Quintmagic Chronicles 1: Chapter 5
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I’m back with chapter 5 and I think I finally opened all the plotlines I need right now. This will be an interesting ride, guys.
Also, sorry that it took forever for me to post this… I was busy, okay?!
One of a kind
LX-014-6. The number echoes in the back of her head. Her stare is empty and unfocussed as she is being dragged along and back to her holding cell and into the isolation she’s learned to hate. She has lost her own battle against the control of the druids long ago, making her nothing more than their puppet or weapon. They didn’t even bother giving her a name, calling her by her identification code or simply referring to her as ‘the weapon’.
Perhaps, that is all what she will ever be – a monster created to serve the galra empire without questioning any orders. She raises her head when the two soldiers make a turn that does not lead back to her isolated cell. Instead, they’re bringing her to a part of the facility she hasn’t ever been in.
They pass a few patrols, consisting of mostly sentries. The lighting changes too. The hallways aren’t lit in the familiar green glow of the containment blocks. Instead, they’re purple. The girl bites her tongue, resisting the urge to ask where they are headed with all her remaining willpower. Eventually, the question answers itself when the doors open to a hangar. She’s being brought away for some reason.
The girl isn’t sure if she wants to know the reason.
- - -
Being held on a cruiser turns out to be a lot different from her usual environment. First, there’s always the distant hum of the engines, the clanking noise of the sentries’ feet on metal. There’s also the hum of the energy barrier generators that keep her in this holding cell. The lighting is purple, something that would take some time getting used to.
Then, there’s the others. She’s no longer alone. She can hear hushed whispers from the other cells. The other captives are making assumptions about her. Nobody dares to speak up, though, afraid of her for some reason. Perhaps it’s her appearance.
That changes abruptly when another person gets brought into the cell across from her. It’s a girl with bright pink eyes and blue pupils. There’s dark lines all over the skin of her face, indicating that the druids must have used her for some sort of quintessence experiment. She has light pink hair that she has tied in a ponytail somehow. The hair is wavy and the ponytail still reaches her mid back. Her eyes seem to light up brightly upon spotting her in the cell across from her.
“Finally! A new face around here!”, she cheerfully states, smiling widely at her. The girl frowns at the cheerful one. That’s when she notices the purple scales on her face, right under her eyes.
“My name’s Lyra! Who are you?”, she asks, pushing her face against the purple energy field that keeps her in her containment unit. LX frowns.
“I’m no one”, she mumbles, sinking to the metal floor and leaning against the right wall of her cell. Her hair is messy in comparison to Lyra’s. Some strands of white and black are covering her eyes, and she pushes them out of her view with a snarl.
“Awh c’mon, don’t be a killjoy. Everyone has a name, right? Also, it’s been quintants since something interesting happened around here. Not since Sai and the rest decided to go sloven-de-hoe”, Lyra argues back and the girl simply growls at her.
“Who says she’s like the others around here? She might as well be that experiment the druids were talking about moving on here”, a male voice argues back from the cell on the girl’s right.
“They couldn’t have finished it already. I thought we had more time to figure this out!”, another male voice interjects from across the hallway, in the cell on the left of Lyra’s. The figure steps into view. He lets his metal hand, it’s his right, rest on the energy barrier, looking at the girl’s cell in worry. He has black hair in an undercut and his eyes are of a dark grey color. Those other three are starting to get on her nerves.
“Wait, if you’re right, does that mean we can’t stop them anymore?”, Lyra suddenly asks, her eyes going wide, “W-we promised Nora that we would-” The girl frowns.
“Can you just stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here?!”, she snaps, startling the other three. Silence follows. Lyra’s eyes scream disbelief. The girl huffs, hoping that she wouldn’t have to keep up with all of them for much longer. She secretly wishes for the isolation of her old cell again, deciding that the silence there was much more bearable that the people talking around her.
“Quiznak”, she whispers, “Mura, Iraj, she- she’s…” The expression of the man on Lyra’s left turns to something that the girl can’t read. What is he thinking of? Trying to come up with a way to get me killed for whatever reason those three have, she wonders, averting her gaze.
< < < - > > >
Somewhere in another reality, the castle of lions is under heavy fire. A fleet of galra ships have it cornered against a massive asteroid field. They’re doing their best to hold up against their weapon systems, but it seems to be a struggle the castle of lion can’t win.
A puigan girl with thin pink hair, tanned skin and light green markings is doing her best to keep the engine from losing any more power. She rushes from terminal to terminal, diverting power from anywhere she could get it. She manages to trip over a wire. She curses, pulling herself back onto her feet and rushing towards another terminal.
Meanwhile on the bridge, Hieronymus Myran the second and a balmeran are doing what they can to keep everything up and running, trying to shoot back at the offending party without much success. “Quiznak! The bay of the blue lion is of fire!”, the royal advisor exclaims, waving his arms around in a panic.
The balmeran is standing at a display, supervising the crystal energy levels with a critical eye. “Section 12-B is down. Maiko, work around it!”, he informs the puigan girl over the ship-intern coms using his headset.
“Got it. Thanks for the warning”, she responds, only to shriek when something in the panel in front of her short-circuits. She jumps back in surprise, dodging a stray bolt of energy sparking from the malfunctioning panel.
