10-27-2008, 10:15 AM
This turned out so nicely that I wanted to brag on it. ^_^
==================================================================
The L-class cruiser Nephelim was one of the last of her kind, one of only thirteen of her successful but aging class still in service in the spaceways. For the
moment she orbited in 'normal' space, above a world whose breathless air howled over the half-flensed bones of what had been living, fertile lands.
Nephelim had come to monitor the progress of the algae colonies that had been seeded in the planet's oceans. She had stayed because her sensors, far more
sensitive and powerful than those of the mere survey vessels which had previously visited this system, had caught the scent of a relic of the ancient arts that
had once murdered every living cell on a vibrant jungle world - as well as allowing other, far worse crimes elsewhere in the universe.
Most captains faced with evidence of Lost Logia powerful enough to detect from orbit would have ignored the regulations and formed an investigatory team from
their own crew rather that calling for a specialist, but Captain Spyder had commanded Nephelim from the moment of her launch, and had seen with his own eyes
some of the painful lesson behind those regulations.
It had taken several days, but Command had rushed a fully trained Enforcer out to do the investigations that could easily kill less mages, and unless he much
misjudged the speed of his ship's elevators...
"Enforcer Lieutenant Dacia Trabant, reporting!"
Spyder swung his seat around and stood, suppressing a grimace at the familiar stab of pain from his knees. Like his ship, Captain Elio Spyder was about ready
to be put out to pasture. "At ease, Enforcer," he said, and looked her up and down. A bit less than average height, thickset but nicely hourglassed,
and fine, regular features under practical, short-cropped hair. Black enforcer's uniform with the standard grey trim and knee-length skirt, slit up one
side for movement. One earring, left side, that had to be the storage form of her Device - a silver cuff from which dangled a slender, transparent emerald
octagonal trapezohedron nearly two inches long but no more than half an inch across. Green hair, grey eyes, and an unamused expression that all but accused him
outright of
staring like a dirty old man.
Well, that was fair enough. He -was- a dirty old man, and she was very pretty indeed if your tastes ran to stout figures and strong bone structures. Even in
his dignified old age, Spyder had too much of the shameless rake in him to mind the petty qualifiers of that statement.
On the other hand, the fact that it was no longer even -surprising- that she looked younger than his grandchildren was enough to let a man know that he'd
passed beyond 'old' and into 'ancient.' He held out his hand. "Welcome aboard the Nephelim. Assuming you're on fleet time, I can show
you what we know."
She nodded and shook briskly, with a grip that felt like a hydraulic press that can been calibrated to stop just at first contact, and said, "Yes, sir.
I'm at your disposal."
One of the privileges of his rank was that when he gestured the pretty young things to lead the way into the door he'd opened for them, they pretty much
had to.
Once he was seated at the head of the conference table, a few quick keys brought up the map generated from Nephelim's sensor logs along its surface, then
overlaid the visual images with the enhancements that had revealed the ancient mana collector.
Trabant leaned over the conference table to trace the arcs of the collector's array with a fingertip. "Hmm..." she said, and bit her lip
adorably. "A Velkan Class Three, it looks like." The Velkan Empire had risen and fallen centuries ago, collapsing into anarchy and civil war near the
beginning of the recorded history of the more modern states that had sponsored the creation and funding of the Time-Space Administration Bureau to enforce
their arms-limitation treaties. Velkan technology had usually been uniquely tailored to the user or occasion, and so Ancient Velkan artifacts were usually
described according to the layout of their internal architecture, or 'class'. The Class Three collectors stored mana in the same array that captured
it, and had been favored for military applications because of their redundancy. "Do we have a geological readout of the area?"
Spyder keyed another set of readouts into the conference table's display, and took a moment as he did so to appreciate the way her current posture threw
her bosom into profile. "Only for surface strata and deep tectonics. We stopped active scanning once we saw what we were dealing with."
"Mmm..." she said, frowning at the table, then pointing at particular locations. "Do you have increased resolution views for here, here, here,
here, here, and here?"
He noted the locations and blew them up for her, then, as they became more visible, realized what she had noticed. "Defensive emplacements?"
"They have the look, but-"
Nephelim's intercom interrupted her. "Captain, Enforcer, we have an incoming vessel. They're armed and shield and ignoring our hails."
The two officers looked at each other, then turned away from the conference table and went to the bridge.
