Chain 054: Crysis

Chain 054: Crysis
Location: New York, 2023
Age: 29
Identity: Drop-In, Type Red
Drawbacks: [+900] Inside The Meat Locker, What Are You Prepared To Sacrifice?, They Built EVERYWHERE

[300/1900]  Spreading Cracks
[Free]      Quiet Guy
[600/1900]  This Suit Is MINE
[700/1900]  N.O.M.
[Mandatory] Tin Man
[800/1900]  You Are All I Can Do Now
[1100/1900] ...Remember Me
[1700/1900] Nanosuit 2.0
[1900/1900] Freedom

Now... this? This is a problem. I shouldn't be waking up in New York City having been stuffed into a nanosuit. I REALLY shouldn't be watching the guy who had the nanosuit before me blow his brains out - guess he couldn't handle immortality? Moreover, his personality reasserting itself unexpectedly as I try to fulfill his mission (a civilian, for all he knew, fighting HIS war!) was just the icing on the cake.

(Alcatraz? What are you talking about? Man, Prophet must've been unhinged at the end - that guy had half his head blown off.)

Normally I keep a low profile, where possible. Telling Prophet the truth, though? It didn't go as well as I'd hoped, at first, until I pointed out that if he'd just let me open a portal to the flippin' warehouse I'd be able to SHOW him. And sure, he thought this was just a delusion, and even was doubting whether his suit had even been given to anyone else. But when dealing with Ceph, with me helpfully pointing out every weak point they have, what strategies would and would not work, and so forth... well, it was enough for him to hand over control for a moment.

At that point I opened a portal directly beneath us and dropped us into the warehouse, and he went 'oh. wait, so that was all real?'. Which was all fine and good, but when he tried to reassert control, I felt it appropriate to retaliate by shooting him (myself) with a particle beam (which was almost harmless). After all, I don't need to control my BODY if I'm using esper abilities.

"You can stick around in my head if you want, and I'm fine with that," I told him. "But you're not going to reduce me to a passenger in my own body. If you want to deal with the aliens, we're better fighting together than fighting each other. You've only scratched the surface of what I can do, believe me." When he continued to protest, I continued, "Look. You know a lot about the Ceph. That's a great thing. But I've fought galactic wars - so if you act as mission control and give me the intel, I can abuse every last ability I have to utterly erase these things from existence. If I fail, it's your show, but give me a chance. You won't regret it."

The bargain was struck, and we proceeded. I went with many of his tactics, though the bow was... seriously dude, why a bow? You know what's easier than a bow? A particle cannon that tears the Ceph apart at a molecular level. Oh, something too big for that to work, or they get wise and try to absorb energy? Well, that's easy, give them a type of energy they CAN'T absorb; turns out the standard counter-Charm to a Ceph infestation is, of course, Fiendfyre.

>"But you burned down Manhattan."
"Everyone was evacuated! And it's not like it was on purpose!"
>"You. Burned down. MANHATTAN."
"You know that if I hadn't done that the city would've been abandoned anyways, right? You were the one going 'screw collateral damage, you've gotta take it out now'."
>"YOU BURNED DOWN THE ENTIRE BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN."
"You're kind of a bitch, aren't you, Prophet?"
>"HOW DID YOU BURN DOWN AN ENTIRE BOROUGH?"
"My attention slipped. We got the job done, didn't we?"

So... yeah. A deal's a deal, though, and though I had Prophet stuck in my head for a good long while, at least my body was my own. Even if wiping out Ceph infestations was a problem, the aftermath of my criminal overuse of Fiendfyre would be followed by a flourishing of local life - trees and wildlife springing up at breakneck paces, especially in places like the Manhattan National Park. It solved the problem of eyewitness accounts of everything handily, too, considering nobody wants to be anywhere NEAR a roaring fire. And... usually, at least, everyone was successfully evacuated before I destroyed everything they'd ever collected in their lives. (Economic gifts from a mysterious benefactor doesn't really offset losing everything of sentimental value, sadly. Still rather peeved that it worked out that way.)

On the plus side, right about the time the jump ended, I figured out how to get Prophet out of my head. All I had to do was increase production of the nanomachines that now made up my body to the point that I had more than I had any right to have... and then split myself in two.

Man, it would have been so much simpler if I had figured that out nine years earlier.