(General Fiction) UHC: Foundation -- Season 2 "GAME"; Episode 3 -- "On Your Marks - Set"

[halcyonlioness]

[Notice: If you are reading this more than a week out past the original posting date of this entry, be aware that this is an older iteration of the story.  It's highly recommended that you read the googledoc as that is the most recent and most updated version of the series.]



Part 2!  Could it be?  We're actually keeping a regular schedule? ... heh.  Let's see how long that lasts. *grinning wryly*

Now the housekeeping: as a refresher for long-time followers of the series and a reference for those who are new, "UHC: Foundation" is a long-running series set in the expansive 'Severance' alternate universe and follows the fates of that universe's incarnations of the Minecrafters we've come to love and respect. As per protocol, for further information and reading, refer to the World Dossier (here) and the compiled story/serial document (here; alternatively, one can follow the story through here.)

"... of mice and men ..."

=====

 

On Your Marks - Set

They were still in that tight sports huddle, though a few of them had gone down on one knee on the cold, indifferent steel floor to rest their spines.

Guude, still standing, nodded accord to let the briefing continue.  “So … supplies are covered.  Now what?”

BdoubleO turned to him.  “We need our objective, that’s what.  Team Two’s job is gonna be specifically hunting down the generators, figuring out how to disable them, and getting us a way out of here once we succeed.”

A creeper-green finger came up.  “If vwe succeed,” Doc remarked coolly.

The Assyrian shot the hideously spliced accented scientist a cross look.  “Positive thinking, Doc.  We’re not gettin’ outta here if you keep talking like that.  This isn’t rocket science.”

Doc raised a cybernetic eyebrow.  “You’re far from a rocket scientist, after all.”

“… I don’t know if I should be insulted or not.”

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 105 minutes==

He was sprinting across the flat, frozen wasteland, almost but not quite at his full capacity.  The frigid air filled his throat and his lungs, almost but not quite burning his respiratory tract with the biting cold.  The gunmetal-gray sphere soared ahead of him, perfectly smooth and devoid of any markings or signature features.

He had trekked across this godforsaken ice plain in nothing but a t-shirt and frayed jeans for … 6 days and 5 nights?  Slightly more than an hour and a half?  His vastly enhanced supersoldier constitution, trained to maintain its own impeccable timekeeping along with the usual augmented physiology, kept flinging both facts at his head like a sensory device that had suddenly decided to clone itself just to troll his ass to the Nether and back.

>Hup hup, little tin-soldier.

Speaking of trollish devices …

BdoubleO had seen some sh!t during his days in the augmentation process, and this headset was right up there with every piece of uncanny-valley Moderan technology that had been used on him to make him the perfect soldier.  Stronger, faster, more alert, more tenacious, and, above all, obedient.

Controllable.

So far, it had simply been a never-ending peanut gallery of snide text remarks being displayed in varying levels of annoying from ‘meh’ to ‘get-the-heck-outta-my-face’ on the enhanced reality display that tinted the left half of his visual perception a constant holographic green nuance, along with the vital readouts of both himself and his fellow brothers-in-war, a close-range radar screen in one corner, and occasional garbled nonsense flitting past like a chat window on ultra speed.

Yes, garbled nonsense.  Damn infographics were actually scrolling fast enough to leave even him stumped on what they were supposed to mean—if they were even supposed to mean anything.  He caught sight of strange, unsettling runes and eldritch script every now and then, but those occasions were few and far between.  And the whole deal was giving him just the right amount of queasy in his stomach pit to not want to dwell on it more than absolutely necessary.

It was just a little bit too close to the oh-so-familiar heads-up display integrated in his own, heavily customized helmet, a helmet that was currently sitting clean and proper in his military storage closet back in Blockhaven along with the rest of his power suit and gear.  The tech was harmless enough these days, having been thoroughly de-chipped and repurposed for a free-spirited warrior instead of a mindless automaton running on pre-recorded messages.

