NPF Avatars 5 - Burning Down The House

[POS Industries]

"Why did I let him work on the RoboHobo project?"

Pedro sat helplessly in the oversized bindle-net, arms crossed as he grumbled about his current situation. Being captured was hardly any fun for anybody, and doubly so for someone who had gone to great links to defend himself from this sort of violation as POS had. Either Doug Doukhobor was smarter than anyone had given him credit or Pedro O'Sullivan was seriously slipping. Fo' reals, yo.

A few minutes passed before Pedro felt the momentum of their trip slow to a halt, before suddenly shifting as the bindle carrying him whipped through the air and opened, hurling him through the air into a polished chrome wall. The wind knocked out of him, Pedro took a moment to regain his senses as he slid down to the floor.

"Mr. O'Sullivan, welcome," Doug Doukhobor greeted his prisoner, a self-satisfied smirk plastered on his face, "and might I say, 'Checkmate'. Not bad, huh? Oh, right, hang on a sec..."

Pressing a button sequence on the control panel next to him, Doug activated a security field around Pedro, a forcefield sizzling to life between them combined with an antigravity device that held the prisoner motionless in the air.

"Much better. I have to say, I'm actually surprised this worked," Doukhobor continued, "The whole plan hinged on your willingly helping the other NPFers, to which I was highly skeptical. Still, my people on the inside assured me that you'd fall for it and, what do you know, you did. Still, it couldn't have happend without my--"

"Cram it, Doug."

"Buh, wha...?" the would-be mastermind stammered, his villainous monologue so rudely interruped by his captive audience.

"You didn't supply anything," Pedro sighed as he floated, "Everything you have is stolen one way or another from POS Industries. From me. Equipment, designs, resources, manpower, covert operatives that are apparently still under my employ... Hell, I even bought up a controlling share of your stock about an hour ago. I own you, you stupid fucking pissant!"

"Not for long, stringbean," Doug growled, growing ever more enraged at this constant stream of verbal abuse, "I've got you right where I want you, and with this machine, I will..."

Before he could continue, a squeal of alarms erupted as the facility around them shook mildly, once again interrupting Doug's attempt at valuable exposition. The sound of gunfire grow closer and closer, louder and louder as the last of Doukhobor's robotroopers fought to repel the intruder before suddenly growing quiet. A few seconds passed before the door opened and in walked the man who had singlehandedly stormed his way into the villain's inner midst.

Santa Claus.

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Teddy bear still in her grasp, the green crystalline entity known as Anima reached the floor of the Kurosen Tower below along with the rest of the NPFers as the two teams had finally regrouped in one spot after what seemed like ages.

A pendent around the plush toy's neck suddenly glowed and surrounded it in an aura of light as Anima set it upon the ground, transforming the Bear back into its natural form, where it let out a loud roar and began sniffing about through the wreckage of the chamber around it.

Anima remained in her avian form, flying toward the nearest familiar face from her telepathic link with Pedro's own thoughts: Rei. The android had limped her way forward, ignoring the zany hijinks of the others behind her for a moment as she moved nearer to the Kurosen itself.

Reaching out in front of her, Rei placed both hands on the relic and closed her eyes. The golden glow of the Kurosen enveloped her, connecting to her main power cell and recharging it and briefly supercharging it for a moment, sending her internal repair nanites on overdrive. Her power output rose exponentially, the energy swirling about the android's body as she "healed", before exploding harmlessly in a quick flash and coming to an end.

"OOOKEEEEEDOOOOKEEEEEE," Rei called out to the others, feeling better than ever as the Kurosen relic decended into a more secured holding area until the appropriate repairs to the facility could be completed, "Here's the situation: The Kurosen power plant has been disabled and NPF City is running on emergency power. Everything should be mostly operational, though the mods' and admins' powers have been altogether comprimised. Limited thread manipulation is possible, but bannings require too much energy and even one could collapse the power grid for the whole forum.

