Her body wasn't her own. Loren's body moved but she wasn't the one moving it. She was nothing more than a puppet. No matter how hard she screamed on the inside, her lips were still.
Don't bother fighting. The Yeerk said to her. It's pointless.
No. Loren thought.
Your friends are dead. Your mother is dead. Elfangor, his brother, your freak of a son, they're all going to die. And you will watch. You can't do anything.
No. You're wrong. This is wrong.
The Yeerk was laughing at her but the sound was fading. Everything was becoming clearer.
Title: One Winged Location: The Tower (dream location)
He remembered the fires.
The McGraths had come in and in an instant a world came down in the sound of bullets.
Renne knew these oak walls, knew them well and he knew the smell of them as they burned. He knew the fiery sting as six bullets penetrated into the thick frontal sections of his skull. They were familiar and old things that had ceased to even ache but felt new all over again. Fine bloody night this is! Are the girls out?
He lay on the oak floor wavering in an eerie state of semiconsciousness. Renne knew his blood was thin and he had bled quite a lot that night. But so too, Renne knew that this part of his skull was a dense pattern of layered substances. None of the bullets had reached the brain cavity. The burn of smoke filtered down his throat. Sounds around him were eerily muted, almost not there at all. The front door slammed shut and the back flung itself open. Timbers creaked and popped as they burned above.
He didn't hear the bullets this time.
The sound of the fire was nearly silent.
Holl amrantau'r sêr ddywedant Ar hyd y nos
His home burned down around him and no one came to pull him out. Unsurprising as that was, Renne found himself standing upright as he used to in those bygone days. He stood inside an ashen shell of a place that reeked of smouldering wood and heated rock. Unsteady feet carried him through a familiar route that wasn't the same as the route from the other. This fire stank of magic and he heard all too clearly that he wasn't alone. I've watched all your suffering
"Lad, ye didn't learn the meaning of Slekt."
"You've been good to me."
"Ffyniant."
The voices matched their footsteps as they turned their backs and walked away. In the silence, Renne was still for a few moments and distantly noted the thin streams still trickling from the six points on his head. Soon enough, he too turned and found himself walking onto a godforsaken stretch of beach. The sea didn't crash here. It was oddly still and a figure emerged from the waves sheathed like a skeleton in a blue shroud. A shroud rotted by age and salt. When Renne felt the cold of a gun in his hands, his fingers became nerveless. He dropped the weapon onto the sand and tried to back away. "It's time to step down. I'm saying goodbye."
The figure picked up the gun.
Aimed.
And pulled the trigger.
He was running before the splash even sounded.
The tower was his home. It had been his home for longer than he'd estimated and he realised now, how wrong he had been to leave it. It rose before him a monolith of stone in the middle of a nowhere-plain, where nothing grew and the wind carried little sound. Except the faint echoing of laments destined to never be heard. He knew why he had built the thing all those years ago. He knew why he returned to it now.
Renne said nothing as he ascended the cold stone walls and nearly fell through the thing's single, tiny window. He'd never put a door or stairwell here when he'd built it. When Renne had built it, he had never intended to come out again. Inside the tiny room, his memories lay strewn on the floor around him. The candles. The single brick stolen from the original NightRunners' fortress before its destruction. His plushie. Over a hundred copies of letters. A worn old spyglass. A journal with its ink pen and ink.
And Billy Cranston's name etched into a brick on the far wall.
How strange, that a voice calls from below the Tower's height in this godforsaken no-man's-land. Distantly curious, the creature at first doesn't make a sound. Curiosity's there but...detached. As if not part of himself. Even so, his voice gives a half-hearted kind of chirp.
Getting up a sheer vertical tower without any doors might prove problematic. Even so, the voice down on the ground gets a response.
A little blue face seems to peer over the edge of a tiny window. Its large, useless eyes show a detached, even hollow sort of slate-gray but those eyes react to nothing. The odd face's big ears give a half-hearted twitch.
"Oh, there you are. I'm Loren." She looked down at Renne. "Listen, this might sound strange, but all of this isn't real. It's a nightmare. You need to break free."
He was home. The forest's dappled light spattered the undergrowth as Red Snout crept amongst the foliage, rifle held loosely in his claws. Something wasn't right here. It was...something. He lifted his nose and sniffed lightly, his blood suddenly running cold as something was carried to him on the wind.
