(This was the last story I wrote for Astorian Shade, a few months ago, a little after reaching level 30 and based on her costume as an incarnate - yes, I was a little impatient. It was inspired by a fight in Brickstown with Crey's agents, and deals with her beginning to awaken as an incarnate. Proofreading and preparing this story for posting really, really made the fact that she probably won't get the chance to go back to Astoria and face Mot all the more painful.
"Keep the other apparitions engaged with regular and N2 ordinance! Voltaic Tanks, focus your fire on the girl! Alternate your attacks, don't give her an opening!"
Crey Industries might strive to keep a sterling, if rumor-plagued, reputation throughout the rest of the world, but here in Brickstown Agent Brooks hardly needed to worry himself with details like that. The field agents scattered across the sunlit street in their crisp black suits, ducking and rolling behind mail boxes, bus stops, any sort of cover they could find while a pair of armored Voltaic Tanks leapt down from their rooftop vantage points to fire hissing blue electron beams at the mirage of a girl hovering in their midst. The PR boys could figure out how to counter any wild stories the pedestrians fleeing the intersection might tell the reporters lately. Right now the Crey agents had a job to do, and Brooks for one loved the smell of ozone in the morning.
"How are the EM readings," he panted into his earpiece, ducking back against the corner of a building as he braced his automatic pistol tighter against his chest.
"They're fluctuating," a youthful voice crackled over the observation team's channel, transmitted from a hidden black-ops control room in some unsuspecting Crey office or another. Details like that are need to know, but Brooks could hear the nervous enthusiasm in the young man's voice. Probably some hot-shot kid angling for an early field promotion.
"Spectral readout's dropped by 46%," the operator breathlessly continued, "and the main apparition seems to be weakening as well. I think you've got her."
Something reached around the corner of the building to grab for Brooks' arm, cold spindly fingers snatching his wrist and trying to rip the gun out of his hands. Something clammy, as still and lifeless as the grave. He whirled around the corner with a sweeping kick, slamming the dessicated ghoul back against a brick wall. A hard wrench of his arms away from those withered claws, a flick of the safety on his gun and, with three quick firecracker bursts, the creature slid down into a crumpled heap of bony limbs, a puppet cut loose from its strings.
"Damn it," he shouted into the earpiece as he switched the channel back to his own scrambling, wildly firing team of agents, "I said don't give her an opening!"
Still, he had to admit his men seemed to be getting things back under control. The girl hovered a few feet above the asphalt, flinging her arms this way and that as she tried to deflect the electron beams with smoky jets of shadow. Just another day in Paragon City, a downtown intersection crackling with lightning orbs and dark energy as a Crey security team tried to take down a ghost heroine and her undead minions. She could almost be human, with her brown hair and plaid school uniform, her dark eyes narrowed with something between fury and growing fear. The sort of girl a guy like him would have nervously hemmed and hawed over asking out back in his own schoolboy days. Well, that was then... and this is now.
"Say goodnight Casper," he snarled, and he raised his gun with one outstretched arm to empty the rest of the clip into the translucent shape of her forehead.
It didn't kill her, of course - ghost and all - but it did break her concentration and send the horde of gaunt, ominous phantoms she'd started to conjure up behind her tumbling right back down into formless dust. More importantly, it gave the Voltaic agents enough time to recalibrate their powered suits and fire two perfectly timed energy blasts at the girl. Her pressed white blouse burst into a fiery wreath, her skin fading to ash gray beneath the crackling flames, and when the crimson glow faded away after a moment, the pale, pretty girl had given way to a tortured shell of its former self, its scarred face blindfolded with gauze and barbed wire.
"Now there's the Astorian Shade I've been hearing stories about," Brooks smirked as the phantom flopped out of the air like a drowning fish, and then to the rest of his men, "don't worry, she's just too weak to keep up her secondary form. This means we've got her."
He motioned for another blast of electricity to knock her flat across the sidewalk, and then he flipped the earpiece channel back to the observation team.
"Tell R&D their ionization strategy passed with flying colors, and let the Revenant Hero team know we've bagged them a ghost," then a flip of the switch back to his security team, "oh, and go round up the rest of those test subjects. They couldn't have gotten far."
