This is a quest I'll be working on in my spare time, to provide me with something other than...
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Born in Fire
Shadows
Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods
- Location
- USS Civilian, DDG-214
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is a quest I'll be working on in my spare time, to provide me with something other than just WildSpace to write about here to keep the creative juices flowing. As always, a friendly reminder: I'm currently deployed, so updates will likely not appear as fast as either of us wants.
----
Your world was a blaze of color and light and sound. Images, so many images, so many emotions attached to them.
"Happy birthday, kiddo! Your mom baked the cake, and I have your favorite dinner!" Two faces you trusted, loved, swam before you, then vanished.
"Come on, slowpoke! Race you to the Wall!" Your best friend, a blur of white clothes and black hair, racing away from you.
"Touch up on the stick - there you go. Now - pull up!" The sky before you, whirling about, green now above you, now below. "Great job!"
Sparks fell as steel crashed against steel at a furious pace, blades meeting eachother for fleeting moments before whirling away. A feral grin. "Gotcha!"
Fear and determination as the din of battle washed over you, a weapon bucking in your hands with a trip-hammer roar, standing atop a great Wall firing on people down below doing their best to kill you. Thunder from massive guns buffeting you as a physical force. Seconds-long bursts of flame and doom, tearing deadly things from the sky.
Terror, sheer howling terror as your feet carried you at full tilt towards something you can't quite make out.
A flash. A thunderous noise fit to shake the world asunder. Heat, intolerable, unbearable heat. Darkness. Coolness. Silence.
---
You awakened to pain.
Your eyes snapped open, and then shut as you hissed when the light got to you. Groaning as pains and aches registered all over your body, you slowly sat up, rubbing at your eyes. The sound of crackling reached your ears, and you slowly opened your eyes to discover the crackling's source.
Fire. You were in the center of a ring of dying fire, resting on earth scorched bare by flame. You shivered, looking about, looking up. It was about midday, and you were, as far as you could see, in the middle of nowhere. Rolling plains fell away from you as far as your eyes could see, with nothing to reveal where you might be or where you might go.
I don't know where I am.
That thought sends a frisson of fear through your nerves, and you took a steadying breath, taking stock of your situation. Looking down, you were relieved to find that you were wearing clothes - dark pants and dark jacket, with sturdy boots on your feet, all dry and unripped. Your hands were, except where you braced against the dirt to sit up, clean.
But you had nothing else. No food. No tools.
Something jingled about your neck, and you lifted a hand to your throat, finding a slender chain with a ring on it. The ring itself was fashioned of bright silver, and set in its center was a gold circle wrapped around an onyx stone cut into the shape of an eagle. You frowned at the ring, turning it over in your fingers, and you felt like you should know what it was, what it meant.
But you didn't, and got to your feet after a moment or two more.
For contemplating a ring wouldn't put food in your belly or water in your body.
I should start walking. I suppose any direction is as good as the rest.
[] North
[] South
[] East
[] West
----
Your world was a blaze of color and light and sound. Images, so many images, so many emotions attached to them.
"Happy birthday, kiddo! Your mom baked the cake, and I have your favorite dinner!" Two faces you trusted, loved, swam before you, then vanished.
"Come on, slowpoke! Race you to the Wall!" Your best friend, a blur of white clothes and black hair, racing away from you.
"Touch up on the stick - there you go. Now - pull up!" The sky before you, whirling about, green now above you, now below. "Great job!"
Sparks fell as steel crashed against steel at a furious pace, blades meeting eachother for fleeting moments before whirling away. A feral grin. "Gotcha!"
Fear and determination as the din of battle washed over you, a weapon bucking in your hands with a trip-hammer roar, standing atop a great Wall firing on people down below doing their best to kill you. Thunder from massive guns buffeting you as a physical force. Seconds-long bursts of flame and doom, tearing deadly things from the sky.
Terror, sheer howling terror as your feet carried you at full tilt towards something you can't quite make out.
A flash. A thunderous noise fit to shake the world asunder. Heat, intolerable, unbearable heat. Darkness. Coolness. Silence.
---
You awakened to pain.
