legionmissions | The Demon Core [closed]

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The Demon Core [closed]

Who| Dipper and Pidge
What| A duo mission gone haywire
Where| Planet Freep, the Second Galaxy
When| After Silent Horizon, before Books of Magic and Out With the Old
Warnings/Notes| N/a

The mission is simple. As part of the ongoing diplomatic missions to the Second Galaxy, they're to meet with the leaders of the planet Freep in a peaceful exchange of information about Freep's technology and what technology the UP can offer them, so that trade can be opened up between them.

Pidge is on the mission due to her technical expertise and Dipper's supposed to be some extra muscle in case things go south, to help Pidge hold out until backup can come from the Legion. Kid Quantum felt the mission was easy enough for it to be a good place for Dipper to dip his toes back in the water after his involuntary medical leave.

So far, it's been as easy as expected. The Freepians have very advanced computer technology and energy sources to share, and they're very pleased with the threshold gates and hard light holograms that the UP can offer.

There's not much that Dipper can do when it comes to all the tech stuff so he leans against a nearby wall with his arms crossed, as Pidge gets to work, smiling a little at her obvious enthusiasm.

...And trying to avoid seeming like he's staring because that'd come off totally weird and creepy. Doo dee doo, just minding his business, keeping an eye out for potential threats.

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Pidge separates from Dipper and hangs back in mid-air, watching and calculating. She really hopes she's got the valve and pipe schematics right so she can open the right one at the right time. She hopes Nuclon's not keeping a trump card up his sleeve. And she can't wait to see Dipper kick his ass/

She vanishes and follows after a few moments. The crash is her cue, and she gets down in time to spot Nuclon's dazed expression before the rubble covers his face. For a second, she lets herself wonder if that might have stopped him for good. But then she sees the glow between the cracks and takes her place at the wheel that opens the valve. It shouldn't take Dipper much to lure him under it, and she jiggles the wheel slightly.

One of the dried up pipes starts to drip coolant in Dipper's line of sight. That's the target. Ball is in Dipper's court.

Dipper almost gets him there. Almost.

"Clock's ticking, kid!" cries out Nuclon, as he blasts energy at Dipper's teke forcefield. "I don't know how you got out of that pit I threw you in, but you're not going to stop the meltdown in time. This reactor is filling with radiation as we speak. Before long, even your protective suit won't be enough to protect you, and then...kaboom."

"You want kaboom? I can give you kaboom," says Dipper, and there's a loud KABOOM as his teke explosively slams against Nuclon, knocking him into a wall so hard the concrete shatters. Dipper stands ready for the villain to lunge at him one last time, ready to slingshot him under the coolant valve.

But then Nuclon blasts...past him?

"Did you really think I forgot your little friend?" Nuclon laughs, and Dipper turns to see a massive empty metal vat falling towards Pidge. It's too wide to dodge or fly out from under.

"No!" Dipper doesn't have enough time to fly over and stand under it or fly her out of the way. So he just reaches out with his teke to catch it, stretching his teke field thinner as he exerts most of the force away from himself. He catches the vat and shoves it aside but because of exerting his field that way, it's not shielding himself quite as well.

That's how Nuclon manages to get in a blow from behind that slams him against a metal railing, head first. Dipper falls the ground, forehead bleeding, his teke field flickering out as he falls unconscious.

Nuclon walks over and picks him up, dangling his body by one arm. "I know what you're trying to do," he calls out to Pidge. "Trying to cool me down and then you think you're going to stop the meltdown. But you're going to be a little too busy for that. Trying to save your friend."

With the hand that isn't holding Dipper's arm, he picks up a piece of twisted metal from the floor, damaged by the fight, and uses it to create a tear across Dipper's chest, one that cuts through both transuit and uniform to draw blood.

"Whoopsie." He tosses the unconscious Legionnaire behind him, and tosses the metal away. "Between me and the core, there's a whole lot of radiation in this room. How many rads do you think he's absorbing per minute? 200? 500? I couldn't even say, at this point!"

