It was clear from the flight
that something was wrong. The girls had
gotten used to travelling at impossible speeds, crossing oceans and continents
in a matter of seconds. Though it was
less than a thousand miles from North Jersey to the location in West Virginia,
it took them over a half an hour to clear the Alleghenys. Worried, they set down in an industrial park
just a few miles past Pittsburg.
"I'm worried we'll lose
flight altogether," Maya said.
"I don't want to crash in the middle of nowhere. And with our defenses draining, too, who
knows what could happen to us?"
"You want to take the
bus? Not very superheroic," Sara stated.
It was clear that she was worried, too, despite her joke.
Maya sighed. "No, but I think we should fly low, and
slow enough that we can safely land if our powers fade."
Sara nodded grimly. She hated having to be serious, but even she
had to admit that the situation looked bad. Neither of them wanted to speculate
on what would happen if they lost all their powers. Would they return to their old bodies? Would
they face criminal charges and lynch mobs for all the damage they did? What if
the draining didn't stop at what used to be normal for them? What if they faded
away into nothing? She set her jaw. Giving up was not an option.
"Let's test our
strength," she said. She strode
over to a dumpster, and to her relief, lifted it with only the slightest
effort. It was clearly more of a strain than it would have been hours ago, but
she was able to toss it dozens of feet into the air. Maya glanced up and with a blast from her
eyes turned the entire metal bin red-hot in under a second. Sara cooled it down with a blast of her
breath, knocking it ninety degrees off of its trajectory.
"At least we can still
pack a punch," Maya said. "We
can fly at a few hundred miles an hour, and we should be able to take a bullet,
right? Maybe we're getting worked up for nothing."
"Let's hope we find
answers about whatever is doing this," Sara said. "Now that we know that there are other
supers out there, I don't want to be on the receiving end of what we pulled on
those clowns in New York. "
"Do you think there's
some Alpha Unit out there draining us down to the level of 'ordinary
goddesses'?"
"Let's not waste time
guessing," Sara said. "It
shouldn't be far now. " She lifted off into the night sky. Maya followed behind her.
The address that they had
searched appeared to be a small corporate building atop a mountain in a remote
area of West Virginia. The last known occupant of the building was LightSword
Games, the publisher of the role-playing game that had started the whole
affair, but according to real estate records, their lease had expired a year
ago. The image on Google Maps looked
like the parking lot was overgrown. The
girls had no idea what to expect.
What they found certainly
caught both of them by surprise. They
saw the glow for a dozen miles before they reached the site. The entire mountaintop was on fire. It was as iff all of the coal underneath the
mountain had caught fire at once, turning the landscape into a hellish scene of
flame and glowing rock. There was no
sign of the building.
"You've gotta be
shitting me!" Sara cried. "All
this way for nothing! And now we're out
of clues altogether!"
"No wait," Maya
said, grabbing Sara's arm and pointing.
"There, where the mountaintop used to be. It looks like the
building fell into a cave or sinkhole or something. I can see tunnels." Sure enough, their
vision was acute enough to see through the acrid black smoke, and radiating out
from the jagged hole were a series of tunnels, filled with flames and noxious
gasses.
"Are you sure?"
Sara asked. "There can't be anything
alive in there, and anything useful must be melted into slag."
"We could live down
there," Maya said. "Maybe
another like us could, too. Who else
could do something like this?"
Sara nodded. "Well, I'm
out of alternatives. Into Hell it
is." She pointed straight down and
dove into the infernal pit.
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