Florin: Don't worry, it's gone beyond my knowledge of canon as well, and I'm the guy writing it.
Tjalorak: Well, that explains things _quite_ nicely. Thanks for the visual aid.
Nate: I am most definitely looking forward to the Stoned!N-Tate/Shizuru conversation. She'll either kill him, blackmail him, or try to 'adopt' him.
As for the thinking small thing? *chuckles* We're talking, in part, about Searrs. You know, they who blow up bridges and bring in a private freakin' _ARMY_, complete with aircraft carriers and such, into the game just to make a bloody point.
Not to mention the 33-C and orbital particle projection cannon ... *blink* er, wrong story. Anyway, yeah ... they can be subtle, but they're just as likely to go the other way.
It was a dark and stormy night.
No, really.
It was.
Two weeks ago, when I'd been in the process of riding a Frame out of Windbloom and heading for the Lutetian border with all due speed, I wasn't expecting things to take me quite this far away from the initial site.
After arriving, I'd set up camp and rested during the day. The plan had been to search the area at night, set up on a decent lookout spot for the day, and see what came out. With Schwarz's fondness for using Slaves there was a fair chance I'd sense something before I saw it, or so I thought.
Not quite right, as it turned out, but not exactly wrong either.
The first time I became aware of it was on the third day after I'd arrived there. The signature was faint, and fleeting, and normally I wouldn't have paid it much attention, but it was the first thing I'd sensed that even remotely reminded me of what a Materialization felt like. And again, it was very much unlike it, since neither Robe nor Slave popped into and out of existence again every few seconds.
It only lasted for five or so minutes, but that had given me enough time to at least get an idea of the direction these ripples were coming from.
Over the next two days, there were two further occasions when this occured, and judging by the growing strength of the ripple I'd say I was getting
closer to the cause.
I didn't find one, exactly.
Not quite so unexpected were the dead bodies and crippled vehicles of a Romulus border patrol I ran into on the second day of my following the bursts. The ice spike that ran through one of those vehicles, armor and all, was new though.
The ice was already melting, and at a visible rate, when I arrived, though. Meaning I'd gotten pretty close.
The ripple that was suddenly almost freakin' on top of me was not warning enough even if this time, pinpointing where it had come from was all too easy.
Then I was too busy hurting from multiple puncture wounds, as the Frame unbalance due to the huge fucking spike of ice that was suddenly stuck clear through it, top to bottom. Oh, and also stuck clear through my chest.
It was there and then that I once again became very, very grateful for the fact that the body I occupied most of the time was just a shell made to mimic a human one. Had I still been human, this sort of thing would have killed me. If not the puncture, then the intense _cold_.
As it was, my body wound down to the level of a biological automaton, and I had it fall limp as a puppet with its strings cut as the Frame finally keeled over, dug into the sand, and became so much mangled scrapmetal.
I waited for half an hour like that, the connection my Core maintained with it barely enough to let its senses function. I lay in wait. Sadly, also in vain.
After I was sure nobody was watching, I expanded my consciousness into the body again, focusing my AT Field to sever and remove the ice. Then I dragged myself from the still intact crash cage, and concentrated on healing my injuries.
Luckily, the regenerative properties of anything containing Angel DNA were relatively easy to activate.
I first crawled, then stumbled, then managed to actually walk in the direction I'd been attacked from. A bit of climbing had me on a stone shelf overlooking the scene of destruction below, and examining the scuffed but still visible footprints.
If the weather kept up, sand would cover those up in a matter of hours.
Didn't really matter all that much, since I could see, ever so faintly, signs of motion in the distance.
"Thank you, pretty little angel eyes," I snickered into the darkness.
Going back down let me see that I'd healed enough to move without any problems. I hauled the emergency pack out from under what was left of the Frame's seat, and trekked up to the shelf again.
I stood, turned, reached out ...
The Frame's remains crumpled, between two shifting planes of faintly visible hexagons, before I expanded the Field down and out. A few minutes later nothing of my destroyed ride was visible, since it now rested around half a dozen meters underground.
Then I frowned. Concentrated. Let my Field unfold behind me, making it as unobtrusive as possible.
The commonly known hexagonal manifestations of an AT Field's presence aren't the Field itself, you see. Rather, they're the energy caught by the Field that bleeds into the visual spectrum as a result of the interaction. The shining golden wings are actually the result of an interacton with 'local' electromagnetic fields.
Right now, barely a glimmer of amber slithered along their leading edges, which I'd expanded to many times their usual size. Normally, this would be overkill.
