Winters and the Beast

Magnetic fields with Miranda's crystallized rope were a strange, fascinating combination. Heisenberg's hammer spun near the material, and the field seemed to 'catch' within the circle, bouncing off its boundaries, intensifying and concentrating the field's effects.

Heisenberg in particular enjoyed this; Zoe was staring, mesmerized, at all of the metal parts of her clothing that tugged and pulled thanks to the alternating field, and Ethan simply struggled to tighten the straps on his holster and the shotgun's carry strap as the weapons whipped to and fro across his body in the "wind." Finally they were taut against his body, and he nodded at his friend.

The medieval ceremonies had lots of chanting, but they were praying over empty crystals, hoping to call forward spirits. Those rituals didn't include a very old, very well-preserved being sitting, playing on the rock with Rosemary as Eva did now. Neither Ethan nor Zoe felt the need to chant, but they stretched their hands over the rock. Ethan closed his eyes, and opened them--in the liminal space.

Rosemary was here, Eva was here. Zoe was here. Heisenberg flickered in and out, connected to them by the magnetic field, looking like a wizard as lines of flux cascaded in zigzags from him around the circle. There was something else here, Ethan realized; it was dark overhead, and large snake-like tendrils of mold wove their way through the hollow. Perhaps the mold had grown here, undisturbed, for years, creating a stronger "blanket." It certainly looked old.

Ethan listened for the whispers that always accompanied this realm. At first he only heard Rosemary's conversational babbling. For her, sitting on a rock near midnight with a ghost was entirely normal behavior. He chanced closing his eyes again; he would ask in his usual way.

Hey uh...anytime now.

The whispers almost immediately answered him, thousands of quiet voices murmuring amongst themselves. Ethan opened his eyes, peering through the black lines created by Karl. The magnetic lines were thicker here than he'd ever seen; it must have been Miranda's insulator. Thunder threatened overhead once more, though this realm never had clouds, simply a reddened sky. Mold likely had no need--or way--to catalogue accurate, complex cloud patterns or stars.

What should he say now? Something cheesy like 'arise'? Ethan instead spoke aloud, straining to see the blackened soil around the rock.

"Come on," he insisted stubbornly. "You know what to do."

The Black God must not have found his unimpressive way of speaking to be blasphemous, for moments after he muttered this, black hair-like strands wove out of the water. They threaded their way across the wide rock, and Ethan struggled not to squirm at how disgusting they looked.

More and more thin tendrils took up the cause, waving and pulling with the aid of more energy, thanks to Karl's magnetic field. This was moving twice, maybe three times as quickly, as the tendrils of mold in the memories he'd seen. Zoe recognized this as well, exclaiming, "Look, Ethan! It's movin' so fast!"

Rosemary completely ignored the hairlike structures that snaked past her and toward the crystal that Eva held. The mycelium somehow knew to avoid the purple lotus. Curious. Instead, the strands wrapped around the other small, white crystals placed there earlier. Eva watched with a nervous glance as the black slipped around the crystal she held. Every time a strand of mycelium came into contact with a crystal, it blanched, whitening. More snaked around the sitting figure.

Ethan glanced over the rock, realizing he knew what to do next. And so did the mold. This was part of its programming. How curious. Who the hell programmed it? The medieval religious folk? Someone else? It knew what to do. It simply needed the energy and communication to do it, and that's what the group provided. If the energy of the original priests was a single horsepower, they were pushing a cool 100, thanks to Karl, and having all three mold beings inside the dome of energy.