Stralia - Madness to one, Knowledge to another.
#7 of Stralia
_Stralia - Madness to one, Knowledge to another. ~~SnowDragon
Hihi, here with Chapter 7! I'm a bit behind in my insane writing challenge, trying to catch up to my comrades and the grey line, creeping higher and higher above my maroon currently written ones. Now, perhaps I should havw warned you all of this last chapter but considering this is the first chapter written entirely under the tasking orders... These will be all very rough first drafts, the words and my intial intent on a page without any typo checking or word misplacement logic clearing. So if you see a bunch of nasty mistakes, they'll all be fixed in the first edit pass and then reposted, though I should have gotten all the glaring ones out of the way that ensure a clean, easy read, but you know about intents and results, yeah? I've decided I'm going to go and take a few suggestions my good friend Sabre gave me, one to post all my first drafts and then edit them later one by one and repost them as clean good copies and two, to publish it when it's all done and editted (Which at this rate, will be once this novemeber writing event is finished. So for now, I hope you enjoy the ride and the story!
So, without further ado I present Stralia - Madness to one, Knowledge to another. As always, enjoy!
Writing time: 2 days Length: Digital Copy Only 8.4 A4 Pages.
Soundtrack: Some Wav file I found of rain falling mixed with the ACM trailer music._
"Where did we come from? Where did magic come from? Will we, as a people, ever know the answer?"
~~Unknown, Outside the meeting of the Eight, 478PS
There was a lot of paperwork involved in being allowed to leave a hospital without the security dragging you forcefully, yet carefully back into the room they had provided you. Discharging, they called it, the term she had used for a human firearm being shot, or a battery slowly having it's power used up by a device it was plugged into, the human language was quite imprecise when you really got down to it and thought about, despite the millions of similarities it shared with her own, close enough to be the same language and yet different in it's own right. It was in these times of waiting that the mind of Senia took the strangest paths, the path of the history of language, a topic that had never been quite studied beyond the basic prinicples of how it sounded and why it sounded that way. Most of the texts that truly dived deeper than that were aged to the point where it was little more than badly maintained jibberish, moldering away in some anicent library that happened to survive Collision, a tome that no one cared about anymore because of such a lingual shift as to be unintelligible, fallen prey to the very thing they were trying to hunt down and stop, an act that was so impossible but simply couldn't fail. Another topic for another book... maybe a topic crossed in the two she already had she needed to bury her beak back into... and get another notebook unsealed in order to take down notes and observations before the knowledge was lost forever when it was transferred and stored deep in some cavernous bunker beneath the surface, never to be read or studied again.
The storm from the night before had mostly cleared, leaving only a thick solid black cloud overhead pouring rain down upon them at a steady but controlled rate, much less freakish weather, as if mother nature herself empathized with her current situation and had decided to cut the falcon-girl and her friends, and her family by extension, some slack. A low, rumbling and rolling sound of thunder far off in the distance put that thought to rest, the storm had merely moved on, off to continue it's destructive path until it's energy simply ran out or it was blown out to sea. The room had it's own TV, bolted to the ceiling via means of a swivel-mount, and the news was her first call, flesh beneath her cheeks going red raw when one of the first articles beyond the news of the storm was about her, a peregrine falcon teenager stuck at an AlpDynOrg roadblock when missing when the mercenaries were attacked by as yet unidentified group of assailants armed with magic and automatic weapons. Her family declined to comment, and Senia could only smirk as she imagined the newsroom employees ringing to her room, and the answer they might have gotten. Evidentally, not a good one. After a fleeting report, she had been found, safe and sound after all, the media had directed their attention to the event that had caused her to go missing in the first place. After some delayed smalltalk about the situation and what the mercenary corportation's role was in relation to the goverment and the Civil Pacification Unit, all general knowledge about the soldier for hire accords as they were known, the United Nations Security Council's Resolution 3-4-5-2-CW, Role of Mercenary Forces on the Battlefield, which offically forced mercenary forces to be treated as soldiers on the field of battle when it was revealed the Empire force was mostly made of mercenary swords for hire as had been the case in Erildisa for decades on end, and that US and NATO forces had been using this as a loophole to execute every enemy solider that no longer had any useful information.
