The Legend Within
by shike77
Chapter I
"You bled along the
edge of reason
You could have changed your mind into the driest season
Don't explain I know
The lives that you let go
the ones you thought you knew
held onto deep dark truth."
- "The Last Scene of
Struggling"
Finger Eleven
WELL-! Hiyo, Me again. ^_^ Yeah… I got sick of the older version. And It's all deletey now. *nods a little*
So-?! How the hell did I come up with this? *shrugs* I dunno, you tell me. I mean, HONESTLY—it's DECEMBER, my family is not even ARGUING because they're too busy sucking up for good presents—and, wow, I'm writing Angst. @_@;; Suprisingly, it's better when I'm happy. My gore is worse, though.
Anyhoo… Any Sci-fi fans out there will KNOW that anything with technology in it that ALSO has magic in it would be classified as fantasy. Any technology-based stuff without magic is Sci-fi. For warning—magic plays an amazingly important role in this fic. Technology is just as big. I will make up terms—and explain them three or four chapters down the road.
And—I'm trying a technique. I might not be able to pull it off, but I've recently read the Finonavar Tapestry, and Mr. Kay used this… STYLE I've never SEEN before that allowed him to make an entire book span the period of a week. And this was a decent-sized book, mind you. It allowed him to go back and go over what characters were thinking and their POV's—not just the person telling the story originally. And DAMN—you don't even notice it.
Nig: *holds up a sign labeled "I'm a consumer whore"*
… Shaddup, you. Anyway, buy that book and read it. There are three books in one—do that. AWESOME! *nods* I worship.
… So, what were we talking about?
RIGHT! My story. ^_^;; *coughs, shuffles papers a bit nervously* Righto. So…
What else to say…? This story (as so far I've got planned) in the sum of a few words: Gore, angst, FIRE, pointy things, technology, and outfits that are proof I've played WAY too much FFX-2—which was a blast. ^_^ WORSHIP!
… *observes the reader's blank stare* What? Your fault you started reading this.
RIGHT-! Su. This takes place on a futury Endiness, just like the previous TLW. UNlike the previous TLW, Leon and Saer's personalities have been altered drastically since the last time you saw them.
Saer: That is the only blessing Soa has ever given me.
… Shaddup. I HAVE FEELINGS TOO, YOU KNOW!
Leon: Yeah. We just like to attack them drastically.
… Sadistic bastards.
And for those of you who are not very good at short hand things, I abbreviate the names of all my fics. Sin's Torment becomes ST, and this one becomes TLW. The most I'll have is three letters. ^_^
… Enough of that, I swear…
Oh—And yeah, still doing the
song-quotey things. ^_^ Nyar. Like those. I'll place the entire verse
(or half of it if it's long) and bold the part that is the title.
Happy? ^_^
And… If I don't get at least six pages on Microsoft Word, (Verdana size eight or ten) shoot me. ^_^ Thank you.
And… On with dos fic?
It seemed odd that they were still following her.
She leaned forward on the hoverbike, smirking at the readings she was getting on her visor. The pale red text danced in front of her eyes as she scanned it eagerly for what she wanted to know.
She growled suddenly, glaring at the bland red print in front of her eyes.
"Only six? This sucks ass."
She leaned down towards the controls, glaring at them as she punched the combination of buttons she'd memorized earlier that week—constantly changing on her, the damned things.
"Owl, this is Falcon, you read?"
The com crackled a bit before the reception cleared up.
"You're driving too fast again, Falcon."
She rolled her eyes, watching the red on her visor try to decipher the type and model of her pursuers.
"Very funny. You take controls for a bit, I've got six UDR's on my tail."
There was a pause, and she was about to remind him how precious time was when the com sprung to life again.
"UDR's? Damn, S-"
"Code names, asshole."
He coughed lightly before continuing. "Falcon, I've got analyze them or you're in trouble. I can't take control of the bike yet."
She snarled at him, dodging a skyscraper. "I've handled plenty of UDR's before you came along, I think I can handle them."
"Wolf won't let you go solo, not after what happened last time. We're pulling enough strings right about now with you even out there."
"Who cares what that puppy thinks?!" she growled, glaring past the madly scrolling text that clouded her view. "Sparrow?"
There was a cheer, then an obvious scramble of chairs and paperwork—the dreaded.
"Right here, Fal."
She sighed. "If I regret this, then you're mincemeat. Got it?"
The smile on his face was obvious over the voice-only communicator as the command overrides began preventing her hands from steering or accelerating.
"But I'll still be one happy mincemeat."
Falcon smiled—more than happy he couldn't see it—and stood on the seat of the bike. Balancing with ease, she pressed a few buttons on the device sewn in between the layers of her right glove and felt the metal on her belt re-form into the desired shape.
Owl's knowledgeable, warm voice spoke caution over the com.
