StV: Florida Man, part two

"Okay," said Bridge, speaking into the driver's side window of the van. "I'm going to find a discreet place for you to appear. I'm going to be pretty tapped out after that, so use your comms and keep us posted. We'll have someone on the channel at all times, but it's going to be a couple of hours before I can pull you back or send anyone else to you. Once you've got a lock on your target, get your costumes on keep 'em on -- nobody shows their face until you're back here."

In the passenger seat, Cloudburst nodded. "If we have to abandon the van?"

Bridge shrugged. "If you have to, you have to. Try to leave it someplace where nobody will bother it for a day or two, and we can fetch it back later if we have to."

He paused, drew a breath, and his gaze went distant. Still distracted, he said, "All right. I'm going to put you through on the shoulder of the highway just a little southeast of Immokalee. All you'll have to do is come up to speed and merge onto the lane, and you'll be headed in the right direction."

The school's front driveway began to fade around them, overlaid with another landscape: a flat stretch of two-lane highway, grassy sand to either side, power lines running parallel to it behind a wall of brush on the right. There wasn't actually a shoulder, but when Bridge said, "Go," Tempest pulled forward onto the sandy ground and began accelerating. 

She was checking the traffic at the same time; fortunately, they had room to merge onto the highway and come up to full speed there. Cloudburst pulled out her phone and tapped the app for an encrypted connection to Team Kraken's support line. "Cell connection out here is crap," she observed, and shut off the camera. "Hey there. We're in Florida. How's Bridge doing?"

Jinx's voice came back, clear and comforting: "I've got him on camera. He's walking back towards the school."

"Good," said Tempest, loud enough for the microphone to catch it. "We're about an hour and a half from Everglades National Park, but maybe twenty or thirty minutes before we start hitting all the nature preserves. Gaunt, do you have a lock on our guy?"

Gaunt shook his head. "Not yet, but I've never been sure just what my range is."

"Well, we may be about to find out. Let us know."

"I'll contact you if we hear anything else on this end," Jinx added. "Also, keep an eye out for reporters -- Florida Man's gone and made national news, and I have an old friend monitoring CJIS info for anything that might help us."

"CJIS?" asked Tempest. 

"Criminal Justice Information Systems," Jinx told her. "It's, um, it's a national law-enforcement information system."

"Ah," said Tempest. "Good to know. All right, we'll keep you posted."

"Please do." 

StV: Florida Man, part one

"This is your target." Jonathan Saint-Vincent tapped a key on his laptop, and then turned to the screen where the projector was showing a mugshot of a scruffy, disheveled man with pale skin and dark circles under his eyes. His blond hair was cut in a mullet, and by his expression he was still half-asleep. "Tom Wilson, white male, age twenty-seven. Calls himself Florida Man. Robbed a string of liquor stores, convenience stores, and gas stations from Miami all the way up to Tallahassee, then shot two state troopers and fled all the way back down into the Everglades. In the process he wrecked four cars, took two people hostage, torched a fireworks stand to create a distraction, and very nearly set a gas station near Fort Myers on fire. Also wanted for tax fraud, dealing drugs, and overdue alimony."

Cloudburst glanced at Tempest, then the rest of the team before she spoke up. "Okay, we get that he's a walking disaster. Why is he specifically our problem?"

"Mainly because he's an Anomaly," Headmaster Saint-Vincent said easily. "He shouldn't have been able to survive those car crashes, but he walked away from all four. Gunfights with the police? Their reports say their bullets just weren't doing what they should have, and at least one officer reports that there was 'something wrong with him, with his face' but wasn't able to elaborate. And then the one night they had him in a cell -- for Drunk and Disorderly, because they hadn't connected him to everything else yet -- something came and busted him out -- right through the wall."

"Ah. So we might not just be capturing him for the authorities," Tempest observed. "He might have an accomplice." 

Saint-Vincent nodded. "That does seem possible," he admitted. "Team Dragon will be otherwise occupied, but we can have Team Phoenix on standby to help you out if needed."

Nightfall caught Cloudburst's eye and nodded. 

Tempest nodded cautiously. "Better safe than sorry, especially since we don't have a good idea of what's going on here."

"And the Everglades can be dangerous, too. So yes, keep in touch and be cautious." 

Colony Planet dreams

Crashed hard and had incredibly weird -- but very narrative -- dreams, probably inspired by the very final scene of Don't Look Up: 

We were on a colony planet. I'm not sure how many people there were, but there were some interesting little details -- the electrical wiring in our rooms hadn't all been hooked up correctly, so if my neighbor switched on his lights, mine went out, for example. (Put in a ticket with Facilities for that one, I guess.) There were snakes that lived in these... basically snail shells... and struck if you set something (a peanut, your toe) in front of the opening. The only good way to kill them was to drop something edible and then behead them when they struck. There were also other, more Earth-normal snakes. 

There were alien ruins and some aliens, who mostly ignored us -- I had the impression that there'd been a hard-negotiated political peace, but I didn't actually dream about that part. Some of the ruins still had active alien tech, too, like the twenty-foot-tall thing that seemed to be half organic and half mechanical. We didn't get too close to that one; it was definitely still moving around. 

There were also monsters: large predators, semi-domesticated by the aliens (or I guess really they were the natives and we were the aliens) in some places, and absolutely feral in others. So there was a very Old West "keep a gun and a knife on you at all times" vibe to the whole thing. Traveling through the semi-forest, even along a trail, was absolutely nerve-racking.  Frankly, so was creeping through the ruins.

All in all I wouldn't say it really went anywhere, but it was a fun bit of unconscious world-building.