Log #73: Kingdoms
Often considered to be the best of the best in humanity, the Elite Scouting Force, or ESF, is in charge of clearing out creatures in designated areas, as well as surveying the land to determine whether it is suitable or not for settlement. After Slayers clear out an area until it has become a safe zone, the Barricade is extended to engulf the new territory, and civilization can expand further. The ESF also takes pride in discovering and studying new types of monsters outside the Barricade, and occasionally finding small settlements of humans that have managed to survive outside the Three Kingdoms. The ESF do not use custom weapons, but instead wield extremely sharp and resilient blades known as Duratanas. For eliminating taller Shade, Pressurized Launching Devices, or PLDs, are required, which fit on its user's back like a heavy backpack. Referred to by commonfolk fairly accurately as "jetpacks," PLDs utilize controlled streams of extremely powerful air pressure to guide its user through the air to its target. PLDs are incredibly dangerous to their users, however, so only the most skilled and experienced of Warriors can join the ESF.
-General Elvira Ramos
490 BPE
No matter how many times I closed my eyes and reopened them, I was still here. I still carried wings on my back, I still possessed a nest of black, scruffy hair, and I still housed a coward within my soul. This was the third chamber in Heim's Pit, and from what I saw in front of me, it was likely the cruelest of them all. The room itself was a simple box, far smaller than its predecessors, and what resembled a projector screen covered every wall, as well as the floor and the ceiling. The entryway that led to the ghoulish creatures had vanished and no exit had presented itself for the last ten or so minutes. Honestly, I had no idea how long I was standing there; it could have been weeks or seconds as far as I knew. The only thing that wasn't a white screen in my vision was a small pedestal, with a blue button on the top.
The label read MEMORIES.
I was terrified of that button.
After what this cave had done to me the last time I had dared to venture further, I was completely terrified of that button.
Despite my terror, I could also sense that part of me, that strangely human feeling of curiosity. That small part of me was willing to take a leap of faith and push onward, if only to experience everything that Heim's Pit had to offer. The other, larger segment of my conscience reminded me that I wasn't presented with any other option; I was still trapped in a box, whether I hit the button or not. It wasn't really a question of if I should push the blue button, but when I would. Stalling wasn't getting me anywhere, so I steeled my nerves, gritted my teeth, and smashed the button with my right fist with the force to shatter bones. The entire pedestal glowed an unearthly light, and vanished. Seconds later, I was plunged into darkness, swept into the one night I would gladly have died to avoid.
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"Hey, Kazu. The heck are we doing here? Aren't we a bit too young to be out this late?"
"Yeah, Russell's right, man. Your dad would be so mad if he found out."
"Both of you, be quiet. Dad won't find out, and that's that. As long as the six of us are together, then we will be fine.
Or, that's what I was hoping. Jack, Terry, Russell, Kazuki, Eir, and Junior. I was only ten, and somehow also the oldest one in our group. The six of us were all just kids, but we had strength in numbers. Junior, our leader, always knew just how to handle every situation, and she led with grace, kindness, and an iron tongue. That wasn't her real name, but it was the nickname she had adopted within days of the six of us uniting for the first time. She was the youngest of us, the cutest of us, the smartest of us, and she loved the nickname. None of us knew why, or anything else going on in her head. None of us dared to ask.
"Hey, Jack, could you hand me that rope? Great, thanks," I said.
We were sneaking around in the Forest of the Crimson Crest, way past our bedtimes. Supposedly, a grumpy old man lived in a cabin below the cliff, and we had to see him, or at least discover why he was so isolated and alone. That was the mission, and Junior had put me in charge of telling the others what to do. Eir was my second-in-command, in case I screwed up or forgot something, while Junior herself watched from afar, judging our abilities. I could imagine her now: crouching in some tree, binoculars over her curious brown eyes, a slight grin entertaining her features. Her double ponytail made her long, hazel hair appear short, and light skin that seemed purer than a mirror was likely covered in a camouflage suit. Her white shirt complimented her ever-present blue jeans, and silent, black sneakers below them which could let her sneak up on a Silverwolf.
