World 079: A Tab on Family
"Whoa! It's one of them!" Wagner let out a terrified cry when he found out that his home had been invaded by a shirtless tanned muscle-man. He was used to only seeing himself look like that when he entered STHEREA. Though he did recognize this visitor. "You can relax. I know you are not my enemy anymore, Wagner.." And the visitor, the Legendary Fisherman, recognized him. "Oh? Well you still scared me half to hell! You're lucky that my parents aren't here!"
"Wagner? Fisherman!?" Crescent came into the roo, drawn by the shouting and equally stunned to see one of Echo's friends in attendance. "Yes. Echo sent me to heck up on you personally. I've heard about your run-in with Schwarzwald and Wagnerok. But has anything happened since then?" The fisherman inquired with a vigilant gaze in his eyes. "Since then? No.. Should it have?" An unaware Crescent asked in return. "It could have, but it seems I arrived on time. It seems Static has abandoned his tower to perform his own strikes against people close to us.. That is why I cam here to give you these." The Fisherman handed them a half dozen empty skill cards. "There is nothing on it." Crescent pointed out the obvious. "Not yet. These are delayed skills made by Echo herself. Just holding one of them should keep a whole group of people safe from Static's influence. If you give these your family, he wont be able to attack them. Cierze and Olympia are out there making sure these get spread around as well."
"Attacked? You mean he could be attacking my mother or father? I have to warn them!" Wagner loudly rejoined the conversation. "Wagner, you do not even know where they are right now. Please do not get too excited, you still have to recover.." Crescent said, as it had only been a few hours since he managed to get up out of his bed. "I feel fine, Aurora. But this is not good. Okay maybe Static doesn't hate me enough to make me his next target, but there is a chance! ...And there is a chance he could attack your family too!" Wagner tried to grab some of the blank skill cards, but Crescent took all but one for herself. "Then let me take care of it. I will visit them.. And then.." She did sound happy to see that he had gotten this much energy back already. "You're not going to come back for a while.. aren't you?" Because it meant he could be left alone. "For now. There are things I still have to do..." She had that look that she'd used so rarely before all of this began: a look of determination. "I get it. Just keep in touch, okay?"
"Of course." Crescent nodded and turned to the Fisherman. "We can go now." The two teleported away with various destinations in mind.
...
"Tycho, who is this? What are you doing? You cannot be in here!" One of the researchers yelled as the flame-haired duelist stormed through their hallways. "We have every right to be here! You thought I was distracted eh? Trying to sneak things past us?" He'd been having a strange feeling in his stomach for some time now, which led him to revisit the network testing facility. After all he had no loved ones left to warn or protect. And neither did Nakana Shintaro, not anymore.
"He's still here. Isn't he?! The man who was in contact with my family." The daughter spoke to the scientist next, with a colder demanding tone. Since both her own home and the Exeter HQ locations were bereft of critical information, one could only get his next lead from the mouth of he who had been working with the Shintaros: Mr. Renner. And Tycho led her straight to him. "He is still recovering!" He'd been here ever since he escaped Static's nightmare, and now he finally woke up. He could start answering questions. "If he can talk, then that's all we need." The duelists ignored the man and barged into the medical ward.. spotting him lying on an emergency bed. "There you are."
"Tycho.. Rivers? And.." Renner looked tired and stressed, but Tycho would not let a few symptoms like that get in his way. "Recognize me? Good. I am sure you recognize her as well?" Tycho refrained from getting up close and personal, if only because of the enforcers in the room with Renner. "Her? Should I know her? What is going on?" Renner seemed intimidated regardless. "You should. She is the daughter of the people you were in direct communication with them, or with someone from their organization! You told them about us, about Echo and those Items! You admitted it!" Tycho snapped back with increasing fury. "Items? I honestly have no idea what you mean. I..I've forgotten everything that transpired in the last few days. Maybe the entity took them from me. It's all a haze.." He whimpered. "Amnesia? How convenient!" Tycho growled.
