Chapter 5
1049 Words
The creature told us about the female camp. It apparently was quite the distance from here. We wondered why the females were so far away from the male camp, it seemed silly to separate the female from the males because of this thing that happened such a long time ago. We suspected that there was some other reason that the creature was not telling us why.
The creature showed me how to use this strange belt. Holding it up close I began to think I had seen it somewhere. Calling it a belt was really a misnomer, it really wasn’t a belt. It was a string of strange looking square-shaped things being held together by some sort of mesh fabric. I had never seen such a fabric, it was flexible yet stiff at the same time. At the center of the belt was an oval shaped thing that seemed to set the belt together.
The squares on the belt all had these strange looking things. They were hard to describe. They had a grid on them, the gird was made of white lines and had dozens of little black squares in between the white lines. I looked at it closely and could that these squares were made of some sort of lightly reflective surface.
“These are Solar Panels,” the creature said
“Solar Panels?” Walker said. “On this belt? I have never heard of solar panels on a belt before.”
“You know what these are pup?” I asked.
“They use the power of a star and store it to power something up.” Walker said, he seemed to be leaving out some information probably because he thought I wasn’t going to understand him.
“These things storing the power of a star?” I asked bewildered.
“Well in a way,” Walker said. “It’s the same way that plants make their food. They don’t use all the power of the star only some of it.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said. In a way I did, but not really. “But if that is the case why do you have it in this part of the world where you never see the star?”
“The artificial star we have here is sufficient,” the creature said.
The creature explained how this worked. Apparently, it worked on something called photo-projectionism, whatever that meant.
“It means that it takes an image,” the creature started. “Like your friend there and re-projects it outwards.”
“Come again?” I said confused.
Walker grabbed a large lever looking that that was sitting next to a nearby wall and walked over to where we were. Walker started drawing lines on the floor.
“Say this is you,” he drew a stick with a head with pointy ears. He then drew a belt on this stick looking thing. “This is the belt.”
“This is me,” Walker drew a smaller stick figure across from where my drawing was. “The belt takes the image of me,” he drew lines out of the belt towards his drawing. “And converts it somehow, and then projects back out over you.”
Walker drew a box around my figure. I looked at it, that “somehow” didn’t seem to be important to me because I felt like I knew how this worked, at least a little bit.
“That makes sense, I guess.” I said. “Does your kind have something like this?”
“No,” Walker said. “This is far more extensive than anything that I had ever seen before.”
“Then how do you know how this works?” I asked.
“Well, we have something similar on our ships.” Walker said. “Our ship uses a similar principle to this, but it doesn’t change the outward appearance it makes something invisible. This is leaps and bounds ahead anything that we have. I have never seen anything like this before, this completely changed the way that he appeared, even making him smaller and making him appear like an actual Fakir male, it even tricked my ocular implant.”
Walker looked at it closer as if trying to figure out how it worked.
“This is how we are able to visit your part of the world without being detected.” The creature said as Walker shot him a look. “Oh yes we have gone to your part of the world before.”
“Why?” Walker asked.
“There is nothing much to eat in this part of the world as you can tell.”
“So, you travel there for food?” I asked.
“Indeed,” the creature responded
“How far into the dark world are we, exactly?” I asked.
I thought about that for a second after I had asked this. I realized for whatever reason I had not asked this. Not even when we had first arrived here.
“We are far enough from the light side that it will take you a few days, or even up to a week to reach the light side.” The creature said.
“That is quite the ways then.” I said.
“Indeed,” the creature said.
The more I was learning about this dark side of the planet, the more I was starting to see that maybe this was the next challenge of Damus. That was when I started to realize those shades, we had seen earlier in the challenge did they come from this part of this world.
I was starting to think that surviving this dark world was the next challenge and that mask, the one that Xavier stole had something to do with the secrets that could possibly lay in this dark world.
“Why did Damus lead us here?” I said wondering out loud.
“What do you mean?” Walker asked.
The creature had also suddenly turned to me when I said this.
“Think of it pup, why would Damus have a transporter that lead here to this planet?” I asked. This was a fact that was gnawing at me since the beginning. Why was it here why it was specifically to this planet what was so important about it?
“All the challenges to this point, have been some sort of torment of some kind or another.” I said. “Then we suddenly appeared here, there has to be something that Damus wanted to accomplish by sending the person who finished the challenges here.”
“Do you think there is something more sinister afoot?” Walker asked.
“I feel it,” I said. It was then I did indeed feel it.
There was something strange in the air. As if by instinct I grabbed the boy and pulled the medallion out of the satchel and raised it above my head in a swift motion. There was a sudden flash.
- Writer
