Author's Note: For those who haven't figured out who the main characters are, I'll list them here for your convenience.
First, Neville Longbottom is obviously from Harry Potter. If you didn't know that, please move out from under a rock and join the rest of the world.
Second, Adam Jensen is the protagonist of the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I originally considered using JC Denton from the original Deus Ex, but in the end thought that Adam was both easier to drag in, and probably better remembered by everyone including myself. Also, he's got arm-blades and punches through cement walls, and JC never did that.
Third, Harper Blaine, protagonist of the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson. She's an awesome writer if you love urban fantasy, and her power set is fairly unique. Harper is one of the characters I will probably do more exposition on/about, as several reviewers already have asked what continuity she's from. For those who liked the first person view, I probably won't be doing more, as I find it really hard to write first-person for other people's characters.
Fourth, Saeko Busujima, from the anime Highschool Of The Dead. I learned of it from watching AMV Hell, and for a series that's half fanservice, the characters are really well written. I also considered using Kohta instead, but went with Saeko mostly so that someone in the party would be non-proficient in ranged weaponry.
Fifth, Xander Harris, also obviously from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did consider carefully taking the comics as canon, but since I haven't read all of them, I stuck with dragging him from the last episode of the tv show. And yes, he fired a Black Widow sniper rifle without any augmentation or genetic upgrades, because I figure after seven years of surviving vampires, demons, and Anya, he's just that badass.
Sixth, Blackjack, who is from the fanfic Project Horizons, part of the Fallout: Equestria set. Yes, you read that right, I someone came up with the idea of crossing My Little Pony with a post-nuclear apocalypse, and it is epic. For you bronies out there, Somber gave me the OK.
Lastly, yes, there's a seventh person in this, who Harper encounters here and who sent Neville those messages. I'm not saying who it is until the epilogue, and I plan to smile enigmatically to any reviews who guess wildly at his identity.
- BlueNinja
Finishing his conversation with the unicorn (and some part of his mind couldn't stop saying "How cool is that? I can't wait to tell Luna!"), Neville stopped to take some stock of his surroundings. He had started at the embassy, true, but he'd moved across a couple of kilometers now, Apparating across long distances and walking across short ones. He'd seen no sign of other survivors, other than his communication with the glowing "omni-tool."
He'd seen and faced a dozen bugs and twice that many cyborgs. Whatever malevolent thing was guiding them (the green-lined hologram woman?) had learned quickly that the bugs were quite vulnerable to his magic. The cyborgs were tougher, but the Hexus spell (and trust Hermione to find an anti-Muggle jinx from an American) would knock a group of them dizzy for a few seconds, enough to hit them with something more powerful.
Ducking into a room labeled "C-Sec Security Room 11D", he moved around behind a desk, crouching over a puddle of dried blue-purple blood and fiddling with his omni-tool again. His mysterious benefactor had sent him another message in an obviously disguised voice, telling him to keep going this way. He didn't think that Blackjack was his messenger, but maybe Harper? She seemed to have a better grasp of what was going on than he did.
On a hunch, he tapped his tool over to transmit. "Harper? Quick question." He waited a few seconds, but got only silence. Then the door in the back of the room opened, and three of the metallic-skin skull-face alien-cyborgs lumbered out. "I wish I had Gryffindor's sword again," he complained to himself as he hexed them, then tore two of them apart with Expelliarmus before shooting the third one in the face.
"I told you to get off the line," Harper's voice suddenly came through.
"Yeah, about that," he said as he picked his way over their bodies to grab a box of ammo cylinders and empty it into the belt pouch he'd made from an abandoned tourist t-shirt. "How'd you figure that out?"
There were several more seconds of silence, during which he left the C-Sec room and continued a little further along, stopping near a giant elevator that looked still intact. "It's rather simple," she drawled sarcastically. "Every time I tried talking to anyone, a couple of borgs showed up." He leaned over the slanted clear doors, staring down the shaft, but the elevator, if it was still intact, was far enough down he couldn't see it. On a hunch, he pushed the call button. "Same thing if you start punching in security codes, using the computers, or things like that."
Blinking, he looked at the call button, glowing bright green. "Like summoning an elevator?" he asked lamely.
"Exactly like summoning an elevator, genius." Looking around wildly, Neville dashed for a crashed aircar with darkly tinted windows, jerking open the door and tumbling inside. Through the dark glass, he watched the elevator arrive, a dozen bugs clambering out of it to look around. Smiling, he Apparated the short distance inside it and pushed the button. As the bugs turned around, he waved right before the elevator dropped out of their sight. "Please tell me you didn't just summon an elevator," her voice came back, slightly marred by static.
