ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)

[Electra]

Wander took a single bound across the space separating her from the comm console and its fighting scientists. With no apparent effort, she lifted one of the attacking techs with each hand and knocked their heads together in a precise move honed by many rounds fighting simulated hooligans and bank robbers. They'd have headaches but nothing worse, at least not at her hands. "All of you down on the goddamned ground right now!" she repeated, letting the unconscious men slump to the dirt. "The Terminus killed my world like you killed this one, and I will have no trouble seeing to it that every single one of you stays on the ground, with your legs broken if necessary, until I damn well tell you to get up!"

She waited, glaring, until the technicians were once again prone, then turned to the redhead. "Explain the setup," she demanded, giving the tech a cursory going-over to make sure she wasn't grievously wounded or anything. Over her shoulder, she called to Harrier, "If you don't know how to kill it, better call Dragonfly."

[Avenger Assembled]

"The risk is too great. I can't destroy it safely." said Harrier, despite wanting very much to blow this place back to the entropy-raddled Hell that had spawned it. He had to be smart; he had to make the heroic choice. He dropped the man he'd been holding, hard enough that he crawled back to the others in terror, and raised his comm to where a mouth would have been on a man. "Dragonfly, this is Harrier. Wander and I have subdued a doomforge and taken its workers. We need to destroy this place, but to do it safely, we will need scientific assistance. I can send you our coordinates for teleportation."

"The, uh, well..." The tech didn't look frightened by Erin's violence, not as such; she was from the Terminus after all, but she and the others had certainly figured out quickly who was in charge. "Lord Mandragora didn't want the forges built here," she finally said, her voice a confidential whisper. "I heard he and Lord Steelgrave fighting about it. He hates Omegadrones, thinks they're soulless and not fit warriors, but Steelgrave said if he wanted his support against Madrigal, he'd better do him this favor of testing...testing the new forges." She swallowed, glancing down into the pits with something like dread. "So if we're dead, he can tell Steelgrave the experiment failed, and he doesn't have to build them anymore."

[Fox]

Dragonfly made a vaguely strangled-sounding noise as her suit communications - barely - picked up Harrier's transmission through the surrounding communications equipment, and she briefly muttered something under her breath about needing to perfect her ability to be in two places at once as she made her way over to Jill between dimensional transfers. [bg=#555555]"Need to help Wander and Harrier,"[/bg] she quietly informed her girlfriend, tone quiet and not terribly pleased. [bg=#555555]"Looks like everything's okay here, for now. They need something destroyed, carefully, or something. You'll have to work the tunneler - just remember, hold onto the lever to stay here. Light next to it will turn blue when it's ready to go again."[/bg]

In a hurry or not, she took a moment to pull the lower plates of her helmet back so she could give Jill a quick kiss. "Good luck," she said, smiling a little even as her suit lit up and the world wrapped in around her. "Love you."

[Gizmo]

Distracted by a particle of dust or something that had gotten into her eye at conspicuously the same time as Yolanda had disappeared through the dimensional gate, it took Jill until Dragonfly lowered the metal plates covering her face to process what was being said. As Mara broke away from the brief kiss, the taller girl's eye widened slightly. "Oh, don't you dare--" By then it was already too late and the armored heroine had teleported away. The refugees still in the Vault were treated to an impromptu lesson in Earth-Prime expletives and projection. Eventually dialing down to a vexed hiss, Jill rubbed her eyes again and stepped over to man the tunneler. Someone had to stay behind and continue ushering the civilians through, she knew, but that didn't provide much comfort. "Love you, too," she mumbled quietly under her breath as the little blue light beside her blinked back to life.

[Electra]

"All right then." Erin nodded at the redheaded technician. "We'll work with that, then. Maybe we'll even be doing Mandragora a favor, not that he'll thank us for it. I've only run up against him a couple times, but Steelgrave seems like a thorough guy. If Mandragora says the thing failed, he'll want to have a look for himself. He'll be looking for a slagged forge and probably dead techs around it." She waved a hand before the techs could protest. "Not you all, so long as you behave," she told them. "Where's the nearest bunch of corpses? I know you probably know." The idea was distasteful, but putting a uniform on a dead body was better than creating a dead body in a uniform, and it wasn't as though they all hadn't done body disposal before. "All of you, start taking off your outfits," she ordered the technicians.

