<b>Forest outskirts, Australia.</b>
Emma closes her eyes and tries not to think of the sweltering heat in the APC as she listens to the static and chatter of the vehicle's comms radio and the background drone of chainsaws as several marines cut a path into the forest.
The plan had been to follow one of the old roads, as the going would have been lighter, easier to get the vehicles and equipment into the depths of the beast, and it had worked - to a point. But the going was still hard, there was still a great deal of brush to clear, and in the day's heat, it felt like they were crawling along.
The woman sighs and leans back in the seat she is strapped into, trying to think about her notes, the project, Jaden at school, anything but this goddamn heat. Her mind drifts along, vaguely touching on this thought, turning that small piece of information over, looking for some new feature, a new thread to pull, entertaining this fancy or that, and her lazy thoughts slip imperceptibly into dream.
<i>She's walking in a desert, the dry gravel crunching under her stout walking boots, the heat shimmering off the ground and evaporating the sweat off her skin before it can make her feel cool. All she can hearare her fotsteps and the wsporadic wind as it stirs the dirt and small shrubs of the outback. She feels tired, weary, she can feel the sun glaring from an impossibly perfect blue sky, bearing down and beating it's furnace against her back, making her skin red and angry.
As she walks she sees many strange sites. one, was a small girl spinning and dancing and laughing whist surrounded by skinned, hanging carcasses of what look to be sheep. In her arms she carries a lamb carcass, and she is humming a familiar nursery rhyme.
Next she finds two toys lying in the dirt, plastic soldiers like little boys like to play with. One is impaling the other throught the chest with a blade, while the wounded one holds onto the blade. The only thing of note is that the wounded figure seems to have had it's head replaced with the head of some grinning toy wolf, somewhat inexpertly. She moves on.
To her right she sees the desert changing to look like the roof of an oldstyle barn one sees in movies of midwestern america. Two indistinct figures sit atop it, staring off, talking lazily. The words sound like a muted buzzing and she can't make anything out. She moves on.
Above her, she hears an eagle cry out. She looks up, and sees a dot descending out of the perfect blue, coming directly at her. She marvels as the creature bursts into flame and then burns away to nothing.
She stops near a small green goat, chewing on some hay from a nearby bale and laughing and barking like a hyena. She moves on very quickly.
She sees next a familiar scene from myth, a man shackled to the ground, a crow picking at his liver. The liver heals before her very eyes, almost completely, before the crow again stabs at it with that long, wicked beak, elicting a moan from the man. She doesn't know if it is a trick of the shimmerring heat, but the man seems to have two faces, one moment looking like one man, and then looking like another, beforte flickering back.
She looks down at the sound of crunching glass, and sees that she is walking along a path of broken glass, mirrir to be exact. Each shard throws a broken, jagged distortion of her face back up at her, all leering and laughing, or sobbing, a parody of the masks seen in the symbol for theatre.
The images continue and blur, until she sinks into a dazed stumble, barely recognizing the oddities she passes...
She stumbles a little, snapping out of her daze, and looks down at a curious plant before her. It looks like a large rose the size of a cabbage, the petals a creamy red, with jagged, zig-zagging edges along the petals. Seven large, jagged leaves spread out from under the strange bloom, rustling slightly as though something moves under them. She stays there, half crouched for a very long time, staring at the thing, marvelling at it. The petals of the flower seem to softly pulse in rythm with her heartbeat, and it begins to make her feel drowsy.
She reaches out to touch the bloom, and the rustling sound underneath the plant grows louder, the petals going a bright, luminescant crimson before her eyes. Her eyes widen as the luminescant petals begin to open, like lips pursing to kiss her outstretched fingers, or bite them, and there is a bright yellow glint at the center of the bloom. The rustling becomes very agitated, and here eyes break away from the tip of the bloom for just a moment to look at the leaves. Before she can even blink, sinuous vine-like tendrils snake out from under the leaves, whipping around her arm, hundreds or sharp, hooked little thorn digging into her flesh. A loud buzzing noise fills her head, like a billion flies on a million bloated corpses, and then thick, dark blood begins to well up from the bloom, spilling out onto the dry desert ground.</i>
"Doctor, we are making camp for tonight" Emma snaps awake at the marine's touch on her shoulder, but she feels deeply chilled and shaken from the dream. <i>Nightmare, more like...</i>
She musters up enough will to say something to the man. "...Thank you..i'll be out in a moment."
