Hello hello everyone! It is a privilege and a thrill to be writing to you today, even more than usual, because this article is part of a joint project with four other amazing content creators: Valentin1331, DerBK of Ancient Evils, Dscarpac of Quick Learner, and Justin of PlayingBoardGames!
I’m stunned and truly honored to have been included in such elite company of creators I admire, but when the consistently number-one deckbuilder on ArkhamDB reaches out to you and asks if you want to collaborate on a project, you say yes SO FAST, and there’s no time for imposter syndrome.
Abstract
Basically, here’s the run-down. Each of the five of us chose a different investigator from the upcoming Feast of Hemlock Vale set, and set out to design our own version of an exploration of, and guide to, the character in question, each of which you can find here:
Valentin’s Kohaku
PlayingBoardGames’ Hank
Quick Learner’s Alessandra
Ancient Evils’ Wilson
Which, as you may have noticed, leaves me with Kate. Perfect. Here is the decklist that will accompany this article: https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/47002/kate-doesn-t-need-roads-fhv-intro-deck-guide-1.0
And with that, we are ready to begin.
Introduction
I’ll keep my personal ramblings short today, in the interest of maximum accessibility; but if you’d like to skip over my personal musings and short fiction, the sections you want from this article are under the headings “Methods” and “Results“, where I’ll be covering Kate’s abilities, access, synergies, and what sort of cool things can be done with her.
But to fulfill my self-indulgent rambling quota (and the cheeky formatting of this article), I’ve wanted Kate in the LCG for YEARS at this point. I have played almost every game in the Arkham Files (yes, even the original Arkham Horror. Don’t try it. The rules of that thing are more eldritch than any Ancient One), and Kate has always been a character I’ve loved, but who I’ve felt has typically fallen just short of really delivering on her thematics.
Weird Science is rad, and a scientist encountering the unknown and answering it by learning and trying to apply what she does understand rather than just panicking and going crazy is an obviously more interesting route than most scientists in our source material. And more believable. Plus it makes her stand out from most of the rest of the cast, who are usually either non-academics or experts in the esoteric. Aside from Agatha (another character I am extremely excited to see in the LCG), we don’t really get a lot of scientists or people in STEM in general, and it offers a fresh take on interacting with the mythos that I find very satisfying.
Add to that that Kate has a sweet weird-science hip-holstered dimensional manipulation device and you’re golden…except you aren’t, really. In most of her appearances, the Flux Stabilizer is more or less forgettable. Whether that’s because the effect is just not that impactful, or because its impact is entirely contingent on pure luck, I rarely found her magnum opus playing the decisive role I wanted it to in her stories.
Well, those days are over. Kate’s LCG incarnation brings with her the most powerful, consistent, and interesting form of the Flux Stabilizer she’s ever had, and it is a BLAST. Sometimes literally! I finally feel like I’m toying with the forces of creation, using my expertise to place myself between monsters and intruders from other dimensions and send them packing with a flip of a switch. Furthermore, Kate’s abilities make her a charming jack of all trades who can fill any role in a party, from nigh-unparalleled clueving potential to a bizarre take on a primary fighter to a technical supporter passing all the strange tests a scenario has to offer, and everything in between.
My excitement over the Stabilizer, and the relative simplicity and strong theme of a Stabilizer-focused deck, has led me to build this deck guide around maximizing its potential (as you may already know if you’ve read the write-up over on the decklist). But that doesn’t mean I won’t go over all the many and varied ideas I’ve had for Kate, and all the potential synergies and directions I’ve thought of so far. The point of this article is to inspire you to find the take on Kate that most interests you; so without further ado, let’s get scientific in here!
Methods
If you’re reading this article, I assume you already know what Kate’s abilities and deckbuilding are; if you don’t, pop over to the decklist and take a quick look. But unlike some investigators, the nuances of Kate’s abilities can be unclear and hard to parse. So let’s do some parsing.
Kate’s main ability is spread across two cards; her own, and her signature permanent, the Flux Stabilizer. At fast speed, Kate can move any clues in her personal pool onto a Science or Tool asset she controls, as long as it does not already have a clue on it. When she does so to the Flux Stabilizer, it flips to its Active form, from which point on any time you move a clue onto an asset you get +2 skill value for your next test that phase.
