Hilda - Lycadea

by Paul Kater

Clearly their little trip outside was still a bother to him.

  "I see," Hilda nodded.

  "And for the day, we hope you can see the high council again. They were very pleased to meet you, and they have many things they want to discuss with you."

  "Oh," Hilda responded. She was not too pleased with that prospect.

  "And what would that bring?" Rebel voiced Hilda's thoughts. "We'll be in that room full of breaking things for what?"

  Davdruw looked hurt. "Perhaps you should stay away from the high council and remain in your room then," he tried.

  "No chance," Maurizio said, "we go where Hilda goes. I assume."

  Hilda nodded. She looked at her wizard. "Do you think that would help, being there?"

  "We can at least try," William shrugged, filling up the mugs again with a wave of his hand. He made a cup of tea materialise in front of Davdruw as well.

  After breakfast, Davdruw took the group to the Palliza again. He first had objected to Kerna being there, but Hilda insisted that the woman had to come. "To take care of the cats."

  Gesmarion and Katinki looked up and came to greet the group. "Welcome back, honoured witch!"

  William frowned, as they only seemed to notice Hilda, but he refrained from mentioning something. Being invisible had its advantages, he knew.

  The day passed with a kind of inventory of all machinery and systems, under Rebel's supervision. She was the one who understood most of all that stuff. William looked at all the people who made up the high council. Many of them were sleeping on improvised beds; he changed those into proper beds, just to have something to do. Maurizio and Kerna took care of the two cats, as long as these animals wanted to. This meant that the two people stood empty-handed most of the time.

  "Oh, this is interesting," said Rebel at one moment.

  "What is?" Hilda asked. She at least tried to understand.

  "This console here," Rebel pointed, "looks like it is controlling the weather over this area."

  "Controlling the weather..." Hilda sounded disbelieving and disgusted. "You do not want to control the weather."

  "They wanted to," Rebel said. "And their technology did pull it off for a while, but something is going wrong with that now."

  Rmani, a woman who stood near the apparatus, explained that Rebel was correct, and also that they had been trying to make the system work again. "It does not work well, though."

  "It works worse, I dare to bet," Rebel said. "The more you adjust on these things, the more unstable the output parameters become, so the next machine in the chain will get unbalanced data and create a faulty projection of the meteorological adjustments, so the whole thing will end up in an atmospheric deviation of considerable proportion."

  "What?"

  "The weather is going to be crap," William translated for Hilda.

  "Right. And what if you just stop that thing from doing whatever devious deviating it now does?"

  Rmani stared at Hilda. "But, honoured witch, then the weather will become... unpredictable!"

  "And it is predictable now, is it?"

  Rmani fell silent. Gesmarion then confessed: "We do not know how to shut it down."

  "Ah. That is a different dragon," Hilda said. "Maybe we can find something out. Rebel here is so good with that."

  Maurizio, carrying Grimalkin, coughed for attention. "Maybe that is not a very good idea, Hilda."

  "And you have a better one?"

  "Maybe we can fine-tune the machine," the captain tried.

  "So you are in favour of messing with the weather. Without me, sir," Hilda told him. "Let's see if we can calm it down first." That was as far as she wanted to go. There was no way she was going to touch any of these things.

  The small group watched as Rebel go to work. Well, attempted to, as she had to depend on the lack of knowledge of the high council. Most of her questions were replied to with a good old shrug.

  Hilda looked at William, who looked back at her. They shared the same worry that this might end up in some serious disaster concerning the weather.

  One of the high council members, a man by the name of Tarmis, happily started flicking a switch.

  "What are you doing?" William asked, hoping that this man had some form of a clue.

  "I don't know," Tarmis said, "I sometimes do that to see if something happens."

  "And always with that switch?"

  "No. I take a different one every time and they all seem to be broken. I never hear of something that changed." Tarmis reached for the switch again. Hilda punched his arm away.

  "Ouch, honoured witch, why did you do that?" He really did not seem to understand.

  "Suppose you are messing up some weather on the other side of the planet? Suppose you trigger some heavy rain that causes people to drown?"

  "Uhm... oh..." Tarmis put his hands behind his back.

  "Can that happen?" Kerna with the cats asked.

  "Who knows," William replied. "If we're lucky nothing happened. Does anyone even know if there are people on the other side? And how many? And if they are in the same mess as you are?"

  Davdruw, unfortunately, could assure them that the state of misery was the same everywhere. Some people had contact with other groups, as far as the communication systems allowed.

  Rebel in that time had discovered a pattern in a few things on the consoles, but she had no idea what they meant.

  "Better leave it all be then," the witch suggested.

  Davdruw looked at his silvery sleeve. Then he asked to be excused. Without waiting for a response, he paced off on his long legs.

  "Wonder what he's upto," Hilda commented at the disappearing back.

  "Honoured witch! I have something for you!" One of the council members came to her, waving his arms excitedly. "Here you are!" He handed her a broken switch.

  "Oh. Wonderful." Hilda frowned at the thing in her hand. "And your precise meaning of this gift is?"

  "I don't really know," the man said, "you seemed interested in the other one too."

  Rebel tapped a panel. "Looks like this is broken too." At that moment, the panel came to life and showed a very complex scribble. Several council members gasped.

  "What?" enquired the witch.

  The answer came in the form of a trembling floor.

  "Uh-oh," someone said. Someone from the high council. This did not bode well.

  "What?" Hilda asked again, getting slightly impatient with the council and worried about the unrelenting tremble.

  "I'm afraid something is going wrong."

  Hilda and her friends had figured that out already.

  "Very wrong."

  That just made it worse.

  19. Rescue mission

  The floor trembled some more, this time more serious, as if the previous tremor had been a practice run. The equipment against the walls responded by vibrating, and here and there parts fell off, as if they agreed with the floor's trembles. William and Rebel hoped they were not crucial parts.

  "This is an earthquake, right?" Hilda tried. It was almost a relief as some of the Lycadeans nodded and looked around for more possible parts coming down. Nothing happened anymore though. The floor settled down, as did the parts.

  "I want out of here," Rebel said. "If tapping a console already calls up an earthquake, I'm not touching anything anymore." She had barely said it when another trembling made itself known.

  Hilda looked at William. "This was something different..." Her words were confirmed by a display coming to life by itself and a set of blue lights blinking. "Does that mean alarm?" she asked Katinki, who nodded.

  "Hmm. What happened to red for danger," the witch muttered. The display in the meantime occupied itself by showing a pyramid that was slowly collapsing.

  "Madonna," Maurizio said. "Are there people in there?"

  Davdruw confirmed that notion.

  "We have to go and get them out!" Rebel voiced the feeling of the entire group. They all started running towards the door, Kerna included, when suddenly a
small beam of light enveloped Hilda and froze her in place.

  "Crappedy crap!" she shouted. She could only moved around inside the circle of light. "What is this? Can someone let me out?"

  Davdruw, his hand still on his sleeve, said: "My sincerest apologies, honoured witch Grimhilda, but I cannot let you go out where the danger is. You are too precious. You are here to make right what is wrong!"

  William drew his wand and pointed it at the spiritual leader. "It is against my feelings to hurt a spiritual leader," he said, "but if you don't release her, I will. And then I am going to find the biggest elf in existence and let that suck on you."

  "Suck an elf," Hilda said, "that's what I call style."

  There was another rumble through the floor, the display showed a pretty picture of a piece of wall falling down.

  "And maybe we should hurry up in style as well," the witch added.

  Davdruw's hand moved to his sleeve, but William's wand was faster. The sleeve disappeared and the tall man tapped on his bare, pale arm. "Sorry to burst your, ehm, sleeve," said the wizard as he turned to Hilda. It actually took him a few tries before he had removed the light circle that kept his witch imprisoned.

  "But you-" said Davdruw. At that point William slammed the man with some innocent magic. There was a light circle around him. And it was sound proof.

  Kerna, Rebel and Maurizio were waiting by the door. Hilda and William joined them and they left the council hall, leaving Davdruw and the high council behind.

  In the corridors there was a lot of running around by people who all attempted to do some rescue-y action. None of them however seemed to have a decent clue of what to do, though.

  "Holy Bejeebus," William said, "this is going to be tough."

  Maurizio said: "I am sure that Rebel can make them