More Toby. 2011, 2012

 

Toby, 2010, 2011

 

Ledges hike in Cayahoga Valley

the overlook, looking down!

And then the scrambling trail below, looking up!

Good loop trail, some steps, mostly flat unless you like scrambling up and around the beautiful obstacles!
 

Tenth Daughter, Part 9

 River of Mnemosyne

As I stepped into my suit and pulled on the ringlet gloves, I saw a dark form approach from the village. Quickly I snapped on my boots and grabbed up the blade that was stuck into the ground. The form grew larger as it approached, no surprise, but it didn't stop growing and in an instant of recognition I saw it was the giant, Hagrid. He saw me and grinned horribly. The troops gathered and we watched the falling lights dipping beyond the village. They fell and fell. Hundreds of lights descending from the invisible belly of a flailing Octopi mother's engorged belly. 

Transports that had been recharged from sources within the village pulled up and we climbed aboard, one hundred and ninety-one, and one giant who weighed down the back of a reinforced jeep. Its rear bumper caught a rock and sheared off, clattering off the side of the road. The main road through the village veered twice and we careened through, knocking bricks from corner buildings. New rubble joined with old rubble, becoming one in the same. As we rumbled in, cutting the silence in two, the wives and old women peeked out of windows. The children hid in closets and babies cried. 

I took the ride as solace and reverie. Nothing had my full attention for long and soon the pockets of my soul swirled like partners in a dance hall. A ballet, a tango, a mob. I picked a tiny denim swathe and dipped my pinky. I was scant months old and laying naked in a chilled crib. A wire tethered cap sent pulses of colors and imagery to my infant brain. Before I breakfasted at my mother's breast the training had begun.

The transport tire ran over a stone, and we all lurched from the bench, grabbing at each other's arms to steady. The trucks rolled on through the last of the cottages, like cavalry coming out of a canyon. I almost expected a volley of arrows, a parting shot from indigenous onlookers, but none came. Ahead the ambient light of our adversaries polluted the night, beyond that our driver saw nothing but the canvas flaps and big tires of the truck in the road ahead. Explosions rocked us from our seats.

"Get off, get out," someone shouted. The enemy was shelling the transports on the road ahead. We scrambled out and off the road by the dozens and soon every truck was burning. By instinct we fled from the flames behind to the fire ahead with only our armor and our blades to protect us. The blaze had left us no darkness to hide behind.

A slick synth, stitched, four-holed button pocket. I played a modern goal sport, a war sport. I was seven. Dee was our quarterback this day. We pushed to the goal, advancing by degrees, until I stepped wrong. The ball tumbled loose. But Dee was there, she retrieved the ball and then lateralled, and the warriors flew toward the action. She stood over my fallen body, protecting me from harm, then lowered a hand and pulled me to my feet. Her hair fluttered and covered her face, mouth opening, screams.

Divided, we drove forward to the fight, staying low, crouching behind boulders and debris. Our broken transports littered the field. Piles of lumber, random sheds or hovels became our shields. We no longer knew what exactly we were fighting over, nobody could tell us the goal. Except this: find the enemy, kill the enemy. 

Beyond the fire I turned back to the road and seeing a ditch I crouched low and tumbled sideways into it. Just then a body vaulted the gap and me. I twisted in the ditch and swung my blade, feeling it bite and the blue shrouded body fell hard, grunting. Springing up, I hacked again at the Octopi, severing an arm, then thrust into its body. At first I lost my bearings, but seeing the flames I wheeled and ran from the village, staying off the road, keeping low, swinging at every foe. 

Soon I was enveloped by darkness, and I thought maybe I had run beyond the fight. I turned and saw black figures moving in the distance, silhouetted by the fire. I bent to a knee. It was like watching a play. The leading man was a giant and he whirled and smote and finally he stopped. For a moment the giant stood still, his weapon slowly lowering. A fog obscured the scene. A gauzy curtain that lowered, then rose again. When the smoke cleared the giant was gone and other shadowy dancing figures took his place. I took that, and I put it in a pocket.

That was the breather I needed. Slowly without thought, without feeling, with no fear, I rose into a crouch and jogged back to the war. My lance was lowered, my blade outstretched, and the whistling shrapnel and the shouts and swishing blades surrounded me and my battalion. 

"Here's another. Hand me another flag." The sergeant pushed a yellow pennant into the ground at the soldier's feet. He was cut nearly in two, cloaked in blood, not all of it his own. Sargeant picked up a blade from the scorched earth and laid it over the soldier's chest. His armor was broken and the mottled gray uniform was ripped. One chest pocket was torn open. "Scan his code as well. Number 22." They shuffled through and stepped over the scattered dead Octopi, looking for familiar uniforms and faces. 

Now I sit upon the banks of the river, at the confluence, and have a choice. Do I drink from the River of Mnemosyne, or of Lethe? All my training, my entire existence, has led me to Hell and out the other side. Now I bathe my feet at the rivers. One soothes, and one prolongs my torment. How do I choose?

the end

Tenth Daughter, Part 8

 All the Lights in the Sky

Later than sooner we reconvened by the base of the hill, receiving a scowl from Sargeant. The supplies had been gathered without us and most of the tents were set up. Not ours, and we were last in line for chow. Some electrics had been reconnected and new supplies were due to fall from the sky shortly. But our power suits and laser cannons were useless now. After eating we all gathered around a fire and worked on our suits, bypassing the hydraulics and greasing ball cuffs. To my left Blondie was wetting her blade. Even without a charge it could slice through Octopi leather. But their blue charged shields would twist an ill-timed thrust. We would have to be at our best in the coming fight. 

