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Save Point: Enchachement Theory

Infang Island, Lioshan Autonomous Region

Sethkill runs his fingers, both thumbs and claws of all, over what is left of the control panels like they were a lover, and there is a disturbing look of madness in his eyes. He places the side of his muzzle against the lightly dusty but illuminated surface.

"I don't like it," Cleo hisses in a whisper into Terrownes ear; he knows that sound, it's the 'we may have to fight a few hundred people to get there,' sound. "He's lost it, assuming he ever had it."

Sethkill begins to speak a mangled melange of Azatlani, several modern languages and bits and pieces of Sethurani for the untranslatable bits. He has lost himself, but his psych abilities seem to have increased beyond proportion. He sounds like a diagnostic readout for the broken machine.

"Main systems are offline. All but one subsidiary quanta encachement packets have been perforated. Analysis of damage suggests that they have been drilled into using a primitive digging mechanism of some kind. Charge is at zero. Remaining subsidiary cache has been subject to some form of reverse engineering using a toothed wheel and gears to selectively release potentialities. Charge is at two percent. Main quanta encachement packet has been perforated but has been repaired. Analysis indicates that structure has been lined with primitive stonework of some kind and and the aperture has been sealed with a cylindrical canister made of worked meteoritic stone. A river from the surface has been diverted over the structure thus created to provide an alternative cooling mechanism to prevent the packet from overloading. Many secondary systems have been damaged by the river water. Charge is at sixty percent."

"Do you know what any of this means?" Terrowne demands of Cleo. "I was never able to get a clear explanation out of him about how the more exotic sethura technologies worked. The Dragon can intuit how it all works directly, but I can't, at least whilst staying sane. You were always the one to call for the technical side."

"He only told me a bit of it," Cleo murmurs back, trying not to lose the thread of what Sethkill is saying. "They had to build the ship on a vast scale to make it work, so they assembled it into an entire self-contained island they could set down or move about wherever they needed to. The island exists across a whole range of possible realities, the majority of which were never actually real. There's a device in the middle, a quanta enchachement packet, that systematically entangles its own equivalent particles in adjacent could-have-been universes to create linkages between the two and sufficient potential to move between them. It's the exact opposite of a battery. It charges itself as long as the system remains unobserved and unopened, but the instant you pry it open it discharges itself."

Sethkill continues. "Outer perimeter systems have collapsed due to shielding structural failure resulting from initial and possibly secondary perforation incidents. These losses are isolated."

"The last time I was here, there was evidence of sporadic human occupation over long periods of time," Terrowne comments. "There was also all sorts of really weird stuff about, and I mean that in the 'someone has been altering reality' high weirdness sense. Random people seem to wash up here occasionally courtesy of their own interaction with the entanglement phenomena. Some of them must have found ways to access the stored charge and used it to adjust their own reality as per their personal desires."

Sethkill continues. "Environmental systems are not functional. All systems have been disabled by large quantities of black high-carbon particulates and localized small-scale electrical discharges. Cause is unknown."

"Plus, there have been some hints in popular culture that occasionally someone escapes as well and gets back to civilization," Terrowne adds, after giving it due thought. "A lost island that you can't leave and isn't there when you try to go back. A place that's usually somewhere in the fabled Lioshan peninsula, full of exotic metal-sheathed temples to lost cultures, full of impossibly vast and hopelessly broken underground passageways made out of seamlessly carved stone. "

"I saw half of a commercial passenger jet crashed on the beach as we flew in," observes Cleo cynically. "For a lost island, this place gets a hell of a lot of air traffic."

Sethkill pauses. His eyes gleam like insane black marbles with way too much dilation.

"Conclusion. We can totally fly this thing, baby!" he leers cheerfully at Cleo. (It's still totally inconsistent with his normal character, but Cleo is used to being leered at happily and so takes it as something of an improvement. This changes rapidly when Sethkill starts to hit the control surfaces and the entire structure begins to shudder and tear itself apart).

"What the fuck have you done?!" howls Cleo, grabbing him by the shoulder both to try and keep her balance and to try and keep him away from the controls. Terrowne has already fallen over but has turned it into a moderately successful rolling maneuver which has seen him slide under a table. Sethkill continues obliviously hitting keys, often repeatedly because they aren't working all that well.

"Passengers are warned that we may experience some turbulence on take-off!" yelps Sethkill in an enthusiastic voice. "All trays should be placed in the upright position! In case of emergency, we are all totally fucked!"