* * *
Being a ghost doesn't mean being free of pain. It just means different things cause it. She hardly noticed the hard concrete scraping against knees that are more a visual metaphor than an actual body, and her breath panted in quick, ragged gasps out of the mere habit of having once been alive. But the crackling energy of the electric bolts, the frigid blasts of the cryo rifles, each shot perfectly calibrated to disrupt her manifestation on a quantum level... they hurt, they burned and stabbed through her like searing needles, they even made the bullets slicing through her intangible shape hurt. Had the people she'd tried to rescue gotten away?
Do you remember?
Crey's agents gathered around her, their motorized suits whirring, radios buzzing, dark sunglasses reflecting the sun as it set behind the grimy warehouses of Brickstown. A motley assortment of armored soldiers and suit-clad agents focused now on preparing for extraction. They hardly seemed to notice her anymore. Subdued, contained Not a threat.
Do you remember my whispers in the crib? The echo of my voice in the womb?
The priests of the Banished Pantheon had hardly noticed her either, once it became clear that no matter how much they tortured her, no matter how much pain they milked from her fragile body, it would never be enough to complete the ritual. She lay bleeding and dying and they hadn't even cared enough to gloat over it. Discarded, useless. Forgotten and ebbing away...
Your power is neither nature nor magic. Not born of man's knowledge, nor the machines he builds.
And a voice whispering promises she'd already forgotten by the time she'd learned to talk, promising that even pain could be a path to power, even this could be destiny...
It is not written into the cells of your body.
Their leader paced along the curb and spoke into his headset, saying words she didn't have the strength to discern anymore. But out of the corner of her eye she could make out the tear-streaked faces of the people she'd tried to rescue, captive once more, waiting hopelessly for the armored vans that'd take them back to the labs, back to the experiments.
It wasn't gifted to you by death. The rituals merely unlocked a part of it. Enough to save you from dissolution. To make you more than a ghost.
The voice still promising, still whispering to her, a stinging in the back of her eyes that tinged the red-lit streets with a pulsing white glow, that told her this is destiny too...
Remember my promise. Remember who you were born to be.
* * *
"You see," Agent Brooks told his men with a sideways nod to the fallen, ash-gray specter, "whether it's a hero, a Rikti or even a ghost, it always comes down to firepower."
"You think you know power," the phantom suddenly snarled, and this time her voice sounded different. She'd sounded like an ordinary girl at first, and then a little raspier, her pained groans sounding hoarse in that blindfolded form she'd collapsed into. Now another voice seemed to rise and join hers. Not male or female, but filled with quiet, understated menace.
"You... know... nothing!"
And with those words, the whole intersection exploded into light.
"Well now," Brooks muttered to himself with a soft, trembling bravado as he gradually dared to lower his forearm from his eyes, "there's a neat trick."
White feathery wings beat the air, blowing newspapers and litter across the pavement in slow rhythmic gusts, the plumage drooping into a deep red hue along the lower edge as they raised the girl a few feet above the ground once more. She'd changed too, her scarred cheeks a flawless ivory now, her blindfold replaced by a silver Venetian mask that covered her eyes with its impenetrable slits, her plaid skirt now contrasting a buckled, palladium-hued leather bodice that reflected the fiery wisps of light sweeping and wrapping silently across her body.
"Double the beam intensity, fire on," he started to bark to the Voltaic tanks, and the words came out as slowly and incoherently as if he'd been talking underwater. The air pulsed outward around the girl to envelop the street corner in shadowy waves, seconds stretched and twisted into minutes by each silent throb. He could see the wisps of fog wrapping around the pair of armored agents, but he couldn't possibly shout a warning fast enough to keep it from seeping through the mechanized joints, the men clutching their throats and tumbling across the concrete.
"Do you comprehend our nature, Agent Brooks?"
Two voices speaking in calm, tranquil unison, the girl and something else entirely.
"Fire," he shouted into his microphone, "just take it down now!"
"We have a problem, sir."
It took a moment for Brooks to realize the words had come from his headset, from that young and now panic-stricken voice back at the command station.
"What problem? We're a little busy here!"
