While he took his place in the formation, as .GREP had ordered, .SORT couldn’t help but question what was really going on and whether it was some kind of test meant for his benefit. He was relatively new to being a Ghost—at least, in respect to the rest of this team—and there wasn’t enough evidence here to convince him that this experience was as new to them as it was to him. If this was a test, that was slightly amusing. If not, then unsettling; this coven was supposed to be one of the best around, and one thing he did know from experience was that the being the best always got you more, stronger enemies. He wondered whether he was going to get himself killed by fault of having joined the wrong crowd. As soon as he thought it, he couldn’t but keep a smile from his face (or what passed for one here on the Planes). As if he had not been risking exactly the same thing much of his life anyway.
He noticed the thin barrier erecting itself around them. That had to be the girl, .CAI. He relished the way the barrier formed, the way the vibrations of her energy subtly reverberated into the air at just the right frequency to create the shield, which he could perceive through a combination of senses that he had still no words to describe, and which his brain processed as a mixture of tints and hue variations. The Ghost World was an art gallery to him; more than that, it was the paintings in the art gallery. It was being in those paintings. It was art itself. Every little action made on the Planes he detected as an incredible stroke of a brush held by an unbearably skilled hand.
“Well it’s definitely a goddamn Monday,” .CAI said dryly. “Someone see something I don’t?”
Her words were splash of color to his senses. In the real world, he would have kept to himself, just waiting to see what was going on here—he still wasn’t sure that the situation hadn’t been engineered to test him—but being on the Planes, where every action was so meaningful, his own emotions became twisted and harder to read. He felt himself compelled to talk, for no other reason than to ground himself.
“I think we’ll see something very soon,” he said, thinking to himself that he was in on the joke. He couldn’t help but push it further: “Excuse me, but as the new guy, I have to ask… do any of you have the slightest idea who could have done this to us?”
