Runestones

Operation: Runescue Mission is a go! Or no, it absolutely is not; whispering that aloud to yourself for the first time reveals how absolutely fucking dismal that portmanteau is. Good lord.
Well, luckily you’re going to have plenty of time to workshop a better name as you search for a handful of very specific, small, stone-like objects on the beach. In the dark.

It took you 30 minutes alone just to get down the horrifically dangerous ‘stairs’ (alleged) carved into the cliff-face that constitutes the only way up or down this particular geological formation. If this is the beach that you washed up on, you wonder just how the fuck Chrome managed to carry you back up to the top without braining the two of you. You can barely carry your phone torch without feeling like you’ve not got enough hands stabilising you.

You still can’t justify going out during the day, but you also can’t just send your new furry friends out to go sifting for rocks in the sand for you. Plus, you can vaguely sniff out the more powerful runestones to a general area, since there’s effectively no interference from the environment here. It’s not gonna be that bad.

Then you step in a really slushy bit of sand and feel a thousand envies for your friends who have night vision.


Exhaling and shaking the sediment from your shoe you center yourself and walk dead straight toward the strongest energy source you can feel. It’s weak, the kind of thing that usually gets lost in the background radiation, but it’s different here. You kneel down gently in front of a pile of pebbles toward the cliff face and start to sift through them. You aren’t looking for stones per se, since most of the runestones you’re looking for are just like, little packages of spell components. They’re made of a few different materials, and as you manage to make out a familiar symbol on a crumbly stone from which you feel no energy, you remember some of those materials are probably soluble. Rats.

You lean forward and scrape through the pebbles faster, trying to spread the pile onto the sand for easier depicking. While you’re as good with your runes as any no-cool-extra-forms-magical-creature tends to be, you aren’t the best when it comes to having the more complicated ones memorised; and you CERTAINLY don’t have the chemical components committed to memory like, at all. That’s just not something you have to deal with. It’s like being one of those people who knows how to make their own toothpaste. Like yeah, cool when the apocalypse hits but until then just buy it? It’s not like you were supposed to know you’d end up in some far flung universe with no magic whatsoever! Oh thank fuck, there’s your reusable minor illusion knucklebone. You were really worried you’d lost that one.

You thumb the crevasses of the carvings, expunging a little seawater from it as you run along the grain. This was the one you were sensing. It’s got a higher capacity than a store-bought illusion rag. You made it in school last year and did a pretty good job. Got an A. Everyone had to source their own bones, but all that really meant was asking around butchers or literally any were-folk for leftover whole-mutton. Tyr and Nicole brought in enough for half the class between them, though you ended up carving Tyr’s for him since the longer rune sequences aren’t really his bag.
There’s 4 of 5 decent charges in it still. Rolling it over in your hands you sink back on your knees, the excess pressure squeezing damp out of the sand and into your shins. Nobody really took that lesson seriously at the time, not even you- since, let’s be real, this thing is useless. But it was fun. You wonder if anybody else even…

“Hey, you’re that dirt guy, aren’t you?”

An unfamiliar voice sends you into a panic. You scramble to your feet and let loose one of your freshly regained charges, casting a sudden illusory image of something.

“WhwhwhwhAT THE FUCK?!” Your uninvited visitor staggers backward, shaken, giving you enough time to run.


But run where?! You swallow hard and look up at the 20 foot sheer cliff that stands as your only escape route. You are unilaterally, unequivocally, fucked.

“What ARE you??” You hear from behind you, the voice shaken. You give yourself half a second to make a decision. That decision is violence, let’s go-

You spin on your heel and tackle your opponent to the ground, knucklebone still in your palm as you push their shoulders into the shore.

“Do not tell ANYONE that you saw me. They won’t believe you.” You snarl. It’s like you’re reading off a script. This is what you do, right? You scare them into silence. That’s how Mothman does it, you think. Actually no, he just screams, doesn’t he?

The babbling ‘I won’t tell anybody I swear!’ from your target subsides as they notice the brief, genuine introspection on your face as you mentally calculate whether or not you could pull off a good enough scream.

“Wh- What’re you gonna to do to me?” They grimace, but you immediately recognise a marked decrease in fear. Shit, you blew it.