"I hate to remind you again, but don't use the handguns. The technology's ancient, and I haven't figured out whether or not if works with your belt, there."
The tips of her lip turned up into the ever-present smirk. She grabbed the guns from their holsters, loading the weapons and listening to the sonar device carefully, waiting for her que.
It came as the sonar bounced back to her in the shape of a… paw? Metal, by the sound of it…
She spun and pulled the trigger on both weapons rapidly, several advanced bullets ripping through metal as if it were a thin sheet of silk. A substance began pouring out of the UDR, although the sonar was of no help in identifying it. Never faltering, she focused on the next target. Apparently of the same making.
"Try not to ruin them all!" Owl warned her—why he even bothered anymore was a mystery—as she pounded titanium into its thin metal 'skull.' The bike beneath her swerved to dodge a horizontal pole, causing Falcon to nearly lose her balance.
"Careful, Sparrow!" she snapped, glaring past the haywire readings (useless), trying to regain her sonar—lost it in the stumble.
When she gained it again, one of them was about to bite her head off.
She swore, emptying the rest of both clips into the UDR. As it crashed into the machine directly behind it, throwing that one into the building Falcon had just flown by, she yelled at her com, "Owl, get more ammo in these things next time!"
His reply came as she watched—or listened to—the machine crumble against the laser-enforced artificial steel that was the building's makeup. "Falcon, it's impossible. Your belt won't be able to carry that much metal without being detected."
"You're impossible," she grumbled at him, grabbing what looked like a metal cylinder from her belt with her left hand. She gripped it fiercely and, with a whir of tiny gears and the sound of metal grating against metal, a blade engraved with the pattern of dancing flames sprouted forth, closely followed by the crossbar. The hilt thinned out to fit the proper grip for a sword and she spun it, testing the weight she already knew would be flawless.
She didn't hear the retort. What she did hear was the returning sound wave reflecting off of the metallic making of those damned machines straight overhead.
She swung the blade in a high ark, slicing through what could only be the underbelly of that tin can as if it were air. The substance the machines leaked suddenly soaked her, and even the helmet couldn't protect her from her above-average sense of scent.
Blood?! What the hell, they're machines!
She had not the time to ponder further, what with the last—thing hovering overhead. Seeing as sonar gave off annoying echoes, she pressed the button that turned off her sonar and another that raised that infernal visor.
What couldn't have been anything but hot, sticky saliva was welling in the large, gaping mouth full of diamond-cut teeth—recycled, she noticed, because of the way it caught the light—and couldn't help but let her mouth drop a little at the thick muscles and tendons that lined the inside. What she had thought to be plain old metal was intertwined with rough, course skin overlaid by a series of intertwining wires coated in some sort of metallic substance. The metal must have reflected the sound waves first, and she most likely disregarded the skin for one of those blasted echoes.
How she hated herself sometimes.
The monster—which looked oddly like one of those dogs she'd seen in books—dove for her, and she couldn't help but notice that in the single natural eye remaining, there was the presence of pain that the seven robotic ones didn't contain.
Of course not. Robots weren't programmed to have feelings.
She swung the blade, neatly beheading the monster—again, being sprayed with the blood that smelled just the slightest bit of robotic fluids. She caught the head and body as they fell and seated herself on her bike.
"Sonar on."
For once, the voice command worked and she heard the return of the images around her. None left.
"Visor down." Without even waiting for a reply, she turned to the com. "We've got an issue."
"Well, yeah, you're half an hour late for your haircut appointment and Peacock's on the fritz about it."
She rolled her eyes. "Stop it, Sparrow."
At the tone in her voice, he silenced immediately.
"Give me my damned controls back so I can get to the rendezvous point."
There was a sudden stall in the fast pace Sparrow had chosen and she ordered the bike to hold onto the body and head for her. The machine was apparently obliged to comply without complaint—the only thing she ever liked about the damn things—and she gladly took back the controls.
"Owl, you're not going to sleep for the next few months."
She knew that was an understatement.
***
"I hate irony," Leon mused as he stared out of the window at the planet he'd been born on, staring at the miserable grey clouds that covered the entire surface of the damned place—ground up after that nuclear blast.
"Hm?"
He glanced over at Onica, who had raised her eyes from the Rosary she clutched to her chest. Dark blue eyes looked him over, watching as he gained a tighter grip on the bar he was holding and swung himself closer to the window.
"My parents were Jewish."
He smiled for her—although it was lop-sided and half-hearted—and she merely nodded solemnly in reply.
"Medieval Christians chased the pagans out of their homes," she replied simply, "and moved their holidays to Pagan dates to take away their celebrating." She ran her thumb along the image of the woman—Leon never knew her real importance.
"… We're taught, in Church, to welcome the end of the world and to pray for it so that we may join Jesus and God in heaven."
He didn't smile at that. He watched her blink furiously, then bury her face in her knees and try to fight off the tears.
"How long does everyone else have?"
