Flash Fiction Friday – One O Too Many

It’s Friday! Happy Friday! I actually have flash fiction today. As so often, this one is based on a prompt. Today’s prompt came from Writer-Bot, a Discord utility bot I use that has prompts and other stuff, and it was the following: ” A soldier has to rethink their strategy after a spelling error proves it wasn’t a dragoon terrorising the local villa.”

Hope you enjoy the resulting little bit of fiction!

One O Too Many

The radio crackled and a familiar voice came through. 

“Unit 14 to home base, do you read me?”

Meg held the transceiver up to her mouth, squeezing the push-to-talk. “Home base to Unit 14, hey Alex, what’s up?”

“We’re gonna need backup.”

“Backup?” She cast a glance toward the list of active assignments that sat on the desk by the radio. “It says here you’re locating a dragoon?” Sure, time-rifts made everything complicated, but she still couldn’t quite fathom why a single dude on a horse with a severely outdated gun could pose any real problem for a team of four specialists trained in wrangling the temporally displaced.

“Just send the backup.”

“You wanna tell me why?”

“Trust me, you wouldn’t believe me if I did…”

Meg shrugged. Someone would tell her what was up, eventually, but by the tone of Alex’s voice now was not the time. “All right, transmit your position and I’ll have a unit right over.”

“Make it two.”

———————–

Alex sighed and tucked the radio back into their belt, before making their way over to where their three teammates were standing.

“Any change?” they asked and the others shook their heads, looking as pale and shocked as Alex felt. “Great… Well, backup’s on the way…” they continued, and peered out between the trees in the direction of the villa. It wasn’t as though this was the first time they’d arrived at an assignment and found out their information wasn’t quite right. It happened a lot, particularly since people were generally speaking really bad at identifying what era of history someone came from. But this wasn’t a case of misidentified fashions. No, this was something much… bigger.

Alex crossed their arms over their chest and waited, keeping their eyes fixed firmly on the great, winged dragon that had curled up on the roof of the house, green scales glittering in the midday sun. 

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