From the space fort, an air assault shuttle rockets away, descends, and enters Titan's sepia atmosphere. From here, life becomes a sepia movie.
Donny's aboard. He seems disturbed, when everything suddenly becomes brown-and-white... But he manages, somehow.
Down in the Titan Congo, the POW camp is still under the gun. The mercs have already lost two of their own trying to escape. They'll surely need a gift from heaven, if they're to be reunited with their passions...as unexpectedly secure, safe, and humane as this camp is...
As the air assault shuttle descends, it shapeshifts into an air frigate. It also puts a high-tech cloak over itself, both camouflaging and radar-proofing itself.
Below, the Congo passes. It would look greener, if it wasn't so sepia brown...
At last, it descends towards Donny's stop. It creeps into place, hovers, and opens a deck hatch.
A bosun's mate drops a line through it. With it, Donny repels his way down to the ground. Out here, it's an even longer way down than it would be if this was back home in Georgia. But of course, everything on Titan is ten times bigger...
Once on the jungle floor, Donny takes a flashlight, and flashes a signal, saying that he's made it down. A light near the hatch flashes a received signal, and closes the hatch.
Donny hides, as his ride flies away. He doesn't think anyone's nearby watching. They don't either, but... In war, it always pays to be prepared.
Or rather, it usually does. If only some nerdy foes would stop trying to use a warrior's preparations against him... Naturally, the military cartel has no tolerance for such nerdy foes. Alas, that's not to say that the sentiment is mutual. Naturally, as long as these foes think they can have a good laugh, they're not going to hesitate to play tricks on their enemies. Their only hope is if they start following orders. But then, it doesn't take a nerd for one to know that most people would rather commit suicide than follow orders.
Lucky for Donny, he's not such a warrior. He's got a job to do...and a challenge to overcome. So, he gets a move-on. It's a long way from here back to Sara, after all. And every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...or in this case, a doubling back of 1,300,000,000 clicks.
From the shadows, sinister eyes watch him. And so, the hope of concealment is blown. OTOH, we don't yet know whose eyes they are...
Before long, Donny can see the camp's perimeter. He can also see a few agents who patrol its perimeter. He's crept out, a bit... Alas, he didn't come here to become the final girl in a horror movie.
So, he activates a few gadgets, hidden in his gloves, his boxers, and a pair of garters he wears around his lower legs. He vibrates his entire body lightly...and within moments, he's completely invisible.
It's one thing for the world to look sepia. Now it looks sepia and blurry. Even so, Donny must continue. So, he gets started.
Good thing about the concealment: it's scent-proof. Hence, he can stand right beside one of those terrifying guards, and not be detected at all.
That periscope comes up, and does a full revolution. It retracts itself without setting off an alarm...or locking its gaze on Donny's position.
For some reason, the guards' battlements are accessible from outside the fence. But then, from what Donny's heard, the Titans can be real bimbos sometimes. So, stepping lightly, Donny ascends such a ladder.
He...gets pretty high off the ground... But of course, if Donny was afraid of heights, he'd have better things to do than join the air force.
In each battlement, he sets a few traps. He programs the robotic battlements to go through the motions, to dupe anyone watching into thinking that they're still active. But he severs several connections within their artillery, disabling it. He also leaves a timed explosive in the battlement's armories...among the cannon shells.
To get from battlement to battlement, he uses a crossbow to shoot bolts with cables tied to them. Thanks to some marksmanship-honing he did right before his deployment, he doesn't miss a mark.
In moments like these, Donny half-wishes he was a galago. Maybe if he was, he could LEAP from battlement to battlement, rather than needing archery and cables.
Soon, every battlement is booby-trapped. Donny now shoots a cable from the last one to the armory roof. This time, he slides down it...but not without hooking himself to a momentum-regulating pully that he trails behind him. The pully hangs from the rope, braces him, and keeps him from sliding down it too fast.
With tools, he undoes a ventilation turbine on the roof. He's thankful that in a world ten times bigger, at least the ventilation turbines are human-sized...if not slightly bigger, at the bases...
The base is the reason he must remove it. Once he has, he drops a rope into the chute. Once again, he rappels down a height. And for this, he's very glad he's brought Titan-sized rope.
Donny, too, is a bit confused, when he finds digging tools among the POW's confiscated effects. Nonetheless, he's not here for them, so he leaves them. Instead, he gets their rightful weapons, and equips them to become invisible temporarily.
