New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl

Published
by Fey Dreams Productions, LLC

Copyright
@ 2013 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. This material may not
be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior
written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact
[email protected]

This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are
fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Writing may
be a solitary occupation, but it's rarely a one-person job. It takes a village
to produce a novel. This book wouldn't have made it without the help of many
people. The list below is not exhaustive, and my apologies to anybody I left
out.

To Carlos
and Carmela Martijena, parents extraordinaire, for their constant help and
support.

To Joan T.
Masters, ex-wife and best friend forever, for making me a better person.

To Igor
Buminovich, Erik Fisher, and Scott Palter, for answering assorted questions on history
and languages, and double thanks to Scott for all his help and constructive
criticism. Any errors and infelicities in this book are mine; there would
be plenty of them without those gents' kind help.

To Kevin
Siembieda of Palladium Books, who gave me my first full-time writing gig, for
the opportunity to make a living doing what I love and for his generous help with
this project.

To George
Vasilakos of Eden Studios, for all his support.

To MaryAnne
Fry and Delia Gable, for being great artists and awesome friends, and to Jesse
Belle-Jones for portraying Christine Dark for the cover.

To Scott Coady,
gaming buddy, for all his help and support. The Dude Abides.

And last but
not least, to the talented folk at
www.geekandsundry.com
. This book is in many ways my love
letter to geek culture, and few things embody that culture like their YouTube
channel (
http://www.youtube.com/geekandsundry
).
Thank you for all the inspiration and entertainment.

Carlos
J. Martijena-Carella

www.cjcarella.com

Chapter One

Christine Dark

Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 11, 2013

Last stands suck.

Outnumbered a gazillion to one. Bullets
and rockets and bolts of energy and angry glares and bad language rained down
on her in an epic downpour of malice and destruction. She faced the slings and
arrows and magic missiles of outrageous bastards and somehow managed to survive
the onslaught. No problem, she told herself, I can handle this. Her
counterattacks took the bad guys down in droves, stacked their quivering bodies
like cordwood, but for every dozen she struck down, another dozen and a half
showed up. The center cannot hold, or in other words we are totally effed up,
this is the way the world ends, all banging and whimpering and burning
sensations and not so fresh feelings. In the words of the ancients, we’re going
from suck to blow and it’s going to hurt a lot before it is over…

Something bad was behind her, worse than
the hordes of murderous men and beasties facing her. She most definitely did
not want to turn around. So she turned around.

It was dead, but still deadly. It wore
the face of her father.

She had no idea how badly things would
have turned out, but luckily her alarm clock saved the day.

“Holy mother of crap!” Christine Dark
groaned, and smacked the clock until it stopped beeping like an R2 unit in
distress. That had been way intense. Her dreams were usually completely
nonsensical dreck or small, anxious things. Showing up for class and realizing
you had skipped classes for most of the semester, plus had forgotten to wear
pants, that sort of thing. Oh, and the occasional dirty dream involving dark
handsome strangers with very skilled hands and mouths. This one had been a
Michael Bay does Marvel Comics after smoking a hefty dose of meth kind of
thing. She had been in fear of her life, and the weirdest thing was, her
dream-self had laughed in the face of death. In real life, Christine didn’t
laugh even in the face of mild discomfort.

Her heart was racing. She didn’t
ordinarily wake up feeling like she’d run a marathon. Weirdness. Even after
showering and getting dressed, the world did not feel quite right to her,
almost as if she was still dreaming. The surreal detached feeling persisted all
the way through breakfast with her roommate Sophie. Sophie hadn’t spent the
night in their dorm room, a not irregular occurrence, and had texted Christine
to ask her to meet for breakfast. Christine agreed. She agreed to most of
Sophie’s requests and suggestions.

“There’s a party tonight at the Delta
Phi’s,” Sophie said as soon as Christine sat down with her tray-ful of sensible
breakfast food.

“On a Tuesday night?” Christine asked.
Most of her attention was on the food in front of her. She was starving and
feeling a bit shaky on top of everything else.

“You should come,” Sophie continued. She
hadn’t noticed Christine was feeling off this morning, but Sophie rarely paid
attention to matters not pertaining to Sophie. Normally Christine didn’t mind,
but her dreamlike state was beginning to be replaced by grumpiness.

