Chapter Three — Disruption
Sarah chewed on her kiseru as she watched Isaac fall into his super persona. It was a little bit like Chains, a little bit like Bulwark, but mostly just himself, though more intense. She was used to seeing stuff like that, given the circles she ran in, but it was odd to see it happen without a costume change.
For herself, she’d separated out the hat and the kiseru specifically for Scheherazade, keeping the illusion of normal cigarettes for when she was out in public normally. It might not have been much of a costume, but since she could make her clothes look like anything she wanted, the props were more than enough for her. It helped that Scheherazade was mysterious, so she didn’t have to talk to people, which was still not her favorite activity.
The thought made her stir herself to start acting as Scheherazade, and send her smoke out in discreet threads, starting longer-ranged surveillance and, if necessary, teleportation. It wasn’t enough to just sit there and be mysterious anymore, or to sit and wait for events to develop. She wasn’t acting as Dad’s lieutenant anymore, nobody giving her orders and no form of backup to bail them out if something happened. Isaac was relying on her to keep them safe from anyone who might be a problem.
Amusingly enough, at least to her, Isaac had a definite flair for the dramatic when he was using a super persona. She thought it was due to all the television and comics, rather than actually growing up among supers like she had, but it worked for him. Especially when it came to obvious belligerents like the other moonies, who clearly weren’t ready for a couple of humans on Deep Kingdom raptors.
“You are what?” The moonie was clearly incredulous. If she were just going by tone of voice, she would have said he was bored, but the translator rune held a lot of the meaning. It truly was an alien existence, to have so much communication bound up in magic, and one she didn’t care for. Having everything packaged up magically with the intent just there felt lazy, with no need to interpret what she was seeing or hearing and truly understand the meaning therein. The lack of ambiguity or flexibility, and with the lack of things like wordplay, rhyming, consonance, scansion or meter just made the moonies and their language feel artificial and stifled. “Alianora, this is highly irregular!”
“Looks like someone wasn’t consulted,” she muttered to Isaac, who shook his head slightly and then hopped off Shay, the slow-motion fall in the low gravity of the moon oddly catching to her eye.
“We need to get involved,” he told Lia, ignoring the person that was trying to object. “Planning or something. Just being here isn’t enough.”
“Yes,” she replied, also ignoring the increasingly apoplectic moonie. “I have arranged for rooms for you and a place for the mounts. We are far from the front lines but I do not believe that is required?”
“It shouldn’t be,” Isaac agreed, aware that his talent was not fully certain in all too many ways. “But there’s no way to control the specific effect once it starts. If it causes local problems, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I know,” Lia said. Sarah had discussed that very thing with Isaac, because there was no way that this could end cleanly. Breaking a stalemate in any direction, for any reason, came with some degree of collateral. Something that was easier for villains to stomach than heroes, so maybe she’d swayed him a little bit, but he had seemed set on his course regardless.
“Alianora, this is still irregular!” The moonie sputtered, though most of the indignation came through the rune rather than body language or words. When Sarah had seen moonies on television – Lia was the very first one she’d met in person – they always seemed so stiff and formal. The rune put a lie to that, letting Sarah almost feel the emotions of the various lunarians who made up the welcoming committee, even those who weren’t speaking. It made her itch to break out her notebook and start writing things down, but she had a job to do first.
Scheherazade exhaled a plume of smoke, which roiled forward between Isaac and the belligerent moonie and formed into a duplicate of herself. Though in accordance with the extra height that lunarians carried, she scaled herself up into a true amazon, somewhere around eight feet tall so she look him right in the eyes. Face to fact that way, the difference between human and moonie was cast into stark relief, a single arm of her illusionary form carrying more heft and physical threat than his entire body. Not that she had actually cracked the ability to make her illusions solid without Isaac’s help, but it wasn’t necessary most of the time, especially since the moonie flinched away hard enough to slide backward, a few feet in the low gravity.
“If you’re not going to be helpful, leave.” That was what she said, sort of. Despite the practice that she’d had with the translation runes, the words came out with a much sharper tint to them. Something closer to shut up and shove off than the firm but marginally polite phrasing she’d been trying for. Which was exactly her problem with the language, and not being able to employ her usual facility with words was going to be a trial the entire time they were on the moon. Isaac’s eyes crinkled as he held in a smile, but otherwise pretended not to hear.
