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Thread: In a Mirror, Darkly

  1. #21
    Lord Pyre
    Guest
    Some things in this world were poetically referred to as a force of nature. They were powerful, uncontrollable, and more often than not disastrous. And yet, in this age of mutancy and enlightenment, there were those who could bend those natural forces to their will with almost effortless ease. Mutants could avert wildfires, conjure earthquakes, summon storms simply with a wave of their hand, if they were so blessed with such abilities. In the face of humanity's newly emerging evolution, those forces of nature could be manipulated and controlled as easily as any other force, seemingly in accordance with all of Newton's laws.

    But in that realisation lay a dark truth. For all the forces of control and creation, there was a dark force, equal and opposite, whose only apparent purpose was chaos and destruction. Such things, such people were necessary to bring His plan to fruition. Such things were necessary in the grand order of things, even. Hinduism described Kali, the Destroyer, who cleared the path for the Creator. Scientists believed that before the universe's genesis, an older one had needed to collapse and be destroyed. Life was a cycle, a circle; everything had it's time and place.

    When it was all complete however, and his vision had come to be, when the time of destruction had ended; when that time came, would mutants like He and she still have a place in this world, or was he building a paradise he could never inhabit?

    Enough, He urged himself, His thoughts rattling around inside the helmet that shielded them from uninvited scrutiny. This is a day for anticipation, not anxiety.

    Something slipped in His demeanour; a small section of the armoured personality He wore giving way to the faintest hint of what had once lain underneath. His eyes turned to Morrígan, displaying something that wasn't doubt, but that clearly lacked the burning certainty that usually endorsed His actions. The look of someone so accustomed to controlling and dictating all that the prospect of leaving a task so great in the hands of others was unnerving.

    "Do you think it will work?" he asked.

  2. #22
    Morrigan
    Guest
    "Yes."

    He had barely finished the question as the word left her lips. Morrígan forced her gaze to lock with His for an instant, nothing but confidence in what she had spoken - in Him - was allowed to be seen. There may have once been a time she would have done more to assure Him that all would be well, that even when the entire world couldn't comprehend His actions she had... but those days were gone. Given all that had been achieved Morrígan considered the tradeoff for a large portion of their humanity worth it.

    Her eyes lingered on His for perhaps a second too long before she turned to the window once more. A small, not entirely pleasant, smile formed. Of course His plan would work, even if the others failed in their task she always had her own ways...

  3. #23
    Lord Pyre
    Guest
    Morrígan's confidence was resolute. There were scant few things that she lacked - subtlety perhaps being chief amongst them - but confidence was something she had in overwhelming, sometimes excessive abundance. She thought herself untouchable, and perhaps to most she was, but she was not invulnerable; not immortal. Beneath her power and ruthlessness she was still just a mutant woman, still as vulnerable as any other when she did not choose to defend herself, as the mostly accidental burn marks that peppered her body from their more intimate encounters could attest.

    Hubris was mankind's greatest weakness. Even He was not immune for it, though His mind saw fit to offset it with a considerable amount of caution and paranoia.

    He mustered a small smile, drawing on the flickering flame of hope for the Machine and what it would mean if they were to succeed.

    "Perhaps, if all transpires today as it should, the world will finally come to understand the truth of what we are trying to create."

  4. #24
    Morrigan
    Guest
    What You are creating. She almost spoke the thought but held it back at the last second. Morrígan was perhaps the only individual alive who could have dared to correct Him and gotten away with it, but she knew better than to test His patience... even if the end results could prove entertaining. How many times had she purposely pushed Him? How many times had He let her get to a certain point before He let it be known how much she could infuriate Him? It was a fun, dangerous game that only drew concern from one person - neither of which was standing in that room.

    "Some of them will. Those that have enough insight to see past their misguided beliefs won't be able to deny it any longer." A small sigh left her. "But there will always be others. The Heretics that refuse You."

    And so it came back to that again. The same thing she had said a thousand times before, always with the same ending. No doubt today wouldn't prove any different but it never stopped her.

    "I could get rid of them. You don't need me at the compound for this."

