Purr
Kaerri's Man. =)
(Part 1 of 2)
The American highway belonged to Ylva!
In her very first solo drive in the former United States, Ylva cruised down the American highway, windows down, moonroof open, in a brand-new black GMC Yukon SUV with yellow UEG plates. There was kind of a freedom in it really, flying down a lonely highway in a United Earth Government-owned vehicle with tinted glass. No one but the most-daring highway patrol officer would pull a vehicle like this over and she knew it! Ylva had begun her cloudy morning drive from Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia). In order for Ylva to complete her ASC training, she had been assigned a few courses in the former United States and had been in-country for about half a year studying and updating her technical skills. Now that her education was complete, she had received orders to report for duty to Eglin ASC base in the Florida "Panhandle" (northwest Florida near Alabama and Georgia). The Army of the Southern Cross had requisitioned her this nice, classy SUV to make the easy trek with.
Interstate 95 and her destiny were hers, at least for a little while. Meanwhile, this played on the radio.
Things happen during long drives and Ylva believed she still had a few hours left in hers. One such thing involved an unexpected call on her smartphone. While in Florida, driving while using a smartphone was illegal and Ylva knew this, but in the life of an ASC Technical Officer, phone calls could mean orders. So, she glanced at the phone and saw a number her smartphone recognized... as phone-spam. Even in post-holocaust Earth, there were damned scammers trying to scam. Ylva took the turn off the highway, replaced the phone, and cruised on. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Except Ylva could not know that by taking her eyes off of the road she had taken the wrong turn off of Interstate 95 and into completely unknown Floridian territory.
Ylva drove on for some time when she finally realized that she was not seeing the signs to Interstate 10 that she was hoping to see. In fact, she wasn't seeing very many road signs at all. Perhaps part of her wanted to turn back, but the friendly voice on the radio had earlier reported signs of thunderstorms in the area (there had been a tornado that had blasted through Florida very recently and things were still a little crazy in this region - not that Ylva had any firsthand experiences with those in Sweden). Oh, for Google Maps and the technology humanity had prior to the coming of the Zentraedi! But those days were gone. The Rain of Death had seen to that.
Ylva's first sign of trouble was the black smoke rising from where there should have been no smoke at all. Ylva knew black-colored smoke likely meant something synthetic was burning. A vehicle or building perhaps. As she slowed to a cautious roll across the road, she saw something completely unexpected - the burning remains of what was once likely a car. Twisted silvery pieces of wreckage were scattered about in all directions. A burning tire roasted on the road, her only company. Ylva knew this vehicle had just been hit by something that caused Mega-damage! Ylva had no Mega-damage gear on her of any kind (she was to receive her armor and gear at Eglin). Even the vehicle she was driving was of the non-Mega-damage variety. It seemed to be an excellent time to hit the gas and get out of there... except ...
... that was when Ylva saw the bodies.
In Ylva's hesitation in that single moment, she changed the course of her own cosmic destiny.
Three giant bodies of Zentraedi lie in death, their sickly, malnourished faces identifying each of them as Malcontents, the male Zentraedi still loyal to Lord Dolza who had nearly succeeded in destroying Earth during the event everyone knew as the Rain of Death. An enormous Mk. VIII particle rifle lay beside each corpse, badly-maintained and silent. This discovery was incomprehensible! According to the military and the media, the nearest Malcontents were in Arkansas, not so far east in Florida! But Ylva's eyes discovered something stranger, more unexpected than all of this.
She saw a huge smoking burn-hole through the face and helmet of one of the Malcontents.
The horror-stricken expression of the Zentraedi told all - this grunt had seen something that had shocked him to his soldier core - and what could take a Malcontent by surprise? The scientific brain that Ylva possessed immediately began correlating facts. For facts, evidence, and understanding were the bridges to the betterment of humankind, however battered the Earth was. Ylva reasoned that the hole could not have been caused by missiles (which would have detonated and therefore caused a much-different injury) nor the fires of, say, a Tomahawk destroid (those flamethrowers were not nearly so powerful as to blow a single hole clean through a Zentraedi helmet, skull, and helmet again!). Even moreso, Ylva knew that the battle armor used by the Malcontents was fire-resistant. Mega-damage fires only harmed it half as much.
