“So…what the hell is going on?” I asked Professor Hawkins grimly after I finished filling him in on Harper’s chamber and the mess with Clarissa. “Why do they want the lantern shield? He didn’t seem like he expected it to cause problems when he removed it.”
He rolled his eyes. “Harper doesn’t EXPECT problems, he precipitates them. I knew about his little pet project. Everyone does. But if that thing is aware and has breached containment, we have a huge problem.”
“Can’t you just…kill it?” I asked hesitantly. “Like it’s pinned down and weakened, right?”
He snarled silently. “No. It has vessels. High level Void Children are monstrously hard to properly dispose of. That’s the point of the research. With vessels in play, that means it has vectors. If we destroy the main body, its soul will fragment and scatter into the tainted. It’ll burrow in, lie dormant until they leave, and then consume them once they’re returned to realspace.”
I swallowed hard. “That…sounds bad. Does that mean we can’t do anything? Because I feel like we should do something.”
“We ARE doing something,” he said bluntly. “We’re completing our prototype. Your new demon will be the perfect counter to this infestation. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason they tried to steal the lantern shield was to prevent it. If we can complete our research in time, we can use it to cleanse the Void taint from the students.”
Gritting my teeth, I glared at him. “I don’t care what they want, I care that they tried to MURDER my wife. If I find out who ordered that, the only cleansing I’m going to be doing is wiping their brain matter off the butt of my staff.”
“Agreed,” Callie said darkly. “I did not appreciate watching you almost die. In fact…I think it’s high time that I finished what I started before entering. No more stalling. I’m breaking through to B-rank tonight.” Despite her steady voice, I could feel the shaking, almost uncontrollable rage flooding the bond at the idea of losing me. I realized after a moment that I was flooding it right back, and we’d gotten into another panic spiral.
Closing my eyes, I took a long, slow breath. “Alright,” I said slowly. “Let’s calm down. Both of us are a little keyed up. I’m ok. You’re ok. Everything is alright. You were waiting to break through for a reason, remember? You wanted to hit Advanced status?”
“I don’t care,” she said bluntly. “Honestly, my priorities have changed. With all this, not to mention the work on the new timepiece…I need to be B-rank. If I had been, I might have been able to help at least a bit against that monster, at least by relying on my Heretic Fire. As it is, I’m useless.”
“It’s your call, Cal,” I shrugged. “With your Domain established already you’re more than prepared for B-rank.” She nodded fiercely, leaning up to peck me on the cheek before she turned and ran out of the room. “Wait, that’s not-” I yelled after her in a panic. “Damn it, she’s gone. I didn’t mean right NOW.” Turning my glare on the vampires, I said, “Follow her!”
Tamsin glared at me. “We don’t work for you. We-”
“Do you like the ground?” I interrupted her. She blinked, clearly confused. “The ground. Solid earth on which to stand.”
“I…yes?” she said slowly.
I nodded cheerfully. “Cool, well unless you want me to drop you into a bottomless pit where you can spend the rest of eternity falling into endless darkness where your feet will never again find purchase, you’ll follow my damned wife and keep her safe. And if something happens to her because you’re making me take time out of my day to threaten you, I’m going to stomp your faces in and wear your heads like shoes.”
The psychotic vampire siblings were deeply unpleasant people, and I was completely fine with threatening them with violence to keep my wife safe. Once they ran out of the house, of course, I called up Cosmic Waltz. “Do me a favor, find the Asura and let them know Callie needs a guard. Or ten.”
“She’ll be fine for tonight,” my mentor assured me. “I’ll put Elonwy on protection detail until your people are in place. Once she’s B-rank I assume she’ll be quite a bit more durable. Her racial trait seems well crafted. Shockingly so for a lower realm.”
“Her dad made it,” I nodded. “He’s a fairly influential god back where we’re from.”
He hummed without interest. “Fascinating,” he said with zero actual enthusiasm. “In any case, now that you’re here, I’ll need your help testing a couple of thoughts I had about the project. I wasn’t planning to bring you in this early, but since you discovered the monitoring, my plan to have you running around independently to get pure data is pretty much shot.”
“Sounds fine,” I told him with a shrug. “But before that, do you have like…a place I can put my friends? I left them in my Domain after the attack, but I don’t want to keep them in there all night. They all have their own majors. I don’t want to send them back immediately though.”
He raised a brow at me. “No, I don’t have a place to keep C-rankers. I’m surprised you bothered to ask. I’ll write them notes for their classes. I AM a professor. Now, why don’t we focus on these tests? Follow me.” He gestured for me to trail behind him, and I did. He led me down a hallway and to a small, wooden door.
