You’ve seen television, and you and I both expect sothing when we walk into a secure governnt black site that does not officially exist.
You expect to have a paranoid guard order you to step out of the vehicle and then go through an exceptionally thorough pat down. This happened.
“I don’t know what you’re looking—”
“This will go smoother,” the guard said, “if you don’t talk or ask questions.”
He brought out a small plastic baggie and arched an eyebrow at . “What’s this?”
“Seeds,” I said.
“Seeds for… what now?” He fished out a second plastic baggie. “And what is this?”
“Flowers and berries.”
“Flowers and berries,” he repeated in a flat, semi-suspicious voice.
“As a Healer I need all the plants I can get for my potions and salves and unguents and such.”
“I… am aware of that,” he probably lied. “Remain here with your hands against the van.”
A short discussion with the higher ups later, he reappeared and handed back the suspicious baggies. He snorted. “You’d better not be bringing marijuana into another world,” he said. “It’s legal in so states but not this one. And not legal federally. The top brass told to relay that to you.”
I chuckled. “I promise I won’t be doing anything like that.” That was a lie too; marijuana had so dicinal properties and I was going to have access to that. I’d co from California, so getting access was easy. But just the seeds.
Now, when you enter a governnt black site, there are also things you don’t expect to see. You don’t expect to first park your full size rental van in the large and sparsely populated parking lot outside of the building, then go through sliding doors that are motion activated. Just like he local community center in nowheresville USA.
You don’t see that sa old drop ceiling you’ve seen everywhere else in your entire life. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones with the eighteen inch white tiles with the little holes in them, interspersed with that soulless halogen lighting that doesn’t create shadows.
My heart was thudding out of my chest walking down the hall with the nondescript offices. And we’re talking literally nondescript: no na plates on the doors or above them on signs. No inspirational posters telling you to hang in there. No posters of any kind actually.
I couldn’t see if my mother was behind , and I was terrified to ask her in case this facility had the sorts of high-paranoia tech systems I thought it did. Instead I forced myself to saunter at a dium pace, and hope that my mother didn’t get too caught up in scratching the full extent of Skulkins’s belly. If she stuck with , this wouldn’t be a problem.
One drab guntal gray hallway took the place of the last, in a place I’d visited only briefly. The HQ had debriefed the whole team at the castle after the Glumpdumpkin debacle. This had gone on for a week, where all our experiences were taken down by teams of bored Wizards and a few other assorted employees who were stuck at their desk jobs. We obviously omitted all the alarming personal stuff, such as the sheer volu of sex I’d been having with almost all of them. The only other important bit that needed to be dealt with was Cinzy’s defection from the team. Short-lived as it was, the top brass would have been not okay with the situation. Instead we lied and said she’d been very emotional at one point, set off a short-lived crisis that I had needed to clear up with a fast-acting treatnt and cure before healing up the God of Apparel. She had, however, been so overco that she had disappeared into the wilderness for a few days while we took care of things. It was there Blake’s team found her and picked her up.
From there, a lot of the debrief centered around my Nakamamon bond situation. Nobody had two bond mates. Nobody had a sapient bond mate, unless you counted Larelle, the sapient one, bonding a non-sapient Nakamamon. That was also an oddity, but not unheard of. So for several days, I appeared before this committee and that to answer questions. They tried their very best to rope Vellenia and Shakindria into the debrief, but the two of them weren’t employed by the Agency.
From there, they tried to get tricky; first, they attempted to offer my two bond mates employnt contracts, with lucrative deals. Since neither of them truly understood the value of money, having worked under a barter system and goodwill payback in this alien world, neither of them knew or cared about the perks or bonuses.
The only ti they were tempted was when Vellenia ca back to in the castle and explained that they had offered a better deal for back on earth, and my earth family.
It had been a hard eye roll for , and a refusal. My family was set. With the overti pay I was getting, the hazard pay from several different instances, I had already gotten more than my full year’s first salary in just five months. Vellenia gave a reassuring hug and said she would be thrilled to give anything I needed back on earth, just say the word. I told her I was grateful but it was completely, totally, wholly, and in all other ways unnecessary.
The psych evals and debriefs continued for a good week before I started to demand my R&R ti. When they started to pull military regulations out of nowhere, I had to remind them that I had read them all, rembered them all, and Alan had helped recall any of the other ones I missed. Yes I had filled out the appropriate form. Yes I had filed it with the appropriate clerk. No I wasn’t willing to get additional monetary bonuses for participating in further debriefs. I was overdue, and though I wasn’t going to take a full month off like I was owed, I was going to take the damn R&R.
All that stopped when I got through the portal and landed on earth again.
More debriefs comnced. More questions ‘just to make sure they understood my story’. They were cross-referencing my story against Regina’s, against Alan’s, against Drat’s. This was so nonsense, and I put up with it only for a few hours before I asked to talk with Dick Johnson about how I might go about terminating my contract under several of the harassnt clauses. It would an a monthly payout for the rest of my life and a retirent bonus, so long as I wasn’t found to spill any state secrets, but it would also an a release from my job, as Healer.
