Rest in peace, ptabs0101
"Preparing for Resurrection…"
Angie gasped as she shot up from the floor. A throbbing feeling indicated that she'd just been revived.
"Lantern, report."
Lantern flashed into existence, an Adonis shell surrounding her core.
"Eleven hull breaches of varying severity, small electrical fires about the drop racks, and the comms are in need of replacement, no other significant damages to report." Lantern noted dutifully.
"Why did I need to be revived?" Angie asked, moving off the floor.
"Because you died, of course." Lantern quipped sarcastically. Angie shot her a glare. "Heh, okay, okay. The transfer gate liquified your insides, it's likely it was DNA-locked, meaning that only humans, awoken or exo could go through unscathed," Lantern transmatted a fire extinguisher into two of Angie's hands, who used it to begin dousing the fire.
"Is Summer okay?" Angie asked, concerned for her daughter's safety.
"I haven't been able to make contact with Cloud Errant, but it does appear on our scans along with both Summer and Drei's light signatures."
Angie breathed a sigh of relief. She finished up extinguishing the fires before moving to the ship's troop racks.
Angie had gotten Death to Kells by stealing a fallen skiff and then commissioning Amanda Holiday to make it jumpship-worthy. She had to admit she was glad she did because the troop racks certainly did come in handy, along with a number of other things like the spacious interior and heavy weaponry.
Entering the interior of the rack, she moved past a large black metal box that she kept a digitalized walker tank, which she had also stolen and remodelled, and positioned herself in one of the racks, helmet materializing. Activating the rack, it lowered her into the vastness of space, her only tether from drifting away forever was the metal handle she clung to.
It was a scary thing for a guardian to be lost in space without a ship. They wouldn't be able to die from suffocation, hypothermia or starvation, meaning they would just keep drifting. The few guardians who had been miraculously rescued were all mentally unstable.
Dispelling those thoughts, Angie spied Cloud Errant, pushing herself off from the rack to intercept the jumpship. Gliding along soundly for what felt like a minute, Angie finally collided with Summer's misfortunate vehicle.
"Lantern, are you able to patch us into Summer's close-range comms?" Angie asked as she crawled on the outside of the ship and around to the ramp.
"Sure." Lantern replied before getting to work. "Just a second... and... got it! Patched in!"
"Summer? Drei? Can you read me? Are you okay?" Angie frantically asked into her helmet. There was no response at first before a crackly voice spoke up.
"Yeah! We're okay Mom!" Summer spoke. Angie breathed a sigh of relief as she finally reached the ramp, activating the outside controls before floating inside. As the door closed, the artificial gravity kicked in, and Angie took her helmet off.
A decision she immediately regretted as there was apparently no air in Cloud Errant.
Quickly shoving her helmet back on her head, Angie moved through the ship until she found summer gripping her helmeted head in frustration.
"Summer?" Angie asked, making the younger Guardian spin around to her. "What's wrong?"
Summer let out a frustrated groan before answering Angie's question. "Cloud Errant has several hull breaches, which is why there's no air."
"I was wondering about that..." Angie said quickly before Summer continued.
"The comms are crippled, meaning I can't call for help, the shield generators are shot to hell and most likely won't stand up to a single shot, the warp drive is inactive and there's a leak in the engine! The guns can't even fire without the risk of blowing themselves up along with it!" Summer ranted. "The power conduit also got some damage, but it could still be easily repaired."
Angie blinked behind her visor. "Yeah, that is pretty bad. It would take weeks to fix the whole ship, even if we had the proper tools and materials, which we don't."
Both of them idly looked around the broken ship before Summer spoke up.
"Duct tape?"
"Duct tape."
After patching up what of the engine they could, the two guardians moved back to Angie's, more habitable, ship to discuss their next plan of actions, when their ghost and phantom appeared.
"We have news~!" Lantern chirped.
"Good or bad?" Summer asked.
"Both!"
"Let's start with the bad news then," Angie instructed, her helmet dematerializing.
"Well, for starters, we're no longer in the Sol system." Drei continued from Lantern. Both guardians froze as their gazes wandered to Drei. Their silence was broken by a groan from Angie as she pulled her hands down her face.
"I should have expected this." She groaned, "You said a forgotten golden age colony, but not this..." She looked to Drei and Lantern again. "Any way of knowing how far we are from Earth?"
Lantern shook her 'head'. "The constellations a vastly different from Earth's and we have no way of identifying any of the stars to see how they've moved, or are even the same ones."
"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." Summer shook her hands in front of her, signalling to stop the explanation. "There are other solar systems?"
"Yes Summer, there are other solar systems," Drei said exasperatedly. "It's rather common knowledge that there are, it just wouldn't be cost-effective to scout any of them, seeing as the scouts would have to get past multiple forces of darkness, and then risk even finding one."
"I guess that makes sense..." Summer looked away in thought, making a little pout as she did. Angie thought it was incredibly cute.