Your eyes snapped open, and then shut as you hissed when the light got to you. Groaning as pains and aches registered all over your body, you slowly sat up, rubbing at your eyes. The sound of crackling reached your ears, and you slowly opened your eyes to discover the crackling's source.
Fire. You were in the center of a ring of dying fire, resting on earth scorched bare by flame. You shivered, looking about, looking up. It was about midday, and you were, as far as you could see, in the middle of nowhere. Rolling plains fell away from you as far as your eyes could see, with nothing to reveal where you might be or where you might go.
I don't know where I am.
That thought sends a frisson of fear through your nerves, and you took a steadying breath, taking stock of your situation. Looking down, you were relieved to find that you were wearing clothes - dark pants and dark jacket, with sturdy boots on your feet, all dry and unripped. Your hands were, except where you braced against the dirt to sit up, clean.
But you had nothing else. No food. No tools.
Something jingled about your neck, and you lifted a hand to your throat, finding a slender chain with a ring on it. The ring itself was fashioned of bright silver, and set in its center was a gold circle wrapped around an onyx stone cut into the shape of an eagle. You frowned at the ring, turning it over in your fingers, and you felt like you should know what it was, what it meant.
But you didn't, and got to your feet after a moment or two more.
For contemplating a ring wouldn't put food in your belly or water in your body.
I should start walking. I suppose any direction is as good as the rest.
[] North
[] South
[] East
[] West
Last edited:
Feeling like a bug on a plate
Shadows
Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods
- Location
- USS Civilian, DDG-214
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You set out to the east at a brisk walk. At least, you were pretty sure it was east - you might have gotten your directions backwards. Either way, you were on the move.
Hours passed as you made your way away from where you'd awoken; soon the sun was at your back, and if it hadn't been for the lack of a burnt-out circle of dirt, you could have sworn you hadn't gone anywhere at all. Wherever you were, it was a broad, flat place with little in the way of landmarks. And what was more, you were starting to get hungry, stomach growling with nothing to sate it at hand.
As the last rays of light began to die away, you saw a small copse of trees standing a few miles ahead of you.
I wonder if any of them are fruit trees? Or pecan trees...
A small part of you figured that if there was anything to eat there there might be either something edible to you - or edible to something else.
You made your way towards the trees.
By the time you reached them, it was well and truly night, though the moon was bright in the sky, washing out the landscape in a cascade of soft white light, casting long and dark shadows where its rays didn't fall. The trees, up close, were stunted things, gnarled and twisted, the tallest of them growing from the ground at a fairly sharp angle, rather than going straight up and down.
At this point, you were exhausted. You checked for anything dangerous, and, fetching up against the tall tree, fell soundly asleep.
---
You awoke to rain. Thunder growled overhead, sending a shiver down your spine. The few things you could remember featured thunderous sound prominently, and you felt the beginnings of a headache coming on from dehydration. There was nothing you could do about that here, though, and now you had a choice - stay here, under what shelter the trees provided, or move on, hoping to find a stream or... something, further on.
Should I
[] Stay
or should I
[]Go (on)
Hours passed as you made your way away from where you'd awoken; soon the sun was at your back, and if it hadn't been for the lack of a burnt-out circle of dirt, you could have sworn you hadn't gone anywhere at all. Wherever you were, it was a broad, flat place with little in the way of landmarks. And what was more, you were starting to get hungry, stomach growling with nothing to sate it at hand.
As the last rays of light began to die away, you saw a small copse of trees standing a few miles ahead of you.
I wonder if any of them are fruit trees? Or pecan trees...
A small part of you figured that if there was anything to eat there there might be either something edible to you - or edible to something else.
You made your way towards the trees.
By the time you reached them, it was well and truly night, though the moon was bright in the sky, washing out the landscape in a cascade of soft white light, casting long and dark shadows where its rays didn't fall. The trees, up close, were stunted things, gnarled and twisted, the tallest of them growing from the ground at a fairly sharp angle, rather than going straight up and down.
At this point, you were exhausted. You checked for anything dangerous, and, fetching up against the tall tree, fell soundly asleep.
