Chapter Fourteen — Moonblast

Sarah had a bad feeling about their situation.

The queen had been polite enough, but clearly entirely unconvinced by their arguments.  Which meant that they were now effectively in custody, and by someone opposed to their goal.  And royalty was closer to the supervillain mold than the superhero one.  Queen Selirayne might well decide to dispose of them rather than play nice if things got tense.

At least the servants leading their little group through the palace were polite enough, though when it came to powerful people such an escort was very often just a prelude to something less polite.  Not that the lunarians had a chance of actually being able to either lock them up or lock them down, but she – or rather, Scheherazade – was probably going to have to do something dramatic fairly soon.  There was no time for sightseeing, taking pictures, or making notes, however much she wanted to.

On the other hand, it had been fun to watch Isaac butt heads with royalty.  She was pretty sure he could have steamrolled her if he really wanted to, The Custodian being far less concerned with propriety than Isaac normally was, but cooperation was more important than obedience here.  There were too many people to simply force things through and expect it all to work out.  Especially since events were moving so quickly. 

“Usually, the processes of governance take some time,” Administrator Ichabod said, though whether because he was following the same train of thought as her or just because Isaac was obviously impatient she couldn’t say. 

“We don’t have that much —” Isaac began, before they were interrupted by a lunarian slamming down from above.  Sarah twitched at the sorcerer’s hostile stance, reaching out through her smoke to grab everyone just in case.  Except she couldn’t with Ike.

Thankfully, she’d refined the technique that she’d been forced to come up with down in the Deep Kingdoms, and was able to project illusions that only Isaac could see simply by putting them right on top of his eye.  Ike, Smoke.  The two words were enough, and her boyfriend took a pair of steps backward from the lunarian to bump into Ichabod’s saucer, appearing to trip backward and momentarily brush Ike’s shoulder.  Done.

“Moonblast,” Ichabod said, completely ignoring or ignorant of the byplay, while Sarah jolted at the name.  “What brings you —”

“You’re the ones who are responsible for all this,” the sovereign said to her and Isaac both, definitely not a question as she held a hand up to halt Ike’s words.  Also using human tongue.  Sarah’s instincts prickled still further, as the lunarian sovereign was very clearly unhappy, threatening in a way Mechaniacal never really had been.  The tinker felt like being too close to industrial machinery; Moonblast’s anger felt like the business end of a gun.  Isaac looked briefly shocked, then Sarah could feel him firm himself, making himself more solid, less susceptible to things like being confronted by a sovereign.

“I see no point in either protesting or agreeing,” The Custodian said.  “You clearly have already concluded certain things —”

“Change it back,” Moonblast interrupted, clearly not in a mind to talk.  “Whatever you’ve done.”  Oddly, she looked at Sarah more than Isaac, which was confusing but this was hardly the time to clarify matters.  Instead, Scheherazade sent out more invisible tendrils of smoke, ready to change, manifest, or move on a whim. 

“Even if I could, even if I wanted to, it is too late for that,” The Custodian said, face a neutral mask.  He wasn’t even completely lying.  “Motion, once started, is hard to stop.”  Moonblast’s runes lit, power humming in the air, a hum that was matched by larger etchings engraved in the walls, and Scheherazade reached to turn them all to smoke before a servant broke into the tension.

“Princess Liesta,” one of their guides groveled.  “The palace wards — please refrain from Grandmeister and higher tier.”

“You are right,” Moonblast said, the audible hum from the two rune sources quieting for a moment.  “Nothing in the palace.”  The palace walls hummed loudly, there was a flash, and they were somewhere else.

Ike, Isaac, and Lia, and her, along with their mounts, in the same relative positions as before but surrounded by gray-purple grassland rather than gray-purple stone, the sun notably higher in the sky.  Teleportation.  Moonblast stared at them, runes lighting up across her skin with a brilliant shine and obvious threat.

“Reverse it.  Now,” she demanded.  “The moon is not yours to play with.  My life’s work is not something for you to just throw aside.”

“I will not argue with you,” The Custodian said, seeming to grow even weightier, his hand drifting toward the pistol at his side.  Sarah doubted that the weapon would actually do anything, even boosted.  Moonblast was a sovereign, after all.  “Only tell you that this is a mess, and I am cleaning it up.  Sometimes that requires more labor, or finding that there is more broken than you thought.”

