Aberrant: Ba'alt - Re: The Search

[Glean]

Karan had been sitting in the same spot now for 3 hours. Not just a sitting still as if entertained by a beautiful view but a completely motionless statue-like stance had come over him. He chose this place, near the river side on the edge of the park when only an occasional jogger passed by, because he knew he would be for the most part inconspicuous. He had to make some precaution to hide from the one who would not approve of his use of power and the heavens were watched closer than the surface or his life would be much easier. For now, all anyone saw was a mid-thirties man sitting comfortably as he watched with apparent deep interest the water skiers and sunbathers of the Endes River. His search for now was uninterrupted.

When Karan left the goddesses world his friends were still there trying to figure out a way to deal with the Gilded once and for all, but all he wanted to do was find a way out besides the exit through the Inn that he feared so much. All that using the World Serpent would bring was trouble and his friends had way too much of that already. There had to be another way. Universes were all connected somehow physically and in other ways than just the spiritual, magical, ether, or whatever connection the Serpent Inn was. SO he fled for weeks at many times the speed of light to the edge of the Goddesses small Galaxy and into the nothing that lied past. After 2 months he returned back to the Goddesses world to find his friends only to find that they had left without him. The world was in no better shape than Karans deep space search disaster.

The Pultytes and the Ban came to the Godesses world. They came in force to try and destroy everything that did not belong and nothing there belonged to their odd view. But this time the Goddess was prepared, or rather she was made aware of their attacks and prepared her people. It was a sort battle from what Karan had gathered from Saul but the world was changed and it did not take long before the Goddess, also know as Cerina, appeared to Karan. She wanted him to leave but after he explained that he had been trying to leave for months the two of them meditated on the matter. Cerina needed more ambient quantum and then she believed she could finish the Universe she was so painfully interrupted making so many years ago.

Karan helped in developing the Quantum magnet as he called it and after it was sure the blueprints were in order, assembled it in 2 hours. To make a long story short, when Karan awoke the Universe felt complete once again to his spatial awareness. After some short farewells and detailed training to the Gilded on operating the Q-Magnet Karan left Cerina?s world once and for all. After he left the system, which took only a few moments, Karan really let the smoke out and pushed on Galactic west at thousands of times the speed of light.

The vast emptiness went on for what measured out as weeks to Karan and then into months and years. At times Karan would stop and simply float hopelessly for days wondering if this was how he as going to spend eternity. Times passed that made him want to create his own universe in the area where he was sure it could fit just so he could be around people again. If only he had the power he would be happy again, but he guessed that that was not how he was made. He flew on again and repeated the pattern of hopeless drifting time and again until finally he sensed something.

A random passerby, a merchant ship he suspected, had drifted too far out into the void and had lost themselves. They had mistakenly used Karan?s glowing aura as a star to guide them. That was a terrible mistake for them as it drew them deeper into the void. The Pale and the Dark Fae had driven most of the 23 crew completely insane to the point that some had killed others and some simply died. When Karan neared the ship, the dark energies fled but the damage was already done and all he found was brain dead or chaotically insane humans who could offer no help to him. The ship log and astrogation charts are what led the glowing man back to civilization as he knew it.

The first few dozen planets he came to were either low population or very low tech which allowed him to use his powers without caution. He always settled down a few weeks and asked around (thankful for Universal Integration enhancements, and mega Intel to help him speak) for sign of his friends. He never found anything. This led him developing a search talent by mixing and melding a few of his powers. The end result was Karan manifesting several dozen small flying spheres a tad larger than golfballs. These glowing Drones as he calls them, had flight capabilities rivaling his own and the single purpose of searching for specific quantum signatures. If they found the pattern they would immediately report back to him with a galactic coordinate. The drones allowed him to multi task and he kept searching hundreds of world and galaxies with only an illogical draw toward galactic west that he could not understand. He fed the draw and the west became his ultimate destination. 327 worlds later the draw to the west was weakening so Karan slowed his movement and increased his search.

