Past Lives (The missing Positron/Numina story)

CAVEAT: This story was written as a way to introduce a Task Force to resurrect War Witch and at the same time get a new (old) armor for Positron into the game. Since that art was never completed past a VERY rough concept that Noble Savage would never let see the light of day, this was never published.

The writers, however, took some of the events that transpired within as canon.

Please excuse typos and grammar mistakes, this is the first draft and I don't really feel like editing it.

Past Lives

Positron, aka Professor Raymond Keyes, was hard at work in his high tech lab within the Freedom Phalanx base. His current pet project has been vexing him for the better part of two years, and that was figuring out a way to bring War Witch back to the land of the living.

He knew that most people who “die” are simply dead forever, but in a few cases they can be brought back to life. Statesman and Manticore were both dead and resurrected, and he himself was killed by the Rikti during the Honoree’s entrance to this world. If it were not for the Dark Watcher and a quick resurrection spell, he’d be dead forever.

War Witch is a special case. She’s been dead too long for a normal resurrection spell to work. However, her spirit still exists, training heroes in Croatoa. Perhaps the mystical energies tied to that place are keeping her fused with this plane of existence? In his exasperation he wondered if science was even useful in this quest, or if more mystic investigations were to be had. If that was the case he should contact Numina, the Phalanx’s resident magic-user.

“Numina, its Positron,” he spoke over the team’s communicator. “I need some help.”

“I was wondering when you would get around to asking me.” she said as she floated through the wall and into the lab. “War Witch, right?”

“Yes, I was wondering if…” he was cut off.

“You know I am not technically dead, right? Her situation and mine are totally different. I am simply trapped forever in my astral form. Requiem killed her.” She stated bluntly.

“I understand your predicament. It’s just… I think I have reached the end of where science can take me in my quest bringing her back. I need some mystical expertise,” Positron said.

“You came to the right girl,” she replied. “Let’s see what you’ve got so far.”

Numina started pouring over his notes. The two spent the better part of the evening discussing theories both scientific and mystical. Ray never really interacted with Numina on this level before, and he was finding it fascinating talking to someone whose background was so radically different than his. Their conversations veered off of the subject of War Witch and spiritual resurrections, and they began to reminisce about previous adventures, and in general had a really good time.

“Do you remember back in the early 1990’s? There was that one villain, what did he call himself? Morbid Curiosity?” Ray asked.

“Oh yeah, he was a whack job. Average Joe finds himself in possession of a Necromantic rod. Causes all sorts of trouble.” Numina replied.

“Yeah, didn’t he try to resurrect his dead family? Only he didn’t know how the rod worked and we ended up with an army of zombies rampaging through Baumton.”

“Right, Baumton! How I loved the Headquarters we had there.” Numina said.

“That place was State-of-the-art for the 1990’s. Too bad the Rikti decimated it. That was one of the best souvenir collections the Freedom Phalanx ever put together.” Ray added.

“What?” she asked as if a light bulb had gone off in her head.

“What-what?” Ray asked. He looked at the clock and it was 4am. Perhaps he wasn’t as coherent as he thought he was at this hour.

“You reminded me, the souvenirs we kept back then,” said Numina.

“Buried under a ton of rubble, my dear,” replied Ray.

“Didn’t we keep Morbid Curiosity’s Necromantic rod?” she asked.

“I think so, let me check.” Ray went to the computer and hit the Phalanx’s database. “Yeah, says here that the rod is still under the rubble in the Baumton base. Was never declared dangerous enough for us to attempt to extract.”

“But that rod could be the catalyst we need to bring back War Witch. Its powers and abilities might be exactly what we are looking for,” she said.

“But I don’t want another army of zombies. At least not when we’re not prepared for it!” Ray said.

“We should get that rod. I just know it will be of great help in resurrecting War Witch,” Numina instructed.

Ray put on his armor. Boomtown (as Baumton was now called) wasn’t exactly peaceful and safe. The pair flew off to Boomtown as the sun peeked up over Independence Port.

They arrived at the building that once housed the Freedom Phalanx. Ray punched in a code into his armor and the security measures that he and Manticore put into place to prevent the old headquarters from being looted were deactivated. Positron and Numina made their way into the depths of the place they once called home. Numina, in her incorporeal form, had a distinct advantage in maneuvering through the rubble. Positron was constantly having to reroute power in his armor to augment his strength and move massive pieces of concrete and steel out of the way.

