A Game of Gods: A Multiversal Challenge

the rasp came again this time Icarax was in the middle of the room and fully visible.

"Now, Now, this is not the time for happy reunions, we are under siege and time is short, the day is darkest before the morning and i will not wait for the morlocks to have their say; Doctor shin, please tell us what we do next".

"I fucking died in there!"

Spriggan shouted. He was angry that he couldn't avenge the dead students back in Thor.

"I... couldn't do anything about those students."

Rey looked at the newly reunited couple...and continued to giggle, still idly scratching at his face.

"Kid..." Kisame said to Spriggan with unusual seriousness. "Sometimes, shit happens, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. That's part of life, especially life as a soldier. If I told you all the people I know of who died and went unavenged, we'd be here for hours."

edited 30th May '11 10:43:46 PM by DKN117

Link smiled at the older man, relieved.

“Link Windhero.” He shook hands with him.

"I am glad you are safe."

"You're alright?"

Durant greeted Spriggan with Michael behind him.

"Yeah." The masked agent picked himself up from the ground. "Just leave me alone..."

He walked away from the Somali veteran, leaving the pilot confused.

Bowser wandered over and smacked Rey upside the head again.

"Stop that."

Link regarded the skeletal King with an aside glance.

"Stop it. He can't help himself, so stop it."

"I find it calming for some reason."

Galen steps into the room. I hate getting lost, he thought.

Link turned to Galen, an unidentifiable.... something in his eyes. For a moment he simply observed the Jedi. Then, he began to speak.

“Galen...”

"Yes... Link?" Said Galen, his voice muffled by the strip of cloth he had around his mouth and nose.

Narumi pointed his gun at Shin when he arrived, only to lower it when he saw him. "So, we lost quite a few men now... How shall we end this?" Narumi said to Shin.

Bolas had been focusing on covering the group's entry into the temple. Partially this was because it wouldn't do much good to have to contend with both forces inside in front of them and outside behind them at once. The other part was because inside he'd be a massive target, and wanted to make sure the place was clear before he entered.

He had maintained a light scan on the members of the group to ascertain their actions, and when the fight inside was over he slowly made his way inside as best he could. Though the entrance may have been huge to some, for him it was barely a crawlspace. "I see you all can handle yourselves in my absence, though not without casualties."

Immediately his interest turned to the center of the room; "So have any of you gotten down to the task at hand? What are we looking at here?"

edited 31st May '11 6:37:18 AM by SOCR

—Megatron had fought alongside the others in silence, mainly providing support fire with his cannon, and slashing at whatever got too close. He rested his optics on Ravage's Predacon sigil.—

Why Do You Continue To Wear That?

Dr. Ikari nodded to those who introduced themselves and shook Link's hand, but it was clear that the archaeologist had eyes only for his wife; about the only thing which disrupted his concentration was the sudden telepathic speech of Bolas, causing him to glance up and stare at the Elder Dragon. He looked surprised, but nowhere near as much as he ought to be, and there was no awe or fear in his gaze—only a sense of intrigue and curiosity, as if he were wondering just what made Bolas tick.

Shin turned his gaze back to his wife with a wry grin. "Well, you didn't lie; these certainly are people...of a sort."

Dr. Langley, whose arm had been thoroughly treated and wrapped up in a makeshift cast by Gordon, could only offer him a faint smirk. "Took some...getting used to, let me tell you..."

"I can imagine," he chuckled, helping Aska to her feet and draping her intact right arm over his shoulder. When he next spoke, the man's expression had hardened and his tone grew serious. "Now then, as for what we need to do next, that should be obvious—we need to destroy the artefact. Unfortunately, this huge planetarium is not it; the damn thing is further inside and a mile down. We can reach it by elevator, but we have to go now—there's no more time to waste."

And with that, the archaeologist turned and began to hobble off the way he originally came, his progress slow both due to his limp and the weight of his wife over his shoulders.

Ravage began to follow Dr. Ikari, glancing over his shoulder at Megatron as he walked. "Personal reasons," was the full extent of his reply.

edited 31st May '11 8:11:16 AM by SullenFrog

Political Convenience. Which No Longer Applies To You Outside Your Home Dimension.

—Perhaps not, but... —

Kimimaro silently followed the two injured Doctors, sticking close to them.

The hallway through which Dr. Ikari led the group was winding and darker than the previous one, its gradually-shrinking corridors twisting and turning horizontally and vertically like the sinnuous path of a sidewinder; most of the lights were not working in this part of the temple, and here and there the group came across human bodies—some armoured like the soldiers which had just battled them, some dressed in casual clothes—in varying states of dismemberment...though mercifully, at least, all were dead.

"We heard the sounds of the fighting," Dr. Ikari explained, huffing faintly from the effort of carrying his wife. "I figured...either the creatures had started to make their move...or that they were running from you. So, we decided to make a break for it, take advantage of the distraction to try and destroy the artefact before anything else could happen."

Shin glanced at a nearby corpse with some measure of sadness and shook his head. "Didn't quite work out as planned; the rest of my crew is still safe, barricaded up in another part of the ruins...but the team I assembled to perform this little act of sabotage...well, we didn't get far. Still, we gave those bastards a licking before we went down, at least..."

A few minutes later the group arrived in a broad chamber built like the inside of twelve-sided die; each of the room's pentagonal surfaces bore a single large hieroglyph depicting a large, unblinking eye, and the pupils of these carved eyes directed all their attention towards a cylindrical shaft at the back of the room. A massive stature of a karkarlikarrh stood over this pit, staring down into those dark depths as though to keep watch over whatever horrors it may have contained.

A large elevator had been installed along the side of the shaft, and its single, rickety car looked wide enough and sturdy enough to accompany just about all those challengers present—Megatron, Bolas and possibly Ravage excluded, of course. Furthermore, the shaft was a good seventy feet in diameter, so it was conceivable that the Elder Dragon and the Decepticon would simply be able to fly down to wherever it led.

Dr. Ikari limped into the cagelike elevator and took up a position near the car's control panel, waiting for the rest of the group to get inside.

"It's a long drop," he said with a faint cough, "so try not to fall."

Ravage approached the pit, debating whether or not it would be more prudent to take the elevator or simply transform and fly down; as he drew closer, a grimace spread across the Predacon's face, and he brought a hand up to the side of his head as though to ward off a massive processorache. The closer he got to that shaft, the more he became aware of a strange white noise, a background static which seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once; lines of gibberish code streamed through his processors and across his vision, and flecks of interference muddled his view of the world.

The others would feel something similar, each in their own way; to some, it might manifest as a sort of omnipresent whispering, incessant and maddeningly nearby yet incomprehensible and far distant at the same time, while others might interpret it as a sudden onset of intense hunger or thirst, as though the very nutrients were being siphoned from their body by an unseen source simply by dint of proximity. To Bolas or Galen, it would be a recurrence of that yawning sensation of emptiness, the dark void which they had first felt when the moons vanished and the stars went out.

Dr. Langley had clear felt it as well, if the grimace spreading across her own face and the way her eyes darted about in search of a sound only she could hear were any indication. "What is that?"

"The artefact's interference field," Dr. Ikari replied grimly; clearly he too was suffering the effects. "It's been growing stronger by the hour, and the creatures seem to have gotten more and more agitated in response."

"Not good," said Galen. "Whatever that artefact is, if it can project something this bad, we have to destroy it."

Flandre hunched over, hands on her stomach. This hunger was getting unbearable. She wanted to eat something, anything. If Sakuya was here she would already have made something to eat from no where.

Durant decided to talk to Spriggan on the side while Micheal and the Black Stig would be on the side to see if anything else would be needed.

"Doctors, it may be of some import that what I feel coming from down there is the same effect that fills the sky at least to my senses. A disconnect from everything. Has the team studying the ruins been able to decyphyer any meaning, or relation to the creatures we face?" Bolas started to descend alongside the elevator, but by re-triggering the Levitation which again extended to the group for their use. Langley may now be able to move under her own power, and Bolas was considering ways to heal her completely, though it would be easiest to wait until she expired and simply regenerate her.

Rey simply walked with the others, silent except for an occasional involuntary bark of hysterical laughter, having finally pulled his visor down, but still clawing at it as though trying to reach his face through the thin layer.

"We've made some progress in deciphering the karkarlikarrh hieroglyphics down in the artefact chamber," Dr. Ikari replied, setting the elevator car into motion once everyone who was going to do so had gotten inside. There was a faint hum as the machine warmed up, and then it was descending at an incredibly rapid pace: one second the car and its pasengers were still at the apex of the shaft, with that immense stone alien looking down at them in unfathomable scrutiny; and then the next the air was whipping past them from below, and the chamber in which they had just been standing was a rapidly-diminishing circle of light fading out of sight far, far above.

"From what we've learned, the term Bak'nala refers primarily to the creatures which have been attacking you thus far," he explained. "The prehistoric karkarlikarrh who once inhabited this world apparently worshipped and feared these things as demons of some sort, and believed that they had kept watch over this place since time immemorial; supposedly, the bak'nala were servants of a powerful deity who had imprisoned a rival god beneath this desert as punishment for some transgression, and that it was their duty—along with that of their karkarlikarrh venerators—to make sure that whatever lay beneath the temple was never able to escape."

Dr. Ikari shrugged, grimacing as the feedback from the interference field grew more intense with every passing second. "I would have thought such things were little more than primitive superstition, but now...I honestly don't know what to believe."

"What about the artefact itself, Shin?" Dr. Langley cut in, stepping away from her husband in order to stand on her own two feet. "Washington seems keen on protecting it; he was willing to bombard a huge swathe of the planet just to keep us from getting here, and only stopped when we reached the desert."

"What? That maniac; he must be insane if he thinks that any good which could possibly come from the statue could be worth such destruction!"