legionmissions | Upon my liar's chair [BLARGH FHTAGN] [player plot] [part 2 and 3] [closed to signups]

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Upon my liar's chair [BLARGH FHTAGN] [player plot] [part 2 and 3] [closed to signups]

Who| Rich Rider and those who signed up for Part 2 and 3
What| Stopping the squids from opening a rift to the Cancerverse and saving Rich
Where| At a derelict stargate station and the Cancerverse
When| An IC Day after "Game of Throne"
Warnings/Notes| Lovecraftian squid-monsters, body horror, attempted suicide by black hole

It's time.

They take over and do whatever they have to do, say whatever they have to say to disentangle Rich from anyone that'd get in his way.

The seed was planted a long time ago and what started as a little sprout of life within him grows and blooms within him now, rolling under his flesh, taking over his eyes so that he sees the things that should not be seen. Reality's edges roll away and reveal everything to him, the sickness that is Chronoblivion clinging to the edge of the world and the half-finished worlds and realms beyond.

He can see the Cancerverse and the beings within, staring at him whole universes away. Deep inside himself, his soul thrashes and spasms, and he's lost in a cage of endless rotating fractal visions of the many possible nightmares to come.

And then They push up his sleeves, move his limbs, and and get to work.

Their mission is holy. They will fulfill the Legion's mission and save existence. Chronoblivion's own bloated form will become their new Galactus Engine, they will touch every universe with their gift and life will reign eternal.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rich closes a fist and one of the gravimetric fields catches Grif, acting like a stasis field, pressing down on him with nearly impossible weight.

"You can do this all day, huh?"

Just a little bit of his usual humor is in his voice.

Brainy warned him about the gravimetric fields, but Grif wasn't there to see that warning. There's just a surprised yelp as the trap closes, and he can barely even replace that lost breath under the sheer force of the field.

Screw flying, this is the real cheating here. The thought races, part of a giddy and delirious panic as all his limbs report that yeah, he is well and truly stuck. There's no getting out of this. Grif's head is pinned to the floor, the angles of his helmet propping it up just enough to watch as Rich and the things-that-are-not-Rich approach.

This is it. It's over. This is why you don't volunteer for shit, this is why you don't be a hero, this is why when adventure calls you need to tell adventure to get out of your yard and go fuck itself before you call the cops.

It's now that heroes think noble and brave things, like "I hope everyone makes this count" or "This is how I'd want to go", but Grif?

At least Sarge doesn't get to see this.

He's going to die pinned to a floor, killed by his best friend who has alien brain squids, getting petty satisfaction out of how sad it's going to make his goddamn former-CO. It's a weird, stupid end to a weird, stupid life.

Grif wishes he felt anywhere close to noble or brave.

"Why are you making me do this?" asks Rich as he floats over and lands near Grif.

His arms transform into purple tentacles again and slide around Grif's body, but there's no chance of Grif vibrating through them to escape -- Rich reinforces his grip with bands of Nova Force energy that Grif can't vibrate through.

One of the tentacles slides off Grif's helmet so the two of them can look eye to eye, and a tentacle settles around Grif's neck, gripping it tight, but not so tight he's choking yet -- hinting at what's about to come.

Despite the tentacles, Rich's eyes and face at least stay normal this time. His expression is plaintive.

"I can't let you get in my way. What I'm doing is too important. But it doesn't have to be this way. Stop being so goddamn stubborn. If you want, you don't even have to help me - you just have to stay out of my way. That's all I'm asking for. Don't be a hero. Would that be so hard?"

His voice is pleading, desperate, but filled with all of Rich's usual warmth.

"C'mon, Grif, what do you say?"

Cool update: He's going to die upright and being strangled by alien tentacles instead. This cool update doesn't improve matters much.

While Rich's expression is plaintive, Grif's is hard, marshaling a lifetime of well-tended bitterness. The facade breaks around the eyes though. The fear is too open. There are tears in the corners. This is the best Grif can do.

"Sorry," he chokes. "But I can't let you down."

The Many-Angled-Ones overplayed their hand. Grif is afraid of pain, Grif is afraid of death, Grif is afraid of failing the multiverse, and Grif might even be afraid of how he'll be remembered, but disappointing Rich?

He knows what Rich thinks of him beyond anything the monsters can possibly twist, and Rich thinks his stubbornness is great.

Edited 2017-10-25 05:49 (UTC)

Screaming.

