A commission from  Panther1945 continuing from Part 3. One of Alex’s friends joins the crisis of miniature cities. And so does one of Lady Zeramere’s enemies.

(Note: The entire 15,000+-word chapter would not fit in the text block below, so what's posted there is but a preview. Please download the PDF above to enjoy the whole piece.)

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Donnie was eleven years old and terrified. He was standing on the top platform of the Eiffel Tower. Only, it wasn’t the Eiffel Tower. There wasn’t any wind rushing through his short blond hair. There was only eerie stillness, punctuated by the touchless sound of explosions. There wasn’t any sun glaring into his glasses, or stars twinkling above him. There was an eerie collection of rectangular lights above him: softer than the sun, more radiant than the stars. There was no sky on the horizon. Only a sheer wall, seemingly miles away, painted an evening purple-red. There were no classmates or teachers or anything else he knew as part of his world. There was a war! An insane battle of tanks and planes and artillery shells against giants. Giants of two kinds. The long-headed and armor-encased forces of the Vel’Adrini warriors. And the Dronn, a race of quadrupedal insects with a hive mind and an endless hunger for expansion. And meat; flesh to feed to their ever-growing legions.

On the other side of a line of bluish plastic, some bizarre representation of the River Seine, a trio of Vels had taken up a position around the nearby Arc De Triumph, the iconic archway of white stone. Thick at the base, covered in fanciful sculptures up top. For legged, with a small archway cutting through the thinner dimension of the structure. A taller and broader one cutting through the border one. Surrounded by a circle of pavement which led traffic around its majesty. 

There were three Vels there in total. One of their number, a man in a long and flowing cloak of blue covered in strange symbols of black, was perched upon the Arc itself, having taken it as lookout position. It wasn’t much taller than him, that’s how much he loomed over the landscape. What he was unmistakable: his head was encased in the signature helm, over half again the height of a humans, and pointed up top. Behind him a pair of scouts were huddled behind either side of the Arc. Both females, at a guess. It was hard to tell from such distance and behind cover. They two had the cloaks like the man above, which also obscured their figures. Each of them was peeking out towards the East from one side of the Arc, using one of its four legs for cover. Each over half the height of the Arc, dwarfing the surrounding buildings. As the women shifted about, it became evident that all three were also wearing flight packs made up to look like sail-wings of ice-blue crystal. Forward scouts.

Further out behind them, the false sky was full of gliding platforms, anti-gravity bikes and the like. Unleashing waves of energy blasts upon targets the boy couldn't hope to out at such distance.

The Dronn had many a hold over the surrounding city-scape, but their closest lay further along the river, almost opposite the Tower and about twice as far off: The Louvre Museum. Or, what should have been. In place of its palatial three-winged structure there was a mess of shapes pulled from nearby structures. Great swaths of the city beyond it having been harvested to form a Hive-Post. The four-legged behemoths had bodies that incorporated the physical components of wasps and lightning bugs. With elongated chitinous spikes protruding from their bulbous arms, razor-sharp wings, and an ability to shoot sticky globs of red-hot poison. Which they put to use both to seal up their monstrosity pyramid, and to level the human tanks and machinery that got anywhere near their base. 

The Vel’Adrini were utterly silent as they tore through one line of tanks after the other, bearing the sigils of allegiance too far away to make out. While the Dronn chittered and screeched in an indecipherable cacophony as they jealously guarded their clutter-mounds from thick-nosed World War II-era bombers. Don knew what to call both sets of giants because they were species from his favorite miniature combat game!

And those weren't just any Dronn down below. They were His Dronn. He knew every detail of their coloring as if by memory. The shining black and orange carapaces, heavy on the black. Glowing red at the seams in between the exoskeletal plates surrounding the mouth and neck and chests, the glow meant to brighten as they charged up and released the literally red-hot venom. An affectation these real-life representative were genuinely spat their biological ammunition onto countless targets.

Nor were the Vel’Adrini they faced any ‘normal squadron. They were colored precisely in the style of his friend Alex’s miniature troop. Heavy on the blue and white, with glowing ice-blue visors within their tall and pointed helms. Wide and tall enough to show off their whole faces if not for the obscuring effects of the light. And also ice-blue energy lines about select parts of their armor, that glowed brighter when personal force-fields came into use. Their symbol a three-glyph icon for a Sleeper Ship the boy had written his own backstory for. Outfitted for speed and air supremacy. Skimmerbikes and let-troops a major part of unit tactics, as well as hand pistols that were easy to maneuver and hard to disarm.