Planet Debore had been his home now for the thirty-six months since his draw west ended. Karan did not know what drew him here to this planet but he was sure he had to be in this system. He had kept himself busy with various errands and personal quests charity (ie, law-enforcement) but this was a hard thing to do with te planets sensor level and seeming fear or nova?s. He held his own by aiding other willing non-nova?s to stop the various black market dealings on Debore. Some were beginning to view him as a prophet.

Debore had been a terran colony now for more than 2 thousand years and the population was just over 3 billion. Their technological base was significant and boasted of hyperspace travel and FTL drives as well as plasma weapons and medical care that could make perfect clones complete with brain taping. It also gave the military the capability to track anomalies in the quantum fields with brutal precision. The few nova?s he met on his visit to this planet were slowly disappearing and he did not want to be next. So, he sat on the river side bench and cloaked his power to the best of his ability and let the feedback come in from his fleet of drones.

[Glean]

This search session again yielded minimal results but the man known as Karan knew it was just a matter of time, and of the few things he had, time was something he had limitless supplies of. He turned his head to look around the riverbank as the oh so familiar tickle in the back of his mind told him he was being watched. His head turned the opposite direction of his suspected watcher casually so as to not let on that he had made them. He thought for a moment that this was going be sticky getting out of here without anything other that his quantum charged natural human abilities. How easy it would be to flip the switch in his node and let all the quantum energy in and spark out of here at near light speed, but then he would definitely be done here on Debore. He could not let this happen since he had a few loose ends to tie up before he left.

So instead of playing like he had been alerted, he sat quietly and pulled out a news reader, the equivalent of this worlds newspaper but in a small disposable PDA format, and casually pretended to gaze over the cities latest problems. He was also aware from his training with Pax Concordat so many years ago, that his hunters were in 2 groups and were beginning to flank him. The betrayed calmness and apparent random hand movement from a man some 50 yards away at the railing overlooking the beach to a as of yet unseen second person told Karan all he needed to know; they were planning on getting closer to him today. That meant they were planning on scanning his pattern. If that was done they could find him anywhere on the planet from satellites in orbit. Karan could not allow that.

The man they knew as Karan, and in some circles as Grojie, stood up, tucked the news reader away into his pocket, and stretched as if setting for too long. Karan flexed and stretched for exactly 3 seconds then began to walk briskly away from the man on the rail. The path around this side of the river wound through a good sized park to the north and it was this park that Karan was now entering to elude his followers. He could feel that they were thrown off now and the second spy was attempting to cut through the edge of the park. But now Karan was certain only one could see him and that one was about to lose his line of sight as the path turned. Karan quickened his pace as if readying for a jog and when the turn came up, he was sure he was out of line of sight now for at least a few seconds, he let it out and jumped to a run at nearly 25 mph. He planned on running for only 5 seconds but that was enough to give him a bigger distance between his hunters.

The lack of backup made Karan feel unimportant; didn’t the city police think he was a hard quarry enough to send multiple units to apprehend and analyze? He felt hurt as he looked around the corner and into the forking paths ahead and saw no others discretely waiting for him. Then the feeling came again that told him he was again being looked upon in a more than passing fashion. His pulse quickened as he directed the flow of adrenaline to better fuel his reaction time and level of alertness. He jogged onward at a normal pace for terrans and took the left fork in the grassy path. This one led to Stone park where many of the worlds leaders were immortalized in statue form and museums honored fallen artists of ages past. Forking left also would allow him to spot the second spy if he was sharp enough.

A few moments later and Karan came to a small fountain surrounding the worlds present Duke. The water was spraying here and there in splashes and rainbow cascades. It had been nearly 15 seconds since he last line of sight again with his pursuers and this was a good a place as any to hide and plan an ambush. Karan dove quickly behind the edge of the fountain and lie there in a face down prone position this time depending on his sense of hearing. The hedges near here limited visibility to about 10 feet, as long as he was lying low. Ten feet was more than enough space for Karan to do his dirtywork.

He only had to wait about 90 seconds and he heard footsteps and the muffled subvocalizations betraying the use of radio com. They hadn’t used them on the riverside probably due to the fact that they knew Karan was sharp. Now they were loosing their cool and fell back to radio coms; they both were likely blaming the other right now for losing Karan. The good thing was the fact that they were using radio com’s. It meant they were probably not within line of sight of each other. Karan was to exploit this to his advantage.

