All in all, it hadn't been that bad of a weekend, Frank Calhoun thought to himself as he stepped back into his Darkside apartment. Hanging up his battered surplus parka and stetson by the door, Frank then crouched low to untie the double knots of his hiking boots and removed them. Normally he'd be sporting fresh bruises and scars that his augmented body would be in the process of healing, as his job really didn't have 'weekends off.' Walking to the threadbare couch in his cramped living room, Frank reflected on that fact.
The good-ole-boy turned anima imbued occult dynamos job, of course, was monster-slaying. A warrior of the Templars, Frank was known in official records as a 'direct action specialist,' but when it came down to it he was in the business of ending the existence of dangerous, unnatural things—or corrupted humans in the service of such things. Strigoi, draug, oni—these things didn't much care what day of the week it was. They wouldn't refrain from their nature just because it was Saturday. And their nature was to kill, to main, to terrorize.
Sitting down and propping his feet up on the chipped wooden table that he often used to perform firearm maintenance, Frank smirked.
Well, a cultist might care what day of the week it was; some days had greater significance than others in Ye Olde Cultist calendar. It might be because of the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebb and flow of the etheric tides. Sometimes it was just because of some bit of trivia from the history of the cult. 'The Elder Deathseeker used to chuck a virgin child into the Outer Dark every Tuesday, so, we do the same. It's tradition!'
The cultists generally still didn't take the weekend off from being murderous fuck-heads.
And so, Frank didn't have the luxury of 'weekends' very often. This weekend, however, he had.
Frank glanced at the older CRT television propped up on milk crates, considering turning it on. Chuckling dryly to himself, he resisted the urge. He'd just watch the news, and the news would just piss him off. Either he'd be angry at the petty, stupid things humans still fought over when their doom stalked them from the shadows, or at the outright bullshit lies peddled by media organs manipulated and controlled by the societies. Like that from QBL lately and it's attempts to frame certain members of the Templars, Illuminati and Dragon.
He was in too good a mood to subject himself to that tonight.
When the Pathfinders mission in Kaidan had ended, Frank had signed up for a contract with Omega Group International, a Templar special projects cabal. Headed up by old friends Felicity Bane and Alexis Cassidy, Frank had been happy to work closely with the OGI crew. This week, though, that contract had ended. With Templar assets being pulled from Kaidan, and no immediate need to retask him, the Hall had given Frank some rest and refit time.
Scratching at the stubble on his face, Frank grinned. He'd used that time to catch up with people he'd not had the opportunity to see in weeks, if not months. There had been trips all over Ealdwic, an honest to God dinner date, and some good old fashioned drinking. No briefings, no range time, no Oh-Dark-Stupid calls to send him to forsaken places where reality was fraying and everything there more or less wanted to eat his face.
It was late. Could probably just go to bed...
Frank belched, and chuckled aloud. He'd had a few more beers than normal tonight—nothing his quickened physiology couldn't handle, but enough that simply going to sleep here on the couch was sounding pretty good. Swinging his legs off the table and onto the couch, Frank started to shift his body, trying to get comfortable. As he did, he heard from that warm little spot in the back of his mind. Echo, the psychic shade and remnant of his sister.
So, was that a date earlier today? With that Templar girl?
Frank grinned in a lopsided fashion. The 'Templar girl' in question was a friend from another part of the Order. Younger than he was, rambunctious and energetic she generally gave him all he could handle in their social interactions. It was not, in his opinion, a true 'date.' They'd split the check, after all.
I think you should ask her out to something again. You need to date more. Geesh. Living like a hermit here with your almost empty apartment and your Field and Stream magazines!
“If I need dating advice from a ghost, I'll b'sure t' ask for it,” he murmured with a smile, closing his eyes. The ceiling light in his living room was still on, so he put an arm over his eyes.
Not a ghost, grumbled Echo.
“I know,” Frank replied, his voice just a whisper now as consciousness started to become elusive. “An' yeah, I probably oughta date more. S'just hard. This life.”
Donnie and Amita worked out okay, and they have the same kinda life.
Letting loose a cavernous yawn, Frank nodded slightly, feeling the cushions of the couch rub against his neck as he performed the motion.
“I reckon they're kinda th' exception t' th' rule. Prob'ly a lot of rules.”
Still should date more. Goodnight, Frank.
But Frank was already asleep.
Splat.
Splat.
Splat.
Frank awoke, face twitching. What the hell? Why was he awake? And why was it so dark, had the power in the apartment stack gone out again? That happened here in Darkside. Especially when the trains went by.
