Hello Readers, This is SabaraOne, back online for a new Story. I'm excited to do this one and I hope you like it. I'll be slowing down my release of Demon Admin so I can focus on this one, but I'll still be putting them up. I'll say more at the end, so until then, enjoy!
See if you can catch the reference in the chapter name.
Chapter 1: Encounter at BSL
We Link in and immediately revert to Base Form, crossing our arms over our chest. We then float in the void for a moment, letting ourselves recover from what could easily have been a decompression death in the form of Yeesha, our friend from the Myst dimensions. We had copied her form and ability to teleport without the use of a Linking Book during the year we spent on her world. While we know that morphs we create ourselves won't be affected by the lack of oxygen or pressure in deep space, we can't be sure about forms we copy from others.
After a moment, we send a jolt of energy into our left arm, rezing our Ki, a D'ni communications device given to us by Yeesha. After tapping the holographic display for a moment, a swirling blue portal appears near us, slightly behind. It pulls back to reveal the cut-off delta of our Cobra Mk. III class multipurpose starship. The portal collapses, swirling in on itself. We grab onto the hatch telekinetically and pull ourselves in. We negotiate the hatch into the airlock, down the zero G hall, and into the cockpit, strapping ourselves into the left chair and sliding our tail into the hole we'd cut into the back.
We glance to our left, activating the left panel and selecting the Contacts pane. Empty.
Incoming signal, announced the ship's AI. While we have not yet fully uplifted it, it is much more intelligent than comes with a standard ship in the Elite Dangerous dimension, I am attempting to decipher the message… … … The message contains two words, 'Baby's Cry,' Based on this I determine it is a distress call.
"Lay in a course for the source. Move to different locations and triangulate if necessary. Alert us when the jump coordinates are ready." We respond before siting and waiting for the ship to prepare. The AI sends the ship on several moves through Supercruise, allowing the ship to move at faster than light speeds for in-system navigation.
Jump ready, engage?
"You want to take this one? After that last attempt landing on a planet you could do with some practice."
Negative, The signal is coming from an orbital outpost. You fly it.
"Okay then," we comment, engaging the Frame Shift Drive to move our ship in Hyperspace. Upon dropping from hyperspace into Supercruise near the system star, we point the ship at the destination, max the throttle and monitor the remaining time to arrival. At seven seconds we cut the throttle to 75%. Due to the lack of a proper navigational beacon, we drop several dozen kilometers from the outpost. After about a quarter hour of sublight flight, we arrive at the destination. The outpost has a distinctly damaged look. We can see charr marks and a number of what looked like broken internal bulkheads through the viewports. We locate a docking hanger and approach. Surprisingly it actually opens automatically. To the left of our own we notice a purple ship with a large green viewport on the front. It rests on a trio of landing gear extending from the sides and back.
We depart our ship and start to explore. The hanger bay holds nothing of interest, so we move to the next room, which has a ramp in the middle. While exploring this one we think we hear a noise. We clench our right fist and extend our arm weapon, a double-barreled HECU SPAS-12 shotgun. Peeking around the next door, we see a number of platforms connected to the side walls extending over the large vertical area we are at the bottom of. Halfway up is a door sealed with a security hatch and at the top is another open door. We rez in our Ki and open a channel to our sister Risa.
"Hey sis, how're you doing on this fine day?" Risa says with a crooked grin before noticing the serious look in our eye. This is made more difficult for her by the translucent red visor in our helmet. She's never seen it before as we only use it when we feel there is danger. Risa is a feminine AI. She takes the appearance of a red-armored human female. Her armor is seamless but not form-fitting, like ours. Unlike ours, her armor doesn't have blue circuit patterns on it. She doesn't have either a Disk or a pair of katana like us. Nor does she have a helmet or a tail. Her unarmored head has mid-back length blonde hair that she usually lets lie loose. Due to our helmet, we honestly can't say if we have similar hair. We are, in fact, a clone of her and her creator Camanion, a Mobian single-tailed fox. Camanion has the same blue and purple face we have.
"We're doing fine. On a damaged space station. We think there's something in the next room. You have a weapon better for mid-range than a shotgun?"
"Yeah, check this out!" Risa says excitedly. She clenches her right fist just like we do and her arm morphs into her blaster. She's been doing a lot of work on it. Last time we saw it, the stock and barrel were recognizable and she told us it wasn't stable. Now it was very detailed, with a long barrel, an ammunition clip on the left and iron sights. It also seemed to be capable of using multiple barrels and ammunition types. "The BlasTech DC-17 Interchangeable Weapons system. It can act as an assault rifle," She ejects the magazine, detaches the barrel, replacing it with a longer one, attaches a scope and slaps a smaller magazine into the back over the course of about two seconds, "A sniper rifle firing a soled pellet encased in blaster energy," She replaces the barrel with a larger maw, popps off the scope, attaches a sort of hopper and pops a grenade in the back, "An anti-armor grenade launcher," reset to assault rifle mode with the addition of a wide-mouth barrel on the bottom, "And a non-lethal crowd control mode. It's the weapon of choice for Grand Army of the Republic commandos."
She presses a hidden control and the weapon detaches from her arm, restoring her right hand. The gun sprouts a butt and trigger, "Actually, I prefer to hold it like this."
"You got plans for the ammo?" We ask.
"Of course! Here," she sends us some data files and a packet of Resource Units, a collection of varied subatomic particles. "Have fun!" She clickeds off.
