Stolen Sunshine

The sun was still high in the sky on Agahia when Karina had left for work. Hannah was going to be at her own work until well past their normal dinner time, so she had plenty of time. Today's task: make sure this new plane actually had a safe place for Entela to set up a new home. With less than a hundred years left until Volaria stopped existing – which thanks to Solari, Karina would be alive to see unless something got her first – they needed more places to move people. They had Agahia, but what if something happened to it?

Something like her.

Stop that.

Entela's tunnel first tried to place her inside of a tree. She could use her ability to planeswalk to avoid the tree – which was now missing a large chunk of its trunk and being supported only by the shimmering disk of the tunnel’s magic. Once the magic vanished, the tree realized it was over nothing and fell straight down. Then fell over, with the loud cracks of branches refusing to get out of the way and the rumble of the tree hitting the ground. That probably also meant that Entela now had a 3-meter-tall wooden log in their research tunnel.

Okay, so the original landing point wasn't safe. But, based on the rings of this tree, it looked like trees here grew pretty quickly. It was also about the same time that it was on Agahia – with the same bright sun in the sky –  so it might not be too bad to go between the two. It was warm, with a very slight breeze. Those coordinates needed to be fixed, though. Karina poked at her transceiver. The coordinates she was standing at were at the top of her screen at all times, so all she needed to do was open her folder for notes about… ‘Unnamed Plane 17’. That wouldn’t do, it needed a better name.

… Maybe she should get out of the forest before changing the coordinates that Entela had by a few decimal points. Or at least find a place where the coordinates can be a little bit wrong and not cause problems. Based on the position of the sun, every direction was equally unidentifiable, so Karina instead relied on her transceiver to tell her which direction north was, and went that way.

The ground was mostly hill here. Trees blocked out the sun, preventing grass from taking root, but there was a lot of dirt. The hill couldn’t make up its mind about whether it was going up or down, which left it a lot more like a place for a hike than any kind of town or city. Maybe there was enough room for an individual building here or there? Nothing that could make a large settlement without damaging the ecosystem. Karina kept trying to follow hills down – maybe there was a river or something she could follow to a larger place. They probably needed water anyways – it would be much easier to pull it out of the river than spend their limited aether making it. Every time she did that, the hill went back up – then went down further, and back up less.

Then finally went down far enough for there to be some minimal amount of water flowing. A small creek, narrow enough for Karina to just jump across it, ran down a small ravine held up by rocks and tree roots. A small path – maybe made by the constant movement of animals, or maybe completely by accident – ran down one of the walls of the ravine, made up of hardened dirt and weathered stone. It seemed sturdy enough to let Karina get down to the water’s edge.

It wasn’t much flow, but it promised a larger flow downstream, so she followed it. Aside from birds, animal life hadn’t made itself apparent, but there were trees of so many varieties, and other low-to-the-ground plants and mushrooms that would probably be dangerous to eat.

The creek widened only a little bit on its own. And worse, it seemed to lead underground, because it disappeared into a hole rather than into a larger river. Maybe if it were big enough, a source like that could be a good place to put a city? Entela was mostly underground anyways. Getting down there to find the water again would be a lot harder than it sounded, though. If it was that big, maybe there was a surface entrance somewhere?

While she didn’t find a surface entrance in the immediate couple of minutes, she did manage to find something else useful: A safe place for Entela to station people. The land here was flat, protected on one side by a large rock, and still had trees all around. It probably wouldn’t be good for a city – at least not one for people larger than stuffed animals – but it could at least be a place Karina could come back to.

Karina opened a screen on her transceiver to copy down her coordinates, and as she did so, noticed that she had a message. The message came from Master Sara, and was specifically marked as ‘non-urgent’. All it said was ''‘Message me when you can talk. We need to meet up.’''

Ominous. Buuut, Karina had just finished a task, and if she left, she could just come right back here. Maybe now was a good time?

Can talk now? Karina sent. She had spent so much time learning how to type Volarian, and then Hannah started teaching her all the places she can decide not to write words anyways. The shorthand looked the same to her as her messages as a little kid, but apparently it was different?

Sara’s response was almost instant. ''‘Meet at the main Entelan tunnel. I have something we need you to do.’''

Karina took a moment to check her coordinates again before sending a message back. On my way. The idea that Sara suddenly had something different for her to do was a little bit… concerning. Karina wasn’t even technically responsible for tasks coming directly from Sara; she had Seiva as the head of the Eternity Project above her, who was supposed to pass down orders like that. Did something happen to the Eternity Project? Did something happen to Seiva?

