'We got a hit,' the young scientist in glasses and a white lab coat, holding a small cuboidal instrument in his hand, standing in front of what was shaped like a giant upright torus, cheerfully said. The rest of the men and women in the room, all of whom had lab coats on, cheered. Some were sitting in front of their computer screens, some were standing up with their translucent tablet computers in hand and there were about nine in total in that rather big room.
The room had walls padded with what looked like metal sheets. It had no windows but had no lighting issues either. There were large wires laying on the floor heading from a couple of computers to the large torus that lied up right against the wall to the opposite side of the door. There were few translucent fibers and copper wires running along the length of the torus from its inside, which were visible through equally spaced open segments along the torus.
A whistling sound that accompanied a flashing light flowing along the fibers that wrapped around the torus filled and echoed in the small room, but soon after the announcement of observation, the whistling sound started dying, slowly losing its pitch and becoming a rhythmic grumble before vanishing completely.
'I'll get the doctor,' the young physicist holding the cuboidal apparatus announced. He left the apparatus on a desk by the door and headed out into the hallway. Passing pots of plants decorating the hallway in his way, he made it to a room separated from the hallway by panes of glass. Through the glass the man sitting inside the room was visible.
Sitting behind his desk, facing the direction of the hallway and the door to his room, this man was fast asleep with his head hanging off his neck as if it had been broken off. Peeking from between his black strands of hair, the silver strands stood out and those silver hair strands had infected his glorious beard as well. In a white lab coat, just like his assistants and interns, he was getting the best rest he had for weeks in the total darkness of the unilluminated room with window blinds closed and lights off.
'Doctor,' the young assistant woke up the bearded man. 'We did it. It generated positive results.'
The doctor got up from his chair with a deep breath and wide-open eyes. 'Finally, let's go.'
They both headed back down the corridor into the room with the torus.
'Jeewan, turn it on,' the young scientist asked one of the two operating the computers, and Jeewan obliged. The rhythmic rumbling started back up and revved up to a whistle. One of the female assistants standing nearby walked over to the doctor and handed him her tab. The doctor was soon lost among the numbers in the screen and graphs adjusting themselves with time.
Looking back at the torus that now had small flashes of light running along the exposed fibers the doctor said, 'Fire her up.'
'Electromagnetic echo test,' the young scientist announced. 'Pulse transmission in three, two, one...'
There was a spike in two of the graphs in the tab that the doctor was holding. One of them was radial and the other one was cartesian. The doctor's eyes lit up with astonishment. What he first let out as a loud chuckle, that soon followed another chuckle soon turned into him laughing loud.
'Well done, boys,' said the doctor, handing the tablet in his hand to the female assistant to the right of him and tapping on the shoulder of the male scientist to the left of him. 'Well done.'
He walked out the room with a grin across his face. In his ear a female robotic voice spoke 'Connecting to Arch-minister.'
The man at the receiving end of the call was sitting behind his desk in a large room of white and beige. The room was decorated with statues, framed documents, a set of empty furniture, and two massive, beautifully carved sandalwood doors at the left and right sides of the room. The man in the room, behind whom lay a giant window in the place of a wall, was the furthest away from the two doors, and it was well suited to his lack of motivation to leave his seat. Serving tea to this gentleman was a faceless robot with the features of a mature woman, wearing a red dress over the cold metallic skin.
'Mr. President, there's a call for you from one Dr. Minato of Central Institute of Science,' the android, stopping pouring the tea, alerted. 'It's from your personal network, should I put it through?'
'Yeah, put it through,' the man didn't answer without taking a sip of tea.
Then a voice spoke in his ear. 'Sir, we did it.'
'You can leave now,' the president ordered the robot and the robot obliged. Waiting for it to leave the room, the president didn't speak. 'Encrypt the line.'
'Dr. Minato, you can continue now,' the president said.
'The gateway is functional, sir, we need three more vacuum fission cells and we are ready to go through,' Minato explained. 'Should I contact- should I set up a schedule for a meeting to discuss departure procedures, sir?'
After a few moments in thought, the president spoke. 'No, call Rob, take whatever he can spare and go through, send us back the observations.'
The voice spoke once again in Dr. Minato's ears, 'Connecting to the arch-prophet.'
