Ryn stood in her armour glaring at the complex of organic looking structures that stretched out across the dome she was in. Deep purple, riddled with tunnels, some of which were too small for her to pass through and crawling with drones and constructs courtesy of Bob and the Martian Shelly. It shone almost like metal but flowed with rounded corners that made it look disturbing to people used to construction based around right angles.
The enemy combatants varied from foot long midnight centipedes to massive armoured machines lurking deeper within the complex. Ryn glanced at the “sky”, a simulation of screens and projectors that created an illusion of a dark night on earth, a faux-moon showing only a sliver of light.
She took a moment to examine her status and breathed deeply at the familiar numbers. She was so much stronger than she’d ever imagined she could achieve.
Name: Kathryn Borrows
Level: 41
Ability: Suntouched Teleporter
Constitution: 100%
Reserves: 1728000
Suntouched Teleporter: You were destined to inherit your mothers powers but due to feeling the power of the sun while in the womb your body has been changed, incorporating some of your fathers power. You can both teleport yourself and summon jets of solar fire. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.
Guidelines:
Teleportation distance: 406080 km
Maximum Temperature: 180000 degrees
Line of sight required.
Modifications:
Level 2: Wreathed in Flame. Whenever you are covered in flames your reserves costs are halved.
Level 3: Increase Reserves x5
Level 4: Maximum Teleportation Distance x3
Level 5: Increase Reserves x3
Level 6: Melee Adept. Despite your physical frailty you are more competent and do more damage with close combat weapons than ought to be possible.
Level 7: Maximum Teleportation Distance x5
Level 8: Increase Reserves x2
Level 9: Maximum Teleportation Distance x3
Level 10: Increase Reserves x3
Level 11: Syncopated movement: your power and physical body flow seamlessly from one move to the next. You can dance with fire and teleport in rapid succession effortlessly
Level 12: Maximum Teleportation Distance x3
Level 13: Reserve Regeneration rate x3 (base rate now 15%)
Level 14: Maximum Teleportation Distance x2
Level 15: Maximum temperature x3
Level 16: Increase Reserves x2
Level 17: Bright knight: when defending innocents or friends you are considerably faster and stronger.
Level 18: Armour of the Phoenix: conjure flaming armour to protect yourself. Reduces physical damage considerably but takes increased damage from ice attacks.
Level 19: Maximum Teleportation Distance x3
Level 20: Class One Enhancement: True flame. Your Elemental body is unlocked and is immune to physical damage. You take enhanced damage from ice attacks. Have you ever seen fire in zero gravity? You can move like that now.
Level 21: Maximum Teleportation Distance x4
Level 22: Increase Reserves x4
Level 23: Hide in the fire: you can conceal yourself in any source of fire.
Level 24: Maximum temperature x2
Level 25: Maximum Teleportation Distance x4
Level 26: Maximum temperature x2
Level 27: Increase Reserves x2
Level 28: Maximum Teleportation Distance x4
Level 29: Increase Reserves x3
Level 30: Remote incineration: your flame jets can be created anywhere you can see.
Level 31: Increase Reserves x3
Level 32: Maximum Teleportation Distance x4
Level 33: Ring of fire: create burning barriers that inflict mobility and regeneration debuffs on any enemies that pass through them.
Level 34: Maximum temperature x3
Level 35: Cold flames: fire doesn't have to burn, unless you want it to.
Level 36: Reserve Regeneration rate x2 (base rate now 30%)
Level 37: Increase Reserves x2
Level 38: Maximum Teleportation Distance x2
Level 39: Fire sight. See out of any fire within your teleportation range.
Level 40: Class Two Enhancement: Summon Flame Wisps: summon five flame wisps, independent entities through whom you can use your abilities.
Level 41: Maximum Teleportation Distance x2
A fist sized chunk of fire appeared over her outstretched palm. With an effort of will she shrank it down to something resembling a spark escaping a fire. It shot off into the winding tunnels, ignoring the snapping jaws and slashing limbs that tried to take it out. Ryn could see all around it and she noted the numbers and types of the swarming monsters. Shelly always came up with new variants, ever stranger template creatures that could move faster, spit acid or other chemicals and elements, and always in even creepier shapes than the last time Ryn ran this gauntlet.
Four more sparks shot out, threading their way deeper into the nightmare construction through other gaps and mapping it out in her mind. She flashed into fire and prepared herself to move through killing and burning everything that attacked her on her way to her goal.
