The Random

Chapter 17: Captive to the Light's Lords

Chapter Seventeen: Captive to the Light's Lords

     As soon as they charged into the room, Heartfilia and Harriette received the news about the fire that ashed the Cinder Laboratory, where most of Dr. Rubber's researches were being conducted. Suddenly, Harriette felt herself torn between getting to her husband as soon as possible or stay at the tower and wait for his son's return. She gasped desperately at the thought as pictures of probabilities began to terrify her.

     "Don't worry Harriette, Michael's being taken care of now at the Nontral House. He's safe" said Heartfilia, right after ending a call from one of her men who was at the laboratory when the fire happened.

      She gave Harriette a comforting and assuring look, barely able to display what could had been an apologetic look, before gazing through the glass wall, the whole of Servidron city seemingly floating around the Rubix Tower. Inside her, a lot more than what happened and was happening right then could be of her doing, were boggling her. She thought maybe everything came to burst and that now rached the deciding point. 

     Harriette cleared her throat. Somehow, that news calmed her, but not completely, as she was still anxiously waiting for his son. Amidst of all those things and possibilities, she found herself at the middle standing, but couldn't do anything for the ones she loved. She suddenly felt guilty about how terribly she played the roles she should be to the most important people in her life —to Charlie, her son, and to Michael, her husband.

     She cast her eyes outside, where the blue lights gathered thick around the glass-walled room. She would have heard the wind whistling outside, singing a haunting melody that would have made her even more terrified, had the walls not made it impossible.

     Atop, a gigantic spherical bulb was emitting much brighter beams of light, radiating away to meet other beams coming from other light towers from surrounding cities. She was sure where those beams emanated: the one from the Northeast, York, a city of more than one million and a bustling wealthy city; from the North, the City of Brookes—that would have been the easiest city to infiltrate had it not safeguarded by the looming Cavalanth Ranges skirting around its borders; to the East, the City of Rah, confined in the borders of the force field; and the Capital, the City of Virmo in the Southeast and the abandoned City of Decanthia in the South. Around these Cities, were similar lights from their neighboring confined settlements, cutting across the sky to meet other beams and continue the link. Harriette could almost envision what it could look like from the sky: a web of lights with Servidron, the "Light" as most people would call, serving as the central source and its brightest point. Finding their refuge inside the wedges, were supernatural groups contained inside their own domains, desperately trying to escape the web of lights shrouded over them.

     Harriette took a brief glance of the entire room. It was so much larger than she thought. The room expanded into an oblate sphere, transparent glass almost surrounding all of it. Through the middle, a long elevated platform, made alternately of thick glass and some kind of stainless metal, ran across; above it were twin touchscreen monitors standing back-to-back.

     To the wall facing the North, another table—one that was far smaller than the one running through the middle, along the east-west axis of the room, had computers, monitors and other devices placed over it.

     Outside, the city laid silent and mysterious, its skyscrapers reaching for the same sky that the Rubix  already impaled. Harriette focused her gaze at the converging points of the beams; an explosion of brilliance radiated around the balls that the meetings created, a nimbus of faint red glow surrounding each of them. And then she noticed what just a glimpse could not possibly see through a mere sight. Beneath and above the beams, where glow was barely perceptible, a continuous flow of red lights, fainted by the presence of a more dominating blue light, was running straight in repetitive fractals.