02-14-2023, 04:30 AM
Silence stretched onward around him. Light filtered through the dense canopy overhead and dappled the air in warm hues. Snow too had made its way through bare trees whose branches reached toward the heavens like a clawed hand’s last desperate extension.
The slight opening among the naked trunks, curiously, was bare. A neat lane of ground flowed from a gnarled tree a full twenty feet away; no snow, bone dry as though it was summer on the plains. Odd indeed. Certainly not nature’s witchcraft.
Normal sounds of a forest returned. Hatch waited ten minutes past nature’s return. Chirps, squeaks, rustles of foragers once more at ease. He called the obsidian egg once more into being; this time a half-shell. Into the vessel went spent fibrous batteries, various tufts of garment sacrificed in the name of a rescue or escape, a tough over-suit…a mask and helmet bomb-scorched and broken by more than a million volts twice-over. Anything at all encountered that was part of their target’s dismembered kit went into the urn. Though he left the microdrones dead where they’d fallen.
Five minutes to deadline Hatch keyed into the device’s system and set a timer. No one had showed; the kid was alone and probably had been talking to another drone. Either way he didn’t give a rip.
The device’s aperture walls grew upward in neat increments as the hover-bike sped away above the snow.
Five more minutes passed. The timer finished its run. The trigger concealed within the gnarled tree activated and, on the last charge, birthed the light of the sun. Too bright to see, the nearly tangible beam of nearly three million volts shot into the egg. Was absorbed. The light again seemed to linger in the air well after power had cut. The device folded itself into a pack that served as a base for what little remained. Most of the fabric annihilated into nothingness; what survived of the suit was too delicate to handle. A broken and brittle mask lay half buried within a pile of ash. An end and a beginning at once.
Hatch, NPC
The slight opening among the naked trunks, curiously, was bare. A neat lane of ground flowed from a gnarled tree a full twenty feet away; no snow, bone dry as though it was summer on the plains. Odd indeed. Certainly not nature’s witchcraft.
Normal sounds of a forest returned. Hatch waited ten minutes past nature’s return. Chirps, squeaks, rustles of foragers once more at ease. He called the obsidian egg once more into being; this time a half-shell. Into the vessel went spent fibrous batteries, various tufts of garment sacrificed in the name of a rescue or escape, a tough over-suit…a mask and helmet bomb-scorched and broken by more than a million volts twice-over. Anything at all encountered that was part of their target’s dismembered kit went into the urn. Though he left the microdrones dead where they’d fallen.
Five minutes to deadline Hatch keyed into the device’s system and set a timer. No one had showed; the kid was alone and probably had been talking to another drone. Either way he didn’t give a rip.
The device’s aperture walls grew upward in neat increments as the hover-bike sped away above the snow.
Five more minutes passed. The timer finished its run. The trigger concealed within the gnarled tree activated and, on the last charge, birthed the light of the sun. Too bright to see, the nearly tangible beam of nearly three million volts shot into the egg. Was absorbed. The light again seemed to linger in the air well after power had cut. The device folded itself into a pack that served as a base for what little remained. Most of the fabric annihilated into nothingness; what survived of the suit was too delicate to handle. A broken and brittle mask lay half buried within a pile of ash. An end and a beginning at once.
Hatch, NPC