LOL...I love reading your stuff Set, can't wait for the continuation!
-------------------- Read the alternate adventures of the Legion after Legion of Three Worlds! postlo3w
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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quote:Originally posted by Invisible Brainiac: 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.
Brainy and Dreamy get a lot of play and characterization in the books, so I haven't really been as motivated to run with them. Some of my favorite depictions of them where in the Universo Project, where Imra enters their minds, and Brainy's mind is like a crazy machine, so powerful that Imra can't even see herself within it, save as a pulse of electricity, and Nura's mind is filled with alternate futures, as if she's seeing everything that could potentially happen, all at once, and lasering in on the most likely future, from the jumble of potentials.
Paul and, LaRoque?, was it? really managed to showcase that with minimal words and pictures, and I'd just be kind of repeating what they said (without the visual accompaniment!).
I do love exploring the 'feel' of various powers, 'though. All too often, comics seem to brush over how the hammer of Thor must feel in his hand, or how the sensation of flipping through the air must feel for Nightwing, with little details like the rustling of cape fabric whipping behind Batman as he drops from a ledge, or the rush of air and debris kicked up as Rocket Red takes off.
Comics could be a lot more visceral, and engage more senses than just sight, I think, and that's something I get to play around with, by replacing pictures with a bunch of words.
quote:Originally posted by razsolo: AHHH IT'S NOT FINISHED!!
LOL...I love reading your stuff Set, can't wait for the continuation!
Thanks! I have quite a bit more stuff planned out, but I was stalled for, like, a month, so I decided to go ahead and get this installment posted, to clear my palate of this, and make room for the new stuff I wanted to work on.
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Another great story Set, am looking forward to seeing where you take this from here. Your team of Legionnaires is well chosen too, and as always well written. Love how Alya considered choosing teams as well. So many clever ideas touched up - the planet getting its name from an old drunk, Zoe's social isolation, mysa's twisting the protection spell, Tellus avoiding "predators"... its got to be said, we want more, more, more!
-------------------- "Tempus Fugitive" the final part of the Adventures of Dream Boy series, set in the Three-Boot Universe. Read it only in the Bits o' Legionnaire Business Forum.
From: here, more often than not | Registered: Sep 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Harbinger: Another great story Set, am looking forward to seeing where you take this from here. Your team of Legionnaires is well chosen too, and as always well written. Love how Alya considered choosing teams as well. So many clever ideas touched up - the planet getting its name from an old drunk, Zoe's social isolation, mysa's twisting the protection spell, Tellus avoiding "predators"... its got to be said, we want more, more, more!
Thanks for the kind words, and more is on the way! How about... Now!
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
There is sound around her, but it is distant, like someone left a holoviewer on in the next room, and she is able to blank it out and return to sleep, confident that she still has a few more cycles before it is time to wake up. Finally, the pressure on her arm, a dull ache from sleeping on it too long, rouses her, and she feels like she has to swim up through layers of thick water to reach a waking state. For a moment, Zoe feels like she is being smothered, like she actually is in water, sinking to her death, and she begins to panic. A distant voice, from far above her, accompanied by a dull red glow, as of the setting sun of Aleph, gives her a goal, and she struggles to rise to consciousness, to find a strong arm pulling her the rest of the way through this dreamlike vision of drowning that was attempting to keep her down.
Her eyes snap awake, and she can feel the sharp pain in her arm as her dream-memories of oversleeping or perhaps drowning fade away, and are replaced by waking world memories of the Zundraki expedition, of possession and injury and betrayal.
“Mom?” she mutters, surprised at the mousy squeak that comes out, barely audible to her own ears.
She can see others from the expedition, strange and alien-looking, with their helmets off and their pale and exhausted faces visible, perched atop the black insectoid forms of their environmental suits. A strong arm supports her as she attempts to rise and the world spins around her and turns dark, and when everything comes back into focus, she recognizes one of the Winathian sisters, but can’t seem to get her eyes to steady enough to read her nametag and tell which one it is, “Where’s my mom.” She croaks out, and the sister, Falice, she thinks, shushes her and gives her cool water to drink. “She’s resting, still in stasis,” a voice comes, sounding like it should be coming from Falice, but from the wrong direction, and she suffers a moment of vertigo before she turns to see Falice’s twin, Marette. Trying to focus on the twins at the same time is disorienting, as if her drug-fogged brain cannot process the concept of twins, and thinks that she is seeing the same person in two places at once. Zoe closes her eyes, where the world is dark, save for a faint ruddy illumination, and a distant nagging sensation fills her with the notion that she has forgotten something, that she has woken up too fast, and left something vitally important behind, in the land of dreams…
Violet regards the passengers warily, unable to visually confirm what Tellus and Mysa have assured her, that the possessing entities have been expelled and confined to the crystal globes sealed away in the storage container. Mysa muttered and drew many glowing patterns in the air, binding spells, she called them, to contain the possessors within their scarlet prisons, and every now and then she tensed as one of the runes glowed a little brighter, as the entity within that crystal tested the strength of the Witch’s wards.
