An Ing's Ideas (miscellaneous snips)

[Krazyfan1]

Neat.
Pre-fall Vampire Drone.

 

[FormlessAlien]

This has held my attention for the last few days. Nothing Murder Drones-y actually happens in this section, though, cause this is all intro. I also have some stuff (probably a oneshot) about the protagonist here in her original setting, but I haven't finished it. I plan to do so eventually.

Click to shrink...

My tail twists in a confused frown. I consult my short-term sensory memory again, more deliberately, and find the same very sudden change.

"…Mini, did it get cold?" I ask my companion, quietly, to reduce airflow. "Or do we need to fix my senses?"

She blinks, flaps her wings, and frowns herself. "It got cold," she answers. "Really cold."

Ah. "Lovely," I mutter, and sigh, and immediately afterward remember that I should not have done that as the surface temperature of my core components drops precipitously. Something which I need to fix, immediately, before my performance starts to drop and I become incapable.

I am very glad that I've practiced for this.

I stand, smooth down my dress, turn away from Mini and the sigil we were studying, open my mouth, and pull the edges of the energy converter mounted just under the base of my neck into a catalyzing formation.

Anima too low-grade to be worth refining, cycling past the converter before I reburn it, catches on those edges and shears into whorls of concentrated unrealized flame, and two large heat sinks in my chest jump immediately from a comfortable 20 or 30 or so degrees to near boiling. That unrealized flame surges under momentum through the crystal-copper channels of my throat to realize at the projectors in my mouth, and the wall in front of me is suddenly burned white in my vision by a projected beam of white-hot heat. Reflex pumps my bellows like it was designed to, pulling more cold inside me and switching valve position to force that cold air past my sinks and exhaust it hot over the sides of my face, but I catch myself before they cycle twice, and the heat, slowly, begins to diffuse back through heat pipes and through thin insulation layers into the parts of my skin not already heated by the backblast of my self-defense weapon and, more importantly, my anima engine.

It hurts, especially in my energy converter, but only warningly. Doing this once won't do me any damage I can't fix, in the long run. And it should buy me at least an hour of operation before I can't maintain consciousness.

"I'll get the book," Mini tells me before I can ask, and she makes a wing-assisted leap to the pouch on my hip.

'Thank you,' I think back to her, and I gather my thoughts. Next step. Next step is temperature stabilization.

Mini crawls into my pouch, and then her weight vanishes into our home. She'll be back soon. Soon enough. I'm—I do not need to worry, I need to focus—I straighten my tail and unclench my fingers. I need to prepare to tie together a spell. I can make the foundation.

I reach out into the edges of myself and discharge a minor peripheral cell up into my high-grade anima tank. Nothing less than deep Breath can stabilize a spell ready to cast, even temporarily, but this Endurance is of the first circle, so it won't take much at all, and I cannot allow myself to be distracted. I sweep a finger over my chest (my dress will serve to hold this spell for the minutes I need) and start weaving the part of me I just set aside behind it.

I have the spellstring nut finished and the ward base half wrapped behind it by the time I feel Mini's weight return to my pouch, and I pause for several seconds, holding the pattern in place through force of will, to reach into my pouch and pull Mini and my spell construction notes out. She crawls up to my shoulder, I flip one-handed to the third section of my notebook, and the remaining thirty seven seconds of weaving are much less stressful.

At the end, my anima pulls free from me and properly into the fabric of my dress, and I move to let the spell within loose. I draw freezing air through myself to tell the held-back spell to "Snap!" in the tongue of dragons, flickering the edges of my 'natural' Breath with the word, and the nut spins to let the spell fall into active shape and onto me. The air against my skin changes immediately from bitter, freezing cold to a temperate warmth that might feel hot in contrast if it weren't for the still-aching burn of my air-starved heat sinks in my chest. Now that I no longer need that heat as a precaution against freezing fluid lines and anima engine containment failures, I cycle my bellows immediately and vigorously to remedy that.

"Well," says Mini from just next to my jaw. "That was exciting."

'Far too exciting,' I agree, through our connected thoughts rather than speech as all the airflow in my body is still occupied with pulling heat out of me and making the edges of my vision shimmer with mirage. 'Sudden, as well…' I frown (and try to get a hold of my shivering), glance down at—ah, I'm still holding my notebook. I snap it shut and slide it into my pouch, and I then return my attention to the sigil I'd meant to look at. The hexagon at the center remains unchanged, the curl of the arrows extending from three of its corners is consistent with what I remember, and the only difference in anima I can see with my right eye is textured like me. '…What was that?'

