To Kill a God

Awakening

When Alphonse came back to his senses he found himself staring at a blurry ceiling. He was also in dire need of a bucket.

As he was trying to turn himself over, his hearing popped back in place and he could make out a few distinct noises. Someone was arguing, voice pitched high and panicked, while someone else--a woman--was making a few monosyllabic comments. There was also someone puking. A lot.

He blinked a few times, his eyes burning as they filled with tears, but it served to bring his vision back to something close to what it had been minutes ago. Around him, all over the ground and stacked in haphazard heaps, were torn books and pieces of wood.

The library, he thought. I was in the library.

This thinking lead him to two new thoughts: first, he realized that he was not, in fact, dead, or even substantially injured. That was good. Al could operate if he wasn't dead. Not being dead was a very good thing.

The second thought was that he had not been alone. Zips was there. Sophie might be dead.

He whipped his head around, searching until he found his little sister just a few feet away, kneeling with her face towards the ground. Her hood was still on, obscuring her visage, but she seemed alive enough. Vomiting quite a bit, but alive.

His third thought was that they had been caught in an explosion. This was not too surprising. The heirs of the Ardito cartel were quite aware that the enemies of their mother might want them dead. She had, in fact, trained them to deal with this.

Mind made up and things brought into focus, Alphonse jumped to his feet and tried to ignore the dizziness that made the world lurch around him. In one motion he found the two arguing people--his assailants?--whipped out the Walther P99 he had tucked in a back holster, and thumbed off the safety.

He didn't say anything, just kept the gun pointed somewhere at the ground between them. He took three long strides to place himself between them and his sister. If they opened fire on him, they might hit her too, but it was symbolic, and made for good drama. Being dramatic was half the battle, his mother used to say. To that end, be made sure the hood of his jacket was low enough to cast a shadow over his face. It helped that the light was coming from behind him.

The shorter of the two raised his hands above his head. "I swear it was an accident!" he squeaked.

Al blinked. Was the man green? Pushing the thought aside, he focused on the young woman beside him, blinking to clear the blurriness in his eyes. Her stance was making him rather nervous. It was a fighter's stance. One leg slightly forward. Knees bent. Hands open at her sides and ready to snap into a guard position. Al kept an eye on her as he spoke. "Zips, you alright?"

"I hate everything," his sister muttered. "This is worse than when mom caught me drinking Charlie's beer and made me down that bottle of bourbon. My everything hurts!"

She was fine, he decided.

He felt tears welling up even as the need to vomit subsided. With a few last blinks he looked around the library.

He was not in the library. Rather, he was in what look like a bachelor pad, if medieval Europe had bachelor pads. The room was spartan in furniture but opulently decorated with piled dishes and opened books. Stranges lights hung from the ceiling, casting a bluish glow across the wooden walls and scuffed wooden floorboards.

There was only one little window, and it was covered with a thick black blanket. Judging by the lack of light, he assumed it to be late at night or early in the morning. Or maybe there was another room on the other side of the window.

Most interesting of all were the appliances. There was a washer and dryer in one corner, made of bare steel with large, obvious rivets. The top had an embossed logo with GE on it and Gnomish Electrotechnics in small letters.