Essentially, she can move a clue onto the Stabilizer to initialize it, and then move clues onto any other Science or Tool assets in order to get +2 to a test. Any test, with any stat. This is pretty sweet, but there are some obvious limitations.
Firstly, you are limited by the number of Science/Tool assets you have in play. This puts a high setup cost on the deck, which can be mitigated by some cards we’ll talk about later, but it can also stretch your slots. There are strong slotless options, but most of them are specific to certain strategies, so selecting your array of assets wisely during deckbuilding, and getting them into play each scenario, are notable hurdles in getting Kate up and running.
Secondly, you are limited by the number of clues you have. If you haven’t seen the rulings, don’t worry–you can still spend clues you’ve moved to your assets for scenario objectives, so don’t be afraid to use your +2s for fear of being unable to meet an act threshold. Doing so even frees up the asset you’ve already clued, so you may clue it again next time you need another +2!
But that doesn’t change the fact that there are a limited number of clues in a scenario, and the number you can hold at any given time will vary wildly based on your player count and how effective the rest of your team is at clueving. A single-player Kate may only have access to a few clues at any given time, while depending on the scenario a 4p Kate could comfortably be packing 20-30 without breaking a sweat. So adjust your asset spread accordingly.
I personally think around 8 Science/Tool assets is a good place to be, particularly for the 4p Current-spamming version I’ll be playing; but I recommend testing for your group and your personal playstyle.
So assuming you’ve mastered your asset spread and you’re slapping +2s all over the place, you may now be running into a problem. Either all your assets are clued and therefore full, or you’ve run out of clues to throw onto them. Fortunately, we can fix that with her other signatures, the Aetheric Currents, one of which was shuffled into your deck when you first initialized the Flux Stabilizer.
The Currents serve two purposes. First of all, they reset and refuel Kate’s primary ability; secondly, they’re thematically GORGEOUS, and represent the actual effect of the Flux Stabilizer–namely to close gates and banish extradimensional threats–in action. There are two of them, and each time you initialize the Stabilizer you choose one to shuffle into your deck, at first from your bonded cards but later from your discard pile. Though they have different primary effects when played, both also share three effects: they move all clues you control on assets back into Kate’s pool, ready to be used again to generate +2s; they draw you a card, thus cantripping (replacing themselves with a new card); and they flip Flux Stabilizer, essentially de-activating it and requiring you to move a clue onto it to re-initialize, shuffle in a Current, and start spamming +2s all over again. It’s a rather elegant loop, in my opinion.
Now let’s talk about the differences between the two Currents. The first, Yuggoth, is in my opinion the weaker of the two, but has valuable tech opportunities. It is an Intellect-based Fight action (though you can use Combat if you want) that exhausts the target and moves it to any location if you succeed. An enemy that doesn’t normally hunt or patrol, or that you’ve Transmogrified, can be neatly shut down with this, but even a mobile threat can be delayed, and it is still functionally an evasion which is always helpful–especially since it doesn’t require you to be engaged with the threat, unlike its counterpart.
Said counterpart is the Current of Yoth, and my pick for the more powerful of the two. It is an Intellect-based Evade action (again, Agility is allowed, if you want that for some reason); when it succeeds, instead of being evaded, the enemy is shuffled into the encounter deck. This is essentially a one-hit-kill; sure, you’ll see the enemy again, but at worst you’ll have functionally evaded the problem and blanked one of next round’s mythos draws, and at best it may be quite a while before they’re able to find their way back.
Neither Current can affect Elite enemies with their success riders (exhausting and yeeting/shuffling away), but there is still value to be had during boss fights with Fight/Evades that draw you a card, reset your pile of +2s, and can use your (likely superior) Intellect over their normal stats.
So there we have it; Kate’s abilities. The result is a play pattern of getting/keeping a clue to initialize the Flux Stabilizer, charging it up by passing a variety of tests using your other clues as +2 boosts, then killing or evading an enemy by discharging the Stabilizer and starting the process all over again. Although you can get by resetting your clued assets solely via spending clues on objectives, or another tactic like Clue Drop, I personally find mastering the built-in loop to be the most satisfying way to play Kate, because it oozes theme and power.
