Just some stories.

[marcoasalazarm]

WE BE LEGEND: A CORELINE STORY.

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On the clouded days, the really bad ones where the clouds were closer to the ground and there wasn’t even a glimpse of the sun, David was at his most skittish. Those clouds brought bad memories to the fore, memories that no high-schooler should have to deal with.

But he had. Every day and night. They came constantly, a barrage that never seemed to end, never seemed to have control. They came, a relentless deluge against his psyche.

So he lost himself in anything he could find. He lost himself on his schoolwork, on his love life, on the half-time job he grudgingly went to in order to keep his apartment and his education.

In this land, however, things coming back to haunt you were many, and came often. And came every time your guard was down, made your mind wander, made you see so many things that could only be seen in the marvelous 20-20 eyesight of retrospective that you went mad-or got so close that it seemed like a nice alternative.

As a ‘for instance’, today: first it had been the clouds. Then it had been the rather… *steep* climb in the obnoxiousness of his fellow classmates.

But the final nail, the fact that creeped him out more than others, was the book that the English teacher asked his students to read.

David stood up at the teacher’s orders, looked into the book and read aloud, in a voice that would have come from an Ultravoice:

“Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if there ever was one and there was one.
But to concision: I will sketch out the basis for my thesis, which thesis is this: Vampires are prejudiced against.”

Richard Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’. A damn good short story that, once, he had read for the sake of entertainment.

“The keynote of minority prejudice is this: they are loathed because they are feared. Thus…”

Now, as he read the story, it took every once of his being to not look back towards the rear of the room, looking for Bailey and some reassuring that, hell no, they weren’t still locked inside a basement, listening to the super-powered *things* out there trying to get in.

“At one time, the Dark and Middle Ages, to be succinct, the vampire’s power was great, the fear of him tremendous. He was anathema and still remains anathema. Society hates him without ration.”

His mind briefly lapsed back to some snippet of the Simpsons, where it was shown that the books the kids from Springfield Elementary read were Playboy articles and TekWar. He wondered what the hell triggered this, wondered why this professor had to make him read this *today*.

“But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician…?”

He kept his Ultravoice-like reading until he was asked to stop.

“That is good, David. You may sit.”, the teacher said, making a waving motion with his hand. “But next time, try to put more *inflexion* on your reading, if you please.”

Any other day, David wouldn’t have given enough mind to the matter, merely nodding and saying ‘okay’. But today, as he sat, his sight locked on to the teacher’s face and took in every detail, details of a face that could only be there because of the magic of television.

He felt like grabbing the book and tossing it on the teacher’s face, damning the man to Hell and any other dark dimensions for having the idea, having the *nerve* of making him read such literature on such a day, ‘damn you, Teach, screw you and whoever created you!’.

But he didn’t, since he would gain nothing from it. He just took a deep breath…
…and almost started hollering anyway when the teacher asked Bailey to read.

“Outside, they howled and pummeled the door, shouting his name in a paroxysm of demented fury. They grabbed up bricks and rocks and hurtled them against the house as they screamed and cursed at him. He lay there listening to the thud of the rocks and bricks against the house, listening to their howling.”

He wondered for the briefest of seconds if Robert Neville was out there, on Los Angeles or elsewhere, still locked up inside his house, in fear of what was outside. He wondered, as well, if Robert Neville had become one more Fiction afflicted with Authored Rage.

He had seen it, the Rage. It was the sole worse nightmare that any Pre-Vanishing Human could think of, a Fiction (or two, or five, or –Heaven help those who made them- an even cast of thousands) thinking of nothing but his/her destruction, willing to do anything to achieve this-from lynching him on the very spot up to destroying the entire city block the author stood on, bystanders be damned.

He had experimented with writing a fan fiction soon after the Hours were done, a little drabble about Sakura Kinomoto. A girl who couldn’t hurt a fly. It had been a simple experiment-after all, the Virus had come and gone, right? Everybody was back, the Fictions were (in some fashion) calming down?

She appeared, tried to kill him by beatdown, using strength-enhancing magic and that staff of hers-and he didn’t think that now, nor any time soon, he would be able to empty a gun as fast as he did then.

As Bailey read on into the part where Robert Neville discovered the vampirism being a virus of some sort (and he chuckled in his mind at *that* detail), David looked around the class.

On the front rows there were the Midwich Cuckoos: those girls with the blonde hair and the silver eyes that he really didn’t gave a damn about remembering their names and they all looked so alike that he would mix them up anycase. Following them were the Evangelion kids-Alternates of every single one of them. Hikari was, admittedly, an *extremely* scary Class Representative, worse than any leather-lung Drill Sergeant he could think of (and he could think of some pretty extreme examples).

