|
|
Post by Trevrizent on Aug 3, 2015 20:06:17 GMT
Agreed Stuff:
Setting: fantasy sci-fi
|
|
|
|
Post by Trevrizent on Aug 3, 2015 22:43:58 GMT
Aunty Mai tried to grab my wrist, but I pulled away. “Hold out your arm, Syph,” she said with a sigh.
Tears fell down my face in a steady stream, beyond my control. I did not want the shot. It hurt too much. “No,” I muttered, wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands.
“Syph…” Aunty Mai was getting that look she always got when I put up a fight. “Please, just hold out your arm. You don’t want to get sick, do you?”
“No! No!” I wailed as she got a hold of my arm. “No, I don’t want it! It hurts!”
“Syph, stop it!” she snapped. “We’re not going through this again!”
“Mai, Mai, hang on a second,” a new voice spoke up.
I turned to see who it was, but Aunty Mai held me very firmly in place so I couldn’t. I knew the voice though. I just couldn’t remember what his name was.
Aunty Mai looked up at him with a frown. She suddenly stood and wrenched my arm aside, causing me to stumble. “Fine,” she snapped. “You give it to him.”
The very tall man had the syringe roughly forced into his hands. Aunty Mai let go of my arm with one last twist before stomping off in a huff. The gray doors slid closed behind her on the way out.
I just held my arm, trying to will the pain away. Her grip had left angry red marks on it in the shape of her fingers. I rubbed my face with my hands again.
“Oh Syph.” I looked up to see the tall man looking down at me. He shook his head and knelt down on the ground in front of me. “You really need to be stronger than this. It’s just a shot.”
“It hurts,” I mumbled. “It hurts a lot, and I don’t like the needles. Please don’t hurt me, mister.”
He rubbed his head with a hand and looked from the syringe to me. “You know why we have to do this, right?”
I did. Everyone talked about it. “Cause of the weapon.”
He nodded. “This is not an usual war, you know. They attacked us with sickness rather than guns and swords. If you don’t get your injection, you’ll get horribly sick. And then you’ll die.”
“But why do I have to take them?” I sniffled. “You and Aunty Mai don’t have to.”
“That’s because we weren’t exposed to it like you were,” he replied.
“It’s not fair, mister,” I cried.
“Just be brave, Syph. Trust me, this pain is nothing compared to what it would be like if you got sick. You are very lucky to be here, hidden in the lab with us. If the enemy found out we were here, saving you and the others, we’d be executed. And you would be thrown out to suffer and die with the rest of them.”
He took my arm, gently, and synched the band tighter above my elbow. I closed my eyes tight, covering them with my free hand. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to see it.
“There’s no hiding from the pain, Syph,” he said slowly. “You have to face your fear.”
Whimpering softly, I forced my shaking hand to lower, and I opened my eyes.
The needle slipped into my flesh like a hot knife in butter. It was such a quick, smooth motion, I hardly noticed its presence. But then that thick, dark purple stuff in the syringe was injected into my blood. It was only a matter of moments before I felt it begin to spread. It unfolded in me like unfurling wings, bending and stretching itself before snapping wide open to flood my system. I seized and dropped to the floor, clutching my body in my arms, holding onto myself for fear I would lose it to the pain.
“Syph, just hang on,” the man said, but I could barely hear him. I felt blood explode through my mouth, and I bit off something heavy in my mouth. Whatever it was rolled across the floor. The man grabbed my face and forced a strip of leather into my mouth.
“It’s going to be alright.” I saw his lips forming the words, but I couldn’t hear them over my screams.
|
|
dawny
New Member
Posts: 16
|
Post by dawny on Aug 3, 2015 23:37:30 GMT
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Oriax.”
She couldn’t see him in the dark, but she heard the frantically whispered reply. “You can’t back out on me! We already got the money, we’ve got to finish it! The twins are counting on us!”
“I don’t want to do it! It’s not worth it, what if one of us dies! We could just leave now, I’d cover our tail. The twins would never find us. We could go to come little mining colony and lay low for a year or two and then go to one of the outer planets, or to a Metropolis. We still got the money, you know we could make it.”
