The Open Door (megacrossover)

[Singular Quartet]

Resident Evil would have far more potential than Silent Hill. An undead-infested survival horror would be a great training exercise, and if the Bearer of Reigle got infected with the T-Virus, they’d be able to absorb the ability to reanimate necrotized tissue and possibly gain psychic control over all the zombies and Tyrants. Zombies and Tyrants aren’t up to par with grunt soldiers of neoChaos, but they’d make cheap cannon folder or convenient guinea pigs for experimentation. Other variants of the T-Virus included T-Veronica, NE-T, T-Cameron, and the G-Virus. Some were intended as vehicles of transhumanist modification instead of bio-warfare.

No, you misunderstand.

Silent Hill has the possibility of going very wrong for neoChaos. Resident Evil would be a cakewalk for them; the zombies are stupid, and even the monsters are just fleshy. The T-virus isn't going to do anything negative to Bearers of Reigle. Silent Hill, though, with the traumas in the backstories of so many characters, will have plenty of material to work on them with. Remember the 15th Angel? The town is a lot like that, but possibly even worse for its subtlety.

As I recall from the main plot (1 & 3), most of it is about some sort of twisted god trying to coming to be and causing armageddon.

[Enigma]

Personally, I'd like to see NewChaos' take on Silent Hill...

That has the potential to go very, very wrong, actually. It entirely depends on how nasty the thing that empowers the town is, but a lot of people in NewChaos, from the people like Lars and Rong-Arya who lost so many people in the Second and Third Impacts, to even the Gods themselves, have psychological problems and have experienced things that the town could really, really work on. Forcing the Arya part of the personality to relive the aftermath of Third Impact over and over again, walking through LCL flooded streets of the town, with part liquid fiends that victimise her, play on fears of being weak, and watching what happened to that friend over and over again would be pretty horrific.

Oh Pyramid Head! Where are you? There are some nice people for you to play with.

[holyknight]

Personally, I'd like to see NewChaos' take on Silent Hill...

That has the potential to go very, very wrong, actually. It entirely depends on how nasty the thing that empowers the town is, but a lot of people in NewChaos, from the people like Lars and Rong-Arya who lost so many people in the Second and Third Impacts, to even the Gods themselves, have psychological problems and have experienced things that the town could really, really work on. Forcing the Arya part of the personality to relive the aftermath of Third Impact over and over again, walking through LCL flooded streets of the town, with part liquid fiends that victimise her, play on fears of being weak, and watching what happened to that friend over and over again would be pretty horrific.

Oh Pyramid Head! Where are you? There are some nice people for you to play with.

Err......if Arya were to be locked on a vicious horror feedback, that, while horrific for her, would likely be VERY stupid on the middle/long run, as inside her Psyker being, it's also a Warp Daemon, you know...a being that it feds and empowers itself on emotions, specially negative ones. Rong would be pretty much PO'ed capitally to someone messing with his host, and to boot, he would be on the equivalent of a big power boost, given the loop of Arya's mind, and her psionic mind literally releasing warp energy like cheap candy.

The entities on SH play on your fears and doubts.
The entities on Neo-Chaos, EAT your emotions, and are at their most strong and violent modes, when those emotions are from negative situations.......While many of the still human forces under Neo-Chaos would be affected, i would guess that the opposite would happen with ANY Daemon. If you wanted to REALLY teach Pyramid Head the meaning of mindfuck, send that Slaanesh's Keeper of Secrets to have some R&R on the Silent Hill plane.....

[Valorie]

Going to Silent Hill would be similar to Lars' time in A!MG Hell, where the daemon would either a) overwhelmed by negative emotions and goes insane, or b) gives birth to an irredeemably evil hell-daemon. Both options are VERY bad and could do a lot of damage. Also, the emotional energy of several non-daemonhost Psykers could accidentally create a coalesced pseudo-daemon.


Are there any places saturated with Positive emotions aside from "Heaven"? While not as violent as a hell-daemon, a daemon spawned entirely out of positive emotions would be just as disruptive. It might seek to cleanse what it perceives as corruption, but since very few beings qualify as 'pure goodness personified' it could end up destroying entire planets or galaxies in its self-righteous quest for the sake of purity. Or it might reason that "too much life" would accelerate a universe's entropic heat death and go on a murdeous rampage "for the greater good" to extend the universe's lifespan by a few millenia, much like Adam Warlock's disembodied 'Goddess' persona.

Scipio: "Snap into a Slim Jim! Oh yeah!"
Scientist: "Dammit, who allowed Scipio to watch WWF Raw!?!"
Intern: "It was either that or reruns of Sesame Street. Don't worry, it can't get any worse."
Scipio: "Scipio Prime, transform and roll out!"
Intern: "Oops. Nevermind. It just got worse."

Hilarilous! I'd pay to see that!

[Setesh]

Are there any places saturated with Positive emotions aside from "Heaven"? While not as violent as a hell-daemon, a daemon spawned entirely out of positive emotions would be just as disruptive. It might seek to cleanse what it perceives as corruption, but since very few beings qualify as 'pure goodness personified' it could end up destroying entire planets or galaxies in its self-righteous quest for the sake of purity. Or it might reason that "too much life" would accelerate a universe's entropic heat death and go on a murdeous rampage "for the greater good" to extend the universe's lifespan by a few millenia, much like Adam Warlock's disembodied 'Goddess' persona.

There was at one time a forgotten realms campaign session write-up with something like that(link to it died sometime last year.). A Solar found a spell that would obliterate Grazz't and his three layers of the abyss. I order to cast the spell he had to consume the still beating heart of 20 innocent children (vile spell), that adventure within the campaign had the party trying to stop the Solar from doing so. At the tenth victim (and thrashing of the party) the Solar explains why he's doing it shedding tears as he kills each child. This left the party in a loop of 'greater good' vs. 'immediate good'. the party in the write-up decided killing children wasn't worth it even to destroy Graz'zt and fought the Solar 4 more times before finding a way to stop it.

[Satori]

If you want a good example of "positive energy" D&D has a literal Positive energy plane.

Don't be thinking it's fluff and bunnies though, stay there too long and YOUR HEAD ASPLODE.

Look up Whitestar the Planar Shepherd for a fun writeup on this.

[Academia Nut]

Today's musical suggestion is anything from Saurian Meditation by Karl Sanders, particularly The Elder God Shrinewhen you hit the final bit. If you know anything about Karl Sanders and who he is, you may already be saying 'Oh shit'.

Chapter Sixty-five: School

Ashley tapped her pen impatiently while she considered her options for the upcoming simulation in the afternoon against her bastard of a rival, Scipio. She had made their first fight look easy, but that was because she had been ordered to ham it up at the debriefing, something she had gone to with gusto to keep from freaking out due to the fact that she nearly had to change her plug suit after the tank had blown up a fucking mountain! The fact that it could do that had not been part of her mission briefing.