The man Dr. Minato next connected was sitting behind the chair at the front of a long desk that could easily accompany twenty men but with only about ten occupying it now.
In a mild darkness within the room, one of the men in the room was standing up running his hands across a holographic image of a giant mech pointing out segments of the miniaturized behemoth that stood at the center of the table. There were men in military uniforms engaged in negotiations, but this man of interest was silently waiting for his men to provide him a verdict.
When Dr. Minato's voice spoke in his ear, he got up, excused the board, and after asking his sister sitting right next to him to take over with a gesture, he quickly left the room. 'Sorry everyone, a family emergency.'
Barely an hour had passed by the time he and about five of his men arrived at the facility. Dr. Minato upon noticing the familiar face welcomed him.
'Good morning Mr. Hiroshi,' Minato extended a friendly welcome and shook the gentleman's hand. Mr. Hiroshi, straight from his meeting, was in his tuxedo. Returning Minato's smile, he followed Minato into the room with the giant wired torus. The wires were sparkling more than it did earlier and the fibers carried more flashes of light as well. The lab assistants and interns, operating the torus under Dr. Minato's supervision, were running everywhere, verifying everything twice and thrice, running tests until the time was up.
Following Mr. Hiroshi, five of his men entered the room. Dr. Minato couldn't recognize the first, but the second to enter the room had been imprinted in Dr. Minato's head as one of Hiroshi's worst henchmen, and it had happened so from the incident that has been cataloged in Minato's head as 'the incident in North Hitoka'.
A Bean dropped this man at the front of two giant gates, overgrown with vines, guarding a mansion far from civilizations, surrounded by woods to all the sides. There were birds chirping and leaves rustling, but when the man stopped breathing to focus more on the land he was about to infiltrate, he heard nothing: no lawnmowers, no dronids and absolutely no footsteps.
The gates creaked open with a push. The man drew out his pistol and after toggling its safety, verifying its bullet count and loading it he slowly paced towards the mansion buried in time. He eyed each and every window facing the front; there was no motion. The overgrown grass parted ways for the man to pass through, but the padded dirt didn't give away the sounds of his footsteps.
The stone staircase that led to the two giant front doors of the mansion stood sturdy as it did six years ago before the mansion was abandoned, but the doors themselves had become a source of food for many generations of termites.
The doors were pushed open, but surprisingly they did not creak. Only the light that snuck into the foyer gave the stranger's presence in the house, that was until a heavy slab of withered wood fell onto the floor making a loud noise that echoed through the house.
Reaching under the pillow in the master bed, she pulled out a pistol.
A creak! It came from upstairs. With the pistol at the ready, the man tip-toed across the entrance hall to the stairs on the other side. Barely checking the two hallways to the opposite sides of the hall, he hastened towards his goal. He knew a lot more creaks would follow his way up the stairs, but time for sneaking was over with the fallen slab.
He cleared rooms one by one starting with the first room to his left. The door swung open and a pistol threatened every piece of withered furniture in the room. There were cupboards, a bed at the corner, a desk at the window, and on top of that desk, one plushie of a tiger with a long tail and one eye.
When nothing in the room was threatened by the pistol, the man moved on to the next room. His steps were quiet, breath steady and aim unwavering. Few steps towards his destination, he noticed the door to the next room was already half open.
In an instant, the door burst open the rest of the way and the man was ready with his pistol aiming into the room. Holding a pistol back at him was a girl, with hair so long it reached down to her toes. Terrified of the armed man, with her usual lisp-y accent, she advised, 'take whatever you want and leave.'
'Miss Kikuchi,' the man said. 'Put the gun down.'
'Please leave,' Sakura replied. 'I don't want any trouble.'
'Put the gun down,' the man paced closer.
'Stay back!' Sakura screamed, about to break into tears.
'This doesn't have to be hard, miss Kikuchi. Hand me over the blade and I'll be on my way.' The blade laid behind Sakura, on the table, in the man's field of vision.
I hope you understand the risk and I'm sorry to leave all this burden on your shoulders, but there's no one I'd trust more.
There was a silence for a few moments as the man could not progress any further, Sakura could not back away any further and both of them had no idea how to proceed. The man stepped one step closer, cautiously, to only get caught off guard by a voice from behind.
