Reinfiltration.

"Fuck 'im, he's dead and gone now." Yeah, sure, that's what it'll end up like in a few minutes if he doesn't get any help.  Damn bastard wouldn't risk his hide for his momma if she showed up.  Can't say that out loud though, even pissing shits like him off isn't worth the risk.  Live with them, think your thoughts, but don't piss people off who you have to rely on.  Least he's an open book.

I say, "He's the one who carried the disc."  That's all, he knows what it means.  Cut's the engine and we drift for a little.

"Shit."  Yeah, shit for you, and for me, but not for Chris, and that's best for all of us in the long run.  "How're we gonna get back in."  He's phrasing a question, but he's really just thinking to himself.  Doesn't expect an answer.  I'm just the gun.  He's the boss, the maps.  He's got the sequence of guard shifts memorized and the experience organizing this type of operation.

I speak up anyway.  Worst he can say is that it won't work.  "The corpses."

"What?" Yeah, sounds like a non-sequiter.

"The horse corpses.  They have to feed those things in the cages somehow, and we did, I did, leave some of them downed on the way out.

"No way in hell those things are gonna get us back in."  So he says.  That's the knee jerk though, he always says that shit right at first.  Hates other ideas on instinct.  I got no idea how he's survived in this line of work so long, but he must have a nose for real trouble.  "Well, not just by themselves they won't."  There's the pull.  He's working on it.  I don't know the way he's gonna pull this, but it's gonna be harder.  Might be safer though.  "they have stuff to feed them in there already is the problem, and they'll be looking for Trojans."  Well that's true enough.  I have yet to find a man who looks inside dead horses, but I've yet to figure out how to hide inside a real dead horse without making it look. . .messy.  "What we need is artificial scarcity and some good reasons to bring them in quick."  That's the hard part, and he's already got it solved I bet.  He's good at his job, even if he is a bastard.  "That's why we bomb the roads, lure some of these crocs up," he splashes the water, "and give the things in there a scent to make 'em hungry."  He's grinning, all smug.  It's a mean face, getting pleasure from his oneupmanship: me and the people in the compound both.  "You feel up to killing some scientific abominations when we get dumped in?"

This is the part I know I'm good for.  "Yes, sir."  I got one in the head earlier, popped it like a cherry with sharp little fangs scattering everywhere like gooey head-grenade shrapnel.

"Good.  I'll need you to fix up the horses and start one cooking.  I've got the bombs and the crocs."  They're gators, but he doesn't care about that, no difference to him either way.  I've got some work to do.  Learning anatomy can be fun.  I'll need to make it look like we got eaten by the gators though.  Makes it more sensible for why they'd find the fire.  I wouldn't be stupid enough to bring in something that strange without some proof.  "Get to it then, quick.  That bastard won't last more than a day hiding from them in there, and then we'll have lost the disc for sure."  Maybe if I phrase it right I can get him to lose a finger for the ruse.

Experiment One.

A soft thunder followed the man as he let the sand flow out of the blue-grey pot he held at his side while he walked.  It made a circle on the floor, covering up the guidelines that had been drawn out in chalk in the hours beforehand.  The man's wrists were still sore from the painstaking attention to detail he had put into the angles that linked the complicated yet graceful pattern into one whole interconnected design.  Now he walked with an uninterested gait, almost lost in thought as he paced across the cold floor next to each line.  The sand didn't stop flowing, had reached a volume on the floor that easily tripled the capacity of the jar, but this was normal for things found in a wizard's castle.  It's plain nature fought against the ostentatious nature of some of the other practitioners of the art, as did the plain pants and shirt that the man wore, the spectacles upon his nose, and the shoes that would have seemed perfectly normal besides the fact that they did not make a sound.  When the flow cut off, the mouth of the jar tipped up just as the sand-line reconnected with itself where the man had started, the chamber was quiet.  Setting the jar aside to pick up a small dagger from a podium, the man backed away from the circle.  He frowned through his closely trimmed beard, brownish blonde like the sand on the floor.  He bit his lip a second, then with a quick glance to his hand, pricked his finger.  A toss dropped the dagger next to the jar, in the corner, clattering as it slid and bumped across and into the grey stone tiles.  Gingerly stepping around the sand, the man picked his way to the center of the design, keeping the single drop of blood perched upon his finger.  Spinning in place, slowly double checking his handiwork, he nodded to himself.  Then the drop fell, crimson and shimmering down into the sand.  Soaking out, then streaking along, the sand turned all a bright red.  Every line seemed inundated with it, staying at first the dark red of blood then lightening, and finally shining a bright white, casting a dark shadow of the podium and the jar and the dagger on the rounded walls of the chamber.  The man left no shadow, standing in the middle.  His figgure was illumined, almost seeming to glow itself with the light that shone around.  Ignition.  White flame catching on the sand to dance and flow through the circular design.  The sand below it melted into red glass, holding its form, but not its substance.  The man's frown curled up, a smile growing along with the flames.  He clapped his hands and the flames themselves melted, flowing across the floor into pools of light, some caught in the design and other bits lapping at the walls.  Some pooled around the man's shoes.  There was no podium, no jar, and no dagger.  Just the man and the circle and the glowing water.  "It worked."  His smile was beaming now.  Running to the door, he threw it open.  Down the hall, past the stairs and to another wooden door the brother of the other room's.  This one he also threw open.  Inside there was a circle just the same as the other he had left, the glowing pools, and sitting in the corner where he left them, the podium, the jar and the dagger.  "It worked!"  Now it was to the stairway, up and up and up to the top tower.  He scribbled notes, drew out careful diagrams, and smiled to himself.  "Now to figure out how to do it without a receiving circle.  Can't expect other planets to set those up for me beforehand, can I?"  It was the start to a long decade.

