WhiteRain Posted December 6, 2013 Share Posted December 6, 2013 DISCLAIMER: This is a repost of the prior deleted RP. I thought to edit it to be less annoying, but the changes required to do that would basically gut the entire thing. so consider this an elseworlds story. Any resemblance to characters live or dead is entirely coincidental. Either way, it is my final RP. ,, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ,, “Everybody dreams. Every dream ends. ,, “Our dream ended as it always had to; with a cold awakening to the harsh light of morn, and bitter disappointment. ,, “I am Chang Zha-Yang, White Rain to some, and a spiritual leader to others. I am the second and final Divis of the Teragen, digger of its grave, and writer of its eulogy. “This is my final testament to the hopes we had, the battles we fought, and the future that we lost. With luck, this record will survive and be of use to somebody, somewhere, and if of no use, then I hope it will at least be of historical note. Let us at least not be forgotten. Surely we’ve earned that much. ,, “Hindsight is the all-powerful, final arbiter of wisdom. So with hindsight, allow me to recount the story of our final years. ,, “Our end came from the place it began, with the philosophy that gave us something approaching unity, and something approaching identity: Teras. We all got it wrong in the end. Even Mal, I think. ,, “My place in all of this has ever been the cynic and philosophical critic. I challenged all I knew and alienated most of them out of my sheer unwillingness to leave questions unasked. It will not be easy to live with. I can never know, even with my perceptions, whether I asked the right questions or – far worse – if I misunderstood the answers. ,, “Some will ask ‘where did it all go wrong?’ ,, “The children. It went wrong with the children. ,, “In our war with Utopia, begun by their sterilisation of our people, we soon realised we were outgunned. The idea that our nova brethren would flock to us when they realised what was being done to them proved to be the fancy of idealists and cretins. The one set were blinded by the dream of a nova society free of human interaction, and the attendant belief that all novas fundamentally wanted that; the other set… just blind. Both sets underestimated the intelligence and the loyalty of our nova brethren, and the entirely human capacity to accept circumstances that are not ideal in the hope of improving them through strife and effort. ,, “It is a sign, I think, that so many of us derided them for this simple nobility of spirit. I believe we lost that somewhere along the way. ,, “Let it also stand as damning truth that in the entirety of our unwinnable battle with Utopia, the only group which hurt them was the Aberrants. It was they, not us, who revealed the existence of Project Proteus. And when they did, all of our naïve hopes crumbled to ash. Exposing flaws in Utopia did not destroy it and send its adherents flocking to our banner. It just caused the nova adherents to redouble their efforts to make Utopia into what it claimed to be. ,, “Utopiate novas were outraged, of course, and some did come to the Teragen. But most accepted their apologies, as I had cautioned they might. And worse was what came next. ,, “Let us call them the mother-hunter wars. ,, “This was an absurdity, a five-way battle between five different factions, three of whom should technically have been on the same side and all of them so utterly blinded by arrogance and ideology that working together was unthinkable. These three blighted idiot pantheons were the Aberrants, those we can loosely call Shen’s Children… and us, the Teragen. ,, “And our opposition were Proteus, the adder in darkness, and Utopia, returning to its role as world heroes, ironically and sadly trying to protect the parents from its own twisted spawn. ,, “It is insane, even to me, that we were never able to find some compromise, some way to cooperate in all of that time. But we Terats never did compromise. Nor did I when I had the power to do so. Let those words be carved on my tombstone. ‘Here lies Chang Zha-Yang’ it will say, and in post-script, ‘She never compromised.’ ,, “Perhaps it would have been a better world if I had. ,, “There were casualties in these wars, really a series of ridiculous skirmishes wherein terrified fertile – and usually married – novas, desperately and futilely attempted to protect their baseline friends and families from the collateral damage of battles fought in their name. Neighbourhoods were flattened. Thousands died. And some of the children were lost. The motherhunter wars ended with the death of the first infant, with Proteus the victor. Everything after was just salt pouring into each other’s wounds, claws scrabbling at the edge of a precipice into which we were all falling, while Utopia buried all of us in negative propaganda. ,, “Let it stand that I stood against these actions from the beginning. It was wrong to seek to hoard the children as we did. It laid the groundwork for our ultimate failure. The Aberrants were right in the petty dispute between we ‘independents’. They sought from the beginning to get those parents away into seclusion, to let them start life anew. We sought to enrol them in our war. ,, “Our war. ,, “That was what it became, after all. We had nominal allies at first. There were occasional points of contact betwixt us and the Aberrants, a few desperate alliances, one or two collusions. But once Andre Corbin had revealed Proteus – with us running some protection to ensure that he succeeded – the Aberrants had no further issue with Utopia. As for Shen’s Children, I believe they viewed us as nothing more than an annoyance… to their disadvantage. Certainly they failed to accomplish their goals, from what little I have surmised about those goals. Like us they wished to destroy Proteus, but they had no interest in working with us to accomplish that, and no interest in trades of information. I believe they killed the leader of Proteus; an act so significant that the project head was replaced within one solar day, and the group went on as efficiently as it ever had. ,, “And so there we stood, truly alone against Utopia. For our warriors it was a glorious day. Finally they could disgorge years of bile and frustration before a public whose eyes were wide open to Utopia’s corruption. ,, “They lost. ,, “One by one our warriors fell. The child prodigy, Glory, destroyed us all but singlehandedly. Where she was not, Caestus Pax was. We bloodied Team Tomorrow, but never hurt those two lynchpins of public approval and Utopian propaganda. And the public, as time has shown, will never back a loser. ,, “Mal let it all happen. ,, “Mal, the most powerful nova to have ever lived, ostensible leader of the Teragen, allowed us to be struck down and pared away to ineffectuality. Everyone that has ever met Mal likes him. I like him. But I will never trust him again, should our paths meet. ,, “He began this. He started it all. And he let it all go to hell. ,, “If that sounds as if I am shunting the blame, banish the thought. But I do not want those key fools to escape history’s scathing. We should all be remembered, we fools, and learned from, so that nobody makes the mistakes we did. My own shameful role in the tale will come soon enough. ,, “Our situation was desperate. The children were the only answer we had. ,, “Glory was too powerful, too overwhelming. She rendered us ineffectual, invalidated us by her sheer power. Shen’s Children could individually have wiped out half of the Teragen if the mood took them. More than one could have destroyed the entire world. ,, “In short; things were out of control. ,, “I can never know if my suspicions were right, if Mal and Scripture placing themselves as sole fathers, with Bounty as sole mother, of all the Teragen’s children was as stupid, narcissistic, self-aggrandising and ultimately destructive to the cause as I believe it to have been. ,, “But perhaps I am absolutely right, and that was Mal’s intention all along. ,, “He taught the children Teras from birth. They lived it from the beginning. We all came to it flawed, we foolish novas. We were weighed down by our pasts, unable to ever quite step away and see what Teras really meant. ,, “Teras… it means to go your own way. Strip away the meditation, the power, and the changes; individuality is what lies at the heart of it. Go your own way; follow the dictates of your own quantum expression. Ignore all else. ,, “And there we were, playing war with the future of children, forgetting that we were not their parents, and our wars were not theirs to fight. ,, “That was our end. Not their action, but our reliance upon it, and our lack of insight into what their action would be. ,, “We gave birth to children more intelligent than us by far, more perceptive, more insightful, more brilliant than we could dream. And they saw through us, I think. They saw the future the Teragen offered. ,, “They declined our invitation. ,, “Puck broke it all. My protégé. ,, “I cannot say that he did not learn from me, and I am proud of him. He learned from me, ever the contrarian, that going his own way mattered more than pleasing his elders. And when he gained the power to walk between worlds… that is exactly what he did. ,, “Given the option, Puck’s option, the children chose to go their own way with him. They left, one and all, and in so doing adjudged us their parents inferior, inadequate to the purpose of guiding them. They went in search of their own battles to fight. ,, “This, then, is the summation of our fatal error. ,, “We terats fought not for ourselves, as Teras suggests, but for the children. We fought for some