Lia and Naota sat nearby. The two of them were Nekojin, ‘Cat People’-and both of them were Anything Goes practicioners. He was only glad that he wasn’t an enemy…

Max sat by the window. A slightly younger version of the ‘Dark Angel’ character, she had all the hotness of Jessica Alba (since technically, hell, she *was* Jessica Alba), with a million times more deadliness.

The entire class was full of Fictions: ninjas, mutants, monsters, freaks. Even the so-called ‘normal’ students had big eyes and small mouths. He and Bailey were the only two ‘Reals’.

“World’s gone to hell. No germs, no science. World’s fallen to the supernatural, it’s a supernatural world. Harper’s Bizarre and Saturday Evening Ghost and Ghoul Housekeeping. ‘Young Dr. Jekyll’ and ‘Dracula’s Other Wife’ and ‘Death Can Be Beautiful’. ‘Don’t be half-staked’ and Smith Brothers’ Coffin Drops…”

David knew that, somewhere deep inside Worcester, there might be someone laughing his ass off. The whole world as he knew it turned upside-down, extinct, not with the massive ‘kaboom’ of the world’s nuclear complements or the cough of a disease, but by a bunch of phreaks and an assortment of lines of code.

And as the story went on, as Bailey read about how Robert Neville found an uninfected dog and theorized about why a cross affected the vampires, as the story went on into the fact that Robert Neville was now the ‘minority’, the vampires’ bogeyman, David’s brain caught onto something.
“And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.”

He and Bailey, and Heaven-knew-how-many-people…. They were now the minority. They were the ‘legend’. The people that once created works of fiction without fear of reprisal other than strongly-worded criticisms. The people who saw them as mere harmless entertainment, with no subconscious fear that they could be (in some twisted way) truly happening, if not right next door, then in another dimension.

The people who were before the Vanishing, who didn’t disappeared. The people who now had to deal with the traumas of 23 hours of immeasurable madness. The ones who walked down the street and saw the passerby and thought, I remember that particular jackass from back in my childhood on the Saturday Morning cartoons, and I remember that girl, I thought that her series was a little too excessive with the fanservice…

And the many of them, the oh-so-many of them (of *us*, David corrected himself) that took up a gun and blazed away into said crowd because, hey, they’re only *cartoons*, right?

“Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever…”

‘We be legend’, David thought.

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"OH, CRAP…": A CORELINE STORY.

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"And in other news, several prisoners escaped from Fox River State Penitentiary are still at large. The break-out, which was prompted because of the latest rampage of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner and the collateral damages to the prison's East Cell Block, was led by such famous inmates as Theodore Bagwell and Kenneth Parker, Jr., who are currently the focus of the ongoing manhunt.

If you see any of the men on the screen, please call the police or the United States Marshalls office at the following number…"

-Transcript from WMAQ-TV Special News Bulletin.

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SEVERAL MILES NORTH OF GURNEE, ILLINOIS.
9:45 P.M., LOCAL TIME.

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Joshua Callum was a normal man. An ordinary crook, one of many out in the world. He had never done drugs, had never killed a soul (scared the hell outta them, sure. But never *killed* them), and if you hadn't happened to be the poor sap that he was trying to rob at the time, you could actually say that he was a good-mannered man.

That is, if you wanted to ignore the 5-year sentence because of armed robbery that had gotten him tossed into Joliet Prison (oh, sorry. It was now known as 'Fox River', wasn't it? Hard to keep track of the damn names, nowadays).

Josh Callum had taken the sentence like a man, just bidding his time and trying not to rile up anybody and ending up in a slab. A hard thing to do, with all of the hair-trigger tempers inside. Especially around Bagwell. That gimpy bastard was a full-blown ax-crazy lunatic, capable of raping you, make you eat shit and then beheading you.

If you were lucky, he would do it in the incorrect order.

Callum had been one of the many bastards to take the chance to run when the Hulk brought down the wall, fighting with some damn redhead in blue. It was pretty easy to see that the guards did not gave a flying fuck about the inmates getting squashed dead in the crossfire (and with the collection of monsters that deserved it, was it really THAT hard to understand? ), so he took the initiative to save his own ass.

