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Knocking on Heaven's Door [MtG/Multicross/SI]

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I'm still curious where Old Man Genocide and Lina are. Did Shade not leave them any instructions behind? Are they just close acquaintances and cleansing Zendikar was just a favor?
 
Wow. Meryl is really lucky that both she and her friend sparked. Or tremendously unlucky.

Edit: oh wait. They are just on planet Gunsmoke. With some rebels there. That makes more sense.
 
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Chapter Seventy-Eight (Bleach)
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    • Chapter Seventy-Eight (Bleach)

    Genryusai Yamamoto sipped his green tea calmly, his eyes softly burning as he took in the appearance of the duo. His office looked thoroughly thrashed, and coffin-like and seal-covered boxes seemed to litter one side of it. Not a single strand of hair was out of place on his head. His sword stood in the crook of his left arm, his right hand upon the handle. He raised a single eyebrow at the duo's presence, and then nodded.

    "Master of Death," he said, "and...Superbia, was it?"

    The hulking man nodded, dropping his cowl to reveal the Slivers' typical head crest.

    "Just call me Harry," the Master of Death said, "Master of Death sounds pompous when it's said by someone that looks older than me," he added. He glanced at the boxes. "People giving you trouble?"

    "The usual," Genryusai acquiesced. "They are incapable of equating old age with speed, and thus they end up trapped faster than they can make their demands. They are the lucky ones. The ones that I allow to make demands usually anger me enough that they are the ones I cut down."

    Superbia nodded. "As expected from one of father's trusted friends, even these many pose no threat to you," he spoke with a fond smile. "We don't have time to waste," he continued. "Father's life might be in danger, and if his life is in danger, then everything in the Multiverse is in danger too."

    "I know that all too well," Genryusai said.

    "Then do you know anyone from his past that would hold a grudge so powerful they'd have no fear in kidnapping him and angering the Dragon?" Harry asked, only for Genryusai to chuckle in return.

    "The list is so long, even giving it to you would be meaningless. Though it might console you to know that to date, only one Planeswalker has eluded the Tyrant's laws," Genryusai said, placing his empty cup of green tea on the desk by his side. "Though if he has eluded him for so long..." the leader of the Gotei Thirteen looked at Harry, who in turn held the gaze back, not a single emotion betraying his face. "Ezio Auditore from Firenze if I am not wrong," Genryusai said.

    "I know where to find him," Harry said, "But I don't think he did it. He's an assassin, not a thief."

    "Those who do not follow the laws are only a single minute away from committing crimes," Genryusai replied stiffly. "Either you follow the rules, or you do not. And if you don't, then what is the difference between theft and murder if not the thrill that one receives from it?"

    Harry shook his head. "I'm not gonna bother talking you out of your ideas," he raised both hands in mock surrender. "Well, I guess we can go ask him if he hid the sleeping beauty in his castle."

    "Ah, you too believe father to be a beautiful existence?" Superbia said suddenly, eyes glinting as he looked at Harry. The cloak that covered his body began to shift, glinting light starting to reveal itself beneath it. The Master of Death blinked once, very, very carefully. Harry had the feeling he was trudging on a minefield, and for some reasons unknown even to him, he feared to find out how deep the rabbit hole went. "What a joyous thing to know! I was holding myself back from commenting on father's absolutely adorable eyebrows, but since you have revealed your true nature, then I guess-"

    "Please do not get naked in my office, Superbia," Genryusai said flatly. His eyes burned as he spoke, power thrumming through his frame. Superbia seemingly deflated, and then turned to look at Harry with a small smile.

    "I can give you a card to my father's fan club later, Harry! I can call you Harry too, can I? As fellow lovers of father's perfection, there is no need for stuffy titles!"

    "Did...your father...create you like this?" Harry asked, his face showcasing all possible forms of expression that could define shock, surprise, and bewilderment coupled with the need of an adult. Though he was the adult, so he had to grit his teeth.

    "Of course not! Father believes that every individual capable of free will should grow himself up and become his own person! I was awed by his bedtime stories, and decided to dedicate my life to bringing the glory that is father to the masses!" he pulled out from his cloak, courtesy of a tentacle, a thick and large tome. "I've been writing a book on his life! Well, more like the events he told me!"

    Harry stared at Superbia, and then he stared at the book.

    Superbia looked at the book, and then looked at Harry.

    Genryusai simply massaged his face, and said nothing more as the duo disappeared from his sight.

