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 ]
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
<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.
Posted by Set on :
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…”
Posted by Set on :
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.”
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
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…
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
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!
Posted by Set on :
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!
Posted by Invisible Brainiac on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
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!
Posted by Invisible Brainiac on :
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.
Posted by razsolo on :
AHHH IT'S NOT FINISHED!!
LOL...I love reading your stuff Set, can't wait for the continuation! Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Harbinger on :
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!
Posted by Set on :
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!
Posted by Set on :
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.
Posted by Set on :
“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…>>
Posted by Set on :
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.”
Posted by Set on :
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!
Posted by Set on :
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?’
Posted by Set on :
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.”
Posted by Set on :
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.”
Posted by Set on :
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.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)