The intruder was a pure warship, and obviously designed and equipped to avoid betraying her origins. Her engines were Ysgardian, her lines somewhere between
Midchildian and Sartelmian, and her shields were the exact same TSA-proprietary type that Nephelim herself carried. That a vessel with that general design
philosophy should exist wasn't, in itself, that surprising. Though the power of the TSA's fleet let it maintain the balance of power between individual
nations, that didn't stop them jockeying for advantage and holding themselves ever ready for defense or attack, and any power in so tense a situation could
find any number of uses for a warship that could never be traced back to them.
What was shocking, and terrifying, was its size and power. It was easily half again Nephelim's mass, and faster in the bargain. No nation, on no world,
should have been capable of building so powerful a warship, let alone keeping the tremendous expense and effort a secret from the watching eyes and ears of the
TSA.
"Captain," Trabant said from beside him as he watched it come on in the location plot and thought furiously, "I don't think it's very
likely that they're here, risking discovery like this, just to destroy a single cruiser, however famous."
Which would mean that they were here for the Lost Logia. But... "I can't afford to send an away team to protect that site," he told her.
"I'll need them before this is over."
"Understood. I'm asking to be allowed to go alone."
"Can you stop -their- team from taking... whatever this is?"
"I'll have to," she said, calmly, and smiled like she was sharing a secret.
Captain Spyder met her eyes, gauged her confidence, and felt the plan crystallize. "Request granted. Report to the teleporter station, Enforcer - and good
luck."
* * * * * * *
Without living plants to process carbon dioxide into oxygen, a planetary atmosphere quickly ceased to be breathable. The gas that animal life depended on was
too reactive to linger in more than trace amounts past a decade or two. As the percentage of heat-trapping CO2 rose, planetary temperatures increased, and
Monitored Planet 079 had been a warm world to start with. It didn't get enough sunlight for a true greenhouse runaway, that would boil off the oceans and
add their water vapor to the insulating blanket... But even through the cooling envelope of her barrier jacket's temperature and atmosphere fields, the
sopping heat of the poison air was like a physical blow.
"VORSICHT!" a metallic voice bellowed, echoing off the eroded hillsides even before the teleport field had finished dissipating. "GEHEN SIE WEG
ODER WIR SHIESSEN!"
Ancient Velkan was a dead language, but 'watch out!' and 'go away or we shoot' weren't the most complicated concepts to cover in an Academy
class. "Adamant," Dacia said.
"WORKING," the Device answered in its metallic soprano.
"Reflect."
"S-MIRROR," Adamant Star reported as the ancient magicannons fired. Once, the defensive choke point had included forty of the robotic weapons and a
full squad of combat Knights, but that had been millennia ago. When commanded, only eleven of the ancient weapons were still functional enough to even perceive
the firing impulse. Four of them failed to do so, one more could not track to bring itself to bear, and a sixth blew apart as deadly energies hit components to
corroded to carry them. The bunker that had held it blew apart, scattering bits of rotten concrete and sterile soils far and wide.
Five of the weapons, however, were still working, a fitting testament to the skill of their makers. Five beams of deadly magical power reached out...
And were deflected at carefully chosen angles, sent screaming back to destroy the weapons that had fired them.
Defenses dealt with and pressed for time, Mage and Device moved deeper into the ancient facility, all senses awake for even a hint at what lay within its
buried reaches. On the horizon, a sheet of lightning flashed along the upper reaches of an oncoming stormcloud, actinic blue-white light turned golden by the
dust in the air.
When she emerged out of the tunnel and into the central chamber of the buried complex, Dacia felt an icy breath of real terror stroke down her spine. When the
Saints of Ancient Velka had lead their armies of Knights to conquer the known universe, they had found savages on a thousand worlds squatting amidst the ruins
of a society with powers as far beyond their own, fit to shatter a world, as theirs were beyond those of a flint-knapping hunter-gatherer.
And in this place which she must defend alone against an unknown foe, lay an artifact of that long-ago society - lost Al Hazred.
In general, it looked like a floor mirror, a perfect disk six feet across, held up by two feet fixed to its decorative frame, but rather than reflecting the
room it occupied, the 'mirror' showed a the shifting red-purple vision of the Dimensional Sea, the bizarre otherspace that starships like the Nephelim
or the courier she'd ridden to this system dived into to bypass the speed of light.
