New Beginning 23: One for the Record Books

[The Mediocre Gatsby]

"So, Doctor Brown couldn't do anything with my memory. Which sucks balls. So now I'm down to sticking around here, trying to see if any of the objects on my persons could trigger anything. So far, all I found in my pockets were a key, and some coins. That was an hour ago. Now I've caught wind that Earth is being attacked. Invaded by some otherworldly force. I didn't remember much, but all I know is that for some reason or another, Earth was important. I had to figure out how to get out of here... My best bet, more than likely, is  to find the person I followed to this planet."


 After about an hour of searching, Aaron finally located the one called Four.

 "Excuse me, Madame, I was wondering. I have this feeling, I don't know if I can exactly call it remembering something, or a vibe of sorts, but I just really need to get to Earth. Is there any way you can assist me in that."

 Aaron quickly remembered how powerful the person he was talking to was, and quickly added "Please?" to avoid seeming impolite.

[Zaleramancer]

"You want to leave now when we're literally besieged and all exits are close-" Four began, then paused, "Actually, I know exactly the best way of getting you out."

Miss Blue glanced over at the now grinning Four, "Four. Don't."

"I think I will, actually." The grey woman turned to Nano, "Now, there's a sweet spot right between where the gate is and the initial gauntlet for the incoming enemies. We are tracking some incoming energy signals that don't sound promising and  predict a fair chance of them blowing in the gate within five or ten minutes. So you can sit right there, then carve your way past whatever forces flow in, then you can just warp to Earth. If you can't manage instantaneous interstellar transit, we can give you a widget your wee little robots can replicate."

Once more, Blue began to interject before being silenced by a wave of Four's hand.

"Do you like the sound of that plan? If not, there are other options, but they may be much slower. We can't compromise our defenses."

[The Mediocre Gatsby]

Aaron looked at Four with a mixture of... well, looks.

"Let me get this straight. In exchange for you giving me the technology to return home, you only ask that I go through this tiny backdoor in your defenses, and destroy any of these robots that might be trying to get through there? Please, correct me if I'm wrong." Aaron asked.

[Zaleramancer]

"It's more like the front door, and robots are supposed to be entering there. That allows me to direct them towards places I desire them to be, as well as prepare a lovely death gauntlet for them. Don't try to murder all of them. That would take quite some time, and anything capable of breaking down the gate is going to be rather formidable", said Four.

Blue and the pale figure started to whisper to each other while pointing at some complex figure on the drifting table of symbols before them.

"You just break a bunch of them while carefully avoiding whatever it is that knocks the gate down, then scuttle off to Earth to keep them from burning it down."

A keening wailing alarm began to sound, echoing through the room.

"Right on time. So, do you accept? Best choose before it's too late."

[The Mediocre Gatsby]

Aaron began laughing hysterically.

"What was that? Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. I was watching a cat video from the internet in my head. Something about a front door? Look, I'll do whatever it takes to get home, just give me the tech I need to warp from here to Earth."

[Zaleramancer]

Four shrugs and hands him what looks suspiciously like a flash drive.

"Whatever weird nanites you use should be able to read the pattern on this drive in order to construct a sixtieth century light drive about the size of a grape. Should be good for intergalactic travel, but avoid black holes. They tend to not get along. Now, Six?"

The pale looking person waves a hand a Nano, and Nano finds himself standing in what looks like a hallway the size of a large football field. A vast gate covered in crawling runes and flashing fields is at one end, and the other end vanishes into darkness.

The gate itself is a marvel of spatial engineering as it forced all possible links between exterior and interior space to pass through it. This effectively prevented teleportation, regardless of source or power, from bypassing the gate itself. Of course, none of this stopped someone from simply blowing the gate open and entering anyway.

Which was, in the typical (To the mind of the collective) fashion of Technari, the plan of entry.

The exterior of the gate stood on a tidally locked, lifeless, dwarf planet orbiting a furiously screaming blue star. There was not a single iota of life for a few hundred thousand gigaparsecs, which was by far the preferred order of things. It was far safer for everyone involved.

