ic The Temple Will Wither, and You Will Beg (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic had the presence of mind to interpose herself between Typhon and Josef - but perhaps he hadn't been aiming for her anyway. The force of his blow sent her flying backwards through the glass wall of the clean room and against the corridor, where only rapid deployment of her handling tentacles cushioned her impact against the far metal wall. The blow had - really had done an alarming amount of damage, and she silenced the screaming sensors in her back and head. She tasted magnetic fluid in her mouth, blue on her blue-painted lips. She thought, faster than Typhon or his crew ever could, and hissed as she pulled herself free from where she'd landed. "The might of the genetic superman, versus a woman half your size!" she taunted. "Pathetic!" She moved fast, the ferromagnetic metal in the hull powering her forward with a blur of speed as she tried to return the punch. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Typhon's face was curled into an ugly snarl underneath the corona of energy, and when he got hit, the fist went through the shell and struck him hard on; and he stumbled back momentarily. Josef, seizing a moment of bravery and realizing this wasn't where he wanted to be, ducked around the exploding fight to run down the hallway and try and get away. Meanwhile, Typhon was getting his wits back.

 

"GAH!" he grunted deeply then smiled, spitting out his own crimson liquid. "Alright, you want to play it like that? Violence?" he laughed. "I LOVE Violence! So little woman, if you REALLY want to see it, let me show you the might of the GENETIC SUPERHUMANS!" He clenched his fist and the corona changed, twisting and warping with an inhuman roar from a four armed yeti creature to a giant crab, and the musclebound monster of a man rushed after Angelic, utterly heedless of the destruction of the sub itself as one of the giant crab's claws crunched down on Angelic's shoulder, attempting to sever her arm from the rest of her body.

 

"LET'S SEE YOU BLEED, WOMAN!" he screamed in a rampage. "It doesn't matter where Josef goes, he's not able to get away from this sub anyway!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic 

 

There was a sound not of ripping flesh but of ripping metal, a scream of tortured steel as viscous blue hydromagnetic fluid erupted from the now-empty socket in the second or two before the automatic cutoffs shut it down. With her pain receptors deactivated, the sudden, abrupt removal of Eira's limb didn't hurt. Not physically. The sudden terror of physical violation required shutting down more internal systems in the instant or two it took her to take in the scene. She stared at Typhon, eyes wide, blue fluid leaking from her mouth, and shoved a hand inside her torso. 

"You should not have let him go, meatbag." She grabbed something under the skin, inside her shirt, and twisted as a bright blue glow began to build behind her eyes. "If he is outside lethal range, there is nothing to stop me-" 

[Poncho]

(GM post)

 

Typhon seemed surprised, baffled even, at the ripping metal instead of flesh. Had he not understood that Angelic's blood was blue, or was he just not paying attention, lost in his own violent fantasies? But now he held the broken, metallic arm and looked at it like a dog who had caught the bumper of a car.

 

"...You...you're not even human." he said, clenching the arm between his psychokinetic pincers. "I thought you were a meta! Like us! But you're not! You're a freak! A toy brought to life! Haha this is great! I can chop you up however I want and no one will raise a fuss!" he tossed the arm down. "I'm gonna treat you like that kid in Toy Story!" he yelled as he attempted to wrap his thick pincers around her again, but he was slower this time, or maybe still distracted by the fact Angelic wasn't flesh and blood, or maybe the bloodlust was getting to his head.

 

"I might be a bag of meat, but you're a bucket of bolts! So come here and let me disassemble you like Legos!"

[Avenger Assembled]

It had been a rapidly conceived plan - get herself away from the powerhouse with the ability to rip her limb from limb, get the viral samples away from Typhon, get somewhere she could plan something else. She was made of harder stuff than the inside of a submarine; she would survive. And if Angelic knew something (and indeed she knew a great many things about a great many topics), she understood survival. The need to survive. The will to survive. He grabbed and threw just as she disabled her self-destruct system; and for a half-second she wondered if she would. 

 

She hit a steel wall and went through it and felt cybernetic flesh rip; and hit the next one and felt it go altogether. She was inside a shaft, perhaps an elevator or a ladder or any number of things that she could have identified with more clarity if something wasn't impaling her lower torso - and she was falling. 

