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The Tale of a Crow

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C r o w:
Inside it was a round area, in its center there was a table, with machinery all around it.
On the table was positioned a stretcher, and tied to it there was a girl.
It looked like a pretty normal human, exception made for the hair that were all of a light grey and jet black on the temples.

She looked like she was sleeping, so no worrying about her for now.

"Wait, if I came in from that door, where does this lead instead?"
He muttered to himself while trying to remember that zone's layout.

He then opened the door.
"Gods have mercy...."
It was full of stretchers, all with people tied on them.
All had gruesome malformation on them, pieces of the body cut off and sometimes even inhuman body shapes.
Extremely long teeth, skins with colorations that wouldn't be possible to have in nature, the hair and the hairs, all with strange shapes and colorations.
This were certainly the left overs of a mad scientist.
On the side of each corpse there was a little card with written on each things like
"C-14- Failure", "C-27-Failure", "C-05-Failure" and so on.
Under the word "Failure" it was written what caused the death for each of them.
Everyone had written there "Test-Substance-02".

After staring at that gruesome slaughter-fest, he rushed out of that room and closed the door behind him.

He found the girl awake, looking directly at him.
"Hi, who are you."
"Nobody."
"Are you a doctor?"
"No, not at all."
"Am I going to die like the others?"

Those words were very saddening for the man, he realized she already knew what happened to the other cavies. Feeling like it was a cowardly thing to just run away without trying to help. But it was also too dangerous for him to bring that girl with him.

He walked around the table, thinking, continuously coming in and out of the girls field of view.
Then he stopped near the door.

"Hello? Where are you going?"

"To hell with it!" He blurted out, surprising the girl. "I'm expendable anyway."
Emil then drew out his bloodstained combat knife and walked quickly toward the table.

The girl was scared, she didn't want to die, that man was scary, she closed her eyes as he was upon her, waiting for the knife to hit her.
Only to hear the straps that tied her to the table snapping as they got cut.

"Quick, get up." The man said while reaching out to her.
Emil was wearing a combat armor, and over it a duster. He then took off that duster, there was another underneath, perfectly and totally identical to the one that he had just took off.
"Here, put this on, good, now follow me."
Emil first went outside of the lab and started to look for some good distraction on the map.
On the easternmost side of the facility there was the generator that powered up the entire facility.
"If I can find a way to blow that thing up I coul-!"
Something clicked sonorously behind him. He turned around, knife already in hand, only to see the girl loading a heavy revolver, strangely similar to his...
Wait, I'm not feeling it in my side! "Hey! That's my gun!" He then said angrily.
"This is a nice gun! Can I keep it?"
"No, you ca-" He targets to say when he was interrupted by another voice.

"Doctor Ahslim! Are you there?" It was a guard, he lowered his guard for a second and that happened, typical.
"Hey!"
"Who ar-!" The last word was silenced by a powerful boom coming from the girl's direction.
A bullet caught him between the eyes.
The body wilted, lifeless, on the ground.
When he turned around he found the girl with the gun aimed at the guard's dead body, then quickly taking another bullet from Emil's belt and loading it into the gun.
"Ok, you can keep it."
She smiled as an answer.

C r o w:
The lights going towards the generator area were stronger than the ones that were everywhere else, so trying to sneak in the shadows and in the bushes had become difficult, or at least it would have, if on,y the place wasn't so unguarded.
At one point there were no plants around anymore and the area became full of machinery.
Enormous cogs chaining into each other, moving multiplied other systems, pipes spewing jets of steam, the stench of diesel burning...
That was definitively the generator room. Multiple cables departed from the generator towards center of the facility.

"Ok, you stay down, try to hide if someone comes, and shoot them if they are guards, understood?"
She nodded, her long hair following perfectly her head's movement, creating a grey wave in the air.

"And hold your hair still! They are moving all over the place, it's distracting me."

Then he crouched and started to walk trough the room.
There was an engineer inspecting a panel beside two enormous working cogs.

Seeing the scene Emil already formulated an idea about how to stop the machinery,
it was quite gruesome and very likely to happen.
"Come oooooooon, do I really have to do this..."

He tried to find some other way to stop the generator.
"Well, I'm no demo man, so I gotta do what I can."
He muttered.
The engineer managed to hear the muttering despite the noise from the generator and turned around:
"Oi! Who's there!?!" As soon as the man finished his phrase he found Emil's sword passing through his neck.
"The Baronies sends their regards."

When the man's body fell on the ground, Emil sheathed his sword and started to lift the body.
He then threw it between the cogs and immediately there could be heard screeching sounds and bones breaking.
In the end the cogs stopped, and the steam streams started to overflow the room.

Emil started to run where he left the girl, only to find a man with his face mashed into pulp by what appeared to be the handle of a handgun, other six corpses were around him.

"Hey! You still here?"

She came out from behind a corner.

She had a guilty face.

"I have run out of ammo."

He took off his bullet belt and gave it to the girl.

"Oh, much obliged."

The generator room was becoming a sauna.
And the screeching from the generator itself was getting terribly loud.

"Let's get moving."

C r o w:
The maps on the wall had pin-point accuracy, they also presented every and any secondary passage.
"I still don't know why would anyone put everywhere maps of the place in what is supposed to be a secret facility." He said to the girl.
She actually answered:
"Oh, I heard that people kept getting lost in natural caves, and that someone even died, so they decided to mark the really usable ways, that had no chance of getting you lost."
"It actually makes sense."
Running quickly to the southern hangar he met nobody, and nobody still had noticed the corpses hidden by Emil hours ago.

When he reached the hangar, the light were off, many other systems were malfunctioning.
Explosions could be heard in the distance.
With a little buzz also the lights of the hangar overheated and exploded, creating sparks that temporarily illuminated the room.

Still running the two exited the facility.

C r o w:
Outside, it was night time.

"Ok, now, be careful and do exactly as I do."
Emil said while starting to climb down the cliff on which the airdock was located.

Even if she was climbing bare handed, she was actually moving faster and with more agility than Emil.
Still, she was perfectly copying every his move.

When they reached ground, in the forest at the mountain side, while Emil immediately started to walk rotor wards his ship, the girl was standing still and looking amazed around her.
"What is this?"
"Uh...a forest?"
"I heard that name! It's beautiful!"
"You know how to shoot a gun but you don't exactly know what a forest is."
Emil lowered his guard and looked directly at her in amazement.
She simply shrugged her shoulders.
"Whatever, we still must get out of this island."
"What's an island?"
"Ohgoddamnit."
"Huh?"
"Nothing! Just keep following me."
He said as he speed up.

The modified squid was still perfectly covered by the foliage of the surrounding trees.
Emil climbed up and then reached out to the girl's hand.
As soon as both were on board, he reached the wheel and started the engine and the balloon lift system, quickly raising above tree-level and gaining speed.

The mountain could be still seen at their side. Some booming noises were heard and on another side of the mountain, flames erupted and pieces of rock were thrown in the air.
Apparently, the engineers weren't able to prevent the overheating of the generator.

The girl was still like she was glued to the starboard railing, her eyes shut open with a mixture of joy and amazement in them.


"This time I'll have to go around the northern border of Chaladon, it was already annoyingly risky flying trough the mainland once, don't want to do it twice."
Emil was thinking loudly.
The girl was lying down near there, covered with his duster and a pair of portable blankets: "Who are you talking to?"
"Why, I'm talking to one of the few people that I know is capable of understand my reasoning!" Snared Emil.
"Who would they be?"
" Me, of course."
He then proceeded to take a bottle of moonshine, that was near the fuel tanks.
He was about to open the bottle, when he remembered to check if it was really drinkable moonshine, or the engine moonshine.
It was the drinkable one.
He took a few sips and then put the bottle back into place.
"Why are you drinking fuel?"
"That's moonshine, a pilot's best friend, when either they or their ship need a boost."
The girl was showing for the first time a suspicious face.
"If you say so."

C r o w:
The travel back to the CRIES HQ was felt as fairly quick by both, since Emil was being continuously hammered by questions and had to talk a lot.

His original plan to kill some time during the travel back was to read a novel called "El Muid", it was very recent and many of his colleagues found it to be a simple, short and yet epic and enormously entertaining story. For some reason the ones that were the first to discover it were the guys specialized in explosives and demolition operations.

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