Topic: The Mystery of the Southern Desert

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-13 21:35 EST
There is some part of me deep down inside that knows this isn?t all necessary. It?s the part that whines and complains when I?m stumbling down a filthy alley or letting some thug bully me. It?s the part of me that wonders just what the hell I?m doing it for when I?ve got to force myself to take the punch head on, rather than swivel to my left, chop up and out with my right hand, break the attacking arm at the elbow, and drive my other first into the attacker?s solar plexus.

It?s the part of me that really hates the taste of scotch, and the part that wonders what it must be like to be affected by alcohol.

Then there?s that other part of me. It?s the part that?s seen good men die. It?s the part that?s been on the the wrong side of an interrogation room. It?s the part of me that?s seen what happens to the people who let their guard down.

So I stumble through the streets, reeking of the alcohol I?ve been drinking and spilling for weeks now. My clothes are baggy and cheap, the better to play into the role of the poor sap who fell face-first into Rhy?Din and is barely making enough money to support his drinking habit. They?re comfortable, and they hide my gear perfectly, but they?ve hardly seen a drop of water since I got them.

If you think playing undercover bum is rough work, try playing it with a hyper-sensitive sense of smell. Not so much fun.

Still, it?s been useful. People don?t tend to watch their words around the drunks and the bums. They?re treated like children. If they don?t appear to be actively listening in on the conversation, then they must not be. I?ve learned a lot in the past few weeks: enough so that I?m pretty sure I can make my way out of the city with the gear that I need - and without getting spotted.

Some of it?s easy. The water?s easy to come by. A dark brown bottle looks the same whether it?s filled with water or booze, and nobody finds it odd to see me stumbling down the street with one in my hand.

The rest of it?s not so easy. I?ve been working the docks for a few weeks now, loading and unloading cargo. It takes some doing, but I manage to ?misplace? a crate of cloth, leather strips, and sewing materials. Sure, it?s all multi-colored high-fashion crap, but it?ll get the job done. All I really need is something to keep me out of the shade for too long. UV rays don?t mean much to me, but you?d be surprised the amount of power you can soak up out of the desert sun. Don?t want to get any twitcher than usual out there, if you know what I mean. The leather?ll make good replacement boots, at least, and my SNEAK suit will provide most of the resistance to the wind and sand.

I know what you?re thinking. Why not just have Wolvie beam the latest high-tech stuff to some drop point and pick it up on my way out of town? Hell, why not just have him beam me out into the desert in the first place?

Cause I don?t fancy getting killed, that?s why. The transporter?s annular confinement beam causes enough background fluctuation that anyone with a compass and a working knowledge of electro-magnetism can figure out it?s been used. Whatever this thing is out there, Wolvie doesn?t want anyone else knowing about it yet, otherwise he wouldn?t be bringing it to me.

So we do it the old fashioned way. Truth be told, I kind of like it that way anyway.

***

I?m out of the city by sundown the next day, after making sure to make a big depressing scene of drinking and yelling in the local Inn. If anyone thinks to ask - and I?ve given them no reason TO ask - they?ll just assume old Dolus is sleeping off a binge in a gutter somewhere. If I did my job correctly though, I won?t have registered on anyone?s radar yet anyway. No questions, no worries.

***

The desert?s bigger than I expected. Kilometers listed on a PADD don?t quite add up into a real visual in my brain. I need to see it to really understand it.

The sun - as alien to me as they all are - beats a steady symphony of energy down on my head as I make my trek into the desert. Already the wind and sand are whipping and tearing at the ridiculous bright green and pink cloth of my makeshift traveling cloak. From a distance I probably look like an Orion who got into a horrible accident at a bubblegum factory. Or maybe like an Orc with a really bad fashion sense.

Or, that part of me says, you just look like one great big neon target.

I sigh then, pull out my Tricorder, squint through the blasting sand and wind, and check my heading one last time. Straight ahead. Whatever?s out there, it?s thataway.

I just hope I have enough backup plans for when this all goes bad.

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2007-12-14 15:30 EST
The Great Desert of Rhy?Din is caked with miles upon miles of sand and towering dunes that shifted and changed with the burning wind that carried the dry grains, much like the strong torrential current of the icy oceans... Such cruel places were not for the faint hearted or the ill-disciplined where you can easily end up lost, and eventually dead?

These wastelands were commonly populated by sparse pockets of nomads, which are apparently best well avoided given their stance on how to deal with outsiders trespassing or mining materials upon their homeland. Some were not as savage, and were known well for their hospitality and deep rooted traditions passed down the many generations...

Though, they have been slack rather recently in keeping up their usual appearances in the public eye, either because they have had been hiding ? disappearing like ghosts in the usual sandstorms, or have in fact moved on further south to avoid the Northlanders and their usual petty wars and power struggles over fertile land they never had cared much about. Grass wasn?t the be all and end all of their lives. Survival was the aim of their game.

What could have caused this exodus? Why would they leave so suddenly?

Exactly one month ago a shooting star travelled across the night sky ? a common sight to these people, and as it entered the atmosphere of the planet the large cosmic object refused to burn up like most. It could have easily skipped back out into space due to its speed and angle of decent as it was trapped in the gravitational field, but for some inexplicable reason the ball of blazing fire had suddenly changed its course towards the surface itself! Perhaps it was due to the force of the planet?s gravity that had caused the sudden change? Either way it still fell to the surface at its terminal velocity? Which was nothing unsual, yet...

