TANoTerrans:Tales

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Ida - 16.11.16 02:30

"Ida!" Ida was squatting in a field of tall brown grass. She did not know the kind. The sun beat down overhead, making the field the only cover from the sun for an acre on either side. "Ida!” On the ground in front of her was a small field mouse. It was dead. She had been playing with the cat outside when it had found the mouse and killed it. Now they just sat there looking at it. "Idaaaa! Come in! It's time to go!" Vaguely, Ida was aware of her mother calling her from the distance, but her focus was the mouse. What does it do now that it can't do anything? What is the existence of a mouse that isn't? A little bit of blood marred the neck, and its mouth hung open as if it had fallen asleep and lazily forgotten to close it. She stroked the mouse. It felt soft, and fragile, and warm, like it might still be alive, having only the external appearance of being dead. --"Ida." The voice was in her ear, in her head. She spun around, no longer a five year old girl in a meadow, now the seventeen year old lying near death in a basement. The owner of the voice sat in front of her on a velvet couch, legs crossed and one arm propped up on the arm of the couch, resting her chin. "...Ida." She said again. "Is this a dream?" Fear edged in her voice, and her breath caught in her throat. "Of sorts. You were dreaming of a moment from your childhood, yes?" "It was during the summer, when we went to our aunt's house in the country. I was five. The cat killed a mouse--" "--Oh, so that's what brought me here..." The woman shifted pensively, staring off into the black walls at something only she could see. Ida suddenly remembered where she was. She was prone, staring up at the woman from the cold tile covered in her blood, the bullet holes in the wall behind her. "I'm dead, aren't I?" She phrased it as a statement of fact. "Not yet, Ida." The woman leaned closer and looked down from the seat. "I'm here because I have something to give you before you are no more." Ida strained to listen. It was taking all her effort just to keep her eyes open. The tile beneath her was slipping away, its cold hardness seeming as soft as air. "Not yet, Ida!" The woman was inches from her face, holding her arm with the strength to pull the dead from the afterlife. "I haven't made my pitch, yet." She smiled, showing a row of small, sharp teeth. "What are you?" Fear and helplessness trailed the words. Fear of things worse than death. "My name is Freyja, and I can save your life, even return you to health, and give you the power to avenge yourself.." "I'm not dead." She said, defiant, and cool. "Not yet, but you will be, soon enough." The creature named Freyja grinned again, and Ida suddenly recognized the face. It was hers, but twisted and uncanny. She startled into sudden, hazy sobriety, and tried to sit up, choking and collapsing. "No, no, no, no... I can't have you dying yet." She cupped Ida's head in a clawed hand, and put the other on her back, feeding her life, forcing the blood to flow. "You and I both know you have more to lose than your life. You know how this ends, or must I show you?" An image flashed across Ida's vision of her friends and team-members, fighting their last battle, the last-ditch nuke in Haddock's hand, of the thousands milling about in the undercity, unaware of how close they were to total annihilation. Her vision flashed back, Freyja's -- her face inches away, her breath sweet and comely. Ida wished she could go. She wanted to go with this creature who stole her face and promised ultimate power. She knew it was worse than death, in her gut. Worse than failure of the mission, a worse fate than dying alone, on the cold, unsympathetic tile, with a million others to follow. Still, she wished, lusted for the power to rise again and do the impossible. Freyja stood up, her eyes cold, and betraying a deeper loathing, an irrisistable desire. "You have made your decision. Come with me." Ida felt heavy on the cold floor. She mustered just enough strength to croak, "I can't." "Walk, Ida!" Her voice was firm and compelling, and Ida began to move. With legs that should not work, and blood that should not flow, she walked off the tile floor, out of the dark lab room, out of the building, out of the world, compelled by an unseen force that pumped into her legs and moved them for her. She followed Freyja into a light, where she found herself in a completely featureless black space, standing on nothing. Freyja turned around and came close to her, their heads side-by-side, Freyja almost out of her vision. She whispered in her ear, her voice heavy with lust, almost sexual, definitely with cruelty, "This will hurt a bit, but it will be worth it in the end." Ida turned as Freyja, or what had been Freyja, now a thick whisp of curling black smoke, lept into her body, entering through the eyes, ears, mouth, seeping through the skin. Freyja burned, Ida's skin crawled, and her mind ruptured. Her skin cracked and split as the creature forced its way in, displacing Ida's body and soul with its own. A shred of Ida's perception, trapped at the back of her -- their -- mind watched as Freyja took control, examining her new body -- a brutal demonization of Ida's old one. Freyja turned, now back on the laboratory floor, and looked at her reflection in a small surgical mirror. Inside, Ida screamed, her face was pitted and black, her mouth filled by several rows of sharp, sawblade teeth which ran up and back into her skull, and filled her mouth like a needle casket. Her eyes glowed white, pupils shifting and twisting into evil, strange symbols. On burnt black skin, the same symbols repeated, twisting and shifting like a living tattoo. All features seemed withered and emaciated, skin stretched tight over hard bones and sinewed muscle. Horns of several forms sprouted from her skull, piercing the skin and causing incapacitating pain. She wished she could fall unconscious, escape this prison inside her own head. Had she been alone in her body, she would have. :No more wishes will be granted today, Ida, not for you.: The ultimate horror of understanding thundered across her. In her mental cage, she shook. There was no end, no escape, and no return. She knew this for sure, beyond reckoning. In her mind, she did collapse, finally succoming to the wounds she had sustained. Though they no longer affected her body, her mind poured vitality,. The most fatal wound of all having been administered, it pressed against her soul, squeezing the life out, feeding itself with her own, but she could not die. She passed instead into a deep internal sleep, exhausted from the attempt to hold on to a life she used to live.