"Easy now. It is possible he is telling the truth." One of the other scientists asserted. After all both Static and Continuum had demonstrated the ability to alter a persons memories. "Maybe he is.. maybe he isn't. I think I know someone that could jog his memory." Nakana smiled and made Renner feel a little nervous. "Jog? How?" He looked around the room to avoid her gaze. "My friend here suffered from the same condition. But the lady Echo restored his memories. If you truly forgot, we could have her examine you as well." Nakana pointed towards Zanbatou, and gave him a lie. The bodyguard still had not regained his past self. But Nakana still believed that he would come back to her eventually. And he did not need to know that. "I.." Because he was faking his condition, and she could tell from just one look at him. He had no spine left, and caved in after a simple bluff. "I will tell you.."
...
"Mom! Dad! Are you two alright?" Charles teleported into the living room without thinking, with Cherry Anise at his side. He immediately saw Blanche waiting for him there along with his parents. "Oh thank god." He could finally breathe easy. Though the same could not be said for his mother. "Charles. Please do not so suddenly appear in the room like that!" She gasped for air. "The situation must truly be serious." His father concluded, seeming pretty calm as usual. Their son rarely referred to them with anything other than their first names, so he could tell something got him spooked. "Is this Static that dangerous?"
"Static? You told them about him?" Charles turned to Blanche. "Yeah, I gave them the cliffnotes. I got here pretty fast once I found Echo."
"Yes she was very helpful. You never told me you were friends with someone famous, Charles. And who is this, another friend of yours? You're getting popular!" Arthur noticed Cherry and reacted with a little too much excitement. "The least you can do is introduce her to us. Hello miss, would you like something to drink?" Gwen greeted her warmly as well. "Mom, dad. Please, not now." Charles groaned while Cherry Anise tried to hold herself back from rolling her eyes. Situations like these just reminded her too much of her own sappy family life.
"Blanche, are you sure nothing happened while we were gone?" He inquired as he finally used the moment to sit down. "Yup. It was all boring. Maybe Static decided to bother someone else? Though I hope not, of course. How about you. How did things end up with Primrose?" She assumed the answer would be positive, since Charles made it here in one piece. "I saved her.. but she was still asleep afterwards. We took her to a nearby ambulance and left before anyone could ask me any questions." He explained, leaving out the part where people were blaming him for starting the fire. "Miss Primrose? Did something happen to her? Why, she was such a nice lady." Arthur still got concerned with what he did hear. "It's something to do with why we are here. Nobody got hurt." Charles swore. Though he knew that it had been sheer luck that the fire did not do anything more than property damage.
"Hey uhm.. hate to interrupt. But I am getting a call from the oldtimer here. We should probably take it." Cherry coughed and revealed her blinking dueldisk. "Oldtimer? You mean V? Maybe something is the matter with Asterisk?!" Charles' own dueldisk blinked too. This looked urgent. "Asterisk? No I don't think so. He's sending this message to all of us." The trickstar duelist explained. "I see. Mom, dad.. I am going to have to take this call, I will be right back." Charles excused himself and headed into the next room.
"Of course dear." Gwen smiled. It felt nice to see him have so many friends.
Charles linked the call on his dueldisk, which created holograms of himself, Cherry and Blanche in Therese's office and holograms of everyone there inside his room. The champions, Vigionair and Therese were already there, Echo and her companions joined the call later and Hydra managed to arrive at the last second using voice-chat only. "Are there more coming?" V impatiently asked, many noticing the panicked expression on his already normally stressed out face. "Scura's with her family and could not join us, Tycho and Himiko are discussing their own affairs. and Bionis has gone off the grid. This is it." Therese reported back. "Never mind them. You will have to fill in everyone else along the way because this is information that simply cannot wait." Vigionaire slammed a suitcase on the table. The case opened up and created a scaled down projection of the Tower Beyond.
