AND THE WOLF HOWLS FOR LUNA
Disclaimer: I own nothing except Silver.
Notes: I am introducing another of my avatars in the anime "Uninhabited Planet Survive". Silver is another of my self-inserting characters like Baran or Iridia. However, Silver is not a human, but a wolf with a rather strange background. I hope you'll like this story.
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Prologue
"Our Message."
Sung by Kiroro.
Lyrics & music by Tamashiro Chiharu.
If this sky, and this wind and these colours were to disappear,
What would… What would happen to us?
I hope this sea, this planet, this dream, and this time aren't interrupted.
We're setting off, so I have no time to worry
We're facing the future that stretches on forever.
I broke out running that day in my bare feet
I want to believe in these unchanging loves.
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In the 21st century, Mankind successfully implemented Anti-gravity and Warp navigation, and embarked on full-blown space development.
In the hundred years since then, wonderful growth was achieved.
In the 22nd century, people live in colonies, and more than 30 artificial planets have been built in space.
But why such an achievement?
At the beginning of the 21st century, Earth experienced many problems. Depletion of the Ozone Layer, air pollution, and the Greenhouse effect added up to abnormal weather and in the middle of the 21st century, a large-scale change in the Earth's crust occurred and Earth underwent a destructive change which made it uninhabitable for humans.
So Mankind flew away from that disaster, and embarked on space development.
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And I appeared, howling.
I am Silver, the Wolf of the Moon.
As my name hinted, I am a male silvered wolf of 6 feet long for 70 pounds of weight with luminous green eyes.
My origin is lost in the sea of Time. As far as I can say I have always been there since the Moon orbit around Earth.
Each time there is a full moon on Earth, I could appear in some location across the Universe.
Yes. Although I come from Earth, my mission has taken me to many strange places, some even not in the same galaxy as my home planet.
My mission is to protect.
More specifically, I am always the protector of a girl.
No matter her race, her social class and her appearance, I am here to protect a female child whose age vary between the toddler stage up to just short of a young adult.
For this girl, I am bodyguard, mentor, friend, confidant and/or parental figure until she can live on without my help. I am not always successful, and those failures gnawed at my heart, if only I could clearly remember them.
The forces around my mission are mystical in nature. Due to this I am a blend of physical power, psionic abilities and plain magical might. It is also the reason why my memory is almost completely wiped out after a mission, just before I appeared again somewhere near my protégée.
And such is my curse. The memory of my charges is reduced to some half-remembered names, fleeting pictures of smiling or scowling faces, traces of deep emotions, wisps of tears and echoes of laughter.
Sometimes, Fate and Destiny send me to protect a girl who is actually the daughter or a direct descendant of one of my precedent charges, and for a time, my joy and/or sorrow double as I renew my relationship with a lost piece of my past.
But I always must depart at some point.
I think that without the memory wipe, I would have succumbed to insanity after an eternity of duty.
And so here I am, howling in the night.
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The whole colony of Roca A2, built on a moon of Saturn, seemed to shudder as the haunting howl ran through the domes. For those people, who had abandoned their world, the howl of a wolf brought back atavistic responses built into their DNA. This night, some people checked around fearfully and closed tightly their homes. Some dreamed of old Earth and many women smiled mysteriously in their sleep, somehow soothed by the fierce sound.
However eight persons reacted more strongly to it.
In her small apartment, a young girl blinked and stopped packing for the school trip tomorrow. She gazed through her window, searching for the origin of this sound that seemed to penetrate to her soul and made her so... She couldn't even name what she was feeling.
She was a fourteen years old Caucasian girl with determined bright blue eyes, red-orange hair and a ready smile. Luna grew up with her father on Mars. When her father died in an accident, she studied hard and won a scholarship from the Howard Foundation. She then moved to this colony along with her pet robot cat Chako.