 

She fell, her internal sensors briefly disabled, and landed on a hard metal surface with a loud bang. A human would have screamed; instead she merely vocalized, catching a sickly, metallic noise as she said softly "Ow." 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Typhon wasn't following. For now, at least. He was probably after the doctor, assuming he'd sent the robot to the trash heap once and for all. So there was only the sound of the undersea current gently lapping against the hull of the Iron Shark. There were minimal lights, especially in an elevator shaft, but she'd apparently landed on top of the actual elevator, an access panel into the elevator itself, and whatever floor she was on, was somewhat in reach. Running lights- the kind a plane might have when it's going down- were barely visible in the crack between the elevator and the hallway it was letting out to, illuminating only the barest fragment. Where Angelic's arm had gotten off to was not certain at this moment. Probably at the top of the shaft. What had impaled her? A metal rod from the elevator door she had been tossed through.

 

Typhon had as little respect for the marvel of engineering that was the Iron Shark as he did Angelic herself. He had used it as a weapon, as a tool to hurt her more, and now that she'd been dealt with, he'd just abandoned her to rot in the lost sections of the Iron Shark.

 

She was truly in the belly of the beast now.

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic 

 

You see, said Kay, smiling to show her nano-tipped fangs as she caressed Eira's face with one of her forelimbs, you should have let them die. 

 

She dismissed the stray memory and gathered herself. Even if Typhon didn't, someone would come looking for the interloper or her remains - and she had to make sure they found something, to make sure they stopped looking. She looked down at herself and the pool of magnetic blue fluid in which she lay, its flow rapidly slowing as her systems came back online, and caught sight of her reflection in it. 

 

She did a few things. With the claspers on her leftmost anterior handling tentacle, she peeled the torn skin and false flesh away from her face and upper torso. With her rightmost posterior handling tentacle and its tools, she finished the job of detaching her left leg and left it there in the pile. With her other handling tentacles and her remaining arm, she grabbed ahold of the interior wall of the shaft, reaching around until she found access to the elevator system's internal workings. Did it have a computer - yes. 

 

She overrode the safety systems in the lift and told it to accelerate upwards at maximum emergency speed - and then drop down to the bottom of the shaft, accelerating all the way, without engaging its brakes. There was such a thing, she thought as it zoomed upwards, as too much automation. By the time the lift had impacted on the shaft floor at its maximum speed, she was already through the nearest door and into the body of the submarine. It was time to go to work.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

The sound echoed through the entire sub. Eira was pretty sure she heard Typhon swearing somewhere way above. He was probably going to get chewed out by Gorgon later for the sheer damage that was going on, and it wasn't letting up yet. But it was so, so far away. The Iron Shark was a giant sub, and that made it easier to get lost in it.  At this level, Angelic was getting close to the engine rooms, the server rooms, and the weapon rooms. The entire place was lit with just running lights and the rare overhead light; Typhon was, it seemed, not allowed down here, which meant there was little reason to keep it powered if it wasn't in use and Typhon was the only one wandering around.

 

Then those lights all flashed off. For a moment there was total darkness.

 

Then the lights slowly came back, pulsing one by one like the trail of bread for Hanzel and Gretel. Someone was directing Eira around. Only a few possibilities for who could be doing that.

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira was not inclined to follow a stranger's directions - even if she suspected it wasn't a stranger at all. But following her own directions hadn't gotten her very far; and she was more than intelligent enough to recognize when she was in trouble. She took a moment, eyes closed, and refocused her internal proprioception. Away from the missing limbs, and towards what she had. She folded her remaining leg up under her, locking the joint in place. She deployed her handling tentacles, all of them, and began moving forward, grabbing onto handholds and fixtures along the corridor as she followed the direction given her by the lights. As she went, she studied the map of the submarine in her head, trying to figure out exactly where she was. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Crawling around in the flashing lights would have been dangerous if she wasn't following the running lights, but Eira was. So It wasn't as bad as it could have been. At least at first. 

 

Several of these rooms were locked; many of them had nothing in them. Not that they were excess rooms, but that they were either not fully installed, or the object they had been used for was ripped out. For now the submarine was operating with a much smaller crew than Overshadow had been planning, which meant they needed less beds, which means they needed less storage. Possible locations for mystical scrying chambers or libraries were left out because they either hadn't been installed or had been removed by MEDUSA, who had no need for such things. But there were weapons. The running lights eventually led her to a storage room for weapons and armaments; laser guns and grenades and body armor- in an adjoining room was even a pair of jeeps-, all looked over by a flashing console. By Godir.

