Open Air – TranceKing123
A/N: It's been awhile. I was taking a little break, but then I got this idea... and yeah.
Look, I know this is a third Sonic fic, but it will be my last. Might as well write three stories at a time.
So, yeah. SEGA owns some stuff. Other people own other stuff, I own some stuff... We get it.
~~~~~=+-)(-+=~~~~~
Chapter 1: Just a Little Blind
"Wait, the scanner is responding!"
"What do you mean?"
"That weird scanner we found on the ground. It's picking something up."
"Hey, give me that. I'm the tech guy, so I can figure this out."
"Ummm, you're forgetting who engineered all your-"
"Shut up. There's words."
"Delta Kappa Echo. Come in, Delta Kappa Echo. We've lost track of the girl. Turning on the frequencies. The patterns are coded her brain. We'll find her that way."
"..."
"Ummm, and what's that supposed to mean?"
"I don't know, Sonic. But I can track the other end of this conversation."
"Something about this isn't good."
"Yeah. I know."
*****:)(:*****
It's amazing how we can just interpret time as a number. Nobody should ever see 3:00 AM on their clock. And the people who do don't really care.
There's zero point to even bother passing midnight. After all, there's this thing called a curfew, right? Kids have it.
And she was still a kid. Well, maybe just inside. All the stuff she needed to learn, she was educated with. Still, she was very immature. In important times, she could step up and act her age. Problem is, when nothing demanded it, no effort in the slightest was given to make things less complicated for other people.
It never showed, either. After all, her apartment was very tidy, neat, and visually appealing. Just like every other apartment at the "StayCation Complex," the one she bought had 2 doors which led to two extra rooms inside of a hallway.
Too bad nobody ever looked inside of it. Because if they'd look at the one closest to the end of the hallway, which was where the living room was, they'd be quick to judge.
You see, Kelsie van Adel was not the calm type. She hadn't gotten noise complaints, but then again, she got along with the neighbors really well. It might have been her charm, but whatever. Being a deep toned purple colored fox, there was not much to go wrong, or at least that's how she felt.
Then again, people who like to stay in nice hotels more than often end up a kind-hearted creature.
That might've been why the neighbors were like this. The "StayCation Complex" was basically a hotel that somehow morphed into an apartment building. When you stepped into a room, you immediately were in a hallway, with a left wall to decorate and a right wall to quote-on-quote. This wall had two doors, which led to the fancy four-star hotel style bedroom and the "do whatever the hell you want cause it's empty" room.
Kelsie had turned this "come on, sky's the limit" room into a slowly progressing music studio. It wasn't much yet; the computer and digital audio workstation was a huge budget to balance. But, heavy basslines and deep ambient soundscapes kept the room always live, proficient, loud, and heavy.
She had decided to take the roll of making her songs as deep as possible. Emotion did matter, but giving your listener a really deep feeling you could pull out of them was priority number two. The more bass she was able to blow around on the master, the happier she'd be.
Not many females were in the electronic music biz lately. The only ones had a moderate fanbase of a few hundred. As much as she wanted to change that, she knew she would have to dedicate all of her time to simply making music and eating the occasional chocolate brownie protein bar. She wasn't ready for that yet.
As deep as she was sent, entering trance states inside of her own music, she still had a life. She also had a purpose.
Kelsie couldn't put a finger on that. She tried to pay attention to the random foreshadowing that she could only dream about. It was useless knowing anything about her except the fact that her music was bass-heavy. With such dense music, she tried learning about her personality based on that. She was a really quirky person, so it made no sense that she made this type of music. Still, it was possible that she could be really self-conscious about herself. Or maybe she was a straight-faced individual. After all, she didn't have many friends, and this gave off a really dark aura around her. Maybe people assumed this since her color was a dark purple that was almost black. But then again, light blue and light pink colored critters sometimes were a little darker then they looked.
Either or any other way, she didn't care too much about it. It wasn't like she had to impress anyone. She wasn't bullied when she was younger; she just had stayed away from a lot of people to avoid the fear that others were being judgmental, when she really was making stuff worse. She was always a "smart-ass," as they would call it. Kelsie thought it was her swagger, but other kids her age proved her wrong otherwise.