“She has a point, Magister Aucliostratus. There is nothing to be gained by objecting to their presence at this point in time. Nor do you have authority to control movement in or out of Muiraton.” The named moonie huffed and stormed off, but in the low gravity it was more of a quick-march skate, taking long sliding steps rather than pushing upward.
“That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?” Sarah asked, letting the oversized illusion of herself disperse, reclaiming some of the smoke to form a cloak down her back and letting the rest disperse into the area so she could keep an eye out.
“Eventually, maybe,” Lia temporized. “Not everyone is read in to what we’re doing, and why and how, but it’s going to be obvious soon enough.”
“Then let’s get started,” Isaac said, scratching Shay’s muzzle as he looked around at the other moonies, none of whom had the courage to approach.
“This way,” Lia said, steering her raptor out of the plaza. Isaac followed on foot, with Shay hopping experimentally, bounding up and down like a rabbit. Astoria followed suit, rising half a dozen feet in the air before floating to the ground. Isaac, on the other hand, was attempting the shuffle-slide the moonies used, possibly out of an attempt to fit in but more likely because he was a bit of a theatre kid and he’d definitely want to perfect the characteristic moonwalk.
She endured a few of Astoria’s exuberant hippity-hops before deciding she’d be better on the ground herself, slipping off the saddle and catching up to link arms with Isaac. He flashed a smile at her, then went back to scanning their surroundings as if expecting an attack. It seemed unlikely, but she shared the possibility with Astoria, who still kept bouncing but her attention sharpened as she looked around at the rune-marked stone buildings and streets.
They walked in an invisible bubble as the inhabitants of the town gave them ample room, obvious to her with her senses spread out further than just ordinary line of sight. It was easy enough to spot the difference between civilians and soldiers, even with moonies. In Star City, most people learned to spot career supers just by the way they held themselves and moved, and it seemed that the general attitude was the same among lunarians. In the Deep Kingdoms that hadn’t been useful, but only because everyone fought.
She took surreptitious photos as they moved, trying to get more of the buildings than the inhabitants. Her main goal was to keep Isaac safe, given the limitations of his power, but she sure wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to take in the sights and make notes on what she saw. There was surprisingly little in the Five Cities Alliance on lunarian culture, and if the Mesker Kingdom had more thanks to Moonblast, they weren’t sharing it.
The language issue alone showed why those on Earth knew little about the moon. It had gone against her better judgement to have the rune branded on her skin until Isaac had helped her push through, and even now there was some degree of distaste dealing with the language, even if she appreciated all the work it did interpreting for the moonies. It might be that no other human had used one; she sure hadn’t run across anything in the libraries about people getting lunarian translation runes. It was always the other way around, the lunarians using runes to translate to another tongue.
She itched to break out her notebook and jot down her thoughts, words and sentences forming in her head, but that could wait until they were somewhere defensible. While she might not have been the most interested in the lessons her dad taught her, she had definitely paid attention. Combat wasn’t something to take lightly, and especially not in a potentially hostile location.
Each of the buildings they passed seemed just slightly off, built as they were for taller, thinner beings in a gravity that didn’t need arches and supporting pillars in the same way buildings on Earth did. Her intuition insisted that a big slab of stone as a balcony perched atop a single column with carvings so deep they nearly cut all the way through was a disaster waiting to happen, but on the moon it probably was perfectly fine.
Lia led them into a domed building, the sunlight instantly dropping off, filtered into something less harsh by the runes set around the windows. The translation rune actually gave her an idea of what everything else meant, even if there was a difference between the language and the magic. In this case, it seemed like there were etchings both to create light and to stifle it; presumably to deal with the thirty-day lunar rotation.
At the center of the dome’s floor was what looked like an oversized wooden cup, stamped with a complex arrangement of runes that projected an image of the lunar globe in the sort of strategic overlay she was familiar with. Admittedly, Blacktime only had one for cities, rather than an entire moon, but it had many of the same trappings. The elderly Moonies seated there – the age conveyed more by the rune than any obvious physical features – discussing something only added to the effect.
