnes has apparently become this dryad as she so claims. She may have those answers as well as the answer to what is happening with Hank Phillips. It is up to us now to determine if those answers are indeed true." "And if they are true?" Jim asked him. "Then I fear the questions that will arise to replace the ones that we answer today may lead us somewhere that we don't wish to go but will be unable to avoid doing so once they are known," Singh replied. "You saw how the three of them greeted us when we arrived?" "Couldn't really miss that," Mitch said. "I was wondering for a minute if we all needed bow and kiss her ring. Not that I could see that she was wearing one." "Wheels are now in motion gentlemen. What we just experienced was a Declaration of Being. A formal proclamation of the existence of a Grove under the terms of the Concord. I would advise you both to speak to this dryad in as respectful a manner as possible for the remainder of our conversation. We must make every effort now to meet the expectations that we are now held to in speaking with a member of the Grove. She is no longer just a person of interest in this investigation, she is as close to royalty as the Grove acknowledges and there will be consequences if we fail to fulfil every jot and title of the absolute letter of the law. This was supposed to be nothing more than an interview, but we have been thrust into this position by the will of others. M'Tehr is not responsible for this I think, she moves by the will of her people and she would not have done this without the full blessing and backing of the entire Grove network. The Grove network, gentleman, the union of the dryads, has just staked a claim and they have used this interview to make the three of us their witnesses to that under the articles contained in the Concord." "Was that why you asked her about names?" Jim said. "It was," he said, "part of a Declaration of Being identifies the existence of a Fae enclave so that its rights and the obligations of both parties may be identified. But you'll notice that she did not do so." "Does her not doing that invalidate it in some way? Like not signing a check?" Jim asked. "Not quite," Singh answered, "by doing it that way all she did was leave the door open in a manner of speaking." "How so?" Jim asked looking back at the three fae behind them. Him looking at them was impossible to conceal while they were wearing the bulky protective suits, so he knew that there was no way that any of them had missed what he had done. "A Declaration of Being, gentlemen, serves two purposes. One of them is the recognition of what we thought we had here. A member of one of the Fae races that was somehow a revenant of the distant past. Something that was considered just barely a possibility but still included in the Concord because the Fae insisted that it be so." "And the other purpose?" Jim asked. "The other purpose was intended for them to use in the future when ambient magic was stronger and they expanded in their numbers. It was something that was also hypothetical. Until now that is." "Let me get this straight," Jim said trying to wrap his head around it. "This Concord, which most people have never heard of, is supposed to cover and authorize having an ancient group of these people suddenly pop up out of the earth and assert a claim and we have to respect that. And at the same time if a new group appears and does essentially the same thing we have to respect that as well. I'm really not seeing how making a deal like that was such a good idea for our side of the board right now." "Detective Brighton when you put it in the manner that you just did it does indeed sound as unfair to us as you suggest. But there are compensations that come into play in such circumstances as well. And those compensations are much more generous than you know. The thing that is relevant here is that both of these areas of the agreement were hypothetical scenarios when the Concord was hammered out and before this instance there have been very few examples of revenants awakening." "How many have there been?" Mitch asked. "Less than a dozen worldwide since the Concord was signed. And of those near dozen cases only three managed to survive reawakening and retain a semblance of sanity." "What happened to the others?" Jim asked. "They were put down by their own kin," Singh replied. "It was too dangerous to all of us to have left them to continue in the state they were in after it was clear that they would never recover their minds." "So what do we do now? What's the plan?" Jim asked. "The plan is to continue doing what we are here to do gentleman. Investigate the disappearance of Cecil Barnes. Singh answered. "And in doing so we may do more than that. There is something about this entire case that has not felt right since you brought me into it. I could not place my finger on just what it was before and with all that has happened there was not the time to think deeply on it, but I am of a mind to think that the next few minutes will have much bearing on what we know. Possibly more than we may be prepared for," Singh looked at the two detectives and saw that there was agreement in their eyes with what he had said. "With that in mind then gentlemen. Shall we continue?" There was no objection that either of them could think to make so both of them remained silent. He turned back toward the clearing and started going back to where the answers waited. ------------------------------------------------- "You understand that we have reasons to be sceptical over the claim that you just made, Lady of the Grove," Jim said to Cecil. "I understand that," she replied. "If I were in your shoes I would be as well." "So you admit that we have good reason to feel this way, Lady of the Grove," Jim continued. "I can understand why you would feel so detective," she answered, but I think that when you hear what I have to say you will accept my explanation. "We'll see, Lady of the Grove," Jim said to her. "The problem with what you are asking us to believe is it does not match the evidence that we have. Cecil Barnes was a human male, while you are clearly a female and even though you look exactly like any other young woman, we have seen you are identified as Fae not only by our colleague here, but by your own kind as well. How do you explain this?" "I can see how that would argue against my being who I say that I am," she said. "But once you hear what I have to say I think that you will have a better grasp of the bigger picture here." "As long as you answer any questions that we ask and those answers explain the evidence, then I see little problem with any of what you are saying, Lady of the Grove," Jim responded. "I can only demonstrate you what it is that I know. It is up to you to determine if what I show you is the answer that you are looking for and not only the answer that you need to know," she said "Lady of the Grove, have you spoken with the Hamadryad M'Tehr about any of what you are about to relate to us?" Singh asked her. "I ask this not to cast aspersions on what you are intending to relate to us before hearing it, but to determine if there has been influence that you might be unaware of." "She has told me fragments only, but not the whole," M'Tehr interjected. "It is for this reason that I could not name the Lady of the Grove. And you should know as well that I have advised her against telling you this information until she has recovered more of her memory." "And why is that, Lady of the Grove?" Singh said pressing Cecil. "Because mostly I couldn't make much sense of what I know," Cecil answered. "When I emerged from what M'Tehr called my nature I could barely remember anything at all and what I did remember was so disturbing to me that it was all I could do to face it. I wanted to try not to remember." "Why would you not want to remember, Lady of the Grove?" Singh asked. His deep voice taking a slightly gentler tone as he did so. "Because what I remembered was jagged and sharp and smashed into pieces. I couldn't even begin to start making some manner of sense with it until M'Tehr started asking me many of the same questions that you want answers to." "I understand your meaning, Lady of the Grove. Let us start with the obvious then. How does a human male, a developer with one of the biggest software companies in the city not only become a woman but a dryad?" Cecil smiled at the question and playfully shook her head no at them. "You're asking the wrong question," she said to him. "But I'll do what I can to tell you what you want to know until you ask the right ones. And one more thing if you will?" "What is that, Lady of the Grove?" "Can we please, please dispense with the honorifics? I promise I won't take offence and it will make things go much more quickly as well." "I have no objection to suspending the use of honorifics for a short time, Lady of the Grove. In the interests of expediency of course," Singh answered. That is, providing that the Lady M'Tehr does not object?" "In service of expediency in the matter, the Grove has no objection," M'Tehr answered. "So long as proper respect to the Lady of the Grove is also tendered." "Of course, Lady M'Tehr. That is only proper," Singh replied. "Please continue if you would Detective Brighton." "How do you mean we are asking the wrong question?" Jim asked ignoring her spasm of coquettish behaviour. He was familiar with subjects deflecting his questions for their own purposes, but somehow, he didn't think that was what she was doing yet. "I mean you're not starting in the right place," Cecil said. "You're starting somewhere in the middle of what it is you want to know because you want answers to what is in front of you and if I do it that way then you will only know part of what I have to tell you." "And what is the right place then?" he asked ceding the point to her. "You already know the right place," she said. "The right place is the beginning." Mitch looked at the heavily pregnant woman sitting in the throne of root and vine. There were a lot of places that they could consider the right place but there was only one thing that pointed to the beginnings of a connection in his opinion. "Why did you want to start using Black Lotus?" he said to her. "And that is the right question. Everything that conspired to bring me here and make me like this begins there," she said. "The answer is that it was an impulse. I found some for sale at the flea market and I was curious about it. I don't think I would have gone looking for it deliberately otherwise." Jim flipped through his notebook until he found the relevant scribble, he had made about this. "You bought it from a woman named Tonya? Is that correct?" "Yes, how did you know that?" she asked feeling a sudden need to pout. "I have been reading the journal that we found when we searched Cecil Barnes's house. The story that he related there seemed a bit far-fetched when read in isolation." She looked down at her own body and moved her hands down to grip both sides of the pregnancy that was distorting her form. "And yet here we are both in the same situation. And to think that I was foolish enough to believe that because I was going to do something completely different than she did that I wouldn't end up in similar set of circumstances." "We tried to locate this Tonya, but so far we have had little luck. Tracking down someone who breezes in there to have a yard sale is not the easiest thing to do," Mitch mentioned. Cecil recognized that it was more for his companions benefit than anything that was directed at her. "If you want to wait all you have to do is be at the hospital in a couple of months. I'm sure the staff would remember who they are when she starts swearing during labour." "I would think that a woman displaying that sort of behaviour in such circumstances is fairly unremarkable to the average hospital staff," Mitch commented. "True, but one that insists that she should not be doing this at all because she is supposed to be a man would stand out even to them." "Finding her is not as much of a priority if what you are telling us checks out," Mitch answered. "So why did you start using Lotus?" "I wanted to know if what I had heard about it was true." "And just what did you hear that it would do for you?" Singh asked her. "As I understood it, once I learned how to properly harness it I would have access to secrets and knowledge that most people didn't even suspect existed. I wanted to know what those secrets were." "And is that what you desired? Power and access to secrets?" Jim asked. "Not like that," she answered. "I was just curious is all." "And what did you find out when you got into the aether? What did going there give to you?" Singh asked interrupting Jim. "Everything," she said to them in a breathy voice. "The first time I slipped into the aether I was unable to even move. All I could do was float above barely above myself and watch things flicker around me. I watched my house being built. Not remodelled but built. I saw a dozen forest fires burn into nothing but cinders in the place where my house stands. I felt like all I had to do to find something out was just to look around for it and the entire time I was in that state I was frustrated. "Why?" Singh asked. "Because I wanted to do so much more. The entire time I was out of my body I was still tethered to it. It took me nearly the entire time I was under to open the bonds enough for me to get loose and then all I could do was flail around like a fish on a forty pound test line once I did." "So, you were able to loosen your physical bonds while you were making your first trip to the Aether then?" Singh asked. "That's quite a remarkable claim for a newcomer there to make." "Yes," she answered. "I'm coming to understand that