Pidge ducks, hoping, praying, her small size would save her from the metal vat. But then the shadow that loomed over her suddenly started moving in the other direction and her heart sank.

She could call out to Dipper, tell him not to do it, to stick to the plan. For all the good it would do. She can guess he's acting on instinct and sure enough, it works. Nuclon blasts him away, Dipper goes down and...he's not getting up.

That is, until Nuclon lifts him up and...no.

Pidge twists the valve as hard as she can, letting the coolant flow free and fast, before flying into the air and in front of Nuclon, still invisible. If he's going to make this personal, she's going to go all out.

From behind him, the metal gives a soft "klang" where her bayard connects with it, and then a sharp whip-crack when the cable snaps the metal forward, on target with his back.

She needs to get him down as fast as humanly possible. And she needs to show him only thing he's done is made her twice as determined to save the reactor and Dipper, no matter what the cost.

He sees her. It's only glimpses, as he fights his way back to consciousness. It's not enough for him to be aware of what's going on, to be able to process the logic of getting his teke field back up to see if that can help, or to patch his transuit.

It's only little fleeting moments -- and his brain doesn't even try to focus on anything else. It just...sees her. The only coherent thoughts that ever fight their way to the surface, are:

Fighting. For a world.

And for you.

That's the best his brain can kick out as the fight goes on, just completely unfocused admiration, and the vague thought that his chest feels far too hot.

The metal connects to his back and she drops her invisibility. And drops to the ground. Nuclon roars in anger and pain as the side slams right into his middle, and as he goes down the metal flips up and over them both.

Pidge can't waste a second, but she can multitask, and as she releases her bayard from the slab and it snaps back to her hand, she aims it forward. The blow wasn't enough to take Nuclon down completely, but it was enough to keep him in one place as she did her calculations.

"You think I can't take you down, save my friend, and this planet!? Well, guess what? You're wrong!" She fires, just as he stands, and it crunches into his gut, the momentum propelling him directly under the stream of coolant.

It was less clever and more...filled with anger. But it dissipates the moment she turns around and sees Dipper lying there motionless, which causes her eyes to feel hot for reasons outside the growing temperature of the room. He has a patch kit, right?

OK...right in his pouch. She sets to work on his suit, sealing the rip with slightly trembling hands.

"Dipper?! Dipper, talk to me!"

He groans, but she's calling out to him and her voice sounds urgent, urgent enough for his worry to carry him back to consciousness.

Also...something's wrong. The skin of his chest feels like it's burned and the burning feeling is spreading through his chest. After she patches his suit, it's not as bad as it was, but something feels...wrong, like there are prickles shooting through his body, only now just fading as the transuit regains integrity. And his head is killing him. It could just be a concussion but it feels like something else is compounding it.

By the time he sits up, he's sweating, his face pale. The skin that's visible through his torn uniform, the skin closest to the transuit rip and the patch, is a nasty shade of red. Not all of it is red from the bloody scratch, some of it is an obvious radiation burn.

He could panic over how many rads he took, and it does take him a moment to collect himself, but then something explodes in the control room not far from them, and he tries to move past it, just like that.

"The core. Probably still overloading. We have to -- to --"

He goes paler and leans over, retching and throwing up. The transuits are, fortunately, programmed and constructed well. Air is kept in, contaminants are kept out, bodily fluids like blood and vomit are expelled. He spits.

"Concussion can do that. Yep. Concussion can totally do that. Let's go with that for right now." For now, it doesn't matter. He's injured, he'll work past it. "The core. How do we shut down the core?"

With that, he tries to stand, so he can do all he can to help. He's too dizzy to do it on his own, or to use his teke for it, or to even focus on using his flight ring to help him.

Ugh, she should be used to this from Hunk. But then again Hunk throws up from motion sickness, not dying of radiation poison on the floor. She turns her head as he vomits, towards the rapidly spinning core.

"Right! Sure!" She loops an arm around him to help him (or haul him, whichever works) to his feet. He probably does have a concussion, that much is true. She scans the room, certain she saw...there. A rack of control rods.

