I tapped the copper tanks on my back with a leather-gloved finger. “And I still have these.”
“I’ve got these, but the light wouldn’t last long.” Claire raised her own gloves, clenched her fists for two seconds, pointed them at the battering ram minion, and let go. Purple and blue sparks arced into it. I took it on faith that the body was now dangerously sticky.
Ray closed his hands again, easing the power ball out of existence. “Okay. Next, bad air. If you notice yourself feeling drowsy or faint, we back out, fast. Vera, if oxygen concentration drops below eighteen percent, warn us. If any or all of us pass out, drag us out. Okay?”
She dinged cheerfully. I made a mental note. Watch the oxygen, Penny. Give it a good, hard look. Never take your eyes off of air.
Would my funky new gas mask protect me? Should I put it back on? It made my head feel annoyingly constrained, and gave my voice a weird buzz.
Oh, what the patoots. Sure, I fastened it back into my helmet.
Pointing my staff down the rocky corridor, I raised my voice above Ray’s. “Any other important warnings? We need to catch this guy. He’s had hours to accidentally unleash a cataclysm with at least two powerful, evil magical artifacts.”
Ray and Claire snickered at ‘accidentally’. My gut impression of Mammon as a goober must have historical support.
Ray bowed low. “We shall make haste, my evil queen.”
He trotted into the tunnel. I followed, with Claire close beside, Apparition behind, and Vera above us giving off light. Although come to think of it, the goo in my staff also glowed. Not a lot, but maybe enough to be useful. Should I have left it behind? My parents thought of it as Penny Akk’s. I couldn’t imagine anything we did down in the Undercity would get an audience.
Fair enough, then.
The tunnel twisted enough that you couldn’t see far forward or back, but I thought we stayed straight. We didn’t have much time to get lost. The first time the tunnel branched, the path of disturbed dust swerved straight through that doorway.
‘Doorway’ being the literal description. A couple of feet of hacked-out stone past the side of this corridor, an open door led into what looked like a house, one of those pretty houses like you get up on the hills where the walls and ceiling and floor are all white. Adobe? Was that adobe?
The rocky tunnel did keep going, now with a layer of ancient dust coating the floor.
Claire kicked that dust, sending it floating in the air, and smirked. “So much for needing to brick up our door.”
Ray replied by pointing up.
Claire and I looked and simultaneously said, “Ooh.”
The ceiling had a little dust on it, but that dust was all smudged in lines, dragged along scratch marks.
However, right this very moment, no horrible spider beasts lurked or menaced, and we needed to hurry. I gave Claire and Ray a nudge to follow the trail into the buried house.
Good thing I did. This place was clean. Spotlessly clean, with no furniture, only big, airy rooms and windows that looked out on blank rock. The floor tilted to one side, but not so badly we couldn’t walk. Widely scattered smudges and scuffs suggested Mammon’s troops hadn’t been so agile.
Although those same marks suggested he’d had a lot less of them than I would have expected. We followed the thickest trail to stairs that led down to the first floor, and as I peeked around that corner, tiny figures scurried through a door and out of sight.
That made me look back behind us. Something small and the same pale beige as the house stopped rubbing at a scratch in the floor and ran behind a wall.
“Did anybody else―?”
They all nodded.
I moved on to my next, more worrisome question. “What if the trail is gone on the way back?”
Ray said, “I thought about that. Absolute worst case, we have the Machine eat a path straight up.”
“Vera has a good sense of direction anyway,” Apparition added.
The robot in question let out a proud little ting.
If the others weren’t here, I’d have given Ray at least a hug. I was so proud of how he’d thought all this exploration stuff through! He was serious about treasure hunting.
Whatever the tiny cleaners were, they didn’t seem in a hurry to attack. Watching the corners just in case, we proceeded down the stairs. From there, we hardly needed a trail as confirmation. Out of the front door, we could see another tunnel, or maybe a cave.
“This has to be some supervillain’s base,” said Claire, in a hush.
