The Open Door (megacrossover)

holyknight · Post by **holyknight** » 2009-02-13 02:05pm

Academia Nut wrote:I'm writing the latest chapter, and I'm going to admit that if I could I would eliminate the Star Gate, Nanoha, and Buffy elements of the earlier story as they no longer really work with what I want to do, but I've constructed them as being fairly integral so I will have to make do I suppose.

Who knows? as you have well described, Tzintchi has often left things seemingly forgotten, only to have them reappear from nowhere, and with all the subtlety of a car-bomb on the middle of a St Patrick's Day procession.....and making ask yourself, if he isn't mind-fucking you again, its part of his grand design, or he's doing it just for the LULZ......While the BTVS/Nanoha/SG elements are now on the backburner, sooner or later they will emerge as the parts of the puzzle do re-arrange to let them join the image on our vision.

Jaeger · Post by **Jaeger** » 2009-02-13 06:32pm

How does Vita feel about her former collegues?

To combat the Necrontyr mass-teleportation, its possible that neoChaos could equip a heavy-carrier’s main cargo hold with a gate/portal for smaller vessels to travel through, sort of like the jovian Tulip ships from “Martian Successor Nadesico.” A single large ship could allow an entire fleet spring up out of nowhere and evacuate just as quickly using a variant of SG1's Stargate technology. Traveling through webways and the Warp Immaterium isn’t always available, so it’s useful to have two or three back-up contingencies just in case.

Does the Stiletto have enough interior space to house an Eva unit and its docking throne? Can an Eva and it’s pilot commune with the daemon bound within the Stiletto’s structure to help it learn and grow?

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2009-02-14 02:54am

Due to the sheer amount of spoilers, well, the text box below are fairly obvious.

To try for a summary:

Nanoha -Spoiler

Fate - Spoiler

Hayate - Spoiler

Yuuno - Spoiler

Arf - Spoiler

Vita - Spoiler

Signum - Spoiler

Chrono - Spoiler

Lindy - Spoiler

Asura - Spoiler

Subaru - Spoiler

Teana - Spoiler

Everyone else is pretty much filler or a bad-guy, or a 'seems to be an evil guy/gal, but secretly once you find out their hidden history, are actually tragic villains' type bleh.

Aranfan · Post by **Aranfan** » 2009-02-14 08:49am

I think it's explicitly mentioned that the only reason the Wolkenritter weren't killing people in season 2 was because they knew it would piss off Hayate. And if Nanoha had been older she would have been permanently unable to use magic ever again after what Shamal did to her.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2009-02-14 04:41pm

Chapter Sixty-nine: Innocence Proves Nothing

Well, the Judge was current scattered about in pieces and on fire, so that plan hadn’t exactly worked out very well and Spike was trying his damnedest to get out of the line of fire as the warehouse he had turned into his little lair was raked with gunfire. Now, normally vampires scoffed at gunfire, but that was when they were getting shot at with handguns firing 9mms or .45s, not an M2 machine gun firing .50 BMG rounds capable of decapitation or removing a vampire’s heart.

Of course there was also the mix of tracer rounds that caused any vampire hit by one to go up like a torch, one of the reasons why the Judge was currently burning. Bastard couldn’t be taken down by any forged weapon, but unfortunately people hadn’t been forging weapons for the past couple of centuries! The berk went down like a chump in the opening salvo when that dork who palled around with the Slayer had shown up with that gun and somehow managed to fire it from the hip while standing without getting knocked on his arse.

Well Spike had enough of this town if this was the way things escalated these days. He and Drusilla were getting out-

The impact that severed his spine did not actually hurt all that much as the nerves were completely severed by the bullet as it passed through him, shattering bone and blowing out a good chunk of his intestinal track as the large bullet expanded as it travelled through him.

Now face down on the concrete with his whole world falling apart around him, Spike muttered “Oh bugger.”

He then began to crawl.

Drusilla was screaming, screaming in her deranged way that, “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go kitten!”

Cackling with the psychotic rush, Xander shouted out over the roar of the gun, “Cry some more bitch!” before he perforated the insane vampire, dusting her as one of the huge bullets took her head off above her jaw.

They, well Super Ninja Witch Willow, had infiltrated the Sunnydale Armoury and made off with an excellent collection of heavy weaponry. Now, attacking the vampire stronghold in the middle of the day, they had smashed in a window to let in plenty of light and then had begun the extermination.