Made it through the hole, ran like hell, and managed to find a change of clothes and a car that was built long before the Vanishing-a Chevy Nova, pretty tattered, with a radio stuck on this annoying talk station and the occasional backfire. Better than nothing-especially with those fancy-ass 'security innovations' that were being added to the cars as of lately. DNA screening, vocal password verification, facial recognition… all that was missed was a damn colonoscopy. Pre-Vs were simpler to hot-wire.

And so he drove. Out of town, and as fast as legally possible. He would reach Milwaukee in a few hours, ditch the car, ditch the clothes, law low in some alley and find a way to reach Canada without drawing attention from some crazy-ass bounty hunter or something.

The talk radio was now playing some fancy-ass 'shock jokey', a wanna-be Howard Stern by the name of 'Schmuck-O' from some city back East. The jerk had the song 'Hold On, I'm Coming' by Sam & Dave playing on a continuous loop on the background and was pretty much bitching about Supers-something that every interviewee and caller so far seemed to have an opinion on. It was not even aiming for a super in particular-this guy was just rambling on and on about them, giving his opinions (shocking as they were) on everything, from their choice of clothes to their ages to their figures to their hair colors and styles to their political affiliations (be them real or rumoured).

For the last hour or so he had attacked the supers involved in the Hulk's rampage-some alternate versions of Rei Ayanami (who was apparently the 'local' Wonder Girl), Asuka Langley Sohryu (who he dissed repeatedly for her use of the code-name 'Valkyrie', calling her every kind of bad name for a German under the sun and not-quite-but-close in labeling her a Nazi), Rally Vincent (who was the 'local' Ms. Marvel or something) and some others (he was calling the local Green Lantern a 'bottle fairy', for one).

Callum had started to dislike the guy right then. He surely preferred to be arrested by a good-looking girl in a leotard (but who could kick his ass all the way back to Chicago) to some crazy nut-job who saw a badge as a hunting license (which he had seen his fair share of). He had also seen those girls fighting the Hulk-and they were handling him well… as much as someone could have a hope of 'handling' the Hulk.

Callum sighed in resignation. He could not change the station-he could not even turn off the radio. The knob was in the passenger seat, glinting in the street lights and mocking him. So he would have to stand the jerk until he abandoned the car.

The sign for the Gurnee exit passed him by, merrily showing he was almost there.

He was half-way out of the state. Nothing to worry about.

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"I mean, don't take me wrong-sure I would thank her if she saved my ass, as it woud be the proper way to do… but I'm actually rather thankful of the fact that this Tsundere bitch's all the way by Lake Michigan while I'm here at the Falls.", Schmuck-O said.

"What's 'Tsundere'?", his guest said, and Schmuck-O snickered.

"It's a Japanese term. It's kinda hard to describe, but to write it, you need to combine the terms for 'frigid' and 'lovey-dovey' together. I mean, it's 'Frigid' AND 'Lovey-Dovey' IN THE SAME WORD. You know what I think when I hear that?"

"What?"

"That whoever's the poor asshole who gets to be her lover's gotta *loooove* the Masochism Tango. It's a requirement. Gotta be one. Can you imagine how the love life's like? 'Look up my skirt and die-but if you don't, it's the COUCH for you, mister!'." At this, Schmuck-O chuckled.

And it was all that Asuka Langley wanted to hear from this jerk, and she tried to tune out as best as she could. But it was hard, with pretty much every radio on the highway giving off his annoying frakkin' voice and her enhanced hearing picking everything.

Enhanced hearing. A blessing and –often- a curse. Like the rest of the set. She could not recall the exact amount of times she had broken something or heard a slight she was supposed not to hear or had given someone a burn because she stared *too* hard…

So she had an attitude. And a powerset that didn't exactly allowed for forgiveness if she lost control. Okay. She could live with that-had done so for a while now. Had adapted to it. Had become stronger as a person because of this.

One thing she would not accept-EVER-would be someone dissing her actions, though. This she would not change, for she was out there kicking ass, taking names, saving lives and risking her own-she deserved the recognition, for she was giving her best.

And even if she *had* gone through the wall of Fox River, courtesy of an uppercut by the Hulk, and made a big-ass crater in the yard and broken every window in the place from the sonic booms of the giving (and taking of) blows (and which bruises she could feel even now still healing up)... if she had not fought the Hulk, what would it have done? To the county, to the city? That Hulk had been a smart one-it was looking for a fight, not to be left alone.

Those were surely the worse.

In the aftermath, she had gone and helped the rest of the heroes patch the wall as best as possible, and then offered her help in finding the escaped inmates-for it was the least she could do.