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier stalked among the technicians as they undressed like an all-too-real phantom from the recent past, his pike crackling with energy, the looks of utter terror that they shot him when he lingered too closely enough to make Steve's cybernetic guts churn. He hated that look of fear in people's eyes; he knew he deserved it, it was no more than his due, but that didn't mean he didn't feel that awful sense of alienation. But now as he stood among these people, these doomforge technicians who looked so like the ones that had-he paced away from the group until he thought he could control himself again, standing by the machines as a sinister sentinel. Wander didn't much have the chance to be a good cop, but with Harrier there, it was easy enough with these people around.

"There's, uh, a cache in the square over there," said the redhead to Wander, pointing with shaking hands towards a dug-out portion of the scorched earth nearby between what had once been buildings. "What the dragons left, what they didn't want, but it's there and they look burned..." She swallowed hard as the implications of that set in.

"We will collect them," said Harrier, making a decision as he wheeled on the technicians, pike in hand. "Go!"

And so it was that Dragonfly teleported into the middle of what had recently been an abattoir; Harrier encouraging a group of two dozen terrified people in their underwear towards a great earthen mound from which grim reminders of slaughter poked out, Wander intimidating one particular redheaded technician, and all around her the high-tech machinery of the Terminus, magnificent machines of horror that glowed and crackled with entropic power, and deep pools of silvery metal that might have looked worth investigating without Green Screen's story.

[Fox]

Dragonfly just kind of stood there for a moment, turning her head to take in the scene; she finally raised a hand and grimaced. [bg=#555555]"What is--...no. You know what - nevermind. Have decided I don't care and don't want to know."[/bg]

The nanites were more interesting, anyway. Little lights danced behind her eyes as she idly poked at them with her mind, and she clearly didn't much like what she found. [bg=#555555]"Terminus doesn't really do 'subtle', do they. ......mmmh. Tempted to weaponize them, but too easily exploited. Should probably just destroy them, or make them destroy each other. ....mmmh, distributed systems always annoying to reprogram. Don't want 'grey goo scenario'. What have you found out about them so far? The nanites, I mean."[/bg]

That last bit was directed at Wander, as addressing her meant not having to look at nearly-naked people. [bg=#555555]"Would like to eliminate as many surprises as possible."[/bg]

[Electra]

"Hardly anything about the nanites themselves," Wander admitted, slightly abashed. "I've mostly been trying to keep a handle on the tactical situation. The techs here say that Mandragora was basically pressured into setting this place up, and his plan was to abandon it to the Doom Coil or whatever and say it didn't work. We're having them create some believable technician corpses here, so once we've slagged the place, Steelgrave will look at it and believe that the nanite forge was a failure. Once we're done, if you could shove these guys in a dimensional pocket or something, that would be great. They're..." Wander pursed her lips, studied the pathetic-looking and weedy nearly-nude techs. "They're reprehensible," she decided. "You can't look at them and not see thousands of screaming, begging, crying people they put into the forge. But we're better than that, and we have to take them with."

[Avenger Assembled]

Erin's redheaded contact had stayed close to the two women, though she'd divested herself of her outfit too, evidently milking her position as spokeswoman for all she was worth. It wasn't hard to guess that she'd had plenty of chances to see what happened to people who her superiors lost interest in. "Oh, well, ah, the nanites work by, you know, rapidly reconfiguring the base components of the body and the brain into Omegadrone replacement parts. There are actually only a few hundred worker units needed; Most of the chemical bath you see there is to add the Terminus steel and other materials not present in the human body naturally." She twirled her fingers together nervously and stumbled on, "It's much more humane, you know, much faster than the old way..."

Across the way, Harrier and the others had returned with the remains they'd be disguising, and Harrier had put them to work arranging the signs that would fool whoever came to view the site later. He didn't strike a blow, hardly said a word, but when he approached the techs frantically went about their work in sheer terror of what he represented.