now. M'Tehr has been telling me in our conversations that it isn't an easy thing for someone to do the first time they enter the aether, but I did manage to do it. Maybe if I hadn't then I would have just given up and I wouldn't be like this now, but I doubt it. I've always been a stubborn one when I ran up against a problem. I just couldn't leave it alone. That's part of what made me such a good programmer." "And what did you do then?" Singh asked. Jim and Mitch let him take the lead in the interview because it had veered so completely into his area of expertise. Something he was grateful for the two of them doing. He had worked with other detectives on other cases that had assumed what he was speaking of was nothing more than hokum and had brushed him off with little regard for the facts presenting themselves. "When I came back from the aether, I did what I would have done for any problem," she said. "I did a great deal of research to try to find a solution and once I did find something out that looked like a likely solution I wanted to try it out and see if I was right. When I thought that I could do what I wanted to do when I found myself there I went back in." "You must have had a disciplined mind. And could you do what you intended to do once you did so?" he asked. "Yes," she said. "I could move around. At first it was like swimming. I felt like I was in an MMOG while I was there if you want to know the truth. Someone who hasn't done this has no idea of how exhilarating it is to move around like that for real instead of on a computer screen. Later, when I learned how to move without imitating a spectre, that is when I really became interested in being there." "Why was that?" Mitch asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. "Because when I was there is when I found out that there was a lot more that I could do than just look around and see bits and pieces of the past. I found out that I could not only change myself but I could affect things here in this world as well." "And this is when you became female?" Jim asked her. "Is that one of the changes that you made because you could do something like that?" "No, that happened much later. What I was doing was starting to learn to do things to the things around me. I never considered making changes to myself there at first. I didn't consider that was even a possibility. I didn't think that even with what I had seen and done after a while that it could allow me to do those things. In some ways I never thought that I could make changes on that scale outside of a game format. And then suddenly I could" "Like what?" Mitch pressed. "What changes did you make if you didn't make this change in yourself?" "Mostly small things, in the beginning all of them I kept confined to when I was in the aether, I didn't try them on for size in the real world." "What sort of small things?" Mitch asked. "Things like making me look younger for a little while." I spent a week while I was working at home being twelve years old again every time I crossed over. That was about the extent of how far I went with changing myself and just when I thought I was able to take my next step I ran into something I didn't expect to find there." "And is that when you raised your wards?" Singh asked. "I detected two of them while I was examining your home." "Yes, that's when I raised the wards," she said. "The first few times it didn't take long for me to find out that when I left my body, I stayed connected to it with what looked like a very thin tether. The fourth or fifth time I was away from my body I started feeling like something was picking at me while I was there. It wasn't much at first but each time I did so I started to feel more and more pain from whatever it was that was causing it." "So, I made a plan the next time I travelled there. I doubled back and hovered over my body where hopefully I would be high enough that whatever was hurting me wouldn't see me lying in wait," she said. "What did you find when you did that?" Jim asked her. "I found that when I was gone, it wouldn't be long before these small creatures arrived and once they did they began to pick at my tether. I guess they were attracted by the unshielded life energy radiating off of it right where it connected to my body. They were nothing more than some form of scavengers I'd never seen before and what I felt was when they were eating part of my tether. Once I saw what was responsible, I descended and chased them away. But now that I knew what it was that was causing me to feel that I needed something to keep them away from me before I went back in." "How did you learn to raise a ward then?" Singh asked. "Once I got back fully to this world, I did what I always would do in that situation. I dove in and did more research. I found what I was looking for and then put what it was I needed into place to keep them away from me. Those things were nothing but a nuisance anyway. The danger from them that I learned was that with continued exposure and enough time they could sever my tether and I would be lost and wouldn't' be able to find my way back to my body." "That is quite true. There are many accounts of some who vanished into the aether only to find their path back severed. I too have learned of these creatures in my studies. They are called the Borok' phai, the eaters of souls. They are as you say a nuisance, but they still pose a danger to those who do not take sufficient precautions. Who was it then that taught you to raise a ward?" Singh asked. "No one really did. I just looked up some things on the internet and found references to books that I could order that would tell me more. I spoke with a group of others who were doing the same thing online and learned from them what the problem might be and how to fix it. But no one showed me how and the next time I was there I set the ward to repel creatures of the aether into place so that they would be kept away. It seemed easy enough to do so I did it," she said. "And why did you raise the second one if the first one met the needs you spoke of?" Singh asked. "That happened after this happened," she said indicating her naked body. "And just what did happen?" Jim asked. So far all he had heard was pretty much a recap of what he had read in Barnes's journal. And the only thing that told him was that if she was not Barnes that she had likely had access to it somehow. And if she had just read it then it seemed she also had a very good memory as well despite her claim that she had trouble piecing it all together after coming out of her feral state. Considering the set of foot prints leading away from the house in this direction, that piece of evidence argued more that she had been in the house rather than she had been the owner of the house. "If you want to understand that I need to tell you a little more about how it was for me being there in the Aether first," Cecil said. "The big thing that I found out that I could do there was to make changes to myself that were not what you would call normal. I already told you I spent a week being twelve years old again, but that was not all I did." She continued. "At first, I kept it fairly low key and safe. I gave myself long hair, I made myself bald, I layered muscles on muscles until Arnold looked like a ninety pound weakling compared to me. I made myself only an inch tall. I made myself almost a hundred meters tall. I bent myself in so many different ways but I still basically remained the man I was. It was all just variations on a theme. But after I had spent a few weeks there I found that I was spending a lot of time pushing the envelope while I was there. Things that I had only dreamed of doing outside of a computer world were suddenly possible for me for real." "What sort of things? Jim asked. "For one thing I found that I could walk through things that were solid here while I was there. That was an accident the first time it happened. I wasn't paying attention and I ended up putting my hand through the wall. Things there are easier to pass through it seemed to me. It was like I was more solid than what I found there was and I could just enter it like it was smoke. I did that for a while and then I started seeing if I could try to manifest myself as solid in the real world even though I was still in the aethereal one. I was starting to make even more progress and I was gaining a lot of confidence in what I could do there. But it wasn't until I began to alter myself in the material world that I started along the way toward ended up like this," she said. "How do you mean alter yourself?" She giggled before she answered. "If you must know it was the time I gave myself a fourteen inch dick. It was when I was just playing around with changing myself there, but I was vain about it so I never changed it back. I just left it like that and the thing was I found out that after enough time staying that way...it changed that way for real." "So, when did you make the decision to turn yourself female?" Mitch asked her. "You're jumping ahead in the story again," she said. This time she did pout. "But I'll tell you anyway." "I never decided to do that to myself, maybe I might have given enough time. I probably would have added it to the list of things to do just to see if I could do them, but what I was doing when this happened was making wings for myself," she said. "This might even have been fun if that was something I had chosen to do. Like I said I might have tried it eventually once I had finished exploring other things that were more interesting to me, but I digress. The important thing is that I'm not the one who made me like this." "Who did then?" Jim asked. He noticed something and he wondered if Singh had as well. He was certain that Mitch picked up on it. As long as she was talking about what she was doing to herself she projected that playful demeanour while she was talking about it. The moment she started talking about becoming who she was that demeanour vanished completely into utter seriousness. Jim didn't think she was lying and he wondered why the idea of that alarmed him so much. "I don't know who he is. All I know is that he moves in shadow and he terrifies me more than you can possibly understand. I called him the dark man when I dared think about him at all after I escaped." "A dark man?" Mitch asked. "Are you trying to say some black man that you ran into is responsible for this?" "I didn't say a black man," she said, "I said a dark man. A man that literally was dark. I know it's not that creative of a name but it is an accurate description of him. I didn't have time to get creative when I was running for my life. When I saw him in there it was like he was made entirely of shadows." "How do you mean escaped?" The woman on the throne shuddered. Jim noticed that now that she was speaking about something that had a negative emotional component that the forest around them was starting to draw close around them. Almost like it was a cloak being drawn tight against the body to conceal it. "I mean escaped. I mean that he captured me while I was in the aether. He toyed with me and then when he was tired of toying with me, he made me into this woman," she said shuddering. "Maybe it would be easier to follow if you just let me tell you how it happened and save the questions for after I'm done." Mitch looked at the other two detectives. Neither one of them indicated any objections to that so he nodded his agreement and let the woman who called herself Cecil Barnes continue uninterrupted. --------------------------------------- Cecil was going to try something new this time. Each time that he had gone into the aether previously he had contented himself with doing small things in small ways. The problem with that was that what he was considering small was changing with each expedition. Each trip had been a voyage of discovery for him and he was finding it was getting harder to motivate himself to return to the physical world. There was not any barrier placed between him doing so, rather it was that he was losing his desire to do so. In some ways for him it was like when he got wrapped up in MMOG's. The world there was so much more intoxicating than the mundane one he inhabited that the digital world he was visiting became preferable to him. When that happened in his gaming life, he usually forced himself to withdraw. He'd seen what happened when you allowed yourself to be subsumed by the shadows you created and that was not ever pretty. The aether was not like that though. It was thought made manifest. It was not a shadow of reality, but a reflection and the image that was held up for him to view was just as solid as the real world in its own way. And with each new vista that opened up for him there he was finding he had less and less desire to leave. There was just too much for him to discover here. The last few weeks of exploration he had spent his time exploding things. Exploding something in the aether seemed a poor word to describe what it was that he had been doing, but that was the closest physical world equivalent to what it was that he was actually doing there. He had been reading online some of the other accounts of what people said was possible in the aether. Some of it seemed completely in the realm of fantasy to him; not that the idea of fantasy bothered him since he had enjoyed the genre for years. It was just when he tried to match his rational mind against what was supposedly possible there that he had a hard time believing that it could happen. That was something that held him back for weeks when he decided to attempt this exercise in what the aether was really capable of doing. The surprising thing was that he had little trouble exploding inanimate objects. He was able to do that almost