A delivery?

Curious. Nythadri kept no ties to her world before the Tower, and knew of no one who might have seen fit to send her a gift. Her family, perhaps … at a push. Every letter they’d ever sent had fed the flames in her hearth, unread, and they had consequently stopped arriving a long time ago - before she had even earned the serpent ring. But if not them, that didn't leave a lot of potentials to speculate. Farune? Hardly likely. A mistake, perhaps. A misunderstanding. Or something mundane that would make sense once she'd received it. She pushed the door to the small office without hesitation, strangely bereft of the sorts of excited inquisitiveness one would usually expect at so uncommon an event.

An Aes Sedai sat behind the desk; Brown, Nythadri would imagine by the stacks of paper scribbled with ink. Ledgers and piles of letters arranged into some obscure order decorated the desk and shelved walls; checked, presumably, before being collected by their intended recipients. Or held until such as time as delivery was deemed appropriate. The ageless face did look up, but only to nod towards the waiting courier. A man as non-descript as the precise and smooth lines of his uniform.

“Nythadri Vanditera?”


She nodded, and held out her hand impatiently, eager to be away. She had been called directly for this, hailed down by a breathless and excited novice because the courier had been instructed to relinquish his goods personally – had in fact calmly refused to leave it in the hands of the Tower, which insofar as the Aes Sedai (and even Nythadri herself) were concerned, was as good as the hands of Nythadri Vanditera. It fit in the open palm of her hand, with a weight that suggested something significant within. Curious now, despite herself, she curled her fingers around the hard edges of the box. There was nothing outwardly to identify it; it was just plain, neat, unexceptional. She prolonged the mystery of it, looking askance at the sister. It would be preferable to retreat to the privacy of her own rooms to open it, though doubtful she would be offered the luxury.

“You’ll need to open it here, dear.”
Spoken disinterestedly, amidst the scratching of a quill; the Aes Sedai did not look up.

She shrugged, disinclined to argue, opened the box, pulled the object out. And folded back the wrappings.

A falcon in flight, with a flash of aqua caught in its outstretched claws. Darkness rushed the edges of Nythadri’s vision, and it felt like falling. Falling ever so hard and fast. The sigil of her brother. Lying stark in her pale palm. So unexpected it tugged her sharply off kilter, wrenched her somewhere dark and distant. Seconds trickled past unnoticed, her expression deathly still. Then, as numbness receded to sensation, ice stung her palm and prickled up the length of her arm. If the Aes Sedai had not been there, she would have snatched her hand free of its burden. But composure demanded more of her than rash impulse, no matter how sickening the twist in her stomach. A blood-soaked memory battled for consciousness among the dim-lit halls of things better left forgotten. “Who sent you?”
Her eyes flicked from the pendant to the courier, lethal as black ice. A detached control robbed any warmth from her gaze, and she spoke again before he even had a chance to answer. “Who is it from?”


She was very still, her voice steely and measured, expression deceptively blank. But the world was vibrating around the edges. Punctuated by a cascading rampage of buried memory. Tash’s face was predominant among the recollection, like his ghost shared the room, fingering the cold gold that had once lain against his warm and beating heart. Who would send such a thing? And perhaps more importantly, why. Fury mixed with disbelief, the pain tight in her chest. Light send her hand was not shaking; it felt like it might, and her grip on the hard edges of the pendant intensified. Squeezed her fingers white.

“It was sent anonymously, Accepted.”


“Anonymously,”
she repeated, and the word tasted bitter. Who. Had. Sent. It?

“I don’t want it.”
Quick steps brought her forward. She pressed it against his chest, crinkling the smooth front of his uniform. “Take it back.”
But he did not move. Calm grey eyes accepted her hostility placidly, even as he was pierced by the uncompromising demand made eerie in her pale gaze. His hands were clasped behind his back. With the Aes Sedai perched behind, she would not be able to sway him; though he might have noticed, in that moment, how the demand in her expression faded to a desperate plea. If he did, it did not cause him to falter.

“Then do as you will with it, Accepted. I am only charged with its safe delivery.”
His gaze broke to check the Aes Sedai, and he bowed his head. Retreated. Left her staring at a wall, with a weight of guilt hanging heavy in her hand.

“Accepted?”


Steeling her breath, blinking back the gaping black hole of the last few moments, she turned. The sister waved her forward, arm outstretched. A flick of Nythadri’s hand, a flash of gold, and the pendant fell from her palm, swinging like a pendulum suspended from her finger. The Aes Sedai cupped it in her grasp, and she snatched her hand back gladly. The chain clinked against the desk. For a moment saidar brightened her periphery, followed by a buzz of foreign weaves. Then the sister shrugged, and held it aloft. If she knew anything of Nythadri’s past, of what this trinket meant, she did not show it. “There is nothing to prevent you keeping it, child.”


