Chronicles of The Omniverse Archived Van Leugen: The Newtons

as written by Tiko and Script

Later that evening...

Tessa and Aeidai were diligently at work, or that is to say that Tessa was pouring over some of the study material she had acquired from the Invictus, while Aiedai did... well... Tessa wasn't entirely sure what Aiedai was doing.

The airy girl was sat cross-legged nearby, her eyes closed and her mind focused on the obelisk. Through the many layers of wards and protections she'd set upon her mind, she was just about able to delicately probe at its physical manifestation whilst avoiding the mind that lurked behind it, searching for clues as to its nature. To the outside observer, however, she seemed simply to be lost in meditation.

Overhead the sound of raindrops began to patter upon the roof of the tent that the pair were seated in, soft at first and then rapidly gaining in tempo. It had been drizzly and miserable most of the day, but it was only now that the heavens finally let loose. Outside she could hear the shouts of people as they were rushing to take cover from the sudden onset of rain.

It was enough to jar her momentarily from what she was reading and she closed the book and stood up to head towards the front of the tent. Something felt wrong though...

Her skin was rapidly growing hot and she tugged at the collar of her shirt.

"Do you feel that?"

It was all that she managed to utter before her voice grew choked and her skin began to blacken. She looked down at her own hands in horror as the flesh began to die in front of her own eyes. She turned towards Aiedai only to see the other woman suffering the same.

One of Aiedai's pale cheeks had crumpled away to reveal the bone of her jaw blackening and turning to ash. Her eyes had snapped open, burning with celestial fire as the spirits within her fought to try and preserve their host. Her form was swiftly wreathed with light, healing energy battling with the destructive radiation in a brilliant lightshow that filled the tent.

Horror and agony filled Tessa's mind as the cacaphany of hundreds - if not thousands - of screams reached her from outside, and yet... a single name came unbidden to her memories even through the pain and shock.

____

5 years ago...

"I have a final gift for you, young one. A reward for your dedication to an old teacher. Of the thirteen, each has a name. To call on in the direst need, which of these would you learn?"

"Time..." Tessa replied after much deliberation.

"Tessa Cartner, you choose...wisely for one as young as yourself." His voice had altered as well, becoming a deep, grandfatherly rumble. "Time is the name by which the peoples of Terra call me, but you, young mage, will know better."

It was then that the demon removed the blindfold. When at union, those eyes were deadly to a mortals sanity, but now they were occupied only by the one. They seemed to be black, but if one looked closely they could piece out the truth. Thousands of individuals made up those eyes, in the state of life they they were. He saw them, each one, and knew the one behind the face of age.

"Listen, and let my name never be forgotten-"

____

"Balt...ahaz...eiro Mal...a...chain Grimoir!"

The shriek of the final words deafened her as her flesh began to dissolve and break down at a molecular level, until in a matter of a few excrutiating seconds it was-
 
as written by Lobos

There is power in a name, a fact that mortals often forgot, and so rendered less effective.

"Balt...ahaz...eiro Mal...a...chain Grimoir!"

Frozen in mid-step, Plures felt the call like a tidal wave slamming across his many souls, none more so than the singular portion of him who's name escaped on a dying scream. So far away from his once student, the intent behind the summons was unmistakeable.

Space folded with scarcely effort displayed, where he once stood among mountains, he now existed within a sphere carved of the earth, beneath the very foundations of a city. Power erupted from the entity, a cascading nexus that at first brought the localized time of Van Leugen to a complete halt.

Eddies of the instability immediately warred against his intervention, the visage of Plures flexing as yet more of the demon extended the powers to combat his brutal action on such a large part of Valore. The aspect that was time paid no heed to its brethrens' intercession, beginning to channel its most fundamental forces into rewinding time itself within a sphere, extending its influence to capture the deadly wave of radiation, and the individuals who perpetrated the act, driving it all back within its source.

It would have been a simple matter to merely take it there, to act directly, and to remove the threat. But though unbound by the laws that governed those who live far above mortals, Plures felt that if mortals could inflict harm on such levels, then mortals had a duty to maintain the stability of their world. All power had a price, and now his once student, Tessa, would find herself challenged to act as the catalyst for redeeming the lives that would have been lost.

The demon continued to turn back time itself, the seconds blurring together as the temporal reversal wound the clocks back to the beginning of the day, halting once more. There would be one boon offered, a clue to correct the jarring wrench of memories of the past and the new present. The actions had been perpetrated within Van Leugen, the device made and detonated there. Plucking a single item from the place of its construction, a microfusion cell, it was this he offered, through time and space once again, before time was allowed to flow as before, the herculean efforts of all aspects of the amalgam entity focused entirely on both maintaining a loop within time itself, and stabilizing the interference it would have within the greater world's already torn fabric of reality.

To those within Van Leugen, nothing would seem amiss, simply a fateful day replayed until the cycle could be broken. To those without, however, it would be as though a dome of incandescent energy had descended to enshroud the city, an impermable barrier of stilled time and locked space, light itself frozen within atmosphere.

