Dela

Walking beside the two trainee Wardens, Dela kept scanning the abandoned and damaged buildings. Fear was helping her stay alert despite how tired she was. Getting a few minutes of rest had also helped, hopefully it would be enough to let them get somewhere they could sleep in safety for a few hours. Alexander was gently snoring in the back of her head, and she didn't want to wake him up unless she had absolutely no other choice. He had taken a big hit in the fight, and she felt how badly his back hurt.

At least he was safely tucked away with a chance to recover.

“I've gotta ask, what is up with you and your powers?” Dwayne asked.

“They're pretty easy to explain,” she said, happy to have something to distract from her exhaustion. “I've got superhuman agility and can jump and climb really, really well. And Alexander is super strong and durable.”

“No,” the boy said. “I mean how can you switch bodies like that and why do you act like you're two different people?”

“Because we're two different people. It's kind of annoying when one of us wants to do something but the other one has the body, but I've only been able to really come out in the last year, so I'm used to it.”

“Multiple personality disorder,” Flamer said.

“I am not a delusion!” Dela shouted, exhaustion causing her anger to flare up. She'd spent years being thought of as a delusion when she'd first shown up, she wasn't about to put up with it now that she could appear in her own body. Without thinking she said, “I'm a biological artificial intelligence.”

The two teens stopped dead in their tracks, their surroundings forgotten as they focused on her. She didn't like the looks in their eyes. Dwayne stepped back, looking ready to run, and Flamer's good eye narrowed, flame flickering in her hand.

“What?” Dela asked, backing up, getting ready to jump if they attacked her.

“You're Project Gemini,” Flamer said.

“Yes,” she whispered, suddenly self-conscious at hearing her formal designation.

“GOD DAMMIT!” the girl shouted. “I should have realized anyone we met here was going to be a criminal.”

“I am not a criminal! I didn't ask to be created, and I am not to blame for what my father did to Alexander.”

Flamer started walking away, not taking her eyes off of Dela. “Come on Dwayne, lets get out of here.”

Dwayne looked nervously at her, then turned to Flamer. Slowly he started walking away.

Panic rose in her chest. She and Alexander needed help if they were going to survive in The Oubliette. She was too tired to protect Alexander and he was too hurt, and neither of them really knew how to fight. She had to do something.

“Is this how you thank us for saving you?” she demanded. “We could have stayed quiet and let you get raped and beaten. Grenadier would have loved to have Alexander and I acting as a scout and guard, but we threw it all away to help you. And now you're going to just abandon us because of my father?”

“You're not even human,” Flamer said, watching her as if she was a dangerous beast. “They use you as an example of the dangers of unreal science in our training class.”

Tears welled up in Dela's eyes as the pair turned and walked away. She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood, fighting the urge to run away. Andrea had been trying to teach her to face her problems, if there was ever a time to listen to her therapist it was now.

“I'm a legal citizen of the US, and my body is all real. Just because I wasn't born in the normal way doesn't make me a monster or a criminal. And what about Alexander? Are you just going to leave him behind after he got shot protecting you? He's bulletproof, but getting shot still hurt him.”

The pair stopped and looked at each other. She couldn't see their faces, but a small glimmer of hope formed. She saw Flamer nod once and Dwayne turned to face her. “Come on,” he said.

Forcing herself to give them a little smile, Dela walked over to them. Now would be the time to say something nice, she thought about what her therapist would want her to say. “Thank you. I know this seems weird, but I'll do my best to help out and make sure you can trust me.”

“Whatever,” Flamer said. “You take point.”

“Uh... Point what?”

The girl massaged her forehead, wincing as she pressed on a bruise. “Walk in front, keep an eye out for danger, we'll watch your back.”

“OK!” she said. She really wasn't excited about taking point, but if it meant she got to stay with them, she'd act like it was the best thing in the world.

**

“This is what the edge of The Oubliette looks like?” Dela asked, staring at a misty greyish cloud, that quickly turned an impenetrable gun metal grey.

“That's it,” Dwayne said, “the edge of reality.”

