Yup, got another chapter for Piper + Meredith right here. I'm liking this story more and more as it unfolds. I know that it's moving slowly but that's kind of what I want for it. Too much speed in subject matter as delicate as this comes off as sloppy and that's not something I'm exactly aiming for. Anyways here it is.
http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600098655&chapter=5
Click, read, and be merry...
...hopefully. ^_^
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
Christmas 2008
Hey all!
How was your Christmas? Mine wasn't that bad. Being agnostic makes this a confusing time of the year for me but I always remind myself of the commercialism to work myself though that. As usual I spent Christmas with my immediate family (all five of us). Problem with my folks is that we don't open our gifts until after we eat, which is usually around 4pm, which means that most of the day, Christmas is just like any other day.
In the past I've had a tradition of watching my old VHS tapes of Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing (they may seem cheesy now but they bring
back A LOT of memories) unfortunately I couldn't do that this year, so I ended up watching movies. I finally saw the film adaptation of Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, but since I haven't read His Dark Materials yet I can't be a judge of its worth. What I can say is that I enjoyed the world. The stiff acting took nothing away from the palpable 'Englishness' of Lyra's environment. Not to mention the different peoples and the quiet mysticism; it all inspires me. I like the mythology of Philip Pullman's work.
As far as presents go I'm happy to say I scored two things I actually wanted; a Nintendo DS and one of Barack Obama's books. I'm happy with both. That being said, Christmas isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid it seemed like the most fun part of the year but these days it feels more like a headache; running around buying gifts for everyone, cleaning up the house, cooking, washing... meh. I think the best thing about this time of year is that it brings the people you love together. That's its primary virtue.
How did everybody else find their Christmas? Cool or drool?
How was your Christmas? Mine wasn't that bad. Being agnostic makes this a confusing time of the year for me but I always remind myself of the commercialism to work myself though that. As usual I spent Christmas with my immediate family (all five of us). Problem with my folks is that we don't open our gifts until after we eat, which is usually around 4pm, which means that most of the day, Christmas is just like any other day.
In the past I've had a tradition of watching my old VHS tapes of Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing (they may seem cheesy now but they bring
back A LOT of memories) unfortunately I couldn't do that this year, so I ended up watching movies. I finally saw the film adaptation of Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, but since I haven't read His Dark Materials yet I can't be a judge of its worth. What I can say is that I enjoyed the world. The stiff acting took nothing away from the palpable 'Englishness' of Lyra's environment. Not to mention the different peoples and the quiet mysticism; it all inspires me. I like the mythology of Philip Pullman's work.As far as presents go I'm happy to say I scored two things I actually wanted; a Nintendo DS and one of Barack Obama's books. I'm happy with both. That being said, Christmas isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid it seemed like the most fun part of the year but these days it feels more like a headache; running around buying gifts for everyone, cleaning up the house, cooking, washing... meh. I think the best thing about this time of year is that it brings the people you love together. That's its primary virtue.
How did everybody else find their Christmas? Cool or drool?
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Single Cell Geosphere, Chapter Four-ish...
The last fragment of Single Cell Geosphere. As you'll see it ends inconclusively, I was in the middle of writing it when had my laptop problems, so there's nothing I can do about it. Oh well. Give it a read if you don't mind a cut-off.
**********
Chapter Four: Necropolis
**********
Although it was a cheap and outdated Pro Beta 900x model that had been obsolete for nearly sixteen years, the sand craft Rawlings bought was making their journey to Gastellum ten times easier than it currently had been. They set out from Blue Dust City early and jetted off down the sloping stone platform into the sands of the East-Half covering a day’s worth of walking in an hour ‘s worth of riding.
Sand crafts were the ultimate means of travel across the Sargasso and the East in general. They did the job that horses did in the East and cars did in the West. There was enough room in this one, Little Dakota, to house a good five people, so they had at least one extra bed to spare inside. At top speed these things could hit more than 240mph, but it was only safe to go that fast in races or in the open sandy seas of the Desert Sargasso. Fortunately Anneliese wasn’t that kind of speed demon and she kept her steady over the dunes until they approached the coast. The gunslinger learned this trade, sand craft piloting, from a travelling Klajkukan costermonger in Farm Hill, Harley’s hometown. She always knew that one day the skill would come in handy (though Harley denied the notion) one day. She’d been proven right. Anneliese wasn’t the only one amongst them who knew how to pilot sand crafts, Rawlings did too, but she was better at it.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. There was no system of autopilot on sand crafts (there were rumours going around that researchers in the West were planning some kind of satellite navigated model but thus far that was unproven) so to cover as much ground as possible it was necessary for Anneliese and Rawlings to alternate their turns piloting, like shift work. Anneliese (being the stronger person) did most of the piloting during the day when the sun was at its hottest and most draining, while Rawlings took up her place in the night while everyone was sleeping. The space inside the sand crafts could also be quite suffocating after a while, which was constantly an issue with Zoe, who required a breath of fresh air every now and again.
Providentially this wasn’t the first time she’d been shunted around in a sand craft so she handled it better than the others expected her to.
It took four days of non-stop riding to hit the coast (without the sand craft it would’ve taken them fortnights) which was where they came to the intimidating and ruthless sand ocean known as the Desert Sargasso. At that point they spent the night at a coastal town called Port Fluey, where they restocked on food supplies (what little they could find) and water, and refuelled Little Dakota. While on land Anneliese went about visiting a navigations bureau to discover the best route to cross the Desert Sargasso with.
“Go northwest of here,” informed the nautical clerk. “Go for a day’s worth until you reach Heywood Island and from there head due west until you make it to the West-Half. If you stay the course you shouldn’t have a problem, even without a navigator.”
With that advice in mind she slept the night soundly with the others. The bright morning after saw the beginning of their protracted sail across the abiding vastness of the Desert Sargasso. What set them off on their dalliances wasn’t seagull chirps but vultures’ squawks but there was no sense of foreboding. It was better to leave the East behind for now. Rawlings was cheerful that he would soon see his wife, Zoe would be safe, Anneliese just wanted her money, and Harley? Though she didn’t like to say it in front of Anneliese she was actually looking forward to seeing the West again. She was a native of the West but she had been born in Farm Hill, a small town that was more pro-East than the East was. In reality she’d seen very little of the West-Half and she had never been to the Capital before. It was feeling more and more like an adventure, rather than some lousy job to pick up cash.
The Desert Sargasso was no pleasure trip though.
Because it was nestled in the centre most point of the continent it was the hottest with temperatures soaring to nearly 55 degrees Celsius -- on a mild day. To fall into the sands unless you had a winch was a death sentence, as they could suck a grown man into its depths in seconds. There were also certain paths you had to take across it. If you dared to stray too far from them you might be thrown into uncharted sands, which were said to be populated by titanic sand beasts. A legendary creature named Baalbagnabush was fabled to stalk off-course travellers below sand level for days before it rose out of the depths and gobbled them whole. Anneliese didn’t really believe in such crazy stories but she knew full well that the natural wildlife out here was dangerous thus best avoided. If you were out in the middle of the vast sand seas and had a malfunction, or sprung a fuel leak, you could only pray that you were lucky enough for another sand craft to find you. If one didn’t then it was just a matter of twiddling your thumbs until you starved to death. The sands around the coast weren’t the most pleasant sight either because much of the wreckage of the war still lingered there. Since shoreline towns and coastal orichalcum mines were so important to the financial centres of the East, they had been the earliest targets of the West’s naval fleet. Many of them had been bombarded with nights of constant shellfire and bombings until they surrendered, if not then marine infantries were landed on shore to force out an acquiescence. Only a fraction of the hundreds of port towns on the East coast still existed. The East wasn’t just laying back defenceless however and many people did resist the invasions and bombings, which led to many bloody battles by the sand seas. The results of those battle were there for all to see. Old battleships and sand crafts, unused tanks and crashed jet fighters, rusted mortars and unexploded shells, everything. Most of it had been swallowed up by the sand but some of the debris was left staining nearby coastal islands. Talks had been had between leaders of the coastal communities about whether or not they should ask the government to start clearing up what was left but they eventually opted against it. It served as a reminder of the horrors they suffered through for three years. All this made the sail less than entirely pleasant. But, at least for the first stint, things proceeded smoothly.
They were half a day’s ride from Heywood Island when it happened.
At the time they happened by a dense archipelago that forced Anneliese to slow down lest to hit one of the little rock islets and damage the craft. In the cockpit she flipped a series of switches and dials to achieve these, eased up on the exhaust, and gently turned the rudder to gradually guide the sand craft through the throng.
Behind her she heard the door open. It was Harley. The blonde marched in, yawning, and folded herself over the secondary pilot seat next to her.
“Turn on the radio.”
“Why?”
“I’m bored.”
Anneliese snarled crossly. “Not this again. Come on, Harley. Look how far out we are, we’ll never pick up any frequencies.”
“Just try it…” She whined.
Surely trying it was better than listening to her whine? With both of her eyes still out on the dusk light presence of the archipelago, Anneliese toggled the knob of the old AM/FM. She mostly received static and white noise for her troubles but at some point stumbled by one frequency their radio was able to pick up semi-clearly.
“Today in an impromptu press conference,” began a slick-voiced news anchor, “President Bracht confirmed the Senate’s approval of the Eastern economic stimulation package. The Senate rejected the previous proposal last month for its allegedly inadequate scope in regards to the East’s current grain shortage. The approved package is expected to be put into place by the end of the year.”
Anneliese sneered at the West-Half news feed. “Tch. Condescending bastards. Like Bracht cares what we’re suffering through.”
“Hush!” Chided Harley. “I’m listening to this!”
“In other news, constabulary chief Armand Bustard has confirmed that there are no suspects in the disgraceful raid of the Grand Cenotaph Memorial. Five days ago the tomb was burgled by an unknown assailant who appears to have stolen the remains of the late lieutenant-colonel Xenogenes. Chief Bustard admitted today that the police have no leads and are beginning a joint investigation with the military to uncover new evidence. In other news-”
Anneliese switched the thing off before she heard anymore. “Goddamned West-Half. So they’re corpse-kidnapping necrophiles now?”
Then she saw Harley chuckle.
“What are you laughing about?”
More giggles. “…‘Bustard’…!”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just a funny name, that’s all. Besides, it’s probably just some prank or something. What’s the point of stealing a dead body?”
The door opened again. This time it was Rawlings. When Anneliese saw him she eased. “Good, it’s you. I thought it might be Zoe looking for more air. Look, it’s getting late so you’re gonna have to take over for me in an hour or so.”
“Yeah, about that,” Rawlings nudged his glasses. “I see we’re passing through an archipelago. Do you think it might be possible for us to find an isle to camp out on for the night?”
“Are you serious?“
“Just for tonight. Without any air conditioning it’s hot as hell in here and it’s taking its toll on her.”
Anneliese curled Little Dakota around another islet in their way before answering. “You know, we’re never going to get anywhere if we keep stopping for bathroom breaks and powwows every three yards.”
“Zoe needs it.”
Then Harley got involved, throwing on the puppy eyes. “Annie, please…?”
Both of them were looking at her for her relent. As much as she wanted to argue the point there was no way they’d let it go. So with a sigh she gave in. “Fine, okay? Fine. We’ll stop for her air.”
**********
It took her a quarter of an hour or so before she found a island large enough for them to beach Little Dakota and spread out for a camp. Zoe really did need the air, because when Harley saw her she looked far more frail and breathless than usual. Her cheeks and forehead were swollen red, her pale skin was damp with salty hot sweat, and her tiny chest beat up and down whilst she laboured to draw in breath. They rolled out four sleeping bags and shared bottles of water between them to cool off then hit the hay in their own time.
Anneliese was curled up on her side trying to sleep that night when she felt a seductive breath at her ear, strong arms at her waist, and a loving figure spooning her back. Without even opening her eyes she knew it was Harley.
“What do you want?” She bit, sharply.
She could almost feel Harley’s smile behind her. “It got a bit lonely in my sleeping bag so I thought I might share yours. Is that okay?”
“As a matter of fact… it’s not.”
“…Are you mad at me?”
That was when the brunette turned and faced her. “We’ve been together since before you could walk, we’ve saved each other’s lives more times than I can damn well count, yet why is it that whenever we’re dealing with those two you constantly fail to back me up?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Harley.
“You always take their side, Harley. They’re slowing things down and you’re letting them.”
The blonde frowned. “Zoe was feeling poorly so we stopped for the night. Did you wanna suffocate her instead?”
“We’re not here to baby-sit them, we’re supposed to be taking them to Gastellum as a job. Am I the only one who still remembers that?”
“Annie, you don’t fool me, this has nothing to do with Zoe and Mr. Rawlings. What’s really bothering you?”
She turned back around. “Right now, you.”
“Annie…”
“Would you just get out of my bag please?” It was said so brusquely it surprised the both of them. Strangely enough Harley didn’t take her time returning to her sleeping bag -- and she didn’t say a word. It took another hour for either one of them to close their eyes under that bejewelled night sky.
*********
It was still dark out when Harley was shaken out of her sleep that night. The gentle sound of the coursing sands was actually quite soothing, despite her sour mood, and it helped in getting her to sleep. That was all disrupted when a desperate and terrified Rawlings shouted into her ear “Harley! Please wake up!” At first she thought she was just dreaming it but the hands at her shoulders were dreadfully real. So she opened her eyes, yawning, while the frantic scholar yelled the same declarations at Anneliese, “Wake up! For the love of the Gods, wake up!”
Harley tiredly wiped the sleep out of her eyes. “Mr. Rawlings? What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s Zoe!” he shouted. “She’s gone!”
Now she was more alert. “Gone? What do you mean she’s gone?”
“Look!” He pointed at her purple sleeping bag. It was empty. “I stirred for some water and when I looked over she wasn’t there! Oh my word, what could’ve happened to her?”
Anneliese, now awake, glanced around the islet they were camped out on. It was very small, much like the rest of them in the archipelago, no more than forty metres in circumference. It was also very flat so there was no place on it for her to be hiding.
“Did you check the Little Dakota?” asked the markswoman. “Maybe she got hungry.”
He threw his skull into his palm. “No, I checked it already. She’s not there. What in the world could’ve happened to her?”
Harley and Anneliese glanced at each other before looking around again. One look at the nature of the archipelago was enough to tell you that this was bad. The islets were small but the gaps between them were metres apart, far too wide for Zoe to have jumped them on her own. Then there was the possibility that whomever was after she and Mr. Rawlings had finally caught up with them and snatched her. But could someone have done that so swiftly and quietly? Just swiping her from underneath their noses without a single one of them knowing about it? Then there was the worst possibility of them all. The sand. The watery depths of the Desert Sargasso had claimed more lives than would ever be known. Harley’s courageous father, Garland, once said that these seas were the most frightening part of crossing the continent. Had Zoe fallen into the sand?
None of them wanted to think it.
Anneliese was the first to stand, clapping her hands of sand. “Alright, lets take a look around.”
Neither Harley nor Rawlings would argue otherwise. The trio left the camp as it was, sleeping bags and water bottles everywhere, to hop inside the Little Dakota and begin a sweep of the entire area. The archipelago was about a mile or so in its expanse and Anneliese couldn’t navigate very fast here (for one thing they were trying to spot Zoe and there was always the risk of damaging the hull) so their search ended up taking hours. Under the glare of the red moon, “Blood Luna”, they toured around the islets in the hopes of finding Zoe. It wasn’t until they approached the shores of an island slightly larger than the rest that something happened.
Harley and Anneliese sat at the cockpit while Rawlings leaned between them to stare at the display screen. That was when he noticed the island. It was bigger than the others and at its centre was a tall, tilted rock piercing the sky from the stony island floor. Something about it just seemed odd.
“Look there,” Rawlings said. “Lets search around that.”
To Harley it looked unremarkable. “Why?”
“I have a hunch.”
They didn’t have anything else to go on. Anneliese steered the Little Dakota over to that island. When buoyed there the three of them climbed out and headed up to the slanted rock. It was like a giant stalagmite cracked from the floor of a dank cave and hurled into this sandstone. What made it even more unusual though, was that it had an opening. An opening lined with wood and large enough for people to walk through.
“You think Zoe could’ve gone in there?” Anneliese asked.
Rawlings thought for a moment. “I’m not really sure. We’re nearly a quarter of a mile off the campsite, but… we can’t dismiss the idea. Let’s take a look around and see what we can find.”
They all then nodded to each other in agreement and proceeded through the wood-stabilized cavity. Its innards were cramped and in pitch-black darkness, so dark in fact that even when Anneliese pulled out her rifle and switched on its attachable torch, only part of the way was lit ahead. With that little light they could just about make out the cracks and grooves of the walls, the crumbling lumber of the support beams (withered over time by the gnaw of sand mites) and the sand grains blown into the opening by the hot wind. To their surprise however this aperture in the rock monolith was not just a cave. It in fact concealed a pathway. It was a crudely cut series of steps paved off with boards of plywood inching into the darkness. With one hand holding her firearm and the other yanking the cobwebs from her way, Anneliese took the lead and led them down.
As they made their way down it became clear that this whole thing was more elaborate than they’d imagined. It took fourteen minutes for them to reach the bottom of the staircase -- the foot of a whole new chamber. It was too dark for them to see it in it entirety so Anneliese slowly panned her torchlight around. The circle of illumination revealed, bit by bit, a circular cavern large enough to host a party of fifty. All along the walls were wooden beams that supported the roof but more revealingly, the floor was littered with pickaxes, backpacks, hardhats, dusters, laptops, wiring, empty clips and tattered bits of paper, and broken-down digging equipment. No one had been down here for years and yet the air was so stale and crisp. It rankled Harley’s button nose.
“What is all this?” Wondered Harley.
Rawlings marched up to Anneliese, recognizing it. “My Gods…”
“What is it?” Questioned the brunette.
“This place,” he said. “I think it’s the site of an archaeological dig. An excavation must have taken place here.” Then the fire in his resolve turned stalwart. “Zoe is in here. I’m sure of it.”
“How? How can you be sure of it?”
He said nothing -- and that said all that needed to be.
“Rawlings, what are you not telling us?”
He advanced, regardless. “Please, just trust me on this. We have to find Zoe.”
It looked like they had no choice anyway. Rawlings and Harley wouldn’t leave without Zoe, and without Zoe, Anneliese would never get her money. Sighing in defeat, the gunner turned on her heels and led the way again. The light set them their path forward, revealing more than just the remnants of an archaeological dig, but rather a door. It was made of limestone and when pushed her torch all the way up its expanse it proved to be as tall as the sealing. Nailed to the left side of the door was a bit of dust-ridden plastic. Rawlings wiped it off and it said, quite simply, “Necropolis.”
The scholar gasped. “It can’t be…! This is the Necropolis?”
“Necropolis?” Harley put forth. “What’s that?”
“An antediluvian, lost city, once thought lost to us,” he confirmed. Then is rumination became private. “My word. Did the Social Reconstruction Project stretch this far out then…? But I thought that the Senate disavowed-”
“Hey!” When the searchlight went wonky Harley and Rawlings turned and saw Anneliese pushing at the twinned doors of the Necropolis. She shoved at them with her shoulder and yelled, “Will you give me a hand?” at the pair. They quickly did that and with their combined strength the three of them managed to push those heavy stone doors open. A blast of radiance shone from the indenture and flooded the dig sight with light, revealing its full extent, including the sand-eaten bones of past researchers. They way was forward now and what lay beyond those gates was far more important.
Harley, Anneliese and Rawlings were staggered to see it. The room beyond was in technological leagues ahead of the previous one. A thinner but taller circular room made entirely from metal, and brought to life by hundreds of golden lights pulsing in and out between the gaps of the wall’s steel plates, like a heartbeat. The floor of it was a pitch black marble that flashed angular streaks of emerald with every echoing step they took inward. When the three of them were inside a second set of doors automatically shut behind them. Nineteen metal pistons rose up from the marble in circular formation and connected with nineteen catches in the distant roof. Then, from the pit of their stomachs, they felt the platform they were one shunt downward.
“What’s going on!?” The internal mechanisms were so loud Anneliese has to shout to be heard.
“What is this!?”
An astounded Rawlings looked around him. “Don’t be alarmed, it’s just an elevator! It’s a product of the technology of an ancient civilization that Western archaeologists researched for years!”
Harley held onto one of the pillar as the elevator zoomed southward. “Where is it taking us!?”
“Most likely to the Necropolis…!”
In the coming moments the elevator column stopped at the bottommost point of its descent. Out of the light pulsing walls to their front a pane of light materialized and forged forth another doorway. Rawlings motioned for Harley and Anneliese to follow him out. They did that and the three stepped, not unknowingly, into the ancient sprawling city that was known only as Necropolis.
It was a colossal ancient metropolis the expanse of which stretched for longer than could be seen delimited only by the wide and enormous rock cavern that sealed it from the world. Waterfalls of sand poured from the stalactite-combed geo ceiling and poured into the pits and causeways that surrounded the city. It was a conurbation of round flat roof houses constructed from limestone. Its layout was of circles, one ring of houses expanding to a larger ring of houses and yet another larger one beyond that and so on. The circle was a reoccurring motif of this culture, it was everywhere even in the layout of the dusty streets and throughout the many intricate murals that adorned the walls of every building. The streets were littered with remnants of this civilization, of the shattered debris of toppled buildings and cracked intricately designed ceramics. Glassless windows were covered with tattered yet expertly designed tapestries bearing the complex circle patterns and glyphs. Skeletons of long dead townsfolk lay sprawled everywhere in shredded clothing. The smell of sand and stone hung thick in the air. This was Necropolis.
“A whole city?” Harley took it all in.
Rawlings nodded. “Yes… hidden from the whole world, deep underneath the Desert Sargasso. I had heard rumours but I never imagined that…”
“How are we supposed to find her in a place this big?”