You open your mouth and close it again as you run a blank on follow-up threats. “I… Uh…”

There’s a beat of silence.

The guy you’re pinning down shuffles their shoulders and seems to realise you’re not that heavy. They begin slowly lifting themselves from the ground with you still on top of them, without too much effort. “Soooo…”

Your bravado immediately crumbles into frantic pleading.
“Okay but please please please don’t tell anyone you saw me!” You hiss, terrified.

“I’m- I’m not gonna narc, don’t worry.” They stop midway upright, and give you time to shuffle off them. You do so, sheepishly. The two of you sit a little dazed on the sand for a second before a light catches your eyes. You squint into the beam. It’s coming from up on the cliff.

^“HEY!”

The distant voice belonging to the flashlight-bearer is unfamiliar and angry. Your new companion blurts out a curse and grabs you by the arm, dragging you upright as they sprint across the beach toward a rocky outcrop.

“Whwho’s that?” You ask, barely keeping your feet under you.

“Cop.”

“Police?”

“Yeah.”

Ooohohoohohooo, a troublemaker, huh? Between breaths you ask what kind of trouble they’re making.

They usher you over a slippery rock formation that’s a little too high for your liking and respond, “Graffiti.”

Slipping down slick hardstone you land in an ankle-height puddle, but you’re too busy avoiding an authority figure to care. You follow their lead into a beachside cavern and gather up enough air in your lungs to rib them.
“Parents are out and you decided to smoke weed and do vandalism?”

They sound genuinely panicked for a second.
“How did you know I was smoking weed, is it really obvious?”

You haven’t actually caught a whiff of weedsmell at any point during this encounter; you were literally just fucking with them. You make a note to ask them for the packet later to determine if the kid was sold oregano, because nothing about this guy makes you think they are older than 16. But for now you have more important questions. You can sense something in here.

“Anyway, who are you and where is this?” You’re drawn toward the back of this space.

“I’m uh. I’m Adder, and this is where my sister usually hides out. It’s got a back exit somewhere-- Onto a hidden bit of beach…” You hear them pace around behind you, their voice is wavering.

“Right, right.” Your hands shake more than usual as you fumble to turn your phone torch on. Your head is honestly starting to buzz, you’re wondering if you managed to hit it on something on the way in.

“... I’m Ali” You take perhaps a little too long to give your name. You’re distracted. You drop to your knees too hard and ding your shins on the rocky floor. The small piece of carved wood you pick up is covered in a bath-bomb residue of sludge. Both of these runestones are unusable. Well, the wooden one is salvageable if you dry it, but the fire effect it contains isn’t worth the evaporation. The partially dissolved gritty remains of what was probably a welding powder-pack is full-on worthless, though.

But these aren’t the one you’re sensing. You stand back up, wobbly, and try to hone in on it.

“What’re you doing?” Adder approaches you, feet sloshing the layer of cave water presently soaking into your shoes.

“Looking for something…” You mumble. Sliding a hand along the cave wall you point your torch into a deeper passage. Twisting your whole upper torso you turn to Adder, the shining torchlight giving you your first good look at them.

They’re purple- You keep meeting purple people it seems. They lack fur. Your first instinct is to say their head seems cobra-like, but you don’t quite know how ‘being a snake’ should be affecting the limb situation, since they seem to have all of them. Their tail is rather impressive, bigger than basically everyone else’s you’ve seen so far. The whites of their eyes are instead an amber yellow, and they’ve little perforations along their snout.

“Uh-huh..?” They duck out of the glare of your phone beam.

“Oh, uh. Yeah it’s just… How deep does this place go? I can sense one of my runestones in here… I think it might be through there.” You turn back to the opening. It’s easily big enough to walk through, but narrow enough to look scary.

“Well there’s supposed to be a back exit in here somewhere, and this looks like the only way further…”

You stop before simply charging ahead yourself. “Can you see in the dark?”

“I can see temperature gradients, yeah.” Adder confirms.