Plures settled into a kneel, the strain on himself only evidence with the tautness of his neutral expression.
 
as written by Tiko, Script, and Lobos

Tessa blinked her eyes as she found herself engaged in a casual discussion with Milos. A discussion she recalled having had just that morning...

"Just about anywhere works, but over by Virgil is the hub of activity." Milos said, pointing to the robotic being reading through different books with multiple arms and the vehicles around her.

"All hands on deck with that one." Milos joked, "Because she has several arms." He explained to the newcomers.

"Heh. Anyways, we've got people on the way with tents. Rain isn't good for our books."

Milos words were a drone in the back of her head as she tried to re-orient herself to what had happened. She had died? No. It would seem the day had been reset. Plure's boon had packed a punch it would seem.

"Hm?" Tessa asked as she realized she was only half listening to Milos. "Oh, that's fine. We'll go get settled in..."

The girl looked like she had seen a ghost, but to the Invictus on hand it was likely credited to the close proximity to the obelisk and nothing more.

As she and Aiedai walked away towards where the tents were soon to be errected, she looked down to note her hands shaking. What had happened?

"Something troubles you," Aiedai stated as they walked, turning her gaze on Tessa. "We sensed that something came upon you during that conversation, a shadow of terror and pain. What happened? We detected no change in the world around you."

A slight clatter nearby, quiet yet obviously not natural, announced the appearance of a small microfusion cell.

The clatter caught Tessa's attention while others might have paid it no mind. It was an unnobtrusive enough noise, but it was also new. She had no recollection of it from that morning...

Perhaps she had simply overlooked it though?

She knelt down, and her eyes located the source of the noise and she picked up the tiny object in her fingers as she stared at it. Perhaps it was nothing, but perhaps it was something...

For now she pocketed it.

"I'll explain shortly-" Tessa began.

She was momentarly interupted by the arrival of a Lamia enchanter jogging over to hand her and Aiedai some charms. She thanked him mutely before speaking lowly to Aiedai as the enchanter moved off to see to other matters..

"I think we all died," Tessa explained. "Tonight."

Aiedai blinked slowly, before fixing Tessa with a confused stare. "You saw a vision?"
 
as written by glmstr

Virgil's hands were rapidly turning through pages, the fusion of Man and Magic examined each page with a machine's speed and the delicacy and precision of a seasoned surgeon.

That is, until it happened.

The bronzed construct halted in place, completely still aside from its four arms closing the tomes it held and putting them down.

"Something just happened," the blue gemstone of a face was incapable of expressing the emotions conveyed in her voice.

The last time she felt something like this, her soul was torn from her body and put in the metal husk she knew so fondly now.

Her next words were not a question, they were a demand for explanation.
"What was that."
 
as written by Krysis

Elsewhere in the city, in a park with a brand new sandstone statue in the middle of it, something started to scream the moment the barrier went up. The statue didn't just shatter with the crescendo of the wailing, it erupted into a writhing coil of sand. It drowned the park and those that had been enjoying the morning in the choking dust of a living desert and battered those poor souls with the agony suffered by the mind suddenly severed from her last mortal anchor.

Minerva managed not to kill any of the people caught in her pain, nothing worse than a couple of broken bones and a concussion left in her wake, before she shot into the sky in a cloud of pebbles. She pounded against the shell Plures had erected, desperately seeking passage back to the body she had abandoned so long ago. It took her several minutes to realize that she could not escape. Further more, that she was still 'alive', more or less, despite being so cut off.

From a distance, it probably looked like a sudden dark cloud that roiled and fell back to earth in the vicinity of the Newtons, where there was already so much destruction that Minerva felt it would do no harm if she lost control. Those closer saw the shapes of a pair of fists in those clouds, the size of houses, that slammed against the frozen light before dissipating. Falling to the ground in a hail of small stones, Minnie soon gathered up again into the female form that she preferred. That form knelt and hunched over her middle, sobbing inconsolably in the narrow field of small craters her failing wrath had left.
 
as written by Saarai

"Didn't feel anything." One of the mages said to Virgil, "I did." Another added, "It's that obelisk, it's messing with us." Milos told them, "We might need to put more space between us and it." He continued.

There was a silence among the Lamia. When you dealt with magic for a living, nothing was ever nothing. Something happened, it was just a matter of figuring out what happened.

"Describe it." Milos said to Virgil, "Describe what you felt."

He was savvy enough to get an understanding of what she felt, to try to narrow down what it could have been.
 
as written by glmstr

"I don't really have words for it. It just felt wrong. Every fiber of my being felt. . . Violated," Virgil would have shuddered if she still had a human body, instead only supplying the noise that came with it.

"It felt almost like my soul was torn from my body, but for just an instant. Did the force behind this obelisk tear the fabric of reality or something? Supposedly this sort of feeling tends to accompany such things."
 
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