“Holy shit am I glad to see you! This place blows and the waitress only keeps bringing me coffee,” Abbey sighed, resting an arm on her hip that looked like it was coated in interlocked black scales from her pointed fingertips up to her biceps. Her other arm was the same way, and as she caught Ash looking at it she smiled and answered a question she thought he was forming. Her outfit was different from back at the bar. She looked like she had just come back from the gym decked out in her sweats with a black sports bra and her jacket nowhere to be found. Ash thought it at least looked more appropriate for the summer when thinking about Gray’s outfit.

  “I didn’t get to show you my soulbond before,” she held her arms open, almost looking like she was ready for a hug as the black scales across her skin had a slight shine to them. “I can cover my body in these scales and I get SUPER strong.” She crossed her arms, a proud smile on her face as the dark scales greedily caught the light shining over them. “It used to only work on my fingers, but it got stronger the more I practiced.”

  “Did a dragon kill you or something?” Ash asked, half joking, wondering if mythical beasts weren’t outside of the question in a world like this.

  This immediately earned a laugh out of her as she reached forward and patted him on the shoulder. He felt the pressure immediately as one of his joints popped, the sound going unnoticed with Abbey’s booming laughter flooding the diner.

  “Nah, I wish though, that’d be a pretty cool story to tell!” Considering she didn’t tell the real story right after told Ash that it wasn’t something she was willing to tell yet. He let the line of questioning drop and picked up another just as quickly.

  “How’d we wind up here?” Ash asked first, still not fully understanding how traversal from the physical world into the soul sea worked in the first place.

  Abbey crossed her scale covered arms again, looking deep in thought as she mulled over how to answer. “Dunno,” is the answer she reached after about ten seconds.

  “Helpful…” Ash was unable to hide the disapproval on his face.

  “Hey I know that look, you just thought that doesn’t help at all, didn’t you?” Abbey had a disapproving look of her own on her face, “it’s complicated, okay?”

  Ash didn’t have a hard time believing that it was complicated, but he was having a hard time believing that a Diver that supposedly scouts ahead doesn’t know how she ends up inside of soul streams.

  “Usually there’s like a door, or a pool,” She opened her arms again, spreading them wide to illustrate how big a doorway could appear, “Normal people can’t see them, they kind of look like rain puddles, but the reflection in them is all wonky.”

  “That’s a little more helpful, but we, or at least I didn’t go through any puddles. I just felt really lightheaded and wound up here all of a sudden.”

  “That’s where it gets all complicated,” Abbey closed her eyes and sat down on one of the chairs she didn’t destroy. As she sat down, bright flames covered her arms and burned away her scales before disappearing again. “I didn’t dive into a puddle either, but here I am.” She gently rocked the chair she was sitting onto its back two legs before letting it fall back down to four. “Maybe something’s wrong in the greater soul sea…”

  Ash didn’t even know what the soul sea looked like when it was “right” so he didn’t really have any advice to offer, but he did have another question. “Well if we can’t figure out how we got in, can we at least figure out how to get out?” Ash pulled up a chair to the table Abbey was sitting at, leaving them both sitting under the flickering light.

  “Getting out is the easy part,” she paused for a second, “most of the time…” Ash waited for her to explain as he rested his elbows on the table. “Soul streams open up when someone kicks the bucket. Sometimes they’re little, sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re dangerous, but they’re all made from the same stuff.”

  Abbey’s chair tilted a little as she started to rock again, the motion helping jump start her thoughts. “The best way to leave is if you nab the soul that made the stream in the first place. It’ll get you a pretty fat bonus too!” Her smile came back as she thought about the potential reward. “If you wanna leave fast though you can start causing trouble or busting things up to get booted.”

  “Is that why you’ve been busting up tables?” Ash asked, thinking about what might have happened if he started shooting light bulbs like targets on a range.

  “Nah,” her chair slammed back down as her rocking stopped, “that just feels good to get some frustration out, but if it got me kicked out of here that wouldn’t be too bad. I hate mazes…” Her lips turned sour as she looked up at the flickering light.

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  Ash took her at her word, thinking back to when Betty first appeared. He didn’t define him oozing ketchup and mustard onto the floor as much trouble, but it was at least enough to summon the waitress’ attention. Now that he thought about it though, Betty didn’t comment on what he had been doing, all she did was pour him coffee and then disappear. Since Abbey mentioned the coffee, he figured the same thing had happened to her, especially since Betty mentioned four customers.

