Comic 1169 - Mess with auras, listen to CDs
Posted on 24th Jan 2019, 5:38 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
Average Rating: 5 (4 votes) /
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Author Notes:
"Well," Michelle begins, "at least we know there ain't no other rats runnin' around out here in the middle o' nowhere. I'd hate to think they could come bustin' outta the bathroom walls at any second."
You also conduct a quick test--first by getting the phone number of the burner phone you tossed into the red. It... takes a bit of work, as you have to make little not-really-finger-like appendages to cycle through the phone's information. Once you have the number, though, you ask Caius if he can call it.
"Uh, sure," he replies. He... kind of squints, and tilts his head a little--and the phone in the red begins to vibrate.
"It's ringin'," Caius states. You nod, and confirm--Caius's phone can reach to the inside of the red, which means if you (or anyone else) ever gets stuck in there, Caius can be reached as well.
"Huh," Caius replies. "So I can call into tha red, and into... uh... wherever tha tradesmen are."
"The red's some kinda pocket dimension," Fuse points out, "and we're still not even sure where the tradesmen are. ...Probably another dimension, though. I know it's been said, but--damn, that's a good phone."
Caius chuckles. "Right? Ya even get used to it bein' in your brain after a while."
You ask Fuse if he can use his pyrokinesis real quick. You're... mildly curious how it affects his aura.
"Sure," he replies. He looks around for a moment for something to light on fire, before settling on some blank sheets of paper. He sets them on the floor. You watch his aura closely.
As the papers burst into flames, there's... definitely something happening. His aura becomes more erratic, flailing outward, not specifically at the papers but definitely in that direction--not touching them, per se, but almost leaning toward them. The motion of the energy is hard to describe--something between a shudder and... just... kind of whipping that way. It feels very imprecise, like a jerk or a convulsion.
Fuse kills the flames after a second, and again, his aura reacts--in a very similar fashion, in fact, though the details are far from identical. It also seems to be a slower, more drawn out sort of... jerking around, when he subdues his flames compared to when he makes them. You're not sure what to make of it.
Thinking about auras does make you curious about something else, though. Your electricity is biological--and you can convert biological components into others. That should include your aura.
You attempt to pull something out of the red via your aura. After a few moments of straining... nothing happens, though your aura does shift and sort of... pull itself in a bit. It may need something more tangible to work as a proper entrance.
Just to be sure, you convert some of the electricity in your aura into blood. This does work, though it's rather odd to see the blood just... kind of appear in the air like that. You pull more bioelectricity out of that blood, focusing on having it resemble the energy in your aura. It mostly works, though a few sparks kick off, and it takes a second for the energy to adjust and fit into place--you're still a tad inexperienced, in the big scheme of things, when it comes to energy manipulation.
"Err," Dr. Finch narrows his gaze, staring up at the blood you're just kind of... floating around. "Don't you normally require a container of some fashion in order to levitate blood...?"
Well, yeah, but it is in a container. It's inside
uhhh
your aura.
"Oh, shit," Fuse remarks.
Okay, maybe you hadn't really registered that part. You are, indeed, manipulating blood through the air, within the container of... well, technically yourself. Sort of.
Dr. Finch's expression briefly seems to short circuit. "The... the the excess output of your body's natural electricity... counts as a container for purposes of..." He shakes his head, almost going to adjust his glasses before he realizes he's still holding a CD in each hand. "Well then. That... potentially changes a great deal."
Liz holds her hands up for a moment in an unenthusiastic shrug. "If your powers require a container and your aura counts, why didn't this work before?"
"She didn't know about auras," Fuse says simply. "Couldn't feel them until recently."
"Yeah," Michelle adds. "Blondie works on some real power of belief type shit."
"...That's really stupid," Liz replies.
"I mean--" Michelle grins, and shrugs. "Kinda, yeah? We don't make the rules, though. Cosmic god stuff."
"The rules, such as they are," Dr. Finch begins, "by and large tend to be insane at worst, alien and irrational to a human perspective at best. Perception and understanding on the part of the user have consistently been a component in what Mine's been capable of up to this point, however."
"And her mom," Caius adds.
