Titans of Chaos

A bright light below my feet and to the left pulled at my attention. I rotated back to my earthlyform, which has the best eyesight, and pulled in my extra energy-fans, so that I was little morethan a girl in a brown jacket and goggles, in free fall, weightless. My scarf fluttered overhead.

I was seeing a glitter of the moral strands that tied me to some object below. In a moment, itbecame visible: a streamlined shape of golden metal, its blunt head reddish with friction, an auraof heat around it. With my upper senses, I could tell it was propelling itself upward bymanipulating magnetic energy, powered by some sort of controlled hydrogen-fusion reactiontaking place in the chest cavity. There was a trail of expelled metallic motes behind it: Wherecosmic rays or other high-speed particles had disturbed the body on a cellular level, it had ejectedthe damaged tissue.

And I saw its inner nature: powerful, masculine, rational, slightly worried, slightly impatient.

Victor Triumph.

We matched velocities, and the golden humanoid shape directed a beam of radio-energy in mydirection. Like all forms of communication, I can read the internal nature and intention of themessage, even if I cannot pick up the radio blips in which it is coded.

"Amelia, this was gross negligence on your part. Your contrail is leaking exotic particles thatdon't exist in nature, some of them radioactive and highly visible. You may have given away ourposition. Come back down to Earth. We are going to have to sneak back to the island by acircuitous route. Vanity is going to have to arrange some sort of punishment."

I would have been more in a mood to be chastised by Leader Vanity if I hadn't reported to her justas she was posing nude for little Quentin. Quentin had dug up some white mud that, with Victor'shelp (and of course I noticed that no one can get anything done without Victor's help, the manwho should really have been in charge this whole time) had been transmogrified via molecularengines into a serviceable fine clay. Quentin had no kiln other than a corner of concrete withsome parts of a stone wall still standing, but he had Victor to come by and superheat his clayfigurines into porcelain.