First Contact

There's always another emergency. Another crisis. If you feel like there isn't a crisis or emergency happening, you're in the middle of one you didn't notice and will now take you down. - Legion

This is the worst day of my life. - El Barto, Crime Lord and Supreme Court Justice of the Hamburger Kingdom

So far! - Homero Monstroso, Super Villain

The plain was a think of barely solid and still baking lava fields, razor sharp shards of black ice, twisted trees with screaming and moaning figures hanging from them, withered and diseased looking bushes, and scattered boulders.

On an iron throne made of skulls and twisted, blackened, blasted metal sat a large figure. All corded muscle, skin the color of dark sandstone, black tattered bat wings, massive claws, large tusks, and a bestial face with large red eyes. The horns were black, white at the tips, with bronze filigree on them.

Around the throne were scattered men and women. Some were bound by chains or barbed wire, screaming in torment before the gaze of the Lady Lord of Hell. Others were free, watching with remote disinterest.

One of the figures was a slim bald man in bronze loricated armor, wings of polished copper, and a sword on his hip. He watched everything around him with barely concealed amusement.

His name, was Legion.

A shimmer appeared in midair for a moment and then resolved into a matronly looking woman with a severe face and a cigarette in her hands.

Legion watched as the Lady Lord of Hell, part of yet separate from the demon, moved up and merged with the massive figure.

"Well?" Legion asked.

The Detainee looked down. "You were right. His templates were unraveling, he was starting to suffer neural scorching," she shook her great head.

"Did you manage to imprison him in ice so we can look at the condition of his soul without any data alteration?" Legion asked.

The beast nodded. "I think he knew what I was doing. At least part of him," the great beast said quietly, its voice a rumble. "He almost leaned into it at the end."

Legion nodded. "He's been in a bad way for a long time."

"I tried to put him back together," The beast said, tapping the arm of the throne with one serrated and curved claw. The beast looked up. "I didn't want him to suffer."

Legion shrugged. "I know."

Legion moved around a set of four screaming women kneeling on the hardened lava, their arms bound together with wire, their legs bound together with spiked leather straps, all of them facing outward. He sat down on a boulder next to one of the men in ancient camouflage.

"I looked for him. For thousands of years I searched for him," Legion mused. "I found the others. Dax, Menhit, Bellona. Even Sacajawea. I found them all," Legion used his thumbnail to break a chip off of a crack in the rock. "I could never find Pete."

"The omnicorps kept shuffling him around, re-templating him," the Lady Lord of Hell said. "I looked at the base template. It was designed to be overwritten. New name. New history. They could trade him, sell him, just keep him working," she shrugged. "Eons of having his brain overwritten with whatever the omnicorps wanted him to do."

The Lady Lord of Hell shifted, looking up as another cluster of falling stars screamed across the sky.

"Why? Why not just grab someone out of college? Why upload the data, use him, then wipe him, over and over?" Legion asked. "Cost effectiveness isn't the reason. Specialty isn't the reason since he had to be retrained. It doesn't make sense."

The Lady Lord of Hell chuckled. "The answer is behind us. An old answer, even older than you. Not as old as I am for the players, but older than anything else for the motivation."

Legion frowned. "Who and what?"

The Lady Lord of Hell picked up a thick black cigar, puffing on it, inhaling the smoke deep into their chest rather than the recommended method. She exhaled smoke and leaned back, getting comfortable on the throne.

"The what is simple: cruelty and greed," she said.

"And the who?" Legion asked.

"The Council of Eternity," she said. She twitched her bat wings. "Part of them, anyway. The same part that had managed to create the Combine but then lost it all to the Imperium and the Glassing. Ancient homonculi masquerading as the living, exerting power and their will from beyond the grave. They blamed people like Pete for the Glassing, for almost causing them to die, so they punished him."

Legion frowned. "How do you know this? More of your assumptions?"

The Lady Lord of Hell shook her head. "Processing the records of the ancients."

"Speaking of processing: Who will you put in the upper management and leadership positions? Yourself?" Legion asked.

The Lady Lord of Hell burst into laughter. It gained sharpness and brittleness until it was a wild, maddened sound that echoed off the trees, the screaming souls, even the sky itself. When it was done, she wiped one burning tear from under one eye, still chuckling.

"No. God, no," she said. "I've led a few overprojects in my time, but I know my limits. I'm fine running a small team, where I can have my fingers in it all, but a project the size of the one Pete was trying to micromanage would be insane. No, never."

"Then who?" Legion asked. "Don't look at me."

"What are you doing here?" The Detainee asked.

Legion shrugged. "I always keep a few versions of myself in places that it's hard to reach and that I'm unlikely to get whacked. It bypassed the Immortals rebirth system because technically I'm not dead, there's other versions of me."

"And to keep an eye on me," the beast smiled.

Legion smiled back and nodded. "And to keep an eye on you."

