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| deus ex machina | |
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| Topic Started: May 27 2012, 04:49 AM (260 Views) | |
| Forge | May 27 2012, 04:49 AM Post #1 |
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Date: 14 May Time: 2200 hrs Forge opened his eyes once more to find himself in Naze’s cabin. He smelled deer stew on the wood burning stove. The warmth emanating from the old, yet well cared for, stove was comforting. The wizened old man stood over the pot stirring it with a wooden spoon. Forge rose up to one elbow and looked across the one room cabin at his mentor. “Are you going to sleep all day or are you going to eat?” Naze asked. “Am I dead again?” Forge asked as he rose from the floor and sat at roughhewn table as Naze sat two bowls of thick stew before them. “You only come to visit me when you die?” Naze posed as he sat and ate a steaming spoon of soup before it cooled. “Or only when you need help?” Forge had remained the prisoner of his own home in Texas. Due to a very unfortunate surprise attack his security system had been turned against him. The new Black Queen had used her technopathy to hijack Forge’s elegant equipment and turn it on its true master like some mistreated dog biting the hand that fed. The Maker was fortunate that the system had been reprogrammed to contain him rather than exterminate. Forge was able to convince it to allow him some food and water over time. In the beginning Forge had used every verbal command he could think of to try and override the system. The only response was silence. Any keystroke combination or biometric lock he tried failed. When the White King tried to create a weapon or tool to use in an escape attempt the security suite analyzed it and would engage an electrified floor or knockout gas jets or some other means to render Forge unconscious. After a time Forge stopped trying to escape. That did not mean that he gave up. No, the Cheyenne turned his attention to the other pressing issue. The Black Queen had attacked him and imprisoned him in his own glass castle. Had the time finally come when they moved to oust him as the White King? He kept that in the back of his mind at all times. Forge had seen other usurpations. Who was sitting in his throne now? Had Elizabeth fallen as well? The one thing that helped to ease that issue in his feverish mind was the fact that he was still alive. If there had been a coup he would not be alive, of that he was certain. Those that did not hold onto their rank often met with untimely demises. The possibilities were almost enough to drive him mad, and there were some that whispered the White King was not far from that little venture. Forge looked down to the stew. He seemed to remember going into a meditation in an attempt to find a solution. The Cheyenne was fairly certain he was not dead but eating the stew would not free him from his prison. The smell was delicious but he just idly stirred it with his spoon. “So you haven’t answered,” Naze urged. When Forge gave a puzzled look his mentor asked again, “Do you visit me when you are dead or when you need help?” It was true. Forge needed help in this situation. He had devoted himself to his craft and insulated himself from contact and made himself a target once more. The weak made the easiest targets, Forge knew that. “The strong ones are targets as well,” Naze said reading Forge’s mind. There was a silence between the two men, master and protégé. “I don’t know what to do. Please help me, Naze,” Forge relented, feeling much like the child he had so many years ago under Naze’s tutelage. Forge’s mind had raced but he couldn’t find the answers. “She was holding the key in her hand when she came for you,” Naze replied as if that would open all the wonders of the universe. When Sage had come for him she was holding a strange pistol. Forge had barely glanced it in his peripheral vision before he was enveloped in blue. The Maker did not recognize the design. Was it some new prototype from Stane or Stark? Maybe Roxxon. He wondered with whom Sage had aligned herself against him. The security would just incapacitate him again. “Are you suggesting that I use a gun to escape?” Forge asked. Naze scraped the bottom of his bowl for the last morsel of stew. “You will have to sacrifice. Something you treasure and something you’ve already given,” Naze explained thereby explaining nothing. He reached across the table and took Forge’s bowl and began to eat more stew. “When was the last time you had a good home cooked meal?” Forge rubbed the bridge of his nose. He did not need a lecture from his own dreamwalk. Or was it vision quest? The Chosen One of His People couldn’t remember any more. Forge had all but turned his back on his heritage. In the wake of the Shadow King’s attack he had given great sums of money into rebuilding the town. He had made a few visits but it wasn’t the same. The Maker had connected with Dani Moonstar to help ground himself and find a sense of perspective but most of Naze’s teachings had been lost to time and disuse. When Forge pulled his hand away from his face and opened his eyes he was sitting in his house in Texas. For a prison, Sage could not have chosen more comfortable digs for the Maker. It was immaculate and incredibly technologically advanced. The interior design had been seen to by a brief paramour of the White King’s before he was the White King. She had even tastefully devoted one corner of the master bedroom to Jonathon Silvercloud’s Cheyenne heritage where as half of the mansions in Texas were themed in some garishly inaccurate First Culture motif. “How could I not think of that before?” Forge said shaking his head and set about freeing himself. |
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| Forge | May 29 2012, 09:39 PM Post #2 |
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Unregistered
