Difference between revisions of "FHD Remix Chapter 25"

Revision as of 18:41, 5 March 2010

Back to FHD Remix main directory

Previous: FHD Remix Chapter 24: Gates of Hell

Chapter 25: Sortie to Hell

[Features Criminal by Disturbed, tenth track on their album Indestructible, 2008 Reprise/WMG; Fly Away pat-a-cake rhyme original to FHD Remix and has not been recorded]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmeOmCyG7PY (c) 2008 Reprise/WMG (warning: coarse language; applicable lyrics in FHD Remix have been changed)

[Doom 3 twentieth stage; not accurate to the game]

Tatakai emerges from the teleportal in mid-air with another of Mike Wingren's masterpieces stuck in her head.

Malevolent criminal, I
When the vision paints my mind
Cross the invisible line
And you'll be paid in kind

Malevolent criminal, I
When the vision paints my mind
Cross the invisible line
And you'll be paid in kind

That's what she is in this dimension: the enemy on a break-and-enter mission to steal something from their most secure vault. And ... she feels like exacting some paid in kind for the seven thousand of UAC's brightest minds lost in just nine minutes.

Criminal: this suffering
It makes me think like a criminal
The suffering when we're alone
Criminal: this suffering
It makes me feel like a criminal
The suffering when we're alone

Unable to hear the voice of the Saviour she's known for so much of her life, and having left Jack Campbell behind on Mars, she feels very much alone. She is flying very quickly. With the various lava pools and whatnot, it is very easy for her to soar from thermal to thermal. The only weapon that operates at the sorts of ranges she needs to hit the various demons on the ground below is the plasma rifle.

"Typical enough for me
That I burn inside in agony
What power will enable me
To bury my vision?

She realizes that in the warm, dry air of hell, she might not be able to land. And she can't furl, even if she wanted to, her wings are somehow locked in automatic deployment.

A hunger coming over me
As I learn to hide the agony
To make a final remedy
To close the door once and for all!

Some sort of hunger, she realizes. The place is having a strange effect on her: it's like somehow her body no longer needs oxygen, nor sleep. Could she hold her breath forever, circle above her prey for thousands of years? No. The portals to her plane must be closed.

In a world that I don't want to know
With a message that I never want to send
To be free from all of this
I want you to quicken my end

She remembers Mars, a place that only two days ago, she never expected to even visit. She remembers blasting the fleet distress call card to little smithereens.

Don't tell me I cannot go
With a wound that refuses to mend
Deliver me from all of this
I want you to quicken my end

[The second line is manifested in the game's Nightmare difficulty level, where you lose five points of health every five seconds until it is down to 25.]

Where is the end? She needs to find that Soul Cube and get back out of hell. She spotted a teleporter on the ground on a hairpin peninsula in a canyon full of lava in which lies a huge horned skull. Oddly, one of its antenna "ears" was magnetically suspended in mid-air. That's her ticket out.

{It seems the whole experience is}
Terrible and crippling
The pain is much more then physical
Beyond belief when we're alone

Streams of lost spirits circle in the chaos around her, crying for water, crying for companionship. It is bizarre: despite that she can see thousands of these sorry incorporeal creatures, many of them right next to each other, each is totally alone, unable to sense any of the others ... a horrible way to spend eternity.

Typical enough for me
That I burn inside in agony
What power will enable me
To make this decision?

The Saviour. She senses the Soul Cube through one of hell's internal portals, located on a rickety tower. She finds the steadiest air she can, and with her Enforcer caps the flying skull "Lost Soul" creatures out of the air surrounding it. She lands by coming over it level, pitching up past full stall, then flapping her wings furiously. She still needs two steps after she lands. A Hell Knight in a hidden compartment throws a powerful green fireball at her. She moves dramatically to avoid it. She's a huge target with her wings deployed, but still smaller than a Hell Knight.

Despair has fallen over me
No way to hide the agony
Embracing my calamity
To save myself once and for all

Two scratched shotgun rounds ends the physical existence of this creature. Betruger's voice taunts her, "With every step you take, your soul comes closer to me." She stoops to find a body in an environmental suit, and a PDA. Containers with weapons and ammunition. <UAC's been busy here,> she thinks. Oh? She pries open a container in pursuit of a familiar green glow: BFG plasma ammunition.