As the burning object got closer and closer to the point of impact, it could now have easily been seen by the natives that it was in fact not a lump of the usual rocks falling from the sky, but possessed one large metallic body streaming both flames and the multi-coloured maelstrom of plasma vented out behind in one long serpent trail that carved the night sky with one blinding ominious light. Within a blink of an eye it crash landed deep in the middle of nowhere in one earth shattering thud?

Plasma had rained down on the natives, some dying from the intense burns instantly and soon had thought this an omen from their worshipped gods, and fled with the sick and dying.

Upon collision with a single dune the sand?s body had cushioned the vessel enough to absorb the impact blast, thus producing not so much of a crater worthy of the ship's size and mass. Sand was thrown for miles ? melted by the impact as deadly shards of glass long since covered and forgetten? The now silent derelict had conveniently come to rest upon its belly, half consumed by the dune it had collided with? The fires snuffed.

One long month, and the dunes wait for no one ? man or god, for the ship now could barely be spotted without careful observation and a clear, bright and sunny day which is not in short supply. From the dullness of the sand there glistened a section of the vessel?s hull, still barely poking out from its burial site. Upon this ten by ten foot panel, a lone circular maintenance shaft door remained intact with its DNA-encoded keypad lock flickering between life and death. It would seem that the only to gain entrance was through this duct and even then, it has been welded shut from the inside by concentrated and accurate phaser fire.

But why from the inside?

As the man drew closer to its location...

He was not alone?

Something was watching him from quite a distance away - out of sight and out of mind?

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-14 19:51 EST
Whatever it used to be, it was dead now. It could be a ship, or it could be an escape pod. Hell, it could be a submarine that sunk to the bottom of the ocean this place probably used to be some billion or so years ago.

What? It could happen.

It was impossible to judge its size. The dune surrounding it might be nothing but a big pile of sand. There was no telling what might be buried beneath it. There was just the metal plate and what looked like a hatch. If were going to make an educated guess, I?d say that whatever was putting out the transponder signal was somewhere inside that hatch. Unfortunately for me, I could stand there all day scanning it with my tricorder and never find a thing. There was something in the sand - or maybe in the ?whatever? - that was disrupting all my scans. The dinky little power supply in the tricorder didn?t have the strength to get past all the interference.

It also meant I was blind. There could be a full battalion of troops just over the hills all around me and I?d have no clue. I had maybe a twenty-meter radius where I could scan for life forms, and maybe another ten where I could spot major energy signatures. After that? Nada.

So yeah, here I am standing out in the middle of the desert, brightly colored bolts of cloth flapping and snapping all around me in the blistering winds, and with no idea of what could be out in the dunes all around me. This is what I classify as a bad thing.

That makes it decision time. Do I make my way for the big shiny chunk of metal sticking out of the sand and just knock on the hatch, hoping that A) someone?s inside and that B) they don?t answer the doorbell with disruptor fire?

Or do I spend another few hours patrolling the perimeter, checking out the dunes all around the place before I head inside?

Easy answer to that one.

***

The patrol turns up nothing, but that doesn?t quell my worries any. The desert stretches on for miles, and just because I can?t see very well in all the sand and wind doesn?t mean someone (something?) else couldn?t. I don?t have the time or the supplies to check every conceivable vantage point, so I have to make do with securing the outlying perimeter. Fat lot of good that?ll do me if there?s a sniper out there. I really don?t feel like getting high caliber rounds bounced against my skull, and phaser fire tends to make me giddy and reckless.

I make sure to take my time heading for the hatch. Every step towards it could mean the step that triggers something. Booby traps, alarm systems, trip wires, land mines, you never know what could be out there. My brain keeps screaming at me that this whole situation is prime, one-hundred percent, Grade A quality trap-bait. Mysterious signal out in the middle of a desert? One man on foot coming out to investigate? A child could figure out a way to exploit that situation.

When it?s all said and done, however, there?s nothing else for me to do. I came here for a reason. Wolvie thinks it?s important, and I tend to agree with him. I don?t like mysteries, and I don?t like traps. That makes me the best candidate to be out here risking delirium, sunburn, or sniper fire.

I take it one step at a time. Step, look around, strain my ears, inhale deeply through the nose, and let myself taste the currents of energy all around me. It doesn?t tell me much. I don?t know the smells here, and the energies of this place are fluctuating so wildly I can hardly even tell that I?m here, let alone someone else.

So I do the only thing I can think of. After hours of circling the thing and hours of picturing all the different ways my scalp could split open, I step up to the hatch, raise my knuckles, and knock three times on it.

It?s hollow.

So?s my stomach.

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2007-12-14 20:38 EST
In the pitch black there sat a face in front of the helm?s main computer control panel centred within the ship?s bridge, situated right at the very top of the vessel. How can anyone get in the damn thing without actually prising open that hatch? There was a way, but not for the humanoids to take?

The long cowl that hung before the bright blue screen had slipped back just enough as the figure tilted its head back so that the light touched both the healthy coloured cheeks and lips of the shrouded one?s face.

A horrible buzzing sound that echoed all around ? flying; and hidden above the cowled one's head in a hurricane that reacted violently to the horrible noise screaming throughout the ship?s chassis all because of three, simple, knocks.

Like someone had shaken a bee's nest, and inside, the bee's buzzed angrily.

It wasn?t because the ship was small ? or that the man outside knocked hard enough to send the vibrations throughout the buried derelict, it was all because the creatures inside had an excellent sense of hearing perception.

?Aiyyyyyyyackkcck!? ? Came a chorus of ear-splitting screeches from somewhere over that cloaked shoulder, but the darkness hid them. There was however the noise of many legs scuttling about sneakily ? the click of mandibles opening and closing, and the noise of drool smacking against the cold hard metal ground.