"Also, our initial boot of the gate may allow all the baddies we left back on Mercury with a way through." Lantern said to them. "But, the silver lining to it is also why it's so bad: this is most likely a golden age colony."
"Which means we can get golden age technology!" Angie turned to summer with glee, "Summer, do you know what this means?!"
"I can rub this in Cayde's face!" Summer happily answered. Angie faltered at her daughter's priorities.
"N-no... well, you can but that's not what I meant." Angie cleared her throat. "If we were able to reclaim golden age technology, think of what it could do for the city! That's if it survived this long..."
"Well!" Summer clapped her hands together. "We aren't getting anything done up here, why don't we go down and see what we can find?"
"Oh, you guys are going to love this," Lantern said as she took control of the ship, the two guardians feeling it rotate so they could see the planet. "It certainly resembles the Earth, but the moon is broken!"
"It is?" Drei asked. "Interesting. I would have thought the planet's gravitational pull would have restored it, should it have been destroyed during the collapse."
The hunter and the templar moved to the spacious cockpit of DtK to see where they would be spending the foreseeable future.
"Y'know," Angie began, staring calmly at the planet, "I never get tired of seeing a new planet. It's just so... serene."
Summer didn't respond. Angie turned to see why only to observe a pained longing on her face as she took it in.
"Summer? Summer are you all right?" Angie put a hand on her shoulder.
"I..." Summer gulped. "I-I've been here before..."
Angie removed her hand and stepped back. So did Drei and Lantern, all three in shock.
"What?"
"This... this is where I died."
Putting the... sensitive, conversation on hold, Summer moved back to Cloud Errant before they made their way down to the planet, touching down their ships in a forest clearing. They silently made their way outside, helmets off and not speaking a word. Angie really wanted to console her daughter, but it was hard to know what to do after the revelation that Summer came from a lost colony of humanity.
So, after setting up a camp and getting a fire going, the two simply sat on toppled logs in an uncomfortable silence. Every time Angie tried to say something, the words caught in her throat before they could come out, leaving her to resume her guilty silence.
Summer had been growing more and more frustrated. How did she know that she had been here before, how did she know this was where she died? Drei found her in the Russian Cosmodrome, not some faraway planet that may or may not have golden age technology.
Well, at least that last question was cleared up. After reaching the surface, Lantern and Drei had picked up signals. There was a colony here, but they certainly weren't golden age. From what they could gather, this civilization's level of technology was only slightly more advanced from the time when humanity had first encountered the Traveller.
Speaking of the phantom and ghost duo, both were a bit on edge. On one hand, there was Angie, they had no idea of how to help her in her current predicament. On the other hand, was Summer, who was quite clearly in a bad mood, or as close as she could get to one. Summer was not traditionally a person to carry anger or hatred, but the few time she had lost her temper never ended well for any on the receiving end.
Movement in the shadows beyond the campfire finally urged Angie enough to say something.
"Something's watching us. Thirty, and counting." She counted, not looking up to see Summer's response. She still could see the monsters clearly, her innate nightvision allowing her to pierce through the darkness. "They look like wolves..."
"Beowolves." Summer corrected. Angie looked up to see a certain glint in Summer's eyes. She couldn't tell exactly what it was, but Angie knew it was something.
"We'll talk about this later, okay?" Angie subtly moved her hand to her magnetic hip holster. Summer gave a small nod, a reluctant agreement. Summer was just as uncomfortable to talk about the subject as Angie was, if not more so, but they had to talk about it.
Whipping it from her hip, Angie drew a hand cannon of her signature Royal Straight. Four distinguishable hand cannons that had become just as famous (or infamous depending on who you asked) as her lover's Last Word. The Jack was the first to be fired, quickly followed by The Queen. A beowolf dropped with each shot fired, their smouldering necks still burning with arc and void energy.
Summer followed suit and drew a sealed Thorn. In a flurry of white rose petals that earned her the 'White Rose' moniker, Summer was behind the now charging beowolves, letting loose a volley of gunfire, dropping a chamber's worth of beowolfs, their bodies crumbling before the guardians' very eyes.
By now Angie was also firing both The Kind and The Ace alongside her other two hand cannons. What the Templar found peculiar was that no matter where she shot these creatures of darkness, they all fell with a singled shot. Legs? One. Chest? One. It irritated her, like missing a piece of an invisible puzzle. Before long, she heard the clicking of the Royal Straight's triggers, signalling she was out of ammunition.
"Summer! I need to reload!"
"So do I!" Summer called back, hitting a beowolf with the butt of Thorn before sinking a knife into its skull. Angie looked at the remaining beowolves and made a choice.
Since becoming a Templar, Angie had worked rigorously to develop both her Light and Dark powers. All four of her arms began crackling with arc black ark energy.
Titans had their Strikers.
Warlocks had their Stormcallers.
