Saladin Fisher and Bella Braddock needed a way to get from Beaver Island to nearby High Island, separated by four miles of Lake Michigan. High Island wasn't inhabited and there wasn't a regular ferry service there even in good weather, let alone in October during a rainstorm. Rosalie, the AI assistant built into the Surfa platform on their phones spoke up and offered two suggestions.
- Steal a boat from a vacation home. The island had plenty of empty rental and second homes, inhabitants gone back to the mainland in anticipation of the ferry service shutting down for the winter.
- Buy a magick spell from the Surfa store that would transport them to High Island.
The Courtiers went with the magick spell. They took on a debt of six minor charges and learned the ritual Uber To Hell. If they found the treasure, Rosalie promised the debt would be immediately cleared. Per the ritual activation conditions, Bella called the phone number given and told the dispatcher on the other end she'd "Go through hell" to get to Beaver Island. Ten minutes later, a fire engine red Yugo pulled into the Burger King parking lot.
The fat man in the front seat wore thick black coke bottle glasses, like the blob cenobite from Hellraiser. He gave no indication that he understood Bella, but the two back doors opened on their own. The Courtiers climbed inside. There was a thick plastic divider that obscured their view of the front seat. The car pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. He turned off the paved highway and down a gravel road into the woods. The trees blocked more and more of the light until they couldn't see anything but a blue light approaching up ahead.
The car emerged from the forest onto a vast, rolling moonscape, blue lit by an unseen light source. The surface beneath the car looked like lunar regolith, until the Courtiers realized it was actually pulverized bone, accumulated over thousands or millions of years. The car sped along and the earth shook. Like a shark or killer whale, something was swimming beneath the surface of the skeletons, producing a wake as it approached the car. Bella was terrified, Saladin thought it was super cool. The hideous beast breached the surface and leaped over the car, narrowly missing it. Bella closed her eyes, covered her ears and tried not to vomit. Sal stayed glued to the windows.
It went on like that for a while.
Bella couldn't take it anymore. She opened the door and fell out onto a beach. On one side of her, the ocean, whipped by the rain. On the other side, a forested bluff. Above them, the night sky, pouring rain. They had reached High Island in record time. There was a trail of red, yellow and blue fire on the surface of the water, leading from Beaver Island across the lake and up the hill on the High Island side.
High Island was uninhabited. In the 1920s it hosted a cult that believed they could live forever through faith. Anyone who died was judged lacking in faith and buried in an unmarked grave. Immortality made reproduction unnecessary and the cult practiced strict celibacy. The whole thing fell apart when the cult leader got caught with a harem of underage girls. A century later, the rotted foundations of sect's abandoned buildings still dotted the forested island. The Courtiers had seen them when they visited previously for a weekend hike. This time they weren't here to gawk at historic ruins, they were here for the treasure. With no other indication where it was buried, they followed the flame trail.
At the top of the bluff, they found the cyclist. Sitting under a shelter half, drinking Miller by the fire. The flames flickered blue, red and yellow, burning without heat. Bella noticed a stone slab beneath the fire. Sal underage drank with the cyclist while Bella extinguished the fire and dug away the soil so she could pull up the slab. Beneath it was a staircase. The cyclist enjoyed his supersonic trip, and agreed to watch the entrance for the Courtiers in exchange for another special order. Luckily, the Burger cultists grilled their two remaining magick patties before they closed down the restaurant. Sal handed him a charged burger, Bella ate the other one, and the Courtiers descended the staircase.
The stairs opened up into a limestone cave, inside which was an underground beach at the edge of a subterranean lake. On the shore of the lake, lodged in the sand and rock pieces, was a small chest. Bella opened it and found twenty pounds of gold coins, along with the regalia of the King of Heaven and Earth: a glass ring, a wooden scepter, a red robe and a tin crown. She pocketed the ring without Sal noticing.
