Chapter Text
Sylvia awakes in agony.
That isn’t entirely outside the norm for her, but she usually medicates it to a manageable level.
When she reaches for her bedside table, toward where her supplies should be, her elbow hits the edge of something cold and hard and she recoils in pain.
As she peels her eyes open, she is greeted to a misty sort of daylight. Strange scents assault her—soil, foliage, nature. Why is she outside? She sits up as pain lances down her back. Her entire musculature is pulled into a thousand angry knots that protest each movement. She whimpers involuntarily as she tries to climb out of the object she’s encased in; one half of some kind of metal and glass pod. The upper half is gone, discarded several paces away as though it had blown open upon landing. There’s a series of thin cords connecting it to a parachute that’s tangled up in the undergrowth behind her.
She manages to roll out of the pod with a bit of effort, yelping as she hits the dirt and her body sings in pain again.
Next to her, twigs snap and leaves crunch as someone approaches her. When she looks up, she sees her boyfriend Greg. He’s fully decked out for the range in his desert camo pants, a green-gray FROG shirt and his FLAK, minus the plating. His well-worn coyote boots are caked in mud, and he’s still wearing his personal tactical gloves with the thumb and index fingers cut off for precision when shooting & reloading, though he currently is only holding his KA-BAR. His trusty Desert Eagle is holstered at his hip, and upon seeing Sylvia, his expression instantly shifts from surprise to disgust.
“Why the fuck are you here?” he snarls out, lowering his weapon.
Sylvia just lets out a tiny whimper. Everything hurts. If she was asleep in that hard metal pod, she can imagine that’s why. Sleeping at a bad angle on her own amazing orthopedic-supportive mattress can cause her to wake up in pain, so a flat metal makeshift bed would have absolutely destroyed her overnight.
“G-Greg…” she whines, trying desperately to control her reactions through heavy breathing. It doesn’t work—she just ends up feeling lightheaded as her pain still roars across every inch of her.
“Look, I don’t have time for this. You aren’t supposed to be here. They must have fucked up on the extraction,” Greg tells her as though every word he is forced to speak to her is an annoyance for him.
“What are you—where’s here? Where are w-we and w-what’s going o-on?” Sylvia stammers out in confusion, her brainpower severely muddled by the pain currently assaulting her body.
“That program I signed up for, the one I’ve been training to get into. This is the last part of it. It means I made it through all their tests and trials,” he actually sounds excited as he says it, like a rush of pride seizes him for a moment before he remembers who he’s talking to. “I don’t know why you got dragged along, but if everything they said about this place is true, then you won’t last five minutes out here.”
“ Where is here? ” Sylvia hisses out impatiently, unable to swallow a sob that breaks out of her when she tries to sit up. She vaguely registers that above her, two suns are visible; one yellow and one more distant and bluish. She blinks several times, but the sky remains unchanged in her vision.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Greg tells her flatly, “when I signed up, they said whoever made it through to the final selection would be transported to another site for the last test. Guess they took you, too, because you were with me when they came.”
Sylvia tries to remember. She recalls going to the range with Greg so he could get his weekly target practice in. She’s still wearing the clothes she’d gone in; dark leggings and flat ankle boots, a support tank and a soft, oversized gray sweater. As it stands, Greg is an expert marksman and refuses to let his skills regress, despite that he’ll never see combat again. Not in an official capacity, anyway. Not with an eighty percent disability rating from the VA thanks to a fucked-up shoulder, bum knee and ‘depressive mood disorder’ AKA ‘PTSD-induced depression’. But right now, he’s all geared up, his eyes wild with the possibility of war.
She can only remember part of the drive home. At some point, everything goes black. Her memory isn’t the greatest sometimes, given the meds she takes, but she should still remember more than that. Getting home? Going to bed? She has to assume those things never happened. They never made it home.
“Whatever,” Greg finally says, heaving a sigh. “You’d only be a burden to us. Just lie here and hope something kills you quickly.”
“Wait—what?” Sylvia whimpers out, but before she can say more, Greg plants his muddy boot on her shoulder and shoves her hard, sending her careening down a steep hill.
The pain is blinding, and by the time she hits the gravel of the riverbed at the base of the hill, she passes out.
┈․° ☣ °․┈
Sylvia feels a rush of heated air buffet her face several times, pulling her from unconsciousness. She doesn’t know how much time has passed, just that when she wakes, she’s somehow in more pain than she was before.
