Danny's Story

A note from the author

iamba — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:23:34 +0000

Hi there. It’s almost two months since my last installment, and I think it’s time to admit that Danny’s Story is on hiatus.

This story — and the series — is a work in progress, and the on-line format is an experiment for me. In a way, it’s been successful. Having an audience was a much-need incentive to write what I did, I learned a bit about publicity, and I received some very helpful feedback regarding the story and its on-line format.

As is possible with any rough draft, I’ve reached a point where I feel something is wrong. Many plot elements just don’t seem to be working, and I think it’s time to dismantle what I have and take it back to the drawing board — again. I like Danny and the crew too much to give up on them. Anyway, I have too many business cards that I don’t want to waste (plus that nifty flyer that my friend created for me), so I can’t give up. Good news is, since deciding to put this story to scrap, I’ve already got some new ideas percolating.

Thank you very much to everyone who’s read, and to those who commented or reviewed. Your feedback is priceless.

I don’t know when the Danny rewrite is going to happen. I do hope to finish editing another novel — this one already completed! — so please check back for a link soon.

Thanks again, everyone!

–Iamba

39. in which danny is surrounded by dragon

iamba — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:31:08 +0000

After Danny landed, it was many long moments before she lifted her head to survey the damage. The tall silhouettes of trees still loomed in the fading smoke. Ferns still curled near her on the ground. They were blackened with a film of soot, but green with life nevertheless. She stared around herself, but there were no signs of the dragon. No signs of movement at all.

At length, Danny’s attention was taken by globs of black that had hardened against the ground and the trees. Several were on Danny herself. She poked and scratched at one on her arm and found that it had the texture and consistency of charcoal. Flakes and chunks fell away under her fingers.

The dragon. She broke an entire glob off of her leg and examined it. This is where the dragon had gone: its flesh had exploded in flaming chunks, landed, and hardened into char.

As Danny pondered the dragon’s demise, the smoke that obscured the Heart from her view settled. She tossed the chunk of charcoal to the ground and strode toward it. The trees around Danny were whole and alive, and so was the Heart.

Not for long, thought Danny, grimly. With its guardians defeated, she only had to destroy it to slay the forest.

Danny stood among the swirling haze, staring at the immense tree that was the Heart and contemplating how to kill it. While she did so, a form appeared in the haze and began to approach her. It was tall and massive, with an incredibly long, sharp…lance!

For a moment, Danny was dumbfounded. Staring her down was the wooden knight that she thought had perished in the dragon’s flames. The yellow eyes of its mount smoldered at her.

Then, the knight kicked its horse against the flanks, the lance came down, and they began to charge toward Danny.

“Oh, shit,” she swore.

Christie “Iamba” Bailey

38. in which the dragon, in a word, explodes

iamba — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:33:30 +0000

Suddenly, Danny’s feet were being swept out from underneath her. The tree bough seemed to rise swiftly to meet her, but her stomach told her that she was really dropping. Her wrists cracked against the bough, and the cannon clattered from her numb grasp and was gone.

Branches whipped against her face and limbs, and then she was flying upward by her ankles, whisking past a green whirl of trees. After a second, she switched the ocular input from the Suit so that the world appeared right-side up. She was traveling quickly through the trees and a thinning cover of smoke – straight into the dragon’s grasp. It was the dragon’s tail that had her by the ankles. With a flick, it tossed her into the air. Danny broke through the canopy. Her vision somersaulted. Trees-sky-smoke-shadow. She descended toward an image of wide open dragon jaws.

As she descended, she could smell the stench of burning sulfur. Smoke trickled from the dragon’s dark throat. She began to make out the details of the scales that rimmed its lips, the blackened gums and yellowing teeth. She extended her arms in front of her and launched three of the goo nets with which she had recently defeated the cyborgs. They hit the dragon’s mouth wetly, filling its maw like a massive piece of chewed-up gum. Half a second later, Danny landed against the soft mass. Immediately, the goo began to harden – with her in it.

“Danny slipped free of the goo and dropped to the ground,” Danny said. In a moment, she was tumbling to the ground. She rolled to her feet and looked up. The dragon was shaking its head again, this time while making a muffled, moaning roar. It recoiled its head, leaped backwards, scuttled sideways, pawed its face, worried its head, lashed its tail, and cried. The ground underfoot vibrated with its efforts. Thick, grey smoke poured from its nostrils.