And the one big thing I was, in the other world, was in demand. Between healing up several different troubleso gods, saving the clutch of eggs of possibly an entire species, and saving fellow agency mbers’ lives, I’d proved my worth to the Agency. Yes they probably suspected a bigger problem with Cinzy, no they couldn’t prove insubordination, abandonnt of duty, or going absent without official leave. Nor could they figure out the Nakamamon bonding situation I had going on. Both of these things bugged them.
The other thing that bugged them was the fighting aspect Nakamamon situation. I’d been in the middle of that, fighting for my life the entire ti, so clearly I wasn’t responsible for it. The Agency didn’t try that route, but they did get pretty close to making that insinuation. In the end I had to squint at them and ask them if they were insinuating what I thought they might be, and they backed right off.
Turns out Blake was a bigger problem than I thought.
What I hadn’t known until this round of debriefing was that Blake—now a brand new Nakamamon species called a Brawldar—had escaped confinent. Before he’d done that, several of the Nakamamon bond mates on Jacoby’s team seed to have beco infected with so unknown condition or illness, because they went feral also. They had apparently gained the fighting aspect. Archie went fighting too, and Jacoby’s team ended up capturing over a dozen fighting aspect Nakamamon. Which was clearly both a problem and a situation a lot of Guardians were loving.
All this debrief ti took more than two weeks and caused to show up just about the ti that Sarah was celebrating six months of growing a baby. I’d been done in about four and a half months, but we’d partied in Glumpdumpkin a whole extra week, took our sweet ti traveling back to the HQ castle, and then once the lengthy debrief ended, it was another two days’ travel to where the portal now sat.
It slowly changed locations, as it happens.
Narrating this whole sordid ss of lost ti to myself, I hoped to keep my mom in the loop and cover for any noise she made. I didn’t think Skulkins allowed for his invisibility-cloaked subjects to make sounds, but I wasn’t going to take chances. I’d only been under the cloak once, and too much had gone on since then. Too much was still going on.
“That’s how these people here caused to lose over two weeks of ti,” I finished. “Which is why I’m so glad to be back, obviously! Love this place. Love you guys, and you.”
I shot finger guns at two very confused soldiers in what I want to call ‘desk uniforms’, and then the guard standing at attention next to the portal room door.
“Guard that portal well, soldier,” I said.
I was directed by a bored lackey to a waiting room, little more than a tiny bedroom with an even tinier bathroom.
“What’s the hold up, if I may?”
“Agency personnel transferring in and out, sir,” he said.
I chuckled. “I forgot you guys made a lieutenant. Love that you did that, even though it doesn’t make sense. Probably not for the lols.”
“No, sir,” he said, but wouldn’t elaborate.
“Are we talking about anyone I know?” I asked. “My team mbers?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that information, sir.”
“When can I get back through?” I asked.
This kid was not a good liar. And listen to , calling him a kid. He was my age, maybe a year or two younger. “We’ll have you through just as soon as we can.”
That wasn’t going to work. My mother would reappear anyti, perhaps minutes from now, or gods-knew-how-long. Nobody had brought Nakamamon through the portal to the other side. You weren’t supposed to be able to.
I sat for approximately one minute after the guard was gone before getting up and pacing the tiny room. Then I realized I could bump into my mother and stopped doing that.
“Frickity frackity forking forks,” I muttered darkly. Hearing my mother snort for real this ti let know she was here with , of course.
“I hope Skulkins looks okay,” I told a supposedly empty room. “If he begins to appear ashy or seems lethargic or glassy-eyed, we will force the issue.”
I didn’t know how we were going to do that.
I swallowed, disliking the powerlessness on this side of the portal. In the other world I had clearly defined skills, special abilities coming out of my earholes, and Tokens.
Tokens.
“This might help tide soone over if they were feeling drained,” I said, and manifested an Affinity Token. A mont later it was snatched out of my hand, and I slled a hint of that usual magic sll as it dissipated into sparkles of rainbow mana.
Approximately one more minute passed, one that lasted six thousand years in my mind. “That’s it, we’re—”
The door didn’t burst open, but instead slid slowly back into the wall. Standing there was Cinzy, blinking at .
“All is well?” she asked. This was our prearranged code phrase.
“No all is not fracking well!” I blurted. “You guys mucked with the plan. Let’s move.”
She didn’t move and kept a straight face, sohow. “So… all is well?”
I pursed my lips. “All’s well that ends well.” All I could think was, this had better end well.
One sharp nod later and she whirled, setting off at a brisk pace towards the portal room. She didn’t look back, but I did, and to my dismay I noted a mom-shaped blur moving through the corridor behind , looking a bit like an alien predator that was never able to kill Arnold. That ant Skulkins was getting low on mana, and him getting low on mana ant he might be close to death. No one had a single shred of data on the physiology of Nakamamon in this world, the effects of mana desaturation, or any of that. We were in completely alien territory.