“From a long time ago, maybe. A buried Spanish mansion,” I replied, in the same low tone.
That got Ray into the conversation. “If you factor in what was mad science for the time, the building could be much older than that. Pre-Spanish conquest.”
I nodded. “Super powers have been present in every ethnic group through humanity’s recorded history. There are just more of us now.”
Claire sighed. “Shame this place is so empty. We’ll never know.”
It was extremely empty. Bare floors, bare ceilings with no sign of light fixtures, just the building itself and its tiny cleaners we had no time to investigate.
I nudged Ray and Claire again, and we crept out the front door…
…into a swamp. Well, alright, then.
We’d gone down quite a ways. Enough to justify this tall cavern that stretched on and on ahead and around us. The ancient base must have had an air filter, because the moment we stepped outside, the stink of salt water and rotting plants hit. Pools of water dominated the landscape, threaded by a web of rocky humps or paths of compressed vegetation. Tiny plants choked the pools, but the most prominent and common plant was a wheat-like grass that stuck up in sheafs out of the bog. The end of each swayed heavily from a burden of fat blonde seeds.
Less common, but even more attention-grabbing, were the mushrooms on patches of bare rock, especially the ceiling. From buttons as small as the last digit of my pinkie to monsters half my size that hung from the roof like chandeliers, they all glowed. The dominant colors were pink, green, blue, and purple, and they gave off so much light we no longer needed Vera’s.
Mammon’s trail ripped a path over the mats of flattened grass, and following him through the bog was easier than any point so far. Good, because this place was big. We hit the end of the cavern, went through a tunnel so short it was more like a gateway, and entered a cave the same size.
That gave us time for more chatter, but at least we were moving this time!
“I wish I knew what allowed all this to grow without sunlight. It must be the same energy source that spawns the moss in our lair,” said Ray.
Cautiously, I offered, “I… have an idea…”
Incautiously, Claire nudged me. “Well? Spit it out, oh Super Brain.”
“I think there’s a dragon asleep under Los Angeles.”
That got a moment of silence, or at least a moment of only squishy footsteps and distant bug noises.
“That would rock,” concluded Claire.
“That would rock so hard,” concurred Ray.
“Dad tried to poo-poo it, but Marvelous told me once that dragons aren’t just intelligent animals, they’re major natural forces. They both said there’s one nearby. If it’s a few stories underneath us, its influence could be radiating out and activating the chlorophyll cycle in the absence of sunlight.”
I reached over to brush my fingers over a grain stalk to demonstrate, but to my surprise, Claire slapped my hand away.
Yanking my arm back, I squeaked, “What? Do you know what those are?”
“They’ve got to be Verdant’s mutant millet,” she answered, to my lack of enlightenment.
Ray pursed his lips, and hunched his head down between his shoulders momentarily. “Ooh. Yeah, don’t eat those. Don’t even touch them.”
“Why…?” I prodded them.
Steering a little farther away from the grain bunches around the path, Ray said, “Verdant supposedly intended to make a p
erfect super-crop, but got a little overambitious and rigged it to protect itself by sterilizing squirrels and deer. What it does to other mammals is harder to predict, but…”
“Not safe. Got it,” I said.
He nodded.
For the first time, Apparition joined our speculations. “I saw a grasshopper wearing a top hat in the last cave. It didn’t look intelligent. I think someone glued a tiny top hat onto its head.”
Straightening up with imperious Team Leaderiness, I declared, “Gentleman and ladies. Conclusion?”
Claire saluted, grinning impishly. “Hundreds of years of super powered refuse, sinking further into the ground with every earthquake.”
“We’ve run out of trail,” said Ray, entirely serious.
He was right. The clumped up vegetable paths had stopped, replaced by higher berms of bare rock, now without fungus. This stuff didn’t have the dust from the tunnel, either. If there were scratches, they didn’t show on the worn, uneven surface.
On the upside, without those clumps of old grass, we were left with only two very clear options. Each ran off to a hole in a different, distant wall.
