Okie doke, for those of you who have not yet and/or wish to read the first chapter of my Magus fanfic, entitled "Magness"...Here it is! If you have already read it and/or just want the jist of the fic so far and/or what I need/want from
you (yes,
YOU specifically haha), simply scroll down until you see the words V_TRANS IS MORON! in big bold letters.
<11,999 B.C.>
TEMPORAL VORTEX REPORT
-REPORT NO. 1-
[UNKNOWN TRANSFER RATE, SYSTEMATIC DATA MALFUNCTION]
CRYPTIC TEXT SYNCH RESULT – MULTIDIMENSIONAL TIMELINES
CODE – “MAGNESS”
CODE EX. – “CONVALESCE OF HOPE”
“There is
no hope!” The voice echoed into his mind like a splinter ebbing back and forth into an enormous blood blister long caked in its own blackened sludge, “You will
not find...”
“I
will.” He commanded the voice in a soft dulled tone. He strode on into the wastelands of the newly formed and now snowcapped burgs. A chant, a spell, a faint white glow about his head, and then the plunge into the deep caverns of the awaiting abyss.
If you let the cold engulf you, if you become one with it, it cannot sway you. Your body will still grow cold and blue, but you can ignore these things and move on if you don’t struggle against it. His blood seamlessly synched with the water flowing around him; it chilled and almost froze as it swarmed within his veins. Eyes turned into unblinking search beacons, casting rays this way and that in the wreckage of the deep.
His weapon was held long and behind him, making him look like a kind of tropical fish or ray with its upturned blade bending and catching the last hints of light from above. Legs and arms stopped, the scythe was brought around, lips moved faintly, a flare of red light emanated from the blade, and the rubble was lit up, to his concealed horror and disgust.
Twisted metals, broken shards of shiny glass-like material, and a fish gnawing on something that resembled a right hand (already missing its index and middle fingers) were only a few of the sights. It was a hand. He could somehow smell the decay and blood under there. Even in the cold and the water, he knew that smell, intimately. It was part of a former life that seemed far away now, in a distant dream.
There was no time for that. There was never enough time for anything anymore. Again, the voice begged him to stop, “No hope...” It pleaded despairingly, “...Nothing left.” This time he chose to ignore it, and he went on.
Three months time was spent in this same grueling manner. Several hours would pass; he would rise from the depths to a solid chunk of ice and then command it not to move from its spot. Upon doing so, he would either rest, partake in the local variety of Salmon-like fish (of which he had detested as a child though now it had a more elegant taste with a simple spell he once watched a sorceress cast...
or was it a wizard? he thought to himself), or fight/ignore the voice until one of them gave up for another hour or so.
He finally thought he saw something, a faint glow or light, when he found the ruins of the ominously blackened Water Fortress. But it was not a glow or a light, it was nothing. Neither a scrap of clothing, nor a hint of flesh or bone-and certainly not the ornament the wise men had given her, although the last he had seen it with her the light was fading fast-was found. For all he knew, that jewel was powerless and in the belly of some sea beast by now. Although he knew it had to be otherwise.
Then he noticed it. The decay. The smell of blood. It did not reside in this room. This one room that proved to be, quite easily, the most important room in his entire life. The room where he had lost everything. Twice. Now it proved again to be important on some fundamental level. This was another Omen. Not a Black one, no, but one of hope, a White Omen of sorts. Three soundless words escaped his lips, bound for the voice that taunted him.
“There
is hope.”
There was a way now, he knew. It would be tricky, and he wouldn’t like the path, but there it was, plain as the chill that ran up and down his spine when he dived in and out of the icy blackness. Would he need someone like those times before? He didn’t know. He’d only know on the way. Like before.
Was this destiny? No, he knew too much about how things worked now (had, in fact, since he was a child) to believe in fate. Sure, some things can be pulled and prodded with wire strings and bamboo poles, but there is no such thing as fate (he remembered hearing someone talking to a Poyozo about this somewhere in his childhood; perhaps it was a dream, or perhaps it was both).
The heavy oaken door seemed to stand without any support. The hinges were attached to nothingness. Upon the door, three words were writ. No, they weren’t written, they were engraved, they were part of the door. The edges of the large black letters seemed brimmed with gold. This is what they said:
--- (The Princess) ---
< (Kid) >
The handle was the same type of shining gold that lined the letters. It beckoned to be held, to be turned, to be pulled. He had no choice. His thin hand, gloved in comfortable leather, went to it. He held it, turned it, and pulled it as easily as if it were made of paper. Instantly a fantastic swirl of blue light emerged and engulfed the doorway. He stepped forward, into the light, entranced with the sounds of wind and rapture that surrounded him.
The blue light swirled past him in great bright folds of azure, sapphire, cerulean, and indigo. He came out of the light and into an unfamiliar bustling place. The blue light faded to a dot behind him. No one in this place seemed to notice this happen. He didn’t notice the blue light behind him nor did he notice most of the people, or care about them in fact. He was focused on someone far in the distance past a large grouping of people. Her hair seemed different, a faded yellow color, and her entire image seemed to fade in and out of view. But her eyes. They were the same sharp color; and they did not fade with the rest of her.