A closer look revealed the second corpse was not so much killed by a fire-blast through the skull but was decapitated by fire! Not far away, the third still corpse revealed some of its own ghastly evidence to Ylva. His head and helmet had been crushed inwards, blunt trauma to be sure, but smashed in all the way to the neck! Beside it, two halves of a particle beam rifle lay crackling in the dirt.
Then Ylva realized... she had stopped the SUV in the middle of the empty road in the middle of Florida-nowhere to attempt to gather and digest this hideous, seemingly-impossible scene. She could not hear the radio or the engine running or the air conditioner blowing. The questions increased. What in the universe had killed these enemies of humankind? For Ylva, the answer was - nothing in the Army of the Southern Cross nor Robotech Defense Force nor the Malcontents known armories! Something else did this. And very recently! But... what?
That was when she realized she was not alone. She heard movement. Up in the trees. Flocks of crows, their black wings flapping, were gathering. Waiting. Expecting.
Ylva turned her head and to her left, she saw a giant rise from among the trees. No, not the familiar sight of another emaciated Malcontent trooper with his ugly rifle at the ready, but something perhaps no human of her time had yet seen - a Zentraedi of a different breed altogether! This healthy-looking, well-fed warrior stood with a straight back and shoulders square. He stood some 40 feet in height and wore a strange armor the color of blood that seemed molded to his body. Ylva's education in Zentraedi lore told her nothing about this!
In one hand, the warrior held a massive pistol. A massive smoking pistol. Ylva could reasonably surmise now that this was the plasma-based weapon that had torn through the Malcontents' fire-resistant armor as if it were hardly there. Evidence strongly suggested this warrior had killed his fellow Zentraedi! All logic clashed in Ylva's education as her mind told her that the only Zentraedi left were the Malcontents also known as "Dolza-Zentraedi" who were starving, glory-hungry Malcontents littered through the world (especially Brazil and the Arkansas Protectorate) and the Breetai-Zentraedi who had willingly undergone micronization to join the human race in fighting the enemies of Earth.
The soldier before her was, very possibly, not known to the human race. It was a discovery that could change everything the ASC thought they knew!
In his other hand, the warrior hefted a strange object that resembled a warhammer. It was ringed with a fading white light like that of pure starlight. He replaced his hand cannon in his armor's strange holster that seemed to sheath itself around the barrel of the gun. He drew forth a cloth and cleaned his warhammer of fresh gore, very likely from the third Malcontent. He stood looking down, grinning, as if his attention were on something or someone else. Then he spoke a question of some kind.
And Ylva, while being highly-educated in the Zentraedi lore (and therefore understanding of their weapons, tactics, and general abilities), could not understand a single word he used. The only languages Ylva knew were her native Swedish tongue and English.
Suddenly, there was a burst of movement from the trees. The crows scattered violently. She heard a sudden whispered word in English, but there was no way a voice with that kind of depth and heaviness could have come from anything human-sized! "You!" Her head spun in the opposite direction. "Micronian, you have seen too much! I will bring you to my masters!" Ylva saw the green-clad, hunger-stricken face of a fourth armored Malcontent. Then she saw a wall of white cloud expand from all around her and, belted in her SUV with the windows down, she had virtually no chance of escape. The white gas surrounded her in scant seconds. She tried to hold her breath and became woozy anyway.
The gas operated operated upon skin contact too, she realized too late. That, one of her biology instructors would have said, was cheating. Ylva swooned. She did not remember her head falling upon the steering wheel or the SUV coming to a gentle stop against a crow-less tree.
(Part 2 of 2)
When Ylva woke, it was to the sound of a man laughing, engines running from behind her, and a sky of the purest blue all about her. She was in the cockpit of a Logan veritech! The man beside her was huge - 6 inches over 6 feet (1.98 meters tall) and massively-muscled. He had the strange accent of a man from... England? She felt a large hand pat her thigh. "Heh, heh! Don't you worry, my little love muffin! You an' me? When I'm done wit' you, yer gonna tell me everything you saw back in Florida!" He was dressed in an ASC paramedic's uniform and not the standard Mega-damage mega-suit military personnel wore when piloting such aircraft.