Rural Happening and Lifelong Lessons: Part 2

Twisting a tentacle through the water, the creature snagged Saul by his leg.  Barely able to gasp a breath of air on surfacing, the boy was drawn deeper into the water.  As the air flowed out of him, panicked, he even dropped his sword, though the unwieldy nature of the weapon would have afforded him little help against the squid.  More tentacles stretched forth, groping him, strangling him, immobilizing him beneath the murky waters.  Saul was only half aware of what creature gripped him, seeing brown, slick skin with patchy green spots and lines, shifting ever so slightly as the beast coasted along the bottom of the marsh.  He happened to glance to the side, noticing the treasure he had waded in for: A bent old fishing hook.  The way the thin, frayed fishing line fluttered in the current brought up by the squid suggested a fish that had been too big for the line that held it.  As he slipped into unconsciousness, it seemed very unfair that he had been caught for so ordinary a find.

A pair of eyes watching from the shore held the power that tipped the balance of Saul's fate that day.  Lithe steps brought her to the water and then deeper into the muck.  She had stepped out of the tree, pushing out of it as if it were the same brown mud that squished under the water, and leaving the bark exactly as it had been.  Swirling in her wake, the water itself seemed to push her body onward towards the one-sided struggle that was almost at an end.  Reaching out, he put one hand upon the squid's body, pushing it away with a forceful, yet graceful motion.  Around the boy's waist she wrapped her other arm, pulling him free of the tentacles, each dropping off lazily as the squid seemed to drift off in a daze.  Retracing her steps she dragged Saul back to the shore before letting him slump back on his back.  He had swallowed water, and she had to pause and think, head cocked to the side.  Kneeling with a hand on his chest, she made a pulling motion up towards his mouth and a stream of water splashed out his nose and half-open mouth.  Again she paused, but as his coughing started she smiled and stood.  By the time he had a chance to look up, her light, white and grey mottled skin was disappearing back into the tree, and soon followed by the bright green hair that reached halfway down her back.

There weren't supposed to be dryads out this far was all he could think as he recovered from his ordeal.  Those were only memories or from stories of those adventurous enough to go all the way to the deep marshes.  "Um, well, I don't quite know how I should go about thankin' a tree, err, dryad, but, uh, thanks."  He took a breath, waiting for something, but nothing responded but his rumbling stomach.  Blushing, he glanced back up at the sun, sinking lower towards the horizon.  With a bow toward the tree, he ran off back towards the town, sticking to the shallowest water he could.  His mother made him wash off for an hour, so his dinner was cold by the time he got to eat it.

Saul's friends didn't believe him, of course.  Tall tales like that are almost always the overactive imagination of little boys, a bit of knowledge that even kids learn early on.  He was wise enough to know his parents would think he was lying to cover up for the mess he made when he got back that day, so he didn't talk about it.  He only asked his teacher, Ms. Calthern what you'd do to thank a dryad, like in the stories that parents tell of brave warriors and grand quests.  She thought for a moment, then said that most things weren't fit for a little boy's ears, but there was a tradition in the capitol of taking a seed from the dryad's tree and planting it in an honorary place.  Saul thought about this for a few days before he finally asked his parents for a garden, and it was a weeks worth of badgering before they would let him start one.  It would be in the back, resting against the wall of the house and facing north with a good area of sun for it to sit in.