?The Intruder will not enter the ship.?

?AIIIIIIIIEEEE!-CCCK!?

?They must not discover the nest. They will capture me ? study me. They must not know. They will kill the Swarm. Kill him. We, must, survive.?

?Ckt-ckckckck??

__________________________________

That feeling of being watched? It only intensified. Like the hidden eyes had become a lot closer ? so close in fact that it felt like they were right behind him?

Just beside his feet two antennae emerged from the ground gingerly poking around. It felt the ground about his feet thus causing enough movement of the sand particles to create a loud enough shuffle to become noticed.

But then seconds later the first move had been struck... And it wasn't none too friendly either...

Directly behind him the entire six-foot body of the creature erupted from under the ground spraying sand all about them in the process of revealing itself, lowering visibility for a few moments as it rised to stand upon all six legs, ready to pounce.

It was without question that the alien creature resembled much like the common Terran Insect - the Ant, with several distinct differences. The obvious one being that it is damn big, the second being that it?s protective exoskeleton was of a cream shade that outrivaled most synthetic armours in sheer physical toughness, the third being that the structure of the Ant-like creature?s body should normally comprise of three ?sections,? in this case it had four. The fourth bodily section held a set of large semi-transparent wings that resembled the common fly yet with an odd shade that shimmered and shinned of all the colours of the human spectrum, which in itself almost appeared like a dragonfly's colouration.

Its mighty mandibles opened wide, locking into place as the fountain of drool splat in front of its face towards the man standing directly in front of the only physical human method of entrance into the Swarm?s nest.

The saliva splat towards the man was harmless enough ? if anything it smelt bad, and had a sort of a snot green-tinge to it. The oversized bug didn?t attack just yet, instead with the mentality of an animal defending its young it tried scare tactics first, and screeched at him, trying to make itself look big - rearing back on the hind two sets of legs.

The screech was quite loud, quite annoying and smelt quite horrible too.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-14 21:02 EST
Giant.

Man-eating.

Insect.

Let me repeat that.

GIANT.

MAN-EATING.

INSECT!

Okay, so maybe I was inferring the ?man-eating? part, but still. Giant insects? I don?t like regular, tiny, burrow-into-your-ear-and-eat-your-brains insects, let alone gigantic burrow-into-your-apartment-complex-and-devour-your -labradoodle insects. This was definitely not what I was hoping to find out here.

Not hoping. Expecting is a whole ?nother story. On the list of things I expected to find out here, giant insects were somewhere above Elvis and somewhere below ?lots of sand.? Don?t get me wrong. Giant insects, man-eating or otherwise, are always surprising. They?re just not as surprising the third or fourth time around.

So when the huge pale ant thing reared up on its proportionately spindly legs - had to wonder what kind of exoskeleton the thing had if it could support that massive body on such thing legs - I managed to keep from doing something stupid like shoot the thing. Or wet myself.

Instead, I brought my empty hands up to my head and took two careful and very broad steps backwards, trying to stay out of the range of its mandibles. I didn?t like the looks of them, and I especially didn?t like the over-frigging-whelming STINK wafting from the thing?s disgusting drool. I could only hope it wasn?t poisonous or acidic or mutagenic or any of the other lovely little traits that nature and genetic engineering tend to put into monster spit.

That it would even bother to go onto its hind legs suggested to me that it wasn?t exactly an immediate and deadly threat, but that?s not the kind of hunch I like to go on. When faced with a giant and possibly man-eating insect, assuming it?s just trying to scare you off is a sure way to wind up on the business end of a set of mandibles.

So I kept my distance, but I kept my eyes on the thing too. I didn?t want to seem like I was turning tail and running, either. For all I knew I could trigger some biological imperative in the thing to chase down its prey. Plenty of animals out there that?ll be nice and docile as long as you aren?t afraid of them, but the minute you start sprinting away from them something just snaps in their animal brains and suddenly you?re guest starring on Wild Kingdom, and lemme tell you, it?s NOT a recurring role.

I couldn?t run, but I wasn?t going to let myself get too close either. That left me with one option. Sometimes it?s a great option. Sometimes it?s one step above letting myself get eviscerated.

I talked to it.

?Uh...Take me to your leader??

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2007-12-14 21:11 EST
It would be normal for most alien creatures to go right down to the disembowelling and the dismemberment and the impregnation and the list of other horrible ways to kill a humanoid, but instead by a simple amount of unexpectedness, the mandibles closed? And it drew back down to all of its legs? Yet it came closer? Those ?elbowed? antennae reached slowly forward ? and as thick as body builder arms started to ?feel him up? in ways which could have been classed as sexual harassment.

It prodded.

It even had time to prod him several times on the chest with them.

Turning its head left, then right, then back at the man ? did it really understand him? Did it really have the capacity to understand the human speech? Perhaps, perhaps not?

But the sudden change certainly suggested that something else was controlling it. But how can it? There was no way something could transmit a message through all of that metal housing and various electronic equipment?

It took a few scuttling steps back, its wings fluttering several times as to stretch and work out the kinks in the exoskeleton?s swivelling joints?

And so the awkward tension, begun?

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-14 21:38 EST
Have you ever tried to stand still while a giant ant sexually harasses you? It?s not easy, nor is it fun. Giant insects and sexual molestation are the kind of thing best left to bad anime, not my life. Yet there I was, standing in the middle of a desert, half-cloaked in bright green and pink cloth, and trying to maintain my manly composure while this thing frisked me.

