Continued from The Hunt

Dimirty had carried blonde to Alistair's lab through the underground tunnels. He had almost tripped several times, but he was thankful the woman wasn't overly heavy, though his arms felt like noodles when he dropped her into a cot in the lab.

It wasn't necessary now, but it would be later so Dimitry started strapping the blonde down. He mumbled to himself. "She's drunk and the 'form should be enough to keep her out." That's what he kept telling himself.

There were cameras in the little room. He knew Alistair was watching in his creepy sort of way. Human test subjects, she was the first woman they'd tried. They hadn't had good results on anything yet except animals... dogs and rats seemed extremely susceptible to the 'thing' Dimitry didn't understand any of it.

Now it was a matter of waiting till she woke up. Alistair always wanted to taunt his victims first - make sure they knew what was going on. That if this worked they'd be powerful god like creatures able to make more of themselves with ease. That was Alistair's favorite part. Describing how they would reproduce themselves. Dimitry shuttered. At least the money was good!

(( Alistair will come in when Nat wakes up. http://w11.zetaboards.com/TheFirstAge/si...t=10373581 -- I have to go see why his image isn't showing I know I picked one ))

Bored. Dane was bloody bored. He sat inside a restaurant in downtown, pressed against the window, wishing he hadn't left Mexico. He hadn't seen Aria in weeks, but that wasn't to say that she hadn't seen him. He was trying to stay away from her, but the woman was worse than a drug. He was addicted and couldn't get another hit. Worse yet, he wanted to kill her every time he thought about her, but the problem was he could only kill her once. She would be gone forever then, completely out of reach, unless he kept the body around somewhere. It would turn rotten eventually, smell and decay. Unless there was a way to preserve her using the power. Actually, that wasn't a bad idea. How, though? He needed to practice. To work it out.

He pulled out a map from his Wallet and searched for the nearest pet shop.

Aria had gotten the alert that Nox had been named a god and frowned, but there was nothing she could do. She was already rogue, but the Atharim didn't know that. She needed all her connections. She added a last known whereabouts to his file for whatever hunter decided to hunt him.

The meeting with Rat had gone well after he had showed up. He was an hour late and Aria was on her way out when he showed up. She didn't buy him a drink and she didn't go back inside, she made him walk with her. It hadn't taken more than a simple touch to make him do her bidding. A fond touch, a little lust and desire with a smidgen of fear and he was putty in her hands. She smiled at the feeling of complete control.

Rat had told her that the Regus lived. She had know that much. The fire in the Baccarat building had been devastating, but he'd gotten out through the tunnels. There was no real way of truly finding him in the tunnels, but she still had her land warriors and the mapping software her and Nox played with. She didn't need the Atharim connection to track the Regus. She'd do what she'd done since coming to Moscow. Hunt the monsters in the tunnels. This was the worst of the worst.

Mikael sent one ZARS agent - Hammel - with Aria to do the hunting. He was both bodyguard and keeper. Mikael said he'd have gone himself, except he had no training that would be beneficial. Hammel knew how to survive in the trenches of war torn areas. He was a combatant before he came to ZARS.

It wasn't hard to get a second pair of land warriors synced up to her wallet and before they knew it they were outside the ruins of the Atharim building as it melted into the ground with godsfire. Underground it looked even worse than at street level. Aria started the tracking and mapping software and they started moving through the tunnels. There was no easy way to do this, it would be sleeping and eating in this shit hole, which is why Hammel was with Aria and not Mikael himself.

It had been a while since Dorian had actually been home in the daylight. Or when anyone was awake for that matter. Christian watched as Nova scampered around the front yard. There was a clear line of where the pup was avoiding along the drive and the walls. Dorian crossed across the lawn towards the pup. There was a loud blaring noise and Dorian was squating in a defensive position as his son ran out of the house with a ball of fire floating in his hands. "Fuck, son put that away."


Cruz sighed and looked at Dorian with a frown. "You didn't tell him?" He looked at Christian.

"Your father moved to fast and I forgot he didn't know." Dorian watched as Cruz took him by the arm and moved in away from his current spot and squatted down in the grass and looked like he was concentrating - taking a .... Dorian let the train of thought go. He looked around the front of the estate and saw the 10 foot high stone wall erected around the yard.

Dorian asked. "Nox's handywork?"


Cruz nodded. "I helped. There are alarms unless you come down the drive. The front door is trapped when we go to sleep, same the the side door. We might lose the door if someone trips it. We might lose half the house if someone tries to come in the windows. Nox is paranoid, Dad. He's digging a fucking tunnel in the basement. We broke through yesterday and he's got a wall of air blocking the tunnel to keep monsters out."

