0937dragon

[0937dragon]

Inquisition, Indiana: Chapter 02

More Like a Breech Between

Eleanor approached the two men at the front of the group. Just a few feet away now, she looked them up and down and asked more confidently than she felt, “Guys care to tell me what you’re doing on my farm?”

They were dressed… well, bizarrely, if she were honest. One was dark-haired and slim with a twirled mustache, the other broad-chested and with blond hair shot through with grey, his face rough with stubble. That was all fine and well. But the mustachioed man was wearing some leather contraption, all adorned with buckles and fasteners and jewels, and the other was wearing what could only be described as armor. The armored man had a sword on his hip. The other carried some kind of staff.

Eleanor chewed on a nail and in the silence muttered, “Bit early for Ren Faire, innit?”

“Excuse me?” the blond man said quickly.

“We’re, ah,” the dark-haired man cut his compatriot off, noticing the terseness in his voice as much as Eleanor had. “We’re actually a bit lost, it seems.”

Eleanor glanced from the thing in the sky, to the two men she was confronting, to the soldiers behind them who were shifting anxiously in the noon heat.

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

The dark-haired man broke into a smile that could only be described as charming.

And also possibly slick.

“My name,” he said with a bit of a flourish, but the broad-chested man interrupted him in a whisper that Eleanor could hear, and wasn’t sure she shouldn’t.

“Is none of her business until we find out who we’re dealing with!” It was said through his teeth like he was anxious, like his anger might be directed mostly at himself, and like he might be just as scared as she was.

So she volunteered: “I’m Eleanor Redgrove. This is my land, and that,” she made a conscious effort to point with the gun over her shoulder to seem as intimidating as she could, which probably wasn’t very, “is my house. Your, I assume, soldiers?” she offered a question and a pause to allow them to correct her, but neither the two men or the soldiers spoke up to correct the leadership or the occupation, “look hot. I’ve got cold drinks in the fridge.” She didn’t add that she was willing to take the strangers into her home because standing so close to the buzzing green void in the sky made her far more nervous than the man with the sword at this point, and she couldn’t explain why, except for the fact that directly above her was a buzzing green void in the sky. And the dark-haired man didn’t seem so bad, even if she had no idea from where he’d come, or indeed any of them.

“Dorian Pavus,” said the man with the mustache, and he offered a bow and a little twirl of his wrist, the other hand palm out on his back. “And I certainly wouldn’t turn down a drink.”

“You never do,” muttered the blond man. “Cullen Rutherford. Commander Cullen Rutherford,” he repeated, with extra emphasis on the ‘commander.’ And he offered Eleanor his leather-gloved hand. She shook it firmly, looking him dead in the eye, and she thought she saw a smile flick across the corners of his mouth, but it was gone in a flash.

“Come on, then,” said Eleanor, taking the shotgun from her shoulder and holding it carefully vertical along her side, “let’s get moving. I’ll get you drinks, and then you can tell me what exactly the fuck,” and she pointed to the green void with a firm finger, “that is.”

There were about ten soldiers with the two men and they hardly fit around the dining room table - which was to say they didn’t, but with the soldiers in the dining room and Eleanor and the two men in the kitchen, the squeeze wasn’t terrible. A few of the soldiers, Eleanor could see, sat in the chairs provided, and the others seemed perfectly happy to stand and drink the beers she’d offered them. Swiffer hadn’t seemed thrilled about the influx of strangers into the house, but the slim man - Dorian - had seen the cat start to dart across the kitchen floor and deftly swept her up into his arms, petting her downy belly with a brown hand, and Swiffer was so overjoyed she went limp as she purred like an on-board motor.

“What is it with mages and cats?” the commander said softly, his hip propped against the lip of the kitchen sink, leather gloves tossed onto the table so that he could grip the beer bottle, its glass slick with condensation.