Those rescued are equally defensive and suspicious it seems, refusing to do more than remove the helmets of their environmental suits, as if expecting the ship to begin to fall apart at any moment and leave them stranded in the vacuum of space. She attempted to speak to a few, but they seem preoccupied by their own wounded, and emotionally exhausted from their recent ordeal, both the pirate attack, and then the possession by these strange remnants of the supposedly extinct alien culture they had come all this way to study.
Her teammates are quiet, or absent, as well. Tellus is so deep in telepathic trance that his skin has lost color and appears as gray as death. He assured her that this was completely safe, and that he was keeping ‘an eye,’ so to speak, on their passengers, both human and Zundraki. Mysa stated a need for privacy and quiet, to meditate on maintaining the wards, and to regather her arcane strength and focus, and went into the command cabin with Chameleon Boy, who was piloting the ship, and Blok, who sits silently beside her, leaving Violet feeling very alone, as if she’s the only person really ‘on watch’ over the surly and uncommunicative members of the research team.
The young woman whose nose she broke stirs for a moment, and a pair of students attend her before she seems to slump back into unconsciousness. She looks so young and fragile, compared to the vast face with its cold features and authoritarian voice that had loomed over her inside the girl’s pressure suit. Looking at the expedition’s logs, she identified her as the daughter of the team leader, some sort of regionally famous archaeologist that Violet had never heard of, the only member of the team to remain possessed by one of the alien entities, who was somehow keeping her alive and in stasis, despite injuries that should have killed her long ago.
Reminded of Azra Saugin’s condition, Violet moved over to where the wounded woman was reclining, under constant watch by a Dr. Kenzl, who seemed one of the few expedition members to have recovered from the psychic trauma of possession. “She’s still stable?” Violet asks and the doctor nods his assent, without even looking up at the intrusion. ‘Curious,’ Violet thinks, suspicions rising, ‘Everyone else is twitchy and filled with anxiety. He’s cool as ice…’
“I have identified an energy reading that I assume is the alien intrusion.” The too-calm doctor says, pointing at a squiggle of multi-colored lines on some spectral graph that mean less than nothing to her. “I am concerned that Doctor Saugin shows no sign of consciousness herself, indicating possible brain trauma, and further concerned that this trauma might not be a result of her injuries…”
Violet teases those words around for a moment, attempting to decipher exactly what the doctor meant, before speaking up, “The alien might be shutting down her consciousness to make room for its own, permanently?”
“Hmm?” Dr. Kenzl says, almost as if he’d forgotten that he wasn’t merely speaking aloud to himself. “Yes. That is one possibility. She also may have suffered brain-death before the alien took control of her body. Or she may simply be deeply comatose.” He says with the sort of dispassion that she would expect from Brainiac 5, but then says something Brainy never would have, “We should keep this speculation to ourselves for now. Her daughter has suffered enough for one day, without being led to believe that the aliens may have kept her mother’s body alive merely to extort her cooperation.”
Violet had to suppress a chill, that these ‘Zundraki’ could be so coldly manipulative, and yet, she forced herself to consider their actions from the perspective of the last members of a long-dead race, willing to take any action to escape extinction. The warring perspectives lasted only so long as she looked at the ceiling, and as she looked back at the drawn face of Azra Saugin, and the small body of her daughter, unconscious across the passenger bay, she decided that she couldn’t justify the actions of these aliens.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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“Zoe Saugin,” the voice calls, and she feels herself sinking deeper into a half-dreaming state, as if suspended ever-so-lightly on the cusp of waking and dreaming, floating on the surface of sleep, but not yet submerged within it.
“Do not be alarmed,” the voice says, soothingly, but with a faint air of urgency. “Your mother lives, sustained by our power, but our power is not endless, and we require your help to sustain her until she can receive proper medical care…”
Zoe feels a flash of distrust, something about betrayal, but it is gone, swept away like a fleeting half-memory, and the voice continues, “There has been much confusion, and ill-considered action by those desperate among us. I beg your forgiveness, and beg that you do not consider us foes. We wish only to survive, and would bring no harm to you or your loved ones.”
Still, something nags at her, and some part of her recognizes that the voice is indeed desperate, and that it requires her assent, or it would not be asking, it would be taking.
