War with D.E.S.T.I.N.Y.

[spoofer]

Characters: Ensemble cast, any/all characters of Xistentia!
Summary: D.E.S.T.I.N.Y. comes to Xistentia for the first time, bringing with it violence and havoc. Combat against enemy agents, healing, emergency sanctuary, and "Drift Compatibility" happen here. Refer to the OOC plotting post and the mod announcement!
Date(s): November 4-18
Warnings/Notes: Violence, death, psychological themes, trauma. Please warn for anything else in your subject headers!

WAR WITH DESTINY

By headsman's blade or battle-axe

Fight For Your Life

Everything is, in short, super fucked. Era Ra's warning came at the right time, forewarning of some of the weapons and fighting styles that could be expected from D.E.S.T.I.N.Y.'s agents, but still, the people of Xistentia have not faced a force like this before. The ragtag combination of fighting styles and tactics promises both versatility and confusion.

For better or worse, D.E.S.T.I.N.Y. is in similar chaos.

The first to come are ships from the Western sea, bearing a mix of warriors in and monsters. Some wield old-fashioned steel swords and others bear laser blasters, and their armor is just as varied. Some creatures appear domesticated, while others are feral and snap at their own. However, one primary feature identifies the enemy: their war color is red, which adorns flags and uniforms. Interestingly, the sea and sky of Xistentia seem to be fighting back in their own way, massive waves and a storm, even animals pestering them as they attempt to land the beach. However, it's only a matter of time before the mainstay of their forces reach land, some two hundred fighters. It's then that sentient fires start to whirl into the forests, leaping from tree to tree.

You have the home court advantage. Even the foliage itself seems to cooperate with you, aiding in efforts for stealth by keeping you downwind, twigs failing to crack when you misstep. Soon, you're joined by Xistentia's other forces-- a handful of battered ships taking air, an odd assortment of elves and talking dogs, demons and aliens from outer-space, coordinating counter-attacks.

BATTLE MODE: ATTACK

You're locked in combat with a woman who seems oddly familiar, though you don't know her face and can't think of her name. You hit her in the head, and now a narrow slice of her face shows through her red-rimmed helm. She wields a rifle tipped with a heavy blade, though it crackles with electrical energy. She is a proficient swordswoman, deftly parrying and striking against you, her face eerily expressionless. Her blade has a switch that, when activated, will send out a net that numbs your limbs and drags you to the floor. Here's hoping you won't face this demon alone.

She's not your only problem. You may have noticed, that in every epic battle with evil wizards, there's always some kind of a problematically gigantic elephant. This is one of those days. At least, there's only one, its trunk as wide as a car, its feet moving slow, so that it might crush the trees rather than trip over them.

Fight one or both, or fight the hordes of nameless minions around them. Either way: there's plenty to do. Those of you who thought things were too quiet here? You'll be busy today.

SEEK SANCTUARY

Fighting isn't for you? Well, you'll want to get out of the way, then. The "wards" protecting the city are failing, and people are heading toward The Temple where the protections remain the strongest. Here, the injured need healing in the stone beds. The civilians do their best, comforting children, cooking food, trading intelligence, repairing weapons and armor where possible. Feel free to pitch in; they need all the help they can get.

BATTLE MODE: SUPPORT (PSYLINK)

And here, you've reached the Temple, you've laid yourself down on one of the many glass-and-stone beds within the safety of its stone walls. You know what the other Xistentia residents have told you about it— this is the next phase, after the memory share had raised shields against the psychotropic rain. This is the PsyLink. Through this bond, you are said to be able to activate special defenses. No one seems to know exactly what they are, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And beyond the Temple walls, times are desperate indeed.

Each drift requires at least two people. Your daemons will find and connect you, seemingly at random— and you may find yourself with the unlikeliest of partners.

Drift Compatible

The Kissing Booth participants find it easiest. Everyone else-- it's a wild jumble, finding yourself caught up in a firehose of not only your own memories, but that of someone else. Everything they think, everything they feel, is intertwined with your mind.