Splat.
“Fuck,” he hissed. There was a leak, too. Water dripping from the ceiling was hitting him in the face. Great. And the weekend had gone so well. Groaning, Frank tried to get up off the couch, and belatedly realized he was no longer on the couch. Just as well he lived alone. It'd be embarrassing for someone else to see that he apparently was having more trouble with his liquor than he usually did. Christ, he felt sore.
Throat felt sore, too. Voice was raspy. Maybe he shouldn't have accepted Luella's challenge to drink whatever she chose. Feeling around in the blackness, Frank finally found a table leg, and starting his way up the length of it. As he did, a rough blanket fell off of him. Huh. Must have gotten a blanket in the night and fallen back asleep.
The table leg was a lot taller than he remembered. Almost like a workbench, and not like his coffee table at all. Man, but whatever she'd given him was doing a number on him the morning after. Lucky for him he had the rest of Sunday to recover.
Brow furrowing, Frank's adjusting eyes noted there was dull light coming in from under his front door. A front door that seemed closer than it usually was. How far from the couch had he rolled? Yes, very good he lived alone. Oh well. It had still been a fun Saturday, even if his Sunday was starting like a shit sandwich.
Well, walk out to the hallway, see if everyone else had lost power. Go see the apartment super, mention the leak. Reggie wasn't necessarily what the rest of Ealdwic would consider an upstanding member of society, but the man did his best to keep this little part of Darkside mostly intact and running. He'd do what he could, as quickly as he could.
Frank's hand closed over the doorknob.
Except it wasn't his apartment door. It was too rough. Wooden plank. More like the door to a shack back in the hollers. There wasn't even a doorknob, there was a slat you pulled to the side to open it. In the dim light coming in from under the door, Frank gave the slat a second look, running his fingers along it. No, it was there all right.
This wasn't his apartment.
Taking a deep breath, Frank tilted his head back. Not too long ago he'd have started completely losing his shit. The weird dream stuff, well...he was learning to adjust to it. He felt like he was a year or three behind everyone else in Ealdwic, but he was getting there. Getting used to bibbledy fuck weirdness.
“Echo, this yer doin'? Wake up ghost girl, tell me what's goin' on.”
Again, his voice was raspy, harsh, and Frank coughed uncomfortably. It was as if he hadn't used his voice in a long, long time.
There was no answer from Echo. Concentrating, there wasn't even that little warm spot of love and protectiveness in the back of his mind. Maybe...maybe that's how this particular dream was going to operate. Stranger things had happened to him of late.
Frowning, Frank slowly moved the slat and let the door swing outward.
Rolling wooded hills, some fairly steep. Aspen trees, white ash. If he didn't know any better, he'd have guessed he was somewhere in the foothills of the Appalachians. Didn't look like Kentucky, though, or Ohio. Not quite. Not quite right to his eyes. Where had his dream taken him? Glancing back, Frank saw that the structure behind him was indeed just a shack. A shack located in what really looked like the Appalachians.
Not quite right fit the sky as he looked up as well. The sky was overcast, but not in a way that felt natural. The grays and whites were just off. Almost more like smoke. A chill wind picked up, and Frank shivered. Looking down at himself, he realized his clothes were completely different than when he'd gone to bed. Dark, rough pants appropriate for the fall or winter, not the summer. A heavy long sleeved shirt. Frank ran a hand across his face and realized he had developed a bushy beard. The thought made him chuckle roughly. Seemed his personal hygiene had slipped even further in this dream.
As he pulled his hand away, he spotted a scar on his left hand. Pale, ugly. It hadn't been there before.
Given his augmented body's ability to heal itself, it shouldn't have been there at all.
Standing in the half light, wind swirling around the shack's rocky location, Frank willed his anima to life.
Nothing happened. Curiosity at what kind of dream this was started to turn to unease.
Gazing out over the hills, Frank noted that snow was starting to fall. Holding out the scarred hand, he caught a snowflake. He blinked, looked again.
It wasn't a snowflake. It wasn't snow.
It was ash.
For several long minutes, Frank stared out over the valley this shack overlooked.
“Where am I?” he breathed out quietly.
He'd stood there for perhaps a good fifteen minutes, just looking out at the hills and trees and the slowly falling ash. Frank had never been that good of a student, but he knew ash falling from the sky indicated something big had burned.
Maybe a lot of somethings.
