Author Topic: High End IC Episode II-At the End of the Time Which Can Never Be Returned to  (Read 52428 times)

Offline Kuroimaken

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Re: High End IC Episode II-At the End of the Time Which Can Never Be Returned to
« Reply #160 on: February 25, 2019, 01:54:54 PM »
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Murakumo finally appears.

"Can't freakin' believe this crap..."

He raises a finger to the skies.

"I am Hugo Lotushand! By the ancient covenant, hear my call! I offer you no less than the body and soul of my enemies!"

An immense golden emblem appears beneath Murakumo, crackling alive with dark lightning. The skies cloud over.

"Fourteen pillars of the abyss! Twenty-eight sacrifices! Breach their vessels and sublimate their spirit! The house of Lotushand commands thee!

LIGHTNING..."


Serpentine forms circle around the emblem with increasing speed before he points to the maid.

"...EXPLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSION!!"

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Offline ketaro

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Re: High End IC Episode II-At the End of the Time Which Can Never Be Returned to
« Reply #161 on: February 26, 2019, 02:00:30 AM »
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"Sounds like you've got an ace in the hole still!" Katherine shouts up at the maid before her, having rather effortlessly shrugged off her supposedly heavy attack and what little damage had made it through, albeit wholly cosmetic at that point, had already vanished.

"I'm conflicted between finishing this now or just enjoying the massive disappointment you'll have if I let some one else do it. Can't be giving up all my secrets to ya, after all~" the mercenary girl cheerily quips, giving a playful wink at the giant maid. "Your next attack might be your last, make it count, okay?"

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Offline Raineh Daze

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The Yatagarasu weathers the storm of missiles without flinching, even gleaming slightly as it brushes off the damage.

The chest-mounted beam that lanced out in all directions after that was only to be expected.

"That's it, we need to fix the future now. Maids that won't maid are an abomination."

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Offline YuweaCurtis

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The projectiles rain forth, heavy damaging 00, destroying her clone and tearing up the WeisWritter. Even her magic attack platforms had been destroyed. No matter, I feel like ending this with a bang anyways. Maybe this will make the others run and even if not it will make them easier to deal with. she thinks to herself takes a moment to take a breath and circulate her chakras into the mecha. It seems as if it pulls itself together despite having no sort of automated repair systems. She then looks back, "This should nearly be done with. Thanks for bearing with it Aryk." Glyphs appear behind her mech as one in particle lights up with harsh black light. The area around the maid briefly catches on black fire before said fire detonates. Stephanie's eyes had transformed again, and she brings her hand up to her left eye, "Oops, seems I got a bit to excited."

"Seriously?" Teresa says, partially in response to the maid hate, but to her mech being scrapped. Flying out in her escape pod, she transmits to Stephanie, "I'll have to give R.I.N a good talking to about making her mass produced mecha more sturdy! Or maybe actually make me a custom unit. Huff. I prefer fighting on a person level anyways." She flies off to as safe of a distance as she can before sending a distress signal to R.I.N.'s battleship body.

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« Last Edit: April 03, 2019, 10:23:14 AM by YuweaCurtis »

Offline oslecamo

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Hugo, Amaterasu and Stephanie unleash a combined attack with their blasting upon the aether phantom fleet remants. The remaining ships attempt to protect the psycho maid but they blow up one after the other until only the robot maid remains, her own energy shield shattering before her plating starts vaporizing under your combined onwslaught.

: “This body may be destroyed but not our cause! We’ll be back-”

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:”Now those were some really nice fireworks!”

:”M-Mister Lotushand, are you sure it's safe to use abyss covenants? My mentor always warned me against it.”

:”Aether Phantom fleet signals remaining-Zero.”

:”All in a moment’s work. Go around the area and make double sure the perimeter is secure, collect any remains you find. In particular from my-Katherine’s Wildraubtier Schnabel.”

:”Affirmative mistress!”

