ic Here There Be Dragons [IC]

[Electra]

The tough plant layer covering the shelter resisted the Simurgh's claws for a moment, but even supernaturally strong greenery couldn't withstand the creature's force forever. They gave way with loud wooden cracks and the snapping of vines, broken edges naked in the air as the Simurgh tried to dig past them. 

 

"All right, nice birdy," Fleur muttered, watching the massive animal at work. "Just a little closer..." With a quick wave of her hand, the plants were in motion, weaving themselves back together again, this time into a net rather than a shell. In seconds, the wings of the creature were pinned, and then its body a moment later. Before long, it was hard to pick out the Simurgh under its leafy covering. Beneath it, the Simurgh would be in a similar fix, unable to hear or see much of anything from where it was. 

[Fox]

Tiamat didn't bother following the bird down to ground-level, watching with satisfaction as it was bound in place. Instead she flew back toward the earth-and-plant cage and circled, cutting a slow, lazy spiral into the air over the assembled hero and monster.

That didn't mean she was passive, however: on the third turn she bellowed, a deep, powerful sound driven by lungs accustomed to fueling fire - a noise you felt more than heard, vibrating in your bones and in the earth. That and her circling shadow casting patterns on the grasping leaves sent a message that was universal in this or any other animal kingdom: stay down. The air was now owned by a greater predator than you.

[Thevshi]

When the large creature flew down to attack the dome protecting the UNISON survey team, Velocity saw her chance to try to help deal with it.  Fleur managed to entrap the Simurgh in some of her plants.

 

Turning sharply, the yellow clad speedster quickly closed the distance back over to where Gaian Knight had landed the flying platform.  *CRACK*  Her fist shot out at supersonic speeds as she passed the Simurgh. 

*WHAM*

 

The punch landed solidly, but the massive creature easily withstood the attack.

 

Velocity continued on past, moving a few hundred feet away as she looped back around, ready to continue trying to drive the Simurgh away.

[Avenger Assembled]

Ice crystallized on the surface of the Simurgh and chipped off, the massive beast seeming to shrug off Frost's attack effortlessly. He kept pace with it even still, icy white tendrils drifting uselessly across the creature's flanks like an angry winter storm cloud. Have I grown so weak in sixty-five years that they simply shrug off my strongest attacks? Feh. thought the ice vampire peevishly. What a day this has been. Oh well, at least it has eaten no one's flesh so far. Pfah, that was a grim sight. He really had had a very unpleasant time the last time he'd been to Kaiji Island. So what am I complaining for? Hardly any hazard here from great beast. "We shall triumph, friends!" he called aloud as he drifted away. "Never fear!" 

[Fox]

"That is one tough bird," Gaian Knight observed from his position above the bound creature. The base of his platform blossomed, looking like nothing so much as some overly-spiked flower or pinecone, before the individual pieces broke away to rain down on the Kaiju in a flurry of blunt missiles. Each flew unerringly toward the Simurgh, striking with as much force as he could manage from his vantage point where ever feather and flesh could be found exposed between Fleur's plants.

"Very tough," he added, frowning down past the edge of his platform at the somewhat less-than-spectacular results of his volley.

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel frowned as the creature shrugged of his sonic assault, but thankfully Fleur was there proving why people paid attention when she got mildly irritated at you. He also felt the group frustration as they kept battering the Simurgh and it kept not going unconscious. He decided to try and fix that.

 

With barely a thought, he floated down and to one side of the great creature, even as the not-quite-audible hum of sonic energy around his body shifted subtly. Taking just a split second, he let loose with a sonic barrage...that seemed to only just barely hit.

 

"Hmph. You'd think with a beastie this big aiming would be easy..."

 

He seemed mostly to be thinking aloud to himself. 

[trollthumper]

The barrage, however, struck deeper than Gabriel had initially estimated. The beast - harried, tied up, and clearly intimidated by the sheer force directed at it - reeled as the blast found its way directly into eardrums the size of trampolines. With a terrible burst of strength, the titanic bird ripped free from its prison and took to the sky, flying off at top speed.