Eleanor sat at the kitchen table, her eyes scanning the commander’s gloves. Those were not crafted for show, she realized. Those were real gloves, real leather, a kind of leather she wasn’t even sure she could identify, rough and scaly, and those people in the dining room were real soldiers, though from what army - from what era? - she couldn’t say. Her brain lit up with impossible possibilities.

Without looking up, Eleanor asked, “Who are you people?”

The commander sighed. She turned her eyes to him, and she saw his face soften. His eyes were deep brown, sad, lines of worry creased well into the flesh of his forehead. The blond of his hair was like straw, and the grey that mottled it seemed fresh, new. She figured he couldn’t be more than a handful of years older than she was - thirties, early forties at the very most - but he looked tired, harried, worn. He looked like he wasn’t sure he wanted to do this anymore. He reached out with his empty hand and grabbed a chair from the table, pulled it out for himself, and sat, setting his beer down.

“Ah, Lady Redgrove, look,” he said earnestly, “there is very little chance that any of this is going to make sense to you.”

“Oh, don’t talk down to the poor girl, Commander,” said Dorian, still snuggling the kitten, who was still pleased about the snuggling, “there’s very little chance that any of this makes any sense to us, except that we have had the distinct advantage of knowing about it first.”

It sunk into Eleanor’s mind for first time that the men had accents. She would call them English, but she didn’t know very much about accents, and they weren’t identical accents, either.

“Let’s start small then,” Eleanor groaned. “What’s that thing in the sky?”

Dorian answered succinctly. “It’s a rift. A Breach.”

Eleanor flicked her eyes from Cullen to Dorian. “A breach in what?”

Finally looking up from the cat, Dorian answered, “Well, that’s a question. It’s a Breach in… well, it’s more like a Breach between.”

“Between?”

“Between.”

She stared him down, and he pressed his lips thin and put the kitten on the floor, who beseeched him to pick her up again by mewling sadly for a few moments before stalking off.

Dorian folded his arms. “Between…” he began slowly, then looked to Cullen, as though for approval, but the commander just shrugged, palms open to the air. “Between our world and yours.”

Eleanor cocked an eyebrow, expecting dissent from the more serious Rutherford, but none came. So she answered, “Huh.” She decided to let that one go for now. She wasn’t entirely sure how to object to it, at any rate. Standing up and shouting that that was bullshit didn’t seem like it would get her very far. And it wasn’t like she had a better answer. “Where did it come from?”

“Well, that one we made,” Dorian offered.

“...That one?”

“...Ah.”

“I thought as much,” Cullen said, exasperated. He put his elbows on the table and his palms on his forehead, fingers in his hair. Swiffer curled around the commander’s boots and meowed to see if this second new person would coddle her as well. Cullen peeked around his forearms to the floor, then lowered one hand to pat the creature on the head. “Hello, kit,” he said gently. Seeming satisfied, Swiffer bounded away.

Cullen refocused on Eleanor, folding his arms on the table. “Your people don’t know yet, then?”

Eleanor reached up to yank the hair elastic from her head. The tightness in her scalp was not being helped in any way by her sloppy bun, and she sent her nut-brown hair cascading down her back. Giving her scalp a quick scratch, then a rub, she said, “I don’t have any people. And I sure as hell don’t know anything about it. Haven’t heard anything online, either. Nothing on Reddit or Twitter or anything. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something about a - a, what did you call it, a breach?”

The commander’s eyes narrowed slightly in a way that indicated he had no idea what Eleanor was talking about apart from the fact that she was being honest about her lack of information. “Then you haven’t seen any darkspawn?”

“Pardon?” Eleanor thought for an instant that this was some elaborate hoax, some trick being played on her by - by whom? - but the idea was wiped away by the sheer dismay on Cullen’s face, by the pained way he held his hands out to his gloves, snatching them up and crumpling them in his fists. If this was a trick, these two were excellent actors, and that thing in the sky was an excellent effect. But if it were all real… She snatched up her bottle of beer and drained it, slamming it back down on the table. “I want some answers,” she demanded, then seeing the stunned looks on the two men’s faces, added softly, “please.”