"Adamant," she said, "analyze."
"INTEGRATION," the Device answered, and the drifting motes of dust hanging in the nearly still air of the chamber went from a pretty haze to
signposts of its sluggish air currents. Every sense seemed amplified, not because it detected more, but because she learned more from what they gathered.
Such as the echoes of the thirty-six boots running through one of the other entry corridors, illuminating the labs and apartments of the complex with their
echoes as clearly as any mechanical sonar. Dacia smiled a nasty smile and decided to take a chance. With a deep breath she focused and leveled Adamant's
staff-like form and began to draw and draw and draw from her reserves, gathering power until the commandos emerging from their entrance spotted her and began
to try to dodge out of the way.
"STELLAR RAVE," Adamant intoned like a headsman's falling axe, and all the power Dacia had gathered few loose in a blinding torrent of
destruction. That incredible beam of silver energy vaporized five of the foe outright, and the corona of heat created simply by being -near- it burned seven
more to ash. The doorway that they had entered through, and the wall surrounding it, seemed to simply go away. In an instant she had cut their numbers by two
thirds, and shock almost paralyzed them as she charged on the wings of her magic -
"DRIVE JET."
- and dashed one's head in with six feet of swinging silver metal.
Four of the others scattered without a sound, while the fifth moved in, stabbing with the bayonet fixed to the front of his oddly-shaped weapon. She recovered
from her strike and swatted it aside, then turned the motion into a feint with one end of Adamant and a blinding strike with the other. He deflected most of
the impact, striking it up and away so that it barely grazed his shoulder, but that was more than enough.
"IMPACT."
The shoulder she'd struck shattered. The concussion of the strike liquefied half of the man's chest and sent his corpse flying with a silver shockwave.
Then the others attacked, not with spells but with mass weapons, tiny shards of metal driven to supersonic speeds by carefully controlled and contained
chemical explosions.
"S-MIRROR," Adamant Star initiated the defensive spell herself, and a good thing. Dacia was too shocked, to busy being chilled to the bone, to do it
herself. If these people, whoever they were, were willing to turn to technologies that placed such an incredible potential for slaughter into the hands of
-any- soldier, any -child-... if they had an -army- to match
their mysterious battlecruiser... There wouldn't be -anything- they wouldn't stoop to, not war, not poison, not betrayal, not the murder of entire
worlds...
The enemy kept firing, forcing her too keep the shield up as they spread out and trying to get an angle around it, and she couldn't respond, couldn't
fire through it any more than they could.
Fortunately, she didn't need to. "VOID LENS." Almost casually she grounded one end of Adamant on the floor next to her boot, and let the other
slope out to aim at nowhere in particular.
"STELLAR FLARE." The piercing beam of energy shot off to the side, then glanced off of thin air that was abruptly ringed by a spell-circle and
pierced through one commando's head and a second's chest before bounding a second time to cut a third man in half. On the far side of his body it was
deflected on last time to kill the last of the invaders' landing team and burn a head-sized hole in the far wall.
Now, to see if there was more to the landing party... "LONG SCAN," was a spell that she'd created by tweaking a standard wide area search to take
advantage of the improved information processing ability that her own original Integration spell created. Together they let a single human mage with or even
-without- the aid of a Device match or exceed the reach and sensitivity of a cruiser's active sensors.
what she saw was disaster, a badly wounded Nephelim halway across the system trying to limp back to the planet... and an equally hurt but unslowed mystery ship
already on its way into atmosphere to snatch the prize its first landing party had died trying to attain.
It would be hours before Nephelim was close enough to help... and as many troops as a ship that size could carry, even with those lost to battle damage, would
overwhelm her long before then.
Dacia shut down the scan and the integration. Her natural senses would suffice for what she needed to do... and she'd need the mana. "Adamant,"
she said, and leveled the staff at a new target, "initiate mana collection."
Then she waited out the long minutes while the mystery ship entered atmosphere and her own power was used to suck in the ambient energies of this place,
storing and concentrating them until the ship was so close overhead that she could feel the tingle of its antigrav fields across her skin. "Adamant
Star... I'm sorry."
"IT IS OUR DUTY. I AM PROUD TO BE HERE."
"Strike."
"ADAMANT STAR COLLECTION TYPE NOVA RAVE, THREE, TWO, ONE, RELEASE."
The flood of unbearable brilliant struck out... and hit the mirror squarely.
