Big Damn List, Again.
Title: Routine Patrol
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner
Prompt: 031- SUNRISE
Word Count: 1980
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Aliens? No problem. Except when they are.
Author's Notes: Part of the Carboxylic Acid series.
Fanfic 100 - Green Lantern Corps - Sunrise
“Run.”
The aliens in sector 018 should have been close enough to Oa that Green Lanterns were regulars in every inhabited system; Lanterns passed through all the time. There were enough anomalies in it, though, that it had managed to grow and spawn this cesspool of a lawless planet. Guy Gardner glared at the alien in question; it was small and purple, soft skin stretching over a round body. It looked like a plush toy, nothing in its appearance hinting at the horrors beneath its skin.
“Fuck off,” he said, knowing that it was a useless show of defiance and that he would hop if it so much as it said toad. There was nothing else he could do, not with Kyle like that.
The alien laughed, small mouth stretching impossibly wide to show a double row of sparkling white teeth, giant glistening eyes squeezed shut in mirth. “You Lanterns,” it said. “You know what will happen if you do not run.” For emphasis, it stroked a small rod dangling from a chain around its neck - one of many. Some shone brightly, some were smoky and dark, others broken jaggedly partway down. They clinked together as the alien moved, sliding under its three-fingered hand.
“Fuck off,” Guy said again, but he was meters away before the words left his mouth. The sun rose over the mountains behind him, reddish light spilling over the rocky ground. The alien laughed, the sound growing fainter as he ran. The pale rock rose high on either side of this narrowest of paths, twisting and turning so that he could not see farther than a few steps ahead.
Fissures in the rock hissed as he passed them, sometimes spewing noxious steam and sometimes showing a glint of what might have been eyes deep within. He could feel his heart pumping, blood flowing thick and strong through his veins, and his lungs heaving as they drew in oxygen and hurled out carbon dioxide. This was easy enough, so far. An insignificant weight hung at his waist; if he barely moved his hand, he would be able to feel the weapon that hung there. A simple short knife, blade hammered out of pot metal and wired carelessly to a wooden hilt, was a poor substitute for his ring, but Guy Gardner was nothing if not resourceful.
“Just patrol Sector 018 until the rookie finishes training,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, sure, Salakk. Just until the rookie finishes and Krgze gets out of the infirmary. Right. No rookie could’ve handled this.” On the other side, he and Kyle hadn’t precisely handled the situation either.
The sun rose higher behind him, its rays lightening to orange and promising heat to come. Guy ran faster; if he didn’t complete his objective before it stood at the apex of its arc, everything was over.
The first obstacle was a rockfall blocking the path; there was nothing for it but to climb over. Guy scrambled through the stones, dislodging pebbles as he went. None of them shook anything larger loose, and he slid down the other side in a hail of scree.
The pace was too high to maintain indefinitely; he couldn’t move at a dead run forever, and killing himself under a desert sun wouldn’t help Kyle or anyone else. The aliens had told him precisely where they wanted him to go, and he forced himself to set a pace that would get him there alive. If he’d calculated it correctly, he would be in plenty of time.
The color of the cliffs around him never changed, although the fantastic shapes rose and fell around him. Sometimes he thought he saw a path that might lead to higher ground, where he might find a shortcut or a way to circumvent these damn aliens altogether, but it was invariably a dead end and he found himself back on the ground with nothing to show for his efforts but wasted time. He couldn’t help trying, though, and hope inevitably fueled another attempt and another.
“Patrol the sector,” he muttered again under his breath. They’d followed rumors of trouble, and really should not have been surprised when they found it. Missing ships led them to a tourist-attraction ball of oddly-shaped gas - pretty, yes, but why would you go lightyears out of your way to look at it? - and there had been actual planets orbiting the star at the center of the nebula. Kyle had let his ring give them an in-depth explanation of the stellar phenomenon, but all that Guy had gotten out of it was that planets might have made the gas go into funny shapes, which was clearly irrelevant. Except that the shape then argued for the presence of planets, and that meant that perhaps there was uncharted territory in there. “Fucking aliens.”
A river thundered through the canyon below him, bisecting his path neatly in two. There was no way he could jump the gap - it was a good thirty feet across and the wind was blowing directly in his face. Two towers of rock leaned towards each other, almost forming a bridge over the river fifty feet up and perhaps eighteen inches wide. “Bastards.” He didn’t have enough time to find an alternate route across. Guy climbed the rock.