You can't get caught up in it. You have to let the memories of the past, your predictions for the future, and the terror of war flow in and out of you, without neither resistance or pursuit, gently tuning them out. And in this serenity, this psychic silence, this acceptance of not only yourself but the other other, you find perfect connectivity— harmony with your PsyLink partner.

In this space, you find yourself having strange conversations. You and your partner will share ghostly images, some of which seem to be images from the past— while others seem to be present-day moments from the battle outside, fighting the enemy, as if you are somehow in two places at once. You must find traction and stay in the now and stay calm, but it's harder than you think.

The instant you latch onto that memory or emotion, it's a mistake... but you forget.

Your shadow is here. Whether out-of-context, or right here where it was meant to be, it's trying to kill you.

But you're not trapped here alone. Someone is calling your name, a familiar voice in the pandemonium. That voice comes from your drift partner. It's up to them to pull you back, remind you of who you are, and balance you. Hold on to them - they're your anchor, but you'll have to do the same for them. A successful drift means helping each other. Do it well, and you'll help to power the temple's defences. Fail, and there'll be trouble for everyone seeking sanctuary here.

Comments

[servomotor]

[Tony Stark is definitely out of his mind. Many people with diagnostic qualifications would agree. He's met with a variety of labels. Narcissistic, surely. Trauma reactions, absolutely. Usually it's more personality-level problems than a mood thing, but maybe that's because he doesn't feel as bad as he should given the frequency with which this kind of shit happens to him.

But the fact is, what he's talking now isn't the craziest, dumbest shit. It's what you should do to, when you don't want to die; it's how you signal the world and its doctors that you plan on sticking around.

You make plans.]

I mean it's a special hamsterball. Advanced technological properties, [he says. I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whomever I wanted to do it with.] And I can fly this thing. [He does. He shouts a warning, then flips it upside-down. rising above the line-of-sight for the other's turrets.] Fridayd, decrpytion-download status? [and his suit answers for him, a tinny, female mechanical voice barely audible in the thunder. 89%, ETA 8 seconds. Eight seconds. That's not bad. He rolls the craft, fires down at the ship that had nearly got them. Takes off a third of their wing. This thing is a lot less maneuverable than the Iron Man suit.

But there are more ships. Little single-passenger fighters zipping into view. He fires at them once, twice, before opting to drop down. Trees magnify, from a sinkscape of broccoli heads to graphic detail, imminent fall. If it's the information they want, he and Shepard could still get what they wanted out of an emergency landing. Can I ask you something personal? If this was the last birthday party you were going to have, what would you do? He can't remember what he was doing his last birthday. His next one isn't til May. It's always on May.

May seems so far away, both the last and the one that marks age 48.] Hey, Shep.

[Last year, he'd probably been wooing Pepper back. He wonders how Shepard would fit in, in his world; he knows she'd never abandon hers. RAKRAKARAKA. Bullets puncture the side of the craft-- harmlessly. He hits one of the fighters as he falls backward into the jungle; as they fall, with stomach-lurching velocity, every bolt and panel of the ship rattling as they fall. He's almost fifty. Too old to learn new tricks, but not the women to do them for.

With Pepper, it had been sauteed prosciutto, a Sonia Delauney, and apologies.]

Finish the sentence, [he says.] 'If passion were power.'

[And that's when it happens. The ship twice the size of theirs, bursting out into the window on Shepard's side of the cockpit, its cloaking shield shimmering, showing them their own reflection. Enemy soldiers are abandoning the ship, knowing that it means to batter them.]

