Ch 22

It was a long time before the police were able to get to the mountain and investigate the bodies. Ben had half expected, for some strange reason, the bodies to have vanished by the time the police got there. The police were mostly professional about it, but being from the town of hope, they were less cops and more men dressed and trained to act like cops only in the presence of legitimate law enforcement. The bodies were still there, but the one in the mud had moved, sucked into the ground by some unknown force, and only his hand stuck out from the ground, flesh mostly eaten off of it. Nothing seemed to have touched Vaughan's friend.

“Oh, Christ on a pogo stick,” one of them said “Get the camera, I've gotta show this to my kid.” The other officer came with the camera, and the first officer got low and smiled with a thumbs up next to the exposed hand. For a moment, a thought flashed across the officer's mind, and he molded the hand to also be giving a thumbs up, and then it flipping the bird, getting both pictures. By the end of it, the officers were laughing up a storm.

“Shouldn't you be collecting evidence?” Louden asked, seeming to be genuinely offended. One of the officers glanced over at her, and then at Ben. They had restricted their guides to those two and sent the other three home. Ben suspected Louden was here solely because she was attractive and in tight clothes.

“Sure,” the officer said, tapping his skull “Got it all up here. Three kids at a party go wandering up a desert mountain, high and or drunk, bury their friend, forget about him and die of exposure. There, solved it!” The other officer gave him a resounding hi-five, and they both started laughing and leaving the scene.

“Don't you care at all what really happened?” Ben asked, voice growing frustrated.

“You already told us everything, right?” The first officer said.

“Unless you lied,” the second said, suddenly very serious.

“You better come clean right now if you did,” the first one said.

“You son of a bitch,” the second one said, raising his voice “Tell me the goddamn truth, did you leave anything out?”

Ben coughed, wilting under the sudden intense pressure.

“N-no, that's how it went down. I just thought it was weird, why would they bury him?”

The officers looked at one another, then burst out laughing, exchanging a fist bump.

“Classic Bad cop, bad cop,” the first one said, then slapped Ben on the back. “Don't worry so much. Why did they do it? Fuck, why do people chop off their own balls and cook 'em up on a skillet? Who knows. People are just nuts sometimes, and all we can do is report it to the families and make it sound like they died without a lot of pain.”

“Lie, basically” the second cop said.

“We'll have someone come by and pick up the bodies, identify them, and get them back to the families. Truth be told, we thought you kids were trying to take us for a ride. Come on, lets get out of here; it's a long trip, and mama's making chili tonight.”

–

A little while after the cops, Louden and Ben left the mountain, a storm rolled through the area. That is an inaccurate way to describe it though, rather than a storm rolling through, it was a storm rolling from the mountain. Thick, black, thunder-clouds spread like an expanding circle from the area, bringing rain and lightning that turned the ground to mud. The storm grew in intensity, a great wind, a vortex around the mountain, and at it's crescendo, a massive pillar of lightning, like seven woven bolts of electricity, struck the ground of the destroyed Oasis Dungeon.

The site of the impact smoldered, smoke rising from the crater. In the center, Casimer and the Viridian Dungeon Core sat, motionless. The ground began to shimmer as though in a heat wave, then an arm of dirt lifted Casimer, and another grabbed the second core, pulling it into the ground. Casimer began to lift rocks, first in the campsite, then in the surrounding slopes, and finally some distance down the mountain where the bounds of his influence ended.

“This is incredible,” He said, vibrating the air to form audible sound. “I'm so. . . big! I never knew the world was so large.”

“It's much larger than this, My Lord,” Melchsee said, a spark of light that came from Casimer's gem and reformed into a glowing woman with an opal in her forehead. “Much, much larger.”

Casimer seemed almost asleep, his awareness spreading and penetrating every particle inside of his influence, his mind effortlessly keeping track of it all as the rain-water flowed through and out of his domain.

“What's incredible,” Melchsee said, eyes going wide “Is what you are doing right now. Back when I-” she seemed unsure. “Human beings,” she said, changing direction “are the dominate species on this planet. A lifetime ago, or about sixty years,”

“What's a year,” he asked.

She paused, realizing Casimer had no concept of time “Oh, here, I'll just explain it.”

From her forehead, a projection of the solar system appeared. Casimer's focus sharpened on the area visibly, like the resolution was turned up in that particular spot.

“So, you've got the sun,” she said, highlighting the bright orb “Then a few other planets in-between earth,”

“What's a planet,” Casimer asked, voice patient.

“We are on a planet. This one is called Earth.” The earth lit up.

“There are more, out there. Other planets,” he said, a tentacle of dirt indicating Mars, then the gas giants. “And this,” he said, indicating the asteroid belt beyond Mars's orbit “Are these planets as well?”

“No,” Melchsee said, suppressing a smile “That is the asteroid belt. My previous employer swore up and down it was an exploded planet, but that's not a relevant issue.” She collected herself, then continued “The planets rotate around the sun in a predictable, orderly fashion,” the planets were set in motion, orbiting smoothly “Each rotation of our planet is what we call, a year.”

“That explains it,” Casimer said, a small note of amusement in his voice “I had wondered why the world alternated between light and dark. What is the name of this dungeon, the one who set it all in motion? I'm quite the fan of their work.”

“Nobody knows that. So, sixty years would be-”

Casimer beat her to the punch, creating his own model of the solar system with balls of dirt and rocks, setting them into rapid orbit, till the third rock from the sun had completed sixty rotations.

“That seems like a long time,” he mused

“Most humans die in that amount of time,” she said “But new humans are born to take their place. A long time ago, I was created by a human being, born in their mind. At the time, I thought it was as powerful of a mind as could exist, and among humans, I was correct. But you. . . I wonder how much of my help you'll need once you've got all this figured out. I may have to find something else to do with my time.”

“You might be right,” Casimer said, attention still clearly on his model of the solar system, which was steadily gaining resolution, each ball of dirt or rock being coated with a different type of metal for each planet. The metal flowed over the rocks and seeped from the balls of dirt, forming mirror smooth shells, silver metal shimmering with heat, never cooling.

“Do you really think I would forget you offered to serve me at the point of a sword? That you commanded me to make you my servant, demanded that I become greater than I was? Now that the tables have turned, I find that interesting.” There was a flex in the space around Casimer and his model solar-system, and fine details began to impress themselves into the planets, giving them geographic texture, though not the geography of the planets they represented. If one were to examine them with a microscope, they would see each planet was an endless desert, covered in mountain and the occasional oasis.

They spun for a while, moving at the rate of a day a second, movements totally smooth and silent, with occasional hiccups in orbit as Casimer's concentration lapsed and then corrected itself. Thunder boomed and the winds whipped and howled with abandon for miles and miles. Giant mice huddled together for warmth in whatever shelter they could find, mutated toads crawled about, aggressive and aimless.

All the while, the reach of mana, like water flowing into a dry sponge, spread ever farther.