Rich freezes in place and for a moment he can only look at Grif, like what Grif just said needs time to tunnel inside him until he can finally comprehend it - and it reaches what it's tunneling for. It reaches something deep, underneath the creatures crawling in his skin and through his brain.

He does love Grif's stubbornness, because it's not just stubbornness for the sake of stubborness anymore, it's stubbornness in the face of things that are wrong. Say what you will about him, but when something terrible's going on, Grif doesn't know when to quit.

If Rich is coming up against that stubbornness right now...what does that mean about him? What does that mean about what he's doing?

Screaming.

There are tears in Grif's eyes and Rich's eyes brim with tears to match. Somehow, his arm reforms out of that tentacled mass, the tentacles holding Grif shifting so they're coming out of Rich's shoulder instead. He reaches up his very normal human hand to cup Grif's face, and almost thoughtlessly his thumb brushes away the tear in the corner of Grif's eye.

Why aren't you screaming?

"Why aren't I... Why aren't I ...?" he breathes out.

Everything feels so good. He knows his place, he knows who he is, know's what he's doing is right. He's more confident than he's ever been in his life.

...which means something's wrong. He's struggled with a massive inferiority complex since he was a teenager, and now it's gone all of a sudden? Now everything feels perfect and he feels complete? It feels just like... just like ...

"The Phalanx," he breathes out, eyes going wide. "Just like..."

He looks at Grif dangling in the tentacles and for just a moment he sees Ko-rel there instead, bleeding, dying in his arms after he helped Gamora kill her. His very first Nova, dead, all because he couldn't fight off the Phalanx infection fast enough.

No. He's not letting it happen again. Not this time.

Not again.

Not to him.

Why aren't you screaming?

It's his own voice. The strange voice that sounds like something other is actually his voice, reaching through all the muck the same way it did once before.

Why aren't you screaming, Richie? he asks himself.

"I... am..." he grinds out between his teeth.

Attaboy.

He screams and tosses Grif aside, away from himself, before the things inside him have a chance to take control and hurt him. It's good that he did it because as soon as they start losing control, they try to take over again by force, try to shove his mind down deep where it can't reach the surface again. Tentacles sprout out from all over his body, and his face turns that sickly purple again, his eyes glowing purple. The tentacles accidentally knock off his helmet and he crouches there, gripping at his head like his hands are the only thing keeping it from exploding.

But he's not giving up without a fight this time.

"Oh no you don't, you monsters! You screwed up! I know you're in there now and I can see you for what you really are!" He starts ripping tentacles off himself, trying to get them out of his skin, weeping as years of painful memories pour back in without the rosy filter the squids had placed over them. "Did you really think you could make me forget everything you did to me?! Did you really think after stopping you from taking my universe that I'd just lay down and let you take this one? That'd I'd sit back and let you take the multiverse? Like hell."

He isn't going to make it easy for them.

"Grif's not the only one that's stubborn."

Edited 2017-10-25 07:03 (UTC)

Grif pulls his head back to try to avoid being touched, but it's not what he expected. He freezes. Something's happening.

"...Rich?"

Rich either can't hear him or can't listen, he's too busy snarling at what's going on in his own head, but he's alive and fighting in there. Grif shouts as he's thrown, but there's hope in it. He hits the deck with a thump that knocks the breath out of him, but then he's using a gantry to drag himself up onto his shaking legs.

"C'mon, Rich!" he yells. "Kick their asses!"

He's helping. Maybe. Hopefully. Fuck it, if there's even a chance it's useful, he's going to yell.

Rich's stalling - and Grif's stalling - pays off. It means Grif is alive by the time the cavalry arrives. The hangar door glows orange as time is reversed to a point before it was locked down, and it swishes open.

Kid Q is in through the door first.

"Whoa. Okay, fan out, we're going to need to keep him here, but not so close that whatever that is gets grabby for hostages. Nova, help Grif stay on his feet. Brainy, get that portal shut down before we have another life-changing field trip to a different galaxy, please."

Edited 2017-10-25 09:13 (UTC)

With a transport so loaded with people that care about Rich, Robbie is surprised that they don’t get cartoonishly stuck in the door as they rush out.

He’s not far behind Kid Quantum, and he doesn’t have to ask for an order. If Nova is getting Grif and Brainy is closing the portal – that’s funny, he thinks, he was talking about interdimensional portals yesterday – then both of them could use cover. Distraction duty is a go.