“Grandfather, I’ve returned,” Lia said, stopping at a decorative circle encompassing the projector and the men examining it. Her raptor snorted at the sight and then huffed at Astoria and Shay. Through the bond, Sarah got the impression that the raptors were being invited off somewhere there was food and water, and Sarah gave the go-ahead once she’d extracted a few of the supplies from the saddlebags by way of turning them to smoke. Not to mention the lantern, which they needed for the translation rune.
“Alianora,” said one of the aged moonies by way of greeting, before inclining his head ever so slightly to her and Isaac. It wasn’t much, but the translator rune conveyed a far warmer greeting than the slight movements would suggest. In fact, there were some extra layers of knowledge there about relative ages that had her scrambling for her notebook to get it down before it slipped out of her head. Lia was younger than she would have expected, at least among moonie society, maybe a decade older than her and Isaac, whereas the grandfather was some immensely ancient venerable of a century or more. The translation rune seemed a lot more effective, and in-depth, than it had been down in Star City.
“I have been told that you can help with our civil war,” the old man continued. “And while I trust Alianora’s judgement, I admit I do not quite understand how it works.”
“Even humans don’t fully understand superpowers,” Isaac said, not at all offended. “What I need is to be involved in the civil war. Not just be indulged, but actually make decisions, meaningfully affect it. It doesn’t have to be anything profound, just enough that I have a connection to the war.”
Sarah figured that once things started to change, there wouldn’t be any issue with retaining the metaphysical contact to the moonie war. That was the conclusion they’d drawn before coming, anyway, though neither of them were going to say as much to either Lia or her granddad. They might be helping the lunarians, but being too open about what they could do was just an invitation for sabotage.
“That is necessary?” The old moonie asked, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “The war is complex, personal. I am not certain an outsider could change the strategy at this point.”
“I am the Custodian,” Isaac said, the translator rune conveying his amusement better than his actual tone of voice — as well as what Isaac meant by Custodian. Concepts of maintenance and care, cleaning and repairing. “That’s going to happen no matter what. And it’s likely going to change very rapidly. So sooner started, sooner finished.”
“Would you mind demonstrating what you intend to do?” The other old man asked, looking less uncertain than Lia’s grandfather but far more suspicious.
“Certainly. Give me your hand.” Sarah had a comment spring to mind about Isaac’s handsiness, but refrained if for no other reason than she didn’t want to undermine her boyfriend. Instead, she kept her smoke circulating outside the building, keeping an eye on their surroundings. It wasn’t like they’d made a secret of where they were going, and several gawkers had tagged along, hovering outside the building and gossiping. Nobody had crashed the party yet, but a secure operation this wasn’t.
“We’ve got some watchers,” she murmured into Isaac’s ear, using the same technique she’d been forced to develop back in the Deep Kingdoms. They didn’t have comm-pins anymore, but the raptor’s crystaltech bardings had some degree of communication, not to mention they’d packed some tinkered point-to-point devices just in case.
“I’ll make it quick,” he murmured back, as he gripped the wrist of an extended arm. Moonie hands just were too long-fingered and thin for a proper handshake. The old man’s eyes widened as Isaac did whatever he was intending to demonstrate his power, the runes that covered his exposed scalp and arms flaring as he invoked them.
“What is—” The moonie blinked. “Extraordinary. I don’t see how this is possible at all.”
“That is exactly why we wanted superpowered individuals,” Lia reminded him. “They can do things our magic cannot.”
Sarah grinned behind her illusionary expression. It was petty, but she really enjoyed the idea of Isaac showing up Moonblast, specifically. The magical girls she had been a fan of when she was younger – and still was a fan of, really – had been overshadowed by the moonie princess in recent years, so she felt personally offended even if it was silly.
“To business, then,” Isaac said brusquely. “Lia has promised certain payment and I’ll hold her to that, but what I need from you is a degree of protection and non-interference. While I don’t know how long this’ll take, I’m basically going to have to be using my power for days at a time. And we might end up having to move elsewhere; we’ll play it by ear.” Isaac gestured to the strategic display. “But we can start now.”
