Unforeseen Consequences
Before
"Well, here goes nothing,"
Kneeling next to the unconscious form of the young man in light practice armor -- Caboose, again, in just a few minutes; not Omega or O'Malley anymore, hopefully -- Grif aligned the suction cup on the bottom of the bomb-shaped device in his hand with the back of Caboose's head and stuck it on.
The device beeped, and lights played along the piping connecting the "bomb" with the suction cup. Grif breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that that meant that it was working. And then sparks began to play across the surface of the "bomb" casing, arcing not only onto Caboose, but also onto Grif, who hadn't moved away yet, in case something needed to be done, and was now beginning to regret that decision, as he knew that he wouldn't be able to get himself to any kind of reasonable distance fast enough.
"Aw, crap."
The AI Extractor didn't explode, in the conventional sense, but it did open up a tear in space-time, just large enough to swallow up the two armored soldiers from Blood Gulch. Grif considered, as quickly as he could, just what he could do to get himself away from it. If asked after the fact, he wouldn't be able to tell whether or not he'd made an attempt to signal his base's teleporter, but he'd have to guess so, at least subconsciously, as the whiteness of the rift was overcome in his sight by brilliant emerald.
Between
Green light flooded Grif's vision, momentarily interspersed with white motes of light the likes of which he'd never seen. As the moment stretched, time suddenly an uncertain quantity, he pondered the question of just what was going on. If the AI Extractor had simply exploded -- the girl who'd given it to him had said that was a problem with the previous model, that she'd since fixed -- then he'd have expected this to hurt rather more than it seemed to. This didn't seem like what he'd have expected from activating the teleporter either, though, nor like the explosion that had thrown him forward in time once before.
Maybe I'm dead, he thought to himself, and death is just a freaky green-lit stasis for all eternity. That'd kinda suck. On the other hand, he could hear his breathing -- it was just about the only thing he could hear, in this featureless green void.
Finally, his vision cleared, accompanied by a brief buzz-hum noise, and he realized... he was in the Nexus.
" SonofaBITCH."
Grif was in the Nexus, talking to a man from another universe. Marc Slayton seemed like a reasonably okay sort, for all that his question had been about inadvertently causing an alternate of himself some trouble. They'd gone back and forth about how each of them had gotten himself screwed over by his government. Slayton asked Grif about the way that his armor had been glowing, and Grif explained about the circumstances of his interrupted teleportation.
Slayton said, " Heh. Maybe you'll get lucky and head back to your own time."
Grif finished the cigarette that Slayton had given him, and gave the signal to the device he'd put together to let him smoke without taking off his helmet. It ejected the spent butt, and he ground it under his boot.
"Ha. Not very likely." Grif felt a shift inside him, as though he could feel the tug of the portal he'd been sucked into a month ago. Strange how he hadn't felt that at the time. "Looks like I'm about to find out."
The green, once again, became all he could see... except that through it, there were spots of white. That shouldn't be happening; not with the teleporters he's used to, anyway.
"What the hell? Aw, crap."
Now
He heard the buzz-hum again, the only thing he could hear just then. The noise faded, and in the long moment that followed, blinded by greenness, the sound that remained was of his breathing within his helmet. Once more, that noise, and he was on a world that was neither Relic Island, nor Blood Gulch, nor even the Nexus. The textures were entirely different, and the sky was wrong. There were these strange creatures standing about, two short legs forming a fulcrum point along a long but squat body, with a tail and a mouth full of short tentacles.
If they noticed him, they didn't have much time to do anything about it; the green-light washed over him again, with that same buzz-hum, taking him away from there and to another similarly textured space. This one seemed smaller, almost like a room, although it was hard to tell for sure in the almost total darkness. There were other creatures here, brown-green digitigrade bipeds with three arms and six eyes.
They also had little, if any, time to react to his presence, as he was taken away again, finally deposited in a vast chamber, brown-yellow metal walls and occasional gray metal pipes. This place, finally, looked like it might've been built by humans -- there were even areas marked off with yellow/black danger striping -- though the massive rotating apparatus in the middle of it was unfamiliar to him.
Grif didn't care to take the chance of waiting too long to figure it out, though. He already knew, from his respite in the Nexus, that his teleport control relay had gotten fried. He'd gotten himself a PINpoint from the vending machine, but now, as he raised his arm and looked at the wrist he'd strapped it to, he found that it was no longer there.
"Fuck."
His preferred route of escape cut off, he decided he had to work with the situation instead, and looked about quickly to get his bearings. There was a door over there, and... oh. On the ground, behind him and about 30 feet away, lay what looked like a human body. The man was tall and slender by non-SPARTAN human standards, with short dark hair and glasses. He was clad in an armor-like outfit whose color, if not its style, was rather like Grif's own. The suit had apparently done the man only so much good, though, as the suit and some of the debris all around him was bloody in a way that made Grif's check for a pulse obviously superfluous. He did it anyway, though, and found only cold still flesh there instead.