---
You awoke to rain. Thunder growled overhead, sending a shiver down your spine. The few things you could remember featured thunderous sound prominently, and you felt the beginnings of a headache coming on from dehydration. There was nothing you could do about that here, though, and now you had a choice - stay here, under what shelter the trees provided, or move on, hoping to find a stream or... something, further on.
Should I
[] Stay
or should I
[]Go (on)
The path not taken
Shadows
Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods
- Location
- USS Civilian, DDG-214
- Pronouns
- She/Her
In the end, you couldn't stay under that tree.
Potential lightning strikes aside, there was no way for you to gather the water pouring from the sky. Sure, you could - and did - suck on the sleeve of your steadily soaking field jacket, but you'd need - well, you wanted - something a little more substantial. Fate smiled on you, though. One of the trees was, in fact, a pecan tree, and you gathered up several handfuls of the crunchy nuts from underneath it, stowing them in your pants pocket.
They weren't much, but they were protein and energy in bite-sized packages, provided no worms had gotten inside any of them.
You kept up your trek towards the east - or, at least, what you thought was east, given that the sun was hidden behind the clouds. It was a wet and moderately miserable trek, though the dehydration headaches you should have been getting were warded off by what water you could draw from your clothing.
The clouds cleared away towards the afternoon, leaving the world muddy, muggy and bright. All things considered, it could have been worse.
Off in the distance you saw what could have been a city, the skeletal shapes of buildings rising from the horizon. Something about it set your nerves on edge.
Perhaps an hour after you spotted the city, you came upon a house on a gravel road. It was abandoned, that much was obvious - the windows were shattered and the door hung ajar. But someone might have been there recently - there were tracks. Bootprints.
Should I take a look inside? Maybe I can find something useful there.
[] Write-in
[] Continue on
Potential lightning strikes aside, there was no way for you to gather the water pouring from the sky. Sure, you could - and did - suck on the sleeve of your steadily soaking field jacket, but you'd need - well, you wanted - something a little more substantial. Fate smiled on you, though. One of the trees was, in fact, a pecan tree, and you gathered up several handfuls of the crunchy nuts from underneath it, stowing them in your pants pocket.
They weren't much, but they were protein and energy in bite-sized packages, provided no worms had gotten inside any of them.
You kept up your trek towards the east - or, at least, what you thought was east, given that the sun was hidden behind the clouds. It was a wet and moderately miserable trek, though the dehydration headaches you should have been getting were warded off by what water you could draw from your clothing.
The clouds cleared away towards the afternoon, leaving the world muddy, muggy and bright. All things considered, it could have been worse.
Off in the distance you saw what could have been a city, the skeletal shapes of buildings rising from the horizon. Something about it set your nerves on edge.
Perhaps an hour after you spotted the city, you came upon a house on a gravel road. It was abandoned, that much was obvious - the windows were shattered and the door hung ajar. But someone might have been there recently - there were tracks. Bootprints.
Should I take a look inside? Maybe I can find something useful there.
[] Write-in
[] Continue on
Through a mirror
Shadows
Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods
- Location
- USS Civilian, DDG-214
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You decided to take a - careful - look inside. This, naturally, started with a rove around the outside of the house. The house had been battered by something - the walls themselves were cracked and the siding hung loose, as if shaken by a giant hand. The paint - what was left of it - was white, and all of what remained was concentrated on the far side of the house, facing away from the city. The windows were missing, and you'd already spotted the door ajar. But nothing - nothing you could see, at any rate - was lying in wait outside the house.
So, gathering up your courage, you made your way inside the house on soft feet. Despite your best efforts, your boots crunched on fallen glass as you stepped through the threshold, and you froze, eyes and ears wide open. Nothing moved, and the only sound that came to your ears was the gentle creaking of old wood and the whine of the wind flying over the flat land.
Even in the middle of the day it was dark towards the inside of the house, though the darkness was diminished by the daylight streaming in through both the windows and holes in the roof that you hadn't been able to see from ground level until now.
You began your search through cabinets and drawers, through and under the furniture, through closets, behind doors. Your search turned up a lot of insects, mostly, but you found a mostly-intact gray poncho underneath a tattered mattress. In the attic you found a faded but perfectly serviceable green bag, much to your delight, which contained a battered green-grey canteen. The poncho found a new home inside the bag, followed by a spoon, a fork, and a slightly-rusted but cleanable sharp-tipped wooden-handled dinner knife, which you carefully wrapped in a scrap of cloth and placed in the bag. You found a prybar in the garage, hidden between a workbench and the wall behind it.