She had been assigned, much to her (secret) annoyance, to find an escaped guy with the name of Joshua Callum. Not a bad-looking guy (it reminded her of Chris O'Donnell, if only a little), petty thief, small-time fry in a swarm of sharks. Certainly nothing that they needed a Kryptonian to catch-and she had said so, only to flinch under the eye of the chief U.S. Marshall in the taskforce. The cyborged bitch sure was a hard-ass-somebody had joked about her getting lessons from Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and then was promptly shut up by her stare.

After some legwork and knocking on doors, she had found that somebody had stolen an old Chevy Nova in the vicinity of the prison. She had gotten its description and then took off, looking for the car.

The police had been pretty shaken up because of the rampage, and it would take them some time to organize. As well, once outside the city, surveillance became pretty unreliable and Highway Patrolmen were still a pretty short resource.

A smart guy would get the hell away from the city and cross the state line. A *smarter* guy would ditch the car as soon as possible, but Asuka hoped that she would be able to find it, and any clues about his destination, if needs be.

She had searched the south roads first, and finding nothing, she went north. Her enhanced hearing would pick up the backfires of the Nova, if the car was still in motion.

That is, if she could filter out all of the bullshit that guy was spouting…

She could hear it. In front of her, very far away, but she could hear it.

Asuka Langley, the Valkyrie, opened her eyes and grinned, picking up speed as she focused her strength into her flying ability.

Many people at ground level suddenly heard a sonic boom, scaring more that one person in the state of Illinois.

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For Callum, it had been like some kind of magic act. One moment the highway was clear, illuminated by the moon, the street lights and the Nova's lights-and the following moment she was there, a girl as thin as a waif, a redhead clad in blue and red-with the part that drew the eye the most being the big red 'A' on her pretty developed chest.

She just stood there, her hands clasping her waist, her face serious, just waiting for his move.

He had seen the news-seen the girl take all kinds of punishment like it was a light drizzle, seen her tear apart tanks and robots and other things with those thin hands like it had been tinfoil. Callum was smart-and in the second that it took him to note her and recognize her, he knew what he had to do.

He stepped on the brakes. The brakes screeched bloody murder, like nails on a chalkboard, and he could hear a slight burning smell as the disks fought to find purchase against the wheels.

But the car didn't slowed down.

It was then that he knew the brakes didn't worked-and he shouted in terror.

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It was the typical move, the 'Supergirl Roadstop'. In a fight between an invulnerable body and 2 tons of fast-moving steel, the car would lose. Smart people knew that. So they would stop or turn their car out of the way and into some place where they would be stopped.

She popped in the way of the car as fast as her abilities would allow and stood her ground.

She didn't need her enhanced senses to hear the brakes fail, to see the look of terror form on Callum's face. They both knew that the car would not stop.

So she changed tactics. She floated a little off the ground, her body bracing for impact in a practiced tackling pose. She let the car crash into her and then push her back, rather than stand her ground and risk Callum going out the windshield. She found purchase with her right shoulder and her hands and then pushed with her flying ability, countering the car's inertia slowly.

They were locked, her and the car, for several yards-and with sureness, the car slowed down and finally stopped.

Asuka let go of the car and looked at Callum, saying simply:

"Are you alright?"

The escaped felon nodded dumbly and said a hoarse: "Oh, crap. Oh, crap. Holy Crap…", over and over again. The man was struck dumb with the shock of what had happened.

Asuka walked up to the driver's-side window and added: "You got lucky there. At least you hit me and not some other car or a pedestrian."

Callum nodded again, slower this time. "Oh, crap."

"Well, the brake issue wouldn't have been your fault. That is the owner's fault and nobody else's. But if you *had* hit someone…"

Callum nodded again.

"I've gotta get you back to Fox River. Sorry. I'll… just tell them you gave up peacefully, so you won't get any years tacked onto your sentence.", she said. "Now, you wanna stay on the car or…"

"No."

For a second, Asuka thought that Callum was going to try something stupid (not that he would have had any chances against her).

"I… I wanna stay here for a moment. Just… stay here for a moment…", Callum said, still in shock. The man looked like he was going to have a heart attack if he got any more excitement.

So Asuka accepted his choice. They just stood there on the side of the road for some time.

During which, Asuka melted the radio with her heat vision.

She would later blame it to 'an electrical problem', neither hers nor Callum's fault.

The U.S. Marshalls decided not to press the issue.

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The Final Fate of Lionel Prendergast: A CORELINE STORY.

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“Appointed unto man once to die. Then comes judgment.”

