Gaia

Gaia

Chapter 1

The Covault trio was moving to Odin City, away from their cabin in the woods, and their ‘pet’ cat affectionately named NoLegs, thanks to him only having ‘arms.’ The cat was Rosalie’s, and it really tugged Allastar’s heartstrings seeing how sad she was that she couldn’t take him into the metropolis. Linus told her this, but even Allastar could tell he almost didn’t want to tell her. This tore Rosalie apart, and she almost tried to stay behind.

Well, there they were. Everything packed that they could carry out of the cabin, and gone. Currently, they were wandering through the off skirts of the Poison Marsh and almost along the shore of Jade Lake. Allastair looked to Rosalie, who walked with her head down.

“Ugh, we’ve been walking forever… You alright Rosalie?”

“Yeah, e-except for NoLegs…”

“Still miss him, huh?”

“Hey, it’s not like you care about animals, just let me be sad.”

Allastar didn’t reply. Linus sighed and spoke.

“Well, let’s stop once we’re away from this marsh, I don’t think this would be a good place to set up camp. We wouldn’t want another run-in with those poison muck golems.”

Linus was mentioning one he fought before, with a lance-spear hybrid donated by the Apple Army. That’s what the cats prefer their military force to be called by. Of course, it was the cats of the Kitten Kingdom, which NoLegs was from. A simple roamer he was, without a job, so really it was good Rosalie found him. At least, that’s what she argued. He hopefully didn’t decide to stay in the cabin and he went back to the forest monarchy, otherwise, Linus thought it would be ‘pretty bad if he did.’

An ‘eternity’ later the marsh turned into a little bit of grass and sand, and instead of purplish-brown murky water, it was beautiful turquoise water, signifying they had reached Jade Lake officially. Allastar, always the first to complain, asked Linus;

“We are at Jade Lake, right?”

“Yes, we are.”

“So let’s stop!”

Allastar stopped and sat down, forcing Linus and Rosalie to stop too.

“Might as well.”

Linus unpacked the bag he had and set up a tent thing, and Allastar made a fire. When they were settled, Rosalie sat staring at the water, eventually speaking up.

“Why are we leaving anyway?”

This was a question for Linus, Allastar sat silently.

“We, just have to, okay?”

Allastar knew he was lying, but Allastar didn’t tell Rosalie that.

“Let’s sleep, okay Rosalie.”

Rosalie nodded slowly and crawled back towards the fire.

“Uh-huh, alright.”

They eventually all fell asleep. Allastar’s sleep was at first dreamless, as it had been for as long as he could remember. Except, when remembering his mother. There it was, a dream again, but really, to him, a nightmare. Of sorts, if you just call any bad dream a nightmare.

Allastar woke up with his face feeling like it was coated with something around his eyes. He rubbed it off, knowing what it was. Tears, he knew without having to actually know. Besides that, he forgot it and carried on.

Everything else to mention that morning was uneventful, and the trio started off once again. Allastar stopped occasionally to pick up something shiny, eventually dropping it, sometimes showing it to Rosalie. He thought about a lot while walking, and they stopped for food and such until they found a rickety fence. By then, they moved away from the lake a bit, but they could see the fence and the lake just by turning their heads. Allastar mentioned it.

“Linus, what is that place?”

“To be honest, I don’t know.”

“Then let’s see.”

Linus paused and sighed.

“Alright then.”

The trio turned towards the run-down area. They found a locked gate, which Allastar bashed open with a rock before Linus could stop him. Allastar waltzed in.

bad idea

The other two followed him, and the gate shut violently, then with a rumbling anticipating it, a giant, gross, thing burst from underneath the ground. It was a death worm.



Chapter 2

Rosalie, staring up at the revolting creature, which was drooling acid, froze up. She stared at the empty abyss that it had for a head, but was knocked out of a trance when it’s sharp, spear-like tail surfaced close-by the head. Linus turned to her.

“Rosalie, we need to fight, get ready!”

Rosalie frowned and nodded, not really excited about it, but aware there was no getting out of it. She watched as Linus prepared his telescoping lance, and as Allastair stood in a fighting stance with a light short-sword. Sure, the Covault trio were regular kids, but living in the forest meant they had to learn to fight. Rosalie hesitantly readied her bag of alchemical flasks and short bow, making sure she had some flasks of neutralizer for acid.

