Re: Vendetta [S!2 Round 1 ~ Presidentialgon]
09-27-2012, 09:08 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.
When Altara had pledged herself to aid Zenith, she had expected him to already have some goal in mind and likely a way that she could be used to aid him in whatever that goal might be. This wasn’t really all that representative of Zenith’s actions or behaviour based on her time spent with him (if truth be told Altara had been so focused upon her own objective that she had paid next to no attention to the alien, save when necessary). This was a notion that she harboured about humans (as far as she was concerned Zenith was close enough to be classified as a human); that they were all uniformly treacherous and manipulative. She believed that the inclination to scheme and plot on how to turn any given situation to their own ends was an innate aspect of humanity.
Zenith didn’t really have much of an idea what his long term goal was at this point. The most obvious and pressing concern, one that didn’t seem to bother the druid, was this battle to the death. However, he was sworn to help people, not to hurt them and definitely not to kill them. The idea of asking her to end the life of one of his competition did cross his mind, but it was unconscionable. Maybe if he had more time to think, and a less distracting environment to thin in, he might have opted to ask Altara to protect him, in the hope of forming a more concrete alliance between them. But before he might have reached this conclusion Altara was using a machine to produce fully grown insects within seconds and he made his mind up then and there.
Dr. Zenith Grey pressed a couple of buttons on the robotic gauntlet he wore, and in response the gauntlet projected a holographic display showing his catalogue of species. It was a work in progress, a complete anatomical record of every species of creature he had encountered and hopefully one day a complete record of every species that existed. Of course, even before the battle and the implications therein, Zenith had known that completing such a catalogue was the work of more than one lifetime and perhaps not even possible given multiple generations of work. This didn’t deter him from recording new species when he could, and now before him fluttered creatures he had never seen before, which no member of his species had seen before.
He requested that Altara generate samples of as many different species as she could. She was happy to do so, if not a little suspicious.
--------
Colin Andrews was someone that everyone knew. They would pass him in the corridors, he always seemed to be in the more important meetings and from time to time he would speak at press conferences about the issues of the day. However the thing about Colin Andrews was that nobody seemed to know what it was that he did. Nobody ever really asked any questions because they assumed that someone else knew what he did and even if they were to be suspicious for a moment that suspicion would be quickly slain by the fact that it was Colin Andrews. Good old Colin Andrews, above suspicion more or less because he was so familiar, so completely unthreatening.
The Special Projects Unit was Colin’s brainchild, as was the fact that the SPU was to be kept secret from the highest ranking governmental officials, even from the President himself (especially from the President himself). Without wishing to wander too far from the point he did not believe that the government could be trusted with the power that lay within the items the SPU hoarded, though they might from time to time benefit (unknowingly) from them. At this point you might be wondering what made him so qualified to hold these items of great power and wield them as he sees fit, but come on, this is Colin Andrews we’re talking about here. He’s not a bad guy, right?
As pockets of chaos had erupted throughout the Presidentialgon Colin hadn’t been worried. A talking deer had been appointed to head up a newly created and extremely alarmist governmental position, whilst throughout the public areas of the Presidentialgon there were riots and dangerous individuals ran free. While others panicked and desperately tried to bring the situation under control (no less than seven bills to ‘burn down all the forests’ had been presented to the House of Congress in the last hour) Colin remained calm and resolute. He’d been through one office in the Department of Agriculture where the Secretary had been drinking himself to death whilst everyone else was alternately packing all their things and smashing up the place. Colin knew that at some point he was going to need to step back, assess the political (and physical) damage that had been done and work out how to fix it, but for now he was finding it kind of amusing.
Or he had been.
Then he had received an automatic notification on his handheld computer telling him that unauthorised SPU tech had been opened by unknown fingerprints. This was a disaster. Forget all the damage being caused throughout the facility and people being whipped up into unruly mobs about things that probably didn’t even exist, if they were catastrophes then this was the end of the world as he knew it, and before he could even process that it had gotten worse as a forest started to grow at unnatural speeds throughout the facility. This was SPU tech laid bare to the world. Before this he might have been able to send a covert team down there and silence those responsible and keep a lid on this entire thing but now… he couldn’t even find the words to express his devastation.
