ic The Nothing From Coming For You (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

"Willow should be with her children," said Steve quietly. "and Wander has seen enough of these places." He stood like a statue as he considered the words of the others, then said frankly, "There are no magical experts I would trust here. If there is an incident with Lemurian or Atlantean magics, we will find a solution." 

 

Retracing the steps of the initial, low-rez reconaissance soon enough brought them to the broken-open doors of the ancient vault that held the cyber-crypt, the orichalchum frames emblazoned with barbaric imagery that Steve was able to identify as artwork from Mandragora's long-dead homeworld. The crypt itself was long and cylindrical, lying canted on its side, and a deep jet black marked with still-iridescent red that didn't quite match the stonework all around that was primarily built out of local rocks. There were bodies here too, or rather their remains - humanoids in Mandragora's colors, along with what might have been Atlantean and Lemurian bones. 

 

"The organic residue left behind is too great for nanites to have been used here," Steve added softly. "Those bodies froze intact upon death and have been here ever since." 

 

The crypt lay, half-off the altar that must have been its intended resting place, like a half-built monument to a future that had never come, surrounded by the bodies of those that had died around it millennia earlier. It wasn't broadcasting any direct signals, but to find out what lay within, whether well-concealed corpse or cybernetic memory, their probe would have to get even closer. As the probe approached the crypt, the stale air of the long-gone tomb seemed to hum with suppressed power.

 

 

[Fox]

Dragonfly hnned, barely audible behind her helmet, eyeing the remains and almost wishing they'd sent a better probe so that they could get a better view and assessment. Almost. Easier to cut this one off, she told herself. Less dangerous if it's corrupted and the enemy learns the terrible secret of off-brand low-bidder webcams.

 

"Unsure if unfinished state is in our favor," she said, turning her attention to The Keyboard That Time Forgot, clacking away at a few quick instructions. "Good for technological issues, less likely to be set up. Bad for magic ones. Unrestful spirits, etc. Assuming this is one of the most important things in tomb, though - if foes made it here, they did well. How well...guess we find out?" She frowned, glaring at the screen again for answers before giving up and hitting [enter]. "Time to see if we're as smart as we think we are."

[Avenger Assembled]

 

The connection was difficult at first, only possible with the presence of two master cyberkinetics and someone familiar with the bizarre technological constructs of the Terminus, and the natural fear of contamination meant that their data gathering was slow. The group had time for lunch, such as they could eat, anyway, before they began making significant penetration into the crypt's archive. It was dark outside now, darker even than the civil twilight of that morning, and the howling of the wind showed that they were indeed in for a significant winter storm like the sort that they'd been lucky enough to avoid so far. Noise outside or not, though, the domes were secure - and so was the connection to the probe inside the hill. 

 

The practicalities came first. There was nothing inside the crypt - no organic remains, nothing. There was a residue of something in the interior compartment that generally held the bodies of the dead, but the probe (deliberately under-sensored) lacked the ability to find out what it was. It was not Mandragora. 

 

What the crypt did hold was data, and a tremendous quantity thereof - the active mainframe of a system that had been activated multiple times a day by multiple people for at least twenty years from its internal chronometer.

 

There was a story here, albeit a half-glimpsed one. First were the desperate inquiries about dimensional travel and time travel, failed attempts to build great open-windowed machines out of the remnants of other things. Then someone's eye for detail - an architectural drawing of military barracks and a vast paddock, easily as large as multiple football fields, carved out of the rock and ice itself. More and more pictures; machines and dragons working together to melt the ice, larger and larger structures being built. Children being born, families being raised. All beneath the eye of Mandragora. 

 

Deaths. Hunger. Cold. "Sacrifice".

 

Then came the war. 