To supplement this gameplay loop, Kate has some rather unusual deckbuilding. Fortunately, she has the full Seeker 0-5 as a foundation, to which she adds Science 0-4 and Insight 0-1. We’ll get more into the specifics of what this gives her later in this article, or over on the decklist, but for now the main takeaway is that she is primarily a Seeker with a narrow but very interesting assortment of low-level Guardian and Survivor cards. In the future, Science 0-4 may expand into a broader assortment of interesting options; I certainly hope it will, and will be closely watching to see if her deckbuilding proves more like Mateo’s or more like Finn’s. Poor Finn.
But either way, she’s already extraordinarily strong and interesting, with a spread of extremely diverse playstyles to enable or that enable her. Speaking of which…
Results
With a solid understanding of what Kate can do, let’s start thinking about how we want to take advantage of that.
First off, let’s talk Aetheric Currents, because it’s pretty simple: draw. Draw so many cards. If you want the Currents to be your primary weapon/enemy management tool, or simply want to play them as often as possible to reset your slew of +2s, your best tactic is to take advantage of the many ways Seekers have to accelerate their decks. Perception (and the other neutral skills, if you’re frequently using non-Intellect stats), Dream-Enhancing Serum, skills to combo with Grisly Totem, etc. are all good, as of course are Cryptic Research, Deep Knowledge, and even the less efficient draw cards like Preposterous Sketches and Thorough Inquiry. There’s no tutor for the Currents yet, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and as an added bonus all this draw will reward synergies like the Ancient Stones and Cryptic Writings.
Disclaimer: you will almost certainly still draw Cryptic Writings during the upkeep step, no matter how fast you’re cycling. It’s just one of those rules of the LCG, like how Take Heart always makes you pass tests.
Secondly, and much more interestingly, let’s talk about Kate’s +2s. How are you going to get that asset spread into play? Fortunately, Seeker has a couple powerful options: Archaic Glyphs (Markings of Isis), one of the best setup cards in the game (especially with the help of Knowledge is Power) and one Kate is uniquely able to enable, since her ability makes her extraordinarily good at oversuccess payoffs; and Unearth the Ancients (2), a frequently overlooked card that also turns investigatory oversuccess into several saved actions and resources. And of course, there’s the option of just spending the time and resources to play them out manually. As long as you’ve estimated the number you’ll need correctly and don’t waste time setting up clue receptacles you’ll never use, this is far from a waste of time; once you’re online, whether you’re hoovering up clues with Glyphs or Research Notes or one-shotting non-Elites with Aetheric Currents, you’ll be more than compressing enough to make up for the slow start.
But what assets ARE you putting into play, I pretend to hear you ask? Good question, because the options are not universal. A few options are fairly obvious–Empirical Hypothesis, Laboratory Assistant (yes, she’s a Science asset!), Magnifying Glasses, Dream-Enhancing Serums, that sort of thing. But there are a lot more slightly niche-r picks that will depend on who exactly your Kate is.
Research Notes gives you the powerful Clue Drop strategy (which I’ll talk more about later) but will consume a big chunk of your deck in enablers and payoffs, so it’s a bit of a commitment. Surgical Kit is the same but for healing–maybe Kate is getting a double MD-PhD? For a more chemical (and more consistently combat-focused) angle, the Strange Solutions are an oldie but a goodie. And Survival Technique is a new and very shiny option I’ll cover more later; although you’ll need to include cards to take advantage of its second ability, it is slotless and (according to a recent ruling) can even boost your basic investigate actions with its first trigger!
An important question for this deck is how you want to spend your hand slots. Are you brave enough to loop a variety of assets through a Tool Belt (I am not)? If not, you may find yourself having to choose. Microscope (4) is thematic and recent, but I’m personally not a fan because of the awkward 2-action cost; for hand slot clue compression eligible for Kate’s ability, my pick would be Fingerprint Kit. It can even be readied using Fine Tuning! Going in a completely different direction, Alchemical Distillation is a powerful Customizable that could shift you into more of a support-oriented direction, or simply keep your own assets and economy topped up. Pocket Telescope could help if you’re hunting Synergy payoffs, interacting remotely over Barricade, or just playing Dream Eaters. And then a pet card of mine, the Hawk-Eye Folding Cameras, are almost always technically worse than Mag Glass, but provide an extremely thematic aspect of recording your research for posterity and your own benefit that thematically synergizes well with the rest of Kate’s building up power alongside her understanding each scenario.
I don’t think I need to tell you how to get clues in Seeker, so we’ll skip over that hurdle with the understanding that Kate has probably already advanced the act in the time it took me to write this sentence. So let’s move straight on to a much more exciting question: what are you going to DO with all these +2s, spilling out of your arms like too many limes?
There’s an obvious answer, one I’ve already stumbled into just two paragraphs ago, and which you’ve probably noticed is conspicuously absent from the decklist above: Archaic Glyphs (Guiding Stones). In fact, I didn’t include any Glyphs in my build. What’s up with that?
Well, there are two reasons. The first is that a large part of why I enjoy deckbuilding is trying to find unexpected combos, builds, thematics, and playstyles. And the first thought on almost everyone’s minds, seeing Kate’s ability for the first time, was “whoa! she’s great at Glyphs!” and they were right! She’s so good as to rival my beloved Well Prepared/Necronomicon Joe build, and if you haven’t taken a Glyphs deck through a campaign I highly recommend Kate, Joe, Akachi, or any of the other brilliant users I and many other deckbuilders have explored. There is no rush quite like scooping up eight clues in one action, except maybe the rush of picking up twelve or sixteen! But my goal with this blog is to suggest things that maybe haven’t occurred to people before, and Glyphs Kate was a bit too obvious for my style.
The second reason is that I’ve built so many Glyphs decks I need a break, ok? I need to find other payoffs! Please, designers, give me other Seeker oversuccess so my brain stops straying constantly towards MORE GLYPHS AAAAHHHH.
So, uh, yeah. I decided my Kate would be completely nonmagical, and I wouldn’t even reskin the Glyphs to represent something mundane or scientific. No Glyphs for me…but that doesn’t mean no Glyphs for you. Thanks to the Currents you probably won’t need Prophecy Foretold, but Markings of Isis is very strong here, and Guiding Stones is as ever the best clueving tool in the game and will probably never be toppled from its throne. A Guiding Stones Kate will have so many clues, and be actively using so many of those clues, that your limitation on assets in play could probably be DECK SPACE as much as anything.
With the obvious candidate out of the way, what are some other tools? Well, I talked at length about Empirical Hypothesis over in the decklist, but repeatedly triggering the “succeed by 3” hypothesis via Fine Tuning is a strong source of draw. If you go Clue Drop (which, again, I’ll talk about in a minute), her ability will help blast through Research Notes tests, especially un-Tabooed ones. For a more unexpected option that really takes advantage of her off-class access, try the dark horse candidate Breach the Door to reduce even the highest shroud to nothing–and she can even take Shed a Light as a payoff for that newly-zeroed-out shroud!
But my personal favorite use of her ability is just to pass tests. All the tests. All of every the test, no matter the stat it asks for. Specifically, I mean those assorted tests printed on locations and objective cards and treacheries and enemies that ask for a variety of stats and are always a little awkward to maneuver your party around getting. Well, no longer. Just have Kate do it! With enough clues ready, you can even pass Will and Combat tests like a pro, or evade in emergencies where you lack a Current ready to hand. I find this flexibility really satisfying. Survival Technique can even help you pass those location tests!
Ok, so with the main Kate needs out of the way, let’s talk about other interesting things her cardpool offers that may be more niche, more parasitic (in the sense they’d need to be a big focus of your deck), or just kinda funky and cool.
For starters, I just brought up Survival Technique again, so let’s actually dig in. Survival Technique is a new card that lets you gain boosts to tests on locations, or–and this is the big one–pick up cards you’ve attached to locations and play them again. For Kate, there aren’t a ton of options for this, but the ones that are here are extremely intriguing. I already mentioned Breach the Door; a Survival Kate can repeatedly reduce shrouds to 0, clear the clues, then pick up Breach and move on to do it again. Seeker also has Map the Area if your 3-4p party is gathered in one place taking a lot of tests, or Shortcut (2) for fantastic movement support. Perhaps the most interesting is Barricade, a card usually limited by how quickly you’ll have to discard it as you move on; Survival Kate can pick up and put down Barricade everywhere she goes to prevent enemies from reaching her. You could even depict it as her using the Flux Stabilizer to create a forcefield, or an area of dimensional stability they can’t enter. Which, uh, sounds completely awesome to me.