She shrieks as she moves and a thousand tiny rocks jab into her skin, trying to at least roll off of her back to spare her most sensitive muscles from the torture. She hears the slow rush of water to her right, which ends up behind her as she manages to pivot onto her left arm. The gravel now in front of her shifts loudly, and she realizes she may not be alone.
When she finally peels open her eyes, she sees what woke her: just a few paces in front of her stands some sort of quadrupedal alien creature. It looks like some kind of gnarled dog with an array of tusks jutting out of its head and body at all sorts of angles. Sylvia is vaguely reminded of some of the monsters she’s encountered while playing Dungeons & Dragons. This thing looks like some unholy combination of a displacer beast and a spinagon.
Unfortunately, unlike the creatures in her fictional D&D games, the thing before her seems very much to be real. It appears to be regarding her curiously now that she’s stirring, though it doesn’t move aggressively at all.
Sylvia is certain she’s about to be mauled, and honestly…she briefly wonders if that would be a kindness. In the middle of nowhere, without her medication and comfortable accommodations, she’s going to be in constant, blinding agony. Despite her circumstances, she has never considered suicide an option…because even on her worst days, she can medicate to a tolerable level and manage to make her life worth living. Her body no longer keeps up with her fiery spirit, with her wants and her desires, but she makes do, because what else is there, other than an empty void waiting on the other side?
Survival is worth fighting for if there’s even an ounce of joy left to be found in life.
Now, though, she wonders if death might be a mercy.
As she thinks on her current circumstances, the creature just stands there, still watching her. Eventually, a shrill whistle resounds from the distance, and the beast’s head lifts toward the air before it darts off up the hill and out of sight.
Sylvia lets out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, allowing herself a small whine of pain as she does.
She isn’t alone for long.
Eventually, the tall grass within her line of sight at the apex of the hill shifts strangely. It isn’t the wind. She can’t see what causes the movement, but she does notice a weird glimmer above the grass that’s moving.
The grass stills, but that odd glimmer still remains. She locks her eyes upon it until she isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real anymore.
The grass finally moves again, and the crunch of gravel is preceded by large divots being ground into it, as though some unseen entity is walking toward her. It stops only a few paces away, and the glimmer shines brightly for a moment before the illusory glamor fades, revealing whatever is now standing in front of her.
Sylvia startles, ending up on her back again and letting out an involuntary yelp of pain. As she writhes there, helpless and whimpering, tears begin to flood her eyes and stream down her face. She’s not even afraid to die at this point—she’s just in so much pain.
This new creature is bipedal and vaguely humanoid. Much of its skin is exposed, covered in bits of metal armor and wire mesh. Though its musculature isn’t entirely alien, resembling a masculine human torso, its flesh is greenish, mottled and speckled in a way that’s almost…reptilian. Its hands appear clawed, and its feet are strangely shaped, the ankles wide and trunk-like. It wears a nearly featureless mask which bears only eyes and is heavily domed along the top with a flattened panel where a mouth would be. There are tube-like things that sprout out from behind its head and cascade down its back that resemble artificial locs, but Sylvia can’t tell if they’re part of the mask or part of the alien.
It must be an alien, she surmises. It certainly isn’t human. It cocks its head at her, regarding her for far too long, like it’s looking through her.
No, not through her… into her.
“Please…” she whimpers out, unsure even herself if she is asking for a merciful death or a helping hand.
A few clicking noises are its only answer, at first, and then Sylvia's own voice is being played back to her, like a recording.
“Please…”
Sylvia feels cold dread settle in her stomach. She isn’t sure if this thing is mocking her, or if it just doesn’t understand her and is mimicking like some kind of parrot. It probably doesn’t understand English, or any human language, for that matter.
It clicks at her again, then another recording plays. This one is an unfamiliar, masculine voice.
“Help—!” it says, cutting off quickly and repeating it once more, “help—!”
Sylvia closes her eyes, tears leaking down over her temples as she faces the sky and lets out a shaky, wretched sob. She just wants the pain to stop. She doesn’t care how anymore.
The crunch of gravel tells her the alien is moving closer to her, its steps accompanied by a hollow clacking noise. As she peels her eyes open, the creature crouches near her shoulder, and she catches sight of a cache of bleached bones dangling from its belt. One of them is a toothy animal skull. The other looks vaguely humanoid.
