Chapter 47

“Mom, can you take me to Pomona?”

Tiff watched Melissa pause halfway through putting her “lunch box” onto the kitchen counter to clean out. By the letter of the law, it was still a box…but while most people might have a small tin or a floppy bag that could comfortably fit a sandwich, an apple, and a Capri Sun, Melissa used a 150-quart cooler.

It advertised being able to hold 124 cans and 82 pounds of ice.

Surely, marketing to the appetite of Might-based Metas had to be a full-time career.

“Excuse me?” Melissa smiled down at Tiff. These were obviously not the words she expected to come from her middle daughter.

“Some time tomorrow or Sunday, can you take me to Pomona?”

Melissa’s brow wrinkled and she adopted a worried look. She crouched down, placed the back of her hand on Tiff’s forehead and tested for a fever. She put her hand on Tiff’s chin and turned her head left and right, peering into her eyes and face at different angles.

“Sweety, are you feeling alright?” She asked, her voice dripping with concern.

“Eh?” Tiff mumbled. She didn’t think she exhibited any signs of sickness….

“Something wrong?” Rick asked from his seat at the kitchen table.

“Honey,” Melissa said seriously. “I think our daughter is defective.”

Tiff prickled…before instantly feeling her expression go flat as she deflated. Her mom was having a laugh, wasn’t she?

“She wants to go to Pomona.”

“Ah,” Rick nodded sagely. “A common affliction of the youth today.”

He went back to reading an article on his tablet. Melissa tsked.

“Do you even know what’s in Pomona?” She sassed.

“Cal Poly,” Rick answered instantly. “And the LA County Fair.”

Melissa opened her mouth…but slowly closed it. She gave Tiff a tentative case of side-eye.

“Do you want to go to university?” Melissa whispered. “Not saying you can’t, of course, but I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned it.”

Tiff chuckled and shook her head. At most, she considered going to the local community college. Melissa gave her a swift nod.

“That’s not the point,” she said loudly, directed at her husband. “And it’s October. The fair’s in May. What’s she gonna do at an empty fairground?”

Somewhere along the lines, this argument stopped being about Tiff, and she was all for it. Rick’s finger hovered mid-scroll, and he stopped to think.

“...maybe they have a pumpkin patch?” He said hopefully. Nice try, Dad.

“The point,” Melissa continued, splendidly ignoring poor Rick, “Is that there’s nothing in Pomona. The answer is nothing.”

“Yes, dear,” Rick said with a chuckle, going back to his article. But Melissa wasn’t done. She glanced down at Tiff, quirked a smile, and winked.

“I remember when,” Melissa said dramatically, closing her eyes, staring at the ceiling, and placing the back of her hand over her face, “Kids used to have standards. They used to beg to be taken to Disneyland.”

“Can we go to Disneyland?” Tiff perked up, instantly pivoting to the more attractive option. Technically, it had a Rift, too! Though finding it, and subsequently accessing it, might be a bit of a problem.

“Denied,” Melissa said ruthlessly. “What’s so interesting in Pomona that you’re willing to brave LA traffic on a Saturday?”

Tiff huffed a sigh and boosted herself up on the counter. She peered into the lunch box and saw…a whole bunch of empty, off-brand Tupperware floating in the remains of melted ice. What did she honestly expect?

“The Rift,” Tiff groaned. “I want to go see the Rift.”

To her credit, Melissa didn’t react the way a typical parent might when presented with their child's interest in something incredibly dangerous. She did, however, slide Tiff down the counter so she wasn’t in the way. That was the price of sitting on the countertops: act like an accessory, get treated like an appliance.

“Well,” Melissa said slowly. “I think you already know I won’t let you go into a Rift, so I don’t think that’s what you’re scheming for. Talk me through it, Tiff. Why do you want to visit the Rift? Unless you’re a delver, there’s not much to see.”

“Because of my Class,” Tiff sighed. “You know I knew about it before it dropped. Dad said you even tried to warn people about it.”

Tiff looked up at her mom curiously.

“How did that go, by the way?”

“Not well,” Melissa chuckled. “People treat Rift reports the same way as they do when trying to predict earthquakes. Sure, somebody probably gets it right every now and then, but who takes it seriously? Too bad.”

“Right,” Tiff nodded. “Hopefully next time, we can figure out a better way. If there’s a next time.”

“Pretty sure Rifts have been around since the dinosaurs, kiddo,” Melissa grunted. “Heck. Maybe that’s where dinosaurs came from. You still see ‘em inside Rifts all the time.”