Slowly and cautiously, she put her hand into the cloud. At first it felt like a cold mist, then her limb was enveloped in the thick fog and it was like she was pushing into rubbery jello. “So to get to another part of The Oubliette, do we just walk through?” she asked, shuddering at the thought of walking into the icky feeling space.

Flamer sneered at her. “No. We'd just get stuck and have to work our way back out. We need to find a crack. Come on,” she said, walking along the cut off street while watching the fog.

“And what does a crack look like?” she asked, pointedly not looking at the girl. She forced herself to start walking again despite her aching legs and feet. .

“It's a blurry spot. Like looking through old, dirty glass, sometimes its moving, sometimes it isn't,” Dwayne said.

She smiled at him. “Thank you. Grenadier will know where these cracks are, right? So he'll probably have guards around them.”

“Nah. The smaller ones appear and disappear at random, only the big ones are permanent.”

“What if we're moving through a crack when it disappears? I don't want to be cut in half.”

Flamer snorted. Dela bit her tongue to keep from snapping at the trainee hero, like she so desperately wanted to. She silently told herself that she and Alexander needed their help, for now, if they wanted to survive.

Dwayne gave her a sympathetic look. “Don't worry, they don't close if anything is inside of them. The science is strange, but if you're in the middle of one, your reality is making it stable. It can't collapse until you're out. When we go through, we'll want to be holding hands so there is no chance of it cutting us off.”

“OK, that makes sense.”

“Uh,” Dwayne started to speak, stopped, then said, “You said you have to sleep soon. How much longer can you go before you, switch?”

Yawning, Dela gave him a little glare, before turning it into a smile. “I wish you hadn't reminded me. I feel like I haven't slept in days. Alexander is still hurting, so I'll keep going as long as I can, but I'm going to need to at least sit down soon.”

“How do you know Alexander is hurting? Can you... feel him?”

She nodded. “Kind of. We can always feel each other, but I'm not feeling the pain. It's like I can tell he is really sore, with a sharp pain on his left side and a dull, throbbing ache all over the rest of his back, but it's over there. So I only know if I focus on it.”

Dwayne gave her an odd look, tilting his head back and forth. “That's weird.”

Shrugging, Dela said, “We've been told that, a lot. But it's what I've always lived with and Alexander can't really remember a time without me. So not having someone with you, seems really weird to us.”

“What about your thoughts? Can you read each others minds?”

“Nope. We can talk to each other without speaking out loud, and if we concentrate really hard we can kind of let each other know what we want to do, but our thoughts are our own. When I told them Alexander wasn't talking to me, I meant it. He didn't want the twins knowing what we were thinking, so he just shut up as soon as they appeared.”

He nodded in understanding. “So what about when you attacked Grenadier, did he tell you what to do?”

“Alexander didn't tell me anything except to jump, once he got me looking at Grenadier. So I did.”

“You just trusted him, with no idea what he was going to do?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking at him like he was crazy. “I didn't know what he was going to do, but I knew he wouldn't want to hurt me or him. So he had to have a plan and I didn't want to be there, so I trusted him. We don't always get along, but I know he's not suicidal or anything.”

“So you guys don't argue very much?”

Looking at her feet, Dela let herself frown as she remembered what they'd been doing before they ended up in The Oubliette. “We didn't use to argue much. When we were kids, we got along great. I was the friendly voice in his head and he always wanted to show off for me. Then as we became teenagers, and I started being able to use his body, and then I got my own body, we started arguing more and more. It doesn't help that I'm a girl and he's a boy.”

“What does- Oh,” he said, his eyes going wide. “Yeah, I see how that could be a problem.”

“If you two are done chatting, we've got a crack,” Flamer said.

Up ahead, lying flat on the road was a gently swirling blur. She could see the pavement underneath, but it was rippling in an odd way, almost like it was CGI. “So this will get us out of here?”

“Out of this part of The Oubliette. There's no way to get out of The Oubliette from inside,” Flamer said.

“Do you know where we'll end up?”

“Nope.”

Dwayne sighed, shaking his head. “These are random tears. The Oubliette isn't a natural construct and it's not in a 3D shape. Picture a lot of rooms of all different sizes crammed together into one big, constantly moving ball. As it moves, the walls crack and reform. One minute a crack will open up to Room 10, then it will close as the whole place moves, and another crack will open nearby but go to room 500.”

