Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
The Zundraki homeworld had collapsed centuries ago, its mantle having contracted in a mysterious cataclysm that triggered devastating quakes along its surface, destroying the ancient civilization that was now the source of Zoë’s frustration.
Reknowned archaeologist, Azra Saugin, aka ‘Mom,’ had spent the last six months on this fractured lifeless rock, leading an expedition that was excavating and cataloguing the remains of mostly devastated Zundraki ruins, which meant that sixteen year old Zoë Saugin, her oldest child, had also been stuck on this barren hostile world. She’d been here for six months, confined in pressurized life-support structures, with no privacy, consigned to share quarters with the other dozen and a half members of the expedition, composed primarily of archaeology students five or more years older than herself, who were thrilled to be here, called her ‘the kid,’ and regarded her mother as a miracle-worker.
Brushing away the last foggy traces of the recurring dreams she had been experiencing for the last week, of being trapped in some cavern deep beneath the ground, Zoë woke up early and frowned in existential despair at her paler than pale skin, denied exposure to the light of a sun for months, and at her bedraggled and neglected braids, which had to be kept out of the way so that she could wear the ugly environmental protection suit that allowed her to survive this dead world. She glared at the suit, all black and insect-like, and just knew that it had to be the source of the oppressive dreams, as she once again pulled herself into it and checked her seals, before leaving the pressurized survival shelter that was ‘home,’ to ‘go check on the transmitter.’
‘Checking the transmitter’ was her daily ritual, and her excuse to get out of the cramped quarters and away from the various students, who would likely have avoided her due to her youth, even if they hadn’t been unwilling to fraternize with their bosses kid. The horizon of Zundrak was a desolate thing, stark in its lines, as the rising sun had minimal atmosphere to blunt it’s sting, and what were once perhaps great mountains lay in sundered blocks of tumbled stone, brought low by the countless earthquakes that had shaken this world to ruin thousands of years ago.
Not for the first time, she envied her brother, who had oh-so-conveniently gotten into a good study program back home just a few months before they were to depart, and had managed to duck out of accompanying them to Zundrak. He was staying with friends back on Aleph, while she was stuck in this stinky environment suit, a centimeter away from some combination of death-by-suffocation, death-by-exposure and death-by-radiation-poisoning, but woefully unprotected from a lingering death-by-social-isolation.
Her comm-circuit chirruped softly, and she didn’t have to read the display projected on her helmet to know it was from mother. While she’d tried, perhaps a little too desperately, in one case, to get involved with the students closer to her own age, none of them would speak to her unless spoken to, and so any comm had to be from mom... She shook off the embarrassment of that rejection, and blinked acceptance of the call, a mere formality, as her mother could override the circuit and force the message through anyway, and winced as her mother’s overloud voice broke the silence of the Zundraki morning.
“Zoë, are you up and about?” there was the familiar tone, long since having abandoned asking why her daughter was always up and out of the pressurized habitations so early. What was more annoying, that she didn’t approve of anything Zoë did, or that she didn’t care enough to even argue with her about it?
“Yeah, mom. Just checking the transmitter. Today’s supply day.” Zoë said, relieved somewhat that this was the end of month, and, for once, she had an actual excuse to be out, as a fresh shipment of supplies was due to arrive by shuttle. Due to the erratic orbit of the Zundraki core fragment, and the orbiting ring of debris that had sloughed off of it when it fell apart, the transmitter that kept them in intermittent contact with the rest of galactic civilization was a boon to the delivery ships, and was perhaps the only thing that had kept Zoë sane, allowing her to tune in to broadcast programming and pretend for a few hours each evening that she was anywhere but here.
“Yeah, everyone’s getting the waste ready for removal,” her mother replied, the sounds of others talking behind her not entirely filtered out by the communications software, “and making room for the new rebreather filters and whatnot.” It was the sort of empty chatter that was unlike her mother, and Zoë was beginning to wonder what she was building up to as she paused, and then continued. “So, since everybody here has things to do, I was thinking that we could go to section C and have a little ‘us time’, away from all the chatterboxes…”
Zoë didn’t know how to respond to that. The mother she knew how to deal with always had time for her precious students, and never for her own family.
And yet, how like her mother this was. The one day a month that new faces would be seen, new stuff arriving, that one might get to eat food that hadn’t been pressure-sealed or reconstituted, was the day that her mother wanted to drive kilometers away to a dig-site. So typical! But she found herself agreeing anyway, “Sure, whatever. That sounds fine. Want me to go warm up the rover?”
“No need, I had one of the flunkies do it.” Her mother said, perhaps attempting to score some points by dismissing her students, but only succeeding in making Zoë wonder if she similarly dismissed her daughter, when talking to her graduate students…
[ January 06, 2012, 05:15 PM: Message edited by: Set ]
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
The ride to the dig-site was awkward, the vehicle bouncing along in the lower-than-standard gravity, on oversized treads almost as large as the vehicle’s body itself, and Zoë listened to music, while her mother had projected maps of the current dig-site on the forward screen, splitting her attention between avoiding chasms and tracing out potential undiscovered chambers on the site-map. Conversation was sporadic, and both of them were a bit on edge, as each attempt to say something had distracted the other from something she would rather have been focusing on. Six months together, in such quarters, had left them with nothing to talk about, and, increasingly it seemed, less patience for even making the attempt.
