A Rational Magic || ONC2022

Twenty-Five || Infested or Infected?

"Oh my god," I gasped as the spinning stopped, dropping Kat's hand and glancing around. "I hate that."

Kat pressed his hands to his ears, looking extremely uncomfortable. "Anya."

The tick-tock of the very hallway we stood in snapped through the haze I was in, and I winced.

"Oh, yeah... yeah, that's loud."

I rummaged through the bag, eventually coming up with what I assumed were some sort of noise-cancelling headphones.

It took some coaxing to make Kat remove his hands from over his ears, but he did so after I made to wander off alone.

Can't be letting me do that, I bet.

He let me 'lead the way', though, both of us trying our best to keep an eye out for anything strange.

The disadvantage of not destroying a very important sense, given the 'dark fire' plot, was that said sense was still totally out of commission. If there was a strange noise, nobody would hear it.

But for a long while, we came across nothing and no one else.

I was fascinated.

If Lani was here, I decided, she'd probably be rambling about how this was exactly the sort of thing that shows up in one of her 'steampunk' favourites: something I had never had any interest in. Despite the somewhat science-y, somewhat historical nature of the genre, I've always steered clear. Probably because Lani's 'favourite' also had much more magic than you might expect in a historical sci-fi series.

It was as this thought was crossing my mind that I walked into someone.

Brilliant.

I scrambled upright and mimed some sort of apology, trying my best to convey the fact that I really, really didn't mean to walk into him, but he didn't look particularly pleased. He kept saying something that might have involved 'Katriel' but also might not.

My lip-reading 'ability' was little more than wild guesswork, but I was getting the uncomfortable feeling that Kat and the stranger might know each other.

There was also a reddish lump on the older fairy's neck. Like a bite.

I shifted the headphones a little to give my ear just enough space to hear the fairy's words, trying to look as innocent as possible at the same time.

"What are you doing here?"

"What bit you?" I asked, gesturing vaguely at the mark.

Kat inched closer to the wall — presumably in an attempt to get a better look at what I was pointing at — and out of the corner of my eye I saw his face drop.

Without any warning, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me around the older fairy with a strength I didn't expect him to possess, not letting go until we're separated by what could be a dozen hallways. Then he muttered a few words to himself — or maybe shouted them, who knows? — before pulling his headphones off.

I followed suit a little more hesitantly, but I apparently needn't have worried. Whatever he did, the sound of the gears and cogs and whatever that made up every wall and ceiling and even the floor (albeit under what I imagined was some kind of glass) seemed a lot more bearable.

"How come you didn't do this earlier?"

"Because we had to move," Kat said, tipping his head back to stare up at the ceiling. "You can't hold something like this when you're moving."

"And so we're just not going to move, now? You seemed pretty scared of that guy back there..."

"We were right," he says, cutting me off. "I don't know why I thought it'd be impossible for them to get down here, that was Adalia's friend and now he knows that a kiat viris is down here with a human and he definitely knows about the chaos reigning overhead and—"

"Jesus, breathe!" I forced a weak laugh, trying to catch up with everything he was saying. "Kiat viris? Do I want to know?"

"No."

"Okay then." Definitely not a good thing, whatever it meant. "How come you were so freaked out by that bite mark?"

"Let's just say that MALIS is not holding back."

"Very helpful, thanks—"

"Riedeiss."

Several little bug-like things dropped out of thin air, one of them landing on my shoulder, and I batted it away. Kat raised an eyebrow with a quiet sort of surprise on his face.

"I didn't expect that to work."

"What are these?" I asked. But he refused to answer with a name or anything particularly helpful.

"An infestation. They're not common down here."

"An infestation of what?"

"Uh. Nothing dangerous to you. To me... it could be deadly."

"And is that to you or to fairies in general?"

"To me. Fairies and elves in general, this one, it can be... pretty ugly."

"Are we talking flu ugly, Spanish flu ugly, plague ugly or smallpox ugly? Because there's a huge difference."

"I don't think I want to know the difference between the flu and the Spanish flu. Uh, which is the, like, not-worst but not-best, there?"

"Probably Spanish flu if we want the least-worst of the really significant ones. Plague if we want the worse one."

"I do not want to know the difference between the flu and the Spanish flu," he said decisively. "These little things are probably less likely to kill you than the plague, if I recall correctly... but that probably doesn't matter."

"Seems more like malaria then."

"Of course it does. Look, do you maybe — ow, damn it, riedeiss — want to get out of here?"

"Are you okay?"

"Anya, I asked if you wanted to get out of here," Kat repeated. "I can't do much, I'm not really that knowledgeable about this stuff. If we stay here, I'm probably just going to end up dead."

"Okay, okay! Yeah, let's go."