The only advantage he had was the chaos that currently reigned in the Presidentialgon and the fact that government was never quick to respond to a crisis. It would not be today that they would look into how this happened (an investigation that would as things stand expose him and ruin everything he had ever worked for), it might not even be tomorrow. He had some time and he needed to act, to destroy everything that could link him to the unauthorised and morally questionable operation that had been going on for years, right here in the Presidentialgon, right under everyone’s noses. And he would have to kill everyone who knew about it, it was just a matter of fact. If he wanted to survive then his entire staff (and the intruders of course) would have to be dealt with.
Colin wasted no time. He made his way to the Department of Supplies where he filled out the appropriate forms and was supplied with a number of deadly weapons. The clerk had looked a little concerned, but everything was in order; Colin had the appropriate authorisation (he always did) and so the items were handed over. Shortly afterwards the clerk got a bullet in his head for his troubles. Can’t leave any witnesses, Colin mused amiably as he tore to shreds the requisition documents. He would have to remember to make sure the network of cameras had all had a mysterious malfunction when he was done with his current task.
The vault was located in a section of the Presidentialgon which was mostly given over to maintenance and automated systems. Colin only saw one or two people on the way down and they were too engrossed in their own personal disasters (most likely the extra work they were having to do to deal with the current calamity) to pay him any attention, even with flecks of blood on his shirt and a gun jammed into his belt. Really the building should have been evacuated long ago but President Kipling just kept making speeches about how wonderfully brave and steadfast the people of NeoTransAmerica were being in this troubled time; Colin was particularly proud of his hand in his appointment.
Colin would have admitted to feeling a certain amount of trepidation as he stood at the door to the vault. Whoever was inside was of an unknown quantity and was surrounded by crates filled with highly advanced technology; 95% of which could be weaponised at a moment’s notice. After a moment’s hesitation (and no more) he entered the combination, made his way down the short security corridor and opened the inner door up with his palmprint. Though he would have been hard pressed to say what he had been expecting he was pretty sure he wasn’t expecting what looked like the world’s most dangerous petting zoo.
There were snakes, enormous spiders as big as his fists, monkeys climbing amongst the crates, a golden maned lion sauntering nonchalantly between the aisles and an emerald green basilisk half-hidden in the shade beneath the shelves. The scene was eerie in its remarkable placidity; the animals here ought have been killing one another, or if not that then surely they shouldn’t have been this well behaved. The only sign that something was amiss was a bickering coming from the back of the room. Colin had his gun out in a second and was wishing he had opted for a silenced model so he could dispose of these creatures without alerting the intruders. As he stalked through the worringly tame wild animals the atmosphere seemed to change. The bickering turned to full on arguing as the voices were raised and the creatures seemed to regain their predatory edge.
As he reached the end of the row he saw a woman, who seemed to bear a passing resemblance to Celia Rensfield (an agent who worked for him) but younger and inexplicably garbed in a length of torn white curtains. Standing opposite her was an alien ripped straight from a bad B-Movie; holding a scalpel in one hand and some kind of cute furry creature that didn’t look exactly natural in the other. Around them animals were tensed up, baring their teeth and growling as the argument became more and more intense. A bear reared up onto its hind legs and really Colin should have shot them there and then.
The alien went to lower his scalpel and before it even left his hand, the woman’s attention was elsewhere. She’d noticed Colin and suddenly all hell was breaking loose. Colin opened fire on the pair, though the bullets were slowed or sent off course by the same kind of air manipulation Altara had used to scatter the seeds. In a moment the animals turned from merely threatening to violent. Those nearest the SPU administrator tensed and leapt, and whilst this was going on Zenith took this opportunity to turn and flee the vault.
In what seemed like just a moment it was all done.
Zenith was gone and Colin was dying on the floor, his throat torn out by an enormous wolf. Around him were the corpses of creatures; their bodies torn apart by the bullets that ripped through them. Altara didn’t move. Beneath her calm exterior roared an ocean of rage. She pledged herself to help Zenith and he repaid her by wishing to perform ‘science’ upon her creatures; he requested her aid in cutting them open and documenting how they fit together, what made them tick. That this man, the memories of the woman whose body she inhabited identified him as Colin Andrews, tried to kill her and did kill some of her dear creatures was almost irrelevant; just another horror inflicted upon her by the beasts known as men. She decided there and then that this wouldn’t stand one second longer. She’d reclaim this place more properly, she would force out or kill every last human. It was no more than they deserved.
