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The West August 7, 2017 2:03PM Nellie leaned against the sheet metal wall, listening to the sounds of the dark city outside: men’s voices, mostly, and the occasional sound of machinery and power tools. The men had dragged in a mattress and tattered blankets, but she couldn’t quite get comfortable. The mattress smelled funny, and even with noises outside, the empty little room still felt like a sarcophagus. Aleisha stood leaning against the wall next to the door, smoking a cigarette. “Sit down,” said Nellie. “You’re making me nervous.” Aleisha shook her head. “I don’t like it here.”

The West August 6, 2017 11:03 PM Eric hissed a creative barrage of expletives as he raced through the Valley. The BRI security was close enough that he could hear their boots thudding against the rocky floor. He hadn’t had time to work out any of the details of this tunnel or where it led to. Some Valleys were short, only a few feet long, and others took days to traverse even in a vehicle. He used the camera flash on his tablet to light his way as he stumbled across the rocky Western floor. This one was a short, narrow tunnel blocked with rocks and boulders. I had to pick the rough one, he thought. He climbed up a narrow crevice and f

Tearis August 7, 2017 1:00PM Eric stumbled blindly after his Xzeejee escorts as they ran through the Tearil jungle. In the heavy fog that had descended over the past few hours, he didn't know how they were navigating - it was all he could do just to avoid clusters of tangled, white plants. The leader finally grabbed him by the hand and dragged him along. The leader seemed to notice his gasps for air and she called to the others, signalling for them to pause. While Eric caught his breath, the Xzeejees mulled about, apparently unfazed by the forty-five minute jog, and the leader gazed up into the tree-tops. She let out a shrill whistle that r

Coonswater August 6, 2017 10:38 PM "I just saw a shooting star." "I saw it, too." Every day, after dark, when her family thought she was asleep, Nellie would sneak out of her house and meet her friend, Aleisha, in the cave beneath the mountain. A few hundred yards down the road was the town border, where the huge, faded, peeling sign stood greeting visitors: a cartoon mountain man wrapped in layers of furs, smiling underneath a speech bubble proclaiming, “Welcome to COONSWATER!” Beneath this, in smaller letters: “Home of Ol’ Bob Coon!” Coonswater had no tourist attractions, no history to speak of, and no jobs,

Tearis August 7, 2017 6:13 AM Nellie, Aleisha and Maggie stalked through the white jungle, wielding sticks they’d pulled off of trees. There were surprisingly few dead plants just lying around on the ground the way one would expect to find them on earth. Once, Nellie found a stick half-submerged in the ground, with the sticky white surface slowly growing over it. They were going after the bubble-wrapper Maggie had seen a short distance away. The plan was for Maggie to attack the creature by herself – she would just need the two of them to pry it off of her if it attacked. As they walked along, Aleisha asked, “So, what was

Tearis August 7, 2017 6:43 AM Eric awoke stiff and aching. He'd twisted his back somehow during the night, and couldn't turn his neck all the way to the left, but somehow he hadn't fallen off the branch. The sun shone through the treetops, flickering in his face. He craned his neck to look around and saw that the forest floor was still murky with fog. Eric popped his shoulders and climbed up to the topmost branch he could reach, looking over the fibrous, fungoid canopy. He held a hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare of the Tearil sun. The planet’s terrain was flat and nondescript. There was a smudge on the horizon to his r

Earth: BRI, Coonswater Facility August 6, 2017 7:04 PM There was a siren, and Lilun jumped out of bed with a bolt. “ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO THE HOLE – SUBLEVEL 34-B.” Lilun almost forgot to don her lab coat and pants. There was little point in her wearing them, anyway; she was a Xzeejee – a creature from the planet Au’wm - which meant that she was covered in fur. She’d been working for the Benson Research Initiative for her entire adult life, and even though everyone working in the sublevels was used to working around Xzeejees and other creatures from outside of earth, the humans still sometimes called h