[upside]

( she makes herself useful where she can, sitting in the co-pilot seat and firing her gun through the windows of bullet holes, killing and killing and killing. she's been in the game far too long to feel remorse -- she's killed turians and asari and krogan and strange soldiers in red armor, and she isn't about to get shaken up now. war is nasty. war is ugly. war is something she takes the burden of, to relieve the people back home of it.

she thinks about earth. she thinks about thessia.

couldn't save one and now she can't save the other. her mood promptly sours. it's true that success ruins work ethic -- every problem, every difficult choice, she's always managed to come out on top regardless of the odds stacked against her. and then the reapers came. and then thessia fell. and thane died, and mordin died, and legion died. and the grand commander shepard learned that hard work and fighting and wanting something isn't all it takes to make it happen. cities fall, people die before their time, empires and races die out. her own race is on the brink of extinction, and where is she?

sitting in this plane, next to tony, missing her fucking shots.

commander shepard. you can do this, jane. you've spent fifteen years training to be better than you are, of growing up from the age of sixteen when her mother and father were brutally murdered in front of her -- to enlisting in the military, to killing turians, to rising the ranks to n7 prestige and becoming commander lieutenant, to becoming captain of the uss normandy goddamnit it shepard get your head in the fight

if passion were power ...

she didn't come all this way just to die here, next to some guy who might never know how she feels towards him. this is a losing fight, probably, the two of them in a ship that has taken too much damage on any and all of its sides, swiftly descending while being flanked in all directions. she didn't come here to die. she didn't come here to die.

she didn't come here to die, because it's the one thing she never learned how to do. )

Then my electricity bill would be way higher.

( she says, swiftly sliding from her seat to tony, a knife procured from her suit that slices his seatbelt away and then goes quickly back where it came from. metal arms wrap around a metal body, and shepard figures that if this doesn't work at least tony has a higher chance of surviving the fall. the ship peels around them, sheets of metal tossed off, burned by endless bullets from all directions. it deteriorates, disappears, and the ship ramming them keeps up an endless bam bam bam, jolting them.

shepard focuses. she doesn't listen to anything other than tony in her ear, feeling his body between her arms. if it's the last thing she feels, it's not too bad.

but, then she releases, and there's a warped sound of energy that explodes from her, purple glow covering her body and then pushing up onto tony's suit, morphing the red of iron man into a futuristic sheen of purple. it hugs, and then it expands, until it's a physical energy field circling the two of them.

when they hit the ground, it bounces with a surging sound, rattling them inside. on the second fall, the bubble bursts, and they hit the forest ground with a thud. )

[servomotor]

[Every time Tony almost dies or thinks he's about to, it's quite different. He enjoys a range of variability, in terms of settings, companions, frame of mind ten minutes before, and the rate at which he's being annihilated. The chemical poisoning of his blood had been the slowest. Any number of Extremis-fueled psychopaths punching his head in had seemed like a faster death. Falling into deep space, the holographic connection to Pepper's cellphone flickering out in his HUD, had been somewhere in between.

It's never how the books talk about it. Life flashing before your very eyes, or even remembering some embarrassing arbitrary fact, like having forgotten to turn off the kitchen light the morning before, an unpaid bill, uncertainty about the last time you told the one you love that you do. Maybe it's because an AI has run ninety percent of his 'home life,' and he had the world's best personal assistant(s) beside. Not enough random miscellany to fire his neurons. And the obsessive tendencies of his brain, always attenuating his concentration to the glory of the cause, the dedication of redemption, to the imperative of murdering bad people, with little room for the natural predispositions for humans to be embarrassing in the usual way.

Right now, all that flashes before his eyes is

purple?

Purple. Brilliant and expanding.]

Tree, [he barks, when it's gone-- and then there are branches reaching, leaves rupturing on impact. He can't properly feel it. He could have sworn the last thing he'd seen had been fire, an oxidizing, brilliant shade of orange, metal tearing apart. His brain has always been a minor miracle of education and it hastens to shove the pieces together into a sensical order. It comes together in Shepard's arms. Literally, physically— he realizes she's holding him, that the circle of her embrace is the focal point of the power that emanates from them now. Biotics.] TREE.

[Maybe he's just embarrassing in the weird ways.

They smush onto the ground like a dropped orange, the glowing skin of the forcefield bursting apart on impact, spilling them, its meat contents, out across the soft earth. He tumbles inelegantly aside, rattling around inside his own private husk of metal until he flops to a stop. He'd thought better than to try the repulsors.

The HUD beeps and flashes at him. It might be future-tech, but for a moment, as he breathes, and watches his visor static and refocus, it's as annoying as a fucking car alarm.]