"Pedro's been kidnapped, a vengeance-driven duplicate Santa is on the loose, and there's a mad scientist out there that's spent all day trying to kill each and every one of us, tried to destroy the very heart of our forums, and needs to be brought to justice. I'm putting the tournament on hold temporarily so that we can go in there and put an end to this before something really goes wrong..."

A hyperlink portal opened before the group as Anima came to a rest in Rei's hand, returning to her shard form as the android placed Anima in her pocket before continuing her exposition.

"Your submitted tournament items will be transferred back to you at O'Sullivan Tower, where we're going to resupply before storming Doukhobor Labs," she explained as she walked into the portal, "I'm going and you don't have to come with if you don't want, but I'd appreciate the help. I have a bad feeling about what Doug's got planned..."

[Fenris]

Wizardcat was violently ejected from the premises. Fenris turned around, opened the door, and waved a thread around Wizardcat, and returned him to the top of the Kurosen tower.

He added a note to the Warned User List that Wizardcat attempted to sneak into private property.

[mauve]

"Oh, I'm coming, all right," Mauve growled. "Nobody tries to kill me and destroy the forum and gets away with it. Not if I have anything to say about it. And I'm gonna make that jerk-face pay for wrecking my camera. The finer legal details over whether it's actually 'mine' may be blurry, but Ecurt and I did go through a lot of trouble to break into the Gaia news van and steal the damn thing."

"And let's face it: Santa's had it coming for a while. Now's as good a time as any to put an end to all of the above problems."

She pulled the brim of her hat down further on her head and followed Rei through the portal.

[Nikose Tyris]

"...So, it's not the real Santa Claus?" Nikose asked, crestfallen. He looked as though his world had come crashing down around him. He even sat down on the ground, and hugged his knees to his chest. "But I've always been such a good boy, and I've never gone out of my way to hurt anyone before!"

"..."

Nikose stood up again, his eyes shining with tears. "Okay, now I'm PISSED. I'm in. I didn't spend all year being good just to find out that Santa's not real!"

[Arhra]

The back-up control room in the false Mashirosen Tower was looking very different than when Arhra had first arrived there. Panelling removed, the innards of the machinery behind it spilled out, connected into a silvery nest of wires and conduits. At the center was Arhra.

Remembering Pedro O'Sullivan's override code, Arhra had also activated the R.E.I. program, the AI who had later made the change from Realisticaly Empathic to Relatively Empathic and become POS Industries' spokes-android. She seemed to be taking the discovery she was a temporary replica of something that already was only tenuously alive quite well. The two had talked about it. It had been very moving.

While technically she didn't exist, she felt the need to bring something to Arhra's attention. "Uh, as much fun as you're having, I think I should remind you this universe is collapsing."

The mysterious series of events that had coughed up several instances of Arhra had warped her powers. This one had changed to an ability to take technology into herself. Serendipitiously, this cyborg-Arhra had ended up in a structure filled to the brim with sophisticated hardware.

As such, she was busy filling herself to the brim with sophisticated hardware. Cannibalising the now dormant defence systems of the tower, Arhra was rearranging it around her. It was quite obvious that if she wasn't mostly immobilised by the process, Arhra would be rolling around in cat-like bliss.

She opened her eyes, "I know." she said quietly, "But there was no chance to get to that portal. I have found another solution." Being handily jacked in to the system, she summarised it briefly. She'd attempted to convert a large portion of the tower into a interdimensional railgun. "Are you certain you don't want to come?"

"There is no place for me there."

Arhra nodded. "Good luck to you then." she said, standing and the various jacks disconnecting from her, falling away. The generators she'd salvaged whined as they drew power before the final fall into oblivion.

There was an explosion of light, and then there was nothing.

* * *

Hugging TBM slowly to death, Arhra suddenly released him. "Certainly!" she said, having shown no sign of hearing his request until this point. Patting him vaguely, she wandered off towards Rei when Pyros suddenly fell through the roof, half frozen and landing on his face.