==================================================================
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
==================================================================
The L-class cruiser Nephelim was one of the last of her kind, one of only thirteen of her successful but aging class still in service in the spaceways. For the
moment she orbited in 'normal' space, above a world whose breathless air howled over the half-flensed bones of what had been living, fertile lands.
Nephelim had come to monitor the progress of the algae colonies that had been seeded in the planet's oceans. She had stayed because her sensors, far more
sensitive and powerful than those of the mere survey vessels which had previously visited this system, had caught the scent of a relic of the ancient arts that
had once murdered every living cell on a vibrant jungle world - as well as allowing other, far worse crimes elsewhere in the universe.
Most captains faced with evidence of Lost Logia powerful enough to detect from orbit would have ignored the regulations and formed an investigatory team from
their own crew rather that calling for a specialist, but Captain Spyder had commanded Nephelim from the moment of her launch, and had seen with his own eyes
some of the painful lesson behind those regulations.
It had taken several days, but Command had rushed a fully trained Enforcer out to do the investigations that could easily kill less mages, and unless he much
misjudged the speed of his ship's elevators...
"Enforcer Lieutenant Dacia Trabant, reporting!"
Spyder swung his seat around and stood, suppressing a grimace at the familiar stab of pain from his knees. Like his ship, Captain Elio Spyder was about ready
to be put out to pasture. "At ease, Enforcer," he said, and looked her up and down. A bit less than average height, thickset but nicely hourglassed,
and fine, regular features under practical, short-cropped hair. Black enforcer's uniform with the standard grey trim and knee-length skirt, slit up one
side for movement. One earring, left side, that had to be the storage form of her Device - a silver cuff from which dangled a slender, transparent emerald
octagonal trapezohedron nearly two inches long but no more than half an inch across. Green hair, grey eyes, and an unamused expression that all but accused him
outright of
staring like a dirty old man.
Well, that was fair enough. He -was- a dirty old man, and she was very pretty indeed if your tastes ran to stout figures and strong bone structures. Even in
his dignified old age, Spyder had too much of the shameless rake in him to mind the petty qualifiers of that statement.
On the other hand, the fact that it was no longer even -surprising- that she looked younger than his grandchildren was enough to let a man know that he'd
passed beyond 'old' and into 'ancient.' He held out his hand. "Welcome aboard the Nephelim. Assuming you're on fleet time, I can show
you what we know."
She nodded and shook briskly, with a grip that felt like a hydraulic press that can been calibrated to stop just at first contact, and said, "Yes, sir.
I'm at your disposal."
One of the privileges of his rank was that when he gestured the pretty young things to lead the way into the door he'd opened for them, they pretty much
had to.
Once he was seated at the head of the conference table, a few quick keys brought up the map generated from Nephelim's sensor logs along its surface, then
overlaid the visual images with the enhancements that had revealed the ancient mana collector.
Trabant leaned over the conference table to trace the arcs of the collector's array with a fingertip. "Hmm..." she said, and bit her lip
adorably. "A Velkan Class Three, it looks like." The Velkan Empire had risen and fallen centuries ago, collapsing into anarchy and civil war near the
beginning of the recorded history of the more modern states that had sponsored the creation and funding of the Time-Space Administration Bureau to enforce
their arms-limitation treaties. Velkan technology had usually been uniquely tailored to the user or occasion, and so Ancient Velkan artifacts were usually
described according to the layout of their internal architecture, or 'class'. The Class Three collectors stored mana in the same array that captured
it, and had been favored for military applications because of their redundancy. "Do we have a geological readout of the area?"
Spyder keyed another set of readouts into the conference table's display, and took a moment as he did so to appreciate the way her current posture threw
her bosom into profile. "Only for surface strata and deep tectonics. We stopped active scanning once we saw what we were dealing with."
"Mmm..." she said, frowning at the table, then pointing at particular locations. "Do you have increased resolution views for here, here, here,
here, here, and here?"
He noted the locations and blew them up for her, then, as they became more visible, realized what she had noticed. "Defensive emplacements?"
"They have the look, but-"
Nephelim's intercom interrupted her. "Captain, Enforcer, we have an incoming vessel. They're armed and shield and ignoring our hails."
The two officers looked at each other, then turned away from the conference table and went to the bridge.
