Academia Nut wrote:You will note that there was something in the shadows that seemed annoyed with her but didn't do anything about it. You may begin gibbering now.
You mean here?
Turning to shadows to move through the substance of the mansion, Seras felt a mind lurking at the boundary of existence in the shadows, resentful for her intrusion upon its domain. She just sent a psychic growl back. This was her turf. The presence retreated, for the moment, and Seras had the most distinct feeling of recognition. She would have to re-examine her memories.
Yeah, I'm hoping you revisit that later.
As for C-tech, I know very little, honestly. I've never played it, never been exposed to it until people started fanfics for it here. However, I do have enough occult knowledge to know that a Shield powerful enough to have that many layers of protection *should not* be that easily sidestepped.
Those shields are up there to make sure people vanish -completely- from any kind of magical influences. The fact that Seras not only knew where Elizabeth was, but knew what was going on, could 'hear' an order to stop from Elizabeth, and then *Reply Telepathically* "I don't know how to kill myself, and I won't do it either" when Elizabeth was asked...
Chandler should be shitting his britches right now. Whatever arcane magic set up the Master/Vampire connection is powerful enough to get through what are probably the strongest shields OIS can get up, as well as so subtle that OIS had no clue it was there. The 'reverse taint' spell was terrifying enough, now you see what it's to protect against!
Sidenote: There's a old joke amongst the Arcane Practitioners I know: "No matter how powerful the shield, cats and kids can walk right through it." Add that to the puns on Seras's nickname.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
I'm jsut wodnering what role teh Hellsing library will play... just the hitns from the journal make me picture all sorts of reasons various cults and factions would wnat to find, cliam, or destroy it for themselves... I wish I knew mroe about Cthulu tech so I could make predictions how the factions might react to the idea of a perfect copy of the NEcronmican without sanity destroying additions... to say of other reasons (And if the destruciton of Rome mentioned in passing was for the mystical knowledge they horded... than what might these groups do to try and deny the knowledge of the Hellsing family?)
I'm trying (and failing) to remember if Seras actually got in a sip from any of the Millenium faction. I mean feasting on Pip (with consent no less) yanked her straight up to Alucard's fully sealed level. Or at least, if you consider how weak she was prior to that - which is to say, pathetic for a true vampire. And she got her shadow/blood arm ability as well. Then to top that off, Hirano stated, and I quote "There is a speed of light, and there is also a speed of dark. Seras can fly and move at the latter", unquote (From Sakuracon '06. He's hysterical in person. Yes, I met him & got a lithograph. *preens for 2 seconds, then get back to the review*). And all that from drinking on Pip as he died.
I honestly can't remember if she drank anything from Heinze before giving her the mother of all facial friction burns, and I'm fairly certain she didn't nip the Captain (damn shame there). But were there any other members that she might have gotten a snack in from? Because even the late 'game' ones had some fairly unique powers/abilities that Seras would have gained herself.
Of course that and if she ever gets to go to Restriction Arts Zero, we get to see the Bloody Tides stunt again.....
Macross Daedalus Attack: Because nothing says "Frak You" like punching them in the face with an aircraft carrier.
Macross Frontier Version: Unless you use 2 aircraft carriers. ☟ Named after a g/f! Sheesh, stop asking. ☟
barricade wrote:I honestly can't remember if she drank anything from Heinze before giving her the mother of all facial friction burns, and I'm fairly certain she didn't nip the Captain (damn shame there). But were there any other members that she might have gotten a snack in from? Because even the late 'game' ones had some fairly unique powers/abilities that Seras would have gained herself.
IIRC, she specifically stated she wouldn't drink a single drop of Heinze's blood, that she'd just kill her and be done with it.
Seras sat atop her coffin outside the manor bounds, waiting for pick up by her master’s new masters. She really wished that she could have just let poor Ellie just wait out the sweep of the mansion, but the girl needed medical attention Seras couldn’t provide and she had needed it immediately. She had a number of open wounds likely to suffer from infection if not treated, so Seras had foisted her upon the military in the hopes they wouldn’t just kill her.