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The last thing he saw, before the darkness, was the flames coming towards him. The ‘Prometheus’, the ship he commanded, was disintegrating all around him, and he had first-row seats for its destruction, standing in its bridge, trying to teleport as many of his crew as he could to the planet below.

In the darkness, he felt some amount of pride, since he had tried –god*dammit*, did he tried- to save them. No regrets on that part-except, possibly, that he could have saved more. But as the situation stood, he had made his effort’s worth.

He could accept his final judgment, whichever it ended up being, with his head high.

That’s when someone coughed softly right next to him, and said:

“I think you can open your eyes now, sir”, in this extremely demure voice.

Prendergast opened his eyes, taking in his surroundings-and almost freezing. He was not the most religious man around-admittedly- but he *had* expected something like a white light, some clouds, Saint Peter…

The room that he was standing in right now was Stargate Command. Or rather, the mission briefing room in Stargate Command, a perfect replica of it, down to the few scuff marks in the polished wooden table that he *could* remember from his first-ever debriefing, right before taking command of the ‘Prometheus’…

The sole exception was the woman standing next to him. She stood almost as tall as him, and was dressed in a white military uniform with a red cape, gold tassels and a couple of medals. The two pips on her uniform’s throat were polished to a mirror shine. Her eyes were brown, a shade or two darker than her hair, and wide in excitement.

She said something in a low voice in a language he didn’t quite understood (Japanese, maybe?), before she saluted him and said:

“Welcome to Asgard, Colonel.”

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Now THAT made him do a double-take. “Asgard!?!?”

“Yes, sir, Asgard. As in, ‘Valhalla’ Asgard, ‘Ragnarok’ Asgard….”. Prendergast though that maybe it would have sounded better on Jack or Shaft. Sarcasm just didn’t sounded good on her soft voice.

“So… you’re Death?”

“Just standing in for her right now. She’s kinda busy, you understand, with many people dying on the multiverse. Some of them require processing as well, and then there’s the travelers.”

That term made Prendergast raise an eyebrow. “What exactly do you mean with ‘travellers’?”

“I’ll answer that in a few minutes, sir, but for now…” she pulled out a couple of chairs and sat down. “Please, Colonel, sit. I promise to explain, but I have to follow some protocol before that.” Prendergast did so.

She took a deep breath and said: “For starters, my name is Kasumi Tendo. My rank –*former* rank- is that of Major in the JSDF. I’m what you would call an ‘SPB’, or ‘Super Powered Being’-a supergirl, if you want. I represent a small, secretive branch within the Asgardian government that is interested in your services.”

Prendergast’s eyebrow shot up again. Although he *had* seen weird crap- he was captain of a *starship*, for Christ’s sake-but a *supergirl* talking to him? Nope, didn’t believed that.

“Now, Asgard is what you would call ‘Heaven’, ‘Purgatory’ or ‘Limbo’-a transition point in the middle of the Multiverse for people, living –the ‘travelers’- or dead. Some people who have died can apply here to return to life, some live people who travel here get killed, and the world keeps on turning-like I said, a transition point. Our official political statement is that we are neutral-kinda like Switzerland.”

Prendergast noticed that her voice was a little shaky when she said the ‘Switzerland’ part. “But you still go on and do battle at times, right?”

“Sometime people get lost out there, sometimes *things* happen in a universe that threaten to damage those nearby, and sometimes people just wanna take over the world. That’s when we act, because if the damage goes too far, eventually *we* get affected. And if *we* get affected, believe me, sir, *everything* gets affected.”

She leaned close to Prendergast and looked him right in the eye-and that’s when he saw *something* in hers, he didn’t knew exactly what, but it spoke of power and strength-which he decided right then to not have unleashed onto him.

“Currently, we’re undergoing a pretty bad stage. Because you see, the Offices-the Asgardian government- is becoming corrupt. They have given free reign to a number of undesirables to just... wander the Multiverse and do as they want. The chaos that they have raised insofar has been compensated by the good they’ve brought, but there’s people who believe that this balance won’t last. These people are a minority, sir.

They -the minority- are the people I represent. We’re recruiting people –with capabilities and experience- to carry out operations. These operations, of course, are covert, but are meant to try to bring some balance. And that’s where you some in, Colonel Prendergast.”

“You want me to become a hitman? Heaven’s Hitman?” He said the last one with sarcasm. “Do you have any idea of how that sounds?”

“In actuality, sir, I understand that you were captain of a USAF spaceship prior to arriving here. If we hired you –if you’d accept- we’d give you a post as captain of a ship, with anybody from your former crew who accepts. All you’d have to do in return is to transport stuff for us every once in a while.”