Gatecrashers - 16.11.14 03:05

Lithyl stared through the telescope at the mysterious gate. Its surface shimmered, boiled, and turned, and shifted from one second to the next. It was a fluid, metallic surface, glowing from within as if lit by a light source that wasn't readily apparent. To Lithyl, from where she was sitting in the observatory, it seemed alive. On the panel in front of her was a console with a monitor reproducing the view she had just been examining, a handful of other screens, dials, counters, and an array of buttons and switches filling the spaces between. Suddenly, the surface went still and rigid, and a moment later, a small instrument beeped as she saw the small speck she had been looking for reemerge from the surface of the boiling sphere in the distance.

She leaned over, keyed one of the buttons at her station and spoke softly, "Cailmes, your dog is back. What does he tell you?"

Cailmes came back over the intercom.

"The far side seems to orbit a planetoid... Atmosphere... Carbon, Nitrogen, Methane, a handful of noble gasses in trace elements... Seems to be..." Lithyl could hear him tapping the keys, and the thoughts going through his head almost as audibly through the intercom. "Very cold... Oh my God, Lithyl, come take a look at this. The probe recorded some images of the surface, and the footage is... This is incredible..." His voice trailed off as Lithyl drifted away down the hallway. Out the viewport, the probe drifted into the silhouette of the ship.

The crew and captain had gathered around Cailmes on his monitor. As Lithyl joined them, the screen was playing back images of a dark, barren, rocky landscape, over which the craft was flying toward a tower like a giant needle. After a minute, its true size became apparent as it finally seemed to grow on screen, and the base of the tower was revealed as it came over the horizon. Cailmes skipped forward and the camera flew a circle around the tower, before taking back off into the sky.

All the huddled faces around the screen looked astonished. Standing structures, especially ones as tall and fragile looking as the tower, were rare to find. Structures beyond the unmarked gates were often either bombed to pieces in the war or home to Raive, or home to savages left behind after The Fall.

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Lithyl's eyes snapped open to flashing red lights, blaring sirens, and a pre-recorded female voice warning of a collision. She lay there not understanding for a moment. She was in a stasis pod. The ship had been just entered the gate. She and the rest of the crew had gone into stasis for the long journey to the other end of the gate, where the ship would release them from stasis when they neared the other gate in time. Could it have failed to wake them somehow, passed through with everyone in stasis and hit something on the other side?

Her internal dialogue was broken by the face of her captain in the pod window.