He’d come to this living nightmare through a chain of events that his very practical mind still did not want to fully accept as having happened. One moment, he’d been following his class to their first stage on the museum exhibit of miniaturized cities, unfortunately starting with the Middleton Museum Of Culture’s permanent display. Setting foot on a gangplank he’d walked at least half a dozen times on previous occasions. The one that granted a view directly overlooking a scale representation of World War II era Paris. Nazi flags in some areas, where there wasn’t the banner of Vichy France: the red white and blue flag of France with a dark double axe over seven golden stars in the middle. A copy of which was on display full-size on the wall of the gallery. A gallery that was dozens of feet across at a side, to enclose the truly massive display set into a drop in the floor below.

Next, there was a blinding flash of orange light. Then everything and everyone was gone, and he was at the base of a four-legged tower.  A vast square of interlocked metal poles above him, with rounded sides that circled outward towards the legs. A tower whose visage he only recognized from underneath -- the sweeping curves, the mix of triangles and squares, the delicate sea-shell modeling of the support arches -- from its use in countless movies and TV shows. Air-raid sirens were wailing. Some of which were coming from the famous Tower itself! Blaring from miniature sirens set all over the squared lower platform.

The sound was everywhere, inescapable. Screeching, keening, driving into his ears like ice picks. The kid crouched in pain, and put his ears up to his head to mute the warble, but it vibrated through his very skin. And worse was the rumble that came up from the solid surface below his feet that rattled through the whole of his body. Coming on its heel was an awful pressure wave of pure noise. Screaming in fear and confusion, Donnie looked up to see a four-engine plane zoom clear over him. A shining glass bubble set into its bottom. It roared from his left to his right and away. 

BA-BOOM!!! A plume of red and orange and black erupted to the side.

Donnie didn’t shout, he didn’t think, he didn’t do anything but run in the other direction. Heedless of the strange sound his feet made against the surface he was running across. Which looked like concrete but wasn’t. He ran and he ran and he ran, out from under the four-legged behemoth and into a small park. Where another explosion, this one some way to the left of him, made him stop short. He tripped over his own feet, and went tumbling towards a small lake. “Whaaahaaaaa!” falling past a small tree, he fell into the pond itself. Expecting utterly to end up cold and wet.

Only to roll further, atop a smooth, hard surface until inertia killed his movement. Still on the blue-ish ground, through which he could see the lake bed below, he rubbed a scuffed hand. But not a cold hand. The clear blue surface below him wasn’t ice. It was too warm, and so was the air around him. “What the heck--”

Pu’thud! Pu’thud! Pu’thud! A series of small rocks rained down upon him. Some clear, so solid brown or grey. All of them singed and stinking. “Plastic?”

Another explosion -- this one from the direction he’d been running through -- cut through the wail of the sirens, and sent him bolting again. Not back under the tower, but to another side of if. The side facing the long, grassy walkway he knew to be called the Champ De Mars. Where he found more plastic; a field of astroturf running as far as he could see. 

The only thing that made sense in that moment, impossible as it was, was the Eiffel Tower itself.  But when he turned back to look upon it, he found that a gigantic letter V had been attached to the lower part of the needle-like upper third. Below that, a banner of pure white. DEUTSCHLAND SIEGT AUF ALLEN FRONTEN the words written upon it in blocky letters.

“German?... The Liberation of Paris!” Alien as this all was, it was all too familiar. “The model?!” Donnie Warren was a kid who prided himself on his grades and his mind, and he had no clue what was going on. Just admitting that to himself was terrifying. To say nothing of the sound of another pair of explosions, these unseen, and the sight of a snub-nose fighter plane billowing smoke on its arcing drop to the far end of the astroturf.

But he knew one thing: “The Eiffel Tower survives this!” Donnie ran. This time, towards the Tower. His limited grasp of the French Language allowed him to read just rough of the signage to navigate by. A bit of zipping around later, and he found a Tower leg that contained an elevator and staircase. Both were abandoned, and that meant to him in the moment was no one was going to stop him from taking the high ground. The girders and struts and diamond-textured floors plates were metal, and metal meant some measure of protection. He found that out well enough, for all the pacing he did while waiting for the box to come down to him.

