Post by Brimstone on Dec 9, 2016 22:39:16 GMT
Brilliant shafts of sunlight streamed through the open hull above the cramped, dusty chamber. The golden light played across the leafy foliage that endeavored to consume the alien spacecraft room by room. Where the hull had breached, the ceiling had long since rotted away to expose the bones of the chamber’s construction. Tangled vines looped and dangled between the rafters, nearly indistinguishable from the broken cables they grew alongside to. The door stood ever so agape - a thick, taproot-like vine having pried it open over long centuries. Partially embedded in the far wall was the crumbling remnants of an uncomfortable ‘bed,’ which, despite missing some of its bulk, took up most of the narrow space. To one side, a portable medical console stood at ready - the exact nature of the device was unlikely to be apparent to a layman. Countless long years of exposure to the elements and plant growth had rendered the machine inoperable, perhaps even unsalvageable.
A pale yellow light blinked on the console’s side, flickering and fading in intensity at irregular intervals. A silent plea for freedom to any and all who might show the sulfur gem mercy. If not for the shadows lurking in the corner of the chamber, the weak glow would be utterly drowned out by the bright sunlight.
The slow decay of the machine was an ever-present weight in the gem’s mind, prodding at Brimstone like a petulant child whenever there was a lull in her thoughts. She was intimately aware of every crack in the console’s walls, every invading root that probed the circuits and panels, and every growing mote of rust that crept along the sophisticated innards of the device. Long before her gem had been placed within the power module of the console, she had begun to think of any technology she was housed in as something of a surrogate body. After a millennium of imprisonment, she grew nearly incapable of distinguishing a difference between the machine and herself, and then grew to feel a morbid fascination for the machine’s decay. The slow dilapidation turned her thoughts to the nature of biological lifeforms - how they age, growing weak and sick, withering, dying, and inevitably decomposing into base elements. Whenever she enjoyed a brief moment of lucidity, she considered with a scientific indifference how her current experience might compare to that of a aged biological creature.
Trapped in her technological prison, Brimstone had only a vague awareness of a cycle of light and dark in the environment around the console. She concluded the shift in light must be the day-night rotation of whatever backwater planet she was lost on, and hoped that she was indeed trapped in a derelict ship on a living planet. With all the optimism she could muster, she hoped that she was not buried a garbage dump on some barren moon. Or, worse still, drifting through cold space...utterly forgotten. In vain, she tried to distract herself from the possibility that she was doomed to rot in her prison forever. She dreamed of a more pleasant time: the unity of her squad, the glory of the hunt, and those few precious moments she had felt truly respected, if not free. But the console that throttled her senses and exhausted her mental faculties ever turned her musings to the subject of death and helplessness…
The lost sulfur’s only hope was to catch the eye of some wandering passerby, and so she threw all her efforts into shining brightly. Perhaps a scavenging alien beast’s curiosity might jostle the gem out of the machine. Or perhaps a sapient humanoid might take notice of the glowing jewel and retrieve it from its prison in a gentler manner. The thought of reforming from the slobbering jaws of an animal or the filthy hands of savage made Brimstone flicker with disgust. With time squeezing tight on her sanity like a vice, however, she would gladly take whatever savior fate steered her way.
A pale yellow light blinked on the console’s side, flickering and fading in intensity at irregular intervals. A silent plea for freedom to any and all who might show the sulfur gem mercy. If not for the shadows lurking in the corner of the chamber, the weak glow would be utterly drowned out by the bright sunlight.
The slow decay of the machine was an ever-present weight in the gem’s mind, prodding at Brimstone like a petulant child whenever there was a lull in her thoughts. She was intimately aware of every crack in the console’s walls, every invading root that probed the circuits and panels, and every growing mote of rust that crept along the sophisticated innards of the device. Long before her gem had been placed within the power module of the console, she had begun to think of any technology she was housed in as something of a surrogate body. After a millennium of imprisonment, she grew nearly incapable of distinguishing a difference between the machine and herself, and then grew to feel a morbid fascination for the machine’s decay. The slow dilapidation turned her thoughts to the nature of biological lifeforms - how they age, growing weak and sick, withering, dying, and inevitably decomposing into base elements. Whenever she enjoyed a brief moment of lucidity, she considered with a scientific indifference how her current experience might compare to that of a aged biological creature.
Trapped in her technological prison, Brimstone had only a vague awareness of a cycle of light and dark in the environment around the console. She concluded the shift in light must be the day-night rotation of whatever backwater planet she was lost on, and hoped that she was indeed trapped in a derelict ship on a living planet. With all the optimism she could muster, she hoped that she was not buried a garbage dump on some barren moon. Or, worse still, drifting through cold space...utterly forgotten. In vain, she tried to distract herself from the possibility that she was doomed to rot in her prison forever. She dreamed of a more pleasant time: the unity of her squad, the glory of the hunt, and those few precious moments she had felt truly respected, if not free. But the console that throttled her senses and exhausted her mental faculties ever turned her musings to the subject of death and helplessness…
The lost sulfur’s only hope was to catch the eye of some wandering passerby, and so she threw all her efforts into shining brightly. Perhaps a scavenging alien beast’s curiosity might jostle the gem out of the machine. Or perhaps a sapient humanoid might take notice of the glowing jewel and retrieve it from its prison in a gentler manner. The thought of reforming from the slobbering jaws of an animal or the filthy hands of savage made Brimstone flicker with disgust. With time squeezing tight on her sanity like a vice, however, she would gladly take whatever savior fate steered her way.