At first, Danny wasn’t sure what was happening. Flashes of orange flame licked out from small holes in the matrix of hardened white goo that filled the dragon’s mouth, covering it and keeping the jaws open. Smoke billowed up from the nostrils. A peculiar rushing noise filled the air between the dragon’s bellowing. When Danny realized that the dragon was blowing fire, and that the pressure was building against the wad that blocked its escape, it was too late. With a sudden, concussive explosion, dragonfire burst outward like a nova. The force of the explosion picked Danny up and threw her through the trees.

In the back of her mind, she observed wryly that she had probably broken her record for the amount of times she’d been gone airborne without wings in one day.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

37. in which danny fights fire with plasma

iamba — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:16:02 +0000

The charging horse and rider were at least a hundred feet away. Danny stood her ground and raised the cannon. She felt she had run enough for one day. She sighted the horse and released an air-splitting round of plasma fire.

The air in front of her exploded in a fury of heat. As the explosion spread and dissipated, she had but a moment to note that the horse and rider were gone, but there was the dragon’s head, pinning her with its gaze. Through a frame of spreading plasma, she watched its jaws part. Blue flame erupted in the darkness of its throat. For a heartbeat, everything seemed to stop as she stared, agape, at the vivid display of fire and plasma. Then, she gasped and raised her arms to her face just as a white-blue jet of dragonfire blasted her. She dropped to the ground, was knocked violently backwards, and tumbled like debris until she slammed into a tree.

Another heartbeat passed, in which the heat and vertigo and shock swept Danny up in a swirl of confusion and disorientation. When the inferno faded, she was still alive and whole, sprawled against the base of a tree. Underneath the Suit, her body was steaming with sweat. As the shock cleared, she became aware again of her optical input. She realized that it had not turned off at all through the dragonfire. She found herself staring into a haze of grey smoke.

Two red lights glowed spectrally in the smoke. As they drew closer to Danny, they resolved themselves into two enraged dragon’s eyes. Suddenly, the two eyes became a face that split into a wide, toothy maw. Danny started and flopped like a fish in an effort to leap to her feet. But she was too late. The jaws snapped shut around her chest and shoulders with a crunch.

Danny knew brief, crushing pain and a loud screeching sound like metal rending. The dragon chomped on her, then recoiled like it had been stung. It wailed and shook its head wildly. On the ground, Danny grabbed at the earth and wheezed for breath. She had a brief brush with the black unknowing of unconsciousness, but her mind swirled back into reality. The initial impact of the dragon’s teeth turned immediately into burning pain that began in her lungs and spread outward. While protecting her from the piercing damage of the teeth, the Suit could not fully protect her from the blunt force – which, if not for the Suit, would have killed her on its own.

Danny forced herself to sit up. Every breath brought pain. The dragon still shook its head with pain and shock. Biting into the Suit had apparently not been a pleasant feeling for it. She hoped it would learn from the experience. The crushing pressure of its jaws may have been just enough to squeeze the life out of her if it tried biting her again.

Danny wheezed out words to heal herself. The pain disappeared, and a pressure was lifted from her lungs. She stood. The dragon gave its head one last violent shake, then looked down at her and hissed. The sound unnerved Danny.

Another blast of dragonfire roared toward Danny. Though she was on her guard, she still narrowly leaped from its path. The forest once again was filled with hot, grey smoke. She stood on a stout lower branch of a tree and trained her cannon into the haze.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

36. in which danny underestimates the Heart of the forest

iamba — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:15:05 +0000

Chapter Six

The mystery of the forest fell away around Danny like a veil dropping. It had remained virtually indestructible simply because Danny and the people of Circuit Runner had not been targeting the correct part of it. They had been attacking parts of a single, humongous tree – a magical one, to boot. Danny knew well enough that if you killed parts of a tree, you did not kill the whole thing.

It seemed so obvious to Danny now. The simplicity of the solution was almost ironic: kill the Heart to kill the entire forest.

The objective would be entirely too easy. Every piece of deadly technology in Circuit Runner was at her disposable – which included a dizzying selection of plasma, laser, nuclear, nano, and quantum weapons. Like an executioner rolling out her leather roll of tools, Danny laid the possibilities out in her mind and examined them with cool intensity.

Plasma. Plasma would do. Laser could slice through the trunk and topple the Heart like a piece of timber, but only if it could pierce all the way through the tree’s girth. Nuclear was too messy. Nano took too much creativity; there was an overwhelming variety of microscopic machines and functions they could perform (metabolize the tree from the inside out, dessicate it, interrupt individual cells’ chemical pathways). And quantum was just too confusing for Danny.

