A double length update today because, as a certain Amber GM would say, Many Things Happen At Once.
I think I might stick to about this length for an update in the future.
The sensation that she was confronted with in the depths of that old lab somewhere under the streets of the city was similar in nature to the feelings that she
had felt while she was visiting her ancestor's tomb. She could feel something strange though the sensation that she felt was drawing her away from the
hangar and areas directly connected to it. Lacking anything better to go on, she turned a corner and continued deeper into the facility.
At the upper door, the figure in gray drew their hand away from the keypad and walked through the doors as they slid open a second time. The sound of the doors
opening was swallowed up beyond by space and sound proofed walls. The darkness did not seem to be much of an obstacle for them, perhaps they possessed
equipment similar to the person they were following. With unerring movements, they walked through the gloom, boots scarcely making any sound at all.
Up at street level, the Irregulars had set up shop in the parking lot of a nearby shopping arcade. Several large, black personnel carriers had parked in a
secondary lot and were set up with great interest in a building that was, supposedly, condemned. Naturally, the press and private citizens were all being kept
away from the area. It was, after all, a potentially dangerous situation whenever the Irregulars were called in to handle a situation. In the years since the
organization had formed, the point that the way the Irregulars were forced to do business was generally dangerous.
Urban warfare was always a nasty business, worse than the mechanized combat that had been the hallmark of the Knightmare era of warfare.
In the midst of this, a man dressed in the uniform of a minor functionary in the Britannian army made himself useful and generally unobtrusive as he kept tabs
on what was going on. He was a technical officer, according to his insignias, which excused the presence of a pair of utterly black data glasses affixed to his
face which were not a part of the standard uniform. As he navigated the communications chatter and quietly relayed information to forward units, he observed
that the Irregulars already had someone in what they were classifying as Restricted Area 4, with notation that there was support backing them up.
The man frowned fractionally at that and waited. At some point he suspected he was going to have to get involved with the matters at hand, but he wasn't
sure exactly when that was going to be. If the operative made their move, he was going to have to find a way to disrupt them. If he made himself too obvious he
was going to be up to his neck in commandos. Sometimes the greater part of valor is discretion on when to make use of said valor.
It wasn't the first time that he questioned his decision to let his younger sister infiltrate the facility itself, but he quickly countered that line of
thought with the realization that she would have never been able to blend in with the army regulars. He had been military once, and there was a certain way of
moving and holding yourself that someone from the outside never quite got right.
His unmarred eyebrow popped up fractionally behind his glasses when one of the Irregulars who was waiting in the wings suddenly went into a seemingly silent
fit and dropped to their knees, clawing at the collar of their uniform as if suddenly feeling trapped within the suit. Their fellows grabbed them and hauled
them off the line, looking rather shaky themselves.
In the depths of his glasses, the projection layer reported on information he'd gleaned from compromised frequencies. There was something down there that
had severely rattled someone on the team. After a moment more, an implant in his inner ear reported the Irregular's voice, a woman, screaming something
about 'The darkness closing in all around her.' It wasn't the person in there, though, they were still moving in.
The rumors of the Irregulars having an advanced information sharing system seemed to be pretty much on the money. Who the hell put a claustrophobic person on a
team with a uniform that had full body concealment, though? They'd have to be on anti-anxiety medication just to put the damn helmet on. And how hard up
did someone have to be to freak out over an information projection in the face bowl? Maybe the reason they were so still was a full interior projection of what
their fellow was seeing?
He made a note to himself to try to steal one of those suits before this was finished, or at very least the helmet. They had to take them off at some point.
He was going to have to generate a distraction soon, though, otherwise things were going to go straight to hell very quickly, and the girl he'd sent into
harm's way was someone that he could not afford to get captured. His ancestors would rise from their tombs to punish him, were he to actually allow
something like that to happen.
With his subversion of the communication's board, though, he could slip just enough chaos into the system to give her a fighting chance. All he had to do
was wait for the right moment. The delicate nature of the situation meant that he would have to continue to wait and see what happened next. The need for
patience in his situation made him feel somewhat better as well for patience was another one of his specialties.
An eerie, red glow filled the lab that the infiltrator in black had discovered, it had been dim at first, but increased in intensity as she had explored the
lab further. Within a few minutes, the glow had become sufficient to illuminate the lab enough to see by, according to the sensor in her helmet. The air
quality was good, if a little cold, but she didn't mind the chill. The mask over her face came apart in two parts, the lower part with atmospheric filter
dropping down to her neck, the upper part with the imaging system going up to her forehead. Without echolocation, the lab looked a bit less mundane, except for
the red glow coming though a heavy glass window on one side.