"Ah, ha!" yelled the scientist. "It's great to see the wildlife, but it's even better to see it leave sometimes!"

The rest of the flight to the facility was uneventful - but once they touched down, the first thing the soldier did was turn on the anti-aircraft defenses. The facility looked like it had been on the island for quite some time, perhaps a relic of World War II. It had not been repaired so much as reinvented, the basic framework of a barracks turned into something made of titanium and full of enough monitoring equipment to make NASA jealous. The scientist gathered his samples and, almost as an afterthought, scraped up some of the blood the bird had spilled during his assault on the flying island. After a few minutes of careful examination, he turned back to the group with a face that was both enraptured and grave.

"It was a strange theory... a shot in the dark, but... this is amazing, and horrifying, and..." He cleared his throat. "Sorry. We gathered mineral samples from Biosphere A. Soil samples, plant samples, like I said. And... now we have samples from the Simurgh. A greater class of being. Except... well, look at this sample from the flowers at Biosphere A, and this sample from the Simurgh. One is plant. One is animal. Technically speaking, the most they have in common is that both have DNA. But there's too much in common between the two, as if they've got a common ancestor.

"And then... there's the soil. I thought I was mad, but I had to test it as well. The soil has DNA. Not stray plant samples seeded throughout, but actual genetic material in and of itself. It might be safe to say it's not so much soil as it is the cast-off of something greater. Like... skin flakes."

The scientist sighed. "That's not seismic activity out there. Biosphere A is one gigantic organism, from the beasts that wander it to the plants that grow there to the soil itself. And it's waking up."

[Thevshi]

Velocity breathed a small sigh of relief as the gigantic creature finally had enough and choose to fly away.  No one was hurt and the creature seemed to not have sustained any serious injuries itself.

 

As the flying island of rock started off once more, the speedster continued along below on the ground, easily keeping pace as she made several loops around the area to check for any other possible threats.  Luckily, nothing else came after the group, and they reached the research facility that UNISON had set up on the island, or more accurately, the one that the organization was reusing.

 

When the lead scientist began his examination of the samples his team had gathered, along with a sample of the Simurgh's blood, there was nothing to do but wait until he was ready to share what he had learned.  For Velocity, that was not an easy thing.  Thought the analysis only took a few minutes, to the speedster that few minutes seemed far, far longer.

 

By the time the scientist had finished his analysis, Velocity had begun showing clear signs that she had been standing around too long with nothing to do, but she quickly focused on what the man had to say.   "Well, that does not sound good."  She replied once he finished explaining what he had discovered and his theory on what was going on.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Well, we can summon telepath, I suppose," said Frost, chewing on this information carefully. "Gaian Knight and Fleur de Joie, do you think you could speak to such beast and persuade it to resume slumber for a few more millenia?" He hmmed. "Of course, that leaves with operating question, no. We do not seem to know if it thinks, and if it does not think and we cannot persuade it to resume its slumbers, porheps we can just..." He made a little thumb and finger gun with his gloved hand, fired it, and shrugged. He'd have been far more explicit when dealing with a team from his own country, but Americans could be so squeamish about these things. "It is only idea. Creature that large moves, tidal disruptions across all this part of Pacific. Lacking an al-Darsan or Atlantean, could drown half the islands in these parts." 

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel shook his head at the finger-gun suggestion.

 

"That's risky, too. Probably too risky. I mean, how would we accomplish that without either fully waking it, intelligent or no, or causing it to have..."

 

He seemed to take a moment to put the idea into words. When one was discussing how part of an island was a giant monster, that came with the territory.

 

"Some sort of death spasm? Even a moderate twitch could scrape some of the smaller islands clean. But..."

 

He tapped his chin.

