Interlude pt. 1 -- Rebuffed and Battle Battered in the Cistern of Souls.
Mel grew more impatient as he circled around the perimeter of the district. The little thief was safe for now. She had retreated into Sachmilli's security van after the interrogation.
Yet, there was still a presence in the air all throughout the district. A haze flowed through every street corner, like a slow-motion dust devil, errant in purpose.
Mel had only seen such determination from the spore entities on the occasion they created the fortress outside of Asunción, where they migrated the Dissapeared just before the nuclear explosion.
There was no definition in form this time, but he could feel the willful purpose that drove their actions, and it all pushed forth from the hollow beneath the aqueducts.
Mel flew away from the ducts to unravel where the invisible-to-the-human-eye tendrils led. They flowed outwardly from the falls beneath and touched what seemed like random individuals as the pedestrians hustled and mulled about the nearby streets.
He tagged with laser pulses those amongst the crowd who could be identified for later study of their inoculation status and biometric signatures.
With this task complete after tagging three dozen humans, Mel flipped aerially and flew back up a tendril, noting the strong waves of energia bristling against the back of his wings as it flowed through the synapsis that guided the movement of the spirally coils.
The Nightwing did not like that something out of the ordinary was occurring. Mel mumbled to himself in fretful chirps, for all he could do was observe, collect data, and report.
He had not been equipped with talon pins on this occasion where he could nick the spores to take samples or use the pins as an extension of his natural defense as circumstances may require.
As he made it back to the duct pillars where he perched to rest and plot his next move, a cacophonous surging of sound from below jarred him back into flight.
Mel shivered; it was the song of a dragon.
He circled the pillars where the song bellowed. Alarmed, Mel tuned up an audio scan for signs of a reaction from the creatures below.
Mel expected the bats to swarm out in an angry stir that he would have to dodge, but they did not leave the caverns below.
He spat out in between his beaks in contempt of them. For mammals, they tended to be dumb.
Or, at least from his own anecdotal experience, Mel thought this to be true.
Perhaps there were good, smart, and outstanding bats in the world, but he had yet to meet any.
He shivered for a moment.
Bats!
Once outwardly expressed, Mel shook off his phobia to examine what just then caught his eye.
The two humans closest to the support pillars behaved quite curiously. As in they reacted not at all.
A male and a female chatted together at a motorized bicycle charging station to his immediate north. They were not reacting at all to the Song of the Dragon even as it thundered on.
Mel focused on the couple; pulling power from his server support in the security van, he measured the dilative pattern in their eyes, the beat in the woman's neck, and the reverberation in her ears.
From these figures, the server AI extrapolated a simulation of what the humans heard.
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Their ears made no music of the Dragon's song. It was mere industrial noise to them.
Mel raised up in hover to get a higher view that revealed the tendrils were being drawn back into the well below him.
Then a subdermal command from Sachmilli got his notice.
-- Meet me at the base of the channel support columns. I'll fit you for map survey work in the Cistern of Souls.
Essence, the last word meant. It was a concept that long ago caught Mel's attention and excited his curiosity about the nature of existence. He had the server's AI translate dozens of treatises that expounded on the idea.
It was not an easy task for him; true understanding seemed to elude his perceptions, but Mel was persistent, and the AI was continuously self-correcting—building ever more tangible models of language translation that appealed to the intrensic locution of the Nightwing's senses.
Mel went over these works of philosophy, from Plato to Dennett, dozens of times until he felt he reached a basic grasp of the subject matter. Soon he wished to have a conversation with a human.
Mel swooped down, and once he landed on the foundation supporting the columned pillars as he was commanded, the Nightwing peeked around.
The Cistern of Souls, Mel wondered. What does this place made of chunky cement block have to do with the vital essence of things?
Sachmilli approached with the two women, Annebél and Tasìa. Their subdermal netting-works shivered silvery. Utterly beautiful to his eyes, the both of them.
But Mel was forced to adjust the colorband of his sight range so he could focus on their motions. The much littler one was approaching with something in her hand, a Nutty Nut-Nut Noog-Noog bar!
His favorite Noog-Noog bar.
She broke a piece off of it. His cah pitched up range in a high twitter in his response. Glad he was, though, that his murder back on the rooftop in Villa Marròn did not see him behaving so undisciplined, but otherwise he did not care.
Afterall, it was a Nutty Nut-Nut Noog Noog bar!
As the fey damisela standing before him cooed with pretty-sounding chirps of her own, Mel plucked the first piece of the bar from her fingers.
He sung for a moment, but a thought occurred to him. Mel got Sachmilli's attention and asked him to in turn ask the little thief a question.
"What did he say?" Tasìa asked as she broke off another piece of the candy bar.
Sachmilli suppressed laughter.
"He wants to know if you are using the Noog-Noog bar to entice him to fight a dragon on your behalf."
She squealed and gave Mel a smile in return.
"Are you my little Sir Percy de Escandia?"
Only vaguely recollecting the reference, Mel called up the homebase AI, which returned an answer.
The Nightwing gulped.
The Black Knight of Camelot?
So the damsel does expect me to fight the dragon on her behalf.
His wings shivered, and Sachmilli eyed Mel curiously. His handheld device translated the Nightwing's emotional state of being at all times.
"Relax, my friend," Sachmilli began. "I would not send you to fight a dragon. The diagnostics from our administrative breach show that the dragon Mithras is now constrained in a net comprised of USB relay, hooked into it for data extraction. It also happens to drain the dragon of its strength. The next several hours are optimal for accomplishing our goals."
A shadow encroached from his northeast.
It was the tall one named Annebél, and he knew her well. She shimmied over with the familiar hard leather case, in which she kept his talon pins, in one hand and the key for it in the other.
For a year, after she took over for the deceased Pablo, killed by guerillas, Annebél was his main tender, and only recently had she moved back to her old haunt in Asunción. The case had not been opened at any time since then.
Annebél threw back the latch hold, and the equipment self-assembled. His eyes were thirsty for the sight of his tools and weapons, even as he continued to be fed bits of candy from the little one.
Along with the talon pins was an airgun used mostly for emergency tagging purposes. As Annebél fitted it along his chest and inserted CO2 rods, she explained why he would need them, though he already knew.
"If the bats give you trouble, you can use this to clear a path through them. The puff will sting them and force them to scatter."
Sachmilli called it the blunderbuss. It was a very versatile air gun. The last time used, he and Sachmilli raided a field of mutant coyote. Mel dive-bombed them and applied head shots while old man Cuervo popped them with a Remington long rifle as they tried to scatter.
Annebél elaborated on how she was setting up the gun for him.
"The default is set to micron flechette quartz for swarm control, but the secondary will switch it out to a .33 slug at 1200 PSI for anything you need to individually take down."
If Mel had lips, he would be smiling at that moment. His brain was built for scavenging, which made him an excellent investigator, but, even still, he absolutely loved to hunt.
After she was through fastening the air gun assembly, Annebél slipped on his goggled hood. It appeared like a set made of several platinum and silver watch bands holding in place a pair of optical lenses and a groove that extended the instrumentation of the cochlear implants so he would not be dependent on their home base server in the security van.
It comported to his head sleekly.
Annebél smiled and appraised him.
"You look so sexy with your hood and gun."
He fluttered his wings and squawked in approval and communicated back:
Damn right, my fair sister; I am one sexy beast!