BEYOND 3A: BloodRed and ScaleBlack

The Nineteenth Feather: Unidentifiable Flying Object

After chatting with her the rest of the way, they went their separate ways.

Meggie stood before her front door, strangely unable to open it. Not because it was locked, but because she felt an ominous presence inside her house. She clasped her hand around the door knob and couldn't for the life of her twist it. So, she knocked three times.

No one answered.

She knocked again.

No one answered.

She knocked yet again.

No one answered.

She knocked one final time, and the door opened by itself.

She pushed the door further and saw that her feelings were correct. The floor was covered in blood and the atmosphere was suffocating. Meggie followed the trail of blood into the living room, where the corpses of her aunt and her uncle lay. Meggie would have fallen unconscious from shock, had the object that killed them not caught her gaze. It had the appearance of a football-sized hovering disc akin to an alien spaceship. It possessed a strange aura that compelled Meggie to stand under it. So, in a trance, The helpless girl slowly marched forward, ignoring the corpses of her caretakers in favour of the hypnotic object.

Suddenly, her brother appeared and broke a vase on the UFO, causing it to lose its effect for a split moment. Her brother shouted at her, begging her to run away as far as possible, since that thing could only target one person at a time. Meggie, having been snapped back to reality, screamed in terror over what she was seeing, prompting him to kick her through the doorway, inciting her to start escaping. Her brother was ultimately killed, but she didn't know about that yet as she frantically ran away in a state of confusion and fear. The UFO began it's pursuit, abandoning its hypnotic effect in favour of a very direct approach, which was the method it used to kill; A massive spike that shoots out of its bottom in a nanosecond.

Meggie ran screaming, begging for anyone to save her. Begging for a hero to defeat the threat pursuing her. Begging for the faintest spot of hope.

no one answered.

Despite how much she cried, no one stepped in to rescue her. As the disk drew closer, Meggie's life began flashing before her eyes, it wasn't very eventful. One second away from death, she desperately shouted: "HELP! PLEASE!" and prayed for a miracle.

Then, fate decided to throw her a bone. The object was suddenly struck by a blunt weapon and sent tumbling away at high speed. When Meggie cooled down from shock, she realised who came to save her; Dennis, alongside a devil-looking girl unfamiliar to her. Dennis looked back at her and asked: "Are you okay?" and the only sounds that came out as a response were incoherent blubbering mixed with crying. Corna asked him: "You know her, Kid?"

Dennis: "I met her earlier today."

Corna: "And how mad are you right now?"

Dennis: "Very."

Corna: "Go to town."

The pitcher pulled out a baseball and tossed it into the air around the time the disk became airborne again. He struck the ball with his energy-infused bat and hit the enemy dead on, prompting him to shout: "Hell yeah! Even with a numb arm, I'm still good!"

Corna: "Don't get ahead of yourself, Pitch the Kid, We still need to pacify it."

Dennis: "Yeah, yeah, I'll make an opening as usual."

Corna: "...Be careful, there's something off about-"

Before she could even finish her warning, the danger she tried to warn about came into effect. The disk started sending off painful telepathic waves as a defence mechanism. Dennis and Meggie were only suffering from a severe migraine because of it, Corna on the other hand, the one who could read those waves clearly, was on the verge of dying. She immediately dropped to her knees and started puking and excessively sweating, crying, and screaming her lungs out. Dennis was quick to understand what was going on and urgently chucked his entire bat at it, putting another dent in its metal. When the waves stopped and the momentary torture ended, Dennis ran up to Corna and asked: "Hey! What happened to you?!"

Corna was completely unresponsive. The mind-tearing waves of their opponent temporarily reduced her brain to mush from sheer pain and agony, meaning that it was up to only Dennis to fix this mess.

It would have been manageable and perhaps easy to do, had he not thrown his main weapon straight to Argentina. He hurriedly looked around for anything to throw and noticed that Meggie was still in the scene, terrified beyond belief. Dennis shouted at her: "Why the hell are you still here?! Run!" and grabbed a nearby trash can lid. He then held it like a flying disc and muttered: "You wanna play frisbee?! Okay, bitch, we'll play frisbee!" and ran toward it in order to get a few quick hits on it. However, The UFO sprouted several zigzagging spikes that all rapidly moved toward him. He blocked from the front with the lid, but his back was exposed and as a result, his shoulder was impaled. Dennis ignored the pain and muttered to himself: "Malacoda... Can send anything flying at three thousand Km/h... no more... no less..." and flicked his finger on the lid, blasting it forward like a bullet train and destroying the spikes he blocked. He ran forward, forcing the spike out of his shoulder, and threw a small rock he picked up, functionally turning it into a bullet. He kept picking up everything that could fit in his hand and throwing it at the UFO, disallowing it to retort in any physical way.

Having been nearly destroyed, the flying disc resorted to going back to an old move, hypnotic waves, and unfortunately, Dennis was caught in it. Unwillingly, he began marching toward the UFO, which intended on impaling him through the top of his head. The atmosphere of helplessness was suffocating for Meggie. The rest of her family had died, Corna was incapacitated, and her first friend was walking into his own coffin.

Meggie was indecisive and timid by nature, she'd rather let the ocean waves of life sweep her in any direction than to swim in any direction. If she was unjustly punished, she'd take it. If she was bullied, she'd endure it. If she was alone, she'd bear it. She was afraid of making her own choices, because it was the very thing that cost her parents their lives. The one time she decided to help and save someone pinned under rubble in the middle of a fight led to her parents rushing in to get her away, only to be killed as a result. As a result, she was afraid of being a person, afraid of influencing her surroundings in any way, afraid of doing what her heart desired.

Until this moment.

Meggie found herself gritting her teeth and running to push Dennis out of harm's way and ultimately succeeding. Dennis woke from his entranced state, facing the ground. He groaned: "Ugh... My head... What happened...?" And when he turned around, he saw Meggie's fate. The disc spike had impaled her through her head, coming out from underneath her jaw and piercing the asphalt below her. 

Not many people in this world got the luxury of a quick death, but she was one of those lucky people.

Nineteenth Feather:

Plucked