At least I hoped it was frisking me and not just flirting with me. Flattering as it might be, I?m not into girls with bug-eyes, let alone actual bugs.

Still, there was no real sense of deadly malice coming off the thing. If anything there was no real sense of, well...Anything. It didn?t really feel like it was an animal sniffing out an intruder. It felt like it was...

A puppet. A robot, maybe. That would be just my luck. Not just a giant insect, but a giant ROBOT insect.

I closed my eyes while it did its whole frisking thing, and tried to get through all the refracting interference I could feel all around me. There was some element in the sand that was scattering energy like a disco ball, and it was giving me a headache to try and sort it all out. But there did feel like there was something there. Something faint, but sturdy all the same. I opened my eyes.

The ant had moved back, and it was working its shiny, gossamer wings several times a second, fluttering them at a speed that definitely seemed like it could be enough to get thing airborne. That?s right: giant flying man-eating robot insect. It was starting to stack up.

But I had the sense of something now, and I wasn?t about to let it go. This thing wasn?t entirely in control of its own actions. Either that or it was far more intelligent than it looked. It just stood, antennae wiggling at me, as if it were waiting for me to make the next move.

I tried another tried and true line. One that was a classic for a reason. It?s right there in the First Contact handbook.

?Don?t worry,? I said, hands still up by my head. ?I come in peace.?

If that didn?t work, I was going to ask if it needed to phone home. Then I?d be all out of cliches, and I?d have to start coming up with my own ideas.

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2007-12-17 15:03 EST
?Youuuuuuz willzzz stateezzz yoooouuur bizneszz!" The Ant creature?s mandibles rattled as the monotonous near static Psionic ?voice? echoed outwards in a single omnidirectional pulse, it even had the power to rattle the sand particles off from its exoskeleton.

?Szzztate it!? It boomed, reaffirming its demand with a single long six-legged stride closer. Meanwhile the antennae seemed quite distracted at the prey and twitched and rose into the hot dry air to taste the Desert?s atmosphere? A sand storm was coming. It could sense it drawing closer. So, discarding its previous demand before the other could speak, it looked away then back towards the man in a single whip of its head, ?Youuuu. Muuzzzzt. Leaaavvvve!"

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-18 19:41 EST
"Leave?" I asked. "But I didn't get to state my...biz...ness..."

My words trailed off and I turned around. All thoughts of the giant bug (okay, not all thoughts, it's a giant bug, for pete's sake!) slipped from my mind. I could hear it. I could smell it.

And damn it, I could feel it.

You know what a sandstorm does to the levels of static electricity in the surrounding area? It does a lot. Enough that it could seriously put a strain on me, and that's not even thinking about how much fun it'll be to be dispersing that kind of energy while my skin is being flayed off, re-grown, and flayed off again. I needed shelter, and I needed it fast.

Well the bug had to have come from somewhere. I turned and took a step towards the thing.

"There's no leaving," I said to it, then pointed off into the distance. "I can't outrun that. I don't think you can either. So I guess you're either going to show me how to get in this...thing...or we're both about to get sandblasted."

I hoped it could understand me. I hoped it knew a way out of this.

And I really hoped this wasn't one of those hive mind dealies where this thing was the bug equivalent of a fingernail.

Dammit. I hate regrowing skin.

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2007-12-21 16:24 EST
The bug tilted its head, almost questioning the man if he was actually serious? True, the sandstorm could do quote the damage to its exoskeleton ? but even then, it could easily survive by simply?

As it scuttled back and turns its body away, it reared back on its hind legs once more ? pushing itself up to survey the scenery, almost looking for the offending freak of nature. It stopped and stared at something that was coming fast from the distant horizon, and it turned back to the man?

?Theeeeereezz nooo wayzz inn foooooorrr youuuuuuu-za!?

Aside from the obvious exposed hatch which was sort of welded shut.

It took the main entrance which, just so happened to be underground ? and just as easily it appeared it dove into the sand like it was water. The last thing seen of it was its wiggling body burrowing down, the fragile sand caving in on the tunnel made.

Looks like the visitor had been left there to be flayed by the sands.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2007-12-21 23:03 EST
?Theeeeereezz nooo wayzz inn foooooorrr youuuuuuu-za!? the thing hissed at me, and then suddenly turned and burrowed smoothly into the sand. For such a big bug, it sure could move. The sand was sliding in to cover its tracks in hardly an eye-blink. It would only take a few seconds for the sand to settle enough so that a soft, pink, bipedal mutant would have a hell of a time burrowing.

That left me with about half a second to make a very important decision. Did I stand outside and go through the delightful process of regrowing skin while in a full blown energy psychosis? Did I whip out my phaser and jack that bad boy up to level sixteen and show these bugs just how meaningless a metal weld was against forty-five terajoules of phased energy? Or did I take a deep breath, dive into the hot sand, and hope like hell I could follow the bug's trail?

Option one was out for obvious reasons. Option two was feasible, but could very well get me into hot water with the giant talking bugs that might be inside that thing. Option three, was, well, unfeasible. I can hold my breath for a heck of a long time. What I can't do is swim through sand, let alone a few million tons of it.

So I chose secret option number four. I pulled out my phaser, set it to just above stun level settings, and pointed it straight at the spot where the ant had disappeared.

The crimson beam shot out of the phaser in a flash. At first I got nothing but a lot of sizzling, smoke, and surprisingly enough, a little bit of steam. Once the steam started to dissipate, I bumped up to level four.

