Tails #1: One Man’s Monster Is Another Man’s…

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Dandelion Drift: Kitchen

6:23am SGT

“I’m going to go flirt with the crazy soul-eating fox.”

I sigh into my coffee, set down my mug, and look sideways at my green-eyed, wide-eyed best friend of twenty-three years.

“Okay fine.” I say, pushing my chair back from the table. “You get the skipper started up. I’ll go get the rocket launcher.”

He gives an abashed smile as he backpedals towards the door, snatching his jacket off the coatrack. “Thanks, Lysanne. Smoothies on me on the way back, promise!”

“You still haven’t gotten me my smoothie for the last trip!” I call as the hatch door spirals open, and he runs through it.

“I’ll get you two this time, then!” he shouts over his shoulder as he runs down the hall, pulling his jacket on while the door spirals shut in his wake.

I give another sigh, even though no one’s going to hear it. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I down the rest of my coffee and drop the mug in the sink.

“Alright.” I mutter to myself as I head to the coatrack to grab my field jacket. “Let’s go do something suicidal.”

Lysanne’s Notes

My friend Jazel has always been fascinated with supernatural creatures. And in fairness, so have I. It’s why we’re both Preservers — arcane professionals that study magical creatures and, in some cases, collect the endangered ones so they can be preserved.

We work off of the Dandelion Drift, an eco-sanctuary arkship that looks a lot less pretentious than its name sounds. It’s basically a giant biodome separated into partitioned environments, cradled between the front and back halves of the ship. We sail the galaxy, roaming from system to system as we study all sorts of arcane creatures.

And occasionally impound or kill the troublesome ones.

We like to think of ourselves as scientists, but CURSE, the organization that owns the ship, tends to view us more like pest control. We like to study problems; they usually want us to stamp them out and poke through the remains. It’s led to some differences of opinion over how we choose to handle our assignments.

Which brings us to our current assignment: CURSE caught wind of some soul-munching monster on a settlement planet near the edge of dark space, and sent us to deal with it. We figured we’d bag and tag it, find out if we could resettle it on a preserve world, and move on to the next assignment. It’d take a week, maybe two, I thought.

It’s been three months.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Dandelion Drift Skipper-2

7:49am SGT

“So, what’s the master plan this time around?” I ask as our skipper ship descends through the planet’s atmosphere, the windshield tinting red at the edges. “Every day that we spend on this is another day she gets hungrier. At some point she’s going to try to raid the settlement again.”

“Tracking.” Jazel replies, holding up a dreamcatcher and tapping it against his jaw as he stares out the windshield. “If we can track her, we can trap her. If we can trap her, we can talk to her.”

“Yeah, because that’s worked so well in the past.” I say. “This might have to be a euthanasia assignment, Jazel.”

“No.” he counters almost immediately. “We put down creatures that can’t be controlled or resettled. We don’t euthanize people.”

“How many times has she tried to eat your soul in the last month alone?”

“Uh…” His face scrunches up as pauses to count up each incident on his fingers.

“You literally had to stop to count the number of times, Jazel.”

“Look, she probably doesn’t know any better.” Jazel says as the red tint starts to fade from the windshield. Below us, the rolling green expanse of Vissengard’s surface stretches out below us for miles, pocked with lakes here and there. “A wild dog bites. It’s what it does.”

“And you keep trying to pet it when we should be putting it down.” I point out. “The settlement here on Vissengard is expecting us to solve this problem. The local leaders are getting a little antsy; it’s been three months and all we’ve really managed to do is put up a barrier around the settlement and piss off the monster prowling around outside. If we don’t get results soon, we’re going to wear out our welcome.”

“So it goes with colonists and corporations.” Jazel mutters. “If they can’t use it, understand it, exploit it, or bend it to their will—”

“Then they’ll use every weapon in their arsenal to wipe it out, yes.” I finish for him. “But this time we can’t hide behind the ‘humanoids are bad’ straw man, Jazel.” I look sideways at him. “This creature is killing people.”

“Well, it was.” Jazel points out as I steer us around a mountain range. “To be precise, it was killing one person every three to five years. Which really isn’t that bad, if you think about it from a natural predator’s perspective. And it’s been doing this for generations, at least according to the locals.”

“Just because it’s been doing this for centuries doesn’t mean it’s okay.”

“All the more reason to talk to her and see if we can convince her to stop!”

“We’ve covered this already! Every time you try to talk to her, she starts chasing your ass through the forest and usually gets within six inches of sucking your soul out of that stupid face of yours!” I exclaim as I pull us into a long, curving arc around the last mountain in the range. “We cannot reason with this thing. We have tried. It needs to be put down.”

“No. Give it a bit of time. I can make it work.” Jazel insists. “A rare creature like this, we should at least try to preserve it before going to the euthanasia option. Even if it is predatory.”

