"Crap..." Jake muttered as he felt his mind being encouraged to be teleported back. "Can you trace my location, because I think I'm about to be-" With that, he vanished, the familiar pop as the air filled in the gap taking his place shortly after.
"... Well... crap..." Wirespike simply said, putting on his goggles and attempting to follow his trail.
-----
"-gone." Jake suddenly said as a flash of light guided him to the location of the Resistance HQ. "... Damn..." He muttered, again teleporting his minions to his location. As he walked over to the location everyone seemed to be congregating at, he said, rather loudly at that, "What's going on? I remember hearing something about a video screen...?"
A faint pop and Wirespike appeared alongside Jake. Sybil coughed lightly, but gave little other sign that this was her doing.
On the video screen, the scene played on.
---------------------
Grandville was a place of chaos. The streets were filled with undead and soldiers in dark green and shimmering black uniforms surrounded by a horde of undead of all types.
Ahead, a line of soldiers in Mayhem colors marched to meet them, their footsteps a steady thump echoing over the shuffle and clamor of the walking dead.
A great moan sounded as several hulking creatures of rotted flesh rose from the ground, splitting the metal walkways. The monstrous creatures' eyes glowed green, their rancid breath visible as a green cloud. They stood nearly as tall as the grand statue of Elitist in the center square, and it was this statue that a pair gripped with their massive arms and tore to the ground effortlessly.
"Ready, men! Destroy these traitors!" shouted the commander over the Grandville loud speakers. "FIRE!"
Volleys of flame and lightning were lobbed up over the Atrocities and into the ranks of the undead. Moans signified hits, but these damages were not unrepaid. The Liches began to cast their spells, sending large orbs of death magic streaking towards their living foes, striking them down.
The Grave Knights and traitor-soldiers rushed forward to meet the charge, their war cries and thundering steps causing the ground to rumble. Lesser undead filtered in behind them taking strikes at distracted soldiers.
The Liches rose into the air, meeting a fleet of fliers that was using strafe runs to try to pick off the enemy army, even as turrets appeared from strategic locations to do the same. Their spells were quick, taking the lead two by surprise.
The four Atrocities moved forward, advancing on the tower. This would not take long.
--------------------
"You knew this day would come, Elitist. You're foolishness was ultimately your downfall," said a particularly satisfied Blightlord.
"I haven't lost yet, nor will I. The others are already on their way with their troops. You don't have long before everything I've allowed you to build is destroyed. You are the fool." Elititst turned from his holo-screen to face his enemy.
"I think you'll find our 'friends' quite occupied at the moment. You see, while the sewer system may have become uninhabitable for the living, I have found no such problems."
A momentary flicker in his eyes was the only sign Elitist gave of panic. The screen behind him changed, multiple boxes showing each of the sectors of his empire. Everywhere, undead troops were pouring outward, holding forces at bay. Elitist couldn't help but notice some armies had already stopped fighting, and scowled as recognition of who led them came to him.
"As you can see, some have seen the futility in aiding one as lost as you." Blightlord chuckled. "Cannot even maintain the respect and fear of your own lieutenants. How sad..."
"I find the fact that you refuse to face me in person even worse. Always hiding in your fortresses, safe from true harm. Coward."
There was a brief flash of darkness, and Blightlord was behind Elitist, a sword shoved through the large man's back. "I thought I might make an appearance for this special occassion..."
Elitist staggered forward, clutching the blade protruding from his stomach. "You..."
"Yes, me. Ruler of former Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and soon, the world."
Elitist staggered, falling to his knees. He chuckled even as blood began to dribble from the corners of his mouth. "You'll never... have true control. I can already tell these armies... are straining you. It won't be long before... you face the same fate."
Blightlord scowled as he stepped forward, kicking Elitist to the floor and placing a boot on his back. He twisted his sword and wrenched it out. Elitist howled in agony as his nerves were set aflame. Then, with a final twitch, he collasped, dead. "I think I can handle things..."
Arc ID: 475246, "Bringing a Lord to Power"
"I'm only a simple man trying to cling to my tomorrow. Every day. By any means necessary."
-Caldwell B. Cladwell
"Well..." Kip said hollowly.
"That was disheartening," Psycho13 finished.
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
Sybil glanced back at the silent, her face grim. Though the screens couldn't see inside of Elitist's personal chambers, she felt his presence slip from the world.
Rachel stepped from the group. "We can use this! If we strike now, before he can regain control-"
"I have already thought of that, but there is too much at stake already. If we-" Sybil began, but she was cut off as Elitist's life force began to flow strongly once more.
She turned towards the vid screens and watched in amazement as the hordes of undead outside Grandville began to collapse, falling away into the shadows. The Atrocities melted into waves of acid, disintegrating a few unlucky soldiers. But the most important thing was occuring at the very peak of the Mayhem Tower.
Elitist stood tall, Blightlord's limp body grasped firmly in both hands. "Let all know the might of Elitist!" the large man cried. "Traitors will be destroyed." He brought the body down over his knee, cracking the spinal cord. With a great shout, he hurled the corpse off the roof, sending it falling to the ground, where it exploded in a putrid cloud.
