Sound of Silence, Part 2: Friend

"In restless dreams I walked alone...
Narrow streets of cobblestone...
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light...
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence..."

It felt like being crushed by a giant wet washcloth.

The comedy of such a description was lost on Sine, as well as her spacial awareness. Nothing distorted her vision; she could still see the abandoned houses, the dark sky, the cracked pavement that had been beneath her feet, but whatever had her was twisting her around with the force of a tornado. Sine found her hands locked into their current positions, unable to direct her blade or change its current needle-blade mode, unable to even squeeze the trigger. The only advantage she'd maintained was finding the time to close her eyes and mouth when she'd felt herself get swept up, having previously jammed filters into her nose and plugs into her ears when she'd been less aware of the threat and compensating in case it tried to use gaseous or sonic attacks. As it turned out, it didn't need to.

She couldn't breath, but she wouldn't have time to suffocate. She could feel her limbs being torqued in their joints, the pressure closing down on her torso and skull, the rough consuming pressure trying to crack her open like an egg. She wanted to scream, but then it would be inside her too...

She didn't hear the unique arrival sound, or the loud yelling. Only the vaguest sense of blue light, and then the pressure was gone, Sine crashing down onto the street, just barely managing to avoid whiplash-bashing her head into the ground. She heard more yells and the sound of firepower as Zephyrus tossed various weapons at where he thought the threat might be, and then turned back to his best female friend as she tried to sit up, coughing violently.

"Sine! Are you all right?"

"Jelly..."


"What?"

"Jelly!" Sine babbled. "They're just jelly! It's not my fault, they're just jelly! JELLY!"

"Sine, snap out of it!" Zephyrus said, peering around for the invisible threat.

"THEY'RE JELLY!"

"Du! Ly! Noted! Sine!" Zephyrus said, snapping his crab claw in front of Sine's eyes as loud as he could with each word. Sine blinked a few more times before her vision cleared.

"Zephyrus...thanks. Oh god, thanks. Never have I appreciated your promptness more than...well, the last time I appreciated it." Sine said, pushing herself up.

"With you it's kind of a necessi-"

"Zephyrus, your ocular sensors. They're more advanced than a human's, right?" Sine said, cutting him off as she retrieved her weapons.

"Yes..."

"What about auditory?"

"Yeah..."

"I need you to access every single mode on both and turn them all on at once, cycle rapidly through them, interlock them, whatever! Infrared, motion detectors, electroreception, everything! If you have sonar, use that too! Even if it's redundant, I don't care! Now!...Please!" Sine said, looking at Zephyrus, whose unique face still managed to convey his expression of confusion, alarm, and beneath it, mild irritation. "I would have told you all this before you came, but...well you saw it. Or rather didn't."

"What WAS that, Sine?" Zephyrus said, even as he began booting up the necessary programs. Sine didn't answer immediately, instead yanking the clip from her bolter out to check its ammo, snapping it back in and looking around.

"Do you see anything? Hear anything?"


"Nothing I shouldn't be seeing." Zephyrus said, scanning around the wrecked neighborhood. "God...what happened here, Sine?"

"...you ever think about eyes, Zephyrus? Human eyes?" Sine said, putting down her sword so she could comb her hair out of her face with her fingers. Zephyrus, despite himself, sighed inwardly. He knew what was coming. Sine was never that good at getting to points, at times. He knew enough about her that it was a coping mechanism; she rambled with the idea that the greater outline she could give a situation, the more control she could exert over it. Hopefully her need to talk wouldn't just bring whatever he'd tried to shoot running back, like how her initial request had.


"No Sine. Why?"

"Well...they're quite something if you think about them. A fully working camera, with color, depth perception, distance estimation, fairly decent tracking ability...and when you come down to it, they're mostly made out of water and jelly." Sine said. Zephyrus figured that explained her rant, as he tried to get his sensors to filter out ambient and non-dangerous unnatural heat sources. That was the problem with heat tracking; it was great if you were in some cool underground cave, and not so great when you were in a city scarred by hostility and fear. "Our ears aren't bad either. The smallest bone in our bodies is in them, you know?"

"Sine? Skip to the end, if you could?"

"Sorry...the point is humans are very dependent on those two senses. We have five, but nearly all our data comes from those two. The problem is, they're imperfect. We can't see, for an example, x-rays. But since virtually all our ideas of life come from something we can see or hear, we assume that everything falls under that...what happens when it doesn't?"

"...so...we're dealing with a ghost? Or some kind of alien with a cloaking ability?"

"Oh no, nothing that simple."

"Only in our lives would a ghost or cloaked alien be simple." Zephyrus muttered, and jerked his main hand towards a vague flicker of motion that turned out to a light going out in a nearby house. "What is it then?"

"I read a journal kept by one of the town's founders, back at the tail end of the 19th century. He died inexplicably, and official cause of death was due to mountain lion, but he wrote in the journal about being stalked by something. Something he couldn't see or hear. Not because it was quick or quiet, but because he LITERALLY couldn't see OR hear it. He called it 'the damned thing'. Something that lay outside both human visual and aural perception. Or worse...had vision and aural abilities that ALSO lay outside from human perception. I also found some newspapers about mystery deaths back in the 30's, more in the 70's...it seems like this thing wakes up every 40 years to feed."

"And you happened to drop down into this place just at the right time." Zephyrus said.