He grabs a lever located just above his head and swings from it to pull it down, and in so doing thwarts Cleo's heroic final attempt to drag him away from the controls. The lever is somewhat sticky and will not move.

"Prepare for lift-off!" howls Sethkill with manic glee.

The lever goes clunk.

A flash-bang detonates with magnesium next to Cleo's head. White phosphorous burns her eyes. A barrel of gunpowder explodes under her cunt as she's sitting on it, while she's still holding the match. Lightning shorts out the path between her pierced ears and her pierced nipples.

Blink, and the island is gone.

~*~

Consciousness returns with a truly epic nosebleed.

Cleo hasn't seem this much red liquid dripping out of her muzzle since an incident that involved face-planting into concrete from several stories up. She smears the stuff off on her hand, flicks the excess aside, rolls over and gets up.

Logic demands that at this point there should be alarms going off, things on fire, and people looking for out of focus fire extinguishers they can't quite seem to pick up to combat the threat. But the sethura technology is mostly solid state and so it doesn't seem to do any of those things, although it can, based on recent experience, bend, deform and generally sag in a manner that will render it quite dysfunctional.

More importantly, thinks Cleo, even the worst collision or explosion wouldn't have burst every single little tiny blood vessel in her muzzle at the same time. This is more like the peculiar side-effects seem in high level magic usage, although she doesn't seem to have the usual headache and the nanotech in her blood is already reconstructing the damaged membranes, cutting off the flow of blood and generally limiting the damage. Whatever it was must have been huge but instant, like a burn that takes off the top layer of skin but leaves the underlying layers intact and able to heal.

Absently, she pulls Terrowne out from under the table, where he has sensibly stayed put during whatever it was that just happened. He seems to have purely reflexively dropped into first stage transformation and adopted the most human-like form of the Dragon, but he's lying very still and electric discharges in a pretty shade of blue are arcing intermittently between his first and second sets of long and weirdly cropped floppy ears. The arcs take a several seconds to crawl along and about his muzzle and then ground themselves on the floor, sparking out in little sprays of tiny charged particles. Once this process is complete, something reboots inside his head and his eyes come open again. "Best multiple ever?" suggests the Dragon subversively, looking into her mind through his eyes.

Cleo slaps him forcefully across the muzzle, on the basis that she might as well share her pain as anything else to get him back, but this has absolutely no effect. Since the Dragon enjoys experiencing both pain and pleasure, she adds, 'Come on. Take it, bitch!' and repeats the process whilst flicking her tongue at him like a dominatrix. Rewarded, the Dragon relinquishes its grasp and fades back out of the real. Terrowne is back, at least for now, unnatural blue eyes and all. Long experience suggests that it wouldn't do to set the Dragon loose any earlier than is absolutely necessary for survivals sake.

Sethkill has manged to fold himself up into a truly impressive tangle of limbs in the background somewhere, courtesy of of having twice the number of major leg joints of anyone else, and has the front hang of his loincloth draped down over his muzzle, whilst his cock has come free of its sheath and is sticking up into the air. Cleo sighs, even whilst admiring that muscular sethura ass. It's a shame to see Sethkill taken down so far; he was the most composed person she ever met who could actually still get things done, like drink and get laid regularly. Losing Keselt seems to have fucked him up completely.

Terrowne helps her haul Sethkill to his feet and dust him off. She grabs his tackle and pushes it gently but firmly back into place. She's kind of hoping he'd respond; it would be a good sign, or maybe therapeutic in the face of his loss. However, it seems to be just a side effect of the same neurological event that made her feel like someone shoved a stick of dynamite up her cunt. She drapes the kevlar-like loinguard back down over his sheath in the correct manner. Sethkill does not have a nosebleed, but given the differences in his design, something similar is probably happening inside his ears. She mimes 'Can you hear us?' in Azatlani, then in bad Sethura.

"Yes," says Sethkill, shaking his head. "Yes, I can."

Whilst his initial exuberant mania seems to have worn off, he still seems a little unresponsive. An initial determination to take some sort of absolute risk seems to have been downplayed by now having to settle in for the long haul, to enact its consequences. He doesn't really want to talk; but he will, or if the mood takes him.

"What did you just do?" questions Terrowne patiently.

Sethkill rubs his ears several times before answering. "I have bought you to visit my home. You let me visit yours, and offered hospitality. Now I have bought you to see mine."

