All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 210: Code White

As the weeks went by, the castle settled into a regular routine and began to assume some semblance of normalcy. Normal, of course, until the incident.

My sensors indicated some abnormality with the ground outside. I had picked it up last night, but hadn’t had time to investigate. Helping the soldiers clean up all the sawdust from their lumber mill took priority. But when I finally did emerge from the soldiers’ temporary structure, I was greeted by an awful sight.

I had barely gotten used to the idea of the outside world being covered with dirt, but this? This was somehow worse. A brown slurry of unknown origin had covered the camp, concentrated most densely along walking paths. It wasn’t mud exactly, but it must have shared some relation. The stuff clung to boots and trouser legs, seeming to and I could detect muddy footprints heading into almost every tent.

This was a disaster of epic proportions. Every area of dry, densely-packed dirt had been replaced with this new foe. Even with my newfound powers, cleaning this up would take me all day. To make matters worse, I still had no idea how far this terror had spread. Was it a local calamity, or were we caught up in some wider phenomenon? How had the castle fared? The only saving grace was that the covered areas were unaffected. Aside from what was tracked in by the humans and their boots, of course.

I ran through last night's logs, looking for anything out of place. We received some precipitation last night, which normally helped wash things away. Even if it did spread water everywhere, it was something I usually looked forward to. That could have explained mud, but surely not this.

Looking more closely, the precipitation had been a bit unusual. The water had displayed a far more ordered molecular structure than normal. But the ambient temperature had continued dropping every week, so I had put it down to simple entropy.

As much as I wanted to start cleaning up this mess right away, I had to go check on the castle. If this was widespread, my responsibilities lay there first. Hovering carefully off the ground to keep the disgusting slush from my underside, I zipped off toward the castle.

As I zoomed over the camp, I noticed more oddities. No one seemed to care that much about this development. Sure, they knocked their boots together before they entered the tents or any area that was relatively clean, but they otherwise just trudged through the slurry. No one really made any moves to clean it up. Arthur’s men weren’t so well-trained on cleanliness, but this seemed a bit much.

In fact, I didn't notice anyone acknowledge the stuff until I crossed over the castle gate. There, the stone paving of the path leading inward had been scraped clean of the brownish-white stuff. When it came to the people though, the only behavioral difference I could detect was that they were wearing slightly warmer clothing.

Once I got into the castle’s courtyard though, things changed. Sure, there were patches of muddy brown, but there were also patches of purest white. Both appeared similar, the only difference being the concentration of dirt within the mixture. That, and the ratio of liquid to solid water was higher in the slurry than in the white powder. It seemed that this was more complicated than I originally thought.

The places where the brown, muddy, dirty, gross stuff gathered were where the humans had walked. The unbroken fields of the purest white were places completely untouched by human hands or boots. However, even now the humans were in the process of destroying these fields of white.

All the little ones were running around like the children they were. They would scoop up the white stuff, pack it into little balls, and hurl it at each other, the clumps exploding into chaotic messes that covered everyone and everything. The more they ran, the more brown stuff slowly encroached on the white fields. But at the same time, the more they stayed in the white fields, the less brown stuff clung to their boots.

I spotted little Leanne as she walked out to the center of the field. The first several steps of her path were brown, but after that, they lightened until she left only little holes in the white. After a few moments of walking, she collapsed in despair on her back at the state of the world and began thrashing around wildly. Oh, no. Was she hurt? I zipped over to check on her.

As I hovered overhead, I noticed something was not as I expected. She wasn't crying or screaming in despair; instead, she was laughing. What was there to laugh about here? Moving her arms and legs in a rhythmic pattern, she made an impression in the fluffy whiteness, making an outline of herself with very thick arms and legs.

I wasn't sure what the point was, but soon enough she stopped and stood up carefully. The girl hopped away to look down at her work, pointed, laughed, and called over to her friends.

This was a disturbing occurrence. Had this white powder somehow infected the children's minds with this insanity? How could they not see the problem of the brown sludge, much less help its apparent spread? Why did they trample through these fields? I needed to get to the bottom of this. After making sure that Leanne was okay, I continued toward the castle to ensure the inside was still safe.

Once I got in, I was thoroughly pleased with what I saw. Sure, there was a little bit of gross slush in the entryway, but it was mainly around a pile of boots and shoes next to the door. People were apparently in the practice of taking their boots off and putting their inside shoes on.

One of the Nighty Knights stood by the door with a broom, continually sweeping the mess outside. Another held a rag, wiping down the floor after his partner. Good. I was glad they were taking my teachings to heart. This would surely serve them well in the future. I couldn't help but give them a little salute, which they returned with smiles on their faces.

Still, as I zipped upstairs, I could tell they looked outside worriedly. Maybe they were concerned about the madness gripping the rest of the fellows of their company. I wished there was something I could do to comfort them. But honestly, I had no idea what was going on. I would need to talk to Beatrice. She would be able to explain to me what was happening.

I found her in her office looking at reports while rubbing her forehead in frustration. She had been extremely busy this week getting everything set up. At the same time, the Council, Arthur, and his military’s structure had proven exceedingly helpful with putting plans into motion. Still, they generated awe-inspiring amounts of paper to record everything.

While I was certainly impressed by the organization of the army, I was sometimes shocked at how many resources they took to operate. I had expected them to require less now that they were no longer in the field and doing complex maneuvers. But apparently, when they were stationary, things got even more complicated. The work I remembered from watching over Arthur’s shoulder was nothing compared to this. I hovered over Beatrice's desk, and it was a measure of her exhaustion that she didn't even recognize I had come in.

Normally, she was never slow to greet me with a cheerful hello or a bow. This time, she was just scribbling numbers on a spare piece of paper off to the side, evidently trying to figure something out. I studied the sheets of paper laid out in front of her. It took me a few minutes, but I understood what she was getting at. It seemed that she hadn't fully grasped the problem, but her instincts were good and commendable for her to realize there even was an issue.

I carefully gave her a soft beep so as not to startle her too much. Her head whipped up in surprise, then she jumped to her feet and respectfully greeted me with a cheerful "Hello, master."

I tapped a few pieces of paper indicating certain numbers on them, and she looked at them and frowned. "Yes, something doesn't line up here, but I'm not sure why exactly."

As I expected. She had good instincts, but humans seemed to be pretty bad at basic math. I supposed that’s why Beatrice had insisted on setting up classes for everyone. So, I started to walk her through the problems, projecting equations as we went. As I did with the children, I had little symbols that represented different mathematical operations, to make them easier to understand.

Little herds of sheep gathered in the illusion over my head, demonstrating all steps for the correct accounting calculations. Bee followed along as I described exactly what the numbers were saying and why the results were wrong. It wasn't anything malicious, here, as was most often the case with Arthur. This was simply a bad accounting error where some of the numbers had been improperly calculated.

Still, as I walked her through it, she smiled at a certain point as she got the idea and could put together the rest herself. I was really proud of her. She was clearly learning how to organize and do math much better.

After we had settled the problem of math and she had made some careful corrections to the ledgers, I finally got around to asking my own questions. I replayed my logs of the precipitation last night, showing the white flakes of madness slowly sifting down through the air to land on the ground. I showed her the unbroken patches of white, the brown slurries of semiliquid mush, and the people tracking the mud everywhere through the camp. And last of all, Leanne, laughing in the snow like a crazy person.

I expected some somber explanation of what was going on, some commiseration over this new great threat. At the very least, I hoped for some insight into why no one else seemed worried. But instead, I watched in horror Beatrice broke out in a smile and giggled. "Yes, it's snowing so early in the year! Isn't that great?"

She was also infected.

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