Saida turned around to find a dark skinned girl in a grey, hooded denim jack leaning half way out the driver's side of the black Nissan. Her eyes were dark but lively, and on her lips lingered the faintest shadow of a smile. A neat ponytail curled over one shoulder and an iron ring hung from the chain around her neck.

Saida shifted her helmet to her other arm and stirred the air with one hand. "Who's running? If you try to run me over, I will automatically ride faster. It's basic survival."

Her friend chuckled and shook her head. "If I was trying to run you over, you would be dead by now."

"I'll believe that when I see it."

"And you'll see it the day you push me over the edge. Count on it, Sadie."

Saida smiled and stepped off the road, allowing her friend access to the student lot. As she waited, she wondered mildly how things'd have played out if she was working without her best friend by her side. All her endless nights behind a computer screen would mean nothing to her without Kiara to share coffee the following morning. She chuckled and rubbed her neck through her headscarf.

Several minutes later, Kiara scampered to her side and gave the case strapped to her back a casual tap. "So what did you find this time?"

"We have another burning off in the North district." Saida set to work unbuckling the straps that fastened the briefcase to her shoulders. The two of them walked at a leisurely pace. "Same as the others, you know. The energy is like nothing that has ever been documented before. It appears quickly, and disappears almost as fast, but the energy lingers. It's still detectable now even." She paused. "I didn't see this one personally, but there was a news report on the local four site this morning."

The two of them came to a hole in the fence that surrounded the football field. Kiara held the chicken wire aside for Saida to duck through, before following close behind. "So you were up all night again, I gather?"

The hijabi sighed. "You were never good at picking out key information. The press got wind of this one."

"No. I got that; I just don't think it's such a bad thing."

Sadie scoffed and started climbing up the stairs to the bleachers. Kiara followed close behind, their footsteps echoing across the empty morning like hail against linoleum  "Right. Because alien conspiracies and noisy reporters are just what we need right now."

"Then what do you suggest we do?"

The two of them took a seat on the highest bench of the farthest corner from the parking lot. Sadie leaned her head against the aluminum backing for a moment before propping her case up on her lap and punching in a series of numbers. A moment later there was a telltale click and she lifted the lid like a laptop. Inside the case sat two glass visors, almost like something one would see in an anime. The visors appeared frame-less, almost like a pair of UV reduction glasses like the type you get after yours had been dilated. But Saida new better. The two dorky pairs of glasses were worth more than her life was, maybe more than both their lives, because in them held the capability to capture more data than anything before. The internet was the closest thing in existence that even came close to capturing as much as her visors – but it had many years of head start, and she was progressing them fast.

And data was everything in this era.

They worked by taking in the environment, like a smart phone, or even the human brain. Except unlike a phone or a brain, her visors didn't filter anything out. Everything that was captured with the glass, and everything was stored right into a self-replicating cloud server than was almost as infinite as data itself. And then more importantly, it sorted it, creating instant statistics, probabilities, likelihoods, and then predictions based on that knowledge. Through the visor she could see the data details of the world that humans were previous blind too. The temperature of a rabbit's beating heart, the physical wind through the trees, how fast it was, how cold it was, how many leaves if rustled as it passed.

Through her visors, Saida could see the world broken up into a thousand key components. It was beautiful.

Yet also to terrifying.

She knew when people were going to get sick, knew the calculated probabilities of accidents happening to each car on the road, and just how many people carried concealed weapons nowadays – even within her own school. She had left so many anonymous tips that she had gotten a back up phone with an auto resetting sim card, just so they couldn't be traced back to her.

And now the world was burning. The fabric of existence was shifting, and she didn't know what to do. Saida considered the question for a moment before unplugging one of the visors from their mobile charging port and handing them over to Kiara. "We do what we always do. We watch, we record, and we try to make sense out of infinity."

