zg_shadows | A conversation in another world.

There was no real sunlight in the umbral realm of Scar. There was a nasty grey light, which seemed to creep everywhere, and there was the garish yellow light of the lanterns than hung on street corners. During the day, the light was never enough. It made reading difficult and cast a nasty shadow over every face in the giant city which made all the inhabitants look jaundiced and sickly. At night the light was too strong. The thin and torn curtains that every house in Scar had were never enough to block out the light, and so sleep tended to come in short shallow bursts.

Early in the morning, the great factory klaxons startled the inhabitants into waking, and throughout the day these klaxons continued to sound, marking out every short snatched break that the thin grey workers were allowed.

Most who existed in Scar ('lived' was somehow not the right word) had been created there, and had never known the possibility of any other existence. They were ground down, colourless creatures, who did not tell tales of impossible lands of sunshine. Rather, they talked about inanities and irrelevancies. They talked of rivalries and scandals, and odd smells that they thought they caught in the factory smoke. They talked of food, and drink, and squabbled over who got the last scrap of the greasy and fatty substance that was normally served for dinner.

It was a miserable, wretched place. Days stretched into weeks there, and then weeks into months, with no real way of marking the passage of time. It just staggered on, weary but unchanging.

This all, of course, was particularly unpleasant for those who had not been born there.

They did exist.

Over in the Sixth Quadrant of the Thirty Sixth Industrial Sector, there was a man with too much body hair who swore blind that he had once been a werewolf, left here by his pack in revenge for some long forgotten crime. Down in the Ninth Quadrant of the Twelfth Technological Sector, there was a thin grey man, who typed faster than any other programmer in his section, who said he had been a computing student at MIT in another world, but had fallen into this place after working forty eight hours straight on an interning job.

And in the Seventeenth Quadrant of the Hundredth Border Sector, there were three people gathered around a particularly miserable attempt at a fire, who had not been born here, had been here far longer than they had intended, and were now ready to leave.

"So," said one, who was a female that the kind would have described as 'curvaceous'. "Where to now?"

One of her friends, who was also female, but smaller and slighter, shivered slightly. "Anywhere but here," she said. "This place is miserable. Do you have enough energy to power a jump from here?"

The first female pulled a face. "I think so," she said, and stared around the charcoal grey landscape with an expression of distaste. "There's more out here. Out on the edges. Closer to..." and she tilted her head towards the barren black hills that rose up behind the broken walls that they stood before.

"Shhhh!" the third party said firmly. He was tall and broad, with close cropped hair of an indeterminate colour. "Don't give it a name."

"Why not?" the second girl asked. "Is this an extension of 'if you look at it, it looks at you. Now if you say its name, it might start talking back to you?"

"Maybe," the tall one said. "I just think it's better to stay safe. God knows we're not exactly at the Arcadia Gateway this time."

The taller girl perked up. "Oh! The Arcadia Gateway! We could go back there," she said hopefully. "I've got the pressed flowers, and a handful of dirt. I could totally navigate us there."

She reached for one of a series of small pouches she had attached to a thick black leather belt that she had slung around her waist, and began to fiddle with them, stopping only when she caught the looks on the faces of her companions.

"What?" she said.

"Hetty," the man said. "You know we can't..."

"Why not?" Hetty said.

"Because we can't," the second girl said. "You know what we need to do."

Hetty stood quite still for a moment, chewing on her lip awkwardly, before she replied.

"We're safer out here," she said. "You know he can't get into the Otherworlds. You also know that if we go back to Earth..."

"...we'll maybe have a chance of stopping him," the man broke in. "We'll maybe have a chance of putting an end to the thousands of human sacrifices, and the total horrible devastation that will happen if Keddah's bloody Pet Cthulhu gets loose."

"And how the hell are we going to stop him?" Hetty said. "We've not exactly done very well so far. How long did I have to spend hunting for you after Pet Cthulhu threw you into the deep Otherworlds? And what about May?"

She glared at her female companion. "You were pretty much dead when I dragged you out. I had to suck a chunk of the Pacific Ocean clean of life, just to stop you from dying. We tried to kill Keddah. We failed."

"That's just because I was ten seconds too late in trying to nuke his brain," May snapped. "and I let him get the first strike in. If I'd..."

"But you didn't!" Hetty snapped. "You tried. You nearly died, May. James nearly died."

