Yuma didn’t feel any pain, she didn’t feel anything at all. She sat down. She looked at her body but didn’t see anything. She waved her hand in front of her face. Nothing again.
She looked around the long white room, it looked like it was a part of the Labs, but one she’d never seen before. On every surface was complicated-looking machinery with frequent sparks shooting aimlessly outwards. She brought her gaze around the room and noticed that pieces of it were shifting and moving, the errant sparks quieted down.
High above her, it sounded like muffled conversation. She couldn’t hear what was being said. The lights in faraway sections started shutting down, one by one. It frightened her even if she couldn’t say why.
Suddenly electricity swarmed over the walls and caused several new points to pop open and spill current into the air. She ran over to try and touch it, to fix it. She couldn’t say why but she knew it wasn’t supposed to do that. As she reached it the wall burst apart and she finally started to feel pain in the middle of her chest. It didn’t stop.
She screamed and screamed as her voice cracked and broke. After she grew quiet, all was quiet. More lights, closer to her this time, had gone out.
She felt movement beneath her feet. Was this what an ‘earthquake’ was?
She felt a thrum that came from far beyond the walls and machinery. It was familiar. In the cold, empty room it felt comforting and she drew the warm vibrating string close to her.
Entire banks of lights were turned off, it grew faster and faster. She turned around to run, they were turning off in that direction too. The darkness flowed towards her. It felt… hungry.
Then, it stopped. A single light remained directly over her. She couldn’t see the machinery anymore, and couldn’t see the walls either. Nothing but her small circle of light
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As Jack set her in the Pod she started to twitch. He ignored it and closed the lid and jammed the AI disk into the side.
“Fix her up Terminal.”
Before he finished his sentence it had come back with a response.
0/20 Magno-Tubes required for rejuvenation.
0/? Electro Items Required for Electro-Zappa Heart v.2
[https://i.postimg.cc/Nf3sR631/Screen-Shot-2022-10-19-at-4-23-46-PM.png]
Both the Magno-Tube circle and a larger square opened up at the same time. Jack started feeding his Tubes into the machine.
Tule caught up, “Is… is she… alive?”
Jack continued inserting the Tubes as he turned to look at Tule.
“Yeah, she is, I can feel her. She’s not okay, but she’s alive. Probably doing better than you.”
Jack spared a glance towards the top of the crab. Suspended far above the crab, the tearing vortex was large now, much larger. Inside of it was,something.
Jack looked back to the crab and saw, also something. Now would be a really good time to have Yuma’s sight.
“I can’t see what replaced the dome. Can you?”
Tule turned and manipulated his eyes from squinting to wide and back again. He shook his head, “No, nothing, I can’t make it out.”
Jack threw his Zappa into the slot searching pockets for anything else he could add.
“Do you have anything electrical on you?”
“No. That pistol is one though.”
“It is?” Jack fired it off into the ground. He saw a bar of white light shoot and burst the metal section apart. He felt bits of electricity disperse. It felt familiar. He threw it into the slot.
“Wasn’t that with one of Kala’s men?”
“It was. How did you heal yourself so fast?”
“Same reason why my sight has returned to baseline. I burnt Nano to regenerate the area.”
“I had no idea you could do that.”
Tule studied him with an inquisitive eye. “Then how have you been healing yourself?”
“Electricity.”
Jonah piped in and they both turned in shock, the man could just absolutely disappear into the background, “How did you get down?”
He finished his sentence but there was neither acknowledgment or response to his question.
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Below the vortex, the blue haze had finally lifted.
“Leanne what do you see below it.”
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She squinted, her Senses Allocation was decent, although nothing spectacular. Leanne called over one of her few remaining Sentries. “What do you see?”
The Sentry she had called over squinted, “A man, no. A robot. It’s glowing blue. No scratch that, it has cracks all over it leaking blue light.”
The Clan Head’s stroked his beard in long even measures.
“The SI.” At the Clan Head’s words, everyone froze.
“Clan Head!” He whipped his head up, he had never heard Leanne speak with that urgency toward him. He saw her gaping mouth and followed her finger. She was acting strang-
The vortex stopped pulling and with a sound of reality breaking, a massive crab eye poked through the tear in space-time. The tear stretched as it attempted to push in further.
“Sentinel, we are getting to the top, now.”
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“What the… I gotta go.” Jack took off, whatever was happening there needed immediate attention. He was having trouble unlooping his blade claw.
He saw Tule running alongside him as he got it in hand, “Tule, what are you doing?”
He coughed, “I’m going with you.”
“No, no you’re not, you’re just going to die.”
“That’s why I’m going, so you don’t. Thank you for keeping my sister alive did you operate on her heart?”
Jack’s feet kept moving but his mind stopped at that.
“Sister? Yeah I did, wait who’s your sister?”
“Yumata.”
“Yuma is your sister?” That didn’t make sense. They started to climb. “How come she’s never mentioned you, she didn’t even look like she recognized you.”
Tule looked at Jack, “How much do you remember?”
That was a good point, “Fair enough, I don’t remember anything.”
This time it was Tule’s turn, “You don’t remember anything at all? Everyone has a few memories.”
“No, nothing.”
“Nothing? Everybody has at least one.”
