Little Lightning

Chapter 37

The next thing Lyrical knew, she was lying on the floor of the room she had stood in, twenty feet from where she had started, head spinning and vision doubling. She groaned as she propped herself up on her forearm, her ears ringing. She had a faint sense of something wet trickling through her hair. Probably blood.

Rubble surrounded her, smoke rising from the... hole in the wall?

Her vision began to focus, becoming one image once more. The ringing in her ears persisted, loud and high pitched, sending occasional spikes of pain through her skull. As she slowly sat up, careful not to irritate her already injured and bruised body,  she tried to comprehend what had happened.

She had been standing twenty feet away, when she remembered turning and having everything go black. Now she was somehow on the other side of the room, rubble around her, some sort of giant tube attached to the wall. It looked to be at least ten feet tall and ten feet wide. And coming out of the tube like passageway, was a person. Or at least, she thought it was a human, till it came closer. It quickly became apparent that it was far from human.

The creature had a human face. Gold eyes peered out from spiky, wavy, deep blue hair, short enough it wouldn't get in the way but long enough to get in its eyes, the sides and back shorter than the top. One of its sclara's was not white, but black. Freckles danced across its humanoid nose and cheeks, stark on its copper colored skin. From the front, its body was the body of a normal, albeit wiry, teenage boy. But that was where the likeness to a human being ended. The back of the creature was almost the exact opposite to the beauty on the front of its body. Black scales were visible crawling up it's back, rough like a dragons. Black horns spiraled up from its head, black as a night without stars. A scaly black tail, long and writhing, whipped back and forth like a viper waiting to strike. Even the hands of the creature, which could have been almost human, were tipped with inch long claws that looked as if they could slice through steel like a hot knife through butter. It wore a deep grey tank top that was clearly modified to fit its massive scales on its back and shoulders, white exercise shorts stark against the black scales that faded into human skin at the knees.

Lyrical watched as the creature walked towards her casually, stepping on the unconscious back of her escort as if he weren't there. He stopped in front of her and bent down to her level. Grabbing her chin with one clawed hand, he tilted her head back and forth as if getting a better look at her. The scales on his hand were surprisingly cool and smooth to the touch.

"You'll do." His voice was surprisingly young, low and gravelly as if he hadn't used it in a long time.

"What are you?" She whispered, too weak to pull her face out of his grasp. He looked surprised at her question for a brief moment before grinning, revealing straight white teeth, his canine teeth too long to be human, too short to be actual fangs. His hands tightened on her face, causing her to wince slightly.

"Why, I'm your worst nightmare."

That was when everything went black.

Lyrical woke up feeling like she had been run over by a truck, and then eaten and regurgitated by a giant bird, and then dropped from the sky onto a bed of snakes.

That is to say, she felt like trash.

She was no longer in the room she had been in before. Now she was sitting in some sort of containment cell, hands in high-tech manacles, a glowing green wall allowing her to see outside of her cell. Wincing at the pounding headache reverberating through her skull, she stood up on weak legs and hobbled over to the green wall, trying to see where she was.

She seemed to be in a giant prison. The inside of whatever building her cell was in was shaped like a giant hexagon, hexagonal shaped cells identical to hers stacked on top of each other as high as the eye could see, like a giant beehive. Walk ways every few hexagons broke up the massive collection of cells, grey amidst green. Guards in strange wear walked back and forth on these walkways, every few cells one standing on watch.

"Where am--ah!" Lyrical jerked back, hand going to her head as a bright flash of pain hit her. It faded quickly, leaving a dull throb on her forehead in its wake. Looking back to the green wall, she reached out her hands hesitantly and touched the wall. She jerked back at the pain that followed, swallowing a yell of pain. She looked at her now burned hands, green sparks still dancing between them.

"Welcome to the Thunderdome, sweets." A voice said. Lyrical looked up, startled, to see someone who looked to be a wearing a guards uniform. With purple skin and large elf ears, he looked unpleasantly like Kirtash's almost murderer. "Nice to see you're finally awake." She just stared at him blankly. Finally awake?

"How long have I been out?" She asked him.

"I'm not the one to ask." He told her, shaking his head. "All I know is that they brought you in unconscious about a day ago, and you haven't woken up since."

A day? What did that weird dude do to her to knock her out for so long?

"Where's the dragon guy?" She asked, genuinely curious.

"Dragon guy?" The guard looked confused. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "I didn't see a dragon guy when you were brought in." After a moment of silence, he spoke up again. "Come to think of it, whats a dragon?"

She shook her head as a way of dismissing him. Sometimes she forgot that those myths she was so used to on Earth were not regular in space. Heck, sometimes she forgot she was even in space.

"But I do know that when they brought you in, it was with special orders from Lor Zace to be extra vigalent and that you were the most dangerous prisoner we have, which is kind of hard to believe considering we have a lot of the galaxies most dangerous criminals here."

Lor Zace? Was that perhaps the half dragon boy she had seen in that room?

Before she had a chance to ask who that was, some sort of radio crackled on the guards chest, saying words in an unintelligible language. The guard responded back in the same language, his tongue sliding over the symbols like he had spoken them his whole life.

"What? What is it?" Lyrical asked, purely in desperation for an answer.

"Nothing too important." He shrugged. "We've just returned home. To--" He proceeded to say a word that Lyrical knew her human tongue would stumble over. She backed up. She knew that collection of sounds.

She was back. Back at the planet she had escaped from.

Back with the Blueteins.