ic No Better Time to Start(IC)

[Ari]

GM

 

"You failed, Sri Syren."

 

The truth was hard. Hard as the packed stone beneath his armored feet, as hard as seeing what was once a vibrant ocean turned to silver mirrors. Hard as the skulls of his changed people that had splattered silver blood against his armor. He'd had to tear most of it off and blast it to atoms, to avoid what had happened to Sri Sare up in orbit. Communion infection was nothing to take lightly. 

 

Rojan Lhar, darkly handsome as ever in his glimmering black and purple hardsuit, was flying above the scene of recent carnage. Well, not flying. It was more like he was standing on the sill of a window seething with otherdimensional energy blacker than the starless void.

 

"Mentor, when he wakes up, will remember that failure for the rest of your life, and so will everyone else. But if Sri Syren dies here..."

 

The bracers that drifted down into his line of sight whispered softly, just out of hearing.

 

"I was like you, once. My dreams dashed, facing a future of certain disgrace. Rojan Lhar had to die."

 

Echohead's hands, finned and scaled under the leaking blood, reached out to take the weapons. The sight stirred something, something rising up in revolt, some contradiction driving into his....no, it was gone.

 

"To reclaim my honor, Blackstar had to be born. Be reborn as well, Sri Syren, and take your place among my army of the lost."

 

The bracers locked onto his wrists, a wave of otherworldly power sweeping over his body to deactivate and discard the remaining Star Knight armor.

 

"You are a rare resilient soul, Syren. And you fight with agility married to power. You will henceforth be known as Platinum Porpoise. Welcome to the Blackguards."

 

[Exaccus]

The incoming fist split into four indivdual glancing blows instead of the more head on hit he'd otherwise have taken when he

 

"Pffft ya done goofed eh porpy? Stealthy approach of demolishing a wall haha!" Facs laughed aloud before addressing their protestations.

 

"What are you, Juvenile? "We didnt start it!" Wah wah wah...where'd they pick up losers like you?"

 

He raised his hands into the air and began to summon energies to him.

 

"Together, Forever? Surf or turf?"

[Ari]

GM

 

Forever Boy

 

There wasn't any reply to Facsimile. Platinum Porpoise deciding instead to leap deftly to Electrum Eagle's side. He brought down a scything arm covered in hungry shadows that set to gnawing and grappling with the luminous shell of coherent energy the Danger heiress had conjured. With an eerie, hollow hissing noise, the shadows playing across the surface carved halfway through the shell before its light managed to conquer them.

 

"You! Flyer!" Porpoise turned to face him as Electrum Eagle continued to strain furiously against the binding light "I don't expect you to understand this, but the longer this machine stays around him," he pointed at Facsimile as he dodged from a coruscating swipe "the more likely it gets that the next time it turns on, it explodes! Do you want to lose your home forever, just to win a fight?"

 

Echohead

 

He's right said Sri Syren you saw what happened when he tried to use the DR's powers the first time

 

But you can stop him. You can do it easily. You can save them all, like I did. 

Edited September 20, 2018 by Ari
Factual error.

[RocketLord]

Pan stopped his movements in mid-air completely as Platinum Porpoise called out to him. He would lose his home forever if that strange thing they had come to steal exploded? Wait, that thing could actually let him get home, and if they kept this up, that whole thing might explode and rob him of that? Honestly, Pan wasn't quite sure if he fully understood what was going on, but he wasn't about to be robbed of his chance to go home. His thoughts raced a hundred miles a minute. The other guy, the one that had just called out to him, he was using the power of the doorway, somehow? Is that what would caues the doorway to explode? 

 

They had to end this quick, then. Another ball of energy flickered into Pan's hand. He should throw it at the bird. Get him down for the count. Keep going. But he turned to the Porpoise instead, quickly flying down closer to him while pulling his arm back for the throw. "Shut him down! Quick!" He threw the golden ball straight at Platinum Porpoise, but the sudden panic in his voice was very different from the confidence he had shown just the moment before. 