“Not me, nothing before waking up.”
Tule didn’t know how to respond to this, so he didn’t.
“What’s the plan?” Jack wanted to see what ideas he had.
“You have an Affinity don’t you?” Jack was more shocked than he thought he would have been after being hit by the ‘she’s my sister’ bombshell.
“Uh yeah, it’s Electric Affinity.”
“Mine is Magnetic, can you sense anything above?”
They were nearing the top, if he was going to check before getting up there, now was the time.
There were 5 big nodes that stuck out to him. Four of them were around the edges of the crab, shaped like some sort of tower with an orb on top. He felt electricity flow through them and disappear. He studied and imprinted the patterns the electricity flowed inside it, who knew when it might come in handy, it was converting the electric snakes into something.
“Electricity is flowing into the tower then it disappears. There’s another signature too, it feels. Wrong or sick, I’m not sure. The towers though I can sense those clearly.”
“Holding the tear open.”
“I think so. They have some electric aura around them, some sort of shield.”
“Yumata tried to shoot the electric pistol into it.”
“What happened?” Jack caught his look, “The tear?”
Did she cause this? No, maybe she just overloaded it.
“We need to take it down then.”
“I can cut through.” Tule seemed confident, either way, they were coming over the top lip of the shell
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They pulled themselves over the lip and Tule easily removed his blade from the crab’s thick upper chitin layer.
“That thing cuts through the crab skin that easily?”
Tule smiled while looking at it, “It’s a good blade.”
Jack started walking over to the metal tower bolted into the crab’s shell. His hair started to rise and stopped. He stepped back, that had never happened to him before. He didn’t like it.
Tule was looking towards the center. The crab they were standing on was nothing like the crab coming through. Its massive pincer was half as wide as the shell they were standing on. The larger half of the pincer had pinched onto their side of reality.
Jack focused. He was familiar with the layout of the circuit. He pulled gently, trying to redirect the delicate currents. It fought it worse than the electric snakes had.
“Tule stop!” Jack stopped Tule from diving into the tower. It would have turned him into a curled and blackened heap.
“Jack you need to hurry, whatever you do, do it!”
At ‘do it’, Jack outstretched his hand and pulled. It wasn’t like before, with the snakes, it wasn’t necessary to have his hand extended but the visualization helped. He saw a section that looked extremely delicate and constantly had current running through it. He closed his fingers and ripped the current out of the circuit.
Whatever unstable energies remained imploded. Jack’s Stance kicked in and Tule drove his sword into the chitin again.
The implosion reversed and broke Jack’s stance sending him skimming across and then over the edge of the shell.
Maybe it was better this way. Tule withdrew his blade from the ground and took a step toward the center. His knee weakened and he had to steady himself. When had he taken that wound? He closed it in a blood-tinged burst of iron-colored Nano.
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How did all these people move so fast? They must have Allocated agility. Right about now, Jonah would trade two fingers for two more Allocation to his Endurance. He took breaks in his climb. He had already dangerously lowered his Endurance, if he kept pushing it could compromise his Constitution Tier.
Thankfully most of the different energies that came from his fingers were effective at cutting through the chitin. No that wasn’t right, the connective tissue of the dead crab.
He breathed in an out then started to climb again, right hand, left hand.
“Jonah! What are you doing up here?”
His grip failed and then recovered as he hugged the wall of crab sinew. Jonah identified Jack climbing back up, alternating between using a blade claw and punching a finger through the connective tissue.
Jonah did a double take as he tried to process Jack punching his finger through the steadily hardening sinew.
Jack stopped alongside him for a moment.
“Weren’t you supposed to be ahead of me?”
“Fell off.” Jonah watched Jack climb past.
He had his own reasons to go up top. He wasn’t going to sit by and let the people he cared about suffer in this pit anymore. Well, it was just Eilien that he cared about, but Yuma too.
A shimmer surrounded him as pushed onwards, involuntarily starting to burn Nano.
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Had stopped his trip forward as the air itself started to shake. The tear flickered in and out as slices of the mega+ sized crab’s massive pincer struggled to force itself through the tear.
He heard a voice that didn’t come through his ears.
[CHCHCH YOUR CRABMOTHER LIES DEAD, ROBOT. THIS CRABFATHER WILL INFORM THE ALLCRAB OF YOUR FAILURE.]
The tear started to peel and warp space behind it as it stopped moving relative to the ship. It accelerated over the span of a blink and was gone, stretching back down the spine of the ship. As it passed through the room his ears popped. It was quiet.
Tule tried to burn more Sense Allocation and any Free Nano he had to regenerate his hearing but nothing happened. Was he out of Allocation already? No, his other Senses were working fine.
A tortured sound of grinding metal came from deep to the South. He felt it through his feet.
The SI screeched in static and called out, “No no no! It can’t be. It mustn’t be! So close, so many years, and this one was so close!” Tule had dismissed the worrying sounds coming from the rest of the ship as he pushed himself towards the SI. He had to finish it. He leaped to board the SI’s platform and ran blade-first into a force shield the SI casually threw up.
His Toothpick stuck in, vibrating more than he had felt in a long time as his blade worked to separate AB into A and B.
His grip was weakening, the vibrations made his vision shake and his inner ear go haywire.