An old west tale... in space.

2

Ayame Mizuka stepped off the transport into the stink of Hurt on a Friday afternoon, Brimstone’s blazing heat smacking her square across the face.

She hurriedly pulled the UV protectors on and blinked.

Too late, bright white and blue patches erupted over her field of vision. She blinked them away as best she could and headed for some shade.

Getting used to this would take a while and she wasn’t certain which of her senses would take the longest to adjust.

Hurt stank, no, that wasn’t right, Hurt reeked. She was already missing the orderly hustle and bustle of Terminus. She’d grown up there, lived every waking moment of her first twenty four years there. It was massive, it was filled with tens of millions of people, but it never, ever reeked.

This place reeked.

And there weren’t even all that many people here. There were some, yes, she saw a few dozen step off the transport, maybe a couple hundred bustled around the roofless station as she hurried through it, but nothing at all like the sea of life she’d walked with back at home.

Down the first staircase she found two ridiculously modest three story buildings, what passed for offices here maybe. In between them she saw an alley and the first shade he could find in this bloody inferno.

She ducked into it, closed her eyes and watched the spots dance in her head.

When she opened them she saw the girl. She was tiny, delicate like some porcelain doll and her silvery hair was stunning, Brimstone’s light catching in it and giving it a luminous rainbow hue. She wore nothing but rags and she stared up at her, studying her silently.

Ayame hadn’t seen her when she’d come in.

She blinked once and peered past her.

Through the stink of this miserable city, a delightful new flavor popped into her senses. She turned and saw….. him.

She had seen Sy-el in her briefings, studied them years ago at the University, but none of it had prepared her for the actual presence of one of them.

It was tall, a bright orange in color. It had six appendages that she could see. Two more of them, the deadly ones, were hidden within its carapace. Four unblinking emerald green eyes glared out at her emotionlessly. It wore a black top hat and a matching black trench coat, perhaps imitating a person, perhaps mocking a person.

It was the creature’s smell that stood out the most. It was a stench so rancid, so utterly dreadful that it somehow stood out in this world of stink.

She finally yanked a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and thanking god she’d brought it, she pressed it to her nose.

It didn’t help much.

The creature uttered something much like the last sound an alley cat would make as it were being strangled back home.

“Excuse me?” She asked it, keeping that piece of cloth pressed against her nose as tightly as possible. “What was that?”

It made that sound again, once, twice and a third time. It took a few more cat death rattles before she finally got it.

“Ryukyu.”

“Yes, yes, Ryukyu, yes,” she tried smiling at the hideous apparition, smiling and nodding rapidly. She turned back to the girl, still smiling and nodding.

She was gone.

END PART TWO