Rosalie acted first, lobbing a timed flask of neutralizer towards the worm’s head, which exploded in its mouth, ruining its main form of attack. This particular worm, luckily, was small for it’s kind, so when Linus and Allastair ran towards it, they didn’t get completely clobbered. Linus stabbed a hole in the head near where the beast surfaced, which left a large brown-red circle that oozed a similarly colored viscous liquid. Allastair made quick, deep cuts in it, and the creature reared in pain. It then attempted to smash Allastair into the dirt but got distracted when Rosalie fired a fire-chemical tipped arrow into the tail, which ignited it.

The death worm, forced to put out the fire, dragged its tail underground into the moist, choking earth. To do this, it pulled its head further out of the ground, which gave it more movement in it’s head. Seeing this at the last moment, Allastair ran away.

“Linus, get out of there!” Allastair shouted to Linus, who was ignoring him, standing defiantly with his lance pointed at the creature.

“Linus, please!” Rosalie shouted, terrified.

Linus looked back to them for a moment, grinning, then looked back to the worm and charged towards it. He aimed for the nexus of a web of bulbous, pulsing veins that spread across the worm’s lower body. There was a moment of stillness until Linus pulled the lance out of the no-longer-pulsing nexus and the freak of nature pointed it’s head to the sky, letting out a loud, deep screech of pain before it flopped over to the side, dead and bleeding in multiple places.

Linus walked back to the others, smiling. “Well, we did it. We killed some demon.”

Linus lead them out of the graveyard and the other two gladly followed him. They quickly went to the path along the lake again.

“Let’s not listen to any more of Allastair’s suggestions,” Rosalie mumbled.

“That should be given, shouldn’t it?” Linus replied.

Allastair rolled his eyes and sighed. “Let’s just keep walking, okay?”




Chapter 3

Allastair and Linus were talking, absentmindedly. Allastair had pointed south, his hand lazily hanging in the air.

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever wonder what’s out there?”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries, isn’t it? Like, if we’re all alone floating on our rock suspended in space, or if there’s some ancient civilization out there just waiting to be discovered, or maybe by some abyssal coincidence that they’re out there too, staring back across the void. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.”

A long pause.

“What? I meant like, what’s there, that scraggily looking rock.”

“Oh, I… yeah.”

“And what was all that stuff about an ancient civilization, and the void?”

“...Nothing.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright... Hey, where’s Rose?”

They looked ahead to see her running towards a building, excited to finally arrive at Odin City.

“Uh oh.”

They ran after her, struggling to catch up, especially since she had a headstart and was already faster than both of them. She finally stopped when she was well into the city. Allastair and Linus eventually caught up, breathing heavily. They had seen the last of the farmhouses, and they started seeing suburbs, all in straight lines pointing towards the very heart of the city. Not only was the heart the center of the city, and the busiest place in the city, it also produced nearly all the power needed for Odin.

“Woah, jeez Rose…” Allastair said between breaths, “Couldn’t you have at least waited a moment.”

Allastair sat on the curb, and soon the others joined him. Rosalie was the first to stand up.

“Let’s keep going, there’s nothing exciting here!” Rosalie shouted enthusiastically.

“Can we please just wait a bit longer?” Allastair pleased, but Rosalie was already walking away, humming.

Linus reluctantly followed, and Allastair behind him.

Soon, the houses turned to apartment buildings, buildings to complexes, and eventually, to taller and taller skyscrapers. As they walked they passed bird people, men on stilts, a few cats with fedoras, performers on the street, a man with an accordion who was named Thaw-mi-el and a woman with (by Rosalie’s counting) 17 desert monkeys, friendly little creatures that enjoy being around people like this woman who had huge hair. One of them jumped onto Rosalie, then Allastair, then Linus, then back to the woman.

Then they saw it, the heart of Odin, a massive structure displaying the feats of human engineering and vital to the city’s functions. The best part about it is that it’s completely green, although the telltale smog that hung over the city, blocking out the sun and drifting up into the mountains, isn’t quite gone yet.

As they walked through the city, the sun began to fade away in the distance. The sky turned colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. It was like every day on Gaia, but for some reason, people were watching the sunset, even though it was normal. Linus stopped to look out to the sunset and then he saw it. Allastair and Rosalie noticed him stop, then looked out to the sunset too.

There it was, a silhouette of a large ball-shaped floating object off in the distance, and another shape, but more flat and spinning, obvious by the arms that came off of it with elegant designs. This invoked several emotions; wonder, terror, excitement, fascination, and an underlying, persistent sense of dread.