Re: Epic Clash [Apply today!]
01-28-2011, 04:13 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.
Teival couldn't stay there any longer. Just as it had as a child, the stifling nature of the place itched at him, digging at the base of his mind and giving strength to the niggling little doubts that he'd worked so hard to contain. What if he wasn't so powerful after all, what if he didn't deserve to live, what if he was doomed to be as dead as the rest of them, just chipping away at the icy barriers he'd erected around them and slowly seeping out into his mind. For a moment, his calm slipped.
In the distance behind him, the house became a funeral pyre.
-
"...And then we were just back- he must've been the only thing keeping us from snapping back to where we belonged. We still don't know what happened- one minute, we were all separated out and barely making a dent, and the next, we were back in here with the whole room blasted and charred.
"From there, the Overseer picked us up and stuck us in front of a huge crowd- just us and Glere. Spender and Asteira must've both died in those caves." He sighed. "It's terrible, really, that it couldn't've been one of them here with us instead of that fishbowl-headed maniac."
The pair was nearing a largish blister, and Eric was nearing the end of the story. He wasn't exactly sure how he was going to handle the last little section. That one tiny detail about Ms. Stacey being a duplicate based on his memories was hardly likely to go over well, and he wanted to steer clear of it as long as he could.
"Why is that?", she asked him. The more she heard, the less she objected to having to walk across the rubbery terrain- it was hardly a pleasant thing, to be sure, but it wasn't as bad as some of the things Thomas had been telling her about.
"Well, it, uh... This is going to sound terrible, but at least they were people."
Linda frowned. "How do you mean?"
Eric sighed. "If it were Spender," he said, taking his time and choosing his words carefully, "our choice would be easy. Do we kill a good man, a soldier, just for our own survival, or do we sacrifice ourselves so that he can go on to do good in the world? That's hardly a choice at all- we could make that in an instant and die with our consciences clear, knowing that we'd done at least one good thing in our lives.
"Asteira, even, would be preferable- she's treacherous, cruel, and entirely without morals. It sounds terrible, but killing her would be an easy decision."
"But not Glere, I take it?"
"Not so much, really. We know next to nothing about him, and what we do know is that he's either completely mad or hiding his real intentions. If we condemn him to death, we could be taking someone great from his people, but if we let him live, we could be returning a nightmare to them."
"Look," Linda replied, a bit exasperated, "you can't know everything. Maybe he's good, maybe he's bad, maybe he's just plain off-the-wall; whatever the case, it's not your fault he's here. It all comes down to the Overseer, and you can't beat yourself up over what he makes you do."
"Oh yeah?" Eric shot her a look. "I'd like to see you pull the trigger, then."
The reporter started to respond, paused, and stopped. After a moment, she just started walking again, and Thomas did as well. They were nearing their goal, now- a single, isolated blister, clearly nearing the end of its life cycle. They'd been walking towards it for some time now, and they were almost there.
A few minutes later, just as they were arriving, it burst, enveloping the area in fog. They wandered blindly through it for a few moments, both thinking about how it was probably inadvisable to be doing so with the assorted threats about but neither commenting, until finally, Thomas's hand hit metal. A few moments of following it around brought him to a door, which started swinging out and down at his touch. As it did, it shifted the fog around it enough that a designation could be seen:
PTV-433494437
A completely ordinary ship registration, indicating a completely ordinary private transport vehicle. There were millions of them in service in Thomas' time, and this one was a fairly ordinary Prifib-10, manufactured in 2418 and sold with marketing that touted the latest safety features and backups. "A family transport," the ads had called it.
For Thomas, this particular shuttle had been home for weeks at a time while constantly going back and forth between city-ships to see this or that neurological expert. He'd spent more time aboard it than at home as a child, and while it hadn't been an especially happy place for him, he certainly hadn't objected to being aboard. He'd gotten archives of various vidshows and things, and he'd spent loads of time watching the same few adventures over and over again. The specifics of the shows had been long forgotten, blurred together by the mists of time into an unrecognizable kludge identifiable only as "childhood", but the shuttle itself had remained a fixture in his mind.
For the moment, though, he wasn't terribly concerned about nostalgia or vidshows. Now, he wanted nothing more than to check the ship's operations and just leave.
"Ms. Stacey, if you wouldn't mind helping me with the pre-flight checks?"
She looked as relieved as he was. "Absolutely."
The inside of the shuttle wasn't much to look at- just a single main chamber with a pair of seats up front with the controls, a main central area not more than four meters square, and a tiny bathroom off to one side. The main door opened on the other side, sliding down and doubling as a boarding ramp. Next to the bathroom unit, a cot was half-buried under a sort of nest, a pile of blankets and pillows that a young Thomas had used to curl up in and watch shows on the wall.