 

"If it's even vaguely creature-like, perhaps we can soothe it even if we can't negotiate with it. Lull it back to sleep? Between Gaian Knight, Fleur de Joie, and myself, maybe we could set up some sort of impromptu "signal" that basically puts it back to sleep. Music soothes the savage beast, right? Well, I can put humans, aliens, fae, animals, and probably even demons to sleep, or nearly so, if I give it a try. How hard could it be to do it for this thing?"

[Fox]

"If it's close enough to dirt, I might be able to help reach it," Gaian Knight agreed, frowning downward. "I'm on board for trying to soothe it back to sleep, or talk to it if it's awake enough and intelligent. If we do put it back to sleep, though, it's going to be a temporary solution - we're going to need something long-term, eventually. Something that isn't an execution," he added, frowning up at Frost.

"I won't be part of that as anything but an absolute last option. And I mean last option - last-few-seconds-before-we-face-an-unstoppable-wave-that-kills-hundreds option. I'm not budging on that."

[Electra]

Stesha furrowed her brow at the scientist's findings, momentarily transitioning away from mild-mannered superheroine into hardnosed biologist. "Are you sure about that? Soil samples are lousy with the DNA of life forms existing in a biome, and in an undisturbed environment like this one, it's hardly unlikely that the DNA evidence would be even thicker than usual, or that the DNA of the plants and animals would be closer together. Even modern humans share fifty percent of our genetic code with bananas, after all." The next few minutes involved some intense discussion with the scientists on the team, as well as a review of the samples gathered thus far and something involving a fern that grew out of nowhere at Stesha's feet and disappeared just as quickly. Finally, she blew out a long breath, looking a little confused still, and a little alarmed. 

 

"If the entire biomass is one large lifeform, it represents an amazing scientific possibility," she told the others. "For such a seemingly diverse collection of species to in fact be a single organism would have huge implications for the way we look at biology and life sciences. Killing it is totally out of the question. We have to find a way to subdue it, or if it insists on rising, to mitigate the damage that it's going to do when it happens. We need to get a better look at it first, though." 

[trollthumper]

The scientist nodded. A glimmer of a relieved smile passed across his face; clearly, he was in the presence of like-minded individuals. "We have a number of ideas on the table," he said. "Of course, there's the matter of implementation. Given the size of Biosphere A, there's no good way to isolate it. If it needed room to wander, it would likely claim the rest of the island and drive out the native life - and we've seen what happens when that life goes on walkabout. We've considered induced psychic contact that could keep it sleeping, but it would be an incredible risk to the psychic - making contact with an entity this great and this ancient could be traumatic. So far, sedatives have pulled ahead as a solution, but it would take some time to synthesize one suited for Biosphere A's physiology --"

A slight rumble went through the compound, followed by a distant sound that could have been stone scraping against stone - or a faint screech. " -- and we may not have time for that."

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel gave a slightly worried look to the scientists. He then looked at the ground.

 

"Should I try doing something to even minorly calm down...ah, bisophere A? Even if it doesn't stop it, if I can slow it down, it'll be worth it, right?"

 

Gabriel was not a biologist, kaiju specialist, botanist, or geologist. But he knew he could calm people and animals down really really well with his powers, and he'd done so over large areas before. Even if he couldn't specifically negotiate wit the "biosphere", he thought that surely he could use the more subtle aspects to calm it down. But hey, that's why he asked the others there.

 

But he bet he could out-dance anyone there. Except maybe Comrade Frost; he knew Russians were mean dancers.

[Fox]

"Sounds like we may as well start with that," Gaian Knight mused, looking down at the earth - and through it - and pondering. "Carefully, though. We know nothing about this creature, whatever it is; it's hard to tell how it'll react to stimulus. I really wish we just knew more about it, but the picture I get is vague at best and we may not have the time - or the safety - to do any real imaging."

"Hurrm. Just so long as you don't go angering Great A'Tuin or whatever," Tiamat rumbled - she'd remained in her natural dragon form but was at least making an effort to keep her head down - so as not to attract undue attention - hunched in a semi-circle around as much of the non-heroic group as possible. "I can only catch so many of you if you go falling off the side of the world."