The memories of the Imperium would not allow them to continue the way they were. When the forces of darkness there struck, and they struck on levels incomprehensible to the sensibilities of the Scoobies before Halloween, the Imperium did not go “Oh, score one for the bad guys” and let it be. No, they struck back. They got bigger guns, they raised armies, and they paid back butchery and brutality in kind.

When Angel’s transformation into Angelus had become apparent, Buffy had not wallowed in self pity or waffled on what needed to be done. No, she had finally given in to the part of her left behind by the Inquisitor, the part of her that said that it was not enough to fight the forces of darkness when she encountered them. No, she had to hunt them back to their holes and destroy them utterly in the process, root out the rot so that it could never again take hold.

When anything that wasn’t being shot up stopped moving, Xander begrudgingly released the trigger to the gun. Growling, he tried to get the images of the final fight with Horus out of his head, to resist the urge to jam his bolt pistol into a crack in the armour and pump round after round into the traitor.

Buffy smirked as silence settled and said, “Thus begins operation Dies Incendia.”

The Mayor sat in his chair and glowered down at his town, watching the smoke rise from the cemeteries, watching the Worst Case Scenario unfold. Amongst the intelligent members of the supernatural, there was an unspoken fear over the past hundred of what would happen if they humans ever finally got pissed off. They prey had fangs now, and anything that couldn’t shrug off nuclear weapons was vulnerable, and if it came down to it, the demons would horrifically lose a war of attrition unless they had extra dimensional reinforcements.

In short, unless one wanted to trigger an apocalypse, then a war with humanity would inevitably be lost. So far the humans who knew about the supernatural had kept their mouths shut partial because they felt they wouldn’t be believed, partially because they were afraid of pushing groups towards seeking the apocalypse option.

Unfortunately when it seemed that every other week some idiot was trying to cause an apocalypse anyway it made keeping trigger happy demon hunters in line. Everything had gone wrong since Halloween. Mayor Wilkins had back up plans to all of things that had been wrecked so far, but part of his deal had been to make Sunnydale a haven for demons and vampires. With every crypt and hiding hole in town having just received an arson make-over meeting his obligations was going to be a touch difficult now.

Catching those who had done it was going to be problematic as well. He suspected the Slayer and her friends, but they had been very careful to keep their activities off the streets. If he called in “official” outside help then he risked bringing in competent people who could potentially bust open this whole secret conflict and bring light of the things that go bump in the dark to those armed with tanks and napalm. And so far “unofficial” channels had been proving remarkably incapable of dealing with the Slayer, even before she had decided that she liked gasoline and bullets.

Of course, intentionally staffing the local police with the biggest idiots and sycophantic patsies he could find meant that he couldn’t rely on them. Oh well, he’d picked them, so he’d surrendered his right to complain about being surrounded by morons.

Oh, this was going to be troublesome indeed.

Giles arrived at the library to discover his students sitting with a map of Sunnydale in front of them, every cemetery and a few other places all circled in red, and several of them crossed out with red Xs. They did not have the soot smudges or the scent of smoke on their clothing, but the implications were quite clear.

Giles was silent for a moment before he stated, “You are responsible for the current panic in the streets from the string of arson?”

No one said a word, but it was confirmation enough.

Giles exploded. “Damn it! You can’t do this! Did you even think of the consequences?”

His uncharacteristic swearing caught the group off guard for a moment before Buffy coldly glared at Giles and replied, “Yes. Yes we did. We also considered the consequences of stealing from the US Army and the use of guns. We’re tired of playing defence, of letting the bad guys slink back to their lairs so they can lick their wounds, recover, and then kill more people.”

“And getting yourselves arrested is going to solve all of that?” Giles demanded furiously.

Slamming her hand down on the table with her full Slayer strength, causing the wood to splinter, Buffy retaliated, “Giles! You always wanted me to do more research, but did you think I wouldn’t notice all the stuff on the life expectancy of Slayers? I just turned seventeen Giles, and according to the records, I’m already living on borrow time! The Watchers treat the Slayers like weapons, so I’m going to give them a fucking weapon! I’m angry Giles, angry at this world that takes our hopes and dreams and smashes them on the fucking ground and grinds our hearts into the dirt.”

Xander then very quietly turned to Giles, his eyes sunken in to his skull and his face pale from the strain of the powers within his body. The two of them shared a look before Giles looked away in shame.

“Giles, I’m going to die. My body is burning up with what’s been put in it, and my mind is slowly breaking up under the strain. All I have is knowledge of war and fighting and the strength to back it up. All I can do is to die swinging, trying to keep this sort of thing from happening to others,” Xander said pleadingly.

Giles sunk down into a chair, despairing at what this world had done to these children, suddenly feeling so very old. But then again, they were all older still, weren’t they? They had decades, even centuries of memories crammed into their heads, lifetimes of war and brutality. They truly did look tired; tired of the fight and struggle, tired of letting evil happen and not having a good response.

Sighing, Giles said, “Okay, I can accept that we might need a change in tactics, but we need to go about this properly…”

Spitting up muck better left unconsidered, Spike managed to haul himself out of the reservoir around the Sunnydale waste treatment plant. He was still paralyzed below the waist and in terrible condition, but his head and heart were still intact, so if he could crawl into some shade before catching a tan, he would eventually be back in fighting trim.

While most vampires in Sunnydale used the sewers for movement, that was mostly the storm drain system and other large, spacious, mobile pipes that had a minimum of waste in them. Spike on the other hand had decided to make sure that his lair had other means of escape. Hauling himself out of that hellish battlefield and into a running sewer had taken everything in him, but at least he wasn’t dust like everyone else.

Still, he would avoid the exact details of his escape in any theoretical memoirs he might write. No need for the full details to be known by the next generation of blood suckers.

Well… he’d seen Dru go down -damn the Slayer and her friends!- but he’d lost track of the hair gel ponce who had brought all of that down on them. He hoped the bastard was dust in the wind along with everyone else now.

Damn Slayer! She and her friends had been acting weird for months now, but this was a bit much!

Crawling along hand over hand into a nice bit of shelter in the form of an unlocked storage shed, Spike collapsed and relaxed, letting his undead flesh begin the glacially slow process of regenerating the massive amount of damage he had suffered while his mind began the process of thinking about how he was going to get his revenge for this.

This was going to take a special amount of effort to get just right.

Oz sat quietly beneath the light of the moon. It would be full in two days and for some strange reason over the past few days he had been feeling a strange magnetic pull to the celestial body. He idly scratched at the bandages that swathed the mark where his cousin had bit him. Crazy kid, his parents really should have learned to control him better.

Perhaps because of his more nocturnal activities he had taken up recently, he found that he could not get to sleep this night, despite the fact that they had nothing scheduled for the evening. No, he felt a sort of electric tingle in the air. Pacing back and forth, he eventually just quietly slipped out of the house, drawn by something he could not comprehend.

There was definitely something in the air, for he could hear the barking of dogs all over the town as they were agitated by the coming of something that tickled at their canine sensibilities. Something within Oz made him want to scream at the near full moon, to howl along with the symphony of voices.

Before he knew it, Oz was rushing along, headed for the woods outside town, his body hunched over and his arms twitching almost as if he wanted to run along on all fours. Soon a trickle of creatures joined him. First it was just stray and escaped dogs, but soon other creatures like coyotes had joined in. There were dozens of canids all around Oz, and he growled at them, telling them to stay in line.

A part of Oz felt the same as he had during Halloween, trapped within his own body while something else took him over, but another part felt wild and free, running with a pack.

His senses alight in ways he had never before experienced Oz bayed triumphantly as the pack arrived at a large cave in the middle of the wooded region around Sunnydale. He could smell all the animals around him, picking out each individual scent marking each member. They howled and yipped in frantic excitation. Drool dribbling down his face, Oz snapped at them all, calling for quiet as a high pitched hum he had barely been aware of hearing began to become unbearable.

Eyes alight with fire, he watched as strange, static charged mist began to leak from the mouth of the cave. For several tense moments nothing happened, but then sparks were seen dancing across the floor of the interior. Padding out carefully, iron hard claws scraping away rock in sprays of orange fire, Freki emerged into view.

The size of a rhino, the ancient Fenrisian Wolf had lived for millennia, hardened by constant battle and exposure to the Warp. His hide bullet-proof and his jaws capable of crushing a man in full power armour, he could take on a main battle tank and have a good chance of winning.

All those who had gathered prostrated themselves before the titanic wolf even as the enormous creature sat down next to the entrance, a sentinel waiting for his master while his brother Geri emerged and flanked the opposite side.