After about an hour they had made it down to Positron’s old lab. It was relatively free of major damage, just covered in dust and age. Memories started to fill back into Ray’s head. Experiments he never finished. Technology he never completed. He was soaking it all in when he heard Numina giggling.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

She pointed to a damaged section of wall that revealed a hidden closet behind it. “Did that look that bad, back then?” she asked.

Positron went over to the wall and forced it open. And he saw the focus of her amusement. His old combat armor. DRS-03. The third incarnation of the original power armor he and Doctor Rudolph Bein worked on. Bein used the first suit, DRS-01, as the villain “Doctor Null”, where Positron had the second one. After the Freedom Phalanx was formed, Ray worked on the DRS-03. The suit he wore today? That is the DRS-08.

“Shiny,” Numina mused. “But then again, it was the 90’s.”

“That’s Impervium, pure and solid.” Positron said. “Notice the lack of any damage or wear, and I wore that armor for years. Man that was a nice suit of armor, I kinda miss it. Maybe after we get the rod, I can take that back to the base as well.”

“It is kinda, I dunno… sexy.” Numina said. Ray couldn’t tell if she was serious or mocking him. He assumed mockery.

“Let’s go, there’s nothing in here that can help War Witch,” he said. And the two made their way deeper into the complex.

Positron was being very careful with every piece of rubble he moved. His suit was doing load-bearing calculations on the fly and he was only moving pieces that had a 95% or more “safe” rating based on the suit’s read-outs. As they got deeper and deeper he found himself clearing more and more rubble, and eventually he reached a near dead end. His suit analyzed four key pieces of rubble. They had ratings of 20%, 40%, 63% and 80% based on all available data. In order to progress he had to risk moving the 80% safe piece.

He powered up the strength augments in the armor once again and grabbed the beam. He pulled at it and it didn’t budge. He overclocked the augment and started to move the rubble. It came free and the room didn’t collapse around him. He breathed a sigh of relief.

The 63% piece now reported as 96% safe with the new data. He casually grabbed that piece and pulled at it. The piece tore apart in his hands unexpectedly. He had forgotten about the overclocking he did on the strength augmentation and literally didn’t know his own strength. Numina heard a rumble and spun around just in time to see the ceiling of the room come collapsing down on Positron.

She started yelling his name, waiting for a response. After a minute that seemed like forever, she heard him moaning.

“Ouch.” Positron said. It was not transmitted through the speaker in the armor. It was muffled, betraying some damage to his suit.

“Oh my, are you alright?” Numina asked concernedly.

“Armor is powered down,” he said but it was difficult to hear him. “And I think I am bleeding. I’ve got one arm… free, I need to…” His voice was no longer muffled, “There! Got my helmet off. I can breathe again. Kinda. I think I am stuck though.”

Positron attempted to reboot the armor to no avail. The system was completely off-line and the pain in his gut told him that was a very bad sign. The core CPU to the suit was located near where the pain was, so whatever broke that was probably pierced through his abdomen.

Numina made herself corporeal and grabbed a strong metal pipe to use as leverage on the rubble pinning him down. Ray struggled to move under the weight of the armor and barely made it free before Numina lost her hold and the rubble came crashing down where he once laid. She looked down and saw a jagged piece of concrete rebar sticking through Positron’s side, blood gushing out of it.

“I won’t lie. This is going to hurt. A lot,” she said as she yanked the rebar out. Ray grimaced and nearly blacked out from the pain, but soon the pain receded as he heard Numina chanting. When she finished he found himself with renewed vigor and full of adrenaline. He punched the safety latches on the armor and crawled out of the broken suit.

He looked at Numina and she said, “Healing spell, it looked pretty bad.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Without the armor, I’m of no use. See if you can go ahead and find what we came for. I will meet you in the lab.”

Numina phased through the rubble, the layout of the place coming rushing back to her. She soon found herself in the vault, where the Freedom Phalanx kept the most dangerous criminals in cryo-stasis. After the destruction of Baumton this place had only one resident, because it was decided that moving him was too dangerous. He remained on ice and under rubble until last year… when Roderick Mueller paid a group of villains to come in here and free Reichsman and reform the 5th Column. The only things in this room now were the decrepit corpses of Longbow and 5th Column agents that died that day. This whole area was a reminder of her own failure. She attempted to stop those villains, but their might was too strong. They defeated her and ensured that the Reichsman would be freed.

