And Angels Made From Neon And Garbage Scream Out...

The first thing that crossed Martin's mind when he saw the giant glowing pyramid in the distance was how much paperwork he was going to have to go through after this was over. The second thing was that sinking feeling in his gut about how he was most concerned about the paperwork, though that thought only burned dimly within.

He rubbed the bags under his eyes and chugged down his eighth cup of coffee that day, while the Colonel was sipping his first. The Colonel was a tall, dark-skinned man, the youngest to reach his position in over 40 years and, more importantly, the nearest high-ranking military official to the site of the rising pyramid.

Martin turned to the Colonel.

“Have you seen that movie 'The Day The Earth Stood Still?”

“Yeah, when I was a kid.”

“Do you remember that scene where the alien takes out that little device and gets it blasted out of his hand? The one that turned out to be an intergalactic encyclopedia?”

“Kind of. Your point is?”

“Don't be the guy who shoots it out of his hand, that's what I'm saying.”

The colonel paused, and looked bemusedly at Martin, who was currently chugging down his ninth cup of coffee.
“You know, it's weird. I would've thought that a guy in your profession would be a little more-”

“Awestruck? Rapturous? Lemmee tell you, this job, it wears on you. Incidents pile up. That one at Port Risley for instance...”

“Wait, was that that the one in-”

“In Jersey yeah”

The Colonel paused. He winced a little. A lump went down in his throat as he ran his fingers through his sandy blonde hair.

“Jesus...”

“But that's in the past now. Let's get on with this.” Martin said. He opened up the last of the three one-gallon milk jugs he had filled with coffee for that day and started drinking directly from it.

He then took out a large folder filled with forms, removing and filling each paper out with one hand, and swigging down that coffee with the other, and continuing this until they reached the site.

Trailers dotted the landscape, acting as an improvised “base” at the moment, as millitary vehicles and troopers swarmed around like ants on fire, trying to rig up devices they barely understood for a moderately-secret mission that was likewise opague to them.

Infrastructure for this sort of thing wasn't up to code in this region, Martin noticed, as he saw the shabby state of the trailers and diagnostic equipment. Swigging down the last of his Coffee, Martin presumptively walked out the door as the car rolled to a halt. Two confused young military men rushed up to meet him and held up an uneasy salute.

“Simmer down kids,” he said, brushing his hand towards them, “This isn't some X-Files/MKUltra bullshit. Just a matter of procedure.”

The two soldiers eased down, almost disappointed. The colonel walked out the side of the car. There wasa moment's pause as they all surveyed the landscape,and the great glowing thing in the background.

“So,” the Colonel asked during the pause, “will we go in?” Martin nodded. “So how much security do you-”

“Usually one or two of them. These things are either meat grinders or wet farts in the dark. Either way two warm bodies are the most pragmatic.”

“Allright then. After yo-”

“Let's get on with this.” Martin interrupted, walking down the lanes of trailers and equipment. Every moment or then, Martin would stop at one of the machines, look at a few ticker-tape printouts or digital windows, rustle with a few things, hold his head and sigh annoyedly, and walk forward and onward. There were readings coming out of the devices, which the colonel could not make heads or tails of. Things like “Vibratory Fluctuations Per Minute”, or “Percentage Reality Displaced” or “Aether Enervated” or “Lifeforce Emissions”. But he could see that Martin looked alternately annoyed and confused as he looked at each readout, about that there was no doubt

At one point, the general saw Martin look at a readout, tossit down, and walk up to the side of the case. He cracked open a door, looked in the case. There was a glass chamber with a bright orange egg inside, cracked in two, with ashes all around. The white shone luminescent, and there was a small; flopping fetal bird-thing in the case, puffing flame and weeping as electricity arced and shocked it.

Martin looked in disgust and muttered to himself. “They really are resorting to anything these days”. He shut the machine off, much to the consternation of the soldier manning it, who he quickly pushed aside as he plowed his way through and continued looking at the diagnostics. The bird thing looked up and relaxed a little. It seemed to be waving, as the colonel passed by.

As they continued, the colonel looked upward to the pyramid.

Like the tooth of an elder god it stood, great panels of obsidian laced through with veins of turquoise glow, like a memento mori held to this day. And yet Martin's eyes stayed firmly affixed to the diagnostics, his only looks towards the pyramid being ones of disgust and annoyance.

But, they reached it. The door was open. The cool wind of milenniae past blew through the great yawning entrance. And Martin rammed past it as the guards and Colonel gently stepped through.