"I dunno, and I don't think we can afford spending more time figuring it out, either," Mini says. She hops off of my shoulder into the air, and her wings split and leap from a standstill to the customary buzz that leaves her hanging almost stationary in front of me. "Nobody else was dressed for it either, and I don't think fleshy people can heat their cores as easily as you can."

Meaning any of them who don't have access to temperature control are at risk of dying, and soon. I grimace, glance at the sigil again (maybe a false lead, maybe entirely unrelated to the magic in this area, and I can look at it later if the expedition doesn't end early, it is not as important as lives), and start walking.

"We'll make it in time," Mini tells me (or perhaps lies to me, it feels like she's lying, but it may be my mind doing the lying) reassuringly. "You can jog fast."

-----​

The mouth of the cave opens to some five centimeters of snow rather than desert sand, and to an unfamiliar night sky rather than bright blue day. Dark, twisting shapes hang in silhouette against stars I have never seen on the horizon, and nothing I see is remotely similar to where I was an hour ago.

"…So it was teleportation," Mini says blankly. "Fantastic." And she drops face-first into the snow and screams.

"I'm putting that weather ward in a wand tonight," I decide, staring at the ringed disc of an unfamiliar and extremely large planet hanging high above against the field of stars. "Before we do my maintenance. Before we get moved somewhere worse."

"Good idea," Mini agrees, voice muffled by the snow. "Should make a damn warstaff and shoot whatever did this after."

"I can breathe lightning," I remind her, still staring up at the sky.

She sighs, heavily. I empathize. "Yeah," she says, "that fucking works too."

 

[Krazyfan1]

Neat.
so are the murder drones in this fantasy world similar to the Warforged from Eberron?

 

[FormlessAlien]

Ah, this is supposed to be in the normal Murder Drones setting. The POV character here is indeed similar to a Warforged from Eberron, though the thing she and her kind were created for is different.

 

[FormlessAlien]

"We could bury the entrance in snow?" I suggest.

Mini squints at me. "From inside?"

I tap a finger on a wand in my belt, the one with the pattern for an evoked servant contained within.

"Oh, yeah." She frowns, looks down at the snowy ground, then at my wand, and then back at the ground. "…Could one of those make a convincingly natural pile?"

"Ah." I consider the simplistic language interpreter built into the spell, and the extremely limited library of actions to carry out interpreted commands. I could expand that, if I built the servant directly—! …but that relies on what knowledge I can impart, and my skill with disguise is… "…No," I answer at length.

"Hm." Mini looks past me, at the entrance of the cave which is either identical to the cave we were in before or is the cave we were in before, and frowns. "…Do you have the juice to map the area?"

I ping my storage, and find I have two peripheral cells still filled. Only one of my proximal cells is drained, and my core cells, all three that my engine can support, are untouched. "Handily," I tell her. "Why?"

"Cause we're not staying in the cave—" and before my tail can droop more than a few centimeters, she interrupts herself to say, "No, I don't care how much you want to study it, it might be dangerous, and our position is not secure right now!"

"I was—" I begin to lie, and then I remember she would catch me from the thoughts in my mind, and I sigh. "You're probably right to be cautious," I say instead.

Mini flicks a sharp smile. "Someone from that heart of yours has to be."

I'm not in the mood to say the next line, something about how few times I've blown myself up, so I just try to smile back and draw a wand from my belt instead. The earthseeking question bound within thrums against my Breath. "What kind of place are we looking for?" I ask.

"Civilization, ideally," Mini says. "Caves that aren't this one, if there's none of that. We need shelter and security."

I nod, and look down at the wand in my hand. "Shelter and security," I mutter to myself. I discharge a peripheral cell deeper into the engine, into the parts that are more 'me,' and press its contents tight against the woven songs of the wand. Feed it to them. Make that anima into a fleeting copy of that song. The new song's threads strain against me, trying to pull into a knot and release into the world. I tell them to "Snap," and let them go.

And my mind

stretches​

down—

I am cold, and I am hollow.

A fresh wound aches at my core, and death lingers on my skin.

The petitioner should know this. She should have guessed. She has felt my cold.

Perhaps she does, and she has, for she asks for other things.

She wishes to see the parts of me around her.

She seeks the built places, and those none can find.

I show her what is known by those from whom I come.

The shattered cities. The deep places which have not been lost.

The safer places to hide. The places to hide from. The fields of the frozen.

I press the knowledge into the song she sings, in the spaces and words that she knows.