A fine powdery dust did nothing for his grip, and more than once during the ascent he caught himself by the barest of margins. His arms were shaking by the time he pulled himself over the top, more from the height than the exertion. A vivid image of the bus that had knocked him off a cliff - how many years ago had it been? - while he’d been Hal Jordan’s alternate bloomed behind his eyes, and he choked it down. There were no buses here, no children to save. The two-foot gap between the tips of the stones was a step rather than a jump, and he made it effortlessly. Going down was another matter; he couldn’t see where he was placing his feet. He’d gotten nearly to the bottom when a flaking ledge gave way and he swung wide.
Physical training took over from reflex, and Guy managed to land on his feet and then to turn his momentum into a forward roll. He came up running again, the sweat of not-quite-panic drying against his skin. The sun rose higher in the sky, bathing it with the multi-colored light of the nebula as he raced against the clock.
Another half-mile gave him the reason for the knife. The only native fauna of this particular planet appeared to be tiny little insects, living on lichens growing in the rocks. They had actually been rather pretty. The thing growing out of the ground in front of him was definitely not a local plant; its whippy branches writhed and spat lines of dark fluid, and there was nothing living around it. The very rock had been pelted away, widening the path. Guy watched it for a moment, to see if there was a pattern. None emerged that he could see, so he tossed a rock at one side to test whether or not the plant would react to it.
The rock produced no change in the plant’s pattern of movement, and Guy waited another moment before running through the twisting strands. The knife warded off most of them until he was nearly clear, and the strike sent him sprawling. He scrambled out of range, brushing the back of his head and tugging off his vest to make sure that the tree’s poisonous sap hadn’t touched him. As far as he could tell, he was clean.
The sun’s rays beat down on him as it approached its apex, and Guy redoubled his pace. He was so close to his goal. The white rock reflected the glare, blurring his vision, until he suddenly ran into shade. He stopped, breathing hard, to look around. The last obstacle was a maze, walls two meters high of thick smooth stone. He smirked.
Climbing the walls was almost too easy after the river, and he ran along the tops straight toward the green spark at the center.
”You seemed to prize your jewelry,” the alien had said, after he’d regained consciousness. Kyle had gone down hard before getting a proper look at what had attacked them, and Guy hadn’t had time to make a construct at all. They’d both been pricked with a poison dart, right through their costumes. He’d woken to find himself bound and Kyle stretched out in the sand, unconscious with a ring of twisted metal wrapped around his head.
“Fuck off,” he’d told it. The alien had laughed, and told him that his ring was at the end of an obstacle course. If he made it through in time, he’d get it back. If he refused, Kyle would pay his forfeit. A chain holding several apparently glass rods was around the alien’s neck, and it selected one with a greenish tint. Scraping its fingers down the rod produced convulsions in Kyle, and Guy had weighed his options.
A camera would follow his movements, broadcasting to an audience somewhere nearby; the alien was making a killing on this illegal distortion of a game show. He filed that bit of information away for further consideration.
The alien obviously had no idea what it was dealing with; Kyle’s ring was still on his finger, but Guy couldn’t count on his partner waking up. The quickest way to his ring was through the obstacle course. “Fuck you,” he’d said to it, just for good measure. It had smirked at him, purple skin barely even wrinkling around its small mouth. Kyle had stopped twitching as soon as the alien had stopped touching the rod, and the alien had simply spoken a single further word.
“Run.”
The ring was under a glass lens mounted in an expanse of rock; as soon as the sun reached it, the magnified light would create enough heat to make most things catch fire. The ring wouldn’t be damaged, of course, but he wanted to get at it before it was too hot to hold. Guy snatched it away just as a pinpoint of light started to sizzle on the rock below, jamming it onto his finger. Energy flooded through him, and the ring sparked. He launched himself into the air and towards the aliens.
More darts flooded the air as soon as the alien camp came into sight, but he knew how they worked now, and the darts bounced harmlessly off a skintight construct. Green light on the ground told him that Kyle was awake and fighting, and he swooped in to carry off the alien leader.
It gibbered in his hands as soon as he got it off the ground, making incoherent promises. Guy held it there for a moment before asking politely who and what was involved in its little game. He couldn’t do much about the audience - there were sick bastards everywhere who got off on watching other people suffer - but the entire production crew was on site. Locking the alien into a construct, he returned to find Kyle had the situation mostly well in hand.
“I got the leader,” he said, as they put the last of their catch into its restraints.
“I got the rest of ‘em,” Kyle retorted. “You get to take them home.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He rubbed at his temples, though, so Guy took over maintaining the construct. With any luck, this would be the most eventful part of their patrol.
“Never a dull moment around you,” he said after a moment, when they’d left the brilliant nebula behind them.
“Ha,” Kyle retorted, and added to the prisoner transportation. If he felt the need to take Guy’s hand to do that, Guy wasn’t about to complain. He tightened his grip, making sure they all got safely home.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Big Damn List
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner
Prompt: 031- SUNRISE
Word Count: 1980
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Aliens? No problem. Except when they are.
