Just X

“That’s a reach X,” he said flatly, “we give quarter to enemies that actually would appreciate it. But if an enemy is going to try and slit your throat when you extend a hand of friendship, then its a waste of effort.”

He wasn’t usually one to try to win staring contests, or dominance contests of any kind.  It didn’t shame X to look away from Yen’s eyes; no.  The look on his face as he dropped his gaze was...disappointment.  And sadness.

“...No.”  The rancor had left his voice, and disappointment dragged down his shoulders.  “No, I suppose there isn’t.”

He didn’t want to lose respect for Yen, but something in him couldn’t trust the man the same way, not after this.  Maybe never again.

“...I came to see you about something, but...I forgot what it was.  I’ll send you a message when I remember.”

“He was dangerous X. Almost ready to graduate into a Liash Acolyte from all our reports. He wasn’t going to be swayed into complete surrender and every moment he was alive, he was going to continue being a danger. One can only contain those kinds of people for so long until something goes wrong.”

“You mean to tell me you killed an INITIATE?!  Yen, they’re CHILDREN!  YOU KILLED A FUCKING CHILD!”

Suddenly, a blue glow and an ominous resonance of power filled the hallway.  X’s wide eyes turned from rage to alarm in an instant, and his left hand flew to his right, clamping down viciously on his forearm.  The glow and noise subsided.  For a moment, the right arm had bulged in its sleeve, but it returned to its normal size--skinny, bony, and childlike.

His Buster had just activated, without him willing it to.  Such a loss of control was...unheard of.  Unacceptable.  His anger hadn’t gotten this out of control except on a handful of occasions...the most notable one, he didn’t even remember.

X was silent for a moment.  He closed his eyes and forced himself to pull in several deep breaths.  He’d had quite a bit of practice at hiding his emotions, and he employed it now, putting a lid on his rage, and sudden burst of terror.  When he spoke next, the Brigadier’s voice was quiet, and cold as the metals that made him.

“An unfortunate outcome, but he attacked me. He also had already proved himself a danger even as a restrained prisoner…I’m afraid protocol is very clear in these situations.”

“That’s no EXCUSE!  I don’t care if he pulls a buzz-saw out of his ass!  You could find a way; you could SEDATE him instead of KILLING him!  Killing a prisoner in cold blood is MURDER, to HELL with your protocols!  YOU OBVIOUSLY NEED NEW ONES!”

How long had it been? To feel someone’s very life throb under his hand. Just a little squeeze and he could end this one’s life right here and now. Yen did not find enjoyment in it, but he was well aware how much power he held right now.

The young Liash’s face was red as he struggled to even draw breath. Which was hard when you were being held a few inches off the ground and an armored powerful hand clasped tightly around your throat. Yen’s hand to be exact.

He did not expect the sound of crunching bone.  Or the sound of the spasmodic choking that preludes asphyxiation.  He didn’t expect the sound of a body hitting the floor.  They were all sounds the centuries-old warrior knew well.

So when Yen exited the interrogation room, he was greeted by five feet and seven inches of trembling Reploid rage.  X’s green eyes were ablaze with wrath, his teeth bared, clenching painfully against each other.

Just in time for a junior Hunter to nearly crash right into him. Luckily, the Cainbot had shot an arm out and stopped the much smaller Reploid from colliding with his commander. Not that it seemed to phase the other Reploid, who immediately was jabbering. 

“SIR SIR! GENERAL X HAS COME BACK!”

Signas’s processor stopped for a moment. X had finally returned home? After a whole year of being missing. The last time Signas had even heard from X was a brief message about him being thrown around the multiverse.

And now he was back home. Finally, after all this time. Signas’s blue eyes dropped down as he steadied the Hunter. ‘Where?”

“He’s in his office sir!” The Hunter yelped when he was pushed aside. Signas had determination in his step and he barely even registered Yoshio’s stealthy following.

The Cainbot’s long strides found him in X’s office door in short time. And he was shocked to find X sobbing in the middle of it all.

“S...Signas...”

Finally, someone close to him.  Someone who wouldn’t mind if he...if he...

X pushed himself to his feet, slipping and stumbling on papers, and lurched towards the Supreme Commander.  He launched himself at him, clinging onto the towering figure in a desperate hug--and, burying his face, he sobbed with abandon.

He must have looked very small to Signas’s eyes, he thought, small and helpless.  He didn’t look threatening in the slightest armored only in jeans, tennis shoes, a t-shirt, and an open overshirt.  He looked like a child.  

