Okay. Everyone just shut up and move along. I feel like us (The people in the RP in question) are the only ones acting maturely in this situation. This roleplay affects nobody in the community, only those who join. If you don't like the RP, then don't bother joining it or reading it. We're having fun, and if you disagree with our way of having fun, ignore us! We don't need to take this. Do you not have anything better to do than hate on us? I'm sure you have your way of having fun, as do we. So everybody just move away from this and we can all forget about it. Go find an RP that conforms to what you like, or start one yourselves. If you don't like our style, then don't worry about us. You can choose to never see our thread again. If you do, just don't click on it. Please though, let's all act mature, as I know we all are, and move on from this.
They had finished their ride in silence. Smoke and fire hung on the distant night sky like a supernova, its glow drowning the shattered moon. Homsy's death had not been the first, but it had more of an impact then the thousands who died when the Red Sector was breached, or during their chaotic decent to the surface of the planet. Herc remembered the fear and uncertainty they had felt when that first casualty had occurred, in stasis before they had awoke. That had been the first time they had been forced to stare the mortality of their mission in the face, but Homsy meant something else. They had lost their leader, and they had arrived on an empty world. Stranded. Herc could not shake the feeling, or the word. Stranded.
The sickly-colored yellow mold gave way to plains of hair-like grass. It was neither as stiff nor as fibrous as the grass on earth. Deep burgundies and blood-like crimsons coiled and whipped around each other with the breeze, and it looked like a scenic painting come to life. When it passed into the bright blue lights of the OTHV, the redness faded into a slight pigmentation in strands of dancing liquid translucence. It was beautiful, but so strange that it was also unsettling.
"Is this shit poisonous?" one of the soldiers said. Nobody answered. They all tucked their legs in closer.
On Earth, everything had evolved next to each other. Poison was rare outside of animal defenses, and that much had been passed down since the beginning of time. It was almost innate, and what you didn't know could be learned by asking, or reading a book, or any number of simple methods of research. Herc could remember as a kid wondering how what was safe to eat, or to touch, had been learned, and he had decided that at some point somebody had tried each one, and that somebody had suffered or died. At home, that had been an almost funny concept, laughable because endless generations separated him from it. But here, it was different. They had technology, of course, but that had its limits. They would have to learn most things through death.
Smoke rose in a stringy column on their horizon, marking their destination. In the sky above, the colorful twinkle of the floating "Fish-Shrooms" joined the stars. It was like the lights on aircraft or communications towers at home, gaining in number what they lacked in rhythm. It was hard not to be taken captive by the peculiar beauty of the place.
They arrived a burnt crater in the field of reds. The glider had been mangled upon impact, and wrenched sheets of steel stuck out of the dirt like the ribcage of a prehistoric monster. It was an ugly scene, and its violence pulled Herc back into reality.
Bodies lay burned amongst the matted red grass. Blackened flesh broken by pink, bubbled fissures filled the air with a putrid smell that reminded Herc, to his disgust, of barbecue. That smell of vomit and death joined it. Some of the bodies were eviscerated, slick pale noodles hanging from bloody gashes in their bellies. Heads and limbs were missing, and most were dead.
But some were not. Herc got to work assessing the damage. The meaty smell worsened as he hopped off the OTHV and hustled into the mess. He felt a wet tingle at the back of his throat, and within a moment he was vomiting bile and undigested food-paste into the grass nearby.
Soldiers fanned out, doing what they could to help. They offered water to the concious and ineptly inspected the twisted wreckage.
A second OTHV arrived behind them with, with a rack in place to allow for the storage of the wounded. Herc wished it had been an ambulance, but as far as he knew they didn't have anything of the sort. The bare simplicity of the military would have to do.
Herc prepared the wounded for transport. Lacking the equipment to do anything more than basic field surgery, he could do little more then repair bleeding wounds and prepared the badly burned for transport. There was not enough protective salve to go around. More often then he would have liked, his preperation was nothing more then sedatives.
"Listen up!" the squad sergeant shouted. He had been interviewing the only victim of the crash in a state to talk - an unburned man who had jumped right before they struck the ground. Something he had said disturbed the sergeant. At first, he had just been an escort. What the unburned man said seemed to have awoken the soldier inside of him.
"We have to move quick!" the sergeant explained sternly. His finger rubbed the trigger-guard on his rifle. "There is something out there and it dragged some people off before we arrived. Be on the watch, and lets move before it comes back!"
Dread shot down Hercs spine, and the night air seemed to come alive. His mind heard inaudible growls, and the black of night seemed to hide unseeable shapes.
Herc moved quickly. The soldiers helped him to move the breathing bodies as fast and careful as they could. He couldn't keep his eyes from darting nervously toward the dark. When it finally came, it was not where he had been looking. And he did not see it when he looked.
A gurgling grown came out of nowhere, like the maniacal laugh of a movie monster. A soldier near the edge of the wreck suddenly flew through the air, blood spraying across the ground. Red flashes of light sent pulsing blobs of color as men discharged their weapons at the unseen predator. A second roar came from behind them, and another soldier was plucked from the ground. After that, it was chaos. It was a route.
Someone shouted for Herc to run, but he didn't need to be told. He hopped on board the OTHV as soldiers began to pile on it. Strobing plasma charges and the stampede of shouting soldiers seemed to hide their attacker. Herc couldn't see it - or they. He could only hear. Roars like they came from a massive pipe of boiling water. A third soldier was ripped from the back, and his flight left a contrail of blood.
The moment the last man touched the OTHV, they sped off into the night. They spat and cussed, the soldiers a little embarrassed by the fact that they had fled. "Shit, what the hell wast that?" one asked.
"I dunno, man." another added. "I didn't see it. I was right there was Kyles got got, but I didn't fucking see it."
The colony loomed like a monolith of steel and glass. Patches of sickly colored algae clung to its dented walls. From the ground, it was huge. From the air, he had saw a wheel - cornerless and rounding in on itself. But from here, it looked like a solid wall, its curve slight. It towered above the coral-like foliage on the ground, rising over one hundred feet in height.