In the corridor beyond, Nythadri’s heart was pounding, and bile stung her throat. A message? Anger. Her jaw locked. A warning? Fury so white she could feel herself ripping apart at the seams, for the person who had been so cruel as to send this to her. When she closed her eyes she saw Tash's face, and when she opened them she saw his pendant. A memory and a guilt she had fought so hard to bury, to forget, to accept in icy stillness. She placed it back in the box, and forced the lid shut.

Normal Test example
#FF00FF - Danika

lightgreen - Aria/Sierra

#0072bb - Nox

red - Marcus

khaki - Thalia

#FE0 - Dane

Gold - Ivan

lightblue - Alex



Edited by Nox, Oct 27 2017, 01:35 PM.

Continued from The Hunt

Dimirty had carried blonde to Alistair's lab through the underground tunnels. He had almost tripped several times, but he was thankful the woman wasn't overly heavy, though his arms felt like noodles when he dropped her into a cot in the lab.

It wasn't necessary now, but it would be later so Dimitry started strapping the blonde down. He mumbled to himself. "She's drunk and the 'form should be enough to keep her out." That's what he kept telling himself.

There were cameras in the little room. He knew Alistair was watching in his creepy sort of way. Human test subjects, she was the first woman they'd tried. They hadn't had good results on anything yet except animals... dogs and rats seemed extremely susceptible to the 'thing' Dimitry didn't understand any of it.

Now it was a matter of waiting till she woke up. Alistair always wanted to taunt his victims first - make sure they knew what was going on. That if this worked they'd be powerful god like creatures able to make more of themselves with ease. That was Alistair's favorite part. Describing how they would reproduce themselves. Dimitry shuttered. At least the money was good!

(( Alistair will come in when Nat wakes up. http://w11.zetaboards.com/TheFirstAge/si...t=10373581 -- I have to go see why his image isn't showing I know I picked one ))

Bored. Dane was bloody bored. He sat inside a restaurant in downtown, pressed against the window, wishing he hadn't left Mexico. He hadn't seen Aria in weeks, but that wasn't to say that she hadn't seen him. He was trying to stay away from her, but the woman was worse than a drug. He was addicted and couldn't get another hit. Worse yet, he wanted to kill her every time he thought about her, but the problem was he could only kill her once. She would be gone forever then, completely out of reach, unless he kept the body around somewhere. It would turn rotten eventually, smell and decay. Unless there was a way to preserve her using the power. Actually, that wasn't a bad idea. How, though? He needed to practice. To work it out.

He pulled out a map from his Wallet and searched for the nearest pet shop.

Aria had gotten the alert that Nox had been named a god and frowned, but there was nothing she could do. She was already rogue, but the Atharim didn't know that. She needed all her connections. She added a last known whereabouts to his file for whatever hunter decided to hunt him.

The meeting with Rat had gone well after he had showed up. He was an hour late and Aria was on her way out when he showed up. She didn't buy him a drink and she didn't go back inside, she made him walk with her. It hadn't taken more than a simple touch to make him do her bidding. A fond touch, a little lust and desire with a smidgen of fear and he was putty in her hands. She smiled at the feeling of complete control.

Rat had told her that the Regus lived. She had know that much. The fire in the Baccarat building had been devastating, but he'd gotten out through the tunnels. There was no real way of truly finding him in the tunnels, but she still had her land warriors and the mapping software her and Nox played with. She didn't need the Atharim connection to track the Regus. She'd do what she'd done since coming to Moscow. Hunt the monsters in the tunnels. This was the worst of the worst.

Mikael sent one ZARS agent - Hammel - with Aria to do the hunting. He was both bodyguard and keeper. Mikael said he'd have gone himself, except he had no training that would be beneficial. Hammel knew how to survive in the trenches of war torn areas. He was a combatant before he came to ZARS.

It wasn't hard to get a second pair of land warriors synced up to her wallet and before they knew it they were outside the ruins of the Atharim building as it melted into the ground with godsfire. Underground it looked even worse than at street level. Aria started the tracking and mapping software and they started moving through the tunnels. There was no easy way to do this, it would be sleeping and eating in this shit hole, which is why Hammel was with Aria and not Mikael himself.

