Dawn of a New Age, Part 1

This is the first installment of my experiment at sharing with you, our dear reader, some of the fiction I have written for my upcoming supers game. You, along with my players, will be discovering details about the upcoming campaign. My hope is that it generates some discussion, and I can get some feedback from my players and the readers of Stargazer’s World.

I would like to point out that this piece of fiction, along with the upcoming installments, is not licensed under Creative Commons. I have hopes of doing some other projects with this story and the setting so this story’s copyright belong to Roberto Micheri. I still believe in the Creative Commons license and intend to continue support it in the future. Thank you for your indulgence.

Without further ado, here is part 1:

Dawn of a New Age, Part 1

March 14^th, 2011

10:27 AM

The taxi stalled midst traffic. Ahmad cursed loudly in Farsi and hit the steering wheel. He didn’t worry about the passenger, the woman didn’t speak his language and he wondered if she even spoke proper English. Her conversation was a series of clichés, punctuated by a shrill laugh, that she kept repeating to whoever was on the other end of the line, he was glad it wasn’t him.

“You’ll have to finish that problem on your own Kimiya, this engineer has to get his taxi running.” He hung the phone on his young sister and tried the ignition one more time. It sputtered but refused to come back to life. Just at that moment traffic decided to crawl a few feet and the drivers behind him began their honking.

“Are we like, going anywhere?” She leaned so close to the partition Ahmad almost gagged on her cheap perfume. “One moment,” he replied, fishing for the hood latch with one hand while reaching for
the taxi’s radio.

Static suddenly burst from the radio, loud, ominous and strange. His passenger threw her phone to the floor with a shriek; his own Bluetooth earpiece began making the same strange sound. He threw it on the dashboard but kept hearing it, suddenly realizing it came from all around the taxi, from other car radios, even from the store on the street, every single piece of electronic equipment was making that same noise, a shrill, multi-toned burst of static. The televisions on the stores’ windows showed no images, only multicolored rain and when Ahmad looked at the taxi’s radio the digital display was blinking strangely.

His passenger screamed; all around him people were leaving their cars, shouting and running. Ahmad looked out his windshield and saw it. A plane was barreling down the cavernous avenue hundreds of feet above the street! The wings had broken off against the sides of the buildings, debris raining down, and the fuselage was on fire, falling fast on the city street.

Ahmad had never been a particularly religious person but at that moment he prayed. As if through a fog he heard the passenger fumble with the taxi’s door and run out, but she never stopped screaming. The plane’s shadow came over him and he knew the end had come. The roar of metal, concrete and people mixed in a strange cacophony as if the city itself moaned. Strangely he had almost no regrets, he had lived a good life, oftentimes full of hardships, but he had lived. His only regret was that his sister would be alone now. He thought of Kimiya for the last time and closed his eyes.

©Roberto Micheri, 2010. All rights reserved.