Sarra’s jaw drops open and she repeats back at him what Jeremy just said to her. “You’re… invincible?” she says.
Jeremy nods.
Sarra intends on asking another question (just as soon as she can think of one) but then she spots Marcus walking across the lawn towards them. “Chatravati wants to see you in his office,” he tells Sarra.
“Wonder what I did now,” Sarra rolls her eyes and thrusts the charred cricket ball into Jeremy’s hands before striding off towards the mansion.
“And you’re coming with me,” Marcus tells Jeremy. “There’s been a troll sighting in the city,”
“A troll… like the one that broke out on the first night I was here?” Jeremy asks as they walk back across the grass. Marcus nods. “Do they live in the sewers or something?”
Marcus holds the front door open for Jeremy and he steps inside. “No,” he says, before reconsidering: “Well, some of them probably do.”
“Where do they come from then?”
“You understand that Chatravati’s office is… well, two places at once?”
“It’s the Folkvangar,” Jeremy says. “Freyja’s Hall.”
“That’s it,” Marcus nods. “The Folkvangar exists because reality here is… thin.”
They pass down a flight of narrow stairs that leads to the teleportation chamber. Beside the teleporter sits the bike that Conor modified in order to save Beringsford from the space plants. It is mostly in pieces.
“The Folkvanger is where it’s thinnest, “Marcus continues. “But there’s weak spots all over Genoa City. That’s why it’s important for us to be here, in Genoa City. Reality here is thinner than it is in Sumner or Cunningham.”
Jeremy remains silent while Marcus calibrates the teleportation device. Just as they are about to step through it, Jeremy asks: “So what’s on the other side of these weak spots?”
Marcus shrugs. “Chatravati calls it the Mystic Realm,” he says. “But I don’t know about that. There’s just another dimension on the other side, another facet of reality.”
“Like the Crimson Court,” says Jeremy and Marcus nods. Together they step through the teleporter.
This time, Jeremy manages to stay on his feet. He shakes his head from side to side and blinks in the darkness of Westcrest’s second garage. “Conor really needs to install some automatic lights in here,” he says. “So… how do we bring a troll down, anyway? Aside from shooting its eyes out.”
Marcus heads over to a supply crate set against one wall of the room and begins lifting weapons out of it. “Amethapeel canister,” he says, holding up a lightweight metal tube. “The stuff inside is an extract from flowers that don’t grow here… but Chatravati has a greenhouse full of them. Trolls hate the stuff,”
Jeremy slips the cricket ball he was still carrying into one of his jacket pockets and takes the canister from Marcus.
“Yjarj-fibre net launcher,” says Marcus as he takes out a short cylindrical tube with a trigger at its base. “Not even a troll can break through one of these nets,”
“Yjarj are aliens right?”
Marcus nods. Reaching once more into the munitions crate he takes out a small claw-shaped weapon. At the flick of a switch, electricity crackles between the two pincers of the claw. “We call this the heart-stopper. It will only keep a troll down for a few minutes though… they have notoriously persistent hearts.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Jeremy.