Preparations and Reflections [Dark Data]

[Kelly MacAryn]

Even though Kelly was prepared for it, the transition from the Pale Moors to the Nexus was striking. The cold and the wet and the relentless, monotonous impact of a downpour coupled with the potent scents of wet earth and rot gave way in a single instant to simply nothing, and more nothing, as far as the eye could see. A few windblown raindrops sputtered through the shimmering archway at the traveler's back, but less than a dozen steps carried him beyond their reach. His hobnailed boots made no sound on the featureless ivory floor of the Nexus as he wheeled his bicycle out into the void, but the tires squeaked, and water pattered off his clothes and dripped from his ponytail in a rapidly-diminishing stream.

Traveling through it for the fourth time, Kelly decided that he liked the Nexus. The more complex 'verses all had distractions in abundance, but the seemingly infinite void gave Kelly an opportunity to take a step back from it all, evaluate his situation and plan his next move. 

There was a lot to do. He'd hit the ground running once he arrived in Coruscant, rapidly accomplishing his first strategic goal, but Darkshire had slowed him down (although the opportunity presented by establishing a relationship with the garrison partially made up for that). It was necessary, but time-consuming, and now there was this Nebula business... it couldn't be ignored, and had to be taken seriously unless new information suggested otherwise, but who knew how long it was going to take? 

Kelly considered himself a patient man, but he didn't like delays, and operating without a far-reaching support network, although he would swear it was how he had lived for most of his life, just felt wrong.  

And then there's the horrible familiarity of this whole Dark Chip fiasco... I've been putting off evaluating all these new associations and fragments of memory I've retrieved, the dreams and the feelings, the deja-vu - I know I have. I feel like they've grown threatening somehow - like there are things in my head that part of me doesn't want to recall, and dwelling on the nature of Nebula's particular brand of corruption feels like clawing at the seal on a very deep, very dark hole. 

What kind of a person was I, really?

The psychic didn't have an answer. Striding through the Nexus with his bicycle in hand and his quarterstaff floating along beside him, he made an executive decision. 

As soon as the business in the green is done, no more delays. I'm going to sit down, no matter where I've ended up or what else is demanding my attention, and I'm going to put all of this together. All of these methods and strategies, the obsessive planning, this deeply rooted need to fix all this chaos....I know part of it ties back to my lost Kingdom, an attempt to recapture that feeling of sublime servitude, but the yearning seems so much older than that. 

Before I was a King I was a traveler. Almost all of my coherent memories are from that part of my life. 

What was I before that? 

Kelly's wristcom gave him a telepathic nudge, silently alerting the psychic that he had mail. He put the question aside, and opened a dataverse-window.

Both PepsiCo and Doctor Regal had returned his messages. He checked Alan Mayhew's inbox first. 

The cola-conglomerate's concerns were predictable. They wanted Alan Mayhew to keep an eye towards potential new marketing opportunities, and to eliminate any threat to PepsiCo's customer-base or profit-margins with extreme prejudice. The traveler replied that he understood, and stated that he'd submit a report when the business was concluded -  as well as stating for the record that he was taking this job pro-bono, purely in the interest of keeping business running smoothly.

With the maintenance of his alternate identity seen to, it was time to discover what Doctor Regal had to say. 

Kelly read the e-mail carefully. The Doctor had answered each of his concerns concisely and completely, though one answer in particular was disappointing. He could see why Regal would refrain from imposing a rigid command structure on a semi-random collection of Primes; They were a breed not known for taking orders well - but the lack of co-ordination still struck him as bad planning. It could have been handled better.

But the rest of it... this is good information. There being only one stronghold in each 'verse simplifies things considerably, though the fact that Nebula seems aware that they're under attack is a complication I'd prefer to do without. The fact that they're using probing strikes suggests a higher level of strategic planning than anything Regal appears to be employing... good scientist, bad strategist. 

Typical. 

The psychic moved on to the information on the Tangled Green, which was easily the highlight of the message. 

A small group of defenders making use of natural hazards, guerrilla-tactics and opportunistic ambush fighting in order to defend their command center...  between my haunt, my powers and my skills, I think I can beat them at that particular game - especially if there's really a potential ally already inside their stronghold. Even if the mystery-intruder has been captured, it proves that a lone fighter can penetrate their lines. The vague rumors of a nightmare-beast are a bit more worrying... I'll have to make sure to keep something in reserve just in case they turn out to be more than just stories.  

The last part of the e-mail was the most troubling. Doctor Regal's clarification of Nebula's reality-warping qualities as unpredictable, highly virulent and semi-random made them almost impossible to plan for or anticipate - and it was yet another part of the situation which gave Kelly a strong sense of deja-vu. Thinking about it made his ears itch. 

If it comes up, I guess I'll just have to improvise.

At the bottom of the message was a link to an attachment containing a the names of the Primes who Regal had briefed personally, a partial list of contact information, and the 'verses to which various Primes had been deployed. There were no name's the traveler recognized among Regal's core-group - though there was a notation placing Hiro Protagonist in Camelot, which, if Kelly had interpreted their relationship correctly, meant there was a good chance Okor was also in the area.  

That's the neighboring 'verse. Good to know.

Kelly closed the dataverse window and climbed on his bicycle. It was time to pick up the pace. 

