Starve Free (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

Late November 2010

After an exhaustive background check, Harrier had been granted permission to meet with someone who he'd first heard of some weeks after his arrival on Earth-Prime. Prometheus was like him, an Omegadrone, but free from the power of Omega! But of course Prometheus himself had been terrified at the thought of meeting another drone, and truthfully Harrier had needed to work up his nerve to even ask. But his background had been checked and his mind probed by psychics, and so on the edge of the Claremont campus he'd been introduced to the boy who was Prometheus. It had been heartening and disheartening all at once.

Prometheus looked tired and sick outside of his armor, the way all the lesser drones did, and his mind wasn't terribly sharp. Murdock wasn't at all sure what future the boy had...but at least it was the future of a free man, making his own choices and living his own life, and never again forced to kill and die at Omega's whim. Prometheus was a lucky boy; his mind was free of any memories of the Terminus, those circuits destroyed by the powerful gravitic blast that had blasted him free of the control of Omega in the first place. Truthfully, Harrier was a little envious of him.

After their meeting, the two drones headed to the gym to work out, something Harrier hadn't had the opportunity to do in months, Prometheus stopping to change into his now-camouflageable armor along the way. Prometheus, like Harrier, was a firm believer in wanting to know how to kill Omegadrones, and Harrier's more recent liberation and his programming as a heavy tactical unit meant that he knew better that most sacred of arts. They stood together in the boxing ring, one in his armor and with Harrier's covering his arms and legs so he could wield his own pike. "Remember. Under the chin. Destroy the brain. Even the heavy units are underarmored there." He said, gesturing with a hard upwards gesture. Prometheus watched avidly, as he always did when taught. Neither drone noticed the heroine watching them from the door.

[Electra]

Erin had been a little bit surprised when Mr. Archer had sent her to keep an eye on the Omegadrone as he sparred with Prometheus. She knew Prometheus, who was a nice kid, if mentally slow and easily confused. He'd had a hard life, and she did her best to make things easier for him the few times they'd been assigned to work together. Now there was another freed Omegadrone in town, this one bigger, stronger, and smarter than the Claremont student. Summers had allowed the meeting, but Erin could understand the staff's caution in letting him actually spar. She supposed that if something bad did happen, it made sense that Archer would want someone there who could actually stop the fight.

In her own practice uniform, with a water bottle in her hand and a towel over her shoulder, Wander looked like she was just coming to work out. Instead of heading to the equipment though, she hung out near the practice ring, keeping a sharp eye on how things were going. As long as it was nothing more than a lesson, she would just watch.

[Avenger Assembled]

"You cannot hesitate, Prometheus," the half-armored drone was warning the other student as they both practiced with their pikes. "If you are fighting a drone, you will be very lucky if they have simply come to kill you. If you are unlucky, they will take you back, and destroy you again." His voice was quiet and flat, not quite devoid of intonation, but still somehow artificial. He sounded as if he was already inside digitized armor, in fact.

"But what if they are free too?" asked Prometheus, his voice innocent and a little worried at the prospect. "If you are free, and I am free, then many more of us could also be liberated. Wouldn't it be murder if I kill a free drone?"

"Would a free drone be attacking you?"

"...if he thought I had come to take him back, yes!" Prometheus wasn't a smart boy, but that didn't mean he was incapable of thinking. He was in some ways, anyway, a reverse of Mark. "Surely we cannot fear each other so much."

"Fear can be healthy," replied Harrier after a moment's pause, honestly not wanting to hurt the other drone's feelings. "Fear can keep you alive. I'm not telling you to attack first," he said thoughtfully, "but if an Omegadrone does attack you, he has taken his life in his hands. Believe me. You're doing them a favor." They worked out for a while more, practicing some fairly lethal-looking manuevers with their power pikes, before class called Prometheus away. He went to change out of his armor, shaking Harrier's hand before departing, Harrier's own armor retreating back inside his body as he watched the boy go. He turned, then, and saw Wander.

"If this space is yours, I am finished with it." He put his hand on the post and vaulted out of the ring, landing feet-first with a loud THUD as if he'd fallen thirty feet.

[Electra]

Erin shook her head and didn't bother to lie. "I'm not going to use it. I was asked to keep an eye on your sparring match, to make sure things didn't get out of hand. Whenever people start sparring, student or not, it's safer if there's someone there who can stop the fight if things go wrong. I can see you're an Omegadrone," she told him, though right now he looked startlingly human. "Do you remember what it was like inside the Terminus?" It seemed, from his instructions, that Harrier knew a lot more than Prometheus did about what things were like where they came from.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Yes." Murdock replied without hesitation, studying the girl before him with suspicious eyes. He knew the students here were trained to deal with an Omegadrone, but there was something different about this one. Something a little unsettling. He considered telling her that he'd never visited Prime before his liberation, that whatever she'd lost to the Terminus he hadn't been responsible for. But could he really say things like that, and sleep at night? "My organic brain was not damaged during my liberation. I recall everything that has happened to me."