The chamber they’d found at the location labeled ‘Section C’ was in amazing shape, given what had happened to this world. It was the first section of wall they’d located that had remained relatively intact, even if it had fallen flat, and now was primarily a ‘floor,’ more than a wall. Intricate curvilinear script was gouged into the stone itself, as if impressed in clay that had been baked into solidity. The script itself was ever-so-slightly more radioactive than the surroundings, and residue of a blue-ish pigment, the source of the radioactivity, remained in the grooves, having long since desiccated into flakes and dust, but remaining behind, with no air to stir it from the grooves.
The xeno-biology students had already determined that whatever species built the Zundraki civilization had to be powerfully tolerant to high radiation, perhaps even, it was theorized, subsisting directly off of it, perhaps in place of a need for oxygen or chemical sustenance, as the thousand year old ruins must have been lethally radioactive, in their heyday, to have such elevated levels of radioactivity after so long a time of decay.
She wordlessly set up the lights, while her mother set up the portable computer, which was trying, once again, to translate the fragmentary markings, with no success. They had long ago concluded that the markings were either artistic, or ritualistic, in nature, as they did not follow any mathematical or linguistic structure that the translation software could deduce, and since this software was able to translate any of dozens of UP languages so quickly that a native speaker couldn’t tell the information was being translated, they were confident that whatever these markings were, they weren’t writings.
So much about the Zundraki remained a mystery. Vast structures of stone had been virtually reassembled from the fallen rubble strewn across the ravaged surface of the world, and the architecture seemed relatively primitive, despite the necessity for some sort of advanced technology to cut, shape and move such massive blocks of stone. Complex alloyed metals had been found, but no signs of machinery or industry to forge those alloys. Across the sites, there were no signs of representational artwork, and no decipherable written language. While evidence of mining found all over the world, no remainder of agriculture could be found, and fossilized life was minimal, with a high percentage of the surface appearing to have been underwater, at one point. Even the name ‘Zundraki’ had been assigned to them by the explorer who had discovered the shattered world, Captain Zephus Zundrak, of the Expeditionary League, and Zoë smiled at the thought, as her mother found few things more disagreeable than the notion that this ancient race was named after that old drunkard.
A faint vibration thrummed through the ground, disrupting her train of thought as she turned to look at her mother, to see if she had turned on some item of equipment. Zundrak was geologically dead, its molten core a frozen lump of weakly radioactive metal, and after earthquakes powerful enough to rip the world apart and send pieces of it hurtling into space, it had not suffered a tremor for many centuries, as seismically lifeless as the tomb it had become. Her mother was also looking towards her, with the same puzzled expression, and the ground trembled again. She could see the faintly glowing blue dust rising from the glyphs carved into the fallen wall they stood upon, only to settle back down, before jumping up again in a strange sort of luminescent dance as the ground shuddered one more time.
“Zoë, the transport!” her mother said, before the ground lurched violently beneath them and felt like it was slamming upwards into her, like a rising wave. Everything spun and went sideways, and whatever her mother was shouting was buried in a squeal of static that filled her helmet like screeching bats, making her want to hurl it from her head. Something struck her side, her leg, her back, as she felt herself tumbling uncontrollably. The ground seemed to be attacking her from all directions as she rolled suddenly to a stop, and struck the side of her helmet with her fist, ending the disorienting screech of static abruptly. In the eerie silence, surrounded by an indistinct luminescent blue fog of radioactive dust, she pulled herself awkwardly to a sitting position, shifting stones off of herself that would have been harder to move in a more powerful gravitational field and remembering briefly that first day on Zundrak, when she leapt high into the air and slowly rolled a couple of giant stones, pretending that she had super-powers, under the low gravity.
She shook her head, and adjusted her mixture, recognizing that she was light-headed. All the tumbling must have caused her suit to administer extra oxygen, or not enough, and she took three deep breaths to stabilize herself, just as her mother had taught her when they first were testing out the new suits they would spend so much of their time in. ‘Mother!’ she thought desperately, suddenly remembering the situation. She turned down the gain, and attempting to comm. her mother, “Mom! Are you okay?” she sent, turning to attempt to get a view of her surroundings, “I think the tablet shifted, and I rolled into some sort of chamber beneath it. I can’t see through the dust, yet…” she paused as she turned up the headlamps on her suit, chilled to note that one of them was broken, from where her head must have cracked into the stone surface as she tumbled, and relieved that it wasn’t her faceplate that had cracked… “And it looks like…” she paused again as the light from the single lamp shone on a rounded chamber, somehow untouched by unimaginable catastrophe, it’s walls filled with hexagonal niches, containing glowing spheres of crystal, embedded in something that looked like support-cradles of organic webbing. “Like nothing I can describe.” she finished lamely.
“Mom?” she called out again, only to receive static, as she tuned up her comm. for higher reception. The earth moved again, softer this time, and she had time to see a block of stone sliding down the inclined surface behind her, and she rolled forward, narrowly avoiding being crushed by the slow-falling, but deadly-none-the-same plug of stone. She got to her feet, mere inches from one of the glowing crystals, and she could feel it pulsing warmth, through her suit. ‘Oh no, the radiation seals must be damaged,’ she thought, but her hand reached up, as if by its own volition, threading through the fibrous strands holding the crystal in the center of the hexagonal chamber, and touched it gently, before the world become fire and sound.
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
The fire in her body subsided, and it felt like the earth was shaking again, but Zoë realized it was her body convulsing, as if trying to expel the radiation that was poisoning it. She felt like she wanted to throw up, but it wasn’t her stomach rebelling, it was her flesh, as if her entire body wanted to tear itself free of her skin and bones, and get as far away from her as possible.