Realising that their role had been legalized in every sense of the world, human private military corporations, which until that point had been restricted to logistical operations and civilian control were able to uparm themselves and form private armies, services sold to the highest bidder. When the war ended and the lines of culture and hatred began to fade and blur, some bands of mercenaries fighting with the Empire saw the opportunity for greater profit, greater recognition and formed together with human companies to form what became the Alpha Dynamics Organisation, First line of Action, Duty, Culture and Service as became their motto, a company that prided itself on performing whatever task they were paid to do in a non racist fashion, accepting contracts from either and any side, but also keeping an effective set of morals that kept them within the rule of war boundaries set by the UN so many years ago in human history, which allowed them to continue operating, to grow and become what they were today despite such public outcry. According to news sources, which was never a good way to get the truth in any way, shape or form, the corporation of soldiers of fortune were dispatched as early containment and control to a location, hired by the government as they were quicker to respond with the heavy units required for the mission. "Now, the source wouldn't say," said the reporter, now on scene as they said, a huge truck painted in the black and red colours of the fire service, red, blue, yellow and white lights flashing over every inch of it while two men in blue jumpsuits covered what looked to be a burning wreck in white foam from a yellow hose. "why the C-P-U needed them, or what they were supposed to take into custody, but as you can see behind me it didn't go well. From what we understand, the AlpDynOrg guys made contact with some sort of cell, likely Anti-equality terrorists. From what we know they were heavily armed and blew up this A-P-C behind me which has burned for most of the night."
"Now we have footage leaked from the Organization from one of their helicopters that was dispatched to the scene when the fighting broke out," Why they promoted such violence Senia would likely never know nor figure out, like a sport, to see which channel could push the boundaries further with each major event, making an act out of suffering, a push for ratings and little else. The footage took that short laspe in her attention to change, gone was the man under the umbrella in front of the fire crews and had been replaced by a very clear image of an airborne camera, electronically distorted sound of rotor blades from a helicopter in the background, along with radio chatter, most of it unintelligible, though the important bits were subtitled, mostly communication between pilots checking targets and relaying information to the soldiers on the ground and back to their refueling base, the camera shot was ringed with odd information, numbers on either side, three letters in capitals, different letters and symbols and numbers, it all just looked like a jumbled mess, even to her sharp eyes. "As you can see here, the crew of this Cobra gunship arrived on site just in time to see the Striker detonate," That fireball was huge, bigger than she thought and the scale! That had to be fifteen metres in the air! The camera was, thankfully she noted, not detailed enough to make out any discerning information about the cars or the people, specifically a falcon, two humans and a lizard scrambling for cover, once in the news was enough for her month, thank you very much, but the smoke of the huge fire covered the traffic pinned in by the truck behind them quite well.
"Now, we don't know at this point, but this... yes, this here is quite interesting," Her blood almost froze, as did the rest of her body which didn't quite get the message as in the smoke, where Sarah's mother's car had been, the thick obscuring smoke flashed a hot white colour from within as the helicopter fired it's rockets at the street, the glow little more than something in the corner of the digital eye, thick yellow explosions pounding into the theatre they would have been inside of if they had of left no sooner than an hour earlier, a pausing, horrifying thought as post detonations, the structure was little more than fiery debrs and scrap metal, girders bent like paperclips and horseshoes. "Alpha Dynamics says they located two bodies that weren't destroyed by them at that spot, what happened to them we're not sure, we just don't have enough information at this point." She merely blinked, how long until they found out it was not human nor magic nor Erildisan that had killed those... creatures, the only word she could use to describe them from memory alone, terrifying, but rather her, a mix of two creatures, one of which Humans had tried... and apparently failed to make extinct. She shook her head, tossing the thoughts from her mind. Now wasn't the time to worry about what she had done in the past, not while her friends who were not to know the truth either were so close and wouldn't stop prying until they got an answer that satisfied them. Blessed but cursed by the company she chose to keep, as good friends as they were, how would they react when they learned what she really was? It was a question she had avoided asking for as long as realised, years ago, what she actually had the ability to do, a question she tried so hard to avoid but the inevitability of it being posed as she studied further and deeper into the subject the harder it became to avoid.
The only thing that would confirm without a doubt what she truely was would be a proper bloodtest, checked against markers of known dragons and against her own species that wasn't a blood relevite, but the dragons had been extinguished months before the war came to it's end and the races came to their tense but stable peace, making the task of actually finding out beyond the realm of possbility. Difficult to ask, impossible to answer and even harder to shelve when she realised she didn't have any answer that would calm her mind about it, like trying to heft a heavy box into a cupboard that was fighting back. Threatening violence against one's own thoughts in order to correct their actions seemed to work better than anything else, at least for the meantime until she got somewhere quite and she started to mentally wander again. When the staff had finally processed the paperwork required she was more relived anything else, if only to distract herself from that overwhelming question, when the staff finally let her stand, and leave the room and the hospital itself, through the main lobby, past the hundred seats that made up the triage centre, and the dozen people sitting within, as if their eyes were painted to her form. And the the pair of humans did not let the falcon out of their sight, like an old human expression she had heard, the irony not lost upon her inner most thoughts, their forms hidden underneath a pair of umbrellas, Sarah's extended to the side to protect her now dry clothes from the rain still falling down all around them with the comforting pitter-patter it had always fallen with, a sound that made her wings twitch, wanting to expand and let the gentle water splash against those primary feathers, the thought resisted even as they stepped around cars, down walkways with Qui right behind them, and finally to a somewhat large sized vehicle with a tray on the back instead of the traditional boot or trunk, something Sarah refered to as the pick-up, which seemed an accurate term for what it was being used for, her family must have owned two vehicles, considering in all likelihood they would never see the vehicle that had been used last night, even if it was still intact.
Well, it wasn't her fault if it was! This one had a much deeper sound, more of a rumble, a deep, loud vibration that reminded her a lot of her own growl just after downing prey and moments before devouring it. "We let the school know this morning as soon as the... police rang," A different term for a different time, Sarah's parents must have lived through the Collision war and lived some time before that, "so you don't have to worry about it."
She smiled. "That was the least of my concerns," A short pause, that sounded so short and cruel for someone who was trying to help. "but thank you. Is my mother alright?" Sarah gave a quick little chuckled snicker as she responded, trying to change the subject away from her hasty and poorly thought out response, means of coping with a situation no one should have to, perhaps?
"She was a bit annoyed we pulled out the big guns when all you were doing was wandering in the forest, something about not trusting your experience. I'm not sure she understood that when they found you, the Officers said you looked like you'd seen hell reincarnate." Well, Senia didn't doubt them for a second there, and only gave a quick, short nod in response, opening her mouth to say something else post Sarah's next words, but unlike she expected, those words never came, the topic still too awkard to broach. It was hardly every day people died in your presence, at least not anymore and while Qui and herself were perfectly ready, willing and able to accept death as a thing that could simply happen, Sarah was human, and simply hadn't been brought up that way. Humans liked to think they could live forever and very little made them change that way of thought and even when it happened, others tried their best to ignore it outright, most often for the worst. What it meant in the current sense now though, was that the rest of the trip was held in a form of awkard silence, parties wanting to communicate but not knowing any one way around the topic that had been brought up too soon from the event. The conversation between friends had died in a way she never had though possible, perhaps a warning that their friendship and their interactions between one another had been fundamentally altered because of the event, perhaps in the same way that hers had been when she thought of the dark after that helicopter crash in the schoolyard on top of the science building.