Fortunately it seemed to have all turned out for the best. Or at the very least Seras would be put into a position where she was inside a facility rather than outside and thus could get into close quarters combat with humans rather than giant robots if it came down to it. Those things hurt like a bitch and most of the newly gathered souls of the Dhohanoids had been hurled screaming into the abyss beyond life to fuel her regeneration. The others were now suitably cowed.
Seras wondered at what to do with some of the information gathered from the souls of those she had slain. Chrysalis was apparently up to the same sort of thing Millennium had been, only a thousand times larger and with far better PR. Exposing them probably wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do, especially if she didn’t want to trigger an internal war on top of the external ones.
Seras watched impassively as a number of what looked like helicopter gunships sans rotor blades floated into view, training large looking guns upon her. A larger floating ship opened up doors along its bulbous sides and men in form concealing combat armour descended on rappelling lines. Seras just smiled at it all, remembering fondly her days in Hellsing and the crack troops available to them.
The heavily armed troops surrounded her in a crescent, pointing very large calibre weapons at her face while their breath hissed out through filtering masks. Seras just grinned at them, disconcertingly. Finally one of them said, “Wipe that grin off your face, thing.”
Seras blinked, in the process closing her third eye and thus causing her eyes to shift from glowing red to the pale blue of her human days, which clearly freaked the soldiers out. It also revealed two who had previously been invisible to her senses, something that caused her to raise a curious eyebrow at them. This sudden notice of their presence equally spooked those two.
“More comfortable?” Seras asked cheekily.
The commander moved in to smash her in the face with the butt of his rifle, something Seras didn’t dodge, but neither did she move with the attack, causing the butt to shatter against her face like it had been hit against a concrete wall.
“Please now gentlemen, there’s no need for violence and the wasting of perfectly good equipment,” Seras chided like a schoolmarm scolding rambunctious ten year olds.
“We’re going to need bigger guns here,” one of the men sub-vocalized, probably thinking Seras couldn’t detect that.
Instead, Seras just grinned and said, “I have a bigger gun if you want it.” She then hopped off her coffin, causing the soldiers to recoil from her and the gunships to flutter uncertainly. Before she could get out her party favour an imposing man walked into the scene and said, “Quit it all of you! You! Thing! Your master’s continued health depends upon your cooperation.”
Pausing in her task, Seras looked at the man and despite the identity concealing nature of his armour she tilted her head to the side and said, “Chandler, I see.”
“Parlour tricks will get you no where,” Chandler replied irritably.
“No, but getting you to bite your tongue will,” Seras replied before she hefted up her coffin and nodded towards the transport how hovering above the ground. “There?”
“We would prefer you not accompany us like that,” Chandler replied, his posture looking distinctly uncomfortable about the way she was carrying such a large and heavy object so easily.
Her feet lifting off the ground, Seras floated towards him, the screen of soldiers nervously moving with her. She grinned down at Chandler, or at least where she was fairly certain he was, her eyes having resumed their red glow as she used more of her power to achieve flight and thus losing track of him through whatever means fouled her third eye, before she asked, “Would you prefer I accompany you in this manner?”
“We have transport arranged for you,” Chandler replied, feeling distinctly out of his depths on this one. Behind him a slaved cargo drone featuring a massive number of wards landed and opened up its belly hold.
The grin not disappearing from her face, Seras settled down onto the ground and resumed her human eyes, noting several more soldiers lose their invisibility to her third eye. Definitely something to file away for later. She then walked over to the transport and settled in, sitting daintily on her coffin.
She could feel the static crackle of the wards about her, slowly crumbling next to her presence. These were anti-supernatural wards, but they weren’t directly keyed to vampires, who were always a little tricky due to the partially human nature of vampires, and as such her mere presence, slightly out of tune with the energies they were used to handling, was corroding them, degrading them.