There was one building largely taller than the rest. It could be seen from across the city. The entire Necropolis was built over a shallow underground basin, with the uppermost point being the rim and the lowermost the centre. A sizeable step pyramid poked up from that centrality and loomed over the rest of the city with its height. A corridor of light shot up from its centre to illuminate the entire cavern, like a sun. Whatever it was, Rawlings’ instincts were telling him that that was the hub and Mecca of its ancient administration. It was naturally the first place they ought to head to.
He pointed it out. “Let us go there.”
From there they were off. Though the layout of the city was elaborate and intricate, Rawlings navigated the three of them (again by ‘instinct’) along the circling limestone streets. Each one was occupied by ruined homes and shops, the toppled remains of some thatched shacks, overturned carts and chariots, broken spearheads and swords, and of course, more and more skeletons. Their march through the city was a constant barrage of the ancient world’s culture and legend. Harley didn’t know much about the history of the world but she did know that many old cultures had been lost to it. Most academics and theorists posited that the cause of this was the planetary degradation. Was that the phenomenon that sunk Necropolis.
Hours into their journey to the centre of the city, the group came through a town square elevated slightly from the sand tracks. One thing Anneliese noticed about it was the greater number of bodies laying nearby. She would’ve asked Rawlings about it but before she could something absolutely chilling occurred. The pillar of light shooting from the step pyramid could be seen turning from blue to black. When it did a series of mournful wails, sobs and screams overcame the courtyard, and astoundingly, eerie spectral wraiths rose from the dust.
Harley shrieked, grabbing Anneliese by the arm. “What the hell are those?! Are those ghosts?!”
The sight made her reflexively align her rifle to them but a staying hand of Rawlings’ stopped her.
“Don’t waste your bullets,” he said. “those aren’t ghosts.”
“Then what are they?!
He rubbed his wedding ring finger. “Most likely… strands of consciousness programmed into CPUs… diary units and record programs… overtaken by the central systems of the Necropolis. Those kinds of feelings can’t be buried by data, if anything they cling to what little life they can and… these holographic projections are as close as they can come to new life. In a way you could call them ‘ghosts’… but only of that machine.”
“Whatever they are I’m not comfortable around them,” Anneliese said. She looked at Harley. “Are you alright?”
She was still a bit shaken so she didn’t realized she’d been asked that. When it did register, that Anneliese was wondering about her, the martial artist pulled her arm swiftly from hers. “I just want Zoe back is all. I’m fine.”
They proceeded. It took more long jogs and dashed through courtyards, marketplaces, trading roads and temples. Eventually though Harley, Anneliese and Mr. Rawlings came across the step pyramid in the centremost point of the Necropolis. It was a great structure indeed, towering above them at nearly 300 metres in height. It mightily exuded that blast of cerulean power, the crack of which was like a constant thunderbolt to their ears. Anneliese observed it closest ‘door ’ (if it could be so called) a slab of sandstone matching the gold-coloured rock of the pyramid. It was covered with complexly carved glyphic symbols.
“How do we get inside?” Was her concern.
But they weren’t the only ones there. “Look!” screamed Harley. Rawlings and Anneliese turned to what she pointed out, and they both gasped. It was Zoe. The child stood at a distance from them at another of the symbol-scrawled doors of the pyramid. But when Harley looked in her eyes she could tell that something was off. The innocence in Zoe’s eyes wasn’t there nor was the demure curiosity. Instead she saw cruel certainty complimented by a dark, clandestine smirk.
“Zoe?”
Rawlings was too frantic to notice it. “Zoe! Zoe! I’m here!”
Instead of running into his arms like she usually did, the West-Half girl turned to the glyph door -- and walked straight through it. The three gasped. How could that have been possible?
“What in all the East was that?!” Barked Anneliese.
Harley trembled. “It must’ve been one of those ghost projection things again, right Mr. Rawlings?!
“I…!” He was at a loss for words. When he touched the glyph door himself it was as solid as the rock it was made from. “I have no idea…”
Then they heard rock grind against sand. The door that barred their way gave way, slowly dragging itself into a gap between the floor stones. The glyph door was gone. Had they been invited in? Whatever was going on all three knew that they couldn’t hang around anymore and ran inside in pursuit of Zoe. What they were brought to was an internal chamber, all its golden rock walls and sectioned ceilings covered in the same archaic hieroglyphics as outside. Rawlings led the way when he ran up a curling set of brink-laid steps, shouting Zoe’s name, tailed by a confused Harley and a cautious Anneliese. That staircase led only to one place, very close to the summit of the step pyramid. It was an antechamber similar to the technological elevator that brought them down to the Necropolis in the first place -- black marble floors and mechanical walls -- the only difference was the corridor of light shooting up from its centre through the cavity in the ceiling that took it out to the city skyline.
Zoe was standing in front of it.
Rawlings called out to her, “Zoe! Zoe, we’re here!”
With that same cruel smile as before she turned to them, “Keep your distance…”
They all gasped. Zoe could speak? And, of all voices; in that genderless, atonal one?
“Zoe…!” Harley yelled.
The western child only smirked at their candour. “You all care very much. It’s charming. She slumbers warm, content with the notion, that she might be loved. Such a thing swallows up the fear and makes one free.”
Rawlings turned speculative. “You said ‘she’. ‘She slumbers’. Who are you…?”
“I am Zoe.”
Harley pulled her fists. “I knew something was weird about this! Why don’t you start making sense?!”
“You know I’m not what you love.”
“Oh I’ve had enough of this,” Anneliese lowered her weapon. “If you’re Zoe then you’re coming with us. If you’re NOT Zoe then you’d better tell us where she is or I’m gonna start shooting.”
The Being that appeared to be Zoe turned to the light pillar.
**********
...And that's all that's left. I hope someone enjoyed what little of SCG I could bring them though!
**********
Chapter Four: Necropolis
**********
Although it was a cheap and outdated Pro Beta 900x model that had been obsolete for nearly sixteen years, the sand craft Rawlings bought was making their journey to Gastellum ten times easier than it currently had been. They set out from Blue Dust City early and jetted off down the sloping stone platform into the sands of the East-Half covering a day’s worth of walking in an hour ‘s worth of riding.
Sand crafts were the ultimate means of travel across the Sargasso and the East in general. They did the job that horses did in the East and cars did in the West. There was enough room in this one, Little Dakota, to house a good five people, so they had at least one extra bed to spare inside. At top speed these things could hit more than 240mph, but it was only safe to go that fast in races or in the open sandy seas of the Desert Sargasso. Fortunately Anneliese wasn’t that kind of speed demon and she kept her steady over the dunes until they approached the coast. The gunslinger learned this trade, sand craft piloting, from a travelling Klajkukan costermonger in Farm Hill, Harley’s hometown. She always knew that one day the skill would come in handy (though Harley denied the notion) one day. She’d been proven right. Anneliese wasn’t the only one amongst them who knew how to pilot sand crafts, Rawlings did too, but she was better at it.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. There was no system of autopilot on sand crafts (there were rumours going around that researchers in the West were planning some kind of satellite navigated model but thus far that was unproven) so to cover as much ground as possible it was necessary for Anneliese and Rawlings to alternate their turns piloting, like shift work. Anneliese (being the stronger person) did most of the piloting during the day when the sun was at its hottest and most draining, while Rawlings took up her place in the night while everyone was sleeping. The space inside the sand crafts could also be quite suffocating after a while, which was constantly an issue with Zoe, who required a breath of fresh air every now and again.
Providentially this wasn’t the first time she’d been shunted around in a sand craft so she handled it better than the others expected her to.
It took four days of non-stop riding to hit the coast (without the sand craft it would’ve taken them fortnights) which was where they came to the intimidating and ruthless sand ocean known as the Desert Sargasso. At that point they spent the night at a coastal town called Port Fluey, where they restocked on food supplies (what little they could find) and water, and refuelled Little Dakota. While on land Anneliese went about visiting a navigations bureau to discover the best route to cross the Desert Sargasso with.
“Go northwest of here,” informed the nautical clerk. “Go for a day’s worth until you reach Heywood Island and from there head due west until you make it to the West-Half. If you stay the course you shouldn’t have a problem, even without a navigator.”
With that advice in mind she slept the night soundly with the others. The bright morning after saw the beginning of their protracted sail across the abiding vastness of the Desert Sargasso. What set them off on their dalliances wasn’t seagull chirps but vultures’ squawks but there was no sense of foreboding. It was better to leave the East behind for now. Rawlings was cheerful that he would soon see his wife, Zoe would be safe, Anneliese just wanted her money, and Harley? Though she didn’t like to say it in front of Anneliese she was actually looking forward to seeing the West again. She was a native of the West but she had been born in Farm Hill, a small town that was more pro-East than the East was. In reality she’d seen very little of the West-Half and she had never been to the Capital before. It was feeling more and more like an adventure, rather than some lousy job to pick up cash.
The Desert Sargasso was no pleasure trip though.
Because it was nestled in the centre most point of the continent it was the hottest with temperatures soaring to nearly 55 degrees Celsius -- on a mild day. To fall into the sands unless you had a winch was a death sentence, as they could suck a grown man into its depths in seconds. There were also certain paths you had to take across it. If you dared to stray too far from them you might be thrown into uncharted sands, which were said to be populated by titanic sand beasts. A legendary creature named Baalbagnabush was fabled to stalk off-course travellers below sand level for days before it rose out of the depths and gobbled them whole. Anneliese didn’t really believe in such crazy stories but she knew full well that the natural wildlife out here was dangerous thus best avoided. If you were out in the middle of the vast sand seas and had a malfunction, or sprung a fuel leak, you could only pray that you were lucky enough for another sand craft to find you. If one didn’t then it was just a matter of twiddling your thumbs until you starved to death. The sands around the coast weren’t the most pleasant sight either because much of the wreckage of the war still lingered there. Since shoreline towns and coastal orichalcum mines were so important to the financial centres of the East, they had been the earliest targets of the West’s naval fleet. Many of them had been bombarded with nights of constant shellfire and bombings until they surrendered, if not then marine infantries were landed on shore to force out an acquiescence. Only a fraction of the hundreds of port towns on the East coast still existed. The East wasn’t just laying back defenceless however and many people did resist the invasions and bombings, which led to many bloody battles by the sand seas. The results of those battle were there for all to see. Old battleships and sand crafts, unused tanks and crashed jet fighters, rusted mortars and unexploded shells, everything. Most of it had been swallowed up by the sand but some of the debris was left staining nearby coastal islands. Talks had been had between leaders of the coastal communities about whether or not they should ask the government to start clearing up what was left but they eventually opted against it. It served as a reminder of the horrors they suffered through for three years. All this made the sail less than entirely pleasant. But, at least for the first stint, things proceeded smoothly.
They were half a day’s ride from Heywood Island when it happened.
At the time they happened by a dense archipelago that forced Anneliese to slow down lest to hit one of the little rock islets and damage the craft. In the cockpit she flipped a series of switches and dials to achieve these, eased up on the exhaust, and gently turned the rudder to gradually guide the sand craft through the throng.
Behind her she heard the door open. It was Harley. The blonde marched in, yawning, and folded herself over the secondary pilot seat next to her.
“Turn on the radio.”
“Why?”
“I’m bored.”
Anneliese snarled crossly. “Not this again. Come on, Harley. Look how far out we are, we’ll never pick up any frequencies.”
“Just try it…” She whined.
Surely trying it was better than listening to her whine? With both of her eyes still out on the dusk light presence of the archipelago, Anneliese toggled the knob of the old AM/FM. She mostly received static and white noise for her troubles but at some point stumbled by one frequency their radio was able to pick up semi-clearly.
“Today in an impromptu press conference,” began a slick-voiced news anchor, “President Bracht confirmed the Senate’s approval of the Eastern economic stimulation package. The Senate rejected the previous proposal last month for its allegedly inadequate scope in regards to the East’s current grain shortage. The approved package is expected to be put into place by the end of the year.”
Anneliese sneered at the West-Half news feed. “Tch. Condescending bastards. Like Bracht cares what we’re suffering through.”
“Hush!” Chided Harley. “I’m listening to this!”
“In other news, constabulary chief Armand Bustard has confirmed that there are no suspects in the disgraceful raid of the Grand Cenotaph Memorial. Five days ago the tomb was burgled by an unknown assailant who appears to have stolen the remains of the late lieutenant-colonel Xenogenes. Chief Bustard admitted today that the police have no leads and are beginning a joint investigation with the military to uncover new evidence. In other news-”
Anneliese switched the thing off before she heard anymore. “Goddamned West-Half. So they’re corpse-kidnapping necrophiles now?”
Then she saw Harley chuckle.
“What are you laughing about?”
More giggles. “…‘Bustard’…!”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just a funny name, that’s all. Besides, it’s probably just some prank or something. What’s the point of stealing a dead body?”
The door opened again. This time it was Rawlings. When Anneliese saw him she eased. “Good, it’s you. I thought it might be Zoe looking for more air. Look, it’s getting late so you’re gonna have to take over for me in an hour or so.”
“Yeah, about that,” Rawlings nudged his glasses. “I see we’re passing through an archipelago. Do you think it might be possible for us to find an isle to camp out on for the night?”
“Are you serious?“
“Just for tonight. Without any air conditioning it’s hot as hell in here and it’s taking its toll on her.”
Anneliese curled Little Dakota around another islet in their way before answering. “You know, we’re never going to get anywhere if we keep stopping for bathroom breaks and powwows every three yards.”
“Zoe needs it.”
Then Harley got involved, throwing on the puppy eyes. “Annie, please…?”
Both of them were looking at her for her relent. As much as she wanted to argue the point there was no way they’d let it go. So with a sigh she gave in. “Fine, okay? Fine. We’ll stop for her air.”
**********
It took her a quarter of an hour or so before she found a island large enough for them to beach Little Dakota and spread out for a camp. Zoe really did need the air, because when Harley saw her she looked far more frail and breathless than usual. Her cheeks and forehead were swollen red, her pale skin was damp with salty hot sweat, and her tiny chest beat up and down whilst she laboured to draw in breath. They rolled out four sleeping bags and shared bottles of water between them to cool off then hit the hay in their own time.
Anneliese was curled up on her side trying to sleep that night when she felt a seductive breath at her ear, strong arms at her waist, and a loving figure spooning her back. Without even opening her eyes she knew it was Harley.
“What do you want?” She bit, sharply.
She could almost feel Harley’s smile behind her. “It got a bit lonely in my sleeping bag so I thought I might share yours. Is that okay?”
“As a matter of fact… it’s not.”
“…Are you mad at me?”
That was when the brunette turned and faced her. “We’ve been together since before you could walk, we’ve saved each other’s lives more times than I can damn well count, yet why is it that whenever we’re dealing with those two you constantly fail to back me up?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Harley.
“You always take their side, Harley. They’re slowing things down and you’re letting them.”
The blonde frowned. “Zoe was feeling poorly so we stopped for the night. Did you wanna suffocate her instead?”
“We’re not here to baby-sit them, we’re supposed to be taking them to Gastellum as a job. Am I the only one who still remembers that?”
“Annie, you don’t fool me, this has nothing to do with Zoe and Mr. Rawlings. What’s really bothering you?”
She turned back around. “Right now, you.”
“Annie…”
“Would you just get out of my bag please?” It was said so brusquely it surprised the both of them. Strangely enough Harley didn’t take her time returning to her sleeping bag -- and she didn’t say a word. It took another hour for either one of them to close their eyes under that bejewelled night sky.
*********
It was still dark out when Harley was shaken out of her sleep that night. The gentle sound of the coursing sands was actually quite soothing, despite her sour mood, and it helped in getting her to sleep. That was all disrupted when a desperate and terrified Rawlings shouted into her ear “Harley! Please wake up!” At first she thought she was just dreaming it but the hands at her shoulders were dreadfully real. So she opened her eyes, yawning, while the frantic scholar yelled the same declarations at Anneliese, “Wake up! For the love of the Gods, wake up!”
Harley tiredly wiped the sleep out of her eyes. “Mr. Rawlings? What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s Zoe!” he shouted. “She’s gone!”
Now she was more alert. “Gone? What do you mean she’s gone?”
“Look!” He pointed at her purple sleeping bag. It was empty. “I stirred for some water and when I looked over she wasn’t there! Oh my word, what could’ve happened to her?”
Anneliese, now awake, glanced around the islet they were camped out on. It was very small, much like the rest of them in the archipelago, no more than forty metres in circumference. It was also very flat so there was no place on it for her to be hiding.
“Did you check the Little Dakota?” asked the markswoman. “Maybe she got hungry.”
He threw his skull into his palm. “No, I checked it already. She’s not there. What in the world could’ve happened to her?”
Harley and Anneliese glanced at each other before looking around again. One look at the nature of the archipelago was enough to tell you that this was bad. The islets were small but the gaps between them were metres apart, far too wide for Zoe to have jumped them on her own. Then there was the possibility that whomever was after she and Mr. Rawlings had finally caught up with them and snatched her. But could someone have done that so swiftly and quietly? Just swiping her from underneath their noses without a single one of them knowing about it? Then there was the worst possibility of them all. The sand. The watery depths of the Desert Sargasso had claimed more lives than would ever be known. Harley’s courageous father, Garland, once said that these seas were the most frightening part of crossing the continent. Had Zoe fallen into the sand?
None of them wanted to think it.
Anneliese was the first to stand, clapping her hands of sand. “Alright, lets take a look around.”
Neither Harley nor Rawlings would argue otherwise. The trio left the camp as it was, sleeping bags and water bottles everywhere, to hop inside the Little Dakota and begin a sweep of the entire area. The archipelago was about a mile or so in its expanse and Anneliese couldn’t navigate very fast here (for one thing they were trying to spot Zoe and there was always the risk of damaging the hull) so their search ended up taking hours. Under the glare of the red moon, “Blood Luna”, they toured around the islets in the hopes of finding Zoe. It wasn’t until they approached the shores of an island slightly larger than the rest that something happened.
Harley and Anneliese sat at the cockpit while Rawlings leaned between them to stare at the display screen. That was when he noticed the island. It was bigger than the others and at its centre was a tall, tilted rock piercing the sky from the stony island floor. Something about it just seemed odd.
“Look there,” Rawlings said. “Lets search around that.”
To Harley it looked unremarkable. “Why?”
“I have a hunch.”
They didn’t have anything else to go on. Anneliese steered the Little Dakota over to that island. When buoyed there the three of them climbed out and headed up to the slanted rock. It was like a giant stalagmite cracked from the floor of a dank cave and hurled into this sandstone. What made it even more unusual though, was that it had an opening. An opening lined with wood and large enough for people to walk through.
“You think Zoe could’ve gone in there?” Anneliese asked.
Rawlings thought for a moment. “I’m not really sure. We’re nearly a quarter of a mile off the campsite, but… we can’t dismiss the idea. Let’s take a look around and see what we can find.”
They all then nodded to each other in agreement and proceeded through the wood-stabilized cavity. Its innards were cramped and in pitch-black darkness, so dark in fact that even when Anneliese pulled out her rifle and switched on its attachable torch, only part of the way was lit ahead. With that little light they could just about make out the cracks and grooves of the walls, the crumbling lumber of the support beams (withered over time by the gnaw of sand mites) and the sand grains blown into the opening by the hot wind. To their surprise however this aperture in the rock monolith was not just a cave. It in fact concealed a pathway. It was a crudely cut series of steps paved off with boards of plywood inching into the darkness. With one hand holding her firearm and the other yanking the cobwebs from her way, Anneliese took the lead and led them down.
As they made their way down it became clear that this whole thing was more elaborate than they’d imagined. It took fourteen minutes for them to reach the bottom of the staircase -- the foot of a whole new chamber. It was too dark for them to see it in it entirety so Anneliese slowly panned her torchlight around. The circle of illumination revealed, bit by bit, a circular cavern large enough to host a party of fifty. All along the walls were wooden beams that supported the roof but more revealingly, the floor was littered with pickaxes, backpacks, hardhats, dusters, laptops, wiring, empty clips and tattered bits of paper, and broken-down digging equipment. No one had been down here for years and yet the air was so stale and crisp. It rankled Harley’s button nose.
“What is all this?” Wondered Harley.
Rawlings marched up to Anneliese, recognizing it. “My Gods…”
“What is it?” Questioned the brunette.
“This place,” he said. “I think it’s the site of an archaeological dig. An excavation must have taken place here.” Then the fire in his resolve turned stalwart. “Zoe is in here. I’m sure of it.”
“How? How can you be sure of it?”
He said nothing -- and that said all that needed to be.
“Rawlings, what are you not telling us?”
He advanced, regardless. “Please, just trust me on this. We have to find Zoe.”
It looked like they had no choice anyway. Rawlings and Harley wouldn’t leave without Zoe, and without Zoe, Anneliese would never get her money. Sighing in defeat, the gunner turned on her heels and led the way again. The light set them their path forward, revealing more than just the remnants of an archaeological dig, but rather a door. It was made of limestone and when pushed her torch all the way up its expanse it proved to be as tall as the sealing. Nailed to the left side of the door was a bit of dust-ridden plastic. Rawlings wiped it off and it said, quite simply, “Necropolis.”
The scholar gasped. “It can’t be…! This is the Necropolis?”
“Necropolis?” Harley put forth. “What’s that?”
“An antediluvian, lost city, once thought lost to us,” he confirmed. Then is rumination became private. “My word. Did the Social Reconstruction Project stretch this far out then…? But I thought that the Senate disavowed-”
“Hey!” When the searchlight went wonky Harley and Rawlings turned and saw Anneliese pushing at the twinned doors of the Necropolis. She shoved at them with her shoulder and yelled, “Will you give me a hand?” at the pair. They quickly did that and with their combined strength the three of them managed to push those heavy stone doors open. A blast of radiance shone from the indenture and flooded the dig sight with light, revealing its full extent, including the sand-eaten bones of past researchers. They way was forward now and what lay beyond those gates was far more important.
