A/N: In the beginning, I vowed never to do OC's again . . .
Wow, that came out a lot like the dark intro of a movie. Sorry about that! This initially wasn't going to be a crossover and mainly something I wanted to do for myself after finally playing the new DOOM.
So what better way to celebrate the game-play reveal of Doom: Eternal with a bit of an expanded universe, shall we?
Can't believe I wrote this shit abroad on my crappy phone, back when I was sans computer for a half-year. It was getting so long that the program (believe it or not, I used an inbuilt app for note-taking to write this beast) would briefly crash the screen every time I tried opening it, so I heaved the file over here. Divvying it up to buy me some time for my other project: Mass Transcendence.
As such, this story is implied to contain a modicum of blood and gore, (a morsel, nothing the little people have to worry about) suicidal thoughts and actions (just like the pharmaceutical companies taking over your TV ads) . . . and . . . oh yeah, cursing!
Sorry, I guess I'm lashing out with a bit of sarcasm when I saw a great Mass Effect Fanfiction nearly ruined by an absurd apology in the summary! IF you're sensitive to these strong topics, don't go in and read it. More importantly, don't give the writers a hard time because you suffered a panic attack and conveniently forgot that it was you who had the idiocy to willingly go in an environment that triggers you. If you want the story taken down, be forward about it or better yet, just leave and go fuck yourself someplace else. Goddamn pansies . . .
I don't make any money from either Bethesda or Bioware or from any other publisher underneath the sun just like every other goddamn writer on this godforsaken site. (except some shit writers. Fifty Shades anyone?)
Ahhhh . . . . where were we?
A Merciful Doom
Pt. 1: You Have Been Warned
Follower Jacob Rienfield was exactly that. A follower.
A blurred face in a million of unremarkables just like him.
He had been blinded to the ulterior motives of the UAC; the insidious methods the hierarchy kept maintaining the status quo. The little people like him were always the ones taking the fall for the higher ups dropping the ball while it rolls and tramples the expendable. The cannon-fodder.
No, not blinded. Wrong choice. More like . . . lack of imagination.
He hated it all. And that spirits-damned virtual intelligence, always reminding him of the shitty reasons why he came and chiming their work schedules every day. Even Vega, the only piece of cool tech that seemed agreeable to him during orientation was locked from him. Something about only level three candidates being able to use him. It was a collectively suffocating, desensitizing initiation. A damn cult of work ethic that should have been obvious from the start.
In the end, it was all insanity. It was all bullshit. The mission, the facility, the workplace, and he would have been able to live with it all, just like the countless people living or dead who confronted that daily reality. But those special projects were not a lie and many of the wrong people paid that price.
In one of these monumentally asinine fuck-ups, a hell portal had opened.
He came here as a lowly engineer, learning and honing his previously freelance skills on the job. On one of his trips to the desert hellscape of Mars, he was sent to repair some heating equipment around one of the bases which happened to be waaay out of his league in terms of clearance. Really, a level two candidacy and in response, they dispatched a security guard to accompany him. He didn't mind as long as he didn't interfere.
I suppose you aren't guarding the secret cookie jar, he thought, casting a cursory glance behind him, smiling sarcastically underneath his helmet. Sardonic humor happened to be his specialty and his preferred weapon to cope.
The howl of the planets wind, the clouds of sediment rising off and on the distance; it was the only place he felt a serene calmness, away from prying eyes and the forced work ethic medicine they had to down . . . though the Mars surface was anything but calm.
The weather on this lonely planet was inhospitable for a reason. It took decades to lay a proper foundation and even more to get it operational. Frequent sandstorms, rapid heating and cooling during the night and day cycle, rocky, dangerous terrain . . . it all was designed to make the very brightest of our technology fizzle out sooner rather than later. It was hard to believe this place could have once been teeming with microbial life.
He waved his scanner over the ground, following its pings towards the cable. The Martian surface tended to bury much of the small infrastructure in a matter of hours. It took a veritable army to maintain life support and Rienfield was just another cog in that machine.