The two of you switch places and Adder goes through first. The tunnel is on an upward gradient, making traversing it an odd experience. It’s only short, though; about two arm’s length. Adder joins you in shining a phone flashlight around. It seems to be a surprisingly sizable cavern; maybe the area of an average room. They look for the exit while you get yourself down to crawling in the standing water. Your nice flowing housecoat has been gaining damp for the last little while, no reason to stray away from obtaining more of it.

You push past the haze in your brain and put your phone between your teeth, supporting yourself on both arms. You don’t feel stable enough on just one. You’ve got it down to this general area, you’re just gonna have to feel around for it.

“Have you found that thing you’re looking for?” Adder calls to you from the other side of the space.

Their voice is tinged with worry, but you’ve no time to process it.  As soon as they asked, you managed to put a hand right on it.  You blurt out a ‘YES!’, almost dropping the phone from your mouth as you do.

You rock backward to kneel upright and hear Adder approaching through the puddle you’re sat in.

“What is it?”


You use your now-spare hand to free up your teeth. “A warp runestone. I could use this to figure out the materials I need to make an efficient set…”

You palm it and note that it's some kind of tumblestone. You tend to always use at least one higher-quality warp rune per teleport, made of a harder material which won’t just instantly disintegrate upon use, so that you can use it as a return point if you want to warp back. This is one of the fancy ones. If you were to make a guess, you’d say it’s maybe milky quartz.

“So… About ^the-!” You both freeze up as you hear the sounds of watery footsteps outside. The two of you simultaneously move to press your phones to your chests to block their respective light sources. You’re very, very still.

“Oh fuck this. I’m not going in a fucking cave.” You hear the voice Adder earlier identified as a cop grumble outside the cavern’s entrance.

You’re hopeful for your safety for a moment, until her voice raises to a bark, and she addresses you.

“I know you’re in there! I can smell you perfectly well over all the fucking brine!”
The smack of a hand against wet stone rings out and bounces the cave walls.
“Tide’s coming in! If you don’t want to be trapped in there until sunrise, you’ll do the smart thing and come on out!”

Ah. You take a few things into consideration and they resolve themselves in your head. Here’s the process:

Consideration one: Unlike lakes, oceans have tides.
Consideration two: You walked upward to get into this chamber.
Consideration three: You found your runestone up here.

Reasonable deduction:
This runestone made its way in here from the ocean, ergo, this chamber fills at least partially with water at high tide.

You turn your phone back around and point the light around the cavern. Oh that’s really cool. You tug on the sleeve of Adder’s hoodie and silently point to the watermark that is more than midway up the wall. They return you a moue.

“So where’s that back exit?” You whisper through teeth.
“Okay so that was the thing I was like, juuust about to tell you…” Adder gives an awkward gummy mug. Your face drops from a caustic smile to an aghast stare.

“I think this is the wrong cave.”

There’s no time to think. You can’t get risk getting caught by fucking police, but you’re not a fan of drowning and hypothermia either. You can come back for the runestone if you really need it but you’re pretty sure it’s quartz and that’s all you need to know. You have your knowledge. You push Adder back to give yourself the space and start drawing in the sediment. You’re going to be going less than 100 feet, one stone is enough.

“Ow- Hey!” Adder whispers their complaints.

“I’m getting us out of here. I can get us back on top of the cliff. Get ready to run.” Whereas, you’re barely whispering at all. It’s more of a hiss.

You grab the length of his arm with yours, hand gripping just below the armpit. He seems to get the message and squeezes your shoulder. You visualise the empty plot out back of Chrome and Tabitha’s as hard as you can and just hope against hope that you don’t break anything important on impact. The familiar sensation of your stomach turning like you’ve just gone over the first hill of a rollercoaster hits--

And then you wake up in bed.

You blink rapidly, trying to reconcile the experience. You roll your neck to the left and adjust your eyes to the fluorescent lights. This is not a familiar house.

You should be panicking, but you’re too exhausted. You can barely bring yourself to move. When you actually manage to draw up enough energy to roll from your back onto your side, it’s as if the rest of your body finally wakes up and has started screaming without you. Your stomach feels like it just collapsed in on itself and you crumple into a ball. Quiet as you wanted to be, you can’t stifle a groan of genuine pain as it all falls on you at once.