It had been his own indomitable stubbornness (he didn’t really refer to it as stubbornness, though) that had seen him through in those dark days when the full realization had hit him: the things that were being done to him and his little brother and to dozens of selected Moderan citizens besides.  He had only been able to save himself, his kid bro, and a certain legendary VPF General, from a fate worse than death—but to BdoubleO, that was what truly counted.  He had made a powerful new friend and gotten the chance, both for himself and for his own little brother, to build a new home and a better future than the one his once-glorious patron society had ultimately intended for them all.

And it was that same indomitable determination that now had him chasing a metal floatyball of nondescript technological nature across a fsking ice desert at three-quarters his unladen top speed.

He had spotted it earlier that same ‘day’, right at the crack of dawn—a huge, dark, towering hemisphere sticking outta the stark, white landscape all around him, five worm-segmented mechanical arms coming out of it and pinning it to the ground.  Using the remaining cover of fading twilight to the best of his abilities, he had snuck up as close as he had dared.  Sure enough, there had been a quartet of those damn black-armored fskers standing in precise formation around the device, and that was all the confirmation he needed.

He had unleashed his adrenaline reserves, sprinted forward in a full-on body charge … and the alien dome had simply retracted those arms and their grappling claws into its smooth, gunmetal sides, lifted off of the ground with a low, sonorous hum to reveal itself as a perfect sphere—and the black soldiers had all vwoiped away in little purple sparkles without so much as a glance towards him while the infernal device had taken off in a straight line like some extraterrestrial object fresh out of a really cheesy B-movie.

It was one of the generators.  It simply had to be.  Everything about it lined up.

Now he just had to keep it in his sights, and hope that it wouldn’t do anything incredibly obnoxious like …

… angling itself into a precise 45 degrees incline and ascending higher into the air.

BdoubleO had certain standards about himself.  He was a married man and a father, he was undoubtedly on live television, and so he kept the unholy slew of less flattering adjectives and adverbs closely guarded within his own mind, never letting a single stray syllable onto his tongue.  Instead, he channelled that explosion of frustration and fury into doubling his sprint in a hackneyed intent to leap off the ground spectacularly like a great mountain cat and … likely flop back into the snow in an undignified heap when his hands and feet would inevitably slip off the sphere’s flawless surface.

As if on cue, the device faded away suddenly, as if it had passed into the same white fog cloaking the horizon—or simply activated some kind of stealth field.

“Fricker.”

This time the Assyrian did utter a few choice words.  He kept the subject matter to a PG-13 rating, though.  He wasn’t going to come home to his little girl giving off her most scalding disappointed-daughter face.  Intelligent 5-year-olds were a scourge when they set their minds to it, especially when it was warranted.

He could only hope that his two beloved ladies would hang in there while he got himself and all of his war brothers out of this mess.

Taking a few moments to halt his momentum and steady his breathing, he squinted towards the visibility edge.  He furrowed his brow.  That couldn’t be right.  There was a biome shift ahead, barely peeking out of that blanketing, cotton-like fog.  And it wasn’t any kind of biome he’d expect, coming from a freezing wasteland of ice and snow in all directions.

It should have been a mountain taiga, at most.  Maybe even a cliff face so precipitous that no snow could cling to its surface.  But no, not in this screwy place.

It was a fsking jungle.

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 45 minutes==

The labcoat was more gray than white at this point, having dutifully absorbed two and a half hideously compressed days of manic digging and mining.  DocM felt the moss-green, grotesquely distorted half of his face twitch gently—clean room clothing wasn’t intended for suffering ludicrous amounts of cobblestone dross, damnit.

He could turn his mind away from the slight discomfort, however, being thoroughly occupied with the contents of the abandoned mine cart and storage chest that he had fortuitously encountered during his subterranean venture.  The long, gaping chasm he had been dropped off next to at the start of this ridiculous deathmatch event had made him light up inside like a geeky kid noticing the latest electricity set hiding beneath the Christmas tree.  Or Hanukkah menorah.  Whatever worked.  Chasms meant abandoned mineshafts, and abandoned mineshafts meant technological riches to be—ahem—retrieved, not plundered, and repurposed into new and magnificent intents.

Of course, abandoned mineshafts also meant a rainbow hue of unwholesome hostiles hell-bent on claiming what biological life still remained in the half-mechanized scientist.  Such as the reanimated skeletons of what had to be long-dead mine workers and guards, judging by the mixed bag of mining picks, iron swords and bows wielded by the clattering horde that had attempted to savage him in an unguarded moment.

Emphasis on attempt.

The good Doctor wasn’t all brains, he was cleverness and battle-savvy as well.  While he certainly preferred ranged combat by means of highly sophisticated firearms, he was no stranger of getting up close and dangerous either.  The combined hatchetpick had seen an alternate use in those frantic moments, its woodcutter edge turned momentarily to splintering calcified remains for the sake of his survival instead of dismantling mine supports for a quick and easy source of already-processed lumber.

Would have been nice with a proper hand-held energy gun to zap them all into oblivion, though.

The chest was straight-forward enough.  An old weapons cache, little more than a tangled pile of hatchets, pickaxes and second-sorting blades and knives, all of them rusted and pitted, but some were still moderately sharp and/or pointy.  He had found a handful of potion bottles tucked inside the toolian detritus, as well—health and regeneration, according to their still-vibrant colors, and that was definitely going to come in handy down here.  It had not escaped the good Doctor that the customary Vanalian recuperation was curiously disabled in this elaborate deathmatch arena.

The mine cart had, ironically enough, proved the more interesting of the two containers.  At first Doc had been quite content to outright ignore it, but the tip of a mining drill peeking over the cart’s edge had convinced him otherwise.  The drill’s engine had long since been reduced to a clod of hardened rust, but the gearbox was still intact—and with a bit of clever redstone application, it would be perfectly salvageable as a whole new engine of its own.  He simply needed to find the redstone now.

Inspired by the lucky draw, he had promptly emptied the mine cart in its entirety.  An assortment of mining dross and old crafting tools, much to his disappointment … and then.

A small, strange device, clearly a part of something larger and more complex, that even now eluded his razor-sharp intellect with its unassuming design.  He pored over it endlessly, turning it back and forth and around in his hands (one creeper-green, the other dark metal grey), trying and falling oh-so-short at making heads or tails of how the device was supposed to work.

It had to be a component of the alluded ‘Headset Breaker’.  He was certain of it.  Just because it didn’t seem to actually do anything in its current state didn’t mean that it was harmless.  It was perfectly possible that the Breaker would only become fully functional when all pieces were in place and correctly assembled. Minecraftia knew that was a closely cherished method of the good Doctor himself, to safeguard his own diverse creations.

More often than not from themselves.  And himself.

His mind immediately drifted over to the next available piece of machinery.  The mining drill was large enough to once have required some kind of tripod or wheeled chassis, but with a bit of improvised disassembly, the gear box turned out quite a convenient bundle in Doc’s lap.  He put it aside, his wandering thoughts scanning for yet another thing to feast their analytics on next …

For some reason, he decided to check the chest a second time.

He blinked, at least with the red glow of his cyborg half.  How had he missed that?  He reached into the chest and almost reverently lifted the small mining laser from the chest’s bottom with both hands.  Now this was the kind of technology that made Dr. Mossner tick.

He checked with outmost care for any failsafes and activation springs.  Then he hefted the device with practiced ease in one hand, aimed it at a broken mine buttress twenty feet ahead in the ruler-straight mine passage, and fired.

An incandescent bolt of reddish light lanced from the mining laser’s optical muzzle and sheared through the wood, leaving it blackened and smoking, along with a deep gash in the stone wall besides.

A giddy grin split across Doc’s face before he regained control of his impulses.  Dangerous, dangerous.  Those were parts of himself better left asleep.