Without skipping a beat, he took out his pen (of the kind that clicked off and on) and a small notepad, and began writing as they stepped through the place, slowly but surely.

The obsidian-black walls with the turquoise-glow continued inward. Electronic tones booped out from the environment now and then, and panels of color lit up momentarily only to flash still in some unknowable pattern. Images of points upon the earth and places out of time flashed upon rippling screens, and those turquoise veins ran through that eerie; pristine ruin. But, while the three millitary men were inp awe, Martin had his nose squarely kept to the notebook he was jotting notes in, only looking up to scan through the aetheric SF-baroque vistas and take in data points.

While the machines worked as they went through the structure, humming an electric tune as they walked through the linear path of corridors winding upward, there was nobody there. Not even a mouse scurrying about, or a fly making its wanted presence unwanted. One of the soldiers tapped the wall with his rifle butt. “Hello? Anybody home?” he giggled in that tense way one does when one is teetering on the edge of a cliff.

“They almost never are” Martin muttered under his breath.

The colonel was just about to retort, when a bright blot of light shined through to him from a room, straight ahead of them. The colonel and soldiers rushed in, while Martin held his head annoyed and slowly walked along with them.
It was pyramidal in celling, presumably at the top of that pyramid, and it was like a gallery of an older world.

Bright screens like rippling turquoise pools buzzed alight in the chamber, dots of color flaring in and out here and there on their surfaces. And, in the center of it all was a humanoid, on a dais.

It looked feminine and metallic, colored like a war-banner, made of spines of steel like a samurai's armor or perhaps some toyetic super-robot, with an antennaed head covered faceplate and eyes that held but a few sparks within.

“They almost never are,” he thought. He felt something spark as their steps moved forward, a faint; tinny sound, a faint; sparkling feeling in his brain, a faint; haunted memory.

Cool air swirled around the chamber. They stopped moving. The soldiers moved closer to Martin Martin reached in his pocket. He pulled out a taser. The statue scanned them with sparks beneath its eyes, looking upon them surreptitiously with an electric fuzz like the eyes of god.

“Get in front of me, and be ready for anything” he said.

He stepped, carefully, cautiously forward. The colonel was one step ahead. His arm was not on his pistol. He knew it would do him no good if something happened. Besides, there was that part of him that wanted to see what the hell was going to happen.

There was something buried in Martin too, the fear, that leady, coagulated fear, that something would go horribly wrong, that the moment would collapse, the wizard would be shown behind his curtain, and it would all reveal itself for another ugly farce.. Images flashed in his head, some from his memories, some almost flitting in from the static itself.

And, with the images came light.  Light from the screens as they walked towards the dais, light from the air, and light from the machine's eyes. Then, it began to move.
“Good day Mr. Martin Delphine, Colonel Honeycutt, Privates Alvin Winstone and Martin Thomas. We come in peace, for the sake of mankind.” she spoke, leaving hers hands open.
-
The white interrogation room hummed with electric tension, both of the literal and figurative kind. The robot and Martin sat face to face, a table in-between them, and a one-way mirror between him and the colonel. A fist-sized hole was blown through the five-inch steel back of the transport vehicle that had brought them there outside, along with several of the concrete buildings and a small chunk of the barbed wire above the fence surrounding the base.

After all passengers had exited, as if a minor demonstration that she could leave when she wanted, the machine had shot out the blue beam as they were filing in, in plain view. But, she'd still followed them in.

She was currently tinkering with a walkie-talkie she'd gotten from inside the vehicle and taken apart, because nobody wanted to be the one to ask the ancient super-robot not to take the obsolete hardware.

“So, what's your mission?” Martin asked, folding his hands and sipping down his lukewarm; bitter coffee.
“In years past, in eons perhaps unbeknownst-” she said.

“Skip the history crap and tell me what you're doing now. Can't you transfer this into my head, like those pictures you were doing before.” Martin rubbed his temples.

“We are afraid that would perhaps take even longer by your standards. And as of now. Mr Martin Delphine, waiting, and learning.”

“For who? And for what?”

“For an elder civilization of man, against a race of things from another space in the many.”

“Why did they leave you here?”

“To make sure it never happened again, they left, and they left me and a few others, composites of the greatest minds amongst their fighting machines in apex almaglations of their mechanical designs, to be activated if they should fall or fail.”

“Where did the pyramid come from?”

“A space between spaces.”