Pushing it open we walked down a flight of creaky wooden stairs, arriving at a basement workshop I hadn’t seen up to this point. “So, we don’t have quite as many tools as we would have in the Continuum, but I’m spacing out my hours there to maximize point value, so we’ll need to make due.”
I nodded, walking into the lab slowly, taking my time and trying to puzzle out what everything did. There was a lot of stuff. Boxes of spare parts, machines humming with strange energies, an odd piece of machinery that didn’t appear to actually DO anything aside from moving in interesting ways like a piece of modern art. In the center of the room, there was a particularly odd device.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, pointing to the raised platform covered in large runes. Or rather, tiles with runes on them. The platform was about five by five feet, with each square foot taken up by a single rune that I didn’t recognize. The runes all glowed in slightly different colors, and the back of the platform had a large arched bar that acted as a single guardrail.
He snorted. “That is the dimensional resonance frequency oscillation platform.”
“What does it do?” I asked him suspiciously. “Because you only give those long complicated device name answers when they do something you’re embarrassed to admit.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” he frowned. “It’s just a complicated piece of machinery that would require highly technical scientific jargon to explain to you, and I don’t have the time. But you don’t need to know what it does. Just how to use it. Follow my instructions and the tests will go quickly enough.”
It occurred to me that this whole exercise might not really be about testing at all. Thinking about it, I owed him, so I would do it. And I knew he wanted to finish this project, sure, but I also suspected the professor was using this as an excuse to distract me from spiraling about the Void vessels. He knew what I was like, and he knew that if I didn’t have something to focus on I would spin out and drive myself crazy.
“Now, what you need to do is climb onto the platform,” he said carefully. “By matching your harmonic frequency to the shifting gradient patterns underlaying the rune schema, you can synchronize your dimensional resonance with the platform, allowing for an enhanced examination of your temperospatial substructure.”
I frowned at his pompous tone, annoyed that I didn’t actually understand…at first. Then Dan chimed in from the back of my brain and I narrowed my eyes. “Wait,are you saying you just need me to step on the runes as they light up?”
“I didn’t say that,” he corrected me. “It may be true. But I didn’t say it. Now get on the platform and put your feet on whichever color I tell you to.”
Grumbling, I climbed onto the platform, getting ready to apply my boots to whichever rune he mentioned. “Alright,” I told him when I was in position. “All you have to do is give me the color, and I’ll hit it immediately.”
“Chartreuse,” he said after a few seconds. “Mauve, Cerulean, Periwinkle.” He continued calling out colors and I continued not hitting all of them because the names were only somewhat familiar. After a few seconds, he called me to a halt. “Stop, stop!” he snapped. “What are you doing? I told you the colors.”
“I don’t know what color Mauve is,” I told him bluntly. “Or chartreuse. I DO know cerulean and periwinkle, but that’s only two out of four.”
We kept at it like that for the next two hours. Finally, after an unnecessarily long series of footwork drills, we finally completed the testing to his satisfaction. Once I was finished, I said my goodbyes, retrieved the notes that each of my friends had been offered, and headed back to my residence.
When I arrived, I decided to check in on the others, entering my Domain directly to maintain their security. When I got there, I was all but mobbed by my closest confidantes. Well, mostly my closest confidants. I was also surprised to see one less familiar but still known face among them. Ian.
“You came with us?” I asked him as everyone else scattered. “Shows a lot of trust.”
He was B-rank, but not a vampire of anything, so I wasn’t too worried about him being in my Domain. Still, I was surprised to see him. He didn’t seem to share that sentiment, because he just gave me a tired smile. “I didn’t have much choice,” he said ruefully. “One of your subordinates grabbed me during the fight. I’d have been dead if he hadn’t.”
I assumed he was talking about a demon, though I didn’t know which one. “Well, you’re welcome,” I said with a laugh. “Make yourself at home for now, we’ll get everyone settled tomorrow and you can get back. I suspect Professor Hawkins gave me a not for you too.”
“Thanks,” he said gratefully. “I’ll take you up on that.” He looked like he wanted to leave it at that, but to my surprise, he felt compelled to add one more bit of information. “You helped me out, so I have one other bit of information. If you want it.”
“Of course I do,” I assured him. “Something about the missing students?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Something I heard Clarissa talking about with one of her recommendations. Didn’t make much sense at the time, but after this mess tonight I’d have to be stupid not to know she was suspicious. This was before that though. Ages back. I heard her talking to one of her suggested entrants. She mentioned a red door.”
I froze. Because I had heard that phrase before. Or rather, I’d seen it. On a piece of paper tucked into the visor of a cluttered car that belonged to my friend. Elonwy had a note about not opening a door in her basement. She’d mentioned forgetting it and leaving it open. What was it? What did it have to do with the Void, if anything? I had no idea, but I knew this was at least a place to start. I guessed tomorrow I’d need to get in touch with a friend.