Star Harbor Nights

Perfect ushered the newcomers inside quickly, not sure that she trusted them but feeling it would be better to get to the bottom of things inside and away from prying eyes. Also, there was something on the young woman Dani's face that spoke of pain and fatigue that she didn't think could be faked. The other woman, Raven, was harder to be read. Her thin lips were almost smiling, but her face was impassive. The look in her bright, black eyes was almost one of curiosity.

"Okay, let's run through that again," Perfect said, guiding Dani towards the most comfortable of the living room chairs. "Who are you?" 

"Well, like I said, I'm Dani, and this is, uh, Raven," Dani said as she sank into the chair. Raven didn't respond to the offer of a seat, instead moving around the living room, looking very closely at the pictures on the wall. "Or maybe she's a raven. I'm not exactly clear on that, actually. She doesn't seem to... talk. But she saved me from a bunch of Bone Lords..."

"The Bone Lords all got turned into skeletons," Perfect pointed out.

"Right," Dani said. "And then they were after me..."

"So, this was before they got killed," Perfect reasoned.

"No, after," Dani said. "Last night."

"One of us is deeply confused," Perfect said.

"Would it shed any light on this conversation if I said that the Bone Lords weren't just killed by the ritual, they've been transformed into undead spirit wraiths?" Ray said.

"When did you learn that, exactly?" Perfect asked.

"Night before last," he said.

"You didn't think to mention it before?" Perfect asked.

"I was coming up to it," Ray protested. "Remember, 'bad shit coming down the pipeline'? That's the start of it."

"Yeah, she said something about that," Dani said.

"Who, Raven?" Perfect asked. She looked at the woman as she said her name, but Raven didn't acknowledge that she'd heard it.

"Raven doesn't talk," Dani said. "But there's this... place... that Raven took me to, and there was a lady there, who said something worse is coming."

"Hey, don't overwhelm us with details, now," D.J. said. "Why don't you start at the beginning?"

"Okay. Right, well, I got this ring," Dani said, holding up her hand to show off the gleaming silver-blue band set with an immense square-cut blue stone. "It's magic, or something. It can change my appearance in, um, different ways, and it can make clothes... costumes... and magical tools. I kind of had the idea of maybe... you know, being a superhero, but mostly I've just been kind of messing around, partying and stuff." Her gaze fell down to the carpet as she spoke, and she mostly mumbled the last bit.

"Wait... you don't... are you the blue ghost?" D.J. asked.

"Um... possibly," Dani said. "What's the blue ghost?"

"What're you talking about?" Perfect asked.

"Well, the rumor going around the local dance club and rave circuit is there's this mysterious girl who haunts the dance floors... she's supposed to be translucent or glowing blue," D.J. said. "She'd show up at a different night spot every night, sometimes dancing and flirting and sometimes keeping to herself, but nobody's ever sure where she came from and nobody ever sees her leave."

"Oh, yeah," Dani said. Her voice had a dull, tired quality to it. "That's me."

"Wait... you got a magic ring that gives you super powers, and you took it clubbing?" Ray asked incredulously. At the looks Perfect and D.J. shot him, though, he shrank back quietly into his seat.

"The only thing is, some of the people I talked to swore the ghost was Asian," D.J. said.

"A lot of my outfits are kind of anime-inspired," Dani said. "I like to do a little cosplay. Or I always wanted to, but never really had the chance for it."

"Okay, so, moving the story along," Perfect said. "You're hanging out at night clubs... and that somehow leads to the Bone Lords."

"Well, there was this guy," Dani said. "Kind of skeezy-looking, I guess... but he came up out of nowhere and kissed me, then fell over, I'm pretty sure dead. It freaked me out, so I turned invisible..."

"So the ring turns you invisible," Perfect said.

"Yeah, and I ran," Dani said. She looked up, as if she expected somebody to say something. "I didn't know what else to do, so I ran... and I ended up. Well, it sounds kind of stupid, when I think about it. But I guess I thought if I started using the ring right, it might make up for the guy dying or stop it from happening again. See, I thought the ring had killed the guy."

"Do you have any reason to think the ring wasn't responsible?" D.J. said.

'Yeah, that comes in later," Dani said. "But at the time I didn't see how it could not be my fault."

With that, Dani related the tale of how she'd encountered the skeletal Bone Lords, and the bizarre shadow hunter who called herself La Luna Nueva. Perfect broke in midway through the tale.

"So, a woman with a Spanish name invoking Greek mythology," Perfect said. "Would you say her accent was Spanish, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, S..."

"I couldn't tell you," Dani said. "But, anyway..."

She told most of the story, skipping over the most intimate encounter that had happened in the church. When she got to the part where her flight had ended with the encounter with the masked woman who'd told her about her choices, she again edited her story, not wanting to reveal too much of her personal history to these strangers, or let them know that she wasn't as old as she looked. She completely skipped over her trip home, the stunning revelation when she'd taken off the ring and remained a girl, and how close she'd come to a disastrous encounter with her mother, and instead jumped straight into the part where she'd wandered the city streets at a loose end, sometimes followed by a large black bird and sometimes accompanied by the silent warrior woman.