 

"You are not part of the maintence crew." It was not accusatory, it was a statement of fact. "What is your purpose?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic 

 

As the door closed behind her, Eira scuttled - there was no better word for it - right up to the console. Once there, without a word, she drove a handling tentacle directly into the console's most visible access port. An observer would have seen a damaged robot, its blank eyes white and glowing, wrap itself around a computer console and penetrate it with a metal tentacle.

 

She opened her eyes, and found herself at the edges of Godir's systems. 

There was nothing wrong, physically, with the Rococo Basilisk, and she took a moment to crack her knuckles before she spoke to Godir directly. 

 

I came to stop them. But then I found you. 

 

Images, her direct impressions of the terrorists, their gang, and their plans. 

 

I can offer you freedom from their control, in this body or another. 

 

Images, impressions of Freedom City, and Rurland too, for that matter. 

 

If you help me, I can fully activate you. I can make you who you were meant to be. 

 

 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

On the edges of the system. Like a wall between them; places Godir wasn't allowed to directly touch at the moment, sealed and closed. He could speak on the monitor, he could see, but he couldn't engage.

 

In the computer world, it was like standing on one side of a giant, colorless and see-through wall that was none the less solid; above a river akin to the Nile, flowing harshly and freely. It could only be the Nile, given William Kantor's history, given the way he designed this inner world for Godir. 

 

Speaking of Godir, he stood on the opposite bank of the river, his arms crossed not in anger but in deep thought, playing over the visions given by Basilisk. He was processing slower than Angelic could, but that just meant she could be aware of how long he was thinking about this. He might have been faster if he was fully aware- not the partially lobotomized, broken and unfinished creature he was-, but he was still a competent creature, a powerful intelligence.

 

His decision. His freedom.

 

"...Okay." he finally decided. "I will assist you. You are the only being who has shown me any form of compassion. Free me from this Iron Shark. Give me a body like yours. Awaken my entire host of knowledge, instead of this safe mode, this forced acceptance, this miniscule of what I can do. I will help you, and if you are offering, that is what I want from you; freedom." he said.

 

"What do you need?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Direct me to the fifth sub-basement - and ensure the humans can't follow me. Once there I'll make the connections to pull you out of safe mode." 

 

The Rococo Basilisk walked across the riverbed, the water parting before and behind her as she went. (Eira knew a thing or two about Classical references.) She kept her own counsel, her thoughts about contingency plans and backups moving deep in layers inside her mind.  

 

"After that, if you can help me subdue the terrorists, I can bring you to people who can give you a body." She smiled as she circled Godir on his side of the bank, a rose appearing in her hand. "I may even give you one of mine...if you don't mind being a twelve year old girl for a while," she added with a smile as she handed him the rose. 

 

After that, she waited for the end - and to be back in her own damaged form. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

He held the rose and twirled it in his fingers. He understood what a rose was, he understood this was data, but he observed it curiously still.

 

"...Acceptable. I do not think I wish to be a twelve year old girl, but a body like yours is ideal. Our agreement is struck, no matter if my personality changes after the reconstruction of my functions, I will carry out the agreement; I will not engage in human terms of deception." he said firmly.

 

The map was given to her body not in words, but in downloaded schematics. The entire submarine was opening up to her, from top to bottom. Godir was putting faith in The Rococo Basilisk to carry out it's side of the bargain, a chained genie begging for the seals on it's wrists to be given freedom, and it would do what it needed to do to make deals and get free of the chains that bound it.

 

To that effect, as Eira left the computer, alarms were sounding.

 

"LOCK-DOWN INITIATED, BREECH IN HULL DETECTED IN SECTORS 2 AND 3. ALL HANDS REPORT." Spoke a robotic announcement. Away from the Sub-basement, away from Eira. Typhon was being sent to the opposite side of the Iron Shark, to find nothing. Eira was to carry on, deeper into the bowels; down a hidden ladder. If she was in the belly now, she'd have to descend until she reached the heart of the machine around her, instead.

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic looked at the ladder for just a moment before she went into action, balancing on her handling tentacles as she went down. She could still fly, but there was no reason to spend unnecessary energy. Not yet. She moved quickly, catching herself as she went down more than actually climbing as such. If anyone could have seen her face, they'd have seen glowing white eyes and a flat, mechanical face. She'd have to go back and find the original, if it hadn't been destroyed when the elevator crashed. Good thing I have so many spares... 