 

Expeditions had found the world was inhabited by amphibious, reptilian humanoids - then found the reptiles' rivals, a civilization of humanoids that lived on a nearby continent. They had spells, and monsters, and powerful things, but none so powerful as what the forces in Antarctica possessed. Mandragora had tried to ally with first one, then the other, but both had broken with him - and put aside their rivalries to war against the forces of the Terminus, cast ashore on Earth-Prime multiple tens of millennia ago. The war had gone badly for the Alliance at first - but Mandragora's forces were unable to replenish their numbers and so any loss against them was impossible to replenish. 

 

Soon enough their raiding parties were being pushed back - and then _they_ were being raided, an army slowly moving against them from two different continents. The movement of armies, the collapse of defenses...

 

The last file in the crypt's records, or at least the last they found in their first pass through the records, was an audio recording of the master of the fortress. "This is the last journal entry of Mandragora, the Dragon King of the South. I tried to conquer this world but united it against me. Lemurian and Atlantean, ancient enemies, have come together in one great war to defeat the Dragon King of the South. It is fitting that I die as a shaper of men, just as I was meant to be. I go now to die among my enemies in the frozen wastes of this land. Let them take the poisoned chalice of this fortress. It will be their death, just as it was mine. We will die together - in the name of the one who brings Death to all. HAIL ENTROPY!" 

-

 

Across the world in Freedom City, Tarva the Black opened her eyes and screamed. She didn't stop.

[Electra]

Miss Americana drew back from the link for a moment and took a deep breath. "All right, well. We know they didn't come on purpose now, at least - and they got here using magic. If they were accidentally thrown across space and time, it's a little less likely that anyone will be trying it again. We know they couldn't get any of their machines to take them back up and running, though that may have been an infrastructure problem as much as anything else. I can't imagine they had an easy time securing tech resources. That's the good news. The bad news is, Mandragora is out there somewhere, likely buried under a few tons of ice. Hopefully dead, but I wouldn't bet the farm. Good thing the planet isn't getting steadily warmer or anything." 

[Gizmo]

Kimber Storm passed through the wall and part of the floor as she rushed to her lover's side by the most direct route. "Tarva?!" The shadows in the corners of the room writhed and wailed with screams of their own as she look the taller woman by the shoulders, face creased with worry. "Baby, what is it?! What happened?!"

 

- - - - -

 

"Never assume technological superiority when you can assume some moron falling through a hole in space, yeah?" Jill quipped, the tightness in her voice making the joke fall weakly. Not needing to be at the controls of the drone she paced about the room with nervous energy. "If he is still kicking somehow, though, he'd just be one guy, right? No army, no dragons, no toys. I dunno what powers he's supposed to have himself but that's not that bad." She didn't sound entirely convinced of her own argument.

[Fox]

A padded finger made a tik-tik-tik sound as it was tapped against a leg plate, Dragonfly watching and listening with ever-increasing dissatisfaction. "...maybe," she said, giving half her attention to making sure that audio log hadn't sent anything untoward back across their connection. They'd been awfully careful setting it up, but when dealing with powerful megalomaniacs there was no such thing as "careful enough." "Might depend on who he took with him to 'die among his enemies'. One-man army, desperate pride gambit? Last military force? Actually dead, frozen and waiting, where....?"

 

She was all frowns, behind her helmet. Too many known factors. "Concerned by poison metaphor. Armies fought into empty tomb, unknown residue. Maybe paranoia, maybe not actually metaphorical. Strongly recommend not retrieving probe; planned not to anyway. Not worth risks, even with best medic on our team."

[Avenger Assembled]

"The eyes! The eyes, they see!" Tarva's terror and grief was palpable as she put her arms around Kimber, burying her face in the smaller woman's torso and muffling sobs against ectoplasm. The cacophony was impressive - the shadows in the room (and there were many of those) were sobbing too in sounds of inhuman alarm, her hounds running around frantically and barking at nothing, their thin, greyhound-like forms seeming to stretch as if whatever force that created them was being pulled to its utmost. 

 

-

 

"That it was an accident is reassuring," commented Steve, reaching down and taking Miss Americana's hand for a quick moment. "But it could mean many things yet - there could be a breach in the dimensional barrier deeper within the fortress proper, or other things buried elsewhere beneath the ice. An invasion would be definable, an accident - makes matters difficult." 

