The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Goldglo
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The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Casey Ripkus resisted the urge to laugh out loud. At face value, the whole premise was ridiculous. It had been just over 5 years since she’d stood on almost this exact spot, talking to the same person, learning that the RASG was about to go bomb Twilight Isle back to the stone age. And while this latest news wasn’t quite on the same outlandish level, it was pretty darn close in her book.

“We’re going to do what?”

She was pretty sure she’d asked that same question, in that same tone, five years prior.

“Pest control.” replied her companion, Cypers.

Casey’s facial expression was a mixture of bemusement and irritation.

“Pest. Control.”

She said the words slowly, as if doing so would make them sound less crazy.

“Of a sort.”

“Great,” she deadpanned, before sighing. “Can’t wait to load up insecticide pellets in my guns.”

“Might need something a bit stronger. Rumor is that the wyvern population’s in a boom cycle and the beasties are helping themselves to whatever they can take as far as foodstuffs and animals. They’re even feasting upon people who live in mountain villages and the tribes in the desert beyond the town of Cadentia. Someone’s paying a bounty fee to take ‘em out.”

Casey looked skyward, squinting as sunlight filtered through the grey-white winter clouds blanketing the sky. Things were so much simpler up there.

“That’s just stupid, Cypers. Whatever they’re paying can’t be worth half a tank of fuel in one of our birds, much less however many of us are supposed to go up there. And why in the hell would Simon agree to take payment for us to shoot animals?”

“Look on the bright side, Casey. At least it’s a legit, paying mission.”

“Uh-huh. And what’s next, school-bus escorts? I think I’m about done with this, Cypers. There’s gotta be something better out there for people like us.”

“You want to leave the RASG?” Cypers asked in a tone that suggested he was more than slightly taken aback by the sentiment.

Casey sighed, lowered her head and looked around at the snow-covered landscape, broken up by runways and strategically plowed convoy routes in and out of the airbase.

“Yeah. Yeah. I do. And I’m not the only one. This whole RASG deal’s not all its cracked up to be, and it wasn’t all that cracked to begin with.”

It was Cypers’ turn to sigh. “All right. One thing at a time. We’ve got a mission briefing. After that, well…” he left the thought unfinished.

“Yeah. Come on,” she said, turning to walk toward the hangars, intent on catching a ride to the briefing rooms. It was too cold to walk that far in the middle of winter.

“One more for the road," she murmured, “and then I’m done.”
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Re: The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Casey bit her tongue, hard, to avoid any one of three poor choices: telling Old Man Simon that he’d finally lost his last marble, getting up and walking out of the briefing before being dismissed, or throwing up her arms in sheer disgust.

She and her fellow pilots had spent the last ten or so minutes learning about wyvern colonies, the hows and whys of their separation into various broods, wyvern migration patterns, wyvern birthing cycles & wyvern individual and en masse defense tactics against predators.

She stole a quick glance around the room and witnessed four separate eye rolls, two ceiling-stares and one head nod that she swore was accompanied by a slight snore. She also saw, on several faces, expressions of the same incredulity that she felt boiling over within herself.

She knew what they were all thinking: We’re going to murder wildlife because someone decided a bounty was a good idea? We’re really going to fly up there, shoot down the ones in the air and pick off the ones too stupid or too young to fly as they cling to their nests? What in the hell is happening here?

Casey shook her head as Old Man Simon began to point out clusters of nests tucked into canyon walls.

This isn’t what I signed up for...

The briefing continued but she wasn’t listening, at least not to anything but her own conscience.

Screw this. I’m not gonna be party to killing a bunch of undergrown dragons. No way, no how. I’m not doing this. I’ll quit right now.

She couldn’t stand it any longer. The holographic image of the wyvern-infested canyon on her personal display shimmered as Casey slammed her fist onto the small desk attached to her chair, ready to unleash hellfire and brimstone upon Simon and everyone who thought that any of this was a good idea.

Pausing mid-sentence, the RASG commander looked at his disruptive pilot, stood up straight and crossed his arms.

“Something to say, Miss Ripkus?”

You’re goddamn right I do, she thought. And she opened her mouth to say it all.
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Re: The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Too late, only when she was halfway out of the chair with her mouth forming the first of several choice curse words, did Casey recognize the tension in the briefing room had slackened greatly before her little display. She heard the other pilots finish shifting in their seats and realized the ones in front of her had straightened up, examining their desk-displays with renewed interest.

