The lad O'Make wandered through a moment ago and this happened. Sorry 
Taylor and Lisa turned the corner, talking happily about the latest bizarreness of the Dark Lady Amy, and as one stopped dead. Taylor looked around, Administrator having sent her a warning sensation powerful enough for the dimmest of people to feel, while Lisa's own power had clearly done the same for her. "What the hell was
that?" Taylor commented with surprise.
As she was about to reply, Lisa snapped her head around at a rustling sound in the nearby alley. Both girls stared as something that looked like a cross between a white cat, a rabbit, and an eldritch horror stepped out from behind a garbage can, its beady red eyes fixed on both of them.
[DELETE!] Administrator instantly said.
Taylor had already acted before her huge friend spoke, and even as the thing was opening its own mouth...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"What the fuck was
that?" Assault shouted as the entire Rig rang like an enormous gong, a vast roaring sound rolling over them.
Armsmaster checked his HUD which was linked into the Rig's sensor suite, but before he could answer, a brilliant white flash lit the nighttime scene outside the windows like the world's largest flashgun. Everyone hit the deck, but other than the flare of light, nothing else seemed to happen.
"Origin is in the docks, somewhere approximately half a mile inland," he snapped, checking the readouts. "A massive plasma discharge reaching from the stratosphere to ground level…" Pausing, he rechecked his instruments then shook his head. "No. Reaching
from ground level
to the stratosphere. A weapon?" Frantically flipping through pages of readings with twitches of his left eyebrow, he tried to pin down what had happened, while everyone else got up and moved to look out the windows.
He slowly followed, still mostly concentrating on the readings he was studying.
"Holy Christ," Assault whispered. Focusing on his colleagues pale face, Armsmaster studied him for a second then looked in the same direction. His mouth dropped open a little. There was a fading remnant of some sort of brilliant green-blue beam reaching from a point deep in the docks straight up as far as the eye could see, parting the thin clouds in a perfect circle that was visible thanks to the half-full moon. It looked somewhat like some of the effects he'd seen Legend produce but on a scale that was terrifying.
All around them alarms were going off, people were talking urgently on phones, and general chaos reigned, but he and Assault kept watching as the phenomenon faded away. As it started to dim to the point of disappearing, he had the thought to look up to where it was aimed.
Which was directly at the moon.
He squinted, then activated his visor's telescopic function, thinking something was a little off about… "Oh, my god," he said involuntarily.
"What?" Assault asked.
"There's a new crater on the moon."
"...
What?!"
"A new crater. Approximately…" He took the best measurements he could with his visor even as he linked his helmet computer to the telescope on the top of the Rig and slewed it to point at the same place. The higher magnification allowed him to get a more accurate measurement, which agreed to two decimal places with the one he'd estimated. "Approximately eight point six miles in diameter," he finished numbly. "Directly on the exact trajectory that beam was following."
"Something in the city
blew a hole in the fucking moon?" Assault squeaked in total horror. Armsmaster nodded in equal if not greater incredulity.
"The evidence suggests so, yes," he whispered, swallowing.
"
HOW?"
"I have high speed footage from a camera overlooking that area of the city," he replied, already playing it back through an algorithm to enhance the contrast. The image whited out a moment later, then came back to show the beam glowing brilliantly, then about four seconds later went white again with an even brighter flash that came from above. "Christ…" he said after absorbing the information and coming to a conclusion he very much didn't want to.
"I don't know what did it, but
something fired a physical projectile from ground level at an acceleration that got it to approximately one quarter the speed of light by the time it left the atmosphere," he said through dry lips. "How it didn't erase half the city in the process I have absolutely no idea. The shock wave alone should have killed everyone inside twenty miles. But as far as I can see all the damage reported so far is restricted to broken windows and roughly the same damage as a minor earthquake. No casualties recorded at this point in time."
Assault stared at him white-faced, then looked out and up at the moon. With good eyes it was barely possible to see a dimming red pinprick just on the dark side of the terminator. "Holy shit…" the other man breathed in horror.
"Indeed," Armsmaster replied, unable to think of anything more useful. Both of them stood there for some minutes, trying to work out what could possibly have produced what had happened. And why.
What would ever require such an over the top response?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Blinking spots out of her eyes, Lisa sat up rather painfully. Next to her Taylor was levering herself to a sitting position, shaking her head and mumbling. "Ow," her friend moaned, holding her head in her hands.
"Think you got it?" Lisa asked, when she was able to hear anything over the ringing sound in her ears.
"Administrator says it's dead," Taylor replied, still wincing as she rubbed her temples. "She also says well done, and not to hesitate if I see another one of those fucking things."
"My power is pretty sure you just fixed a very big problem, by the way," Lisa said as she got up, then held out her hand to help Taylor stand. "It doesn't want to talk about what it was though."
"Yeah. Administrator just told me some things that make me think we should work out how to find the rest of those little fuckers one day and drop a star on them."
"One thing at a time, Taylor. U.N.I.O.N. has a lot of work to do locally before we go looking for more trouble," Lisa laughed, albeit rather painfully. Her everything ached. Examining the crater where the thing had stood was she winced again. "Another pothole. Better put it on the list."
"Already done," Taylor assured her, holding up a notebook then making it vanish. The two girls exchanged glances, looked up at the moon, as one shrugged, and went about their business. Pizza was on the menu tonight, after all.
