Chain 008: Terminator

Chain 008: Terminator
Location: 1999, Sarah Connor Chronicles
Age: 21
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+350] I'm Old, Not Obsolete, With These Weapons? I Don't Know, Nothing Dead Will Go
(Abilities: Savant, Sorcery Savant)
[Free] Smash Those Metal Motherfuckers
[100/1350] Judgment Day
[150/1350] Most Paranoid Delusions Are Intricate...
[350/1350] Hey, Wait! You Swore!
[650/1350] Easy Money
[1050/1350] No Fate But What We Make
[1100/1350] Cool Shades
[1200/1350] .45 Longslide
[1250/1350] Your Clothes, Your Boots...
[1350/1350] Atari Personal Computer

Things that are really bad: coming across a couple of people who are wanted by the FBI, in New Mexico, while I'm trying to track down my past self. (Spoilers, he wasn't here.) Things that are worse: finding them under attack by a Terminator.

Things that are good: derailing the ENTIRE goddamned timeline by magicking that thing to death and rendering him down for parts so that I can study them and figure out how to reinforce my ... armor ... oh fuck all kinds of duck, I don't have my armor. Damn. I had just gotten that to work, too.

Well, that's okay because apparently the Connors have disappeared and are travelling through time. I'll just have to keep myself entertained by going "fuck it" and calling myself a superhero, and very publicly running around and fixing problems. It's magic, motherfuckers, I ain't gotta explain shit. On the plus side this gives me a lot more time to actually let loose with magic and work on things, even if the Terminator silliness is happening in the background and oh look it's 2007 and the Connors have reappeared and are confused as hell, because by playing superhero I accidentally caused imitators to come to light. I mean, it's not capes and colors, it's villains and vigilantes, but it's still a crazy thing. And I maaay have used a bit of magic to push some of the more worthy people to the point of being able to use minor cantrips. Fireballs or flight or whatnot. It's fun. I mean I can fly too, thanks to playing with magic, it's just not easy by ANY stretch of the imagination. (How? By wearing a harness under my clothes charmed to levitate at will. Yes, I cheat.)

In any event, the Connors are back, and I track them down. The internet in 2008 is a wonderful thing, and while I'm not exactly a genius right NOW when it comes to technology... there are enough people who owe me favors. Sure, it blows the Connors away to see me in costume, but they don't need to know that I have a tiny little camera attached to a pen drive in two places hidden within that very costume. Which means that, some months later, covert and very frank interviews with them were uploaded on a young YouTube.

Also uploaded: cameras showing a firefight (and magic fight) between the Connors, two vigilantes, myself, and a T-888. No deaths, but I had to stabilize one of the vigilantes, El Tiburon, after the T-888 shot him in the liver. The half-melted remains of the machine, with its power supply and head-case completely destroyed, were verified as legitimate by some three-letter agencies.

YouTube got a lot more popular a lot sooner, with such exposure. (I mean, it doesn't hurt that I'd been basically uploading a lot of the stuff I did ANYWAY... so.)

As an unasked favor to the feds, I floated the idea of some sort of mysterious villain, which the internet took and ran with. Meanwhile, a lot of companies that were pursuing artificial intelligence were quietly shut down.

The Connors were cleared, and John actually became a hero himself. I taught him magic, and he became my successor as I fell out of the public eye. John becoming a sorcerer himself, though, helped sell the whole thing to the public - he had saved humanity from genocide, and to prevent it, his greatest enemy tried to kill him before he was born. Technology versus magic, in the public view.

Despite more time travel shenanigans and a malicious AI sending things back through time trying to invent itself, Judgment Day was averted. Cyborg incidents and anomalous tech were blamed on an inventive villain that called himself Skynet. The machines Skynet kept sending back got seemingly less advanced as time went on, and after a final battle with a platoon of T-900's that were displaced back in time, it stopped altogether.

Apparently, despite being technologically superior and in fact becoming more advanced, cyborgs are not good against magic.

(And yet, Terminators are alive enough to count... when you need a living sacrifice. How do you think John got brought to full power so quickly?)

And what a weird, weird world resulted from all of this...