Unfortunately, once Scipio had accepted that the impossible was possible and that the improbable was probable, he had responded with alarming acceptance and then began to kick Ashley’s ass in the simulations.

Bored, she stopped tapping her pen and started doodling an impression of one of her earlier encounters with Scipio. She had a little super deformed Bolo wearing a leotard with a cute little angry face atop one of the posts of a wrestling ring, preparing to leap down on top of an equally cute version of her Eva, also in a leotard, with a dazed look while it lay helpless on the mat.

When he had his anti-gravity drives functional the giant bastard was surprisingly agile and adroit for a battleship with treads, and trying to engage Scipio in hand to tread combat resulted in Ashley getting crushed, flipped into the air and picked off by a Hellbore, or ground to a paste by his tracks about half the time.

But getting close to the Bolo was the only way to actually have a hope of beating it as trying to engage at long range was a losing proposition. Scipio would just bracket her with three Hellbores and she couldn’t physically dodge fast enough to avoid getting hit by one of them, at which point even if her Void Shields and AT-field kept her from dying she would get blasted again two seconds later while still trying to recover at which point she would be dead.

Of course, any individual trick to get to close range would only work once, aside from sitting on top of something Scipio didn’t want turned into an irradiated cloud roughly the shape of a mushroom.

Her latest trick had been to use a planar AT-field to hide beneath a section of ground and then drop Scipio into a dead fall while firing her plasma cannon at his belly. The problem there was finding the sort of terrain that wouldn’t look out of place after she burrowed in. Scipio had to have seismic sensors to determine what terrain he was mobile in, so now that he knew the trick he would look for it and AT-fields produced a peculiar reading that he would now know to look for…

Ashley interrupted her train of thought as she flipped her page back to the assignment at hand, away from her doodling as she felt the attention of the teacher coming towards her. She then flipped back to her doodling once it was safe to do so. While active psychic abilities were disallowed and there were sensors to check for that sort of thing, Ashley was one of the most gifted precogs of her generation.

One of the less painful reasons why she was a pilot… junior cadet pilot irritatingly enough, despite the fact that the Eva was useless without her.

Just three more months and she would be out of this frustrating nightmare, this endless make-work project. The names of every Eva pilot were engraved alongside those of the gods and many were worshipped as ascended daemons. Fuck, the Evas were often called god-machines. But Ashley was under a strict gag order not to leak the nature of her ‘extra-curricular’ activities. Not until she was eighteen and thus legally an adult.

She wouldn’t get the full title of Eva pilot until she finished a post secondary degree and her officer training, but at least she would be able to drop the irritatingly contrite ‘junior’ part of her title and actually tell people about it.

Although the past few weeks she had been appreciating school just a little bit more because it was a few more hours each day where she wasn’t getting her ass kicked by Scipio. She’d dropped to the bottom of the leaderboard from first place amongst all of the cadets, junior and senior.

There was something she didn’t want to gloat about.

Her mind drifted a little as she tried to think of ways to trounce Scipio, only to be broken out of her reverie by her instincts telling her to look up right away. Cheryl Henderson was looking her way with a catty smile on. That usually meant that she had something up her sleeve for tormenting Ashley. Stupid bitch…

Stupid high school politics drawing the bitch’s attention too. So her family had money and connections because her mother was a member of the Agricultural Output Committee and her paternal grandfather had been a minor industrialist who survived Third Impact and provided the followers of the gods with guns early on. Big whoop. Ashley would get to have a chat with the gods in person on graduation. But until the blessed day when she could actually show off just how awesome she was, she just had to grit her teeth and bear it.

It had all started over a boy too, although one neither one would willingly touch with a twenty foot pole. Most youths had no strong affiliation for any of the gods, but most kids in high school had a thing for Mislaato, with some of the more aggressive types going for Asukhon or Tzintchi, depending on how their ambition manifested. There were very few teenage worshippers of Reigle as she was seen as more suited to old people.

Alan’s family were hardcore Reigle worshippers and thus he had gone so far as to gain a couple of minor gifts. Gifts were pretty rare, and two on a teenager were incredible, unfortunately when they came from Reigle this made Alan the least popular kid in a school full of the cut-throat politics of horny teenagers in a permissive culture.

Unfortunately his gifts while gruesome and slightly obnoxious, were extremely useful in that he didn’t get bored and he didn’t need to sleep, so he could just plough on in life, steady and unceasing. As the diligent worker he was, he used all that extra time and attention to study endlessly, giving him the best test scores in the class. He was considered a major loser, but when you needed extra tutoring, he was the guy to turn to.

Ashley missed classes fairly frequently, and while she had the cover of psyker training, occasionally legitimate, she was only given so much slack. The consequences of letting her grades slip were dire, and the majority of her pay as a pilot was put into a trust fund, so she couldn’t hire a private tutor. So she went to Alan for help.

She didn’t really like him per say, but he had helped her out enough that when she heard Cheryl bad mouthing Alan’s more unpleasant aspects, Ashley had asked blithely, “So do you think Mislaato will reward you with a clit on your tongue for all of your worship?”

Despite the fact that Cheryl was quite proud of her skills and activities, she had not quite liked the insinuation that her ability to suck cock was less attention getting for the gods than Alan’s ability to collect acne and psoriasis. Especially since it was true.

Thus a covert war of rumour and bitchiness between the two of them began, and it was unfortunately asymmetric warfare. Cheryl’s family had power and wealth, which meant that she had attracted a gang of sycophants and gophers seeking for some of the gilding to rub off on them. Ashley had few friends due to her Eva training taking up much the time outside school that could be devoted to socializing.

Cheryl had launched the first barrage by spreading the rumour that Ashley had slept with Alan. The few opportunities for dickings Ashley had been cultivating had vanished in an instant. Worshippers of Reigle prevented the spread of disease by acting as massive repositories for the unpleasant side of biology, but that didn’t prevent human instincts from kicking in. No guy wanted to stick his dick in poon contaminated by Alan’s day old street vendor wiener.

While the temptation to just slug Cheryl had been present, picking a fight would probably get the bitch’s family involved, and if it came down to a legal battle, Ashley’s employers would be forced to step in and bail her ass out, something that would have rather dire consequences for Ashley. So she had decided to turn to the most dangerous faction in the school.

The Tzintchians.

In earlier generations they would have been considered a strange blend of nerds and preps, a bunch of overly ambitious and scheming bastards who loved the latest innovations in technology and sorcery. They were a secretive group that liked to pry, liked to gather knowledge, and who had their own bizarre schemes, traits that made them unpopular. Going to them for help was risky because that was like a fly walking into a tangle of competing spider webs. And while they generally all went on to become successful scientists, engineers, officers, politicians, businessmen or the like, they were still generally considered losers in school for consistently trying to get good grades and other things instead of trying to get as much pussy or dick as possible.

