legionmissions | The Demon Core [closed]

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"We'll still have some time. At least a little."

Maybe five or ten minutes. It might be enough, just enough, especially if they start fighting without any attempts at self-preservation. They can do a lot more damage if they're not worried about getting out of it alive, if it becomes 'if we're going, we'll take him out with us.'

"The others won't be able to walk into this without getting exposed too much too, but if we can stop him before he moves on to another world, before anyone else has to try to fight him --"

Dipper walks over, takes the knife back and stuffs it in his pocket, and turns with his back to the wall, sliding down next to her.

"We might not be able to save the people here, or save ourselves, but we can still save other worlds by making it so he doesn't leave this one. We can still make it mean something."

He takes her gently by the hand.

Edited 2017-03-05 23:36 (UTC)

She holds his hand back, tightening her grip ever so slightly.

"...If Nuclon works like I think he does, we'll need a way to cool him off. There should be enough water in the plant to soak him, even after it goes critical. Then it'll be up to Legion to contain him before he heats up again."

They're going to lose everything. Pidge will never see her family or Team Voltron again. Somewhere, Mabel is about to lose her twin brother. Their friends in Legion will be devastated. They'll have only a matter of minutes to make their deaths important. And before all that, they just have to sit and wait for catastrophe that will destroy a planet's worth of innocent lives.

She really doesn't want him to see the tears in her eyes.

"Dipper...I'm sorry you'll never see Mabel again."

For just a moment, he has to close his eyes as he tries to keep the tears in, and during that moment, he can't help but picture his sister, smiling the way she's smiled a thousand times over.

He tries to hold onto that. And hold onto the fact that someday, if the Legion can get to her to tell her what happened, that she'll probably be proud of him for at least trying to stop the monster behind this.

"I'm sorry you won't get to see your brother." A pause. "He'll probably be okay, though. Your friends back home care about you." It's so, so easy to care about her. "After all you did to try to find them, I bet they won't stop until they find him and your dad."

She smiles, though it's a deeply sad one. They do really care about her, don't they? Even though they can annoy her intensely, she cares deeply about them as well.

She feels the same way about Dipper.

"I know they will. I just hope they hear it from Shiro instead of a stranger. Maybe it's silly but they deserve to know about Katie before Pidge."

"Katie?" he asks, confused.

Edited 2017-03-06 02:07 (UTC)

"My real name."

He should've known, with a name like "Pidge." He'd thought it was maybe some kind of difference due to future stuff but sometimes if something sounds like a made up name, it is one.

If it quacks like a duck...

He smiles a sad little smile.

"Mason," he says. "Mine's Mason."

She actually chuckles and it surprises her that there's actually some heart to it, no matter how small.

"I think I would have gone by 'Dipper,' too. No one's used that name since the 2020s."

"Oh, that's good to know," he laughs. "My name is equally lame in multiple centuries."

He squeezes Pidge's hand a little to make it clear that he's not offended at all. He thinks it's funny, too.

It's amazing that he can even laugh at a time like this and maybe it's a little giddy and nervous, but it's better than moping or crying.

And that's when he realizes that the only reason he can laugh right now is because he's with her. Even though he wishes she was somewhere safe instead, somehow her presence makes him feel a whole lot braver. There are worse people to face inevitable horrible irradiated death with.

Tell her. Tell her how you feel before it's too late.

They only have minutes left.

"Pidge. Listen, there's something I need to --"

And that's when the massive doors a the top of the silo start whirring and moving again.

"The doors! Maybe somebody found us!"

They're both laughing which...well, it's not the worst way to go. Standing by someone who makes you laugh as you're about to die slowly over minutes, vowing to stop an enemy you couldn't even touch?

She can be OK with that. She's failed her teammates, her friends, and her family, but she can be OK with at least that.

He's got something on his mind. Pidge looks him in the eyes, full of curiosity. Whatever it is, it's worth her full attention...

And then the doors drown out all her thoughts. They're sliding open and it's the sweetest sound she's ever heard in her entire life. She suddenly scrambles to her feet, letting go of Dipper's hand and prepping her bayard in a rush.

"We've got another chance!"

Dipper stands up, too, and puts his arms around her neck like before.

One of the plant workers sticks his head over the edge to look down into the silo. It's a familiar face; one of the workers they saved earlier did notice they'd been dropped down in there.

"Legionnaires, if you're alive down there, we're here to assist," the worker calls out. "That creep left your omni-whatsits and flying rings up here. We can throw your rings down or we gots a hover-platform that can bring youse up."

She glances at Dipper, who's holding on tight.

"Don't worry, we're coming up!" She fires and the bayard carries them all the way to the top. She grabs the worker's hand, who pulls them over the lid and hands them their things.

"Two things: which way did he go and how are the coolant levels there?"

"He went back to the reactor core. All the radiation alarms are going crazy, it looks like it's going critical," says the worker. "But the coolant levels are still reading normal. Looks like he damaged the core by messing with the outtake vents that slough off excess energy, not the coolant systems themselves."

After putting his ring back on and taking back his omnicom, Dipper slams his foot down on the device that'd been blocking their powers.

Blue telekinetic energy flares to life around him again.

"Clock's ticking. Time to go."

Pidge nods to Dipper, adjusting her flight ring and taking to the air.

"We need to cool Nuclon by any means necessary! Good news is that it shouldn't take a lot of coolant to negate his power. Bad news...I have no idea how we're going to it."

Dipper takes off with her.

"There's got to be something we can use in the reactor core. We got so caught up in trying to keep him from slamming us down that we probably just missed it."

He adds, "We should do the plan I suggested earlier, but in reverse. I'll keep him busy, you try to find something we can use, and then we'll work together to get him where we can dump coolant on him."

Except they'll have very, very little time, if they just use their flight rings to get there.

"But first, we need to get there -- and we need to do it faster. Hold on!"

Dipper reaches out and takes her by the hand, rolling to draw her in closer, wraps an arm around her waist, cocoons them both in telekinetic energy, and then: NYOOOOM!

His telekinesis shields them from the force and wind-shear, and they wind up back at the main reactor in seconds, instead of minutes.

He lets go of her waist again.

"We ought to go in through the roof. We might catch him by surprise, and if they need to try to cool down the reactor later by dumping stuff in the reactor room? Easy access."

Edited 2017-03-24 03:35 (UTC)

There's a momentary lapse in Pidge's focus when she feels Dipper's arm close around her waist, not that she has time to think about it. It's...probably just the fact that they're going incredibly fast.

"Uh-" She clears her throat, "That is, I should be able to open a valve while you keep him occupied. I'm pretty sure all we need is one to subdue him long enough, but he'll need to be right under it to get the full impact."

They're coming up on the reactor core and and Pidge braces herself for the entrance.

"Once that's done I'll need your help opening the others so don't let him get you."

"I won't." A pause. "Probably." Another pause. "I'll try not to."

And it's time to go in.

"Get ready to fly in behind me."

Going in first and keeping Nuclon's eyes on him while she slips in quietly behind him makes more sense than divebombing in together. If he plays his part right he'll keep Nuclon too distracted to really pay attention to what she's doing.

With that he suddenly falls feet first like a stone, caving the reactor's ceiling in. When he gets inside, Nuclon looks up in surprise, opens his mouth to say something and then gets casually slammed through a wall with Dipper's teke before he can even get a word out.

Edited 2017-06-09 02:29 (UTC)

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)

The Demon Core [closed]

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