Letters to the editor

[odium.]

It was a long walk down a dark and harrowing corridor, the likes of which he'd ventured a hundred times before. However, this time, the air seemed chilling and aside from the occasional overhead lamp every six or so feet, it felt as if nothing but this hall existed. His footfalls echoed, vibrating through the hall, before returning to him a few seconds later. It was a rather unsettling feeling, the sounds of his own feet made it feel as if the hallway were full of people.


The door read "Edward Brown", in plain lettering and was followed by no prestigious title or military rank. Vanilla.


His hand clasped the cold faux gold knob and remained there for a moment before slowly turning the device without even a single knock to proclaim his arrival. It swing inward to reveal a small, mundane, room that was reminiscent of a cubicle. The tableau was a desk and menial trappings; file cabinet and a personal water cooler. When he entered through the doorway, he closed the door behind himself.


Without salutation or even proper stature, Merle slapped a rather seemingly over-stuffed manila folder atop the day-planner on the desk. Reaching in to the inner-pocket of his jacket, he retrieved a diskette, and in a likewise manner dropped it ontop of the folder before speaking.


"Everything, down to the last detail. Iris was in pretty bad shape after all was said and done; I went ahead and assimilated her notes into my own report on top of making an audio-video version.


"Anything else, now that the hijackers of the Lightning Rail have been brought to justice?"

[supernal]

The door open to reveal a small, neat room and a small, neat man seated with rigid posture in his chair. Stacks of paper could be found across the entirety of his sizable desk, but 'littered' was not an accurate adjective. Each stack of paper was neatly organized so that it seemed to be a single, thick sheet rather than sheets layered one atop the other. And they were positioned in an orderly fashion as well, swallowing almost the entirety of his workspace but not crowding it.

There was no window in this office. The office they wanted to give him was too much of a security risk, all open spaces and ridiculous elevation; Edward's protests got him something similar to a bunker in turn. That the lack of windows forced Edward to chew toothpicks in lieu of smoking was his one complaint.

"Merle." Edward's eyebrows raised up on his forehead in his most sincere imitation of surprise. "Grab some pine."

Merle did no such thing. Merle, instead, slapped a heavy portfolio of information onto Edward's desk and more gingerly laid a diskette atop it. Edward fingered the diskette, inspected its crystal core and accompanying fiber circuitry, toyed around with the idea of asking Merle if it was encrypted but just the thought of there being an algorithm that he couldn't break almost made Edward burst out laughing.

"Iris? In bad shape?" His surprise was no less of a facsimile. "She always is. Damn dame never knows when to slow down. She'll be the death of us all, if she doesn't off herself first."

"Anything else, now that the hijackers of the Lightning Rail have been brought to justice?"
"There's always plenty to do and not enough manpower to do it. I guess that's what gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling inside every time a thief is caught or a crook handed the axe, blade-first. You ever think about taking a vacation?"

[odium.]

He leaned hard against the door, crossing his arms over the buttoned cardigan that lined the upper half of his frame. His eyes narrowed behind those horn rimmed glasses as Edward chose to speak about Iris as if she were some sort of unstoppable force, gritting his teeth, he bit back the urge to unload on his superior. She wasn't some ungodly being of infinite energy, she was flesh and bone like the rest of them, and they chose to use her as some expendable commodity. She was more than that... but they would never understand.

"Right."

Shifting his weight, Merle turned slightly so that one of his shoulders was removed from the surface of the door and so that he was no longer facing Edward directly. He had suddenly become curt after Edward's mentioning Iris like that, and not unlike their entire relationship, Merlercin didn't want to argue with Edward right now. The tension between them always existed on some level, be it in the realm of consciousness or not, bundled with the stress that came hand-in-hand with the sort of work they chose to do.

"You've forgotten? Six months ago, I was in orbit, working on the defense satellite systems. That was written off as a vacation."

He let out a breath and it carried away his brusque attitude. Merle's chocolate brown eyes scanning Edward for but a moment before rolling over the surface layers of the files stacked about the man's desk.

"You knocked me off assignment in Dougton to assist Iris with the... miscreant gang that was terrorizing the Lightning Rail. Did you at least have anyone do a follow up on the information I'd gathered after the explosion? Not only were those energy signatures not human, I've long suspected that they weren't from this world... or possibly even this dimension."

He coughed into his fist and cleared his throat before continuing.

"Three years ago there was a similar incident in Genesaris with a power reading that was off the charts, astronomical stuff, of course I didn't have the chance to investigate it further... but what could something like this mean? I don't think rest and relaxation are something we can afford, if we want to keep Terrenus alive and well."

Iris doesn't need to be a martyr; his eyes narrowed.

[supernal]

Edward motioned to the chair on the other side of his desk. The motion itself, coupled with the penetrating gaze that most easily identified the Brown heritage, made it very clear that this was not an invitation but a command.