Hovering over the planet it geosynchronous orbit were several Technari battlemoons that were even now raining down a salvo of powerful bombs upon the gate, only to have them bounced off or imploded or, in a few cases, turned into flower petals. While the area around the gate had been blown down to the bedrock, the gate itself remained perfectly untouched. As the last bomb dropped, tactics shifted. The moons began to unfold like flowers, sending out hundreds of thousands of smaller ships, autonomous drones or attack bots, and large mechas capable of space flight. This horde descended upon the planet like a swarm of hungry locusts, dancing across the cooling landscape towards the gate itself. They stopped a safe distance from the defenses, spreading out in a perfect hemisphere. Then they waited.

Above the, a crackling portal began to form behind a trio of the battlemoons. It spat and rippled, sending out odd gravity waves and strange temporal energies. Then a small figure, no larger than a normal human was spat out. It was a robot in the form of a woman- looking more like a beautifully made porcelain statue accented with gold than anything so crude as the machines around it. She descended upon wings of blue fire towards the gate. The other robots shrank respectfully from her, for she was nothing less than a war-machine unlike any other, stolen from as far into the future as the Technari could reach. A post-singularity Valrexian Dreadnought. A self-replicating robot designed to wage wars across whole galaxies and billions of years. There were whole galaxies in the far flung future where nothing lived but raging dreadnoughts fighting wars at the command of species millions of years dead.

This was a single one that had the misfortune of being flung backwards into the 50th century, where the Technari had found it. It took centuries of virtual time and incalculable resources, but they had finally cracked the firewalls defending her. Even now, whole epoches from home and to damaged to commit true replication, the Dreadnought still had the power to crack whole planets in half.

The Dreadnought raised both hands towards the Gate. A beam of hissing blue flames flew from them, the waste energy alone destroying those robots who had been foolish enough to hover to close. It struck the shields like a thunderbolt striking a cobweb. There was a deep rumble as space rippled before the gates were blown off their hinges and into the hall itself, falling a few hundred meters before Nano.

And then the hordes of the lesser robots surged forward as the Dreadnought hovered overhead.  

[The Mediocre Gatsby]

Nano looked at the legion of robots pouring out from the portal.

 "Okay. Just have to assimilate this device into me and I'm all set!"

He closed his hand around the small flash drive device, and suddenly he was able to unlock the secrets of this 6th Century doodad. "Alright, now that I've got the plans in my head. Let's mix it up with my deep space suit and head home."

 His skin began to ooze the liquid metal again as the deep space suit that he wore to get on to the planet returned to his body, only this time, with a glowing blue light in the center of his chest. He formed the visor and set a course for Earth. Just before he took off, however. A thought occurred. These robots looked REALLY formidable. Not something he'd want to go up against on his own. He also didn't want to risk any of these robots making it's way to Earth.

 "I need to think of some sort of cloaking device in the armor... Something that would make me invisible to the eye, and to a sensor.... I know!" He thought to himself, staying hidden from the robots. Aaron coated the armor in retroflection panels, to allow him to turn invisible. He then concentrated himself on every individual nanobot that made up his body. He wrote in his mind a sort of program that would make every nanobot act as if it were not even there.

 "Let's hope that does the trick." He thought to himself as he focused on his destination.

[Zaleramancer]

Three, known also as Red, enjoyed the available spectacle. He had exactly three minutes and thirteen seconds to spare on it, and as such saw no need to rush. It was rather rare to see reality benders go to war, and he wanted to see it first hand, though from the relative safety of the top of a large building.  

So far, he had to give the Wulfy one a 7.3. While the destructiveness was quite good, the finesse was rather low. The fact that the huge blast would likely destroy more civilian infrastructure (Or civilians themselves) than enemies was a cause of a slight penalty.

While the rocky one was doing much better, and the sheer fury at which he fought was actually rather intimidating, he had yet to have much of a chance to rack up on the big high-point maneuvers.

Red began mentally tabulating a list of possible rules for point gain and loss while fiddling with the playlists on the small whatever-it-was his headphones were connected to. He took a few seconds to prod the local network, and sent a few useful firewall updates into KARMA's inbox for whenever it came back online. As a new wailing song started to play, Three glanced down at the firefights below. Most of the Technari bots had ignored him because he wasn't spraying energy and power readings in every direction. And also because he was using Seiðr to look like a chimney.

If he hadn't had a very annoying schedule today, Red would be more than happy to have joined the others in their wanton destruction of life and property. That was what he was made for, after all.

He checked a wristwatch, then vanished before the clock had a chance to tick.

[The Mediocre Gatsby]

"Three... Two.... One!" Aaron counted down in his head. He ran off and jumped, achieving liftoff almost silently. So far, so good. He didn't give off any signals that weren't needed. As he silently flew over the hordes of robots, he gazed up in front of him, he saw the infinite vastness of the cosmos. It was breath taking to behold.

 "Man... this is insane. Alright, back to the task at hand. I have to weave around these guys so as to not be detected. At the speed I'm traveling, it should be a relatively quiet exit." Aaron said to himself. "Computer. Begin setting a course for Earth using this 6th century Light.. thingy."

 Aaron was so close, the robots were behind him as he headed towards Earth. He turned around and took one last look at the planet behind him before jetting off.

 "You know, they've been so nice to me... It would be rather scummy of me to just leave without helping even a little bit..." Aaron thought about trying to manipulate the powerful robot on the front lines into attacking the forces behind it. But then he remembered that Four could probably find hi and kill him by getting in the way of plans that were carefully put in to place.

 "You know, if they really needed my help, they wouldn't have let me go, right?" He thought. He prepared to be jetted across the universe, right for Earth.

 He powered up the device and sooner than he could blink, he sped through the stars. He closed his eyes so that he wouldn't be blinded by the intense light. As he thought more about Earth, he began to get odd vibes. Names, places he didn't remember but knew somehow were important. After what felt like 3 minutes passed, Aaron noticed a tiny blue sphere in the distance that was rapidly approaching. It grew bigger as he headed in it's direction. He noticed white specs on the sphere, and a smaller white speck surrounded the blue ball. He knew he was home.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

Mechs and drones and droids, big and small, stampeded through the gate unrelenting. Things tall and lanky like unrealistic gangling humanoids, short and chunky things like great colossal sumo, things on all-fours and all-sixes and all-tens came slithering, prancing and trudging about across the grounds of the Zaleramancer's front gate entrance.

And not a moment would be spared before turtle-shaped Hoorvath Tera-Saucers let up their legs and take off into the air firing phase-disruptor beams, Wyt'Yythin Hemisphere-Cortex Devastators would begin pulsing out mind-scrambling pulsar stun rays, and everything in the wake of the Uytaraopethicanthropskil'na Quantum War-Hull would receive matter-warping distortion blasts.

"You see? I told you, the Zaleramancer is not easily conquered. Transapient technology is nearly a waste upon him." came a grumbling voice from within the depths of the centermost battlemoon.

The voice responding was quick to shut down the complaint, "The Dreadnought was my true intention, at any rate! The others were simply in case such force was unnecessary. Now, let's see how he likes a bit of play from a few Abeil Mark 4 droids from planet ZXyxxzxzzyzz. Even he shall acknowledge our might. And for good measure, make certain to release the Ytraxa Subquantum Black Hole War-Engines absolutely last. He shall know devastation before his ranks are wiped out."

"Yes, Motherboard Prime."

"I mean ABSOLUTELY last." the Technari Queen repeated, "After even our main part is played. For his assault against Technari supremacy, his INSULT with the most banal of taunts to our ranks--a BLUE SCREEN EPIDEMIC--he and his shall know the lowest devastation."

