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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 15:21:40 GMT -5
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The hard outer shell of the pellet melted away, warmed by its host's body heat, its medicinal properties soothing the injection site. Once the last of the outer shell had been dissolved and absorbed, all that remained was the microscopic submersible pod once stored within, floating there in a dark sea of body fluid and tissue.
Inside Proteus II, an alarm was going off. Not as a means of alerting its pilot to an instrumental error or dire emergency, but merely to rouse her from her slumber. It took her a good minute or so, but eventually, Lydia started to twitch. Then she let out a low groan. "Okay, I'm up, I'm up..."
Her hand blindly searched the dashboard for the appropriate button, silencing the infernal beeps. Then Lydia straightened up, removed her helmet, and unfastened her seatbelts, giving herself a moment to stretch and regain her senses. She was a little sore, fairly dizzy, and dealing with a rather mild headache, but these were all par for the course when it came to the injection phase. Honestly, she'd dealt with hangovers worse than this.
Once she felt as awake as she was likely going to get for a while, Lydia looked out her window...
Her environment, illuminated by Proteus II's intense searchlights, was comprised of rows upon rows of soft, yellow-tinted, bulbous spheres, each one slightly bigger than the pod, squishing against each other as they ebbed and flowed in the surrounding fluid. Fat cells. A clear indicator of her current location.
Lydia cast a hard frown at the world outside her pod. "You guys seriously need to think of a better place to inject me."
After muttering that to herself, she promptly got to work contacting the lab proper, adjusting her headset with one hand while reactivating her radio with the other. "Mission Control, this is Proteus II. Do you read me?"
She received no response. No voices, no radio static, not even a telltale hum. No indicators that someone was on the other end.
"Repeat: This is Proteus II. Come in."
Still nothing. Ever wary, Lydia took the helm and started piloting the pod through the sea of adipose tissue, continuing her attempts to radio the lab all the while. "Anyone there? Am I inside von Felden or what?"
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 15:39:43 GMT -5
"I see you're as functional as ever."
Liderc scowled at the ship in front of him, resembling a small metal galleon with triangular wings on the side. Entering the ship, a few presses on the control panel confirmed that the containment barrier alone was maintained; the rest of it, not so much. He frowned, and his hand melted into a wrench shape, removing the control panel to inspect the damages. "... Faravahar's shame region, what the hell is this."
To a human, it would seem as though it was merely off. To an angel, however, the damage was evident. He removed one cog, then another, and then a third...
"Oh, come on." And the entire control panel was broken, it seemed. "Perfect. And I imagine getting a ride will be difficult... Time to do some on-site repairs..."
... And then it hit. "... I'm going to need some new parts..."
---
"So... how're you feeling now? You think you can walk on your own again?" Percy was still supporting the much-taller blonde, although the strain of doing so was made evident by the sweat on his brow. "Because I think you put on weight..."
"Perce, your fat comments are the last thing I need right now." WIlliam shot Percy a weak glare, before putting his free hand to his forehead. "My headache's back... Oh gods, I'm starving..." As the pair came close to a bench, the brunette set the blonde gently down.
"Hey, I'm gonna go grab you a bite to eat. You want anything in particular?"
Groan. "Something simple, or something with eggs... Please, no grease..." Percy nodded.
"I'll be back in a few minutes. You try and see if you can't get some strength back."
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 15:51:30 GMT -5
"Hello?" Lydia was clearly starting to get agitated. Maybe even a little concerned. She was already approaching the gluteus maximus and she still hadn't heard a single noise in her headset. "Dad? Jack? Does anybody read me?"
With a deep breath, she started flipping some switches. It was painfully obvious that something was wrong, but it was hard to tell exactly what, let alone if it was a problem on her end or mission control's. "Well, if anybody can hear me, I'm gonna try to restore contact by activating one of the electromagnetic booster cells. Standby."
A soft, static hum rippled through the cockpit as she turned on one last switch...