In a world that I don't want to know
With a message that I never want to send
To be free from all of this
I want you to quicken my end

Scratched BFG plasma will be a quick end, she thinks. Always wary of her surroundings, she dismantles her plasma rifle and adapts its plasma inducer to the BFG cell. She has been thinking about how to do this since she found Michael Abram's PDA. The rifle's plasma inducer generates just enough pressure to get the concentrated wing claw poison into the BFG cell.

Don't tell me I cannot go
With a wound that refuses to mend
Deliver me from all of this
I want you to quicken my end

She finds the finds the teleportal with the cry of the Soul Cube coming from it, disengages her BFG from her chest mount and clips it to her air lanyard. Out comes the plasma cell that was in it. In goes the slightly brighter scratched plasma cell. She hears creatures approach with orders to attack, she flips the coverts from her alula claws and smiles. They quake in fear: an angel stands ready to attack. Once she extracts some scratch from her left claw into the plasma inducer, she shows them how she's poisoning her BFG ammunition. They all decide they would rather deal with Betruger's wrath than hers. Tatakai now starts actually singing her song as she enters the swirling cyan light of the teleportal.

"Now you want to know?
You want a name?
You want to call me Tatakai
Now you want to know?
You want a name?
You want to say it doesn't matter"

She materializes in front of the Guardian, a four legged creature the size of a trash truck with a gullet large enough to consume the dumpsters in a single swallow. Her veins glow as though she has magma for blood. She roars angrily at the spot where Tatakai materialized, which is not where she is at that moment.

"Now you want to know?
You want a name?
You want to call me Tatakai
Now you want to know?
You want a name?
You want to say it doesn't matter now"

"Hold trigger to charge," the display on her weapon says. Tatakai gives the Guardian a wink and presses the firing stud. The weapon's mechanism's produce an hum increasing in pitch, while the warning tone beeps faster and faster. The display shows increasing pressure from the inducer. When the inducer light goes red, the pressure continues to climb, but more slowly because the bottle is out of plasma. The weapon will explode if she does not release the trigger ... a problem they'll fix with the next model.

"Now that you wanna know
Now you wanna name
Now you wanna place
Now you wanna time
Now you want it all"

The BFG's distinctive green fireball leaves the muzzle. A moment after it does, the eight stream charges ionize paths to eight different points on the enormous enemy. They don't seem to bother her, but she turns her head, realizing Tatakai's true location.

"Now that you wanna know
Now you wanna name
Now you wanna place
Now you wanna time
Now you want it all now!"

The direct, full charge hit from the super-cannon knocks the Guardian onto her side. First, Tatakai hears a laugh. The glowing wound on the Guardian closes over instantly and she is restored to full fighting form before she even gets back onto her feet. Tatakai, after reloading her weapon, realizes she has a major problem in front of her. <How do I kill you?> she thinks.

Betruger, who is also a fan of Disturbed, finishes the song for Tatakai as she climbs one of the obstacles in the Guardian's arena, using not only her hands and feet but her wings, alula claws getting a grip on some of the narrow cracks between the great stone bricks. The Guardian launches a carpet of fireballs that Tatakai has climbed above.

"In a world that I don't want to know
With a message that I never want to send
To be free from all of this
I want you to quicken my end
Don't tell me I can not go
With a wound that refuses to mend
Deliver me from all of this
I want you to quicken my end

"Don't say that it isn't so
I'm on a path that you'll never comprehend
Set me free from all of this
I need you to quicken my end"

"Greenborough," Betruger's omnipresent voice taunts, "I never took you for the suicidal kind."

Tatakai summits the twelve metre column and with a smile, says, "Betruger, you sang that part, not I. Oh, yeah, I can quicken your end." The empty plasma cell pops out of her super-cannon, and the next one she smoothly loads into the weapon and closes the cover.