The house seemed to have been fairly thoroughly looted, however. Anything useful was long since gone, and you made your way to the door to leave.
Creak.
You stopped again, still and silent, but nothing moved, and no other noises were audible. You relaxed.
Creak.
Bewildered, you looked around, putting your weight on your right foot.
Creak.
Oh.
You looked down at the bare, dusty floor, and tested your weight on your right foot one more time.
Creak.
The board was loose, there.
You pulled the prybar from your bag, and set it against the join where the board was - ever so slightly - set away from the other floorboards. With a little huff of exertion, you pressed down on the prybar.
Cree-unk.
The board came up, and you peered inside the hole.
Inside you saw a sleek metal shape, squared off on the top, designed to fit in someone's hand comfortably. A green steel box, just narrow enough to fit in the hole. Another, smaller, brown box lay on top of that.
You picked up the pistol.
And then...
you
were
Elsewhere.
The sound was oddly muffled, and you could here crackling blasts of noise dimly around you in the half-lit room, all concrete and steel partitions.
"You're going to want to hold it like this." said a voice to your side, and you turned your head to see the speaker. Oddly, you could hear her voice just fine. Next to you stood a woman, tall, pale, with shoulder-length blonde hair, the tips blue as Caribbean water. She was whippet-thin and dressed in what had to have been a uniform - it was black and gold, with a symbol you couldn't quite make out adorning her sleeve and collar. In her hands was a copy of the weapon you'd just found, and she held it in a sure, right-handed grip, both hands clasped over it.
"Keep both of your eyes open - it helps with depth perception, and keeps you aware of your surroundings. If you're wearing a vest, stand like so -" she said, turning her body to face full-on towards the man-silhouette target downrange. "That's to keep your plates facing the bad guys. Flying lead is bad for your health if you don't have something in the way to stop it. If you're not, stand like this -" she said, turning so that the side of her body was facing the target, her left arm bent towards the floor, right at full extension. "It'll make you a smaller, harder target. Take the safety off, then line your front and rear sights up on your target, breathe, and squeeze..."
The gun rocked, spitting a tongue of flame and thunder.
"Now you give it a shot."
With a rush, you found yourself back in the present, holding that pistol.
What in the hell was that?
The experience had left you mildly disturbed.
You distracted yourself by pulling the boxes from the hole in the floorboards. The green box held eight magazines full of ammunition for the pistol, and a minimal holster that looked like it would fit on your belt and securely hold the pistol. The brown box held...
Makeup?
You blinked in confusion. Little pots of green, brown, tan and black makeup were held securely in place by the interior of the box, along with another plastic box, this one hinged. You opened that, and found a small mirror. You saw yourself for the first time since you'd awoken.
Green eyes stared back at you in your reflection, set in a sharp-featured, feminine face. Not an unkind or an unattractive face, if you thought so yourself, simply... simply as if anything unnecessary had been stripped away, leaving only a beauty of simplicity. Freckles were sprinkled across your skin, and a lock of red hair was loose from the braids it was bound into, the lock almost-but-not-quite reaching down to eye level. You smoothed it out of the way, pushing it back under the braid it had loosed itself from. You were dirty, from waking up on the ground the first time and from sleeping in the open last night, smudges of dirt on your cheeks.
You closed the folding mirror gently, and it came to you that the makeup might not be makeup, but camouflage paint. The thought came unbidden from nowhere, and you frowned gently, thinking.
You were shaken from your reverie by the sounds of approaching hooves.
[] Write-in
So, gathering up your courage, you made your way inside the house on soft feet. Despite your best efforts, your boots crunched on fallen glass as you stepped through the threshold, and you froze, eyes and ears wide open. Nothing moved, and the only sound that came to your ears was the gentle creaking of old wood and the whine of the wind flying over the flat land.
