Post by Dark Beauty on Aug 21, 2007 15:13:07 GMT -8
((I had one with a story plot!!! It was crazy! It lasted the whole night, and was extremely detailed, though some parts are a bit hazy... and I am not gonna go into all the details, either, since it would take WAY too long. Anyway, story mode!!!: first part...))
There was something wrong. Everyone felt that. What was going on? There was a different feel to the air. We all felt that someone or something was around. In a war, you cannot be too careful, and that feeling had become familiar after five years of secret service. The house we were surrounding certainly used to be a safe-haven for us… but now our group felt like there was one of them in there.
The government had been destroyed three years previous by the Assassins; those Americans who felt no need to be loyal to the country any more. It was a civil war; Americans against Americans, the Assassins fighting for the country for themselves to make it an anarchy, and the Patriots fighting to keep the country and to stay alive. The Assassins were well-named. They killed anyone who opposed. Captured Patriots would now find themselves lying in order to stay alive. All of the public places were now guarded by Assassins with machine guns... for the people's protection is what they said. We Patriots knew it was a lie.
The worst part of the war was that there was no specific leader of either group. The Assassins had simply come together; it started with a bombing at a workplace in Chicago, and it escalated from there. With the government overthrown and the president assassinated, the Patriots had nobody to call a leader, either.
But they had us now.
Over these bloody five years, there have been heroes from our side. Martyrs. But there were only scattered numbers of them. People who would really stand up against the Assassins.
We did. And we still lived.
When the war had spread to the state of Washington, our large high school was torn apart. Being teenagers, everyone wanted to be their own individual. Opinions were strong and immature for the most part. The thought of doing what one wanted appealed to many of them. The school became unsafe, but the law was still intact then. We had to attend. Gangs were formed and stealthy beatings and even killings took place after school. Soon it became so bad that it even happened during school hours. Security could do nothing; and some of them believed in the Assassin’s Dream. The school became shambles, until the principal was assassinated and one of them took over. Now the student body lived in terror; all except the bullies. The school turned a blind eye to them. Anyone who was thought to be a real Patriot was brought in and interrogated. Nothing would happen to them in the open if they confessed, of course, but everyone knew when that student ended up mysteriously disappearing that they had been killed for their belief in the true America.
We had kept our opinions to ourselves; our group was always tightly knit, and we shared the Patriot’s Dream. However, those who had known us for a long time and believed in the Assassin’s Dream betrayed us, even after being our good friends. One day, our drama teacher had appeared in front of us; Oddball, Tim, Thorney, and others that we knew were behind him, looking savage. They threatened us. We stood our ground.
“You filthy Patriots; don’t you know your country is dying?” Oddball spat.
“Yes, and we are its still-beating heart,” Thistle threw back at him.
Oddball snarled, showing his dripping fangs, but we were not shaken. Then he looked to me. “You.” Then he reached for me, his beast-hands covered in bloody fur and his claws ready to kill.
With a yell, Zephyr jumped from my side, where he had been standing, and delivered a roundhouse kick to the beast-boy’s head. He fell to the ground, unconscious, Zephyr standing over him, ready to kill anyone else who tried to lay a hand on his friends.
And that was when we officially became outcasts. We fought our way out of there and escaped the darkened school ground. We fled to the Cascades, our slogan becoming, “We are the country’s heart, and we will pump blood back into its limbs. We will fight. And we will win.”
And we have been fighting ever since. We have come out of hiding after training one another in what skills we each knew. Some are still better than others in areas, but after years of training with one another, we are all better than most of what used to be the military soldiers.
I looked to Raiku, who looked back at me worriedly. We were at the front of the house, which was my grandmother’s that she had offered for protection. Nobody really knew her connection to me from the Assassin’s side; though her name was the same as mine, we had taken to call ourselves by our screen names from long ago. Everyone now knew us by those names now. We all had a price on our heads. They had no pictures of us thus far; they knew that we were virtually always together and knew what weapons we had, and there was a sort of physical description for each of us, but not very good ones.
Adrenaline ((Tyler from my youth group)) ran out from behind the side of the house, holding his M16 in his large hands. He silently made it known to us that there was indeed someone in the house, and it was not one of our own.
We nodded. I drew my katana from its sheath on my back, and Raiku drew his broad sword.
Suddenly, there was a burst of deafening sound as machine guns were fired from the back of the house. I knew that Zephyr, Thistle, Hamster, and Princess ((Jane)) were down there, so I dashed after Adrenaline, who was racing back down the hill on the side of the house, shouting something I could not hear. Raiku was right behind me.