The Tyrant King was here. He had only smelt it once before, and that was one had wandered by, barely edging their territory, being smart enough to know that one T-Rex was no match for a tribe of prepared raptors. But this was not the same. Red Snout was alone. And he had a sinking feeling that he was the tyrant's prey.
And that is not the worst of it! Nura puts her hands to her head when she feels a precognition. Her eyes snap open and whirrs around to face Red Snout and Loren.
Nura narrows her eyes at Red Snout, not at all perturbed by the fact that he was speaking - it is a norm on so many planets that creatures talk. For all she knew, Red Snout could be a member of the dinotoplians near Galtros.
"Then who will stop the giant fireball that will arrive in sixty-two seconds?" At the end of her sentence, it hits twenty-two seconds.
Loren just looked at Nura from her place on the ground. (What? She'd learned to listen to Elfangor and Nura seemed to know what was going on.) "The what?"
He can't aim worth a tinker's damn except toward whatever sound or smell he's trying for. Hoping whomever's got him gets what he's doing, the beastie locks his fangs down, tenses his jaws and after a few seconds, releases twin jets of a rather....corrosive toxin.
Nura is floating cautiously up high, behind the tyrannosaur's head. Her flight ring enables her to feel almost weightless with Loren's and Renne's weight combined, in her arms. A hip cocked to the right, for when they will need to dart away to avoid being eaten alive by the prehistoric fossil.
But having to carry Loren and Renne disallows Nura the position of directing Renne's corrosive toxins. "Loren. Aim for Renne!"
Arms? OH! Pardon that, he had to process what she was doing. Chittering, the beastie turns his head to follow the direction of his arms...and bites down to release another twin-jet of toxin.
Red Snout is doing his utmost to lead the Tyrant on a merry chase, hoping that the humans know what in the name of Scravis' Talon they know what they're doing. And that they take down the Tyrant before Red Snout is injured. He ducks, dodges, bounding from side to side in an effort to keep his pursuer off balance. He half-turned, firing off a shot that was just as likely to go wide as it was to hit before getting back to the business of running. What he wouldn't give to have the rest of his tribe's warriors here with him...
But they weren't here and it was up to him. He bounded over a fallen try, then screeched in surprise and pain as a tree branch caught him across the face, sending the raptor sprawling across the ground.
Get up! You can't wait here! GET UP! His mind screamed at him as he hurriedly struggled to his feet, not wanting to look back for fear of what might be gaining.
Nura had been the one who had removed rubble after rubble away until she discovered Querl’s mangled body beneath the pile of debris.
She had also been the one who had picked up his body, never-minding the blood and the dirt, and carried it out of what had been the plaza. The medical examiners were almost afraid to take the body, but at Nura’s insistence, they did. She knew that Querl had passed on, but still she ordered the examiners to check two more times before Lyle had to pull her away.
It had taken two Legionnaires to restrain Nura after she had punched in Lemnos’ face when he was in custody of the Science Police.
Nura starts to date Thom a month after Querl’s death. Nothing is as she had previously predicted and yet things come along so predictable that the little quirks of Thom start to become annoyances. In truth, he has little confidence in himself, and is constant to please, than to be pleased. More than once does Nura turn down his offer to share quarters.
She finds herself down at the Memorial more often than not. Usually when she is disgruntled by something.
But almost always it is at night when she visits, turning on the phosphorescent lights so that she can stare at Brainiac 5’s statue which stands on a pedestal, surrounded by sunflowers (at Salu’s demand).
Nura places her hand against the statue’s chest, where his heart would be if flesh and blood. She stares up at the perfect grooves and lines of the statue’s form, marveling at how realistic Element Lad had made him. It’s almost as if the real Brainiac 5 is standing right there in front of her, looking down on her with an imperious demeanor he had always carried.
She’s fairly confident that he’s laughing at her, somewhere in the Beyond, saying, I was right and you were wrong. And if Nura looks closer at the statue, she can almost see what looks like a smug twitch to the corner of the statue’s mouth.
Ayala turns out to be his type. They both enjoy the eccentricities of dating and it isn’t long before they are sharing quarters. She passes them in the hall one day – they’re holding hands and laughing about something that Cham had done to Jo’s shampoo – and she finds herself more jealous that Thom and Ayla have a sweet relationship than that Thom has moved on.
But that’s not to say that Nura remains alone.