Dorian glanced to Cullen and crossed his arms, saying, “Reminds you a bit of Trevelyan, doesn’t she?” Then he turned back to Eleanor and said, “I asked you about a map?”

[0937dragon]

Inquisition, Indiana: Chapter 01

Author's note: What you are about to read is my 2015 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, which is to say: it may or may not need lot of work. I have it on ff.net, but this posting is the result of it having looked over by my dear beta reader, so it should be the best that it can be. That being said, it was mostly written in a month, so any feedback is still appreciated (or pandering and overblown compliments, those are always welcome).

I do want to point out one major thing, before I get a thousand comments (or two, whatever): I started writing this in May/June before I stopped and decided to save it for NaNo. As such, it is not compatible with the Trespasser DLC. I already had something like 20k words before that content was released, so I decided instead of retconning such a huge piece of work, I would just let it stand as a piece of strictly non-canonical fic. I had read The Masked Empire at this point, so it's not entirely bonkers, but it has nothing to do with the content in Trespasser.

Also: this has been posted on AO3. If you want to read it there, that’s cool. I’m putting it here because I’m in the process of ditching my Patreon (I’m sure you all know why) and I want to keep all my writing in one place, so I’m slowly but surely putting all my original and fanfic in one place so a bitch can get paid. Links in the sidebar. Support is amazing. Support is love.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

Eleanor was painting her house when the sky opened up.

Actually, she was just about to take a break. She stood propped against her ladder, shielding her eyes from the late morning sun and wondering how hot the day was bound to get as she reached into her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She brought the rolled white paper to her lips and withdrew her lighter from where it was stored within the soft pack of smokes, bringing the flame to the end of the cigarette and inhaling deeply. There was enough dust in the air from the barren, fallow fields that if she wanted more particulates in her lungs, she could probably just breathe in, but that had never stopped her from lighting up. Good thing she hadn’t bothered to seed those fields, too - the earth seemed drier this year than ever before.  Slipping the pack back into her jeans pocket, Eleanor rubbed her eyes and worked her fingers into her loosening ponytail, pulling the elastic away from her scalp so that she could tie it up again, more tightly this time. She was just about halfway done with the house, she figured; she might be able to finish before evening if the sun didn’t get too unbearable. Tomorrow at the latest. It was a big, old farmhouse, but it was all right angles, and she’d done this before. Her hair secured more tightly on her head now, away from her eyes, Eleanor took the cigarette away from her lips and breathed out almost as hard as she’d breathed in.

And that was when it happened.

There was a sound like the crack of a whip, and not like that at all. Sometimes when the jets flew overhead from the airfield, if they hit mach speed at just the right instant, they made a sound like this, and for a brief second, that’s what Eleanor thought it had to be, until she felt the shock wave. The tiny jolt from a flyover would hardly shake the windowpanes. This sudden shock nearly knocked her off of her feet; it shook her into the ladder well enough, and she found her arms flying out to catch the paint bucket that had been resting on the third rung, steadying it before she lost the better part of five gallons of Loyal Blue. A bit sloshed over the side and onto the ladder, but she probably had more paint than that on the front of her white t-shirt, and anyway, her priorities were rapidly shifting as a thin, green light filtered over the sun, pale at first, then heavier, like the most threatening kind of storm clouds. Eleanor tried to look up to see what was happening, cigarette still clenched in her teeth, but the brightness of the day, the brightness of the green, and the sudden shade of the growing dark blurred her vision until all she could see above her head were roiling pea soup clouds.

It was a bit late in the season for tornadoes, and this far north she hardly saw more than one or two a year, if that, but Eleanor wasn’t about to take any chances. There wasn’t anything else it could reasonably be.

Reasonably.

