Carnival - A LitRPG Apocalypse

Evie had summoned a dome of air around her and Ryn to protect them from the winds as they flew east. This was not the optimal configuration for her to fly, she usually formed a diamond shape to cut through the wind with a tapered rear to minimise the wake she left.

“Good job ess-ing up Ryn!” Evie smiled at her little sister. “Straight to level two as well. You’ll be joining me on the Wall in no time!”

“I’m not so sure about that Sparkplug. Mum is my hybrid combat instructor now,” Ryn said glumly.

“Ha! Vic will get you ready in no time! You’ve got her powers but a personal teleport from Dad?”

“Kind of.”

Evie slapped Ryn on the shoulder making her stumble on the platform and bounce off the invisible dome surrounding the pair.

“Sorry! So you’re like Sunstrike but with the mobility of Traveller? And you don’t have the utility of Dad’s power to port other stuff and open portals so you won’t get stuck playing traffic conductor! It’s the best of both worlds! You’ll end up as an ultra mobile nuke!” Ryn thought about Evie’s words and concluded her crazy sister probably wasn’t too far off.

“I can’t do Dads rock drops though. Those are his most powerful attacks,” she replied.

“Nah. Those are his area of effect attacks. You’ll have fire for that. His best attack is just teleporting something’s head off. Baron of the Topping,” Evie smirked, knowing how much John hated that name, and Ryn smiled back.

“I can’t do that either,” Ryn pointed out.

They began to descend towards the Topping. John had expanded the glacier carved landmark and burrowed deep beneath the ground to create a large complex to house his red shirts as well as the equipment and “big rocks” he needed on a daily basis.

What had once been a conical hill standing alone a few kilometres from the forested cliffs that led up to the Yorkshire Moors was now shaped like a top hat of stone five hundred metres across. The top had been broadened and flattened, barring the peak upon which sat the house Ryn had grown up in. Around it John had laid down a large courtyard and garden complex which had several more homes belonging to leading members of Treehome’s teams.

The Tree towered to the north, stretching hundreds of metres into the sky and spreading its blue leafed branches across several kilometres of land. The Grove, where Ryn’s grandad haunted the trees in his Ent bodies, formed a boundary between the Tree and the Topping that only the craziest cultists from Ascension were brave enough to cross on foot. Much to John's annoyance there were still plenty of them making the journey on a regular basis.

As soon as Evie set down next to the main house Ryn jumped away from the dissolving disc of force and ran inside to change for dinner. Vic was already cooking with John in the kitchen and they both paused to greet the new arrivals.

“Puck steaks and roasted veggies plus a side of sliced boiled wasp eggs! Go wash up and change if you need to. We’ll serve in ten minutes,” said John happily. It was nice to have his children back together again.

Ryn shot off to her room, prompting John to grumble about her not understanding her power yet while Evie went to the fridge where she pulled out a carton of orange juice and a bottle of chilled Blueferm. Blueferm was the highly distilled beverage produced by fermenting blue fruit from the Tree that when mixed with OJ produced a sweet and highly intoxicating drink.

“You guys want one?” Evie asked as she began mixing her drink. Vic nodded before resuming slicing the boiled wasp eggs and Evie began to make her stepmum a drink as well.

“I’m good thanks, Sausage. I’ve got to keep a sharp mind to teach the littlest one to fly,” John replied as he began lifting the steaks out of the pan and plating up. “How’s the Wall?”

“Fucked,” Evie replied.

“Language!” chorused John and Vic. Ryn overheard from her room and made a note of another debt owed to the Jar.

“Piss off, it's true. Any news on Bob’s drama?” Evie asked, taking a long sip from the purple coloured concoction and passing the other glass to Vic.

“Nothing concrete. The anti-Accord elements are gaining numbers but we’ve got no proof they are screwing with his bots. It feels like maybe he’s going robo-senile,” sighed John as he began adding the veggies and sliced egg to the plates.

Hurtful! Bob sent to John through his implant. I’m not going mental, mate. Something is going on. John flicked the chat out of his vision. He was worried about his friend but this was family time and Bob knew better than to interfere unless it was an emergency.

They had dinner and talked about inconsequential things. Evie teased Ryn about her obsession with Inferno but she was forced to admit he was a good bloke in the end. This resulted in Ryn’s smug levels rising to unprecedented heights and as the meal drew to a close John couldn’t help but smile as he prepared to take Ryn down a peg or two.

