Peaches Kane: Awakening to the most supernatural of worlds, in her first adventure

Peaches Beltempo’s summer job- assisting with LARP quests for children, in the sunny outdoors- takes a lot of imagination, love of life, humor, games, and always, water.

The element of surprise has led to laughter and curiosity, ideas from the young co-creators of the adventure.
Bad surprises, you can watch for. The mobile dungeon master learns all the rules of safe fun, dealing with scuffle of guiding kids of various personalities, their safety versus the freedom of the outdoors.
But no matter how much you believe in the pretend play...it’s never too dark, and never too real… Or...it wasn’t.

Yet, here they are.

The darling group of children carry illusions of dazzling credibility about their person, a malicious air and uncanny power. Their forms break into distorted smiles, like hungry things, bent on satiation. The occult force that brings these six, fragile beings closer, with energy-consuming, inhuman aspects around Beltempo, grasping for a coherent response here in the clearing.
“I don’t want to hurt them,” she thinks. “Someone had to do something terrible to them, or some force. Or is this just happening to me?”
Excitable by nature, she calms herself, to gain some knowledge, if not understanding, for until this ends, she must not fear. Yes, I’m scared, but how can I out run what they’ve become? A place without harm. I can believe in it!

She swallows, gazing at the wondrous totems and warriors manifested in these eight year-olds. Can they?
“There’s this surge in pure belief.”
The shimmering in Peaches Beltempo’s stomach stimulates her- to aspirate the words, going from thought to voice, to the ears of the transformed children in her care.
Behind her bewildered expression, she thinks: “I would have to be asleep or insane to comprehend what’s wrong with them.”
But three seconds later, she says:
“Eleanor, the good part of your mother- the Dark, Warm Queen- remember, the trickster water spout, the mist, the rainbow? We can go now! We can find her on its other side.” The hideous, beautiful children react:
Eleanor and Velika, with delight;
Ziv, with the hunger to grow as a wizard, in this place of new runes to learn for crafting;
Evan, a new warrior well into the habit now of imitating and adding cousin Ziv’s powers, senses
a place of greater power, feeding the surge that floods the circuits of his imagination. The next thing to do is to find a reality to match the powers they feel!
Nobody, Nobody and Madelaine leer and rock, entranced.
Colton,a flaming skullfaced warrior, destroys a nearby branch of a fallen tree.
And Huey-Thing demands to know:
“Will you put down the changes on my character sheet? Show me what rank my powers are, now!”
“Huey, there’ll be two extra experience points. Given today!”
Four of them, eager, and the other four, willing enough.
“Why so many Questers in one group, anyway?” she thinks in passing. “And what’s happened to Kalan? I walked up from break: Quest Leader was gone.”

She ponders radioing the site supervisor.
“And say WHAT?!?”
A trigger feeling, nearby. “I’m stepping onto the turf of whatever eerie Might possesses the questers. They’re still innocent kids- whatever they appear to be.
“Let’s step across the snare. It’s worth it.”
Peaches can tell you the quadratic equation. She can tell you the names of six K-Pop songs that debuted this week. She can find 38 countries on the globe, though she’s only lived in the US.
She knows all her friends and sorta-friends and family members’ birthdays. She can paint, skate, play guitar, and when she’s all alone, sing.
Occult training, though?
Possession?
An actual friggin’ spell?
She looks at her bag, with the bibliographic Quest Guide. “Might as well throw out all the rules.”
She thinks about a hero she created years ago, that she played when she was little. Merry Wind. Where was it she would float? She named it after the bottle, when she cleaned her skinned knee.
It was a place where no harm can be done, nor befall anyone. And it needs to be REAL, right now.
“Let’s go to Witch Hazel’s Garden. Here! Move your arms, like this...like you’re polishing your aura...breathe in, breathe out, and picture a rainbow. We’re going to summon the rainbow’s end. That’s where the quest goes next.”
* You don’t always know what’s going on, but when there’s no time to think, you either recognize the movement and the time to make, or not.
The very fact of the children following her instructions out of instinct bolsters Peaches’ confidence. What does Peaches look like? Ain’t nobody got time for that! The flapping arms of the little questers do, utilizing the still-unaccounted spell, generate the colors, a ROY G BIV semi-sphere growing with intensity. Their features begin to dissolve of their gruesome mien; their sproutling youth retakes prominence; the bulk of their menacing figures becomes fluid, then evaporates.

And quite nearby, the caster of the spell, by which he had taken the belief of the children and transformed them into his monstrous vanguard, feels intense anger percolating from his usual pool of brooding resentment. All frustration had flown his bosom, only moments ago, as the power of Loki became restored once more to Shandru, the now-ascendant new supernatural master of Earth. Shandru: the human superpower of the world needs no other name!
But, his mesmerized followers?

Yes, it’s turning out...he is still not prepared to sustain his regained might (if that was a delusion, safe to say, this spell is absolutely effective). The one-time carnival hypnotist has two devastating abilities, granted by the power of the belief, harnessed from the children: one, telekinesis on a level that lifts buildings from their city moorings. With the other, he attempts to teleport the children closer to him, in the grove, away from the meddling girl. She’s not yet been made his slave. That will be Shandru’s next amendment to reality.

The rainbow scintillates the horizon of the peak of People’s Crossing. The power of Shandru’s pawns is magnificent to behold; they utilize their empowerment to mind-bendingly glide into the sky, becoming one with the rainbow’s arc. Now, with a simple gesture…
...the mystic schemer realizes his hand might as well be waving goodbye, for the instance has passed; the paradigm, shifts.
As though into a revolving bubble, the children pass a golden, sun-bright membrane. Astounded, Shandru realizes the ‘egg’ drifts above planetary orbit. A structure, with the distinct look of an intelligent design, shadows that bright place, as now does floating Shandru. It cannot be space- he can breathe! Or is he breathing from habit- this is unlike any plane he’s known!

No!
The plan was, become able to extort the world into making him dictator, on account of his ability to steal entire banks and tuck them away on the moon, and other such catastrophic inconveniences, his to wield as simply as a squirrel does her tail. A flick, a desire, and the wills of others pale!

Having spent the few days he was an agent of the power of the trickster god, teleporting and lifting other things, Shandru realizes:
“I don’t know how to teleport myself. And I don’t know, from – where, just to-where!”

Shandru cautiously slows the impulse to action. It was attempting something impossible, before, which stripped his powers. Thor’s enchanted mallet was never meant to be lifted by anyone else, apparently. The loss of that weapon, though, has taught him.
Pursuing his new ‘weapons’ has left him in the strange sort of place in which one expects those outside time, gods, or those within ‘angel-time.’ The membrane has shrunken to the size of a pea; it yields not to his powers. It acknowledges Shandru not a wit.

But, with thought, alone, stemming from a lifetime of experiencing- and sometimes, yes, faking- ESP, allows Shandru to ‘swim’ in a single minute, to observe the structure.


“It’s a pyramid!”
What could that opening be? A shaft? A trap? The end of all Shandru has considered reality? Or the expansion of all he has known?
Shandru dares… TO BE CONTINUED. what did you think? Write me at integr8dsoul@gmail.com