-1It seemed as though she alone could see the lone jet limping slowly through the sky, trailing thick clots of greasy black smoke behind it. She could tell from the wavering, erratic course that it was barely able to fly. Even from this distance she could tell that it was badly damaged. An entire half a wing seemed to be missing, and part of the aircraft's fuselage had a chunk taken out of it. Damaged or not, it didn't look like any aircraft she knew of. The sun came out from behind a cloud and shone upon the jet, silver sparkling like the play of sunbeams on rippling water, and the Shard in her pocket blazed red hot for a moment. And she knew. "It's him," she said. She knew no name to give him, save what she saw him as… The Silver Devil. He haunted her dreams every night, him and the other one, the leader of the blue-eyed ones. She named him in the same way, by what she saw him as… The Noble Lord. Certain faces had stood out as well among the hordes, and she had named them as well. They weren't so much real names as what her mind labeled them as, the defining aspects that made them recognizable to her.
Among the red-eyed ones who served the Silver Devil there was Rains Death From Above, who decimated battlefields from the sky, Likes To Yell and his spastic partner, Moves Swiftly. Destroys Everything was always on the front lines, laying down devastation with the biggest cannon she had ever seen, as was Tosses Enemies who merely threw things around. Rains Death From Above was sometimes accompanied by Shoots Blue Fire, who also flew but preferred to walk.
The Noble Lord also had teammates who drew her attention. There was Heals Others, who helped the wounded, Says Nothing who never spoke, Always Ready who had big guns and was always willing to use them, and last of all there was Shows Off, who did just about everything with a dramatic flair that always made her giggle.
Wasting no more time, she ran down the street, following the smoke trail in the sky, hoping she could intercept him before he could do any damage as he had in her dreams. And through it all she still felt that call in her mind, the one she had learned to recognize as the voice of a damaged or broken machine crying out for her aid. The aliveness inside her, the power she had gained, sheer life force, allowed her to sprint like a marathon runner down city street after city street, block after block, out of the city. Her run took her down to a reservoir just in time to see the plume of smoke arc downward and explode into a huge gush of water that sprayed into the air, high enough to clear the forty-foot-high embankment. She paused, uncertain. The call was still there, loud and clear, but the thought of its source gave her pause. This was the Silver Devil, after all. She'd seen his deeds in her dreams, how many lives he'd taken and how many more he'd ruined. Still, something else deep inside her, separate from the power she felt, urged her on. She chuckled. She never had been able to resist the urge to help someone in need, human or animal. "Looks like I'll have to extend that to mechanical," she said to herself as she began to climb the embankment, taking it slowly, step by step.