"A-ha! Got it."
He pulled out his belt of excavation tools and went to work digging up the grave of the glorified AC.
It ended up taking an hour to clean the connections. The guard dutifully reminded him that a storm was heading their way. He merely glanced up from time to time to confirm its meandering advance across the plateau. Still a way's off.
A brief, painful spark later, the device hummed to life, kicking up a fit of sand.
"Come on, let's go."
He dusted himself off and set a map display on his device to guide him towards . . . well, not home, just a dwelling for now. His visor was suddenly obscured by a cloud of sand enveloping him. The storm seemed to materialize out of nowhere. None of the readings he took before the trek had indicated something like this. The map up link fizzled into nothingness. He kept his eye on the security guard who hobbled over to him.
"Don't say I didn't warn you."
"Shut up," he growled, and the words were swept away with the wind. He fumbled for his old-fashioned compass and watched as it spun circles. Either magnetic or electrical causes were disrupting navigation though it was the possible the two weren't mutually exclusive.
Spinning around, he motioned for the guard to stick close and set off in a random direction. He then promptly felt the sediment collapse underneath his outstretched boot. The guard yanked him back on his ass from the hidden cliff edge.
"Visibility has clearly gone to shit."
"Yeah, no kidding."
He caught sight of something blood-red in the haze and pointed it out to his unwitting partner.
It was one of those elite guards, the ones who only defended the most secret of projects. He hardly ever saw them up close, but the company bulletins always reminded you to heed their orders or face immediate expulsion . . . yada, yada, yada.
But what was one doing all the way out here?
He gestured for his partner to follow as he tracked a safer route down. The artificer wanted a clearer confirmation. Only the Red Coats could help them get back to base; their equipment was state of the art. He crept through the bedrock and gestured at the man to lower himself. He peered past a boulder to find a whole squad of the shiny suits milling about. They were taking stock and guarding the area in a tight perimeter. Some others, the techies Jacob presumed, were setting up munitions, utility belts, and what looked like blue markers.
"Is it done?"
Rienfield felt the vibration speak more than the noise. It was the only reason he kept focused on the tech instead of searching for a faceless speaker in the sands like his partner did. Jacob squinted into the cloud and saw as a massive, silvery cybernetic being emerge from the shadows.
"What the hell?" For the young artificer, this was news. He'd heard of robots for the rich but as the heir to nothing except a hungry family, seeing one in person as big as 8 feet tall was mind blowing.
"No fucking way. Is that good 'ol Samuel Hayden?" The guard gushed.
He peered at his partner like he had grown an eyeball for a flashlight. That couldn't be possible. He thought he had died or something . . . cancer, some rare condition.
Wasn't that the way all great minds go?
The guard started up as if to explain his outburst, having not realized that it was irrelevant now. "Quiet!" Jacob demanded as he continued to eavesdrop on the conversation. Something about Lazarus and the seven ages of hell or something. It was all just mumbo-jumbo to him.
They began shouting something. It sounded like "Clear?"
The wind suddenly whipped itself into a full-blown frenzy. A tornado burst from the sky, looping and twisting towards a glowing point in the ground. The gravel cracked as right before their eyes, a portal opened.
But something went wrong. A piece of containment field fizzled out and in response, the hell portal dilated to massive sizes. The boulder they were hiding behind was swallowed as were the other figures.
He pulled on the dumbstruck guard, trying to pull him away from the vortex. The idiot tripped over a rock and he was brought down with him. The sand shifted, and they began sliding closer. Their hands scrabbled for purchase, but the sand simply dissolved in their grasping fingers. The guard was panicking and began yanking on his leg like a puppy. He tried to kick him off, but it would result in him losing what semblance of traction he had.
The black hole roared once more, and it finally devoured them whole.
. . .
. . .
A rumbling voice came into consciousness.
"Leave them. They're dead weight. Nothing lasts long here, corporal . . . except them. Proceed to the objective."
