Chapter 47

Saturday 31st July 1999

I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t expect our summer to begin like this. Obviously, the place Dakota’s been living in is really one of Neil’s houses, and so it’s not like he has no right to bring his family down and stay there. And we’ve stopped by a couple of times over the past week-and-a-half, getting to know him, Cassie and the twins, which has been nice.

Still. As selfish as it is, that’s the place where we get to hang out without anyone else around.

We’d resorted to spending a chunk of our time at Bao’s place, which wasn’t particularly bad but we had Mrs Thomson flitting in and out on occasion (her name is Daiyu, but Bao insists we use her surname). And as nice as she seems, it really puts the dampeners on things to have an adult in the building.

I know, I know, we’ve been really fortunate to spend so much time in a house with no-one else around but us. I probably sound spoilt to be complaining. But with school out, the days are long (even accounting for your typical teenage lie-in) and the change has felt that much more acute.

It definitely wasn’t how I was expecting summer to begin.

Nor did I expect to wind up being served up a well-barbequed burger by Neil in his bright orange summer shirt and khaki shorts. This was the man who fronted a gun-toting raid on Nick’s base a few months ago. I honestly couldn’t picture him wearing anything but formal attire, ready for action. Or manning a barbeque, really. This was down-time Neil. The husband and father. The other side of him.

If I’m coming across weirdly, it’s probably because I’ve been waiting well over a week now to spend some one-on-one time with Dakota (if you catch my drift, which I imagine you do, and this is just proving my point further). I feel like it’s messing with my head at this point. She’s stayed over at mine twice since the Henderson family showed up, and both times, Lucy took it upon herself to play mind games with me and bring the chance of anything happening between Dakota and me down to a solid zero.

Where was I…? (See what I mean? Gah…)

With a nod, a smile and a “thanks”, I took my burger and wandered over to one of the tables that had been set up in the garden.

“Starting off light?” Dakota asked as I sat down beside her, opposite a disgruntled Kitty getting her nails painted by Anna.

“Have you seen how big this is?” I replied, showing her the burger before pulling off the top bun to apply condiments. “I think it’s gonna fill me up for the next three days.”

“Stop speaking in code, lovebirds!” Anna called out, not taking her eyes from her work on Kitty’s fingers.

“Huh?”

And then I realised what she was implying…

“Wait! No! We’re not! This burger is huge-!”

“Aah, stop, you perv!” she giggled.

“Come on! If I’d said hot dog, I could understand, but-!”

“Dakota, make him stop!” Anna cried out, relishing her comedic turn.

My girlfriend looked at me with a sly smirk.

“Eat up, Alex,” she purred, so seductively that I very nearly forgot my burger and my common decency.

“Go inside and get a room!” her cousin squealed playfully.

“Hey,” Pete spoke up next to me as I squirted ketchup and mustard on my burger, “if you and Dakota get married someday, that’ll make us cousins-in-law.”

“You, Anna, and Dakota’s ten thousand cousins on her mother’s side,” I nodded, before finally taking a bite into my immense burger.

“Ten thousand…?” he repeated, eyes wide and brow raised high.

“Twelve,” Dakota clarified, “but yes, he’d suddenly have a lot more family.”

“And I could be a bridesmaid!” Anna declared, taking Kitty’s other hand and continuing her work there. Kitty was grimacing all the while.

“Oooh, your nails look lovely, Kitty!” Harriet cooed as she walked past. It was her birthday a couple of days ago, but she chose to spend much of the day out with her friends (Dakota included). Kendal, Zahid, Kitty and I were invited over along with Bao for the evening. She’d been in a particularly warm mood since.

“Thanks…” Kitty muttered, just too late and too quietly for Harriet to have actually heard.

“Th-They do!” Pete echoed with a smile in Kitty’s direction. “They bring out your eyes, and err, yeah…”

And as I finished chewing and swallowing the burger…

“If your dad ever drops out of the heroic-mercenary game, he could make a killing as a chef,” I told the twins, before catching my words and adding, “no pun intended.”

“Our dad’s a mercenary…?!” Anna asked me, attention abandoning Kitty’s nails, jaw dropped.

That was it, I realised. I’d just unwittingly spilt Neil’s big secret into the laps of his children. He’d probably skin me alive for this.

“N-No! It’s an expression! Like ‘man, I’ve been working like a heroic mercenary all day!’”

“Your faaace!”

Anna creased over with barely-contained laughter.

“We know really…” Pete told me, smiling away.

