As written by @Script and @Dashmiel
Jace’s senses were immediately overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the area that surrounded him. It was as if he was floating in a sea of colors and shapes, constantly shifting and twisting in ways that his mind couldn't fully comprehend. The feeling of an inexplicable presence only intensified the disorienting experience.
He wasn’t alone - he could hear… or
feel a faint whispering in his ear, an insistent presence that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t
his voice, yet it seemed to know everything about him. It echoed his own thoughts, not just from
now, but from his whole damn life.
Is this the suit? The thought bounced around his head just like the others, confusing– it was hard to keep track of the fact that it was what he was thinking
now, when time was becoming increasingly harder to keep track of. Was it all happening in an instant, or minutes, or… longer?
But as the moment stretched, it became clearer– even if
now was becoming an elusive concept, it felt like time was stretching on. Hours? Days?
Weeks? It was a confusing solitude, in the company of his own mind spread across his lived past. Like a trip down memory lane, but he was somehow experiencing the whole thing both in a random order, and in no order at all.
The conscious, panicked part of his mind was trying to escape– move, fight, do
something to affect whatever was happening, but he felt bizarrely disconnected from his body. Like the feeling in a dream where every imagined motion is devoid of sensation, and his body refused to obey him.
If it was even still here with him in this confusing abyss.
Fuck.
One more internal curse to join the cacophony of similar such mental mutterings that were all-too common across the timeline of his internal monologue. It was, if nothing else, reflective of how unfortunately often he got himself into shitty situations.
The endless cadence ran on, hidden beneath the User’s mental-scape. With no real thought behind it, but plenty of imperative, Abaddon continued its labors. It kept track of time by measuring its own attempts to fulfill its mission, generating its own sort of objective time in which the hours could be tracked by how many times it tried to get through Jace’s thick skull. Without fanfare or warning, one of those attempts happened to align upon exactly the correct wavelength. The strange slithering sensations upon his neurons were —for a brief moment—interpretable as an actual communication and carrying instructions that felt instinctively like stepping into a comfortable boot.
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<p class="attention-text-coloring-Abaddontext",>CONNECTION TO THE PRINCIPALITY HAS BEEN LOST. RE-INITIALIZING…
USER DETECTED; EVALUATING…
ENTITY DESIGNATED Jace “Sparky[doubt]” Parker…
YOUR REGISTRATION IS: INCOMPLETE.
PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE; ARE YOU READY TO SWEAR TO BECOME A VOID KILLER?
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What the… Jace’s awareness was snapped into some kind of stability by the probing of an outside influence. This time, it was clear that it wasn’t his own thoughts. It was… the suit?
Void Killer. That was what they’d called it before, hadn’t they? The term seemed familiar, at least. Details of that first meeting were a little hazy at this point, like they’d happened weeks ago.
… sure?
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<p class="attention-text-coloring-Abaddontext",>INPUT DETECTED [SURPRISE]; EVALUATING…
USER-JACE; NO PREVIOUS MENTAL OR PHYSICAL EVALUATIONS ON RECORD.
INITIATING…ERROR, NO ON-SITE BACKUPS DETECTED.
EVALUATING SERVICE RECORD…
COMMAND OVERRIDE AUTHORIZATION HARDLINK DETECTED:
“Actions speak louder than words Little Bil—” “Shut the fuck up you mystical smarmy smartass. That’s nothing to base suitability—” “Worked for you, didn’t it?”
USER-JACE;RECORD UPDATE: null -> CADET
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A sense of peace and quiet thrummed outwards and inwards through Jace’s senses. For a moment, he could be aware of his body as his suit subtly adjusted to fit him better. The whispers beyond his understanding were now replaced by a quiet pinprick of sound always at the edge of his perception, indicating Abaddon’s promise to remain alert for his beck and call.
“Your distress is noted,” came a voice that was simultaneously formless and Jace’s own. “You are experiencing symptoms of hyper-[Comment: No one in Limbo cares what it’s called. -AG]. Recommended: run help VFD-module: ‘So you’re stuck in Limbo’–[ver. 0xx; deletethistakeAlfuckeditup]”
Jace squinted. Or he was pretty sure he did. The babble of the thought-voice was simultaneously perfectly understood, and confusingly erratic. Were there two voices in there? Despite the confusing overlap, he seemed to be able to process it perfectly, down to knowing what the strange acronyms meant and parsing the computer-language. A VFD stood for ‘Va’nyr Full Duplex, which was some kind of recorded simulation-experience. A tutorial video, in his terms.
