“Despair is something not harsh enough to fully paint this picture to the gravity it requires. The herald of your extinction, the menace that had done nothing but seek your end, the beast of your own making had followed you despite your drastic measures. Despite everything you’d done to get this far. The lives wasted, the risks gambled with, the elation of survival collapsing in on itself. Nothing could really compare to this feeling, the nearness and certainty of a death you’d struggled and strived to escape. Least of all as that feeling was multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over as each of the Garkah were now irreparably linked in collective emotional minutia. The fear alone would have killed thousands if they still had anatomy susceptible. But what truly destroyed all semblance of positive emotion was the instant revelation that their wanton destroyer, their ultimate Threat… was just a kid pushed too far.”
And that his arrival had rent their plans in twain. The Ark was raked with overload. The power siphoned from countless Garkah, twisted and reformed into wrathful permanence and singular cannibalistic purpose. There was nothing that could stop it as it was separated from Threat like metal from ore. The slag running roughshod through the storage constructs in the Ark, overflowing and spilling out in all directions. Once interconnected systems became melted hollows of what they once were. A mold being broken as its last casting completed its cooling. But not all was destroyed. More rather… infected.
That wrathful energy was repurposed yet again, molded by the systems it crashed through, was given form and function to prevent rejection once it was returned. As was the process with all the other Garkahs’ power. But this power was corrupted and corruptive. Systems it didn’t destroy were crammed full of more energy than they could hold, energy that held emotion and form it could not understand. Power that was seeded with sentience, but given no nurturing environment to grow appropriately. So it festered, stagnated in all the systems of the Ark, save for its core. The only part protected from the overload, and the only part that could cut itself off from the hell that surrounded it.
The Garkah were crushed under the weight of hubris and refutation, but they were not dead in that instant of ultimate despair. So they retaliated as best they could. Threat was barely cognizant of what he was as a barrier of focus and construct separated him from the rest of his fellow Garkah. It could do little for the image they all saw and felt, but it was a dam against the truth they could hold to for the stability they needed at the moment. A stability they would need for a long time as their Ark began its launch sequence.
The sphere was dropped from its plinth to the rail it would ride to the stars. A wondrous if not ominous sight to those left behind. Half the city in flames as a storm of electricity gathered around the last precipice left unburnt. A massive splitting of the atmosphere as it fired, bellowing the flames higher as everything was kicked with almighty back blast. The sky would have been given yet another new star to follow for the briefest of moments before it broke away from its overbearing mother. One last aurora of excess energy trailing off it like a rainbow hued comet. But all its symbolism would be tainted and reversed. A cause for celebration for those left behind, and a cause for despondency for those in its path.
A path none inside could see or dictate, automated systems that survived guiding it to wherever it saw fit. Toward the world it could say held those most compatible to its carried host. A host that had plenty of time to reconcile with their situation, with their humility, and with their Threat.
“Like I said before, I don’t know how long it took them to get to Earth, but it was long enough for those walls to come down. And long enough for the Garkah to realize the extent of their sins. Speaker was the first to force that wall up between his people and Threat, but also the first to relinquish it when they had healed from the untimely shock. Their reconciliation probably took years to get through, plenty of them had their grievances thrown back in their faces as they tried to level them at a kid with little memory of what had occurred, and even less control when he did. Likewise Threat had to reconcile with himself, with what he’d done to his people. Even if they hated him well before hand. Both sides had plenty to sift through, and plenty of time to do it in.”
As well as plenty of time to work on fixing their Ark as best they could. A few surviving connections to the outer systems gave them at least some warning as to what they had fully suffered, just not a whole nor clear picture. They worked to clean out as much of the corruptive energy as they could, worked to mend melted over connectors and hubs. But the power was difficult to work with, and harder to work against. And their new bodies, while easily able to manipulate their own energies, were as infinitesimal as the source of their powers. And the hubs built into the Ark were too large to fix meaningfully. So when they approached their final destination, they were unprepared and unable to stop what would ultimately be their greatest sin.