She ran around to the front of the house and darted up the porch steps, slamming open the screen door and dashing into the kitchen. The door snapped back closed behind her. Digging through the drawers, Eleanor grabbed candles, matches, a flashlight and a packet of batteries, and the master keyr ing  - the one with the keys to the barn, the shed, and the storm cellar. She also grabbed her cell phone from the kitchen table. She chucked all of this in a cloth grocery sack that had been hanging up next to the fridge, and threw it onto the table. She flung her cigarette in the sink, and as quickly as she could, she went around the house, upstairs and down, closing and locking all the shutters and windows, hoping it didn’t fuck up her fresh paint too royally - as though a tornado wouldn’t. She found Swiffer, her tiny, grey kitten, blessedly still in the house and not roaming around the fields, huddled protectively under the foot of Eleanor’s bed as though the cat knew something was coming, and Eleanor unceremoniously threw the poor creature on top of all her storm equipment in the grocery sack. Then she picked the whole thing up, slung it over her shoulder, and made quickly for the front door. She heard Swiffer mewling pathetically as Eleanor slammed the front door shut. She was just about to jam her key in the deadbolt when it all stopped.

There hadn’t been any sound, except for the sound of wind. But now the silence was oppressive. Eleanor was frozen on her porch with one hand on the doorknob, one jabbing forth a key, afraid that if she stirred somehow she would bring it all back.

She held her breath.

She held her breath until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and then she exhaled quickly, sucking in fresh if dusty air, feeling her lungs expand. Swiffer cried softly from within the grocery bag, and the flashlight and batteries clacked together as the animal tried to find its footing in the soft sack. Finding her strength, Eleanor backed away from the door, gripping the keys in her fist as she stepped down off of the wide porch and onto the lawn. She walked cautiously around to the side of the house where her ladder was still propped, paint still upright, Swiffer still meowing in a frustrated way, now trying to poke her head up and over the side of the bag. Eleanor swatted the cat gently back down, whispering to it, “Just wait one second.” The kitten, perhaps sensing the urgency in her owner’s voice, quieted now, and settled down to a stillness.

Eleanor peered up at the sky, the fist that was clenching the keys brought up to her brow to shield out the sun that again seemed as bright and strong as it had when she’d climbed down from the ladder for a smoke. It seemed bright and strong, yes, but a bit… discolored. There was still a definite greenness to the sky; there were still fits of twisting clouds, but they all centered now around one point, away from the sun, a point that seemed to want to pull up and in on itself at the same time that it forced out all that green. She had no good words for it, maybe whirlpool, or black hole, but nothing like that was quite what she meant. It was like a second tiny green sun churning away in the sky, but not in space, no; it was in the sky she could fathom, some fixed point above her head, maybe a few hundred yards or even feet over her. She couldn’t judge it exactly, but she knew it was close.

And beneath that all-too-close point churning and burning above her, a short distance away on the perimeter of her land just where her lawn met her field, were people.

Eleanor backed up to the house, went back up the porch steps, unlocked the front door, and hurried inside. She gently set the grocery bag down next to the coat rack, letting Swiffer go free. Retrieving her cell phone as the cat bounded away from the sack and into the kitchen, Eleanor stood and went to the hall closet. From within, and beneath a forest of coats, Eleanor withdrew a shotgun. It was the only gun she owned, and she hated it, hated even the idea of it, but it had been her father’s before he had passed away, and so she left it where he had left it in the closet, next to a box of ammunition. It was never loaded anymore.  She didn’t load it even now, only held the barrel of the gun in her left hand as she stuffed a few shells in her pants pocket with her right, and closed the closet door behind her with her foot. Equipped now with a phone, a half a pack of cigarettes, and a gun, Eleanor went back once again to the ladder, and watched to see if the figures approached.

They were at enough of a distance that Eleanor had to strain her eyes to see if they made any movements at all - she’d left her glasses on the nightstand, damn it; she hadn’t wanted to get paint on the lenses, and besides, she almost never wore them when she wasn’t in front of a screen - but Eleanor thought that, in that impossible silence, broken only by an infrequent and distant buzzing which she figured must be coming from the green light above her, she could hear voices. And they seemed to be shouting.

