Darkened Stars - Chapter 1

Darkened Stars - Chapter 1

Stardate 25338.1 - May 3, 2348 - 17:52:00

Shock and a feeling of almost airy disconnect that he vaguely recognized as shock washed over him as his eyes took in the alien looking forest he had appeared in, before they settled on the other being in the small clearing with him. 

Somewhat shaggy brown hair, and a face that reminded him of Gerrit Graham, he could hear the being muttering almost unintelligibly to himself.

"I was sure that was going to work, nobody bothers with the sexagen dimensional axis for the very reason that it's just that unstable."

"What about?" He continued, snapping his fingers as the Rain’s entire world suddenly lurched and got bigger.

"Almost that time, for a moment I could all but feel the nexus point about to give." He snapped again, and this time the Rain’s vision blurred and lost focus as an earthen rumble knocked him on his ass.

He rubbed his eyes, trying really hard to ignore the fact that his hands were now blue as he did so. Only for a shivering panic to set in as his vision came back and he saw how a few hundred feet away the planet he had been standing on now seemed to be missing its other half.

"Damn." The being muttered suddenly as he looked up, his eyes focusing somewhere off in the distance in a way that suggested he wasn’t actually looking at the world around them. "That was a fast one, must be getting close."

He snapped his fingers a third time, vanishing in a flash of light.

A moment later another identical flash occurred and another being appeared, this one looking so much like John de Lancie as Q. He stood almost right next to the spot where the other being had disappeared looking around with an almost disappointed expression on his face as he took in the quickly falling apart world around him.

"What a mess." He tsked, shaking his head as his arm began to come up.

"Wh-what!?" Rain finally got out in a squeak.

John de Lancie's arm paused as his eyes snapped over, Rain’s utterance seeming to finally have altered the being to his existence.

"Well you shouldn't be here." He muttered, his head tilting slightly in contemplation as the disappointed look returned. "His carelessness is even dragging mortals into this now."

"Pa… Planet…" Rain stuttered, pointing towards the missing half of the world that, from the rumbling of the ground, was very likely now in the process of breaking up around him.

"Oh right." The being that could only be Q exclaimed as a look that was halfway between realization and considering look seemed to come across his face. “Mortal.”

"Well, I suppose this could be my good deed for the century. So shoo, go home little child." He continued, waving idly in his direction moments before the world disappeared in a flash.

Once again his sight cleared, and he was left blinking in shock for a completely different reason at the unlikely tableau he found himself a part of. Flickering lighting lit a street of derelict looking buildings that dotted the streets to both sides of him as fires burned in abandoned barrels that she could see the occasional person huddled around.

He stumbled forward as an odd feeling of impact hit his head. And he turned to see a grungy looking man in a tattered coat looking at the crowbar in his hands in shock.

“What the fuck!?” The grungy looking man exclaimed angrily. “Felt like hitting a fucking wall.”

“What are you doing?” He asked, backing away from the grungy man in alarm as adrenaline began to course through him.

“Getting a pay day that’s what.” The man muttered, hoisting his weapon and looking at Rain with greed in his eyes. “So hold still little girlie.”

That was enough for him to turn tail and run, concern about anything else left by the wayside in the face of someone who seemed to be trying to bash his head in. Ducking into a nearby ally, he made it less then a dozen paces before tripping, the shorter length of his legs throwing off what would have otherwise been at least a somewhat practiced gait.

Face down on the pavement of the road he felt someone grab his leg, and he flailed wildly at whoever it was as an odd blue light seemed to flicker around his body.

“Must be one of those cardie bastard’s pets to have a personal shield like that.” The grungy man grunted out as Rain’s smaller strikes seemed to do little to nothing to him. 

“But that just means I gotta go slow with you.” He continued as he grabbed one of Rain’s flailing limbs and squeezed.

Pain radiated out from Rain’s arm as he clawed with his other hand at the fabric of the man’s jacket, only for a metal bar to find its way to his throat and slowly press down as the man’s dirty face filled his vision.

“None of that now girl.” The grungy man told him as she tried to push him away with her remaining arm as fear and panic congealed together for a moment before the man’s chest collapsed inwards and he fell dead on top of Rain.

“What…” Rain mumbled to himself in shock as he pried the dead man’s death grip off his arm and shoved the body off him to roll onto the ground with a thud.

With how much effort it had taken to push that body off him, he was pretty sure he didn’t have any sort of super strength, so how had he… No, now wasn’t the time. He had no idea where or even when he was, which meant there were more important things to deal with. Like the adrenaline crash and sudden realization that he had just killed a person.

He flipped himself onto his hands and knees moments before he began dry heaving as everything seemed to compound together and hit him at once. And it took a few minutes from there to pull himself back together enough that he wasn’t a shivering wreck. 

Looking towards the still thankfully dead body with a grimace, he crawled over to the form and began searching it for anything that might help shine a light on his current reality. Which ended up amounting to a whole crap load of nothing outside of the crowbar the man had tried to brain Rain with.

“Motherfucker!” Rain yelled out as a rage came over him as he grabbed the crowbar with both hands and raised it above his head. 

“You try to kill me!’ He said as he slammed the crowbar down onto the body with a meaty thwack.

“Or worse!” He continued, raising the crowbar and bringing it down again.

