Disclaimer: Transformers Prime and the Monster Hunter franchise do not belong to me. I only own the storyline and my OCs.
Normal: "..."
Machine Speaking: "..."
Flashback/Others Talking Over a Comlink: "..."
Important Points/ Significant: "..."
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The transport re-entered the base through one of the enormous tunnels designed to fit something as big as an Elder Dragon.
It touched down on the reinforced landing platform, rolling into one of the unloading bays.
This particular bay was where material from low-class monsters were registered. They would then be shipped to separate processing facilities, where all traces of the virus would be removed. The materials would then be put up for sale, or distributed as rewards.
Jack, while tightly gripping his harness, curiously peered out of the window, along with the rest of the recruits. This was the first time they had docked at one of these stations, so they were bound to be a little curious.
"The transport has come to a complete stop, please deactivate any transport safety equipment, and exit the transport."
The ship rolled to a stop, engines shutting down, and air-locks depressurizing. Jack unbuckled his harness, hopping out of the seat. He pulled his weapons out of the slots, strapping them back to his sides. He was about to head over to where the agent was, before his dad stopped him.
"Hang on their kiddo," James flipped Jack's faceplate up and held his hand out, "I think you forgot something."
There was a chipped blue and orange scale in his hand. Jack took it, examining it. He realized it was one of the scales that were cut off of the Velocidrome during their fight. It was chipped, with blue banding over an orange undertone.
"Thanks Dad!" Jack smiled at James. James chuckled.
"It's tradition to keep a scale of every monster you face. That way, they are never forgotten."
Jack smiled, clutching the scale and ran to where the recruits were bunched around the agent. The agent began announcing wha they were to do next.
"This was your placement test. As per the guidelines of your very first official quest, completion grants you access to any ONE piece or set of materials from ANY monster. Check your arm-screens for more information. Your results will be posted in TWO WEEKS. Do not forget, or you WILL. BE. STUCK. WITHOUT. A. TEAM. It has happened before, and YES, you WILL have to complete group assignments BY YOURSELF. Dissmissed."
Jack stood there for a while, dazed. Miko yelling in his ear brought him out of it.
"Dude! We get to pick material from ANYTHING WE WANT! Isn't this great?"
Jack nodded, and looked at his arm-screen. It flickered to the market page, listing various horns and scales at different prices. He pulled up his current balance, the one-piece/set coupon showing. The coupon was for the E.L.D.E.R market only, not applying for any of the private merchants. Credits were normally used for buying parts, but most people prefer to buy from private merchants, or would hunt diseased monsters themselves to get the needed materials.
He dropped his arm, letting the screen flicker off. It was interesting, but could wait until he took a shower. He headed back to the barrack area where all of the recruits, people twelve years and above, destined to become hunters, lived.
He entered the main living area through a hallway that led from the landing platform, and exiting onto another equally large platform. There were couches everywhere, with recruits happily chattering amongst themselves, as well as a huge, silver Monoblos emblem decorating the floor. There were four tunnels leading out from the platform, two leading into the individual rooms, and one to the base's elevator ring.
His room was in the boy's wing, located in the left of the living area. He walked through the tunnel leading to the wing, ending up at the intersection of two hallways, resembling the layout of a hotel.
He eventually reached his room, and the silver room code 'RB-57-T04' was embossed on his door. It was located at the next bend in the hallway, and was one of the corner rooms. These doors had lights lining them, his currently a vibrant red. On the door was a fingerprint scanner, replacing the traditional doorknob. He pressed a finger on it, and the door slid up, lights turning green, to reveal a moderately sized room, with a closet and a bathroom with a shower stall.
He walked in, taking off his boots while the door closed behind him. As he headed to his closet in search of his standard uniform, he began thinking about the different choices of materials he could get
Materials were used to craft and upgrade weapons. Jack already knew what material he wanted to get. Stripping down his recruit armor and turning on the water, Jack though back to his twelfth birthday.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-flashback-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack ripped open his second birthday gift. His first had been a full-size basic armor set for Nyre, when he was big enough to fight by his side.
When he opened up the box, he found a few items that he had never seen before. According to his parents, they had found them on hunts and missions, but could never ID them. They also couldn't find the monster they came from, so it was safe to assume that they were still out there somewhere, hiding in the shadows.
They assured him that these monster parts were virus free, for only the items that an infected monster's blood touches are dangerous.
Two of them looked like scales, but made of glass. Touching them, he felt a sensation similar to that, of touching something of extreme cold or heat. They were bigger than both his hands combined, with jagged edges. They had been found half buried in a glacier, and the only reason Jack's parents had them was because James smacked into the glacier they were in and looked up.
