Chapter Five - "Terrifying Mystic Hula Hoops"

From the outside, the Danzour Amber Mines didn't look like much of anything. An incredibly forgettable remote featureless office park building that looked a million other nondescript cubicle farms scattered all across the country. There were half a dozen business names on the index out front, but only one ever got any mail - Chronos Reductus Ltd. - an exclusive prestige watch making company that only made 52 watches every year.

They really were incredible watches.

The grey brutalist structure was off on its own, with a parking lot in front of it that usually had about half a dozen cars parked in front of it, although an astute observer would notice that the cars didn't move daily, but weekly. The lot itself could hold easily ten times the amount of cars, but never did, but again, its slightly remote location made it seem like it had originally been built with a purpose in mind, and that purpose had disappeared, but rather than let the entire structure go idle, they were renting out space in it for a song.

In actuality, since the building's most recent construction (its fourth time being built), only a handful of people had ever set foot inside of it. Originally, the building had been put up to discourage prospectors in search of gold and other mineral veins, but the first front had looked too much like a mine building, so the second incarnation had gone for even more bland, a frontier brothel with a terrible reputation. That proved only one thing - no reputation was bad enough to drive away clientele from a brothel. So the third reputation had been for a telegraph relay station that turned into a telephone relay station, but in the early eighties, they'd rebuilt a fourth time with the anonymous business park, and that had been a successful camouflage for decades.

Before stopping at the Mines, however, we'd chosen to go to the town of Cheyenne instead, which had a population of about sixty-five thousand people, give or take. It felt like a sneeze of a town, but it was where Rosalyn Sexton, Larry's wife, could be found, at her and Larry's home. Benny, their four-year-old, was off at school for the day.

They actually had one of the nicer houses in Cheyenne, a big 5-bed, 4-bath, 2-story home with over four thousand square feet of space on a ten thousand square foot lot on the north end of town, just a bit east of Francis E. Warren Air Force Base. I'd always been amazed that something as remarkable and surreal as the Danzour Amber Mine could exist so close to a military installation, but as my Uncle Bertram always reminded me, "We were there first."

When I found out that the house had cost a little more than $250k, I'd nearly shit bricks. That wouldn't even buy you a studio apartment in most of the Bay Area. But then again, Larry did live in Wyoming. I tried not to think too much about money, being that the Sexton family lineage was quite loaded, with sizable real estate holdings. (If anyone ever asks you how you get wealth, kids, the answer's always real estate.)

Larry and Ros were still planning on having a few more children of their own, but they just hadn't gotten around to it yet. At least that was what I thought until a visibly pregnant Rosalyn answered the door, and Charlotte immediately went into giddy mode.

"Rosalyn!" my sister giggled. "Why didn't you tell us you and Larry were pregnant again? How far along are you?"

"Just shy of six months," Ros said with a soft sigh. "We were looking forward to surprising everyone with the birth announcement." Ros was just a couple inches taller than five feet, with jet black hair and a tanned skin that revealed her half-First Nations heritage. She was dressed in the usual lumberjack attire that was commonplace for most North American werewolves - flannel and denim, although she had on an oversized Catherine Wheel t-shirt underneath the flannel overshirt that I recognized as one of Larry's. "Benny's super excited about having a sibling on the way. Did you go by the Mine yet, or did you stop here first?"

"We're stopping here first, Ros," I said to her. "Anything out of the ordinary going on at the Mine as of late?"

"I've been replaying the last few weeks in my mind, Dale, and I can't think of a damn thing that was even the slightest bit unusual that wasn't tied to the baby, and even that just felt like the normal, usual, upcoming baby shit," Ros said, leading us into the living room. "I absolutely hate that I can't go in there, but you know how bad my allergy is to that stuff."

"I know," I said. "That's why we left the box he sent us in the car. I knew even bringing it into the house would set you off on a sneezing frenzy."

"I appreciate that, Dale," she said, grabbing her cup of coffee. "Do you think he's dead?"

