Point of Documentation: Marshall, Phoenix 11
Marshall’s eyes opened to a hand around his chin. It held it up firmly as the fellow pilot looked him in the eyes. A flashlight was then shone and blinded Marshall, who justly let out a string of curses at the woman. “Oh come the fuck off Luz. It was just a bump.” He swiped a hand up to try to get the light to stop.
The woman, Luz, did not relent and held on tighter. “Marsh, don’t be a baby about it. You slammed your head right into the shielding on the craft and got knocked so loose that they had to pry you from between the seat and the side of the cockpit. Upside down. If you don’t have a concussion, then I’m going to recommend you to be a living test dummy for testing out new crafts.” She shone the light into the other eye and sighed. “Yeah, I’m definitely recommending you now. No signs of a concussion.” The hand left his chin, but Marshall almost felt the need to keep fighting to keep the hand on.
He relented, however, and simply leaned back on the medical cot. He had ended up here after a spat with the local insurgents from one of the orbiting Outposts above the archaic North American continent. They still used the old terms, even though more modern maps just labeled it as Angel Controlled, Demon Controlled, or Contested for anything other than human lands. The only reason they even got into that spat to begin with was because the Outpost had sent out a party to raid the training grounds of Phoenix. Scalpers, coming to get materials from destroyed craft and satellites. Pirates and Brigands.
Marshall huffed and stood up off the cot. “If you recommend me, I’m telling Flight-Command that you’ve been sneaking extra rations and storing them in your cockpit.” he fired back at Luz, getting a smile on his face.
Luz looked offended at him and slapped him on the back of the head. “How do you know about that? Was it Gregory? I told that lard to keep his mouth shut!” She said this in jest, but her slaps still hurt like hell.
“No, no, I saw you sneaking some in the other day. But now I know Gregory knows and I’m absolutely going to tell him and get some dirt.” Marshall’s smile never wavered, and soon Luz smiled at him too.
“Ugh, you’re unbearable. You’re lucky your sister works on the bridge, otherwise I’d totally shunt you out of an airlock so you can trouble the Ints and make them crash instead of us. Besides, how the hell did you end up colliding sideways with three of them and NOT end up a milkshake?”
They both stepped out of the medical ward of the ship as they spoke, drawing the attention of the five people waiting in the hallway. They each stood there in the hallway, seemingly waiting on them to exit.
There was a taller man with a bit of a stomach on him. He didn’t lose out on any muscle mass with the weight, and instead seemed to embody strength itself. Gregory, Phoenix 7, a hot headed-brute who people wondered why he ever signed up for the Navy, and a fighter pilot at that. He was much more suited to be in a bomber’s crew or a gunship. Marshall even claimed the man could be used in boarding actions to just scare the shit out of those on the other side and make them give up.
On his shoulder was a smaller framed person who looked like the most kid-ish, androgynous person you had ever met. Standing at no more than 5’5”, they were one of the best pilots when it came to recon missions in their entire flight. Felix, Phoenix 15, the youngest of the crew and the spitfire of their little group. The fact that they liked riding on the nearly seven foot tall giant of a man that was Gregory was never a mentioned fact. Maybe they just liked to be tall?
Standing next to them with a sour look on her face was a scarlet haired woman who seemed to be arguing with Felix for some reason. She was the most ‘physically pronounced’ of the group, supposedly joining off of connections more than anything else to their flight. Her and Felix butted heads like no one else in the flight, and sure as hell the most in their wing and little group. Samantha, Phoenix 21, and the latest number of the Phoenix group. She wasn’t all for show, however, and was actually a tactical nutcase who could sniff out a dangerous situation for miles. It didn’t help that her family had a special lineage that supposedly were psychics or something and were used on ships such as the cruiser they were on.
Standing away from the three were two more just sitting and chatting between each other. A man by the name of Stephen who was roughly ten years the senior of the oldest one here seemed to be chatting with Vivian, a woman who had been in the medical ward for a while longer than Marshall for some corrective surgery. Stephen, Phoenix 2, and Vivian, Phoenix 4, were some of the longest retained members of the wing and held seniority over them. Rank-wise, Stephen was effectively the second in command of the wing and handled a lot of the personal relations between the members of the wing. Vivian was just an extremely lucky pilot that had not only survived for years in the wing, but even had earned some metals herself for her acts.
On that note: Luz herself was wearing the Phoenix 3 designation on her shirt. She was effectively one of the more core members of the wing and was directly related to the Wing-Leader herself. To say that she was multi-talented wouldn’t do her justice. She was the most medically inclined of the group, a comms officer from bootcamp who decided to change to pilot school, and had multiple years of college under her belt. To say she was overqualified to be here was an understatement.