Dakota rubbed my back while stifling a giggle, and I placated myself with another bite of my burger. Curse my gullibility…

“Hey, just so you guys know,” Bao began, appearing from nowhere (or, rather, the other table) and performing a quick circuit around our table, “I’m gonna go pee, so I’ve not vanished or anything, okay, back in a minute!”

His lap completed, he zoomed off through the back door and into the house.

“Eww, does he always announce that…?” Anna asked Dakota and me.

“Uhm… guys…!”

Bao returned to the garden abruptly, visibly unsettled yet trying to remain composed (and bobbing about in sphincter-pinching desperation).

“When is a house not a house…?”

“If you need the bathroom, use the bathroom,” Harriet called out to him from the other table. “You can ask us riddles afterwards.”

“No, it’s… it’s not a riddle, it’s… the house! Come and look!” he urged us. It sounded a little like he was struggling to compose his thoughts… whether he was that desperate to go, or what he’d seen was so out-there that he couldn’t figure out how to describe it, I wasn’t sure at that moment.

“I’m barbequing. Just explain,” Neil’s voice boomed.

“It’s okay,” Cassie spoke, getting to her feet along with Kendal, Zahid and Harriet. “I’ll check it out.”

Now, everyone at my table was standing up too. I quickly took another bite of my burger, and figured I’d bring it with me to be on the safe side. Y’know… the side of “making sure I get to eat this burger”, I guess…

I was pretty much the last through the door, and I was expecting to be held up behind everyone else in the kitchen. After all, I could see everyone filing in from outside, through the windows.

And yet, just like with Cosmic Comics before, I made my way inside and found something completely different. In this case, a sprawling, bustling city high-street.

“This is crazy!” Anna was squealing as I took my first steps into this surreal domain.

“Just another day when you’re a Painter,” Kendal told her with a wink. “But this is pretty weird even for us…”

“You say that, but I’m not particularly surprised,” Zahid shrugged; and then, a moment later, “scratch that, none of these people have a face…”

A family walked past me at that moment, and exactly as Zahid said, not one of them had a face. They were blank people filling the streets, like background extras added for realism.

“Tell me we don’t have to fight all of them…?” I asked (rhetorically, of course).

Dakota headed a little further into the street, looking around at the innocuous hustle and bustle.

“Gonna assume not… or hope not…”

“Maybe they’ll turn on us when we Painterise?” Bao proposed, still bouncing on the spot. “Like we’re invisible to them right now but then they’ll recognise us as an enemy…”

“Do you really want to fight hundreds of people at once?” Zahid grunted at him.

“No, I want to pee…”

“We suit up, fight them if they come for us, and investigate if they don’t,” Dakota instructed, summoning her spear. I quickly shovelled the rest of my burger into my mouth as she turned to her aunt and cousins.

“You might want to step back. Just to be safe.”

“So long as we can see you guys do your thing!” Anna enthused while being pulled back by a retreating Cassie; Harriet joined them and Pete.

Everyone else had their weapons in-hand, and I resorted to wiping my fingers clean on my wrists before manifesting my sword. The six of us all raised our weapons to our chests and, with our usual bursts of colour, clad ourselves in our Painter clothing. I braced myself, preparing for the crowds to turn into a swarm, a raging mob that we would have to fend off.

I swear I could hear a record scratch when absolutely nothing changed in the behaviour of the faceless extras surrounding us.

“Well, there’s one question answered,” Kendal spoke up with palpable relief.

“You guys Painterising is the coolest damn thing!” Anna cheered behind us.

“Not you too…” Zahid groaned at that choice of words.

“Anybody else’s weapon glowing…?” Kitty asked softly, staring at the dual blades of her claw.

I looked at my sword, and found the blade pulsing with blue light, in the same manner as when it was tracking the other weapons from a distance. Which, of course, didn’t make any sense, what with all six of the Lokon weapons being close enough that said function wasn’t necessary.

“Follow the glow…?” Bao checked with the rest of us.

“It’s the only lead we’ve got,” Dakota nodded. She waved her spear back and forth, checking which direction brought forth the strongest glow, and then set off down the high-street. We followed after her, and I checked on my own weapon’s light to double-check the path we were heading down.

“Should I stay here, or…?” I heard Harriet call out from behind us.

“Yeah, stay put, Haribo,” Bao replied gently. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us.”

And so we headed into the city of blank-faced people, searching for answers. Our journey didn’t last long, as within a minute, we reached a door with no windows, marked only with an upwards arrow. The building it was part of had no distinguishing features at all. Our weapons were glowing fiercely in its presence.

“Monsters behind the door…?” I suggested cautiously.