He blipped the plates to the sink, to be dealt with later, and turned a sharp eyed expression on Ryn who shrank back in her seat a little.

“Time to learn to fly, Kid. Shall we?” he asked.

Ryn stood and nodded before heading towards the front door. As she stepped outside and the stars shone down on her she found her Dad already waiting. She didn’t shiver from the chill but at the realisation it wasn’t so far off that she would be able to travel the solar system, tread between the stars above, under her own power as well.

Vic and Evie, sporting glasses full of burnt sienna coloured cocktails and a jug for refills, came out as well and sat down in the comfy chairs in the courtyard. Evie kept shit talking Ryn, predicting catastrophic failure but that her sister shouldn’t worry because the Stormwitch would save the day as always.

Ryn grimaced as she politely, and insincerely, acknowledged Evie’s mildly drunken banter. She quietly began formulating a plan for a booze jar to serve alongside her trusty swear jar. That would teach her!

“So. Teleporting isn’t like other powers. Well it kind of is in that it’s basically magic and makes no bloody sense.” One Essence for the Primary Jar. “The difference is the way it makes no sense makes a lot of sense. That wasn’t very clear. When you came in and needed to get changed, what did you do?” John asked as he faced his daughter from six feet away.

“I went into my room and got changed?” Ryn replied. She knew what he was getting at but Evie was a bad influence. Evie and Vic laughed at her reply as they clinked their glasses together and settled in for the show

“Try again?” asked John calmly, ignoring his wife and eldest child.

“I crossed the space the old fashioned way. I could have teleported.”

“Correct. Flying with teleportation… those who can’t do it call it cheating but it’s not. You need to learn a few crucial things, the first of which is you can change the direction of your momentum. You aren’t like Breaker, able to control it directly. If you’re falling you can turn that into rising but you can’t just cancel it. Why is this important?” John asked.

“It means I need to bleed off momentum to land and I have to allow extra reserves to catch myself at the top of the arc when gravity has cancelled whatever force I needed to disperse.” Ryn was suppressing a sigh. She knew all this cringle. She just wanted to fly!

“Right. You can’t just blip about as you want, not until you’ve got a lot more reserves, anyway. In the meantime you need to be economical. That means you’re back to using gravity as your ally. How fast can you get when you fall?” John asked.

“Um… pretty fast?” Ryn replied doubtfully.

“About a hundred and twenty miles an hour. You do not want to hit something going at that speed, understand? That would be a very not good situation! So gravity is both an ally and an enemy,” He smiled and blipped her a kilometre straight up. He’d always been a “chuck them in and let them learn to swim” kind of guy.

Ryn’s scream was practically ultrasonic as she started falling, accelerating faster and faster every second. Almost instinctively she cloaked herself in fire to reduce her reserve costs while what remained of her conscious mind ran through options to escape this lesson without having to rely on someone to save her. She knew that she wasn’t at any real risk and that there would be a solution that didn’t involve Evie or her Dad saving her bacon. These thoughts counted for very little, emotionally, when she was staring at the ground rising up to give her a splatty and terminal hug.

The earth was drawing rapidly closer and details too small to make out from where Ryn’s frunging Dad had blipped her rapidly grew into clarity. Her mind locked up as trees began to look less like plastic models and much more like things she really didn’t want to impact at this speed.

In a moment of panic she blipped sideways. Five reserves gone. She continued to plummet towards what she could only assume would be an extremely splatty and final impact.

She tried again, trying to wrap her head around changing her momentum with the teleport and she was suddenly shooting further away from the ground at a forty five degree angle. This was a step in the right direction as far as Ryn was concerned. Her gravity induced demise was slightly further away than a moment before. She wasn’t entirely sure this was an improvement though. What went up must come down after all and she quickly concluded she had merely delayed the inevitable.

As she reached the peak of her arc, about halfway across the Grove, and it looked like the street pizza she was destined to become would be placed somewhere in the middle of Treetown, she tried again. This time she shot up vertically after her teleport. Her scream of fear turned into a howl of joy as she lurched towards the clouds.

John appeared next to her, pacing her ascent with a series of teleports.

“See how easy it is? When you hit the peak and have zero momentum, blip down!” he called before vanishing.