Yen kept a firm hand on Will’s shoulder, feeling his apprentice’s trembling. Dammit, he shouldn’t have let the boy see this. He didn’t NEED to see this. And now he was heaving everything inside him up and out. He cast Velaquez a warning look before looking at Vector.

“You’d best see what shape Darius is in, I’ll catch up to you in a sec.”

The Frenchman gave Will an understanding look and nodded at Yen before he and his staff moved over to where a mill of soldiers were tending to a prone figure laid out on the ground. Yen heaved another sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose with a free hand. This was the last thing his people needed.

X handled the Alliance boys—and they were boys, some of them mere teenagers—with as much care as possible, but he wasn’t exactly rough on the Liash.  He knew that what the Liash had done here was despicable.  A surprise attack, against untrained rookies, most of them young enough that they’d never even been away from home before…He knew that the Liash had offered the Alliance friendship and then betrayed their trust.  He knew that they were the enemies of his friends, of General Yen and Vector Du’Galle.  But humans were humans—or, in this case, life was life.  He tried to hate the Liash.  When that didn’t work, he just tried not to feel.

He tried not to look into their faces, too.  That didn’t work, either.  There was a part of X’s mind that held the faces of all the dead he’s ever seen—dead civilians and dead Mavericks alike.  After living for so many hundreds of years, his mind had partitioned itself into sections, some only accessible during certain times.  He tried not to look into their faces because he didn’t want to call up that partition.  And yet it came to the forefront anyway, every dead face of every body he carried added to the unnumbered faces of the dead burned into his memory.

Sergeant Randolph said his name three times before he heard him.  He looked up at the man and realized suddenly that he had tears on his face.

Randolph nodded over at Yen. “Go be with your friends,” he said quietly.  “We’ve got things handled here.  You’ve been a big help.”

“…Okay.”  X sniffed, trying to stop the tide of tears, trying to shut out the endless slideshow of dead faces in his mind, but neither would stop. He picked his way across the battlefield back to Sissel.

*****

“No but...that had to be on purpose,” Ikki insisted.  “I saw you drop out of a portal straight onto two of their heads.  You squashed them into jelly, one with each foot.”

The Red Draconian gave the bloodstained Replica a wry look.  “And I’ll be pulling bones out of my foot scales for a month,” he quipped.  “Honestly, that was not on purpose.  That just happened to be where they Gated me in.”

Ikki liked this dragon-man…what were the others calling them?  Draconians?  He had a dry sense of humor, something that the Replica identified with.  The familiarity of it gave him a sense of stability amidst this insanity.  He’d just broken out of a laboratory where he’d spent over a year being tortured…he’d just massacred an entire science division of Liash…he’d been responsible for a good number of dead Liash in this base, too.  It was only a few minutes ago that the Draconian had reminded him that he’d still been holding his sword.  Ikki had dismissed it, sending its Darkness back into himself.  Now, he wasn’t sure what to do.

A flash of blue hair caused Ikki’s crystalline eyes to flit up.  Was that—had that been—the sight of the white lab coat made Ikki’s skin crawl, after what he’d just been through, but that hair.  Ienzo? Here?  No…no, he was seeing things.  Had to be.

“Still.”  Ikki shifted his weight from hip to hip, folding his arms. He wished he had something to do with his hands.  Maybe this was why Vanitas smoked.  “The bone splinters in your feet are a small price to pay for my life, and the Major’s.  The Liash you squished were about to make French Fries out of us.  We owe you.”

*****

Will could feel Yen’s hand on his shoulder.  He wasn’t aware of much else.

The smell of blood is what triggered it.  It’s always what triggered it.  He remembered, in a weird, warped sort of vividness, his own birth.  There was rawness to the memory; it was wads of twisted emotions, visceral feelings.  Bright lights and sounds and colors.  And pain.  Gods, it hurt to be born.  Will dearly hoped that when human babies cried, it wasn’t because their births hurt, too.  A Golem’s sure did.

The scent of blood saturated the memory.  He was being made, because someone else was being unmade.  Unmade and remade, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, over and over, until he was infused with a substance that should never have been housed in flesh.  

But there was more blood than just that in his memories.  There were the memories that came before, memories of a life that wasn’t his.  Memories that had belonged to the former owner of this body.  Belonged to the boy whose corpse he inhabited.  Those always hurt to see, even the good ones, because of the sense of wrongness that accompanied them:  they weren’t his.  

There was blood in those. Death in those.  Emily’s and Peter’s deaths.  The predecessor, Kenneth’s, death. Even Kenneth’s weak human nose could smell the blood, the sharp tang of iron in the air, the slick feeling of death coating his skin.