Danny conjured a handheld plasma canon and spent a moment studying her target. One blast to the top and one to the bottom would do it, she thought. One to destroy the roots, and the other to destroy the vast head of leaves.

It would be too easy. She raised the canon, targeted the base of the tree, and squeezed the trigger. A peal of thunder accompanied the fat gob of plasma that shot toward the tree and exploded at its base. Wet sparks splashed in every direction. That shot was followed rapidly by another, aimed at the tree’s top.

The moist green leaves and succulent living wood of the Heart went up in white flames and thick, black smoke. A loud sound of splitting, creaking wood accentuated the roar of the fire. The earth trembled, sending a shudder up the tree in which Danny perched.

In only moments, the flames had burned themselves out. The base of the tree was blasted black, but still whole. The burnt leaves of the tree’s top were merely char atop an otherwise healthy, green head. The tree should have been reduced to ashes. Instead, it was only burned around the edges.

Again, the ground shuddered, this time strongly enough to shake Danny from the tree. She allowed herself to drop to the ground, and landed easily on her feet. She looked up toward the Heart in time to see a huge shape appearing out of the smoke. Two hot, red embers of eyes appeared atop a narrow head. A great flap of wings quickly cleared the thickest smoke away, revealing the form of an immense black dragon. It regarded Danny with those ember eyes, framed by a crown of horns.

Something moved in the haze at its feet. The thick root there stretched and enlarged. Two legs reached forward, caught purchase on the ground. A barrel-chested horse stepped out of the wood and stood beneath the dragon, smooth and eerily steady. A silent, wooden knight sat atop it, lance resting at his hip.

Danny’s skin prickled. All three entities stared at her silently, and she stared back. Just as she steeled herself to act, the dragon’s eyes flared. It stretched its neck and opened its maw in a roar that made the leaves of the trees tremble. The horse reared and charged, and the rider leaned forward, bringing the lance to bear.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

35. in which danny makes a profound discovery

iamba — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:29:16 +0000

Danny slipped into stealth mode. The world wavered, and Danny had the peculiar feeling of being disembodied as her Suited body disappeared from view. Only a faint trembling of the air – like heat waves – betrayed her presence when she moved.

She climbed up into the tree behind which she’d been hiding. There she perched, unmoving.

She ran an analysis on the energy signatures emanating from those lifeforms that showed yellow on the bioscan – those that the Suit’s computer could neither categorize as plants or animals. The edges of her vision blurred with an array of tiny, rapidly-changing numbers. After only several seconds, the numbers came to a halt, and the computer spat its results back to her. All of the alien lifeforms shared a similar energy signature, in the same manner that all plant life shared a similar energy, or all animals.

Next, Danny increased her sensors’ sensitivity to this energy and banished all other lifeforms from her scan. Her world came alive with yellow light. Every tree glowed solid with it. Each branch sparkled with the quick movements of tiny yellow forms – sprites, fairies, forest spirits. And the goliath tree at the center of the forest – it pulsed with yellow. Danny’s suspicions were confirmed in her mind. This was the forest’s heart.

Danny’s gaze followed the line of the Heart’s trunk downward. The unmistakable form of a huge, serpentine dragon coiled among its roots. Her gaze hesitated on it for only a moment.

The roots. Her attention focused in on these. The yellow lines of the Heart’s roots curled underneath it, spreading outward and downward. Intently, she followed the line of one set of roots. She found that they connected seamlessly with the roots of a neighboring tree. Gaze flicking back and forth, Danny quickly ascertained that all of the Heart’s roots connected with those of the trees around it. Indeed, all of the roots of all of the trees that she could see connected underground, like an impossibly complicated mesh of Celtic knotwork.

A flush of adrenaline shivered through Danny as she was rocked with a sudden realization. Quickly, she ordered her computer to isolate the Heart’s individual life signature, and dropped everything except it from the bioscan.

The ambient glow of spirits went dark, but the entire forest remained lit.

Every tree in the forest was one, single entity. The Heart was the forest.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

34. in which three dryads sleep, nestled in the tree

iamba — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:12:50 +0000

So enthralled was Danny with the magic pulsing from the tree that she almost missed the pad of hooves along the ground. She ducked behind a normal-sized tree just in time to escape detection from a small guard of centaurs — real centaurs of flesh and fur. The muscles under their horse pelts rippled as they walked. Their human hair was a mess of matted dreadlocks and braids. Each gripped a spear.

