Remnants of the Earth
SPACE STATIONS => TRIM => Topic started by: DragonSong on October 09, 2019, 11:59:33 am
-
Annabelle's first attempt at escape had not gone well.
Honestly she couldn't even remember much of what had happened after the alarm system she'd been suppressing suddenly came back online--she'd badly misjudged just how much of her power she could use with the stupid TRIM chip embedded in her temple--and within thirty seconds she'd been tased unconscious and dragged back to her "dormitory".
At least, she assumed that was what had happened. Her memories of the first few days after that were a blur of white coats, bright lights, and a wider variety of pain than she'd ever really thought possible.
The next thing she could really remember was waking up in her hospital cot, one wrist cuffed to the bed, with one of the doctors standing over her, explaining that they had updated her chip. They had control now; without approval from a computerized control unit, Annabelle had no access to her powers at all.
It felt like losing a limb. She could feel the phantom tingles of electricity sometimes at the tips of her fingers or sparking behind her eyes, but the moment she reached for it, the feeling vanished.
In all of the five years since she'd been found and brought to TRIM, she thought that might be the most effective torture they'd come up with. It had been nearly two months of this, and even after enduring dozens of previous tests and experiments, she thought much longer of this might actually kill her.
Fight...
Annabelle sat up in bed, looking around the darkness of her tiny cell. That--that was a voice. A voice she didn't recognize. Where...?
Fight it, my child.
Her eyes widened as she realized the voice was inside her head. "Oh gods." She looked around, though now she knew it was useless. "What--what's going on?"
You must fight. It was a whisper, fuzzy and barely audible, almost like static. Cannot...much longer. Go now. Go while...doors are down.
Annabelle got the distinct feeling that there was more to the message than she was hearing, her brow furrowing in confusion as she tried to figure out exactly what the voice was trying to tell her. Perhaps she should have been more worried about anonymous voices in her head, but honestly? At this point, it barely even phased her.
And the voice wasn't completely unknown, somehow. Almost like a memory of a dream, something she couldn't quite grasp.
But she didn't have time--or honestly really the inclination--to prioritize that train of thought. "Go while the doors are down", what did that mean?
As if in answer to her thoughts, she saw the red glow of her door lock flicker, then blink to green, and heard the unmistakable snick of the automated lock turning open.
She was frozen on the bed, wide eyed and staring, for a long, elastic moment. Then she burst into movement, launching herself off the bed and racing for the door, barely pausing a moment once she'd cracked it open to check the hall before she darted out and began running for the far door, bare feet hardly making a sound against the cool tile.
She reached the door, fingers closing around the handle, and the harsh blare of an alarm suddenly ripped through the hall. She froze, terrified, memories of her last attempt racing through her mind--but it wasn't a door alarm, it was an emergency alert. Someone must have realized the door system was offline.
Go while the doors are down.
Alright. She could do this.
Either by miracle or by design, the path from Wing Alpha down to the southwest docking point was almost entirely clear of doctors and technicians. Annabelle had memorized the guards' routes from her last escape attempt and there should have been more people down here, but the emergency protocols had called them all to an upper level.
All but the two standing at the main door. Annabelle stopped dead once she caught sight of them, then ducked back around the corner and poked her head around again, more cautiously this time. Okay, there were only two of them, and they were probably distracted by the alarms. If she took them by surprise...
A sharp pain jolted through her head and she had to bite down on a cry, clenching her eyes shut as electricity surged through her blood--
Her eyes snapped open. Electricity.
She could feel her magic again.
Not knowing how long this would last, spurred onward by a surge of wild, giddy relief and joy, Annabelle dashed out into the hall and went barreling right for the guards, sparks jumping from her fingertips as she raised her hands and focused the energy down her arms and gather in her palms. If she could just toss a ball of electricity at them, it would be enough of a distraction for her to rush through, grab the first ship she saw and put this place far behind her.
The magic pulsed through her blood, surging into her hands, ready to be released. The guards were going for their weapons, but she was faster, throwing her power forward with a shoot as she charged directly toward the door between them.
Something happened. Something sharp and hot and dangerous that made both the chip in her temple and the core of sparks at the center of her magic protest painfully. The electricity sprang from her hands, hotter and fiercer than she'd intended, singeing the edges of her hospital-regulation scrubs, but she couldn't pull it back, could only watch in horror as the guards jerked and spasmed, then went limp, collapsing to the ground.
It didn't look they were breathing.
Annabelle felt the floor slide sideways beneath her feet, her stomach twisting sickeningly. Her steps slowed, vision pinpointing to the uniformed figures on the floor. Oh no. Oh no no no no no--
Focus! Another jolt of pain, this one actually drawing a cry from her lips. Run, now! I cannot maintain...fading.. will not be able to help you again.
"I'm sorry," Annabelle whispered as she ran through the door into the docking port, vision blurred with the start of tears. "I'm so sorry."
Official TRIM ships were all on the same wireless locking system, which was also down along with most of the doors in the facility. Annabelle ran for the first single person craft she saw, a generic security vehicle, and managed to both jump start the ship and slip her consciousness into the navigation system just long enough to input random coordinates before she felt her power begin to fade again.
A soft sob caught in her throat at the loss, but she tried to swallow it down, curving the ship toward the slowly opening docking door into open space. She punched forward, accelerating to max speed as quick as she could.
A ragged, hysterical laugh joined the muffled sob in her throat and she sank back in her seat. She had no idea where she was going, what it had cost, but she was out.
By the time the emergency at TRIM was under control and the patients counted, it had been nearly six hours since Annabelle's escape. Somehow, she was the only subject who had managed to utilize the chaos effectively, though there were plenty of other injuries from patients and subjects attacking the staff. Enough that the core staff couldn't mobilize quick enough to send someone after her.
"Call in one of asset recovery operatives," Annabelle's lead doctor, a psychic called Garth Farrow, ordered his assistant as they watched the security video of the young woman attacking the two guards. "One of our best--someone who isn't scared of a little lightning."
-
Saendyr shot up in bed as his communicator started beeping loudly and flashing. He never wanted to miss a call from his employer, of course, so his reward for wanting to be quick to pick up the phone was a 3:46 AM call from Mr. Trim.
Excellent.
The window blinds were open halfway and the lights from passing hovercars filtered past occasionally as he reached dumbly out beside his bed. His apartment wasn't huge but for a flat in Tynova it was pretty comfortable. Three rooms and one bath, trash incineration included.
He sat up in bed and held the communicator up, the blue light illuminating his purple skin. The call was from ARC Dispatch.
"Talk to me."
"You have been activated. Report in to Dr. Farrow at TRIM immediately, and come ready to work."
One of the benefits of working for a shady research laboratory was that the commute was always fast. One short transit ride to the Thanatos Inc. headquarters in Tynova and Saendyr was already halfway there. Of course, the Thanatos Inc. building frequently dispatched shuttles full of employees and technicians to their orbital assets, but a couple of those went a little farther than that, and damn fast to boot.
He was through the lobby and heading up, passing through a security zone afterwards and through a clearance zone after that. The security depot. He found his locker, armored himself up, and picked up his weapons from the quartermaster. The dispatch had mentioned that the doctor had specifically mentioned "lightning" so he made sure to pick up an energy harness restraint and an extra drum magazine of rubber bullets.
Once he had everything, he hopped on one of the shuttles, alongside some reinforcements for the several injured guards, and they took off and sped up into the atmosphere.
It was around two hours total after he was called in that the shuttle was landing inside one of TRIM's sealed hangars. Saendyr stepped down, ready for duty and also carrying a duffel bag with spare clothes in case he had to stay on the move.
He looked about as he stepped down into the hangar, and if nobody was waiting for him then he would make his way over to one of the guards and ask to be taken to Dr. Farrow.
-
Farrow’s assistant was a squirrelly little man with a sharp jaw and weak chin, tapping one foot anxiously as he waited for their operative to arrive.
Seandyr was certainly a distinctive character, and the assistant had no trouble spotting him and quickly making his way over to give a short, clipped, “The Doctor is waiting to see you,” before turning on his heel and leading the agent down a series of halls to Farrow’s office.
The moment he knocked in the door it slid open with a soft whoosh if air, revealing Dr. Farrow hunched over a datapad in his desk, frowning as he re-watched the footage of the incident yet again.
He barely acknowledged Seandyr, and ignored the assistant entirely. “Ah, you’re here. Good. How much did Dispatch brief you on?”
-
Indeed, Saendyr literally stood out from the others in the hangar, a quality which he had his inhuman legs to thank for. He walked on those slender, three-toed feet of his rather gracefully, picking his way across the hangar before Farrow’s assistant intercepted him.
Sendyr looked down at the assistant, one of the many Suits and Labcoats that made this place their permanent workplace. He was a little disappointed he didn’t make it to TRIM’s weapon lockup (half his kit was in there!) but he supposed he’d just have to go afterwards.
He didn’t waste any breath talking to the Labcoat guiding him through, and when they arrived to Dr. Farrow’s office Saendyr gave the assistant a curt nod before stepping in, removing his helmet as he did so. At the doctor’s question, he chuckled and tucked his helmet under his arm.
“Hello, Dr. Farrow. Told me a decent bit. Brought my rubber gloves and everything,” he said as he walked up. He was already heavier than the average human and the military spec body armor he wore certainly added some weight of its own. His footfalls were heavy and he had a calculated, precise manner of walking.
He bent a bit to peer down at the datapad, wincing when he saw the looped footage of Annabelle streaking around the corner and cooking those two guards in their armor. His stomach tightened a bit when he saw the escapee was a human test subject, quite unlike the rogue operatives and lab monstrosities that he was used to.
Still, as he watched the footage, Saendyr could understand why they’d called him, and none of their usual manhunters.
“How long ago?” Saendyr started, and then straightened up to regard Dr. Farrow. Time was of the essence and every moment meant a bigger head start for Annabelle.
“And how did this even happen, anyhow? I’ve got a report to write after this, you know.”
