The amount of interest Philippe Dubois gave to the events of the frenchman, Arthur, and the toppling building outside was about the same amount of interest he showed in the “health courtier’s” presentation.  He paused for a moment chewing, as a backdrop of screams in both french and german provided a soothing dinner serenade for him.  Chuckling to himself, he remembered that advisor.  Oh, what an example he set!  Count Dubois wasn’t ignorant to the fact of someone else entering the tent, but he already knew who it was, the litany of foreign swearing and screaming gave him away.

“[i]Le fils prodigue revient.[/i]” He thought to himself.

Even now he could sense Steinbrook’s melodrama from here.  He was not interested in being friends with this man, but watching him suffer did bring bourgeois some amusement.  Just what was he so upset about?  Of course Count Philippe Dubois le Bourgeois did not shower, at least not recently, the natural oils of his skin accumulated preventing any odor from occuring!  At least, this is what his physician had told him, long ago.  He departed the realm of sycophants on a mule, and sat feasting many miles away.  As Arthur lifted his mask to eat, Philippe sensed a moment of vulnerability.

“Imprégnez-vous des odeurs et des arômes de notre fête!” He shouted,  “Ce masque ne perturbe pas vos sens?!”

While shouting at Arthur he ripped the man’s protective mask from his head with an explosiveness one might consider would be of a man his size in pure muscle.  His mouth opened jaw unhinged and crushed down on the apparatus with a cracking of glass, and crunching of plastic.  

Through a full, half-chewing mouth he poked at the german, “Ici laisse moi t'aider.”  Leaning over on one cheek, Philippe blew the tent open.

[center]***[/center]

With every thundering resonance of Thomas’s skull colliding with Jacknathema, the half-herald could see the caving of the operative’s skull.  He was literally killing himself on a spiritual attack--because the physical one was worthless.  Jacknathema had adapted too far for the physical blows to even faze him.  But the physical blows were never the intention, just the outlet of Thomas’s one and only overpowering emotion that he lived, died, and abided by--rage.  Jacknathema had fury of his own, but Thomas’s assault would not end how he thought it would.

With the psi-emitter reinforcing both of their will powers, it was soon apparent that there were two different, conflicting wills within Jacknathema.  Jack’s was the fury and Anathema’s was survival.  Naught could happen but separation, and with it, Anathema returned to the tomb he was buried in.  When the bomb dropped it was preceded by a number of things: by a triangulation of satellites far into the exosphere, by gross misconduct of agents who had no respect for the world in which they lived, and by a misappropriation of resources in what was a hectic power vacuum left by Heinzemann’s death.

The bomb threaded through the aperture created by Merse and contacted the two falling into the mantle--a direct nuclear hit. Like a charge of potent subterranean explosions, it sent rippling shockwaves through the bedrock beneath. The worldwave expanded outward as if the crust were a carpet and the might of this charge, though relatively low in radiation, rippled the pavement surface and buildings that stood in its way, snapping them loose like a doormat beaten out of dirt. Jack and Thomas both perished that day.

Anathema was the ground in which they tread.

With Goldman being flung up, and the burrow collapsing in on itself, a moment of silence was all that was left behind.  It was just as it had been when Merse dropped a city on Jack.  Anathema’s spirit, bound to Jack, sought to reconstitute with whatever was available, molding the clay of earth to flesh.  The radiation was bad deep in the earth, so he sought existing life closer to the surface, where the minerals blocked some of the harmful rays, and allowed for life to exist, even in its most minute of form.  Anathema’s spirit, his astral body, corroborated nematodes, microbes, and other microorganisms at an astounding rate.  It repeated the process of reinventing itself, losing some of its adaptations to an entirely new body,  but Anathema persisted where Thomas had not.

A minute passed, two minutes, and finally a palm ripped from the ground like a ghoul from the grave.  Anathema, fully Val’garan, pulled himself from Thomas and Jack’s tomb.  He pulled aspects of himself from beneath Allure city, and from the astral plane, protecting himself from the forced passing.

Agron, Thomas, and Jack, however, all found themselves in a poorly designed interrogation chamber.  Jack, now resembling the same slim, unassuming scientist from Moss Landing, stared back at the investigator.  The biologist hadn’t aged a day since the attack, even though it was nearly thirty years ago.  In fact, he wore the same out-of-style white button up, gray slacks, and black belt with loafers.  Though looking harried and scuffed up, he almost appeared as if he had just escaped from the assault on Monterey, right down to the perspiration which slicked his short dark hair.

