The child was going to die. Everyone knew it, though none of them had the heart to say so aloud. He had been sick for months, getting progressively worse with an illness nobody recognized. Every treatment that could be found had been tried, and Maiovan was a world of many talents. Its populace was human, people who had wandered there one way or another from every culture, from a dozen different planets. All manners of science, magic, religion, and medicine could be found, and they had each been given a chance to cure what at this point, everyone knew, could not be cured. The doctors had given up, said their subdued condolences, and quietly left with their paychecks. Now there was only mother and son, in a tiny, disheveled room that was all that remained after possessions had been sold to pay for ultimately futile expert treatment. She knelt by the bed most of the day, but there was more than desperate hope in her vigil. She was building. With money not spent on care, an amalgam of wishes had been slowly constructed: machines implements of prayer, magical artifacts, simply lucky charms, everything from every angle painstakingly pieced together in an intricate sort of device. In her studies she had read about some of the old gods, finally landing on one of the primary deities of her people's past. Surely such a being could cure any ailment, but clearly praying was not enough. She had to make contact, before it was too late. And so early one morning, the strange process was begun. Advanced technology began to hum, spells were cast, the best hopes of all the cultures Maiovan had to offer working with one message; come to me. Something came.
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She wasn't sure, at first, what had happened. The device was there and then gone, apparently consumed in a flash of its own abnormal power, and someone else was standing in the room. It didn't have a distinguishable gender, its body mostly concealed, but had a human shape. The woman didn't know whether she was really seeing something until it spoke aloud, voice raspy and disturbing. "I am here." It looked about the room, something alien in its eyes, foreign emotions and thoughts that couldn't translate properly what they were perceiving. Before the bewildered and increasingly hopeful mother could speak it interrupted, seeming to grow agitated. "But it is not right!" The creature stormed about and knocked over furniture as if it didn't see its surroundings, feeling and smelling the walls with an unsettling aura of panic. "Are you...?" The woman reached out to touch it, only to have the visitor leap back and point accusingly at her, actually taking notice of her for the first time. "You are Man! It is not right! I am not meant to be here with you!" It backed away, still pointing. "Your time was meant to be over. You have had your chance, it's our turn!" Before another word could be gotten in, it turned and fled, all but tearing the door off its hinges in its haste.
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Countdown
Weather Control: Ultimate
- Ranged Attack Only
- Ranged and Melee Attack
It ran out into the street and stopped to look around, ignoring the honks and yells as cars screeched to a halt. Everything it saw seemed to increase its panic and anger. "Why is this here?! What has happened?" Some people got out of their vehicles to shout, others just starting to gather on the sidewalks and stare. "The time was supposed to be up. The seventh day was for rest, for the Mankind to have its chance, and on the eighth would come our turn!" There was a brief pause, and then it suddenly knelt down and tapped the ground, a spark of electricity fluttering around the covered hand. The people who had been ranting quickly fell quiet, watching as the process was repeated, handfuls of energy tossed up at the sky and threaded back and forth into the atmosphere and down into the core of Maiovan as magnetic pulls were tested, and the math of the world's rotation and orbit around the star were calculated. "He still sleeps...that is why. He is not awake! It must be remedied!" Cries went out as the ground began to shake, and the wind picked up rapidly. "I have seen...this world spins an odd number of times in a rotation. There is no room to go beyond the seventh day! He never awoke, it repeats to the first!" People were fleeing back to their cars, only to have them suddenly ripped off the street and hurtled through the air by gales that kept increasing in force. The weather seemed to have gone mad, as lightning pulverized a building and then left with clouds that were gone in an instant, tearing winds erratically changing in both force and direction. A violent tremor shook the city and a tsunami began to rise from the coast, only to change direction and crash back into the sea. Panic spread almost as quickly as the chaos, and within the frantic destruction no one could hear the screaming of a solitary voice. "He sleeps because the seventh never ended, but our time is long overdue! It must be made right! There MUST be an eighth day!"