Only when Donnie was on the elevator, and it was moving its long way up, did he realize how fiercely he was shivering.

“This is crazy! This is crazy!” He paced about the small box, trying and failing to calm himself. Free of the sights, if not the sounds, of the war outside, he collected enough of his wits to try to call for help on his smartphone. Which he whipped out from the case looped to his belt. With a single swipe, the screen lit up. But there was no signal. Not to the internet, not to any cel tower. He confirmed the phone’s modem was sending out for a signal, but there was nothing out there -- out wherever this was -- to receive.

“Maybe I’ll get a signal when I’m up top. Or maybe I’m seventy years before there’s any signals to be found.” That last thought did more to unsettle his stomach than the elevator’s inertia. So troubled was he, so disoriented by the continual explosions, that no sooner did the elevator let him out on the top level did he realize that he had no recollection of switching cars.

It was a scant mercy that he faced no resistance, found no other souls, there on the third level promenade. A floor that didn’t offer much more than space to get off the elevator, a small promenade of windows, and a thin stairway to the upper floor. Here, at least, he was relatively free of the shrapnel of shells and explosions. It felt safer that the floor above, with its open-air walkway secured by his thin mesh of steel wires. He could see well enough through the windows, and would probably draw less attention from passing planes.

He again turned to his smartphone, this time for its camera’s zoom-in function. Pressing the device against one window pane after the other, he took in the scope of the scene below. Sometimes with his own eyes, sometimes with the aid of magnification. What he saw chilled him to the bone. It was a war, alright. Donnie didn’t need the ever-present wailing to tell him that.

Just on the other side of the river that stood at the Tower’s base, the evidence was easy to see. Alleyways were cut off with sandbags. Streets were cut off with barriers of crossed metal. Tanks and personnel carriers moved this way and that, stopping to fire their shells or unload infantry. Shots were fired from atop the sandbags and broken sections of wall, through broken windows, and out of open doorways. And not all of the fighters wore the green fatigues of the Allied forces or black of the defending Nazis, easy to recognize now that he knew what to look for. Civilians in dirty street clothes darting from one piece of cover to the next, bearing rifles and Molotov cocktails.

Between the noise, the motion, the random flashes of fire and debris, and the inability to see much of anything at a time through the viewfinder, Donnie couldn't make heads or tails of the battle’s progress. Who controlled what. Who was winning or losing a single block. Or what the targets of the various bombers in the air were. 

What he did become aware of, as he ran from one side of the tower-top to the other, was that those bombers started to fall off or disappear. The dogfighters as well. And when the neighborhoods all around him darkened with oncoming vehicles and personnel, it was clear both slides were running from something. That something turned out to be characters from a tabletop game made up in the Twenty-First Century. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them.

It was when he reached over to unsling his backpack, so he could compare what he was seeing to the stash of  Warp War 5000 minis he wasn’t supposed to have brought to the field trip at all, that he realized that he must have lost his backpack somewhere along the way. Possibly crushed, with all the physical evidence that might prove this all some terrible dream, under the growing mess of rubble far below.

There was no time to mourn its loss. The Dronn were marching in from the west, stomping over all in their path. Leaving vast trenches in the urban landscape, trenches that skewed sideways whenever a pack veered off to set up one of their hive-mounds. Building them from the surrounding terrain, ripping houses and businesses and apartments to shreds Heedless of the panicked rush of miniscule humans that fled from these places just in time. In many cases to be crushed underfoot by the enormous insects. In others, to be collected for later use.

The Vels were coming in from the other side of the Seine, the west if his recollection of the original model was accurate. Many of them hopping over vast amounts of territory on their flight packs, or flying above them in circular command sleds. They set up long defensive lines against the local forces, which they utterly dwarfed. A few volleys of energy blast later, the lines would creep forward. Stepping over the melted slag they’d made of machines and men.

This was the situation Donnie had found himself for untold minutes as he struggled to accept what he was seeing, and the danger it represented to himself. While the Vels and Dronn inched closer to a mutual confrontation. A battle in which the smaller Nazi and Allied forces would be completely irrelevant. And so would history: there would be no telling whether or not the Eiffel Tower survived the storm that was brewing “I’m not safe up here, either!” 

The rattling of the textured diamond-plate floor underneath his feet confirmed that no, he was not.


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