Something like too-loud music clashed in her brain, and the more she tried to concentrate, the louder it became, until it settled down and both body and mind went quiet. She took a deep shuddering breath. This felt *nothing* like radiation poisoning was supposed to feel. And then there was a pulse of the strange not-music, and silence again. Her hand smacked on the stone beneath her, a single time, and went still. She lifted her hand, as if searching it for answers, and the sound pulsed again, twice, in rapid succession, and she watched her hand clench into a fist, and thump the ground twice, as if answering the tone. She forced herself to sit up, and above her, the glowing crystal that she had touched was no longer glowing. All those near it retained the dull ruddy glow that had suffused the stone she had touched, but it was now dark. ‘What does this mean?’ she thought, as the sound returned, pulsing three times, and then her hand slapped the ground three times.
“Who are you?” she asked aloud, aware that nothing outside of her suit would hear these words, but she feared that whatever was communicating with her was more than inside her suit, but somehow, if that was possible, inside her *body.*
Both of her arms rose involuntarily, and she felt a twinge in her shoulder, where she must have pulled something during the fall. Her hands moved in strange patterns, and the stones on the wall began to pulse in strange rhythms, blinking in fractal patterns that passed by too quickly for her to process. “Record,” she said belatedly, ordering the camera in the suit to begin recording the display, and the music in her skull returned amplified by a hundred fold, causing her to black out from its intensity.
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
<Awaken Zoë Saugin, of Aleph. You must awaken.> the warm masculine voice of her favorite sim-star said beside her ear. As she opened her eyes, for a moment, she was home, in her own bed, before it faded away and she was back on the dusty floor of an alien chamber, on a dead world, covered in a light spattering of glowing blue dust.
“Ohhh…” she felt trembly, like she wanted to be sick still, and attempted once again to comm. her mother. “Mom! I think I’m trapped down here. There might be a radiation leak.” Remembering the voice, “And I think I’m hallucinating…”
<You are not imagining us, Zoë Saugin, and your mother cannot answer you, as she is injured. You cannot wait for her to rescue you, but you must pick yourself up, and come to her rescue.> the voice said, sounding like it was coming from right next to her. She spun to look, and was overcome by light-headedness again. When her vision cleared, she looked again, but all she saw was the chamber, with its dozens of stones. More than one was now dark.
“Who are you?” she asked the air.
<You would call us the Zundraki, and that name will do, as you lack the physical structure to pronounce the names we call ourselves. Close your eyes, they interfere with your ability to see.>
“That’s impossible,” she says, “You’re all dead…” but finds herself closing her eyes, nonetheless, more to end the dizzy spell, than at the voice’s direction.
Images swirl in her mind, colors and patterns, resolving into a view of her body, kneeling in the chamber, and the image spins and moves like a rocket, up along the tilted stone slab that deposited her hear, to the upper surface, where she can see the suited figure of her mother, pinned beneath a stone menhir that has toppled over in the quake.
“Mom!” she cries out, but as she opens her eyes, the image vanishes, and she’s back in the crystal chamber. Struggling to her feet, she has to overcome another wave of nausea and vertigo, and the voice startles her again. <Move slowly, your body is injured. Your mother lives, but you must bring us to her, so that we can rescue her together. We do not wish to allow our world to claim your lives, as it claimed ours…>
Zoë staggers towards the inclined slab and tries to anchor her fingers into the grooves in the stone to use as handholds, but finds them too smoothed by age to provide any grip, “I’m not sure if I can climb this…”
<Calm yourself. We will do this together.> she hears, as her body turns of its own will towards the wall of crystals, and her arms gesture again in unfamiliar patterns for long moments. Two more stones go dark, and she can see reddish pulses of energy surge forth and merge with her hands. She can feel warmth, again, much less painful and invasive than before, and an external force lifts her from the ground, allowing her to rise effortlessly along the length of the stone slab, and softly depositing her on the surface of the world. “Mom!” she shouts, seeing now with her own eyes her mother’s body, which looks disturbingly like a crushed insect, due to the segmented black exo-suit she’s wearing. A single hop takes her across the distance, and she attempts to move the stone pillar, but cannot due more than shift it, eliciting a groan from her mother that she is finally able to hear on her suit comm.
<Do not again move the stone,> the voice cautions. <The light which is her life dimmed as you did.>
“I can’t leave her here!” Zoë protests, feeling as if she’s gone mad, and is arguing with herself.
<Another must sustain her life, just as I am blocking your awareness of your broken arm.> the maddening calm voice continues.
“What?” she says, as a blinding wave of pain passes through her arm, and she looks down to see that it is indeed broken, and that someone has attached a pressure patch from her belt to a tear in her suit. Her arms again move of their own volition, and a reddish wave of energy passes from her suit to the surface of her mothers, before seeping in, and she flinches as her mother’s eyes open.
“Zoë Saugin,” comes her mothers’ too-calm voice over the comm. “Your mother remains unconscious, but we can now move her body. I will stabilize her life-functions, but this will take my full concentration.”
“I can’t move this stone…” she begins <But we can>, the voice continues, as she sees dozens of reddish motes of light crawling along the surface of the ground, welling up from the subterranean chamber, and to the stone. The stone shudders under whatever force they bring to bear, and lifts itself up, and she quickly pulls her mother free, swallowing the urge to scream as she sees her mangled lower body. She quickly peels off vacuum seal patches and applies them to every broken seal she can find, and checks the atmosphere gauges, to find that her mothers’ suit is nearly empty. Connecting her own suit to her mothers, she shares her remaining mixture, leaving enough for her to get back to the transport. Her mother’s body feels too light in the low-gravity, and yet the mass tugs at her, feeling like some evil force trying to keep her in place, to tear her away from Zoë, and keep her here to die, as Zoë pulls her body to the transport.