"Don't see that sort of thing nearly enough." Arhra decided, keeping an ear open to the android exposition. Pratfalls are always funny.

To her surprise, she then swooped down on dragonback, landing neatly and dismounting, helping her passenger to dismount. Then Arhra corrected herself - she wasn't over there, she was here, so her exact double had swooped down.

Leaning heavily on this new Arhra for support was another Arhra, which did not help with clarity. The dragon the pair had been riding then turned into Arhra, confusing the situation even more.

There would have been an awkward silence if there hadn't been a rumble, as if the fabric of the universe was being violated again, and a fifth Arhra appeared, stumbling from the momentum left over after being shot between dimensions from the false Mashirosen Tower. Though at least she had the common decency to look a little different from the others.

Looking at each other, they all came to the same realisation. Before they went through the portal, there was something very important they had to get sorted out. Even the poisoned Arhra, fighting the deadly venom of Wilshasa, straightened, standing without support. It was very important.

Each Arhra stepped forwards, forming a line abreast facing Hawk the self proclaimed time warrior and Arhra proclaimed emergency food supply. Identical devilish grins upon their faces, they spoke as one. "Hello Hawk." they intoned. "Where is your god now?"

[Karrrrrrrrrrrresche]

"Okay, now I'm PISSED. I'm in. I didn't spend all year being good just to find out that Santa's not real!"

K36 chuckled as he stood up, "It's okay Nik, It's just an EVIL santa. I'm sure the real one will give us a buncha points for stopping an evil version of him."

"As for me, I don't think this guys going to stop hunting us even if we do just leave him alone"

He wandered over to the portal, and before stepping in continued. "Besides, maybe this guy has a flag for me to steal!"

[PyrosNine]

"Actually, newbies to the mayhem, I killed Santa between Avvy saves christmas, and the next NPF Avatars. So this is a non-dead santa from an alternate dimension that I did not kill, yet is aware that I killed him in the original universe. And apparently he's miffed or something." Pyros pointed out, holding up a link to a previous post (recorded history).

"Then I burned the North Pole to the ground, and then had Lawyer-ninjas on my ass for a good year or so."

[Melfice]

Melfice had turned around just in time for a small amount of the water to hit him right in the face. But only a small amount. The rest of it was smartly blocked by Indori, who had seen the events happening, but chose not to alert his host.

Melfice looked at Keyman quite angrily, as he was without doubt the only one who'd do such a thing -most notably because he was holding a seltzer gun, but chose not to react. He wiped his face dry on his cape and turned to Rei.

"You may count me in also." Melfice stepped forward to the portal. "Incidentally, you wouldn't happen to be able to teleport me to my home dimension, would you, Rei? It has been ever so long since I've rested my eye on my beautiful homeland." With a twinkle of reminiscence in his eye Melfice looked at the android. "Perhaps you can help me once we are done here?"

Melfice stepped through the portal, after K36 and Nikose.

[Bailey]

Keyman clutched his shoulder in pain, not noticing the glare from Melfice, and dropped the seltzer gun, stumbled slightly, ended up with one foot on top of the seltzer gun, and then fell over rather dramatically, moving at least twenty feet as he did so, and grabbing desperately at something as he fell, but only managed to pull it down. He looked at the thing he had grabbed and his eyes widened in fear, then he scrambled away, smacking right into the line of Arhras.

This wasn't going to end well.

There was no possible way it WOULD. Not after he de-pantsed a deity.

[PyrosNine]

As it happened, and as Newb hoped, he did in fact depants Asheth. However, she was wearing two pairs of pants that day, and his attempts to see anything worthwhile were thwarted, yet again. However, Asheth rather enjoyed the feeling of warmth one gets from having two pairs of pants, and was particularly annoyed.

"ULTIMA DISRESPECT!" She yelled, her heels glowing, as she made a hard kick at Newb's crotch.