A quick look at the controls and Ylva saw she was some 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) off the ground and falling rapidly! She had no clue where she was or how she had gotten there. It seemed only that this big brute believed she was still unconscious for aside from his beastly grin, he was paying attention solely to the Logan's instrumentation, its movements, and some kind of dogfight going on up above.
Then suddenly, the Logan shook mightily. Warning lights went off along with audible alerts from the HUD. The Logan had been seriously hit!
"Blimey!" the big man yelled and fought angrily with the controls. "Stay together, ya bleedin' hunk of junk!!"
The Logan was shuddering badly. Whatever had hit her had hit her very badly. Ylva knew the signs; this Logan, if hit again, could break up in mid-air with them inside of it. But at that moment, Ylva could have sworn she heard something or perhaps someone else. It certainly wasn't the British bruiser beside her. But what was it? The voice repeated itself and Ylva perhaps thought she had clonked her bonkers...
...for the voice was originating in her very mind!
"I am heavily-damaged. Make no attempt at transforming me."
This woke Ylva up in a way that made her grogginess disappear. The Swedish Technical Officer possessed the mental fortitude and physical condition to now take action.
Ylva could...
1. Play unconscious (keeping her eyes closed) and see what happens.
2. Understanding the Logan's controls, she could attempt to suddenly eject them both out of the Logan (upon activation, Ylva knows the ejection seats punch both pilot and co-pilot out).
3. Grab her own flight controls and attempt to take over control of the Logan.
4. Coerce this fine, outstanding gentleman into peacefully letting her go and perhaps fly her back to Florida.
5. Anything else Ylva could come up with.
What does Ylva do?
The American highway belonged to Ylva!
In her very first solo drive in the former United States, Ylva cruised down the American highway, windows down, moonroof open, in a brand-new black GMC Yukon SUV with yellow UEG plates. There was kind of a freedom in it really, flying down a lonely highway in a United Earth Government-owned vehicle with tinted glass. No one but the most-daring highway patrol officer would pull a vehicle like this over and she knew it! Ylva had begun her cloudy morning drive from Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia). In order for Ylva to complete her ASC training, she had been assigned a few courses in the former United States and had been in-country for about half a year studying and updating her technical skills. Now that her education was complete, she had received orders to report for duty to Eglin ASC base in the Florida "Panhandle" (northwest Florida near Alabama and Georgia). The Army of the Southern Cross had requisitioned her this nice, classy SUV to make the easy trek with.
Interstate 95 and her destiny were hers, at least for a little while. Meanwhile, this played on the radio.
"Neverending Love" by Roxette. A little tip of the hat here to the late and incredible Marie Fredriksson! What a voice! And this was Roxette's very first hit!
Things happen during long drives and Ylva believed she still had a few hours left in hers. One such thing involved an unexpected call on her smartphone. While in Florida, driving while using a smartphone was illegal and Ylva knew this, but in the life of an ASC Technical Officer, phone calls could mean orders. So, she glanced at the phone and saw a number her smartphone recognized... as phone-spam. Even in post-holocaust Earth, there were damned scammers trying to scam. Ylva took the turn off the highway, replaced the phone, and cruised on. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Except Ylva could not know that by taking her eyes off of the road she had taken the wrong turn off of Interstate 95 and into completely unknown Floridian territory.
Ylva drove on for some time when she finally realized that she was not seeing the signs to Interstate 10 that she was hoping to see. In fact, she wasn't seeing very many road signs at all. Perhaps part of her wanted to turn back, but the friendly voice on the radio had earlier reported signs of thunderstorms in the area (there had been a tornado that had blasted through Florida very recently and things were still a little crazy in this region - not that Ylva had any firsthand experiences with those in Sweden). Oh, for Google Maps and the technology humanity had prior to the coming of the Zentraedi! But those days were gone. The Rain of Death had seen to that.
