The Western Front (1bil AD - Mau)

[Lucien DeChain]

It was day five of summer. The sun would not go down again for another fifteen days.

Engel activity had been increasing because of the sun's influence. It was mating season, and the creatures were coming out of their forests and hidey holes to find a suitable feast for a potential mate. And, of course, that meant a lot of Engels camping around the domed city.

A message would appear on Mau's inner eye HUD. It read as follows:

Pvt Mausser. Orders have been recieved. Please standby for transmission:

A recent expedition into the wilds nearby the city has given us information about a certain relic that has been uncovered. This relic is of grave importance, and must be recovered for the safety and good of the remaining Humankind.

Your mission is to recover this relic.

Our sensors indicate proximity warnings across 1 km, 5 km and 10 km radius of the city. Please proceed with caution.

Good Luck,
Major Blackthorne

Mau would recognize the name as the man in charge of the Feather division of the Reservists High Command. Getting a message from him directly is not rare, but not every Feather gets orders from him.

There was a set of coordinates sent to his HUD as well, that pointed him West. There are exits to the city to the North, East, South and West.

[Vespyr]

Relic, hmm?

Mau stood with a toothbrush busily vibrating in his mouth, in front of the tiny holographic mirror in his cramped bathroom, and mulled over the message he'd received that morning while he watched news headlines flitting hastily across the top of the mirror screen. After a moment he bent at the waist and spat into the sink, then flicked the switch on the wall to turn off the light and the screen projections.

Once he'd pulled on his customary form-fitting but incredibly durable clothing, the lanky man pushed his hair back with a rolled-up red bandana, a thing widely regarded as tacky due to its ancient roots, but Mau thought it looked just fine. He left the small living quarters and strode with his feline ears at a constantly alert twitch, the furred tips swiveling to and fro, listening intently to the sounds of those living above and below him. The corners of his lips were pulled into the subtlest of content smiles as he passed people in the narrow streets, nodding silent greeting to anyone he happened to recognize.

"Going out, Mau?" someone asked. The one-eyed man nodded affirmatively.

"Careful out there."

Another nod, reassuring.

The coordinates provided would lead him to the city's western exit, and once he was permitted to pass through it, into the thick green wilds of a long-lost world. Mau breathed in deeply; this was the air he wanted to breathe. A rather pleased grin wore on his face as he inclined his long back in a runner's pose and then surged forward, into the forest.

[Lucien DeChain]

As Mau ran through the forests, he would find himself encountering random Engels here and there. They seemed to be roaming about, in some sort of frenzy. Though, with Mau moving at an incredible speed, they could not catch him, and most wouldn't even notice him.

Finally, he approached the coordinates given. It looked to be a ruined city. Half-defeated structures overgrown with moss and flora, crumbling remains of what was before. In the middle of the city was a strange, still standing structure.

Mau would recognize it as an ancient cultural symbol of passing from the mundane world into the spiritual world. But, it did not fit the description given of the relic. Plus, it was much, much too heavy to move, even with his strength. But, these were the right coordinates...

[Vespyr]

Mau would sit for awhile on a nearby lichen-covered boulder, gazing at the strange monument. He knew this wasn't what he was looking for but he took interest in it anyhow. As usual he wondered back through the long years this place had seen and imagined, as best he could, what the lives of the ancients who frequented this place were like. Every place, every thing had some story attached to it even if that story had perished in the mind of someone who had lived and died millions of years ago. They were all still there somehow, and Mau watched the apparitions in his mind's eye as they passed mysteriously to and fro beneath the primordial monument.

But he had come here with a mission, after all. The young man's tail flicked and he leapt down from the boulder with a sigh to heedfully approach the structure. His ears were perked at high alert and swiveled to catch the lightest sound around him as he stood at the threshold of some foregone spiritual realm. Long fingers ran lightly over the moss-drenched stone that seemed to breathe at his fingertips as if it were alive.

With a curiously furrowed brow he recalled the description of the relic he was meant to find. What was it again?

[Lucien DeChain]

Mau recalled that the artifact in question was a book. It had writing in ancient archaic ruins, probably in the dead language of English.

