In The Shadow Of Giants

The Start Of Everything

Old and almost entirely replaced to the brim with augments, Gabe Johnson has taken part in almost every event of the Thousand Year War. He carefully navigates a glass of aged whiskey to the contours of his mouth. The smell of his cigar clove leaf wrapper burning permeates throughout the room. All of it the benefits of the war.

"Ya know I didn't always have all of this techno shit in my face, It used to be nice and pretty, smooth too." he added while using his left hand to pull up his fat cigar to his mouth. Scars traveled across his face in rifts and valleys, some of them going deep into his tissue, some above the surface and fully healed except for the paler skin tone.

"The boys I ran with during the war used to pick up ladies at every station that we stopped at...before they landed in Harper's field." He sighed and shook his head while lifting the shot glass for one last time before he sat it down onto an aluminum coffee table.

"Harpersfield; we didn't see the fuckers coming, falling from the sky, destroying Mary Jane Children's hospital with its own weight."

He sighed heavily while waving his head back in forth in a slow and mechanical motion, Quickly he looked to his arm chair and activated a video of the first landing, a massive blue ship is falling down slowly to the ground. Panicked civilians jumping over abandoned cars and grey dust is rising over the horizon. The camera drops from its owner's hands, falling to the ground as the metallic blue coloured spaceship comes into view more clearly. it is log shaped and has what seems to be thrusters shaped like squid heads. Moments after its landing the jet thruster shaped objects begin to move away from the ship. The process continues for two minutes until the tail of the ship is high in the sky elevated to what seems a hundred stories.

The ship is not done with its transformation. The legs of the ship begin to fold out in order to create a flat platform while heavy metal doors slowly open down revealing an armada of ships. Tiny black dots with a tip of neon blue began to spit out from the mouth of the mother ship. Blood curdling screams begin as these spaceships get progressively closer and closer until a blast of green fire erupts and the video is lost to a haze of static.

Gabe sighs and breaks the crackling noise of static with his throaty voice "Kid..I know you're writing this book. And I know that after that day not a damn thing was to be the same for humanity. I know you know about the food lines, the desperation, cannibalism and all of that fucked up shit, but you won't ever know what me and every other man and woman in the field that day was feeling when those things showed the hell up at our front door. You won't know that feeling of desperation, that horrifying nagging feeling that you're just an ant against a Titan."

He kicked back in his chair with his clove cigar in the corner of his mouth and ended his speech, "But it won't hurt trying to tell ya. So fire away."