Kupopolis Archives

They used to say "all roads lead to Tasnicaport." And maybe they did. Hell, they still say something similar in Thebes. The only difference is you know they're lying. Or maybe the people who say foolish things like that just never spent as much time on the road as I have. Because in my experience, every road in this web leads to one of two destinations: trouble or a dead end.

And if you're really lucky, you get both.

It was night, and I was holed up in a little dive about eighty miles outside Kohlingen that truckers frequented. It doesn't really matter where I was from or where I was headed. I didn't care. But none of that garbage about the journey being the destination - I was just fed up with the shit life had dealt.

Until that night, I thought life had conspired to use war and death to take everything out of this web that could ever matter to me. Living is an injury that only death can heal, and all that drek. I was a real sad sack, and used to living so deep in my self pity that most days I wouldn't have noticed if the sun never bothered to come up.

I'd been dropped off there hours earlier by a man heading into the city on business. A cold mug of coffee sat on the chipped formica in front of me. It was bottomless, but since I hadn't ordered anything but it and some toast I think the waitress had decided to ignore me.

I didn't care enough to call her over. She was obvious busy watching her portable television on the bar, inbetween trips to deliver stale pie and greasy burgers. Neither the dumpy waitress, my fellow patrons or the drone of the television interested me, until she cranked the volume.

A panicked female reporter's voice pierced through the quiet truckstop. Her frenzied report seemed to concern a rash of crimes in Kohlingen that had started a week or so earlier. I hadn't heard of it, which didn't surprise me. Current events were of no use to a drifter.

It sounded like real end of the world, fire and brimstone type stuff though. Brother fighting against brother, people leaving their jobs to thieve and vandalize, arsons, murders, rapes. And then suddenly, it had stopped.

"Government officials won't comment, but experts theorize it was some kind of biological attack launched by Scande or another enemy of the State," the reporter said. "But so far, medical tests have turned up no definite cause of the madness. And for some, their lives may never recover. We'll stay with the story as long as it takes to find answers for you..."

I tuned it out again, as jangling chimes told of someone entering the place.

"Goddamn weird truckers."

I looked up to see a disheveled young woman brushing off her coat near the door. She glanced around the place with hooded eyes. Seeing every other booth taken, she slid in across from me.

It happened, sometimes. They say like calls to like, and sometimes other drifters would recognize me as one of their own. Usually that meant an excuse to make conversation or bum a smoke. I guess it must be comfortable, feeling like you belong even for a few moments.

I never feel that way, so I really wouldn't know.

"Take my advice," the girl said. "If you're planning to hitch tonight, stay away from the ICORR rig." She met my eyes slowly then looked back at the table. I guess she was pretty under the grime, and it was hard to tell but it looked like her voluminous jacket hid some serious curves. But I could tell from her eyes that someone had hurt her bad, and girls like that are nothing but trouble.

"ICORR," I said. "They contract for the government."

"Um. Just don't take a ride from that guy. He's seriously mental."

"You come from Kohlingen?"

She nodded. "Well, not originally. But yeah, I was there. I decided to get out when things went seriously bizarre. Almost enough to make a girl want to find a quiet place and settle down."

"Yeah," I said, and took a bolt of the cold coffee to wake myself up. It was time to move on. I stood and put a few geld on the table. There was a little extra there, which I half hoped the girl would notice before the waitress arrived. She looked like she needed a good meal.

"Keep out of trouble, kid," I said, turning my back.

"Wait, where're you going?"

I shrugged. "If that guy's weird as you say, he needs to be taught a lesson. Besides, I need a ride."

The rig was easy enough to find. The ICORR brand on the single trailer stood out among all the civilian rigs. When I stepped outside, the trucker had finished refueling. By the time I reached the rig, he was inside and had the sooty liquilyte engine rumbling. I pulled the passenger door open and hauled myself up.

The bulky man eyed me. "Presumptive," he said.

"I heard you pick up hitchers."

He nodded and threw the rig into gear. The movement was soothing and familiar. It was like coming home, even if it smelled funny.

"So you talked to that girl?"

"Yeah." I saw no reason to lie.

"Weird little bitch," the man said, popping caffeine pills like candy. "Here I am, giving her a ride out of that hellhole, and she tries to roll me. While I'm doing seventy on the highway."

"She tried to roll you?"

"You some kinda damn parrot? Yeah, she pulled out some kinda shiv and tried to stick me when I ignored her passes. Showed her, though."

"What'd you do?"