Myran skates across the floor of the bridge towards his personal controls using the roller-skates the green paladin had recently made for him. And in the middle of the whole fiasco, there’s princess Priyane, standing at the two crystal pillars with closed eyes. Her brows are furrowed in concentration and a single drop of sweat rolls down her forehead and nose, only to drop to the floor in front of her feet. Her hands clench tightly around the crystal pillars, and her whole body is glowing turquoise.
“Careful, Number 5! On your six!”, Myran warns the green paladin. The green paladin yelps, barely pulling herself and her lion out of the line of fire of the enemy’s secondary ion cannon.
“Thanks, Coran!”, she calls back at him gratefully. She dodges a few smaller asteroids, trying to shake off a few enemy fighters.
“What is it with this ship?! Its weapons are unlike anything we’ve ever encountered before!”, she then continues on, blasting a few of the annoying fighters that are following her with the greening-cannon with an angry snarl.
“I don’t know, Katie! Focus on shredding the main ion cannon! We can’t let another blast hit the castleship!”, the red paladin argues back, dodging a few asteroids while rapidly approaching the ship’s main ion cannon. There’s rapid fire from the ships other weapons, and he’s being tailed by a small squad of fighters. He hisses angrily before pulling off his attempt under the pressure.
“They’re just too many, Yorak! Already tried getting close that way without success”, the yellow paladin yells. He’s distracted for a moment by the beam of an ion canon and a fighter manages to hit the yellow lion’s left side. The lion and Hunk are sent flying straight into the asteroids. Hunk screams loudly in surprise, immediately trying to regain control of his lion.
“Tsuyoshi! Hang in there, buddy!”, Yorak shouts, turning red around to help him, only to crash into a fighter himself. Keith yelps in surprise, followed by a thud and then silence.
“Yorak! Tsuyoshi! Quiznak! Takashi, what are we going to do?! We’re being overrun!”, Pidge shouts in concern, barely dodging another ion canon’s beam with an angry roar.
“Yorak, Tsuyoshi, do you copy? Are you two alright?”, the black paladin asks, keeping up a façade of calmness. All he gets in response from Tsuyoshi is uncontrolled screaming. Yorak groans lightly on the other end of the transmission, but not giving any other response.
“Yorak!”, Takashi calls then, showing a lot more concern for his friend. Once again, there is no response. Katie curses again, but in another language that none of the paladins understand. Shiro can tell by the way she spits the words out, but he decides not to act on it as there’s more important matters to be dealt with now.
“Yorak is down. He must have gotten knocked out cold by the impact”, Katie concludes, gritting her teeth.
“Paladins! Retreat!”, Priyane suddenly shouts, opening a visual channel. Behind her on the screen, Myran is chasing Kaltenecker through the bridge, throwing various altean sentences out while rushing after the rampaging cow on his roller-skates.
“What the fuck is the cow doing on the bridge?!”, Katie shouts in disbelief, steering the green lion towards the yellow lion and attempting to stop the other lion from spinning out-of-control.
“Language”, Takashi throws back at the younger green paladin, deciding she’s over-doing it with the cursing now.
“English”, Katie then snaps at their leader, clearly aggravated. Tsuyoshi finally calms down and stops his screaming when his lion finally stops spinning, thanks to Katie.
“Thanks, Katie”, Hunk pants, holding his head.
“Paladins! Please return to the castle! We must leave, now!”, Priyane orders once again with urgency in her voice, “We’ll get torn apart if we don’t retreat right now!”
“I’ll go fetch Yorak. You two, get me an opening!”, Takashi orders, turning his lion towards red and dashing towards him in the black lion. Black picks up Yorak’s lion by the neck and Takashi maneuvers the two towards the opening the other two paladins create for him.
“Please, Hurry! We’re running out of time! Re-route weapons system energy to the main turbines and telludav!”, Priya exclaims, regaining her balance after a particularly hard hit on the ship’s particle barrier.
“Princess! We can’t let them- “, Coran begins to interject, but he’s quickly silenced by the princess.
“I’ll deal with this myself. Just get the telladuv ready and enter coordinates!”, Priyane retorts with a determined gaze, before closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, letting the glow of her quintmagic get even brighter. Coran watches her hesitantly for a few ticks but turns back to his controls a moment later.
“You heard the princess. Prepare everything for a wormhole jump, Maiko!”, Coran orders upon opening a visual transmission to their newest crewmember and mechanic. She salutes at him, and the communication ends.
Meanwhile, the resident pilot of the blue lion awakens with a gasp and sits up straight. He looks around in a panic, at first not recognizing his surroundings. He takes a deep breath, finally recognizing the med-bay of the castleship. “Leonardo!”, Matteo, who had been keeping watch on him up until now, exclaims in surprise, jumping up from his seat and dashing over to him. He insistently, but gently pushes Lance back down onto the medical bed Lance had been resting in up to that point.
“Please, stay down! You’ll aggravate your injuries!”, Matteo informs him, only to almost fall on top of Leonardo when another tremor goes through the castle.
“W-What’s going on…?”, Leonardo asks, feeling like he’s going to fall asleep again at any moment. His right shoulder hurts like hell, and when he turns his head, he realizes that there’s a thick bandage wrapping it up.
Matteo is about to explain, when the main lights go out, leaving only low, turquoise lighting to illuminate the medical bay. “Are we under attack?”, Leonardo asks in confusion.
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