Memory of AUSOS

S1| Ep01: War Drums at Dusk

The hollow beat of war drums unsettled the late afternoon dust. Intan yawned as one beat led to another, reverberating through the flimsy screen walls of the classroom. At the fifth beat, she looked up with a start.

"Rogue Doll on the grounds!" shouted the boy kneeling next to her.

Her other classmates leaped to their feet as they, too, deciphered the signal, and pushed toward the windows in a scrambling mass, each student straining for a view. Their professor shouted for order, to no avail.

Intan set down her writing brush and the bound text she had been pretending to follow along in. She stood, patting absently at the wrinkles in her uniform. Fished out a pair of cotton plugs from her pocket and stuffed them in her ears.

Then she strode over to the back of the room, picked up a mallet, and smacked the gong in the corner.

The gathered students jumped and turned. One of the girls actually shrieked before covering her mouth, blushing.

"Have you all forgotten proper protocol?" Intan said, serenely removing her earplugs once she felt the ringing of the gong fade.

In its place continued the drumming, a steady, unrelenting rhythm that rattled her very bones.

This is not a drill. Rogue Doll spotted in the first quarter. All students, return to dormitories immediately. This is not a drill --

The professor coughed. "Thank you, Cadet."

Intan ignored him and walked out the door.

* * *

Students poured out of the cluster of classroom buildings. They moved at a brisk but steady pace, heading toward the reinforced floating walkway that connected the main campus grounds to the dormitory complex on the lake. Instructors stationed themselves at waypoints, gesturing and barking out orders. All else was quiet but for the drums.

Proper protocol recommended marching together as a class, but Intan, still drowsy from the late afternoon lecture, let herself be swept away with the crowd.

"Just one Doll. Can't be that serious," muttered one of the upperclassmen walking ahead of her.

"I bet the Headmistress's already got everything under control," replied one of the girl's friends.

"Wonder what it's here for?" asked another.

"Test flight gone wrong, you think?"

Intan didn't think it likely for the staff to have sounded the war drums if the matter were so simple. A single Doll was no real threat, this was true, but it could still cause considerable damage if left unheeded. But she had seen no Dolls through the classroom window, could see nothing on the horizon even now. A few of the instructors seemed unusually tense, but Intan supposed that was just their natural state of being. She couldn't think of any good reason for such tension. Not when the island had been at peace for years.

She was still plodding methodically through the list of possibilities in her mind when someone screamed.

"Look!"

Intan and her fellow students halted in unison and glanced to the left, like a herd of startled deer poised in the moment before flight.

There, from beyond the wall, loomed the grotesque painted mask of a Doll.

"Keep moving!" yelled an instructor as the Doll rose and crashed into the western watchtower. Its smooth metal limbs jerked about unnaturally. For a moment it stopped, as if puzzled. Then it shrugged away the debris and started heading toward the neighboring engineering compound, from which students with the bamboo insignia emblazoned on their chests had been evacuating in orderly formations. They broke out of their formations now, scattering in a mad dash for the entrance of the walkway ahead.