-
Dr. Farrow watched the bounty hunter's face when his attention focused on the video--because dress it up however you like, as far as the good doctor was concerned, their Recovery Operatives were little better than bounty hunters. Just bounty hunters with exclusive contracts.
"Mm." Farrow pursed his lips and steepled his fingers just in front of his face. "The answers to those two questions are connected, conveniently enough. It's been nine hours and twenty three minutes since the security failure that allowed Ms. McAlistair here to make her escape. It's been almost nine hours exactly since we lost contact with her inhibitor chip." His fingers flew over the datapad, drawing up the readouts from Annabelle's chip, which did indeed cut out eight hours and fifty-seven minutes ago. Farrow tapped a spike in the readout for her magic that flared just before the escape itself. "See that? That shouldn't be possible. We've spent the better part of decades of study here making sure that that is not possible."
Frowning, Dr. Farrow turned the pad so he could bring up a new screen, muttering under his breath, "Of course, technically, the door failure shouldn't have been possible either. We're still working out how that happened, exactly. Some sort of outside interference that, again, shouldn't be possible." he glanced up at Saendyr and added, almost as an afterthought, "If you can manage to get any information out of her, be sure to get it to us as quickly as possible."
He turned the datapad back around, showing a tracking screen. Like the rest of the readouts from Annabelle's chip, the tracker cut out just about nine hours ago, but the general trajectory seemed to be heading for Edanith.
"We need her back, and we need her now." Farrow lifted his eyes, expression stony. "I'm giving you access to all recent and current information from her chip, such as it is. If it comes back online, you'll be able to track her easily. Additionally, I'm giving you access to roughly thirty-six percent of the video documentation of Ms. McAlistair's...treatment. Perhaps more knowledge of her abilities and what we have thus far tested with her will allow you to...better apprehend her."
He paused, lips a thin line, then added, "Do try not to get yourself killed by this one. The amnesia makes her a surprisingly valuable test subject."
Edanith
Annabelle woke up slowly, in pain and confused. It took longer than it really should have for her to realize she was in a small space shuttle, not her dorm back at TRIM. It took even longer after that for her to remember exactly how she'd gotten here--the doors failing, her mad dash through the facility, killing those two guards, stealing a ship...
And crashing a ship, apparently. Or just about.
The red, dry earth of Edanith was encrusted all over her viewing panel, and a closer look revealed that she seemed to have somehow managed to plow the ship into the surface at just the right angle and just the right speed to avoid completely obliterating the vehicle. Even more miraculously, as far as she could tell, she had only a handful of scrapes and bruises from the ordeal--probably a twisted ankle, it was sort of hard to tell.
All in all though, not bad.
The voice in her head was gone too. She thought maybe she should be upset about that--whoever the owner of the voice was had essentially saved her after all--but honestly she was just relieved. Savior or not, whoever--whatever--that voice was hadn't given a single damn when she killed the guards. And it hadn't been shy about hurting her to get her to do what it wanted either.
Groaning, Annabelle forced herself to the shuttle door and smacked the release button, all but tumbling out onto the sandy earth. A quick glance around told her that she was in a long rut that ended in a sort of crater around the small ship, and beyond that...
Nothing. Just red earth and wide sky.
"Well." Annabelle glanced down at herself, then back to the shuttle, then down again. She had nothing. No supplies, no real clothes besides her hospital-issued scrubs, not even a pair of shoes.
She also had no choice.
"Forward then," she murmured to herself, climbing slowly out of the small crater and setting out into the barren Edanith frontier.
-
The doctor's explanation made Saendyr cross his arms, although on the inside he was smiling like a jackal. He wouldn't be working for this charnel house if the pay wasn't good enough to keep his entire family afloat, and while he knew that they did bad things to people here it was never his direct problem.
Until now, of course, and he had to go subdue a poor girl and bring her back here. Would he stay up and think about it? Probably. But the 50,000 credits per contract makes it a hell of a lot comfier and hey, maybe he could even get some hazard pay for this one.
But, all that negativity aside, his report had the power to make this doctor's life a living hell, since it'd be going straight to TRIM's Head of Security (as did all containment reports, in-house or otherwise) and multiple extremely compromising security breaches did not sit well on that particular piece of paper.
"Believe you me, that info's going to good use," Sendyr said, even as he laid his commlink on top of the good Doctor's datapad so the file transfer could begin.
"And allegedly impossible circumstances notwithstandin', it sounds to me like you've got to either change all your security pathways and access codes or find the man on the inside that opened it all up," he said, taking a couple of long, thudding strides across the room.
"'Cause you know as well as I do that after what happened four months ago, HoS is going to be looking for somebody to roll over for this. Just make sure it ain't you, Doc."
With a snap of his fingers and a parting smile, he put his helmet back on, grabbed his commlink, and stepped back out, speaking as he went.
"And don't you worry, you'll have every hair on her pretty head here soon enough Just make sure you can keep her in one place by the time I get back," he said, and didn't wait around for a response.
Next stop was TRIM's lockup for specialized weapons, and he made friendly talk with the quartermaster as he retrieved some more specialized re-containment items. Rubber bullets and titanium handcuffs were good and all but TRIM carried the good stuff.
Shoulder-mounted net launcher, wired to a laser sight on the helmet? Check. Eyedrones and pellet-sized sleep gas grenades? Check and check. Just as he was about to leave, the quartermaster got his attention and handed him a thick bracer for his right arm. Experimental new technology designed to attract magic to itself and protect the wearer, all outbound containment operatives for the next two months were required to carry one for field testing.
Excellent. unproven technology strapped right to his arm, what could go wrong? Besides, he didn't have the heart to tell the quartermaster that it was a little redundant to give one to him. Then again, lightning you aren't hit with is leagues above the alternative, so he couldn't quite decline it.
After all that debacle, he was on a transport shuttle headed to Edanith. The drop zone was nearby the hijacked security vessel she'd taken, so he had some time to kick back in the belly of the shuttle and set his commlink to project inside his helmet visor. With a bit of trepidation, he started the playback and began to watch Annabelle's testing logs...
[Do you want to describe what's in the logs as he makes his way to Edanith?]
-
[Yeah, I can do that! Annabelle will just sorta be wandering around anyway lol]
"What is your name?"
"...Annabelle."
"Last name?"
"M-McAlistair."
"You know this."
"I...yes?"
"How?"
The young woman in the video frowned slightly at the lab-coated man watching her from across a desk, fingers tapping diligently at his datapad with every answer she gave--a slightly younger Doctor Farrow.
Annabelle herself was clearly younger, barely more than a teenager, dressed in a simple white hospital nightgown with her hands shackled to the chair in which she sat. Unlike the footage of her recent escape, in this video her hair fell just passed her shoulders, and there was no inhibitor chip implanted in her temple.
"I just...do," Annabelle murmured in response to the doctor's question.
"But you don't remember anything else? Who you are, where you came from? How to came to be found in our northwest storage compartment?" The doctor's eyes narrowed. "How you nearly killed three men, and put one in a coma?"
Annabelle winced and shook her head. It was painfully clear that she was scared, and confused, and wracked with guilt. Every emotion was worn plain on her face, carried in each line of her body.
"I--I don't know. Really, I don't. I'm sorry, I never meant to hurt anyone, I promise! I didn't, I--"
"Alright, enough." The doctor raised one hand, pressing a buzzer with one finger of the other. "Security is on their way. They'll escort you to your new room." He smiled, cold and cruel. "Welcome to TRIM, Ms. McAlistair."
The next clip cut in what was clearly halfway through a video. Annabelle was once more strapped into a chair, slumped forward, head hanging low toward her chest. Her shoulders heaved with heavy, painful breaths, and her hair--shorter now, like it was in the escape footage--hung lank around her face, hiding most of it from view of the camera.
Doctor Farrow and two other scientist were speaking in low voices just behind her chair, scribbling notes and occasionally bouncing theories off one another.
"If we partially released the inhibitor--"
"No, too risky. We've seen what she does on accident, can you imagine if she turned on us?"
"True enough. But we can't get an accurate measurement with her powers half-hobbled like this."
"Perhaps a more...invasive study? Looking directly into her mind?"
Annabelle jolted, her head snapping up, revealing the long, fresh burn mark that spread over the left side of her neck and shoulder. She shook her head, blue eyes wide and frantic, and her mouth opened, throat convulsing as she clearly tried to speak.
All she managed was to cough up a mouthful of blood, slumping back into the chair, evidently unable to keep her eyes open.
"Hmm...perhaps. The psychologist? Maybe a few weekly sessions...?"
"Worth keeping in mind. For now, let's run the test again. Live wires in three, two--"
The video cut out with a sharp, staticky crackle that sounded suspiciously like a scream of pain.
After all, if their recovery operatives didn't see an abuse of human rights, they really had no evidence to report.
The third clip was entirely audio.
A woman's nervous laugh. "I didn't really think I needed a therapist, but...whatever the doctor says, right?"
"We can just talk. How are you? Did you sleep well?" A male voice, the psychologist.
"Yeah, I slept...fine." Mumbled, wary. "Weird dreams, but I always have those. I sleep through the night though--"
...
"Dreams, you mentioned those. What kind of them do you have? What about them makes them weird?"
"Well...you know serial dreams? They're kinda like those, only it's always this same person. A woman, and she says she's my mother..."
"Mother?" The therapist sounded curious.
"She says I'm special. She says that...all her children are special."
The conversation continued a few more minutes, the psychologist asking just why Annabelle was special while the young mage was clearly unable to answer. Then he suggested looking directly into her mind.
"I'd say it's painless. But I'd be lying."
"How...not painless?"
A stretch of silence. Then:
"Your mother...strange. Feels as if...not alone."
The audio was suddenly fuzzy and corrupted--the file had clearly been edited on short notice. Annabelle's voice came again, high and scared, but her words were too garbled to make out.
Then a scream, a clatter, a shout of pain, the doctor shouting for the"subject" to be removed immediately.