Small, cute and feline with pink fur and pink-red eyes, Chako was a cartoon-like robotic female cat that had been abandoned by her old owner and left for scrap. She was about to be thrown into a smelter when Luna's dad rescued her and rebuilt her to give to Luna as a present to compensate for the tragic loss of her mother. Since their relocation, she had helped Luna as best as she could, using her knowledge and a rather pointed sense of humour. For once, even her experience couldn't analyze what her circuits were…feeling. How such a sound could affect so much her functioning?
Sharla was a rather shy girl who Luna became friends with when she transferred into the Noble Family Soria Academy. She was a small girl with light brown hair and deep green eyes under glasses. She was also a fantasy-dreamer and the sound of a wolf howling made her gasped in awe and her eyes sparkled although there was a hidden uneasiness.
Menori, class president of the Noble Family Soria Academy and daughter of a high-ranked figure within the Space Commonwealth Parliament stopped playing her violin. The haunting feral song had cut through the blue-haired girl's cold and insensitive shell and even her passion for music couldn't protect her suddenly exposed heart. Two tears fell from her lavender eyes before she angrily wiped them. What was outside that could bring out her emotions so suddenly?
Howard, the blond green-eyed son of a wealthy company owner was startled by the sound. He was a loud, spoiled, cowardly and selfish boy that thought he could do almost anything because the Howard Foundation was very wealthy. But even knowing about the security of the family mansion and the reach of his father, couldn't protect him of the irrational fear that seized him when the howl rippled through the Howard property. He abandoned his thinking about his late defeat at the hands of Luna and her comrades and promptly took refuge under the sheets of his bed, shivering.
A tall boy gazed through the night. Bell was a brown-haired black-eyed kind boy. Even if he was pressured into doing whatever Howard asked because his father works for Howard's father and Howard regularly threatened to have his father fire Bell's father, he was smiling and feeling a large weight had disappeared from his heart. This anachronistic sound was welcomed and he felt that some good things were going to happen. Especially, he remembered fondly the determination and the kind smile of Luna when she stood up for him against Howard and won.
Kaoru paused through his martial arts katas. The quiet and reserved black-haired youth turned his hazel eyes into the night of the colony and searched a long time for the origin of the strange animal-like sound. It was funny, but the "Lone Wolf" of the Noble Family Soria Academy didn't identify the author of the howl although, deeply inside, he felt some sort of kinship.
Shingo wrongly identified the sound as a dog howl from a previously unknown model of pet robot. The brown-haired twelve years old boy was a genius that jumped two classes into Luna's class. However, he thought it was a model of robotic pet like those he repaired and his dark-brown eyes sparkled as he searched the network for information for this unknown model. His parents forced him to stop since they wanted him well-rested fro the school trip tomorrow.
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"It's her."
Silver gazed upon the group of seven students walking through the spaceport to gate their transport ship for the school trip to the Jupiter-2 satellite.
The wolf has disguised himself as a German Bloodhound to pass discretely among the people. Many times he had been forced to use his mental power to pass himself as the pet of people entering the port. His powers enabled him to influence the humans, but there was little he could do against the technological control devices and they were many. At least, not without drawing too much attention on him.
He frowned. Even robotic pets weren't allowed without a master and an electronic identifier. Time to use higher-level powers. He reached for the Mana surging within is core, his soul and weaved it into a complex matrix. Air rippled around him as his image distorted and suddenly he wasn't there…in appearance.
An invisible wolf disguised as a dog quietly and discretely boarded the space-vessel.
The interior reminded him of the 20th century large passenger planes like Boeing and Airbus models. He found a remote corner too small for a human and squeezed himself in it and then he observed the dynamics of the group where his charge was.
He smothered his chuckles when Luna had the surprise to found that her pet Chako got onto the field trip space ship by sneaking her way aboard hidden in Luna's leather backpack. He smiled when he saw the friendship blooming between Sharla and Luna and the tentative of the red-haired girl to open up to the other members of her group. He shook his head when Shingo tried to visit the Reactor room and was firmly kept out by the personnel. He appreciated the steel within Menori when she confronted Howard and his cronies trying to enter the entertainment area before its opening.