Harley, Anneliese and Rawlings were staggered to see it. The room beyond was in technological leagues ahead of the previous one. A thinner but taller circular room made entirely from metal, and brought to life by hundreds of golden lights pulsing in and out between the gaps of the wall’s steel plates, like a heartbeat. The floor of it was a pitch black marble that flashed angular streaks of emerald with every echoing step they took inward. When the three of them were inside a second set of doors automatically shut behind them. Nineteen metal pistons rose up from the marble in circular formation and connected with nineteen catches in the distant roof. Then, from the pit of their stomachs, they felt the platform they were one shunt downward.
“What’s going on!?” The internal mechanisms were so loud Anneliese has to shout to be heard.
“What is this!?”
An astounded Rawlings looked around him. “Don’t be alarmed, it’s just an elevator! It’s a product of the technology of an ancient civilization that Western archaeologists researched for years!”
Harley held onto one of the pillar as the elevator zoomed southward. “Where is it taking us!?”
“Most likely to the Necropolis…!”
In the coming moments the elevator column stopped at the bottommost point of its descent. Out of the light pulsing walls to their front a pane of light materialized and forged forth another doorway. Rawlings motioned for Harley and Anneliese to follow him out. They did that and the three stepped, not unknowingly, into the ancient sprawling city that was known only as Necropolis.
It was a colossal ancient metropolis the expanse of which stretched for longer than could be seen delimited only by the wide and enormous rock cavern that sealed it from the world. Waterfalls of sand poured from the stalactite-combed geo ceiling and poured into the pits and causeways that surrounded the city. It was a conurbation of round flat roof houses constructed from limestone. Its layout was of circles, one ring of houses expanding to a larger ring of houses and yet another larger one beyond that and so on. The circle was a reoccurring motif of this culture, it was everywhere even in the layout of the dusty streets and throughout the many intricate murals that adorned the walls of every building. The streets were littered with remnants of this civilization, of the shattered debris of toppled buildings and cracked intricately designed ceramics. Glassless windows were covered with tattered yet expertly designed tapestries bearing the complex circle patterns and glyphs. Skeletons of long dead townsfolk lay sprawled everywhere in shredded clothing. The smell of sand and stone hung thick in the air. This was Necropolis.
“A whole city?” Harley took it all in.
Rawlings nodded. “Yes… hidden from the whole world, deep underneath the Desert Sargasso. I had heard rumours but I never imagined that…”
“How are we supposed to find her in a place this big?”
There was one building largely taller than the rest. It could be seen from across the city. The entire Necropolis was built over a shallow underground basin, with the uppermost point being the rim and the lowermost the centre. A sizeable step pyramid poked up from that centrality and loomed over the rest of the city with its height. A corridor of light shot up from its centre to illuminate the entire cavern, like a sun. Whatever it was, Rawlings’ instincts were telling him that that was the hub and Mecca of its ancient administration. It was naturally the first place they ought to head to.
He pointed it out. “Let us go there.”
From there they were off. Though the layout of the city was elaborate and intricate, Rawlings navigated the three of them (again by ‘instinct’) along the circling limestone streets. Each one was occupied by ruined homes and shops, the toppled remains of some thatched shacks, overturned carts and chariots, broken spearheads and swords, and of course, more and more skeletons. Their march through the city was a constant barrage of the ancient world’s culture and legend. Harley didn’t know much about the history of the world but she did know that many old cultures had been lost to it. Most academics and theorists posited that the cause of this was the planetary degradation. Was that the phenomenon that sunk Necropolis.
Hours into their journey to the centre of the city, the group came through a town square elevated slightly from the sand tracks. One thing Anneliese noticed about it was the greater number of bodies laying nearby. She would’ve asked Rawlings about it but before she could something absolutely chilling occurred. The pillar of light shooting from the step pyramid could be seen turning from blue to black. When it did a series of mournful wails, sobs and screams overcame the courtyard, and astoundingly, eerie spectral wraiths rose from the dust.
Harley shrieked, grabbing Anneliese by the arm. “What the hell are those?! Are those ghosts?!”
The sight made her reflexively align her rifle to them but a staying hand of Rawlings’ stopped her.
“Don’t waste your bullets,” he said. “those aren’t ghosts.”
“Then what are they?!
He rubbed his wedding ring finger. “Most likely… strands of consciousness programmed into CPUs… diary units and record programs… overtaken by the central systems of the Necropolis. Those kinds of feelings can’t be buried by data, if anything they cling to what little life they can and… these holographic projections are as close as they can come to new life. In a way you could call them ‘ghosts’… but only of that machine.”
“Whatever they are I’m not comfortable around them,” Anneliese said. She looked at Harley. “Are you alright?”
She was still a bit shaken so she didn’t realized she’d been asked that. When it did register, that Anneliese was wondering about her, the martial artist pulled her arm swiftly from hers. “I just want Zoe back is all. I’m fine.”
They proceeded. It took more long jogs and dashed through courtyards, marketplaces, trading roads and temples. Eventually though Harley, Anneliese and Mr. Rawlings came across the step pyramid in the centremost point of the Necropolis. It was a great structure indeed, towering above them at nearly 300 metres in height. It mightily exuded that blast of cerulean power, the crack of which was like a constant thunderbolt to their ears. Anneliese observed it closest ‘door ’ (if it could be so called) a slab of sandstone matching the gold-coloured rock of the pyramid. It was covered with complexly carved glyphic symbols.
“How do we get inside?” Was her concern.
But they weren’t the only ones there. “Look!” screamed Harley. Rawlings and Anneliese turned to what she pointed out, and they both gasped. It was Zoe. The child stood at a distance from them at another of the symbol-scrawled doors of the pyramid. But when Harley looked in her eyes she could tell that something was off. The innocence in Zoe’s eyes wasn’t there nor was the demure curiosity. Instead she saw cruel certainty complimented by a dark, clandestine smirk.
“Zoe?”
Rawlings was too frantic to notice it. “Zoe! Zoe! I’m here!”
Instead of running into his arms like she usually did, the West-Half girl turned to the glyph door -- and walked straight through it. The three gasped. How could that have been possible?
“What in all the East was that?!” Barked Anneliese.
Harley trembled. “It must’ve been one of those ghost projection things again, right Mr. Rawlings?!
“I…!” He was at a loss for words. When he touched the glyph door himself it was as solid as the rock it was made from. “I have no idea…”
Then they heard rock grind against sand. The door that barred their way gave way, slowly dragging itself into a gap between the floor stones. The glyph door was gone. Had they been invited in? Whatever was going on all three knew that they couldn’t hang around anymore and ran inside in pursuit of Zoe. What they were brought to was an internal chamber, all its golden rock walls and sectioned ceilings covered in the same archaic hieroglyphics as outside. Rawlings led the way when he ran up a curling set of brink-laid steps, shouting Zoe’s name, tailed by a confused Harley and a cautious Anneliese. That staircase led only to one place, very close to the summit of the step pyramid. It was an antechamber similar to the technological elevator that brought them down to the Necropolis in the first place -- black marble floors and mechanical walls -- the only difference was the corridor of light shooting up from its centre through the cavity in the ceiling that took it out to the city skyline.
Zoe was standing in front of it.
Rawlings called out to her, “Zoe! Zoe, we’re here!”
With that same cruel smile as before she turned to them, “Keep your distance…”
They all gasped. Zoe could speak? And, of all voices; in that genderless, atonal one?
“Zoe…!” Harley yelled.
The western child only smirked at their candour. “You all care very much. It’s charming. She slumbers warm, content with the notion, that she might be loved. Such a thing swallows up the fear and makes one free.”
Rawlings turned speculative. “You said ‘she’. ‘She slumbers’. Who are you…?”
“I am Zoe.”
Harley pulled her fists. “I knew something was weird about this! Why don’t you start making sense?!”
“You know I’m not what you love.”
“Oh I’ve had enough of this,” Anneliese lowered her weapon. “If you’re Zoe then you’re coming with us. If you’re NOT Zoe then you’d better tell us where she is or I’m gonna start shooting.”
The Being that appeared to be Zoe turned to the light pillar.
**********
...And that's all that's left. I hope someone enjoyed what little of SCG I could bring them though!
Monday, 22 December 2008
People Who Steal The Breath of You
Ever seen someone so genuinely beautiful that she or he inspires the best in you, artistically speaking? A person so naturally breathtaking that she or he just makes you want to compose; artwork, music, fiction, poetry, song; what have you? For me that person is Rashida Jones. She's the most 'impossibly beautiful' celebrity I've ever seen.Does anyone else have someone who inspires them in such a way? A muse?
On Marvel, Gender & Youth-Aimed Comic Books
WARNING! If you have not read the Young Avengers, New Mutants/New X-Men or the Runaways, and you still plan to do so, this essay will contain spoilers!
Between 2003-5 it's clear to me now that Marvel tried to make a really hard push for new, younger blood into its already vast fanbase. Between those years they launched more than a few new titles (or modern spin-offs of older comic books) aimed at a younger, more affluent base to drum up support and boost sales. It's clear why they did this -- manga and anime. Manga has been dabbling in the Western scene since the eighties, and it saw a small but stable fanbase grow during the 90's, but it wasn't until 2002 onwards that anime and manga really exploded on the Western front. Up until then manga was a cult interest but after the advent of Poke'mon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, it went mainstream.
Marvel seems to have tried dealing with this in a variety of ways, the most obvious being a new interest in bringing superheroes to the cinema screen. We've seen movie adaptations of Spiderman, the X-Men, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Blade (though that started a little earlier), Iron Man and even Ghost Rider. It's clear that shrinking comic sales helped drive this push for more movies and thus far it seems to have been a success. There was something else that they tried which was just as significant however, a stream of comics aimed at newer audiences who were probably more familiar with Poke'mon than they were with The Avengers.
These comics were (at least on their own terms) impressive. Marvel's intent wasn't to just regurgitate older tropes with newer faces, they tried to expand their bases on all fronts by including more women, more people of different ethnicity and... (gasp!) a few gay people too. Most of these new launches didn't gain traction aside from a slight few, three of which will be the focus of this essay, and I'm not going to explain why or how. What I will do is show how they went wrong with a primary angle: gender.
Say what you want about anime. Some of it (I'm pointing a finger at Hentai here) can be downright freakish. Sexism is rampant within it too, if not in the 'gender role' sense then definitely in the 'objectification' sense. If you have ever seen Project A-Ko or Plastic Little then I think you know what I mean. That being said -- there is a persistent depth of spirit in manga. It's just willing to go into more areas than Western comics are. It's more comfortable with female leads, it doesn't ram social morals down your throat as frequently, it isn't as concerned with the happy endings, a lot of it is finite (which is important -- mangas generally end somewhere but comic books like Spiderman are ongoing, which means you constantly have to worry about continuity and it makes it THAT much harder for someone unfamiliar with the series to jump on the bandwagon). Manga has advantages over comics that make it easier to swallow, especially when you want to empathize with heroes a bit more complicated that Superman.
Marvel knew this -- which is why it went out of its way to create newer franchises to pull in consumers like me who grew up with the X-Men yet were being drawn to Ranma 1/2. The problem is that as noble and logical as their goals were, it's clear that the VAST majority of Marvel writers involved in these "teen draw" comic book franchises were not thinking hard enough. Looking back at the best of these works it's obvious that beneath their polished armour of freshness were old flaws and pitfalls that their writers and artists failed to overcome. And surprise, surprise; gender was one of them.
I'm concentrating on three particular comic books of this 'new generation'; The Runaways, The New Mutants/New X-Men, and the Young Avengers. In all frankness I really enjoyed these books. Most of the time anyway. There were bits and pieces I didn't like, obviously, you can't like 100% of anything made by others, but at their core these weren't BAD comics. Far from it. They were BETTER than most people expected. And they could've been even better than they were except for some niggling fallacies that, with a little more thought, could've easily been avoided.
A classic and ridiculously blunt example of this is the portrayal of the female body. Lots of people have talked about this problem in comics with more art and flair than I have, but I'm gonna call this shit out when I see it too. For some reason swathes of comic book artists feel the need to draw women with gigantic breasts. Not just big breasts but balloon-sized, laughable, meaninglessly huge breasts. When you see this on say, Spider-Woman or Sue Storm or Black Cat or what have you, you tend to dismiss it because they originate from a different era. But there is no excuse for it in female super heroines being created now.
Take Laurie Collins from New Mutants/New X-Men. Why on earth would a fifteen-year-old girl be drawn with as big a chest as her middle-aged mother? Bar the creepiness of visually fetishizing a minor like that, it's completely absurd anatomically-speaking. Some of the poses and waist lines these girls are drawn with really make me wonder if their artists have actually seen a WOMAN before, much less a teenage girl. This isn't a problem with every artist -- different people have different styles, as far as the West goes my favourite artist is David Finch, but this problem is pervasive.
I think we can all agree that the traditional fanbase for comics have been 15-30+ males but there are women readers out there too, they're growing in number, I'm pretty sure they don't appreciate this kind of depiction of the female body anymore. It's just fanservice; and with the slight exception of some comic book women in which sexuality is a key narrative asset, like say, Emma Frost, it's completely unnecessary. That's a key difference with manga. In manga fanservice is an exception whereas in Western comics it's an uncontested rule.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't some women out there with naturally large breasts (and yes they need rep too) but you can't have every girl on your team running around with breasts the size of watermelons, especially not when that team is made up of teenagers. It's just plain stupid.
To be fair though, in the case of the Runaways, Marvel gave us a character that didn't have that Greek Goddess type figure that Marvel and DC are so fond of -- Gertrude Yorkes. You could call her the 'Velma' of that group but that would be a disservice to her genius. She's overweight. She's witty. She's insightful. She's cynical. And she develops a relationship with the closest thing The Runaways has to the Jock stereotype, Chase Stein. I respect the fact that Gertrude was given a more realistic figure. Not only was she aware of it but she was PROUD of it. In fact when a future version of her appears before the group Gertrude remarks how 'skinny' her future self is. I respect the fact that no one EVER made a point of suggesting she was any less attractive than any other woman for having a bigger figure. But this leads me to another problem.
During the Runaways comic the group get tangled with a Vampire called 'Topher' who was able to semi-seduce two of the girls, Karolina and Nico, into kissing him. This spell had no effect on the boys (Alex Wilder and Chase) nor Molly Hayes or Gertrude. I can see why it wasn't allowed to work on the boys or Molly. Topher wasn't gay and Molly was portrayed in an infantile, child-like manner which bars her from the realm of sexuality. So why not Gertrude? Why was she unaffected by Topher's charms? There could be a number of reasons. They were never alone together. Gert was too suspicious of him. Topher wasn't attracted to her. Perhaps all of the above. Or -- and I am leaning this way -- was it because Gertrude was portrayed with less gender-based stereotypes than her female teammembers?
The point I'm making is this. In comics, teenage women are constantly portrayed in an emotionally tempestuous way. In the case of romance or love triangles they are ESPECIALLY prone to 'temper tantrums' or seemingly illogical outbursts. In all three comic books there are romantic entanglements in which girl A has feelings for boy A but for some crazy reason girl A can't admit them. Let me drop a few quotes as examples;
"Gee, they're [Billy & Teddy] lucky. No matter what happens at least they have each other. And you have Eli."
(debating whether or not to call the police after seeing a girl murdered by their parents)
That might seem harmless enough. You could even argue that it just builds up the romantic tension. But most of the time there's no real NEED for denial. When two people have a thing for each other in a book, comic, film or TV show, the creators need to drop subtle hints to infer it. That being said, in these particular comic books, there is rarely a contextual need for such frigidity. You can't tell me that women who're prepared to risk their lives in facing off against monsters and supervillians and killer robots are timid to the idea of being emotionally available for no apparent reason.
I want to believe that the writers think having someone deny that they have feelings for someone they clearly have feelings for is romantic. They might've gotten a pass for that if it worked both ways, but it doesn't. In the case of Eli/Patriot of the Young Avengers? He doesn't talk about his attraction to Kate much but not once does he go out of his way to deny it. Same thing with Alex in the Runaways. He knows exactly how he feels about Nico and never does he say otherwise, not even when Nico denies her own feelings right in his face. As a result the impression is left that this 'teasing frigidity' is specific to girls.
The closest thing there is to a male exception in this case is David Alleyn of the New Mutants/New X-Men. After envisioning a grim future world with him as a Machiavellian POTUS and his teammate and love interest Noriko 'Nori' Ashida as his First Lady; David begins ignoring Nori for a period of time. This frustrates Nori until they finally confront each other about it and begin dating. Fair enough. Maybe the whole "running away from your feelings" trope isn't specific to girls in a writer's eyes. Except for one thing. David has a pragmatic reason for doing what he did. He was shaken up by his vision and probably had some lingering worries of it coming true. When you consider the fact that Nori DIES in his vision, you can't blame him for being worried. A bit like what Mamoru did to Usagi in Sailor Moon R. It's still a shitty thing to do but at least there's some palpable (albeit faulty) logic behind it. Thus we have the problem.
A guy never denies his feelings unless there's a valid reason for it but a girl can do so arbitrarily, because it helps make her look 'cute'. That's the thought behind this.
This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't compounded by the fact that almost every kiss in these three comics are initiated by the girl rather than the guy. Nico initiates her first kiss with Alex as does Kate with Eli; and while I think that that's a positive image (women taking charge of the situation) isn't that a little disjointed? A girl acts fuzzy about her crush but doesn't mind kissing the lips off the guy when it counts? Bullshit. And don't tell me it's because they're afraid that their guys won't respond to them. Nico was not blind. She knew how Alex felt about her. As did Kate. And Sofia Mantega.
In sum all of these traits make these heroines look flighty and fickle. And these things aren't there because of who these heroines are, they're there because they're women. It's like like the writers are suggesting that women are so fussy they don't know what they want. It all comes back to this idea that women are, at soul, pure passion, and that no rationality can be had with them.
Other things pop up and stick in your craw too if you look hard enough. I think it's odd that when Nori takes a more commanding role of the New Mutants her relationship with David disintegrates. It's the same with Nico in the Runaways. When she becomes leader the closest thing she has to stable boyfriend is Victor Mancha, but that already shaky pairing collapses. By the reverse, Alex has no problem both loving Nico and commanding the Runaways, nor does David have any trouble co-leading the New Mutants whilst dating Nori. A suggestion seems to be dropped that a woman can't be a leader and have a relationship at the same time while a guy can.
Of all the female characters in these three comic series, Kate Bishop/Hawkeye of the Young Avengers was undoubtedly the best. She was tough, resourceful, intelligent, cunning, sensible, funny, charming and complicated. Once Eli had his blood transfusion she was the only Young Avenger without powers and yet still rocked hard with the best of them. Was she beautiful? You can bet your arse she was. But her beauty wasn't the sum of her image; in fact Kate was so good of a character her sexiness was something of an afterthought. What made her special was her character and spirit, the fact that she could stand up to two incarnations of 'Captain America' (the real deal and her will they/won't they love interest, Eli/Patriot). I imagine that this has more to do with referencing some of the antagonism that the original Hawkeye felt for Cap in the original Avengers comics, but that doesn't change how well it reflects on Kate's character as a whole. Despite how wonderful a heroine Kate is, it's almost ruined by the way Marvel established her fighting abilities. During a conversation with Jessica Jones it's revealed that Kate was attacked by a thug in a park and (arguably) raped. As a result she buries herself in fighting arts so that she can feel, in her own words, less afraid. I'm not sure how I feel about sexual violence being the origin of her power. And fortunately I'm not the only one to see this.
But for all the problems I could point out in these new teen comics (and they aren't limited to gender, let me tell you -- I can see fumbles with sexuality, race and religion in them too) we have to understand that they signify something fundamentally good in that Marvel is trying HARDER. It's easy to criticise something you like because the mistakes stand out more. What really bugs me is how avoidable these discrepancies are if you really try hard enough. That shouldn't discount the charm and success of these comics however. The Young Avengers and Runaways are the two most gay-positive comics I've ever heard of. Many of the heroines depicted in them are tough, complicated, endearing and dare I say it, pretty cool. They're more open to people of colour, not just as team members but also as team leaders. Eli/Patriot of the Young Avengers, Alex Wilder of the Runaways, and David Alleyn of the New Mutants/New X-Men have very few similarities aside from a couple of things; all three are black and all three have been a leader of their respective teams at some point.
I'm dismayed that these younger-aimed projects seemed to have fizzled out, at the very least the Runaways was successful, won both a Harvey and an Eisner award, snagged Joss Whedon as a guest writer, and there's talk of a film adaptation. Marvel seems to be devoting itself to large-scale crossovers right now (House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc). They had a good thing going and I'd like to see more of it. But if they want to keep abreast of the newer crowds these little mistakes can't keep happening. Keep trying, Marvel! You're winning me over again, slowly but surely.
Between 2003-5 it's clear to me now that Marvel tried to make a really hard push for new, younger blood into its already vast fanbase. Between those years they launched more than a few new titles (or modern spin-offs of older comic books) aimed at a younger, more affluent base to drum up support and boost sales. It's clear why they did this -- manga and anime. Manga has been dabbling in the Western scene since the eighties, and it saw a small but stable fanbase grow during the 90's, but it wasn't until 2002 onwards that anime and manga really exploded on the Western front. Up until then manga was a cult interest but after the advent of Poke'mon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, it went mainstream.Marvel seems to have tried dealing with this in a variety of ways, the most obvious being a new interest in bringing superheroes to the cinema screen. We've seen movie adaptations of Spiderman, the X-Men, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Blade (though that started a little earlier), Iron Man and even Ghost Rider. It's clear that shrinking comic sales helped drive this push for more movies and thus far it seems to have been a success. There was something else that they tried which was just as significant however, a stream of comics aimed at newer audiences who were probably more familiar with Poke'mon than they were with The Avengers.
