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| Issue #6 July 2009 |
"Offspring" Written By Ed Ainsworth |
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Standing a few meters away from where they had last heard Threnody's distress call, Nate and his group, which included Krang of Atlantis, Sersi of the Eternals, Ransak of the Deviants and Crystal of the Inhumans, steeled themselves for what they might find within this realm.
Leading the way, Nate charged over the small verge to see the creature holding his wife in its floppy tentacles. Gritting his teeth, he saw the meme bomb cradled in its lap, being stroked and absorbing the malevolent adoration from its possesor.
“I wondered how long I would take you to get here, Nathan.” The creature got up, letting the meme bomb drop onto the floor and acting in properties similar to an inanimate object, yet all who were gathered there knew it wasn't. As Nate moved towards the creature, he gestured for Krang and Ransak to free his wife and Blackheath with the point of his hand and the blaze of telepathic knowledge.
“I came as soon as I knew your location and your identity, Cube.”
The entity was dumbfounded for a moment before relaxing it's posture once again, casting its eyeless gaze towards Threnody. “Ah, your connection with your wife must be strong indeed, Nathan.”
“You wouldn't believe how strong,” he offered in return as they began to posture for one another.
“Well, it is time to begin the endgame, is it not?” the Cube asked, expanding it's form in a vast black wave.
“Yes,” was all Nate could offer as the tidal wave washed over the group.
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“You've done nothing for us, Smithers,” came a voice, like a pine-cone falling onto rocks.
Blackheath looked around, his neck and bark covered his features creaking as concern and panic took hold of him. It was dark, and he couldn't feel the Verdant fields anymore. Taking a few steps forward, he found himself confronted with small, green people of a sort which he'd never seen before.
“Who are you?” he asked, kneeling down to touch them. He felt a connection to the fields through their forms.
“We're the ones you neglected, Smithers. We're the ferns that became extinct so many years ago, but we live within your collective minds. We're part of the memory of the Flora, but you choose to ignore us, concentrating instead on the plants that are still alive.”
“Wouldn't you want that? To preserve your species and children by caring for the future?” he asked as the fern people grew in size with every pang of guilt and every twist of shame in his stomach.
“No, we don't want that, Smithers. We don't WANT to evolve. We Don't NEED to Evolve. We are perfect the way we are and you have ignored us!” The fern creatures grew larger, their fringes pushed out like green spikes aimed towards his face as every breath cast more spores into the atmosphere.
“Oh God…” was all Smithers could offer before the creatures bore down on him.
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Krang felt the soak of water around his waist, but it was cold water, salty and fresh mixed together. He could feel the halocline underneath him, where the salt water sat on top of the fresh water. He felt movement underneath him; looking through the clear water, he saw what was creating the movements.
Enormous sharks, creatures of the sea, swimming around. Before there were people there were fish, creatures that had evolved to maximize their potential in water, such as the Meglodons and Icythosaurs and other more primitive animals. These were Krangs ancestors. He cast his gaze downward as they moved through the water without effort, their fins guiding them and their bodies perfectly adapted for their lifestyles.
His gaze cast down to his own body and he saw that he wasn't anything like them. Considering he thought himself so much more than a surface dweller, he was more like them than any creature below the surface of the ocean. The efficiency in his movements did not exist, every swimming movement was painfully protracted and obvious; these creatures could turn without a moments notice.
Krang looked to these creatures, moving silently through the water and once again felt the urge to vent his emotions. The perfect race he thought Atlaneans were when, in fact, they were nothing more than wet humans.
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As she looked upwards into the sky, she saw the vast metal features of the Celestial gazing down on her, causing her stomach to feel light and sweat push itself to the surface of her skin. She reached out to her side, taking Ransak's hand as she did so, noticing that he was in an equally amazed fugue state.
“This is...too much,” he began, before his mind started to break down even more. “Why me, you metal faced bastards? Why make me look this way and separate me from my others? WHY ME?” Taking his metal rod from the place on his back, he charged forwards, blasting energy blast after energy blast into the creature’s leg. “WHY ME?!” he continued to scream as Sersi watched the Celestial. Its gaze wasn't on them; it wasn't even on this planet. So vast was the attention of the Celestial's, its gaze covered eons, not physicality.
