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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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I've kicked the Player to do some more writing. The Player insisted on publishing parts of the "Hybrid Shadows" story, so for the next few days you will be seeing some of that. Hybrid Shadows is a sci-fi story where humanity has retreated to a new planet, but the colony's technology malfunctions, leaving the colony dependent on a loney girl who never had hybrid abilities to explore their new land.
The young woman glanced over her shoulder, staring up to the sky. The dark reddish light of night was slowly turning to the blue-green of dawn. She saw it there, a darkness, a void in the dawn light. One thousand kilometers above the world was the starship Celestial Guard, in stationary orbit over where the Spirit Dawn colony was now under construction.
The world upon which she stood, this land she now called home, was Shendar. Named after one of the ancient legends of her own world, a god of war, of power, Shendar and its leaders too were overbearing, powerful, and to Kendra's eyes, oppressive.
This land was similar to their home world, a world of dark green lands and soft red oceans. Called KshDonar, it was a dying world that Kendra had never known. KshDonar too was named after an ancient god, the god of hope. It was hope now that brought her people forth across the stars, as the old world was now a land with a dying sun, and blackening, dying vegetation.
Kendra was born aboard ship, sixteen Sols ago. The Celestial Guard, along with many other transport vessels and supply ships, left the dying KshDonar 70 Sols before. To Kendra, to her parents, to her grandparents, Celestial Guard was home.
"And now, Shendar is," Kendra thought to herself. She turned again, fleeing from the sight of the colony ship, toward the protective forest in the distance.
Celestial Guard was about a quarter of the size of the smaller of Shendar's two moons, Fraliksh, which was now fading toward the horizon as this world's sun started to rise at her back. Celestial Guard was huge. It was a set of nine gigantic cylinders rotating around a central point, a tube that worked as both an transport elevator and supply transporter. The colony ship carried thousands of crew and inhabitants across many dozens of light years in search of a new home. It was dark grey, and, to Kendra, menacing. It was an eye hovering over this world, watching her.
The glance at the ship was only for a second, as the girl turned and ran onward toward the forest ahead of her. She knew she was being tracked. Someone aboard that spacecraft was watching her right now, wondering what she was up to. They could see her, and due to the tracking technology implanted into her body they also knew exactly who she was. The device was planted in her, in her back close to her spine, as it was in all the colonists from the world KshDonar.
Kendra didn't care. Let the overlords watch. That is how she thought of them - the overlords. The command crew of Celestial Guard was also the government of the people, and had been for generations, as it had been determined that the populace could not be counted on to run business of the colony ship, or the many accompanying military and supply vessels. Like everyone on the surface of this new world, she had been spied on her entire life. Unlike most of her fellow colonists, Kendra had been found wanting, inferior. Kendra could not hear the Song. She did not have access to the Grid. For any access to the network, Kendra had to use slow and clunky hand-held devices in a way that humans had to do hundreds of years in the past. She was laughed at. She was also a mystery.
There were many people on board that had been technologically inferior, due to insufficient genetics for Grid integration. These people were the Non-Hybrids. But unlike the others, Kendra's genetics were not inferior. They were, instead, unusual, advanced, complex in a way that none of the doctors could understand. In another world this might have made her special. But in this age where all that mattered was integration of the human body and mind into technology, Kendra, who could access nothing, was considered next to useless.
Kendra ran, closing her mind and thoughts to the painful reality of her situation, of how people viewed her. Her forearms bear, she ran through shoulder-high ferns, through this field, one yet to be cleared. The ferns were a pale red, with a thick sheen of moisture left from the pre-dawn rains. Kendra ran faster than most. This was one of her gifts. Her breathing fast, her lungs ached as she ran faster. As the newly constructed colony town faded in the morning mists behind her, she felt a sense of freedom that she had never felt aboard ship. The ferns slapped at her as she ran, some leaving a residue on her that caused her to itch. She didn't care.
Finally after several minutes she burst out of the field and into the depths of the forest.
The trees of the forest rose hundreds of feet into the air, the branches thick with vegetation. It was dark within the trees, difficult to see in the predawn light. Kendra slowed down only a bit though. She had been here, in these woods the day before as part of a scouting mission. And as she had then, Kendra could somehow sense the objects around her, the trees, the animals, the plants. What her eyes could not see in this light, another skill, undefined, seemed to take over. Yesterday it had been daylight. Her scouting party had been sent to find plants and herbs that could prove edible, or medicinal. She had been along for only the simplest of tasks, of course. They didn't trust her with more.
In this predawn, there was no pursuit of Kendra from the colony, none as yet anyway. Perhaps there wouldn't be. After all, she was not considered that important. Also, where would she go? Where would a failed hybrid hide anyway. "Useless," they thought she was. Oh, they wouldn't say it aloud, where she could hear. But she could see it in their expression, in their glances toward one another. And she knew they were talking, communicating in a way she could neither sense nor understand.
The bark of the trees in this forest was a very deep brown, almost black. They stretched up into the sky, huge, larger than anything she had ever seen or imagined. And the scents, the smells of this world were so strange, exotic. They filled her with such a sense of wonder. The smells were sweet, Kendra could almost taste the life of the trees, the animals in the woods about. It was so different than anything aboard ship, even in the garden rings, where the food for the colonists had been grown.
Kendra's eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness around her, as this world's sun began to rise. The thick trees still cast the land about her in shadow, but it allowed her to run all out again. Kendra took off, laughing, running away from her life into the new world.
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