“The rest you’ll probably know, but the context certainly helps color all of it better… to a degree. When the Ark fell on my town I was asleep, almost a completely different person to what I am now. Not just because of the obvious, but because I… wasn’t wholly there. For the longest time I couldn’t even remember my parents’ faces. Not even when they were standing right in front of me. Anything I had no strong emotional attachment to was just noise to me. The wall paper in my room, to people on the street, the lessons at school. Anything other than what I liked… or didn’t like, was just a blur to me.”
“I could remember everything about what Tlatoani had done that week, all the bad guys he’d fought or people he’d saved. At least the stuff they showed on TV. I could remember my favorite clothes and how comfy they felt, the taste of my favorite foods… and the ones I hated. Heh. My dad used to… to… hrmm never mind. My parents helped me with most of the things I’d have forgotten without help. They had most of the neighborhood give me candy and tell me their names so I could associate them. They also taught me a lot about the world by showing me heroes from all across it. That’s how I became a fan of Tlatoani, and I guess a super fan in general.”
“All they while I could barely even make them out. I’ve thought a little bit about why that all was. I think they were just too familiar to me. I still saw them as my parents, but the emotional connections just faded away after a while. You know who they are you just… don’t need to see them to know. But I’ll never forget the red scarf my mother wore. The warmth it still had when she gave it to me on cold days, the way it trailed behind her when we went anywhere… The way it billowed when the Ark finally found us.”
The overcharged systems, bearing that corruptive energy, worked without fail once the Ark touched down. The scanner, meant to find suitable hosts for the Garkah still buried inside, fired off as the first of the town’s people approached the alien hunk of metal that had landed in their street. But with that scanning pulse came the overflowing contents, and the malformed beings that were formed from its stagnant ocean. Every person hit was slammed full of what amounted to sentient energy that ripped through and changed them to what that energy saw as its form… Threat’s form. And with it came that same overpowering darkness that had locked him away from himself. The last emotions of a few of the town’s people were strong enough to be imprinted onto these mutated beings, but they held sway over those bodies now. And they knew nothing but what that power gave them… and a hunger beyond satisfaction.
“I watched my entire neighborhood get stuck down before my eyes. I watched my dad and mom get hit and disappear forever into overly bright electrical discharge. That… was the first and last time I could even remember seeing their faces. The desperate look of my dad running to shield us from what was outpacing him. The tears in my mom’s eyes as she tried to reach me before... before everything fell away. I was hit like all the rest, pulled away from myself… from what little I had. But somehow I was also the last. A twist of fate or random chance with the arcing of the pulse. I was the last one… And therefore the only one compatible within range of the Ark. So it decide to give me everything it had.”
“It shot its core sliver deep into my head, along with all the power it still had stored up. Every single Garkah onboard was shunted into my head and plopped down on a single brain cell, along with all of their respective power, plus a good chunk of Threat’s energy. It also slammed me into a broom closet and knocked me unconscious, so it’s not like it was a calm experience. But… it spared me the fate of watching my family turn into laceroids and probably kill me. As if that was a conciliation for everything else that happened.”
“The Garkah in my head worked almost immediately to sequester and hold back the Threat energy that got in, basically damming up my emotions so I couldn’t accidently trigger it, or get subsumed by it. But Threat wasn’t so frightened. He woke me up, helped me rationalize that I had people living in my head, who were also borrowing my language center so they could learn to understand me. That’s why I was mute when I came to you, lots of time without a voice and little need to speak out loud. He also basically awakened the powers that I had been given by this whole process, turned that closet into a pincushion. But… he couldn’t do much to hold back the sudden retention of memories I had. The process apparently fixed whatever was wrong with my brain while it was fiddling with my biology. So unfortunately I could remember what had happened right in front of me.”