“Hey, Rich!” he called, deliberately using first names to avoid the Nova/Nova Prime confusion. Robbie made his way forward cautiously, no bouncing until he finds Rich. “If it’s the purple thing throwing you, nobody judges people off the beige-brown spectrum here! And purple doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy! Lots of Legionnaires wear purple!”

"On it!"

Vance goes high, flying up toward the ceiling. Part of it just getting eyes on what's happening and being able to direct people in to where Rich and Grif are at. The other part is because, when it comes to containment, he's probably one of the ones best suited to it. Telekinesis was useful that way.

"Robbie, he's to your left and forward about fifty or sixty yards. Sam, Grif's about twenty feet away from him."

Things may be awkward between himself and Robbie, but he's not giving it any thought. It doesn't matter right now. They all have the same goal here: make sure that Rich gets back in one piece.

"Got it!"

In a less desperate moment, Sam might've balked at the fact that he's clearly got the easy job here, but they've got way bigger things to worry about than his stupid teenage insecurities, and while it can't always be said that Sam's rational, he at least has the sense to clamp down on it.

The easy job, after all, is still pretty important.

It doesn't take him long to make it to Grif, grabbing one arm to pull over his shoulders and keep him upright. "You're not gonna like, puke or anything, are you?"

Grif not being dead is a goddamn miracle, and Wash isn't about to examine that too closely.

"Copy!"

He's moving as quickly as he can, moving closer to Rich and putting distance between himself and his teammates. He doesn't know if he'll need his power nuke, but the last thing he wants is for anyone but Rich to be caught in it.

"Wasn't planning on it," Grif tells Sam, suppressing a wince. He tries to sound nonchalant, but he really is relieved to see the rest of them and he really is doing worse than he wants to be. His job right now is to get clear so they don't have to worry about him.

Grif hates it.

Over at the portal, things start looking nasty. It starts to whine a high pitched whine and the edges of it start to look like they're on fire. A sinister light pours through that bathes the entire room in shades of purple and crimson. Inhuman screeching can be heard echoing from somewhere far away. Then, in the center of the portal, a great eye suddenly opens and peers into the room, darting around as it looks at all of them.

Then something else starts to push its way in, mouths gaping, tentacles grasping.

Primal fear floods the room, radiating out of the portal like heat. This...thing isn't meant to exist in the material universe. One of its tentacles reaches out and grabs Brainy, waving him in the air. When he forms a sphere of shields around himself, more tentacles wrap around the field and squeeze, trying to break them.

Rich himself is clearly still struggling for control. The purple keeps washing over his skin, making it pale and wrinkled and dead, and then it keeps turning back. His eyes flicker back and forth like a broken street lamp from the usual blue they glow when he's using his powers to a sinister purple-red light. As fast as he rips tentacles out of himself, causing them to wither and die on the floor, new ones form and start waving dangerously, trying to grab at them all.

Rich screams again and cringes, tears squeezing out through his eyelids as the squids dump years of suffering back into his brain. Still, even as they lay him bare, they make themselves vulnerable. The more they open him up to them the more they leave themselves open for him to see.

"Brainy, they don't want you to touch something called a 'entropic regulator.' I think if you mess with it, it'll let you shut down it down fast enough -- !"

The squids cut him off by using the tentacles sprouting out of his body against him. One of them wraps around his face like a gag, and another warps around Rich's neck, squeezing. Just because he's their host doesn't mean they'll need him as one for long. He's just a tool for them and one they won't need anymore if the portal is able to do its job in time.

As he struggles with being strangled, he starts to lose control, and since his mind has been laid bare to them - they know any weaknesses about the others that Rich knows. So tentacles whip out, wrap around Speedball's torso, and squeeze, until something cracks. Then fast enough to be difficult to stop but slow enough that the damage can't be considered concussive, they press him back into a pile of broken equipment filled with sharp fragged metal.

Rich lets out an "MMPH!" a hand extended towards Robbie.

Then they hijack Rich's powers, too. His arms start flailing wildly of their own accord and Nova Force energy fires out of his hands wildly.

Edited 2017-10-29 00:19 (UTC)

Kid Q blasts at the thing that's grabbed Brainy, causing parts of it to wither into dust and die as they're aged a thousand years. She manages to nail the tentacle holding onto Robbie, too, a sphere of quantum energy breaking his fall as he becomes free.