Jack handed me a long, thick rope, and I carefully lowered it down the cliff. When there was no rope left to lower, I let go, and double-checked that Jack was still holding on. I tugged a few times, to test how well he could bear the strain, and walked to the edge of the cliff. "Hey, you... can hold my weight, right, Jack?"
"Of course, don't worry about it, Fo. I've been lifting quite a bit, so you can count on me," he winked in reassurance, flexing with one arm.
"Just double-checking," I responded.
With that confidence, I began my descent, clutching to the rope like the sturdy, comforting leg of a father.
"Alright then, how we doin' on time, Fee?"
"It's only 21:00. Don't worry, Fo, we got plenty of time," Eir responded calmly. We each had a codename, or at least four of us did. Eir was Fee, Terry was Fi, I was Fo, and Russell was Fum. Junior didn't need one, since "Junior" already was a nickname, and Jack, upon complaining that he didn't get one either, was reminded that Jack already was a character from the fable, and it fit perfectly with ours. Our code names were only used in operations like such, or when we were messing around, certain that no one could hear us.
"Hey, Fum, how's the cabin looking?" Jack glanced to a nearby bush, barely straining from my weight.
Russell peeked out from the edge of the bush, and looked through his own pair of binoculars. "Well, nothing. Still. Just like every time you have asked for the past hour, nothing has happened. It's still quieter than a rabbit hole surrounded by cobras. Mmmm... rabbits."
I scanned the trees that stretched far beyond our target, and glimpsed downwards. It was still quite far, and I immediately shut my eyes, hugging my face close to my arms. I was still sliding down the rope slowly, with no protection or safety. "C-Can someone please tell me how much farther?"
Eir immediately filled me in, clearing her throat as she peeked over the edge. "Well, I don't have any sort of measuring device, but I'd have to say more than halfway. Maybe ten or so meters left? I'll go with twelve."
"Great."
I loved heights. So very much.
When I finally made it down and made sure that the coast was clear, the others followed, one by one. Jack was the last, and when it was his turn, he tied the rope to a tree and took a massive leap off the edge like a madman in an action movie. Naturally, the rope wouldn't tolerate such behavior, but we somehow managed to catch him without breaking anything or anyone. Eventually, only Junior was still on the cliff, surveying our position. The rest of us grouped together, and made our way through the thicket that led to the old cabin. It was definitely the perfect location for some old horror movie, with vines growing on the walls and everything.
"It appears to be two stories with an attic, considering the shape of the roof," Russell noted approvingly. "At least whoever lives in there isn't wasting too much space living alone... aack!" Russell was interrupted by Jack pulling his ear, sending the scrawny kid stumbling back.
"Shut up, will ya? You don't need to be so inconsiderate, Fum. Living alone is nothing to joke about, even if it is an old, grouchy man," he grinned.
"Owowow! Just let go," Russell pleaded, to which Jack compiled gleefully, before immediately catching the small kid in a headlock. The two laughed until they collapsed onto the dark, wet grass, and Eir had to remind the both of them that this was a covert operation, and bawling in laughter wasn't the best way to remain unnoticed.
"Come on, Jack and Fum, you too, Fee. We need to speak as little as possible, even if it is only in whispers," Terry shyly reminded the three of them. Meanwhile, I never slowed my pace, grinning inwardly at the scene behind me.
"Fo, what's going on down there? Were you spotted? Why is there so much noise coming in through the talkie?"
"Oh, sorry, Junior. I forgot to tell them to end the transmissions when not talking to you. It was just a... squabble between Jack and Fum. Then Fee tried to break it up, and Fi reminded all of them that talking in general is a bad idea."
She paused, considering this for a moment, then replied hastily, "Alright, then. Make sure they stay quiet, okay? This is a very important mission, and it would suck so much to ruin it after all of that planning."