------------------
All across the Isles and Paragon City, the undead began to shudder violently, falling away into the darkness. In Dark Astoria, where formerly Blightlord's fortress only showed as a globe of impenetrable darkness, was now clear, empty graveyard dotted with unearthed bones.
Arc ID: 475246, "Bringing a Lord to Power"
"I'm only a simple man trying to cling to my tomorrow. Every day. By any means necessary."
-Caldwell B. Cladwell
Jake's eyebrows rose as he witnessed the turn of events on the screen. "Well..." He simply said. "That's a sudden turn of events."
"No kidding." Wirespike muttered, folding his arms.
"So what does this mean for us? Forgive me, I'm not up on my current events."
"I... can't say." Sybil seemed rather surprised by what had just happened. "But we'll need to take this opportunity to secure Croatoa."
She turned to the group. "A few are already there, and the base was just finished. We'll need some assisstance doing some last minute clearing of the area. One of the teleporters is already set to the location."
-----------------
The Obsidian Arrow climbed along the rooftops, hungry for revenge; hungry for blood. He looked out over the streets of Brickstown, not sure where his brother had gone anymore. The trail had grown cold hours ago, but he couldn't give up the search just yet.
Not until his brother's head was lying just as Windsong's was.
Arc ID: 475246, "Bringing a Lord to Power"
"I'm only a simple man trying to cling to my tomorrow. Every day. By any means necessary."
-Caldwell B. Cladwell
Twilight seemed delighted as he floated out of the shadow of Psycho. Now that there was no Blightlord, that meant no undead which meant he no longer needed to fret over whether there would be bodies with a life force from which to feed. With the undead the spirit has long since passed...
"Ah the pandemonium, the mayhem! Delightful......' He regained his usual demeanor as the moment faded. "Well Sybil... We would not mind mopping up the stragglers left near Croatoa. If we are needed you may yuse your usual methods." And with that he stepped into the teleporter.
Jake scowled as the mention of further work entered his ear. "Ugh, why can't we just drop a nuke on them and get it over with?" He muttered, walking in the general direction of the teleporter.
"Rest assured, we'll take care of things." Wirespike said curtly, smiling as he walked only a few steps behind his double.
"It's none of your business," Block Bot spat out as he took a step away from Baalial. "But since it seems you'll kill me unless I explain, then I shall do so."
"Our methods of communication have been denied to us," the android said with a barely concealed tone of frustration coloring his speech. "As have the means of our longevity. The manufactory satellite, the secret to Toy Dispenser's might, was destroyed a year or so ago. The bodies we had then were all that remained of our many iterations and he decided that he could not afford to lose us. He designed for us new bodies, utilizing advanced and sometimes esoteric technology to give us advantages where we had none before."
Eyes glowing bright red as his tone shifted to anger, Block Bot continued.
"And then that god damn Elitest managed to find some way to hack into our signal and use it for purposes it had not been designed for, spreading a crippling virus to all of us. Two months we were crippled, unable to do a thing as Toy Dispenser forcibly shut down the links and strove to cure us."
"Do you know how much of an agony it is," Block Bot said, staring right into Baalial's eyes. "How much of an agony it is to be trapped within your own body. Unable to move, to speak, to do anything? All while your mind can operate at speeds faster than any mere human can comprehend but can do nothing except loop in upon itself in an endless cycle!?!"
Block Bot's voice had gradually risen to a shriek at the end of his rant, causing several rebels to leap to their feet to see what was going on. The android automatically pacified them with a flexing of his psychic muscles, keeping the rebels from asking uncomfortable questions.
"That is why we can no longer speak to one another as we once could," Block Bot finished, his voice completely under control and his eye dimming. "How the six of us, once effectively one, are now split in twain. Are you quite satisfied?"
*********************************************
"This is too convenient," Toy Dispenser said aloud. "We just get this sudden arrival of reinforcements, people from our past, and events start cascading out of control. We've made more progress in a single day than in years of long fighting and guirella actions."
"This can't be coincidence," Combat Toy rumbled. "Not only that, but suddenly Blightlord ups and gets himself killed? As much as I loved seeing that power hungry [censored] get his just desserts, I can't believe that it'll be this easy."
"But there's nothing we can do at the moment," Toy continued in an annoyed tone of voice, crossing his arms in a furstrated gesture. "All we can do is secure it and hope that things keep falling in our favor."
"And we should really keep our eyes open," concluded Small Toy.
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
Baalial's ethereal flames dispelled from one moment to another, snapping off as if someone had just snuffed a candle, and his serpentine pupils shrunk in shock.
He knew such a feeling. He knew the torment of such a trap. Though powerful, Baalial was still a demon, a creation of humanity's beliefs made manifest, and as such he being had to obey all the rules and regulations that came with such an existence - even those that could contain him for millennia on end, entrapping him in limbo without even a form to grasp.
"I'd think he is." the dragon commented, tapping the demon's shoulder to snap him out of un-fond memories, "As am I. I suppose I owe you an explanation then. It's really quite simple: I am Hotaka. That facsimile over there is just a stand-in to mess with people's heads..."