“Moonblast,” Ike spoke again.  “This isn’t something you can just stop.  I know what —”

“It absolutely is.” Moonblast said, her actual voice flat but the translator rune conveying the deep fury there.  “If people would just stop interfering with it!”

That time, Scheherazade acted by instinct, turning them all to smoke a moment before a blinding flash of light engulfed them.  Something powerful jostled the particles of her power, but she was just smoke — whatever potent energies had engulfed them, there was nothing for it to act upon but an undifferentiated haze.

The light faded, showing Moonblast’s skin still shining with runes, energies strong enough that even in smoke form Scheherazade could feel it.  The lunarian’s eyes focused, and for a moment it seemed like the sovereign was looking right at her, even though Scheherazade was only a diffuse cloud of drifting smoke. 

Something squirmed against her hold, her grip on the smoke forms of the others slipping, and she hastily tossed them back into reality.  The three raptors first, then Lia and Isaac atop theirs, with Ike off to the side; all of them displaced from where they’d been, on the other side of Moonblast.  She put one of her smoke clones atop Astoria, the other two manifesting at her mount’s side.

She didn’t come out of smoke herself.  Unlike with other people, she could maintain herself that way almost indefinitely — at least, after Isaac had tweaked both herself and her power so she didn’t lose herself in the smoke anymore.  Which meant it was harder to incapacitate or fool her, especially if someone was targeting a smoke clone rather than her true body.

The three clones gripped their weapons, targeted, and opened fire.  One rifle whined as it drew on some ravening white energy, a submachine gun spat green bullets, and something closer to a shotgun flung burning ice.  Tinker creations all, and more powerful than simple gunpowder, but she didn’t hesitate.  Moonblast could take it after all, as a sovereign she’d been targeted by far stronger things.  The point was really to distract her from Isaac and Lia, who weren’t nearly as tough to pin down as she was.

And Ike too, she supposed, who was working frantically at his chair controls.  The edge of his saucer had blown out from the inside, energy discharge making the metal droop like wax, but it still hovered and hopefully it could fly.  Because so far as she was concerned, the play here was to get the hell away.  She didn’t recall Moonblast being able to go supersonic, at least.

Moonblast whirled as lasers and projectiles pinged off of invisible protections and swept a beam across the trio of smoke clones, forcing Scheherazade to briefly dissipate Astoria again. The raptor sending her resigned-but-grumpy emotions across the psychic link — she wanted to jump on Moonblast and tear her apart with sharp teeth, but was smart enough to realize that wasn’t possible.  The beam itself touched only smoke, save for when it hit the stock of the shotgun and vaporized that.  The lunarian’s eyes widened upon seeing the lack of impact, and with a flick of a hand imprisoned the clones and their weapons in boxes wrought of conjured force instead.

Scheherazade yanked at the smoke, feeling it nearly cut off from her.  For a moment nothing happened, then she felt something shift, in that peculiar way that meant that The Custodian was applying his talent.  She didn’t know what kind of change he was shifting, but after another moment or two her smoke popped right through the force boxes.

“You are a tricky one,” Moonblast said, the runes on her skin strobing in kaleidoscopic color as the boxes vanished.  She raised her hands to do something else, try a different sort of magic, which was when Isaac shot her.

His first dart actually missed, despite being practically point blank, ripping through the air and heading off into the sky to land who knew where.  Moonblast twitched around, and the second dart hit her square.  The shields that the normal guns bounced off shattered with a sound like breaking glass, and a haze appeared in the air as a second set of defenses caught the bit of metal.  The color went from white, to blue, to green with a faint whine as the dart slowed to visibility, before the projectile simply fell down to the ground.

Moonblast’s runes pulsed, and by instinct Scheherazade turned everyone to smoke once again, barely ahead of several ravening pulses of light covering where Isaac and Shay used to be.  The squirming feeling of something pushing against her power got worse, and Ike rematerialized without her intending to.  So far Moonblast had completely ignored both the Administrator and Lia, so Scheherazade dumped the lunarian off next to Ike and focused on rematerializing Isaac in a better position.