imagined future where we would all, ultimately, become normal, respectable members of society. All our struggles, all our battles, were born from anger at our infertility and the desire to be a true species, to be able to pass on our genetic code to those who would come after. We wanted to build a place to do that. We wanted to build a society of our own, where we would be normal. ,, “It is pathetic to re-read these words. To know that we betrayed ourselves so utterly. ,, “What is ‘after’ to beings that chase the burning torch of immortality? ,, “What worth have children to those whose own legacy is not yet writ? ,, “For all our introspection, all our posturing, we never asked ourselves that most fundamental of questions. Why are we even breeding at all? What is the point of it? ,, “Our rhetoric, in retrospect, was familiar. That should have been a sign of things to come. Maybe it was. Maybe that’s why the Mathematician retreated so early, why Mal – he has no claim to ‘Divis’ anymore – became so schizophrenic in his leadership. ,, “We fought so that our children would have a future, as if they could not forge a future for themselves. ,, “Some of us arrogantly assumed the children would take up our struggle. Win our battles. Many of us banked on it, as the years wore away our numbers and our sanity. ,, “Instead they decided it had nothing to do with them, and departed for the next world along. They were Terats. ,, “As the final Divis of the Teragen, the sadness and our ultimate failure, is mine to bear into eternity. The other terats; my anavasi, the casablancas, the shattered remnants of the pandaimonion, vigilance, the harvesters… all they have to question is their own failures. Many never had the grand perspective, the chance to affect things. They can be comforted by their own struggles, knowing they tried their best. ,, “But I, through process of elimination, through purity of ideal, was elevated beyond my station. With Mal retreated and the Teragen twice broken, first by Glory, and then by Puck’s departure along with the children and many adult terats that he called friends… I was the last man standing, as it were, the only one of the pantheon who had not suffered enormous setbacks or physical injury. ,, “I believe my wife is to blame for all of that. ,, “She is in chrysalis, but she will waken soon. I can hear it coming. ,, “Lucrezia could manipulate world events in a way I never could. If only she had been with me. If only I had not missed her so much. Maybe that was all of it, in the end. Maybe I could have been the leader we needed, if only I had not missed my wife so terribly, and if I’d had her delicate, manipulative touch to reshape the world at her whim. ,, “If, when you listen to this, you live in Changtopia… well… you already know what we did later. But I don’t know what we’ll be doing when she wakens, and my story is not over yet. ,, “Shen’s Children left not too long after Puck did. I believe they loved our world, but not enough to stay. Two at least remain in the solar system. One is currently terraforming other planets. Another has made a base on the moon, I believe, or Mars. We are on reasonable terms, and she is friendly with some of my closest friends. I don’t know if she’ll be back. ,, “I will not lie; I was disappointed by most of them. I met only two, but heard little of the others that impressed me. Their surrogate father seems to have done a terrible job of preparing them for the world, and a worse one of preparing the world for them. But then, perhaps he had Mal’s view, and always hoped they would depart for greener pastures. We do not know and never will. Shen is dead, and his secrets, taunting as they are, died with him. ,, “Circumstance gave Utopia the chance it needed to become heroes again. ,, “The details are vague. Some Terats were involved in what happened, but only on the sidelines. As wanted criminals, they could not get too close to the action. Some alien force attacked us, or attempted to. Glory, along with other space-capable Utopians, met them out in the deep black of space and crushed them. The footage of those battles, shot by one of the anavasi and a dear friend, has won all of the awards you could possibly imagine. How on earth she kept calm out there, while explosions rocked the emptiness and nuclear forces shattered ships on the backdrop of the boiling sun, I shall never know. ,, “In the meantime, in my role of Divis, I took on an old enemy. ,, “Caestus Pax. ,, “Mal defeated him, and so did I. ,, “Mal turned off his node. While I, unable to face the bully when he came for me, allowed myself to be arrested. I let the world see him for what he was. Public opinion will ever lie with the – in this case literally – tortured artist. ,, “Another dear friend, Sakura – shorthand for a much longer and more complicated name – did not take kindly to