 

Downloading the contents of Mandragora's archive was a far more laborious task than it would have been otherwise, given the extreme risk of information crossing directly from the Terminus-built machine to one built by the people of Earth-Prime. The presence of technopaths might have made it easier - but given the magnitude and infectious potential of their foe, it could have easily made things more dangerous. As the probe continued its download, they wound up erecting a recorder for the playback on the probe's monitor - infinitely slower than any number of possible solutions but by far the safest. 

 

- 

 

Tarva denied everything. She looked Kimber in the eye and told her that she'd simply had a terrible nightmare, something that was by no means uncommon for the Terminus exile. But the shadows in the room moved with a barely suppressed energy that spoke to a swallowed, perhaps stifled terror, and the hounds on her bed were growling at the darkness that was usually their home. "There is work that I do in the shadows without you," said Tarva, doing the trick where her long black hair obscured her face. "I've done it before. You shouldn't be afraid."

 

-

 

Having departed during the download after a brief consultation with Miss Americana, Harrier returned about the time everyone was breaking for their evening meal. A winter storm had settled in outside, with howling winds that were clearly audible even inside the dome. Taking her aside, he told her quietly "The railguns are online, but the orbital devices will have trouble targeting through the storm. If Mandragora is out somewhere in the mountains, there's no finding him in the winter. How are you?" It was a question with many meanings, under the circumstances. 

[Fox]

Mara had secured a corner table for herself, Ellie, and a couple of the drones she hadn't sent back - though without orders, those were mostly sitting on the table watching the rest of the room. "Think I liked the arctic better," she tiredly observed, poking dubiously at what passed for food on an isolated research station. She'd retracted the lower half of her face plate some time ago, but hadn't taken the leap to eating - having money hadn't truly spoiled her, but she did so love her creature comforts and under normal circumstances - or with better ingredients - she'd have made something herself if it meant no fancied-up rations. "Arctic has troubles, but also nice magic and happy people and meeting pretty girls on Christmas. Antarctic has maybe-dead frozen world-destroyers. Not ideal."

 

Condemning herself to a bite of what was probably macaroni and cheese, she pulled a small frown - not as bad as expected - and turned to her girlfriend. "Doing okay? Lost track of a lot during science bits. Happens, but shouldn't. Don't want to ignore you."

[Gizmo]

"Hey, baby, hey," Kimber murmured soothingly, kneeling next to Tarva on the bed and cupping her cheek gently in one hand. She used the other to carefully slide locks of raven black hair out of the way. "Look at me." After so many years of survival at all costs, planning for every darkest possibility, Tarva telling her not to be afraid was one of the most alarming things the phantom could imagine. She ducked her head enough to make eye contact with the shadow witch, giving her a small comforting smile before telling her, "You're full of bull-pucky. Now who do I have to go scythe? 'Cause nobody upsets my liquorice whip like this without getting scythed."

 

- - - - -

 

Ellie gave Mara an amused smile over her own nearly finished food. With her own busy schedule and myriad of commitments she'd become comfortable with the idea that sometimes food was just quick and easy fuel. "The occasional moments of scientific tunnel vision are part of the package, hermosa but it's sweet of you to worry." She knocked her knee lightly against her partner's leg under the table. "There's less meeting pretty girls here but I'm pretty happy with the one I've got so that's fine by me." Her expression turned more serious as some of the weariness of the day became clearer on her brow. "If your expertise means mine doesn't come up, I'd be fine with that, too."

