Scene: Earth?
The sky glowed a dull red as the dust in the upper atmosphere blotted out the sun. A few thin black clouds hung in the air above the ruined city. The buildings still stood tall, but the missing windows and the silence gave no sign of life.
Scene: Office building
Inside what had once been a typical office building, the skeleton of a monster lay on the ground in front of an open doorway where it had been killed. The bladed boots on its feet and the armor covering its chest were those of a soldier. The long jaw of sharp teeth showed it was not human.
A haggard young woman roughly stepped over the skeleton. Her black hair was an unwashed mess. She carried something large, heavy, and black in her hands.
She walked past the battle-scarred office furniture to the snack vending machine. After propping the heavy object she was carrying against the wall, she threw the vending machine to the floor and turned it over on its back with little apparent effort. She dropped to her knees and punched her fist through the plexiglass to grab the last item: a Fruity Oaty Bar. It was never her favorite, but it was food.
She thought she heard something. A tapping noise, soft and steady. Water? Footsteps? She raised her head to listen and pulled her unwashed hair away from an ear. Definitely footsteps. Not an animal. Not heavy enough to be a lizard. A person? Impossible. She must be imagining things. She shook her head and returned her attention to the granola bar, biting off the end of its wrapper and spitting it away as the steady noise grew louder.
"There she is!" The man's playful voice was impossible to ignore. Shocked, she dropped her dinner and held still.
"Hi, Jill!" The voice again. She quickly turned her head to see a balding man in his late forties, fatter and in better spirits than anyone deserved to be after an apocalypse. He wore what looked like a plain navy blue t-shirt, pleated beige cargo shorts, a fanny pack and tool belt with a several unidentifiable items attached, and a tinted eyepiece attached by a thin arm to a plastic ring around his left ear. He waved at her. "My name is Miguel Legato and I'm a recruiter for the Crash Championship. You can call me Mick."
"Mick." Her mouth made the word. It had been a while since she had spoken to anybody.
"Yeah!" Mick grinned enthusiastically. "We'll get along great!"
Jill blinked, still unsure how to react.
Mick switched to his sing-song voice. "I've got something for you." He reached down his front and unzipped a pouch at his waist, and produced a round orange object. "It's an orange!" He smiled and tossed it at her. It bounced off her shoulder and began to roll away. She pounced on it, brought it to her mouth, and chomped into it, eating the rind and all. Sweet juice poured down her chin.
"It's a Valencia." Mick said this last word with extra flair. "You like it? I bet you like it."
Jill felt that something was not right. This was too good to be true. She cautiously examined what was left of the orange. "What is this?"
Mick answered the unexpected question. "It's... an orange?"
"No..." Jill's hands shook. "It's not real. This can't be real. What am I eating. What am I eating." Her voice rose to a scream as she threw the orange aside. "WHAT AM I EATING???"
"That was an orange," Mick said with some concern in his voice. His concern quickly dissipated. "I can get you another. I can get you all of the oranges you will ever want, better food than that granola bar you were noshing on, clean clothes, and a shower, because you could use one." He unconsciously put a hand to his nose. “You just have to come with me and I’ll get you all these things.”
"Don't trust him, Jill." Jill looked to her side to see who was speaking. This third voice came from a young girl of about eight years old who looked like a younger version of Jill. Jill turned her head back to Mick, and the younger girl was gone as suddenly as she had appeared.
"What are you?" Jill asked Mick.
The question surprised Mick. "Oh, me? I'm Mick... I'm a businessman. That's what this symbol means." He put his finger and thumb on the clip-on symbol at the top of his shirt. "I'm licensed for dimensional splitting and transport of people and materials. My ship is parked outside..."
As Mick talked, Jill stood up and walked to the side wall and retrieved a gigantic black gun of impossible bulk, three feet long with a stock that was almost as tall as her torso and about half as wide. Jill hefted it with a little difficulty. She was used to carrying it around.
Mick cautiously took a step back. Jill interrogated him further. "Your ship?"
"Yeah, I have a ship!" Mick beamed with pride. "We can just walk out and get going and I'll get you off this planet and we'll go someplace better."
Jill did not believe him. "The Lizards will come. They will hunt you down."
Mick smiled. "We won't have to worry about lizards where we're going. There are only people. And some bird people and insect people and there are some lizards too but they are friendly lizards."
Jill shook her head. "That's not possible."
Mick happily disagreed. "Sure it is! Let me show you."
Jill considered her world's technology before the war. "We don't have any spaceships. We don't have space colonies." She thought for a moment before reaching her conclusion. "You're not real."
Mick patted himself. "Sure I'm real. I'm pretty sure I'm real."
Jill looked to her side for a few seconds. She turned back to Mick and smiled. "Anna says you're not real."
"Anna?" Mick asked with confusion as this conversation went in a direction he was not expecting. "Who is Anna?"
Jill continued smiling. "Anna is my sister." She liked her sister. They always got along well.
