"Hah... Hah... We can keep doing this to the ends of the galaxy and back, damn alien... I ain't losing to you...!" taunted Apollo through heavy breathing as he stared down the next incoming wave of interference. He and the data nest had been going back and forth like this for hours, with Apollo one by one breaking through the hazardous waves the alien emitted. Without any connection to his PET or Battlechips coming from Glenn, Apollo could only attack with brute force and evade, and despite his stubbornness there probably wasn't much fuel left in his figurative tank. He had to jump back to the quantum transmission somehow, but with this crazy thing dogging him constantly...
"Argh, blast it all! Eat full throttle, alien!" shouted Apollo in frustration as the interference wave closed in, before flipping all 5 of his backpack thrusters forward to launch one last ignition blast with every bit of fuel remaining. The engine cones began glowing bright red as heat built up within them, until...
*WHAM*
The entire ignition process aborted as something crashed into Apollo's exposed back, forcing him to turn his head away from the incoming interference wave to see just what had... "Lab rat...?! What the flying scrap are you-"
"I AM NOT A LAB RAT!!!" shouted Mir angrily, after having gained Apollo's attention by throwing her shoulder into his back with a booster-assisted tackle. Not planning to stop there, Mir lifted the LTC up and jammed it point-blank into the rocket Navi's side before announcing, "Re-establishing link!".
"Hey, wait, what are- Yeooooowch!!!" yelped Apollo as Mir pulled the trigger and launched a round of Lumian bullets right into him, causing him to flinch in pain and twist his various thrusters in random directions. "You goddamn little... What was that for?!"
"Apollo!" shouted a sudden, different voice from within Apollo's comm system.
"Glenn?!" gasped Apollo in shock, suddenly reconnected to his PET and Operator back on Earth. Once that registered, though, Apollo's attention was right back on Mir. "Damnit lab rat, did you really have to do it like that?!"
"It was fastest, and do you really think we have time to spare?!" countered Mir before pointing over at the rapidly approaching interference.
"Ergh... Glenn, I need a launch, now!" grumbled Apollo before barking a demand back to his Operator. Lacking the time for words, Glenn quickly obliged by slipping a DashAttack chip into his PET and shooting it a few hundred trillion miles into space. By the wonders of Lumian quantum transmission, Apollo received the data in an instant, causing his main and secondary thrusters to re-align on his back and dropping one of his two heat shields down in front of him to grab. "Hang tight lab rat, this is going to be rough!" announced Apollo just before wrapping his free arm around Mir's waist and yanking her in next to him behind the heat shield.
"Whoa! Hey! ...Where do you get off calling me that after I saved your life?!" responded Mir indignantly just before Apollo ignited his thrusters.
"Liftoff!!!" yelled Apollo, ignoring his makeshift passenger as he went full throttle, accelerating to top speed in moments before crashing his heat shield flat into the interference wave...
Mir's Actions:
1) Resync Apollo to his PET
Apollo's Actions:
1) Grab Mir
2) DashAttack1 (90 damage {C}, Impact, Line Attack 5, Movement) @ Interference wave
--TURN SPLICE--
The Interstellar Frontier
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Launching straight into the interference wave did one thing at least. It broke through what was, by all appearances, a solid wall of unidentifiable data. Apollo's heat shield crashed straight into the wave, and the wave gave way, allowing the two astronaut navis to punch straight through it. The downside of all of this was that beyond the outermost edge the interference wasn't solid in the least. And pushing through the haze of static and color that followed was not quite as simple as breaking through a wall. For a moment, their vision faded, as everything from the the data entity somewhere ahead of them to the shield in front of Apollo's face dissolved into the cloud as though it had never been there. Then, every possible stat on both the navis' and their operators' ends began displaying false readings and errors.
In particular, HP readings began displaying impossible values, greater than their current upgrades allowed for. Terrain data began displaying for an environment that didn't exist. The chip that Apollo had just used for his launch appeared to still be usable, while on Mir's end her two most recently used chips appeared to have already been expended. Glenn's PET then received a warning that Apollo's heat shields had broken and that he was currently stationary, but as the haze of interference broke, he appeared to still be holding onto Mir and flying out of the wave, with both shields still intact. While most of the anomalies righted themselves as Mir and Apollo returned to normal space, or at least as close to 'normal' as an accidental network in deep space inhabited by an unknown data entity, their respective PETs continued to receive error messages.