Firewall's com screen faded to black, and he went back to directing attacks from the comfort of his battlemoon. And when he was done installing the tera-drive which would send out their directives throughout the rest of the invasion, he would take the untraceable teleport node Motherboard Prime had provided him with, to rejoin her, and watch the ensuing chaos at her side.

[Philote]

Zauber walks forward while Billy panics and plucks the mask off of his face and just gives him a "How are you going to talk your way out of this now" shrug.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Billy gapes for a few moments, before bowing his head in defeat. "I don't very well suppose you'd believe I had an evil twin brother, would you?" But then he raises his head back up, and grabs Zaubar by the arms. "You can't tell anyone else about this." he implores. "You've cursed yourself for the rest of your life, the monsters of the ethereal have felt the wavering of your heart and have mistaken you for a dead man. They eat dead people, Mr. Zaubar!"

It's strange, but under that mask was a perfectly ordinary face. There wasn't any decay at all, it was as bright and vibrant as ever. The boy was undisputedly alive, and was now reaching inside his pockets. "I can do something about this, hold on a moment. There!" He said, pulling out a ankh cast in gold connected to a looping chain. He slipped the necklace around Zaubars neck and went digging again. "A friend of mine taught me about these, they're meant to protect a person on their journey through the afterlife. Fascinating practices." he pulls out a few more talismans and the lot join the gold ankh on Zaubars neck. "Those should alleviate some of what you're in for, but I can have a better solution given a little time. How do you feel about bandages?"

[Philote]

"Are you trying to scare me off again? The seal is literally right there" Zauber says doing an exaggerated waving motion with his arms towards where the Guardian and Miss Shield are at work. "We could finish this once and for all."

Zauber leans close and whispers to Billy. "I'm a lot stronger now than when we were in college. I've ascended, just like I told you about. No more need for a body or anything."

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

"No, this is deadly serious." Billy exclaims. "If you aren't properly protected some horrible thing you can't even see will come along while you're sleeping and rip your soul...to...." He trails off, then says softly. "Wait....you're here to help me?"

[Tsubasa & Wen Tien]

(Been trying to figure out how to do this for some time now. Sorry if it's unexpected.)

Asoka walked up to the door and stood still. She could clearly feel the pulse of power given off by some of the beings, though she couldn't identify who, and had a look on her face that clearly showed that she wasn't expecting people to be there. Opening the door, she stepped through... and almost as quickly fell back through its frame as she cried out, "Billy! Zauber! What are you two doing here? And why are you two in this room of all places?"

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

"Oh no!" Says Billy, rapidly searching through his pockets. Letting out a cry of frustration, he reaches over a takes one of the amulets off of Zaubar and rushes over to Asoaka. There's a sudden thud as Vaults arm comes down right where Billy had been standing moments earlier, but the bot doesn't notice. In his head Vault can hear the spider laughing at him.

Billy, meanwhile, throws the amulet over Asoka's neck. "Sprits. Wavering heart. Bad things." He says, starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

[Tsubasa & Wen Tien]

As Billy does this, Asoka confusedly asks, "What? That makes barely any sense. Please repeat that in a fashion that I can understand."

[Philote]

"Ah! Asoka! Did Billy plan a reunion and forget to invite me?" Zauber exclaims.

"Knight, did you forget to tell me something important before I came on this trip, or were you just simply unconcerned with my well being" Miss Shield says, chiming in. "What are these charms and why do only the newcomers need protecting?"

[Tsubasa & Wen Tien]

"No, he didn't plan a reunion. I came back after my apprenticeship to study more and asked for permission to look at the seal and see what its current state is. Obviously, permission was granted, but like I asked: What are you two doing here? No one told me that you'd returned or that Billy had been revived from the dead," Asoka replied.

She materializes her Soulsword in hand before continuing, "Shall we destroy Red Eyes once and for all since we're here and we have veritable juggernauts with us?"

[Philote]

"I was just getting to that, but then Billy started acting all strangely. I was around for the party earlier and then I noticed that there was some tinkering with that seal I placed so long ago."