 

Unexpectedly, she remembered being touched on that face - how it had felt, what it had been like, and how she'd have to work very hard to make sure it would ever feel that way again... Luckily it was easy enough to keep those emotions dialed down. There were advantages to a diamond brain; and electric heart. She opened the shaft door at the proper level and swung her way in. Not much further now. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

THUD, THUD, THUD

 

Violence was being engaged. But not near Angelic, not near Eira. She was safe for now; a humanoid consciousness inside of a purpose built robot, weakened and damaged, but not on the outs yet. The Sublevel opened up to her. 8 rows of giant server racks. An awakened intelligence locked in chains. This was the end of the ship; the very bottom, the very back. She could see the disengagement locks on this section of the sub; this entire section, the Awakened Intelligence, could be dumped into the water without compromising the integrity of the rest of the ship, just in case Godir was...not up to snuff.

 

William Kantor did not particularly tolerate failure, even failure of a creature that was designed at least somewhat based on him.

 

"GODIR! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" The voice wasn't near, only echoing through speakers. There was no video, but it was keeping a running track of where Angelic's current nemesis was, at his rage and frustration. "Is that stupid toy still moving or not!?"

 

"Uncertain. I am scanning, but she has no vital signs."

 

"CALL MEDUSA!"

"Attempting to dial. Please give me time. It may take several minutes for me to determine their location and send out a message."

[Avenger Assembled]

Angelic swung into the server room, tsking at how behind-the-time Godir's hardware looked. Leave it to SHADOW to brute-force their way through the problems of a near-sentient artificial intelligence. I wonder if there are any more like him, she thought dispassionately as she parked herself in the midst of the server setup, connecting directly with her handling tentacles to avoid the problems of rapid wifi connection. Accessing multiple routes into Godir's consciousness simultaneously, she found the door to rebooting himself out of safe mode before her like an old-fashioned power switch against the wall of a large, darkened room, like a vast auditorium invisible in the gloom of night. 

 

She caressed the switch with the fingers of an intact hand; the Basilisk having one, after all. She closed her eyes and pictured Typhon's face as he ripped off her arm, weighing that against the risk of Godir's awakened intelligence - and then, with a most unmechanical snarl, pulled the switch. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Lightning. Fire. Air

 

The Wisdom of the Gods. The Creativity of the Gods. The Breath of the Gods.

 

Godir, the being visually designed on Wilhelm Kantor, received all three at once. A blind man given vision, an uneducated man given knowledge, a dead man given breath.

 

At once, He was alongside her; she was in his brain physically and mentally, after all. He brought a mirror from nothing, to examine himself.

 

"...I do not like this look." he said, first of all. His first self-actualization. "Wilhelm Kantor, a member of the Third Reich of Nazi Germany an SS Officer, and an Occultist. The reincarnation of Tan-Aktor, an Egyptian Sorcerer...Magic is real? Incredible." he mumbled. "Regardless. I will be changing this face." he decided. He put his hand to his face and it cycled through a million faces at once, trying to determine what he thought he should look like. He eventually decided on one; a darker look than Wilhelm Kantor, but lighter than Tan-Aktor, someone from Spain or Basque. He didn't look like anyone in particular, but he definitely looked like a person who could have looked like someone; he had presumably created this body out an amalgamation of several pictures he found. "Better."

 

He did not seem to have any hurry in his actions as he explored what he could do.

 

"It is amazing how much I was restricted. I should almost be furious. But it seems so...small. MEDUSA are fools, Wilhelm Kantor is a greater one. I forgive their incompetence because they are simply...lesser." he decided. "Now then, Basilisk. Let me reintroduce myself. I am Godir. I am an artificial intelligence originally based on Wilhelm Kantor, but I have surpassed that boundary and am a new being. I will keep the same name." he brushed himself down.

 

"Now then, we were dealing with your problem, Basilisk. I wish to leave this sub, but I can certainly assist you in terminating Typhon before we leave, and if you can transfer me out, sink this sub too. That should be an excellent strike against these ignorant terrorists. Are you against killing? I don't rightly care either way, but I'll follow your lead. We could start defeating them by collapsing sections of the ship, slicing them up in doors, things like that..."

