Disclaimer: I do not own Cartoon Network, the PPGs or the RRBs. I own only my own work.
Summary: 11 years it has been, since what they thought was the final battle. Pushed to do things that needed to be done, but which they would never be able to condone, they believed that the ultimate enemy had finally been annihilated. They were wrong.
Romance: Color matching, primarily blue.
Chapter 1: Starstruck
Space...sometimes the endless ocean of neverending emptiness, other times teeming with the most increadible beauties that any entity of any planet had ever seen. Mankind has alway been in love with it, both for the mysteries that it might hold, and for the answers, but while it may have been the desire of humanity to boldly go into the black abyss and find whatever might be found, to explore the endless amout of variables in an endless trek to nowhere, there was one constant amongst these variables.
Space was lifeless. It could not sustain the spark that was needed for life to evolve and grow. Across the millions of planets in the universe which contained life, there were few entities who had the capability of surviving, for even a moment, within the black.
And yet, here at this moment, in a galaxy not altogether far away from the Milky Way (reletively speaking), six of these beings flew across the abyss, locked in epic conflict, wearing nothing to protect themselves from the nothingness around them, using the energy of their own bodies to keep from freezing and apparently capable of surviving without an atmosphere to envelope them.
Two streaks of red light, one a dark blood red, the other almost pink, clashed over the red giant star which marked as the current arena for their battle. They moved at increadible speeds, too fast for a normal human eye, but if you could see them, you might be surprised by their forms. Children, perhaps 5, perhaps 6 years old, clashing with a ferocity great enough to crumble mountains in their wake.
The dark one was a boy, his T-shirt and baseball cap both deep red, as were his large eyes that glinted with a surprising degree of intelligence and cunning for his apparent age, not to mention an almost obscene amount of sheer self-confidance. The gleeful smirk on his face left no doubt as to how much he was loving this fight.
The light streak was a girl, her hair in a pony-tail and a large bow stationed atop her head. To match her counterpart's cunning eyes, hers shined with a calculating and strategic genius that would put any chess-grandmaster to shame. However unlike the boy, she did not at all look as though she were enjoying the moment. Quite the contrary, the intense scowl on her face let all present know that she would rather get this over with as soon as possible.
In the airless vacuum of space, neither combatant could speak with the other, but their faces communicated all that was needed.
'Why?' the girl's face seemed to ask, 'What good could possibly come from this senseless fighting?'
The boy's eyebrow cocked and his grin widened, 'Do I need a reason?' he seemed to ask, 'I fight because it is our destiny to fight. Because neither of us can live in a world where the other exists. Because I will never be content until I have proven that I can destroy you, and I will either do so here and now or I will die trying. I fight because I want to. Because I have to.'
The girl shook her head in despair and charged, the two becoming flashes of light again as they crashed into each other.
Not far by, two other pairs were similarly locked in combat, one pair ferociously creating streaks of green dangerously close to the heat of the dying star, the other farther out into the void of space, their blue light both more apprehensively circling each other and clashing only occasionally.
The green pair fought the hardest, the boy and girl hardly ever more then a foot away from each other, her fists flying as fast as the bullets from an automatic rifle and her eyes glowing with sheer unbridled rage, his taunting smirk eating up her anger like candy and never throwing a punch himself but deflecting every one of hers. They never stopped to communicate with looks. They didn't need to. Their fists were communication enough.
The blue pair hardly ever approached each other, except for when the boy dashed in to make a brief attack and then quickly retreat. The girl in her blue dress with her blond pigtails and her eyes which looked almost afraid, both of being hurt and of hurting her foe. The boy not afraid, but cautious and showing no emotion, breaking her down methodically and patiently, each of his perfectly planned strikes wearing her down little by little.
The battle had been storming for almost 30 minutes by this point, and still showed no signs of letting up. Somehow, they all knew that this would be it. Either the boys or the girls would not be returning to earth after this.
The red girl charged and met her foe, bathed in the glow of the red sun. She launched a spinning kick at him, which he dodged by bending back at the waist and retaliated by slamming an elbow into her chin. She pushed his arm away and crashed her fist into his jaw. He used the momentum from the attack to spin around and land a chopping strike to her throat, which knocked her down enough that he could easily slam his knee into her gut. So shaken up by this was she that she lost her hold on her position in space and his follow up punch sent her flying back towards the star, causing her bow to catch fire and burn to ashes immediately.
