Charlotte Palmer and her Half & Half regulars don’t include any technologists. Leah Snow’s absence is felt keenly, but even without her, the larger task force numbers several inventive wizards. And Charlotte has consulted with her Menagerie colleagues as well. The goal is to take the gift of the former superhero Resister, now crown prince of Iceland, and replicate it.
In a blessedly short amount of time, the deed is done. The anti-Eigendrake task force are now ready to don specialized suits, mixing technology and sorcery, that will prevent them from being remembered. Charlotte hopes - she needs - these suits to immunize the team from the sight of the Eigendrakes, now curled around cities in the Multi-37 parallel universe.
“A few of us should go first,” Charlotte suggests, and the others see the logic in it. As a band of self-sacrificing heroes, of course the next challenge is to decide who that will be. Nobody wants a repeat of what happened before.
“While inside, we will not remember that the others are there,” says the Resister of Multi-50, already a user of the technology the team wears. When questioned, he explains that his version of the memory spell is different. It affects only himself, personally, but that will be sufficient to protect him when the time comes. “The others will forget that we have gone in. I suggest each of you finds some way to busy yourself, some other task perhaps, and let it be a pleasant surprise when you discover us returned.”
In the end, four people will go. Resister, Charlotte, Vermillion, and Bodark. The werewolf and vampire claim to be more durable than most members of the task force, and Charlotte has to acknowledge that they were successful in fighting the Eigendrakes in their first clash. Resister is going because he is most familiar with the memory-shielding tech. Charlotte is going because there is something she must know, two questions only she can answer.
Many, many cities have been taken over. The team must select four.
Charlotte’s chosen city is Cairo.
Charlotte has seen movies where people wear space suits or diving suits. She has never worn such a thing before. But now she understands.
Walking through the city of Cairo, the loudest sound she hears is her own breathing. The thing she feels isn’t the wind of the city, but the suit’s weight. She can smell the air she smelled when she entered the suit, dirty and tangy from the machinery of Leah’s lab where the team had worked from.
She can look out through the face-plate and see the outline of her own hands, wrapped in a silvery mesh. She can see her feet move as she walks forward.
“You must be the politest person around you,” Resister had told the team when they were suiting up.
Now, Charlotte understands what he meant. People can’t really process that she’s hear. She must step out of the way, or bump into passersby. But all these people are bound to the Eigendrake. An individual might forget. But would this entity notice, if she bumped into enough of its mental servitors? Charlotte does not wish to find out. So she watches her step, and makes room, and continues walking unnoticed and unremembered.
Cairo, as an Eigendrake nest, looks to be in the midst of a perpetual sandstorm. It is a listless, lifeless brown. Visibility is bad, and the outlines of everything are blurry. Charlotte is reminded of the Sepiaverse, and the odd color tint the team noted there. She’s come to learn, from Leo and Jason making a project of rescuing its residents, that the discoloration is not an optical effect, but a psychological one. There is a psychic pressure that bears down on people. Cairo has it too.
Close up, Charlotte can recognize what Astra had commented on. The people here aren’t awake, not really. They’re sleepwalking through the dreams of another lifetime. They’re enacting memories that have journeyed across a cosmos to find a home.
But they cannot be allowed to displace the lives that are already here, Charlotte reminds herself.
It’s not hard to find the source of the power that holds Cairo in thrall. In their travel forms, the Eigendrakes resembled lithe snakes made of yellow lightning. Now their essence is distributed across a city. The draconic outline is still faintly present from a distance. Inside, it’s like plant pollen.
Charlotte walks, tracing it to its source.
The dragon’s core is wrapped around a skyscraper - the tallest building in the region. There is Cairo, sitting on the Nile river, and east of it the New Cairo City. That distance again, still to the east, is where the skyscraper rises from administrative and governmental buildings. Charlotte wishes she had studied articles about the area before coming in. Her questions had been spiritual, not geographical, and her mission is urgent indeed, but now her curiosity gnaws at her. She thinks of herself as old among the generation of Halcyon Heroes she calls friends, yet this city’s age puts her to shame.
None of the people around the skyscraper are doing their proper tasks. People dressed in security guard’s clothes are arguing, or orating. People dressed in business attire are speaking to invisible partners, carrying on a long-lost conversation.
These people - their ancestors built ancient wonders. Now they themselves have built this skyscraper, and this beautiful city. They have much to be proud of. They deserve to be free.
Charlotte starts up the stairway of the tower.
She is not wholly ignorant of this skyscraper’s origin and purpose. It is a government building. It was constructed in the spirit of a pharaonic obelisk, and its topmost parts resemble the crown of a god. She wondered at the time if this association would draw the Drake. Now perhaps she will find out.
Her own breath is coming faster. It’s all she can hear in the suit. Not even her feet on the stairs can compete. Perhaps there is some sound-dampening materials in the walls? Perhaps the suit is naturally like this.
Perhaps she is breathing hard because she fears what she will find. Perhaps because she has been walking, and climbing, for so very long.
The suit holds the heat she produces. She feels beads of perspiration forming on her brow - another artifact of life she’s experiencing again, in the pseudo-mortality she’s conjured for herself. The suit will not allow the air to wick it away. It will stay here and accumulate.
There - the top-most level. The concentration is strongest here.
The core of the Eigendrake fills the grand hall at the top of the building. It is glowing, pulsating, vital. It reminds Charlotte of depictions of St. Elmo’s fire.
She studies it for long minutes with her occult awareness, doing her best to ignore the physical unpleasantness of wearing the suit. She dare not probe, whether with spell or physically. She has not even brought her spectacles, connecting her to the booklins. The entity here must have no knowledge of her presence. And, seemingly, it does not.
This is what it was like to be Resister, she thinks after a few minutes. To watch, to observe, perhaps to intervene, but not to be known.
As she inspects the core of the Eigendrake, Charlotte has an answer to her first question.
Devon Crowninshield sought to weave souls around her to make a corporate god. Before that, the aggrieved dead sought to turn her into Pandemonium. Both times, it was her ability to mesh with many souls that made her a target of such machinations.
There is something recognizable there, honed and sharpened like a blade, yet familiar underneath its refashioning into an ark of souls.
This Eigendrake is another Charlotte Palmer.