"Shit. Okay, buddy, let's get you out of here. Hopefully someone outside cares who you are and can tell me where I am and how to get home." Grif picked the corpse up, cradling him in his arms, and made for the door. It had been built in a strange, horizontally-split fashion, but had nonetheless been blown partially open by whatever cataclysm had recently happened in this place. The room beyond seemed to be some sort of antechamber to the cavern he'd left. Another human corpse lay there, wearing a suit and lab coat reminiscent of scientists everywhere. Klaxons could be heard resounding through the door out to whatever lay beyond.
After poking a moment at the mechanism hanging precariously on the wall next to the door out -- retinal scanner? -- it uttered some complaint about "unauthorized personnel," but opened the door anyway. Grif transferred the armored man's body to one arm to free the other hand to drag the scientist's corpse out of the antechamber with him. This led him to a large corridor, curving to the right, with another scientist trying to do CPR on someone dressed like a security guard. The scientist wouldn't pull away from his task to answer any questions, though, which left Grif with a bit of a quandary.
After a moment of pondering, he muttered, "Fuck," and left the labcoated corpse with the scientist. (There appeared to be no shortage of such bodies lying about, whereas the armored guy was maybe someone important enough to draw out answers from whoever else he might encounter.) He followed the corridor, dodging exploding computer equipment as he found an elevator. The lettering on the wall, an arrow pointing back the way he came from, told him that he had just left the "TEST LAB." This gave him at least some extra hint of what might've happened here, even if it didn't necessarily enlighten him much on what it had to do with him. The elevator took him up one floor to another computer-laden corridor. In one corner, a pair of scientists were huddled, one white, the other black.
"Why didn't they listen?" the black one said, his tone despairing. "We tried to warn them."
The white one, who was sitting on the ground with a minor head wound while his compatriot looked it over, replied, "I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one."
Satisfied that his friend would be okay, the black scientist straightened up and, seeing orange armor, exclaimed, "Gordon, you're..." He paused as he fully looked at the figure standing in front of him, and the body in that figures arms, and continued, "Oh. You're dead. But..." He looked up into the reflective facebowl of Grif's helmet. "Who are you?"
"My name's Dexter Grif, and I want some fucking answers."
"Well, here goes nothing,"
Kneeling next to the unconscious form of the young man in light practice armor -- Caboose, again, in just a few minutes; not Omega or O'Malley anymore, hopefully -- Grif aligned the suction cup on the bottom of the bomb-shaped device in his hand with the back of Caboose's head and stuck it on.
The device beeped, and lights played along the piping connecting the "bomb" with the suction cup. Grif breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that that meant that it was working. And then sparks began to play across the surface of the "bomb" casing, arcing not only onto Caboose, but also onto Grif, who hadn't moved away yet, in case something needed to be done, and was now beginning to regret that decision, as he knew that he wouldn't be able to get himself to any kind of reasonable distance fast enough.
"Aw, crap."
The AI Extractor didn't explode, in the conventional sense, but it did open up a tear in space-time, just large enough to swallow up the two armored soldiers from Blood Gulch. Grif considered, as quickly as he could, just what he could do to get himself away from it. If asked after the fact, he wouldn't be able to tell whether or not he'd made an attempt to signal his base's teleporter, but he'd have to guess so, at least subconsciously, as the whiteness of the rift was overcome in his sight by brilliant emerald.
Between
Green light flooded Grif's vision, momentarily interspersed with white motes of light the likes of which he'd never seen. As the moment stretched, time suddenly an uncertain quantity, he pondered the question of just what was going on. If the AI Extractor had simply exploded -- the girl who'd given it to him had said that was a problem with the previous model, that she'd since fixed -- then he'd have expected this to hurt rather more than it seemed to. This didn't seem like what he'd have expected from activating the teleporter either, though, nor like the explosion that had thrown him forward in time once before.
Maybe I'm dead, he thought to himself, and death is just a freaky green-lit stasis for all eternity. That'd kinda suck. On the other hand, he could hear his breathing -- it was just about the only thing he could hear, in this featureless green void.
Finally, his vision cleared, accompanied by a brief buzz-hum noise, and he realized... he was in the Nexus.
" SonofaBITCH."
Grif was in the Nexus, talking to a man from another universe. Marc Slayton seemed like a reasonably okay sort, for all that his question had been about inadvertently causing an alternate of himself some trouble. They'd gone back and forth about how each of them had gotten himself screwed over by his government. Slayton asked Grif about the way that his armor had been glowing, and Grif explained about the circumstances of his interrupted teleportation.
