Challenge: The story must feature character interaction at its heart but it must be only non-verbal communication, internal narration included. The story must include or be an action scene and a character must change for the worse.
I hadn’t planned on spotlighting Iazyer’s backstory yet, but the third element was too perfect not to make this challenge story about him and where his downfall as a member of the Skaf’Enenitaa (Monster Hunters – a group of Eskel-Zai who are hunting down the IRS Enforcers who took part in the Massacre on Thyrif, which decimated four major Eskel-Zai clans almost entirely, for revenge) started.
Zafme led his squad further. This section of the ship was empty, blessedly silent save for the alarm blaring in the corridor. At the next intersection, he halted them, then motioned for half to go left and the other half to keep going forward with him.
Sounds of gunfire came from where the other half had gone, followed by a thud and the sounds of receding bootsteps.
Zafme pressed on. The other squads seemed to be facing more resistance than them, just as planned.
The other half of his squad met them at their destination — the cockpit, where the monster had locked itself into, thinking it could use the ship’s defense systems from there. Zafme would think it an amateur if he did not know it truly was one of their targets, one of the many monsters they had been hunting for years now.
He motioned for Trill to hack the door’s lock and the rest of them to take position.
The door opened. The monster and whoever were with it started firing.
Zafme did not get a chance to fire before the sharpshooters with him had already stunned everyone inside. He checked the room before motioning for his squad to follow.
The monster was down, ready for them to capture. The others were ship personnel, younglings all three of them. Sprawled on the floor, lit up by emergency lighting, they looked like livestock sent for slaughter. Whoever had assigned them to a monster’s ship probably thought of them as expendable crew.
Zafme’s squad was supposed to just grab the monster and go, but something compelled him to put the younglings to their species’ recovery positions while the others disarmed and picked up the monster they were there for.
For whatever reason, the younglings stuck in Zafme’s mind. He derived no pleasure from them taking their collective revenge on this particular monster, his mind too preoccupied with the look of the younglings. They had left the ship flight-capable and the life support systems were fully online when they left, but for whatever reason he still worried about them.
He did not like it, not one bit, not when it had already started interfering with his duties. Something like this could easily be the beginning of the end for him, and he could not have that, not while the massacred clans were not fully and properly avenged.
WindySilver 