Chromium || A Little Match Girl Retelling

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"ʙᴀᴛᴛᴇʀɪᴇs ʟᴇғᴛ: 2"
...

"FOF844 to C-control." Alison could feel their saliva freezing on their lips behind the respirator, the fractals digging into the creases on the drying skin.

Their teeth had begun to clatter on their spasming jaw, their fingers had locked themselves into forming a cage around the lantern handle. They would occasionally tap their immobile hand with their mobile one, finding reassurance in the stinging pain that would shoot up their arm.

Visibility was a rare commodity in the storm. The occasional parting of the snowflaken-laden draughts would reveal a never-ending stretch of transformers and cables.

Glowing wisps of ionised gas descending from the cloud cover above them would occasionally cross their path, gliding across the snow like celestial sidewinders.

Rhodenia's showing off her electromagnetic field aberrations again, Alison thought as they trudged through an auroral plume. The violet-blue particles, photon clumps that behaved like fireflies, swirled around their boot covering legs and dissipated.

The planet liked leaving the humans stumped- her phenomena often had the brightest heads on Earth pelting their chalks in frustration. Sometimes those chalks hit unsuspecting students in the eye. Alison was one such unlucky recipient of a chalk-based injury.

Cryosuits unfortunately didn't offer protection against the ionised gases emitting the photons.

The engineer jumped in their suit when the aurora crossing their path contorted into something resembling a primitive rodent. They stopped to look.

Were they hallucinating now?

No they weren't.

Four legs, a pair of long twitching ears, a fluffy tail, heck even a pair of eyes blinked at them. The auroral plume rippled and flowed around it and like a rock in a stream, the particles condensing to form a rabbit stood there. The creature slowly turned its spectral head towards the human.

It then dissolved into the river of photons and disappeared.

"FO..."

Crack. Static.

Alison's hand trembled as they steadied the cryosuit's helmet. The snow around them was piling knee deep.

"Hel-hello?" they called.

The static cleared for a moment despite the interference from the aurorae.

"FOF844... you hear me?"

"Yes," Alison whispered, shutting her eyes and sighing.

"You're okay...you're okay," said the male voice. "This is a technomancer speaking..."

The next battery found the slot, the lantern blazed to life again.