“My parents, my neighbors, everyone was gone. I still remember the fires turning the horizon black and red, the ash starting to burn by lungs, and the empty space in my feelings where I should have been crying for what happened. And you want to know what made all of it worse. That was my birthday, 11 years old and given the worst birthday gift a boy could ask for. And that realization didn’t go over well with little old broken me. I nearly burned down half my neighborhood killing the entire town’s electrical grid. I also broke that dam wide open… and I guess half my problems stem from that day alone. The other half came later.”
“I spent the next six week living in a mattress store on the edge of town, scrounging supplies and listening to Speaker teach me how to use my new powers. The Garkah were good to me, scared at first of what I would think, but I could feel everything they felt. Like I was one of them just with a physical body. After those six weeks I decided to try and branch out, to try and head to Brighton for more supplies or help. On the road I saw what my town had done to anyone in their path. The split open cars, the destroyed buildings… the blood stains. When I finally got into the town I happened to find a survivor and… I guess his wife maybe. I never learned who or what they were. They were starving, hunkered in a basement trying to keep out of sight, and my sudden appearance threw a wrench in that.”
“Before I had left Frigateville the Garkah had begun transmitting a signal that would ward the Laceroids away, and were working on a suite of sensors that could detect them. My visit with that couple coincided with their attempt to test those sensors… and it got them killed. The sensors overburdened the power supply they were pulling from, turning off the countermeasure signal. And the couple were arguing over what to do with me… too loudly. My voice was still spotty, I tried to get their attention to quiet them down but… But it was too late. I watched them get ripped away, I had to listen to them being eaten alive. That was the first time I’d ever blacked out, to the sounds of flesh being ripped to pieces.”
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“When I came to it was quiet again, Speaker told me what had happened. Told me what those things were, told me they were my neighbors, my friends, possibly even my parents. Something broke in me after that, the other half of the source of my troubles. I couldn’t stop myself from hating them, hating everything for putting me through this. For destroying my life, even if I barely knew what was missing from it. I resented them, resented everything. And apparently that feeling was powerful enough to create something that shouldn’t have existed.”
“That sliver in my head from the Ark, the Garkah had used it as a prison of sorts for the bulk of Threat’s power that had slipped in to me. Not enough to prevent me from gaining a bit of his abilities and… I guess a bit of his anatomy, but a large chunk of it. Apparently this prison wasn’t airtight, and emotions were able to slip in and out of it. The energy inside was still difficult to call sentient, but it was close. Close enough to take in emotions and learn from them. Copy and reflect them. The largest… blob of this was just a mass of aggression and hatred that was impossible to reshape. But on the inside wall, hugging a crack in its cage, an offshoot mass was more than willing to take in new emotions. And new feelings. This moment. This was when Resent was born.”
“It wasn’t much to start, I didn’t even know about the sliver let alone what was inside it, but this thing… this fucking mass of sentient energy… He was the one who took over when Para threw the whole damn bus at me. He was the one staring back at you through that red eye. He was… He was the one who made me kill Ziyou… and Glaz… and Phazer.”
“You… you probably know most of the rest of what happened to me after that moment. I decided to keep walking after I recollected myself and turned away from that resentment inside of me. It was too late, but I still couldn’t stand blaming the Garkah for what happened. They couldn’t bear all of the blame for this, and neither could Threat. I decided then and there that I would try and help them, to help them atone for what happened, for the destruction and death they brought with them. But along that path I unwittingly added myself to the list of the guilty in a more direct fashion. A consequence of holding that resentment at bay, I demanded of them, made them keep the countermeasure on no matter what. A selfish thing that helped along the reconciliation… and only caused more pain down the line.”
“The… hmmm… that signal was the cause of the Signal Massacre. It pushed the Laceroid away from me and toward the Wall en mass. I had no way of understanding, of knowing what it even was or what it was ultimately doing. And too much uncertainty to not keep it going. Until I walked into Berta, starving, tired, and the last of the power we had used up to feed that fucking signal. But... we ultimately found you… and the rest of my town.”