Shepard.

[and the next minute, he's up. Scrambling over to her, the servos in his armored legs swizzing, giving him strength where his bones and body would have deserted him. He kicks through clods, and yanks his mask off.] Jane.

[upside]

( in her own defense, there really isn't a moment where shepard thinks she died. she knows all too well what death feels like, so she knows -- she's on her back and she opens her eyes to see the xistentia sky, that bright and beautiful thing behind all the chaos and the fire and the gunshots. it's there. she's not dead. she needs to get up and start moving.

but fuck if she isn't tired. the routine of disaster weighs heavily on thirty-two year old shoulders, and for a little while it's -- it's tempting. just to sit here and let the war take her. die, looking up at the sky.

but it's also not an option. she has to win because she doesn't know how to die. you could break every bone in her body, and she'd still find a way to hold a gun and fire it at her nearest target. a hundred foot fall isn't going to stop her, a reaper isn't going to stop her, nothing can stop her.

she hears her name and wobbles up, cringing at a pain in her side which she can't spare the time to figure out, blinking her eyes rapidly until she finds tony. tony. a welcome sight. she grunts and she attempts to help herself up, finding her footing eventually on two numb legs. )

We lived — they know that. We need to find cover. ( there's no more teasing filter on her -- she's full commander mode. sharing glances at their surroundings, she points to her current goal, a cave some thirty meters away. ) That's it, lets go!

[servomotor]

[The cave turns out to be a mundane space with stone walls, dirt floor, some leaves flipped in through the mouth of it where wind, elements, possibly badgers had accidentally carried material in with them. It is entirely unremarkable, except for the fact that it's quiet and the red-armored invaders seem to have overlooked it utterly.

Which seems like a miracle in and of itself.

It's not fucking paradise, but it's good enough for him to tug her down beside him and provoke Fridayd into a scan over her frame, from the roof of her red head to the armored tips of her toes. It shouldn't surprise him at all, that she's okay, and it doesn't bother him that she seems to be laughing at him in the half-light of the stone, more focused on asking him what daemon feed is saying about the sitrep than the possibility she's experiencing internal haemorrhaging.

It's like the time before man, the distant sound of birdsong and the smell of residual petrichor from the rain a week ago. She says, We don't have a lot of time, and she means before they might be found, before an adept tactician comes at just such an angle through the trees to find vantage of them through the tiny gap in the stone. Tony knows what she means.

But maybe that's why, beset by chaos, and understanding with hair-raising clarity that the enemy would find them through an infinitesimal window inside a small door, by dint of coincidence so chance it might as well be fate— maybe it's because of that, because of probability and prudence, that his mouth finds her mouth in the half-dark, untrembling but soft, the cold metal edge of his helmet brushing her cheek.

He isn't unstoppable. He's only a man in a can. But if she doesn't stop him-- that'd be all right.]

[upside]

( the idea of it is always kind of there even if it's stranger in practice -- really, she's imagined kissing tony so frequently in her mind, that their first kiss feels like their hundredth, like shepard had greeted him on the beach with kisses and didn't stop until. until. well now, maybe, when they're actually kissing -- has she been imagining it that long? the scruff of his beard and the metal frames of his suit hugging her her cheeks, the taste on his tongue like fuel for a fire and yesterday's whiskey. her mouth opens for him, unquestioning, no hesitation. the tension between them has been palpable since day one, it's just been a ticking time bomb for when the magnets of their mouths, drawn from mineral and physics, pressed together.

and it's apt that it's now, probably, in some damp cave on the sidelines of some battle, when there are a thousand things more important to focus on. but all shepard can do is listen to the metal slide of her fingers cupping tony's sides, holding him in place and pulling him in. she tastes the salt on his lip and the dirt off hers. it's not perfect, but it's real. it's tony stark.

but it can't last forever, and shepard slides off after a little while, foreheads tapped together briefly before shepard leans back on the rock of the cave floor, tapping her head on the ground. her eyes stay squinted on tony, a sleazy grin curling up her lips. )

That's not what I meant, Stark. Not that I'm complaining.