***
Alianora of Mare Crisium watched closely as Isaac began making suggestions, her diagnostic runes fully empowered to catch when he started using his power. She hadn’t been privy to most of his practice, of course, but she could catch hints of it from both himself and the Miller girl. It wasn’t as clear as she’d like, despite the specialized rune she’d made to locate the effects, solely because it was so subtle. At a guess, maybe one percent of lunarians would be able to notice something was happening, and then only if they were looking.
Isaac’s actual suggestions were straight out of Star City’s official policy for when sovereigns clashed. Withdrawal of assets, reinforcement of civilian centers, a general shift to a defensive stance from a more proactive one. She thought it was mostly because he was afraid of what might result once the stalemate started breaking down; a stalled war was bad, but a war that wasn’t stalled was still murder.
Despite all the discussion, there was no exercise of his power. She noticed he kept reaching for the front pocket of his shirt, touching a device therein, the same one she’d seen him pull out when she had visited. Intrigued, she invoked some different analysis runes and was surprised to find the item in question resisted interrogation.
It took her a moment of sorting through what her diagnostic runes told her to understand that her initial impression wasn’t true at all. It wasn’t that it resisted analysis, it was simply that it was too complex for any analysis to be viable. She had presumed the thing to be a simple timepiece, but it most certainly was not. She watched with carefully concealed horror as the information started being converted to whatever native mechanism the watch used, and she was forced to dispel the attempt at analysis before the alteration reached her runes and corrupted them as well.
She didn’t know where he’d found the thing, but the lunarian classification would be relic. Earth had plenty of them, too; things that might not be any better or more powerful than modern magic or technology, but operated on entirely different principles. Such things could create effects deemed impossible by experts, but at the same time often lacked fundamental abilities. Supposedly the royals had a device that could take a person back in time a full lunar cycle — but only one person, once per century.
It wasn’t until her granddad started issuing orders, using runes that Alianora was still decades from comprehending, that something started to happen. As usual, Isaac’s power was profoundly subtle and all-encompassing, and what was worse, it refused to propagate properly. Instead of rippling outward like a cast should, it was simply there, a sudden flavor in the base state of reality. Even on the moon, her divinations were not powerful enough to dissect the complexity of the effect in question; one of the things that made superpowers entirely separate from proper runic magic.
Despite the pervasiveness of Isaac’s power, it was a small thing, and for a moment Lia wondered if it was actually enough to affect the war. Then she shook off the doubt; a drop of maer was not much, but a drop of maer on every inch of the moon’s surface would create floods fit to drown cities. Isaac’s power had always been that sort of subtle. Compounding actions creating a significant deviation. The sum of percents – a very human concept – was a profoundly effective mistress.
“There we go,” Isaac muttered as his pocket watch started ticking, an infuriatingly inconstant series of clicks. “I’ve at least got a start on things. We’ll see how it goes.”
“I give it maybe thirty minutes before someone storms the building,” Sarah said. Lia turned to her, alarmed, while empowering some of her other runes to survey the surroundings outside the building. At first glance there was nothing to support Sarah’s claim, but on closer inspection she could see the knots of people gathered together not far away. It wasn’t a mob, but it was trouble, the sort she had heard supers report in on occasion while patrolling. Not something she was familiar enough with to spot on her own, but once Sarah had pointed it out, it was obvious.
“Should we move, then?” Lia asked, returning her attention to the interior of the command center. “We do have your quarters prepared, but this is not the only place capable of housing you.”
“We can’t just run at the first sign of trouble. We always knew my coming here would cause issues, so better to confront them head on.” Isaac didn’t sound even winded despite the impossibly large suffusion of power that went out far beyond anything Lia could sense. True, it was small and subtle, but the scope was staggering. “Besides, if it’s your people and you know them, it’s probably more likely you can talk them down.”
“Why would any of our people be upset?” Grandfather questioned, with the sort of naivety that came from being totally surrounded by like-minded people. He had probably known better at some point, but years of sitting far away from the actual frontlines of the war while planning things in the abstract had dulled some of his instincts.
“Not everyone likes change,” Isaac answered before Lia could, looking away from the strategic display. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, so it’s probably best if you take care of that before we have an actual fight on our hands.”