"Freelancer, take out his powers!" Even if that doesn't hurt the squids, it'll keep them from using his powers against them. "Nova, help me lay down cover fire to free Brainy. Justice, take care of Speedball."

Doubletime, I'm giving you your orders over the earplugs so they don't see you coming. After Wash downs his powers, I need you get in there and destroy the tentacles that are strangling Rich. she says over their connection via the telepathic earplugs.

Things go apeshit right about when Robbie gets eyes on Rich, and then it's a matter of where to even look. Keep an eye on Rich, definitely, although ... that's a Doctor Strange problem, from the looks of it, and he's been gone for months now.

Another eye on the it reaching through the portal, all eyes and too many teeth for something that isn't on XBox.

He can hear Grif and Sam somewhere nearby - Robbie thinks he should spare an eye for them as well, try to clear a path, but then Brainy's under attack in the edge of his field of vision.

There's too much to keep track of, and Robbie prioritizes distracting the squid in the portal from Brainy, if he can, and hopefully keep it from noticing the other new arrivals. Energy bubbles are very good at annoying hell spawn.

... but there really was too much going on. When Robbie moves to launch himself at a spot near the portal, planning on an explosion of bright bubbles on impact, he takes that eye off Rich.

Stupid. He thought Rich was fighting it well enough, and that Vance is a better anti-tentacle wrap helper. Now, he's worse off than Brainy, because the tentacle's squeezing hard, and Robbie isn't even remotely succeeding in pulling the appendage off of him. "Rich, buddy, you need to ease up on the hu-"

Crack. It's a double crack, actually, matched with a sharp pain. The pressure feels worse, or maybe the pain feels worse against the pressure. Robbie really can't tell, because his head feels fogged with the sensation.

It's funny, in a sick way, that he realizes that being in pain hasn't made him short of breath in years, no matter how badly he was cut, just as the jagged, twisted edges of metal pierce his back. It shouldn't hurt this bad, if he could just relax and breathe through it; he should be used to this. But he can barely breathe shallowly, and he's never been skewered before.

Then, the tentacle pushing him into the debris rots to death around him, and he's falling and landing on a bubble that's not his - it almost sends him bouncing, but he manages to get a hold of himself, figuratively, and slid to the floor. Literally, too, as his hand pushes against the one exit wound on his stomach to slow the bloodflow. He can feel more running down his back. Damn Time Trapper stealing powers - pain used to be worth it.

"I hate... portals." He weakly bats a stray energy bubble at Rich. It's the principle of it.

It's like watching one of his worst nightmares going on in front of him, something unspeakable taking control of his friends and there's nothing he can do about it.

In his nightmares, though, it's all in slow motion. Things that Vance should be able to deal with and can't because he's frozen in place. Here, though, there's no chance to react because it's all just going down too quickly. There's hardly a moment for him to even start getting his brain in gear before Robbie's bleeding on the floor.

He knows that, tactically, giving up the high ground is a bad idea. Up here, he can see everything and may have a better chance of reacting next time. (Because he'd done so well so far.) But it's clear that Robbie's wounds need to be attended to before he can be moved.

Which is why Vance drops down beside Robbie, reinforcing the TK shield around them, extending it even into the floor as protection against the tentacles. He winces as one slams down over his head as hard as it can, but turns his attention back to Robbie, doing a quick scan to see how bad the injuries are.

Well, shit.

Still, maybe it's a good thing Grif is half slung over him, because that's enough of a reminder to Sam that he can't just jump straight into the middle of things without thinking (the way he'd almost certainly be doing otherwise). He needs to move in the other direction.

"Hang on, dude."

Why limp across this mess when he can just blast them in the other direction, right?

Wash has seen some shit. Battlefields, genocides, the inside of someone else's brain (both literally and metaphorically), the list goes on far too long for comfort or even sanity.

While motherfucking Cthulu somehow isn't at the very top of that list, he's still going to have nightmares about this for a good long while.

But right now, in this moment, none of that is important.

He snaps his attention back to Rich in time to just barely dodge a blast of Nova Force and sets off his power nuke. "Done!" It'll take care of the Nova Force for the next two minutes; if he's lucky, it'll affect the tentacles as well.

(He's long since stopped putting stock in being lucky. That's York's job.)