And, looking around, he found a hardcover book laying on the ground right past the Torii Gate. On it was some letters that Mau couldn't read. It was a thick book, and bound with leather. How archaic. Printed on trees and bound with animal hide.

There was roaring off in the distance, and then...

ROOOAAAARRRRRRR

About twenty feet away from Mau, from the right, came an Engel. It was twice as tall as Mau at the shoulder, and seemed to have been drawn by his presence.

It flared its nostrils and snapped it's jaw at Mau, placing a foot forward. It started to crouch slightly, growling low.

[Vespyr]

When Mau spotted the book, his eye widened a little with almost childish wonder. He stooped to pick it up, dusting off the cover, reveling at the finely crafted though primitive object. He had a fascination with old things, and was tempted to flip through the brittle pages of the book though he could not read them. He refrained, though, aware of the object's age and how fragile it was.

There wasn't much time to admire the relic, however; at the first roar in the distance, Mau's ears perks to the sound of danger and a grim frown pulled at his thin lips. He promptly captured the ancient object in his hands by pressing a button on a small device that encircled his wrist, which emitted a small beam to scan across the book and disassemble its particles while recording them as a digitized image. Thus the item was stored in Mau's item registry and could be recreated holographically, or even physically again, though the latter required more equipment than the simple band he kept around his wrist.

All of that took about five seconds, and by the time the Engel had found its way to Mau's location at the ancient gate, the young man had leapt with ease and grace to the top of the stone structure. He waited there, tail lashing as the beast drew nearer. From the top of the gate he was about level with the beast's head as it growled and seemed to prepare for a pounce.

Mau could teach him a thing or two about pouncing, if that was indeed the creature's intent. In a split second, the lithe man sprung from the stone structure and landed quite acrobatically in a handstand on the top of its head. He pushed off again, twisting his agile body midair so that he would face forward when he landed, long legs straddling the Engel's thick neck. He dug his feet into the space just below and behind the monster's mandible with his legs pressed tightly on either side to keep from being jostled or bucked off as he flattened his torso against the top of its skull, leaning forward with his arms outstretched to gash his claws into the Engel's eyes.

[Lucien DeChain]

The Engel roared with pain as it tried desperately to buck the man off his back. Its eyes started to gush blood and eye goop, and it blindly thrashed about, trying desperately to swing the man around into its snapping mouth.

It started to stampede into the closest object that would possibly be of help: The Torii Gate. It ducked its head and slammed the top of its skull into the gate's beam, hoping the force would dislodge Mau from its back.

[Vespyr]

Mau glanced up as the creature began to charge, unhooked the toes of his boots from its jaw and hopped into a crouch on the beast's back. He clung to the thick fur between its shoulders as it rammed into the gate with enough force to send a tremor down the length of its body. Mau with his catlike balance held on unfazed. He flicked his gaze up to the Torii Gate with a grin of mischief.

What were the odds that the ancient stone structure would come crashing down toward the Engel?

[Lucien DeChain]

About 3.15x10^16.

Bam. The stone structure, which has been around for a billion years, suddenly crumbled from the impact from being rammed by a random beast with a cat-man on his back.

As the structure crumbled, miraculously, in large chunks that slammed down on top of the Engel, burying him in rubble, Mau was somehow unharmed.

IT'S ALMOST LIKE IT WAS MEANT TO HAPPEN?!

At any rate, the Engel was now buried and unmoving. The path seems clear now...

But you feel as though you're being watched.

{OOC: Entropy 1/1 Used}

[Vespyr]

Mau leapt backward away from the collapsing gate and the presumably dead animal. As he stood in the clearing dust, his eye meandered over the billion-year-old rubble with a somewhat apologetic look tensing his brow. But only for a moment.

It was nice while it lasted.~

The man's ears perked almost of their own accord after that, pangs of instinctual uneasiness warning him that he may not be alone. He glanced around the scene furtively and stalked closer to the fallen gate and the motionless Engel trapped beneath its heavy shattered stones. After taking a moment to assure himself that the beast would not get up again, he trotted up unto the mound its body and the fallen stones created, and perched at the zenith of it.

