Star Harbor Nights

It was budget review time at DELPHI, which meant that most of the scientists, each of them a leader in one or more fields of study, were basically running around like chickens with their heads cut off or falling over themselves trying to kiss up to the government axe men who would ultimately make the decisions that affected all the work DELPHI would do for the next year.

Trinity Night, of course, was no scientist, and was thus singularly unperturbed by it all.

"Miss Night, I've never been quite sure what it is you do here at DELPHI," the severe, round-faced man from the accounting office said as she sat behind the rarely-used desk with her name on it, applying a top coat to her fingernails.

"Well..." Trinity began, pausing to brush her black hair out of her face and blow on her nails, "I do... all sorts of things, really."

"Let's start with one thing, shall we?" the man said, raising his clipboard and pen expectantly.

"Just one?" Trinity asked.

"To start with."

"Okay, well," Trinity said. "One thing that I do is wave my hand like this," she said, raising her hand and drawing a squiggly symbol in the air, "and make you forget that you ever wondered about it."

"Wondered about what?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Why you haven't raised my salary twenty-five percent," she said. "Ta-ta."

"Oh, right," he said. He got up and started ambling towards the door, muttering, "Why haven't I?" as he went.

"You told me you don't even cash your checks," Jonathon noted, coming into the office as the man was leaving.

"I don't," Trinity said with a shrug. "But now the next time somebody takes it into their head to question my presence, it will be incumbent upon him to defend me."

"He gives you money, therefore he owes you?" Jonathon asked, perplexed by her logic.

"He'll have to justify why he saw fit not only to keep me on but give me an appreciable raise," Trinity said. "The question shifts from 'Why are we paying this woman?' to 'Why are you paying this woman?', and he loses standing if he can't provide a satisfactory answer."

"And what exactly will that answer be?"

"He'll find one," Trinity said, with a smile and a disarming shrug. "That's what men like him do best: justify themselves."

"As if the shadowy demimonde of government bureaucracy wasn't arcane enough without your influence," Jonathon said. "But, come... I have something that may require your attention."

"Something dire?"

"Not particularly... at least I don't think so," Jonathon said, offering his arm. "You do have to start earning your new salary some time, though."

He whisked her off through the maze of corridors to a room in the advanced materials lab. A spotlight shone down on a work table, illuminating a silver metal cube, about three inches across each face.

"What is it?" Trinity asked.

"I can tell you several things that it isn't," Jonathon said. "It isn't any element found on the periodic table of such. Though heavy, it isn't nearly dense enough to belong to one of the hypothesized 'islands of stability' that might exist further down said table. It also isn't astrum argentium, obstinatium, or any other exotic metal we've ever catalogued."

"Where did it come from?" she asked.

"Recovered from the body of a broken Portalien probe," he said. "Though I'd stake my credentials that it wasn't made by them... it matches nothing in their technology, aside from the point that they modify existing technology rather than creating new ones."

"May I?" Trinity asked, reaching for the cube. At a nod from Jonathon, she picked it up and held it up to the light, turning it this way and that. Its surface was highly mirrored, and unsmudged.

"Its melting point, if it has one, is somewhere in excess of thirty-five hundred degrees Kelvin," he said. "It cannot be scratched with anything we have, which gives it a rating on the Mohs scale of at least fourteen. It doesn't conduct electricity, it reflects high energy radiation, it provokes no reaction in the psi-sensitive, and in short, defies every attempt we've made to analyze it."

He looked at Trinity expectantly.

"Well, it isn't magic," she said.

"You're... you're sure about that?" he asked.

"You don't usually sound so disappointed to hear me say that," Trinity said.

"When a thing so defies the ordinary laws of physics with which I'm familiar, it's somewhat comforting at least to know there's a reason," he said.

"Hold on... you said it has defied analysis," Trinity said. "Normally, you'd treat something like that as a puzzle to be solved. When we first met, you told me that you regarded 'It's magic!' as a poor excuse for shutting down a line of scientific inquiry."