Tiff didn’t really want to think about a giant T.Rex popping out of a freshly formed Rift in the middle of downtown, stomping through the streets, terrorizing people.

…it wouldn’t obey stoplights! Traffic would be all messed up!

Tiff laughed to herself, because otherwise, she’d start thinking of what dinos in LA would actually do.

“So,” Tiff sat up straight and gathered her courage, “The Rift opened, and…I didn’t take it very well.”

“Your dad told me,” Melissa said, pausing to rub Tiff’s head. “Chin up, kiddo. You did good.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Tiff moped. “If you know something, you should be able to do something, right?”

“Not always,” Melissa sighed. “There’s a reason they say ignorance is bliss. Could you imagine how ancient [Oracles] must have felt? Especially since nobody ever believed them either.”

Melissa fell silent as she finished cleaning out her lunch box. With everything emptied, she drained it, stacked the Tupperware in the dishwasher, and wiped it down with a towel. As she hefted it up and went to store it, Tiff had an idle thought.

How much time did enhanced Metas like her mom actually spend on eating and food-related activities? Like, really. It was a considerable time sink, one that might actually rival the usefulness of being a hearty beefcake.

First, there was the time spent shopping for food. Overall, in the time-spent-fooding tier list, this one was rather low in impact. It only took a little bit more time to buy the extra food than it would for a normal amount, but it was there nonetheless.

Next was preparation and cleanup. In Tiff’s opinion, this was where the majority of extra time came into play. It only took a few minutes to make a single sandwich…but when you had to make 2, 3, 4 extras…? Or more? Straight-up time loss. The #makealunch any% splits were all shot.

Of course, one couldn’t discount the act of eating all that food, but it turned out, usually, a big person with a healthy appetite ate fast. In the sandwich-pounding game, Melissa could clear 3 or 4 stages of sandwich before Tiff could finish 1.

In a practical application, using constraints Tiff could adhere to without making a mockery of Melissa’s very real skill in cooking, Tiff’s time spent fooding was drastically smaller than her mom’s. Tiff could cook a simple dinner, eat it, and clean up in a vastly reduced timeframe. For example…a simple plate of spaghetti. Tiff only needed a small portion of spaget, which she could boil in a small pot. From raw noods to consumption…maybe 30 minutes at most? Melissa, on the other hand, would easily spend over an hour.

Same with the proverbial sandwich. 5 minutes to make one, tops. But Melissa needed a dozen of them, and when she packed her lunches for her long road trips, she’d spend hours in the kitchen the day before her work week began, sometimes taking up the whole day.

But was that a worthwhile trade-off? Tiff could get by with a minimal amount of calories, but Melissa and Victoria certainly couldn’t. Would Tiff trade a significant portion of her life doing nothing but eating for the chance to lift a car up in one hand?

…probably.

But at the end of the day, it was nothing more than a thought exercise and wasn’t something she needed to concern herself with. Melissa walked back into the kitchen and the thought was already gone.

“Sure thing, Tiff,” Melissa said, giving Tiff a soft smile. “We can go to Pomona.”

​

Getting permission to go somewhere was only half the battle. The real fight started in the morning…with waking up. Tiff’s alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 7 am on a Saturday, which was foul and unreasonable and unholy. Nobody should ever need to get up that early on a Saturday, even though functioning human beings need to be responsible.

The alarm went off, Tiff dragged herself through the motions of getting dressed and ready, and when she slugged her way into the kitchen, she found her mom and dad sitting around the table, enjoying the peaceful silence. Victoria was meeting with the people she was going to guard during her upcoming Rift clear, and Amy was dead to the world, fast asleep.

“Morning, munchkin,” Rick said, scooting out Tiff’s chair with his foot. Melissa plonked down a mug of coffee-flavored milk in front of Tiff and smiled.

“You’ll need it,” Melissa smirked. “We’re leaving as soon as you eat breakfast and I’m not letting you sleep in the truck. If I’ve gotta stay awake in traffic, so do you.”

Tiff chewed on her thoughts as much as the cereal she was stuffing into her face. She didn’t mind staying up, provided she was already awake. And if it was really only going to be the two of them, a bit of a road trip could be quite fun! By the time Tiff had finished breakfast and was ready to go, Melissa had transferred the rest of her coffee into a travel mug and Amy still hadn’t woken up. Rick was staying home, so it was just mother and daughter, setting off into the great unknown…of the LA County freeway system.