"Dumped her at that shithole," the man said, slurping a KuatCola. He looked over at me, and something in his eyes sent chills down my spine. Never taking his eyes off me, he reached out and turned on the radio. Some hack crooner from The West started clawing his way out of the speakers and into my ears. I focused on the windshield.

"That jacket," he said after a few minutes. "Don't see too many like that."

I shrugged, used to comments like that.

"Guess not."

"How'd you get it?"

"Charity." It was time to lie. "Raineric Army."

"No. No kinda man would give up a jacket like that to charity. And no way his family would, if he died. Where'd you get it?"

"Sounds like you answered your own question," I muttered, staring at my reflection in the dark windshield. My jacket was ratty, but he was right. It wasn't exactly normal, and marked me out as not being exactly normal either. The shaggy brown hair, unkempt beard and cold ochre eyes were all shiftless drifter, but the jacket was something else.

"So you're a STORM."

"Was," I said. "Left the army a long time ago."

The man whistled a long, low note. "I was EUS too."

"Not STORM."

"Regulars. But I always envied you guys. Even if they did fuck with your genetic makeup it'd be worth it, to touch something right out of history. Like the heroes that took down Kefka! What's it like, being near actual magicite?"

Not a conversation I felt like having. I'd been a STORM a long time ago, in what seemed like a different lifetime. Leviathans had clashed, and I had lost. But they say you never stop being a STORM, and on that at least they're right.

"Can I have it?"

I frowned. "Have what?"

"The jacket."

The man was giving me the eye, his lips wet with saliva and cola as his fat, red tongue ran along them. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth.

"No. Are you psychotic?"

"I'll give you anything. My rig, anything."

There was something peculiar in the air, aside from the driver's stink. It was like a rodent gnawing at the base of my spine. I thought about jumping out of the rig just to see how well I'd roll.

Then I felt the man's meaty hand on my arm, and I pulled back.

"Hey, watch it!"

"Please, I need it!"

There was genuine emotion in his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment I saw into his sad little soul. His pointless life was laid out like a picnic on gingham cloth. He'd grown up an underachiever, had an undistinguished military career and three wives, each one uglier than the last.

He didn't just want my STORM jacket. He physically needed it, like a drowning man needs air.

"Lay off." I shoved him back. A familiar feeling had started to broil in the deep of my mind, the same place that felt like a rodent had been gnawing at it ever since I got near the rig. I pushed it down, but it wouldn't be pushed.

I had left that part of myself behind long ago. When I'd left STORM they'd made me sign ominous legal documents to that effect. The changes they had made to make me into a better soldier, they didn't want me using on the outside. Which I was fine with.

But the trucker had really started to grind my stump.

"The jacket," he seethed, paying zero attention to the road. "Give it to me now. Give me now... give jacket..." He was drooling, silver globules of spit dripping all over the bench seat. He leaned towards me, and the gears of the rig started to clash.

"Pay attention to the road!" I shouted. It was too late.

Like a top at the end of its spin, the semi-truck jackknifed onto its side and slid off the road in excess of ninety miles an hour. Only my belt saved me being launched though the window.

The trucker, having unbelted to come after me, suffered that exact fate.

When the rig came to a stop, I unbuckled myself and fell against the window with a sickening crunch. I took off my jacket to wrap it around my hands, and was instantly struck with a feeling of nausea. My stomach went into revolt and started beating against my teeth.

I climbed through the hole the trucker had made, my hands protected by the STORM jacket he had wanted enough to kill us both. Free of the rig I stood on unsteady legs, still shaken from the crash. My stomach did cartwheels, and my mind clouded over. That place in the deep started to burn, and I could hardly keep it from exploding. I wasn't a warrior anymore. There were no enemies around for me to lay to waste.

I doubled over and emptied the contents of my stomach onto my boots.

Then the trucker crashed into me.

We went down in a tangle of limbs; he covered in blood and sweat, I in sour coffee and swollen bread. I slipped out of his desperate grasp and was on my feet before him, backing away towards the nearby forest by the time he had regained his footing.

"Give me the jacket," he moaned, one of his eyes staring blindly in the wrong direction. A deep gash ran up his face into his hairline, and his chest was crisscrossed with glaring red wounds. "Now. I need it."

I shook my head, and started to run. But I didn't want to run; I wanted to destroy. I wanted to fill the world with fire and burn it in the throes of my incendiary rage. There is rebirth in fire, as well as death. And more than anything, I wanted the world to be reborn in the fires of my own making.