<We have rescued you and your mother. We ask that you rescue us, as well. The chamber that has sheltered us throughout the ages has now been breached. If the earth moves again, the stones that hold our minds could be destroyed...>
“My mom needs immediate attention!” Zoë pleads as she straps her mother into the back of the transport, “Can we come back?”
<Your mother will not die. She cannot die, so long as [untranslatable] remains present to sustain her form in stasis.> the voice counsels. <But what we have done for you has also depleted our energies. We must leave this place, or we too, shall die.>
Zoë closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, momentarily becoming aware of the various pains across her body, where this Zundraki ghost, or whatever it is, has used its energies to pull her together and help her get clear. “Okay, we owe you that much.” She agrees, “What do I need to do?”
<We need something to carry as many of the crystals as possible from the chamber…> the voice says, and Zoë quickly grabs a handful of specimen gathering bags and cargo nets, returning to the site of the cave-in with a series of sudden bounds. As she lowers herself carefully down the inclined slope of what was the original ‘floor,’ the reddish glow from the chamber below seems to slow her descent, so that she lands as soft as a feather, and as quickly as possible, she snatches up the glowing crystals and places them within the netting, wincing as they clank together, but relieved to see that they are sturdy enough to survive gentle impacts against each other, as she does not have anything with which to individually wrap them.
As she gathers the crystals, the ruddy light illuminating the room fades, until only the light from her single headlamp lights the chamber. The sample sacks are filled to bulging, and she’s not sure how she will be able to carry this load of crystals out of the chamber when the red light again seeps from the sacks, and flows up her arm, lending her their own strength to free them from this place.
A crunching sound beneath her foot stops her, as she looks down to see a shard from a broken crystal, and winces. “Is that…”
<That one’s crystal was broken in the collapse. [untranslatable] now resides within your mother’s body, sustaining her life-functions, but has no place to return, and will perish when she is healed and [untranslatable] must vacate her body.> the voice says, with maddening calm.
“Can’t you make a new crystal? Or maybe he can stay in her body, or… *someone’s* body?” she asks, as she moves easily up the surface, assisted by the red glow of the Zundraki crystals, lifting her body like the arms of a dozen men.
<We will consider options later,> the voice says dispassionately, and for a moment, Zoë feels a twinge of mistrust. ‘They’ve already had centuries to ‘consider options.’ This can’t be the first time they’ve thought of what comes next…’
With the sacks bulging with crystals, Zoë can’t risk leaping back to the transport, and instead settles for a slow jog, doing her best to keep from jostling her precious cargo, although a tiny voice in her head warns her that it might be the best thing to simply let them smash against the unyielding stone of their world, rather than bring them back with her.
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Even with the more powerful comm. unit of the transport vehicle, base camp is unresponsive, and as she moves through the jagged canyons at unsafe speeds, she comes around the final corner to see that the transmitter tower has been toppled onto the habitation module. It’s nothing like a movie, with plumes of smoke and random fires and shell-shocked survivors wandering around, since the marginal atmosphere of Zundrak wouldn’t support a fire for more than a few seconds, and the smoke from what could burn has settled into a hazy smudge of knee-level smog. The survivors look like black-shelled humanoid beetles, in their environmental suits, and the most shocking sight is the delivery ship, smashed into the ground outside of the camp, and smoldering from multiple points, as if it had suffered multiple explosions, or, as if it had been fired upon...
A dozen comms vie for attention in her helmet, as the survivors see the transport coming into view, and she wonders what took them this long, until she realizes that they’ve probably been trying to comm. her mother…
She picks Dr. Kenzl, who she remembers being the least likely to scream in her ear, being a frustratingly boring old man who spent a two year internship on Colu, and, it was joked, had been reprogrammed by the Coluans to be more machine than man. “Zoë, your mother is not answering her comms. Is she alive?” Typical Kenzl, Zoë shrugs, no tact whatever. “We’ve been attacked by raiders. They waited until we had off-loaded the shipment from the transport shuttle, and then bombarded the camp, seizing the supplies, ransacking anything that remained usable on the shuttle, and leaving us here.” Zoë reeled at the matter-of-fact description, and couldn’t help but hear a hint of admiration in Kenzl’s recount for the efficiency of the pirate’s tactics. The Coluans really had done a job on him…
She chooses her words carefully, and broadcomms them, rather than have to explain to everyone individually what had happened. “The bombardment triggered a cave-in at Section C. My mom’s badly hurt and in stasis, to keep her alive.” She can see a dozen more comms, no doubt questioning how she managed to rig a medical stasis field out of archaeological field gear, but ignores them, “The Zundraki saved us.”
Her comms channel lights up with another dozen incoming messages, and she rejects them all, returning to a private channel with Dr. Kenzl. “We’re all going to die here, if we don’t get that transmitter tower back up, aren’t we?” Dr. Kenzl’s reply is delayed for a moment, “Yes. We have no new rebreather filters, and the old ones are at 45%. Seven people have various levels of life-threatening injury, and if you have some means of sharing this stasis technology, it’s vital they receive it. We have no new food supplies. The shelter is wrecked, and we have to stay either in suit, or in your mother’s transport vehicle.”
He pauses again, as if a shred of tact remained to the man, “And we have no medical bay or supplies to handle the sort of surgery that your mother may require, if her injuries are sufficient to warrant stasis. I’m sorry, Zoë.”
