Escaping The Draft
Sung Hortsmann crouched and examined the door before him. He then cursed at the stupid wizards who had built it with an access panel at the wrong height for a halfling. Seers, no doubt. Their lack of craftsmanship was evident to him under the light of his low-visibility goggles. Sung produced one of his basic multitools and selected a lever-like one, then pried at the panel until it came off. He placed it on the floor by his feet, then peered into the hole.
At least someone had taken charge of the cables inside. They had been neatly arranged and labelled alongside the circuit board, so Sung simply followed them until he found the ones he needed. Selecting the microshears from his multitool, he cut them. He replaced the cover in silence, using a tiny strip of double-sided tape to keep it in place.
Perfect. This door was as old as the university premises it was in, so the circuits had been added later. Being the youngest wizard who had ever achieved the warlock range, he had had no trouble locating the weakest egress point of the building.
It could almost be funny, Sung thought, if it wasn’t me here sneaking around. If I get caught… but I must do it. I’m not going to stay put and wait for the damned Draft.
Sung tapped a button in his goggles, and the lenses went into full infra-red mode. He looked around, checking that there was no one. His heart almost skipped a beat when he saw something moving a couple rooms away, but the bright spot was too small. It had to be a cat. Of course, Sung was aware that anyone in a stealth suit like his could jump on him, but come on, this was the University. Its security measures had been put in place to prevent intrusions, not really to keep people in from getting out.
A fact that worked to Sung’s advantage.
So, let’s see if I am as good as everyone says I am. Youngest warlock ever, ha.
Sung walked away, mentally cursing.
Seer, diviner, conjurer, enchanter, sorcerer, magus, warlock. Damned people, the ancient Guilders. We’re all engineers in the end, dammit. The other galactic races laugh at us and our damned Guild traditions and absurd names! Just like those morons who played genic games with early colonists thousands of years ago. Lovely halfling I am.
Sung stopped at the gate to the sports yard.
Here goes nothing, he thought.
He pushed. The gate opened with a click, and that was all. No sounds, no alarm, no lights. Nothing. Sung breathed heavily, chastised himself for doing so, and stepped out, closing the gate behind him.
The hated sports yard. He tiptoed towards the pool building, which had been built next to the exterior walls. A beep sounded in his ear. Sung lied on the floor and waited. A few seconds later, a double beep indicated the routine security sweep was over, so he stood and sprinted towards the pool’s entrance.
Let’s see if the price I paid for the cable data was right.
Sung pulled the gate. Another click, and it opened. So he had cut all the corrects cables. One more to go. He slid inside and closed the gate again. Tomorrow all of it would be noticed, but tomorrow he’d already be off-planet, if everything went according to plan.
No, he thought, everything is going to go according to plan, full stop. No more Draft.
Guided by his goggles, Sung walked towards the locker rooms, then into the lavatories in there. He locked himself in the last cabinet, then almost laughed out loud at the useless gesture. He stepped on the seat and raised himself up to the window sill above it. He fit awkwardly, but he just needed a few seconds in order to bring out the tiny screwdriver from his multitool and unscrew the window.
Again, no alarm went off.
Sung peered off the window. The street waited for him a couple of meters below. Amazingly, this was possibly the most dangerous part of his escape: he had to carefully control the fall. After all the time it had taken him to arrive to this point, it wouldn’t do to injure himself now.
Sung jumped. He rolled with the fall, then bumped to a stop against something hard and metallic that made a loud noise, including several irritated growls and hisses. It was funny, how cats had followed humans everywhere in the galaxy. Even the other races had taken to them. In this back alley his goggles informed him of the presence of at least five of them.
Sung stood. The first part of his escape was over. He checked the time on her goggles’ display. He had one standard hour to reach the spaceport. Not impossible, not easy either. He sneaked out of the alley, checking the streets carefully. He could only see a couple of late nighters –drunk, judging by their gait– negotiating the space between a street lamp and a corner.
He wasn’t safe yet, and Sung knew it. Many things could still go wrong, not the least of which was crossing the Shades, the euphemistically called less than healthy neighbourhood, at night. And in a hurry. He checked his battery power. Barely enough, but that was unavoidable and he had known it beforehand.
Sung activated his stealth suit and ran off.
***
Sung opened his eyes and tried to move, but he couldn’t. Manacles. His instincts told him to try to check his goggles’ AI, but he didn’t. He wasn’t wearing them.
Damned. I was so close. I boarded the ship!
“Glad to see you awake, son,” a known voice said. A burly, squattish halfling walked into Sung’s field of vision. Not that Sung needed him to in order to recognize him. Dr Hortsmann. His father. “Now we’ll take you back, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind, father. I don’t want to be drafted.”
“You have no say in that. It’s the Law,” Sung’s father said.
“But I want to keep studying. I don’t want to play etherball.”
~~~~
This is my entry for this week’s Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Who The Fuck Is My D&D Character?
This time Chuck pointed us to the title website, Who The Fuck Is My D&D Character? The website offers a short, briliant description of a D&D character, that we should use as the starting point for our story. I must confess I clicked seven times or ten… In the end I chose this description:
RESTLESS HALFLING WARLOCK FROM A CITY WITH TOWERS THAT RIVAL THE CLOUDS WHO IS TRYING TO DODGE THE DRAFT.
And then I decided I’d go in as many different directions as I could. And I apparently forgot about the character’s hometown.
