Post by Suji on Sept 30, 2009 1:09:03 GMT -5
Written/Guest Written by Gage
Not pain exactly just a distant sense that something was wrong. That is what Helena was feeling. The cockroach body didn't really feel pain, it just knew that it was damaged.
She had been trying out this new morph when something bad had happened. That is all the information she had at the moment and it was what she would work with. First thing, demorph, then deal with the rest. Come on Helena, get it together.
Her human body slowly began to emerge from the broken body of the cockroach and as it did she almost wished she had stayed a bug. Newly grown human skin was burned off almost as fast as it appeared as it came in contact with super heated metal slag that was all that was left of her surroundings. The pain was almost too much to think through but she did.
If she was going to make it out of this alive she would need stronger skin but she couldn't go back to cockroach. She hadn't had the morph long and she wouldn't be able to use its senses to navigate her way out.
As soon as she could call herself fully human, if a severely burned one, she concentrated on the image of scales. Almost instantly a wave of scales began to replace the raw flesh of her body. When they covered everything, giving her a moment's respite, she stopped the morph and pushed her way out of the remains of the trailer.
She made it to the woods and thought of her next course of action. The trailer and everyone who had been in it were dead. She could see that from here so that meant Johnny, Leena, Rebekah, Kevin and Atoli were out of the picture. Who did that leave? Matthias, Melanie and that new kid whose name she wasn't too sure of. She had to try to contact them and she had to get away from here. Canary would be best.
She closed her eyes and thought of the part of the canary she wanted most, wings. The bones in her arms hollowed out and elongated, reshaping as they did, until she had wings. Ok, now beak, feathers, talons, tail. As she thought of each body part it appeared until finally she stood in the woods, a human sized canary. Small. She shrank.
When she had thought speak she called out to the others. <<Matthias? Mel? If you can hear me I'm alive. If you can't hopefully you're alive too.>> She wasn't the type of person to wish for things but this was a pretty bad situation and it was only getting worse.
A spherical shape floated into view. It fired at her and she narrowly avoided the beam. She began to demorph. The thing's beams wouldn't pose such a danger to a human and it obviously didn't matter if it knew she was an animorph. Their cover was blown.
She picked up a branch and swung for the robot but she missed. It did back off a bit though and that gave her room to do the only thing left to her...run.
She ran in the direction of the outhouse, the only other building she knew of, but when she got there a controller stepped into view and pointed a dracon beam at her head. She stopped short. Damn.
"You're done. Surrender Animorph." And live as a slave, she mentally added. The controller facing her looked nervous despite his brave words. He looked like he had never pointed a weapon at a warm body. In that she had more experience than him. But she didn't charge him. It would have been stupid and it wouldn't have helped her any. She waited for her chance. "Over here! I think I found one!" He was calling reinforcements but he had made a mistake in his eagerness to have someone else take charge of the dangerous prisoner. He had taken his eyes off his captive and that gave her the opening she needed to disarm him.
He leaped at him and broke his arm while flipping him over her hip. She grabbed the fallen dracon beam and shot the controller. It didn't kill him but it hurt and he would stay down. She didn't waste time wondering about his fate.
Again she ran but she had no purpose and that could be fatal. Where was she going? The outhouse was obviously out. The others were probably dead. She was deep in enemy territory. She had to get out.
She didn't have a travel morph, but unlike most animorphs, she didn't see herself as defenseless without a morph to call on. She had made it to Vancouver from Mexico and had done it with only her human limbs to rely on. Her limbs and the gun given to her by her mother. She had gone back for it after being found by Matthias but it was now just a piece of molten metal along with the rest of the trailer. But she had a new gun. She fingered the dracon beam.
Alright so make a choice. West is the ocean. North is the Arctic. I go east I might make it to Chicago or even New York. I go south and maybe I make it to LA. It's closest and Jullian is there. South it is.
She turned south.
She was about two hours out of the city, though it had taken her four hours to get this far. She hadn't wanted to go into the city itself and so had detoured around. Except modern cities weren't like walled villages, they just kind of spread and it was hard to tell where city ended and town began. But she had stayed out of the heavily populated areas and was walking parallel, though not on, the road.
That is when she ran into her first sign of trouble. She felt a wind blowing in the opposite direction from the small breeze that had been blowing all day. She looked up and saw a Bug Fighter coming back around. She looked around her for a place to take cover and dove behind a tree. This wouldn't protect her long.
