Outside Influences

Bel and Orseis tumbled through the air like unprepared birds shoved prematurely from the nest. Bel shrieked and squawked as her snakes and Orseis’ tentacles wrapped around her face, but when she finally uncovered her eye and looked down the cold grip of terror wrapped firmly around her spine. She grasped Orseis tightly as they spun through the open air, momentarily paralyzed by the utter lack of anything except for the floor thousands of strides below them.

Then, from the corner of her her wind-blurred vision, she saw the flash of color from her tattoo of Kjar. The goddess lounged across her right arm; her fierce eyes seemed to stare straight into Bel’s soul. Bel was immediately ashamed: she couldn’t imagine her aunt in whimpering like a coward.

At least try something you pathetic girl, she castigated herself. Try to fly, or fall better, or…

Bel took stock of what she had: her armor, Orseis, and Orseis’ bag. “The parachute!” she gasped.

The sudden idea swept her fear aside, and she frantically tried to get a grip on Oresis’ pack without letting go of her friend. After a few aborted attempts she forced herself to stop, close her eye, and take a few deep breaths.

She kept her eye closed – the air was biting at her face too strongly to do more than squint anyway – and wrapped her legs around Orseis to free her arms. Okay, she told herself, better to die suddenly while doing my best than the die frantic and screaming, right?

She sighed with relief when her searching hands finally found a grip on Orseis’ backpack. She pulled on all of its straps, making sure that it was tight around the girl’s slender figure, and then felt for the flaps. Behind the outer flap, secured with a thick leather buckle, was a second flap that was held closed with a tied cord. Bel cursed whoever made that design decision as her fingers picked at it, and the eventually gave up and used liquify to rip the little cord to shreds. She reached into the pouch and pulled out the parachute.

The parachute bloomed above them like the most perfect flower. Well, a flower with a lot of holes and some torn strings, but as long as it’s still working I won’t care.

The fabric snapped full as it trapped the air beneath it, and Orseis jerked upwards. Bel yelped in panic as the girl slid through her legs, and Bel desperately clutched at her clothes as Orseis was quickly jerked from her grasp. Her hand closed around Orseis’ pants and she held tight. Orseis pants slipped dangerously low on her waist, but Bel twisted the fabric with her hands, wrapping it tightly above Orseis’ knees.

Bel looked down and grimaced. If I have to hold myself like this the entire time…

She blinked as she looked at her clenched fists. Actually, holding on isn’t that hard. I know I’ve gotten stronger, and I’d gotten pretty good at climbing trees, but I feel like I should be struggling.

In fact, if my ribs weren’t sore from Crystal beating the shit out of me, this would be easy.

“Hey Ori? You there?”

Bel sighed when Orseis remained limp, her tentacles waving around in the wind.

Well, I’ll just look around for–oh, you have got to be kidding me!

Bel stared open-mouthed. Technis’ Barrier extended all the way through the fifth layer, although she could finally see the bottom of it curving slightly.

“Bite me,” she cursed at it. “Suck a bag of–”

Her earring buzzed, interrupting the rush of curses. Both of her hands were busy clutching onto Orseis’ pants, but she was desperate for a distraction. She shrugged her shoulder up to her ear until she managed to squeeze the earring between her shoulder and jaw and initiate the connection.

“Hey James,” she greeted quickly. “How are things with you?”

“Don’t act so happy all of a sudden, it’s suspicious,” James rejoined. “What interrupted us? Were you attacked again?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“What do you mean, ‘a little’?”

Bel laughed as some of the tension left her body. “Just a little. We’re still fine. I don’t want to waste time with boring stuff, so we don’t have to talk about it.”

“You don’t–”

“Yeah, I don’t,” she interrupted. “So tell me how you are. How’s Beth?”

She heard her brother sigh, a long and frustrated puff of air like a bellows slowly deflating.

“Well, Beth just got back from taking a break from politics.”

“She took a break?” Bel exclaimed. “How did you get her to do that?”

“I convinced her that you weren’t listening to anything we said anyway, and Hanti is just going to keep micromanaging everyone to death. Beth went to go get that dagger you dropped.”

Bel was confused for a few heartbeats until she remembered Beth’s second-favorite dagger. She’d dropped it when she was running for her life from the cat girls – the ones that shot mountain piercing beams of light from their mouths.

“Is she okay? Those cat girls were no joke, James.”

“Yeah, she’s fine,” he replied. “She took Seth with her. Did you know that he grew up around there?”

“Really? Cool, I guess.”

Bel looked down. “Hey, do you remember how I told you that Orseis and I have gotten really strong?”

“Yeah. You were bragging about it kind of nonstop, talking about how good your are at tree climbing and throwing rocks now.”

“Yeah, that. I’m wondering if we weren’t as good as we thought. Is it possible that gravity is going down instead?”

“Well…” James trailed off uncertainly before eventually replying. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, we’re using the parachute to go down again.”