Danny had already faced the centaurs’ cyberpunk brothers. She was all too happy to avoid the real things. She remained hidden until they had passed, then glanced back toward the goliath tree. No doubt, the centaurs were guarding this. Even those that had been transformed into cyborgs had carried out their duty with single-minded ferocity.

She performed a quick bioscan of her surrounding area. It was teeming with life. Green plant life, red animal life, and bright yellow unknown lifeforms. The guard of centaurs were red forms moving away from her. At the ground near her feet scurried little red shapes – mice, rats, insects. She glanced back at the humongous tree. It was a blazing, brilliant green. Nestled in the core of its trunk glowed several slim yellow shapes. Yellow, because her sensors could not recognize them.

Danny puzzled over this, and zoomed in closer with the Suit’s telescopic vision. The three shapes resolved into three slim female humanoids, bodies still and heads bent, their backs pressed against each other. They seemed to be asleep. Dryads? she wondered.

On closer inspection, Danny noticed that the tree itself had a yellow tinge in the bioscan. It was highly possible that her cyberpunk technology recognized the presence of ephemeral life forms – of spirits – but could not categorize them. To the world of Circuit Runner, such creatures did not exist. It was a wonder the Suit could sense them at all.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

33. in which danny discovers the heart

iamba — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:13:56 +0000

Danny found herself sprawled across the forest floor, face pressed to the ground. Sounds of crashing reverberated through the understory.

When she looked up, the cyborg was gone. It had blazed a path through the forest, leaving a gaping hole through the trees in its wake. She stood slowly, first getting to all fours and then putting each leg underneath her, relishing the sudden calm. As she did, her gaze remained trained ahead of her, at the hole through the trees. A dazzling green color took her attention, and she began to walk forward, her feet moving — one in front of the other — almost of their own volition.

Danny came to stand beside the white-and-metal mass that had been the cyborg, and stared. The tree trunks here were velvet with green moss. Some branches still swayed, supple, with the cyborg’s upset. The leaves that spread from them were a vital green. The air was suddenly damp with the respiration of plants. It was ripe with flesh and life.

The ground that Danny stepped forward onto was springy with leaves and fallen foliage. Somehow, this portion of the forest had remained untouched by the metal and silicone. The air virtually thrummed with magic. For several long moments, Danny found herself turning in circles, dumbfounded by this sudden change. She was…home. Engulfed in enchantment and green, growing things.

Danny’s final turn brought her face-to-face with it: the most immense tree she had ever seen.

At first, Danny did not recognize it for what it was. Its broad trunk was merely a backdrop for the trees in front of her. However, when she drew closer, she found that the forest thinned. She gazed down a stretch of bare forest floor toward a tree as large as a high rise. Its head was so vast that it precluded the growth of any other trees for hundreds of feet from its base.

“The heart,” murmured Danny.

Energy radiated from the tree — a skin-tingling, pulse-throbbing quickening of the air. Despite Danny’s enmeshment in the Suit, she could feel it on the back of her tongue and trembling against her skin. Magic. Forest magic.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

32. in which danny gives wild chase

iamba — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:45:52 +0000

Like a squirrel being chased, Danny sprang from the end of a branch. The bough bent sharply under her weight, and half of the tree shook with the force of her jump. Leaves showered to the floor below. Her extended hands grasped a thick hanging vine, and she slid down it, crying out in surprise when the vine’s leaves turned out to be razor sharp wafers of metal. If not for the armor of the Suit, she would have been cut to ribbons.

She landed in a crouch on the ground below, unharmed. She stole a quick glance upward. The cyborgs were sliding down the vines toward her like spiders toward their prey.

Not today, she thought.

But that did giver her an idea.

As the cyborgs sped down toward her, Danny flipped onto her back in a roll. As she faced up, she extended her arms in front of her and splayed open her palms. All the while, she spoke hurried, harsh words of description. Her palms opened — she finished the sentence as the tendons went taught — her breath caught –

And her words came true as twin sprays of white liquid shot up from her palms, bursting in the air into wide, gooey nets. Each net wrapped around one of the cyborgs, then hardened on contact. As Danny completed her roll, she hastily shot off one last net, then sprang to her feet. Immediately, she ducked to the ground and covered her head with her arms as two of the incapacitated cyborgs hit the ground heavily as roundish messes of metal and hardened white cement. The ground trembled with each impact.

Unscathed, Danny glanced up and started. The third cyborg — one of the two lackies — had escaped her attacks. It was less than ten feet away and falling toward her, its metal strut legs spread wide like a terrible halo. Its face twisted, and it let out an ear-piercing scream like rending metal.

Danny rocketed forward just as the creature hit the ground and skittered forward on its eight nimble legs. Using her momentum, she ran up a tree, then flipped forward from it, grabbing onto another tree’s branch. She swung onto another branch and ran.

The cyborg leaped easily after her. When it did, Danny somersaulted to the ground. She gave it wild, evasive chase.

The cyborg kept pace, springing after her and almost premeditating her next moves as she turned this way and that, running, leaping, rolling. It dodged two more of Danny’s attempts to net it, gaining ground with each of those brief pauses she took.

The clack of its legs grew loud behind Danny. She had to try netting it once more, and without losing her forward momentum this time. She could not afford to lose any more distance.

Danny leaped into a forward flip. Her hands extended in front of her. At the turning point of the flip — as she turned to face the cyborg upside-down — she shot two nets from her hands.

The cyborg was snapped up in an explosion of white glue. Just as Danny landed on her feet from the flip, she was knocked forward through the air. The boulder that had been the cyborg crashed past her and shot through the forest with its unchecked momentum.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey

31. in which the forest becomes a twisted cybernetic wonderland

iamba — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:06:27 +0000

As she watched, the haze of nanomachines began to glow softly so that Danny was surrounded in a milky luminescence. If it wasn’t for the ground beneath her feet, Danny would have thought she was suddenly floating in a dream. Streaks of brighter light began to ripple through the glow — zipping faster and faster — until all of the nanomachines had drawn together into one ball of mysteriously glowing light. It hovered for a moment, ethereally, then floated off into the trees, like a will-o-wisp. Then, disappeared.

Danny’s surroundings were now clear to her. The trees here were completely indistinguishable from machines. This was a cyberpunk vision of a forest: thick coils of silvery cable twisted around each other into the thick, sinewy trunks of trees. Leaves were radiant bunches of circuit boards. The air absolutely hummed with a chorus of exhaust fans.

Once she had confirmed again with the satellite map that she was indeed traveling deeper into the heart of the city-forest, Danny jogged on. Patches of ground were lit with sprays of fiberoptic grass that cycled psychedelically through the colors of the rainbow. Hanging vines that tapered into computer wires dangled from the branches. Everywhere, the glow of green and red power lights and the blinking blue of modems. She no longer felt as if she was running through a forest, but a surrealist’s image of a computer wonderland.

Danny’s audio input detected a new sound. A clicking, like the ticking of a loose part. The sound was familiar — naggingly so — but she could not place it. Almost subconsciously, she was aware of something watching her, so when she ran up a small ridge and abruptly confronted a trio of centaurs, she was startled, but not surprised.

“Centaurs” was not an adequate term for them, really. They may have been centaurs, once, in a prior incarnation, but the resemblance was shallow. Rather, they were fantastic, alarming cyborgs. Their naked human torsos were studded with cybernetic implants and sat atop metal chassis of eight clicking, spider-like legs.

There were three of them, all appearing masculine. Their bald heads reflected the lights of the machine-forest. Their black eyes stared at her with the dead gaze of robots’ opticals. The one in the lead — a barrel-chested, bronze-skinned monster — threw its head back to shout a command to the two that flanked it. Its mouth opened, and out came a barrage of bleeps, stutters, and high-pitched whistling. It was speaking in digital, but its message was clear.

Kill.

The leader splayed open its palm. Quicksilver bubbled up from its metallic skin and snaked outward, hardening into a rod in its grasp. Like a child’s toy weapon, the rod telescoped outward into a staff. The length of it glistened like mercury. Two fang-like prongs jutted from its point. Electricity arced and crackled between them.

They rushed her. Gasping, she went in the direction her muscles instinctively propelled her — straight upward. She caught onto a branch and dangled for a moment. The cyborgs, having charged through the spot she had just been, stumbled to a sudden stop. Their gazes swung upward. The quicksilver staff was raised. Again, the leader barked a digital command.

Meanwhile, Danny swung onto the tree branch and was sprinting through the canopy. To her dismay, the cyborgs seemed even better suited for the trees than the forest floor. They scuttled easily up the trees after her and quickly began to catch up.

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Christie “Iamba” Bailey