This of course meant that Cheryl avoided them and tried her best to stay out of their machinations. So Ashley had gone to them and through her secret military connections managed to get a few of the de-classified but harder to find files to some of the military nuts, which was upgrade her status from ‘pawn’ to ‘useful pawn’. She wanted something to use against Cheryl and she knew she could bargain it from them.

Through the close knit ties she had moved into the notice of the intelligence nuts, a truly creepy trio who waged a clandestine war with the administration of the school by constantly trying to set up their own monitoring networks. It had turned into a bit of a ‘Great Game’ as neither side would actually let out their activities even to retaliate for the actions of others because it would be publicly embarrassing for everyone involved to have their actions made public.

The three of them had cameras set up all over the school that they used to gather information for their own purposes… one of which was a minor voyeur porn ring that they ran amongst the students, although they kept the juiciest bits squirreled away, awaiting the perfect opportunity to use. They were particularly fond of petty blackmail.

From there Ashley devised a rather roundabout plan, mostly because it helped secure her position amongst the Tzintchians as they appreciated that sort of thing. Then she secured a deal with a budding future entrepreneur who had a longstanding rivalry with Cheryl over her family connections and some break that Ashley hadn’t known about at the time. One rather depraved sex act “caught” by a hidden camera, some military grade time stamp editing, and a “blackmail” attempt that went south later and Ashley had managed to purge herself of the rumour that she had slept with Alan and replaced it with the rumour that she was really, really kinky and that Cheryl was just a jealous bitch afraid of someone usurping her position as the best ‘net worker’ in school.

That had been the peak of Ashley’s offensive actions as Cheryl had an unpleasant tendency to escalate rather faster than even most berserkers found prudent. Smarting from the blowback in the rumour mill, Cheryl had somehow convinced one of the teachers to start unfairly grading Ashley. Ashley strongly suspected that the trading of sexual favours was involved, and while encouraged between the students it was highly illegal between students and faculty. Whatever Cheryl had done though had been out of the prying eyes of the surveillance cameras.

Of course, while the military wasn’t particularly compassionate about social problems or personal struggles with algebra, they took very poorly to attacks of that nature on one of their pilots. So after a few weeks of investigation the teacher suddenly discovered that he was being called up for militia duty for six months due to an error on his training records that indicated that he had not properly completed a training module and thus he would have to retake basic and a portion of his initial stint in the military.

The appeal process took seven months to get to tribunal.

Let it not be said that the military was not without its sense of humour.

Unfortunately this seemed to enrage Cheryl all the more despite the fact that Ashley had only brought up the concern of unfairness in marking to her rather aggressive guardians, and she had to spend the next two months staying low under the blistering assault of petty invectiveness until the year ended.

Two months later and Cheryl had calmed down to the level of ‘non-apocalyptic’ but she was still incredibly pissed at Ashley and so the past seven months had been spent putting up with Cheryl’s petty bullshit, mostly Cheryl wrecking Ashley’s chances at getting laid. Ashley occasionally retaliated by releasing the latest bit of dirt her voyeuristic allies had dug up, but she kept it low to avoid escalating the situation to the point where the military had to step in again.

Of course, since the past few weeks when her training had really stepped up with Scipio, she barely had the time to think about anything but how to beat that damn Bolo. Who the fuck put treads on a thermonuclear battleship anyway?

Eventually Ashley just ignored Cheryl and went back to her doodling, not quite sure why her senses pricked up at that time. Maybe the bitch was planning something…

About an hour or so later as she was heading out of the school to get picked up and taken to the military base where her Eva was stored, a peculiar thing happened. In a series of events that could not be coincidence, two of the Chaos rules football jocks were horsing around and shoved a first year with an excessively large slurpee in hand. Iced syrup went flying everywhere, just in time for a third jock that was running to catch the ball the other two had been fighting over to step in it and slip.

Standing at the top of the stairs and forewarned by her precog Ashley adroitly side stepped and watched as the overly muscular idiot who had probably been rejected for Space Marine training five years ago went down the quick and painful way. She really had no pity for him as he tumbled down, saving that for the pair of second years who had no idea what hit them when the human avalanche struck.

As students rushed to the aid of those fallen, Ashley quietly seethed. It would be damn near impossible to prove that this had been an “accident” and not an actual accident, and Cheryl was keeping the worst of her plotting off campus these days, but her superiors would want to know immediately about any sort of possible attempts on life or limb.

Ashley turned away. Her guardians didn’t take excuses for being late that didn’t involve police reports.


Ashley slid on her plug suit, a non-descript military issue black one that she tragically could not show off to all the horny boys out there. While, like the naughty nurse or the slutty policewoman the uniform of the Eva pilots had exaggerated fetish forms, the gods kept exclusive right on the military version of the plug suit and thus while far less revealing than the novelty versions, actual plug suits were considered far sexier due to their rarity.

Aided into her entry plug by her team of technicians, who she only absentmindedly nodded to in thanks while she plotted her strategies and tactics against Scipio. For some reason they always gave her the mission briefings for these sorts of simulations after she was in the Eva, probably to better prepare her for rapid deployment later. She had to think fast when thrown into a scenario, had to already be prepared for anything.

As the entry plug filled with LCL and she felt the psychic amps connect to her brain, feeding her sensory data from her Eva, which in this case was faked by an extremely sophisticated array of computers that could simulate a real world combat scenario quite accurately. Right now her Eva was secured in its throne and the sensory data was a real feed, letting her see the three Eva bays where the shattered hulk of Scipio lay.

One thing that Ashley had never begrudged Scipio for was the fact that the bastard was fucking tough. When he had first been hauled in it had taken a month to scrub and strip out all of the radioactive parts of the Bolo. The treads had been all missing when they found Scipio and the drive wheels rendered down to mangled stubs by the AI tank’s refusal to stop moving. Multiple direct hits on the glacis plate by Hellbores or their equivalents had drilled a ragged, melted hole nearly to the command centre. The rear was almost completely shorn off, only a slight indication of the rear Hellbore, apparently by a shaped charge thermonuclear warhead that made skin contact.

Analysis indicated that Scipio had ceased function due to running out of fuel and then he slowly succumbed to brain death as the ionizing radiation that flooded his hull ate away at his electronics until only a nub at the centre of the survival core remained viable.

The other Bolos they had discovered on that radioactive wasteland had apparently been in worse shape and most were unsuitable for even parts salvage, a testament to their ability to keep going. Hell, technically Ashley had only ever mission killed Scipio, and had never actually succeeded in outright destroying the implacable war machine, while he had vaporized her multiple times.

Then the face of the base commander, Brigadier General Stuart Scott, an ironically very Indian man whose family had been tied to Britain since sometime around the late 19th century who still managed to somehow pull off an impressive Scottish accent. If he was giving the briefing that meant that they had something special cooked up.