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 15:59:22 GMT -5
As the brunette was off getting hangover food, William took a few seconds to take in his surroundings. It was some kind of plaza, judging by the people walking by and paying his well-hungover self any attention on the bench. "... Coulda been worse..."
He glanced around, seeing some kind of... machine. Placing a hand on it, it produced a sign in the Purgatorio script. "Oh? Wassat? Newspaper? Yeah, I'll take o..."
The machine began to buzz, and the sign's characters distorted, being replaced by Latin, Cyrillic, and other languages that the blonde would not know of. "Wh... what the fuck? What's that?! I don't know how to read the old languages, dammit!" At that, the machine spit out a newspaper, in the same jumble of languages that the sign was in. Sighing, the blonde resigned and opened it.
"Pr... something about inter-something... up...?"
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 16:22:34 GMT -5
"Yeah. Great. This is great," Lydia grumbled to herself, still messing around with the radio in the hopes that something would eventually come through. She hadn't dealt with dead air this bad since the early tests, and even then it was corrected pretty quickly. Now, though, nothing she did improved the signal, and considering she had no other way of contacting mission control, it seemed like she was going to be in the dark for a while as to whether this was an instrumentation failure in the pod or if the guys at the lab were just having a really hard time correcting this issue.
Still, not wanting to be completely clueless on her current situation, Lydia continued, "Guys, I can't hear you, but I sure as hell hope you can hear me. I'm having trouble figuring out what's wrong, but everything else on the ship is operational, so I'm gonna proceed with the mission as planned until further notice. I'll keep the booster cell active until I can get a signal. In the meantime, I'm gonna get to work implanting the optic nerve interface."
Upon pulling out a computer keyboard and typing in instructions, the monitor to her right lit up with a map of the host's body, charting a course to the head. A course Lydia had long since memorized, but to be fair, it's harder to know where you're going when you're traveling through a network of tunnels. And in these particular tunnels, one wrong turn could lead to some unsavory locations.
"Alright. This won't hurt a bit, buddy."
An arm extended from the pod. A thin laser beam emitted from the arm, slicing through the membranous wall in front of it like a hot knife through butter. Lydia stopped only after making a micro-incision big enough for the pod to squeeze through, and soon she was slowly piloting Proteus II into the vein, letting the pod get swept up in a powerful current of plasma and red blood cells...
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 16:43:41 GMT -5
"Hm. That was easy. And in the only store that actually wrote in my language..."
Liderc hummed to himself, exiting a store with a rather heavy-looking bag. "Now, I just need to get the repairs done and leave this place. Filthy endotherms..." Unfortunately, he just so happened to be passing by a very-hungover man, trying to read a newspaper in a jumble of characters. The green angel scoffed as he got closer. "Hmph. Pathetic little humans, can't even agree on one language. Is it really so hard to crush everyone under a totalitarian government with one script?"
Unfortunately for Liderc, there was a sound from within his bag as he passed William by. "... Come again?" He dug through the bag, eventually finding the culprit- a thermometer, whose readings kept changing, even in the cool air. "... This can't be..." Digging more into the bag, the green angel pulled out more malfunctioning devices- a pressure meter whose needle kept spinning, a calculator overflowing and underflowing, a price scanner displaying massively inflated prices... Hey, space tolls exist!
When Liderc was done, it seemed as though all but the parts without some kind of display were malfunctioning. The red-eyed angel turned to the blonde in front of him. "You-!!" He seized William by the throat, causing the blue-clad man to yelp in surprise.
"Whoa!! Gugk...!! Gah, it's you! Green asshole b- AUGH!!" That earned him a punch to the stomach from Liderc's free hand.
"That's for messing up my electronics! Hang on, I'm not dealing with a drunken ape..." With a wave of his hand, a cobalt wave washed over William, causing the seized man to sigh in relief, if only for a moment.