Ylva's first sign of trouble was the black smoke rising from where there should have been no smoke at all. Ylva knew black-colored smoke likely meant something synthetic was burning. A vehicle or building perhaps. As she slowed to a cautious roll across the road, she saw something completely unexpected - the burning remains of what was once likely a car. Twisted silvery pieces of wreckage were scattered about in all directions. A burning tire roasted on the road, her only company. Ylva knew this vehicle had just been hit by something that caused Mega-damage! Ylva had no Mega-damage gear on her of any kind (she was to receive her armor and gear at Eglin). Even the vehicle she was driving was of the non-Mega-damage variety. It seemed to be an excellent time to hit the gas and get out of there... except ...
... that was when Ylva saw the bodies.
"Dog Fighter" for the movie, Macross Super Dimensional Fortress "Do You Remember Love?"
In Ylva's hesitation in that single moment, she changed the course of her own cosmic destiny.
Three giant bodies of Zentraedi lie in death, their sickly, malnourished faces identifying each of them as Malcontents, the male Zentraedi still loyal to Lord Dolza who had nearly succeeded in destroying Earth during the event everyone knew as the Rain of Death. An enormous Mk. VIII particle rifle lay beside each corpse, badly-maintained and silent. This discovery was incomprehensible! According to the military and the media, the nearest Malcontents were in Arkansas, not so far east in Florida! But Ylva's eyes discovered something stranger, more unexpected than all of this.
She saw a huge smoking burn-hole through the face and helmet of one of the Malcontents.
The horror-stricken expression of the Zentraedi told all - this grunt had seen something that had shocked him to his soldier core - and what could take a Malcontent by surprise? The scientific brain that Ylva possessed immediately began correlating facts. For facts, evidence, and understanding were the bridges to the betterment of humankind, however battered the Earth was. Ylva reasoned that the hole could not have been caused by missiles (which would have detonated and therefore caused a much-different injury) nor the fires of, say, a Tomahawk destroid (those flamethrowers were not nearly so powerful as to blow a single hole clean through a Zentraedi helmet, skull, and helmet again!). Even moreso, Ylva knew that the battle armor used by the Malcontents was fire-resistant. Mega-damage fires only harmed it half as much.
A closer look revealed the second corpse was not so much killed by a fire-blast through the skull but was decapitated by fire! Not far away, the third still corpse revealed some of its own ghastly evidence to Ylva. His head and helmet had been crushed inwards, blunt trauma to be sure, but smashed in all the way to the neck! Beside it, two halves of a particle beam rifle lay crackling in the dirt.
Then Ylva realized... she had stopped the SUV in the middle of the empty road in the middle of Florida-nowhere to attempt to gather and digest this hideous, seemingly-impossible scene. She could not hear the radio or the engine running or the air conditioner blowing. The questions increased. What in the universe had killed these enemies of humankind? For Ylva, the answer was - nothing in the Army of the Southern Cross nor Robotech Defense Force nor the Malcontents known armories! Something else did this. And very recently! But... what?
That was when she realized she was not alone. She heard movement. Up in the trees. Flocks of crows, their black wings flapping, were gathering. Waiting. Expecting.
Ylva turned her head and to her left, she saw a giant rise from among the trees. No, not the familiar sight of another emaciated Malcontent trooper with his ugly rifle at the ready, but something perhaps no human of her time had yet seen - a Zentraedi of a different breed altogether! This healthy-looking, well-fed warrior stood with a straight back and shoulders square. He stood some 40 feet in height and wore a strange armor the color of blood that seemed molded to his body. Ylva's education in Zentraedi lore told her nothing about this!
In one hand, the warrior held a massive pistol. A massive smoking pistol. Ylva could reasonably surmise now that this was the plasma-based weapon that had torn through the Malcontents' fire-resistant armor as if it were hardly there. Evidence strongly suggested this warrior had killed his fellow Zentraedi! All logic clashed in Ylva's education as her mind told her that the only Zentraedi left were the Malcontents also known as "Dolza-Zentraedi" who were starving, glory-hungry Malcontents littered through the world (especially Brazil and the Arkansas Protectorate) and the Breetai-Zentraedi who had willingly undergone micronization to join the human race in fighting the enemies of Earth.