You get all kinds of interesting effects when you pull this little stunt. At the first stage you're melting the sand into glass. Then you kick the power output up by a few terajoules and suddenly you start vaporizing the melted glass in a perfect cylinder. Bump the phaser up to level five at the right moment...

And bingo. Instant tunnel.

Just hope it's not that long a way down.

Queen of the Swarm

Date: 2008-01-08 17:20 EST
(Sorry for length of no reply!)

The way down was exactly that. A long way down? The heat itself would send the sand into glass and, luckily for him, it would slope. Like one large slide it would disappear into the darkness. Where would it end? Would it simply hit the side of the hull? Would he splat against it?

No. It led right into the Engineering, where the Warp Core still buzzed and fluxed. It was a shame, really, for the darkness spread there too save for the plasma curling in its ethereal mist, trapped in the confines of the metallic tubing.

Bodies littered the ground? Dressed in tattered Star Fleet Uniforms? They simply died during impact ? smashed skulls, broken necks, backs, battered bodies although some appeared to be ripped limb from limb?

No doubt the work of someone, or something.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2008-01-08 17:51 EST
Falling at a twenty-degree angle down a tube of recently-molten glass was not half as fun as it sounds on the surface, so that gives you some idea of just how painful it actually is. By the time my long tumble was over and I went crashing into something sturdy and metallic, I had lost a good two-thirds of my makeshift cloak as it singed away to ash.

I also managed to smack my head against the aforementioned metallic thing, resulting in a not-so-stealthy *CLANG* that echoed throughout the chamber I'd found myself in.

It took me a moment to gather my wits about me. I blinked a few times in the darkness and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. I inhaled slowly through my nose and snorted slightly at the decaying smell of death all around me. My eyes had adjusted enough to be able to see the golden reflection of a standard combadge on one of the corpses nearby.

Starfleet. Funny, I hadn't heard of any ship like this that was supposed to be out here. Then again, that nebula up there had a funny way of sucking in all kinds of ships that shouldn't be allowed. For all I knew this ship might be from a different reality than the one I was familiar with.

The other scents I was picking up seemed to add to that hypothesis. I could smell bugs. Lots of bugs. And as I closed my eyes and let my sense of self flow outward, I could feel more than that too.

These bugs were alive. And if I was judging things correctly, that spot where they were all gathering was probably where I needed to be if I wanted to talk to whoever - or maybe whatever - was in charge.

So I pried open one of the doors to a Jeffrey's tube and got to crawling, and tried really, REALLY hard not to think about what a giant termite would look like.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2009-01-20 19:22 EST
Here's something you gotta remember. Starfleet vessels are not made for deep sea diving. They aren't made to land on planet surfaces. They aren't made to withstand multiple G's of force, and they sure as hell aren't made to sit with a few thousand tons of sand and rock all over the hull. Guess what happens when the structural integrity field completely shuts down and the only thing holding back the desert is some duranium plating?

That's right. The whole goddamn motherf*cking craphole of a ship collapses in on itself, leaving morons like myself to wonder if he'll suffocate or be crushed to death.

Hey, on the plus side, at least there's no more bugs to worry about, am I right? That's worth being buried alive for a thousand years, right?

"Hey, Dolus, do me a favor? Go check out this weird thing in the desert. Shouldn't take more than a few days."

"No prob, Wolvie, my man! I'll be back in a jiffy!"

Oh how naive I was back then. Sometimes, as I'm stuck motionlessly in the dark and suffocating embrace of a few metric assloads of sand, I think back fondly to those good old days when I used to worry about things like getting shot in the head or having my brain melted by omnipotent beings.

I should have known it would be the sand that finally got me. As far back as I can remember, it was always sand. The kid who used to pick on me in school? Sandy. The first food I almost choked on? A sandwich. First girl who ever lit my apartment on fire? Sandra. Substance filling the hourglass that reminded me that my time in this universe is finite, thus triggering an epiphany that led to me spending an ill-advised two years as a tumbler for a Chinese circus?

You guessed it: sand.

Oh, it was diabolical. But now I was onto its game. I knew what the truth was. Sand was out to get me. It was in my lungs. It was in my eyes. It was crushing down all around me. A million tons of it, a billion tons of it, an entire universe of sand weighing down against an adamantium endoskeleton and a goddamn healing factor that WON'T JUST LET ME F*CKING DIE ALREADY!

Oh. Wait.

I think I just wiggled a toe.

No, wait, it was just my toe re-atrophying for the thousandth time. Funny thing about healing factors and being buried alive by an entire desert. You atrophy, you heal, you atrophy again. You suffocate, your heart stops, your heart starts up again.

Lucky me, there's just enough static charge in all this sand to provide me with enough energy to let my body power my healing factor.

I think I've forgotten what it was like to breathe. I figure it has to be like surfing. You ever surfed? You get on the board, you paddle out to the big breakers, and then when you catch one you just inhale that puppy as you ride it all the way to shore...

And then slam into a beach full of SAND.

Sand. The indomitable enemy. Giving me just enough to keep me alive so it could torture me. How many times did I pass out? How long have I been here? Days? Weeks?

Millenia?

And all I get from this sand is static. All I get is enough to keep the brain alive. It's such crap.

Stupid sand! Don't you know it's not scientifically possible for there to be enough static charge in you to keep me alive for millions of years when my lungs are filled with sand? Why don't you crack a book for once in your life, sand? You make me sick.

Stupid sand and it's stupid scientific impossibilities.

Heeeeeey.

Hang on a second. You know, sand doesn't really have that much of a static charge to it. So how am I still alive, anyway? It doesn't make any sense. The sand has it all wrong. The sand screwed up! The sand doesn't know what it's talking about anymore!

There goes my toe atrophying again. Boy that's getting annoying. I can only stand that for a few thousand more times before it really just drives me crazy. I'll bet my toe is in cahoots with the sand. The both of them trying to drive me out of my mind with impossible things and atrophying.

Oh, I'll get you someday, my big left toe. Or should I call you by your true name?

BENEDICT ARNOLD!

Gah! There it goes again, all twitchy and annoying. Oh, I'm gonna get it, one day.

You know they hang traitors, right? Someday I'm going to hang my twitchy toe. That's what happens to collaborators. That's what happens to traitors who twitch every five seconds for ten thousand years while I'm trapped in a desert and there are bug corpses probably smushed up in the sand all around me.

"Hey, Dolus, do me a favor?"

Oh, wait. I already flashed back to that. That's a good idea, though. Let's recap the situation.

Me: trapped under an entire desert's worth of sand. It's dark. It's cold. Can't breathe. Can't move.

Sand: My mortal enemy.

Big Left Toe: Traitor to the cause.

Bugs: Squished.

Starships: Not submarines.

Me: Still trapped under an entire desert's worth of sand. Still can't move.

Big Left Toe: Still twitching.

Me: Still trapped under an entire desert's worth of sand.

Big Left Toe: Still twitching.

Me: Still trapped under an entire desert's worth of sand. Still can't move. Totally impossible to move. Too much sand on top of me.

Big Lef--

Now how do you suppose my big left toe is twitching if it's impossible for me to move? Could it be related to how I'm absorbing enough ambient energy to stay alive?

Oh. I get it now. My toe's not twitching. My toe's not atrophying. My toe is absorbing energy. My toe is sucking up the ridiculous amount of joules that's all stuck up inside that almost dead Warp Core from the starship.

I don't have just enough energy to stay alive. I have enough energy to travel faster than the speed of light! I have enough energy to create a static warp shell and move through subspace! I have enough energy to defeat my arch enemy...SAND!

Power exploded from my every pore. Pure annihiliation exploded out from me as I let loose the incredible amount of energy I had absorbed in my thousands and millions of years living as a captive to the evil sand. In half a second, I was rocketed up through miles and miles of sand. My flesh was shearing off of me like sheep's wool.

Also, sand was getting in my eyes. Boy oh boy that stings!

Up and up and up I went, fueled by the power of an antimatter-based warp core. My body was ground down to hardly more than a brain in a skull thanks to the sand tearing at me, but I didn't care. As my old pal Captain Planet once said...THE POWER, WAS MINE!

I'm paraphrasing there, of course. It's also very possible Captain Planet was a cartoon. Unless I'm thinking of Thomas Jefferson. One of those guys is a cartoon. That much I know.

I don't know when I finally burst out of the desert floor. I think I probably lost consciousness somewhere during the whole getting-flayed-alive-by-sand thing, but I do know that eventually I woke up.

Of course, I was about two thousand feet in the air by then. Seems that once I started expending all that stored energy, it kind of didn't want to stop. Lucky me that I ran out of juice before reaching escape velocity, am I right?

WHUMP.

I landed right back in the sand. Only this time I wasn't buried in it so much as I had cratered it. The impact from the fall made me pass out again, and I woke up right in the middle of my eyeballs growing back. The first thing I saw was sand.

"Get away from me!" I screamed at it, pushing myself up on unsteady arms and legs. I hadn't quite gotten around to getting my skin back, but you know what, I wasn't waiting around for something that inconsequential. I had to get out of here before the sand got me again.

I picked a direction and started running.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2009-02-16 22:28 EST
I'm not really sure where I ran out of juice. The desert's a big place, and the sun's a great charger, but with the kind of power I was using it didn't take too long before I did a face-plant.

Wherever I was, it wasn't technically a desert anymore. I had that much figured out. See, when I found myself lying face first in a very murky, very brown, very liquid pool of water, that's when I started to put two and two together. Definitely not a desert.

Oh. Also not a place where I can breathe.

I yanked my head back and sucked in a great lungful of air. That proved to be a mistake, because the air wasn't so much airy as it was fecal. I don't know if you've ever been desperate for air at the same time as you were gagging from the stench of animal poo, but for your sake I hope you haven't been. On the list of things that are fun, it ranks somewhere below "not."

"Grrkk! Kkackk! Snarrkkk!" I said observantly. My stomach was doing its best to empty itself into the pool of brown murky please-don't-let-me-find-out-what-it-actually-was water I had just been soaking in. Other than a throatful of the brown water, there wasn't anything in my stomach to empty, so I spent the next thirty seconds or so dry-heaving, my face a good four inches from the disgusting pool.

I was somewhere in the please-kill-me stage when a voice distracted me from my fruitless convulsing.

"Oi! Whozzere an' whut's all this?"

I straightened my back and turned in the direction of the voice. My stomach tried to eject itself out of my esophagus, but I managed to clamp it down.

"What?" It wasn't that my voice was froglike. It was that my croaking was human-like.

"Whatchoo finkin' of, drinkin' from me swag 'ole, eh?"

"Madam," I said in between an acidic burp. "I'm sure I have no idea."

The rotund old hag waddled over to me, her great bushy beard covered in tiny flecks of spittle. Her mud-covered leather boots sank into the ground a few inches as she stood over me.

"Who's you 'ferrin' to azza madam there, boyo? I's ol' Sam o' the Soups, an' if I's o' the femine per-swayzeeon, then I's like ta be the ugliest lass whut's e'er been laid eyes upon, ain't it so?"

I blinked at the woman. "Are you seriously talking like that, or am I still goofballing off of UVs?"

"Ain't ne'er spoked no way ofer'n dis here, I says."

"Just checking," I said, and then fell backwards into a small patch of grass. The overwhelming stink of stinkiness continued to stink at me from all angles, but I decided to ignore it for the time being. Not being in the desert was, for the time being, worth the awful smell.

Old Sam of the Soups peered down at me. "Why's you ain't a stitch ta yer hide there, boyo?"

"Huh?"

His disgusting boot nudged the bare flesh of my abdomen. "Yer willer's out fer a howdyado, as iz the rest o' yer shame."

I frowned and looked down. "Shame? Really? I've never had any complaints."

"Thassa 'nother way ta figure I ain't a lass there, boyo. Femine types ain't like ta hurt a man's feelin's none."

I waved a dismissive hand in front of my face, then sputtered as the disgusting stench wafted over me because of it. When I recovered I said, "I'm just a little cold, that's all."

"A likely tale indeed."

Growling, I rolled over onto my front before pushing myself up to a kneeling position. I glared up at Sam's chubby face. It was all red and pockmarked where it wasn't covered with facial hair, and his eyes were two black beads set deep in his skull. Those two beads stared right back at me.

"Look, Sam. I didn't come here to talk about the particulars of the male body image. All I know is that somebody here claimed to be a man of soups, and yet I've been here for a good three minutes and I haven't seen a single soup. Now either you give me some soup or I'm going to have to declare your of-the-soup title to be null and void."

Sam pursed his lips, causing his beard to bristle out in front of me as he leaned in close. His breath was a slight improvement over the stink all around me, but only just.

"An' who're you ta 'voke me rightful title, flappin' about with yer willer an' frightin' me hogs with yer snorkin' and snarkin'. A man whut ain't got a shirt for his back's about ta tell me my trades, iz he?"

"Hey!" I said, pointing an angry finger at him. "First of all, I don't know what you're implying with your hogs, but I haven't seen any hogs in months and I sure as hell didn't snork or snark with any of them. Second of all, just because a man's got no clothes doesn't mean he's not still the same man he used to be. And third of all, the man I used to be is the man I still am today, which is an Admiral. I've got a ship and everything, and if you don't give me some goddamned soup, I will bombard you from orbit with so much firepower you'll think it's the Fourth of July in Christmas!"

Sam appraised me skeptically for a long moment. His stubby fingers stroked at his beard before he nodded at me slowly. "It's soup yer wantin', izzit?"

"Yes, please."

"I's seven soups, but only four fer strangefellers. Of them four, two'd kill a man whut ain't got the guts for it. Of the others, only one's a proper soup ta be et wif a spoon an' bowl. Is got onions innit. An' water."

"Onion soup?"

I looked around then, finally taking in the area. I was on what looked to be a small farm, and judging from the four fat pigs that were huddled against the corner of a rickety wooden fence that had me surrounded, I was in a pig pen. Off to my left was a small field of onions, and off to my right was a tiny wooden cabin.

"I didn't touch your hogs," I said. "I swear. And if you would give me a bowl of onion soup, I can pretty much guarantee that we'll be friends forever."

Old Sam of the Soups's beady black eyes looked me up and down.

"You'll be wearin' me sonny's tunic an' a proper pair o' britches ifn' yer ta sit at the table o' ol' Sam of the Soups."

"Your sonny? Your son?"

"Aye, thass the one."

"Sure. Just as long as he's not wearing them at the same time."

Old Sam of the Soup grinned at me then and clapped me hard on the shoulder. "I'd shudder ta has a sight on that, boyo! Me sonny's been graved fer nigh ta be forty summers past!"

Then he started laughing. It was a full-bodied belly-laugh that had him wheezing with mirth. I didn't actually get it myself, but I've never really gotten "soup people" humor.

Still, I pretended to chuckle along with him. After all, a few hours ago I was trapped under a million tons of sand and was slowly losing my mind from energy psychosis. Now I was looking at the prospect of a bowl of onion soup and the chance to wear a dead guy's old pants.

Yup, things were definitely looking up for Dolus Gairu.

Dolus Gairu

Date: 2009-02-21 23:55 EST
It took me three days before I realized that old Sam of the Soups was out of his damn mind. I would have realized it sooner, but recovering from over a year of full-blown energy psychosis took longer to recover from than I would have thought.

See, the thing is, I've got this power. My body can absorb, alter, redirect, and reconstitute energy. Been able to do it since I was a kid. It's what makes me a mutant.

The problem is the side effects. I can hold a pretty good amount of energy with no problems, but once I start getting into the double-digit gigajoules, things start to go squirrelly. My mind starts to break down, and before I don't know it, I'm babbling about invisible goblins and trying to pry the CIA radio transmitter out of my teeth. The more energy I get, the harder it is to stay in control.

You know how much energy a leaking warp-core puts out? Somewhere between an ass-load and a sh*t-ton, that's how much. I'd just spent over a year trapped under a few thousand tons of sand with enough energy to shatter Relativistic Physics flowing through my brain. That's not the kind of thing I can recover from in a day.

So I spent a couple of days with ol' Sam of the Soups. Sam, as I've mentioned, was a nutter. The guy was an onion and pig farmer, although I don't know why he kept the pigs around. He didn't eat them and he didn't sell them. He lived on a steady diet of onion soup, and he definitely smelled like it.