There was the 57, the 60, the 71…the 91 and the 5…the 605, the 405, the 10…not to mention all the smaller numbers. Not, like, the numbers were smaller, because there were things like the 164 or the 142, but those were, like, roads and not freeways. Looking at the map on her mom’s truck's dash screen, Tiff wondered if the concrete maze was making a math joke or if it was budget connect-the-dots. Fortunately, Melissa knew exactly where she was going, so Tiff didn’t need to commit precious memory space to remembering useless directions.

And really, once they got on the freeway itself, it wasn’t all that bad. Certainly not as world-ending as some people liked to complain. Traffic moved, even if it was slow at times, which just meant Tiff got to spend more time talking with her mom.

Most of their conversations were harmless filler. Commenting on the perpetual state of freeway construction, counting the increasing number of golf courses that popped up along the drive, making fun of billboards and their over-the-top advertisements…nothing that Tiff would call defining dialogue, but the sort of small talk to build the foundation of a comfortable haven.

It took about an hour to drive all the way out to Pomona, and once they started seeing signs for turnoffs and detours, Tiff paid closer attention to their surroundings. Something as impactful as a Rift should be incredibly obvious and stick out like a sore thumb…one might think. But that wasn’t always the case, as Tiff learned during the Santa Ronda affair, depending on what the physical entrance to the Rift actually looked like.

The Santa Ronda Rift had been a very large, swirling vortex, stretched vertically and large enough to reach the height of buildings, but that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes, the entrance could be a horizontal plane reminiscent of a whirlpool, where Tiff was frightened that people might accidentally fall in. Perhaps they did, making Rifts all the more dangerous; though if somebody accidentally fell into a Rift, it was probably on them at that point for not paying attention to where they were walking.

Melissa pulled off the freeway and the surroundings looked like any other urban sprawl Tiff had ever seen. Not as dingy as some of the heavier or population-dense areas like downtown LA, but it wasn’t one of those middle-of-nowhere exits in the desert like Barstow with a barely functioning defense grid protecting their freeways from Wilderness Rift escapees.

“Do you know where the Rift is, Mom?” Tiff asked. Melissa had managed the entirety of their navigation, mostly from memory but also punching it into her dash, in part to check for traffic updates and also to help keep Tiff entertained. Obviously, whoever maintained the GPS maps wasn’t going to add a Rift as a publicly available attraction or destination…but Tiff would be shocked if there wasn’t an add-on to enable it for Rift divers or emergency workers. Oh, and it probably didn’t show up as a glowing portal, but she had a hunch some sort of hazard or warning sign popped up when a Rift first materialized to warn people away.

“Not exactly,” Melissa frowned, resisting the urge to angrily berate a Prius that cut her off just because she was a giant truck.

“That’s okay,” Tiff smiled, pulling out her tablet. “I can find out.”

“Is that your dad’s?” Melissa asked, glancing over.

“He made this for me,” Tiff grinned. “Took an old tablet and put my TAS on it. “It’s very helpful.”

“Your dad’s useful like that,” Melissa nodded sagely. “It’s always good to have a Techie in your life.”

“Among other things, I’m sure,” Tiff teased.

“Oh?” Melissa quirked an eyebrow and smirked. “Would you like me to expand on those?” She teased. “In great detail?”

“No, I’m good,” Tiff hastily retracted.

“But there’s so many!” Melissa laughed.

“I’m good!” Tiff wailed. “Look, it’s over there, over there! Take that street!”

Melissa turned them down an avenue filled with shopping complexes and pockets of residential zoning. They pulled into a parking lot, but most of it was walled off by barricades, caution tape, and large piles of rubble. In the middle of the shopping center, born from the wreckage of a Big 5 Sporting Goods, was a 30-foot-tall, white, shimmering plane, like the rippling surface of a lake. Occasionally, people would still stop to take a look (much like Tiff and her mom), but most locals seemed to be over it already, and for them, the Rift had already blended into the background.

Still, there were plenty of workers going in and out of the ruined area, cleaning things up and shunting debris around, and there was a whole crew of guards to make sure nobody got up to any mischief. Tiff and her mom casually walked toward the Rift area, clearly interested and clearly uninvolved with the cleanup.

One of the guards eyed them as they approached, positioning himself to intercept them. Not wanting to make waves or try to break the law, Melissa walked straight to him.