I wasn't about to make myself into a handy and obvious nightlight, though, so rather than, metaphorically, sticking the extensions deep into the flow of the planet's natural energy fields, I merely had them ... 'trail along the surface' would be a good way of saying it.
Slower? Yes. But also far less obtrusive.
And yes, I was ever so glad I'd figured out how to phase them through things, since otherwise the pack on my back would have been so much confetti right then.
This time, nobody noticed me following them. Not that they were really trying, I realized a day later after finding a place to lie low during daylight hours. It looked like they were on the move, and judging by the map and compass in the pack, they weren't heading for Artai.
They were heading for Aries.
'They' being a kind of desert vehicle I'd not seen on Earl until then. Low, long, wide, and skirting the sands - literally - the hovercraft left surprisingly little dust in its wake. Something the Frames had yet to manage well enough, since they were usually bloody obvious during the day. For all that, it was also quite large. I'd bet anything there was around as much room inside as there was in the trailer of a large truck.
I kept with them, making up distance at night. The air became steadily less and less dry, the vegetation more and more prevalent.
When they finally stopped, we'd reached the ocean, and the area was slowly getting lush with forest and underbrush.
That night, the confusing dreams of a shadow shrouded yet somehow still glaringly bright red moon that I'd been having ever since I'd lost the Frame were replaced with something else.
... waking to saltwater lapping at my face ... burning ache as muscles struggle with the tide ... bleeding fingers dragging my body ashore, front rubbing against rocky beach ... bandages ... soft covers ... faces ... familiarity and alienation at the same time ... nothing is as it should benothingisasitshouldbenothingisas ...
It had been disturbing in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on, the obvious ones aside.
A day later. Yesterday.
I woke up to the sensation of RobesMaterializing in the distance.
'Isn't there some sort of survival excercise that Garderobe usually holds in Aries?'
For a moment, I thought the hovercraft missing, before I spotted its bulk covered in woodland cammo netting.
Motion at the edge of the smallish clearing drew my eyes, and I brought the binoc goggles around my neck up.
A Flea - a small hoverbike type that I'd swiped the mini-turbine designs to put into the Frames from - slewed to a stop right beside the disguised craft. The person who dismounted, thought ...
'Paydirt,' I thought as John Smith, the front man of Schwarz, made his way to the large vehicle.
By then, I was praying to whoever happened to be listening in hope that the binocs' image capture still worked, despite their mildly beat-up state.
When Smith took off again a few hours later, back the way he'd come, I briefly contemplated sticking around. Then I realized he was heading in roughly the direction I'd felt the Materialization ripples come from.
That, and the fact that the skies were taking on a decidedly overcast look, and twilight seemed like it was going to come early today, sealed the deal.
I made my way back from the rise I'd taken position on, taking to the air on the opposite side from where Schwarz's people had set up shop, then circling around whilst still keeping low enough to not be spotted through the relatively thick tree cover.
Sadly, it was about five minutes into this that I realized the tree cover was also effectively stopping me from seeing any signs of Smith.
And then I picked up the Robe signatures yet again, along with the faint but still visible shapes flitting through the air in the distance. I should count myself lucky that my eyesight adjusted as well as it did - part of the whole Adam package adaptability deal I'm guessing - and seemed more acute than that of even the enhanced Otome. Then again, those enhancements I'd seen in action were mainly focused on combat, not detection.
Still, I went to ground. Better safe than sorry.
It looked like I'd stumbled across something here, with Smith in the area, and the Otome about. What, though? I didn't know, but I'd sure as hell wanted to find out.
Which had me trekking through forested mountainous terrain to avoid the eyes in the sky ...
... I used to love hiking, so things weren't as problematic as I'd initially made them out, though I did sort of wish I still had either my Frame or even a Flea.
This was yesterday. Or a few hours ago. Take your pick.
And I did run across something interesting, though not in the way I'd initially planned.
Mercy. Heh. Gabriel had reminded me not to lose it. The reminder had been both a blessing, and a curse at times. Then again, those two words often meant the same thing.
Which, I think, explained what I was doing here and now.
Sort of.
Wet.
Cold.
Rain slamming against my back and face as I glided through the storm on Field-fed wings, heading along the shoreline and for the lights far ahead.
I could feel the heat of the bundle I'd wrapped in my runner's jacket - holed and bloodied though it may have been it was still good protection against the elements - and it didn't fill me with confidence.
I'd literally stumbled across the hollow tree she'd been put inside. A blonde girl wrapped in what looked like a Garderobe issue sleeping bag, the heat of heavy fever almost tangibly hanging over her. The packs and supplies, all in twos aside from a single water flask, meant that she'd not come out here alone, and that whoever she was with had gone to get help.