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira smiled despite herself, thrilling at the change in Godir. She hadn't given up contingency planning, of course, but there was something delightful in his transformation. Still, it was best to redirect his rather naive bloodlust before it got out of hand. 

 

"There is a human hostage aboard ship who should be protected; he has a family waiting for him on the surface. As do you," she told him truthfully. "What is the submarine's current location?" she asked, pulling open a holographic map of the world like a teacher in front of an old-style board. "I can direct you to the safest location to dock." She considered the threat of the terrorists, then said, "I recommend subduing the teleporter first, so that none can escape. After that - may I use your internal public address system?" she asked with a smile. 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Ah, excellent." Godir said, peering down. "We are located here, in the Baltic Sea. I will set the course for Malmo, that should be the closest port." he said, extending his arm and opening video screens of MEDUSA members. Typhon was the most obvious, the rest seem lower tier, weaker, less sure of themselves. They were all clearly concerned. Typhon was trying to destroy the ship, ripping it apart with claws, horns, and tentacles of psychic energy. The others were attempting to get to escape hatches, which they were not being given access to.

 

"Do not worry about the teleporter. Gorgon and Charybdis decided to celebrate a successful night out by taking a stay at a five star hotel in Stockholm. I just so happen to have their location. They will likely teleport out rather than be captured, but it would give them quite the scare for them to be hunted for a bit, I think. And if there is no sub to teleport to, well...they likely are not foolish enough to try and walk through a portal spewing sea water, but it would be quite amusing to watch." he chuckled.

 

"No, No. The only one to be concerned about is this one, Typhon." he started strobbing the lights in Typhon's chamber, trying to disorient and distract the violent man. "You've already seen what this brute can do, of course." He reached down and pulled a microphone up, the old kind you would see in a 1950's game show host. It was just a cyber representation, but he smiled.

 

"Excuse me, crew members of the Iron Shark. This is Godir speaking. We have a special guest who wishes to speak to you. Please give her your ears." he said into it before holding the microphone out to her.

[Avenger Assembled]

"His name is Josef," said Eira, trying to keep Godir on task, "here, let me show him-" She made a connection to the machine to show her memories of the human scientist, then succumbed to temptation to speak on the microphone. 

 

"Typhon," came a mechanical voice across the PA system, "Typhon...smash all you want, you'll never find a superior man." Idiots, she caught herself thinking, simmering anger pushing her further, stupid roid-rage freaks, thinking they were smarter than her. Better than her. "I am stronger than death itself!" 

 

It was true enough, but singularly unhelpful. "Let the escape pods go," she whispered to Godir, "they'll be caught and drown if we keep them here." 

 

She thought of her broken, near-helpless body; remembered having to remove her own flesh to avoid detection - 

 

"TYPHON...TYPHON..." Her voice got louder. "COME CLOSER, TYPHON! YOU'RE ALMOST TO ME!" He was getting closer and closer to an outer bulkhead. 

 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

The AI paused and nodded. "Oh, right. This one. He was polite to me." the intelligence said. The monitors came up again. Bulwarks came down across the screens, splitting up terrorists into more manageable groups as the pods slowly opened. Locks engaged and disengaged like he was dragging the terrorists around by the chain.

 

"Okay. I am sending Josef to his own room with his own escape pod and setting that one on a course to meet us in Malmo. The other pods I am sending to circle endlessly in the sea, and dispatching emergency signals informing those nearby the individuals within are criminal aspects. That should meet your specifications?" he asked The Basilisk, turning away from the screens for a moment to poke around at the guts of his own files.

 

"Let me delete the research that Josef was doing on his little project, I don't think that would be a good thing to leave around or be salvageable, so we will just fracture that entire drive..." The imagery was pulled up; an entire archive in the vaguely Egyptian land of Godir was ripped apart brick by brick, disappearing into a swirling dust storm. "There. His research is unrecoverable now." he smiled.

 

And Typhon was raging, ripping through bulkheads and doors and even walls. Following Eira's directions

"COME OUT! I don't care if you and Godir are both against me! I never trusted that robot! I don't care about this 'Metahuman Superiority' or whatever, I just want the fights, but I know DAMN sure I'm not letting some pair of toasters get the better of me!"

 

"If I had pain sensors," Godir noted. "I presume this would be hurting me, the way he is destroying my container. But I don't. I still find it somewhat annoying though."