Yes, she got no swagga back.^
At least the days of education were over. Learning boring useless crap was just that. She had made a few friends while learning in classrooms, but other than that, she couldn't pull off much within the school walls. She dropped out with just a year to go. She was going off of unemployment money she was earning. As far as economics go, if Kelsie didn't get a job in three years, she would get a monthly payment courtesy of the government. After three years, if she still was unemployed, they'd stop giving her money until she worked at a job for more than 10 years, which was not an easy feat.
Kelsie wanted to be in the electronic music industry ever since she dropped out. She had been experimenting and studying for half of her life. Now, almost a full adult, still in the young adult years, she had to live life at the fullest. By making deep house, deep trance, and deep dubstep, she could squeak through an even mix of "need to do" and "want to do." It was working out nicely for her.
But for today, she wanted to get a little more serious. Through the money she was given as a child and as an unemployed being, she had bought a 64-bit Pent-Core 500 MB Windows 7 hard drive with two 20 inch monitors and a well-designed desk with a perfect fit for it all. Kelsie also had the M-Audio Stuidophile speakers, which blared the perfect amount of bass, mid, and treble. She had bought Ableton Live Suite 8, since she wanted a huge external setup built after a few years. Native Instrument's "Komplete 8" was her primary internal softsynths she used. But, freeware including "Synth1," "TranceDrive," and "D_Blue Glitch" were also all used in her productions.
One more thing made her setup complete. She had gotten an M-Audio KeyRig 69 key MIDI keyboard to record scores with. This keyboard was USB, and it linked directly into Ableton and played any noise she created with the softsynths.
All of the equipment together cost a grueling 3711 coins. But, since she had a giant savings account, it was nothing. She did have 5,000 coins left in her account, in which she usually spent 1,500 coins a month and collected 1,700 each one of the twelve. With the bank interest as well, she was bringing in about 300 coins a month. Not bad for someone who is unemployed. Not bad at all.
She was thinking of getting some extreme hardware and filling up her desk and the shelves under it with synthesizers, VCO's, and other external hardware she could use to create more unique sounds.
But to do this, she needed a 16 port USB extender and an 8 port USB dock phono connector. Therefore, she could plug in the USB synths and VCO's. As for the stuff with the phono cords, (The end of a phono cord almost looks like a LiveWire or an AUX cord) they could be plugged into the phono ports that would link straight to the MIDI keyboard, in which another connected USB cable would record the sounds and scores.
She went into the bedroom to get a notepad. When you stay at a hotel, there's always a bedside table with an alarm clock. More times than not, there's a notepad on that table. The apartment complex had apartments built like half of a good condominium with a hotel-style bedroom. Everybody always asked why the rooms weren't called condos. The truth was that condos were about five times the monthly price of a regular apartment. Plus, most condos in Station Square had a permanent payment.
Anyways, in the bedrooms, that hotel-style bedroom had a notepad, and people could call for a new one. It was a huge stack of sticky notes that formed a cube. This cube, from the sides, looked like it had some diagonally blended red and orange gradient. But, each individual note looked like a regular, white square piece of paper when torn off. Not magic, but Kelsie was sure it was way cooler if someone was high off of drugs.
She snatched a similar colored pen from the room before she left as well.
After sitting down in her living room, she started writing down her wish list of everything she needed to get.
Kelsie started with the USB extender and phono dock. After that, she started thinking of a possible synthesizer she could want. She wrote down "M-Audio Venom" (pronounced V-Nom) on the notepad. Under it, she also put "Korg Kaoscillator" and "any VCO you can find." After ripping off the top note, she returned the stack to its place, as well as the pen.
After finding her keys, she went to her door and locked it behind her. After walking down a hallway straight out of a Hilton, she made it to the elevator. Since the place was pretty impressive, there were 5 floors, and she lived on the fourth.
She hit the "*L" button on the elevator dashboard and arrived at record time.
