(Events take place right around the Firestorm crisis of Tiberian Sun, simultaneously with the events of Syndicate in the Assassins Creed timeline.
WW2 Eva: Red Alert 2's Lt. Eva.
Desmond: Desmond Files (f-list))
Desmond looked around in confusion, Cabal having completely backed off and given Desmond the floor. He could still feel the other AI nearby, this was his home system after all, but he wasn't anywhere 'nearby'.
"What? What did you do?" His breathing was still ragged, but the marks on his skin were fading along with the Apple's power. He could already feel the others brushing his mind and trying to sooth his frayed nerves; it felt so good to have them there.
He looked around warily, Cabal wanted to walk NOW? After everything that just happened with the fight? He had just wanted to go somewhere safe to calm down and decompress, and in his fear he had ended up against something that made it so much worse. "I told you before, I just want to be alone."
With his exhaustion he was now able to feel all the alerts the system was giving off, damage reports, casualties, status updates on what was going on outside. None of it was good, his fight with cabal had made it that much harder for NOD to fight back and it most likely didn't help with their little would be alliance. He was just so tired right now from everything.
"As you wish."
For a split second, everything Desmond could see, including the void, vanished. No, it wasn't pitch black. It was an understanding of oblivion, non-existence... loneliness. Desmond was left by himself as an idea, a concept. The concept of being alone - he was made to understand that feeling exactly as he had asked.
The split second turned out to be a bit longer, as the feeling settled in, exactly as it was requested from Cabal. Cabal was now nowhere to be seen or heard, even.
The blackness around him was all encompassing, it wasn't like the Grey where the dead went once they died. This was more like he was stuck between one place and another. He shivered in the nowhere, feeling the distance between the others in his mind but thankfully they were still with him. Had they vanished, he would have been lost.
What did Desmond himself truly feel at that moment, as he understood what he asked for? Was it peace? Tranquility? Was it true solitude, or did his thoughts haunt him?
None of that would be answered in time, as he suddenly found himself materialized back at the Temple in another split instant beyond his control.
"LEAVE!" Kane shrieked at his men, as they quickly attempted to avoid the collapsing concrete. Without warning, Kane had just managed to shove Desmond off of him, and onto the console. The latter looked like he had seen a ghost at the door, just after Oxanna had ran in a few seconds ago.
Finding himself back outside was a relief in its own right, hearing Kane yell at his men to leave; Oxanna coming into the room and thankfully he could see clearly that it wasn't Lucy. The shock of the void had snapped him out of his panic, Jake's body lay still with his neck cut open, dead. The men around him now running to their stations as they were being attacked by the GDI forces that had arrived earlier.
He turned to look at the console he was now touching, he could feel Cabal inside watching but Desmond didn't feel the need to jump inside. Somehow... he was out? Cabal had kicked him out? He wasn't sure how that was possible but he remembered fighting the AI but when he looked at Kane and Oxanna, he expected something, questions, glares, something to express their anger at the damage done earlier. But it never came, like it never happened.
He spoke quietly, more a question to Cabal then anything, "What did you do?"
He moved away from the console and approached Kane as the building shook again. "How is GDI already here?"
As the soldiers safely exited the room, Oxanna remained behind, and Kane turned to Desmond.
"Have you managed to calm down?" Another far away explosion. "We have to go. I have a good guess, but you're not gonna like it."
As he said that, Kane reached out and grabbed Desmond by the wrist, yanking him at the last second from a collapsing boulder. "This room will be our tomb if we don't leave," Oxanna interrupted their embrace. "We have to meet up with Emir and plan our next move."
The three left the chamber in time for it to collapse completely behind them - GDI was relentlessly targeting different sectors of the Temple with better precision than last time.
Desmond nodded to the question, he glanced back as Jake's body was covered by the collapsing room. It wasn't a pretty end but at least he wasn't suffering for it now.
They ran through the building as it shook, GDI was targeting seemingly randomly and that was leading to a lot of damage. He quickly turned on Eagle Vision, Ezio right there with him as they looked for Emir's blue in the building. He thankfully wasn't in an affected area yet but that didn't mean he would be safe for long.
"I already don't like it, it can't get much worse then that. We have a fall back point?"
"Yes," Oxanna responded. "If our intel is correct, the Kodiak is actually fast approaching - we need to ready ourselves to intercept it. We haven't been dealing with this type of firepower from any normal GDI base, especially after destroying that one." Oxanna turned to look at them as she walked faster.
"We know this particular enemy. They're not easy."
Aboard the Kodiak, Chandra, Brink, and the rest of the crew had been in dead silence over what transpired. The GDI leadership aboard the Philadelphia was in disarray over what had just unfolded, and how to respond to it. Some suggested readying the Ion Cannon, now that they've located an active, important NOD base to target.
"General," Chandra responded to his superior across a secure channel, "I'm not sure it's a good idea to be so brash. We haven't yet located McNeil," referring to Jake's older and more accomplished brother, currently MIA since his victory over Kane in the second Tiberium war. "We need to first return the Tacitus befo-"
The conflict of interests between the Kodiak and the Philadelphia was abruptly interrupted by EVA, whose voice came in distorted.
"I am unable to sustain a link with Philadelphia. Attempting to reroute signal."
"Watch yourselves, people." Chandra and his crew strapped in as an Ion Storm indicator flashed in red at the screen. Chandra rerouted comms to their US base, instead of the now disconnected Philadelphia.