Meanwhile, the wave of interference they had just passed through began to break up behind them, leaving a string of junk data in the wake of Apollo's flight. Ahead of them, the entity Apollo had been fighting appeared to contract, leaving more empty space between the solid light structures that made up its nest and the brighter light that could only be assumed to be the creature's body. Meanwhile, junk data and scraps from broken platforms began flying toward the nest.
___
Mir: 120 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.]
Apollo: 300 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.] [Heat shields: Intact, but displaying as broken (ERROR)]
Unknown data entity: ▒₦≈♪Ω↕ [???: Currently drawing in junk data]
Terrain: [Invalid Terrain]
In particular, HP readings began displaying impossible values, greater than their current upgrades allowed for. Terrain data began displaying for an environment that didn't exist. The chip that Apollo had just used for his launch appeared to still be usable, while on Mir's end her two most recently used chips appeared to have already been expended. Glenn's PET then received a warning that Apollo's heat shields had broken and that he was currently stationary, but as the haze of interference broke, he appeared to still be holding onto Mir and flying out of the wave, with both shields still intact. While most of the anomalies righted themselves as Mir and Apollo returned to normal space, or at least as close to 'normal' as an accidental network in deep space inhabited by an unknown data entity, their respective PETs continued to receive error messages.
Meanwhile, the wave of interference they had just passed through began to break up behind them, leaving a string of junk data in the wake of Apollo's flight. Ahead of them, the entity Apollo had been fighting appeared to contract, leaving more empty space between the solid light structures that made up its nest and the brighter light that could only be assumed to be the creature's body. Meanwhile, junk data and scraps from broken platforms began flying toward the nest.
___
Mir: 120 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.]
Apollo: 300 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.] [Heat shields: Intact, but displaying as broken (ERROR)]
Unknown data entity: ▒₦≈♪Ω↕ [???: Currently drawing in junk data]
Terrain: [Invalid Terrain]
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Despite reality seemingly collapsing on them in the midst of the interference wave, Apollo and Mir managed to break through to meet the unknown core. The nest-like structure shrouded whatever was actually inside with a barrier sewn together with broken bits of the light bridges Mir had scaled to get here, and as well was filtering the garbage data their assailant was inhaling. Could it not launch another interference wave in succession, and needed to recharge? That would certainly be a relief to both Navis if true, as they were very aware already of what kinds of problems this foreign junk data could create. "Blast it all, are you working or not you damned shield?! How could junk data short us out so easily?" grunted Apollo as he yanked his still held heat shield by its mechanical arm, which was not cooperating with the astronaut's usual commands.
"It's a completely foreign data language; our programming can't do anything but throw errors at the influx off all this junk... but besides that, would you let me go already?!" yelled Mir through her helmet's comm system to Apollo, who was still lugging around his female counterpart by the waste like a sandbag.
"Tch..." hissed Apollo as he cast Mir aside, letting her reorient in the zero-gravity environment. "So? My triumphant rescue party is here, but I'm not seeing a way out right now."
"Tower's transmission will still be lined up for another 30 minutes, but the outbound link is being distorted by all the foreign data being projected by... that." explained Emily in reference to the data entity while she (and the entirety of NAXA mission control) sorted out the myriad of false errors being thrown on her own and Glenn's PETs. "... By the way Mir, the LTC isn't actually jammed, despite what it may say."
"Huh?" responded Mir thoughtlessly before looking down at her weapon's display screen, which was presenting a strange and fragmented double-image of both the FireBurn and Shotgun firing protocols from back during the asteroid tunneling. "What the...?! Oh no, come on... The input is responding, but the output doesn't even... Yet, you're telling me it's still working Emily? Ugh..." Mir's lips quickly twisted into a frustrated scowl as she tried to navigate the cannon's interface, only to be met with odd and inexplicable results.