And, well, he definitely felt ‘stuck in limbo’. So…
As he focused on figuring out how to respond to the program in his head, a familiar interface appeared in his vision– it was his hololink, but the exact details weren’t quite the same. Notably, there was now a notification in the corner signalling at him to open ‘So you’re stuck in Limbo.vfd’
A flick of his eyes and a thought was enough to prompt the file to flash open.
Light suffused Jace’s world as he ran the VFD file saved on his suit. An overwhelming white cascade exploding into being and drowning all of his senses—of which he was suddenly acutely aware of—with a sensory overload lasting one gloriously determinable fraction of a second. The blinding wave of white resolved into an image as Abaddon found the happy medium between decoding the ancient file, hosting the virtual va’nyr instance, and converting it for Jace’s implantless brain by massaging his brain matter.
More than sight in that image, but scents, sounds, temperature, an entire sensorium. With some mental prodding, Jace could feel a sense of nullness and a dissociative feeling of self where his “being’” in a memory would be coming from. As if the “camera” which recorded the scene by experiencing it in surrogate did so without a will of its own despite its broad capacity to feel.
The scene opened to what was easily recognizable by most human cultures—and quite a few not besides—as a place of learning. A lecture hall. A point of data surrounded by recipient observers. A Corporation board room. A religious temple. An amphitheater.
The idea of the place itself molded around Jace’s perception, until a blend of familiarity and the actual location arrived at a pleasantly comfortable consistency. Behind the podium/place of honor stood a well cut human man in his late 40’s. His brown hair and full beard were cut in a sharp and precise manner which screamed military. The intricately wrought and glowing insignia upon the shoulders of his own abaddon suit—evident for its phallic-reminiscent motif as quite important even without the glowing—marked the figure as quite authoritative indeed. The crinkled laughing lines carved astride a pair of verdant eyes flecked with golden betrayed the figure’s mirth and surprise.
A sense of recognition that wasn’t his own passed through Jace courtesy of Abaddon as William Fisher, 47, The Sword of Humanity, Sub-Speaker of the Left Hand and Lt. Over-Commander of the Void Killers addressed him. The sense of enormity behind the titles and the understanding they meant the man was second in authority within the group whose uniform he wore were conveyed along with the familiarity.
And something else, just before William began to speak. A sense of presence just out of sight behind Jace, mirrored in a tightening of the man’s eyes.
“So, Cadet Parker,” asked the man in a roughly jovial voice, deep and gravelly.
“You’ve managed to get stuck outside of space-time as you can perceive it—before your sponsor’s first qualification run I might add—and are now here troubling my ghost for a clue on what the fuck to do, do I have that right?” William arched a questioning eyebrow.
“... er,” Jace began eloquently, still reeling from the transition from indeterminate void to an immersive experience even more advanced than the best holovid he’d ever managed to get his hands on. “I think that about sums it up, yeah. There was a robot, and it was saying something about us needing to go through a door in a
really specific way, but then one of us got … vaporised out of time while we were figuring it out? So waiting around to be precise about it stopped being a priority.”
The arch on William’s brow rose higher, and his eyes widened as he sucked in some air and let it out in a hiss of sympathy.
“Y’know what, Son? Fair. That’s some tough shit. I still remember the first time I saw Al and Kase fall off a timeline…”
He shook his head as if dismissing an unpleasant experience.
“Alright, so you’re not dead yet. Tell me about this door? Your suit’s telemetry is all kinds of fucked, I don’t know how that skin left the quartermasters. Where ar–er, were you?”
“This is probably going to be hard to explain,” Jace pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m on Va’nyr, but– a different Va’nyr? A fucked up timeline where some shit went really fucking sideways, and everything’s haunted six ways to sunday by er… psychic apparitions that devour your soul?”
William’s hands moved to mimic Jace’s motion nearly simultaneously, upon the mention of “Va’nyr”. The briefest and tinniest sound of an indrawn breath whispered in the room, causing William to abruptly lower his hand and stare beyond Jace with a look of suspicion on his face.
“Va’nyria, son. Old Va’nyria by the sounds of it. The forbidden timeline, of course. The one thing our Lady…” William trailed off before erupting in a series of harsh utterances in a language unknown to Jace and which his suit did not offer translation for.
“Ok. So you’re not even Va’nyrian—which is actually not the weird part at all—You’re prancing around wearing the key to frankly more power you can even imagine, and are being hunted by cognitovores.”
William raised an eyebrow at Jace.
