Threats from within.

[Exile]

Planet New Berlin. Several weeks later.

Sprint. Jump. Sprint. Under. Dodge. Sprint. Under. Sprint. Rest. It all came so natural to me now. I was making my way through one of the more densely grown and less populated forests of nighttime New Berlin towards a drop off point for one of our usual "reclaimers" (it's not stealing if it belonged to you in the first place. We want our artifacts back, see.) Normally they'd send a new recruit to do this sort of thing, fetching artifacts from places known to be as secure as it gets, but alas. Bennet insisted that I go.


I had been taking orders directly from him for the past few weeks now, right after I went and saw Angela. Apparently he was the one to train me in the use of my new found tricks. Or "abilities" as Bennet called them. If he indeed was going to do just that then I'm guessing this training differs a lot from what I'm used to, basic Spectre training. He gave me a rather large set of simplistic tasks to perform. Fetch me this, riddle me that, kill that politician. Same old same old. But whether it was due to his influence or thanks to what happened to me whilst I was "out", during each of these tasks I'd find out new things about my abilities. Take two assignments back for instance. I was ordered to infiltrate a Corsair outpost on the Freeport up in Theta. Now, naturally those Zoners don't want your weapons on their station. So if it were to come to blows, I'd have to improvise. Improvise I did. They stopped me at the checkpoint as expected and scanned me for any weapons or explosives or anything that they might find interesting. The scans showed nothing, but one of the guards insisted on a "manual search". He grabbed my shoulder, but in stead of finishing his search, he ended up as a paste on the corridor wall. What? I only looked at the guy.

When I started this run (literally and figuratively) for the drop off point I wondered what would happen this time, but nothing extraordinary or "unusual" (heh, unusual.) had happened so far. Bennet did seem pretty keen on me doing this. "Either you get it, or Oblivion gets it" he said right before he waved his hand at me and turned around as if he wanted to say "Now shut up and go." Perhaps I did get a bit more.. Assertive. Or annoying. Regardless of what I wanted to do, this was my assignment. It took me several hours of running, leaping, jumping and stunting to get to the densely covered area of the forest and even then I'd have to go knocking on tree stumps in order to find a hollow one. Lovely job.

I could go into detail on how I spent hours and hours consulting the trees, asking them which stump was my stump, but in truth ; I just felt it. After almost four hours of constant free styling through the forest I was hit by a sense of familiarity. Bennet told me that might happen more often, and that I shouldn't ignore those feelings. I stopped at the edge of what seemed to be a less dense area of the woods. There were a few trees here and there, leaves covered the ground in a blanket of browns. Normally I would have stood still at the sight of such a thing. But for some reason, that too I no longer cared about. Quid pro quo, perhaps?

One of the trees on the opening had a, well, an opening! Right underneath the stump was a small area uncovered by leaves. Something glowed fiercely inside. I reached in and grabbed whatever was in there, which turned out to be a glass jar filled with some kind of small plant. The plant was lovely, sure. But what caught my eye was the second thing inside of the jar. A glowing light that moved through the jar, circling around the little plant. You'd expect the glass would feel cold to the touch, seeing as how nighttime New Berlin isn't exactly known for it's sun and beaches. The glass itself felt surprisingly warm though, and I'm guessing the little plant wasn't the cause of that.

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