At the same time Apollo was still fighting with his bugged heat shield, muttering some unsavory explicatives in the process, leaving Glenn obligated to take hold of the situation and get everyone past these pointless glitches. "So Apollo and Mir are both trapped unless we can get rid of the disturbance's source. Sounds simple enough." concluded Glenn from Emily's explanation, before picking a Battlechip out from his folder and lifting it up to show between two fingers.
"What? No, you can't!" gasped Emily at the prospect. "This is a completely unknown entity, we can't delete it! We don't know how strong it is, what its programming looks like, where the data is hosted... We need to study it! And-"
"You're going to put research ahead of survival?!" barked Glenn, which shut Emily right up and brought mission control to a momentary halt. "Survival is the number one priority in any mission. Don't pretend NAXA has never thrown away a potential discovery just to make sure I, and all the other astronauts in program history, made it back in one piece. There isn't a damn thing in the universe more worth it... right?"
"Ah... right..." answered Emily hesitantly, feeling terrible for having forgotten her place in this whole affair.
"That's it, then! This thing's been pissing me off for the last 2 hours, and I'm going full throttle on it!" shouted Apollo, throwing his maybe/maybe not messed up heat shield to the side while pulling one of his four attitude thrusters forward and immediately shooting a burst of firey red propulsion at the nested data entity.
"Well, we need to suppress the junk data flow if nothing else..." sighed Emily as she began picking out Battlechips to send. "Mir, can you try to be careful?"
"I can try, but I don't have a clue where this thing's weak points are... It's just going to be lucky either way." admitted Mir as her Operator delivered a pair of guns through the PET. The LTC's display screen was a garbled mess still, but the input sequence for chips was muscle memory for Mir at this point, so she blindly tapped in a few commands and successfully loaded both weapons into her cannon, prompting the Lumian tank on the backside to begin filling with quantum ammo.
"Keep your distance for now, Apollo. We can't trust your shield still, so just keep the thrust up and try to disrupt the in-flow of this junk data." commanded Glenn as he slotted in just the one chip he was already holding.
"Roger that!" confirmed Apollo as he flipped forward the other 3 small thrusters attached to his backpack and readied them for ignition. "It's a big target, lab rat, so try to not miss."
"I don't miss." stated Mir bluntly as she pointed her LTC at the data entity. That said, she didn't really know WHERE to not miss. "Emily, can I get a target?"
"Um... The nest's data structure seems less stable at this point, if these preliminary scans are right. It may just be another glitch, though..." suggested Emily, albeit without a shred of confidence.
"Better than nothing." said Mir as she adjusted her aim to suit Emily's coordinates and pulled her cannon's trigger. Apollo followed suit and primed his thrusters, letting fire spit out of them in conjunction with the quantum beam emitting from Mir's weapon. Being the far faster projectile, Mir's quantum Cannon bullet reached the target first, followed not far behind by Apollo's FireBurn thrust emission. Mir then pulled the trigger again, launching an electrically charged ZapRing comprised of a Lumian loop, while Apollo lifted his heavy main thruster forward over his head and began dumping extra fuel in it from the spare tank on his backpack. A powerful blast of propulsion jumped out of the main thruster, forcing Apollo to ignite his attitude thrusters in the opposite direction to keep stable. The Lumian ZapRing and self-charged propulsion burst streaked through the empty space between the Navis and foreign entity as the bombardment began...
Mir's Actions:
2) Cannon (40 damage {A+}, Knockback) @ Unknown data entity
--Rocket Science (Passive Take Aim to:)
3) ZapRing1 (50 Elec damage {A++}, Stun 1) @ Unknown data entity
4) Dodge
Apollo's Actions:
3) Buster Normal Attack (40 Fire damage {A}, Seeking) @ Unknown data entity
4) FireBurn2 (105 Fire damage {A}, Line Attack 3) @ Unknown data entity
--Liquid Fuel Transfer (Passive Buster Charge)
5) Buster Half Charge Attack (80 Fire damage {A}, Seeking) @ Unknown data entity.
