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Aberrant: Children of Quantum Fire - [Interlude-Coraline#1] Grand Tour


Karren Gaunt

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Time: The morning after Rainbow Room III: Mixing Colors, 21 March, 2027

Coraline took a deep breath and took a final look around the forest clearing in which she crouched. She had asked Norman to meet her here, the clearing where her parents had died to protect her seven years ago. Someone had pulled down the cabin where she had spent the last six months of her life before meeting Uncle Shen, time and the elements conspiring to erase any other signs that here was where her world had been shattered, even to her senses. That fact tinged her features with melancholy, but affirmed her choice to start her trip here as well. You had to know where you came from to move forward. Know where you came from but be prepared to let go of it. A river didn’t regret leaving a particular bend of streambed after all, even as it was flavored by the sediment from that bend.

Norman was gone already, blinking ahead to the first stop on what he had charmingly called their ’Grand Tour’ of the solar system, promising to wait for her arrival on top of Olympus Mons. He really did make her feel better just by being around, a warm, supportive glow that made her want to be better than she was.

So she’d follow, not by cheating physics but by trying to ignore them all together.

The young metamorph released the handful of Canadian topsoil and pine needles she held in her fist as she stood, letting it hit the ground even as she left the chains of gravity behind. Her features blurred as she kicked her nervous system into high gear, added another magnitude of speed to her potential thrust with a silent request to her node. A final dopplered laugh and she sonic boomed into vertical flight, transitioning into silent flight as an angel of pure light only as she cleared the atmosphere on an arcing route to Mars at a speed few novas could dream of reaching under their own power.

But Coraline wasn’t done yet and for the first time she heeded the strange new whisper of her node that had started humming at her around these speeds. Absurdly fast became impossibly fast as quantum bound photons became quantum bound tachyons, invisible to the universe as Coraline crowed pure joy to an unhearing creation. She arced over the plane of the solar system at nine times the speed of light, reveling in being nova for the sake of being nova as her senses magnified to take in the heavily distorted view of the solar system from the other side of relativity.

She actually missed Mars on her first pass, fliting through the planet before she realized what happened and having to loop around to find the spot where Norman waited. Coraline tried to stop an artful twenty feet from the waiting Terat but couldn’t slow down at all, passing through the planet *again*. Okay. That was annoying.

Third pass, she applied quantum from her node to convert back from tachyons into photons, aiming for the same showy arrival. That didn’t work out either, the metamorph plunging intangibly through the rust red surface of the planet to her further chagrin, able to decelerate only by inches after she was miles deep in Martian rock. Coraline Boehm then made her way up to where Norman hopefully still waited, humbled somewhat by the very physics she sought to bypass but still exultant and flickering through every color of the visible spectrim and beyond.

Whew, okay. Flight, Enhanced Movement, Hyperflight, Lightspeed on, E-M Vision, and then Lightspeed off. 62 out of 75 Quantum left

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Welcome, beautiful Coraline, to the greatest mountain on Mars, the mighty Olympus Mons, or in other words to Barsoom. Norman sent to her telepathically, as he walked toward her, she would note he was wearing the same thing as John Carter did in the Barsoom series, and she felt a telepathic invitation to join him, to shift into the outfit to match his. Care to wear the outfit of the natives? Of course, Norma was also showing that he enjoyed that series that Bombshell played the character of Dejah in, which might bring to mind participating in the modeling shoot with her a few weeks ago, and his mental tone was teasing, allowing her to know that she could chose not too of course.

Mars had a very slight atmosphere, but her sense of perception was strong enough that she could actually smell things, even in such a slight atmosphere, like the dust in the air, and the frozen water that could be smelled by someone with her degree of mega-perception. The planet had a migratory nova population of a 1/2 dozen, as well as several nova's who actually lived here these days, some of them even folks considering the red planet with regards to transforming, but non of them were nearby, though both Norman and Coraline would be able to tell if they approached, non were within a 100 miles at the moment.

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Coraline actually hadn't watched or read much of the series in question, learning about it via the odd episode or two her siblings might have watched back on the island. So it took her a second to catch his reference, photonic form hanging there with it's 'head' cocked to one side in curiousity before reclaiming the nature and presense of flesh, a wry grin on her face. She flitted forward and molded herself against him, looking up into his eyes. 'Well, if you're curious, yes, I can go much faster than the speed of light, but I need to work on my stopping after turning it off. Aparently my node can only do so much of the impossible at one time,' her mental voice offered equally teasing, gifting him second hand glimpses of the universe from the other side of c with the control of years of practise working a link that was not her own, exultant.

Her eufiber shifted as she spoke into his head, becoming not one of the overly-bejeweled bikinis of the show in question, but a clinging two-piece top and long skirt outfit in yellows and reds that offered just a more mystery to the eye. Coraline wasn't going to give him his naked muse that easily. 'So which direction do we start off in first, Norman?' she asked, indicating the horizon in all direction with a graceful spin on her axis midair after gifting him a gentle kiss. A joy and antisipation in seeing and touching and smelling everything there was see bubbled in her eyes, danced along the movement of her limbs.

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He enjoyed the shifting of her clothing into the outfit that matched his, but was still short of being actually too revealing, not that he couldn't try to convince her, but he preferred for things to develop naturally, rather then forcing them to unfold the way he wanted them to, unless it was necessary to do otherwise. How about a run down one of the canals, or a visit to the poles, maybe a jump out to Phobos and Deimos after a bit, both of those sound like fun, or we could visit a martian cavern, I'm sure there are some caves here within this mountain. Wherever they went he was fairly sure it would be fun and interesting for both of them.