  “Is that like some kind of defense mechanism against soulseekers? I haven’t seen any yet around here.”

  “Mhm, but it gets weaker the longer someone’s been a corpse for. Even when you’re dead your soul still has a connection to your body,” Abbey pointed a thumb at her chest, “and the more it rots, the weaker you get.”

  Ash wondered how long it had been since he died before his soul was found. To him it had only felt like a night, as if he had just woken up inside of his soul stream. He tried his best to not remember what that ink covered mess he saw when he first woke up looked like. Try as he might though, he couldn’t get the image out of his head, and every time he remembered it the shape of another body in his bed grew clearer.

  “How long was I dead for? It felt like I just woke up, but would Vandal need a barrier if my own soul’s defenses were still strong enough to protect me?” Maybe he was dead for longer than he thought, but when he woke up again he felt good as new.

  “What about when you get your body back?” Ash asked, taking his elbows back off the table as he held his hands in his lap. “I don’t think I died very…cleanly, but when I woke up again I looked and felt fine. How did I get fixed up?”

  “Something to do with the Diver system in general, but people at the bottom ranks like us are told not to worry about it.” Abbey looked past Ash at the surrounding tables, her eyes lazily scanning her surroundings, starting to look a little restless. “I didn’t really care though as long as I got to come back and get free drinks.” Ash figured that was the end of that, and it was better to ask about the situation they were currently facing. He figured it was probably better to ask Forin or Vandal anyway.

  “Do you know the waitress here, Betty?”

  “I read her nametag, and she’s probably the mark we’re after, but that’s about it. I’ve never eaten here before, and after trying the coffee, I’m not coming back…”

  “That’s another lead down then, she knows less about her than I do.”

  Abbey stands back up as she hits her open palm with a balled up fist. As soon as her fist made contact, flames spiraled around her arms before the black scales took root again, making her arms look a little bigger than before. “That’s enough of a break! Now that we’ve got double the fighting power let’s charge our way through to the center of this thing!”

  “The center?” Ash stood back up with her, hoping that didn’t mean she was suddenly going to take off sprinting in a random dark direction.

  “Every stream has a start, an end, and a middle. I figured this place is so big just to make the middle harder to get to.”

  Ash couldn’t exactly question the logic with how much he was in the dark here, both literally and figuratively, but he still felt like there was more to it than that. “Is this how scouting usually goes? You just kinda punch stuff and run around until you get to the bottom of it?”

  “Yup! It’s worked so far!” Abbey beamed as she held up a scale cloaked fist.

  “Maybe the job requirements here aren’t as strict as I thought…” Ash got slightly better at hiding the disappointment on his face as Abbey continued to smile. “Watch and learn,” Abbey told him, taking a step forward as she crouched down low, one arm pulled back behind her with a fist clenched. Like a spring finally released after being held down she shot up, her scaled fist connecting with the underside of a table with a metallic sound clank. There was a small flash at the moment of impact, and without blinking the table skipped into the air, slammed into the diner ceiling, and rebounded back onto the ground on its side, making the surrounding chairs jump from the force.

  Ash stared wide eyed as he looked at the new dent in the ceiling, and the table keeled over on the floor as Abbey’s black knuckles momentarily glowed red before their color faded back into the black void. As a couple of pieces that used to be a complete part of the diner’s ceiling slowly fell onto the floor, Ash heard the same electronic hum that kept him on edge today.

  The little light that was above the table they sat at went out, but at the same time, every other swinging bulb in the diner flared back to life. With new light to illuminate the diner, the two of them could finally see all the surrounding tables again, and this time there was actually a wall with booths in sight. The distance from here to there was about the same as when Ash spotted Abbey punching a different unfortunate table into the next life.

  “See?” Abbey sounded prouder than ever as she crossed her scale coated arms. Ash thought to himself that the timing was a little too lucky, but after seeing her send that table that probably weighed five times as much as he did, he let it slide.

  “Well, the lights did turn back on, so I’d call that progress.” Ash admitted, even though he didn’t know what caused them to turn off in the first place. “Let’s head for the wall, there might actually be another door out of here.”

  “On it!” Abbey took off, barreling through the tables as she made her way to the wall, with Ash carefully following behind her as he kept an eye on their surroundings. He wasn’t very worried about her after that display earlier, but he still wasn’t sure what could be lurking in the diner with them. If they could manage to find another door he’d finally feel like they were actually getting somewhere.