6) Dodge
"It's a completely foreign data language; our programming can't do anything but throw errors at the influx off all this junk... but besides that, would you let me go already?!" yelled Mir through her helmet's comm system to Apollo, who was still lugging around his female counterpart by the waste like a sandbag.
"Tch..." hissed Apollo as he cast Mir aside, letting her reorient in the zero-gravity environment. "So? My triumphant rescue party is here, but I'm not seeing a way out right now."
"Tower's transmission will still be lined up for another 30 minutes, but the outbound link is being distorted by all the foreign data being projected by... that." explained Emily in reference to the data entity while she (and the entirety of NAXA mission control) sorted out the myriad of false errors being thrown on her own and Glenn's PETs. "... By the way Mir, the LTC isn't actually jammed, despite what it may say."
"Huh?" responded Mir thoughtlessly before looking down at her weapon's display screen, which was presenting a strange and fragmented double-image of both the FireBurn and Shotgun firing protocols from back during the asteroid tunneling. "What the...?! Oh no, come on... The input is responding, but the output doesn't even... Yet, you're telling me it's still working Emily? Ugh..." Mir's lips quickly twisted into a frustrated scowl as she tried to navigate the cannon's interface, only to be met with odd and inexplicable results.
At the same time Apollo was still fighting with his bugged heat shield, muttering some unsavory explicatives in the process, leaving Glenn obligated to take hold of the situation and get everyone past these pointless glitches. "So Apollo and Mir are both trapped unless we can get rid of the disturbance's source. Sounds simple enough." concluded Glenn from Emily's explanation, before picking a Battlechip out from his folder and lifting it up to show between two fingers.
"What? No, you can't!" gasped Emily at the prospect. "This is a completely unknown entity, we can't delete it! We don't know how strong it is, what its programming looks like, where the data is hosted... We need to study it! And-"
"You're going to put research ahead of survival?!" barked Glenn, which shut Emily right up and brought mission control to a momentary halt. "Survival is the number one priority in any mission. Don't pretend NAXA has never thrown away a potential discovery just to make sure I, and all the other astronauts in program history, made it back in one piece. There isn't a damn thing in the universe more worth it... right?"
"Ah... right..." answered Emily hesitantly, feeling terrible for having forgotten her place in this whole affair.
"That's it, then! This thing's been pissing me off for the last 2 hours, and I'm going full throttle on it!" shouted Apollo, throwing his maybe/maybe not messed up heat shield to the side while pulling one of his four attitude thrusters forward and immediately shooting a burst of firey red propulsion at the nested data entity.
"Well, we need to suppress the junk data flow if nothing else..." sighed Emily as she began picking out Battlechips to send. "Mir, can you try to be careful?"
"I can try, but I don't have a clue where this thing's weak points are... It's just going to be lucky either way." admitted Mir as her Operator delivered a pair of guns through the PET. The LTC's display screen was a garbled mess still, but the input sequence for chips was muscle memory for Mir at this point, so she blindly tapped in a few commands and successfully loaded both weapons into her cannon, prompting the Lumian tank on the backside to begin filling with quantum ammo.
"Keep your distance for now, Apollo. We can't trust your shield still, so just keep the thrust up and try to disrupt the in-flow of this junk data." commanded Glenn as he slotted in just the one chip he was already holding.
"Roger that!" confirmed Apollo as he flipped forward the other 3 small thrusters attached to his backpack and readied them for ignition. "It's a big target, lab rat, so try to not miss."
"I don't miss." stated Mir bluntly as she pointed her LTC at the data entity. That said, she didn't really know WHERE to not miss. "Emily, can I get a target?"
"Um... The nest's data structure seems less stable at this point, if these preliminary scans are right. It may just be another glitch, though..." suggested Emily, albeit without a shred of confidence.