"There! If we insert those rods, we can stop the reactor from building up power!" She glances back at the reactor. "That is, if we could get close enough to it without boiling alive..."

Dipper extends a tendril of teke to pick one of the control rods up. It wobbles in the air as he goes to shove it into the dock that needs it, but it melts into a molten pool on the ground when it gets too close.

"I'm going to have to do this faster, aren't I," he asks. "So it can start absorbing neutrons or whatever it's absorbing, before it gets hot enough to melt."

Of course this had to be harder than just gently lowering a control rod into place. He's going to have to fling it at high speed, into a very narrow target, while entire the world is spinning.

"How fast? Can you figure it out using your omnicom?" A pause, and the tiniest grin. "And your giant brain?"

Because calculating it is going to be a factor, so he's giving credit where it's due.

"And if we douse one of them in coolant first, would it make it so it wouldn't have to be as fast?"

Edited 2017-06-13 00:38 (UTC)

"Uh...couldn't hurt? No idea if it'll help either." Pidge suspects that the speed is going to matter just a bit less than the aim and, oh man, it's great that Dipper has such a high opinion of her but she's not really as much of a physicist as she she is a computer programmer. The Omnicom is going to have to fill in the gaps.

Her fingers fly over the Omnicom. "How straight can you see right now, because you are going to have to throw it at least 200 miles an hour and your aim has to be perfect." She tries to tilt the screen away from him. She didn't realize that there was an automatic probably calculator on the device and the number is...demoralizing.

"And if that's not enough pressure for you, we only have a few minutes left before catastrophic meltdown!"

"Totally not enough pressure. How can I work under these conditions with no motivation?" he says, levitating another control rod, and leaning against a railing to try to steady himself.

He tries so hard to line it up perfectly, but with the entire world moving and shifting, this one goes fast enough but misses the mark, shattering as it hits the wall a centimeter too far to the right.

"Dangit."

The next is lined up perfectly, but not quite fast enough, melting in mid-air.

"Dangit!"

There's only one rod left. The rest had been trashed during the fight.

"I don't know -- I don't know if I can do this," he says anxiously, hefting the control rod up in the air with teke. It wobbles, just like he wobbles on his feet. "I can barely--"

He can barely stay on his feet.

"Dipper!" She grabs his wrist with the hand that's not supporting him. "You have to focus. After everything else we've been through, and all the stories you've told me? I know you can do this."

A monitor by the rack of control rods sparks, and the reactor starts to emit a low metallic stress groan. Pidge sucks in breath and continues.

"I mean, let's be real, you kind of have to do this. Or this planet will be poisoning passing spaceships for the next thousand years and that's before they'll be able to fish our mummified corpses out of here without melting all the equipment!"

Is that helping? Pidge is honestly not sure if that's doing anything for his concentration, but it's kind of odd that she genuinely doesn't know. She adjusts her grip around his middle.

"Just...leave the standing to me and concentrate, OK?"

It does one thing, it makes him laugh a delirious little laugh.

"Nothing like reminding someone about their potential mummified corpse to get them to chill down."

It does actually work, though. The nervous laughter relieves some of the tension. And a reminder of the stakes gets him stubborn and determined, makes him want to win. He has to do this to save the both of them -- or at least her, if it's already too late for him. He has to do this to save a whole planet.

And he's done that before.

You've already helped save worlds.

Okay, so back home, maybe that'd been mostly down to Grunkle Stan but he and Mabel were the ones that rallied the town. They got everyone into the Fearamid. Stan never would've even had his opening if it wasn't for them. And since then, since joining the Legion he'd helped save others.

...then there's the fact that she's helping hold him up. It makes something warm and tingly curl up inside his chest and he's pretty sure it's not radiation this time.

Probably.

There's a different fluttery feeling there, but despite feeling it, it doesn't mess up his control of his teke. In fact, as he rotates the control rod and lines it up, it finally evens out and stops wobbling. He draws in one last deep breath and lets it out.