That earned her a raised eyebrow from Gaian Knight, and she snorted. "What? You think I can't read?"

[Thevshi]

Velocity listened to the others and the UNISON scientist as they further discussed the problem, which was just as bad as the speedster figured it was.  She was certainly glad that most of the others were only willing to consider any lethal options as a absolute last resort.  But, there was really not much for her to add to the conversation, or even any possible course of action being discussed.  While she generally understood what they were talking about regarding this “biosphere†creature, it was still rather outside her expertise.  Now, if we were dealing with an evil corporation that was trying to bring about a global economic meltdown, I could totally deal with that.

 

There was also the fact that her powers could not really help in trying to sooth Biosphere A, or help keep it sedated.  If anything, she was far more likely to help rouse it.  Great, back to being a cheerleader I guess.  The young woman thought as she stood by listening, appearing to fidget some, both a result of feeling a bit useless and standing still for so long (well, to her).  Least this time it would be for a team far more likely to win than North Bay's football team.

 

"Well, I don't think I can do much to try to calm Biosphere A, but it certainly seems like something you should try Gabe.  We do not seem to have many other options at the moment."  She stated in support of Gabriel's statement.

 

"If worse comes to worse, I might be able to help break up any tusunami that might be created by the creature's awakening, at least enough to reduce any impact."

[trollthumper]

The scientist considered Gabriel's offer. "We haven't had a chance to map the nervous system of the entity," he said, "or even discover if it has what we'd conventionally recognize as nerves and a brain. But... some sort of connection must be directing the other species to this area, and it must have some sensory feedback if it knows when it needs assistance. If I joined you in the field, I could likely help --"

 

There was another tremor, stronger this time. "Doctor," said the security chief, "it doesn't sound like we have time for another field trip. If you were here for a few hours, do you think you could get closer to synthesizing a sleeping pill?"

 

"I would at least make some headway --"

 

"That will have to do." She looked to the others. "Knight, was it? Take that floating rock and get us to the epicenter of Biosphere A. I've got coordinates, I can direct us. Once we get there, the one with the singing voice can start on the lullaby. And if any of you have creative ideas on how to keep this thing in its crib, feel free to improvise."

 

A few minutes later, the platform was on its way back across the island. Things were still again - perhaps too still. No roars, no shrieks, and the Simurgh had long since taken back off into the skies. It would have been a peaceful moment in paradise - but as the heroes looked over the side of their mount, they swore they could see the earth quiver slightly, like water after a stone breaks the surface...

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel nodded as a plan was decided upon.

 

"Right, I'll try to focus on our way over. This is a bit bigger than most previous targets."

 

While on the platform and traveling, Gabriel had knelt down and seemed to be alternating between sitting in a somewhat meditative stance, and going through what were likely a few silent prayers.

 

When he felt the platform stop, his eyes smoothly opened as he stood up...and then simply floated out over the side of the platform, eventually coming to a very soft rest on the ground, taking a stance with one foot and one knee supporting him, before he tilted forward and placed both hands palm-first on the ground. The air rippled around his body, and then the sound waves began gently pouring down into the ground. The soft vibrations carried a sense of peace, calm, soothing sensations intended to placate the beast the size of an island.

 

He just hoped it worked.

[Thevshi]

Velocity was with the others on Gaian Knight's flying rock platform this time.  Though it was moving rather slowly in her view, given what has been reveled regarding Biosphere A, she had the feeling that running along what appeared to be the back of the creature at hypersonic speeds was unlikely to help with trying to keep it asleep.  Glancing over the side of the platform, the speedster felt she had probably made the right choice.

