Wish upon the Stars chapter 1034

It was time to leave. Devon had done a lot of research on this place, and while he had no method of escaping, he did know there was an emergency signal in place. Aside from sequestering trial participants, The Quiet Room had been designed as a fallback shelter in case of a catastrophic attack on the Wishworld. In the event of long term habitation, having a secure channel to signal for aid from inside was integral to proper functionality.

Of course, it wasn’t compulsory or anything. If it was used, there was a chance they might ignore it, but with my parents and grandparents watching over things like a gaggle of hawks, I was doubting they could get away with that.

The downside was that it was a SECRET emergency signal, otherwise any of the refugees would have access to signaling capabilities, and since the place was designed to be absolutely secure, that was counterproductive. Devon likened it to a hardwire broadcast line out of  a signal proof bunker.

Which was why we were currently climbing the side of a massive sky high volcano. “This place is ridiculous,” I complained. “It’s supposed to be a bunker, right? What’s the point of making it so big?”

“It’s self sustaining,” Devon huffed as he climbed. We’d tried to fly up, but there was a haze of heat distortion around the volcano’s body. Someone had engraved formations on the body of the mountain to keep them off…mostly, but it was still a hell of a climb, especially carrying a pair of B-rankers on our backs.

I was carrying Franklin, given my higher stats, though I was beginning to feel like I’d been tricked, because I explicitly forgot my wife had modifiers from her racial trait. I had something similar from Sammael, but to a much lesser extent. I groaned as I adjusted the weight of the bigger man. His actual physical weight wasn’t much, but the big bastard was B-rank, and his Impact was interacting with the strain in an unfortunate way.

I groaned a bit as my foot slipped, rocks skittering down the black stone slope as I scrambled to right myself. I stumbled around a few steps and then froze, trying desperately to balance myself. Finally, I spread my wings to act as a ballast, at least best I could with someone on my back.

My head wasn’t doing well. Being several people at once without the benefit of Piece of Mind had been…well at the time fairly intoxicating. But my brain was tired and sluggish from overexertion, and I had no way to restore it. It wasn’t physical, exactly, it was mental strain. Even my soul restoration couldn’t do anything here, because the exhaustion was LITERALLY all in my head.

“Why did they put this thing at the top of a volcano again?” I asked Devon with a scowl.

“They didn’t,” he grimaced. “They put it at the bottom. We just have to climb it to get IN. They made the slope as inconvenient as possible to prevent anyone from casually stumbling on the place.”

I sighed. “Of course they did. Because why make anything easy.”

Groaning, I resumed my trek, pushing through the discomfort with mild difficulty. My pain tolerance had taken another level from this nonsense, which I supposed was a good thing, even if I wished I hadn’t needed it to. When we finally reached the top, we began our descent. We climbed in silence, all of us wrapped up in our own thoughts, and when we finally descended into the lowest chamber of the volcano and crossed the platform in the lava, we were left staring at a red sphere sitting in a jagged black cradle.

I reached out and tapped it…and nothing happened. I groaned, waving a hand, and an old man in a robe appeared beside me. “I need to know how this thing works,” I told Dantalion with a tired sigh. “I assume you can extract some kind of…directions?”

He nodded slowly. “I can. This is only B-rank. If you can upgrade me directly with the staff it would be a lot faster, but if not, I can brute force it. It’ll just take a while.”

“Can’t upgrade anything for a while,” I sighed. “Did it twice in a row basically, and I’m pretty much tapped for the moment. We can wait.” I reached up, pushing the bound Franklin off my back. After we healed him and Callister we’d rebound them in Callie’s spatial flames. They couldn’t speak, or move, or even see. I turned to Callie. “Alright, so once Dan is finished getting the directions sorted out, we can call for help. And then…we’re done. We’re all finished. I can’t believe it’s over.”

“Over?” Callie giggled. “This was just the background mess. Don’t forget, we’re coming out just in time for your coronation, maybe a little earlier if they can get us out. You still have to get up in front of the entire WCP and all those witnesses and accept your position as the Wishmaster.”

I raised an eyebrow at her tone. “Why do I sense a whole bunch of shadenfreude in that statement? Shouldn’t you be sympathizing with me?” Honestly, the idea of going through the coronation right now, while I was this raw, was kind of agonizing. I just wanted to sleep for eleven and a half weeks.

“Should I? Mr. This is my wife and she’s the daughter of a god?” She smirked at me. “I love you to pieces, babe, but you’ve definitely got the attention coming. Besides, after this whole mess, don’t you think having a bunch of people focusing on you too much is a champagne problem?”

Despite her teasing tone, I could feel her concern through the bond. She was worried. And I think she knew me well enough to know that I would FORCE myself to keep it together for the coronation. I wanted to play along, to tease her back, but I was just…tired. I sat down, slumping to the ground, ignoring the clank of my armor. “I’m fine, Cal,” I assured her.