"Drop it," Jonathon said.

"No, I will not drop it," Trinity said, exasperated. "Jonathon, this isn't like you."

"The cube, Trinity," he said. "Drop it on the floor."

"What?" she asked, even as she began to stoop down.

"Don't be gentle," he said. "Just hold it out and drop it, from about shoulder height or so."

Curious, she obeyed, holding the cube out from her body and dropping it. Instead of clattering on the ceramic tile floor as she'd expected, it bounced back almost to the same height from which she'd released it, then fell back down and bounced back up, this time going a little further astray. It bounced several more times, behaving exactly like a rubber ball, except for not bouncing quite so wildly around.

Jonathon picked it up, squeezing it in his hand with no appreciable result, except the whitening of his knuckles. "It keeps about ninety percent of its energy per bounce, which would give it an elasticity on par with the best commercially available 'bouncy balls'... except it gives absolutely no evidence of this property outside of the 'bounce test.'"

He wound up and threw it at the wall, catching it neatly when it flew back at him.

"If that isn't magic," he said, "then I'd like to know what it is."

"So would I," Trinity said, bemusedly.

Earlier... 

 On a roof top in Star Harbor that looked like it had lost a fight with a scrap heap, 4B agents carefully laid out a grid and then went about collecting and cataloguing the pieces of twisted metal and broken plastic. The origin of each piece was identified, when possible... there were pieces from an outdoor grill, remote controlled cars and boats, electric scooters, diesel engines, discarded computers, a broken web cam, pencil sharpeners... essentially, anything and everything electrical or mechanical.

"What the hell is this?" one of the agents asked, holding up a small metal cube that glittered in the sunlight. Despite the severely battered and broken condition of the wreckage all around it, there was not a scratch on it.

"Dunno," another said. "Unidentified portal junk? Tag it, bag it, and send it on to DELPHI, with anything else we can't make."

Earlier... 

Dandy had just broke the neck of one of the giant, one-eyed shaggy humanoids when the body of the other plummeted down onto the ground, almost hitting her in the process. She gave a rather loud yelp, jumping backwards, as the thing landed atop the one she'd been fighting.

"My bad!" her sister cried from the rooftop.

"Watch where you're slaying," Dandy called back up.

"I said I was sorry," Lily said, dropping down to the street beside the monster corpses. She looked down at them disdainfully. "Ugly motherfuckers, aren't they?"

"How do you know that among their kind, they aren't considered handsome or even beautiful?" Dandy asked.

"How do you know that among their kind, fucking your mother isn't like the highest form of art, or something?" Lily asked. She held up her hand, which held a shiny metal cube. "Anyway, mine had this on him... seemed to act like it was some kind of treasure or prize."

"I wonder what it is," Dandy said, taking it from her.

"Well, these things are sort of demon-ish," Lily said, taking it back. "Maybe it's a puzzle box, like in those movies?"

"What kind of puzzle has no moving parts?" Dandy asked, reaching for it again.

"Maybe it's the beginner model," Lily suggested, pulling it away and holding it out behind her back. "I mean, these guys weren't exactly the sharpest bulbs in the drawer, right?"

"I just want to look at it," Dandy said, trying to reach around her sister.

Suddenly, a tiny little robot with wheeled feet and a USB web cam for its head jumped out of a storm drain and snatched the thing out of Lily's hands.

"Hey!" Lily cried, giving chase... but the bot was already across the street and down another storm drain.

Suddenly, the two sisters froze in place. Ears that had the sensitivity of a hunting cat's picked up the wail of approaching sirens.

"Let's go find somewhere else to be," Dandy said.

"But... puzzle box," Lily said.

"If a demon had it, chances are it's nothing good, and better for that to fall on a bunch of gear gnomes than anybody else," Dandy said.

"At least this one wasn't dressed like a leprechaun..."

Earlier... 

"Good morning, Johnny, my boy," the faded old gentleman known as Reverend Jack said to the bartender of the Sands of Time. "I'm normally a creature of habit, but I believe I'm up to trying something new today."

