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MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 09-02-2016
Samus has a look of calm collection as she exits from the Nexus gate. She places a hand on either side of her helmet, begins to lift … and then returns her arms to her side.
Stepping from the standing stones that enclose the gate, she sees the orange sun drifting westward. It was night when she last left Camelot. Perhaps it has been less than a day since she snuck away to observe the fight at the Nexus. Perhaps longer. She wastes no time in heading to her ship.
It’s where she left it, hidden a small ways away from the gate in a small alcove. She checks it. There are no signs of any intrusion. She kicks her legs off the ground, twitching her feet just enough to boost herself up to the roof of the ship, before descending through the roof-hatch into the ship’s cramped cabin compartment. She reaches a hand towards the controls.
She stops.
A moment later she touches a hand to the side of her visor. It shines blue and begins to emit a ray of light that sweeps across the interior of her ship, permeating through the reflective surfaces. Her gaze casts downward, into the ship’s belly.
And then in one fluid motion, she spins around the captain’s chair into the exit compartment, her suit tightening into an organic blue appearance. The hatch opens and she leaps out into the sky as her suit continues changing, speeding upwards. She lands some distance away as the ship explodes.
Her visor captures the full blinding light of the white explosion and she shields herself from the tiny bits of shrapnel that burn her suit. There’s no time to take stock.
The Stalker is behind her.
A blast of blue light engages the Hunter as she dives to her left, turning and shooting as she lands. The Stalker tumbles in turn to shoot; Samus strafes and tracks her shot, landing a couple of trifling explosions on her adversary’s monstrous form. In retaliation the Stalker charges up a shot, the light at the end of its cannon swelling from pebble to shotput in a half-second. Samus grits her teeth and responds in kind.
The two blasts collide in the matter of meters between them, and the light elicited grants them each a moment to reposition. Samus takes her stand behind some rocks, holding her gun arm aside to charge. The Stalker takes the high ground, its head and cannon poking out from an observing cliff edge.
As the light fades, Samus spies her opponent and lets her shot loose. In the moment it takes the Stalker to dodge and respond, Samus has vanished beneath the low rocks. The Stalker flares her arms in rage as her body lights up. Myriad missiles begin to form themselves upon the wretched suit – the shoulders, the kneecaps, the waist, its sternum – and as they do they begin to fire themselves outward in an awkward arc, blue lights tracing their rise and their fall.
A small blue ball less than a metre in diameter boosts from the exploding wreckage. The light within the sphere emerges into Samus Aran, who tumbles, hitting the ground and rolling to a stop.
She stands and meets the eyes of her opponent. In Coruscant’s bowels, it had been difficult to get a good look at the Stalker. She now sees why. Its armour is an inky silver, almost black, that seems to absorb the light. It moves forward upon two-clawed boots with an animalistic gait; the top half of its body is slightly hunched towards its prey.
“What are you.” Samus demands, her voice bare of intonation.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 09-04-2016
It hisses … and laughs. “Don’t you …. recognissse me?”
Samus balks, her eyebrows twitching from their usual low stance just above her eyes to a more elevated position. In that moment, the Stalker dives forward. Its left hand reaches out and its gauntleted talons extend.
Samus dives backward at the last second, her suit taking the shape of a ball. She rolls between the legs of the advancing Stalker, gets back up into her human form, turns and shoot a charged blast at the back of the Stalker’s head. It screams. But not in pain.
“Ssstupid technique!”
Beams extend from its body. Tendrils of hot blue light that cross the distance between armours in a moment. They sear into Samus’s chestplate and her eyes go wide as she dives backwards. Sparks of electricity emit from the point of contact.
“Phazon,” she says.
Her suit lights up. It’s the same blue of her opponent’s tendrils. But this light is contained, it channels across her suit in veins and rivulets, the energy lifting her feet off the ground. As the Stalker locks in, she releases another charged shot.
This one hurts it.
“You …!” it hisses.