“No! The twins are not enemies we want to have. No matter how this turns out, it’s better to do it and face the consequences that to run from the twins. You don’t know what they’re like, El, you’ve never met them.”
She still couldn’t see his face, but she knew the face he would be making, the same one, of apprehension, paranoia, fear, that he had every time he talked about twins, or the time he had met them.
He took a deep breath. “We have to go through with this. We don’t have a choice now, El. We gotta do it. It’ll all be over in four hours.”
Ellaria buried her face in the crook of her arm and took a shuddering breath. My god, she wished she had never agreed to help Oriax. He had never been the brightest tool in the shed, but he was a sorcerer and the money was good. She needed this payday. But she should have known that if the Consortium was willing to fork over that much money for a simple data heist there had to be a catch. Oriax had never questioned it. His faith in the twins, or maybe his fear, was too strong.
Static crackled over the radio and then the mission operator’s voice hissed into the dark air of the tunnel. “The guards have begun their rotation. You’ll have your opening in two minutes. Don’t miss it,” and then there was silence.
“Are you ready, El?”
“Do I have a choice?” she hissed back, biting bitterness in her voice, followed by a sigh and, “I’m ready,” with a much more controlled inflection.
Oriax flicked on the pen light and set about taking the screws out of the floor panel above them. He had already unscrewed them most of the way so that they could move quickly when the time came.
El remained still, the radio in hand, waiting for the final signal to move. It came just as expected, two minutes after the first message.
Oriax pushed the floor tile up and to the side, leaving a square hole that Ellaria climbed through from the pitch black tunnel below into the hallways above, mostly dark except for where light spilled from an open doorway on the left a few meters ahead of her.
Below her, she heard Oriax chanting and knew he was casting an illusion so that the cameras wouldn’t pick up her presence. The laser security grid had already been taken down. She didn’t know by who, that was out of her jurisdiction. It was fine, anyways. She didn’t need to know, to do her job.
She tiptoed forward and peered into the lighted room. It was empty, just as it was supposed to be. It would be empty for the next thirty second and then not again for the next thirty minutes when the security guards would rotate again.
She darted past the doorway and around the first corner. She’d nearly memorized the building’s floorplans. Down to the end of the hallway, then the second to last left and take the stairway all the down to the basement and then straight ahead, second left and the key to the door was 2-041London and then she was into the data archives. First row straight ahead, at the corner of the seventh isle. She found the panel that was supposed to open and took the phone and cord from her pocket, plugging it in to the USB port.
First the virus that she’d written downloaded into the system, covering her tracks before she made them, distracting the antivirus. Then she started looking. They were really very good, they’d hidden the files just right, they were clever to tuck them into operating systems exofile. It was expertly done. She wouldn’t have found it if she hadn’t known just where to look. But she was prepared. The Consortium did their research, that much could be said for them. The files were just where she’d been told they would be and it was a simple matter to make it a visible file and then empty the contents onto her phone before tucking the now empty file back into its hiding place.
Beginning to feel a bit surer of herself, Ellaria disconnected the phone and stowed it in her jacket pocket, closing back up the panel and turning back to the door. She looked at her watch. She still had six minutes to get back, plenty of time.
Down the hall, up the stairs. She waited at the corner of the hallway until she saw the guard pass by on his rotation, and she waiting another twenty seconds for him to get around the next corner and then she ran back up the hallway, to the right, around the corner, past the guard room.
She really knew something was wrong the moment she saw that the floor tile had been replaced, sealed back down, but she didn’t admit it to herself. It’s just the illusion, she thought, or perhaps Oriax needed a break so he’d put the tile back down.
She walked over and tapped it with her toe to make sure it was solid, it wasn’t an illusion. It was solid. She tapped harder and then stomped on it. “Oriax, open it up! I’m back!”
She got a response, but not the one she’d been expecting.
“Catch,” someone called quietly from behind her and she whirled around just in time to catch a little metal box, the size of the box fancy necklaces came in, with a little latch on one side. She looked up from the box at the person who had thrown it.
He wore a baseball cap and a black scarf tied loosely over his nose and mouth and chin and wrapped around his neck. He wore something that might have been a military uniform, but it wasn’t crisp and pressed. It had tears and singe marks and it was completely black in the dim light, except for the red armband around his left bicep.
