Undefined - The Zephyr Book 1 ? (completed)(#Wattys2016)

Chapter 35 - Cello

Author's Note: The video on top is David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and the idea for the whole Zephyr came to me while listening to it.

35 - Cello

"We're here, B5. This is as far as these two ever went inside," Jika says.

I survey the layer around us. Underneath our feet and over our head it's all blue, semi-transparent goop, dripping from the layer above and bubbling up from the layer below. Inside the gooey blue stuff, I can see little glowing bubbles or beads. Mostly more beads in different shades of blue, but there's the occasional purple or bluish green and I even spot a pink.

I stick my hand into the blue slimy goop and pull out a dark green bead. It has a soft and springy texture and sticks to my hand, spreading out into a disc and then bouncing back into a ball-shape. I'm searching for something grey or black, something I can absorb.

Jika comes over to see what I'm doing, "Heh, that's cool, it's responding to you. When I touch them they instantly fossilise and turn to sand."

"If I were a green Jewel, what would it do?"

"These beads are condensed power, when a Green touches them they break into spots of light, then the Green just sucks up as much of them as he likes, the rest just dissolve back into the layer."

"How do they know how much to absorb?"

Jika shrugs, "Never asked. Guess they get trained or something. It doesn't matter to us, brother, now does it? Let's get going with this before we create an erratic field."

The Zephyr activity picks up around us because we have these bags of ash. Jika says that's because power is violently curious. For example, we have to eat Zribble for a week so that the Zephyr wouldn't treat us like an alien object but accept us as part of its own make-up. It was said that before the invention of Zribble, the power would be so attracted to the alien substances it would tear people apart to look at what they were holding in their stomachs or bloodstream. While organic human life isn't the issue, there is only a small variety of foods and in a very certain form that the Zephyr considers non-alien. Zribble is also infused with some of the Zephyr's own "materials" as Jika calls them. Not the power, but the actual wrapping of it all, the bouncy black stuff we walked on in the first layer, or the blue slime that holds the beads in B5. It is all collected regularly in boxes, dried up and used inside the Zribble formula.

Jika knows a whole lot about Zribble, because he works in the Factory.

I don't know Jika that well, but his mood seems normal, and Plunging just another mundane task. I can see why everyone likes him. Being around him is fun and I find myself laughing much of the time.

But the closer we reach our destination, the quieter he becomes, until I realise that his cheerfulness is only a ruse, he's hurting terribly. I don't know how I'd act in his place, knowing that the only reason I'm alive is because my friends died before me and gave the healers time to save me.

"How long did you know them?" I ask conversationally while we walk on, our feet making suction sounds as we sludge through the goop. Jika wants to find the Pool of Rainbows in this layer and make that their burial place. I'm glad that these two will have the proper respect they deserve instead of getting dumped in here like useless trash. I never thought that my first Plunge would also be a funeral but I guess I'm the right partner for this kind of thing. Death is part of my life, I know how it feels to lose people close to you.

"Seran and I went way back, I came a year after him, and we had so many things that linked us together. Markreet was twenty and had been in the factory for the past four years. He had a tough life before he came to the Zephyr, grew up in the lowest place in Rockdem, he practically lived on the streets. He was violent, they even said he killed somebody before, and he was addicted to substances when we got him. But we cleaned him out. The Factory was the right place for him, and he turned out to be a good kid once we learned to see past his rough exterior. You know, brother, the Factory is where they send the tricky ones, those that they're embarrassed about."