The conversations and arguing stopped as Marshall and Luz made their way out of the medical ward. Felix immediately jumped off Gregory’s shoulder and ran up to Marshall. “Hey, is your skull ok? I can’t collect it after you die if it’s in, like, a million pieces.”
Luz covered her mouth to hide a smile as Marshall just stared down at Felix in mock horror. “Wait, you want my skull? What happens if I want to come back to life? Do I have to barter for it back?”
Felix nodded happily as Samantha made a frustrated noise behind them. Marshall looked up and gave her a smile. “It’s ok Samantha, I know what I’m getting into with this. Besides, who cares if I lose my head? Apparently Luz here thinks I’d be more use as a demo-dummy than a pilot anyways.”
Luz, in turn, nodded her head. “Oh yeah, especially with your weirdly shaped skull. A shape that apparently lessens the shock of crashes.” Marshall made a mock offended face and turned back to Samantha, who just looked absolutely lost. Good. She’s gonna get hazed one way or another if she wants to hang out with their group in this wing.
Stephen cleared his throat and cut into this debacle. “As much as I’d love to hear you all torture the new pilot for another while, we’ve got another scramble order for later this week. Apparently a nest leveling is needed. Something about a Legion spawning from this one and possibly another one coming soon. So we’ve been told to run a few drills with all active members and scramble at full force.” He gestured to Vivian. “And with me saying that, I’ve warned all of you and expect you to be there at 0200 hours. In the meantime, we need to get Vivian’s new nametag. New names and identifiers need clearance by a higher up in a wing after registering, after all.” Vivian nodded to this with fervor.
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“Well shit, congrats Vivian.” Marshall said, stepped over and giving her a pat on the shoulder. “So we’re gonna have a party over this, right? Beer and snack, yeah?” He raised an eyebrow to the ‘higher up’ as he declared himself.
Stephen sighed and nodded. “Yes, we’ll have a celebration two days before scrambling. Get your duties in order and prepare for the worst. I heard the Wing-Lead already has a banger planned. Something about sneaking booze on the cruiser…” Obvious distaste was on Stephen’s face and in his voice as he said this. What a dry man.
The rest of them seemed more than happy about this. In fact, Gregory uncharacteristically smiled and pumped a fist in the air. “We train, then drink!” The unspoken giant declared this, and the rest of them cheered as Stephen and Vivian departed.
Each of them eventually wandered off towards the hanger on the cruiser to start training and getting their things in order. Marshall and Luz went together down to the hanger. Whilst their designations may be a good bit from one another, they were actually assigned as ‘buddies’ for the wing’s dynamic. They flew close to one another in combat, but were apart when pre-combat in the wing’s formation. When they weren’t in their fighters or being called on, however, they also shared another thing: a room.
When they got to the room, some tomfoolery occurred, which later ended up in both of them changing clothes for a training session in the hangar. Luz left first, noting that he had gotten a message from his mother on his holopad while he was in the medical ward. Marshall thanked her, letting her walk out before he read it.
He moved over to the bunk-bed living section of the room, sitting down and having to move his rebreather off the bed and onto the stand next to it. The thing still smelled of Roberts and the medical waste he had sitting around. Marshall scrunched up his nose at it and decided to put it across the room on the desk.
Upon doing that, he sat back down on the old, brown covered bunk bed and opened the message on his holopad. His eyes looked at it… and saw nothing. There was no message there waiting for him there. Just a blank screen. Maybe Luz had made a mist–
“Hello Marshall. Enjoying ourselves again, are we?”
Marshall reacted to the holopad suddenly writing to him in the inbound message section by widening his eyes and opening his mouth in surprise. What the… had he actually hit his head too hard? Was he imagining things?
“As much as we enjoy watching us pretend as if we could wind back time, we have a duty here. The talent we have must be found and capitalized on. Time is not infinite. Tragedy is inevitable.”
Confusion covered his face for a moment before he started to remember. Right, he wasn’t here. He was in some shitty room with a little goblin who loved to use that rod and cause him to be in pain. He just needed to know why he was here.
The answer came quickly as the holopad continued writing to him. “Continue with the memory. Something is hidden here that will help us. What set us apart from our other crew members?”
What set us apart? Marshall thought on this for a moment before he got up and wandered to the door. He opened the door to the hanger, not the hallway it should be. He was shocked for a moment, but rationalized it as dreams skipping around when needed. Yeah, that had to be it.