"Whoa! Did you just turn your suitcase into a hologram projector?" Cierze gasped. To her eyes it looked as real as the actual location, just tinier. "What? This? This is just a conversion of some physical dueldisk technology with some of STHEREA's enhancers added to the projection. That's hardly the most amazing thing one can do in this bizarre new situation we find ourselves in." With more time, who knows what Vigionair could have invented or discovered. But he did not have time to get creative. "The case is not what I wanted to show off. This place is; this tower of Static. Before my equipment could not get a grip on the thing, as if it did not exist. But now that it's anchored itself in the real world, I have figured out its purpose.. The tower beyond is what's keeping the two worlds together. But more importantly, it is the source of Static's power!"
"The source?" Charles flinched. That was news of critical importance indeed. "The tower? How does that work?" Mephistar sounded a little more skeptical. "I do not know exactly. But it is a fact that every Legacy Item Static collected had its power fused with the tower. And the seventh item was the thing that allowed him to bring his power into our world. Well to be more concise, it allowed thought to have an effect on matter." The hologram of the tower revealed a flow of energy that spread across the world around it like sonic waves. "No matter where the tower stands, these same energy peaks are detected. My theory is that the Static you have seen so far is just an extention of his will: both the faceless entity and the being that's taken over Adami's avatar. The Beyond is his true form, his core."
"The beyond? The tower? But I thought... he was like me?" Echo understood what Vigionair wanted to say, but struggled to comprehend why. "He is nothing like you, dear Echo." Midsummer took this chance to help her out. "Think about it, think about how you were created. STHEREA gave life to you because it gave life to the first need and desire a human mind experiences... companionship. It is only natural for you to have become as sweet and beautiful as you are." He seemed blissfully unaware of how much his words disturbed those around him, and not everyone could put up with it. "You do not get to talk to her that way, Midsummer. How could you possibly know all of that to begin with?" The Fisherman glared at the masked man. "Fisher, please. You do not have to be like this.." The fact that he came across as envious stunned Echo a little. "Indeed. For that is what Static would want. For him it makes sense that he would start not as a friendly face, but as a platform for conflict. His tower began as a stadium for dueling to seed conflict. That is all he cared about, then and now."
"That.. reminds me." Charles suddenly remembered a fact he wished he'd thought about sooner. "When I tried to stop Static from completing the ritual, I phased into the subconscious layer of the tower. I saw what it looked like on the inside, and I saw something at the heart of it." He poked his finger at the tower projection. "Somewhere around here. What do you think that could be, the powersource? Does that mean there is a way to cut Static off from that source?" Destroying the tower seemed to what was necessary to return STHEREA to just a virtual state. "Hm. my scans of the physical tower came back with no structural weaknesses. So I do not know what it could be." Vigionaire began to say...
"I think Charles is right." And Scarlet Rose interrupted. "Oh hello V. I see you modeled your own layout of the tower. It could use some work." She smiled as she simply walked in through the projection. "What do you...? What do you know?" Vigionaire asked, trying his best to set his personal frustrations aside for the greater good. "What my lesser half also knows. Perhaps for reasons of curiosity, it appears that she ran her own studies into the nature of the Tower Beyond after we split up. She even determined that there had to be a core to the overall structure. I am not saying her way of analysis is in any way superior to yours, but since my former lab is now connected with that location she does have a better studying position. Perhaps she was trying to study its weaknesses and report about them back to Static. But she strangely left no comments about it in the data I stole. Either way, thanks to Charles' testimony, we can now verify her hypothesis. If we reach that level physically, we should be able to pinpoint the exact coordinates within the subconscious layer as well."
"So it's like a puzzle? You pull out that one piece and it all comes tumbling down?" Heleil recapped for the benefit of herself and her fellow champions. "Sounds good to me! When can we begin?" Acrates loudly agreed.
"I would say the sooner the better." Therese spoke up. "Because we are reaching a crisis point. Our cover story of a malfunctioning network is no longer being bought by the public. More and more duelists keep causing acts of minor or major destruction. And the attack Khan led on the military base has put every government on edge. They've issued us an ultimatum now. If we, Exeter, do not fix the problems of STHEREA within the next 12 hours... Then they will launch an all out aerial assault on the island and the tower. And sadly, the only one we can turn to for help are you." Therese felt ashamed to admit it. The companies were all helpless in the face of Static's wrath. "Twelve hours? We.. we should be able to pull that of." Charles claimed. "If Static is distracted right now, this may be our best chance to attack the tower. Though I doubt he left his tower unguarded. He could have left a dozen illusions behind, a hundred followers and a thousand ADIs." It would not be easy.
