Chapter Seventeen — In Dreams

Administrator Ichabod was not having a very good day.

It wasn’t even so much that his vacation had been cut short; he’d actually expected that.  Him, time off?  There was no way that it wouldn’t end without some kind of crisis.  Normally, though, such crises were taken care of before they rose to the level of his personal involvement or even public consciousness, by the mechanisms he’d put in place specifically to address them.

This one, however did involve him directly, and in a place where he had no access to his resources or personnel.  The very reason he had a stable of superheroes and, importantly, sovereign class supers to direct at an issue was because he was no longer an asset on the field.   Even so, Ichabod wasn’t used to being such a passive and useless piece of luggage, since he could at least dispense advice or call in other help.

Without active control of his power, without the resources and people he had spent so much time building up, all he could manage to be was ballast.  Even there it wasn’t so much his own doing as Hartson – and it had to be Hartson – had somehow altered his chair so it was being towed at speeds just short of supersonic, and without being torn to pieces.  With the travel saucer destroyed, and didn’t that sting, since he wasn’t even sure it could be replaced, it was all he could do to keep his own power under control. And that was after Hartson had worked undreamt-of miracles to make changes to things he thought could not be changed.

That didn’t stop him from making notes for the future; simply typing his thoughts was almost reflex.  There were so many simultaneous concerns that his lack of personnel was actively irritating.  Hartson’s ability to manipulate superpowers directly, for example, enabled entirely new avenues for augmenting heroes and rehabilitating villains.  Mechaniacal’s willingness and ability to move on grand scales was something that needed to be addressed, but without actually sparking a violent response.  Then, of course, there was Moonblast’s behavior, which was a difficult topic.

The three raptors slowed dramatically to study the situation in the lunarian city, which Ichabod had to admit was interesting in an academic way.  The massive Mechaniacal drone seemed to be nigh-invulnerable to the rune magic being sent in its direction, and it was surrounded by the telltale distortion of power suppression, so there was no point in getting close. 

There was a suspiciously clean crater in the center of an open square, no doubt where a demonstration of the drone’s power had been made, but the supervillain didn’t seem to be handling the lunarians too roughly.  He recognized the odd purple-black of nauseating beams, which were an incredibly useful crowd control tool when dealing with populations that didn’t have the very simple countermeasures. 

Ones that were built into the suit of every Star Central superhero, at his direction.

“We do not have time to gawk,” Ike prodded, since it seemed that everyone was overly interested in appraising Mechaniacal’s actions when they were in the middle of another crisis altogether.  “The sooner we can contact Earth, the sooner we can get reinforcements.”

“Would Earth even want to help?” Hartson asked.  “Given the official non-interference policy and the antipathy toward runes.”

“The actions of a human supervillain are one of the things that trips the non-interference policy, in fact,” Ichabod said.  Nobody had been stupid enough to leave massive loopholes in the agreements like that.  Internal affairs were generally easy to demarcate from external interference or existential threats.  Despite the distance between them, and the barriers of the crystal spheres, the moon was still the Earth’s sister.

“What if we were to resolve things before they could muster a response?  You’d prefer that, I hope?”

“What are you getting at, Mister Hartson?”  It was clear the boy had gotten an idea in his head that he expected Ichabod not to like.  Which, to be fair, was likely.  That didn’t mean he wouldn’t lend his support; heroes got damn fool ideas all the time and they paid off more often than most would hope.  That was the nature of the hero business.

“Sarah noticed that your talent is a bit like smoke.  The stuff turns to vapor, but Bubs and Savage seemed entirely real. That must mean it’s possible to make it work like real matter, right?”

“It is not something I can change on command, but yes,” Ichabod said, after a moment to remember who Bubs and Savage actually were.  Members from Justice for Hire, whom he had accidentally taken from a shadow reality some years back during an attempt to actually channel his power rather than simply suppress it.  He couldn’t even protest that was a different thing, because shadow realities had no more substance than dreams did; possibly less. 

“With the sheer amount of power you’re putting off right now, I had an absolutely wild idea,” Miss Miller cut in.  “Splitting the two populations up over the existing moon probably won’t work, and I can’t really blame them for it.  But what about two moons?” 