“Aw reit noo kiddies. We’ve decided ‘at yoo’ve performed weel enaw in tryin’ tae kill each other fur th’ time bein’, sae the-day wer’re daein’ somethin’ a wee bit different. The-day yoo’re gonnae wark together tae try an’ hauld back a simulated coonter lat at tae repulse a planetary invasion. Tae simplify things fur the-day th' only objectife oan th' field will be th' enemy forces, but in future missions ye will also hae tae protect friendlies,” General Scott explained.

Ashley ground her teeth but said, “Of course sir.” Damn it! Scores were only posted on the leaderboard if they involved competition between pilots. If they began a cooperative training schedule then Ashley might never recover from the savage thrashing Scipio had given her in the rankings.

“We're uploadin' th' mission profile an' th' simulation noo,” General Scott said before the transmission ended and data began to flood Ashley’s mind.

She always had to repress the urge to gasp a little in the LCL whenever they fired up the Eva, although in this case they were just feeding the data that she would get if there was an actual activation. The experimental and Series One Evas had apparently been much more feral than the current Series Five Evas, but the fact that they lacked S2 engines and plasma reactors meant that the surge of god-like power must have not quite been the same.

At her heart power was drawn from the void, a slippery, exotic source of limitless energy, enough to power her Eva long past the age of the universe… hell, with the AT-field the Evas could theoretically last past the age of baryonic matter. The S2 engine powered mobility, the AT-field, regeneration, and in more evolved models more esoteric things like flight. It was a cool, obedient, yet devious energy, almost like a trained snake.

Meanwhile at a point between her shoulder blades a star burned, the plasma reactor flooding her nerves with an intense fire that was almost erotic. Whenever the reactor first started up it was like an orgasm in her spine. Hot, arrogant energy, it was kept well confined and thus was more trustworthy than the S2 energy. There was also more of it, if limited in duration due to fuel supplies. The plasma reactor powered the plasma blaster and the void shields, which while nowhere near as versatile as the AT-field, were much better at dealing with huge amounts of energy.

Then the mission profile data hit her mind and she nearly lost control of her excretory system. This wasn’t a mission against other possible targets like the Goa’uld, the Ori, the Federation, the Klingons, or even actual competent ground forces like the Imperium, Eldar, the Orks or other such beings. No, this simulation was against the Necrontyr.

Everyone knew that they would face the Necrontyr one day, but everyone assumed that it would be a future generation that would bring down the sixty million year old empire. They were bogeymen used to frighten children and the justification for the ever increasing military build-up. As far as she knew, Ashley had never heard of a simulation against them.

A cool male voice entered her head. “Ah, junior pilot cadet Ashley, you are more familiar with the laws of physics in these conditions I am, but can you confirm the numbers?”

It was Scipio. Scipio was asking her if this was bullshit or not. He was probably confirming elsewhere while she waited, but considering that she had been the one screwing with physics when fighting with him before, he wanted to hear it from her mouth.

Adrenaline having flooded her bloodstream, her mouth only kept moist by the LCL that surrounded her, Ashley said, “This information is normally classified, but I have no reason to suspect it is false.”

“That would imply that their personal infantry weapons could eventually destroy us without our shields up, given time,” Scipio pointed out.

“It would,” Ashley whispered in horror.

The basic infantry unit was a tall, thin alien with, dour, sunken features and oddly elongated proportions, especially about the face. They were wrapped in thin, segmented shells of metal that clung to them tightly, not needing the bulk of servo assisted power armour as the metal was both protective and mobile. In their arms they carried long rifles set with eerily glowing green tubes: gauss flayers.

Just the weapons used by the infantry were enough to give Ashley the willies in her Eva as they could theoretically eventually drill through her armour given enough time, and then there were the units equipped with phase shifting armour that could probably just fly through her armour and rip her apart in her plug if her AT-field went down. It was what the infantry was supporting that really scared her though.

Their primary target was not anything as simple as a monolith or an obelisk tank, oh no. No, those would be support units. No, their primary target was a Khufu-class mobile oppression barge. Basically a small warship incapable of getting any higher than orbit, it was a two-hundred fifty metre long floating fortress, its main section a broad, flat blade with two smaller triangles jutting out at the sides along the rear quarter. Along the rear section where it broadened out there was a massive gold pyramid set with a dreadful green crystal at its apex on the top side and a somewhat more modest ziggurat on the bottom side. The pyramid contained the command centre and a particle whip while the ziggurat contained a portal capable of bringing in reinforcements from across the galaxy. The top front section was a carrier deck for four monoliths and a dozen obelisk tanks and had turrets for arrays of quadruple heavy gauss cannons. The bottom front section was studded with more cannons and extensive gauss flux arcs.

It was a floating grim reaper, a relic from a war sixty million years ago that had been crewed by unimaginably many generations of Necrontyr and it was their job to kill it.

By the time the tactical data download finished and the simulation began, Ashley had to exert all of her self control keep from trembling in her seat. This was just a simulation, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t feel real. Worse yet, seeing the numbers and knowing that there were millions of worlds out there dominated by the Necrontyr it suddenly made their position seem all the more precarious. If one of those things landed on Earth it was all over for everyone. Everything would die, their molecules stripped apart layer by layer until there was only dust and sand blowing in the wind of a dead world.

Ashley had forgotten all about her ranking on the leaderboard, she had forgotten about wanting to defeat Scipio, and she had most definitely forgotten about Cheryl.

---

I decided to cut it off here as the battle deserved its own chapter. I think I'll call it Lesson, or possible Object Lesson.

[Fiji_Fury]

Damn. That is one well written chapter. The sense of dread was really conveyed, especially when compared to the mundane irritants the early part of the chapter explained. As for the Necrontyr... my only experience with the Necron is from the Dawn of War games. Are they really so powerful and proliferate in WH40k? If so, what the hell is the explanation for any of the other 40k powers somehow surviving?

[Skyfox120]

Damn. That is one well written chapter. The sense of dread was really conveyed, especially when compared to the mundane irritants the early part of the chapter explained. As for the Necrontyr... my only experience with the Necron is from the Dawn of War games. Are they really so powerful and proliferate in WH40k? If so, what the hell is the explanation for any of the other 40k powers somehow surviving?

oh they are that powerful,arguebly moreso since in cannon 40k verse they don't have to worry about relativley weak mortal bodies. (not to mention they're ridiculous regen rate.). Hell their spaceships can go toe to toe with any other races ships of the same class, with the better chance of winning.... DESPITE HAVING NO SHIELDS!

C'tan are even scarier

Fortunatly they aren't as prolifeate. Having been in stasis since well before Humanity even evolved, they are only beginning to awaken. And doubtlessly many of their tomb worlds have been destroyed by either chance, or other races. so they aren't relativly as numerous....

[MichaelAwesome]

Wow. Very ominous. Glad to see they’re not coddling the pilots.

How many Eva pilots are involved in this group simulation aside from Ashley and Scipio?