“There should not be fighting here,” Meister Calochon said, his runes lighting up, powerful even despite his age. “Are we not all of the reestablishment branch? Do we all not use the same mother tongue, the one that has guided us for millennia?”
“Boy, you guys have it good if that’s the only thing you worry about,” Sarah said, holding up a hand as the Meister switched his glare to her. “I’m sure you know your people, but we’re outsiders and the Custodian’s power is at work now. Small choices start to cascade surprisingly quickly.”
“Magister Aucliostratus was notably upset,” Lia said, trying to survey for the man in question. It had been some time since she had been back to the moon, let alone this particular enclave, so she didn’t know what the internal politics were, and what the tensions might be, but she did remember Aucliostratus from her cohort, years ago. Many people were very tired of the war, but that could manifest as wanting things to end — or blaming those in charge for not being able to secure a victory.
Part of her was glad to have left most of that consideration behind when she went to Earth. There was something clean and straightforward about trying to recruit supers for the cause, even if Hartson had been the first notable success. Admittedly, most lunarians wouldn’t have been able to survive the conditions on Earth in general, with the crushing gravity that needed dedicated runes to counteract, and noise and press of humanity in general.
Minutes passed as she kept an eye on the outside of the building, while Isaac and Sarah talked with her grandfather. She listened with only half a rune as the pair tried to understand exactly what was going on with the war, amused at how horrified they were by the number of cities that were occupied by both royalist and reestablishment lunarians, where strain often flared into violence. If it were something as simple as territory that would be one thing, but the fracture ran far deeper than that.
Outside, the crowd swelled in size to maybe twenty, which wasn’t large when compared to something like Star City, but for a gathering of strong casters in a small settlement it was not inconsiderable. They were virtually all on the younger side, Lia’s cohort or younger, and none with a rank above Magister, which itself was odd as there shouldn’t need to be so many of that rank in one town.
Aucliostratus himself appeared eventually, hurrying in from somewhere else in town. It’d been long enough that she didn’t actually remember where everyone lived, but she had to assume he’d stopped by his home given his change of clothes. He’d reattired himself in a uniform several steps above what he’d actually earned, or at least, what she thought he’d earned. She cast the scry she was using to Grandfather and Meister Calochon, who accepted the rune transfer with the ease of long practice.
“By the guiding stars,” Grandfather muttered. “Is he trying to take my position? That’s ridiculous! He can’t even sustain the strategic castings.” Calochon, rather than worry about Aucliostratus, turned to Isaac.
“Is this your doing?”
“I’m sure my power is accelerating it,” Isaac said. “What I have done was remove the war’s resistance to change. Unfortunately, that means a lot of things that have been stable no longer are. Some for the better, some not.”
“Still, seems a bit fast,” Sarah remarked. “I imagine that our actually being here has more of an impact.”
“We haven’t had outsiders here in a very long time,” Grandfather admitted, as though it was just occurring to him that would be a problem. His talents definitely didn’t lie in the social, but few people could match his scrycasting. Lia had inherited some of her more radical runes from his work, things that only the reestablishment techniques could manage.
Aucliostratus pushed through the wards screening the strategic room from the outside, striding across the stone with six of, presumably, his closest supporters in tow. Grandfather stepped forward to confront them, but Lia kept her scrutiny on Isaac and Sarah. She could take care of herself, as could Meister Calochon and Grandfather, but the humans didn’t have proper defenses against runes — and just as worryingly, the reverse was true. She still remembered Isaac killing a massive lizardman with just a touch, and she didn’t want that kind of thing brought to her ancestral home.
“Grandmeister!” The new arrival ignored everyone but her grandfather, sweeping forward in a way that Lia might have found impressive before her time on Earth. Now, though, he just didn’t have the mass to be imposing. Not when compared to people like Captain Bulk. “What were you thinking, bringing in outsiders to our place? Earthlings who know nothing of the moon, and now you’re issuing orders to reduce the front?”
“These outsiders are to aid in ending the war,” Grandfather replied, gesturing in Lia’s direction. “Or have you forgotten why we spent so much time and effort sending Alianora down to Earth?”