“Of course, we require your assent. Our powers are peaceful, and we could never force you to do what you know to be wrong. But the energies of the one who remains within your mother’s body were never meant for this sort of duty, and it grows weak, lacking the skill or the power to sustain her life much longer.”
“What do you want from me? To possess me again, so that you can try to break free?” Zoe asks, finding her mental ‘voice’ in this half-dreaming state.
The alien consciousness shimmers in the formlessness around her, a dull red glow, nothing more, as it replies, “You would never agree to that, and I fully understand your hesitation. Instead, I offer to show you how to unlock the power within yourself, so that *you* can sustain your mother’s life, and, eventually, heal her injuries yourself.”
Her mind whirls with the possibilities, as the voice presses on, sending advantage, “You have always had the gift of power. It is what allowed us to call to your dreams, to attempt to alert you to our presence, and what allowed us to speak to you, when no other among your expedition had the means to hear our cries.”
“You are special, Zoe Saugin. The same power that burns within our people, that flows through this ‘White Witch’ that wisely stopped us from seizing what did not belong to us, it burns within you as well, although untrained and raw in potential. This power, your people have long abandoned, called magic, it is your birthright, and I would show you how to awaken it within yourself, only to heal and bring life and health to the world, never for ill purposes.”
‘I hope this isn’t another mistake…’ Zoe thinks, as she allows herself to surrender to the possibility, “Show me.”
As Violet looks down at the older woman’s face, she starts and begins to shrink involuntarily as Azra Saugin’s eyes open and look into her own. She quickly regains control and returns to full size, hoping that nobody saw that display, but Dr. Kenzl is the only one nearby, and his attention is fully upon his team leader.
“Doctor Saugin?” Violet says, passing her hands in front of the woman’s face, hoping to gauge her pupil responses. Azra Saugin’s face contorts slightly, and her mouth opens and closes, as her eyes blink one and then the other. She tries to hide an expression of disappointment, at what seem to be signs of severe brain damage, and possible paralysis.
“The brainwave patterns remain alien. Azra Saugin remains deeply unconscious,” Doctor Kenzl says, and Violet can hear the words he doesn’t say, ‘or worse…’
The woman’s green eyes continue to blink, and her mouth open and close, in irregular patterns, and Violet recognizes a repetition of pattern, just as Dr. Kenzl says, “Do you think the creature may be attempting to communicate?”
Violet mutters, “Tellus,” to her Flight Ring, “We need you.” A moment later, the Hyrkraian is by her side, turning his head to the side, as if inspecting the facial movements for himself.
A moment later, his telepathic voice washes over her, and she can recognize, as if seeing them in her mind’s eye at a great distance, that these words are also being transmitted to Chameleon Boy, Blok, and, after a moment, Dr. Kenzl, who seems a bit startled by the inclusion in the telepathic link, but adjusts with his typically atypical aplomb, <<The possessing entity wishes to speak. I will allow it to do so.>>
A second telepathic voice forms, coming at first from a great distance, but resolving into focus quickly. <<I am [untranslatable]. I have been instructed to maintain the life-functions of this creature so long as others of its kind follow the commands of [untranslatable], who is the one who shed me, and the leader of those who remain.>>
Chameleon Boy’s telepathic voice replies, a mellifluous thing that adjusts in volume, tone and apparent gender a dozen times in a sentence, <<Are you threatening to let Azra Saugin die if we do not free your leader?>>
There is a moment’s silence, as if the entity is gathering its thoughts, or communicating with another for instruction. <<Those are my instructions, but our leader has been defeated, and so his orders no longer bind me. I choose to disregard them, and wish to come to an alternative arrangement with you.>>
<<Not big on loyalty, even to each other…>> Violet shares with her teammates, not allowing the alien entity, or Dr. Kenzl, to ‘overhear’ this private aside.
<<There comes a time when loyalty for loyalty’s sake is a mistake, and one must choose to do the right thing, even at the cost of betraying friends and family.>> Blok says, restricting this thought to Violet, Tellus and Chameleon Boy. While he does not elaborate on the thought, Violet remembers too well how he turned on the only family he had ever known, the League of Super-Assassins, and sided with the Legion.
<<He doesn’t sound like he has your noble intentions, big guy,>> Chameleon Boy adds, <<It’s admirable to see the best in people, but not everyone deserves it.>>
Having wrapped up the telepathic ‘side-table’ discussion, Chameleon Boy then broadcasts to the full link, <<What sort of terms do you wish, in exchange for preserving Azra Saugin’s life.>>
<<I seek to survive. I do not know if I am a living creature, or a ball of magical energy that has been spun into the shape of the mind and memories of someone that died many centuries ago, but I do know that I wish to continue to exist. I cannot share the magical secrets of my kind, as I am a soldier, and not a scholar like the others. I do not even know the nature of the spell that sustains the life of this body. The spell was cast by our leader, and I was placed here with only the knowledge I need to maintain this weaving with my own energies.>>
<<How long can you keep her alive,>> Violet asks.
<<My energies have diminished one part in eight. Whatever time has transpired, I can keep this body alive for seven more time units of that duration.>>
Somehow, she can feel Blok’s fingers punching buttons, and see colors flash before his eyes, as his awareness bleeds through the telepathic link, before his voice rumbles deep within her belly, <<We will be at Tranh Ho Observatory, which has a fully staffed medical bay, in six hours, long before the entity runs out of strength.>>
<<You will not be allowed to remain within this body,>> Chameleon Boy begins, before Violet flash-briefs the others on Dr. Kenzl’s theories, only to have Tellus confirm that Azra Saugin’s consciousness remains intact, although currently in a comatose state.
The entity seems to give the matter little thought, replying quickly, <<A temporary solution would be to evict one of the others from the consciousness crystal that houses it, so that I could transfer into that container.>>
Not bothering to selectively transmit her surprise, Violet exclaims, <<So, just kill one of your own people, so that you can live?>>
<<Of course.>> the entity replies. <<The scholars intended to do the same to your people, once they had learned enough of your ways to convincingly impersonate your kind…>>
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There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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Worlds of sensation have passed around and into her being, as if spinning galaxies whirl within her belly, and her eyes burn like stars. The moment stretches into infinity, and then retreats like a crashing wave, leaving Zoe feeling small and alone, clinging to an ember of brightness, like a tiny glowing life-preserver in an ocean of night. She can see a thread leading away, into the darkness, and wonders to what this spark of power she clings to is attached, so far beyond her perceptions…
“The time is now, Zoe. The spell is cast, and your energies, the balancing forces of life and of death, have been placed upon the fulcrum of power. Energy will flow through you, energy of life itself that you can use to heal your mother. Awaken, and go to her, for the energies that sustain her have been weakened further by the meddling of others, who seek to help her, but do not understand the delicate forces that keep her alive…”
She can feel herself rising, energy warm within her, and as her eyes open into the dimly lit passenger bay, she feels the sharp pain in her arm dissolve into warm waves of liquid fire, the pain pulsing away with every heartbeat, and flowing away through her fingertips into the air. Falice (or is it Marette?) is there, saying something that Zoe does not have time to hear as she stumbles to her feet and crosses to where her mother lies, beneath a bay of medical scanners, and surrounded by gawkers.
Violet is momentarily stunned as a black-suited figure pushes past her, and the telepathic link fades as Tellus turns to send a visible wave of telepathic force towards the figure, staggering her in her tracks before confirming audibly, “She is not possessed.”
Violet recognizes the young girl from before, who had been possessed by the leader of the Zundraki, and as she lays her hand on her mother’s stomach, just above her mangled hips and legs, a golden-green wave of sparkling light flows down through the crushed environmental suit, passing through the radiation-resistant metal like light through glass, and as Violet leans forward to attempt to stop her from doing whatever she is doing, her hand hesitates on the girls shoulder as the vital signs on Dr. Kenzl’s medical scanners surge upwards, as if Azra Saugin was rising from stasis.
The door from the command chamber cycles open as Chameleon Boy and the White Witch storm out, “What is going on…” Cham begins, but is interrupted by Mysa’s scream as she clutches her head. “They are trying to break free…” she says, dropping to a knee with an arm upraised as if attempting to ward off some incoming blow. “Stop her!” she cries out, clearly in great pain from whatever invisible assault she is experiencing.
Zoe can feel the cells in her mother’s legs and hips, so many dead or dying, and she pours life-energy into those few that remain alive, causing them to divide and divide again, experiencing many weeks worth of growth in mere moments, and cannibalizing the surrounding dead and dying tissue to fuel this unnatural growth spurt. She can hear people around her, talking, arguing, screaming, but it is all background noise as the power flows through her. She feels connected to a vast web of life-energy, and yet, it feels strangely distant, as if she’s tied to something that is both intimately close, and a million miles away. Still, she pulls, and the life-force flows down this endless river, falling like rain from a source so far away she cannot see it, and washes away her mother’s injuries. It’s all happening so fast that she realizes that the legs are not going to be able to heal without someone cutting off the remains of the exo-suit, as the crumpled metal which until now had prevented her mother from bleeding to death, was now preventing her legs from returning to their proper shape and form.
