PLOT: WISE SNAKE'S EMERGENCE

[theearth]

Who: OPEN.
When: March 9th, Sunday, daylight hours.
Where: The business district of Locke City.
What: An enormous snake monster is pissed.
Warnings: Violence.

[The alien explodes silently - but it explodes.

First in a small cloud of hot (rose-scented) gas - those there to watch its final moments will want to step back.

A ripple in the air pulses - heavily - from where it once was, with absolutely no sound and color, but penetrating force. Anyone standing within two miles of the point of origin will feel a push, with those closest guaranteed to be knocked off their feet and temporarily dazed. Cars swerve and crash. Staff in the nearest office buildings launch into disarray. There’s no shielding from the blast - it can be felt through walls, through structures, in the air, and underground.

And it is felt underground.

The entire business district starts to shake, abruptly, jarred to a stir by some movement. It rises over the span of a long half-a-minute to the magnitude of December’s earthquake.

Tuning Towers experiences the worst of it - windows are smashing and objects are shaking loose and falling from the upper floors.

It finally ends - with screaming - as the head of an enormous pink snake breaks the lobby floor.

It flows its way quickly out of the hole it’s made, breaks itself another hole ever so politely through the main entrance doors, which were not meant to accommodate a twenty-foot-tall-and-wide exitor, and as it draws the last of its tail out after it, the quaking dies down.

It’s now roaring its way through the streets of Locke City’s business district - all several hundred meters of Wise Snake, emerged in the flesh (or stone?).

No regard for the walls of buildings, streetlamps, civilians, stopped and blindly pulled-over vehicles, anything else on its course - in a frantically-awakened, unrestricted rampage.]



[ OOC: This is part two of the Season 1's finale. The first - the assault on the farmhouse - is here; pertinent plot posts one and two. ]

Comments

OuO

[quariantine]

[ Melati comes tearing out of a street just down the way from Gerald. There are two things to note about her.

One, she looks terrified. The shins of her jeans are stained and dirty and she is constantly looking back, trying not to fall down a third time. She still has her backpack on, though. For some reason, she hasn't let go of it yet.

Two, there is a shotgun sticking out of her pack. It's an M-27 Scimitar. It's pretty sizable.

She's been trying to avoid people due to her gun situation, but when she spots Gerald, she walks towards him, cautiously. ]

Wait, I know you! Lana's brother, right?

/smashes into this like a smashing person

[centurian]

[ It takes him a second or two to place the face, but he realizes that he knows her. Sort of. She was one of Lana's friends and...

Before he even knows what he's saying, he's asking her a question. ]

Metali, right? Have you seen Lana anywhere? I tried to get ahold of her with but her cell wasn't—

[ And then his train of thought trails off as he happens to see a certain something in her backpack. A certain something that leaves him with that familiar feeling of an echo-pulse.

And now he's staring at her with a look of confusion. He knows what that is, and that could only mean a few things. ]

Where did you get that?

CACKLES

[quariantine]

[ Metali. Melati pauses, rolling the name around in her head. What a strange way to put it. Oh well, it's close enough; it's kind of an emergency and she has more pressing matters to concern herself with.

She's about to answer his question - no, the last she saw of Lana, she was still at the dorms, and she didn't know if she was going out today - but his pause concerns her. She follows his line of sight to her gun ("her gun"?), and then immediately, uh. Starts babbling. ]

Oh no, no, you've got the wrong idea! I don't know whose it is - it just showed up in front of my feet an hour ago and it wouldn't leave me alone - I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but the gun is following me, and it's better than me tripping over it all the time, right? [ ... Screaming internally. ] You have to believe me.

[centurian]

Wait- That's not what—

[ And now he just feels bad. Congrats, Vakarian. May you be remembered as a great intimidator of college girls.

Now his hands are flailing. ]

I do believe you. It's just that right now, I just got this... [ shit, how does he explain this without sounding like a crazy person... ] Well...

[ oh! HE KNOWS HOW. ]

...Does the word "turian" mean anything to you?

[quariantine]

[ What a silly, made up word! She's about to open her mouth and ask him what kind of game he thinks he's playing when there's a real, actual emergency swirling around him, but then she stops. There's a rushing sound and a heartbeat, this just happened to her a few hours ago...

She comes back from the echo slightly disoriented. ]

... The deal's off. Fist? The Shadow Broker? [ ...!? ] What was what?

[centurian]

[ Before Gerald can answer, he's hit with yet another echo. He's silent for a minute as he tries to make sense of it. Saren... Shadow Broker...

Quarian?

But... back to reality. ]

They're called pulses. Or echoes. Or... echoey-pulses. Long story short, you're connected to someone from an alternate universe or your past life or something. You may or may not get their powers and appearance, which is why I've developed a chronic case of synthesizer in throat. [ Not, as Lana might've said (and Gerald tried to convince himself), destroying his vocal chords in a truly epic shouting match with their father. ]

Oh, and if the word "turian" gave you one, it means we're probably connected too. I'm probably not explaining this well, but there's like a whole network with an FAQ and everything.

[ a pause ]

If you feel like you're going insane, it's perfectly normal. Do you have your cell phone on you?

[quariantine]

[ She's got half a mind to just turn around and leave this crazy mixed up Wonderland trip, Lana's dorky older brother be damned, but she can't deny that she'd been wondering how you could throw your voice so badly in a simple yelling match. And he's citing the crazy factor. She likes that he's acknowledging that. (If there's a FAQ, there's answers. She likes answers too.)

So she'll stare at him, narrowing her eyes, then pull at her backpack, grabbing her iPhone out of one of its pockets. She'll lower her gaze to unlock it. ]

What am I doing? And, uh, what's the gun got to do with anything?

[centurian]

You should have a few numbers that are popping up in your head right about now. Don't think about it too much, just type them in.

[ Seriously though, he's aware of just how crazy he sounds right about now, and he's really glad that she's humouring him. In any other circumstance, he might be flashing an apologetic grin right about now, but instead he looks around, making sure they aren't in any immediate danger. ]

And when it pops up, look for a post made by [ insert mordin's number here. ]. That's the most recent version of the FAQ.

As a warning, though, you'll probably still think I'm crazy even after you read it.

[quariantine]

[ Fine. Fine. She pulls up her internet browser (because she's looking for a post? apparently?) and types whatever number -- okay, that one, why not -- and oh my god what even is this. She's going through this website, trying to find the post in question, thinking furiously about the ramifications of what she just did. She's taken some computer science classes, she knows what's up. ]

... Wait, what I just did shouldn't have been possible. [ She's searching for the right address and not looking up, but she's thinking out loud regardless. MULTITASKING! ] You can't just... access the same website from different urls without getting redirected to the same source. It's acting like the url is also a user id, like we've accessed some sort of forum without any sort of authentification, like having the number itself is enough authentification alone... What in the world, this isn't how the internet works!

late forever

[centurian]

...Trust me, I said the exact same thing when I first connected to it. [ His expression is sympathetic. After all, at least he only had to deal with this on his first day at a new job. Not in the middle of a possible (alright... probable) alien invasion. ] I figured I'd accidentally hacked my way into a remote server or something.

Until, I tried to write the number down on a piece of paper. Then things got really crazy.