“You have spaceships?”

“We’re in the middle of the Multiverse, sir. There’s nothing we can’t eventually obtain. But that is if you accept.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we’ll just delete your memory of this conversation and deliver you to a proper government contact, one that will put you with the rest of your crew and -possibly- reincarnation somewhere. But I cannot assure your safety once outside this base, sir, not yours, not anybody’s.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I don’t do threats, sir. It’s just not me. But the truth is more than enough.”

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Prendergast and Kasumi stood there for a couple of minutes, unmoving and not saying anything else. She had said what she needed to say, and now it was his turn to decide. She could hear Prendergast’s heartbeat, steady as a clock, definitely in control. Whatever his decision would be, he was thinking it carefully.

Thinking back to this morning, when she woke up to find Roger attired on his own honor guard uniform (a USMC one, she noticed), she didn’t knew what it was for.

And then she found out. The Offices’ Black Ops division. The Watchers just weren’t enough right now. They had to make some more teams, and quick. Roger had just gotten back from speaking to an Alternate of Jack O’Neill, and had the hangover to prove it. Roger got a call soon after his explanation, completely killing any attempt at a nice day, and he promised to make it up to her later. She got the call from Washu just after he left, regarding the Alternate of Prendergast that had suddenly appeared in the Briefing Room of the Bunker, and her immediate attention.

It was the first time she had to change at super-speed since she came to Asgard.

Her train of thought was derailed when her super-hearing picked something up: a familiar beep-beep-beep over at the Control Room, followed soon by the familiar whirrings and alarm of the ‘Gate opening.

She looked up to the ceiling (secretly annoyed to the blinking red light on it), and the said to Prendergast:

“You wanna see something interesting, sir?”

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She walked to the nearest window and pressed a button, opening the blast door that covered it. Prendergast got up and froze when he saw what was beyond it.

It was a Stargate, and a perfect replica of the Gate Room over at NORAD, he noticed. But the Stargate, and the room itself, was super-sized, and he could almost see a full-sized F-302 (hell, a god-damned *tank*) rolling thru the thing with no disassembly required.

Right now the Stargate was dialing up, and soon after it opened, the massive ‘water’ effect almost reaching the other side of the room. What followed right after that, he was used to (in a way).

A demented amount of energy blasts came right across it and slammed all over the room, preceding the charge of seven people right out the ‘Gate, all of them firing back with automatic weapons Prendergast had never seen before. The blue-white contrails that came out of the muzzles reminded him of the railguns on the ‘Prometheus’.

Kasumi noticed that there was someone missing. She slapped another button and said aloud, the voice carrying to the Gate room thru speakers:

“Where’s Roger?”

One of the men –Prendergast then did a double-take, was *that* a *robot*?- turned to look at them and seemingly shrugged. Kasumi then let go of the button, tensed up….

…and jumped right thru the glass, shattering it and landing in front of the robot. She grabbed him by the front and lifted him up just as the shards of the window (thick shards as thick as Prendergast’s arm and that glittered in metallic tones, he noticed) crashed with the ground. The shards, he also noticed, did a metallic sound when they hit.

“Where’s Roger?”, she asked again, this time almost growling.

“He stayed behind!”, the robot said. “He made us go first, said he’d leave ‘em a surprise!”

Kasumi dropped the robot (who fell on his butt), and then said: “I’ll go after him.”

One other shooter stopped firing and grabbed her by the arm –and Prendergast then though, /if she could lift the robot, what will she do to the shooter?/- and yelled over the gunfire:

“No, you can’t! He’ll come here shortly! If *you* go, we’ll have to come after you!”

And then, a man came thru the ‘Gate. A pretty small man, firing like crazy with a machine gun. He skidded to a halt right in front of Kasumi, almost crashing with her.

The robot and the man yelled the same order: “CLOSE THE GATE!!!”

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The Stargate closed with a particularly loud clap, and that’s when the soldiers stood at ease. A couple of them exchanged high-fives, one of them fell to his knees and started to pray, and the rest just relaxed.

Kasumi turned to look at Prendergast and opened her arms wide in a flourish.

“And this”, she said aloud “is our flagship unit: The Watchers. They do anything, from mapping worlds to saving them to, occasionally, raising hell in them.”

She pointed towards the robot: “Commanding officer, Captain Grey Shard.” The robot waved.