    "On the twenty-second year of father's existence, he came across a field of bones and skulls, a dark volcano spewing forth dust and toxic clouds in the land of Mordor," Superbia said as he and Harry departed, the wizard holding on to Superbia's scruff of the neck as the Sliver Apex had the book open and was clutching on to it tightly with both hands. "He battled him upon fields of lava and deep into caves covered in magma, and with bellowing furor dragged his soul into the maws of his hungry children, ripping to shreds all that he was for the glory of the Hive!" he giggled as he turned a page. "It's been a while since I last read it. I've been hibernating for a long while."

    "Why?" Harry asked as the Blind Eternities spanned all around them.

    "Don't know," Superbia replied. "Father came to me one day since he created me incapable of connecting to the rest of the Hive and vice-versa. He wanted me free to think my own thoughts, but...so, anyway, I was knee deep in horrible baby-eating orcs who were faithless heathens to the glory of Father when father came and told me that I had to go to sleep. He had something big to prepare, and he needed lots and lots of energy."

    "You don't know what it was?" Harry asked, only for Superbia to giggle as he turned another page.

    "No," Superbia said. "Father's will is inscrutable when he wishes for it. I had faith in father, and once he woke us up again I headed right over to his rescue as was proper for his most beloved son," there was smugness in his voice. "I'm his firstborn, so I have to set an example for everyone else."

    "It's strange," Harry said. "Why is it that he needs to give you energy?"

    "So we don't go eating everything and everyone," Superbia said. "We could survive by consuming meat and flesh, or by draining mana from Leylines. That would bring exponential destruction to the Multiverse however, and father doesn't want that. So he sustains us through his might and power, allowing us to grow at a sustainable rate."

    "Should you be telling me this?" Harry asked.

    "Should I not? The glory that is Father should be told to everyone! His will is absolute, his strength unchallenged, his cunning second to none," Superbia gushed with his voice rising into trills, "And so whoever kidnapped father in his moment of weakness is going to suffer. We'll make them pay. We'll make them pay so, so much that only when the Multiverse dies we will let them go," he added with a voice filled with candid joy.

    Harry held on slightly tighter to Superbia's scruff of the neck. "You should let me do the talking."

    "That's fine," Superbia said. "I'll do the mind-raping."

    Harry's feet landed on soft moist ground which, considering the smell, couldn't be anything else but manure. Superbia landed on his back inside a big pile of it, and yet as he hastily rolled to the side and got back up, the dung didn't even cling to his cloak.

    "There will be no mind-reading," Harry said.

    "Of course I'm not going to read his mind," Superbia replied, blinking slowly as if not understanding where the problem was. "I'm going to rape his mind. Tear it to shreds. Turn it to mush. After all, he is one of father's enemies. He has killed other Planeswalkers, so he must be killed in turn."

    Harry sighed and waved a hand in front of Superbia. The next second, the Sliver found himself turned to stone.

    "You wait here," Harry said as he began to walk across the long lines of grapevines towards the beautiful looking castle that overlooked the entirety of the fields all around it. The banner of the Assassins fluttered on the castle walls.

    There even was a moat surrounding the castle itself, but before it, there was a small metallic mail box with a red button beneath it to ring if one wanted to talk with those inside the castle.

    Harry pushed the button.

    "Hello Harry," the voice that came through the speaker was rich and suffused with the thrumming power of youth and good looks, even though it was only the voice, it would have been enough to make any woman and even a lot of men feel their knees wobble from just how fascinating it was. "What can I do for you, my friend?"

    "You don't happen to have the Tyrant inside your castle, do you?" Harry asked.


    "...I'll lower the drawbridge and you can explain what's been going on while I hid here," Ezio said as the drawbridge began to slowly lower. "Also, I have a bottle of red wine that I'm sure you'll enjoy."

    Harry smiled.

    He ordered the wine of his bar from him, after all.
     
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    • shadenight123 said:
    "It's strange," Harry said. "Why is it that he needs to give you energy?"

    "So we don't go eating everything and everyone," Superbia said. "We could survive by consuming meat and flesh, or by draining mana from Leylines. That would bring exponential destruction to the Multiverse however, and father doesn't want that. So he sustains us through his might and power, allowing us to grow at a sustainable rate."
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    I wonder what Harry think of this?
     
    One issue I have with this story is that it is constantly showing Planeswalkers as the highest scale, when basic logic and quite a few situations in canon show them to be a different scale. Yes, Oldwalkers have infinite mana. But that is mana with restrictions on rate of use, restrictions on what can be done with it and restrictions in who uses it.

