[LoweGear]

Originally Posted by LoweGear

Here's Part IV, slowly getting there....

Spoiler for length:

It took Glock some time to accept that this alien staff was Sofia; he had used his mind-link with the storage device to truly confirm its identity, along with the standard voice challenge. It was also some time before we realized that the tablet was gone from its safe hiding place. An energy signature scan confirmed what I had initially suspected: that somehow, the tablet had teleported and integrated itself into Sofia, completely changing its external appearance without changing the AI. This was unnerving enough for it showed that the tablet possessed some strange and unique abilities, something we had considered, but had no evidence to back up until now. As for why Sofia, and not my Khaydarin or Galatea was infused, our only theory is that as the highest ranked mage in the entire expedition, Glock had left the largest amounts of residual magic energy into Sofia, which the tablet detected and thus acted on.

For days, Glock refused to use Sofia whenever we went out to the site; this was disturbing behavior for the person who had said that he’d never leave his precious device alone, at the same though he drove off anyone who would try to touch Sofia, sometimes using extreme force. We thus conducted our investigations on the device remotely, and on the table he had left it on, although progress was painfully slow and fruitless. It took days of coaxing from me and the team to convince Glock to wield his Sofia once again, although he was noticeably upset at the thought.

Our first look at the new and improved Sofia came about when I… persuaded Glock to spar with me to assess the staff’s abilities. Just to test him I lounged at him with a full-powered Sonic Breaker, which I knew he could handle with no difficulty. What happened next was one of the weirdest moments of that session; Glock was readying to parry my charge with the staff, and I was half expecting him to repel my attack. I never did dream that I’d just suddenly PASS right through him and trip, ending with a mouthful of sand.

Shinji: *snicker*
Asuka: More like two mouthfuls of delicious sand…
Kay: I know, very tasty.

Other abilities manifested themselves that day; asides from the phasing effect I just described, Glock also displayed the ability to arc electricity around him without hurting himself. Not knowing Glock to be an elemental user I knew that these were powers granted to him by the strange tablet. He also displayed the ability to move faster than even SS-class Midchild high-speed mobility spells like Sonic Move, and he could also summon a powerful pulse of light that turned night into day. Also unusual was how Sofia’s AI somehow gave names to these powers, and how she displayed them in the cryptic glyph language from a holographic projection from her sigil. Respectively, she called them “Phase Shifter”, “Lightning Field”, “Chronometron”, and “Solar Pulse”.

Shinji: She won’t admit it, but Asuka was drooling when she witnessed those…
*Asuka silences Shinji with Logic Bomb*
Rey: *back turned, seemingly wiping off her face*

After a debriefing of that day’s activity we concluded that, while unfortunate that Sofia lost her original form, Glock gained several powerful abilities with the tablet infused into the device. Since he wasn’t coming with us on our descents, I asked Glock to practice with his new abilities, to better understand their capabilities, and perhaps find better applications for their unique powers. Afterall, his spells could help him out in future endeavours, and it might even save his hide or two. He agreed, albeit hesitantly to my request. And with all of our recent discoveries of what appeared to be a tomb chamber in the heart of the site, I thought that our day couldn’t possibly get any better.

But that night, everything started to change…

I think I may have been a bit too fast in my releases Here's Part IV appended with additional information... and THEIR first appearance:

Spoiler for length:

Glock had been getting less and less sleep ever since he first laid his eyes at the site, and the incident with Sofia only made it worse. He was deeply troubled, and I would find him awake in the middle of the night, performing guard duty without his device, pacing restlessly. And when he did sleep, he was visited by dreams I only knew were bad. He would wake up in a cold sweat, in an almost catatonic state. I had never seen him in that state before, a far cry from the stout, composed, annoyingly stiff and serious Armed Clerk that I knew. Even I was getting incredibly worried. I confronted him about it, more forcefully this time. I’ve known him to be quiet, but I’ve never known him as the type to hide things either. He started mumbling, speaking incoherently. I couldn’t stand it; he was breaking down right before my own eyes. You wimp. I slapped some damn sense into him once, and again, and another, before he degraded any further.

Asuka: More like beat the living daylights out of him… he got smashed up really…
Shinji: *shakes head at Asuka*

He decided to tell me everything that night.

It was six years ago, during a drug-busting raid on the Kruschev drug-cartels on the sparsely inhabited remote 111th Non-Administrated world “Solaria”. A TSAB team had just made a successful arrest of a known criminal druglord, and was about to arrest him. I had heard of this mission, since it destroyed the Kruschev family’s fortunes, and I had been using them for financial assistance at the time. I had also heard that Lord Kruschev had set up an ill-planned ambush inside his underground warehouse and headquarters, which resulted in a firefight that ended up killing him along with most of his men and the TSAB officers. And I had also heard that there was only one survivor in that incident, who went missing for several weeks before he was found nearly dead several kilometers from the scene.

There was an ambush, and there was a shootout. And that officer did go MIA. But the devil was in the details.

Said officer’s name was Private Glock Heckler, who had been a major factor in the initial success of the operation. With a squad made up of powerful AA rank mages, the mission’s success was all but assured. Cornered and without a way out, Lord Kruschev revealed his hand, and unleashed his trap on the unsuspecting officers.

It happened so quickly that there was no time to react. Officer after officer fell to the power of Kruschev’s skeleton like automatons, their green energy beams literally flaying and skinning the squad to their bones, their exoskeletons shrugging off the officer’s best attacks. But these machines did not take orders from anyone. They tore apart all who were inside, TSAB and criminals alike, sparing no life that stood against them, staining the place with the blood of their victims. The remaining officers who managed to defeat the first wave of automatons thought themselves safe, before their relief turned to astonishment and horror as the broken pieces of the automatons they had thought dead reassembled themselves and continued their indiscriminate murderous rampage. Trapped inside the labyrinth of heavily fortified walls and ceilings, and with the machines closing in on all sides they fought till the last man, and in the end only one was left. And his only option was to use his most powerful buster spell to bury himself and take down the unstoppable monstrosities with him. As he charged his spell he saw the caped visage of a dark skeleton, and stared down its demonic gaze before he sent the entire world crashing down on him. And he thought it was the end.

But they would not let it end so soon. They would not forget the insult of him defying death. They would make him fear death; they would make him death itself. And for days the young officer slipped between darkness and light, and when he awoke the horror he felt could not be described.

Because he could not feel any.