Everman and Sparky (Chapter 3)mature

Chapter 3

Two days after meeting with his beloved employer, Brice Watershaper once again found himself an unwilling passenger upon Mr. Wardell's exuberant airship. The little spook greeted him personally, and escorted him into the bowels of the flying fortress. He was clad in another of those crisp suits straight out of an old-timey mobster movie, only this time perched upon his nose was a set of half-round spectacles so small Brice wondered if they were cosmetic only. The man stood barely to shoulder level, but like before, the tall red feather of his hat soared well above Brice's own noggin.

The small, regal man lead his latest partner-in-crime to a series of offices nestled next his own. Procuring a ring of keys larger than his own head, he shuffled through no less than fifty of them before coming upon the correct one. He approached a wooden door, unlocked it, stepped through. Brice followed, and immediately his eyes fell upon the tall, alien object dominating the center of the room.

In a rough sense of the word, it was a doorway; a skinny, angular doorway frame sheathed in black standing erect upon a thin rectangular base. A large block of machinery, dark, rectangular and seemingly featureless in design, shared the base with the doorway, standing just behind it.

“What the hell?” Brice voiced aloud, eyeing the device suspiciously. Never had he seen its like before, and he would not have been surprised if suddenly it grew mouths and tentacles and tried to consume them all. It just looked so damn alien and out of place in the small, carpeted office with oaken veneer lining the walls.

Mr. Wardell paid him no mind, not bothering with a single explanation as if the feeble mind of his subordinate would never begin to comprehend its mysteries.

From a small writing desk of deeply polished wood, Mr. Wardell produced a small device most similar to that of a cellular phone. It was small, dark, wrought in plastic, and bore numbered buttons with digital display on its face. He was poking about the buttons as he turned back to Brice, speaking as he did so in his incessant nasal tone.

“This will, I've been assured, deposit you just outside Mr. Vance's central headquarters. You'll find that everything has been arranged for you, including your hiring and placement.”

“What is that?” Brice inquired, paying less attention to Mr. Wardell's lecturing statements and more attention to the device at the center of the room. It had begun to stir, becoming alive with a constant, mechanical hum and a soft glow of a hundred tiny operational lights within the large rectangular machination. Consoles and digital printouts had come to life on either side of the device, reporting strings of information displayed in an alien language.

“A Nexus Slipgate, I'm told,” Mr. Wardell replied nonchalantly.

Brice did not find the answer satisfactory. Every seemingly factual statement he had made thus far bore the afterthoughts 'I'm told' or 'I've been assured,' as if he didn't actually have the slightest clue firsthand what any of this did.

And that made Brice nervous.

“Mr. Vance will be expecting you as a new hire,” Mr. Wardell continued, not so much as looking up from the foreign phone-like device in his hand. Either that device had garnered his attention completely, or he didn't want to look a condemned man in the eye before signaling the executioner.

Deepening Brice's fear of the ungainly device, a doorway of shimmering black erupted into existence inside the previously empty door frame. The suddenness of it caused Brice to start. He leapt backward, edging along the wall, never removing his eyes from the seemingly-alien device.

The doorway had resolved itself as a shimmering image of the night sky, outlined with swirling, sickly hues of purple and blue. He swore he could almost make out tiny bolts of lightning shooting from the illuminated frame.

At last, Mr. Wardell looked up. His eyes, peeping out from behind those too-small spectacles looked, amazingly, bored, as if he had seen all of this before. He, with one hand, adjusted his small top hat, on top of which his single enormous feather rustled.

“They will be expecting you on the other side,” Mr. Wardell explained with a touch of impatience. Brice suspected that this whole affair had set him behind schedule.

“You want me to go through that?” Brice exclaimed, flabbergasted. He really began to suspect that his employer meant to kill him and dispose his body into space.

“If I did not intend for you to go to Mr. Vance's offices, I would not have opened the doorway for you,” Mr. Wardell glowered. Those beady little eyes half hidden behind those beady little glasses began to assess him coldly.

“Why not just take a rail car there?” Brice pleaded. The reflected, unsettled image of the night sky upon the doorway was mesmerizing, and at the same time disturbing.

“A rail car will not take you where you need to go, now enter the anomaly!”

Anomaly. Referring to his means of transport as a supernatural event rather than a doorway did nothing to ease Brice's worries.

But, on the other hand, Brice had no alternative. The only door leading out of this tiny office was likely locked, and if not, than he had an entire labyrinthine airship filled with Mr. Wardell's goons to navigate in escape. Plus there was Lily, happily absorbed into a world of fiction, and Brice here, suffering the cost of that bliss.

Swallowing heavily, Brice advanced upon unsteady legs. He must do everything he could to ensure his sister's comfort. He mustn't give Mr. Wardell any reason to rob her of that.

Brice stopped directly in front of the doorway. The light emerging from the anomaly cast the room whole in an otherworldly glow, filled as if with moonlight magnified ten fold.

He looked uncertainly toward Mr. Wardell, who had not moved even a single muscle while waiting for his employee.

“Have you ever been through here before?”

“I send underlings like yourself so I won't have to,” Mr. Wardell replied coldly. Again, that did little to reassure him.

“Is it going to hurt?”

“I'm told not.”

“Right.”

Bracing himself for the worse, closing his eyes tightly as if he didn't even want to see what would become of him, Brice stepped forward into the Nexus Gateway.