She turns off the comm. for a second, although the display indicates that dozens of individual comms to her, and at least a half-dozen broadcomms to all, are cycling furiously across the ether. ‘Must be a madhouse out there,’ she thinks, relieved to not be hard-coded into the academic admin channels and forced to listen to the chaos.
To the air, she asks, “We can’t get you off of this world, if we can’t get that transmitter up and running, to call for help.” There is a delay, and she feels a distant something, like the music from before. She can recognize that the Zundraki are communing with each other, and that, having been touched by their communion, she can now sense it occurring.
<Those injured can be preserved the way your mother is being preserved, and we may have sufficient energy remaining to move the transmission tower, but my people are nearly exhausted. We cannot remain in the crystals, if we are to do this thing. We must have bodies to share, so that our own energies are not destroyed.>
Zoë can sense something different in these words. What is supposed to sound like resignation, instead sounds like a subtle threat.
“So you can’t, or won’t help us, unless we let you possess all of these people, and get out of those stones...” she asks, afraid that she really has no choice but to say yes.
There is again a brief pause, before the voice resumes. <Your bodies are alien to us. You are small, fragile and filled with hungers that are foreign to us. You have far too few limbs, and limited and disorienting sensory capabilities. I assure you, my people do not wish to ‘possess’ your people, as you understand it. Just as I am sharing your body, temporarily, and yet am not manipulating your body like a toy, so to must my people temporarily use the bodies of your people to focus our energies without depleting ourselves to the point of dissipation.> There is another brief pause, and the voice continues. <And were it our intention to simply escape our dead world, we could just remain in the stones, and wait for your people to die from lack of atmosphere, or sustenance, or medical care. In a matter of weeks, another ship full of your people will arrive to find out why the supply ship did not return, or, at most, in another month, when the next supply ship arrives, and we would no doubt be taken off-world as valuable alien artifacts, whether we save each other, or not.>
Zoë admitted that the Zundraki’s logic was flawless. It was like arguing with Dr. Kenzl, cold-edged and practical and utterly without compassion.
She contacted Dr. Kenzl. “The Zundraki can put the wounded into stasis, and help us get the transmitter up and running, but they have their own needs…”
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Lightning Lass sat at the monitor board, trying to make a game out of keeping track of where the various Legionnaires were assigned at any given time. She had already gotten in trouble last week for arranging the mission teams in alphabetical order, and had switched to less obvious games, such as arranging for duty teams to be assembled by order in which their homeworld was admitted to the UP, or by what astrological sign they would share, had they been born on Earth.
Various low-priority SP alerts flashed by, and she glanced at them to make sure that they weren’t the sorts of situations that would warrant a Legion presence, but only one leapt out at her. Pirate attack on an archaeological dig site in the Zundrak cluster, and the nearest SP presence was twenty hours away, while the Legion team on Coriolis Six was only six hours away. No food, immediate medical attention needed, faltering life-support. She thumbed on the amplifier relays and used her Flight Ring to contact the Coriolis team leader.
Chameleon Boy had just settled into the seat of the cruiser, and was reaching for his Flight Ring when he felt the silent signal from it. He had, once again, left it on silent mode, so as not to activate while he was in disguise as someone else, and forgotten to switch it back, so no one else in the command cruiser noticed the incoming call before he replied to Lightning Lass. “Ayla, how did you know that we are just leaving Coriolis?”
“I did not, but congratulations. I need you to get to the Zundrak cluster dig site at maximum speed. They’ve been attacked by raiders, and have wounded. They’ve also got no supplies and limited life support, so they’ll need to be evacuated. There should be eighteen survivors, so the cruiser should have room for them, even if some of them have to be stacked on medical pallets like cargo…”
“I have the coordinates” Blok said agreeable, having punched them into the navigation computer while Lightning Lass was talking.
“We are undocking from Coriolis station and punching it in now. Are the pirates still there?”
“According to the report, they left three hours ago, and it’s taken the survivors this long to get the transmission tower up to call for help.”
“Acknowledged,” Cham said, before turning back to Mysa, Violet and Tellus, who were still strapping in. “No rest for the weary, we’ve got a rescue mission.”
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
The cruiser worked whatever unfathomable cold iron magic it used to tilt space, and make them fall towards their destination, as Mysa meditated upon the situation to come. While she had been trained to prepare herself for spellwork in distracting and adverse conditions, like most, she preferred quiet solitude, and the presence of Blok beside her, unspeaking and lost in his own elemental thoughts, was a pleasant contrast to the sort of distraction one of her other teammates might have provided.
A basic spell of survival would be her most useful tool, for this rescue mission, and she teased and implored the necessary threads of power from the disparate weaves of magic that flowed through her body and soul, assembling them into the twisting trembling knot of bound forces that would, at a simple tug, unravel to transmute fouled air to pure, and cold vacuum to life-giving warmth.
Cham could see the shattered ring of debris that made up the former Zundraki homeworld, although he would have to navigate through it to reach the core fragment that held the expedition camp. The distress signal continued to repeat, and attempts to assure them that help was on the way had gone unanswered.
“They still aren’t responding. Can you sense survivors yet?” he asked Tellus, who had removed the seat next to him to make room for his bulk.
<I CANNOT, AT THIS RANGE.> the Hyrkrain replied telepathically, having clearly been attempting to use his powers to do this very thing, and failing to adjust his telepathic volume for this closer range communication. Cham felt the words ripple through his cells like a shockwave, and saw the nodules on Tellus’ back turned a somber shade of dark violet as he expressed his embarrassment for the telepathic ‘shout.’
Shrinking Violet steps into the cruiser’s cockpit and shrugs apologetically to Tellus, “She’s too nice to say so, but I think Mysa would like for you to keep it down. I think her spell just fell apart…”
<Apologies,> the chagrined telepath said, in a much quieter mental voice, <I was attempting to reach the researchers…>
“…Who are coming into view now,” finishes Cham, as the cruiser gracefully crests the last planetary fragment that lies between them.
Violet shrinks to the size of a man’s arm and leaps up to stand on the console, viewing the scans as they come in. “You should set us on the opposite side of the camp from their downed freighter, in case that area is unstable.”
“Good plan,” Cham agrees, banking the ship to present a minimal profile, concerned that the distress beacon could be a trap for the unwary. His questions were answered as he saw multiple exo-suited figures moving in the wreckage of the encampment, this was no trap to lure in and ambush potential rescuers.
“Secure for landing,” he said softly over the comm., hoping to not disrupt Mysa’s concentration if she was in the midst of whatever preparations her magic required. He ‘parked’ the cruiser a meter above the weathered stone, reluctant to trust the already stressed surface of this fractured world-fragment.
Violet was already at the hatch, having expanded to her full height to work the controls, and she toggled her transsuit and checked to see that the others had similarly prepared themselves, before opening the airlock. Cham had activated his own transsuit, and saw that the White Witch was similarly prepared, as was Tellus, whose suit was more of a barrier against the local radiation, or airborne toxin or contagion, than supportive, as his breather unit provided his atmospheric needs. Blok, obviously, had no need for either, as his silicon-based biology had no such vulnerabilities.
As the door opened, and Cham and Violet leapt down to land with exaggerated caution in the low gravity, he could see the black-suited figures, glistening like humanoid beetles, come moving towards their craft, arms raised in greeting. Something about the way they moved seemed awkward, as if they were suffering the effects of radiation poisoning, and he shot off a private communication to the others through their Flight Rings, “Check them for radiation poisoning, or some sort of infection,” before opening up the Rings’ comm. frequency to receive the barrage of transmissions he expected from the dozen or so researchers he could see.
Instead only a single voice came through, deceptively calm, “Thank you for coming to our rescue. Sklaran raiders downed our transport, leaving us with no food or reserves of power for the coming month. We have a half dozen wounded, one critically, and our atmosphere reserves are almost depleted.”
The speaker’s voice was that of a young girl, whom he could identify standing at the front of the shuffling delegation, but her tone was matter-of-fact, as if reciting a prepared speech, and something about the way several of her entourage leaned on each other, or stumbled as they moved forward struck Cham as suspicious. Could it be simple exhaustion and the effects of depleted oxygen reserves that explained her unnatural calm, or the drunken movements of her comrades?
“Something is wrong with these people,” Violet says abruptly over their Flight Ring communication band, echoing Cham’s suspicions, and a moment later, Tellus’s telepathic voice adds, <There is a powerful telepathic…> before dissolving into painful psychic static that leaves the Legionnaires clutching their temples, as the black suited figures surge forward.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Floating near the cruiser’s hatch, Mysa regains her focus to see threads of crimson magic link the black suited figures as they raise their arms in the complex gestures of spellcasting. All of them are sorcerers? she thinks despairingly, as crimson tendrils of force wrap seep forth along the ground, coiling like serpents around crates of emergency supplies, and hurling them towards the arriving Legionnaires.
She pulls back only to see Blok, her knight in basalt armor, rise up between her and the incoming projectiles, which silently impact on his immovable form, to be battered away like children’s playthings by his relentless strength.
Chameleon Boy has similarly recovered, although the spasm of the psychic distortion has caused his face to momentarily transform to a less recognizable state, before flowing like water back to his familiar humanoid appearance, which she knows he only wears for the convenience of other humanoids. “Something must be controlling these people, try not to hurt them.” He says abruptly, twisting his form to become elastic, so that the supply crate that throws him back into the side of the cruiser deforms his body in what should have been a fatal manner, only to rebound away, as his body springs back into shape. He descends into the midst of them and assumes a many-tentacled form, attempting to grapple multiple of the black-suited figures simultaneously.
Tellus remains near the hatch, and from the look of intense focus on his face, is still in the grip of some sort of psychic conflict, and as Mysa opens her eyes to the streams of energy that the figures before are tapping into, she can see that a half-dozen of them stand motionless, linked to the Hyrkraian by delicate strands of energy, as they combine their wills to attempt to overwhelm his own. Whatever form of psychic defense he brings to bear, she can see that they psychic lines twist and maneuver, as if unable to land a secure connection to his mind, but surely he cannot evade their assault forever.
The answer is to be seen, she is sure, and she views the patterns of this alien magic, determining that they appear to be attempting to tap ley lines, and yet are failing, as if they are unfamiliar with the patterns of force that lie twisted within this destroyed world. As she watches, they adapt their workings, making new gestures, and begin drawing upon the encampments portable generator, a feat that she would not think possible, and, even if it were, certainly something that no sorcerer could, let alone group of them, could do within mere moments!
A moment of admiration for such an adaptable people wars with apprehension, as she recognizes how dangerous these mystics could be. To Blok, she cries out, “Destroy the generator! They draw upon it to power their magics!”
Faster than the sorcerers can react, Blok leaps, and his great body moves like an implacable stone missle, smashing through what obstacles are abruptly thrown into his path to strike the generator and smash it into smoking ruin. The generator silently explodes around him, momentarily obscuring him from sight, but Mysa closes her eyes to focus her energies, unconcerned that such a thing could harm his invulnerable body.