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'Or how about all of the above?' Coraline countered before leading the way north at a speed just faster than Norman could readily reach, starting off their first day with a teasing chase that kicked up little clouds of dust in their wake as they skimmed over the surface and around martian rock formations. They dove through dry sea beds and ancient canyons. Took in meteor impact impact craters. Flitted around the planet's pair of potato-shaped moons and reveled in a sunrise that made rust-red hills light up with blood. Visited with a fellow nova tourist who warned them that Venus wasn't as interesting as it sounded. Spoke in images and emotionally charged thoughts over a link just for the two of them. Spent a final few hours watching the Earth rise through enhanced senses while she moved through her daily katas and he etched her image into a sheet of metal from their packs.

The next day was Venus, and it turned out rather exciting actually if in a slightly monotonous way, a super-heated hell world boiling in it's own heat, upper atmosphere alive with acidic thunderstorms that reboiled into mist before ever coming close to the ground. Coraline reveled through this world as a mote of light, feeding Norman sounds and images of a world wracked into a hellish stasis, a thousand craters dotted amid spiderweb cracks and pancake volcanos she wished they had a camera that could survive the heat and pressure to get. The pair decided to cut the visit a little short, ending the day at Mercury.

Fire and ice, the planet proved, dotted with delicate ice crystals on one side and glaringly backlit on the other, a small dense world lockstepped with it's parent and providing Coraline with some choice stones to carve out her memories of Venus and the trip so far. Norman teasingly suggested they visit the sun next, earning a chuckling denial from the young metamorph and timeless hours of dancing to the magnetic roar of the sun playing off the Mercurian poles instead, a melody as chaotic and demanding of improvisation as any they'd heard. Both young nova strove to out do the other and not really sure who won before they collapsed in an estatic daze across from one another in an ancient impact crater. Cora gazed at Norman and voicing over their link, a broad grin on her face, 'I think I love you, Norman Holden. I truly do.'

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It was midway the next day between Jupiter and Mars, whizzing past scattered asteroids that had long ago lost their chance to be a planet, that Coraline had the idea to test out Uncle Shen's warning, altering her course ever so slightly to come within range of a tumbling asteroid she spotted out of the corner of one eye. She *pushed* outward with her node, gifting her superluminal momentum to the rock and experiencing the most unpleasant sensation she had ever felt, her tachyonic form crackling out of existence for a mind-rending fraction of a second that sent her tumbling off course, thoughts reeling, but not enough to miss the spectacular results of her action. The rock was gone, and in it's place was a fading sphere of light and heat from the total conversion of her target into energy.

If she had been flesh and blood, she would have been vaporized. If she had been in her photonic form, she would have been shredded into part of the wavefront behind her. As it was, Coraline had to shake her head at the realization she had a destructive ability on par with anything her siblings could pull. Who knew what it'd do on a target on Earth? Not something she was going to test any time soon. Not lightly anyway.

She still had her vaguely dazed expression when arriving near the icy surface of Europa where Norman waited, timing her deceleration to appear in the sky above her companion gliding to a halt near him with the grace of experience and returning to captivating flesh and blood with a rueful smile on her face that lost any trace of ruefulness as she took in the looming giant of a planet filling the sky above them with bands of racing gas, the trace of thunderstorms, and most temptingly, the great crimson vortex of Jupiter's endless storm. Oh, Coraline *wanted* to ride those winds.

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Jupiter's magnetosphere was extremely powerful, so much so that it was dangerous to those who didn't have protection when one was as close as Europa, but both nova's were fully adapted to this environment. Additionally, the Norman's control over magnetism could produce much greater results, but then, he was very powerful in his control over magnetism anyway. So, lovely lady, where shall we go next, a visit to all of the various moons of Jupiter, the vulcanic Io, or the massive Ganymede? Perhaps a dive under the ice here to visit the depths of Europa? Or are you looking for a dive into the big giant himself? He nodded toward the massive gas giant above them.

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  • 3 weeks later...

'Yes. To all of them. But first the great red spot. To see if I can ride it. Take me there and rescue me if I get in trouble I can't handle?' Coraline asked under the reflected light of the Solar system's largest failed star, happy and excited to be sharing all this with him. The young Terat gave her a looong look and then nodded, taking her hand and flashing along magnetic currents to their destination.

Twenty minutes later, they reappeared on the icy surface of Europa. Norman looked none the worse for wear, if you discounted the concerned look on his face at the state of the young metamorph in his arms. She looked like had been struck by lightning, her hair fritzing out in all directions and slightly burned. She stank of swiftly evaporating organic compounds, a rich mixture of the best hydrocarbons an eternal storm could cook up and trap. Quantum still discharged invisibly along her limbs, knitting burns and injuries up into whole tissue.

She also had the biggest grin on her face, an adrenilien fueled excitement only spoiled the slightest bit by the conclusion to her brief adventure in Jupiter diving, twirling free of his grip to spin in the air. "That was *amazing*! Next time, I'll know that lightning bolts can come travel downward in places like this and totally dodge it the..," She crowed, or rather, attempted to crow to the vacum before she caught sight of Norman's expression and looked abashed.

'Sorry, Norman. I'm a little distracted after an all out flight,' she sent along their link, touching down on the ice again, 'Thank you for saving me before I fell any deeper.'

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  • 2 months later...

Norman responded by kissing her, a deep, sensual and intense kiss, one that let his feelings and emotions with regards to the woman in his arms out and matters continued from here, getting more heated as they exchanged a few telepathic words and emotions between them, and soon enough they were making love under the light of Jupiter upon the icy surface... before their tour though the solar system continued.. and they made love several more times in exotic locations during their tour, floating in the rings of saturn, and upon the surface of the dwarf planet eris..

End of Thread

XP: 2 standard, 2 Nova

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