“A venture I never approved of!” Aucliostratus took another step forward, waving his hand in the direction of the strategic display. “We have spent years fighting the royalists to a standstill, but never a victory, and now you are pulling back by influence of these people? Grandmeister, you are no longer fit to stand on the Reestablishment Council.”
“What?” Grandfather was rightly startled, as was Lia, but after a moment she started drawing on a different set of runes in anticipation of an actual conflict. “That is quite irregular. I don’t need your approval for anything, nor do you have standing to have any say about the Council.”
“You say that, but my people are here, and we are more than capable of ejecting you and your strange earthlings.”
“I doubt that.” Isaac’s voice cut in, making Aucliostratus whip around in surprise. “Besides, things have already started, and now we have to see it through to the end. Your politics aren’t going to change that.” He glanced aside at Sarah, whose shroud of smoke had been growing ever since Aucliostratus appeared. “Banishment?”
“Sure,” she said, to whatever pre-arranged plan that was, and Isaac took a step toward Aucliostratus. Protective shields shimmered into existence, but they simply shattered as Isaac impacted them. Lia had missed him using his power on himself, but no lunarian could have possibly expected a human to hit like a house.
Before the Aucliostratus could react, Isaac closed his hand about the opposing lunarian’s arm. Lia winced at the contact, knowing how powerful that kind of grip could be from an earthling. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Isaac had ended up snapping the arm he’d grabbed, but apparently not. What happened was actually far worse.
Isaac’s relic ticked softly for a moment, and Aucliostratus vanished in a puff of smoke. Everyone gawked at where he’d been, and it was only thanks to one of the scrying runes that she’d left active that she realized that he’d simply been deposited outside, congealing from the smoke a few buildings away. Of course, to those inside the room, it looked like Isaac had just disintegrated the man with a touch.
“He’s fine!” Isaac said over the first bubbles of panicked shouting. His voice seemed to have more force without him actually raising it, which Lia’s runes interpreted as a little bit of power put into the air. Something that made her yet again revise her opinion of his talent. The supposedly-same power being applied in so many ways just seemed wrong, compared to the precision of magic. “He’s just in time-out for the moment.” Lia winced again, this time at the dismissive and infantilizing concepts behind the phrase time-out. That would make Isaac no friends.
Whatever rising tension there had been stumbled to a halt, the flow of Isaac’s influence shifting subtly to the sound of a brief ticking. Sarah smirked, puffing on her kiseru and watching the whole tableau from behind the big hat — though Lia knew that was all illusion, and she was probably a lot less casual underneath the smoke.
“Now, I would say not to be too hard on the guy,” Isaac said. “My influence is going to cause all kinds of things to start happening. Nothing too different than what could normally happen, but those differences can build up fast and part of the reason I’m here is to address the mess that’ll make as it happens.”
“Is that not working against your talent?” Lia asked, intrigued, more concerned with the specific nature of Isaac’s power than she was that any of the other lunarians would do anything. She recognized most of them to one extent or another, and she didn’t think any of them had the constitution to try anything without Aucliostratus, especially given the casual way Isaac and Sarah had handled the belligerent lunarian.
“No more than cleaning up after yourself is for any other kind of work,” Isaac said, outwardly at ease but clearly keeping an eye on the other lunarians. Outside, Aucliostratus still seemed to be in a form of shock, cycling through runes as he tried to understand what had happened. Lia had been in smoke form once, and it was quite the disconcerting experience. “So I’ll need you to keep an ear and an eye out for me to actually put out those kinds of fires.”
“I see,” Grandfather said, the dazzling array of runes scribed over his body lighting up as he empowered the massively powerful strategic scry. Very little of his skin was unmarked at this point, which meant it was far too late for him to pivot into any serious offense or defense. Something that she hadn’t considered a problem due to Muiraton’s relative secrecy and isolation. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“Once Muiraton is secure, I will be willing to take you wherever you are needed,” she volunteered, envisioning an entire wave of sudden crises as Isaac’s power reached out through time and space. The war itself would probably not budge for some time, but anywhere the conflict was cold, it might become hot again and quickly.
“Good,” Isaac said. “Let’s clean up this mess.”