The jostling of small arms disguised the beleaguered grunt that escaped Jacob. It was the acrid smell that rapidly awoke him. In the distance, the thumping of boots leveled off into nothingness.
It took him a few minutes to work the stiffness from his extremities and limbs. His eyes stung harshly when he exposed them, the stinging ash repeatedly blinding him. He had no context for the ambient smells that assailed his senses except for one word: death.
Slowly but surely, he stumbled to his feet and nearly vomited with how pungent the smell was. Jacob glanced around and found nothing but rocky cliffs. Down below was obscured in a soupy dark haze, a bottomless pit. The sky was in a perpetual state of dusk, orange and golden but with no obvious source of light.
The man sharply inhaled in surprise of an obvious fact. He could breathe! His helmet must have broken off and fallen. Hell had air, however polluted it was by indistinguishable scents . . . or it could be poisoned with carbon monoxide and he was effectively a dead man walking.
Some floating spires glowed of in the distance with what looked like red electricity arcing through the structures. Maybe that's how they could hover. Could it be the storied Argent Energy? The reason why he was stuck here? And if it could keep mountains afloat, could they be on an island in the sky?
His imagination got the better of him and he gagged at the sudden wave of vertigo that hit him.
A groaning sound caught his attention and he lumbered around. It was the forgettable personnel from earlier. He went to shake the man awake, or at the very least, knock him down a few notches for getting them sucked into this hellscape but begrudgingly, he found that his services were no longer needed.
The man pulled himself up as his rebreather loudly expelled oxygen. Rienfield made no attempt to help his partner up but the whispering strands of no being crazily repeated by the marine had begun to unsettle him.
"Have you gone off the deep end already?"
The man jumped at his voice, or rather flopped, as he was still lying on the ground after an unsuccessful attempt. He pulled himself up to his elbows, breathing heavily.
"How the hell are you breathing in this stuff? Are you insane?"
Rienfield dusted off his helmet, found it was a hollow piece of junk and tossed it aside. "It wasn't my idea and speaking of ideas, how about we get the fuck out of here, huh?"
Finally, he offered his hand and the prone marine took it. "You obviously have no idea where we are," he grunted as Jacob pulled him to his feet. "According to the brochures, we're effectively stuck in a den crawling with a bunch of blood-thirsty demons! I don't even have my gun anymore. We won't last two seconds in here!"
"Keep your voice down!" He growled in a hushed manner. "Or you'll get us killed in a heartbeat."
"Alright then what do you suggest?"
Rienfield didn't respond immediately to the prodding. Instead, he wandered off and bent down at the last place he saw the group of Elites standing. He rubbed some sand between his fingers in contemplation and let it dissipate to the ground in a sparkling heap. Bones ground to dust. Jacob didn't give voice to the troubling words Hayden had spoken.
"Right now, the only chance we have is to follow the excursion team that got dropped down with us. With any luck, we might able to get some protection," he said, rising to his feet slowly.
The armored soldier made a show of looking around. "They must be a way's off by now and I don't see a single damn footprint anywhere."
Rienfield held up his intact conduit scanner like a pair of house keys.
"Not without this, you can't."
It was the same piece of tech he used to find the buried cable. Now it would be their only guide in this hellscape they had traded for another wasteland. He flicked open the latch and his scanner managed to barely distinguish a trail bobbing and weaving down the cliff.
"Lead the way." The man shrugged and Rienfield obliged him. In the radio silence that followed, they had made their way down the slope very carefully. The trail was getting hotter and brighter with his scanner.
"Come on, hurry up. We need to be faster than them, so we can catch up." Jacob explained as if to a little child.
The man was huffing and puffing as subtle as a steam train. "Well then," he managed to get out through short gasps, "maybe you should have been the soldier."
Rienfield paused at the comment and mused about that prospect. Yes, his evaluators had said just as much but he politely refused claiming guard duty in the foundry wasn't his cup of tea. At least as an engineer, he could routinely get a breath fresh of air outside, so to speak. The Martian surface supposedly had demonic sightings from time to time but none he had remotely encountered in his three odd years working for the UAC. His concealed sidearm still clung insistently to his thigh, another detail he refused to let on. All this to feed his family and make sure that they had enough power to even read.