He continued to pan his attentive stare around the area, body poised like a collapsed spring, ready to pounce away at any instant... but if no sign of danger appeared, he would take a few minutes just to relax there and collect himself before he would make his way back to the domed city with the relic collected. He passed through the Western gate back into the modernized world with a silent sigh.

[Lucien DeChain]

As soon as Mau passed through the security barrier of the West gate, another message would appear on his inner-eye HUD.

Pvt. Mausser. An update has been received. Please standby for transmission.

Good work, Private. You have displayed your skills in the completion of the mission, having successfully retrieved the relic.

Now, your orders are to bring the relic to the central command center, where it will be destroyed. At this time, it must also be removed permanently from your item registry. This is to be done for the good and survival of the human race.

I'll be expecting your report.
Major Blackthorne

There is an item reassembly station at central command. You remember that it is on the opposite side of town as your living quarters, but, orders are orders, and it wasn't actually that far.

[Vespyr]

A slight frown pulled at the corners of Mau's lips at something about the order, but it hardly showed as he strode through the the clean but cramped city streets

Destroy the book? But I haven't even looked at it yet...

The man kept his hands in his pockets as he walked, but inside his fingers twitched a little restively. The good and survival of the human race. How many times had he heard that phrase, over and over, to justify some of the things he'd done? Surely the book couldn't cause any immediate harm, as long as he destroyed it right after he was done examining it. He just had to feel that ancient leather under his fingertips again...

Mau's right hand slipped from his pocket as he passed a reflective window, and he tapped the button with the digitizer's beam reflected and aimed at itself. A copy of the entire band was made and stored inside its own registry, along with everything that was already logged inside. Itemception.

And with just a casual flick of his ears and a readjustment of the bandana in his hair, Mau turned away from the window and carried on toward the central command center.

Mau stopped by the front desk and waved at the receptionist, who recognized him and reached into a desk drawer to hand him a thought-to-speech translator headset. Mau nodded thanks and slipped the thin band over the top of his skull with the receptor modules positioned at his temples, closest to the area of the brain devoted to speech production. A small antennae with a tiny speaker at the end jutted forward and curved around near his mouth. It then emitted a rather realistic-sounding human voice, though it was a little tinny and robotic.

"Thanks."

Mau ventured further into the bustling command center, making his way to the item reassembly station. There, it was just a matter of plugging a thin cord into the band about his wrist for a few moments as he selected the book from a list of items that appeared on the screen (making sure to check the 'DELETE AFTER REPLICATION' option at the bottom of the selection panel). The machine began to whirr as the artifact was re-engineered, meanwhile Mau waited with his hands in his pockets.

[Lucien DeChain]

And, indeed, the book was removed from Mau's inventory (though the digitizer was not), and materialized on the table in front of him. A small ding symbolized the completion of the task.

To his left was a matter deconstruction chamber. To his right, a clerk was sitting, keeping watch over the reassembly station. She eyed the old book, a curious glint in her eye. In fact, there was a certain amount of recognition in her eyes.. Maybe she could read the archaic runes?

A security camera eyed curiously from on high, watching the whole situation.

[Vespyr]

Mau noticed the woman there as he waited for the replication to finish, and after a few times glancing back he found himself curious about her curiosity.

"Do you know what this is? I just picked it up from some ruins, it's apparently special," his translator spoke, as Mau looked on with his brow innocently raised. He lifted the book from the table and paused between there and the deconstruction chamber, in case she had further insight to provide... he hoped.

[Lucien DeChain]

The woman looked on at Mau and nodded slightly.

"I do.. Sort of. I can read it, but I don't know what it's supposed to mean. The words are foreign to me."

She approached the man with a curiosity that gleamed, as she hesitantly placed her hand on the leather of the book. She felt the embossed designs, and the stitching of the leather, while saying:

"H-O-L-Y B-I-B-L-E." She said.

And then, satisfied with her self, she walked back to her station and motioned for Mau to do whatever he needed to do with the relic.