She pulled the dracon beam from the waistband of her jeans where she had had her t-shirt pulled down over it. One dracon beam wouldn't take down a bug fighter but their crews weren't big.
The bug fighter landed in a clearing near her and a Hork-Bajir stepped out. He was alone. That meant there was only this one and a pilot to worry about. She took careful aim and turned the knob up to a higher setting. The Hork-Bajir began walking towards her though it hadn't spotted her yet.
A neat hole appeared in its forehead and it dropped to the ground. She ran to take out the pilot before it figured out what had happened and lift off.
She ran up the ramp to the bug fighter and saw a Taxxon at the controls. She hadn't seen one before but she had heard enough descriptions of the monsters to recognize one. He turned and lunged toward her. Five holes were burned in his body before he made it half the distance.
If she could have flown the bug fighter she might have considered taking it but she was no pilot. But she couldn't leave it here. If she did the yeerks would find it and wonder what was wrong. She turned the dracon beam up to full blast and shot the Taxxon corpse. It disintegrated.
She went outside and did the same to the Hork-Bajir. Then she concentrated on putting as much distance between herself and the ship as possible.
She woke up with a start. She slowly sat up so that she could see over the dash board of the abandoned car she had been spending the night in but ducked back down when she saw flashlights all along the road. She had only gotten a quick peak but she was pretty sure she had seen a full scale manhunt out there complete with human, hork-bajir and taxxon controllers. All this over one bug fighter crew? She guessed they didn't like the idea that there was something out there that could hurt them.
She debated with herself what she should do. She could morph and get away but she would have to leave the dracon beam behind. To be honest she felt much more secure with a weapon she knew how to use than as a human who could turn into a song bird. So morphing was out but if she stayed human she was sure to be found. But that might not be the worst thing, at least if they thought she was just a straggler and not an escaped animorph.
She pulled the brown leather jacket that she had found in this car closer around her and hid the dracon beam in the inside pocket. Then she feigned sleep. If they found her then they would think she was a stray and would probably send her to the nearest city, maybe even all the way to LA. It would actually be safer than traveling this way and when she got as far as she could go she would morph her way out.
But the whole plan depended on her establishing an identity as an average human and not a threat.
When the controllers ripped open the car door Helena feigned surprise and terror. It wasn't that hard.
She was bundled into a truck with a lot of other scared prisoners and now they were being shipped somewhere. She had found a corner to sit in and had proceeded to stare stonily at the wall. She hoped the expression would keep any would-be trouble makers away. Even though they were all in this together she had found that desperate people often did stupid things and she didn't want to get into a fight in such an enclosed area.
Helena had a long time to think on her trip to yeerks know where. She hadn't been doing a lot of that in the past 24 hours, just reacting to the situation as it came up but now that she had a quiet moment she was beginning to realize how bad things had gotten. She hadn't been close to anyone in the faction, her own fault, but having them ripped away so suddenly felt like a mortal wound.
Now that the pain had come she didn't want anything to do with it. She pushed it away like she did most emotions. Normally the ability to suppress things so easily would have given her pause but today she was only grateful. She knew that she would have to deal with it later, she always did. When she locked her emotions away like that they didn't disappear, they just got buried, and they grew, often coming back to her at the least opportune time and stronger than ever. But she couldn't give into the despair that was eating away at her. If she did she couldn't keep moving, couldn't keep planning and one misstep could kill her. She had to stay focused. Escape and get to LA. She didn't know what she would do once she got there but she would get there if for no other reason than to make sure they knew about what had happened to the Vancouver faction.
And once she was in LA she would see Jullian.
The LA animorph that had come to Vancouver a couple of weeks ago had brought word of her brother there. In fact he had been sent specifically to find her. He hadn't stayed long, just delivered his message and turned back around so Helena hadn't gotten the chance to ask many questions. But she hadn't really had many to ask. That wasn't right, she had a lot of questions, too many to ask a stranger.
She had been working up to asking Matthias for a travel morph so that she could go see him and talk to him herself but before she did she had wanted to demonstrate a mastery of the morphs he had already given her. That is what she had been doing when the yeerks hit the trailer and the practice had saved her life.
Saved it for what?
That question again. She hadn' t missed it.
Helena didn't want to think about he immediate past so she was thinking about her past in general.
Helena was 5 when her youngest brother was born. She remembered when her mother had told her. She had gotten angry and run up to her room. Another brother? Another sibling to share the house with, another little kid to take care of.