Things had looked grim, though. She was fighting the fever, I could tell that much, but it didn't look very promising.
The fever also didn't look to be natural. I didn't know exactly what the nanomachines inside an Otome, even a Garderobe student like this obviously was, did. I could bet they augmented the body's healing, though.
If it wasn't natural, though ...
... cursing silently. My other leg came down on its middle, crushing the body against rocky ground. Damn. Poison didn't work on me, but the bite of the damn bugger still hurt. Figures. I go to an alien world, and of all the possible things, I get bitten by a ...
That had been a day or so prior, when I'd still been trailing the hovercraft and too busy with not being noticed that I nearly stepped on a snake.
At a guess ... Well, no. No real need to guess.
I didn't often expand my Field to interact with those of other people. Memory bleeds were useful sometimes, but more often than not the result was just an onslaught of information that didn't really amount to very much in the end. Still, some of the less useful side effects were that this let the person doing the expanding ... synchronize, sort of, with the person the Field was being expanded around.
The sudden feeling of heat, dizzyness, and other bleed-over effects of the fever were easy to shrug off for me. The flare of pain in the right ankle - the opposite of the leg I'd been bitten on - was not.
I'd snapped my Field back, wishing I'd learned how to stimulate a human body's natural healing. Angel bodies were very similar, but still sufficiently different in that regard that me trying to use that method would have resulted in ... well, either a pool of orange goo, or the girl's mind being flash fried. I think. I wasn't even going to think about what kind of feedback would happen, and what that would do to me.
My pack, which was almost empty now, provided a temporary solution. I wasn't really sure if it would do much good. The antiven Black's runners have in their packs' emergency medkit is mostly good for countering a bite or poisoning in the early stages.
It was better than nothing, though ...
Not much, as it turned out.
By midnight, the fever was no longer rising, but held steady. And the antiven doses seemed far less effective than advertised.
Later, I'd find out that the girl's nanomachines were breaking the antiven down faster than it could become fully effective as well as countering what they could of the venom - which was part of why she was still alive.
There and then, though, things didn't look all that good ...
Mercy is a funny thing that way.
I think what sealed my decision was when she'd started crying and calling out for someone called 'Nina'.
'Gabe, I don't know whether I should curse you or thank you,' I thought, swooping down towards the lights below.
Smith could wait.
Or so I hoped.
*shrugs* I like her, she's bouncy. Among other things.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
Tjalorak: Well, that explains things _quite_ nicely. Thanks for the visual aid.
Nate: I am most definitely looking forward to the Stoned!N-Tate/Shizuru conversation. She'll either kill him, blackmail him, or try to 'adopt' him.
As for the thinking small thing? *chuckles* We're talking, in part, about Searrs. You know, they who blow up bridges and bring in a private freakin' _ARMY_, complete with aircraft carriers and such, into the game just to make a bloody point.
Not to mention the 33-C and orbital particle projection cannon ... *blink* er, wrong story. Anyway, yeah ... they can be subtle, but they're just as likely to go the other way.
It was a dark and stormy night.
No, really.
It was.
Two weeks ago, when I'd been in the process of riding a Frame out of Windbloom and heading for the Lutetian border with all due speed, I wasn't expecting things to take me quite this far away from the initial site.
After arriving, I'd set up camp and rested during the day. The plan had been to search the area at night, set up on a decent lookout spot for the day, and see what came out. With Schwarz's fondness for using Slaves there was a fair chance I'd sense something before I saw it, or so I thought.
Not quite right, as it turned out, but not exactly wrong either.
The first time I became aware of it was on the third day after I'd arrived there. The signature was faint, and fleeting, and normally I wouldn't have paid it much attention, but it was the first thing I'd sensed that even remotely reminded me of what a Materialization felt like. And again, it was very much unlike it, since neither Robe nor Slave popped into and out of existence again every few seconds.
It only lasted for five or so minutes, but that had given me enough time to at least get an idea of the direction these ripples were coming from.
Over the next two days, there were two further occasions when this occured, and judging by the growing strength of the ripple I'd say I was getting
closer to the cause.
I didn't find one, exactly.
Not quite so unexpected were the dead bodies and crippled vehicles of a Romulus border patrol I ran into on the second day of my following the bursts. The ice spike that ran through one of those vehicles, armor and all, was new though.
The ice was already melting, and at a visible rate, when I arrived, though. Meaning I'd gotten pretty close.
The ripple that was suddenly almost freakin' on top of me was not warning enough even if this time, pinpointing where it had come from was all too easy.
Then I was too busy hurting from multiple puncture wounds, as the Frame unbalance due to the huge fucking spike of ice that was suddenly stuck clear through it, top to bottom. Oh, and also stuck clear through my chest.