Tearis August 7, 2017 6:04AM Maggie’s eyes snapped open. She thrashed on the ground, trying to figure out where she was. She recognized the teal-blue sky, white-stemmed plants and purple flowers. The memories of the previous night came flooding back to her along with the throbbing pain from her wounds. She pulled back one pant leg and looked at the gash she’d received climbing over the barbed wire. That would have to be treated. The wound next to her ribs wasn’t much better – a little deeper, and the rocks might have gored her. Both of her parents were dead, now. When her mother had died nine years ago, it had been h

Tearis June 8, 1974 6:32AM “Robert” was a human name. Robert himself was not human. He stood at the edge of the empty battlefield, staring with four eyes across the soft, white terrain. He leaned against one pale blue tree, claws sinking deeply into the plant’s soft, velvety flesh. Metallic brown blood oozed from a gash in his side, darkening his red robes. Robert paid the wound no mind – one more battle scar would only earn him that much more respect from his soldiers. Robert watched Leir, his wife, walk across the empty field and stand in the morning sunlight. She knelt and dragged one slender, amber-colored claw

Tearis, Etris Lunn August 7, 2017 2:30PM Eric studied the Tearil architecture as he bobbed past on the back of his steed. The buildings seemed to bubble out of the ground, intertwining with tendrils of blue and magenta vines, some almost buried underneath clusters of pale pink fruits. Little blue blades of grass grew between every cobblestone, each blade curling at the top, and here and there tall pink plants with streaks of yellow at the top grew like trees. The lead Xzeejee tugged on the reigns of her beast and brought it to a halt. The other creatures skidded to a stop around them, and the leader called out something to the Tearils, spea

Tearis August 7, 2017 11:30AM Nellie kept her eyes on the back of Maggie’s head as they trudged through the jungle. She wished that they could have taken just enough time for her to go back to her house and grab a bottle of water, or even a stick of deodorant. Her whole body felt achy and sore after having spent the night sprawled out on the rubbery white ground. She tried to imagine how good it would feel to take a shower. If Aleisha felt the same as Nellie did, she wasn’t saying anything. Aleisha was like that – the things that bothered Nellie always seemed to take twice as long to start to bother Aleisha. Nellie thought

The West August 7, 2017 2:03PM Christopher Lau sat at the end of the table, chewing the end of a ballpoint pen with a BRI logo on the side of it, and said, “Can you tell me what exactly Benson’s trying to do?” He and Maggie had been talking for the last two hours, mostly about the deaths of Maggie’s father and old Benson. It felt like an interrogation. Nellie and Aleisha were a few floors down in a room Lau had set aside for them. Lau’s office was up in the highest reaches of the factory building. It had once been a nice room, with a huge window on the side overlooking the little town and a balcony looking out

Earth: BRI, Coonswater Facility August 6, 2017 7:23 PM It felt like a rainy Saturday evening, a world away from the routine with laundry lining the halls in between being washed and dried and cartoons playing nonstop on the TV and the light outside too dim to keep the lights off but too bright to feel like the lights should be on... But Maggie wasn't home. She was a mile underground. Instead of dirty laundry, it was drawers full of papers stuffed with confidential information which belonged nowhere but in their desks, but those desks had been overturned when the riot hit, and instead of cartoons, it was the loudspeaker blaring the alert: "Th

Earth: BRI, Coonswater Facility August 6, 2017 12:00 Eric’s few days off were usually spent in the facility commissary, drinking cup after cup of coffee and debugging his latest pet-projects. When he wasn’t working, he was spending time with his girlfriend, Maggie Verger. He hadn’t seen much of Maggie for most of the month – she’d been spending all her time topside, monitoring old Benson’s vitals alongside her father, Sam, the founder of the BRI’s Medical branch. Eric always got a little antsy without Maggie around. It was too easy to lose himself in his work, and without her to talk to, it gave him