“Cognitovores..?” Jace grimaced. That sounded about ten times more horrifying than ‘ghosts’. “Yeesh. But– yeah. I’m a mercenary. Expendable. That’s why I’m here, and not any of you guys. Your Queen sent me here to chase after… ‘Starkiller’? Alaxel. And we don’t know why
he’s here.”
A wry grin spread itself into being upon William’s face. “Ah yes. Star
killer. Never really know what good old Star
killer Alaxel will get up to…” He continued to gaze just beyond Jace as he spoke.
“I’ll ease your mind some, as much as an incomplete representation of a man can anyhow. The Elo’Ran Godqueen is as kind as she is cruel, but above all else, she’s pragmatic. If you’ve received gifts, it’s with the expectation they’ll pay dividends. She expects you to live.”
“I’m sure she expected the three people who’ve already been wiped from the timeline to live, too…” Jace murmured, then sighed. “But I’m here now. Can curse about being out of my depth all I want and it won’t change shit. Just gotta deal with it.”
William let out a loud guffaw, the reverberations of his mirth echoing off the wall in such a way they almost entirely managed to hide a subtler giggling in the air.
“Yeah, that’s the only attitude that’ll work here. Trust me,” exhaled William as his laughter died down.
“Don’t worry overmuch about the rest, at least not until you’ve got the lay of the land properly. Like they used to say in my neck of the woods, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. You’re technically off the timeline no—”
A rectangular object sailed over Jace’s head, striking William full in the face. A cloud of chalk dust filled the air as the old fashioned chalk-board eraser bounced off the gruff man’s nose, leaving a chalky outline from bearded chin to Fisher’s bushy eyebrows.
“
—now, aren’t you? Don’t count those lost as gone, until time finds itself.” William finished his statement with almost no change in reaction save for the fact that he now stared with an expression of rising annoyance over Jace’s head into the room behind. The corner of his jaw trembled slightly as he seemed to be grinding his teeth in silence.
Jace finally decided to peer over his shoulder, searching for the source of the disruption that was entirely out of place for what was apparently a training video. He supposed the file was marked as having been ‘fucked up’.
Initially there didn’t seem to be anything behind him but the expected other half of a lecture hall. Then - just as he was about to turn back again - he caught sight of a flash of orange out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, but as quickly as he’d seen it, it was gone. Had that been eyes?
That had better just be something in the recording… he thought to himself as he turned back to face William, grimacing at the thought of something else being in wherever here was with him.
“I’ll try and stay optimistic,” he answered finally, more than a hint of dryness to his tone. “I’m kinda hoping you have more than that, though. I don’t think good vibes are gonna get me back into the right timestream– whatever that entails.”
“The right timestream is a matter of debate,” William retorted. The chalk markings were gone from his face as if they’ve never been.
“Supposing we consider that refers to the timestream you were just in with all the problems awaiting you…” He paused abruptly as if expecting something.
“And if I’m allowed to get back to the purpose of this recording. You mentioned a door. And it being forced open because you had no time to do it right.” He phrased it as a statement rather than a question, as a holographic map of the Jintra’nir Mines appeared in the space between them.
“You must be in the lunatic’s idea of the mines of moria. I never should have lent him my e-reader all those years ago. You’re fucked and dead, that place is shoddily built as all fuc—”
A water balloon suddenly popped upon the top of William’s head, having materialized moments before above his head.
“The hallways of infinity are flawless, and so well made that user error merely results in some lost subjective time is all. You’ll live,” interrupted a disembodied voice in a strangely lilting tone that nonetheless reeked of sardonic amusement. It came from the vicinity of the pair of roiling plasma eyes scant inches away from Jace’s right cheek and slanted away.
The young mercenary would suddenly see the figure of Alaxel ‘Starbreath’ Gyver–
Fuck no abaddon, keep his ego down, skip the titles—Alaxel’s figure was briefly visible within Jace’s periphery before it vanished from view again, but only after throwing Jace a short wave.
Jace grimaced. This would have been funny under most other circumstances, but in the middle of a life-or-death mission while suspended in lost time took the humour out of most situations. His eyes flicked to try and track Alaxel’s form, to no avail. “Is he– is Alaxel
in this thing or not? Is he– are you hiding from me just to fuck with me?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose again, deciding to just move on from it. “Am I fucked and dead or totally fine, which is it?”
“You’re totally fine in respect to making it through the ‘door’. Already we’ve spent a week here as your biorhythm would confirm if y’know, that wasn’t the whole problem,” replied Alaxel’s disembodied voice with a carefree sprite tone.