Just don't think about where you are or the very real possibility of hidden eyes following your every move. You'll be home in time for dinner.
They continued to pick their way through the craggy bedrock as the wind rushed by with a demonic howl. It made him jump every time the breeze kicked up.
Then they began to hear what sounded like fireworks. A red flash lit up somewhere in the distance followed by more explosions. More gunfire. Something had beset the search team and judging by the echoing screams, they were getting torn apart out there.
The hairs stood up on the nape of his neck. "Stop, maybe we should go around. There's no telling how much resistance they could be drawing towards . . ."
He turned around as he finished his sentence.
". . . us."
The soldier groaned and coughed blood, gingerly touching the gaping harpoon in his gut before he was pulled, kicking and screaming over the edge by a barbed tentacle.
Impish looking demons spawned all around Jacob and began screeching like banshees. A pained groan escaped him as he cupped an ear with one hand and armed himself with his pistol in the other. His hands were trembling. He had never shot anything before except a nail gun. Panic was beginning to set in and so did the clouds it seemed.
A tremble shook the ground where he stood but the gremlins rushed at him seemingly unperturbed. He managed to blow the heads off one . . . two before they knocked him down. Screaming, his vision obscured by a pile of racing digitigrade limbs, they quickly pried his environmental gear off piece by piece as the others scratched and diced his face. One swipe hit his eye and he roared, blinded.
It didn't occur to him to prepare for death; a path he already was set upon. Pain and evisceration were his world now. His pistol fired wildly, catching another few square in the chest but not enough. If anything, he was buying more time for his agonizing expiration.
Another boom, even bigger than the last one raised him into the air, knocking a few off his back. The gremlins scrambled to their feet, but they weren't looking at him anymore. They were hissing at the newcomer, one he barely caught with his good eye. It was a humanoid beast, standing upright at damn near eight feet tall with purple, beefy musculature and a white skull, except the thing had no eyes to speak off. Just rows of shark teeth gnashing and chewing on what he assumed to be a previous kill.
The thing roared, and the gremlins gave his slashed arm a possessive squeeze. They were defending their spoils. The demons rushed off to confront his inadvertent savior. The imps clambered on the beast's back as the blind warrior swung and knocked the others off the edge with a sweep of its massive tree-trunk hands. The last one that hadn't sunk its teeth in yet was split in two with a pump of its fists. The behemoth turned his attention to the rest and began picking them off like ticks, squashing, ripping, and tearing them off its back. Skulls cracked to the ground and were promptly turned to gore underneath its hooves.
It was an awesome display of raw power that captivated the wounded human until he realized they were fighting over him. When the blind demon won, he was dead meat.
Somehow, he still had functionality and began to crawl his way off the plateau. He barely made it two feet before a decapitated imp head came rolling down to a stop next to him.
He turned on his side and saw the last survivor hissing and snarling at the creature. It managed to duck and sidestep a few swings. Infuriated and fed up, the beast jumped impossibly high into the air and came crashing down on it.
A shower of demon gore obscured what was left of the human's vision, as the resulting shockwave launched him into the air. His world flipped and turned in on itself as sky and desert merged mercilessly together. His back snapped through what felt like rock and he hit the dirt, skipping off what seemed like an incline. This pattern continued, until gravity finally did its job and grounded him into the slope, carrying his broken body away from the battlefield. Tumbling down with dirt caking into his eyes and setting fire to his wounds, he finally came to a standstill on what felt like plates, scraping over his ribs and peeling off the skin that remained there. He reeled like a worm, his mouth open in silent torment.
Then the bones came crashing down. More dust crumbled over him as the fossils snapped and pounded against his spine mercilessly.
And then everything was still.
. . .
26 Days Later
Nearly a month after First Contact
. . .