She opens them again, to see the sorcerers have turned to face her, recognizing finally the threat she represents, and she can see that they have begun a new series of gesticulations, gathering power again, this time from the Legion cruiser itself. She has no time to focus on what their working, as she attends her own, reaching deep within herself to where her spell of survival waits, intricate knots of azure energy circling each other contentendly, bound into an elegant and life-affirming pattern of energy.
In her mind’s eye, she cradles this delicate magical construction, and then her hands become as claws, seizing and twisting this gentle thing, deforming and pulling at it, causing it to pulse and squirm, as if trying to escape the torture she inflicts upon it. Her face grows cold as she forces herself to go against her instincts to so pervert this spell, and, as if in some distant world, far away and beyond her ability to care about, she can see that the sorcerers have combined their magics to bring the communications tower toppling towards her motionless form, as she hovers paralyzed by the intensity of the focus required for her spellworking.
Again, Blok is there, rising from the surface of the broken world to match his strength against the tons of metal and composite toppling relentlessly towards her in the low gravity. The event is silent, but she can imagine the groan of tortured metal as his body impacts with the tower, and, with terrifying ease, stops it’s fall, and then tears it bodily from the bolts that anchor it into the stone and hurls it high above the Zundraki core fragment, where it becomes a distant twinkling, possibly just another star in the night sky.
The spell writhes in her grasp, and she takes a last breath of clean air as she releases the energies of this mangled thing of beauty, twisted so that a spell designed to refresh the atmosphere and replenish the bodies of those around it, instead transforms life-giving oxygen into choking methane, causing all within her line of sight to begin convulsing as their bodies reject the toxic atmospheres now present in their environmental suits.
She looks upon the suffering she has brought about with this misuse of her life-saving magic, noting that her physical hands are locked in the same position as those in her mind’s eye, as if throttling the life from some small creature, trembling with exertion as she watches the black suited figures begin to stagger and fall, gasping for air that they can no longer breathe.
Chameleon Boy has already adapted his Durlan cells to process methane, after a single cough, and Blok, of course, is utterly unaffected, as is Tellus, to whom a faceful of methane gas is a fragrant and refreshing breeze. She knows that Violet, who was not warned and could not hold her breath, will not be unaffected, but prays that her teammate will forgive her, when she realizes the extent of the danger before them.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Violet quickly recognized that these people were acting very weird. Why was this young girl answering for them, when they had a couple of prominent researchers present? Why were they moving like they were unfamiliar with their bodies? She was all-too-familiar with how readily shapeshifters could adapt to move like the forms they had assumed, unfortunately, and this seemed something different.
Moments after they began their assault, Chameleon Boy confirmed her suspicions, warning that they appeared to be under external control or coercion, and she dashed forward at the size of a fingernail, unnoticed in the confusion. She quickly isolated the one who had spoken, who seemed to occupy some sort of position of authority, even if that didn’t fit with the quality of gear she saw on the others, and reduced her size even further, negotiating the radiation shielding by moving along comm-circuit conduits, taking long seconds to find her way along the labyrinthine corridors that eventually led to the inside of the leaders helmet.
She emerged near the earpiece, and quickly moved to the bottom of the faceplate, where she could look up at the mysterious leader of this attack force. Her face was surprisingly young, with red hair pulled back into braids, and bright green eyes focused intently ahead of her, utterly unaware that she was not alone within her helmet. Then again, she hadn’t been alone, even before Violet arrived. From this distance, her stance and focus seemed utterly alien to her youthful features, and Violet agreed with Cham’s initial assumption of mind control.
Recognizing that their attackers had shown no evidence of communicating among each other, and that they seemed to be taking their cues from this ‘leader,’ Violet muttered an apology to the young girl whose face loomed above her and expanded slightly as she flew up to slam her knee into her nose, cracking the cartilage and causing her to stagger back, hands smacking uselessly on her faceplate as she attempted to swat away the miniscule figure attacking her.
Green eyes flashed red, and Violet could feel a wave of anger pass over her like a wavefront of radiation from a dying star. The voice that issued forth from the young girl’s mouth was strained, “You will not stop us. We have survived far worse than you.”
The menacing tone was interrupted as the air within her helmet filled with a brownish haze of methane, and both she and Violet began to choke…
As Violet doubled over, covering her mouth and nose, attempting not to retch, and very glad that she was not in a sealed pressure suit, and incapable of covering her mouth, she could see the young girl’s face, still looming before her like that of some mountain-side fresco, now bloodied from her broken nose, and eyes watering from the brutal mixture now replacing her air supply. Her eyes had returned to green, and her voice, suddenly fragile and uncertain, blurted forth between coughs, “They came from those crystals! They need our bodies to…” before cutting off suddenly. Violet could see that whatever force compelled the young woman had taken control once again, and turned to see the direction she had indicated, where a rover with supply satchels filled with some unknown cargo lay. Whatever crystals the young woman was attempting to tell her about must lie there, if only she could get a breath to warn the others before she passed out…
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Tellus moved like quicksilver lightning through dangerous waters, avoiding the many cruel minds that sought to take his own, taking the forms of predatory creatures, ensnaring lines, treacherous currents and seductive places of refuge. While his body hung in midair, all-but forgotten as his mind evaded a half-dozen psychic attackers with a grace that none seemed to be able to match, his mind remained blank, unable to spare a second to plan any action more sophisticated than to merely dodge and evade and confound his relentless pursuers.