And as I ran, it happened. I started to lose control, and sparks flew where my boots landed. I could feel the heat at my back as the underbrush became fuel for the flames of my mind, but the trucker kept coming. Over the flood of blood past my ears, I could hear his lumbering footfalls. My mind wanted to run, to get away from him, to save him from the fire that was coming out of my pores with the sweat. But something deeper and more primal wanted me to stop and to burn him to a cinder.

That primal force fed me images from my past; Scandian soldiers standing on the battlefield in ragged regiments, turned into pillars of ash before they even knew I was there. I watched battlefields erupt in earth, water and flame as I came upon them with my brothers. The fire burned hotter within me, and it was all I could do not to unleash it on the trucker panting behind me.

I almost dropped the jacket that was still wrapped around one fist, just for the pleasure of watching him fall on it hungrily only to be devoured in flames of my design. But before I could, I stumbled. It was like the fire that burned inside me had been doused. And then someone started screaming.

In my mind.

I turned, and the trucker was on the ground. Around us the forest was burning. The man looked up at me, a dazed look in his one good eye.

"Where am I?" he asked.

I remembered the news report of the events in Kohlingen, and the red and black ICORR logo on the side of the trailer. It had left with the chaos, and the chaos had come with it. Lingering effects of a biological attack?

Somehow, I doubted that.

"Run," I said, pointing away from the road, deeper into the forest. I didn't know what lay in that direction, or if the man could outrun the fire, but either way it was better than the hell to which I was about to return. He looked at me, obviously confused, tired and hurt. The injuries he'd sustained on flying through the windshield had apparently caught him up. But there was no time for licking wounds, so I reached into his mind and pushed.

I've been told that planting a suggestion like that with fire hurts. The strands that make it up, temperature and whatever else, aren't meant for dicking around in a person's mind. But I had other concerns than the comfort of a trucker who had nearly killed me. With the push, he got up and ran. I shrugged back into my jacket and also ran, into the fire, towards the screaming.

The night opened up before me when I left the forest, the kind of night you only ever get far outside a city. The starry sky spread out overhead, and I felt the fires of those cold balls of light calling to me through unknowable distances. I ignored it though, and focused on the overturned semi-truck.

Behind me, the fire raged. I could hear sirens wailing in the distance, and whether they were coming in response to the overturned truck or the forest fire didn't matter to me. I had to know what the trucker was hauling, what had caused so much pain and destruction and had awoken something in me that had lain dormant for so long.

I pried what had become the bottom door open. It slammed down to the ground with a force that sent me reeling back. Inside the trailer was darkness, but that was chased back by my hand ensconced in liquid flame. With that makeshift torch, I climbed inside, and the screaming in my mind grew more intense.

"Who's in here?" I asked, waving my hand around. Boxes had tumbled all over the side of the trailer that was now the floor in a haphazard manner, and I stumbled over them. Nothing struck me as peculiar, until I looked up.

Sitting in a chair on the wall, as if it were still the floor, was a rail-thin little girl. She could hardly have been more than nine or ten. There were tears in her cold, blue eyes. Her hands were cuffed behind the chair, and something lay crumpled at her feet. She wore a plain white shift and straw-straight red hair fell over her shoulders in a series of braids. Somehow, I knew she was the one who was screaming though she wasn't making a sound.

When I saw what lay at her feet, I nearly fell to my knees.

Crumpled next to her chair were the remains of what could only have been a Slave Crown. Painful memories came flooding back, and my hands started to move of their own accord. I broke her handcuffs and lifted her out of the chair, careful to touch no part of the Crown. If she had been wearing it at some point, it was beyond me how she had broken it. But I knew that I myself held no such power.

In my arms, the girl buried her face in the crook of my neck and I felt the wetness of her tears against my skin. A thought came into my mind unbidden, and I knew it wasn't my own. Even still, I wrapped her tightly in the STORM jacket and picked my way out of the overturned trailer.

"You're safe now," I whispered. I didn't know how, but it was true. And I understood she knew that too.

The jacket she now wore had certain attributes to repel magical and psionic attacks, affording the STORM some protection against mages that had studied their art for decades longer than the sparingly trained Marines. Somehow, the girl knew that. I wondered if she knew because I did, or if I wasn't the first STORM she'd crossed.

There would be time enough to unravel those mysteries, though. Whatever the girl was, the one thing I knew was I wasn't going to let ICORR deliver her bound and tied to the Esperian government. I would burn, first.

With her nestled in my arms, I stepped into the fire.