legionmissions | THE GONE-AWAY WORLD [modplot]

Entry tags:

plot: the gone-away world

THE GONE-AWAY WORLD [modplot]

Who| Those who signed up
What| The "Gone-Away World" plot
Where| The planet Tezeram
When| The same time as "The Ninth Gate" and "Total Eclipso"
Warnings/Notes| child endangerment

The Legion cruiser breaks apart upon entry to atmo. It just can't fight its way through the warped reality of the planet, through the willpower of the many criminals on Tezeram willing its destruction. But the Legionnaires own willpower and thoughts factor in, from the moment they're close enough to the planet to start influencing the "stuff" that makes up everything on Tezeram's surface.

So even though the ship rips apart, they don't die. Instead they find themselves down on the planet, separated into pairs that have to find their way towards the criminals behind all this, and find their way to each other. If they try to will the Legion cruiser back into being, they'll find it's impossible. They must defeat the criminals responsible for all this, and join together to will the cruiser back into being at the same time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The planet itself isn't familiar to North, but that doesn't matter - for a moment, even in vague shades, it's truth boring through the hull of the plate. The impossible smell of a world on fire, incense and camping played in the wrong key, reaches him before he can remember that he's in a helmet with filters, and that nothing comes through that crisp and vivid. But by then the ship is a ship again, and Cortana's back to business, and even Theta is redirecting his attention from the display to the schematics he'd been pulling up, giving a soft 'woah' when the layout of the ship snaps into focus on a much larger scale than he'd been expecting. But a flicker of a moment to process and Theta's's back to work, willing into place the infrastructure, cameras and security measures and all the other on-ship particulars that will lock any hostiles into a maze he and Cortana can control and twist around on them.

"On the second date?" He tries for levity, after that. It's the best option he's got - while he doesn't except he'll really amuse her, compassion or pity aren't even options. Not with Cortana. "You're gonna ruin my reputation, Cortana."

Not that that stops him from holding out his hand, the other already working to click open the appropriate port in his helmet.

Loss is simply a fact, entropy the foreordained victor in all things, and the best anyone can do is avoid thinking about it. As far as Cortana's concerned, the half-formed vision of Reach was a slip, something that won't happen again. In the background of her thoughts the blueprints of the cruiser rotate around its center of mass and reform themselves into an exploded view, collapse to unity again, rotate another along another axis, fly to pieces again...a machine mantra to make sense of a world of illusion.

"I couldn't fit in the implant even if Theta weren't already there." It should be banter, but her tone is too flat as she drops the chip into North's gloved hand. "This will just give me a place to jump if the body gets destroyed."

Edited 2017-09-25 02:04 (UTC)

Proximity alarms start beeping, indicating there's...something moving towards them, something that's bypassing doors and walls. Rattling sounds start echoing through the vents, along with the sounds of something...growling.

He slots the chip into place, making sure the helmet seals back around it securely. "Good to see we're looking out for the unlikely- shit." His best efforts at dragging her into a back-and-forth, away from that unsettling stillness, cut off cleanly with the sound of alarms as he turns his head toward the most likely sound of the noise and brings his rifle off maglock. "Theta-?" he calls under his breath, already blinking into thermal vision to try to get a glimpse of whatever's coming at them.

"I'm looking!" And he is, though he's still trying to focus on willing the ship into keeping its shape as well, hoping to at least make whatever wall has to be torn through as solid and unfriendly to rip open as possible.

"Don't crack your helmet," Cortana warns.

Then she thinks about a molecule. It's organic, mostly carbon and hydrogen with a phosphorous group hanging off one side. Not too complicated, really. Humans have known about the family for a good six hundred years, even if this particular cousin is a recent addition: VX7 nerve agent, lethal in doses measured in micrograms.

She fills the air around them with it...and as an afterthought, triggers the chem-bio warning on North's HUD.

Things start pouring out of the vents. Things with exoskeletons and acid blood. Upon entry to the room, they lunge at the two and then quickly curl up and die because of the nerve gas, twitching.