A machine gun flurry of bullets clattered uselessly against that gleaming bodice, and then a howling wind, tendrils of white mist and black shadows ensnared the agent who'd fired the gun, flinging him against a wall to silently drain away every struggle, every scream.
"We are the very dawn of life."
"It's the target's readings. They've changed."
"Changed how," he shouted, then frantically switched channels, "try freezing her!"
The hulking, gleaming white shape of a Cryo tank rose up behind the winged figure, aiming his cannon and unleashing a beam of glittering ice shards into the radiant glow. He must have gotten her attention, at least, because she flung her right hand out at him, flexing her palm as though drawing him closer... and instead pulling a thin red stream of light from the seams and joints of the suit, sending the agent tumbling headlong across the ground.
"We are older than the Pantheon. We are greater than Mot."
"The overall pattern's still basically spectral," that faraway voice answered, "but the energy signature's something else entirely. Her attacks don't read like a ghost anymore."
"Then what do they read like?!"
That silver mask half-hidden behind her dark hair turned toward him with a slow, pitiless inevitability, heedless of the Crey agent's trembling gun. Her feet lifted higher off the ground, her wings beating steadily, silhouetting her against the crimson sunset…
"I am power made manifest."
"They're reading," his voice soft and hesitant, as though admitting to a condemned man that there's nothing anyone can do, "they're reading like Statesman, sir."
"I am the Well made incarn-"
At that instant, something snapped and gave way in the angelic figure, and in another moment she tumbled and bounced across the concrete, her wings dissolving into motes of light in the wind, her plaid skirt and pallid cheeks suddenly ordinary and human again. The air hung heavy and still in the twilight, the silence a deafening ring in Brooks' ears as the aura surrounding the girl faded away to reveal the rest of the squad scattered limply about the street.
"Well," he panted, "whatever that was, at least it's... gah!"
He suddenly tumbled to his knees, clutching uselessly for a few seconds at the ethereal wisps of fog twining his limbs and slinking around his throat in tightening coils, and then he fell flat across the pavement, joining the rest of the retrieval team in dreamless sleep.
"What," the crouched girl gasped in quick, choked breaths as she lowered her open palm, one last burst of strength spent conjuring the attack that'd knocked the Crey agent unconscious. Her lungs ached more from the habit of breathing than necessity, her painfully skinned knees and elbows forgetting for the moment that they had no nerves to feel such pain.
"What was that?"
After a few more gulps of air she rose to her feet, swayed and then caught herself against a streetlight. She took another breath, steadied her voice and then closed her eyes, speaking directly into the cellular airwaves with only a slight shudder to betray her bewilderment.
"FBSA registered hero Astorian Shade, MAGI department. Eight suspects incapacitated at the west intersection of Mashu Bridge. Crey Industries security team, human experimentation. They're alive, but barely. Bring ambulances," and she tried to flash a weak, unpracticed smile to the dumbstruck captives huddled by the curb, "it's okay. You're safe now."
* * *
"There's been a change."
Mender Ramiel had long since learned to feel a twinge of dread at such words, especially when they crossed the lips of one such as Prometheus. He cast a worried glance across the perpetually golden cloudscape of the Mender's Enclave and turned to face the titan.
"It's about the Well, isn't it?"
"It's about the Incarnate destined to bring you here," the azure figure answered grimly, "the one we've met in this timeframe has already begun to awaken."
"But that can't be right," the Mender blinked with confusion and suddenly shook his head, "the one in this timeline isn't strong enough yet. We've both seen that."
"No, she's not," Prometheus replied, turning to gaze thoughtfully across the sky at the islands drifting around the aerial city, "the spark ignited within her, but burned only for a moment. That's probably the only thing that kept her from being consumed by its power."
"You mean," Ramiel asked with the hesitation of one who already knows the answer.
"It tried to pull her onto the fast path."
"I see," he answered slowly, losing himself in worried thought for a moment and then finally giving a rueful smile, "that'll certainly keep things interesting."
(This was the last story I wrote for Astorian Shade, a few months ago, a little after reaching level 30 and based on her costume as an incarnate - yes, I was a little impatient.