On the other upside, we didn’t need the trail. Along the left-hand path, broken pillars rose out of the water. Elegantly fluted, one pair was so intact that it still sported a capstone. The peaked triangle of stone had once held bas-relief figures, but time and water had worn them into vague shapes that had four limbs and a body and that was all you could really tell.
Uhh… okay, one second. Size comparison check. Yeah, unless the Miracle Millet down there was a lot taller than everywhere else, the capstone was only about five feet off the ground.
The exit at the other end looked squat, too, entering a broad building with more pillars and steps in what might be marble. It had a very Greco-Roman temple look. More importantly, lights flickered and something moved beyond that doorway.
Could I hear voices? Maybe. If so, at this distance, so faint that I might only be fooling myself.
Still, we’d obviously caught up with our ne’er-do-well quarry. It was time to move in for the kill. Quietly, eyes peeled for ways to spread out and approach less visibly, we started down that path.
‘Started’ being the operative word. It only took a few steps before water splashed, sloshing in a puddle out of the swamp and up onto the rocky path. The puddle humped up into a mound of water with flailing limbs, maybe the size and shape of a drippy, wiggly cat.
The forelegs reared up, flopping more like tentacles than cat arms, but the urgent waving was hard to mistake. Especially followed by one arm jabbing towards the other arm of the fork.
It was the elemental I’d rescued at the beach! How did she know I was here? How did she know what I wanted?
Duh, because she really was a mystical water elemental! Take that, Dad!
Ahem. With more decorum, I bent forward and asked, “You want us to go the other way?”
The top of its body flailed, forward and back. A really clumsy nod.
I tried another question. “The way we’re going isn’t safe?”
It wriggled from side to side. A head shake.
Pulling down the gas mask, I gave the elemental my warmest smile. “Thank you. You are very kind, and I’m sure this makes us even.”
“You trust it?” Claire asked me as we turned around.
“Implicitly,” I answered. Behind us, a slosh indicated the elemental returning to the briny bog.
Still, Claire looked wistfully back over her shoulder. “I wonder what’s down there we’re not supposed to see?”
“Unnecessary danger,” answered Ray.
Claire stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re such a killjoy tonight.”
I leaned over and bumped my shoulder against Ray. “He’s acting like a professional treasure hunter. Besides, do you want to see Mammon unleash the statue’s guardian again, with no Mech to seal it away?”
Wistful, Claire mused, “It would eat him first…”
“‘First’ is a small word with big implications.”
She stuck her tongue out at me, but declared her agreement by skipping down the rocky road ahead of us, jumping from bump to bump.
That gave me a moment of silence to look backwards myself, and see the friendly elemental slip into the water. I waved her goodbye. Water elementals probably weren’t much for conversation.
Apparition said, “This is a lot like teaming with Lucyfar, only without forgetting to commit your crime because you got distracted terrifying a man who kicked a dog.”
Unanimously, and with no discussion necessary, we took that as a compliment and strutted along the gray rock road towards our new, hopefully Mammon-occupied destination.
When we got there, it wasn’t even impressive. At least, the door wasn’t. It was just a regular doorway, metal lined, sure, but with the door itself gone so long ago that grass grew on patches of muck in the stairwell beyond.
Ray went through first, beckoning us after.
Inside, it was… different. We had to get past the slimed and fungus-mottled booth first, and several steps down the wide, gentle staircase to see the transformation. The stairs ran at an odd angle, because the interior wall ran at an odd angle. We had entered way up the side of a several story tall dodecahedron. The sloped, diagonal walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of yellow metal, bright beyond bronze or brass. More like gold, but really hard. Neither Vera’s flashlight nor luminescent fungi were needed to light the chamber. Glowing blue strips in winding patterns kept the place lit, and for all I knew, were the source of the room’s warm, dry air. Shockingly dry, coming out of a swamp.