Through your haze, you can hear the sounds of somebody moving around pretty hastily, followed by a burst of speech that you don’t quite comprehend. You recognise the voice as Adder’s, though, you think.

They’re talking in a worried tone and you’re catching occasional words that vaguely coagulate into a “Oh thank god you’re not like, dead.” kind of sentiment. You decide to try and thank them by wrenching yourself out of the fetal position enough to make eye contact. A smile is attempted, but you’ve no idea if it works. It makes them stop talking. This does not help determine whether or not it worked.

You take a couple genuine shots at speaking yourself, but even you can hear that your ‘What happened?’ came out about 7 syllables too long.

Your eyes stopped being able to focus on anything back when your body decided agony was the answer, and you can just about see the purple and pink blob that constitutes Adder lean in closer toward you as the words coming from them slow down enough for you to properly comprehend them. You think they’ve just realised just how out of it you are.

“You teleported us back up the cliff, like you said. But you immediately collapsed and were out cold for ages… I only lived like, a block away from where you got us, though, so I just...carried you home.”

Fuck, okay, that’s not supposed to happen but it makes a lot of sense. That’s why you’re fucking starving. You must have used your own body to cast the teleport, since there’s uh, zero ambient magic in this whole goddamn universe. You probably just burned a marathon’s-worth of calories in one second. 20 different thoughts hit you at once and cancel each other out to become a high-pressure brainfog. You manage to get the right sounds out to communicate something, though.

“I-I’m… Really, fucking hungry,”

Adder says something and then leaves the room, re-entering about a minute later carrying something that you feel them put down on the bed next to you. Still clutching your stomach, you use your other arm to claw the air until you can find them to pull yourself upright. The change in elevation does not treat you well, but you regain your bearings best you can. The cold air on your arms alerts you that your coat was taken off at some point before you woke up. A larger-than-average square medicine tablet is placed in your hand. Huh.

Adder catches the confusion on your face and informs you that it’s a glucose tablet, and to chew it before swallowing. You guess that makes sense, a sugar tablet is probably a pretty efficient energy intake to start with. It feels like chalk, if chalk were more chewy, and tastes very sweet. They hand you a fizzy drink that tastes much the same. Just pure sweet with no other undertones. Either your perception is really fucked up or they’ve got some specific tastes. You down the full bottle in seconds.

“Feeling any better?” He asks.

“ -- Yeah,” You respond. You’re a little out of breath from drinking a whole bottle of soda in one go, and you can hear it in your voice. You realise you can actually kind of, uh, see, now that you’ve presumably got some sugar circulating your brain again. You blink and take in the room. It’s lit pretty bright with a row of lights studding the ceiling, and otherwise seems to be a pretty regular bedroom. There’s posters. Other items. Stuff.

You look toward the object Adder put down on the bed, it’s a clear plastic tupperware filled with primarily chocolate.

“Can I?” You are polite. Jesus Christ you’ve never wanted to eat something so badly.

“Uh, yeah. Obviously.”

Within seconds of Adder’s response you have opened the box and are tearing into the first chocolate bar you can get your hands on. It literally takes you eating half the thing before it registers that it contains nuts, something that usually repels you from a food. It’s a good job you’ve not got an allergy.

Any other day, the volume of candy you consume would be embarrassing but this is what we in the business call ‘Extenuating Circumstances’. By the time you’re done you’re certainly not nourished, but your brain is functioning again.

“If I’d’ve known you were diabetic, I would have used some glucose gel while you were still out, sorry.” Adder apologises as you roughly wipe your mouth with your knuckles. Huh? No, you’re not diabetic. You just burned a like, dangerous amount of calories too quick and knocked yourself out. Y’know. Magic stuff.

“Oh. Well okay then.” Adder looks relieved but puzzled.
Your brain begins sifting through its backlog of thoughts and you fill the space with some small talk.

“Are you? Is that why you had sugar tablets?”

“No, no. Not me. My sister.”

You visibly seize up with anxiety. The thought backlog stalls again.
“Shit, are you sure they aren’t gonna tell anybody about me?”

Adder shakes his head. “We’re home alone right now. My sister is away, at university.”

“And your parents?”