I'm assuming in this post that Skeletor is listed as 'Keldor' on Regal's documentation, seeing as he was in disguise when he arrived at the lab. 

[Kelly MacAryn]

Peddling hard, powerful legs pumping, the traveler wove his way through the Nexus, his quarterstaff psychokinetically in tow. There was a slight chill as his sodden hair and clothing dried, raising goosebumps on his bare arms.  

As he rode, giving other people a wide berth and taking extra-special care to avoid the Fountain of Infinity by at least half-a-kilometer, he focused on the upcoming task, and tried to recall everything he could about operating in the jungle. 

Camoflage was a must. He'd put on some more fitting clothes before entering the 'verse. Provided this all ended in violence - and if Regal's narrative was even remotely accurate then it probably would - then see-and-don't-be-seen was going to be just as important, if not more so, than kill-or-be-killed. He'd want to stick to the treetops, if possible, and be on the lookout for dead-falls, trip-wires, and other easily-concealable traps. Most jungle-predators - and that included guerrilla fighters - liked to ambush from the trees, but preferred earthbound prey.

They're unlikely to be expecting somebody who knows what he's doing - from what I've gathered, most primes just kind of make it up as they go along. 

Here's hoping I actually DO know what I'm doing... 

Eventually, the gate to the Green came into view, a distant verdant arch with shades of bark visible between the vines. Kelly had nearly reached it, could actually smell the clean, forest-scent of chlorophyl, soil and fresh oxygen streaming from the gate, when he was abruptly overcome by a sudden wave of vertigo.

The traveler skidded to a stop and dismounted, dropping the bike with an unceremonious crash, and barely made it two lurching steps before collapsing to his knees. His telekinetic grip on his weapon was lost, and the staff bounced and clattered on the featureless white floor.   

What...?

This was different than when his psychic powers had reawakened, or when his Haunt had returned. There was a buzzing in Kelly's head, a rumble and a pressure and a roar, and it was growing. It felt like a machine had switched on inside his mind, and the parts were kicking on, one after the other, doing their best to shake everything around them to pieces in the process. His vision went dark for a moment. 

Then, with all the terrible majesty of a sledgehammer hitting a television, he could see. Infrared and ultraviolet, magnetic fields, gravity, and radio-waves, it all folded and unfolded, weaving a perfect picture in impossible colors, feelings and flavors and sounds, a synaesthetic smorgasboard of sublime complexity that combined to create a flawless real-time map of everything around him. 

The metaphorical fog that shrouded his memory started to roil. It was reacting to this new development, thinning, withdrawing in the face of a major contextual clue as the light of dormant senses which had defined much of his former life dawned once again. He was assaulted by random sights and sounds and smells, debris of the past clamoring for release. All together, the experience was overwhelming: reawakened at last to higher realms of perception, the psychic's brain practically sang. 

One minute ticked past, then another. The intensity died down as the traveler's powerful neural architecture compensated for the new feedback, some pre-existing structure within his haunt intervening to take the brunt of the strain.  

Kelly sat up, brushing a cascade of damp brown hair out of his eyes - his ponytail had somehow come undone - and blinking hard. His normal, human-standard eyeballs still worked - but comparing his deep-set baby-blues to his newly potent sensorium was like matching a jet-aircraft against a hang-glider. On a certain level, it was the same thing, but one was so superior that the other almost didn't seem to have a point. The only advantage his eyes had was that they could show him things that lay beyond his higher senses' limited range; outside his purely mundane vision, things got fuzzy past about fifteen meters, and incoherent past twenty, but extrasensory nearsightedness was only a minor drawback.

He now had a 360-degree absolute perceptual territory. The value of that couldn't be overstated.

Of course, there wasn't much to see in the nexus, no matter what he was looking with. There was some radio noise bouncing around -communication between 'verses and Primes. His staff was over there, and his bike was over there; Both were surrounded by weak magnetic force-lines. He was also acutely aware of his wristcom, and of the liberator aide on the opposite arm, both putting out a variety of low-key electronic noise.

The ground beneath him was almost invisible, blank in any spectrum.

It's probably a good thing this didn't happen after I went through the gate. I don't even want to think about how much worse it might have been if I'd been somewhere with actual stuff.  

Kelly rose cautiously to his full height, still slightly unsteady, and retrieved his staff without looking at it, telekinetically calling the iron-shod weapon to his calloused hand. He also levitated the bicycle, deploying its kickstand and leaving it beside the gate. 

The traveler took a deep breath, then another, facing the shimmering surface of the portal contained within the gate and trying not to be awed by the flavor of its spectra. His mind was still sparking, but as disruptive as this experience had been, it didn't change his immediate goals - and seeing as how those goals probably involved penetrating a jungle stronghold, that meant he needed a new set of clothes. 

The rainbow glare of Omnilium lit the Nexus. Ten minutes of careful summoning later, the psychic was dressed in a digital camouflage version of his usual outfit, hard-to-resolve pixelated patterns covering his jeans and tee in shades of brown, purple and green, with stripes of black grease-paint on his arms and criss-crossing his face. Feeling as prepared as we was likely to get, and vaguely annoyed that he couldn't do better, Kelly broached the gate to the Tangled Green. 

Kelly has reached the Tangled Green! Let the games begin!