“Okay.”

“And it’s really slow. Like… less than half what I expect?”

James hesitated. “That’s bizarre. You’re going through the fifth layer? How many strides do you think you’ve gone down in total?”

“James, how would I know?”

He clicked his tongue. “Well, if you could get a glass teapot and fill it with water, I think you can make some kind of barometer.”

“James, where the hell do you think I am? I’m falling towards–”

Bel looked down. “I’m falling towards some kind of snow covered plains, where am I going to get a teapot?”

“Geez, don’t bite my head off. You should have brought better gear.”

“I’ve already lost all of my stuff!” Bel exploded. “All I have is my armor, Ventas’ necklace, and my earrings! Do you think I could have made it down here with a glass teapot?”

“Well, you could have turned back–”

“For a teapot!” she shrieked incredulously.

“Urm, Bel, what’s happening? What are you doing with my pants?”

Bel glanced up sheepishly, and saw a very confused, very embarrassed Orseis. She was busy trying to wrap her tentacles around her exposed midsection.

“Look, James, we can talk about teapots later. Orseis just woke up, so I’ve gotta go.”

“Woke up? I thought you were falling?”

“Yeah, she got knocked out. Anyway, talk to you later!” Bel lifted her head from her shoulder and rolled her neck. “Ugh, that made me too stiff.”

“Bel, what’s happening?” Orseis repeated insistently.

“Well, you got knocked out and I had to run away.”

“Seriously? Wait, why are we in this absurd situation?”

“Well, Nebamon – he’s one of those cultists – he cut out the bridge from underneath us.”

“What bridge?”

Bel rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll back up.”

Bel rushed through the story, repeating bits until Orseis seemed to get it. Worryingly, Orseis didn’t actually remember the point where she was knocked out. Her memories seemed to stop right around when they found the boulder.

“Are you okay, Orseis? I feel like I had to repeat things a lot, and your memory is a little short.”

“I dunno. I think I’m fine? My head is ringing like crazy though.”

“From getting thrown into the tree?”

“I can’t remember that part. Maybe? Or maybe being half-suffocated by these straps isn’t good for me.”

Bel looked up with concern. “Don’t loosen them. We’re still falling.”

Orseis weakly waved a tentacle. “Yeah, I know.”

Bel chewed on her lip with worry. “If I wasn’t hanging from your pants I’d check your head for bleeding, I think. I remember James saying that bleeding in the head is bad.”

“In the head? Can you see that?”

Bel winced. “Oh, maybe not. He’s got some diagnostic abilities that I didn’t bother with.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine. We’ve just gotta land.”

Bel glanced down. The structure of the fifth layer was becoming more clear as they slowly drew nearer to the bottom. Not that there was a lot to it: it was mostly a giant plane of uninterrupted white, with large jutting rocks sticking out of the snowy expanse. How can it be so cold down here when it was so warm up there?

Bel looked up at the ceiling and was surprised to see a few areas where the stone was actually glowing faintly with heat. We found a couple of hot springs up there… I guess that’s why they were hot. But why those spots?

Bel took advantage of their slow descent to study the floor above her and was able to discern a pattern. Wherever there’s a hot spot, there are a bunch of silver roots that converge. And those roots come from the Pillar.

“I think that the Pillar is pumping magma to the different layers and keeping them warm,” she told Orseis.

Orseis didn’t respond, so Bel looked at her companion only to see that Orseis had fallen unconscious again. Bel worried on her lower lip with her teeth, fretful that something was wrong with the young girl.

“Ori? Hey, are you okay? Ori?”

Orseis didn’t stir, and a gnawing dread formed in the pit of Bel’s stomach. She gets hit on the head a lot, but she usually recovers. Ah, James would have probably found her a helmet or something. He was always the thoughtful one.

Bel glanced anxiously towards the ground. There wasn’t much she could to do make them fall faster, so she tried to inspect the floor of the layer for anything useful. It was mostly just snow-covered plain, but there were large boulders – some possibly large enough to consider hills – that stuck out of the otherwise featureless expanse. A moment of inspection revealed that they’d fallen from the layer above from areas that had melted through, like the hole that she had just jumped through.

The Pillar that supported the world only shone upon the fifth layer with a dim light, barely brighter than the blue glow of Technis’ Barrier, but it was still enough to leave the Pillar-facing sides of the rocks snow-free. Those sides of the rocks supported some hardy plant life. Bel hoped that they also had some food – she would head to a large one once they landed.

The increasing bite of the cold against her skin was already making her miss the fourth layer, deadly tree rats and all.

“The closest rock is only a few thousand strides away, I think” she announced to her unresponsive friend, “so we’ll just have a quick walk.” Bel was having trouble gauging distances across the mostly featureless expanse with only one eye, but she thought she was about right.

“Despite what James said, I think that gravity must be going down, so I’m sure you’ll be easy to carry,” she announced with confidence.