immediately. With living things, he found he was, for a long time unable to take the next step and he wondered if his exploration of this part of the aether was just going to be a dead end. Exploding something here was not that different from seeing it lay out on paper. The more accurate comparison he supposed would be with the special effects that he had seen in some films. All you had to do was to take control of something in the aether and will it to separate into its component parts, just as you would do so if you were drawing a diagram of some piece of hardware. His first experiment had been with an old broken radio. He hadn't even had to leave the house to do that. He went up into the attic where the dusty wood cabinet that housed the 1940's model RCA was kept. It was something that was in the house when he bought the place and finding it had been as much of a thrill for him as when he ran across something in the flea market. It didn't work of course. Whatever it was that prompted the previous owner to tuck it away under a cloth in one corner of the attic was serious enough to reduce it to nothing more than an ornate room decoration, but not serious enough to warrant sending it to a landfill. The wood was a dark polished mahogany underneath the thick dust that had filtered under the sheet that covered it. His first thought when he saw it after flipping the sheet off was where he was going to put it once he had restored it. The problem was that there was no one in Stafford that would venture to repair it and that was what he wanted. He wanted it to be restored as much as it could be before he put it back downstairs. He had found an older man who could do the job, but he lived three states away and the price he wanted to do the job made him wince when he heard it. It wasn't the first time that one part of his collection had turned out to have a higher price tag than he expected, so he did what he always did when that was the case. He punted the project down the road until he could make it happen. The problem in this case was that when he had the money and called, he found out that the man he had spoken to had died in between the two calls. The woman who ran the shop now offered to attempt the restoration, but from the way that she was talking about it, Cecil didn't think that she would be able to do it in the manner that he had in mind. It wasn't because she was a woman that stopped him; it was something in how she was talking about doing the job itself that stopped him. The man he had spoken to, either her father or grandfather had impressed him with being able to detail the possibilities and the likelihood of correcting them without even seeing the radio. When he spoke about it Cecil could tell that it wasn't just the voice of experience that he was listening to, it was a voice that had both experience and passion in the same way that Cecil did and he appreciated that more. She on the other hand was approaching the project the way you approach changing a dirty baby. There was no love of the project in her, just the need to do a quick and dirty job and move on. He didn't think that she really wanted to do it at all, but she would if he hired her to. She'd take the job, she might even do a tolerable job, but there was no connection with it the same way her elder had conveyed. When she quoted him an even higher price than before that was enough for him to thank her for her time and lie that he would be in touch when he was ready to get it taken care of. The bottom line was that after talking with her, he didn't trust her to do more than the bare minimum to restore it. And the chance that she might, in her seemingly uncaring fashion, damage it further was just too great for him to take. Cecil reluctantly put the radio away where he had found it and kept looking for someone who could do it justice. Before he had gone into the aether he had brought it down into the Florida room. That was where he intended to put it anyway and if this worked at all it was all to the good as far as he was concerned. Besides he needed an open area and while the ward he had cast protected most of the house he didn't want to have something intrude while he was trying to do this. At first the wooden cabinet of the radio remained unchanged. He tried coming in direct contact with it at first before realizing that was just an affectation that carried over with him from the physical world and he stopped doing it. Not surprisingly, he failed utterly. Each time afterward was also a failure and he was beginning to think that he would have to abandon this attempt like he had to abandon restoring the radio for now. In the end he ended up seated in a lotus position as he often did when he contemplated a problem in the aether. Without meaning to he lazily focused on looking over the tuning knob and was gratified and startled to see it detach itself and float over to him before resting in his palm. As he stared at it he could feel the structure of the metal knob in his mind as he held it. And as his mind roamed over it the knob exploded and expanded in front of his eyes until he saw it as a three-dimensional representation of itself. His fingers traced the inner grooves where it had been cast and he could see where metal fatigue was starting to make its mark, even without any use for no one knew how many years. He could see where it had been worn smooth with use and where it was strongest. He looked at the interior curvature of where it mated with the dial and saw how some weak points had clustered over pressure points where it made contact. He would have to be careful when he used this knob in the future he thought and watched it collapse back into itself. The other thing that he noticed only became clear the next day. He had the day off for a change. The project team that he headed up had finally made delivery on the entirety of their portion of the project and they were in housekeeping mode while they waited for the other project sections to catch up. Normally, they would just forge ahead, but with how integrated this project was that just wasn't possible. Shifting their focus to another project wasn't feasible in the short time available so no one higher in the food chain at Maxintell pushed the idea. Instead they called it down time and no one on his team argued with them over it. Cecil least of all. He was having some difficulty in maintaining his focus, or if not maintaining it then keeping it completely targeted on his team's goals. Ever since he had begun to discover what was really possible in the aether he was drawn back over and over again and the serious nature of it didn't really register with him until he was in the office one night working late and found himself involuntarily shifting from one realm to the other. He was in a meeting with the other section heads discussing project updates and in general wasting each other's time repeating what had been said at the same sort of meeting only a few days before. There was plenty of time for him to think of other things like what was going on in the aether, since his part had already come and gone and at most, he would be required to volunteer some input on what one of the others said. He was listening with half and ear to the conversation and considering the problem he was having with exploding things in the way he had read that he should be able to do. From the way it was described in what he had dug up it should be simple to do, but Dunning-Krueger was working against him here. Instead of actually being simple the effort he was expending seemed anything but simple. It was more like a code that he couldn't break no matter which way he came at it. He was considering the problem again and he felt a strong flash of resentment that he was stuck in this time-wasting excuse for a meeting when the physical world receded and he found himself in the aether. His first reaction was shock that it had even happened. There was no way this should have happened at all. He only used lotus when he was certain that he would have time to pass between both realms and he hadn't been able to imbibe for several days because of his work schedule. He almost panicked when he found himself in the aethereal version of conference room twenty-one-zero-one. He felt a moment's disorientation and then calmed himself and willed himself to return. He was only gone for a few seconds in actuality. He doubted that anyone noticed. It had been in the beginning of the end of the meeting and someone else was speaking so all eyes were off of him when it happened. After he hastily shifted back to the physical world, he fidgeted for a bit and he found he had no further problem with his mind wandering for the rest of the meeting. With time off he wanted to try to repeat what had happened in the conference room but when he walked into the Florida room, he felt something being displaced against his foot and he heard the tinkle of metal as it skittered across the brick facing of the floor. He looked down and saw that the metal knob that he had examined in the aether the day before had somehow moved to physically occupy the same space that he had left its aethereal counterpart in. He reached down for it and retrieved it from where it had come to a stop and held it up to the light to look at it before replacing it on the dial. ---------------------------------- "So, you are saying that you moved this radio knob in the dream world and then it moved in the real world?" Jim asked her. "Yes, I did," she answered quietly. She still hadn't moved very far into her narrative and even with the detail of the answers that she was giving she still seemed to mainly be just relating what had happened to them rather than trying to slant the meaning of her words in some fashion. Jim turned to Singh and asked him if he had heard of anything like what she was telling them happening before and saw him nod his head before answering that it was a common effect. As he explained it like called to like and what was done in one world was echoed and mimicked in the other. That the process passed in both directions and when she had moved it and left it sitting there it was only a matter of time until the metal knob was going to move of its own accord so that it was in sync with its aethereal counterpart. He looked like he wanted to say more, but he merely held his peace and asked her to continue. Jim made a mental addition to the running checklist of questions he intended to ask Singh about when they were finished here and saw the heavy man's eyebrow twitch upward when he did so. Cecil looked at the three men seated before her. It was not going to be possible to just tell this story to them as she had hoped. She'd asked them to hold their questions until later so that they could get the full uninterrupted understanding of it all. She could see now that was a forlorn hope. She glanced quickly at M'Tehr standing beside her and Jacen. M'Tehr was connected to the entire Grove network. What she saw they would see. She steeled herself. What she would do next was going to tax her to the very foundations of her being, but it needed to be done. Of them all Jacen would have the heaviest burden in this she thought. So be it she decided and reached out to them. --------------------------------- Cecil looked at the knob on the dial for a moment and then concentrated and envisioned himself shifting between the planes. It happened with less effort than he thought it would take. There was some resistance at first, but it fell away with only a little effort and he found himself surrounded in the aethereal version of his home looking at the old radio. He moved away from his body and felt his essence separate from the physical and when he glanced down, he saw the thin blue tendrils of his anchor leading from where he was to where he had been. This was different he realized almost immediately, for one thing instead of a single tendril there were more of them and they were smaller ones in comparison. When he used lotus to enter the aethereal plane he felt much more connected to it as well. Entering it in this fashion made him feel swaddled and blocked off in some strange way. Like he was not completely in the aethereal world at all, but only passing through it in some way. As he considered how different he felt the obvious comparison that came to him was how information packets were shifted about on the net. When he used lotus to facilitate the transfer it was like a dedicated direct line connection, this was more like he was being broken into pieces and sent all at once and not arriving all at the same time. He didn't like how it felt. Maybe it was just what he had become accustomed to, but he preferred going there while the lotus was there to ease his passage and he didn't want to stay very long this time. He would have to explore this later, but first he would have to overcome his discomfort over doing it this way. He slipped back into and merged with his body before separating his essence from the aether and started gathering what he needed to enter the way he wanted to enter. He opened the louvered windows at the top of the Florida room for ventilation and got started. The brazier was easy for him to light by this point; he certainly had enough practice doing it by now. The tinder caught quickly and he slowly fed it small pieces of hickory until it was well and truly caught. He supposed he could have used ordinary charcoal to do this but there was something about using wood to do this with and even with the extra effort it didn't take long for the coals to begin to settle down. He sprinkled his pinch for today into the pan and waited. Once the fumes of the lotus began to rise and envelop him he felt the more comforting sensation of his familiar complete