A Journey Unthought Of: Revival of Chaos

by Hustlin Tom

Chapter 29 - Adam, Lyra Heartstrings

“Have you ever thought about growing out some facial hair?” Lyra asked abruptly, as the two of them made their way back toward Hollow Wood through the thick pink and purple dusk.

Adam shook his head and looked at Lyra with a confused expression, “..Whaaat brings this up?”

“Oh, back in Canterlot mustaches were all the rage,” Lyra explained before tapping him lightly on the chest, “and I think a little mustache would make you look,” she stopped to drop her voice into a sultry tone, “astonishingly handsome.”

Adam incredulously looked at Lyra, who waggled her eyelashes at him. Adam snickered a little to himself, and gave her a little shove away from him, “You are such a spaz!”

“Yeah,” Lyra nodded with a knowing look on her face, “but you love every minute of it!”

Adam pretended to think about it for a second, before smiling back at Lyra and saying with a laugh, “Yeah, you’re right, but facial hair is probably not in the near future for me: it reminds me of not being able to shave at all, and having to look disgusting every day when I didn’t have somewhere where I could try to look like a decent human being.”

“You’ve never looked decent, red face, but I like being stuck with you anyway,” Lyra teased.

The two of them set to playfully shoving each other across the asphalt road they were walking on, until they both settled down into a quiet stroll. The town’s outskirts were not far away, and there was still something that occupied a lot of Adam’s current thoughts.

“Hey Lyra,” He tried to ask as casually as possible, “Do you remember anything weird happening when I had just finished training for today?”

Lyra drummed her lips with her right pointer finger as she thought, “Not that I can really think of. Why?”

“So you don’t remember anything strange at all happening?”

Lyra began to look at Adam with a perplexed expression, “No. I was helping you practice, you were frustrated, then we finished up, and here we are walking back into town. Why're you asking?” Lyra’s expression shifted to one of wonder, “Did you get some kind of magical epiphany or something?”

“Actually, you did. You started talking about someone called ‘the Conductor’ who was reaching out to you, and about how the universe is part of some kind of song.”

Lyra’s eyes widened, “I was in a trance?”

“And you don’t even remember it. Who’s this Conductor anyway? I don’t remember you ever mentioning any stories about him.”

Lyra shook her head, “As far as I know, I’ve never heard a story about anypony like that; legendary or modern.”

The both of them paused as they heard a rumbling sound in front of them, and they looked just in time to move out of the way of a large black Humvee that was driving out of the town at an alarming speed. On the back of the van was a symbol in the form of a silver arrowhead pointed upward, with a gold arcing semicircle just meeting it at the arrow’s tip.

“Oh God,” Adam quietly exclaimed, “I know that symbol.”

Almost immediately after he uttered those words, the car slammed on its breaks, and the doors opened. Five troopers with guns decked out in grey body armor leapt from the van, which began to head back in Adam’s and Lyra’s direction. Adam grabbed Lyra by the arm and began to run off the side of the road.

“Adam,” Lyra exclaimed, “What the hay? Who are these guys?”

“No time,” Adam yelled back to her, “just run!”

The five troopers each grabbed onto a rail on their Humvee, and they hung on as the car began to catch up with Adam and Lyra. They braced their knees as the car went offroad, and began to train their weapons on their two targets. Adam led Lyra into a small washed out gully, and jumped into it. It was just about neck high for him, and was about as tall as Lyra was. They ran along the dried up stream bed, and the car was trying to come alongside them. The two troopers on the side of the Humvee closest to them lined up their sights, and fired. Lyra was able to bring up a small magical shield behind them just in time, and two small cylinders, not bullets, fell off of it and down into the streambed behind them.

“These guys are with the same thinktank that experimented with me!” Adam yelled over his shoulder, “They’re trying to take us back, probably to do something worse than what they did with trying to teleport me. They’re not gonna get us; I’m never gonna be caged again! Stop!”

He screeched to a halt, with Lyra bracing herself on him to stop too. The Humvee stopped only ten feet in front of them, and the troopers fired more shots, with their slugs impacting on Lyra’s shield yet again. Lifting her out of the gully, Adam jumped after her onto the other side of the streambed, and they ran to a nearby outcropping of hoodoos. The gap was too wide for the car to get over, so the five security force members climbed down the gully and back up the other side, buying the couple precious seconds to try and find a way to lose them in among the protruding rock formations. Their path weaved through the rocks, until they both stop behind one particularly large rock.

“How did they find us though,” Lyra whispered, “We weren’t doing anything that could really attract attention.”

Adam turned his thoughts over in his head, trying to see what could possibly have brought the think tank to Montana, and then the idea came to him. His face fell, “Remember how back in Equestria the Maiden possessed you and showed us the human ruins there? She said that magic was just another kind of energy: they must’ve been able to detect us through your use of it and my trying to use it.”

A soft beeping sound filled the air, and the two of them fell as quiet as the grave. One of the troopers was nearby, and his radar was picking up some fluctuating readings nearby. He slowly began to make his way around a rock formation, his emergency taser waiting in hand. The radar showed he was getting closer to the source of the Heisenberg radiation, and he steeled his nerves as he approached his target. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Seven. He paused, and waited around the opposite of the hoodoo from his target. In a single burst of energy, the security officer rounded the hoodoo. Just around the corner, a gloved hand slammed into the left side of his head, knocking him into a rock pile five feet away with the force of what felt like a sledgehammer, knocking him out cold. Adam breathed heavily as he brought his mechanical left hand down, and it began to involuntarily twitch.

“Green is down, Green is down!” they heard being barked out close by, and they heard the sound of rocks scraping against each other as boots scrambled over the terrain to get to the downed trooper’s position.

“Let’s go,” Lyra said in a harsh whisper, and she pulled Adam away in the opposite direction of where the troopers would be going.

They had only gone a few steps before Adam felt something lodge in his back, and electricity coursed through him, causing him to shudder, gasp, and crumble. Lyra felt Adam collapse like dead weight out of her hands, and had just enough time to exclaim “Adam!” before she too received a jolt from a taser module, falling unconscious.

The four remaining security officers were on them in a matter of seconds. Adam tried to struggle against the volts traveling through his body, but one of the troopers simply punched him in the head.

“Damn it, not again,” he managed to wheeze before falling into blackness himself. One of the troopers took out a scanner, waving it over their targets bodies. The scan came up questionable on Adam, but was positive on Lyra.

The four looked at each other through their helmet’s visors and nodded, “Bag the chick; she’s the one we want.”

“What about the guy?”

“All he’s got is background radiation, probably from her.”

“Take him. He knows something. ‘Damn it, not again,’ and he managed to take Green down. He’s coming with us.”

Lyra’s eyes fluttered opened, and before the officers could react, she cast one last spell, “Forget”. Her golden energy washed over the troopers, who shuddered a little as their minds were altered, and their thoughts began to bend to her will. After a moment, Lyra’s eyes closed once again, her spell incomplete.

The security officers looked at each other again, “Bag her, she’s the only one that matters.”

With that finished, the troopers picked up Lyra, and headed out, leaving Adam alone in the darkening night among the rocks.

Comments

[Alan Smithee]

I expect to see Tommy Lee Jones cornering Adam inside a hydroelectric dam, and Adam jumps off the dam to escape.

[Hustlin Tom]

3932753
That would've been awesome! I loved Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black. Good times.