[Electra]

Miss Americana smiled ruefully, just a touch of Gina visible in the way her lips turned. "Words cannot even describe the headache I'm going to have when I put this thing to bed for the night," she admitted. "Trying to do so much from far away is taxing. I just can't think of any good way to get down there without, you know... you know." She shrugged. Gina's therapist had her on a steady diet of exposure therapy but it was slow, slow work. She could make herself travel if it were a matter of life and death, but they weren't quite at that point yet. "I wish you were here. But if there's nothing else we can do tonight, I should probably get some rest." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I saw eyes opening at the bottom of the world - and terrible things that followed. They are going to come for me, boon, and when it is done all this will be -" She made a little gesture that encompassed the room, the castle, the city. "I need to go there and take the eyes when they open - before they can see me." Unconsciously, she made gestures with her thumbs that encompassed gouging out eyes. "You would only endanger your soul if you went, and you are all soul," she added, running her fingers through Kimber's hair. "You have been darkened enough by my touch." 

 

- 

 

Steve rested his head against hers, something that he had to admit was easier with the robot than with Gina. "Soon." 

 

The next morning, if you could really call it morning, the download from the temple below had finished. Circling the probe's backup cameras around to keep scanning the 'vault' had confirmed some of their earlier suspicions - the corpses in the vault looked to be a mix of human and humanoid, some human-like and others closer to the amphibious and reptilian people rumored to have dwelt in Lemuria, and the artifacts scattered around were at least in theory a potential archaeological and mystical treasure trove. No one was particularly willing to go down there and get them, though. They all knew the caliber of the foe they faced - still, the scientist crew that weren't the heroes kept themselves busy recording whatever data they could gather from the probe's backup cameras. 

 

"There's no doubt about it," Zielonki was commenting, a look of awe on his face as he wrote quickly in his notebook. "This isn't just Lemurians, these look like Proto-Atlantean artifacts as well. My God, this was a joint Lemurian-Atlantean invasion!" 

 

While Dragonfly and Miss Americana collaborated on a final check of the incoming feed from the probe, Steve took Jill aside. "Thank you for coming," he said softly. "I know what you have left behind. I am...grateful for your presence, and that you kept word of this cancer on Earth-Prime secret." He sighed softly, then said with particular fire, "It will be a pleasure to see the scientists home and watch this valley burn." 

[Gizmo]

Kimber didn't actually need to breathe but she suppressed a sigh all the same. "Hey. If there was a problem with your touch I'd've brought it up by now," she chided softly, briefly pressing her forehead against Tarva's. She swatted lightly at the taller woman's knees until she'd moved enough for Kimber to sit more comfortably in her lap, arms draped over her shoulders. "I don't remember signing up for 'boon companion except-when-maybe-it's-a-bit-dangerous.' It was more of a 'boon companion, full stop' situation." She tightened the embrace enough to press their bodies together, one hand snaking up through the back of Tarva's hair. Her voice was no more than a whisper but right next to her lover's ear it may as well have filled the room. "I'll keep telling you as often as I need to, you don't have to face these things alone any more." She planted a kiss on her neck just under that ear, lips cool and soothing. "Now. Do I have time to take care of you first or do we need to leave right away?"

 

 

- - - - -

 

"I think we'll all sleep better after that, yeah." Ellie didn't do much to hide the sidelong look she gave Steve, trying the gauge his state of mind from his body language. "I'm glad you called us. I mean, maybe not glad; could have lived without freezing my delicate bits off during this whole thing." She let a sardonic drawl into her voice to make sure the stoic cyborg understood which part of that statement was a joke. "But it beats the hell out of you trying to deal with this on your own because you didn't want to inconvenience your friends. We've got your back." It hadn't been that long ago that that would have probably been his first instinct. Being part of a team and a family had gone a long way over the past few years. She wasn't really sure of the details of his relationship with Miss Americana but they seemed to do each other good as well.

 

The medic cleared her throat before the exchange could turn too introspective. "Besides, after what we saw on Yoyo's Earth? If all we do is piss on Mandragora's grave? Worth it."

[Fox]

"Focus, please," Dragonfly cautioned, with all the tone of someone who had to deal with a lot of borderline-mad-scientists. "Lemurian-Atlantean resistance, based on data," she corrected, gesturing without looking at one of the cheap CRTs. "Doesn't sound like they joined forces because they liked it. Underscores importance of keeping focus on...goal...posts? Sports metaphors. Not my strong suit."

