My assignment

For the class I'm taking we have to write a scene of soft science fiction - or social science fiction, meaning psychological instead of freaky robotic.  I took a character from my short story and imagined her at the beginning of her Warden journey.  Yes, I'm putting it here.  Why?  I have no idea.

Flin sat at the bottom of the cliff and waited for her guide to emerge from the tunnel.  The sun had set an hour ago, stars were decorating the sky and hungry wolves had begun howling.  A cool wind was blowing through the canyon, ruffling Flin’s long hair and wrapping it around her shoulders.

She could go on.  It was her decision to wait for the man who brought her here, the man who was yelling her name over and over again in the tunnel behind her…his voice echoing, sounding desperate.  Flin felt no need to answer.  There was only one way out and she’d found it.  He would realize she didn’t need him soon enough.

The man had found her this morning, explained what had happened to her and said he wanted to be her guide; teach her how to handle what she was now able to do.

Flin looked down at her hands, glowing in the starlight.  Back home again.

She laid her head back against the flat stone behind her and took a deep breath.  Home.  Not possible, anymore, the man had said.  The only way to know you’d managed to get home was to catch the glow, and it lasted only minutes.  Even now it was fading.

Without training, the man said she would slip into different realities on accident, which didn’t seem likely.  The vibration, the hum, the feeling of twisting and being compressed to an impossible space…all of that was deliberate.  She’d originally done it to escape the explosion and she knew what she was doing, even though the man said she hadn’t.

But he said there were more of them.  Wardens.  People who protected the boundaries.  Flin liked the sound of that.  Here she was just a soldier, a follower of orders, one of many.  Out there, somewhere in the stars, she could be something more.  Someone important.

“Oh, here you are,” the man said emerging finally from the tunnel.  “Have you been out here all this time?”  He clucked in annoyance, but didn’t wait for her to answer.  “Never mind, never mind.  It’s over here.  Just a few more feet.”

A small lantern hung from a strap that crossed his shoulders.  It swung light around the forest as he trotted ahead of Flin down a small path, barely discernable through the leaves and small shrubbery.  Flin let him get ahead of her, almost to the point of disappearing, before she followed him.  She liked the feeling of being alone and she didn’t need the light to see.  She trailed a hand against the canyon wall and stepped through the forest lightly, knowing somehow that she did not want to leave tracks.  The man was careless, anyone could follow him.

A wolf howled somewhere close behind her.  She felt the familiar chill as the threat wound its way up her spine.  Would they let her leave?  Would they miss her?

“How do you keep slipping away?” the man asked when she finally entered the clearing.  “Shocking, really, how well you blend in.  Never seen anything like it.  Well, here it is.  What do you think?”

He broadly gestured to the black ship sitting in the meadow behind him.  It was taller than some of the trees surrounding it and the starlight was reflecting off of it like a pool of water.

“Looks small on the outside,” the man said.  “But I can assure you it is plenty big.  We’ll be fine on our journey.  Are you ready?”  Again, he didn’t wait for an answer, but moved forward, away from her.

Flin was still.  Was she ready?  Though she’d never been to this section of the forest before, she knew it intimately.  The wind carried with it familiar sounds of birds and insects she knew the names of.  After only a few minutes in the other reality, Flin had felt alien.  There had been trees and shrubs she couldn’t identify, sounds she couldn’t place and even the air had seemed foreign – heavier with a metallic odor.  What would it be like on a completely different planet?

The man had reached the ship and was standing beneath it.  He reached up and pressed something Flin couldn’t see.  A door opened at the side of the shuttle and lights went on inside the ship.

“Are you coming?” he asked Flin.

She took a step forward, let go of the canyon wall and realized she was.