It was inspired by a fight in Brickstown with Crey's agents, and deals with her beginning to awaken as an incarnate. Proofreading and preparing this story for posting really, really made the fact that she probably won't get the chance to go back to Astoria and face Mot all the more painful.
EDIT: On November 25th Astorian Shade defeated Mot, led a team against Adamastor and experienced the most perfect ending to her story possible. I wish there was time to write an epilogue, but I'm glad to have finished her journey.)
Chronologically it takes place several weeks after the events in "The Fall" and "Survivor's Guilt.")
"Keep the other apparitions engaged with regular and N2 ordinance! Voltaic Tanks, focus your fire on the girl! Alternate your attacks, don't give her an opening!"
Crey Industries might strive to keep a sterling, if rumor-plagued, reputation throughout the rest of the world, but here in Brickstown Agent Brooks hardly needed to worry himself with details like that. The field agents scattered across the sunlit street in their crisp black suits, ducking and rolling behind mail boxes, bus stops, any sort of cover they could find while a pair of armored Voltaic Tanks leapt down from their rooftop vantage points to fire hissing blue electron beams at the mirage of a girl hovering in their midst. The PR boys could figure out how to counter any wild stories the pedestrians fleeing the intersection might tell the reporters lately. Right now the Crey agents had a job to do, and Brooks for one loved the smell of ozone in the morning.
"How are the EM readings," he panted into his earpiece, ducking back against the corner of a building as he braced his automatic pistol tighter against his chest.
"They're fluctuating," a youthful voice crackled over the observation team's channel, transmitted from a hidden black-ops control room in some unsuspecting Crey office or another. Details like that are need to know, but Brooks could hear the nervous enthusiasm in the young man's voice. Probably some hot-shot kid angling for an early field promotion.
"Spectral readout's dropped by 46%," the operator breathlessly continued, "and the main apparition seems to be weakening as well. I think you've got her."
Something reached around the corner of the building to grab for Brooks' arm, cold spindly fingers snatching his wrist and trying to rip the gun out of his hands. Something clammy, as still and lifeless as the grave. He whirled around the corner with a sweeping kick, slamming the dessicated ghoul back against a brick wall. A hard wrench of his arms away from those withered claws, a flick of the safety on his gun and, with three quick firecracker bursts, the creature slid down into a crumpled heap of bony limbs, a puppet cut loose from its strings.
"Damn it," he shouted into the earpiece as he switched the channel back to his own scrambling, wildly firing team of agents, "I said don't give her an opening!"
Still, he had to admit his men seemed to be getting things back under control. The girl hovered a few feet above the asphalt, flinging her arms this way and that as she tried to deflect the electron beams with smoky jets of shadow. Just another day in Paragon City, a downtown intersection crackling with lightning orbs and dark energy as a Crey security team tried to take down a ghost heroine and her undead minions. She could almost be human, with her brown hair and plaid school uniform, her dark eyes narrowed with something between fury and growing fear. The sort of girl a guy like him would have nervously hemmed and hawed over asking out back in his own schoolboy days. Well, that was then... and this is now.
"Say goodnight Casper," he snarled, and he raised his gun with one outstretched arm to empty the rest of the clip into the translucent shape of her forehead.
It didn't kill her, of course - ghost and all - but it did break her concentration and send the horde of gaunt, ominous phantoms she'd started to conjure up behind her tumbling right back down into formless dust. More importantly, it gave the Voltaic agents enough time to recalibrate their powered suits and fire two perfectly timed energy blasts at the girl. Her pressed white blouse burst into a fiery wreath, her skin fading to ash gray beneath the crackling flames, and when the crimson glow faded away after a moment, the pale, pretty girl had given way to a tortured shell of its former self, its scarred face blindfolded with gauze and barbed wire.
"Now there's the Astorian Shade I've been hearing stories about," Brooks smirked as the phantom flopped out of the air like a drowning fish, and then to the rest of his men, "don't worry, she's just too weak to keep up her secondary form. This means we've got her."
He motioned for another blast of electricity to knock her flat across the sidewalk, and then he flipped the earpiece channel back to the observation team.