"I never forget." Edward looked up for a half-second and then back down. "I mean a real vacation, son." As Edward spoke he thumbed through the fat stack of papers ensconced between two manila ends. He read at about a page a second, with casual glances that pried free from the mass of rhetoric all critical information, and even this was a leisurely pace.

"Drinks with little umbrellas in them served in coconut shells, soaking up a bit of color into that pasty skin of yours, that kind of thing."

Merle didn't pay that much mind. Edward didn't expect him to. Edward continued to flip through the information within the manila folder, now about three-quarters of the way through. Merle then launched into his favorite subject; the errant, foreign, massive energy spikes. Edward looked up again, again for half a second, placed the diskette Merle had given him in a drawer, and drew from it an identical storage device.

"Here." Edward tossed the diskette towards Merle. "Eleven noticed the same spike. Went to Artifacture and got Julius to make him a ritual and containment device. Eleven's reports contain a holo-array with as accurate a recreation of what happened in Genesaris as we can get. He was also able to get some samples; fallout from the event. The analysis is in there too.

"It doesn't match the signature in Dougton, but there are some interesting similarities. We've compared this with some of the portals that have been opening in Terrenus. No match. More importantly, there are two distinct signatures coming out of Dougton while what's coming out of Genesaris has a singular source. Whatever it is, it isn't from Valucre or any coterminous plane."

Done reading, Edward leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. He looked at Merle over the apex made by his joined fingertips.

"I'm serious about you taking a vacation Merle. I won't force it on you. We put you through all kinds of stress training at Camp. I know you can handle it, I've seen your scores. But just because you can fire all cylinders while you're running on empty doesn't mean you should."

[odium.]

Before Edward even spoke, Merle was in the seat. Suffice to say that although their relationship was, at times, exascerbated, they both knew their respective places. The man rambled on about taking time off, as if their work was ever done, or that evil was on hiatus. It was then he noticed Edward rummaging through a desk drawer before the diskette cut through the air.

It struck him in the shoulder before he hot-potato'ed it several times, in a panic, where it eventually bounced from his knee and finally to the floor at his feet. Embarrassment was not essentially the correct word, but it was close enough. Merle scooped the crystal cased object before returning his gaze to Edward as if nothing had happened.

One name in perticular caught his attention. Julius Aldoid, his jaw clenched and eyes narrowed.

"You mean Eleven was able to infiltrate Genesaris, but I thought he was on consignment?

"So... you want me to go on vacation, yet you give me this kernel of information beforehand? Next thing I know, you'll be dropping airship tickets to Saint Desolatus on me."

Simultaneously as he spoke, Merle deposited the cased diskette into the inner lining of his cardigan pocket as an identical substitute to the one laying on Edward's desk.

"... We're both realists. So I'm going to level with you."

He tapped the underlying diskette in his pocket with two fingers.

"This scares the shit out of me.

"I'll take the vacation, only if Iris is given time off as well. She needs to rest."

[supernal]

"You mean Eleven was able to infiltrate Genesaris, but I thought he was on consignment?"
"He went out before that. Long before that. Damn near when the thing first happened. Eleven used to be one of the sharpest of you bunch." Speaking in the past-tense was not a detail likely to go over Merle's head.
"So... you want me to go on vacation, yet you give me this kernel of information beforehand? Next thing I know, you'll be dropping airship tickets to Saint Desolatus on me."
"What an old man wants and what a young man intends to do, I find, don't always match up." Edward thought that, coupled with a fatherly smile, was a bit more uplifting than 'a weapon does what it is designed to do and I can't really help that'.

Merle made his ultimatum; the old man considered his next move carefully, and so a brief span of silence stretched, insignificant but for the two men it passed between and the circumstances they found themselves in.

"Sure." Edward left out that Iris hadn't clocked in for weeks now, and had spent nearly all of her time in a vast clearing in the Great Pine Barrens, tinkering silently under a sun-and-shadow dappled background at some contraption hitherto unknown to the Terran technicians. All of this coming to a head the moment Danae came back from a special operation, and Iris felt that she and Lisa weren't the only ones showing the world that PeaceKeepers were deadly regardless of gender.

"Sounds fair enough." Edward also left out how these massive signatures rattled his own cage, but Edward had in his corner faith. Not in the abstracted religions of the Gaians, but in the unmitigated military might at Terrenus's disposal and faith bordering the absolute in the PeaceKeepers, his PeaceKeepers.

"Why don't you hurry up and get out of here before I slap you around some."

[odium.]

"I'll see what I can do about not getting roughed up by you, I guess."

He stood and moved to the door, stared at it for a brief second with his hand on the knob, as if either waiting for the right time to say something or for Edward to add a final comment. There was neither.

The latch clicked once as the door shut and Merle was gone.

[supernal]

[end thread]