I’m assuming that Ashley’s Eva has a ‘minor’ degree of biomechanical adaptability. There’s no way that Tzintchi would’ve built four subsequent series of Eva units without incorporating a low-level mutation factor or, at the very least, the capacity to generate new bit of code to improve existing algorithms. Way back in “Thousand Shinji,” Dr. Akagi Risuko confirmed that even stimulations were enough to encourage change in an Eva unit.

[Valorie]

When you talked about the Necrontyr’s phase shifting armor, do they become intangible by shifting out of synch with space/time like Leliel’s sea of Dirac? Or can they pass through solid matter by altering the vibratory rates of her atoms, passing their atoms through the spaces between the atoms of the object through which they are moving? Or they shift from solid matter into an energy state? Any combination of those three are possible.

Hikari had said that C’Tan phasing technology was derived from observations of their wars with the Angels. The fact that neoChaos was able miniaturize the Lance of Longinus proved that they have a crude understanding of phase technology, although reproducing it seems to consume too much time and resources for it too be of any practical application within their current manufacturing abilities.

[barricade]

Posted this over at SBs -

I can suddenly see an EVA/Bolo pairing much like how infantry in WW2 paired up with tanks. Tanks were used to sweep ahead to take out targets of priority and provide on the spot fire-support for the infantry, while the infantry both used the tank as protection from incoming fire, and protected the tank from other infantry when the tank was 'looking' elsewhere. By themselves, they could be swarmed under, but as a unit, they were to be feared.

More modern IRL tactics pretty much separate the two, unless its urban fighting, in which they almost immediately go back to working as if joined at the hip, but the ideas still stand as solid tactics. And if you consider the size of the Bolo in comparison to the Eva, then while it's not -quite- the same, as an EVA is likely to tower over the top of a Bolo by a bit, it could still be done.

So Ashley is about to get a glimpse into the -real- face of warfare where it's absolutely bare-bones bloody, gritty, ugly -murder- of the worse kind. And there isn't going to be any curbstomping in the slightest.

This also likely says volumes about just why the leadership has pitted Ashley against the Bolo again and again. Even though she's lost virtually everytime, she's still tried to come up with something new, and never quit. There's a reason she was at the top of the leaderboard, and now she's being given a lot of opportunities to prove it - "Even though you did everything right, sometimes, you'll still lose." And she's likely learning incredibly rapid as well.

When you talked about the Necrontyr’s phase shifting armor, do they become intangible by shifting out of synch with space/time like Leliel’s sea of Dirac? Or can they pass through solid matter by altering the vibratory rates of her atoms, passing their atoms through the spaces between the atoms of the object through which they are moving? Or they shift from solid matter into an energy state? Any combination of those three are possible.

Hikari had said that C’Tan phasing technology was derived from observations of their wars with the Angels. The fact that neoChaos was able miniaturize the Lance of Longinus proved that they have a crude understanding of phase technology, although reproducing it seems to consume too much time and resources for it too be of any practical application within their current manufacturing abilities.

It's likely that its phasing out by vibrating the atoms. Otherwise if it was a partial Sea of Dirac, they would be able to completely bypass an EVA's AT-field. Yet Ashley specifically points out that they can't use the Phase-Shift until after her AT-field goes down.

[phongn]

I was thinking about your problems where this was spiraling out of control, Academia Nut, and I thought of an idea (after hitting up the Eyrie fanfiction group's page).

Split up the stories. You can then give them a beginning-middle-end as each one should, you can concentrate more on development, and it might not just look like "Chaos owns all" if you put everyone through real trials (and have the occasional story in which our protagonists lose). You can make a universal/multiuniversal framework (sort of like Undocumented Features), too. For your readers, it might also help since different people have different interests.

As it is now, well, you have one giant tangled mess, and I think untangling and separating everything out might help you figure out where each individual plot goes, even as your main "overplot" moves forward.

[White Haven]

I can't agree there, at least partially because I love tangled interweaving omniplots. Then again, I read Peter Hamilton for fun, and he's more or less the dictionary definition of that.

[Academia Nut]

Damn. That is one well written chapter. The sense of dread was really conveyed, especially when compared to the mundane irritants the early part of the chapter explained. As for the Necrontyr... my only experience with the Necron is from the Dawn of War games. Are they really so powerful and proliferate in WH40k? If so, what the hell is the explanation for any of the other 40k powers somehow surviving?

Canonically the reason the other powers are still alive is because the Necrons (undead robotic descendents of the Necrontyr) are asleep. That's pretty much it. Games Workshop actually has had to backpedal a bit on the Necrons for 5th edition because they way they were writing them before their victory was simply a matter of time, which was working counter to their "eternal stalemate" position. The Necrons have been slightly toned down now, in that time has actually cause a lot of damage to their infrastructure and things no longer work entirely the way they're supposed to due to the fact that sixty million years without maintenance has managed to take a toll. A hell of a lot less than it should for most things, but the fluff now states that a lot of the Necrons aren't working properly and more than a couple of the Necron Lords have gone a little bit nuts. This also caused a major toning down of the C'tan, who are no longer available as 40k units (the models are now nutty lords who think they're the Star Gods).

But yeah, the Necrons have universally been portrayed as the most advanced and scariest force in the fluff. They (well, the Nightbringer anyway) are responsible for causing the fear of death in sentient beings (except for the Orks, who are nuts). They're relentless and unkillable, slow but unstoppable, and their guns rip apart their enemies piece by piece, so that not even the thickest armour is proof against them. They also have phase technology and the best teleporters in the galaxy, so you can't even hide from them. You can run but you'll only die tired.

Incidentally, this and a really poor unit selection for tabletop has seriously hurt the 'crons in the 40k game. They're seen as a rather boring army.

On to other things, I should probably also give you the historical run down for the Evas.

Test types - Units 00 and 01
Series 1- Production models. Units 02, 03, and 04
Series 2- Mass production models. First to make standarized use of S2 engines. Units 05 through 13
Series 3- Unification era models. Dropped the numbering system. Attempted to bind daemons to the Evas instead of using pilots. Instability resulted in the scrapping of the series after the securing of the planet
Series 4- First Evas to use advanced technology passed on by the gods and returned to human pilots. Also first to use adult pilots. Unforseen difficulties resulted Series 4 being considered an interim system
Series 5- Modern pattern of Eva. Uses an S2 engine for locomotion, regeneration, and AT-field generation. Uses a Titan grade plasma reactor for weapons and to power three void shield generators. Pilots are selected at a young age, no later than early puberty, and grow alongside their Evas, avoiding the difficulties of Series 4.

Finally, I don't intend to split the Open Door yet. That would just make a mess of different individual stories to follow while still doing the same thing, although I am definitely going to move into more 'arc' based patterns, sticking around with one story until it is locally finished before moving on to the next instead of jumping all over the place like some of the earlier parts of the story. Beyond the Open Door is a sort of attempt to let other people explore other stories that I'm not focusing upon though. The multitude of plots will become important later when they start converging, so splitting things up is a bad idea as it will become (even) easy(ier) to get lost.

[phongn]

I can't agree there, at least partially because I love tangled interweaving omniplots. Then again, I read Peter Hamilton for fun, and he's more or less the dictionary definition of that.

Each story can interweave, of course, but I think some more formalized structure and focus would help his plotting and writing.

[WillowBee]

High school melodrama and a doomsday scenario of epic proportions. Ashley is having such a bad day.

Are the series five Evas ‘generalists’? Or does each unit have its own specialty? The war with the Necron is intended to be a few decades/centuries away, so their current lull phase of operations seems like the best time to dabble in specializing (or modular modifications like the D-Type equipment) through trial and error. Also, it wouldn’t make sense to limit all Evas to the humanoid form, much like how the Angels took a wide variety of shapes and forms.

Series 4- First Evas to use advanced technology passed on by the gods and returned to human pilots. Also first to use adult pilots. Unforseen difficulties resulted Series 4 being considered an interim system
Series 5- Modern pattern of Eva. Uses an S2 engine for locomotion, regeneration, and AT-field generation. Uses a Titan grade plasma reactor for weapons and to power three void shield generators. Pilots are selected at a young age, no later than early puberty, and grow alongside their Evas, avoiding the difficulties of Series 4.

Hypothetically, the current Eva units might be more stable if the military asked for volunteers to ‘temporarily’ give up their souls to animate the war machines and act as an interface for the pilots. They’d know that when the Eva is eventually destroyed or decommissioned, their souls would be allowed to pass on to the Afterlife, so its not like they’re going to be trapped forever. Like Lars the Stiletto’s communication daemon, some might seek out such a prospect for a shot at immortality or to earn some brownie points and avoid punishment in the Afterlife.

[Academia Nut]

I'm still working out the exact technobabble justification/wandwave sort of thing, but in the original series the Evas seemed to need three components: the Eva, the soul/part of soul of the pilot's mother, and the pilot. Now, with their greater understand of psychic powers they don't exactly need the middleman for interface, but when they tried to go with binding daemons to the Evas they ran into an issue of compatibility. Since the daemons all contain bits of the essence of the gods and three out of four of the gods were Eva pilots (and they gave Mislaato one later) it was like all of the daemons were tagged with the antigens of another Eva, to make a biological analogy. The Evas strongly tried to reject them and while they could make them work for a little while, the Eva mind and the daemon mind ended up eroding each other and they ended up useless after a few short years.

The Series 4 Evas tried going back to the pilot arrangement, but again, cutting out the middleman. The issue there was that the adults had very strong, resilient personalities and several things happened. If they made the Eva minds too strong they got into a fight with the pilot and either overwhelmed the pilot and drove them insane, or refused to synchronize. If they made the Eva minds too pliable the pilot dominated ended up taking over the Eva mind completely, including autonomic functions, which ended up killing the pilot when their brains were overwhelmed and tried to regulate two bodies simultaneously. They got some successes, but they needed rare and extremely strong psykers who could force a synchronization with a strong willed Eva, and if control slipped the Eva would go berserk. Thus they decided to change their methodology, in that while growing them takes longer they can find pilots much easier so they can have multiple cohorts going at the same time instead of having to find one or two candidates a year a killing a several of them trying to get things to work.

[EarthScorpion]

Thus they decided to change their methodology, in that while growing them takes longer they can find pilots much easier so they can have multiple cohorts going at the same time instead of having to find one or two candidates a year a killing a several of them trying to get things to work.

And, Gods forbid that that sounds just a little familiar. I mean, no-one has ever tried raising a child to be a perfect Evangelion pilot, that they were chosen because they were special, and to pilot as a saviour of humanity.

*coughcoughAsukacough*

I have to say, that explanation really made me a little worried for NeoChaos. Those little expediencies have the potential, some point in the future, as the Gods become more jaded and detached from humanity, as they forget the message of the Emperor, to really snowball. Not to the level of the OldChaos gods, no, we're talking more like that NecronLord story about the viewpoint of the Deceiver's victory.

[Academia Nut]

That's actually the exact issue they are trying to avoid by refusing to help out Ashley at school or let her brag about her status, and in fact why she is going to a public school instead of having private tutors. They don't want her to lose all touch with reality and get a massively swollen head. She's arrogant and a bit of a bitch, but she knows what its like to be the underdog, to not have people bow down before her. When Scipio started beating her ass, she didn't fold up because she wasn't the best any more and the fragile, narcissistic ego she had built up around that concept shattered. No, she started thinking of new ways to beat him.

I suppose you could say that this chapter was a subtle exploration of the differences in justifiable self confidence and arrogance, and how the New Chaos gods are having a bit of trouble producing the former over the latter.

Of course, when they first came up the idea:

Tzintchi: Okay, so we're going to need to be careful with these kids if we want to make them pilots. I think we should avoid private tutoring and the like while they are training.
Asukhon: What's wrong with private tutoring? I had that and I turned out alright.
***long, awkward silence***
Asukhon: FUCK YOU GUYS!

[consequences]

I have to say, I really like the reminder of why wishing for Newchaos to get stomped on is fucking stupid.

On the first level, the Necrons and C'Tan were the people that won the eternal war in 40K, forcing immortal enemies with bloddfeuds ranging back thousands of years at a minimum to combine forces and kill themselves and all their followers to provide for even a chance at victory.

On the second level, everyone who gets stomped but not annihilated realizes now that there's a big bad out there that they are currently ill-equipped to provide a note-worthy speedbump against. As such, they'll be building up and developing as hard as they can. As such, they each represent a potential eventual fallback position, if Tzintchi forbid, Newchaos is defeated and the C'Tan gain inter universal travel, where without the current stompings, they'd just be food.

[Jaeger]

Do they have a high rate of teenaged pregnancy in their schools? I’d be surprised if they didn’t.


Off topic: I have a question about the Bearers of Reigle. In Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Section31 created a plague to kill off the Founders, but was later cured by Julian Bashir and Odo. If a Bearer of Reigle tried to cure an infected Changeling, is there a chance that a Bearer might accidentally absorb some of their morphogenic matrix and turn into liquid-based shapeshifter? Imagine a corrupted Great Link, a planet-wide ocean made of phlegm, bile, and cancerous lumps teeming with maggots and fungal growth, a thousand diseased minds joined together as they revel in their despair and hopelessness.

[Crayz9000]

Off topic: I have a question about the Bearers of Reigle. In Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Section31 created a plague to kill off the Founders, but was later cured by Julian Bashir and Odo. If a Bearer of Reigle tried to cure an infected Changeling, is there a chance that a Bearer might accidentally absorb some of their morphogenic matrix and turn into liquid-based shapeshifter? Imagine a corrupted Great Link, a planet-wide ocean made of phlegm, bile, and cancerous lumps teeming with maggots and fungal growth, a thousand diseased minds joined together as they revel in their despair and hopelessness.

Or better yet... don't imagine that. Just thinking about it is nauseating enough.

[barricade]

Off topic: I have a question about the Bearers of Reigle. In Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Section31 created a plague to kill off the Founders, but was later cured by Julian Bashir and Odo. If a Bearer of Reigle tried to cure an infected Changeling, is there a chance that a Bearer might accidentally absorb some of their morphogenic matrix and turn into liquid-based shapeshifter? Imagine a corrupted Great Link, a planet-wide ocean made of phlegm, bile, and cancerous lumps teeming with maggots and fungal growth, a thousand diseased minds joined together as they revel in their despair and hopelessness.

So basically, they create Dagobah.
Hmm...kinda makes sense actually.
*head explodes from the forbidden knowledge*

[Academia Nut]

Chapter Sixty-six: Lesson

The sun was hot, a white sphere that hung in the sky like a baleful eye, baking the planet below. A class F5 star to Sol’s G2, it was about 25% brighter, and the planet was a touch closer than Earth was as well. Only relatively low water content had kept the planet from undergoing a runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus. As it was the planet was hot and dry, covered in dense scrubland and colossal, continent spanning deserts with low, salty seas that were more overgrown lakes than true oceans.

The Necrontyr loved it. It was a world cooler than their own hellish homeworld while still being warm enough to their tastes. The local plant life, scraggly blacks, blues, and browns, also appeared vibrant to their more UV sensitive eyes.

Ashley only absorbed the fact that it was hot outside through the sensations coming from her external sensors and the feeling of her Eva through its black, energy drinking armour. Of course, in her current state of near panic the disjunction between the warmth on her Eva’s skin and the coolness of her own flesh as fear gripped at her.

She and Scipio were in a small valley carved by period flash floods and the winds of this world that could accumulate without interruption across vast savannahs and deserts and then hurl sand and grit hard enough to create weird, fluid sculptures on the rocks.

“Don’t launch drones or begin active scanning,” Ashley warned.

“Reasoning?” Scipio asked.

“The metal that composes their armour and technology absorbs microwave and radio waves extremely well. You’ll just give away our position,” Ashley explained. “Trust me, the moment they pick up a strong radar signature they’ll zero in on our position and its over.”

“And you have this information how?” Scipio inquired.

“Precog… damn it, if we try and engage we’re just going to get swarmed and then the barge will pound us into scrap,” Ashley noted, possible scenarios, still distant and fuzzy but clear enough, running through her mind as she peered across time.

“Then our first objective would be to separate the enemy from their support elements,” Scipio calmly noted.

“They have a portal, they can summon reinforcements from any part of the galaxy,” Ashley pointed out, living out the awful experience of having wave after wave of monoliths and obelisk tanks rush out of the swirling green portal on the under side of the barge.

“So the enemy has superior firepower, superior numbers, and superior logistics. I had received the data myself but I still find some of the implications hard to reconcile. Your confirmations however are quite useful as you help define what is possible and probable now that the standard laws of physics as I knew them no longer apply,” Scipio noted.

“Yeah, well when you can see into the future like I can and all you see is screaming death then the usefulness of my abilities don’t seem all that apparent,” Ashley replied.

“On the contrary, your contributions have prevented the implementation of several tactics and strategies that would have had no degree of success without your forewarning. While unconventional and imprecise, I have learned in our encounters that your predictive abilities have a frustratingly high accuracy. You have used this to achieve victory far outside the probabilistic bounds of your machine and your own biological limitations,” Scipio told her.

Ashley paused for a moment, her fear somewhat forgotten as her brain chugged away at parsing that statement before she asked, “Did you just tell me that you respect my precog because I’ve been kicking your ass?”

“Idiomatically, yes,” Scipio replied. “You are more than the sum or product implied by your parts. While true that I have achieved more victories than you, the fact is that you continue to surprise me with unconventional and unpredictable strategies despite repeated refinement of my own methods. So what do you suggest we do that the enemy would not expect?”

Ashley thought for a long moment, confused by the admission that Scipio seemed to find her as infuriating and frustrating to fight as she found him. Finally she said, “We have to destroy their portal and cut off their ability to call for reinforcements.”

Scipio seemed to take a second or two -a time Ashley knew was an eternity for the AI- to formulate a response. Finally Scipio said, “That would involve approaching close to the enemy, which as we have already established has difficulties due to issues with detection and support from secondary units.”

“I know, but it’s the only way we will have a hope of winning. Even if we start kicking ass and taking names in huge numbers, it will just call in wave after wave of reinforcements while pulling away from us. We need to ambush the barge, hit it hard and fast when it does not know when the attack is coming,” Ashley explained.

“We are not exactly optimally designed for ambushing,” Scipio pointed out.

Ashley grinned and said, “Maybe you…”

“I have already developed a counter to that tactic and in any case if you have your AT-field active you will be unable to tell when the enemy is at optimal range due to its levitating method of locomotion, and if you do not have your AT-field active you will be quite visible to IR even if buried in the sand,” Scipio responded.

“I will have to trust in my precog and reflexes to tell me when to fire then,” Ashley responded with all of the courage she could muster up. It was funny talking to Scipio; he seemed to inspire her want to do better since he never criticized her for wanting to do the impossible.

“Can your precognitive abilities tell you where to best set your ambush?” Scipio asked.

“I can only get images that basically sum up to ‘probably a good idea’ or ‘probably a bad idea’ for things between forty-five seconds to three hours in the future unless I seek the answer to an exceedingly specific question, so not as such no. But so far this plan only includes my contribution,” Ashley replied.

“I am to serve as the bait to your trap then?” Scipio asked coolly.

“Yes. I need you to lure them. It’s hard to describe precog, but anything beyond pure reflex is like looking at a tangle of possible outcomes, all with different probabilities associated with coming true. I can however act to make certain outcomes more likely than others. There are no guarantees though until a few seconds before things come to pass. So if you serve as a lure I can increase the probability of the enemy being in a certain location at a certain time,” Ashley explained.

“How will I lure them then?” Scipio asked.

Looking over her intelligence map and peering through the future, Ashley replied, “They are current on a mostly direct line as they expand a search pattern for us. The course of the barge will not deviate for the next ten minutes. There is however a section of dunes not far from our current location I could hide in that would serve my purposes, but the barge would not cross over it unless it diverted. I have a set of waypoint and action pairs, call them ‘action points’ if you will, that should get the barge to divert to your location.”

Ashley then took a slightly trembling hand off one of her butterfly grips and began typing in the necessary coordinates. Scipio received them without complaint or comment before he said, “These are surprisingly precise, down to the second.”

“Sorry, I know you like things to four decimal places,” Ashley replied semi-sarcastically.

“Any interesting concept though: fighting an enemy over the horizon while not using any active targeting systems or spotters and before they have fired a shot that could be used to calculate distance,” Scipio commented. “I trust that these varying time marks are to present an unpredictable velocity and thus force the Khufu-class barge to divert to bring its sensors to bear.”