[Fox]

[bg=#555555]"Making omegadrones,"[/bg] Dragonfly spat, contempt practically dripping off her voice as she started gracelessly salvaging parts and metals off the Terminus machinery. [bg=#555555]"Very relative scale. Don't justify what you did here."[/bg]

Normally there was a kind of muttering, distracted energy to the young engineer when she built - the barest hints of a manic love of building, a pleasure at solving a puzzle even under pressure. But not this time; whatever she was putting together, it was with a cold, quiet professionalism - practiced but detached and devoid of any sort of enjoyment.

[Electra]

"Unless you have something tactically relevant to say, shut up now," Wander advised the redhead curtly, sparing her a withering glance. "You can dish out all your excuses for murdering humans on behalf of the Terminus once you're in prison." She stayed close to Dragonfly as the genius engineer did her work, keeping one hand on her bat and an eye out for trouble that seemed inevitable. Honestly, despite her experience, Erin was just as glad that Murdock had taken over the job of arranging and dressing the selected corpses. "The evacuation's still going on, right?" she murmured to Mara, too quietly for any of the others to hear. "We're cutting it close with the two hours as it is, but this thing has to get shut down."

[Avenger Assembled]

Dragonfly and Wander efficiently shut down the redhead, who stood there palefaced, her white skin cast ruddy by the red and burning skies overhead, while the others went about their work. From the look of fear on her face, it wasn't hard to guess what she was fearing: the consequences of failing those she'd been working for were worse than death, and from what Harrier had described, even those in the Terminus who opposed Omega had a tendency to treat his slaves as disposable enemies rather than disposable pawns. But that wasn't how the heroes of Freedom operated, a fact Harrier only occasionally had to remind himself of as he herded the last of the techs into line.

They'd done their grisly work as best they could, turning the after-effects of the dragons' slaughter into something that would look much like theirs. The techs, made up of the usual assortment of races and appearances that marked humans from the Terminus, didn't bother begging or pleading as he gestured with his pike. They knew they could expect no mercy from an Omegadrone. Harrier might have expected to enjoy their fear; it only made Steve Murdock angry. Damn these people for what they'd done...and damn the Terminus for revealing the darkness in them. The darkness in them all. Finally, so he didn't have to feel like an Omegadrone anymore, Harrier spoke.

"Stop there. Form into a circle so that Dragonfly's spatial warp can reach you." He stalked back and forth like a prison warden inspecting new recruits, nodding as the redhead joined the larger group. "You will be transported back to our Earth, where you will be dealt with fairly and justly. As you have dealt with NO ONE!" The shout came from the heart, and it was enough to make the crowd flinch.

"Are you...are you from this world?" asked the redhead, looking even more fearful of the Omegadrone than the others.

Harrier kept his armor on as he stared the woman down, perhaps because hiding his face made it easier for him to control the emotions he felt today. "I was born on the streets of Nihilor. Son of a murdered world, father to a murdered life. Were I yet the boy from those streets, your fate would be-"

Suddenly, just as Dragonfly was putting the finishing touches on her spatial device, the communications console flared to life. Beep beep. Beep beep. "It's...it's Dragonshelm!" called the tech, backing away from Harrier so far she bumped into her peers, who still were giving her hostile looks. She flinched forward and hurried over to rejoin Wander and Dragonfly. "It's Mandragora's ship. He's calling us."

[Avenger Assembled]

The evacuation of the Vault was proceeding apace, people crowding through the whirling dimensional teleporter at every stroke, the room thinning out all the while. Tress and Kurt (at Samson's insistence) had already gone through, leaving Samson and a pressed-into-service Lieutenant Hudson to watch the machine's gauges as they whirled. With two dozen people left, suddenly there came a great BOOM and the entire Vault shook harder than it ever had before, the dimensional teleporter yawing dangerously back and forth as everyone left staggered and tried to keep their feet against the shockwave. A new alarm was sounding, urgent and high-pitched, while green sirens flashed. Samson pulled himself to his feet and said simply, "That's the breach alarm. Something's at the surface door and is trying to dig its way in! I'll see if I can get something on the interior cam..."