'Your breakfast is ready, miss,' Hames, the friendly robot butler, now a little worn and rusty, entered the room. The man turned his head to check the visitor standing behind. Sakura, seizing the window of opportunity, grabbed the blade and reached for the bathroom door to her left, but she was too slow for the man.
'Stop,' just as Sakura was about to disappear into the bathroom, the man fired a warning shot, and unfortunately for Sakura it hit her right in her calves.
With a loud scream she retreated into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Hames didn't know what to do, hence as with every case of emergency he contacted the authorities immediately and advanced on the man. 'Stop, intruder!'
Outside the bathroom door, there were multiple gunshots. Sakura was scared and hurt, with no idea of what to do next. She was in so much pain, but for some reason she was too scared to scream. Now sweating and whimpering in pain, she sat down on a ledge and attempted to cover her gunshot wound, but the bleeding wouldn't stop. With pure panic and pain, her head started to lighten, and she started feeling dizzy. Before passing out, she knew it was her last chance to do something if she didn't want to bleed to death in the bathroom.
There were still sounds of struggle coming from the other side of the door: it wasn't the way out. She wouldn't get far on foot with all the bleeding, hence looking at the blade she realized there was only one way out.
Take me to a safe haven, and someone to help me.
Hames, for all the metallic weight of his body, still was easy to be thrown into a wall when he was hovering, hence that's exactly what the man did. Fracturing the hard concrete wall, the metallic butler was thrown into it. The man wasted no time and picked up his pistol. He quickly aimed and fired three bullets into the bathroom door, one to the lock, and two for the hinges. After retreating a couple of meters, he picked up speed and rammed himself against the door. It swung open.
There was blood on the floor running up the tile ledge that separated a bathtub from the rest of the bathroom. There were muddy footprints all over, but by the time the man broke into the bathroom, the girl that had left those footprints was nowhere to be seen.
There was a gross disregard for protocol the way he proceeded. No surveillance was done before the infiltration, the target that was meant to be caught alive and unharmed was shot and most importantly the object needed to be secured was lost. No amount of compensation would change Minato's opinion on the agent in question.
The agent to enter the room next, had a relatively cleaner record. He was renowned as one of the best investigators at Hiroshi's disposal. His story was much more different from the first and in Minato's catalog it was summarized as the 'Heston convent incident.'
Heston, a city of the future, a conurbation born of excellent planning and architectural wonders. Highways, Expressways and Speedways on top of each other, skyscrapers of apartments and fewer even larger skyscrapers for office space reaching for the sky from the spaces between roads running well above the ground populated everything the eye could reach for miles. With so many residents in this city, some carefree and some burdened, there never were parts of the city too congested. No traffic, even in the busiest hours and the population distributed well among the layers of the city, never condensed.
Among the concrete pillars, skyscrapers and highways running high above, there laid a couple of hundreds of square meters of green land and covering the majority of it was a building complex with old Restreal architecture. Main supporting pillars topped with spires, massive, stained windows on every wall and giant skylights from every side gave the buildings an uneven level of reverence.
The second agent felt as if he was committing a sin, defiling the sanctity of the grounds, walking up the stone stairs to its entrance with the earthly ambitions he carried.
A nun emerged from inside of the church building, which was distinguishable from the rest of the buildings due to the shape and size of it and walked towards the detective.
'Excuse me sister,' the detective asked politely. 'Do you know where I might find the- uh- headmistress?'
'Oh, the Prioress was just in the church, I think she headed to her office,' the nun responded politely with a smile. 'May I ask what this is about?'
It was not many moons ago when she crawled into the doorsteps of the convent with a bloody foot and pleaded the headmistress for safe haven from her father's gang rivals that are in pursuit to end her life.
'Sorry, sister, it's a confidential matter,' the agent expressed his sincere regret. 'Could you tell me where her office is?'
'Sure, turn left from the entrance hall and it's the first door to your right.'
'Thank you.'
As directed, the detective made his way into the hall. Past him, a group of nuns in habits went past deep into the building, just arriving from the church. Several of them observed the stranger curiously without drawing too much attention to themselves.
The detective knocked on the office door.
'Come in,' a female voice from inside requested.