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The White King rose from his seated position. He had been meditating in hopes to discover a way out of his current predicament and not in fact gone to join Naze in the Beyond. The pieces of his plan came together in his mind. It seemed easy enough though there was a certain degree of danger involved. Danger was the price to play in the game of Hellfire. The foolhardy or unprepared were reduced to ash in the crucible. True, Forge had been caught unaware in his home but he was nothing if not resilient. He knew the security measures in place and what they were capable of doing unless that treacherous wretch Sage had further corrupted them. Through the entire confinement Forge had been allowed anywhere in the lower floor except for the control core. The White King had tried to access that area for further analysis of his situation but the swarm of diamond winged microflies had been released and he had to retreat. All of the doors were locked and the security panels had slid over the windows. The opposite side of the panels projected a recorded image of the inside of the home to show an empty interior so any passersby through the secluded area would perceive and empty abode. Even if Forge had tried to signal anyone from within they would not be able to see him. Forge walked calmly through the house under the watchful eye of his security suite. He could clearly envision the cameras as they rotated silently in their hidden niches to follow his path and the electronic impulses firing away from the pressure sensitive floors sending as they measured the weight load and electrical resistance. Forge’s jailor never slept and could not be brought to a bargain of release. The program monitored the Cheyenne as he entered the bedroom. Here the man stood before the tasteful display of Cheyenne artifacts. Forge pulled one item in particular from the shelf and he imagined the camera cranking in the focus to visualize what he had grabbed in order to analyze the threat level. The Maker had pulled out a simple deer antler that had been used during shaman ceremonies. It was not classified as a weapon at all. The White King then walked slowly and confidently to his empty sitting room. With a few easy movements he revealed the hidden user interface. The security system analyzed Forge’s movements. He had tried to override Sage’s commands before but to no avail. The White King performed his movements as he had every time previously. He entered the key strokes and then gripped the metallic alloy that would read his biometric markers in an effort to gain access to the mainframe. I must make sacrifices, he thought to himself and then drove the carved antler through the back of his bionic hand. In Forge’s palm he had installed a parabolic discharge reflector based on the high intensity retinal output from the optical assembly from the sentinel he and the overly vocal vigilante Spider-Man had deactivated. The assembly was good for three small bursts or one larger output but the White King knew that even the stronger blast would not blast through the sealed doors of his home. When the antler pierced the housing the stored the weapon, energy passed through the connection of the biometric lock into the user interface and then through the direct conduit into the command core. There was a bright flash of light and a shower of sparks that singed the White King’s face and arm. With his flesh and bone hand he triggered the released mechanism and detached his prosthetic arm still clenched inside the interface. Like a coyote in a trap he had sacrificed a limb, one that he had already lost, to escape with his life. A different sacrifice was yet to come he knew. The lights inside the home dimmed and brightened uncontrollably. The door and window locks sealed and then opened. The overhead lights finally died down and the house was lit with dull red hued emergency lighting. Suddenly, the red lights clicked off and then on once more. They repeated the process twice more before the Maker realized there was an almost imperceptible shortening in the frequency of the flash. The final containment protocols had been initiated. Forge hissed between his teeth and ran through the house. It was a timer. The White King would not have been so painfully clichéd as to program a vocal countdown for the self destruct sequence of his facility but thought the increasing frequency flash was a practical alternative. As he ran to the garage Forge regretted the considerable loss that would be incurred with the destruction of his Texas home. The time, money and effort he had sunk into the outfitting of the home and the research held inside would all be lost, but he could escape. He almost considered it a fair trade. The White King rushed headlong through a cloud of the microflies and felt them slice into his flesh. He made it through the threshold of the garage as a light-net had engaged behind him. A quarter inch of the heel of his boot had been sliced off. He gauged how much time was left before detonation by the frequency of the flashes. Forge vaulted past the motorcycle since it would be nearly impossible to drive with one arm and leaped into the rebuilt ’70 Charger. He gunned the engine to throw the vehicle through the garage doors with a huge jolt and a terrible crash. The Maker tore down the secluded roadway and looked into his rearview mirror with perfect timing to see a bright glow in the night sky as his home erupted. If Forge couldn’t save his research he wasn’t going to let anyone else have it. He turned his eyes back to the road with his destination in mind. The White King was driving east but he was not heading to New York. He could not wage war on the Black Queen unprepared. Three hours later the muscle car was sitting inside the gate of a roadside storage lot. Forge heaved the rolling door upward for unit C-11 with his one arm and then pulled it closed behind him. The fluorescent lights flickered to life overhead to reveal a grease stained concrete pad, a red rolling toolbox in the corner and a lawn mower with no wheels sitting on cinder blocks. Forge stepped forward and pressed a sequence of keys on a number pad by the door. The White King’s secret cache revealed itself. Tool benches emerged from the walls and an island in the middle of the floor rose, already laden with completed projects. Forge was not planning a revenge-blinded frontal assault on the Hellfire Club, he did not have all the facts. He did not know, aside from the Black Queen, who had a hand in his captivity. At any time during the day regular club members were cavorting around the mansion and could be possible witnesses if Forge simply pulled a gun on young Tessa Ayasli. There were many avenues of retaliation that Forge could take but there were two things that took precedence. He needed a new arm but that was secondary for the time being. Most importantly, he had to warn his Queen. Forge could not fathom that she was one of the conspirators against him and felt that he had to warn her. Within a few minutes he had created a scrambler that would disperse his signal if traced in reverse and sent a single word to the White Queen. “Beware.” |
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2:17 PM Jul 11