Post by Head Admin on Apr 25, 2017 2:03:42 GMT
Most explosions emit light. Some do so in complicated ways, mixing colors in strobing patterns of fire and smoke that blind the eyes. But in the case of metatanium, the reaction emits no light. It absorbs.
One instant, the sun rose over a lazy Valor City as its inhabitants woke to see another morning.
An explosion shattered the hush of the sleeping city.
The next instant, half the city was gone, and a detached black splotch was all that could be seen where it had been. I imagine the astronomical concept of a black hole would look like this, a solid oil slick that bent light around its edges. The city bent inwards, light itself warping to the horrible extraterrestrial explosion. A rising ball of blackened orange-red flame baking the startled air.
The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the experiment had failed far underground, was being violently agitated from the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading the incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame rose. A column of gas must have rushed up into the vacuum created by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet, came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground, and great rags of fire, changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red again, went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. Then geysers of hot ash and molten steel spouted upward; some of the white-hot debris pelted the city from above and below like man-made meteorites.
It must have looked like the world was ending.
At the very epicenter of the blast, in the shuttle that had been designed to operate well past the speed of light, I remained. When the blast occurred, I was blinded. There was a darkness so profound, so unpiercable that it burned my eyes. It felt like my body was torn apart at the molecular level. A flash of bright white came from the ongoing blast, and everything was ablaze for an instant. I never heard the sound of the explosion. My heart pounded so hard that it filled my ears. But then there was sudden, total silence.
The shockwave belched toxic, radioactive flame into my flesh and my lungs, but I barely felt it. All I knew was the pain. My skull felt ready to split from the internal pressure of existing in the vacuum that came from an explosion. I wanted to cry, to scream out, but it was impossible to breathe.
Another burst of white lightning, this one so intense it felt as if it had came from my very eyes. I still couldn’t hear anything, with an equivalent storm raging inside me, but I felt the world itself quake for one second. My limbs shook as all my muscles underwent hard spasms. The pain in my head grew, and I could breathe again. I screamed.
I think I said "Why?! Why is this happening?! This wasn't supposed to happen!!" but I knew the answer already.
To any who shared my schooling in theoretical physics, the implied problem would be understood. They too would see the potential of metatanium, but would also see the more important metaphysical currents underlining the complexity of the leak. They would see the flow of energies that followed the extraterrestrial fuel as it worked through the shuttle. They would see how its amazing power wove together, became a tapestry, became a superpowerful mutation that anyone could make use of through the application or exposure to metatanium. The best of scientists, perhaps a few of my peers, would recognize the purpose of my experiments.
That frightened me. That was why I would work only when alone, only after the lab was empty. That was why I couldn’t ask for another's assistance. That was, no doubt, part of what kept me so interested. Not only did the work itself fascinate me, but it was taboo. Illegal. Perhaps even morally wrong. Doing something above conventional laws added an exciting spice to the work.
I could have made heroes. What went wrong?
"This should have made heroes!!"
More lightning answered, more thunder shook the ground. My arms and legs failed, and the shuttle imploded on me. My vision went red, as if my eyes had filled with blood. I was dying. I had been hurt so many times before, but this time was going to kill me. I knew it.
I lay there, crushed by the burning shuttle, suffering. That was more than I could take. I think I died.
Merciful. I wished I had sooner. I deserved it.
I awoke to the rain of fire and smoke. My lungs pumped like bellows in a foundry. When I realized my eyes were working again, it was as though a fist of orange flame had decided to punch its way out of the main complex. Windows had shattered. Smoke and fire rushed out. Thousands of pieces of glass and steel, a deadly rainfall, showered down. Alarms - shrill and deafening- erupted. A huge bite had been taken out of the metatanium lab. But there was a warm light filtering through gaps that had been created in the roof, though the smoke threatened to choke it out. I stared up into the sky, and it occurred to me - it was the sky. That was sunlight.
Not only did I pull the trigger, but I built the gun that shot the city in the heart. It was hard to believe it had done so much damage.
Paramedics and emergency response teams shouted commands at the other survivors. My head was a mess. Fear tugged at every corner of my mind. The fact that I was alive right now exposed me; it must have been a beacon to death. I was exhausted physically and emotionally.
"Is anyone alive in there?"
A voice called to the burning remnants of the laboratory, the amplified voice of emergency response teams calling through to the epicenter of the blast. Inside the capsule, I looked up and saw one-hundred and forty-nine bodies.
One hundred and forty-nine people I knew.
I fumbled with the seatbelt that kept me trapped in the imploded shuttle, and the scorched fabric came free easily. I tried to stand, get my feet underneath me, but it didn't work. I crawled from my seat, and there must have been a gas leak that reached the burning pod, because the shuttle was enveloped in a fireball that launched me through the front end of the cockpit.