Her devilish smile wilted, and I saw real worry in her eyes. “You don’t feel fine.”

“Ok, then I’m NOT fine,” I admitted. “But I’ve been through worse, and I’ll get through this too. And you’re right. I need to be on the top of my game for the coronation. I can keep it together. You don’t need to be afraid.”

She stepped forward, folding her arms around me as she rested her head on my chest. “I’m not afraid you won’t be able to do the coronation. Fuck the coronation. I don’t care if you spend the rest of your life repairing toilets. I just hate feeling this…sick guilt from you. I just want to fix it. What can I do?”

“Sorry love,” I said tiredly. “Don’t think a heart to heart is gonna fix this one. I just need time. But when I do need to talk, I know you’re there. And it means more to me than I can say.”

She buried her head deeper against my chest. “Fine. But if you try to shut me out when I can help you, I’m going to kick your ass. I don’t care if you stats are higher than mine, I can do it. And if I can’t, I’ll tell your mom on you.”

“You monster!” I gasped in faux horror. “How could you?”

“You better be afraid,” she grinned smugly. “I’m your worst nightmare, pal. There’s nothing scarier than an archangel with nothing to lose. That’s where the saying comes from.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “What saying?”

“That…there’s nothing scarier than an archangel with nothing to lose,” she trailed off and then finished lamely. “It’s common folk wisdom where I’m from.”

“You mean the city we both grew up in where no one even knows what an archangel is?” I asked dryly. “Common folk wisdom there?” I felt a bubbling current of warmth in heart, and couldn’t help but smile. Despite knowing she was trying to cheer me up, I was touched. She’d accepted I didn’t want to have a serious talk, and banter always relaxed me.

A loud throat clearing came from behind us. I turned to find Dan bowing deeply. “Apologies my lord, my lady. But I seem to have discovered the on switch.”

“That was much quicker than expected,” I observed.

He shrugged. “They were less concerned with security than expected. There was no password required. I assume they thought leaving it at the bottom of an active volcano would be sufficient protection. Combined with being in this world to begin with.” He paused. “Well, there’s also a blood lock on it, but that’s hardly a concern given your presence as well as your cousin’s.”

That made sense. The difficulty of reaching here combined with the bloodline requirement was pretty secure. I walked over to the sphere. “Alright, so how do we do this? You mentioned an on switch?”

He nodded solemnly. “It’s right there.” He pointed at a large engraved circle of black metal with the skull and lamp logo of the Wishmaster on it.

“I take it back,” I said wryly. “That took you way TOO long to find. You didn’t try the LITERAL on button first? It’s not exactly subtle.” I tried to hold back my chuckle, but not very hard, I knew Dan wouldn’t take it the wrong way.

“I…may have overcomplicated things,” he said with a wince. “One of the downsides of dredging up the tiniest details is that sometimes you miss the big stuff. Combined with the fact that no one has ever actually USED it and that it’s too high ranked for me” He cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Sorry about that.”

I just laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I did it too, man. No big deal. You can head back, I appreciate the assist, necessary or not.”

I snapped my fingers, and he faded out of existence, dragged back into the Domain where he would wait with the others. Looking at the other two (not counting the prisoners) I blew out a breath. “So. We need to send a message out, and I assume we need to include pretty much everything that’s happened.”

As expected of an encrypted emergency channel though, when I pressed the button, we realized this wouldn’t be as easy as we’d hoped. “There’s a CHARACTER limit?” Devon sputtered as it activated. “What POSSIBLE function could that serve?”

“Might be some way to limit the rank?” I speculated. “I know limitations can help stretch effectiveness in items. Doesn’t really matter though. We need to put together a debrief that can fit in…two hundred forty characters? What a weirdly specific number. Whatever, we need to condense things down as much as possible.”

Which turned out to be more difficult than I’d expected. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it was the death of clarity. It took us about twenty minutes to pack everything we needed into such a small message. When we were sure we’d gotten it all, we hit the button again, and the sphere flashed red. The letters floating inside dissolved, swirling into a vortex of fiery sparkling light points.

Finally, after about two more hours, a message came back. It was…” Numbers?” I asked in confusion.

“Coordinates!” exclaimed Devon. “That’s the WCP’s five band structural location formula. It’s based on present location. So let’s see. Fifty miles away or so, northwest? Direction, angle, distance, elevation, terrain. All five bands. This is the exit. It has to be.”

Sighing, I hoisted Franklin back up over my shoulders. “Good work, guess we have our heading. I’m assuming they’ll be waiting there. So let’s not keep them waiting for long.” Callie lifted Callister easily, and the three of us looked back up the volcano’s inside with a sigh. “Well,” I said as we started the climb. “At least it’ll be downhill the whole way once we’re out.”