The beast tapped a talon on the throne again. "Do you plan on looking for the rest of me? The part that got away? She took with her vital data on the mat-trans and who knows what else when she separated from me."

Legion shook his head. "No. Daxin and I were serious when we told her that nobody gave a fuck about her or even knew who she was. Let her run if she's running, let her live her life if she's stopped," he looked up at the sky. "You're the architect and manager of Hell, you're more important to pay attention to rather than she is."

The demon chuckled. "All right."

"Stop avoiding the question, though," Legion said. "Who are you planning on putting in charge of the entire situation?"

The Lady Lord of Hell opened their knees and the matron stepped out, walking down the dais and stopping next to a bound soul. She pushed it down on all fours and sat on the soul's back.

"I have eight thousand years of SUDS records of multiple species," she said. "I figure, rather than look to names we know, how about we look for those who either can do the job effectively or..."

"Or?" Legion asked.

"We look among the living in the high security areas. Worse comes to work, we use the cloning vats to start an entire generation or two that we can search for talent out on the Iota Layer," she said. She looked up as more screaming stars fell from the sky in streaks of white light. "The one thing we don't do, is we don't rush. We don't say: 'the world is ending, Godzilla is attacking Tokyo, and the prom is tonight! We have to use whatever we find!' We take our time, we select who is best for this project by our standards."

Legion nodded.

"Here in the SUDS, the one thing we do have is time."

-----

The sky was color of the shadow of a rainbow, filled with flickering artifacts and jagged pixel edges. Here and there small blue stars of error screens winked in and out like fireflies on a muggy night. The ground was blasted, an impact stripping away bmp-leaves and doc-bark, leaving behind only the hard code-wood of the trees.

The trio moved forward carefully, looking around at their surroundings in curiosity and trepidation. Their hands sought out one another's hands and they held tight to one another as they moved forward.

"What do you think the falling star was?" The frog asked.

The man shook his head. "I do not know."

"Perhaps something wonderful or terrible to see?" the fox suggested. "Either way, we will be enrichened by witnessing where it fell."

The frog and the man nodded.

The trio moved through where the bedrock of the OS layer had heaved up, climbing up fifteen foot cliffs and carefully moving down slopes that led to the next cliff.

The squawking of error checkers filled the error as the black birds landed on the denuded branches and began pecking at the bugs in the hard-code wood.

Finally they came out into a clearing blasted into existence by the impact. A figure lay in the crater, face up, arms and legs spread out. A shining blade in one hand and a still smoking pistol in the other.

They drew close in wonder at the sight.

The figure was dressed in black leather with spikes that glittered, a black leather trench coat, with a pair of mirror shades that reflected the strange sky.

"Do they still live?" the man asked, feeling a twinge of fear at the sight.

The fox knelt down, putting on forepaw on the figure's chest.

"They live. They are merely in slumber as they dream," the fox said.

"Let us make a small fire to warm ourselves and provide light for them to find their way home from their dreams," the frog suggested.

"Perhaps a cup of tea?" the man said hopefully.

The frog nodded, moving about the blasted clearing and picking up chunks of firmware-wood. The man and the fox joined him, gathering enough for a small fire. Fluffy metadata was added to the wood and used as tinder.

Soon, the small fire was flickering, a teapot merrily bubbling away. The frog poured each of the companions and then itself a cup of tea.

They sat and looked at the figure laying in the crater.

"What do you think they have seen and done?" the man wondered, blowing on the hot tea.

"Wondrous things," the frog said, smiling. "Such a being, who came to earth as a falling star, has surely seen and done wondrous things."

The other two nodded.

The trio sang songs, ate and drank, and slept near the fire. They covered the figure with a blanket of soft sql-moss they gathered and wove into glittering cloth. They looked at the stars in wonder as they blinked on and off with a multitude of colors, some the trio did not even have names for.

Twice, angels fly by in the sky and the trio waved to them.

Thrice a dragon flew by, terrible in its majesty as it moved across the sky as if they were seeking to swallow the moon. The trio waved at them also and one dragon, its belly full of golden glittering tokens, waved back.

Once a great figure appeared on the horizon, its head surrounded by circles of burning gold, each of the three circles covered with a thousand eyes, looking around with eyes of burning fire. The trio sang songs of bravery and glory as the figure moved on, its task unknowable to the trio.

"This is a place of great wonder, friends," the man said.

The fox and the frog agreed.

The fox held the supine figure's head as the frog carefully tilted a cup of soup into the figure's mouth. The man rubbed the figure's feet to bring warmth back to them. The frog made sure the blanket was warm and comfortable.

The man sat with the fox and the frog as they sat by the fire and told the man tales of the wonders they had seen.

One endless morning in the endless days the figure's eyelids fluttered. They shifted slightly.

The frog, the fox, and the man leaned forward.

Crashrider opened his eyes and stared at a sky the color of the shadow of a rainbow, filled with flickering artifacts and jagged pixel edges.