We made it to the back of the house. The windows were broken with bullet holes on the sliding glass doors. From the garden, I could see Thistle in the bushes, deflecting bullets from the house with her large axe, and Hamster shooting back with her own dartgun ((this was, like, poison darts coming out at high speed from a tiny machine gun)). Zephyr and Princess were not to be seen.
“Hamster! Where are they!?”
She looked up at me, still shooting into the house. “They’re in there!” she screamed over the din.
Adrenaline did not hesitate; he jumped into the nearest window, shattering it, and disappeared into the darkness. Raiku followed. Knowing I wouldn’t be much use outside, I raced around to the front again and burst through the front door. The interior of the house was dark; I could see next to nothing. I made my way up the stairs. Suddenly, three figures clad in army fatigues jumped down from nowhere. Assassins. How did they know about this place? I made quick work of them with my katana and moved into the rooms. Nothing there. They were downstairs, where all the secret plans had been stored away.
I flew down the stairs, the noises of the bullets still exploding seemingly all around my head.
It was suddenly light downstairs and the gunshots ceased. Zephyr was standing over Princess and holding his double crossbow loosely in his right hand. Princess was lying still on the floor. Zephyr looked stricken, and there was blood running down his face. I felt a pang when I saw that scene. “Zephyr...” I whispered. His brown eyes shifted to me slowly. His face was haunted.
“Dark... I don’t think...” He looked down at the body behind him.
He did not need to finish.
I looked around the room, desperate to know if she had been killed in vain or not.
She hadn’t.
I realized that the floor was littered with bodies of fatigue-clothed men and women. I recognized some of them, and my heart constricted. Why would they choose this? I thought to myself sadly. How could they betray me like that... and kill those I love?
I pushed those thoughts from my mind and looked for Adrenaline and Raiku. They were emerging from my grandfather’s office, our secret and important documents in their hands. Adrenaline looked up at me and shook his head in answer to my silent question. “They didn’t get anything. It’s safe.”
Raiku looked around the room at all the bodies littering the floor space. “What a mess.” He looked up at me. “Your grandparents aren’t going to be too happy.”
We went back outside, Adrenaline carrying Princess’s limp body. Thistle screamed and jumped out from behind the bushes, running toward the blonde beauty’s form. There were tears in her eyes when she arrived in front of Adrenaline. She reached out a pale hand and touched Princess’s cheek gently. She looked down in sorrow, unable to do anything else in her grief. I was fighting the urge to cry. My eyes itched with tears trying to form, but I refused. There was no time to grieve now. We had to get out.
Hamster bit her lower lip at the scene and looked at Raiku. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
Raiku, who was supporting a very upset Zephyr, nodded. “Yes. We got in just as she was shot down. She died bravely.”
“I wish we had more time to say goodbye,” Adrenaline said sadly. “We have to get out of here, though. Now.”
There was a general muttering of agreement, and Adrenaline placed the body of the martyr tenderly down in the garden, where blooms of daisies sprang into bloom about her lifeless form.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hamster shook her head. “There is not another choice. The plan has to wait. We need more people than we have now.”
I sighed. This discussion had gone a long time, and none of us were happy with the outcome. Our cave that we had gone back to after months of not using it had already been filled with the gloom of the event from last week, and now it was stifling with the feelings of unfinished work and foiled plans.
Adrenaline was sitting with his head in his big hands. Raiku was sharpening his sword feverishly, muttering something about his negative feelings of change. Zephyr was staring into the fire, silent and brooding. He absently held my hand, tracing little designs on the back of it with his free hand while lost in his thoughts. Thistle held her axe in an upright position, leaning forward on it in disappointment, while at the same time leaning to her right to rest her shoulder on my left upper arm. Hamster was standing with her arms crossed, staring into the darkness of the cave. I simply sat there, letting my best friends lean on me. Hamster had voiced what we all reluctantly knew would have to happen.
With Princess gone, our operation was impossible. Chameleon ((Austin)) was not in our group at the moment, either. We had been amazed when he had not come back at the designated time from his mission. How could he have been caught? He was the fastest and stealthiest of all of us. Later, however, we found that it benefited our cause and he had not, in fact, been captured. He was now in a castle-like school, patrolled by Assassins on all sides. However, the school was full of teens and children who were like us. Some might have even shared the views of the Assassins once, but now were sick of it. They were miserable, forced to go to school under the rule of those lunatics.
And that’s why they were listening to Chameleon. We had received word from him through one of our communicative processes that he had tried to infiltrate the main office for their information, but he had found it impossible for one person to do alone. Therefore he had blended in. The Assassins had been confused at first and interrogated him, but he convinced them that he had been there the whole time. They never did keep documentation of each student. So he had been working to undermine the school’s system with the help of the children. When he had told them of who he was, they all listened intently and were excited that not only did they have a legend in their midst, but they could do something about their current situation now. He had told us he’d return with more troops once he overthrew the school; it was the first place that we would actually have to overthrow showing ourselves to the public. We had helped small businesses out everywhere through various techniques, but never once had we done a revolutionary movement like what he was suggesting.
But now there was no choice in the matter. We had to help him now, since Princess was gone; she had been a critical part to another plan that we were going to do in the mean time. Chameleon would not be happy to hear the dire news we now had... but perhaps he could get what he wanted to get done faster with our help. And once we got all those kids on our side...
...We’d be unstoppable.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We looked up at the school from our place in the forest’s trees, all of us dressed in our school clothes from years ago. This castle-like institution used to be a university. Now it was the largest patrolled school in the whole broken nation, where all children below the age of nineteen were kept. It was basically a boarding school, a concentration camp and an orphanage all at once.
And it was huge.
I looked at Thistle, who was crouched in the same tree as I was, with raised eyebrows, and she looked back at me with an equally impressed glance.
“There must be thousands of kids in there.” Zephyr and Raiku were on branches in the tree next to Thistle and mine, looking up in awe at the building.
“No wonder Chameleon has been taking such a long time,” Hamster muttered from her tree to the other side, which she shared with Adrenaline.
We all looked to each other, steeling ourselves for our new operation. It was two in the afternoon. The school was in the middle of the forest, looking much like a ruin of an ancient civilization. Its stone walls were at least thirty feet high, not including the towers. And, in the middle of the school, a large flagpole was standing tall. On it was the Assassins’ flag. I had growled in my throat when I had seen it. It was the same as the Patriots’ flag, but there was only one gigantic star in the blue square instead of fifty.
“I hate that flag,” Raiku had hissed. “It’s so deceptive. Many people don’t realize that the one star is anarchy itself, not one united country.”
That flag was going to be the first thing to go once we got the school into an uproar.
“All right. Ready?” I asked, looking at them all. We all nodded to one another, and then I looked forward, toward the school. “Let’s do this, then.” We jumped and disappeared into the forest’s shadowy protection.
There was something wrong. Everyone felt that. What was going on? There was a different feel to the air. We all felt that someone or something was around. In a war, you cannot be too careful, and that feeling had become familiar after five years of secret service. The house we were surrounding certainly used to be a safe-haven for us… but now our group felt like there was one of them in there.
The government had been destroyed three years previous by the Assassins; those Americans who felt no need to be loyal to the country any more. It was a civil war; Americans against Americans, the Assassins fighting for the country for themselves to make it an anarchy, and the Patriots fighting to keep the country and to stay alive. The Assassins were well-named. They killed anyone who opposed. Captured Patriots would now find themselves lying in order to stay alive. All of the public places were now guarded by Assassins with machine guns... for the people's protection is what they said. We Patriots knew it was a lie.
The worst part of the war was that there was no specific leader of either group. The Assassins had simply come together; it started with a bombing at a workplace in Chicago, and it escalated from there. With the government overthrown and the president assassinated, the Patriots had nobody to call a leader, either.
But they had us now.
Over these bloody five years, there have been heroes from our side. Martyrs. But there were only scattered numbers of them. People who would really stand up against the Assassins.
We did. And we still lived.
When the war had spread to the state of Washington, our large high school was torn apart. Being teenagers, everyone wanted to be their own individual. Opinions were strong and immature for the most part. The thought of doing what one wanted appealed to many of them. The school became unsafe, but the law was still intact then. We had to attend. Gangs were formed and stealthy beatings and even killings took place after school. Soon it became so bad that it even happened during school hours. Security could do nothing; and some of them believed in the Assassin’s Dream. The school became shambles, until the principal was assassinated and one of them took over. Now the student body lived in terror; all except the bullies. The school turned a blind eye to them. Anyone who was thought to be a real Patriot was brought in and interrogated. Nothing would happen to them in the open if they confessed, of course, but everyone knew when that student ended up mysteriously disappearing that they had been killed for their belief in the true America.
We had kept our opinions to ourselves; our group was always tightly knit, and we shared the Patriot’s Dream. However, those who had known us for a long time and believed in the Assassin’s Dream betrayed us, even after being our good friends. One day, our drama teacher had appeared in front of us; Oddball, Tim, Thorney, and others that we knew were behind him, looking savage. They threatened us. We stood our ground.
“You filthy Patriots; don’t you know your country is dying?” Oddball spat.
“Yes, and we are its still-beating heart,” Thistle threw back at him.
Oddball snarled, showing his dripping fangs, but we were not shaken. Then he looked to me. “You.” Then he reached for me, his beast-hands covered in bloody fur and his claws ready to kill.
With a yell, Zephyr jumped from my side, where he had been standing, and delivered a roundhouse kick to the beast-boy’s head. He fell to the ground, unconscious, Zephyr standing over him, ready to kill anyone else who tried to lay a hand on his friends.
And that was when we officially became outcasts. We fought our way out of there and escaped the darkened school ground. We fled to the Cascades, our slogan becoming, “We are the country’s heart, and we will pump blood back into its limbs. We will fight. And we will win.”
And we have been fighting ever since. We have come out of hiding after training one another in what skills we each knew. Some are still better than others in areas, but after years of training with one another, we are all better than most of what used to be the military soldiers.
I looked to Raiku, who looked back at me worriedly. We were at the front of the house, which was my grandmother’s that she had offered for protection. Nobody really knew her connection to me from the Assassin’s side; though her name was the same as mine, we had taken to call ourselves by our screen names from long ago. Everyone now knew us by those names now. We all had a price on our heads. They had no pictures of us thus far; they knew that we were virtually always together and knew what weapons we had, and there was a sort of physical description for each of us, but not very good ones.
Adrenaline ((Tyler from my youth group)) ran out from behind the side of the house, holding his M16 in his large hands. He silently made it known to us that there was indeed someone in the house, and it was not one of our own.
We nodded. I drew my katana from its sheath on my back, and Raiku drew his broad sword.
Suddenly, there was a burst of deafening sound as machine guns were fired from the back of the house. I knew that Zephyr, Thistle, Hamster, and Princess ((Jane)) were down there, so I dashed after Adrenaline, who was racing back down the hill on the side of the house, shouting something I could not hear. Raiku was right behind me.
We made it to the back of the house. The windows were broken with bullet holes on the sliding glass doors. From the garden, I could see Thistle in the bushes, deflecting bullets from the house with her large axe, and Hamster shooting back with her own dartgun ((this was, like, poison darts coming out at high speed from a tiny machine gun)). Zephyr and Princess were not to be seen.
“Hamster! Where are they!?”
She looked up at me, still shooting into the house. “They’re in there!” she screamed over the din.
Adrenaline did not hesitate; he jumped into the nearest window, shattering it, and disappeared into the darkness. Raiku followed. Knowing I wouldn’t be much use outside, I raced around to the front again and burst through the front door. The interior of the house was dark; I could see next to nothing. I made my way up the stairs. Suddenly, three figures clad in army fatigues jumped down from nowhere. Assassins. How did they know about this place? I made quick work of them with my katana and moved into the rooms. Nothing there. They were downstairs, where all the secret plans had been stored away.
I flew down the stairs, the noises of the bullets still exploding seemingly all around my head.
It was suddenly light downstairs and the gunshots ceased. Zephyr was standing over Princess and holding his double crossbow loosely in his right hand. Princess was lying still on the floor. Zephyr looked stricken, and there was blood running down his face. I felt a pang when I saw that scene. “Zephyr...” I whispered. His brown eyes shifted to me slowly. His face was haunted.
“Dark... I don’t think...” He looked down at the body behind him.
He did not need to finish.
I looked around the room, desperate to know if she had been killed in vain or not.
She hadn’t.
I realized that the floor was littered with bodies of fatigue-clothed men and women. I recognized some of them, and my heart constricted. Why would they choose this? I thought to myself sadly. How could they betray me like that... and kill those I love?
I pushed those thoughts from my mind and looked for Adrenaline and Raiku. They were emerging from my grandfather’s office, our secret and important documents in their hands. Adrenaline looked up at me and shook his head in answer to my silent question. “They didn’t get anything. It’s safe.”
Raiku looked around the room at all the bodies littering the floor space. “What a mess.” He looked up at me. “Your grandparents aren’t going to be too happy.”
We went back outside, Adrenaline carrying Princess’s limp body. Thistle screamed and jumped out from behind the bushes, running toward the blonde beauty’s form. There were tears in her eyes when she arrived in front of Adrenaline. She reached out a pale hand and touched Princess’s cheek gently. She looked down in sorrow, unable to do anything else in her grief. I was fighting the urge to cry. My eyes itched with tears trying to form, but I refused. There was no time to grieve now. We had to get out.
Hamster bit her lower lip at the scene and looked at Raiku. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
Raiku, who was supporting a very upset Zephyr, nodded. “Yes. We got in just as she was shot down. She died bravely.”
“I wish we had more time to say goodbye,” Adrenaline said sadly. “We have to get out of here, though. Now.”
There was a general muttering of agreement, and Adrenaline placed the body of the martyr tenderly down in the garden, where blooms of daisies sprang into bloom about her lifeless form.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hamster shook her head. “There is not another choice. The plan has to wait. We need more people than we have now.”
I sighed. This discussion had gone a long time, and none of us were happy with the outcome. Our cave that we had gone back to after months of not using it had already been filled with the gloom of the event from last week, and now it was stifling with the feelings of unfinished work and foiled plans.
Adrenaline was sitting with his head in his big hands. Raiku was sharpening his sword feverishly, muttering something about his negative feelings of change. Zephyr was staring into the fire, silent and brooding. He absently held my hand, tracing little designs on the back of it with his free hand while lost in his thoughts. Thistle held her axe in an upright position, leaning forward on it in disappointment, while at the same time leaning to her right to rest her shoulder on my left upper arm. Hamster was standing with her arms crossed, staring into the darkness of the cave. I simply sat there, letting my best friends lean on me. Hamster had voiced what we all reluctantly knew would have to happen.
With Princess gone, our operation was impossible. Chameleon ((Austin)) was not in our group at the moment, either. We had been amazed when he had not come back at the designated time from his mission. How could he have been caught? He was the fastest and stealthiest of all of us. Later, however, we found that it benefited our cause and he had not, in fact, been captured. He was now in a castle-like school, patrolled by Assassins on all sides. However, the school was full of teens and children who were like us. Some might have even shared the views of the Assassins once, but now were sick of it. They were miserable, forced to go to school under the rule of those lunatics.
And that’s why they were listening to Chameleon. We had received word from him through one of our communicative processes that he had tried to infiltrate the main office for their information, but he had found it impossible for one person to do alone. Therefore he had blended in. The Assassins had been confused at first and interrogated him, but he convinced them that he had been there the whole time. They never did keep documentation of each student. So he had been working to undermine the school’s system with the help of the children. When he had told them of who he was, they all listened intently and were excited that not only did they have a legend in their midst, but they could do something about their current situation now. He had told us he’d return with more troops once he overthrew the school; it was the first place that we would actually have to overthrow showing ourselves to the public. We had helped small businesses out everywhere through various techniques, but never once had we done a revolutionary movement like what he was suggesting.
But now there was no choice in the matter. We had to help him now, since Princess was gone; she had been a critical part to another plan that we were going to do in the mean time. Chameleon would not be happy to hear the dire news we now had... but perhaps he could get what he wanted to get done faster with our help. And once we got all those kids on our side...
...We’d be unstoppable.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We looked up at the school from our place in the forest’s trees, all of us dressed in our school clothes from years ago. This castle-like institution used to be a university. Now it was the largest patrolled school in the whole broken nation, where all children below the age of nineteen were kept. It was basically a boarding school, a concentration camp and an orphanage all at once.
And it was huge.
I looked at Thistle, who was crouched in the same tree as I was, with raised eyebrows, and she looked back at me with an equally impressed glance.
“There must be thousands of kids in there.” Zephyr and Raiku were on branches in the tree next to Thistle and mine, looking up in awe at the building.
“No wonder Chameleon has been taking such a long time,” Hamster muttered from her tree to the other side, which she shared with Adrenaline.
We all looked to each other, steeling ourselves for our new operation. It was two in the afternoon. The school was in the middle of the forest, looking much like a ruin of an ancient civilization. Its stone walls were at least thirty feet high, not including the towers. And, in the middle of the school, a large flagpole was standing tall. On it was the Assassins’ flag. I had growled in my throat when I had seen it. It was the same as the Patriots’ flag, but there was only one gigantic star in the blue square instead of fifty.
“I hate that flag,” Raiku had hissed. “It’s so deceptive. Many people don’t realize that the one star is anarchy itself, not one united country.”
That flag was going to be the first thing to go once we got the school into an uproar.
“All right. Ready?” I asked, looking at them all. We all nodded to one another, and then I looked forward, toward the school. “Let’s do this, then.” We jumped and disappeared into the forest’s shadowy protection.