“This is a restricted area,” the man said, though his voice lacked the conviction of a determined bouncer the closer Melissa got. He eyed her warily, his neck slowly craning backward as he had to look up further and further just to see into her face. “Lady, this isn’t a place for gawking. You…,” he trailed off as Melissa came to a stop at a comfortable distance from the man. Comfortable…for her. The man gulped. “...are really tall.”

“I get that from time to time,” Melissa chuckled. “My daughter wanted to see the Rift. We don’t plan on getting in the way. Is there a place we can safely observe? Cleanup crews sometimes establish a viewing platform to consolidate rubberneckers and tourists.”

“Yes,” he said rather quickly. “Just follow the tape over to the Shoe City. The responders used it as a staging ground; there might still be a few benches left.”

Melissa thanked the man and led Tiff over to the designated area. As he said, four benches were lined up against the outside wall of the building, creating a makeshift patio. It was maybe 100 or so feet away from the Rift, though obviously they couldn’t walk straight up to it due to the barriers and roaming guards. Tiff flopped down onto a bench and Melissa sat next to her.

“Well?” Melissa asked. “It’s a Rift. This what you were hoping to see?”

Tiff didn’t answer right away. Just looking around, it was clear to see the devastation one Rift could cause in an area, though thankfully it seemed to be localized to a single building rather than many.

Maybe not so thankfully to the owners of the Big 5 store, but Tiff would take small mercies.

“There’s…not as much carnage as I thought,” Tiff admitted.

“Were you expecting something similar to Santa Ronda?” Melissa asked. “Don’t forget, we visited the same day it was declared stable. People around these parts would also volunteer to help clean up and make their city safe. Rifts, like most disasters, have a way of bringing people together. And don’t forget; Santa Ronda got cleaned up in a week, too.”

“I guess,” Tiff mumbled. “It’s just…I saw the System report. Somebody died here.”

“Many people die to Rifts,” Melissa sighed. “Some while trying to stabilize them, some by complete accident. It sucks and I wish it wasn’t true, but I won’t sugarcoat it. You already know.”

“Mom…,” Tiff asked hesitantly. “What do you think happens to people who die in a Rift?”

“What do you mean?” Melissa asked softly.

“Like, their bodies?”

“Well, if it’s a team, I’m guessing the survivors would try to bring them home,” Melissa said. “Though I suppose it depends on the manner of death. There are a lot of ways to die, Tiff…not all of them are pretty.”

Tiff was pretty sure no death was pretty, but she understood what her mom was saying. In this case, she was grateful for a little evasion.

“But what…,” Tiff pressed on, “What if there’s no survivors? Or what if they get abandoned? What if…they’re still inside when the Rift closes?”

Melissa closed her eyes as her lips formed a tight line.

“I don’t think anybody knows,” she said honestly. “Once a Rift is gone…it’s gone. And everything with it.”

Tiff felt her insides squirm and she was silent while her stomach settled. She didn’t need any additional existential dread right now, thank you very much. Instead, she tapped on her tablet to bring it to life and pondered the current Rift.

“So my TAS tells me all about a Rift,” she told her mom. “What kind of monsters spawn, what the biome is…and what sort of resource it produces.”

“You know what goodies drop?” Melissa asked with a raised brow. “That’s interesting. What’s in this one?”

“Marble,” Tiff answered. She looked up at her mom curiously. “You think that’s worth keeping a Rift?”

“That’s good stone,” Melissa nodded, turning back to the Rift. She stared at it for a minute, watching the occasional person enter or exit, but nothing was being carted out. “Probably not, though. Maybe if the Rift was located in a quarry, or in some wasteland or the mountains or pretty much anywhere that isn’t in the middle of a city. I think it’d have to be a really enticing resource for the government to claim the land and take it from whoever owned it.”

Tiff nodded along; that made sense. She probably wouldn’t want a factory in the middle of her neighborhood, either. But that begged the question: could it be moved? Supposedly, Tiff unlocked the ability to customize her Rifts.

She tapped the Rift on her screen and tried to bring up the customization menu, but it beeped angrily at her. She read the alert and frowned.

“What is it?” Melissa asked curiously. Her smile faltered and she shot a worried glance back toward the portal. “Something wrong?”

“No,” Tiff shook her head. “My Class lets me adjust Rifts now. I wanted to see if I could move this one, but I can’t. I can only edit a Rift before it forms.”

“Ah,” Melissa nodded. “Any idea of what you can change?”

