Pick or Be Picked

On Neksis Five, as they say, pick or be picked. Failing that, run faster than the flowers and you might live.
That was what I did today, 'day' being a relative term— the compound lights switch on and off in fifteen-part cycles to make up for how dim the sun is, and I guess that will have to count. The wind, of course, doesn't help matters. It scours away feathers like flying teeth and sometimes drops rocks on your head: not conductive to a good day at all. And it screams. Last time I went outside it almost swatted me into a cliff, and when they say 'cliff' here, they mean 'cliff.' Thousands of wingspans high!
I've told you this, right?
Yeah. Last turn of the patrol circuit. What was it, ten divisions? A year?
Hard to tell with no sun and no seasons and no sane people to reckon the date. Scientists, you know. I'm just security. I get to watch sand. And the Demolishers.
Oh, those Demolishers. I've told you about them, too.
Anyway, back to flowers. They aren't real flowers, but Aunt Thubura insists on calling them that because they have something like petals and are among the few growing things here that don't try to bite your fingers off if you touch them. Also, they don't chase you. Much. And when you cut them from their stalks they bleed a more diluted sort of acid. They're black and purple, and I made sure to bring along our corrosion-resistant buckets this time. You know the ones— remember the jumping jaw-face incident?
So there I was, on the surface, all dressed up in my breather mask (can't breathe sand— or ammonia, to think of it) and hauling these two buckets behind me. The wind was blowing, one constant shock of flying rock powder against my shields, and it was so cold I could imagine my beak shattering like yellow glass, pieces scattered across the ash. One tap and CRACK! Beak confetti. I was flying on both pairs of wings, buckets hooked into my tails, and I still couldn't make much headway. Not without resorting to madwork. Anywhere else, of course, it would have been like buzzing a park full of chicks— madwork, all the way, like normal— but the Demolishers don't like it. They figure it's "an offense to their hierarchical methods of progression," which basically means the following:
1. Aunt Thubura and I can do these things and they can't.
2. They've noticed no one else in the compound can do these things either.
3. They know that the compound in general has technology that they don't. A lot that they don't.
4. They know that if they cooperate with the compound, they can have the technology. They also know that, no matter what they do, they can't have what Aunt Thubura and I have because it isn't a technological thing, it's a species thing. Short of transforming themselves into Firebirds they have no way of copying all the great things that we can do.
5. They hate that.
Administration, suffering the Empire-granted duty of keeping the Demolishers happy enough to convince the local masters to volunteer as soldiering subjects, has therefore prohibited the both of us from performing any overt display of power. To be specific, anything both conscious and intentional, which shuts down a lot more than you'd think. Oh, I can still handle the weather and get myself out of trouble if I have to, but anything that I can shut off and keep off has to be off.
I have to use doors. Actual doors. I hadn't realized the sorts of inconvenient places doors were in until a few months ago— only one or two points of entry to any given structure, and all of these inevitably opening into the wrong room or a long, boring, empty hallway.
So... no hopping. No supersonic travel (the shockwaves can start rock slides in this atmosphere, thick as it is, and the rocks fall like they're attached to parachutes). No phasing through solid objects like walls. No illusion work. No smacking around any Demolishers that cause trouble unless it's a more extreme form of trouble than our defenses can handle. This, so far, hasn't happened.
Well, they tried a rush with those funny little exploding guns once, but we just shut the doors and waited them out. Gatodos says they would have been able to do some actual damage a few thousand years ago, when they were on the ascendant, but an orbital defensive system gone horribly, horribly wrong solved that for us in a big way. We're just lucky, I suppose. Not that Gatodos would admit it.
Anyway, we're not allowed to use what evolution gave us. Never mind that no one would order an Imperial to take off their skin or stop walking on their feet.
It sounds like I'm complaining: I'm not. I'm just stating fact. Accurate recordings of this sort of thing will be very valuable one day. Future generations have to know what trials and suffering their ancestors went through, so they can marvel at our accomplishments and suffer through tests concerning our mighty deeds.
Like harvesting flowers, for instance.
Wind shrieking. Sand clawing. Cold as cursing. Neksis Five: the only planet where entire mountains lurk in hiding. One wrong turn, I tell you. One. Wrong. Turn.
The flowers were preparing for their afternoon hunt when I found them.