immersion in the aether rise up around him again. As he walked through the wall into the back yard Cecil pondered the difference between the two ways that he had found to get here. True he didn't care as much for the new way he had discovered but it could definitely prove useful he realized. Going through while lotus made the passage possible was something that he was already ready to do and familiar with, but he also had to consider that he only had just so much of the lotus he bought left. Even if he only used a small pinch at a time whenever he indulged he was still burning his way through it. Eventually it would be gone entirely and if he was unable to find a similar stock of the same type he might just be left with this as his sole means of getting back here as well. Still there had to be some kind of advantage to doing it this way, he wouldn't have been the first one to have found himself able to slip between realms at will like this. He sighed to himself. Like so many other things he had discovered here it looked very much like this was something that was going to result in him climbing back on the research wagon again. That part really didn't bother him; he just wished that he had been able to make better progress on his current bugaboo before doing that again. There was a rustle in the winds overhead and he looked up in time to see a sparrow darting overhead. He reached out and felt its passage slow and then stop. That was a neat trick. He'd learned it weeks ago and it wasn't often that he got the chance to use it. The bird was suspended just over thirty or so feet above his head. He concentrated on himself while still holding the bird immobile and felt his perspective begin to rise upward as he steadily added mass and height to his body. When he was able to reach for the bird he plucked it from the sky and held it motionless in his hand. He looked at its frozen form lying there in his hand and felt a moment's jealousy over how it could just fly without thinking about it. He'd made himself coast and fly like a superman comic more times that he could count by this time but there was something about having a pair of wings of his own that he could use the same way. He'd tried to do it before. He'd looked up all of the information about it online and in the library, but when he came here to do it himself he was just stumped it seemed. He ran his finger along the sparrow's flight feathers and got ready to put the bird back in the air and release it. "I wish I knew what I was doing wrong," Cecil said regretfully as he started to let the bird go. When his fingers fell away from it the bird exploded. Cecil froze looking at the living bird detailed just as he had seen in so many diagrams hanging in front of him. He watched each beat of its heart pumping blood through arteries veins and capillaries. He saw neurons firing in the bird's brain in response to the last stimulus they had received before he had stopped it moving. And he saw the muscles moving as they shifted to create the steps that made flight possible for a little sparrow. Fascinated he kept the bird exploded and let loose of holding it in place. He followed behind it as it moved through the air in slow motion enthralled by how the muscles moved, how the bone structure acted to aid it in this simple act of motion and more importantly he watched the interplay between the motion of the wings and the brain guiding it. He had no idea it was that complex at all. Even the muscle attachment had to be just right or it wouldn't work. The good thing about this happening was that his fascination had overcome his shock at suddenly succeeding in exploding a living thing. He wondered what it was that let him succeed this time. Before he could let the thought digest too much the next thought crowded right in after it. Would he be able to return the bird back the way it was? It would be a pretty sorry return to allow the little sparrow to wind up like his radio had just because he couldn't put him back together. He closed his eyes and envisioned the birds system moving back in line to where they were in reality. He concentrated as the image in his mind moved back to where it began. Circulatory, neurological muscular, every system that came together to make up one small sparrow shifted in his mind until he knew it was back in place where it belonged. Cecil opened one eye almost unwillingly, half afraid that he had botched it in some way and released the bird back into normal time stream. The bird sat on his enormous palm for a moment twitching his head and twisting it in that circular pattern bird's use as it got a better look at the giant human holding him. It chirped and spread its wings and soared away from Cecil. Cecil had been holding his breath the entire time that it took to release the bird and watching it fly away. He shifted his vision until he could follow it easily as it dwindled but there was no indication that the bird suffered any ill effects from what he had done to it. A flash of triumph flickered in his breast. He'd actually done it. He'd managed to successfully explode a living creature and return it to its proper condition. Moreover he was certain from his observation that now he knew exactly what it was that he had been doing wrong when he had made his abortive effort to create wings for his own use in the aether as well. What was it that had been different this time he wondered? Had it been because he was not actually focussing trying to explode the bird at all? As he thought more on it, that seemed more likely than not. After all he had been more focused on wondering why what he was doing in a related subject was not working rather than trying to force this task to completion instead. He came to realize that if it was the other way around he would not have been able to do it at all. But because he had done it this way, whatever internal safeguards that he raised against himself were not engaged and the effort managed to slip past them. It had to be a mental issue he realized. Something inside of him was holding him back for some reason, but whatever it was it had been overcome for just a moment and that moment was all he needed to know that he could do it. He wasn't going to try exploding a living thing again right now though. If he did he might even be able to succeed a second time, but he had no inclination to try. He was just too excited. Not only had this barrier been overcome unexpectedly, he knew what it was that he was doing wrong. A feeling of exhilaration made his own nerve endings hum with excitement. It wasn't a matter of crafting wings that would work in the manner that the books said they should work and it wasn't a matter of making his bones sufficiently hollow so as to function in a similar fashion. Those were just parts of the whole. Important parts to be sure but there was so much more than that he realized now. What he had been doing up until this point was little different than trying to change a tire on a car and leaving off lug nuts with which to hold it in place and omitting to grease the moving parts so they would function as they should. Of course you couldn't just slap an adapted set of wings onto a human frame. That wasn't even step one let alone two. There were so many other things that had to be in place just to support the external that if you didn't know they should be there your eye would just slide over them and not even register that it had even seen what you needed to know. He wanted to get right to work on it and in his mind he began turning over the steps necessary for him to even make this attempt. Once he had them all down he ran them through his mind again. For a brief moment he wondered how this would work if he tried to work out those calculations out of the aether itself and if in some fashion he wasn't smarter to a degree when he was in here. That was an interesting idea. He should test it the next time he had a complex project and see how it compared to his performance out of the aether. That was for another time though. He finished his mental check and decided that he probably had just enough time for him to attempt this before he reached his departure time. Keeping his departure time was important to him. He used the same method when he played MMOG's. Having a hard departure time was a helpful way for him to keep from getting sucked into too much and finding out that when he raised his head from those waters that more time than he had planned on expending had passed. The first thing he made was the wings themselves, that was the easy part, calling them into being. The substance that made up the aether was far more malleable than he expected it to be. What was difficult was crafting them so that they would fit behind his shoulder blades the way he wanted them to and still attach properly. He had already figured out that if he just wanted to convert his arms into wings that would be more feasible but he didn't want that. He was going for angel, not harpy. That was his downfall he realized. If he hadn't cared about that stylistic aspect he probably would already have succeeded in doing this. Creating wings in that fashion would have used many of the same neural pathways that he already used. That was part of what was missing by placing them angel fashion. Another thing he overlooked was blood flow. Without mapping that out and incorporating it into his circulatory system the wings would be useless. Even with proper mapping it still wouldn't work, he needed a higher circulatory pressure as well to offset the different requirements this modification would place on his altered body. There was, after all, a reason why a hummingbird's heart beat as fast as it did. He may not be in the real world doing this but it seemed the rules governing how things worked remained fairly constant. What being here did for him was to allow him to bend those rules in his favour according to how those constants functioned. As long as he followed those constants he had a great deal of latitude in bending others. He slipped them into place. What he knew now made placing them in the optimal position almost too easy for him now. But that was deceptive. He mapped out the changes that needed to be made to adjust his body to its new configuration. Each system needed to mesh properly so he took his time. In his mind's eye he flashed along tracks in his own body checking connections and testing them until he was certain that he had covered every aspect except one. Bone density was going to be the tricky part. He needed to make his skeletal frame light enough that the wings would be able to function as he intended and still maintain enough strength to support him when he landed. Take away too much and he would be unable to support his own frame upon landing and in that condition a broken bone would be the least of his worries. He supposed there was a lesson there, but he was too caught up in what he was doing to puzzle it out right now. The last step, but one more thing before he committed himself. He flexed and hoped he was right. Cecil's smile nearly split his head in two when he first felt, then saw the wings on his back start to move and then spread to their full length. He had made them much larger in scale to overcome the physics of his human frame. He gave a tentative flap and felt a moment of joy as his muscles strained to lift him off. Not even possible of course, not like he was but it did at least give him a proof of concept. Now for the dicey part. Reducing his mass. He focused inward again and reduced about fifteen percent. Another attempt. This time his wings managed to lift him about six inches from the ground. He gave it up for now and concentrated on reducing more mass. His second attempt snared him a good meter of distance before he had to give it up and return to earth. In the end it took him eight or nine attempts to get the balance right. Although to be truthful the last four of those attempts were him trying to scale up and add mass rather than subtract it. His final attempt saw him rise into the air just as he wanted to when he first began to entertain this idea. The wind shrieked past him and his wings shifted with the air currents as he fought for altitude. It really was so very different than when he had opted to fly like superman shortly after he started coming here. That never really felt real to him. Too much like what he thought it would be like when compared to doing something similar on a computer. Of course it was exciting but it didn't feel anything like this. He tried to put it into some familiar category as he caught a thermal and spiralled up even higher. The most obvious comparison was to hang gliding, but that was not even close. There were some principals that were shared but it, in the end, were not like this. This was more primal, more alive than he expected it to be. After failing to find something in his experience that would match what he was experiencing he realized that only swimming was even a pale cousin to what he was feeling and stopped trying to categorize it. It was flying; real flying and it had no frame of reference for him because until he had done this there was no frame of reference possible. He looked down and realized that he had risen nearly a thousand feet above where he started from. It wasn't the first time he had looked down at his home from the safety of the aether. He'd gone even higher before more times than he could think of offhand. What was different about this flight was how he was moving with the air itself. He dove toward the river and flared to level off a couple of hundred feet over the stone of the river walk. The landscape flashed beneath his wings and before he really expected it, he could see the Well's river bridge coming up fast. He