Apple of Discord: Chapter 3

It’s night, and you are in the clouds. There are flashes of lightning everywhere but no thunder. Your heart races, and you’re out of breath. There’s a crackling sizzle of electricity somewhere off in the distance. 

Below you a swirl of mist emits a soft light. As you try to move toward it, a woman’s voice behind you says, “Careful. That’s a long drop.”

You don’t feel surprised or alarmed by the voice, just curious.

“Who are you?” you ask.

The young woman is now in front of you, sitting on a bit of cloud that looks suspiciously like an air conditioning unit. She has shoulder length hair that fades from dark purple at the roots to vibrant pink tips.

She’s wearing a green sweater, faded jeans with holes worn into the denim, and combat boots. She turns a carved boomerang over in her hands then fidgets with the ankh hanging from her neck. 

“I’d ask you your name, but I think I already know.” The girl’s voice has a faint British accent.

She points at you with her boomerang. “Tatty orange shirt and a sword? You’re a Greek from Percy’s summer camp, aren’t you?”

“You’re obviously Egyptian. How do you know Percy?” you ask suspiciously.

“We all know Percy,” says another voice.

You both turn to see an athletic kid who looks like Curt Cobain. He’s wearing a green tee shirt and jeans. 

“And you are?” says the Egyptian girl.

The Curt Cobain looking kid opens his mouth and extends his hand, but cloud vapor instead of sound emerges from his mouth when he utters his name.

“That’s odd,” says the Egyptian girl. “Let me give it a go. My name is…”

Like before, cloud vapor emerges from her mouth the moment she utters her name. 

She narrows her eyes. “Hmm.” She speaks an incantation, in a language you assume is ancient Egyptian.

As she speaks, her boomerang flashes with golden light, revealing a tracery of tiny hieroglyphs. The glowing images on the boomerang float off into the air and toward her throat, where they fade into the flesh at her neck.

“Let’s try this again shall we? My name is…” Just more cloud vapor.

“Okay,” you say. “We’re in a dream, and we can’t speak our own names. Fine. Why are we all here?”

“Yeah, good question. I’ve had some pretty strange dreams before, but this is the first cross pantheon dream I’ve had, AND I have a really weird family,” the blond guy says, puffing out his cheeks.

“Where are we?” you ask.

The girl looks around. “Judging from the looks of things, we’re stuck on a rooftop somewhere between New York and Austin.”  

It’s a dream, you think. Normal rules don’t apply.

You see a cool flash of lightning below in the warm glow you saw earlier. It must be another rooftop.

Above you, an angry voice comes from the tall tower suddenly looming overhead.

“Find Meg and bring her to me, alive!
Kill Apollo and bring me his head.
I’ve cracked the seal on the necropolis.
You’ve got a nearly endless supply of undead warriors, and you are out of excuses.
Do not anger the beast.”

You recognize that voice. It’s Nero.

“Of course, your gloriousness! I have Fulgar tracking down the watcher as we speak. With him we’ll be able to find Meg and the others. We think he’s haunting a hotel in downtown Austin.” That voice belongs to Pontifex.

The images and sounds shift suddenly.

And the three of you find yourselves in the hallway of a fancy looking hotel.

The white marble floor has a rich brown runner of carpet, and the walls are lined with Victorian era portraits.

Every one of the paintings has either a single person or a group of people that stare at you relentlessly. Seriously, they have a staring problem, you think.

Then they look away from you, gazing at the northwestern wall.

The image swirls again.

You’re inside a dark, cramped space.

The ceiling is only about five feet high. The floor is a treacherous mismatch of broken concrete, stones, and wooden lathe.

It looks as though someone tried to build a wooden floor over the top of another, much older floor and somehow managed to forget that there were people over five feet tall in the world.

It’s like they added the ceiling above, thinking they were stopping here.

You hear a coughing come from the corner of the room and turn to see a ghost  of a man in a Victorian coat sitting at a desk, surrounded by spectral books. A lone lantern casts the same warm glow you noticed earlier in the dream.

Another man emerges from the gloom, looming over the seated man’s shoulders. He places a hand on the smartly dressed man’s shoulder.

He has his sleeves rolled up, and you can see his forearm is tattooed with a stylized weathervane. The tattoo sparks momentarily, and the seated man jumps as if he was just shocked.

“I knew we’d find you.” The man with the tattoos smiles, revealing two rows of rotten needle-like teeth. “Ghosts and haunts are my speciality.” He looks around. “Clever of you to…”