“I still see their eyes staring back at me every night. They’ve calmed a lot since… since I accepted being what I am. But… it’s hard to sleep most nights. I saw my mom among them… hrrmmm… And then saw her again when Para wheeled her out of cold storage to fight me at graduation. She was still crying, unable to stop because the… the laceroid that took control of her could do nothing else. All it knew was wrath, hunger, and a sadness it couldn’t even understand! …So I tried to free her the only way I knew how to at the time. But…but she freed herself from that eternal torment. She’s the only pair of eyes I don’t see in my nightmares… and the only one I was able to save.”
“You’ve already been through what comes next to just get here. I was put in an orphanage, got a job at Untied Armors. They were the only place small enough to even have a shot at trying for. Everywhere else was too corporate and sterile. There I worked with the Garkah to hone my powers and build up to a suit that I could use in conjunction with them. A few parts containment suit and few more walking armored battery. After that I quit and signed up and you know all that more personally. I just… have to cover what Resent did as I tried to become a hero.”
“Apparently he’d followed along with my life like a thrice reflected image transposed on a piece of clay molded into the shape of a Garkah. I don't fucking understand it all either, the things a fucking menace. He became fully sentient at some point, understanding and remembering everything he’d gone through to get there. He even showed me what life was like for beings like him… Its hell. I’m not exaggerating, it is literal hell! Like... like all the dissolving and ripped apart pieces of Garkah that were killed and taken in by Threat were remolded and left to work backwards from whatever was left of their existence. All the while having to contend with rouge emotions absorbing and fracturing them apart, gravitational bodies eating them like singularities, and whole new beings coming into life and dying without cohesive thought. Its madness... and probably not a very good upbringing. But the first time I became aware of the extent of my powers, and the power that came out of that hell, he was there. He was directing its flow, and learning to manipulate it… and learning to manipulate me. That first day when you stopped me… that was his first outing. And I had no idea.”
“The second time… it was a surprise for both of us. That Berta scenario, the pain from facing down even simulated laceroids, and the literal pain of getting beat to shit and gashed over my eye. It gave him the perfect opportunity… because I needed power just to survive… and he had plenty on offer. He poured a chunk of the central blob that he shared a cell with out. Trying to show those weak approximations what a real… what a… hggrrr… Even with him out its hard to avoid him. But anyway, after that me and the Garkah knew something was wrong, not because Resent had showed his hand, but because that mass spoke.”
“It was just one word but it was enough. Rage. The only thing it understood and the only thing it cared for. But it speaking drew our attention, and clued the Garkah in on what had was happening in that sliver. At least enough to know they had to take action. We had to take action. The… heh… the day I broke the Ark was the day we took care of it. And also the first time I had ever seen the inside of my own head. The Garkah had built a small city on the cell they’d landed on, a little bit of simulation carried over and solidified there. That was also when I first saw them as they really were… or how they are now I guess. Simulated bodies you’d be forgiven for thinking were laceroids, but different enough to tell with certainty that they were the people I had been talking to in my head for half my life. Together we worked to remove that mass from the sliver before it reached any real form of sentience, before it found a way to take me over on its own. It worked in the end, gave me a massive power boost and showed me what I was really made of. Showed me the threads that I’d been given and that I used for my powers. And… then I broke the Ark.”
“But then that sliver somehow slipped out of my head. And slipped into my suit. All the while Resent was still hiding inside. And I unwittingly gave him a better prison cell. That chunk of Ark I took I put into my suit, upgraded it so it wouldn’t meltdown when I used my new full power. But that sliver was added into the mix, and Resent took my suit as his new home. He was silent through the rest of the course, even during graduation. The energy I took in wasn’t so quiet, but I still had control of that. Control enough to not snap Hothead’s neck for what he did to my mother’s scarf… But control enough. At least until Para blasted me into the ground.”