"Ga... I feel sober again... Thanks, ma- AUGH!!" Another punch.
"You will tell me just what the bloody hell you are doing, otherwise-!!"
A foot collided with Liderc's head, releasing the angel's grip on William, who caught himself on the bench before further head trauma could result. "Yo, Will! Green asshole birdy giving you trouble?"
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 17:35:46 GMT -5
Lydia tightly gripped the controls as she suddenly felt the atmosphere violently shake, accompanied by a deep booming sound from somewhere down below. "The hell was that?!"
A mere second after asking herself that, the computer beeped, notifying her of her arrival at her destination. She quickly extended one of the pod's hooks, letting it snag the venous wall and stop her in place. Fighting against the current, Lydia once again extended the laser arm, ready to cut her way out before another thunderous jolt rocked the ship loose. Stifling a curse, she swung the hook again, only managing to scratch the surface the first time but successfully regaining her grip the second. "C'mon, kids, play nice out there!"
Anxious to escape this vein before her host could make any other sudden movements, Lydia made another quick incision in the wall, detached the hook, and rocketed out of the bloodstream and towards the optic nerve.
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 17:49:20 GMT -5
"Alright, I didn't come for a fight..." Liderc conjured a naginata to one hand, the other having green flames swirling around it. "But I suppose mopping up two apes will be easy work. Now, come to me, apes! Show me what you've managed to accomplish!"
William's eye twitched, but not from anger. Placing a hand over his eye, this action went unnoticed by Percy, who called a sword to hand. "You wanted a fight... You'll damn well get one. Oh, yeah. Will, your egg and rice is in the bag. Sorry if the contents got a little jumbled from the flying kick." With a shout, the brunette charged for the angel. There was clanging sounds as the naginata and sword collided.
William threw the newspaper over his head, glancing down at the bag. "Well... might as well eat up... Maybe if I eat this sudden eyeball... stiffness will go away... And I'll be in better shape to help out..."
"GYAAAA!!!"
"KUAAAAAA!!!"
"Nope." William paused after just one bite of the rice-and-egg mixture. "This isn't... helping... Oh gods, did it just get worse?!"
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 18:09:59 GMT -5
Proteus II firmly clung to the host's left optic nerve, the front of the ship facing the eyeball as it moved about in its socket. The tiniest bit of dull orange light shined through from outside, illuminating the microscopic pod as it prepared another one of its gadgets. This one vaguely resembled a miniature radio tower with four spikes on the end, currently loaded into a rocket launcher-like barrel.
"Sorry about this, buddy... I don't envy the sensation you're about to experience," Lydia murmured as she manually aimed the device at the eye. Once she had it properly calibrated, for the sake of routine, she turned on her radio and stated, "Firing optic sensor."
Then, with a push of a button, the antenna was launched away from the ship, whizzing through the surrounding fluid at high speed before its spiked end embedded itself in the host's retina.
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 18:26:30 GMT -5
"What's wrong, ape? Feeling worn out?" This earned Liderc a mouthful of spit to his functional eye. "You-!!"
"Mad? Why not, according to you, I'm an ape. Why not fight like one?" Taking advantage of Liderc's temporary blindness, Percy launched a kick directly to the angel's lower half, causing the green man to yelp and knell over.
"You... You-"
"Oh, did I just kill your future children? Sorry. Not sor-"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!"
William tossed the newspaper and dish aside and fell to the ground, clenching his left eye. Percy instantly dispelled the sword in his hand and ran up to the collapsed blonde. "WILL!! Will, say something!! What's going on?!"
William glanced up at Percy, still clenching his eye. "M... My eye... it hurts... so much...!! I can't... handle it...!!!"
Percy summoned a pink light to his hand. "Mind... if I have a look? Maybe this is some kind of delayed reaction?"
All the while, Liderc shot the pair a long, unamused look. "Will someone kindly explain just what the bloody hell is going on?"