“Jane did it in two and a half yesterday. That’s your target,” said a floating drone. The rest of her team were either entertaining themselves in their down time or watching on the live feed. This sense of being watched had taken some getting used to. The nervousness and clumsiness had faded the more times she had been exposed to this kind of training. The benefits of the after action reviews with her team, though occasionally embarrassing, far outweighed the sense of being under a lens. Besides which, when they really fought, whether against the void, monsters, or the increasingly unruly wider population, every single move they made would be logged and analysed by both friends and foes.
She closed her eyes and absorbed the information streaming back from her wisps. The smaller biological enemies were now spitting something akin to liquid hydrogen and sharp little blasts. It didn’t bother her wisps, they were too small and too fast to be bothered by that kind of attack. One of the tiny motes of fire burst out into a much larger area occupied by several snakelike creatures and dominated by a titanic mech that swivelled quickly and released a torrent of low temperature gas.
Before the wisp failed she blipped in behind the mech and began incinerating everything in the room. These locations were always moved between runs. Getting to them was part of the challenge and then sterilising them was the crux of the objective. There were always half a dozen or so of these rooms hidden within the ever changing maze that the void-spawn building had become.
Incomprehensibly hot fire swirled around her. The biological enemies flashed into steam and the mech began to melt. Within moments the area was clear and she took off to continue her hunt. Bob complained vociferously that this was cheating but as in the past she simply flew through the chitinous walls, allowing her body heat to melt them away like ice under a blowtorch.
She moved deeper into the building, creating an inferno that trailed after her. She kept a part of her mind of the wisps as they sought out another heavily defended nest room and another part tracked the fire as it spread out through the structure in her wake. She could see and hear and smell through the fires. How the senses were translated so she understood them as a human being was as yet unknown. Bob had been unable to identify a mechanism, but it worked and she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Soon the building behind her began to collapse but she burst into a new nest room, this one dripped with a liquid that left frozen splotches on her as it landed on her shoulders. The pain was electrifying, snapping her focus back onto her main body.
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She glanced around, cataloguing the location of her foes then blipped back into the conflagration that followed her. She shaped a blast of fire to lance through the room ahead of her, incinerating a thirty foot wide cylinder over a hundred feet ahead of her. She moved forward more cautiously to check that the room was cleared. It was. The frozen structures had melted away and all that was left was ashes. There was a groan from the structure above her. She was deep into the complex now and widespread damage to the struts and walls tended to result in…
She blipped over to a wisp to escape the collapse. She could have burned the material above her but the idea was to minimise structural damage where possible. Not because they were worried about damaging any possible void structures they might have to attack in the future but because they generally assumed it wouldn’t be quite so easy to destroy the real Void structures.
A wisp found another creche which she destroyed remotely, abusing her ability to summon her flames remotely in the same way she abused her ability to teleport to anywhere she could see out of a fire. Her mum had this ability as well but she had never, as far as Ryn was aware, made much use of it. For her it allowed her to bypass the line of sight restrictions on her powers and was invaluable.
The rest of the trial went just as smoothly. The bioconstructs and drones weren’t programmed to kill, robbing the experience of a lot of its authenticity, but the reactions and the experiences Ryn’s team gained were invaluable. Especially the missions that involved the entire team that allowed them to exploit the synergies that existed between them.
She demolished the remaining nest rooms over the next sixty seconds then blipped back to a fire at the edge of the structure and flew out to hover on actinic beams of fire off to one side of where she had begun.
Blasts of fire suppressant exploded from the structure and she backed away slightly to avoid the foul smelling gases. Waving a hand in front of her face she lowered herself down to the ground, stepping away from the glowing stone as her body returned to normal.
“How’d I do?” she asked aloud.
“Two minutes twenty seven seconds. I expected better. Even knock-off Batman can do better!” barked the drone as it circled down to orbit her and scan her body for any issues.
“The liquid nitrogen didn’t get me much. It’s healed now,” Ryn said as she waved a hand to bat the overly attentive machine away. It flew up out of reach and the lens on its camera narrowed slightly.
“That wasn’t liquid nitrogen girl. You don’t know what it was so don’t be a pain about letting me check.”
“You wouldn’t use anything truly dangerous,” she grumbled but tolerated the closer inspection by the drone. Once it had orbited her a few more times the drone flew back up to a holding position.
“You check out. Let’s debrief in a bit more comfort. I think the others will be there as well.”
“Bet your ass we will!” said Bad over the open comm channel. “These are too easy, Bob. We need a proper challenge!”
Ryn grinned and blipped herself to the doorway allowing access to the huge training chamber. She threaded her way through the familiar bland corridors that seemed to compose so much of Mars Base One. Bob’s inventiveness when it came to names was oft maligned by the teenagers in snarky jokes at his expense.