"Southern Cross, come in," he attempted, "Experiencing increased Ion Particle Activit-"
Once more, he was interrupted, but it was far worse. An ion lightning bolt struck the right propeller thruster for the Kodiak, before it began to lose altitude towards its right.
"What the hell was that?! Sou- Philadelphia! Anybody! Mayday! Ma-"
In a split second, Brink and Chandra's distressed eyes met right before collision. The Kodiak went down and crashed in a giant ball of fiery flames.
Once Emir was collected, the group quickly went to the command center, monitors lit the entire area as they tracked the Kodiak along with other things, weather, the remains of the first base and its troops. Desmond didn't know much about the Kodiak other then it belonging to GDI and was a flight vehicle.
The temple shook again but this time from lighting, it made Desmond look around nervously. It didn't feel normal, to him he could usually feel a tingle from the charged air of a thunderstorm but this made him shiver. It wasn't normal. "What the hell is going on... wait, did they just veer off course?"
Another giant explosion nearby. The sky lit a terrifying hue of red surrounding the Kodiak's fall.
"The Tacitus," Kane exclaimed, "Desmond; can you sense it?"
His top priority was to turn this new war around as fast as possible before they lost their chance at getting the upper hand.
Desmond watched the ship trying to navigate even as it fell towards the earth. He blinked on Eagle Vision and the whole ship lit up with people, the majority being grey, a few white, some red and maybe a gold/blue? It didn't take long before something on the ship flared and washed out all the other colors causing Desmond to flinch for a moment at the intensity of it.
He could have sworn he heard a scream too but that might have just been some of the personnel around at the moment. He shook his head to try and get rid of the bright spot from the Tacitus. "Yeah I see, it's around the center of the ship. I'm assuming they were trying to shield it or some kind of lab? I think I saw it flare up, maybe the storm is messing with it?"
The Kodiak's demise was, in size and proportion, biblical. A giant wave of sand and debris washed through the entirety of the GDI base and the Temple of NOD as the Kodiak's crash roared through the entire region. The crash site continued to explode, the fuselage still getting consumed mercilessly by the fueled engine flames and burning cargo.
The battle with GDI took a sharp turn as the base was distracted with rescue operations that were about to begin. In a few minutes, battle control would transfer to Southern Cross, one of GDI's primary headquarters in the US, after connection with both the Kodiak and Philadelphia was disrupted.
In a few minutes, GDI's contingency heuristics, Project Lazarus, was going to deploy a new team to handle the emerging global catastrophe they are about to face without Kodiak and Philadelphia leadership.
Project Lazarus, known discretely among only a few GDI higher ups, was a deep contingency initiative started by the Allies since the Great War with the Soviet Union, that allowed them to have a "bench" for available leaders, in the event a catastrophe took out communication with their current leadership... including their untimely demise, very much like the Kodiak's.
At the top of the new chain was Lieutenant General Paul Cortez, and his new task was to guide GDI globally through the rapidly forming Ion Storms that were forming as a result of increased Tiberium activity. Cortez was made aware of the Tacitus and its location, and it was his quick thinking that prioritized search and rescue over attacking NOD's Temple in Sarajevo.
"This storm... may have been our salvation," Kane muttered to Desmond and the rest of the group, as he witnessed the giant, mushroom-shaped fumes filling the red sky above the Kodiak's crash site from afar. "The tide is turning now. Can we make it to the crash site?"
He turned to Desmond to see if the Assassin would advise traveling or not.
He was still tingling from the ion storm and it didn't seem to be letting up anytime soon. Considering it came out of nowhere and had both groups scrambling. "Do we need any kind of shielding for the lighting? It's giving me chills, but if we can get there without our rides frying I'd say go for it. If we wait too long then GDI will send a rescue right? If it were me I wouldn't want to be on their wreck when they arrived... but we could use some traps. What do you think?"
Desmond would faintly see the Kodiak glowing white in the sand with the golden center of the Tacitus. He could also see a lot of the people who had been on board... well, their lights had been drastically cut. There were only a few survivors left and some were fading fast.
"Well, that still depends - if it's dangerous to get there on foot, then we must ride. Ground would still be safer than flight," Kane looked at the horrendous dark clouds above the Kodiak's wreckage, "...as I'm sure our GDI friends learned the hard way."
Another explosion from the crash site. "I have an idea," Kane interrupted the windy silence.
Taking out a small fob from his pocket, Kane pressed on a small remote button with his thumb to reveal one of NOD's fundamental hidden tech, parked within the Temple's hangar: the NOD Stealth Tank.
"We can use one to sneak into the crash site undetected. Once there, we must disembark to search for the Tacitus. If we hit any trouble, the tank will be our return point. Are we clear on this?"
Desmond nodded at the plan, while looking at the stealth tank curiously. He hadn't seen anything like it before outside of a video game, he was impressed it was real.
"When we get to the ship should we split up and look for any survivors?"
They could only fit a small group in the tank but it would be enough for the mission unless Kane had more of these.
"My objective would be the Tacitus. I highly doubt anyone survived that. "
Kane felt that 'human' side of Desmond was at complete odds with the recent footage. No matter how innocent Desmond acted, Kane could not forget what he saw.
He wondered what would happen. Not even he could have prophesied what Desmond was capable of doing with that type of potential in him.
((We're back! Happy Easter everyone. What will happen next? How will Cortez handle this mess? Stay tuned for the next chapter, releasing soon!))