Sarah knew that Isaac didn’t like super-fights, but secretly Sarah actually did.  She wasn’t a battle maniac like some, but with her power she was effectively invulnerable, and never really felt threatened.  The one exception to that rule was the depowerment ray, and that wasn’t something to worry about here.  And nothing else made her stretch her mind and metaphorical muscles more than a fight. 

Isaac was more vulnerable than her on the face of it, but with ontological inertia, maybe not.  They’d talked about how it was exactly the process by which invulnerable artifacts came to be, and while Isaac’s limits fell far short of that extremity, he was tougher than it seemed.  And that wasn’t counting whatever influence that kind of thing might have over luck or fate. 

All that said, she didn’t have any hope of actually beating Moonblast.  Isaac’s gun was about the most powerful thing they had and the lunarian had completely no-sold it.  Ike was the only real wildcard and his life support chair was mostly for that, rather than combat, so she doubted he had a hidden weapon.  Assuming he was even willing to take potshots at another hero. 

Leave, she scrawled across Isaac’s vision, as well as Lia’s and Ike’s.  Out-speed her.  Scheherazade could shield their escape, follow later.  Astoria’s comms meant that they wouldn’t be completely out of contact, even if they hadn’t exactly set up a fallback position.  Isaac’s head snapped in her direction, and he very much didn’t look happy, but he slapped his hand against Shay’s saddle and the raptor leapt into the air.  Lia followed, having said nothing the entire fight, as if hoping to remain unnoticed. 

Ike didn’t follow.

“Moonblast!” He didn’t just shout it, his chair amplified his voice to get her attention, even as Scheherazade cast obscuring smoke between the sovereign and the two leaving on raptor-back. 

“What?”  She spared him a glance, her voice snapping as she began to rise upward from the low hover.  “Are you going to tell me to —”

“I’ve lost containment!”

The words were so strange that Sarah took a moment to stare at him through her smoke form, paying more attention than before.  The partially-melted section was spreading, crackles and sparks shooting around the saucer and tracing out arcane shapes and signs.  That was bad enough, but other things were tracing themselves through the air nearby, lines in colors that she had no name for and shapes that seemed to have extra dimensions.

“Oh.”  Moonblast’s wrath fled as she saw what was going on, floating casually backward as a massive claw reached out through a rent painted in the air and pulled it open.  “Slugs.”

What emerged from the rift had some resemblance to the media Sarah had seen on biotitans, but instead of the characteristic fleshy purple it was wrought from a hazy silvery energy, wispy at the edges.  To Moonblast’s credit, she completely dropped her focus on Scheherazade and the fleeing pair on raptorback to target the apparition.  The same arm-thick energy blast as she’d tried to use on the smoke clones impacted the thirty-foot-tall amalgamation of claws, eyes, and hide, driving it backward across the lunar grass.

“Banish this thing!” Moonblast said, as the pseudo-biotitan opened its jaws to roar.  It didn’t actually make a noise, instead emitting a blast of deafening silence, washing past in a painful wave of nothing.  Moonblast responded with another, much more powerful attack, a coruscating bubble of energy that blew the monster into constituent vapor — which misted together to reform, none the worse for wear.

“I’m trying,” Ike growled, one hand playing the chair controls like a pianist while he focused on the monster, though to no apparent effect.  Sarah did remember vaguely that before he was Star Central’s Administrator, Ike had been some kind of super, but she didn’t know any of the details.  Apparently some kind of summoner, by the looks of things, but given Moonblast’s reaction it was more than just that.

She dropped herself and Astoria out of smoke as she reformed her clones, rubbing her raptor’s neck as she keyed the radio.  One of the important things about being a super was understanding that friend and foe could shift very quickly, and with Moonblast thoroughly distracted by what was going on, running away would actually be counterproductive.  There was nothing like a good team-up fight to make people more reasonable.

“Get back here quick,” she said into the pickup.  “We’ve got a situation.”  Another rent tore itself through the air, this time high up in the sky, stretching a lot farther than the first one.  Strange sounds began whispering on the wind, from nowhere in particular.  “More than a situation,” she corrected herself, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“Roger.”  Isaac’s tones were still hard and weighty, that of The Custodian, which was oddly reassuring.  Especially since while Moonblast was still throwing down with the false biotitan, some sharp-edged cuboid with the bizarre shifting that was characteristic of higher-dimensional life had pulled itself out of nowhere and was making a beeline for her. 