Was that part of whatever this dream was, too? Frank still held to the idea it was a dream of some kind. He'd had stranger. None of this being real would explain the surreal environment around him. His sudden inability to channel anima. Inexplicable scars and the nagging sensation he'd aged somehow. Shaking his head curtly, Frank turned back to the ramshackle dwelling behind him. Maybe there were clues inside.
Before Frank shut the door to block out the increasingly cold temperatures, he took stock of the interior of the shack by the midday light. He thought it was midday, anyhow. It was hard to be sure.
The shack had quite a lot inside for such a small place. There were stacks of canned goods: beans of several kinds, vegetables, some fruit. Some cans of tuna. There were also containers of peanut butter, of water. There was dried meat. There were some weathered looking first aid kits, a Coleman lantern with some fuel canisters near by on the work bench. The rough blanket on the floor and a sleeping bag, rolled up, he'd apparently used as a pillow.
A small camp stove sat in a corner, cold and inert. A map was tacked to one of the windowless walls, and in a separate corner was a rifle. Nodding to himself, Frank shuffled the few feet over to it, picking it up.
It was the rifle Solomon Lancaster had runed and enchanted for him. A Marlin 1895 chambered in .45-70, the lever action weapon was a nod to a bygone era. A 'cowboy' rifle, perhaps less famous than Winchesters and Henrys, but no less potent. Certainly more so now with Lancaster's work. A box of cartridges and a bandolier for the same were near by.
Frank ran a hand across the finely wrought scrollwork and sigils along the barrel. Normally the hairs on the back of his hand would stand up as his anima imbued body came close to the magically reactive rifle.
Now it just felt like a mundane rifle, albeit one that had been painstakingly embellished. Setting the weapon down again, Frank turned to regard the map, resting his hands on his hips. It was a map of the United States, and even before he got close he could tell there were annotations and notes all over it. A box of cheap pens, like the ones a person could purchase at a gas station or a Wal-Mart sat on the floor below the map.
The entire eastern half of the United States was covered in marks. Many cities had circles around them, with a small symbol or a few words next to the circle.
Philadelphia had a circle and a small symbol that looked like a period or dot with squiggly lines coming off of it. So did Pittsburgh. And Boston.
Raleigh had a circle and a pentagram. The same with Baltimore. Durham a circle with 'Tophat Militia.'
Washington D.C., New York City, Norfolk, and several others simply had a circle with an X through it and no further notation. Frank shivered, and not from the cold breeze blowing into the shack. Apparently whatever had happened in those places needed no other explanation.
Where there was writing, Frank recognized it as definitely in his hand. Slowly withdrawing from the map, Frank lit the lantern, closed the door, and sat down on the rolled up sleeping bag.
Was this a dream of what might be? Sometimes the Buzzing talked about how 'everything has happened, everything is happening, everything is about to happen' or some other crazy bullshit. Was this an example of what they meant?
Frank scratched at his full beard, narrowing his eyes in annoyance. For a dream, this beard was itchy. As he looked around the shack again, the boards rattling lightly in the wind his stomach began to grumble. Blinking, Frank looked down at his chest. Apparently his dream self was hungry.
Well, shit.
Sighing, Frank got back up and grabbed up a can of baked beans, then started rummaging around for a can opener.
It took a few tries, but Frank eventually got the camp stove going, and soon had a hot meal of beans for his troubles. As he ate, Frank went over his strange situation in his head. He assumed that this was a dream. A dream in which it seemed he had somehow journeyed from Ealdwic to somewhere in the Appalachian mountains. He'd aged, and suffered injuries at some point in the in between. The shack was set up like the bolt hole of some survivalist, and given what the ominous scratching on the map indicated, that was due to some sort of national disaster across the United States. He still wasn't sure where he was.
When he thought to check his phone to utilize its GPS feature, he found he no longer had his Hall issued phone. He did have his wallet, however—though when he opened it the few British bank notes inside looked as if they hadn't been out of that wallet in some time.
All in all, a pretty crappy dream. Echo still wasn't answering. If this was the work of the Buzzing, and it was an attempt to frighten him about a possible future, then hey. Mission accomplished.
Or...
Or it wasn't a dream at all.
Frank had finished his meal and set the can and spoon on the work bench. He'd deal with them...well, when? If it was a dream, he was going to wake up and the hell with it all. If this was real, then...he'd deal with it later. Just...later.
Troubled, Frank wrapped himself up in the blanket again, shut off the Coleman, and tried to get back to sleep on the floor of the shack.