“Are you actually saying that because you believe that, or because you find her attractive?” I demand. Blunt, straight, to the point.

Jazel doesn’t answer right away, looking up as if he’d find the answer in the sky or something. “Can I say yes to both?” he says after a moment.

“I hope they etch ‘Killed by his monster kink’ on your gravestone.”

“Wow thanks Lysanne, you’re a great friend.”

Lysanne’s Notes

Understanding Jazel is best done through the lens of my earliest memory of him.

We were both about twelve years old, and since we lived in the same neighborhood, we did a lot of stuff together. Not because we liked spending time with each other, but because our parents tended to kick us out of our houses at the same time each afternoon in the summer and tell us to get some sunlight instead of staring at screens all day.

Even back then, he was a classic explorer, with brown hair that stuck up everywhere like a lab beaker had blown up in his face. We would hang out with each other because we had nothing better to do, but his curiosity about nature would always have us wandering in the woods, looking for weird creatures or watching insects go about their business. I’m pretty sure our mothers started regretting sending us outside after we started coming back with bugs and lizards that we decided would be our new pets.

Though we never really went anywhere adventurous — there wasn’t much that you could call dangerous in the woods around our neighborhood, except for a couple varieties of poisonous snakes — Jazel was decidedly more daring with his explorations. This was demonstrated one day when we were wandering around the AC units behind my house.

“Hold up, you see that?” he’d said, grabbing my sleeve and holding me in place before I could wander through the metal boxes that kept our house cool.

“See what?” I’d asked, following his finger. It looked like he was pointing at a web woven between one of the AC units and the wall, but the web looked empty.

“Over there. The web. The spider’s in the corner. Can you see it?”

I looked to the corners of the web, and sure enough, there was a long black spider perched on one of the corners of the web. Both of us edged a little nearer so we could get a better look at it.

“It looks dangerous.” I’d said. It looked like it had a scarlet fiddle shape on its abdomen, and the tips of its legs were tinted red.

“Yeah, it’s a black fiddleback.” he’d said, those inquisitive green eyes fixed on it. “They hunt using a neurotoxin that can kill people. A lot of people get bit by them every year because they’re not paying attention to where they’re going.”

I started looking around for something to smash it with. “We better get rid of it before it hurts someone.”

“No, I got it. Don’t worry.” Jazel had said. I’d turned around to see that he’d prodded the spider onto his forefinger with one hand.

“What are you doing?!” I’d screeched. “What if it bites you?!”

“It won’t bite me if I don’t scare it.” he’d said, letting it crawl from one hand to another as he started walking back towards his house, smiling over his shoulder at me. “I’ll take it back home and keep it in the terrarium where it won’t bother anyone.”

And that was the day I realized that in spite of his quiet, mild, inquisitive demeanor, Jazel was absolutely batshit insane.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Helios Settlement: Airfield

8:15am SGT

“He’s back for another dance with the devil?”

“Something like that, yeah.” I say as I finish pulling my gloves on. The skipper’s parked on the settlement’s airfield, and Jazel’s already making his way towards the fencing that walls off the settlement from the vast forest outside. Standing beside me is the settlement’s deputy sheriff, rocking the five o’clock shadow and a widebrimmed hat. Plasma pistol holstered at his hip, boots shined until I can see my reflection in them.

This guy oozes so much latent masculinity that I think I might get a craving for red meat and gravy potatoes if I stand downwind from him.

“Well, hopefully he gets her this time.” Deputy Milor says, working around the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Turrets been picking up heat signatures and movement near the fence more and more recently. Human-sized stuff, not rodents and the like. She’s gettin’ hungry.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And you would know that how…?”

“I feel it.” he says, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the forest past the fences. “In my bones.”

I puff out a breath. “You should probably get that looked at. I don’t think bones are supposed to resonate at that frequency.”

“Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.” Milor admits, folding his arms as he looks down at me. “Seriously though, Preserver, it’s what, going on three months now? People are gettin’ antsy. The problem ain't been taken care of.”

“You ever try to catch a monster powerful enough to clear an acre of trees with a single spell, deputy?” I ask, pulling out my data slate and flicking through the files.

“I can’t say that I have. But the mayor’s getting impatient with this… whatever it is you guys are doing. I know you two are real big on the nonviolence thing, but some problems you can’t solve with kindness.”

“I don’t give a damn what the mayor thinks and I won’t give a damn unless he starts coughing up some dough.” I say, glancing up from my data slate and giving Milor a flat look. “We’re working on this problem for free. We put up the warding barrier around your settlement for free. I know this creature’s a tough customer, but if you want extermination, you’re going to need to pony up for it, and it ain’t gonna be cheap. You’d need to shell out enough to convince us it’d be worth more dead than alive.”

Milor puts his hands up. “Hey, I’m not the treasurer, I’m just pointin’ it out. The longer that thing stays alive, the more antsy people get. If you two can’t get it under control, the mayor’s going to give the Vaunted a call and ask them to do it.”