The Guardian opens a small portal above her spine, and out of it emerge three glowing seekers, about the same size as brats, but they fly with one flashlight-like glowing eye, and probably other passive ones, Tatakai figures. One spots her, and immediately, the Guardian herself turns and belches a gravitic plasma charge at the top of the column. Tatakai jumps off the obstacle, gliding to get enough speed to bite the air, she flaps furiously, seekers in pursuit, locking the BFG into its slot on her chest to clean up her grubby aerodynamics.

The Soul Cube finally says something she can understand, "Destroy the seekers, and the Guardian becomes vulnerable."

"The portal?" she asks.

No reply, but the Guardian seems to be very angry at the Soul Cube for having said what it did.

Tatakai whips out her two pistols, and, finding a fast rising thermal, uses it to help bank into a snap turn. One seeker stops in midair and starts looking around frantically for Tatakai. It is the last of the three to get wasted by her quick aim.

The Guardian hesitates to open her portal. Tatakai realizes, a hesitation that cost her the round, since her pistols are unlikely to do enough damage before the next trio of seekers emerges. Once Tatakai has her BFG back in her hands, the Guardian has no hope.

The portal opens above the Guardian. Tatakai slows her glide, allowing her to aim her weapon to the side as she circles the ponderous beast. The humming and beeping. Angry green fire leaves the muzzle. As Tatakai's wings stall, the ammo cover on the left side of the weapon pops open automatically after the full four-count discharge. As she pitches over into a shallow dive, Tatakai returns the weapon to a more aerodynamic dead-ahead configuration, then starts to reload it.

The softening beams find the three new seekers and zaps them out of the sky. The main charge hits the portal with a muted, but still substantial blast. The Guardian stops, apparently stunned, as though it can hear nothing but tinitis and see nothing but stars. With an agonized moan, she falls over. The Soul Cube cuts its way out from inside and floats nearby.

"Featherwing!" it cries in delighted surprise. The cube was made with one of its edges absent; in its place is a smiling face with four small eyes. Four lights adorn the corners of the cutaway edge, with a fifth in the middle replacing the mouth of the face. Around each of the other corners, elaborately engraved circular blades spin. Out of its base hangs three long fixed blades, but, like all its blades, it can furl and deploy them like a featherwing can his wings. It spins about, making a series of distinctive sharpening sounds which have no abrupt starts or finishes. Tatakai could swear that was its happy dance.

Tatakai swoops low to pick up the floating Soul Cube, but instead of catching it up in the air, it obediently takes up formation with her hands. Smiling, it explains, "We are many, we are one. We are the Praeleanthor. You know us as the Soul Cube. Free us from our eternal prison, and we will help you vanquish our enemies. Listen for our call, and then free us to smite down the evil."

Tatakai dives through the portal that opened where the Guardian burned away. She emerges low over the UAC teleporter and pulls up barely in time, circling to bleed off her speed, the Soul Cube continues, "Destroying evil gives us life and makes us stronger. Unleash us when you hear our call. We will pass the life force of those we slay to you."

Tatakai says, "Sounds like a deal." Coming in low over the "runway" of the little peninsula, she says, "I can't furl my wings here and the air is thin, so if you could put the blades away, I'd greatly appreciate it." The Soul Cube nods and furls, then Tatakai lands hard, wiping out onto her face and sliding. The Soul Cube bounces playfully in the cinders around her after she stops, some of its many voices sings "Featherwing, featherwing, fly away with me" in a child-like pat-a-cake rhythm. Tatakai picks herself up and brushes off.

The Soul Cube continues in its normal plural voice, "We foresee a great battle. The outcome is not clear. We are the only way to slay hell's mightiest warrior."

"No you're not," Tatakai says.

"Assigned us this task, the Saviour has," it explains, "Victory will buy the lost of your world more time to find his love."

Tatakai pauses, turns to her left and notices what appears to be a small shrine on a little peninsula of its own, jutting out into the magma. An object glows within a cocoon of overlapping spines. Tatakai approaches it, spreads the spines and finds the object. The object itself doesn't glow, but around it is an aura, much like the halos Catholics drew around their depictions of the Saviour in ancient times.

"That must be what they call The First Book," the Soul Cube explains.

It is a small red paperback with its title engraved in gold. Its opening corners are rounded, and the binding seems to be wrapped around, rather than folded.

