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Chapter 12: Over the Sands, Along the Coast
If you READ MULTIPLE FORKS of Chapter 11, then put a tally mark in the Sneaky Peeky box on the last page.
If you MADE YOUR CHOICE AND STUCK WITH IT, then put a tally mark in the Carefully Consistent Box on the last page.
As the adventurers load their gear into the dune buggies, Warner approaches them. “Hey,” he says, and they stop working for a moment. “I just wanted to say that I really appreciate what you folks have done for the city.”
“All in a day’s work, my man,” Phyr says with a smile. “Or a week’s, or whatever,” he adds with a shrug.
“Maybe for you,” Warner continues, “But you really pulled us back from the brink, this past week. You didn’t have to do that - you could’ve stolen a couple buggies and skipped town, and we couldn’t have stopped you. We’re not out of the woods yet, there’s still a ways to go. But you gave us a shot in the arm, and if we work hard and all pull together, then I think we could come back from this.” He sniffs and blinks back a tear or two, then straightens himself up and extends a hand. “Anyway - for what it’s worth, you have my thanks.” Phyr shakes his hand, Vector gives an informal salute, and Pannych gives him a hug.
Once they’re fully ready to go, Warner reviews the plan with them using Phyr’s map. “We’ll be traveling mostly along the coastline until we reach the badlands. It’s longer as the crow flies, but much better than a straight path through the dunes. You’ll see what I mean when we cut across this here peninsula - once we’re heading West, it’ll be quicker and easier. Once everything flattens out and firms up, then we cut South - this’ll be the easiest leg of the journey. All told, we should make it a day or two ahead of time.
“Now, I’m not gonna drive you right up to the front door - that’s just foolish, I’d be a sitting duck outside. That means you’re gonna have to walk for a bit. Hope’s End is on top of a bluff overlooking the Wastes, and there’s nowhere to hide in the blind spot at the foot of the bluff, so I’m gonna drop you guys off here.” He zooms the map in and jabs a finger at a spot around a nearby mesa. “There’s a bunch of shallow little caves in the mesas around here, we’ll just have to weave a bit through ‘em so they don’t see our dust as we’re coming. We’ll find a cave that’s out of sight from the castle, we may need to clear out some bandits, and we’ll stow the buggies - I’ll have you recharge ‘em so they’re good to go when you get back. I don’t know how long you’ll need, but I can give you three days to get back to me before I’ll have to cut and run - but I’d be leaving a buggy behind if I do that, so I’d really rather not.
“We’ll have these speaking stones for the trip, and I’ll give you one to hold onto while you're dealing with Thorn. If you know it’s gonna be longer than that, then I can take the fuel cell from the other buggy, and with these two mana potions and the solar panels, I can get back to town on my own. We can stay in contact, and I can come back later. And if anything crazy happens, just update me, and I’ll do the same for you.”
“Got it,” Vector says with a nod. “So we’re heading over some dunes, then along the coast, and into the badlands - you’ll drop us off out of sight and a ways off, then we’ll hoof it the rest of the way, and be back in three days. Anything crazy on either end, we got the speaking stones, we’ll figure it out. Sounds good to me.”
“Wait,” Phyr says, “Aren’t we gonna be sneaking around at some point? I mean, what if we’re up in the castle rafters and all of a sudden you shout there’s bandits closing in on you?”
“Just call for radio silence,” Pannych says, “And then give an all-clear when it’s cool to talk again.”
“OK,” Phyr says, “But what if we call for radio silence, and then you need radio silence, Warner? Like, you don’t want us giving you an all-clear if you’re hiding in a cave with bandits just outside, right?”
“First,” Warner says, “That’s extremely unlikely, but it does happen. Second, these things turn off - there’s transmit mode, receive mode, and plain off.”
“I know how they work,” Phyr says impatiently, “What I’m asking is: what if we need to communicate an emergency, but for whatever reason, we can’t?”
“Then that sucks and we die,” Pannych says. “Christ, there’s only so much planning you can do!”
“Right,” Vector says, “No plan survives contact with the enemy. We’ll have to adapt as we go.” Warner nods, then snaps a finger-gun at Vector.
“Fine, whatever,” Phyr says, “I just think we should have a plan in place so we don’t have to spend time thinking of one under pressure. That’s all.”
“Fair enough,” Warner says. “Any other questions before we go?” The adventurers shake their heads, and they get into the buggies.
Warner drives lead with Vector, and Pannych follows with Phyr in her passenger seat. As they leave Warner’s garage, the last rays of sunset are fading ahead of them to the West. Getting out of town is slow but steady, with only the occasional stop for pedestrians - but once they’re out past the city limits, they open up the throttles and head Northwest into the dunes.