An arm pulls at her, and causes her hand to lose contact with her mother’s body. Immediately, sirens and alarms sound off from the medical scanners, as her mother’s body begins to slide into shock, and she wrests her hand free from the surprised Legionnaire at her side. As she places her hand back on her mother’s stomach, her mother’s black-suited arm jerks upwards and seizes her hand, locking it into place with relentless strength. Her mother’s face turns to her, and she knows from the expression that it is not her mother who speaks, but the creature possessing her, “You cannot stop the process or this body dies. You have broken the stasis, and I cannot start it again. Use the life-energies to cause the metal that confines the body to come alive and flow away from the injuries, so that they might heal.”
Zoe had no idea that the life-energies could be used that way, to give a form of ‘life’ to inanimate objects, and yet she does as she is told, sending the energy not merely to sustain her mother’s life, now hanging by a thread as her magical life-support has been stripped away, but also to attempt to bring life to the cold alloy and synthetics of the environmental suit, which shudders and ripples as it splits apart at the seams and peels away from her mother’s body, tearing itself apart obediently like the petals of a flower opening, and revealing for the first time the horrible extent of her mother’s injuries.
If her mother’s arm hadn’t locked her hand in place, she would have recoiled, and the Legionnaire is again tugging at her, to no avail, as she feels energy pour through her into her mother’s body. She no longer feels in control of the process, and is aware that the others who were around her have been pushed back by some force, leaving her to heal her mother unhampered by their actions.
Her mother’s arm suddenly releases hers, and pushes her back. “Enough. You are being used.”
Zoe stumbles back into Violet, so shocked by the end of the flow of life-energy that she feels like something has been torn from her, and filling her with an incomprehensible sense of loss.
Her mother’s arm, still under the control of her alien possessor, gestures towards a woman kneeling by the entrance to the front of the cruiser. Zoe recognized her as the Legion’s resident sorceress, the White Witch, in the grip of some terrible force, a great stone humanoid kneeling behind her, powerless to do anything to help her. Zoe could see crimson energy besetting her from all sides, snaking along the decks like serpents of energy, and recognized it as the Zundraki ‘magic,’ attempting to overwhelm and possess this most dangerous of their foes. She looked to her mother, whose voice had warned her that she was being used, and saw a similar stream of crimson energy, flowing towards the Witch, but where the others struck like vipers, this stream of energy coiled like a constrictor, and instead of weakening the pale azure shield around the Witch, seemed to be infecting it, infusing it with some of its own energy, and causing it to shift from a barely perceptible blue haze, to a darker purple hue.
At first, she fears that the entity possessing her mother was trying to poison the Witch’s defenses from within, but she quickly realizes that it is somehow lending its own strength to her defense, as the now-purple shield seems to be much more effective against the darting red vipers, and they are growing paler as they expend more and more of their own limited reserves of energy attempting to batter down her now-strengthened defenses.
She reaches for the life-energy within herself, certain that she can draw upon energy to bolster the Witch’s defenses as well, but as she does, she is aware of a surge of energy that instead replenishes the crimson serpents, and the Witch turns and growls, “Stop! Every time you call upon those energies, you strengthen them!”
Before Zoe can even make a conscious choice to try and control the flow of energy, she sees the Imskian woman again, shaking her head and muttering, “Sorry about this,” as a green-gloved fist comes forward into her nose, again.
“So what exactly happened there?” Cham asked, perplexed by the mystical events of the last few minutes, most of which had occurred on spiritual planes imperceptible to even Durlan senses.
<<The leader of the bound entities communicated with the unconscious girl, and manipulated her into believing that her mother was dying at that very moment, and that only by accepting a gift of power from it, could she save her mother’s life.>> Tellus relayed, having read the unconscious girls mind as Violet lowered her back to the deck.
“And the ‘gift of power,’ as with all gifts of power, had a price. When she invoked the power to heal her mother, life-energy flowed not only into her mother, but into the leader of the entities, who had cast the spell, using her as a conduit to flood them with enough power to break through my warding spells.” Mysa finished, robe wrapped around herself as if the climate-controlled interior of the cruiser had grown cold.
“But the one possessing Dr. Saugin seemed to stop her, or was that my imagination?” Violet asked.
“It not only stopped her from feeding them more power, but also lent me some of its own power, enough to allow me to adapt my arcane defenses to precisely counter the forces they were using to attempt to possess me. Even with Tellus’ psychic aid, I would have been overcome,” she added, with a shudder.
<<Six of the containment crystals have gone dark, and I sense no thoughts within them. But none of the passengers are possessed…>> Tellus said, clearly concerned that some of the entities had found a way to evade him.
“I felt some perish.” Mysa confirmed. “They gave their own lives to attempt to overwhelm us, after waiting so many centuries to be free… What could motivate such desperation?”
“What of Dr. Saugin?” Cham asked, seeing that the woman’s body appeared to be fully healed, and yet she lay still, vital signs low.