"You have to look out for your siblings Helena." What a responsibility to put on a 5 year old. But she had taken it seriously. And that was why she hadn't liked the news of yet another little person who would be depending on her.
She wondered where they were now. And she found it odd that of all her siblings, Jullian was the one who had followed her example and went looking for a resistance. He was the one least like her of all of them so why was he out here, where were the rest of her family?
But asking such questions was pointless until she had someone who could answer them.
She wondered how long it would be until they reached their destination. Another pointless question.
The last couple of hours of the trip was spent staring at nothing and concentrating on planning her escape once they reached wherever they were going.
Turns out it was all unneccessary.
The loud truck horn is what brought her attention back to the world. The deep note had been playing for the last minute and now it was sounding frantic. Helena stood up to see if she could get to the front of the cabin and get a better look. Wrong move. She went flying into the other prisoners as the driver of the truck slammed the brakes and brought the truck to a screeching halt. But apparently too late.
She heard a crash and an explosion outside. A second later the heat from the gas fires hit her and everyone else. Everyone started to panic and tried to escape. It was like a stampede except infinitly more dangerous since the panicked people had no where to go.
She knew that if she stayed where she was then she would be trampled to death. She pushed her way back to the corner, hoping that the walls on two sides would give her some leverage. As she was getting there she saw a small boy in her path. She grabbed him and pulled him with her. Someone so small would die in all this.
She pressed the boy into the corner and stood in front of him, protecting him from the worst of the chaos. She only turned around when a breath of fresh air swept through the truck. She looked over her shoulder and saw people streaming out the pull up door that was now wide open.
She grabbed the boy and followed. When she jumped down to the ground she saw that there was a woman standing there, a shotgun in one hand and the remains of the lock in the other. Most of the people from the truck were running into the night, disappearing into dark alleys and broken down buildings.
Helena pulled the boy behind her and reached for the dracon beam at the same time. In an instant she had the weapon out and pointed at the unknown woman but the woman had the shotgun levelled at her head.
For a moment both women stood stock still staring at each other, weapons aimed. Both were probably wondering how fast the other could shoot. Helena looked her over. She looked Helena over and then said with a small, ironic smile, "Welcome to New York."
Continued in Welcome to New York.
Not pain exactly just a distant sense that something was wrong. That is what Helena was feeling. The cockroach body didn't really feel pain, it just knew that it was damaged.
She had been trying out this new morph when something bad had happened. That is all the information she had at the moment and it was what she would work with. First thing, demorph, then deal with the rest. Come on Helena, get it together.
Her human body slowly began to emerge from the broken body of the cockroach and as it did she almost wished she had stayed a bug. Newly grown human skin was burned off almost as fast as it appeared as it came in contact with super heated metal slag that was all that was left of her surroundings. The pain was almost too much to think through but she did.
If she was going to make it out of this alive she would need stronger skin but she couldn't go back to cockroach. She hadn't had the morph long and she wouldn't be able to use its senses to navigate her way out.
As soon as she could call herself fully human, if a severely burned one, she concentrated on the image of scales. Almost instantly a wave of scales began to replace the raw flesh of her body. When they covered everything, giving her a moment's respite, she stopped the morph and pushed her way out of the remains of the trailer.
She made it to the woods and thought of her next course of action. The trailer and everyone who had been in it were dead. She could see that from here so that meant Johnny, Leena, Rebekah, Kevin and Atoli were out of the picture. Who did that leave? Matthias, Melanie and that new kid whose name she wasn't too sure of. She had to try to contact them and she had to get away from here. Canary would be best.
She closed her eyes and thought of the part of the canary she wanted most, wings. The bones in her arms hollowed out and elongated, reshaping as they did, until she had wings. Ok, now beak, feathers, talons, tail. As she thought of each body part it appeared until finally she stood in the woods, a human sized canary. Small. She shrank.
When she had thought speak she called out to the others. <<Matthias? Mel? If you can hear me I'm alive. If you can't hopefully you're alive too.>> She wasn't the type of person to wish for things but this was a pretty bad situation and it was only getting worse.
A spherical shape floated into view. It fired at her and she narrowly avoided the beam. She began to demorph. The thing's beams wouldn't pose such a danger to a human and it obviously didn't matter if it knew she was an animorph. Their cover was blown.
She picked up a branch and swung for the robot but she missed. It did back off a bit though and that gave her room to do the only thing left to her...run.