After Arodatam’s minions fly away for cleanup duty, her machine’s cockpit then opens and she comes out, stretching out her arms while taking a deep breath then turning to and addressing Katherine:

:” Now that the easy part is over, let’s get down to hard business. I’m now willing to believe you’re my past self, Katherine, and those that fight alongside you may be our ancient companions after seeing you all in action. Which makes it even more surprising you would willingly seek me out. We could seriously damage the time-space continuum. So what made you take such a great risk? What do you need me for?”


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Offline Raineh Daze

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"You're already in the past fighting enemies from the future. Working with yourself isn't going to do much more damage than that already has."

A slight pause. "I wonder what that says about the nature of time... I imagine it would add something to proposals about divergent multiverses rather than a single timeline, unless this timeline can also contain information that it can't fit in a stable loop..."

Offline Kuroimaken

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"Yeah, time loops and paradoxes are the stuff of logical nightmare, Ammy. Careful you don't herniate your brain.

I'm guessing you're not aware that you're stuck in a time loop yourself, Arodatam. Our problem is actually very similar to yours. We're trying to clean up a mess of the future that's spilling over into our present - their past.

If we fail, organic life as we know it will cease to exist and a galaxy-wide war will deplete every natural resource as well as any hope for the future. That a big enough reason for you?"


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Offline oslecamo

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: "You're already in the past fighting enemies from the future. Working with yourself isn't going to do much more damage than that already has."
:”Your future, my past, tomato, tomatoes. But yeah guess that if there was a line we’ve already crossed it long ago so may as well keep going and see what happens.”

: "I wonder what that says about the nature of time... I imagine it would add something to proposals about divergent multiverses rather than a single timeline, unless this timeline can also contain information that it can't fit in a stable loop..."

:”Ammy I’m a catgirl, I don’t think that kind of talk is healthy for me nor my sisters!”

: "Yeah, time loops and paradoxes are the stuff of logical nightmare, Ammy. Careful you don't herniate your brain.”
:”My head hurts Hugozinho!”

: "I'm guessing you're not aware that you're stuck in a time loop yourself, Arodatam. Our problem is actually very similar to yours. We're trying to clean up a mess of the future that's spilling over into our present - their past.

If we fail, organic life as we know it will cease to exist and a galaxy-wide war will deplete every natural resource as well as any hope for the future. That a big enough reason for you?"

:”That’s all very old news for me. And it shouldn’t exactly be a surprise for you either. Ever heard of entropy? There’s only so much hydrogen for the stars to burn in the universe. It’s still pretty far away from your time, but I was the one who had to live through it. Ok I was uploaded to DAUGHTER by the time things started to get really ugly but you get the idea. Wondering each cycle if we would finally run out of electricity and all shut down for good. As resources became scarcer, of course wars broke out over what little was left. Even magic ran down to a trickle. The signs should be already visible right now, we just closed our eyes to them.”

:”It’s a taboo topic between most espers. We all hope we’ll find some solution and...”

:”You won’t. And as for ‘organic life as we know it’, it’s already happening too.  People grown in labs like Ammy and Nei have been becoming more and common. Not to mention androids and cyborgs. Hugo and Katherine, we are the species in the way to extinction like so many before. And why wouldn’t this happen? Do you think somebody as beautiful and strong as Amaterasu could just spontaneously appear from a random relatiosnship? People fuck without reproducing and reproduce without fucking. Why risk random genes when you can select the ones you like most? Why limit yourself to the genes of just a couple when you can pick from as many sources as you want or even make your own? Why limit yourself to flesh when you can add synthetic materials? Why do you think I look like this now? Katherine’s body was good fun while it lasted, but eventually it got too old and patched up and needed to be replaced.”

:”Affirmative, we do not understand why anybody would willingly choose to keep such obsolete hardware instead of upgrading.”