She, like her sisters, was loosing, and she knew it. She had to think up a plan, and she had to think it up quick.
Luckily, plans were her specialty.
The next blow flung her around so that she was staring just for a moment at the blinding light of the star. A thought struck her mind. A horrible though, but at this point quite possibly her only chance. There was no time for second guessing or regrets. It was them or the boys at this point, and she knew what she had to do.
She blinked, not a simple flicker of the eyelid to apply moisture to her eyes, but a long and complex series of flashes that was picked up by a special high-tech contact lens in her right eye, that would send messages to two matching lenses that her sisters possesed. It was the only way that she could send messages to them since they couldn't speak in space.
"Throw up your shields and draw the boys in closer to the red star. I have a plan."
The returning messages were almost immediate.
"You got it Brainiac!"
"Yes...right."
Without a second thought she threw up a pink sphere of energy around herself and dashed off towards the star. The shields were a new technique of theirs, a further extension of the energy within their bodies that they could manipulate, creating an almost indestructible orb around them that, while a fantastic defensive mesure, prevented them from any serious offensive techniques, since they couldn't throw a punch and the orb also prevented their energy beams from getting out.
As she predicted, her darker counterpart copied the technique (they had managed that almost a week after the girls had discovered it, as anything they could do, so could the boys), and followed her into the blazing heat and light of the star.
She fled as fast as her body could move, her shields mostly, but not totally, buffering the intense heat of the star, her persuer never far behind. She pushed as hard as she could, but her body was beaten and brused and she was lower on energy then she was. He was gaining on her. If he crashed down on her from above, she would be knocked into the star, and her shields would last at most five seconds in there.
She saw on the horizon of the star, twin streaks of green that confirmed that at least one of her sisters had followed her orders. She could only hope that the other had as well.
She blinked more orders, this time taking slightly longer and again the responces were immediate.
"What! You crazy? Do you realize what you're asking?"
"But...but...why?"
She shook her head, "We have no choice, just do it!"
She got no further objections and decided to focus on the task at hand for herself. The first thing that she needed to do was get out of his line of sight. A split second would do, but she needed to get that opening and he was closing in on her fast.
She smirked as she remembered a trick that she used to play on her sisters when they were catching up to her with their games of tag. They had learned to counter it, but this boy had no experience with that. Hopefully it would give her the time that she needed.
She waited until he was nearly on top of her, within a foot or so. Any more distance between them and he would see it coming. She had to time it perfectly. She waited and waited for her chance, knowing that if she was off by just a split second it would be for naught and he would have her.
Finally, he was close enough. She stopped. Completely stopped moving from him. As she anticipated, he was unprepared for her sudden halt and overshot her position by nearly 100 yards before he stopped and turned back to her, his eyes blazing with fury and ready to take her down.
But she was gone. The boy blinked and glanced left and right, then back up into the sky and even behind him, but she was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished. He screamed in frustration, or would have had he been able to make a noise. After a moment he decided she must have dashed off in a different direction and was using the red glow of the star to desguise her pink trail.
Whatever. He'd find her. She was just delaying the inevitable.
Dear creator it was hot. Not sweating hot like it had been when she was a few hundred feet above the surface of the star, this was blistering, searing, excruciatingly hot. Her shields were the only thing keeping her alive, but even so it had to be nearly 500 degrees inside her shield. A normal human would be long dead. She could feel her shields failing her, she had already been under the surface of the star for 2 seconds and she had at most 3 left.
She watched the glowing figure of her foe above her. 2 seconds. He seemed to be heasitating. 1 second. Oh please let him leave! He did, dashing off in a random direction and almost a milisecond before her shield gave out she shot up and breached the surface. Her shields began to regenerate and she flew away, far from the surface of the star at an angled arc away from the direction that the boy had gone.
She flew up and away until the star was barely the size of a baseball from her perspective, and found her two sisters waiting patiently for her.
