Chapter 109: When a Ripple Becomes a Tidal Wave

Ripley

A Pandora. It had something to do with an old myth, Mirage had once told me — apparently some really angry guy wanted to kill the gods, so he opened up a forsaken box that unleashed evil and terror into the world, dooming it. Now, I couldn’t help but consider that maybe I was doing the same…

No, because a Pandora had already been opened earlier this year. Three months ago, I had been a down-on-his-luck Shard Operator with nothing but his good charms and one hell of a brain, but today… I was so much more.

Or maybe, I’d always been this, just a diamond in a coal mine.

“Great!” Topaz clapped his hands. “Missy can just tear it out!”

“No, I can’t.” She responded, looking at the box gravely. “The last time we didn’t know what was in a locked box, it didn’t go to our plans. No offense to you, Dreadwire.”

“None taken.” I responded.

“Point is, we still don’t know if Goliath is inside there… we can’t be sure until we open it… Twilight?”

“Right, Ripley… it’s a Gold Grade, so we’re going to need to handle it together. I’m already in your head so we can manage a Faux-Proxy Protocol through you, I should be able to use your Gold Warpcode to get it open…”

“Before that…” I reached over the box, searching for any fault in the metal, it was perfect… but as always, perfection was nothing but hiding your flaws.

I found the invisble seams, soldering through the metal to open up a tiny compartment where my finer blades spliced through to find an opening into it’s internal circuitry…

So I hadn’t opened the box. The last one, now I confirmed it. There was simply was no way to open it up without input from an external signal, mechanically, it was impossible to open.

But in a few moments, I’d taken out a Gold-Grade Explosive, a tool that I could use for one free kill on anything below Tier IV… This was probably worth more than my paycheck, but it was also a lifeline.

Strangely, there wasn’t any Bioshard scanning mechanism needed to open it, I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Rather, it seemed to be built to reject anyone and everything, just prodding at the streams of Gold Warpcode building it’s Datashield was… overwhelming.

I remembered this feeling once before, back when I had Data Delved with Mirage. It was akin to The Firewall, the massive internal DataShield keeping a MALtitan at bay. The Pandora seemingly had a stray flare torn off that sprawling magma-like shield… and… if I were to touch it with my own Warpcode it was like submerging my hand in…

Fire…

So that’s a Fire Warp Tendency. Warpcode in the nature to destroy.

“I’m ready…” I hooked up more wires from my arm into the exposed control panel, gulping tight. “Twilight?”

“Let’s do this.” Her digital avatar held her hand over mine, and we both shared one look with Missy… who was staring upwards.

“Shit.” She muttered. “There’s reinforcements, you two need to be quick. I’ve only got one or two more Tier III in me to fight.”

“And…” Topaz trailed on. “I’m going to get out of here. Ciao!”

His presence vanished as he stepped behind the corner, and Missy too gave us one last encouraging look before her powerful legs carried her away.

Alone, me and Twilight sighed, laughing at the unison.

Then we delved.

———

Heat, pure quenching heat that melted your skin of your bones. Heat that made it difficult to blink — as your eyes boiled. To breathe — as your lungs dried out. To think — as your brain twisted under the managmous energy.

“Ripley?” I heard someone call, but amidst the scorching currents of this new world I was but dust in it’s grasp.

“Ripley!” Twilight grabbed me, drawing Energy from me that pulled my thoughts back into shape. I blinked, but then I remembered that I couldn’t blink — I was an Avatar…

A poorly dressed one at that. Twilight was merely lending me her abilities, she didn’t have a direct source of Warpcode for me to imitate but it gave me enough stability that my Databreak enhanced manipulation of Warpcode could squeeze out some semblance of modesty… not that she hadn’t seen me without it.

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While we were in a delve, it wasn’t a full neural deep dive like last time… I still felt an inkling of concious control over my real body, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I was.

“Ripley.” Twilight said for a third time, cementing me into this reality of burning Gold. “Can you hear me?”

“That’s a copy.” I slurred, the initial mental assault still left me unsure of my thinking. “Alright… so how’re we going to do this?”

“Remember how Mirage used to be able to… wear me? I can try doing that with you… we have what’s called a Shadow Tendency. Think of it as Warpcode that attempts to go unseen by hiding in the shadows of others… not like yours of course. But I think I should be able to well, shadow you.”

I nodded, the oddness of a lack of true neck muscles not lost on me. Reaching out with the glowing half-flowing limbs of my digital self, I touched Twilight’s much more grounded form of flowing cloth and fairy lights.

Her violet body began to break apart, crackling as it flowed up over my body like a shadow had been cast upon me. It was comforting, a solace amidst the burning and stifling pressure exerted upon us. Her presence and mine joined together to the point I could feel the hum of her thoughts, her fear, her comfort in my proximity.

