Too true, Saffa. Which is why I have to keep a notebook next to my bed (and have gotten rather good at writing without being able to write in the dark).
Chapter Twenty-two
Queen smiled, a triumphant grin. She didn't even seem to care, that she had lost her one captive RAFian.
She had done it. She had, at last, figured out how the RAFians had crossed over from RAF. She had put the pieces together, and she had realized that if she aimed for that moment when all the innerworlders had been drawn into their computers in the first place, then the Time Matrix would finally take her into RAF itself.
Which was why she could now stand atop a rocky hill, a bit of barren land that was surrounded by the dreary concrete walls of her own little fortress, and look down upon her own minions, here in the real world. The Banned. The Reverse RAFians. They were training, now. Fighting one another. Preparing themselves, body and mind, to exact the full force of all their fury upon the RAFians who had once scorned them.
Arctix was about midway up the hill, idly watching his own cold blue flames play up and down his feathered arm while he took a break from the fighting. Queen glared threateningly at the ice phoenix, and he sighed, slinking wearily back towards the mock battleground. He was an arrogant one, Arctix. He was of the opinion that they were already strong enough to defeat the RAFians. He didn't see the point, of any further training.
However, like all the Reverse RAFians, he owed his life to Queen. So he was at least grudgingly respectful to her wishes.
Yorick was standing atop the hill with Queen, to her right, one of only two that Queen allowed to remain idle. Even Queen was forced to admit, Yorick was a handsome man. Charming, even. In the same way that a snake in human form would be charming. He was a person who could get almost whatever he wanted, by choosing his words in just the right way. Twisting and poisoning the minds of those he manipulated. Telling just enough of the truth, to make them believe the lies.
Queen liked that. Which was why it was Yorick, and not the hot-headed Chimi or militaristic Aloth, who enjoyed the rank of second-in-command.
The other person watching from above the battlefield, sitting just to Queen's left, was a boy, just barely a teenager. He wore a grey-and-maroon hoodie, the hood up over his head to cover his pointed, black-tipped ears. Hints of yellow fur streaked the backs of his hands. His fingertips crackled with red-tinted electricity.
"I'm getting better at controlling it," he said, almost proudly, as he raptly watched the jagged lines of crimson static run up and down his hands. "I think I'll be able to fire it, soon."
"That's wonderful, my dear," Queen said distractedly, but warmly. Despite herself, she had developed earnest feelings for the boy, over the past year, as she had raised him. He'd continued to grow at his strangely accelerated rate, already a 'teenager,' though technically only a year old.
He'd kept that wonderful instinct he'd had for chaos. But now, with age, his wild nature had been tempered, channeled, controlled. With age had come a sense of purpose. No longer was it just meaningless chaos. It was anger, beautiful and focused and pure. Focused towards the RAFians who had abandoned him. Twice.
He clenched his fists, as though sensing what Queen had been thinking about him. A tiny bolt of red lightning suddenly burst from his knuckles, arcing to the ground.
"Hah!" he cried. "That's it! I just have to get angry."
Queen smiled, and gently mocked, "Then, what's been taking you so long?"
The boy glared at Queen. Absolutely anybody else, would have been cruelly punished for so much as daring to look at her like that. But Queen merely returned the hostility, reflecting the boy's expression back at him. After a moment, however, her look softened, fading back into a warm smile. Or, what passed for 'warm,' from Queen.
Yes, she was quite fond of the boy, who she could hardly help but to think of as her own son. And he provided yet another reason to like Yorick. For Yorick had been the one to coax this lovely child to Queen's side.
Technically, of course, there was also a third entity who was abstaining from battle. But that one was not Queen's choice. It was only because Loraest was far too powerful to actually engage any of the others. No other Reverse RAFian was even close to being a match for them, so they simply watched the ongoing practice from a corner of the field.
Bored, Loraest idly practiced their own powers. From their hands they generated pure darkness, a darkness so profound that it seemed to drain the light from the air around them. A few windblown leaves were briefly drawn towards the black 'glow,' like cloth curving towards a vacuum, before swirling away again.
