GM Interlude

It wasn’t like it was bothered.

It was… difficult, to become bothered. The strange ways of thinking that soiled the form the entity had adapted were everpresent in the back of its consciousness, boiling around like… something that it didn’t have the words for. Buts its hosts did.

An unmanaged teakettle, or so they say.

All around was chaos. The best farm of information it had seen, enough to warrant two visits, to fix the interactions to something resembling an orderly observation. Too much would have spoiled it. As it stops, hanging in the sky much like many of these hosts could not, the entity observes, a scan over the world below. Mature shards, growing shards, at the center of it all, amplification. A bed of chaos. A rut of destruction. Shards that do not belong it it, but are not dead.

Puzzling.

It lowers, though it can see without it, to observe, and watches as everything stills with its presence. The entity bites down the emotion stirring when the men and women shrink back, feeling the uptick of stress and fear in the area. There. Information. An easy way to farm it, with this minute conflict, this little… distress.

It was barely worth his attention. Nothing here was worth his attention. But its job is to do good, and good is…

Good is….

Eradication.

Purification.

Cleanse.

The warrior lowers, a few feet down, and its feet almost brush the floor. But then it stops.

And then it stares.

With a twitch of its avatar, in a matter of second, the entity follows its senses, smashing through the paltry containment as if its was nothing. The time distortion shatters around its shoulders as a king would shrug off a mantle that no longer suited him. Vertical again, the warrior hangs.

O

“What the hell is he doing,” Marie whispered to her partner. Samuel just shook his head, eyes on the shattered containment facility, ears filled with the screeching of delighted mutants. The bubble flickered and died, and before their eyes, everything they were fighting for crumbled.

Sam held his standard-issue assault rifle to his chest, as if it could provide him comfort. As if a gun could protect him against a thousand million capes, and screeching and sobbing at the thought of getting his blood.

His momma had told him when he joined the PRT that he was throwing his life away.

The wailing of mutants reached a cacophony, and he watched as Scion surveyed the thing he’d been guarding for the last six weeks. His own private Hell. God had come back to Hell, and it seemed to Samuel that he was going to undo the darkness that he had Wrought upon Earth.

He hadn’t believed her until now.

“Enacting his Revelations,” he murmured, one hand going from his rifle to his rosary. “As is his will upon the Earth. Amen.”

O

Malady.

The entity looks upon a field of limbs, and water, and faces, monstrous and warped, and in the scene it sees the face of its counterpart.

Pestilence.

The shard of its counterpart, assignment of shards, collection of information, the shard of propagation. Twisted and warped into a tumor, a landscape of… otherness. Compounding - it was continuing to spread. Ruining its information. The cycle was broken, and not even this last scrap of normalcy was left to it. There was nothing to be done. It would spread. It would continue. It would build upon itself, as entities do, continuing to propagate, warp the last possible cycle into a facsimile of itself.

Endemic.

Nothing to be done.

O

Dragon stopped, a single, triangular wing shielding two PRT squaddies from the coming dawn. As golden light painted her metal hide, she received messages. Ten. Forty. Ninety. Three hundred and five.

Precognitives, thinkers, a woman from England, all sending messages in - both to her and to the PRT - at the same time. Something has gone wrong.

The man next to her prays, the frightened woman putting a hand on her chest and rocking back and forth. Dragon was almost privileged to be witness to this. This human fear, this desperation. This was what she fought to protect - people like this. Marie and Sam, read her display. Marie Tollknocker, Samuel Hillbrecht. Same graduating class. On parole for indecency on the job. Assigned to Flint, until they worked off their punishment.

Dragon swung her serpentine neck around, and looked upon the garden of monsters inside. Kholkikos, guardian of the fleece, arched its acidic claws against the wooden platform they stand upon.

She thought she may have an idea as to what.

O

The entity feels rage.

Cancer.

O

Dragon watches as Scion raises a hand and carves a line of radiation through the east coast, the beam splitting their platform in two.

CRITICAL FAILURE IMMINE

And then, darkness.

(written by Dragoneisha)