I’ve been promising to talk Clue Drop for half this article, so let’s do it. Clue Drop is good for Kate in a lot of ways beyond just the primary enabler (Research Notes) being eligible for her ability. In general it’s a very powerful strategy that can provide you with a lot of stats, draw, extra actions, and even double the clues you put into it; with Kate it gains the added advantage of resetting the clues she’s already locked using her ability, by dropping them off an asset then picking them back up into her personal pool. This is obviously extremely good, and makes the Aetheric Current part of her normal loop superfluous (though you may still want to do it for fun or EVEN MORE +2S).
Thanks to FHV, the elephant in every room with the right deckbuilding access is Parley. So can Kate Parley? Yeah, if you want! Seeker may be a distant second to Rogue in Parley power, but Kate has access to the classic Interrogate and Persuasion and the fresher Confound to make an Eldritch Tongue approach viable. You’ve got to have a quick wit on you to keep that research funding flowing, and Kate is ready to oblige, even if only as a sideline to her deck’s main projects.
Some other fun pieces she has access to include: Fool Me Once, the best anti-weakness card in the game (especially for rapid cyclers); Tinker, for more (probably hand) slots to fill out that asset array; Hand-Eye Coordination, Knowledge is Power’s sadder cousin and a cycling payoff that works with your tools; Knowledge is Power, Hand-Eye Coordination’s more successful relative and possibly the number one cycling payoff, if you’re willing to commit to gross humanities things like books and spells; and neither last nor least, if your group is anything like mine, I think I’m obligated to point out that Kate can in fact take Delve Too Deep.
Discussion
Well, there you have it! That is an almost-exhaustive list of my initial thoughts on Kate, mechanically speaking. I hope I have inspired a few of you to give her a shot, whether you’re rolling with one of my builds or finding your own spin on her!
If you’re familiar with this blog and my content, you know what’s coming next, so if you’d like to stick around for a short fiction vignette depicting Kate in situ, I’d love to have you. But if you just came for mechanics, that’s all I’ve got for you today, so I’ll say my goodbyes now.
Please check out the other brilliant creators participating in the FHV introductory series; their content is absolutely fantastic, they’re awesome people, and I am once again truly honored they wanted me to be a part of this project.
We have a great community here in Arkham, and every year I’m happy to see us building it up, and taking advantage of it, more and more. After all, someone clever once told me there was strength in numbers.
I’ve got a feeling they were right.
References
The stacks of the Orne Library are a bit unsettling at the best of times.
Not in any particularly unnatural way, although (like any library, or indeed any place in Arkham) the building has always had its fair share of ghost stories; no, at the best of times the stacks are simply unsettling in that way all old, dark buildings can be. Sometimes, even the places humans themselves have built can press that ancient animal button in the brain that sends your metaphorical ancestor scurrying back to their cave, or up a tree.
“We’re such odd creatures.” Kate mused as she stared at the darkness.
“What?” Delphinia, her intern, said from behind her, voice straining a little under the weight of several moderately-sized crates.
Kate shot a smile back over her shoulder. “Nothing.” She noticed the boxes. “Oh, let me help you with that.”
“I’m good–” Delphinia wheezed. Kate laughed as she took the crates from the younger woman and set them on the ground.
“We can set up our equipment on a couple of these little library carts. Should make it a lot easier to get it where we’re going.”
Del–she preferred Del to Delphinia, which she had once told Kate sounded like the name equivalent of a lacy doily–helped her unpack the piles of detectors, modified geiger counters, and radio equipment. “Where ARE we going, professor?”
Kate glanced into the darkness of the stacks. They almost seemed to stretch out before her as she watched.
“Wherever all that mess–” she gestured to the pile of equipment Del was strapping to the cart “–says we ought to be.”
~~~
As they proceeded down the rows of rickety old bookcases, pushing the carts of machinery alongside, Del spoke up.
“Man, this place is spooky. They used to tell us ghost stories about the library back when I was an undergrad.”
Kate nodded. “Me too. Imagine how much more eerie it would’ve been before they installed the electrics? Flickering candlelight?”
“Like the electrics don’t flicker?” Del’s eyes played across the vague shapes of books in the low light. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter, less sardonic. “Nah, it’s a lot worse now that kids have actually…gone missing down here.”