 

She sighed, dropping her helmet into her hands. Even with rest and food she was rapidly feeling like she wasn't getting enough of either. "Just...be careful. Always assume data is inherently dangerous, or leads to inherently dangerous things. Would probably even put this through memetic filters if I had time to study and invent them. Best case, find an old corpse, destroy site from orbit, loss of findings or not. Better that way."

[Avenger Assembled]

"There will be time for that, on the bones of the dead," Tarva promised Kimber warmly, taking her head in her hands and kissing her firmly. "You at my side is all the strength I need for now - and all the salvation." The look in the shadow-witch's eyes were one of dark and building intensity, as if her inner shadows were piling up on each other, one after the other, in a growing obsidian agglomeration. "We need to go soon - sooner than the others can follow. You must learn to calculate these things, boon," she added affectionately. "I can gather power to take us there. It is far away, but within my reach." She smiled. "Within our reach. We will take the eyes, and be safe from all that they can see." 

[Electra]

Miss A didn't take her eyes from the screen, completely engrossed in absorbing the probe's information and images as it slowly navigated the ruins. "A relationship of convenience," she agreed. "Against a foe so deadly and implacable that it justified transcending age-old hatred for a brief time. I don't know that we're going to learn much about the Atlanteans or Lemurians in this investigation, but we have other opportunities for that. I do think we need to take what information we can get about Mandragora, even if it's just a matter of storing it in eidetic biological memory and transcribing it later. If this is a puddle that formed from a cut-off eddy of the timestream, then Mandragora is still out there and still a very present threat." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Suddenly, all around the room, alarms began going off. Steve was big and he moved slowly sometimes, but the next thing anyone knew his pike was in his hand and deployed. Security alarms in the compound were springing to life - and, ominously, alarms from the probe inside the crpyt were going off too. The sudden eruption was of long-dormant eldritch energies, like static feedback through powerlines when a lightning strike is near. "Teleportation," Steve said aloud as he bolted for the exterior door. He knew Miss Americana could handle activating the compound's defenses and Dragonfly and Jill O'Cure could guard the staff - but protection was his job, and though the things here were the enemies of all life they were his enemies most of all. 

 

The airlock cleared him in a trifle, and in full armor, Caradoc stalked outside into the howling winds of the Antarctic. It was dark indeed, distant storms casting the civil twilight into a deeper darkness than anything you would find in Freedom City. It was colder and deadlier than anywhere on Earth-Prime out there - but he had been in colder places than this, and darker, and gotten out. It was easy enough to find the interlopers, the humanoid and the spectre who had arrived together, the former pinging a familiar pattern to his armor's radar defenses and the other a familiar pattern of radar interference that nonetheless was unmistakable. He pumped the action on his pike, and as he approached Ghost Girl and Tarva out of the darkness of the storm, his pike blazed brilliantly with the light of a searing magnesium flare, white light cast on his holographic disguise as he stalked towards them like an avenging demon. 

 

""You!" he shouted, his voice tinny and inhuman through his armor. Without hesitation, he bore down on Tarva with hardly a glance for Ghost Girl, his weapon hot. "What do you think you're doing?"

 

"What am _I_ doing?" Tarva spat back, her dark voice crackling against the howling night all around them. She didn't seem afraid at all, if anything the darkness all around them seemed to strengthen her righteous fury. "I might have known you would be here, you bloody-handed vulture! Have you come to pick the bones of the dead?" 

[Fox]

"STAND DOWN."

 

Dragonfly was pretty sure airlocks were for people without short-range teleports; she'd been on Steve's heels when he left, and now she was hovering in the air between the three of them and the building. Four glowing wings of spun energy and space shed at least some light on both her armor and her friends - though the latter betrayed their position soon enough anyway, each drone's face-dominating eye lighting blue as it booted and shifting red as it immediately went into combat mode.