These comics were (at least on their own terms) impressive. Marvel's intent wasn't to just regurgitate older tropes with newer faces, they tried to expand their bases on all fronts by including more women, more people of different ethnicity and... (gasp!) a few gay people too. Most of these new launches didn't gain traction aside from a slight few, three of which will be the focus of this essay, and I'm not going to explain why or how. What I will do is show how they went wrong with a primary angle: gender.
Say what you want about anime. Some of it (I'm pointing a finger at Hentai here) can be downright freakish. Sexism is rampant within it too, if not in the 'gender role' sense then definitely in the 'objectification' sense. If you have ever seen Project A-Ko or Plastic Little then I think you know what I mean. That being said -- there is a persistent depth of spirit in manga. It's just willing to go into more areas than Western comics are. It's more comfortable with female leads, it doesn't ram social morals down your throat as frequently, it isn't as concerned with the happy endings, a lot of it is finite (which is important -- mangas generally end somewhere but comic books like Spiderman are ongoing, which means you constantly have to worry about continuity and it makes it THAT much harder for someone unfamiliar with the series to jump on the bandwagon). Manga has advantages over comics that make it easier to swallow, especially when you want to empathize with heroes a bit more complicated that Superman.
Marvel knew this -- which is why it went out of its way to create newer franchises to pull in consumers like me who grew up with the X-Men yet were being drawn to Ranma 1/2. The problem is that as noble and logical as their goals were, it's clear that the VAST majority of Marvel writers involved in these "teen draw" comic book franchises were not thinking hard enough. Looking back at the best of these works it's obvious that beneath their polished armour of freshness were old flaws and pitfalls that their writers and artists failed to overcome. And surprise, surprise; gender was one of them.
I'm concentrating on three particular comic books of this 'new generation'; The Runaways, The New Mutants/New X-Men, and the Young Avengers. In all frankness I really enjoyed these books. Most of the time anyway. There were bits and pieces I didn't like, obviously, you can't like 100% of anything made by others, but at their core these weren't BAD comics. Far from it. They were BETTER than most people expected. And they could've been even better than they were except for some niggling fallacies that, with a little more thought, could've easily been avoided.
A classic and ridiculously blunt example of this is the portrayal of the female body. Lots of people have talked about this problem in comics with more art and flair than I have, but I'm gonna call this shit out when I see it too. For some reason swathes of comic book artists feel the need to draw women with gigantic breasts. Not just big breasts but balloon-sized, laughable, meaninglessly huge breasts. When you see this on say, Spider-Woman or Sue Storm or Black Cat or what have you, you tend to dismiss it because they originate from a different era. But there is no excuse for it in female super heroines being created now.
Take Laurie Collins from New Mutants/New X-Men. Why on earth would a fifteen-year-old girl be drawn with as big a chest as her middle-aged mother? Bar the creepiness of visually fetishizing a minor like that, it's completely absurd anatomically-speaking. Some of the poses and waist lines these girls are drawn with really make me wonder if their artists have actually seen a WOMAN before, much less a teenage girl. This isn't a problem with every artist -- different people have different styles, as far as the West goes my favourite artist is David Finch, but this problem is pervasive.I think we can all agree that the traditional fanbase for comics have been 15-30+ males but there are women readers out there too, they're growing in number, I'm pretty sure they don't appreciate this kind of depiction of the female body anymore. It's just fanservice; and with the slight exception of some comic book women in which sexuality is a key narrative asset, like say, Emma Frost, it's completely unnecessary. That's a key difference with manga. In manga fanservice is an exception whereas in Western comics it's an uncontested rule.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't some women out there with naturally large breasts (and yes they need rep too) but you can't have every girl on your team running around with breasts the size of watermelons, especially not when that team is made up of teenagers. It's just plain stupid.
To be fair though, in the case of the Runaways, Marvel gave us a character that didn't have that Greek Goddess type figure that Marvel and DC are so fond of -- Gertrude Yorkes. You could call her the 'Velma' of that group but that would be a disservice to her genius. She's overweight. She's witty. She's insightful. She's cynical. And she develops a relationship with the closest thing The Runaways has to the Jock stereotype, Chase Stein. I respect the fact that Gertrude was given a more realistic figure. Not only was she aware of it but she was PROUD of it. In fact when a future version of her appears before the group Gertrude remarks how 'skinny' her future self is. I respect the fact that no one EVER made a point of suggesting she was any less attractive than any other woman for having a bigger figure. But this leads me to another problem.
During the Runaways comic the group get tangled with a Vampire called 'Topher' who was able to semi-seduce two of the girls, Karolina and Nico, into kissing him. This spell had no effect on the boys (Alex Wilder and Chase) nor Molly Hayes or Gertrude. I can see why it wasn't allowed to work on the boys or Molly. Topher wasn't gay and Molly was portrayed in an infantile, child-like manner which bars her from the realm of sexuality. So why not Gertrude? Why was she unaffected by Topher's charms? There could be a number of reasons. They were never alone together. Gert was too suspicious of him. Topher wasn't attracted to her. Perhaps all of the above. Or -- and I am leaning this way -- was it because Gertrude was portrayed with less gender-based stereotypes than her female teammembers?
The point I'm making is this. In comics, teenage women are constantly portrayed in an emotionally tempestuous way. In the case of romance or love triangles they are ESPECIALLY prone to 'temper tantrums' or seemingly illogical outbursts. In all three comic books there are romantic entanglements in which girl A has feelings for boy A but for some crazy reason girl A can't admit them. Let me drop a few quotes as examples;
"Gee, they're [Billy & Teddy] lucky. No matter what happens at least they have each other. And you have Eli."
"What?!?"
"I'm just saying..."
"I do NOT have Eli. All we do is fight..."
- (Cassie Lang/Stature and Kate Bishop/Hawkeye)
(debating whether or not to call the police after seeing a girl murdered by their parents)
"So I guess I say... make the call."
"Weak! You're just voting that way 'cause you wanna suck face with Alex.""I do not!"
- (Nico Minoru & Chase Stein)
That might seem harmless enough. You could even argue that it just builds up the romantic tension. But most of the time there's no real NEED for denial. When two people have a thing for each other in a book, comic, film or TV show, the creators need to drop subtle hints to infer it. That being said, in these particular comic books, there is rarely a contextual need for such frigidity. You can't tell me that women who're prepared to risk their lives in facing off against monsters and supervillians and killer robots are timid to the idea of being emotionally available for no apparent reason.
I want to believe that the writers think having someone deny that they have feelings for someone they clearly have feelings for is romantic. They might've gotten a pass for that if it worked both ways, but it doesn't. In the case of Eli/Patriot of the Young Avengers? He doesn't talk about his attraction to Kate much but not once does he go out of his way to deny it. Same thing with Alex in the Runaways. He knows exactly how he feels about Nico and never does he say otherwise, not even when Nico denies her own feelings right in his face. As a result the impression is left that this 'teasing frigidity' is specific to girls.
The closest thing there is to a male exception in this case is David Alleyn of the New Mutants/New X-Men. After envisioning a grim future world with him as a Machiavellian POTUS and his teammate and love interest Noriko 'Nori' Ashida as his First Lady; David begins ignoring Nori for a period of time. This frustrates Nori until they finally confront each other about it and begin dating. Fair enough. Maybe the whole "running away from your feelings" trope isn't specific to girls in a writer's eyes. Except for one thing. David has a pragmatic reason for doing what he did. He was shaken up by his vision and probably had some lingering worries of it coming true. When you consider the fact that Nori DIES in his vision, you can't blame him for being worried. A bit like what Mamoru did to Usagi in Sailor Moon R. It's still a shitty thing to do but at least there's some palpable (albeit faulty) logic behind it. Thus we have the problem.
A guy never denies his feelings unless there's a valid reason for it but a girl can do so arbitrarily, because it helps make her look 'cute'. That's the thought behind this.
This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't compounded by the fact that almost every kiss in these three comics are initiated by the girl rather than the guy. Nico initiates her first kiss with Alex as does Kate with Eli; and while I think that that's a positive image (women taking charge of the situation) isn't that a little disjointed? A girl acts fuzzy about her crush but doesn't mind kissing the lips off the guy when it counts? Bullshit. And don't tell me it's because they're afraid that their guys won't respond to them. Nico was not blind. She knew how Alex felt about her. As did Kate. And Sofia Mantega.
In sum all of these traits make these heroines look flighty and fickle. And these things aren't there because of who these heroines are, they're there because they're women. It's like like the writers are suggesting that women are so fussy they don't know what they want. It all comes back to this idea that women are, at soul, pure passion, and that no rationality can be had with them.
Other things pop up and stick in your craw too if you look hard enough. I think it's odd that when Nori takes a more commanding role of the New Mutants her relationship with David disintegrates. It's the same with Nico in the Runaways. When she becomes leader the closest thing she has to stable boyfriend is Victor Mancha, but that already shaky pairing collapses. By the reverse, Alex has no problem both loving Nico and commanding the Runaways, nor does David have any trouble co-leading the New Mutants whilst dating Nori. A suggestion seems to be dropped that a woman can't be a leader and have a relationship at the same time while a guy can.
Of all the female characters in these three comic series, Kate Bishop/Hawkeye of the Young Avengers was undoubtedly the best. She was tough, resourceful, intelligent, cunning, sensible, funny, charming and complicated. Once Eli had his blood transfusion she was the only Young Avenger without powers and yet still rocked hard with the best of them. Was she beautiful? You can bet your arse she was. But her beauty wasn't the sum of her image; in fact Kate was so good of a character her sexiness was something of an afterthought. What made her special was her character and spirit, the fact that she could stand up to two incarnations of 'Captain America' (the real deal and her will they/won't they love interest, Eli/Patriot). I imagine that this has more to do with referencing some of the antagonism that the original Hawkeye felt for Cap in the original Avengers comics, but that doesn't change how well it reflects on Kate's character as a whole. Despite how wonderful a heroine Kate is, it's almost ruined by the way Marvel established her fighting abilities. During a conversation with Jessica Jones it's revealed that Kate was attacked by a thug in a park and (arguably) raped. As a result she buries herself in fighting arts so that she can feel, in her own words, less afraid. I'm not sure how I feel about sexual violence being the origin of her power. And fortunately I'm not the only one to see this.
But for all the problems I could point out in these new teen comics (and they aren't limited to gender, let me tell you -- I can see fumbles with sexuality, race and religion in them too) we have to understand that they signify something fundamentally good in that Marvel is trying HARDER. It's easy to criticise something you like because the mistakes stand out more. What really bugs me is how avoidable these discrepancies are if you really try hard enough. That shouldn't discount the charm and success of these comics however. The Young Avengers and Runaways are the two most gay-positive comics I've ever heard of. Many of the heroines depicted in them are tough, complicated, endearing and dare I say it, pretty cool. They're more open to people of colour, not just as team members but also as team leaders. Eli/Patriot of the Young Avengers, Alex Wilder of the Runaways, and David Alleyn of the New Mutants/New X-Men have very few similarities aside from a couple of things; all three are black and all three have been a leader of their respective teams at some point.
I'm dismayed that these younger-aimed projects seemed to have fizzled out, at the very least the Runaways was successful, won both a Harvey and an Eisner award, snagged Joss Whedon as a guest writer, and there's talk of a film adaptation. Marvel seems to be devoting itself to large-scale crossovers right now (House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc). They had a good thing going and I'd like to see more of it. But if they want to keep abreast of the newer crowds these little mistakes can't keep happening. Keep trying, Marvel! You're winning me over again, slowly but surely.
Sunday, 21 December 2008
Song of the Week: "Fear The Voices"
What's good, folks?
It's that time of the week again, people. Yup! Song of the Week. This time it's 'Fear the Voices' by Alice in Chains.
When it comes to rock music, I find that lyrical styles tend to fall into two particular camps; the 'metaphysical' kind and the 'empirical' kind. Metaphysical rock lyrics use symbolism and generalizations to invoke feeling and reflection. Sometimes it's genuinely substantive (as in the case of Helmet) and other times it comes off as jumbled nonsense. Empirical rock lyrics on the other hand are specific, sharp, and sociologically aligned. That was one of the traits I loved most about The Offspring. They were unambiguous. When Dexter Holland sung about violence (Keep 'em Separated) or suicide (I Choose) or destructive relationships (Dirty Magic, Me & My Old Lady) you were never in the dark about it.
For me, Alice in Chains was one of the few bands to manipulate both, not just in terms of the lyrics but also in the mood and tenor of their work. The reoccurring theme of AIC was drug abuse -- the beauty of it, the sadness of it, the horror of it, the ridiculousness of it -- but by tapping into that empirical/social issue they displayed a self-aware sense of despair and life-to-death wisdom that has metaphysical resonance with everyone. In many ways they were truly an existential band.
Alice in Chains definitely ranks as one of my top three music acts (alongside Helmet and System of a Down) and I really believe that they were the most underrated band of the nineties. Grunge music has been dead for well over fourteen years now and STILL I'm in love with this sound. How's that for immortality? So here's one of their songs, 'Fear the Voices', for ya.
It's that time of the week again, people. Yup! Song of the Week. This time it's 'Fear the Voices' by Alice in Chains.
When it comes to rock music, I find that lyrical styles tend to fall into two particular camps; the 'metaphysical' kind and the 'empirical' kind. Metaphysical rock lyrics use symbolism and generalizations to invoke feeling and reflection. Sometimes it's genuinely substantive (as in the case of Helmet) and other times it comes off as jumbled nonsense. Empirical rock lyrics on the other hand are specific, sharp, and sociologically aligned. That was one of the traits I loved most about The Offspring. They were unambiguous. When Dexter Holland sung about violence (Keep 'em Separated) or suicide (I Choose) or destructive relationships (Dirty Magic, Me & My Old Lady) you were never in the dark about it.
For me, Alice in Chains was one of the few bands to manipulate both, not just in terms of the lyrics but also in the mood and tenor of their work. The reoccurring theme of AIC was drug abuse -- the beauty of it, the sadness of it, the horror of it, the ridiculousness of it -- but by tapping into that empirical/social issue they displayed a self-aware sense of despair and life-to-death wisdom that has metaphysical resonance with everyone. In many ways they were truly an existential band.
Alice in Chains definitely ranks as one of my top three music acts (alongside Helmet and System of a Down) and I really believe that they were the most underrated band of the nineties. Grunge music has been dead for well over fourteen years now and STILL I'm in love with this sound. How's that for immortality? So here's one of their songs, 'Fear the Voices', for ya.
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Smells Like Sapphic Spirit, Chapter Five
Many greetings, everybody.
I have a new chapter for Smells Like Sapphic Spirit for you. If you've been following this story than you really need to thank Operculum for her support. I promised myself that I was going to update it before Christmas and I'm glad that I did. After this I'm going to start writing My Ice Creamy Kiss 2 (which I seem to be getting new ideas for everyday).
Enjoy the chapter!
http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=544197474&chapter=5
I have a new chapter for Smells Like Sapphic Spirit for you. If you've been following this story than you really need to thank Operculum for her support. I promised myself that I was going to update it before Christmas and I'm glad that I did. After this I'm going to start writing My Ice Creamy Kiss 2 (which I seem to be getting new ideas for everyday).
Enjoy the chapter!
http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=544197474&chapter=5
Friday, 19 December 2008
An Odd Experience
...Something weird happened to me today and it happened about three hours before I wrote this so if my words seem jumbled you'll know why. Okay here's what happened. Every Friday I take my free day from university and do volunteer work. It was while I was on my way back from that that I stopped to get a bus. Anyway, while I was waiting for my bus I saw a pigeon get run over by a car. I saw it happen with my own eyes. There was no blood and the bird wasn't killed, but there were feathers everywhere -- from the angle in was standing in I can only assume that one of its wings had been run over. It was a pretty awful sight, let me tell you, but thankfully I saw the pigeon hobble off the road onto the pavement, where it settled near the plot of a tree. My bus came about three minutes or so after that.
I couldn't stop thinking about it on the way home. On the one hand, it seemed kind of trivial. Birds get run over all the time, right? Then on the other hand I couldn't help but feel angry at the person who ran over that bird (I didn't get a good look at him/her but he/she drove a Fiat). Then it dawned on me -- I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat and I like it. That kind of thing happened to all the chickens and ducks that I've ever eaten in my life. Next week I'm gonna be sitting down to a meal with my family with a dead turkey as the main course.
It got me thinking (as lots of things usually do) am I a hypocrite for this? You know it reminds me of an episode of Frasier where he, Niles and Martin are up in a cabin and Martin goads Frasier into duck hunting with him. Frasier protests that it's 'barbaric' and Martin counters by making a very valid point; "You can eat it but you won't kill it."
I wonder right now -- what business do I have bitching about some arsehole running over an animal when I regularly eat meat? Is that nonsensical or has anyone else wondered about this? One thing I love about philosophy is that it helped me recognize some of the contradictions in life. This is one I'm trying to figure out.
I couldn't stop thinking about it on the way home. On the one hand, it seemed kind of trivial. Birds get run over all the time, right? Then on the other hand I couldn't help but feel angry at the person who ran over that bird (I didn't get a good look at him/her but he/she drove a Fiat). Then it dawned on me -- I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat and I like it. That kind of thing happened to all the chickens and ducks that I've ever eaten in my life. Next week I'm gonna be sitting down to a meal with my family with a dead turkey as the main course.
It got me thinking (as lots of things usually do) am I a hypocrite for this? You know it reminds me of an episode of Frasier where he, Niles and Martin are up in a cabin and Martin goads Frasier into duck hunting with him. Frasier protests that it's 'barbaric' and Martin counters by making a very valid point; "You can eat it but you won't kill it."
I wonder right now -- what business do I have bitching about some arsehole running over an animal when I regularly eat meat? Is that nonsensical or has anyone else wondered about this? One thing I love about philosophy is that it helped me recognize some of the contradictions in life. This is one I'm trying to figure out.
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
The New Character for My Ice Creamy Kiss 2...
...is going to be Bethany. Many thanks to everyone who offered me their suggestions, Wild Cat and Luthien especially, but I'm going with Bethany, because of all the characters suggested I think she best fits the climate of the story right now. That being said, I liked the others a great deal, so is it okay if I use still them in My Ice Creamy Kiss 3 (when I get around around to it)? It occurs to me that I can't jam even half the stuff I wanna write for Kim, Adrienne and Bethany into a single sequel so a third will have to be done -- and that's where I plan to expand the roster a bit. If it's still okay for me to use your characters in the future, please tell me so, I'd be grateful.
Oh, and on a side note, the person who suggested Bethany to me? You didn't leave your name so I could thank ya! ^_^
Oh, and on a side note, the person who suggested Bethany to me? You didn't leave your name so I could thank ya! ^_^
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Single Cell Geosphere, Chapter Three
**********
Chapter Three: Little Dakota
**********
A journey to Gastellum would not be easy. From Dolley it took a few thousand miles of territory to cross over the Sand Continent’s East Half and make it to the more prosperous West, and one could only think of making most of that large journey by sand craft. This was because the East-Half and the West-Half were separated by a gigantic ocean of sea-like sand called the Desert Sargasso. The entire sand sea consisted of quicksand -- therefore it was impossible to cover the Sargasso on foot. They needed a sand craft for the trip because there was no other affordable means of transportation.
Since Stokely’s one had been wrecked there was no way to use it and besides, Rawlings was a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of returning to the crash site. One Dark Sentry had escaped from Dolley and if he was likely to start the pursuit of them anywhere it was there. So the next best thing was to find a new one.
Sand crafts were not cheap. Even your average model could cost as much as 4000 credits. Between them the group had very little money (all of Rawlings’ credits had been taken from him and Harley & Anneliese had the 900 credit pay-off of the previous job, Zoe, being a kid, had nothing either) but Harley simply ruminated on there being somewhere in the east that sold a sand craft within their price range. Anneliese, ever the well of rustic knowledge, pondered a while on where they aught to go to get one. It soon occurred to her that they needed to find a settlement with a large trading community where travel across the Desert Sargasso was commonplace.
The only town that big, and within walking distance, was Blue Dusk City. It was a fairly large mining town northeast that sent sand crafts to the Desert Sargasso’s east coast. An offshore string of underground orichalcum mines lay there that the local communities relied on as a primary export to the west. Blue Dusk City had a cyclical migrant pattern in which every winter (when the Desert Sargasso’s climate was at its coldest) the miners would extract metal from the ore and ship it back to Blue Dusk City, where from there it would be sold to merchants who would in turn sell the shipment across the Sargasso in the West-Half. It was the closing stages of winter now, which meant most of those miners were setting up shop to return home. If there was anywhere where people were likely to sell cheap sand crafts it was at Blue Dusk City.
So after Rawlings purchased some supplies with their funds, the party set off for it.
What should have been a two-day walk actually took a week to execute and largely for one reason; Zoe. Like before she just wasn’t fit for by the foot travel. Every so often she needed a break and some water to cool herself down, and the others were often left waiting for her in the mean time, idly pouring sand grains out of their shoes or throwing rocks at squawking vultures. Though the constant stopping and started pissed Anneliese off to no end it was enough for her to have Harley give her one of those warm, “cool it down” looks. No one else in the world could pacify her so.
In that long week they trekked across the East like pioneers of old, climbing up stone hillocks, wading through dunes, marching in the baking sun. If they passed by a village with an inn they spent the night there but they only happed by one or two throughout the week. Most of the time they camped out under the stars or if they were very lucky, in a hospitable cave.