"We certainly hope not," Charlotte told her. "But we won't know until we're there. We don't like running in blind, though, so we wanted to find out what you could tell us before we went in to investigate. Nothing's seemed odd?"

"Honestly, Shar, I've been over and over it in my head since the autosender fired, and nothing seemed any different in anything I can remember," Ros said, taking a sip from her mug. "He wasn't working more or less than normal. He didn't say anything interesting had happened. He didn't feel like they'd made any particular interesting discoveries lately, and it's just supposed to be him for the next couple of months until your cousin Kenneth shows up to spend a few months doing some specific research regarding the Enclave."

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "Anything interesting regarding Kenny?"

"Not really," Rosalyn said. "They're working on some new theory that posits the Enclave aren't actually dead, that the substance they're in is some kind of hibernation goo, that just has kept them in stasis the whole time. That they're not even dead."

"That's not possible," I said to her, before I frowned, scrunching up my face. "We're not talking about people resting after a long weekend here. You're talking hundreds, possibly thousands of years without air, food, water... longevity magic is hard, and the idea of keeping someone like that intact? There's no fucking way. Even magic at its best would have trouble with something like that."

"I'm just telling you what Kenny's theory was, Dale," Ros grumbled. "He's probably wrong. But that's what he and the other eggheads think. They're gonna be here eventually, but they weren't in any rush about it, so I don't think anyone's worried about the Zaxxix getting up and walking away."

"Yeah, I'm certainly not worried about that either," I laughed. "That ain't happening."

"Don't worry, Ros," Charlotte said, giving our werewolf cousin-in-law a big hug. "If he's okay, we'll bring him back, and if he isn't... well... we'll find out what happened and let you know."

"I just... I just need to know what happened," Rosalyn said, starting to break. "But most of all, I want Larry to meet his goddamn second son, okay? Is that a thing I can ask of you?"

"Well, what the hell are we wasting time here for then?" I asked, giving her a be-brave smile. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. We'll get it done, one way or another."

As we got back into the car and closed the doors, Shar turned to look at me. "What are you thinking, Dale?"

"I'm thinking I sincerely hope we don't have to bring her bad news soon enough," I sighed. "She's already got to deal with the mess of being part of our family. Someone in it should get some happiness from it."

The Mine was off to the west, along route 211 (better known as Horse Creek Rd), just a bit past the Iron Mountain Country Church and the railroad tracks. It was the kind of building that definitely stood out, but it was so nondescript, you had to assume it was just something someone had built in optimism and had only partly lived up to those dreams.

Charlotte parked her car in the nearest spot next to the building itself, and it was pretty easy to spot Larry's big-ass Escalade a couple of spots over, completely unmoved. We hopped out of the car and walked up to the building, as I reached into my pocket and pulled out the spare set of keys to the building that I kept, as the Mine's emergency contact person.

The front door had a couple of packages out front, things that would've been picked up by Little Larry on his standard in and outs from work, so Charlotte gathered them up as I unlocked the front door and moved us into the enclave. It was a small room between the façade and the actual structure, but it didn't look like much of anything other than a small waiting room.

Once she and I were inside, I moved over to the second set of doorways and placed my hand up against the palm scanner and my eye against the optical scanner. While the technology was running my hand and retina through the system, half a dozen swept up from the floor, surrounding us, bouncing up and down like a series of terrifying mystic hula hoops. They encompassed basically the entire room, ensuring that everybody inside of the chamber was of Sexton blood.

Technically, Rosalyn would've been fine getting this far, but the minute the next door opened, her eyes would've started watering so bad she couldn't see, and she would've been sneezing to the point of having trouble breathing. She would've had to immediately flee from the building, which would, of course, prevent her from looking in on Little Larry.