For a long moment, a few seconds, a few minutes, a lifetime? He stood there transfixed, hypnotized, gazing upon this sight. His feet moved forward, but every time he did, she stayed exactly the same distance away. His hand shot out in desperation. His mouth opened to call to her.
The ground was damp with dew. The cool night air was fresh and unsullied to the point of hygienic cleanliness that reminded him of something like Windex. The stars in the sky twinkled more then he had ever remembered seeing them as a child. The truth was that there was now more dust in the atmosphere, remnants of “
The Destruction”.
His skin seemed luminous in the gloom of those hours of darkness as he woke from his dream. A stern look of consternation spread across his face.
“Where was it?” He whispered to himself. He couldn’t remember where the door without walls had stood. He couldn’t remember what the unfamiliar place it led to looked like, the people there, or the clothing they wore.
“No hope in dreams.” The voice said to him, laden with its own sad dismay.
The great and powerful witching hour was upon him. He dug at the earth beneath the tombs small stone indicator (no one else would ever know she was there) with his hands and they instantly became caked in the coffee-colored dirt. Every now and then, he’d look up; checking the stars to make sure the hour hadn’t past. He shouldn’t have fallen asleep he told himself. The dream meant something though, that’s why things happened the way they did.
Then he came upon it at last. It was wrapped in a smooth (although now smudged with dirt in several places, most of it flaked off the silk as he had broken up the earth) material he knew well. It had been a part of his wardrobe until he had finally come back here. He quickly, though with meticulous care, striped the cape from the figure before him.
It was a wondrous marvel. The skin was the same creamy color he had remembered from the later parts of his childhood. Before, she had a slightly auburn-colored tone, full of life and radiance. There was almost no sign of decay. It was as if the slimy maggots and worms he had almost expected wished to stay away from the body. Her cerulean hair was fading to white, but had grown a few inches longer since he had buried her. Her perfectly trimmed and manicured nails had also grown out considerably, but the tips remained in tact like a ghost of proper etiquette.
The smell was the same though; the smell of death. There is a base smell to death outside of just blood and decay. It’s a soulless smell. It’s the same as an empty attic or crawlspace; a stale smell like woodchips, only somehow entirely different. He did not gag or hold his nose in disgust. He simply took the glove off his right hand as he straddled her waist. With that hand he stroked her cheek lovingly as if she were a delicate porcelain doll. He said a brief prayer; it too was a phantom of that former life as a child.
“I’m sorry...” The words seemed so foreign to him now. He couldn’t remember ever speaking them to anyone but possibly his sister. He lifted her cotton shirt and exposed her stomach, her chest, her long cold, yet still somehow supple breasts. He touched one of her milk chocolate-colored areola and his face contorted into a small frown. It was much closer to the color he remembered her skin being. At this, he readied his scythe, “...I know you would understand...mother.”
Those words too had been difficult to say. He hadn’t thought of her as such since he was a youth, since before her shift. At first he and his sister had almost thought it was simply grief over the passing of their father. There was something else though. She became a work horse, almost never ceasing. She still seemed obsessed with the energy transfer, even though it had taken their father from them. He remembered her taunting and laughing at him then; telling him that he too deserved to be bound to the earth with the others whom lacked her own form of enlightenment. This person who took his mother ate away at his very soul and it angered him.
Of course, there was something more important than those base things they knew, something else that flowed around them; the Black Wind. It never died within him, even when he was sent away, even when he grew to be a man, when he was confronted by the people set out to kill him, even as that great flaming bastard was finally destroyed in his, no,
this, very era, right before his very eyes. The Wind still raged on. It had reminded him of his goals, it guided him, and eventually, it saw to it that the fiery demon was defeated. It seemed to taunt him at first, when he was a child, he remembered, much like the voice was doing now.
Again, there was no time to be reflecting on the past. No time for memories he would much rather forget. Times he’d much rather change. He shook the thoughts from his head and focused on the task at hand.
He had made the difficult journey back past the badlands of snow and ice. He went on even beyond the jutting debris of that ominously dark tower; that dark tower which had brought forth both a terrible nightmare and a fabulous dream when his eyes first lay upon it, floating high above. He went to the New Mountain, not much further to the South. Here, more winds and even more cold assailed him, screaming for him to fall, trying to coax him to leave. Rocks and dust fell upon him; trying to push him back, make him slip, lose his grip, burn his eyes. He would not be stopped by such small forces of nature. It would take a demon with as great power as his own to accomplish such a feat.
Another night fell and another witching hour came upon him. It was then that he found that which he had sought, The Cave of Time. The blue dot of an entry-which had always reminded him of a curtain blocking the sun that had a hole in it-was long gone. That he already knew though. He had come back from this place before, after leaving the End.
He opened the pack-he had only recently acquired after returning-that he had slung over his right shoulder. It was just half filled with various objects: his Amulet, a couple extra changes of clothing, various medical supplies and magical drugs, and many other small trinkets. The two he went for were enveloped in part of that cape that was currently still wrapped around his mother, who was now safely buried back in the ground.