 

Unfortunately, that choice meant she was left waiting and watching, which provided LOTS of time (from her perspective at least) for her mind to wonder some.  The yellow clad heroine glanced over to Fluer, giving the other woman a small smile, as she recalled her visit to Sanctuary a couple of weeks ago to talk to the plant controller about some personal issues.  Based on the advice Stesha had given her, as well as tests run by Supercape and Dadelaus, the speedster had come to a decision.   She just had not had much chance to act on that decision just yet.

 

As Gabriel began his attempt to lull Biosphere A back to sleep, Velocity focused back on the present, readying herself should she be needed.

[trollthumper]

Gabriel's song quickly pervaded the hushed island, sinking into the depths of the earth. The tune began to play on the ears of those gathered around the gigantic creature's resting place; while they weren't getting the full blast of the soporific tune, there was enough of it leeching out to make the eyes heavy. But they couldn't drop their guard - the island was clearly reacting. Where before this patch of land had been quiet, now it was clearly dead. There was no movement whatsoever, no distant calls. Even the wind was still. As Gabriel's song continued on, it seemed like the island was in perfect silence. 

 

And then, it broke. The earth began to quake - at first a tremble, like a truck passing by on a distant highway. But then it grew, and the soil began to split and crack. They could feel something rising, as if a mountain itself were growing out of the earth. 

 

"Get back!" yelled the soldier, pushing the scientist behind her as she trained her gun on the swelling mound. There was no way it would do much, but she had her obligations. 

 

The soil pushed aside enough to reveal something several yards down. A large, underground lake, somewhat discolored, perhaps by soil content. But as the light fell on it, the "island" in the middle of it grew clearer - and the sides of the lake pushed inwards, shutting against the light. An eye, one that hadn't seen sunlight for thousands of years. The eye opened again... but weakly. The lids were growing heavy. And in time, it shut entirely, and the creature began to retreat into the depths of the earth. 

 

"Good," said the scientist, trying to catch his breath. "Good. That should keep it for... some time. We can start some work on it. And... hope it's another long time before it decides to wake up."

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel paid no heed of basically anything as he focused on pouring sonic energy into the creature beneath him. He couldn't let his nerves or wonder distract him, or not only would they all die, potentially millions would die. So he kept pouring the energy on. Thankfully, it wasn't completely draining; he'd done this plenty of times before with big, unruly crows or the like.

 

Finally, it was done, and he sat back on his haunches with a sigh and a rueful grin.

 

"Anyone got a granola bar? I'm suddenly feeling a bit hungry; been a while since I did that much in one continuous go."

[Thevshi]

Velocity was feeling the effects of Gabriel's song, but knew she had to stay alert.  So the young speedster was checking what was going on around them constantly, as in carefully examining everywhere (thanks to her goggles three hundred and sixty degree vision) in a matter of seconds, and then checking again.

 

As the ground swelled and opened up to revel what turned out to be a massive eye, Velocity's mind was racing, trying to think about what she could possibly do if that thing started to rise.  The water displacement would be massive, and she tried to figure what she might be able to do to break up the waves that would form, and how fast she would have to go to run them all down.

 

But then the eye closed once more, and the ground began to settle as Gabriel's song lulled the creature back to sleep.  Breathing a sigh of relief, the speedster glanced over to her teammate as he sat back onto the ground, complaining about being hungry.  Velocity vanished for a moment in a blur of yellow, and then was suddenly back, next to Gabriel.

 

"Here you go."  She stated, holding out a couple of granola bars she had just gone and picked up from the George Washington.  "Great job Gabe."

[KnightDisciple]

Gabriel gave Velocity a tired smile as he accepted the bar. He ripped off the wrapper and consumed it in just a few bites. Once finished, he tucked the wrapper in a pocket to dispose of later.

 

"Thanks, Velocity. I'll need to destroy a big spread later, but that'll take care of me for the moment. Whew. Well, win for the team, right? I was kind of worried when the eye opened, but looks like we'll be fine for a while. So, uh, should we all head back to the ships for now?"

 

That was mainly directed at the scientists, questioning if they desired to return to a lab building on the island, or simply get back to the waiting ships just off-shore.