With the monster purified and returned to human, the team sets about with trying to clear the lake of the supernatural forces tainting it as well as dealing with the signs of motion that Squaddie Daley had seen on the way to their position. However, they are immediately interrupted when Thomas receives a brief vision of men in sharp suits speaking to government officials and images of mobilizing troops.
"Why did you call the army in?" Thomas asks immediately, "We didn't need their help." The distraction is such that his normal quick regeneration seems to be inhibited and his wounds fail to close.
Kasper immediately denies that he called the military and notices Thomas moving over toward the first aid kit and trying to do mundane medicine. Immediately he tells the kid off and sets about giving him proper medical aid and demonstrating a point perfect example of dressing wounds before they return to the problem at hand.
While Kasper discusses protective rituals with Ms Mills, Thomas goes over to the lake and tries to banish the energy from it the same we he banished it from the woman. Instead, the mass of energy in the lake sends him flying backwards through the air into a tree some distance away. He picks himself up a little bit woozy from the trip but confirming that there is for more energy in the lake than in the woman he had cured. Most likely due to the rift still within it.
With the surrounding mountains blocking the reception from their communications equipment, Kasper assigns Daley, Mills and the other scientists to help out with setting up the ritual for the protective spells while he goes further up into the mountains to look out and see what the incoming traffic is as well as get in contact with M-Com. Unfortunately, after taking a look around and seeing a low-flying old-model MiG do a recon flight overhead, his patience is a little short and he ends up snapping angrily at the person on the other end of the line before hanging up without really giving or getting any information on the situation.
After that, he looks over the incoming vehicles from the town and concludes that the best way to protect the victims from death, when they all attack his team and Thomas, is to seal off the paths into their area and thus delay the most likely mutating townsfolk long enough for the rest of the team to clear the energy from the lake.
Back at Lake Kaindy, they've finished drawing the ritual circles and Ms Mills asks if Thomas can use his magic to produce heat and turn some of the sand and dirt into glass so that they wouldn't just break the circle by scuffing their feet over it. Thomas protests loudly at this idea, to which Ms Mills assumes that he means he can't produce heat and turns instead to Squaddie Daley. Though Daley's reaction to the question of whether or not she can produce heat is simply "I'm telepathic."
Thomas cuts into the conversation and clarifies that his concern is that glass is very easily broken. Ms Mills responds then with a mild "Oh" before asking whether or not Thoams could produce enough heat to create obsidian. This garnered the response that "I can't make obsidian, I don't even know know what obsidian is!" At this point Marcia Campbell suggests the use of the latex material they use to take casts at crime scenes. As the team starts working at that, Thomas grabs some of the soul-trap talismans from the mobile lab and sets about to siphon some of the energy from the lake in order to make it easier to ward off the tainted waters. Mills makes some off hand comment about Thomas providing a little help, to which Thomas asks if that was a short joke, leaving Mills thoroughly confused.
Kasper and Price, meanwhile, have arrived at one of the passes with just barely enough time to place the explosives. Price, who's apparently been training in demolition starts noting to Kasper some key places where he could place the explosives. Kasper interrupts her and asks why she's telling him about it instead of just doing it and sends her to start rigging the explosives and he takes position to watch the incoming cars and trucks.
In hooking up the explosives, it becomes apparent that something has snagged one of the wires, causing the set up to initially fail. Under cover from Kasper's sniper gun keeping the oncoming locals at bay, Price manages to repair the set up and the two of them just barely manage to get out of the area even through the assorted bullets coming their way from the now blocked locals as he takes probably one of the most reckless "trails" ever taken by jeep or driver...much to Price's dismay as she tries to answer his comments about buckling up and keeping him looking at the road.
Thomas and Daley help apply their own supernatural abilities to Ms Mills ritual, unfortunately something ends up going a little bit quirky. Whether it's Thomas's irritation, though Ms Mills seems to be inadvertently teach him patience, Daley's inexperience or Ms Mills own shadow excuse for a ritual. Something strange happens and the world around Thomas and the others seems to start fluctuated in time somewhat. Time seems to pass slowly, and then suddenly it would surge forward lightning fast.
Using this ward, Thomas advances on the lake, which has a lower energy field within it due to Thomas siphoning off some of the taint and giving it to Ms Mills to use in developing the protections earlier. He applies his magic again on the weakened lake's taint and once again, the energy of the lake seems to recoil at his approach and soon he was walking through what seemed to be a tunnel of water. The rift then is easy to find and it is among the largest of these rifts that the two have seen yet. Thomas reaches out to close down the rift but it resists mightily almost willfully and in a brief flash before the rift actually closes, Thomas has an image of rift after rift being poked into the fabric of the world and, oddly enough, he sees an image of himself born out of one of those rifts.
With the rift closed, the energy of the lake quickly fades away and with it the force that was trying to avoid touching Thomas. The Chosen, recognizing the oncoming crash of tons of water tries to leap straight up out of the lake, but unfortunately he doesn't quite make it and the water cascades all around him turning him about every which way until he is confused as to which way is up. It takes some effort, but Thomas manages to swim up to the surface and breathe in a lungful of air as he pulls himself up on shore half-drowned.
Oddly, while they had arrived at the location of the hunter's cabin extremely early in the day, it was already night. An extremely clear night with bright stars.
Some distance away, Kasper is driving as suddenly the sun and the moon starting whirling backwards through the sky in tremendously high speed. The distraction takes his eyes of the road and if it weren't for Price calling out at the last moment, they would have done serious damage to the scout. Instead, they manage to get away with just ruining one of the tires. After replacing the tire with a spare, Kasper looks at Price and asks her if she has any idea what just happened. She responds that she's just as stumped but thinks they went back in time because the sun starting going backwards, only she lost count of how many times the sun and day flickered. Tey complete the rest of the way back to the hunter's cabin just as Thomas is crawling out of the water and Kasper demands to know just what they thought they were doing meddling with time.
After an argument and the realization that they have gone back in time to before their were satellites and Kasper spent several minutes calling Ms Mills to task for the effectiveness of her ritual, Thomas starts walking off, figuring that they weren't going to get anywhere if they just hung around there. He doesn't travel far, however before he encountered an unusual woman dressed in Ainu clothing coming to them out of the darkness.
Katkemat had sensed the influx of a sudden burst of time-related magic such as used by the Shintoist sorcerer she pursued and thought to encounter one of her enemy's minions in the area ahead. Instead she found herself looking at an oddly dressed boy. Though it was quickly apparent that he had great magical potential. After some difficulty in trying to talk to each other, as the language charms had not been made with the dialects of more than eight hundred years in the past, and an exchange of suspicions, Katkemat made the dismissive attempt to bind the boy so that she might question him at her leisure without his posturing. Instead, her spell encountered the polar opposite of the energy it expected and the resultant shock caused her to bind her soul to that of the boy's...and suddenly they could understand each other.
The shamaness immediately knew what had gone wrong and started apologizing to the boy for mistaking him for an enemy. In the conversation that followed it became apparent to Thomas that Katkemat knew quite a lot about magic and some about time magic, and decided to grab her and take her back to the camp calling out "Hey, guys! Look what I found!"
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