Magi-Nation Lore

"Fail-Safe"
A Cold Welcome, Part 1
By Paul Wyatt, aka Vermillion De

A panicked sense of freefall awoke Keva with a start, coughing and sputtering as broken ice fell around her. Her hands came up instinctively to catch her fall, and she struggled to focus. Something immediately struck her as odd. She looked down, and her hands were … blue? She quickly counted her fingers, pinched the skin along her arms and legs to make sure she still had feeling, and breathed hard to check her airways. Everything seemed to be working fine, though she expected the room to feel colder—especially now, with the floor covered in ice.

Did something break down in the hibernation medium? She checked the sleeves of her parka, but they hadn’t changed color. Confused, Keva looked behind her at the pillar of ice she had been suspended in, but there was no discoloration there either. She shook her head to clear the fog of cold sleep and get her bearings.

“Focus, Keva,” she told herself. Somewhere, an alarm was blaring, and the lights were turning on in rows, starting from behind her. They should never have gone out. She awakened where she expected: within the Arctic Energy Facility. She’d designed the system herself, meant to store the massive energies sent from the Core until it passed up to the Axis Tower, which ultimately focused it into the Dream Barrier. The AEF regulated the flow of energies, stabilizing it enough to control. It was her magnum opus, a symphony of self-sufficiency.

So what happened? Keva thought to herself. She gazed with bleary eyes around the control room and struggled to her feet. Rows of flat panes of ice spread out in front of her, used as displays for various workstations. Most of them showed nothing, but a few were blinking back to life as glyphs danced across their displays. She wandered towards the cluster of workstations at the front of the room. Nearby, stairs led up and out of the facility. At the other end there were vats standing in rows. Each one filled with charged fluid—a glittering purple liquid medium suffused with ground Animite—which the facility used to store its massive reservoirs of energy. As her eyes regained their focus, she limped her way over to the closest work station, pushing what remained of a maintenance construct off one of the Maginer’s relays.

The waist-high pedestal had an orb-like protrusion from the top, and glyphs to demarcate where to touch it. Designed to allow caretakers of the facility to wordlessly interact with the complex systems, or in this case, a way to quickly decipher a large amount of information without needing to read it. As Keva touched it, the display at the front blinked to life and the station began to shake off its dormancy. Keva could relate.

Why am I awake? What happened to the constructs? She wondered. She’d designed the systems with built in redundancy, but removing her from stasis was supposed to be a last resort. The AEF had dozens of other fail-safes, each one designed to buy them time or give them options. Or, as someone she respected had described it, to make a bridge to a bridge. If no one could fix it, maybe she could at least buy the Dream Barrier some time.

She could make out the vague outline of an Eliwan across the room, and pointed at him. “You! Where is everyone? There should be a team…” Recognition sparked through her, and she raised a hand up to block the glare from the light fixture just above her head.

He wore a tattered, red hood that covered most of his features. In fact, most of his body was covered by a maroon cape that appeared too large for him, and was punctuated by gold-studded pauldrons on his shoulders. A spire made of what looked like bone jutted from each pauldron, or the tooth of some great beast. His hands were mottled and discolored, but he moved with a gait that was disturbingly smooth. From beneath the hood shone two glowing eyes, but they spread open with surprise. Something in his obscured features sparked a memory in Keva.

“Morag?” she called, stepping toward him as she spoke. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be down in…” She froze when she realized that something wasn’t right. The oddly smooth gait made sense; the man had always glided around a room using one of his inventions. Now though, it was something else. The energy emanating from him felt … wrong. Something inside her twisted at the sensation of it.

The surprise in Morag’s eyes vanished as they narrowed to slits, and Keva felt something cold crawl up her spine.

“Wha- what happened to you?” she sputtered.

A long moment of silence lingered between them, like he was contemplating his response a little too hard, but between his new appearance and the strange feeling of the energy emanating from him she found herself distracted.

Morag followed her gaze, looking at the strange coloration of his own hand. His expression became less harsh. Keva opened her mouth to break the silence just as he spoke up.

“We were not all as lucky with our hibernation sickness,” Morag replied.

She straightened at that, and felt a pang of sympathy. Suddenly she felt thankful she had only gained blue skin. “I … I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” She waved a hand in front of her to shake off the awkward moment. “Whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here. None of these readings make sense.” She pointed to a relay behind her.