Martin facepalmed. “So, any more valuable insights maam?”

“There are weapons for us, scattered across the land. For us, or the others like me”

“Why didn't they wake up with you?”

“Do not put all your eyes on the same bear, that is what they told us.”

An aphorism, he presumed. Martin pushed at his temples and gulped down his last cup of coffee.

“Let's get facts straight here, and let's get them there now.” He said, rolling into the schpiel that'd been globulating in his mind during the conversation, “You're alone maam, and your claims seem relatively dubious if not flat-out laughable. You're from a dead civilization that I don't even know if it exists or not, brought up by a system that I didn't even know if it glitched out or it just failed, for a problem that may or may not be happening.

And you're probably stuck in the same hole as me, all things considered. I'll take you to the department for 'assignment', and you can go about your merry way if you promise not to interfere in the affairs of the US government. There were no dimensional anomalies detected by our machines, no records of archaeological finds, and I do not think that there are little green men from the Sixth Dimension back to get us.”

The conversation paused. The machine locked eyes with him. If there were a mouth beneath her visor, it would be frowning right now. “You seem a very sad, bitter little man.” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, as if every Tom; Dick and Rosa hasn't told me that already. Maybe with your electro-psionic-bullshit static you can see it's all about my mother, or it's all about butt things or whatever!”

“No. Your mental-patterns will not- there is something thick, and clotted, a fog of memory. You're holding on to some years-ago misery so hard nothing can penetrate it. I do not understand this."

“Fine. You want to know why? Because everything is bullshit. The monsters are always old and dying, the fairylands are rotting, the aliens are always sex criminals or trying to sell something, the superscience is breaking down, the vampires and werewolves are either losers or spree-killers, and the world of the paranatural is just as big a shithole as where I- I mean we come from!”

The machine's eyes narrowed. The lights in her eyes flickered for lack of tearducts to cry with.

He withdrew his fists and his cold; crushing stare “Now can we get on with the pomp and circumstance and paperwork and bureacracy, or do I need to go into every miserable soul-crushin-”

“Look. Look at this”

The static crackled and rose up, like a phoenix of another age, burning a way into her mind. Three-dee moving scenes of things like her flashed through his mind, in cities of yesterday that looked like the cities of tomorrow, of metals and energies foreign to him and towers and streets thought impossible.

A blue machine fighting neon-light eyeballs in a huge barbed-wire cage through a city, fighting twice as hard when a mechanical flying bulletproof heart rushed in like round two of a calvary from hell. A walking red armor merging its body with a great cannon in a city square, blasting at the mechanical glass/brass flask pumping out the same liquid death that was eating away her metal skin.  A satanic armor of wires held a bleeding woman in its arms as a pink machine ran in; electricity flaring between her fists in rage for a dead love. A yellow armor holding the line as a flapping-winged claw-crane hacked at it again and again as it tried to punch through the door to devour man's last hope. All of it, the feeling of righteousness, the fire of passion, memories of the old things which had driven him before the world began to rust and the lights faded.

The electric field stopped. And his mind went back to the white; one-way-mirrored room, with the sad little man, and the machine from an age of glory and grandeur now gone.

“That was me. That was us,” she said. She got up, and slammed the door away, as Martin sat, digesting the series of events.

She did not touch the soldiers, and they did not fire upon her. Though, every now and then as she passed, she gave one a small salute.

And, from behind those mirrors, Martin let the ember of those memories burn within him, knowing of times when he was not alone.
-
It took Martin fifteen minutes to find the machine. She was shuddering in a closet near the front door. If she could cry liquid tears, she probably would be. The static aura was prickly, dangerous, woeful.

“You're afraid, aren't you,” he said, looking down at the piteous machine.

“We were beautiful. We saw so many things back then, things you would not understand. And now there's nothing. We do not know where we are going, but we want to see again, is it gone, is it gone forever.”

“You have regrets?”

“You would not understand.”

“Try me. I think I know my own regrets.”

“Then let us both speak of them.” She got up, out of the closet in a swift; gymnastic; mechanical motion. The tile made a crunching crack sound when her feet landed. Martin wiped his forehead, nervously. “You know, it's getting kind of stuffy in here. Here, let me open up the window,”

Martin moved over to a tiny thick-glassed window and shuffled the sticky metal slowly upwards. In the middle of this, he turned to ask her, “Say, you know, I never really bothered to ask your name.”