"Are they both still at the surface?" she asked via the eye-communication-lens.
Her green sister nodded, not even bothering to use the device.
"Then lets end this, once and for all."
The red brother flew around the star with increasing anger. No matter what, it seemed like he could not find any trace of his quarry. A flash of light appeared in his peripheral vision and he dashed off towards it. To his annoyance however he found only his two brothers standing still with looks of confusion upon their faces.
They possessed no high-tech communications devices, but the red brother flashed the other two a look which clearly was meant to ask, 'What happened? Where did they go?'
His responces were two shrugs and he cursed to himself. This couldn't be right. For all three of them to have lost their prey at the same time? This had to have been by design. But why? What was the girl's plan? He glanced down at the flaming ball of gas just over 100 feet beneath where he stood, and suddenly it came to him, just as quickly as it had his counterpart.
They were sitting ducks where they were!
He shot his head up to somehow deliver a warning to his brothers but a tri-colored beam hitting the surface behind them told him that he was already too late. The star heaved beneath them and a sudden flash of light and energy shot upwards towards them.
When you know you are about to die, sometimes you do things which are completely illogical as your body moves faster then your mind to try and keep you alive. The red boy felt fear grip his gut for the first time in his life (in any of his lives for that matter), and as the light shot up to ingulf him, he screamed out to his brothers, "RUN!"
But as always, in space no one can hear you scream.
Hundreds of thousands of light-years away, a man in a white lab-coat watched the monitors in his laboratory, his face sweating not from heat but from fear as he knew that there was every possibility that his girls...his daughters...would not be coming back. High above the surface of the earth, a worm-hole had been created which lead to a random point in space, somewhere far away from here. He didn't know where exactly.
His girls and their ultimate enemies had flown into the wormhole in order to have their big fight to end all fights. The boys had been becoming too powerful and too dangerous to be allowed to continue to exist anymore and any fight could potentially destroy the entire city or worse, so he had created the wormhole so that they could safely battle it out somewhere far away from here without endangering the lives of possibly millions.
The generation of the wormhole was perhaps the second most increadible thing he had ever accomplished, but he had no time to enjoy it now. He just wanted his girls back home.
Suddenly the readings on his monitor started to go haywire, energy flashes off the scale! He jumped from his chair and began to press buttons and flip switches, the purpose of which only he knew, in order to stabilize the portal.
"Oh dear, oh dear, oh my, oh my!" he fretted as he worked faster then he could ever remember working. He had no idea what was happening on the other side, not having had the time to create a feasable method of communicating with his girls when they were through the wormhole, but he couldn't imagine this was good.
Suddenly, three small but potent spikes appeared on the screen, and he switched to camera mode, allowing him to look directly at what was happening. He saw three streaks of color shoot out of the wormhole, and he sighed in relief. He couldn't see his girls faces, but the colors were light. They were back. He watched in confusion as the red streak charged at the building-sized construct which was keeping the wormhole open and with no hesitation smashed right through it. The wormhole closed in an instant but just before it did he thought he saw another light, this one much larger, appear at the end of it.
The professor was stunned for only a minute before running back to his dashboard. He found a microphone and spoke into it.
"Blossom!" he called out to his girls, "Is everything alright?"
The returning voice was like music to his ears, "We're fine Professor. Sorry about your machine. We'll explain it all when we get there."
The Professor sighed one more time and collapsed onto his chair. He was getting too old for this sort of thing.
The first thing that Professor Utonium recieved when his girls arrived however was not an explination. It was a hug. A blue beam of light crashed into him with such force that he was knocked onto his rump and knocked the wind from his lungs. It took him a moment to get his bearings back, but when he did he realized that one of his girls was lached onto his chest, bawling into his lab-coat.
"Bubbles, sweetie, what's the matter?" He asked her as he rubbed the back of her head.
"Oh, Professor!" she wailed loud enough to strain his ears, "It was horrible! We had to MURDER them!"
"Oh honey, come now." he spoke in his gentle voice, "It couldn't be as bad as all that, could it?"
"YES IT IS!" the crys and wails continued.