 

Not quite all of those eyes were pointed toward Tarva and Ghost Girl.

 

"Don't know who you two are, or why you're here, but you'd better have good reasons. We are slightly busy doing science to prevent potential apocalypses, and if any of you start throwing around exotic energy unprovoked while we're trying to control a situation probably involving exotic energies I will personally drop you and put you in a holding cell until you figure out why that's stupid. Talk, or leave, but stand. down."

[Gizmo]

Kimber, who had been taking a moment to enjoy the frigid weather, covered her face with her palm as she recognized who was shouting at them. "Sweet strawberry preserves, every time she leaves the house. Unbelievable," she muttered softly to herself, bracing for another deeply unpleasant interaction. Keeping her voice low she added to the woman beside her, "Tarva, boon, maybe this is a glass houses situation, eh? You two can go back and forth all day but you said we're on a schedule, right?" She offered a guilty little look of apology before floating forward a few paces, translucent blue coat glittering in the uneven light.

 

"Hiiiii, I'm Kimber," she greeted with a slight singsong and a wave, not looking at all concerned by threats of holding cells or Omegadrone weaponry. "I'm a ghost, since that usually comes up anyway and I know people who say stuff like 'exotic energies' usually have some issues with it so just getting that out of the way up front! This is Tarva." She looked over her shoulder to exchange a look with the shadow priestess before correcting herself against her better judgement. "Tarva the Black. She defected from the Annihilists years ago..." The emphasis was pointedly directed at Caradoc as the poltergeist folded her arms across her chest. "...so when she got a vision of something nasty - she gets visions sometimes, also a magic thing, sorry - she thought we should go help." That was maybe a generous interpretation of the motivations at work but it was true enough.

 

Looking past the armoured woman with the flickering wings she gave Caradoc a tight smile. "Heeey, good to see you again, always suuuper fun. Is Miss Americana around, too? Because that would be, like, extra perfect." Kimber could appreciate the bad blood the former Omegadrone harboured and even if she didn't enjoy dealing with it she couldn't fault him. After the last time they'd worked together her empathy toward his star spangled partner was stretched a little thinner.

[Avenger Assembled]

Dragonfly's presence reminded Harrier that Yolanda Montez breathed the same air as Tarva the Black. 

 

It was not a pleasant reminder. 

 

"She is a tourist, playing at redemption while dwelling in a palace with her lover." The simmering frustration left behind after their most recent encounter, when her former allies had baited a deadly trap with the then-lost lives of others,  didn't help his mood. But he did follow Dragonfly's advice and stifle the searing white flame at the tip of his pike, strengthening the howling darkness that lay all around them. Tarva certainly seemed to like it."So you have had visions,"  he said, speaking clearly to be heard over the increased howling of the storm. As much as he disliked Tarva, and he truly did - she was for the moment on the side of life against death. "What were they?" 

 

-

Inside the lab dome, the scientists went back to work once it was clear that their facility wasn't under attack. Things were still developing, though - the transmission from the probe was still coming in but it was coming in through increasingly heavy interference. The initial 'flash' of eldritch energies in the room around the probe had faded, but it had left 'sparks' behind that were reminiscent of nothing more than the smoldering of a pile of kindling near the site of a recent lightning strike. It hadn't burst into flames yet - but who knew what being 'dry' meant in terms of magic? On the probe's secondary cameras, some of the artifacts in the room were beginning to radiate in a mixed cascade of white and red that gave a strange pinkish cast to the bones and stones in the room. 

 

-

 

Tarva told her tale, glancing from Dragonfly to Caradoc and evidently finding little of comfort in either of their armored faces. She picked the former as the most likely target, however, perhaps simply because it wasn't Caradoc. "So you see what you...scientists supreme should do is abandon whatever, ah, science scavenging you're doing here and simply allow Kimber and I to destroy the facility using magic. She is an avatar of death and I am an avatar of shadow, the work will take us but an hour - perhaps less in such a convivial atmosphere!" She wasn't raising her voice in the shadowy storm, rather, the storm itself seemed to amplify her words. "There's nothing here you need to know. The secrets of the Terminus will only warp a mind unprepared for their true and terrible nature." 