With the loot secured, it was time to leave. The cyclist came running down the stairs and warned them that there were men with guns upstairs. The group debated lying in ambush, but decided on speedy egress instead. They ran up the stairs and ran right into Jepthah and the other Lost Boys, who blocked the way up to the surface. Jep held them at gunpoint, but Sal convined him that he was carrying a suicide bomb on a dead man's switch. Jep told him he was insane. Sal talked past him, addressing the three teenagers. He told them it didn't have to be this way, they could do something else with their lives besides rob people at gunpoint. They decided they didn't want to point their guns at him. Jep wasn't convinced. He didn't feel like giving peace a chance when Sal had just threatened to suicide bomb him.
Behind the Courtiers on the stairs, the cyclist yelled that there was a problem and they needed to leave right now. Behind the cyclist was a plesiosaur, whose long neck allowed it to fit its questing head inside the passage. It bumped into walls, sniffing and tasting the air. Like a Greenland Shark, the beast was blind, but had an excellent sense of smell.
Everyone kept their cool, at first. Jep told the kids to run for it, and tried to lean around Bella to get a better shot at the monster. Bella pushed past him and ran for the surface, Sal did the same and gave him a kick in the ass on the way, knocking him down the stairs. They made it back up with the treasure. A single gunshot came from the cave. Then a chuffing sound, like an alligator bellowing. Then silence.
The cyclist came out of the cave. He was covered in a spray of arterial blood. It wasn't his.
In spite of his orders, two of the Lost Boys tried to run back into the cave and help Jep. The Courtiers stopped them before they could endanger themselves further. Bella and Sal dragged them down the trail to the beach, where the bandits had hidden their stolen boat. They got the kids and the cyclist and his bike and the treasure aboard, and they shoved off into the lake.
Bella drove the boat across the choppy lakewater while Sal talked with the teens. The Lost boys were ex-Mormons, abandoned by their Fundamentalist parents after being excommunicated in order to leave surplus wives for the cult's polygamous elders. Jep had adopted them into his gang after finding them at bus stations and homeless shelters. One of the kids cried, and his tears blossomed into sea anemones in the hull of the boat - the special order he consumed earlier finally taking effect. Another pulled a gun on Bella and demanded she turn the boat back so they could rescue Jep. She refused, he squeezed the trigger and a flag came out of the barrel, unfurling to reveal a Burger King logo. Bella took his gun and tossed it in the lake.
Back on the beach at Beaver Island, the Courtiers called a cab to take them to the Burger King. Sal called the Court helpline and told them he had treasure and artifacts in need of immediate pickup. The cyclist had seen a man devoured by a plesiosaur and wanted nothing more to do with the Courtiers. He got on his bike and drunkenly pedaled off into the sky, the special order finally taking effect. The three teens elected to stick with the Court, after Sal promised them the Queen would take good care of them.
At the Burger King, Bella went in the back and tried on the regalia of King Strang that she found in the treasure chest. She slipped on the ring, crown and robe and waved the scepter around, hoping it had some magick powers. The True Queen Erica Fisher re-established the psychic link from earlier, apologizing for yelling at Bella and asking what she needed help with. She caught her serf dressing up in a set of looted royal regalia and playing Queen. She told Bella to take it off immediately. Bella put the regalia of the King of Heaven and Earth back in the chest.
In the parking lot, the Courtiers waited with the treasure. A truck came out of the mist and rain, making a sound like a foghorn. It pulled to a stop just before barreling into the restaurant. A man in plate armor and a Burger King mask got out of one side, a shirtless man with a perfectly regular grid of cutting scars across his body got out of the other. The pair of Cataphracts gave the Courtiers a receipt indicating they had received the treasure, got in the truck and drove off. Or rather, they reversed back into the mist, making a perfect inverse of the foghorn sound when they arrived. Then they disappeared.
For recovering both the gold and the regalia, and eliminating a rival cabal that tried to rob the Court, the lucky Courtiers were granted promotions and titles of nobility. Sixteen year old Sal Fisher became Sal "Mega Commander" Fisher, while the anime obsessed Murbella Braddock became Bella the Sabre.
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