There is a curiously formal or archaic sound to the phrasing; it seems to mean more than it readily implies. The wording seems significant.

"More detail, my wolfy love," hints Cleo, and sits behind him, scratching behind his ears to help relieve the discomfort of healing. She looks like a mother and her child now.

"I don't know how long it has been, or how short. Different times in different places. So I decided. We should go home. And finish this thing, for once and all. Even if it is only to lay a silk knot and burn the horn offering on a grave that has gathered dust for centuries."

"We don't know the meaning of those rituals," explains Terrowne gently. "You'll have to just say whatever it is that you want to say."

"Keselt is dead," grieves Sethkill. "And I have brought us here, to mark her passing, to the world of Sethuramandraki."

~*~

The island has carried with it trees, birds, plants, whatever else was on its submerged undersea shelf or within the spherical volume of its transition. The paths out seem to be the same as the paths in, the birds sing and the leaves are wet. But overhead the skies are far too bright and the palest shade of pink, like a gentle sunset through the long dust of a volcanic haze. The air is different too, no longer the dense rich humid thickness of a tropical summer but crisper, more dry, although still warm. It seems to be safely breathable (although some of the insects that are flying around are behaving rather loopy and flying all over the place) but is obviously different, with a rich eloquent stench like moist dirt and fucking, and a certain density.

"You get used to the smells," says Sethkill. "Your world smells like a desert compared to ours. Even when you're not in a desert. I missed this." His ears flick.

The shortest path out is to some basalt bluffs that overlooked the sea, engineered to look quite plausible as parts of the shelf underpinning the island. It's a straight run and takes them only about half an hour, but they are bought to a standstill by the remarkable sight from the cliff edge.

There is no ocean there. Any salt water that came with them has fallen out already and drained. Although nothing can be seen directly save a narrow circular railing that seems to encircle the entire island, it is possible to conjecture based on reason alone that the island is perched atop some high and precarious place, in which it is positioned and supported by the railing. The landscape can be seen extending outward far below, but the vegetation that grows across it is in strange colors, predominantly reds and yellows like an extended fall, but with black and other strange shades mixed in as well. "Like a beautiful forest fire," says Cleo lustfully. The rivers are water and so they look like water, but the minerals they dissolve seem to be different and so the water at any depth appears faintly to deeply purple.

On the shores of the island, the sand is drying, the mud is stinking in the sun and blending with the local atmosphere, and a few unlucky fish which have not been extracted along with the excess ocean have already expired. Any molluscs attached to the shelf are already doomed. Cleo grabs a couple of the larger fish, guts them with her claws and packs the fishy remains in her backpack, keeping one to eat as sushi after she's rinsed her claws with bottled water. "What? We might need something to eat for dinner before we get back," she says when everyone looks at her.

"I voted to keep the ocean," says Sethkill. "I wasn't one of the landscape engineers, but I got a vote and I said keep the ocean in place. If you're going to balance an entire island on top of a tower just to show off, you might as well keep the water that goes with it. It's not like it weighs that much compared to the whole island, after all. But they said no, we want easy access to the underside of it and all the equipment. So the ocean gets drained off into a holding tank. Its all very complicated and completely spoils the effect."

Off to the extreme right, a small scarp collapses and falls down into nothingness. The fragments can be heard bouncing off something and tumbling back towards the center of the island, but far beneath it, and the sound fades out rapidly.

"See what I mean?" sighs Sethkill. "They should have just kept everything in place."

Below the basalt cliffs, several small rivers also flow into nothingness, dissipating into spray before they hit the unseen collection surface. One at least has spawned a rather nice rainbow, although its positioning and optical characteristics are somewhat skewed by the differences in the light color and atmosphere. "Look, over there," says Terrowne. "I've always been very lucky where rainbows are concerned. The more of them I see, the more good stuff happens. This is an excellent sign."

Cleo knows that since Terrowne can manipulate reality to a certain extent, his idea of a good sign has somewhat more meaning than would normally be the case. Beneficial auspices mean that his powers are flowing nicely and making things happen with fortuity. Normally, on days like this she takes him to her bed and has him fuck her free in the certain knowledge that whatever he chooses to do will make her cream herself.

Landscape view duly admired, they look for a way down. Some past castaway has attached a series of ladders made of large segments of bamboo from shelf to shelf down the cliff face, presumably for easy access to the lowest outcrop from which to go fishing.