At a Loss for Words

All the noise makes reading very difficult. The irritation is like a itch that doesn't need scratching just yet, but you might pre-empt it with a lazy claw before it gets out of hand.

"Would you kindly quiet down? I need to concentrate."

Sloan grunts as he plants the blunt end of the haft he's holding into yet another security soldier's face, snapping his head backward and making his knees buckle. He flinches as a shower of stray bullets tears past him and hammers against the far wall.

"I swear by Ben Hamor that if these bloody ::grunt:: bastards ::crack:: ever get tired of gettin' knocked on their asses ::thud::, I'll bloody well kill you!"

Gogajin. So excitable! Amazing they have any semblance of society at all.

Varissa is out of feathered shafts and is behind Sloan, crouched, ready to hamstring any that get past with her wicked curved blades. She glares at Jin and shows her teeth to him.

Jevumm, of course, have not even a semblance of society, and not for the first time, Jin is happy that the blood covering her arms up to the shoulders is not his; yet at the same time regretful that he has been forced to endure such odd bedfellows (as the Gogajin say - something about mammals sleeping in groups).

But there are more important things to concern him now. Jin needs to activate this fantastic Cheldrun device, and he can't find any kind of instructions anywhere on it.

The device itself offers no hints as to how it functions, exactly. It does not draw on a visible power source (the Cheldrun use veins called cables to carry mechine-energy, Jin knows). It is simply a textured cyllindrical object, dull black, with six spokes rising up from the edges of it, a bit like metallic teeth. In the center on the top a small circular depression is visible. There are what appear to be written characters etched into the surface at regular intervals - not Cheldrun, even more alien.

Jin sighs, and for a moment notices that Sloan is on the floor grimacing in a small pool of blood. Varissa leaps through the air, shifting into a massive hunting cat in mid-air. She slams into the first soldier who tries to enter through the wrecked security door and disappears in a spray of gore. Jin blocks out the screaming from outside the room which is now echoing in the hallway. He notices a device he's always been curios about.

It is, he believes, a data port. Data, as in ontologies; port, as in the place where Cheldrun oceangoing vessels accumulate to disgorge their cargo. It appears to have two cables attaching it to a pair of orifices in the wall. He touches it gently with the tips of his claws, presses the button that bears the symbol the Cheldrun use for the transmission of energy into or out of a mechanical device. The data port lights up and he flinches back as a ghostly, pixellated image erupts out of the device.

He smiles a long smile, and begins manipulating the keys of the machine, assembling Cheldrun words in order to instruct the machine to reveal what it contains. He quickly finds the collections of information pertaining to the device in the room - the data port seems to have been used as supplemental memorization for whoever has been working with the device thus far. The notes are laborious to read, clearly written by a borderline imbecile who needs to record every detail of every activation method attempted.

Finally Jin finds what he wants, slows to read very carefully, unblinking.

Both Sloan and Varissa are outside the room now, shouting to each other. There is the percussive thudding of bodies against floors, walls...ceiling? A collective shout and Sloan is driven back through the door into the room, his feet sliding in the blood on the floor, grappling with four soldiers. A fifth soldier climbs through the wreckage, sees Jin near the wondrous device, and raises his weapon.

A small sign escapes before Jin's dewlaps erupt in a riot of bright colors. His mouth opens suddenly and with a coughing sound he sends a spray of acidic fluid into the face of the soldier. He falls back, wiping frantically at his face and then beginning to scream as he drives more burning fluid into his eyes. The other four soldiers have dragged Sloan down the floor and they are trying to beat him into submission. Jin hunches and leaps, catching one of their helmets in his claw as he passes over the mound of struggling mammals, jerking the soldier's neck and unbalancing him - Vorax-Snatches-Zipsum. Another tries to rise and Jin ducks down, whirling, his tail slamming into the soldier's shaky legs and sending him sprawling - Rising-Water-Trip. As he falls Jin snatches a truncheon from his belt and cracks the temple of a third soldier who has lost his helmet entirely.

The first soldier has righted his helmet and lunges at Jin. They fall in a tangle, but Jin quickly maneuvers out of his grasp, scuttles around to his back and grabs his limbs with clawed feet, left hand, and tail, immobilizing them with a Relentless-Clinging-Vine technique. With his free hand, Jin pulls off his helmet and beats his skull with it until he goes limp.

Sloan, covered entirely with blood, rises to his feet, gasping for air, looking at Jin with his mouth hanging open. "You -"

"Behind you."

He turns just in time to grapple with a fresh soldier. "Reinforcements!" Varissa shouts from out in the hall. Sloan grimaces. "This had better be worth it you bloody lizard." Jin just watches, unblinking.

He turns from the tumult to the device, bends down, and begins depressing areas around a specific series of "First Mind" runes (whatever Cheldrun fallacy that represents). With the last one, the device begins to shift and change. It comes alight, the runes shining out and projecting their images on the walls in bright purple light. As the device shifts and swells, the runes move in whirling patterns. Jin steps back, watching raptly, revealing its internal workings.

There is a chamber at the center through which its energy passes, from the Power Core to the Differential Layer. It is designed to hold a special substance in inertial suspension, altering the charge of the energy passing through before it is projected outward. But the machine has an immediate effect as well - the room quickly begins cooling as particles slow and vital energy dissipates. Jin feels a tremendous weight when he tries to move, and the hallway is suddenly quite quiet. He slowly, gruellingly reaches down into the padded satchel that he's been carrying for months now, reinforced by a careful geodesic latticework of reeds to protect the Vorax egg from being broken. Jin heaves it out of the satchel, already slowing down drastically, feeling an overwhelming need to go to sleep. His steps shuffle forward toward the device.

Clawlength by clawlength he heaves the egg outward and upward, bathed in flickering purple light, until it comes into contact with the stasis field at the center of the machine. Suddenly it slips into the field effortlessly. He watches, heavy-lidded, a distant part of him grinning in triumph, as the egg is burned, cracks, and is incinerated by the energy, rendered from sold and fluid to a colloid inside the chamber. The colloid has its effect, imparting its unique charge to the energy passing through the chamber.

There is a blinding flash of purple light that passes through Jin's body, through the walls of the chamber, outward until it passes through the streets of the city, outward and upward, a rising tide of shimmering purple light, First Mind runes crawling across the surface of the bubble of radiance that is quickly rising to cover the entirety of Stardown, stretching even further, kilometers in every direction, passing over villages and towns and farms, until it comes to rest at last, a vast purple dome.

At first there are screams, panic, scattering, shouting, alarms, and then the sounds die away, until the vast city of Stardown falls silent, watching the dome of light cover them until even the light of the sun takes on a faint purple tinge, seeing the ancient runes on its surface and feeling that they are somehow both alien and familiar, like a half-remembered dream.

Hei-Shi break from their stupor of suprise, their ear-pieces exploding with frantic traffic. They attempt to activate their Dis-Locators...and nothing happens. There is a faint sound of burning circuitry. Nothing.

About this time, Stardown rises up. Hei-Shi blood flows, broken blue armor is stuffed with straw and rags and burned in effigy. Goshi representatives sent to maintain the peace are chased through the streets and beaten by mobs. Goshi monitors are smashed and torn down by shouting revolutionaries. The city scrambles to find some way to respond.

They are suddenly at war.