“Brace yourselves, people…” Dakota spoke, reaching for the door’s handle. Time seemed to slow right down as she turned it, the fear of what was lurking beyond embracing me. And, once again, my preparation was met with absolutely nothing; when Dakota finally swung the door open the rest of the way, only a humble stairwell lay beyond it.

“Still think this isn’t weird, Zahid?” Kendal asked.

“We fought living Opal Fruits,” he reminded her flatly.

All the while, Dakota headed through the door and began making her way up the stairs. Naturally, we followed again; a dozen steps, a small landing and a turn, and another dozen steps, until we aggregated again at another closed door.

“Ready?” Dakota faced us, already grasping the handle.

“Go for it,” Bao urged on behalf of all of us.

… okay. Just… hear me out on this.

The heat and humidity hit us before anything else, literally as Dakota opened the door up.

Then the unique lighting, then the abundant green, and finally the overall view of an entire, fully-fledged, honest-to-goodness rainforest.

“Alright, now this is hitting peak weird…” Zahid sighed.

“Doooon’t mind me…”

Bao squeezed past us, hurrying into the rainforest.

“Any connection between a city and a jungle…?” Kitty pondered, as we stepped into the wild green yonder.

“Concrete jungle…?”

Well, it was the first thing that came to mind…

The top of the stairwell chamber was built as a grey cuboid, a strange outcrop amidst the plant-life. A quick look at my sword showed that the glow had diminished, back down to normal levels.

“What now…?” Kendal asked while taking in our new surroundings.

“I’m still tracing something…” Dakota noted, moving her spear around. “I reckon we have to head through here to find… something…”

“A tenner says it’s another door.”

Zahid was spinning his axe around in his hand as he often did, staring up at the canopy that hung so far above us like a cathedral ceiling of green and white

Bao strolled back over to us, clearly a lot less tense now.

“Alright, let’s do whatever it is we’re doing.”

“Promise me you’ll wash your hands and your blades when this is over…” Dakota addressed him, half-wincing.

“Of course, I’m not an animal. Well, we all are, but-”

“Quick, let’s move,” Zahid interrupted him, marching into the jungle.

I’m not sure quite how long we spent traversing the tropical environment… maybe half an hour or so. If the city seemed ridiculously huge inside Dakota’s(/Neil’s) place, then this rainforest was on another level entirely. And, even under the logical assumption that this was crafted by Harmony, it was deceptively real… the temperature, humidity, sounds and smells, it was all just like being in a real rainforest, as best as I could imagine a real rainforest would be like. The only thing not quite realistic was the array of creatures we spotted: large, three-headed snakes, chameleon birds, spiders hanging from threads and transforming in shape over and over like some kind of Microsoft screensaver.

We reached another doorway, again as part of a concrete box, and found another stairwell on the inside. All getting very Narnia or Doctor Who, I know…

Place your bets on what we found on the next floor.

Those of you who said a mountainous domain, gold stars.

It could’ve been worse, of course. We could’ve been forced to scale a single mountain. This was more like the location where James Bond would find a hidden base, minus the snow. Numerous peaks and troughs, with uneven ground between them.

“I’m sensing a pattern here…” Dakota groaned.

“Each floor has a different environment,” I observed, like it needed to be said now. “Guess we have to mount the insurmountable…”

“Surmount the insurmountable…” Bao corrected me.

“Yeah.”

… it’s only now I realise what I’d said…

We spent maybe a little longer here, once again travelling where our weapons dictated, past grazing living rock creatures that Bao insisted would make for cool Pokémon.

The next doorway, the next stairwell. More heat as the next floor was unveiled.

“It’s… it’s just a really big beach, guys…!” Kendal assured us uneasily as we stared out at the desert sands ahead of us. “If you listen really carefully, you can hear the sea!”

We must have spent an hour or more traversing the dunes, and we never saw so much as a drop of water.

What we did see were creepy faces in the sand, and peculiar hands rising up, a dozen twitching fingers seemingly seeking us out through the air. They appeared to emerge wherever we went, and with the incredible heat pressing down on us (made bearable only by the sheer uniqueness of our Painter gear), it made the whole experience feel much more treacherous than even the previous two jaunts. And all the same, they didn’t attack. They stalked us, but never made a move, like we weren’t worth the effort… or, to look at things from another perspective, like they weren’t the crux of this particular adventure. This whole thing wasn’t about fighting sand-hands. We had bigger fish to fry.

… and funny I should put it like that, because the next floor was a gigantic body of water. The doorway opened onto a motorboat just big enough for the six of us.

It is very hard to follow the glow of Lokon weapons while chugging along in a boat.

Still, we made it to yet another doorway block, on a tiny outcrop like the one we’d exited from.