"Yeah," Michelle agrees with a nod, "her mom did some goofy stuff with perception, too."
You look at Mom's red. The giant mouth on the wall doesn't say anything, but it does seem to be smiling a bit wider than normal--which reminds you of what they told you before. "What is a container? What does it mean to be inside?"
You convert the free floating blood back into latent electricity. There's... a lot going through your mind, at this point--the realization of auras changes... a lot, possibly, in regard to what your hard limits actually are.
Before you get carried away with that, though, you want to test those CDs. You walk over, and Dr. Finch hands them both to you--the one fairly plain disc, and the one heavily decorated, somewhat alien looking disc. You want to make sure they're not dangerous before everyone else listens to them--so you opt to play them somewhere else.
"Our Mars base should no longer be occupied," Dr. Finch suggests, "and has computers that should be capable of playing the discs."
"If you ain't back in like fifteen minutes, though," Michelle says, "we're comin' up there after ya."
Michelle waits outside in case the bunker doors need to be flipped, while you head to Bunker D. You remember there was an office here, with a computer Fuse hacked to bypass the password lock--so you head that direction.
You walk into the little office. The only other sound in the room is the slow mechanical inhale and exhale of the air cycling device.
You sit down at the desk, and pop in Dr. Finch's weird, fancy disc, first.
The old computer takes a little while to get going, but eventually loads its music playing program.
The audio, at first, is... discordant and strange. You can't even really describe it as music, it's just... a bunch of odd sounds, many from instruments you can't identify.
After listening to it for a few minutes, though, it starts to blend together. The nature of the track doesn't change, you just... start to hear the music. Your mind steadily begins to recognize the flow of it, and from there, you start to realize how brilliantly composed it is.
You feel it--the odd signals your brain is trying to send, and the demand for more dopamine. You fight it, at first, but as you listen to the song longer... you stop seeing the point. You let it take you,
and take you it does.
It's like you melt into your seat... and begin to rise.
The walls of the room push back, and the ceiling drifts away. You follow it, pulled gently into outer space.
You're taken on a journey, the music guiding you--you can perceive it, almost touch it, as it carries you through the cosmos, beyond worlds you've never seen before.
You arrive... somewhere. You can't even begin to recognize it, or describe it--you can't bring yourself to focus on any detail for more than a moment. It simply... doesn't matter. Maybe the architecture doesn't make sense, or maybe you're just not concerned about it. You're in a palace, or a temple--somewhere nice, somewhere warm, somewhere meant for important people.
Out beyond, two golden moons hang in a swirling bronze-black sky. One of them is extremely close.
There's... others here, with you. They're not human, but again, you can't muster up the energy to care who or what they are. All that matters is that they're happy, and you're happy. They're honored and excited by your presence--
"Blondie."
You are ripped quickly, but not painfully, back into your seat on Mars. You shake off a slight numbness as you glance toward the door, where Michelle is standing. You stop the music.
"You been quiet for fifteen," Michelle says. "You alright?"
You feel a little light headed, but everything's going back to normal quickly enough. You try to describe your experience, but... it was like a dream, and all the details are quickly fleeing your memory. You definitely felt like you were in another world, though.
"Weird," Michelle replies. "Were you gone, or like--?"
"It felt like when you go to meet the tradesmen," Red tells you. "You were here, but you... weren't."
You pop the disc out, and put in the other one--Caius's COMBAT #11.
What begins to play isn't a song, though--after a couple of seconds of only background noise and shuffling, you hear a young woman's voice begin to speak. The audio is... not of exceptional quality. It's clear this CD wasn't made by professionals, more likely recorded in someone's house. She also has a very strong accent--you're not sure where she's from, but it doesn't sound like this country.
"Okay, so-- hi, this is our eleventh attempt at this. It's getting better! This one, um, this one's actually more effective than the... the um... previous ten. It is stable! We've tried it several times, and no one's exploded, and it's not painful. So, cool! Right? We nailed that part. It is... um... pretty big, though. Don't try it in tight spaces, you can really wreak havoc on your drywall. As with any of these rituals, um... no using it for bad stuff. Okay? This is for fighting fascists, and um... stuff like that. If you're using our spells for hurting innocent people or... r-robbing convenience stores or something, we WILL find you. Or, um, she'll find you, and that might be worse. Gods have rules, okay? Even the, um, nice ones. Okay, so..."
