Mirage - Part 3

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Guest Content / 8 comments

[Read Part 2]

My boots crunched onto a loose dirt floor, and I rushed immediately out of the light cast by the trapdoor above. It was difficult to tell how large the cellar under the Temple was, since the only light came from the kitchen and from a string of three rudimentary lightbulbs along the wall leading to the cellar door. On the far side of the room, there was only darkness. I sank back into it, staying low to the ground and watching the trapdoor. Footsteps were pounding the floorboards over my head, and as soon as they cut out, Uriah Noskov careened through the trapdoor. He landed badly, and his momentum carried him into a roll across the dirt. His head swiveled around, letting loose a few black locks over his forehead. I reached out my hand and beckoned him toward the darkness. He scrambled toward me on all fours, and as he did so, I backed up into a stone object. It wasn’t solid earth like the walls of the cellar. It was tall and roughly twice as wide as I was. I thought it was a column, and that gave me an idea.

Mirage - Part 2

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Guest Content / 4 comments

[Read Part 1]

I only caught a glimpse of the scene inside the Temple before the raider behind me thrust my head against a table, but in that glimpse I discovered the source of the blood that had dripped onto my ear. One of the retired officers was slumped against the wall with a swelling patch of red on his white undershirt, and his drinking partner was standing over him with senseless dead eyes. One raider had his weapon trained on the officer, and he was barking orders at him in modified Kyrgyz. I couldn’t see what sort of weapon he carried, or the fate of my own drinking partners, because I’d been bent over the table and all I could see, as the raider slung a thick rope around my wrists, was Uriah Noskov, bent over a table next to me for the same treatment. I did notice a voice that I recognized drowning out the raider’s shrill cries.

Mirage - Part 1

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Extras, Guest Content / 7 comments

[Read the Forward]

Mirage

By Thalia Gordon

 

You’ve heard of Terekat, but you’ve never heard it called by its real name. We called it Oasis. Sitting next to a dry lake bed at the outer edge of Zone 5, Terekat is as far as a town can get without leaving Minerva’s sphere of influence. Still, at the rim of sand and nothingness, legends were spun of the bacchanalian parties hosted there. General Fionn Okane had personally fortified the town and converted it into an Aegis outpost by 2093, and the residents were so grateful for Minerva’s protection that they were known to accommodate a soldier’s every whims. The General built a geodesic dome around Terekat to filter out dust in the air and protect it from raiders. His original plans to expand the indigenous town into a colossal city of the future had proven impractical, as I’d discovered in a seminar last year, where the General had displayed to us, with a touch of pride, the extravagant blueprints of his failed utopia.

Mirage - Forward

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Extras, Guest Content / 12 comments

[In case you missed it, read the Archivist’s Introduction]

From: Thalia Gordon ([email protected])

To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] +208 more

 

If you’re one of the few recipients of this message that recognize my name, then you may have some idea of what this file contains. You may already be squirming in your memory foam seats. Good. Stay there. I know you’ll be tempted to reach for your comm. You think you know who to call to make this go away. I’ll save you the trouble – it’s not going away. There is no one you can ring and nothing you can do to cover up a mess as ugly and poisonous as this. Sure, you can tuck away the bones and melted steel, fold them into the desert sands where Terekat used to stand and wipe the name from all your maps. You can bully witnesses and twist up testimonies into pretty little things for you to display on your desk. You can try to hide the rot, but that’s the tricky thing about rot. It spreads.

Mirage - Introduction

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Extras, Guest Content / 15 comments

Just who is Thalia Gordon?

I can’t find any official record of her in the databases. According to Minerva, no such an individual ever existed.

And yet, she keeps popping up when I read original, un-indexed documents.

Who is she, and why has she been erased from the Archives?