Another few moments and one of the pair of footsteps were close. Close enough for Karan to smell the durametal on the man that could only be a blast pistol. He let him come closer until finally when Karan made visual contact he stayed crouched on all fours but bolted at the man with speed to rival most sprinters. Without ever getting his head above the hedge and hoping the second man did not have a line of sight, Karan pulled one government man down and incapacitated him before the man knew what happened. The whole event was like one of those wild animal attacks on a much smaller and weaker prey and Karan put the now unconscious man where he was hiding only a few moments ago. Before he left him however, Karan made sure to crush the Blast pistol and any communication equipment. He then set about getting the second man.

Some time later, Karan found himself back in one of his apartments; he had to have a few so as to not be in any one place too long and varied his schedules. His abilities had led him earn the money for such luxeries in various non-lethal but only semi-legal means. Today he found himself in one of his favorite homes. It was his first here on Debore and thus more of his heart was here. He had bought a place with 7 rooms in hope that his draw galactic west had led him to this planet and that his friends were here. Karan had planned to show up surprisingly and save their days with a luxurious apartment. He never thought that perhaps Chronos or the rest of the family might be at least as well equipped to earn money on this planet as he was. Everyone needed Glean, at least that was what he liked to think on these lonely days. But another thought came to him, why were the nova’s here on this terran planet disappearing? He detected only eleven when he arrived and he never made contact with them once he knew they were not his old friends, but their number was down to six. When he was Glean, he could sense all of their patterns and witnessed a pattern simply stop at times. It was not an end to the pattern like death, which he had seen many times before, but something else. He had reasoned at times that they were teleporting away and that was the reason they were simply disappearing from his senses. This was the most comforting conclusion so he stuck with it. It seemed logical anyhow; why would other nova’s want to be on this planet with a government that appeared to hate them.

[Glean]

Glean, in the form of Karan the rather nondescript middle eastern native chose to look into the missing nova’s only a little bit. But the more he looked into it the more he was puzzled. After tracking and following the remaining six nova’s on the planet (in secret) he discovered that each of them was for the most part unremarkable, at least compared to his old friends. There may have been examples of strength, dexterity, and intelligence; and a few even exhibited outright external powers like flight and invisibility, but none showed a pattern that would support the disciplines he had so regularly encountered in his old team. Karan persisted in monitoring them from afar for months while his drones were searching the galaxy for his friends. What he observed was interesting and disturbing to him.

On one occasion while he was watching one of the nova’s walk down the street, the nova collapsed to the ground. People around panicked and a few even offered assistance to the nova who appeared to have fainted. The nova was able to be brought back to consciousness but then Karan detected no quantum pattern. No node. It was as if they were never a nova in the first place. He continued to observe the nova, who seemed to have cancelled her work day and returned home to her apartment uptown. All Karan could do was observe her from afar via his quantum senses. Being able to see through walls was handy at times. The female nova who recently lost her powers seemed to be in a panic. She fell to her bed and wept for quite a time before she finally seemed to accept her fate. Her pattern was gone and she was nova no longer. She had not left the planet or been slain, she simply stopped being a nova.

The next thing he knew as he begun to walk the steps to meet the poor lady was that his drones found something. The messages came to him in flashes and he was made aware of hits on his drones. Three confirmed signatures all on the same planet. Now he was torn with excitement and cause to do what is right. He paused on the steps up to the small apartment building and thought a moment. His feeling to do what he thought was kind and right was over ridden by a deep compulsion to rejoin his old friends. He needed to be near them. It felt as if he really had no choice in the matter and before he really made the effort to form conscious thoughts he had shed his relatively dormant form and lifted off into the skies as Glean. No thought was given to what the small amount of witnesses thought of a glowing man streaking into the sky.

Now he was bearing down on what his drones saw as Smite, Chronos and Allison but he was over 2 weeks away at his top speed. The anticipation was going to kill him but he couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened to Heartsease, Quinn, Smith, and the others. He hoped it was not something he could have helped with to avoid. Only time would tell now. He was on his way home.