We'd known about the werewolves' allergy to the amber-like substance for decades, which was why we'd left the artifact in Charlotte's car when we were in Larry's house. This time, however, we'd just left it in the car, since the artifact was supposed to be kept a decent distance from the mine whenever possible, and we figured nothing was going to be dumb enough to try and break into Charlotte's car, although Charlotte had brought the totem with her in her satchel, not wanting to be apart from it.

The five bouncing rings finally settled back into the floor and the lighting color schema of the room changed from the menacing orange to the family's colors - deep forest green and autumn golden brown, as my late father's voice said, "Sexton family members recognized. Welcome to the Danzour Amber Mine."

"Thanks Dad," Charlotte grumbled beneath her breath, her uncomfortableness echoing my own at hearing our deceased Dad speaking to us once more. I knew as the current Gunslinger, I could've gone and recorded new messages for all our facilities across the world, but it A) felt like a colossal waste of time, B) felt pompous as fuuuuuck, and C) sounded an awful lot like unnecessary work.

The two heavy metal doors in front of us slowly slid apart and revealed the elevator, which must've returned to the top floor at some point. There weren't any signs of distress or damage to the elevator, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel better or worse about that. We stepped into the giant metal box and pressed the Bottom button. (There were only two, the other labeled Top.) There was also a stairwell we could've used, but it was five flights, and I'd rather take the lift instead of walking.

Once we reached the basement, the doors opened again and we were bathed in a thick syrupy golden light as all the amber reflected light in our direction, a heavy wash of subdued but enveloping light. Most of what you see when you enter the mines is that amber substance - on the floors, on the walls, all around you. And while we've gotten rather creative at all the lighting solutions - they're mostly just long drilled tubes filled with high-powered LED strings - the resulting effect really is like nothing you've ever seen before.

One thing we stress pretty highly is not to touch the amber itself. The pathways are all covered in plates of metal, and for the most part, the amber itself has large plexiglass plates pressed up against it, so that reaching out and touching the substance is more than a little tricky.

Touching the amber shouldn't do anything, but the substance itself is unpredictably reactive to different things at different times with no real warning. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the time, it doesn't react at all to electricity. That said, every so often, you'll see a bolt of static go shooting through the substance like a hummingbird on speed, flitting around before disappearing. Most of the time, water just sits on top it, like it would any other rock, but you leave it there long enough, and sometimes, just sometimes, the substance will swallow it up without warning or explanation.

You can imagine why nobody wanted to leave flesh pressed against it for a long time.

That said, we'd done that experiment too, leaving a rat in a cage with no bottom on top of a platform of the amber like substance. The camera set up to watch it fritzed out and when it came back on, the rat was missing and there was no trace of it in the amber below. You better believe that freaked some people out, and when they tried running the experiment again, this time nothing happened for weeks and weeks on end, so they finally pulled the plug.

The drillbits we use to create holes are ruby-tipped, the only thing that seems to let us chip away at the substance, and even then, it's a pretty laborious process. The only reason the artifact actually got loose was because it was near the edge wall, and one my Dad's cousins, Cousin Patrick, was so stubborn that he spent ten years getting the damn thing free, drilling a single line at a time until he'd gotten to the point where he could get in behind it. That's why his initials were carved into the bottom of the chunk of amber, PS. We'd passed it around to a bunch of other mages, let them study, poke and prod at it, and every single one of them had come up short, unable to tell us just about anything about the Zaxxix artifact contained inside, nor much about the substance surrounding it. One of the best wizards I know, Evil Eye Evelyn, the most she could tell me after spending a month subjecting it to every test she could think of, was that she'd accidentally spilled her Dr. Pepper on it, and it had "glowed a funny green for a bit."

That was truly a discovery for the ages.

"Glowed a funny green for a bit."

Oppenheimer, eat your heart out.

There wasn't a body in the front entryway into tunnels, which made me feel better. That was almost immediately contrasted by the fact that the tunnels felt colder than I remembered them being, which made me feel worse. You learn to trust your instincts in these matters, and they were in definite conflict with each other.