“Visiting her. That’s why I was out doing, you know, illegal stuff.” They punctuate the last two words of their sentence with jazz hands.

You unclench everything again and ask how long you have until they get back. How long are you safe here?
Adder finally sits down on the bed next to you rather than standing awkwardly next to you, like they have been doing. “Until late tomorrow afternoon.”

Okay. Okay that’s fine. You push your fingers through your fringe to unstick it from your forehead. You’ve regained enough of your sensibilities now to notice how absolutely drenched in sweat you are. Gross.

With your left palm still on your forehead and your weight leaning back on the other, you sit. The trains of thought get themselves back on track and your unconscious mind gets to working through a few. You leave them running in the background as you fall back on small talk again.

“What’s your sister like? You said she used to hang out in the cave on the beach?”

“Oh uh…” Adder slides a hand along their cobra hood the way you’d put a hand through hair. “She’s kind of a troublemaker. She’s like, never gotten arrested, but she’s gotten way close before.”

“And somebody’s gotta keep up the level of chaos around here while she’s gone?”

Adder laughs, “Yeah, yeah.”
There’s a pause and then they shrug. “I dunno, I think I just miss her. I couldn’t go visit since I have shit to do tomorrow, but like, I’m feelin’ it, y’know.” he turns to you with a halfhearted smile and you feel a wound pry open.

“Do you have any family? I still don’t even know what you are, if i’m honest…”

You exhale a shaky breath and start, “Well, I’m basically an alien,” and then then your chickens come back to roost. You’ve remembered what you realised. Your sentence hangs on it’s conjunction and you stall.

“And… And…” Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. There’s so little ambient magic here that a routine teleport took you out; your magic really hadn’t recharged at all, it’s going straight to your physical body. It wasn’t just the rebound last time, it was the act itself. Individual runestones barely even make a dent in the cost. You would need multiple. You would have to charge multiple. You don’t know if you could charge one. You’d suspected it before but now it’s basically all but confirmed. You are trapped here. You aren’t going home.

“Hey, uh?” Adder snaps you out of your thought spiral and you shakily pull your hands from your face, where you’d had them cupped over your nose and mouth.

“Was that a… Sensitive question…?” Adder grimaces at you politely.

You blink back the formation of a couple tears and shake your head. “No, it’s fine.”

“I think I just miss them.”

They had to carry you when it came time to make yourself scarce. Your body had just about caught up with the loose skin you gained over your stay here, but now you’ve gone and gotten some more. Chrome remarks that you’re lighter when he pulls your staggering body off of Adder’s shoulder. You don’t respond and he doesn’t follow it up. You watch as Adder balks at the amount Tabitha hands him as ‘Keep Quiet’ money. You really ought to get a rough exchange rate going in your head if you’re gonna be here… indefinitely.

Your arms hang limp around Chrome’s neck as he supports the entirety of your weight himself, and you muse on your situation. Your blood’s cooled since your little freakout. Also literally, you’re colder now. The cool night air is too cold even with your coat on. You settle closer to Chrome and step through it logically once more. It’s been 2 months. Maybe even longer back on Earth. They’ve already had your funeral, if they’ve even noticed you were gone.

“One thing before you go!” Adder interrupts your introspection yet again.

He pulls out his phone. “We should exchange numbers, in case you need help again.”
Oh! That actually kind of takes you by surprise. You don’t remember the last time you exchanged phone numbers with someone? It’s all about instant messaging these days after all. You grab your mobile from your pants pocket and start to punch in the number Adder presents on his screen when the character limit comes up one short.

“... Oh right. This phone is from another universe. I don’t have uh, signal. And the phone numbers here are different” You say with a half-chuckle.

Chrome takes an arm out from under you and grabs his phone, presenting it to Adder.
“Here, put your number in mine for now.” He bumps his head against yours nonchalantly. “I’ll buy you one when we get back.”

Adder finishes typing and hands the phone back, and Chrome resumes a more stable carry position. You give a final thanks to Adder, and apologise for keeping him up so late. He says it’s no problem, and that he probably still owes you one for getting him away from the police anyway. Then, with all said and done, you head home under cover of night.

It’s fine, they’re not gonna miss you.