“You really don’t recognize me?” He stated with barely contained, tremulous fury.

Though his body remained the same, his mind had been broken, over and over again, and it wasn’t until the psion girl released him from his prison did he have the means to communicate in such a manner.  Gone was the meek, shy, middle-class man from California, and though Thomas shouldn’t have been the full brunt of Jack’s fury, he still was.  Thomas was the authority.  Thomas was supposed to protect Jessica.  Thomas was supposed to protect Jack.  Thomas was supposed to protect everyone.  Thomas failed.  Not only did Thomas fail, but he BETRAYED his goal when he [i]killed[/i] Jessica.  Jack [i]hated[/i] Thomas for his betrayal, because in his irrational train of thought, Thomas was the reason Jack became a Val’gara in the first place.  Jack struggled to convey this into words.

“I call you a murderer because it’s what you are,” Jack said standing up and slamming his hands on the table, “you killed Jessica and you killed me!”

“You killed everyone in that city when you brought us here.  You dropped a bomb on everyone to kill what you thought was a single Val’gara.  You were wrong.  For the first time in ever, [i]I[/i] was in control, and you murdered the world because you’re some shit-head jock who thinks that if he’s not the center of goddamn existence then existence isn’t worth having!”

As Jack raged, a subtle blue aura began to whisp about his body, tongues and tendrils of barely perceptible mist licked the outline of his frame, like a near-invisible frame.  He jammed a finger towards Thomas and Agron, collectively, 

“Well guess-fucking what, Thomas.  [I]YOU’RE[/I] not worth happening, and the world would be better of if you never existed to begin with!”

[center]***[/center]

Odis was a curious creature indeed, with form-shifting abilities the Operative had never seen before.  His strategy was ineffective.  Odis, or Panident, shifted himself into a plasma matter state, but what he didn’t count on is that the architecture of the Discorporate building was specifically meant to endure radiative emissions of this nature.  Panident would win the battle of attrition, but a siege this was not.

As Odis attempted to radiate through the carbon nanotube, they shuttered and polarized, bouncing him within its walls, convecting him in the fusion process within.   Instead of searing light and burning pain, the citizens of Capital city witnessed, on a crystal clear day, a blackening of the upper portion of the tower.  The zenith of the edifice shifted as if it were a negative, and seemed to swallow light around it while emitting none, but visible by its distinct lack thereof.  A protective measure that not only saved many lives, but also secured data from Panident’s insidious corruption.

Little did the Operative know that the end result would be the same.  Only those who had been paying attention would notice the instantaneous shift in light and dark.  Calculating approximate time before critical mass was achieved while simultaneously enacting New Roswell’s quantum entanglement warp technology a complex procedure for many, but was a simple and dismissive as an entry-level technician closing a pop-up for the operative.

“[i]Goodbye,[/i]” the biocomputer thought to himself.

And the upper third of the tower vanished.  Somewhere, several hundred light years away, a new star would be born.

[i]--Payload AF138 Detonated -2.966309 x 40.069665[/i]

The operative regarded this literal earth-shattering news with casual disinterest, even while Iedereen fainted.  His immediate response was to restrict all satellite access.  The Allure official then, true to the information broker’s prediction, started listing all the resources he was sure Apollo would be happy to exploit.  He neither had use for such things, nor the authority to negotiate such terms.  He smacked his lips and made a watery sipping sound as he responded to her groveling.

“We’ll start with your scapegoat,”  and as if on cue, the building lost power.

[center]***[/center]

[i]New orders.  Directive: Merse. Spencer is no longer a concern, we have visual on Merse.  District Alpha, Coordinates 3232 encryption key beta.  You are clear to proceed we want target ALIVE. Over.[/i]

[i]A bit late to the party,[/i] Sarge thought to himself.

[i]“Boys, new directive.”[/i] Sarge projected, [i]“We got a bead on Merse, coordinates uploaded, they want him kickin’.”[/i]

A mental sigh of disgust came from lanky Dex,[i] “They’re the ones that gave us Overkill permission, and now they take it away?” 

