OT: Hell is For Heroes.

[dogscoff]

LOL! Nice one. It closes everything neatly, but at the same time opens up so many more questions.

Thanks AZ, I'm still smiling from that.

[Puke]

mmm... pie.

i dont quite feel wrapped up yet, though. it isnt revealed who the attacking fleets are, unless i just havent been paying attention. nor does it really explain what the purpose of our ex-supergirl was. again, unless i havent been paying attention.

I think this is just the prelude to the wrap up.

[TurinTurambar]

It can't be wrapped up:

She handed the pad to McArthur, and stood in silence as he read the report. As he reached the end, his eyes jumped ahead to a single word, the only word, really, that the report needed to contain.
�No...� he whispered.
Gomez nodded. �It's confirmed, sir. They're back.�

[AgentZero]

You were saying....



Kaelan O'Shea stared at his bedside monitor in disbelief. Barely half an hour ago, he'd received a brief, terse message from Saraea telling him that Kagan and Alice were dead, and now this. He shook his head and squinted at the screen, convinced what he was seeing was a trick of the eye, a sick joke, anything but true. But all the authentication codes checked out fine, no matter how unbelievable the news was, there was no questioning the authenticity of the message. Kaelan reached for the the glass sitting on his bedside table, and, finding it empty, cursed loudly and pushed himself out of bed in search of something with which to fill it. The message had been sent by a pretty, young comms officer aboard Admiral McArthur's command station. It was a copy of a dispatch being sent all over the fleet, but what was contained within it was-
�Hey...� The prone figure in his bed stirred sleepily. The petite brunette he'd picked up on his last port of call sat up on the bed and stared at him drowsily. �What's wrong?� she asked, noticing the expression on his face.
�End of the feckin world,� Kaelan replied, waving a hand at the bedside monitor.
�Can I look?� she asked.
�Yeah, work away,� he replied, trying to remember her name. Karen? Kelly? Kaelan? Yeah, that sounded familiar. Oh... Right. He groaned softly at the load taxing his mind and tried vainly to push his eyeballs further back into his head. He wandered out of the bedroom and stumbled over a bottle of scotch.
�Well look at you!� he declared happily, scooping it up off the ground and holding it up to eye level. �Thought you were getting away did ya? Back inside with ye!�
He marched back into the bedroom triumphantly to find Katherine? Kristin. Yes! That was it! Kristin was curled up in a tight ball, staring fearfully at the monitor.
�It can't be,� she whispered tearful. �Not again, it can't be.�
�Aye, but it is,� Kaelan said, pouring two large glasses of scotch. �So drink up and enjoy yourself, for only the Nine Whores know how much longer it'll last.
The girl took a glass with a shaky hand and drank deeply as Kaelan settled himself in beside her to run through the dispatch again. It started out with a thin line of text stating that the old enemy, that which had nearly wiped out the Second Dynasty, that which was supposedly exterminated, had returned. Following that eye-catching proclamation, there were several pages of sensor analysis, comparing recent scans of ships that had been attacking the Imperium all across it's borders to scans taken thousands of years ago, and if that wasn't enough to satisfy the reader, it ended with footage from a battle showing a gutted ship spewing bodies out into space, and whoever had taken the footage had managed to get a good clean shot of the faces of those being sucked out. One look at one of those skull-like, demonic faces was all Kaelan needed to convince him beyond a shadow of a doubt. That horrific visage was burned into the minds of all school children as the personification of all that was truly evil.
�What are we going to do?� asked Kristin, interrupting his musings.
�Well,� Kaelan said slowly. �We are first going to get very, very drunk. Then, when we wake up, we're going to stop off at the nearest spaceport, buy up a lifetimes worth of supplies, and get the bloody hell out of Terran space.�
�Where will we go?�
�Doesn't much matter,� he replied. �The Second Dynasty barely survived the last invasion and they were thousands of years ahead of us. The Imperium doesn't stand a chance, that report says as much, so the further away we get from here, the better.�
The following morning, Kaelan awoke to find himself on the bridge to the sound of a console beeping. He pushed himself out of the command chair, and stumbled over to the source of the noise, only to find that it was the communications terminal with a message confirming that all supplies had been loaded, and he was cleared to depart. With a fuzzy minded scowl, he looked over the manifest of cargo that had been transferred onto his ship. Several lifetimes worth of fine food, drink and medical supplies now filled his cargo hold. He scratched his head blearily and was still trying to figure out how this had all happened when Kristin strolled casually onto the bridge.
�You decided there was no time like the present after your third bottle,� she informed him after taking one look at the confused expression on his face. �So you came up here, sorted everything out, and passed out as soon as they told you it'd take seven hours to prepare everything and get it loaded.�
�Oh,� he said slowly. �Well, in that case, is there anything you want before we go?�
Kristin, a social outcast and only child to deceased parents, shook her head. �No,� she said softly. �I'm all done here.�
Kaelan reflected for a moment, then decided, �Me too.�
With that, he brought the ship into the air, rising higher faster and faster, blazing through the nighttime sky until they broke free of the atmosphere, and soon after, broke free of the constraints of normal space and into the limitless freedom of null-space.