Getting to the dunes is nice and quick, but crossing them is another matter. Up one hill and down the next when they’re shallow; snaking around them when they’re steep; up and down, left and right, over and over. Pannych has Warner to follow, so she at least doesn’t need to make navigational calls herself, and as she gets a feel for the dunes she finds that the driving is both focusing and relaxing. Phyr and Vector, on the other hand, need to be on the lookout for danger with their weapons ready, and the constant changes in direction threaten motion sickness with every abrupt shift in pitch, yaw, and roll.
They only take two bathroom breaks, and each pit stop gives an opportunity to stretch their legs while the engines cool and Phyr tops up the batteries. But the thought that every minute stopped is another minute’s delay begins to drive them a little nuts. It’s not like a normal road trip, where you can space out and stare out the window, or blast some tunes, or play a game with the signs or license plates - it’s a desert crossing in the dead of night, when every monotonous dune they cross might lead to beasts, bandits, or broken bones. They must remain constantly alert, which fatigues them mentally, and the five-point harnesses don’t entirely eliminate the struggle to stay properly seated, fatiguing them physically.
It’s about a hundred miles of this, which takes about four hours with all the speed and direction changes. It’s still the middle of the night when they crest a dune and can see the coast at last, just a few more sandy hills away. Once they reach the flatter area of the beach, Warner calls a two-hour break at 1 a.m., right on schedule. The sudden cool breeze, wet and salty, is a refreshing pick-me-up for all of them, allowing them to decompress from the fatigue of the dunes. Warner says, “All right, hard part’s over - I’m gonna open ‘er up, just make sure you gimme a good hundred yards or so in case of anything sudden.” Pannych acknowledges, and after their break, they accelerate to a steady cruising speed.
They travel for two hours, then take a 15-minute break, then travel another two hours, and so on in like fashion. At 9:30, they stop and set up camp to eat breakfast and get their sleep during the heat of the day. A large tarpaulin is stretched across four tall segmented poles, each weighted by squat little drums they fill with seawater. This simple shelter shields the pair of buggies from the Sun’s worst, and is also enchanted to absorb energy from sunlight, so it does double-duty. A pair of smaller poles and some weighted stakes make for a simple lean-to that covers the four of them as they sleep on light linen spread over the sand. As they cannot take their rest in shifts, having only six hours to rest, Warner sets up a telescoping pole topped with a combination proximity sensor and alarm clock, to wake them at four in the afternoon, or if any living thing larger than a beach ball crosses the rapid sweep of an Obvious Deterrent red beam, covering the area from ten to about a hundred yards away from their little campsite.
Their day rest passes uneventfully, if fitfully for the adventurers unaccustomed to it. They waken, eat a late lunch, pack it in, and are starting the buggies again at 4:45. As the Sun sets in the West, they see the Aguja-Piedra mountains. Phyr says, “They look all wavy and shimmery, and faded like they’re in fog. Kinda purple, too - are they a misty mirage or something?”
“No,” Pannych says, “They’re just really far - all the air and moisture, combined with the turbulence from the mixing air, plays tricks with the light. The purple tinge is chromatic aberration. We’d see the same thing when we took family road trips to the Rockies - well, not the waviness, but everything else.”
At their 11:15 dinner break, they run out of sandy beach, and reach a rocky strip just a couple miles wide between the rolling dunes and the mountains, looming in the darkness as empty jags of nothing in the sparkling night sky. Warner tells them as they eat, “Now that we’re on solid ground, we’ll be making slightly better time. We’ll still need to stop every couple hours to cool down and top up, but we can go a bit faster without overheating the engines.”
The break after next comes right at 6:30, allowing the adventurers to watch as the pre-dawn gloom erupts to full-blown day over the featureless expanse to the East. Overnight, that narrow strip of hard earth expanded, pushing away the rolling dunes and leaving only a vast, barren plain. To the West, they see the mountains as bathed in golden dawnlight: massive jags of stone thrust up and away, like the quills of a planetary porcupine burrowed into the Earth’s crust. There are no foothills, just a shelf of mesas abruptly falling off, as though two tectonic plates were simply stacked one upon another by a lazy god who got tired of puzzle pieces that needed to fit together but just didn’t.
Phyr says, “Something tells me the Rockies do not look like that.”
“No,” Pannych says, staring at the curious formation. “No idea what causes that.”