By the time he got time and friends enough to venture back out into the marsh it was nearly the end of the Holy month.  They made their way out to the tree, his friends laughing and joking and making the occasional jab at his story.  The tree wasn't quite in season to bloom, but Saul wanted to tell the dryad about the garden he was going to start, and ask for a seed once it came around to be fall.  As trees do, Saul was met with silence.  Silence until the friends he had brought with him started giggling behind him.  It was a nice day.  "I'll come back in the fall."  his smile twitching upwards as his eyebrows did the same in the center.  His friends were already heading back out, talking of the festival that would happen at the end of the summer.  A noise from the other side of the tree, a branch hitting the ground he thought.  Racing around the tree, he found the wooden sword that he had forgotten, and stuck in a crack in the wood was a seed.

Rural Happenings and Lifelong Lessons: Part 1

Saul was not in his father's shop, minding the parchments.  He was not running errands for his mother across town.  He certainly wasn't at school, though only on account of the holy month celebrating Alrea, the goddess of restoration.  All around town the men and women spent their time cultivating the land, restoring buildings, and setting parties to help ease past misgivings.  Saul, being only eight and an adventurous boy, had instead set out for the edge of town and the marshes beyond the low hills that banked the eastern side of the Pauli river.  He had tried recruiting some of his peers, but they had been whirled up in the festivities with work or play that they could or would not leave.  His company was a crude-hewn sword of wood that he had whittled in his free time the past summer despite his mother's disapproval of what she would only term 'that sort of thing'.  A few of the farmers and townsfolk on the road gave him a smile and a nod as he ran by, most of whom he knew by name from their visits to his father's scroll business.  Farmer Najit even called out to him about the fertility charm that his father had promised to have ready for today, but Saul was in a hurry and didn't know anyway, so he just called out "dunno" as he sped to his destination.

Brown dirt receded into flowing green grass that squished and sucked at his feet as he angled his way into the swampy floodplains that the river expanded into before emptying out into the sea thirty miles southwest.  The vast expanse of the swamp was his playground, and more important to a young boy, a vast swathe of unknowns that were almost certain to contain hidden treasure.  For all his time spent dozing off when Ms. Calthern went on about the history of the town and the country, he had caught the notion that at some point way early on there was a veritable wealth of ruins in the bottom of the swamp, and with the water flow that came in the spring there might be a good chance to find some of it washed up a mile or so in.  All of the best rumors talked about the overgrown heart of the swamp, deep and dark with trees as old as the town and mushrooms as large as houses, not to mention the dryads and fey folk that were supposed to inhabit that area.  He wasn't quite so bold as to go that far in, even if he had the time, but searching the shallows where the flow was greatest was well within his ability and courage.

A mile or so of walking, avoiding sinkholes like the older kids had taught him last summer when he could get an afternoon or morning away from school, staring into the muck in hopes of seeing something shiny, and watching out for blinking eyes that he would like to think led to reptilian bodies his courage and wooden sword could fight off, and a few hours had easily passed.  Nothing had caught his eye besides a few glittering pebbles, smooth after their travel down the river.  Climbing up an old, gnarled tree that pushed its way skyward he surveyed the sky and the glistening surface of the swamp alternately, shifting between the silent mystery of treasure he just knew was below him in the waters and the delightful shapes of clouds that he formed into heroic battles,  back-lit by the early afternoon sun.

Finally, stomach rumbling, seeing nothing but his own fancies, he hopped down to make his way back across the marsh towards home.  The light had shifted, and there had been a slow current by that time, so when he glanced out once more into the water he saw a faint glimmer under it, deep in a thick weedy place beside the small island the tree had accumulated.  Stepping closer, peering farther into the murk he saw a shimmer of metal, not of the stony reflections that had fooled him through the morning as he had scouted his way through to the tree.

Wooden sword propping him up in the water as he gingerly stepped towards it, grin already expanding on his tanned face, he slipped.  It wasn't the first time he had slipped today, though it was the first since he had begun to use his sword as a cane.  It was the first, however, that happened to be within hearing of a particularly mean creature of those parts.

Of the few rare creatures one would sight in the swamp, the squid was the least likely you were to actually glimpse before it did any mischief.  Mostly it would steal a catch of fish or flip a boat into the water before blending back in with it's camouflaging skin.  Little boys, however, were just the right size that a squid of great enough size, and this squid was easily a man's length without counting its tentacles, would find him a very delicious snack.