But Sam wasn't completely useless. Turns out that what Sam called soups, other people might call potions. Magic potions.

I know, I know. Magic? Really? Well let me tell you, as an intimate student of all forms of energy, magic is some heavy-duty stuff. And this place is swimming with it.

And I don't mean ol' Sam of the Soups' hut. I mean the whole damn planet. Maybe even this whole universe, cause I'm not entirely sure this is actually my universe.

Those kind of distinctions start to fade away as one approaches the multi-faceted aspects of cross-dimensional spatial relation. Go far enough and fast enough in one direction and you'll eventually reach the end of the universe. So what happens then? You skip over into the next universe, which, depending on your point of view, could then be considered a part of the universe you just came from. It's a whole perspective thing.

It's kind of like the definition of linear time when time-traveling. One's personal timeline becomes a separate entity, unique and apart from the shared timelines of one's origin. Ask Wolvie about it sometime. The guy'll talk your ear off about personal timelines and sub-spatial chronotons interacting with hooblydobblywhatsief*cks, or something like that. He knows time. Me? I stick with space.

The point is that this place, wherever it is, is full of magic. And this crazy guy living in the middle of nowhere on this twisted little sphere of magic turned out to be more than just a crazy old hermit. He could make with the potions, and after listening to me babble on about shadow people and gremlins for three days, he finally sat me down and force-fed me a bowl of the foulest tasting soup I have ever supped.

I don't know what was in it, but I could feel the little tendrils of magic seeping across my throat and into my skull as I swallowed it. Before long all that excess energy was just draining out of me like he'd fed me an energy-laxative.

Pleasant image, I know.

But there's kind of a problem. Thermodynamics 101. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. So when a crazy universe-hopping mutant Starfleet officer with a year's worth of matter/anti-matter reactions stored in his brain needs to get rid of energy, what happens? You think it just dissipates out into thin air?

Nope. It gets blasted out.

And no, you sick sicko, it doesn't get blasted out bathroom style. I can direct the energy out of any part of me that I want. Hands are the preferred conduit, although I've been known to use my eyes when I want to show off. That hurts like hell though, and has the pleasant side effect of temporarily blinding me.

So! The situation is thus:

Me: Brimming with power and mad as a hatter on acid.

Sam: Of the soups.

Magic: Forceably ejecting energy from my body.

Energy: Gotta go someplace.

So I kind of blew up his hut.

Look, it's not like I meant to. I had a couple-megaton blast in the chamber and it had to go somewhere. It's not like I actually directed it at him. I shot it into the sky. It's just that the sky was kind of blocked by the ceiling, and the blastback kind of blew the walls out and splintered most of his furniture. It also managed to give him a pretty bad sunburn and bleach most of his hair.

Hey, my bad.

But at least afterwards I could actually think again. For the first time in over a year, my thoughts were back to being only slightly nutty. I was filthy, I was wearing a dead guy's old clothes, I had crazy-beard, and I smelled like onions, but at least I could think again.

A year. Jumpin' jellybeans, it just finally hit me. A year. What the hell's been going on while I was gone? The whole reason I was even on Rhy'Din was because Wolvie said he needed some help. It wasn't exactly the first time I'd disappeared for a year or so at a time, but I hoped he didn't think I'd just abandoned him.

Oh crap, the Locust! Man, I hoped there hadn't been any malfunctions since I'd been gone.

I had a lot to do.

***

"Aye, there's lookin' sturdy then, isn't it?" Sam remarked, nodding thoughtfully to himself as he looked at his new hut. It had taken me about a week to build the thing, with a little assistance from Sam in the form of free bowls of onion soup. Sam had taken the destruction of his house in stride, saying, "Ah, ain't a worry fer that. I lives where I oughtta an' ain't a place else."

I had no clue what that meant, but I decided that Sam was the kind of guy who rolled with the punches. But since I was the guy who'd blown up his house, and since Sam's potion had managed to clear out my system of excess energy, I definitely owed him. His new hut was twice the size of the old one. The planks of wood that were the bread and butter of its construction were actually sized properly and fit snugly, providing him with actual insulation. All in all, he was probably better off with the new place.

"You like it?" I asked, nudging one wall with the toe of my borrowed and ratty boot.

"Aye, izza right decent hoot, that."

"A hoot and a half," I replied with a wry grin. I hefted my makeshift bag over my shoulders and glanced off to the distance. I could just make out the haze of Rhy'din's (the city, not the planet) smog over the horizon. If I started walking, I might be back in a day or two. "Anything else I can do for you before I go, Sam?"

Ol' Sam of the Soups shook his head. "Ya best ta trot off'n see ta yer bid'ness whut's needed doin'," he said. He clapped me on the back and shoved me in the direction of the city. "Off'n ya, then."

"All right, Sam. Thanks."

"'Course, 'course."

I shook his hand before I left. It was solid and it was real. He was a fat old man who smelled like onions. He fed me, he purged me, and he didn't hate me for blowing up his house.

So I was just a little surprised when his hut, his farm, his onions, and all of his pigs disappeared after I was fifty paces away.

A little surprised, but not too much. That's magic for you. Maybe I'd see Sam again someday, but I doubted it. The universe, whatever it was and however it was perceived, didn't really work like that.

The mystery of the southern desert was over. A bunch of bugs were entombed in a dead starship under the sand. It wasn't exactly Columbo. Now it was time to move onto something new.

Like getting back to Rhy'Din, taking a shower, and never eating onions again for the rest of my natural life.

End - Mystery of the Southern Desert