Author's Notes: Part of the Carboxylic Acid series.
Fanfic 100 - Green Lantern Corps - Sunrise
“Run.”
The aliens in sector 018 should have been close enough to Oa that Green Lanterns were regulars in every inhabited system; Lanterns passed through all the time. There were enough anomalies in it, though, that it had managed to grow and spawn this cesspool of a lawless planet. Guy Gardner glared at the alien in question; it was small and purple, soft skin stretching over a round body. It looked like a plush toy, nothing in its appearance hinting at the horrors beneath its skin.
“Fuck off,” he said, knowing that it was a useless show of defiance and that he would hop if it so much as it said toad. There was nothing else he could do, not with Kyle like that.
The alien laughed, small mouth stretching impossibly wide to show a double row of sparkling white teeth, giant glistening eyes squeezed shut in mirth. “You Lanterns,” it said. “You know what will happen if you do not run.” For emphasis, it stroked a small rod dangling from a chain around its neck - one of many. Some shone brightly, some were smoky and dark, others broken jaggedly partway down. They clinked together as the alien moved, sliding under its three-fingered hand.
“Fuck off,” Guy said again, but he was meters away before the words left his mouth. The sun rose over the mountains behind him, reddish light spilling over the rocky ground. The alien laughed, the sound growing fainter as he ran. The pale rock rose high on either side of this narrowest of paths, twisting and turning so that he could not see farther than a few steps ahead.
Fissures in the rock hissed as he passed them, sometimes spewing noxious steam and sometimes showing a glint of what might have been eyes deep within. He could feel his heart pumping, blood flowing thick and strong through his veins, and his lungs heaving as they drew in oxygen and hurled out carbon dioxide. This was easy enough, so far. An insignificant weight hung at his waist; if he barely moved his hand, he would be able to feel the weapon that hung there. A simple short knife, blade hammered out of pot metal and wired carelessly to a wooden hilt, was a poor substitute for his ring, but Guy Gardner was nothing if not resourceful.
“Just patrol Sector 018 until the rookie finishes training,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, sure, Salakk. Just until the rookie finishes and Krgze gets out of the infirmary. Right. No rookie could’ve handled this.” On the other side, he and Kyle hadn’t precisely handled the situation either.
The sun rose higher behind him, its rays lightening to orange and promising heat to come. Guy ran faster; if he didn’t complete his objective before it stood at the apex of its arc, everything was over.
The first obstacle was a rockfall blocking the path; there was nothing for it but to climb over. Guy scrambled through the stones, dislodging pebbles as he went. None of them shook anything larger loose, and he slid down the other side in a hail of scree.
The pace was too high to maintain indefinitely; he couldn’t move at a dead run forever, and killing himself under a desert sun wouldn’t help Kyle or anyone else. The aliens had told him precisely where they wanted him to go, and he forced himself to set a pace that would get him there alive. If he’d calculated it correctly, he would be in plenty of time.
The color of the cliffs around him never changed, although the fantastic shapes rose and fell around him. Sometimes he thought he saw a path that might lead to higher ground, where he might find a shortcut or a way to circumvent these damn aliens altogether, but it was invariably a dead end and he found himself back on the ground with nothing to show for his efforts but wasted time. He couldn’t help trying, though, and hope inevitably fueled another attempt and another.
“Patrol the sector,” he muttered again under his breath. They’d followed rumors of trouble, and really should not have been surprised when they found it. Missing ships led them to a tourist-attraction ball of oddly-shaped gas - pretty, yes, but why would you go lightyears out of your way to look at it? - and there had been actual planets orbiting the star at the center of the nebula. Kyle had let his ring give them an in-depth explanation of the stellar phenomenon, but all that Guy had gotten out of it was that planets might have made the gas go into funny shapes, which was clearly irrelevant. Except that the shape then argued for the presence of planets, and that meant that perhaps there was uncharted territory in there. “Fucking aliens.”
A river thundered through the canyon below him, bisecting his path neatly in two. There was no way he could jump the gap - it was a good thirty feet across and the wind was blowing directly in his face. Two towers of rock leaned towards each other, almost forming a bridge over the river fifty feet up and perhaps eighteen inches wide. “Bastards.” He didn’t have enough time to find an alternate route across. Guy climbed the rock.