“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” bellows Samus. The light beneath her suit reaches deafening cadence. She steps forward and begins releasing charged shot after charged shot into the Stalker’s body. “You’re her! You’re Dark Samus! …
“… Metroid Prime!”
“NO!” It bellows. “WRONG AGAIN!” And blue light explodes from within its carapace, alike to Samus’s own. It responds with its own volley of charged shots and they strafe, slugging it out at a distance.
The human hunter takes one shot and it’s all over. She staggers backwards, takes two more – and gets relegated to the grass. Sparks fly from her visor. She leans up to project a shield from her arm cannon. From behind its translucent green barrier she sees an even greater light. It hits her and the barrier explodes, taking part of her arm cannon with it. It’s still intact but the barrel is shattered and exposed.
Samus stops herself short of falling. The blue light at her back foot as she pushes from a half-kneel to a standing posture.
She lashes her hand forward, releasing the Grapple Beam. It snakes onto the Stalker. Samus pulls to the side, supporting her arm with her gun-arm, and wrenches the Stalker off her feet, who crashes into a nearby tree. She raises her gun arm and releases a volley of missiles – one, two, three – catching the Stalker in the explosions as it tries to get up, and then snakes forward again with the grapple beam. But the Stalker grabs it. It pulls, and Samus, shocked, leaves her feet and meets with a gauntleted fist. She disengages the beam before the next haymaker can incapacitate her, and flips backward in a less-than-graceful recovery. The Stalker is already firing again.
Samus sneaks another Grapple Beam under the oncoming volley and pulls the Stalker down and forward. The next fist to make contact is her own – a satisfying crunch punctuates her uppercut. She follows up with a roundhouse kick that sprawls the Stalker.
“I beat you once!” the Hunter cries as she leaps forward. Her charged cannon meets with the ground as the Stalker rolls aside. “I can do it again!”
It raises its gun. “You didn’t beat ME!!!!” It screams in defiance, blasting a flurry of shots Samus’s way.
Samus charges forward in a rugby tackle, landing a one-two-three combo of punches into the Stalker’s sternum. She raises her boxer’s stance, lifts her shoulder, and cracks her arm cannon straight into her enemy’s face.
The visor shatters. The eyes beneath are all-white.
It roars.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 09-25-2016
Time freezes. It’s that day. That last day before everything changed.
It had been a long one. Starting with the destruction of Samus’s power suit and the creation of a wholly new one, suffused with metroid DNA. The alteration of her very genetic make-up. The revelation that the Galactic Federation had, all along, been breeding metroids for their own purposes.
Those things were chilling, sure enough. But what was worse was that every step she took in that godforsaken space station, she was shadowed. How many parasitic copies of herself had been created in the end? At least six, she’d been told. But they’d all been destroyed when the space station crashed down on SR388, destroying the planet and all life on it. It had been a necessary step to save the universe. So she’d believed.
But had it worked? The hunter before her looked different from any of the clones she’d seen on that station. But the eyes were the same.
“X-Parasite,” whispers Samus.
“RrrAGH!” responds the Stalker, drawing its clawed hand upwards an inch away from Samus’s exposed face. “Not a parasite! SPACE PIRATE!”
“Yeah?” Samus weaved and connected with a kidney punch, before drawing her fist back and driving it again into the same spot. With every connected shot, phazon sparked forth; this one coated her hand in the blue substance. Her fist seemed to absorb it, glowing ever more strongly. “You don’t look like any Zebesian I’ve ever seen.”
Samus drew herself up to her full height. “You look like a human.”
Another crack as she head-butts the monster. But on its way down, the Stalker catches her head. Samus falls with it in order to avoid serious neck damage, but this places her in the grip of her enemy. Tendrils pull out from beneath the Stalker’s armour and wrap themselves around Samus. For a moment, they struggle. The glow of blue between them intensifies. It seems as though Samus has become the prey again.
And then Samus speaks. “Missile Storm. Initiate!”
Everything lights up. Samus can only cross her arms to shield herself from the blast as dozens of tiny missiles shoot from her shoulder-pads and she is carried upwards on the explosion. When she hits the ground, her armour is smoking.