With a quick, silent nod and a pat on the shoulder from Sarah when they arrived without incident to the home of the falcon family, a quick pull and push of the handle and door in the required order had her out of the vehicle and stepping up the stairs before they had even pulled away, in no way eager to depart without actually seeing her get home, full well knowing what had happened the last time either of those two had let her out of their sight... oh, they had better not remain paranoid like that for too long... As good friends as they were to her, perhaps her closest anyone staying that close and keeping such a watch on for any length of time would grate on her nerves until she challenged for honour, what made home such a good place, a private place to sit, to work without being disturbed and to relax, her bed, her nest, her sanctuary... if only it were the case in her dreams as well... shaking her feathered head and using a free hand to clean up the mess that created as the key slipped into the granite oiled lock, turning and clicking into place the door swinging open, the front room of the house empty... her mother might have been sleeping and just in case of that, she slipped those shoes off silently, placing them in the rack before more or less sneaking up the stairs straight to her room, clicking the door closed behind her with a very practised set of motions, barely making a single sound at all throughout the entire procedure, and she was only getting better with each passing performance, another smile for the day, curse the day she ever started counting.
Without her jacket and through muscle memory she wasted an action slipping the blade from it's safe hiding place and set it down upon the desk to the left of the computer keyboard for now and slipping the chest rig off and folding it in two before sitting that on the bed right next to the chair before fanning those wings just that little bit, the inch that was required to sit comfortably, feathers rustling, a few droplets of water resting upon them but no large problem for the chair she sat on. Cringing, what a waste of electricity to leave the machine on all night and most of the morning in fact as well, though she could hardly blame herself for it considering that when she had left the night beforehand, getting caught up in some sort of military engagement was the least of her concerns or worries! Flicking out her hand to catch the monitor's on button with her thumb, waiting for the box to wind itself to on, a nickname she had given the term for the sound it made, a long soft sort of whine, might like a small dog might make when it wanted something, her wings pressed back against the comfortable pusedo-leather, letting out a soft sigh, closing her eyes to relax, to think, wondering what normal was, and what it felt like. Unbidden, the thoughts of last night came to the forefront of her mind once more, those figures charging at her from the smoke moments before she struck them down out of sheer anger, muttering under her breath a curse for the ages to hear but... Something about them was oddly familar, not in any direct way, but she'd seen them before, somewhere? No. No, she dare not consider the possibility that someone she might have known of any personal level would have done anything to gain the military attention of AlpDynOrg, let alone come charging at her through smoke, flames and gunfire like some form of berserker, not caring whether they lived or died, only that they destroyed their enemy.
She shook her head, then corrected her feathers, she really had to do something about that, maybe a clip or something... No, it wasn't familarity through sight it was something else entirely. She'd seen them clearly through her emerald orbs protected by the second, protective eyelid and hadn't recognised them at the time, or any time before or after she had struck them down, it was only now, in afterthought that she saw something... Sight came to sight and mind came to mind as went the old Erildisan saying, Practise makes better learning than a classroom, invoking that one was better at something they did and saw rather than something they read about, something the humans really ought to have learned centuries ago instead of hiding in their books and their computers and their vehicles and their electronic tools, but in this case, something seen would be remember when it was next laid eyes upon, whereas something thought of post event would have been something that had happened within one's mind. And while the circumstances of the night where certainly terrifying, they were not nightmarish, she had killed the source of her terror, twice, that night, so it was not from a state of disturbed rest, but rather from something she had thought, or had imagined while fully awake, perhaps without even realising it at the time. The mind was best at working when it was woring at something it wasn't supposed to be focusing on or doing, in this case, imagining something she had most likely heard about, or read... Wait, there was something in the record of the 496PS Symposium's records, something she had read now that she thought about it that had seemed odd. She rolled the wheels of the computer chair over to her cupboard, retrieving the book in question and lifting it to her bed, placing it open that, opening it to the felt bookmark sewn into the hard covered surface, keeping it secure in place. it was here she had been stopped last time and hadn't had the chance to start reading again, in the middle of a straightlined, rather boring discussion between Saint Charles, the country's foremost expert on the healing arts, head of the Sancures, the Healer's Society and an up and coming university student who was devising a way to apply arthemtic to spells in order to establish some form of order or ranking to the power of spellcasters and mages.