The body of Azra Saugin replied, although the clipped tones left little doubt that it was her possessor who now used her voice. “The body is repaired. The mind remains adrift, beyond my ability to reach. I have taken a great risk, assisting you against the scholars, and seek assurance that our bargain will be upheld.”
Mysa sighed, “We have a code that forbids killing. We would not have taken your life, or left you to die, whether you agreed to help us or not.”
The alien paused for a moment, before replying in Azra Saugin’s voice. “All forces must exist in balance. Everything has a price, as you well know, sorceress. Even had you not demanded a price of me, I would pay a price, because it is our way.”
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There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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To be continued, I'm just working in smaller installments right now, and I just had to axe a couple pages because I didn't like where it was going...
Back to the drawing board!
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There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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Zoë can feel a dull ache behind her eyes, as if something is trying to pushing its way out of her skull. ‘Is this going to be my life? Short periods of consciousness interrupted by being punched in the face?’ she wonders, as the memories of the last few moments spin through her waking mind.
She’s in another room now, a sealed private room, and the medical equipment looming over her is much more advanced than what she’d seen in the Legion vessel. She’s surprised at how quickly her senses have come into focus, after her last return to consciousness, and is suddenly afraid that she’s been unconscious for days…
Trying to sit up, she suffers only a hint of disorientation, and reaches up to her face, expecting an explosion of pain from her broken nose, but finds that, apart from a fancy regen-compress on the bridge of her nose, everything appears to be in place and pain-free.
And then she sees it…
Next to her bed, the crimson crystal pulses dully, shedding a blood-tinged pall on the decanter of water next to it on the table. She reaches involuntarily towards it, not sure if she wants to touch it or push it away, and her motion is arrested as she sees the delicate white ribbon on her wrist. It glows with golden threads to her sight, and as she feels its power, it seems to weigh dozens of kilos, so much that her arm trembles with the exertion of holding her arm aloft. She knows it’s all in her mind, that if the ribbon actually weighed this much, she probably couldn’t have lifted her arm in the first place. As she reaches with her other arm, which lacks any such decoration, to touch the ribbon, the ruddy light darkens and she hears a faint buzzing voice.
“The Witch has asked that you do not remove the binding. It blocks you from accessing your power, which the others would draw upon to attempt another escape.”
She pulls back against the headboard of the medical bed, only now realizing that someone has removed the exo-suit that has been her constant companion against exposure, radiation poisoning and suffocation for these long months. A moment of panic rushes over her as she forces herself to stop instinctively seeking out the protective garment. She forces herself to recognize the higher gravity, and, as she counts her heartbeats until they return to a more measured beat from the accelerated rate brought on by her fear, she also recognizes a slight ‘tilt’ to the gravity. She’s not on a planet, but on a space station, one that uses spin, instead of artificial gravity, so that she feels like she’s always leaning slightly in one direction, a theory that she confirms by checking the decanter of water, half-filled, and with the water leaning slightly to the side of the station’s spin.
Her eyes return to the glowing crystal, once again silent. ‘Why would they leave me with one of the Zundraki?’ she wonders, fearing some complicated plot by the Zundraki to possess everyone, and leaving people locked in rooms with a crystal, to ease the process. ‘This isn’t some alien menace holo-drama,’ she reproaches herself. ‘They don’t need to do anything like this to possess people…’
“Um, hi?” she says, uncertain if the entity within the crystal can hear her spoken words, or is reading her mind, or using some other means of communication. “Where are we?”
The crystal dims again, and she recognizes that it is blinking quickly, so quickly that she didn’t see it the first time. A comm pad next to the crystal speaks in a neutral tone, apparently translating whatever light-pulse-code the crystal is emitting. “The speaker-to-minds referred to this place as ‘Tranh Ho Observatory,’ although the words have no meaning to me. I have been instructed to inform you that the physical damage to your mother has been corrected, and I have been removed from her body. We are to remain here, so that the others cannot draw upon our energies to attempt escape.”
“The communication device can be used to view her.” The entity continues in a no-nonsense tone, “I was told that you would be more cooperative if you were allowed to do so.”
‘He’s as tactless as Dr. Kenzl!’ she thinks, stifling a smile as she grabs the data-pad and finds several video feed links on the screen. Clicking the one marked ‘Saugin, A,’ a three-dimensional image appears of her mother lying back in a medical bed, the hulking body of the Hyrkraian Legionnaire obscuring most of her, but having enough of a view of her head and feet to see that she appears to be just asleep, although still as pale and indifferently clean as a month in a pressure suit would indicate…
“Why is the Legionnaire there? Is he a doctor?” she asks aloud, unsure if the entity would even know.