What she saw astonished her.
She'd seen pictures in school of something like what she was seeing with her own, two eyes. The red glow was provided by emergency lighting of an actual
Sakuradite reactor, not a large one, but sufficient to power the equipment in the area. Some sort of backup generator, she presumed, that had been activated
when she entered the lab.
The strange sensation she was feeling seemed to be coming from the reactor itself.
She saw something else in the window and briefly thought she understood what it was that she was seeing when reality lurched violently. She tried to hang on to
the console she had been standing next to but it writhed in her hands like a living thing for a moment. She dimly felt her head strike something hard and cold
before she knew nothing else for several seconds.
In the window a pair of eyes burned through the gloom, illuminated by a bird-like sigil.
Up on the surface, the man with dark glasses frowned as a report came in of the Irregular in the facility having 'found the target' and begun the
process of subduing her. He couldn't afford to delay any longer. He fed a virus into the comm system that started the process of swiftly bringing it to its
knees while transmitting back information consistent with Sakuradite related interference. Even if there was none down there, by the time anyone found out what
was going on they'd both, hopefully, be long gone.
In the next van over he heard his 'superior' begin to loudly exclaim something about environmental contamination. Thusly having distracted the enemy
for a moment, he waited until no one was looking at him or had him in their peripheral vision, and took an opportunity to slip out.
In the moments that followed, several things happened at once.
A figure in a gray Irregular uniform dropped down from the top of the van the man in dark glasses had been working in and attempted to land a falling kick on
him that actually cratered the pavement when the blow missed his shoulder by scant inches. The man managed to roll away from the strike with blinding speed and
dropped several capsules on the ground that discharged a thick cloud of chemical smoke in the immediate area.
Down in the lab, what looked like a cabinet lit up as the girl in black's hand brushed across several switches and buttons at random on the console she had
been leaning on in a desperate bid to keep herself from falling over. The Irregular's visor snapped closed again as they whipped their head around towards
the movement and sound heard from that direction.
Several hoses set into the side of the cabinet discharged a cold, misty gas that rose towards the ceiling quickly, dissolving in the air. The air itself took
on a rank, slightly moldy scent like something very old had been introduced to the room. The smell dissipated quickly, but it was enough to slip into the
helmet of the Irregular and make them wheeze. After another moment the cabinet's door cracked open on one side and the face of it unfolded under its own
power.
In a different universe, a small girl ran.
It was a hot, oppressive afternoon somewhere on an overpass in a huge metropolitan center. There was no traffic, for which the child would have been thankful
had she the thought in her mind to be thankful for having no traffic to worry about. The sun beat down. The reclaimed swampland which the city had been built
on still provided for an oppressive humidity that made the air seem as soup.
Something was coming. Something terrible was coming. She knew it.
It sounded like a train and a hurricane all at once, and the roaring sound of it only grew louder in her ears as the eternal seconds of her run ticked by. She
didn't know what it was, she didn't want to know what it was. Whatever she did, she could not look back at it. To look back at it would mean it would
get her, and that would be the end of everything.
Flames exploded up either side of the overpass as the world turned black and red for a moment, causing the child to trip over her feet and fall to the
pavement. The pain of colliding with the tarmac was not nearly as painful as the horrible thudding in her chest as the thing which was chasing her drew closer.
She could feel its breath. She could feel the horrible, hammering sound in the air even as the sound drowned out her ability to hear. The deep bass of the
noise thudded deep in her chest, strangling her heart.
And then it all stopped and the world went abruptly and blissfully black.
Outside of the infiltrator's mind, back in the lab, the sound dampeners in the Irregular's helmet did nothing to mask a sudden, feminine scream as the
soldier reached up towards her head as if trying to cover it from someone raining blows down on it from above. Her whole body reeled as if struck several times
over, finally turning once entirely and falling forward in a rather undignified heap. As she lay there she curled up as if the fall of her cloak could shield
her from whatever she had just experienced.
On the surface, the man in dark glasses was in a struggle for his life. His opponent was not faster than him but, impossibly, they were much stronger than him.
Physical blows that missed his body tore at the air. Their footfalls left prints in the asphalt. It was like fighting something that weighed as much as ten men
but moved with the grace and speed of only one.
When, from nowhere, his attacker suddenly recoiled, gripping at their chest as if someone had stabbed them, he made his escape rather than press his luck in
trying to defeat them. It was only a handful of long strides to a manhole, which he made his escape through by detonating a small charge he'd concealed
within it, knocking the lid clean off and into the engine block of a nearby military vehicle. He would have time to worry about when he had been found out
later, he needed to find a way to get to his sister before it was too late for her.