:”Now I’m not saying it was perfect proccess neither that mistakes weren’t made nor that I don’t have any regrets. But the best you can hope for is smoothing up the transition from the old flesh to the new. There’s no stopping this unless you want to bring everybody back down to sticks and stones.”

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Offline ketaro

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Katherine fell distracted from the conversation going on around her as she sat there in the sky mulling over the recording from her Confident of the Psycho Maid's last message. It felt off to her but it was something to pocket and think about for another time. One problem at a time and there was a more pressing one right now.

"Can we stop dancing around the topic and get to the point Hugo? None of us can do anything or really cares about whatever consequences might come of all these time shenanigans. It's already happened, and we're not the only ones thinking about abusing it to get ahead here. But we are probably the only ones not trying to purposely destroy the universe for it."
« Last Edit: April 07, 2019, 06:11:40 PM by ketaro »

Offline Kuroimaken

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"Well aren't you a nihilistic ray of sunshine? Yes, we get that you're old and you lived through it. From our perspective, though, this shit is coming down now and we're not gonna sit here with our thumbs up our asses while it happens.

Our enemy already knows what kind of moves we make in the future, and we have more limited resources than they do information-wise. So our best bet is play to what they already know. We think they're setting up Dark Falz to wipe out this civilization early, survive and grab the spoils, banking on the assumption that they can wipe out that ugly motherfucker where we failed.

Now I can pep talk the shit out of you until you give up and help us, or you can tell me if you come from a future where THIS has happened."


Hugo shows her some stills from the "Nei got brainwashed into hating him" collection.

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Offline Raineh Daze

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Kicking back in her seat, Amaterasu starts thinking about the obvious: what kind of weakness could some hypothetical future adversary exploit to give her a virus? Sheer physical capacity wasn't a suitable vector, even a distracted future Katherine would probably have noted if it was some sort of uberplague. So it had to be some exploitable flaw. The fundamental unravelling of fusion to insert a virus that way? She was awesome, but not a reinvent-physics-to-defeat awesome. So it would have to be through some old, established weakness or technological limitation...

Say, like the loss of a limb and "improved" security from the Administration. As much as that really turned out to be worth with all the additional timeline info. Techno-organic interfaces in general would be her weakspot, since piloting the Yatagarasu to really achieve their initial design goal left so many surfaces to attack.

But maybe it was also the solution. The original design proposals called for all of this energy output to be contained within a single, intelligent container. A flawless technobiological lifeform merging the advantages of both... and in the end unable to overcome R&D's enemies: time, funding, and other technology. They could half do it, split the baselines reactor power into a mecha and push the burst fusion into her biological form. Good enough to be a war machine, even if neither of them could meet the spec, even combined. Yet that had been over a hundred years ago, the Administration had pushed the technological boundaries since then, and with all the shrapnel from this fight around, specks of future technology...

She can beat this; circumvent the future flaws by eliminating the exposed vulnerabilities; merge incompatible technologies to block the administration; complete the original research goal. She was Amaterasu, a goddess of the sun: energy seemingly without end. If her systems and the Yatagarasu's were fully merged, with all these refinements and technologies and their inbuilt energy-seeking natures it could be done. All the warnings about entropy... they were a reminder. It was her original goal: harness zero-point/vacuum energy. No doubt like any early improvement she might have trouble fully deploying that energy and spend most of it on containment, but... she already rearranged mass enough. Gravity itself might be a decent substitute for nuclear hellfire.

 "Ready, little brother?"

Combining would be hard. She had some technical components, but was hardly adapted to integrate more. The Yatagarasu was able to full decompose itself for superluminal transport. Good thing that Mao had provided a working template, even if none of the inner workings were really the same technological base any more. Dissolve the Yatagarasu for transport, transfer the energy into herself rather than stopping at the boundary of flesh and from there: let instinct take over. Force of will could handle fatal injuries, this was just more of the same.