Hunters had their Arcstriders.
Angie had her Raijū. Named after the monster of Lightning, her super did something similar.
Angie let out a roar like the sound of thunder, halting the beowolve's advance, before fifteen black lightning bolts struck down the remaining monsters, leaving only three left.
As Summer finished off the few that were left, Angie took a moment to collect herself. She had forced that super a little too much. Being connected to the darkness allowed her to call upon supers whenever she needed to, but unless she waited for her powers of light to balance it out, the aftereffects could lead her to be a tad... homicidal.
Angie hadn't pushed it too much with that last super, but the black arc energy were telltale signs that she hadn't balanced it. Pushing the grimmer thoughts out of her head, she sat back down on the log as Summer came over and sat next to her.
"Mom are you okay," She asked, putting a hand on Angie's spiked shoulder pauldron.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm... I'm fine." Angie nodded slowly.
"The lightning was black."
Angie put her arms around Summer, pulling her into a hug. "Hey, it's fine. I only went a little bit too far, no murderous intentions." She stroked her daughter's hair. She could feel Summer quivering ever so slightly. Angie looked up into the now starry sky.
"Now, let's hear what you remember, okay?"
Her eyes opened and a burst of power flowed through her body, but it was not her own. Some of her children had died. That was to be expected for they were always hunted down by the lesser humans. The blood and souls of poor fools fed her through the feasts of her adopted children, and they did well until some Huntsman or Huntress spoils it. Though the taste of their soul when those same Huntsmen fall was just so exquisite.
But these losses were different. The Darkness that made up her children were tainted or to be more accurate, purified. When her children were slain, she simply reuse their essence to spawn more but it was now impossible with what was done to them. To find the cause for this, she tapped into the memories of her fallen children, an ability that she rarely used these days.
Her blackened heart stopped for a second when she caught a glimpse of the ones who had slain her children. One had four arms, grey skin and glowing blue eyes, probably some kind of faunus, they were always getting weirder these days. But the other one...
Pale complexion, reddish-black hair and silver eyes.
"It couldn't be," Salem snarled. It wasn't possible. She made sure that woman was dead! She had sent an entire army of grimm to kill that woman so why was she still alive!? It wasn't just that. That woman was wielding powers that were long forgotten and could be mistaken for the Maiden's, but she knew better. But as she played the memory over and over, she began to see something else. Something that both unnerved and intrigued her. The faunus, she wasn't purifying the grimm like that damned Summer Rose was, she was drawing their power into herself. She tried to see if she could tap into the memories of the ones the faunus killed but found herself unable. They were gone, removed from the cycle.
"Who are you...?" Salem asked as she focused on the figure's abnormal face.
"…Maybe you were one of the settlers of this planet and escaped through the Gateway when the Darkness attacked," Drei suggested gently as the two guardians, ghost and phantom discussed Summer's death on this world, Remnant as Summer had said.
"Maybe," Summer conceded, but a small part of her thought that the Ghost was wrong.
"Okay, that's enough of Summer's past that she doesn't remember." Angie stood up. "You two," She pointed at Lantern and Drei, "What have you found?"
The two creations of light explained how Remnant was divided into four kingdoms, unlike how it was during the Golden Age where everyone was united under one banner. The northern kingdom Atlas (formerly Mantle), the eastern kingdom Mistral, the western kingdom Vacuo, and the central kingdom Vale, where the four currently were.
Then there was Dust. Dust was known as a naturally occurring energy propellant that the people of Remnant relied on. It had similar properties to Glimmer but was not as effective as a Glimmer due to Glimmer being more potent and not limited to functioning within the atmosphere of a planet. Dust, on the other hand, couldn't function outside Remnant's atmosphere, precluding the possibility of space travel.
It also removed the possibility of using Dust to repair their jumpship. They would have to reconfigure any Dust tech that they find to run on Glimmer instead so they would be compatible with the Cloud Errant. But first, they would have to find the needed parts.
"Well, we've still got Death to Kells, so getting around won't be so hard." Angie jutted a thumb at her and Lantern's ship. "We could just leave Cloud Errant here in stealth mode and focus on finding parts for the... flyable ship."
Summer looked to her mother, and then to Drei.
"She's got a point you know," Drei said.
"So where do we find the parts?" Summer asked.
"I'm afraid that the parts we require can't be found locally and even if they are, we lack the funds to purchase them since I highly doubt they would accept Glimmer," Drei shook his head, "The technology on Remnant isn't on the same level as ours so there's not much we could do."
"We could rob the military."
All three of them turned to Lantern to star at her for what she just proposed.
"What?! No! We can't just Rob the military- Summer?!" Drei noticed his guardian already running to DtK. "I should have expected this. You agree with me, right Angela...?" Drei turned to find that Angie had disappeared. Looking back at the ship he saw her walking up the ramp.
Despite all possible logic and compression, Drei's eye twitched.
