"Right.
Lemme put those away." I did the little flex, and the claws
slid away.
"And
your eyes are green. Like... like cat eyes. It's time for you to
spill, buddy boy."
I
pointed at the zeppelin "Your thing.", pointed at the
members of the phantom squad who were tying down the Zeppelin lines
as we talked "Ray's thing. And this is mine. I met my cat.
Then I started getting... Catty, I guess. It's a thing."
"You.
A re not telling me everything."
"Maybe
not every little thing. But, seriously, how is my thing any weirder
than yours? You're a conjurer, Ray's a summoner, and I'm a
skinchanger." I responded, and watched her absorb that; I could
she that she liked it, even if she was still a little pissed.
Ray
stepped up, in peace-maker mode "I think what she's trying to
say is that you scared the crap out of her, man. And I think that
because, see, you scared the crap out of me, and I kind of want to
yell at you right now, too."
"Oh.
Uh. Well, sorry, then." I started to chuckle as I said it.
Couldn't be helped.
Gina
just rolled her eyes "Jackass."
Ray
looked at both of us "Okay. Cool for now. Now, do we want to
do some clean-up here, talk to the tribes? Or do we want to
backtrack to my place, trace out our list of people that have taken a
hit? Or back, but out to catch a peek at Laurent's place?
Gina
responded "I vote we get a look at Laurent. From a distance,
but still, a look. The plan we've got, such as it is, depends on his
place being something we can find and mess with." I nodded;
it was sense.
We
went for it.
...
Laurent's
pillar was worth seeing. We had cruised up to the barest sight of
it, lights off, and hung in the sky, looking at it through the
rail-side telescopes Gina had included in her plans for just such a
moment.
It
was built almost entirely of Kingsport buildings – and almost all
of them from the dockside area; the whole pillar was wrapped in in a
twisting fog bank that wound around it. Of itself, that wouldn't be
that stunning; we'd seen pillars with waterfalls and other effects
before. But ranged around it, like defensive earthworks, were seven
scalloped nightkind hives growing up from the ground, connecting in
to the pillar with flying buttresses, and connected at the ground by
the patch of spreading black stone that the pillar and hives all sat
on.
Ray
was thinking about it "The towers had more hives, when we first
ran into them."
"Sure.
And look how well that went." Gina shot back.
"Well,
I'm not suggesting a repeat performance. Just saying, it's a fight
we could win; the plan is workable, so far. I sure wouldn't mind if
we had a little more help when we did it, though."
"Back
and away, then?"
"Yup."
...
The
next few hours took us from one pillar to another, with Ray getting
to know the people Laurent had damaged. I came along for a few of
the stops, but mainly stayed on the ship, practicing rolls, jumps,
and other maneuvers in the bomb bay. Ulla watched, occasionally
giving opinions. About halfway through the 'tour', Gina stopped by
to watch.
"Seems
like a lot of work, coz."
"Kind
of? Mostly, I need to get used to the line on what I can and can't
do. Like, just how fast am I? Thinking I'm just a little faster
than I am is bad. Thinking I'm a little slower probably means a
wasted chance to do more. Like that, but also things like how far I
can jump, how quickly can I learn to pull out the claws. It's gotta
be natural."
"You
know you have a tail right now, right?"
"Wha...
Oh, wow. That's new."
"That's
what bugs me, coz. If you get yourself set so that this is natural,
will the real world still be natural for you? Or are you going to
try and claw up some asshole one day, or jump off a roof somewhere?"
"You
don't just mean me, though."
"No.
Not just you. I was starting to think of you as our anchor, though,
you know? Ray has a collection of imaginary friends that he can
still feel when he's awake. I've gone to get myself a coffee, and
caught myself thinking that needing to do it that way was just so
stupid. It was okay, though; I thought, Ben, he's still solid."
"And
I'm not."
"Right."
"Not
sure what I can say. Maybe we're just adjusting to weirdness we've
stumbled into, and it'll all settle down as we get used to it. Maybe
we'll end up cracking up completely in the real world. But, hell,
maybe the drug lord whose mind we're planning on invading through
dreams will realize that we've got our hands on ancient narcotics
that were rediscovered by a secret government project, and we're
hoping to use our new powers to break up his evil cult, and he'll
just have us shot."
"When
you put it that way..."
"It
sounds like we must already be completely out of our damn minds as it
is? Yeah. I know."
...
Once
we'd finished stopping at everyone on Ray's list, we started looking
at the plan in detail. Something like eight of those we had visited
had a clear grudge that Ray though he could lift from them. On two
of our stops, the actual dreamer was too visible, and Ray didn't want
to call them into lucidity. In the other failed attempts, either
they'd healed their internal damage enough that Ray couldn't find a
representative for it, or it was directed at someone or something he
couldn't figure out.
Eight
serious traumas, all dumped into Laurent's head in a single night, in
addition to chopping out whatever occulted support the hives were
giving him. It did sound workable, though we wouldn't be able to let
the fight turn into a siege. The total running-around and
negotiation called for was pretty similar to what we'd done that
night, which felt like a good thirty hours of subjective time, all
told. We'd want to practice the whole show; it would not be good to
wake up still carrying the things we hoped to dump into Laurent.
With
the plan reviewed, we let go of lucidity, and slipped back into
normal sleep.