'Apologies for this inconvenience, sister,' the detective apologized, walking into the room and slowly closing the door behind him. 'I'm Raymond Buckingham, from GDI intelligence, investigating a missing person's case.'
He pulled out a badge from his pocket, of which details faded in after it was opened and displayed.
'A missing person's case?' the Prioress took a seat behind her desk gesturing to the detective to take seat as well. 'That's being investigated by the GDI?'
'Yes, ma'am,' the detective pocketed his badge and pulled out a picture. 'The girl in this picture has gone missing.'
The headmistress accepted the photo, squinted her eyes and looked at the photo attentively.
'And GDI's interested in this girl?' headmistress inquired.
'Yes, sister,' the detective replied confidently. 'I cannot share the details of the investigation with you, but it's of utmost importance that I do find her.'
'I don't recall seeing this girl, sir, and don't mind me saying, but is this girl Hitokan or Neichan?'
'There is no way I'm wrong,' the detective thought to himself. He had been on this pursuit for months now, and he wasn't ready to give up his hunch.
'Yes, the girl is Hitokan,' The detective answered and without letting the headmistress notice, he dropped a small spherical shaped object onto the ground from his pocket. It waited a few seconds still on the floor before it rolled over to the office door. It snuck under the gap below the door and made it to the entrance hall. After checking around to see where the rest of the sisters would have gone, as fast as a fly, it sprung into flight.
The small bot flew through the crowds passing one hall after the next, an open corridor and a series of hallway intersections before it made way to a dining hall. In the dining hall, the tiny dot of a bot was not the only robot going about their work. The group of nuns who just came from the church had sat down at the long dining tables that filled the hall and the egg-shaped robot butlers were serving them food. Few more dronids flew over the tables, cleaning and checking on the nuns to see if they needed anything else. Finally, there were a couple of faceless androids in different outfits walking around the dining halls hastily, helping the egg-shaped robots out. It was one cohesive automated system that suffered no delays, and the sisters were thankful for it.
Six faces scanned so far, and there seemed to be seven more here; the tiny bot got back to his work. The sisters who just joined the dining tables were all in prayers, with their hands together, covering their lips. The tiny bot landed on one of the glasses on the table, facing all the seven nuns and scanned them one by one, but to seek the odd one out, no such advanced AI was required since through the thick veils and bandeaux her round eyes stood out easily.
Gotcha.
'As far as I recall, the last girl to join the convent was Bernadette and she joined about six months ago,' the sister replied, but the detective was no longer interested in continuing this conversation. 'We had no recruits after that.'
After pausing for a while, with a gentle smile, the detective got up from his chair. 'Well, if anything comes up, just let me know.'
'Wait... what's this?'
The headmistress too got up from her chair to show the detective out.
'Thank you, sister.'
Sakura held the tiny bot down against the table and slowly and carefully picked it up. She immediately recognized it. 'There was a stranger at the headmistress's door,' Sakura thought, reminiscing about what she saw on her way to the dining hall from the church. 'They found me!'
'Damn it,' the detective about to leave the entrance hall suddenly turned back, pulled out a handgun, one larger than a normal pistol and ran back in. 'We've been made.'
She was running as fast as she could with her limp and the tiny bot chased after her tracing her every step.
'Call the police!' the headmistress screamed as the detective headed into the building.
Sakura ran into a cell, closing the door behind her.
'Not again!' The detective ran deep into the building, past the dining hall in the direction Sakura was headed. All the nuns he met on the way stepped aside as much as they could at the sight of the man running at them with a pistol.
Take me to the middle of nowhere: somewhere I'll be safe.
By the time the detective got to Sakura's door there was one more nun calling out for her, reaching to open the door. She too, after noticing the armed man, stepped aside and grew quiet. The detective rammed the door open, but once again, it was too late; there was nobody in the room, it was empty.
It was the odds that were against him in that case, not his experience or tactics. Maybe he could have not gone in at all and only sent in the bot, but still there was no guarantee of success if Sakura managed to notice the tiny flying spy. Minato never categorized that failure as a mistake on the agent's end, simply that it's a coin that chose to land on its side.
