Ineffable

Awww that's not you Devious. You've made me sad. Say something neat like you always do. What's wrong...?

I am legally insane. I have a psychoththerapist and 'special' medication that I am required to take, and I have someone who comes over every week to check and make sure that I have taken it.

And I will say this. IF I really am insane, I wouldn't want to be sane for a minute. Everything is so pretty. Like crystals...

Bah, there I go again. Ignore this post.

((I'm still trying to figure out if that knack is a gift or a curse.))

Of course, there were no longer any active Clockwork anywhere. The ones chasing Schwarzherz had all fallen apart after he had sealed the building's entrance, and there were no Clockwork anywhere in sight in the Grenadier Village or the Cannonade. So naturally, Dax hit nothing except the hallucinations of Clockwork brought up from being drunk with so much power.

((...Nah, not really. Poe only has his own independant resources to tap, and anybody he can force to help him. He isn't allowed to use H.C. employees or gadgets that arn't directly labeled for individual use.))

"...And once they are all inside, we fight them all one by one until they're all dead." Poe finished. "Leaving Breaker for last." He added.

"I don't know..." Xabu said.

The arsonist rolled his eyes.

"The whole concept of three on one really bothers me here..."

Motnahp remained silent, although he agreed with the pencil-thin giant.

"So would you prefer to have ALL of them fight us three, all at once?" Poe asked.

"Oh no, I never implied that." Xabu said quickly. "But you cannot tell me that the only resolution then would be one on three. That's just cowardice."

There was a lengthy silence.

"Three on three?" Motnahp suggested.

"Fine." Poe spat. "Whatever."

Xabu looked a good deal happier.

"And what was that part about the others?" He asked.

"They will proceed normally." Poe said simply. "So now we simply wait for them to arrive. And don't YOU have a certain someone to be?" He snapped at Motnahp.

"Multitasking." The Mind Reaper stated calmly.

"I don't care, I want everything you have leveled on him. Now. Go." The arsonist snarled.

Not really, it's a very versatile defense. It hardly matters HOW complex the painting is, a simple bucket filled with white-out can do wonders...

"I have others." Karl called back, right before vanishing into the rubble.

-----

The moment Scwarzherz and his men managed to seal the entrance, the Clockwork collapsed on the spot into trillions of tiny bits of scrap, which proceeded to roll/drift/bounce/whatever along the ground to settle into heaps and/or fall into cracks in the ground.

-----

The Council soldier, after making positvely sure there were no hostiles about, got his walkie talkie out again and began tp speak into it...

I'll go with creation.

*Pops open skull cap and scratches brain*

Yep.

Say, does anybody have a nail-gun lying around that they don't need...?

But would it mess with them enough to make us snap? There are already plenty of pieces of art that can replicate such effects. For example, a perpetual waterfall where the water falling off the edge goes back up to fall again up a stream using a straight level path. Sure, such things are hard to comprehend or even look at, but would they really drive us insane?

*Appears*

Hullo meat-sacks.

*Tosses Parallel Cannon into thread*

Whoever gets it first keeps it. Laterz.

*Vanishes*

Even though Karl had left in a hurry, the Vaguard had gotten more than plenty of time to scan both.

Karl was perfectly normal to them. (For a mortificator anyway.) There were no magical residues about his personna, and no unusual anomalies about him either. As far as he was concerned, nothing was wrong with him.

His coffin, on the other hand...

The entire thing appeared have a transport apparatus installed in it, either that or it had an interior teleport option. There was nothing else too special about it, aside from various automated surgical tools grafted into the sides, tubes, and so forth. The box was a morgue slab. It was easy to imagine Karl could have a fresh cadaver ready from the thing in mere seconds, either by transporting a ready one there or by having the coffin make alterations to deceased bodies. Other than its rather disturbing features, there was nothing too abnormal about it.

If they wanted to catch him, he was still in plain view, hurrying off.

Nah, most of my characters are already insane to begin with.