While the reporter began the external checks (drive pod fractures, external warping, that sort of thing), Thomas went inside for system diagnostics. It only took a minute, and all functions registered operational. Getting up and heading for the door, he called, "How's it look, we good to fly? If we could be off this ball before the other one comes down on us, that'd be-" He froze mid-sentence when he saw the scene outside.
Teival stood behind Linda, one hand over her mouth and the other holding a spectral knife to her throat. His expression was an unsettling combination of curiosity, confusion, and hunger, co-mingling on his face in what could only be termed a predatory fashion. He saw Thomas as an interesting if minor oddity, looking at him as one might a peanut with three nuts inside or a fused pair of bananas- unusual, certainly, but not to the extent that he wouldn't consume him anyway.
"This one is nothing," the Dairen said, not even deigning to grace Linda with a personal pronoun, "and I am reasonable. I am willing to offer you a deal, if only because of your... situation, and you should rejoice that I will give you that."
"Oh, really?" Bern took control, Eric reluctantly letting it go with Greg's urging. "How about this deal- you leave the lady out of it and take up whatever problem you've got with us?"
Teival bristled. "You should be thankful I am willing to grant you this much. I could squash you in an instant, but I instead offer you a chance at civility. Be grateful and accept before I change my mind."
"What, you think you could take us down so easily? Yeah, right."
Teival next-to-snarled back, "Fine, if you insist on your arrogance, then so be it."
"Good! Just you and me, mano-a-mano, let's do this!"
Seething, the Dairen shoved Linda to one side and strode forward. "Fine. I will take your lifetimes and add them to my own, enforcing the eternal rightness that is-" He stopped, eyes wide, spasmed for a moment, then collapsed face-first on the ground. Two thin wires stretched from prongs in his back to the weapon in Linda's hand.
"The Entonware '88 Personal Defence Device," she said, grinning a bit as she quoted the taser's ads. "Because you're worth protecting."
-
Two minutes later, the Packston family transport lifted off, with Walt flying with deft fingers, Linda sweeping the comm bands for any hint of a signal, and Teival slumping unconscious in the tiny shower stall of the shuttle's bathroom.
"Setting course for anywhere else," Walt said, punching in commands. Hoping, of course, that there is anywhere else. He set the dual-core dilation generator to full, used navigational thrusters to aim them squarely away from the two psychospheres, and throttled up the power to the photon drives.
The twin planetoids fell away behind them, shrinking slowly into the distance.
Just as everyone in the shuttle (that was conscious at the time) burst into cheers, a loud, wheezing squeal cut through the cabin. Soon, it resolved from static into a voice.
"...Iiiiiiiifffffyyyoou are hearing this, then you, too, are a victim of the whims of an enigmatic master, whom has forced you into a battle to the death with many other strange beings. You are likely far from your home, far from your friends, far from your family.
"My name is Vandrel Reinhardt, and I am in a battle similar to yours. I seek allies, to overthrow these unworthy grandmasters. I assume that, if you can receive this message, then you have some way of reaching into the multiverse. Seek me out. Together, we can fight for our freedom."
Thomas blinked, then turned to Linda. She was already prodding the console, trying to determine just where the message had come from. After a moment, she shrugged. "According to the instruments, it just came out of nowhere. The ship's traced its origins somewhere, but the readout's not giving me any clear data."
"Well, if it's got it traced, does that mean we can reply?"
Another shrug. "The 'reply' button's flashing nicely, and everything seems otherwise in order. May as well try, right?"
Thomas nodded. "Right. Well, you want to go ahead, Ms. Television Personality?"
She thought for a brief moment, then shook her head. "No, you should do it. You're the person in the battle, after all, I'm just... Actually, you still haven't gotten around to telling me how I got here in the first place. Care to take a moment?"
"Maybe after this- we don't want to risk losing the trace, do we?"
Linda frowned, but it made a certain amount of sense. "Alright, fine. One moment." She pressed a few buttons, then nodded to him.
"This is Thomas Packston replying to Vandrel Reinhardt," Eric said. "We have, as you've said, been abducted and forced to do battle. This same communications channel should serve well for a good while. As for overthrowing, we're certainly interested, but we're hardly in a position to do anything. If we get the chance, believe us, we will act- we've no great love for the being who calls himself Overseer, and if given the chance, we will certainly do what we can. Packston out."
Linda cut the transmission, checked the screen, and said, "Well, it seems to have gone out. Hopefully it actually reaches this Reinhardt person."
"Mm, yeah. No telling where it could end up, with this trace."
"Right. Now that that's over, you have some explaining to do. Just how is it that I came to be here?"
