VSDalSheron

ORIGINAL VERSION: Man lived beneath the surface since birth, but the elderly would just vanish. I am one to witness a brief moment of curiosity which was stripped from all. All the scrapped machinery were calling to me, calling me to make them a part of me. For the next six months from my own mind, I built an armor made for those who will fight a war against the unknown. So I traveled the networks of small geofronts until I saw many sealed off points: metal doors with broken panels or warded locks were the only security that would turn me away before. A dear friend came to me, worried about my well-being, it took an entire night to tell her what I had discovered, and expressed great interest in helping me. She was taken by my curiosity, so we worked together on her armor in much the same process as what it took to build mine. Once finished we trekked through the labyrinths until alarms started sounding off, followed by guards disappearing. We blasted our way past the doors and

As a child, I was always making things: model aircraft, toy guns, computers; it didn’t matter, I was always busy. They called me a genius among the rising artificers, a rare title given only to those with strong tech oriented creative skill sets. There was but one person I viewed as my equal in all that I did, a girl by the name of Celessa, who I nicknamed ‘Roly Poly’ due to her always being curled up when she was sitting at a computer. A strange quirk, but as long as she was comfortable, who was I to judge? One day, I fashioned a Gatling cannon during my Builder’s Club activities after school, to which I was club President. This cannon I made fired paint pellets and used almost no metal in its composition. I was having some problems with it, and in a flash of insight, I asked Celessa to inspect and evaluate it for a solution, namely for the erratic shaking in the barrels as they spun when fired. Watching her dismantle y work was rather reassuring, her hands moved with such

I was one of many engineers, looking down upon the thriving metropolis below. My job was finding the imperfections along the rails, and I saw to it that they got fixed by calling the problems in if they were too large for just one person. This task required me to rhythmically tap the primary metal bars that ran along the top and see if the resonator flashed in any color but green which illustrated the condition of the material at the point of contact. Some of these rail routes took me inside buildings, which some building owners used for loading and unloading of shipments rather than congest the ground level systems, and as such, I saw the processing partitions where each building tenants were given a space to manage their arriving and departing shipments, so this area was usually full of boxes and crates, organized chaos as it were. When the trams rolled by below us, we dropped to one knee as the speed of their approach tended to shake the support rail we stood on, and we knew

It’s been six months since we last saw sunlight in this world, six long months of terror. The skies are red and yellow now, engorged with the mercurial nanomachines that block our sunlight. Though their landing came with the death of almost half this continent’s population, the survivors banded together to secure safe havens from the storms that ravaged the lands every so many days. This “Metal Virus” as the mad machine called it, was created to purify this world of life in time, and they would stop at nothing to achieve these goals of theirs, survival or not. Regardless, our supplies were running low and I am in charge of the procurement of sustenance for the two hundred lives under my command in this reinforced stadium. To keep the storm winds out, we fastened lead plates on what few openings the place had and replaced the doors with quartz plate panels, transparent, but well protected from the mercury storms that blew through. Fortunately, we secured stealth shipments from

This was year three since I had taken up residence here in the great canal city of Zorveresk, and each time I was hired to find anomalies in the command modules below the city, I was still filled with dread at how dismal the underbelly was. Large metal roadways line the structural members holding the city up, driving down deep into the planet. The massive glass panes were several feet thick and showed the ocean water outside with access paths some twenty feet up overlooking the water’s surface. All this was held in place by air pressure systems, so that the repair crews could dive out into the sea below the city to do work as needed. One of the added things here was the numerous caged systems hanging from large chains, which would descend and ascend at random intervals. This wouldn’t be a problem at the surface, but here at 2000’ depths, people would sneak into these areas with amorous pursuits and an addiction to thrills would try to do things on these chained systems only to

Six months since we had been fighting the Krakanor and things seemed to be on an even playing field, we found their assault forces. We repelled them, then got shot at by the backup. If this kept up, we would be the ones running out of supplies before they did. Their furious assaults were in response to our assassination of one of their war masters, and though that meant we would no longer see the Kavashro-01 series of war machines, they fielded their other machinations in greater numbers. I prayed something changed before we found ourselves overrun. While Zeska was recovering from her injuries from her last action, she kept herself busy by operating communications for the team. One day in the dead silence of the spring night, we received some broken intelligence about an unknown object descending in the mountains to the South. I called upon Commander Kedali to mobilize all of our available resources to acquire the object after it fell. Though she was hesitant, she later relented

Our latest campaign was an astounding success, the Raven Principality now lived in ruins and its people were dead, exactly as Arkanon had instructed us. However, ever since we got back from the mission, Eirika had seemed to be out of sorts, like her heart was… elsewhere. When asked about it, her answer was unclear, and a medical test came back negative. Eventually, she asked me how it was that I could maneuver my flight forms with such efficiency, regardless of visual obstructions. So that was what this was about, now I got it. Coming back all beat to hell was a good reason for such a distracted mindset. At least we had eyes on the problem now. I remembered when I had this problem many years ago and fixing it was no cake walk either. I placed us both on leave for a few weeks so I could take her out to the training fields, to a place few go and even fewer return unscathed. Planet Zeklos, gas giant, distinctive rings of dust and ice. It was here I learned the way to perfectly evade.