Her guilt.

It all washed over me, and I was glad just knowing I truly wasn’t alone. The flame stirred beneath us, a massive and flowing wall with no gaps in it’s surface… all we needed to do was drill a hole, spread chaos through it’s inner structure and ripple it outwards by inverting it’s own protection measure against it.

Autocannibalism, in a sense.

I began to call upon my stores of Gold Energy, wreathing them through my physical mind and into the thick wires connecting me to the Pandora. My digital self glew like a miniature star, but it was a dwarf compared to the all-encompassing force of the Pandora’s security measures.

My hands began to move on their own, as Twilight’s guiding presence streamed in my conciousness to merge her ideation with my action… merge…

‘Twilight’ X ‘Dataweaving.’

Under my Thought Multiplier, which had grown immensely more productive in my advancement of the tiers, I felt my conciousss and unconciouss knowledge of both beautiful manipulations of code become one. And clearly, Twilight had as well, she gasped into my very brain. “That… that’s weird.”

But the effect was astounding, together, we turned the relatively tiny flakes of code into slivers of devastation as we began our assault. Purple-tinged spears of code dug into the matrix of the Datashield, infecting the fiery code to begin attacking itself.

For moments, it worked, but then it didn’t. A wave of casual heat tore through the purple-woven cloths that had protected my forearms, even burning through it to singe at my ‘flesh’. I heaved, my physical body, but my digital was consumed under the commanding throes of the multiplier’s effect.

Twilight had been with me from the beginning, she guided me for so long through all of the hardships I’d had to face. She’d been the reason I could smile some days, a whispering voice who assured me.

Dataweaving had never been my strong suit, but in the last three months, I’d had to change. I’d delved without possessing a Dataweaving Feature myself, I’d coded Implants, changed the fabric that built our society fundamentally through my werid-ass BUG.

But the BUG was only a tool, it had been me who made the connections. Me, who found the path. Me who flowed through it.

I didn’t let Twilight handle all of the weaving of our DataCleavers now, I poured my essence into it. My Energy spun as I felt the immense heat and radiation of the wall beneath, and I captured what it meant to be that powerful as mere code.

Was I mimicking it? Not really, neither was I mimicking Twilight’s Shadow Tendency. Rather, I was searching through it as my own Warp Energy infected it. Flame, so hot and bitter, wasn’t what I wanted to embrace.

I remembered my first ever Shardware. I must have been… eight? Maybe younger, my father always had a passing interest in the science, but he had always been more of a constructor of the none-Shard infused mechanics. It was my mother who’d been building and scrapping all sorts of machines for her degree while he’d been a collector of old pre-Collapse trinkets.

A watch or two, a computer that had several inches of redundancy, radioes and whatnot. To him, it was just a collection of what we had lost to the MAL. To me, it was proof of humanity’s desire to overwhelm the odds.

We could flow in any which way, forward or back, lose again and again to ourselves or the other monsters that had usurped us. But we adapted, despite all of the dread and despair humanity had faced. That I had faced. We had come back from it.

Poured from one container of tragedies to another, we filled it what we had, then overflowed past it’s boundaries to spill into our ocean of ingenuity and persistence. I didn’t know what the rest of humankind was planning for their future, but I knew how I would fight as time and space coursed me into different paths.

It didn’t matter how many tragedies I had faced, I had always been the one to capture myself and move past it. I may have mimicked Features, but I was always the one to use them in my own capacity. I wasn’t one who grasped at shadows to mimic them, no, I stole from them — and became more. I was the one who filled up Implants with Warpcode to embrace their true potential.

One step at a time in a shallow pool of my desire.

And each step rippled out to the cosmos and beyond.

Latent Warp Tendency (Water) has been uncovered…

The Water Tendency allows The Adapter’s Warpcode to become more malleable, as well as give it better compatibility with foreign Warpcode and Shardware.

Water Tendency is estimated at… Bronze III

Iron-Grade Tendency Boon: Increased proficiency at raw Warpcode manipulation.

The Water Tendency… the ability to flow according to the shape of the vessel. Od my thoughts. My Warpcode slipped into the gaps of Twilight’s own Shadow Tendency, becoming something more as we weaved over where cloth had been torn… and then we streamed down a torrent of Golden shadows.

I didn’t know the nitty-gritty of DataCleavers, but I didn’t need to. Twilight built their formation, a skeletal husk of what they should be, and I poured flesh upon them. Together, we submerged the golden fire beneath us in a pulsing wrath of corruptive violet.

Slowly, a hole began to form, but then I froze as it’s Tendency shifted. Somewhere deep, the undercurrent of fire was emitting it’s light to cast a darkness hidden to both me and Twilight.

Shit. It also had a Shadow-

A spear of golden pierced my head, and the world turned black.