And, as suddenly as it began, the psychic maelstrom around him spun away, and he traced one fleeing mind back to its stolen body, the hunted become now the hunter as he pushed the bulk of his psychic weight into a mind already overfilled by a human owner and an alien possessor. The body was in the grip of physical distress, suffocating as it’s atmosphere had been somehow compromised, but Tellus spared not a second on such concerns, instead inelegantly slamming the full force of his presence against the intruder, causing it to be pushed forth from the mind of the human researcher, and carefully tracking as it fled back to a psionically-resonant crystal chamber of some sort, that seemed at first, in the perspective of pure mind, to be as large as a building, but quickly resolved to be in the material world not much larger than a man’s fist.
He reached out to the minds of his teammates, surprised to find that Violet, too, suffered from the physical distress that was now affecting the bodies of the research expedition. <The team is possessed by psychic entities that are housed in crystals stored on the transport vehicle.>
Mysa’s hands trembled as they maintained their sympathetic grip on the spell that cried out within her, and yet her face grew flush with triumph as she both heard the telepathic words of her teammate, and viewed with her arcane sight the sorcerous possessor fleeing to whatever vessel had stored it’s consciousness previously. She ordered her ring to broadcast her words, unfamiliar with the precise setting that would allow her to specifically communicate with the research team specifically, “The bodies you have stolen will collapse into unconsciousness and you will be returned to your crystal vessels, intruders, whether by our force or by your own choice. If you remain, you risk your own death, and that of those you have usurped.” She was pleased that her voice remained steady. As a sorceress, speaking to others who had received some similar form of training, she knew that any sign of weakness or hesitation would be seen as a sign of an un-disciplined mind.
Long moments passed, and finally a ruddy spark visible only to her eyes fled from the body of the young woman who had first spoken, and with its passing, the others begin to fly forth in a rush, as if only awaiting their leader’s decision to abandon these suffering bodies and return to the crystal orbs that had been their homes.
She could see that one remained, and her eyes narrowed, as the spell screamed to be released from the anguish she inflicted upon it, causing her pain deep in her soul.
Within Zoë Saugin’s helmet, Violet could hear her gasp, “The one possessing my mom, it can’t leave. It’s keeping her alive, and it’s crystal is broken. It can’t leave…”
Violet willed her Flight Ring to activate, and choked out to her teammates, “Stop it now. The last one can’t leave.”
Mysa hesitated, attempting to verify if Violet herself had been possessed, but Chameleon Boy also said, “That’s enough, if there’s only one left, we can handle it…”
With relief, the White Witch released the spell, which immediately began to circulate in the patterns for which it was designed, and the transmuted oxygen returned to oxygen, and all carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide buildup in the area was freed into pure oxygen. The sound of Violet breathing in huge gulps of air filled the channel for a moment, before she belatedly toggled her ring-comm off. Mysa’s hands were cramped, and she felt her body trembling, exhausted spiritually from the struggle to force her magics to perform feats in contradiction to their design.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Zoë felt like she’d run a marathon, gargled sewage and then been kicked in the face by a horse, but her first thought was to run to her mother, all too aware that only the strange powers of the Zundraki were keeping her shattered body from death.
“Mom?” she sent on a private channel, “Are you okay?” as she reached her mother’s body, shocked again at the severity of the damage to her legs, and just as suddenly reminded of her own broken arm, no longer shielded from the pain by whatever powers the Zundraki had invoked.
Moments passed before the comm was returned by a coldly dispassionate voice that sounded nothing like her mother, “The one who shed you remains unconscious. If I leave as directed, I will perish, as will it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” another voice uttered, resonating within Zoë’s own helmet, and she twisted her head around within the helmet to peer down at the tiny Imskian, speaking directly into her microphone.
Zoë laughed at the absurdity of the image, and promptly passed out…
*********************************************
To be continued!
Of Life, Death and Power, the Adventures of Zoë Saugin in the 31st century!
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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This fic got away from me. I don't think it's going to be anywhere near as long as Emerald Legion, but it's not my usual vignette, either!
Registered: Aug 2006
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Wow, Set! Amazing writing as always. Love how EVERY Legionnaire on this mission is getting some good screen time - as is Zoe. Your first post really captured her personality for me, being both resentful of her mm and wantin more of her mom's love.
Titans Idol - vote for your favorite Titans members!
From: Wouldn't you like to know? | Registered: Oct 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Invisible Brainiac: Wow, Set! Amazing writing as always. Love how EVERY Legionnaire on this mission is getting some good screen time - as is Zoe. Your first post really captured her personality for me, being both resentful of her mm and wantin more of her mom's love.
Thanks!
I tried to give Violet, Mysa, Blok and Tellus some good facetime, but I feel that I skimped on Chameleon Boy. Still, I've written other stuff about him, so he feels less in need of exploration than the others.
I was particularly intrigued by how Mysa's spellcasting might 'feel' from an internal perspective, with each individual spell feeling a little bit like a labor of love, part artistic expression, part mathematical formula, part beloved companion, and how deliberately warping a spell to have different effects might be a little bit traumatic (and foreshadow the potential for Mysa to 'go dark' when the situation calls for it).
I'm very pleased that my characterization of Zoe is ringing true to you!
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I really enjoy reading your thoughts on how the Legionnaires' powers work. First Tellus, now Mysa. Very nice - do you plan on exploring how Dream Girl's or Brainiac 5's work in greater detail? I know you already did in your Glorith fic.
Hyperpath: Email this page to someone!
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