"Here goes nothing."

Instead of trying to mentally hurl the thing like a javelin, he points his hand like a gun, trying to imagine that it's a bullet instead. Something meant to be fast and precise.

Bang.

There's an actual crack of sound as his teke launches the control rod at a speed of over 200 mph. It flies into the slot perfectly, and the next sound is a loud groan that seems like it might be the precursor to an explosion, and then... then things start whirring and shutting down. The core cools enough that emergency coolant systems are able to finally flood the core with coolant.

A voice blares over an intercom.

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN SYSTEMS ENGAGING.... EMERGENCY CORE SHUTDOWN SUCCESSFUL.

The meltdown warning klaxons stop blaring and the different quieter klaxons that just signify there's still damage to the core start sounding instead. As some of the overheated emergency systems cool down enough to function again, mechanical arms reach out from the walls, picking up radiation sources and taking them away for containment.

A shield even pops up around Nuclon, and he practically growls from where he's trapped in hardened coolant.

NUCLEOPHASIC SOURCE ISOLATION SYSTEMS SUCCESSFUL. EMERGENCY SHIELDING MECHANISMS SUCCESSFUL.

"Just you wait," Nuclon growls. "I'll get free and --"

"-- get your butt kicked by Pidge again?" Dipper laughs. "We didn't even have to team up to beat you in the end. Apparently, she just had to get pissed enough to do it all by herself."

He turns to look at her, grinning.

Edited 2017-06-13 07:30 (UTC)

She looks back at him, smiling ear to ear and laughing. It's only slightly hysterical, which is really good considering that they were saved by an almost million-to-one chance.

Nuclon growls some threat or another, Dipper interrupts him, and Pidge rolls her eyes. "Oh, give it up. You had every advantage you could've had and you still lost. Imagine what we'll do when you can't split us up with surprise!"

She's still half-laughing when she turns her attention back to Dipper and says "We really need to get you to medical. Like, now."

Dipper's nose starts bleeding.

"Yeah, we have to or Mabel's going to worry. I still have to tell her about --" He pauses, suddenly looking confused. "I haven't told her about the thing with the Lanterns, but this one will be fine."

Never mind the fact that she's not on Legion World anymore.

"But you're right. We have to -- we have to --" He wobbles, a hand placed on Pidge's shoulder to steady himself. "What was I saying?"

His face goes even paler, almost gray, as his blood pressure tanks, and his eyes roll back in his head. Nuclon is the one laughing now as Dipper stumbles and drops, grabbing onto Pidge's arm as he goes down to try to keep himself from just slamming into the floor. The best he can manage is a controlled drop, where he winds up at least sitting down first.

"Oooh, disorientation this fast?" crows Nuclon. "We might be looking at 1000 rads in a minute. New record, but I guess I can't take all the credit. The partial meltdown did some of the work."

"Pidge," Dipper says distantly. "I don't think it's a concussion."

Wow, the save of the plant went so well Pidge almost forgot that Dipper was probably dying. Dipper starts to go down and Pidge goes down with him, half-dragged, half-trying to offer support.

"Yeah! Kind of figured!" she says in a rush, pulling out her Omnicom once they're both on the floor and shooting Nuclon a look to say that she's NOT paying any attention to him anymore, except for the part where he's totally right. "That's why I'm sending out an urgent call to Legion right now. Just..lay down if you have to."

Her fingers shake far more than she's comfortable with as everything she read about radiation poisoning plays in her head like an evil radio broadcast. She's only glad that her device is connecting now as the radiation levels start to rapidly drop.

The floor isn't a bad place to be, especially since he somehow winds up with his head in her lap. He looks over at Nuclon, still dizzy and disoriented, but has the wherewithal to at least give him the finger. (Clearly, he's been spending too much time with people like Grif.)

"We...still...beat you," he says, and his hand drops.

Nuclon had wanted to kill a whole planet, after all. At most, he's maybe going to clock in with a body count of 1, and that's only if Dipper's untreatable.

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The Demon Core [closed]

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