Permanent Scars

The general stirred in his sleep. Black demons haunted his dreams, fangs protruding from their little mouths. They cackled and hissed in delight. They tore his allies to shreds. His men, his family, his friends. All torn to pieces by the demons. General Sora awoke. He did not scream. He did not shout. He cried, because he felt the inevitable coming, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Since the changeling invasion, Vulden had recently reactivated its military service, as well as its space program, although the latter was only shown once the ideas became serious. When the king declared martial law, General Sora, one of two generals in the Vuldenic Army, had absolute power. He had never been in that seat of power, and he feared the day it came. "When the country has fallen to the point where I am the most fit to rule," he would say, "I don't want to live on this planet anymore." He and his fellow general, Tozu, oversaw the military might of Vulden. Being the more abrasive half of the spectrum, as well as being a lightning dragon, Sora trained fire, wind, and lightning dragons, all powerful forces to be reckoned with. Tozu, however, trained earth, water, and ice types. "Solid, calm, and indestructible," was her saying, and being a water dragon herself, she was fickle and adaptable. The two generals made for a dynamic team, Sora taking charge and making the larger decisions, while Tozu adapted to the plan, adding her own ideas and strategies into the mix.

Sora saw the demons he could not fight. And that was a shame, because he intended to kill every single one of them. He assigned his sergeants to each division and set out to the Biological Institute of Vulden. He'd scheduled an appointment with the lead researcher there, Dr. Jonaz, and it was about time he caught up on it.

Pushing through the glass revolving doors, he came face-to-face with Jonaz, a warm smile on his face.

"Pleasure to see you, Jonaz."

"And to you, General. Now, what I wanted to show you." The wind dragon led Sora through the laboratory, coming to a special room he had marked off as "Optic Enhancer". "Per your request, General, we've pushed ourselves to find everything that we could about changelings. This," he said, pulling a microscope over, "is by far one of the best things we've found." It was pieces of changeling skin, a nerve cell, the eye of a changeling, and a bit of brain. Studying each one, the general looked amazed. "Now, I want you to look at the eye first. Notice the differences." The eye, like a dragon eye, consisted of a pupil, a cornea, a lens, and so on. What was amazing though, was the lens. It wasn't a single piece, no. The lens was divided up into about 200 segments, each for carefully analyzing the body of whatever it was looking at.

"Damn," Sora whispered. Jonaz nodded in approval.

"It's amazing how fast these things can react. A changeling can have scanned your entire body within three seconds. Considering this is scanning, not just merely looking at, this is incredible, because it can recognize the order, the class, the phylum, the genus, and right down to the species within this time. Now," he said, "look at the nerve cell. It's completely stretched out, much further than our own. These things are going to get messages to their brain fast. The brain itself," Jonaz pointed out, "is incredibly large and has nerves running into it from almost all directions. Its size can be attributed to the amount of information it needs to store in terms of genetic modification, and the nerves help change every part of the body all at once." Sora looked at the skin as an example. Under the microscope, it shimmered. It was constantly replacing its parts. It was ready for change. The general stopped looking and faced Jonaz.

"Thank you, doctor. Is there anything else you want to show me?" The doctor smiled.

"Of course there is. It is all I have, but it's incredible. Come." He led Sora to another part of the room, where a large screen with a picture of a changeling's DNA was hanging. He handed Sora a pair of green goggles, although they looked like sunglasses. "Now, we're going to change the DNA up there to a common ice dragon's DNA. Watch the difference." The general stared, but no change came.

"Jonaz, I'm not seeing a change. Did you switch the displays yet?" Jonaz smiled.

"Yes, we did. Take the glasses off." Sora now saw the other set of DNA.

"What in the..." He put them back on, and saw the changeling DNA again.

"That's right. We've developed glasses that may be able to differentiate between the false DNA of a modified changeling and the real thing. Once that's done, perhaps we can develop something that can do the same, but on the scale of a whole body."

"That's amazing..." The general laughed and shook Jonaz's claw. "Good working with you."

The general took off for the rest of the day. His meeting with the doctor did little to rid him of his fears. It was in times like these that he took to the aid of a psychic. Buscha was a popular psychic, supposedly able to see into the hearts of anyone she met, and could see exactly what ailed them. No matter what she saw, she always told the truth. It was why she was so popular: she was the only one that could be trusted. Pushing back the purple silk curtain, Sora sat himself in front of her, hollow and afraid. Without a word, she signaled him to hold out his palm, and he put one finger in the center of his hand. She closed her eyes and felt for something, any little emotion. Then she sighed.

"What you fear is something we all fear. The changelings have taken everything from us, yes." Sora leaned forward, listening for the part where it got better. "It is likely that we will go to war with them." She looked up, staring into his eyes as though they she was looking upon his soul. "They are done feeding on us, but we are not done with them. I have seen your visions. The changelings preying upon us once more. A terrifying image, most certainly."

"Yes. What can be done?" She looked down.

"Nothing. What happens is inevitable, as you know. If we are to fight," she glared at him, "I cannot say that your life will be spared." With that, she bid him farewell. Now Sora found any debating silly. He sang, he danced. He laughed. He laughed for the fools in lab coats. He laughed for the fortune tellers and card dealers. What point was it, he thought, to debate anything? Psychic or scholar, the world told him the same thing every day: the inevitable will come. Your beliefs, your profession, your race, your type. Nothing matters, because the inevitable will come. It always does.