The intruder was a pure warship, and obviously designed and equipped to avoid betraying her origins. Her engines were Ysgardian, her lines somewhere between
Midchildian and Sartelmian, and her shields were the exact same TSA-proprietary type that Nephelim herself carried. That a vessel with that general design
philosophy should exist wasn't, in itself, that surprising. Though the power of the TSA's fleet let it maintain the balance of power between individual
nations, that didn't stop them jockeying for advantage and holding themselves ever ready for defense or attack, and any power in so tense a situation could
find any number of uses for a warship that could never be traced back to them.
What was shocking, and terrifying, was its size and power. It was easily half again Nephelim's mass, and faster in the bargain. No nation, on no world,
should have been capable of building so powerful a warship, let alone keeping the tremendous expense and effort a secret from the watching eyes and ears of the
TSA.
"Captain," Trabant said from beside him as he watched it come on in the location plot and thought furiously, "I don't think it's very
likely that they're here, risking discovery like this, just to destroy a single cruiser, however famous."
Which would mean that they were here for the Lost Logia. But... "I can't afford to send an away team to protect that site," he told her.
"I'll need them before this is over."
"Understood. I'm asking to be allowed to go alone."
"Can you stop -their- team from taking... whatever this is?"
"I'll have to," she said, calmly, and smiled like she was sharing a secret.
Captain Spyder met her eyes, gauged her confidence, and felt the plan crystallize. "Request granted. Report to the teleporter station, Enforcer - and good
luck."
* * * * * * *
Without living plants to process carbon dioxide into oxygen, a planetary atmosphere quickly ceased to be breathable. The gas that animal life depended on was
too reactive to linger in more than trace amounts past a decade or two. As the percentage of heat-trapping CO2 rose, planetary temperatures increased, and
Monitored Planet 079 had been a warm world to start with. It didn't get enough sunlight for a true greenhouse runaway, that would boil off the oceans and
add their water vapor to the insulating blanket... But even through the cooling envelope of her barrier jacket's temperature and atmosphere fields, the
sopping heat of the poison air was like a physical blow.
"VORSICHT!" a metallic voice bellowed, echoing off the eroded hillsides even before the teleport field had finished dissipating. "GEHEN SIE WEG
ODER WIR SHIESSEN!"
Ancient Velkan was a dead language, but 'watch out!' and 'go away or we shoot' weren't the most complicated concepts to cover in an Academy
class. "Adamant," Dacia said.
"WORKING," the Device answered in its metallic soprano.
"Reflect."
"S-MIRROR," Adamant Star reported as the ancient magicannons fired. Once, the defensive choke point had included forty of the robotic weapons and a
full squad of combat Knights, but that had been millennia ago. When commanded, only eleven of the ancient weapons were still functional enough to even perceive
the firing impulse. Four of them failed to do so, one more could not track to bring itself to bear, and a sixth blew apart as deadly energies hit components to
corroded to carry them. The bunker that had held it blew apart, scattering bits of rotten concrete and sterile soils far and wide.
Five of the weapons, however, were still working, a fitting testament to the skill of their makers. Five beams of deadly magical power reached out...
And were deflected at carefully chosen angles, sent screaming back to destroy the weapons that had fired them.
Defenses dealt with and pressed for time, Mage and Device moved deeper into the ancient facility, all senses awake for even a hint at what lay within its
buried reaches. On the horizon, a sheet of lightning flashed along the upper reaches of an oncoming stormcloud, actinic blue-white light turned golden by the
dust in the air.
When she emerged out of the tunnel and into the central chamber of the buried complex, Dacia felt an icy breath of real terror stroke down her spine. When the
Saints of Ancient Velka had lead their armies of Knights to conquer the known universe, they had found savages on a thousand worlds squatting amidst the ruins
of a society with powers as far beyond their own, fit to shatter a world, as theirs were beyond those of a flint-knapping hunter-gatherer.
And in this place which she must defend alone against an unknown foe, lay an artifact of that long-ago society - lost Al Hazred.
In general, it looked like a floor mirror, a perfect disk six feet across, held up by two feet fixed to its decorative frame, but rather than reflecting the
room it occupied, the 'mirror' showed a the shifting red-purple vision of the Dimensional Sea, the bizarre otherspace that starships like the Nephelim
or the courier she'd ridden to this system dived into to bypass the speed of light.
"Adamant," she said, "analyze."
