by Charley Case
It was a little like the difference between Danica and herself. They knew each other better than any two people had any right to. And when you stripped away everything but the core of who they were, you found two people who were more similar than anyone suspected. Both of them were nerds for their chosen fields, read scientific articles for fun, and talked endlessly about some new technique in their field that would bore anyone else to tears. But they would sit and listen to one another ramble off technical details and be as excited about each other’s discovery as they would be about their own.
They both were slow to trust but fiercely loyal once they did. They loved the same dorky movies and nineties trivia and Harry Potter. Rarely did they disagree on what to eat, or watch, or do for fun. But while they were basically the same person on the inside, much like the black dress, they were seen as vastly different from the outside. Danica made the dress look sexy and flirty, showing off long toned legs for the world to see, while Mila made the dress look cute and modest, the focus on how the cuffed sleeves framed her shoulders and head while drawing attention to her long black hair.
It was the same dress, but no one ever noticed that they both wore it.
As she came around the corner, Mila saw Lance, Finn, and Victoria working on dinner in the kitchen. Finn was preparing a large salad while Victoria mashed a large bowl of creamy potatoes, and Lance was busy searing up shrimp in a huge stainless-steel pan while a full platter of giant scallops sat on the counter awaiting their turn in the herbed brown butter.
Danica and Rebecca sat with their chairs at the dining table turned toward the clear glass wall, sipping steaming cups of something and watching Remmy as she played with Grimm out in the pool.
The sun had set and night had truly fallen, but the patio was still lit by a warm magical light that, while not coming from anywhere, still glowed everywhere.
Everyone was laughing and having a great time in each other’s company, thoughts of the coming battle forgotten for the night. Mila felt guilty for taking it easy while Azoth did who knew what in preparation for their confrontation. But logically, she knew there was nothing they could do but wait. There was no need to worry about the things she couldn’t change.
She had considered using the cube Yaminah had given her, but she was still nervous that it might let the Drude track her to Rebecca’s house, and she wasn’t willing to put them in danger. Besides, it wasn’t like the cube told them where he was. They would have to recognize the place to find him, and the image Yaminah had first shown her had been a dark room with a throne. It could have been anywhere.
Mila walked up behind Danica and leaned over, planting a kiss on the top of her head before taking the chair beside her at the table.
“What was that for?” Danica touched the spot Mila had kissed in surprise.
Mila shrugged. “I was thinking about you. You’re a good friend, Danica. You don’t have to fight this battle, you know. It’s not your fight.”
Danica rolled her eyes as she lifted her leg and playfully pushed Mila’s knee. “I know that. But you would be right there next to me in the same circumstances. Don’t worry about me. I know exactly what I’m getting into and why I’m doing it.”
Finn came over and set a steaming cup on the table in front of Mila, then winked at her. “Rebecca, did you tell Mila about what you found? It might make her feel a little better.”
“I was about to, pushy. Give a girl a second to settle in.” Rebecca sounded like a big sister.
Finn held up his hands in mock surrender and backed away.
Mila laughed at the ridiculous display and turned to Rebecca. “What’s he talking about?”
“I did a little more reading after you left. When you said the device had three hundred charges or more, that didn’t sit right with me. Gregory was a hell of a documentarian, but sometimes I think he wrote faster than his brain could keep up.
“When he said it should hold twenty or so charges, he meant it should take twenty or more charges. He was estimating the minimum.”
Mila sipped from the mug, surprised to find hot cider with a healthy dose of spiced rum mixed in. She took another large swallow, savoring the flavor before replying.
“So, did you find out what the device’s capacity is?”
Rebecca chuckled. “It’s infinite.”
“Infinite? How is that possible?”
“So, Old Greg as Victoria likes to call him, was a rather clever bastard. He took the same principles the Drude use to store their power and created a device to mimic that ability.”
Victoria held up the device after pulling it from a pocket, having heard the conversation from the kitchen. “It’s a pocket dimension.” She tossed the brass-colored ball over the island to Mila.
Catching the heavy multi-segmented sphere, Mila looked at it with new appreciation. “There’s another dimension in here? Like a different universe?”
“Not exactly.” Rebecca waggled her hands in a “sort of” motion. “It’s a pocket dimension. Think of it as an empty plot of land. You could build a universe on it, but right now there’s nothing there. It’s empty.”
“But it’s infinite?”
Danica nodded. “Yeah, but it’s a small infinite. Like from calculus—it’s infinite but less infinite than other infinities.”
Mila groaned. “God, I hated calculus. But I think I hate that I understand what you mean, which is thanks to that sadistic class, even more. We can put power into it forever and never fill it, but it’s not big enough that we could fit everything in it, because it’s smaller than this universe. It’s part of this universe, unlike the place the Drude keeps its power, which is somewhere else entirely.”
“Exactly.” Danica laughed. “It’s a pocket dimension.”
“So, long story short, we can’t overload this thing and blow it up by accident.”
“Nope,” Rebecca confirmed.