Tatakai gasps, "These things have been made in over a hundred years, and this one looks like it's fresh off the press! How did it get here?"

"You know more about it than we do," the Soul Cube humbly admits.

"It's a copy of the New Testament, the stories about the Saviour, his own words in printed in red. The Gideon Society printed millions of these in the twentieth century," Tatakai realizes how meaningless this must sound to ancients who have been trapped in a cave for over four thousand years. "Uh, Anno Domini. About a hundred and fifty years ago."

"We've figured out your calendar," the Soul Cube says with a smile, "Your year is so much shorter than ours, we know which planet you are from just from that. The glow of the Saviour's love manifests more visibly in this dimension than it does in ours. The evil spirits hate to hear or see his words, especially in their proper context."

"Let's go back to where we can hear him, shall we?" Tatakai rights the control panel under the floating ear of the teleporter, "Anyone know how to run this thing?"

In a different, deeper plural voice, one with more "male" presence to it, the Soul Cube says, "We designed it. We have not the interface details of your version, but to destroy it, you need to align the planes along the third harmonic variance."

Tatakai, more familiar with UAC's equipment, explores the technical guts and finds that this system calls what they are talking about, "EPR Plane Alignment Mode C". Selecting it, it produces a password prompt.

Tatakai sighs, "That mode has been locked out, probably for safety reasons."

"That caused problems for us, too," the Soul Cube explains. "You have two very powerful computers, perhaps they can help."

Tatakai realizes that she hasn't downloaded the PDA she recovered earlier. Pulling it from the pocket of her mandylion, she drops it in surprise. Out of the cinders of the ground at her feet, glows the name of its former owner on the screen:

"Dr. Malcolm Betruger"

Blinks, she does, "What?" She picks it up and presses its "Use" key. It responds to her, doesn't require a login. She cringes at its personal settings, at the anger towards UAC and Earth. She turns it away as she comes across the image of a featherwing being crucified upside down by his wings. After pressing the advance key blindly, she looks at again and sees in the midst of a dense technical file, a line:

"Mode C Password for all Teleporter units: K1ll_@ll_AnG375"

She taps a note into her own PDA, refusing to link it to this fountain of filth, then taps it into the console of the teleporter.

"Warning," the female UAC computer voice begins, echoing what it says in red on the teleporter screen, "Alignment Mode C will destroy the teleportation equipment. Are you sure you wnat to proceed?"

Tatakai throws Betruger's PDA into the lava pool and then selects, "Yes".

It asks for the password again, Kill all angels.

Tatakai taps it in, hoping it doesn't make her do it a third time, and suddenly she is surrounded by a flash. Emerging into the Delta complex at Sector 4, she welcomes the cooler air, warmth of the Saviour, and the lighter gravity of Mars. Moments later, she welcomes the sound of the teleporter ears exploding around her, she turns, then steps back, watching it collapse.

[Doom 3 twenty-first stage]

"You did it!" The Soul Cube cheers from over her shoulder.

Tatakai smiles, "I guess we're just mopping up, now."

"You are too late!" Betruger's voice thunders from the walls, "Hell no longer needs that portal to enter your world. The invasion you saw was only the first wave. The Hell Gate is capable of sending millions of my children into your world. Soon the fleet from Earth will be here, and with their ships, we will bring this hell to Earth!" The sound echos off the walls around her.

Betruger's laugh shakes the entire teleportal structure, and the room starts caving in around her.

"Oh, crap," she says, rushing to the door she came in, which refuses to open. Quickly she furls her wings and jumps into an open floorboard next to the containment control console from which the first report of the invasion was made seven hours earlier. She barely escapes the final destruction of the teleporter.

"We told you so," the Soul Cube explains as Tatakai lies in the dark of the crawlspace, "It is safe to rest now, feathered friend. Just a couple of hours, and we'll wake you."

The Soul Cube lets the children within it sing their pat-a-cake softly,

"Featherwing, featherwing, fly away with me
Fly away, fly away, new heaven you will see
Featherwing, featherwing, fly away with me
Fly away, fly away, share your wings with me"

Next: FHD Remix Chapter 26: Wings For The Wingless; Tatakai's Terror

Back to FHD Remix main directory