The grey clouds were growing darker up above. Churning, swirling, almost like it being morning wasn't a miserable fact enough, they needed to be on a brink of a storm as well. Kiara looked at the glasses for a moment before moving her gaze thoughtfully to the sky, a wisp of her dark hair coming loose from her ponytail as she did. Another brisk breeze swept through and she shivered, pulling her hood up over her head. "Well, then let's see what the wind's been doing today."

She slipped the visor on and pressed her thumb to a touch indicator on the left arm. Moments later, a pulse of electrical blue light spider webbed its way across the main frame in front of her eyes, letting Saida knew she was on line. Kiara's face went from blissful to confused in a the span of three seconds.

"I'm transferring the data straight to my mobile. I don't trust your auto backup on this. Get your visor on and adjust your modifications to filter straight to outer transmissions."

"Why is your set automatically cued to that?" Saida asked as she unplugged her own visor, removed her sunglasses, and cued it to the channel.

"I sometimes use the visor to find hidden wifi, don't judge me."

It took a couple seconds for her visor to go online but when it did, her heart started to beat louder inside her chest. "What is this?" She whispered.

It was like someone had copied and pasted an entire section of the world on top of itself. There was no other way of explaining it. The two of them were sitting on the edge of a massive curtain of copied data, the very idea seemed to go against her basic understanding of physics. The two sets of shouldn't have been able to exist, two things shouldn't have been able to take up the same space at the same time. Yet...

"It's like a hologram," Kiara voiced, glancing up from her mobile.

Saida look looked again, and this time she could see what her friend meant. It wasn't a clear cut and copy of the entire world, that was impossible and she was ashamed that her mind instantly jumped to that conclusion. No, it was more like an energy projection of the world as it was, a curtain of reality meant to shield the eyes. She glanced over her visor, and even without her glasses she could see the ripple of the curtain moving as far as the eye could see (which for her wasn't that far, because she was a near sighted mole rat with a computer fetish).

"A hologram," she echoed. Never before had she seen one so detailed and interactive with the environment. "Almost like...an invisibility cloak."

"Have you been binging star trek again?"

"No," she lied. "But you have to admit, there could be a nuclear warhead inside this data curtain and any normal person wouldn't be able to see it. It's kinda wavery, but...it works."

"Then let's see what's inside." Kiara stood and brought her phone up to the side of her visor.

"What are you doing?"

Her friend shot a sideline grin out from under her hood. "I'm detangling the code. Watch."

And watch she did. Right before her eyes, the hologram began to weaken. Outside the visor, nothing seemed to be happening, but inside of it. there was a whole other world unraveling, forgive the pun. As Kiara worked, Saida could see the work that had gone into the hologram. Endless amounts of code and several hundred variations to move and blend the hologram naturally with the environment. She was almost regretful that they were messing with it.

"Holy..." Kiara took several steps backwards and almost tripped over the lower bench. Saida quickly reached out and grabbed her by the back of her shirt before she fell.

"What? What is it?"

"Wait for it to load," was her only reply.

And then it did load.

"Masha'al —" she gasped but was cut off mid phrase by a roar that deafened the ears. "Tell me I've jumped into one of your Eragon fanfictions. Please."

"This is no fanfic," Kiara whispered, her wide eyes glued to the sky. "That is. A goddamn. Dragon. This is way too plot convenient." From between the storming clouds, descended a golden dragon the size of a school bus, and the length of something much longer. Its gold body twisted through the air like a flying snake, it's wings seemingly fluid as churned the clouds like a blender.

"Permission to scream?"

"Granted."

A/N

And here is the second half. Things are about to get really really fun XD.

So are we liking Saida/Sadie?

I'm going to explain what that data curtain is right now, because by the time the plot explains it, you will have forgotten about. Tern (remember that hunter you all hate?) has developed a cloaking devices to shield areas when dragons pop up. He is on the hunt.

Next chapter we finally have our entire cast in one place. YAS. Plus Mark, because why not.

Covers up by