The Terror Twins, identical girls with a strong discipline for knife combat, each one knew the thoughts and actions of the other. This was what made them so effective in combat. It was a roulette selection this time around, and Sephiria watched the two wheels turned opposite to each other on the large, black granite wall. We saw the first name selected, Sephiria’s was the one, and moments later, the Terosha twins were selected on the other wheel. I wished my beloved Sephiria well as she prepared herself mentally and before every match, I offered up a prayer for her success along with a kiss to seal our vows. She never looked back because by doing so, she would be expressing doubt and hesitation, something she learned the hard way how dangerous that could be. I took my place in the front row, where I watched Sephiria fighting most clearly. ~~Phase 1: The Opening Clash~~ The Terror Twins entered the arena quickly, lunging for Sephiria as she deployed her Mantis daggers to counter

We were digging for what seemed like weeks here on this desolate mountain. In reality, only two days passed since we had found the first lead in a long time, as our search for source of these unusual dimensional wave lengths were coming from the area. Here on this grassy patch located high on the mountain, it seemed to be a strong indicator for a possible site of displacements, so we proceeded to excavate the area to find out more. Eventually we found a large metal vessel roughly twenty feet in all directions, nestled at the bottom of the pit we made. Strange place for a box for sure. With a little tinkering, the front face was opened, revealing a floor with a large circle in the center. With three teammates staying behind to man the command center, I would be going into this unknown territory with my closest confidant. She would be my archivist in this endeavor, documenting all we found. Standing on the circle a panel appeared before both of us, and with one hand each, the

Another successful dive, and me and my partner have found ourselves in a pristine virgin forest, one seemingly untouched by civilization. The only path before us was a rocky cut along the mountainside, running for miles. Eventually we were greeted by an armed convoy vehicle and the driver asked us for our authorization papers. Not having any, we told him we were travelers from afar. Without a second thought, he told us to get in the back and without reason to cause a commotion, we complied with the instructions. He took us to a large building on the other side of the mountain, one side had super industrial lifts going down to a railyard and evidence of mining equipment that left distinct tracks in the dirt. For some reason, this left us rather nervous. Within the building, we were brought before Krosar, the master of the place and all land within a hundred miles of here. This was the Krosari Mining Group primary operations facility and we were trespassing, but Krosar was willing

~~Phase 0: Introduction~~ Zorig, Zeion, and Zahori, three angels charged with being the guardians of the Empire of Cocytus, their spiritual bodies bound inside jet black and ornately decorated armors to root them in the physical plane. Created solely for this purpose, they stood before Aina and challenged her to the rite of succession for status of Guardian of the Empire, as the first and strongest living Crowblood in all of the land. Aina threw her left hand forward and called forth her power by chanting: DEUS VULT! ~~Phase 1A: Manifest~~ Aina’s armor enveloped her body quickly and she began by running down the first corridor of the challenge grounds toward the first guardian’s position atop a tall pillar. ~~Phase 1B: Facing Zahori~~ Zahori, the crow of the sea, was surrounded by water flowing around like a massive whirlpool, and Aina used her chain blade to cut the columns away from her as she rushed Zahori with furious blows and strikes, some of

Original Version The fog kept my visibility down to ¼ of a mile, which shouldn’t matter here since all that remained was large trees on both sides of the streets, with a sodium vapor light source between two trees every six trees. The opposite side was staggered with the same order of trees and lights, going on until the fog obscured the rest. Whatever houses I saw, were dark, solid, and most assuredly unoccupied. Before I took off in my car, I took one last look at the trees. Taking a leaf for myself, it appeared black under the sodium colored street lights but under the light of my visor, the leave’s color was more violet than blue, almost iridescent, quite pretty to the eye. Alright, time to roll. As I drove, the only thing I saw was darkness, fog, and more trees. The lights did nothing to dispel my worries that there was nothing here, not even the lifeless houses within each tree surrounded plot had any clues to offer me about the area. So, I kept going, with little thought

Due to an unforeseen event, our probes were lost on this planet we were in orbit above, which prompted us to investigate the lost communications of our first landing party. This planet was number five in the orbital lineup, and we had set our sights on this one for the prospect of mining gases discovered during our probes initial functioning period. We made planet fall after setting up a G3 load out, light weapons, heavy environmental protection. Three heavily armored landers touched down on the surface about one hundred miles from the first team’s landing site, any closer and we would have landed on rocks and crags, not a fun day. With the lander’s touch down, our armored carriers rolled out the loading hold, onto the somewhat flat ground. This world had a very slow rotation speed, which gave us a 500-hour span between rotations with little axial tilt. I began to suspect the weather on this world was abnormal, even through the clouds, enormous amounts of solar energy made it