His teeth ripped through the last strip of bandaging off his trembling fist. Unwrapped and exposed to the languid torchlight, he saw the wound had pulled itself out of its festering state and had begun to heal. The currents of pain ebbed and flowed along the slash. He gazed mournfully at the remains of his med-kit, contaminated sutures, bandaging, and painkillers from playing medic to the constant scrapes he had accumulated down here. That was it for sterile tools. His wounds would be forced to get better without them.
Groaning, he pulled himself up to the ceiling of his alcove / den / shelter.
With his good hand wiping away the morning sniffles, he stumbled to the chain gun planted dutifully at the entrance to the isolated cave, ready to tear apart any unwanted visitors.
At the time, he couldn't believe his luck, a stash of supplies looted from a dead elite who had used this place as a last stand. What exactly was his fatal mistake had yet to be identified and as long as that loose strand remained, Rienfield would continue to patrol and mark any demonic movements out of the ordinary.
With those salvaged supplies, he used it to fix himself up as best as he could, so he could hunt for food. The stringy ribs of an imp were hung out to dry in racks at the mouth of the cave. It also helped obscure his living scent away from any prying noses. It would just be another carcass in a world full of them.
With gear and tools salvaged from the wreck, Jacob was able to run some code through it, rig up a drone to manage the gun, and program a firing algorithm that forced it defend only when necessary. He wasn't strong enough to carry it by himself in his condition. Just lugging into a better position took the better part of a day to achieve. Despite this, Jacob dutifully kept the weapon oiled and clean to prevent unfortunate jamming although it had never been fired once since it came upon his hands. Rienfield intended to keep it that way.
To kill time, he wrote in an old-fashioned journal, also picked clean off the dismembered remains of the last owner. He tore the pages pertaining to the dead marine off and set it in a forgotten cubby hole, ignoring his temptation to learn the history behind the fallen. Rienfield didn't want to know who the guy left behind. God knows he had.
With his new set of binoculars, he spent his time studying the behavior of demons he could see off in the distance, doodling exaggerated drawings of the different species he had found and listing off unique features. Hell, he would have written enlarged cock in the margin just for the shits and giggles. The journal became more of a bestiary log rather than a personal record for fear of being stricken by his current situation and the starving family he had left behind.
There was no sign that anybody was coming to save him. He couldn't remember the last time he saw a soul in these parts, someone sapient that could have warned him before he committed some potentially devastating mistakes. He was no Martian; some scientist that could live off the soil, but water was the perfect resource to rinse wounds. He was only able to keep himself hydrated by scooping blood from the ponds littered around his hideout. It was akin to eating tofu, an item that never quite satisfies. A purgatory for the senses. As such, his teeth were caked in sour, metallic tasting juices. Bacteria still seemed to be a thing in hell, so he fashioned a bit of wire from his rope and used what little actual water he had scrounged just to serve the purpose of rinsing his teeth.
Rienfield had once heard that in ancient times, some old civilizations used to carve out the hearts of willing participants, still beating, and offered them up to the gods as sacrifices. Some stories say you could gain strength from feasting on the blood of your enemies like Siegfried with the greedy dragon Fafnir. All he felt when he drank was a consistently debilitating nausea.
When the MRE's had dwindled to nothingness, he set out to catch weaker demons using elaborate tricks or simply coming up behind them when they were alone and plunging a knife through their skull. His luck had lasted four kills now to tide him over till next week though he wondered how long he could keep this up or indeed when his luck would run out.
Time was a sketchy concept in hell. There was never a true night per say as the fires raging all over inferno always kept lights shining in his eyes which fucked up his circadian rhythms. He had experienced shuttle lag before, but this was definitively worse.
In his log, the first entry was devoted to the blind behemoth which he had now dubbed the moniker "Hell Knight" on account of the creature saving his life. The others who nearly tore him to shreds, he called imps, because they rarely got along with each other and scampered around like . . . well, imps.