“Don’t they teach anything in demigod school,” Warner asks with surprise. They look at him quizzically, and he says, “The dead gods told us that a billion years ago, dragons came here from another world. They couldn’t fly through the empty black between planets, though, so they all beat their huge wings to bring their planet here. They never steered a planet before, though, and couldn’t stop in time. As the planets collided, first a great fiery breath scoured the land, and then the two worlds became one. The dragon planet was so big and unstoppable that the Earth itself was pushed up in a cataclysmic splash. When all was said and done, the Earth was wounded where the dragon planet arrived, which filled with the dust of the world because it couldn’t close back up. The gods forgot to clean it up and put anything here, and so this became the Forgotten Wastes. The splash was frozen in place like needles of rock, and so they were called the Aguja-Piedra mountains, a name that persists to this day, except the language was forgotten.”
“Spanish,” says Phyr. “It’s just Spanish.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Pannych says. “What does the legend say next?”
“Ain’t a legend,” says Warner, “Word of the gods themselves. They showed people how it happened, so we could see with our own eyes how the world was wrought. It was sped up and scaled down, of course, but we were able to see the actual cataclysm ourselves. Now that the two worlds were one, gravity pulled more on the dragons, and they couldn’t fly with just their wings. So the gods taught them Etherwing, so they wouldn’t lose their wings and have to crawl on their bellies like snakes.”
“Wait, why is Spanish a long-dead language here,” Vector asks.
“Dee’s first girlfriend was an immigrant from Uruguay, she got with her by asking for Spanish tutoring and making friends, and then skipped a year to be in-”
“God, shut up,” Pannych says impatiently. “So the dragons got magic, hooray. Where were people in all this?”
“There weren’t any people yet,” Warner continues, “Not until the dragons got greedy. They figured that if the gods had freely given such powerful magic to let the dragons keep their wings, then what other magic could they be keeping to themselves? So they decided to posse up and steal the power of the gods.”
“How’d that work out for them,” Pannych asks.
“Pretty good for the dragons, at first - not so much for the gods. See, the gods were powerful, but the dragons were many. Strong as they were, gods tended to be earnest and straightforward, to the point that they’d be confused by the very idea of lying. As in, why would you bother saying anything that wasn’t true? The dragons were cunning, though, and the gods realized that they were losing the war. So they created all the human races, the idea being to beat the dragons at their own game.”
“But then why is Spanish a dead language here,” Vector asks again.
“Messy breakup, Deirdre’s birthday, Shirley gave her a-”
“Jesus Buttfucking Christ, will you knock it off? So the humans swamped the dragons, just like the dragons swamped the gods, then? With a more numerous and cunning enemy?”
“Yep, pretty much,” says Warner. “So what’s this about you being involved with someone who knows one of the lost languages?” Pannych facepalms.
“What the Hell did she give you that made you break up with her on your birthday,” asks Vector.
“Nothing,” Pannych says hastily. “I mean, she didn’t get me ‘nothing.’ But it’s not important and we should get back on the road.”
“It’s not really a road,” Vector says.
“Trail, then,” Pannych says with increasing irritation.
“With respect, there’s no trail, otherwise I wouldn’t have a job,” Warner says. Pannych lets out a little scream of frustration and stamps her foot on the hard earth.
Phyr stage whispers to the others, “She gave her a blowjob.”
Pannych punches Phyr in the face for 3 damage. He laughs off the surprise attack, and she shouts, “Dude, what the fuck?!”
“Relax, I’m just messing with you!”
“No, ‘messing with me’ would be cracking jokes with obviously ridiculous falsehoods. This is just spilling details on my worst early sexual experience!”
“OK, all right, I’m sorry…” Pannych grumbles at his apology.
“Wait, how is a bad BJ grounds for breaking up,” Vector asks.
Pannych glares at him, then takes a deep breath as she weighs something in her mind. Finally, she says, “Look, she wasn’t bad at it. It just… felt all wrong. Not morally wrong, but like it was a factual error. I don’t want you thinking she was a bad girlfriend or anything, I actually feel really bad about breaking up with her. I just panicked, and felt like I had to get out of there. And I only told you, Phyr, because I needed someone to talk to about it. Really wish you’d kept that under your hat.”
“Sorry, I thought you were over it. That was like forever ago.”
“To you, maybe. To me, that was six and a half months ago.”
“Oh, shit - I’m sorry, I keep forgetting about the mind wipe.”
“On the plus side,” Vector says, inviting a curious look from Phyr and a hostile one from Pannych, “I think I understand why Spanish is a dead language here.”
Everyone silently agrees that the conversation is over and it’s time to get back in the buggies.
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