Her HUD is flashing. It says that her armour is dangerously low on energy. With a flash and a spark, the light of her Hyper Mode goes out. As it does so, the pain in her body screams out all at once. She is only human, despite all her enhancements. But what of her opponent?
Samus leans upward. She can see a smoking crater, not deep, but enough to stop her seeing in from her prone position. She struggles upward.
So does the Stalker.
More of its armour has been destroyed now. Beneath, exposed, glowing skin. Its blood is not red, but blue. She recognises parts of herself, but unmistakably, they have been altered. It’s difficult to see when the only parts that are exposed are bloodied. Tendrils of phazon leak out from the wounds and knit themselves together. It’s not a being of pure phazon, like Dark Samus. Neither is it pure matter. It’s something … else. And it’s constantly changing.
As it steps forward, its exposed leg breaks and a beam of phazon juts out from the wound, propping it up. Its head looks upwards and Samus can see herself. Filled with hate.
“I’m putting you down,” she says.
The wings fold outward from her smoking arm cannon. Bits of dislodged metal fall down as it opens up like a tripod. It begins to spin. She raises it up.
Bullets begin to fly and tear into her enemy. At first they ping off the armour, damaging only exposed flesh. The beast steps forward. But as the hail continues, the metal begins to shatter. Bit by bit. It tears away in small chunks. The beast screams against the onslaught and raises its cannon, fighting the storm. One shot. Two. Samus stands firm as they fly past her face. Blood and gore flick out like the errant brushstrokes of a freeform artist. It collapses to one knee.
“Power low”, her suit informs her. Still Samus continues, until finally the blood explodes. She can see her own ribcage. Malformed. Exposed. Within it beats no heart, but a flickering sphere almost as wide as the chest cavity itself. As the flesh peels backwards from its form and the eyes of the Stalker roll backwards into a grotesque death mask, the sphere within is undulating like a trapped animal. It is trying to be free.
Samus disengages her cannon and dives forward. “No you don’t.” She throws her still-smoking gun arm into the nucleus of the sphere. It flashes.
She sees everything. It’s as though the Stalker’s fractured mind is flying into hers. But this can be no one memory. She sees herself in a platoon of space pirates, fighting … herself. She sees the claustrophobic corridors of the BSL space station, the entrance to the escape pod bay. Watching through a window as SR388 and the BSL station collide and explode. Phazon. Torture. Arriving in the Omniverse. Consuming. And the fight that just transpired. Rage. Anger. Helplessness.
All of these memories are now hers.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 11-14-2016
Quote:Picking back up One Of The Men from here
It’s midnight when Samus returns to the barracks. The guardsman outside cocks a head. “Samus Aran?”
She simply regards him. Then herself. Then her armour flickers, disappearing into light, and then nothing, leaving her standing several inches shorter in only her gym wear. “Forgot,” she muttered.
The guard is flabbergasted momentarily, which is long enough for Samus to walk through without further question.
Nobody walks the corridors at this time of night, and she’s able to get to her dormitory without anybody else gawping at the futuristic materials she’s wearing.
The door to the bedroom creaks open. Her bed is still empty – Samus’s shoulders sag a little. As she creeps over, she sees R’cheev’s eye open in the near-pitch blackness, and stops.
“Sorry about your nose,” she whispers.
Silence. Then, “Better late than never.”
Samus asks the pressing question. “How long has it been?”
“About two weeks.”
Samus gets into bed.
“That’s it?” R’cheev asks.
“That’s it.” Samus closes her eyes. And they speak no more for the rest of the night.
* * * * *
As breakfast finishes the next day, Lunch catches sight of Samus. “Thought you were gone,” he said.
Samus pauses. “There was something happening I couldn’t ignore.”
“I caught wind of that. But you’re alright?”
“… Better.”
Lunch chews his gum. “Yeah right. We’ll see.”