The sound took her off guard, not because it scared her, but because the two forward-most figures seemed to be as frustrated as she was right now. It was almost comforting, somehow. It was almost funny. They clearly weren’t planning a stealth attack - though perhaps the light show was evidence enough of that - and now, from a half a hundred yards or so away, they seemed completely unable to get their shit together.

Maybe.

Behind the two leading figures was a row of what Eleanor could only assume were soldiers; she judged this solely based on how still and even these figures seemed to stand compared to the two closest to her, who were absolutely yelling, and possibly flailing.

This, if nothing else, gave Eleanor the courage to begin to walk forward, since she thought it might be a while before the figures decided to do the same. She walked slowly, non-threateningly, with the gun resting on her shoulder, barrel aimed well behind her and up toward the sky. Her right hand remained close to the cell phone in her back pocket, just to be safe, but she went on with confidence.

The figures caught sight of her, and their voices quieted.

Eleanor paused, and fear crept back in. With the sound dulled, the thing in the sky seemed even more present, even more threatening, and now she remembered, completely inexplicable. What the fuck was going on here?

Staying still, she called out, “Hello there?”

There was a beat, and then a voice called back, “Hello! I don’t suppose you’ve got a map, have you?”

[0937dragon]

The Second Law: Chapter 01

They were moving the bombs - the warheads, I’m sorry.  The problem with uranium 285 is that is not really stable.  But that’s also the point of U-285.  Unlike it’s more stable brother, 288, uranium 285 has a tendency to go ballistic.

Hah. Ballistic.

So they were moving the bombs - warheads - and they dropped one.  That’s all it was.  Somebody, some poor fuck, the first to go, to burn, to be vaporized, who the fuck knows what happens when you’re literally the center of a nuclear impact, dropped the goddamned bomb in possibly the worst situation for an idiom to become literal of all time.

Somebody dropped the bomb, and the world went to shit.

So U-285 set off all the other bombs - warheads - in Nevada.

Nevada’s kind of still there, but California isn’t there anymore.

California’s seismic relationship with the rest of the continental United States was tenuous at best.  We were all sitting on our hands, waiting for “The Big One,” and some dumb ass with a fork lift drops one one hundred kiloton bomb and California goes bye-bye.

I mean, it’s still kind of there, you know.  It was still there for a little while, at first, bits and pieces, but the cities were gone, the ones that didn’t burn, at least.  Northern California fared a little bit better.  There are still some folks in Washington, I hear, probably sitting around and drinking coffee and palling with Canadians.  Nothing against Canada, you understand.  They’re taking a rad bath and they didn’t launch any missiles.  I hear the maple syrup has quite a kick now.

But California hung around for a while, until the sea levels rose.  While the rest of us were freezing under the subsequent dust cloud, the troposphere was completely losing its shit and the UV radiation kind of melted most of the Arctic.  Possible the Antarctic.  It’s hard to keep track of just how badly things have gone to hell when you don’t have any electronics - not after the EMPs, of course - or people.

I don’t know how many people we lost.

Fuck. We. Like we’re some kind of world family or some shit, the survivors.  Well, let me clear that up right now.  We’re not.  They’re not.  It’s not so bad as every man for himself, I mean, we’re not bludgeoning each other with cinder blocks for setting foot on this or that man’s property.

Not mostly, anyway.

No, we’ve still got our regions and our cities and our whatever the fucks.  This is still the Midwest.  It’s just comparatively a little more west than it used to be, considering how much less west there is now.

Point is, there aren’t too many people left, so it’s hard to gather data or really understand what happened, I guess.  What we figure is this.  Warhead drops off forklift.  Warhead goes boom (they tell us that the warhead had to be faulty to just, you know, go off like that.  Apparently these things aren’t supposed to be that volatile unless they’re dropped from planes, which is kind of the point.  I say?  You play with fire, you’re gonna get burned).  Warhead the First makes Warhead the Second go off.