You could feel the liveliness of the room before you even got to the lobby. Well, most of the time. This time she didn't get that feeling, so the complex must have had no real business today.
After walking out of the giant silver doors in the wood stained elevator, she strolled along to the doors, without acknowledging the front desk clerk since she was busy with another customer. Besides those two, she couldn't see anyone else in the lobby, which was a first. Even the food area was usually stuffed.
After walking outside, she was lead to a dirt road you walked on in order to get to Station Square. But, the small businesses were just outside of the town, on the west side.
She was still holding the note, since her clothing had zero pockets. She was rocking the regular dress code: At least a dress or shirt/pant combo, white gloves, and shoes at all time. Nothing exciting, but excitement is overrated anyways. But still, no pockets, as if that even mattered.
She had reached a side road. There was a shortcut she could take through the forest in order to get to the side town. Not many people went to this small business center outside of Station Square, but the businesses all had websites with mega traffic.
Everybody said that the forest was a dangerous place, but it didn't mind Kelsie. It was just a dirt trail with pine trees around it. The occasional section of the main stream trickled on the right side of the path, which made the walks very relaxing.
Kelsie had zero problems ever coming in or out of the forest. Absolutely zero roadblocks came across her. There was one place that did give her shivers, though. There was a spot where the sunshine was blocked by the massive pine trees which were mixed with regular oak trees, the only ones in that forest. It wasn't the brightest, and hell knows what manifested in there. But every time Kelsie went through, she shook the eeriness off.
After getting on the dirt trail to the forest, there was a weird tingle inside of her stomach. She was in fact excited she was getting new hardware. The problem was that the fact of her getting new stuff wasn't it. It didn't feel right to classify that feeling; there must have been more to it.
She couldn't use intuition here though. Kelsie just had to take it like a pro and advance on with the weird energy inside of her.
As Kelsie started walking, she noticed that weird stuff was happening. She thought she saw a wide purple lightning bolt flash across her face. What had made it so strange was that it was visible across her entire face, into her peripheral vision. This freaked Kelsie out a lot. She paused to regroup after being shocked at what she just saw.
After becoming full focus again, she continued on. What sounded like static entering her eardrums with a loud pulse weakened her. Once again, Kelsie had to stop to regroup. She heard what sounded like a transceiver. After that, everything was normal again.
This had made Kelsie shake a little bit. By no means was anything like that normal.
Plus, it was only just the beginning of the forest.
She advanced on, and decided to gaze at the sky to see what the weather would be. It was sunny, but as she looked more east, she realized the day would end in overcast weather.
She looked at the giant cloud, and the wind picked up. It got a little colder, but not to the point where one shivers. Yeah, no, it wasn't like that.
Kelsie's vision once again became out of focus, but nothing bad was happing yet.
She thought about the worst that could happen, everything was just a little blurry, so she stood and waited a little bit.
Suddenly, her body flashed pure, cream white and slowly faded back to normal. While in the middle of the surge, nothing glowed around her; neither was there a light produced by this. Her body just went white. The scariest part, though, was the fact that she heard a voice this time. It said, "Found her!"
Kelsie looked around, and realized nobody was around her. She didn't sense anything at all. But something was wrong for sure.
She walked some more steps, and some items got very pixelated. Her hearing had a low pass filter on it, and she couldn't take more of it. A light-headed feeling overcame her, and then, everything flashed white.
This was only for a second, and then there was nothing. Kelsie thought for a bit, but then remembered that she had dinner at a restaurant later with some of her friends, so she had to get that equipment as soon as possible. No time to dawdle over psychological discomfort.
She advanced onwards to whatever was ahead. The trail's end point wasn't far away, so she knew it wouldn't be long until she got out of this place. But something caught her eye.
A helicopter was coming in the distance, and it was heading towards the very end of the trail. With all the weird stuff happening, Kelsie got worried. She was freaking out about every little thing now, ever since her body did things only a Deus Ex HR character would do. She slowly advanced until the end was in sight.