Another item was a piece of hide, half his size. It was torn up at the ends, though it was generally intact. The hide was covered in millions of tiny, gleaming silver scales. Jack ran his hand down it, suprised to find that it was as smooth as silk. This one was buried in mountian top, only unearthed when the wyvern Jack's parents were fighting gouged it out.
The next few items were the most intriguing. They were quill-like objects that were as long as his forearms. Their color was charcoal black, with veins of glowing red. They almost resembled mini elongated long swords in shape, with one serrated and sharpened edge and one smooth edge. They were just laying in a cave, covered with silt and dust from age.
The next two items were very strange. They looked like two pieces of glowing, sky-blue quartz. They were found in a monster hoard, so Jack's parents were even more puzzled about its origins than the rest. They were cold to the touch, and were each about the size of a silver dollar. If he looked closely at them, he could just make out the silhouette of a dragon.
There were two objects left in the box. They looked like chipped, straight horns, each one being the length oh his palm. Where the pointy ends of the horns used to be, were cracked edges. The horns, though hollow, were dense, as if made of some kind of metal. These were found in a ravine, in a place commonly scorched by lightning.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-flashback end-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
During his free time, Jack would experiment with the materials, slowly deducing that all of them were super durable, and that the edges of the scales and the quills were very sharp.
He also noticed that, if he put the hide on something with high heat, like right over a flame, and put the crystal near it, the hide would begin to excrete reddish black particles. They weren't dangerous, Jack learned by not wearing any safety gear, but they do seem to boost the hardness of the hide.
The clear scales also seemed to become sharper when exposed to the particles, while the quills seemed to ooze energy when exposed. He still wasn't quite sure what the crystals did, though they did seem to amplify the effect of the hide.
The horns weren't all that special, and besides being extremely sturdy, Jack couldn't make them do anything special, until he touched them to a battery. The horns were instantly electrified, white flashes of power visibly flowing across their lengths.
Jack had slowly but surely developed a dual blade design that would use all of these materials to their fullest potential. All he needed was a main source of energy, which could only come from an Elder Dragon, or an extremely powerful Mutant.
Sitting in the recruit's general living area after a fresh shower, Jack went back to the market page on his arm-screen, searching for the right type of dragon. It needed to have an obvious source of power that was solid, like a bone. He was mainly looking for a horn, the size didn't matter to him.
Crafting weapons from monster parts works quite differently than crafting normal weapons. The materials used are normally too tough to be cut by normal means. This means that the weapons have to be made in a single go. In order for Jack to power his intended weapons, holes must be drilled into the blades to fit the power source. If the holes do not fit the powersource perfectly, then the space in between them would cause the weapon to loose power, becoming weaker than it was supposed to be.
Jack soon found a set of four Elder Dragon horn shards, with the power residing in the bones still intact. Two were small spirals of a gleaming red horn, the size of his pinky, while the other two were slightly larger spirals of dark blue horn, slightly glowing in power.
The two spiral types could be interlocked to form a double helix, thus maximizing the surface area which touched the base materials. The larger the touching area is, the more powerful the unleashed ability.
Luckily for Jack, these four horn spirals had the neccessary elemental affinities, and were purchasable by the coupon. He was about to make his selection before Miko plopped down next to him, looked at his screen, and pronounced him an idiot.
"Are you CRAZY? You get this ONE, GOLDEN opportunity to pick practically anything in the E.L.D.E.R market and you pick FOUR FLIPPING PIECES OF BONE THE SIZE OF MY FINGERS?"
Miko did have a point. To an outsider, it did look as if picking four bone shards, even if they had massive amounts of energy, was a waste of a coupon.
"Come on Miko, they're full of power. Where else am I supposed to find a deal like this?"
Miko shrugged, responding "Well, I think you should go through all of your options first. I guarantee you that no one will choose your precious horns, so at least look for something a little bigger. Besides, I think everyone's done choosing now." Miko gestured around the room.
Jack took a look around, noting how everyone their age was asking each other what they had picked.
"Ok," Jack reluctantly agreed, "I'll hold off on choosing until I look around a little more." He was mostly agreeing because he know that Miko wouldn't leave him alone until he did.
He saved the page with his previous selection, and flipped back to the market page. In the filter, he typed in the words 'coupon,' 'horn,' 'dragon,' and 'lightning'. The results that popped up were as he expected. He had already looked through them, and wasn't expecting anything new to pop up.
...Until something unexpected caught his eye. He clicked on it, sure it hadn't been there before. It was a pair of precrafted blades, but it looked as if they were failures. Instead of being smooth on both sides, the blades each had one rough side, as well as a small hole in the other side. The holes might have been intended for a thumb sized power crystal, but the person who forged it made them too big.