And the feed cut out.
A few other clips and snippets of video were included, mostly just audio notes from Doctor Farrow, documenting the "progress" Annabelle was making--mainly, how far up they kept ramping her inhibitor chip, until she was essentially as chained to the thing as any Edanith mage; perhaps more, for she had no mordecai to help her channel her power.
"She talks in her sleep," one of the last clips noted, almost bored. "Screams, sometimes. Always about this mother of hers. She claims not to remember when she wakes... She's probably lying."
-
Saendyr had seen quite a few things during his military days. Heartwrenching things that could break someone down into their constituent parts, really reveal what somebody was made of on the inside. Watching Annabelle's test footage was something else. It wasn't videos of people prodding some new beast while a bored scientist read off its characteristics and weaknesses or the final recordings of some rogue scientist that he was tracking down.
Dr. Farrow had instead opted to give Saendyr what seemed to be his own heavily redacted torture tapes, a veritable chronicle of human suffering that all started with that cruel, sick smile in the first clip.
He closed his eyes and rest his head back, still listening to the audio in his helmet even as the shuttle bumped and jumped as it cleaved through Edanith's atmoshpere.
There was a lot about Annabelle McAlistair's story that seemed odd to him, from how she allegedly just appeared at TRIM, confused and ready to be contained, all the way to the repeated references of a "mother."
He'd seen enough psychics and mages in his time to know that they were an abstract, sometimes loopy lot, but something about this girl struck him as different. She was dangerous, even if she didn't want to be, of that there was no doubt. TRIM at least made an effort to keep her alive but here on Edanith she's more likely to be shot than spared if she had a lethal outburst.
The shuttle lurched to a stop, and the pilot spoke up through the intercom.
"Here we are. Happy hunting, agent."
"Yeah, happy hunting to you too," Saendyr said, and he stood up. The shuttle doors opened and Saendyr gave the approaching ground a look. When the shuttle was about twenty feet away from the ground and spraying dust in all directions, he stepped out and made a solid landing just a short walk away from the abandoned security ship. He took his rifle off of his back and he switched the ammo type to rubber bullets as he approached the vessel.
She wasn't around, of course, but that didn't stop him from approaching the cockpit (which had been left wide open.)
The wind had removed any trace of her footsteps, but maybe if he wired the right sensors, he could get a proximity readout, anything that might've told him where she could've gone. It took him nearly twenty minutes of work, sitting in that pilot seat that was clearly not designed for someone with Altani legs, but finally he got the radar tracker working.
The ship had remained functional for a short time after Annabelle had left it, and with a smile he watched the radar logs display a person-sized contact moving directly away from the front of the vessel, as if she'd just bailed out and started walking. Smart girl, but sensors didn't lie.
And so he stepped out of that ship and left a TRIM beacon on it for recovery. Looking up into the Edani sky, he frowned and set off in Annabelle's last known direction. He hoped for her sake that he found her before the elements killed her.
-
Forward then.
Nowhere to go but forward.
And forward.
And forward.
Annabelle had no real way of keeping track of time, but she knew it had to be at least a few hours just by how far the sun had traveled across the sky.
The thrice-be-damned sun.
Panting, the techno-mage paused for the fourth time in as many minutes and looked around yet again, trying desperately to get her barrings; she was fairly sure she may have been walking in circles for the last hour.
Red earth, red earth, a few scrubby plants, some tracks from some sort of...something. Local wildlife maybe. A few shapes in the distance that might be a smattering of hill territory--probably her best shot for water.
Alright. That way, then.
Swallowing through a dry, sore throat, she forced herself to keep walking, stumbling slightly in the heat. Sweat had almost completely soaked through her clothes by this point, and the bottoms of her feet were burned and bleeding, but she couldn't stop, she couldn't afford to stop.
Even if TRIM hadn't sent someone after her yet, she didn't want to risk running into any locals. What she knew about Edanith was few and far between, but she did know enough to understand just what level of "deep shit" she'd be in if anyone on the frontier learned she was a rogue mage.
She probably wouldn't even have time to explain that her chip blocked her powers entirely before she got shot.
So she trekked on. It was slow going at this point, her steps stumbling and labored, but at least she was moving, one step at a time coming closer and closer to that tiny hint of hills and the theoretical promise of water, of survival.
-
An hour later, and Saendyr was just about as bored out of his skull as he could be. He’d run at a jog ever since the downed security vessel and the only thing he’d seen was red dirt and rocks. He was going to get nowhere like this, but it was at least far enough away to make the eyedrones useful. He set his pack down and took out two base-ball sized metal spheres, and he tossed them up into the air, and they fanned out but would remain relatively close by, expanding his search area by quite a bit. Both would notify him if they detected a human female.
He paced for a bit, thinking to himself, trying to think of things from her side.
Rogue mage on Edanith, so population centers are a no go. No supplies, no protection, no shelter and no navigational aids either so I’m relying on landmarks. I’ve just crashed, maybe I’m tired or injured...
The horizon held nothing for him but flat desert and the occasional cactus, save for a lumpy cluster of grassy hills that caught his eye. The elevation would be a good lookout point, he could survey wide swaths of land like that and maybe catch a glimpse of her or keep up the trail.
So he pressed on and resumed his jog, and he went on for another thirty minutes before his helmet scanners picked up an irregularity on the ground and he examined it, a dry patch of caked earth that didn’t blow tracks away, with a faintly foot-shaped bloodstain. He straightened back up to his full height and knew he was on the right track, and proceeded slower, more subtly,
-
Annabelle lost all track of time and spatial awareness, only conscious of stumbling forward, ever forward, throat now utterly parched and her lungs protesting every gulped breath that felt like she was swallowing fire.
Why was it so damned hot?
She didn't even realized she'd reached the hills she'd been moving toward until suddenly each step wasn't sending a wave of hot pain up from her feet. Blearily, she looked down and realized that was because she'd staggered onto the beginnings of some scrubby patches of grass--dry and prickly as all hells, but compared to the red earth deliciously cool and considerably more forgiving on her bare feet.
And she could hear water.
If there had been any hydration left in her body, she was pretty sure she would have collapsed into tears as she stumbled the last few steps toward a pathetically tiny, rather muddy little stream and sank to her knees, quickly scooping up handfuls of water. It tasted like dirt and she loved it, splashing a few handfuls on her face once she'd managed to slake her thirst somewhat.
Okay...Okay, Anna, what next? Where can you go?
It was an excellent question, and though she'd asked it of herself the young mage really didn't have the energy or the focus to answer. Her vision was still blurry at the edges and her whole body ached, her injured ankle reminding her persistently of its presence now that she'd finally stopped walking.
"Stupid fucking thing," Annabelle muttered to herself as she twisted around to put her leg out in front and finally actually look at it. She glowered, sizing up the swelling. Probably not broken, maybe sprained, definitely twisted. "Really? Look, you either come out of a shuttle crash with dozens of broken bones, or you walk away unscathed. That should be the rule," she grumbled, glancing around for something she might be able to fashion into a makeshift splint.
-
Saendyr kept his eyes on the hills as he approached. Sweeps with his helmet scanners on multiple different modes all told him that if someone was there, they were most likely deeper inside. If he'd brought a chemical tracer he could've followed a blood trail easier. Hindsight aside, he made a conscious effort not to thud his footprints so much as he came up, and with a flick of his fingers he sent the silent eyedrone hovering ahead, seeing if the stealthy little drone could spot his target.
He stepped on some dry, crunchy grass and the noise attracted his attention. When he glanced down, he was grateful for his curiosity because he chanced upon some more bloody tracks pressed into the dry, easily bent grass.
The print was fairly fresh, and he set his helmet to pick up audio more sensitively. He honed in on the distant sound of running water, and considered his options. He decided to approach from an unexpected angle and he started climbing so he could approach the situation with the altitude advantage. If he could get the drop on her and put a pair of tranquilizers into her before she can zap him he'd be home with his rent paid for the next few months before the day was over.
-
The faint whir of machinery brought Annabelle's attention suddenly snapping skyward. She squinted, trying to make out the source of the sound--but it was gone in a matter of seconds, and she couldn't see anything unusual in the vastness above her.
Still, it put her on edge. She needed to get moving. Grabbing up a handful of dried, woody reeds that were sort of clinging to life by the edge of the small stream, she ripped off a strip from the bottom of her pale blue scrubs and sort of clumsily tied them onto her ankle, hoping the makeshift splint would at least keep her going.
Carefully, wincing as her battered and exhausted body protested, Annabelle forced herself to her feet and looked around again, trying to figure out the best direction to keep walking. Further into the hills seemed like a good bed; at least there was a better chance of finding water.
Gritting her teeth, she started following the stream back upstream, toward what she hoped would be its source.
-
He'd faced much worse climbs in his past, and despite all his equipment and protective plating the armor was designed with carbon sinews to assist movement and allow for the full application of his strength despite his encumbrance. His other advantage was that his lower half was better adapted to terrain like this, and his digitigrade legs and flexible, three-toed feet gripped the rocks much better than a flat boot. The whole time, he paid attention to the square in the top right corner of his helmet's view, the view from the eyebot.
Nothing so far, but maybe that'd change.
He found a nice elevated spot, on top of a rocky rise that had some rocky red earth accumulated on top. He took his rifle off of his back, adjusting his sight for longer range and flicking on the gun tracking system with the flick of a switch.
Wind information, a built-in rangefinder, and other such widgets formed his tech basis, but nothing beat a vidfeed directly down the scope. He hunkered down and surveyed the landscape below.
He thought he saw some movement deeper into the hills, among some shrubs, and he steadied his rifle and chambered a tranquilizer round. He looked down the sight to see what it was...
-
Her skin prickled and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. Annabelle stiffened, and slowly turned on the spot by the bend in the stream where she'd paused to get her bearings again.
There was a sort of tension in the air, something she didn't entirely understand but was almost positive was just as much internal as it was external. She felt like a hunted animal, a deer scenting a wolf on the wind.