Marshall walked around the hangar a little, watching all his former wing members going about and getting ready for the mission that killed all of the scrambled Phoenix Wing members. Eventually he reached his craft, a banged up fighter that had to be sent into the repair bay just to fly again. They had just finished repairing it when the mission had started. It let him fly in his trusty fighter that had always been with him ever since the end of bootcamp. The motto of his wing was stamped across it: “Phoenix’s don’t die, we return stronger”.
The fighter seemed to pull his attention in towards it, almost wanting him to look at it. A chime from the holopad caused him to look down at it. The dust and grime that had built on it made the words a little harder to read, but it said a simple phrase: “Reach out and feel it.”
Confusion pained Marshall’s face once again as he read the message. But, without another word, Marshall did exactly as the holopad wanted. He reached out and set his hand on the fighter in question. A feeling of pure emotion suddenly rushed out from the fighter like a tidal wave trying to drag him down. Marshall fought it, hand firmly glued to the craft’s side. It was a mental battle that felt as if he was swimming upstream in a torrential downpour, but Marshall swam with all his heart. Survival being the only objective. When he met the head of the downpour he grasped it and–
Marshall focused on his fist closed around something small and metal. He opened his hand to look at it, finding something both perplexing and so simple in it. A small car sat in his hand. It was dirty and obviously was just fished out of the sandbox from playing. Yet it radiated so much love and passion. This was HIS toy car from when he was a child. He didn't understand what the importance of this was at all.
Arms then wrapped around his neck from behind, a hot breath in his ear. “You should have died so many times, and yet you willed it to not happen. The machines respond. Driven by your will, they almost become sentient and do things they should not be able to.” The voice of Luz in his ear made his heart so heavy, yet so light at the same time. A well of emotions sprang from him, but were ignored as she spoke more. “When you crashed into those rebels, your fighter should have been crumpled. Yet it protected you. When you were traveling with your new companions and took control of the guns, you did it without training and knowledge. Yet it responded to your anger and hostility towards those men. Even something as simple as a completely destroyed bicycle carrying for miles before giving out when not needed. You have affected those things with your will and emotions for years without realizing it.”
The hand of Luz came up, the arm being barely there and transparent. It closed around Marshall’s hand and closed his fingers around the little car. “You have the power to enact change, and the metal responds to your will. So will it, and ignite what sits in your chest.” Marshall turned his head to look over his shoulder. He was terrified to see what she looked like, but only found the woman he had known for so long. She wasn’t the only one there either. His group and wing lay beyond her, some even waving as he finally noticed them. Luz smiled, speaking again. “I won’t be a freeloader, and neither will any of us. Let’s get that second heart pumping.”
Marshall raised his hand with the car up to his chest and, instinctually, pushed it into himself. A searing pain ran through him as something started fighting inside of himself. His very soul shuddered at the pressure, but didn’t buckle. No, it only resisted even more as the pressure built and built. Soon it felt like Marshall was going to rip in half as the pressure rose to a bursting level. And yet… he didn’t.
With a heavy step, he turned and faced them all. Each and every person he lost before this story of his even started here on Terra. They seemed to be waiting for him, but Marshall wasn’t sure for what. Looking to Luz, she motioned for him to take her hand. “Marsh… let’s go. You aren’t going to die here. We want to go home too.”
Marshall knew now what he had to do. He didn’t just know it, he felt it. Every inch of his body swelled with his intent, his willpower, his now bursting soul.
“Let’s go, everyone. We’re Phoenixes, remember? We don’t die here, and return even stronger.”
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Tethel waved his wand at the human a few times, getting a data reading from it. 2nd-Grade, will-based, karmic, and it looked like–
Suddenly the rod shattered in his hand, causing pieces to fling themselves all over the room. His eyes went wide and he had to shield himself with a skill of his and cause a bubble to appear around his body. The hand wasn’t salvageable, but the rest of him luckily was. He then teleported backwards a few steps quickly to put some distance between him and the human.
What was that… feeling he just had? The human passed out, and then this overwhelming presence came over him and shattered the rod in his hand. It had nearly forced the Cleric to shape into something smaller to get away from the pure intent behind it. Tethel looked at the human… and immediately noticed what the change was.
Tethel whipped out a small recording device and started it. “Log 82C-4A, Tethel recording. I’ve just located a unique human, a self-igniting Void-Heart. No contract signed, and no assistance given. Danger has now risen. Will now enact damage control.”
He put the device away as the human started to come to life again. Tethel swallowed hard at the task now ahead of him. This lowly human… just became something more.