Then she pointed towards the kneeling soldier: “Mecha Pilot, Private First Class Shinji Ikari.” He didn’t do anything but keep on praying (or maybe it was puking, Prendergast couldn’t tell).

She pointed to the two high-fivers “Close Quarters Combat experts, Gunnery Sergeants Ranma Saotome and Ryoga Hibiki.”

And then she pointed to a thin, pale man (was that an albino?, Prendergast noticed). “Silent Incursion Specialist, Corporal Jack Lauren.” Who stared at Prendergast with this unwavering, red-eyed stare.

She hugged a man (a *kid*) with a white bandanna before introducing him as: “Team Mechanic, Specialist Mackey Stingray.”

She turned towards a blond girl that stood there, breathing hard. “Our kind guest, Civilian Specialist Samantha Carter.” Prendergast was almost shocked, because *this* Carter looked no older than 15, but she looked at him, and sure enough, she was her. She had the same eyes.

And finally, she hugged (and kissed the hair of) the small man that had almost barreled into her. “And this is the Watchers’ Executive Officer, Lieutenant Junior Grade Roger Hackett.”

Prendergast looked at the unit with wide eyes, and just though:

/God… Dying for my duty was something I accepted, but why did you placed me *here*?/

)))))))))))))))))))))

Some time later, Prendergast and the unit were sitting in the Bunker’s mess hall, drinking coffee. By now, there was another person with them: a small girl with odd red hair, who called herself ‘Washu Hakubi’ (“Call me Washu-chan, Colonel!”, she had told him earlier).

“So… this is your place?”, Prendergast asked her. She nodded energetically.

“Well… actually, it was not *mine* before, but rather the Offices’. This was a classified depot for relinquished property that they didn’t needed anymore, so I bought it cheap and redesigned it to my tastes.”

Prendergast tried not to think what ‘her tastes’ could be to replicate the whole of Stargate Command, nut and bolt, out of a whim. “You mentioned this was underground a minute ago. So, how far down is this thing?”

“28 floors. Like I said, it was classified. This far down, on this kind of soil, there’s very little chance of detection.”

Questions like these had been brought out by Prendergast for the while he’d met her, with outrageous answers for them all. He’d been taken to a tour of ‘The Bunker’ (their name for this copy of SGC), he’d seen their fighters (F-302s with some rather… *odd* modifications), their armory (which, at any other time, would have passed off to him as some sort of sci-fi museum section or prop storage. He was kindly explained that the rifles he saw firing before were man-portable railguns -and for real, since he couldn’t believe it), and the outside (the view of the Offices’ arcology was not going to leave him for some time to come).

So he saw everything they could offer to him. He’d seen the mess that was several of those dimensions the ‘free reigned’ had modified-outrageous chaos, all of it, as promised, with the unspoken promise of expanding in the future.

And this group was the only one standing against them? They might as well grab one of those sci-fi guns and turn it on themselves-it would be a lot less painful, he thought.

But, then again, he had commanded the ‘Prometheus’. Before him, George Hammond himself had done the job, and those who served with him had classified him as a miracle maker.

And then again, from day one, Stargate Command had gone against insurmountable odds and pulled off miracles-what else could it be, to have managed to defeat the Goa’uld so many times?

And then there was the Wraith over at Pegasus, and then the Ori came, and well… the ‘Prometheus’ was now a bunch of orbiting scrap over some stupid planet in civil war to prove how that was going. He had been told that reincarnation would require a number of memory wipes, and being placed way before the time he died-on the best-case scenario. If he did decided to stay, it would be under the command of the Offices-most exactly, the Black Ops Division. And they had their hands too tied at the moment with the ‘local’ mess to go against those bastards.

If he stayed, he’d be on a similar ‘life’ as the one he lived-nothing but patrolling, battling… dammit. But he wouldn’t be alone, and he’d be packing the meanest warship that they could give out (Washu had guaranteed that to him).

So… what to choose?

It took him forever (the better part of an hour, actually), but he made his choice.

“I think you’re all crazy, and seriously undergunned, outnumbered and very desperate, if you wanted to recruit me. But you’re right. We have to stop them.” At that he turned towards Kasumi, and grinned. “So… where the hell do I sign up?”

()()()()()()()()

SOME TIME LATER:

ALTERNATE DIMENSION RhXphn-132424
MAY 23rd, 2028, 3: 45 A.M. (LOCAL TERRAN TIME).

()()()()()()()()

On Earth, it was several hours for all hell to break loose. An other-dimensional menace, called the ‘Mu’, had captured Tokyo years ago, and now it was going to be re-taken by Earth’s militaries.

