An Unearthly Pink

	The woods were unnaturally cold, the fog too thick, and no sounds but the incessant chittering of voices behind her. Aleen pushed herself off of a tree to compensate for her failing legs, she never thought she was out of shape but she had been running too long over terrain too hard; she couldn't stop though, they were still chasing her, the chittering voices in the fog of ghostly skulls floating over the landscape. She spared a thought to why she wasn't dead or caught, or whatever they do, yet and it all felt like some cruel game to the skulls but she wouldn't get caught, anyone who was caught was lost. The woods were unfamiliar now, the past afternoon taking her farther than she ever wanted, and a root caught Aleen's foot; she managed to not tumble to the ground but the voices were closer now, too close, she kept running while taking gaping breaths, that's all she could do and anything else would mean her death. Her body tired but as if by a miracle she caught sight of what appeared to be a shed made of silver, more of an outhouse but she ran towards it all the same, maybe being inside would let her rest. Aleen crashed into the front door of the shed, pulling at the handle of the locked door furiously "Let me in!"

	"I'm not buying whatever you're selling," an impassive voice came from inside.

	"Please!" she cried pounding on the door "They're going to get me! Please!" Tears were streaming down her face, this one hope the shed had ignited being torn away from her. The voices were close, almost upon her, she couldn't tell if the screaming in her ears was her or the voices getting louder and a moment before they were the same, the silver door opened with a creak and she was pulled in before the door slammed shut. She fell to her knees, tears still coming down her cheeks, and looked up the man who the voice belonged to.

	The man before her was clad in robes of varying shades of purple, wearing simple glasses, and his hair was styled in a simple cut and was well groomed along with his beard. "Now what was that?" He asked Aleen bluntly and went back to a column with strange lights and devices coming out of it. "Here I was studying in peace, and then bang bang bang, and now ghosts are everywhere outside."

	Before Aleen, the room was sprawled out with a coat rack and even doors presumably to other rooms or outside. "It...." Her mind was beginning to slow down from the panic, and was now trying to wrap itself around this information. "But..shack!" She propped herself up on a railing. "It was a shack!" she yelled at the man in her confusion.

	He held up a finger, looking away from whatever he was doing at the column "Don't, people think it's cute, but it's not."

	"It's... on the inside, it's-"

	"I'm warning you, don't do it."

	She looked at the man and let out a breath, seeming to have some sort of revelation "It's bigger on the inside!"

	"By the sanctum." The man rubbed his eyes. "This is why I don't let people in." He shook his head and turned a big mirror jutting off the column to face her, but instead of her reflection it showed the skulls in the fog outside circulating around the box. "Those, what are they?" He asked frankly.

	"I-I don't know." She admitted "They, they started attacking our hunters a week ago, they take peoples' souls and the people just wander around before dying."

	"So why did you leave the village then? Hm?" He asked and turned the mirror back so it only face him "You seemed to think that it was safe in here, so surely you could have stayed in your house. Not come bothering me."

	She looked down, her eyes narrowing as she went back through the events. "I'm the last person," she sat down on some steps that she had walked along the rails towards, "we tried to stay inside, not go out in the woods, but they came in through the windows and holes in the walls." Aleen's hands were trembling in her lap as she was going back to the village. "They came in the morning when everyone was sleeping, only a few people and I managed to get out of the building before they overran it, fewer got out of the village, fewer made it the first hour, me and a friend-"

	"A friend and I," the man corrected her, turning dials and knobs coming out of the column's offshoots, "proper grammar is important."

	"He stopped to rest, and then they were on him, they caught him and I ran, I heard him and I ran." She ignored his correction, it didn't really matter, not to her. "I shouldn't have run, I could have helped him, but I was scared." She hands were going up to her face when she felt a hand on her shoulder, it was the strange man in glasses.

	"What's your name, girl?"

	"A-Aleen?"

	"Listen, 'A-aleen?', you did what you had to, judging by what it swarming around my ship and what you described, you couldn't have done anything, or 'you couldna done nothing' in your parlance."

	"My name's Aleen, not that..." She muttered, she didn't know if he was trying comfort her or be a jackass.

	"Aleen, my name's Pink." He took her hand and shook it before being called back to his column by beeping and dings.  "Now what do we have here, Oh, oh!"

	"....Pink?"  She pushed herself to her feet, what kind of name was Pink, was it some kind of title?

	"Red, Black, White, Blue... Oh! This is brilliant," he said to Aleen as he turned more knobs. "In these things, these ghosts, all colors of mana show up in traces, all but green!" He turned the mirror once more towards her, now showing strange bars. "Now what does that mean?"

	"I don't..." She knew some things about mana, it's what the rangers would use to hunt, but she didn't know how it worked in creatures like this.