Night came late in the summer, but soon the blue skies darkened, and foreign stars appeared like flickering candles. We'd never seen these new constellations. Gooney stretched a long finger to the southeast quadrant. The Sun. We couldn't see the Kuiper belt objects we called home. Or the blackened Earth. My sight faded with the sky of this planet, and I thought again of my sister. I impossibly heard the gasps of my parents and screams as the ground came apart. She fell, it was the beginning of the end for us. For the Earth. 

Soldiers gradually drifted away, stowing their suits and weapons, then falling into their bunks. I lingered by the fire and finally stretched out with my hands folded behind my head. There was a small pocket open in the periphery of my mind where I played hearts with a rummy two-toed sloth named Eduardo. Eduardo wore retro Air Jordens, which was ironic if you had any knowledge of Earth history. Also, he spoke with an Eastern European accent that I found hilarious. So droll, so self-deprecating. A little bit putinevil. 

I was winning until the sloth shot the moon. I gave up, closing that pocket, and noticed the stars moving in the heavens. They grew from stars to lights to lanterns falling swiftly. I jumped up yelling along with the blasting claxons that pulled everyone from their sleep.

Tenth Daughter, Part 7

 Mystic Whales Vs Cosmic Octopi

After I sat, with a cup of warm lemon water nestled between my chapped hands, a pocket came unbidden, and with a little hesitancy slipped in, but only part way.  We dropped through the cloud cover, our individual buckets screeching as the super-heated shields burned. Each pod, dropped from the orbiting mother Whale Transport Ship, poked a perfect hole in the cumuli and pulled down hissing trails of vapor in its descent. All the way to the earth. Balloons flated from the cones and like a dance each pod, together, flipped over then impacted the ground. With luck a troop bucket would bounce. What happened next was always an adventure, but the first bounce was key, and lifesaving. If there was no bounce, then either the balloons were not up to the task, or the ground just got the better of them. We had two hundred buckets, and of that all but one survived. Phase 1. 

We were from first landfall to the last approx one mile apart. The rendezvous was quick. We each came to earth fully equipped, delivered from cracked eggs complete, mobile, dangerous. Our metal was hard, our teeth were sharp. In powered armor we hit the ground running and coalesced on central turf.  

The enemy had gathered beyond and without pause we engaged. I was in the leading group, but as previously stated had fallen back. At the hour I thought the ground had caused my fall, but as I settled deeper into the pocket, recounting the action, I discerned no fault for the earth. Did my suit fail, did my knee buckle? Or did I just lose my nerve? I had been in hundreds of simulated battles and this one felt exactly like those.

Whatever, I hadn't quit on my compatriots, or myself. I kept on, and I engaged. The first foe I met lost their head. The top bit slid from my power blade and bounced off a rock, its ugly head spilled from the helmet. The spiky stubble of an impossible beard and a slimy snout scowled at me from the trampled earth. I snarled back and shouldered the torso out of my way, its multi armed leather wriggling, not realizing yet it was dead. I waded deeper into the melee...

In two chairs in a corner of the cottage the two women reclined. Refugees from a fallen Earth system, they had settled here on Proxima Centauri P-15 alongside tens of thousands, delivered in a hundred Mother Whales. Two hundred years ago the planet was empty, and barely habitable.  Now it was a garden, well populated by pockets of human settlements. And host to an invading horde of Octopi-pigs.

I sipped my water while the others finished off a second bottle of wine. The women had no use for clinkers, there was no significant monetary trade in the villages. They preferred the chocolate and flavored cough lozenges we had in our zippered pockets. Their men and grown children had either enlisted in the local militia to guard the village perimeter or had already died fighting. One of the human women fed a small piece of chocolate to the child sitting on her lap. It licked its snout with glee. Its tentacles wriggled with delight. 

Tenth Daughter, Part 6

 Zero Waste and Verdant Exhalation 

"Plunkit, Plunkit."

The chop thickened, waves engulfed my torso and face, and I tasted salt on my lips. The wind was picking up and a second wave flipped me over as the surf rolled me on to the beach. The sandy beach morphed into an unrivaled expanse of green grass, the downslope of the hill we had just taken, uncontested, but at a loss. I took a last deep breath of salt air, inhaling instead the loamy verge. 

"Plunkit, snap out of it," the sergeant slapped the side of my helmet and my pocket unraveled. "Grab the litter and help get Hagrid to the village." It took six of us to trundle the giant down the hill, stumbling half the way. Between hazardous steps I would glance at his prostrate bulk, sometimes to see his eye lids open halfway. The giant's chest rose and fell slowly, and I prayed it didn't quit, not here, not on this hill.

At the slope's base there was a simple paved road, and one of our lifeless vehicles met us there. The driver had disengaged the transmission and with the help of two other soldiers was pushing the jeep-like transport. We hoisted the gurney onto the jeep and then helped push the car up the road into town. Only one square in, there was a doctor's home, and several of the troops lugged him, not easily, over the threshold. I watched them, unable to help because of the cramped quarters, then turned away from the struggle and walked back the way I came with a few others. The mood was black.

"We should get back to the hill, the Sargeant wanted all hands gathering supplies from the drones."

"Aye, we should," said Goony, but he stopped and looked into the open doorway of a small brick cottage. Inside were two local women and a child sitting at a table. The noon day was warm, and the windows stood wide open, the floral pattern curtains barely stirred in the scant breeze.  He unzipped a side pocket and rummaged inside, pulling out some crumpled bills and a few silver clinkers. "Not much," he said.

"I've some too," said Blondie. She looked at me, and I nodded.

I stepped up to the doorway. "Have you got any wine?" I asked. "Maybe bread?" Sargeant wouldn't miss us, not right away.