“A whole bunch of things, I think,” Tiff said with a frustrated sigh,” But I don’t know the specifics. It just says ‘parameters,’ including ‘difficulty, resource generation, Spawn types, and physical location’. I don’t know what options I have for each of those.”

Melissa let out an appreciative whistle.

“That’s still very impressive. Even knowing one of those, let alone being able to change it, is extremely valuable. You said it tells you the Biome and the Spawns…what did this one have?”

“Something called ‘Terror Wraiths’,” Tiff shuddered. She had no desire to find out what those were. “And the Rift is somewhere called ‘Parallel Urban’.”

“Terror Wraiths,” Melissa spat, signifying she’d at least heard of them, if not dealt with any. Tiff couldn’t imagine her mom fighting monsters…but then again, even though she knew Victoria was an expert Rift diver, Tiff couldn’t imagine her big sister fighting monsters either. But Melissa didn’t venture any extra information, and since she didn’t, Tiff concluded she didn’t want to know, anyway.

“Parallel Urban,” Melissa began, much more thoughtfully, “Is a very interesting topic. Basically, it takes what’s already here, and…twists it. Makes it a parallel of real life. Maybe it’s something that could have been, in a different life, or maybe it’s a vision of things to come. A P.U. Rift would look very similar to the area it infested. Take this one, for example; inside that rift, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find an exact copy of the building it knocked down. It might even be intact. Who knows, the inside of the Rift could be quite large and stretch around us for several miles. It could be this entire block…the neighborhood…a mile or two? The Rift might turn it into a very real ‘urban jungle,’ where the buildings are ruined and there’s trees and vines everywhere. It might look like one of those post-apocalyptic movies.”

“Have you…ever gone delving?” Tiff asked. Melissa chuckled.

“Not on purpose.”

Tiff tilted her head…that was a very specific answer. Melissa smiled at Tiff’s confusion and answered.

“I’ve been in a few Rifts, yes. Haven’t done a lot of fighting. Rifts are…not for the faint of heart.”

“You don’t seem very faint to me,” Tiff mumbled. Melissa laughed and rustled Tiff’s hair.

“I’m not. I know how to hold my own…who do you think taught Tori to throw a punch? Wasn’t your dad, I’ll tell you that. But this isn’t about me; we came out here to look at the Rift. What else does your tablet say about it?”

“Well,” Tiff stalled, dodging her mom’s roaming hand so she could concentrate on the screen. “It didn’t have any ‘Special Attributes.’ I have no idea what that means. Also, the Core went from ‘Uncontested’ to ‘Controlled,’ though I don’t see who does control it. If it’s me, I don’t have any options, but again, that might be because this Rift dropped before I unlocked the edit function. Let’s see…there’s no Spawns left, which is really good, and it looks like there’s a timer here for how long until it collapses. There’s another few days at least, though I could do the math if we really want to know.”

“Eh, not that important,” Melissa waved her hand. “I’m sure the science nerds can figure that out on their own. It’s up to them if they want to extend the life of the Rift and keep it open. I’m more interested in what you can potentially do to any new Rifts that might open.”

“Same,” Tiff agreed, “But I’m also nervous for the next time one does. Is it so wrong to wish it’ll never happen?”

“No, I think that’s very valid,” Melissa said with a comforting smile. “But I also think you’ve been given something very nice. And very powerful. Since you do have it, might as well make the most of it, right?”

“I guess,” Tiff grumped. “But I don’t want people to die.”

“Same here,” Melissa sighed. “We’ll just have to prepare better the next time something comes up. Hopefully, that won’t be for a while, but I have a feeling it’s going to be sooner than I’d like. Your territory is quite large, after all…and weren’t a few of the first Rifts you saw on your map underground? I bet there’s a whole lot more Rifts popping up than anybody realizes.”

“You think we could make some sort of spawning zone?” Tiff muttered. “A place to continually put any new Rifts that spawn?”

“There’s a thought!” Melissa laughed. “Though that might complicate things depending on what type of resource it comes with. We also don’t know what it costs to edit a Rift…or how to pay for it. I’m guessing you won’t be so keen on editing Rifts if it requires human sacrifices?”

“God no!” Tiff gasped. She never even considered that, and now it was all she could think about! “Mom, why?!”

“Relax,” Melissa laughed. “I’m sure the System is more reasonable than that. Well! We aren’t here to lament the future; we’re here to study the past! We came out all this way to look at the Rift, so how about we actually do it?”

¹

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