It was there and then that I once again became very, very grateful for the fact that the body I occupied most of the time was just a shell made to mimic a human one. Had I still been human, this sort of thing would have killed me. If not the puncture, then the intense _cold_.
As it was, my body wound down to the level of a biological automaton, and I had it fall limp as a puppet with its strings cut as the Frame finally keeled over, dug into the sand, and became so much mangled scrapmetal.
I waited for half an hour like that, the connection my Core maintained with it barely enough to let its senses function. I lay in wait. Sadly, also in vain.
After I was sure nobody was watching, I expanded my consciousness into the body again, focusing my AT Field to sever and remove the ice. Then I dragged myself from the still intact crash cage, and concentrated on healing my injuries.
Luckily, the regenerative properties of anything containing Angel DNA were relatively easy to activate.
I first crawled, then stumbled, then managed to actually walk in the direction I'd been attacked from. A bit of climbing had me on a stone shelf overlooking the scene of destruction below, and examining the scuffed but still visible footprints.
If the weather kept up, sand would cover those up in a matter of hours.
Didn't really matter all that much, since I could see, ever so faintly, signs of motion in the distance.
"Thank you, pretty little angel eyes," I snickered into the darkness.
Going back down let me see that I'd healed enough to move without any problems. I hauled the emergency pack out from under what was left of the Frame's seat, and trekked up to the shelf again.
I stood, turned, reached out ...
The Frame's remains crumpled, between two shifting planes of faintly visible hexagons, before I expanded the Field down and out. A few minutes later nothing of my destroyed ride was visible, since it now rested around half a dozen meters underground.
Then I frowned. Concentrated. Let my Field unfold behind me, making it as unobtrusive as possible.
The commonly known hexagonal manifestations of an AT Field's presence aren't the Field itself, you see. Rather, they're the energy caught by the Field that bleeds into the visual spectrum as a result of the interaction. The shining golden wings are actually the result of an interacton with 'local' electromagnetic fields.
Right now, barely a glimmer of amber slithered along their leading edges, which I'd expanded to many times their usual size. Normally, this would be overkill.
I wasn't about to make myself into a handy and obvious nightlight, though, so rather than, metaphorically, sticking the extensions deep into the flow of the planet's natural energy fields, I merely had them ... 'trail along the surface' would be a good way of saying it.
Slower? Yes. But also far less obtrusive.
And yes, I was ever so glad I'd figured out how to phase them through things, since otherwise the pack on my back would have been so much confetti right then.
This time, nobody noticed me following them. Not that they were really trying, I realized a day later after finding a place to lie low during daylight hours. It looked like they were on the move, and judging by the map and compass in the pack, they weren't heading for Artai.
They were heading for Aries.
'They' being a kind of desert vehicle I'd not seen on Earl until then. Low, long, wide, and skirting the sands - literally - the hovercraft left surprisingly little dust in its wake. Something the Frames had yet to manage well enough, since they were usually bloody obvious during the day. For all that, it was also quite large. I'd bet anything there was around as much room inside as there was in the trailer of a large truck.
I kept with them, making up distance at night. The air became steadily less and less dry, the vegetation more and more prevalent.
When they finally stopped, we'd reached the ocean, and the area was slowly getting lush with forest and underbrush.
That night, the confusing dreams of a shadow shrouded yet somehow still glaringly bright red moon that I'd been having ever since I'd lost the Frame were replaced with something else.
... waking to saltwater lapping at my face ... burning ache as muscles struggle with the tide ... bleeding fingers dragging my body ashore, front rubbing against rocky beach ... bandages ... soft covers ... faces ... familiarity and alienation at the same time ... nothing is as it should benothingisasitshouldbenothingisas ...
It had been disturbing in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on, the obvious ones aside.
A day later. Yesterday.
I woke up to the sensation of RobesMaterializing in the distance.
'Isn't there some sort of survival excercise that Garderobe usually holds in Aries?'
For a moment, I thought the hovercraft missing, before I spotted its bulk covered in woodland cammo netting.
Motion at the edge of the smallish clearing drew my eyes, and I brought the binoc goggles around my neck up.
A Flea - a small hoverbike type that I'd swiped the mini-turbine designs to put into the Frames from - slewed to a stop right beside the disguised craft. The person who dismounted, thought ...
'Paydirt,' I thought as John Smith, the front man of Schwarz, made his way to the large vehicle.
By then, I was praying to whoever happened to be listening in hope that the binocs' image capture still worked, despite their mildly beat-up state.