"You got it, Junior. Over and out." Turning to the others in a whisper, "Guys, come on. Let's just keep moving, and save the jokes for when we are out of our target's reach. Just a few more feet, and we should be there." After that, it was deathly silent as the five of us continued onward. In less than five minutes, we had reached the back wall of the cabin, and Russell did a quick scan of the wooden wall to ensure that we weren't being watched. Once that was established, we huddled together, and went over the plan once more.
"Alright, guys, this is the moment of truth. The windows are glass, but Russell has discovered that you should be able to open them by flipping them upwards carefully. There are two windows on each side of the cabin, so each of us will sneak through a separate one. I will use the vines to climb to the roof, and see if I can't find a chimney or some way of coming in through the top. Once inside, we will search the cabin for anything suspicious, always alert and ready to dash, got it? If one of us is caught, we are to immediately abort and get back to Junior as soon as possible. Once we have searched all of the house, we will meet at the front door, and I will explain the rest from there. You guys got it?"
Everyone nodded in agreement, except for Terry, who raised his hand.
"Yes, Fi, is there a problem?"
He looked around nervously, then leaned in a bit closer. "W-Well, what happens if we do get caught? What does that person do while the others escape?"
I considered this for a bit, and asked Junior for her advice. "Well, all I can tell you, Fo, is that we cannot risk one of us giving away all of our secrets. If that person cannot find a means to escape before they are trapped, then they will have to use the potion until we can find a way to rescue them."
Leave it to Junior to think of every situation. "The potion", as we called it, was a small bottle of blue liquid that all six of us carry around, Junior included. It used some sort of liquid element to freeze the vocal cords and prevent speech, until the user swallowed another liquid which released their vocal cords. Junior had the antidote with her, just in case one of us had to use the potion, and if she were somehow captured, she would smash them and we would be forced to use a hidden stash of them in our secret base. Fortunately for us, Junior was safe on the cliff, so we were probably going to be fine.
Without wasting another moment, and before Jack could make some smart remark, we proceeded to the next step of our plan. I climbed the vines of the back wall, Russell went for the back window on the left side, and Jack the back on the right. Eir chose the front left, leaving Terry with the front right. When I reached the roof, the first thing I noticed was the strange coarseness of the surface, despite the heavy rain last night. The red bricks were completely dry, and not a hint of rain was present anywhere. To make things even stranger, there were no drainpipes where the rain may have flown down off the roof. Moving on from the anomaly, it wasn't hard to find the black cylinder that was most likely a chimney. As I gazed down into the chamber, I spoke quietly with Junior to figure out the best approach in order to travel down the chimney. So far so good, I thought to myself. I just hoped that the others were having as much success as I was.
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"Alright, you got it? After making it down the chimney, there should be a door between the stairs on the first floor. It's directly below the owner's bedroom, so you will have to be quiet. How's the view?"
Unfortunately, my "view" was still a world of bricks, but Junior already knew that. Climbing down the chimney with my hands and feet was harder than I thought, for whatever reason, and I had barely made it down three feet before she decided to "entertain me" with another debriefing of my mission within the house. Since Jack and the others were exploring the upstairs rooms, I was to look around in the kitchen and dining room, whose ceiling was the floor of the master's floor. Every step I took down the chimney, I feared that I would slip and fall all the way down, or kick some soot into the air, which would also end up in my falling. On the bright side, there was little soot in the air to start with, so I assumed that the owner hadn't lit the fire below recently.
That was my biggest and only relief.
"Hey, Junior, can you tell what the others are doing? Obviously you can't use their walkie-talkies, but can you get a good view with those binoculars?"
A moment of pause, and then a reply: "Sorry, Fo. Can't see a thing with these lame things. Not only that, but the windows are super-messed up, and I don't think even the best of binoculars could peer into them. I'm sure they're fine, though, since I can't see anything."
"Why is that?"
"Well, because if I did see motion, it would probably be one or all of them running around, which means that something would have happened," she said.
I took a moment to consider this, then sighed at how obvious her reply was, and how long it took me to realize that. I snickered quietly at my density. Thankfully, I was almost at the bottom of the chimney, and all I needed to do was let go, hoping that the logs would quiet my landing. With a hand over my mouth, I released my hands and feet, and slid down a few feet, crashing into the fireplace with a thud. I flinched at the noise, looking around in the wide, dark room to see if anyone had heard me. No one was there, so I let go of my mouth, and another sigh sent soot into my face.
I scrambled out of the fireplace as quickly and quietly as possible, covering my coughing mouth to try (rather terribly) and keep quiet. After a minute of getting the smoke out of my lungs and rubbing my behind, I looked around the large room in front of me once more, until I laid my eyes on the two stairways on either side of the room, each leading upstairs, which had a total of three rooms.
One room on each side, and one in the middle, opposite to the exit.
The middle one was the owner's room.
Below that, my mission.
The bottom floor, a blank, giant room, had four doors: one for the entrance, two doors a few feet from each stairway, and one entrance into the dining room.
As I dusted myself off and started walking towards the dining door, I heard my walkie-talkie beeping in my belt, and quickly lifted it up, glancing at the upper-right hand corner of the screen. A bar was flashing red, with a diagonal line running from the top right corner to the opposite. Crap, this is bad, I thought. All the things that could happen during this mission and my batteries die? Without the talkie, I had no way to talk with Junior. The others weren't an option, either.
I was alone.
Every step I took gave me chills, and every breath made me tense up. Being alone in my house or outside for a few hours was no big deal, since I could always contact my friends if something happened. In this case, my only form of communication with the others was a scream, which would automatically result in a failed mission. I remembered overhearing Eir talk about our success to Junior, and how in all of the time that we were together, we had only failed or jeopardized three out of ten of them. Eir was always looking over our stats as a team whenever she wasn't either busy or hanging out with Terry.
Terry and Eir.
Just the thought of Eir and Terry together calmed my nerves, since they were always so comfortable and happy with each other. A year before they had joined our group, Eir and Terry had stuck together in the face of bullying and harsh treatment. Terry had suffered from PTSD as a young child for reasons I wasn't aware of, but Eir had helped him just by talking with him every day. Even after they met up with the rest of us and we created our secret group of awesomeness, none of us even appeared to be as comfortable around each other as those two.
Thinking about their happiness gave me just enough courage to grasp the handle of the door and slowly open it, cautious that someone might be inside the dining room. It was dark, just like the main entrance hall, but this room had a light switch on the wall next to the door. I reached out as far as my arms could stretch, trying to avoid stepping into the creepy room. With a grunt, I stretched my fingers to their limit, and brushed the switch with my fingertips.
Dang it, I thought, and took one tentative step into the room, just enough to reach and flip the switch. With a click, overhead lights flickered on, illuminating the room with a soft, steady glow. There were two rows of light bulbs, running to my left and right in groups of four, until it hit each wall. A large dining table fit for a mansion rested in the middle of the room, with a dozen or so chairs placed somewhat evenly around the table. Glass vases with dead plants decorated the top of the table, and cabinets occupied the corners of the right side of the room. On the left side, a blank wall and a door were all to see, but a sign above the door read KITCHEN. I walked over to the door, and pulled gently.
Locked.
I let out a sigh, and turned around towards the table. The tiny vases were spaced evenly on the middle of the table, dividing it in half lengthwise. Most of the cabinets were empty, and those that weren't were locked. A tiny part of my mind began to wonder why there were so many locks in a house only one man lives in. Surely he didn't get many visitors way out here, so why the locks?
That question, as well as the overall oddity of the situation soon occupied most of my mind, and I forgot all about my loneliness.
There wasn't much to do in the dining room, and I hadn't actually found anything of use. A few things were strange, though. For one, the dining room was far larger than it had appeared from the outside, just like the entrance hall. The length of the dining room alone seemed to exceed Russell's measurements of the outside length of the entire residence. Also, as I headed back into the entrance hall, I realized that the windows each of my friends had climbed through had doors directly beneath them, and opened into what should have been a vine-covered exterior wall. Despite that, however, no one else had returned to the entrance hall, so they must have found something through those doors. Finally, Russell had predicted that the cabin would be a two-story cabin with an attic, judging from its appearance from the outside, but inside it looked like a two-story mansion with a fancy roof and chandelier. I was so preoccupied with these strange inconsistencies that I barely heard the quiet footsteps approaching from behind me.