Anyone who isn't insane will have seen it before. Cubed. It just isn't happening these days. :/

((You don't always need numbers to turn the tide in your favor, Grey. ))

((Devious nailed it. And there are no active Clockwork outside of the Fuse.))

((And I will remind you that the Cannonade is over...Oh, you know...TWO ZONE SECTORS AWAY FROM THE FUSE. When I said the three blocks away thing, I was just trying to relay how focused this particular Clockwork attack was.))

((I could also use some clarification as well. Boomtown is LARGE people, it was never built to be traversed FAST. It's the largest zone in-game in terms of land-mass, you'd think there would be SOME from point-a-to-point-b stuff going on between fights. Or at least some indication of which direction you are all blazing off in so others arn't confused about who is attacking what when and how. ))

Poe barged in.

The Armored Giant Glanced at Him.

"Oh...NO! Get away from me you little freak! The next moon is on an ellipsis for that giant invisible frog! I do NOT have time for this..."

NORMALLY Xabu would have listened to Poe.

Normally.

But if there was any one thing that could get the giant, (Xabu stood at an easy fifteen+ feet, not even including the spikes on his shoulders, although he was barely a meter in length. He was built like a lightning rod) It was the sight of A Person as Unstable as Poe Wearing Battle Armor. The mere sight of it probably meant the end of time was right around the corner. It also made the said giant cower before a man only 6' 7 tall.

"Relax...I'm not here to ask you to help me in another crusade." Poe said.

There was a very large and evil smile on his face.

"Oh?" Xabu glared down at the arsonist, leaning back as far away as possible without falling into the star fissure behind him.

"Nope. I'm forcing you." The Arsonist threw a grenade at the giant, and that was that. Xabu did not have a choice, with armor as fragile as his, and nothing but open space on every side of him.

He had always thought the stars in this particular fissure were pretty...

-----

Noitpeced hummed in the darkness. It was a pleasent little tune. Something about foam. He was quite happy here where he was, sorting out all these rather important looking modules, surveying the security systems, continually upgrading himself and said security systems, running checks, doing just about everything a being such as himself was capable of doing with the resources at his disposal, all at once.

He saw Poe coming before he was even born, and the Energy Reaper bolted to prepare for the fiasco. However, he left a figment of himself behind, technically he still needed to obey Poe.

That didn't mean he wasn't allowed to bring in outside intervention, of course, but it would take some very fast talking on Noitpeced's part, and if he wasn't fast enough, this thing was going to spiral out of hand...

-----

Poe entered the room.

"Noitpeced."

Motnahp looked drearily at the Husk Lord. That wasn't his name, but the Mind Reaper responded.

"I know I know...Let's go."

-----

Somewhere in Nerva

"Wha-BLAAARGH!"

"You silly fool...It's supposed to be spelled with six As. And it's clearly AAAAAARGH, not any of this consonants added on droll..."

Karl was already gone, having rushed away once he was declared free to go.

-----

It was futile.

For every Clockwork that fell...

An entire batallion of them would swarm in from any given direction.

This was not Atlas Park or Kings Row. This was BOOMTOWN. Here, the Clockwork had an infinite amount of backup. They could recycle their own bodies endlessly up to the point where they were ground to fine powder. They had limitless amounts of scrap to construct themselves from. And now they were backed by the villain of the week.

If one could declare what the most common color in Boomtown was, it would most likely be grey. Either that or black, or some very dark shade of brown. In truth, the most common color here in Boomtown was green.

And that color glared from every shadow, every nook and cranny, the sky was filled with them, the ground crumbled as they tore it away and came up from below, the ground was completely obscured by the tide of them.

The green glow from the eyes of the Clockwork.

Well. At least around Liberty Road, anyway.

Not three blocks away it was as silent as the grave. There were obviously still Clockwork there, but they wern't active. It seemed they were determined to wage World War eleven on only Schwarzherz and his troops. But if any of the others cared to fight, that was fine by the Clockwork.