“I can keep tweaking your talent, I can make things more amenable to the necessary changes, and I can add to the ontological inertia, like I do with Sarah’s smoke,” Isaac said, while Ichabod was still grappling with the sheer chutzpah of the idea.  “And heck, we could even run it past Mechaniacal and see if there’s any math that needs to be done.  Or how it’d interact with the Orrery.  We don’t want to make a mess on Earth while we do this.”

“Of course not,” Ichabod replied automatically, his mind chewing over the thought.  It wasn’t quite as insane as it might have seemed, though he doubted the young Miss Miller actually understood the magnitude of what she was proposing.  On the other hand, before his encounter with the Sovereign of Lies, he had been a true powerhouse, with limits imposed mainly by his desire to keep from breaking reality apart. 

Creating a moon was a tall order even for him at his peak — but Hartson’s talent was really very insidiously powerful.  Not by itself, but in conjunction with others?  Smokeshow had been very average so far as supers went, but Scheherazade was rapidly reaching toward something truly powerful with his help.  It wasn’t an amplifier-type talent as such, but the alterations to Miller’s talents demonstrated that the actual outcome wasn’t far different.

He remembered the brief on Smokeshow’s abilities – the daughter of a very powerful tactical-class supervillain was something Star Central took official interest in – and they had been considerably more limited.  Smoke based illusions and movement, and nothing else.  Still enough to be an absolute menace when properly applied, but nowhere near the ability to, for example, turn other people and objects to smoke, or create fully corporeal clones of herself wielding functional weapons. 

Most of the time, supers didn’t change the spread of their abilities that much.  They might improve their understanding and nuance of their power enough to make previously impossible feats real, but it would usually be in the same general direction.  Stronger, faster, more precise, more elaborate.  Expanding a talent in entirely different directions was generally the mark of someone on the path toward sovereign.

Actually getting there was another thing entirely.  Plenty of supers were powerful enough without being sovereign.  The line between the two was not, in fact, a blurry one.  There was a gulf between someone who could influence a battlefield, and someone who could ignore the rest of human civilization if they so wished.

There was no official definition of sovereign.  That kind of classification was dangerous, pretending to describe something, someone, who was almost definitionally outside the usual rules.  Nor were all sovereigns equal; Blacktime was dangerous and unkillable, but couldn’t threaten an entire world simultaneously the way Mechaniacal could.  The Bellringer could shatter things that defied the comprehension of anyone else, interlopers that shrugged off powers, magic, technology, and physics, but his remit rendered his abilities impotent against entities from within reality. 

In Ike’s opinion, neither Hartson nor Miller had crossed that threshold.  Also in his opinion, neither of them particularly wanted to, but if they insisted on becoming involved in the world, they would likely not have a choice.  It was darkly amusing that for all his protestations of wishing to keep away from superhero work, Hartson chose to tackle the thorniest of all extant problems. 

For the moment, the two were spared the need to rise further, because they had him instead.  Because, insane as it seemed, their solution might work.  The physics of a second moon were effectively irrelevant; the Sunken City had taken command of the tides long ago and the strictures of gravity were moderated by the crystal spheres regardless.  The psi-active crystals of the Earth’s core, surrounding the Deep Kingdoms, stabilized the planet against the civilizations that stretched through the mantle, tunneled beneath volcanoes, opened pocket dimensions inside of mountain ranges, and otherwise stretched and squished physics that underlay the quintillion tons of rock which served as their home.

An extra moon was really a very small imposition.

The magical effects might be more profound, but very little human magic used the moon directly anyway.  The lunarian claim to it meant virtually all human sorcery used, at most, the stars.  Lycanthropes might have to adapt.  A small problem, compared to the one at hand. 

“It might be possible,” he said at last.  As much as he would have preferred to run something through channels, there were times when supers on the ground had to make decisions, and the current circumstances couldn’t keep.

“Might?” Hartson asked, the enthusiasm in his voice noticeably cooling.