...But then they start adapting. The criminals that have taken over this world aren't lacking in creativity. The last of the insect monsters die and then crystalline monsters start following after them - silicon-based lifeforms, lacking the ability to be affected by neurotoxins. These massive crystalline insect-like beings start swarming towards them over the bodies of the dead bug-aliens.

"-thanks." Always nice to have a heads-up. Even when it's after your partner cocoons you both in a potent and highly fatal bioweapon. He's at least aware enough of Cortana's basic sensibilities that the minute she mentions the importance of his helmet, he's switching over from ambient air to reserves.

That's about how long it takes for the vent grates to burst open, and he huffs a satisfied sound as the first wave goes down in a quivering carpet of scrabbling legs and chitin. The first one that doesn't go down brings the point of his rifle up, two quick shots to shatter it into immobility and three more just like it scrambling over the shards.

"All right, let's move!" He's on his way toward the door and ready to take up the rear, trusting in Cortana and Theta to pinpoint their directive and guide them there. He's on swarm control, and after the first half-dozen shots he's locked back the rifle and snatched a shotgun out of thin air instead, blasting a hole in the wave rolling towards them.

It's not the most creative thing, but if North wants to have an infinite weapons locker Cortana's not going to argue, and sticks close to his back. While he's shooting, an almost subliminal rising hum fills the air as she seeks the resonant frequency of the crystalline creatures. When she finds the tone, it crescendos in a monster- (and ear-) shattering blast, dampened in North's case by both his helmet and Cortana playing some acoustics tricks with sound waves cancelling each other out. She's a very considerate partner when she's not busy calling the human half of any given fireteam an idiot.

Meanwhile, Cortana muses on tactics. Right now the Legionnaires are only reacting, and that's bad. It puts them constantly a step behind, pure foolishness when they can do anything they can imagine. Playing this like a normal firefight with slightly cooler toys is playing to lose, especially against people with more practice at this game of fancies and the time to lay plans. Any half-bright criminal in the 31st century ought to have thought up countermeasures against teleportation, but moving themselves isn't the only way to negate defense in depth.

"North. Put up your shield. And maybe think up a Warthog or a Scorpion or something." In the time it takes his organic nerves and brain to process that--Theta can take over if things go too slowly--Cortana does the math and reaches out around them to fold reality like so much cloth. An AI capable of piloting through the 11 dimensions of slipspace has no trouble with the mere five or six it takes to loop their little patch of spacetime through a few exotic transforms and superimpose it on the place they want to be.

Between gunfire and the resonating sound the crystalline creatures start shattering to pieces, but Cortana is right in that they're mostly reacting. After the crystalline creatures start falling, strange amorphous living blobs start plopping out of the vents, stripping metal with their acidic noxious purple bodies as they slosh towards the two of them. They reach long sticky limbs in their direction as the drag themselves across the floor.

But reality folds and on the other side of it they can see a garrison of criminal guards, set up in some kind of stronghold.

Shield - as soon as he hears the word it's up around them, the next wave plopping up against the walls of the dome. That and-

"-a what?"

"A Warthog!" Theta's already pulled up the dash of the vehicle, the wheel and steering column and the seat that materializes behind North at the knees and knocks him down to seated as his brain catches the hook and fills in the rest, chassis and wheels inward. The shield punches out to accommodate it in a whine and crunch of metal until the ship suddenly isn't and they're clunking to the ground in front of a fortification, still tumbling forward, Warthog inside the sphere rolling up to the walls and picking up speed.

"Gravity shift-?" Taking the Warthog and shield straight up the walls is the best he's got, but whatever they're doing it's going to happen soon, because the accelerator's just about on the floor.

If anyone asks, Cortana is going to claim she planned the hamster ball of death.

In the passenger seat, she braces against the dash--if anyone in the UNSC has ever worn a seat belt while riding in a Warthog, she hasn't heard about it--and reviews their options. As little as she likes to admit it, 'so stupid no one would think of it during contingency planning' does in fact seem to be a solid tactic...and will look brilliant in retrospect, instead of just the crazy it is now.