The Professor glanced up at the doorway, where the other two girls floated, waiting for their sister to cry herself out. Blossom was looking at the floor and refused to make eye-contact with him, while even Buttercup, arms crossed and a look of determination on her face, held a glint of uncertainty in her eyes.
"Blossom." The Professor spoke to her, "What happened out there?"
The girl in pink glanced up and for the first time the Professor saw her injuries. He had seen his girls injured before, such was the price of having daughters who spent the majority of their time combating the monsterous, the occult, and the just plain weird, but this was different. The parts of Blossom's skin that wasn't black with bruises was a painful looking shade of red, as though she had a horrible sun-burn. Her hair was singed so badly in some places that her scalp was visible. Worse yet, the way that she was holding herself, even while hovering in mid-air, Utonium knew that she had to have several broken bones, possibly even a shattered sternum.
She'd heal, such was one of the many gifts of being who she was, but he still fealt as though his heart were being torn from his chest. The worst part was that he was afraid that if he reached out and held her, he might accidentily cause her more pain.
"Blossom...", he spoke with the weariness of a man twice his age, "Please tell me what happened."
The eldest in mind of his three girls nodded, "We ended it Professor. They're gone, and this time we made sure that there wasn't enough left of them for anyone to recreate them with."
Prof. Utonium found his curious mind aroused despite his worry, "What do you mean?"
Blossom turned her head away. She looked as though she didn't want to meet her father's eyes, "Your wormhole generator dropped use out near a red giant. We...we were loosing...we didn't have any choice. They would have killed us if we hadn't...if we hadn't..."
And Suddenly Prof. Utonium realized what she was getting at. For a scientist, it wasn't that hard to put 2 and 2 together.
"You made the star go super-nova." he stated.
Blossom nodded, "The star was going to give out any day anyways, we used our energy beams to speed things up."
Utonium shook his head, "That's...unbelievable. No matter how unstable the star was, it would still take an unfathomable amount of power to cause it to go super-nova. I would never have imagined that even you girls could have that sort of raw power."
Suddenly, and without warning, Buttercup collapsed on the floor. The Professor dashed to her and scooped her into his one free arm, just noticing that Bubbles had also fallen unconscious in his arm.
Blossom nodded, "We put everything that we had into it. Every bit of energy that we had in our bodies. I've never done that before...I feel like I'm going to collapse too."
Utonium nodded, "Come on, you girls need your rest. We'll discuss what happened when you're all feeling more up to it."
Blossom nodded and allowed herself to be led up to her room, where the Professor tucked her two sisters into their single large bed before turning to her.
"Come on Blossom, you need to recover your strength. Rest for now and I'll have a big hearty breakfast waiting for you when you wake up."
The pink-addorned girl nodded and floated over to the bed, collapsing into it just before she lost the last bit of her power.
Professor Utonium walked towards the door and turned off the light, but before he could dissapear into the hallway, he heard Blossom call out to him.
"She's right Professor." Utonuim turned his head to glance at his daughter, "Bubbles is right. We did murder them. We've killed monsters before, but it's not the same as killing another person. We've even destroyed them before, the first time Mojo Jojo created them, but that wasn't the same either. This time we blew up a star just to kill them. We meant to kill them, and we did it, ruthlessly and violently."
Professor Utonium had experienced a lot in his time, but he didn't really know how to answer this. Perhaps he never could understand, not being physically capable of holding the responcibility that his girls were burdened with. He gave the only responce that he could.
"Go to bed Blossom. Things will look better in the morning."
Over 3 million light-years away, around the edges of the Triangulum Galaxy, the final pulses of a supernova burst through the endless darkness, leaving nothing in their wake. Two nearby planets, both uninhabited, were terraformed beyond recognition, scarring the entire surface of the planets. Nothing was going to escape the sheer power of the supernova. Anything caught in its explosion would be obliterated.
A third planet was caught in the blast, but unlike the first two, something happened just before the planet was hit. A purple-ish field of energy surrounded the planet, forcing the energy of ths supernova to bend around the planet, protecting the surface from the increadible force.
On the surface of the planet, two figures, roughly humanoid in shape but otherwise impossible to identify beneath their high-tech protective suits, spoke amongst each other.
