Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.22

1.22

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I went through a series of stretches, shifting my entire body one group of muscles at a time. Dull, unreflective grey moved with me, the suit covering my entire body without restricting my agility or my flexibility. Segmented plates shifted smoothly and silently, dark weaves moving as they should around my joints...

What I was wearing now was... quite the far cry from what I used to wear when I was a Warrior. It was basically an armoured full body suit, covering me completely from the base of my skull down. It had no powered components, no ornamentation, and its only use was to cover my body and prevent me from being exposed to the environment.

It was perfectly fine for that purpose, and...

Not much else.

I could not, for the life of me, make something that didn’t resemble my old armour. Consequently, all of my designs had been impossible to wear, because I knew very well that if I ever put them on, I would be comparing them the entire time.

Frankly even this one...

Neither part of me liked it. Chances were that I was going to have the nanofactories eat it and then toss the blueprint into the cold grasp of oblivion... but I only needed it for the next few hours, so I ignored the dislike.

This is what I get for wanting to fly during a storm.

I sighed, and picked up the next part of the outfit.

The air mask, at least, wasn’t as basic as the rest of the suit, but it also wasn’t up to Chozo standards, either. It was simple, large enough to cover my face completely, and therefore also large to cover every part of my head that wasn’t already covered by my feathers.

I put it on, and then took a breath.

... Clinical. Which was good, because it meant that it was working.

I hummed, before grabbing the next thing I’d designed today, which was nothing but a simple hooded raincoat. I pulled it on, tossed the hood up, and shifted my arms and shoulders a bit.

It was the most adequate raincoat I’d ever had.

I nodded to myself, and then grabbed the very last item on the table, which, visually, appeared to be nothing but a silver-white brick.

It was, of course, not just a brick. It was a Nanofactory, one that had a microfusion generator and extended computational infrastructure incorporated into the design. Unlike the originals, there was nothing subtle or small about this thing, which was completely necessary considering the conditions that I would soon be having it work in.

I tucked the brick into my raincoat, alongside two of my Autgents, and then strolled towards the entrance.

I jumped upwards, and the moment that my head breached through the plasma barrier, I heard the sound of rain pouring against fabric, joined by the rush of wind. The fabric of the tarp rippled, but it stayed firmly in place, weighed down much more heavily than this wind would achieve in moving.

When I opened the flap, the rain almost immediately tried to pour in. I could sense the contamination in it, but I didn’t need supernatural senses to see that something was wrong with it. The colour gave it all away, the slightly pink and brown mix leaving caustic trails all over the ground.

I sent a mental command to the Nanofactory while I was still in range. This rain was full of chemicals and useful elements. I’d be foolish to not try and capture some.

Either way, I stepped out, and closed the flap behind me. There was nothing watching me, no machines in place and anybody with good sense having already taken cover long before the storm had truly started, so I spent a moment loosening up my body before taking a deep breath.

Lifeforce surged within my body, and I directed it easily, centuries of old age having taught me well how to not waste my energies. Only the slight glow of my biological lines would have given me away, but they were completely covered up. The raindrops seemed to slow in the air, their fall muted and dragged.

Oh, to be young, again.

My muscles tensed, and that energy reached its crescendo.

The Shinespark carried me to the corner of the street in less than a blink of an eye, leaving a row of displaced rain behind me. My foot stopped against the pavement of the sidewalk, and I halted in place completely for a moment as my Lifeforce overwrote inertia. The rain that I’d passed through dropped to the ground, and an instant later, I carried out another step, following down the road.

I stopped again at the corner of the street, only to once more blur down the rest of it. Again, and again, and again, I did this, stopping for brief instants in order to redirect my momentum.

It took me less than ten seconds to reach the edge of Santo Domingo. I came to a brief pause next to a half-broken building, with a direct line out to the Badlands. It was dark, raining, and my destination was lost to a grey fog.

My last step carried me straight outwards.

I watched the rain break against my mask, splattering against the clear material before sweeping backwards as I continued moving forwards with a nearly impossible velocity. Above, streamers of lightning flitted through the clouds, a mere prelude to the fury that would continue to come throughout the night.

My foot slammed down into sand, and I simply stopped. The sky flashed, and the thunder reached me shortly afterwards.

I breathed out. My Lifeforce faded, internal energies drawn back into rest after this brief action. My blood cooling, after finally being able to act like I wished to.

It was dark out here. The only light came from brief flashes above. Night City itself was only the tiniest blur of colour, the streaming advertisements that went up from the city’s centre barely able to penetrate the rain. As the night continued, it would only get worse.

Nevertheless, I was where I wanted to be.

I looked around, examining the area. Sand and dirt that was turning into mud, some stray plants, and, of course, the thing I actually came out here for in the first place.

The giant fucking behemoth of metal that had once been called an Aerozep.