"Tell R&D their ionization strategy passed with flying colors, and let the Revenant Hero team know we've bagged them a ghost," then a flip of the switch back to his security team, "oh, and go round up the rest of those test subjects. They couldn't have gotten far."
Being a ghost doesn't mean being free of pain. It just means different things cause it. She hardly noticed the hard concrete scraping against knees that are more a visual metaphor than an actual body, and her breath panted in quick, ragged gasps out of the mere habit of having once been alive. But the crackling energy of the electric bolts, the frigid blasts of the cryo rifles, each shot perfectly calibrated to disrupt her manifestation on a quantum level... they hurt, they burned and stabbed through her like searing needles, they even made the bullets slicing through her intangible shape hurt. Had the people she'd tried to rescue gotten away?
Do you remember?
Crey's agents gathered around her, their motorized suits whirring, radios buzzing, dark sunglasses reflecting the sun as it set behind the grimy warehouses of Brickstown. A motley assortment of armored soldiers and suit-clad agents focused now on preparing for extraction. They hardly seemed to notice her anymore. Subdued, contained Not a threat.
Do you remember my whispers in the crib? The echo of my voice in the womb?
The priests of the Banished Pantheon had hardly noticed her either, once it became clear that no matter how much they tortured her, no matter how much pain they milked from her fragile body, it would never be enough to complete the ritual. She lay bleeding and dying and they hadn't even cared enough to gloat over it. Discarded, useless. Forgotten and ebbing away...
Your power is neither nature nor magic.
Not born of man's knowledge, nor the machines he builds.
And a voice whispering promises she'd already forgotten by the time she'd learned to talk, promising that even pain could be a path to power, even this could be destiny...
It is not written into the cells of your body.
Their leader paced along the curb and spoke into his headset, saying words she didn't have the strength to discern anymore. But out of the corner of her eye she could make out the tear-streaked faces of the people she'd tried to rescue, captive once more, waiting hopelessly for the armored vans that'd take them back to the labs, back to the experiments.
It wasn't gifted to you by death. The rituals merely unlocked a part of it.
Enough to save you from dissolution. To make you more than a ghost.
The voice still promising, still whispering to her, a stinging in the back of her eyes that tinged the red-lit streets with a pulsing white glow, that told her this is destiny too...
Remember my promise. Remember who you were born to be.
"You see," Agent Brooks told his men with a sideways nod to the fallen, ash-gray specter, "whether it's a hero, a Rikti or even a ghost, it always comes down to firepower."
"You think you know power," the phantom suddenly snarled, and this time her voice sounded different. She'd sounded like an ordinary girl at first, and then a little raspier, her pained groans sounding hoarse in that blindfolded form she'd collapsed into. Now another voice seemed to rise and join hers. Not male or female, but filled with quiet, understated menace.
"You... know... nothing!"
And with those words, the whole intersection exploded into light.
"Well now," Brooks muttered to himself with a soft, trembling bravado as he gradually dared to lower his forearm from his eyes, "there's a neat trick."
White feathery wings beat the air, blowing newspapers and litter across the pavement in slow rhythmic gusts, the plumage drooping into a deep red hue along the lower edge as they raised the girl a few feet above the ground once more. She'd changed too, her scarred cheeks a flawless ivory now, her blindfold replaced by a silver Venetian mask that covered her eyes with its impenetrable slits, her plaid skirt now contrasting a buckled, palladium-hued leather bodice that reflected the fiery wisps of light sweeping and wrapping silently across her body.
"Double the beam intensity, fire on," he started to bark to the Voltaic tanks, and the words came out as slowly and incoherently as if he'd been talking underwater. The air pulsed outward around the girl to envelop the street corner in shadowy waves, seconds stretched and twisted into minutes by each silent throb. He could see the wisps of fog wrapping around the pair of armored agents, but he couldn't possibly shout a warning fast enough to keep it from seeping through the mechanized joints, the men clutching their throats and tumbling across the concrete.
"Do you comprehend our nature, Agent Brooks?"
Two voices speaking in calm, tranquil unison, the girl and something else entirely.
"Fire," he shouted into his microphone, "just take it down now!"
"We have a problem, sir."