Something was in the way of the exit. It was two guards, or at least that's what they looked like. They were watching the trail. When Kelsie got the glimpse, she immediately walked backwards. She wasn't at an angle where they could see her, so it was all good.
A decision had to be made. Either they were there for her, or not for her. Being a mega pessimist, she decided they were after her, and were related to the weird mental stuff that happened to her.
Kelsie knew she would have only a few choices. After she got out of the forest, she had to take a right. She would have to maneuver through the trees on the right side and get out a different way.
She headed off trail, towards the right, and just kept on going right. She came across a spot where the sunshine was blocked by the massive pine trees. (Which were mixed with regular oak trees, the only ones in that forest) It wasn't the brightest, and hell knows what manifested in there. But she... Well, maybe she was worried.
She saw something gray in the distance, and ran towards it. The closer she came to it, the more it looked like a fence.
Turns out it was a wall. There was a 30 foot wall blocking Kelsie from exiting the forest. This was probably put to contain the wildlife, but it wasn't helping Kelsie.
She looked around for a way over, and saw a tree a little bit to the left that had a branch on it that pointed towards the way over the wall.
Kelsie walked over to the branch and looked up. She tried to guess how much of a challenge it would be. The leap was about 4 feet, but the branch looked a little lower than the wall. It would have to do.
She looked for a possible starting point. There was a branch a little bit above her. She would have to pull herself up.
She soared and gripped on. It was a struggle to get on top of the branch so she could stand on it, but she made it up clean. There were 2 possible branches to go to next. She could have an easy jump to another branch or she could stick her foot inside of a dent in the tree and propel herself up a bit so she could pull herself up on another branch.
Option 2 seemed like the most rewarding, so she jammed her foot right in the small cavity. She went up and stretched for the branch. It was easily conquered.
She realized that the second branch made her get a lot farther up then it looked. The next one would be a challenge.
Branch #3 was really flimsy. She would have to get to a point where she would have to jump and hang on, bringing her back down. The next step would have to require her shimmying left until she hit the point where it connected to the trunk, and then the next step would be decided there.
She carefully scaled towards the middle of the branch she was on and leaped. Kelsie easily got a hold of it, and shimmied to the top.
She was about two feet above the branch she was just on. If she let go, it would take some serious luck to land on that branch, but keeping her balance was out of the question. She looked around and found another branch in front of her, but it went downwards a little bit. It looked real flimsy, so she kept on looking around.
Kelsie heaved herself up and stood on the very end of the branch. This way, she wouldn't snap it and fall down to a serious injury. It would especially suck since some people were waiting for her outside and they'd hear the noise of all her bones snapping in two.
After getting on top, she looked around more. Behind her was another branch she would have to hang on to, but it was kind of a jump.
Without thinking, she went for it anyways. A long leap sent her towards the branch. Putting her arms out, she was focused on executing that perfect timing where she could grab on with ease.
Kelsie clotheslined herself. She had overshot the jump and went branch to throat. Things were finally going for the worst.
Using her neck, she strived to stay clotheslined for just a small bit so she could get a good grip on the branch with her hands. She still had a little bit of toughness left in her.
Maybe she looked all soft and innocent, and she was in fact. But she was tough, and not much could hurt her. She didn't know why at all. After all, she lived an innocent life as a very light sweet female most people adored. After all, looking at the way the boys looked back at her, she knew her appeal was top notch.
Still, it's kind of unexplainable how she could endure hard pain. It must've been something mental, but crazy things were sometimes surprisingly effortless for her. She often pondered this, but philosophizing wouldn't help her too much, since it was past her limited knowledge. But hey, nobody knows everything.
She scrambled up. Once she was standing up, she took 2 of her fingers and touched her neck for precaution. When she drew her fingers back, there was a steady stream of blood.
But the sudden sharp feeling of pain didn't come from there.
It felt like somebody had slashed a knife into her back.
What, that's a good feeling? Last time anyone checked, it wasn't.
She was losing her balance, and she couldn't hold on anymore. Kelsie slowly tipped over for what felt like a minute before she slowly made the descent towards the forest floor.