After a week since the break-up, Nura starts to accept propositions for dates by a few men. All very sweet boys, with the perfect manners, but it is after the first date that Nura finds herself tiring of their perfect behavior and lack of intellectuality; even more absurd is their annoying quirks. One time, she ended a romantic dinner with a handsome young man of the most suitable tastes because she didn’t like the way he arched his brows when she said something questionable.
She stops dating after that.
Tinya tries to get Nura to go dancing with her for a while, but after ten “no, maybe later”s, the young woman stops offering. Whenever they pass each other in the hall, Tinya looks at Nura with a pitying look of concern. Even worse is when Imra starts to pry – though with always the concerned, soft face of a worried friend.
“We’re worried about you.”
“I’m fine, Imra. Don’t worry.”
It becomes more of a flat, indifferent, and rehearsed line than a comforting reassurance.
Sometimes, when she isn’t pouring herself into missions and training, Nura wanders into the Lab Complex in the dark of the night and sits down, and presses her back into the large, floating chair and feels the long-made impression Querl’s body had made in the fabric. Nura outstretches her arms to the control board and puts the pads of her fingers on the keys, the way that Querl used to when he was studiously crunching numbers and analyzing statistics.
A swell of nostalgia overcomes her and she yanks back her hands and brings them to her chest, disgruntled.
Nura remembers the vision that she had long, long ago; when the now one year deceased Legionnaire had been alive and smart-mouthing her at all cuts and corners of their encounters in the halls and mission debriefings.
“The universe is more unpredictable than we give it credit for. Your predictions don’t have to be infallible.”
“You’ll feel different when we’re married.”
…and she remembers what she had said.
“But you’re not really interested in him?”
“Not really. I mean, I don’t see it going anywhere.”
Nura huddles into herself in the chair. “…I never even gave you a chance.”
(http://photobucket.com) Nura starts out of the chair, alarmed beyond all belief of the Gods of Naltor. She clutches the arm of the chair for balance. "Wh-who are you? How did you get in here? The Lab Complex is only available for seasoned Legionnaires, and you are not wearing a flight ring." How did she not predict this intrusion to the Lab Complex?
Loren held up her hands and slowly approached Nura. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. You're not really in the Lab Complex. You're on a spaceship called Stacy. Do you remember hearing about the Nightmare King?"
(http://photobucket.com) What is this woman doing in the Lab Complex at one in the morning? Better yet, what is Nura doing in the Lab Complex at one in the morning?
Nura is a frailer, more delicate image compared to what she looked like before Querl's...ascension to the Beyond. Her hair is long and plait-braided, instead of shoulder-length and just wavy. It hits her the small of her back when she moves. Her fingernails aren't properly trimmed and there are some jagged indents to show that she has taken up the habit of nibbling at her cuticles.
She hadn't even bothered with changing into her uniform before coming down to the Lab Complex. She gets this feeling that she needs to be there, so she crawls out of bed and comes regardless of what she's wearing at the time. Tonight, she had thrown on a t-shirt over her lingerie. Her braid is messy from tossing and turning in her brief-never-enough sleep, and there are apparent bags under her sad, blue blue eyes.
"I don't know who the Nightmare King is, nor do I remember being on a spaceship called Stacy. This is Legion HQ, and this is the Lab Complex. Which you are intruding on."
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Don't bother fighting. The Yeerk said to her. It's pointless.
No. Loren thought.
Your friends are dead. Your mother is dead. Elfangor, his brother, your freak of a son, they're all going to die. And you will watch. You can't do anything.
No. You're wrong. This is wrong.
The Yeerk was laughing at her but the sound was fading. Everything was becoming clearer.
No. No. "NO!"
The dream was over. The real work had just begun.
One Winged
Location: The Tower (dream location)
He remembered the fires.
The McGraths had come in and in an instant a world came down in the sound of bullets.
Renne knew these oak walls, knew them well and he knew the smell of them as they burned. He knew the fiery sting as six bullets penetrated into the thick frontal sections of his skull. They were familiar and old things that had ceased to even ache but felt new all over again.
Fine bloody night this is! Are the girls out?
He lay on the oak floor wavering in an eerie state of semiconsciousness. Renne knew his blood was thin and he had bled quite a lot that night. But so too, Renne knew that this part of his skull was a dense pattern of layered substances. None of the bullets had reached the brain cavity.
The burn of smoke filtered down his throat. Sounds around him were eerily muted, almost not there at all. The front door slammed shut and the back flung itself open. Timbers creaked and popped as they burned above.
He didn't hear the bullets this time.
The sound of the fire was nearly silent.
