Re: Vendetta [S!2 Round 1 ~ Presidentialgon]
01-22-2012, 02:39 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Yako.
Zenith made his way through sterile, cold white corridors filled with blinking, humming machines, one hand along the wall as a guide. He wondered what vaguely mundane adventure his work would give him today-- failure of the oxygen system? Accident repairing the engines? Spaceborne illness?
He slowed. These machines-- so shiny, so new, their construction different from anything he had ever seen. He stopped-- the weren't of Vella Rhos origin. Maybe he could touch it...
And he did-- very gingerly. No reaction-- he stepped closer to examine it thoroughly. It was definitely a computational device, though he could see no input. A server, perhaps? Red and green lights blinked rapidly under dark, shiny casing. It was covered in words, too, but Zenith's grasp of non-Vellan writing had always been weak.
So, either he had dreamt that dinner party and was still asleep, or on a cultivated alien planet-- if he remembered his alien glyphs right, the inhabitants called their planet "Earth"-- and entered into a nine-man deathmatch.
It felt far too real to be a dream.
Zenith moved on to inspect more of the machines, seeing if one might be familiar enough to use. In this hall, most were like the first he happened across-- totally unusable to him. Mostly, he repeated this idle, hopeless search so he could think about his situation without freaking too much.
He heard about these alien gladiatorial challenges before-- though nothing quite so abrupt. He didn't even remember he or his vessel being kidnapped. This just sort of... happened. Of course, how it happened didn't matter much now. Two things needed to be determined: first, wether or not this was beneficial to him; second, how he could win or get out, depending on what he decided for question one.
He would have continued this line of thought had he not heard footsteps and a voice coming down the hall. He panicked-- Earth had never met the Vella Kehn. They'd consider him a monster. And this was a government building-- they'd probably hand him off to the most important scientist, and he'd be subject to experimentation and probing. He looked around-- there was nowhere to hide. He could see down the hall now, make out a figure advancing, hear them talking more clearly.
Zenith took a deep breath and pressed himself against the wall, between two computers. Maybe they wouldn't notice his bright red articles of clothing and mistake him for the wall, pass him right by.
"Sir, I'm saying-- no, please, listen to me." They were talking on a radio to some distant party. Zenith understood that the sentient population of Earth had two sexes, but determining this person's was the last thing on his mind. They were frumpy-- disheveled hair and clothes, with dark circles under their eyes. "The weapons aren't ready yet, they're too unstable to use on the battlefield. Results have been highly variable--"
They stopped just past Zenith. "It's going to take us... three to five weeks to finish testing and build a stable model." They waited for a reply on the other end. "What, no! We couldn't turn it out that-- sir, this isn't just safety. Our own men could die if we roll these out too quickly." They paced back a couple of steps, further outlining the dangers of this mysterious weapon in terms Zenith didn't understand. He sighed with frustration.
"Currently, the misfire rate is--"
The human looked directly at him, falling silent.
Zenith stared back. He could hear a muffled voice coming from the other end of the radio.
"Sir, something's... come up. I'll radio back in a minute."
In the brief few seconds it took the human to clip the radio to their belt, Zenith struck.
The last thing she would see before blacking out was a small grey skinned man throwing his entire body at her head. She came to her senses not three minutes later, but when she looked around, she could find no trace of the strange alien.
She really needed to get sleep. These hallucinations were too much.
Zenith made his way through sterile, cold white corridors filled with blinking, humming machines, one hand along the wall as a guide. He wondered what vaguely mundane adventure his work would give him today-- failure of the oxygen system? Accident repairing the engines? Spaceborne illness?
He slowed. These machines-- so shiny, so new, their construction different from anything he had ever seen. He stopped-- the weren't of Vella Rhos origin. Maybe he could touch it...
And he did-- very gingerly. No reaction-- he stepped closer to examine it thoroughly. It was definitely a computational device, though he could see no input. A server, perhaps? Red and green lights blinked rapidly under dark, shiny casing. It was covered in words, too, but Zenith's grasp of non-Vellan writing had always been weak.
So, either he had dreamt that dinner party and was still asleep, or on a cultivated alien planet-- if he remembered his alien glyphs right, the inhabitants called their planet "Earth"-- and entered into a nine-man deathmatch.
It felt far too real to be a dream.
Zenith moved on to inspect more of the machines, seeing if one might be familiar enough to use. In this hall, most were like the first he happened across-- totally unusable to him. Mostly, he repeated this idle, hopeless search so he could think about his situation without freaking too much.
He heard about these alien gladiatorial challenges before-- though nothing quite so abrupt. He didn't even remember he or his vessel being kidnapped. This just sort of... happened. Of course, how it happened didn't matter much now. Two things needed to be determined: first, wether or not this was beneficial to him; second, how he could win or get out, depending on what he decided for question one.
He would have continued this line of thought had he not heard footsteps and a voice coming down the hall. He panicked-- Earth had never met the Vella Kehn. They'd consider him a monster. And this was a government building-- they'd probably hand him off to the most important scientist, and he'd be subject to experimentation and probing. He looked around-- there was nowhere to hide. He could see down the hall now, make out a figure advancing, hear them talking more clearly.
Zenith took a deep breath and pressed himself against the wall, between two computers. Maybe they wouldn't notice his bright red articles of clothing and mistake him for the wall, pass him right by.
"Sir, I'm saying-- no, please, listen to me." They were talking on a radio to some distant party. Zenith understood that the sentient population of Earth had two sexes, but determining this person's was the last thing on his mind. They were frumpy-- disheveled hair and clothes, with dark circles under their eyes. "The weapons aren't ready yet, they're too unstable to use on the battlefield. Results have been highly variable--"
They stopped just past Zenith. "It's going to take us... three to five weeks to finish testing and build a stable model." They waited for a reply on the other end. "What, no! We couldn't turn it out that-- sir, this isn't just safety. Our own men could die if we roll these out too quickly." They paced back a couple of steps, further outlining the dangers of this mysterious weapon in terms Zenith didn't understand. He sighed with frustration.
"Currently, the misfire rate is--"
The human looked directly at him, falling silent.
Zenith stared back. He could hear a muffled voice coming from the other end of the radio.
"Sir, something's... come up. I'll radio back in a minute."
In the brief few seconds it took the human to clip the radio to their belt, Zenith struck.
The last thing she would see before blacking out was a small grey skinned man throwing his entire body at her head. She came to her senses not three minutes later, but when she looked around, she could find no trace of the strange alien.
She really needed to get sleep. These hallucinations were too much.