Compendium Effect : : Tolen's Trial

Lucid Evolutions

"I was followed. No other explanation," Cade said.

"Or it's all on you."

"Dude. Seth," Oz pleaded.

Seth made to speak but a passing barge tug chugged through the inky river forcing him to wait.

"We were desperate and we are not often unprepared," Cade said.

"He's fulla shit. Ancient alien—come on," Seth said, his native Pittsburg accent prominent.

"And I want to say I regret getting your servitor captured," Cade said. "This roundabout way is new and different."

"When is the part where you tell us just how the hell you found our work?"

"I'm starting to see what she meant," Oz said.

"Who?"

"Nobody," Oz said.

"Convenient," Seth said, the target of his retort ambiguous.

"I was experimenting. My hope was that our intelligence was correct—that Sap—err, your kind's dreamscape interfaces with its evolution process. Before you kicked me, I was asleep and in a lucid state, attempting to harmonize my resonance with the ancient image that kept coming to me. Everything became distorted, as if passing through a mirrored sphere and when the woozy feeling stopped, I was hiking the knife-edge of a volcano cone. I saw a lake of water brilliant blue green and climbed down several hundred meters. Noting the lack of rising steam, I discovered scene was analog—what you would say is illusion. A great web attached to the lakeshore all around it. The center of the web, very much resembling that of the trapdoor spider, formed a funnel and then a crude portal, booted to framework, parting the deep water."

"Crude, he says," Seth said.

"Don't start," Oz said.

"So, you believe this nut case? Our finest work, our best construct is 'crude'."

"Learn you a thing. He found the whole business by accident, looking for something else. Something else we never knew existed," Oz said.

"Fine," Seth said. He reached and drew from under his courier bag's flap a handsome bundle of marijuana. Setting it on his thigh, he rummaged and drew again a box of matches and a pipe carved of blue stone. "I figure what the hell. This Ass goes and destroys our servitor then says he's an alien—but I-R-L, fuck, we're the aliens."

"Technically, no. Your kind evolved here. Mine did not."

Amusement danced through Seth's heavy hazel eyes as he weighed what to say. Ultimately choosing silence, he returned his attention to choosing a bud large enough. He lifted one the size if his thumb, showing it to Oz. "We're about to touch truth, brutha," he said.

"In my defense, your servitor was not around on my discovery of the place. And, on my return trip it had taken form of a giant panda wearing a New York Mets jersey festooned with sequin.

"Festooned. Who the fuck says, festooned?"

"I took it for a trickster, not so much a guardian, which I had surprised by climbing down."

Seth packed the pipe. "We mortals use gates," Seth said.

Oz shook his head.

"So, on my second trip, I was bringing a walking staff back, retrieved from a memory, let's just say I'd located it on the dreamscape. After the hike down inside the cone, I found a wall of timbers built around the lake. But I thought nothing of it because, being so close to what your kind calls 'the astral planes" a change in form isn't unusual, and the structure presented me little trouble, as I walked straight through it. I was so preoccupied with how the walking stick's sentimental energy would ultimately translate that I did not see the red fox in a white top hat and monocle studying me from a rise a few meters to my left, until it gave a yip for my attention."