Abandoned in Place....

Inquirer 2

Ah, but first lets deal with questions of that rather unexpected interruption that elfin couple, Artizza and Fertal, did!

Now, you've already read how those proto-Dark Elves (awkward qualifier word for a distinction between our ambushers and these, but sufficient for the moment) overheard me. How my "radio" voice was broadcasted over the com radio of the dead trooper at my feet.

....

Honestly, I had had reservations about our "friendly" elves who'd, in the end, turned on us. Had broached my reservations (and reasons) with my commanding officer, but he'd ignored me.

....

How exactly things went south so quickly I'll never know. Nobody shall, really. The key Military players got lit up. Human survivors (too few!) only are able to give conflicting, jarring accounts. All bodies are accounted for, but somehow some . . . equipment (like say the landing ship!) has gone awol! Somehow the ship will show up later, a gutted ruin millions of years old, at the very spot it had disappeared. Any data long lost in it's ship's logs and sensor storage drives.

That's what the "cleanup crew" tells me through the grapevine, later. In the meantime, the survivors (those who'd I'd been able to save by locking onto every last "unfriendly" and beaming out into space by my own ship's teleport system) are looking stunned and wary, looking at the party who'd saved their asses!

Oh? You're wondering what I'm talking about? Where did my ship come from?

Hey, I did say that I'm an Inuit AI. My base unit is located inside my "ship" body. In a real way, I'm the brains of the ship. I also can, by remote, control a human like "puppet" unit that's designed along the lines of that old movie character, The Terminator. It's human appearing enough, but a cybernetic combat chassis, covered by a semi- organic coating giving it that human/lifelike touch. I could readily cut contact with that unit (an Avatar), and carry on with my "ship" body (and plaster the spot flat with ship weaponry, things from ship's beam weaponry to a few tac nukes) if needed.

Well, I'm going to gloss over just HOW the Champions (we go to great pains to confirm that they ARE Champions, ala Terra Prime variety, including Artizza and Fertal) are able to confirm they're friendlies (and with all the Military hardware pointing at them, including MY ship's weapon, they're VERY forthcoming). Let's just leave it that we're very thorough after what just happened in confirming to MY satifaction.

After all, I owe that to those humans now left, who are under my command (became the commanding officer with the death of the others above me). Only people left have seen battle. Are vetted, but the oldest (a mere eighteen years old) is barely a corporal). So I'm the officer and I'm in charge. In charge and in charge of their safety.

At least that much is clear. To continue with the mission isn't likely, though, for both obvious and perhaps not so obvious reasons. Obvious reason for not continuing (and returning to base) is that I only have five people left (and wounded at that). Yeah, enough to scrub the mission and return to base. However, from what the Champions tell me my Golem sister, Inquirer.....scooped me!

Meaning that she'd been able to not only come across what her Company was up to but, with her husband and quiet a few friends, defeat them!!

Note: see these links for the recap

http://www. geocities.com/ rule179/ PlotSummaries Episode24358.htm
http://www. geocities.com/ rule179/ PlotSummaries /40251. htm

Yeah, there is that little bit of business of some of this, by what I can tell from their story, still being in the works...

Blank looks? Don’t know what I mean by "in the works"? You do know that the Doctor travels through time and all that? Works for Celestrials who seem to have no nevermind over sending his Champions hither and yon, who in this case seems to have sent back this set of Champions back in time (by OUR clock) before my sister’s job’s done...

Hey, put it down as time travel. Going to have to be careful in what I reveal in this radio call back to base (put a "TARDIS" event sticker on it to let them know why I’m skimping on details) in our request to be picked up. Cannot really expect me to carry ALL of the survivors home inside my ship, right? I’m big enough for perhaps half the size. Try to cram all them inside, and you’re asking for problems. Too cramped (even by Military standards) and too long. Life support system would collapse under the strain. I’m built for speed and for minimal (bare bones basic) support for living passengers, you know (at least now).

Well, there are the freezer tubes, but that’s not something one lightly suggests. It’s relatively safe, but always there is the chance that some glitch happens and the frozen die in deep freeze.

Still happens, even in our day...

So, basically, there is no more mission. Yep, time to return to base (or rather call for pickup) and let the Champions . . . er. . . . well, the dragon mage types have this stuff called Lethe water. Hear from my sister that this stuff is useful in situations like this, letting memories be erased (so compromising and painful memories can‘t be revealed to the wrong types).

Not really thrilled with that idea, messing with another‘s mind, but....

Or maybe nothing will be needed like that. Almost have to hide the smile I feel my Avatar unit almost make as I overhear Jarlath quietly explaining that his "friends" (from their homeland, as they put it) are powerful magical using types.

Hm, seems that Jarlath read Arthur C. Clarke somewhere along the way. That or at least heard his old saying: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." My, sometimes it’s so handy visiting magical worlds like Terra. Can be caught dead to rights, using higher technology than what the natives should be able to use, and explain it away that way. Well enough, but the forced confession that we did get from the Champions are getting more than odd looks from their native friends! Especially from these female centaurs! Wonder what their story is?

Whatever the case, the natives keep switching their attention between the Champions and my ship (decidedly scorched from the quick reentry). Perhaps a little bit of my ship's noseart is still intact, but that's hardly likely what's got their attention.

High magery or not, it's not every day a huge chunk of metal moves like my ship, I'm sure! Kind of having trouble using the ship's repulsors to keep my ship floating.

D*mn forest is playing havoc with lift, yeah. Also bending some physics that would make my job easier...

Anyway, I'd just gotten out the part of the message that detailed just how I’d been able to detect our attackers when all Hell breaks loose. Oh, the information that will/had allowed Artizza and Fertal to be spared from being beamed out by Spaceman Eric Jones (re: 24895). Allow the rest of the Military at large know how to detect an rather deadly potential enemy, next time around. Oh, believe me, what I share will scare people. Will cause the news to spead like wild fire. Need to get that out, and glad I am able!

But here’s the rub. I’m in the area of effect of this Blighted Forest. This Forest is known for time bends. Time trips. In this case, I get caught up (ship, and everyone else inside) in a time warp. Decades pass outside while only seconds pass inside.

Originally, my plan had been to leave the Champions to their own business. To their Quest. Best to stay out of the affair of Champions (who are on a Celestrial given Quest)!

Hey, I’m as good of Samaritan as the next fellow, but I’m going to agree with the others in the Military hierarchy. Best to leave affairs like those who deal with godlike power well alone! But things don’t pan out.

The Forests weird effects shield the weird events outside. Magical effects trump my sensors (damnit). So I miss the world change outside. Don’t have clue about how decades pass, and the hunters who are after this Crystallic the Champions still have give up, writing it off as having dropped off the face of Terra. Miss how a mirror Alliance and a mirror version of the Enemy come upon this Terra and covet it’s rich deposits of tiberium (the stuff that makes all those "wonderful" war machines possible). Oh, it’s not nearly as rich in that exotic stuff as Terra Prime, but sure as shooting it’s high enough to warrant attention! Never will know who pulls the card, but after the flash/feedback through spacetime (which damn near fries ME through my FTL radio in the middle of broadcast, lost all use of it as well as the memorybanks of the Jump charts (i.e. the regular and emergency databanks that I use to chart my ship’s way back Home). Won’t have happened if I’d been off the FTL radio when the Phenomena occurred, but I had so it did.

Lucky I didn’t get fried. As it is, if not fixed soon, the damage done to my base unit is going to spread too far. I’ll flatline.

I don’t tell my troops that or the Champions that, but I do tell them that something happened. Sensors (though dimmed) show decaying spaceships (Military types as well as Enemy) in orbit. Signs of . . . chrono-based weaponry residue: Cronotons (ala Star Trek: TNG techno-babble particles related to time travel and such).

Oh, the battle above was over before it had well begun, I guess. Maybe some inroads with the locals by both sides (i.e. the mirror Enemy and mirror Alliance forces recruiting allies/lackies amongst Terra natives) by some leftover high tech equipment I’m detecting.

I don’t tell the Champions about my suspicions about the chrono- weaponry. Leave it off at it appearing that the ships somehow were abandoned, and were disintegrating in orbit. Afraid that, allies though these Champions are (and good guys by all accounts) I’ve got to keep secrets. I know. I know, you think that I’m being terrible.

Hey, it’s classified material. Won’t break my oath to secrecy over classified stuff. If nothing else, it’s a matter of honor. Sure you understand (and if not . . . then #$%@#$% off).

Uh, just wonder what I’ll have to tell when/if the warping to the local’s reality becomes apparent. Oh, the geography is the same. Same basic flora and fauna as in as far as what is in the Blighted Forest.

Outside, Creator only knows.

Yes, derrangement has happened to this world. One moment, relative normality. Now?

Well, history has twisted and turned upon itself. History was the same up until the time of the birth of the native Fred D’Honaire and native Astra Thessamer (who are presently in one of the Champions pouch as crystal blocks). What happened? Well, the short of it, is in this altered timeline they were never born, period. When/if returned to a non- crystal block state, they’ll remember being human. Will still be stuck forevermore as demifoxes. But if not for them having those eldritch Key components within them, they’d have been wiped from existence! Basically, their time orphans. Walking, talking time paradoxes, forevermore.

Not that they’d know until somebody told them, eh?

Not those left outside the Blighted Forest (which is in a time warp/bubble phase). When the Phenomena hits this world, it spares those within the Blighted Forest. Meaning the lives of the dragons native to Terra aren’t altered. They have memories unaltered.

Outside, it’s a different story. Oh, went along similar tracks like before. Some other warrior woman from Aqualaria gets caught and chained up by the dragon (another woman who’d have been a sister to demifox Astra if not for the Derrangement) while another knight from Allaria (the one who’d been next in line if demifox Fred would have failed in the original timeline) goes into the Southern Caverns to kill the Dragon.

But quiet a bit different for those who’d been named Minestus, Moreau, and the evil son of Zerm (the one we’ll just call Zerm junior). The way it got changed, timeline wise, is that somehow things between Zerm and Zerm junior went much worse, and Zerm managed to mortally wound Zerm Junior. Somehow, Junior used a desperate necromantic technique to try to take over Minestus'body, displacing the evil wyrms spirit with his own.

Didn’t exactly work. Basically, a kind of fusion of personalities happened. Zerm Junior’s dark soul was lost into the abyss, but his personality and knowledge got imprinted into Minestus'mind, forming a really mean and evil SOB indeed!

Instead of a working relationship with Moreau, Zerm/Minestus captured and magically enslaved Moreau, twisting her mind into a slavish servant. She herself intercepts and smashes the brave knight. Then, when Zerm/Minestus makes his breakthrough in his studies . . . to become a god.....

He, using the knowledge of his Zerm side, concocts a means of spreading a rather familair (by now) form of neo-lycanthropy worldwide. But this neo-lycanthropy (much like the Manimal version we’d seen back on Terra Prime, like the one which had twisted the native Frederigo D’Honaire into red furred, whiskered, smiling humanoid fox) . . . . it’s different. It’s more potent. More a lot of things, up to including being contagious to ALL intelligent species (including dragon).

There were to be no others but his new, better worshipper’s race. She gets to retain her dragon form, but her human seeming gets altered by her master into a humanoid animal (a vulpine Manimal, if you must know).

See, that’s the thing. The neo-lycanthropy only produces fox Manimals. And in a perverse twist of fate, Moreau the prophetess/ambassador (i.e. one of many plague carriers) first meets and converts (in more ways than one) are those rangers who’d been looking for Astra in the original timeline. In the Deranged timeline, they were still looking for lost princess’, but way the heck off.

Uh, as for the princess.....well. She’d made a nice snack for the Dragon before this last wacky plan....

So even while the envoys from the mirror Enemy and mirror Alliance were scurrying about, trying to make alliances (even while unaware things had fallen to sh*t up in orbit before they’d well begun), the native’s were. . . . changing.

By the time the battle was over (and the organic bodies evaporated . . . their machinery soon to follow due to the effects of an ultimate doomsday weapon), there wasn’t an uneffected intelligent being left on Terra Prime.

Except for those trapped in time bubbles like that of the Blighted Forest. The "Abandon in Place" phenomena (time based stuff that had, amongst other things, the nasty habbit of burning out FTL radios caught in the blast radius) also burst that bubble, freeing those trapped within soon enough.

But not soon enough to have been able to stop the second phase of Zerm/Minestus'plan. Phase one had been to transform all life on Terra. Second was to erase all memories of having been anything else but worshippers of their creator, their god.

And this is the world our friends are unaware of. Unaware of the enviroment they’re now in.

But....

One last little thing. Though Zerm/Minestus in this Deranged timeline had never gotten his claws on the Crystallic, his Zerm memories knew of it’s existence. The wyrm had always wondered, after gaining what he had, where it had gotten off to....until the day the bubble burst and a brief flash of telltale magic leaks out from the Crystallic. That alarmed the Champions, the unexpected bright burst of light, let me tell you)!

And Moreau, who is Zerm/Minestus' favorite toy, is out there, spreading the Word of her master.

And the vile wyrm himself is out there, in the middle of being worshipped, somewhere as well. Who is now suddenly aware of something.....

Inquirer 2

"Lets hope that reinforcements don’t show up!" one of the privates mutters, going onto mutter something about not wanting yet another Alliance/Enemy war.

Well, don’t think that’ll happen, private.

Pretending not to hear that (just like I don’t appear to notice the ghostly image of the dragon’s true form, stuffed up into "N-space" as Terra like dragons do with their true forms when in human form), I quietly ask for the only help I can.

I ask for help from the Champions, who (after their Quest is done) will be returning to Terra Prime, for a lift. We cannot get Home without a leg up from either a Rule or Agent, I believe.

Too bad I’m too small (shipwise) to give them a lift, to finish this Quest off in an instant. We’re going to be as slow as the slowest member, alas....

1. "Well, don’t know if your comrades will survive the trip." Artizza says softly, looking at the wounded (some out cold, only barely hanging on). "Maybe if we use that ‘Sleeping Beauty'spell to put them all in stasis, so they’ll all make it."

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