But even if the situation would have (and had) been the subject to a rather interesting series, our scope instead now shifts towards the orbit of this little blue planet, where not three minutes ago a starship had appeared. This starship, shaped like a three-pronged blade, was battleship gray and bristling with weaponry the likes of which the two armies down there had never seen before. On the starboard side of the ship, the words ‘SGCS JASPER MASKELYNE’ were painted in large white letters.

“Forward engines, full stop. Enable AGs and maintain position.”, the ship’s commander ordered.

“Aye-aye, sir. Engines, full stop. Anti-Gravity generators enabled. Maintaining position over target area.”, the engineering aide said, pressing two buttons on his console.

The battle cruiser slowed down to a full stop right over the battlefield, and the view from orbit was amazing, to see the least.

“Is that Tokyo?”, Prendergast said in a moment of confusion.

“Yes, sir.”, the science aide said from his console. “Apparently, it has been surrounded by a sphere of energy. I’m also detecting a chronological phase-out within and no human life-signs in the surrounding area.”

Prendergast looked to his science aide (who was, ironically, a Fraal) and said: “Phase-out.”

“The time inside the sphere is passing six times slower than the time outside.”

“So if this is Earth in 2028, inside is…?”

“2012, sir, more or less.”, the science aide said. “It also appears that the surrounding army is getting ready to destroy the field, from the energy projectors I’m managing to detect.”

Prendergast rose from his seat and walked closer to the frontal monitor (since this bridge lacked windows, a thing that he had liked a little from back on the ‘Prometheus’) and squinted.

“It sure looks like Jupiter to me”, he said dryly.

After dying and being ‘drafted’, he had also found his humor to be more like Colonel O’Neill’s (and that was one thing that he didn’t know the reason of, no matter how many times he went to the base shrink).

Washu had come thru and given him command of a ship of his own. The ship’s name, ‘Jasper Maskelyne’, wouldn’t have been his first choice (and he checked: it had been the name of a British magician-turned-military camouflage specialist), but it had somehow managed to fit. The ‘Jasper’ was a Stargate-verse ‘Deadalus’-class that she had adapted with a full-blown cloaking system (guaranteed to keep on working no matter what) and more powerful weaponry, as well as a shield that she swore would never let him down ‘no matter how many satellites come your way, Colonel’.

The price for the command of such a ship –to ‘transport stuff’, like they had said.

Like a small squad of Black Ops shooters that were right now approaching the teleporters.

“Call the transport room.”, Prendergast ordered, to which the comms aide answered with an ‘affirmative’ and a stroke of a keyboard.

“Captain Shard, we’re right now orbiting ‘Tokyo Jupiter’ and awaiting for your team to mobilize, as agreed. I hope that you like our present, as well?”

On the teleportation room, six power-armored soldiers were doing a final weapons check as the cyborg patted a sealed canister (and if the skull-like face could have been able to smile, his would wave been wide).

“Yes, sir. This ‘Pee-Wee’ sure will make the job. Thanks.”, he said.

“Once we transport you down there, we’ll break orbit and leave. I assume that you have an exit route of your own?”, Prendergast said.

“You’re free to stay and watch the fireworks, if you want.”, someone said. Prendergast could recognize the voice as Lauren’s, but there was something odd with it, like it was changing to someone else’s.

“Sorry, but no. Our patrol route just happened to allow us to make a small deviation for your delivery, and as it is, we’re going to have to rush to return before the Offices notice. Thanks for the invitation, anyway.”

“Understood, sir, and thanks for the ride.” Carter, now sounding more like her adult counterpart. The ‘ka-chak-bzzz!’ of a Morita rifle’s charging was heard after that.

“Godspeed, Watchers.”, he said, and to the engineering aide: “Execute.”

And just like that, in a flash of light, the shooters were gone. The ‘Jasper Maskelyne’ turned to leave orbit right after that and moved towards the Moon and the closest inter-dimensional jump-point they could achieve. It would take them four minutes in STL engines to arrive to the point.

Prendergast sat back again in the captain’s chair and keyed the terminal on his arm rest to show him the view of the rear camera. Then he zoomed as much into Tokyo Jupiter as he could.

Right before jumping, Prendergast managed to see a small mote of light appearing suddenly on the surrounding town, right next to the sea. From his rushed calculations, for him to see it, it must have been a massively powerful, concentrated explosion.

Like the one of a SICON ‘Pee-Wee’ nuclear warhead doing its job.

Much to his own chargin, Lionel Prendergast smiled.