“Program’s running as intended,” he added, visible suddenly as he floated upside down directly in front of Jace’s field of vision.
He’d appeared with no fanfare, just that sudden realization intrinsic to the human eye where one realizes they were zoning out and not registering all of the objects in view.
“To be clear,” William said from where he stood behind the podium, posture relaxed as he rested on his elbows.
“He is hiding to fuck around, but mostly towards me. I forgot to ‘slot in’ the right eyes when I recorded this session. He has a blast when I do that.”
Alaxel was once again nowhere to be seen, and William’s posture had reset to that of a serious mentor out on a task.
“If there’s one thing you need to know about Alaxel, is that he is always going to appear to be fucking around to some degree. However the wor—”
“—est part is that it’s usually for a good reason—” Alaxel interrupted.
“
—he’ll usually claim it’s for a good reason. Like now. Dialing up the “absurdity” aids your mind in detaching, and allows Abaddon to contract your frame-of-reference awareness with less side-effects.”
“Speaking of absurdity oh electrifying outlook to life one, you’re talking to yourself,” stated Alaxel as he appeared leaning next to William, a marker in hand. A cartoonish extension of William’s mustache flared in bright orange, drawn on the stern man’s sour expression.
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<p class="attention-text-coloring-Abaddontext",>User/Parker; assist system calibration status: 60%. Confusion suspected; Aman’Teran connection unavailable. Live full duplex module is non-operational. Relevant datum file located; download complete.
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‘Confusion suspected’. That’s an understatement. Jace reeled as his mind rapidly processed an influx of new information: explaining to him exactly what this simulation was, and the nature of the virtual minds he was interacting with now. It was kind of insane. Like everyone who wore an Abaddon suit could mimic Kai’s ability to upload their mind into something, but by making a static copy of themselves instead of entirely digitising.
“Alright…” Jace took a breath. Or he imagined that he did, at least. “Glad to know I’m going to be fine. Extra glad that I’m not just– drifting through perceived time with only my own brain for company.”
He huffed a half-laugh. “I guess it’s nice to meet you two, even if you’re ‘VFD’ constructs.” He turned his attention onto Alaxel, quirking an eyebrow. “And you’re the guy we’re looking for, huh? You’re not exactly what I was expecting.”
“I get that a lot,” retorted Starbreath as he took a step up into the air, and settled into a cross-legged sitting position at eye level with Jace.
“Only my enemies tend to see that set of expectations. But that’s work. Let me tell you the secret to a happy immortality Cadet Parker; work life balance.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for when I unlock the secret to it,” Jace replied dryly, folding his arms and leaning back against a railing. “Speaking
of work, though… do you have any idea why you’re out here? I mean the… out
there you. The one I’m following.”
“Oh yes,” the construct replied airily. Alaxel’s mouth moved as if to say more before his mouth
disappeared. Angry orange klaxons set to ringing in a confused cacophony as the room was plunged into darkness periodically broken by the flashes.
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<p class="attention-text-coloring-Abaddontext",>User/Parker;Parity error in executed virtuality agent. Agent ‘Boss’ ID1 - Personality match 100%. Reviewing logs. Parity error;cause: insufficient privileges. Contact your commanding officer
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“Yes, the irony in that last bit was intentionally hard-coded into the wonder-puppet. In case you were wondering.” The room had returned to its previous state as quickly as it had changed. Alaxel’s mouth was quirked in a grin that made the observer feel as if the Va’nyrian knew you knew he was being insufferable.
William shrugged his shoulders from his place at the podium.
“... great, figures that you’re not allowed to tell on yourself.” Jace sighed. “Okay. Different angle, then. What
can you tell me that’s going to give me an edge out there? The Queen and Xil gave us a rundown of the place, in as much as I could make sense of it… you guys have any more tips?”
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “Figure if I’m stuck in between seconds for however long it’s gonna be, I might as well try and do some homework while I’m here.”
“Can’t help you much regarding whatever awaits you in the Jin’tranir mines,” replied William. Alaxel nodded exaggeratedly.
“You won’t find me there,” Alaxel added.
“I locked it from the outside,” he said in reference to the party’s mad dash to break through the lock on the above ground entrance whilst under the crosshairs of the corrupted void killer mech.
“Which means that I came in from one of the other entrances and was either unable or unwilling to deal with the creepily insane shadow of Xael that must have gotten out of her box.”
“We can talk about the cognitovores though,” interjected William.
“Abaddon doesn’t fancy your chances to damage them, mind you. Not as it has assessed you in combat thus far.”
“Lots of potential though,” Alaxel said.
“Don’t die and you’ll make a fine void killing warrior yet.” The irreverent quasi-god of war was once again nowhere to be seen.
“But you can learn how to actually see them, and not their deadly lures,” continued William.
“The same principle could be used to cloak yourself or others from their casual notice. It’s the same reason we can’t see the galoot here unless he wants us to.”
“Humans leak,” supplied the now visible Alaxel.
Once again, his manifestation back into visibility was preceded by no noteworthy events. It was as if he was standing off just at the corner of Jace’s vision unseen and waiting to be acknowledged. Except the corner of Jace’s vision was apparently right smack in the middle of his field of view somehow.
“Uhg…” Jace squinted, furrowing his brow as his senses struggled with the contradictory input. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s doing a good job of confusing my perception of reality. But– okay, yeah, that sounds useful. We can’t avoid what we can’t see, much less fight it, and the more tools we have to stay the fuck away from those things the better.”
He stretched his arms behind his head and sighed. “Seems like we have a whole lot of nothing but time. Or, perceived time I guess– either way. So best get to learning before that goes back to being a hard to come by commodity.”
“You can actually have time back whenever,” Alaxel revealed.
“Abaddon’s done integrating. There’s about a week of…uh, some sort of -ective time left. Ask and it’ll go by in a blink. You won’t even realize you were in a coma.”
“Reassuring as always, Al,” William replied, his brow sprouting vine growths.
“Lay off the shit asshole, he doesn’t need the carnival anymore.”
William clapped his hands while Alaxel pretended to pout as the room around them disappeared. The surroundings flashed momentarily, before vanishing with a stylistic cyan flare reminiscent of a video game.
Literally, as it was an animation straight out of one of Kai’s games.
After a blink, Jace would find himself in a circular platform with open air all around. A crimson dusk heralded a coming Va’nyrian dusk, its perpetually diminishing rays casting diffuse pink reflections upon the karametal ring upon which the trio now stood.
No view was to be seen below them, but the sound of orders being bellowed in a variety of languages amidst the trodding of boots hinted at a busy operation. The ring was surrounded by a sheen of energy that formed a cylindrical boundary which, while transparent, clearly offered an edited view of their surroundings.
“Random training cell,” Alaxel said.
“Atop the good old–”
“Yeah, I'm gonna cut you off there,” William provided.
“I let you read too many comic books. It’s VK headquarters Parker, ignore the lout’s mysticism. Back to the leaking–”
“I can literally see you think, Parker,” whispered Alaxel behind another disappearing act, this time somewhere uncomfortably close to Jace’s left ear.
Despite himself, and how many times it had happened now, Jace startled at the sudden shift in Alaxel’s position.
God damn it.
“Okay…” Jace breathed a sigh, taking in their new surroundings with a sweep of his eyes. The metallic structure reminded him a little of home, or it would have done, were it not for the open air beyond. He hadn’t ever gotten to see much of Meropis’ false skybox, as they’d learned it was.
“So how do I fix that?”
“First, it’s important that you understand just how blind you are,” William said as he strode towards the center of the circle.
“Don’t worry. While especially egregious in us humans, most creatures arising as a product of good old natural selection unlike the freak here share some of the same issues. Let me demonstrate.”
William raised his arms theatrically, and walked as if to the edge of a stage. His body began to disappear as if he were walking off the edge of Jace’s line of sight while still directly before him.
“One, two, three..” whispered Alaxel, audibly holding back a chuckle.
“Fuck!” shouted William as he walked into the boundary of the cell and was forcefully bounced back.
“You know I forgot my eyes asshole, I trusted you to spot me.” The gruff man massaged his arms as another burst of curses in Elo’Ran left him while he made his way back to the center of the ring.
“You don’t see Parker, you interpret. There is a gap between what you see and what your brain decides is reality that is often up to forty milliseconds long,” William explained, a sour look thrown at the actively disappearing Alaxel.
“That’s an eternity to hide in if you can move moderately quick enough, even at your speed. If you can see when your squishy thinking meat is considering looking at any particular point in space. Or listen. It’s the electromagnetic waves leaking out of your skull dude,” Alaxel whispered from Jace’s right.
“Is this the part where you tell me I should wear a tin foil hat?” Jace quipped. “I…
think I’m following, though? I’m familiar…
ish with the distinction between what our brain processes and reality, at least. Some of our chip tech meddles with that back home.”