My tumbling body was flung from the machine, and I landed on my side on one of the monitoring devices, with its keyboards and screens. The air was thrust from my lungs. My right arm shattered on impact with the ground, but I was alive. I rolled from the instrument onto the shards of glass lying on the ruined tile below, shredding my hands and knees. Gasping for air and retching violently on the scorched laboratory floor, for the first time in my life not thinking about the future, I scrambled to my feet and limped through the threshold of the doorway and through the wreckage of years' worth of funding and research.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
The epicenter of the blast had all but become a sinkhole. Cars and people were being swallowed into the remnants of the underground laboratory, and I heard many screams that were quickly silenced as civilians fell to their dooms. After a bit of searching, I found the outline of the main entrance and began to follow it toward the city. The only coherent thought I could seem to muster ultimately became my mantra in the next years of my life: I must find a way to make this right.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
As I crawled back to the surface, I stood atop the last ash-encrusted ridge. In the waning light of rising sun, I looked back upon the gaping, smoking maw of hell's door one last time. At this moment, I finally saw metatanium for what it truly was; a wicked and foreboding blight upon this Earth. The windswept and charred landscape robbed me of any tears I might have produced. Almost all are dead at the complex under Valor City. The best people I have ever known... gone. In my mind, the blood of the thousands I could not save will eternally stain these hands. In my head, I will forever hear the screams of the dead as they burned.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
Men fell in waves. Those most eager to participate in the experiments were the first victims of the disaster. As EMTs swarmed around me and other desperate survivors, I tried to struggled through them, but I was too weak. They set me down, sitting me on what might have been a bench, and treating my many wounds. I might have heard things like "Somebody stabilize her!" or "She... she won't stay down! I've never dealt with something like this before!" or maybe "The sedative isn't doing anything! What happened in there?!" but the sound of the blaze consuming a screaming mass did not cause me to feel.
The sound of children crying for their mothers would not pull my gaze from the far edge of the city. The sound that finally caused me to pause long enough to look back on the burning sinkhole of Valor City was the voices of those I damned raised over the din, crying in unison. Looking back as the flames consumed the city, my vision swirled. My heart stopped. The strength in my limbs faded, and went limp.
My last thought was of my family. I saw my daughter, and she was mourning my death. She cried and cried. The others tried to comfort her. Her father read her favorite books to her. Her nanny offered to be her new mother. Her uncle hugged my daughter close, giving her a shoulder to weep on.
But there was no comfort. Olga Lobachevsky was gone.
I died again that day.
But the metatanium pumped through my bloodstream, keeping me alive. It wouldn't allow me to die. I'd felt my life dragged out through my wounds, but in the end my life wouldn't go. I think that only the power of God could have kept me alive, but my living was at the same time an offense to Him. I should have died, but instead the pain went on and on. Dying would have been so much easier.
And with the life that metatanium refused to extinguish, I set out to make right everything I had done. I would repair the lives I had destroyed.
This city needed me now.
The world needed me now.
One instant, the sun rose over a lazy Valor City as its inhabitants woke to see another morning.
An explosion shattered the hush of the sleeping city.
The next instant, half the city was gone, and a detached black splotch was all that could be seen where it had been. I imagine the astronomical concept of a black hole would look like this, a solid oil slick that bent light around its edges. The city bent inwards, light itself warping to the horrible extraterrestrial explosion. A rising ball of blackened orange-red flame baking the startled air.
The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the experiment had failed far underground, was being violently agitated from the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading the incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame rose. A column of gas must have rushed up into the vacuum created by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet, came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground, and great rags of fire, changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red again, went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. Then geysers of hot ash and molten steel spouted upward; some of the white-hot debris pelted the city from above and below like man-made meteorites.
It must have looked like the world was ending.
At the very epicenter of the blast, in the shuttle that had been designed to operate well past the speed of light, I remained. When the blast occurred, I was blinded. There was a darkness so profound, so unpiercable that it burned my eyes. It felt like my body was torn apart at the molecular level. A flash of bright white came from the ongoing blast, and everything was ablaze for an instant. I never heard the sound of the explosion. My heart pounded so hard that it filled my ears. But then there was sudden, total silence.
The shockwave belched toxic, radioactive flame into my flesh and my lungs, but I barely felt it. All I knew was the pain. My skull felt ready to split from the internal pressure of existing in the vacuum that came from an explosion. I wanted to cry, to scream out, but it was impossible to breathe.
Another burst of white lightning, this one so intense it felt as if it had came from my very eyes. I still couldn’t hear anything, with an equivalent storm raging inside me, but I felt the world itself quake for one second. My limbs shook as all my muscles underwent hard spasms. The pain in my head grew, and I could breathe again. I screamed.
I think I said "Why?! Why is this happening?! This wasn't supposed to happen!!" but I knew the answer already.
To any who shared my schooling in theoretical physics, the implied problem would be understood. They too would see the potential of metatanium, but would also see the more important metaphysical currents underlining the complexity of the leak. They would see the flow of energies that followed the extraterrestrial fuel as it worked through the shuttle. They would see how its amazing power wove together, became a tapestry, became a superpowerful mutation that anyone could make use of through the application or exposure to metatanium. The best of scientists, perhaps a few of my peers, would recognize the purpose of my experiments.