"INTEGRATION," the Device answered, and the drifting motes of dust hanging in the nearly still air of the chamber went from a pretty haze to
signposts of its sluggish air currents. Every sense seemed amplified, not because it detected more, but because she learned more from what they gathered.
Such as the echoes of the thirty-six boots running through one of the other entry corridors, illuminating the labs and apartments of the complex with their
echoes as clearly as any mechanical sonar. Dacia smiled a nasty smile and decided to take a chance. With a deep breath she focused and leveled Adamant's
staff-like form and began to draw and draw and draw from her reserves, gathering power until the commandos emerging from their entrance spotted her and began
to try to dodge out of the way.
"STELLAR RAVE," Adamant intoned like a headsman's falling axe, and all the power Dacia had gathered few loose in a blinding torrent of
destruction. That incredible beam of silver energy vaporized five of the foe outright, and the corona of heat created simply by being -near- it burned seven
more to ash. The doorway that they had entered through, and the wall surrounding it, seemed to simply go away. In an instant she had cut their numbers by two
thirds, and shock almost paralyzed them as she charged on the wings of her magic -
"DRIVE JET."
- and dashed one's head in with six feet of swinging silver metal.
Four of the others scattered without a sound, while the fifth moved in, stabbing with the bayonet fixed to the front of his oddly-shaped weapon. She recovered
from her strike and swatted it aside, then turned the motion into a feint with one end of Adamant and a blinding strike with the other. He deflected most of
the impact, striking it up and away so that it barely grazed his shoulder, but that was more than enough.
"IMPACT."
The shoulder she'd struck shattered. The concussion of the strike liquefied half of the man's chest and sent his corpse flying with a silver shockwave.
Then the others attacked, not with spells but with mass weapons, tiny shards of metal driven to supersonic speeds by carefully controlled and contained
chemical explosions.
"S-MIRROR," Adamant Star initiated the defensive spell herself, and a good thing. Dacia was too shocked, to busy being chilled to the bone, to do it
herself. If these people, whoever they were, were willing to turn to technologies that placed such an incredible potential for slaughter into the hands of
-any- soldier, any -child-... if they had an -army- to match
their mysterious battlecruiser... There wouldn't be -anything- they wouldn't stoop to, not war, not poison, not betrayal, not the murder of entire
worlds...
The enemy kept firing, forcing her too keep the shield up as they spread out and trying to get an angle around it, and she couldn't respond, couldn't
fire through it any more than they could.
Fortunately, she didn't need to. "VOID LENS." Almost casually she grounded one end of Adamant on the floor next to her boot, and let the other
slope out to aim at nowhere in particular.
"STELLAR FLARE." The piercing beam of energy shot off to the side, then glanced off of thin air that was abruptly ringed by a spell-circle and
pierced through one commando's head and a second's chest before bounding a second time to cut a third man in half. On the far side of his body it was
deflected on last time to kill the last of the invaders' landing team and burn a head-sized hole in the far wall.
Now, to see if there was more to the landing party... "LONG SCAN," was a spell that she'd created by tweaking a standard wide area search to take
advantage of the improved information processing ability that her own original Integration spell created. Together they let a single human mage with or even
-without- the aid of a Device match or exceed the reach and sensitivity of a cruiser's active sensors.
what she saw was disaster, a badly wounded Nephelim halway across the system trying to limp back to the planet... and an equally hurt but unslowed mystery ship
already on its way into atmosphere to snatch the prize its first landing party had died trying to attain.
It would be hours before Nephelim was close enough to help... and as many troops as a ship that size could carry, even with those lost to battle damage, would
overwhelm her long before then.
Dacia shut down the scan and the integration. Her natural senses would suffice for what she needed to do... and she'd need the mana. "Adamant,"
she said, and leveled the staff at a new target, "initiate mana collection."
Then she waited out the long minutes while the mystery ship entered atmosphere and her own power was used to suck in the ambient energies of this place,
storing and concentrating them until the ship was so close overhead that she could feel the tingle of its antigrav fields across her skin. "Adamant
Star... I'm sorry."
"IT IS OUR DUTY. I AM PROUD TO BE HERE."
"Strike."
"ADAMANT STAR COLLECTION TYPE NOVA RAVE, THREE, TWO, ONE, RELEASE."
The flood of unbearable brilliant struck out... and hit the mirror squarely.
==================================================================
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."