* * * * *
Swords crossed swords. Spears crossed spears. Crossbows emptied their bolts into straw men, and axes cleaved them in twain.
Samus had changed since her return from the Nexus. The falter in her hands was gone. So, too, was the fire in her eyes. Something had replaced it. Steel.
Day by day the stares lessened. As new recruits rose through the ranks, Samus faded to the back of the crowd. In evenings she would spend her time going over and over the drills. Sometimes she would sneak to the roofs to do her own. Today was one of those days.
R’cheev came at her with the blunt halberd, and Samus deflected. Angel watched from close by as the two warrior women crossed blades. Although R’cheev was by far the taller woman, one could see that Samus was holding back. Her biceps barely flexed as she held up the poleaxe of wood and steel, delicately but firmly pushing back her opponent. Angel’s job was to try and flank. But every time she made a jump to the sides of Samus, the huntress would make a sweeping backward step, managing to keep her weapon between R’cheev while avoiding Angel. As the curly-haired girl made bolder attempts to attack, she finally grazed a hit; her spear surging forward with surprising strength, into Samus’s back–
… Almost. Samus arched her back at the last second and hopped aside, arms and weapon held dangerously high above her head. Instead of hitting Samus, the blunt spear thwacked into R’cheev, intercepting her attack against the Prime hunter.
“Bitch!” yelled R’cheev. “Sorry.” She made a frustrated sound. “You’ve gotten good, Samus.”
And so it continued.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 04-05-2017
It was dusk in the training yard, and most of the soldiers had already filtered away to their rooms or left the grounds to mingle. Samus was busy kicking the straw out of a training dummy when she felt someone’s presence approaching. Angel. The warrior-woman turned to regard her dormitory-mate expectantly.
“Hey Samus,” Angel said with a small wave of her hand, part of the polite preamble that she would always go through before saying what she meant. “How’s the training going?”
Samus shrugged. “You’re here for a reason?”
The curly-haired blonde mock-sighed in resignation. “Yeah, well … you might not be able to.” A pregnant pause. “That’s if you even want to.” She looked at Samus with a pair of huge eyes that seemed to swim like waterfalls.
“Ugh.” Samus broke her gaze, looking down and away. “Out with it.”
Angel put her hands together and sighed, for real this time. “I want to know … if you can bring a person back to life.”
Samus turned her head back upwards very slowly, her eyes scanning those of her squadmate. She opened her mouth. Then shut it, turned away and was silent.
Angel waited.
After nearly a minute, Samus responded. “I don’t think that would be possible, if you’re asking what I think you are.” She turned to continue. “Someone you knew, if you were a prime … maybe. I don’t think there’s any limit to what we can summon. But we have to know it.”
“B-but can’t I just tell you about my mom?” Angel took a step closer to Samus, prompting the bounty hunter to shift backwards. “Look, I have pictures, and …” She had a bag, and she was fumbling with it now, producing all kinds of trivial effects; a brush, a mirror, makeup, and letters. “I could show you her. Show you what she looks like. You don’t have to know her exactly, right?”
Samus shook her head, overwhelmed. “I … don’t know. This Prime stuff didn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s changed over time, too. There’s more that I can summon now that I couldn’t before.”
“So try!” Angel looked like she was about to burst into tears. “Please!”
Samus closed her eyes and looked down at her feet. Then she spoke. “Okay.”
Angel let out a tiny, high-pitched noise. Then she leapt upon Samus with a hug, pressing her face into the bounty hunter’s chest.
“Easy!” exclaimed Samus, trying half-heartedly to back away from what was clearly a wholehearted hug. After a few seconds with her arms awkwardly raised, she patted them down on Angel’s back. “I can’t … I can’t guarantee it’ll work.” She wore a look of concern.
“I know you can do it, Samus.” Angel was bright-eyed and as sincere as Samus had ever seen her. “You have to try.”
Samus did not look reassured.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 04-05-2017
“This isn’t a good idea, Samus.”
Samus sighed into her helmet. “You always say shit like that, Adam.”