By the time Blue Dusk City peaked in the horizon they were about due for some civilization. Their food supply was running a bit low at the time so not a single one of the four resented the sight of their first restaurant in days. Blue Dusk City was and always had been one of the bigger towns in the East-Half. To larger cities like Gastellum and the former Re’em it was a comparatively teenaged settlement, it was one of the few towns in the East whose populace has stayed largely afloat from the economic decline. Unlike other small municipalities Blue Dusk City was financially upheld by mining, a trade which had suffered a slight downturn in the East (due to the implicit lack of demand for orichalcum) but its exports were a hot commodity in the technologically-developed Western communities.
It’s no secret or wonder that Blue Dusk City was one of the first Eastern settlements to be attacked by the Western Regular Forces during the war.
Everyone was pleased when they finally found themselves walking through the busy streets of Blue Dusk. In place of dunes and stone knolls there were pubs, steakhouses, theatres, libraries, gun shops, hotels, boutiques and more besides. Blue Dusk was built to cater to a population of 6000 and it didn’t disappoint. Both Harley, and strangely enough Zoe, were positively brimming with excitement over all that there was to see.
“This place is amazing!” Harley said giddily. “Where should we go first?”
Anneliese, hands shoved into her trenchcoat pockets, sighed. “Don’t have an orgasm, we’re not spending more than a day here. All we need to do is find a hotel to stay at then look for a reasonable sand craft dealership. If all goes well by this time tomorrow we’ll be on our way to the Sargasso.”
“Do you know of any hotels here, Anneliese?” Asked Rawlings.
She shook her head ‘no’. “Sorry. I’ve never been here before. I just know about it from a tip we were told of by a regular of ours on the Duggan Plateau.”
Then Harley spotted something in the distance, and pointed it out. “Why don’t we use that?”
It was a roadside signpost with a plywood map of the district nailed to it. It displayed this dirt path as the nexus of a series of streets enamoured with commercial establishments. Together, Harley, Anneliese and Rawlings studied the map until it told them of an Inn or hotel they could use.
Rawlings was the first to find one. “Look. According to this map there is a bed and breakfast down the street. It seems to be the only one nearby.”
“Okay then. Lets go,” Said Anneliese.
Harley shot her arm up. “Wait a second.”
“What is it?”
“The map says there’s a big market three streets down. I wanna go there first.”
The gunwoman balked. “Are you kidding me? We’re not on vacation, we’re on a job here!"
What was Harley’s answer to Anneliese’s scepticism? Nothing but to resort to her inner childishness. Harley took her by the hand and gazed up at the cantankerous Anneliese with innocent puppy-dog eyes. “Can I go, Annie? Please?”
“Fine," She relented. “But I’m arraigning the rooms now so you do what you like.”
Harley hugged her warmly, mashing their cheeks together. “Thank you, Anneliese! Zoe, Rawlings? Lets go. Anneliese will get us a few rooms, won’t you?”
Rolling her eyes she quipped, “Yeah, sure” before heading off down the road on her own. It was the only way it could’ve worked anyway. Harley wanted to go and Zoe and Rawlings wouldn’t be parting company any time soon. So the three of them headed off down the street and followed the directions as had displayed to them by the street side map until they came to the ‘big market’ in question, the Moonflower Bazaar.
Blue Dusk City wasn’t considered a merchant town but many merchants did pass through it on their way to the east coast of the Sargasso, so they often stopped here to trade for orichalcum and other precious minerals. Since the war had completely devastated the Eastern economy many of these traders turned their attentions to the West, and often they settled in towns like these (that experienced semi-regular travel to the Sargasso). A small merchant community had been established here since the armistice and the Moonflower Bazaar was a result of that, although principally dominated by Klajkukan traders.
The Klajkukans were a theistic race of fox-eared, fox-tailed humanoids who originally populated the eastern half of the Sand Continent more than 5000 years ago. As the earliest known race of the Sand Continent (and thus the first to be exposed to its rapid desertification) the arid heat had bronzed their skin into a lush honey colour. However human migration and colonization of East had pushed most of the ancient Klajkukan tribes into the vast mountain ranges of the northeast. Those who remained abandoned their belief systems and cohabited with an insurgent human populace in the lowland. Most Klajkukans living amongst the general populace were traders, merchants and bankers; as they tended to belong to the Transcontinental Klajkukan Guild, a lucrative coalition of merchant families adapted from the ancient tribal systems of their ancestors.
The Moonflower Bazaar was a reflection of their power, as an abundance of goods from every culture and corner of the world were gathered into one cobblestone marketplace. Under the beige carpet roofing of each stall was a vendor (most of them Klajkukan but a few human ones too) who sold everything from headless chickens and ceramics to bridal gowns and new model Blasterscythes. It seemed like there was nothing you couldn’t get here.
“Wow…” Harley said, admiring a nearby set of ornamental tea cups. “There’s so much to buy…”
While she and Zoe gawped at everything the older Rawlings kept a watchful eye on the traders. “It is impressive but do not let your eye deceive you. The Guild has a furtive shadow to it.”
“What does that mean?” Asked Harley.
Rawlings heaved a sigh. “…It’s a long story.”
“Then keep it to yourself and stop being such a sourpuss. You’re as bad as Anneliese. Look at how pretty this crockery is. Then again, you are from the West, so I guess you see cute things like this all the time, don’t you?”
“The West isn’t nearly as idyllic as you and Anneliese seem to think. Environmental degradation is taking place everywhere, and wherever it goes it brings tragedy with it.”
Harley and Zoe were already at another stall when she replied. “Okay, whatever you say… oh, look at that necklace, it’s gorgeous!”
“Harley, are you listening to m-”
“Look at it, guy, look at it!”
Rawlings pushed his slipped spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and took a gander. It was a lengthy gold chained pendant from an encased jade gemstone dangling from it. Along with the other bits of jewellery surrounding it, the necklace sparkled brightly in the scorching hot sun.
Our blonde boxer was in awe of it. “Whoa. It’s so beautiful. You know, I saw a picture of my mother once, and she had a pendant just like it. Hey Zoe, does your mother wear jewellery like this?”
The colour drained out of the little girl’s face. Her head twisted to hers, shocked, and a confused Harley immediately saw pain and sadness in her eyes so deep it could’ve killed her on the spot. There were no words for how bad it made Harley feel seeing that melancholy, even worse to have caused it, and worse still when the tearful child ran away.
“Zoe!” Shouted Rawlings.
Harley and Rawlings chased after her when she didn’t stop. Her brown tresses and fluffy dress fluttered about her while running through the turns and twists of the bazaar, crying soundlessly amid the oblivious commerce, until she finally stopped in the sandy alleyway of an alehouse. Harley and Rawlings quickly dashed in after her and found Zoe huddled up in the corner crying silent sobs.
“Zoe,” said her guardian. “It’s okay… it’s okay…”
Through dampened eyelashes she saw him approach. She seemed to know that she was safe with him because as soon as Rawlings came to her side Zoe threw herself in his arms. Harley watched the crouched pair hug at a distance. What on earth did she say to make the kid react like that?
“Is… she okay?”
Rawlings heaved another sigh. “Yes, she’s fine. Just… in the future, please try not to mention that word around her, alright?”
“What word?”
“The M-word,” he told her.
**********
That night the four of them gathered in the bed and breakfast that Rawlings had spotted. It was a quite modest little establishment called the Iron Back Dog and its patrons were people not unlike Harley and Anneliese, travellers and vagrants with no fixed home, passing through Blue Dusk City on their way to or from the Sargasso. It could house about twenty people at any one time at its peak. To conserve as money as possible Anneliese bought them all two rooms, one for Zoe and Rawlings, the other for she and Harley. Because of this the costs of the night were low, only 70 credits between the four of them.
At the moment Harley and Rawlings sat together around a circular plastic table in his room. Between them was a checkerboard with a few red pieces on Harley’s side and a few black ones on Rawlings’. Outside the cosily decorated room was Zoe, who sat on the balcony admiring a wonderful moonlight view of the city. Anneliese was the only one who wasn’t here now. They had had no luck finding an affordable sand craft throughout the day so she went back out to follow a tip they’d gotten a few hours earlier from a fellow traveller, so to pass the time Harley and Rawlings played checkers.
“It’s getting late,” Said Rawlings, ruminating about his next move. “I hope Anneliese comes back soon.”
Harley pushed a piece into an unoccupied upper left square. “She can handle herself.”
“Aren’t you worried about her? The two of you seem to be rather close.”
“Me? Worried about Annie? Nah, she’s too dunderheaded and hawkish for that. Most of the time she’s the one whose busy worrying about me.
Rawlings pulled back one of his two king pieces and asked, “Do you love her?”
“W-wha?!” Blood and its heat rushed to Harley’s face before she stopped and studied the board. An apple-cheeked Rawlings was only three moves away from triple-jumping her. “Oh nice try, jerk, trying to confuse me like that. I should kick your ass.”
He chuckled. “My apologies. Might we forgo the ass-beating?”
“I’ll settle for victory on the game board,” with her next move she avoided the potential ensnarement and captured the second of Rawlings’ kings with one of her advancing reds.
“Checkmate.”
“Wrong game. And for the record? I’m short-sighted not blind.”
Harley stared at him while taking his two pieces off the board. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I know love when I see it. I don’t think it’s anything to be embarrassed about either. Falling in love is a human privilege not a human right, and if you ever do, you should make the most of it.”
“You’re pretty earnest, west-half.”
Rawlings moved another black piece toward Harley’s end of the board. “We scholars tend to be.”
“And what do you ‘scholars’ think about a woman hot for another woman?”
“The academic world, when left to its own devices, can be a bastion of liberalism. Of course some bigotry slips through the cracks every now and again, I can attest to that, but we don’t commonly frown upon eastern sexual practices. The West-Half isn’t nearly as prudish as the East-Half makes it out to be.”
Harley moved one of her pieces out of her rearmost line, capturing the black piece that Rawlings had just advanced towards it. But while doing that she smile nostalgically, thinking of Anneliese. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“Is that so?” He speculated, eyeballing his next move.
“Yeah. My Daddy is Garland Brangwin, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he was a great war hero, all the way up there with Xenogenes. When he came back wounded from the Re’em Uprising he brought Anneliese with him. I was only three at the time and she was eight so I don’t remember those days very well, but for as long as I can recall I’ve wanted to be near her. I think my Daddy wanted her to be like a sister to me… but it didn’t work out like that. When I see her sometimes its like all I wanna do is shove my tongue down her throat.”
Rawlings blushed.
“Sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“N-no, no it’s fine. So, have you ever told her that?”
Harley shrugged. “Of course I have. She just buffs me out.”
“Have you ever told her that without the sexual innuendo?”
“In-you-what?”
“…Never mind,” He pushed his piece into the rear space that Harley previously freed up. “King me.”
Harley reluctantly took of her captured black pieces and put it on top of his latest shuffled piece to crown it. “You are a jerk, using all this love talk to distract me from the game. Is that what they teach you in those fancy western schools? If you talk about sex to an easterner she’ll turn into a dope?”
“Are we talking about love or sex?” Rawlings asked, moving his new king backward.
“Well, they say ‘you can have one without the other but it’s always best to have both’, don’t they?”
That made Rawlings grin. “Humph. “The Macabre Countenance of Freedom“, chapter seven, paragraph two.”
“Yeah, it’s a good book,” Harley moved one of her reds forward. Then she got curious when Rawlings wouldn’t stop giggling to himself. “What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing. I’m just reminded of my wife, that’s all.” He said, pulling his king back again.
“Your wife, huh?”
Then he went into his pocket. “Look here, I have a picture of her. Here you go. It was taken nine years ago.”
Rawlings handed over a photograph that Harley took and admired. It was of a group of people, about seventeen or so, and they stood in front of the hollowed out opening of a geode (the summit of which had a dusty plaque fixed into its rock exhibiting the word ‘Vaecerpher’). The people in the picture were split into two rows and the one occupying the back contained unremarkable faces in lab coats and digging gear, clearly they were just scientists, clerical assistants and manual workers. It was the line in front that held the attention. Six people stood in front of it. Two of them Harley already knew, one of them was Wayland and the other was Rawlings himself, albeit much younger versions of the two. Standing next to Rawlings was a beautiful Klajkukan girl, standing next to her crossed arms was a gruff-looking Regular Army soldier with a sharp halberd and a snub-nose shotgun crossed over his back. Next to him was the more friendly face of a young dark-haired male scientist, and next to him was someone more eye-catching. Another scientist, this time a woman, and she was quite beautiful, especially with her ponytail of chestnut hair thrown over her shoulder, but she had a creepy look on her face -- emphasized by a dirty smile -- that made Harley feel uncomfortable.
“Which one is your wife?” She asked.
He pointed out the pretty Klajkukan woman. “Her. Faeleem Rawlings.”
“Oh,” then a light bulb flashed on. “Wait a minute! She’s your wife? But isn’t Zoe your daughter? Or is she adopted?”
“No, she’s… more like a friend.”
That was odd. Here they had been travelling for a week together and yet she didn’t even know that Rawlings wasn’t Zoe’s father. It made her wonder what they were doing out here in the East together but it didn’t escape her that they were on the run from something. The door clicked open then. Harley and Rawlings glanced up when Anneliese came inside with another of her mood-dampening frowns.
“How did it go?” Asked Harley.
She spat. “Damned terrible. The cheapest sand craft I could find was 1800 credits.”
“How much money do we have left?”
“Deducting the cost of this room I’d guess 550.”
Harley sagged. “We’re screwed.”
Rawlings was busy rubbing his ring when she said it and a thought came to his mind. Though he was the kind of person that hated abandoning something whilst in the middle of it, he walked around the checker table and approached Anneliese.
“I have an idea.” He said, somewhat dourly.
Anneliese stared at him. “Oh you do, do you? You mind telling me how you could possibly raise over a thousand credits in one night?”
“…Trust me. Where did you say the dealership was?”
She didn’t have much of a choice.
That night Harley went to bed early. She didn’t know why she did but she did. Maybe it was the inclusiveness of the game. Whatever it was it didn’t matter because morning hit faster than she thought it could. Anneliese was already up by then (she was a light sleeper) with her guns disassembled across a cotton blanket on the foot of her bed. She didn’t like to be interrupted while cleaning her weapons so Harley padded out into the bathroom compartment for a shower. It was when she came back that Rawlings and Zoe entered.
“Get your stuff together, you two,” said the scholar. “I have a sand craft.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Harley said in disbelief.
Though he was telling the truth his smile was far from triumphant. “No. Come and see.”
So Anneliese reassembled her firearms while Harley got dressed and once finished, followed Rawlings from the Iron Back Dog to a paddock way across town to its eastern edge. The enclosure was one of hundreds lined across the rim of huge stone platform that curved down into a series of sandstone welts leading out east to surrounding desert dunes. It was a launching ramp for sand crafts and Rawlings brought them to one of the craft paddocks lingering there in the morning heat. The name on its wire gate said “Little Dakota”. When they approached it Rawlings took a set of keys out his pocket and tossed them to Anneliese.
“We have our transport.”
“How did you do it?” She wondered, catching them.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Then Harley saw him execute that annoying habit of his. But when she looked properly at his left hand she saw that his ring was missing. “Mr. Rawlings, what happened to your wedding ring?”
“…I sold it,” he squirmed.
Harley, even Anneliese, and particularly Zoe, were all shocked by that. He sold his wedding ring? Of all the personal possession he had (which were few) no one would’ve guessed that his wedding ring was the one he’d end up parting with.
“So that was how you got the money,” Harley said. “Oh Mr. Rawlings, you didn’t have to do that.”
He noble gazed out then to the vast deserts of the great wide distance, whilst a hot wind was busy billowing in through the enclosure. In his determination he brought Zoe closer to him. “I did. I did have to do it. After all, it’s just a piece of metal. A trinket can’t tell me what I feel for my wife. What I want now is to see her again, and to get this child to safety. If selling it was the only way to do that… then the only way is the necessary way. From now on -- my only movement is forward.”
**********
It was a testament to the sturdiness of Gastellum technology. Even with these revolutionary micro-point lasers, firing beams of monomolecular-thick superheated plasma into its frame, it took her squad of Dark Sentries in excess of twenty minutes to cut the tall door down. When it finally gave way it crashed backward into the deep cold of the inner archway. Meredith smirked as her four Dark Sentries fell back behind her, lowering their guns.
Despite the blueprints she’d procured attesting to the contrary, she anticipated there to be at one non-automated line of protection for the mausoleum and it was this. A thickened orichalcum door decorated with the names of all the “heroic patriots” interned here. There was only one she happened to be interested in.
Meredith lead the way while the barrel-held combat torches of her Dark Sentries illuminated the next chamber. It was a small metal platform overlooking a precipitous and diagonally-slanted geometrical corridor stretching thousands of metres below ground. It might have looked like a cul-de-sac into deep oblivion to most but Meredith knew better. This minute platform was actually an elevator.
Though their unintentional chuckles were even more eerie in the dark when the followed Meredith inside, she was entirely unfazed by them. Not even the overpowering stink of metal and soil fazed her. These drones were no threat to her. Thanks to her encephalic-hacking skills they were little more than slaves. She accessed the altar-shaped computer system that controlled it and in seconds the passage downward was fully illuminated by a copious chain of rectangular white lights.
“A fabulous stage…”breathed Meredith, tucking her hair out of her eye. “And its music?”
Its ‘music’ was the loud and chugging whine of the elevator’s hydraulic systems coming to life after years of disuse. It took her and her brainwashed troopers nearly seven kilometres below the surface until it stopped inside an indentation squared to its own size. Meredith marched forward in a now significantly colder environment to a lesser metal door, which, unlike its predecessor, had an immediate means of access -- a keypad. The scientist’s French tip fingernails flawlessly typed a precise twenty-eight digit code into the key and a feminine, automated voice declared;
“Third Subterminal Gate accessed. Only authorized personnel are permitted beyond this point. Please submit appellation and social security code as vocal samples for voice pattern recognition.”
Meredith smirked. There were eighteen rounded discs built into the metallic walls around them which concealed a group of cylindrical shafts. She knew that inside those shafts were dozens of lethal security droids ready to attack and anyone or anything who failed to submit the accurate password information.
“Dr. Meredith Dunham -- 009725469B.” She pronounced fearlessly.
“Vocal pattern: approved. Appellation: confirmed. Social security code: confirmed. Access approved. Initializing Third Subterminal Gate release protocols.”
With a heavy ‘clang’ the door opened for them so they might walk in. The subsequent chamber was gigantic. A huge hall in which they were suspended nearly 200 metres above ground by a vertical bridge further illuminated by yet more automatically light fixtures. All the way down at the very bottom of that cavern was a rock bed floor filled to the brim with nameless and disorganized grey coffins of dead soldiers. This was the main sepulchre of the Grand Cenotaph where only the bravest, strongest, most prolific of all the West-Half’s soldiers were interred. But though there were many great soldiers at her disposal here Meredith had need of only one -- the greatest of them all.
The door to his tomb lay on the other side of the bridge. When they crossed it Meredith typed in her code again, to pass the last possible security check. Its door was retracted upward and a glacial gust of air wafted out from inside. It was a far smaller room, chilled so deeply that the walls were swathed with frost and icicles while clouds of arctic gas rolled about the slippery blue floor. In the centre of it all was a simple poly-metallic sarcophagus marked by only one name --
“XENOGENES".
“Remove the lid,” demanded the doctor, her breath visible in the chill.
Two of her four Dark Sentries scrambled to do just that and used the might of the mechanical arms to lift off the heavy lid. It landed with a crackling thud. The Meredith’s cold lips widened her smile widened when she was at last shown the sarcophagus’ contents. The cold corpse of a muscular black man, chiselled and God-like, resting peacefully inside, his massive and wild mane of thorny silver hair delimited his head like a cushion. Ice particles freckled his deltoid and pectoral muscles. Thanks to the tubes of liquid nitrogen lining his coffin, not one single scrap of his dark copper flesh had decomposed. He was as fresh a man now as he was the day he died.
Meredith opened her hand. “Hand me the Dunham virus.”
The third of her Dark Sentries was carrying a cushioned and insulated valise. It opened the box and revealed to her its secret, a vial of mysterious glowing green liquid and a syringe, one strong enough to break the skin of a man whose corpse had been cryogenically sustained for over fifteen years. The honey-haired scientist transferred a sample of the Dunham virus into the needle and then brought its tip to his left forearm. Her thumb pushed the syringe spine through his cold skin and the gelatinous ‘Dunham virus’ was forcibly injected into his veins.
Meredith’s grin was immovable. “As impolite as it is to trouble the slumber of the dead… I am in need of your services. My useless minions cannot retrieve Number Seventeen… surely a ‘Lion God of War’ can?”
Then, after fifteen years tightly secure, the passionate russet of the war hero Xenogenes opened.
Chapter Three: Little Dakota
**********
A journey to Gastellum would not be easy. From Dolley it took a few thousand miles of territory to cross over the Sand Continent’s East Half and make it to the more prosperous West, and one could only think of making most of that large journey by sand craft. This was because the East-Half and the West-Half were separated by a gigantic ocean of sea-like sand called the Desert Sargasso. The entire sand sea consisted of quicksand -- therefore it was impossible to cover the Sargasso on foot. They needed a sand craft for the trip because there was no other affordable means of transportation.
Since Stokely’s one had been wrecked there was no way to use it and besides, Rawlings was a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of returning to the crash site. One Dark Sentry had escaped from Dolley and if he was likely to start the pursuit of them anywhere it was there. So the next best thing was to find a new one.
Sand crafts were not cheap. Even your average model could cost as much as 4000 credits. Between them the group had very little money (all of Rawlings’ credits had been taken from him and Harley & Anneliese had the 900 credit pay-off of the previous job, Zoe, being a kid, had nothing either) but Harley simply ruminated on there being somewhere in the east that sold a sand craft within their price range. Anneliese, ever the well of rustic knowledge, pondered a while on where they aught to go to get one. It soon occurred to her that they needed to find a settlement with a large trading community where travel across the Desert Sargasso was commonplace.