Dela nodded, kind of picturing it. “If we end up somewhere bad, can you open a portal away from there?”

“I wouldn't want to try. Opening a portal in the same area isn't too tough, but going from one area to another in The Oubliette could be dangerous.”

“Why?”

“I'm opening a hole in reality. On Earth, everything is stable, going from my home to my favourite pizza place, easy, like jumping over a narrow creek. Going from my home to Paris, that's like swimming across a public pool, a little tiring, but nothing too tough. That little portal I did to get away from Grenadier, it was like swimming in a stiff current, I could do it safely, but it wasn't easy. Going between regions, would probably be like swimming on a big lake during a storm,” he explained.

“So going from here to Earth is impossible?”

“Yeah. That would be like me swimming across the Gulf of Mexico during a category 5 hurricane. If I could even open a portal, it wouldn't be survivable.”

“That sucks,” she said.

They reached the edge of the crack, looking down at it, nausea made Dela turn away, covering her mouth to keep from vomiting. Asphalt shouldn't move like rippling water.

“Dela, you're agile, and the least beat up, hold onto my hand and I'll lower you into the hole,” Flamer said.

“I want Dwayne to hold me,” she said, not trusting the girl.

“Why?”

“Because he won't drop me to get rid of me,” she replied, too tired to think of a nicer way to say it.

Flamer scowled. “I wouldn't drop you!”

“You think I'm a criminal, and were going to leave me behind!" she shouted. Even with Alexander asleep, she could picture him scowling at her, as she screwed up again. "I'll go first but only if Dwayne holds my hand, I trust him.”

Dwayne stepped up, holding out his hand. “It's OK, Samantha. You're hurt, I'm not. I'll hold her hand, you hold mine. If anyone comes by before we're through you can hurl a fireball at them.”

“Fine,” Flamer said, “let's just get out of here.”

Taking Dwayne's hand, Dela gingerly put her foot into the crack. She gasped as the asphalt proved to be about as solid as water. Her leg slipped down, and she couldn't feel the ground. Moving around, her shin hit something solid, but it seemed to just be a thin ledge, her toes only touched air.

Pulling her leg back up, she got to her knees. “I need to see what's there, hold onto my ankle,” she said.

Pushing her hands through, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes as her head followed. She hoped no one was waiting on the other side.

The watery sensation faded, and she opened her eyes. She was coming out of the floor in what looked like an apartment. Her black hair sat normally on top of her head, but the ends, which were on the other side of the crack hung upside down. It was the weirdest sensation, she was kneeling down, and her upper body was upside down, but her head was right side up.

Pulling back, her nausea came back as gravity flipped around. Pushing her gorge down, she turned to her companions. “It's an apartment and it looks deserted. But we're in the floor so gravity gets really strange.”

“Good enough. Let's go, but be careful,” Flamer said.

The two got down on their knees. Dela had to hide her smirk as Flamer winced when her bare legs hit the road. The three of them crawled into the crack, one after the other holding tight to the leg in front of them.

The came out in the living room of a dusty apartment. A balcony was cut in half by the steel grey cloud that marked the edge of area. Looking around, Dela saw family photo's lining the wall, and what looked like a little shrine sat in a corner of the room.

The two trainee wardens were on there feet moving around the apartment, they came back less than two minutes later.

“Is it safe?” she asked.

“Looks it. No one has been here for years, and it's only the single apartment,” Flamer said.

“That's good,” she said. Lying down beside the crack, she put her head on her arm and closed her eyes. The adrenaline and fear that had kept her going began to fade away.

She felt Alexander rising, replacing her body.

For a moment she was surrounded by blackness. She pictured a comfortable bed and soft classical music playing in the background. Her imaginary body slipped into the bed and under covers. The soft mattress felt wonderful after her long and terrifying day.

Seconds later she fell asleep.

___

The Oubliette will be updated every second Friday. My other story Necromancer Unmanned, will be updated every second Monday, and Doom Valley Prep School will be updated once a week alternating between Monday and Friday.

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