He remembers not to activate this equipment until he's climbed about halfway to the hole in the ceiling. Once there, he activates the equipment. Now, he's under a time crunch. He's got to redeliver all of the weaponry before the camp's captors sense what's going on.
Pieces by pieces, he leaves it by the back doors of all of the barracks. Among the barracks, guards stalk right past him, without so much as sensing him...or accidentally stumbling across invisible weaponry leaning outside the back doors of POW barracks.
Throughout the day, Donny does most of the work. He's almost endowed every barracks, when...
The armory door opens. In it, a she-hyena stands, stalks in, and looks around with narrowed eyes...
She sees the rope. She looks up, and she sees from where it hangs... That's an ugly shaft of sunlight, she thinks. She takes it in her teeth, and rips it from where it hangs.
In doing so, she takes out a part of the roof...a part that Donny happens to be on. Donny cries out...which she hears. Lucky for him, though, she still can't see him...or smell him.
Donny sees her just in time, and lies still. She heard him. So, she's still here. She stalks around, and sniffs around.
Donny doesn't worry. She doesn't know it yet, but right now, he's just keeping her distracted...
Up in the bunkers, the timers for the explosives run out of time. One by one, like a daisy chain, the battlements explode. Once it becomes clear that the explosions are no accidents, the captors sound the alarms.
About now, the mercs' weapons become visible. About now, one of them tries to slip out the back...and discovers a gift from heaven. He rallies his co-captives, and one by one, they all take up arms, and begin the fun part of the escape.
Lucky for Donny, the she-hyena, too, is alerted by the noise, and abandons the armory. Alas, Donny knows that he's gotta get out of here fast, before the captors come to arm themselves against the escape. With that said, he'd better take this opportunity to better arm himself, too...
Everywhere, all over camp, the revolution plays out. With ever-growing guns, the mercs go berserkergang on their captives, ripping them to pieces. Their captors barely subdue them.
As honored as Donny is to join the fight, he's a bit confused at how inhumanely the former captives resist their ex-captors. They also don't seem to value Donny's help, much...
With antitank rifles, holes in the fences are blown. With victory cries, the mercs swarm through the holes, abandoning their ex-prison.
Donny slows and pants, glad that the revolution has been won. All he's gotta do now is join the stampede, and...
From a gunship above, the camp takes on heavy fire. Donny's in the line of fire. From all around Donny, debris collapses. Soon, he's been buried.
When the smoke clears, he lies among it, knocked out. He wouldn't believe that the people who sent that gunship are the same people who sent all those mercs to get captured; the same mercs that Donny's just worked so hard to spring.
Hours pass. The cover of night raises itself. The jungle gets a bit cooler...but not too much.
Donny's still right where he was. No one's come for him. He wouldn't believe that no one's looking for him.
He could probably find his way home just fine. It's just that the air force that trained Donny also trained him to always have his teammate's back, even if he's of a different ideology, theology, or sexuality.
A series of very brief tremors are what wake Donny. He moans, rubs his eyes, and tries to stand...only to find that he can't walk.
Moments later, that becomes a very big concern. From atop the ring of debris that surrounds him, a menace of the Titan Congo addresses him...with big scary glowing eyes.
It's a titanoboa...of the Titan Congo. In many ways, it resembles a ball python. In others, it's more like the Anaconda from the movie of the same name.
Donny feels himself...and despairs. He's not invisible anymore. Hence, he can be smelled. And all a snake's gotta do to trigger its own sense of smell is flick its tongue. A human would think that that's a rather strange organ to smell things with... But of course, if snakes cared about humanity's opinion, they'd be easier to domesticate. And sadly, the snakes here are just as impossible to domesticate as the ones on Sferë always have been.
From above, the titanoboa slithers towards her latest conquest. She surrounds Donny in her coils. She rises up, high over him on her own neck, peers down at him, and flicks her tongue.
Shit, Donny thinks. In moments like these, Donny wishes he'd never joined the air force...
From far away, lighting flashes. Simultaneously, the snake's head explodes, and leaves its gore everywhere. Now without a host, the top of its neck falls like a tower...and inadvertently reinforces the serpentine fort that now surrounds Donny.
Donny can't see very well. He's been blinded by the snake's mess. Shit; that titanoboa sure could've afforded to eat fewer striped polecats in life...
From above, a pair of metal tweezers squeeze at Donny's sides, uplift him, and drop him in a bag. The bag is soon hung from what feels like a giant woman's waist. The bag hangs...and bobs against one of her ass cheeks, each time she walks.
Donny's too revolted to care about what's happening to him. He just hopes he gets a chance to clean himself before he dies.