Settling in, Seras watched as the doors sealed about her and waved to the cameras and other instruments arrayed about her, watching her, observing her, trying to learn what she was. She could feel their fear, their hatred, but she just grinned at them, seemingly carefree and excessively happy. Inside she was quietly picking her mind against the incredible array of science and magic set around her. Such curious things they were.
While not what she would call a mage, she had eaten more than a few people with knowledge of the arcane and picked up a few things between the time of her death and the time of her sealing. She could feel the way the wards interacted with her nature, could feel how they were supposed to siphon away energy from higher planes while not affecting the lower ones. Against creatures that projected down from higher realities, they would be quite effective. But Seras grew up across dimensions, from lower to higher, and she was grounded at the end the wards weren’t supposed to affect.
Curious. Most curious. To Seras that meant that they hadn’t dealt with anything mystically oriented like her before, and thus their entire mystical background was lacking a gigantic chunk of knowledge. It was like trying to do organic chemistry without knowing about chirality.
The metaphor struck her with a thought that made her giggle and she asked one of the cameras, “I know you think me sinister, but have you considered that you might be holding the mirror wrong and I am in fact just dextrous?” To add to her comment she extracted a one pound coin from seemingly thin air and played a few sleight of hand tricks with it before making it disappear again.
She spent the rest of the trip in silence, figuring out how she was going to deal with all of this. The first priority was to keep her master safe. The second was keep herself safe so she could continue to accomplish priority one. The third was to keep humanity safe. Considering that last one, she was really wishing she could trade the situation for something more manageable. Like say if the entire Third Reich were turned into vampires and she had to battle some sort of undead cyborg Hitler armed with an excessive number of high calibre weapons. Yeah, that would probably be a more reasonable request of her.
Seras was having a lovely argument with Pip over whether or not that had already been done when the transport settled down onto the ground and the bay doors swung open to reveal an excessive number of giant robots pointing very large guns at her. Picking up her coffin as daintily as possible, Seras put on her best Southern Belle accent, aided by actually having eaten a woman like that before, and said, “Oh well now, you all didn’t have to go and do all this for little old me.”
“Move slowly down the ramp, place your box on the ground on the yellow circle, then move to the red circle,” the irritated voice of Chandler announced over an intercom. Seras had the feeling he was the sort of man who instead of showing his fear got increasingly irate. Somewhat useful of a trait, unless of course you happened to be the walking collective nightmare of an entire species, in which case it got annoying really quickly.
Walking down the ramp of the transport, Seras emerged into a colossal indoor hangar bay to discover that there were even bigger robots with even bigger guns surrounding the transport, tracking her. Mostly track her actually, because several of them seemed to have a case of the jitters. Seras actually paused and looked at those ones, her nostrils flaring as she tried to scent something out. Something that smelled good, like an entire swimming pool full of fresh virgin blood.
The jittering robots suddenly as one turned to run, the sort of motions that Seras knew instinctively, but they all quickly ceased moving all together, except for some rather organic sounding snorts and growls that sounded more fearful than angry. Seras considered all of this for a few moments before shrugging and continuing on her way. She felt it was just lucky nothing had decided to shoot at her during that little interlude.
“What did you do to those Engels?” Chandler asked from his hidden bunker.
“I don’t know, but blind panic and fear seems like the sort of instinctive response most animals usually have towards me, so maybe it’s related,” Seras answered, equally bemused by the subject as everyone else.
“That seems unlikely,” Chandler seethed. “Need I remind you of the consequences of your refusal to comply?”
“You kill Ellie and thus set me free to go upon a roaring rampage of revenge, drawing needed resources away from the war effort to contain me, thus dooming humanity to a variety of unpleasant fates, death being perhaps the most preferable of the bad ends?” Seras asked sweetly.
“You’re surrounded by enough firepower to give a frigate a hard time, I think you overestimate your abilities,” Chandler seethed.
Setting down her coffin on the yellow circle, Seras walked over to the red circle and asked cheerily, “Would you take me more or less seriously if I ripped off my own head and used it as a sock puppet?”
There was a long pause before Chandler said in the sort of calm voice that indicated he was supremely furious, and thus for him probably pants wetting scared, but controlling it, “Such vulgar demonstrations are unnecessary at this time.”
Seras pouted before she said, “A pity. I’ve been working on my act.”
“Your lack of cooperation is being noted,” Chandler growled.
Waving her hands down at the red circle, Seras asked irritably, “I’m standing on the circle, am I not? What more do you want?”
“How about you shut up?” Chandler barked, the sound magnified by the artificial source and the voluminous hangar bay.
“You know, it’s very rude to brute force open other people’s mystical wards to rifle through their thoughts, so while I am psychic it’s not like I could have known that without you telling me. How rude!” Seras complained, crossing her arms under her ample bosoms and sticking up her nose and chin while frowning.
“Are you always this fucking annoying?” Chandler demanded.
“Only when dealing with assholes. By the way, I don’t have to be psychic to know that you probably want to know what I did with the Hellsing occult library that Ellie probably mentioned, so can we get those sorts of questions out of the way and proceed with the futile poking and prodding?” Seras announced.
Chandler grumbled before he said, “We figured it might have been you who recently looted the tombs. We suspect there were some very dangerous books in that collection. What did you do with them?”
“I hid them in the same place as the anchors for my control spells,” Seras replied. She then added on, “Also, by your standards all two hundred of them would be pretty dangerous.”
“Two… hundred?” Chandler asked incredulously.
“Well, you’ve got the basics like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, the Book of Five Shadows, Cultes de Goules, De Vermiis Mysteriis, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, Unausprechlichen Kulten, Upon the Edges of Eternity, Encarmine Lusts, Untangling Infinity, Principia Sortis, the Horrible Undead, a Comprehensive Guide to the Anatomy and Principles of Killing the Monstrous and Demonic, and of course the Queen’s Approved Guide to Basic Sorcery. Then you get the more advanced books and the commentaries… it all adds up pretty quickly,” Seras listed off, quietly manifesting extra fingers to count up to fourteen before making them disappear again to fold her fingers together into a contemplative posture.
Chandler listened quietly from his bunker before he shouted out, “Half of what you just listed are illegal and the other half sound illegal even if not on the records!”
“Bet you want to get your hands on the Comprehensive Guide though,” Seras replied cheekily.
“Human knowledge has moved on since your day, we don’t need those sorts of things these days,” Chandler scoffed.
“Then how come you don’t have dedicated anti-vampire wards and are wondering how the hell I can smash all of your stuff so easily?” Seras asked sweetly.
Chandler remained quiet while Seras watched an unmanned forklift carrying what looked like a rather unpleasant box covered in arcane script rolled up to her. Another forklift rolled up to her coffin as well. Shaking her head, Seras said, “You know, I am willing to cooperate, all of this is really unnecessary.”
“So you say. Get in the box,” Chandler replied.
Rolling her eyes, Seras complied.
---
These expository chapters are slow and awkward, and my heart isn't really into them, but I think everyone is hanging around for what comes after, namely Seras getting into brawls with mecha and into situations that make even her go "Oh crap."
I love learning. Teach me. I will listen. You know, if Christian dogma included a ten-foot tall Jesus walking around in battle armor and smashing retarded cultists with a gaint mace, I might just convert - Noble Ire on Jesus smashing Scientologists
Well I, for one, was amused. Any chapter containing a phrase like "get in the box" is probably a good chapter.
Any job worth doing with a laser is worth doing with many, many lasers. -Khrima
There's just no arguing with some people once they've made their minds up about something, and I accept that. That's why I kill them. -Othar Avatar credit
Actually, I'm enjoying seeing Chandler piss his pants. Nothing quite like a person who 'knows his stuff' finding out he's missed a chunk.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
LadyTevar wrote:Actually, I'm enjoying seeing Chandler piss his pants. Nothing quite like a person who 'knows his stuff' finding out he's missed a chunk.
I prefer the plotter finding his entire plan going under from something that they forgot or couldn't account for, but that's personal taste.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Nothing quite like a person who 'knows his stuff' finding out he's missed a chunk.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)