...run...
Again, the strange voice, but it was so faint now she almost didn't notice it. She wouldn't have, if she hadn't been so intent on listening for the telltale sounds of another living creature in close proximity.
I can't run, not on this ankle. She looked around. I--I could hide? But maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm just being paranoid, and hiding will keep me in one place long enough for whoever they send to catch up...
She swayed on the spot, hesitating. Hunted creature she might be, but it seemed she didn't quite have the instincts of true prey.
-
Now that, he wasn't expecting. He tensed up when the girl he'd watched suffer through all those research tapes just up and appear in his scope. He tensed, suddenly... nervous. The scope homed in on her and he centered her. Saendyr noted the makeshift splint, the way she seemed nervous, almost as if she knew something was wrong...
Well, there wasn't a better time than this.
With a flick of a switch, his safety came off and he aimed for her good leg. The tranquilizer shot was chambered and he took a moment to exhale and get used to her nervous swaying. He was confident he had a good bead on her and as the gun-link system gave him the "all clear shot" message, he squeezed on the trigger ever so slightly in preparation.
Sorry, Annabelle. he thought, and then fired twice, with the second shot aimed a bit higher, more towards her hip. She wasn't too far off a target, so hopefully he could bag her and be home early so he cold get on with feeling guilty about this.
-
Run!
She tried. She really did. She managed a few steps before there was a sharp pain in her leg, then another in her hip. She actually kept running, limping heavily, and managed to get a few yards from the stream before the world started to blur around her.
Oh no. She'd been drugged too many times not to recognize the effects of a tranquilizer. Her eyes, hazy now, looked down to see the two darts sunk into her skin. No no no no no...
The voice was gone. Terrifying as it had been, she found she suddenly ached for it--it had at least helped her escape before. She wasn't sure she would be able to do it again on her own.
"Please..." She hardly even realized that she spoke around, her vision tilting and spinning as she turned in a slow circle, feeling herself start to fade. "Please, don't...I can't...please..."
She dropped to the ground, unconscious.
-
Two hits, and she barely even made it a few more steps before looping out and dropping to the ground right there. The laser microphone on the scope picked it all up, every last word that she said until she finally went still.
It made him feel heavy in a way he’d never thought before. He’d shot and killed enemy soldiers, and was no stranger to tragic scenes or shows of needless brutality.
Still, it took him a moment to regain himself. He’d shot her with tranqs but considering where she was going he’d probably just killed her. No, no no no.
He shook his head and got to his feet so he could climb down the rock face. A few minutes later and he was stooped down by her. He put the standard manacles on her, cuffing her hands behind her back. He took a scan of her head, confirming that her chip was still in her and operational but unresponsive to external commands, including the command to actually inhibit her powers.
Well, at least she was already bagged.
He tried to radio back to TRIM, but he was getting some pretty heavy interference. The hills played hell on signals and there was a dust storm rolling in, so the only thing he could think to do was keep sending out a signal even as he found a nice, sheltered spot and accommodated both himself and Annabelle.
“Come on, just go through...” he muttered anxiously, even as he busied himself preparing a meal ration. He took his helmet off but kept the antenna extended. It was all patched into some earbuds he was wearing so he didn’t have to put the whole helmet on to use the radio.
-
The thing about tranqing a mage was that it never lasted long--magic required a bitch of a metabolism, even magic that was dormant or currently unable to be accessed by its wielder. So while Annabelle rightly should have been out for at least an hour, it really only took about ten minutes before she groaned and started to stir against the red, sandy earth where she lay.
It wasn't the first time she'd woken up cuffed in unfamiliar surroundings in the last few years, and as she lay there groggily taking stock, she knew with a gut-sinking certainty that it probably wouldn't be the last. At least, not if TRIM didn't decide to just kill her outright once they got her back. They might. She was more than just a security risk now, she was an embarrassment.
She groaned again, squinting as her vision sort of pulsed and blurred, then cleared quite abruptly. Laying on her side, hands bound behind her back, all she could really make out was what was directly in front of her--a helmet with some sort of antenna sticking up from it in a weirdly jaunty manner.
"What the hell?" she mumbled, voice thick. Her throat was dry from her trek over Edanith's inhospitable terrain, and her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton from the tranquilizer. Not a fun combination.
Wincing and muttering curses, Annabelle tried to push herself up into at least a semi-seated position. She failed. Repeatedly. While the drug in her system was fading steadily, her entire lower body was still either numb or filled with the pins-and-needles torture of shaking a limb that had fallen asleep back to life. Plus, her ankle still hurt like a sunnovabitch.
On the fourth try she managed to roll herself onto her back as she collapsed down to the earth again, glaring up at the rocky outcropping over her head. "Ow..."
-
Saendyr had busied himself with a quick meal, the kind that cooked itself when you opened it. At least TRIM packed good grub, not any weird, bulk-imported foreign ones. And so he chowed down on a good old salisbury steak as he watched the many colors of sand and dust whip by the entrance of the cave, forming an enchanting curtain of color. The storm filtered the sun a bloody red and thus the little cave they were sheltered in was painted the same color.
The storm brought heat as well, and his crests were a little flushed at the moment, heightening the Altani part of his heritage just a little bit more. He was still fully armored up, the suit had enough padding to sit comfortably just about anywhere, and he let his long, hoofed legs stretch out.
Damned storm, he couldn't even get a local signal, let alone radio for a pickup. Didn't even know if his mission beacon had even gone through, either. Either way, the small sparks of lightning caused by whipping dust was nothing compared to the lightning sitting much closer.
A light thud caught his ear, and he turned where he was. He drew his sleek plasma pistol and it was aimed in a flash. The dust in the air helped show the beam, and the laser sight was focused right on her chest.
"Woah there, Lightning..." he said, voice even.
"Don't try and move so suddenly."
Pretty impressive, for someone with two tranqs in them. Those things were cleared to recover all kinds of assets, people being the least intensive.
"Your field trip's over. You're done and caught."
-
She went still and quiet almost an instant before the laser sighting appeared on her chest; it seemed she had gained some of a hunted creature's instincts after all.
Bright blue eyes flickered over her captor, wide and clearly scared--but her mouth was a thin, hard line, the fists clenched at her sides trembling slightly, either with fear or rage or...maybe something else. It was difficult to tell which.
"...You won't even let me sit up?"
The question was perhaps a little pointless. After her four or so failed attempts in the last few minutes, she wasn't even sure she could sit up. Still, she had to say something, and with a gun trained on her by this alien--because that's clearly what he was, and even in her time at TRIM she'd met only a few--she wasn't quite sure what she could risk.
Recovery Operatives were paid well to keep their charges safe for TRIM's experiments. That said, there was every chance Farrow had put out a "dead or alive" call for her, after all the trouble she'd caused him. She had no idea just what this man was being paid to do: if she stepped too far out of line, her corpse might have earned him just as much credits as a living asset.
And Annabelle had never been particularly good at deceit or subterfuge. Every single one of her thoughts shone from her face, were clear in the sharp, tense lines of a body that should have had some softness to it, but half a decade of torture and experiments had made hard and lithe. And always those wide, electric blue eyes, trained on his face, lost and scared and...
Maybe just a little bit defiant.
-
He chuckled.
“Oh, you can sit up. Have some chow or water, too,” he said, turning the plasma pistol off but waving the laser at her, mostly at her chest. “Just not too quickly, if you understand me. I’ve seen what you can do,” he said. He rested back and kept eating.
“And if you ever raise your fingers at me, you’ll know what plasma to the leg feels like.”
He motioned to a small collection of provisions by his pack. Most of it was fancy, imported alien rations like “junga fruit with krata curry”, and his backup canteen was there too. He picked up his helmet and moved it a bit closer to himself.
-
Annabelle flinched back, already trying to curve in on herself protectively, though she knew it would be useless against a plasma blast.
When he motioned to the provisions she managed to uncurl enough to glare at him, despite knowing it was a stupid, reckless thing to do. "How exactly do you expect me to do that?" she hissed. Her hands were bound, after all, and she could barely sit up under her own power.
But she was not about to ask him for help. Nor would she expect him to--he was a TRIM dog, she was just lucky he hadn't outright shot her.
"...Why are we even still here?" She'd expected--or would have, if she'd had time to expect anything--to just wake up back in a cell in TRIM, rather than stuck on Edanith.
-
“We’ve got the famous dust storms of Edanith to thank. Can’t get a damn signal out,” he said, perhaps a little too careless around this girl, but there wasn’t any real reason act like a goon either.
It was a strategy he’d learned dealing with POWs during his military days. Act personable, crack a few jokes, tell the truth. If you don’t win the enemy over you’ll at least keep them thinking. An enemy trying to sort you out is an enemy less focused on escaping or killing you, after all.
“And if you slept off a tranq like that, you’ll get your strength back soon enough.” he added. His rifle was leaned against the stone wall next to him, so he went and laid it on his lap so he could have it handy, in case he needed to tranq her.
“And... well, there’s something else.”
He looked at her once again.
“Those two guards. Did you kill them on purpose? It’s a hell of a way to go, getting fried like that.”
-
The stricken look on Annabelle's face was probably all the answer he needed--but just in case, she suddenly twisted away and dry-heaved violently as reality--and fading tranqs in her system--turned her stomach.
It took a few moments for her to gasp in enough air for a response, and when she could finally speak her voice was raspy; she hadn't had any real food in her stomach to throw up, but her throat was still raw.
"...No. I didn't--I didn't mean to do that..." She drew in another shaky breath. Back to him, head bowed, she murmured, "They're really dead then?"
Of course they were dead. She'd known that the moment it happened, logically. But some small, childish part of her brain had been desperately hoping that maybe someone had gotten help to them in time. Maybe they were just...heavily wounded.
But no. No, she had killed them. She could blame the voice all she liked, but the power had been hers--and she hadn't even stopped running to look at the bodies.
