Incursion Thirty - "The Storm Seed, Part One"
Within the Black Spike, Lady Oblivion reclined upon a chaise longue. She stared up at the ceiling, and sighed.
No-one melted from the wall, saw she was unhappy and dropped to his knees by her side. "What is it, what's wrong?"
"This whole tower you built me. It's … great, but..." She swung her legs down and smoothed out her skirt. "It's more of a home than a base of operations."
"This is all we will ever need."
"Is it? It's hardly going to impress anyone, and it has next to no provisions for coordinating our attack on the humans."
He stood. The frown plastered across his face wrinkled the bandages across his eyes. "You hold too tightly to your former life, my love."
"And you forget yours!" She snapped.
"Oh?" He backed toward the door and reached out to open it. "I have a new present for you."
"Another?" Lady Oblivion rested her head in her hands, her long claw-like nails digging into her scalp.
"This one, you will like."
No-one flung the door open.
There stood the man who had once been General Bryant.
Upon his forehead was a gaping chasm of black, like a third eye. Strapped to the left of his face similar to an eyepatch were fresh gauze bandages. Though the mutation had yet to spread, his already substantially trained shoulder muscles had blown out of all proportion giving him the hunch of silver back gorilla. While he still wore his dress jacket, exposed parts of his person were covered in a shiny black carapace.
Her mouth fell open. "General?"
The mutilated Bryant tried to focus on Lady Oblivion. He seemed to be struggling.
"He's currently rather a work in progress, my dear." No-one showed Bryant into the room. "Try not to break him."
Oblivion stood and approached the man she'd once looked up to in a past life. She circled him, studying his greatly improved physique. She looked him in the eye. "Do you recognise me, General?"
He didn't speak but he locked eyes with her. His frown said it all, as though he wanted to shout at her for something but couldn't find the words.
"Aw, you do, don't you." She placed her hand on her heart. "Though I've probably changed since you knew me as poor little Celeste Hennings."
"I … have changed … to," Bryant grunted with considerable effort.
Lady Oblivion turned to No-one. "Did you have to remove his personality?"
"It was getting in the way."
"Well I hope he gave you plenty of grief for your trouble," she sneered, and returned to her chaise longue, letting her gaze drift back to the ceiling.
"My dear... I mean him to be the Reincarnation."
Her eyes snapped back to him. Bryant either didn't want to move, couldn't, or existed on a different wavelength to them. "Is that wise, No-one?"
"Why not?" he replied. "What better, more ironic way to end the humans is there?"
"I hope you know what you're doing."
He produced a small tile-like object and held it up for her to see. "Of course I do, and this unassuming little thing is precisely why it won't fail. We have a former magi in our midsts." He gestured to Bryant. "... and we have the original source of the darkness clan's power, their rune. Stripped from the body of an ancient magi shadow warrior.
"We will birth the perfect combination of the Blackness and the Darkness, and turn their own power against them."
o0o
While Maria had stayed at the Barricades outside the Black Spike in order to run operations from there, the others returned to their mountain HQ.
Just because they had an ongoing situation, that didn't mean they could neglect their tasks. StratCom was still the front line for issues of this type. No-one giving them a week of breathing room certainly didn't preclude any other parties not looking to attack during the meantime. If it happened, the military would be ready for it.
After three days (and coincidentally no attacks) it became painfully clear that nobody could answer No-one's ultimatum in good conscience, and they split to make use of the seven day armistice.
The obvious answer was to fight to the last and damn the consequences. The other option, to surrender and bide their time until they could form an effective resistance against the Black Water overlords, was looking more and more sensible as time passed. Just because No-one thought of the Cross Rangers as the front line in this war, did that give them the right to choose the future course of humanity?
The StratCom Reliefsooncaught wind of the predicament, and it didn't take the media at large too long to jump on the bandwagon (running stories like The gods sitting pretty behind their weaponry would choose to doom us all, or What about us, the majority?).
Robert was surprised it took that long.
Walking into town from his parent's house, after picking their brains for an answer, it became apparent that he was being followed.
He spun, expecting to find a reporter, and came face to face with young girl with a grossly blown out of proportion image of his morphed face front and centre on her t-shirt. Lord knows what she's got on the back.
"Can I help you?" he asked with some trepidation.
"Oh, no…" The teenager giggled like some parody of a parody of the media's representation of a fangirl. "I'm just happy to be near you. Pleased in fact."
"Okay…" Robert found it took a more than moment to speak. "Well, I've got a lot of things on my plate right now at... work… and I need to be getting on. You understand, right?"
"Sure, sure. I understand." She grinned.
"Good. Great."
Robert continued on his way, wondering how they'd ever managed to gain fandom and whether they should have made more effort to hide their faces in public.
Naturally the girl continued tailing him. Without looking at her, he spoke, "Are you seriously going to keep this up?"