“When I departed, her body was healed, but she remained unconscious. The speaker-to-minds attempts to contact her mind, and convince her that the danger has passed, so that she will return.” the voice says from the datapad in her hand, causing her a moment of surprise.
She turns the image so that she can see the monitors that display her mother’s brainwave activity, and instead of the usual gentle curves and patterns, a riotous smear of colors plays across the screen, making it appear that her mother is having some sort of seizure, but a nervous glance at her mother’s peaceful face and still body reassures her that whatever is happening, must be normal, as other medical personnel standing nearby appear unconcerned. ‘Maybe the scanner just can’t handle telepathic input, and is freaking out because so much is going on in there right now?’
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Zoe finally shuts off the image, finding it too painful to be sitting here helpless, like a child sent to her room, while that freaky-looking telepath roots around in her mother’s head. She knows that the worst thing she could do right now is burst out there and interrupt whatever he’s doing, and that he must know a thousand times more about what he’s doing than she does, but the watching and waiting and not knowing is too much. Better to put it aside, and not mess things up with a hasty reaction. Mom always said, ‘Wait for it. The answers are there, and you’ll find them when they are ready to be found, and when you are ready to find them. You can’t rush science!’
Easy for her to say, she studied cultures that died out centuries ago! Still, the reminder of her mother’s work reminded her that everything that anyone ever thought they knew about the Zundraki was about to be turned on its head. Nobody even knew what they looked like, as no biological remains had ever been found, and here she had one sitting next to her!
“What do you look like?” she asks impulsively. “I mean, what did you look like, before…”
“The words and concepts I learned from your mother’s mind are not adequate, but your champions asked me a similar question, and the speaker-to-minds assisted me in crafting an image. It is stored on the communications device.” the dispassionate voice said.
“We call them telepaths,” Zoë offered. “What you are calling ‘speaker-to-minds.’” While she spoke, she located an image file labeled ‘Zundraki’ and called it up, only to recoil at the true form of the alien she’d been speaking with. She’d seen and been friends with an assortment of aliens, but most of them were humanoid, and the ‘Zundraki’ was like nothing sentient she’d seen before. The body was twice the size of a human, and frighteningly insectoid, with a twelve-legged lower body, combining elements of scorpion and centipede, a pair of stingered tails that arced around the torso, and a vaguely humanoid upright torso that rose into the air from where a typical arthropods head would be. The torso had four slender limbs that came from a bulge on the back of the carapace, and arced around to end at the front of the body, splitting into a pair of slender gripping pincers, that looked more like curved blades than ‘fingers.’ The most alien feature was the lack of a head, with three thick stalks rising from the ‘neck,’ each possessing what appeared to be a large toothless mouth, and a single unblinking eye. In each ‘mouth,’ some sort of glowing object resided, and pouch-like structures built into the carapace, both on the torso and the thorax, seemed to contain more of these objects.
Zoë nearly dropped the datapad as the alien used it to speak again. “You find my form as disturbing as I find those of your species.” it said in the same frustratingly neutral tone.
“Well, it’s certain different from my species, but I guess we knew from the architecture that you’d be larger than us,” she said, realizing how lame that sounded, but not wishing to offend the alien, or admit that bugs kind of creeped her out… “Our forms are disturbing to you?” she asks, attempting to deflect the topic.
“Soft and vulnerable and incapable of surviving in our native environment. Lacking in external armor, or any means by which to damage an opponent. The circulatory system seems faulty, as once the body is punctured, death by blood loss seems almost inevitable. I also could find no source of power.” the alien says matter-of-factly, as if reciting from a list of tactical flaws.
Zoë looks again at the alien hologram in front of her, “We store energy chemically, from things we ingest, but you didn’t have a mouth, or any body fat…” Based on what she has learned about the Zundraki homeworld, she offers up a hypothesis. “Your people didn’t eat at all, you drew power from the radioactive ore you carried in those pouches!”
“Correct. As ore would deteriorate and provide less sustenance, we would replace the faded stones with more nourishing specimens. For many centuries, our people warred among themselves for choice deposits to harvest, until our sorcerers discovered the elementals, which proved to be our undoing...”
Intrigued, and ordering the pad to record, Zoë urges her captive audience to continue, “Tell me more about these ‘elementals,’ um… Do you have a name?”
The crystal blinks rapidly, and the pad only says, “Untranslatable,” before continuing, “To speak my name, I would need three sources of energy, and the ability to change the intensity of exposure, and alter the angle and position of each of the energy sources.”
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Thinking quickly, Zoë says, “Can I call you Elgin?”