When Altara had pledged herself to aid Zenith, she had expected him to already have some goal in mind and likely a way that she could be used to aid him in whatever that goal might be. This wasn’t really all that representative of Zenith’s actions or behaviour based on her time spent with him (if truth be told Altara had been so focused upon her own objective that she had paid next to no attention to the alien, save when necessary). This was a notion that she harboured about humans (as far as she was concerned Zenith was close enough to be classified as a human); that they were all uniformly treacherous and manipulative. She believed that the inclination to scheme and plot on how to turn any given situation to their own ends was an innate aspect of humanity.
Zenith didn’t really have much of an idea what his long term goal was at this point. The most obvious and pressing concern, one that didn’t seem to bother the druid, was this battle to the death. However, he was sworn to help people, not to hurt them and definitely not to kill them. The idea of asking her to end the life of one of his competition did cross his mind, but it was unconscionable. Maybe if he had more time to think, and a less distracting environment to thin in, he might have opted to ask Altara to protect him, in the hope of forming a more concrete alliance between them. But before he might have reached this conclusion Altara was using a machine to produce fully grown insects within seconds and he made his mind up then and there.
Dr. Zenith Grey pressed a couple of buttons on the robotic gauntlet he wore, and in response the gauntlet projected a holographic display showing his catalogue of species. It was a work in progress, a complete anatomical record of every species of creature he had encountered and hopefully one day a complete record of every species that existed. Of course, even before the battle and the implications therein, Zenith had known that completing such a catalogue was the work of more than one lifetime and perhaps not even possible given multiple generations of work. This didn’t deter him from recording new species when he could, and now before him fluttered creatures he had never seen before, which no member of his species had seen before.
He requested that Altara generate samples of as many different species as she could. She was happy to do so, if not a little suspicious.
--------
Colin Andrews was someone that everyone knew. They would pass him in the corridors, he always seemed to be in the more important meetings and from time to time he would speak at press conferences about the issues of the day. However the thing about Colin Andrews was that nobody seemed to know what it was that he did. Nobody ever really asked any questions because they assumed that someone else knew what he did and even if they were to be suspicious for a moment that suspicion would be quickly slain by the fact that it was Colin Andrews. Good old Colin Andrews, above suspicion more or less because he was so familiar, so completely unthreatening.
The Special Projects Unit was Colin’s brainchild, as was the fact that the SPU was to be kept secret from the highest ranking governmental officials, even from the President himself (especially from the President himself). Without wishing to wander too far from the point he did not believe that the government could be trusted with the power that lay within the items the SPU hoarded, though they might from time to time benefit (unknowingly) from them. At this point you might be wondering what made him so qualified to hold these items of great power and wield them as he sees fit, but come on, this is Colin Andrews we’re talking about here. He’s not a bad guy, right?
As pockets of chaos had erupted throughout the Presidentialgon Colin hadn’t been worried. A talking deer had been appointed to head up a newly created and extremely alarmist governmental position, whilst throughout the public areas of the Presidentialgon there were riots and dangerous individuals ran free. While others panicked and desperately tried to bring the situation under control (no less than seven bills to ‘burn down all the forests’ had been presented to the House of Congress in the last hour) Colin remained calm and resolute. He’d been through one office in the Department of Agriculture where the Secretary had been drinking himself to death whilst everyone else was alternately packing all their things and smashing up the place. Colin knew that at some point he was going to need to step back, assess the political (and physical) damage that had been done and work out how to fix it, but for now he was finding it kind of amusing.
Or he had been.
Then he had received an automatic notification on his handheld computer telling him that unauthorised SPU tech had been opened by unknown fingerprints. This was a disaster. Forget all the damage being caused throughout the facility and people being whipped up into unruly mobs about things that probably didn’t even exist, if they were catastrophes then this was the end of the world as he knew it, and before he could even process that it had gotten worse as a forest started to grow at unnatural speeds throughout the facility. This was SPU tech laid bare to the world. Before this he might have been able to send a covert team down there and silence those responsible and keep a lid on this entire thing but now… he couldn’t even find the words to express his devastation.
The only advantage he had was the chaos that currently reigned in the Presidentialgon and the fact that government was never quick to respond to a crisis. It would not be today that they would look into how this happened (an investigation that would as things stand expose him and ruin everything he had ever worked for), it might not even be tomorrow. He had some time and he needed to act, to destroy everything that could link him to the unauthorised and morally questionable operation that had been going on for years, right here in the Presidentialgon, right under everyone’s noses. And he would have to kill everyone who knew about it, it was just a matter of fact. If he wanted to survive then his entire staff (and the intruders of course) would have to be dealt with.