“I hope this is the last one…” Kitty murmured as we disembarked from our boat.

“Don’t worry!” Bao replied, going to pat her back before resisting (he’d at least dipped his hands and Lokon blades into the water earlier). “There can’t be much more!”

“You’ll jinx it, Bao…” I warned him.

And one flight of stairs later…

“No!”

So he cried out into the chilly polar air.

“Nooooooooooo!”

“It’s okay…” Kitty told him, lightly patting his arm even if she looked uneasy doing so, blushing ever-so-slightly.

I don’t know whether it was night in the real world by now, but we had the northern lights (or perhaps the southern lights? Is there a difference other than where they are?) hanging above us, a beautiful dancing curtain of coloured light against the darkness. Our complete inability to feel the cold made the whole experience acutely unreal, but it once again felt remarkable to be walking in such a foreign land.

While our sea voyage had seemingly been creature-free, we saw plenty of penguin-like balls of fluff strutting around here, and centipede-like icy beasts rattling as they skittered along.

“Remember when we were just chilling and having a barbeque…?” Zahid mentioned as we headed over another snowy mound.

“That was fun, yeah,” Dakota replied warmly, fondly.

“And now we’re crossing Planet Slizer or something…” Bao groaned. “If we wind up in a volcano on the next floor, I… I quit…”

“I see the doorway!”

Kendal pointed into the area that lay below now we’d crossed the mound: seemingly iced over, the doorway box was awaiting us.

Too tired to rush now, we simply trudged our way towards it.

It took a little effort to open this door thanks to the ice; Zahid wound up managing to tug it open after a brief struggle, and as soon as he had, we clambered inside to scale the stairs.

“Please be a place made of pillows and marshmallows…” Kendal pleaded aloud while slowly turning the handle to the next floor.

And while it wasn’t quite as nice as that…

Beyond the door was the front hallway of Dakota’s place.

“… guys, I think I passed out in the snow, I’m seeing Dakota’s…”

“No, I’m seeing it too…” I told her. “Did… did we make it…?”

“It looks real…” Dakota spoke as we headed into the house. “Alex, Bao, Kitty, check things upstairs. And wash your hands, Bao…”

“Roger that,” Bao nodded, and the three of us made our way up yet another flight of stairs (though much more familiar this time).

Put simply… everything was pretty much normal there. The bedrooms were the bedrooms; the loft was the loft. No other doorways. The only sign of anything Lokonessence-related going on was the windows all showing nothing but a white expanse outside.

“All clear upstairs,” I reported as we regrouped in the living room.

“Same here,” Zahid replied, “except for the great white outdoors and there being no handle on the back door.”

“So…”

Kitty looked between us, seemingly hoping for a plan to emerge.

“Can we just sit down for a bit? I’m exhausted…” Bao remarked, taking a seat on the sofa before anyone could answer.

“Yeah… let’s unwind and think… Lemme see if there are any drinks left in the fridge…” Dakota said before making a beeline for the kitchen.

Kendal, Zahid, Kitty and I all sat ourselves down, and I have to confess, it was an immense relief to take the weight off of my feet. I felt like I was going to fall asleep in a matter of seconds. Thankfully, that didn’t happen; Dakota returned with a couple of big bottles of cola and some water, and we relaxed for a while. Bao seemed to recover quite quickly, as he threw on the PlayStation, and before we knew it, it just felt like any other day. Suddenly, everything was normal.

“You know,” Neil’s unmistakable voice suddenly emerged from the kitchen some time later, “you could’ve come back outside.”

“Oh!” Dakota chirped, jumping to her feet, then looking to the front window to see the normal world outside, evening light casting shadows down the street. She turned back to her uncle. “Everything was blank outside, we couldn’t see you and the door had no handle…”

“Fair enough,” he replied simply. “You realise you’ve been in here for five hours, right?”

“It’s a long story…” Kendal insisted.

“Fine. You can tell us all about it. A little story time for our last night here.”

And he disappeared back outside.

“… before anyone says anything, I honestly didn’t know…” Dakota told us sheepishly.

“He’s not very good at keeping you informed, is he?” Zahid commented.

The rest of the evening was spent recounting our ridiculous journey to the Hendersons and having more fun conversation (Cassie is absolutely the master of witty anecdotes), until the time came for us to leave. We were invited to stop by tomorrow, so we saved the proper farewells for then.

As Dakota and I hugged each other goodbye for the night, she whispered in my ear:

“One more night.”

The hushed words and breath hitting me. The look on her face as we broke from the hug.

Frankly, I don’t know how I survived that night…