As far as she was aware, the young man in question didn't survive Collision or the massive fighting that broke out at once afterwards, which was unfortunate considering, at least from the limited knowledge she had gleamed from the book thus far, his theories were very sound and at the time were some of the leading edge, he would have made a fine Heremtic if it weren't for the fact he had the skill to cast water based spells. But this wasn't what she wanted and so flipped back a few pages. Ah, yes. A Once-Mage, a rare person who once had the ability to cast but had for one reason or another lost it in a natural or unnatural way, invaluable thanks to their ability to feel the spark of what would be a successful spell and knowing exactly what it would do and how it would affect the world without actually being able to cast it, almost a seer of the magical ways, able to see the future effects of a spell not yet cast, an elf by the name of Yillian had listened a little too closely to something Sir Eisenhower had said and his mind had run with it, launching into a tirade about his old adventuring days. Judging by the copyist's notes at the time, it was clear Vaakazar had been ready to nudge him back to the topic at hand, but before he had the elder elf had mentioned a case of what he refered to as "natural magic", in this case, a monster his much younger self had run into in the darkness of a cavern he had been... well, looting, yes his younger live had been full of adventure, he shouted to the room, now rounded with light hearted chuckles directed at their mental commrade before Eisenhower had quizzed him of the creature's appearance. And there it was, a description of the creature, down to robes and what was probably it's exact height, like before her mind placing all the pieces of the pointedly accurate description together, only this time she saw and knew exactly what her mind was doing, checking only to confirm before banishing the imaginated thought ad picture of the creature. Yillian then said, almost offhandedly, that he had tried to disspell the beast several times, but not a single method he knew of at the time worked and that he finally had to banish the creature by steel and brute force once his knowledge of magical methods ran out. He knew at the time as well as he knew now that any spell that had a lasting effect, such as reanimating a dead body, or levitating a heavy object required the mage direct his focus to it, the spell was an ongoing effect rather than a once of bout like a fireball or water jet, which only had to be maintained for as long as it took the spell to strike it's target, and that any spell being sustained, for however short or however long, could be disspelled or banished by another mage who knew how to will something out of existance, but the dragons where the only race that had shown any real capability of mental agility in order to collaspe direct offensive spells before they struck their targets. One might be able to stop a fireball before it hit it's target, but if it struck trees and burst into flames, one either had to know an entirely new set of spells, to remove the fire from existance or to douse it with a body of summoned water.
The concept of stopping spells in flight was a new one to her mind, learned only when she had read this section the first time around and she was still grappling with the concept of trying to think one step ahead of your oppoenent to not only know he was going to cast a spell, but to know exactly what it was and to know exactly how to render it harmless before it struck it's target. Even the most basic of fire spells, the well known fireball could, depending on the strength of the mage, another reason the mathematical Heremtic's studies would have been useful, should they ever have been completed, travel at a substansal velocity, the fastest recorded in modern sport was just shy of two kilometres a second, between the incapability of most minds to accomplish it and the Collision meaning that Erildisan mages didn't have to worry about magical counterattacks, leaving them to focus on purely causing as much damage and havoc as possible left it to fall out of favour to the point where most probably didn't even think of it on an intellectual level beyond 'that would be nice, too bad it's impossible.' Did she have a right to keep all this knowledge to herself? Here she was, carrying, possibly, the last of the books of it's kind, possibly with the most in depth studies into magical research that, since Collision, were irreplaceable. Never again would the words of Vaakazar or Eisenhower grace the world or any tomes ever again, for the humans in all their haste, fear and complete irresponsibility for anything bar themselves had destroyed the greatest minds her world and theirs had ever known. Yes, this information was important to her, but to her race... it was just too important to lose, it was too close to being lost. She had to do something about it.
She had to learn. Learn so she could teach.