  5. #25
    Lord Pyre
    Guest
    There was no reason to ask to which them she referred. It was the question asked many times, and the same answer given just as often. Morrígan would destroy until there was nothing left; such was her way, her weapon's mentality. While part of her perhaps did understand the subtleties, she simply chose to ignore them, all too eager to embrace an approach that left strategy abandoned in the dust.

    "In their stronghold, they are contained," Pyre explained with the kind of steady, persistent patience that was usually reserved for children. "They focus their efforts on defense, consolidation, and sustaining a population as large as the one they have accumulated. They are preoccupied, and thus the threat they pose is minimal. Decimate their home however and you scatter survivors to the wind. Despite your powers, you cannot be everywhere; you cannot slaughter everyone. Some will escape; and when they do, they will go to ground. They will cluster into smaller pockets of resistance that will be easier to scavenge for, easier to conceal, and too numerous and dispersed for even you to find them all."

    He shook His head. "In Vanaheim they are contained. The threat is at it's least."

    There were other reasons, but they would go unspoken: both new better than to mention them openly.

    "In the meantime: I may not need your presence, but I still wish it. This project is for the benefit of us all: we must stand together for that to be understood, not split our efforts between war and peace."
    Last edited by Lord Pyre; Sep 25th, 2013 at 09:16:46 PM.

  6. #26
    Morrigan
    Guest
    Only He could make her still feel like a foolish child at times. Even the creature within seemed chastised by His remarks for once, even if that sensation was quickly replaced once more by the all consuming fury that was hers to keep. It flared and burned at her senses until it made her fingertips tingle in anticipation of... Nothing. A deep breath was taken as she pulled everything back in to herself. No... she would never lash out at Him. There was no sense in it, there never had been. This world needed Him to rebuild what she destroyed and to disrupt that was a line she was not willing to cross. One day He would say yes, but it would be on His terms that Vanaheim was dealt with.

    She rolled her head to ease the sudden tension that had knotted itself in her shoulders before looking back to Him.

    "As you wish."

  7. #27
    T.J. Harriman
    Guest
    Inside the compound...

    The Major gave the charred and still-glowing jagged rim of concrete a nudge with his boot, the faux leather of the makeshift footwear sizzling on contact. He knew it would do that - when you carved through stuff with a superheated plasma beam you had to kinda expect a little lava style molten action to be going on around the edges - but that was what set him apart from the person who'd built the thing: Tom was an experimental physicist, and needed to confirm the facts for himself.

    Carefully, he stepped through the two-foot-thick maw they had cut, careful not to let anything important - specifically his genitals - get too close to the roasted rock. Safely clear, he cast his gaze around the empty room, confirming O'Hara's continued assurance that their incursion had gone unnoticed.

    His team followed him through, fanning out to secure the room without instruction, readying themselves in breach positions by the one exit. Tom waited for a moment as O'Hara placed his bare hand on the concrete and, after a moment of hesitation, nodded that the next door was clear. On point, Tom burst silently out into the corridor, rifle aimed in each direction just long enough to snap off a shot at possible guards or observers if he needed to; but once again O'Hara's insight was on the money, and the expectation that this sector of the compound would be deserted seemed accurate. Tom resisted a grudging smile; O'Hara might be annoying, but at least he was useful.

    The team progressed through the network of corridors with practised precision, not a single living soul interrupting their advance. It was all starting to make the Major feel decidedly uncomfortable.

    Setting foot into the holding room made him feel worse.

  8. #28
    Liz Heller
    Guest
    The second that the door opened, the arrivals had Liz's attention: not guards as she'd expected, but resistance fighters as she'd refused to allow herself to hope. In fact, not just any resistance fighters.

    "You're late," she muttered, offering her cousin a grim smile.

    He flashed back a more enthusiastic one of his own, but Liz couldn't muster enough optimism to reciprocate. Her gaze fell away, turning back to the holding cages that were considerably less populated than they had been a few hours before. In particular, Jack was gone; the look of terror in his eyes when Syn had arrived with her entourage of guards and selected him specifically was something that Liz knew would haunt her for a very long time. It wasn't just the fear though: it was the fact that he tried to hide it; tried to look strong for her benefit, so maybe she wouldn't think he was quite as pathetic as he must have assumed she already did.

    Liz's hands became fists again.

    "We've got a problem," she uttered, climbing stiffly to her feet as one of the soldiers used the butt of his rifle to smash open the cage's lock.

  9. #29
    T.J. Harriman
    Guest
    "There's always a problem," T.J. countered.

    "Sidearms," he added, gesturing to two of his soldiers that they should give their back-up weapons to Liz. They complied, and his womanizing father's bastard nephew's daughter - yeah, his family was more than a little messed up - managed a grunt and nod of gratitude, but the way her attention was focused so intently on the pistols, and the way that her usual snarktastic attitude seemed to have been driven out of her with only grim seriousness left in it's wake... that was a little unsettling.

    No wonder he'd been having a bad feeling in his gut this whole time.

    "Big problem?"

  10. #30
    Liz Heller
    Guest
    Liz nodded.

    "Syn is here," she explained. They were all intimately familiar with Lord Pyre's power-stealing bitch of a step-daughter; Tom more intimately than others, given that she'd sucked his mutant abilities out of his face and spat them into Psion's tonsils. There was something decidedly messed up about the way that Syn did her thing, but then, there was something decidedly messed up about Syn, and just about everyone else in Pyre's batshit crazy cadre of psychotics and fanatics.

    T.J. seemed to take that news well; she knew it was a sore subject, what with command identifying Syn as a priority kill target despite the fact that she was pretty much the only person capable of putting Tom back together again. That wasn't the worst of it though; her wince warned the Major to brace himself.

    "Pyre is coming." Those words were ominous enough on their own. "Morrígan, Victory, and god knows who else as well. The whole package." She drew in a slow breath, struggling to keep her jaw from clenching. "Something big is going on here. They're building something. The guards talked about it like it's gonna change the world; and it seems like they need an ass-ton of mutants. Maybe it's a weapon; maybe it's something else; didn't sound like the guards knew all that much, but to be honest they were pretty busy bricking themselves about the big man showing his face."

    She hesitated.

    "There a plan here, Major?"

  11. #31
    T.J. Harriman
    Guest
    T.J. glanced away, focusing on the Lieutenant.

    "Not here, sir," O'Hara answered his unspoken question.

    The sleeping beastie that lived in the Major's gut, waiting to devour his innards every time things started going badly wrong, woke up and started salivating. He forced out a sigh.

    "You're a fringe benefit," he explained, offering an apologetic wince to his cousin. "Command sent us in here to retrieve a guy named Myers. He's a resistance fighter; leads a small cell of former athletes or something. Only met him a few times, and to be honest he seems like a bit of a tool: but word is that Psion went after him with extreme prejudice, and Hunter is pretty insistent that we get his boy back."

    He hesitated. "If Pyre is building something big, then best guess is that he needs this Myers guy for something. And if Pyre needs something that bad -"

    The rest didn't really need to be said. His eyebrows shifted ever so slightly into a look of concern.

    "You good enough to get out of here?"

  12. #32
    Liz Heller
    Guest
    Liz's lips twitched at the corner into a shadow of a smile; the look of borderline crazy anger that T.J. was used to was back in her eyes.

    "Rest assured, Major -"

    Her thumbs jabbed into the charging studs on the back of the pistols, a faint hum emanating from the power cells as they built up a charge in the pre-fire capacitors. She rolled her shoulders, trying to work out the knotted tension that had formed during her stint in the cage.

    "- I'm good enough for a lot more than just that."

  13. #33
    Perun
    Guest
    At Vanaheim...

    It was not a throne room, but it might as well have been. Wotan insisted that every inhabitant of this underground sanctuary - mutant, mundane, or otherwise - was equal; and yet every position of power or authority was filled by some member of Wotan's bloodline, or some individual who had proven their loyalty to him. Any democracy was carefully contained, capped off to prevent it from ascending too high up the hierarchy and interfering with the way of running things that Wotan had dictated. Yes, his abilities gave him the insight into people and situations to allow him to instinctively know the best course of action to achieve a particular goal: but just because it was the correct thing to do didn't mean that it was right.

    Perun strode through the doorway, helmet tucked under his arm, offering a curt nod of greeting to the two soldiers stood flanking the doorway as guards. It was gestures like this that raised his ire: so deep inside the network of tunnels, caves, and excavated chambers, there was no need for Wotan to have guards to protect him, and yet he did. It was all about appearances, about how if Wotan looked secure then everyone in the city would feel more secure; but while it perhaps made rational sense, Perun found it morally questionable.

    He came to a halt at the foot of the long table that dominated the center of the room, choosing to remain standing rather than to take his customary seat. Most of the chairs were empty, save for three: at the head of the table sat Wotan himself; to his left the one that Perun had heard called the Sorcerer Supreme; and to his right, Aegis, the one whose council Wotan seemed to regard highest of all.

    That too was a source of frustration: that it was Wotan's eldest daughter and not his eldest son who he held to that level of esteem. It wasn't that she was his sister - any archaic sentiments about gender roles had been thoroughly beaten out of him by his belovéd wife - but rather because it wasn't him. There wasn't any one thing that he had done to cause his father's lack of faith in him, but the fact that it existed at all wounded him deeply.

    "News from the field," Perun announced, his mere arrival not having been enough to attract the attention of his father or his advisors.

    "The Resistance has discovered that Pyre is constructing a possible weapon in what once was Colorado."

  14. #34
    Wotan
    Guest
    Wotan's eyes looked up tiredly from his papers. Once again, Perun stood before him, and he could feel the sense of intend and purpose radiating from him like a wave. He knew what his eldest son wanted; and in turn Perun already knew what Wotan's response would be. Even so, they continued their dance, questioning every decision; every instruction that was given for the betterment of them all.

    Of Wotan's many sons and daughters, his eldest - Perun - was the only one who ever felt the need to question his wisdom and insight. He had no idea what he had done to lose the boy's faith in him, but the fact that he had cut deep. But no matter how many times events proved Wotan right, Perun continued to demand that he justify himself. So much time wasted. So much potential not achieved.

    With the faintest movement of his head, Wotan indicated the sorcerer beside him.

    "We are aware," he explained simply.

    For any of his other children, that would be enough; but Wotan knew that Perun would demand more. He almost sighed but held it at bay, gathering every scrap of patience that he could muster.

    "I have already permitted Colonel Hunter to deploy his Guardians in response. Ensis is readying his forces to assist if required, and Sentinel is preparing for any retaliation that might be incurred."

  15. #35
    Perun
    Guest
    Perun uttered the words that Wotan had known he would utter since he entered the room.

    "Let me accompany the Guardians. You know I can help them."

    For a fleeting second, Perun almost allowed himself to hope that his father would say yes; but the slightest fall of Wotan's eyes was all the answer that Perun needed. Yet again, his father denied his attempts to make amends; denied permission for any action that might allow Perun to restore his father's faith in him. Wotan's will was that Perun remain in the city, his gifts used on the rarest occasions to soothe storms or stimulate rainfall to replenish their reservoirs: minor acts for a mutant who could manipulate the elements on a whim.

    He tried, failed, to stop his hands clenching into fists.

    "Why?" he countered, indignant words forced out through a clenched jaw.

  16. #36
    Wotan
    Guest
    Wotan's reply escaped as a low growl, that resonated around the audience chamber.

    "Because I am not in the habit of needlessly wasting the lives of my sons."

    That statement hung in the air, the stone walls playing custodian for a few seconds while Wotan allowed, hoped, it would make it through ears that so seldom listened. There was anger in Wotan's eyes, but also overwhelming sadness; it took self control to keep his lips and hands from visually trembling with the emotions that were coursing through his veins like a poison.

    He thought of more he could say. He thought about the duty that he and all of his family had to protect the refugees of Vanaheim from Lord Pyre and his followers. He thought of what might happen if Perun attacked and failed; of how the people of Vanaheim might fare without him there to defend them; of how Pyre might react to the knowledge that Wotan's son dared to defy him openly. Standing between Pyre and the innocent was one thing; the faintest scrap of morality seemed to still linger somewhere in Pyre's misguided mind, and thus far he had refrained from hunting them down. But one mistake, one provocation too far, and no amount of morality would be able to keep Pyre's anger at bay.

    But Wotan said none of this; it did not bear repeating, and once more would not convey anything that Perun had not already heard and ignored so many times previously.

    "You have my answer," he said quietly. The silence between his words ached. "You are dismissed."

  17. #37
    Aegis
    Guest
    It was never an easy moment to watch Father and Son argue and part of her heart genuinely ached as Perun turned on heel and strode angrily from the chambers. Aegis could not stop herself from feeling the equal frustration of both parties as it bled slowly into her, waging war as if the two were still staring each other down. She knew Perun's mind, though, knew that even now he was facing his own battle within...

    "He is still trying to atone for Arizona." A hint of sadness marked her words. "You know you should not be so harsh with him. You push, he will only push back doubly."

    Aegis's eyes slowly drifted away from the door that had been slammed shut only an instant before. A soft sigh left her before she turned to her Father. "You know of what I speak. You are the mind and he is the body, if you are at odds the system will not function to its fullest. You were not wrong this day and in time he will understand but you must allow him to. Walls are meant to keep us safe, Father, but you must have doors or there is only starvation and ruin."

    A hand reached out and gently was placed atop of their leader's in a comforting gesture. "Perun will do what is right."

  18. #38
    Wotan
    Guest
    Wotan listened to Aegis' words, but his eyes were focused on Perun as he stormed from the chamber.

    His breath escaped as a low sigh.

    "But what," he challenged quietly, "If I am not building walls but am instead building a dam? Any weaknesses we allow Perun's rash actions to punch in the barricade we have placed between ourselves and Pyre risks unleashing a deluge that we cannot hope to withstand."

    He shook his head, features falling all too readily into a frown. "Perun has always done what he believes in his heart to be right -"

    A tired smile and a glance was offered to Aegis.

    "- sadly, neither his heart nor his head possess the kind of insight that nature has blessed you with."

  19. #39
    Aegis
    Guest
    She forced a smile at her father's words. Ever had he looked upon her with favor and while she had never shied from it, her gifts never left her without knowing the impact it often caused her siblings. Still, that knowledge was never among the insight she granted to their father. At least, not directly.

    "Do not underestimate the wisdom of the heart," a small, suppressed laugh escaped. "You of all people should know that the logical choice is sometimes not the one we follow and that the consequences are not always unwelcome."

    Her hand slowly withdrew as Aegis once more looked to the door. She wished she could offer more insight to what her brother's actions may be, but he had learned how to keep his sister's reach from his mind. There were ways of ensuring Perun's obedience, he could not be manipulated. But others, those whose council Perun never seemed to question... The thought disgusted her. No, Aegis would never use her gifts for such a purpose.

  20. #40
    Wotan
    Guest
    A genuine smile this time. From anyone else, such a statement of truth might have been unwelcome: seen as arrogant, scathing. But such insights were why Aegis was here. She saw things that Wotan could not, and the sights they shared she saw through different eyes and different senses. Though they disagreed, often, it was not a matter of whom was correct and whom was not; but merely of perspective.

    When Wotan looked at his son, he saw a master of storms who had spent decades as a lone agent: impulsive, arrogant, and reckless. When Aegis looked upon her brother, she saw a man driven by his emotions the way that Wotan had been in his youth. That emotional drive had led him to make what had seemed like mistakes; but they had given him Perun and Aegis: two children he loved dearly, but whom he would have been deprived of had he listened to his head instead of his heart. This was what Aegis did: pointed out the hypocrisy and the error in his logic. Right was not what one of them had and the other did not; it was what emerged when their two opinions collided.

    "Perun most certainly takes after his father," he agreed. His smile softened the severity of his frown, and weaved it's way into his voice. "Whereas you take after your mother."

    He sighed, placing a hand on Aegis' forearm and offering a paternal squeeze. "Perun will do what he feels is right -" he repeated. His gaze shifted, settling on the sorceress to his left. "- and we will do what we must to ensure it does not go wrong."

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