Crystal Compass Book 1: Part 4: Camp NaNo July2014

“Tea?” She asked, poking her head around the corner and looking at the guy who, despite looking like he was in his twenties was probably about three to four hundred years old. When Sam nodded she went back to making a pot. “I know I can Sam, but it’s getting ridiculous. I thought a Haven was supposed to be neutral ground. Safe, for the inhabitants and for the immortal who visit? Faebeasts are not safe.”

“I’ll have a word with Si Ren.” Sam promised, “But her and her Fae don’t hold themselves beholden to the same rules as the rest of us, they never have.”

“Different Compass.” Twilight frowned slightly. The Crystal Compass, the organisation of Immortals that Sam and Jack belonged to was the purview of the nature spirits and those Immortals whose powers related to the way the world worked. Each direction belonged to a Season. The north belonged to Winter, the east to Spring, south to Summer and West to Sam’s Autumn. Each direction had two leaders. The Kings or Queens who kept the seasons running smoothly and the Protectors, who were supposed to be the ones keeping the peace. They were the ones who were supposed to organise the Monster Hunters and keep a watchful eye on the elemental Immortals who refused a place in the compass and went out of their way to cause harm to the mortals that shared their world.

Si Ren and her following belonged to the other Compass, the Dark Compass. The one that was full of Immortals who were born of myths and tales. Some of whom even had been around as a species in the days when mankind had still been evolving as a race. They had Kings and Queens too, those who best exemplified the seven sins ruled the Dark Compass and were supposed to keep their people from going too far off of the rails.

Si Ren was the Queen of Lust. She was also the one who had invaded the home of the Fae King, who had refused to follow any Compass’s rules and hated mortals and immortals alike and forced him to bow to her. Twilight was mostly convinced that the Fae King was causing deliberately sending his beasts into a Haven’s territory purely because he knew it would get her into trouble and he would not be blamed for the actions of ‘mindless beasts.’ It seemed like something he would do.

That did not mean that she had to like it. She was willing to fight to protect her home and the people in it, but she was, as Sam had reminded her, mortal. The crossbow he had given her helped, but to the faebeast the only reason the bolts would have been gnat bites if they had not been cold iron and laced with salt. She and the entire village could have been in real trouble if it had not been for Elena, the Spring Protector.

That was one of the many dangers of having one foot in the human world and one in the realm of the immortals. Getting caught up in the politics was never fun. She normally tried to let it pass her by. It was certainly easier to ignore the politics than it was the monsters that came through town.

Not that faebeasts were her only concern. They were not the only creatures who liked to go bump in the night. It had been a shock to her system to realise that all the tales her grandmother had told her were true and the monsters under the bed were quite real. Still, none of that related to the fact that there had been a faebeast roaming her village.

“I’m fine anyway.” She reassured Sam as she picked up the tray, upon which were two mugs and a teapot, “And hey, it’ll be Ukko and Fawkes’s issue soon. Maybe you should have words with them so they know to keep an eye out...” She let out a huff when she realised Sam had already left without saying a word. “A goodbye would be nice.” She scolded, though she knew the Autumn King could not hear her.

Digital Distraction: Part 32

Dani felt guilty as she followed the goons though through the service entrance to the castle and hid in the kitchen. Tristan and Kari had made for an excellent distraction to allow her to get away, that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel horrible for letting them get caught.

Still with the bad guys distracted by their latest batch of incoming players, it was easy for her to slip into the rest of the castle and search for the information she had been sent to get. She was running out of time. The players were piling in, eager to get their DimDisks reset so they could continue their game session. Once they were all here, Dani didn’t doubt that the ritual would begin and everyone here would die.

She needed to get to the admin room. Once there she could unlock everyone’s DimDisks and at least give them the ability to defend themselves while she downloaded all the information that Pegasus had requested she get.

She didn’t know what else she could do. She didn’t have magic, there were people on the island who did though, she just wasn’t sure she could rely on them. Not when the backup Pegasus had promised her was helpless to do anything because his brother was being held hostage somewhere on the island.

She figured the brother had to be here, in the castle. She was hoping to find the security room while she was looking for clues. They had to have security cameras around here. If only to ensure they could be aware of who shanked who during their Gathering. If her luck held up, though, they would be at two completely different ends of the castle.

She started off by heading down the stairs at the back of the room. The huge stone staircase, with its heavy looking wooden railings, led down into the store room. It had huge wooden racks and cupboards that looked like they could easily hold enough food to feed the horde they had invited to the island. Most of them were empty though, just confirming Dani’s suspicion that they weren’t planning on feeding their guests.

Towards the back of the room there was a heavy metal door with a barred window, hidden away behind the last huge rack, where she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been investigating a noise that she could hear from the back of the room.

She couldn’t see anyone beyond, but she could see more doors, just like the locked metal one she was peeking through. She couldn’t find the keys for the metal door and honestly she didn’t think she had time to play ‘Hunt the Keys.’ Whoever, or whatever, it was down there was probably safer than up here with the bad guys.

Instead she headed back towards the kitchen, hiding behind one of the stacks as a secret entrance slid open and two of the robed figures from earlier, their hoods up, hiding their faces, entered the store room using a secret entrance. She watched them go, unsure if they deliberately left the secret door open wide or not, and then followed them upstairs, being careful not to be spotted as they went through the kitchen and into a dining hall.

She waited a few minutes, until the sounds of talking on the other side vanished, and then slipped through the unlocked door. The difference in style was startling. While the store room and the kitchen had looked old in style, they had had all the modern mod cons, the dining hall had a huge, heavy wooden table with thirty to forty uncomfortable looking wooden chairs around it and one, cushioned, spiky looking chair in a dark wood that had probably been stained black.

It was a room that was meant to make an impression, with its narrow windows that barely let any light through and the solid vision torches on the walls that gave off just enough light to pass as real torches but not enough to light the gloom in the middle of the room.

Dani was nervous as she tried to decide which of the four doors to go through. The one behind her she could rule out instantly, that one would only lead back to the kitchens and either the store rooms or the back door.

She had no idea which door led to what besides that. She had no inside information, no understanding of how the castle was laid out and she wasn’t a super spy. Realistically her best bet was to just keep trying doors until she struck gold.

She was just about to try the rightmost door when the leftmost door opened, revealing a room full of computers, a robed goon whose hood was down, revealing him to be a young man of about twenty with a strange henna tattoo down one side of his face.

She got lucky. Something started alarming on the consoles within, causing the mook to turn to face them. Dani took advantage of the disruption to dart into the room and slam the door shut behind her.

The mook wheeled around at the sound of the door shutting but Dani was ready, driving a fist into his chin as hard as she could. He staggered backwards, slamming into the console that was beeping, taking a moment to recover. Dani used that time to make another swing at him.

He ducked, driving his knee into her stomach and winding her, causing her to curl up in a ball and collapse to the floor, coughing and wheezing.

“Who the hell are you?” He demanded as he poked her with his foot, glowering down.

Dani grabbed his foot and rolled over, making him lose his balance and slam head first into the door. The mook crumpled into a heap, leaving Dani to push herself up, leaning on the desk chair which looked about as medieval as the rest of the computer banks in the room, i.e. not at all.

This had to be the admin room she had hoped to find and, luckily, it did seem to have all the security cameras in place. For once, it seemed, the ShadowSwords had been organised and kept all their technology together, out of sight of the players. She couldn’t help but wonder, though, as she sat in the desk chair and tried to work out what was alarming, if it had been the ShadowSwords who had been organised or whether DimSoft had been trying to keep the castle’s atmosphere in as many places as they could.

She finally managed to find out what was causing the ruckus when she noticed that one of the security cameras had picked up movement in somewhere that looked like a dungeon. Tristan was busy trying to break into a cell.

“Right...” Her hands flew across the computer bank as she worked, inserting a portable hard drive into the system to copy the data over to even as she cut off the alarm to give him more time and tried to see if there was a way to override the locks in the building automatically, “Time to go to work.”

Digital Distraction: Part 31

“You know, those guards look horribly out of place.” Tristan commented as he tried to count how many guards were outside the castle. “They’d be better off in suits of armour or something.”

“They obviously gave up on the magic for now. Obviously guns work better. Problem is there’s too many for us to slip past.” Kari frowned, thinking as she beheld the men who were in suits and who were obviously carrying. She agreed with Tristan, the rest of the island had had a projection of a medieval setting laid over it. The modern suits and guns broke the illusion that they had been trying to set. “If we walk up to them, we’ll get grabbed.”

“Only if you’re with me.” Dani corrected her, glancing around thoughtfully before slipping off her DimDisk and handing it and the two cards in her hand to Jamie. “I’ll go in first. Then you guys can walk into the castle without trouble. You claim you found the DimDisk on your way in and keep it safe for me, okay?”

“You sure?” Kari asked, concerned for her safety.

“I’ll be fine.” Dani promised, with a smile she didn’t feel. “Give me twenty minutes.”

“I don’t...” Tristan started.

“I have an...” Dani paused and wheeled around at the sound of the bushes behind them moving. She caught sight of the guards moving towards them, guns pointed in their direction and bolted, leaving Kari and Tristan behind as she darted away.