She turned. This time, if there'd been a mouth under her “My name is either a number or long technical description from a, I mean my long dead language. But the first word in that code is Qixvoj, so I suppose I can be called that.”
“Well then, let's start from the end, and work our way back.”
--
The soldiers stood outside of the trailers, the night-black adding to the weirdness of the situation.

They shivered in the moonlinght, and they shivered even harder when they saw something moving, whether it be a jack-rabbit, a tumblweed, or a dimensional anomaly to a horrible monster realm.

While there were indeed no dimensional anomalies by the pyramid, there was very much one by the
A ripple in the darkness, from which a gaudy thing emerged, like a huge two-ended ever-pumping steel piston, body adorned in hole-covered leaking; leering mask-faces, sturdy armored legs like colored glass on both vertical sides.
It was monster NV Model Number #001: Pinston. And it was here for the Grand Dimensional Crusade, for the cause of ruination.
-
“It had a Phase Two?” Martin asked

“Is that unusual to you?”

Martin and Qixvoj had been talking for several hours by the small kitchen. A pot of coffee was half-emptied beside them. Martin had a large mug, qixvoj had a small platter she sometimes “sipped” from with her fingers.

“Well, I don't get it. Why wouldn't they have put those parts on phase one? Seems inefficient to me.”

“Well, we had it explained to us as a jury-rig, something like using one's intestines as a lasso after being disemboweled.”

Martin would've asked her whether they'd actually been that colorful when giving her the metaphor, but thinking about it; given all he'd heard that night, they probably had.

“But, anyway, the one of our model was out of commission after the creature went into its second phase, though it tried to the creature opened up like a flower, and she could see the core imploding, folding space and time within. The warp was tearing that component's group apart, none of our weapons could do anything. I remember, the one of our model tried to crawl to try and hit it. But, for a last-ditch effort, it was the one of the Tankard model who grabbed one of the thing's layers and rammed it in, like an ouroboros. And it worked, more-or-less.  She sacrificed most of her chassis for that. And she never quite fully healed from her damaged core. Always had to carry a secondary-restarter on her after that.

She said it was worth it though. She was the greatest of the series, beautiful, dazzling, there was always a power in her treads hammering across the freeway, bulkhead gleaming in the sun as those of our model tried to keep up.”
“So, was she your, I mean that specific model's mind chop-shopped into part of yours, beau?”

“Indeed, there were several model from other series whom we remember most fondly.” She said, quickly, as if trying to change the subject. “But yes, she does present heavily from our minds.” A few lights in her face flared up. If she'd have been capable of blushing, she probably would be right about now.

Martin chuckled and then held his head. “Series?”

“Oh yes, I've forgotten to mention, there were several different series of machines; different from us but for the similar purpose. There were the ones on treads and tank-bodies like battering rams with the piston-arms, the ones with great wings and wheels for speed and flight, the ones with drills and burrowing jaws, the ones with propellers and thousands of flapping fins for the oceans, and several more obscure. Some of the models merged to form me had... fond memories of several individuals of these models. We wonder how they're doing right now.”

The static aura around them, which Martin had been ignoring for the most part at this point, flared up slightly. “This reminded you of something?” the machine asked.

“Someone. A lot of someones.”

“You have someone you loved?”

“If you mean 'cared about,' I had friends, companions, once.” The machine tilted her head. “Oh you mean in that way. Nah. I mean, I can care about people, or I used to anyway, but never in that way. I've heard people talk about how, apparently, it's something called 'asexuality,' which seems as good as any description.”

“But, how did you-” She fell silent in mid-sentence, and the lights dimmed in her face.

“Lose 'em? Well, either they got burnt out of my line of work, or burnt out by me. I told you some of my 'Greatest Worst Hits', as far as assignments go, which weren't much compared to-” The electric aura around them began to crackle further, like an ozone-smelling brain massage.

“Be fair to yourself, even we found those events harrowing. In particular the Xenostellar 'Baby Factory' and the Suffer Chapel we found horrifying. We cannot even imagine how a human would have dealt with the-”

“Barely.” Martin interrupted. He took a sip of coffee. “And that was only a few scrapings from the top of the scab. The worst one, oh god the worst one...”

The electric aura died down around them. “You do not want to speak it.”

“I can't. You could've read it like a book if you wanted to.”

“But you do not. I understand this-”

She stopped. The sounds of loud heavy metal music blared from speakers all across the base, and the sound of army boots. Martin ran out into the hallway and also into the colonel's chest.