“Yes,” Ashley responded before realizing it wasn’t a question. It was a statement of actual trust.

And then Scipio left, his tracks kicking up a huge column of grit as he moved for the first action point.

Leaving Ashley alone. It was just a simulation, but it still scared the fuck out of her. Was there any way to truly train for this sort of thing? For a long moment the urge to just give up because she had no hope of victory. Everything had always come easy to her because of her precog. Her Eva had few overt mutations, just enhanced speed, stealth, and reflexes so she could eke out the most from her gift. But those didn’t seem like nearly enough right now. Scipio found her a tough opponent despite continually kicking her ass and she had no clue how to beat the Necrontyr where she was constantly plotting and losing against him. What chance did they have?

But then the bitch in her rose to the surface. How was she ever going to claw her way back to the top of the leaderboard if she just gave up now? She was better than that! Had Tzintchi ever sat in his Eva before his ascension crying about how he wanted to run away? Never! She was going to meet him one day, and all the other gods, and would she say she was afraid of a simulation? Never!

With a surge, Ashley had her Eva take off, running across the barren landscape, forming her AT-field beneath her Eva’s feet so that she had superior traction and speed while avoiding ripping up the landscape and leaving a nice trail or series of dust clouds to follow to her hiding place.

Arriving at her chosen hiding place, she then formed her AT-field into a horizontal plane beneath the sand and used it to push up, excavating an Eva sized hole for her to crawl into before carefully dropping the sand back into place, forming an AT-field about herself to prevent sand from falling into the barrel of her plasma blaster and from letting her IR signature leak to where her enemies might detect it.

For several long minutes she had to fight down the dual fears that she had dug her own grave and that she was just running away. She could handle this. Of course, she would need quite the shower after she got out as her plug suit was practically a swimming pool from all of the cold sweat soaking her.

Scipio would begin by bombarding the barge and its infantry support from across the horizon with his mortars, and then begin firing his hellbores along seemingly random vectors but where actually the paths Ashley predicted the scouts would take, hopefully knocking them out of the sky before they could report back.

It had to work. It had to.

It…

A sudden twinge told Ashley that long minutes of waiting, down in the dark had paid off as she pulled the trigger to her plasma blaster on instinct, unleashing a narrow beam of white hot star matter.

The dune she had hidden beneath exploded into a shower of sand and molten glass, revealing the Khufu-class barge floating above, its dull grey metal faintly gleaming with the green energies of its weapons and drives. Immediately above Ashley there was a swirling green portal, and her beam slammed directly into one of the edges, cutting into the dread material and melting it away. The swirling green portal immediately cut out and died, but Ashley held down the trigger until her gun went into automatic shut-down so it could cool off.

Something important looking dropped off the lower ziggurat.

Then Ashley was running, her Eva churning out of the sand, kicking shocked and surprised infantry out of her way. She barely made it out from beneath the shadow of the barge before green lightning began to engulf her Eva, ripping apart her shields as she sought to escape.

Acting on instinct, her left hand snapped out so fast she created a sonic boom with its passage and snatched a rather surprised monolith out of the sky. Crushing its armoured surface, she then whipped around and hurled the stunned vehicle back at the barge. The gunners attempted to swat it out of the sky, but unfortunately the regenerating hull was quite good at resisting gauss flayer beams and thus it was quite undiminished when it impacted the barge with a satisfying crunch. The damage was a pin prick, but it bought Ashley enough time to get her Eva behind a nearby set of rocks.

The shelter lasted a few seconds before it was ripped to its constituent atoms by the unholy force of the particle whip that served as the main weapon, but it gave Ashley enough time to regenerate one of her fallen void shields before she dashed out again.

Time slowed as her perceptions accelerated, as she pushed her Eva for every bit of speed it had. Her armour would be of little use if one of the heavy gauss cannon clusters hit her with her shields down, so she just had to move faster than they could track. The anti-infantry weapons limned her Eva in a halo of green lightning, slowly chewing away at her shields, but she kept moving, ducking and dodging and weaving to avoid the grim fate that awaited her if she let the big guns target her for even an instant. In turn, she set her plasma blaster to pulse fire and peppered the barge with ravenous energy, blowing away and melting weapons mounts.

She was already diving and rolling beneath the barge as its particle whip fired again, vaporizing a chunk of the desert. The move kept her alive, but only for a little while longer as her shields failed again while she was under the sights of dozens of weapons emplacements. Her skin began to crawl and burn as the armour and flesh of her Eva was burned away, only to begin regenerating again.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one regenerating, for already parts she had melted away were flowing back into shape, the metal resuming the form it had born before she had rearranged it.

Trailing smoke and fire, an entire section of his war hull stripped away by repeated particle whip attacks from monoliths and obelisk tanks while phase shifting troops contended with the many, many anti-personnel weapons that studded the surface of the Bolo. With a massive dual thunderclap Scipio fired two hellbores and completely ripped the portal ziggurat off the bottom of the barge.

Switching her plasma blaster over to loose confinement continuous fire mode, Ashley swept the space around Scipio with a flamethrower like cone of plasma, burning away most of the infantry even as she felt her Eva getting flayed alive. The void shields in her shoulder mounts had already been destroyed, stripped away by the relentless fire.

Scipio returned the favour she had done for him by placing his third Hellbore shot into a cluster of heavy gauss cannons and turning them into molten slag.

Staggering away, her whole body alight with pin pricking pain like everything had been slept on funny and had not received a proper supply of blood in hours, Ashley noticed that the barge was beginning to rise and accelerate away. It would put distance between them and then smash them flat with its particle whip.

Dropping her AT-field, the only thing that had been keeping her marginally intact under the relentless assault, Ashley instead manifested it as a sloped plane in front of Scipio and cried out over the radio, “Charge!”

Scipio hit the ramp at full speed and rapidly gained traction on the phase shifted surface, accelerating up to one hundred ten kilometres per hour. He rode the full way up the ramp before the pain caused Ashley to lose control and the field disappeared. It was already good enough though as Scipio was already on a parabolic arc that would take him on to the flight deck.

With a massive thump and crash of shattering metal, Scipio scraped across the surface of the barge, all three Hellbores trained on the pyramid that contained the particle whip. He discharged all of them simultaneously at the exact same at the same spot. The pyramid was ripped to shreds in a tsunami of liquefied metal while Scipio’s momentum carried him across the flight deck and off the other side.

Ashley did not see the end of Scipio as phasing shifting infantry took the opportunity of her lowered AT-field to attack, crawling inside her Eva, slicing it up from within. Ashley screamed in agony as the sensation of being vivisected reached her through her interface with the cybernetic war machine.

The entry plug went dark as the simulation ended with her death. A red message then popped up that read, “Mission failed. Primary target insufficiently damaged to cease activities.”