    Oldwalkers can create and destroy Planes. This says nothing about power and everything about how they effect the Blind Eternities. They can survive anything that doesn't break their souls. That's an esoteric ability with no meaning for how much power they have. Saying they are bullshit for their abilities to screw with the setting elements of M:tG and having esoteric things that make them theoretically more vulnerable to some types of attack says nothing about how they stack up to other settings at all.

    Saying that displayed abilities of Oldwalkers makes them able to casually no-sell most sci-fi settings is not only nonsense, but also flatly non-canon. There is a line that specifically gives a scale for Oldwaker power. Boiling oceans. Freyalise said that she could boil oceans in her prime. Not vaporize a world, boil an ocean. This was in the Time Spiral block books, the same source that gave us the Mending in the first place, as in non-debatable canon. It also gives us Oldwalker decay from Freyalise stating that she had gotten weaker, but that may be Rift related issues.

    Again, Oldwalkers are a different scale, not higher up on any other setting's scales. So, a more canon compliant version of this story would see Nicol Bolas stomped flat by Slivers with Saiyan and Kryptonian traits, or some other sort of high end biological bullshit from outside M:tG canon. Or Shade would not even bother with Ajani because Nicol Bolas is packing relativistic speeds where nobody but Shade can hope to catch up.

    And that's not mentioning that if Shade were really thinking about it clearly, he should have several orders of magnitude more power than Bolas can comprehend because he can grab a few octillion planets of power from timeline hopping Slivers camping out in a few dozen 40k Planes. Not to mention the Warp of all those timelines... Shade has a LOT more mana available thanks to the auto expand of Slivers over Bolas needing manual gathering.

    Another canon violation: Common time travel for Planeswalkers. Yes, a lot of settings have it, but in M:tG actual time travel is borderline impossible. Teferi spend decades, if not centuries, of his life trying to find a non-Karn form of time travel and failed. In canon, you have Time Spiral's multiversal breakdown based time travel, Karn's Silver Golem time travel and whatever Ugin did, which may have been related to Eldrazi reality warping. That's basically it for major time travel. There might be a few extra ones in more minor stories, but for main storylines there are only those three.
     
    Morphic Tide said:
    One issue I have with this story is that it is constantly showing Planeswalkers as the highest scale, when basic logic and quite a few situations in canon show them to be a different scale. Yes, Oldwalkers have infinite mana. But that is mana with restrictions on rate of use, restrictions on what can be done with it and restrictions in who uses it.

    Oldwalkers can create and destroy Planes. This says nothing about power and everything about how they effect the Blind Eternities. They can survive anything that doesn't break their souls. That's an esoteric ability with no meaning for how much power they have. Saying they are bullshit for their abilities to screw with the setting elements of M:tG and having esoteric things that make them theoretically more vulnerable to some types of attack says nothing about how they stack up to other settings at all.

    Saying that displayed abilities of Oldwalkers makes them able to casually no-sell most sci-fi settings is not only nonsense, but also flatly non-canon. There is a line that specifically gives a scale for Oldwaker power. Boiling oceans. Freyalise said that she could boil oceans in her prime. Not vaporize a world, boil an ocean. This was in the Time Spiral block books, the same source that gave us the Mending in the first place, as in non-debatable canon. It also gives us Oldwalker decay from Freyalise stating that she had gotten weaker, but that may be Rift related issues.

    Again, Oldwalkers are a different scale, not higher up on any other setting's scales. So, a more canon compliant version of this story would see Nicol Bolas stomped flat by Slivers with Saiyan and Kryptonian traits, or some other sort of high end biological bullshit from outside M:tG canon. Or Shade would not even bother with Ajani because Nicol Bolas is packing relativistic speeds where nobody but Shade can hope to catch up.

    And that's not mentioning that if Shade were really thinking about it clearly, he should have several orders of magnitude more power than Bolas can comprehend because he can grab a few octillion planets of power from timeline hopping Slivers camping out in a few dozen 40k Planes. Not to mention the Warp of all those timelines... Shade has a LOT more mana available thanks to the auto expand of Slivers over Bolas needing manual gathering.