We dispel our weapon, deciding we'll need at least one hand for the coming operation. Holding out our left arm causes a dual hatch to pop open in our forearm. A laser rises out, flipping back on a turret mount before coming back front and center. We scowl slightly and dispel our Ki, not liking the look of the laser barrel clipping through it. A graphical glitch we'll sort out later. Even after almost a year and a half of subjective time since activation, some of the ways our different subsystems interact still amuse and annoy us. We hold our right hand in front of us and point the turret at our hand. It glows for a moment before firing a stream of coherent light which darts around n a small rectangle, forming one of the assault rifle magazines. A series of images flash on our visual sensors.
AMMUNITION DETECTED : ANALYZING…
TYPE: LASER BLASTER
FIRE RATE: HIGH
DAMAGE: MODERATE
READY
We retract the digitizing laser, transferring the magazine to our left hand and extend our arm weapon. A slot opens just behind the pump in the left side and we slap the mag in, pumping the shotgun. The upper barrel extends and narrows slightly while the lower barrel widens. A quick test fire later we start to give a sadistic grin, "Yes…we can work with this."
We pop through the open door, weapon at the ready. We hop from platform to platform, wondering how this could possibly be legal to build, then thinking about the irony, considering what we are like in the dimension we consider to be our home. The next room has a large and somehow unbroken window. It has a sort of "bathtub curve" shape to it. The walls are white and pink for some reason we'd never understand. The next room has a large number of platforms and sealed doors. A sealed hatch is in front of us. It's different however. We place our hand on the door and sense a large amount of electrical activity on the other side, plenty of computers. We explode into a swirl of red data cubes and flow through the door, reforming into our red-armored self on the other side. The room is painted green with a number of large consoles and a plate in the middle. We avoid the plate, sensing that it connects to the communications systems and move out the open door.
The room is quite dark. We activate our visual sensors Night Vision mode. Our visor flashes from translucent red to solid green. This room has a locked hatch directly in front. We ignore it and hop up two platforms and then to a third. Off to the right we notice a thin passage and immediately start compiling a morph form small enough to travel through it. The next room has a number of platforms and a small tunnel I front of us, caused by a door blocked mostly by debris. We drop down to the bottom, telekinetically slowing our fall a the end. We note movement in the next room and hop up a few platforms, jump into the void, invert, and telekinetically stick ourselves to the wall, with our head, shoulders,and arms sticking partway around the edge of a low ceiling. We click a hidden control and the magazine clicks out of our arm weapon. We hold up a sniper mag and wait for it to be scanned.
AMMUNITION DETECTED : ANALYZING…
TYPE: SOLID-CORE LASER RIFLE
FIRE RATE: LOW
DAMAGE: HIGH
READY
We slap in the magazine and our shotgun's lower barrel turns into a grip stock and the top barrel extends into a rifle. A scope rezes on top. We look through it at 10x and switch to 20x. At this point we can easily see a heavily damaged room with the words "Quarantine Bay" on a sign at the front. At least that's what we think it says. There are a number of broken cabinets and tables blocking significant portions of the floor. A blue and red hardware program hops over each obstacle, With each jump it almost curls into a ball. Behind the last some sort of horned toad jumps around, oblivious to the world. When the hardware program jumps the last barrier, the toad spins mid jump and opens its mouth facing towards the hardware program. We note that its mouth is glowing and that the hardware is bringing an arm cannon of some sort into line. Luckily for us, the hardware is not between us and the toad. A beam of blue light connects our shotgun and the toad for a second.
At this point, several things happen at once. The toad dissolves into a yellow floating creature, we drop down, inverting as we fall and landing on our feet, and the hardware program whirls around, aiming at us.
And that's the first chapter of the second mainline story in the Legend of Composite series.
So… Where do I start? Well, so yes. This story is based on Metroid Fusion, though with "gameplay" for lack of a better term closer to Prime or Other M. I know that Fusion is considered to be one of the worst in the series, but I really don't care. If you have a problem with that… Well, take it up with me in a PM. I love flamewars anyway.
The DC-17 is used in the Star Wars: Republic Commando novel series and video game tie-in. The game may have not been as good as, say, Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon, but it did have its charm. If the game is anything to go by, Risa taking two seconds to switch attachments is pretty slow. All the attachments Risa shows are in the novels at least.
"Encounter at BSL" is a reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot "Encounter at Farpoint." Why? No idea! I just needed something to name the first chapter.
Now that I'm running mainline, Shoutout this week goes to redditor Tuxedo_Jack. This guy has been on Tales from Tech Support almost as long as Gambatte. He's also probably the closest to a real-life… Well I can't mention the other guy in a K+ story, maybe not even a T. He does appear in one of my other stories thugh… To put it this way, you never take anything off of Jack's desk. One of his latest stories involves an engineer who took a 5 port switch from Jack's desk and blew up a modem, a router,and a motherboard because it had been "modified" to pump raw mains power into the ethernet jacks. Not pretty. He also invented Camanion's (as yet unrevealed) weapon of choice.
As always, feel free to review, after all, how can I know what my readers think if I'm not told eh?
So until next time, this is SabaraOne, logging out!
And hey, I finished a chapter 3 days before release schedule! Unheard of!
EDIT: Since I know somebody's going to complain, I know that Mobians are from Sonic. I'd have listed it as a crossover except that 1. The only purely Mobian character I may even mention is Camanion and 2. even if she does appear, it'd be as little more than a cameo.