Eventually she made her way into the trophy room. Anything really dangerous was removed before the base was sealed off. Just knickknacks remained. Stuff no one thought had any value. Stuff like the Necromantic rod. Numina located the locker Positron said it was stored in and opened it. There it was in all its unholy glory. She picked it up and started to make her way back to Positron’s old lab.

As she passed back into the vault area, the rod seemed to come to life. It wobbled in her hand, and pressed an impression in her mind. “LIVE AGAIN” was echoing through her head. She couldn’t tell if the thought was her’s or the rod’s.

“Live again?” she spoke out loud as if asking the rod a question. That was a mistake. The rod took it as a command and the bodies of the dead Longbow and 5th Column soldiers that littered the room rose up and took aim.

The skeletons and zombies emptied what remained of their clips in her direction. She had no choice but to completely phase out, dropping the rod. She couldn’t retrieve it without phasing back in, and that would put her at the mercy of these undead abominations. She also couldn’t remain phased forever. She didn’t know what to do.

Suddenly a blue beam of energy cut through the room, disintegrating the undead. Numina phased back in and picked up the rod, looking up at her savior she saw the room’s emergency lighting reflecting back at her. It was her knight in shiny armor.

“Man, you can get into a lot of trouble on your own,” said Positron as he stood there wearing his old DRS-03 armor. “And didn’t I warn you about that rod and zombies?”

“At least we know it still works,” she said, betraying a thankfulness in her voice to the man who rescued her.

Positron recovered his broken armor and he and Numina flew back to the current Freedom Phalanx base with the rod. They carefully avoided Dark Astoria and any graveyards on their journey back.

Positron spent the next few weeks bouncing between two projects. With Numina around he would work with her and the Necromantic rod on a solution for War Witch, but his own time was spent improving the DRS-03 armor to a more modern standard. The new armor, the DRS-03 Mk. II, was a thing of beauty. The Impervium was a marked improvement over the alloys he had been using since the Rikti war, and he was able to incorporate the Prometheus energy from his DRS-08 armor into this one as well, returning that comforting blue glow that people began to relate to his hero identity.

But the real issue was War Witch. The rod was a huge step in the right direction, but he needed a few more things to help with that research. Fortunately there were always new heroes around willing to team up and tackle jobs for the Freedom Phalanx. Perhaps a Task Force was just the thing that was needed in order for he and Numina to finish their research…

Fparn.

Also, amusing. I would have loved to see Retro-Posi in game.

My Threads

So, how's it end?

Sounds interesting....did you have a concept or perhaps some pictures of what the DRS-03 Mk. II might look like?


S.

Oh, great... solid Impervium armor AND every power available to Blasters. SHOW-OFF!

All kidding aside, thanks for sharing this kind of stuff with us. Looking forward to the Lore Question session, too.

- the Cosmically Curious Copper Cockroach
Virtue Forever!

Where's Doc Delilah when you need her? ;-)

It would have been interesting to have some kind of "archaeology" game inside the main game, where you could play missions that required puzzle-solving to accomplish and find the "treasures", whether they were lost super base trinkets, Oranbegan-style magical ruins, or even criminal/historical investigation ("What was the substance that got 'dumped' all over Venice?").

That was cool. Thanks for sharing it.

I like that the relationship between the two of them was progressing. That seemed a "realistic" expression of two people who work together growing closer. Also, I think it's neat that they planned to resurrect War Witch, though I think it could have benefited from a tiny bit more explanation about why they wanted to rez her in particular. (She's not the only ghost around.)

Basically, it sounds like Posi got a Ultra Mode upgrade.

Love the story. Would have loved to see both the armor and the base in game. Alas.

Ending? Please? C'mon, it'll be awesome! :-D

I truly enjoyed that story. Thank you

Very, very interesting... yes, I think I can use this.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Thanks for the story Posi! Makes me wish you and the other writers were doing write ups for after November...

You break it, you brought. You resurrect it, you fought it.

Very cool! I always thought it would be great to be able to go into the old building on a TF or something.

And I'm not sure what the full back story to War Witch is, but for some reason I see her as like a hero version of Ghost Widow.

This would have been seriously awesome.