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
"Gah!" Psycho13 shouted as Twilight hopped out of his shadow, "Stop doing that!"
Kip glared at Jake. His eye patch seemed to throb and pulse.
"The reason why we can't just nuke them is because the utilization of nuclear weapons (and similarly powerful or designed weapons) has far-reaching consequences. That, and we likely don't have a nuke, near-nuke, or nuke-like weapon in our possession. We're the underdogs here!"
He turned to the Resistance regulars.
"We don't actually have a nuke, do we?"
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
Jake stopped and turned to Kip, eyeing him with a 'Are you serious?' type of look.
"A) I dunno how you heard me, maybe I said that a bit louder than I thought I did, but still. And B) That was sarcasm spoken out of aggrevation. You know, the thing that describes what people say when they're not serious?" Jake sighed. "I'm just saying, not like I'm criticising(sp? I'm tired right now.) or anything." Jake walked off again, leaving Wirespike sighing and shaking his head.
"You'll have to forgive him, he's not in his right mind right now..."
Rachel glanced at the vid-screen showing Croatoa. Sybil cleared her throught, bringing the girl's attention back to the situation. "Nuclear missiles won't work. We discovered he has a few different counter-measures a while back," Rachel said.
Arc ID: 475246, "Bringing a Lord to Power"
"I'm only a simple man trying to cling to my tomorrow. Every day. By any means necessary."
-Caldwell B. Cladwell
"I wonder if he ever is," Kip replied gruffly, "I've been listening to that dip-[dung] for only twenty actual minutes, and he always seems to have some wise-[butt] thing to say! Reminds me of some of the people I met in life who really needed swift kicks in the-"
Psycho13 clamped a hand over his friend's mouth. When Kip went to do something about it by swinging a fist up, Psycho caught his wrist and bunched it up behind him in a hammerlock. The ragged looking scrapper then turned to Wirespike.
"He... He's not too keen on pattern recognition," he explained sheepishly, "And he's not terribly apologetic. Plus, he's quick to anger... Not at all a good mix at the moment, huh?"
Kip grunted and the visible eye glared at his friend. Tendrils of energy flashed brightly from it for a moment, but little else happened.
"Calm down, Kip," Psycho13 whispered as he released his friend, "Last thing we need right now is you getting into a fight with the both of them."
"How would you know it'd be both of them?" Kip hissed back incredulously.
"Skull structure."
Kip's eyebrow arched at that, but he let it go. Grumbling he walked off in a different direction.
"Forgive him," Psycho implored Wirespike, "He takes everything so seriously..."
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
Wirespike chuckled and nodded, glancing back over at his double to check his progress. "Yeah, Jake never really was good on a team..."
"But yes, we do have some," Toy said after Sybil finished speaking. "Not many and not in an easily accessible location, but they are in existence."
The mastermind firmly ignored any stares directed at him as he folded his arms and seemed to glower at Sybil. It was easy to tell there was some bad blood between the two.
************************************************
"Then you know what I'm talking about," Block Bot muttered as Hokata answered his question. "And you know why it is a particularly touchy topic to me. To all of us, I suppose, though the others hide it more easily."
Block Bot sighed as he put his face in one hand. "It is still so hard to get used to these new emotions that I occasionally have trouble controlling them. And I'm afraid I just don't remember you at all," Block Bot said to Hokata. "Neither you nor your human form. Which isn't that hard to believe really. With our main databanks gone, we've had to compress our memories in the same fashion that humans do. It results in annoying memory loss."
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
((If you were planning on staying at the base longer I'll edit the post.))
Twilight turned to the others as they arrived on the scene of the clean-up, a crimson substance dripping from his hands. On the ground near them there was the mangled body of an average mayhem soldier, it was apperant his eyes had literally exploded and he was twisted in an altogether unpleasent manner...
"What can we say, he happened to have ran here alone in desperation and...Well, we suppose we don't need to fill you in on any details..."
"Hm, I see." Hotaka remarked with a nod, considering Block Bot's take, "Then I suppose we'll start with a technicality: dragons aren't shape shifters. That's only a myth we disseminated a long time ago to make people a little more careful. Police as such are still a relatively novel concept, you know. For a good while, humans had only their own morality to do so - and that didn't always work too well."
"Good times." Baalial snickered in commentary, "But yes, that's about the size of it. He just uses a seeming to look human. Nice one, too. But he hasn't..."
"...managed to get the compression spell to make me smaller than three meters." Ryuu huffed with a growl to his demonic compatriot, "I know. And I'm working on it. Shrinking isn't as easy as you'd think..."
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
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Baalial performed the equivalent of quizzically raising an eyebrow while the dragon's eyes narrowed somewhat as well.
"Block, are you feeling alright?" the creature questioned, stepping closer to the droid, "Not to be called ungrateful, but why don't you remember me? Your link to Toy's central memory should've...wait a minute. You guys have been talking to each other for some time now. Whatever happened to the instantaneous communication?"
"Yeah, you have." Baalial now grew suspicious as well, a kindling of felfire streaming up his body. From his thoughts, Block Bot quickie discerned the demon believed him to be some sort of imposter, "Mind spilling what's up with that...?"
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters