The Reign is Over – Part 11
We are now in rarefied air here at The Quill.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a story go to eleven parts before.
Honestly? I usually run out of interest or determination somewhere between six and eight. My meh-o-meter finally ticks to full, and I can’t make myself continue. It takes a lot of work to keep stories told in this fashion going. I have to constantly refer to previous parts, to notes on who has done what when, and I have to try and keep things interesting for those who are just tuning in while also making it good times for those who have stayed the course.
It’s a delicate balancing act, and I’ve usually valued new ideas and opportunities over seeing stories through to completion. This has led to some awkward moments like The Sweetest Thing where I go through the wind-up, and then there’s never any follow through. I still have nightmares about Sweetest Thing, because I loved the story so much yet I never managed to deliver on any of the premise.
It’s the danger of writing this blog in the fashion that I do. I can’t (see: don’t) always choose to follow through with my ideas on The Quill by design. These posts are a form of writing workout for me, a chance to make sure my mental muscles are in fine form. When they become so convoluted that they cut into the time I could be spending on writing long-form projects, it’s usually time to turn over a new leaf.
Then along came The Reign is Over. I’m not going to lie: This project has continued to excite me. I find myself writing parts of it when I’m in the pool, or when I’m washing dishes. It’s become something that I really enjoy writing, and that’s even taking last week into consideration, when I was certain that it had run its course and it was time to move on.
Instead, here we are, working on part number eleven. Eleven!
Let’s keep this train a-rollin’.
The Reign is Over – Part 11
Lieutenant McNamara’s foreboding thoughts plagued her as her team transitioned through the enormous gateway which separated the mansion complex from the storage areas and shipyards. There had been a locked armored door barring their way, but a few minutes talking to Brutus was more than even Reignover had been counting on. The enormous slab of door that had been meticulously blasted off was slowly smoking in protest as it lay across the entrance foyer of the storage facilities.
As Lieutenant McNamara led a pair of officers through the smoldering entrance, her worst fears from hours of planning and strategy meetings were on full display. There was cover available everywhere. The entrance to the storage facilities was an enormous circular room containing multiple recesses which housed the smaller personal storage lockers, free of any bothersome customs inspections or governmental banking regulations. Each of the smaller personal storage niches was a recessed, curved well with small storage doors coating the exterior wall from floor to eight feet up.
You could fit at least four people into each recess, and the enormous circular room contained no less than twenty such niches.
Poking out from every single one of the storage recesses was the barrel of a plasma cannon. A military grade plasma rifle. Which had never once come up in their intelligence briefing, nor their careful exploration of Reignover’s operations, nor in the meticulous work of decades of Organized Crime investigations. Not. Once.
“FALL BACK, FALL BA…”
McNamara never got to finish her yelled warning, as a mountain of protective muscle named Lieutenant Reginald Armsworth hauled her bodily through the impromptu door. He was just in time, twenty plasma rifles spewing forth a phalanx of green bolts that hammered into Officer Denning and Sergeant Hightower, the pair who had who had gone through the gateway with her. Hit multiple times in the first volley alone, both had dropped instantly. Follow-up shots came in the second volley, and with them more bolts began pounding through the doorway, clipping Corporal Vasquez and Officer Bukhari in the arm and shoulder respectively.
Officer Bukhari managed to absorb the shot on her body armor, which had saved her life. The armor bore a smoking pit where the blast had struck, but she was otherwise unharmed. Corporal Vasquez wasn’t nearly as lucky, the blast catching her in the elbow, and cleanly bisecting the limb and cauterizing the wound in the same gruesome display.
Her scream, more of anger and frustration than pain, rang out, bouncing off the blank and oppressive walls of the exterior hallway as more rifle fire attempted to drown it out. Impossibly, over all the cacophony, Lieutenant McNamara heard the rich, abrasive laughter of Laszlo Reignover himself. He had left his perch on high to join the fray.
It was so very like him; at once ensuring his best man was on the job while he projected an aura of determination. He painted himself as the hero and lead the charge from the front. It was all part of the game, however, and tricked others into thinking he cared about anything beyond his personal power and carefully cultivated aura of menace. It was just another message, delivered in his signature bombastic style, and his goons were too stupid to see they had been tricked into offering up their undying loyalty.
Clenching her teeth, McNamara set her jaw and crawled back to the sharply cut edges of Brutus’s portal and began returning fire.
To be continued…
Bombastfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
