Other Worlds: V 2.0

[initiates]

Date & Time: May 21st, beginning at 0900.
Location: The Initiative Hold and all throughout Elmer's world
Characters: Anyone participating in the fighting, anyone staying behind.
Summary: Elmer's world is fought for and lost.
Warnings: Violence, death.

They reopen the portal at 0900, May 21st. The first scientist who stepped through was killed within thirty seconds; the rest who followed made it back through to Exsilium, albeit not unscathed. The portal was shut again by a panicked operator, although a second operator knew to keep the coordinates locked.

Within ten minutes, the alert had been sent out. There's no time to wait for the Transports to gather en masse; as soon as they have a sizable enough force to stand a chance at fighting through and clearing their gateway's location, the door is opened again.

Immediately inside the door is a desolate, grim scene. What had previously been the coast of Japan is now scorched earth, blasted sand, and little else. As the first point of contact for this world, it has undoubtedly suffered the worst. Here, the UE didn't stop at governments, financial centers, and capitols — the UE destroyed everything in sight. There are enough UE soldiers remaining in the broken country to give the Transports a difficult battle, although by now the bulk of their forces have moved on.

The Initiative will soon realize the necessity of opening more gateways, just as the UE had done. Transports will be deployed to London, Berlin, Paris, DC Washington, Moscow, Beijing, New York City, Hong Kong, Madrid. Through each of these windows, the destruction is staggering. Buildings are more husks than structures, everything that can burn is alight, and the death toll is off the charts. Blackened bodies seem to line every street, while pieces litter the ground among the rubble. There's no doubt that the UE has no need of the people of this world. They're after resources only, and anything and anyone already here is to be removed.

You can find UE soldiers everywhere. They move in coordinated squadrons of 20, and each of them carries a small arsenal. Even without their incredibly advanced and destructive weaponry, they're fearfully formidable. Each soldier, while still only human, is a genetically perfect clone, further enhanced by technological implants. They're all highly trained in physical combat. Even if you can disarm one of them, don't count on close-range attacks being any easier to handle. They've brought along cannons, small flying craft, and lightweight tanks. Each of these is the top of the line in terms of technology, geared toward destroying as much as it can, as quickly as it can. The United Earth is here to destroy, and they won't stop to wonder why their targets go from being civilians and scrambling, off-guard, comparatively primitive militaries, to trained and powered Transports.

For anyone staying at home, they'll find that any Initiative presence has withdrawn fully to the Hold. All Initiative employees are needed, and most of them in the med bays. The majority of the Initiative focus is on recalling and resurrecting fallen Transports, but attention is still needed for the living-but-wounded. Any Transports who stay in Exsilium and offer their help will have it immediately accepted; they'll be put to work in the medical wings, runnings supplies, or simply set at a machine and told to keep an eye on the numbers: Transport vitals, UE movements, and maps upon maps of changing statistics and colors.

At 1500, the Initiative will recall all Transport soldiers back to Exsilium and seal shut the gateway. The UE numbers are too great, their soldiers too powerful, and Elmer's world is lost.

Comments

[speakveryclearly]

So she sat, moved her occupied hand to loop around the other girl's shoulders, as her free hand began to hold her eyeshadow and loaded the gun it actually was.

The very least she owed Rose was not to leave her.

"I won't. Other people do that quite a bit more often than me." She wasn't looking at Rose anymore, only staring at the soldiers approaching in the distance. Counting them. Counting bullets. That would probably be necessary.

Tried not to think about it too much.

[flightybookshrew]

"Mm," Rose couldn't really manage a response to that, everything was sort of...fuzzy and distant and she was absolutely certain this should have hurt more than it did. It was mostly just annoying. Especially the coughing.

She wasn't even the soldiers approaching, wasn't aware of anything except the faint sensation of Kanaya holding her. Her violet eyes were barely open, but they were staring at the rainbow drinker, and she opened her mouth as if to say something...

And then she was gone.

[speakveryclearly]

Kanaya's eyes widened, briefly, as she felt Rose go still - the pulse stopping where her neck pressed against her arm. Death, then. Familiar to her, yes, but not quite as such a close feeling. Blades were sharp. The softer death of bullets was one Kanaya naturally normally experienced at a distance.

Then there was shooting to be done, after she moved the lumber in front of her to provide a tiny bit of cover. The soldiers were getting closer, and the advantage the thin alleyway provided in one fallen's body blocking the people behind it could only last for so long.

[flightybookshrew]

And for a few minutes, nothing happened. Rose just lay where Kanaya had placed her, still and empty and gone.

Perhaps they had been wrong. Perhaps what she did really was a heroic death.

[speakveryclearly]

She only looked back once. Much more would defeat the point, after all. Death did become Rose in a way - there was a way her pale hair and skin could look haunted in contrast to the bright red blood on her dark-painted lips - but it wasn't right for her to be dead in god tier clothing, when she was supposed to have overcome darkness in favor of goodness and hope and light and purity (she did forget science).

She didn't dwell. She had headshots to do. Though, armor-piercing bullets in her arsenal or not, those Masked were pesky... oh, and quite a few of them could actually accomplish acrobatic feats like leaping over the corpses of their comrades or just vaporizing obstacles. That was wonderful. (Human sarcasm.) At this point, alleystuck, she couldn't exactly be expected to get past them - there wouldn't be enough time to fell them all - and letting them reach Rose's corpse wasn't an appealing option either.