[Exaccus]

"Surfs up dude! Lets fry this fish faced felon!" Facs chortled as he made his own contribution to forever boy's blast, causing it to swell and thrum with additional power as it raced towards its target.

 

"Hey porpy, didn't ya mama teach you any manners? It's rude to point and talk about people around them!"

[Ari]

GM

 

Platinum Porpoise was ready, trackng the movements of the pair and moving to dodge out of the way, but the world-warping of Alex's new powers delivered the blow with greater force and speed than expected. The shining lance of omniversal energy met his bracers' barrier of shadow-stuff at a crucial off-balance moment. Sent wheeling and spinning backwards, his arm crashed through some of the support scaffolds around the DR.

 

"You don't get it!" the alien gritted his teeth, launching back to his feet as his shoulder oozed red around the burn. "Sri Rojan is doing this planet a favor! Do you have any idea how many artifacts, technologies and artists come from outer space? This machine threatens all of us just by existing! If you'd just let us take this to the Nightcourt, you would have nothing to worry about!"

[Thevshi]

Veronica

 

When the second alien tried to free the first, attacking the barrier Veronica had put around it, there was some damage done, but the glowing mystical energy remained in place.  As Facsimile and Forever Boy coordinated attacks against the free alien Veronica considered her barrier.  Focusing on it for a moment, the teenage Danger channeled mystical energy into the barrier, repairing the damage that had been done.

 

"Well, if this Sri Rojan had sought to request the gate instead of just sending the two of you in here to just take it, perhaps we might have been willing to at least listen to what he had to say."  Veronica replied to Platinum Porpoise.  "But since you chose to attempt to take it by force, there is little reason to just take your word about the gate and just allow you to have it."

[Supercape]

Echohead

 

Echohead struggled to understand half of what he had felt during his dip into the alien mind. But one name was clear. Blackstar. He was behind this. 

 

But how? What machinations are turning?

 

He hadn't really much of a clue. He was a gardener, and then he had some AEGIS briefing (about super villians on this world). And...aliens and the realms beyond earth were a blank. 

 

In any case, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. So he should pretend he did. 

 

"Pardon us for not trusting you" he shouted at the Platinum. "We will get the truth soon enough!" On this I am confident! Lets see what he knows about the machine in more detail!

 

But first!

 

He reached into the motor cortex, and gave a hard tug. See if he could move anything after that...

[Ari]

GM

 

Platinum Porpoise seized, then was still. Electrum Eagle was still struggling, but with two barriers of light, both the mystical creation of Veronica's amulet, and the tight, constricting coils of Pan's starry whip. The fight was over.

 

As the dust settled, there was a rattling at the main door to the lab, opening as it admitted the crisp and compact Prudence, Veronica's PA looking far more upset at the dust and grime lightly speckling the Danger than the giant hole in the wall, the man resembling a window to other worlds, or the two aliens.

 

"Ah, Ms. Danger, you're unharmed. Now, if you'll-"

 

Then several things happened at once.

 

First, the metallic frame of Facsimile's new body disintegrated.

 

Second, the shadows seeping from the aliens curled around the DR, sparking it into activation.

 

Third, the activation caused the DR to lash out at Alex, whose dimensional warp of a physical presence was no longer protected.

 

Fourth, the previously-contained forces at work began to rage out of control, causing distance, mass, time and gravity to radically alter in waves that pulsed from young mimic!

 

Fifth and finally, one of those pulses picked up Prudence in mid-sentence and flung her head-first straight for a yawning rent between realities!

[Exaccus]

Alex's initial response was to cry out in suprise as he felt himself getting torn out of himself and tied in knots around himselves highly unpleasent and weird sensation!

 

It dawned on him that he currently existed in a state of quantum uncertainty, that he and several alternate versions of himself were colliding and all of them were at once being born and dying over and over again.

 

His body becoming a kaledascopic mass of fractals of himself  as a mass of limbs and facial featurrs folded and unfolded from within him a sort of cosmic tumble weed on a thread of his own past and probable futures playing out across the lab

 

"Ahsushshdushagatysbhayau" he called out, all possible combinations of what he might say playing out and having already played out echoing around him from dozens of mouths

Edited September 25, 2018 by Exaccus

[Thevshi]

Veronica

 

If Veronica seemed bothered by the bit of dust and grimed that had gotten on her during the brief encounter with the two aliens, she showed little sign of it.  She gave a small sigh of relief as things seemed to come to an end as both foes were either unconscious or subdued. 

 

However, that relief quickly faded as the shadows around the two aliens seemed to reach out to the DR and seemingly activate it, causing Facsimile appeared to lose control of whatever connection he had with the DR.  As if that was not bad enough, the new chaos that began to unfold quickly resulted in Prudence getting propelled toward a rent in space that had been created by the out of control DR.

 

Luckily Veronica still had the spell she had prepared for the fight active, as she grabbed ahold of the nearest solid surface with one hand and case the other out as it glowed with green mystical energy.  Another wall of the same mystical energy again sprung into existence, this time forming between Prudence and the rift she had been flung toward…

[RocketLord]

Pan was just about to let out a victory cry, and then everything went crazy. They had it, they stopped the bad guys, and then the Facsimile guy went absolutely crazy. Pan hadn't seen anything like it ever before. He was constantly shifting, changing. There were uncountable voices, he was a blur of motion, energy leaking everywhere creating rifts all around them.

 

Pan paused for a brief second, considering the possibilities. One of these rifts might lead him home to Neverworld, but if it were doors to other worlds like the villain had said, then it could destroy everything here. Even if he returned home, that really wouldn't be worth it. 

 

So, stop Facsimile. Contain him and stop all those random movements. Glowing bands materialized in Pan's hands again, before he threw it at Facsimile, hopefully containing his movements and the random energy pulses. "Do anyone know how to stop this?" Everyone else here had to know more about this machine and Facsimile than Pan did.

[Supercape]

Echohead

 

"Thuh-thuh-th-th-th-thuh armbands!" spluttered Echohead. 

 

Inside his head, he felt the whirrings and musings of the brain he had copied. It was all rather disorientating, and he could sense the copied personality - which sensed the danger - start to bubble up into his own psyche. 

 

"The armbands! Of those two! Throw them into the vortex!" he said, more clearly, with a slightly different accent, tinged with a crystal clear anxiety. He pointed frantically at the two aliens who they had fought. 

 

"That should cause a hyperdimensional lens loop!...I mean...that should shut it down!"

[Exaccus]

For his part facsimile continued to roil like an unfoldind fractal though one that now had a glittery golden thing entwined with it.

 

A dreadfuly familiar sensation came over him, his conciousnesswas dispersing, his thoughts were getting slower and more garbled as he hemoraged energies from the wounds in reality he was now laced through out.

 

He had to focus! And it was with an extreme ammount of it he forced his none euclidean form to move with purpose, dozens of arms grabbing onto himselves and pulling and pushing them together to try and stem the flow of dimensional bleed.

 

"Ep ju! Opx!" He called out as he strained to make his mouths work

 

"J dbo'u ipme po nvdi mpohfs..." he groaned

[RocketLord]

That didn't really work out the way Pan had hoped. His energy bands just swirled around inside Facsimile instead of actually holding him in any way. The garbled mess of voices that were Facisimile's voice made sense to him, and he couldn't hold on much longer. Whatever they did, he might end up destroying his way home. He had already decided it wasn't worth somebody's life, so instead he listened. The bald man, the odd one, he shouted about the armbands and throwing them into the vortex. So, a choice. Porpoise or Eagle, who should he go for? 

 

A quick flight over to the paralyzed Platinum Porpoise on the floor, and Pan began to try and pull the armbands off. If he succeeded, great. He would throw them straight at the vortex. If they were locked on too tightly to be moved, he would go with plan B and pull Platinum Porpoise off the floor and try throwing him into the Vortex instead.

[Ari]

GM

 

Pan gave a mighty heave. And then another, and very soon after that another as the immobilized alien could only stare at him in mounting horror. The bracelets, though they fitted as gently as anything, no power Forever Boy possessed could unmoor them from their owner. Electrum Eagle, for his part, saw what was happening and began frantically, futilely fighting his restraints, his black wings lashing and slamming into the rigid walls of his prison to no avail.

 

Platinum Porpoise was a lot heavier than Pan had expected. He couldn't throw him, he had to drag the piscean alien to the growing, living Vortex.

 

"Ms. Danger!" Prudence shouted from behind the force cage that had caught her, and which she showed a tremendous disinterest in leaving, "I do not wish to seem alarmed, but if we are in the middle of an interstellar incident I have some questions for the after-action report!"

 

As Forever Boy dragged Porpoise to what had once been Facsimile, it was obvious that just the change in location was having a remarkable effect. The chaotic discharge and warping of energy around the Vortex was getting weaker, halved in strength and duration as the frozen alien was dragged away from the DR and closer to a totally uncertain fate.

 

"First," Prudence's voice took on an increasingly nervous edge, "is this necessary? If not, I will have to answer significantly more questions. Safeguarding sapient life is a fundamental value of Danger International."

Edited October 23, 2018 by Ari

[Exaccus]

Alex was not in a good way, he could feel his life unravveling into the quantum uncertainty of infinite dimensions, he was pretty sure that becoming a donut hole in the universe wouldn't be very good for him, or anyone sharing that same plane of existance as him....assuming it wouldn't have a wider blast radius than even that, falling to his many many knees he grasped at the ground and attempted to overwrite his form with concrete as pan drew ever closer to him with the defeated platinum porpose.

 

it seemed to work, several of his arms had begun to become concrete! but as experience should've taught him, it was never ever that simple! with a sickening crack and a mind numbing pain that made him cry out in agony, his partially transformed limbs were ripped off, pulled in and either crushed or unravelled into atoms.

 

"Pw! Uibu ivsu!" he cried out in agony and mild annoyance both, this quantum stuff was going and had taken an eternity of an instant to get used to!

[Supercape]

Echohead

 

"Deadly force? Bu-but someones going to die!" said a confused Echohead, his brain becoming scrambled with anxiety and his strange psychic powers. However, one thing cut through the jumple like nothing else. Fascimile was in peril of death Or worse. 

 

Possibly much worse. 

 

He aimed his blaster pistol at the device. 

 

"Id  rather blast the machine that let him die!" he declared, defiantly....

[Ari]

GM

 

The DR was made of stuff found almost nowhere on Earth, made over decades the project leads claimed, refined over the course of a World War, through the depths of a Cold and the paranoiac retaliation of the Terror. 

 

All through the tour Umberto and Veronica and Alex had heard about the grand promise its completion made, of a better, more connected future and a community where borders were rendered irrelevant concepts condemned to oblivion.

 

It blasted to pieces as easily as anything else. The raging void it had leashed to Facsimile wavered, howled and at last evaporated as the delicate machinery fell in sizzling chunks of red-hot metal.

 

At the same time, Forever Boy had wrangled Porpoise to the brink of the now merely whispering gulf into nothing that was Alex. The Vortex was no longer growing, but this close Pan could see quite clearly the threads of living shadow reaching from the alien gauntlets to the master mimic.

 

The gap reared before him. It would take but a moment of pressure, one sharp shove forward, to fling Platinum into the abyss, taking the danger with him.

[RocketLord]

The Porpoise was heavy. Pan slowly managed to pull him across the floor and towards the portal. He could throw him in. It might work, would end all the danger. He could see the shadows from the portal that used to be Facsimile reaching out towards the gauntlets. It might shut them down. He was just about to do it when the woman shouted about deadly force on a captive. Pan frowned. Save everything around them, or save one villain? Really? Was that how things were in this world? Put the villains before the good of everyone else? He was just about to do it anyway, before pausing. She was right, though. Doing something like this, throwing a helpless victim to his probably death, that was something the Hooked Man or his pirates would do. Pan was better than that, wasn't he? Smarter, too.