"Better than nothing." said Mir as she adjusted her aim to suit Emily's coordinates and pulled her cannon's trigger. Apollo followed suit and primed his thrusters, letting fire spit out of them in conjunction with the quantum beam emitting from Mir's weapon. Being the far faster projectile, Mir's quantum Cannon bullet reached the target first, followed not far behind by Apollo's FireBurn thrust emission. Mir then pulled the trigger again, launching an electrically charged ZapRing comprised of a Lumian loop, while Apollo lifted his heavy main thruster forward over his head and began dumping extra fuel in it from the spare tank on his backpack. A powerful blast of propulsion jumped out of the main thruster, forcing Apollo to ignite his attitude thrusters in the opposite direction to keep stable. The Lumian ZapRing and self-charged propulsion burst streaked through the empty space between the Navis and foreign entity as the bombardment began...
Mir's Actions:
2) Cannon (40 damage {A+}, Knockback) @ Unknown data entity
--Rocket Science (Passive Take Aim to:)
3) ZapRing1 (50 Elec damage {A++}, Stun 1) @ Unknown data entity
4) Dodge
Apollo's Actions:
3) Buster Normal Attack (40 Fire damage {A}, Seeking) @ Unknown data entity
4) FireBurn2 (105 Fire damage {A}, Line Attack 3) @ Unknown data entity
--Liquid Fuel Transfer (Passive Buster Charge)
5) Buster Half Charge Attack (80 Fire damage {A}, Seeking) @ Unknown data entity.
6) Dodge
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The aim of every single one of Mir's and Apollo's attacks was dead on. All of them reached the target and flew straight through the openings in the nest to the mass of data within with no trouble. Kind of amazing, really, given the circumstances. It was when they made contact with the entity that things started to get strange.
A flare of data erupted from the point where the cannon bullet hit, instantly filling the space between the brighter 'body' of the entity and the less bright nest structure and closing the gap that the bullet had passed through. There it remained, at least for the few microseconds before fire from Apollo's thrusters reached it through another gap. The entity contracted even more within the nest at the moment of impact, then flared out in all directions. This sudden expansion was met with the FireBurn emission, which only caused the entity to flare up even more, briefly pushing through the confines of the next. Despite the lack of an atmosphere, the space around Mir and Apollo suddenly became extremely hot. Apollo's final shot pushed him away from the epicenter of the sudden flash of heat, while Mir was able to fly out of it before firing the Lumian ZapRing. While the two shots appeared to push straight through the entity, parting the data around them, an intense light filled the void the two navis had just vacated. A new rainbow bridge grew between them, extending off into the distance.
The entity's body, if it could be called that, retracted again, although the 'holes' left by the last two projectiles lingered for a few more seconds before closing. Despite appearing to have gone straight through the entity though, the propulsion blast and zapring had not reappeared on the other side.
___
Mir: 120 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.]
Apollo: 300 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.] [Heat shields: Intact, but displaying as broken (ERROR)]
Unknown data entity: ☺$≈♪∑↔ [???: Currently drawing in junk data]
Terrain: [Invalid Terrain]
A flare of data erupted from the point where the cannon bullet hit, instantly filling the space between the brighter 'body' of the entity and the less bright nest structure and closing the gap that the bullet had passed through. There it remained, at least for the few microseconds before fire from Apollo's thrusters reached it through another gap. The entity contracted even more within the nest at the moment of impact, then flared out in all directions. This sudden expansion was met with the FireBurn emission, which only caused the entity to flare up even more, briefly pushing through the confines of the next. Despite the lack of an atmosphere, the space around Mir and Apollo suddenly became extremely hot. Apollo's final shot pushed him away from the epicenter of the sudden flash of heat, while Mir was able to fly out of it before firing the Lumian ZapRing. While the two shots appeared to push straight through the entity, parting the data around them, an intense light filled the void the two navis had just vacated. A new rainbow bridge grew between them, extending off into the distance.
The entity's body, if it could be called that, retracted again, although the 'holes' left by the last two projectiles lingered for a few more seconds before closing. Despite appearing to have gone straight through the entity though, the propulsion blast and zapring had not reappeared on the other side.
___
Mir: 120 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.]
Apollo: 300 HP [Glitch - Invalid data: Battle stats periodically display erroneous readings.] [Heat shields: Intact, but displaying as broken (ERROR)]
Unknown data entity: ☺$≈♪∑↔ [???: Currently drawing in junk data]
Terrain: [Invalid Terrain]