8.Feb.09
Beast Wars
Prologue
Now,
she had known that she had some of those day dreams where one isn’t in their
own world but somewhere else...Alright, so maybe a few times more then a few,
yet who hasn’t?
When
dreaming, you can have an adventure, maybe a fantasy love, or whatever else one
could think of. But it was still just a dream,
one that you could wake up from and go back to real life. Maybe you even can
write down that dream in the form of a short story, or a longer one.
Yet
despite it all, it would always supposed to just a dream. Nothing real...
Blue
eyes blinked open and stared at the trees in front of the owner. The young woman
stared long and had at the unfamiliar and somewhat thin forest.
Perhaps
‘forest’ wasn’t the right term for it was more of a light wood, almost
like a park until the woman had come to a bluff where the landscape proved to be
no park. The trees gradually became thinker the farther the miles sprawled out.
Here and there rock formations covered in yellowed grass jutted up out of the
cover of leave filled branches.
The
sky above was a bright sapphire blue, completely untainted by the air born
pollutants of the Twenty First Century. It wasn’t cold out, nor hot but in the
level between where you could when a sweatshirt and be perfectly fine.
The air tasted crisp and new, even more so compared to the large
city the woman was use to living in.
She
stood at five foot five, had an average build with strawberry blond hair was
pulled back into a ponytail and treaded through the back of a red and black
baseball cape that had an Autobot insignia on the front. Faded green work paints
had a verity of goodies in their many pockets and like the thick boots had some
sawdust trapped in rolled up ends. She had on a gray sweatshirt that had been
passed down from an older sibling years ago and had also once been white. A
black cord ran from two headphones clipped to the front of the over shirt and
ran down to a MP3 player hidden in a back pocket.
Her
name was Tallen and she was twenty two years old, almost twenty one in another
month. She worked two jobs, one at her family-owned Scuba diving shop and in
construction. Tallen primarily lived with her step father and over ten snakes in
a two bedroom apartment. Although she wasn’t in college at the time she was
planning on going back with in a year.
At
the moment, she was completely, and utterly lost.
Not
just in the physical sense of not knowing where you were but also confused. It
was a sinking feeling you get in your heart. Where you gut twists and clenches
down, it’s not the best of feelings because you just know that you are
so very much screwed, and not in the good way.
Yet
at the same time...there wasn’t a damn thing you can do other then stare in a
weird, twisted sense of wonder.
Tallen
let her backpack slid off her right shoulder and drop gently to the ground so no
to harm the cargo inside. She looked around and for once in a long, long time
she felt truly helpless in the current of fate.
She
closed her eyes and sank down until she was sitting cross-legged. Tallen opened
her eyes, gazing over the bluff to the sweeping woods beyond and forced almost
all thoughts out of her mind. First things first: How did she get here?
Frowning,
Tallen tried to remember her last memory before she had woken up on the ground
some odd meters back. Tallen came up with the clearest memory that she knew was
from a week ago, when she had been working as a Divemaster on a charted boat.
She remembered being upside down passing tools to her step father and another
man that were in a tight spot in the engine compartment of said dive bout.
Slowly,
as she propped her chin on a palm and picked at the grass under her, Tallen
worked through the rest of her scattered and fragmented memories of the next few
days. She was doing go up until Saturday night and nothing of Sunday.
Tallen
knew that she had planed something with her best friend for Sunday...She just
couldn’t grab onto what they had planed or did. Tallen and her friend tended
to get lost and sometimes go off and do something else then what they planned at
first, though one of them always left a message with one set of parents or the
other.
Yes,
they were both over nineteen but they live in a big city. Vancouver was a good
city and all, but it was common sense: Night time, two young women that are
still new to clubbing (if you can call it that), it can spell trouble if
you’re not careful. Thus they were smart and give those the two trust a heads
up of where they planned to go and if there’s any changes in those plans.
How
ever, since Tallen was the one that normally drove, unless they took the
Sky-Train, she don’t drink anything more then a single strawberry dacory or a
pinocolata (and most of the time those were virgin). Or more often than no,
she’d get buzzed on Vanilla Cola or Dr. Pepper. Or rather get hyper but it’s
kind of the same when they were out dancing. Either way the two still end up
flopped over and sleeping through the next day just the same.
But
the question was: how did Tallen get from dancing with her best friend, half
giggling over the butt of the guy in the red shirt, to being out in the middle
of some forest that she didn’t know? This was far from the temperate rain
forest climate Tallen knew and loved in her Northwest home. There were no ferns
or cedar trees, no damp moss or two foot deep piles of pine needles...There was
grass instead of clusters of swordfern and nettles covering the ground.
Tallen
loved the woods as much as the next person, but she did not know this one. The
woman shivered, she didn’t like it. Not in the least.
That
sinking feeling came back and Tallen shivered again but it had nothing to do
with the air temperature.
“Now
what?” Tallen wondered aloud as she once again looked around for a clue as to
were she was or what happened. As before like the last fifteen times there was
no hint or clue.
Well,
she couldn’t just sit on the bluff all day and have a fool’s hope of being
found before nightfall.
“Get
your butt up,” Tallen said as she stood and walked over to the edge and looked
first down and then rescanned the land below. This time taking her time and
studying one section at a time before moving her gaze and repeating the process.
“There we go.” She smiled as she saw a break in the tree line, not a
clearing but a steady line that meandered through the woods.
Even
if it wasn’t a full of water there was a good chance that it was still a steam
bed. It was as good as anything to go on and hopefully she could fallow it down
stream to…well, some kind of civilization. Wither it be a village or town.
Now…how
to get down…
“Wait.”
Tallen turned and reaching into her right thigh pocket pulled out a pocket knife
and stepped back to trees behind her. She carved her initials into the thin bark
on both sides of the tree. Grabbing up her back pack again she started back to
the spot where she had woken up, marking the trees and keeping the initials in
sight of each other. She had a feeling that she might have to find the place
again, just in case.
It
took some time, but eventually Tallen found her way safely down the bluff, she
still marked some trees so she didn’t get turned around. She didn’t rush
either, knowing that if she did then she’d get lost even more.
After
the half an hour climb down and nearly an hour’s walk later the sounds of
running water was welcome indeed. Pulling shoes and socks off and rolling up her
pants the woman put her feet in the cold water, wincing slightly but enjoying
the break.
A
not so distant explosion ripped through the relative quite of the afternoon air
and made the woman yelp and nearly fall into the stream.
“What
the hell?!” Tallen scrambled up onto her feet, bouncing from one foot to the
other to get her shoes and socks back on. Leaping the gap from her wide rock to
the bank where her pack was. Grabbing it she hesitated before fallowing in the
general direction of the explosion. On the way she hacked a rough ‘X’ into a
few trees with the pocket knife.
There
was more, smaller, detonations that helped guide the young woman and as Tallen
got closer she could define gun shots and a few varied yells. She stopped far
enough away that she could see or be seen by who ever was fighting, though she
could hear almost everything. Including alien words not foreign in the sense of
like Spanish or Russian but literally alien.
Suddenly,
Tallen didn’t like the idea of getting any closer.