Dorian went into the house and down to the basement and everything looked in order. Cruz said. "In here." In the room Nox had taken to living in after he and Elyse broke up there was a fucking hole in the wall and Dorian took a step but he came face to face with something blocking his way. "He's lined this room and Christian's room with more rock, says iron or lead or something. I don't know how he knows it all looks the same to me."

"Why?


Cruz shrugged. "He's protecting us. He said if the alarms were tripped at night that we needed to get down here and in the room. Said the Atharim have nasty weapons. Said we might still die but it's all he can do."

Dorian sighed as his phone rang. It was Ivan and their conversation was brief. Nox had prepared for the Atharim hunting Cruz, and now they were hunting him. Fuck! The alert had barely gone out twenty minutes ago and already the most dangerous people were chopping at the bit. Just Fuck! They were all screwed.

"Talk your mother into staying down here with Christian. You can crash down here too."


Dorian sighed but Cruz nodded. "Is Nox going to come home?"

Dorian nodded. "He's with Ivan. He'll be home."


Cruz relaxed. "Good cause he didn't do whatever it is you think it did."

Dorian laughed. "Son he did exactly what I think he did and nothing more. And he'll keep doing it even after the Atharim try to kill him."



Edited by Dorian, Aug 18 2017, 02:03 PM.

I'm migrating my web sites from one server to another so there are somethings that might break with the wiki and hosted images. But it's only temporary.

I messed something up on the old server and I want to hit the latest OS and the latest software so I'm going to do this migration to clean up my stuff.

Henrik and Stephan heeded the high alert. There was a god in their ranks. One who had confessed to murder. One who had signed the registry after his confession. They hadn't recovered yet from their foolhardy adventure chasing foreigners and professionals. No they were to hunt gods. It was their calling. Their only calling.

This kid knew how they operated. He'd been in HQ. He was American but he came from generations of cowboy Atharim. Men and women just like him - hunting creatures and gods. And he was a god! How could they not have known? Had they seen him walking through the halls?

They signed their names to the mission slip. They would hunt him. Their greatest achievement yet!

Marcus DuBois' foray with Vellas had yielded some fruit, he supposed. EM weapons were a bane and learning to detect their use, let alone guard against it, was hard coming. Still, the connection with Vellas was there now, however faint. There was no love lost between the men.

Then again, Marcus believed he was not capable of love, not anymore, that emotion having been burned away through all the years in the cauldron that was his childhood. He refused to think of his brother Andre in Chicago. Ascendancy had asked him to make contact but that had been futile. Andre was and would forever remain lost in the backwater that was America, clinging to the belief that they were still relevant.

At Marcus' accession to Consul over the Consulate on Channeler Oversight, he had reached out, offered him a place in Moscow as well as a connection to get onto the CCDPD there. Restructuring was going on, though slowly, of that department and already research was being done by hundreds of lawyers and legislators over how the laws would have to be rewritten to cover the Ascendants now that they were out of the closet.

And that was only the half of it. The revelation of the Atharim and the things they hunted added the need for still more laws. Was it legal to kill a creature such as the one that had nearly killed the Ascendancy merely for existing? Did they have rights?

Marcus had his own opinions about things like that, but at least for now, he had enough on his plate.

More than enough. As Consul, it was primarily up to him and his newly formed team to begin set up the Consulate, setting the parameters of oversight, the organizational structure, and so on. The Ascendancy had been clear. Vellas would oversee the military aspect of channeling, taking those whose abilities lay in that direction into training.

The United States had done the same, though intelligence hinted that their program had already begun earlier. That only served to light a fire among the top brass of the CCD. A new arms race had begun, every bit as dangerous as in the previous century.

Marcus hungered for control of that. Part of him did. But rulership could never be based purely on military might. Not any kind that lasted anyway. No, the real path lay in control over all aspects of the empire.

And that was where Marcus' sat, because his Consulate, per the orders of the Ascendancy, would touch the lives of everyone. His Consulate (and he did think of it as his) oversaw channeler registration. All channeler's not in military services were in his purview. They would identify those who a posed real danger to the empire and put them down. (Theo Andalain being the impetus for that.) Whether that involved Vellas' strike team remained to be seen. Marcus would push to have their own autonomy in that regard.

People with talents like Jensen James and even himself would also be identified and nurtured, with the CDD (and his Consulate first) being the recipients of those gifts. While Marcus might have discovered the way to craft metallic parts that used the Force to resist any breakdown, he would never become a factory unto himself. But others could. If he chose to share, that is. More and more, he was considering it. At least the manufacture. It was tiring but not overly so, nor was the method too dificult.

What would that do to manufacturing in the CCD? Machinery and parts that never wore down. Vehicles and weapons that would not break. He could almost see it, see the flow of products and wealth and power.

The cold war was not just going to be fought with channelers. While the US had a probable jump on channelers, conventional weapons would never become obsolete. The registration was already giving an idea of what percentage of the population was Ascendant and while they were many in number, the percentage was quite low- not even in the single digits. No, the need for conventional weapons would not disappear.

