2023-05-27: Marooned

• Log: 2023-05-27: Marooned
• Cast: Puru Two
• Where: Dakar
• Date: U.C. 0097 05 26
• Summary: Puru Two stars in the hit new spacenoid teen drama, Left Behind, about a dramatic spacenoid teen who was left behind. Because she was left behind, you get me.

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Smoke billows from the windows of a low-rise apartment block in the heart of Dakar, thick and black. The cause could be anything, and by now is unimportant. Clouds of the stuff unfurl and bloom as they stretch skyward, just one voice in a choir. A scene repeated dozens of times across the city, it leaves an acrid haze drifting over the rooftops. Spins a blanket of formless grey from the smouldering homes and below. It settles over, wraps around, smothers the city in a murky embrace. The perfume of war, come to the proud city. "I start at your bidding,", the charcoal clouds whisper, "but I stop when I please."

As quickly as the warring tribes descended on the city and ruined it with their arguments and their anger, so too have most of them since departed. Fled to treat their wounded, mend their weapons, make amends and plans for next time. There are courses to be charted, wars to be mapped, distant battlefields to shape. In the game of grand strategies, there are forces and callings greater than the individual which shape the movements and decisions of the day. So it should come as no surprise, that in the wake of the battle of Dakar, stragglers and casualties from all sides of the conflict remain. It is this understanding that helps explain why the Three Ships Alliance pilot known as Puru Two, and sometimes (but decreasingly so) Callisto Diana, is unconscious in the back seat of a badly-oxidized Lada. She lies beneath a man-sized hole in the roof whose edges form a jagged flower of torn fiberglass, beneath a blanket of frangible automobile glass. To understand why she is here, we must revisit the events of the battle's closing quickly: because she chose her method of escape from her destroyed Mobile Weapon poorly, and the only method of egress from clinging to an external pipe on the now-burning apartment block was downwards. Into the car. Which broke her fall. It is very simple.

Her consciousness lies several murky layers below. For now. The events of these turbulent dreams are unimportant, for the most part, replete with self-torment and uncomfortable imagery. We have visited them before. We will visit them again. They are not the focus, now. They also vanish into gossamer threads of memory as a crew of firefighters descend on the car and render the door unlocked through the use of a halligan bar and ample brute force. The noise of the impact and their shouting is enough to wake the dead, and Puru Two is pulled back across the boundary into the waking world, where the pain is more physical than emotional, and sometimes both. Discomfort blossoms through the veins of her right arm in a way that 'pain' does not do credit to: there is a sense of wrongness and immobility that instantly codes to her as a dislocation. Glass rubble slides from her hair as she sits, but none of it is sharp. Thank you, automotive industry.

The firefighters are helpful, as emergency services teams often are. Her black normal suit is without insignia and rank, but none of them seem overly concerned with this. Possibly this is for their own sake: the less you know, the more earnestly you can claim it as a defense. A few muttered excuses and one sleight of hand later, Puru Two disappears into the service alley for the Almadies Apartments as feeling returns to her arm. She has mentioned nothing to them of the biting pain in her breast with each breath, or the pressing need to be ill: those are concerns above their pay grade, and she is relatively low on time.

Here in the darkness between places, amid the empty water bottles and the faded concrete, Puru Two winces as she climbs a nearby fire escape for a better view. She cups her gaze with one hand as she nears the top of the stairs, spying the telltale glimmer in the sky of oh-so-many ships returning to space. Alas, without her. Not an unreasonable move: with no communication, no transponder, and the AMX-004-03 Qubeley Mark II last seen being destroyed utterly by a direct hit from a Beam Magnum, it would frankly be foolish to assume she hadn't been rendered into a cloud of atoms.A long way from home, the clone with the orange hair folds her arms across the thin railing of the stairs. The discomfort that has dogged her thus far, despite the quick return of her shoulder to its socket, has only intensified. The world feels as though the walls and ceiling wish to change place.

"Okay. Challenge accepted." she grouses in a voice with no real gravel to it, because she is a teen-ager who wants to sound well hard. "I've come back from worse."

That's true.