 

 

[Electra]

Miss Americana watched the monitors, her perfect face taut with worry, worry that tightened her voice as well. "Ready Evacuation Plan Three," she told her assistant lead engineer. "Warm up the plane and get everybody together." She switched on the comms channel. "Dragonfly, you need to get Caradoc and the newcomers out of here right now. Something about one or more of their powers is spiking energy inside the chamber. It's not critical yet, we might be able to save it if no more fuel gets tossed on the fire. Just don't let any of them do anything until they're far away from here." She personally suspected that Tarva's power was entirely to blame, but this wasn't something she was willing to be wrong about. 

[Fox]

Dragonfly muttered a handful of swear words at Miss Americana's transmission, gritting her teeth as she eyed the newcomers. "Not after 'secrets', not remotely stupid enough to try leveraging Terminus technology without being very, very desperate; will personally remove anyone trying to steal knowledge, for safety. But if we thought destroying everything was a safe option it'd be done. Wanted to myself, had to get dissuaded. We found evidence of a Terminus incursion here, from long ago. Trying to make sure there aren't lingering problems from that. Trying to do it safely,"

 

She dropped toward the ground a bit, but not a single drone left combat mode. "Going to repeat myself. According to radio, you three are already causing reactions with artifacts we want quiet and destroyed, probably just by being here. You will stop using powers, and you will leave the area, and then we will all talk like sane people and good scientists and will not cause catastrophes." Her helmeted face was impassive, but her posture was not - it betrayed no fear, but a whole mountain of caution and a bomb defuser's tightly-wound nerves. "Not optional."

[Gizmo]

"Hopefully it's not Plan Three because it wasn't good enough to be Plan One," Jill quipped, standing to Miss Americana's left with her arms crossed. Whatever the evacuation plan she wasn't going far from the audio feed to Dragonfly until they had a better idea what was going to happen. Pitching her voice a little quieter so as not to carry to the team of scientists preparing themselves she added, "So Steve isn't normally so, uh..." She pursed her lips briefly while considering her choice of words. "I guess I didn't really think he knew how to throw shade. He has history with the melodramatic one from the bad old days?" Anybody with that distinction seemed like they'd qualify for 'shoot on sight'. From what she could hear the former Omegadrone might have been considering it.

 

- - - - -

 

"Excuse me, you would know if we were using any powers!" Kimber shot back tartly, increasingly agitated by the accusatory tone and ratcheting tension. "I'm literally not even breathing on your precious 'potential apocalypse,' alright?" With a finger raised and her ethereal form floating a little higher in the air to have a slight height advantage on Dragonfly she was about to continue but stopped short suddenly and bit her lip. "...although I am carrying a scythe that can cut through reality that was forged in large part using ancient ambient magics on another plane, which when you say it out loud seems like it could probably combo badly with a bunch of leftover junk, yeeeaaah. I still think everyone's being totally rude but maybe better safe than sorry?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Harrier considered his options - and Dragonfly's suggestion that he too might be at fault. "I have used my weapon in my time here, but never under these circumstances." He turned and looked around the camp, then the terrain beyond it. He didn't need to say out loud what he was sure Mara already knew, that further teleportation would only flood the area with more energy. The nearest inhabitable shelter was the manual control center for the railguns and other defenses built into the base's perimeter, not a place where he'd willingly take Tarva the Black. The mouth of the excavation into the buried temple would be at least temporarily habitable, but that again was no place to take Tarva the Black. 

 

On the other hand, neither he, Dragonfly, nor the new arrivals actually required shelter. "The false obelisk to the north," he said, "we will gather there." Though the fallen column of granite had _looked_ like an archaeological formation at first, as far as he and the others had been able to tell it was simply a trick of erosion. It wasn't a long trip as such. 