"Sure, why not? They might be expecting 'through the walls,' but I bet they haven't planned for 'up the walls.'" She looks at the opposition and runs a few scenarios while they pick up speed, perhaps a tenth of a second. "Just floor it and I'll handle the acceleration vectors."

No point in tipping their hand, and Cortana imagines a few stun grenades going off amidst the massed guards, solely to give them what they're expecting. Just a standard suicidal frontal assault by bleeding-heart Legionnaires, folks, nothing to see here. When the Warthog hits the right distance, she implements the equation she's been thinking of for at least 300 milliseconds. It's a beautiful one. She'll have to share with Theta later so someone can appreciate it for the aesthetics instead of just the effects.

Their personal gravity remains well-behaved, the force on the Warthog changing smoothly over just long enough to act like a ramp and turning the fortress wall into the ground as far as North's senses are concerned, while around them all accelerational hell breaks loose, random directions (but none of them useful ones) becoming 'down' for the guards at various gravitational pulls, some unfortunates slammed by 10 gees, some practically weightless in gravities so small as to be immeasurable...and none of them in a gravitational field that remains constant or even pointed in the same direction long enough to get their bearings.

That'll teach 'em to be organic.

It's just stupid enough to work. The problem with a world of imagination is that not all criminals actually have any imagination, especially not the mooks assigned to guard the outpost.

So no, they don't expect a military vehicle to just roll up the wall and into their base in a glorified hamster ball. They're also not expecting stun grenades and they're sure as hell not someone to play merry hell with gravity.

That means the two of them burst onto the scene fairly explosively, and mooks go flying or slam down into the ground due to suddenly now weighing 400 pounds. They have a clear shot at a massive door that leads inside into the main part of the outpost, but someone's imagined that it's made out of inertron, the hardest densest substance in the universe, so they're going to have to imagine their way through or around that.

While Cortana is busy making elegant origami out of whole reams of the standard accepted textbook of physics, North is focused on two main beliefs - that a Warthog is absolutely capable of rolling along a rigid sphere, and that the two AI on the team are capable of doing whatever they please, whether or not he could have even conceived of it beforehand. So the vehicle rolls right up the wall, down into the compound, and forward into the fray. The whole time, Theta's on the lookout for any remaining forces who look less than absolutely bewildered or panicked, pivoting the mounted gun at the rear of the vehicle and shooting through the flickering gaps in the shield that he's engineered countless times when the shield was still an armor enhancement entirely under his control. Per Legion rules, he isn't firing the standard-issue armor-penetrating rounds - instead, there's a full-auto barrage of miniature fireworks mortars bursting just close enough to their opponents' faces to take care of disorienting the ones still trying to struggle on through Cortana's attentions.

When they hit the ground - the actual ground, not a temporarily flipped point of gravitational pull - North pulls a hard turn toward the door, whistling a low slide of almost-admiration as he rolls up tapping the brakes. "Well okay then." A key, maybe. Or a really, really impressive explosion, though- hell, depending on how much further inside the kids are-

"No, it's okay!" He can catch the vague shape of the thought, the familiar patterns North's brain lights up in when he's thinking of how to take something down or take it apart, and he's just as sure that there's absolutely no need for it. Doors are made to be opened - and there's always a teammate, always a friend, right there and ready to get them inside so they can help finish the job. They're on a team - and that means trusting that there's someone there to handle the stuff that you can't do.

"It's gonna open."

Edited 2017-10-06 01:34 (UTC)

And the door swings open.

There's something to be said for the power of will and imagination on a world that allows for the bending of reality. Currently, that something is, "if you believe hard enough, you too can yank a friend from a different planet where the laws of reality are concrete to perform a simple but necessary task for you here!"

This is, of course, how Wash found himself on Apokolips one moment and in front of a control panel God knows where the next with a sole directive at the forefront of his mind: open the door.

Which, after a moment, he does.