-
"They're dead," Saendyr said, narrowing his eyes at her. It was an important thing for him to bring up, because while he didn't know the guys or didn't really particularly care about TRIM's goons (apart from a moderate respect for some of the veterans among them), he wanted to know how Annabelle felt about it.
Because apart from the cruel things done to her, the only thing he knew about her was that she was a lethal-grade mage who'd escaped far too easily. But seeing the horror in her eyes and hearing the shock in her voice told him a lot.
It was the last thing he wanted to see.
He looked back out towards the dust storm as she recovered herself, silently cursing himself. Shit, she's really just some poor girl, Saendyr thought to himself, and he drummed his fingers on his armored thigh.
"How'd you get out? I've seen capers and breakouts, subtle and violent, but I've never seen anybody just walk out like you did."
He offered a smile and a sidelong look.
"Pretty impressive."
-
Annabelle managed to pull herself together enough to glare at him. “Fuck you,” she hissed, wincing at the soreness in her throat but keeping that glare firmly in place. “Why should I tell you anything?”
He was a damned TRIM agent. He was just going to take her back—and she was starting to realize that he wasn’t actually going to shoot her, either by orders or...something else.
Probably orders.
She looked away, slumping heavily onto one elbow. Her head bowed tiredly and a few shivers that she desperately wished she could will away ran through her body. “...What are you going to do with me?”
-
"Because it sounded like somebody's gone through a lot of effort to get you out. Only way this could've happened," he said. Then, he shrugged, and continued eating. he spoke up again after a minute or so.
"That's my theory anyways."
Then he fell quiet again when she asked him what he was going to do to her.
"I'm going to take you back to TRIM. It's that simple."
-
Of course she'd known that, but hearing it said aloud sent a pang of desolate, resigned terror through her. She closed her eyes and shuddered, leaning back against the cramped wall of their little outcropping.
"...Just shoot me," she whispered, eyes still closed as her head lulled to the side. She didn't even realize that she meant the words until they were already spoken. "Your pay can't be much different either way, and it'll be easier to cart back a corpse than a live mage."
Her tone was blank, hopeless. Though her whole body trembled, her face was...oddly serene.
Maybe this is better, some tiny part of her mind mused. Maybe at least then I could get away...
She should have known it would never work. And death honestly seemed like the preferable option, when her only other choice was TRIM.
-
That hit hard, even if Saendyr didn't want to show it. The way she told him to just shoot her and even seemed at peace with the idea just sort of served to further cement how wrong this felt to him. He didn't sign onto TRIM's best-paying and most dangerous security contracts just to retrieve their kidnapped torture victims, let alone execute them.
Why was this traumatized girl so important? Why did they call him in to do this, they knew this wasn't his area of expertise...
"I'm not going to shoot you," he said, and looked back to her.
"You're going back, alive. Doc wouldn't have it any other way."
-
She barked out a sharp, bitter laugh at that. “Oh, no. Of course. Doctor’s orders, after all. Should’ve known he’d make sure he still had an anomaly to prod at once they brought me back.” She cut a harsh, jagged sort of smile in the direction of her captor. She hoped it masked the threat of tears in her eyes. “It’s so much more informative to torture a live subject than dissect a dead one, isn’t it?”
The smile became purely an expression of bared teeth, and she looked away again. Slowly, carefully, she managed to ease herself back until she was in more of a seated position, back and shoulder braced against the stone.
“...You’d better decide soon just how much you don’t want to shoot me,” Annabelle whispered after a moment. Her eyes were fixed on the sands outside, and her voice had gone soft again. Hoarse and tired. “Because I mean it when I say I’d rather die than go back.”
Maybe she should. Maybe she could plush him hard enough to actually use that gun—if she couldn’t really escape, it was the next best thing.
-
He actually let out a short breath at that. He gave her a long, considering look, as if he was judging something about her.
"So what, you think you're just gonna force me to kill you?" he said, and he shook his head slightly. He had the drop on her the first time, but he reckoned that he'd subdued much worse in a drag-out fight.
"Think you're bad, just cause you fried a couple of poor suckers who shoulda been keeping an eye out? Like it or not, you're staying alive."
-
Annabelle felt her blood boil with hopeless, impotent rage. She bared her teeth in an expression somewhere between a smile and a snarl--
And the faintest hint of sparks skittered down her arms.
She didn't notice. She was too far gone, lost to what she was convinced was the helplessness of her fate.
Fine. He wanted her to force him to shoot? Then she would.
A feral, shrieking sound tore out of her chest and she launched herself at him desperately, shoving off the wall awkwardly and swinging her bound wrists in an effort to catch him in the throat. The shriek changed to a scream of pain somewhere in the middle, but she didn't stop, hurling her body into his wildly, with no aim other than to slam him to the ground.
-
Daersen tensed. When the lightning went through her hands, his crests lit up in response to the static in the air. Blood rushed to his thick skin and it gained a rubbery quality to it. He'd barely noticed his change either.
Lounging as he was against the rock, holding an edible ration with a bioplastic fork in the other, he was at a bit of a disadvantage. When she shoved off he opted to just drop today's dinner and raise his hands to defend himself.
He tried to block her two-handed swing with his plated arms and then try to catch her and get her under control.
-
Her balled fists struck his plates and she twisted, throwing the entirety of her—relatively slight—weight against him as she attempted to bowl him over.
Pain coursed through her, white hot and pulsing, and she gritted her teeth against it; though not before the beginnings of another choked, agonized wail slipped passed her lips.
It was useless. She knew it was useless, but still she fought, clawing at his face with her bound hands and kicking out desperately even as she felt him trying to get a grip on her, to subdue her.
“I won’t go back, I won’t go back, I’ll die first, I will, I’ll die first!”
The words sounded distant to her own ears. She could hear the roughness in her voice, but the hoarse drag in her throat was vague and unreal, as though it didn’t belong to her body at all. She didn’t realize she was crying, didn’t feel the slight sparks and leaps of electricity over her skin as she struggled and screamed and—
The thought was fuzzy and vague, barely coherent, but she acted almost instinctively. Hands still bound, she nonetheless tried to grab for the bounty hunter’s gun.
She had no idea which of them she was trying to shoot.
-
"No, you w-"
Saendyr struggled against her, trying to subdue her and not hurt her at the same time, but she was fighting like an animal, screeching and swinging. His words cut off when she reached for his gun and he decided that was the last straw.
Ignoring the scratches she'd left on his cheek,
He turned his body so that his sidearm was less accessible to her and he tried to shove her onto her back with the weight of his larger body and heavy armor. If he succeeded, he'd try to put a knee on her chest so he could hold her in place as he tried to pull out the containment collar from his belt.
-
It was useless to keep fighting. Even if she hadn't been drugged, he was still decidedly stronger than her. Not to mention nearly twice her size. Maybe if she'd had proper access to her magic it would have evened the odds a bit, but as it was...
Useless.
That didn't stop her from trying.
As his knee planted in the center of her chest she gasped, nearly all the breath knocked from her body, but she still bucked up in a futile effort to dislodge him. Then he moved, reaching for something on his belt, and her eyes tracked the motion instinctively, then widened.
She went very, very still. Her eyes were massive in her thin, pale face, locked on the collar he was trying to grab. She couldn't move--fear had locked every muscle in place. She hardly even seemed to be breathing as she watched his movements like a cornered rabbit staring at a fox.
"...Please..." Again, her voice was distant to her own ears, and a part of her wondered why she even bothered. It wasn't as though he would listen to her. "Please...don't."
-
Daersen caught the icy chill go through her when she saw the collar, and he seemed to make a decision then. He brandished the collar a little closer to his own chest. He was tempted, but he settled for letting her hands go, confident in her fear of the collar.
“That’s right. When this collar reads that chip in your neck, it’s going to go straight to maximum lockup. Do you want that?”
He straightened up, still with his knee firmly on her chest.
“I’m not going to shoot you, Annabelle. And if you try to pull a stunt like that again, you better hope you succeed.”
-
There wasn't even enough air in her lungs to whimper, though her body tried instinctively, producing a choked, pathetic sound that she was still too terrified to be ashamed of.
It took a moment longer than it should have for her to register his words. Chip in your neck. Maximum lockup.
A...containment collar?
Oh. Not what she'd feared then. Still plenty bad, but not all the way to spine-chilling, bone-freezing terror. The knowledge was enough to relax her body just slightly; she still didn't want that thing anywhere near her, but she managed to release some of the tension from her muscles, trying to show that she wasn't going to spring at him again.
Then she frowned. Ignoring what he'd said about shooting her--or rather not shooting her--she rasped, "The chip...it's not already at max control?"
It always was. Ever since her last escape attempt. At least, it was supposed to be...
Her eyes widened a bit, an unconscious part of her mind reaching for her magic, and then reeling when she actually felt it. Oh stars, it had been so long...everything she'd done since the security malfunction had either been manipulated by the voice, or the result of pure instinct. Feeling her magic again, actually feeling it, intentionally--it nearly broke her.
She clenched her eyes shut as a sob wracked her body, tears streaming down along her cheekbones and temples to fall into the red dust around them.
-
She broke down crying, but not out of terror or sorrow. He could hear the joy in her sobs and something about the whole situation ringed him as very wrong. He shifted his knee so he wasn't pinning her quite as roughly, until finally he let her breathe freely, although it didn't keep him from kneeling by her with his hand still on his sidearm.
She could shoot lightning from her hands, so he wasn't quite ready to relinquish his guard around her.
"Chip's been on standby ever since the security lapse. TRIM station tried to reinitialize, but by the time they got the system fully back up there was too much distance from the chip."
He sighed and stood up.
"Even if you didn't have a chip at all, you wouldn't make it half a mile before this magnetic storm ground you down. So stay put."
-
When she was finally able to get a full breath in she gulped air like she'd been drowning, nearly choking as the sobs rising in her throat redoubled. She managed to roll onto her side, gasping and shaking, and curled her fingers into the red dust by her head.