banked right and passed over the bridge toward the centre of town. Already he was going farther afield than he had planned to, but he decided to indulge himself a bit more. Ahead of him, sitting on the bank of the river was the Alagosta textile Mill. Running parallel with the river was the canal that the mill's owner had dug to dip into the river and power the machinery when it was first built. Cecil banked again and descended to the roof. It would make a good a landing field as any other place he thought. Sure there were venting pipes and chimneys poking out of it still, but it was also broad and flat and there was a good deal of height that he could use to jump off just like a sparrow and regain altitude once he was ready to leave. As he came in for his landing he wondered if he wasn't being overconfident. He had been making landings before he tried this, but that was when he was doing superman style flight. Considering how many laws were constants here he might not be as ready for this as he thought. The thought only lasted for a moment though. This is where our hang gliding experience is relevant his mind argued back. A landing is a landing. The physics and aerodynamic principles are the same. Stop over thinking it and just land! That thought made too much sense to dismiss. Cecil stopped thinking about it and concentrated on his landing again. The broad expanse of the tar coated roof grew larger as he made his approach. The wind rushing past his cheeks made it hard to judge his airspeed and a moment's doubt flickered back up into his mind. Flare! The thought blazed in his mind and he shifted his angle of approach so as to present a wider surface and spill airspeed quickly. The roof which had been rocketing toward him stalled and slowed and then he felt his soles impact on the hard surface. With each strike of his feet as he flapped his wings and ran it out as the roof below him boomed hollowly with each step. Cecil came to a full stop and panted although that was probably more of a reflexive action than from actual need. He'd already learned that the exertions he experienced here didn't actually translate into actual muscle fatigue. But that didn't stop him from reacting the way that his body expected him to. He stepped up to the waist high brick parapet that lined the roof itself and clambered up on top of it. The mill parking lot spread out below him and he could see the buildings that had been added later on as the city had grown outward and swallowed up the available land around it. Now that he was still again he saw flashes of how it had looked before. One moment the land blanketed with a heavy presence of trees and the next various buildings that he knew were long complete in different stages of construction. He watched the tapestry of the city creep and change around him for a while and decided that he had lingered long enough and it was time to go home. Cecil extended his wings and leapt into the empty space in front of him. He felt his wings bite into the air around him and his muscles pumped to drag him higher. It was so easy he thought. The longer he spent actually doing this the less he spent thinking about what it was that he was doing. It was almost as if he had duplicated the instinct for flight inadvertently as well as everything else. He would have to think on what that could mean when he left the aether he decided. It would be a fascinating topic to discuss the next time he logged on to his lotus explorers group page. As his neighbourhood hove into view he decided that there was one more thing that he wanted to try before he called it a day. During one of his first trips into the aether he had witnessed what looked like one of the workmen who Alagosta hired from time to time to thin out the woodlot lose a pocket watch. From the way the man was dressed he estimated it happened sometime in the thirties. He was pretty certain that he knew where it had ended up when the man lost it and the thing that he was curious about was if it was still there at all. Since it took a few moments once he stopped moving around for the land to start shifting through what he was coming to think of as snapshots of the past, he was pretty sure that he could locate it and verify that it was here still before he slipped out of the aether and went out into the woods to look for it for real. If anything his second landing was even easier than his first and he stood there amidst the straggling trees that made up the woodlot in his time flapping his wings and feeling their feathers shifting as he moved with them. Almost with regret he gave the mental command to shift his body back to what it was before he started this experiment. That was his default form as he thought of it and as before he had little trouble resuming it. The wings that he had crafted thumped to the earth beneath his feet and his shoulders already felt naked without them there as he watched them dissolve back into the aether they had been formed from. A quick check with his inner eye told him that all of the changes that he had made had been reversed within moments. He started to turn toward the centre of the woodlot. If he remembered correctly the watch had dropped from the man's pocket and slipped into the burrow of a ground squirrel. There was little chance of anyone finding it there, but he would still have to be careful once he tried to do this in the real world. Even if the burrow had not collapsed in the intervening years that in no way made it safe to just stick a hand into and start rooting around in. There were rattler's and copperheads around here and an old ground squirrel burrow made a first rate den for snakes as well. Better to check it out here where it was safe and then do it for real. He thought it was just a little west of the big elm, but not as far as the oak that was just behind his fence. It would only take a moment for him to find it he figured and to dip his head beneath the earth and see if the watch was still there and if anything was keeping it company as well. At least that was what he had in mind anyway. "That was quite a show friend," Cecil heard the man's voice break the silence of the aethereal world. Cecil froze. He had gotten so used to it just being him here he hadn't thought that there might be other explorers here as well. Not surprising really. While he did speak with some in his group who were also exploring the aether he didn't think that any of them were even remotely located near him. He forced himself to relax and turned around to greet the newcomer who had arrived so unexpectedly in what Cecil realized he had already been taking for granted as his own private world. Cecil blinked and then blinked again. The man that had spoken to him was impossible to see in any detail. It was a man. From his outline he was a big one, but as Cecil had reason to know that didn't really mean anything. He had his own hulk mode as well so that didn't necessarily mean that this man was like this in real life. But that thing with the shadows though, that was interesting. Cecil had never thought of doing anything like that before. "Thanks," he said back to the man, "I just figured out how to do that today. I was surprised that it went as well as it did. I guess I'm just having a good day today." Cecil watched the shadows moving over the man. He was wearing something, definitely some kind of suit, but with all of the movement it was impossible to see any details about him. Cecil mentally calculated how far away the man was from him. He was about a dozen paces away so unless he knew something to make how he bent the rules match how well Cecil could bend them he wasn't too worried about the man trying to come to grips with him. Still the fact that so much of him was hidden the way it was starting to make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "I'd say you've had more than just one good day. And those wings you were sporting. Mighty fine they were. Impressive workmanship there. Like I said, that was quite a show you put on." The man had a deep voice and the soft southern inflection that caused him to emphasis certain words and pronounce others differently marking him as someone who was either a native of Stafford or someone who had lived there long enough that whatever speech patterns they had possessed before were long forgotten. "You know I've caught a glimpse of you here and there before friend. Been watching you today since I saw you first start to fly over by the river walk a little bit ago. That was something now," The man took off a shadowy hat and held it between his hands. The outline of the hat was strange. For some reason Cecil didn't think that it was any type that he would recognize just from the shape alone. "I tip my hat to you just for that show alone friend." "Well thanks; I guess I didn't know anyone was watching. How long have you been watching me?" Cecil asked. It was hard not to be polite back to the man. His manner of speech and just how he spoke was amazingly disarming on some level. He still made no move to come any closer to Cecil though. Something that he was oddly grateful for. "Oh I been watching a long time friend, but I've been here a longer time already. A powerful long time in fact. And in all that time... I don't think I've seen another sorcerer quite like you. You've got talent now. I'm here to tell you, you do." "I'm sorry, but you must be mistaken mister. I'm not a sorcerer. I'm just an explorer is all. I found my way here and I've been curious ever since is the long and the short of it." "Friend that's almost funny that is," he said. "How so?" Cecil asked him. "Well friend, the plain honest truth is that it doesn't matter if you actually call yourself a sorcerer or not. But what you just said there about wanting to know how it is here. That's practically the definition of one. For certain it is." "Well I can't do any magic," Cecil replied. "So I think that kind of argues against how much of a sorcerer I could be." "Well that doesn't matter none friend. Doesn't matter at all. You know what does matter?" he asked "No I'm not sure that I do," Cecil said. The shadowy man flipped the hat up the length of his arm and deposited it back on top of his head. He leaned his right elbow into his left palm and left his right hand to clench into a fist that he held in a meditative way in front of his mouth. "The only thing that really matters friend, is what kind of girl you are." Cecil was floored by what the man said to him. Regardless of how well he spoke or not, what he had asked him made exactly zero sense. "So what is it friend? Do you know what kind of girl you are?" Cecil only thought he was floored before. The strange man doubling down on his odd question was a little too much to take he decided. He wondered if spending too long in the aether could affect your mind in ways like this. Maybe that was the man's problem. He'd spent too much time here and now he was more than a little off his rocker mannerly or not. "I really think I should be going now mister. It's been an experience meeting you. I can definitely say that. But I'm going to have be going now," Cecil said trying to keep an even tone in his voice while he chose his words with care. If this strange man was more than just a kook, he wanted to be careful not to set him off before he could put some more distance between them. And the last thing he wanted this man to know was just how close the two of them really were to where Cecil lived in reality. "Now where would you be wanting to go to now?" he asked. "Home? There's nothing you can find there that matches what's here now is there? That's why you're here after all. That's why we're all here for that matter. We want to know." Cecil shifted his weight on his to the balls of his feet. If this went south he wanted to be able to dig in and put on some speed to get away. "Besides friend," the man continued speaking. "You still haven't told me what kind of girl you are yet and that's something you should be doing you know. Only polite thing to do when someone asks a simple question of you is to answer it. It's just courtesy. No need to be rude about something simple like that." Now the man took a step toward Cecil and when he did Cecil took a half step back away from him. He could spin on one foot and dig in and be away from here quicker than this crazy apparition might think. He'd been good at track when he was in school and he'd kept himself in good condition even before he started improving himself in the aether. This man may be more than a bit spooky as far as Cecil was concerned and he may not want to turn his back on him right away, but he was pretty confident that he could put some distance between the two of them when the time came to make his move. Cecil took a step back and then another step. He started to take a third when his heel hit something solid behind him. Whatever it was that was there thumped hollowly and out of instinct Cecil turned to face it. But there was nothing there for him to see. That didn't mean there wasn't something to feel though. Cecil's hands fanned out automatically feeling for the limits of whatever it was that seemed to have risen out of the aether and blocked his path. The edge curved around to each side and when he tried to go back the way that he had come he found that whatever it was had formed all at once and while invisible, was yet a solid circle around him. Almost by reflex his hands raised to find the edge of whatever this barrier was only to find that it curved above him. It wasn't a circle at all, it was some kind of dome and there he was trapped beneath it, like a rat with a punchbowl upended over it. Cecil looked over at the shadowy man, the dark man. He was walking toward him. He was taking his time doing so as