Before the others could run for the hills the goons were on them, guns pointed at their chests.

“Put your hands up.” One of them demanded, waiting for them to do so before he gestured to one of the other men. Kari let out an indignant squeak as they took her DimDisk and backpack before patting her down thoroughly. Tristan nearly swung for one of the goons when Kari flinched away from an inappropriate touch, only for him to get pinned against a tree.

“I wouldn’t.” Tristan felt the barrel of a gun press against the back of his head, making him let out a low growl as his arms were forced behind his back. He struggled as he heard Kari yelp in pain, only for the butt of the gun to slam into the back of his head hard, causing pain to flare up, his legs to buckle and his world to go dark briefly.

When he came around again he was alone in a small, stone walled, room. It was dark, and dank, the only light entering the cell coming from the tiny, barred window in the thick, heavy looking metal door. He staggered to his feet, pain spiking in his brain as he did so, his world lurching horribly alongside it.

“K...Kari?!” He called, attempting to barge the door open, only to find it didn’t even shudder in its stone frame. “Kari!”

“Tristan!” The voice that answered him wasn’t Kari’s. Tristan let out a frustrated growl when he realised it was Tea speaking.

“Tea?” He demanded, grabbing the bars in his window and trying to pull the door open instead. “Is Yami here too?”

“I don’t know.” Tea replied, sounding a bit desperate, “I don’t think so. They drugged him and were saying something about a first sacrifice when they locked me in here. Where’s Kari?”

Tristan had no answer for her. When the tugging didn’t help, however, he went back to trying to barge the door open, frustration growing when it didn’t seem to help. “Damnit! There has to be a way out of here.” He snarled as he kicked the wall hard with the flat of his foot. To his surprise the stone shifted slightly. When he kicked it again some of the material sticking the stone together fell out of the gaps between blocks, looking like it had crumbled away or possibly just not been mixed correctly.

“Tristan?” Tea asked again.

“I don’t know, but I’m getting us out of here.” He promised, “Just wait a little longer.”

C.N. April 2014: Digital Distraction Part 29

“Hey!” Tea protested as she was shoved into a stone cell hard enough to stumble, preventing her from trying to bolt out before the heavy metal door slammed shut.

“Shut up.” The hooded mook who was locking her cell door growled, his companion limping slightly where she had driven her rather heavy boot into his foot.

“Why should I?” Tea demanded, glaring at him through the small barred window in the huge metal door.

“Because if you want to get out of here, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.” The hooded creep informed her. “After all, the only people who know you’re here are our men. Your friend’s been drugged so heavily, if he wakes up in time for the ritual he’ll be lucky.”

Tea winced, having been pulled away from Yami, who they had taken to another part of the castle. They needed him. They had only survived the last few hundred ‘End of the World’ scenarios because the Pharaoh had been there to save the day. If Yami wasn’t going to wake up in time, she were in a lot of trouble and so was everyone on the island.

The mook seemed pleased at that reaction and he and his companion stalked off, leaving Tea alone in the dungeons.

She hadn’t expected to get thrown in the dungeon when she had been dragged out of the secret tunnels. She didn’t know what she had expected, but being separated from Yami and dragged down to the lower dungeon level hadn’t been on her list.

She had hoped to at least pass Yugi when she had realised where she was being taken but she hadn’t seen any sign of him which really worried her. She didn’t know if her friends had already managed to get him out or whether he was being held in a different part of the castle, and she was worried that, now they had Yami, they had had gotten rid of Yugi.

Yami would never forgive himself if he survived this and Yugi didn’t.

Tea didn’t bother pacing the cell, instead barging the door just once before spending the first ten minutes trying to get her arm through the bars on the door to allow her to either pick the lock or work out some other way of escaping.

When that didn’t work, she moved away from the door for a little bit to work out another way of opening the door.

She had no intention of being the damsel in distress again. She was sick of it. She had been planning on taking self defence lessons for that exact reason. Annoyingly they had been due to start next week.

Still she wasn’t as helpless as the bad guys thought she was. They hadn’t bothered to check her bag, believing her to be less of a threat then the King of Games. That meant she still had everything that she had packed ‘just in case.’ Including the set of lock picks she had been practising with ever since Marik had kidnapped her. She just had to, somehow, manage to reach the lock on the other side of the door.

She would have picked the lock from her side, except she didn’t appear to have a keyhole she could use to do so.

“I have to have something in here I can use.” Tea grouched as she went through her backpack, “I packed everything bar the kitchen si...ah ha!” She grinned as she pulled a small spool of crafting wire from her bag. “Let’s see if this works...”

