DANGER: Atlantis Complex SPOILERS!
Across Time and Space
4
"Fuck."
Vinyaya spat the word out, along with a mouthful of the thick, slush-like substance, pulling herself up and out of the tunnel and flopping onto the hard surface of the glacier. After a few shallow, scraping breaths, the Wing Commander forced herself up onto her elbows and proceeded to cough and retch violently, her airways clogged with a mixture of ash and slush. Fire and ice.
Exhausted by this minor effort, Vinyaya weakly rolled onto her back, her legs still dangling into the tunnel she had dug, and stared up at the grey Icelandic sky. Interspersed with the standard grey clouds were streaks of black smoke. The shuttle, and the 14 officers inside.
"D'Arvit," Vinyaya swore again and her stomach rolled sickeningly with grief.
Though the elf sincerely wished to remain lying on the glacier, her instincts told her to keep moving. Whatever monster had controlled that probe could still be on the loose.
Over the course of several, painful movements, Vinyaya stood up and, hands on hips, surveyed her surroundings. She was nearly a kilometre from the wreckage. The space probe was gone and the shuttle appeared to have sunk into the ice, the billowing clouds of smoke marking its position. She checked her com set. Nothing. The blast from the shuttle's engine had fried her suit's circuits and she had left her helmet back in the restaurant, which, unfortunately, now lay at the bottom of a crevasse.
Vinyaya shook her head, wincing as the vertebrae in her neck seemed to grind together. The events of the last few hours seemed to blur together like watercolour paints.
She had been making her way up the shuttle's ramp, attempting to warn the crew inside of the approaching enemy probe, when one of the engines must have exploded. Vinyaya remembered Captain Short shouting something at her, but her voice was nothing compared to the roar of the fairy ships. The explosion itself had hit her like a tsunami, the concussive blast tossing her aside, breaking her neck (along other bones) and leaving her discarded on the melting snow at the shuttle's stern.
As the shuttle continued to burn around her, the Wing Commander's magic had gone to work, attempting to repair the damage done by the blast. However, despite running hot, Vinyaya was unable to walk or move away from the inferno and with the ship threatening to collapse on top of her, came up with a plan.
Despite every instinct in her body, Vinyaya stopped the healing. Her neck had been mended enough for her to have feeling again, and while she still sustained several grievous injuries, she knew that soon she would be forced into a magical induced sleep, one that could prove fatal in such a volatile locale. Silver sparks hovered around her finger tips, like soldiers waiting for their next orders.
Focusing all her magic on her heart, Vinyaya raised its beats to a dangerously high rate, and thus began to shield. In an act of pure desperation, the fairy began to dig down into the slush, her vibrating form slowly sinking, as though into quicksand. She took one, gasping breath before her head submerged into the mire, gravity and magic pulling her down and away from the burning shuttle, and into the glacier.
The slush wasn't very deep, and soon Vinyaya was faced with a wall of solid ice, which is not a very welcoming sight when one's lungs are screaming for air. Silently praying to Ares, Vinyaya flicked her Neutrino up to its highest setting and sent a dozen charges into the glacier below, superheating the slush around her and melting it twice as fast. That, along with a well placed kick, punched a neat hole in the glacier, which turned out to be the wall of one of the vast caverns that riddled the compacted mass of ice. Like a goldfish down a toilet, Vinyaya zoomed down through the hole, followed by a stream of slush and landed with a splash on the cavern floor, five metres below.
Spitting slush, Vinyaya crawled along the floor of the ice cave, which, luckily, slanted upward, so that the flow of melted snow was contained to one area. Shielding had warmed her slightly, but now she shook with cold and despite being on solid ground (relatively) kept her heart rate up in order to keep her core temperature up. Barring this, Vinyaya allowed a few trickles of magic to return to their job of healing while she focused most of her physical energy on dragging herself towards safety, wherever that was.
After what seemed like an eternity of crawling through the frigid cave, Vinyaya collapsed, releasing all the magic she had been holding back with an exhaled breath. The cold hit her like a slap across the face and her chest ached, lungs filled with frosty air. Just before she lost consciousness, Vinyaya remembered wishing that, whatever else her magic did; it kept her from going hypothermic and dying in her sleep. The irony was just too much to bear.
Waking an undetermined amount of time later, Vinyaya found herself not only alive and well, but fully drained of magic. She drank from a nearby glacial stream before making her way back to the surface, a task which, despite being healed, was almost as difficult as the descent.
Now on the surface, Vinyaya made her way over to the wreckage of the restaurant and the shuttle. Still unsteady on her feet, the Wing Commander stared down into the crevasse from above. Despite being burnt and twisted almost beyond recognition, Vinyaya saw that the shuttle was missing its escape pod. She smiled weakly. They had a chance. Now all she needed was one of her own.
Stepping away from the edge, Vinyaya raised a hand to run through her silver hair and was surprised when it came back, dragging chunks of blackened strands, removed from her scalp by the gentle tugging. For a few silent moments, the Wing Commander stared at the hair in her hand, halfway between furious and heartbroken. Vinyaya was not a vain woman, or, at least, not as vain as Corporal Frond, but among other fairies, her silver hair was a distinguishing feature and one she couldn't help but be a little proud of.
Dropping the chunk of hair onto the snow, Raine Vinyaya couldn't help but utter a single word before pulling her sopping hood over her head and stalking down to the destroyed restaurant, hoping to find her helmet among the tacky decorations and badly painted murals and contact the LEP for a pickup.
"Fuck."
Okay, so not as badass as I originally planned it, but hopefully still believable. However, I do enjoy that the dialogue (3 words, total) is completely composed of profanities, both Gnommish and English.
Now here's the deal. You guys send me 8+ reviews and I'll post the next instalment of ATAS, one which is sure to please the A/H fans. Muahahaha...
P.S. If Holly is allowed to have amber sparks as she 'gets older,' why can't Vinyaya have silver sparks?