After the detective's failure, the pressure of the operation fell onto the man who walked into the room next. An ex-clean-up crew soldier now on Hiroshi's payroll. He was the one to send to get a job done, regardless of its scale and that's exactly what the guild did ordering him to pursue the investigation in frost adorned peaks of Servea.
The cold snowy mountaintops would have been too much for anyone else, but for a trained GDI soldier, nothing nature could throw would compare to the suffering he had in the bootcamps. Boots sunk a couple of feet down into the snow and every next step took more effort than the last. The cold was painful and the mix of fatigue, sweat beneath the warm jacket and chilling wind in the face made it uncomfortable as uncomfortable gets. The view of the cold mountains ahead and snowy trees laying behind would have been a sight to behold if not for the snow actively trying to bury the friendly observer.
A hut was now in the agent's field of vision lying a little far up the mountain. Setting his eyes on it, against the freezing winds, he made his way up.
'Anyone home?' the agent knocked on the door of the hut. The place was not large enough to fit more than two people inside, but the smoke popping up from the chimney assured comfort within the wooden walls.
Suddenly the door swung open, and the agent found himself at the bad end of a shotgun barrel.
'Name yourself,' it was an old woman who interviewed the agent in a thick Servean dialect. She was wearing a lot of layers of cloth on top of each other, which seemed to have been mended by the old woman herself.
'I'm a weary traveler, miss,' the man replied in flawless Servean. 'If I could stay here for a few minutes to catch my breath, I'd be eternally grateful for it.'
Sure enough, soon the agent was enjoying a hot cup of coco wrapped in a warm blanket, but he hadn't taken off his jacket. A fire blazed by the hearth, warming boiling a kettle of water laying on it. The old woman had sat down in a rocking chair, enjoying a cup of coco herself.
'What brings you here, young man?'
'I'm here for sightseeing, miss,' the agent replied. 'But got caught in a storm and I was separated from my group.'
'Where are you from?'
'Uh-,' there was no use lying, his appearance already had given away the answer. 'From Hitoka, miss.'
There was a moment of silence as the two enjoyed their cups of coco, but an unspoken tension didn't fade away. The shotgun laid against a cupboard next to the old woman's rocking chair.
'We haven't had a storm in many days, though,' the old woman added, attempting to sound not too suspicious.
'I guess in that case I've walked too far off the trail,' the agent said, gulping down his coco. 'I assume you don't get that many visitors around here, miss.'
'No, not much,' the old woman replied.
Then the hut became silent once again. There were sounds of wood creaking and the rocking chair going off balance from time to time to keep the two company as they each sipped the cups empty, little by little.
The more time went past, the more restless the old woman became. The chair was rocking faster than it did before. She eyed the man all over, again and again, for a single inconsistency, not certain as to what she should be looking for. The agent, after taking the final sip, rested the cup on top of a table.
'You better be leaving, young man,' the old woman advised. 'Before another storm hits, or it'll be harder for you to reach your group.'
I hope it'll be enough, there's no way I'm climbing back down.
'I can afford to stay a couple of more minutes, I finally got the location to our camp,' the agent replied. 'And besides, what are the chances two storms hit on the same day to a mountain that rarely gets any.'
It's so cold, I can't wait to get back inside.
'Maybe it's the first storm of the season,' replied the old woman. 'Wouldn't want to take the chance.'
Almost there.
'I highly doubt it, miss,' replied the agent.
The door to the hut opened with a creak. Outside, Sakura stood looking in with a stack of firewood in her grasp, confused as to who the stranger was. The agent recognized his target instantly and got up to his feet.
'Run, Sakura, Run!' the old woman suddenly screamed in Hitoku as the agent hastened towards Sakura. Sakura immediately dropped the stack of firewood and started running down the hill. Before the agent could progress far, the old woman pulled out her shotgun and aimed it directly at him. 'Stop! Or I'll shoot.'
BANG!
The shotgun trigger remained unpulled. A smoking pistol had been drawn in a flash. And the old woman's lifeless body collapsed onto the cupboard behind her. A splatter of blood covered the majority of the small wall on that side of the hut and now a Charon locket, which had snuck out of the old woman's dress, laid on the blood that stained the floor.