	"Of course you don't, I know better than to expect yokels to know everything," Pink said dismissively, pulling some more levers jutting off of the column and it began to make noise. "Either these are like the Nephilim, in which case I should really study them; Or they were made by someone, and dear Aleen, what would be the question then..."

	She still wasn't sure if he was trying to be an ass or if it came naturally to him, either way he saved her so she couldn't complain too much. "Who?" She managed to say at his prompting, was he just using her to satisfy his own ego?

	"Of course who, that is the question to ask regardless of how many colors these ghosts have," Pink said, motioning for her to try again. "What is the question, the real question we have to ask?"

	"Why?" She asked to see if it was right, those things didn't actually produce anything, they just ate as far as she could tell. "Why would someone make these?"

	"Oh, that is good, but not what I was looking for." Pink said without looking away from the mirror.  "The question is: 'How?'.  Aleen, the people who can effectively use four or more colors of mana without the help of an artifact are exceedingly rare."

	"So there's either more than one of them summoning the ghosts or one person is using an artifact?" She asked him, walking closer to Pink and the column as she grew more confident with her guesses. "Could they be using souls for power or something? My dad always told me that our souls are made from mana." Pink stopped tapping on the buttons, now his hummings were replaced by stony silence. "Pink? Am I right?"

	"If you are," he said and pulled a level hard enough that it looked like it would break, and the column began groaning, "then we better stop them, no one has any right to use anyone else as a power source." His voice now sharp with what seemed to be painful memories. "Now, Aleen, let's go on a trip."

	"Wait, where are we going, and how? We're in a shack!" Pink produced a device that looked like some sort of handheld crossbow and fired it at Aleen, a light emitted from the crossbow thing and hit her in the eyes. "Ow! What was that for?"

	"Needed a psychic scan so I could get the coordinates for your home village," He inserted the apparently psychic (whatever that means) crossbow into the panel and began clacking away on it.

	"You could have asked  first!" her eyesight was still recovering from the bright light.

	"Not asking saved approximately one minute of trying to explain to you why I needed to do it." The room began to shift and the column stopped groaning quite so loud. "As for how,  this is no mere shack; This is a ship capable of traveling between planes, traversing the dark space between worlds!"

	"But that's impossible," she said in surprise and Pink raised an eyebrow while looking directly at her.

	"Really, this is what you are choosing to call impossible?" He asked her, making sweeping motions with his arms as he continued to speak.  "Not the ghosts outside and not the dimensions of this room, but the fact that it can travel between worlds? Aleen, my dear girl, nothing is impossible, nothing! If I learned one thing, there's always the exception to the rules, perhaps there is something that is truly impossible in some corner of the multiverse; but that would prove that nothing is impossible." He pulled the crossbow he used on her before out of the panel. "Don't think about it too much. Anyway, we're home," He said and kicked open the door. Aleen walked out after him, her village was quiet with only moaning come from the people who were wandering about. Pink grabbed the mayor who was wandering aimlessly and shot the crossbow thing into his eyes like he did with Aleen.

	"What are you doing?" She asked walking up towards him. "Stop hitting people with that psychic crossbow!"

	"First, it's on soul mode, not psychic. Secondly, It's not a crossbow: it's a psychic scanner." He said in a matter of fact manner, pressed some buttons on the scanner and hit the man again. "Good news is that they still have their souls, but...."

	"But what?" She asked right before Pink shot her in the eyes with the scanner, again. "Ow, stop that!"

	"Hush, I needed a test sample since I don't know what simpleton brainwaves are like." He said impassively and looked at a piece of glass on the scanner. "Souls are intact, but something about their minds are broken. Could it be, if the ghosts are drawn to psychic signatures then I have a way we can catch them."

	"I'm not going to let you hit me again," she responded, she really didn't want to see the ghosts ever again and Pink's constant assault with his psychic scanner was getting on her nerves.

	"As if such menial mental signatures could attract the attention of the ghosts." He scoffed and hit himself in the eyes with his own device, recoiling from it. "Oh! oh, that does smart." He said, covering his eyes for a few seconds. After he apparently recovered from the scan, which Aleen was sure took longer for him than it did for her, Pink walked back into his shack and came out a minute later with a large pole with a giant ball at the tip and attached the psychic scanner to it. "Aleen, when people were being attacked, did they say anything about what they were experiencing?"

	"N-no?" She was incredulous that Pink thought people would take the time to examine what was happening to them. "Mostly screaming, no, just screaming, like normal people."

	"And that's why Normal is boring, Aleen." He said pointing to her. "People never bother to exposit while they are being mentally torn apart by strange ghost monsters. That's why we have to do experiments like this." He pulled the trigger on the psychic scanner and a clear pulse came from ball on top of the pole. "Aleen, get inside the ship," he told her calmly.

	"Pink, what's happening?" The forest came to life around them all of the sudden.