[Electra]

"Did you work for Physician Friendly?" Erin demanded, her eyes fixed on his face, burning with intensity. "Were you one of his goons, did you go to the planets that he was working on?" She hadn't seen any Omegadrones on her world, but she'd known they were there, thanks to Doctor Atom. Who knew how many, or what they'd done, or what they knew? It was a dangerous question, though, because how could she just let someone who'd worked for that monster go, no matter how sorry he claimed to feel about it now?

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier's eyes widened: these were not the questions of an angry woman with no knowledge! "No. Physician Friendly uses Nightmare Nurses, robots of his own design, rather than Omegadrones, for his personal security. He feels Omegadrones do not provide the proper atmosphere for his research." He studied the girl before him, seeing a look in her eyes he'd imagined a thousand times. "I was assigned to heavy combat duties. Extirpating resistance, fighting in the games. The Physician does not engage in either." A wise man would have shut up there, but Harrier was more honest than wise. "I was primarily part of the household of Shadivan Steelgrave and the Madrigal Martinet."

[Electra]

"All right." Erin pursed her lips, pulling back hard on her own emotions. Steelgrave was terrible, and the things he did were hideous, but they weren't as freshly, viscerally horrifying to her as Friendly and his crew. "Can you tell me anything about Physician Friendly's compound? Where it's located, and what the security is like? I've been told it's very tight, and would be difficult to penetrate. What are Nightmare Nurses like? Are they Omegadrones in different skins, or do they have different strengths and weaknesses?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"I am happy to help Freedom City's heroes learn how to defeat the Terminus," said Harrier, still giving her a watchful look. "There is no goal more important." He walked up to her, his footsteps a slow, deliberate tromp on the ground beneath their feet. "If you are a prole, the Helpful Hospice is the worst place in the Terminus," he said bluntly. "When I was your age, I would have gladly taken my life before I fell into the Physician's clutches. Why do you wish to know of such horrors?"

[Electra]

"He killed my world," Erin said flatly, her face cold, but her eyes betraying the unspeakable sorrow. "He released a virus, a tailored virus that killed all our heroes, and wiped out the population. We couldn't come up with a vaccination. When we tried, it created a massive wave of human zombies that finished the work the virus didn't. For all I know, he had his hand in that, too. And then, when everything was gone, Omega came for the dead planet, my planet, my world. I was the only one who made it off alive. And no one knows better than me that he needs to die before he does that to any more planets. I'm going to kill him."

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier stared at Erin, his face and body unmoving, that for a second she thought he was going to refuse, or flee, or do anything else before he said, his voice still flat and calm, "If you have access to a holographic display unit, I will recreate a three-dimensional map for you as best I can. I was only deployed to the Hospice during times of heavy security, but I can tell you all that I recall about its defenses and construction. What forces will you be bringing to bear? How will you make your attack?"

[Electra]

"I'm still working on that," Erin admitted. "I need to know more first before I can make a plan, and I need to have something to show my friends before I ask them to possibly give their lives. It's going to be a small, surgical strike team of heroes. Myself, I'm just a brawler, but I can dish out and take hits with the best of them. I'm hoping to bring along people with more versatile talents. A blaster, a dimension hopper, maybe a reality warper. If you come with me, I'll take you to our holoroom," she told him. "You can make as big a map as you need, and I'll be able to save it and use it for simulations later. It's this way."

[Avenger Assembled]

Inside the holoroom, Murdock went to work fast. He built the Terminus first, providing a physical reality to a place Erin had only seen in blurry movies older than she was, or in the stark series of pictures Mark's father had made and donated to the school before his untimely disappearance. First there was a sky, red and starless, then it was full of black smoke rising from a thousand dark, oddly shaped buildings that rose up like the fingers of a corpse scratching at its coffin. "The Hospice is located near the equator of Nihilor, close to the mouth of the Doom Coil." That was a great red finger that seemed to reach down from the red mass overhead into the earth, as if the ground was devouring the sky itself. "It is neutral territory so close to the Coil, as the Physician prefers not to fight the wars of the other Annihilists and none would fight so close to the Coil for fear of Omega's wrath." He studied the great red finger, his face hard to read. "It is the engine that destroys worlds."

The ground beneath their feet was cold metal, and Erin was vaguely conscious of its strange shapes and textures, as if the metal itself was somehow organic. "In ancient days, the Lord of the Terminus slew the ancient gods and used their skin to build his world. Some say they yet live." With a few steps, he began building the low complex of buildings around the Hospice, before that building itself began to rise up, higher and higher, a grim tower over their heads. Harrier was silent as it reached its full height. "I will help you build the interior. Your simulation is...is very evocative."

[Electra]

Erin nodded, hugging her arms to her chest as she watched the world come to life, such as it was. "It's got very intuitive programming, you don't have to put in a lot of parameters for it to start figuring things out on its own. It's probably got some data on the Terminus stored in its memory banks, stuff that I can't access, but that the program can tap into." She stepped forward and began walking towards the Hospice, barely conscious of her bat suddenly being in her hand. Even in simulation, this was no place to be unarmed.

