Empyrean Iris Story Collection

Take a Piece

Section 1 All businesses employing human workers must provide on sight psychological services

Section 2 The intentional psychological abuse of a human will be considered a class A intergalactic felony.

Despite the outcome of this story, recent ill-will towards humans from "Previous Rioting" was remarkably lessened. Galactic leaders are in discussions about reopening talks with LFIL representatives as intergalactic opinion towards humans has markedly improved.

We weren't expecting this....

The planet was stable 7 billion years, and not a tremor, not.... Not a shiver, and yet here we were, brought to our knees.

It is relatively unknown for planets to have an unstable crust. As far as we know the human homeworld is the only habitable planet were they routinely deal with a shifting exterior. Over thousands of years they have developed technologies to mitigate those effects until nothing but the greatest disaster can even so much as level a city block.

Of course we were not so prepared, for thousands of years the pressure had been building up upon a weakening fault line, until one day, the ground could take no more. We weren't aware of the signs, and we didn't have the instruments necessary to detect the slowly weakening rock below us.

The cataclysm happened in the late evening, one moment there was nothing but the early morning buzz of commerce, and the next it seemed the world was ripping itself in half. There was the first massive jolt sending thousands to their knees, cracking support structures, ripping through roads, derailing transportation, and sending screams upwards to paint the sky with its terror. Thousands died in that initial tremor, but then it only built, the ground began to rattle and shake as if the world was determined to rattle itself to pieces; those that had managed to survive the first moment were brained by their own household appliances, thrown to the ground, buried under rubble. I couldn't hear them crying so much as feel it in my soul as I stuck frozen to the street below.

I watched as the buildings above me, thousands of feet high came crashing to the ground as if in slow motion. Windows shattered outwards sending glass into the sky shattering the light into a prism of color. Metal bent and snapped, the noise was horrific and rending. The entire world was screaming. Bodies fell from buildings silhouetted against the sky in their last moments of panic. Shrapnel roared up from the crashing buildings, I watched as a wave of running bodies were pulverized under a mass of falling stone, just engulfed by steel and stone and glass. Debris roared around me in spirals and explosions, it cut into my skin and shredded my clothing, my fur, my ears.

I was blinded by my own blood, I couldn't even scream as the dust set in. It rolled upwards from the collapsing buildings in a column of jet black smoke and dust that blotted out the sky and plunged the world around me into perpetual darkness. I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything, but I could feel the pain feel the class as it cut into my belly, my hands and knees. I cried out for help but was choked by the dust.

....

I couldn't have known it at the time, but there were those coming for us. The Galactic Assembly sent sixteen ships to our aid. Three ships made it in the first hour while I crawled through the shattered glass choking on the air as I stumbled. Humans have a long history of disaster on their planet, they have people especially there to deal with this. Their name speaks for itself "The First Responder." They can be deployed for anything, fire, crime, natural disaster. Generally they are fearlessly brave, aggressively reckless and mentally steely.

I was beginning to lose hope stumbling through the darkness trodding on broken glass. I could see nothing hear nothing, and then there it was a light cutting through the mist, particles of dust split through the beaming luminance, and I was blinded eyes burning. That's when I saw it appear from the smoke, a single eye illuminated in the darkness behind goggles, a sturdy helmet and a gas mask. Its creamy white efface was already coated in a layer of ash and dust, but the white of its eyes was the single brightest thing in my vision.