“This is a major undertaking.  No certainty of success is assured, especially if either Mechaniacal or Moonblast take issue once they understand what is going on.”  Ike watched the pastel landscape of the moon fly by, blurry past the armorplast of his chair’s environment bubble and the smeared condensation from compressed air.  “But we certainly have to do something before the moon gets shaken to pieces.”

As if to punctuate his words, the sun vanished suddenly, blocked out by a faint but growing spiral of rune-force, etched across a massive, opaque shroud of energy. Worse, it didn’t come from the storm they’d left behind, but from somewhere further away. The phenomenon was high above the moon, possibly all the way out in space. 

“That’s not Moonblast, is it?”  Hartson asked, his voice through the radio coming out flat and uninflected.  It reminded Ike of Glorybeam for a moment, which was certainly an uncomfortable thought.  A sovereign without any sense of humor or respect for law and authority was just a disaster in the making.

“No,” Ike replied shortly, considering the apparition.

“That’s one of the royal artifacts, I think.”  Alianora spoke up, breaking her long silence. The flat and uninflected tone was different on a lunarian voice, sounding more normal, and Ichabod realized that, with Hartson’s tendency toward different costuming and personas, he might simply have been mimicking the way lunarians spoke.  The fact that he had a rune translator lent credence to the theory, and Ichabod revised his threat assessment down a few notches. She also hadn’t reacted to the suggestion of two moons, which was significant even if Ike didn’t know in which direction.  “I’m not sure even Mechaniacal’s work could stand against it.”

Personally, Ike wouldn’t bet either way, but magic did tend to be able to bypass most tinker defenses.  It was a major weakness that kept lesser mad scientist types from snowballing out of control.  Mechaniacal wasn’t a lesser tinker, though, and even if he couldn’t contest rune magic directly there was a reason that dealing with the man was a seriously difficult endeavor. 

Even if Queen Selirayne could wipe out most of Mechaniacal’s army with her artifacts, that just meant Mechaniacal would unleash more, and ever more powerful ones.  It was how virtually every tinker operated; they had a bit of an obsession with finesse and precision, meaning they rarely used maximum force as a first strike.  Mechaniacal was certainly no exception, which meant they still had time until things escalated into smoldering craters.

“Magister Alianora,” Ichabod said, dredging up the full name and title from his memory. “Do you expect the concept of two separate moons to resolve the issues between royalist and reestablishment lunarians?”

“I — maybe?”  Despite the clear uncertainty, Lia’s voice was still as unexpressive as before. “Making people move to a different moon would be as big a problem as migrating across the moon, even if a portal or something could be made,” Alianora continued.  “If you could somehow present people with it, fait accompli, I think that would be sufficient.  Our own home, with everyone else far away…”

“Hold onto that vision,” Ichabod said, taking a deep breath – for all that he didn’t truly need it, with the life support chair – and casting his mind back to patterns he had not used for years.  Some of them, for over a century. “Stoke the dream, feed it and let it grow.  We will be needing it shortly.”

“Understood,” Lia said, though there was a slightest bit of a questioning tone.

“At this rate we won’t have time to find the jammer and get Earth-side help,” Ichabod concluded, watching the energy shroud spread.  It didn’t billow like a cloud, but jerked outward in geometric blinks, like dark pillars being shoved outward, followed by a pastel gold trace of runic characters.  “We need to get started immediately.”

“Do we need to go toward that aurora?”  Hartson was all business, the three raptors slowing down in their flight to hover over a swath of dense forest cut through by a maer river.  The surroundings were oddly hushed and tranquil, the quiet seeming almost wrong in contrast with everything else.

Ike glanced toward where his talent was still being funneled, the gate turned toward a mostly-harmless river of energy that was rippling into space and taking up a good chunk of the horizon that the steadily growing weapon was not.  By now, someone on Earth probably had noticed the twin blots that covered a significant amount of the moon’s surface.  Vilmonica surely had been notified and probably had found that Ike was not responding, but if someone tried to jump into the situation it would only complicate matters.

“No, but what would help is a place of significance.”  He didn’t know how Hartson’s talent worked, but his certainly benefitted from everything that influenced the dreams of peoples, places, and civilizations.  The only reason he could keep the aurora going was that it had always dreamed of reaching the moon — even if that particular living phenomenon had been gone for years.  One of the brief, tragic creations of the villain Rainbow Master, before he’d been put down for good.