There were memories that came after, too.  Memories in his own life of blood, death, loss and pain.  There was the little girl in the very first world he’d ever visited.  The very first time Fate had pulled him out of his own world and sent him to another.  He’d been taken in by a kind family there.  Two parents and a daughter.  Yumi.

He remembered the earthquake. The overpass that collapsed.  The chunk of concrete crushing her small body. The blood on her lips as she smiled at him and told him not to cry.  The feeling of his mind rending in two as he could smellfeelsee her soul leave her body.

He remembered the blood on his own hands, too, from countless battles.  He’d been careful, always so careful, never to cause the death of a sentient being…but there was always so much blood.  When your power was to deconstruct matter and energy, you tended to blow holes in things a lot.  There was always so much blood.  Had he done it, really?  Could he say for certain that he’d never killed?  Not with those blackouts that had happened in his youth.  He could never really be sure…

Yen’s touch on his shoulder was the only thing keeping Will from destabilizing completely.  The smells of the battlefield, the sights—they prompted wave after wave of vision and emotion to flow through him, and all through it, the awful acrid tang of blood filled his sensitive nose.

He needed to get it out.

Will covered his face with his arm, breathing in through the sleeve of his turtleneck.  He began to cough.  He coughed to force air through his nose in rapid, violent bursts; he coughed to expel the scent of blood from himself; he coughed to cause his throat to grate, hoping the pain would distract him.

He was useless, here, and he knew it.  He needed to leave.  He should have stayed behind, in Berlin.  He was useless to Yen.

Fighting, he could do. Will could focus on a fight, could shut off all else until the task was done.  He could protect the people who needed to be protected.  But there was no one left to protect, now.  The Liash had killed them all.

…the Liash.

Hate bubbled up within the Golem.  Hate, and rage of a kind that he had wielded as a weapon before.  One small, strong hand shot up and seized Yen’s sleeve.  Shaking and jerking, Will pulled himself to his feet.

“The Liash,” he croaked.  “The announcement.  The Black Flame—”  He pointed to one of their uniforms.  “That’s the Liash.”  He looked up at Yen, clouded golden eyes beginning to churn with rage and alarm.

“There’s more about these people you don’t know.”

An epic plot-arc for your RP blog that we run, so you don’t have to!

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| What is the Liash Conflict? | The Story So Far | The Main Blog |

It began with Project Guardian.  Albert and Vector approached the Council of Voices with the idea of creating the Guardians due to the losses suffered during the Reaper War. Despite some great misgivings at the implications, they gave their approval finally to take Terrans who were ill-adjusted and were likely to never fully recover from the Breaking to be converted into new super soldiers for the military.

After months of careful study and nurturing, they have finally managed to create the first generation of these new soldiers and they are currently undergoing field trials to be adjusted to their new augments and powers.

Elsewhere, Brigadier General X and Sissel Dering had accidentally gotten caught in a rift-warp.  Thanks to a malfunctioning rift-creating watch given to Sissel by Cycorp, the detective and the general spent a year being flung from universe to universe.  By chance, they happened across Cycorp Company again, where Vector deactivated the watch.  But then Vector got a call for medical aid on an colony outpost planet named Z’ar.  Sissel and X tagged along for the summons.

General Yen also found himself busy with offworlders.  Just before the word went out about the colony planet Z’ar, an Elf named Lorene dropped into Berlin and caused a stir.  He kicked up several fights before Yen finally defused the situation, only to have the Traveller Will drop in and another fight nearly break out.  The shenanigans were interrupted as Yen received the distress call from Z’ar.  Lorene and Will tagged along.

Just before the Z’ar incident, Liash Commander Jerind Orichalcos met with the Infinite Alliance’s Council of Voices to propose a trade agreement. The Liash would give the Alliance access to the techno-organic weapons of Bastian, if the Terrans and Technoar would agree to cut ties with the Draconians and Naga.  The offer was, of course, abhorrent to the Council of Voices, and Orichalcos was promptly asked to leave.  He responded by teleporting a Liash strike team into the heart of the Alliance’s Archives, where they proceeded to steal data.  The Liash hacker managed to get through half of her task, uploading a sizable amount of data directly to an unknown Liash location.  Unfortunately for her, the Archives’ defense shot her through the heart, along with all of her comrades except for one, who was taken for Psionic interrogation.

The Z’ar Incident itself was a massacre.  Six thousand Liash forces overran a compound of two thousand fresh recruits of the Alliance.  There was a Sectis colony and a budding Naga colony nearby; the Sectis managed to get all of the Naga civilians inside and seal the colony shut before the bloodshed got too out of hand.  But out of the over two thousand men and women stationed on the military outpost, only one survived:  Major Darius O’Connor, the commanding officer stationed at the base to oversee training and inspection.