To any outside observer, all that seems to happen is the Yatagarasu dissolving into blinding light and falling inwards, drawing other debris from the battle in with it. Alarming, in the sense that any catastrophic reactor failure would be alarming, but not urgent to those assembled.
Only without the inevitable explosion, simply Amaterasu stretching, a raven on her shoulder with a noticeably metallic sheen. "I suppose you're still handling reactor subsystems, then."

"Sorry about that, I needed to address the virus problem."

After all, even if she appeared similar externally, any sort of medical scan would make it clear how different her insides had changed.

TL;DR: Absorbed mecha. Glowed a lot in doing so.

Offline oslecamo

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: "Well aren't you a nihilistic ray of sunshine? Yes, we get that you're old and you lived through it. From our perspective, though, this shit is coming down now and we're not gonna sit here with our thumbs up our asses while it happens.

Our enemy already knows what kind of moves we make in the future, and we have more limited resources than they do information-wise. So our best bet is play to what they already know. We think they're setting up Dark Falz to wipe out this civilization early, survive and grab the spoils, banking on the assumption that they can wipe out that ugly motherfucker where we failed.

Now I can pep talk the shit out of you until you give up and help us, or you can tell me if you come from a future where THIS has happened."


Hugo shows her some stills from the "Nei got brainwashed into hating him" collection.

“...Hugo, where did you get those? They are true in my time, but they are also highly classified recordings. You are the one who went around wiping out civilizations for Dark Falz. Or will from your point of view. We thought we had finally sealed it for good, but you went ahead and released it for light knows what reason and ushered an age of terror that keeps repeating. Before Dark Falz changed hosts in each iteration, but after what you’ll do it will be always Dark Hugo the profound prophet who keeps coming back. Whole cults will rise worshiping and making humanoid sacrifices in your name. You’ll command so much power that people will fight each other with plasma knives for a moment of your attention. You’ll inspire so much terror that people will serve you faithfully just for the promise you reward them with a swift painless death when you decide their time comes.”

: “Ha, I knew it!”

“For all I know, killing Hugo now would be the best bet of stopping Dark Falz doing anything bad.”

: “Now let’s not get too crazy. I’m sure we can solve this problem while keeping Hugozinho alive, just need first for him to admit he has a problem. Or will have a problem. My head’s hurting again...”

: “I know, otherwise I would’ve cut Hugo down first thing I saw him. Here I was burning my brain thinking of if I should tell him or no and what and how to say but seems like Hugo already has that piece of data. Here’s hoping this helps him change his path. Still I’ not a freelancer anymore, I can’t exactly leave my duties at the drop of a hat. They would replace me with somebody far more ruthless and far less understanding. I can help you a lot better staying here where I can support you with intel and supplies.  Can also lend you troops. But there’s one condition...”

: “Katherine. You’ll be the one with the access and command codes to my stuff. You decide when and how to best use them. Don’t share them with anybody else. I only really trust myself nowadays and you’re me after all, so technically I’m not sharing with anybody else by letting you have them. Also need a new ride? Can let you have one of our models. ”

"Sorry about that, I needed to address the virus problem."

Amaterasu can instantly feel several eyes, cameras and scans locked on her.

: “...Ammy, you have nothing to apologize about. You just showed destiny can be changed. Whatever happens to you now, I do not know, but I’m still refilled with hope.”

”...Did I just witness a midseason upgrade? I did! YAAAYYY! I’ll get so many likes in my Instaphoton account!”

:”Awwww, I wish I could do that too.”

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Offline Kuroimaken

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"Wow, this gets more ludicrous and showy every time I hear more details about it. But between you and Ammy, my point has been proven to me.

There is more than one possible future, and in all likelihood multiple timelines. Amaterasu just proved as much.

If we had a single timeline, Ammy would never get the virus that ends up screwing her from what she just did. But without you telling her of the possibility, she never would have taken the action that prevented it from happening in the first place. Causality would end up being a bitch and tear at the space-time continuum in a tantrum, most likely erasing Ammy from existence.