“Montes Huygens,” Alianora said after a moment, looking around to orient herself.  “It’s one of our oldest sites that isn’t a relic from a prior civilization.  It’s not even that far.”

A moment after she spoke, the spell form in the sky finished, beams of energy falling from the heavens.  The orbital bombardment didn’t look like normal lunarian casting, not even Moonblast’s blinding bolts of power.  Instead it was black etched with gold, the fingers literally writing themselves into existence as they descended upon, presumably, all the various cities where Mechaniacal’s drones were positioned. 

The moon shuddered as the relic’s energies touched the ground.  It wasn’t even a moonquake, which would have been disturbing, but at least comprehensible.  Instead it was as if the entire orb had been shaken by some vast hand, rattling beneath them as the whole moon seemed to be knocked askew.  The position of the sun and the Earth tilted in the sky, just a few degrees, and a vast, slow wave of wind washed past them, gentle in defiance of the cataclysmic impact. 

Ike tapped the buttons of his life support chair, the mechanisms beeping as they removed stress hormones and stabilized mood.  It wasn’t the worst circumstance he’d seen, nor the most desperate, but he could feel time ticking away.  Escalation was always a problem with superpowers, and in this case there was no incentive for anyone to back down.  Not yet.

“Let us go, before they shake apart the moon.”

***

“Alianora, we are ready to move.”

Grandfather’s voice came through a unique, heritage rune that had been inscribed under her tongue, one that allowed her to speak through the strategic scry.  A capability that was used infrequently and secretly, for obvious reasons.  The moment anyone realized that Grandfather could direct agents both on the Moon and Earth any time he wanted, they would seize, destroy, or suborn her family’s work.

“Wait just a little bit longer,” Lia said.  Despite the power in the sky, despite the frozen storm, despite the unnerving wrongness of feeling the moon itself tilt off-axis, if just by the tiniest fraction, she was as yet unsure. 

“Granddaughter…”  Grandfather sighed, the rune-resonance coming through directly to her despite all the energies in the air.  The strategic scry really was a wonder, a construct that had been slowly assembled over time and designed to help offset the relics and power that the royalist faction had gathered to itself.  “There’s little time to wait.  Selirayne has triggered one of the Black Vault artifacts, this human supervillain has machinery in every city.  If we wait, we will miss our chance.”

Contrary to what Aucliostratus thought, the older generation hadn’t just bided its time and kept to itself.  They had simply seen the fight against the royalists as something to be approached with extreme caution, less the conflict shake the moon apart.  But now that everything was falling apart, there was no point in waiting.

Possibly.

“I believe that the humans may yet have a solution,” she demurred.

“It seems foolhardy to place our trust in them.  We should simply take down the jamming and let them return,” Grandfather said, though his rune resonance came across more worried than belligerent. 

“No, leave it for now,” she replied, steering Norastra toward Montes Huygens.  “I fear they would bring in other supers, who would try to resolve the situation with more force.”

“Would that really make a difference at this point?” Grandfather argued, but unlike with most of the younger generation, he didn’t dismiss her.  She was trusted far beyond the normal bounds of her age and rank, for a very specific reason.

She’d spent most of her time on Earth.

Of course, she was the inheritor of her family’s runes, handpicked and trained to address the war, but the main point was that she had a more objective viewpoint than anyone else.  An understanding of both the moon and the Earth that most lunarians could not fathom, immersed as they were in the war and the runes every moment of every day. 

Lia hadn’t been back on the moon for long, but she already felt the inherent distaste upon seeing the royalist runes, hearing them spoken, and found herself struggling to be objective.  For someone like Grandfather, seeing that artifact covering the sky had to be viscerally disgusting.  Lia saw it as the desperation it had to be.

“You should focus on contesting Mechaniacal, not Selirayne,” Lia said at last, feeling the fracturing resonance all around her.  She doubted any of the supers realized exactly how much damage was being done at the moment, power splintering through not just the physical world, but the mystical bonds that suffused the entire moon.  “No matter what future we may be trying for, he doesn’t feature in any of them.”