C.N. April 2014: Digital Distraction Part 27

Joey nodded and pocketed the earring. Kari had commented on the fact Tea had had her ears pierced during the school year, telling the teen that her earrings looked really pretty. Tea had apparently dropped one of them to give her friends a clue as to which way they were heading. He glanced around one last time, making sure there was nothing else he needed to pick up, then gestured for Ombre to follow him and darted up the tunnel.

“Keep up!”

It felt an awful lot like Duelist Kingdom all over again as he started the landing preparations to touch down on DimSoft island.

He wasn’t foolish. He knew that he was walking into a potential trap. The virus that had hit Kaiba Corp’s system hadn’t been very difficult to hack once he had managed to isolate it. It had been simplistic in its design, almost too much so. There was no way, if they hadn’t been trying to lure him in, that the virus should have led him back to its creators as easily as it had.

Still they were threatening his company and that was something he would not allow. He was convinced he knew why. Their VirtualNet system had the potential to overthrow his Duel Disk System, but only if people could be convinced that his tried and tested system couldn’t be trusted. No one would want to spend hundreds of thousands of Yen or worse, English pounds, on virtual tech that would probably break down within a year if Kaiba Corp could provide the same sort of service reliably with not even a fraction of the cost.

But after the Duel Disk System had gone down for three days while they tried desperately to recover or replace the information that had been wiped, people were looking for other options, ‘just in case.’ They had done that to him, to his company, to his staff who had worked themselves to the bone to try and get everything up and running again.

If it hadn’t been for Ironhide and the backups she had made, it would have taken them much longer, but she had saved them weeks, even months of work by copying everything she had had access to into her backup system. Or rather a backup system he hadn’t even known existed until this point.

He planned on looking into that once he had dealt with Dimension, or rather with SharpShade, who he rather more suspected were the driving force behind the break in, the virus and his horrendous stock prices. The fact that it was a ‘N.O.A.’ security system made him wonder if his half brother, the Gozabora Kaiba’s true son, had survived the decimation of his virtual world somehow.

According to Ironhide it stood for Networked Office Armour security system and had been a part of the system before she had joined the company, but he had asked around. Ironhide was the only department head, temporary or otherwise, who used it. He wasn’t sorry she did, but he needed to know more about it, in case something like this happened again. He couldn’t really afford the three days it had taken to get into it after the breech, nor could he risk trust a system that could have been created by an adopted sibling who had once tried to kill him.

Still for now it had saved his company and allowed him to get everything settled enough to let him come here to deal with the threat personally.

At least this time his brother wasn’t in danger. Just before he had left the grounds of the mansion, he had made sure his brother was securely in the panic room. Mokuba had objected, worried for his brother’s safety and about the amount of work he had to do at Kaiba Corp. Kaiba had managed to talk him round by helping him get set up so he could work right where he was without any trouble.

It was one load off of his mind as the helicopter touched down and a group of suited men gathered to meet him. Despite having no intention of actually testing their game, he had Ironhide playing and reporting to him for that, he was pleased to see one of the men had what amounted to a Duel Disk without the projectors and half the processing power. He wanted to reverse engineer it later and find out exactly how much of their programming was actually his programming.

“Mr Kaiba.” One of the men smiled at him as he slipped on the DimDisk and inserted his deck, “Welcome to the island. I’m afraid you’re a bit behind the others. They all started about an hour ago.”

“I was expecting Harper.” Kaiba responded, not bothering with the pleasantries. “Where is he?”

“I’m afraid Mr Harper is busy at the moment, he was expecting you a couple of hours ago and now the game has started he has details to take care of.” The man informed him, “However if you head for the castle, he will be formally addressing everyone this evening.”

“The castle?” Kaiba questioned, looking at the fortress on the mount in the centre of the island. It looked like some stereotypical evil fortress from some generic fantasy game, just as every evil fortress in a Dimension Software game had. It was reassuring actually. That on some level he was dealing with the same level of inability to design that he had seen from Dimension the entire time. It told him that it was SharpShade who was the problem and if he could deal with them, Dimension would go back to being the hopeless incompetents he was used to dealing with.

“That’s right.” The mook nodded, “If you head there now, Mr Harper will probably be ready to see you by the time you get there.”

Kaiba nodded. If he had had his way he would have landed in the castle courtyard or as close as damnit, but the forest surrounding the castle was too thick and if he had tried that landing in the tiny central courtyard he would have crashed. Still it wasn’t that far to the castle and unlike the last one he had infiltrated he would be able to walk in the front door. He stalked off, heading towards the castle and looking forward to dealing with the issues and going back to his job.

“I hope you enjoy your game, Mr Kaiba.”