It took a moment for Brooks to realize the words had come from his headset, from that young and now panic-stricken voice back at the command station.
"What problem? We're a little busy here!"
A machine gun flurry of bullets clattered uselessly against that gleaming bodice, and then a howling wind, tendrils of white mist and black shadows ensnared the agent who'd fired the gun, flinging him against a wall to silently drain away every struggle, every scream.
"We are the very dawn of life."
"It's the target's readings. They've changed."
"Changed how," he shouted, then frantically switched channels, "try freezing her!"
The hulking, gleaming white shape of a Cryo tank rose up behind the winged figure, aiming his cannon and unleashing a beam of glittering ice shards into the radiant glow. He must have gotten her attention, at least, because she flung her right hand out at him, flexing her palm as though drawing him closer... and instead pulling a thin red stream of light from the seams and joints of the suit, sending the agent tumbling headlong across the ground.
"We are older than the Pantheon. We are greater than Mot."
"The overall pattern's still basically spectral," that faraway voice answered, "but the energy signature's something else entirely. Her attacks don't read like a ghost anymore."
"Then what do they read like?!"
That silver mask half-hidden behind her dark hair turned toward him with a slow, pitiless inevitability, heedless of the Crey agent's trembling gun. Her feet lifted higher off the ground, her wings beating steadily, silhouetting her against the crimson sunset…
"I am power made manifest."
"They're reading," his voice soft and hesitant, as though admitting to a condemned man that there's nothing anyone can do, "they're reading like Statesman, sir."
"I am the Well made incarn-"
At that instant, something snapped and gave way in the angelic figure, and in another moment she tumbled and bounced across the concrete, her wings dissolving into motes of light in the wind, her plaid skirt and pallid cheeks suddenly ordinary and human again. The air hung heavy and still in the twilight, the silence a deafening ring in Brooks' ears as the aura surrounding the girl faded away to reveal the rest of the squad scattered limply about the street.
"Well," he panted, "whatever that was, at least it's... gah!"
He suddenly tumbled to his knees, clutching uselessly for a few seconds at the ethereal wisps of fog twining his limbs and slinking around his throat in tightening coils, and then he fell flat across the pavement, joining the rest of the retrieval team in dreamless sleep.
"What," the crouched girl gasped in quick, choked breaths as she lowered her open palm, one last burst of strength spent conjuring the attack that'd knocked the Crey agent unconscious. Her lungs ached more from the habit of breathing than necessity, her painfully skinned knees and elbows forgetting for the moment that they had no nerves to feel such pain.
"What was that?"
After a few more gulps of air she rose to her feet, swayed and then caught herself against a streetlight. She took another breath, steadied her voice and then closed her eyes, speaking directly into the cellular airwaves with only a slight shudder to betray her bewilderment.
"FBSA registered hero Astorian Shade, MAGI department. Eight suspects incapacitated at the west intersection of Mashu Bridge. Crey Industries security team, human experimentation. They're alive, but barely. Bring ambulances," and she tried to flash a weak, unpracticed smile to the dumbstruck captives huddled by the curb, "it's okay. You're safe now."
"There's been a change."
Mender Ramiel had long since learned to feel a twinge of dread at such words, especially when they crossed the lips of one such as Prometheus. He cast a worried glance across the perpetually golden cloudscape of the Mender's Enclave and turned to face the titan.
"It's about the Well, isn't it?"
"It's about the Incarnate destined to bring you here," the azure figure answered grimly, "the one we've met in this timeframe has already begun to awaken."
"But that can't be right," the Mender blinked with confusion and suddenly shook his head, "the one in this timeline isn't strong enough yet. We've both seen that."
"No, she's not," Prometheus replied, turning to gaze thoughtfully across the sky at the islands drifting around the aerial city, "the spark ignited within her, but burned only for a moment. That's probably the only thing that kept her from being consumed by its power."
"You mean," Ramiel asked with the hesitation of one who already knows the answer.
"It tried to pull her onto the fast path."
"I see," he answered slowly, losing himself in worried thought for a moment and then finally giving a rueful smile, "that'll certainly keep things interesting."
"Now, I'm not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box."