But since that didn't happen, we now know that unless we somehow mess with the fabric of time itself rather than messing with the events, we can have multiple outcomes to the same actions. In other words, causality is now our bitch. Every outcome from there is a matter of data.

'Dark Lord Hugo, Fucker of Planets' as I'd like to call him obviously still happened in a timeline somewhere since we know of him too. And he's obviously related to Dark Falz. Our current theory is that it's trying to harness the power of every iteration it's ever had so that it can become unstoppable - it might even be the reason why it has been thwarted but never fully destroyed so many times, we're in a timeline where it has never succeeded.

It's fine if you give Kathy the keys to all your cool stuff. What we're lacking most right now is intel. So cough it up baby, it's exposition time."


Hugo cracks open a disk and produces popcorn.

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Offline oslecamo

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:"It's fine if you give Kathy the keys to all your cool stuff. What we're lacking most right now is intel. So cough it up baby, it's exposition time."

Hugo cracks open a disk and produces popcorn.

Arodatam snaps her fingers and one of her minions brings out a bottle of Katherine’s favorite drink from inside their mecha.

““You first, Lotushand. Still waiting for you to explain how did you got your hands in classified footage from your own future. Because at the lack of a better explanation, it must be assumed you already are 'Dark Lord Hugo, Fucker of Planets', traveling to the past and replacing his past self. Or projecting their mind to dominate a younger Lotushand. Blending in with Ammy and Katherine and Stephanie, the perfect cover to change the timeline in Dark Force’s favor. You don’t only have intel that should be impossible for you to have, you also call me ‘baby’ when by all means I should be countless times your senior. So here’s hoping there’s a reasonable explanation for all of that.”


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Offline Kuroimaken

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Hugo provides everyone with photon chairs.

"Don't be silly. Clearly if I had been at that business for any amount of time my nickname for myself would be Devil King Hugo, Fucker of Galaxies. But perhaps more to the point, if I needed anything from you, intel about things I already know would not be among those.

The explanation for that is a lot simpler. Someone gave Nei this footage hoping to turn her against me. I managed to talk her down, and that's when we stumbled upon that data. Who was that again? Her name escapes me at the moment, a poor android wandering the desert.

Oh, and the 'baby' thing is just me watching reruns of Evil Dead: the Zombie Devil Robopocalypse yesterday.

Bruce Campbell's clone still looks so young."


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Offline Raineh Daze

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"Hey, if anyone was going to get information about their future self, I guess it would be Hugo. Besides, he doesn't seem all that world-threateningly dangerous." Amaterasu says, staring at Hugo for a few seconds and declining any chair in favour of sitting on the air itself. Like decreased efficiency in the air was going to stop her from doing that. "No, nothing unusual about Hugo."

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Offline ketaro

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“Katherine. You’ll be the one with the access and command codes to my stuff. You decide when and how to best use them. Don’t share them with anybody else. I only really trust myself nowadays and you’re me after all, so technically I’m not sharing with anybody else by letting you have them. Also need a new ride? Can let you have one of our models. ”

"Oh? Oh! Um, alright. Cool! Glad to know I can, uh, trust myself? Thank you, I'll do right by you. Me. Er, us? Eheheh..."

"As for Hugo, well, I mean, he is weird, but, like, if I didn't sort of trust him.....I do still feel pretty much one hundred percent sure I could take him. Sorry Hugo, haha." she chuckles, shooting him a cheeky grin.

Offline Kuroimaken

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"That's okay, I need you to keep thinking that in case we do need to fight someday."
Kami darou ga akuma darou ga, ore no michi ni tateru mono NASHI!!

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Offline ketaro

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"I don't think saying that out loud helps you with Arodatam right now...."

Offline Kuroimaken

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"It's fine. She's you after she learned to think differently."
Kami darou ga akuma darou ga, ore no michi ni tateru mono NASHI!!

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