That frightened me. That was why I would work only when alone, only after the lab was empty. That was why I couldn’t ask for another's assistance. That was, no doubt, part of what kept me so interested. Not only did the work itself fascinate me, but it was taboo. Illegal. Perhaps even morally wrong. Doing something above conventional laws added an exciting spice to the work.
I could have made heroes. What went wrong?
"This should have made heroes!!"
More lightning answered, more thunder shook the ground. My arms and legs failed, and the shuttle imploded on me. My vision went red, as if my eyes had filled with blood. I was dying. I had been hurt so many times before, but this time was going to kill me. I knew it.
I lay there, crushed by the burning shuttle, suffering. That was more than I could take. I think I died.
Merciful. I wished I had sooner. I deserved it.
---
I awoke to the rain of fire and smoke. My lungs pumped like bellows in a foundry. When I realized my eyes were working again, it was as though a fist of orange flame had decided to punch its way out of the main complex. Windows had shattered. Smoke and fire rushed out. Thousands of pieces of glass and steel, a deadly rainfall, showered down. Alarms - shrill and deafening- erupted. A huge bite had been taken out of the metatanium lab. But there was a warm light filtering through gaps that had been created in the roof, though the smoke threatened to choke it out. I stared up into the sky, and it occurred to me - it was the sky. That was sunlight.
Not only did I pull the trigger, but I built the gun that shot the city in the heart. It was hard to believe it had done so much damage.
Paramedics and emergency response teams shouted commands at the other survivors. My head was a mess. Fear tugged at every corner of my mind. The fact that I was alive right now exposed me; it must have been a beacon to death. I was exhausted physically and emotionally.
"Is anyone alive in there?"
A voice called to the burning remnants of the laboratory, the amplified voice of emergency response teams calling through to the epicenter of the blast. Inside the capsule, I looked up and saw one-hundred and forty-nine bodies.
One hundred and forty-nine people I knew.
I fumbled with the seatbelt that kept me trapped in the imploded shuttle, and the scorched fabric came free easily. I tried to stand, get my feet underneath me, but it didn't work. I crawled from my seat, and there must have been a gas leak that reached the burning pod, because the shuttle was enveloped in a fireball that launched me through the front end of the cockpit.
My tumbling body was flung from the machine, and I landed on my side on one of the monitoring devices, with its keyboards and screens. The air was thrust from my lungs. My right arm shattered on impact with the ground, but I was alive. I rolled from the instrument onto the shards of glass lying on the ruined tile below, shredding my hands and knees. Gasping for air and retching violently on the scorched laboratory floor, for the first time in my life not thinking about the future, I scrambled to my feet and limped through the threshold of the doorway and through the wreckage of years' worth of funding and research.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
The epicenter of the blast had all but become a sinkhole. Cars and people were being swallowed into the remnants of the underground laboratory, and I heard many screams that were quickly silenced as civilians fell to their dooms. After a bit of searching, I found the outline of the main entrance and began to follow it toward the city. The only coherent thought I could seem to muster ultimately became my mantra in the next years of my life: I must find a way to make this right.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
As I crawled back to the surface, I stood atop the last ash-encrusted ridge. In the waning light of rising sun, I looked back upon the gaping, smoking maw of hell's door one last time. At this moment, I finally saw metatanium for what it truly was; a wicked and foreboding blight upon this Earth. The windswept and charred landscape robbed me of any tears I might have produced. Almost all are dead at the complex under Valor City. The best people I have ever known... gone. In my mind, the blood of the thousands I could not save will eternally stain these hands. In my head, I will forever hear the screams of the dead as they burned.
And it was all because I wanted to create heroes.
Men fell in waves. Those most eager to participate in the experiments were the first victims of the disaster. As EMTs swarmed around me and other desperate survivors, I tried to struggled through them, but I was too weak. They set me down, sitting me on what might have been a bench, and treating my many wounds. I might have heard things like "Somebody stabilize her!" or "She... she won't stay down! I've never dealt with something like this before!" or maybe "The sedative isn't doing anything! What happened in there?!" but the sound of the blaze consuming a screaming mass did not cause me to feel.
The sound of children crying for their mothers would not pull my gaze from the far edge of the city. The sound that finally caused me to pause long enough to look back on the burning sinkhole of Valor City was the voices of those I damned raised over the din, crying in unison. Looking back as the flames consumed the city, my vision swirled. My heart stopped. The strength in my limbs faded, and went limp.
My last thought was of my family. I saw my daughter, and she was mourning my death. She cried and cried. The others tried to comfort her. Her father read her favorite books to her. Her nanny offered to be her new mother. Her uncle hugged my daughter close, giving her a shoulder to weep on.
But there was no comfort. Olga Lobachevsky was gone.
I died again that day.
---
But the metatanium pumped through my bloodstream, keeping me alive. It wouldn't allow me to die. I'd felt my life dragged out through my wounds, but in the end my life wouldn't go. I think that only the power of God could have kept me alive, but my living was at the same time an offense to Him. I should have died, but instead the pain went on and on. Dying would have been so much easier.
And with the life that metatanium refused to extinguish, I set out to make right everything I had done. I would repair the lives I had destroyed.
This city needed me now.
The world needed me now.