"You've come to settle your bill, then?" Johnny asked wryly.

"It's funny that you should mention that..."

"Funny for which one of us?"

"...because I have come into an object of considerable value," the reverend continued, "and while it's only a matter of time before I find a buyer to convert it into legal tender, perhaps you could eliminate the middleman, so to speak, by taking it from me as trade, against my debts both present and future."

"It would have to be considerable value, indeed, to have anything left over for future debts," Johnny noted. "But, pray tell me, why would I take the task of selling this questionable bauble myself?"

"Security, son, security... who knows what misadventures may befall me between the time when I manage to collect money for the artifact and when I find a chance to deliver the same into your hands?"

"What exactly is it we are talking about?" Johnny said.

"I was out taking my morning constitutional along the border of the near-astral when this most peculiar object came sailing out of a chance dimensional aperture and struck me in the head," the reverend said, placing a metal cube on the counter. "I was more stunned than hurt... particularly as it did more damage to my chapeau than it did upon my person... but I collected my wits swiftly enough to chance a peek through the tear before it closed. I caught only a glimpse of squat, malformed bodies of a greenish-gray color... fleeing away as though in mortal terror."

"That is exactly what I want sitting on my bar," Johnny said. "A mysterious object of extradimensional origins, which makes shapeless horrors quake with fear."

"So your thoughts follow along the same lines as my own," Reverend Jack said. "It's clearly an object of great power, and thus, great value."

"My thought is to show you to the door by way of my boot," Johnny said. "Get this thing out of here at once!"

"Well! I offer you first crack at it, as a favor to a friend, and this is the thanks I get?" Reverend Jack said melodramatically, pushing away from the bar and stomping off angrily, the soles of his filthy boots flapping noisily. He walked backwards, continuing his speech to the bartender, who simply rolled his eyes. "Well, trouble yourself no more over it... I assure you that you shall never lay eyes on this trinket again, and your loss, Johnny Dark, because I mean to fetch a pretty penny for its..."

He stopped talking when he backed into what felt very much like a furry wall. Without turning around to look, he reached around behind him and felt a hairy, muscular bicep, a broad, fur-covered chest, a corded neck, and a lantern jaw with a fat, sneering lower lip curled around tusky fangs.

"Oh, dear," he said.

Four strong hands grabbed him and turned him around.

"Hello, boys," he said sheepishly to the pair of one-eyed monstrosities. "What can I do for you, on this most auspicious of days?"

"Mighty Cthugllor wants its money," one of them said.

"Certainly," Reverend Jack said. He thrust the cube at the monsters. "Here you go. Object of great power, considerable worth. Give it to good old Cthuggy with my compliments, and tell him he may keep the change."

"Mighty Cthugllor demands cash," one of the duo said, stepping forward menacingly, but the other one put a clawed hand up.

"This will do," he said. At his companion's questioning glance, he said, "Mighty Cthugllor wants cash, Might Cthugllor shall have cash... once we have sold this item ourselves, keeping the excess for ourselves."

"Pah! How much could this tiny thing be worth?"

"Can you not tell? It has the stink of the outer realms about it!" the other said insistently. "I know a mortal of the earth realm who would pay much for such a thing."

"Well, it sounds as if you gentlebeings have some details to hash out," the reverend said, stepping sideways around them. "I'll just leave you to it, then."

Earlier... 

It was the bottom of the twenty-seventh inning. The score was close... purple to green. All eleven bases were loaded. There were seven balls, six strikes, and six outs. It all came down to one pitch.

The pitcher stepped up to the mound. He wound up, and let fly. The batter swung... and connected. The glittery metal cube zoomed away across the field, going up and up until... with a horrifying crash...

"Dude!" the pitcher said. "You broke the dimensional boundary!"

“Does that count as a foul ball?” one of the outfielders asked.

"Forget that… my zmezlar is totally going to kill us!" the batter shrieked.

"What was that noise?" a shrill voice cried as the players scattered in all fifteen directions.