Holl amrantau'r sêr ddywedant
Ar hyd y nos
His home burned down around him and no one came to pull him out. Unsurprising as that was, Renne found himself standing upright as he used to in those bygone days.
He stood inside an ashen shell of a place that reeked of smouldering wood and heated rock. Unsteady feet carried him through a familiar route that wasn't the same as the route from the other. This fire stank of magic and he heard all too clearly that he wasn't alone.
I've watched all your suffering
"Lad, ye didn't learn the meaning of Slekt."
"You've been good to me."
"Ffyniant."
The voices matched their footsteps as they turned their backs and walked away. In the silence, Renne was still for a few moments and distantly noted the thin streams still trickling from the six points on his head.
Soon enough, he too turned and found himself walking onto a godforsaken stretch of beach. The sea didn't crash here. It was oddly still and a figure emerged from the waves sheathed like a skeleton in a blue shroud. A shroud rotted by age and salt.
When Renne felt the cold of a gun in his hands, his fingers became nerveless. He dropped the weapon onto the sand and tried to back away.
"It's time to step down. I'm saying goodbye."
The figure picked up the gun.
Aimed.
And pulled the trigger.
He was running before the splash even sounded.
The tower was his home. It had been his home for longer than he'd estimated and he realised now, how wrong he had been to leave it. It rose before him a monolith of stone in the middle of a nowhere-plain, where nothing grew and the wind carried little sound. Except the faint echoing of laments destined to never be heard.
He knew why he had built the thing all those years ago.
He knew why he returned to it now.
Renne said nothing as he ascended the cold stone walls and nearly fell through the thing's single, tiny window. He'd never put a door or stairwell here when he'd built it.
When Renne had built it, he had never intended to come out again.
Inside the tiny room, his memories lay strewn on the floor around him. The candles. The single brick stolen from the original NightRunners' fortress before its destruction. His plushie. Over a hundred copies of letters. A worn old spyglass. A journal with its ink pen and ink.
And Billy Cranston's name etched into a brick on the far wall.
Re: One Winged
Re: One Winged
How strange, that a voice calls from below the Tower's height in this godforsaken no-man's-land.
Distantly curious, the creature at first doesn't make a sound. Curiosity's there but...detached. As if not part of himself. Even so, his voice gives a half-hearted kind of chirp.
"Eee?"
Re: One Winged
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A little blue face seems to peer over the edge of a tiny window. Its large, useless eyes show a detached, even hollow sort of slate-gray but those eyes react to nothing. The odd face's big ears give a half-hearted twitch.
"Eeee. Yeu?"
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The Tyrant King was here. He had only smelt it once before, and that was one had wandered by, barely edging their territory, being smart enough to know that one T-Rex was no match for a tribe of prepared raptors. But this was not the same. Red Snout was alone. And he had a sinking feeling that he was the tyrant's prey.
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"Red Snout? It's Loren. Don't eat me." She held her bat ready, as if that would do anything against a velociraptor.
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"Everyone on the ground!"
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"Be silent! He shall hear you, you fools!" He hunched lower into the underbrush, quivering in nervous, anxious anticipation.
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"Then who will stop the giant fireball that will arrive in sixty-two seconds?" At the end of her sentence, it hits twenty-two seconds.
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New subthread!
Swarming the Monster
It rushes toward him, the ground shaking with each heavy stride as its wide-stretched jaws begin to close the gap.
Re: Swarming the Monster
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But having to carry Loren and Renne disallows Nura the position of directing Renne's corrosive toxins. "Loren. Aim for Renne!"
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But they weren't here and it was up to him. He bounded over a fallen try, then screeched in surprise and pain as a tree branch caught him across the face, sending the raptor sprawling across the ground.
Get up! You can't wait here! GET UP! His mind screamed at him as he hurriedly struggled to his feet, not wanting to look back for fear of what might be gaining.
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What-If 1/2
She had also been the one who had picked up his body, never-minding the blood and the dirt, and carried it out of what had been the plaza. The medical examiners were almost afraid to take the body, but at Nura’s insistence, they did. She knew that Querl had passed on, but still she ordered the examiners to check two more times before Lyle had to pull her away.
It had taken two Legionnaires to restrain Nura after she had punched in Lemnos’ face when he was in custody of the Science Police.
Nura starts to date Thom a month after Querl’s death. Nothing is as she had previously predicted and yet things come along so predictable that the little quirks of Thom start to become annoyances. In truth, he has little confidence in himself, and is constant to please, than to be pleased. More than once does Nura turn down his offer to share quarters.