He walked over to one of the few still-functioning computers along the wall and typed quickly at the keyboard, the screen changing to a grainy, black-and-white security camera that showed a scene like something out of Hell itself: three massive reptiles, each panel-truck sized or more, were inside what must have once been the entrance hall thousands of feet overhead, the bank vault door that once must have been the front entrance next to them neatly melted to pieces. They seemed to be arguing with each other; one small and yellow, another grossly fat and blue-green, a third lean-faced and red-skinned, with the hatchet eyes of a born predator, but there was no sound on the feed: instead they seemed to settle their argument, deferring to the red one, who led the way down, breathing black curling Terminus fire as they went.

"Looks like Mandragora didn't have a lot of faith in Green Screen!" called Samson. "They'll be knocking on our door in twenty-five, thirty minutes once they get through the blown tunnels! I suggest we finish up and let you people get home!"

[Fox]

Dragonfly was screwing a couple final plates into place as the 'phone' rang; her creation was rather simple and unadorned, layers and layers of tubes and plates that seemed designed to spin and rotate, the only constant the simple metal handle she held it by.

"It's Mandragora's ship. He's calling us."

[bg=#555555]"No,"[/bg] the heroine corrected, flatly. [bg=#555555]"Was calling us."[/bg] She pushed the little black button on her device's handle, and it lit up.

The effect was rather like being in the middle of a sandstorm, if the sandstorm was made out of broken pieces of reality. The world just tore apart, fragments of everything in the area shattering away and sweeping into a single, chaotic storm that eroded everything in its path, walls and pools and machines alike eroding away into dust - less than dust - like the wind of a thousand years had been condensed into one horrible series of seconds; only the places occupied by humans, technicians, and bodies were left untouched, shards of space collecting back into their normal, harmless arrangements before fracturing again on the other side of their individual 'bubbles' of safety.

By the time she let go of the button the area was a flat, pitted wasteland. Dragonfly's expression was unreadable behind her helmet as she looked around at the almost perfect half-sphere of scoured terrain, and then over at her fellow heroes. [bg=#555555]"....I would like to leave, now."[/bg]

[Electra]

Only years of exposure to people like Mark let Erin keep her composure as the world seemed to fall apart around them, and even so her eyes were a little wider than normal as she looked to Mara. "Yeah, I'd say we're ready to go back now. Harrier and I ran, but taking all these prisoners is going to be more of a problem. I could ferry everyone in groups, but there's no way we're going to have that kind of time before Mandragora gets here to see what happened to the forge." She pursed her lips, looked over the group. "Maybe you could shove some of them into another dimension until we can deal with them later? Even if it's not pleasant, at least they'll be alive." Even as she spoke, Erin scanned the skies, waiting for signs of Mandragora's response.

[Avenger Assembled]

"They will die in agony if you leave them here," said Harrier coldly as he joined the two women. "Swiftly, if Mandragora is merciful. Slowly, if not." Through soulless, faceless armor of spikes and pain he stared at the terrified prisoners, memories of a thousand horrors in the back of his mind. He thought of his parents, finally, and the grief and horror of a thousand years in bondage. "...too many people have been slain by the Terminus in this place already." Despite temptation, very powerful temptation at that, they were all better than this. "Real enemy is..." His head jerked up as, far enough away in the sky that the unaided eye could see only a cascade of black against the red sky, reality tore open and something grey, massive, and six-limbed, one of which was a set of massive wings, broke through. "Incoming!" Louder, he shouted over the technicians screaming in utter despair, "GET CLOSE! NOW!"

[Gizmo]

Watching the grainy feed of the reptilian beasts, Jill swallowed slowly in spite of the composure she was maintaining for the sake of the remaining refugees. "I kinda thought 'dragon' was going to be a figurative title," she admitted to Samson as a gout of entropic breath took another camera offline. Recalling Yolanda's last words before departing and the state the young girl had been in when they first met, an insistent ball of tension formed low in the medic's chest, something between that sat heavily like fear but burned hot like fury.