Leon turned away, looking coldly out the window at the dying planet they were orbiting. Their home.
"I give them a month."
She nodded with a sniff, her hair moving slowly in weightlessness even though it was cropped—however unevenly—to be level with her chin. It seemed that no one wanted to waste power by giving the cargo hold gravity, and neither stowaways had expected them to.
"I hate it. Why the hell should we have to put up with a few people's mistakes!?"
Leon closed his eyes and shook his head. "I don't know."
"The people down there aren't the ones who built that bomb!" She waved in the direction of Earth, head still on her knees. "The people on this fucking ship did! And they're the ones getting away with it!"
He turned away from her again, staring out at the Earth.
"… You know, my brother still had a chance to be normal. Social Services found out about Celeste's drug addictions, and Luke's alcohol problems. They were going to get us a new home."
He rested his head on the window, closing his eyes.
"That was the day the bomb hit."
After a few minutes, Onica sighed.
"… I was at Church. The Armageddon Mass."
He looked over at her, watching as she wiped a tear away from her face. He turned back to the window again, having no comfort to offer. He understood little about the Christian faith—or any religion for that matter, being Atheist.
"… Everyone just…"
"… Reduced to dust."
She looked over at him watching his green eyes stare at the black planet that had once been his home. Once been the water planet. Now…
First the Dinosaurs and whatever killed them. Well… who knew what the Big Bang wiped out? Perhaps there was an eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth that had been going on forever. Perhaps there was no real dawn of time. What if everything had always started with the destruction of something else?
The two of them sat for a long time in silence, only Leon noticing when the ship started to move away from Earth—although the green-eyed teenager never had the heart to tell his friend, so Onica never knew for sure exactly when the ship started moving. He didn't want her to look out the window at the planet anyone would have mistaken for Venus.
He wondered if Venus had life on it, once, and they just made the same stupid mistakes.
His thoughts continued along those lines for what seemed like an eternity. They both would have lost track of time had it not been for their digital watches, the time and day staring at them rather blankly. Once Onica—half-starved and in a crying fit she was known for—tried to phone her foster parents on her cellphone, only to get a message that informed them rather blandly that the user was currently out of the service area, and that she had to return to the Calgary area in order to make use of the mobile device.
That particular revelation caused them both to laugh a bit, and Leon decided to scrounge through the luggage around them, as if to find something they could eat. Most of what he found were priceless gems and expensive dresses, but the contents of one particular package was a rather large bundle of beef jerky and Belgian chocolates.
When he returned his gaze to Onica's, she was regarding a watch embedded with opals rather coldly. For a moment, Leon wondered why, but he shook that off and offered her some of the food.
She scarfed that down. It had been days since they'd eaten—not to mention only a few hours on the ship and already the lack of gravity was beginning to get to their heads. Onica was spewing random phrases, the only real movement the gentle up and down that made her look suspended in water. Of curse, Onica had never really been… 'all there.'
She nearly attacked Leon when he prevented her from eating more than he gave her out of their little stock of food. While he was fighting off the constant need to grab the handle to the door and fling it open—even though the only one they had a chance of opening led to space—Leon managed to pursuade her to calm down. He sung her a song she had taught him—a lullaby she claimed her birthmother had always used to keep her from crying—and she slowly fell asleep.
After that, the food supply hidden in case she wake before he did, Leon fell into a fitful dose. Twice Onica's screaming woke him up—after the second time, he stuffed a sock in her mouth.
"In space, no one can hear you scream," he grumbled hoarsely, shivering from the cold. "Nobody but me, that is."
He sounded like a rapist that belonged in a mental hospital. And that scared him.
He wondered if he was going crazy as well—several times. Whenever he woke, he was crying and sweating, sticky spit filling his mouth in spite of the fact that he'd had nothing to drink for days. Nothing.
He was almost afraid to wake Onica up, even when he decided it was time for more food. She'd had a history of sleepwalking, and she was murmuring and thrashing about wildly, as if trying to walk but being held back by some invisible force.
The last time he could remember having his thoughts somewhat clear was the sight of what looked like two planets, side by side, their sizes relatively the same. Pluto and its moon. The also remembered the time on his watch being exactly six hours different from the time the ship had started to move away from Earth.
With human technology, it had taken years just to get to Mars.
When asked later, he replied that he couldn't remember a thing past that. He assumed it was the speed they were moving at and the lack of gravity that drove them both into madness—Onica first because of her frequent bouts of depression and whatever other mental issues she was always struggling with back on Earth.
The next thing he knew, he woke up in a strange room with a blonde girl that looked so much like Onica standing over him.
… *cough* and this would be where I answer to all my reviews.
BUT-! Anyone wanna be in a Christmas Humour fic I'm working on? I know Fifi and Steel wanna be in already… I'm assuming Striker, too.
I wanna get it started soon, so it's done before the day. ^_^