    Another canon violation: Common time travel for Planeswalkers. Yes, a lot of settings have it, but in M:tG actual time travel is borderline impossible. Teferi spend decades, if not centuries, of his life trying to find a non-Karn form of time travel and failed. In canon, you have Time Spiral's multiversal breakdown based time travel, Karn's Silver Golem time travel and whatever Ugin did, which may have been related to Eldrazi reality warping. That's basically it for major time travel. There might be a few extra ones in more minor stories, but for main storylines there are only those three.
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    Well, think of it this way:

    1) The Rifts' nature is the Multiverse is tied to the Planeswalkers' powers in some way. When they go, so too do their powers drop considerably. If Dominaria is entirely covered in Rifts, the opposite could pretty much be true.

    2) As was shown in the first meeting with Bolas, Shade is holding back by reinforcing a Shard that holds Dominaria's rift-filled form. As he says, he is the only one, barring perhaps Bolas, who could keep it up. This is why he doesn't present a threat to the Dragon. He does have more mana, but most of it is spent in keeping the Shard from shattering, releasing the full consequence of a Rift-Apocalypse.

    Bolas also gains power from other means. Great scenes of strife/battle and whatnot seem to be capable of empowering him, and it's also been shown in the final showdown that Bolas possess the ability to disrupt the Hive's psionics, rendering each Sliver a singular entity and thus...well, making them easy pickings.

    3) The only time-travel that was effectively done is the one that is the prelude of it all, sending Shade back twenty thousand years. The rest is either a great show of renewal/restoration magic or the Slivers' natural ability to snap and see countless realities as they form, and then as they break. (It's the flavor text of one of the Slivers' cards, btw)
    "With a twitch of its muscles, its timeline forks. Then, just as quickly, its two selves reintegrate. Causality, strangely, seems not to mind."
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    Hope I answered your doubts, though in the end if I did twitch canon powers somewhere, as long as the twitching is self-consistent (that is to say, both sides use it) then I reckon it should be fine. That's my opinion though.
     
    shadenight123 said:
    Hope I answered your doubts, though in the end if I did twitch canon powers somewhere, as long as the twitching is self-consistent (that is to say, both sides use it) then I reckon it should be fine. That's my opinion though.
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    There's nothing wrong with going off the canon-rails.

    Smashing into stuff. Destroying homes and families.

    To make an enjoyable story.
     
    Wait, so everyone wanted to kill the Tyrant despite him keeping two apocalypses in check that would've hit the multiverse the moment he died? Did they just not know or are they yolo'ing?
     
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    Syn0 said:
    Wait, so everyone wanted to kill the Tyrant despite him keeping two apocalypses in check that would've hit the multiverse the moment he died? Did they just not know or are they yolo'ing?
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    They are planeswalkers, YOLO is their standard operating procedure. Except it isn't really YOLO because they are functionally immortal since the only real threats to them, aka other planeswalkers, where mostly kept in check by Shade.
    As for the Dominiara problem, im pretty sure that only Bolas, Shade, and Shades hive even knew about the rifts in the first place or at least they where the only ones who knew what would happen when the rifts are let out.
     
    I am not really on the Planswalker Terminology but since the Phyrexia and Eldrazi are dead.

    Having Shade Dying would mean all the Planeswalker's being hit with the mother of all Nerf Bat's to them right?

    Doesn't seem to be that much of a big consequence.
    Edited.
    ... Oh yeah his Hive to wouldn't be to happy about it would they?
    Edited Again.
     
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    Hadiz said:
    I am not really on the Planswalker Terminology but since the Phyrexia and Eldrazi are dead.

    Having Shade Dying would mean all the Planeswalker's being hit with the mother of all Nerf Bat's to them right?

    Doesn't seem to be that much of a big consequence.
    Edited.
    ... Oh yeah his Hive to wouldn't be to happy about it would they?
    Edited Again.
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    Not exactly. The time rifts of Dominaria, which Shade is suppressing, are actually threatening to initiate a chain reaction where they continuously open new rifts throughout the entire Multiverse, eventually destabilizing it and probably destroying it.

    In canon they tried and succeeded in closing these rifts - this act was called the Great Mending - which led however to all Planeswalker Sparks losing tremendous amounts of power and abilities. No more shapeshifting, no more shit-tons of mana, no more immortality. The only thing Sparks could do post-mending was to allow one to walk the Blind Eternities, but even that takes far more effort than it once took. A process that once took merely a thought now suddenly requires great amounts of effort.

    So if Shade dies and Dominaria gets lose, either somebody else needs to take over his spot or they need to seal the rifts, leading to the Great Mending and thus everybody getting a massive Nerf.
     
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