Clinging to every Hour
Force Field: Supreme
Before communication was destroyed, reports went out on the cause of the weather fluctuations. Reinforcements came from all directions, those who weren't picked up and hurled away or turned to ash by lightning bracing themselves behind shields in a circle around the target. They bellowed warnings through loudspeakers and horns, but nothing could be heard over the shrieking winds, or perhaps it was all ignored. Faced with no other choices, the officers opened fire from every angle of the surrounding ring, intending to bring the target down quickly. But most of the shots were flung away by the squall, and what few reached their mark abruptly stopped in midair and dropped, their field of gravity snagged and discarded. The figure finally seemed to notice its attackers, and made a sweeping gesture. "Away from me! You have had your time! AWAY!" Torn from the ground by something more than wind, the forces were battered aside likes paper dolls, tumbling across the ground until the ground itself was torn upward and folded over them, smashing the entire ring. The shrouded figure returned immediately to its business, and screams began to pierce the constant howling as the few people still in the area pointed at the sky, consumed by a blind panic. Hurtling toward them at horrific speed, Maiovan's moon seemed to be falling from the sky.
Bells' Last Toll
Gravity: Ultimate
- Ranged Attack Only
- Ranged and Melee Attack
Some of them ran, and others just stood where they were, staring slack jawed into space. A few charged insanely at the one causing it, and were crumpled and thrown away like a child's toy without being touched. But the moon began to change direction, coming perilously close until it darkened the sky, and then swooping past like some obscenely huge aircraft. The sky exploded with sound and the winds became even more violent, as the rapidly changing gravity pressed down and then ripped up the surface in a wave as the celestial body passed. Huge cracks were torn through the ground and entire slabs of the street were pulled up and dragged off into space in the tail of the moon's passage, along with several buildings and a number of survivors. The figure paid no attention, rooted in place and untouched by the catastrophe, until things finally began to calm. Winds slowed and the soil became still, until all that was left was a grim, unpleasant silence. The city was gone, a stain of rubble pulverized in a hundred different ways, quiet as a painting save the occasional crackling of ruined buildings falling apart. Gracefully sitting down on its oddly intact circle of asphalt, the figure watched a sunset that only minutes ago was hours away, and stayed there. It stayed for days, never moving. Nobody came to search the wreckage for survivors, or attack the culprit. Birds and insects came and went, and then moved on, finding nothing left for them either. After eight days had passed the visitor at last stood and looked disappointedly at the sky, muttering to itself. "Still asleep...this is not where the time was set. There must be a ...first world, with a first star, which was used to set the place of the first days." It looked down and picked up a small brochure that had come fluttering against its foot, an ad trying to attract tourists to another world. Khazan, it read. A nexus of realities. A center. The figure stared at it a moment, and then dropped the paper and walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the ruins. Fourteen days later, the moon collided with Maiovan, and eliminated nearly all life on the surface that had survived having the planet's orbit violently altered.
Epicenter
Earth Quake: Ultimate
- Ranged Attack Only
- Area Affect
- Ranged and Melee Attack
When worlds were made, they were chaotic and violent nightmares of fire and destruction, as if the impatient planet crushed its shape again and again trying to find something that fit. When worlds were unmade, they looked much the same. The ground buckled and pulled away from itself, stones split in half and ancient sediments flew to the surface in erratic, wheezing gouts. As unseen forces shoved it through space into a new path, great hands of power crushed its surface like so much brittle paper, leaving it broken inside and out. To some it would be a scene of terror as their societies and the very base they were built upon crumbled and fell, pained heaves of earth and friction swallowing history itself and grinding it into forgotten dust between its far older teeth. To others, it was a thing of beauty, the world shrugging off its insignificant parasites, breaking down into its original state of unstable havoc and natural wrath in order to start anew with a different load. It was a sign of things done right and progress being made, a sign that the universe was ready and waiting for the next state of its existence, and that the planets it harbored were eager to scour themselves of all that was old and obsolete.
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