Karina took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. Entela, somewhere near the tunnel. She’d lived there with Hannah for many years. It hadn’t even been that long ago when they finally moved to a house in Agahia. She pictured the Tunnel, somewhere in the middle of the city of underground hallways, took a step, and let herself leave Unnamed Plane 17. The open, fresh air was replaced by stale ozone. The cool breeze was replaced by crushing heat. Rather than the rustle of leaves in the trees, there was a low hum of magical energy.

The hallway she now found herself in shimmered with magic as ripples skated across the metallic walls and floor. Where she stepped, a new ripple formed of silvery waves on a pale blue surface, interfering with other ripples further away. It wasn’t natural – far from it – but there was life here too. This was the life Hannah was more accustomed to than Karina was.

Now came the problem with Entela that somehow everyone else seemed to avoid: This hallway looked absolutely the same as every other hallway in the city. She could be literally anywhere and wouldn’t know it until she found a door she recognized. At least many of the other big cities – off and on Volaria – had street names or something so that people like her could find anything. The only labels anywhere were doors (sometimes), staircases, and elevators – and the last two only really helped her figure out what floor she was on. Instead, she was expected to use intuition, magic, and maybe her transceiver if the map was working that day.

Intuition was almost worthless without knowing where she was first. Magic, though… According to Hannah, if she could feel for the aether in the air, it would always be moving away from the Core, the big reactor that powered everything in the city. It would do nothing to help her find the tunnel from the Core, but since they were in the same area, it would be a start. All she needed to do was close her eyes, feel the magic in the air like Hannah tried to teach her. This was far easier when the only aether was in a small box and a battery, instead of literally everywhere, walls and floor included. Focus on just the air. According to her, the walls and floor should look like blocks where aether wasn’t flowing the same.

Unfortunately, Hannah’s description only kind of worked, because the aether in the walls was constantly moving. And more vigorously than the aether in the air Just blocking it off was way too difficult. Instead, she had to force herself to picture it, feel it, and then consciously ignore it when feeling for the aether to move. It never worked as quickly as Hannah’s. But it could eventually work, a little bit. She could start walking in a direction. Hopefully she wasn’t too far out.

As soon as she had a direction to go, she consulted with her transceiver’s map of Entela. Aaaand it was as useless as she expected it to be. For now. It had every detail mapped out, including apartments and classrooms. It showed her where the Tunnel was compared to the core, and let her flip through the various floors once she figured out which floor she was on. The problem was that it had no idea where she was – an issue with planeswalking the way she did. Hannah was confident that if she went through the Tunnel like most people, it’d find her immediately, but she didn’t have that luxury most of the time.

Karina passed a couple of hallway intersections before coming to her first staircase. According to her map, she needed to be on floor 3, and the staircase told her she was on floor 5. Did Entela count from the top or the bottom? She’d learned and unlearned this fact so many times for so many different planes that both options seemed correct. Surely Entela’s counting started at the ground floor, right? But big Entelan ships on planes that they could use them were labeled from the bottom.

While she tried to decide where she was going, looking up and down the stairwell to try to gain any sort of better plan, a high school-aged kid rushed up from the lower floor. They were probably on the way somewhere, but Karina managed to get their attention with a slight wave. They had a golden glow in their eyes.

“Uh, do you know where the tunnel is?” Karina asked them.

“Uhhh, arf tunnel?” the kid asked. They looked up through the ceiling at an angle. “Two floors up, straight that way,” they answered. “Not too far.”

“Great, thanks!” And before Karina could say anything else, the kid squeezed past into the hallway behind her. Two floors up, straight that way.

Maybe if she had more confidence, Karina could have figured that out herself. The instructions were simple, and once she got to the third floor, she realized she knew exactly where she was. The door immediately opposite this staircase – already a bit of a landmark in a place with so little detail –  had a little hand-painted sign that Karina passed by almost every day when she and Hannah were still living in Entela. She could totally track down the tunnel from here.

The hallway passed directly by one set of double doors that lead into the Core, where Hannah still worked most days. It was locked by a metal plate that only recognized magic from specific people, of which Karina was not one. That was the place that powered all of Entela.

From the core, Karina walked the short path that she walked over and over again with Hannah, from Hannah's workplace to the tunnel leading to Agahia. The door to the tunnel was wide open, but the only people present were engineers and military. There was a single engineer at the control panels, poking buttons and turning knobs that Karina couldn't even pretend to know the function of. The large glass cylinder in the center of the room was empty and even cordoned off. There were a couple people standing around, wearing Entelan uniforms and checking their rifles.