Compounding things, she found herself without anyone's lead to follow. Okay, fine. What would Erik do? She was pretty sure the answer was, 'say something pithy about dragon slaying and charge the monsters with a pointy stick,' which didn't seem as immediately helpful as she might have liked. "Do you have any way to collapse those tunnels?" she asked Samson, reaching absently for a ponytail that had been cut off more than a year previously. "Dragonfly can always teleport the others in here without them."

[Fox]

[bg=#555555]"I hate this place. So much."[/bg]

Dragonfly didn't pause, though - no hesitation; the rather dramatic entrance of...whatever that was...temporarily broke her out of her funk and her hands were immediately on the technicians, folding them away in ones and twos until they'd all disappeared into wherever things went when she sent them Not Here.

[bg=#555555]"You too,"[/bg] she insisted, solemnly putting a hand on the wrists of Harrier and Wander. [bg=#555555]"Can get out of here the same way I came - can jump around the terrain as I head back, make us hard to follow. But can't take you with me as-is. ....advice: don't fight it too hard, pocket's fragile sometimes. Don't worry - you'll come back to normal space if my suit takes too much damage, anyway."[/bg]

And with that dubious reassurance she sent little lines like creases in paper flowing across their bodies, reality folding up around them until they were left in what was apparently an endless white void populated only by the cowering technicians. Alone, Dragonfly disappeared, teleporting closer and closer to her girlfriend and relative safety...one mile at a time.

[Avenger Assembled]

"I can do more than that," said Samson, flipping open a glass panel on his console and putting his hand over a big red button beneath. "I can collapse the tunnels down on their scaly heads. Even if those murdering monsters can survive a mountain falling on them, it'll slow them down long enough to complete the evacuation. I'd have done it sooner, but I didn't want them to think blowing the mountain down was the only way to take us out." As damaged as the complex was, the only way to track the dragons was by the security display overhead, the red LED lights showing the systems in the upper tier of the complex slowly going dark as the dragons burned deeper. "There goes the crew quarters...and the mess hall." Level 2 had fallen, and they were well on their way to Level 3. "Wait for it..."

-----

Dragonfly blinked across the blasted hellscape as fast as she could, a dragon in pursuit. The massive grey specimen overhead loomed impossibly large and fast in the air, beating the red and dying sky with great leathery wings as it chased her. He was fast, fast enough to have scorched the complex they'd left behind with a single gigantic breath of burning entropic fire and to chase the fleeing Dragonfly in the same moment. She was faster than he was, and that great bulk in the sky got further and further away at every blink, but he had clearly got her scent and was in a slow, ominous pursuit like a force of terrible nature. At the very last blink before the Vault, Mara appeared almost nose-to-nose with another dragon: a red-crested lizard as large as a schoolbus, curled up lazily amid a massive pile of scorched bones in the middle of the burnt-out park; the dragon had just enough time to look at her in surprise before Dragonfly abruptly appeared down in the depths of the Vault!

[Fox]

Dragonfly was panting by the time space unwrapped around her, depositing the armored heroine back in the Vault and to...well. 'Safety' was rapidly becoming a very relative term. Her first order of business was carefully pulling Wander and Harrier back out of storage, and then dropping the others out with significantly less finesse. [bg=#555555]"Something very very large out there,[/bg] she offered, once she'd had a chance to catch her breath a bit. She'd had to turn some of her suit alerts off halfway there when it had started complaining about capacitors blowing out. [bg=#555555]"And headed this way. Big...grey...dragon-thing? Smaller ones outside, but guessing you knew about them already. These...people....[/bg] 'People' was clearly not the word she'd wanted to use. [bg=#555555]"....are horrible people. Taking them with us, and then throwing them into prison to rot forever. Or longer. Prefer longer."[/bg]

[Electra]

Wander took a moment to get her balance and recover from the momentary disorientation of dimensional transit. She'd been tossed in a dimensional pocket before, blind, deaf and out of her mind thanks to psychic attack, so this experience was definitely better, but the blank white void had been more than a little disconcerting. She shook it off and turned to the others, one eye on the security display. "How much time do we still need? Can we get everyone out and shut down the machine before they reach us?" If her teammates had been there, Trevor and Mark and Joe, she'd have suggested going out and fighting anyway, because any blow against the Terminus was a good one, but despite their formidable powers, Mara and Ellie weren't primarily fighters, and Murdock was having trouble holding himself together already. Fighting would be a last resort.