As she recaptchalogued her eyeshadow and replaced it with her chainsaw, she spared one final glance over to where her former trolling victim's body lay...

[flightybookshrew]

Perhaps the universe had a sense of appropriate timing, but it's not until the situation is quite grim that there's any particular stirring from the Seer of Light's corpse. Suddenly though, there is a soft, faint glow that seems to encapsulate her body, and a strange, quiet noise almost like a hum as she floats off the ground, hovering in place, hanging limp like a rag doll.

The places where she had been shot glowed with a more intense light, and as it faded even her god tier pajamas were repaired, looking as if she had never been shot in the first place. Even the blood stains were gone.

She sank slowly back down onto her feet on the garbage pile, but her eyes were still closed...how aware she was of the world around her was hard to guess.

[speakveryclearly]

Mended... by the time Kanaya saw Rose unsullied the light had faded from her body; she only took in a flawless goddess with eyes shut out to the world burning down around them. Was this the preclude to her getting back up? Or just what a dead Seer looked like - sanitized - thanks to the perks of the god tiers?

A progressive knife to the back was Kanaya's reward for this degree of distraction. On the bright side, one of the Masked ran straight into her chainsaw's blade, meaning their legs buckled in place on the ground while their torso maintained momentum and fell forward in Rose's direction.

[flightybookshrew]

Whether it was Kanaya being stabbed or the torso being flailed at her, Rose's eyes suddenly snapped open, just in time to flit out of the way of the tumbling torso, one of the thorns appearing in her hand.

"Stay away from her!" Was shouted, though it wasn't at any particular soldier, and suddenly the alleyway was full of twisted purple lightning, hitting pretty much everything that wasn't Kanaya or Rose.

There was a lot of screaming.

[speakveryclearly]

The knife slid out of Kanaya's skin unevenly as its wielder's skin was rendered a scorched mess and merged into the molten materials of Masked armor, making proper grip maintenance rather difficult to say the least. Relief put pressure all over her on top of the immediate shock, like too many blankets.

"The same applies to my companion!"

Taking out her gun with her other hand, she fired half a dozen rounds without looking into the emptying, sparking space behind her. Three hit. Sentient weapons were a wonderful thing.

[flightybookshrew]

As the spontanious thunder storm of death faded, Rose settled back onto her feet from where she had floated up a bit, and frowned at the pile of smoldering corpses, then over at Kanaya, then down at herself. A quick check over with her hands revealed that her injuries were gone, even her robe was fixed, and her eyes were a tad wide as she looked back at the rainbow drinker.

She'd realize how hurt Kanaya was in a minute, probably.

"...Well." A beat. "I can't say I was expecting it to work like that."

[speakveryclearly]

Both of Kanaya's weapons turned back into makeup, one tube for each hand. She was thinking about touching them up, her fingers twitched to do so; it was only the pull of the tentacle therapist's compelling tendrils that prevented her. She tried not to feel a faintly squishy stab wound that would not be particularly bothersome but wouldn't pull itself obligingly back together either. Damn progressive knives.

"Neither can I, though I also can't say I had any particular expectations at all."

[flightybookshrew]

"Mm," Rose made a soft, distracted sound as she checked herself over again, glancing up at Kanaya...and then spotting one of the rainbow drinker's various injuries. Her violet eyes went wide, and she hurried over to the other teen.

"You're hurt. How badly? We need to get you back to the Initiative."

Rose was functionally immortal. No one could really say the same of Kanaya with any certainty.

[speakveryclearly]

"N-n-no we don't," Kanaya deflected quickly. She shook her head for emphasis - she was fine, trolls didn't mind stabs, especially not rainbow drinkers! Except her undeath was written by Andrew Hussie instead of Troll Stephenie Meyer, and her skin was not actually made of diamond, and progressive knives really were a bitch. Rose's safety was much more important. God tier or not, she was human, and soft, and vulnerable. "We need to get you somewhere you won't get hit again! What if that squadron called for backup?"

[flightybookshrew]

"Then the backup will regret answering," there was a dark aura around Rose as she said that, her eyes faintly narrowed, and the wands in her hand seemed to crackle before she caught herself. She had to focus on Kanaya right then.

"And you are hurt, I am fine. Come on."

[speakveryclearly]

"It's just a little backstabbing..." But she knew it wasn't safe to not let Rose have her way. (Jadeblood lady's hamartia. She really had to stop submitting so often.) And maybe she did have a point in that it would be better to acquaint herself with whatever terrible alien medicine the Initiative had in store for her if she was meaningfully hurt later.

"Okay, fine, at least hover a bit so we can get there faster and I can demonstrate how incredibly spry I am right now."

[flightybookshrew]

Rose just frowned at her, even as she floated up a few inches off the ground. Her expression was stern, her arms crossed.

"There is no such thing as a 'little' stabbing, Kanaya," Rose should know, she'd been a lot stabbed before.

"Good. Let's go, I will clear the way." Her wands crackled again as the dark purple aura flickered to life around her body and she started towards the end of the alley. At least it wasn't the black tentacled one.