“Help—!” it repeats again in that weirdly tinny recorded voice, taking something out of one of its armor panels.
It’s sort of gun-shaped, in the same way tools can be, like caulk guns or piercing guns. There’s some kind of bluish liquid visible in the thing, and the creature motions toward her side with it, almost in exaggerated pantomime.
“Help—!” it says one more time, motioning with its head so those tube-like locs sway with the movement.
Sylvia lets out a soft sigh of resignation and looks to the sky again before closing her eyes in acceptance.
Whatever this thing is going to do to her, she’s resolved not to bother fighting or begging.
The needle pierces her side through her clothes with a hiss, and the temporary sting instantly dies, along with all feeling in the area. She feels like she’s been injected with novocaine, but then the sensation starts spreading further and further until her entire body becomes blissfully numb.
The sound she lets out is one of relief, and the errant tears leaking from her eyes, now, are happy ones. If this substance is killing her, she is comforted by the fact that in her final moments, it offers her a brief respite from her agony. The sob that bubbles from her throat, now, is one that comes with a smile.
“Help—!” the creature repeats, and the gravel shifts before Sylvia’s whole world is shifting and she feels herself being carried. She’s slung over the alien’s shoulder like a ragdoll, her entire body lax and pliant with whatever drug it’s dosed her with.
Sylvia is slammed with exhaustion and doesn’t protest. She fades in and out as the river moves out of view and the light of the suns becomes obscured by trees. She feels more than sees the alien take a bounding leap, and then they are flying through the trees like some kind of primate species. It isn’t long before her world goes black again, this time from sheer relief.
┈․° ☣ °․┈
When she fades back in, Sylvia feels cold. Her pain hasn’t entirely returned, but there’s a familiar dull ache about her muscles that reminds her of how she feels when medicated. Sore, stiff, but not in agony. As she sits up, she realizes she’s on a metal table of some kind. The room she’s in looks weirdly sterile, all metal walls and high-tech apparatuses that look like the kind of medical equipment you’d see in a sci-fi film.
The alien from before is standing nearest her, so close she could reach out and touch it if she dared. She doesn’t—in fact, she freezes when she sees there are two more of them, now: one standing near the door and another across the room.
All of them are large— huge —each standing at least seven feet tall…but the one in the doorway is the biggest, and from the way he’s holding himself, he has an air of authority about him. Like the others defer to him. The one across the room is the smallest, though only marginally, and it’s wearing the most armor of the three. The last, the one next to her—her savior, she reasons, seeing as she isn’t dead—has a skin tone that is greener than the other two. It reminds her of java moss, like a blanket of virulent life shrouding a dead tree.
They’re conversing, she guesses by the rapid sound of clicks, guttural sounds and their head movements. They don’t stop on account of her waking, though the one nearest her clearly takes notice, moving closer until he is right up against the table she’s seated on.
The one in the doorway doesn’t seem pleased. He gestures aggressively toward Sylvia, then makes a dismissive motion. The one next to her bristles and takes hold of the human’s upper arm, grip firm but not painful. It does startle her, though, and she gasps softly as he tugs at her and motions toward one of the weird medical devices, clicking defiantly toward his fellow alien.
After a while, they all fall silent. The one in the doorway doesn’t say anything for a long, tense moment, though Sylvia can sense its gaze on her. After what feels like an eternity, it finally lets out something not unlike a huff, clicking and grumbling in low tones before turning and stalking off. The smaller one across the room follows quickly, moving in a way that seems strangely deft for a creature so large.
It is only her and her savior again. He looks down at her and gestures, tugging her. She gets down from the table gingerly, trying not to aggravate anything as the alien leads her to the pod-shaped machine across the room.
“Help—!” the recording plays again as he points at the machine, then taps at the massive display screen on the side. After a few beeps, it shows the image of a featureless human female.
“Help—!” he repeats, gesturing to the machine again as he pokes one of the buttons. With a hiss, the top slides open, giving her the ability to step inside.
Well, she’s either going to get some help from this alien technology, or she’ll get turned into a smoothie. Either way, she’s going to have relief from her pain, with any luck.
After taking a deep breath, she steps into the machine and lies back, letting the alien close the lid above her. He taps at the screen, and she hears the muffled reassurance again as the machine fogs up and she feels herself drift off.
“Help—!”