A fine powdery dust did nothing for his grip, and more than once during the ascent he caught himself by the barest of margins. His arms were shaking by the time he pulled himself over the top, more from the height than the exertion. A vivid image of the bus that had knocked him off a cliff - how many years ago had it been? - while he’d been Hal Jordan’s alternate bloomed behind his eyes, and he choked it down. There were no buses here, no children to save. The two-foot gap between the tips of the stones was a step rather than a jump, and he made it effortlessly. Going down was another matter; he couldn’t see where he was placing his feet. He’d gotten nearly to the bottom when a flaking ledge gave way and he swung wide.
Physical training took over from reflex, and Guy managed to land on his feet and then to turn his momentum into a forward roll. He came up running again, the sweat of not-quite-panic drying against his skin. The sun rose higher in the sky, bathing it with the multi-colored light of the nebula as he raced against the clock.
Another half-mile gave him the reason for the knife. The only native fauna of this particular planet appeared to be tiny little insects, living on lichens growing in the rocks. They had actually been rather pretty. The thing growing out of the ground in front of him was definitely not a local plant; its whippy branches writhed and spat lines of dark fluid, and there was nothing living around it. The very rock had been pelted away, widening the path. Guy watched it for a moment, to see if there was a pattern. None emerged that he could see, so he tossed a rock at one side to test whether or not the plant would react to it.
The rock produced no change in the plant’s pattern of movement, and Guy waited another moment before running through the twisting strands. The knife warded off most of them until he was nearly clear, and the strike sent him sprawling. He scrambled out of range, brushing the back of his head and tugging off his vest to make sure that the tree’s poisonous sap hadn’t touched him. As far as he could tell, he was clean.
The sun’s rays beat down on him as it approached its apex, and Guy redoubled his pace. He was so close to his goal. The white rock reflected the glare, blurring his vision, until he suddenly ran into shade. He stopped, breathing hard, to look around. The last obstacle was a maze, walls two meters high of thick smooth stone. He smirked.
Climbing the walls was almost too easy after the river, and he ran along the tops straight toward the green spark at the center.
”You seemed to prize your jewelry,” the alien had said, after he’d regained consciousness. Kyle had gone down hard before getting a proper look at what had attacked them, and Guy hadn’t had time to make a construct at all. They’d both been pricked with a poison dart, right through their costumes. He’d woken to find himself bound and Kyle stretched out in the sand, unconscious with a ring of twisted metal wrapped around his head.
“Fuck off,” he’d told it. The alien had laughed, and told him that his ring was at the end of an obstacle course. If he made it through in time, he’d get it back. If he refused, Kyle would pay his forfeit. A chain holding several apparently glass rods was around the alien’s neck, and it selected one with a greenish tint. Scraping its fingers down the rod produced convulsions in Kyle, and Guy had weighed his options.
A camera would follow his movements, broadcasting to an audience somewhere nearby; the alien was making a killing on this illegal distortion of a game show. He filed that bit of information away for further consideration.
The alien obviously had no idea what it was dealing with; Kyle’s ring was still on his finger, but Guy couldn’t count on his partner waking up. The quickest way to his ring was through the obstacle course. “Fuck you,” he’d said to it, just for good measure. It had smirked at him, purple skin barely even wrinkling around its small mouth. Kyle had stopped twitching as soon as the alien had stopped touching the rod, and the alien had simply spoken a single further word.
“Run.”
The ring was under a glass lens mounted in an expanse of rock; as soon as the sun reached it, the magnified light would create enough heat to make most things catch fire. The ring wouldn’t be damaged, of course, but he wanted to get at it before it was too hot to hold. Guy snatched it away just as a pinpoint of light started to sizzle on the rock below, jamming it onto his finger. Energy flooded through him, and the ring sparked. He launched himself into the air and towards the aliens.
More darts flooded the air as soon as the alien camp came into sight, but he knew how they worked now, and the darts bounced harmlessly off a skintight construct. Green light on the ground told him that Kyle was awake and fighting, and he swooped in to carry off the alien leader.
It gibbered in his hands as soon as he got it off the ground, making incoherent promises. Guy held it there for a moment before asking politely who and what was involved in its little game. He couldn’t do much about the audience - there were sick bastards everywhere who got off on watching other people suffer - but the entire production crew was on site. Locking the alien into a construct, he returned to find Kyle had the situation mostly well in hand.
“I got the leader,” he said, as they put the last of their catch into its restraints.
“I got the rest of ‘em,” Kyle retorted. “You get to take them home.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He rubbed at his temples, though, so Guy took over maintaining the construct. With any luck, this would be the most eventful part of their patrol.
“Never a dull moment around you,” he said after a moment, when they’d left the brilliant nebula behind them.
“Ha,” Kyle retorted, and added to the prisoner transportation. If he felt the need to take Guy’s hand to do that, Guy wasn’t about to complain. He tightened his grip, making sure they all got safely home.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Big Damn List