Between

Episode 28

Episode 28

"Come on!"

CLANK.

"Come on!"

Trixie took a moment to catch her breath. She'd been heaving her warhammer at nothing for quite a while, and she felt she was beginning to make some progress. It had taken a good deal of effort and logic, not to mention too much time wandering around the Junkyard, but she'd finally found some manner of vehicle and/or building that had been rendered completely invisible. Even in the bizarre pseudo place known as Between, making something invisible was neither common nor simple. No one would do it just for the fun of it, so if something was invisible, then it meant someone wanted to hide it. In this case, she knew precisely who had hidden it, and what they were hiding. Now she just needed to get at it.

"What is this thing? A damn bank vault?" she grumbled.

She stood and began to carefully pace along the invisible surface. Each step brought a hollow metallic thunk until one step came down... and kept going. A different sort of creature might have fallen, but a pair of wings on one's back means one can gracefully recover from little things like stepping off a cliff or slipping on a banana peel.

Trixie fluttered herself up and back, then reached down and felt for the unseen edge. Her fingers brushed across a sharp corner with a very smooth surface. These were common features for objects in The Between. A thousand different mechanisms and phenomena could result in something being sent to this place, but many of them shared the tendency to slice off those parts left behind with supernaturally clean and smooth cuts.

A bit farther along, Trixie's fingers grazed another sharp edge, then dipped into a void. Her black lips curved into a triumphant grin as she found a thin chain. That was a favorite way to mount the sort of powerful talismans necessary for, say, rendering a huge hunk of metal entirely invisible.

She pinched the chain and pulled it free. A wonderful tearing sound heralded the other favorite way to attach things in The Between: duct tape. It was as useful here as anywhere. Once the enchanted piece of metal was removed, the whole structure flickered into visibility.

As she'd theorized during her interminable hammering, it was indeed some manner of vault, or at least most of one. Luck would have it she'd chosen the wall of the vault, and though she'd thumped a nice little bowl of destruction into it, it would have taken a great deal more hammering before her hammer would have punched through. The edge she was kneeling on was the bottom of the vault, and the door was to her left. Someone had scavenged the locking mechanism, but Stubbs had replaced it with a copious amount of thick chains and at least seven padlocks of assorted complexity and design.

"The imp knows how to lock things up," she said. She twirled the hammer in her fingers. "Lucky I brought the skeleton key."

Something that one learns rather swiftly when in the scavenging game is the simple fact that no safe is truly safe. A few feet of steel and a lock that would take a genius to circumvent can only ever slow someone down. With a little dedication and the right tools, it is only a matter of time before the door swings open. And with a lot of dedication, it turns out the right tool is always a hammer.

Trixie leaped into the air and flapped her wings, flitting in a tight circle with the hammer outstretched. The head struck the largest of the locks with perfect precision, shattering it with deceiving ease. A handful of similar loops that imbued the head of her hammer with frightening amounts of momentum made short work of the remaining locks. The most stubborn of them took three hits, but when it was gone the chains went slack and the massive door was hers to open.