Sakura hastened down the mountain, out of breath. She didn't want to process what the gunshot might have implied, for she knew it couldn't have been in her favor. Her walk up the mountain had already been tiresome enough, and now the running had started to drain the last hint of energy she had. Her foot sank into the snow with every step and with the amount she sank into the snow it was difficult for her to see where she was going and as a testament to her lack of direction, she managed to reach a dead-end at the edge of a cliff. Sakura turned back to retreat, only to see the agent now blocking her path.
'End of the line,' he had a handgun aimed directly between Sakura's eyes. 'Don't move.'
Sakura couldn't speak, she was too tired, but she involuntarily kept stepping backwards. 'This is insane, just leave me alone.'
'Don't move,' the agent ordered with a cold tone.
Sakura raised her hands halfway surrendering; with the deadly slope behind and the deadly soldier from the front she didn't have much of a choice. From the fatigue, fear and pain from her mind wondering what might have happened back in the hut she was breathing heavily. The world slowly started blurring and stopped making sense as she started to hyperventilate. She wasn't falling, but she felt as if she was and, in a panic, she stepped back: onto nothing.
The agent leaped forward, but he was nowhere fast enough. Sakura fell off the cliff. The agent quickly put the gun back in his jacket and ran down the mountain heading to where Sakura might have fallen off to.
She fell for about a meter down before she hit the steep ledge and rolled down the hill picking up momentum. The cold hard face of the mountain was not merciful to her and with gravity doing its thing, her body was breaking with every roll and tumble. Her face smashed against the stone multiple times and with the gaining speed the next hit was always worse than the last. She tried grabbing onto something, but nothing could tone down her momentum. Within seconds she had rolled to the bottom of the cliff, devoid of momentum, buried in the snow.
She was still conscious and now the cliff directly above her, seeing the height terrified her. Her whole body in pain, face broken against the hard rocky cliff, she was bleeding from every inch of her body. Beneath the gloves, boots and her snow-coat, she could feel herself bleeding out. Whimpering in pain, her face unapologetically drenched in tears and bleeding both from her head and nose she tried to get up. She couldn't support her weight with her right hand, hence as soon as she tried, she collapsed back onto the snow. Moaning and whimpering with every move she did very slowly, she got back up to her feet. She dragged her left leg, which couldn't support her weight either, as she tried to limp into the woods.
I can't keep doing this! I can't! They can chase me to every end of earth, I have no way out!
'Ouch,' Sakura clenched her teeth and fist. The stitches were healing nicely, but still the bandages hurt every time she had to remove them to clean her wounds. Sister Bernadette finally managed to clean Sakura's stitched bullet hole and started putting on the medicine and putting the bandages back up.
'It's so stupid that the headmistress doesn't let us use Tyclopse shots,' Bernadette complained. 'This would have healed weeks ago.'
Sakura smiled in response, unable to complain about the woman who saved her life.
'Headmistress told me that your father's gang rivals are after you?' Bernadette asked. 'Is that true?'
Sakura nodded.
'Wow, that's scary,' Bernadette empathized. 'But I don't think this place would be too safe for you. Ever thought about going to a different country? I bet if you talked to the right person, they'd arrange it for you.'
'I- I'm not sure,' replied Sakura.
Bernadette, very carefully attending to the bandages, not wanting to hurt her new friend, focused all her attention to getting the wound properly dressed.
'I know it's probably very hard to leave your home behind,' Bernadette added. 'It's all you've known in your life, right?'
Sakura nodded, now really in thought about what Bernadette was explaining.
'But you could start a new life. You wouldn't have to live in fear of anyone coming to hurt you and maybe- maybe years later, you could come back, when everything has settled, and they are no longer looking for you.'
With the final knot on the bandage, dressing the wound up was completed.
Maybe that's what I have to do: leave. Find a new world, new life, new friends; leave this darkness behind. Among the infinite worlds, there has to be a beautiful world, a world from the pages of one of my books, a world where I wouldn't be sidelined or hunted, a safe world, safe from this one.
Sakura stopped still and closed her eyes. The pain her body was in was overwhelming, but a glimmer of hope shined in the blade she was now holding in her palm. A chance. A life.
Take me to an oasis, in the middle of a storm that none would dare cross, an oasis that would be my home.