"Ha. Do you think I would spend my time analyzing the dangers without also coming up with measures against them?" Vigionaire let out a cocky chuckle and pressed a few keys on his dueldisk. "Huh? What was.." The very next second every duelist within the room received a shot of energy from temporary strings of light. "Nothing much, I simply took the liberty of mass-copying my vision filter software to each of your systems. It's been very effective against the power of the Lance so far, and it should also help you navigate that confusing subconscious layer better. I've also created a rudimentary communication network and various anti ADI algoritms that should slow down even the ones that are controlled by the Crown, and emergency escape routines to avoid being paralyzed by the Armor. That would leave us to deal with the Shield and it's dimension twisting abilities. For that I would suggest that one of us stays behind to monitor our progress on this map.. And since she seems to favor your layout over mine, I would nominate Scarlet Rose for that role." He concluded with a slightly petty tone. Scarlet Rose managed to laugh nonetheless. "Hee. I would have suggested the same thing, V."
"Man. V thinks of everything." Blanche let out a cry of awe as she checked out all the applications added to her dueldisk. "Thank you. I could have gone on longer had there been more time. But we do not, we should go as soon as we have a proper attack plan. We cannot have this fall apart like our last incursion."
"No we do not. Though I did appreciate it." Hydra spoke up, since the last incursion happened for his benefit. He knew a lot more rode on this one... "I have my own suggestion however, which I do not expect will get much resistance. I say Midsummer Nightmare stays behind as well." Which is why wanted to make sure the right people were in on it. "Midsummer? But why?" Only Echo seemed to be willing to speak up on his behalf. "Because he betrayed us once before!? I see no reason to trust him now, not even after everything he has done so far." Hydra cast his glare at the masked duelist in the corner of the office, where he'd been standing in eerie silence for some time. Charles and Mephistar shared his opinion and expression. Midsummer Nightmare could only laugh at their open animosity. "You would part me from Echo now? You need her for this mission. But have you even asked her if she wants to go?"
"Please do not... I don't like it when you fight." Echo interjected with some careful phrasing. "I know what they want me to do, Midsummer. I know they need my voice, they need me to stop anyone who can be stopped. And I also know now that I can.. fight... those that cannot be stopped. I am ready to do all of this." It gave her no joy, but her reluctance to be proactive was another factor that hurt their previous attack on the Beyond. "Your voice is not even the most beautiful thing about you, miss Echo." Midsummer claimed with his softspoken voice. "I.. thank you for saying that, Midsummer. And I really do not want to say no to you, or to anyone else either. But maybe they are right, maybe it would be better if you stayed behind. I cannot make people see you the way I do, and Static would turn those feelings into something worse." Feelings of hatred were what he wanted, and she did not those to make their next mission more dangerous. "You have the final say as always, lady Echo. If you say you want me to stay, I will." The masked man bowed and gave in.
"Okay. Do we have that all settled? Good, now we only have one remaining issue to discuss! How will we pin the tower down. If Static smells danger, he could use the Ark to retreat to any part of the world. And it would take us forever to find him. We need to ensure that he still is distracted." Vigionair presented the problem. "We should give him what he wants.." Charles knew a solution. "What?" V did not like the sound of that. "I say, we use me as bait."
...
The family home of Adami did not usually see a lot of unusual action, it was just one of many homes within the busy city district. But today would be different. It already had been, due to all the incoming and departing duelists. But even when it seemed like Gwen and Arthur had been left alone.. they attracted the strange and odd. Two figures descended upon the house with the force of monsters. A blast of ice knocked open the front door and sent cold winds into the building that froze over the walls and floor. "Ah! They're here!" Both Gwen and Arthur cowered in fear as the attacker marched into the living room. "It cannot be!" They stared at the vision of their own son's avatar: Static Void. "Hello, mom and dad. I have come for you." He smiled wickedly and began to raise his hand.