He placed the mining laser to his other side and picked up the stripped-down drill gear mechanism once more, scrutinizing it with a practiced eye.  He glanced at the discarded pile of weaponry, then back again to the assembly of gears and levers in his lap.  Maybe …

There was enough stray metal bits to use as rivets, and one of the small iron hammers from the mine cart seemed sturdy enough to still be usable.  He tossed the picks and hatchets aside: he was looking for elegance, practicality.  The shortblades and knives fit the idea he was imagining.

When he finished, he was sitting with what looked like a cross between an overly amped gunblade without the gun, and a mechanized Swiss army knife without the central covering handle.  He held it out at various angles to test the weapon’s integrity, and swung it around in metered circles and figures-of-eight.  On cue, the sequence of blades fastened to the cogwheel mechanism at the contraption’s heart swung out and around into an oversized throwing star before neatly clicking back into place.

He felt it.  A dark surge of murderous excitement that never reached the surface.  Half-formed images in his head that he never allowed to coalesce.

The headset clamped to the metal side of his head hummed softly.

>The highest virtue of any scientist is to maintain an open mind, Doctor.

~||~

Guude shifted his weight from one bare sole to another.  “… so … we really haven’t figured out exactly how we’re escaping once the walls come down, have we?”

“Not yet.  I’m hoping one of us figures it out before we actually get around to disabling the generators …”  BdoubleO looked around at the agreeing hums and nods.

A deceptively white-haired, ninjutsu-armored warrior, sitting almost too casually with his legs crossed, raised his pointer finger into the air in a polite gesture of attention.  “… actually, I’ve been trying to teleport out of here for the past few hours.”

Everyone’s eyes turned to Etho.

He continued calmly: “… but something’s screwing with my magic.”

BdoubleO rolled his eyes meaningfully, a hint of remembrance in his expression.  “Well geez.  I forget you can do that …”

Pause angled a dirty look at Etho.  “Were you planning to come back for us?”

The resident Mindcrack ninja’s facemask didn’t reveal his expression, but the cheeky, teasing tone in his voice was proof enough.  “Would I abandon you guys?”

A beat of part grumpy, part hesitant and part amused silence.

Guude sighed and rolled his eyes as well.  “Of course he’s coming back if he can get outta here, guys.  But I think if he can teleport himself, he can teleport all of us.”  The VPF leader levelled a knowing stare at the ninja.

Etho nodded matter-of-factly.  “That’s doable.  I think I’ll be able to pull something off once we’re out on the field, but I’m gonna need time.”

Bdubs nodded in accord.  “We got all the time in the world, Easy E.”  The supersoldier gave the thinner man a firm slap on the shoulder, and Etho cringed minutely from the force.  “I’ll leave our escape plan to you, ya sneaky ninja.”

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 60 minutes==

The rounded flask hung neatly suspended on sturdy wires inside the crucible’s bubbling water, thick fumes billowing out of the container’s narrow opening and dispersing through the swamp cottage’s windows.  Several simple beakers and crude petri dishes stood arranged on the nearby workbenches along with wooden bowls holding both solid and liquid ingredients.

Etho sat cross-legged on top of a storage chest in the farthest opposite corner of the single room, holding his facemask tight against his mouth and nose to keep out of harms way while the pungent mixture finished boiling down to its reactive components.  To an outsider, his posture would have appeared passive and relaxed, but the Redstone Ninja wasn’t passive and relaxed even when he was asleep.  Simply sitting down like this, his thoughts remained on the move, always ready to react to new developments.

He hadn’t quite started out this well-established, though.

Dumped into a soggy swamp by his black-armored overseer and left with 15 minutes to prepare for a lethal gladiatorial show, he had made for the nearest tree the instant the countdown timer hit zero and clambered into the topmost eaves, ready to start leaping from treetop to treetop in true ninja fashion … only to very nearly find himself face-down in the reeking swampwaters when he misjudged the first distance a handful of centimeters short.

It was a strange experience.  It hadn’t taken much of an adjustment; his mind spent its every waking moment in a constant state of preparing and being prepared to adapt, finding new advantages whenever an obstacle presented itself.  Even so, having to spend that extra half-second before each jump was a peculiar relief, a subtle catharsis of returning to a more ordinary state of body and mind.

The only thing that kept him from enjoying the change of pace was the headset.

Putting it on had been excruciating enough, what with the godawful creepy way it seemed to drill itself into his skull and link up with his own squishy insides, but one would expect that immediate flash of agony to subside once the endorphins kicked in.  But it just couldn’t be that easy—not in this horrible deathmatch game.

The infernal contraption had hummed into life against his left temple … and then the long, slow hellmarch had begun.  Etho had never really experienced migraines before, but now he sincerely hoped that he hadn’t been too dismissive of them in the past, because wow, if this was what it was like to even have a mild case of one …

It wasn’t enough to have to suffer this constant, low-key neural static, mostly reduced to a light but neverending thrum behind his ears; no, it also had to spike painfully whenever that trollish text would broadcast itself over the holographic heads-up display—and the spike always focused itself in and around his left eye.

The redstone one.

He would have been able to shrug it off as the redstone’s own innate conductive properties messing with the headset wiring, if it hadn’t been for the altogether unnerving sensation of abject pain coming from within the eye—as if the eye itself was projecting its own agony onto his synapses like some weird, etheric feedback.

He really didn’t need to be distracted by such thoughts.  He had his hands and head full with an only moderately harebrained escape plan, and every slip in concentration could cost him dearly.

His curiosity of this swamp biome’s resource potential had soon started to pay off.  Mushrooms—some of which he had only seen a few times before in the Minecraftian wilds—dotted the shaded lees beneath the tree trunks, and here and there he had been able to pick rare moss and fern, until his meagre backpack was nearly filled to capacity with a hedge witch’s worth of alchemical ingredients.

Ninjitsu magic had a few things in common with Minecraftian Yaga brewery, after all.

He had also come across a measure of native wildlife, in the form of huge lumps of slime shifting hither and thither through the already-sogged swamp.  As an experienced war veteran and still-active scout, Etho was well aware of the general properties of the strange, pseudo-sentient oozes, including their tendency to congregate in marshlands and similar biomes.  Due to the fact that those regions were hardly, if ever, properly mapped out, Minecraftia’s slimes were still considered almost on par with the Earthen bog beast, both in rarity and reputation.

He had been able to pounce on a few smaller ones; if “pounce” was an adequate description for “walk up to and stab until it stops moving”.  Indeed, the little twitching chunks had collapsed into inert puddles, leaving behind jiggling globules of pure slime that he had managed to gather up and contain in small packages made from broad frond leaves before the blobs would try to recombine with each other.  They would undoubtedly come in handy later.

The main breakthrough had been the discovery of this swamp cottage at dusk on the second night, a simple reed-roof box of a house raised up above the swampwaters on sturdy logs tall and thick enough to easily weather a small flood.  It was clearly inhabited, judging by the faint, thin plume of smoke rising from it in a wispy column barely distinguishable from the evening sky.  Etho had stayed in cover behind a nearby tree, keenly watching the wooden ladder leading up to the doorway, and eventually observed a Soiac hag, laden with reagent pouches and a harvest basket, wander up to the cottage and—with surprising agility—scale the ladder and head inside.

He had quickly made his way onto the porch roof, slipping with trained ease into his combat stance.  Sure enough, the hag had stepped out again a few minutes later, likely to dispose of some household waste, and the Redstone Ninja had struck in an instant.

One snapped neck, a thorough pocket rifling and an unceremonious corpse toss into the water channels, and the swamp cottage had a new resident.

The cottage was well-furnished, considering its standards.  A cobblestone furnace made up the single room’s centerpiece, flanked on either side by workbenches with sizeable storage chests lining the rest of the room.  Etho didn’t squander a single moment taking stock of the supplies, and they were impressive: several more mushroom and fern species than the ones he had already collected, a number of lichen samples that even he struggled to place at first, generous helpings of bog beans and leaves, and even spider eyes of multiple persuasions; both of the forest and the cave variety, hinting that there must be accessible surface caverns in the area.