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier found himself suddenly wanting to do something other than walk into the Hospice. Instead he made Nightmare Nurses, two flanking the big iron front doors, for Erin to inspect. The robots, she could tell, deserved their names: they looked like menacing combat units with whirring blades at the tips of their hands and long pipettes along their limbs, but far worse than anything was the living human faces, complete with blinking and moving eyes, that sat atop their metal skin. "Cloned tissue." Harrier assured her. "Not living beings. The Physician believes this makes them more approachable to visitors. They are designed to process beings from many different realities, many of whom will have special abilities. They are heavily armed with chemical and physical weapons. One or two would have been able to fight me on even terms before my liberation. I estimate that a minimum of one thousand will be available for the Physician if you do not somehow disable their communications systems."

[Electra]

"Communications..." Erin mused. "I know a guy who can build me a jammer, if we know enough about the system in advance. I'm not bringing him with me, though, so if we're wrong, it could be tough." She looked at the nurses again, then up at the building. "How many victims are in the building at any given time?" she asked Harrier. She'd had some time to steel herself to that reality at least, after what Phantom had told her. It was hard, very hard, to accept that there might be people who could not be saved, but she wasn't going to plan that way unless she had to.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Some tens of thousands. The numbers vary if there has recently been a conquest, or if there has been a rebellion." Harrier looked up at the building and suddenly his armor erupted over his body, a cascade of metal and flesh that rapidly transformed him into a faceless, souless automaton. He felt a little better that way, absurd though it was, behind the shield of armor. "If you enter through the main doors and proceed straight up the main elevator shaft, you will encounter far fewer. The Hospice is designed to keep people in. Not keep them out," he said from behind his armor.

[Electra]

"Tens of thousands," Erin murmured, staring up at the huge edifice. "God..." She shook herself and headed for the doors once again. She couldn't let herself think too hard about the scope of this, or she'd never be able to accomplish it. Even in the vague and fuzzy theoretical, the idea was terrifying. But in her heart, in her gut, she knew she could never live with herself if she didn't make the attempt. In some ways, she wished she'd done all this two years ago, when she'd had much less to live for.

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier walked her through and into a vast steel room, a giant sphere lined with cages on tracks, filled with bustling waves of Nightmare Nurses at his direction. "This room will be like this, but with more...more screaming." He hesitated briefly, then pushed on. "That will change as you push in further and the patients are generally anesthetized. There will be automatic weapons emplacements here, here, and here, that the Nurses will activate if they are unable to subdue you. If they survive your initial engagement with them." He added, striding towards the central shaft. "The Physician works from a laboratory in the center of the tower. He is very focused on what he does. If you rise up this shaft fast enough, you will be able to catch him largely unawares."

[Electra]

Erin followed the Omegadrone as he walked, trying to take in everything of strategic importance without internalizing it more than necessary. "Can you tell me anything about restrictions on dimensional travel here?" she asked. "If I can bring in a dimensional controller or something, will they be able to open portals in and out of here, or are things locked down somehow? I don't know much about how that stuff works," she admitted, "but I'm going to learn."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I am...unfamiliar with the dimensional properties of these rooms," said Harrier distractedly, his featureless face moving back and forth with deliberate intent as he scanned the massive ampitheatre of the great front hall. "To travel into the Terminus is to risk the destruction of a world. Once a door is opened, them Omega knows that world, and can send his armies there. This world, though, is special, and safe enough if you take certain..." He turned suddenly and studied Erin. "You are the sole survivor of your world. You are certain of this?"

[Electra]

"I'm the only one who got out," Erin told him grimly. "I only met a dozen people in the eighteen months I traveled, and they wouldn't have taken my help. Doctor Atom estimated five thousand survivors worldwide, in pockets too isolated for us to find. Several malevolent groups were fighting over the world when I left. If there were survivors then, I doubt there are any now. I couldn't have done anything to help them," she said, with the emphasis that meant she was trying to believe it. "I could barely save myself."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I was not yet born when my homeworld died." said Harrier, staring again at the door. "Those with powers became drones. Those without, came here. My parents had known the one who gave their world to Omega, and so became his slaves. They thought they were fortunate." Screams of infernal agony rang in his ears, and the stink of blood and death and horror assaulted his nostrils. "The Physician enjoys forcing the patients to sing, Do not allow yourself ot be distracted by that. There can be no distractions here."

[Electra]

Erin really hadn't needed to know what happened to the last survivors of her world, but she listened unflinchingly anyway. She hadn't saved them, this was the very least she could do. "No distractions," she murmured with a nod, forcing herself to ignore the screaming and the smell. It wasn't that hard, she'd become inured to those things long ago, so it was merely a matter of recapturing that cold, hard feeling inside, where nothing mattered but the goal. "What if I go to my world first, and then leave from there?" she asked him. "Would that give one more level of protection to Prime, in case I fail?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"If your world has not yet been pulled into the Terminus, either into the Doom Coil or simply into the Ravel, then traveling from there would be another level of protection," the drone agreed. At her look, he explained, "When a universe dies, pieces of it may yet survive, scattered through the Terminus." He took his pike and drove it into the wall as he talked, the blade striking the door latch and blasting open the elevator. "The survivors...live better than those who live on Nihilor." Inside the shaft, his jets roared to life, and he offered her his hand. "Flight is faster than climbing, if you cannot leap so far."