There were others too. Few of them gave quite a fright quite like the shark blobs with teeth. Another species in this world that defied classification, they made one hell of an introduction, namely with a boulder from above. He still saw them from time to time, but it was his first hint that there was some kind of verifiable ecosystem in here. As it turns out, the boulder that had unceremoniously plunged itself down upon him contained the equivalent to grub, little worm-like pests. Far above was a family of the beasties gorging on the cliff face. It quickly became clear that their behavior was more than guided by instinct. When one sibling started edging out the other , the offended retaliated and the two sped off from their brief feast like fighter jets. They playfully nipped at each other's heels with massive rows of fangs, never making contact and clearly held back. It was odd that play was even a concept among hell's inhabitants. Not much room to grow in such a pressure-cooker environment.
These, among other observations were jotted down hastily in his journal while it remained unspoiled. As he scribbled and doodled corrections to his previous drawings, his eyes were soon drawn away to the tripod-mounted binoculars with a growing sense of unease. Sitting cross-legged, he reached for that forgotten journal of the Dead Elite. Some part of him insisted on prying into the parting notes of this guy but his hands betrayed him. He simply folded them in two and tucked it away in the back of the same journal he knew he would never be able to fill. Might as well piggy-back the stories of two doomed explorers for the convenience of posterity.
His eyes scanned the cave wall and he noticed the white marks he etched in the granite to tick off the days that passed by . . . and a thought occurred to him.
Like everything else that hadn't been spoiled in his life, it was his firm belief that any thought of the family he left behind would paralyze him, a fatal mistake. Now . . . Maybe his family weren't the only ones that deserved to grieve.
He wasn't going to avoid it any longer. He flipped to a fresh, clean-cut page, pen hovering expectantly over the imaginary margins. Where his fingers had deftly drawn embellished representations of the creatures that would torment him, the page now flickered blankly in the whistling breeze. His words were frozen
But he soon foregoed a constructive narrative in favor of the non-nonsensical ramblings implicit in a introspection. He began, noting how he had effectively become a survivor, someone lost in an unforgiving environment and little supplies. He took stock of comparisons to his unique situation between those stranded upon high seas, war camps, or plain old jungle, the likes of which were damn near extinct on Earth.
He wondered what would become this place. There was an eons long dynasty entrenched in this world. Could there be any sort of major upheaval in their cultural history? Before he got dropped into this place, he would have snorted in derision. When do demons have a culture? But when he observed a clearly man-made landmark perched a little way across the cliffs, the question certainly started becoming valid.
Jacob didn't know what to make of the advanced architecture he had seen on one of the few excursions out of his safe house. Nothing he observed in the demons exhibited an intelligence to build temples beyond the most effective way to ensnare and dismember their spoils. That would imply a level of logistics and sentimentality that shouldn't exist in these creatures. His theory on some kind of unspoken universal lines of communication remained unproven but highly fitting. The damn things were attracted to the place of worship as waves migrated it to the place seemingly at random, almost as if for Sunday mass. Demons he had never encountered before dropped in to do the equivalent of praying. From the brief look he had got, they seemed to be doing this activity in complete harmony. Gone was the rampant territorial-ism, unprecedented aggression and infighting that set each of them at odds. Only something more powerful could get thugs and brutes to clean up their act if only for a brief time.
If that was the case, does this intelligence rule through respect or fear?
In his journal, he noted down that it must be the latter. After that, he stayed the hell away from it on return trips. Whatever relic that could possibly be tucked away in there was not worth the risk.
He looked out into the vast expanse, the canyons dotting the crimson horizon, the lightning arcing across the floating spires, and the howls of distance tornadoes embroiled in perpetual flame. Despite the sting of ash and decay whipping around his body, he found himself breathing in deeply. Nobody could deny the view. It wasn't pretty but at the very least, consistently awe-inspiring every time he saw it.
His day having been made, Jacob pried off a chunk of imp and chewed it gratefully. He unwrapped the eye-patch bandanna that covered the remains of his optical nerve and returned to his dwelling in a stable, if not comfortable, silence.
At least the VI wasn't making his life a living hell.