"Alright, I won't tell you," he replied jovially.
"You're hopeless. And I'm going offline. I need to duck through the past again to get past these cyborgs." Before he could ask what any of that meant, there was a final-sounding click, and his omni-tool now said there were no active receivers within range. He tried cycling through a couple of other communication channels, but the message didn't change.
At the bottom, before the doors slid open to allow three dozen cyborgs to perforate him, he Apparated again, this time to the roof of a warehouse-looking building. As they shambled about in confusion, he took up randomly sniping them with curses, teleporting around to different sheltered positions.
Harper cut off her tool with irritation. Whoever the British man was, he certainly had a pair of brass cojones, but she had doubts about teaming up with someone that reckless. Peeking around the corner one last time at the trio of well-armed giant ape-cyborgs, she slid a few layers backwards, to the next fully stable layer fifty thousand years in the past.
She slid through a crowd made up primarily of brown bug people, occasional splotches of color showing their servant races. Nothing she'd seen yet signified why the major layers seemed to shift backwards every fifty thousand or so years, and while it was a point of interest, it mattered less than making sure the cyborgs didn't install lead-lined air conditioning in her.
Ghosting through the crowd, bits and pieces of conversation struck her, almost intelligible, straining her concentration as she struggled to keep in view both the past she walked in and the present she needed to return to. Thus the shock that came from someone grabbing her by the arm almost threw her back into the present in the midst of the cyborgs. "Not that way," the fur-covered person grated out. "That way, 200 steps." He released her arm, and stepped backwards behind one of the bug people, literally vanishing from sight.
For several seconds, Harper simply stood there, staring at where he went, until one of the bugs stepped through her ghostly body, sending a shiver through her spine. Turning, she counted off the steps, then slipped back into the present. The room was dark, but her omni-tool gave enough light to see the outlines of futuristic medical equipment. Near the door was a red box with a white cross on it, and with some surprise, she popped it open to find several packets labeled "Medi-Gel."
She took several minutes to do a more thorough search, eventually finding a portable doctor's bag filled with bottles and syringes in alien text. Casually dumping it all out on a metal tray, she slipped all the gel packets into the bag and strapped it around her waist. Maybe futuristic medicine wasn't so bad after all. Slipping back into the grey, she moved through the door, dropping back into the present in the hallway outside.
Wherever this was now, it wasn't connected directly to the exposed streets, which she hoped was a good thing. Instead, a long hallway, lined with various offices for medical clinics, travel agencies, tax specialists, and numerous signs in alien script that Harper could only guess at. She moved down the passage in silence, gun at the ready. After a few hundred yards, it ended at a left turn, a glowing sign indicating that the Presidium lay in that direction. At least I'm not lost, she thought grimly.
The last store before the end was a café, and through the hallway door she could see bursts of light and hear sporadic gunfire. Crouching down, she ghosted through the door again, slipping through a store only filled with ghostly echoes, and solidified near the shot-out window, still crouched behind the nearly waist-high sill.
The scene outside was near chaos, as red and green beams of light came flickering across the plaza, only from one direction at a time, but changing origin every few seconds. One of the cyborgs had its back to her, so she took the opportunity to stitch a series of holes up her spine, her shots lost in the cacophony of a dozen other borgs blasting wildly away every time the light-beam appeared.
Each one took out an alien in a different fashion, sometimes ripping them apart, causing components to spontaneously explode, or opening slashes with invisible blades. Harper took out a few more with careful, time-slowed shots, and despite a rush of reinforcements, the battle was over fairly quickly. Harper had just started to rise, when a pop of displaced air echoed, and a blood-spattered man in slacks and a red and gold sweater suddenly appeared, his back not quite to her.
He stood there for a moment, surveying his handiwork, then winced, bending down and clutching one calf. Looking slightly into the Grey, she could see the wounds inflicted on him, none of them serious. But what truly held her view was the small beam of golden light still clutched in his right hand. She rose slowly, hopping over the broken window as he collapsed to the ground.
As she approached, he started to raise what she recognized as a wand, and she held up empty hands as she continued towards him. "Hold still, let me see what I can do," she said soothingly, and he dropped the wand hand and lay back on the street with a groan. "How many times have you been shot?" she asked incredulously, realizing the red on his sweater wasn't supposed to be a bizarre tie-die pattern.
"Too many," he squeezed out painfully, and her hands fumbled at the zipper of her bag as she recognized the voice. "Good timing though, I'll grant you that," he said, then slumped bonelessly the rest of the way, unconscious at last.
