Katsina follows Doc to join him in the warmth of the van while Sam goes to set avalanche traps. On her way there she uses her gloves to break off a piece of bark from some firewood, cautious not to let it near her exposed skin lest the wood trigger her allergy. Inside the van, she takes one her throwing knifes - one that was damaged during the RV crash with the Natelys - and begins to carve shapes into the soft underside of the bark. She chants lowly under her breath, weaving magical incantations into the wood. Before he drops into the Matrix, Doc glances over to see her work. To him it looks like a cow or a bull of some sort, perhaps inspired by some of the nearby ranches.
Katsina looks up and sees Doc examining the carving. "It's an auroch. A wild ox." She pauses before continuing, wondering if Doc already knows more about aurochs than she does. "It's a Wiccan symbol of speed and strength. They went extinct in the seventeenth century."
She continues to carve. Doc drops into VR. "I wonder if I ever met an auroch," she says before realizing Doc has returned to his Matrix searches. I wonder how old I am. She shakes her head at the thought, which is too large for the moment.
The inside of the van glows like a fireplace when she finishes the preparation. She concentrates before breaking the wood to trigger the spell. The wood crumbles in her magically strengthened hands and a rush of speed floods through her. She locks it down by offering a memory to Hecate, a piece of her experience. The memory drifts off like a dream after waking up, leaving Katsina alone in the van with Doc and a pile of crushed bark.
Outside, Sam stomps laboriously through the snow, his tremendous weight causing him to posthole with almost every step. His massive muscles propel him forward, pushing the snow aside with little more effort than if he had been walking through shallow water. It crunches with each step, the sound being especially pronounced against the quiet, snowy night. Sam doesn't have to go far, nor should he: the detonators need to be within half a klick to reliably trigger in terrain like this.
It's a few days past the full moon and Sam's brain is playing tricks on him. Thermographically, he can hardly see anything. Everything is frozen, cold, blended together. In the regular spectrum, the moonlight illuminates the snow, providing a clear outline of the area. Astrally, the world is painfully bright. The trees, the earth, the Gaiasphere, overwhelming. His head swims with the conflicting sensory overload. He's having visions... is that normal on the astral or are they notable? They feel like waking dreams. He swears he sees his astral self, almost as if he were looking in an astral mirror. But there aren't mirrors on the astral, are there? No, and even if there were it wouldn't be what he's seeing. What he sees is his former self, his unInfected, unAwakened self, gazing back at him with a mixture of horror and incomprehension. He looks around for Bear to see if there's an explanation, but there is no Bear and no explanation.
He feels woozy and puts a hand out to steady himself, hoping that he doesn't get jumped by something wild. He pauses to listen while steadying his breathing. Howling in the distance? Wolves baying at the moon? The woods are dark and mysterious and full of suspicious magic that Sam can no longer avoid. It's woven into him now, but he can't do what he came here to do with magic. He removes the explosives and detonators from his pack. Explosives won't trigger an avalanche on very stable snow but Sam knows that the cold winter wind will help his cause. Wind can deposit snow ten times faster than snow falling from storms. If the weight from a new snow is added faster than the underneath weak-layer can adjust to its load, then it fractures, and an avalanche is born. Or, if some metahuman were to trigger a kilo of high explosives, that would do the trick too. Sam blinks to confirm that the hallucinations are gone, then gets to work.
Back at camp, Ohanzee summons Whale to help him keep watch for the night. The summoning is frictionless, almost as if Whale were volunteering.
Whale looks around and seems bemused by the location and curious about the surroundings.
"Mountains," Whale says to Ohanzee, circling camp to investigate the trees and van and other oddities. "Very well."
Ohanzee and Whale take first shift while Katsina sleeps in the van, curled up inside a mound of blankets. Doc finally disconnects sometime after midnight, then shuts down the satellite link for the night. He yawns, relieves himself, then beds down. Chino is snoring, having trotted around the perimeter of camp to reinforce his territory.
Ohanzee is left with the night sky and a couple thousand stars. He might be able to see more but the light from the moon is flooding out the dimmer ones. The dwarf silently, telephatically communicates with the spirit about matters unfamiliar to the denizen of the deep. It helps pass the time at least.
"How do airplanes stay up in the air?" "Why do metahumans get sick?" "What's your favorite game?"
The night is cold and long and draws out slowly like a knife. Ohanzee does his best to stay thawed; at least the frigid conditions make it easier not to fall asleep on the job. He keeps an astral eye on the local spirits, who seem to be peeking covertly at the massive Whale, curious about the outsider. Ohanzee hears some howling in the distance but nothing comes to investigate the small, delicious dwarf.
It's a relief to pass the watch to Katsina. Ohanzee astrally projects and taps her dual-natured forehead. She wakes up groggily, fighting off fatigue with no benefit of soykaf like the others. She emerges from the van wrapped in her bundle of blankets, then plops down on a rock. Caccooning herself tightly, she resumes answering questions where Whale left off.
"Why do you metahumans have so many languages?" "How much does the sky weigh?" "Why do people die of old age?"
Katsina raises an eyebrow at the last one but decides to let it slide for now.
Night slowly passes into not-night. Whale goes to Ohanzee to announce his imminent departure. The team emerges from their various sleeping nooks to find Chino stretching, cracking his knuckles and limbering up.
"We gon' do this?" he asks, hopping up and down. "I'm ready to kick that obelisk into the Seventh World." He guzzles a beer for breakfast, belches, then looks for the green light to begin hammering time.