Ryn waited till it felt like her stomach rose up into her chest then glanced down and blipped. She appeared a foot off the ground and rose slightly before falling into a heap on the gravel with a relieved, and slightly manic, laugh.

“Knew she’d figure it out!” called Evie, raising her glass in salute.

“Next time you and your mates steal from the stalls I’ll send you higher,” said John with a much more evil grin than Ryn was used to.

“Ok Dad,” she stammered.

“If it happens again, when I teach you how to fly I won’t be as nice!” called her mum as Vic and Evie once again clinked glasses. “You’re not a kid anymore, whatever your age might be.”

“So. Do you understand the lesson?” John asked and when Ryn nodded he smiled more gently. “Good. You know it all gets logged right? The stall owners are pissy with kids not because they don’t get paid but because it can take a while for the charges to get passed to the parents. We like to let you guys think you’re getting away with shit.” Two more Essence for her team's gear fund.

"But why?” she asked.

“How would you deal with kids with superpowers? Or kids about to get them? Sweetie, I know only too well what happens when little shits get the ability to do stuff that amounts to magic. Some slack is cut on the understanding it gets reigned in as you grow up. We don’t want you lot going down the road of the Court.” He sighed loudly at the end.

Ryn knew he’d had to “deal” with more than a few teenagers from the Court who went too far. The Court ruled much of what was formerly France and northern Spain, having established a new aristocracy. Dad complaining about learning the lessons Napoleon had taught them didn’t seem to help and every few months John was sent to resolve the problem of a recalcitrant, arrogant youth. Sometimes it was just collaring and sealing their powers for a while. Sometimes a more permanent solution was needed.

“Ready to try again?” John asked.

“Yeah. Can I launch myself this time?” Ryn asked.

“Sure kiddo. Now you’ve got the idea it’ll be a lot easier. To begin with, you'll want to use my old method. Let gravity help you out. Build momentum by falling then blip higher and use that energy to jump through the sky. I still fly that way sometimes, you know? It feels more real than just blipping from place to place.”

Ryn hadn’t known that. Her dad wasn’t great at sharing his feelings and most of his day to day activities were a mystery to her. She looked up and blipped a hundred metres above the courtyard. She fought down the adrenaline and left it to the last moment before moving herself back up and shifting her momentum to a forty five degree angle. She flew through the air towards the Tree with a shout of joy.

As she began descending she teleported again and launched herself further north. She arced over the canopy of the Tree, laughing like a lunatic as it began to fall behind her. Fall. It seemed like a very important word to her right now. As she reached terminal velocity again she teleported, flicking herself to the west.

She moved west then north, then east. By the fifteenth or sixteenth blip she had moved god only knew how far, and she began to head down towards the waters of the North Sea. She smiled as she fell, arms outspread and closing her eyes for a moment to truly appreciate the sensation. She snapped her eyes open again and glanced down, paying attention to the infamously monster infested waters approaching rapidly. She reached out to twist reality and move without moving but nothing happened. A fraction of a second later a crippling headache washed over her and left her barely able to think. She blacked out.

“It’s ok kid.” Her dad’s voice, calm and reassuring. “We’ve got you.” Ryn rubbed at suddenly tear encrusted eyes. She hadn’t been crying a moment ago? As she freed them from the cloying grip of her tears and looked around she found she was floating on one of Evie’s force-discs. The familiar shape of the Topping was below her.

“What the frunge happened?” Ryn gasped, immediately regretting it as even that much effort sent waves of pain through her bones.

“You zeroed out, sweetie,” said Vic. Ryn realised her head was resting on her mum's thighs. “That was the second lesson. If you want to fly… never run out of reserves.”

“Well done Sausage the Second!” Her Dad seemed far happier about this situation than her head told her anyone should ever feel, under any circumstances.

“Don’t call me that, Dad. It makes me sound like a rejected formerly-pork product,” she grumbled.

“Well-” John began before Evie elbowed him in the ribs, cutting him off with an oomph.

“I zeroed out in the first wave, Sis. It sucks. Never did it again. It’s good training for hangovers though.”

“You won’t be able to fly like this properly until you’ve got some more reserves, Ryn,” said Vic. “But it taught you some valuable lessons right?”

“Yeah. Momentum is queen, reserves are vital and Dad has a frunged up sense of humour,” she groaned as the stars in her vision slowly began to fade.