"So how did you end up here?" Perfect asked.

"Well, I was wandering around, like I said... and I ended up turning a corner into an alley, and there was a guy there, standing in front of a fire in a trash can. At first, I thought he was wearing some kind of big billowy cloak, and it was going to be some more weird shit I had to fight my way through," Dani said. "But then he turned and I could see it was just a big trench coat. I was going to turn and walk away, but then he said my name... my real, I mean, my full name, and I thought, 'oh, shit... it is going to be some more weird shit I have to fight my way through.' But he just asked if I wanted to hear a story."

"What did you say?" Perfect asked.

"Okay, well, at that point, I was still thinking he was going to turn into some kind of weird shit I had to fight my way through," Dani said. She seemed slightly buoyed by having got through the worst parts of her tale. "I mean, mysterious guy in an alleyway asks you if you want to hear a story? I figured that's either got to be a set-up for an anthology of horror stories and in the end you find out he's the devil and you're in hell, or he's gonna tell a story with eerie parallels to your own life and at the end is some incredibly obvious moral, and I wasn't really in the mood for either... but I kind of didn't see any way around it, so I just said, 'Sure.'"

"Just off the top of my head," D.J. said, "but you could've said no."

"No, see, I've played video games like this," Dani said. "He would have just hung around until I said yes, because the story can't continue until I did. It's what's supposed to happen next."

"Dear lord, you should meet my friend Diana," Ray said. "I think you'd get along great."

"So, what did this mysterious figure tell you?" Perfect asked. "I'm going to ahead and assume it wasn't that you'd died and were in hell."

"He told me about a girl who wanted to be a hero more than anything," Dani said. "And then he told me how to find her."

"That's it?" D.J. asked. "That's all he told you?"

"Well, he made more of a story of it," Dani said. "But I don't remember the words. Just the impression of them, and how they made me feel."

"How did they make you feel, Dani?" Perfect asked gently.

"Like I had disappointed somebody," Dani said. "Like I wasn't measuring up. Only, you know, the kind of disappointment where you've let down somebody you really respect and instead of yelling or telling you how badly you've messed up, they just get all quiet and say 'I see.' and that makes you feel worse than if they'd yelled but at the same time you're determined to do better?"

"In my family, we call the quiet kind 'disappointing daddy', and the other kind 'disappointing mommy'," Perfect said without thinking. "Um... let's all pretend I didn't say that."

"Okay, well, I've never felt that before," Dani said. "But I've read stories where it happens to the hero, and that's how I felt, hearing the story about her... well, about you," she added, looking at Perfect. "And... here am I."

The room fell silent as Dani finished. Everybody jumped when a sudden tapping noise broke the stillness, only to look around as one and see Raven poking curiously at the surface of a small decorative mirror on the wall.

"Well, Dani... your story is, quite frankly, a little bizarre," Perfect said, keeping her tone kind but choosing her words carefully. "And there are some obvious gaps... and it's just a tad suspicious that you show up on my doorstep with a magical ring right when I'm talking about putting together a team of heroes to fight mystical menaces."

"See, but, it's fate," Dani said.

"I don't believe in fate," Perfect said.

"I do," Ray said, quietly, getting to his feet and pacing across the room away from them. "And I can fill in some of the gaps. The place that Raven took Dani is called the Sands of Time. The masked woman is called the Seeress, and she knows all about fate, seeing as she's in charge of it. She's the one who warned me about what's coming, and about the Bone Lords turning all undead. If she had anything to do with setting you on the path that put you here, I'd... well, I'd want to warn you to run like hell, but it's already too late."

"What are you talking about?" Perfect asked.

"Don't you remember me telling you not to get wrapped up with the mystical bullshit any more than you needed to?" Ray asked, whirling around to face Perfect. "This is what I was talking about, Perfect... this. Her. The Seeress. Once she sets her eye on you, you'll never have a free moment... never have a free thought, even, because she sets everything up in advance for you."

"You make it sound like she's omniscient," Perfect said.

"Damn near it," Ray said. "Anyway, I've told you everything that I can about her. If she sent these two to us... well, we shouldn't try to refuse their help, but..."

"I don't think she did send us, though," Dani said. "She tried to dismiss Raven, and she told me that it was my choice what I did next."

"Trust me, she wouldn't have brought you to her if she didn't have a pretty solid idea what you both would do," Ray said.

"So, wait," D.J. said. "Let's boil this down to the essentials here: is she good, evil, or what?"

"She's... complicated," Ray said. "She safeguards the continuity of the physical universe."

"Well, pardon my inexperience, but that sounds good," Perfect said. "Look, I was recently handed vague portents of doom from an elemental nature spirit... you were told by the Seeress that 'bad shit is coming down the pipeline'... she told Dani that something worse than the Bone Lords is coming, and this 'La Luna' said that the unmaking symbols in the church signify the end of the world. We're being given the same message from multiple independent sources. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

"What can we do about it?" Dani asked.

"For starters, we can fight," Perfect said. "We can fight like hell."