Too bad. She almost made it.
There was a feeling inside of her that told her she was gonna end up falling anyways. Sure enough, she did. Better fill up that confidence, missy.
As she made the trip down, her fall was suddenly stopped. Something caught her left arm and yanked her upwards.
It felt like her arm had been yanked off. She quickly looked to see if it came off.
Nope. Instead, there was a rope around it. The rope was making her hang 8 feet off the ground.
Although she didn't hit the ground, she was still shooting pain. She knew the guards must've heard her blood-curling screams. With teary eyes, she glanced at her arm again and saw a huge gushing blood fountain coming from the rope.
The rope had ripped open a chunk of her arm. Now she was bleeding from three spots, which were her neck, back, and arm. Death wasn't too far off now.
She started floating up towards the sky. This was it for her. Kelsie guessed that this was it. Time for death to take its course.
There was a new sound coming through Kelsie's ears. It was an obnoxious pulsing sound with quick alternating whooshes.
She tried to match the sound to an object, and then it came to her.
That sound was from a helicopter.
The rope was connected to a helicopter, she guessed, and it was lifting her.
The purple lightning bolt she experienced just minutes before came back. Her senses were repeating what had happened earlier. She waited for the voice.
...took her? Well, send some goddamn planes! We don't have all day.
...Okay, so now what?
The first time, this weird unseen nature had found her, and now it was sending planes after her. It was obvious that something with major psychic powers was trying to track Kelsie down.
But, why? It didn't make any sense for this to be happening. Maybe she shouldn't have gone into the forest after all.
But that wasn't the cause. The psychic force would have found her anyways. Her head was having a hard time wrapping around the situation, and she lost all her though for a moment.
She made the decision to look around a bit.
What she saw was a huge drop below her. The helicopter had lifted her hundreds of feet off the ground.
This was all because her left arm got caught in the rope.
Her vision was super blurry since she was not only moving up, but forwards too. It wasn't forwards for her, but it was forwards for the helicopter. Kelsie still tried to look inside of the helicopter. There was a window she could try to look in, and that's exactly what she did.
All she saw was yellow and blue masses mashing the controls to the helicopter.
And then, the helicopter started moving around quicker. A red light was flashing from what seemed to be on the right of the cockpit.
The helicopter jerked to the left, and Kelsie felt the rope pull. It pulled excruciatingly, and Kelsie was in much more pain than her arm had ever been in. She attempted to scream as loud as she ever would.
Nothing came out of her vocal chords. It was hopeless. Kelsie was being dragged through the sky for no apparent reason.
And she could do nothing about it, unfortunately.
Her vision was getting much more blurry, and motion started to blur heavily.
But she still heard the loud pop behind her. And she also noticed some huge gray missile-looking thing pass her right side, just inches from her. She started to panic.
It seemed like the things in the helicopter did too.
Kelsie looked behind her and saw a fast approaching plane heading straight towards her. Her body started quivering badly, and she suddenly felt heavy in her chest.
The window opened like a door on the right side of the helicopter. Kelsie could barely make out the words they were saying.
"THIS IS CRAZY!"
"SHUT UP! IT'S OUR ONLY CHANCE!"
"WHATEVER! YOU JUST WANNA SAVE THE GIRL!"
"NO, WE HAVE TO SAVE THE GIRL!"
Another loud pop came from behind her, and she saw another projectile fly by her.
It scraped one of the helicopter blades.
Even Kelsie felt the huge clunk as the helicopter's gravity shifted terribly. It was going down.
Some orange light was erupting from the helicopter blades. The helicopter, Kelsie assumed, would blow up in no time. The blue and yellow colored masses had emerged from the helicopter to some part of the plane. Kelsie couldn't tell or even guess as to what they were doing. She just had to wait.
Kelsie looked behind her. What a mistake. The plane was only yards from Kelsie, and for some reason, Kelsie was drifting towards it. Something orange was falling from the sky as Kelsie slowly started to drift away from the plane.
No, it couldn't. Was the rope damaged? Did it cut? Suddenly, the orange mass slammed into the window of the plane.