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My binoculars were foggy, the tree was cold, and my tummy was rumbling.
To make matters worse, Kazu's walkie-talkie had just gone silent, so I didn't have anyone to talk to as a distraction anymore. It was so quiet and so creepy that it took all of my bravery to keep still up in my bed of leaves. Part of me wished I had gone down with them, but I knew that it would go against the purpose of this mission. Chances are that they would bump into each other at some point, and be able to work together after that. Plus, they had Kazu to lead them this time, and he knew what to do. He was always a bit nervous, and didn't do well in situations with a lot of pressure, but he always ended up pulling through.
I had faith in Kazu.
As much as I wanted to talk with the others about their findings, each of them were in a super-covert operation at the moment, and the walkie-talkie would give them away. Eir and Terry were probably together anyway, so they didn't need me. Kazu was out of the question, since his just died, and Jack speaks way too loud for me to even consider calling him. Russell, on the other hand, was very similar to me, so we often had plenty to talk about. We had both lost our parents, in a way, and had to learn to be self-sufficient.
Russell was, at a young age, cared for and loved deeply by his parents, but when he was around four his family had another child. They balanced their love between the two children well for two years, but their attention quickly drifted away from the boy to his baby sister. In fact, he once admitted that he couldn't stand that life anymore, so he fled from his home three years ago, and had been living on his own ever since.
Despite Russell's parents' neglection of him in favor of his infant sister, he was always the bright, cheerful guy with the sarcastic jokes and terrible puns. He learned to be independent of his family really quickly because of their neglection, so he was very skilled at a whole bunch of things. Whether giving himself new nicknames, like Russell the Awesome or Russell the Incomparably Humble, or just turning every serious matter into a game, Russell always made each stressful situation manageable, if not downright fun.
I felt like I could relate to him, since I was forced to become independent from my parents, but in a slightly different way. I'm only seven-years old, but two years ago, my father was suddenly hospitalized. Nobody would tell the child daughter what was going on, so I never did know the reason why he was there, but he passed away three months later. My mother became depressed soon after, and started drinking heavily. She would scream at me for no good reason, throw things at me whenever I took too long to get something for her, and soon lost her job as an accountant because of her drinking. Less than a month after losing her job, I was visited by a police officer while I was alone at home really early in the morning. He told me that he was very sorry, but my mother had died in a car accident while coming home from the store. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant at the time, but when they took me to the hospital where she was, I saw why she had gone to the store at such a random time. The drunk, depressed mother who had lost her husband for no good reason, as well as her job, had gone to the store to buy me a birthday present.
It was a $90 stuffed purple unicorn with a horn that could light up in all different colors, the same one I had always begged her to get every time we passed the store. My mom earned about $40 monthly, not considering house expenses. When I was told all of that, the truth of everything had sunk in, and I cried. I cried so hard, they let me sleep in the hospital that night. After that, I was all alone.
My family wasn't well known, so their deaths weren't noticed by many. All I had to live off of were anything that they had inside the house, and any remaining money from their jobs. It was tough, and since I was only six years old, I didn't know much about anything. Then I met Kazu. He was an easy three years older than me, but helped me in any way he could. He wasn't super busy during the day, so he would tutor me as much as he could. He taught me how to cook simple meals, what foods to eat to stay healthy, and most importantly, how to make friends. I actually was invited by his father to move into their house, and it felt like I finally had a family again. We never really felt like or acted like siblings, but he was still really kind to me, and continued to tutor me, since I couldn't afford school. Eventually his father made enough to put me back in school, and I met Jack and Russell soon after. In no time at all, I had a family again: Eir, Terry, Russell, Jack, and Kazu. Now all I had to do was keep them safe and happy.
As if the world was responding to my renewed determination, a flicker of red suddenly appeared in the corner of my vision, in the direction of the cabin.