“We don’t know that for sure yet. All we know is that this is the last place they were seen.”
“Sure. And that your machines say there’s something weird in the stacks.”
Del wasn’t wrong. Kate’s office over in the science building was piled high with equipment nobody else on the faculty recognized or understood. Hell, some of it Kate barely understood, and she had built most of it and worked closely with the scientists and engineers who had made the rest.
The result was a narrow room where you were surrounded on all sides by bleeping and ticking and periodically-dispensing ticker tape. Most of the pings were meaningless noise; half the time Kate wasn’t even sure that they were detecting what they were meant to, and the other half of the time she wasn’t sure the things they were meant to be detecting even existed.
Being on the cutting edge of dimensional physics meant a lot of crossed fingers.
But two weeks ago, three of MU’s students went missing, on three separate occasions, and the last anybody had seen them they had mentioned they were going to the library. And amidst all the useless noise of her machines, Kate had finally found a pattern.
Three massive spikes in frequency distortion, all originating from the library’s side of campus, within hours of the student disappearances.
It was happening again. But this time Kate would be ready.
Her hand strayed to the lumpy satchel by her side, bouncing metallically against her leg as she pushed the cart down the empty halls. Naturally, after the disappearances, the school had cordoned off the library until more information could be obtained; no matter how much Kate protested that more information was exactly what she wanted to acquire, they wouldn’t let her in.
So here they were in the middle of the night, hoping to prove that the science Kate had dedicated her life to was real, once and for all. No pressure.
Suddenly, one of the counters squealed.
“Stop!” Kate called. Slowly, she spun in a circle, pointing the detector down each nearby aisle in turn. It squealed again. “Let’s try that one.”
~~~
They stopped about halfway down the shelves and started laying out their equipment.
“I need A batteries in this, this, and this slot,” Kate instructed Delphinia, “Bs here and here, and Cs here, there, and there.”
As the machines came to life, an electrical hum filled the air, and dials and indicators flicked back and forth. Kate’s eyes followed them with increasing excitement.
“Are we…are we getting something?” Del asked. She was too busy staring into the darkness on either side, between the flickering electric lights. “If we came down down into this freaky place for nothing, Professor–”
“Oh, we’re getting something.” Kate grinned and started frantically jotting down notes on a pad of paper. “This is FASCINATING, Del! These readings–there’s a fluctuation here in spacetime itself, but without any accompanying gravitic distortion. Einstein’s theories are…well, they’re clearly right, but…incomplete. This is revolutionary. I think someplace…else…is intruding here. In our library, of all things!”
Reaching into the satchel she always carried by her side, Kate withdrew the small metal canister-like object that represented her life’s work–and, in a sense, her mentor’s too. The Flux Stabilizer. The dream of a traumatized young woman, forced face to face with the unknown, and determined that she and the impossible should be on equal footing at their next meeting.
Eyes flicking back and forth between the dials on her detection equipment, Kate adjusted the settings on the Flux Stabilizer. This was an inexact science; in fact, it was as yet barely justified in being called a science at all. But there was no better time to find out if it worked than to have a chance at saving those missing students.
“We do not stand on the shoulders of giants,” she muttered as she worked, “we stand on the shoulders of ordinary people who achieved great things by standing on the shoulders of the great before them. It is only together, in a human pyramid of knowledge and precedent, that we become the giant whose shoulders will raise the next generation into the future.”
Dr. Young had been fond of disputing old sayings and putting a fresh spin on them. That one had stuck with her.
She hadn’t been ready when Dr. Young was taken. But she was ready now. She hoped. This was the big test, wasn’t it? If she could only tune the Stabilizer to the right dimensional frequencies, then maybe…maybe she could save those missing students.
“Professor?” Del asked, still staring nervously down the dark columns of books.
“What is it, Del?” Kate said absently.
“Are you going to be able to close this…distortion? Portal? Thing?”
“Close it??” Kate yelped, without looking up. “Del, we can’t! Those missing students might not be dead! They might not even have been ‘taken’, they could’ve just wandered right out of our region of spacetime and gotten lost!”
Del nodded. “Sure. Or they could’ve been eaten.”