“That’s because I’m usually right.”
Samus kicked the dirt outside her ship as she walked around. “I don’t want to do it either.”
“If Primes were able to go around just resurrecting anyone, I would know,” said Adam. “The Dataverse isn’t a small place. There would have to be some record of it by now.”
Samus continued to pace. “Maybe. Maybe not. How many primes even are there, anyway?”
Adam didn’t have a body, but his silence might have stood in place for a shrug. “Two to three hundred. Maybe? That’s a conservative estimate.”
“And a bunch of those only came in since the Scramble.”
“Right. But that’s been a while ago now. I know it doesn’t feel like it to you …”
“Then same goes for them, right? What if nobody’s discovered it yet? Or nobody’s reported it? I bet the Empire would know.”
“You want me to hack the Empire’s net?” Adam scoffed.
Samus continued. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“The – the worst that could happen if I hacked the Empire’s net, or if you tried resurrecting a woman you never knew?”
Samus paused, then shook her head and threw her hands up. “Okay, I’m going.”
Adam said nothing. Then signed off.
Samus scanned the countryside for her partner. It wasn’t long before Angel arrived, mouth agape as her eyes darted between Samus’s suit and her ship. “Whoaaaah! Is that what you look like for real? You ARE an alien! I knew it!”
Samus waved her hands. “I’m not an alien … exactly … this is my suit. It’s like a suit of armor. See?” She stretched her arms out and let the suit disapparate, resuming her human state.
Angel’s mouth remained open. Then she pointed up at the ship. “And what’s that? Is that an alien? It looks alien. Like your suit.”
“Uh … no. It’s a ship. Spaceship.”
“Ahhhhhh-ooohhh.”
Samus scratched her head, reassuming her armored form before offering Angel a hand. “Let’s go. It’s not much faster than your horses. It just flies.”
“Oooo,” said Angel as they descended into the cockpit.
She remained intently fascinated as Samus fired up the ship’s engines, shrieking in excitement as it rose up into the sky.
“Northwest, you said.”
“North-northwest. It’s a ways away.”
“Then let’s make haste.”
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 04-09-2017
They sailed through the sky, onwards for hours. Past Minas Tirith, far to the north where the land grew topsy-turvy, the villages more sparse and the mountains more rocky.
“I think it’s here,” Angel finally said.
From the ship’s window could be seen a small hill arrangement in which nestled a number of houses and what looked to be some kind of farm. The hills were bordered by a large forest which spread down the countryside back towards the south.
The settled down on the outskirts of that forest and disembarked, walking along the edge of the forest towards the gap in the hills where the entrance to the village lay. Samus was clad in her usual Camelot-wear of a tunic outfitted with brown leather guards, that of a warrior or seasoned traveller. Her hair was tied at the back. Angel’s hair by contrast hung loose, and she wore a long white shirt that draped down to her knees, over a plaid skirt that hung just above her ankles. It took a few minutes of walking to reach the mouth of the hills and start up the dirt path towards the village.
A young boy and girl of perhaps six years old bumbled across the path before turning to see the two arrivals. The children waved before continuing up, past a wooden fence that appeared to pen in sheep, and into the village proper. Angel and Samus followed.
Past the farmhouse, the rest of the village houses – mostly single-storey wooden houses that were barely past being called ‘huts’ – spread out in neat rows and lined the hills which enclosed the village boundaries. As they approached, people began to turn and look. The silence and stares met Samus as she moved through the small crowd. It was a familiar sight to the hunter.
Angel led her to the far end of the village, to one house which looked, despite its identical size and colour, perhaps just a little bit quainter than the others. It didn’t take a single knock for the door to open.
The man’s brown eyes were partially covered by a mop of greying hair and accented with eyebrows like brown slugs. He scratched his stubbly beard as he surveyed Samus.
“So you’re it,” he said, with the voice of one acknowledging the postman. “You’re the prime, eh?”
Angel placed her hand on Samus’s back. “This is Samus, dad.”