well. It was plain that for him taking his time with whatever he was doing here was just a bonus to him. Cecil bounced his hands against the clear material listening to the bonging sound that it made when the palms of his hands impacted with the surface. He pushed against it. Maybe it absorbed force. Maybe the harder you hit it the more strongly you were repelled. If that was the case he could possibly push his way through this barrier then if he went slowly. But no matter how good the theory might have been, the clear force of the wall resisted all attempts by him to force his way through it. Cecil pushed one final time trying to shift the barrier maybe even tip it over, but it was all wasted effort. The dark man was almost here now. No matter how close he came Cecil could still see no details in his features. Only the shifting outline of the man. The outline and the voice. There may not be any way to get out of this thing here he realized as the man slowly stalked closer to him, but there was no reason why he should really stay here either. Cecil didn't like exiting the aether from a different point than where he entered, but from what was happening here that seemed the more prudent choice compared to being part of what whoever or whatever this person was had planned. The better part of valour it was then. Cecil closed his eyes and concentrated. It should only take a moment to shift him out of the aether. Then, if whoever this was wanted to keep playing this game, they would have to follow and do it in the real world. And once both of them were there at least Cecil would get a good look at his face. "Problem friend?" Cecil heard him only a few feet away. He opened his eyes and found that not only was he still in the aether, he hadn't even budged. "Miss your ride maybe?" the dark man asked. "That's a terrible shame isn't it? Just ruins that whole good day when that happens, don't it?" "What is it you want?" Cecil demanded. "What is it?" "I told you what I want friend. It's a simple little thing. I just want to know what kind of girl you are," the dark man repeated. "I'm not any kind of girl," Cecil shouted back loudly at him "I don't even know what you're talking about. Now let me go already." "No need to be rude now friend. No call for it at all. Just answer the question." "I'm not any kind of girl damn it!!" Cecil bellowed. The dark man was almost within touching distance of the dome. His fingers brushed against the outer surface of the material. He gave a low laugh as he did so. "That's what they all say," he said to Cecil in a lilting cadence tracing his finger on the other side of the dome. "Every single one. They say they're not any kind of girl. They'll swear it on a knee high stack of bibles they will and you know what?" The dark man leaned in closer still. "They're lying. Just like you're lying right now. Because once they stopped fighting it and stop denying it, and stop lying about it. You know what we always found out after we finally settled all that dust?" He fixed Cecil with a cold eyeless stare that made the blood in his veins run cold. "That there was always... some kind of girl... lurking in there. So I'm gonna help you now. Just like I helped them. That's what I do, I help people. We're gonna look and we're gonna find that girl together y'hear? You're gonna know exactly how to answer my little ol' question the next time someone asks you. Once we finishes up here,...you're going to know exactly what kind of girl you are. And then you're gonna know the most important thing... about what it means to be that girl. You know what that is friend?" Cecil felt his face turn pale at the way this crazy man was so calmly discussing his insanity with him. "No," he said. Whether it was him answering the question of just denying what was happening even Cecil couldn't tell at that exact moment. "That's alright friend. Once you know what kind of girl you are, then it'll all be clear to you, cause then you'll know exactly who you're supposed to be. And knowing who you're supposed to be. Well that's a priceless thing. The most priceless thing there is to know." The dark man raised his wrist as if checking his watch. "Time to get started now," he said. "So much to do before we're done. Seeing what kind of girl you are. That's just the start. You'll see." He gestured and Cecil felt the dome lurch and nearly lost his footing. The ground beneath his feet began to fall away from him until he was hovering only a few feet in the air. It's not a dome he thought. It's a sphere. The sphere started tumbling as it rose in the air. A slow rotation that constantly kept Cecil off balance until all he could do as it moved was ball himself up inside of it to keep from being battered more than he could avoid. His head still couldn't help being thrown out of line with his body no matter how he tried to tuck it close to his chest to keep it from being injured as the sphere gradually increased its spin just enough to prevent Cecil from even having a chance of getting to his feet. Cecil was starting to feel sick from the constant rotation. This was worse than being on one of those fair rides that used centrifugal force to pin you against the wall. The difference here was that he wasn't pinned to the wall; here he was more like a sock spinning and bouncing out of control in a dryer's drum. Feeling sick and focused more on keeping himself from being injured Cecil almost missed it when it happened. It was faint at first; imperceptible in the riot of motion, but after close to a dozen revolutions he was certain that it wasn't his imagination. The sphere was getting smaller with each completed circuit. He was certain of it. Each time the sphere revolved the man shrouded in smoky shadow made a gesture like he was pushing it to go faster and faster, like a playground bully with his favourite punching bag trapped on a tilt a whirl, but each time he did so the gesture was less pronounced as if the area that he had to push was becoming less and less in size. Cecil felt it shift even closer and splayed out instead of folding himself in a ball. The area within the sphere was much smaller now. Before there had been plenty of room and he could not touch both sides at the same time as he tumbled about, but now he could easily press against the sides of the sphere with his hands and his feet and hold himself centred in it like Da Vinci's Vitruvian man. Cecil pressed against the sphere trying to force it back but he just couldn't. He didn't have enough leverage and all he accomplished was holding himself still in the centre of the sphere as it spun which made him feel even more nauseous. He closed his eyes to keep from seeing the blur the world outside had become, but that helped him now no better than it did the last time he rode the "Wild Bucket" at the fairgrounds. And even if he didn't feel nauseous, each revolution was still reducing the area inside the sphere. Another dozen revolutions and he felt his arms bend inward too much to keep him in a stable position and he was returned to tumbling inside as he had been when he began. Cecil folded himself as tightly together as he could, protecting his head and body as much as he could and hoped it would stop soon. It didn't, but he could feel it start to slow and when it did whatever relief that he might have felt was tempered by the knowledge that the sphere had become so small now that he was confined almost entirely touching its shell. The small size it had been reduced to had crushed him into a near foetal position and the sphere had elongated into more of a flattened egg shape to accommodate his compressed frame. A long oval egg like a snake's egg rather than an avian one. The now egg-shaped sphere slowly ceased to rotate and gently sank onto the earth and came to a stop. For Cecil the only relief was now that the actual spinning was done, if he was lucky, the spinning that he was still experiencing would soon end as well. "That was quite a ride wasn't it friend?" the dark man said. The egg was resting just in front of him and he was looking down as Cecil. "Yes sir, nothing quite like it at all." He reached down and laid his hands on the surface of the egg and on the other side of the clear surface Cecil could see his hands stroking the area just over his face. "Don't you be feeling disappointed now. Ride's not over, fact is this rides just getting started," he said and the light dimmed and thickened and fell away leaving Cecil in absolute claustrophobic blackness. "All kinds of girl in the world friend. All kinds," Cecil heard him say his voice muffled. "But I'm thinking the kind of girl you are...would be something special. You got all this here potential just covering her up right now is all. But I seen it, I surely have." Somehow Cecil could feel the man's hands roaming all over the surface of his prison almost as if it wasn't there, even though it held him immobile in its grip. "Won't take no effort at all for her to see the light of day. No it won't." His hands abruptly stopped moving and centred themselves somewhere between his diaphragm and his sternum. "Oh there she is," he said triumphantly. "And here you thought there wasn't no girl there. But I knew she was. I knew it! I knew it, I knew it. Only thing to do now is see just who she is. Only decent thing we can do after all. Yes sir! Wouldn't be right to leave her stuck in the dark like that. Wouldn't be chivalrous now would it?" The shadowy man's hands had stopped roving over the surface of his prison. Cecil could almost feel a pressure as they hovered over him. "Oh, she's something else now friend," Cecil heard him say. "Voice like tinkling bells. Lord have mercy, now that's a voice like an angel there. No wonder you was able to do a trick like that so well. Tell the truth now! You was already part angel! Wasn't you?" Cecil felt his throat chill like ice water had been poured down his gullet in a rushing torrent. A waterfall of freezing contracting sensation that left him speechless and numb. "Oh and she's a slender thing too, but not too slender is she? Nosirree bob, she may be a little ol' thing, but she's got plenty of sweetness in all the right places. Hooowhee. That one's a real head turner, yes she is, yes she is." Cecil felt compressed all over, pressure that made every fibre of his body ache with the torment of it. For a brief moment it felt as if he had some room in the prison, but it must have been his mind playing tricks on him in the darkness because he had even less room now than he thought he did. "Oh and the face on that one," he said in exaltation. "That girls got whole flock of angels flying around in her, don't she now. And black hair, black hair like a silk waterfall. Mercy! Mercy, mercy!" A hundred thousand insects. That's what it felt like Cecil decided. Like a hundred thousand insects were swarming all over his face and head from out of nowhere. A shifting mass that tormented him with their ghostly touch and tumbled into each other over and over never stopping or even staying still. "Oh and the walk on that girl. Oh, mama did right by her, yes indeedie she did. I tell you now, only decent thing to do when you see something like that, is STAND UP AND SALUTE!" he shouted the last part, but Cecil was barely aware of it. He was more concerned with the fire lancing down his lower back all the way to his heels. Like someone had restrung that part of him with white hot piano wire and the searing pain of lashing those wires into place was only the beginning rather than the end. His eyes clenched shut and a high pitch shrieking whimper whispered from the bottom of his lungs to the roof of his mouth, but barely any sound spilled from his mouth at all. It hurt too much to do more than that. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmmm MMMMM! Why'd you go and lie to me now and tell me wasn't no girl there. Oh mercy! Tell the truth now. You knew she was there the whole time didn't you. Didn't you. Didn't you. Didn't you! You just wanted her all to yourself. Uh huh, Uh huh, Uh huh. That's what it is. But I can't let that happen now. No I can't, No I can't. Look at her there, mouth like a strawberry. Looks so SWEET! I just can't stand it; I got to have me a taste of that right here, right now!" Cecil felt hands grip his head on both sides of his temples and pull him up to mash his face into the blackness. A mouth covered his own forcing it open and once it was he felt the owner of that mouth deeply inhale. A deep slow inhalation that stripped every ounce of breath from him. The lips pulled back for a moment and it felt for a brief moment that there was still something there bridging them. Something feather light, something being drawn from deep inside of him and then the mouth came down and drank deeply from him, devouring him. Drank him until there was nothing remaining to drink and when the mouth rose from hers there was an aching emptiness that left her hollow. Her pitcher had been drained and all that was left was that fragile raw sensation that remained behind tormenting her in its raw absence. "Whooo hoo! That just makes your head spin now. All at once like that. Now that was sweet girly girl. Let me tell you now. That was POTENT stuff! That was the real stuff. That was the McCoy now, yes it was. A man don't see that every day now. No he don't. After something that fine a man's got to show his appreciation now. Yes ma'am he does!" Cecil felt his hands on the shell surrounding her. She could feel him leaning in close to her. She could feel his shadow face close enough to whisper to her. "Rides almost done girly girl. Be careful when you step off'n it now. Still lots to do at this here carnival. Yes there is. But now you need to let me know. You need to tell me what kind of girl you are. Then we can really play." Words whispered out of Cecil's throat. Faint words. Words that passed her lips with nary a hint of sound. So faint were they that all the man listening could tell was that words had been uttered. "Say that again girly girl," he said. "And put some pepper on it this time won't you?" "I...don't...know," she whispered, just barely louder this time. "Oh now that's a sad, sad thing to hear. Heartbreaking is what it is, heartbreaking. Shouldn't be like that now. Can't let something like that stand. No I can't. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna pop that hood and take a look. Yes ma'am. Pop it right open and let the sun shine in, that's what we gonna do," We gonna POP IT!" With his last words the darkness holding her fast dissolved like a sun smothered mist. Light flooded into her eyes as her body tumbled free from its confinement and left her to sprawl on the shifting earth of the aether "Hoooo whee!" Look at you now girly girl." The shadowy man thumped his chest in emphasis. "Now that's what I'm talking about right there. That's some kind of girl. I got to say it again, that's a girl now. You spell a girl like that C-A-N-D-Y, yes you do. Cause girl you are just top of the line, tricked out, one hundred, fifty percent eye candy. Whooo. So sweet." He lowered himself down to her level, until he was squatting just hovering over where she was still sprawled on the earth. "So how 'bout it now. You gonna tell me what kind of girl you are?" Cecil gasped raggedly. The pain inside of her in that torn empty place radiated throughout her body. She had no idea that level of pain was even possible. It made every other pain she had ever experienced in her life seem little more than the sting of a mosquito on a warm summer's night. The dark man was still talking over her. His cheerful patter flowed over her unnoticed, only the pain was what was real. Pain was her whole universe and it was expanding exponentially. She had to get away from here. As overwhelming as this tidal wave of pain that had subsumed her was there was worse waiting for her. The dark man had already said as much. Along with the pain was its boon companion terror. She had never known a living person could feel this much terror and not die from it. It was a black hole that swallowed all other emotion and sensation leaving nothing else behind. She pushed against the ground with her left hand, her right arm curled against the ground limply. It was all she could do to just use her left. Her head lolled from her neck and as she lurched upward she felt the alien sensation of part of her chest swinging slightly in time with what little effort she was capable of. "That's it girly, girl. Stand up there and let me get a look at you." Her legs didn't want to move. They were still sprawled on the earth where they had come to rest when she had tumbled out of her prison. She tried to get them to move but the best she could do was make them twitch spasmodically. Like a fawn she thought, I move like a newborn fawn. Her mind knew how to walk, so did her muscles. It was all still there, it just didn't want to work right yet. No matter how much she willed her legs to move they just couldn't seem to follow even the simplest effort. She didn't even want to think about the absence of what should be there between them, but the effort to move her legs to try to stand made her all too aware of what was no longer there and conversely what was nestled now in the space vacated. She gritted her teeth and pushed again and this time she was able to half-rise, but the effort also made her cry out as well. Long black hair draped her head and blocked out the sight of all but the earth directly under her face. It was so close that earth. Less than a foot below her. That distance should be nothing for her to move, but right now it took everything to even hold her head this far up. She pushed again and felt one of her legs respond, her left one she thought, she couldn't be sure. She shifted her balance and half rolled over, feeling the free moving flesh gracing her chest swing free and hang down. Gravity it seemed was working just fine. She dragged her right leg forward and felt earth beneath the sole of her foot. She pushed upward and tried to lurch into a standing position, but all the effort did was cause her to spill forward and collapse into the earth again. She felt the taste of dust clotting in her mouth and nose and spat it out. Another attempt, this time she got to her feet and even as she did so she felt herself weaving back and forth as she tried to maintain her balance. A lurching step and she almost tumbled to the ground again. Her hands clawed out blindly, desperately snatching for anything to steady herself with and by chance one of them caught a stout branch from a nearby sapling. She hung onto the tree, her body half standing; half draped against it and felt her head swimming in the vortex of pain and terror that was still churning inside of her. "Oh look at you standing up there so quick like that. That bodes well. Yes it does, yes it does." Cecil drank in deep panic breaths. It had to be now. It had to be while she was on her feet. She didn't think that he was going to give her more time than she already had been given before he closed the distance between them and started to do whatever it was that he had in mind. She pushed away from him and staggered deeper into the woods. "Now don't do that girly girl," she heard him call after her and nearly tumbled into the underbrush as she almost lost her balance. Every step she took was tinted with the terror that she would misstep and go sprawling and not have enough time to clamber to her feet again before he was on her. Her foot slapped against a fallen log. Their proportions were wrong and she'd misjudged her stride. Her centre of gravity was betraying her with every step it seemed. Nothing felt right, everything about her moved the wrong way and the only thing that was even giving her a glimmer of hope was that she was still on her feet and moving faster than when she started, but she was under no illusions that it was in any way fast at all. The only reason that he hadn't caught her was that he hadn't even tried to yet. She staggered into the brush and felt its leaves tear at her as she bulled her way through the foliage out of sight of the man shaped shadow behind her. "Ready or not girly girl. Here I come," he hollered behind her and she let out a little squeal of terror trying to pour more strength into her legs to squeeze just anything more out of them that she could. Anything to put distance between them. As forlorn as that hope was it was the only one she had. The brush thinned out ahead and through it she thought she could see the back of her fence barely two hundred meters in front of her. She staggered that way feeling barely steadier than when she had started. "Now where do you think you're going now girly girl. I told you the fun's just beginning." His voice was closer to her than she expected it to be. She couldn't help doing it. Her hands locked on a passing sapling and she leaned against it, her head hanging between her arms. Upside down she saw him slowly walking after her. Unhurried, unhindered, inevitable. She screamed and pulled against the tree to catapult herself forward. If she could just get to the fence she could pass through it, she knew she could and there was the ward surrounding that part of the house. That might keep her safe long enough for her to pass back into her own body and get away from him. A humming sound blistered the air in front of her and she actually saw the sphere he cast start to form. It curved toward her, grasping arms of invisible force moving to surround and trap her. She screamed and kicked backward. The sphere formed and snapped shut less than a few inches from her foot. She rolled over and scrambled to her feet tumbling her way away from it. Away from the fence she was aiming for. "Oh no, girly girl. No point going over there. Wouldn't do not a lick of good if'n you did," he called after her. In the pounding of her heart and the thunder of the blood pumping though her veins the horror of the idea that he did indeed know where she lived reached through the terror and grabbed her throat in its iron grip. She wailed and dove deeper into the wood as she dodged another sphere forming in front of her. It was so slow and lazy it telegraphed clearly to her that he wasn't in any way serious about catching her yet. He was playing with her. The deeper into the woodlot the thicker the underbrush became. The sun found it hard to pierce all the way to the forest floor at times and her bare feet were torn and bleeding already as was the rest of her bare exposed hide. She hadn't even been aware that the egg it seemed had dissolved away the image of the clothing that she carried with her into the aether and now her mind was reacting to what it expected to happen as if she were actually running naked through the woodlot. A big elm loomed out of the forest, bigger and thicker than the other trees around, the space around it cleared by the canopy that denied light to everything that challenged its right to this stretch of forest. For a brief instant it flickered in front of her reduced to a sapling that barely stood against a strong breeze and then towered above even higher than it was now. The clear wall formed without warning in front of her. There was no time to stop and she ran headlong into it. Her impact with it stopped her dead in her tracks as motion met something immovable that bleed off its velocity in sudden force knocking her back from it to stagger for a moment at the sudden stop. Her face had smashed against it and now blood was pouring from her nose and lips where her teeth had bitten into them with the jarring sudden stop. She tumbled to the piled leaves below her, their crushed musty stench rising into her nostrils now that they had been disturbed. "I think that's quite enough of that now girly girl," the mocking voice of the shadow man called as he walked slowly into the clearing behind her. "You gonna hurt yourself, you keep that up and I can't let you do something like that now. That's my job." Cecil instinctively crab crawled backward away from him. The sphere moved with her as she desperately backpedalled until she felt the rough bark of the elm slap against her naked back and she came to a jolting stop. "End of the line girly girl. All comes out now. I know what kind of girl you are." Deep ragged breaths, her eyes darting around looking for escape that was nowhere in sight and all the time the slowly walking shape of the dark man coming closer. He stopped barely three paces from her and looked down at Cecil. "Oh I expected so much better from you girly girl," he said in a mocking mournful tone. "I thought you was special, but turns out the only thing special 'bout you is how disappointing you are to me. All you are is just another frightened girl. I so hoped you were more than that. I really did." The gentility of his tone belied the menace of his intent and she hunched closer to the tree. Anything to put a few more inches of distance between them. He took another step closer to her. He sighed and shook his head in a disgusted manner. "Time to finish this whole thing up then frightened girl. Plenty left to do when I'm done with you." Cecil felt an involuntary whimper escape her lips and she hunched closer to the elm and felt part of her back slip just barely into the flesh of the tree behind her. The tree! She thought. The elm was inside of the sphere. She could put it between them. It may not be much of an idea but anything was better than staying here waiting for her tormenter to lay his hands on her. Cecil willed her body to move back further into the rough bark of the tree. She couldn't move forward or to the left or right, but whatever the dark man was doing to keep her from moving in those directions was absent behind her. She hoped her half-baked idea was worth something. She felt the rubbery softness of the tree give around her. Resistant at first and then rapidly yielding and swiftly folding around her to envelope her in its darkness. She could no longer feel the binding that he had placed on her, but she could sense it just outside the barrier of the bark shielding her from his grasp. The binding had circled completely around her as she had thought it did. If the tree hadn't already been in the circle she realized, she would still be helpless against whatever it was that the dark man had in mind for her. She had a brief thought of moving up to the top of the tree and emerging long enough to form and unfurl the wings that she had shaped for herself before. If she could do that she could move much faster than he may be able to compensate for. But he must have anticipated that thought. Through the motions she felt it make the sphere was brushing against the leaves. She could already feel it extending upward and meeting overhead in a bulbous cone that enclosed the stately elm from the tip of its wide spreading branches all the way to where the thick trunk met the earth it was rooted in. She felt his hand brush against the thick bark, reaching for her. As his hand moved toward the wood cocooning her, her panic ballooned. She could move through solid things while she was here so of course he could as well. The tree might delay him but it wouldn't stop him anymore than it had stopped her. The edge of his hand touched the bark where her hair was and she reflexively crouched down recoiling from him. She felt his hand withdraw and heard him laugh again. That same dreadful laugh that he had made when he snared her and began molding her to suit his tastes. "Oh, I was wrong about you all right. I'm not afraid to say now. When I'm wrong I'm wrong. And I was wrong! I'm not too proud to admit being wrong now! Here I thought you were just another frightened girl and there you go and show me the light. Lordy you are such a clever girl!" he exclaimed delightedly. "I LOVE me a clever girl. I mean it, I really do. I have me a genuine deep appreciation for a clever girl," He leaned in and stroked the bark of the tree that she crouched inside like it was her now silken thigh. "Clever girls...they are so much... fun... to play with," he said. And as he said it, all she could do was shudder at the implications of his words. She felt his hand moving on the bark above her. Slow, gentle strokes that belied the malevolence he radiated to her. "So much fun to break," he said almost lovingly his voice rising higher in pitch as he kept moving his hand lower along her trunk. "So much fun to sculpt...into whatever I desire you to be...in body... and in mind," His hand stopped moving where her throat had been before she crouched down into the base of the elm's trunk. "There you are. I found you. That's where you went to. Thought you could hide from me didn't you. But I found you. I fooouund you. I found you and now it's time to play, clever girl," he said in a flat self- satisfied tone whilst simultaneously thrusting his hand deep within the solid wood over her head. ----------------------------------------- Cecil tried not to pay attention to his patter, her mind was frantically racing, and desperate to think of anything that she could do that could keep him from reaching her. The thought flashed in her mind that maybe, just maybe she could make the tree stronger, harder somehow, maybe just more dense would be enough. If she could do that she might be able to keep him away long enough to think of something else. Her wings were formed from the energy of the aether, they only seemed to fall into nothing, but energy can't be created or destroyed only converted into another form. That was the first law of thermodynamics and while laws can bend here, they still can't be broken she thought latching onto the sliver of hope that she thought she saw. They seemed to crumble away to nothingness, but that was an illusion, they were only converted into a resting state and energy in a resting state was all around her, just waiting to be used. All she had to do was channel it somehow and give it direction. She reached out into the land around the tree and felt all of it around her. Masses of it. Mountains of resting potential. She felt it and she grasped at it. The gaping, ragged, raw empty place inside of her responded along with her. She hadn't expected that to happen and there wasn't time to consider what it might mean. She reached down deep into all that was around her and pulled all she could into herself. She needed a channel. What better channel than her own body. It needed direction, what better direction than that provided by her own mind. There was so much of it, the more she took into herself the more was there, somehow lost in the tsunami she had summoned into herself that raw empty part of her filled and she ceased to feel pain from it at all. She sensed his hands moving onto the bark of her tree, it was almost like she was watching him outside of it in some strange way. He was almost done playing and ready to move in for the kill. His hands darted after her and she focused and unleashed everything that she had gathered into herself directly into the elm itself. The energy poured out of her. A supernova of floodwaters breaching a dam all at once. A roar, a torrent, greater than a galactic tidal wave flowed into her at the same time so what she harboured there within her body stood unchanged in the din she had summoned. She almost had no words to conceive of just what it was that she was conduit for. All she knew was that at that moment they were one. *It's not enough.* For a moment she thought that the dark man was taunting her again and she doubled the immense flow again feeling the density of the tree increase. *Stop,* the voice said. *All you are doing here is only being felt outside of the aether. That will not serve your needs here.* Cecil realized with sudden clarity that the voice was right. No matter how much she channelled into the elm this was still a place where rules only bend. And she had already underestimated what the dark man was capable of once. *Come to the heart. Deep, deep in the earth where he cannot reach you,* the voice urged. His hand erupted into the tree itself seeking her. Cecil squealed in terror and as she did she buried herself deeper in the trunk of the elm. She felt herself slip down into the earth where the thick roots bored through the soil. She could see the dark man's hand fishing fruitlessly above her. His fingers clutching blindly for her. And there in the centre of the massive root ball she saw it. A swirling seething blaze of energy that radiated out into all of the elm around her. "Oh clever girl, you do not disappoint me do you," she heard his words echoing above her. She recoiled from his voice and pushed herself deeper into the earth, waiting for her toes to strike the barrier the dark man had erected above. It was waiting there. She knew it was. *The heart. Take the heart into yourself,* the voice whispered. That voice again. It made no sense what it said, but she could tell at least that there was no malevolence there. If there was a choice between what the voice said to do and the dark man then there was no choice at all. Cecil reached out for the blazing heart and drew it into herself. It was different from the energy that she had taken from the world around her. That was resting energy. Energy waiting to be directed. This was living energy. The vital force of something as connected to the world she came from as she was herself. She could feel it flooding into her, pouring into and healing that part of her that the dark man had torn in her very being, but she could feel something else as well. She could feel that the barrier curved through the earth beneath the elm, but it did not sever the roots. The roots moved unobstructed through the shimmering ball of energy he had summoned into being. Awareness of each molecule that made up the whole of the elm unfolded in her mind. There was nothing that it touched that she did not touch as well. She felt her mind expand through the soil around her. A vast network spreading in every direction lay right at her fingertips. A network that the dark man could not touch nor bar her from. *Go, go now,* the voice urged her. *Fly far from here and find safety where you can.* "Who are you!" she pleaded with the voice. "Oh that's none of your concern clever girl," the dark man answered her. *A shadow of a memory,* the voice answered her and then fell silent. She gasped in relief at the sudden realization that her way out, her escape was only inches away. The dark man had continued talking. His hand was beginning to sweep downward, waving slowly back and forth as he deliberately prolonged seizing her. "But do you know the best thing is about having a clever girl?" He asked almost mockingly. "The best thing...is when you're through with her. The best thing is when you keep her around every day afterward. Like a trophy you might say. A commemoration of when you imposed your will on hers. A walking obedient memorial to your own greatness. A trophy to be kept until..." His voice rose sharply at the last part and left the words to follow unsaid, just as his fingers clutched and scrabbled at the surface of the earth bare inches above her head. Cecil dove down along the long root line feeling her body compress to follow the knotted twisting rope of wood as it passed through the energy binding her here and moved beyond into its far, slender, questing rootlets some forty feet away from where he stood on the earth above her. She felt it end and paused a moment wondering if it was far enough away for her to rise up through the earth and take flight to make her escape. "Oh!" the dark man exclaimed in delighted surprise. "You are such a clever girl. You are going to be such a treasure for me when I have you in hand. I'm gonna have to make special plans for you." Cecil sensed another rootlet nearby. Only a few inches really. She extended her hand from the root she inhabited until she made contact with it. She felt her hand slip into it and followed it through the earth separating the roots like water cascading down the path of least resistance. She sped across the root network of the oak and then beyond into another elm. Past the elm and into the wide root network of the big oak just beyond it. Eighty feet away, a hundred, a hundred and thirty, two hundred flashed by in seconds. The thin glowing line of the tether that led back to her body shown as clearly below the earth as it did above. "Such a delight!" he exclaimed. "Nothing better than a challenge, but I will still find you clever girl," She heard the dark man say the last part matter of factly, but his voice was fainter now. She felt the oak tree's farthest root terminate just under the fence in her back yard and froze in panic realizing that the network of tree roots that had been her highway this far had finally reached its terminus. "So that's where you're going, clever girl," She heard him say. He was coming closer now. He had narrowed down the direction that she was fleeing in. "Nowhere to go now, clever girl? Don't disappoint me. Not now when you've shown such promise thus far," she heard him say in a mocking tone. A mocking tone that was gradually increasing in volume as he drew closer. Cecil felt her nerves screaming at her to just break the surface and make a run for it. The fence would conceal her from him for a few vital moments and she could get behind the safety of the ward guarding her still body just a handful of steps away. And she would be frozen solid the moment she did that, she realized, trapped again. Frozen and helpless, bare steps away from safety. The dark man would like that very much. The mental torment he could inflict on her by snatching away her safe harbor just when it was in her grasp would be something that she was sure he would relish doing to her. She felt the confinement sphere he had used before plunge down like a depth charge into the earth nearby. He didn't know exactly where she was yet. Her life energy in the aether was cloaked by the life energy of the plants growing around her. The network of tree's roots she had fled down had masked her. She hadn't intended it to do so, but it had. The bushes and scrub growth that clustered around them had concealed her further; even the grass had done its part cloaking her from him. The grass, she thought and reached out instinctively in desperation. The shallow roots of the grass that curled into a thick intertwining mat just above her. A mat that reached all the way to the base of her home's foundation. All the way inside her protective ward. Cecil seized the roots of the interwoven fronds and streaked toward her refuge like a jet-powered mole. She felt him closing in and she could feel the shudder of the earth as another of his confinement spheres plunged into the earth behind her. The fear of being captured again so close to succor gave her extra incentive to speed away. Her fingers collided against the buried brickwork that faced the lower part of the house's foundation and she felt the cool safety of the ward she had erected flare at her touch, draw her close and drop around her. The barrier recognized her right to enter even if her aetherial form no longer matched her physical one. "Now!" she thought to herself and rose up from the earth just inside the green-gold of her own barrier. She took a cautious step backwards and felt the bricks and wood behind her part and grant her entry into her sanctum. She was inside the Florida room now, right where the brickwork joined the timber of the house. Her eyes stared through the large pane windows in the direction she had seen the dark man approaching from and she shuddered as she saw him slowly walk unimpeded through the fence ringing her property. He stopped and stood there in the back yard watching her naked breasts heaving with the deep rapid gulps of air she was taking in behind the glass. As she drank in those deep panic-driven breaths she hoped the ward was enough to keep them separated. He raised his hands in mock surrender and Cecil shuddered in apprehension of what he would do next. He did not move at first. She hoped it was because he lacked to power to break her barrier. But he just stood silently in the back yard looking at her through the glass. Then his hands fell together and slowly, mockingly he began to applaud her. A steady measured clapping that did not reassure her and in its measured pace it only indicated further agonies that were, at best forestalled, rather than honest appreciation. "Oh well done, clever girl," he said. "It's such a pleasure to find a quarry that truly appreciates the merits of the chase itself. But now...I think... it's time for us...to really...play," The dark man took a slow deliberate step forward with each word. Cecil squeezed her eyes shut not wanting to see just what it was that he was going to do. She wasn't safe after all. She thought she would be, but she really wasn't. She stood there, eyes closed, shuddering uncontrollably with dread, out of options entirely and just waiting for the hammer of his twisted desire to drop. But it didn't. Long minutes crawled by and she willed her eyes to open only to see the empty yard beyond the big panes of glass. The dark man was gone. Cecil released the breath she hadn't realized that she had been holding onto and dove with a desperate fervor for her body stretched out on the brick floor.