She arrived at a door that looked like any other along the endless corridors but this opened into a short tunnel. As she emerged from the end of the tunnel she found herself in the terrarium where her team and their families had chosen to make their home over the last year. Trees swayed and insects buzzed, creating a simulacrum of an open area on Earth. A simulacrum of an environment that was becoming increasingly rare on Earth itself.
She flew up via teleports, not wanting to set fire to the precious greenery below her, and arrived at the large, round room built into the side of the cavern wall, far above the treeline. It connected internally with a series of spacious apartments, the windows of which gleamed along the wall below it.
She appeared on the balcony and pushed aside the glass door to enter the comfortably appointed room. Everything was cream and beige, Bob’s sense of décor was another thing they often teased him about. On a series of couches facing a large screen her friends were scattered about. Jane was leant back drinking something that smoked slightly as her ambient temperature brought it near to boiling while Bad and Sally were hunched over in a heated discussion with Simon.
“So how was I?” she asked brightly, a thread of fear winding through her at the inevitable deconstruction and highlighting of her mistakes.
“Fine,” Jane waved the hand not holding her glass airily. “I could have done it better of course!” Jane looked over and smirked as Ryn took a seat next to Claire. Bolf was stretched out between the sofas and the screen in his best “tummy rubs please” pose. All four feet in the air and his tail wagging slightly.
Bad looked up from the conspiratorial conversation he was having and stood up to move in front of everyone. He smoothed back his short hair and grinned across his friends.
“We need to stop these pointless exercises Bob,” he declared to the room in general. Everything here was Bob. Whether a drone was present to act as a focal point for a conversation didn’t matter.
“You think you’re ready to go back?” the voice echoed around them. Bob didn’t sound like he thought much of their chances.
“Yes. Without actual combat experience we aren’t gaining anything anymore. Surely you can see it? We’ve gone from taking twenty minutes to just over two for the same runs!” Bad exclaimed.
“They aren’t the same. Ryn almost walked into a trap today,” said Bob. A door slid open at the back of the room and a bio-Bob walked in to pick up the conversation. “All of you have made similar mistakes in the last week. You think the Void won’t learn faster than I do? You’re strong now but you’re still arrogant, headstrong kids!”
“We’re all sixteen. Except Armand but he’s Comte de Loire and technically outranks you!” barked Sally. She rested a hand on Simon’s shoulder as the boy seemed to prepare to lunge to his feet to support Bad.
“Rank doesn’t matter. Without Prime and Doris all I’ve got are drones and they aren’t much of a challenge against high level humans. I can’t guarantee your safety back on Earth anymore. Wayfaire is under siege, kind of,” said Bob.
“What about Ascension?” demanded Simon, brushing off Sally’s hand and striding over to Bob. “This infighting… the Monarchs don’t give a shit and my people are suffering!” Claire nodded at the boy's words. The attacks on Ascension were worse than those aimed at Wayfaire. Now that anyone could level as high as they liked a lot of people had. Some of them held grudges against anyone who had enforced the Accords. Usually against members of their own factions, as was the case for both Ascension and Wayfaire, but often enough it was against another group the newly risen considered to be in competition with their own side.
“The terrorism is largely contained,” Bob said unconvincingly.
“Bollocks! Bob, Wayfaire and Ascension were world powers before! Now what are they? Scared and weak. They need us. They lost most of their Signatories! Only a few Sigs have gone off on interstellar jollies from other factions! It’s left us weak,” Sally snapped.
Bob raised his hands at them all. He moved over to a cabinet and took out a bottle, pouring himself a large glass of something the kids weren’t allowed to touch.
“I hear you but what can we really do?” he asked as he sat down and took a slug of his drink, unwilling to argue the point although anyone who thought Ascension and Wayfaire were weak was a fool. Weaker than they had been? Perhaps. But they were far from weak in comparison to most.
“You can’t do anything. You need to remain impartial for the sake of BME. We’re not stupid, that has to stay as it is. Without Doris you’ve got no teeth, anyway.” Jane’s voice was cold, unusual for the girl. “We can do a lot though. We don’t need to worry about lower levels and us being back on the field will get all the assholes to back off.”
Bob grimaced as he was reminded of his impotence. Sending Prime and Doris away with his friends had been necessary in order for him to make a meaningful contribution while they were away. Apart from a microsecond connection to his absent selves six months after they were supposed to have left he had received no information. Perhaps in a few years he’d get something back. Maybe the entangled particle communicator would start working at some point.
