The problem was, Ekstrom wasn’t sure if she was remembering right anymore. She’d run through it countless times in her head, from when the Code first told her it needed her to stop the lightning from somehow making direct contact with her Wonder to when a blast of static shock knocked her out just as she was walking back into her Wonder.
She wasn’t sure how long she was out from that, but when she came to her Wonder had gone dark. Then flickered back on before she left, and it’d been days since but she was still suffering from a constant and severe headache, waves of nausea, and otherwise unexplainable amounts of static. Her coworkers said the storms had been doing similar things to them, but from how they described their experiences it didn’t sound nearly as bad as what she was putting up with. As in, it shocked them but it hurt her.
At some point she just started feeling grateful she wasn’t getting any kind of burns from it.
And what possibly made it worse was how lonely and homesick she felt off-Wonder. Even in the hours after coming back, the feeling would set in and no amount of personal comforts did anything to make it go away–this gnawing, aching feeling from deep inside of her that would make her chest wrench in the most agonizing way. So she’d been coming back to her Wonder almost daily…but even that didn’t completely get rid of it.
Today she was back again, and had been there for a few hours already just…laying on her bed in the Knight’s quarters, at a loss on what to do.
“‘Active some defenses or something’ it said…” she murmured to herself, eyes closed as she went over her last conversation with the Code for the umpteenth time. She poured over the map so many times already, but this place was big enough that she wouldn’t even be surprised if she missed even the most obvious sign somewhere despite her efforts.
Still, after several more minutes of thinking…the maps made the most sense to try and find some indication of…something to hint at a defense system. The Code wouldn’t mention it if it never existed in the first place, would it?
The Knight rolled silently out of bed and plopped herself in front of her desk, moving almost on autopilot as she unlocked her console and pulled open the relevant files and moving them to the appropriate spaces. The power flickered as she did, but thankfully her currently built-up static wasn’t doing anything more than that. The 3D map soon manifested in its designated space. “Defense system, defense system…” she sighed as she pulled open her notebook to have it handy while she went over the map. Again.
Her efforts didn’t seem to go to waste this time, as she squinted at a portion of the map that looked…almost entirely useless. And it caught her attention simply because there was no way it would be on here if it was actually useless, which meant there had to be something there, beyond the obvious.
“Knowing me, I probably skipped over this because it looks so empty…” she muttered under her breath, and with a little shake of her head. It was a bad habit she sometimes had–manifesting mostly at work, her coworkers and bosses often knew to tell her to look again and to try to not skip ahead–and clearly something she had to start fixing.
Pulling her focus, she zoned in on the map and started trying to pick it up apart.
It was a completely blank field, except there were dots–markers of some kind, she guessed–that were laid out in a noticeable pattern, spanning the entirety of the space all the way to the marked borders. She stared for what felt entirely too long before it occurred to her that she could reach out and actually adjust the angle.
A quiet gasp escaped her as she realized, almost immediately upon adjusting the angle, exactly where the markers were.
She shut things down–a safety precaution at this point, given how iffy the power was because of the storm–and raced back outside despite the teeny tiny voice of reason in the back of her mind that told her it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to go out again given what happened last time. This wasn’t optional, though, as far as she could tell. If she didn’t at least grab one of those markers and bring it inside to study, she had the worst feeling that she’d continue to go nowhere with her search for this supposed defense system.
Ekstrom quashed any thoughts hinting at her doubts of its existence as she went, grimacing through the various static shocks she experienced all along the way.
The trek up to the surface was as it always was–long and particularly tiring given her current state, but she made it. The sky was as ominous as the first time she laid eyes on it in DC, and the air popped and crackled with the energy. She stayed by the stairs for a second, working up the courage to step out into the tundra before her. None of her previous visits here were particularly pleasant, but at least now she had a specific goal in mind for herself.
Doing her best to eye the surrounding area for one of the markers. Most of the closer ones had been destroyed by the lightning the immediate area was summoning, so…if these things did serve some kind of purpose, she had a feeling she’d have to start replacing these one at a time somewhere down the line. Eventually, she spotted one not too horrendously far away. The metal was just barely peeking out from underneath its camouflage of snow, and it flickered into her eyeline when a bolt of lightning came crashing down several feet ahead of it.
She was just steeling her resolve when more bolts struck, one after the other, as if in warning. Ekstrom, in her defiance at the storm apparently trying to get in her way, grumbled a few choice words under her breath before making a break for it. And she made it in almost no time at all, to the marker in question, quickly snapping it up and slipping it into the safety of her jacket in a rather anticlimactic sort of way.
Maybe she laxed too soon, though?
Because it happened again. Her hair stood on end. The crackling in the air seemed to get louder. There was a funny smell.
Ekstrom barely had time to react when she realized what was happening, and the violence with which she was knocked to the ground by another crack of lightning was enough to knock her completely out. She came to seconds later–or maybe it was minutes later? She wasn’t sure. But it was much the same as last time–a horrible headache, intense nausea, and the crackling now sounded like it was coming from her. Turning over, she was still on all fours when she wretched something fierce, expelling the contents of her stomach right where she was.
As if on cue, the crackling again intensified, and she was barely able to fall back on her back and pull her shield over herself in hopes that it would do something to absorb the incoming strikes.
It didn’t. Not for any of the three strikes that followed in quick succession.
When she again woke up, it felt like her head was ready to split open with how bad the headache was now. Her vision was blurry, and her body was the level of sore she normally felt after an intense workout. Luckily her stomach was already empty, so her efforts to stand were met with dry heaving but she had nothing to actually throw up. Lightning still struck at random around her, but as though it had made its point it left her alone as she made her way back.
As impossible as it was to admit, but the trek down had been even more challenging than the trek up. Along the way she checked on the marker in her pocket, and by some small miracle it wasn’t friend so there was some sense of satisfaction in knowing everything she was feeling now wasn’t for nothing.
Ekstrom did her best to steady her breathing as she went, each step a struggle as she just about dragged herself down and, eventually, into the safety of her Wonder. When the entrance closed behind her, she crumpled to her knees, and eventually fell face first onto the ground, the impact echoing in the empty main hall. The power was out again, and she could again hear the storm raging just outside.
She was one step closer, at least, and that had to be enough for now.
Closing her eyes, she felt entitled to at least a little nap before she headed back home.
1522 (gdocs)
Backdated to 3/12/25.
Backdated to 3/12/25.