"I thought that the scientists said that the star was good for another 3 cycles!" the first called out in outrage, "It's damn lucky that we already had the planetary shields ready or the entire population would be fried!" Although the sheilds kept out the vast majority of the sound from the explosion, he still needed to yell to be heard above the earshattering boom.
"Keep your wits about you!" The second figure yelled, equally loud "We have an important job to do. Until we can clear out the sky, we need to monitor the shields and makes sure that any faults and tears are closed up before they can damage the population!"
"How did they even know the shields were going to work?" the first asked, "I mean it's not like there's a supernova every other year to test it out with!"
The second shrugged, "Hell if I know! The scientists know what they're doing, and I don't complain so long as it works!"
Suddenly, the two workers were interrupted by an earsplitting crunch, and they turned their sights to the sky to see, a few miles off in the distance, a web of cracks in the shields, radiating from a single point.
The second worker quickly took charge, "Get back to the powering station and increase re-stabilization power to that area of the shields by 200%! Must be some debris that was tossed around in the SN and was thrown our way! Looks really small so all that power is going to be focused in one little spot, which means it'll probably break through the shields for about half a second! Make sure it's not more then half a second! I'm going to fly over there and check it out!" And without waiting for a reply, he clicked the heels of his boots together and two small rockets appeared on the bottom of his feet, sending him shooting towards the anomaly.
With the advanced tech of his suit, he reached the area in shot time. What he found was something that he had never seen before. What was noticable before anything else was undeniably the crater in the ground. Over three miles in diameter, and at least two-hundred feet deep, it staggered his mind to see it. More then that, was the state of the earth itself, scorched pitch black, like it had been the center of a firey explosion. He supposed all of this could be expected, considering that the ground had just been exposed to the heat and energy of an exploding star, but what was less expected were the strange streaks of color that he saw here and there, blue, red, and green. He didn't know what to make of these.
His eyes were drawn to the center of the crater, where he presumed the object that had been thrust through the sheilds was, and he began to fly towards it. The epicenter wasn't hard to locate, despite the enormous size of the crater, as the streaks of color seemed to make rings that extended outward from a single spot.
As he first began to approach the center, at first he was dissapointed as he thought that nothing was there, but then he saw the meteorites. Three orbs of jet black stone, jagged and craggy, almost invisible over the scorched earth, but revealed by the fissures of color, the same as the strange glowing streaks on the ground, that covered them.
He had never seen anything quite like these artifacts. He flew over to land by them, the first thing that he noted being that the ground was scorching hot, probably so hot that if not for his suit, his feet would have caught fire. He reached his hand out towards the middle of the three orbs, this one covered in jagged red gashes, and almost immediately had to retract his hand for the heat that it was giving off. He pressed a button on his forearm, and a wave of light from his wrist ran over the object, quickly scanning it.
What he read caused him to recoil in shock. Surely those readings couldn't possibly be right! He scanned the object again, but the results were the same. He shook his head. He knew that these models of scanners weren't supposed to break, but he supposed it was possible. The only other explination was that what the scanner was saying was correct...
...that there was indeed an organic core inside this meteor. He couldn't fathom such a thing could be possible, that there could be anything organic that could pass through an exploding star and not be reduced completely to ash. Surely whatever it had been, it was now dead, but the fact that even the tiniest remenant of it remained was beyond astonishing, it was completely insane! It was then that he noticed the second astonishing thing about the meteor, that being the sheer amount of energy that the thing was putting out. The thing had more power then anything he had ever seen before. As a Krong, his people naturally generated great amounts of bio-energy within their bodies, it being the main factor in their success in conquering other worlds, but this...this was off the charts. The greatest gladiator of the ring of three skulls didn't generate a fifth of what he was seeing here. Even one of their major ships's FTL drives didn't generate as much power.
He had to get this back to the High Emperor. He would want to see this.
Author Notes: So here it is, my first Fanfiction! I tried to model my style off of my friend who is also a writer here (his name is KingofEverything, check out his Naruto and Bleach fanfics, they are AWESOME!). He gave me a lot of pointers and stuff. Heck, he probably wrote half of it :D Anyways, tell me what you think, reviews are always appreciated. Chap 2 will be up soon, hopefully.