Sunday, August 31, 2008

spELlcaster Part 4

"A seed? ...Like a child?" I was thoroughly confused. Fumans had left things behind before - vehicles, documents (largely indecipherable, although there were large groups of people attempting even to this day), weapons (oh, and the US military had had a field day with those), and various knick-knacks that presumably meant something in the year 748,282 AD [which is where we had determined they were traveling from], but had those of us still in the 21st century were only frustrating puzzle pieces. But they'd never left behind anything living.

Thus far the time travelers modus operandi had been to appear - generally outside some sparsely populated town - and then take things. Or people. Or animals. ...and then vanish again.

Sometimes they stuck around for a while, taking in the sights, and grabbing various souvenirs, but none of them had been in our time for longer than three days at a time. And the last one had appeared over a year back, when it had been believed that we had stopped them. "We" being us spellcasters, of course.
Because the Fumans were impervious to everything that the various world militaries had thrown at them. For the most part, conventional weaponary was ignored by the future humans. Occasionally they'd strike back, as if they were annoyed by an insect buzzing at them.
They had also largely ignored any attempts at communication - probably because they couldn't understand us. Or were choosing to. Lord knows we couldn't understand them.

The only thing that got through to them - in any way - was bending. We could hurt them with bending, we could stop them from moving, we could stop their weapons from destroying things, we could even send them back, and plug up their time traveling capabilities. Or so we had thought.

"No, not a child," Stone told me. "A plant. A ...well, a ..carrot. Sort of." She touched a few buttons on her handheld device and turned it to show me a photo. I saw a large glass aquarium, approximately 7 feet tall, filled with soil and a gigantic orange monstrosity. It was triangular and wrinkled and did somewhat resemble a carrot. But it also had a face. A human face.

I wrinkled my face in disgust. "Almost enough to make one swear off being a vegetarian," I joked, handing Stone her computer back.

"Yeah," she said, "Well, it gets odder. Two days ago, the carrot spoke. And it asked to see you."

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