She finds herself down at the Memorial more often than not. Usually when she is disgruntled by something.
But almost always it is at night when she visits, turning on the phosphorescent lights so that she can stare at Brainiac 5’s statue which stands on a pedestal, surrounded by sunflowers (at Salu’s demand).
Nura places her hand against the statue’s chest, where his heart would be if flesh and blood. She stares up at the perfect grooves and lines of the statue’s form, marveling at how realistic Element Lad had made him. It’s almost as if the real Brainiac 5 is standing right there in front of her, looking down on her with an imperious demeanor he had always carried.
She’s fairly confident that he’s laughing at her, somewhere in the Beyond, saying, I was right and you were wrong. And if Nura looks closer at the statue, she can almost see what looks like a smug twitch to the corner of the statue’s mouth.
What-If 2/2
Ayala turns out to be his type. They both enjoy the eccentricities of dating and it isn’t long before they are sharing quarters. She passes them in the hall one day – they’re holding hands and laughing about something that Cham had done to Jo’s shampoo – and she finds herself more jealous that Thom and Ayla have a sweet relationship than that Thom has moved on.
But that’s not to say that Nura remains alone.
After a week since the break-up, Nura starts to accept propositions for dates by a few men. All very sweet boys, with the perfect manners, but it is after the first date that Nura finds herself tiring of their perfect behavior and lack of intellectuality; even more absurd is their annoying quirks. One time, she ended a romantic dinner with a handsome young man of the most suitable tastes because she didn’t like the way he arched his brows when she said something questionable.
She stops dating after that.
Tinya tries to get Nura to go dancing with her for a while, but after ten “no, maybe later”s, the young woman stops offering. Whenever they pass each other in the hall, Tinya looks at Nura with a pitying look of concern. Even worse is when Imra starts to pry – though with always the concerned, soft face of a worried friend.
“We’re worried about you.”
“I’m fine, Imra. Don’t worry.”
It becomes more of a flat, indifferent, and rehearsed line than a comforting reassurance.
Sometimes, when she isn’t pouring herself into missions and training, Nura wanders into the Lab Complex in the dark of the night and sits down, and presses her back into the large, floating chair and feels the long-made impression Querl’s body had made in the fabric. Nura outstretches her arms to the control board and puts the pads of her fingers on the keys, the way that Querl used to when he was studiously crunching numbers and analyzing statistics.
A swell of nostalgia overcomes her and she yanks back her hands and brings them to her chest, disgruntled.
Nura remembers the vision that she had long, long ago; when the now one year deceased Legionnaire had been alive and smart-mouthing her at all cuts and corners of their encounters in the halls and mission debriefings.
“The universe is more unpredictable than we give it credit for. Your predictions don’t have to be infallible.”
“You’ll feel different when we’re married.”
…and she remembers what she had said.
“But you’re not really interested in him?”
“Not really. I mean, I don’t see it going anywhere.”
Nura huddles into herself in the chair. “…I never even gave you a chance.”
Re: What-If
Re: What-If
Nura starts out of the chair, alarmed beyond all belief of the Gods of Naltor. She clutches the arm of the chair for balance. "Wh-who are you? How did you get in here? The Lab Complex is only available for seasoned Legionnaires, and you are not wearing a flight ring." How did she not predict this intrusion to the Lab Complex?
Re: What-If
Re: What-If
What is this woman doing in the Lab Complex at one in the morning? Better yet, what is Nura doing in the Lab Complex at one in the morning?
Nura is a frailer, more delicate image compared to what she looked like before Querl's...ascension to the Beyond. Her hair is long and plait-braided, instead of shoulder-length and just wavy. It hits her the small of her back when she moves. Her fingernails aren't properly trimmed and there are some jagged indents to show that she has taken up the habit of nibbling at her cuticles.
She hadn't even bothered with changing into her uniform before coming down to the Lab Complex. She gets this feeling that she needs to be there, so she crawls out of bed and comes regardless of what she's wearing at the time. Tonight, she had thrown on a t-shirt over her lingerie. Her braid is messy from tossing and turning in her brief-never-enough sleep, and there are apparent bags under her sad, blue blue eyes.
"I don't know who the Nightmare King is, nor do I remember being on a spaceship called Stacy. This is Legion HQ, and this is the Lab Complex. Which you are intruding on."
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