“Good.” Mila closed her eyes and forced another charge into the device. She pushed the power as hard as she could, trying to see how much flow she could get into it. There was a definite bottleneck, but she’d drained herself down to her last ten percent and opened her eyes before the scallops were plated. It was far faster than she’d ever done it before, and she took a large gulp of the hot cider as a reward, finishing off the mug.
She put the device on the table and held her mug over her head. In her best Viking impression, she shouted, “Another!”
Danica’s eyes went wide. “You drank that already? How? Mine is practically still boiling, and I got it ten minutes before you did.”
Mila looked at her in confusion. The cider was hot, but it wasn’t that hot. She looked over to see Finn take a big gulp from his steaming cup before starting to chop the cucumbers for the salad.
“Well, I guess that answers that, then.” Mila lowered the mug. “I’m becoming a dwarf, aren’t I?”
Rebecca nodded. “Yeah. Well, partly. You’re still a Valkyrie, but you’re also becoming something else. Your new Valkyrie status doesn’t account for this much change, though. There’s something else working on you as well.”
“Yeah, but what?”
“I have a theory, but…it’s a little far-fetched.” Rebecca hedged.
Mila laughed. “More far-fetched than me changing species?”
“Good point.” She leaned in and gave Mila a long appraising look before continuing. “Have you ever heard of the Elementals?”
To Rebecca’s obvious surprise, both Mila and Danica nodded.
“You have?” She leaned back and looked them over as if trying to judge whether they were telling the truth. “Are you fucking with me?”
Mila laughed and shook her head. “I did a little job with Dirt a couple of months ago. Nice guy, not very talkative though. Are there others?”
It took Rebecca a few seconds to recover. “You’re for sure going to have to tell me about that sometime, but to answer the question, yes there are others. No one but the Huldu knows who they are, but that�
�s not the important part. The important thing is that the Elementals were a reaction by Earth herself. She needed to protect something precious, so she intervened, and the Elementals were born.”
Mila raised an eyebrow as she regarded Rebecca. “You’re saying Earth is aware and created a race of dirt people to protect something?”
Rebecca shook her head while frowning. “What? No. Sorry, I didn’t explain that very well. Yes, Earth is somewhat sentient. It was a feature of the great ship that made it so advanced. No, she did not create a race of dirt men. All the Elementals are of different races. But, she did modify them. Much in the same way you’re changing. It’s only a theory.”
“Hypothesis,” Mila and Danica said at the same time.
“What?”
“Never mind.” Mila waved away the comment. “Why would Earth need me to become something different?”
Rebecca shrugged, but Finn and Lance came in with steaming dishes of food followed by Victoria with the large salad Finn had made before Mila could ask any more. Not that she knew what to ask anyway.
Chapter Twenty
That night, Mila laid in the crook of Finn’s arm, the covers thrown off the bed once again as they let the conditioned air evaporate the sweat from their bodies. Mila was still breathing heavily, trying to catch her breath.
“You okay over there, darlin’? You’re huffing like the oxygen scrubbers went out on your ship,” Finn commented in an infuriatingly not-out-of-breath way.
Mila tried to blow a strand of sweat-soaked hair from her face, but it refused to budge. Huffing in slight frustration, she sat up and spun around to sit cross-legged on the bed beside Finn. She quickly gathered her hair in both hands and twisted it into a large sloppy bun on the top of her head and held it there with one hand as she fanned her face with her free one.
“Sorry, babe. You’re way too hot to lay against right now.”
Finn got a goofy grin on his face and waved the comment away with comical awkwardness. “Awe, thanks, babe. You’re not so bad yourself.”
She lightly slapped his abdomen, getting a satisfying “Oof!” from him.
She rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You’re such a dork. You know what I mean.”
He chuckled along with her. “Yeah, I know. What I want to know is if you’re feeling okay. Usually, you’re pulling blankets off the floor within two minutes of finishing.”
Mila felt a bead of sweat roll out of the back of her hair and down her back, while at the same time she saw that Finn was already dry and relaxed. Even his chest hair was standing back up in curly tufts. Was she okay?
“I think so. I’m not cooling down. Maybe all that hot cider is finally catching up with me.”
Finn rolled out of bed and walked to the bathroom, disappearing behind the door but leaving it half-open. The faucet turned on for a few seconds then Finn came back out, folding a damp towel into a four-inch-wide long strip. He came over to the bed and reached around her neck, then draped the cold towel over it so the ends hung against her chest.
She stiffened at the sudden chill but quickly felt relief as her body finally started to cool down.
“Oh, that’s amazing.”
Finn grinned and fell back onto the bed, crossing his ankles as he bounced slightly before settling back into his spot. “Works every time.”
They sat quietly, him laying back watching her while she kept her hair up and let out little moans of pleasure.
“How are things going with getting your berserker rage under control? Are you still talking with Rolf?” Mila asked out of nowhere.
Finn pursed his lips and folded his hands behind his head. “I see him fairly regularly. We usually grab lunch while I’m out in the afternoons. The training, if that’s what you want to call it, is pretty much over. I can keep myself in the flow while still being able to cast.”
“Are you still immune to magic while in the rage?”
“For the most part. I need to lose myself, though, if I want full immunity. At that point, I might as well be a wild animal so I can’t go that far, but I can shrug off about eighty or ninety percent of a spell without much of a problem. Why?”