Beyond the obvious defects they had, the blades were almost perfect for Jack's needs. They used two types of materials, both being parts of horns containing Elder Dragon power. The pieces of horn used were scale-like, with one of both kinds fused together to make the blade.
According to the description, each blade was mostly made of an opalescent cut of Lunastra horn, with the rough side made of a glowing, carved piece of Alatrion inner-horn. The pieces were expertly melded together, though the crafter was too impatient with the engraving process, causing the glyphs, which should be present on the shimmering surface, to become extremely shallow, smooth carvings. Pretty to look at, not that useful.
The holes meant to hold enhancement gems were enlargened because of a premature cutting. The crafter was supposed to wait for at least twenty four hours after melding the horns together, but only waited three, causing the material to crumble under the strain of the elemental instability when they bore the hole.
Jack considered for a moment, mentally revising his weapon blueprint. Though not what he had originally intended, Jack could get almost three times the power as his original blade designs if he was clever about crafting them. Jack selected the blades, and paid for them via the coupon. They would be delivered to his location soon, via 'airmail' whatever that was.
Miko, looking over his shoulder, commented "Well, I guess that's as good as it's going to get with you. BOORIIING."
Jack looked at her, screen flickering off, exasperated and a little curious. "Exactly what did you pick?" He asked. She wouldn't be this adamant about him picking something cool, if she hadn't picked something cool herself.
"Look at this," she showed him her screen, "Is this not the coolest thing you've ever seen?"
It was an enormous claw, twice as tall as Miko. It was a dull gray, its description saying that it was salvaged from a mutant monster's hoard. It didn't say what the affinities of the horn were, nor the species it came from.
"Miko?" She hummed, "I think you got duped."
Miko immediately launched into a tirade about how offended she felt that he thought she wouldn't be able to tell when someone was tricking her and that she was very sure that the claw was a rare monster part. Jack just tuned her out, until the last few words she said caught his attention.
"Besides," Miko shrugged, "It looks alot like a Lao-Shen-Long claw doesn't it?"
Jack had no response to that. If it really was an elder dragon claw, then it wouldn't be up for grabs. The only way that Miko could possibly get her hands on it, were if it was not identifiable as a claw from one of the dragons.
"Lets just wait until it gets here." said Jack. He was suddenly hit by a thought.
"Do you know what 'airmail' is?"
Miko shook her head, answering, "No, did it say that for your materials too?"
Jack nodded, about to say something else when a shadow suddenly appeared above him. As he turned towards it, the shadow split into a mass of smaller shadows. They revealed themselves to be delivery Wingdrakes, monsters specially trained to deliver packages.
This was the first time Jack had ever seen a wingdrake. He guessed that this would be the 'airmail' that the market website was talking about.
He expected that the drakes would deliver the items they had ordered. He didn't expect them to just fling the boxes in their faces and leave.
But that was exactly what happened. Jack's package was only about his size, so, while it did smack him in the face, he managed to catch it. Miko, however, wasn't so lucky.
Jack looked over the sofa, finding her groaning on the floor, the momentum of her package having propelled her over the back. He quickly put down his package, reaching over the sofa to pull her up. She was a bit dazed, but otherwise unharmed.
She quickly shook off her dizziness, and pulled her package out from behind the couch. It had slightly dented in the fall, but was relatively intact.
"So," she gestured to the boxes, "You wanna open yours first?"
"Alright." Jack responded.
The boxes were made of aluminum sheet metal, so they weren't that strong, hence the dent. They all had a fingerprint scanner on the front though. After the contents of the boxes were recieved, they would be reused, to minimize waste.
Jack touched his finger to the scanner, and the box opened. Inside, nestled in a mound of packing peanuts, were two shining blades the size of his arms. He carefully lifted one of them, suprised to find that they were lighter than his original dual blades. They didn't have handles, so Jack was hesitant in moving them further.
"Cool!" Miko remarked, hopping back over the sofa. "Lets see what I got!"
She slid her box over while Jack put his down. When she opened it, he could see the claw-like object that Miko had proclaimed 'cool'. It was still a dull gray, with pieces flaking off. Jack piced up one of the pieces, and examined it. Finding it to be dirt in every way, Jack turned to Miko, only to find that she already had a sad look on her face. He then decided to cheer her up.
"Hey Miko," she looked at him, about to cry, "It is cool, and maybe you can draw some minerals from it?"
She perked up, saying "Yeah, it is still pretty cool! AND, I'll need minerals for building my weapon. Thanks Jack!"
Jack decided to take another look at the claw. It did seem like it was made from rock, but when he went to brush off some more dirt, the entire outer layer of the claw fell away. Both Jack and Miko gasped at the revealed object.
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After bumping his head into that glacier, James was called Batbird for a week.
Jack and the other may seem OOC, but remember, they are still children, and June hasn't lost her husband yet.
