"What the?"
Wally stares at the bright red circle on the ground, appears to have materialized out of nowhere. Removing his ultraviolet goggles, keeping his corrective lens on, maybe he was seeing things. It was moving or flickering, maybe another weird object he could add to his collection, but it doesn't seem right.
What the hell is that? As he reaches to touch it, the red circle suddenly moves from him, to the other side of the bridge.
Maybe it's a bug. Wally sets down his things as he walks over to the mysterious circle. It moves again, as if trying to get away from him. He tries blocking it, but it continues to move. It does a slow circle around Wally, but as he tries to twist around to see it without moving, he follows the dot in a complete 360° and falls over. Wally feels stupid for falling for that failure of common sense of moving around, yet it is as he is getting some fun out of it by chasing the little bright dot around. The dot finally moves down the bridge at high speed. Wally runs after it, trying to catch it. He chases it down the street and into the open Hudson valley.
Unknown to Wally, distracted by this one red dot, another laser dot appears behind him, then another, tens of them, hundreds to thousands of them, all in a giant circle. Appearing on buildings and quickly traveling down the edifices, streets, and into the dry river, all of them enclosing around the one dot Wally is after.
Having chased this thing in circles, the strange dot stops in the middle of the deserted valley.
"Aha!" Wally triumphantly yells. He still doesn't notice the other red dots enclosing him.
As Wally reaches to grab the dot but found it is just light.
"Huh?"
The other dots triangulate with the center dot. He notices the ground shaking and the air getting hotter.
"HUH?" Wally exclaims, hearing a low roar, something like the sandstorms, but different, like something fiery and mechanical. He looks up, finally seeing the source of the noise, small balls of fire in the air coming down right above him fast!
Screaming in panic and out of reflex, Wally runs in one direction to avoid the threat. The bellowing noise has become very loud, scorching hot and windy altogether. Wally losses his footing and is blown off his feet by the unknown object, a column of fire, smoke, and kicked up dirt filling the air with deafening sound, suddenly winding down in a mechanical whir, all is calm.
Wally can barely move, shaken as he risks a peak at the source of the noise and heat that knocked him down.
The dust still thick to see through but the ground now has turned to molten blacken glass. Wally finally sees the object: a rocket ship.
He slowly gets up, still shaken but now knows what just landed. The spacecraft had three extended engines attached to a tall body. A Buy n' Large logo stretched along the side, along with the letters 'ARV' written in futuristic bold font on the side. Wally cautious approaches this thing, wondering what it was doing here.
A whirring sound emits from the spacecraft, causing Wally to jump over the hissing of a hatch opening up at the rear of the unknown ship. Wally dives behind the nearest rock to hide, no more than a few meters away. Something lowers from the opening, a six foot long cylindrical capsule, made of translucent metal, Wally noticed a layer of frost covering the whole capsule, as if emerging from a subzero freezer being lowered by the mechanical arm and letting go of it, the object levitating a few inches off the ground longitudinally.
It looked like a cryonic tube but had no seams along its surface to form any kind of opening, like it was one solid piece. A holographic keypad appears on its spotless surface. Through the tinted layers of frost and the capsules semi-transparent material, Wally could make out a silhouette or a shadow within the capsule. Its shape oddly enough resembled something akin to a body, or an object with long and uneven curvatures. It looks like this capsule was holding something...or someone inside.
Wally watches on in fascination, sinking back behind his cover every time these machines create a loud noise. A smaller robotic arm emerges from the ships mechanical arm, punching in some codes into the capsules keypad. As the last code punched in, the capsule emits a soft whir, getting louder and louder, like its getting ready to-
PSSSSSST!
Wally jumps in surprise as the pod suddenly hatches open, cowering behind the rock.
What is that?
Seconds go by without a single sound, drawing in a notion for Wally that all was clear. His curiosity gets the better of him as he hesitantly peeks over, the steam slowly fading to reveal…
A human, thawing and reclined lifelessly inside the pod but upon closer inspection, it was breathing. When Wally focuses clearly at the fully unfrozen human with the steam completely cleared, gasps at the sight.