I hadn't realized it, but sometime between getting onto the elevator and getting off the elevator, the SoulEnders had made their way to my hands, and my sister was holding LastBlade in hers.

"Something is definitely off," I said to her.

"This place feels like a tomb."

"It is a tomb, sis," I laughed nervously, as I started to move a bit more into the Mines. Despite the fact that we can't really dig into the amber, we can dig around it, and so the Mines, like the Enclave base they were built on, run down several floors.

We did a slow and careful sweep of the first floor, and found nothing amiss before making our way down to the second floor. "Lawrence!" my sister shouted. "Are you down here?"

Her voice echoed off the walls, but no one responded.

"Did you expect him to say, 'oh hey, I'm over here! What are you doing here?'"

"No, but I figured I should give him the option of responding, if he was."

"Nothing's alive down here, sis," I said, tucking the SoulEnders back into their holsters. "No need to worry about that."

"I don't smell dead body, though," she said, taking another whiff of the air, as she squirrels LastBlade back into its' concealed scabbard. "I smell... pine cones? What the hell?"

I took a long, deep inhale of air only to realize she was right - it was a combination of pine trees and lemon. "Cleaning fluid? That's strong, too."

"You'd think it would've faded," Charlotte said. "If it was spilled recently."

"Hang on, we can get the air in here cycled out," I said as I made my way over towards the air cycling system, which was next to the lights. I hadn't wanted to turn it on when I first came in because if Little Larry was dead, we would've been hit with a load of awful odors, but now that that seemed unlikely, it didn't hurt to run the air cycling through its paces. I flipped the switch and the machine slowly chugged to life as the industrial drum started spinning, the shutters for the long ducts opening up before the fans started spinning up, pumping the stale air out and fresh air into the mines.

That's when shit got strange.

Down a few floors, we could suddenly hear the fierce sound of metal shredding and heavy pounding as something tore up one of the air shafts, climbing up towards the surface. I decided to take the stairwell and try and get to the top floor as quickly as I can, but I was already significantly behind the clattering, and whatever I was chasing was already up and out of the shaft. I could hear a rupturing of metal followed by what sounded like a muted explosion then debris scattering.

None of it sounded what one would call "good."

When I got to the surface, I could see what the explosion sound was - it was Charlotte's car. The little Mini Cooper had been torn in half, and there were fragments of it strewn all across the parking lot. Most importantly, my bag had been ripped open, and the relic Little Larry had sent me was gone.

"Fuuuuck," I muttered as I glanced around, looking for tracks of any kind, but not seeing any.

There was an exhaust pipe that had been torn open on the side of the building, clearly where whatever it was had made its way out, and it was also in tatters, having been ripped asunder with no care or hesitation.

I walked back over to the stairs and pulled the door shut behind me before I started stomping my way down to the Mines again. I wasn't even sure how to tell Charlotte her beloved Mini Cooper had been destroyed - that thing had been covered in all sorts of protective spells, and they'd been decimated like they weren't even there. I knew she'd built quite an attachment to it, and there was no way it was going to be salvaged after that mess. I also knew that we were going to have to get back the relic that had been taken from us, once we understood what the fuck was going on.

As I made my way back into the mines, I shouted, "Shar, I've got some bad news..."

"Nevermind that now, Dale! Larry's alive!" she called up from the bottom floor.

Well, any news like that would be good news, so I started winding my way down the walkways, heading to the very bottom floor, and sure enough, down near the end of the hallway, there stood Little Larry.

Sort of.

Our cousin was there, much as he'd always looked, except he wasn't standing on a metal platform - he was standing directly on the amber, and the substance had grown upwards and encased him up to his knees in the golden prisonlike substance. The rest of him held perfectly still, as if suspended, and I scowled a little bit, as I looked behind him and saw a giant gaping recession where I imagine an Enclave sorcerer used to be literally only days ago.

On the ground, there was a bucket half full of liquid that reeked of pine leaves. "Well, there's your source of the smell."