Her Smoke Army assembled in front of her, the stock of her shotgun still completely missing, and opened fire.  Unlike with Moonblast, the weapons actually did something, knocking pieces out of what seemed to be nested hypercubes, the debris themselves shifting shape in a hyperdimensional tumble before settling on perfect tetrahedra.  She actually remembered this particular monster, from an incursion back when she was a kid.  That had been the first time she’d ever seen The Bellringer, and would hopefully the last.

The thing fell apart, dispersing into a silvery, ethereal vapor in the exact same way that Moonblast’s target was.  She took a moment to acknowledge what was probably a really bad idea and tried to grab ahold of it. Smoke was smoke, and smoke was hers.  Her work with Isaac had really helped her expand her horizons on what her power could do.

It felt like grabbing a live wire.  It squirmed and jolted, energy she didn’t recognize and couldn’t describe fighting back against her control.  The stuff felt alien, but there was still something there, enough of a similarity to smoke for her to sink metaphorical claws into.  It battled to reform while she struggled to seize control of it, the silver vapor writhing uncertainly a few feet away. 

Astoria suddenly moved underneath her, and with a crunching sound grabbed something and tore it to shreds.  Sarah hadn’t even seen it.  More silver mist wafted into the air, but she was still wrestling with the first bit and merely nudged Astoria to stay away.  The emotion she got back from the raptor was more like a mental eyeroll, but the raptor danced sideways, away from the congealing vapor.  There was another explosion from where Moonblast was still tackling her opponent, just before Sarah was finally able to subdue the bit of foreign smoke she was fighting.

It didn’t come with any insight, any extra burst of energy or external power.  It just was suddenly more of her smoke, same as usual.  Nothing that she couldn’t have made herself with a few seconds of concentration, which disappointed her for the brief instant she could think about it, before reaching out to wrestle with the still-congealing remains of whatever Astoria had decided to savage.  Which was only the tiniest dregs of what Moonblast was not occupying, as a second manifestation had joined the biotitan, this time a miniature crystalline entity. 

And the rift in the sky continued to expand.

She did notice that nothing was attacking Ike, nor did he seem even slightly worried about it, instead being concerned with shedding the now deeply scored and melted saucer to reveal his normal hovering life-support chair underneath.  All the manifestations, the strange sounds and bizarre phantoms, as well as the actual creatures or summons crawling out of the very air, were all aimed outward.  Which would be a problem when Isaac returned.

“Hostile entities, manifestation type, all altitudes, tactical on up,” she said into the radio, knowing the jargon since she was usually the coordinator back when she was in the gang.  Not that they often ran into anything fancy, but Dad had insisted she know.

“Understood,” The Custodian replied, voice tense.  He knew the jargon thanks to his time in Justice for Hire, so even if he had a lot of blind spots where supers were concerned, when it came to this they were on the same page.

A moment later two specks in the air resolved themselves into Isaac and Lia, dodging some of the creepy crawlies that had managed to get themselves flying and staying well away from the ever-widening rent into something that was cutting apart the sky.  Nothing had emerged yet, but there was motion beyond it, something that was only faint shadows but made her think of a gigantic eye. 

Isaac dropped down next to her, landing so fast it made her wince despite the lack of any weight in the impact; he had clearly dialed his own inertia to near zero so he could go from full speed to zero without pancaking.  He glanced around at the slowly growing battlefield and aimed his pistol at a large, bearlike apparition that was just lumbering forward from nowhere.  It exploded into mist, and the hill a half-mile away did a fair job of imitation a moment later, flinging dirt and vegetation into a slow-motion arc.

“Ike’s power is out of control,” Scheherazade said, not even flinching at the landscape destruction.  “I can nullify some of this, in pieces, but he needs to be stopped.”  The way Blacktime – and maybe even Dad – would have dealt with such a thing was just by shooting Ike in the head, but Scheherazade doubted that would work.  A talent so powerful would probably just manifest something in the way, besides which, even thinking of killing Administrator Ike was inviting far more trouble than she was willing to take on.  “Tweak his power?”