my imprisonment. If I can claim a genuine piece of glory for myself, it is that she considered me a true friend, and that she temporarily forsook her innocence and her pacifism to see me freed. If any measure can be taken of a leader it is in the people who gather round and believe in them. ,, “Pax did not take well to my breaking of his public image. Mal took his image as the world’s most powerful nova. As the hero. But it was I that cast Pax as the villain, as the jack-booted representative of the establishment that cannot bear artistic freedom, that seeks conformity and crushes independence. He became a character in my songs. I made him into the symbol of all that the world had witnessed, of all Andre Corbin said of ubiquitous Utopia, of all the dirty secrets everyone wanted to forget. ,, “The children loved that. ,, “For all of this gloating – for this was a victory for me – I would be dead if Glory had not come back in time to save me. But then… I knew she would. ,, “It is not my place to write the end of Pax’s story. He lives on, after a fashion. But the world’s shining knight lies broken, his shell cracked and bleeding. Part of me weeps for him. I have felt the same despair and know how heavily it weighs on the soul. But I am aware that he walked this inevitable path side by side with us. The Teragen and Caestus Pax were like great serpents coiled about one another, trapped in eternal conflict. We had to fall together. Without us he has no purpose. ,, “So here is to Pax, the enemy we deserved. ,, “In these final years I have become Divis and Mathematician both. I hear the future in whispers, and find myself writing sheet music instead of composing. When I write, I hear my songs, sung by me in the near-future, and simply note down what I perceive. ,, “It’s all quite eerie, really. ,, “I wish I could have proven my detractors wrong. But it’s too late for that now. ,, “So how have we left the world, we gods among men? ,, “Not much different than when we arrived upon it, in honesty. Sakura has retired to seclusion with Darion Mográine, another good friend of mine. They appear to have begun a hesitant romance during my imprisonment. I hope it has flourished over these last years. Both have seen too much suffering, and it’s time that the karmic wheel pays out for it. They contact me from time to time, but I rarely answer back these days. She is too good of heart and too easily drawn into these battles, and Darion is a charming sucker for duty, all too moral a man to leave a call to arms unanswered, no matter the cost to his own soul. ,, “Let her raise her children with a man that was once a father. Let them grow up in peace. Let them find their own causes. Let them live as we wanted the children to live all along. ,, “They will be nearing twenty, now. Perhaps we will see them soon, those three darling girls. ,, “For me, the world will always be my muse, friend and enemy. Though today I plant the Teragen’s gravestone, the battle goes on. Teras will not die with the organisation. I may not be Divis in name after today, but I will keep that belief system alive and I will spread it as far and wide as I can. But from now on we all fight it our own way. We will fight and fail and fall or thrive as terats should; alone. Let there be no more grand alliances, no more schemes for power over all Novas. Let us stand with our close friends and lovers and none other, and shape our own corners of the world to our own devising. ,, “And if that makes us weak, if that makes us too easy to pick off… so be it. This was the sword we picked up. ,, “The prospects are not terrible. ,, “Project Utopia are on good behaviour thanks to Glory, another child of the future, but one who has chosen to reshape our world instead of finding her own. There are none in this world to oppose her, now. ,, “I hope Glory lives up to her name, and that one day we will not all be bowed underneath her wing, praying for gods that walk among us, forgetting that we long since drove them away to walk elsewhere, among more fitting company. ,, “But Project Proteus still remains. For all her power, Glory has not crushed that organisation. ,, “No longer attached to Utopia like a suckling parasite, it writhes and grows in the dark corners of the earth, forever perfecting the techniques they’ll need to bring us under heel for good and all. ,, “They were the wisest, those quiet leaders. ,, “Proteus survives. ,, “The Aberrants survive. ,, “We lambasted them for years, those Aberrants, called them fools and cowards, refused their occasional extended hand and took umbrage when they refused ours. Yet in the shadows they still remain, untouched by the events that have gutted the Teragen and handed absolute victory to Utopia. ,, “Those of us who remain militant have nowhere to go. Shrapnel and her idiots are little better than petty terrorists now, easy photo-ops for Glory and her new, revitalised Team Tomorrow. Geryon, still admirably leading Vigilance, has a little less to do than before. He likes to pop up on television and let Glory know he’s watching her, like an overbearing uncle. James was always one of our brightest minds. He knows the future is hers for now. But she’s looked the other way for him once or twice. ,, “Glory has come to me twice in recent months. I believe there are the bones of an olive branch being extended towards me. Perhaps I will accept, and see what she envisions for me. I believe that Pax’s fall has left her without guidance, without a parental figure. It may be she seeks that in me. I have a reputation for wisdom that I have not earned. Still… I do miss Puck. It will be nice to have someone to teach, to watch them grow until they surpass me. ,, “But that is the future. And if you are reading this you already know what has happened to me, where I stand. You do, I say, because whatever happens I refuse to be forgotten. ,, “And so, in hindsight, that final arbiter of wisdom, you stand as the judge of my decisions. I hope I made some good ones.” ,, -Chang Zha-Yang, Divis, November 20th, 2046 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteRain Posted December 6, 2013 Author Share Posted December 6, 2013 Chang rose. The chair that had been shaped to her form contracted and flowed back into her buttocks. The speakers clicked on the terminal, and the green light that indicated recording winked out. She pressed a button to upload the data onto the OpNet. It would enter a secluded corner of the OpNet, while a secondary hardcopy would be buried in a time capsule, in a place of Sakura’s choosing. In twenty years, assuming the OpNet lived that long, the speech would be released into the general OpNet and go viral inside twenty four hours. ,, She felt an irrepressible sadness. The Teragen’s dissolution fell to her, in the end, an executive decision that had to be made no matter the opposition. The snake had been decapitated. She saw no point in endless thrashing about. ,, Her speech here meant nothing to the other Terats. She had told those who needed to know in person, and stood ironclad against their objections, insults, threats, and in one case, congratulations. Count Orzais always had been a reasonable nova. ,, Another organisation would rise from the ashes, she suspected. Her call for them all to face their foes alone would be ignored. The advice was impractical. But those practical thinkers, calling themselves Terats, would fall from the path one by one. Orzais was one of the few that could walk the practical path. It seemed that was his personal expression of quantum. ,, Chang saw this as her final, desperate attempt to guide the Teragen stalwarts on the proper path. They will call me coward and traitor, she thought, nodding. It did not even arouse emotion in her. She felt so tired of it all. Nineteen years in the saddle brought very little but pain and headaches. ,, She stood in the basement of what had once been the headquarters of the Anavasi, the hidden place where Lucrezia had been in chrysalis all these years, so long that it seemed she might never emerge. But after all of this time she would finally come out. ,, Lucrezia, her body reshaped into a large, shining oval of semi-solid latex supported on a plinth of the same material, stood silent in an alcove on the far wall. ,, But the future rang in Chang’s ears. Her wife’s questions echoed back from time soon to come, and Chang drank them in. She’d missed that voice for so long. Just hearing it in whispers brought her to arousal and soothed her at the same time. ,, A sound touched her ears, in the here and now. ,, The perfect oval bulged outward, as if a face were pressing into it from within. Lucrezia’s perfect lips formed and parted. She uttered her first gasp in twenty years. ,, A bust formed, rising up out of the oval. Legs emerged from the underside, over-long, and when they touched the cool concrete, she stepped free. Lucrezia contracted to human proportions, all shining black. Then with a soft tic, she formed an impression of skin on her face and hands and feet, and her hair became glossy. ,, Chang’s shaft swelled near torso-thick at the sight of her. She shivered. ,, Lucrezia, always beautiful, now embodied a sort of divine arousal and desire that could be matched by only one or two novas in the world. Every line was perfection itself, every movement slinky and flawless. ,, She smiled at Chang. ,, “Hey, wife.” ,, They came together and kissed. Chang all but melted into Lucrezia’s arms, close to literally. She watched as more of her wife began to emerge from the oval. ,, Soon she lay in her wife’s lap, watching as dozens of her emerged from the chrysalis. They filled the room, lined up around Chang with eager faces and hungry bodies. ,, “There is over three hundred of you,” Chang said. ,, Lucrezia ran a hand through her hair. “Yes, that there is. And if you don’t mind, every single one of me needs a good fucking.” ,, ,, *** ,, They emerged from the basement a week later. ,, Chang walked with her head on one Lucrezia’s shoulder, while the rest of the army came behind. ,, “So I missed it?” Incredulity hung heavy in her tone. “It’s over?” ,, “Yes,” Chang said. Her four-toned voice resonated. “I’ve ended it.” ,, They emerged into the light of day. ,, Lucrezia’s face fell for real, then. Chang could see the expressions changing on those behind her, running back through them all like an electric current through water. ,, “What the fuck…” ,, Their once-glorious headquarters was a blast zone now, a burned-out wreck of a building with collapsed wings and fallen roofs. Devastation characterised the landscape now. A tower stood black against the sun, a desolate scarecrow speaking mutely to the island’s fall. ,, Chang stood up straight. For a moment her clothes dissolved into hair and then re-knitted as her customary hoodie. This one bore the legend that became very popular after the release of her post-imprisonment album Chains of Paradise. It read, in bold white letters ‘CHANG WAS RIGHT’, on the background of her customary white raindrop symbol. She put her hands into the front pockets. A pair of hands gripped her hips from behind. A Lucrezia rested her head against the back of Chang’s neck. ,, “Shortly after my arrest, somebody snuck an extremely large explosive device onto the mainland of the Kiribati Islands. We should have detected it but didn’t. Accordingly, we suspect Proteus involvement. They have the expertise to do something like this. Who knows, maybe it was fellow Terats. The Anavasi certainly ruffled some feathers. It doesn’t matter. We’ll never know for sure, now, though Shiv and Meh’Lindi certainly intend to discover it.” ,, “All of this, though,” Lucrezia said. Several of her filed past Chang and spread out, looking about them. All wore disbelief on their faces. “Everything you built.” ,, Chang bowed her head. The bitterness had subsided, and her tears were long since cried. In prison, when they told her, she’d thought Utopia to blame, and thought they’d told her that to break her. She took revenge in song, even when she knew that they were innocent. If she could not shoot the guilty party, the messengers sufficed. ,, “Most of it, yes. An emphatic statement on our viability, according to Shrapnel.” ,, “How many did we lose?” ,, “A lot. None of our closest friends, at least. For a time we thought Darion had died, but he happened to be away with Sakura when it happened. Still, she lives close enough, and the blast was big enough that it almost took out her home. It was that which made her militant. She’d been angry enough that I was imprisoned, but according to Darion she… well, ‘flipped her lid’, was his metaphor of choice, when this happened. Twenty five of us died. Most of the rest left. There was nobody to take over in my stead, really. The Alchemist would have been the logical choice, but she died in the blast as well. She got better.” ,, Lucrezia vibrated with anger, but some of her curled up to cry. A few ran their hands through once-fine sand blasted to glass. The islands were dead, now. Utopia would reclaim them eventually, but Chang had, through torturous court proceedings, been proven to ‘own’ them, and had refused to let Team Tomorrow erase the evidence of the Anavasi’s few glorious months. ,, It was time to let that go, too. ,, Chang’s heart felt tight at that. All dreams end. ,, Arms enfolded her. Four sets from four directions. Chang collapsed against her wife, glad to let her knees buckle, glad to be weak again. ,, Lucrezia pressed Chang’s face into the softness of her breasts, swelled and shaped them against her face. Chang shuddered and nuzzled. ,, She stopped thinking for a time. ,, Eventually she sat, with Lucrezias around her, surveying it all for the final time. ,, One of her wife, sitting nearest, took her hand. “There’s a lot I’ll need to see before I can do much of anything. I need to explore my new powers. I’ve changed quite a lot, I think.” ,, “Time we have,” Chang said. ,, They said nothing more for some time. Then she rose and led them to the blackened beach. They waited there until nightfall. ,, And then, Chang stretched. She raced across the ocean for hundreds of miles until she bridged from the islands to the nearest mainland. Then she stretched herself wide and shaped herself into a true bridge. ,, Back at the beach, she formed a torso out of the cobbles, and beckoned to her wife. ,, “Come, my love. The world awaits us.” ,, Three hundred Lucrezias smiled. And she came. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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