Queen Raidne — Roleplayer Guild

Finnegan's Trade House

As soon as Finnegan finished his message, he pressed the little red button again. The red lights went steady. Whatever that thing in the sky was, it wouldn't steal his damned gold. He'd come to this node decades ago with barely a kettleful of gold, and now there was more than that hidden underneath the bar top. Completely loyal servants (those that were sane enough or cowardly enough to not fight the Titan in the sky) followed their evacuation procedures, accessing dozens of hidden vaults, secret rooms, and the occasional blatant safes to haul the treasure into beastly plastic-aluminum electric trucks. Statues, paintings, gold coins, irreproducible antiques, and eclectic miscellanea steadily made their way into the trucks. Finnegan was grabbing the black tea kettle full of gold beneath the bar. Retrieving the heirloom, Finnegan raced down the hall. A fairy brandishing an elaborate glass polearm of all things was awkwardly making her way down the space, getting stuck on the corners. His red, translucent wings twitched in irritation. "Get out of the way, you bleeding idiot!" Finnegan shouted. Something suspiciously like a gamma ray beam vaporized the Fay. Finnegan dumbly peaked around the hole, seeing burning wall after burning wall leading back to an alien in power armor. A creature with a face uglier than imagination previously allowed for peeked around the corner down the hall. It was... eating an ottoman, stuffing littered on the floor. The thing snorted, seeing Finnegan, and dropped the last bit of fabric before launching itself toward him. Finnegan leapt into the hole, the lingering radiation making his glamour flicker horribly. The thing crashed through the wall. In desperation, Finnegan hurled his kettle full of gold out the window and leaped after it. Outside, the situation had gone from bad to worse. Things were everywhere, species he'd only read about were firing weapons that he didn't know what did to no effect, but a stream of Fay were still faithfully carting his gold to the trucks. Finnegan scooped up his kettle and leapt into the air, finally in something of his element. The sky was equally chaotic though. Every few meters, some ordnance, creature, alien, or misguided Fairy was rushing to its objective. Getting to the trucks was difficult, but Finnegan thought he could make it. Then the creature lept into the air after him. The blasted thing could fly. "Oh, come on. There's thirteen stories of beautiful ottomans right over there. Can't you munch them, instead?" Miraculously, the thing exploded in a puff of black flak. Where had somebody gotten a flak cannon? It didn't matter. In seconds, he would be on a truck, and on his way out of here via the Path. "Go, go!" he shouted, gesturing for the Fairy at the head of the convoy to leave. The trucks started abruptly, rapidly accelerating down the Path. Those that had tank treads, anyway. The rest were still bravely chugging on despite their flat tires from the now-sharp rocks on the Path. Even those were moving faster than he could fly, though. The last of the trucks was about to turn the corner leading off-node. But he was doing fine, all he had to do was fly for half a second. That's when a stray bullet slammed into his shoulder. Finnegan tumbled through the air with a death grip on his kettle. Suddenly someone grabbed his shoulders, heaving him further away from the trucks, which were now gone. "Damn... you..." Finnegan mumbled. His consciousness was fading, but whoever had him also had a prodigous amount of iron nearby. It was an alien with metal wings, and they burned. The alien was rocketing toward its ship, and the last thing Finnegan remembered before going unconscious was absolutely refusing to let go of his pot of gold. ~o~0~o~ Myo blinked his way back to consciousness. He just wanted more sleep, but something important was nagging at him. An explosion rained concrete dust on his back. The anti-Aether! He got up to his knees, and had to stay there, blood rushing from his head. Something was wrong, he felt so naked. He was completely out of Aetherfluid. He'd never run completely out before. He didn't even know it was possible; the Aether was always right there, and grabbing some Aetherfluid was practically instinct. It was always so easy before, but now he didn't know if he could even make a glamour. But he could still sense the wrongness above him, and he had to leave, even though he had to know it at the same time, had to get closer and learn its secrets, exploit it. Myo shook his head. It cleared. He had to leave. Now. Conveniently, there was a convoy of trucks racing down the Path to his left.

The Fairy Path

Many very small things passed through the Path. In its pseudo-consciousness, the Path acknowledged this as good. Most of the very small things were forgettable, except for two. One was its creator, and the Path would give Her a friendly nuzzle, like a loyal dog, if it could. The second was the Very Nice Lady. The Lady was different than the others. Her extradimensional strings were shaped just so. And she convinced it to try new things, like having sections that never moved, little nodes. Occasionally the Lady would stand near edge of its heart and talk, and talk. The Path couldn't hear her, of course, but it could feel her presence. And if it concentrated really hard, it could feel the muscles in her throat vibrate and her teeth gnash when the Lady was angry at something. Over time, it had learned to listen. It had learned to understand. The Lady would go on about this Fairy or that Fairy living in its heart, and how they'd danced for hours that night, and how she almost hated to deceive them. Other times she would have a gleeful excitement, laughing madly at her latest scheme. The Path listened. It had to, the Lady was in its heart. Technically, quite a few very little things were in its heart, but the Lady was always the most interesting. One of the nodes, though, one of the nodes that the Lady had talked her into making - it writhed, twisted, tore. One of the very small things had poked a hole in it. Angrily, the Path shifted the node to a different bit of hyperspace, trying to patch the hole with a locallized supercluster of hypertense cosmic strings. But even though it had moved, something pinned it to realspace. Something was wrenching the hole bigger. Something was - painfully - eating it-! The Path didn't know what to do. It had never had to defend itself. It had never been under threat; it didn't understand the notion. So it sat there, and tried to repair itself. But the hole refused to go away. The Path felt a presence there, or a lack of it. Without warning, the node exploded. In agony, the Path screamed. Long trails of it appeared momentarily in real space, lighting up the void with faint translucent rainbows, like a soap bubble. For an instant, it curled up into itself, withdrawing endpoints, retreating toward its heart, wrapping its tendrils around its heart like a mother protecting her child. And then the Lady was there, and she was speaking, and things were normal, except for the long, skinny arm of Path floating out in space, alone, cut off; but the Lady mentioned that it might be able to re-attach it, work around where the node was. She was right. The Lady was always right. The node that once contained Finnegan's unraveled, shattering into a trillion pieces of glowing real-space, great long threads of pure magical Aether whipping about. What was left of it - a chunk of cratered land, a lot of debris, a floating emergency bunker, some charred ships and aliens, and other detritus, appeared in realspace near Fleet Solution, arms of pure Aether crackling about before retreating back into hyperspace.

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