The human inside the pod was a woman, the most beautiful human woman.
Eve.
She lays reclined in her thawed out cryonic pod in deep sleep, like a sleeping angel. An angel with long, straight vanilla white hair fittingly framed the prettiest face Wally had ever laid eyes on, or, as she is the only face Wally has seen in his vivid memory. She was what anyone could imagine as the perfect looking girl: soft cheeks, delicate pink lips, a small nose, narrow jaw, skinny neck, and perfectly tuned skin that looked smoother than the finest memory foam or silk.
The woman suddenly stirred, awakening from suspended animation. She sleepily opens her eyes, turning over to sit up, and at that moment, Wally was suddenly transfixed upon the purist blue eyes he ever seen. They were bluer than the deepest ocean or the clearest sky, with a twinkle in them akin to starlight.
She slowly steps out onto the ground as she looks around, taking in her surroundings. She stood five foot eight inches. Even from afar, her voluptuous body looked impossibly stunning. She looked clean, healthy, and fresh from a long slumber in cryonic sleep, and she appeared to be young, around her early twenties. She wore some sort of hi-tech skintight suit, matching the curvatures of her athletic female body, with state-of-the-art foldout holographic-pads, biodegradable scanners and a wide variety of scientific equipment strapped to her utility belt. She also had built-in anti-gravitational servomechanism onto her heels on her boots strapped on her long firm legs. Her suit was all white like her long hair that ran down the center of her small back. Translucent nano-wires pulsate in her suit's circuitry, adding technological beauty to her physical magnificence that had more than stole Wally's breath.
Eve punches in a code on the cylinder she emerged from and in a second, the pod began to separate into pieces, folding into each other and shrinking until the entire thing was a pocket sized cylinder! Wally is amazed but still focuses on her. She places the cylinder into one of her many side pockets, now pulling out some holographic pad from her utility belt, scanning the area around her.
Captivated by this maiden's impossible image, Wally watched her move with such fluid motion as if walking on air itself. The toxic waste doesn't leave a single microbe of dust on her glorious all-white figurine, the sterility surrounded her like an aurora of her own light. Having seen nothing but this Earth's ruined landscape and its mountains of trash and the deceased for so long, the figure made it almost painful for Wally to see more of her, like staring into the sun. Being accustomed to the simplicities of what other humans have left behind as treasures to him seeing her now, he looks at her like even the starriest night skies of the entire cosmos are nothing compared to her, and the ugliness of the destroyed environment around her makes him feel out of place, his universe shattered.
She was, to him, the honest to god definition of "beautiful." He muttered under his breath, his head tilted, time seemed to slow as he feels a slow build of something inside, a sense of warmth and yearning, running through him, feelings of instantaneous attraction and longing he has never felt before.
The ship's robotic arm retracts. Wally snaps out of his trance at the sudden noise. He ducks again behind his cover, unsure of what these machines were doing by themselves.
He kept his eyes on the woman, who now moved further away from the ship. A whirring sound heard, engines firing up.
The ship!
Wally runs to escape the approaching blast waves of the launching spacecraft. Unfortunately, Wally is yet again blown over by the heat of the rocket engines as the ship achieves lift off. A column of fire and smoke engulfs the surface. Wally is blown a few meters away, over his head several times. In a few seconds, the roar and heat of its engines got quieter, the ship climbing higher into the polluted sky as it disappears into the clouds.
Shaken, having survived twice from being burned and blown away, Wally raises his head from a ducking position, making sure it's safe. All is calm again.
Wait! The woman!
He looks around the dissipating column of smoke and dust, before spotting her a few hundred feet away. She is unharmed, still gracefully surveying the ground if nothing happened.
She stops for a moment, looking up into the direction the spaceship took off if waiting for it to leave. She looks around her, all clear. She raises into the air, spinning lightly, her antigravity boots glowing, but emitting no sound.
"Whoa!" Wally is fascinated further by the female's ability to fly.