She ran in the direction of the outhouse, the only other building she knew of, but when she got there a controller stepped into view and pointed a dracon beam at her head. She stopped short. Damn.
"You're done. Surrender Animorph." And live as a slave, she mentally added. The controller facing her looked nervous despite his brave words. He looked like he had never pointed a weapon at a warm body. In that she had more experience than him. But she didn't charge him. It would have been stupid and it wouldn't have helped her any. She waited for her chance. "Over here! I think I found one!" He was calling reinforcements but he had made a mistake in his eagerness to have someone else take charge of the dangerous prisoner. He had taken his eyes off his captive and that gave her the opening she needed to disarm him.
He leaped at him and broke his arm while flipping him over her hip. She grabbed the fallen dracon beam and shot the controller. It didn't kill him but it hurt and he would stay down. She didn't waste time wondering about his fate.
Again she ran but she had no purpose and that could be fatal. Where was she going? The outhouse was obviously out. The others were probably dead. She was deep in enemy territory. She had to get out.
She didn't have a travel morph, but unlike most animorphs, she didn't see herself as defenseless without a morph to call on. She had made it to Vancouver from Mexico and had done it with only her human limbs to rely on. Her limbs and the gun given to her by her mother. She had gone back for it after being found by Matthias but it was now just a piece of molten metal along with the rest of the trailer. But she had a new gun. She fingered the dracon beam.
Alright so make a choice. West is the ocean. North is the Arctic. I go east I might make it to Chicago or even New York. I go south and maybe I make it to LA. It's closest and Jullian is there. South it is.
She turned south.
She was about two hours out of the city, though it had taken her four hours to get this far. She hadn't wanted to go into the city itself and so had detoured around. Except modern cities weren't like walled villages, they just kind of spread and it was hard to tell where city ended and town began. But she had stayed out of the heavily populated areas and was walking parallel, though not on, the road.
That is when she ran into her first sign of trouble. She felt a wind blowing in the opposite direction from the small breeze that had been blowing all day. She looked up and saw a Bug Fighter coming back around. She looked around her for a place to take cover and dove behind a tree. This wouldn't protect her long.
She pulled the dracon beam from the waistband of her jeans where she had had her t-shirt pulled down over it. One dracon beam wouldn't take down a bug fighter but their crews weren't big.
The bug fighter landed in a clearing near her and a Hork-Bajir stepped out. He was alone. That meant there was only this one and a pilot to worry about. She took careful aim and turned the knob up to a higher setting. The Hork-Bajir began walking towards her though it hadn't spotted her yet.
A neat hole appeared in its forehead and it dropped to the ground. She ran to take out the pilot before it figured out what had happened and lift off.
She ran up the ramp to the bug fighter and saw a Taxxon at the controls. She hadn't seen one before but she had heard enough descriptions of the monsters to recognize one. He turned and lunged toward her. Five holes were burned in his body before he made it half the distance.
If she could have flown the bug fighter she might have considered taking it but she was no pilot. But she couldn't leave it here. If she did the yeerks would find it and wonder what was wrong. She turned the dracon beam up to full blast and shot the Taxxon corpse. It disintegrated.
She went outside and did the same to the Hork-Bajir. Then she concentrated on putting as much distance between herself and the ship as possible.
She woke up with a start. She slowly sat up so that she could see over the dash board of the abandoned car she had been spending the night in but ducked back down when she saw flashlights all along the road. She had only gotten a quick peak but she was pretty sure she had seen a full scale manhunt out there complete with human, hork-bajir and taxxon controllers. All this over one bug fighter crew? She guessed they didn't like the idea that there was something out there that could hurt them.
She debated with herself what she should do. She could morph and get away but she would have to leave the dracon beam behind. To be honest she felt much more secure with a weapon she knew how to use than as a human who could turn into a song bird. So morphing was out but if she stayed human she was sure to be found. But that might not be the worst thing, at least if they thought she was just a straggler and not an escaped animorph.
She pulled the brown leather jacket that she had found in this car closer around her and hid the dracon beam in the inside pocket. Then she feigned sleep. If they found her then they would think she was a stray and would probably send her to the nearest city, maybe even all the way to LA. It would actually be safer than traveling this way and when she got as far as she could go she would morph her way out.
But the whole plan depended on her establishing an identity as an average human and not a threat.
When the controllers ripped open the car door Helena feigned surprise and terror. It wasn't that hard.