"And you didn't even try," James snarled. Hetty looked as if he had slapped her. She went very white and took a step backwards. May made a small noise and tried to shush James, but he kept talking. "You know, Hetty, you're possibly the most powerful one here. You're the mage. You're the one who can walk between worlds, and break open continents if you want. You're the one who could maybe do something, except you won't even try."

"James..." May said, and James waved her aside.

"No May," he said. "I think this is a conversation that we need to have. Keddah is our problem. We helped him stay alive early on. We let him make his pact with that...with that thing. He is our problem, and Hetty knows that. She just..."

"I'm just...what?" Hetty snapped. "I just don't care? I just don't want to stop Keddah? I'm still tainted and evil and want to go back to working for that thing?"

Hetty was white as a sheet, and trembling slightly.

"Look. I hate what Keddah has become. I hate what he does. I hate what I did to help him, and I really hate the fact that I ever even talked to that thing. I do.

"But I hate the thought of losing you guys even more. And that's what I'm scared will happen if we try and go after him again."

"So we just keep running?" James asked, his voice tight. "I'm sorry, Hetty. I can't accept that..."

"Enough!"

Both James and Hetty stopped, surprised, and stared in confusion at May. May's hands were on her hips and her chin was raised in sharp irritation.

"Both of you," she said firmly. "That's enough."

She turned to face Hetty and held out her hand. "Look," she said. "I know it's difficult. I know you don't want to kill Keddah. I know you're not good with that kind of thing, but we have to. What he is doing is wrong. No shades of grey about it. It's just wrong. And we need to stop it. Otherwise the pet Cthulhu is going to get loose, and I really don't think that bouncing from world to world will help us then.

"You remember saying, ages ago, that you were tired of us just screwing up wherever we went. Well, this is our chance to not screw up."

James nodded and broke in. "This is our chance to do the right thing. Please, Hetty..."

Hetty sighed.

"OK," she said.

She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and her hand went to the elaborate dragon pendant around her neck. "I just don't quite know what we can do. I honestly don't think we can do this on our own."

"Then," James said, "we need to talk to people who can help us do this."

Hetty nodded, chewing on her lip slightly. "I guess I'm technically a mage," she said, and ran her fingers over the ornate dragon pendant again. "That probably means it's safe-ish for me to try and talk to them."

May frowned.

"Are you sure?" she said. "They've not exactly been too fond of us in the past."

"To be fair," Hetty said, "we did kinda provoke them last time."

The three of them exchanged meaningful looks. May muttered "yeah...sorry about that..." and then they moved on with a kind of cheery determination.

"I'll go talk to some mages," Hetty said. "I'll just say I'm an Orphan or something, which is mostly true, and I'll tell them there's a methusulah Baali running around..."

"...don't say that," May broke in. "The words won't really mean anything to them. Just say 'powerful'. That'll get it across better."

Hetty nodded. "OK. You do overwatch on me? That way if anything goes wrong, you guys can come in, but we won't cause havoc by saying the wrong thing to each other."

James and May nodded.

Hetty tilted her head to one side. "OK," she said. "We going to go back to Earth then?"

She glanced around the black and barren wasteland that they were standing on and looked almost mournful. "You know," Hetty said. "I'm going to miss this place."

"Well, I won't," James said briskly. "I'm looking forward to being out of here. Let's get a move on."

"Give me a moment!" Hetty protested. "It's going to take me a while to try and suck in the power to fuel this jump, OK?"

She knelt down, and rubbed some of the dusty grainy earth between fingers for a few moments. She closed her eyes, and as she sat there, you could almost hear the soft sound of waves breaking against the beach. Her skin seemed to glow, and for an instant her hair was lifted by a breeze that no one else could sense.

"We're almost good to go," Hetty said, and the other two clustered close to her. Hetty tilted her head to one side in a moment of thought.

"If I'm going to see the mages," she said. "I'm going to need a new name. Hetty Miller is far far too ugly a name to willingly admit to in public."

"We'll sort that out later!" May said, and poked Hetty gently with her finger. "Now let's move."

Hetty smiled at her friends.

"OK," she said. "Let's go pick a fight with a demon."

One hand rested on the grey dirt at her feet. Her other hand rested on the dragon pendant, and she closed her eyes as she began to focus.

"Let's go home," she whispered. "Let's go home"

And a few moments later, there was nothing to see but the unchanging grey walls of Scar.