His stomach then reminded him that he hasn't eaten since his arrival and some passengers searched for the origin of the sound. It was fortunate that his fur and invisibility prevented anyone to saw his blushing. He decided to follow Shingo, Sharla and Luna to try to pick out a few snacks.
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Sharla sighed as she drank a lavender lemonade. "Our group is definitely the worst."
Luna nodded. "That's it! They put all the problem children in one pack." Silver almost spat out the hot-dog he snatched from a passenger at that.
Sharla blinked. "Why would they do something like that?"
Shingo smiled. "If you put them in one group, and add Menori, the school will have an easier time managing them."
Sharla thought about it. "I see…" She then gasped and pointed to her. "Hold on! Does that mean I'm a problem child too?"
Luna nodded with a serious face. "Naturally." She held it a few seconds before bursting into laugh as Sharla mock-fought her.
Silver held his laugh as he continued to eat his treat, when suddenly his sixth sense blared a warning of imminent danger for him and his charge.
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The ship rocked as a gravity storm hit it. The crew didn't detect it as it seemed to have appeared suddenly in the rear arc of the vessel. The computer proved to be unable to calculate an emergency course correction to avoid it: The only course to avoid it was to perform an emergency warp manoeuvre.
Following the instructions of the crew, the passengers boarded the escape shuttles. The group of Menori calmly entered their assigned shuttle, unaware that an invisible wolf was following them.
The Lunar Wolf smiled as she witnessed the comportment of Howard and Shingo. The first was playing with the non-functioning control stick and the latter was admiring the control panels.
Luna and Menori scowled them as the ship rocked again as a gravity wave hit it. A hand pressed accidentally the Emergency Separation button and even Silver was too occupied with the movement of the vessel to have noticed it.
As the preparations for the emergency warp jump continued, Silver could only shake his head in front of the stupidity of Howard. He was a sheltered selfish boy that had really no idea of the reality. Unfortunately, his sixth sense continued also to tingle dangerously. Howard might learn sooner than he thought that not everything could be altered by the money of a rich parent.
The situation was serious. Silver gained the rear of the shuttle as the children buckled their seat-belts and dropped his disguise and invisibility, hidden by the seats. He feared he would need his full power in a few minutes.
The countdown for the warp clocked on, but three seconds before it happened, the sequence of emergency separation of the escape shuttle reached its course and the shuttle ejected.
Luna was preparing herself for the sensations of a warp-jump, but it wasn't happening. She opened her eyes and gasped in dismay as she saw that the shuttle was in the vacuum and within the edge of the gravity storm.
Menori, Shingo and Luna gained the cockpit and could only acknowledge that their ship was gone and that they were still in the storm. The attraction augmented and pulled the shuttle in.
It was time to act. Sensing that the shuttle couldn't support for long such an intense unstable gravity field, Silver planted his claws in the floor to anchor himself and called upon his power. A blue wave of light gathered around him and spread through the shuttle, reaching outside and a solid bubble of magical energy snapped into place. The children all gasped at this phenomena and gazed at the rear of the shuttle. Bell could see the origin of the blue light, but he was speechless as he stared as the glowing dog-like creature.
Shingo was awed by what he saw by the cockpit window. "I don't believe it! There's an actual force-field around our shuttle! But this kind of equipment exists only at the experimental level?"
While Silver could protect the shuttle and the passengers from most of the stresses generated by the Gravity Storm, he couldn't change the vectors. The shuttle began to spin on itself and the children found themselves too occupied at maintaining their position against the G-forces to think about the strange creature that revealed itself in their shuttle.
The shuttle disappeared in the maw of the gravity storm and circuits began to fail and explode as the force-field couldn't deflect all the energy discharges hitting the shuttle.
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Notes: I discovered recently the anime "Uninhabited Planet Survive" and fell in love with it. I hope I didn't make too many errors.
Read and review, please.