“See if you can raise the Core or the Tower. I’m not getting a response from either.” Keva turned back to her station and pressed her fingers to the glyphs. She cleared her mind, and presented the relay with her intent: I need to know why the facility shut down. It responded in turn by flooding her mind with nodes of data. It took her a moment to unravel each one, scouring for the information she needed. “It looks like we lost power completely; the system tried to reroute it, but the secondary conduits are down. Is NOTHING working?” She fumed, gesturing angrily at the display.

Her outburst had caught Morag’s attention, but he only watched her in silence. She closed her eyes, and tried to focus on the data. The answer was here, she just had to put the facts together. Power is flowing here, but it isn’t reaching the Tower. Either way, the conduits are damaged, which means whatever the problem is…

“It’s here. Whatever’s draining the power has to be in this room,” Keva thought out loud. She looked up reflexively, as if she could see the Dream Barrier from here. “If we don’t figure this out soon, the effect on the Barrier would be—”

“Catastrophic.” Morag had drifted so close he was practically breathing down her neck.

She whirled, startled at his proximity. She hadn’t heard him approach at all. He raised his hand towards her and she backed into the terminal. Before she could open her mouth to protest, he bombarded her with a kaleidoscopic array of discharging energies, casting purple, blue, and black arcs through her body.

“I thought that might be the case,” said Morag, no longer hiding the malice in his voice. Keva crumpled to the ground, wracked with pain, her senses going numb under Morag’s relentless assault. Her leg hit something solid on the way down, and out of the corner of her eye she saw it—it was a power conduit, jutting out from the console she had just been working on; links of shaped animite forming a chain, wrapped in insulating casing. If Morag had had legs, he would have been standing on it.

She lashed out with an awkward kick. Keva’s foot split the cold, brittle casing on the conduit, fracturing the animite within, and causing energy to crackle out from the severed connection. Morag recoiled with a hiss and floated away from the source of the discharge. Keva winced as the sudden release of energy burned her leg, but she vaulted up onto her feet.

Morag is the traitor! she screamed to herself internally. Her mind scrambled for an explanation, a defense, a strategy, but she had too much to process, too much to do. She was out of her element in a fight like this, and she had to focus on one thing at a time. She scrambled for a weapon, something heavy, anything. She stopped when she spotted a dormant construct, and seized it with both hands. I just need to energize the construct, then I can use it as a shield! She focused, trying to gain control of it, but as even Keva strained, she knew her energy was all but spent after Morag’s attack.

Sweating, she looked up to see how Morag would come at her now, but to her surprise he was neatly gliding away from her towards the exit, still facing her as he went. His eyes were fixed on her, but he made no aggressive move. 

What does he know that I don’t? Keva wondered. What had he done? What would have been severe enough to cause the control room to lose power, and why would he leave now?

The answers all came at the same time, as the lights flickered out again, and the sound from the siren trailed off with a weak uneven groan. The conduits thrummed with power but Keva couldn’t tell where it was going. Not until a vortex emerged between her and Morag, whirling in fury at the center of the room.

“No!” Keva exclaimed in shock. She wasn’t sure what the vortex was building towards, but it sure looked like a Door, an animite powered portal to another world. A Door here could sap every last ounce of energy from the reservoir! Instinctively she rushed towards it, but stopped at the event horizon. Translucent purple tendrils lashed out as the vortex expanded. She stepped back as it grew ever larger. The displays flickered and died. Rows of overhead lights blinked out. Slowly, the room was growing darker and quieter, as systems went down one by one. Soon the entire facility would fail, all of the energy stored in the reservoirs leeched out to feed the burgeoning Door.

She ran to the closest relay, but found it completely dead. I need to get to the conduits. Maybe if I can get around the Door and get outside I could—

A whorl of black fire burst against the carved stone wall ahead of her, spraying chunks of sharp rock everywhere. Pain stabbed into her arm. She slammed to a halt and backed up, tracing the spell to its source. Morag gloated, his raised hand still smoking from the expulsion of energy. She backpedaled as another streak of energy flew by her, turning a nearby relay into smoldering wreckage. The repeated barrages forced Keva to seek cover.

She winced and pulled a small shard of stone from her arm. She didn’t have enough energy to fend off Morag’s attacks, and she hadn’t grasped the threat in time. The unstable vortex expanded wide enough to encompass the full width of the room. She couldn’t avoid it now, but passing through it without energy to defend herself was suicide.

She was trapped. The spinning vortex still had enough gaps for her to see through it, and on the other side stood Morag.

He looked pleased with himself.