 

"You better be happy about this, Fishface." He kneeled by the still prone Platinum Porpoise and focused for a moment. He had done this before. It was a good trick. One that he should try and do a bit more often. Might come easier to him then. He created a golden ball of energy in his hand, much like the one that he had created for attacking earlier. Then it started to take shape, forming into a short blade of glowing golden energy. Then he put it to work, starting to try and cut the armband off. Get that off, then get it into the portal. There, problem solved.

[Supercape]

Echohead

 

The young man caught up in this dimensional web of terror - Fascimile? - was in a state of panic, or confusion - or quite probably both (how often they went together), and thatm given he was clearly possessed of formidable suitablepowers, was dangerous for everyone!

 

Echohead was not best fond of mind wiping persons, but right now, it seemed the only safe thing to do. Or, to be more precise, it was the least dangerous thing to do...for there was no getting away from it...they where in deep trouble, the lot of them!

 

So, he reached inside Fascimiles mind and started pulling away at the memories of the last minute. See if that helped!

Edited October 19, 2018 by Supercape

[Exaccus]

Facsimile felt somewhere in his minds the events of the day were being pulled away from his brain, what he'd been thinking about as he'd been hefting power cores and the conversations he'd had all falling away.

 

His first instinct was to struggle against it but being quantumly uncertain he had the benefit of hind and foresight both, this worked to help him return to normal in the majority of timelines so he relaxed himselves as much as he could and allowed his brain to be flossed.

[Thevshi]

Veronica Danger

 

"The incident report will have to wait Prudence, the incident is not quite over yet!"  Veronica shouted to her personal assistant as she focused on the situation.  The DR was not destroyed, which was likely for the best currently, however Facsimile was still suffering from the power he had copied from the gateway.

 

Shutting down the constructions of mystical energy she had made, the teenage Danger began focusing on gathering a few of the small pieces of jewelry she wore on her wrists and around her neck, working to create something she could use to temporarily shutdown Facsimile’s powers and hopefully allow him to snap back to his normal self.

It took a few moments, but soon Veronica had her spell together, and she slipped the small silver bracelet with the selected charms around one wrist as she focused back on Facsimile.  Taking a deep breath, she gestured toward the other teenager with her hands, as they once again glowed with mystical energy, this time surrounding Facsimile as she attempted to shut off his powers.

[Exaccus]

Alex was very confused, here he was surrounded by people he'd never met before in an unfamiliar place and in quite a deal of distress.

 

He attempted to use his powers to defend himself but they were...Stuck? Broken? Strained? Like a cramped muscle locked in place.

 

Then some sort of energy was being directed at him, making his powers receed? He struggled against it with all his strength, but he was so tired as he thrashed and stumbled in his attempt to escape but it was for naught.

 

He felt his form unspiralling back to flesh and blood and at the same time his legs collapsed and he fell into his face like a log with a dull thump.

Edited October 31, 2018 by Exaccus

[Ari]

GM

 

Under the edge of Forever Boy's light saber, the armband had cracked and buckled as the energy field it contained was let loose. Like a tongue of flame, darkness deeper than any in the universe roared from the device and spiraled like claws for Pan's face! 

 

He'd dodged, but not fast enough thanks to the tight quarters and the speed of his foe's weapon. Luckily his inner light had deflected the blast, intercepting and dispersing it harmlessly into the light of the living world.

 

Even better the damage was lasting. While not destroyed the armband was clearly damaged, something tinged at the edge with purple hissing and slithering across it as the alien mechanism fought to maintain its coherent tie to another dimension. In that light its continued existence was nothing less than remarkable. The tie it had to Facsimile was visibly wavering, too.

 

As Alex regained his human form, the last eddy leeched from him, the Void sealing behind it silently but with an impact like cannonfire, the sensation of something slamming shut, some difference in metaphysical pressure abruptly normalizing. For the first time in several minutes the lab was silent.

 

In the distance the heroes and bystanders could hear sirens.