"Lucky me, huh? Of all the small towns in the multiverse, I have to stroll into THIS one. The one that's expanded a great deal since the last time. Instead of being able to pick off a few victims from the outskirts, the damned thing came right up in the center of town."

"It did all this?"

"Oh no...they did it. The townspeople. To themselves. Another thing about humans Zephyrus, our brains. They're made up of three parts. Limbic system controls the movement and biological functions of the body, cerebral cortex controls advanced things like sapient thought, and the reptile brain as its cordially known controls all the basic animal instincts. Eat, sleep, procreate...fight, flight."


"Your neurology is actually a little behind the times, Sine."

"Really? How do you know that?"

"I have detailed files."

"Interesting. Well, the point is that part of the human brain is still based all around the animal instincts we still have. They're imperfect, but sometimes they pick stuff up that our more advanced conscious senses can miss. You ever see a dog growling seconds before a threat presents itself? Same thing. I think." Sine said. "If the presence of a superior predator sets it off, and humanity in general has no superior predator, then what do you think happens when the reptile brain goes crazy and human senses can't marry a source to what's setting it off?"

"...they find one." Zephyrus said quietly.

"You see the end result. I don't think the damned thing even means for it to happen. It's just a hunting animal, wants to eat. But if you inject a massive amount of blind fear and the anger that comes with it into a mass of people and have no apparent cause...well, things break down. I wasn't as badly affected...I think maybe due to my less than usual brain. Still needed to pop some tranquilizers to keep rational...made me realize that just because I couldn't see it didn't mean I didn't know people who COULD."

"Like me."

"Like you, my friend. The fact that you're loaded for bear and half the animal species I know is a delightful bonus." Sine said, yanking up her sword. "Arnold said it best. If it bleeds, we can kill it. And considering it ran away when you popped out of nowhere and shot at it, I'm pretty damned sure the damned thing BLEEDS."

"...I would have shot at it more, but all I could see was you thrashing around, I didn't know where to aim..." Zephyrus said.

"You did your job fine, Zephyrus. Now we need to finish it." Sine said, turning around. "Now...if I was something that was effectively invisible to my prey that got hurt for the first time in how long, where would I go..."

"Where did YOU go, Sine?"

"Pardon?" Sine said, turning her head towards Zephyrus. Zephyrus folded his arms, letting a bit more of his crossness come out of his eyes.

"This is the first time I've seen you since Christmas. And Christmas was the first time I saw you since Zoofights ended."

"...I was busy."


"Sine, you're a dimension-walker. If your job's travel was just around the world I might understand your absence, but you can literally be across worlds, and further still, in a heartbeat."

"...between Zoofights and Des I fell behind on my orders. I had to pick things back up after Christmas, especially if I wanted to a buffer before the next Zoofights..."

"And you can't pop over for an hour, half that? You can't make a phone call? Write a letter? Heck, we're starting to get electronic communication which I'm sure you know about, you can't send an email? By the way, Jonesy got a blog."

"...that's...nice? Zephyrus, is this really the best time to discuss this?"

"We're clean. I've checked everything in the surrounding hundred yards, and if anything moves into that radius I'll know and cut this off. So...what gives Sine?"

"...I was busy..." Sine said, looking away from the former robot master.

"Every hour of every day of every week?"

"...I see you've picked up more social experience."

"Some. Stop avoiding the question, Sine. I'm your best friend, so why do I feel like a Facebook friend?"

"You've gotten to Facebook?"

"Maybe...it's kind of confusing at the moment....hey. You're doing it again. Stop that." Zephyrus said, trying to keep his chiding soft. "Okay, I get maybe not visiting Erebus and Jonesy, or Rain and Stella, or Alex and Sarah...but not even Antoinette? Or, heck, ME?"

"...you haven't exactly been reaching out to let me know your displeasure over this, Zeph." Sine said, looking back at Zephyrus, her head cocked and her expression neutral.

"I didn't think I HAD to! Until recently, anyway."

"Zephyrus, I..." Sine said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I've always been something of a transient girl...and the chaos of Zoofights did kind of make me long for a return of those times..."

"Except when you're in trouble."

"Hey, watch it. The old me would be LONG gone from this mess. I stood my ground and tried to fight because of your examples. You and the rest of the Bargoers."

"Fair enough. What about the rest?"

"...Zephyrus...it's not easy to explain..." Sine said, turning back around and starting to walk away. "I don't know...ever since Jaxx kicked the bucket and I got back into the run...there's a part of me that just doesn't want to stand still...even if that means leaving behind things half-built to rot. I don't think it's a major part of me, but I think it wants to be...and that's ME, Zephyrus. No outside source screwing with my head. You should know what it's like when you're coming from a bad situation. Haven't you been tempted to blame every screw up on Wily?"

"...Sometimes. How big is YOUR sometimes?" Zephyrus asked, his tone neutral. Sine ran a hand through her sweat-drenched hair again.

"My sometimes...my sometimes they are a-changin'...maybe you're right, maybe I do need to ground myself...again..." Sine trailed off. Her brain had clicked onto something.

"Now...if I was something that was effectively invisible to my prey that got hurt for the first time in how long, where would I go..."

How about underground?


The vibration under her foot was her only clue. The only indication of what was coming before the street ripped up from under Sine. Until the rough pressure seized onto her pretty little head.

Seized.

And twisted.


"And in the naked light I saw...
Ten thousand people, maybe more...
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share...
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence..."