“Got it,” The Custodian said, and directed Shay over toward where Ike was sitting, still trying to work his chair controls.  Even as far away as she was, she could hear the warning beeps of the chair’s functions.  She wasn’t sure if Isaac could actually adjust Ike’s ability to use his power, but it seemed like their best bet.  And it was safer than him using that vastly overpowered pistol of his.

She pulled her Smoke Army around to defend herself and Astoria as she reached out to try and grab the vapor from Moonblast’s latest evisceration.  Once again they were completely outclassed by the powers around them — but this wasn’t like the incident with the crystalline entity.  Scheherazade could contribute, could help, could even stall someone like Moonblast. 

All that remained was to see if The Custodian could clean up this particular mess.

***

Shay skidded to a stop next to Ike’s chair, and Isaac reached out to slap a hand against it.  No matter what happened they’d need to get the heck out of the area, and if the chair was inertialess he was pretty certain Shay could tow it.  He would have liked to start tweaking its conceptual resilience too, just to keep Ike safer, but he didn’t know enough yet to not make it worse.

“I can adjust your power,” Isaac said, leaning further to put a hand on Ike’s shoulder.  The bald man actually twitched at that, clearly not expecting it.  He glanced up at Isaac, something flickering through his eyes before hardening into a professional mask.  “It has to be related to change, but I can do it.  Tell me what needs to stay fixed, and what needs to be easier to shift.”

Ike glanced around at what was rapidly becoming a battlefield and started talking.  Isaac knew that it was genuinely an enormous concession from the man, and didn’t waste any time with personal chatter.  There was just the task at hand, and making sure whatever the hell was above them didn’t manage to emerge from the rift.

“I don’t have direct control over anything I let through,” he said, speaking rapidly.  “I never truly did, and the Sovereign of Lies broke what little control I did have.  It used to be I could manage what came through, all kind of aspects about it, so I knew what it was and whether it was safe, what it wanted.  Now all those aspects buzz around and flit in and out of my control — let’s start with magnitude.  Stop that from changing; wait for my signal — now!”

Isaac leaned into making it harder for the magnitude of Ike’s power to change.  While he still didn’t know exactly what Ike’s power was or how it worked, he understood the concept of it having a lot of moving parts.  Or at least, that was how Ike thought of it, and that was what mattered.

The rift in the sky stopped widening, and a moment later, a horrible wail shook the ground. Clouds of dust billowed into the air, trees fell, and a moonquake sent cracks zigging and zagging through the ground.  That seemed to be the extent of the benefits, though, since nothing else changed.  Everything that had already manifested stayed, and the rift remained a danger because even as he watched, Scheherazade’s Smoke Army turned their fire on an oversized fish-centipede that dropped from the rent in the air. 

“The heck is that?” Isaac asked, peering up at the shrouded thing beyond the rift.

“The Bellringer’s opposite number,” Ike said. “Or the memory of it.”  He sounded unconcerned, but Isaac balked at the very idea.  He’d never seen the Bellringer in person, or even seen video of the super in action – only blurry pictures – but the man’s only purpose was to destroy footholds from outside creation.  The opposite of that didn’t bear thinking about.

A whistle and a thud interrupted his momentary shock as a massive winged monkey plunged down next to him, Shay bouncing off to the side to avoid an oversized simian fist.  Isaac vaguely recalled the original, which had been driven out over the city walls and summarily swallowed by the Green Grove druids, making it a relatively harmless threat.  The only memorable thing had been that it had stood on top of the Star City Bank tower screeching at flying supers for a good hour, first.  Before it could go after him again, Scheherazade turned the energy gun on it and exploded its head into vapor.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, tapping his saddle as he sent Shay his intentions.  Even if none of the memories of exotic threats past were attacking Ike, Isaac was not so protected, and there was no way he could work on getting Ike’s power under control while dealing with ever increasing numbers of summons.  Or whatever the hell they were.

“Yes,” Ike agreed, which actually surprised Isaac.  “Moonblast can let loose without anyone else around.”  Isaac was speechless for a second at the idea that Moonblast’s previous near-nuclear detonations and plasma beams were not full power, then shook it off and tried not to think about how he’d be completely dead without Scheherazade.