For all that she had been acting as an agent for the reestablishment lunarians to end the war – and in fact, as one of the small fraction who realized that wasn’t the same thing as winning outright – she had never truly given thought to what that might look like.  Not only did she not know how it might be accomplished, she had never dared to fully admit it might be possible.  Not even in dreams.

Now, Ike, Isaac, and Sarah between them had provided a sketch, a possibility that didn’t come with the death and destruction of half the moon.  Something that was impossible for lunarian magic, or even for any normal set of superpowers.  She had known, to some extent, of Ike’s previous abilities – information was her specialty, after all – but had never considered his aid a possibility. 

The full extent of his powers were unknown; the Sovereign of Lies having rendered any records about them unreliable at best.  He couldn’t use them anyway, as everyone within the industry knew.  Anyway, he wasn’t really sympathetic toward the lunarian cause on either side, and even if all that weren’t true, who would think large enough to pitch the idea of a literal second moon?

But now that it was brought up, she could imagine it.  A twin, the same features, the same cities, the same structures.  A place where they could be on their own, away from the trouble of the royalists and their bizarre thoughts and perspectives.  Somewhere they wouldn’t have to give up anything.

And a place they could send those who were seduced by the royalist runes, an exile that didn’t put the burden and knowledge of hardship on the friends and families of anyone who turned on the mother tongue.  Another moon, far away, where all things were the same but the people and the language they spoke.

One from which they could welcome those who returned to the fold, who understood the inherent betrayal and objectionable nature of the royalist runes.  They would be welcomed home, not into some distant and secluded place but an equal civilization, firmly in hand of the lunar surface as they should be.

No more struggling against people like Moonblast, who had destroyed who knew how much of the future by enforcing the present.  No more worries about clashes with the royals, who held the power structures and hereditary institutions and ancient artifacts.  No more pollution of the runic tongue, tainting the minds and even the land with its ideas.  No more endless cycle of blood between them.

Giving up nothing and getting everything was a dream.  That just wasn’t how the world worked.  And in truth it wasn’t how this worked either; there would be consequences, there would be dangers, and if Ichabod and Isaac working together had that much power, it was just as likely that they could destroy the moon as duplicate it.  Nor had they reached that point without a certain amount of pain.  Lia could feel the cracks and wounds in the moon and the runes, and could only imagine the death and destruction that was occurring as a consequence.

Beyond Mechaniacal’s devices and the damage they could do, the spreading disruption of rune resonance could have all kinds of dire results.  She had no trouble herself, given how used she was to working with slightly unreliable rune magic.  Earth did not favor the use of reestablishment magic, especially when the moon was not in the sky.  But most lunarians did not have her experience, and would falter in ways they’d never experienced before.  Normal infrastructure might well fail, reinforcements to buildings or instruments of industry finding their meanings confused and slipping, a temporary problem with permanent consequences.

“Definitely deploy against Mechaniacal,” she decided, sending the suggestion back to Grandfather.  “You’ll need to do that anyway, and if we fail you’ll at least not have wasted your time.” 

Of all people, she was the one who was making the call of when and where to escalate.  She, who hadn’t been on the moon much at all for the last twenty years and wasn’t anywhere near the most powerful of the reestablishment sorcerers.  Even the supers had more or less written her off.  Even now Isaac was talking with Sarah and Ike, leaving her out of it and relegating her to the role of showing them where to go.

But that was fine.  It was even by design; she was an information specialist.  Personal power was not part of her portfolio, but maneuvering other people’s choices was.  She didn’t need to take control, or to even lie.  She just needed to consider what the best time and place was to present certain things.

Montes Huygens wasn’t even the most profound or historical site around, but all the others that seemed handy were in royalist hands, and Lia didn’t want to incline whatever came out of this attempt in their direction.  Huygens was too remote to be meaningfully controlled by either faction, and wasn’t too far away besides.  If this attempt failed, they’d still be close enough both to Moonblast’s storm and Muiraton to reach either in short order.  At that point, they’d have to.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Alianora,” Grandfather said, but didn’t bother warning her further.  If things went bad, they’d go really bad, possibly to the point that Lia wouldn’t be around to take the blame she would so rightly deserve. 