She’d missed something. Something fairly important by the look and sound of it.

“Something on your mind?”

While the tone of his question wasn’t entirely reprimanding, she could tell that Matt Simon wasn’t pleased with her interruption.

Frozen, Casey felt her face flush bright red as she eased herself back down in her chair.

“Ah…no. Sir. No, sir.”

That response earned her snickers from her fellow pilots and a disapproving look from Matt Simon.

“Then kindly sit down and listen up,” Matt said with a frown.

“As I was saying, for those of you who bought into the rumors…or perhaps started them…let me say here and now that I haven’t spent the last fifteen minutes teaching you everything-you-ever-didn’t-care-to-know about wyverns so we can go up and slaughter them. Maybe you’ve heard of the bounty. Maybe you haven’t. But we’re not going up there to create and collect wyvern corpses.”

Too self-conscious to slouch, Casey nonetheless tried her best to look invisible in her seat and stared intently at her holo-display, listening to what came next.
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Re: The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Matt went on to explain that the call to hunt wyverns had been in place for at least a year and had started out with good intentions…the wyverns, having experienced a population boom in recent years, had been branching out further and further to find food sources. Too often, those food sources had come at the expense of the nomadic tribes and village settlers in the deserts and mountains beyond the border town of Cadentia. In order to protect themselves, contracts had been taken out with various groups and individuals, many of whom had proven more than adept at wyvern hunting, especially as the days dragged into weeks and then months.

The decline in the wyvern population, though, had resulted in emptier and emptier stomachs in their primary predators which were even larger flying creatures commonly referred to as umadi by most of the desert tribes. With the skies lacking their primary food source, umadi had begun to raid the mountains and deserts, essentially replacing the wyverns as the most imminent threat to crops, herds and people.

“I’ve personally spoken with the elders of the Bakton, Viltark and Pashtong tribes,” Matt told them, “along with several of the foothill village councils. They’ve agreed to scale back, or in a few cases, outright cancel the wyvern hunting contracts. And they’ve asked for our help in reducing the umadi threat. The umadi aren’t numerous, certainly not as numerous as the wyverns were, but their appetites are notably voracious. A single umadi could consume several wyverns and not be fully satiated.”

Matt called up a display of an average sized umadi on everyone’s holo-desktops. They’re huge, they’re armored and they’re cranky because they’re hungry. Our job is to go up there and protect the wyverns. If these umadi attack, we’ll drive ‘em off. If we can buy the wyverns time to repopulate, maybe things balance out again.”

Matt looked up at his pilots.

“That’s the idea at least. Questions?”
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Re: The Wyvern Bounty: Unexpected Repercussions

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Matt Simon sighed, leaned back in his chair and stared past the stacks of debriefing reports, one from each pilot, each time they’d gone up on wyvern protection detail. He’d read through so many already, he had no desire to tackle the rest of the pile. At the end of the day, the final details wouldn’t change. A handful of dead wyvern, two accidentally casualties of the RASG, and several dead or wounded umadi.

All in all, things hadn’t gone like he’d planned but if they kept flying protective sorties over the next several months, especially during the wyvern mating season, it was possible that things might balance out.

Possible.

The estimated percentage of that possibility wasn’t encouraging but when push came to shove, he felt like they had to try.

Sighing again, he stood, stretched and keyed his access code into the communication system.

“Yes, sir?” asked the voice on the other end.

“The dead wyvern and umadi…have we been able to bring them back to base?”

“Yes, sir. Transport landed a few minutes ago.”

“Good. Reach out to Sephina at the Hunter’s Guild. Give her all the corpses if she wants them. And whatever payment they give out, turn it directly over to the Benson Boulevard Initiative. Better some good comes out of our mistake than none.”

“Mistake, sir?”

Matt didn’t bother trying to hide the irritation in his voice. “We went up to protect those wyverns, not drop the population further. Remember? Make the call.”

“Aye, sir. Right away.”

Matt sat back down, reached out and grabbed a handful of the debriefing reports, scanning over the names. Jonas Riley. Dion Scholl. Laura Syson. Casey Ripkus.

Casey. She’d been a handful lately, at least more-so than usual. Setting the other reports down, he activated her report and began to read.
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