It had clearly seen better days, that much was obvious with even just a single glance. The hull seemed pitted and almost droopy, corroded greatly. Paint had been stripped off by the acid rain, and left to drip all over the ground, staining the earth a vague green and black.

I could see where the hull had been cut into, as well, rough gouges in the metal that spoke of plasma cutters and a lot of effort.

I approached one of them, and stepped inside.

The interior really wasn’t much better than the exterior. Every little piece of machinery had long been ripped out, and what remained was little more than scrap metal. The rain seeped in through holes in the ceiling, dripping down onto spots that had been stained in various colours. Sand had blown in from the storms, and flakes of metal had gathered like piles of dust.

Even so... There was a lot of metal here... and the decay wasn’t that much of a problem for me as it would have been for almost anybody else.

I shifted, and the two Autgents I’d taken with me floated out of my coat, their sensors lighting up a moment later. Thin beams of light lanced out, marking the walls with brief flashes of colour and holographic shapes. To most, it would seem like mere decoration.

To me, it was a very detailed report.

The hull’s primary composition consisted of titanium aluminide, engineered into a latticework structure incorporating significant internal voids to maximise durability while minimising weight. The entire envelope of the Aerozep was like that, a simple yet effective design that had long been worn down by time and extreme weather.

I was currently standing into the gondola, the underside of the Aerozep where the cargo and passengers would be. The material composition here was quite a bit different, and though a lot of it had been ripped out, not all of it had.

The interior space had been liveable, and that demanded certain standards.

Electricity had been available throughout the entire gondola, and so there had been cabling, ports, batteries, and all the usual stuff that goes into such a system. A lot of it was gone, but not all of it.

On a similar note, water had been available, and most of the pipes hadn’t been ripped out. It was, for the most part, plastic, galvanized steel, and PVC that handled cold water, but the hot water pipes had been copper.

The engines had been too big to take entirely, and so it was mostly their internal components that had been pulled out and recovered. What was left was scrap, but that ‘scrap’ also consisted of components that hadn’t been taken because they weren’t good enough to be taken.

Silica was in abundance, and not just because of what was inside the Aerozep. The sand was its own perfect supply.

Sum it all together, and there could easily be two or three hundred tons of useful elements here. I couldn’t take all of it without making it obvious that it had been taken, though, but that really wasn’t as much of a limit as it could be.

I could do what I wanted without taking all of it anyway.

I reached into my cloak, grabbing the Nanofactory brick. After a moment of deliberation, I walked over to the engines, and set it down firmly on the ground. The two Autgents floated back to me, projecting a hologram of the Aerozep, and I looked at it as I calculated how much I could get away with.

It didn’t take me too long, and once I was done, I sent the instructions to it, and walked straight back to the hole that I’d entered from.

The rain continued to pour, only strengthening as time went on. It wouldn’t last too long, but it was going to get much stronger before it let up.

I looked up. Dark grey looked back.

I hummed, and reached up to my chest. It took me only a few moments to undo the raincoat, and then only moments more to slip my arms back through the sleeves. I bundled the entire coat, and then tossed it over onto a broken desk. It caught on the edge and folded up, and then I walked outside.

The rain slapped into my body suit, and I felt it only through its weight, meagre as it was.

Alright.

My Essence twisted, and from the two thin openings in the back of my suit, my wings emerged with a flurry of air.

I wasted no time. My wings curled upwards, and then flapped downwards.

The first beat was wrong, but it had been several centuries since the last time that I had flown. It carried me a half-dozen metres into the air regardless, slightly lopsided. Embarrassing, but the memory was already returning to me.

The next beat was better, and I rose twice as high, straightening as I did. I felt the air catch on my filoplumes, the old and nearly forgotten sensation oh so welcome to feel again.

The third beat is perfect, my Lifeforce infusing my wings and strengthening them beyond simple physics. A shockwave of air pulses around me as I shoot upwards, rising into the storm fearlessly. My wings twitch, and I ride the wind as I fly higher, the ground below me fading into meaningless grey and brown through the rain.

I feel the wrath coming, and my wings fold, my body spinning through the air. I reach one hand outwards, towards the sky, and point a finger down towards the ground.

The world flashes white as the bolt of lightning strikes me. My perception slows, and I feel it as it arcs through the metal of my suit, flowing along the path of least resistance, from my hand, up my arm, across my chest and shoulders, and then down my other arm before reaching my finger.

It shoots off downwards, and something that looks vaguely like a lightpost receives it.

I can’t help it.

I laughed, sheer and simple joy boiling within me. My wings flare wide, and I spin in a circle before rising even higher into the air.

My soul exults, and I already knew that I was going to do this again as soon as I could.

This wouldn’t last forever, but I would be enjoying it every single moment that it lasted.