Jase drops the headset onto the comms desk and slumps forward until his head is resting on the dark wood. This is a nightmare, a complete and total nightmare. If Luke absolutely has to go crazy and dump F5 tornados on a crowd of unsuspecting people, you’d think he’d have the decency to wait until Jase was conscious. Sighing, Jase lifts his head just slightly, and thumps it back down onto the desk.

He tries, he really tires, to take care of Luke as best he can, but it’s hard when half the time they’re hundreds of miles apart. And then there’s the times when he’s in a coma. While not exactly a common occurrence (he’s pretty sure this would be the first, actually), it does make things a little difficult when it does happen.

But there’s something off about this entire thing. While Luke is known to be a little reckless sometimes, most of the time, this is just downright weird. No way should Logan have had to knock him out, for one. It should have been enough for Reefer to just shake him out of the trance he goes into when he gets lost in the weather, and point out that hey, tornado bearing down on the base, not a good thing. He wouldn’t have been far enough gone for that not to work with only a handful of tornados running around. It just feels like there’s something missing, something that could explain what the hell happened and why, and he has no idea what it could be.

Which means he needs to get back on the radio.

Peeling his head of the desk, Jase sits back up, and puts the headset back on. It just takes a little fiddling with the comms board, which probably he’ll be killed for later, and he has a connection to Crow. “Hey, Carthill, it’s Jase Charter, on Njord, could you get your lousy captain on the line for me? Thanks.” He taps a pencil against the desk, waiting, impatiently.

“Jase? You there?”

“Yeah, hey Sam.”

“It’s good to hear from you, we were worried.”

“Sorry. Look, what can you tell me about what happened out at West Range?” Jase asks, drumming the pencil rapidly.

“God, not much.” Sam says, and he sounds strained. “Reefer called in, in a panic, says Luke’s in some sort of panic, that whenever anyone tries to get near him they practically had their skin ripped off by a wind sheer. I explained that probably wasn’t Luke’s doing, and Logan tried to knock him out. The first time he just got zapped, so Reefer distracted Luke by flooding the area, Logan put him out, and I controlled the storm. Then Reefer and Atlas, that’s Luke’s lieutenant, took him to West Range hospital.”

Jase puts his head in his hands and takes a deep breath. “Anything else?”

“We spoke a couple times before then, mainly about the weather trauma all over the Islands. We both got sort of locked out, I guess, for a while. We agreed to keep an eye on what was going on.”

“Nothing that would make you think he was scared, or hurt…?”

“No. Well, we both freaked out a bit over the whole shut out thing, but after he met up with Reefer, a storm popped up out of nowhere out on the range, before the rest of it happened, so obviously the wall had disappeared.”

Jase sighs, because he’s not getting anywhere and he’s tired and he needs to understand this.

“Fosher didn’t tell him, y’know.”

“What?”

“That you were in a coma. He only found out when Lawrence assigned him to the phantoms. And then Fosher decided it would be better to lie and tell him you were fine; awake, I mean.”

Jase swears, grinds his teeth, clenches his fists, and if he were strung any tighter he thinks he’d snap.

“He still doesn’t know.” Sam adds. “Otherwise I’d have gotten a call as soon as they let him out of the hospital.”

“Alright,” Jase says. “Alright. So first, I kill Fosher. And then I get a hold of Luke and find out what the hell happened.”

“Not that I don’t think Fosher deserves it, but you might have a bit of trouble talking to Luke if you’ve been thrown in jail.”

“Okay, so I kill him after.”

“Not exactly the point I was making there.”

Previous: Scene 5-XI

Scene 5-XII

Next: Scene 5-XIII