:uwugun:

Beta'd by Sesparra

I was more than a little grateful for the sensor suite built into my combat skin as we crept through a particularly dank corner of a cavernous room. Sonic mapping and infrared analysis showed a rather large population of Fallen throughout the area, and as much faith as I was willing to put in my combat skin and its shields, even if only a handful of them had the kind of rifle that had almost punched my ticket out in the open, I didn't think we'd be able to make it, raw firepower be damned.

"Ah, perfect," said the Ghost, marking a splotch down the side corridor I was hoping to travel down. After a moment, that splotch sharpened and zoomed in to reveal a rifle, leaned up against a crate and covered in dust but still in somewhat decent shape. "A firearm."

I was a little bit warier, but after a moment of more intense scanning, I took the weapon from where it had rested for who knew how long, leaving a clean spot against the crate in its wake.

"Hopefully this thing still works," I said, dropping to one knee and starting to pull the unfamiliar weapon apart.

"Is this really the time for that?" the Ghost asked, sounding more than a little exasperated.

"I'd rather do it now so I know if the gun's gonna crap out on me and prepare accordingly than for it to just happen without warning," I said, my programmable screwdriver automatically reconfiguring itself to the screws that this weapon used in time for me to pull apart the internals. "Chamber looks tolerable, could use a good clean but not something that could cause problems, barrel is…" I took one look at the readouts and winced. "Damn, it's like the thing wasn't rifled at all with how much shit got crusted on."

"Can you really do anything about that now?" asked the Ghost, as much out of curiosity as out of concern for time.

"Thankfully, yes," I said, extruding the magnetic chisel from its slot in my armor's thigh and taking it to the layers of mud, dust, and gods knew what had been all but slathered all over the inside of the rifle. "Not as much as if this were a really good Forerunner rifle, but if it were a Forerunner rifle I wouldn't have to deal with this, just flush out energy channels and then we're ready to roll."

"I… see," said the Ghost, sounding like it didn't quite know what I was talking about but that it was going to keep figuratively nodding along anyways.

I gave the inside of the barrel one last scan, making sure I hadn't missed anything, before returning the magnetic chisel to its place and reassembling the rifle. This took less time, what with having already pulled it apart and learning what went where, but I made sure to spool up an explosive charge and set it for proximity launch just in case something found me while I was still working on it.

Thankfully, my precaution came to nothing, and as I continued along the corridor, I now had a gun to sight down, which despite lacking the raw stopping power that most Forerunner options would provide still made me feel better, like a particularly boxy security blanket.

I managed to make it down two more corridors and most of a third without encountering any kind of opposition, finally coming across two smaller creatures with the energy shields I'd seen outside, although thankfully this time their barriers were out of position to stop my shots.

Before I raised my rifle from where it was pointed directly towards the ground, I took a moment to scrutinize the two of them. They had two arms ending in three-fingered hands, one bearing a gauntlet that was projecting the energy field, and below those, protruding from the back, were stumps that had presumably at one point been other limbs. From the one that wasn't facing completely away from me, I could see two eyes set closely together, not quite covered by the brownish-gold helmet it wore, and underneath its eyes a set of chitinous mandibles clacked together almost agitatedly.

The other one froze, and I heard an intake of breath, before both wheeled around, presenting their shields as they scrabbled for pistols at their sides. They both let out an almost wheezy shriek as their guns swept up, both of them spitting bolts of crackling energy at me.

With that de facto declaration of war, I swept my own rifle up, firing off short bursts to pass through the small cutouts in their shields that they were firing through- but no, the rounds impacted the shields, because the sights on this thing hadn't been calibrated in who knew how long and I hadn't thought to set them.

"Ignore the sights, just get me a reticule off of how the bullets flew," I said, impellers flashing on as I propelled myself down a side corridor to dodge the blasts they'd loosed at me.

"Done," said the Ghost after a moment, and I spun ninety degrees vertically to peek back around the corner down at ground level, rifle first, and squeezed the trigger. Thankfully, the Ghost had managed to get the reticule damn near perfect, and the loss of their firearms had them both reeling back enough that I could take the half-second it cost to blow them both to bits with a launched grenade.

Again, that sensation of raising a hammer struck me, and I just about managed to remember to pull up a monitor of my brain activity as it passed.

It wasn't exactly a smoking bullet, but there was enough noise in the cerebrum and cerebellum to be worth analyzing, and a brief moment's focus from both myself and the Ghost revealed what looked to be proprioceptive input from a secondary input source, albeit not one that we could trace.

"That's… peculiar," the Ghost said, eventually.

"Yeah, but unsolvable questions later, we need to figure out some better solution than just lurk in the Wall until we fuck up and get got by something out there." I knelt down by the remains of the Fallen, examining their weapons and equipment. As it turned out, both of the gauntlet-mounted shield generators had been overloaded by the explosive, but that meant they only needed a power cycle to get them up and running, so I maneuvered one of them off of the thoroughly perforated corpse that it was attached to, and I took the less battered pistol for later analysis. Otherwise, there was only a glimmer of light around them, which seemed to vanish as I passed through it.

"Ah, good," said the Ghost. "We've got Glimmer, so we can afford to manufacture at least a little ammunition for that thing."