“You think a bunch of kids are going to scare these bastards into backing off?” Bob asked, then raised his hands as they all bridled at his words, even gentle Claire took offence. “I know you’re strong. I know you’re good. Really good and well trained. Those bastards won’t see it that way. They’ll see you as a payday. With the Carnival gone you’re the biggest bags of Essence available and it’s not impossible to beat the level gap. We did it a few times. Mostly against monsters but sometimes against people as well. How many people do you want to have to kill, children?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time we killed people.” Ryn’s voice was soft but somehow cut through the tension in the room.
“You want to do more of that?” asked Bob in a harsh tone.
“Of course not!” Ryn snapped back. “But if us being there would take some of the pressure off of Greg, Brendan and the remaining Orions it’s worth it.”
“Girl. It won’t. It’s a fucking jungle down there now. It’s not too bad in Wayfaire and Ascension. Stop! Look I know what you’ve seen and heard but it’s nowhere near as bad back home as it is on the subcontinent or in Africa. Or bloody China. Death and Magic are much more hands off than Life and Liberty. Frost is ok as well. She’s blasted a bunch of rebellions and power mad wackjobs into shards of frozen flesh.”
“They obviously only care about people getting stronger, even the good ones like Life,” said Bad.
“Not sure how good any of them are,” muttered Simon but Bad ignored his friend.
“They only have one objective. Humanity needs to get stronger. How many teams have gone off world? One reason Ascension is getting preyed on is so many of the top Orions have followed Gemini and gone away. We can help stop that. Even the Inheritors are struggling despite Mindscar still being here,” Bad concluded.
“What are they calling them now? Ravagers or something? Assholes going on killing sprees,” asked Claire.
“Ravagers are the ones who are killing monsters. They ravage the landscape as they seek Essence. That’s why the Eurasian steppes were destroyed. Cullers are the ones hunting humans. They’re the ones we should be worried about,” Bolf had given up on fishing for tummy rubs and sat up as he spoke, turning to face Bob. “Those are the ones we need to stop. Mother’s pack has been decimated and it is all due to those scum. I have lost brothers and sisters.”
“I think we can all agree that killing dogs is evil,” said Bob. “And we’re all glad the pack was so strong when she went. Kids… You’re not ready yet. I’m not ready yet.”
“What else do you need?” asked Bad suspiciously.
Bob sighed and leant back in his chair. He raised his glass to his lips and took a sip. “Fuck it,” he muttered and waved his free hand at the screen to direct the teams attention in that direction.
“You might think that without Doris I’m not much use, especially as drones don’t stand up well against human abilities. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some options,” Bob began as the screen showed an image of Earth from very high orbit.
“What the hell have you done with the Necklace?” asked Ryn in shock. “That was barely a few miles of struts and pods the last time we were home!”
“It’s grown to accommodate a significant number of BFOs. There’s over fifty in the fleet now and they’ve all been heavily updated from before.” Schematics flashed across the screen. Each BFO had three rings running around its circumference that formed something like a circular train line. Mounted on “railway cars” on each ring were hundreds of weapon systems.
“The main problem was reload and wear and tear,” Bob continued. “So we’ve gotten around that by mounting each weapon system in such a way that as they fire they move around the ship and a fresh weapon is presented. By the time they are back in line to fire they’re reloaded and have cooled down. I need another few hundred of these before we can move to restore order.”
“There won’t be anything left of the planet if you deploy those things en masse!” said Claire unhappily. “What you’ve already got can lay waste to half the world!”
“I’ve been thinking about it. With where we are, with the Monarchs and the new high rankers, it seems to me it won’t be a case of whether we can beat the Void. It’s going to be a question of if there will be anything left afterwards,” said Bob sadly. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg, kiddos.” the screen switched again and showed outlines of the weapons built into the Necklace before panning back to show the whole construction. It now stretched for hundreds of miles in low orbit, gradually growing to encircle the equator of the Earth.
The weapons already in place would make any supervillain insane with envy. Kinetic bombardment, energy weapons, missiles… The Necklace was meant to defend the planet, not obliterate it.
“It’s a doomsday machine?” asked Simon as he took in the designs faster than anyone else.
“No,” said Sally. She was even faster than Simon when it came to her thought processes, even if she didn't understand the engineering as well. Andrea nodded in agreement.
“It can be turned outward just as easily. It would cause everyone on Earth to try to kill Bob though,” Andrea said with a touch of fear in her voice.
“Yes. Until I’m ready we can’t act to interfere with what’s going on at home. If we move too early they’ll destroy all my work. If we wait we can put something in place that will stop the madness and be a huge pain in the ass to the Void when they finally rock up for a scrap,” said Bob.