ARCHE
[English]
image [https://i.imgur.com/sw5jQm3.png]
Snowfall
10-11-103 P.I. 11:56 PM
The sudden sneeze pulled Hyperfania’s thoughts from times long past, sorrowful memory dissipating along with the mist of her breath.
ACHOO
She turned her attention towards the source of the distracting noise.
Huddling on the leeward side of Hyperfania’s towering weaponized form, her mother braced against the winds of early winter. Scarf and gloved hands deeply tucked within her heavy fur lined coat, the elderly woman adamantly stood sentry beside her monstrous daughter along Fafnir Base’s outskirts. Still, her many warm layers weren’t enough to stave off the cold, and the consequences of prolonged exposure to the harsh Himalayan weather had already begun to show the cracks in both her mother’s age and biology.
ACHOO
She was now sneezing at regular intervals.
“You should be inside,” Hyperfania muttered from her mind to her mother’s.
“Tell me about it.” Her mother used her scarf to rub at her sniffling nose. “But since I’m your Temp for the time being, I’ll just have to make do.”
“A Handler’s help is worthless to me now. Even yours, Mother.”
“I know. Just think of it as a formality to keep the Chairs on the other side of the planet from losing their shit, my Skyfire.”
Hyperfania let out a guttural hum, acknowledging the joke.
“Do you really plan on staying out in this storm? My Core can’t keep us both warm. This weather will break you, and then I’ll have no Temp at all.”
“E-even still.” Her mother shivered and crossed her arms. “Considering our circumstances, I don’t see how I have much of a choice.”
ACHOO
“Listen to yourself!” Hyperfania protested. “Are you trying to freeze to death? Plus, your sneezing is distracting me, which neither of us needs right now. Go back inside. If it starts coming back for another attack, I’ll call.”
Her mother scoffed through the connection, “Not likely! You’ll go charging after Model F the moment I leave your sight! And for what, I wonder, hmm? Not like you can see a damn thing out there in this dreadful night. No, no I think I will stay right where I am.”
And there it was!
“You take me for a child!” Hyperfania snorted, the first hints of descending snow melting in her Core’s expelled heat.
“No…” her mother responded, “… but my intuition is seldom wrong.”
Snorting again, Hyperfania let the conversation end and returned her focus beyond the inky blackness that loomed along Fafnir Bases’s border of light. She had more pressing matters to deal with than stubborn mothers, and there was only so much her grieving heart was capable of enduring. Proper reconciliation would just have to wait.
Soon, large clumps of white filled the air, and the ground began to shift in color, leaving Hyperfania to dust off the ice amassing on her ivory fur-like feathers. Lifting her long, winged forelimb off the ground to better reach her shoulder, she used the tip of her hooked, scaly beak to carefully separate the clumps of matted strands. Her neck being too short to reach her back or hindlimbs—and the scales of her underside not being of current importance—Hyperfania devoted her efforts to methodically preening shoulder to wing-wrist.
First down one limb.
Then, the other.
Then both again for good measure.
It was critical she was ready to fly at a moment’s notice.
ACHOO
Huffing in frustration, instinct compelled Hyperfania to break from her third cleaning and address the mother issue. “You’re impossible. Permission to leave post… Handler?” she said mockingly.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
ACHOO
Her mother didn’t reproach her, answering nonetheless in her stuffy way, "Depends. What for?" she said aloud as was dictated by bioweapon field operation procedure.
“There’s been enough needless death here for one day,” Hyperfania responded dryly, and without waiting for an answer, did as she pleased. The approaching rogue bioweapon’s time would come soon enough, but first came the safety of her last remaining family. Their current arrangement as Temp and Bioweapon was just a formality after all.
Behind them, the feeble glow of military outpost Fafnir of the Atlantic Trade Union’s Bioweapon division barely held its own as the mountain storm furthered its assault. Among the sparse barracks and hangers crowning the vast expanse of the underground base, few of the surviving and still present personnel dared venture out against the elements. A wise choice by human standards.
On the other hand, however, the apes’ lack of thermal protection did sow the seeds of their resourcefulness.
With a quick scan, Hyperfania found what she was looking for along the wall of the base’s outermost RTD building not ten meters away. Cut firewood poked out from the inside of a storage bin partially covered by a blue tarp, its free corner flapping in the wind.
Straightening her azhdarchoid form, Hyperfania propelled her quadrupedal winged frame towards the firewood, the membranes of her massive, folded wings billowing like sails. In only a few long strides, she ambled over to the bin. Spreading her forelimbs to lower her stance, she pulled back the rest of the tarp with the hook of her robust, short beak.
Hyperfania looked to her mother who’d quickly shuffled alongside in tandem with her movements, doing as needed to maintain her opposition to the wind. Annoying as she was, the tiny human was lucky her bioweapon creations held her in such high regards.
Or at least… they had.
Using her jaws, Hyperfania picked five small logs from the top of the pile, their brittle, cold bark chipping on her fangs and filling her mouth with irksome splitters. As she did so, her mother’s figure moved to open a small box beside the bin.
“I suppose… y-you’ll need kind-dling?” her mother gestured as she lifted the small box’s contents into the open.
Hyperfania gave an acknowledging hum as she shook her head free of collecting snow.
Returning to their post, Hyperfania slowed her strides to allow her succumbing mother to keep pace. Once there, she reared back, balancing on her slender hindlimbs as she stretched out her wings. With a single forceful flap, snow and debris were cast from the space before her. In the center of the new clearing, the campfire was set.
“Stand back,” she ordered.
Behind the furred hood and scarf, her shivering mother peered back through the small gap between the fabrics. Then came a sneeze. Then another and another. At last, Leto Botha, oldest of her kind, mother of terror, creator of bioweapons and quite possibly one of the smartest humans alive… fucking listened.
Proceeding to take shelter between the trunks of Hyperfania’s forelimbs, her mother was careful never to touch her weaponized daughter’s form directly. The cautious habit was one developed over their many years together out of necessity. A lesson many Temporary Handlers learned too late as their carelessness condemned them to death by electrocution upon coming in contact—deliberately or otherwise—with their assigned bioweapon. By Leto Botha’s very design, bioweapons were, in fact, quite literally, lethal to the touch.
Calling on her Core’s stored power, Hyperfania let the energy flow through her as she aimed for the pile of wood and kindling, serrated jaws open. In an instant, a blinding beam of electricity, perfect and straight, struck the logs and ignited them. Quickly attending to the newborn flame, she folded in her wings and nestled down to make her bulk a barrier against the wind as she gently stoked the fire with deep, slow breaths.
“I’ve turned off my epidermis conduction,” she grumbled as the fire took on a life of its own. “You can lay against me now.”
Without speaking, her mother shuffled over and sat, resting her back against Hyperfania’s wing as if it were a giant hammock. While she offered no gratitude for the slightly less miserable sentry arrangement, neither did she display any of her inherent nitpickiness. It was a “Thank you,” loud and clear to be sure… in her mother’s own conceited way.
Off in the distance, the beating blades of a tiltrotor echoed off the walls of the hidden mountain valley, sounding its imminent arrival. It was the fifth one within the hour to approach the nearby landing zone. Clouds of dust and snow scattered in its wake as the machine wobbled dangerously in its hover. Landing gear extended, it braced the ground as spinning blades slowed but never ceased in their motion, remaining ready to lift at a moment’s notice.
As soon as it reached a standstill, personnel and soldiers alike of Fafnir Base stormed the landing zone, some carrying large containers and cases, others aiding those who could not support themselves on their own. Among them, a man tightly wrapped in blankets was suspended between a pair of medics on a handheld stretcher. Within minutes, the boarding was complete, and another plume of dust signified the tiltrotor’s departure as it rose and faded into the night, the blinking of its navigation lights the last to be seen before vanishing entirely.
By this point, Leto Botha had lowered her scarf as she held her still gloved hands to the crackling campfire. Despite her refined age of one hundred and twenty-eight, the semblances of youth still clung to her, as did the sun’s warmth during the final days of summer. Wise, emerald eyes reflected the fire’s light like a forest aflame, shining brilliantly against the many wrinkles and cracks of her rich, ebony skin. A few gray curls hung past the rim of her hood as her chin stayed tucked within her well-worn scarf, which, once red, had now faded to a soft burgundy-pink.
Even with her knees pulled up against her chest, her posture was immaculate, back straight, shoulders relaxed as the fire’s embrace eased the chill. As far as Hyperfania knew, her mother was not one for the outdoors. In fact, she seemed to actively avoid such things in preference of the sanitized and controlled spaces of her many laboratories. But… here she sat, on a mat of dirt and snowmelt, perfectly content as if she had spent all her life doing so.
It was a peculiar sight. The regal woman’s appearance was more that of a Lawless wanderer huddled over her pitiful fire than the head of Bioweapon Research and Technological Development. And yet, without size or strength, fangs, talons, or the power of a Core, she could disarm the bravest of soldiers, intimidate the most egotistical of leaders, and sway the harshest of skeptics with mere words.
When Hyperfania had asked how she’d managed such accomplishments, all she received was: “The possibility of an idea, no matter how absurd, holds the power to become as potent—and frightful—as any truth.” In time, Hyperfania came to understand the meaning of her mother’s words. And furthermore, that all intelligent things, no matter their level of consciousness, were susceptible to it.
Her mother being no exception.
Like a fouled anchor at the bottom of the sea floor, once set, there was no moving her, even when all she held dear was at risk of being sunk along with her.
For a while longer, she watched over her mother within the peace of their fiery microcosm, doing her best to ignore the grief corroding her soul. In that quiet little place that was theirs alone, bathed in flickering light and battered by both wind and snow, away from all else who remained upon the isolated mountain base, Hyperfania allowed herself to rest.
In due time, as the beating blades of yet another tiltrotor emerged from the night and the process of the evacuation resumed, Leto Botha’s sneezing had—
ACHOO
… mostly subsided.
____________________________________
P.I: For those who are potentially unaware, this stands for Post Impact and notates the new cataloging of years following the Apophis B asteroid strike that occurred at the tail end of the Evolutus Mass Mortality Event (or E.M.M.E.). The precise year defined as the first of our era is considered to be the same as the one that saw the establishment of the Atlantic Trade Union (or at least the micronation that would become it) in Iceland, as well as the re-establishment of international trade between the Han Republic and Nihon, which is believed to be the first between any Sovereign nations after the collapse at the end of the A.D. era.
Temp: Shorthand for Temporary Handler.
Azhdarchoid: A form in resemblance of the azhdarchids, the largest and greatest of the pterosaurs, and the last of the true dragons.