Mila bit her lip and gave him a coy look. “Do you think you could shrug off infernal magic?”
His face fell slightly. “Oh, that’s why.” He reached down and scratched his thigh while he thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. The problem is that infernal is an entirely different kind of magic, but it’s still a kind of magic. I honestly don’t know. I do know that I don’t want to find out, if at all possible.”
Mila sighed, then pulled the damp towel from her neck and tossed it on the nightstand. “Well, there goes that plan. On to the next one, I guess.” She swung her leg over him and settled down on his stomach.
His eyes brightened. “Oh, I like this plan, but it seems a lot like the one that nearly sent you into a full-on inferno. You sure?”
“We might not have much more time to do this before the big day. I want to get in some overtime.” She smiled, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Besides, you said your towel trick always works, right? I’m going to test that theory.”
“You’ve been aggressive lately.” He gave her a narrow-eyed look. “I like it.”
She shrugged theatrically. “What can I say? I’m a stone-cold Manther killer.”
Mila sipped her orange juice, washing down her second helping of bacon pancakes as everyone else was finishing up their first. Everyone but Finn, who was halfway through his third stack.
This whole dwarf thing was freaking Mila out a little. She couldn’t remember eating that much for breakfast in a long time. What scared her was that she wanted another pancake.
“You were so right, Finn. These are amazing.” Lance took another bite and chewed with a big smile on his face.
“Yeah, they’re really good!” Grimm echoed, bouncing in his seat while he stabbed another bite onto his fork.
Finn leaned back while taking a long pull of coffee and smiling. “The secret is mixing the salty and sweet. It’s an entire culinary style on my homeworld.”
Rebecca wiped the corner of her mouth and picked up her juice glass. “I’m pretty sure that’s a well-known combination here on Earth, too.”
Finn’s face fell a little, but he shrugged it off. “I should have guessed. There were dwarves here in the beginning, after all. Probably got passed down through the generations.”
“That might be what happened.” Rebecca winked at Mila.
Mila snorted a laugh, then cleared her throat and asked the first thing that came to mind so she didn’t have to answer the suspicious look Finn gave her. “Have any of you heard about people disappearing?”
She wasn’t sure why she asked that until she remembered it was what Azoth told her to look into, to see that he was serious. Suddenly, she cared about what the answer might be.
Everyone shook their heads while looking at her like she had an ear growing out of her forehead.
“It’s funny you should ask that.” Lance swallowed his last bite quickly. “I was on a forum this morning where they were talking about villages around the world vanishing off the map.”
Rebecca groaned and reached over to pat him on the arm. “Babe, please tell me you’re not talking about those conspiracy forums.”
He laughed and nodded. “Yeah, I am.” He turned to the rest of them to explain. “We research magical people and creatures like her family has done for as long as anyone can remember. As you can probably guess, by this point, there isn’t much the family hasn’t found and written about extensively. We’ll have to show you guys the library at some point. It’s insane. There are literally tens of thousands of books dating all the way back to before Earth was even in the design process.”
“Babe.” Rebecca gently knocked him out of his tangent.
“Right, sorry about that. I love that damned library. I’ll be honest, I can’t believe the family entrusted the collection to us. Especially since it took so much convinci
ng to get the Huldu to unpack Gregory’s shipping crate. He brought copies of everything he could get his hands on before booking passage…” Lance got a distant look on his face as he began heading to his beloved library in his mind.
“Babe,” Rebecca repeated, this time a little louder.
Lance shook his head, clearing whatever had taken his thoughts. “Sorry.”
Mila laughed, her shoulders shaking slightly. “It’s fine. I get passionate about my interests, too.”
“I bet. Anthropology is fascinating. It’s a large part of what we do. Maybe we could collaborate at some point. Having an expert would speed things up considerably.”
Mila considered Lance’s proposal. She didn’t know if she would ever go back to the museum at this point. Maybe working with him and Rebecca would be nice.
“I’ll consider it.” Mila waved for him to continue. “You were saying about the forum?”
“Yes, conspiracy forums are ninety percent insane people shouting into an echo chamber, but once in a while, you find a real nugget. I started using them with the idea that there are still quite a few creatures from private collections in stasis down in the main storage hold. A lot of these creatures don’t have any formal documentation on them. Now, stasis is a wonder of magic and technology, but it’s not perfect. Once in a while, something gets loose and makes its way to the surface. More than likely it ends up on a conspiracy theory blog or forum. So, every morning I scan the threads and see if anything jumps out at me.”
“And you found something on missing people?” Mila had no idea there were creatures held below Earth’s crust waiting to pop out and start eating people. It was fascinating. However, she’d fixated on the missing people.
Lance gave her a half-grin. “Not only people, whole towns. The people, the buildings, even the streets. Poof! Gone. So far, it’s only been in remote places so no one has been able to corroborate the guy’s story, but someone did the math and the numbers of missing from the towns the guy mentioned alone was over a hundred thousand. The huge number was enough that I wrote it off, but now that you’re asking, I’m intrigued.”