Slowly, she became aware of her body again. Of the magic pulsing through it, yes--oh stars she never thought she'd feel this whole again--but also the dull throbbing from her ankle, and the by now scorching burn in her throat.
"...Water." Annabelle lifted her head slightly to look at him. Tears still streamed down her face, but she'd managed to get the desperate, broken weeping under control at least. "If you really don't want me dead...I need water."
-
"Water."
Saendyr reached down to his belt and set his spare water canteen down next to her, but otherwise kept his distance like he had before. He alternated between conflicting feelings of wariness and doubt, feelings that he hoped to avoid by taking all the fights against all of TRIM's contained monsters or high-threat fugitives. So now, why was he playing personal kidnapper, to Dr. Farrow of all people?
He picked up his helmet and put it on. It clicked and the environmental seals hissed. With a tap on his temple, Seandyr turned on his thermal optics so he could cut through all the dust and interference.
He was taking a quick survey of their surroundings, but he made sure to keep Annabelle in the corner of his eye.
-
The electro-mage scrabbled for the canteen and gulped down nearly half of it desperately before she remembered that, as dehydrated as she was, she was just as likely to make herself sick if she wasn't careful.
That, and she didn't know how much water they had. And she had no doubts she wasn't going to be high on this operative's rationing list if they started to run low before the dust storm died down. She'd heard the things could last days on this planet.
An automatic, raspy, "Thank you," scratched out of her throat, and then she almost immediately winced. Why the fuck was she thanking him? He was literally her jailer, and was most likely about to be complicit in her murder.
She didn't doubt Farrow would want to keep her around after this. Maybe he'd wanted her brought in alive, but she suspected that was just to get a few last living bioreadings before he disposed of her and decided to just cut her up.
Or maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd just keep torturing her for whatever was left of her natural life.
...That seemed worse, so it was probably the correct guess.
Not expecting an answer, she sagged forward and let the canteen droop listlessly from her fingers as she asked, "Why are you doing this? Is it really worth the money?" She wouldn't pretend to know this operative's life, but...she couldn't imagine any pay was worth this.
But maybe she was just naïve.
-
At the question of the pay, Daersen “hmphed.” to himself, the sound barking out out through his helmet’s comms. The sound filters gave his voice a tinny growl that caused him to sound not too far off from one of those grunting marines in whatever was the newest holoflick.
“For me, not so much. I like a bed and hot meals, don’t need much else,” he said easily, eyes still glued onto the horizons as he searched for a visual frequency that could cut through the storm. He turned his head to acknowledge her with his visor.
“But it keeps the mom and pop comfortable, and safe from people like TRIM, hell yeah it’s worth it.”
He gave up scanning with his helmet, and turned on his heels to go and retrieve his rifle. The scope’s optical housing made his helmet’s visor look like two cups with a piece of string attached to it, so it was his last hope for keeping a good eye out.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m a little overqualified for this op. No offense to you, Lightning, but I’m usually recovering real monsters. Even for someone as deep in TRIM as you, there’s ungodly shit you wouldn’t believe you’d even see.”
He chuckled.
“And they got’em locked up with keycards and control chips. No wonder I still have a job.”
-
She stared at him for a long moment, both processing what he said and trying to figure out how to respond. Or if she wanted to.
Finally, she glanced away and muttered, “So my life for your family’s?” Maybe surprisingly, there wasn’t actually any judgement in her voice. She didn’t have anyone like that, anyone who cared about her—or if she did, she didn’t remember—but she imagined she would do just about anything to protect them if she did.
She narrowed her eyes at him as he touted his own qualifications though. She knew better than most just what it would take to bring someone like her down. She was well aware that the good doctor hadn’t been taking any chances when he sent this operative.
“...Annabelle,” she said bluntly, drawing her knees in closer to her chest. “If you’re going to be sending me back there, the least you can give me is the curtesy of my name.” She glanced over at him again, then added in something next to a whisper, “I’m not a monster.”
Though after everything that had happened in the last day...she wasn’t entirely sure she believed that anymore. And that, more than anything else, terrified her.
-
"Annabelle, who's not a monster. No shit," Saendyr said, hoping the gruffness in his voice would help blunt the steadily growing feeling of wrongness that was building in his gut.
"Top brass seems damn convinced of the opposite, though. It doesn't make sense," he said, turning his head back to the storm and his scans. Finally, he found a visual wavelength that cut through the dust and interference, at the cost of making the world grey. Heat and energy caused a lighter shade while the magnetism caused dark splotches to appear in his vision every now and then.
Still, her question cut through to him, even if he didn't show it. Yeah, it was her or his family. Nothing against the poor girl, but it was a relatively easy decision for him, even if he was starting to doubt himself in that regard.
"Someone's invested in you, and it sure as shit isn't that walking human-rights tribune assigned to you."
-
She laughed, rough and tearful, and glared at the rocky wall. “Doesn’t make sense? You just told me I killed two people. I—“
Burned them alive. Cooked in their own armor.
Her stomach turned again, but she managed not to retch. She took a few breaths—in through her nose, out through her mouth—then finally looked back toward her captor.
“…See anything?” It was meant to be something of a snide comment, but there was a bit too much fear lingering beneath her voice for it to really work. She winced, annoyed with herself, and glanced away again.
She tried not to think about what else he’d said. About someone being invested in her. About the voice.
Maybe I’ve finally gone really, truly crazy.
-
"I saw the footage," Saendry said, and looked over to her in the pause leading to his next few words. The helmet lit his face up on the inside, so she'd be able to see his eyes. He didn't look upon her with any form of judgement or hate, instead the look in his eyes was purely analytical.
"The lightning came from your fingers, but you didn't really kill them. Your fear did."
Another short pause.
"Monsters don't kill out of fear or panic," he observed, and he would have said something else, but then his attention was drawn away. She'd be able to see his helmet light up inside, in the direction facing outwards from their shelter. He looked over, and just as quickly ducked his head and dove forwards, landing in the dust several feet from her as the rapid-fire blasts from an energy rifle left soft-ball sized holes in the rocks where Saendyr had just been.
The impacts sent pebbles and dust all over their shelter.
-
That hadn't been what she meant, but before she could clarify that she'd been asking if he saw anything in the storm--or even attempt to process what he'd said about seeing the security footage--her original question was answered rather explosively.
Annabelle cried out, throwing herself to the ground behind her captor. "What the fuck?!"
Magic crackled at her fingertips and she looked around wildly, feeling panic start to set in. She was trapped--they were trapped, but she was bound. Maybe the "recovery agent" could defend himself, but she certainly couldn't in her current state.
"Let me go," she hissed desperately at Saendyr. "Please, you have to untie me!"
-
"The fuck is right," he growled quickly. He'd landed on his side, and so his large frame, along with the added bulk of his powered armor, made a rather easy shield for Annabelle. As he righted himself just enough to spot a crouched figure on his thermal optics, peeking out from behind a not-too-far-off rock He also noticed the shouldered laser rifle, braced against the stone with the barrel trained straight at him.
Saendyr raised his rifle, and the man fired. The ensuing laser bolt went screaming off one of Saendyr's pauldrons, leaving a dark streak and sending Saendyr's aim off and into the man's cover, which drove him down. He didn't even respond to her plea to be let loose, instead already moving to get to his feet.
"Stay behind me," he said curtly, voice even as he rose to his feet and started to strafe sideways towards their shelter's exit. As Saendyr loaded one of his two emergency magazines of lethal ammo for his rifle, he sent out a radar ping from his helmet, and cursed under his breath.
Outnumbered, enemies all over. Yeah, sounds about right. A different enemy popped out from the other side of that same rock and rattled off a few shots from a lighter weapon, which Saendyr took confidently to his armor's chest and arm plates in order to return a devestating three-shot burst from his rifle into the man's chest, sending him scampering backwards on his ass with a bullet through his lung and fucked up torso armor.
Even then, with his focus elsewhere, he didn't notice the looming shape of another attacker at the flank, entering their shelter with a primed vibrosword ready in his hand.
Their attackers wore what seemed to be Aedolian military equipment, but all standards of uniformity were thrown out the window and their equipment appeared weathered.
-
“You can’t leave me like this!” Annabelle shouted desperately even as she struggled to keep herself behind whatever protection his body provided against the enemy fire. She choked on a scream when another energy blast ricocheted off his arm, so close that it nearly burned her cheek; she could hear the buzz of his powered suit like a constant whine in the back of her head, making it difficult to focus.
Wait.
Powered armor.
Saendyr may not have noticed the sword-wielding attacker slipping into their shelter, but with her shoulder turned to the hulk of the fray as she tried to hide behind him, Annabelle certainly did. Her mind snagged on a thought, that one thought—powered armor—and she did something very, very stupid.
She darted out from her cover behind TRIM’s recovery agent, running straight for the ex-soldier. It was a dumb enough move that it gave her a split second of surprise where the man was frozen, unable to react, and that was all she needed.
She moved on instinct, bound hands flying up to slam into his chest as electricity arced from her fingertips—but unlike with the guards back at TRIM, it didn’t even seem to burn him, let alone kill him nigh instantly. Instead, the sparks sank into his armored suit, and Annabelle’s eyes flashed brilliant, electric blue.
“No,” she snarled, crooking her fingers as though she was pulling on the strings of a puppet.
And the man swung in place, movements sharp and jerking, trying to resist as his armor moved under her command. She forced him forward, into the line of fire, hoping his companions would see and stop shooting long enough for them to come up with a better plan.
Because she didn’t think she could keep this up very long; she’d never been a particularly powerful mage, and she had only just gotten full control of her abilities back. Not to mention she had absolutely no idea how she was doing this.
-
Saendyr tried to focus on the conflict in front of him and tried to drown out Annabelle's voice. Of course, she'd just love for him to uncuff her and take his attention back off of her, but unfortunately for her, he was a little busy. Even if he wanted to unshackle her, he wasn't going to just turn his back to enemy combatants and start playing with his PDA.