Mick was not happy to have to inform her. "Jill, I don't think your sister made it."
"What do you mean?" Jill nodded to her side. "She's right here."
Mick touched his eyepiece as he scanned the area. There was no one else there. "Uh, Jill?" He decided to roll with it. "She can come along with us! It'll be great! We can all go exploring--"
A touch of cruelty entered Jill's smile as she shook her head. "You're not real. It's not possible for you to be real. You're just another hallucination." She raised her gun at Mick.
Mick tried to talk her down. "Jill, put the gun down. No, bring it along because you'll need it --"
Jill grinned as her gun's barrel glowed white with energy. "... so I won't really be hurting anything."
Mick screamed "SHIELDS!" as he jumped to the side and ran out the nearest doorway, dodging a thin white laser beam that punched through the wall behind him and the wall behind that one.
Jill smiled happily. "I haven't hunted anything in weeks. This’ll be fun."
Scene: Office building, hallway
As Mick ran down the hallway, something on his belt beeped and a mechanical voice spoke. "Voice command not recognized."
Mick yelled at it. "Raise personal shields!"
This resulted in the same beep and response. "Voice command not recognized."
Mick opened the door to a stairwell and entered as Jill fired a blue burst of energy at him from the end of the hallway.
Scene: Office building, stairwell
The pressure wave from an explosion in the hallway knocked the door off its hinges and into Mick, throwing him down the stairs. As he lay still on the landing, Mick spoke the command once more. "Raise personal shields." A shimmer briefly covered him. He sighed. "Thank you." He put his hands to the floor and began to stand up.
As Mick got to his feet, Jill appeared in the doorway. "There you are." She smiled maliciously while a red light glowed within her gun’s barrel.
Mick jumped down to the next level of stairs as Jill fired a red burst of energy into the wall behind him. Chunks of the wall flew out, as did smaller bursts of red energy that exploded and threw bits of red shrapnel in all directions, further scarring the already battle-damaged walls. The energy and debris from the explosions bounced off of Mick’s personal shield, but there was a limit to how much it could deflect.
The dismounted door covered the stairs in front of Jill. She kicked it down the stairs and fired a shattering blast of red shrapnel into it.
Mick glanced back up at the sound and decided that he needed to get away from Jill quickly. He looked down and saw that the railing was missing from the lower level. He drew a cylinder with a handgrip from his toolbelt and pushed a button with his thumb. The cylinder produced a short blue lightsaber about eight inches long. Mick swiftly sliced out the railing to his side of the stairwell and jumped across the center of the stairwell to the lower stairs. His momentum carried him forward and he ran face-first into the far wall. His personal shield prevented any damage to his face, but his lightsaber punched a hole into the wall before it automatically turned off as he dropped it.
Mick bent down to pick up his lightsaber and hurried down the stairs to the next door. It would not open. Looking through a window in the door, he saw that the doorway was blocked by a barricade of office furniture. He hurried downward again and was stopped by a grim sight: beside the next door, the way down was blocked by the corpses of 7-foot-tall space lizards with large holes in their power armor. He paused and heard their killer slowly stepping down the stairs towards him. He looked back and saw the gouge that his lightsaber had made in the wall when he ran into it. He looked ahead and saw that a large chunk of the nearby wall had been blasted out.
Mick turned his lightsaber on again and began carving a large circle into the damaged wall. "Wherever this goes... I guess I'm gonna find out." He kicked the circle, pushing it back an inch. He rushed forward and pushed it through and fell through the hole as Jill aimed her gun down the stairs at him.
Scene: Outside
Mick screamed "it figures!" as he fell three stories into the mud outside of the building. He groaned as he rolled over. "Yep, it figures." His scanner had fallen off his ear. He picked it up out of the mud, shook it, and glanced around.
The muddy area used to be a garden for long-dead flowers that would have once grown next to the building. On the other side of a concrete walkway, the former lawn was bare mud and dirt. A sign identified the building as once belonging to a company named Applied Nanotechnology. His egg-shaped ship, the size of a 2-story house, was still parked in the middle of the street. Mick stood up, wiped his muddy shirt, and wiped his muddy hands on his shorts.
Jill leaped down and landed on the concrete walkway in front of him, shattering it under her feet. Her heavy gun slipped out of her hands. She reached down to pick it up.
Mick tried to talk her down as he walked around her and toward his ship. "Uh, hey, Jill, could we talk about this? Less shooting? More talking?"
Jill lifted up her gun. "No. More shooting." She aimed at Mick and then a saw a more appealing target. "What is that in the road? Is that your ship?"
Mick smiled. "Yes! Come on! Let's get you out of here."
Jill eagerly asked another question. "What would it look like if I shoot it?" She grinned as the gun's barrel glowed blue. "Let's find out."
Mick yelled. "Emergency transport pattern alpha!" A shimmering beam of light surrounded Jill and she disappeared. Mick sighed. "Well, that was a waste. Maybe I should try again. Another time." He turned and walked towards his ship.
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