“I think… that was the first time me and Resent resonated, the first time I fell in on myself like Threat. The first real time I used his powers. I could still feel and see, I could still direct and understand what was happening. But I wasn’t myself… not completely. If Erd hadn’t smacked me across the arena I’d probably have killed Para then and there. But instead I think Resent was knocked out of me… but I was still left in the state we were fighting in. And in the end you know how that turned out.”
“That was the second time I truly blacked out, and it left me too weak to keep Resent at bay, even though I didn’t even know he was there. He wormed his way back in, soaked my world in nitrous… but he wasn’t the one who lit the match in the end. I’ll admit to not being strong enough to walk away but… you still have to lay blame where it’s due. Para got what he deserved! It… it just cost more than I could handle. And in the end Resent found his in again… and used me to kill those heroes like the monster everyone thinks I am. I won’t shirk my blame… I killed them just as much as he did. But I’m not the one who enjoyed it… I’m not the one who wanted any of this.”
“When you showed up… I guess my subconscious finally found its way back against Resent. You just keep on saving me with that shield of yours. After that, and after a long walk, he found a way back up as Buster challenged me. But that didn’t end the way he thought it would. I certainly wasn’t expecting to come back to this world with a sword through my chest. And… I certainly wasn’t prepared to die like that. And apparently neither were the Garkah. They used some kind of matter teleporter, it’s still there in their city half built. But it… poofed me away I guess. It just… didn’t take them with me. They sacrificed themselves for me. Sent me away so that I wouldn’t die for their sins, for the guilt they felt. I still don’t know where they are, but they said they would turn themselves in and admit to the blame they couldn’t let someone else be condemned over.”
“The only problem, besides the fact that they were the only thing keeping my nightmares away from the crisis, was that Resent didn’t die that day either. While I was, admittedly blacking out the city the first time, he was being encased in concrete by Buster. And apparently festering like a cancer. When the city was blacked out the second time, that was him. He was trying to still manipulate me, calling me back to him and pretending to be the Garkah calling for help. Just a lot more aggressively than I should have accepted. But unfortunately his blast caught that VTOL full of survivors I just got fucking done freeing and… hrugh… And I couldn’t just let them die. I went after them… ended up walking right up to him without knowing… and couldn’t stand living in the lie I was being drowned in at that moment. I broke him out, put him back on, and slammed face first into that cost of vengeance. And opened myself up to be manipulated all over again.”
“I beat Buster and her trap all by myself, held his sways at bay, but the walk back to Eagleville was just all downhill. When I came back to my hideout firebombed and the only refuge left to me in ashes I was nearing terminal velocity. The Dockers crucifying the Zors nearly boosted me past that. But… but that damn idiot leading them stopped that fall at the right point. Low enough to see who… and what I really was. But still high enough to be myself… to keep who I was. Resent was screaming at me to kill them all but he wasn’t in charge anymore. But that didn’t stop him from finally showing his hand in full.”
“When I lost control, that was him dragging me the last mile down to the pit he lived in. A desperate move, a more direct attempt to sway me back to what we were before. That dichotomy of rage and resentment. Hgrrr… that Ever Again bullshit. He came too close to using my powers to tear everything he saw apart, to wantonly siphoning everything he could get our hands on. He actually liked killing people, tearing away what made them people, memories and emotions and all the mess mental activity created. He like eating all of that, like a fucking single celled organism gobbling up anything smaller than it. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t going to fucking let him just use me again. I returned what he took, pulled everything I had in my body away from him and threw it away so neither of us could use it. Put both of us on the ground so we could both die and end this shit…! At least… that was the original plan. But you all changed that. And Speaker changed that.”
“He had left me a message, one that I had accepted as his final goodbye. But it was always meant for me, written in energy on the inside of my suit. Energy that was tired nicely to Resent’s tail like the thread of a sweater. A thread I pulled and unraveled him with when I shattered that corrupted suit. Sorry again for dropping all that on you then, but it was either that or an unfulfilling death for something I wasn’t fully to blame for. And the rest is just… walking home… and walking on eggshells till you arrived. And blew down my door.”