“This is more acceptable than ‘untranslatable,’” the alien accedes. “The elementals were entities from another dimension, although this theory was controversial at first, that could be called forth and bound to service. They were pure energy, but could inhabit matter, similarly to how we have become patterns of memory and personality, able only to inhabit the bodies of others. The process was destructive, and matter inhabited by the energy could be manipulated like fluid, but would fall apart if the energy was removed, so our sorcerers would bind the elementals to dig great tunnels to the richest ore deposits, freeing our species to expand in population and leading to a great cultural revolution as our people were freed from the need to war on each other to sustain smaller populations. Elementals also could be bound permanently within a structure, being called into stone to shape it into a desired form, and then locked forever into the stone, so that the stone would remain in that shape and never fall apart.”
“For centuries, the prevailing theory was that elementals were not sentient, and that any appearance of such was the result of the creature picking up echoes of the summoning sorcerers personality when called forth from nothingness. The idea that these creatures had existed before being called forth, that they had a home dimension, and that they could be regarded as sentient, was ruthlessly suppressed, as our society was dependent upon their exploitation.”
“The truth of things could no longer be denied when they opened their own portal and began coming to our world uncalled. Their attempts at negotiating with our leaders led to conflict, and they finally retaliated by sinking thousands of their own energy forms deep into the mantle of our world, moving through it and causing it to collapse behind them. Our world collapsed from within, its structure eaten away by the elementals, and great fragments of our world eventually began to fall away into the sky, blasted away by the exposure of our molten core to space.”
“The scholar caste furiously sought solutions, most of them involving military solutions, attempting to close the portal, or bind the elementals as a group, or expel them from our dimension, or simply destroy them all. The leader of our group chose another path, studying the means by which they could exist as pure energy, absent physical bodies, and developed a technique to extract energy-form patterns from our own bodies, that would retain our consciousness, memories and personality. The process was tested on many of the soldier caste, before any of the scholar caste were risked, and I was the first success. The one who shed me then selected several dozen of his most loyal fellow scholars, and bound them into consciousness crystals, and we were sealed within a vault that was reinforced by means both mundane and magical, in the hopes that we would survive the many catastrophes besetting our dying world.”
The voice stopped, and Zoë thought for a long moment on the fantastic tale she had just been told. “One question. What did you mean by ‘the one who shed me?’”
“Our leader, the one who possessed your body, is the one from whose cast-off outgrown carapace that I formed. From your mother’s thoughts, I understand that some of your species have multiple genders and multiple parents, but our people have no gender, and a child is created when a molted carapace has enough functioning neural tissue to struggle to consciousness and become a new individual, instead of simply being abandoned.”
“[Untranslatable], our leader, is my parent, although it is not typical for one shed by a member of the scholar caste, particularly one so highly placed in the ranks of academics, governance and sorcery, to become a soldier caste, and so I have always been regarded as an embarrassment to our leader.”
‘Yeah,’ Zoë thinks sympathetically, ‘I can identify with that… Mom wants me to be a scientist, like her, and I’ve always wanted to be something else…’
“I seek understanding of your ways, if you do not fear giving away tactical information.” the datapad says, stirring her out of her thoughts.
“Uh, sure, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t know anything ‘tactical.’” she concedes.
“Our leader instructed me to keep your mother alive, only so long as your people cooperated, and to allow her to die if you did not cooperate. This did not seem sensible to me, and yet our leader seemed to think that you would surrender the advantage to save her life. Is this normal for your species, or a trait specific to yourself and your mother?”
Zoë is taken aback by the callousness of the assumptions, and how baldly ‘Elgin’ is admitting to his people’s plans. “I *hope* that most people would feel that way, and not just about family, but about anyone!”
“Our leader understood how to defy conventional thought, and was among the first to accept the possibility that the elementals were sentient, and came from another place, instead of fighting to maintain the official position that they were merely tools we had created. This same talent has proven useful in manipulating your people, and your ties to one another.”
“You don’t feel the same way about him? If one of us threatened to go smash his consciousness crystal, you wouldn’t do anything to stop that?” Zoë asks, seeking to turn the tables on the dispassionate alien, hoping that he’ll admit that they aren’t so different.
“The one who shed me regards me with contempt, and tore my mind from my body during experiments to find a way to save both self and political allies, experiments that had proven fatal to those before me.” the calm voice says from the datapad. “No. I would not risk myself to preserve that one’s existence.”
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Continuity note;
This story is set after Tellus joined, obviously (because I wanted to use a telepath, but not Imra), but the other Legionnaires who joined at the same time have not joined yet. Polar Boy remains with the Subs. Magnetic Kid has not begun super-heroing. Sensor Girl is still Queen of Orando. The UP is not yet aware of Quislet or Teall.
And if that didn't give something away, I've been way too oblique.
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