“And you don’t even have the fucking decency to have a fucking cellphone or wallet on you!” He finished, panting heavily as he brought the weapon down a third time and just stared angrily at the body as the rage bled out of him.

“Fuck.” He muttered, eyes going wide as the sudden realization flashed over him that having a continued breakdown next to a dead body in what looked like some kind of industrial slums might not be the best of ideas.

A quick look showed both ends of the alley were still clear, but he wasn’t going to chance going out the same way he had come in, so clutching the crowbar in both hands he took off in a dash that would take him out the other end.

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A number of hours spent cautiously weaving his way through the ruined streets and alleyways of the city had allowed him to learn a number of things. The most important being that he was in someplace called ‘New Chicago’, and that a good percentage of the humans that lived here were racist assholes who would attempt to shoot blue people on sight with various types of energy weapons.

A group of the latter having chased him to his current location, a half bombed out factory complex of some kind that the trio of armed humans chasing him had worryingly refused to enter.

“So what will it be. “Rain mused fatalistically to himself as he cautiously followed the flickering emergency lighting deeper into the building in hopes of finding a place he could just curl up and sleep for a few hours. “Radiation, bio-hazard, toxins, monsters, or some type of gang that will try and murder me for intruding on their territory.”

 “Or maybe a radioactive bio-weapon that spews toxic venom, because why would the universe throw just one of those at me when they could combine them together.” He continued with a strained laugh as he exited the industrial passageway he had been walking through to an open area he would bet good money had once been the factory floor. 

“Now let’s see, if I were a break room where would I be.” He muttered, looking around the large rectangular room for a more normal passageway who;e making sure to keep half an eye on the various ominous looking machines.

He spotted a likely destination, a door on the far side of the floor that looked almost completely caked in a combination of dust and dirt. And was just about to start making his way over to it when a hum of sudden electrical activity echoes out through the room and a number of lights flickered to life.

“Un…Un…Unauthorized presence detected.” A warbling mechanical sounding female voice rang out as a quartet of odd looking half domes descended from recessed points in the room's ceiling. 

Rain, having played enough video games to see where this was going, turned and began a mad dash back the way he came, only to skid to a stop as an electrical whine signaled the materialization of an energy field of some kind over the doorway he had entered through.

“Aw fuck.” He muttered, closing his eyes and giving a silent prayer as something that sounded suspiciously like a phaser discharge echoed out.

A moment passed as the steady staccato of discharge sounds continued, and he cracked open an eye to see bolts of energy passing about six inches over his head to impact the energy barrier to little effect.

He took a step to the left, the bolts impact location adjusting as he did.

He took another step to the left, noting that the bolts continued to impact a location about six inches above his head.

He crouched down, the turrets adjusting their aim to continue hitting a point six inches above his head.

“You know what, I’m not going to question this.” Rain muttered to himself as he began to carefully make his way along the wall to the dust covered doorway, bolts of energy impact the same general location six inches above his head as he did.

Half way through his trek the energy discharges stopped, and Rain began to let out a sigh of relief before the computerized voice started up again.

“Phaser capacitors below minimum discharge level, primary facility reactors offline, secondary facility reactors operating at twenty percent, recharge time of capacitors to operational levels estimated at one hour twenty minutes.”

Rain felt a brief moment of hope only to have it dashed as the computer continued.

“Failure to eliminate unauthorized presence with internal weapon systems. Deploying secondary extermination measures. Playing pre-recorded apology to facility workers for their noble sacrifice.”

For a moment the only sound in the room was the rapid slapping of Rain’s feat as she broke into a dead sprint for the door, and then the computer resumed its narration.

“Deploying nerve gas.” It announced, and Rain’s eyes went wide in fear as a cloudy looking mist began to seep in from vents on the walls.

He held his breath as he used his crowbar to try and pry open the doorway, nearly a full minute passing before he was able to wedge the door open enough to squeeze through with the door slamming shut moments behind him the moment he was no longer keeping leverage on the crowbar.

Breathing heavily he leaned against the wall, taking a moment to catch his breath as the computer once more sounded out. 

“Please be aware you are nearing the graviton torpedo production floor. Any unauthorized persons caught within will be killed.”

“You don’t say.” Rain muttered in a complete deadpan.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me where the break room is?” He asked rhetorically looking to the ceiling for a moment before shaking his head and continuing down the hallway.

“The closest break room to production floor three is the first door to the right upon exit.” The computer answered helpfully.

Rain stopped in his tracks, turning a glare up at the ceiling before looking to her right to see a closed door covered in nearly the same level of dust and deterius as the one on the factory floor.

“Hey computer, any chance you could open the door while you're in a helpful mood?” Raine inquired hopefully.

“Facility lock-down is in effect due to hazardous material contamination.” It replied as with a sigh Rain began the task of prying open the break room door.

It took the work of several minutes to wedge the door open, and his smaller arms were burning in protest by the point he was finally able to slip through.

The break room was thankfully lit to the same general level as the rest of the now semi-active facility, it also seemed to possess the same general level of dust covering various surfaces that Rain was really beginning to get suspicious of now that he knew the place was purportedly contaminated with something.

But he wasn't dead yet, so that could be future Rain's problem to deal with, because in the present he only had eyes for the extraordinarily comfy looking red couch pushed up against the far wall that had a–

“Oh fuck me sideways.” Rain muttered in fear as he stared at the image on the wall of a sword piercing the earth. “I'm in the Terran Empire.”