Grimly, she pulled out one of the gel packs, skimmed the instructions quickly, then looked at the sweater. "Sorry about this, Neville," she told him, and grabbing at one of the bullet holes, ripped the garment apart before slathering gel over all the holes in his torso. The leg wound was low enough to reach without destroying any more of his clothing, and she took a brief moment to admire his physique. For a teenager, this kid was ripped!
A shot cracked out from down the street, and she yanked out her pistol long enough to gut-shot another cyborg and literally de-arm one of the bugs. He jerked awake at the gunfire inches above his head. "I feel surprisingly good right now," he told her, and hexed a second cyborg, causing half its head to explode. "What do you say we get out of here and find somewhere a little quieter?"
Glancing back at him, she raised an eyebrow, rewarded with a sudden blush. "I hope that wasn't a pick-up line," she said humorously. "I wanted to get to the Presidium, which is that way." She gestured at her destination with her pistol before picking off another bug.
"Sure thing, no problem," he said. "After fighting Death Eaters, these guys are surprisingly easy. Just numerous. Sonorous!" he shouted, a solid wave of sound sending two bugs flying. "Ready?" he inquired, grabbing her arm, but before she could even open her mouth to respond, they vanished, reappearing a hundred feet away inside what had once been a tourist booth.
Blinking, she rubbed her eyes. "Ow. Next time warn me before you turn us into threads of light." Wiping away tears from the sudden shock of seeing everything in the Grey without causing it herself, she looked around. "The elevator's right there?"
He nodded, then rested his wand on the counter edge, firing off a couple of red bursts, causing the bugs to explode. "Yes. Pretty easy to teleport out before the doors open."
Harper shook her head. "I have a better idea. My turn for the weirdness now." She took his arm, took a deep breath, and thrust them backwards in time. Surprisingly, the brown bug people had the elevator in the same place, though otherwise the plaza ahead of them had been turned into what looked like a slave auction. "Quit the gaping, and don't dare let go of me," she warned him, and they moved up the street, joining a group in the elevator.
The past-echo brought them up to the Presidium, and they walked out carefully, her pulling him off to the side to take shelter before they returned to the present and he discovered they were behind what might have been a bulletin board or map. "That was awesome," he whispered, eyes glinting with reflected firelight from a still-burning aircar not too far away. "What was that?"
She took a couple of deep breaths, scanning the area before answering. "It was an … echo of the past, sort of. That was fifty thousand years ago." Rising, she smirked a bit at his stunned impression. "This station has been around for somewhere in the hundreds of millions of years, but," she frowned, pausing her narrative to think through her words carefully as they skulked down the walkway back towards the embassy.
Finally deciding on how to say it, she pulled them aside, back into the C-Sec room. Something was off about it, but Neville didn't really have a chance to figure out what before she continued. "I'm a Greywalker. What we just did, moving through the past, that's greywalking. This station has layers going back into the past, and while I can't be completely sure, all the most recent ones are at fifty thousand year intervals, almost like clockwork."
He moved over to the desk, settling his butt on the edge and frowning in thought. "So," he said slowly, "every fifty thousand years, for the last, what, million?" He took her hand wobble as assent. "And if the last one was fifty thousand years ago, then we just happened to get here right in the middle of repetition eleventy-one?" He stared at the floor for a moment, then his brain finally put together the subtle clues. "Where's the cyborgs I shot an hour ago?"
She stared at him for a moment, then looked at the still-fresh blood stains on the floor, and lunged at him, thrusting them both into the Grey a moment before the desk exploded. Latching onto each other tightly, it took them several minutes of walking through different crowds of aliens in different layers of time before Harper felt confident enough to return them to the present. "That was too damn close," he grumbled, finally wiping sweat from his palms.
"No kidding." She looked up and down the walkway, and out across one of the intact bridges over the waterway that spanned the center of the Presidium. "Ready for more risk? I'd like to message Adam and Blackjack, let them know these things are getting more cunning."
He nodded, then stopped. "Adam?"
"He's some security specialist from Detroit. I only caught part of your conversation, so who's Blackjack?" She fiddled with her omni-tool, and he grinned, holding up his own model.
"She's a unicorn. Really, that's what she told me," he protested to her incredulous look. "I mean, I'm a wizard, and you've got your own magical powers that I've never even heard of before."
"You're a wizard? What, like Gandalf?"
"Who's Gandalf?"
They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension before Harper cracked a smile and shook her head. "Doesn't matter. I'll call Adam, you call Blackjack. They're on different frequencies, so hopefully once we meet up, we can get all of our communications worked out."
Back to back, they made their respective calls, eyes darting constantly as they searched for the threat they knew would be coming.