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 18:40:56 GMT -5
"Come on, buddy..." Lydia insisted as she stared at the monitor directly in front of her, half impatient, half sympathetic. "I know it hurts. Just... give it some air. Gimme a picture."
Eventually, the dark, fuzzy image on the screen broadcast by the optic sensor started to brighten as the host moved his hands away from his eye. It was fuzzy for a moment, but finally a glimpse of the outside world started to come into view, much to Lydia's vast relief.
On screen, she saw... a teenage boy with messy brown hair, inspecting the host's eye with some sort of magical light.
And as she studied this young man, Lydia quickly found herself even more confused than before. "...Who the hell is that?"
Upon taking a closer look, she noticed another figure standing behind this strange boy, this one a winged, green-skinned humanoid. "Who the hell is THAT?"
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 18:51:11 GMT -5
"Will, move your glasses." The blonde complied, and the pink light grew closer. "Hmm... I don't... see anything..." Percy lowered his hand, and the light vanished. He shot the taller blonde a concerned look. "Maybe... we should get you to a doctor's?"
"Uh." William seemed defensive. "By doctor, do you mean those nutters that cut people open-"
"That's a surgeon, you daft idiot!" Having recovered from Percy's cheap shot, Liderc walked over. "Hang on, let me see if my superior avian senses can detect something... After all, a superior species should care for their inferiors, yes?" This time, William's eye did twitch from anger. He clenched a fist, and...
POW!!
"Wha-wha-OW!!!" Thud. Out like a light.
William inhaled and exhaled, looking at his own hand, then at the man he had just punched out. "... Uh..." He closed his eyes and shrugged. "I'm not concerned. He was kind of a prick."
"Did... you just knock out a guy with one punch?"
"... I think I just did. Sorry, I'm just not in a great mood."
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 19:10:13 GMT -5
"Wait, what th-?" Lydia stared baffled at the screen. The image seemed to shift slightly before going completely fuzzy again, then after a few seconds it returned to normal, the crisp picture practically appearing from the bottom up. It took her a moment to figure out what could have caused this temporary distortion, but then she noticed something else unusual. The eye's peripheral vision seemed to blur slightly, right at the edges, almost as if... "Is... Is this guy wearing glasses?"
This quickly raised some concerns. Nothing in her case files indicated that Riordan von Felden required corrective lenses. This coupled with the loss of radio contact, the strange company surrounding her, AND the fact that her host quite clearly just punched out the winged man rather than using magic or even diplomacy... well, quite a number of red flags had arisen.
She didn't want to assume the worst, but she nonetheless sensed that something was very, very wrong.
"Okay... what is going on?" Lydia promptly detached the pod from the optic nerve and charted a new course. "I gotta get some ears in here."
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Post by DanteMGalileo on Oct 10, 2018 19:30:53 GMT -5
"I need to go lie down, Perce..." William removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Between the hangover and now green asshole birdy..." The blonde put his glasses back on. "This is not turning out to be a good day- hey!"
Percy grabbed William's ear, and with a grunt, began yanking the taller blonde down the plaza. "No, you're going to the doctor's. Don't worry, they probably won't cut you open." The blonde sighed in resignation to his fate. "And 'sides, I'll be with you. What's the worst that could happen with me around?"
"Uh..." William paused in mock-thought. "I could fall into a rice cart from several stories up. I could get attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty chickens-"
"To be fair, you attacked those chickens first."
"I could get mentally reconfigured into thinking I'm a duck. I could have worms." This actually made William pause. "... Oh gods. What if I do have worms?!"
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Post by Pink Moon Wolf on Oct 10, 2018 19:53:28 GMT -5
"Hmm... Mr. Stone? Don't pursue them just yet. It's unlikely those drooling apes at the hospital will be able to detect the pod at its current size. That green fellow with the wings, though... he seemed familiar with those boys. Watching from afar will only yield so much. Perhaps he could offer the insight we need..."
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