Colin wasted no time. He made his way to the Department of Supplies where he filled out the appropriate forms and was supplied with a number of deadly weapons. The clerk had looked a little concerned, but everything was in order; Colin had the appropriate authorisation (he always did) and so the items were handed over. Shortly afterwards the clerk got a bullet in his head for his troubles. Can’t leave any witnesses, Colin mused amiably as he tore to shreds the requisition documents. He would have to remember to make sure the network of cameras had all had a mysterious malfunction when he was done with his current task.
The vault was located in a section of the Presidentialgon which was mostly given over to maintenance and automated systems. Colin only saw one or two people on the way down and they were too engrossed in their own personal disasters (most likely the extra work they were having to do to deal with the current calamity) to pay him any attention, even with flecks of blood on his shirt and a gun jammed into his belt. Really the building should have been evacuated long ago but President Kipling just kept making speeches about how wonderfully brave and steadfast the people of NeoTransAmerica were being in this troubled time; Colin was particularly proud of his hand in his appointment.
Colin would have admitted to feeling a certain amount of trepidation as he stood at the door to the vault. Whoever was inside was of an unknown quantity and was surrounded by crates filled with highly advanced technology; 95% of which could be weaponised at a moment’s notice. After a moment’s hesitation (and no more) he entered the combination, made his way down the short security corridor and opened the inner door up with his palmprint. Though he would have been hard pressed to say what he had been expecting he was pretty sure he wasn’t expecting what looked like the world’s most dangerous petting zoo.
There were snakes, enormous spiders as big as his fists, monkeys climbing amongst the crates, a golden maned lion sauntering nonchalantly between the aisles and an emerald green basilisk half-hidden in the shade beneath the shelves. The scene was eerie in its remarkable placidity; the animals here ought have been killing one another, or if not that then surely they shouldn’t have been this well behaved. The only sign that something was amiss was a bickering coming from the back of the room. Colin had his gun out in a second and was wishing he had opted for a silenced model so he could dispose of these creatures without alerting the intruders. As he stalked through the worringly tame wild animals the atmosphere seemed to change. The bickering turned to full on arguing as the voices were raised and the creatures seemed to regain their predatory edge.
As he reached the end of the row he saw a woman, who seemed to bear a passing resemblance to Celia Rensfield (an agent who worked for him) but younger and inexplicably garbed in a length of torn white curtains. Standing opposite her was an alien ripped straight from a bad B-Movie; holding a scalpel in one hand and some kind of cute furry creature that didn’t look exactly natural in the other. Around them animals were tensed up, baring their teeth and growling as the argument became more and more intense. A bear reared up onto its hind legs and really Colin should have shot them there and then.
The alien went to lower his scalpel and before it even left his hand, the woman’s attention was elsewhere. She’d noticed Colin and suddenly all hell was breaking loose. Colin opened fire on the pair, though the bullets were slowed or sent off course by the same kind of air manipulation Altara had used to scatter the seeds. In a moment the animals turned from merely threatening to violent. Those nearest the SPU administrator tensed and leapt, and whilst this was going on Zenith took this opportunity to turn and flee the vault.
In what seemed like just a moment it was all done.
Zenith was gone and Colin was dying on the floor, his throat torn out by an enormous wolf. Around him were the corpses of creatures; their bodies torn apart by the bullets that ripped through them. Altara didn’t move. Beneath her calm exterior roared an ocean of rage. She pledged herself to help Zenith and he repaid her by wishing to perform ‘science’ upon her creatures; he requested her aid in cutting them open and documenting how they fit together, what made them tick. That this man, the memories of the woman whose body she inhabited identified him as Colin Andrews, tried to kill her and did kill some of her dear creatures was almost irrelevant; just another horror inflicted upon her by the beasts known as men. She decided there and then that this wouldn’t stand one second longer. She’d reclaim this place more properly, she would force out or kill every last human. It was no more than they deserved.
Heaven Help Us | Make Room!!!! | I'm Not Okay (I Promise)
Hang 'Em High | The Only Hope For Me Is You | Zero Percent | Early Sunsets Over Monroeville | DESTROYA | Demolition Lovers | To The End
Surrender The Night | Disenchanted | The Ghost Of You | Party Poison | Vampires Will Never Hurt You | The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You
Hang 'Em High | The Only Hope For Me Is You | Zero Percent | Early Sunsets Over Monroeville | DESTROYA | Demolition Lovers | To The End
Surrender The Night | Disenchanted | The Ghost Of You | Party Poison | Vampires Will Never Hurt You | The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You