The voice then proceeds to describe a ritual, including outlining--in detail--what the symbols placed upon the body should look like, where they should be drawn, and what the words of activation are. She emphasizes a few times that the symbols don't have to be perfect--there's a few contingencies and redundancies in the language used, so a few poorly drawn circles won't turn into a disaster. You don't recognize some of the terms she's using, however--you suspect following the audible instructions may require some basic amount of familiarity with magic, and the symbols/traditions often employed therein.
These guys used a CD instead of paper but otherwise they could be the same guys.
After we figure out what this thing actually *does,* it would be super awesome if we could get in touch with this chick and whoever else she's referring to when she says "we." She sounds like she knows about *us,* at least, and we're also very into the idea of fighting fascists, so I feel like we'd have some common ground. Maybe they'd even be able to provide some advice for fighting Nilpenter.
Also... we may need to see if we can figure out a way to learn if anyone IS misusing this CD, and go scare them into not doing that any more :P
In any scenario, we'd likely have to go through the information ritual with the Tradesmen, and though I can't track down the page precisely, I don't believe they like giving out information on their clients. It's bad for business.
The one major exception to all this is Caius' brain phone. It might he able to contact the ritual people just by willing it. That phone is reaching Grizwald levels of awesomeness: It's just. That. ****. Good.
I'm much less excited about trying to manipulate Fuse's aura while he's trying to light something on fire. DEFINITELY talk to him about this first, and if he's up for it have him abort if anything starts to feel dangerous.
I'd much rather come up with a way to allow Fuse to sense and manipulate his own aura to see if that would help him increase his own power levels.
Are we rested, refreshed, possibly energized from Dr Finch's disc? Or drained, with less focus and such...
He may have been affected by Nil riding the ritual as well - Mine was part of it and has a mental link to him - we should at least check up on him. If he was not, he may have an angle on Nil that we haven't thought of.
or before that, the planet's atmosphere is also a container, we can start there I guess
but yeah for now let's focus on the CD's, maybe when we info ritual, ask the tradesmen what's up with the weedCD that projected us to another planet. Something tells me that if we proceeded, we would've met an entity that would've helped us somehow (let's not test this before we ask the Tradesmen though, could be a bad idea) in the meantime, if the computer's music software has a runtime on how long some of these CD's are, we can see, without playing, how long the weedCD actually is
Because while Mine isn't the type to spend her life between the stars, an afternoon trip to another planet sounds like a nice date with Michelle to me.
I've been considering Liz to be kinda sorta like an aunt to Mine, too.
It's a big world out there, and all this goodwill means a lot.
... Wish she'd try to hug them before Michelle checked in.
Maybe next time.
"When we figure out a way to use our powers, how do we convert that into a ritual for others to use?"
Like some things seem strongly thematic, historically speaking... dark gods like their sacrifices, and tears of the innocent or blood of virgins seem to be things for some types as well, for example. Kinder ones often involve spoken words and mantras. If we can influence the ritual requirements, any ritual we design involving mine's powers should involve an honest desire to do good.
These rituals being created involving Mine's powers... The notes, CD, etc. all sound human in origin. I suspect creating rituals requires some link to deity in question. We've handed out a lot of blood vials over the time all this has been going on, and splattered a lot around too; so I'm guessing whoever the ritual creator is, has some of Mine's blood. We should probably do a quick sense of all of our blood locations - not just the vials, but any active other spots of blood too. We may find our mysterious ritual-maker, and then be able to portal in and say hello - which would probably help their research along as well as giving us access to more recent and better rituals sooner, especially if they team up with Pierce and Finch.
Instead of going ourselves we could send Blobbert first.
He just has such a winning smile. :)
I think I might disagree with the necessity of a direct link for some of the ritualwork; ex: Tradesman mediate a *lot* of our own ritualwork, without us having to directly interface with Nil or the like.