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead
I think I might stick to about this length for an update in the future.
The sensation that she was confronted with in the depths of that old lab somewhere under the streets of the city was similar in nature to the feelings that she
had felt while she was visiting her ancestor's tomb. She could feel something strange though the sensation that she felt was drawing her away from the
hangar and areas directly connected to it. Lacking anything better to go on, she turned a corner and continued deeper into the facility.
At the upper door, the figure in gray drew their hand away from the keypad and walked through the doors as they slid open a second time. The sound of the doors
opening was swallowed up beyond by space and sound proofed walls. The darkness did not seem to be much of an obstacle for them, perhaps they possessed
equipment similar to the person they were following. With unerring movements, they walked through the gloom, boots scarcely making any sound at all.
Up at street level, the Irregulars had set up shop in the parking lot of a nearby shopping arcade. Several large, black personnel carriers had parked in a
secondary lot and were set up with great interest in a building that was, supposedly, condemned. Naturally, the press and private citizens were all being kept
away from the area. It was, after all, a potentially dangerous situation whenever the Irregulars were called in to handle a situation. In the years since the
organization had formed, the point that the way the Irregulars were forced to do business was generally dangerous.
Urban warfare was always a nasty business, worse than the mechanized combat that had been the hallmark of the Knightmare era of warfare.
In the midst of this, a man dressed in the uniform of a minor functionary in the Britannian army made himself useful and generally unobtrusive as he kept tabs
on what was going on. He was a technical officer, according to his insignias, which excused the presence of a pair of utterly black data glasses affixed to his
face which were not a part of the standard uniform. As he navigated the communications chatter and quietly relayed information to forward units, he observed
that the Irregulars already had someone in what they were classifying as Restricted Area 4, with notation that there was support backing them up.
The man frowned fractionally at that and waited. At some point he suspected he was going to have to get involved with the matters at hand, but he wasn't
sure exactly when that was going to be. If the operative made their move, he was going to have to find a way to disrupt them. If he made himself too obvious he
was going to be up to his neck in commandos. Sometimes the greater part of valor is discretion on when to make use of said valor.
It wasn't the first time that he questioned his decision to let his younger sister infiltrate the facility itself, but he quickly countered that line of
thought with the realization that she would have never been able to blend in with the army regulars. He had been military once, and there was a certain way of
moving and holding yourself that someone from the outside never quite got right.
His unmarred eyebrow popped up fractionally behind his glasses when one of the Irregulars who was waiting in the wings suddenly went into a seemingly silent
fit and dropped to their knees, clawing at the collar of their uniform as if suddenly feeling trapped within the suit. Their fellows grabbed them and hauled
them off the line, looking rather shaky themselves.
In the depths of his glasses, the projection layer reported on information he'd gleaned from compromised frequencies. There was something down there that
had severely rattled someone on the team. After a moment more, an implant in his inner ear reported the Irregular's voice, a woman, screaming something
about 'The darkness closing in all around her.' It wasn't the person in there, though, they were still moving in.
The rumors of the Irregulars having an advanced information sharing system seemed to be pretty much on the money. Who the hell put a claustrophobic person on a
team with a uniform that had full body concealment, though? They'd have to be on anti-anxiety medication just to put the damn helmet on. And how hard up
did someone have to be to freak out over an information projection in the face bowl? Maybe the reason they were so still was a full interior projection of what
their fellow was seeing?
He made a note to himself to try to steal one of those suits before this was finished, or at very least the helmet. They had to take them off at some point.
He was going to have to generate a distraction soon, though, otherwise things were going to go straight to hell very quickly, and the girl he'd sent into
harm's way was someone that he could not afford to get captured. His ancestors would rise from their tombs to punish him, were he to actually allow
something like that to happen.
With his subversion of the communication's board, though, he could slip just enough chaos into the system to give her a fighting chance. All he had to do
was wait for the right moment. The delicate nature of the situation meant that he would have to continue to wait and see what happened next. The need for
patience in his situation made him feel somewhat better as well for patience was another one of his specialties.
An eerie, red glow filled the lab that the infiltrator in black had discovered, it had been dim at first, but increased in intensity as she had explored the
lab further. Within a few minutes, the glow had become sufficient to illuminate the lab enough to see by, according to the sensor in her helmet. The air
quality was good, if a little cold, but she didn't mind the chill. The mask over her face came apart in two parts, the lower part with atmospheric filter
dropping down to her neck, the upper part with the imaging system going up to her forehead. Without echolocation, the lab looked a bit less mundane, except for
the red glow coming though a heavy glass window on one side.
What she saw astonished her.