His sensors read movement behind him, and he swiveled his head back, laying down a few bursts towards the enemies still in front of him to keep them down while he glanced. When he saw Annabelle lunging straight for a man in power armor, and then saw her fling him around like a puppet...
All he could do was just get down out of the way as a grown man in Aedolian shock-trooper power armor came flinging around like a feather blown in the breeze. He was cursing and his friends seemed surprised. One of them didn't even get his barrel up in time and sent a few rounds skidding across his armor.
The uninjured assailant tried to lean out of his cover to get around his levitating comrade, and Saendyr kicked the man forwards and leveled his rifle. This time, his shots rang true and a swift five-round burst laid the would-be flanker down.
More fire came from some more approaching combatants, and Saendyr made the decision to pull backwards after a streaking slug slammed directly into his chest and he felt pain as armor buckled, but held. He turned away from the impact and slid further into cover. He looked to Annabelle as he pulled the still-smoking slug round out of his chest-plate.
"You want the cuffs off? Now's your chance!"
-
With a desperate, wordless cry, Annabelle flung the mercenary forward into the stretch of space between their shelter and their attackers as she felt her control over the armor flicker and fade. She collapsed to her knees, panting, and just barely had the presence of mind to register that man had tumbled and skidded a good few yards before coming to a stop in an ungainly heap.
No time to hold still.
Panting, she managed to scramble awkwardly to her feet and stagger the few steps needed to close the distance between her and Saendyr before her knees buckled again and she wound up practically collapsing into him before she frantically righted herself and thrust her bound wrists up into his face. Her expression was a mix of panic and anger, eyes a bright, burning blue that seemed at odds with the red dust swirling around them.
"Off. Now."
-
The man went flying forwards, suddenly very familiar with what it was like to become a projectile. He tried to catch himself on his arms but that just made him tumble into the ground even more wildly. He came to a hard stop against the large rock his friends were covering against and fell limp, knocked into a daze at the very least, although Saendyr wouldn't have cried if the guy had broken his neck, either. The guy laid out by Saendyr's shots was still alive, although the way he groaned on the ground and tried to pull himself behind cover didn't bode too well.
Sendyr stayed knelt behind the cover, grabbing Annabelle by the scruff of her clothes and pulling her up the rest of the way when her stumble had not covered all of the distance needed and collapsed. He kept her down with a strong arm as he prepared a small canister from his belt. He threw the ten-banger over their low cover and whispered a quick "eyes down" to her. The small area behind their cover was sheltered from an otherwise blisteringly bright light that strobed out of the cylinder to an accompanying cacophony of loud bangs, like several loud rifles going off at a random, disjointed rhythm.
The effect was near instantaneous and Saendyr hoped it'd give him the time he needed to whip out his PDA, punch in his access code, and scan her handcuffs, which promptly popped off of her wrists and fell to the ground with an understated clunk.
-
Annabelle gave a rather plaintive, indignant little noise when he grabbed her by the collar to haul her into safety. Still, she ducked her head and raised her bound hands to shield her eyes as best she could at his order.
"What was that?" she demanded, debating if it was worth the risk of trying to peek out from their little shelter and see what had just happened.
Then her cuffs were off, and the relief that swamped her nearly buckled her knees again. She forced herself to get a grip and flexed her fingers, watching sparks of white light dance over her fingertips.
She could run. Her captor was wearing enough tech that she knew it would be fairly simple for her to short it out with a quick burst of electricity, buy herself enough time to at least get a head start. She could...
But she wouldn't make it far in this storm. Or even passed their assailants, most likely.
"Who are they?" she muttered, looking to Saendyr as though he might have answers. And are they after me, or you?
-
Saendyr watched her flex her fingers to coax delicate arcs of lightning in between them, and part of him wondered if he'd just made a critical mistake in response to pressure in the field. It wouldn't be the first time, but damn, it was something a rookie would do.
Still, if she helped him and didn't just turn those fingers on him, then he might just have a chance of surviving this.
"Aedolians," Saendyr said easily. Once the strobe-grenade had finished, Saendyr popped back up to see that more enemies had advanced up. He took a few shots, sending one man hiding behind a vertical spike of rock, but the other two advanced and laid down some shots, one of them being the same man who'd fired the slug from before.
Saendyr crouched down as shots thumped and crackled into the rocks in front and behind them. He angled his arms up and blind-fired the rest of his magazine to keep the enemies at bay, bringing the gun back down when it was finally time to reload.
"Definitely not active service."
No more live rounds, now he was down to the stick-and-shocks and tranqs.
-
"Okay, but why are they here?" Annabelle muttered. "TRIM doesn't usually send more than one recovery team, so not that. And they wouldn't put out a public bounty, so they're not random mercs, unless they're here for you--"
She might have been babbling a bit. But it was fairly clear from her wide eyes and the way her skin had blanched under its layer of dust that she was tiptoeing toward true panic, and working through the situation out loud was allowing her to keep her mind focused, for the moment at least.
Magic sparked along her body, following the line of her spine down to the small of her back and making her shiver. Her fingers twitched, itching to release a bolt of electricity, but she curled them tight into her palms. She was afraid, and untrained, and had no idea what was going on. If she just let her magic out like she had last time, odds were she was going to kill someone. Possibly multiple someones.
Her eyes suddenly sharpened a bit and she looked to her captor. "They're not active service...but you were, weren't you?" He certainly spoke with more authority and vague jargon than she'd have expected from one of TRIM's contract-hunters. "How do you know they're Aedolian?"
-
"I used to wear that armor," Saendyr said easily. He brought up the tactical pad on his wrist and turned on his armor's shoulder-mount weapon, the net projector. in the corner of his helmet's visor, there was a display that allowed him to track the motion of nearby creatures as circular blips and lines.
"TRIM cleaned my records. No bounties, either," he said, but quickly quieted down once the time to strike approached.
The opponents quickly pressed their perceived advantage, and as soon as someone started to close in on them he stood just enough to expose the shoulder-weapon, which swiveled and fired a net at the man with the shotgun. The net was wide enough to wrap around even someone in full power armor, and the electrodes came alive with a sharp crackle and the woman (by the sounds of the voice from inside the helmet) fell over.
He rose the rest of the way, and shielded his visor with a forearm as he flicked a thin disc out from his belt and threw it into the open space ahead. A few shots from the enemies flew past and even skidded off his vambrace and shoulder armor, but a pearlescent, dome-shaped force-field formed and absorbed the rest of the gunfire.
Containment fields were meant for capturing large creatures, but a barrier was a barrier in this case. With the way blocked (for now), Saendyr started pacing backwards.
"Come on, this way!" he said, sparing the still shaking assailant on the ground a passing glance to make sure they were still alive before turning to lead Annabelle away.
-
Completely unused to combat of any kind--and surrounded by people who were clearly very used to it--Annabelle found she could do nothing but what she was told. It was her best chance at staying alive, as far as she could see. At least for the moment.
She had what felt like a thousand questions burning on her tongue, but she bit them back, just giving Saendyr a sharp look and a small nod when he called for her to follow.
She had no way of navigating the dust storm they were heading out into on her own, and could only hope that he did. Breathing deeply once, twice, in an effort to steady her magic, she darted after him, squinting against the wind and red earth.
"Where are we going?!" She had to raise her voice louder than she wanted just to be heard over the wind.
-
Saendyr had to really crank the range back on his personal radar. Anything that went out too far was scrambled by the storm, but Saendyr was hoping that his more modern armor would outperform the enemy's surplus suits in this regard.
"Looking for cover!" Saendyr said. If they had any chance of outfoxing their attackers, they'd have to stay moving in order to keep from being surrounded. If Annabelle had not covered his back from the swordsman, things could've gotten much uglier.
The storm was thick, so Saendyr made sure to keep pace with Annabelle, ushering her along with a hand between her shoulders as he swept his rifle about in search of targets, waiting for assailants to come barreling out of the storm.
He singled out another batch of rocks, and hustled the two of them along until they could both take cover from the storm once again. He took the magazine out of his rifle and switched it with a new one, cursing when he saw he was down to his stick-and-shocks. The delicate tranq shots weren't even in the equation for this.
"These are no good against power armor, even on the highest setting." he said, showing Annabelle the bullets tipped with what looked like electrical conduits and spikes before slid it into his rifle and racked the slide back.
The barrel of his rifle crackled as the adaptive systems switched up to charge the electronically fired rounds.
"If I land the shots, can you make them hurt?" he said, looking to her through his visor.
-
She hated needing his hand to guide her, but the winds were so strong and the dust so thick in the air that she could sometimes hardly see him through the storm, even with him barely an arm's length away. Touch was the only guaranteed method to keep them from getting separated.
Which, unfortunately, she couldn't afford just yet.
She let him usher her behind the new rock formation and quickly crouched down out of the wind, shaking her head and rubbing at her eyes carefully with the heel of her palm. Dust covered her face, but the red earth that had coated her hair almost actually blended in with the natural color, so she looked a bit like she was shedding particles of herself when she shook her head again and bits of it came loose.
She squinted at the bullets he showed her, rubbing her twisted ankle--which had started to throb in protest of so much movement, and now that she wasn't fully panicking she'd actually noticed the dull pain.
Can you make them hurt?
Annabelle's eyes widened as they met his gaze through the visor. She swallowed convulsively, briefly worried she might be sick again, then managed to croak out, "I--maybe, but I can't--I don't know if I'll..."
Yes. Yes, she could. She could pull the electricity from the dust storm around them if she really put some effort into it, could connect a chain reaction from the bullets to their attackers and back until they were a living circuit.
The problem was, she didn't know if they'd stay living. She hadn't meant to kill those two guards, but...but clearly she was capable of some truly horrendous things.
"I don't--" She swallowed thickly. She knew she was being stupid, she was wasting time. And these people clearly didn't care if she or Saendyr survived. But still, she couldn't stop herself from choking, "I don't want to kill again."