The main drawback was, of course, the wholesale dearth of Nether-unique reagents, such as nether warts, quartz, blaze powder and glowstone dust, to say nothing of the extremely potent and sought-after ghast tear.  This didn’t faze Etho in the slightest; most of those ingredients had been introduced into the Minecraftian alchemic science due to their efficiency, delivering a higher payload at a lower materials cost (which did help offset the far greater difficulty in procuring them), but other than that, the principles of reactive agents held fast.

The other consideration was significantly more problematic, however.  While the cottage stores had several types of ingredients coming from the wildlife and even the various forms of undead (including bone meal, zombie flesh samples and even some coagulated bodily fluids that were better left unidentified), there were no Ender-specific materials at hand.

Even that could not turn Etho away from his intent.  There was still more than enough stuff here to pull off what the ninja ultimately had in mind.

It was just going to be a whole lot messier.

Etho pulled his facemask tighter, drew in a moderate breath of fresh air and scooted off the top of the chest.  It wasn’t just the chemical fumes that he had to contend with, but also the smoke from the swampwood torches that he had whittled and charred to serve as a source of light.  Little wonder that those Soiac witches ended up looking the way they did.  At least the furnace was well-built enough to channel its smoke outside through an opening in the back wall.

He grasped a pair of dented metal tools to retrieve the boiler glass before its contents would crust into an unretrievable lump of parched remains, placed the heated flask in one of the empty wooden bowls, and carefully angled its opening away from him and towards the window.  With his other hand, he picked up one of the beakers and flicked a few droplets of its contents into the highly concentrated residue within the still scalding hot glass container.

A thick plume of deep lilac smoke jettisoned itself out of the bottle, forming a surprisingly elegant mushroom cloud that billowed away through the window and into the swamp air outside.  Etho’s attention, however, was fixed on what was happening inside the container; the residue reacted, reformed, shifted into what looked like fine, moist silt—silt that carried a conspicuous shade of purple and seemed to crackle softly with a force of its own, as if it strived to flash into another plane of existence altogether.

The Redstone Ninja grinned excitedly beneath his facemask.  This was the kind of active reagent he was looking to synthesize—now the next step was to give it a useable form.

Propping the flask up with the metal tools to keep it from flopping over in the bowl and spilling its immeasurably precious contents, Etho next reached for a single packet that sat on the other workbench, a rounded bundle of frond leaves that even now appeared to jiggle lightly, almost restlessly.  Picking it up with both hands, he carefully undid the wrapping and allowed the small slime globule to slip into another empty bowl.  The semi-transparent sphere rolled around uneasily at first, before settling at the bowl’s bottom, still carrying that constant ripple of idling movement.

Picking up a thin metal prong, he went about poking and prodding the glistening chunk of primordial ooze, worrying out a small, still-moving globlet that clung to the end of the prong, vibrating almost frenetically and constantly struggling to clamber up the prong’s length.

Now came the tricky part.  He had to drop the globlet directly into the boiled-down base, on the first try, or everything would devolve into a mess.  No-one had really discerned what level of sentience remained the smaller a slime got, but Etho held no qualms that slimes were somehow programmed to clump together as much as they could—and that meant keeping this one little drop from backpedalling to its origin at first possible opportunity.

There were no two ways to go about it.  Etho grabbed both of the metal tools like a pair of chopsticks in one hand and grasped the flask’s narrow neck as hard as he dared, all the while maneuvering the prong with his other to keep the frantic little globlet perched on the tip.  For a moment, he felt a mild, detached sympathy for the tiny spit of jiggling matter, the kind a fisherman might feel for a twitching worm about to be impaled upon a barbed hook.

Holding the flask upright, he aimed the prong over the opening with utmost precision and angled it straight down, leaving the slime globlet to hang like a water drop from a razor-sharp swordtip.  Mindful not to jar the prong sideways, he shifted his grasp to tap a finger at the other end of the prong, sending the impact straight along its length to coax the globlet to fall.

It felt like it went in slow motion.  The globlet slipped off the prong’s tip, plummeted with a singular, vertical jiggling ripple through the flask’s cylindrical neck, and impacted with a little plip onto the sparkling, purple silt at the bottom, leaving a small, spherical crater in the other material.

The purple silt jolted, then it jumped.  To the untrained eye, it seemed at first like the silt was being pulled inwards, as if the slime globlet had somehow transformed into a microscopic black hole within the flask.  Etho, however, was far from untrained.  He immediately set the prong aside and grasped the tools holding the flask with both hands, swinging the flask back and forth, side to side in a specific, 90-degree angle pattern, all the while keeping his attention fixed on the contents churning away within the rounded bottle’s transparent belly.

Gradually, the silt pulled together into itself, as if the alien moisture were evaporating into thin air.  The swinging flask busied the material first into a lump, then a rounded ellipsoid, then into a cylinder with stubby ends.  Finally, it went completely inert, audibly clattering around inside the flask, fully solidified.

Etho breathed out through his facemask and calmly shook the lump out of the bottle and into his palm.  The item resembled a crooked piece of chalk—tinted a smooth, medium lilac and still glinting and popping with those strange, purple sparks.

He turned it over meticulously, scrutinizing its surface with his redstone eye to find any discolorations, any shifts in the chalk’s nuance.  There was none; it was as evenly colored as if it had come out of a crayon factory back on Earth.

Another, triumphant grin spread across his face beneath the balaclava.  He had done it.  He had successfully synthesized a ninjutsu teleportation chalk, with which he would be able to draw out entire arrays to augment his already prodigious magic to the point where he could, theoretically, transport a dozen people at once—if not a few more at that.

Now the next challenge was to find a surface that could hold a first, experimental mass teleport seal.  He immediately ruled out the roof.  Crafted from overlapping wooden slabs and covered in vines and moss, it would be too uneven and full of contaminants to do the trick.  He was left with the floor of the cottage’s single room, its wooden floorboards worn smooth with use and age.

It might just work.  The margins were nonexistent, but by shoving the lone, rickety thatch bed sidelong against the wall and gently tipping it over, he managed to get just enough space to draw out the full seal—albeit to slightly scaled-down size.

The chalk scratched across the wooden planks, sketching out a circular, elaborate array of alchemical symbols and eldritch script.  Squirreling away the chalk in one of his many hidden pockets, Etho stepped resolutely into the seal’s center, shook out his shoulders and went down on one knee in a single, smooth motion.  He breathed deeply a few times, pooling his magic energy within his limbs, core and mind and then brought up his hands in front of himself.

His fingers flashed through a series of gestures too swift to be discernable by the naked eye.  He finished by clapping his palms together firmly, the dull pap! overwhelmed by the thrum of lilac energy that rose up around him as the seal activated.  Each line blossomed with a soft, smooth haze, the very atmosphere within the cottage ballooned with immense power—

—in a flash and a bang of air rushing in, the Redstone Ninja was gone.

On the floor, the teleportation array faded into barely recognizable streaks of gray dust.

~||~

Etho had only so much time to blink the destination light’s flare out of his eyes before he tumbled to the ground.

Correction: he tumbled into water.  Temperate water.  Temperate, rank water.

Swamp water.

>Whoops.

He hissed while still being under, fighting to regain his focus when the headset text sent a migraine flash through his redstone eye, causing it in turn to send painful throbs thundering across his scalp.  He pushed himself to the water’s surface with a gasp and a sputter, noticed within the next heartbeat that the bottom sediments were sturdy enough to stand on, and crouched down within a nearby cluster of thick reeds and broad lily pads to take stock of his position and that of any potential ambushers.

When nothing seemed to spring at him within those first, tense seconds, he gingerly slipped through the reeds and clambered onto the shore.  Yep, it was a swamp.  And judging by the headset still able to harass him with its anonymous peanut commentary, he were most likely still within the arena bounds, too.

Dangit.

Had he somehow teleported into another swamp?  Perhaps the teleportation spell had been too attuned to the biome because of the ingredients for the chalk.

Great.  Just great.

He wiped the smelly marshwater off his clothes and brushed a few vines out of his hair, ruffling it back into a proper spiky appearance.  First things first, he needed to get a better idea of where he was.  Simplest way to do that?  Elevated position.

He made for the nearest tree and clambered bodily into it, reaching its top within the next few moments.  He perched in its top branches and scanned his surroundings, the whole way around.

He got about three-quarters along the horizon’s circumference before he spotted it: a noticeable plume of dark smoke rising over the treetops, almost far enough away to be devoured by the unnatural mists that constantly cloaked the entire skyline.

Somehow, something told him that it wasn’t just another random swamp house he had managed to teleport over to.  Somehow, that same something was also telling him that it was his swamp house he was looking at.

>Try again?

He clenched his teeth, putting one hand to the left side of his head as his redstone eye wheeled excruciatingly within his eye socket for a few agonizing instants.

His temper flared.  An unguarded moment of a lone incandescent pinprick that blazed through his mind’s pathways, searing frustration and red-hot anger accumulated into a singular pulse that he narrowly managed to rein in at the last moment; he was very likely still on live television, what with this fangled deathmatch game going on.

Strangely, that one brief internal tantrum seemed to mollify the pounding migraine.  The redstone chunk in his skull burned and then calmed, leaving his brain to the usual, dull thrum of constant neuronic feedback, and even that seemed to have been cowed for the time being.

He did let out an infinitesimal vent in the form of a carefully chosen invective.  Just for show.  A little ‘emotional outburst’ that would please the eager masses.

Resuming his concentration, he set off through the treetops, leaping from branches to trunks, trunks to branches, to make headway back to his swamp laboratory and give this whole mass teleportation idea another runaround on the drawing board.  He had, fortunately, noticed the faint etheric feedback that informed him in no uncertain terms that whatever dampening mechanism had kept his magic soundly in check within that cell pit was also in effect here in this elaborate gladiatorial arena.  It was definitely weaker, though—as indicated by the fact that he had been able to teleport at all.  If he could create a large enough array, he just might be able to overcome the field altogether and get himself and all of his friends and war brothers out of this fine mess.

Even then, he still felt his redstone eye continue to hum quietly; not with the horrid migraine-inducing feedback of the headset, but with a deep, fierce warmth akin to feeling the heat of an open lava lake against his face from dozens of meters up.  It felt like this peculiar echo, an after-image almost, of that very same tantrum he had only barely averted a mere minute earlier.

It was oddly comforting.  And at the same time, immeasurably alarming.  A sign of things to come?  Maybe.

Perhaps it should stay that way.
~||~






=Author's Notes=
Things have smoothed out a little, and things are bit more clear from last week.  Kinda feeling out of it, but hey... *is clocked upside the head to avoid evoking 'Murphy's Law'* ... ow.

Special thanks to tuan_taureo  for helping me out with the hard writing this week (and last week, and next week, too). We hope you enjoyed.

~||~

 

 

=====

Author's Box (FAQ):
"What is the Severance Universe?" -- The Severance Universe is the setting for the 'UHC: Foundation' serial. Read all the previous chaptersodes here or here, or if you want more info and lore, click here.

Severance Universe One Shots:
SUOS 001 - Hat
SUOS 002 - Descent and Denial
SUOS 003 - Into This World
SUOS 004 - Hostility

Sentimentality
Behind Worn Bones

We do more than just the SevU. Here are other stories for you happy lot to check out!
Saladcrack :: Kiddycrack Ficsnips

Burning the Phoenix (Ch 1)
(TBA)

Comments

[tjmachado]

Wat... Okay, Etho just got about 5 shades cooler than before. At least. And also everything is forming together, and we've seen at least 2-3 "suspicious" things that point toward a traitor. Still don't quite buy it.

[theropod]

Giddy excitement, it grows :D

[mooshlovely]

Yayyyyyy! I love this <3