"Oh, fuck," says Grif. And then he's hanging onto Sam, Brainy and Robbie are in trouble, and everything has crossed a grand new threshold of horrible.

And Kid Q's in his ear, because of course.

Got it, he sends back. Can he do this? He can do this, because he has to do this. The seconds he spends getting boosted away by Sam are all the time he has to psych himself up for it, he hopes it's enough.

Then Wash kills Rich's powers.

"Be right back," Grif tells Sam, and he's off.

Grif isn't as fast as he wants to be. He's been running a lot, he's never been good for stamina, and there's a nasty stitch working its way through his right side. Luckily, though, not as fast as he wants to be is still really damn fast. He slides in around the alien tentacles and starts tearing the smaller ones away from Rich's airway, digging in his nails for extra grip. He makes up for lack of bodily strength with raw pissedness.

The Legionnaires are winning. Wash successfully nukes Rich's powers, which makes it so the squids can't use them anymore. Sam and Kid Q's efforts extricate Brainy and then the Coluan makes quick work of deactivating the portal, targeting the component that Rich pointed out.

The horrible monster pushing its way in screeches in agony as the portal shuts off, slicing through its body. The section of it that was poking through into the universe is severed with a sickening gush of slime that splatters all over Brainy and Sam, and it slides down to the floor like a grisly carpet, twitching and quivering until it finally goes still. It starts to rot immediately, shriveling and withering away now that it's in a universe where death still lives.

Grif also manages to destroy the tentacles around Rich's neck, letting him breathe again. Since the portal is defunct, he's more valuable anyway, so the squids stop trying to throttle him, but their efforts to take control of his body again are in vain. Now that he's been given a chance to catch his breath - literally - he's managing to re-assert control. Especially with the portal breaking the connection to the Cancerverse.

The purple fades from his face, and the tentacles sprouting from his body whip out in all directions, knocking the Legionnaires aside. Only the injured Robbie is spared the onslaught.

...Because Rich is the one doing it, not the squids.

While they're recovering, he flies towards the hangar door, flight ring maxing out on speed. The second it closes behind him he breaks one of the automatic couplers. Brainy will be able to fix it in time, but for now, it'll give him the head start that he needs.

The second he's on the Legion cruiser he came in, he jumps into the seat and undocks the ship, flying out of the hangar on manual.

It's time to end this. Before anyone else besides Robbie gets hurt.

"You should've known better," he says to the monsters inside him. "You killed me a thousand times over and I never stopped fighting you. What the hell made you think I'd stop fighting you now?"

Edited 2017-11-03 02:18 (UTC)

Back in the mining station, Kid Q makes quick work of adjusting to the wind getting knocked out of them. When they discover the coupler's broken, she starts problem-solving.

"Brainy, can we just break down the door and use our transuits to get to the cruiser?"

"Negative. The outer hangar door is attached to the coupling system, and that means it's still open. The hangar's now filled with thalarite radiation due to power core leakage from the other defunct mining stations in this sector. I need to repair the couplers so the door closes and provides shielding before we can enter the airlock again."

Brainy gets to work, dismantling the casing next to the hangar doors.

"It's going to take at least a few minutes."

On a whim she gets out her omnicom and contacts the cruiser.

"Rich, I know you can beat this. We need you to fight them. Even if you can't take enough control to fly yourself back here, if you can at least stop the ship, we'll have time to come to you."

To her surprise, he actually answers, so she pulls up a larger holodisplay so they can all talk to him at once.

"Sorry, boss. No can do."

His face is still his own, the purple banished from it, but there are still tentacles sprouting from his back and one of his hands has been replaced by one. It grips the steering wheel tighter.

"I remember it all now. I didn't die in the Cancerverse. No one can. You just come back every time, and that's what I did. I died and came back. Over and over and over. And they...they put something inside me. When The Time Trapper grabbed me he just locked it all away, until that fight with Evil Superman damaged the seal."

He closes his eyes tight.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know. Something felt off. I started to feel like I wasn't myself -- and I started having these nightmares... and I know I should've looked into it more, but I just didn't want it to mean anything."

His voice cracks.

"I just wanted to come home. I wanted to come home so bad. I thought...maybe I earned it, maybe I deserved the Time Trapper giving me a second chance. But that's not how it works. I didn't earn anything. I cheated. I thought I could escape the Cancerverse but...it followed me back."

"Rich, we can help you. Let us help you. Where are you even going?"

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