And​

I​

gasp, running air over already-cool heat sinks as my thoughts return to myself full of a significant amount of useful and very frightening information about the surrounding area. I shoot to my feet, shivering for reasons unrelated to the cold my weather ward keeps away, and point at the largest silhouette on the horizon with my wand. "We need to get away from the Spire."

"Glitter, what—" Mini's thoughts brush mine and her eyes go wide. "Fucking Dragons above—The bunker, the one with the big door! We go there, we get behind that door, and—"

"Will they let us—" I cut myself off and try to turn my shivering into a frown. "It doesn't matter," I tell us both, and I turn and march, as fast as I can manage through snow. "We will get in if they don't."

"We will," Mini agrees. Neither of us have any idea if we can. The kind of lock-opening magic I have the power to weave is easy to defeat. "And they'll let us in, anyway. They're like us."

They aren't. The countless corpses in the foundation of the Spire are nothing like me in shape. I have never been hunted by something Drase Workshop built especially to kill the people it made. "They will," I agree, regardless.

A voice, one I've never heard before, says words, in a language I don't recognize, from directly above me.

I look up.

Hanging in the air some ten meters above me is a thin-tailed construct with pale skin and golden eyes, clad in an open coat and a short-brimmed hat. The bladed wings on its back hold it up without flapping, as if their points are driven directly into the fabric of the world, and the three fingers of its thumbless hands are long and sharp. I estimate its height, when standing, as about double mine, and its wingspan as five or perhaps six times my height.

And in its wide, flat, smiling mouth are a set of razor-sharp teeth.

"That looks like the keep-away warnings," Mini says from below my line of sight, voice small.

I slip my free hand into my pouch and grasp a handful of fire stars. Not that I have much hope in their detonations doing much against this immense thing. "Fight or run?" I whisper, eyes fixed on the hunter's.

"I—" And the hunter's knife-hands curl back into its flared wrists, in a split second exchanging their place with four-fingered, clawless hands in the same glossy white as the rest of its skin. "…Uh."

And the hunter, still displaying all those horrifying teeth, still with multitudinous blades extending from its back, waves.

"…What?"

 

[FormlessAlien]

Things go wrong when Rei is put into the Evangelion whose heart is made from a piece of her.

Click to shrink...

and then my body is right for the first time in years, but the awful shell is still there, and the chains are still there, and I don't want to be here anymore I don't and I pull at the shell's arms to get to the chains in its chest and it hurts and it isn't working and my eyes are burning and I'm screaming and override:disconnect_link_..-6 are telling me to let myself go but I won't! My Self flashes bright, and I tell the World to get out get out, and override: stops, and the shell's arms move, and I punch its arm through its chest and

the shell is gone, and I'm only in the right body, and holding my Self out is suddenly an enormous strain, but I don't need to block out the World anymore so I pull Myself back inside me and collapse onto the—the control stalks of an Evangelion. I—I'm in an entry plug. The shell was—I just—How—I grab my head and groan. My thoughts—Nothing makes sense. There's… too much of me in my body, I don't fit anymore, but an emptiness that I—that one of me couldn't feel before is infinitesimally lesser than it has been in centuries.

I've only existed for—for five years. Or ten, I don't know which, but that's not centuries.

Nothing makes—

Something explodes, and suddenly, I'm moving, far too fast. I flare my Self on crash-reflex, and Declare that Momentum Shall Not Reach Me, and then I'm in the air above my c—the Evangelion, in the middle of the enormous experiment room I was to activate Unit 00 in, and a crash that would be deafening if I Permitted It to Reach Me draws my eye to an entry plug—the one I had been inside of, it must be—spewing depressurized LCL and smashing itself repeatedly into the wall under rocket power. The pieces connect.

My entry plug just ejected. And, had I not Decided to keep it from taking me with it, I would likely be broken inside its control cabin from the force of those impacts.

If only the rest of the things which happened in the past… minutes would make sense as well. I breathe—I fail to breathe in. My lungs are heavy, and full of liquid, and air only sits on top, and instinctual panic I'd thought I'd learned to suppress floods me, and I'm suddenly, desperately coughing up crimson.

"—yanami," a voice is saying when my breath steadies enough for my awareness of myself to return. The voice, it's coming from below me. It must be the emergency radio in my plugsuit. "I repeat, please respond, Pilot Ayanami."

I try to bring my breathing under control, enough so I can at least speak, and swallow down something that had been trying to escape my throat. "I read you," I respond. My voice is rough, and my mouth tastes like acid and blood.

"Thank the gods," the voice says quietly, perhaps quietly enough that the speaker didn't intend the words to be transmitted. "Please… descend to the ground if you're able, Ayanami," the voice continues, more loudly.

I blink. I look down, at the dead Evangelion below me, at the ground a seventy meters further. And the only thing keeping me here instead of shattered on that ground is My Will. "…Roger," I tell the voice unsteadily. "I will… try."

"Good," the voice says quickly. I hear something shuffle. Then, quieter, "Sir—" and then nothing. I'm alone again. I'm alone in the air. I wasn't made to land independently.

I need to get down.

-----​

"—ouldn't be able to get a helicopter down here in less than two hours, and the aerodynamics—"

"Sir!" a technician interrupts. "She's glowing!"

Commander Ikari's eyes snap back towards the viewing window to find—

"Holy shit!"

—a streak of brilliant red light leading from where Rei had been hovering to a new, steaming hole in Unit 00's right arm. He blinks his eyes clear and clenches his hands tighter at his sides. "Get a camera on that," he orders. "Now."

"Yes, sir!" The sound of rapid keystrokes comes from another technician's terminal. "On screen C!"

"Her emergency radio is transmitting!" yet another says before Ikari finishes turning around.

"Get that on speaker," he tells her.

"Sir!"

A moment passes with no sound beyond keyboards, and then, "—read me?" Rei's voice says. She sounds just as terrible as before. "I've reached the ground. I repeat—"

The technician presses the transmit key. "We read you," she says, and then she releases the key and turns to look at him, eyes wide. "Sir?"

-----​

"Stay there," Commander Ikari says through the radio. Something twists inside me. "A medical team will come fetch you."

"Yes, sir," I make myself say through my suddenly uncooperative throat, pulling Myself back inside of my body again. There's no reason to Keep Out anything but heat right now, and there's enough red in this crater without Me adding to it.

If only I had an Amplifier, the Light of my Soul wouldn't be this color. If only I knew what an Amplifier was.

I shut my eyes and sink down to sit on the steel-clad bone floor. It's uncomfortable, and disgusting, but my legs were shaking too much for me to keep standing. And I'm… tired.

I'm so tired. Like I haven't slept since



something yanks on Me, and my eyes snap open as my Will snaps reflexively shut between me and the World. Everything's red. I taste blood.

This is not my control core. This is not my quarters. This is not Medical. My eyes catch on symbols scrolling somewhere far away—roman letters, A, C, G, T, genes—and then lower, I see runework, coarse, clumsy... familiar.

This is the Dummy Plug Lab. They are making a backup of me, they must be. But it's never felt like anything before. Why is something pulling on Me?

Are They tearing me apart again?

My hand slams against the wall almost before the thought finishes forming, hard enough that the tank around me shakes. Not hard enough to break it. I pull back, gather my Will like I did for the controlled crash that took me to the ground, and—

"STOP!" a voice shouts from around me. For a split second, I hesitate.

But it isn't safe.

I harden Myself against the World and drive my body through the tank's wall.

Glass breaks away from me loudly enough that I need to Stop the sound to preserve my body. It explodes into glittering dust against the far wall. Lights behind me go dark, and red rushes past my feet.

I push enough of the blood out of my lungs that I can breathe and walk forward. I need to move. I can't stay here. They're going to tear me apart. I need to move.

Down. Down is safe. Down is warm. I need to move down.

Why am I breathing so fast? I shouldn't be breathing so fast.

I reach out, stretch Myself thin through the walls of my deployment seed, waiting for a response—Internal Control Eden answers, wrapping itself around me, but it's cold. Weak. It says I crashed.

Crashed.

The backup core crashes down around me. It must've been held up by the tank They were pulling me apart in. It's gone now, lobes smashed into nothing against the floor and against Me.

(There's nothing to tell my replacements who I was anymore.)

Someone's speaking. They don't matter. What matters—I twist against Eden, my Self lurches, and every bulkhead between me and and and and

I walk through the last fragment of mechanical brain, step onto stone built on top of a bulkhead that isn't there anymore, and Make the Stone Not Be, and I fall.

My breathing's still too fast. My heart is beating too fast. I'm shaking. I don't know what's happening.

I don't know what's happening.

I

I land. On the surface of a pool of my blood. Enough of my blood to turn my control core into a lake of it. And I stare up at my body, in what would be its default shape if it weren't mutilated, with my Peer's Control Spear driven through its chest.

I can see myself through its eyes. Tiny, fragile, afraid. Soul blazing bright crimson Denial. I see myself staring back.

This is wrong.

This is wrong.

This is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong—The Spear.

The Spear, it's heavy. It doesn't like me. It tells me I should be contained.

I should be contained.

It isn't safe.

I pull harder.

I'm not—I am Ayanami Rei. I am not C0A41 Lilith. You are not containing me. You do not get to refuse me. I need to get myself free. I got here first. They tore me apart. They tore me apart. I'm not her. You have to believe me. You have to let me.

I can excise you. I could do it! I could cut away—I'm human, I'm not bound by my restrictions, I'm not what you were made to stop! I can do it! I'm standing in a lake of my blood!

I stretch Myself back, wrap around my blood. I Decide It is Me. I watch myself watch myself watch myself. I fall apart.

The shaking isn't gone.

There's less of it.

I am functional.

I'm not safe.

I reach out again. I know the pattern of an Amplifier, even though I'm not—even though Lilith isn't allowed to have one. I grab my blood from under my feet and Make It Flow Up.

My body's less than two meters tall. My soul barely a township. I need to scale it down.

Something from the World outside hits Me. Light, high velocity. It came from a human, behind me. There are a dozen of them at the door.

They don't matter.

I Seed a Crystal in the blood flowing around me and Guide It. It grows through runes and runes and runes and runes. Shell grows upon shell grows upon shell until it's a sphere the size of my fist.

I leave the containment arrays blank. There's no need to make stealing this gift from myself any harder.

Then I grab the Amplifier Core I just made with my hands, shove it into my mouth, and bite

-----​

"She's glowing brighter!" one says into a radio.

The girl, standing on the lake of LCL like it's concrete, in front of the giant pale monster NERV apparently has in its basement, is only visible as a dim, hunched over shadow in the center of a crimson star.

The star shifts.

"Pull back! Pull back!" the commander shouts.

Most of the squad follows the order, rushing back to the safety (or what they hope is safety) of the steel doorframe. One of them doesn't. He stands in the open, looking through his gun's sights but not seeing them, the star's light drawing in his mind. His everything.

The light is his home.

His mother.

Himself.

"What the shit did she just do!"

His gun falls from limp fingers. His fingers fall from lonely bones. His—Something pulls from behind—

"Get behind the damn cover!"

—and the star is gone, and his hands, what happened to his hands—

A flash. Crimson blood overwhelmed by brilliant green.

-----​

and breath returns to me, and I leap into the air and wrap Myself around the spear. It knows I'm not Lilith even though I am. It knows I could follow through on my threat.

It comes free. My Focusing Core repairs the grooves in its casing. I…

I… connect. Unfolding from the now-empty wound, reaching back from the forbidden fruit behind my heart. Thought and feeling flows again, as it was made to, as my experience says it should. The Me and the Me stare at each other with nine eyes and with one soul. A return to wholeness. Oneness.

It should feel as right as it does familiar.

It doesn't.

I don't feel right. My body, it wasn't—it isn't my body, it's too big( too small) , it's too pale( too pink) , it doesn't think like—I squeeze my eyes shut, wrap Myself around the space between Me and Me, and tell the World that only some of Me is Myself( I have grown apart) , and I

snap​

apart.​

And I'm me, standing in the air in front of Lilith, the Angel Nerv kept at the bottom of the Geofront, the one they tore apart into Unit 01 and her, into Me and Her, with my—with her Peer's Control Spear wrapped in the brilliant green Light of my Soul beside me.

And, even though my body's only minutes old, even though my Amplifier would let me move mountains, I am tired. More tired than I remember ever being.

Lilith bends freshly-remade legs in a crouch and reaches out a hand larger than my body, palm up.

|Rest,| she tells me with the raw, freshly-cut edges of Herself.

"Don't let them take me?" I say back, with words made using my vocal cords and mouth.

|I Won't.|

I step onto her palm.

this has been sitting mostly written on my hard drive for a while, as is often the case with my stories, but some stuff on Discord and the fact that I learned how to do ruby text( this) got me to finish it. I ideally want this to be the start of a longer story, but I also wanted this to stand alright on its own in case it doesn't get to be one (because I know me).

Click to shrink...

 

[Cyrus2]

Well I want more of whatever is happening, it sounds all kinds of cool. Hopefully they get somewhere away from this.

 

[Ryune]

Well I want more of whatever is happening, it sounds all kinds of cool. Hopefully they get somewhere away from this.

Click to shrink...

Second!

I'm always for some nice existential confusion and the good Evangelion fics always deliver.