Emma shakes her head to gather her wits. While it had been just a dream it had disturbed her deeply. There was something familiar about it, not so much what had happened, but how it had felt, the way everything in the dream had related to each other. Some of it had felt quite literal, whilst there was something that seemed almost randoly picked from her subconscious, while other were more familiar. The strange plant at the end, obviously represented her very valid fear of this forest. She does not try to extrapolate on the goat.
She uses some water from her canteen to whet her throat, and dampen and cool her face before she labours out of the seat and climbs down from the APC. There are crinks in her neck from sleeping awkwardly, but the heat is quickly going out of the day, leaving a coller, but still muggy night.
"Here." the same soldier hands her a bottle of lotion. "Plenty of bugs at night." He is about 5'8'', wears simple glasses, very functional, not really having any style, or lack thereof, She can see that he keeps his hair shaved shorter than regulation, with only a slight stubble covering his scalp. His features speak of perhaps german descent, but he is mostly unremarkable. She takes the bottle and pops the lid.
"What's your name?" She asks as they walk over to where the heavy canvass tents are being set up, rubbing the lotion into her skin. "Seth. Seth Mars." She looks puzzled. "No rank?"
"Not in the army any more." He says simply, pushing his glasses back up his nose.
"Then you're one of the ...the mercenaries?" She hesitates at using the word 'para', unsure if he would consider it a sledge.
"One of the paras, yeah," he says, bringing out a pack of smokes and tapping out a cigarette. As they approach the tents, Dr Wills steps out of one of the tents, flipping through some data sheets on readings of forets paranormal phenomena. While Emma is head researcher for the translation team, Wills is research co-ordinator for forest-paranormal studies at Warrimbull base. The mercenary waves goodbye and leaves before the doctor spots Emma, and she wishes she could have done the same.
"Dr Marrak, good timing, timing, just wanted to go over some figure, some figures with you." The man seems fratic as he flips through the pages, as though he could do with an extra set of eyes to take in all the information at once. "Some of the core samples we have gathered are very odd, very odd, and while i understand paranormal and parabotanical research is not your field, your feild, i thought perhaps some aspects may interest you. See here, here, and here, and here, readings spiked severly, but when we expected to find elevated levels of activity here, and here, here, we actually noticed either no change, or a drop, a drop,"
"Is that out of the ordinary, doctor? i've always understood the forest to be an unpredictable beast." Emma replies, not really interested.
"True, true, but odd that you use the term beast, odd, it is a full realized ecosystem with incredibly fluid dynamics, why, one would almost say that instead of seasons, seasons, it has well, evolutions...evolutions..very hard to keep up with the rate of new species in even just one field, or to even keep one species in one area. We had one creature we didn't know whether to class as a cephalapod or a mammal...very difficult job indeed, docter, indeed..." The man hesitates. "i just thought perhaps some of these figures may help you correlate with your research, see if there was any link, any link, between your reseach subjects...and...mine.."
Before emma can speak, the man hurries on. "Absurd, absurd, i know, but really, do we not live in a world of a world of the absurd, doctor? i mean, really, if i wasn't gathering the samples myself, myself, and dissecting them, i'd laugh me out of the scientific community." he laughs nervously at this, and they both suffer an uncomfortable silence.
"Well, the directors the directors want all teams to have as much information at your disposal as we can we can, so i thought i would extend my professional my professional courtesy. anything you need, doctor,"
"Thank you, doctor Wills, i'm relieved to hear that. and i won't rule out your theory." It horrifies her just a little that she isn't joking, either. "but honestly, right now, i just want a quick meal and a chance to stretch my legs after that terrible ride today."
The two say thir good-days, and Emma quickly heads towards the tent with "Translation team" written on a small whiteboard.
<i>God, i can't stand this heat!</i>
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