And then there was Sara, standing a foot shorter than anyone else and looking basically everywhere at once. Rather than a military uniform, she was covered by a black dress with a couple of yellow stripes along the edges of the shoulders and bottom of her dress, and black stockings from there to the floor. One moment she was giving numbers to the engineer, the next she was helping fix a problem in the weapons of the military. Then she was digging through a backpack of stuff that she had on the ground, and – did she just say something about a war?

“Uhhhh,” Karina started. Sara jumped and turned to her. Sara usually acted like she knew everything, like she could see things happening before they happened. Karina had never seen her surprised like that.

She calmed down the moment she saw Karina. “Oh, good, good,” she replied.

“Whaaat’s going on? You said war?”

“Well, so,” Sara began. “Yeah, war. Daira finally decided that they were done with our… agreements. Which, we were hoping it wouldn’t come to a fight, but it was kinda… inevitable.”

“Wh-Why? What made this inevitable?”

“... yeah, so. We have a bunch of agreements – maybe ones that aren’t long for the world, given the current situation – that limit how much we can share our technology with lower-technology worlds. Old 7CI documentation and stuff. The… problem with those agreements is that after we shared some of our tech, they implemented our lessons… strangely? In a way that causes harm to themselves and the environment around them, and our agreements stopped us from fixing their problems. It’s been going on for a while now, smuggling technology and information so they can update their tech, and we’ve just had to try to stop them to avoid… pissing off everyone else in the interplanar community.”

Most of that was stuff Karina already knew. Around 15 years ago, Hannah was caught by Sara trying to smuggle in the same way. Hannah never got in big trouble, but she was told she would be arrested and punished properly if she was caught again, so she stopped. That was around the time that the 7CI, an organization Karina used to work for, dissolved into nothing.

Sara continued without waiting for further input from Karina. “So now they’re fighting us for… probably vengeance, probably to get real technology on their world.”

Karina let out a pained breath. She knew enough to see there wasn’t going to be any easy fixes, but also that none of those fixes should involve her. “So, why do you need me?”

“Right, so. … grab this bag.” Sara used magic to lift the bag up to Karina. “Once I tell you what I need you to do, you’re going to leave immediately without waiting for further instructions, so I need you to have this equipment first.”

“Uhh…” Why would she say that? Karina could feel panic setting in, willing herself to stay focused for long enough. She took the bag and looked in it, hoping its contents would push her fears away. Instead, they just made her more concerned. A couple explosives, a pile of vials of yellow healing liquid, another pile of vials of water – probably with aether in it, if she could guess what they might be for. A transceiver, of the same newest model as hers and Hannah’s. And a metal plate.

Sara didn’t need to ask her any questions before immediately moving to clarifications. “Yeah, the plate’s is a return tunnel. It’s synced up to the tunnel at the Academy on Virilin. Hannah’ll know how it works. Transceiver’s hers too, I need you to give it back to her.”

“Back? She never takes that off! Why do–”

“That’s the problem,” Sara cut her off. “During the attack on Agahia – and don’t go there, because you might not be able to get back out,” Sara interrupted herself, as if she knew Karina’s first thought was to go to Agahia and try to find Hannah. “She was abducted. Taken some place off-plane, I assume. We got her transceiver back to see if it recorded anything – no such luck – but since then we’ve had complete radio silence. Apparently, this kind of thing’s happened to a couple planes before, one called Ixalan and one called Intera. Things can go in, but not come out. I’m hoping they’re working to fix it.”

“Interdicted,” Karina said under her breath. The 7CI’s version had been lost ages ago, but… She reached a hand forward and lifted. A rectangle outline appeared in her hand, then all at once filled in with the shape of a gadget much less sleek than any of Entela’s. “I’ll need this back.” she started. “But this does the same, just at room-size. It might help you figure out their version.”

“I’ll get some engineers on it. Maybe if they can figure it out, they can get info down to Agahia.”

“And for Hannah,” she swallowed, “Probably not Agahia, is the best we have? We have no idea where she went?”

“Not a clue. According to Leritha, Daira’s operating on something in the range of 20 planes and they’re working on a map, but apparently they’ve got their own problem with Daira going on. So, as an official order, I need you to locate and retrieve our Head Engineer. Start with Daira, try to remain discreet until you know where she is. Once I’ve got a map from Leritha, I’ll send it your way.”

Daira. She’d been there once or twice, but never very far. She could feel for it, but who could know if she’d be in the right place? And it was mostly islands too, so how was she even going to be able to travel around there?

Karina looked at the ring on her finger, the one Hannah gave her so long ago. "It's magical," Hannah had told her. "So that we can always find each other." Hannah said it romantically the first time, but now that she actually needed to know how to use it…

She couldn't keep thinking about it. Not yet. She needed to get moving. Her sunshine needed her.