Ellaria couldn’t muster any words, but it didn’t appear that he expected any.
He held up a bottle for Ellaria to see, a vial four inches tall and filled most of the way up with smoky grey liquid. “If the Consortium want a demonstration, here it is,” he said, and threw the vial on the floor at her feet.
A shard of glass flew up and scored a cut over her eye. The last thing she saw was red.
---------
The news report said that the explosion which had destroyed a government data archive and killed the four security guards and one intruder that were in the building at the time was an act of isolated terrorism, most likely perpetrated by a lone individual or small group of individuals harboring resentment for acts made by the government during the war.
They were wrong, but there was few people who would ever know.
Two of those few sitting in the lounge of their private interstellar ship on its way to Cuchulainn. They sat in silence, regarding the objects on the table between them. There were two identical little metal boxes, the size of a jewelry box, the kind a necklace would come in, each with a little latch on one side.
Then one of the two looked up at the other across the table, identical pairs of golden eyes meeting each other, faces calm but eyes fever bright.
“The Red Man knows.”
“Have we lost?”
“No.”
“We must be cautions.”
“Yes. We will begin again.”
“This time is the last.”
“Yes. We will make it this time.”
Lips curved into identical smiles. Neither looked down at the little metal boxes on the table.
|
|
|
|
Post by Trevrizent on Aug 4, 2015 1:36:03 GMT
“I’m going to be the best conjurer ever!”
Gray looked up from his scroll at the five year old boy, muddy hands in the air, face beaming, and bare feet probably getting splintered on the dilapidated wooden floor. Gray thought very little of the kid. For one, the little kid, Daichi, was a major hot headed, simpleton. He never understood the word no, he took what he wanted, and he never apologized for anything unless his bull of a mother boxed his ears in and forced it out of his throat. Two, he hated studying. And reading. And writing. And anything related to actual mental work. It was doubtful he would ever get through a basic string of the alphabet, never mind decipher runes and work out the formulas that could conjure great beasts and spirits from out the nether. And third, well, a third point was hardly necessary.
“That’s nice, Daichi,” Gray said simply, turning back to his scroll. He was busy trying to break down the formula of a rather complex conjuring spell.
“No, I’m serious!” Daichi protested, running up and grabbing onto the edge of Gray’s scroll. “I’m going to be the best conjurer ever. Even better than you!”
Gray made a quick jerking motion, pulling the scroll out of Daichi’s grubby fingers. “Yes, that’s all nice and fine, Daichi. How about you go eat another mud pie or something.” The little pest was getting on Gray’s nerves.
“You stupid old man!” Daichi sputtered. His little face was squinted in rage. “You’ll see! I’ll be the best conjurer ever!”
“Right… well, that’s nice.” Gray barely managed to stifle a yawn as he turned back to his scroll.
It was some years later when Daichi returned from traveling with his family to far off places. Now twelve, he had grown in body and mind, determined to prove Gray wrong yet. Or so he thought.
Gray was in his usual place: front porch, scroll reading.
“Gray, is that you?” Daichi asked.
Gray lowered the scroll, peering with steely eyes at the one who dared to interrupt his reading. “Oh, it’s you.” He looked back at his scroll. It was a complex formula for conjuring lost artifacts. Gray was pretty sure he had translated the words correctly, but the ancient script was rather cryptic.
“I’ve been studying a lot on conjuring during my travels,” Daichi started off.
“That’s nice, Daichi,” Gray muttered half-heartedly.
Daichi paused. Gray hoped it was because he was leaving. But he wasn’t. He sighed and lowered the scroll. “What do you want, boy?”
Daichi flinched. “I just wanted to show you what I learned.”
Gray raised an eyebrow. Where was the hotheaded, temperamental brat he used to know? There was a certain, hurt look in Daichi’s big brown eyes. He looked like a whipped dog.
Suddenly, Gray felt thunderstruck. He dropped the scroll, and it rustled as it hit the porch floor. “Wait… you don’t mean-?”
“Yes, I am actually a conjurer,” Daichi said. He held out his hands. There on his palms, bizarre conflagrations of runes were etched into his skin as if made out of discolored veins.