"And I have waited!" Only for the veil to drop. 'Arthur' shed his disguise and revealed himself. "Static! I challenge you to a duel!" He, Charles Adami, activated his dueldisk. "Charles.." Static's smile disappeared. "You tricked me." He looked at 'Gwen' next, who turned herself back into Cherry Anise. "Yes, we did. Static. You wont be attacking my friends or family this time!" The bait worked. Thanks to Vigionaire's projections he could turn himself and Cherry into Static's intended targets, while Blanche took his mom and dad as far away from this place as possible. And now he could duel Static while everyone else invaded the tower beyond. "You must think you're very clever, Charles." Static laughed.
"What's so funny pal?" Cherry sneered at him. "Oh. Just the fact that we both had the same idea." Static Void stopped laughing and raised the world lance above his head, causing himself to disappear. "What! He was an illusion all along? Then.." Charles did not understand. He'd definitely connected with someone when he demanded his duel, and something did break in. But the one responsible was not Static...
As soon as he disappeared, two new figures appeared in his place. The real duelists who burst into his home. "Hello." One was a tall white-haired man dressed up in monster fur and deep blue winter clothes. "We meet again. It has been so long." The other was a blonde woman who wore silver armor and had archangel wings coming out of her back. "It's you?" Cherry did recognize them. Leaving Charles to stand around even more confused.
"Well at least you remembered us.. What is your excuse, Void?" The man turned his scowl towards Charles. "That is quite alright. We hardly recognized him as well. He has changed his appearance since then after all, shed his virtuous shell for his true sinful mortal core." The woman insulted him even further. "Wait.. do I know you?" This pair clearly knew his former self. "Of course, we were there too. We were all invited by Static, Void. No wait, you're calling yourself Charles now, aren't you? Well either way you're not like us anymore." The man laughed loudly. "Yes, we are still the chosen. I called myself Sefirot, the Gigasavior. And my partner here is Cryomatic. Do those names mean anything to you?" The woman gave him one more chance. "! You.." And everything finally fell into place: they were the first duelists who lost Static's game... "How is this possible?"
"We could ask her the same thing!" Cryomatic pointed at Cherry Anise. "You were supposed to have suffered the same fate as us, but you just survived because you had betrayed us from the start!" They were not the only early victims of the Crown, Cherry experienced a 'destructive defeat' around that time as well. Except due to her alignment with Millennium, she could stay inside STHEREA without an official avatar. "Hey. I had nothing to do with what happened to you! Heck, if I remember correctly you were defeated by Imperius! Why don't you go take it out on him instead?"
"Imperius is not here. Static only brought us back from the edge of purgatory. Our minds wandered the voids of the subconscious realm ever since our defeat." Savior began to explain, shocking Charles. "Ever since? But how! Skylander came back too!" He'd seen some duelists recover faster than that. "Oh, so you would remember him? Perhaps that is why he healed sooner in the first place. Did you ever stop to think about that? About us? Every soul in this world gains power from other souls. But we fall so soon, we never had a chance. Not until Static gave us one. Now we are like the others he chose, free from our mortal weakness and moral limits. Now all we need is him, and we will protect him with out life." Gigasavior activated her dueldisk, as did Cryomatic. "You know what, I changed my mind. I was going to challenge her. But I want to destroy Charles too!" Cherry at least did the bare minimum of not forgetting their faces. "He challenged me. And he should be mine. Seeing him be so ignorant of our turmoil fills me with indignation. I have to punish him!" Gigasavior hissed.
"Two to hate one? That does not seem very fair to me." Hydra voice suddenly hovered around the four duelists. "You? The unseen one!" GigaSavior knew of no other duelist that could turn invisible like this. "Cherry,.. find V and Echo. The bait may have failed, but Static still had to be here somewhere for the illusion to have worked. I will support Charles. If they have some hatred to express, they can take it out on me as well. I 'd forgotten about them too after all.."
(To Be Continued in World 080: Conditions for Functional Living)