The blade lodged itself into the air she stabbed it against. Reality rippled around it, refusing to tear apart, but as Sakura pulled down the blade, slowly the curtains of reality split apart. This time the tear felt different, radiating in a different glow and different power. From behind the tear that opened, there was a cabin in the middle of the woods; woods adorned with a green she hadn't seen in a while. It would be her new home, she knew it. Dragging her left foot along with her, she carefully stepped in through the tear and it closed behind her.
It wasn't even luck, just odds against them. She had nowhere to go, cornered at the edge of the cliff, but she happened to have the blade with her. Not even the greatest marksmen would have been able to predict that outcome, or so Minato thought.
The five agents were now in black vests, armed and ready.
'You join them, doctor,' Hiroshi requested from Minato.
'What? me?'
'Yes, if something goes wrong, you'd know how to fix it,' Hiroshi replied. 'Now get suit up.'
Minato hesitated, but he had to hesitantly put on the vest and the belt. As he was putting the kit over his lab coat his assistants carried small tube-shaped cells to the back of the torus, plugging them in place at its foot. Hiroshi examined the room in the spare couple of minutes he had.
'I'm ready,' Minato replied, securing the belt properly and turning it on. The usual blue outline appeared around this skin and coat.
'Ok,' Hiroshi said. 'Turn it on.'
Minato picked up a pistol from the table that had open weapon cases and examined it before he placed the weapon on his belt. Everyone moved to their stations and froze there. The five agents were standing at ease looking attentively at the torus of wires.
'Ok, Triggers fully charged, frequency offset initialized to zero and-' the assistant with the glasses said looking at his tab computer. 'Here we go.'
He pressed a button on this tab and all the graphs started going haywire. The torus started whirring. A low pitch noise grew to a high pitch noise until it faded out of earshot leaving behind a different low-pitched noise that then grew in frequency until it once again grew out of earshot. This kept repeating until a noise resembling the noise of helicopter propellers flapping against the wind took over.
Slowly the image visible through the torus started shifting. The wall came closer, the metallic padding disappeared, then the image moved fast past the city. Buildings in the city disappeared and reappeared as the distorted image kept moving. Then there was the ocean, a ship, a harbor fading fast, drowning in darkness of the night, a city that got replaced by woods and then a fog; a fog confused with what laid within it. The shift of colors and wind blowing out from the torus made the scenario quite terrifying to the uneducated eye. Then the scene became more and more incohesive and loud, terrifying the educated and the uneducated alike. Then it stopped.
Beyond the torus now laid a grass plane that didn't extend far. The horizon was obscured, and the distance was blurred. The assistant in glasses turned back and looked at Hiroshi gesturing that that's it. The torus kept whirling and fibers around it stood completely lit.
'Send in the drones,' Hiroshi understood the assignment. 'And the rest follow.'
The drones flew in first, and after a few seconds of waiting, the five agents followed them in. Minato was hesitant to proceed, hence with a loud breath out his mouth he ran headfirst in through the torus.
The wind was chilly and calm. To Minato's right there was now a giant castle, behind him was a circular tear in space, but to everywhere else there was a fog, a fog of glasses, reflecting images of a distorted and incohesive world. It was disorienting to look at. There were blue skies above and green lands below, but that was all that could be understood looking at this ethereal fog.
Suddenly a loud scream from Minato's right deafened his ears drawing his attention.
One of the agents, standing close to the threshold of the fog, was bleeding; blood squirting from his wrist, from where the rest of his hand had disappeared. He was squeezing his arm with his other hand to try to stop bleeding, but it did not help. The rest of the agents rushed to the man for assistance.
'You moron!' Minato yelled, pulling out an injection gun from the back of his belt, which was filled with a yellow fluid. Rushing over to the bleeding man he injected the shot to his wrist and pulled the trigger.
The syringe emptied and the bleeding slowly stopped. Sure enough, the wound healed fast, and a stump replaced where his hand used to be. The grounds once again grew quiet.
'Get a replacement after we get back.'
Now looking at the strange fog lying in front of them, everyone was scared of the silence. The agents started making peace with this unknown, thinking that maybe the scientist among them had an idea what it was, but Minato was terrified that he had no such man to rely on. He knew the rest would not be able to comprehend a misery that he himself is baffled by.
Did I make an error in my calculations?
Did something go wrong?
What just happened?
Where are we?