“If I can just stabilize the connection, we could send a search party through and–” Kate blinked and looked up at Del. “Eaten? Doesn’t that seem a bit…outlandish of a theory?”
Del slowly raised one hand and pointed down the stacks to the far end of the aisle.
Kate turned to look.
Underneath the flickering lights was a hunched shape, several times the size of an adult human. Light and shadow were behaving…oddly around it. Whether that was due to the dimensional distortion, or some property of the creature itself, Kate couldn’t tell without further investigation.
“I apologize for doubting you.”
Del choked out an “Apology accepted.”
“All things considered,” Kate continued, as calmly as possible, “I think we can come back for our equipment in the morning at a later date.”
“Works for me.” said Del.
Almost in unison, the women spun and began sprinting back down the aisle. The shape bolted forwards as soon as they did, spooling along the ground as pseudopods shot forwards and grabbed sections of the bookcases, dragging its main bulk faster and faster towards its prey.
Kate risked a glance back and whistled. Bookcases were warping around the creature like reflections in a funhouse mirror, and she could swear that behind it, rather than the stacks of MU’s library, she could see something that looked bizarrely like a hazy forest filled with trees.
Those were trees, right?
Why did she feel like they were looking at her?
The thing reached their work station and in a flash all her equipment was crushed in its wake. Kate grimaced.
“Oh, that’ll take forever to rebuild!”
“Better the gear than your ribcage!” Del wheezed next to her.
It was hard to argue with that.
As they skidded out of the aisle and raced down the main thoroughfare of the stacks, Kate awkwardly ran her belt through part of the Flux Stabilizer in her hands and buckled it back on. It wasn’t all that sturdy, and focusing on the handiwork meant lagging behind Del a few steps, but it kept her hands free, and she had a terrified feeling that might mean the difference between life or death very soon.
And no force on this or any other planet could convince her to abandon the Stabilizer to the same fate as the rest of her tools.
Del glanced back as Kate lagged–a fatal mistake.
“Come on!” she cried, then let out a grunt of pain as she ran headlong into a library cart, tipping it and herself over in a pile of books.
“Del!!” Kate screamed. She skidded to a stop a few feet past and turned back to her intern.
“No! Go!” Del shouted. The creature was bearing down on them at a horrifying speed. Had it grown? It loomed over them now, too big for the height of the building–yet somehow the roof seemed to move to accommodate its scale. The not-trees were everywhere now.
For a brief second Kate was paralyzed. It was happening again. Professor Young’s face flashed before her eyes, the energy crackling around the room back in that first experiment where everything had gone wrong, her mentor telling her to run, to escape, to be safe.
Del was here because of her.
Kate leapt back towards the oncoming threat and planted herself between it and her intern–who was struggling to her feet, but far too slowly. She began desperately calibrating the stabilizer.
The creature barreled across the floor towards them. Twenty yards…
Del’s ankle gave out and she fell back to the floor.
…ten…
“What are you doing?? Run!”
…five…
“I’m not leaving you!”
…from yards to FEET–
“Not this time.” Kate hissed to herself as the extradimensional horror filled her vision completely. At the last possible second, she disengaged the safety on the stabilizer and slammed the power to full. Batteries sparked, wires fused, but for one brilliant moment an arc of crackling light leapt between the device’s caps.
One brilliant moment…
…was enough.
The stabilizer emitted a pulse that wrenched the dimensions into alignment around the two scientists, creating an invisible field the predator impacted against as though it were striking a brick wall. Ropes and pieces of its body splattered over the bubble of realspace and then, in moments, fizzled and disintegrated as whatever stolen mass it had generated ceased to sustain itself.
The fabric of reality, no longer propped open, healed shut as they watched. The distortion faded; the not-forest was gone. The stacks were just the stacks.
Kate and Del stood there, pulses racing. It was over.
“Whoa,” Del said.
The stabilizer was smoking. She’d have to replace half the parts and add a lot more insulation–she could feel burns on her hip and side where the activation had scorched right through her coat. And all of her data from examining the local breach was gone. She’d need to find another.
But it had worked. All her theories. Dimensional declination, incursion, banishment. She had done it.
She’d been ready.
Kate took a shaky breath. “Del, if you would, mark down Field Test 1 of the Flux Stabilizer as a resounding success. Further trials to follow.”
Strength In Numbers 