It ain’t called a chain reaction for nothing.

Can I just say what isn’t kosher?  Stockpiling like a million (seven hundred and twenty-three, if you must know) 100 KT bombs - warheads, they’re warheads, because they didn’t have any explosive devices, not these ones - under the same two mile stretch of Nevada desert.  And it’s just fucking stupid, pardon my French, to keep all those warheads on the same base where you launch the god damned bombs.  And this time I do mean bombs.

Yeah.  Yeah, let’s keep all this entirely unstable shit all in the same place.  What could possible go wrong.  It’s not like these things have the potential to start firestorms miles away from their point of impact or anything.  It’s not like the desert is dry or anything.

Oh, but we kept the really big bombs someplace else.  The thermonuclear ones.  The Mikes.

We kept those in New Mexico.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

It’s just, I remember what it was like to have a life.

For there to be life.

[0937dragon]

The Second Law: Introduction

There wasn’t even a war.

Not at first.

I remember when it happened. Hell, it was only eighteen months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. In some ways, I guess, it was a lifetime, considering what died that day. Who died that day.

They said it was an accident, but can you really call keeping a stockpile of over ten thousand megatons of nuclear weapons an accident at all? Can you call bad practices and poor security and a diminished sense of danger an accident? I guess you can if you’re a bureaucracy, and that’s what we were then, in 2023. That’s all we really were. A system of checks that no one balanced. And now here we are, in this wasteland.

Here I am.

[0937dragon]

So What the Hell is Going on Here?

About The Second Law: There wasn’t even a war. Not at first. I remember when it happened. Hell, it was only eighteen months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. In some ways, I guess, it was a lifetime, considering what died that day. Who died that day. They said it was an accident, but can you really call keeping a stockpile of over ten thousand megatons of nuclear weapons an accident at all? Can you call bad practices and poor security and a diminished sense of danger an accident? I guess you can if you’re a bureaucracy, and that’s what we were then, in 2023. That’s all we really were. A system of checks that no one balanced. And now here we are, in this wasteland. Here I am. The Second Law is a story about Opal, a woman who lives through the worst imaginable future: nuclear war. But she survives, and finds a town of survivors, and with her Cessna she delivers mail and news to the parts of the United States that are still inhabited, still inhabitable. But when she heads to Minnesota, the furthest north she's ever flown, she finds out that the man she has been living with might have a past darker than the soot-filled clouds that still block out the sun. About Paperclippe: Paperclippe writes too much. She writes when she really should be doing work, honestly. She writes when her significant other wishes she were paying more attention to him after dinner when Top Gear is on. She's been this way since she realized she could string a sentence together, and has been stealing pens from restaurants to write those sentences for just about as long (she is sorry to all the servers whose pens she has nicked. She hopes she left you a good tip. You folks just have really good pens). The Second Law was originally Paperclippe's 2013 NaNoWriMo project. She wrote it - or at least the first fifty thousand (and eleven) words of it - in twenty-three days, and then promptly forgot about it. She found it on her ten-year-old MacBook whose WiFi card had gone bad in August of 2017 (that's now) while she was looking for something else entirely, and she realized it was actually pretty good. She sent it to a friend who agreed, and so Paperclippe got pretty hyped, and decided maybe she should do something with it besides let it sit on a plastic white MacBook with a bad WiFi card. So she's doing this. She, admittedly, still has to finish writing it. She, admittedly, is abandoning another project to work on this one. She does that a lot. She’ll post a lot more besides that main project here. She’s working on moving it all over from Patreon (though it’s still hosted there, for now, despite their shitty fees), so there’s a lot of random stuff coming you way. She hopes you like: fanfic, eldritch horror, humor, queer stories, essays, psychological thrillers, dystopia, and a whole lot more. She hopes you like The Second Law. Paperclippe is from Pittsburgh and is actually called Melissa Beall if you must know. She plays a lot of Dragon Age. She likes cats. A lot.