For a span of heartbeats all was still and then he arrived. Over ten feet tall, the giant known as Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, set foot on a Earth, if not his Earth, for the first time in ten thousand years. While he did not possess the flashier abilities, he was a massively powerful psychic to match his peerless skill at arms. He had lost his original equipment so long ago, but the powered armour that could assist him no longer existed, and in his hands and with his mind even a rock would be a deadly weapon capable of sundering any armour, while bolter rounds would shatter against his skin. But he did not wield a rock but a giant two handed sword that appeared to have been originally designed as a helicopter blade.

Inhaling deeply, Leman Russ looked down over the congregation that had assembled for his arrival, drawn by the massive psychic disturbance he had created blazing a trail to this point. Quirking an eyebrow upward, he considered Oz and asked, “And what are you doing here?”

---

I'm going to admit, I'm not particularly digging this chapter, but I needed to touch on it for plot purposes.

Jonen C · Post by **Jonen C** » 2009-02-14 05:59pm

In relation to my comment on SB:
Woof, woof, woof!

WillowBee · Post by **WillowBee** » 2009-02-14 07:32pm

What aren’t you liking? It seems up to your usual high standards of excellence. Point out what you ain’t digging so we can help out.

As the vessel of the Slayer essence, would Leman Russ mistake Buffy Summers for a daemonhost? If Buffy were “purified,” would this prevent any future Slayers from awakening?

Setesh · Post by **Setesh** » 2009-02-14 10:17pm

WillowBee wrote:What aren’t you liking? It seems up to your usual high standards of excellence. Point out what you ain’t digging so we can help out.

As the vessel of the Slayer essence, would Leman Russ mistake Buffy Summers for a daemonhost? If Buffy were “purified,” would this prevent any future Slayers from awakening?

No, the 'Halloween Event' happened after Buffy had already died once, Kendra carries the current slayer line, until she dies and passes it on to Faith. Since no slayer was apparently awakened by Buffy's second death it can be surmised she is now outside the normal slayer line.

Edit: Ironic that I know this when I didn't even watch Buffy

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2009-02-15 02:58am

And thus the internet claims yet another victim.
Alas poor Setesh, I knew him well.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2009-02-15 03:18am

I suppose you could say that I was worried about rushing certain developments, and the fact that I did this chapter because I felt obliged to in order to obey my own "rules". The operations to the target universe are going to begin, which means that despite differences in temporal velocity (aka letting things move at the speed of plot) time has to advance in the Buffyverse. So my heart wasn't really in this chapter.

Oh well, I'm still divided between showing off the Jackknife or showing why that Chaos cruiser was stolen.

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2009-02-15 07:35am

I'd say flip a coin if it's the easiest way to pick.
I'm however going to wait here for the inevitable return of the TSAB, and the results....err...more like 'fallout', when the Wolkenritter & Hayate hear about Vita. Nothing quite like having a witch who's almost on par with a Greater Daemonhost, and her 3 guardians (somewhere between a Greater & Lesser Daemonhost in power) who are hell-bent for election on getting their 4th member back. Oh and Fate's little mental breakdown too. I suspect Nanoha will have to unleash Vivio on her. Much moe-moe (god help us all) psycho-therapy ensues.

One thing I would like to know is what happened to some of the other Bridge crew from NERV. IIRC Shinji mentioned, when carrying Misato's body around psychically, that certain members of the bridge crew were 'thanked' by him. Ritsuko & Fuyutsuki are likely 'smeared', and were 100% absorbed by the birth of the gods, but I don't think the Children were going to completely get rid of all the NERV personnel who actually had gone out of their way to help.

von Neufeld · Post by **von Neufeld** » 2009-02-15 10:30am

Good update, it's nice to see some action in Sunnydale again. I see nothing wrong with the chapter.

Valint · Post by **Valint** » 2009-02-15 10:55am

Thanks for the summary.

What is the basic setting? When I see short descriptions like "Third grader becomes a magical girl, gets an animal companion and goes in search of magical crystals", that leads me to think of something Sailor Moon-esque, so I'm not sure where the spaceships and admirals come in.

EarthScorpion · Post by **EarthScorpion** » 2009-02-15 11:29am

Valint wrote:Thanks for the summary.

What is the basic setting? When I see short descriptions like "Third grader becomes a magical girl, gets an animal companion and goes in search of magical crystals", that leads me to think of something Sailor Moon-esque, so I'm not sure where the spaceships and admirals come in.

I've just seen the first two series really recently (It's on youtube), and I can tell you that the name is a real misnomer.

It's far more like "Sufficiently Advanced Technology Girl Nanoha" (and I think that would make a much better title). Really, the magic is just another science, and there is no random outbreak into song.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2009-02-15 12:32pm

Basically, the first series was a massive bait and switch on the part of the producers against the executives/fanboys. They started it off as a basic magical girl show: fight the monster of the week, collect the MacGuffins. Then around the third or fourth episode they introduced her rival by having her blow up a kitten. Then we learn about said rival's unfortunate family life in a rather graphic (for the genre) torture scene. Then the local equivalent of the Time Lords/Federation show up because the fighting between the two of them is threatening the space-time continuum. Eventually the show hits the point where it goes well with music from Berserk.

Yes

Hmmm... as for survivors from the bridge crew... hmm... well, the NERV soldiers got a resort on Australia, so I see no reason some of the other survivors couldn't have joined them.

Aranfan · Post by **Aranfan** » 2009-02-15 12:59pm

I thought the kitten incident was the second time Fate showed up?

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2009-02-15 04:58pm

Valint wrote:Thanks for the summary.

What is the basic setting? When I see short descriptions like "Third grader becomes a magical girl, gets an animal companion and goes in search of magical crystals", that leads me to think of something Sailor Moon-esque, so I'm not sure where the spaceships and admirals come in.

Nanoha by the end of the series is pretty much throwing around pre-Vegeta levels od DBZ firepower, and is not exactly afraid to do so. There's a rather famous one where enemy X is several hundred meters away, behind LOTS of armored bulkheads/doors, and plenty of enemies. Nanoha effectively just asks 'where's the control room'. Upon being told, levels her staff 'Raising Heart' (sounds more like 'Raging Heart') and produces to fire a truly massive particle beam clean through everything all at once, including all the cannon fodder enemies, to get at the real boss.

Or to put it another way, at the end of Nanoha's first season, both NINE year olds are throwing around firepower that final season Sailor Moon isn't even capable of unless you're Sailor Saturn (aka: "Death Star in a Mini-Skirt'). And even Saturn can only match what Hayate can do if she's allowed to go all out.

Jaeger · Post by **Jaeger** » 2009-02-15 08:00pm

Academia Nut wrote:Hmmm... as for survivors from the bridge crew... hmm... well, the NERV soldiers got a resort on Australia, so I see no reason some of the other survivors couldn't have joined them.

Are you talking about the original NERV Bridge Bunnies like Maya Ibuki? If so, to keep Maya cute and huggable after +50 years, I hope she got a prosthetic body like Motoko Kusanagi from "Ghost in the Shell."

Off topic: Well connected people in neoChaos might waste valuable resources in order to maintain cybernetic bodies, either due to vanity, a fear of old age, or trying to avoid the wrath of the Gods in the Afterlife, when the money could've been used in urban renewal, social programs, charity, etc. As such, neoChaos should have some means to control people who can't manage their wealth responsibly or if their actions are having a negative impact on other members of society.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2009-02-15 08:10pm

Well, the economy is vaguely touched upon in that is a command economy for a lot of things, but there is some leeway in various areas and they do have problems with crime still, so the wealthiest people would be those close to the gods or criminal overlords. The only problem for the overlords is that while it is a benevolent dictatorship (for certain values of benevolent) and the Chaos gods have the lives of their worshippers in their best interests, they can still be tyrannical whenever they want and drop down on anyone irritating them like a sack of anvils. It's what the assassins were doing as part of their training. Thus the criminal underworld is no where near as powerful or developed as say the Russian mafia. Still, they are not quite a post scarcity civilization yet, and there is still disparity and inequity, its just not as bad as in the past as advanced technology and precognition have made a lot of the problems associated with 20th century command economies such as inflexibility to changing conditions not a problem. There are other problems, notably laziness in such conditions, but the gods have worked out certain motivating factors and are working on more permanent solutions. It's not exactly a paragon of efficiency, but for a world recovering from war and undergoing a massive military build-up, it works.

Jaeger · Post by **Jaeger** » 2009-02-16 06:06pm

Okay, thanks for explaining that to me.

As part of their infrastructure build-up, how is colonization going? Having most of their non-military/civilian population on a single planetary body is dangerous, much like putting all your eggs in one basket. For space station habitats, there are places of gravitational neutrality known as Lagrange Points analogous to a Geostationary Orbit.

However, given the problems with time dilation and different dimensions having their own set of physical laws, how would colonies counteract the dangers of genetic drift? You clearly stated that humans wouldn’t interbreed with other species, in part to ensure that Gene Seeds remain usable for their Marines, but multi-generational isolation could result in numerous subraces that’d prove to be destabilizing to humanity’s gene pool.

A while back, someone mentioned Iain Bank’s “the Culture.” While completely incompatible with neoChaos, do any scientists of Chaos Undivided believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences thought? Given the wide-spread commonality of psychic awareness and the ability to perceive multiple states of time/space/reality, it’d be interesting what kind of artificial Language neoChaos would come up with that’d compliment their philosophy and outlook on life.

WillowBee · Post by **WillowBee** » 2009-02-16 06:12pm

Asteroid mining was briefly mentionedd, but it was boring and didn't having anything to do with story plot, so it was quickly ignored in favor of more entertaining ventures.

Losonti Tokash · Post by **Losonti Tokash** » 2009-02-16 11:05pm

I know I mentioned this to you earlier today, but I'm definitely pulling for a Leman Russ vs Glorificus fight.

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2009-02-17 01:50am

Losonti Tokash wrote:I know I mentioned this to you earlier today, but I'm definitely pulling for a Leman Russ vs Glorificus fight.

I'll bring the BBQ & chips, you bring the beer.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2009-02-17 04:32am

I chose to show what New Chaos did with their captured cruiser.

---

Chapter Seventy: Tall Tales

Outside the city bustled like a kicked over insect nest as people tried to go about their lives while ignoring the looming threat of war, but inside it was quiet and dark, the low lighting obscured by smoke from various burning narcotics. While it had a reputation for being a bit of a rough place that attracted the rowdy military boys on shore leave, it was actually a more sedate place where the less rambunctious NCOs and officers would go to forget about rank for a few hours without indulging in the wilder behaviour of their subordinates.

The place was an archetype, a pattern repeated subconsciously countless billions of times throughout the galaxy and, unbeknownst to even the more savvy travellers, across the greater cosmos as a whole. And central to this archetype was that one table, the place that was invitation only, and even an invite wouldn’t guarantee your stay, as the price of a seat was a story.

With thoughts turned to the morbid with the war raging on other worlds and in the void between the stars, somehow the subject of ghost stories had come up. Those gathered around the table had already progressed through the basic ones, of things seen in the shadows of hyperspace, of messages received from dead wingmen warning of impending doom, and other common tales.

Then, the musician, a comely young woman in the shadowy background seemed to pick up on the mood and shifted into something a touch stranger and more haunting. This caused one of the men at the table to put down his glass with an audible thump. Everyone looked at him and he said, “Now I have a tale for you.”

Human or near human, he had the broad, ever so slightly out of shape look that suggested a desk job but the hungry, ambitious glint of the eye that suggested that he was not the sort of man to be trifled with. In all likelihood he was an executive or commanding officer on a ship.

Running a finger around the edge of his glass, he said, “Now this happened… oh… I’d say about ten years ago. Back when we were still fighting the Imps, although by that stage things had mostly ground down to skirmishes and cleaning up the warlords and pirates. It was the latter that we were out to find, although they were really more of a minor criminal syndicate than ‘just’ pirates.”

Pausing for a second to take a sip of his drink, the man continued and said, “So for a couple of months the task group I’m part of has been tracking these pirates, driving them off of shipping when we can and slowly gathering up information. Finally, we’ve got enough that we think we can lay a trap for the bastards. So we’re lying in wait, half the task force escorting a group of freighters ‘loaded’ with expensive, military grade hyperdrive motivators, the sort of thing your average pirate in a rust bucket death trap would typically salivate over. The other half of us are hiding in the shadow of a gas giant, using its moons and magnetic field to screen us while stealth relays fed us information. Once the pirates attacked we were going to boost of out the grav well and make a quick jump to hand with both feet on them.”

“I’ve heard this one before,” one of the other members of the table said with a smirk.

“Shut up, and no you haven’t,” the storyteller replied. “This doesn’t one involve the pirates springing the trap on us only for something to intervene, no, this one gets weirder. Technically this story was classified for two years after the incident while the spooks worked on figuring out what happened.”

Pausing to collect his thoughts again, the man continued, “Anyway, we’re sitting there when you can see the comm. officer starting to get a little freaked out by something. Eventually he told the CO that he has picking up an anomalous transmission. Now, our CO, he was this leathery Calamari bastard, hardest fish this side of old Ackbar. So he takes a quick listen in on what’s freaking out our comm. boy and I swear to the Force he goes whiter than Hoth.”

One of the female members of the table, a Twi’lek commando, asked, “Is this…?”

“Yeah, this is about Killfrenzy,” the storyteller said with a nod, causing a small collection of whispers amongst the table before dying down to let the man finish.

“Now, I don’t know what you’ve all heard or not heard, but I was there, on the bridge when this happened. Something was broadcasting… I don’t know if they ever figured out how they were doing it, but somehow they used an entire gas giant as an antenna, broadcasting all over the system. I even heard the broadcast,” the man then paused to shudder and take a drink.

“I know who has heard that signal and who’s just heard the stories. The Killfrenzy broadcasts, they’re not some guy speaking or even a chant. No, those broadcasts are a song, a religious hymn out of the darkest recesses of time. Yeah, there is a voice that is saying ‘Kill frenzy’ over and over again, the words blended into one long madness mantra, but there’s more. The voice chanting it is guttural and oddly accented, like it doesn’t know Basic and just memorized those two words. And in the background there’s a… ‘doom choir’ I suppose you could call it, adding in strange lyrics in an unknown language and random bursts of psychotic, high pitched cackling, almost like children literally laughing to death. If you listen to it for more than a few seconds you start to feel your skin crawl,” the man said before shuddering once more in revulsion and finishing off his drink.

His audience now listening raptly, he said, “So we’ve got this radio signal coming from all around us chanting this psychotic message and we figure it’s some sort of trap so we bug out of there as quickly as we can. We never even see the pirates, and we suspect later that they got the kriff out of there when they heard that broadcast too.”

“Good story,” one of the members of the table said, before the storyteller held up a hand.

“I’m not done,” the man replied, earning raised eyebrows.

“Now, most of the Killfrenzy stories would end here, but a week later and we haven’t heard a peep from the pirates. Eventually one of our agents reports that their smaller bases have lost contact with their main base. So we take the whole task group out to that location, half expecting an ambush, only we find nothing. There’s a hollowed out asteroid that obviously used to be a base, but there’s nothing left there now. Nothing. Long range sensors track an object moving into the shadow of a desolate planet, and we only got a fuzzy blob of a signal off it before it vanished in a weird burst of energy. We didn’t even get a hyperspace tracking off of it, it just disappeared. We did however get a radio signal still bouncing around the system, this quiet, plaintive whistling song of a transmission. I think Killfrenzy found somewhere to satiate its urges,” the man explained.

The Twi’lek from before then spoke up slightly and said, “Uh… I actually might have a continuation of your story. This happened about… three or four years ago. We found a wreck in deep space. It was a wreck of a pirate up-gunned medium freighter floating in the debris cloud above the elliptic of a Mid Rim star system. No bodies, although it had been exposed to vacuum so some of the bloodstains were preserved. Really freaky boarding it though. When boarding abandoned ships, you get a feeling for which ones are going to be bad, and that one was the worst sort of feeling.”

Those gathered around the table all nodded knowingly. The best sorts of soldiers, and those were the ones with stories to tell, all had a set of instincts that told them when a mission didn’t feel right, when something was about to go wrong.

“We were all tense going in there. If we had a Jedi assigned to us I’m sure he would have been yammering on about the Dark Side, but I would have been agreeing whole heartedly. Something evil happened in that place. As I said, we found some bloodstains, but they were mostly just rust coloured patches here and there. Then again, there must have been a major massacre in there to even get that much blood to stay in those conditions. I hate to think what it might have looked like when it was still new,” she explained.

Pausing to remember the details more clearly, she then said, “I any case, we eventually reach the bridge and try to power the wreck up. No good there though, not because its power systems are busted up, but because the fuel tanks were empty. Nothing particularly strange there, but by this point everything was making us jumpy. So we get portable generators hooked up and start poking around.

“Ten minutes in, we’re all more stressed than matter at the heart of a neutron star, and our slicer just loses it. Poor bastard does a triple take before he just sort of curls up. It turns out the chronometer logs stopped recording some time about a thousand years from now when the last of the fuel decayed away in the tanks. Radio-isotope data pegged the ship as being older than the Great Sith War, while the ship’s design is from the Clone Wars. Now, we’ve found ships abandoned since the Great Hyperspace War in the lightless parts of space far from stars, and we’ve found ships displaced in time due to faulty relativistic shielding, but never anything that looks like it went back in time,” the Twi’lek woman explained.

“Now, the brass declared that it was just a malfunctioning wreck, but we were drawn to the area in the first place and we deployed actual boarder teams first instead of a salvage team because we detected a strange radio transmission from that area and then picked up the metal of the hull. We assumed it was a trap, but… nothing… just a weird, time lost, impossible ship,” the Twi’lek explained, twitching her lekku in agitation at the memories.

Finally a rough looking human male with the sort of scarring that implied seeing recent ground action against the Yuuzhan Vong said, “I’ve got you all beat. I saw the Killfrenzy.”

This raised a number of eyebrows before he smirked and took a pull from his beer. Running his tongue over his teeth a few times, he leaned back in his chair, ran a finger over a particularly nasty acid mark on his face and said, “This happened shortly before I picked up this little beauty, which I am actually here to get removed. Now, my task force was assigned to hunting down the Vong's kriffing slaver ships when we find a destroyer analog just drifting in space, the ship ‘alive’ but the crew apparently no longer at the helm.

“So we slip in close with a boarding ship and send in the marines. Full vacuum armour, power assist, big guns: essentially the full Vong killing kit that most ground pounders really wish they had access to all the time. Now we get in there, and it’s like something out of a bad horror vid. Considering that Vong ships are normally like that, that’s saying something. Everything’s dead inside. If it was wearing armour, there’s no head. If it wasn’t wearing armour it’s been hacked to pieces. There’s no sign of who did it, but the slave pens are all empty and there’s some weird symbols painted on the walls in the blood of the dead,” the man, who those at the table now suspected was a marine, explained.

“So we’re getting ready to haul this thing off for the R&D boys to take a look at when we pick up this radio transmission. I didn’t hear it myself, but the rumours all said it was the Killfrenzy song. We also notice an anomalous gravity distortion, sort of like what a coralskipper might produce, but much weaker, and its travelling away from the general vicinity of the transmission. So one group goes off to find the source of the gravity distortion and the bigger group looks for where the radio transmission is coming from. I’m in the latter group. We see it, hiding behind the horizon of an uninhabited ice world, bouncing its signal off the ionosphere,” the man explained.

Taking a deep breathe, he detailed further, “It was big. As in twice the size of an Imp Star big, but it looked primitive too, like someone had taken some ancient stone cathedral and launched it into space. I suppose like that big flying castle thing the Hapans have, only less elegant and more evil looking. It’s studded with guns, and it’s just hanging there, screaming out its chant when it starts boosting out of orbit. Slow and ugly, but we don’t want to get close to it. While we’re trailing it, trying to sort out all the things stuck on its hull, it disappears in a flash of weird light and strange sensor readings. It didn’t jump to lightspeed, but it definitely didn’t cloak either. And when it disappeared in that strange light, everyone who was looking at it felt a chill down their spine. It was never classified, the spooks have other things to worry about, but I don’t think that ship is on our side.”

There was a consensus of nods and then, no one thinking that they could top that story, they slowly began to disperse for the night.

Once everyone was gone, the musician quietly packed up her instrument and walked into the back. She took a few moments to take off her make-up before she opened her locker in the empty back room.

With a loud thump the body of a Yuuzhan Vong spy fell out of the locker, her body folded in half hours earlier, her ooglith masquer neatly set on top of her corpse, the features on the organic infiltration suit identical to the musician now obliviously packing up her things.

A few minutes later an old man who went by the moniker Marti left the locker room, whistling a slow, plaintive song in an alien language.

“Gott weiss ich will kein Engel sein.”

---

A few things
1) The cruiser isn't the actual Killfrenzy from canon 40k, new Chaos just stole the idea
2) The primary Killfrenzy song isn't Engel, but the secondary one after its killed something is
3) Thus begins the new arc

Darmalus · Post by **Darmalus** » 2009-02-17 04:50am

Is there anywhere I can read up on the cannon Killfrenzy?

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

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