[Avenger Assembled]

As the machine finished its last cycle, Samson called over from his position by the detonator. "That's the last of our people out! Now it's just myself, Kashi," he added with a gesture towards the former storage locker that held perhaps the last living being native to this planet, "and you, my friends." He gave the mostly-naked techs a suspicious look, their tattoos and other markings clearly showing they weren't from his own planet, but Samson Powers was evidently willing to trust his new-found friends. "And... now!" He smashed the button on the panel before him and the Vault shook with distant detonations, a look of hard satisfaction on his face as corridors far above their heads collapsed into rocky ruin, crushing the still-moving LED lights that showed where the dragons breaking in through from the surface had been. "That ought to hold the little bastards."

With a look of great satisfaction on his face, he rose to his feet and headed for Green Screen's box. "I'll take charge of moving Kashi. The rest of you had better-"

The box exploded in his face. Still wearing his armor, Samson was smashed backwards into Harrier, the big drone just having the presence of mind to catch him as a shock of heat scorched at them both. The man inside the improvised holding cell hadn't even had time to scream, thought Harrier, half-deafened from the concussion inside the small space as the lights overhead went out! With his armor up, he could see by the glowing red emergency strips; the heroes had taken the worst of the small explosion, Samson had taken a hit enough to be unconscious in his arms, bleeding from a head wound...and there was a large piece of shrapnel, big as his hand, buried in the side of the now-black and lightless dimensional transporter.

Oh-

"He lives! And so do I..."

[Gizmo]

In retrospect, it had been extremely fortunate that Jill had started stepping briskly toward Dragonfly the moment the tired teleporter reappeared in the Vault. If she hadn't, the medic would have been standing precisely where the spear of shrapnel was quivering, its opposite end buried in the interdimensional transporter. It would have been slightly more fortunate, admittedly, if she'd been a bit further to her right when the explosion had ripped though the cavern but as she struggled to pick herself up from the floor, ears ringing and pain pulsing in her left arm, she didn't have the spatial awareness to consider the matter in any depth. "...ow," she managed to croak after a new moments, reflexively putting pressure on the gash across her upper arm with her opposite hand.

[Fox]

[bg=#555555]"Jill!"[/bg] Tired or not, Dragonfly was at her girlfriend's side in a flash, putting her hand on the medic's good arm to help her up. Her suit's warning systems had gone off just in time, the shield she'd thrown up at her fingertips shunting the blast and shrapnel away from her body and leaving a clear spot outlined by a much darker scorch on the ground where she'd stood.

she can heal - try not to worry too much - doting too much? - hate this place [bg=#555555]"Think we've all had enough of this place. Can get us out of--"[/bg] She trailed off, her gaze falling on her impaled invention; once she knew Jill would be okay she reluctantly left her side to inspect the damage.

[bg=#555555]"....okay. Might need a new plan. Or some time. Need to figure out how bad the damage is."[/bg]

[Electra]

Erin's blue HAX uniform was now looking even more raggedy than before from the flying shrapnel, but none of it had been going fast enough to pierce her super-tough skin. In a moment she was beside Ellie and Mara, helping support the wounded healer. "Time's in limited supply," she told Mara flatly, "but we can buy some extra if we have to. Fight them to a standstill in the tunnels, anyway." She took a look at Ellie's wound and frowned, hoping Jill o'Cure was a physician who could heal herself as easily as others. "I'll find a place for Ellie to stretch out, you get to work on the machine," she suggested. "Murdock, bring Samson over here and lay him down. How's he doing?"