Gray sighed softly. “Then that’s why… I see… It seems that the ordeal has changed you. Hopefully for the better… ah, what am I saying. I’m sorry for your loss, Daichi.”
Daichi shrugged his shoulders. “It was my fault,” he said. “I paid the price. My stubbornness made me blind. If I hadn’t been so foolish I might have never pursued this path at all.”
Gray was silent. There was not much that could be said. What was done was done. “Well, why don’t you show me then what you can do.”
Daichi smiled faintly and held out his hands to the sky. His fingers flexed, and glowing runes poured from his fingertips and shot through the sky. The runes flitted around to form massive spiraling diagrams, and from their centers emerged enormous, winged, scaled beasts. Dragons to be exact. Five of them.
Gray’s eyes widened. “Impressive,” he said.
“Really, that’s it?” Daichi asked. “”Impressive? That’s all you have to say?”
“Five dragons is a bit much,” Gray muttered,” kind of a bit of a show off… but you’ve really done something there, Daichi.” Gray looked at him and gave him a wink. “Maybe you will surpass me after all.”
Daichi lowered his hands. “For the sake of the price I paid to achieve this power… I had better.”
|
|
dawny
New Member
Posts: 16
|
Post by dawny on Aug 7, 2015 20:27:12 GMT
“Lance, we have to go now! We can’t wait any longer!” Nyora called, glancing fearfully up at the sky. The bomber ships were silent and they had no lights, but she could see the flames licking skywards, creeping closer.
“Go on! I’ll be there in a moment. Take the children.” He glanced up from the computer screen to look at his wife for a brief moment. The harsh blue-white light from the screen made him look pallid in the otherwise dark room.
“No, Dad!” shrieked the little girl, tearing away from her mother to run back to her father.
“Vasi, go back to your mother,” Lance ordered his daughter. He was almost completely calm, only his son noticed the shaking of his hands from where he stood silently at his mother’s side.
“No. No!” The little girl only shrieked louder until she heard her brother’s voice say her name. She turned to look at him with wide golden eyes and he held out his hand.
“Aru…” She pleaded, her eye’s filling with tears. She could see his sadness, too, but not in tears. She could see it in his smile.
Normally, their parents would scold them. When they were little, it was okay. When they grew a bit older, they would be told not to make things up, they was too old for that now, they must stop pretending they could hear each other speak when they obviously hadn’t. And then they got older still and they learned that what they could do wasn’t usually, that they must not do it in front of other, even their parents. Unauthorized sorcery was illegal. No one would believe them that they hadn’t sought it out, learned the secrets, that it had always happened.
But now, their world was crashing down around them. Their city was burning. Nyora didn’t care what Aru did, so long as he got his sister to safety. The twins listened to each other as they listened to no one else and so when Aru called her, Vasi turned away from her father and walked over to take her brother’s hand.
Together they walked through their burning world. Ashes fell around them and the roar of the fire was all around. They could feel each other’s fright, but in a way it was calming because they knew they were facing it together.
They didn’t dare to look back, even when they heard the explosion of the bomb falling behind them and felt the wave of heat and the pain from the splinters that peppered their backs.
Aru winced and Vasi could see the tears in his eyes, but she knew that the pain that had made him wince wasn’t from an injury. She had felt it, too. They were alone now. She gripped her brother’s hand tight and pulled him forward.
When they stumbled onto the docks, tears streaming down their faces, clothes torn and singed, blood spotting their arms and legs, hands clasped together, knuckles and faces white, they weren’t out of place. Only a man in dark military fatigues notices them, one of the many soldiers running back and forth across the docks, trying to create order or carrying cargo and weapons, but Vasi looked at him with her strange gold eyes and he turned away as if he had never noticed them.
They ducked into the pushing, screaming crowd and were swept into the lines of people tumbling into the military evacuation ships, each packed with people before it took off. They found themselves on the floor one of the ships, peering over the laps of the people next to them to see the fires drop away beneath them and despite the chaos all around them, the twins found themselves with an eerie sense of calm. They could feel the weight of the future on them. There was only one way to go forward now.
|
|