It had been a while since Dorian had actually been home in the daylight. Or when anyone was awake for that matter. Christian watched as Nova scampered around the front yard. There was a clear line of where the pup was avoiding along the drive and the walls. Dorian crossed across the lawn towards the pup. There was a loud blaring noise and Dorian was squating in a defensive position as his son ran out of the house with a ball of fire floating in his hands. "Fuck, son put that away."


Cruz sighed and looked at Dorian with a frown. "You didn't tell him?" He looked at Christian.

"Your father moved to fast and I forgot he didn't know." Dorian watched as Cruz took him by the arm and moved in away from his current spot and squatted down in the grass and looked like he was concentrating - taking a .... Dorian let the train of thought go. He looked around the front of the estate and saw the 10 foot high stone wall erected around the yard.

Dorian asked. "Nox's handywork?"


Cruz nodded. "I helped. There are alarms unless you come down the drive. The front door is trapped when we go to sleep, same the the side door. We might lose the door if someone trips it. We might lose half the house if someone tries to come in the windows. Nox is paranoid, Dad. He's digging a fucking tunnel in the basement. We broke through yesterday and he's got a wall of air blocking the tunnel to keep monsters out."

Dorian went into the house and down to the basement and everything looked in order. Cruz said. "In here." In the room Nox had taken to living in after he and Elyse broke up there was a fucking hole in the wall and Dorian took a step but he came face to face with something blocking his way. "He's lined this room and Christian's room with more rock, says iron or lead or something. I don't know how he knows it all looks the same to me."

"Why?


Cruz shrugged. "He's protecting us. He said if the alarms were tripped at night that we needed to get down here and in the room. Said the Atharim have nasty weapons. Said we might still die but it's all he can do."

Dorian sighed as his phone rang. It was Ivan and their conversation was brief. Nox had prepared for the Atharim hunting Cruz, and now they were hunting him. Fuck! The alert had barely gone out twenty minutes ago and already the most dangerous people were chopping at the bit. Just Fuck! They were all screwed.

"Talk your mother into staying down here with Christian. You can crash down here too."


Dorian sighed but Cruz nodded. "Is Nox going to come home?"

Dorian nodded. "He's with Ivan. He'll be home."


Cruz relaxed. "Good cause he didn't do whatever it is you think it did."

Dorian laughed. "Son he did exactly what I think he did and nothing more. And he'll keep doing it even after the Atharim try to kill him."



Edited by Dorian, Aug 18 2017, 02:03 PM.

I'm migrating my web sites from one server to another so there are somethings that might break with the wiki and hosted images. But it's only temporary.

I messed something up on the old server and I want to hit the latest OS and the latest software so I'm going to do this migration to clean up my stuff.

Henrik and Stephan heeded the high alert. There was a god in their ranks. One who had confessed to murder. One who had signed the registry after his confession. They hadn't recovered yet from their foolhardy adventure chasing foreigners and professionals. No they were to hunt gods. It was their calling. Their only calling.

This kid knew how they operated. He'd been in HQ. He was American but he came from generations of cowboy Atharim. Men and women just like him - hunting creatures and gods. And he was a god! How could they not have known? Had they seen him walking through the halls?

They signed their names to the mission slip. They would hunt him. Their greatest achievement yet!

Marcus DuBois' foray with Vellas had yielded some fruit, he supposed. EM weapons were a bane and learning to detect their use, let alone guard against it, was hard coming. Still, the connection with Vellas was there now, however faint. There was no love lost between the men.

Then again, Marcus believed he was not capable of love, not anymore, that emotion having been burned away through all the years in the cauldron that was his childhood. He refused to think of his brother Andre in Chicago. Ascendancy had asked him to make contact but that had been futile. Andre was and would forever remain lost in the backwater that was America, clinging to the belief that they were still relevant.

At Marcus' accession to Consul over the Consulate on Channeler Oversight, he had reached out, offered him a place in Moscow as well as a connection to get onto the CCDPD there. Restructuring was going on, though slowly, of that department and already research was being done by hundreds of lawyers and legislators over how the laws would have to be rewritten to cover the Ascendants now that they were out of the closet.

And that was only the half of it. The revelation of the Atharim and the things they hunted added the need for still more laws. Was it legal to kill a creature such as the one that had nearly killed the Ascendancy merely for existing? Did they have rights?

Marcus had his own opinions about things like that, but at least for now, he had enough on his plate.

More than enough. As Consul, it was primarily up to him and his newly formed team to begin set up the Consulate, setting the parameters of oversight, the organizational structure, and so on. The Ascendancy had been clear. Vellas would oversee the military aspect of channeling, taking those whose abilities lay in that direction into training.

