I am Sarill Vertage. The thought rings out in your mind, awakening memories and identity. Flashes of your life assail you, too-real memories that make you lose sense of where you are for a minute. Your early days at academy, fighting for placement ranks. Your first hit of 0G, nearly passing out from laughing, and the hunger to get back out there again. The first despair of getting told you didn't have the grades, the pedigree, or the milcorp experience for their test pilot program -- followed eight years, two milcorp postings, and eighty-six applications later by the euphoria of the same recruiter shaking your hand and welcoming you on board.
Unbidden by grief, but rather created by the sudden nostalgia of your life remembered, a single tear forms and falls from your eye. So sudden and strange is the appearance of the tear that you reflexively move to catch the drop as it falls from your eye, as one would the first drop from an unexpectedly bleeding nose. It hits your palm and bubbles into silvery mist. 'I am Sarill Vertage,' the tear whispers as it burns away. In that moment, the sand falls off your body as though you just passed through a sonic shower. Your hair, a twisted wreck from its time in the sand and saltwater, tussles itself clean and neat in an invisible breeze. You feel... like you. Like you on a great day.
All things considered, this doesn't seem right at all.
The strange nostalgism passes, and you inspect what you can see of yourself slowly. You're in your Virgil uniform, pilot's symbol and name embroidered in the upper right shoulder, and it, like the rest of you, now seems much cleaner and in repair than it has any right to be. Reflexively, you make a gesture with your right hand, trying to call up your integrated phone's display. It flickers to life, a little square of light in the L-shaped space between your thumb and pointer finger.
'No Grid Signal Detected'
'No WiFi Networks Detected'
'No Satellite Signal Detected'
Great.
Phone checked, you look around. After what just... happened, or what you remember happening, you're not sure what you expect to see. Other crew members? Wreckage? Teeth, claws, and fire? What you do see is a stretch of sandy beach, broken occasionally by juts of grey rock. It smells more natural than any beach you've been to. No scent of cooking meat, synthetic or otherwise, cheap sunscreen, or of decontamination chemicals. It smells of sand, saltwater, and rotting seaweed. There are seabirds in the air and crabbish creatures that scuttle in the surf to fight over bits of washed up something, but little else of interest on the beach. One particularly bold armored creature, looking something like a small lobster let itself go later in life, is making a bold attempt to pinch your shoe.
The ocean spans half the horizon. Empty and abyssal, you see no sails, buoys, or abnormality to indicate there's anything out there on that vast expanse. Yet... Something tugs at you as look towards the water. A deep, bonechilling sorrow that makes you want to give up and lay back down in the shallow water to be consumed. You shiver and look away, the feeling passing quickly when your eyes unlock from the empty horizon. As much to look somewhere, anywhere, else as to survey your surroundings, you turn your back on the ocean.
That half of the horizon is dominated by... structures. If one had a particularly loose definition of the term, one might even call it a city. Skyscrapers, monolithic towers, massive domes, pyramidal arcologies, rail-cannon spines for shipyards, all cram together in a jagged, impossibly dense, skyline. It would be magnificent, were the structures intact, but this place seems more ruin than city. Skyscrapers are gutted half open, towers lean as though placed by a careless child, domes are torn asunder, arcologies overgrown, and the cannon-spines are bent or snapped. Almost as strange as the desolation itself is how sharply it seems to begin. Though the ground rises up from the beach in a gentle swell that keeps you from seeing the base of the impossible city, there doesn't seem to be a gradual edge to the city. Those ruins seem to be as sudden and complete a front as a garden wall.
So agape are you at the monlithic ruins in the distance that you almost pass over the woman seated at the edge of the beach. Perhaps a hundred feet away, where soil raises up sharply in an embankment, she's seated on one of those juts of grey stone. Her hair is short, white, and loose, blowing in the soft breeze. Though the distance makes it difficult to say for certain, her features seem young despite the white hair. She watches you, expression neutral, as though you were an interestingly colored crab scuttling down the beach. Her clothing is crisp, a blue knee-length coat with a high collar over a white button-up dress shirt and charcoal vest, with pants in the same color as the vest. She's wearing something else in the same blue as her coat, perhaps glasses, on her face.
Across her knees, in an easy to reach but non-threatening position, is a heavy rifle.
One the one hand, she's the only person you can see and she hasn't shot you yet. On the other hand, stranger danger plus one gun.
What is Sarill doing?
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Topic: [SG] Arisen (Read 5596 times)