“Is that so.” I say, raising an eyebrow. “You got a timetable on that, so I can expect when they’ll crash the party?”

“That depends on whether your boy makes any progress in the next few weeks.” Milor says, nodding to the fence. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on his scrawny little butt?”

I look over my shoulder to see that Jazel’s already gone, disappeared through one of the gates in the fence. “He knows how to handle himself in the wilds better than any of your hunting parties do. But you’re right, I should go catch up to him before he tries to ask the monster for her number.” Reaching down, I grab my pack, seating it on my back before grabbing my rocket launcher and slinging it over my shoulder. “Tell the mayor and the sheriff that we’re working on it. If they want it exterminated, we’re going to need to see some ones and zeros, preferably in the five- or six-digit range.”

Milor grimaces as I start walking. “I’ll let ‘em know, but I don’t think that’s in the budget, sweetheart.”

“Better go call up your local Vaunted chapter, then.” I say as I start across the airfield, headed for the fences and the forest beyond.

Lysanne’s Notes

Vissengard had something of a history with the creature long before we’d arrived here.

According to the natives — who, as far as we could tell, were the descendants of a crew whose ship had crashed here about four centuries ago and never got rescued — the creature had been awakened by their arrival on the planet, and had been with them ever since. Early generations of the crash survivors tried to fend it off with the weapons that had survived the impact, but only had limited success, and it was easily able to pick off victims that strayed too deep into the forest or that left their doors unlocked at night. Not that it would’ve mattered, since the creature had demonstrated early on that it was able to withstand a blast from one of the ship’s turrets.

As later generations were born, and were raised in the wilds without contact with modern civilization, the descendants of the survivors started to lean back towards the superstitious predilections that most humanoids gravitate towards. This took the form of seeking meaning in natural patterns, generating spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, and creating rituals to give some sort of social structure to the mini-society that had popped up on the surface of Vissengard. Along the way, they came to realize that they were badly outclassed by their residential neighbor, and after a few midnight summits and much speculation about what they could do about the problem, they resorted to a less aggressive and more ritualistic approach: throw the monster a sacrifice every three to five years and politely ask it to go away.

And it worked, for the most part.

In the centuries since then, the locals would perk up whenever a certain nocturnal flower bloomed on its three-to-five year cycle. They’d get together, settle on someone to sacrifice to the monster (preferably someone young and beautiful, of course; male or female didn’t matter), and they’d throw that person a big old farewell party. Then, once all the fun was said and done, they’d send them off into the forest at night, and the monster, who usually woke on the flowers’ bloom cycle, would presumably eat their soul and go back to napping at the end of the bloom season.

This isn’t to say that all the locals agreed with the tradition, and there were attempts in the past to try and lure the monster with a sacrifice, then gang up on it and kill it once and for all. In those years, the monster usually ended up feasting on a lot more than one soul. Those that managed to make it back alive usually told the story of the carnage to the following generations as a warning against such foolhardiness, and it usually served as a deterrent for a few generations.

It was a tidy little cycle and probably would’ve gone on for a long time.

But the Helios settlers arriving here twenty years ago put a little kink in that.

From what I can tell in the three months that we’ve been here, the Helios settlement has a bit of a rocky relationship with the native Vissengardians. It’s a little bit complex, but what it boils down to is that the Vissengardians don’t feel like the settlers respect the land and their world; the settlers feel like the Vissengardians are delusional and disagree strongly with ritual sacrifice as a means of fixing your problems. Over the past half-dozen bloom cycles, the settlers had swallowed their distaste and let the Vissengardians do their thing.

On this bloom cycle, though, they decided to put their foot down.

From what I gather, things got real ugly. The police went in and broke up the traditional farewell party for the chosen sacrifice, and the Vissengardians got real bent out of shape by that. They responded by picking another sacrifice, the police went in again and broke up that party too, and the Vissengardians went ballistic at that point. They attacked the settlement, the settlers responded in kind, people ended up dead on both sides, and the mayor ordered barricades deployed around the Vissengardian villages.

And while all this was happening, the monster was, and still is, roaming the forest between villages, getting steadily more pissed off as it realizes the bloom is getting close to ending, and that the sacrifice it’s expected for the last four centuries hasn’t showed up yet. It’s chosen to express this frustration in the form of arcane artillery that it lobs at the Helios settlement every two weeks or so; so far it’s managed to hit the library, a supply depot, the west wing of the mayor’s mansion, a playground, and the mayor’s mansion again.

And that’s where Jazel and I come in.

If we can find a way to bag this creature, get it offworld, and resettle it on a preserve planet, then the Vissengardians can stop the ritual sacrifices, the settlers can take down the barricades and repair their settlement, and everybody can go back to arguing about something other than the moral expediency of sacrificing one person to save others.