Spacial Illusions

Chapter One

NOT PROPERLY EDITED

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Everything is in shambles- the ship, the Regiment, the mission, even Callisto herself. It was a battle lost before it even could begin, every Scout Regiment member was stepping off that ship already dead without even knowing it. Callisto wasn't even sure why or how she managed to survive the massacre- if you could call laying on the bloodstained grass of what was supposed to be their salvation watching as Scoutmates were ripped apart or bled out right before her eyes as she did the same at a much more agonizingly slow pace through a series of gashes to her chest and back surviving.

Her memory of the fight was nothing but a blood soaked blur of screams and tearing flesh and snapping bones. The clearest memory of the last two hours was the now prone form of Duma as blood flowed from his mouth and eyes a few inches from her. The next memory she could recall was a massively bloody muzzle shoving corpses aside like ragdolls as it sniffed for any survivors of its perceived enemies. The wan light that filtered through the thick clouds was beginning to fade with the onset of the night, finding that this planet had no moon to light the darkness around Callisto. Without a moon or stars it was hard to tell how long she had been lying in the palpable silence of night, until the rain shattered the quiet.

The rains didn't come in a soft progression like Earth, but in one sweeping torrent across the clearing of mangled and mauled Scouts that filled her mouth and nose with water as she lay facing the skies. Callisto forced herself to stay awake through the night, knowing that if she were to close her eyes she wouldn't be able to open them back up again and fade into oblivion. The rain stopped as quickly as it began with the return of the blue sun's drab light on the clouded planet. Callisto didn't realize that something had made its way through the corpses of her comrades until cold hands wrapped around her arms and pain fired white hot through her entire body as the mystery being tugged her broken and battered form into a woven basket used for towing the carcass of a dead animal for proper skinning and gutting procedures. Was she to be in history as the first Earth meal of a Salutem monster?

The mystery creature stayed just out of eyesight for their entire journey to the unknown den of the of the beast where Callisto is to meet her culinary demise. She was surprised to find the lack of an underground den but instead a tower of ropes that brought the trees down towards her followed by a thatched roof of a hut in the sky. Now was when she caught a glimpse of her captor, a wrinkled old woman of pale yellow with black and red stripes. Her eyes were a pale yellow a few shades lighter than her skin and had a vertically slit pupil.

The elderly woman grabbed all sorts of herbs and brews from wooden shelves on the walls, bringing her striped tail of a snake into Callisto's limited view. It was banded with red, yellow, and black but she couldn't recall the nursery rhyme to spot the difference between the venomous coral snake and the harmless king snake. The woman stuffed leaves in her mouth as her tail mashed a mix of a brackish brown, mushy substance with the roots of the plant she had removed the foliage from. The first she applied was the mush in her mouth she had created on all of her gashes- Callisto trying and failing at keeping in her groans and growls of pain as the surprisingly strong elderly female rolled her to her side to reach her injuries on her back. Once she was pleased with her work she used the darker mixture to act as a cast over the wounds to ensure the healing mix underneath would reach into the furthest recess of her wounds to eat away her potential infections and to speed the healing process.

The woman never spoke, simply placed a blanket over her body to help retain her body heat and vanished from her view. Pain burned through her body as the mixture that woman made for her ate away the dirt and bacteria in her wounds, leaving Callisto moaning in pain with every breath she fought to take in. The view she had of the ceiling restricted her ability to tell how long she had been laying there.