He hated super-fights.

“Right, hang on,” he said after recovering, and spent a moment to reinforce the connection between himself and Ike, along with the chair.  He’d proven that it worked with Scheherazade, being able to shift her smoke powers without directly touching her, and if he was going to be working with Ike it’d be great if he could do so while not awkwardly reaching past a floating life-support chair and constantly under attack.

Then Shay spread her wings, hopped into the air and grabbed Ike’s chair with her feet.  Talons dug into metal and upholstery, and suddenly they were both flying away from the battlefield at speed.  He didn’t have any plan beyond that, but fortunately he wasn’t the only one involved.

“There’s a bunker seventy miles northeast,” Lia said, her voice coming over the barding radio, the light of her runes visible despite the distance.  “A reestablishment safehouse.”

“Great.  Scheherazade, meet us there?”  As much as Isaac hated to leave Sarah behind, the fact was that she was probably the safest of all of them. If she could simply shrug off whatever Moonblast did, then very little else was going to harm her.  Not nothing, of course, given that the Deep Kingdoms had shown there were ways to interfere, but those weapons had been specifically created for the purpose. 

“On my way,” Sarah’s voice came through the radio after a moment, and Isaac glanced back at the fight.  Even over the wind of their passage he could hear gunshots from what Scheherazade was doing.  He was frankly surprised she hadn’t run out of ammunition.

“Keep talking, Ike,” Isaac said.  “I’ll get your power under as much control as I can.  The more I know, the more I can help.”

Isaac had thought that Ike had some kind of information power, given the man’s role as head of Star Central.  But really, it should have been obvious there was more to it given that he was still stuck in a chair that was keeping him alive after however many decades.  Someone like Ike should have been able to get the best superpowered medical care, unless the injuries themselves were a consequence of his power being damaged. 

“I am a gate to dreams,” Ike said after a moment.  “The Sovereign of Lies did permanent damage, and that gate is full of holes and bent bars, but every piece that’s warped or broken is something I can do,” he continued, when Isaac didn’t protest the dramatics. “It can be difficult to describe.”

“I get it,” Isaac said, and he really did.  It was like how altering the resistance to various kinds of change was in different directions or different shapes but even that metaphor was strained compared to what he was actually doing. 

He also actually felt bad for Ike, as the man continued to talk.  Isaac had been at the mercy of his own talent before, when he nearly disappeared into Ravdia.  Or even just when it shifted events and probabilities to ensure things happened, and that meant shifting him.  So being jerked around by power was something they had in common — though Ike unequivocally had it worse.

Their conversation was interrupted by a bright flash, bright enough that Isaac couldn’t see anything for a moment even if he wasn’t looking in that direction.  He blinked spots away from his vision as Shay chirped unhappily, wobbling and flying blind for a few moments.  When his vision returned, he glanced back to see a towering bubble of bright light where they had been.

“Sarah, you okay?”  He interrupted Ike to ask the question, though he knew if she and Astoria were in smoke form she wouldn’t have even gotten the transmission.  A wall of wind hammered them, sending them tumbling in the aching silence. Then the response came through.

“I’m fine. Astoria’s fine.  I guess Moonblast’s fine; that’s her isn’t it?”

“She’s called Moonblast for a reason,” Ike confirmed, listening on the radio.  Isaac looked down to see him fully enclosed by his chair, back to being unflappable as Shay hauled him along.  Something that wasn’t a strain in one-sixth gravity and with near-zero inertia. 

Isaac felt more than a little conflicted about the whole thing.  It seemed like Gloryfall all over again; his actions cascading events into something he hadn’t planned on at all.  He had known things would happen with the moon, but he hadn’t anticipated getting Ike involved, especially considering their rather conflicted relationship.  At least, on Isaac’s end.  He wasn’t sure Ike thought of him at all.

At least he wasn’t responsible for Ike’s infirmity in the first place.  He wasn’t sure he could actually fix it either, not when presumably the best superpowered healers hadn’t been able to.  On the other hand, healers couldn’t change the way talents worked the way he could, and while it felt like a distraction from his main goal of fixing the moon, an unending horde of dream creatures wasn’t exactly conducive to the task.

One mess at a time was the best he could do.