She was bundled into a truck with a lot of other scared prisoners and now they were being shipped somewhere. She had found a corner to sit in and had proceeded to stare stonily at the wall. She hoped the expression would keep any would-be trouble makers away. Even though they were all in this together she had found that desperate people often did stupid things and she didn't want to get into a fight in such an enclosed area.
Helena had a long time to think on her trip to yeerks know where. She hadn't been doing a lot of that in the past 24 hours, just reacting to the situation as it came up but now that she had a quiet moment she was beginning to realize how bad things had gotten. She hadn't been close to anyone in the faction, her own fault, but having them ripped away so suddenly felt like a mortal wound.
Now that the pain had come she didn't want anything to do with it. She pushed it away like she did most emotions. Normally the ability to suppress things so easily would have given her pause but today she was only grateful. She knew that she would have to deal with it later, she always did. When she locked her emotions away like that they didn't disappear, they just got buried, and they grew, often coming back to her at the least opportune time and stronger than ever. But she couldn't give into the despair that was eating away at her. If she did she couldn't keep moving, couldn't keep planning and one misstep could kill her. She had to stay focused. Escape and get to LA. She didn't know what she would do once she got there but she would get there if for no other reason than to make sure they knew about what had happened to the Vancouver faction.
And once she was in LA she would see Jullian.
The LA animorph that had come to Vancouver a couple of weeks ago had brought word of her brother there. In fact he had been sent specifically to find her. He hadn't stayed long, just delivered his message and turned back around so Helena hadn't gotten the chance to ask many questions. But she hadn't really had many to ask. That wasn't right, she had a lot of questions, too many to ask a stranger.
She had been working up to asking Matthias for a travel morph so that she could go see him and talk to him herself but before she did she had wanted to demonstrate a mastery of the morphs he had already given her. That is what she had been doing when the yeerks hit the trailer and the practice had saved her life.
Saved it for what?
That question again. She hadn' t missed it.
Helena didn't want to think about he immediate past so she was thinking about her past in general.
Helena was 5 when her youngest brother was born. She remembered when her mother had told her. She had gotten angry and run up to her room. Another brother? Another sibling to share the house with, another little kid to take care of.
"You have to look out for your siblings Helena." What a responsibility to put on a 5 year old. But she had taken it seriously. And that was why she hadn't liked the news of yet another little person who would be depending on her.
She wondered where they were now. And she found it odd that of all her siblings, Jullian was the one who had followed her example and went looking for a resistance. He was the one least like her of all of them so why was he out here, where were the rest of her family?
But asking such questions was pointless until she had someone who could answer them.
She wondered how long it would be until they reached their destination. Another pointless question.
The last couple of hours of the trip was spent staring at nothing and concentrating on planning her escape once they reached wherever they were going.
Turns out it was all unneccessary.
The loud truck horn is what brought her attention back to the world. The deep note had been playing for the last minute and now it was sounding frantic. Helena stood up to see if she could get to the front of the cabin and get a better look. Wrong move. She went flying into the other prisoners as the driver of the truck slammed the brakes and brought the truck to a screeching halt. But apparently too late.
She heard a crash and an explosion outside. A second later the heat from the gas fires hit her and everyone else. Everyone started to panic and tried to escape. It was like a stampede except infinitly more dangerous since the panicked people had no where to go.
She knew that if she stayed where she was then she would be trampled to death. She pushed her way back to the corner, hoping that the walls on two sides would give her some leverage. As she was getting there she saw a small boy in her path. She grabbed him and pulled him with her. Someone so small would die in all this.
She pressed the boy into the corner and stood in front of him, protecting him from the worst of the chaos. She only turned around when a breath of fresh air swept through the truck. She looked over her shoulder and saw people streaming out the pull up door that was now wide open.
She grabbed the boy and followed. When she jumped down to the ground she saw that there was a woman standing there, a shotgun in one hand and the remains of the lock in the other. Most of the people from the truck were running into the night, disappearing into dark alleys and broken down buildings.
Helena pulled the boy behind her and reached for the dracon beam at the same time. In an instant she had the weapon out and pointed at the unknown woman but the woman had the shotgun levelled at her head.
For a moment both women stood stock still staring at each other, weapons aimed. Both were probably wondering how fast the other could shoot. Helena looked her over. She looked Helena over and then said with a small, ironic smile, "Welcome to New York."
Continued in Welcome to New York.