When Smith took off again a few hours later, back the way he'd come, I briefly contemplated sticking around. Then I realized he was heading in roughly the direction I'd felt the Materialization ripples come from.
That, and the fact that the skies were taking on a decidedly overcast look, and twilight seemed like it was going to come early today, sealed the deal.
I made my way back from the rise I'd taken position on, taking to the air on the opposite side from where Schwarz's people had set up shop, then circling around whilst still keeping low enough to not be spotted through the relatively thick tree cover.
Sadly, it was about five minutes into this that I realized the tree cover was also effectively stopping me from seeing any signs of Smith.
And then I picked up the Robe signatures yet again, along with the faint but still visible shapes flitting through the air in the distance. I should count myself lucky that my eyesight adjusted as well as it did - part of the whole Adam package adaptability deal I'm guessing - and seemed more acute than that of even the enhanced Otome. Then again, those enhancements I'd seen in action were mainly focused on combat, not detection.
Still, I went to ground. Better safe than sorry.
It looked like I'd stumbled across something here, with Smith in the area, and the Otome about. What, though? I didn't know, but I'd sure as hell wanted to find out.
Which had me trekking through forested mountainous terrain to avoid the eyes in the sky ...
... I used to love hiking, so things weren't as problematic as I'd initially made them out, though I did sort of wish I still had either my Frame or even a Flea.
This was yesterday. Or a few hours ago. Take your pick.
And I did run across something interesting, though not in the way I'd initially planned.
Mercy. Heh. Gabriel had reminded me not to lose it. The reminder had been both a blessing, and a curse at times. Then again, those two words often meant the same thing.
Which, I think, explained what I was doing here and now.
Sort of.
Wet.
Cold.
Rain slamming against my back and face as I glided through the storm on Field-fed wings, heading along the shoreline and for the lights far ahead.
I could feel the heat of the bundle I'd wrapped in my runner's jacket - holed and bloodied though it may have been it was still good protection against the elements - and it didn't fill me with confidence.
I'd literally stumbled across the hollow tree she'd been put inside. A blonde girl wrapped in what looked like a Garderobe issue sleeping bag, the heat of heavy fever almost tangibly hanging over her. The packs and supplies, all in twos aside from a single water flask, meant that she'd not come out here alone, and that whoever she was with had gone to get help.
Things had looked grim, though. She was fighting the fever, I could tell that much, but it didn't look very promising.
The fever also didn't look to be natural. I didn't know exactly what the nanomachines inside an Otome, even a Garderobe student like this obviously was, did. I could bet they augmented the body's healing, though.
If it wasn't natural, though ...
... cursing silently. My other leg came down on its middle, crushing the body against rocky ground. Damn. Poison didn't work on me, but the bite of the damn bugger still hurt. Figures. I go to an alien world, and of all the possible things, I get bitten by a ...
That had been a day or so prior, when I'd still been trailing the hovercraft and too busy with not being noticed that I nearly stepped on a snake.
At a guess ... Well, no. No real need to guess.
I didn't often expand my Field to interact with those of other people. Memory bleeds were useful sometimes, but more often than not the result was just an onslaught of information that didn't really amount to very much in the end. Still, some of the less useful side effects were that this let the person doing the expanding ... synchronize, sort of, with the person the Field was being expanded around.
The sudden feeling of heat, dizzyness, and other bleed-over effects of the fever were easy to shrug off for me. The flare of pain in the right ankle - the opposite of the leg I'd been bitten on - was not.
I'd snapped my Field back, wishing I'd learned how to stimulate a human body's natural healing. Angel bodies were very similar, but still sufficiently different in that regard that me trying to use that method would have resulted in ... well, either a pool of orange goo, or the girl's mind being flash fried. I think. I wasn't even going to think about what kind of feedback would happen, and what that would do to me.
My pack, which was almost empty now, provided a temporary solution. I wasn't really sure if it would do much good. The antiven Black's runners have in their packs' emergency medkit is mostly good for countering a bite or poisoning in the early stages.
It was better than nothing, though ...
Not much, as it turned out.
By midnight, the fever was no longer rising, but held steady. And the antiven doses seemed far less effective than advertised.
Later, I'd find out that the girl's nanomachines were breaking the antiven down faster than it could become fully effective as well as countering what they could of the venom - which was part of why she was still alive.
There and then, though, things didn't look all that good ...
Mercy is a funny thing that way.
I think what sealed my decision was when she'd started crying and calling out for someone called 'Nina'.
'Gabe, I don't know whether I should curse you or thank you,' I thought, swooping down towards the lights below.
Smith could wait.
Or so I hoped.
*shrugs* I like her, she's bouncy. Among other things.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm