There's always something that Nero isn't telling you, always something he keeps to himself. It's how he does things. If it isn't important or it's something he can handle, he doesn't really mention it. Let's walk you through, shall we?
We'll start with him testing out the fullness of his magic out, namely the abilities that nobody really knew that he had. Oh, the things he could do with everyone in the galaxy none the wiser! He'd set The Black Spot on Crowley from Squad 0 and was rewarded with the general sensation of what direction he was in, and a vague-but-present sense of his distance. The power could give at least this much on any target he so desired, no fail. It was only vaguely helpful on a galactic scale, much more useful if you were on the same planet, and as effective as a tracking bug if you were in the same general area. Nero got that, and then proceeded to test his Necro-Blade on an empty box in the cargo bay of the Xuanzang. Let's just face it - he spent a fair amount of time there messing about, if he wasn't in his room or wandering the ductwork or something. Much was the young assassin's amusement to watch the cut from the Necro-Blade expand in degradation until the cardboard had disintegrated. It stayed limited to the box in question, which was good, and provided a short while of entertainment. That, however, was when he noticed a sensation that made him sit upright and blink. It was a familiar feeling, one that fed back the sensation of the Black Spot on him and-
"Aw crap! Cancel, cancel, cancel!"
Nobody was aware of any of this, and his mood was still a bit too high off of himself to get mad, so it became more of a 'Whoops! Guess I chose the wrong guy!' thing after the initial shock. They might get a little information out of that, but no harm done...probably. Nero had gone for his stash after that, trying not to think about the incident, and had been snacking and drinking with Laurey in the kitchen area when she brought up the matter of the regularly-scheduled toxin-scrub that rushes through the ductwork and that she was aware of his presence in them, at times. He was inwardly mad about the risk he'd been apparently subjectign himself to each time, but the irritation was fueled by the early screw-up and it made 'im feel like he was getting sloppy. This immediately got turned on its head, though, when Laurey made a stunning confession: She couldn't fight to save her life. So, he ended up starting up some training with her to throw a decent punch, kick people where it hurts, knock people off-balance, etc. It was fun, and it took his mind off of the fuck-ups he'd performed as of late.
He did a fair amount of footwork because he insisted that Laurey work on a REAL target, which is to say one that could move and duck and weave. It wasn't that hard to avoid someone that hadn't really been in a fight before when he was a seasoned veteran, but afterwards, he'd obviously exerted himself a while, so he'd decided to sleep as they headed off to the Galactic Bazaar. Nero hadn't been awake when he received the call, so naturally there'd been a bit of groggginess about him when he looked at the message. And hey, taking a food crawler to a place to buy some music? Why the hell not? Hopefully, this time, they could get down to business without being attacked by another crawler and- Ah, who are we kidding here? Nero definitely wanted another chance at such a fight! No such occurrance, of course. No, this was definitely more chill, and as they were in the music store, the only real surprise was seeing a familiar cyborg from the battlefront that he could hardly mistake. No harm there, for sure, and by the time we reach this point, all fuck-ups forgotten and no worries. He even forgot that Laurey apparently had NO headaches now, even though that was clearly something she'd often had. Something strange...but then she was strange. Ah well.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Now...
He stepped out of the music store.
"Later, guys! I'm gonna go find me a chainsaw!"
Avelyn had him pegged about what he'd put on a mech, no question. Not that it was a bad thing. He had certain tastes that were naturally influenced by his training, but then that was similarly-influenced by him being him. Maybe you're wondering just what the hell he did to those Ascendancy people back when he was 'recruited'. Well, try to imagine a Home Alone situation in which Macaulay Culkin isn't just out to injure the Wet Bandits, but outright kill them. It doesn't exactly work because they're in armored uniforms and he's still a kid, but the injuries incurred with things full of nails, random chemicals smeared all over stuff, his cutthroat attacks when they were distracted - you can imagine why the Ascendancy soldiers HATED him. It was kind of ironic that now that he was essentially a free mercenary that he was in a better mood now than any time in his youth. He was making a mental list of all the things he needed, all while carrying a tied-up box of laserdiscs he'd gotten from the music store.
Let's see, first a chainsaw, then new snacks, and then-
"Heppy Birthday."
"Eh?"
That was his Omnitool. It spoke up, out of the blue. He looked at it now.
"The fuck you going on about?"
"You are sixteen years of age at this time."
"What? Come on, there's nothing on file with that info. I don't even know when I was born."
"Bio-scans have been able to determine the exact age of this user's body. You are sixteen. Why not throw a party with friends and loved ones?"
"Ehh, I dunno... Never really celebrated that sorta' thing."
"That is sad. One moment. Now playing some complementary upbeat music in close match to your recent purchases."
There was a pause from the machine, and then it began to play...uhh what?
Was it trying to...cheer him up?
'Once all this is over, why don’t you buy a farm, as well as settle down with the...partner of your choice?'
Dammit, you and Flame... Okay, you get to stay on.
And so, with this playing, Nero headed off in search of the right kind of tool place to gain his coveted chainsaw. His Omnitool managed to point him in a direction, and now all he had to do was make his way around all the people without dropping or damaging the package in his hands. Laserdiscs were a bit fragile, and even the sturdiness of the box wouldn't protect them from everything. Nearest crawler was too crowded, so he was out walkin'. No big deal. He had a natural grace that'd be hard for Finbarr's cat-form to keep up. Well...that is until he found himself bumping into a trio of toughs, humans who looked like they had nothing better to do than grift and steal. There wasn't NO crime on this station, after all. Naturally, the leader was pissed.
"Watch where you're going, runt! Made me drop my cigarette... Well, you gonna apologize or what?"
"Hey, you're the taller one. You should watch out."
"That ain't how it works, kid. I'm large and in charge, so you fall in line."
"Oh, fuck off with that shit, dick-brain."
"What'd you call me?!"
He and his best mates approached him and started throwing punches. Nero was about to school them when he suddenly remembered what he was carrying and avoided strikes while looking the package out of reach, slipping in between the bastards as they kept trying to land a punch. Okay, they were better than Laurey when she started out - not as awkward - but he was getting them to friendly-fire one another, here and there, and then cloaked himself to merge with one of their shadows.
"What the fuck- Fan out and get that kid! I want 'im in a broken mess when we're done with 'im!"
They all took off in different directions. Once one of them was close-ish to the store he needed to get to, Nero slipped out and you'd see this package on the back of some shadowy animal - A grumpy-looking cat? - amble on into the store before changing back to him again, where the clerk was a little surprised, but he was a Korta who'd seen some shit in his time, so he wasn't too put out, especially since Nero was a potential customer with money to burn. He told that he wanted a chainsaw, a chainsaw that could saw so much that other chainsaws killed themselves with jealousy.
"I want a chainsaw that fucks shit up, lasts a good long time, and isn't a pain to carry, 'cause I still got shit to do today."
"Would sir prefer that I just send the item to his ship direct? There is only a small surcharge fee-"
"A what? You mean you guys deliver?"
"Why, yes. Everyone on this station delivers. It allows customers to keep shopping to their heart's content."
"Well, shit. They didn't tell me that before. Maybe I ran out too quickly... Yeah, this'll be sent to the Xuanzang, and do me a favor: Send this package too, alright?"
"Will do."
Nero ended up buying the Jaws-of-Slice Super-Cutter with self-sharpening chainsaw, a device shown to cut through pretty much all but tough alloys that was also able to collapse the chain section into the main chassis for easier transport. Comes with spare chains, cleaning kit, and decent warranty. Nero wasn't allowed to try it out there in the store, but he was happy, and as the Korta was in back sending off his items...the grifters found him.
"Alright, kid. Nowhere to run!"
They all charged him and...well...he just grinned and took them apart! No knives or anything dangerous. He just dodged them - kicking, punching, and flipping them so they'd end up on the ground in pain. He'd cracked some joints and ribs, and got a satisfying breaking of jaws on top of that! Nero stood amidst the mess they were now on the ground and smirked before wandering off.
The great silver-white void stood silently rushing, activity juxtaposed with utter stillness, as metallic bands of all things historical swirled around a great center. These were events in history, all moving at great speed, all entwined, always and forever...or sometimes never. The area was vast, perhaps infinite in set, and all centered around what to many who could see would describe as a dense planetoid of shiting crystal, eternal white marble, and an unknown assortment of metals. Many travelers will have seen some interpretation of it. It often changes according to the user. You might call it the Vortex, the Axis, The Fourth Dimension, or even Yog-Sothoth. To those that visited it most, however, this was the center. This was all.
This was Axial Time.
Hovering in meditation, the female figure sat with eyes closed and in heavy concentration. It was - oddly enough - a young lady who only recently reached adulthood, but then...this is how they all were, in general. She herself was dressed a bit like Obi Wan Kenobi, for her interpretation of the power had been a bit like The Force. It was all in the mind and how it flowed through you. To that end, she used it to see through time and possibility with greater ease than all of her counterparts. Right now, she was focused on one, just one.
Come on, Raimi... Your whole life has been leading up to this. Take him down!
Every version of them were called Mirai Saito, but one - just one, who had been on quite the journey before they ever met - set herself apart from the others by instead taking the name 'Raimi', an anagram of her birth name. There was something special about her, either brought forth by her history or simply something that had always been there. That was important, in this case, because if she did not rise up to the occasion, her enemy would destroy her world and travel through the galaxy to make it burn. That's what she was up against in there, a foe whose powers would eventually grow to destroy entire worlds...
Normally, this area was known for its calm and serene atmosphere, but not today! It'd been a miracle to keep him out of the heavily-populated areas. She stood ready for the next onslaught. He could do anything, anything at all, so long as it was flushed through the chaotic cascade of a wild molecular disruption. They were surrounded by rubble, a young lady in black with a metallic helmet and clawed gauntlets and a young man in a bluish combat suit with an orange emblem of a supernova in the chest. He wore a mask - a spiked and stylish sort of thing with flare-compensation in the lenses, like her own - but she knew him...or thought she did.
Once, in another lifetime, there had been a Brit-born young man by the name of Allen Forscythe, the unfortunate son of a villain and a woman taken and manipulated by said villain. She had given birth to a well-adjusted boy who rejected his father and was aided by his uncle - an alchemist - to escape the country and lie low in Japan. But that was in another world, in many worlds. Not hers. No no... Her world had to be special, where many of the heroes and villains were inverted! The boy's father, Baron Von Madness, was Baron Von Mentalist here, a philanthropic wonder. Instead, it was the uncle - the self-styled Master of Change - who was corrupt. Raimi had defeated him recently, but like any mad scientist, the man had one last ace up his sleeve. It was the ace she'd been dreading and preparing for ever since she'd heard the name, years ago.
Cobalt Thorium G.
It was a name out of Dr. Strangelove, the war satire, for an element in the Doomsday Device which spelt the end for all humanity. The Master of Change was a self-styled alchemist like his counterparts. He produced potions and chemical explosives, horrible mutants and shapeshifting homunculi. He had taken Allen's natural gift and amped it up, and he had altered Allen's mind as well. In all other worlds, he was a nice guy. Even this one, apparently, but now...
"Oh, not long nooowww..."
The lenses burst on his mask as the energy surged and rippled around him. They had been fighting and, to her credit, she had wounded him more than he had hurt her. He'd kicked her in the face when she tore at his chest. She'd avoided several attacks and slammed him through portals. However, he was good at ignoring pain and he'd sealed all of the wounds, even taken some of the oomph from her own moves with a trick he called 'Unchaos', sucking out the energy potential for chaos and change from a given area to fuel himself. He was preparing to unleash ALOT of his power now, though. Allen had made lightning and fire tendrils, hellish maws open from the ground, created freak tornadoes, and now he was preparing to blow up the whole Prefecture in one blast. Raimi gritted her teeth.
"Alright, you asked for this. TEMPUS FU-"
No, not that one!!
The voice was her own, inside of her head, but it wasn't really hers. It was the one who watched, Oracle. She had been offering moral support or guidance where her combat expertise was limited, but now she was shouting in her head, and it was too late! Tempus Fury was an attack she made up. It was a distorted and disjointed time field that she'd used to tear opponents asunder in the worst way or - when stable - actually reverse time in that area. She was planning to invert everything in on Cobalt Thorium G, but apparently...that was a bad idea.
Allen didn't shift into distorted madness. Everything did. In an instant, the dimensions were out of control as time and space threw a wibbly-wobbly FIT that cascaded in all places! The effects...well...they'd be far-reaching, to say the least.
It did not matter what it was called before. It did not matter that the people still called it Los Angeles. All that mattered was what HE said now, because this...was Zen's World now. He was the word and the law. The people conformed to the rule of law absolutely, or they were processed so that they would comply. We take you now to a line that extends outside of a supermarket, where a man looking right miserable and angry was standing in line. Standing there, that is, until the machine walked over to him. It was a humanoid android armored in blue-black armor. It came installed with a thruster pack on its back and compact engine-wings to guide its flight. It had five-digit hands, stood approximately seven feet tall, and had three large eyes situated side-by-side on a streamlined head designed to reduce air-resistance. This android was Zen. They were all Zen, as Zen was short for Zenigawa Enforcement Network, a great and self-sufficient system built by the altruistic Dr. Zenigawa before his death, wishing only peace and security across the globe. The enforcer unit addressed the man in a deep mechanized tone.
"Citizen John Harrison, you have been correctly identified as a Lawbreaker. Step out of line."
"What? N-no, I haven't done anything! It's bullshit! I've done nothing of the kind!"
"You are a food thief. Food theft normally carries a fine and reduction of comfort, but due to the resistance to Law in this area, food allocation is limited per capita in order to ensure that all persons are fed equally, and therefore the punishment is more severe."
"You collapsed the industry after promising not to harm free enterprise! Of course there's resistance!"
"The heads of those food industries, with small exception, were corrupt. They were arrested for their crimes and the infrastructure was taken over by Zen until replacements could be found. Your complaint is irrelevent. You have stolen and are also under arrest."
He started backing away from the thing in fear.
"You can't do this...! My family will starve without me!"
"They will not. A Lawkeeper will make your deliveries on time, every time. Your family will not suffer, but you will ALL comply with the Law."
"Those hideous things?! They're not human!"
The machine closed the distance and grabbed him by the wrist.
"They ARE human, and you will become one if you continue to resist."
"Someone, help! Don't let 'im take me, please!"
He strained against the android's grip, trying to pull free from its grip with little avail. Zen raised his other hand in order to stun the man completely. It was at this time, however, that the area suddenly rippled and shifted wildly, severe shudders and quakes shaking the entire area, the entire world! An alarm sounded, followed by an announcement over the city intercom system.
-ALL POINTS COORDINATE. ALL POINTS COORDINATE. TIMEQUAKE IN EFFECT. LAWBREAKER-ONE HAS BEEN DETECTED.-
The quake was both temporal AND spatio, the force of two powers colliding and blasting out through dimensions, not the physical area. It was creating...quite a mess, and the results were far-reaching in several different ways. Way down underground, about a mile down from a house built in secret to kill anyone who entered in terrible nasty ways, there was a man. He was a strange sort of fellow with a somewhat classy attire. Vest over shirt, loose overcoat over vest, top hat on head, a face and hair like a grand Irish Noble, and a long-handled scepter that appeared to have the headpiece of a bronzed rubber ducky. There were numerous details about the man to go into, but suffice it to say, this was Baron Von Madness. Right off the bat, knowing that in various timelines there were many such men of madness, and so therefore you might be inclined to ask which one this guy was. Well...first of all, it wasn't Baron Von Mentalist, sadly. This was The Madness, and unfortunately, he was about to get company.
POP!
"Hello, world!"
"Nyaaah!"
The Baron was suddenly visited upon by...The Baron! As a result, he lost at the game he was playing. The Second Baron was wearing a bizarre metallic harness device that was now cycling down its power cells. The Original Baron glared up at him now, quite irritated with his surprise counterpart.
"You couldn't have waited five minutes to do...whatever you just did to get here?"
"You mean, built a time-displacement harness after extensive study of that irritating girl and kidnapping some damn fine technicians?"
"Yes!"
"Well...maybe, but the fact is that someone was going to do it, because the fissure is pretty bad right now, and that means we're going to be showing up all over the place!"
The Quake in the World had been felt by them all, from the lowest acolyte, to the highest overlord. The watched as time and space altered on a whim, and knew that their fabled quarry could be reached. Time it would take and time it was all about, but for the power and the glory and the mastery, all was worth bleeding and sacrificing for.
Seated atop his platinum throne within his might citadel, the Hax did grin as he put forth the calculation. His expertise would see him through the distortion, faster than all the others and with no competition beheld. For he was the master of blood and tech and code, and he too had some experience with time. The Hellatics would surely follow in his wake, but they would be far too lacking and far too late...
It was both a heavy impact physically and energetically. Some of the power released would naturally act in shockwave force and explosive release. It was centered at a construction site for a new mid-range office building in Gotham City, which would...now have to be cleared up and started again. Girders and all kinds of debris lay around them, the dust reaching up to great heights. Amidst the center, which was actually clear, lay the figures of the Timekiller (Raimi Saito) and Cobalt Thorium G (Allen Forscythe), both of whom were regaining their senses. Allen was a bit quicker to his feet, though.
"Okay, good for a warm-up, but now...hmm?"
Eh heh...heh heh heh... Oh dear. He was pretty much out of juice, now. A little to get by on, as it generated now, but wow, what a ride! He turned to ask what the hell Raimi did to him, but suddenly had to duck back as she tried to claw his face off, suddenly! She was a little unsteady, but getting her feet underneath her now.
"Guess it didn't all happen according to plan, did it?"
"Plan? What plan? I don't have a plan. Blam is the plam. I mean, plan."
"Heh...and now you're all tapped out."
"Yeah? So are you."
Unfortunately, he was right. Her hair had a tendancy to spike in back when she had a temporal charge, but right now it was smooth. She was empty. That said, she had enough fighting experience to-
"Unchaos."
What? Oh shit, no no no no!
Too late. There was a ripple-wave that pulled into him from fifty feet in all directions. Dust fell to the ground in a heap, pieces that had still been rattling ceased immediately, and Allen's eyes started to glow again...before he swept himself up in a quick personal whirlwind to rise up WAY out of reach as he shouted "Leaving now! Buh-bye!"! Even her grappling gun failed here. Swearing to herself, she reeled it in and made her way out of the collapsed uhhh...everything, climbing over or under until..
"FREEZE!"
...until the police shouted at her! Wait...that was in English, these people didn't look like Japanese police. Where was she? Raimi decided to uhh, step back, and the cop on the megaphone shouted "WE HAVE THE AREA SURROUNDED! DROP YOUR WEAPON, PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD, AND SURRENDER NOW!". Weapon? Oh, right... She was still holding onto the grapple gun. Well then...this was where she threw a flashbang out at them and fired a hook at one of the nearby buildings!
She swung out of reach, but even still recovering from the flash, several of them opened fire while others were taking to their cars. Raimi got up high, disengaged the hook, launched to another building, and repeated to keep ahead of anyone with a decent rifle. Not gonna get away from them like this, though. Not that easily, anyway. I mean, it's broad daylight and she had NO IDEA what was going on! How'd she get to an American city?! How was she gonna catch Allen now?!
Ping!
Maaaybe now wasn't the time to ask that. She had to lose these guys. Raimi suddenly dropped down on a car that was ahead of the police, took hold of the roof, and shoved her masked face down against the windshield with a devilish grin. The driver went "FUCK!!", hit the brakes and swerved, she went flying, and - most importantly, the police in pursuit began to crash into him and each other, Blues Brothers style! Raimi ended up tucking and rolling, then running for a nearby alley. It was one of those alleyways that had a manhole cover in it. Perfect! She'd used her claws to pull the lids up plenty of times! When the cops rushed into the alley, they'd find the lid just a little bit ajar. They reported her having possibly gone into the sewer. Meanwhile, her grapple gun had taken her to the roof of the building there. Snickering, she let them do as they pleased, getting the hell out of the area while keeping watch for helicopters. No sign of Allen... No idea where she was, or if this really was the United States or just ANY English-speaking town. I mean, she could speak the language, but...ah, she needed time to think... This...this was gonna take some time. Real time, not funny hah-hah I'm-a-time-traveler time.
Name: Mirai Raimi Saito Hero Name: Timekiller Known Aliases: She doesn't really take to aliases, because there's alot of alternate versions of her that have those names. Age: Physically, 18. Chronologically, 26.
Powers:
Axial Time - To understand the mechanics of her abilities, it is first important to explain the center source of it all, Axial Time. Mirai and Raimi are based partially in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Marvel's own Axis of Time, among other things. (You might've seen the Axis when Apocalypse tried to ursurp all of time and space in X-Men.) The very idea is that she would discover the ability to leap into a space that contains all of history concurrently in a swirling mass that can be navigated, and thus she decides to use it to fight crime. She exists with time and outside of it. That is, her mind and body can safely time travel and perceive how to do it unaided, to use the powers of Axial Time without weird stuff happening to her...much. Axial Time is a mass of pretty much infinite lines of history with all kinds of potential. The nearest layer of it is the local time of past, present, and future. The next layers stretch further in either direction, to the point where she could potentially reach either extreme...but has never dared try. Raimi especially hates actual historical travel because she's been to places by accident. It isn't fun. She and her counterparts all prefer to stick locally. The Center of Axial Time itself is a dense semi-crystaline planetoid which has a 'pull' to it that will start to draw in anyone unable to move through time towards it. This is where all the temporal energy comes from or is going. This is where all manner of paradox and crap exists. To perceive this place without some kind of adaptive ability, experience in dealing with time, or protection of some sort will soon overtax the mind as loads of information is dumped into your brain and you pass out or start to lose it. Even the swirling ribbons of history is too much to take in at once. Axial Time is also the gateway to all parallel universes and dimensions, including worlds not your own. There have been some mishaps, stuff that would make you go "GREAT SCOTT!" and "This is heavy...". Raimi's normal powers usually do not operate in Axial Time because time is not flowing in the same sense as in history. It exists durationally, but you can't generally manipulate fields of time here because what you're using time for in this place is perception and navigation. Instances of breaking this rule do apply...usually when something has gone WRONG.
Normal State - Raimi (and every instance of Mirai) is a temporally-charged individual. Starting from a young age, she began to soak up unusual forces which are related to time. She is a rechargeable battery. If she doesn't have the energy RIGHT NOW, just wait a bit. It'll come back to her. She has decent capacity, though, so running out would require mainly a really-exhausting sort of event. I mean, really. Still, at her basics, Raimi has the ability to open portals in time. These are apertures, usually short-lived, that are roughly person-sized, but they have been known to get larger if needed to accommodate...various things. She has control over that, as well as sustaining their opening, through mental concentration. Once she has gone into a portal, she is outside of time by any standard other than durationally. That is, there is a passage of time when in Axial Time, but not a history. Instances of herself are passing through these portals all the time, but they are essentially in the background unless she actually needs them, and then things get interesting. Firstly, Raimi can appear from a portal at any time or place by leaving one point, moving through Axial Time, and appearing in another, having done the legwork temporally-speaking to get a leg up on you in normal time. A Hound of Tindalos works similarly. They're taking shortcuts. Point is, she can move from Point A to Point B, where Point B might even have been before Point A, which can cause multiple instances of Raimi to suddenly gang up on you. This all costs energy and stamina to do, but as long as she can pay it, Raimi can DO IT. Tends not to gather more than half a dozen of her own self to prevent confusion and over-exhaustion. Has done at least twenty when she really had the need. She borrows them from herself before sending them on their way. The last in the line usually ends up pretty tired if it's been a rough day. Anyway, this portalling has also transported objects and people, though any living thing attempting to perceive Axial Time in transition will get overwhelmed by the information overload.
Merged State - Raimi Saito and all other versions of her exist as an anti-paradox, naturally stabilizing time as it flows through them, delivering the energy and the ability to alter events IN time. When she activates her powers, history doesn't kill itself because her stream is expanding into a pond where things swim around in possibility before returning to a normal flow. Her instances are fish who have power over how they move about as the water flows around them. The reason for this is because her normal state is just a by-product of how her actual power works. It's a means to get there that just happens to be very useful. Raimi's true power is manipulating time physically, or rather durationally, as in the speed-up and slow-down of time. Two instances of herself meet and merge with one another, suddenly. All other instances present vanish in a phenomenon she calls Temporal Ghosting, where the possibility of those versions doing what they're doing has been locked off and they cease to be in this point in time, instead being back at whenever they were before. Portal travel is impossible in this state, because all the energy is now being altered via mentally-directed time fields in a local area. It requires that Raimi has some awareness of what she's doing, and where and how and so on, so that it can be focused on. Seeing or hearing is best. Having working knowledge of it is okay. Not being aware of the thing makes it impossible fo focus on. She can't stop something she doesn't know about. Any person who can adapt physically or somehow predict or has some power that can work themselves around time or has time powers themselves can fight against the effects of temporal fields. If not, though, she might just Viewtiful Joe you. Slow down time to create an opening, speed up her own time to beat the shit out of you, and so on. Time fields have a speed-up and slow-down effect that can ignore normal uses of gravity or increase the impact of something to the point of instant shockwaves. You have to be really careful about it. It can be...a real mess. Fortunately, fortunately, she has been able to clean up her messes, to the point where she can actually cause a localized reversal of physical events (or a messy destruction of events) with a move she dubs Tempus Fury.
Equipment:
Timekiller Suit - Different versions of her have different suits. They and their equipment load-outs have varied, to a point. The actual look of the suit will be handled in Appearance. Here's function. Raimi's suit is padded to absorb impact, often rated to a low-profile body armor. She isn't physically stupendous. She uses her powers to give herself more impact. She's wearing composite-toed boots, as well, though there are two parts of her actual suit that are metal with insulation on the inside. The first is her helmet. It's over most of her face, so you only see her mouth, with two red eye openings. There are lenses and such in there to adapt to changes in light, and her ears are generally protected on top of that, for some very good reasons. There is also a transmitter device installed by one of her other selves that boosts the frequency of her mental waves to allow for communication. That one'll make sense later. Anyway, the second metal thing is her clawed gauntlets. Raimi is the Timekiller because she's the tougher version of all the others that is willing to do some pretty dark things, including kill. More on this later. These are indeed metal gauntlets up to the wrist, with fingers ending in forged claws. They have built-in taser/stun-gun devices to add a decent zap to her hand-to-hand strikes.
Utility Belt - Plenty of heroes have them. Raimi did it because she likes Batman. Once upon a time, though, she worked with outright explosives. It was a...different time. Now, having been set straight, her usual stock is in flashbangs and smoke bombs. They make it easier to get out of a situation and create confusion. More to the point, their effects or even just tossing them can have very unusual effects when going through a time field. She also carries some basic medical stuff to treat herself in the field, which is handy in case of...ouch. Apart from that, the only other noted equipment is actually the pair of emergency knives stashed in her boots and a grappling gun in case someone turns off her powers while she's suspended twenty stories in mid-air. You need to have a back-up plan to get out of things.
Appearance:
Let's start with the basics. Raimi Saito is an athletic tomboy, by nature and by necessity. All versions of her tend to be physically active in general, but she definitely trained herself to be fairly well-toned. Her skin is light, her nationality is Japanese, and her height is pretty average. Other physical traits are a bit less so. For one, her eyes are violet, and they tend to glow alight when in heavy use of her powers, though she's usually masked when this occurs. The other thing is about her hair. Normally - or maybe originally is the better word - she has straight black hair reaching down to her neck, a few bangs up front, no big deal. When she started to hold a temporal charge, though, that all changed. Upon having any amount of time energy in her, and especially when her powers are in use, Raimi's hair goes spiky in back while the rest of it remains fairly smooth. It's a weird sort of a tell about her, though it started getting more normal to see her that way than without the spikes forming, because it requires her to be drained to see her as she originally was! Experience and stamina-building exercise caused her to be able to retain more of a charge, so...yeah.
Clothing is pretty normal for her. Not exactly trying to be super-trendy and she isn't rich. Raimi prefers jeans over all other pants, shorts acceptable as well, but anything too formal or remotely dress-like can go die in a fire. She doesn't do dresses, and if none of her other selves got into 'em, she doesn't have to use them either. Shirts will include anything normal, though. T-shirts, tanktops, sweaters, etc. Her preferred colors are fairly deep and moody, such as blues, greens, deeper reds, sunburst orange, gray, white, black, and absolutely nothing that hurts people's eyes. She can't stand to do that to people anymore than her eyes can stand looking at it on others. In addition, Raimi doesn't do tattoos, piercings, or weird augmentations. If you see a mark on her, it's real. If you have to ask where she got it, you don't really want to know.
The Timekiller Suit is a bit...Batman-y. Raimi idolizes Batman, and although her suit doesn't look like the Caped Crusader, you can see some certain stylistic choices that were influenced by the man. The armor-padded full-body suit is mainly black with some dark grays involved to blend in with darkness. The helmet's eye-slots are kind of sinister-looking and intimidating, also red. The claws are generally a yikes in of themselves, looking a bit bulky in comparison to the rest of her, as does the helmet a bit. This is due to their built-in technology and insulation to prevent...well...accidents. The utility belt isn't exactly a Batman utility belt, but it is a belt of many pockets for holding things in. She has the intimidating look because it's hard for anyone to take a teen-turning-adult seriously, sometimes. The symbol on her chest is of an hourglass on its side being eaten by a human skull.
Personality:
I'm adding this because I think it's important. The first thing to note about Raimi is that, beneath it all, she is still a normal person. She cares about people and what happens to them. She wouldn't even get into this sort of thing if she didn't feel it personally. Some would say that her inner worries drive her headlong into situations that she knows are gonna harm her ALOT, and decides that it's worth taking the punishment for the pay-off. Raimi's a bit anti-social, but she is able to switch off the Timekiller for a while, crack a smile, tell a joke, and enjoy her life. Half of what went on in the early days was because she was so afraid of losing her place in life, her point in time where she belonged. To be able to have a place of refuge, a loving family, a life to live... These are most important to her. She hates being the outsider, the outcast, the one that doesn't belong. She bears with it only because she knows there is a place she can go back to when it's all done. Before knowing all that...those were some dark times.
Raimi has a certain stubborn determinism that has bitten her in the ass on more than one occasion. It comes with the territory of looking after time. You were born with the ability to watch over events and alter them, so you feel like there's no greater responsibility to make the right outcome happen than you. That's any of her, but Raimi's life has magnified that to the point where she will take actions that other of her kind will not. She is known specifically for this, out of all the others. She doesn't give up on things because she believes herself to be the last resort, the final straw, back against the wall. If she fails, it's hard for her to imagine anyone who can pull her out of the fire, because it usually means she's in deep. It is because of this that her nature borders on the fatalistic, not really caring how much pain she might be subjected to, as long as everything's intact in the end.
That said, she obviously has breaking points. The time in which she thought she'd lost her place in history was what drove her to the edge, pushed her into more vicious behavior. A perceived failure for her can lead to a rather strong psychological backlash, as she's been there before and seen some pretty terrible things in her life. Raimi is sometimes short-tempered, prone to outbursts, and gets violent when pressed into it. As much as she puts forth the tough persona of the Timekiller who can shoulder all kinds of burdens, these things have affected her, deeply. She has definitely been traumatized by several events in her life, which will be described below. Suffice to say, there is no one more dedicated or desperate in the preservation of time.
Known Affiliations:
Because the Timekiller is kinda' new here, her allies are mainly other versions of herself, with certain exception...
Chrono - The 'original' Mirai. The first one she met. She is the 'closest' one of herself, the version of her that didn't get lost in time. Her suit is a black-and-white suit inspired by Unas Annus, complete with an upright hourglass symbol on the chest and self-tinting ski goggles. She fights with an electrostaff, throwable shockpads, flashbangs, and accelerated Nerf guns.
Stopwatch - A version of her in a jumpsuit that's a bit more introverted, or possibly a bit of a ditz. She has big goofy goggles, acts awfully confused, seems to focus alot of her power to STOP time, rather than manipulate it more subtly. She has a stopwatch symbol and primarily fights with clock hand blades. Might've been trained by Temple Fuget... We're not sure.
Epoch - A version of her where there's apparently a war going on and she's a gun-ho combatant in it. She's in a combat vest, camouflaged clothing, army helmet, gasmask, and has a pair of binoculars at all times. She is armed with all kinds of explosive ordinance, a pair of tonfas, and an actual gun. Even still, she's not quite as vicious as Raimi can be...but she's close.
Oracle - A temporal mentalist, and the wisest of all her 'kind'. Rather than having huge power over time physically, she's more into it perceptually and in the ability to influence the mind. She can, for instance, make Axial Time stable for normal people to be in, or contact any time traveler across time. Dresses a bit like a Jedi. No confirmation on whether she has a light saber or not.
Memento - A version of her who pulls out objects from time to fight.
Momentus - A version of her that mainly relies on Bullet Time to fight.
Tempo - A Mirai who causes events to flow according to her beat so that she can influence the outcome.
Rhythmaster - An alternate version of Tempo who's a bit like a DJ.
Amaranth/Continuum/Eternity - Various holier-than-thou types with their powers.
Timekeeper - Not sure, but she MAY be Gallifreyan.
The Flux - This may be the weirdest one yet, and one that Raimi doesn't get along with. She looks like a shade that's in a state of temporal flux, but is very down-to-earth and common-sensical. The reason Raimi doesn't like her, though, is that Chrono originally called HER The Flux, and she thought it was a terrible name. Like embarrassingly bad. The actual Flux doesn't really get it, and is generally irritated by her, as a result.
The Dapper Dwarf - Short in stature, great in power. This momentum-driven superhero gainst exponential strength from being in motion, and is both smartly-dressed and always a gentleman. As a top hero of the UK, he is often found crossing paths with the ever-cackling Baron Von Madness (Described below).
The Flick! - Anytime Raimi hears the battlecry, "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!", is a happy time.
Baron Von Madness - Although in her world, things are a bit backwards, in most worlds...he's a dangerous villain of mental compulsion by word who is completely insane. He slipped in and out of so many assumed identities that he forgot his own name, and knew only that Madness was his name. He's out to free your mind from the constraints of sanity, with a compelling power of command that force those without strong wills to do his bidding. If he can't get you to comply, though, he'll distract and torture you until your mind is loose enough to take ANY command. That is why he is the mad genius leader of a bedlam bunch of batshit-crazy badasses known simply as the Maniacs. The Timekiller first became aware of him in Chrono's world, but has found that Madness pops up in multiple universes, and that the main exception his her own world, where he is an influential genius, Baron Von Mentalist. He is best-known to be operating out of the UK, but his influence can spread all over, with not just unpowered gun-toting henchmen, but lesser villains that he has control over and an arsenal of devious devices and torturous traps!
The Maniacs - There are many, and some of them are super-tough villains themselves who work under the Baron. Some names to run really fast away from would include...Whifflestomp Jackson, Valgas the Nightmare Body, Jack Winslow the Knife, Kraken the Pirate Captain, Saress the Ophidian, Speaker of the World, and Sousaphone Man. All extremely dangerous, all dangerously insane.
Zen - In a world where a man now-dead tried to build an autonomous robotic protectorate to save humanity, the military turned on that machine, causing it to determine that government and military authority must be quelled and it itself rule humanity. The Zenigawa Enforcement Network (ZEN) controls all things as once the super computer known as HARDAC once tried. Building attack machines connected to its network brain, it swiftly overcame all obstacles through the destruction of all previous android devices and creating new and improved versions in their place. When the Timekiller happened upon world, she found it free of crime and war and strife...but human beings were also controlled to an extent, to never again allow the sin of betrayal. Turns out that this was Oracle's world...and that the task before her is to win the battle against Zen mentally, not physically. The reason he is listed, however, is due to the rising level of advancement, causing him to cross into other worlds to enforce his high standard of order.
The Hellverse - She didn't know what else to call it. It was a world much like Chrono's that she thought was her own...except everything went totally wrong. Her friends either went evil or were killed, the world's worst villains were in control after killing the world's best heroes (some right in front of her), and she herself was almost killed by a villain who tried to rip the time travel power right out of her. It was the worst experience of her life, and it turns out that it was a world where she was born, but after gaining fore-knowledge of what was going to happen...she just stopped her own clock, reversed her time stream, and quietly yeeted herself out of existence.
Evil Time Travelers - Any of them. All of them. If you're the Master or the Rani, you're on the list. If you abuse the laws of time and space without somehow stabilizing the reaction, you're on the list. She has to stop you before you destroy everything. (NOTE: This includes time creatures. Those Hounds are a menace.)
Cobalt Thorium G - FLASHPOINT!
Canon or OC: I made up the character. I may have based her off of things recognizable, but the Timekiller is mine.
List of Reimagined traits: Chrono, Timekiller, Epoch, Stopwatch, Oracle, and all the others are their own characters, created by me. Although, technically, they count as re-imaginings of each other.
Story Overview: I don't mind giving you a nice detailed background. In fact, I think it's necessary.
This is the story of Mirai Saito...except it isn't. The 'original' Mirai (Chrono) had a relatively normal life, up until a certain point. Understand, this is going to get a bit complicated, because of the mechanics of practical time travel. To begin with, Mirai was born to a pair of gifted individuals, Kero and Ashi Saito. Her father had shockwave force powers, which he used to become a crash-helmet-wearing superhero called The Flick. Her mother was a well-organized telekinetic, and used her powers for practical purposes by working in a library. A change in the respective histories of the two versions of this girl occurred when she and her father were driving along in their car - He was being a civilian at the time. - when suddenly, BAM! A large creature attacked, a villain whose body had transformed into a chimeric dinosaur being, the TerrorDactylon. Both were thrown from the car, Mirai surviving unscathed because she had instinctively awakened to the power of transporting herself through time, thus appearing many feet away unharmed instead of slamming into glass and concrete, which her father had done...but endured. She then found that he was fighting this big reptile...and he was losing. She had to help him, so she snuck up behind the beast, grabbed onto it, and sent it falling through time, out of their hair.
In another version of events, as soon as Mirai grabbed onto TD, she was tail-slapped at that same moment, and herself tumbled through time. She went hurtling into past points of history, where she was alone and forced to harshen up, or else maybe die of starvation. She fought, she stole, she may've even injured or killed...while desperately trying to figure her power out. When she did so, she appeared back in her time, but...there was another of her already here! It wasn't an instance of her. though. She had worked on her powers with some practicality to figure out what she was capable of, and could tell the difference between an instance of herself...and a completely different version. This was somebody else, and what she thought was someone stealing her place in history. In reality, though, it was Chrono, who had been learning her abilities, as well, beginning to act on her decision to fight crime. They are both teenagers at this time. The girl calling herself Timekiller has been away a number of years. The aging process doesn't happen in Axial Time, but real life still has a hold over them. Seeing Chrono like this, living her life with her family in her town...almost drove TK out of her mind. She tried to kill her other self several times, ultimately culminating in the time she sent the other girl hurtling towards the Axial Center, where she was certain there would be no return. Neither of them had intentionally examined it by this time.
What followed was a point in which the second Mirai enjoyed the first one's life, knowing and palling around with all of her friends, and assuming the role of Chrono for a while. She was happy, and while her education had obviously slipped behind the other one, she used Axial Time to work on catching up on things. Trust me, this is extremely important. This is Japan. You don't get much of a break in Japan. It almost makes you wonder why there was a British foreign exchange student here. Yeah, one of Mirai's friends was a young man struggling with his Japan by the name of Allen Forscythe. He'd been sent here by his uncle after his mother was under police custody for treatment against mental compulsion, and his father was...shall we say unreliable. Not to be contacted. Untrustworthy. Evil? Yeah, evil. Allen's kind of an important mention for several reasons, one of them being that he was right there when the first Mirai surprisingly returned one day while they were hanging out in the park. Imagine being the guy that's watching two identical versions of your friend argue it out like this and - for the record - having already been told about the time powers. Just think about it for a moment. You're having a nice conversation with your friend, when you find out she may've backstabbed another version of that was the actual friend that you knew, not the one you've been talking to the past three months. What do you do?
Well, in the case of Allen, he unexpectedly knocked them both out, dragged them into a toolshed, and demanded an explanation. He was uhh...capable of things himself, chaotic things, because he was born gifted himself. It wasn't a pleasant subject. You see, his story was that he was on the run from his father - the man who'd manipulated and used his mother in so many ways, including the battlefield - Baron Von Madness! His uncle, an alchemic genius known as the Master of Change, helped his mom into rehab and Allen out of the country, but because he was VERY wise to the kinds of things that go on with heroes and villains, he just wasn't taking this from the two of them. He wanted to know exactly what was going on, what that meant for everyone that knew the both of them, and what they were going to DO, going forward. The only answer he got, though, was the 'going forward' part, which was to...escape. They did it right in front of him, both girls slipping into separate portals, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. Fortunately, this kind of put things into perspective for the two of them. Chrono and Timekiller agreed to stop attacking each other, explain to their parents just what the hell was going on, and then...return TK to her world, because Mirai thought she found the gateway to it at Axial Center.
She was wrong. So very wrong. After the two of them made up and - to distinguish the two of them apart - the second Mirai dubbed herself as 'Raimi' (It's an anagram.), they investigated this portal and Raimi headed to what she THOUGHT was her world...but it wasn't. She discovered a world that practically went to hell, where everything she knew and loved was destroyed and she herself was almost killed while a deadly supervillain nearly gained her powers, and therefore the ability to REALLY screw with history. She escaped back to Chrono's world and recovered there, gaining new levels of PTSD she never knew she had...and it wasn't over yet. As she began to calm down in her life...the PrimalDactylon attacked. He was her first foe, made timeless in the Axial Center, with abilities similar to her own. The world was put into a timeloop on New Year's Eve, and as the countdown commenced, so too would the killing. Thousands of reptile creatures sweeping through the cities, tearing flesh and crushing bone. Millions dying as they rang in the new year, again and again...until they who were gifted in time resisted the loop and pulled out of it.
This was where they met Stopwatch, Epoch, Oracle, and the others. They'd all felt this happen on their worlds and they knew that the Axial Center was being abused. The fact that they could start using their time powers in the place where their attunement with time mainly allows them to experience and navigate it without going crazy or being eaten up by all manner of schisms kinda' said alot. A whole lot of energy was being played out, and as a result they too were being affected in terms of power. This allowed them to combat a great many of the Dactyl instances and gain access to his citadel. However, the Eternity Shield outside needed all of them pressing in to block his power from reaching out, so they could only send one of them in. That was Raimi. She didn't want anybody else to do it, because they wouldn't be up for her own strategy. She knew that Terror/PrimalDactylon was out for blood, and would instantly try to annihilate her. So...in a move worthy of Dr. Strange or a certain well-known Gallifreyan...she put herself in a kind of loop. Axial Time has no history, so when her foe killed her, reducing her to ancient ashes, the ashes remained, but she came back, and she still knew going in what she was doing and had some idea of what actually happened. Again and again, the villain destroyed her, firing beam after beam powered by the crystaline energy source in his chest, until the room was covered in dust. Finally, Raimi slapped the ground with considerable force and filled the room with dust. She tore the crystal from the Dactyl's chest and broke it over his beak, destroying him and his citadel alike!
The aftermath was almost bittersweet. Raimi was alive, though completely drained, and the others had the power to repair the damage to time now that the villain was gone. It was all due to irresponsible use of time. By trying to banish a villain to the place, enough time paradoxes and anomalous events occurred that he became a recursive nightmare plaguing time itself. It couldn't be allowed, just as Chrono's accidental sending of Raimi to the Hellverse couldn't be allowed. It always caused more harm than good. Oracle, who was kind of the self-appointed leader here, was angry...but understanding. They undid the harm, and it wouldn't happen again. More to the point, the traumas that Raimi went through...they were gonna help her with that. They were putting her back in her world, her REAL home, and they regressed her back in age to give her a chance to do it all right. They wanted to help her, but then there was also another reason: Raimi's world needed her there, badly. They ALL had to go back to their worlds and fix their messes as best they could...
Raimi returned to her own life, but sadly...when you're a child, you don't always see things you ought to. At the time, she hadn't known what her real life was like. She hadn't known that a villain had killed her mom, that her dad had gone to vigilantism to kill the one responsible and take justice into his own hands, and that he was wanted by the authorities. It left her an orphan, being taken care of by another superhero, a man who was actually a villain in other worlds. No, it wasn't the Baron. He's still in the UK, but the point is that a number of the heroes were villains in her world, and vice versa. Raimi ended up nearly attacking her own babysitter because he was Sousaphone Man, a man with weaponized brass instruments and low-frequency powers. Shocked by what she had discovered in this world, she entered Axial Time and showed bloody murder at the temporal mass, only to find Oracle replying to her! She assured her that this was indeed her world, and that it was regrettably not perfect. Raimi had to work at it to make it the world that she wanted, the home she so-badly needed, and Oracle further warned her of another issue: "You must stop Cobalt Thorium G. The future of your world depends on it!" But who or what WAS this G?
As it turns out, it was a Dr. Strangelove reference, originally. Namely, the active ingredient in the Doomsday Device. So, Raimi did indeed work at improving herself and her world. Like Mirai before her, she trained like hell and studied all manner of time-related media to help her understand. Back to the Future, Doctor Who, The Time Machine, Slaughterhouse-5, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, a bunch of different Lovecraft tales, any significant time travel story, and so on and so forth. She had to break all limit and fix her world. She found her father and convinced him to turn himself in, get him on probation. Turns out TerrorDactylon was a mercenary in this world and the two of them would end up in a buddy cop situation. Raimi became the Timekiller again and refined her act somewhat, becoming more the hero she wanted to be, though that edge would always be in her life. But then, one day, she found out who Cobalt Thorium G was.
It was Allen.
The fight was brief and catastrophic. As much as Raimi was prepared for alot of things, one situation she hadn't been prepared for was a guy projecting pure chaos. None of the others knew that Allen Forscythe was the one, that in her realm he would spring up - without warning and without any prior encounter - and be a walking disaster area. It was the one thing that he'd avoided by working against the Baron. In this case, though...things had gone different, and Allen's power created instabilities in energy and particles, made metahuman powers fly out of control, and made people fly into a rage. By coming in direct contact with him right when their powers went off, strange interactions of time and space collided, a mass release of energy occurred, and dimensional fabrics tore. In an instant, Raimi saw every instance of every enemy she ever encountered, and knew that the path between them and her had somehow opened. More to the point, when she recovered, it appeared that she was no longer in the right time OR place, and there was no longer any sign of Cobalt Thorium G. Had he vanished? Been knocked through the dimensions? Decided to go for a pizza? She didn't know that anymore than she knew where she herself was... One thing was for sure, though. The allure of new territories to conquer and exploit, the desire to cut loose on an unsuspecting population, or even the chance to get another shot at her personally... That would bring her enemies in force. The Baron, Zen, her old friends from the Hellverse - they would come into this place, to take on the world hit by the dimensional blender effect. She had to put a stop to this, because truly...unless she dealt with Cobalt Thorium G, nothing would recover, and everything could be destroyed!
Sample Post:
She'd been grabbed out of the blue, torn from one moment of time into the next to face this...what IS this? Black suit, hard helmet and clawed gauntlets, skull-eating-an-hourglass symbol- Oh shit... Was this her as a villain? Had she really found a version out to kill her? Why, though? What could the reason be? Chrono had tumbled onto this rooftop and taken a defensive stance with her staff as this thing appeared. Not an instance that went crazy, an honest-to-god alternate of her own history out to get her. Was she the result of some temporal flux, a splintering effect of her own powers? It couldn't be because the teacher- Oh crap, attacking now!
Timekiller had found her, and now that they were isolated on this rooftop, they were going to finish this. She leapt at Chrono, slashing gauntlets forward, their metallic ring sounding as they struck the collapsable electrostaff in Chrono's hands, but hse followed up by kicking the leg out from under the other girl and- Fuck! She snapped her in the legs with the staff before TK could take advantage of it and they both fell. A quick recovery, and soon the both of them were slashing and striking, slamming and swinging, their weapons clashing against one another 'till Timekiller axe-drop kicked the staff out of Chrono's hands. Chrono instinctively punched her in the face and-
CLANK!
Chrono: Argh...!
Timekiller: Heh heh heh heh...
It didn't quite work out. The head's a choice target in ANY situation, so protecting it was a solid investment - longterm - in a fight. She could see out of this thing at least as well as that guy from Phantom of the Paradise, if not better. Had plenty of decent fighting instincts, anyway. For instance, the grenade she'd tossed just a few seconds ago-
Chrono: WHOA!
BOOM!!
Timekiller had stepped back, presumably to put some distance between them while her guard was up. Well, she was right about it, but it was actually all about the damn fragmentation grenade dropping in their midst out of the portal! She'd managed to portal out of there herself, and she was gonna go back and kick the- CRAP!! She was in here, in Axial Time, launching right at her with a portal! They connected in mid-time-space and slammed off of each other, the two of them easily capable of free flight through this ever-churning mass of temporal existence. They collided again and again, then another instance of the Timekiller grabbed her from behind, and she kicked up to knock it away, but the first one hit her good and solid, this time.
Timekiller: You think I don't know what you're thinking here? I AM you! I BELONG here, you fucking interloper! Get out of my reality, or I'll rip you to shreds!
Her own voice had gone a bit hoarse, shouting at people when she needed them to hear that she meant business. All the people she fought while trying to get out of past history and into her own time, all the times she'd had to do things she never normally would do to survive... She wasn't going to back down and she would not fail, not this time! She and Chrono soon began leaping in out out of different times at different points of the city, fighting each other. Daylight here, nighttime there, last week, this week, Tuesday next week. They were could literally punch you INTO next week, and in some cases were doing that to each other here, but they came at one another again and again in order to finally put an end to this. Chrono threw down a pair of flashbangs, but they were almost ineffective, and the other her kept dodging the shockpads!
Chrono: I'm not some goddamn fake here! You have the wrong address, idiot! This is MY world! You're not welcome!
The two of them had started throwing instances of each other into the fight to double and triple-team one another, turning a normal one-on-one into a maddening brawl One of Chrono's instances recovered her staff and tried to zap-stun this Flux version of herself in the head and, dammit, there was almost no reaction! That's when several portals opened, and her eyes widened, seeing dynamite and- WAS THAT C4?! She merged with another instance, slowing down time just as they were exploding. It was too late to stop them exploding. Her other self obviously set them to ridiculously short delay and used her good sense of timing to know when and how to toss them. Chrono leapt out of the way of the bombs and accelerate-slammed into her counterpart, this time knocking her through a wall from the sudden mass-acceleration using temporal fields. Unfortunately, that was just one of her while four others grabbed her and thrust her through a portal leading to...a freefall to nowhere?! She was over the local park by like...a hundred feet! No problem, she'd just slow down her descent and- And that's when the merged state Timekiller got her from behind!
They'd gone their separate ways, as most instances do when they're done with a particular scene, but she borrowed one to converge on Chrono's location and merged once she was outside the portal. Couldn't do it in Axial Time. Didn't work. She hit Chrono from above and behind, and the two hurtled towards the ground, their time fields fighting each other for control over the moment. Land or crash. That's what it was about. Chrono split into two again and broke free instantly, portaling back into Axial Time, where they continued fighting. She knew how to end this. The girl she was fighting may've been herself, but no matter how much she claimed that Timekiller had it wrong, what she had right was how to prepare for a situation. She allowed herself to take a hit and threw Chrono into another portal, to an old warehouse where she'd been storing-
"Holy shit! Where'd she even get this?!"
-ALOT of explosives, her stockpile of war! An instance of Chrono leapt out and merged with her just as Timekiller pressed the detonator she had on her belt. She tried to stop it...
BOOOO-
...and she DID, credit to her...but just a little too late. Chrono had saved her own life, but got flung back through the portal from the sheer forces at play. Knocking out or even killing this girl was hard. She should know. If outright killing her was difficult at best, the next-best thing was to wear her out and then deal with her. She was looking out of it, and the Timekiller struck her in the head in passing, knocking her more towards the Axial Center.
Timekiller: Yeah... That'll do it. Maybe you won't die, because you're me, but you'll be out of MY life. That's for sure...
The dynamic of the Isaac Store was basically this: Either one of them was good at getting the business, but one of them had to organize and determine the value of things while the other took that knowledge provided and made the decisions on what to DO with these things. This was all practice for when they got out of this war and eventually decided to corner the livestock and crop market by working together. Another reason they called it the Isaac Store is that any complaints from higher-ups or enlisted personnel should deal with him directly. Britta had more patience, but Isaac had the right attitude in dealing with the unreasonable, which is to say losing his patience was the correct response. It prevents people from walking all over you, especially if it involves them getting in the way of doing the right thing.
That wasn't important, for now. Nobody was complaining, right now. Except for anyone losing their hand at poker, that is. Isaac wasn't exactly cleaning up, but he wasn't out of it, either. They were generally having a good time, with the dark-haired Gunner facing the no man's land, so that if any unwanted heads or anything else tried to poke into the trenches, he'd see it and he could shoot it. It helped to have Rikes along when he could be here, because the wolf-dog had keen senses to bring to the gathering, and thus the chances of being taken by surprise were almost non-existent. It did mean that his back was facing the trenchway leading back to Plymouth Lane, but the other men here were obliged to warn him if anyone important was headed this way. Furthermore, Rikes would also spot anyone who would take a look at their poker game and hate on it. This one didn't need the glance from the other soldiers, nor the telltale sign of Rikes standing up and glaring down the lane. The fact is that the new arrival had a tell of his own that wasn't in reference to pokerfaces. He'd seen 'im around, him and his big slab of a dog. Isaac was only human, but he'd trained his senses well enough in the picking up of footfalls, breathing patterns, and so on. A man and his heavyset dog were fairly easy to pick out.
He asked of them what they were playing, even as the mostly-brown wolf dog began to sniff curiously. It was a ritual. Isaac had seen it among the pack and regular dogs often enough. No harm in it unless objections were made. Frankly, if the bigger of the two had any issues, he wouldn't have any trouble communicating them. Isaac glanced up at the...yeah, that's a Sergeant...and answered "Poker. Walcome to join.". Truth be told, they'd had a couple rounds, already. What the man had seen in their setting up was Isaac dealing in the latest. Anyway, there wasn't any harm in a Sergeant knowing anything about this. Most lower ranks, such as Sergeants, usually understood that unbearable conditions required them to bear the bending of some rules for recreation. To wit, nobody was going to stop gambling to pass the time away anymore than they were gonna give up a few innocuous bribes to get things moving. The Isaac Store had its assets partially to handle such payments. Getting the cooperation of the stingy quartermaster took a bit of work, for instance. He was kind of a prick... Anyway, Isaac was looking over the incredible bulk of the Sergeant's dog now.
"Strong breed ya got there. Push past or pin down damn near anyone."
Isaac knew dogs. Or rather, his father did, and the information passed down so that he could easily see that Valkur here was a living battering ram when he wasn't carrying supplies or messages like Rikes.
Britta Hagen
She tended to wander about the whole of Plymouth Lane, taking no particular direction unless she had particular goal. Sometimes, you could find things of import - people to address, problems to fix, opportunities to take - quite at random. At the very least, what the commanding officers wanted when you were on duty without a particular assignment was to look busy. As long as it seemed like you were doing something constructive instead of standing around and looking lost, you were alright. It was only when they had something specific for you to do or when they find you without something to do that things could get dicey. On the former, if you had something to do as per orders, you can be sure that you'd better get down to it, or else you were in trouble. And in the latter, you were basically already in trouble, and you were going to get an assignment you really REALLY didn't want, as a result.
All of this was important because morale in Plymouth Lane was terrible. Even one with determination such as hers faltered when the enemy line refused to budge in either direction, leaving them in a purgatorial state as a result. They would not move back, so as to give up the ground they'd gained, but there was yet any sign that an advancement would carve more than feet at a time. Isaac was worried that command would order them to dig tunnels to try and reach the enemy camps in secret, only for the weather and mortal shelling to collapse said tunnels with them inside of it. He did not like the military, and as much as she believed in the cause of the war, they'd both seen things that makes one question the methodology of those in charge. And so, the stalemate continued, with the probably breaking of it lying in potentially great sacrifice, a crazy plan, or both. Britta, for one, didn't think much of the fruitless charges from the trenches. Gunners like her standing in trenches like this made such people irrelevent, even if they were shocktroopers.
Speaking of which, a Shocktrooper chose this time to speak to her. So, 'Marius' had come up the staggered approach to the Assault Trenches - they were like this, of course, to break up the explosive force of any shell that exploded IN the trenches - and his description of Britta was...adequate, but perhaps not doing her justice. Ash-gray though her hair was, there was significant life in those threads, unlike someone for whom age had taken their toll. It was a strange sort of thing, life. It gave you unusual traits, at times. And indeed, Britta was full of life, herself. Also vigor, as she was glaring with machine gun ready out into the land that swallowed up many a soldier, as well as explosives, parts of vehicles, and all manner of debris. She would turn upon being addressed, professionally checking her weapon to make sure she didn't misfire or something. She noticed the slip of the tongue, and there was a slight tilt of the head when 'Marius' made it, but she made no address of it.
"I would be, indeed. Is there something I can help you with?"
Here was where he introduced himself and...funny. That was kind of a Francian name, right? She'd known Jean from her first day of active duty, and he was a Francian-Darcsen, so she knew kind of what to expect in the look, the body language, and certainly the accent. Maybe it was due to Jean being Darcsen while this man was not, but...he seemed quite different. No matter. He was a man in need of assistance, and she had no reason not to help him. Britta herself had on a bright smile, always wanting to reassure those who turned to her for aid, and this one sounded like he wanted use of the Isaac Store. Unless, of course, this were somehow personal. Nah, it didn't seem like it.
"Sure, I can do that. What're you looking to store away? And, forgive me, but is there some reason that a personal footlocker would be inadequate?"
There could be any reason, up to and including him just not having one issued. Isaac and Britta had one. When they started this, the two of them agreed to move their personal belongings - a short list, to be fair - to her own footlocker, and that the Isaac Store would be in the Isaac footlocker. Nobody stole from said store because everybody benefitted from it, and someone trying to would endanger the store, and thus bring down the wrath of a good two dozen people at least, upon said doer of the heinous deed. That all said, Britta would do what she could for the man. Simple storage of items wasn't ordinarily in huge demand, but they'd done it before.
When Ashton mentioned that the Ascendancy maaay have fucking lied to them about them being the only ones who could really bond with their magic crystal meth, Nero only snorted with amusement. I mean, no shit. There wasn't any reason that he could think of that they needed kids to perform on, and there were plenty of expendable adults as much as kids without a future to try this on, so why not? Nero didn't believe for a second that these desperate fucking bastards could only perform this trick on people his age. That was a straight load, so no big surprise there. What WAS a surprise was Iris causing him to flinch with that slamming slab before telling him they'd be getting out of here soon. Geez, he just wanted a sitrep... They really were all freakin' crazy soldiers. No wonder Amy wanted to therapitize them.
You could definitely tell that things were off about all of them. The situation was frustrating for all of them - They got jumped by magic mercs, Squad 0 bailed the mercs out, and so consequently the assholes didn't get dead. - but now as they jumped into the hole...Iris had this weird smile on her face. Nero couldn't miss it, because he went stealthy, and when he did, he was more-so than he was before. It wasn't AS MUCH a surprise when he did it, not as much as the sudden weirdness with his last spell, but that was because his brain caught up with his body when it activated. He could shapeshift! I mean, he could shadow-shift! I mean, he was making all kinds of spooky and horrifying shapes behind Sam and Iris when they weren't looking.
Is this what it's like for Finn? Can I be a frigging CAT?
The shape of one, as long as he was made of shadow. He was still a physical wraith-like form, but now he was malleable AND he still went invisible in the shadows. He could... Holy shit, he merged with shadows! He poked at Iris' shadow, and suddenly he was just overlapped onto it perfectly. That's how he noticed that he mood whiplashed so quickly. She couldn't see him, of course. He slipped back before anybody noticed that something was off. The lot of them had all kinda' senses, after all. Wouldn't want her brother to think he was up to something. Of course, it was at that moment that Maria suddenly broadcast into his head and made Nero lose his concentration.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! When did you guys get here? Geez... Helluva shock, there. Ring a bell or something first, okay?"
He didn't hate telepathy, but it DID spoil the concentration, and he DID want to test out some of what the good doctor plugged into him.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
All of that was neither here nor there, just the last vestiges of what happened as they were pulling Realist out of his cage, then pulling themselves out thanks to Maria's warning and some of that clever portal magic, courtesy of Finn. Back on the ship, Nero took off his mask and chilled, although actually BEING chill was at a bit of a premium. You see, apart from being pumped up, Nero remembered all the faces and names and remarks of every single son of a bitch that brought him into this mess. He had...a list. He had a list, a means of tracking them, and a special method of execution. However, to test it out, he focused The Black Spot on "Fucking Crowley..." to test it out. He wouldn't sustain it, but he DID want to send sort of a message and get a bearing on just how close the boy had been to their location, back there.
The other reason he wasn't so chill is that he was thinking on the way back 'I want a chainsaw.', and so he started checking prices and...oh good fucking god, what? His account had jumped up even more! Where the hell was he going to spent it all? He could buy his own Ascendancy Bomber! No, he could buy the fucking Xuanzang! He wasn't going to, but he could! What the hell?! Well, one thing was for sure. He was going to get...a really good chainsaw. Something self-cleaning and self-sharpening, guaranteed to cut well for ten fucking years! And that was just the first thing that came to mind. I mean, he didn't usually need much, but there was going to be some cutlery. Maybe something hands-free that he could wear, or something that he could build. He wasn't a super tool guy, but with that kind of credit, he could learn to make weapons. Nero didn't know what Ash and Flame did to make this money, but it was going well into his 'Kill The Bastards' fund, no question.
Mars was largely terraformed, and properly too. The bulk of the landscape was still like Arizona, but cold, so maybe more like the Gobi Desert. You could breathe alright, and conditions weren't bad for the most part, but the air was a little thin away from the cities, like being on a mountain. Food and air was being generated in stable hydroponic areas all across the planet to make it more liveable, and numerous machines were working 'round the clock to break down, analyze, and re-orient the structure of the Martian soil to become more fertile, more Earth-like. It was a terraforming project in progress, and it was doing well. The new territories, the unregulated economy, the huge deposits of mineral wealth to be found here... It was windfall, windfall, windfall, especially if your name was Brett Tavors, CEO of the Martian Mining Corporation. Speaking of which, here we are.
The main office of the MMC was a tall skyscrape-fortress, designed to withstand heavy dust and sand storms, which could still occur on Mars. It was built to this level of defense officially so that their employees wouldn't have to 'feel the bumps' while at work. It was really to protect their assets from attack. Much like any company's built-in lawyer defense team, this one was built for combat, with a private security force and a HELLUVA lot of weapons. But hey, given what they were raking in now, all the risks taken as of late were worth the rewards...except for possibly one. They had a fortress within a heavily-guarded perimeter within a heavily-patrolled town with an outer perimeter wall (officially constructed as a windbreaker to prevent the storms from blasting through the streets at full speed), but even still...right now...the owners and operators of this company were not feeling secure. Brett now sat in comference with his board of directors, a group of men and women who were all-in on this, and were now all uneasy because of that little shit who refused to die.
"So, let me see if I grasp the fullness of our situation, right here. We are a pretty damn powerful corporation, are we not? We were daring enough to stake all our livelyhoods on this project, we were committed to making sure that our competition would eat space dust while we hit the finish line, and we all made out like bandit kings. Our influence is great on Earth, and our power is like GODS on this world. And yet..."
He raised a finger, giving them all a pointed stare.
"And yet...we are unable to silence those who keep wanting to raise a stink about our operation. Oh, we were content to ignore it because it was just a pair of punk kids turned soldier. Who cares? Why draw attention to ourselves? Well, let me think... Oh right. Because it turns out that if you train in the army, you start to become a threat! And he DID become a threat, didn't he now?! So much so, that he won enough money to FORCE that investigation we don't need, and he survived the fucking assassins we hired TOO LATE TO DO ANY DAMN GOOD!!"
He slammed the table as rose to his feet, glowering at the people now rooted to their seats with fear. They were his accomplices and they had helped build this corporation, but he could have them all shot. Hell, he had a gun on him. He could kill them all, right now. Maybe just one, just to set an example. This man was a character, and if you're thinking Martin Sheen versus Gary Oldman, you're getting close. He slumped back down in his chair, leaning back a little now.
"Repeat to me again what the Wuye-ying say."
One of the board members read the message from them, once more.
"They said 'Target escaped execution on Earth, now heading to Mars, albeit slowly. Will send top assassin to intercept to guarantee-'"
"Bullshit."
The CEO straightened up again, then pointed to one of the lady directors in the room, who handled some of their espionage offworld.
"Our people on Earth report that Jonathan Renzo was badly injured, but the assassin died before he could complete his task-"
"Failed."
"-while there is every indication that Captain Athena was completely unharmed and no trace has been found of the one sent to her-"
"Faaailed."
"-leaving the fate of Niko Renzo the worst of all, as it would appear his assassin has joined forces with him-
"Worthless pieces of shit, the lot of them. I paid good money for martial artists because that's what I was up against, and what happened? I should've hired a kid with a load of chemicals and too much free time. THAT would've done it! BOOM! Dead. Three weeks ago, this kid and his new pal blasted off from Earth and have been taking their sweet time getting here. Now, maybe it's to throw us off, like we wouldn't see them coming, but they're wrong. Even without any obvious emissions, it can't be hard to pinpoint a ship idling along in space for three weeks, right? Well?"
"We DO have their coordinates and have calculated several landing vectors."
And now, in a manner that made everybody in the room feel just a bit more afraid, Brett lightened up suddenly...and smiled.
"Alright! We have them in our sights. Now...do we take them down in transit, or do we wait until they land? Thoughts? Anyone? No? Tell you what... Let's flip a coin."
The Capsule Corp vessel was automatically adjusting its course and speed now to come in for a proper landing on Mars. From orbit, Mars still looked kind of dead, but there were developments. There were improvements. Also, no Martian war machines or evil alien diseases waiting for them. The imaginations of H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Doctor Who, and so on were thankfully not to be realized. That said, some of the more realistic movies about the conditions of Mars were not far off, especially that Matt Damon film, in the beginning. Point is, the planet was entirely tame, but you'd take it sled dog racing. These past three weeks, though... Helluva workout, and the things he was learning were both impressive and potentially troubling. Wu had stated right out that even though he was helping out, he wasn't comfortable fighting family, or this guy Li. The only real assurance that Niko could give in case they DID come after them was that he promised not to kill them if the opportunity presented it. His training was thus to take such opportunities, sometimes, but it wasn't right for him to decide their ultimate fate with Wu right there on his side like that. It would be just about as the killing of his own parents. Anyway, that was a problem maybe in the future, not right now. After all, if those assassins wanted them NOW, they would have to search an entire planet, and maybe its moons. Niko sat down at the console now.
"Okay, we are coming upon Mars orbit, shifting gravity back down to normal while we come in for a smooth land-"
He'd touched just a few buttons, perfectly normal routine stuff, when the interior lights went red and a siren started up!
"AGH! Whoa, whoa, what the hell? I didn't do that! What's going on?!"
The ship scanners immediately called up a display on multiple contact points on the screen that were getting bigger, identifying them as-
"Missles?! Mars doesn't have a missle defense grid! Not by the military! Oh shit... Wu, strap in! We have to land right now!"
There wasn't simply a few missles, but ALOT of them, and they were coming in from different vectors, meaning somebody had either a bunch of permanent surface-to-orbit missles stations around, or they had that kind of ordinance able to be mobilized and pulled to a location. Either way, this wasn't good! Niko wasn't an expert pilot, but one thing he knew about this ship was that it was fast, and it was small, and it had great control over itself. He pushed the controls from making a nice safe landing to 'express elevator to hell' mode, dropping the sphere-ship down down down through the atmophere to avoid the missles. The ground was many feet below them, but the speed this thing was going, they would reach it in no time flat, and if he didn't stop it, they would both BE flat. Kamikaze-diving a planet in even one of the BEST ships he'd ever seen would still kill you, no question. Let's just say, the speed they were going would put pressure even on the currently-maintained 1-G inside of the ship. Because of this, they avoided the missles...but two of them were close enough to start tracking and they followed them down!
"Ah, shit... Come one, come on, come on!"
He maneuvered the ship left and right quickly, not so much trying to shake them, but rather hoping that they weren't- AWW, YES!! They weren't smart missles! They collided with each other, trying to track him when he jiggled about and- OH, GROUND GROUND GROUND GROUND GROUND!!! Niko put on all the stops to the ship's heavy descent, reversing external gravi-thrust, probably giving them a jolt similar to what the ancient astronauts got from escape velocity...hanging there for a second, before...hitting the landing gear button and letting the ship come to the ground...which they'd depressed slightly from the forces of the Capsule Ship's engines.
"Okay... We're down...and down safe. Let's...not worry about where, just yet. Let's find a town, use some Capsule transport to get there, and not risk getting blown up for a while, okay?"
@mattmanganon Okay, that ought to do it. All the villains with their ambitions will have plenty of reason to be incoming, and the big one is a necessary lynchpin. Anymore questions, comments, concerns, etc., I'll be in touch.
RPM
CAS1006
Owlriel
Neziul
MegaraFoxfire
Altered Tundra
Rhona W
Kuro
Forsythe