The soldier before her was, very possibly, not known to the human race. It was a discovery that could change everything the ASC thought they knew!
In his other hand, the warrior hefted a strange object that resembled a warhammer. It was ringed with a fading white light like that of pure starlight. He replaced his hand cannon in his armor's strange holster that seemed to sheath itself around the barrel of the gun. He drew forth a cloth and cleaned his warhammer of fresh gore, very likely from the third Malcontent. He stood looking down, grinning, as if his attention were on something or someone else. Then he spoke a question of some kind.
And Ylva, while being highly-educated in the Zentraedi lore (and therefore understanding of their weapons, tactics, and general abilities), could not understand a single word he used. The only languages Ylva knew were her native Swedish tongue and English.
Suddenly, there was a burst of movement from the trees. The crows scattered violently. She heard a sudden whispered word in English, but there was no way a voice with that kind of depth and heaviness could have come from anything human-sized! "You!" Her head spun in the opposite direction. "Micronian, you have seen too much! I will bring you to my masters!" Ylva saw the green-clad, hunger-stricken face of a fourth armored Malcontent. Then she saw a wall of white cloud expand from all around her and, belted in her SUV with the windows down, she had virtually no chance of escape. The white gas surrounded her in scant seconds. She tried to hold her breath and became woozy anyway.
The gas operated operated upon skin contact too, she realized too late. That, one of her biology instructors would have said, was cheating. Ylva swooned. She did not remember her head falling upon the steering wheel or the SUV coming to a gentle stop against a crow-less tree.
* * *
(Part 2 of 2)
When Ylva woke, it was to the sound of a man laughing, engines running from behind her, and a sky of the purest blue all about her. She was in the cockpit of a Logan veritech! The man beside her was huge - 6 inches over 6 feet (1.98 meters tall) and massively-muscled. He had the strange accent of a man from... England? She felt a large hand pat her thigh. "Heh, heh! Don't you worry, my little love muffin! You an' me? When I'm done wit' you, yer gonna tell me everything you saw back in Florida!" He was dressed in an ASC paramedic's uniform and not the standard Mega-damage mega-suit military personnel wore when piloting such aircraft.
A quick look at the controls and Ylva saw she was some 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) off the ground and falling rapidly! She had no clue where she was or how she had gotten there. It seemed only that this big brute believed she was still unconscious for aside from his beastly grin, he was paying attention solely to the Logan's instrumentation, its movements, and some kind of dogfight going on up above.
Then suddenly, the Logan shook mightily. Warning lights went off along with audible alerts from the HUD. The Logan had been seriously hit!
"Blimey!" the big man yelled and fought angrily with the controls. "Stay together, ya bleedin' hunk of junk!!"
The Logan was shuddering badly. Whatever had hit her had hit her very badly. Ylva knew the signs; this Logan, if hit again, could break up in mid-air with them inside of it. But at that moment, Ylva could have sworn she heard something or perhaps someone else. It certainly wasn't the British bruiser beside her. But what was it? The voice repeated itself and Ylva perhaps thought she had clonked her bonkers...
...for the voice was originating in her very mind!
"I am heavily-damaged. Make no attempt at transforming me."
This woke Ylva up in a way that made her grogginess disappear. The Swedish Technical Officer possessed the mental fortitude and physical condition to now take action.
Ylva could...
1. Play unconscious (keeping her eyes closed) and see what happens.
2. Understanding the Logan's controls, she could attempt to suddenly eject them both out of the Logan (upon activation, Ylva knows the ejection seats punch both pilot and co-pilot out).
3. Grab her own flight controls and attempt to take over control of the Logan.
4. Coerce this fine, outstanding gentleman into peacefully letting her go and perhaps fly her back to Florida.
5. Anything else Ylva could come up with.
What does Ylva do?