-
Tucked next to her behind a rock, it wasn't hard to notice the sheer dread that washed through Annabelle right then and there. This specific scenario, pinned behind cover with stresses running high, was perhaps his most familiar one as a former soldier.
Her words started choking out, and he put a stiff, steadying arm against the front of her shoulder.
"You won't. Those suits are rated for void combat, user's completely insulated," he said, and with a tap on the side of his helmet, his visor shimmered away. Annabelle would see bright yellow pupils staring at her, surrounded by dark brown irises and a black sclera. These eyes, set into an angular, squareish face that was definitely not human (as if the dark blue skin wasn't a giveaway), looked back at her with the hard sympathy only a soldier could give. Now that his body was directly exposed to the charged storm, Annabelle'd be able to see small lines of energy run along the bony plates on his jaw and set around his eyes as his body redirected the static in the air.
"But if we can fry the suit itself, guy inside's going to take a little lie down whether he likes it or not," he started. He would've continued, had a voice not come booming out from the storm ahead, a man's voice amplified by a helmet's speaker.
"Phylips! Come on, is this any way to treat some old friends?" came the voice, speaking in a spacer's thick drawl. At the sound of his name, of that voice Saendyr's fingers tightened audibly on his rifle.
"And to think Trenk wanted to see you again! You haven't lost your touch, he's deader than a doorknob now. Why don't you walk the little bitch over to us and we won't make this any more unpleasant than it has to be, hmm? Maybe I'll even talk Jess out of cutting your crests off after that pussy shit with the net."
The entire time the man was speaking, Saendyr had his head leaned forwards, helmet leaned against the sight rail of his weapon, shoulders rising and falling with his breathing, now heavier and deliberate.
His expression was that of surprise, apprehension, and just a little bit of... grief? He bumped his helmet a few times with his rifle as he smiled grimly and muttered something to himself.
"Idiot. Always knew that back-up pistol would get him killed..."
-
“I can’t—“ Annabelle started again, but then his arm was braced against her shoulder, snapping her out of her own head and drawing her attention to his face as his visor cleared and she actually met his eyes for the first time. She tried to force herself to breathe, to focus on what he was saying. She wouldn’t kill anyone, the suits were too efficient, this was fine, it was fine…
One of their attackers started shouting, talking to…Phylips? She had to assume that was the bounty hunter. Her eyes widened slightly—someone was dead, but she hadn’t been the one to kill him. That was…
“Hey.” Without thinking, she leaned forward into his arm braced against her shoulder, bumping her head lightly against the side of his helmet. “They attacked. You fought back.” She hesitated, then repeated his words from earlier in a murmur: “Monsters don’t kill out of fear or defense. Right?”
She had no idea what she was saying, why she was saying it. Clearly he’d known this Trenk—and honestly she didn’t know why she cared how he felt.
But, despite being the person who was going to drag her back to TRIM, he’d also been the first person she could remember who told her that her magic, her panic, didn’t make her a monster.
She leaned away quickly, peering out cautiously around the edge of their shelter, then glanced back to him.
“You land the shots, I make them hurt, right?”
-
Saendyr heard the tap against his helmet rather than feeling it, and his proximity sensor gave a a quick blip-blip and a small flashing light. He didn’t move his head, but he gave her a short, sidelong look. It was almost grateful, even. Eyebrows softening, he looked forwards again, and set his shoulders with a breath, closing his eyes as he spoke.
“Main power exchanger is near the base of the spine. The suits are designed to shut off if a catastrophic surge happens. Give it one last jump so the starter battery fries as well. You’ll know when it pops.”
He turned his head against hers just enough so he wasn’t looking with one eye.
“Same with the electric net. I’ve got one more of those. The storm will mess with my plasma sidearm unless they get close up, but that’s an option too,” he added, and even though his visor only showed the upper bridge of his nose to just barely the top of his eyebrows, she’d still see his eyes wrinkle under the effects of a smile. Or maybe a shitty grin.
“Feel free to share some of your own juice too, miss Annabelle Lightning.”
-
She was shaking slightly, but she gave him her best attempt at a firm nod as she tried to quickly process the information he was giving her. "I--I can--" She licked her lips, cleared her throat, and tried again, "I don't know how precise I can get in this storm--the electricity in the air fucks with my magic--but I can definitely overload batteries. I could even make a rough circuit, if you're using electric rounds."
She glanced sideways at him, then added with the barest hint of a wry smile at the corners of her lips, "If you want me to share my juice, you might get zapped." She eyed the bony ridges on his form that seemed to be redirecting the ambient energy in the charged storm, then added with a shrug that was definitely trying too hard to be casual, "Though it seems like you can take it."
-
"Precision? Forget precision, they have us outnumbered," came Saendyr's quick response, eyebrows turning upwards with some amusement at her forced casualness, which seemed all too sudden.
"Just focus on the targets I put out for you."
He tapped the side of his helmet, and his visor went fully opaque, then started to glow a dim green as he stopped using his eyesight and enabled the imaging systems.
He rose, and saw his targets. Lauph, standing front and center with his arms crossed and fully suited up, an automatic rifle gripped in one hand. Jess, standing and snarling behind and to his left, sans her helmet and still in the process of tearing net fragments from her armor's place. Rigo, their old sharpshooter, was behind a rock and with his rifle trained on their position.
Saendyr and Rigo made the briefest of eye contacts through their scopes before Saendyr fired first, sending stun rounds into the rock around him and forcing him into cover.
Jess ducked into cover and Lauph swore and moved to raise his own gun. Saendyr kept true to his promise and sent a stun round sticking into the chest and abdomen of his armor. Lauqh was forced to take a backwards step from the impacts, but found himself chuckling as the stunners started delivering their shocks into his suit to no effect.
"Stunners? Seriously? TRIM's cheaper than I thought."
Annabelle would be able to clearly see the stun rounds, blinking where they remained stuck. Their conductivity would draw in and excite the energy of the storm, basically forming little "targets" that would open a circuit between herself and the suits.
-
I can do this.
I can do this, I can do this, I can do this!
Forcing herself to ignore the pain in her ankle and the churning in her stomach, Annabelle popped up in the brief break in firing that Seandyr had afforded them and threw one hand out toward their attackers, the other reaching up above her head into the sandstorm.
And she become a lightning rod. The electricity in the air coalesced around her up-thrust arm, crackling along her nervous system visibly, blue sparks dancing down her spine and along the lines of her limbs, then exploded outward from her outstretched fingertips. The sparks hit their targets one at a time, a cascade of blue-white magic that created a brief live-wire circuit from Annabelle to the mercenaries and back.
She curled her fingers into her palm and yanked her hand back with a cry, ripping the circuit apart in a blast of ground lightning so quick that it actually caused a small clap of thunder. She collapsed backward, just barely able to catch herself on her free hand before she hit the red earth, panting heavily.
"You...okay?" she managed to rasp in her companion's general direction. She hadn't been aiming any magic in his direction, but a move like that was almost impossible to pull off with real precision. She just hoped any backlash from it hadn't hit him worse than his physiology could take.
-
A shot from Rigo cracked against the rock they were sheltering behind. During the pause, he'd popped back up to his firing position and drawn a bead, only to throw his aim off at the last second once he saw it was their objective and NOT Saendyr. He barked some warnings into his helmet, and Lauph made to move out of the way, but the lightning had already struck.
Lauph yelled, an infuriated sound that was a mix of pain and surprise as the electric current made his suit's servos go taut with electricity. Rigo threw himself back down behind the rock while Jess tried to dive away, only to get lashed by a whip of raging energy as Lauph's suit power drained into the surrounding air.
By this point, smoke was rising from the panels and joints of his armor while Jess, caught without her helmet off, shook fully in the throes of a near-lethal shock, alleviated only by the insulation she DID have on. Finally, when Annabelle ripped her hand back, the entire back section of Lauph's suit exploded outwards in a shower of electric bolts and scrap metal, and the thunderclap cleared the storm away from them for a few brief moments before it came blowing back in.
The whole time, Saendyr had simply turned off the electronics in his helmet and put his arms over his head. Lightning cracked and left black marks and scores against his armor, but while the white plates blackened, they did not buckle. The lightning that wormed its way past didn't seem to bother him, in fact...
Saendyr tried to turn his helmet back on, but found that it had been drained by the experience. With a small huff, he quickly took it off, allowing Annabelle to see his face. His dark blue skin glimmered with lines of captured elecricity like a night sky filled with falling stars. Lightning crackled in between the lines of the crests that ran down his head in neat corn-rows. Contained energy glowed underneath the bony ridges that formed his jaws and eyebrows.
He took a few breaths, breathing out a static-filled electric haze, before helping Annabelle sit up against their cover, staying close enough to her to protect her with his armor as he took another look up above their cover.
"I'm fine. Them? Not so much..." he said, looking over to Lauph, still twitching on the ground, and Jess, rolling around and moaning plaintively as she clutched at her head.
Without saying much else, he looked back down to her to meet her eyes. She'd be able to see some of her own lightning streaking around in his eyes. "You?"
-
"I--"
Annabelle groaned, pitching sideways as the world spun wildly around her. That had been a lot of magic, and ever since her last escape attempt her inhibitor had kept her operating at a fourth of her usual power, maybe even less. It was a shock to her system--quite literally--and in the aftermath her stomach churned and her vision blurred.
"I'm...fine," she managed to grind out, struggling to raise her head and meet his eyes.
Whoa...
"You're a live wire," she noted vaguely, gesturing almost drunkenly toward the skitterings of light that had taken up residence on his skin. "You look like...a night sky..."
She blinked, struggling to focus her attention, her vision, focus anything. "I--I didn't...kill anybody?" Her voice was tiny, pleading, and though the blue of her eyes was still electric as she stared up at him, there was a threat of tears behind them. She was tired, hurting, and now magically drained, but that was the only real question she could form. "Please tell me...I didn't kill anybody..."