Bel stuck out her legs, bracing for a landing, and prepared to catch Orseis so the limp girl wouldn’t slam into the ground. Her feet touched down – and then went straight through the loosely packed snow. Bel sank several body lengths before compressing a solid layer of snow beneath her body.

“Stupid, gods-cursed, crow eating shit of a layer!”

Bel would have kept cursing, but snow began to fill her open mouth and she ended up sputtering with impotent rage instead. Her snakes curled around her head, and she felt a strong sense of dismay from both her little magma snake, Sparky, and her plant-based companion. Yeah, I’ll get right on it, she thought, shivering from the cold that was invading her skin.

Bel kicked and struggled, but all she accomplished was a slow sinking. She was encased in a loose prison of snow, the faint light from above turning dim and blue blue in her tight quarters. After a bit more struggle she managed to clear a small area around her, which allowed Orseis to sink to her level. Bel quickly checked her friend for breath and a pulse, and, after finding both, she breathed a sigh of relief. She pulled the parachute down and wrapped it around Orseis, making her a cocoon that just had a small opening around her face. Hopefully that keeps her warm enough.

“So, what do you think?” she asked her snakes. “Should I try to compact some stairs and lift myself out? Or should I just tunnel forward and hope that I find some solid ground? I think I remember the direction of the nearest rock.”

Her snakes didn’t respond, so Bel thought things through in silence. My real problem will be continually falling through the snow. There’s got to be something solid in the layer, right? It can’t just be snow and ice all the way to the center of Olympos, right?

Bel decided to attempt to climb to the surface first. She would look around to get her bearings, and then she would burrow a tunnel towards the nearest rock. Hopefully it would have shelter, if not something edible.

Bel got to work, doing what amounted to repeated pull-ups to lift her body and compress the snow around her. Then she would sink and repeat the process, waving her arms like a bird desperately trying to fly. Bel was shivering from the cold when she started moving snow, but after an hour shoving and compacting the powdery flakes she was feeling warm, mostly. Unlike the rest of her, her fingers were about ready to fall off. Stars above, if the first humans had to live through this I can understand why they’d breed with some fluffy foxes. Freezing is the worst.

In a fit of desperation, Bel used thermal regulation to shift some heat from her magma snake into her stiff fingers. Sparky hissed, outraged at the theft.

Sorry Sparky, but I don’t feel like losing my fingers to frostbite.

Bel ignored the betrayed hissing as she poked her head over the surface. She shoved her hands under her armpits to conserve their fleeting warmth as she looked around.

“I w-w-wish I s-still had m-my c-c-clothes,” she chattered to herself. A quick look around the bleak landscape revealed that she’d been going in the wrong direction. On the positive side, she was much closer to the nearest rocky hill than she’d thought, only a hundred strides or so.

Bel glanced at the small ramp that she’d made and scowled. It’ll probably take me most of a day to get there, she thought bitterly.

Bel raised her arms, prepared to smash more snow into her lengthening path. Other than these rocks, there nothing – oh, there’s something. And it’s coming right for me.

She squinted, but it was difficult to make anything out against the sparkling snow. Bel reached for her weapon as she waited for whatever it was to draw near, but of course she was once again defenseless. Kjar, please grant me an ability that will stop me from losing all of my stuff, she prayed. Or grant me a weapon that comes back to my hands like that birdman’s spear.

The source of the movement finally drew near enough for her to identify its source. A strange, large-footed, long-necked fuzzy fox-worm thing writhed over the loose snow, its beady eyes locked onto her. Once again, her lack of depth perception and the absence of any object for reference played tricks with her mind, and she realized with alarm that the thing she’d at first thought to be smaller than a riding lizard soon turned out to be several times as large with five legs on either side of it’s long, worm-like body and a long, dart-shaped muzzled jutting out from below its beady little eyes.

Nope.

Bel held out her hand as it drew near. She waited for it to pounce before she blasted it with a shockwave. The suddenly headless creature slumped into the snow, staining the white surface red with its blood. Bel carefully tapped the nearest part of the corpse, pulling out its essence.

The flow of energy always made her feel slightly better, and she was in such a miserable state that the sensation almost brought her to tears. For just a moment she was tempted to huddle up against the cooling corpse to steal some of its fading warmth as well, but then she realized how gross that would be.

And it’s probably going to attract scavengers, right?

Instead, Bel struggled her way over to one of its front paws and used liquify to pull a claw out of the body and reshape the base into a gross approximation of a handle. Then she cut as much of its shaggy, white fur loose as would fit into Orseis bag, and then stuffed the parachute cocoon full as well. Orseis hadn’t so much as stirred since they’d landed, and Bel was worried that the cold would get to her if she didn’t start moving around.

“Maybe I can make a fire,” Bel muttered, examining the trees that dotted the rocky hill.

She glanced at the creature’s corpse. “Maybe I can make a fire and then cook some of this.”