Thomas, sighing, began to explain.
Teival couldn't stay there any longer. Just as it had as a child, the stifling nature of the place itched at him, digging at the base of his mind and giving strength to the niggling little doubts that he'd worked so hard to contain. What if he wasn't so powerful after all, what if he didn't deserve to live, what if he was doomed to be as dead as the rest of them, just chipping away at the icy barriers he'd erected around them and slowly seeping out into his mind. For a moment, his calm slipped.
In the distance behind him, the house became a funeral pyre.
-
"...And then we were just back- he must've been the only thing keeping us from snapping back to where we belonged. We still don't know what happened- one minute, we were all separated out and barely making a dent, and the next, we were back in here with the whole room blasted and charred.
"From there, the Overseer picked us up and stuck us in front of a huge crowd- just us and Glere. Spender and Asteira must've both died in those caves." He sighed. "It's terrible, really, that it couldn't've been one of them here with us instead of that fishbowl-headed maniac."
The pair was nearing a largish blister, and Eric was nearing the end of the story. He wasn't exactly sure how he was going to handle the last little section. That one tiny detail about Ms. Stacey being a duplicate based on his memories was hardly likely to go over well, and he wanted to steer clear of it as long as he could.
"Why is that?", she asked him. The more she heard, the less she objected to having to walk across the rubbery terrain- it was hardly a pleasant thing, to be sure, but it wasn't as bad as some of the things Thomas had been telling her about.
"Well, it, uh... This is going to sound terrible, but at least they were people."
Linda frowned. "How do you mean?"
Eric sighed. "If it were Spender," he said, taking his time and choosing his words carefully, "our choice would be easy. Do we kill a good man, a soldier, just for our own survival, or do we sacrifice ourselves so that he can go on to do good in the world? That's hardly a choice at all- we could make that in an instant and die with our consciences clear, knowing that we'd done at least one good thing in our lives.
"Asteira, even, would be preferable- she's treacherous, cruel, and entirely without morals. It sounds terrible, but killing her would be an easy decision."
"But not Glere, I take it?"
"Not so much, really. We know next to nothing about him, and what we do know is that he's either completely mad or hiding his real intentions. If we condemn him to death, we could be taking someone great from his people, but if we let him live, we could be returning a nightmare to them."
"Look," Linda replied, a bit exasperated, "you can't know everything. Maybe he's good, maybe he's bad, maybe he's just plain off-the-wall; whatever the case, it's not your fault he's here. It all comes down to the Overseer, and you can't beat yourself up over what he makes you do."
"Oh yeah?" Eric shot her a look. "I'd like to see you pull the trigger, then."
The reporter started to respond, paused, and stopped. After a moment, she just started walking again, and Thomas did as well. They were nearing their goal, now- a single, isolated blister, clearly nearing the end of its life cycle. They'd been walking towards it for some time now, and they were almost there.
A few minutes later, just as they were arriving, it burst, enveloping the area in fog. They wandered blindly through it for a few moments, both thinking about how it was probably inadvisable to be doing so with the assorted threats about but neither commenting, until finally, Thomas's hand hit metal. A few moments of following it around brought him to a door, which started swinging out and down at his touch. As it did, it shifted the fog around it enough that a designation could be seen:
PTV-433494437
A completely ordinary ship registration, indicating a completely ordinary private transport vehicle. There were millions of them in service in Thomas' time, and this one was a fairly ordinary Prifib-10, manufactured in 2418 and sold with marketing that touted the latest safety features and backups. "A family transport," the ads had called it.
For Thomas, this particular shuttle had been home for weeks at a time while constantly going back and forth between city-ships to see this or that neurological expert. He'd spent more time aboard it than at home as a child, and while it hadn't been an especially happy place for him, he certainly hadn't objected to being aboard. He'd gotten archives of various vidshows and things, and he'd spent loads of time watching the same few adventures over and over again. The specifics of the shows had been long forgotten, blurred together by the mists of time into an unrecognizable kludge identifiable only as "childhood", but the shuttle itself had remained a fixture in his mind.
For the moment, though, he wasn't terribly concerned about nostalgia or vidshows. Now, he wanted nothing more than to check the ship's operations and just leave.
"Ms. Stacey, if you wouldn't mind helping me with the pre-flight checks?"
She looked as relieved as he was. "Absolutely."
The inside of the shuttle wasn't much to look at- just a single main chamber with a pair of seats up front with the controls, a main central area not more than four meters square, and a tiny bathroom off to one side. The main door opened on the other side, sliding down and doubling as a boarding ramp. Next to the bathroom unit, a cot was half-buried under a sort of nest, a pile of blankets and pillows that a young Thomas had used to curl up in and watch shows on the wall.