Sophie Beaumont was tall, tan and blonde,
built to the specs of your typical fourteen year old boy’s fantasy female
ideal. Christine was short, pale and red-haired, and built to far less
impressive specs. The two roommates had blue eyes, but Sophie’s were deep and
dark blue, while Christine’s were pale and tended to go gray when she wasn’t in
a good mood. Like now, for example. Unreality was giving way to dissatisfaction.

“It should be fun,” Sophie added
cheerfully.

“You know I don’t like that kind of
party,” Christine replied. “I’ll fit in like a Jawa at Rivendell.” Doing a
little fictional mash-up helped her mood a little, but not enough.

“Like a what where?” Sophie didn’t get
either reference, of course. Sophie didn’t get half of what Christine said,
even when she bothered to listen to her. “Never mind. Just come along. Jeff has
a friend who’s dying to meet you. He’s into engineering and stuff, so you can
talk math to each other.”

“I don’t really talk about math during
casual conversation,” Christine said. She’d rather talk about stuff she was
reading, or watching, or playing. Hm. She didn’t talk about what she was doing,
because she didn’t do much other than reading, watching or playing stuff. And
thinking. She did do a lot of thinking. Maybe she should be doing stuff more
often. Something to think about.

“Earth to Christine,” Sophie said.
Christine blinked. “You went away inside your own head again. Boys don’t like that,
you know. You need to pay attention to them, make them feel special.”

“I guess. Every one of them is a precious
unique snowflake, or something like that, right?” Most conversations with
Sophie ended up revolving about boys, and Christine’s deficiencies when it came
to interactions with said boys.
My freaking life can’t pass the Bechdel test
,
she thought bitterly.

Sophie smiled indulgently. “Whatever you
say, Christine. So, are you coming with me?”

What the heck. She was already having a
weird day. Some masochistic impulse drove her to agree to endure an evening of
suckitude. “Fine.”

* * *

The suckitude, it hurt.

Christine tried to shrink into a corner,
but the senior from the Phi Beta Gecko or Whatever House got all up in her
grill anyway. His breath smelled of pepperoni-and-cheese pizza, stale beer and
a hint of cheap mouthwash. “’Sup?” he said.

“Hi,” was her equally suave reply. She
probably shouldn’t have had so much punch, but she had needed something to take
the edge off. The third of a cup she’d downed had taken the edge and a good
thirty or forty IQ points right off.

“I said wassup,” Phi Beta Gecko repeated
in the determined, deliberate tone of the truly drunk.

“Uh, not much? My blood pressure? Gas
prices?” None of the answers seemed to satisfy him. He leaned over closer.

“You’re kinda hawt,” he said. Very
flattering. Luckily, his utter disregard for her personal space gave her an
opening; she ducked and weaved and got out of the corner and away from him. He
was too drunk to give chase. It was clearly time to leave. The night had been a
total disaster so far and it could only get worse.

Sophie had tried to get Christine all
dressed up in the latest slut wear but Christine had refused. She wasn’t wholly
opposed to dressing provocatively – the outfit she’d worn at Dragon Con last
year had turned many a head – but not when hanging out with the muggles, where
she felt like an outsider, exposed, a fish out of water, loser-girl out on a
stage where some d-bags would soon empty a bucket of blood over her head. She’d
ended up in jeans and a nice silk blouse, and had acquiesced to borrowing
Sophie’s high-heeled boots. After slathering a copious amount of makeup on
Christine’s face, Sophie had deemed her fit for public display.

Upon their arrival to the already
crowded, loud and rowdy frat house, Sophie introduced her to Jeff’s friend
Donald or Dominic or Damian: something with a D. Something-with-a-D was kinda
cute but there was a mean glint in his eyes that had put Christine off almost
immediately. He looked her over and Christine had caught what she thought was
either a tiny scowl or a twitch on the corner of his mouth, neither of which
felt complimentary. Then she’d stopped being able to notice details like that
because Sophie had plucked Christine’s glasses right off her face and taken
them away. Okay, she probably should have worn contacts to this shindig, but
she hated putting the darn things on her eyeballs. In any case, she was
half-blind, which didn't help. Some punch-drinking and a few minutes of awkward
conversation later, Something-with-a-D had mumbled some excuse and gone away.
Sophie and Jeff had disappeared some time before that, so Christine was left
alone in a crowd of people she didn’t know. If she wasn’t so drunk she’d be
having an anxiety attack just about now.

