Android

Chapter One - A Rude Awakening

The first thing you are aware of is the arctic-like cold blasting through your thin armor and the sharp headache that blurs your vision. A high-pitched ringing in your ears seems to split right through your skull. You press your hands over your ears, attempting to block out the noise, but the ringing continues on even louder. It makes you want to scream.

When your vision clears, you find that you are lying in the middle of a barren, snowy wasteland with your back to a large cliff of ice and rock. The wind whips past your face and bites at your already red nose. That headache is still racking your brain, and you gingerly pat your head to check for damage, hoping to find the source of the pain. Your hand comes back wet and sticky and red, so you know you're in trouble. Yep, that is definitely what's causing your head to hurt...

Thick blood now coats your fingers and slowly trickles down the side of your face. You look down and see that it has already stained the surrounding snow. A pity that you should ruin such a picturesque scene by splattering that red stuff all over it. How inconsiderate of you.

The blood is evidence enough that you've hurt yourself, but you don't know how the injury happened. Truth be told, you can't remember anything from past this point. Confused and very light-headed, you prop yourself up on your elbows. You look around dazedly, although there's not much worth seeing except white, snow-blanketed land. Wait a second... Look back in that direction. No, more to the right. Now focus your eyes more...

Aha! In the distance, you see someone coming! No, hang on, make that lots of someones. They must be coming to rescue you!

...Wow, they sure are going pretty fast. Alarmingly fast. And they're coming directly towards you. Maybe they were really worried? However they feel about you, their presence gives you both hope and a tiny ounce of fear. But mostly hope.

Your rescuers ride on snow speeders that race over the terrain quicker than ice cubes on smooth glass, and that's saying something. They are all holding objects in their hands that look suspiciously like-- oh crap. They all have guns. Alright, make that mostly fear.

Immediately upon reaching you, the snow-speeder-people surround you where you lie defenseless on the ground. You guess that these people are soldiers, given their possession of guns and their identical body armor. As they circle you, they jump off of their vehicles and train their horrifying gun barrels on you.

One particular soldier stalks right on up to you, a deadly gun in hand. Her imposing figure stops a few feet away, then she aims the weapon at your face. Well, hello to you too, madam. You throw up your bloodstained hands to protect yourself as if the futile move will do any good. It doesn't, obviously, but the good news is the woman hasn't shot you instantly. The bad news is she yells at you instead.

"How did you survive that fall?" she asks fiercely. "That's a two hundred foot plummet to hard flat ground. No android or mortal, Muneri or not, could have lived through a plunge like that!"

Oh gracious, this woman is truly terrifying. You have absolutely no idea what she's going on about, but by the tone of her voice it seems she is almost disappointed that you're alive. Heaven knows why; you haven't the slightest clue as to who she is or what she means to you.

By now, you are twice as puzzled and scared than you were when you woke up here. So, in an attempt to clear things up a bit, you ask the two most prominent questions floating around in the jumbled alphabet soup of thoughts that is your mind:

"Who are you? Where am I?"

The scary woman's face grows angrier (imagine that), and she lifts the scope of her gun up to her eye. She's five feet away, and you don't really see the point of a scope to guide her towards a direct hit. You think she could do just fine without it.