[servomotor]

[She could probably break his armor with her little bare fingers if she put her mind to it, but she doesn't. It's a strange and strangely insulated thing, to kiss when your body is encased in a rocket-powered weapon, but Tony's done it once or twice before, and mostly, mostly, it refines his attention and focus down to a magnified point.

Two points, maybe. His mouth against her mouth, and the heart beating between the heated partitions of his lungs. Sometimes a body is only like a machine, with parts more essential than others, and life contained by its purpose and the components truest to that. No one needs a computer that will switch on but refuse to offer data on-screen or take orders. No one needs a computer that can think, but won't talk about it.

Mouth is to keys, heart to GUI. To be unloved had never been one of Tony Stark's personal concerns, but there had always seemed to be a trick to it that a masterful grasp of algorithm and mathematics couldn't quite master, something about himself, something about finding the right other, something about the nature of the connection. Solve for x. Mathphobes don't understand that that's the easy part, that each of the sides of the equation only appears unequal, one larger than the other, the characters different. In reality, arithmetic guarantees that this illusion is untrue. People, relationships, that's hard stuff. Complicated. Unquantifiable.

They finish kissing, and then he realizes he'd stopped thinking at all. Math taught him how to fly, but there's no unit of technology that could replicate this experience, looking at the crooked smile reshape her flushed mouth. There's a streak of soot on her cheek, and he's close enough to her than he can see a couple of the little black grains that form the smudge.

In the last few months, he'd thought a lot about kissing Pepper. More and more, it had become difficult to remember, her hair transposed with a shorter crop, a deeper luster to her laugh.]

Passion is power, [he tells her.] Or you haven't noticed that's what keeps the lights running in Xistentia?

[upside]

( shepard shakes her head, a little instinctively at first, before the smile that curls up broader on her mouth calls sincerity to her disbelief in him, a marveled and charmed thing, sparing a second to chuckle at him. her hand palms his chest, shoving him in a teasing fashion without any real heat behind trying to get him off. she stays pinned on the ground, leg slightly bent up, unhurried for a moment.

no, no. )

Affection is power, here. ( she corrects, raising a challenging eyebrow. ) Physical contact -- that's where the city gets its power. Passion has nothing to do with it.

( she surges upwards then, knocking tony back so he sits more than pins. every ounce of her is a tease, a question, a challenge to be outdone or proven wrong -- she knows she's right, knows tony might've just backed himself into a corner, knows the world outside is lit on fire, but all she cares about is the tickles of emotion running up and down her in tendrils, head to toes, toes to head. )

The question then is -- is this whole kissing business between you and I something built on passion, or is it just ... powering the city? Affection. ( she shrugs his shoulder. ) You can answer later. For now it really is time to go, before another one of those planes crashes into us.

[servomotor]

[Clank! The Iron Man falls over like a walnut, meat inside of a shell, only that the shell happens to be metal and this meat bleeds if it's bitten. Or bruises. Also an important distinction between edible plant leavings and Tony Stark: sometimes he enjoys being bitten, even when bruised.

Which is maybe why he doesn't mind this entertaining turn of play. Amid the world-between-worlds catching fire outside, the distant sounds of explosions, the certainty of death happening— somewhere. Amid all that, he's being straddled by a woman whose thighs could probably actually crack a walnut, looking up, his bearded face amused, a darker shade of laughter glinting in the dark shade of his eyes.]

This doesn't feel like the time to defer to another time, [he says. His armored hands set down just above her knees, then plane up. Solid, cool, like wrapping her legs around monkey bars.] I take your point. But Option A. This-- [one hand up, so he can swizz a metal forefinger around his face.] Sardonic voice, irony face. Don't let that fool you. The ninety-ninth percentile just demonstrates passion differently. You understand. Military have their repression too.

[Another down-tone swizzzz of rotors, audible, playful. Then he takes his other hand off her leg, agreement with a side of wist.

There are worst ways to die, than having someone like Shepard to look forward to.]