“What's going on?!” Martin asked, as he pushed himself up from the ground.

“Anomalous phenomenon, full mobilization in case of hostiliities.” The colonel helped pull Martin up as he said this. “Your area of expertise sir," he added, nodding.

Martin looked around. Qixvoj was gone, though there were several Quixvoj-shaped holes in the wall. The colonel began running forward again. Martin followed.

 “But why heavy metal music as the siren?” Martin asked

“Y' like it?” the colonel asked, as the door and the sounds of gunfire raged outside “It's Iron Savior, great attention-grabber, really gets the heart pumping. Now look alive and-”

There was no continuation to this sentence as the sound of something burst through through the room. The colonel kicked the door open. It was like a paint-roller covered in brazen faces, steamrolling through one of the many structures. Great heaps of lurid-colored glass filled with soldiers lay in the moonlight outside as the thing flailed its stained-glass legs and got up, tottering like an elephant of Dali combined with a tower of Babel amongst the rubble towards them. Indeed there were little green men from the Sixth Dimension, Martin thought, and they indeed do hate us.

This thought process was interrupted by a spray of steaming cold liquid glass, and by the Colonel's arm tackling him to the side as he dove out of the way.

The soldiers near them withdrew weapons and began firing, as the others were from other places. Their bullets left little but powder-scars, their passing  footsteps left no prints in the dust of battle, their efforts naught but glass as they were entrapped and amberized like a charge of the electric-Light Brigade as all Martin could do was watch and feel sick.

The colonel took a Desert-Eagle pistol out of his boot, and started firing as the thing tottered over to their flank. Definitely not standard-issue. And definitely impractical. But, the one out of twelve bullets fired which hit did leave a nice ding in the creature before the Colonel's arm was glassed. And then his leg. And then the rest of him, as Martin crawled off, scrabbling, shaking, crying, hiding.

Not now, not now, not now, he thought to himself, as his breathing grew short, his nerves grew tight, his heart beat fast and his thoughts stretched back long, long, long. For, today's episode was brought to you by the letters P; T; S; and D, and the secret word of the day “oubliette” screamed through his head like Pee-Wee Herman on crack...
–BEGIN FLASHBACK-
Crack, crack, crack went the timbers on the pier as the agent in the hazmat suit stepped off the one-person government-issued motorboat. Flap flap flap went the tape marked “Do Not Enter” “QUARANTINE” being pushed back as the agent stepped under to see what the damage was.

Hiss went the compressed air to the cattle-bolt-gun, and the sigh as the agent thought that at least their deaths will be quick and painless. And shriek went the man dragging himself down the pier, screaming under the weight of the cartoon-witch-head-shaped tumor crushing his spine.

The agent looked down. The man was weeping and moaning, as the great green head-tumor cackled mindlessly. It was proper protocol to take out any stragglers in the course to “Patient Zero”. He placed the bolt-gun to the man's head, and mercy was granted.

The cachophonous hecatomb became more evident as he stepped into the town of Port Risley. A cartoon halloween hell out of Bosch, cartoonish spooks growing like great fungal cancer gardens of orange and black and purple. Cackling jack-o-lanterns grew out of the sides of buildings like fleshy warts, and ghostlike white masses dragged their way out of a sewer as he walked past.

A dog was dragged past the agent howling, as the giant goggle-eyed spider attached to it's head walked down the asphalt. Mindlessly drooling pseudo-Draculas, pseudo-Frankensteins tugged at the cars they bulbously protruded from, dragging their useless limbs in a way that should not exist.

There were corpses everywhere of course, colorful blights of spooky cancer crushing pale and bloodless bodies of men; women and children like piles of Halloween decorations, almost comical if there weren't so many of them crushed between twitching goblins; mummies and eyeballs smothering the faces of the dead clawing screaming against sidewalks and edifices of still-moving mummies and eyeballs and stretched black cats.

The agent felt like he was choking on his own heart as he walked through the streets, granting bitter mercy to whatever he could, men, women, children, animals. There was no cure for this sickness of the world, no escape, whether as a victim or a watcher. Every step he hoped it might get better, and every step he was further gouged in the soul as the baroque Halloween plague continued unstopping.