The United States had done the same, though intelligence hinted that their program had already begun earlier. That only served to light a fire among the top brass of the CCD. A new arms race had begun, every bit as dangerous as in the previous century.

Marcus hungered for control of that. Part of him did. But rulership could never be based purely on military might. Not any kind that lasted anyway. No, the real path lay in control over all aspects of the empire.

And that was where Marcus' sat, because his Consulate, per the orders of the Ascendancy, would touch the lives of everyone. His Consulate (and he did think of it as his) oversaw channeler registration. All channeler's not in military services were in his purview. They would identify those who a posed real danger to the empire and put them down. (Theo Andalain being the impetus for that.) Whether that involved Vellas' strike team remained to be seen. Marcus would push to have their own autonomy in that regard.

People with talents like Jensen James and even himself would also be identified and nurtured, with the CDD (and his Consulate first) being the recipients of those gifts. While Marcus might have discovered the way to craft metallic parts that used the Force to resist any breakdown, he would never become a factory unto himself. But others could. If he chose to share, that is. More and more, he was considering it. At least the manufacture. It was tiring but not overly so, nor was the method too dificult.

What would that do to manufacturing in the CCD? Machinery and parts that never wore down. Vehicles and weapons that would not break. He could almost see it, see the flow of products and wealth and power.

The cold war was not just going to be fought with channelers. While the US had a probable jump on channelers, conventional weapons would never become obsolete. The registration was already giving an idea of what percentage of the population was Ascendant and while they were many in number, the percentage was quite low- not even in the single digits. No, the need for conventional weapons would not disappear.

And who knew. Given Ascendancy's age and health, it was a simple projection to believe that all of them would live a long time. With long life came a new way of looking at things. Projects that took decades could be planned and carefully husbanded. Knowledge could grow in a mind that was sharp and vibrant, work of decades continually expanded upon.

The Consulate would plug these Ascendants into the CCD to make what was already the world's only superpower more advanced than what could be imagined.

And Marcus would sit at the center of that, overseeing it all. With long life came a long game. Vellas might be head of the military wing of the channelers now, but would that be the case in 50 years? Especially if Marcus continued to apply the same scientific principles that had already helped him.

Brute force was no match for science, technology and ruthless cunning. History taught that lesson clearly. Cortez and Moctezuma. The British and India or among the Aborigines. The game would be very long. Vellas and any others who stood in his way. And then, one day, the Ascendancy. One day.

And so Marcus sat in his room, clouded in what considered justified arrogance, surfing the net, in a rare moment of quiet. Very rare- and too short. There was not enough time to do any real research or study in his own projects. He'd have to find the time, though. Hopefully.

Malik squirmed. Time...he needed time for Malik too. The hunger was beginning to become noticeable. Almaz was out of the question now. And going off hunting would be difficult since his face was becoming more well known. Of course, the trick he'd learned from Oakland might be the answer there. Indeed, it was obvious.

Sated he would hunt soon, Malik quieted. And Marcus read news reports- The nation; World. He skipped Entertainment and went on to Tech, noting where his discovery might be useful. Then Science.

It was there that he stopped. Read the article, clicked the link to the Abstract, and from there went to the full paper. He had to slog through it. His knowledge of physics, while not cursory, was certainly not at this level. Not by a long shot. He reread sections multiple times, trying to understand what had been discovered.

After some time, he thought he had a good idea of the bigger picture. The details, though, simply were beyond his ken, at least at the moment. He had no doubt with enough time and study, he could get it. But it would take too long and he simply didn't have the time right now.

He was well aware that there were people who were experts in things he knew nothing of. That was the way of the universe. He was quite comfortable with that fact. A Sith would not feel diminished by it. As long as they could be trusted to do their work and were loyal, they could be useful.

This Danika Zayed was worth meeting. Because there was something in her work that seemed familiar. The equations she used in to describe the newly discovered dark matter fermion that behaved as Bose-Einstein condensates had a form that seemed related to the eigenvector of the "twistiness" term in his Tau algebra. Not the same. But the structure of the matrix, the.....he searched for the right term....the flavor seemed similar.

It was something he couldn't pass up. He would make the time.

He composed an email to Dr. Zayed, asking her to meet. The signature at the bottom made it clear who was asking. He hoped she didn't take long to answer.

He couldn't help the slight excitement that he felt. He even allowed himself to smile. Not the excitement of the hunt. Not the pleasure he took in manipulating a person.

This was a different excitement, though he couldn't exactly place it.


Edited by Marcus DuBois, Aug 11 2017, 07:12 PM.