"I can't seem to touch him, Dale," Charlotte said to me, demonstrating how when she brought her hands close to him, it almost seemed to hit some kind of invisible field around him, and her hand would be deflected off. "What happened to him?"

I gestured to the floor and how it had enveloped his shoes and ankles. "I think Larry found a way to accidentally dissolve the substance, or maybe just soften it back up again. But it set again too quickly, or maybe it grew back bigger than it had originally. I'm pretty sure we can get him out of this, but I don't think you're going to like it much."

"He's our cousin, Dale. He's family," she said, scoldingly. "That means if there's a chance, we don't leave him. Now, what are we doing?"

"Get LastBlade out and be ready to stab it right between his feet when I tell you to, but not before," I told her as I grabbed a couple of metal plates, setting them in key places around Larry. This was going to be a split-second thing, and if I touched the amber in any way, there was a good chance I would be stuck with Larry in the muck.

"Wait, why are we using LastBlade and not the SoulEnders?" she said to me, as I started to get into place.

"Because we're not sure if the SoulEnders would work, and if they did, there's a decent chance they would destroy all the connected amber all at once, and then we'd really be up shit's creek without a paddle," I said to her. "On three. Got it?"

"Got it."

"One... two... three!" Then I proceeded to do the dumbest thing I'd done in a couple of years - I tried to tackle Little Larry.

As expected, the minute LastBlade sank into the amber, the golden substance liquified and instead of bouncing off Little Larry, I plowed into him, shoving him forward and off the amber pedestal that he'd been standing on and over onto the metal planks I'd set up to catch us. His weight caught me, although he definitely got the wind knocked out of him, but I was more concerned with the amber we'd just left, and sure enough, it looked like it was trying to crawl over and grab Larry's feet again, but this time Charlotte stabbed at it again, and the liquid hopped back, like it was afraid of making contact with the blade again. Once it backed away, it fell still and stopped moving.

"D-d-d-Dale?" Larry said, shivering a little, like he'd just walked out of a freezer he'd been in for far too long. His eyes were bloodshot and despite his frame being inches taller and wider than mine, he still somehow felt small, as if the whole experience had shaken him pretty badly. "When the hell did you get here?"

"You've been down and out probably close to a week, Larry," I said to him. "What were you doing?"

"I'm... I'm not entirely sure," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "The last week or so, I kept coming down here and workin' on something, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it was..." He turned and looked behind Charlotte. "Oh shit, Uncle Freddy got out..."

"Uncle Freddy?"

"I named all the various figures scattered around the mines," Larry said as he finally moved to stand up alongside me. "That's Gunther there, the Enclave that was about to attack Uncle Freddy. The big bruiser in the front hallway is Luther, with Susan and Phoebe next to him. There's not a lot to do down here, really, other than document and try and put together the same puzzle others have been working on for centuries."

"What's with the bucket of solution?"

"Sol--oh! I figured out PineSol mixed with tequila creates a kind of slow dissolvent for the amber substance, so I've been using it to start getting a few loose objects out of the sludge. Nothing too crazy, just things like shards of wood or a flying fork, just to see if it worked and if stuff that could come out safely, so that when Kenny arrived, we'd have something to work on together."

"And does it?"

"Does it what?"

"Does it come out safely?"

"Oh! Oh yeah, although it's not so much a dissolvent as it is a softener, generally," he said as he started walking back up the stair steps of metal planks they'd made. "It can be used to redistribute the amber, though, so I was starting to think maybe we could make some new pathways in, rather than just the tiny stuff we've been able to access via drill bit. We could use it to sort of drain parts of it away and take things out for us to study them."

"Except that it seems like stuff's still alive in there," I grumbled. "Uncle Freddy made that pretty much clear."

"Then we should get after him, Dale!" Charlotte said to me. "We can't let a rogue member of The Enclave be out there on the loose! You should've just taken Mifune and gone after them!"

"About that, sis..."