She'd seen pictures in school of something like what she was seeing with her own, two eyes. The red glow was provided by emergency lighting of an actual
Sakuradite reactor, not a large one, but sufficient to power the equipment in the area. Some sort of backup generator, she presumed, that had been activated
when she entered the lab.
The strange sensation she was feeling seemed to be coming from the reactor itself.
She saw something else in the window and briefly thought she understood what it was that she was seeing when reality lurched violently. She tried to hang on to
the console she had been standing next to but it writhed in her hands like a living thing for a moment. She dimly felt her head strike something hard and cold
before she knew nothing else for several seconds.
In the window a pair of eyes burned through the gloom, illuminated by a bird-like sigil.
Up on the surface, the man with dark glasses frowned as a report came in of the Irregular in the facility having 'found the target' and begun the
process of subduing her. He couldn't afford to delay any longer. He fed a virus into the comm system that started the process of swiftly bringing it to its
knees while transmitting back information consistent with Sakuradite related interference. Even if there was none down there, by the time anyone found out what
was going on they'd both, hopefully, be long gone.
In the next van over he heard his 'superior' begin to loudly exclaim something about environmental contamination. Thusly having distracted the enemy
for a moment, he waited until no one was looking at him or had him in their peripheral vision, and took an opportunity to slip out.
In the moments that followed, several things happened at once.
A figure in a gray Irregular uniform dropped down from the top of the van the man in dark glasses had been working in and attempted to land a falling kick on
him that actually cratered the pavement when the blow missed his shoulder by scant inches. The man managed to roll away from the strike with blinding speed and
dropped several capsules on the ground that discharged a thick cloud of chemical smoke in the immediate area.
Down in the lab, what looked like a cabinet lit up as the girl in black's hand brushed across several switches and buttons at random on the console she had
been leaning on in a desperate bid to keep herself from falling over. The Irregular's visor snapped closed again as they whipped their head around towards
the movement and sound heard from that direction.
Several hoses set into the side of the cabinet discharged a cold, misty gas that rose towards the ceiling quickly, dissolving in the air. The air itself took
on a rank, slightly moldy scent like something very old had been introduced to the room. The smell dissipated quickly, but it was enough to slip into the
helmet of the Irregular and make them wheeze. After another moment the cabinet's door cracked open on one side and the face of it unfolded under its own
power.
In a different universe, a small girl ran.
It was a hot, oppressive afternoon somewhere on an overpass in a huge metropolitan center. There was no traffic, for which the child would have been thankful
had she the thought in her mind to be thankful for having no traffic to worry about. The sun beat down. The reclaimed swampland which the city had been built
on still provided for an oppressive humidity that made the air seem as soup.
Something was coming. Something terrible was coming. She knew it.
It sounded like a train and a hurricane all at once, and the roaring sound of it only grew louder in her ears as the eternal seconds of her run ticked by. She
didn't know what it was, she didn't want to know what it was. Whatever she did, she could not look back at it. To look back at it would mean it would
get her, and that would be the end of everything.
Flames exploded up either side of the overpass as the world turned black and red for a moment, causing the child to trip over her feet and fall to the
pavement. The pain of colliding with the tarmac was not nearly as painful as the horrible thudding in her chest as the thing which was chasing her drew closer.
She could feel its breath. She could feel the horrible, hammering sound in the air even as the sound drowned out her ability to hear. The deep bass of the
noise thudded deep in her chest, strangling her heart.
And then it all stopped and the world went abruptly and blissfully black.
Outside of the infiltrator's mind, back in the lab, the sound dampeners in the Irregular's helmet did nothing to mask a sudden, feminine scream as the
soldier reached up towards her head as if trying to cover it from someone raining blows down on it from above. Her whole body reeled as if struck several times
over, finally turning once entirely and falling forward in a rather undignified heap. As she lay there she curled up as if the fall of her cloak could shield
her from whatever she had just experienced.
On the surface, the man in dark glasses was in a struggle for his life. His opponent was not faster than him but, impossibly, they were much stronger than him.
Physical blows that missed his body tore at the air. Their footfalls left prints in the asphalt. It was like fighting something that weighed as much as ten men
but moved with the grace and speed of only one.
When, from nowhere, his attacker suddenly recoiled, gripping at their chest as if someone had stabbed them, he made his escape rather than press his luck in
trying to defeat them. It was only a handful of long strides to a manhole, which he made his escape through by detonating a small charge he'd concealed
within it, knocking the lid clean off and into the engine block of a nearby military vehicle. He would have time to worry about when he had been found out
later, he needed to find a way to get to his sister before it was too late for her.
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead