Brave New World [landing thread]

all was peaceful in the orbitals. Today was a relatively slow day and the only thing remotely interesting was two pieces of orbital debris bumping into each other so yeh, nothing was happening. That is, until a massive blueish portal opened up in the void and out of the portal emerged a giant figure. At 300 meters long and about 30 meters wide and tall, the stealth frigate was an impressive sight. A RAVENtech super-ramjet prominently jutted out from the nose and seemed to point accusingly into the void. Along the flanks of the ship was a myriad of O'Neil Armories weapons including plasma guns. lasers and gauss guns. Lastly was a large array of hatches that was the VLS system, missiles of all sorts hid underneath the panels, ready to rip apart all comers. Displayed prominently on the side in large white letters was the ship's name: "ONFS Freedom At Last." The ship was certainly impressive, but its crew? That's a bit of a different story.

"Augh." Grunted Etrius as he picked his head up from the captains panel where he had smacked into it when the ship had initially gone into the portal. "I thought Suzie's portal jumps were supposed to be smooth." He remarked. He looked around the bridge of the ship and saw that most of the motley "crew" of remaining humans had all smacked their heads into their respective panels.

He checked his panel and began reading off the diagnostics. "Shields functioning a maximum. Stealth systems active. Hull integrity at 98%. All systems functioning nominally. I think someone should probably get to the medical bay and check up on Suzie, see how she's holding up after sending this ship through the portal. Even the practice jumps were pretty straining."

They didn't trust Game to pilot a ship. He had crossed a galaxy in a tin coffin to save one lost girl.  He had turned a fleet of invaders into stardust, alongside Cheryl. He had earned their respect a hundred times over. This should be his ship! Game watched them scurry about their tasks from the dais in front of the elevator entrance. The bridge was arrayed like an amphitheatre with rows stacked on top of each other with room for three times the humans that it currently housed. The last of an entire species, far from home and far from hope.

They were just children. He had a child of his own.

Game crossed his arms. Never good at hiding his emotions, the venom flowed freely from his gaze. He had a headache. So many machines brimming with artificial life all hummed in his head. Combined with the frantic activities of his compatriots it felt like someone had kicked a nest of fire ants onto his brain.

There it is… It didn’t look like much. The bridge between two worlds, large enough to swallow a… What did that O’Neil call it (he could never keep their names straight in his head)… a stealth frigate. At its edges, it a blurred a rainbow of harsh and bright colors. Reds, oranges, yellows, purples, occasionally a flash of green or a shroud of ominous black. It hypnotized him with its sheer impossibility. He had seen a lot of space, but never anything like this. And we’re going through it. He had to snort at that. Every day was another adventure.

When the bow of the ship breached the portal, he barely remained standing, lurching forward and back before stumbling against a wall. But what was more disorienting than the arrival on a completely different dimensional plane was the whispers. Everything seemed to hush until only a indecipherable chatter began to echo in the back of his mind. Gaping, he leaned heavily against the wall and pressed a hand to his ear, but the noise persisted. He could feel the computers in his head- a spider web that in his stillest moments he involuntarily retreated to –but it was quieter. It almost seemed afraid.  

"O'Neil!" he shouted. This had to be his fault. Everything was always the pilots fault. "O'Neil!"

Lan so far hadn't even stepped foot inside the bridge of the ship during the entire journey for a number of reasons. One, she had vanished for an entire year and had only returned a month or so ago, so she could hardly call anyone else on the ship an acquaintance. Two, she absolutely hated being in space. It had already put her in a less-than-optimal mood, so instead of waiting around with everyone else, she opted to do something else: explore the ship, which didn't take long, then mess around with a little creation she had brought along: a high-tech sports car.

Lan had designed and built it herself from the ground up with some help from fellow employees at RAVEN just before she had vanished from the face of the universe. Powered by a nuclear reactor and as aerodynamic as a jet plane, it was a sight to behold. (HNNNNG) She probably should have taken a hovercar, but being an oddball oldschooler, she took a classic wheeled vehicle instead. Maintenance on them was far easier anyway, and their batteries lasted years longer.