Even in the middle of the day it was dark towards the inside of the house, though the darkness was diminished by the daylight streaming in through both the windows and holes in the roof that you hadn't been able to see from ground level until now.
You began your search through cabinets and drawers, through and under the furniture, through closets, behind doors. Your search turned up a lot of insects, mostly, but you found a mostly-intact gray poncho underneath a tattered mattress. In the attic you found a faded but perfectly serviceable green bag, much to your delight, which contained a battered green-grey canteen. The poncho found a new home inside the bag, followed by a spoon, a fork, and a slightly-rusted but cleanable sharp-tipped wooden-handled dinner knife, which you carefully wrapped in a scrap of cloth and placed in the bag. You found a prybar in the garage, hidden between a workbench and the wall behind it.
The house seemed to have been fairly thoroughly looted, however. Anything useful was long since gone, and you made your way to the door to leave.
Creak.
You stopped again, still and silent, but nothing moved, and no other noises were audible. You relaxed.
Creak.
Bewildered, you looked around, putting your weight on your right foot.
Creak.
Oh.
You looked down at the bare, dusty floor, and tested your weight on your right foot one more time.
Creak.
The board was loose, there.
You pulled the prybar from your bag, and set it against the join where the board was - ever so slightly - set away from the other floorboards. With a little huff of exertion, you pressed down on the prybar.
Cree-unk.
The board came up, and you peered inside the hole.
Inside you saw a sleek metal shape, squared off on the top, designed to fit in someone's hand comfortably. A green steel box, just narrow enough to fit in the hole. Another, smaller, brown box lay on top of that.
You picked up the pistol.
And then...
you
were
Elsewhere.
The sound was oddly muffled, and you could here crackling blasts of noise dimly around you in the half-lit room, all concrete and steel partitions.
"You're going to want to hold it like this." said a voice to your side, and you turned your head to see the speaker. Oddly, you could hear her voice just fine. Next to you stood a woman, tall, pale, with shoulder-length blonde hair, the tips blue as Caribbean water. She was whippet-thin and dressed in what had to have been a uniform - it was black and gold, with a symbol you couldn't quite make out adorning her sleeve and collar. In her hands was a copy of the weapon you'd just found, and she held it in a sure, right-handed grip, both hands clasped over it.
"Keep both of your eyes open - it helps with depth perception, and keeps you aware of your surroundings. If you're wearing a vest, stand like so -" she said, turning her body to face full-on towards the man-silhouette target downrange. "That's to keep your plates facing the bad guys. Flying lead is bad for your health if you don't have something in the way to stop it. If you're not, stand like this -" she said, turning so that the side of her body was facing the target, her left arm bent towards the floor, right at full extension. "It'll make you a smaller, harder target. Take the safety off, then line your front and rear sights up on your target, breathe, and squeeze..."
The gun rocked, spitting a tongue of flame and thunder.
"Now you give it a shot."
With a rush, you found yourself back in the present, holding that pistol.
What in the hell was that?
The experience had left you mildly disturbed.
You distracted yourself by pulling the boxes from the hole in the floorboards. The green box held eight magazines full of ammunition for the pistol, and a minimal holster that looked like it would fit on your belt and securely hold the pistol. The brown box held...
Makeup?
You blinked in confusion. Little pots of green, brown, tan and black makeup were held securely in place by the interior of the box, along with another plastic box, this one hinged. You opened that, and found a small mirror. You saw yourself for the first time since you'd awoken.
Green eyes stared back at you in your reflection, set in a sharp-featured, feminine face. Not an unkind or an unattractive face, if you thought so yourself, simply... simply as if anything unnecessary had been stripped away, leaving only a beauty of simplicity. Freckles were sprinkled across your skin, and a lock of red hair was loose from the braids it was bound into, the lock almost-but-not-quite reaching down to eye level. You smoothed it out of the way, pushing it back under the braid it had loosed itself from. You were dirty, from waking up on the ground the first time and from sleeping in the open last night, smudges of dirt on your cheeks.
You closed the folding mirror gently, and it came to you that the makeup might not be makeup, but camouflage paint. The thought came unbidden from nowhere, and you frowned gently, thinking.
You were shaken from your reverie by the sounds of approaching hooves.
[] Write-in