When told he would be arriving on an alien world, Herc had failed to imagine what that truly meant. He had imagined blue trees and lizard-people - forms that mimicked life on earth. This world, however, was much further away from what he knew. There were things that could be compared to trees, but the comparison fell short of describing them. Porous and tangled, they were more similar to coral then trees. Some grew as tall as grew as old Kauri trees, while others kept each other down in mutual warfare, tangles growing so thick that none of the plants involved could fight free.
In empty patches where the tangle cave way to patches of clay and dirt, the shadows of balloon-like airborne bulbs increased as the plants slowly sank to the ground with the fading light. They grew flatter, deflating as they sank, until they lay on the ground like artificial hills.
There was no grass, but instead a thick fuzzy mold that changed colors from patch to patch like the leaves of deciduous trees in the fall. It bubbled in some places, releasing a thick, viscous liquid in pools of vivid yellow.
This was his new home. Herc couldn't help but stare at the strange new world surrounding him, but there was little time to slow down and admire it.
Drop ships had ferried soldiers into the area surrounding the colony's silent walls, but many had been lost. With their numbers weakened, they struggled to put of a perimeter. Long, thin strips of silvery metal were put into place and switched on, projecting laser walls of hot, white light that shot upward into the sky until it slowly faded into darkness. Tesla-Wireless nuclear generators buzzed from a distance, providing power to everything that needed it.
"You!" a sharp voice cut through the chaos, shrill and heavy. Dressed in thin armor, a gangly woman of Asian descent approached the new arrivals. She held a stubby plasma rifle in her hands and purpose in her eyes.
"You are medics?" she asked, staring as if any amount of time was too long to wait for an answer.
Herc nodded. From the corner of his eye, he could see the surrounding nurses and their first year medical student doing the same.
"We are." Dr. Kumar answered from behind him.
"Good." she replied with a single, strong-jawed nod. "We need you to spread out and join the rescue-teams. We are sending parties out to find survivors." She pointed out the Over Terrain Hover Vehicle filling with teams nearby.
"I will stay here." Dr. Kumar replied. "To set up a triage." There was no objection.
Taking one look at Herc's medical whites, the soldiers gathering around an overstuffed OTHV greeted him with tense nods. He jumped in the back, joining a collection of toughened veterans and stary-eyed recruits. In a moment, the vehicle lifted off the ground and they were sailing comfortably over the landscape.
The vermillion sun had fallen over the horizon, covering the landscape in black-blue darkness illuminated by the shattered moon. Here, amongst the tangled plants and away from the busy landing zone, the alien wilderness felt much more unfamiliar, and much more dangerous. They were aware that they knew nothing about what was here aside from what they had seen. Unidentifiable noises called out from the tangles beyond - sharp, quivering hoops and soft pitched whines played like bird songs in the void. But where they from birds, or at least things like birds? In this world, those sounds could have as easily came from the apex predators of this plain, communicating a plan that would bring them all down. It made him uneasy, and he sunk into his shoulders. At least he was surrounded by men with guns.
A brilliant flash filled the sky with instantaneous daylight. Where the thin glowing trail of the Olympus had been cutting through the sky there was only a fiery cloud raining streaks of pale fire. And a moment later, they heard it. A distant boom, like fireworks on the ocean. It was followed by a breeze that, despite its warmth, chilled them to the bone. Herc imagined the Med Bay, its mother-of-pearl walls melting in the glow of hateful nuclear fire as it filled every room and cabinet.
"." a soldier whistled. "Homsy was still on there."
The MCF is like a city where everyone throws a party on the same day and is amazed that nobody showed up. Of course nobody showed up - they were too busy trying to throw their own parties.
The problem is that everyone wants to make the big RP rather then join it. That creates too many RP's and not enough RPers.
What needs to happen is people need to stop being so driven to be the GM's and instead join RP's that are already going on.
The glider reminded him of the inside of an upper-atmosphere plane. Rows of seats followed the slick titanium walls, each with its own nylon safety strap. It was completely open inside, save for the few thin metal struts that kept its structure secure. From the back end, you could see into the open cockpit, where two pilots went over their pre-flight check with military precision.
Not everyone in this glider was medical personnel. In their rush to fill the gliders as quick as they could, crews had been mixed. Herc guessed that about half of the people wore the white jumpsuits of his field, the rest dressed in a motley of colors.
They found their seats. Herc struggled with the safety straps. They had not been made for his size. His cheeks reddened and he fought the straps more urgently. A few more tugs brought the clasps together, and he fell back in victorious satisfaction. He felt silly now. They had rocketed through space at a velocity that matched the fastest particles in nature, and they were preparing to dive at a full speed in a steel canister toward a world they knew very little about. And in all of this, he had been brought to flush by rubber and nylon.
The passengers exchanged anxious glances, and Herc had reminded himself why. Diving full speed toward a world they know very little about. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to imagine a safe landing. The sons and daughters of the Ararat rushing out to welcome them. Food made from food, a bed he could lay his weight in, and all the solid ground a man would ever need.
"We were from Red Sector." a haunted couple said nervously. Their skin was a clammy gray - it was clear that this thought was a near-death experience to them. "If we hadn't made it to Violet during the warning..."
"I was asleep." the girl said. "If he hadn't woke me up..."
"You arrived here. Safely. Everything will be fine." Doctor Kumar assured them. He was one of the few - him and the pilots - who didn't seem to mind any of this. His eyes were cool and calm, and he was posed as if he were at home, curled in a reclining chair and preparing to read a book.
"I heard some of them was stuck in red sector managed to get out after it was hit." another man spoke up. "It wasn't as bad as they were saying."
"That is unlikely." a girl in medical white interjected. "The vacuum of outer space would have sucked them out of the halls and into space. Ebullism would have kept oxygen from reaching their brain tissue, their lungs would have collapsed and their bodily secretions would have..." she took a deep breath. "Froze as soon as they secreted."
Her words had done nothing to calm down the others, but they seemed almost funny to Herc. This young girl, hardly twenty, who looked barely an inch over five feet, had struck a fear in the other passengers that he could never have done if he had stood up and threatened to beat them out of consciousness.
Her hair was a thick brown tangle held together by a bun on the back of her head. Rebels strands waved on her forehead as she embraced her seat nervously. "Hopefully these spaceships will hold, or we will suffer the same things."
"Nurse." Doctor Kumar said in a fatherly, reproaching voice. "That is enough, dear."
"I'm not a nurse." she replied sharply. "First year medical student, thank you." How had she gotten herself all the way out here? Life, and Earth, had ways of taking a person and breaking everything they had worked for.
The glider shuttered. Its sudden noise caused the pets in their strap-beds in the back of the ship to yip, bark and meow. One of the pilots turned back to his passengers. "That's the hangar doors opening. In a moment we will began our fall." He was grinning ear to ear, like a kid trying a hoverboard for the first time.
Herc could see out the corner of the window. Bright white light had replaced the dark steel doors. A drop ship sped by, leaving a trail of fading blue gelatin.
"This is going to be a bumpy ride." The pilot continued to explain. "We were supposed to be directed by ground control, but something has changed so we are flying manual."
Something had changed? Herc felt like there was more too that then they were being told. He looked over to Kumar. Even the doctor had taken that information ponderously. The passengers across the way were talking amongst themselves, and from their faces he could tell they were concerned, but he could not hear them over the pneumatic roar of the hanger and the metallic convulsions it had forced on the ship. From the cockpit, however, he could only hear manic laughing. The main pilot - or at least the one who had addressed them - was loving this entire thing. Whether that was for the better or for the worse was hard to say.
He picked up mic and gave them the word over the intercom, his voice overpowering the violent noise around them. He sounded as if he would start giggling any moment. Only his words, if anything else at all, were keeping him under control.
"Thank you for flying Olympus airlines." he said in a thrill-filled voice, "We know you have a choice in deathtraps and we thank you for choosing ours. Keep your limbs attached to your body and do not leave your seats until we come to a complete stop."
It wasn't helpful, but they didn't have time to think. As soon as the mic clicked, they were falling.
Herc rued all the moments he had wished for gravity. It came back to them in a hard way. He felt like the weight of the ship itself was anchored to his ankles, pulling him down and down and down. Their animals, which had been barking and meowing angrily before, were now only letting out frightened cries.
The pilot flipped a switch, and they were yanked to the side. Herc could feel that unsettling feeling of having nothing to protect you from falling but the vessel your were in, and see the near-blinding glow of the planet, and against it were an endless number of metallic dots. As they met the whiteness, they began to burn. That was an effect Herc hadn't thought.
They were next. Flame licked at the windows, blinding them to the world outside. It looked hot, but it did not feel hot. Friction caused the little glider to rattle worse then it had before, with a force that caused his teeth to chatter. Over the noise, Herc could just barely hear the first-year med student saying a peculiar prayer.
"I don't want a concussion. I don't want a concussion. I don't want a concussion"
The flames dissipated, and the pilots cry of "Holy shit" caused him to turn his head. A ball of red flame was blossoming well below them. It was one of the dropships, or maybe two. Whatever had happened, it had been lethal, and the fear of death came flooding into Herc with a newfound force. They had thought themselves safe, and they had died anyway.
A second glider cut their view, passing so close in front of them that everyone could see it. Its tail was one fire, and the flames were licking around a pod that had became wedged into the gliders steel hull. Had they been soldered together in the frictious atmosphere above, or had one simply slammed so hard into the other that they couldn't break apart? The pilots turned their vessel, evaded the unified inferno, and sent them back on course.
Pods rained around them like artillery shells, whizzing by with no visible control or pattern. Herc was certain that, any moment now, one of them would hit them and it would all be over.
"We were supposed to clear those." a man in Engineer browns shouted. "Why are they on top of us?"
"The Olympus was going too fast when we dropped." a pilot replied. "It catapulted them out this far.
"This is a disaster!" the Engineer shouted back.
The pilot didn't argue. "Hold on." he replied. And they did.
It was a mere matter of minutes. Moments that would have felt like mere seconds among friends. But here, in the fire-filled sky, it felt like hours. Herc watched from his seat as pods disintegrated and gliders lost control. Would anybody survive the landing with them? It had, as the engineer noted, been a disaster.
"We are going to correct." the pilot said over the intercom. His excitement had died down now, and he sounded as serious as a mortician. "That means we have to head back into the mess in order to keep on our trajectory toward Landfall colony. If we do not, we could find ourselves lost in the desert, or stuck in the sea. Hold on."
They turned, and the Olympus came back into view. It was no more then a distant bar of shining metal, its belly aflame as it struck the atmosphere.
"The captain stayed on the ship." somebody said. Herc hadn't noticed who. The words surprised him.
"He is going to die then?" the young med-student girl piped up. The engineer nodded.
"He gave his life so we can make it." the Engineer noted. "I met him, too. He was the best leader we could have wished for. A real loss."
Herc watched the Olympus as it was swallowed by the fiery atmosphere. It was losing parts, its hull tearing from the corner in red sector where it had been wounded. The ball of fire eclipsed the rest of the disaster, straddling the bright glow of the planet below and the deep blackness of space above. Sitting just above the dying ship was the shattered Moon, Kerimov, crowning the dying wreckage with static light. A funeral barge for their first true leader. It was an image Herc would never forget.
They went silent, drinking up all the death that their landing had brought. Only Doctor Kumar spoke, and his voice was as deep as the black of space.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
Only the roaring of the vessel around them could be heard. Everything went calm, and they descended into the clouds.
"Look." a weakened voice called out from in front. They had stabilized, and their glider had finally began to glide. They were able to unbuckle their safety belts and move to the front, so long as they held onto the handles that followed the ceiling. Most of them did, eager to see their new home.
At first, it looked like a cloud, but as they grew closer it was clear that it was something else. Its flesh was white and spongy - it looked like a mushroom that had taken to the air. The outer layer formed a net around a jelly-like body inside. As they grew closer, the jelly began to glow a deep, neon blue.
"It looks like a floating fish-shroom." the pilot spoke up.
"It looks like a pancreas." the medical student added.
"What is it?" another voice added.
"It is alive." Dr. Kumar replied. And he was right. It was life. Herc filled with warmth.
Two more burst from the clouds, floating slowly against the wind. They glowed a dim green at first, before turning violet, and then blue. How they worked and what they really were no longer mattered to the glider and its hapless passengers. That they simply were was all that it took to enrapture them. And then more appeared, until a herd full of the beasts were passing them by. The distant neon flicker of reds, blues, greens, and violets told of even more, and their colors looked like holiday lights amongst the misty clouds.
As they passed through the clouds and toward the planet itself, the ground came into view. Far in the distance, brushstrokes of tan and red formed the desert they had been told to avoid. Wine-red mesas and jagged canyons formed walls along much of the wastes, but much of it was worse then even that. Nothing but sand and salt far into the fading distance.
The ground below them was a much more complex set of colors. Green mostly, with glittering specks of red and blue, and stripes of orange and violet. A glistening sea stretches far off into the distance, but smaller lakes covered the rest of the surface. They were near perfect circles, like the crater-lakes of the moon, and they each looked as fresh as the next. The term "Pristine" had been used in advertising Invictus. The word had meant nothing to him, however. A word for artists painting scenery from an old earth, or for men selling cleaned tap water on the streets. This was the first time he had ever understood how that word could truly apply to a world.
The horizon was met by a dusky red sun, giving the sky a rich purple hue. Small lines of quick flame shot through the distant sky - parts of the damaged UNIS Olympus as its captain fought to keep it from bringing disaster to the verdant world below. This space junk looked like shooting stars, far detached from the horrror that had born them. In the distance, glowing "Fish-shrooms" twinkled like colorful stars amongst the puffy clouds. They were not the only things taking to the air, however. Things that flew moved through the sky, unidentifiable in the distance.
As they grew closer, they could see more. Flitting strings of black smoke rose up from crash sites, pocking the fresh planet with bent steel. Forests of strange plants surrounded them. Floating spheres hovered silently in clusters, reminiscent of balloons on earth. Some of them had began to descend, finding resting places amongst the alien undergrowth.
The plains nearby crawled with strange creatures that had previously been hardly imaginable. A spider-like beast stood above them all on one dozen stilt-like legs, its body even with the floating flora. From the sky, they couldn't see a mouth on the creature, but it seemed to be doing something to consume air-bound plant, as the plant's flesh trembled at the creatures presence. Around it, packs of strange creatures fled in line like schools of fish in the sea, changing direction with each other and never missing a step.
As they came over a nearby hill, Landfall came into view. It reminded Herc of Bro-City when he had visited it as a young man. A massive ring of metal surrounded - and surrounding - wings of glass. The center hosted a prickled tower of machines and antennas. But the glass on the outside looked damaged, and the colony looked dark. Something was wrong. Everyone looked at the ruin hopefully, wanting to see some glimpse of life. Any glimpse.
But none came.
Dropships, gliders, and pods had all landed safely nearby. Herc was happy to see that some had survived the horrific mess.
Carefully, the glider's landing system took control and they found a landing place.
Don't sweat it, this isn't baseball - it isn't so many strikes and you are out when it comes to apps. Try to make another one, and really have fun with it this time.
2174, Eight Years Before the Olympus Mission: Earth
The flight from Hawaii to California had taken an hour, most of which has been the ascent. It was the second time in his life that Herc had experienced zero-gravity. He hadn't liked it the first time, and he didn't like it the second. For a boy of his weight, zero-g's meant his awkward body was even more awkward. Flabby skin rippled with waves of fat, and his classmates noticed. Luckily, he had avoided most of their cheapshots, as most of the other boys were focused on the effects no-gravity had on the girls. Herc had noticed too. He was glad nobody had saw that their weightless giggle had effected him in a physical way.
When they landed in LA, he welcomed the ground.
Los Angeles was a city unlike anything Hawaii offered. It was more of a patchwork then a community, and it stretched without end across the desert hills. From Bob Hope International airport, they had left Burbank and spent a day touring the city. Hollywood had bored them, its museum-like atmosphere glorifying the early movie industry. They had seen wax figures of historical figures they struggled to recognize, sat through lectures given by costumed entertainers, and found the whole thing hardly exciting.
Compton and its long, thin beach had been more in line with Herc's interests. It reminded him of home. This place was crowded beyond anything he ever seen, but the water was cleaner - floating filters bobbing on the distant waves gave them that luxury. In several places, the remnants of roads could still be seen leading into the sea. Palos Verdes, a rocky island several miles out to sea, marked where the mainland had once been. The fact that old parts of the city were buried in the sand right in front of them seemed fascinating. He had heard of scuba divers finding trinkets in the fish-swarmed remnants of sunken Santa Monica. Filled soda cans, copper pennies, and purses that imprisoned old Identification cards with the names and pictures still visible. He wondered how many things were still buried in front of him, and how much they might be worth.
Their say in LA came to an end as quickly as it began. They hadn't came all this way on a Senior Field Trip to soak in the beaches. No, they had came for something much newer.
They were loaded into monorail carriages and sent hurdling across pillars on the sky, their seats making them as comfortable as tired people in beds. Glass windows were digitally tinted so they could not see how quick the scenery was nearby unless they wished too. The overhead lights dimmed just enough to make it feel like a home. Sedated by the environment, they listened to what the soothing female voice of the intercom had to say.
"It was 2085, and the post-glacial floods of the late twentieth century had devastated the coast. People fled inland, and the economic upheaval that followed caused trouble in cities that saw sudden waves of refugees and immigrants. Violence ensued, culminating in events like the Las Vegas Riots that killed two hundred people and caused permanent damage to the Strip. Citizens called out for new communities, and they turned to academia for answers."
"Civil Engineers began to design cities from the ground up, building them for efficiency. Some of these failed, but many of them succeeded and became the leading cities of the modern world. The first of these was built here, in the California desert near the Salton Sea. It was here that Rip Brody and the science + engineering fraternity "Eta Nu Alpha" designed what would become the standard model for most planned cities. It was here that they built...."
The lights brightened and screens built into the back of the seats in front of them showed the image of a wheel-shaped city.
"Bro-City!"
It was a gleaming white metal cake, as tall as a skyscraper and covering as much area as a small town would. Its edges were decorated with a wedge-shaped glass enclosure as tall as the building itself. Its center possessed a tall tower, its top decorated with communication satellites and radio transceivers. Its center was a dock.
"Bro-City houses 10 Million people in the space it would take to serve a town of 100,000 in a normal city layout. A nuclear reactor at its core means it is capable of producing its own energy. Its circular design allows it to enclose a second set of glass gardens, bringing warmth and beauty to even the inner sections of the build."
Their train slowed down and the windows detinted. In the distance, Herc could see Bro-City approaching. It was mammoth, so massive that Herc could only compare it to a mountain. Pricks of white light poked out from the darkness of the base.
"Modern Space Colonies have borrowed much from the Bro-City design. Think of Luna, or Mars far above, as you gamble in our first-rate Casinos or enjoy the services of our quality sex workers. The halls you walk here on earth are much like the ones our brave colonists traverse in the stars."
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The sickly-colored yellow mold gave way to plains of hair-like grass. It was neither as stiff nor as fibrous as the grass on earth. Deep burgundies and blood-like crimsons coiled and whipped around each other with the breeze, and it looked like a scenic painting come to life. When it passed into the bright blue lights of the OTHV, the redness faded into a slight pigmentation in strands of dancing liquid translucence. It was beautiful, but so strange that it was also unsettling.
"Is this shit poisonous?" one of the soldiers said. Nobody answered. They all tucked their legs in closer.
On Earth, everything had evolved next to each other. Poison was rare outside of animal defenses, and that much had been passed down since the beginning of time. It was almost innate, and what you didn't know could be learned by asking, or reading a book, or any number of simple methods of research. Herc could remember as a kid wondering how what was safe to eat, or to touch, had been learned, and he had decided that at some point somebody had tried each one, and that somebody had suffered or died. At home, that had been an almost funny concept, laughable because endless generations separated him from it. But here, it was different. They had technology, of course, but that had its limits. They would have to learn most things through death.
Smoke rose in a stringy column on their horizon, marking their destination. In the sky above, the colorful twinkle of the floating "Fish-Shrooms" joined the stars. It was like the lights on aircraft or communications towers at home, gaining in number what they lacked in rhythm. It was hard not to be taken captive by the peculiar beauty of the place.
They arrived a burnt crater in the field of reds. The glider had been mangled upon impact, and wrenched sheets of steel stuck out of the dirt like the ribcage of a prehistoric monster. It was an ugly scene, and its violence pulled Herc back into reality.
Bodies lay burned amongst the matted red grass. Blackened flesh broken by pink, bubbled fissures filled the air with a putrid smell that reminded Herc, to his disgust, of barbecue. That smell of vomit and death joined it. Some of the bodies were eviscerated, slick pale noodles hanging from bloody gashes in their bellies. Heads and limbs were missing, and most were dead.
But some were not. Herc got to work assessing the damage. The meaty smell worsened as he hopped off the OTHV and hustled into the mess. He felt a wet tingle at the back of his throat, and within a moment he was vomiting bile and undigested food-paste into the grass nearby.
Soldiers fanned out, doing what they could to help. They offered water to the concious and ineptly inspected the twisted wreckage.
A second OTHV arrived behind them with, with a rack in place to allow for the storage of the wounded. Herc wished it had been an ambulance, but as far as he knew they didn't have anything of the sort. The bare simplicity of the military would have to do.
Herc prepared the wounded for transport. Lacking the equipment to do anything more than basic field surgery, he could do little more then repair bleeding wounds and prepared the badly burned for transport. There was not enough protective salve to go around. More often then he would have liked, his preperation was nothing more then sedatives.
"Listen up!" the squad sergeant shouted. He had been interviewing the only victim of the crash in a state to talk - an unburned man who had jumped right before they struck the ground. Something he had said disturbed the sergeant. At first, he had just been an escort. What the unburned man said seemed to have awoken the soldier inside of him.
"We have to move quick!" the sergeant explained sternly. His finger rubbed the trigger-guard on his rifle. "There is something out there and it dragged some people off before we arrived. Be on the watch, and lets move before it comes back!"
Dread shot down Hercs spine, and the night air seemed to come alive. His mind heard inaudible growls, and the black of night seemed to hide unseeable shapes.
Herc moved quickly. The soldiers helped him to move the breathing bodies as fast and careful as they could. He couldn't keep his eyes from darting nervously toward the dark. When it finally came, it was not where he had been looking. And he did not see it when he looked.
A gurgling grown came out of nowhere, like the maniacal laugh of a movie monster. A soldier near the edge of the wreck suddenly flew through the air, blood spraying across the ground. Red flashes of light sent pulsing blobs of color as men discharged their weapons at the unseen predator. A second roar came from behind them, and another soldier was plucked from the ground. After that, it was chaos. It was a route.
Someone shouted for Herc to run, but he didn't need to be told. He hopped on board the OTHV as soldiers began to pile on it. Strobing plasma charges and the stampede of shouting soldiers seemed to hide their attacker. Herc couldn't see it - or they. He could only hear. Roars like they came from a massive pipe of boiling water. A third soldier was ripped from the back, and his flight left a contrail of blood.
The moment the last man touched the OTHV, they sped off into the night. They spat and cussed, the soldiers a little embarrassed by the fact that they had fled. "Shit, what the hell wast that?" one asked.
"I dunno, man." another added. "I didn't see it. I was right there was Kyles got got, but I didn't fucking see it."
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The colony loomed like a monolith of steel and glass. Patches of sickly colored algae clung to its dented walls. From the ground, it was huge. From the air, he had saw a wheel - cornerless and rounding in on itself. But from here, it looked like a solid wall, its curve slight. It towered above the coral-like foliage on the ground, rising over one hundred feet in height.
When told he would be arriving on an alien world, Herc had failed to imagine what that truly meant. He had imagined blue trees and lizard-people - forms that mimicked life on earth. This world, however, was much further away from what he knew. There were things that could be compared to trees, but the comparison fell short of describing them. Porous and tangled, they were more similar to coral then trees. Some grew as tall as grew as old Kauri trees, while others kept each other down in mutual warfare, tangles growing so thick that none of the plants involved could fight free.
In empty patches where the tangle cave way to patches of clay and dirt, the shadows of balloon-like airborne bulbs increased as the plants slowly sank to the ground with the fading light. They grew flatter, deflating as they sank, until they lay on the ground like artificial hills.
There was no grass, but instead a thick fuzzy mold that changed colors from patch to patch like the leaves of deciduous trees in the fall. It bubbled in some places, releasing a thick, viscous liquid in pools of vivid yellow.
This was his new home. Herc couldn't help but stare at the strange new world surrounding him, but there was little time to slow down and admire it.
Drop ships had ferried soldiers into the area surrounding the colony's silent walls, but many had been lost. With their numbers weakened, they struggled to put of a perimeter. Long, thin strips of silvery metal were put into place and switched on, projecting laser walls of hot, white light that shot upward into the sky until it slowly faded into darkness. Tesla-Wireless nuclear generators buzzed from a distance, providing power to everything that needed it.
"You!" a sharp voice cut through the chaos, shrill and heavy. Dressed in thin armor, a gangly woman of Asian descent approached the new arrivals. She held a stubby plasma rifle in her hands and purpose in her eyes.
"You are medics?" she asked, staring as if any amount of time was too long to wait for an answer.
Herc nodded. From the corner of his eye, he could see the surrounding nurses and their first year medical student doing the same.
"We are." Dr. Kumar answered from behind him.
"Good." she replied with a single, strong-jawed nod. "We need you to spread out and join the rescue-teams. We are sending parties out to find survivors." She pointed out the Over Terrain Hover Vehicle filling with teams nearby.
"I will stay here." Dr. Kumar replied. "To set up a triage." There was no objection.
Taking one look at Herc's medical whites, the soldiers gathering around an overstuffed OTHV greeted him with tense nods. He jumped in the back, joining a collection of toughened veterans and stary-eyed recruits. In a moment, the vehicle lifted off the ground and they were sailing comfortably over the landscape.
The vermillion sun had fallen over the horizon, covering the landscape in black-blue darkness illuminated by the shattered moon. Here, amongst the tangled plants and away from the busy landing zone, the alien wilderness felt much more unfamiliar, and much more dangerous. They were aware that they knew nothing about what was here aside from what they had seen. Unidentifiable noises called out from the tangles beyond - sharp, quivering hoops and soft pitched whines played like bird songs in the void. But where they from birds, or at least things like birds? In this world, those sounds could have as easily came from the apex predators of this plain, communicating a plan that would bring them all down. It made him uneasy, and he sunk into his shoulders. At least he was surrounded by men with guns.
A brilliant flash filled the sky with instantaneous daylight. Where the thin glowing trail of the Olympus had been cutting through the sky there was only a fiery cloud raining streaks of pale fire. And a moment later, they heard it. A distant boom, like fireworks on the ocean. It was followed by a breeze that, despite its warmth, chilled them to the bone. Herc imagined the Med Bay, its mother-of-pearl walls melting in the glow of hateful nuclear fire as it filled every room and cabinet.
"." a soldier whistled. "Homsy was still on there."
What followed was reverent silence.
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The problem is that everyone wants to make the big RP rather then join it. That creates too many RP's and not enough RPers.
What needs to happen is people need to stop being so driven to be the GM's and instead join RP's that are already going on.
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? Khajjit has to make a living somehow.
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4
The glider reminded him of the inside of an upper-atmosphere plane. Rows of seats followed the slick titanium walls, each with its own nylon safety strap. It was completely open inside, save for the few thin metal struts that kept its structure secure. From the back end, you could see into the open cockpit, where two pilots went over their pre-flight check with military precision.
Not everyone in this glider was medical personnel. In their rush to fill the gliders as quick as they could, crews had been mixed. Herc guessed that about half of the people wore the white jumpsuits of his field, the rest dressed in a motley of colors.
They found their seats. Herc struggled with the safety straps. They had not been made for his size. His cheeks reddened and he fought the straps more urgently. A few more tugs brought the clasps together, and he fell back in victorious satisfaction. He felt silly now. They had rocketed through space at a velocity that matched the fastest particles in nature, and they were preparing to dive at a full speed in a steel canister toward a world they knew very little about. And in all of this, he had been brought to flush by rubber and nylon.
The passengers exchanged anxious glances, and Herc had reminded himself why. Diving full speed toward a world they know very little about. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to imagine a safe landing. The sons and daughters of the Ararat rushing out to welcome them. Food made from food, a bed he could lay his weight in, and all the solid ground a man would ever need.
"We were from Red Sector." a haunted couple said nervously. Their skin was a clammy gray - it was clear that this thought was a near-death experience to them. "If we hadn't made it to Violet during the warning..."
"I was asleep." the girl said. "If he hadn't woke me up..."
"You arrived here. Safely. Everything will be fine." Doctor Kumar assured them. He was one of the few - him and the pilots - who didn't seem to mind any of this. His eyes were cool and calm, and he was posed as if he were at home, curled in a reclining chair and preparing to read a book.
"I heard some of them was stuck in red sector managed to get out after it was hit." another man spoke up. "It wasn't as bad as they were saying."
"That is unlikely." a girl in medical white interjected. "The vacuum of outer space would have sucked them out of the halls and into space. Ebullism would have kept oxygen from reaching their brain tissue, their lungs would have collapsed and their bodily secretions would have..." she took a deep breath. "Froze as soon as they secreted."
Her words had done nothing to calm down the others, but they seemed almost funny to Herc. This young girl, hardly twenty, who looked barely an inch over five feet, had struck a fear in the other passengers that he could never have done if he had stood up and threatened to beat them out of consciousness.
Her hair was a thick brown tangle held together by a bun on the back of her head. Rebels strands waved on her forehead as she embraced her seat nervously. "Hopefully these spaceships will hold, or we will suffer the same things."
"Nurse." Doctor Kumar said in a fatherly, reproaching voice. "That is enough, dear."
"I'm not a nurse." she replied sharply. "First year medical student, thank you." How had she gotten herself all the way out here? Life, and Earth, had ways of taking a person and breaking everything they had worked for.
The glider shuttered. Its sudden noise caused the pets in their strap-beds in the back of the ship to yip, bark and meow. One of the pilots turned back to his passengers. "That's the hangar doors opening. In a moment we will began our fall." He was grinning ear to ear, like a kid trying a hoverboard for the first time.
Herc could see out the corner of the window. Bright white light had replaced the dark steel doors. A drop ship sped by, leaving a trail of fading blue gelatin.
"This is going to be a bumpy ride." The pilot continued to explain. "We were supposed to be directed by ground control, but something has changed so we are flying manual."
Something had changed? Herc felt like there was more too that then they were being told. He looked over to Kumar. Even the doctor had taken that information ponderously. The passengers across the way were talking amongst themselves, and from their faces he could tell they were concerned, but he could not hear them over the pneumatic roar of the hanger and the metallic convulsions it had forced on the ship. From the cockpit, however, he could only hear manic laughing. The main pilot - or at least the one who had addressed them - was loving this entire thing. Whether that was for the better or for the worse was hard to say.
He picked up mic and gave them the word over the intercom, his voice overpowering the violent noise around them. He sounded as if he would start giggling any moment. Only his words, if anything else at all, were keeping him under control.
"Thank you for flying Olympus airlines." he said in a thrill-filled voice, "We know you have a choice in deathtraps and we thank you for choosing ours. Keep your limbs attached to your body and do not leave your seats until we come to a complete stop."
It wasn't helpful, but they didn't have time to think. As soon as the mic clicked, they were falling.
Herc rued all the moments he had wished for gravity. It came back to them in a hard way. He felt like the weight of the ship itself was anchored to his ankles, pulling him down and down and down. Their animals, which had been barking and meowing angrily before, were now only letting out frightened cries.
The pilot flipped a switch, and they were yanked to the side. Herc could feel that unsettling feeling of having nothing to protect you from falling but the vessel your were in, and see the near-blinding glow of the planet, and against it were an endless number of metallic dots. As they met the whiteness, they began to burn. That was an effect Herc hadn't thought.
They were next. Flame licked at the windows, blinding them to the world outside. It looked hot, but it did not feel hot. Friction caused the little glider to rattle worse then it had before, with a force that caused his teeth to chatter. Over the noise, Herc could just barely hear the first-year med student saying a peculiar prayer.
"I don't want a concussion. I don't want a concussion. I don't want a concussion"
The flames dissipated, and the pilots cry of "Holy shit" caused him to turn his head. A ball of red flame was blossoming well below them. It was one of the dropships, or maybe two. Whatever had happened, it had been lethal, and the fear of death came flooding into Herc with a newfound force. They had thought themselves safe, and they had died anyway.
A second glider cut their view, passing so close in front of them that everyone could see it. Its tail was one fire, and the flames were licking around a pod that had became wedged into the gliders steel hull. Had they been soldered together in the frictious atmosphere above, or had one simply slammed so hard into the other that they couldn't break apart? The pilots turned their vessel, evaded the unified inferno, and sent them back on course.
Pods rained around them like artillery shells, whizzing by with no visible control or pattern. Herc was certain that, any moment now, one of them would hit them and it would all be over.
"We were supposed to clear those." a man in Engineer browns shouted. "Why are they on top of us?"
"The Olympus was going too fast when we dropped." a pilot replied. "It catapulted them out this far.
"This is a disaster!" the Engineer shouted back.
The pilot didn't argue. "Hold on." he replied. And they did.
It was a mere matter of minutes. Moments that would have felt like mere seconds among friends. But here, in the fire-filled sky, it felt like hours. Herc watched from his seat as pods disintegrated and gliders lost control. Would anybody survive the landing with them? It had, as the engineer noted, been a disaster.
"We are going to correct." the pilot said over the intercom. His excitement had died down now, and he sounded as serious as a mortician. "That means we have to head back into the mess in order to keep on our trajectory toward Landfall colony. If we do not, we could find ourselves lost in the desert, or stuck in the sea. Hold on."
They turned, and the Olympus came back into view. It was no more then a distant bar of shining metal, its belly aflame as it struck the atmosphere.
"The captain stayed on the ship." somebody said. Herc hadn't noticed who. The words surprised him.
"He is going to die then?" the young med-student girl piped up. The engineer nodded.
"He gave his life so we can make it." the Engineer noted. "I met him, too. He was the best leader we could have wished for. A real loss."
Herc watched the Olympus as it was swallowed by the fiery atmosphere. It was losing parts, its hull tearing from the corner in red sector where it had been wounded. The ball of fire eclipsed the rest of the disaster, straddling the bright glow of the planet below and the deep blackness of space above. Sitting just above the dying ship was the shattered Moon, Kerimov, crowning the dying wreckage with static light. A funeral barge for their first true leader. It was an image Herc would never forget.
They went silent, drinking up all the death that their landing had brought. Only Doctor Kumar spoke, and his voice was as deep as the black of space.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
Only the roaring of the vessel around them could be heard. Everything went calm, and they descended into the clouds.
"Look." a weakened voice called out from in front. They had stabilized, and their glider had finally began to glide. They were able to unbuckle their safety belts and move to the front, so long as they held onto the handles that followed the ceiling. Most of them did, eager to see their new home.
At first, it looked like a cloud, but as they grew closer it was clear that it was something else. Its flesh was white and spongy - it looked like a mushroom that had taken to the air. The outer layer formed a net around a jelly-like body inside. As they grew closer, the jelly began to glow a deep, neon blue.
"It looks like a floating fish-shroom." the pilot spoke up.
"It looks like a pancreas." the medical student added.
"What is it?" another voice added.
"It is alive." Dr. Kumar replied. And he was right. It was life. Herc filled with warmth.
Two more burst from the clouds, floating slowly against the wind. They glowed a dim green at first, before turning violet, and then blue. How they worked and what they really were no longer mattered to the glider and its hapless passengers. That they simply were was all that it took to enrapture them. And then more appeared, until a herd full of the beasts were passing them by. The distant neon flicker of reds, blues, greens, and violets told of even more, and their colors looked like holiday lights amongst the misty clouds.
As they passed through the clouds and toward the planet itself, the ground came into view. Far in the distance, brushstrokes of tan and red formed the desert they had been told to avoid. Wine-red mesas and jagged canyons formed walls along much of the wastes, but much of it was worse then even that. Nothing but sand and salt far into the fading distance.
The ground below them was a much more complex set of colors. Green mostly, with glittering specks of red and blue, and stripes of orange and violet. A glistening sea stretches far off into the distance, but smaller lakes covered the rest of the surface. They were near perfect circles, like the crater-lakes of the moon, and they each looked as fresh as the next. The term "Pristine" had been used in advertising Invictus. The word had meant nothing to him, however. A word for artists painting scenery from an old earth, or for men selling cleaned tap water on the streets. This was the first time he had ever understood how that word could truly apply to a world.
The horizon was met by a dusky red sun, giving the sky a rich purple hue. Small lines of quick flame shot through the distant sky - parts of the damaged UNIS Olympus as its captain fought to keep it from bringing disaster to the verdant world below. This space junk looked like shooting stars, far detached from the horrror that had born them. In the distance, glowing "Fish-shrooms" twinkled like colorful stars amongst the puffy clouds. They were not the only things taking to the air, however. Things that flew moved through the sky, unidentifiable in the distance.
As they grew closer, they could see more. Flitting strings of black smoke rose up from crash sites, pocking the fresh planet with bent steel. Forests of strange plants surrounded them. Floating spheres hovered silently in clusters, reminiscent of balloons on earth. Some of them had began to descend, finding resting places amongst the alien undergrowth.
The plains nearby crawled with strange creatures that had previously been hardly imaginable. A spider-like beast stood above them all on one dozen stilt-like legs, its body even with the floating flora. From the sky, they couldn't see a mouth on the creature, but it seemed to be doing something to consume air-bound plant, as the plant's flesh trembled at the creatures presence. Around it, packs of strange creatures fled in line like schools of fish in the sea, changing direction with each other and never missing a step.
As they came over a nearby hill, Landfall came into view. It reminded Herc of Bro-City when he had visited it as a young man. A massive ring of metal surrounded - and surrounding - wings of glass. The center hosted a prickled tower of machines and antennas. But the glass on the outside looked damaged, and the colony looked dark. Something was wrong. Everyone looked at the ruin hopefully, wanting to see some glimpse of life. Any glimpse.
But none came.
Dropships, gliders, and pods had all landed safely nearby. Herc was happy to see that some had survived the horrific mess.
Carefully, the glider's landing system took control and they found a landing place.
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The flight from Hawaii to California had taken an hour, most of which has been the ascent. It was the second time in his life that Herc had experienced zero-gravity. He hadn't liked it the first time, and he didn't like it the second. For a boy of his weight, zero-g's meant his awkward body was even more awkward. Flabby skin rippled with waves of fat, and his classmates noticed. Luckily, he had avoided most of their cheapshots, as most of the other boys were focused on the effects no-gravity had on the girls. Herc had noticed too. He was glad nobody had saw that their weightless giggle had effected him in a physical way.
When they landed in LA, he welcomed the ground.
Los Angeles was a city unlike anything Hawaii offered. It was more of a patchwork then a community, and it stretched without end across the desert hills. From Bob Hope International airport, they had left Burbank and spent a day touring the city. Hollywood had bored them, its museum-like atmosphere glorifying the early movie industry. They had seen wax figures of historical figures they struggled to recognize, sat through lectures given by costumed entertainers, and found the whole thing hardly exciting.
Compton and its long, thin beach had been more in line with Herc's interests. It reminded him of home. This place was crowded beyond anything he ever seen, but the water was cleaner - floating filters bobbing on the distant waves gave them that luxury. In several places, the remnants of roads could still be seen leading into the sea. Palos Verdes, a rocky island several miles out to sea, marked where the mainland had once been. The fact that old parts of the city were buried in the sand right in front of them seemed fascinating. He had heard of scuba divers finding trinkets in the fish-swarmed remnants of sunken Santa Monica. Filled soda cans, copper pennies, and purses that imprisoned old Identification cards with the names and pictures still visible. He wondered how many things were still buried in front of him, and how much they might be worth.
Their say in LA came to an end as quickly as it began. They hadn't came all this way on a Senior Field Trip to soak in the beaches. No, they had came for something much newer.
They were loaded into monorail carriages and sent hurdling across pillars on the sky, their seats making them as comfortable as tired people in beds. Glass windows were digitally tinted so they could not see how quick the scenery was nearby unless they wished too. The overhead lights dimmed just enough to make it feel like a home. Sedated by the environment, they listened to what the soothing female voice of the intercom had to say.
"It was 2085, and the post-glacial floods of the late twentieth century had devastated the coast. People fled inland, and the economic upheaval that followed caused trouble in cities that saw sudden waves of refugees and immigrants. Violence ensued, culminating in events like the Las Vegas Riots that killed two hundred people and caused permanent damage to the Strip. Citizens called out for new communities, and they turned to academia for answers."
"Civil Engineers began to design cities from the ground up, building them for efficiency. Some of these failed, but many of them succeeded and became the leading cities of the modern world. The first of these was built here, in the California desert near the Salton Sea. It was here that Rip Brody and the science + engineering fraternity "Eta Nu Alpha" designed what would become the standard model for most planned cities. It was here that they built...."
The lights brightened and screens built into the back of the seats in front of them showed the image of a wheel-shaped city.
"Bro-City!"
It was a gleaming white metal cake, as tall as a skyscraper and covering as much area as a small town would. Its edges were decorated with a wedge-shaped glass enclosure as tall as the building itself. Its center possessed a tall tower, its top decorated with communication satellites and radio transceivers. Its center was a dock.
"Bro-City houses 10 Million people in the space it would take to serve a town of 100,000 in a normal city layout. A nuclear reactor at its core means it is capable of producing its own energy. Its circular design allows it to enclose a second set of glass gardens, bringing warmth and beauty to even the inner sections of the build."
Their train slowed down and the windows detinted. In the distance, Herc could see Bro-City approaching. It was mammoth, so massive that Herc could only compare it to a mountain. Pricks of white light poked out from the darkness of the base.
"Modern Space Colonies have borrowed much from the Bro-City design. Think of Luna, or Mars far above, as you gamble in our first-rate Casinos or enjoy the services of our quality sex workers. The halls you walk here on earth are much like the ones our brave colonists traverse in the stars."
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