The directive disappears, and he has a single moment to ponder where the fuck he is and how he got here before he follows suit, returning to Apokolips in the blink of an eye.

What the fuck.

Things that don't occur to Cortana: the possibility that their doorman is really, actually Washington and not a doppelganger summoned up by Theta's perfect AI memory, down to the IFF signal that suddenly appears in her perceptions. Wash vanishes before he can clarify the matter, so it will have to remain a secret until they're all back on Legion World comparing mission notes.

"Man on the inside, huh? I was just going to turn off the strong nuclear force." See if your hyper-condensed matter can hold up to a sudden absence of gluons, criminal scum. Oh well, maybe she'll get a chance to try it on the way out.

"Now where are those kids?" Cortana asks no one in particular, and drums her fingers on the dash. Wishing the place out of existence and into open tarmac would hit up against the wills of every one of their opponents, which might prove too much even for the galaxy's most willful AI. Instead, she imagines every wall in the place turning transparent.

Proud as Theta is of getting that right, he is what he is - and the thought of utterly disintegrating some fortifications appeals to the part of him that remembers why he was made in the first place. "Ooh! Can we do that before we leave?"

Despite sharing a few neural walls with Theta, North absolutely does not see that one coming. No sooner is he twisting in his seat to make sure he's seeing what he thinks he's seeing than Wash blips right out of existence, leaving an unmanned control panel and an open door that he rolls the Warthog-ball through before someone can catch on to what's happening and shut them out again. He doesn't floor it immediately - partially because not long after the walls go clear, he bumps them up into and along one, the sphere skittering and scraping along invisible concrete as he rolls them along the length of it with the warthog tipped onto a lazy diagonal. Course correction's a secondary concern and something he trusts Theta to lean into, he's scanning the field as quickly as he can put it together, into and out of thermal range until he spots a pair that's smaller than the others, lit-up in brighter oranges and reds on thermals, and outside of that matching in a way that immediately jumps out in a sea of subtly different silhouettes.

"Two o'clock?" he checks, already heading that direction, because if he's seen it then Cortana's already had time to double-check.

While the Legionnaires are facing off against the wills of every criminal in this place, said criminals have forgotten that their wills aren't the only ones shaping it, and that the wills of the Legionnaires aren't the only ones combating them.

The existence of the Legionnaires in the complex reaches the children. Rooms away, the criminals in the room react to the fuss outside and say just a little too much about who's attacking where the kids can hear, and so they know three groups of Legionnaires are coming from different directions.

Baela and Claeton Trivv grew up on stories of the Legion of Superheroes. They idolized the Winathian Legionnaires Spark and Livewire until they disappeared with the rest of the missing Legionnaires. They have the full collection of Legion action figures at home, every last one, and lovingly add new figures when they're made of new Legionnaires. They still play with the figures of the Legionnaires sent home and hope they'll come back someday. (Claeton still loves his Spider-Woman figure and Baela's favorite is still Great Saiyaman).

And the thing about worlds based on thoughts is that narratives are a natural part of existence. Even though life is random, senseless, and often harsh, the human mind needs to make sense of it.

This has turned into a story of the good guys coming in to save the day, and it's one that the twins believe in much more strongly than the criminals believe in their narrative of actually winning.

The fortress shifts. The way isn't entirely clear - the group of Legionnaires have quite a few mooks to mow down in between them and the kids. But the room the two children are trapped in suddenly morphs and shifts so that there are three entrances to where they're stuck in their cage, with easily breakable doors, perfect for good guys to break through to save the day.

Time shifts too, so that despite however long it took them all to get there, the various teams of Legionnaires are poised to get into the room at the same time. The criminal masterminds behind this plot - unconscious of even doing it - also conveniently spread out so that there's a group of them in front of each entrance.

Three doors. Three teams. Three clusters of villains. It's all neat and tidy. But the Legionnaires still have to imagine up one hell of a party crash to overpower the criminals they're facing.

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THE GONE-AWAY WORLD [modplot]

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I have been summoned

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