Thankfully, the Liash never managed to get off their trump card.  On board the Liash warship-slash-science-vessel the Revenant, the Liash had been experimenting on Ikki (formerly known as Riku’s Replica), attempting to brainwash him to follow their orders.  Ikki managed to not only resist the attempts in mental conditioning, but convince the Liash that they had worked.  When they tried to “activate” him, he instead when on a killing spree, slaughtering those who had tortured him and escaping the ship to make planetfall.  He then proceeded to cut a path through the Liash occupying the base, making his way to the command center, where he found Darius trying to put out a call for help.  Ikki assisted him in making the call.

Help came within seconds.  Through the technology of the Alliance Gate system, Alliance soldiers (hardened veterans, no green recruits) overran the base, slaughtering the remaining Liash forces.  In orbit, the Alliance starfleet bombarded the Liash vessel Revenant until it was space shrapnel.

Long fingers gingerly twist and turn Sissel’s wrist, assessing the damage. “Hold still.” His right hand holds a tool that he presses carefully against the spot where watch and Sissel’s wrist had fused. One beep from it and the sensors around the area go numb, insuring Sissel would be numb there. Then a hiss as a precise solvent is applied, Vector twists gently and after a few moments, the watch finally pops off Sissel’s wrist and into its maker’s palm.

"…well it’s fair to say this device is shot for good. I’ll have to give you a new one. Plasma damage, which I can only assume is part of the trouble the two of you got into." With a skillful flick of the wrist, the ruined watch is sent quietly clattering into one of the various piles of scrap that Vector keeps in his lab.

Both Sissel and X let out such a massive relieved sigh that, as one, their shoulders visibly drooped, and their faces visibly relaxed.  X's head tilted a little on his neck; he felt like giggling a little bit.  He was finally free of that damned distortion field.  He could go home.

Well...once he found another portal out of this world and back to his own, anyway.  Since he wasn't going anywhere for the moment, he could spare a bit to help wrap up this whole mess.

And being that this whole thing was his fault...He'd put Sissel through enough.  He could take the responsibility to explain the mess, and let Vector work his magic on Sissel's shell.

The original Reploid gathered himself up, packaging his guilt and breathing it out in a massive sigh.  He followed Sissel and Vector as the Du'Galle lead the detective to an exam table, as the grateful P.I. hopped up and waited to be repaired.

"Well...it started with a group called the Legacy Society."  Guilt colored X's tone, but he plowed on.  He explained the mission Signas had sent him on, how he'd gone undercover for months as a human, working to infiltrate the anti-Reploid terrorist group.  He explained the kind of work he'd done, that even though his mission was reconnaissance, he'd been so disgusted that he'd been sloppy in covering his tracks upon his return home.  He explained Sissel's involvement in the Antonov Case, and how the P.I. had asked X to meet up with him to pick his brain about Antonov's connection to the Fiore twins, Hana and Sakura.  He explained that while they were waiting for burgers, they'd been attacked--and one of the Legacy Society's plasma bullets had grazed the watch, sending it on the fritz and trapping Sissel and X both--since X had been physically covering Sissel at the time--in a roller coaster ride through the worlds from which they'd only just now escaped.

Move the ‘X’ to the box that most applies to your character.

[ x ] Lawful Good

Acts with compassion and a sense of duty. The type to uphold a sworn oath and will protect innocents at most costs.

[ ] Neutral good

Acts with in a positive manner, although will not value tradition or rules to act as such.

[ ] Chaotic Good

Acts with a rebellious, free-spirited nature but still quite positively. They do the right thing, but are often disorganized and/or not aligned with the rest of society.

[ ] Lawful Neutral

Acts with a strong belief in concepts like honor, rules, and code. Typically places a strong faith in order- they obey or give orders.

[ ] True Neutral

They don’t align strongly with good or evil, nor do they with chaotic or lawful. They usually are undecided between the 4 sections or just gravitate right in the middle.

[ ] Chaotic Neutral

Acts with strong individualist nature and they have a very ‘screw the rules!’ attitude. The individual will follow their heart and promote freedom, but theirs comes first.

[  ] Lawful Evil

Acts with honor, but don’t care in the slightest for the freedoms and rights of others. Very concerned with self-benefit at times, and will twist rules and codes to favor them.

[  ] Neutral Evil

Acts extremely selfishly with no problems concerning betraying others at a moment’s notice. They typically make allies just to further themselves.

[  ] Chaotic Evil