She stops spinning, her suit now changed into something sleek if it was supposed to move fast. In the blink of an eye, she fluidly whirls off into the distance, like a bird, eager to fly after a long time breaking away from a long slumber. The woman felt the need to feel free.
She whips around, doing aerobatic circles, rolls, and loops. Wally whistles low at the display of such beauty of the woman in the air and her power of flight, he follows her fluid movements, trying to keep up with her incredible speed, almost going supersonic as she finishes a high loop. She makes a low pass over him, near the spot she took off. The woman doesn't notice him, leaving him in the dust of her wake.
She moved flawlessly, quietly and smoothly, like dancing in the sky, her white hair waving softly like swimming through water despite being in the blast of wind. Wally brushes off his glasses, from the dust cloud and still perplexed if she was a real angel.
"Awwwwh," he cues, love drunk at the sight of her swimming through the air at high speed as she leaves contour trails in her wake.
After swift movements around the trash towers, she hovers over the spot she started from, spinning flawlessly to a stop on the ground, touching down pretending she was a great dancer at the crescendo of a performance on an emissive stage, being highly praised.
Her hidden audience of one, still behind a large bolder gazed upon her with large, longing innocent eyes. As he watched her dance through the air, Wally felt if he should dance alongside her, like those actors in the movie last night.
I wish I could dance like—No. dance like that…with her, he wondered if he could hold her hand? Maybe kiss her? Wally realized he wanted, no... needed to see more of her.
Only now did Wally finally understand what the meaning behind falling in love meant, like the song, 'It Only Takes A Moment.' He was now in love.
Too oblivious to notice his hand clipping away a piece of rock from the boulder and hits the ground ever so lightly, only giving off a drip of a pebble...
KABOOOOM!
It happened too fast. The rock he hid behind exploded in a bright blue-white flash and deafening crack of thunder.
… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
Seen from afar, it formed a tiny mushroom cloud, the explosive sound alerted Hal.
… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
Eve stared down the direction where the sound came from, her high-frequency hearing detected movement behind her; instinct kicked in and she whipped around in a millisecond with a high-powered Type-2 DEW plasma rifle at hand, aimed dead-centered at where she fired a single shot. Her eyes now shielded by a polarized visor and a holographic heads-up-display, activated by her gun's wireless targeting system every time she drew it for better aim. Behind the digitized mask, her angelic blue eyes now apathetic and cold blooded, like the eyes of a trained soldier.
She waited for the smoke to clear, to verify what the immediate threat was and if satisfactorily vaporized.
Apparently, she doesn't want anyone or anything watching her joy flight, the only fun she ever gets on her mission to Earth, or her 'directive.' After being in hibernation for a long period, she had to shake the last bits of cryonic sleep out of her system, fast as the instant thawing was. She is still not fully awaken and reactive. The last thing she needed is to be jumped or spied on.
The smoke clears, weapon still trained on her target, Eve doesn't move or blink. Only a portion of the bolder still stood, now inscribed with a giant smoldering three-meter wide hole, edge's glowing orange hot and stone turned to glass from the ionized blast.
Hmm, at least my reflexes are still sharp, she thinks to herself as she holsters her plasma rifle to her waist strap with practiced Clint Eastwood style flips, her Head's Up Display deactivates, the visor dematerialize into thin air, her eyes now blue and full of sweetness again as if nothing happened.
Eve returns scanning the environment around her in a gracious state again. She hasn't noticed a terrified human bundled up behind what was left of the boulder, trembling uncontrollably from having missed death by a fraction of an inch from the blast where his head had been.
As a side note, DEW is short for Direct Energy Weapon, a weapons that projectiles comprised forms of pure energy, electromagnetic rays or superheated gas such plasma, pulse sonic, particle beam, carbon lasers and ionized gas which looks like a downsized Covenant plasma rifle from Halo. For those who are not familiar with Halo, it's a science fiction video game franchise created by Bungie, owned and published by Microsoft Game Studios that was released on November 15, 2001 (Wikipedia).