“As do I,” she returned.

“Very well.  We shall bend our efforts against the human technology, for now,” Grandfather said, his rune resonance frizzing near the end.  Either due to the extra power needed for the communication fading, or just because of the sheer amount of interference from everything going on. 

The effects were apparent immediately, at least to her.  While no individual reestablishment lunarian could match Moonblast, the assembled grandmeisters that Grandfather knew and could count on absolutely did, and their contribution to the distant fight was palpable.  The tenor of rune resonance changed, both more and less chaotic at the same time as the true tongue joined in the aftershocks of the artifact’s deployment.

Bubbles of light and shadow appeared on the horizon as hidden protectors were finally allowed to reveal themselves.  Grandfather’s people, who had restrained themselves to keep from mutually assured destruction, at last demonstrating what they could truly do.  She was too far away to hear anything, but she was high enough to see some of the light show as more powerful magic than most could muster was suddenly brought to bear against Mechaniacal’s creations. 

Lia wasn’t sure that the humans noticed.  They were too preoccupied with their own way of solving things, with superpowers and surface politics, to understand the power struggle going on.  But that was why her faction had allowed her to make decisions, and a major part of why they had wanted humans to be involved.  The cold calculus of what to prioritize, who to save, what to ignore, was far easier for those who were blind to the dynamics that informed every aspect of life on the moon.

Lia led the supers higher, climbing toward Montes Huygens.  Though the air didn’t thin out so rapidly as it did on earth, it was definitely scarcer and colder as they climbed, even if the crystaltech protected them.  The same psi-field that kept the wind from sweeping them from the saddle at near-supersonic speeds kept them warm and the air breathable.

Different foliage painted rings in different pastel colors as they rose up the mountain slopes: purple, pink, green, and blue in ascending order.  A physical version of the elevation maps kept in schools and museums in cities everywhere.  While Earth’s highest peaks were capped in snow, on the moon there were still gnarled trees clinging to the rocky summit, the branches growing into natural rune shapes that held onto a maer mist shrouding the actual peak.

Their target was obvious, once they got close enough.  A circle of standing stones rose from a flat promontory jutting from the high-altitude forest, high up enough that the curve of the moon’s horizon was obvious.  Nobody had any idea what the ancient peoples might have thought, looking out upon their world, but the standing stones framed the Earth and were aligned to the stars, images and calculations etched for perihelion and aphelion, midday and midnight. 

The rune disturbance was quieter here, the resonance distant or blunted by the influence of the standing stones.  But Lia could still feel it, a growing discordant choir of energies as virtually every powerful lunarian wielded their most destructive runes at the same time.  Not quite a nuclear holocaust or hegemonizing swarm, or even something like the doomsday ritual that had blotted out the skies the first week she’d been on Earth, but it was only just short and getting worse.

“This is amazing!” Sarah said as the raptors landed, taking a moment to snap photos of the breathtaking view.  Lia suppressed a brief flare of annoyance; it was one of the more spectacular landmarks on the moon, but she would rather have the smoke super’s attention elsewhere. 

Lia winced as a rune signature in the distance flared and died, followed by a brilliant flash from one of the cities just over the horizon.  It was hard to fully appreciate the picturesque nature of the place when people were fighting for the moon’s very existence.  Fortunately the brief aside was just that, and as Isaac and Ike landed and got themselves situated, Sarah deployed the clones of herself to guard their flanks.  Nobody and nothing was assaulting them yet, but it was surely only a matter of time.  She doubted Mechaniacal, for example, would fail to notice what was happening.

“Alianora, if you please?”  Ichabod gestured for her to come closer.  Lia clambered off Norastra, walking across the polished stone between the engraved obelisks.  “Hartson, I’m going to talk you through some more changes; we’ll want to give ourselves the best possible circumstances if we are to perform this particular feat.”

“And I’ll keep anything from interrupting you,” Sarah said, a completely different set of guns from before manifesting in the hands of her clones. 

“While we work, I need to you focus,” Ike said to Lia.  “I need you to dream.”