Sersi began to understand…and the realization had a crushing weight on her own psyche. “We're nothing to them,” she began, dropping onto her knees as Ransak continued to fire his rage into the Celestial's foot. “We not even an experiment to them. We're just a minor anomaly…an equation they worked out wrong, then re-wrote. We're nothing.”
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“Are you all right?” Threnody asked her husband, as she helped him to his feet. Darkness was all around them yet they were perfectly visible to each other.
“I think so,” Nate began as he turned to see the form of Sinister before him, someone who had affected and manipulated both Grey and Threnody in years past. In reaction to his visage, Threnody immediately dropped behind Nate, who stood his ground, bristling to the person before him.
“You are not Sinister,” Nate offered with a calm and well spoken sentence.
“He isn't?” Threnody asked, pushing her head around Nate's shoulder.
“No, he isn't. This is the cube, Thren. It's trying to get to us, to hurt us.”
“How can you be sure, Nate?”
“I just know, Thren.” He clutched his hand tighter and Threnody noticed there was something glowing between his fingertips.
“What's that?” she asked, gesturing with a nod of her head towards his glowing hand.
“A Secret Weapon,” he offered with a thought before stepping forwards. “You've not said a word yet, have you? Have I put you off your step, Cube?”
“You have not,” the cube returned, shaping it's form back to the black featureless void that it had first had when they met. “Well then? Where do we go from here?” it asked after minutes of silence from Nate.
“You said it before, Cube.”
“The Endgame!” It rushed forward, energy spewing from it's tentacles as it tried to re-arrange Nate atoms.
Closing his eyes as he felt his atoms start to dissipate, Nate reached out into the Mind Reef, casting his consciousness out like a net across the realms. Threnody looked on with horror as all that was left of Nate was now his hand clutching against the glowing stone.
The cube looked towards her, casting its eyeless gaze onto her shaking body. “You and your little group will suffer the same fate as Nathan,” he began, not noticing the glow from Nate's severed hand growing stronger and stronger.
A flickering appeared before Threnody as the energy began to siphon from her form. A power she had been unable to access before, the casting of a dead person…or, perhaps, someone who was close to death.
As the Astral form, made from energy and mental polyps, presented itself, it bore a familiar shape to Threnody. The scared X mark across it's chest signified her husbands return. “Nate!” she yelled with pleasure as he shot towards the Cube, scooping the rock out of his severed hand.
“You can't kill me on this plane of existence, Cube. But you...”
He opened his hand and the rock floated in the center of it, casting its energies through Nathan and the entire Mind Reef, a focal point the size of consciousness. Drawing energy from every sleeping and altered mind on the Reef, their energies collected through Nate and fired through his rock, causing the Cube's form began to swell.
To process the ideas and thoughts and feelings and sensations of all these minds would be too much for any entity, be they mortal or immortal. This was the combined collective experiences of every living thing: man, animal or plant on the planet.
As the cube became more and more swollen, it was rendered almost inert. With a final whistle from its form it exploded, casting energy and ashes into the air.
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The destruction of the Cosmic cube sent an explosive force into the ground and around where it's physical form fell, knocking Nate and his group off their feet. Landing on their sides, the group looked from one to the other.
The only person standing was Nate, in the center of the explosive force with the ground scorched underneath him. His clothes were vaporized, though his nudity was the least amazing thing visible to everyone but Threnody. As the ashes tried to scatter themselves to the wind, Nate's hands moved with the sort of deft precision and speed that only a surgeon should possess. Each movement was intimate but, on a grand scale, remoulding and shaping the matter of the Cube’s ashes from the ground upwards.
The object and master who had formerly been the Meme bomb and Cosmic Cube entity were now being morphed into something more influential. As the meme bomb had been a force for violence and death, this new form was like a nourishing fruit of positive ideas as its payload instead of the erosion of important ones.
Ideas, like Tolerance, Acceptance and Equality…all things close to Nate Grey's heart and the plight of the other variations of humanity. As Nate held himself into the air, creating the twisting helix of ideas and power into the form of a gigantic tree with the positive fruit hanging from it's lush branches, Threnody noticed a chunk of rock glowing within his hand.
That must have been what Nate referred to as his secret weapon…the object obtained from the High Evolutionary known as Isotope E, a powerful object capable of restructuring the fabric of a creature or an entity’s genetic code, something that the Evolutionary had at one time been addicted too.
Now it was used to make something special. The Garden of Diversity, a place where Great Thinkers and Telepaths could come to meet and digest the fruits of this place, to create new ideas and peddle new theories and concepts to the world. This would be Nate Grey's Legacy -- Now all that was left was to push the concept onto an influential individual and let the gospel spread as the Mind Reef healed itself.
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As the Cosmic Cube fell, the explosive backlash of it's cosmic energy swept through the realms of the Mind Reef, which had already been pushed to their limits in areas to help Nate defeat it. Areas of rampant deforestation of the trees of genes, or the mind-lakes that had dried up preventing the spawning of ideas, were now beginning to heal themselves thanks to the energies released back into the system by the Cosmic Cube’s destruction.
As the healing shot through the areas, the Mind Reef itself was beginning to heal, especially the meme-field, an idea atmosphere that permeated every aspect of the realm. With the meme bombs indiscriminate destruction of the memetic areas of many of the offshoots of humanity, it left them fighting against each other. Now, with the healing spreading across the realms, the combatants found themselves without a reason to fight.
Thor stood on the Moon, overseeing the apologies exchanged between the Eternal attack squadron leader Ikaris and Medusa, the Queen of the Inhumans. Standing in his plain cloth clothes, he held his hammer at his waist, Gorgon of the Inhumans slapping a massive paw on his shoulder and handing him a bottle of mead.
“Drink, Asgardian. We have only thanks for your involvement.”
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Further under the ocean, the Deviants and Atlanteans have made their apologies and are moving away from each other. The armies dropping their weapons and responding as any logical society would with the recovery of their fallen.
X-49 sits in silence, the water rippling over his plastic shell, as the internal parts of his anatomy blink and beep. The pressures of the ocean floor mean nothing to him, but for some reason, he cannot find the will to stay and watch the clean up.
Perhaps it was for the emotions rippling through the water as the two armies cleaned the land and preened their dead for effects and weapons. Perhaps it was the fact that for all their violence and prowess as warriors, it was still impossible for them to completely give up to their emotions.
Almost as impossible as crying under water.
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“Nate, how are you doing this?” she asked, reaching out of him, but her hands passing through his astral body. The others of the group looked up to Nate as well, not knowing how they managed to escape their individual torments, some more scathed than others.
Nate's astral form looked to his wife with a smile before the rock began to cast it's light again. “Don't worry, my Love. Everything will be all right.”
The rock cast it's light again, as the Astral form of Nate Grey dissipated. Slowly but surely, as the light grew brighter and brighter, more and more of Nate's body began to reform, slowly coming back to its original shape and size, until it was fully formed…naked, but fully formed.
The only thing that had stayed constant on all these forms were his marking, the scar across his body that allowed him to bear the responsibilities of the Mind Reef. Threnody ran to him, and wrapped her arms around her fallen husbands body. He sat up slowly, looking into his wife's eyes.
“Nate, where do we go from here?” she asked, holding him tightly to her chest.
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They stood before him, within the confines of the dream. Lucid dreaming was one of the first signs of his potential. As Quentin moved forwards, wringing his hands together, he saw the light shining from behind them, casting long shadows and silhouettes of their figures against his vision.
Running a hand through his Mohawk, he looks up at Nate, and into the face of this Angel. The man and the people behind him spread their wings, each one individual to their forms, the Blue skinned man had wings of water, whilst the woman with black hair had wings of interlocking semi-opaque plates.
With his mind reeling, looking onto the face of Nate Grey, who smiled as a butterfly of pure psionic energy left the confines of his mind and floated on invisible air currents into the front of Quentin’s brain.
As the group began to move away, ascending higher into the sky of his dream, Quentin’s brain began to formulate ideas. Nate had spread the word of the Garden of Diversity, and set the cogs moving inside Quentin’s mind. Cogs creating ideas on how the world should be...and how he could get to the World.