She was in the driver's seat at the moment. The humans would probably think the car had a really weird seat setup. After all, it had no 'shotgun' seat. The driver's seat was front and center and the broad passenger seat was behind it, able to hold two, maybe three other people. This was the setup of most cars from the dimension she was about to leave, and this was the setup she had preferred. The humans had always awkwardly positioned the driver off-center, which made it harder to see things on the opposite side. But this way, she had equal view on both sides, weight was properly balanced, and the subtraction of a seat allowed for more room for other things, like a system that could switch the car between a street and an off-road mode without the need to swap tires and bumpers. There were compartments that held microscopic machines that ate away material from the bumpers to allow for more tire bounce and placed that material around the tires to strengthen and re-shape them for off-road use. And with the press of a button, all that could be reversed for a smoother and faster street build. There were modes specialized for frozen icy terrain and superflat areas as well for even higher speeds. She tapped the button to trigger the transformation into off-road mode. There was no telling what the terrain would be like once they got planetside, but it was safe to assume off-roading would come before driving on streets, if there were any at all. Five seconds of humming and the transformation was done.

Lan swiped her thumb on a fingerprint scanner to lock down the car and stepped out of it. The door magnetically sealed itself shut behind her. Just after, the ship abruptly lurched as if it had slammed into a giant brick wall, nearly propelling Lan off her feet, but with a painful twist of her ankle and sure footing, she was able to turn her fall into a controlled skid. More importantly, the car didn't move an inch.

Didn't O'Neil know how to pilot anything smoothly!? She could've seriously screwed up her ankle or something. "Moron!" She yelled up at Etrius, even if she was unsure if he would even hear it.

No one would trust Alice with piloting the ship even if she knew how to steer one this big.  She went through ships like a white girl through Starbucks.  Counting only her personal fighters, the Legacies, she was already at XVI.  Or was it XVII?  Ever since her, Kenji, and the Evoknights trashed the first Legacy, her fighters hardly lasted one outing.  So instead of being around stuff she could break, the blond-haired Alice was simply hanging around in the hangar.  Literally, she was currently clinging to the underside of the Legacy Whatever to fiddle with its cannon.  Unlike the other occupant of the spacious bay, flight was Alice’s preferred mode of transport.  Though she had to give Lan some credit, that was one beautiful car.

Driving the car was something else she wasn’t trusted with.  Okay, Alice was banned from even touching most vehicles that weren’t her own.  “I still wanna drive it!” she shouted towards the woman sitting in the single front seat.  If even Lan heard her, she probably would just ignore Alice.  She shrugged and continued working on the large weapon, sticking her tongue out in childish concentration.  Even as old as she was, she still was pretty immature.  She cast a mischievous glance over at the car.  She always could just take the car... But as she thought up her grand heist, Lan climbed out and Alice could have sworn she flashed a glare in her direction.  She quickly went back to looking busy, shoving her plans away for now.

As soon as she let her guard back down, however, the ship decided it was time to check its brakes.  Alice didn’t even have time to realize what was happening before she was pimp slapped onto the hangar’s floor.  Her back hit first but her inertia sent her skidding and flipping.  She only came to jarring halt when her face bashed into a metal door.  The rest of her body crumpled up into itself, contorting her into an awkward angle against the very hard car.  Slowly, she uncurled and slumped onto her stomach, blinking Morse Code.  Everything felt so… numb.  She didn’t mean the pain, oh no that all hurt like hell.  No, it was as if someone had shot her up with some drug that made her whole body feel weak and clogged up all her senses.  She almost didn’t feel the thick liquid on her face.  At a slug’s pace, she brought her hand up to see what it was.  She stared at it.  It was blood, but the color seemed all wrong.  It was not the right shade of red, but some kind of fuzzy tint.

Lan’s voice reminded her that she wasn’t alone, even if the whole ship seemed so far away.  “Hey,” she croaked out a gurgled, nasally sound, “I think I broke my nose.”

Etrius heard the yelling alright, the ship's intercom system was keyed into his implants. "It's not my fault!" He complained over the intercom. And that was true, even though the ship had an emergency manual steering joystick, he hadn't even been using it, it was much more efficient to allow the navigator and even then, it had been an AI making the final approach. He set the ship's sensors for a passive scan and un-buckled himself from the captain's chair and stretched for a bit.

He opened up the ship's intercom again. "This is the captain speaking. We're going to be resting for a bit while we run diagnostics to see what caused the sudden deceleration. In the meantime, I would suggest that everyone find something to occupy themselves with. Etrius out." He announced and then hung up. He walked out of the bridge and took a lift to the engineering section which was also right next to the hanger. He decided that he might as well check on if all of their secondary craft were alright, they wouldn't get any more until they found a suitable planet and set up the fabricator onboard the ship, though, right now it was producing the newer Rifle bits, an upgrade on the now outdated interceptor bits.

He reached the engineering section and hung a left, entering into the engineering bay where he saw two things, a heavily cursing Lan nursing her ankle and a bleeding Alice moving sluggishly and confused. He was immediately very concerned.

Lan facepalmed at Etrius. Occupy yourself with something. Brilliant. It's not like she already had been doing that. She balanced on one foot, rubbing her ankle, when she suddenly got the feeling that something was wrong. She had heard one thing impact another a moment ago, and quickly deduced that one of those somethings was her car. She swiveled around on her one good foot to see what had happened, and the pain from her foot seemed to instantly vanish when she saw an imprint of Alice's face on her car's door.

"Don't touch my car you BASTARD!" Lan planted her slightly injured foot on the ground, swiveled once more on it while swinging her other into the air, then sent it flying down like a guillotine onto Alice's chest with about half her strength. Though only in the act of doing it, she realized there definitely was something wrong-- shouldn't Alice have damaged the car, or at least moved it, instead of her getting wounded instead? She had spent thousands of hours working on her car; she knew what it could hold up against and what it couldn't. It could probably bruise Alice, but smashing cartridge seemed a bit much...

derp

From practically being drowning in cotton senses, all Alice retained was that some ugly ass bitch tried to shove her foot through Alice’s chest.  Her squished chest shot the air out of lungs, spewing the blood collecting in her mouth out.  It splattered back onto her face, making her look like a murder victim.  She flailed as much as she could manage.  She somehow thought that would work oxygen back into her system faster.  Alice had never had much for brains, though.  She flopped around and her only reward was aggravating the already pulsating pain.  She scrambled to her hands and knees, hacking out spit and fresh blood from her steadily bleeding face.  Her lungs became inflated again, enough to where she could sputter, “Ow holy shit that hurt.”

Her eyes reflected the shock and worry that hit hurt like Lan’s car and foot.  She felt along her head and torso, flinching as more pricks of pain flared up.  Actual, honest-to-god pain.  Alice hadn’t felt this much in a long while, and that was from getting hit by a car that was speeding towards her, opposed to the standstill one she crashed into.  She snapped her head up, the blubbering face of a child looking up at Lan.  “I’m dying!”

Lan stared poker-faced at Alice, crying like a baby and flailing like a walrus having a seizure. God, she was getting blood all over the place and just making everything worse. She retained her I-frankly-don't-give-a-gosh-darn poker face as Alice stared at her and claimed she was dying. Hopefully it would make her calm down a little or something. Maybe. It worked better when her eyes her charcoal gray instead of a warm orange.

"You're just gonna bleed more and be in more pain if you keep moving... and you're making yourself look like a prissy! It's embarrassing." She said this as she walked along her car, trying to ignore the drops of blood that been flicked all over its side, and swiped her index finger across a nondescript portion of the car, which popped open the trunk. She waved at Background Sam with the other hand to get him to go away and leave them be. There were far more important matters to attend to than watching her attack people as usual. And she just hated people watching her. It just bugged the crap out of her.

Lan reached into the trunk and grabbed a very basic first-aid kit, then walked back to Alice and knelt down beside her. "I'll fix you up if you stop whining, okay? And sorry I hurt you..... wuss." She muttered.

Etrius watched the scene while his mind raced for answers. His neural link began processing some of the information, while the basic physics tests were coming back alright, there were anomalies in many of the high energy particles tests. That was concerning. What was also concerning was that Alice was actually injured and that she was actually incapacitated by the injury.

He and the rest of SIUNE's staff had dubbed Alice's power Super-soldier, which allowed her to go toe to toe with Lan and Chester when even Galixors would fail miserably. There was no conceivable way that simply a rough landing would incapacitate her unless something happened. No. Losing their powers now would pretty much ensure the destruction of the human race, it was the only thing that had kept them alive the entire time, sure they drew trouble but that was not their fault. Still, the possibility could not be ignored, it was still a viable explanation.

Swiftly, he shut down all devices on his body that could possibly broadcast a signal and ran over to a pannel on the screen. His power was the ability to not be noticed by anyone, sensors would not register his presence and cameras would not even show him when he walked past them unless they were specifically attuned to look for him. He pulled out the keyboard and began running a detection algorithm while running his power at maximum. What he found was disturbing to say the least.

The passive sensors detected him. It was a bit faint, but they clearly detected him and established a positive lock on his identity so for all intents and purposes, he did not have a power.

"All original humans. Report to the infirmary immediately for a power diagnostic. Repeat, all original humans report to the infirmary for power diagnostic." He announced forcefully over the intercom.