After the Strike, before the Breakout - NOW what?
By
catsi563,
Posted on: 2005-10-28 03:52 in Roleplaying
BOOM!
The force of the explosion knocked me clean off of my bunk, throwing me across the room and into the wall. The lights went out, leaving me in complete darkness for a moment, before returning - but this time, in a dark, deep red. Emergency lighting only. The explosion, whatever it was, had cut the power.
Outside, alarms and sirens jangled into life. My ears, however, were preoccupied with a more pleasant noise: the humming noise of the armor as it powered up. Cutting the power had also cut the jamming field. In seconds it was at a quarter charge. It should be at full capacity in just over two minutes.
Another pleasant though struck me. I went to my cell door, and pushed on it, without even bothering to engage the power servos in the suit.
It opened, sliding easily into its slot in the wall, and I stepped outside.
I had expected to see chaos, and in this I was not disappointed. Having been placed in the paranormal section of the facility, a crowd of colorful characters were running around, joyfully burning, freezing, electrifying, and punching anything that they could find. Most of them were on the ground floor. I headed downstairs myself, after stopping for a moment to satisfy a passing curiousity by visiting the cell of the Bug Man, who was rumored to have escaped the Zig unaided.
Though I hardly appeared to be the toughest member of the crowd, the poor dented battle armor must have looked impressive somehow, for no one bothered me too much. I heard whispers through the crowd: "Arachnos!"
Well, this was an unexpected turn of events... but it made sense. Statesman's strike on Mercy Island, though ultimately unsuccessful, had still landed scores of Arachnos paranormals in the Zig... just like I, myself, had been captured in the aftermath of the strike and sent here.
From Arachnos point of view, the timing would be wonderful: the Paragon heroes would be exhausted and reeling, and almost all of the back-up support would be away... what better time to strike the Zig, and get back many, if not all, of their captured paranormals? Not to mention any extras who chose to come: a nice bonus for Arachnos, indeed.
Since I was physically in Paragon, I could check official channels - and, sure enough, the hit was confirmed Arachnos. The channels were alive with chatter. As I suspected, the heroic complement that would normally have turned out at such a daring move had not arrived in any meaningful numbers. Arachnos was determined to answer Statesman's strike and, in this venture at least, it appeared as if they would be successful.
Time to go.
I sent in for clearance, and set about to find the Arachnos operatives who were on the premises, get back to my mission... and find out what had gone wrong.
*Lord Dire watched the monitors in the temporary base he had constructed. the Arachnos Breakout scenario had gone as smoothly as could be expected. With Longbow weakend from the failure of The so called Statesman's Strike. it had been with some ease that hundreds of prisoners had been freed form the confines of the Zig.
Amongst these was one Penny Arcade. The micro dot he had planted before the Strike Event had been barely functional due to the jamming field set up in her cell but it had been adequate to inform him when she had escaped.
Again he had to marvel at the resilliency of the young double agent. she had placed herself into cryostasis to avoid the oncoming storm. but an inadvertant blast from positron had collapsed a portion of the cavern she was hiding in. exposing her secret hideaway. the sensors in her suit registering danger had executed their preprogrammed series of initatives and had awakened her. cutoff from help she had been set upon by a squad of Longbow regulars, and with no time to warn them or to surrender was forced to fight for her life.
Lord Dire had to admit to himself. Even he had not been prepared for the furiosity of the attempted invasion of the isles. yet the defences of Arachnos had held and the strike had gotten no further then mercy Isle itself. Penny had fought admirably and he had aided her again though surreptiously by blasting a Longbow chaser assault vehicle that had appeared to menace her. she had not seemed to make the connection to him as it had appeared as if he had just been one of a number of villians fighting in the largest battle the Islands had ever seen.
He was certain that had she been healthy, and fully aware she would have escaped capture alltogether. but a stroke of bad luck (and a stray energy blast) had rendered her unconscious. Taken into custody she surely would have rotted in prison. her fool superiors seemed to be more interested in keeping her involvement a secret then in assisting her.
And what fools they were. with the information she had fed them Statesman must have been fully aware of the defences arrayed against him. he had monitored some of her last reports himself and they were quite thorough he had even taken the liberty of editing them with aditional information midstream through the means at his disposal. but the Fools had rushed headlong into the lions den heedless of that which was arrayed against them and waiting to spring a trap.
Now he must consider carefuly what to do. with the freeing of so many captured villians many new players would eb added to the game. he must adjust his master plan carefully to take this into account. as he monitored penny's climb into the Arachnos transport. His attention was drawn to the beautiful glass chess set in his study. he gazed at one of the tiny clear glasspawns. and he thought again about pawns; and how a lowly pawn could become a queen.
"which shall you be Penny, I wonder. which shall you be?"
So you mean you'll put down your rock, and I'll put down my sword; and we'll try and kill each other like civilized people?
Dubbed first knight of pep-istan by her majesty Queen Pepcat. first catmonaut to walk onna moon.
PENGUIN!!!...(^)>
...............C(...)D
.................m.m
When I woke up, the first thing I was aware of was my head. It hurt. When I went to rub it, though, my hand clanked against metal: I was still in my power armor. In younger and more innocent days, I might have taken off my helmet and tried the rub the soreness out of my skull. Nowadays, though, I knew better.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a concrete cell. No windows, one wall consisted of nothing but bars. For a while second, I thought that I had been discovered - but then reason caught up with my senses. No, these were not Arachnos prison cells, with their eerie appearance and their plethora of devices designed to make people "talk." This was a vanilla-standard jail cell, Paragon City style. Which meant that I had been captured by...
... well, who had I been captured by? I couldn't recall. Longbow, most likely. I sat up on my bunk and tried to think. The fight on Mercy Isle had been nothing short of flat-out war. I had never experienced anything like it. At the time I had been far too busy, between lasers, explosions, and the distractions of battle, to do much reflection about its course. But now...
I checked the battle-suit. It really was a battle-suit now, in truth as well as in name, and its scarred, pock-marked surfaces bore mute testament to the ferocity of the fighting that I had gone through. The vast majority of the systems were down, some from actual damage, but it looked as if most were under the influence of a power-suppression field.
All of which made sense for a Paragon jail cell. This was certainly a temporary holding facility in which I had been placed until the power armor could be cracked. That would require a team of specialists going over it with a microscope, and apparantly said specialists weren't available at the moment.
Through the bars I could hear a voice, and going to the cell door and looking, I could see a television set, sort of down the hall. It was too far away to see under normal circumstances: but the lenses in the helmet had a manual zoom, and someone had turned up the volume. It was Statesman: he was making an announcement.
"Should the assault be considered a failure?" I recognized the voice; it was some guy from the Paragon Tattler. I had had trouble with him myself from time to time.
Statesman said, Absolutely not. It is true that Lord Recluses defenses were far more entrenched than we had believed; the shores teemed with brutish minions and the skies swarmed with sinister forms. But the combined force of the Freedom Phalanx and Longbow rocked the Rogue Isles with our might. The Strike can be seen as a success in that we carried the battle to the very doorstep of darkness. We have shown them that the heroic men and women of Paragon City will not sit idly by and wait for the vile assassins of Arachnos to attack first...."
I stared disbelievingly at the screen.
Lord Recluses defenses were far more entrenched than he had believed?
How could he say that?
I had spent a month on Mercy Isle, four solid weeks, every moment of them in terror that someone would find out my double-agent status, and I would be shot or far, far worse. Arachnos was not kind to spies - I knew full well what would happen to me if it had been known that I had been passing information on to Paragon...
But I had been successful! Hadn't I? Statesman should have known what the fortifications on Mercy Island were - I took pictures of them! He should have known what the defenses were like - I told him!
Well... no... not him, himself. I sent reports in as I had been assigned to do. I had been assigned to infiltrate Mercy Island, gather intelligence, and send it to Paragon, and I had done this... but somehow the information had not gotten to Statesman, Freedom Phalanx, or, apparantly, anyone who had had charge of planning the assault on Mercy Island.
That meant that either (a) the higher-ups had received the information and discarded it as unreliable or (b) someone had intercepted the information, somewhere between the intelligence gathering and the attack planning stages.
And that did not bode well. Had my identity been compromised? Almost certainly not - after all I was here, and alive, and appeared to be under arrest, same as any thug might expect in Paragon. If the Paragon Justice Department had been fooled into accepting the false "Villian" identity that the Paragon City Science guys had cooked up for me, than surely Arachnos must have.
What, then, was happening in the upper ranks?
And, more importantly, what was I going to do about it?
For the moment, I decided, I was going to sit tight. The last orders I had received, just before the Mercy Island battle, had been quite clear: I was not to blow my cover. I was to observe, photograph, send back data, and wait. Not only had those orders not been rescinded, but there was no one currently here that had sufficient security clearance to be able to rescind them. No one in whom I could confide.
Looks like I'm going to be spending some time in the Zig.
I shook my head at the TV as Statesman flashed off of it and the news briefing moved on. If the higher-ups decided I had filled my purpose, they could simply leave me here, to rot. Nothing to do now but wait for new orders that might never be forthcoming... damn. Damn damn damn....
Better make sure the power armor is up to snuff, though.
Just in case....