[TurinTurambar]

trying to remember her name. Karen? Kelly? Kaelan? Yeah, that sounded familiar. Oh... Right.

LMAO

[Puke]

nice. very nice.

[AgentZero]

Mwahahahahahaaaaaa!



Darkness. Confusion. Pain. A shrill, skull numbing shriek. Silence. A dull rumble. The sensation of movement. And then, light. Bright, white, all consuming light. A low groan. Movement within the light, black shapes moving about. Then, colour. A splash of red resolved into a tousled mop of hair, pale skin, sparkling green eyes, a smiling mouth.
�Rise and shine, sleepy head!� The words, spoken cheerfully, at first had no significance. Their meaning came slowly, dripping one syllable at a time into his consciousness. When the whole sentence had been properly digested, he groaned loudly and pulled himself into a seated position. He looked about slowly, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings. To his right there was the girl, he was sure her name would come to him eventually. To his left, there was a body on a slab. Beyond that, more bodies. He looked back over to his right, beyond the girl was an empty slab, beyond that, a human shape crumpled on the ground, and beyond it, more bodies on slabs. He too, he realized suddenly was seated on a slab. And more to the point-
�I'm naked,� he said, his tongue thick in his mouth.
�Me too,� the girl- Alice, his mind informed him belatedly- replied cheerfully.
He took a proper look at her, noting that she was indeed naked, but far more noticeable was her pale, colourless flesh, even her lips lacked any sort of colour.
�You look awful pale,� he told her.
�I know,� she said with a small frown. �It's distressing. And I feel tingly. Do you feel tingly?�
Kagan flexed his hands slowly and grimaced at the pins-and-needles sensation that shot up and down his arms. He shifted slightly and gasped as the sensation exploded all over his body.
�Blimey,� he muttered. �Yeah, I feel... tingly, all right. Who's the fella on the floor?�
Alice glanced over at the body lying near her feet. �Dunno,� she said with a shrug. �I opened my eyes just as he was about to slice me open with a great big saw. I told him I'd really appreciate it if he didn't, and well, he didn't handle it too well and toppled over.�
�Huh,� was all Kagan could manage, his mind still sluggish, his body still not feeling as though it belonged to him. �What... happened?� he asked a few minutes later.
�How do you mean?� Alice called back, having wandered off to explore the room.
�You... I... Died. Didn't we?�
�I'm absolutely sure and certain we did. Dead as door nails we were. And now we're not. Don't think about it too much or it'll make your head hurt. At least, it sure made mine hurt.� She emphasized her last statement by stopping to rub her temples and then slowly turned back towards Kagan, having explored as far as she could in that direction. Kagan slowly swung his legs off the slab and managed to rise shakily to his feet. He grabbed the white sheet that had been covering him and wrapped it around him, partly out of modesty, partly to help ward off the intense cold he was feeling.
�Aren't you cold?� he asked Alice.
�Freezing,� she replied, then stopped and stared at him for a long moment. �Good idea,� she said finally, grabbing her own sheet and wrapping it around herself. �Here I was wasting all kinds of time trying to find my clothes.�
Kagan pushed the slab back into it's rack, popped open a small door underneath it and pulled out a box. He opened the lid and pulled out a pair of trousers.
�These look familiar,� he said dryly before putting them on. As he struggled to free his boots from the box, Alice bounded happily over to her slab, gave it a good shove to get it closed and bent down to open the cupboard underneath it. Unfortunately, it soon emerged that she had given her slab far too hard a shove and it rebounded and caught her square in the forehead, sending her sprawling onto the floor.
�Well I sure didn't need that,� she said irritably. �Wait! I remembered something. No, wait. I didn't. Forget I said anything.�
�Done,� Kagan said, deciding it was best to completely ignore her ramblings at this juncture in favour of utilizing his limited brainpower for extraditing his other boot. Having finally accomplished this, he discovered his socks beneath his boot and proceeded to put them on, followed by his boots. Alice, for her part, gently replaced the slab into it's rack, then opened the cupboard beneath it and pulled out her box. The first thing she lifted from the box was her shirt, which she held aloft and looked at Kagan through the scorched hole that ran through both sides of the shirt.
�Yup,� she said gravely. �Definitely deaders.�
Kagan stared at the shirt long after Alice had dropped it to one side in favour of other articles of clothing. He tried vainly to bring back some sort of memory of the day they had apparently died, but his mind stubbornly refused to part with anything pertaining to that day. The last thing he could remember was docking his ship at the Zellund shipyards, then lying on the street with his life leaking out of him. And then- nothing. He reached the bottom of his box and pulled his shirt out, to the front of it marred by a large scorched hole. Alice was right, he knew. No one could have survived the injuries that were evidenced by the holes in his garment, let alone Alice's, and yet here they were, certainly the worse for wear, but undeniably alive. He looked at her and couldn't help wonder, as he watched her happily putting on her clothes as if trying them on for the first time, what manner of creature he had been sharing his bed with. He pushed the thought out of his mind as quickly as it had entered. After all, he had survived too, hadn't he? But still, a nagging doubt remained. After all, his injuries would have been far less than hers, it was possible he could have survived, but she'd had a hole blown clean through her, and yet-
�There,� Alice pronounced, satisfied. She was fully dressed, if one was willing to overlook the topless issue. �That's much better, but you'll need something to cover up those,� she told him, pointing at the guns he had strapped to his belt.�
�Aye,� he agreed. �And what about those?� he asked, nodding in her direction.
She stared back at him in puzzlement for a moment, then followed his gaze and dropped her eyes downwards. �Ah, yes,� she said, not looking up. �Well...� he eyes wandered over to the unconscious doctor on the floor. �You take his coat, I'll take his shirt. I'm sure he won't mind.�
Between them, they managed to remove the doctor's coat and shirt, and then placed him up on one of the slabs upon Alice's insistence that he'd be more comfortable there. Kagan found the doctor's coat to be a perfect fit, and though the shirt was much too big, Alice was obviously pleased with it's silky fabric.
�So, what's the plan?� she inquired.
�Well,� Kagan said slowly. �I was rather planning on just strolling out of here, finding the nearest exit and trying to get back to the ship from there.�
�Hmm,� Alice pondered. �And if something goes wrong with the ingenious plan?�
�Well,� Kagan replied, patting his two concealed pistols. �Then things around here are just gonna get all kinds of violent.�
�Works for me,� she replied happily, giving him a big smile. Kagan noticed a touch of pink to her lips, and tugged open the snap-buttoned shirt to reveal skin that was beginning to show mottled colour.
�Starting to warm up?� he asked.
�A little,� she replied, looking down at herself. �Sure don't look too nice right about now though.�
Kagan had to admit that the returning colour gave Alice a blotchy, bruised appearance, which he wouldn't admit aloud, wasn't entirely pleasant.
�You look lovely,� he told her. �Now lets get moving.�
They made their way out of the room and entered a brightly lit corridor. There seemed to be no one around, and they strode quickly up the hall, eager to put as much distance between them and the morgue as they could. They soon realized they were in a very large complex as one identical hallway after another branched off, each one stretching off into the distance. Just as they were beginning to despair ever escaping, they rounded a corner and banged into a rather surprised looking man whose name tag identified him as Doctor Gwenllyn.
�Good evening,� Kagan greeted him cheerfully.
�Err, good evening,� the doctor replied slowly. �Might I ask what you are doing here?�
�Well,� Kagan replied. �We're rather new here-�
�It's our first day,� Alice piped up.
�-yes, our first day,� agreed Kagan. �And we got a little bit turned around trying to find the exit and all, because-�
�There are many corners,� Alice informed the doctor gravely.
�-yes, many corners,� Kagan echoed.
�I... see,� Dr. Gwenllyn said, giving the two of them a look that left no illusions as to what he thought they'd really been up to. �Well, if you follow this corridor to the end, then take your first right, and the second left after that, you'll be in main reception, and I'm sure you can make your way out from there.�
�Great!� Alice exclaimed happily. �Thanks, doc!�
�Of course,� Dr. Gwenllyn replied with a gracious nod. He watched the two hurry off, waiting until they'd gotten about halfway down the hall before tapping a few commands into his wrist controller. As Kagan and Alice passed through the next doorway, there was a pop and a crackle, and the two collapsed into a motionless pile. Gwenllyn shook his head ruefully. Honestly, he wondered. Who had they thought they were fooling?

[Puke]

yea! more story. Im confused and confounded about the dead coming back to life, but im sure that there will be an explination in time. just like with the table.

[Baron Munchausen]

Heh...

Behold the power of the author! Not even death is final.

Intoxicating, isn't it?

[Puke]

indeed it must be intoxicating. i generally prefer for death to be final. but im still entertained by the story.