That went double for the scene we stumbled into. One curving passageway and one right turn later, we entered the portal room.
Several dozen Nakamamon had burst through the portal a mont before we broached the room. We had Shrubbets, Cyclowls, those centipedes brimming with flowers, a couple of Geodiles, and even more. Several flaming bugs fluttering around head level, while terrified soldiers shouted like soldiers always do. One of them was shouting about what they should do, while several others were shouting about how the flaming bugs and centipedes needed to get down on the ground, and freeze.
Tara stood there, screaming at the top of her lungs, while clutching against another soldier. He was wrestling with his weapon. Ivy and Isabelle had relieved another soldier of his weapon, and his consciousness. He slumped in Isabelle’s arms while Ivy pulled the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber.
I heard the words “Condition Ragnarok” shouted, and noted a soldier talking into an intercom phone against one wall.
Ivy hucked the weapon across the room and it crashed into a soldier about to fire.
It was pandemonium. I had to admit it was cool even while strongly disapproving of what was going on here.
And there, in the midst of the insanity going on, was the portal. The reason I had the job of Healer in the first place. A ramp led up to the circular ring of stone so twenty feet across. The stone itself was easily four feet thick and deep, and had been etched with runes so expertly and perfectly that it had to be magic. The gouges were filled with silvery tal, but nobody spent more than thirty seconds in the portal room typically.
In tis like this—strike that, there were no tis like this—ordinarily when the portal was open, those runes glowed with energy. They’d done that by injecting the ring with ludicrous amounts of power until the glowing peaked and caused the ring to fill with bluish energy, which resolved into a blurry image of the other world.
In the monts before shots rang out and “Condition Ragnarok” destroyed the portal completely, I noted the blurry forms of Muppin, Tweedle Dee, Vellenia, Shakindria, Garnet, and Airaconda on the other side. And… Alan?
“Mom—”
Finally, shots rang out. I didn’t have to say more, but I also wasn’t able to. I shot through the room at a fast clip, ducking as though it would help avoid stray bullets.
The first explosive charge went off when I set foot on the ramp, and threw to the floor. I looked back, saw my mother there holding a sickly-looking weasel creature, and grabbed her hand.
“Let’s go!”
That wasn’t necessary, as it turned out. Shakindria stepped through the portal with hand outstretched. Both my mother and I floated up into the air and through the portal. In the nanoseconds I had before I was through, I surveyed a mont of absolute insanity.
Regina had grabbed my ankle and was flying through the air like a space station astronaut.
Tara had succeeded in completely distracting her guard, who had helped her get to the room’s entrance.
Ivy had another soldier around the legs, and he was the one firing wildly into the air at several flaming bugs and a rabbit with shrubbery camouflage.
Isabelle had manifested her shield and leaped in front of a Geodile ready to chomp down on yet another soldier. It had his gun chomped in two already.
And in the middle of the whole chaotic shenanigans my friends created was Cinzy, standing amid Nakamamon of all stripes and colors. She was staring at and waving. I’m positive my enhanced senses saw clearly the misery on her face and the tears brimming in her eyes.
The second explosion went off far later than the first. A full two or three seconds. Shakindria launched the two of us through the plane of the portal an instant before it flickered and disappeared.
For a few long seconds I continued viewing the world in bullet ti. Soone had piled up sleeping bags and pillows on top of Muppin, in a sort of cup shaped landing pad a good ten feet across. I thumped into it, followed by my mother and finally Regina. Behind us, since I was pointed that way, I saw the fire roiling over the portal. On this side it was slightly pinkish instead of blue.
For a brief second the portal remained, but then the third explosion detonated and it blinked out of existence.
Ti slowed back down to normal.
“Mrs. Fletcher?” Regina asked. “Are you all right?”
The stone echidna made an inquisitive sound. The forlorn noise told all I needed to know: Muppin knew that Isabelle wasn’t coming through the portal. There wasn’t one. The big adorable lug also knew Isabelle wouldn’t be joining him any ti soon. I felt a pang of guilt join all the other discomfort I’d been feeling since the team told
“That was a hoot!” my mother replied. “Though I can’t say I’d like to do it again. Oh!”
She began floating up in the air and landed lightly on her feet near where the portal had been just a mont before. Vellenia was there, and imdiately wrapped her in a warm hug.
“I’m very pleased to et you, Lady Fletcher,” Shakindria said, floating over to et her. She offered up a dainty four-fingered yellow hand for my mother to shake.
“Ohhh Fletcher’s mother, it’s such an honor to et you!” My mother was there for it, too, hugging right back. “We have all been so excited to finally et you, and…” She trailed off, looking around. “Where are the rest of the team?”
This is Christopher not having his cake and eating it too.
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