Slayton said, " Heh. Maybe you'll get lucky and head back to your own time."
Grif finished the cigarette that Slayton had given him, and gave the signal to the device he'd put together to let him smoke without taking off his helmet. It ejected the spent butt, and he ground it under his boot.
"Ha. Not very likely." Grif felt a shift inside him, as though he could feel the tug of the portal he'd been sucked into a month ago. Strange how he hadn't felt that at the time. "Looks like I'm about to find out."
The green, once again, became all he could see... except that through it, there were spots of white. That shouldn't be happening; not with the teleporters he's used to, anyway.
"What the hell? Aw, crap."
Now
He heard the buzz-hum again, the only thing he could hear just then. The noise faded, and in the long moment that followed, blinded by greenness, the sound that remained was of his breathing within his helmet. Once more, that noise, and he was on a world that was neither Relic Island, nor Blood Gulch, nor even the Nexus. The textures were entirely different, and the sky was wrong. There were these strange creatures standing about, two short legs forming a fulcrum point along a long but squat body, with a tail and a mouth full of short tentacles.
If they noticed him, they didn't have much time to do anything about it; the green-light washed over him again, with that same buzz-hum, taking him away from there and to another similarly textured space. This one seemed smaller, almost like a room, although it was hard to tell for sure in the almost total darkness. There were other creatures here, brown-green digitigrade bipeds with three arms and six eyes.
They also had little, if any, time to react to his presence, as he was taken away again, finally deposited in a vast chamber, brown-yellow metal walls and occasional gray metal pipes. This place, finally, looked like it might've been built by humans -- there were even areas marked off with yellow/black danger striping -- though the massive rotating apparatus in the middle of it was unfamiliar to him.
Grif didn't care to take the chance of waiting too long to figure it out, though. He already knew, from his respite in the Nexus, that his teleport control relay had gotten fried. He'd gotten himself a PINpoint from the vending machine, but now, as he raised his arm and looked at the wrist he'd strapped it to, he found that it was no longer there.
"Fuck."
His preferred route of escape cut off, he decided he had to work with the situation instead, and looked about quickly to get his bearings. There was a door over there, and... oh. On the ground, behind him and about 30 feet away, lay what looked like a human body. The man was tall and slender by non-SPARTAN human standards, with short dark hair and glasses. He was clad in an armor-like outfit whose color, if not its style, was rather like Grif's own. The suit had apparently done the man only so much good, though, as the suit and some of the debris all around him was bloody in a way that made Grif's check for a pulse obviously superfluous. He did it anyway, though, and found only cold still flesh there instead.
"Shit. Okay, buddy, let's get you out of here. Hopefully someone outside cares who you are and can tell me where I am and how to get home." Grif picked the corpse up, cradling him in his arms, and made for the door. It had been built in a strange, horizontally-split fashion, but had nonetheless been blown partially open by whatever cataclysm had recently happened in this place. The room beyond seemed to be some sort of antechamber to the cavern he'd left. Another human corpse lay there, wearing a suit and lab coat reminiscent of scientists everywhere. Klaxons could be heard resounding through the door out to whatever lay beyond.
After poking a moment at the mechanism hanging precariously on the wall next to the door out -- retinal scanner? -- it uttered some complaint about "unauthorized personnel," but opened the door anyway. Grif transferred the armored man's body to one arm to free the other hand to drag the scientist's corpse out of the antechamber with him. This led him to a large corridor, curving to the right, with another scientist trying to do CPR on someone dressed like a security guard. The scientist wouldn't pull away from his task to answer any questions, though, which left Grif with a bit of a quandary.
After a moment of pondering, he muttered, "Fuck," and left the labcoated corpse with the scientist. (There appeared to be no shortage of such bodies lying about, whereas the armored guy was maybe someone important enough to draw out answers from whoever else he might encounter.) He followed the corridor, dodging exploding computer equipment as he found an elevator. The lettering on the wall, an arrow pointing back the way he came from, told him that he had just left the "TEST LAB." This gave him at least some extra hint of what might've happened here, even if it didn't necessarily enlighten him much on what it had to do with him. The elevator took him up one floor to another computer-laden corridor. In one corner, a pair of scientists were huddled, one white, the other black.
"Why didn't they listen?" the black one said, his tone despairing. "We tried to warn them."
The white one, who was sitting on the ground with a minor head wound while his compatriot looked it over, replied, "I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one."
Satisfied that his friend would be okay, the black scientist straightened up and, seeing orange armor, exclaimed, "Gordon, you're..." He paused as he fully looked at the figure standing in front of him, and the body in that figures arms, and continued, "Oh. You're dead. But..." He looked up into the reflective facebowl of Grif's helmet. "Who are you?"
"My name's Dexter Grif, and I want some fucking answers."