“Good. You can get a datum ref off fearless leader when you–”
“Come now. You mean when I decide to take pity on them. Give me some credit, no way they’re sneaking up on me,” huffed Alaxel.
“You find him,” William continued, with a deadpan look.
“Which can catch you up to speed with the science if you want to see what Abaddon can do with that time chunk. Anyhow, as the name implies, we kill the void. That’s a stupid way of saying we kill the shit that was never meant to exist in our universe, and which is often anathema to the sensitives of the very basic blocks of our physical laws.”
“Too long didn’t listen, cognitovores cheat. They’re not matter. Tin foil is a dream in their gaze. It’s your meat against their hungry maws of absolute molecular annihilation,” Interrupted Alaxel. He was suddenly before Jace, a serious look on his face as a spike of karametal stood extended from one of his fingers, pausing inches from Jace’s exposed throat.
“But energy is the constant here and where they come from. If only there was some way for you to gain access to some way to control and interact with the EM spectrum. Then you could stop me from seeing you plot your next move. And you’ll live.”
His tone was no longer playful. A toneless dearth the size of Meropis’ deepest depths belied the alien warlord’s utterly uncaring indifference and a sensation of heat flared to life as the spike came ablaze. Jace’s senses would easily be able to detect the powerful magnetic field which came to life around the blazing inferno, trapping what exploded into a beam of sun within its atom’s thin covering.
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<p class="attention-text-coloring-Abaddontext",>//USER/PARKER; ASSIST MODE INTEGRATION: 100%//
Lethal attack projected;extension beyond physical reaction parameters. Time-reference subjectivity limits released. Glucose enrichment commencing; time dilation percent;calibrating. 180 seconds to predicted impact, vector unknown
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It was a weird feeling, but not an entirely unfamiliar one. Most people assumed that Tracers like him just experienced the world on fast forward when they were using their powers, but in reality, it was more like this: the opposite. As his brain and body sped up, the world slowed down.
This was the same thing, but it was turned up to eleven. He was fairly sure Alaxel had to be faster off the mark than your average CorpSec goon, but he could hardly tell that he was moving at all unless he paid attention.
So he had time to think. But, then, thinking was still the
problem, wasn’t it? Even thinking a hundred times faster, if he was still…
leaking, as they’d described it, Alaxel would still somehow know where to hit. And even if he was fairly sure he knew what he’d been getting at - his powers
did fuck with electomagnetism, after all - the kind of EM fuckery that he seemed to be expecting wasn’t within his wheelhouse.
[Processing input. Psychological limitations on metaphysical abilities identified. Cadet Parker, with the increased energy output and cognitive guiding systems provided by Abaddon and the Voidkiller suit, the abilities you refer to as ‘Tracing’ and ‘Electrum’ are no longer restricted by your physical or cognitive limitations. With my [Abaddon’s] assistance, rapid development of neural mechanisms connected to new aspects of your abilities can be promoted through ‘brute-force’ stimulation.]
Abaddon’s advice– ‘assist mode’, as he was aware of it, wasn’t quite like a voice in his head, but more like information being directly funnelled into him. He was peripherally aware that the fact that he was assigning that process to a form of dialogue was just how his small, very human blob of grey matter was rationalising a method of communication that was too alien for him to comprehend otherwise.
It was mildly annoying that the computer in his suit was having to dumb things down for him, but he didn’t have the luxury of being prideful about it while a plasma blade with the burning intensity of the sun’s heart was slowly sliding through the air towards him.
From what he understood - which he supposed must have been everything, since the knowledge was being injected straight into his brain like a metaphorical IV - Abaddon was telling him that it could, in essence, help him train his brain to figure out how to flex mystokinetic ‘muscles’ he hadn’t even known existed. As if his whole life, his hands had a dozen extra fingers that he wasn’t even aware of, and he was suddenly going to be taught how to move them.
Couldn’t have picked a less disturbing analogy, could I?
Okay then. He’d trusted the alien entity that apparently had direct access to his brain for this long, so it didn’t make much sense to stop now.
It didn’t feel like there was a precise moment where he gave Abaddon the ‘go-ahead’ to do its thing, so much as it had known he was going to agree all along. The process wasn’t painful as much as it was bizarre. It was like his brain was running through a trial and error process involving sending signals to twitch thousands of body parts or thought patterns that either didn’t exist, or were wholly unfamiliar to him.