Nor was the room empty. The contents resembled a museum of the maddest mad science. Boxes with cones sticking out that themselves had rings sticking out. Sleek white shapes like refrigerators with jet engines attached. Jagged stars that floated way up in the air, orbited by clouds of glitter. A hefty rifle made of smoothly rounded parts separated from each other by about an inch, but which still kept the shape of a gun. Whirling concentric disks. What looked an awful lot like my puzzle box, but twice the height of a man and tied shut with chains you could use to anchor a boat.
And so on.
Not to mention the ones that were obviously wreckage, melted or shattered, but in one case still pulsating.
As our trip down the stairway neared the floor, Claire said, voice hushed by awe, “You could equip an army with all this.”
I grimaced. “Army is right. All my power is showing me are bombs. I think this is a vault where someone tried to seal away dangerously broken things.”
Ray concluded, “So, nobody touch anything.”
I nodded. I wasn’t kidding. My power rarely told me how anything worked unless it would explode, and I got flashing glimpses of exotic devastation every time I turned my head. The tech in here was wildly advanced, and wildly unsafe.
The giant vault had exactly one other obvious exit, on the opposite side from the stairway. A regular doorway, although it looked a little like a tunnel, what with being cut into an outward-sloping wall.
Someone had been here. There might be no scuffing this floor, but muddy swamp footprints made for an easy trail to follow. Their track wound through the widest, clearest path between looming super science death machines to that far door, exactly the path I would have chosen. Did choose. Mud was way less threatening than these strange, secretive, disasters of science waiting to happen.
We switched to tiptoes as we neared the exit, approaching from the side. To no use―a glance through showed no one in the next chamber.
Definitely a ‘chamber.’ This room was less conventionally roomlike than the last one. Not as big, but still massive, it spread out in the shape of a six-pointed star. Every point ended in another doorway.
The walls and floor―rising to a point, it didn’t have a ceiling, exactly―might have been made of gold. A mosaic covered every inch, with unpredictably shaped plaques of wood, stone, metal, colored glass, some of which might actually be
gemstones, and less identifiable materials. Each one had its own decoration, usually a letter in unknown alphabet, or a complicated geometric figure. Some had actual pictures, like a silhouette of a fox’s head.
In that visual clutter, the contents of the room almost got lost. The objects mostly weren’t large, few as big as a man, and widely scattered compared to the high tech junkyard behind us. They managed to be simpler, and even more mysterious. A cylindrical tank of lava. A massive, multi-sided amethyst covered in engravings. A classic fantasy treasure chest. The ten-foot tall yin-yang symbol standing on its side made for a particularly odd touch.
Vera swerved away from us, zooming into one of the branches of the star, towards a small and entirely unimpressive display. From a distance, it looked like an aquarium.
From up close, it also looked like an aquarium, although with a gleaming, complex high-tech lid. I couldn’t get too good a look at that, because long before the rest of us caught up with her, Vera locked her hands, spread her wings, and unleashed her bright pink heat beam on the tank.
It sat there, ignoring her completely. Warmth radiated through the air around the ray, but it had no effect on the aquarium or its contents. Vera kept blasting anyway, a still and silent tableau, peaceful except for the glaring light of the beam and the heat blowing outwards in a soft breeze.
Tilting my head and crabbing around, I got a good look at the contents of the aquarium. A starfish. Thick, lumpy, and bright red, but basically a starfish.
Except, of course, that Vera had no problem with starfish. Only one thing ever inspired her to violence.
“Oh, Tesla. That’s a Puppeteer,” I whispered. Then honesty and the strident Akk tradition of nitpicking made me add, “A Puppeteer biotool, at least. Alive and active.”
“Not for long, if Vera has any say about it,” Claire added, grinning.
“Which apparently she doesn’t,” said Ray. Pulling off a glove, he went to the far side of the tank and held his fingers close to the glass. Then he put the glove back on, gingerly touched the surface, and finally laid his whole palm there. Lesson received: Vera not only wasn’t hurting the aquarium, she wasn’t having any effect at all.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 15