Kelsie headed towards the ground hundreds of feet below her. The rope must've been cut, as she was aware of the free-fall that had overcome her.
It looked like this was it for her. But she'd come across a ton of possible death experiences. This one couldn't be.
It wasn't. There was a sudden jerk that halted her fall.
And then, she was slowly being brought up towards the plane.
The jerk gave her some vision back, but it made her start to feel really dizzy. Instead of just pure blur, the blur was shifting now.
Basically, Kelsie's vision was mega-slurred. It was chug two bottles of champaign and get one of the bottles broken on your head mega-slurred.
But she could still tell that she was heading upwards towards the plane. Maybe good, maybe bad. She tried to figure out what the orange thing was, but she couldn't figure out without seeing it.
Kelsie was almost at the plane. Someone was pulling her into the plane. She could slowly hear the voices.
"UGH... Just... a little... MORE!"
"OOORG... I'm... TRYING! OOOOF!"
Kelsie was just about there when her movement shifted to right instead of up. She had been pulled into the plane.
Just about unconscious, she was dazing inside of her own mind. Nothing was coming together for her.
But she made out the two familiar blue and yellow colors appear from nowhere. She still couldn't make out what they were.
"ARE YOU OKAY?"
She tried to speak, but she could barely even make out a word. "W-w-who..." was all she could say.
"Wow, she's beat. Look at that huge gash in her arm. And her neck, oh my God. I don't even wanna see the arrow in her back. She didn't die from the blood loss? That's amazing."
"Quick, get her some washcloths or something. Look around the plane."
Her eyes moved towards the left, and she saw a huge orange mass just below the broken... glass? Nothing looked clear.
Some questions just can't be answered. Best just to stop asking.
It'd bug her that she'd never figure out what the orange thing was.
"All I found was a roll of paper towel."
"That'll do fine. Here, put some sheets on her wounds."
Pressure was applied to her neck. It really hurt. She had a bad spasm. The same happened when her arm got the same feeling.
"She shivers... BAD!"
The pressure didn't go away; it just got worse and worse.
More voices came from wherever.
"What the fu... HOW DO YOU WORK THIS THING?"
"Don't ask ME."
"Oh, no, does he have this on lock?"
He? Who was this so-called "he?"
The pressure still hurt Kelsie. But it all went away when the plane violently erupted in motion, throwing her across the other side of the cockpit.
"HOLY SHIT! WE'RE GOING DOWN!"
"Wha... WHY?"
"HE HAD US ON AUTOLOCK AND KILLED THE ENGINE!"
"WHAAAAT?"
Her gravity was getting ridiculously heavy. She realized the plane was going down.
"NOW WHAT?"
"BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
"HOW?"
She started sliding some way. Whatever way wasn't clear, since she was losing her sense of direction.
It wouldn't be long until the plane hit. That was the most of her worries.
The least was about the back of the plane, which exploded.
The plane violently was thrown forward, and now tilting towards the window. Kelsie and the two creatures slid towards the window and broke straight on through. Glass got stuck in Kelsie's right temple, shooting pure pain and giving her a new wound. Her veins in the right side of her head started pounding, which was just sending blood out of her. She was falling with red rain all around her.
She was facing the ground, which slowly became visible to be a blue stretch of something, and she realized she was gonna hit it.
She would hit it real hard.
Kelsie had gone through a ton of pain, but she and the red around her would be nothing compared to slamming against the blue floor.
But instead of feeling it, she just went black. And, she felt nothing.
+=+=+=+=+=+={-[]-}=+=+=+=+=+=+
A/N: Woah! This had a two month break in it. Wanted to make it as thrilling and compelling as I could. It only gets better. ;)
If you would like to collaborate with TranceKing123:
Send me a personal message with a small reason why you would like to collab and an idea you have we could expand on. I tried to make this as simple as I could so the collab could get out as soon as possible. Also, you can choose whether the fic should be posted on your account or mine. I really don't care.
Notes:
^ - Please tell me you know what song I got that from.