With no reply forthcoming, he did stop and turn to her again. She merely smiled. Lovestruck is the word. What he really wanted was to tell her to go away, but he couldn't bring himself to break her obviously hyperbole ridden opinion of him. She was a supporter, and the way the media was going on they needed all the support they could muster.
Nevertheless…
"I'm sorry, I get it I do, but I really do mean it when I say the fate of the world rests on me being able to do my job."
"I know." She swooned dramatically and fell against him. "And I think that's just so awesome. An ordinary guy from Steele City becomes a superhero and puts his life on the line for all of us normals. It's like a love story or something."
He flinched at her touch. "I don't think that's what a love story is…"
She continued as though he'd not said a thing. "I knew I recognised you too. You're totes the Red Ranger. You're my absolute favourite." She dug into her t-shirt and pulled a pen from a place Robert was trying his darndest to ignore. "Would you sign me? It would mean a lot to me and my friends."
"Sign you where?" He raised an eyebrow, knowing he sure as hell didn't want that answered.
The fangirl blushed the colour of sunburn and fiddled with her neckline. "Any where you'd like, of course, anywhere at all."
Fearing she might expose herself in public - he wouldn't have put it passed her - he grabbed the marker from her. "How about the t-shirt? Yeah?"
"Sure…" she said, adding, "Just make it out to Leah and the girls."
He could tell she was disappointed, but what else could he do? As quick as he could he signed the shirt as far away from her chest and the image of his face as possible, and pulled away. "There. Glad to met someone who appreciates what we do."
Robert made a decision then to walk away, no matter what the fangirl pulled next. He hadn't lied to her, he really was glad that not everyone thought they were out to end humanity, but when it came in a swooning, overly forward, and presumptuous package like that, he didn't want to let it go any further.
Whilst she did still follow him, babbling something about how perfect he was no less, she only made it to the end of the street before giving up.
At least, she's clever enough to not follow me into destruction…
At some point, he feared, he'd be the one to make a tough decision. The one who'd have the death of society on his bloody hands or the adoration of millions.
And he didn't know if he wanted either.
o0o
Back at base, he found Ken and Brad in the ready room (studying of all things).
"You'll never guess what just happened to me," he said, proceeding to describe the entire encounter.
After a short pause, Brad hung his head. "How come you get all the girls? That's so not fair."
Ken shook his head. "Seriously? The way things are now, and that's the thing you take from the story?"
"Some attention, of the female kind, would be nice... That's all I'm saying."
Though so far the fangirl only had him worrying, Robert gave in and broke out in heaving laughter. Brad wasn't wrong. There were worse things than having a girl pretend to faint on you or ask to have parts of her anatomy signed, and he could think of two waiting for them in the Black Spike.
Ken joined shortly, leaving Brad somewhat staggered. "I… uh…"
In the end, he smiled and tried to make believe he hadn't just made his best friends, his brothers in a different kind of blood, laugh at his expense.
Robert sighed. He hadn't laughed like that for a good long time. "Just nobody tell Allison okay?"
"Oh, she'd totally take that the wrong way," said Ken, dropping his sister right in the thick of it.
o0o
A large space had been cleared at the very centre of the Black Spike. Here, No-one and Oblivion gathered, along with the man who used to General Bryant. Face down on the floor, with arcane runes and scripture scratched into Black Water with painstaking precision, was the stolen darkness rune.
While No-one and Oblivion stood outside the spread of ritualistic scrawlings, Bryant stood within, his face blank, his one good eye sunken and grey.
"Seed of creation, oncoming storm, hear us," they chanted. "Flow to this place, flow through our offerings. Take them up and be reborn within them."
The etchings begun to glow with an unholy force drawn from afar. Bryant froze, a new life snaked its way through him, breathing energy into his wrecked body and mind. Slowly and definitively his partial black carapace begun to seethe and crawl further across his skin. He shed his jacket, the last remaining vestige of his time in the army
"Exist!" insisted No-one.
A streaming jet of purple-tinged Black Water surged out of the darkness rune at Bryant's feet and engulfed him. This was the ichor of the Source. A true undiluted Black Water. Where even the tiniest amount splashed upon No-one and Oblivion it sizzled and seared, twisting their skin up into blisters and whorls that eventually broke to reveal spikes and quills and vestigial eyes and all manner of fresh mutations.
The undiluted Blackness broke and seeped into the ceiling, changing the Black Spike as it had changed them. It made them stronger.
Where once had stood a man, albeit a twisted version of humanity, now stood a being nobody could deny was alien.
A humanoid beetle-looking alien. Smooth black exoskeletal skin that neither reflected light nor gave out darkness. A single horn. Hulking arms etched with both the vile runes that had covered the floor and the magi runes of the darkness clan. A second rune, the rune of wind and air, inscribed itself across the creature's forehead as they watched.
"General…" Lady Oblivion muttered.