The only town that big, and within walking distance, was Blue Dusk City. It was a fairly large mining town northeast that sent sand crafts to the Desert Sargasso’s east coast. An offshore string of underground orichalcum mines lay there that the local communities relied on as a primary export to the west. Blue Dusk City had a cyclical migrant pattern in which every winter (when the Desert Sargasso’s climate was at its coldest) the miners would extract metal from the ore and ship it back to Blue Dusk City, where from there it would be sold to merchants who would in turn sell the shipment across the Sargasso in the West-Half. It was the closing stages of winter now, which meant most of those miners were setting up shop to return home. If there was anywhere where people were likely to sell cheap sand crafts it was at Blue Dusk City.
So after Rawlings purchased some supplies with their funds, the party set off for it.
What should have been a two-day walk actually took a week to execute and largely for one reason; Zoe. Like before she just wasn’t fit for by the foot travel. Every so often she needed a break and some water to cool herself down, and the others were often left waiting for her in the mean time, idly pouring sand grains out of their shoes or throwing rocks at squawking vultures. Though the constant stopping and started pissed Anneliese off to no end it was enough for her to have Harley give her one of those warm, “cool it down” looks. No one else in the world could pacify her so.
In that long week they trekked across the East like pioneers of old, climbing up stone hillocks, wading through dunes, marching in the baking sun. If they passed by a village with an inn they spent the night there but they only happed by one or two throughout the week. Most of the time they camped out under the stars or if they were very lucky, in a hospitable cave.
By the time Blue Dusk City peaked in the horizon they were about due for some civilization. Their food supply was running a bit low at the time so not a single one of the four resented the sight of their first restaurant in days. Blue Dusk City was and always had been one of the bigger towns in the East-Half. To larger cities like Gastellum and the former Re’em it was a comparatively teenaged settlement, it was one of the few towns in the East whose populace has stayed largely afloat from the economic decline. Unlike other small municipalities Blue Dusk City was financially upheld by mining, a trade which had suffered a slight downturn in the East (due to the implicit lack of demand for orichalcum) but its exports were a hot commodity in the technologically-developed Western communities.
It’s no secret or wonder that Blue Dusk City was one of the first Eastern settlements to be attacked by the Western Regular Forces during the war.
Everyone was pleased when they finally found themselves walking through the busy streets of Blue Dusk. In place of dunes and stone knolls there were pubs, steakhouses, theatres, libraries, gun shops, hotels, boutiques and more besides. Blue Dusk was built to cater to a population of 6000 and it didn’t disappoint. Both Harley, and strangely enough Zoe, were positively brimming with excitement over all that there was to see.
“This place is amazing!” Harley said giddily. “Where should we go first?”
Anneliese, hands shoved into her trenchcoat pockets, sighed. “Don’t have an orgasm, we’re not spending more than a day here. All we need to do is find a hotel to stay at then look for a reasonable sand craft dealership. If all goes well by this time tomorrow we’ll be on our way to the Sargasso.”
“Do you know of any hotels here, Anneliese?” Asked Rawlings.
She shook her head ‘no’. “Sorry. I’ve never been here before. I just know about it from a tip we were told of by a regular of ours on the Duggan Plateau.”
Then Harley spotted something in the distance, and pointed it out. “Why don’t we use that?”
It was a roadside signpost with a plywood map of the district nailed to it. It displayed this dirt path as the nexus of a series of streets enamoured with commercial establishments. Together, Harley, Anneliese and Rawlings studied the map until it told them of an Inn or hotel they could use.
Rawlings was the first to find one. “Look. According to this map there is a bed and breakfast down the street. It seems to be the only one nearby.”
“Okay then. Lets go,” Said Anneliese.
Harley shot her arm up. “Wait a second.”
“What is it?”
“The map says there’s a big market three streets down. I wanna go there first.”
The gunwoman balked. “Are you kidding me? We’re not on vacation, we’re on a job here!"
What was Harley’s answer to Anneliese’s scepticism? Nothing but to resort to her inner childishness. Harley took her by the hand and gazed up at the cantankerous Anneliese with innocent puppy-dog eyes. “Can I go, Annie? Please?”
“Fine," She relented. “But I’m arraigning the rooms now so you do what you like.”
Harley hugged her warmly, mashing their cheeks together. “Thank you, Anneliese! Zoe, Rawlings? Lets go. Anneliese will get us a few rooms, won’t you?”
Rolling her eyes she quipped, “Yeah, sure” before heading off down the road on her own. It was the only way it could’ve worked anyway. Harley wanted to go and Zoe and Rawlings wouldn’t be parting company any time soon. So the three of them headed off down the street and followed the directions as had displayed to them by the street side map until they came to the ‘big market’ in question, the Moonflower Bazaar.
Blue Dusk City wasn’t considered a merchant town but many merchants did pass through it on their way to the east coast of the Sargasso, so they often stopped here to trade for orichalcum and other precious minerals. Since the war had completely devastated the Eastern economy many of these traders turned their attentions to the West, and often they settled in towns like these (that experienced semi-regular travel to the Sargasso). A small merchant community had been established here since the armistice and the Moonflower Bazaar was a result of that, although principally dominated by Klajkukan traders.
The Klajkukans were a theistic race of fox-eared, fox-tailed humanoids who originally populated the eastern half of the Sand Continent more than 5000 years ago. As the earliest known race of the Sand Continent (and thus the first to be exposed to its rapid desertification) the arid heat had bronzed their skin into a lush honey colour. However human migration and colonization of East had pushed most of the ancient Klajkukan tribes into the vast mountain ranges of the northeast. Those who remained abandoned their belief systems and cohabited with an insurgent human populace in the lowland. Most Klajkukans living amongst the general populace were traders, merchants and bankers; as they tended to belong to the Transcontinental Klajkukan Guild, a lucrative coalition of merchant families adapted from the ancient tribal systems of their ancestors.
The Moonflower Bazaar was a reflection of their power, as an abundance of goods from every culture and corner of the world were gathered into one cobblestone marketplace. Under the beige carpet roofing of each stall was a vendor (most of them Klajkukan but a few human ones too) who sold everything from headless chickens and ceramics to bridal gowns and new model Blasterscythes. It seemed like there was nothing you couldn’t get here.
“Wow…” Harley said, admiring a nearby set of ornamental tea cups. “There’s so much to buy…”
While she and Zoe gawped at everything the older Rawlings kept a watchful eye on the traders. “It is impressive but do not let your eye deceive you. The Guild has a furtive shadow to it.”
“What does that mean?” Asked Harley.
Rawlings heaved a sigh. “…It’s a long story.”
“Then keep it to yourself and stop being such a sourpuss. You’re as bad as Anneliese. Look at how pretty this crockery is. Then again, you are from the West, so I guess you see cute things like this all the time, don’t you?”
“The West isn’t nearly as idyllic as you and Anneliese seem to think. Environmental degradation is taking place everywhere, and wherever it goes it brings tragedy with it.”
Harley and Zoe were already at another stall when she replied. “Okay, whatever you say… oh, look at that necklace, it’s gorgeous!”
“Harley, are you listening to m-”
“Look at it, guy, look at it!”
Rawlings pushed his slipped spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and took a gander. It was a lengthy gold chained pendant from an encased jade gemstone dangling from it. Along with the other bits of jewellery surrounding it, the necklace sparkled brightly in the scorching hot sun.
Our blonde boxer was in awe of it. “Whoa. It’s so beautiful. You know, I saw a picture of my mother once, and she had a pendant just like it. Hey Zoe, does your mother wear jewellery like this?”
The colour drained out of the little girl’s face. Her head twisted to hers, shocked, and a confused Harley immediately saw pain and sadness in her eyes so deep it could’ve killed her on the spot. There were no words for how bad it made Harley feel seeing that melancholy, even worse to have caused it, and worse still when the tearful child ran away.
“Zoe!” Shouted Rawlings.
Harley and Rawlings chased after her when she didn’t stop. Her brown tresses and fluffy dress fluttered about her while running through the turns and twists of the bazaar, crying soundlessly amid the oblivious commerce, until she finally stopped in the sandy alleyway of an alehouse. Harley and Rawlings quickly dashed in after her and found Zoe huddled up in the corner crying silent sobs.
“Zoe,” said her guardian. “It’s okay… it’s okay…”
Through dampened eyelashes she saw him approach. She seemed to know that she was safe with him because as soon as Rawlings came to her side Zoe threw herself in his arms. Harley watched the crouched pair hug at a distance. What on earth did she say to make the kid react like that?
“Is… she okay?”
Rawlings heaved another sigh. “Yes, she’s fine. Just… in the future, please try not to mention that word around her, alright?”
“What word?”
“The M-word,” he told her.
**********
That night the four of them gathered in the bed and breakfast that Rawlings had spotted. It was a quite modest little establishment called the Iron Back Dog and its patrons were people not unlike Harley and Anneliese, travellers and vagrants with no fixed home, passing through Blue Dusk City on their way to or from the Sargasso. It could house about twenty people at any one time at its peak. To conserve as money as possible Anneliese bought them all two rooms, one for Zoe and Rawlings, the other for she and Harley. Because of this the costs of the night were low, only 70 credits between the four of them.
At the moment Harley and Rawlings sat together around a circular plastic table in his room. Between them was a checkerboard with a few red pieces on Harley’s side and a few black ones on Rawlings’. Outside the cosily decorated room was Zoe, who sat on the balcony admiring a wonderful moonlight view of the city. Anneliese was the only one who wasn’t here now. They had had no luck finding an affordable sand craft throughout the day so she went back out to follow a tip they’d gotten a few hours earlier from a fellow traveller, so to pass the time Harley and Rawlings played checkers.
“It’s getting late,” Said Rawlings, ruminating about his next move. “I hope Anneliese comes back soon.”
Harley pushed a piece into an unoccupied upper left square. “She can handle herself.”
“Aren’t you worried about her? The two of you seem to be rather close.”
“Me? Worried about Annie? Nah, she’s too dunderheaded and hawkish for that. Most of the time she’s the one whose busy worrying about me.
Rawlings pulled back one of his two king pieces and asked, “Do you love her?”
“W-wha?!” Blood and its heat rushed to Harley’s face before she stopped and studied the board. An apple-cheeked Rawlings was only three moves away from triple-jumping her. “Oh nice try, jerk, trying to confuse me like that. I should kick your ass.”
He chuckled. “My apologies. Might we forgo the ass-beating?”
“I’ll settle for victory on the game board,” with her next move she avoided the potential ensnarement and captured the second of Rawlings’ kings with one of her advancing reds.
“Checkmate.”
“Wrong game. And for the record? I’m short-sighted not blind.”
Harley stared at him while taking his two pieces off the board. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I know love when I see it. I don’t think it’s anything to be embarrassed about either. Falling in love is a human privilege not a human right, and if you ever do, you should make the most of it.”
“You’re pretty earnest, west-half.”
Rawlings moved another black piece toward Harley’s end of the board. “We scholars tend to be.”
“And what do you ‘scholars’ think about a woman hot for another woman?”
“The academic world, when left to its own devices, can be a bastion of liberalism. Of course some bigotry slips through the cracks every now and again, I can attest to that, but we don’t commonly frown upon eastern sexual practices. The West-Half isn’t nearly as prudish as the East-Half makes it out to be.”
Harley moved one of her pieces out of her rearmost line, capturing the black piece that Rawlings had just advanced towards it. But while doing that she smile nostalgically, thinking of Anneliese. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“Is that so?” He speculated, eyeballing his next move.
“Yeah. My Daddy is Garland Brangwin, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he was a great war hero, all the way up there with Xenogenes. When he came back wounded from the Re’em Uprising he brought Anneliese with him. I was only three at the time and she was eight so I don’t remember those days very well, but for as long as I can recall I’ve wanted to be near her. I think my Daddy wanted her to be like a sister to me… but it didn’t work out like that. When I see her sometimes its like all I wanna do is shove my tongue down her throat.”
Rawlings blushed.
“Sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“N-no, no it’s fine. So, have you ever told her that?”
Harley shrugged. “Of course I have. She just buffs me out.”
“Have you ever told her that without the sexual innuendo?”
“In-you-what?”
“…Never mind,” He pushed his piece into the rear space that Harley previously freed up. “King me.”
Harley reluctantly took of her captured black pieces and put it on top of his latest shuffled piece to crown it. “You are a jerk, using all this love talk to distract me from the game. Is that what they teach you in those fancy western schools? If you talk about sex to an easterner she’ll turn into a dope?”
“Are we talking about love or sex?” Rawlings asked, moving his new king backward.
“Well, they say ‘you can have one without the other but it’s always best to have both’, don’t they?”
That made Rawlings grin. “Humph. “The Macabre Countenance of Freedom“, chapter seven, paragraph two.”
“Yeah, it’s a good book,” Harley moved one of her reds forward. Then she got curious when Rawlings wouldn’t stop giggling to himself. “What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing. I’m just reminded of my wife, that’s all.” He said, pulling his king back again.
“Your wife, huh?”
Then he went into his pocket. “Look here, I have a picture of her. Here you go. It was taken nine years ago.”
Rawlings handed over a photograph that Harley took and admired. It was of a group of people, about seventeen or so, and they stood in front of the hollowed out opening of a geode (the summit of which had a dusty plaque fixed into its rock exhibiting the word ‘Vaecerpher’). The people in the picture were split into two rows and the one occupying the back contained unremarkable faces in lab coats and digging gear, clearly they were just scientists, clerical assistants and manual workers. It was the line in front that held the attention. Six people stood in front of it. Two of them Harley already knew, one of them was Wayland and the other was Rawlings himself, albeit much younger versions of the two. Standing next to Rawlings was a beautiful Klajkukan girl, standing next to her crossed arms was a gruff-looking Regular Army soldier with a sharp halberd and a snub-nose shotgun crossed over his back. Next to him was the more friendly face of a young dark-haired male scientist, and next to him was someone more eye-catching. Another scientist, this time a woman, and she was quite beautiful, especially with her ponytail of chestnut hair thrown over her shoulder, but she had a creepy look on her face -- emphasized by a dirty smile -- that made Harley feel uncomfortable.
“Which one is your wife?” She asked.
He pointed out the pretty Klajkukan woman. “Her. Faeleem Rawlings.”
“Oh,” then a light bulb flashed on. “Wait a minute! She’s your wife? But isn’t Zoe your daughter? Or is she adopted?”
“No, she’s… more like a friend.”
That was odd. Here they had been travelling for a week together and yet she didn’t even know that Rawlings wasn’t Zoe’s father. It made her wonder what they were doing out here in the East together but it didn’t escape her that they were on the run from something. The door clicked open then. Harley and Rawlings glanced up when Anneliese came inside with another of her mood-dampening frowns.
“How did it go?” Asked Harley.
She spat. “Damned terrible. The cheapest sand craft I could find was 1800 credits.”
“How much money do we have left?”
“Deducting the cost of this room I’d guess 550.”
Harley sagged. “We’re screwed.”
Rawlings was busy rubbing his ring when she said it and a thought came to his mind. Though he was the kind of person that hated abandoning something whilst in the middle of it, he walked around the checker table and approached Anneliese.
“I have an idea.” He said, somewhat dourly.
Anneliese stared at him. “Oh you do, do you? You mind telling me how you could possibly raise over a thousand credits in one night?”
“…Trust me. Where did you say the dealership was?”
She didn’t have much of a choice.
That night Harley went to bed early. She didn’t know why she did but she did. Maybe it was the inclusiveness of the game. Whatever it was it didn’t matter because morning hit faster than she thought it could. Anneliese was already up by then (she was a light sleeper) with her guns disassembled across a cotton blanket on the foot of her bed. She didn’t like to be interrupted while cleaning her weapons so Harley padded out into the bathroom compartment for a shower. It was when she came back that Rawlings and Zoe entered.
“Get your stuff together, you two,” said the scholar. “I have a sand craft.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Harley said in disbelief.
Though he was telling the truth his smile was far from triumphant. “No. Come and see.”
So Anneliese reassembled her firearms while Harley got dressed and once finished, followed Rawlings from the Iron Back Dog to a paddock way across town to its eastern edge. The enclosure was one of hundreds lined across the rim of huge stone platform that curved down into a series of sandstone welts leading out east to surrounding desert dunes. It was a launching ramp for sand crafts and Rawlings brought them to one of the craft paddocks lingering there in the morning heat. The name on its wire gate said “Little Dakota”. When they approached it Rawlings took a set of keys out his pocket and tossed them to Anneliese.
“We have our transport.”
“How did you do it?” She wondered, catching them.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Then Harley saw him execute that annoying habit of his. But when she looked properly at his left hand she saw that his ring was missing. “Mr. Rawlings, what happened to your wedding ring?”
“…I sold it,” he squirmed.
Harley, even Anneliese, and particularly Zoe, were all shocked by that. He sold his wedding ring? Of all the personal possession he had (which were few) no one would’ve guessed that his wedding ring was the one he’d end up parting with.
“So that was how you got the money,” Harley said. “Oh Mr. Rawlings, you didn’t have to do that.”
He noble gazed out then to the vast deserts of the great wide distance, whilst a hot wind was busy billowing in through the enclosure. In his determination he brought Zoe closer to him. “I did. I did have to do it. After all, it’s just a piece of metal. A trinket can’t tell me what I feel for my wife. What I want now is to see her again, and to get this child to safety. If selling it was the only way to do that… then the only way is the necessary way. From now on -- my only movement is forward.”
**********
It was a testament to the sturdiness of Gastellum technology. Even with these revolutionary micro-point lasers, firing beams of monomolecular-thick superheated plasma into its frame, it took her squad of Dark Sentries in excess of twenty minutes to cut the tall door down. When it finally gave way it crashed backward into the deep cold of the inner archway. Meredith smirked as her four Dark Sentries fell back behind her, lowering their guns.
Despite the blueprints she’d procured attesting to the contrary, she anticipated there to be at one non-automated line of protection for the mausoleum and it was this. A thickened orichalcum door decorated with the names of all the “heroic patriots” interned here. There was only one she happened to be interested in.
Meredith lead the way while the barrel-held combat torches of her Dark Sentries illuminated the next chamber. It was a small metal platform overlooking a precipitous and diagonally-slanted geometrical corridor stretching thousands of metres below ground. It might have looked like a cul-de-sac into deep oblivion to most but Meredith knew better. This minute platform was actually an elevator.
Though their unintentional chuckles were even more eerie in the dark when the followed Meredith inside, she was entirely unfazed by them. Not even the overpowering stink of metal and soil fazed her. These drones were no threat to her. Thanks to her encephalic-hacking skills they were little more than slaves. She accessed the altar-shaped computer system that controlled it and in seconds the passage downward was fully illuminated by a copious chain of rectangular white lights.
“A fabulous stage…”breathed Meredith, tucking her hair out of her eye. “And its music?”
Its ‘music’ was the loud and chugging whine of the elevator’s hydraulic systems coming to life after years of disuse. It took her and her brainwashed troopers nearly seven kilometres below the surface until it stopped inside an indentation squared to its own size. Meredith marched forward in a now significantly colder environment to a lesser metal door, which, unlike its predecessor, had an immediate means of access -- a keypad. The scientist’s French tip fingernails flawlessly typed a precise twenty-eight digit code into the key and a feminine, automated voice declared;
“Third Subterminal Gate accessed. Only authorized personnel are permitted beyond this point. Please submit appellation and social security code as vocal samples for voice pattern recognition.”
Meredith smirked. There were eighteen rounded discs built into the metallic walls around them which concealed a group of cylindrical shafts. She knew that inside those shafts were dozens of lethal security droids ready to attack and anyone or anything who failed to submit the accurate password information.
“Dr. Meredith Dunham -- 009725469B.” She pronounced fearlessly.
“Vocal pattern: approved. Appellation: confirmed. Social security code: confirmed. Access approved. Initializing Third Subterminal Gate release protocols.”
With a heavy ‘clang’ the door opened for them so they might walk in. The subsequent chamber was gigantic. A huge hall in which they were suspended nearly 200 metres above ground by a vertical bridge further illuminated by yet more automatically light fixtures. All the way down at the very bottom of that cavern was a rock bed floor filled to the brim with nameless and disorganized grey coffins of dead soldiers. This was the main sepulchre of the Grand Cenotaph where only the bravest, strongest, most prolific of all the West-Half’s soldiers were interred. But though there were many great soldiers at her disposal here Meredith had need of only one -- the greatest of them all.
The door to his tomb lay on the other side of the bridge. When they crossed it Meredith typed in her code again, to pass the last possible security check. Its door was retracted upward and a glacial gust of air wafted out from inside. It was a far smaller room, chilled so deeply that the walls were swathed with frost and icicles while clouds of arctic gas rolled about the slippery blue floor. In the centre of it all was a simple poly-metallic sarcophagus marked by only one name --
“XENOGENES".
“Remove the lid,” demanded the doctor, her breath visible in the chill.
Two of her four Dark Sentries scrambled to do just that and used the might of the mechanical arms to lift off the heavy lid. It landed with a crackling thud. The Meredith’s cold lips widened her smile widened when she was at last shown the sarcophagus’ contents. The cold corpse of a muscular black man, chiselled and God-like, resting peacefully inside, his massive and wild mane of thorny silver hair delimited his head like a cushion. Ice particles freckled his deltoid and pectoral muscles. Thanks to the tubes of liquid nitrogen lining his coffin, not one single scrap of his dark copper flesh had decomposed. He was as fresh a man now as he was the day he died.
Meredith opened her hand. “Hand me the Dunham virus.”
The third of her Dark Sentries was carrying a cushioned and insulated valise. It opened the box and revealed to her its secret, a vial of mysterious glowing green liquid and a syringe, one strong enough to break the skin of a man whose corpse had been cryogenically sustained for over fifteen years. The honey-haired scientist transferred a sample of the Dunham virus into the needle and then brought its tip to his left forearm. Her thumb pushed the syringe spine through his cold skin and the gelatinous ‘Dunham virus’ was forcibly injected into his veins.
Meredith’s grin was immovable. “As impolite as it is to trouble the slumber of the dead… I am in need of your services. My useless minions cannot retrieve Number Seventeen… surely a ‘Lion God of War’ can?”
Then, after fifteen years tightly secure, the passionate russet of the war hero Xenogenes opened.
Monday, 15 December 2008
Character Suggestions for Ice Creamy Kiss 2
Hey, everybody.
I'm planning the next installment for My Icy Creamy Kiss 2 and I want to add a new character to it. I was thinking though, and it seemed to me that I'd be kind of cool if someone else thought up a character for me. So here's my request. Could any of you create a character for me to add to the cast of My Ice Creamy Kiss 2? If you're interested, all you need to do is come up with a name, physical characteristics, a back story, and a personality. My only requirements are that this character must be female and must have a crush on Kimberley. All rights over this character will be yours but I reserve the right to put her through whatever emotional roller coaster ride I see fit. ^_^
Feel free to put down more than one suggestion, and I encourage anyone and everyone who's read the story to give me their ideas, 'cause I'd really appreciate it. And who knows? If I get a nice batch of character suggestions I might even write a little side story for them all!
I'm planning the next installment for My Icy Creamy Kiss 2 and I want to add a new character to it. I was thinking though, and it seemed to me that I'd be kind of cool if someone else thought up a character for me. So here's my request. Could any of you create a character for me to add to the cast of My Ice Creamy Kiss 2? If you're interested, all you need to do is come up with a name, physical characteristics, a back story, and a personality. My only requirements are that this character must be female and must have a crush on Kimberley. All rights over this character will be yours but I reserve the right to put her through whatever emotional roller coaster ride I see fit. ^_^
Feel free to put down more than one suggestion, and I encourage anyone and everyone who's read the story to give me their ideas, 'cause I'd really appreciate it. And who knows? If I get a nice batch of character suggestions I might even write a little side story for them all!
Sunday, 14 December 2008
My Girl is My Poison, Chapter Seventeen
I haven't updated this story in quite a while, most people probably aren't as familiar with it as they once were, but I was moved to writing a new chapter for it when I came across this;
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4609562/1/My_Girl_Is_My_Poison
Someone basically took my story and switched around the names to make it a Spencer/Ashley fanfic (two characters from that American TV show South of Nowhere). When I first found it I didn't know whether to be furious or flattered, especially since I don't remember the person who did this giving me any kind of heads-up about using my story -- but I wouldn't consider it plagiarism since he or she had the decency to say straight up that this wasn't his/her work. That being said, I was flattered, mostly because the story garnered over ninety reviews, the vast majority of which being positive. That inspired me to get off my arse and write a new chapter for the ACTUAL My Girl is My Poison. And here it is --
http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600093721&chapter=17
Have fun with the genuine article, my friends. The chapter's a bit shorter than usual though.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4609562/1/My_Girl_Is_My_Poison
Someone basically took my story and switched around the names to make it a Spencer/Ashley fanfic (two characters from that American TV show South of Nowhere). When I first found it I didn't know whether to be furious or flattered, especially since I don't remember the person who did this giving me any kind of heads-up about using my story -- but I wouldn't consider it plagiarism since he or she had the decency to say straight up that this wasn't his/her work. That being said, I was flattered, mostly because the story garnered over ninety reviews, the vast majority of which being positive. That inspired me to get off my arse and write a new chapter for the ACTUAL My Girl is My Poison. And here it is --
http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600093721&chapter=17
Have fun with the genuine article, my friends. The chapter's a bit shorter than usual though.
Song of the Week: "Little People"
For my second go at this segment we have a song I recently discovered. This joint was on the first Boondocks Hip-Hop Docktrine (which was how I found it) and I enjoyed it enough for me to tour through YouTube to find the complete version. It's "Little People" by The Procussions. Amazing beat, surprisingly sensitive lyrics, so-so vocalists. Have a listen.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
Single Cell Geosphere, Chapter Two
Hey there, y'all!
I've got the second chapter of Single Cell Geosphere right here. As ever it's unedited, so don't be too surprised if you see more than a few typos and errors here and there. Enjoy!
**********
Chapter Two: The Hunted
**********
“Who are you people?”
Anneliese hooked her rifle to her back with its strap. “Come with us. We’ll take you to Dolley.”
The older man protectively huddled the little girl behind him. “We aren’t going anywhere with you until you tell us who you are. Are you bandits? Do you think we have money to give you?”
“Look, we haven’t got time for this, just-”
She was cut off when Harley nudged past her, scowling at her for her silence. Harley knew better than anyone how tactless Anneliese could be. These guys had just been ferried halfway across the Sand Continent by a Blasterscythe-toting mercenary with a bad accent -- of course they were going to be scared. With a friendly smile Harley approached the pair but was mindful to keep her distance.
“Hey,” she said soothingly. “You don’t have to worry about us. We’re here to help, okay?”
The man eyed her cautiously. “…Help us, you say?”
“Yeah. My name is Harley and grumpy bitch over there is Anneliese. And we’re not bandits… at least not in the way you’re thinking. Anneliese and me are mercenaries. We were hired by an friend of yours, to save you.”
“A friend? Who?”
“A man called Wayland?”
When the name was dropped it hit a chord. The newly freed man blinked in surprise as he adjusted his glasses to contain himself. The name didn’t seem to ring any bells with the little girl though. She kept herself tightly hugged to (presumably) her father’s leg.
“Wayland, eh?” Said the male. “I didn’t dare to think that he would come so far out for the two of us. But how can I trust either one of you? How can I be sure that this isn’t a trick?”
Harley, still smiling, shut her eyes. “Heh. Maybe you west-halves aren’t familiar with it but there’s a certain something out here that we easterners like to call ‘honour’. Yeah. We have a crooked way of making money but my Daddy taught me two things; to have honour… and to be a patriot. And a patriot doesn’t lie to people on their knees to score a quick buck on the side; she makes her money upfront.”
Upon hearing that, the man mellowed a little. “A patriot, eh? I think I’ll hold you to that.”
“So you’ll come with us to Dolley?”
“Is that where Wayland is?”
Harley gave him a nod. “Yes.”
He was still reluctant to give them his trust. It was understandable. Harley had no idea how long he had been in captivity but it had to have been at least a week if they’d come all the way from the capital. Gastellum wasn’t exactly a bike ride away. Even so the careful older man heaved a trusting breath and extended his quivering hand to her.
“My name is Percy Rawlings. This child is called Zoe.”
Harley shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“I don’t know why,” he began, “but when I look into your eyes I feel like I can trust you.”
“That’s a good thing,” Then Harley’s attentions turned to the little girl at his side. With her equally childish face Harley kneeled down and smiled at her. “Hello there, Zoe.”
Her only answer was to cling even tighter to Rawlings’ leg. Harley blinked. Was she still afraid of them? But then what else could she have expected? She was just a child yet not only had she’d just survived a necessary crash, she’d been captured and shunted across the world by Stokely Bradshaw. The poor girl had every right to maintain her silence.
“I’m sorry, kid.” Harley whispered, sympathetically.
Anneliese touchily rolled her eyes. “Was she hurt in the crash or something?”
“No. She’s fine.” Said Rawlings.
“Alright then, we’re leaving.”
“Right now?” Whined Harley. “Shouldn’t we give them a chance to catch their breath first?”
“We haven’t the time. You know we’re due to rendezvous with Wayland by three.”
Well she did have a point about that. Harley stood upright, put her hands behind her head, and gazed out down the gorge. They had a fairly long walk ahead of them from where they were and now they had a kid to think about. It was all part of the job though.
“Zoe might get thirsty on the way. Was there any water or food on the convoy?”
Rawlings thought back about it. “There was a freight box with some supplies in the back of the sand craft, I think.”
Fair enough. But none of them budged an inch. For a moment Harley wondered why Rawlings didn’t just go get the freight box but then of course she remembered that he had Zoe -- and he wasn’t going to leave her on her own like that, even if only for a second. So she sighed and did it herself. Though the sand craft had been totalled by the crash it wasn’t about to burst into flames. It had enough of its form for Harley work her way inside and find the freight box. When she found it she hauled the plastic and iron box from the wreckage. As she lifted up its hermetically sealed lid the visibly chilled air leaked from its innards. Much as Rawlings had said there were supplies inside. Bottles of water, freeze dried coffee, cans of soup, a sack of rice and so on. There was a backpack in the craft too so she used that to pack some of the items in, mostly the water and the soup.
“I’ve got the supplies,” Harley announced, returning to the group.
“Okay then,” Anneliese said. “Are we ready to go now?”
Rawlings nodded. “I think so.”
Thus the point was settled. Of course that was why everyone juddered when from her taupe trenchcoat Anneliese unfurled a 9mm pistol. Zoe’s frightened blue eyes widened as Anneliese took aim at a distant target, Stokely, then scrunched shut at the subsequent burst of fire. The bloodily purified contents of Stokely’s skull seeped out the three dank bullet holes it now sported.
“Was that entirely necessary?” Declared Rawlings, whilst Zoe quivered at his side.
After twirling it around her finger Anneliese holstered her gun. “I should think so. Unless you wanted him to wake up in a couple of hours time and inform the nearest government official that his cargo was pilfered by a pair of women mercenaries? I don’t know about you but I prefer to keep my anonymity, thanks very much.”
She stomped off. When Rawlings glared at her as if to demand answers all Harley could do was shrug. What was she to say? Anneliese was Anneliese. You couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
At that juncture the four of them, the two mercenaries and the two fugitives, set off for Dolley down the Lanchester Road, leaving the Ibarra Gorge behind. It was an even longer walk than they thought it would be. Zoe, although not a particularly sickly child, was a fairly weak one. The sweat glided off her forehead like melting ice. Because she was so unfit for this kind of travel they often took break (much to Anneliese’s annoyance). That was where the water came in handy and if there was one thing Zoe proved to be open to that day, it was cold water.
After every break they tried to cover as much ground as they possibly could, with only cactuses, rocks, sand, scorpions and a baking hot sun to keep their attention. Just to keep a low profile they stayed close to the road but kept off of it. A good few hours later the party arrived at the town of Dolley.
For Harley and Anneliese to come here was no big deal. It was simply one of hundreds of little villages that they would pass through on their travels, but for Rawlings (and to a lesser extent, Zoe) it was the shock of a lifetime. All around them were people in need. Young boys looking to be the same age as Zoe, nine or so, gaunt and thin from lack of food. The women were equally as undernourished but had the labours of work to supplement the struggle. They were busy with menial work, milking borderline skeletal cows for there milk before it dried up, mending linen, cooking up thin stews or churning butter for the grocers. There were fewer men out on the dirt tracks for they were either up in the ranches tending to the cattle and the horses, minding the shops, or out in the wasteland hunting the closest thing to game there was in these parts -- vultures. People here were too hungry to worry about second-hand cannibalism. There wasn’t a single corner you could turn to without being subjected to the sight of another person’s suffering.
“This is awful…” Gasped Rawlings.
“I guess a westerner wouldn’t really know,” and with crossed arms Anneliese asked, “Is this the first time you’ve been to the East?”
He nodded, oblivious to the contemptuous undertones in her voice.
“It’s the sad history of the East Half. Back in the days of the Consulate, when the East was ruled over by a tyrant, the Re’em Uprising hit. The West sent in additional troops to support the East Consul in putting down the rebellion while the people of the East largely backed the revolutionaries; and inevitably the people of West-Half declared war. It only took a few years for you people to completely crush us. Then when Re’em collapsed the economy of the East imploded with it, just when the desertification was at its worst, cutting our crop production in half. That was when the government took control of the entire Sand Continent, and the Western Consul, Bracht, became President. This is your world’s legacy to ours, friend. Misery.”
Harley glowered. “Anneliese, that’s enough.”
“I am… truly sorry,” Rawlings said, chaste. “Not all of us agreed with the Senate’s decision to go to war…”
They continued on. It wasn’t long though before they passed by the door of a small and dilapidated residential house. On that rickety wooden door there was a very strange marking scribed out of red dye. It was not unlike a pentangle encircled by a jaggedly painted loop.
Rawlings pointed it out.
“What’s that?”
Anneliese spotted it. “That? It’s a sigil. There aren’t any water purification systems this far out so when cholera hit the villagers were defenceless. Without the West’s technology all these people have to rely on are their superstitions and folk remedies. The purpose of that sigil is to ward away death.”
Zoe seemed to take special note of all this. She was a child of privilege cast into a world of abject struggle. Every single sight about her was a new one, unfortunately they were sights of horror, unfit for such innocent eyes. That was what Harley thought. However they soon came upon the Black Lion Inn.
“Wayland is here?” Asked Rawlings.
“Yes,” Harley confirmed. “Hey, Anneliese? What room is he in again?”
“Ten. Follow me.”
Harley, Rawlings and Zoe followed the markswoman into the Inn, past the check in counter and the dining hall into the main corridor. They ascended the creaking oaken steps to the second floor and followed all the numbered doors until they came to the tenth one. Anneliese gave it a knock.
“Wayland?” She called out. “Are you in there?”
There was no answer.
It was odd. This was where he had asked them to meet him, and they were only an hour or so late. Maybe he was just asleep. Anneliese then took it upon herself to open the door. What they saw waiting for them inside shocked them tremendously. It was the Wayland lying face down in an oozing puddle of his own blood, cold as ice. In her horror Zoe huddled herself against Rawlings’ leg against, whilst he and the two mercenaries stared at the corpse, dumbfounded.
“Good heavens,” murmured the male. “He’s been killed…”
Anneliese crouched down to inspect the body. Wayland had been shot, and not just once, there were more than thirty bullet wounds in his back, neck and head. Not a single shot was non-lethal either. Each wound was located at a highly critical point of the body, insuring death.
“This wasn’t a killing… it was an assassination,” said the gunner. “Who could’ve done this?”
Just then, though she wasn’t sure how, Harley heard a chuckle. It was faint and soft, so soft you might not have been able to hear it, but she definitely did. Then something in her head told her to look up and when she did she saw two figures clad totally in jet black cloaks and ivory operatic masks perched snugly in the rafters up above. The blanks quickly filled in her head when the robes parted for the barrel of a semi-automatic.
“Damn!”
Like lightning Harley bolted before Anneliese and a staccato chorus of gunshots ricocheted off the defensive curl of her force shield. Anneliese’s eyes shot upward and with deep consternation she registered those assailants for who… or perhaps better said… ‘what’ they were. Dark Sentries. While bright orange sparks their automatic fire pelted Harley’s shield Anneliese barked, “Get out of the room!” at Rawlings and Zoe. The older man grabbed Zoe as told and bolted out of the room while the markswoman yanked out her 9mm. The gunfire ended when their guns were spent of their load. Harley instantly lowered the shield so Anneliese could shoot back, but the two Dark Sentries scattered either side of the rafter, one left and the other right, escaping the shots.
Rather than eject his empty clip the first of the two dropped his gun entirely on his way down. Harley met him mid-fall and thrust a punch at him. The Sentry ducked around it, his tattered cloak floating around his stooping body like a midnight mist, and threw a punch of his own. Harley smacked his fist away, mid step, and hit him squarely in the jaw of his mask. He reeled backward and immediately Harley tried to capitalize by pouncing on him, but the second she got close he slapped his back to the floor, reached up for her, and using all of Harley’s own momentum tossed her over his head and into the wall behind them. Harley slammed into the wall with a grunt and slumped to the floor.
“Harley!” Anneliese yelled.
That moment Dark Sentry #1 leapt up and ran like a dark gale toward the downed fist-fighter. He drew back his foot and tried to stamp her down, only to be met with her palms, catching the foot expertly. Harley gave him a cocky grin before twisting with all her body weight. Rather than let it be ripped to pieces the Dark Sentry was forced to twist his whole body with his ankle, landing him on the floor. Then Harley vaulted back up to her feet. Her opponent rose almost as quickly.
“What the hell?” She said. “A blow like that and you’re still able to stand?”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh…” Cackled the Sentry, ethereally.
Harley blinked. These guys, it was like… they weren’t even human. Nevertheless Harley drove herself across that room, ducking under his defensive roundhouse kick and rising up with an uppercut. The blow was so strong it instantly cracked the enamel of the attacker’s mask. He staggered back a moment, stunned by that, giving Harley just enough time to dash around his back and lock her arms around his sinewy neck. The Dark Sentry breathed a wordless protest, flailing his arms, as the blonde girl bore down upon him with all her might, gradually crushing his trachea until he was unable to breathe through it.
She released the Dark Sentry only when his limbs stopped moving. Across from her Anneliese fired repeatedly at the rafters but was unable to hit the second of the two ghastly wraiths, and with every passing moment she found herself unable to control her anger. The giggling Sentry was more than happy to accommodate this, until finally he throw his empty assault carbine at her. Anneliese avoided it but it gave him more than enough time to leapt from the rafters to the floor to the window. His black robed form smashed it into crystalline bits, and, mid-air, he sleekly turned and he hurled something from his cloak threw the window -- an unpinned grenade.
Alarmed, Harley and Anneliese both jumped out the room and hit the deck. The door was blown right off its hinges and the walls themselves shook when the pineapple grenade detonated and took the two corpses with it. A viscous impact tore through the floor drowning out shocked screams and destruction until all became silence.
Harley uncovered her face and at once coughed at the thick black clouds of smoke floating around the corridor. She looked to Anneliese first, who was stirring, then Zoe and Rawlings, who, aside from a few cuts and bruises, were alive. The tenth room of the Black Lion Inn on the other hand was a blazing ruin.
Suddenly Anneliese tore herself up to her feet, enraged, but before she went anywhere, Harley grappled her by the wrist. “What the hell are you doing?” Yelled the pugilist.
“What do you think I’m doing!? I’m going after that son of a bitch!”
“Forget him! We’ve got Zoe and Mr. Rawlings to think about! Let it go!”
Anneliese growled angrily, fist tightly gripped to her gun, but didn’t pursue. “…Damn it.”
**********
The bombing of the Black Lion Inn meant no one could use it anymore. The grenade that the Dark Sentries had used was a model unique to the West-Half, one that released an amplified sonic detonation during the moments after first impact. That sonic boom had completely destabilized the foundations of the building and as a result it was unsafe for use. Harley had helped with the evacuation but she couldn’t tell anyone she and her acquaintances were involved. Thus far neither Wayland’s corpse nor that of the Dark Sentry had been found in the rubble, but in all likelihood they had been blown to bits. Harley shuddered to think how the innkeeper and her husband would survive from now on, but there was nothing she could do to help them. What little money she’d gotten from Wayland was just as necessary for her survival as anything else, plus, there was no way Anneliese would fork over her cash for a tragedy she wasn’t even responsible for. To think that something as meaningless as money could limit your patriotism.
Because their only roof for the night had almost been destroyed they all had no alternative but to camp out of town for the night. They set up their site a quarter of a mile west of Dolley, near an old watering hole toward the Igeewagok Valley. They had no sleeping bags or blankets -- the only thing they could do was use some twigs and sandstone for comfort. Harley started a fire while Rawlings helped her heat up four of the cans of soup that Harley had taken from Stokely’s sand craft. It was vegetable soup, and thin in the broth thanks to the current crop shortage, but after they day they’d all had it was a four-course meal in equivalence. The only one who didn’t eat was the ever silent Zoe. No one blamed her.
By midnight she and Rawlings were already asleep. Despite the fact that she seemed to be the only one in the world protecting her now, she didn’t sleep in his arms, she slept alone a short distance from him. That struck Harley as odd but she didn’t feel she was in any place to pry or question it. Instead she lay across her ramshackle bed of sand and sticks to gaze up at the bejewelled night sky and (on occasion) Anneliese.
The gunslinger hadn’t yet swiped that angry look off her face. Ever since the attack Anneliese had been in an even more sour mood than usual.
So her friend couldn’t help but lean up and probe her out. “Are you okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“People only say ‘I’m fine’ when they’re not fine,” Harley told her. “Tell me.”
Anneliese stared into the flicking fire. “… Those Dark Sentries…”
“You mean those cloaked things that attacked us?”
“Yeah…”
Harley moved a bit closer to her. “You know what they are?”
“They’re Dark Sentries… an elite core of specialist soldiers engineered for the government. Their muscle tissue is re-woven for optimum efficiency, their limbs are surgically removed and then replaced with cybernetic prosthetics, and their brainwaves are fiddled with to make them more subservient. By the end of it their bodies are so mutilated they have to wear those rags… but the trade-off is the power. You wouldn’t believe the amount of damage they can do when they’re in battle.”
Now it made sense. “That isn’t the first time you’ve seen them, is it?”
“No. I’ve seen them before.”
“Where…?” Asked the Brangwin girl.
“…In Re’em.”
Just hearing her say the name so solemnly made Harley wilt. “Annie…”
“I’m not gonna cry…” she whispered to herself, frigidly. “…I’m not.”
Harley didn’t tell herself to hold Anneliese then. She didn’t need to. Before those tears even threatened to fall she embraced her partner. Caringly. Warmly. Lovingly. Anneliese’s desperate sighs made her cling on all the tighter. But a smidgen of pride still existed, even then; “Harley, I-I-I’m fine… I don’t need this…”
She closed her eyes. “…I do. I need it.”
They were all awoken by the squawks of the ravens flapping out the Igeewagok Valley the following morning. The water around this area was infected with viruses and mites so they couldn’t bathe, but instead they used up the last of the water to clean themselves of blood, ash, and sand. The hours were approaching eleven by the time Rawlings finally asked Harley and Anneliese what he’d wanted to ask of them since the attack.
A less troubled Anneliese was loading a fresh mag into her pistol when he approached them.
“What is it?”
“I… have something to ask you.”
“Yeah I gathered that,” she jabbed. “Get to the point.”
Rawlings heaved a sigh. “I’ve just lost one of my best friends. He died for me. Wayland died for Zoe and I. I’ve been thinking about it all night and I just can’t let his death be a waste. I have to get back to Gastellum, and… I know now that we can’t do that alone. We need your help.”
“Are you going to tell us what you’re on the run from?”
He looked away, nudging his glasses. “I cannot tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“It just isn’t… I mean…”
Harley stood up, patting him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’re here.”
Anneliese was taken aback. “Are you serious? You do realize what he’s asking us, don’t you?”
“Yes. He wants us to take him home,” she replied. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
Rawlings’ reply was a mere nod. When Zoe finished cleansing her face with water she brought herself to his side. If it was just Rawlings at risk here then Harley would’ve agreed with Anneliese that this wasn’t their fight. But Zoe was just a kid. She wasn’t even old to have had a first love or kiss and if they left her and Rawlings to there own devices she never would. Even though she didn’t understand what was going on nor why government assassins had tried to kill them, it would’ve been a gross offence to her honour for Harley to walk away. That wasn’t the act of a patriot.
So Harley gave him an accepting smile. “One of you better know how to cook because I suck at it.”
“So… you will…?”
“Yeah,” she said to him, earnestly. “We’ll get you to Gastellum in one piece.”
The emotion rushed to his face. “Thank you so much,” he said. “Thank you so much…”
Anneliese frowned at all this. “Does he even have any money?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. I have an estate in Gastellum. If I sell it, I’ll give you half of the yield. By my estimation that’s at least 300,000 credits. Is that enough?”
All eyes were on Anneliese now, even Zoe’s. She ruminated for a while, re-checking her gun and putting it away, before she gave them all her final answer. The brunette stood up and growled irritably, “I suppose it’s not the worst way to get rich off the rich.”
**********
I've got the second chapter of Single Cell Geosphere right here. As ever it's unedited, so don't be too surprised if you see more than a few typos and errors here and there. Enjoy!
**********
Chapter Two: The Hunted
**********
“Who are you people?”
Anneliese hooked her rifle to her back with its strap. “Come with us. We’ll take you to Dolley.”
The older man protectively huddled the little girl behind him. “We aren’t going anywhere with you until you tell us who you are. Are you bandits? Do you think we have money to give you?”
“Look, we haven’t got time for this, just-”
She was cut off when Harley nudged past her, scowling at her for her silence. Harley knew better than anyone how tactless Anneliese could be. These guys had just been ferried halfway across the Sand Continent by a Blasterscythe-toting mercenary with a bad accent -- of course they were going to be scared. With a friendly smile Harley approached the pair but was mindful to keep her distance.
“Hey,” she said soothingly. “You don’t have to worry about us. We’re here to help, okay?”
The man eyed her cautiously. “…Help us, you say?”
“Yeah. My name is Harley and grumpy bitch over there is Anneliese. And we’re not bandits… at least not in the way you’re thinking. Anneliese and me are mercenaries. We were hired by an friend of yours, to save you.”
“A friend? Who?”
“A man called Wayland?”
When the name was dropped it hit a chord. The newly freed man blinked in surprise as he adjusted his glasses to contain himself. The name didn’t seem to ring any bells with the little girl though. She kept herself tightly hugged to (presumably) her father’s leg.
“Wayland, eh?” Said the male. “I didn’t dare to think that he would come so far out for the two of us. But how can I trust either one of you? How can I be sure that this isn’t a trick?”
Harley, still smiling, shut her eyes. “Heh. Maybe you west-halves aren’t familiar with it but there’s a certain something out here that we easterners like to call ‘honour’. Yeah. We have a crooked way of making money but my Daddy taught me two things; to have honour… and to be a patriot. And a patriot doesn’t lie to people on their knees to score a quick buck on the side; she makes her money upfront.”
Upon hearing that, the man mellowed a little. “A patriot, eh? I think I’ll hold you to that.”
“So you’ll come with us to Dolley?”
“Is that where Wayland is?”
Harley gave him a nod. “Yes.”
He was still reluctant to give them his trust. It was understandable. Harley had no idea how long he had been in captivity but it had to have been at least a week if they’d come all the way from the capital. Gastellum wasn’t exactly a bike ride away. Even so the careful older man heaved a trusting breath and extended his quivering hand to her.
“My name is Percy Rawlings. This child is called Zoe.”
Harley shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“I don’t know why,” he began, “but when I look into your eyes I feel like I can trust you.”
“That’s a good thing,” Then Harley’s attentions turned to the little girl at his side. With her equally childish face Harley kneeled down and smiled at her. “Hello there, Zoe.”
Her only answer was to cling even tighter to Rawlings’ leg. Harley blinked. Was she still afraid of them? But then what else could she have expected? She was just a child yet not only had she’d just survived a necessary crash, she’d been captured and shunted across the world by Stokely Bradshaw. The poor girl had every right to maintain her silence.
“I’m sorry, kid.” Harley whispered, sympathetically.
Anneliese touchily rolled her eyes. “Was she hurt in the crash or something?”
“No. She’s fine.” Said Rawlings.
“Alright then, we’re leaving.”
“Right now?” Whined Harley. “Shouldn’t we give them a chance to catch their breath first?”
“We haven’t the time. You know we’re due to rendezvous with Wayland by three.”
Well she did have a point about that. Harley stood upright, put her hands behind her head, and gazed out down the gorge. They had a fairly long walk ahead of them from where they were and now they had a kid to think about. It was all part of the job though.
“Zoe might get thirsty on the way. Was there any water or food on the convoy?”
Rawlings thought back about it. “There was a freight box with some supplies in the back of the sand craft, I think.”
Fair enough. But none of them budged an inch. For a moment Harley wondered why Rawlings didn’t just go get the freight box but then of course she remembered that he had Zoe -- and he wasn’t going to leave her on her own like that, even if only for a second. So she sighed and did it herself. Though the sand craft had been totalled by the crash it wasn’t about to burst into flames. It had enough of its form for Harley work her way inside and find the freight box. When she found it she hauled the plastic and iron box from the wreckage. As she lifted up its hermetically sealed lid the visibly chilled air leaked from its innards. Much as Rawlings had said there were supplies inside. Bottles of water, freeze dried coffee, cans of soup, a sack of rice and so on. There was a backpack in the craft too so she used that to pack some of the items in, mostly the water and the soup.
“I’ve got the supplies,” Harley announced, returning to the group.
“Okay then,” Anneliese said. “Are we ready to go now?”
Rawlings nodded. “I think so.”
Thus the point was settled. Of course that was why everyone juddered when from her taupe trenchcoat Anneliese unfurled a 9mm pistol. Zoe’s frightened blue eyes widened as Anneliese took aim at a distant target, Stokely, then scrunched shut at the subsequent burst of fire. The bloodily purified contents of Stokely’s skull seeped out the three dank bullet holes it now sported.
“Was that entirely necessary?” Declared Rawlings, whilst Zoe quivered at his side.
After twirling it around her finger Anneliese holstered her gun. “I should think so. Unless you wanted him to wake up in a couple of hours time and inform the nearest government official that his cargo was pilfered by a pair of women mercenaries? I don’t know about you but I prefer to keep my anonymity, thanks very much.”
She stomped off. When Rawlings glared at her as if to demand answers all Harley could do was shrug. What was she to say? Anneliese was Anneliese. You couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
At that juncture the four of them, the two mercenaries and the two fugitives, set off for Dolley down the Lanchester Road, leaving the Ibarra Gorge behind. It was an even longer walk than they thought it would be. Zoe, although not a particularly sickly child, was a fairly weak one. The sweat glided off her forehead like melting ice. Because she was so unfit for this kind of travel they often took break (much to Anneliese’s annoyance). That was where the water came in handy and if there was one thing Zoe proved to be open to that day, it was cold water.
After every break they tried to cover as much ground as they possibly could, with only cactuses, rocks, sand, scorpions and a baking hot sun to keep their attention. Just to keep a low profile they stayed close to the road but kept off of it. A good few hours later the party arrived at the town of Dolley.
For Harley and Anneliese to come here was no big deal. It was simply one of hundreds of little villages that they would pass through on their travels, but for Rawlings (and to a lesser extent, Zoe) it was the shock of a lifetime. All around them were people in need. Young boys looking to be the same age as Zoe, nine or so, gaunt and thin from lack of food. The women were equally as undernourished but had the labours of work to supplement the struggle. They were busy with menial work, milking borderline skeletal cows for there milk before it dried up, mending linen, cooking up thin stews or churning butter for the grocers. There were fewer men out on the dirt tracks for they were either up in the ranches tending to the cattle and the horses, minding the shops, or out in the wasteland hunting the closest thing to game there was in these parts -- vultures. People here were too hungry to worry about second-hand cannibalism. There wasn’t a single corner you could turn to without being subjected to the sight of another person’s suffering.
“This is awful…” Gasped Rawlings.
“I guess a westerner wouldn’t really know,” and with crossed arms Anneliese asked, “Is this the first time you’ve been to the East?”
He nodded, oblivious to the contemptuous undertones in her voice.
“It’s the sad history of the East Half. Back in the days of the Consulate, when the East was ruled over by a tyrant, the Re’em Uprising hit. The West sent in additional troops to support the East Consul in putting down the rebellion while the people of the East largely backed the revolutionaries; and inevitably the people of West-Half declared war. It only took a few years for you people to completely crush us. Then when Re’em collapsed the economy of the East imploded with it, just when the desertification was at its worst, cutting our crop production in half. That was when the government took control of the entire Sand Continent, and the Western Consul, Bracht, became President. This is your world’s legacy to ours, friend. Misery.”
Harley glowered. “Anneliese, that’s enough.”
“I am… truly sorry,” Rawlings said, chaste. “Not all of us agreed with the Senate’s decision to go to war…”
They continued on. It wasn’t long though before they passed by the door of a small and dilapidated residential house. On that rickety wooden door there was a very strange marking scribed out of red dye. It was not unlike a pentangle encircled by a jaggedly painted loop.
Rawlings pointed it out.
“What’s that?”
Anneliese spotted it. “That? It’s a sigil. There aren’t any water purification systems this far out so when cholera hit the villagers were defenceless. Without the West’s technology all these people have to rely on are their superstitions and folk remedies. The purpose of that sigil is to ward away death.”
Zoe seemed to take special note of all this. She was a child of privilege cast into a world of abject struggle. Every single sight about her was a new one, unfortunately they were sights of horror, unfit for such innocent eyes. That was what Harley thought. However they soon came upon the Black Lion Inn.
“Wayland is here?” Asked Rawlings.
“Yes,” Harley confirmed. “Hey, Anneliese? What room is he in again?”
“Ten. Follow me.”
Harley, Rawlings and Zoe followed the markswoman into the Inn, past the check in counter and the dining hall into the main corridor. They ascended the creaking oaken steps to the second floor and followed all the numbered doors until they came to the tenth one. Anneliese gave it a knock.
“Wayland?” She called out. “Are you in there?”
There was no answer.
It was odd. This was where he had asked them to meet him, and they were only an hour or so late. Maybe he was just asleep. Anneliese then took it upon herself to open the door. What they saw waiting for them inside shocked them tremendously. It was the Wayland lying face down in an oozing puddle of his own blood, cold as ice. In her horror Zoe huddled herself against Rawlings’ leg against, whilst he and the two mercenaries stared at the corpse, dumbfounded.
“Good heavens,” murmured the male. “He’s been killed…”
Anneliese crouched down to inspect the body. Wayland had been shot, and not just once, there were more than thirty bullet wounds in his back, neck and head. Not a single shot was non-lethal either. Each wound was located at a highly critical point of the body, insuring death.
“This wasn’t a killing… it was an assassination,” said the gunner. “Who could’ve done this?”
Just then, though she wasn’t sure how, Harley heard a chuckle. It was faint and soft, so soft you might not have been able to hear it, but she definitely did. Then something in her head told her to look up and when she did she saw two figures clad totally in jet black cloaks and ivory operatic masks perched snugly in the rafters up above. The blanks quickly filled in her head when the robes parted for the barrel of a semi-automatic.
“Damn!”
Like lightning Harley bolted before Anneliese and a staccato chorus of gunshots ricocheted off the defensive curl of her force shield. Anneliese’s eyes shot upward and with deep consternation she registered those assailants for who… or perhaps better said… ‘what’ they were. Dark Sentries. While bright orange sparks their automatic fire pelted Harley’s shield Anneliese barked, “Get out of the room!” at Rawlings and Zoe. The older man grabbed Zoe as told and bolted out of the room while the markswoman yanked out her 9mm. The gunfire ended when their guns were spent of their load. Harley instantly lowered the shield so Anneliese could shoot back, but the two Dark Sentries scattered either side of the rafter, one left and the other right, escaping the shots.
Rather than eject his empty clip the first of the two dropped his gun entirely on his way down. Harley met him mid-fall and thrust a punch at him. The Sentry ducked around it, his tattered cloak floating around his stooping body like a midnight mist, and threw a punch of his own. Harley smacked his fist away, mid step, and hit him squarely in the jaw of his mask. He reeled backward and immediately Harley tried to capitalize by pouncing on him, but the second she got close he slapped his back to the floor, reached up for her, and using all of Harley’s own momentum tossed her over his head and into the wall behind them. Harley slammed into the wall with a grunt and slumped to the floor.
“Harley!” Anneliese yelled.
That moment Dark Sentry #1 leapt up and ran like a dark gale toward the downed fist-fighter. He drew back his foot and tried to stamp her down, only to be met with her palms, catching the foot expertly. Harley gave him a cocky grin before twisting with all her body weight. Rather than let it be ripped to pieces the Dark Sentry was forced to twist his whole body with his ankle, landing him on the floor. Then Harley vaulted back up to her feet. Her opponent rose almost as quickly.
“What the hell?” She said. “A blow like that and you’re still able to stand?”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh…” Cackled the Sentry, ethereally.
Harley blinked. These guys, it was like… they weren’t even human. Nevertheless Harley drove herself across that room, ducking under his defensive roundhouse kick and rising up with an uppercut. The blow was so strong it instantly cracked the enamel of the attacker’s mask. He staggered back a moment, stunned by that, giving Harley just enough time to dash around his back and lock her arms around his sinewy neck. The Dark Sentry breathed a wordless protest, flailing his arms, as the blonde girl bore down upon him with all her might, gradually crushing his trachea until he was unable to breathe through it.
She released the Dark Sentry only when his limbs stopped moving. Across from her Anneliese fired repeatedly at the rafters but was unable to hit the second of the two ghastly wraiths, and with every passing moment she found herself unable to control her anger. The giggling Sentry was more than happy to accommodate this, until finally he throw his empty assault carbine at her. Anneliese avoided it but it gave him more than enough time to leapt from the rafters to the floor to the window. His black robed form smashed it into crystalline bits, and, mid-air, he sleekly turned and he hurled something from his cloak threw the window -- an unpinned grenade.
Alarmed, Harley and Anneliese both jumped out the room and hit the deck. The door was blown right off its hinges and the walls themselves shook when the pineapple grenade detonated and took the two corpses with it. A viscous impact tore through the floor drowning out shocked screams and destruction until all became silence.
Harley uncovered her face and at once coughed at the thick black clouds of smoke floating around the corridor. She looked to Anneliese first, who was stirring, then Zoe and Rawlings, who, aside from a few cuts and bruises, were alive. The tenth room of the Black Lion Inn on the other hand was a blazing ruin.
Suddenly Anneliese tore herself up to her feet, enraged, but before she went anywhere, Harley grappled her by the wrist. “What the hell are you doing?” Yelled the pugilist.
“What do you think I’m doing!? I’m going after that son of a bitch!”
“Forget him! We’ve got Zoe and Mr. Rawlings to think about! Let it go!”
Anneliese growled angrily, fist tightly gripped to her gun, but didn’t pursue. “…Damn it.”
**********
The bombing of the Black Lion Inn meant no one could use it anymore. The grenade that the Dark Sentries had used was a model unique to the West-Half, one that released an amplified sonic detonation during the moments after first impact. That sonic boom had completely destabilized the foundations of the building and as a result it was unsafe for use. Harley had helped with the evacuation but she couldn’t tell anyone she and her acquaintances were involved. Thus far neither Wayland’s corpse nor that of the Dark Sentry had been found in the rubble, but in all likelihood they had been blown to bits. Harley shuddered to think how the innkeeper and her husband would survive from now on, but there was nothing she could do to help them. What little money she’d gotten from Wayland was just as necessary for her survival as anything else, plus, there was no way Anneliese would fork over her cash for a tragedy she wasn’t even responsible for. To think that something as meaningless as money could limit your patriotism.
Because their only roof for the night had almost been destroyed they all had no alternative but to camp out of town for the night. They set up their site a quarter of a mile west of Dolley, near an old watering hole toward the Igeewagok Valley. They had no sleeping bags or blankets -- the only thing they could do was use some twigs and sandstone for comfort. Harley started a fire while Rawlings helped her heat up four of the cans of soup that Harley had taken from Stokely’s sand craft. It was vegetable soup, and thin in the broth thanks to the current crop shortage, but after they day they’d all had it was a four-course meal in equivalence. The only one who didn’t eat was the ever silent Zoe. No one blamed her.
By midnight she and Rawlings were already asleep. Despite the fact that she seemed to be the only one in the world protecting her now, she didn’t sleep in his arms, she slept alone a short distance from him. That struck Harley as odd but she didn’t feel she was in any place to pry or question it. Instead she lay across her ramshackle bed of sand and sticks to gaze up at the bejewelled night sky and (on occasion) Anneliese.
The gunslinger hadn’t yet swiped that angry look off her face. Ever since the attack Anneliese had been in an even more sour mood than usual.
So her friend couldn’t help but lean up and probe her out. “Are you okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“People only say ‘I’m fine’ when they’re not fine,” Harley told her. “Tell me.”
Anneliese stared into the flicking fire. “… Those Dark Sentries…”
“You mean those cloaked things that attacked us?”
“Yeah…”
Harley moved a bit closer to her. “You know what they are?”
“They’re Dark Sentries… an elite core of specialist soldiers engineered for the government. Their muscle tissue is re-woven for optimum efficiency, their limbs are surgically removed and then replaced with cybernetic prosthetics, and their brainwaves are fiddled with to make them more subservient. By the end of it their bodies are so mutilated they have to wear those rags… but the trade-off is the power. You wouldn’t believe the amount of damage they can do when they’re in battle.”
Now it made sense. “That isn’t the first time you’ve seen them, is it?”
“No. I’ve seen them before.”
“Where…?” Asked the Brangwin girl.
“…In Re’em.”
Just hearing her say the name so solemnly made Harley wilt. “Annie…”
“I’m not gonna cry…” she whispered to herself, frigidly. “…I’m not.”
Harley didn’t tell herself to hold Anneliese then. She didn’t need to. Before those tears even threatened to fall she embraced her partner. Caringly. Warmly. Lovingly. Anneliese’s desperate sighs made her cling on all the tighter. But a smidgen of pride still existed, even then; “Harley, I-I-I’m fine… I don’t need this…”
She closed her eyes. “…I do. I need it.”
They were all awoken by the squawks of the ravens flapping out the Igeewagok Valley the following morning. The water around this area was infected with viruses and mites so they couldn’t bathe, but instead they used up the last of the water to clean themselves of blood, ash, and sand. The hours were approaching eleven by the time Rawlings finally asked Harley and Anneliese what he’d wanted to ask of them since the attack.
A less troubled Anneliese was loading a fresh mag into her pistol when he approached them.
“What is it?”
“I… have something to ask you.”
“Yeah I gathered that,” she jabbed. “Get to the point.”
Rawlings heaved a sigh. “I’ve just lost one of my best friends. He died for me. Wayland died for Zoe and I. I’ve been thinking about it all night and I just can’t let his death be a waste. I have to get back to Gastellum, and… I know now that we can’t do that alone. We need your help.”
“Are you going to tell us what you’re on the run from?”
He looked away, nudging his glasses. “I cannot tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“It just isn’t… I mean…”
Harley stood up, patting him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’re here.”
Anneliese was taken aback. “Are you serious? You do realize what he’s asking us, don’t you?”
“Yes. He wants us to take him home,” she replied. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
Rawlings’ reply was a mere nod. When Zoe finished cleansing her face with water she brought herself to his side. If it was just Rawlings at risk here then Harley would’ve agreed with Anneliese that this wasn’t their fight. But Zoe was just a kid. She wasn’t even old to have had a first love or kiss and if they left her and Rawlings to there own devices she never would. Even though she didn’t understand what was going on nor why government assassins had tried to kill them, it would’ve been a gross offence to her honour for Harley to walk away. That wasn’t the act of a patriot.
So Harley gave him an accepting smile. “One of you better know how to cook because I suck at it.”
“So… you will…?”
“Yeah,” she said to him, earnestly. “We’ll get you to Gastellum in one piece.”
The emotion rushed to his face. “Thank you so much,” he said. “Thank you so much…”
Anneliese frowned at all this. “Does he even have any money?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. I have an estate in Gastellum. If I sell it, I’ll give you half of the yield. By my estimation that’s at least 300,000 credits. Is that enough?”
All eyes were on Anneliese now, even Zoe’s. She ruminated for a while, re-checking her gun and putting it away, before she gave them all her final answer. The brunette stood up and growled irritably, “I suppose it’s not the worst way to get rich off the rich.”
**********
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