Samus extended a hand. “Sir.”
They shook hands. “Adol,” he said. He motioned for them to come in.
Candles lit the otherwise dim interior of the home. Angel led them through, towards the back of the house.
“This was mum’s sewing room,” said Angel quietly. Cloth and fabric was still littered about the place as though it had been untouched for a very long time. Angel cleared the table in the centre of the room and began to lay down objects. Photographs of some magical variety that appeared to move as you looked upon them. Hair pins and a wooden beaded necklace.
And finally, a burlap bag.
“What is that?” Samus asked quietly.
Angel turned around and her face all of a sudden looked far from the one Samus knew. “They didn’t leave much behind.”
Samus looked back to the bag and some of the colour drained from her already-grey face. “This isn’t how it works,” she said. “I’m not a … wizard. It works through thoughts. Memories.”
Angel continued to arrange the objects so that they sat in a circle. “These are the only memories I can give you.” She placed the bag in the centre. “You said yourself, this isn’t exact. We don’t know what might help.”
Samus was quiet for a very long while whilst Angel continued her arrangement. The curly-haired woman held in her air a quiet intent, a determination that was too far along to be refused. Adol stood in the corner by the door, watching.
The prime jumped as Angel took her hand all of a sudden. “You can do this, Samus,” she squeezed her friend’s hand. “I believe in you.” She turned to the corner and called softly: “Dad.”
Adol grunted and approached the space. He took Samus’s other hand, looking at her with an unreadable expression. Blame, perhaps.
“Now all you have to do is focus,” said Angel, her bright eyes swallowing Samus’s. “Everything that was Anastasia Marissa is here now. Just imagine her face. We’re here with you. Her closest loved ones.”
She smiled genuinely. “This can’t fail.”
Samus looked at the picture in front of her. It certainly gave her a good impression of the woman Angel’s mother had been. A quiet modesty with eyes that showed steel. She had been a strong woman. A dutiful one. One that took pride in all of her accomplishments. That showed in the way her animated self looked to the younger version of Angel standing beside her. Adol stood in the back of the picture, and he looked like a young man. His sly grin and massive frame dwarfed Anastasia’s, one hand resting on her shoulder.
Samus closed her eyes.
The room was silent for many minutes. Those minutes stretched on until the candlelight lit only their faces. Sweat dripped from Samus’s forehead as she stared at the pictures, as though she were trying to see into the frame, into another world.
Over time, the burlap bag began to glow.
Many hours passed. Adol glanced to his daughter and was met with nothing. He opened his mouth, she looked at him, and he closed it.
“You can do it,” Angel would whisper from time to time. “I believe in you, Samus.”
At these words, the hunter’s frown would become more strained still.
As light began to filter through the windows once more, another source of luminance began to fill the room. From above the table’s centre, motes of rainbow colour began to coalesce into the shape of a woman. She drifted down slowly, the colours beginning to settle into a tan white, the dancing lights at her head solidifying into curly blonde locks. Angel and Adol stood transfixed. And then the light broke, and the woman tumbled down to the table. The pair leapt up in unison.
“Mama!” cried Angel.
“Anastasia!” Adol cried in disbelief.
Samus surveyed her creation and watched it speak its first words.
“I’ve missed you,” it said.
RE: MESH Part 2 - Samus Aran - 05-04-2017
Samus sat atop the hill that overlooked the village, and stared at her hands.
Anastasia was down there right now, meeting and greeting the village folk. Angel had called it a miracle. Adol had thanked Samus profusely, showed her side of himself that must have been buried many layers deep. Tears of joy had spilled down all three of their faces. Father, daughter … mother.
“It worked?” asked Adam incredulously.
“I want to believe it did,” said Samus. “That Omni allowed it.” She paused. “What would that mean for me?”
“That would be your choice, Samus.”
Samus shook her head — a motion Adam couldn’t have seen. She rose and stretched her arms out, straightened her back and looked forward. “Any news?”
“Certainly.”
Quote:End of Part 2. To Dark Data!