	"Get in the ship, Aleen!" He yelled. "I'm not risking you in this, the ghosts are coming."

	"Pink..."

	"Aleen! Ship! Now!" He yelled as the fog poured out of the forest and Aleen ran back to the shack, shutting the door behind her. She went to the column and shook the mirror until it came to life.

	The Mirror showed Pink outside from a convenient camera angle, the ghosts had started swirling around him as if they were deciding who would go in for the kill. "Hello," he called out to them, "My name is Pink, the Antideluvian Delver, and I'll be your victim tonight." Aleen grasped the mirror as hard as she could as the ghosts moved in on Pink.  He held his head as the ghosts were assaulting him "Oh, this does hurt, let's see let's see," He started firing the psychic scanner wildly, seemingly slowing the ghosts down and images began to appear within the mass. "Memories!" he shouted "A little girl, some affection towards her. Aleen? Hah!"  He looked towards the box "Aleen, they're only taking memories, your dad's right here!" More images appeared, vistas projected on the fog and images of a strange lizard man and a centaur. "You're looking for memories and you're not very gracious about it!" Pink yelled and threw down the psychic scanner. "You want my memories? Take them all! I've been to countless worlds and seen things your master will never understand! I've gained allies precious to me, and I've lost more than I want to admit!" Pain wracked his voice as the ghosts kept swarming around him.

	"Still not enough, you lot are quite voracious!" He pulled out some notes from his pocket. "That's why you were swarming the trees and everything else, residual memories implanted on the environment, the simple memories of these bumpkins aren't enough I take it. If you want memories, I've got the mother lode for you!" He thrust the notes into the air and the ghost began to swarm around them, visions projecting faster and faster. "These aren't just memories of what happened, but memories of dreams and hopes! You want memories? These are of what will never be! ALEEN, What happens when the Ceaseless hunger meets a undending buffet? LET'S FIND OUT!" The ghosts converged on the notes, and Aleen could see titans fighting eachother and rebuilding themselves to fight again, Pink standing with others, a large lizard man transforming, and then the ghosts exploding outwards causing a shockwave to rip through the forest.

	Aleen burst out of the shed and ran towards Pink, catching him in a hug. He was an ass, but she was worried about him all the same. "Pink, thank god you're alright!" She squeezed him tightly until he pushed her off.

	"Of course I'm alright," he said, brushing dirt off of his robes, "I'm a planeswalker, no memory stealing ghosts are going to do me in." The Mayor, who had previously been wandering , approached them with renewed vigor.

	"Aleen, is he a friend of yours?" The mayor asked her in a jolly mood, like what had happened didn't.

	"Well," she said looking to Pink, and people started shuffling out from the community center. "Wait, are y'all alright?" she asked him.

	"Why wouldn't we be?" The Mayor asked in a confused tone. "Just another day in the life."

	"The Gho-" Aleen was stopped by Pink putting his hand on her shoulder.

	"You see good sir, I came here a few days ago and Aleen here has been helping me in my research. This device measured some strange mana signatures, but we've since then got it all worked out and Aleen was wondering if you were feeling fine." He said as if lying came naturally to him, for all she knew it did.

	"Oh yes, I remember you, mister..."

	"Pink," He shook the mayor's hand,  "thank you for supper last night, by the way."

	"Oh, it was a pleasure for me and the wife," the mayor responded with a laugh and went off to tell other people what Pink had told him as they had started murmuring.

	Aleen pulled the Delver off to the side by pulling on his sleeve. "Pink, what's happening here?" She asked him, trying to stay quiet. "Why don't they remember the ghosts?"

	"It seems that editing their victim's memories was a function of the ghosts, if they returned them. Very possible that they do that so no one looks into ghosts roaming the country side depopulating towns." He said stroking his chin. "This alteration leaves their memories very malleable and open to suggestion, but I doubt it'll last more than a day."

	"But you destroyed them, so how could they do that?" She asked, casting glances at the villagers who were agreeing with the mayor currently.

	"Some creatures have abilities that happen when they're destroyed, triggered abilities if you will."

	"But that doesn't make any sense." she said in hushed tones.

	"I try not to think about it too hard," He muttered and waved to a large man approaching them.

	"Dad!" Aleen called out to him, running towards him and hugging him, much to her father's apparent surprise.

	"You're full of energy today, aren't you?" He laughed and hugged her back before the two parted. "The mayor told me you were helping Mister Pink, hopefully you haven't caused him any trouble."

	"Not at all," Pink cut her off before she could say anything, "in fact, Aleen here was instrumental to figuring out what was happening with the mana."

	"Dad," she asked, thinking of the ranger who died to the ghosts, "has Rofello come back to town?"

	"Rofello?" He scratched his head. "I've never heard of a Rofello, Aleen. Are you sure you're not thinking of someone else?"