"If you say so," I said, standing back up with the shield gauntlet secured around my own arm.

The next corridor had a small handful of the shield-bearing Fallen, plus one taller, with four arms, although not quite as tall as the one that had taken the shot at me, and mercifully with a smaller gun.

I raised both my shield and my rifle, then, after a moment, lowered the gun and magnetized it to my leg as the first energy blasts splashed off of the shield. "You know what, I'm curious."

Then, I ripped back the fabric of reality.

For a moment, there was just me, in an endless, crushing, freezing, hungry blackness that seemed to be trying to pull me apart.

Then, the Ghost materialized, looking more surprised than anything else. "Wow," they said, digital eye blinking as they spun in place. "We should probably get back before we run into something bigger."

"I…" It was like my thoughts were running through molasses. "What?"

"Okay, Guardian, I need you to focus," said the Ghost, sounding a little worried. "You described the Light as an underlayer to reality, right? You need to reach out and touch that underlayer before something finds us."

There was a stirring in the void around us, almost like the wake of something incredibly large swimming by, and it took a moment for my sluggish brain to register the disturbance. Then, thankfully, the adrenaline surge hit, and I managed to find that distant sensation of the Light woven just underneath the surface of reality. As I became conscious of it, I could feel my thoughts speeding back up, and after a moment, I reached out to touch the Ghost.

"One moment," I said, feeling almost like I was clinging to the bottom of the Light in order to not fall off, and I felt the wake again, larger- no, not larger, but closer.

I attempted to flip us around the Light, and for a heart-stoppingly long moment it felt like nothing had happened. Then, there was a screech as something with entirely too many eyes, teeth, eyes made of teeth, and teeth made of eyes shied away from the Light, and in a blinding flash I was back in my combat skin, standing in a corridor that looked like first a bomb and then a tornado had struck it.

"Wow," I said, deactivating the heavily stressed shield gauntlet and watching the temperature gauges built into the combat skin with a wince. Too much more juice could have overcome even its impressive insulation. "Remind me to be more careful the next time I try to reach out to the Void."

"In the future," said the Ghost, with wry amusement in their tone, "might I suggest the metaphorical pinhole, instead of just ripping the entire carpet up to see what it looks like?"

"Yeah, that sounds about right." There weren't big enough pieces left of the Fallen to get a good count, let alone identify the numbers and types, so I didn't even bother trying to scavenge, just hopping over the mess with a brief burst of power from my etheric impellers and continuing on my way, this time with a good deal more caution.

I had the good fortune to catch the next squad of fallen with their shields down, and I sprayed the rest of the magazine at them, just barely managing to drop the last of the shieldbearers before the bolt locked open on an empty chamber.

Reloading the magazine awkwardly, thanks to the bulk of the blue-white plasma of the shield gauntlet, I slung the rifle onto my back, magnetizing it again, and drew the pistol I'd taken from the shieldbearer.

I could feel the power cell within it, a humming bubble of energy underneath the base physicality of the thing, and though it had once been far stronger, it would likely serve for more than long enough for me to find or build a better weapon.

Of course, around the next corner was a wide-open space relatively full of Fallen, a contingent of which had managed to form a phalanx around a taller member garbed in a flamelike energy shield.

"Fuck," I said, and as I dropped the pistol to my magnetized thigh, I poked as small a hole in the fabric of the world as I could, letting the hunger of the void leach into the area just above my hand for the barest instant before hurling it like a bowling ball at the phalanx.

It managed to slip into a gap between two of the shields before detonating, turning the very air corrosive, and the phalanx collapsed under its own weight before it could do more than spray a scant handful of energy blasts at me.

The phantom hammer rose once again, then slammed down, and in the scattering of the sparks it threw off as it met impossible metal on an unknowable anvil, I could see the outline of a secret of the universe.

Not all of it, no, but the shape that I came away with, the idea of an object less as a collection of crude matter given purpose than as a product of human imagination, a plan for what to do on a lazy summer day before school started again, clad in the material of the world and simplified in terms of means of production beyond what most learned men and women could bring themselves to believe.

There was something familiar about it that pulled at memories lost to the void of whoever I had been, before now, an association with a reddish triangle and a green, blocky shape, but ultimately, that was all that came of it.

Of course, the idea of being able to apply much more basic tools and materials to the construction of much more advanced technology, in a situation without any of the supply lines that my memories of the Forerunner Ecumene told me that I should be able to rely on, and still coming out ahead on time, was still a great advantage here, and I took in the burned-out husks and scattered half-empty supply crates with fresh eyes.

"I get the feeling," said the Ghost, "that you've got something crazy in mind."

"Of course I do," I said, feeling the fabric of the world underneath my metaphorical fingers, all but begging for me to take hold of it and create. "This wouldn't be any fun if I didn't."

And that's that!

Perks Earned:

Backyard Handiwork (Phineas and Ferb, 100 CP): Who needs a massive machine shop or specially-crafted equipment when you have some plywood and a toolbox? No matter how complex or intricate of a project you might be making, you'll find that you can easily figure out how to substitute commonly available tools and resources for more complex equipment, and still have the final project come out fine. Also comes with a decent understanding of engineering, architecture, and a few other material science fields to help you get started on whatever projects you might want to work on.

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That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!