 

- 

 

Evacuation wasn't going to be an easy task, not with an Antarctic storm at its current level of intensity in the dead of night. But the scientists on site did the preparations they were supposed to do for a Level Three evacuation - gathering person-portable data, including the 3-D scans of artifacts, while Keri Russet and Toby Koth suited up to go outside and get the helicopter warmed up. The emergency force field generator inside the helicopter might give them enough protection from the storm to reach another Antarctic base, but then again it might not. As Miss Americana and Jill watched, the building energies inside the buried temple seemed to stabilize - the eldritch radiation was still at alarmingly high levels, but not close to the magical eruption that they might have feared. 

 

-

 

Kimber could especially sense the energy crackling inside Tarva as she followed Caradoc out to the fallen stone 'pillar' at the edge of the complex, both suppressed magic and a nervous, barely suppressed terror that in another woman might have something to do with the dark and cold all around them. As it was, Tarva kept her head down and moved forward, keeping a grip firmly on Kimber's shoulder as she walked so that she could keep her balance on the rough terrain. Whatever else could be said for her she was following the advice not to wake what lay below, and had pulled the magic that usually lay around her tight against her skin. 

 

When they'd gotten there, Tarva placed one foot on the granite and asked, "Who was it? Was it Tarvon? I can feel the magic in the bones of this old place..." 

 

"Mandragora," replied Caradoc evenly, a steel sentinel in the darkness of the Antarctic night. "Long ago." 

 

Tarva hmmed, shooting a look at Kimber, and didn't quite relax so much as become less alarmed. "A vicious monster, and not above dire traps - but not as innately wicked as some of the others. There may be more hope in the land here than I thought." 

[Fox]

With the more immediate threat at least partially handled, Dragonfly and her drones stood down - she dropped to more-or-less person level, drone lights shifting back to a pleasant neon blue to help cut through the darkness as they traveled.

 

"Accidental travel, as far as we can tell," she supplied, one drone turning upwards to project a holographic slideshow of confirmed-safe images of recovered artifacts and such. "Not a full invasion force. Evidence of wanting very bad to get back, couldn't manage it. Local powers - Atlanteans, Lemurians - got riled up. Mandragora had power, they had numbers, home field advantage. Wore his forces down. Last record is him leaving to do...something. Die in battle, maybe. Not clean enough for danger presented. That's why we're still here, instead of destroying everything and going somewhere nicer. Need to control or eliminate any lasting threat."

[Electra]

"All right, hold off on warming up the helicopter," Miss A ordered, just as the two pilots were about to head out into the cold. "Keep things packed up, but the energy readings have leveled off for the moment. If our uninvited guests can hold it together awhile longer, hopefully the energy readings will drop again. Give the age of this place, I can't imagine it has the juice to stay at an alert status for very long. I certainly hope not, anyway."

 

Blowing out a breath, she looked over at Ellie. "Oh, you haven't met Tarva the Black yet? She's quite a character. Comes from the same world as Madrigal's Hounds, originally, but she didn't get the full Annihilist treatment, the sort that warps body and mind, removes the sense of right and wrong, all those exciting side effects of gaining ultimate Terminus power. Tarva is an interesting case because she kept her original mind and her original conscience, and still spent several human lifetimes willingly serving the interests of the Terminus." Miss A deliberately concentrated on her console, speaking without looking at Ellie. "She eventually defected when she realized that her faction was unlikely to survive the current civil war going on in Omega's absence, but you can probably imagine why someone who grew up on Nihilor like Steve did would have some lingering issues with her."

 

Her face screwed up in a rare expression of distaste. "I personally try and deal with her as little as possible. She is... exactly as repentant as she must be in order to keep her asylum. I've heard from others that she is tortured by her past in private and just doesn't show it, but somehow even that doesn't seem like enough. Steve is tortured every day and night and he was an innocent. She chose."