The living amongst them were the worst. A line of huge skeletons merrily danced on streets of tumorous jack-o-lanterns and black cats as the people growing out of them screamed in pain. A child was dragged by its leg as a huge purple owl flapped and flew from building to building in the same mindless pattern over and over again. A tangle of humans were trapped scalp-first in a meaty rat-king of Draculas and Wolfmen as they fought over the scraps of corpses living in the street. A whole haunted house the size of a port-a-john was dragging itself through the street leaving a smear of the wreckage and humanity growing out of it as it went nowhere in particular. All were given mercy as the agent could as he walked towards his destination.

A sign reading “Cost-Lo Costumes” was his destination in the middle of the piles of dying and undying that nearly blotted out the heavens, the brickwork and windowsill barely visible amongst the meat growing from the rancid edifice when he stepped upon it in the heart of this hell. The Halloween core. If one could find it in some discount aisle on November first, it was growing from that building's walls, moving, howling, hooting, croaking, laughing, cackling, moaning.

A ghostlike lump of white pointed at the agent, going “Oooooooooooh” as he went in. He paid it no mind.

The lumps of pumpkin witch and skeleton were only denser inside here, with only a few glimpses of musty floorboards and half torn piles of costumes being gnawed upon by mummies and tiny haunted trees.

“Why,” the agent thought “Why did you have to do this to yourself, to them, why didn't you listen...” He reached the back door, grabbing the knob and the eyeball growing through it. And, inside, upon the wall, covered in the tumors to the point where it was almost impossible to tell where the tumors began and the human ended, was a man in a shredded cheap magician's outfit, with eyes begging for death.

“Sch-Hello Sch-Marty” the man on the wall slurred, drool coming out of what could barely be seen. A limp wand lay in his right hand, a busted top-hat upon his head.

“Hello Frank.” the agent said, as he walked up with the cattle-bolt-gun.

“Sch-Marty... I guessh I went too far thish time.” the man said

“Yes, yes you did” the agent said as he put the cattle-bolt-gun against what could faintly be discenred as the man's “head” amongst the pumpkins and tumors.

“Sch-Marty... Pleashe... Kill me...” he breathed. The tumors pulsed as they sounded in screams. And the agent obliged.
–END FLASHBACK-
She-owwwwww. The sound awoke Martin from the flashback. Back to the present, back to the battle, even as his trauma tried to pull him back. It was Qixvoj, body on fire with light, dashing with a turquoise pulse of energy like a shot from a railgun.

Towards the spewing eilodion she dashed, slammed, chipped off a brazen face like plaster with a power-pulsing energy-punch. Electric energy crackled from her body as the thing turned towards here, and let out a metallic whistle like a steam train, and spewed the prismatic glass at her.

Her armor flared with light as she dashed away and lanced off a beam at the creature, which fell on it's side like a paint roller as it dodged. It hissed as it barreled towards her and she jolted back.

Martin watched as she fought the thing. It was a ballet of violence, spewing, dodging, punching, rolling, Hit and dash, dodge and beam. His heart was beating, not with fear, not with tension, but with power, but with hope.

The chipped away at each other like chisels on marble, Qixvoj regenerating from the chunks of debris from the battle, and the creature seemingly regenerating from nowhere. But it was clear Qixvoj was being worn down faster, when the glass splatters on her frame built up, and her arm was stuck fast to her side.

He had to do something. She dashed off to still fight, even if one-handed. He looked to his pocket. The tazer. The one thing he could count upon in his line of work was that; even if neither fire nor steel nor lead could fell a creature, electricity would always work.

She had her back against the wall as she was knocked back again and again still-fighting. But the creature had its back to Martin, as he got up on unsteady legs. With no thought but a primal yell of “NOW”, he jumped on top of it and jabbed it with the tazer.

And for a moment, for a brief instant, it worked. It stopped, it writhed like jelly, it howled, it bucked trying to throw him off. It did throw him off, with a dull thud away onto the fence. But it stopped him long enough.

Qixvoj's chest oepned up to reveal a light, a great turquoise beam, a thing that would have taken too long to charge and release in the heat of the battle now firing, in one stark moment, in one blinding light, as the thing cracked and the beast howled in its death throes.

Martin was wiping up his brow as he tried to get up and he saw a hand towards him pulling him up. It was Qixvoj.

The two looked at each other in the debris, as the glass melted away and the soldiers emerged dazed and confused.

“So, about those... things. I think I know somebody who can help us”

Qixvoj looked at him. Her electrical aura flared up “You seem hesitant about that statement.”

“Yeah,” Martin looked reluctantly, “But there's always time to make amends.”

And, for this moment, as they walked into the sunrise, it looked like wonder still lived in the world of man.