While the reporter began the external checks (drive pod fractures, external warping, that sort of thing), Thomas went inside for system diagnostics. It only took a minute, and all functions registered operational. Getting up and heading for the door, he called, "How's it look, we good to fly? If we could be off this ball before the other one comes down on us, that'd be-" He froze mid-sentence when he saw the scene outside.
Teival stood behind Linda, one hand over her mouth and the other holding a spectral knife to her throat. His expression was an unsettling combination of curiosity, confusion, and hunger, co-mingling on his face in what could only be termed a predatory fashion. He saw Thomas as an interesting if minor oddity, looking at him as one might a peanut with three nuts inside or a fused pair of bananas- unusual, certainly, but not to the extent that he wouldn't consume him anyway.
"This one is nothing," the Dairen said, not even deigning to grace Linda with a personal pronoun, "and I am reasonable. I am willing to offer you a deal, if only because of your... situation, and you should rejoice that I will give you that."
"Oh, really?" Bern took control, Eric reluctantly letting it go with Greg's urging. "How about this deal- you leave the lady out of it and take up whatever problem you've got with us?"
Teival bristled. "You should be thankful I am willing to grant you this much. I could squash you in an instant, but I instead offer you a chance at civility. Be grateful and accept before I change my mind."
"What, you think you could take us down so easily? Yeah, right."
Teival next-to-snarled back, "Fine, if you insist on your arrogance, then so be it."
"Good! Just you and me, mano-a-mano, let's do this!"
Seething, the Dairen shoved Linda to one side and strode forward. "Fine. I will take your lifetimes and add them to my own, enforcing the eternal rightness that is-" He stopped, eyes wide, spasmed for a moment, then collapsed face-first on the ground. Two thin wires stretched from prongs in his back to the weapon in Linda's hand.
"The Entonware '88 Personal Defence Device," she said, grinning a bit as she quoted the taser's ads. "Because you're worth protecting."
-
Two minutes later, the Packston family transport lifted off, with Walt flying with deft fingers, Linda sweeping the comm bands for any hint of a signal, and Teival slumping unconscious in the tiny shower stall of the shuttle's bathroom.
"Setting course for anywhere else," Walt said, punching in commands. Hoping, of course, that there is anywhere else. He set the dual-core dilation generator to full, used navigational thrusters to aim them squarely away from the two psychospheres, and throttled up the power to the photon drives.
The twin planetoids fell away behind them, shrinking slowly into the distance.
Just as everyone in the shuttle (that was conscious at the time) burst into cheers, a loud, wheezing squeal cut through the cabin. Soon, it resolved from static into a voice.
"...Iiiiiiiifffffyyyoou are hearing this, then you, too, are a victim of the whims of an enigmatic master, whom has forced you into a battle to the death with many other strange beings. You are likely far from your home, far from your friends, far from your family.
"My name is Vandrel Reinhardt, and I am in a battle similar to yours. I seek allies, to overthrow these unworthy grandmasters. I assume that, if you can receive this message, then you have some way of reaching into the multiverse. Seek me out. Together, we can fight for our freedom."
Thomas blinked, then turned to Linda. She was already prodding the console, trying to determine just where the message had come from. After a moment, she shrugged. "According to the instruments, it just came out of nowhere. The ship's traced its origins somewhere, but the readout's not giving me any clear data."
"Well, if it's got it traced, does that mean we can reply?"
Another shrug. "The 'reply' button's flashing nicely, and everything seems otherwise in order. May as well try, right?"
Thomas nodded. "Right. Well, you want to go ahead, Ms. Television Personality?"
She thought for a brief moment, then shook her head. "No, you should do it. You're the person in the battle, after all, I'm just... Actually, you still haven't gotten around to telling me how I got here in the first place. Care to take a moment?"
"Maybe after this- we don't want to risk losing the trace, do we?"
Linda frowned, but it made a certain amount of sense. "Alright, fine. One moment." She pressed a few buttons, then nodded to him.
"This is Thomas Packston replying to Vandrel Reinhardt," Eric said. "We have, as you've said, been abducted and forced to do battle. This same communications channel should serve well for a good while. As for overthrowing, we're certainly interested, but we're hardly in a position to do anything. If we get the chance, believe us, we will act- we've no great love for the being who calls himself Overseer, and if given the chance, we will certainly do what we can. Packston out."
Linda cut the transmission, checked the screen, and said, "Well, it seems to have gone out. Hopefully it actually reaches this Reinhardt person."
"Mm, yeah. No telling where it could end up, with this trace."
"Right. Now that that's over, you have some explaining to do. Just how is it that I came to be here?"
Thomas, sighing, began to explain.
Spoiler