Savior in the Dark
Chapter Three: The Beginning of the Dark Time
By: Varyn
Slowly, Varyn opened her optics.
She was hooked up to a monstrous amount of tubes and computers, all of which seemed to be monitoring her.
"Hello?" She asked in a small voice, afraid to turn her head.
Nothing. Dead silence other than the slow clicking and whirring of the computers as they mindlessly gathered their cold data.
"Hello?…Hello!…HELLO!"
She felt like she had fallen into a void. Just her mind, the machines, and this dim little room. She sat up, carefully, looking around.
4 walls, and a door.
That was the rest of her surroundings. She noticed, however, that the door had one small window of thick glass, through which a faint light was cast upon the floor.
Terrified, she began unhooking herself from all the wires and tubes, half expecting she would drop dead if she did so, but unable to stop herself. She had to get to that window.
She warily rose to her feet, still very much alive, and strode over to the door. Pressing her face to the glass, she peered down the hall, first left, then right. It was entirely empty.
If this is a mental institute, then where are the doctors, the guards, the patients?
Where am I?
She tried the door’s handle. Locked. She knocked on the window, desperately trying to call attention to herself. She felt horribly suffocated, and imagined herself being trapped in this little room without respite, for the rest of her long years.
I have to get out of here…I HAVE to…
She raised her fist to the glass and hit it. It would not budge. She began to shake in abject horror. She was sure the air all around was squeezing her. Again, she hit it, and again, finally a hairline crack fractured its surface. She gathered all her reserves for one final blow, and smashed it. The sounds of glass pieces landing on the ground skittered and echoed through the hallway, but still no one came, no alarms went off, nothing.
She drew her sword and reached her arm out through the hole where the window had been, using the sharp blade to wedge open the lock mechanism on the outside of the door. With that, she withdrew her arm and pushed it open.
When she stepped out into the hall and began to walk down it, there was no noise beyond her own footsteps. She ran down the hall, then down some stairs she found, through several lobbies and yet, still, there was simply no one around. She had become too scared of the silence to scream out any more cries of ‘hello’. She had absolutely no idea what to do with herself, until at last one thought formed in her mind:
For the love of Primus, get out of this building.
She did some more running around until she found an exit, but when she did find it, it was already open, and one of the doors was half off its hinges. It was as though a great mass of ‘bots had tried to push their way out, all at once, almost making it seem like the place must have been evacuated in a terrible, desperate, hurry.
Outside, the last of the evening sun was shining brightly as it drifted towards the horizon, and it seemed to be a day like any other... Only the streets, like the building, were utterly empty.
For lack of any better option, she kept walking, down into the streets of the city she recognized as Derycon, a place she had lived in for 10 years before the great war.
The more she walked, the more things looked askew. Here and there, a shop’s windows were smashed, but the goods were left untouched on the shelves and there were no clerks. Hover-cars were left abandoned or crashed on the roads, as though some great chaos had been through here and then passed on, leaving nothing.
When she arrived at the city’s central square, she looked up at the huge TV screen that had always hung there, attached to the side of a building, for the purpose of broadcasting the latest news from all over Cybertron. Every major Cybertronian city had one, and they could always be relied on to have the latest updates, no matter what the situation. It was still there, and from what Varyn could see, it still had power running to it, but the screen was completely blank. There was no news.
She could stand it no longer, she looked up at the darkening sky that wheeled overhead and asked:
"What in the world is going on? Is anything going on? Am I dead?!"
"No, you are not." A calm male voice behind her replied, "But nearly everyone else is."