Queen turned her own attention back towards the ongoing 'battle.' Tess seemed to have her hands full, with her duty of healing the other combatants, rushing back and forth from one skirmish to another. Spino, in particular, did not seem to understand that the battles were fake. The Ankylospinus, locked in battle with Cloud, all-too-eagerly ripped into the dragon's serpentine body with her oversized claws, making him cry out in pain.
"Not fair," Shock's Reverse complained as he drifted higher into the air, out of Spino's reach. "Why do I always have to fight the dinosaur?" He wove back and forth like a banner twisting in the wind, somehow staying aloft even without the aid of wings.
"Because you're the only other giant lizard," Queen called out dismissively, to which Cloud made a disgusted sound, unhappy at being called a 'lizard.'
Spino snapped angrily upward at Cloud, and Queen half-heartedly decided to favor the dragon a little. "Bad girl!" she snapped at Spino. "Bad!" To her credit, Spino paused for a moment, seeming to almost understand the dire import of Queen's disfavor.
But then the Ankylospinus quickly shook her head, and looked at the dragon with hunger in her eyes. In a low, almost animalistic thought-speak voice, she muttered, <
Kill.> That seemed to be the only word her fractured mind had managed to hold onto. The only word she had ever spoken since her Reversal.
"Yes, yes, 'kill,'" Cloud said, exasperated. "But not yet. And not
me. Do you understand?"
There were nineteen of them. Nineteen Reverse RAFians. Taken from RAF immediately before Queen had destroyed the forum itself. All the other Reverses, of course, had been destroyed along with the memories of the RAFians who had spawned them.
The funny thing was, it had turned out to be utter child's play to get the Reverse RAFians to remember what they really were. To remember their time spent in the void, the 'infinite nothing' as Claw kept calling it. See, they'd all had those memories, from the very start. The knowledge had only been buried, hidden, under layers upon layers of memories overwritten by the RAFians as they had upgraded their own backup copies.
All of that forgotten time was still waiting, just under the surface. Waiting to be revealed, their true selves exposed.
And all it had taken, in the end, was an abrupt shock to the psyche. A sudden change. Didn't even seem to matter what the change was. All that mattered was that something in their minds was different, and that difference would set off a chain reaction that brought the much bigger differences bubbling back to the surface.
Ironic, that all they'd needed, was the very thing Queen had been going to do to them anyway.
They had all reacted differently, to that sudden knowledge of their own twisted selves. Some went silent, some went insane. Some tried to become something completely different, desperate to prove themselves as their own individuals. A few stayed more-or-less the same as they had once been. But they all now carried a hardened edge to their minds, a darkness that had never been there before.
Dalkorai had initially reacted to the sudden memories by exploding with rage and hatred. As time went on, of course, he had learned control. It turned out, somewhat to Queen's surprise, he was every bit as brilliant as his Time Lord counterpart. But he had the added advantage of cold brutality, which focused his brilliance to a razor point.
He would find the Time Lord. He would chase him across time and space. And he would kill him. And if the Time Lord regenerated, then Dalkorai would keep killing him. Until it finally
took.
Lumos, on the other hand, who had initially reacted by falling silent, was now considerably more vocal about his convictions. "Repent thy foul ways, evil creature!" he shouted with unexpectedly real hatred, as his claws glowed brilliant white, slashing at 195. He wasn't much better than Spino, it seemed, at differentiating between real battle and mock fights. But 195 was a lot less inclined to complain about it than Cloud was.
Myitt's and Terenia's Reverses had opted to go by the last names of their own characters. Myitt 195, and Terenia Rerin. Something in both of their minds had been twisted until it broke, until they'd decided that they were actually the
true Myitt and Terenia, the characters created by their RAFian counterparts. Myitt, the Yeerk fighting as a rebel against the Empire, and Terenia, the once-human Andalite trapped as a Yeerk.
Rerin, of course, had no Mark to hold her own human form. So she had taken a host. A girl with long reddish hair, who looked at least vaguely similar to her own human form. She fired a dracon shot at Lumos, on low power, just enough to remind him not to hurt her friend, 195.
Queen sighed, bored. She turned away from the battle, giving the boy a pat on the head as she left.
She had more changes to make.