-----

Grenadier Village

The Council Soldier walked out of the cargo container that was really the disguised secondary entrance, and surveyed his surroundings.

Nothing. Not a single Clockwork in sight.

He breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and pulled out a walkie talkie. He muttered a few words into it before putting it back and quickly taking in the perimeter.

Had Build used an X-Ray scan, he would discover he was now pregnant with a Galaxy.

-----

As Breaker stepped into St. Martial, nothing bad happened.

Things couldn't possibly be going his way for once, could they?

-----

Oddly enough, (and surprisingly enough to Poe) they WERE.

"Bring in an army will you?"Poe snarled as he watched the group come out of the D. "Be that way...I have friends as well..."

He left.

The Clockwork sea swarmed forward.

An uncountable amount of electrical bolts blazed from every last imaginable direction, including from the air. Perfected Oscilators rose up and seemed to blot out the sky. Princes rushed forward to get into melee range, ball lightning was tossed about just as often as tesla fields...

And worse yet, the ground directly beneath the troop's feet began to crumble. The Clockwork were below them! A seemingly never-ending tide of princes from below tore away the ground and brought forth limb and electrical power...

-----

"So what now?" Karl asked.

Interestingly enough, aside from a slight heaviness from his stomache, Build did not feel any worse. Maybe the Paradox ooze was triggered by certain actions?

"Yes..." Karl said slowly.

Odd, he thought to himself. I DON'T know...

Wait...

An Image flashed through his mind.

"It's in the Grenadier Village, along the Western Wall. Ever since the Clockwork started attacking they've sealed the main entrance and have disguised the secondary entrance as a cargo container. Last I saw the City Representative, she was heading inside along with two of those silver troops with the sonic weapons.

-----

Klaus would have found something interesting after studying the Clockwork.

There were no left-over mental energies in the thing. Which meant the Clockwork King hadn't been controlling it.

There were no electrical pulses in it, so these were not Clockwork who could operate by themselves.

But there was nothing else. Common sense said it should have been entirely impossible for them to operate.

-----

Why did Schwarzherz and his men feel like they were being watched?

Because they were.

Slowly, all around, in every direction, from seemingly everywhere at once, they rose.

The small troop was entirely surrounded by a literal sea of various Clockwork, all glaring at them with their lifeless green eyes.

-----

Not.

Part.

Of.

The.

Plan.

Die.

The coffee poured into the coffee cup. It didn't mix with the black ooze, however, it merely floated on top of it.

There was a soft *ding* as the coffee machine finished filling.

Nothing happened.

-----

Poe waited. Very patiently.

The monitors then changed. A miscalculation had occured! That was impossible though, how could it miscalculate the time needed to analyize an unknown material?

Regardless of what the problem was, it read that the materials would take roughly an hour to fully figure out.

Then the monitors flickered, and ANOTHER new calculation displayed saying it would take negative fifty three seconds.

Then they changed again, saying it would take two kilometers.

Once everything was finished, the monitors displayed their conclusion.

The liquid was actually not a liquid. It was a solid. (Even though the swishing liquid disproved this quite easily.) It's make-up consisted of Zirconium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium, along with Xenon. (Check the periodic table.) Additonally, the liquid defied gravity, had a mass indication larger than Jupiter's, and was the color bright yellow. (When it was actually jet black.) It was not sentient, and had no mental energy of any kind radiating from it, although in a simulation program the scanning equipment didn't even know it had, the foul stuff had beaten it at a game of cubed triangular chess uno.

And it was apparently related to twenty two whales. Who hadn't been born yet.

And was it just Build, or did the glass containing the black oozing stuff appeared to have instantaneously turned into coffee cup with a seriously ticked-off looking frog with a fairy wand sitting on the edge?

Ineffable, who was going to melt the door, simply shrugged when Toy Dispenser's bots dug in.

"Suit yourself. I'm going to go search for our friend."

He vanished. No flash, no vacuum of rushing air, nada. There one minute, gone the next.