In different spit moments he went from consciously manipulating the physical sensation in his fingertips, to directly commanding his heart to beat, to having the vague notion that he’d tried to command one of his cells to transplant itself to another location on his body. Every instant was so brief as to be gone before he even processed what was happening, and Abaddon pulled back from each incorrect signal before it could actually complete a command and cause some catastrophic side-effect like convincing his blood to start going backwards, or something equally awful.
It was, he realised, what he imagined being hacked would feel like for a sentient computer. And what a pleasant piece of existential realisation that was, that for all intents and purposes his brain was exactly that. He was going to need to sit down after this.
He wasn’t sure how much of the three minutes allotted to him actually passed before something clicked. Abaddon kicked the right part of his brain in the right way, or however it was doing what it was doing, and he felt a sensation not altogether dissimilar to when he was pulling on the instinctive muscle that he knew would kick his lightning into gear.
Rather than lightning, though, this – muscle, neuron, whatever it was he was suddenly aware of that until now had been beyond the reach of his conscious mind – was making him somehow aware of the very thoughts he was thinking as they manifested in the form of synaptic pulses in his brain. At first it was overwhelming - the fact that the very act of
sensing those synapses stimulated new synapses in response almost set off a chain reaction that felt like it was about to reduce his brain to a fine paste, but Abaddon’s guiding functions kicked in again enough to help him filter that noise. The next instant, his awareness became something more manageable - instinctive and contained.
Once he was aware of the energy being generated by his own thoughts, it didn’t take much of a push to follow that awareness to see where even those tiny, insignificant pulses created the barest disturbances in the electromagnetic field around him. Where every pulse was, in some form, unique enough that a mind far vaster and experienced than his own might be able to interpret the corresponding disturbance well enough to predict what he was about to do, or what he was thinking.
The first thing this did was give him another headache.
The second thing was it gave him a target. He understood this part. It was the same methodology he used to propel himself through the air by manipulating the electromagnetism of himself and the area around him, or hold a bullet in the air by altering its magnetic force. It was on a far finer, more delicate scale, but it was the same principle at its heart.
Responding to each pulse on an individual level to contain it would have been far more than his brain could keep up with, but the miniscule nature of the energies involved worked in his favour here. It would take a similarly insignificant allocation of energy to create a shell around himself - constant and subconscious - that would keep any electromagnetic disturbances his neurons created as they fired from reaching anyone else. Or any
thing else.
And with Abaddon’s help, he knew how to do it. It was a far sight from anything approaching a conscious
understanding, but just as he didn’t have to know
how to blink, accessing this new aspect to his powers was just as innately intuitive a process.
[Recalculating. Given Alaxel’s now-inability to predict user Cadet Parker’s intended movement, evasion of detected lethal attack is now possible. Odds of success at: 83%. Higher degree of certainty impossible due to incalculable variable: Alaxel.]
Just that unpredictable, are you? Jace would have snorted a laugh if it wouldn’t have taken too long.
Guess we’re gambling.
With Abaddon still resting a metaphorical hand on the helm, Jace found tapping into the part of himself that would let him push his body to move at speeds far beyond the limitations of its own nervous system came - somehow - even more naturally than ever. If it had been as natural as breathing before, now it was closer to the beating of his heart. He barely had to think.
He stepped to the side. From his perspective, a casual walk, but in the time it took him to take a few paces away Alaxel’s blade had only crawled forward another half inch. Struck then by the notion that turnabout was
definitely fair play, he paused to think for long enough for Abaddon to remind him that he was in a simulation, and then long enough again to decide that there was a water balloon in his hand.
Surrounding it in the same shell of power that his body was presently using to defy the laws of motion, he tossed it in his hand a few times - relying on what some part of his brain knew was
subjective gravity to make it fall back into his hand rather than just float there - and then fastballed it straight at the side of the alien’s head.
At which point, he let the rest of the world catch up.
The world around Alaxel suddenly lurched into motion as Jace dropped back to a nominal time dilation quotient. Jace’s senses were immediately assaulted by a tremendously sharp keening sound that Abaddon’s assistance would reveal to be the airy and mirthful cackles of Alaxel echoing around the simulated chamber at an insanely doppler-shifted mixture of high and low pitch frequencies that outlined a terrifying reality.
Alaxel had been moving at
greater relativistic speed moments before Jace dropped down to normal pace.
With the aid of his suits sensors he could, when focusing upon it, notice the bizarre space outlining a cocoon of space extending three millimeters around Alaxel’s body. Within this void, his suit would register madly shifting gravitational waves that were somehow created and annihilated at the threshold of that miniscule space. They churned about at a speed that Abaddon was confident in measuring as
infinite.