“Things change.”[/i] Sarge grimaced under his mask as the group closed in on the studio.  He didn’t have to give Dex the order for him to put a lock on the “grid.”  Dex already had his backpack off a few feet away from the building and was ready to send bio-pulses feeding through the building.  This would knock out the power, probably not for long, but long enough.

Sarge scaled up near the top and gave Sweat a closed fist signal.  Sweat’s burly form emotionlessly watched Sarge from behind his mask, timing with his superior through a series of three hand signals, and upon the last one they smashed in with an unsolicited invasion upon an unsuspected neighbor.  Sarge dove forward, coming to a half roll while his auto-rifle was out, trained on Margaret, meanwhile Sweat, with speed that belied his bulky frame, was already upon the injured half-conscious Merse, gripping him in a sleeper and activating his beacon.

What Margaret probably saw was a blur of confusion as the operatives carried out a single fluid motion.  Upon their breach, the power to the building blacked out, punctuated with a curt goodbye from the Tech Operative.  As soon as the beacon was ignited, Dex, Sarge, Sweat, and Merse were all teleported to a secure location, leaving a very befuddled Ms. Iedereen.

[center]***[/center]

A team of five waited in the stark, clinical room.  The muted fluorescent lighting paired well with their hospital teals and bleached white attire.  They waited with all the anticipation of a close sporting event, staring at an empty landing.  A trio of three women shuffled up near the awaiting medical team.  By comparison their pinstriped slacks and button-downs seemed ostentatious to the faceless slates that accompanied them in the room.  In each of the three women’s arms they held a box containing all the paraphernalia they would need to hopefully keep their guest pristine and presentable.

The entire room held their breath, all hearing news of what had happened in Spain.  Alert procedures were in effect. One of the women, a well-coiffed individual glanced down at the cross hatched quadrants of the landing, then back up to the blank wall behind it.  Everyone simultaneously felt the tingle at the back of their necks that would throw them into a silent near-panic that heralded the arrival of their VIP.  They shuffled with their boxes, automated machinery pulling out brushes and assisting them with their routines.

The teleportation channels were never great for keeping a pristine appearance.  When Apollo apparated into the room with a flash of light and a pop, he immediately forged briskly forward through the care of his attendants who did their best to keep up with him.  He looked for someone important--more important, rather.  A uniformed soldier stood just outside the door as the medical team slunk back into the room.

“You’d better have something good.” Apollo demanded tersely, as one of the make up artists touched up the tachyon frays to his hair, brushed his attire without impeding his movement.  Consummate professionals, but nothing less could be expected.

The Colonel didn’t miss a beat, “We do,” he replied, unflinchingly, as he shifted the dossier in his arms, “sector 32a.  It’s a class 12 entity from Soran space.”

Apollo didn’t deign him with a response.  The Colonel continued, metering his time.  He had about twelve seconds to finish his report before they entered the briefing room and his clearance capped out.

“It calls itself ‘God’, but it’s anything but.  We’ve appropriated it ‘Armstrong’ due to its nature, an interdimensional titan that we’ve been studying to improve our teleportation technology.”

Apollo glared at him, sidelong, “ I [i]know[/i] what a [i]Class 12[/i] is.”

The composed Colonel could feel heat on the back of his neck, and his features flushed.  “Yes, well, it attacked Soran, and another entity we have not yet identified repelled the titan, we believe the unknown is responsible for the assault on your office.”

“Dig deeper, Colonel,” Apollo commanded as a team of soldiers flung open a pair of double doors into a ready room filled with important military figures, dignitaries, and other high-ranking officials.

The doors shut behind him and he pushed his palms onto the granite surface of the countertop.  “Gentlemen,” he grimaced, “tell me what the [i]fuck[/i] is going on out there.”

A dignitary with a ghostly combover cleared his throat and bore the burden of the eye of sauron.  The official was known for his canny ability to throw military commanders under the bus and not mince words.  

“Since you arrived we’ve had [i]another[/i] security breach.” He rolled an accusing glare at the dour bulldog faced General that sat across from him, who immediately took the reigns of the conversation.

“General Heinzemann is KIA.  In the confusion a rogue agent--”

“Rogue agent?”  Apollo clenched is teeth.  

“Yes, Agent Alice authorized a C21 orbital drop in Allure.”

Apollo’s bloodshot eyes widened, staring through the general. “...what.  She dropped an antimatter nuke… on… EARTH?”

“At the beck of Balvice, our transmissions show.”

The president exhaled sharply through his nostrils as he stared at the patterns in the stonework, shaking his head with near imperceptibility.  “Our best soldiers, panicking like novices.”

His disappointment blossomed as he looked up from his hunched position, sweeping his gaze over all of them as he shook his head, this time his disapproval far more noticeable.  “You have contact with the landmass’s leadership.  You will forge the terms of their surrender.”

He turned and as he began to storm out of the room he yelled over his shoulder, “And get me Thomas and Alice we have much to reconcile for.”

[center]***[/center]

The S.3451 cluster had long since been an active cluster, and from an observable distance a quasar erupted for millenia past its rose-ringed perimeter, disrupting the ivory center mass that hid the presence of the supermassive black hole that caused its rampage.  This explosion traveled for millions upon millions of light years, observable to no one.  Its overwhelming burst of 1040 watts of energy raged through the still silence of space, a blinding beacon of luminosity that sailed through an ocean of black

Just as the galactic engine changed civilizations, shattering some and uplifting others, just as it changed worlds, as it changed ecosystems, and life, so too did it change space, itself. Entering into a supermassive black hole on the other side of the universe this beam changed the properties of the collapsed star, and caused an eruption at the heart of S.3451 far to the other side of the universe.  The unobservable nucleus of the universe soon expanded to a white hole, pouring space and defying conventional physics with mysterious mysticism.

This limb of the galactic engine transcended the scope of the mechanism.  Now, a universal engine, the beam shot from the supermassive white whole and piggybacked off the nearby erupting sister celestial body, APM 04158.  The beam moved with quantum celerity, traversing the entire distance of the constant stream of connected photons to their culmination--the center of reality, the nexus of all things, the Fault.  Though the photons dispersed through the Faults chaotic energies and overwhelming entropy, the beam did not, it adapted, changed, and reconstituted as it was meant to.  The beam radiated out into a wave, expanding for any exit that was possible, and there was but one.  Tracing along residual energies and wiped-out vortices that had expelled a prisoner whose psychic malign to this day flavored the void, the wave burst through a rift that emitted the wave into real space.

The galactic wave washed forward immediately into a nebula of ice crystals that honed it, bouncing it about and heating the cloud up until cornflower blue flashes of light erupted from its hazing guts like a storm buried in an ominous cloud cover.  The beam emerged from the cloud, a honed ray, razor-thin and moving with that previous quantum celerity, riding photons of other long-dead stars, until it reached its final destination.  A homely aquamarine planet dusted with clouds of white… The planet Earth.

As the beam projected down through the planet's atmosphere, passing by the post-exosphere nanite prison that encompassed Panident, it rocked F67X’s technological infrastructure.  The satellite array went down, for but a moment before automation rebooted it, and even the connected New Roswell Operative could feel the power it ushered forth.  The beam lasered down into the center of Allure City, and though its diameter only encompassed a few blocks, its impact would leave a mark on Allure and the rest of Earth for years to come.

The city quaked as the ray blasted down into the center, disseminating concrete, exploding outwards into surrounding buildings, and at its epicenter a figure who bore the full evolutive brunt of Ua’s design.  Far below the city the planet’s tectonic plates shifted, and a tsunami the scale F67X had never seen.

The navy wave that emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea was less a tidal wave and more a massive swell.  As the african and eurasian plates ground, the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault suddenly crushed upwards into a full scale mountain range,that consumed the Strait of Gibraltar, and much of the Alboran Sea.  What part of the swell managed to push into Africa would luckily be received by the uninhabitable zone and the Glasslands.  

When the barrier re established itself, the remainder of the wave crept up its side like an amoeba swallowing bacteria.  This would push New Roswell’s technology past capacity, and though the field diverted the flow of water back towards the mountain range, when it failed, the rains would bless Africa with great havoc that couldn’t be stopped by a hundred men or more.

While Africa would persevere, the Iberian peninsula was a far smaller landmass Portugal, Allure City, France, and Italy were in great danger.

[center]***[/center]

If Max didn’t have enough to think about during his time within himself (his mission, and the strange sword that randomly shot through the stratosphere nearly impaling him) fate decided to throw another twist his direction. He didn’t recognize the comm the guest connected to him through, but he recognized the name.  He picture his trainer frowning at him from New Roswell, the woman having a lecture chambered, hammer cocked on voice modulators and encryption hackers.  But logic was ever the enemy of his instincts.  Sadly his gut won out more than it should.  

[i]You’re kidding me.[/i]  He thought with surprise, more that Tristan was alive, and less by the misnomer.  Tristan never could get his codename right.

[i]“Operative 2232, Callsign Mobius.  Yes, Singh, this is Lionheart.”[/i]  A million questions flooded into his head, and out through his commlink.  [i]“What happened? How did you get here?”[/i] He gave a palpable pause, maybe ever enough time for Tristan to respond, but cut him off, “[i]I’m detecting another presence accompanying you… and--[/i]”

One of the orbiting satellites also had input in their conversation.  The two of them could likely detect the power spike just moments before it fired, authorization codes spilling through their network in the second largest breach of Op security in the history of the organization.  A beryl glow accreted around the spires numerous bristling awns, and crackles of bioforce and electricity skipped to the apex.  Less than a second later a stream of the same blue pined down towards the planet somewhere on the iberian peninsula.

Max had caught the authorization codes, and if Tristan was on the Mobius network--as his communication with Lionheart suggested, so did he.  Alice, and if Alice was involved with the nuke’s launch, so was Balvice.

[i]Thomas, you idiot.[/i] He snarled.

[i]“We’ll have to table this conversation, Singh.  Damage control.  Could use your help.”[/i]

Max shot down towards the planet at a speed only the most powerful of F67X’s machines could muster.  The fact alone that he [i]flew[/i] probably wasn’t enough to surprise the other Operative, but the speed at which he did was enough to convince any witnesses there was something decidedly different about Max.  As he passed through the sundered cloud cover he had less than a second to view the chaos of the surrounding city.  Anarchy reigned supreme as the the combined european military, ghost ops own forces, and other fast-acting contractors spilled in filling the streets with blood and violence.  Xelas kicked his brain into overgear, and he comprehended the individual operations occurring. 

He didn’t care.  From orbit Max cleared the comparably small hole Merse created in the ground, and that Jacknathema and Thomas had swan dove into.  As arcane markings burned into the flesh of his temples, his eyes glowed red, and with that he could see the residual energies Thomas left over when Alice tampered with his psi-disruptor. He and the other entity were tightly intertwined, and time wasn’t really on Max’s side.  It would have to do.  As he plummeted towards the mantle, he reached out and saw these energies coalescing into a rift. Xelas honed in on Thomas and Thomas [i]alone[/i]’s essence. When Max breached the rift he was able to veritably chokeslam Thomas from whatever spirit world he inhabited to the material plane, cutting his interview short.

Spindly legs of silver shot out from Max’s back and pools of silver covered his flesh as the temperature became unbearable.  These multi-jointed spider legs slammed into the sides of the burrow, even as the silver sheen boiled from the planets heat.  ANITA surged with too many different warnings for Max to count, and Xelas didn’t play well with the AI as far as interpreting her desires to the operative.  The legs bowed and bent like an elastic slingshot before they snapped the composite being and spirit-Thomas up and out of the hole.

As Max cleared the pit’s edge he slung Thomas forth, with the strength to send the wisp blocks of distance away were he a physical thing.  Xelas doubled down on his desire to protect and save and coated this ghost in a silver exterior, giving its trajectory very corporeal consequences as it smashed through building after building.  This cocoon of Xelas would nearly impact Goldman, (and even its wake sent a wave of debris towards the metal man that threatened to shred him apart.)  Regardless of the the humanoid of precious metal’s response.  The cocoon came to a stop, and after a few moments fragmented with a very real, fleshly body encapsulated within.

Back at ground zero Max landed upon palm, knee, and foot.  Then took the half-second of downtime to survey the chaos of his surroundings.  He shook his head, disgusted, but took a small chunk of solace in the fact that he thought he might of saved Balvice, at least.

“Crisis averted.” He exhaled.

In his adrenaline spiked rush, Max had ignored ANITA, an issue which had frequently caused himself problems in the past.  He also didn’t hear the warnings of Gennosuke, nor the swearing of Forge, or the urgings of Xelas.  He’d tunnel visioned, and by the time he realized what had happened it was too late.  This branch of the galactic engine had met its mark.

In the center of Allure city.