NPF Avatars 5 - The Universe, Breaking Us Down

[The Kneumatic Pnight]

Alarms claxoned and claxons alarmed: everything seemed to be going wrong. Admittedly, this wasn't the most unexpected outcome of KP getting involved with things, but he'd been playing poker up 'till now. And this was particularly more wrong than normal.

Seriously, what the hell?

“What's going on here?” KP demanded of the soldiering body, as he strode into the purple and blue, fleshly room.

“We’ve got severe temporal and dimensional distortions. Propagating.”

“SPARKY!”

“No, the localized source is extra-dimensional. They’re coming from the POS Industries experiment, near as I can tell.” KP fell silent for a moment, then slammed his hand down on the comm button.

“What’s happening down there?”

------------------------------------------

Renée was still reeling from the effects of whatever temporal journey she just hadn’t made, but her older counterpart was more adept. Technically, she was more used to this than younger Renée. She stood, her can firmly in hand, and she incanted something swiftly and softly. Renée could hardly sense the words in the brief moment they existed, but what she could feel of them was broad and rumbling.

It reverberated within Renée’s very bones. In a moment, a mere second, the words were gone, but a new rumbling filled the air—consumed it: a massive explosion.

Older Renée swept her cane wide and, from nowhere, a flurry of somber, white petals erupted. Despite, well frankly the nature of petals, the barrier held staunchly against the explosion. A wave of ethereal energy soon hit, and the petals, mysteriously held, fluttered, and, finally, shattered into a flood of ephemeral, stony apparitions that soon dissolved. The wave had passed—the barrier had held... but just barely.

Renée was in awe. “What was that?”

“Earth spirits,” Old Renée answered tersely.

“Answer me!” KP roared.

“Uhh...” Renée began, “We hit a little snag where the time-space continuum sort of collapsed in on itself.”

“...”

“A pair of temporally coexistent chaos beasts interfaced with an area of slow-time to tear the universe a new one,” Renée explained.

“I swear to God, this is the most annoying thing that’s ever happened.”

“What about that time you accidentally made an infinite number of unstable alternate timelines branch off from that one dimension, until they all started failing and ate one another in a spectacular, fiery, apocalyptic implosion of doom?” KP sank into the big, black leather chair in the middle of the room and rubbed his temples slowly.

“Fine...” he conceded, with a sigh.

“Because I think that’s what happened here, too.” KP lifted a hand to object, or... something, but froze mid-gesticulation and hung there for several moments.

Finally, he dropped his head and cupped his face in his hands. “I take it back. I don’t want to know what’s happening. I order you to untell me everything you just told me.”

“Uhh... Arhiyarararararara ate itself and then exploded. Also, I made a new friend... er...”

“Call me Kamen,” older Renée answered.

“...right, Kamen. From out of nowhere.”

“Oh, well then, that’s all good news, then,” KP said stiffly, then he stood and strode from the Edelweiss bridge with eerie calm.

“Sir, where...”

“I’m leaving.”

“But... we may very well be facing Armageddon.”

“This Armageddon is far too irritating. Come get me for the next one. I’ll be in the tub.”

From the periphery of the room, the delicate form of Gabriel stood and moved quietly and smoothly to the center. He pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “Sparky, I want you down there to fix that distortion.”

“Ready!” Sparky yelled, with a mock salute.

“SepT?”

“I can’t get a fix on anything in there. The space is so jumbled up I may end up spreading him over several miles,” a buglike avatar of the Edelweiss reponded.

“I’d prefer to avoid that,” Sparky cut in.

“Is there anything you can do.”

“Short of flying the Rig-Jarl in there and killing us all, no. Without a beacon in there to know where I’m pointing, I can’t get anything through in one piece... and we don’t have anything like that in there.”

Gabriel was still. “Yes, we do. Has the autocannon fired?”

“It has,” another insectoid confirmed.

“So we beam him into a three inch diameter space. Wonderful, I’ll start now!”

“Sparky, we need a custom shell that can store and reconstitute SepT beams.”

“Not even I can do that, no matter how godlike I may be,” Sparky responded. “...buuuut, I think I can suspend a reconstituting beam in there with a Spiker Array and the SepT buffer.”

“Do it,” Gabriel ordered with a nod in his usual, soft voice, and Sparky ran off to parts unknown. Well, unknown to you guys. Because you’re stupid. “You have five minutes.”

“Lookit me go!”

...stupid!

------------------------------------------

“So, now what?” Renée asked.

“I thought you knew,” Kamen answered.

“Based on what?” Kamen shrugged and gave her cane a little spin. She spoke a word, under which other words scratched out a harsh whisper—rejecting, in their own essence, even the vivaciousness of a yell. They were unintelligible, but the word above was obvious in its Japanese attack-move-esque manner.

“Ghostwood!” The wood of her staff changed from jet black to a pale ash-white in an instant. And, though it was still clearly smooth and perfect, it looked twisted, crooked, and spindly at the same time: like a burned, dead tree in the night, surrounded by the sulfurous fumes of its own death. The ghostwood was jarring by its very nature, but it had a purpose: attacking the soul.

Then, Kamen charged Mesden, swinging the cane like a saber.