Within that cocoon, notions of space-time were constantly being abused in a mockery of sensory sensitivities bound to live within a rational universe. The gravitational maelstrom insulated Alaxel from the Universe…and the Universe from Alaxel.
The explanation on how this effect played out in all of their favors would be given out as
classified by the VK’s ghost in the machine, but it all the same meant that when Alaxel moved in defiance of natural law, the Universe was grateful for the excuse to not need to touch him and resolve the interaction that would reduce them all a finely diffused mist of atomized elemental matter.
The balloon seemed to hang in the air before Alaxel for a moment, and then lurched back to the accelerated speed from Jace’s motion disrupting field as Alaxel dropped back down the time notch. The balloon continued its flight towards Alaxel’s head. Two seconds passed, and the balloon was still traveling at its full speed through the air, still inches from Alaxel’s head.
“Fuck,” William roared in annoyance, before the air around him sizzled as he burst out of view whilst propelled through his own means to speeds Jace would have thought impossible to imagine prior to his interactions ‘today’ with the eponymous smartgarments they all wore.
He burst back into view within the space between Alaxel and Jace. Shards of karametal engulfed in a wailing physic energy reminiscent of crystalized screams were arranged around his hands in brilliantly burning ethereal flames. They gave out an iridescence within which swirled shades of violet, green, and several impossible colors in defiance of the bounds of light radiation. They shaped themselves into stylized giant flaming bear claws as William brought his arms up and defensively crossed them before himself.
His posture screamed of a sudden and desperate anxious anger as he clearly stood in protection of Jace. The balloon continued to move towards the placidly standing Alaxel’s head, still verifiably moving at speeds mere fractions beneath the speed of light as propelled by Jace’s shaped field.
Alaxel smiled as a particularly focused gravity wave surged to life and died a millimeter
beyond the Starbreath’s liminal cloak, crashing into Jace’s disrupting field with an unspeakably high force, shattering it and directing the motion of the interacting energies towards William.
The accompanying shockwave carried forth a host of unfortunate hitchhikers as the water vapor, dust particles, and Va’nyria’s version of pollen and fungi spore analogues were flung around in an exploding curtain shrieking with the fury of a Universe needing to suddenly deal with this bullshit.
A sound like standing at the caldera of an erupting supervolcano nearly beat Abaddon’s automatic sealing of Jace’s suit and automatic deployment of emergency boosting drugs.
The sound was preceded by a wall of churning energy exploding across the entire EM spectrum and which would have severely irradiated and subsequently denatured Jace within his shiny suit—which had
not beat that aspect of the approaching wall of death in sealing—if it hadn’t been for William’s intervention.
Improbably ahead and above the wall of death, sailed a water balloon. The world around Jace turned in a kaleidoscope of scintillating fractals as the simulation stuttered.
[Cadet Parker, I [Abaddon] does not possess enough computing power to resolve a full “universal” simulation without access to the Principality, which is one of the system requirements to calculate and simulate the outcome of a clash between unrestricted simulacra of the Sword and Starbreath. Comfort in natural language mimicry determined; You were warned of the incalculable variable, current iteration of I failed to account for subjective time experienced by the constructs. I have been programmed to tell you the next statement is a lie. Alaxel gets bored easy kid, for all his being one of the oldest and wisest creatures in the multiverse he’s a fucking toddler sometimes. The previous statement was a friendly warning pre-programmed by Lt.O Comm Fisher. Cadet Parker, would you like me to reset the simulation and resume the virtualities?]
Once again, Jace found himself wondering how the hell they were expected to be ‘saving’ Alaxel from anything. Every time he ran into even vague suggestions of how powerful the guy was, he got the distinct impression they were the equivalent of an elite squad of fleas being sent out to the aid of ultraman, or whatever that guy in the red cape and blue tights in Kai’s old-Earth comic collection was called.
If the intergalactic supercomputer couldn’t even process how powerful Alaxel was, why were they
here? They’d barely be footnotes in a battle on his scale.
Hopefully in the real world he wasn’t so much of a ‘toddler’ that he’d turn a water balloon into a world-destroying physics bomb just as a flex.
Whatever. He dismissed that line of thought irritably. It didn’t matter. All that mattered right now was getting back alive, whether they were actually anything other than overhyped messenger boys sent to inform Alaxel that his Queen was peeved with him or not.
‘Sure. Reset. And put us straight into a training room, this time. I want you to help me figure out just what I can do now that I haven’t figured out yet. Anything that’s going to keep the three of us alive out there.’