And who knew. Given Ascendancy's age and health, it was a simple projection to believe that all of them would live a long time. With long life came a new way of looking at things. Projects that took decades could be planned and carefully husbanded. Knowledge could grow in a mind that was sharp and vibrant, work of decades continually expanded upon.

The Consulate would plug these Ascendants into the CCD to make what was already the world's only superpower more advanced than what could be imagined.

And Marcus would sit at the center of that, overseeing it all. With long life came a long game. Vellas might be head of the military wing of the channelers now, but would that be the case in 50 years? Especially if Marcus continued to apply the same scientific principles that had already helped him.

Brute force was no match for science, technology and ruthless cunning. History taught that lesson clearly. Cortez and Moctezuma. The British and India or among the Aborigines. The game would be very long. Vellas and any others who stood in his way. And then, one day, the Ascendancy. One day.

And so Marcus sat in his room, clouded in what considered justified arrogance, surfing the net, in a rare moment of quiet. Very rare- and too short. There was not enough time to do any real research or study in his own projects. He'd have to find the time, though. Hopefully.

Malik squirmed. Time...he needed time for Malik too. The hunger was beginning to become noticeable. Almaz was out of the question now. And going off hunting would be difficult since his face was becoming more well known. Of course, the trick he'd learned from Oakland might be the answer there. Indeed, it was obvious.

Sated he would hunt soon, Malik quieted. And Marcus read news reports- The nation; World. He skipped Entertainment and went on to Tech, noting where his discovery might be useful. Then Science.

It was there that he stopped. Read the article, clicked the link to the Abstract, and from there went to the full paper. He had to slog through it. His knowledge of physics, while not cursory, was certainly not at this level. Not by a long shot. He reread sections multiple times, trying to understand what had been discovered.

After some time, he thought he had a good idea of the bigger picture. The details, though, simply were beyond his ken, at least at the moment. He had no doubt with enough time and study, he could get it. But it would take too long and he simply didn't have the time right now.

He was well aware that there were people who were experts in things he knew nothing of. That was the way of the universe. He was quite comfortable with that fact. A Sith would not feel diminished by it. As long as they could be trusted to do their work and were loyal, they could be useful.

This Danika Zayed was worth meeting. Because there was something in her work that seemed familiar. The equations she used in to describe the newly discovered dark matter fermion that behaved as Bose-Einstein condensates had a form that seemed related to the eigenvector of the "twistiness" term in his Tau algebra. Not the same. But the structure of the matrix, the.....he searched for the right term....the flavor seemed similar.

It was something he couldn't pass up. He would make the time.

He composed an email to Dr. Zayed, asking her to meet. The signature at the bottom made it clear who was asking. He hoped she didn't take long to answer.

He couldn't help the slight excitement that he felt. He even allowed himself to smile. Not the excitement of the hunt. Not the pleasure he took in manipulating a person.

This was a different excitement, though he couldn't exactly place it.


Edited by Marcus DuBois, Aug 11 2017, 07:12 PM.

It hadn't gone as Nox expected. The needle, the questioning, they believed him. The fact that he was Atharim should have made him sit in jail for the immediate future but here Ivan was walking him out of the building. Coffee. Nox wasn't sure why he wanted to be away from the other cops to discuss whatever it was he wanted. But Nox went with it.

It was a good distraction from his personal life. Sleeping with Jay, breaking up with Elyse, Sage's advances. It was all too much. And he hadn't been sleeping well to begin with now he had this shit to think about too. Not to mention the fact that Dane and Aria were back together and it was his fault. This was a cluster fuck if he'd ever seen one.

There was a coffee shop near them. While it was busy it might hide the fact that they were discussing extraordinary things. Monsters and magic and all things Atharim. Why he didn't tap Dorian for the information was beyond him. Nox wasn't going to be much help. And the fact that he had just confessed to murdering a thing and being Atharim. And being a god. He was fucked. There was only one thing he could think of doing that might protect him and that was letting the world know he Nox Durante was Atharim AND a god. And the best way to do that - was to tell the government. Sure Ascendancy already knew. But his underlings - they didn't. That stupid form might just save his life. Because Nox knew that the Atharim already had him on most wanted. If not for Aria, he just did it himself all to help out Dorian. Which also meant Dorian was fucked.

Nox ordered a coffee and sat down at a table and waited for Ivan to finish up his order. Just fuck!

Ivan sat down and Nox gave him his best smile. "I assume you have questions you don't want your fellow cops to hear so let's get this over with."
Nox pulled out his wallet and pulled up that website for the form and stared at it while he waited for Ivan to ask his questions.


Edited by Nox, Aug 9 2017, 07:11 AM.

Just testing something