	"He was a ranger, remember?" She asked, if they were susceptible to suggestion, maybe she could make them remember the truth.

	Her father was looking bothered by the information when Pink cut in "Yes Rofello, he decided to get married and went to the city, didn't he?" He asked Aleen very pointedly.

	"Oh him, I can't believe I forgot about that," her father sounded relieved with those words, by Aleen's heart sunk and she pulled Pink off, excusing the two of them for a moment.

	"What was that?" she hissed at Pink, trying to keep the volume down.

	"What? You're the one treading in dangerous waters." He hissed back. "We don't know what trying to get them to remember will do to them. Your prodding may very well send them into a catatonic state."

	She glared at him for a moment before turning and going back to her father. "Having a squabble with your boyfriend?" He prodded her.

	"What? Him?" She exclaimed

	"Her?" As did Pink.

	"Absolutely Not!"

	"What would I even find in a bumpkin like her?"

	"Ass!" she yelled at Pink and her father broke out into laughter.

	"What it's like to be young again," he said wiping a tear from his eye," Come on Pink, you should have Dinner with our family."

	"I would love to," Pink said back up towards the shack, "but I have somewhere to be urgently, good job on that whole Mana thing, Aleen, Adieu."

	"WAIT!" she yelled and looked between the two men. "I'm coming with you, Pink. We talked about it last night and my father gave his blessing, remember?" She looked between the two of them and her father nodded.

	"It'll hurt to lose my little girl, but getting to explore the world is a once in a lifetime chance."

	"Oh, you devious, clever little girl." Pink said grabbing the pole. "Aleen, can I speak with you?" He motioned and when she came it was his turn to hiss apparently. "Aleen, what is the meaning of this?"

	"I can't stay here, Pink," she told him pointedly, "knowing what happened while everyone else just muddles about like normal. It's maddening!" She nearly shouted but kept it to a quiet shout. "Besides, you did say I helped you."

	"That's what we call a lie," He said in a matter of fact tone and looked her in the eyes, Aleen was doing her best to glare him down. "Listen," he said, sounding like he was relenting, "if you want to come with me, you'll have to follow my rules and run when I tell you to run. This is very dangerous, and you have a very high chance of getting hurt, dying, or worse."

	"What's worse than dying?" She asked him and he put his hands on her shoulders, looking straight into Aleen's eyes.

	"Pray that you never find out," he said solemnly. "Now, do we have a deal?"

	"Of course," she answered resolutely, "let me just grab something from my house."

	"This isn't a cruise, Aleen!" He called to her as she ran off towards her house.

	"What's a cruise?" She called to him and went into her house, making a beeline for her room. Aleen scooped some clothes up and grabbed a pendant from her drawer before slipping it around her neck, a charm her mother had left her. She ran out of the house, closing the door with her foot and gave her father a kiss on the cheek "Be good, Dad." she said to him as she was backing up towards Pink and the shack, "And for God's sake, ask Ms. Cotter out, everyone knows you like her!" She turned around and ran as he shouted wishes after her. "Pink!" She said entering the shack and closing the door behind her.  "Where are we often to in your magic flying shack?" She asked him, now wondering where she would be keeping her clothes.

	"First of all, it's not a magic shack, it's an vehicle used to travel between planes."

	"A Vutbp?" She asked.

	"No, that's stupid." Pink rebutted and pulled some levers to start the column groaning. "Secondly, we are going to do some nice, quiet research, nothing exciting or dangerous. You know, like my plans for this plane before you came interrupting me."
	"Excuse me for not wanting to die." Aleen said to him "Where can I put my things?"

	"Ideally the incinerator, but if you insist on retrieving them, there's a room off to the left you can sleep in." He didn't even look up when answering her.



	Meanwhile in a large room draped in finery, a man dressed like a merchant lord looked on as an artifact he collected displayed the memories collected from Pink and the notes."Hm, so that's what you're doing with the ship." It had been a pain to find out which plane Pink was on and the artifact he procured was entirely to spy on the Delver without his knowledge of who was looking. All the artifacts and enchantments that went into that ship's making could solidify his hold if he could get his hands on them.
	"Sir," an aged man from behind him, entered without knocking and saw the ghosts swirling around his chambers, "what...."  An Archon summoned by the lord pushed the age man into the room when he was trying to flee and closed the door so the two of them were alone.
	"You really should have knocked," the lord pushed himself up from his chair, his eyes glowing red.

	"Please, I won't tell anyone." The man groveled, backing up.

	"You sold out your previous master, so I know you won't" The man backed up and screamed as his body was blown into flower petals by an invisible breeze  that also carried them out of the window. "Now that was fun, but time to end this diversion of mine." he said simply, unsummoning his minions and picking up the skull flung himself into the blind eternities.