She wanted to go home.

Christine looked around for the exit,
which wasn’t easy in the crowded space. She took another sip of punch and tried
to make her way through the inmates of this century’s version of
Animal
House
. It wasn’t easy. People kept bumping into her. One of them bumped her
hard enough to knock the remainder of her punch all over her, splashing her
blouse and the front of her jeans with artificially flavored grain alcohol.
Nothing beat the feeling of syrupy alcoholic fluid running down your clothes.

All in all, she would have been much
happier playing
World or Warcraft
, watching that web show about people
playing
World of Warcraft
, or quietly reading a novel or
Supernatural
slash fan fic. Or even writing
Supernatural
slash fan fic, which she’d
been guilty of. Well, she’d tried, epic-failed, and now she was cold, wet and
just plain annoyed. Time to say ‘Peace,’ head on home and read some
Supernatural
slash fic before going to bed.

The world flickered.

That’s the only way she could describe
the sensation. For a second or two, everything – the crowd of partygoers, the
loud music, the very floor under her high heel boots – went away, came back,
went away and came back. It was like a light bulb on its last legs going on and
off, but the flickering covered the entire effing spectrum of her senses.
Well,
that was weird
, she thought to herself when the sensation stopped. A second
later, her bafflement was replaced by the urgent realization that everything
she had eaten today, and perhaps the week before, was swirling madly in her
stomach and trying to come out the way it had gone in. Her eyes bulging,
Christine clapped both hands over her mouth and tried desperately to make it
outside.

“Look out, she’s gonna hurl,” one of the
more perceptive Phi Beta Geckos warned the room, and people finally gave her a
wide berth, plenty of space to stagger outside just as everything came
geysering out her mouth and nose. She hated, hated,
hated
puking. No
loved ones around to hold her hair while she did it, either. Christine ended up
on her hand and knees on the mostly dead lawn outside the frat house, heaving
uncontrollably and hating every second of it. A few partygoers – or more than a
few, she really couldn’t see very far without her glasses – were looking on
with varying degrees of pity, amusement or contempt, dealer’s choice; some were
probably immortalizing the moment on their smartphones. She must be quite a
treat for the eyes, down on all fours and giving the world a great shot of her
butt if you didn’t mind a little vomit on the side. Hello, YouTube and Vine.
Goodbye, dignity. Perfect end point for this particular quest. How could it get
any worse?

The universe is always happy to answer
that question, and few ever like the answers they get. She really should have
known better.

The flickering came back. One second she
was on her hands and knees on the lawn, trying not to look at what had been a
veggie lasagna some hours and assorted digestive processes ago. The next,
things went dark and quiet. Another flicker and she was on her hands and knees
on a smooth flat surface with bright spotlights shining right into her eyes,
blinding her. And the second after that she was back on the lawn outside the
frat house. Absolute OMG WTF moment. Brain aneurysm? LSD-laced Rohypnol in the
punch? What?

Christine felt as if something was
pulling at her. The nausea came back, now with extra creepy sensations, as if
someone’s fingers were reaching right through her skull and grabbing her by the
medulla oblongata. Some force was dragging her somewhere. She didn’t know how
she knew that, but she felt it down to her bones. She also felt that wherever
that somewhere was, she didn’t want to go there. No effing way.

“What the fuck? Where did she go?” somebody
yelled. Christine barely heard the words, too busy concentrating on not going
wherever she was going in between flickers. Or firing neurons at random while
her brain went bye-bye, one or the other. She felt certain she was fighting
back somehow, and she had no idea why she felt that. The whole thing was like a
bad dream where the craziest crap appeared to make sense. At least the nausea
was gone, replaced by a falling sensation, even though she was mere inches from
the ground.
If I stumble they’re gonna eat me alive
. The Metric lyrics
flittered through her head like a bat out of hell.

Something went
pop
inside of her.
This
is it
, she thought absently as she felt herself letting go. She was certain
she was dying.
Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry…

She was falling for real now, falling
through the ground, through the planet, free fall into utter darkness, where is
the light? Isn’t there supposed to be a light?

Oblivion.