He opened them with the same gentleness he had used when he touched his mother’s cheek. The first was a long pale white curved tusk of ivory-like material. The second now reminded him of some dried pink fruit, like a large unripe strawberry or cherry. There were four parts to it, and it was encrusted with a dark (was it black?) substance that had the texture of mostly hardened muck or mud.
Foreign, alien, mystical words stirred from out of his voice. He held the murky mysterious heart in his left hand, the pointy pallid white rib in his other.
“Now the foretold moment has arrived...Swap my being from this world to...!” At that moment, he struck the point of the rib into the center of the heart. Nothing happened. His eyes remained transfixed on the object before him; the impaled heart. At first he thought the rib was falling out of the heart, and that was what made the enchantment fail. Then he saw that it was not just the top portion of the rib that was disappearing into the nucleus of the heart, but the bottom end as well. It was being absorbed by it.
He stood there hypnotized by the sight until the rib was gone from sight. After a moment, he thought that it would again not succeed. Then it happened. The heart began to throb with new life and vitality. The dark sludge burned off-the smoke attacked his senses-and the heart glowed healthy pink once again. He felt relieved somewhat. Things were suddenly going as he had planned. The beating of the heart intensified and filled his ears with their heavy drumming.
Then it struck him; like that first bolt lightning that had smashed into him back in his castle when he fought the kid-whom he would later, in the Water Fortress and on Death Mountain, learn to secretly admire-and the despicable frog. He saw it; the electrical surge of power radiating from the heart. It was a sinister dark light, like a shadow. It spread up his arm with zeal and a fever-pitch rate of speed.
More then hurt and more then shocked, he was annoyed. This was a surprise and he did
not enjoy surprises. He buckled under the pulsing heart’s power and was forced down to one knee. The heart pulsated with a bright red glow that grew with each beat and began to fill the room with crimson light. He was feeling faint. The radiance of the light was getting too bright for his eyes. His eyes were absorbed in it though, no matter how hard he tried to pull his face away, his eyes stuck to the image of the brilliantly bright ruby heart that was clasped in a death grip in his hand.
He could not endure it much longer; it was sapping his strength, draining his energy, expending his ability, it was killing him.
“I
knew it.” A faint echo of a voice told him. It seemed so far away, the room seemed far away. Everything felt so far away, “I
told you.
Didn’t I? There is
no hope. Do you think
she remembers
you? Do you think
she cares what happens to
you? I’d bet that she’s moved on by now. She’s found a man to settle down with. She’s had children. She hasn’t thought about you like you have ached over the years for her. And now you’re going to
die; and for what?”
“For
her, for
everything I’ve lived for, fought for, and even died for.” He said through clenched teeth, biting back the pain. He could no longer feel his fingers, his hand was going numb, and his arm was burning in pain, “
I don’t matter.”
“So be it.” Another voice, this one delicate, not the other, cutting voice, but much more familiar, loving, affectionate, resonated from within his mind. No, not from within, almost, but no, it came from the direction of his hand, the heart, “Find your sister, my son.”
The brilliant burgundy light flashed and flickered into a profoundly deep cobalt blue-it was only then that he saw the resemblance of this light to the frozen, watery depths of that vast Zealian Ocean which he had spent the last seven or eight fortnights immersed within-that filled the room with its own dazzling intensity. The Cave of Time flickered out of existence, and all was that vivid blue, rushing past him in every direction. His scythe now seized in his right hand, his pack of odds and ends tucked at his side, and the now fading heart still held-now much more gently-in his left hand.
He continued to watch as his mother’s heart quietly disappeared from all existence. A rhyme he had long forgot that his sister had recited at their father’s wake came suddenly into his mind. Before even that, their mother had whispered it so softly into each of their ears on their fifth year, so soothingly, like they were still newborn babes.
“
Live another day.
Fight another fight.
Struggle against the darkness,
Do it for the light.
If you stop,
Before your last breath,
You’re living naught.
You’re living death.
So be brave.
Be of sound mind.
Endure life’s jolts,
Tolerate the grind.
Live and love,
Forget your hate.
Peace is with you.
Don’t yield to fate.
The Black Wind will blow,
And then you will know.
The dark may fight,
But so will your light. ”
The blue light was giving way. It was opening up, into another world, another time. Where was it, and more importantly,
when was it? Everything seemed so unfamiliar now. The heart was gone, but his powers weren’t fully restored. He didn’t even know if they
would be restored. For all he knew, some evil beasts could be lurking around the next bend. His left arm lay slack at his side. He could still no longer feel his fingers, but the dullness was very slowly and agonizingly departing.
In its place, sharp, hot pins and needles seemed to strike every part of his arm, burning straight to the nerves. He let out a small dissatisfied grunt, with a scowl spread across his face, before he passed out and struck the hard surface of the ground. Was it rock, compact dirt, cement, or metal?
There was no time for that. There didn’t seem to ever be enough time for much of anything anymore. A trickle of blood ran down his temple and clotted in the light blue hair of his brow. He could no longer tell or be bothered in knowing or not knowing.
If the past is to alter...So be it.
V_TRANS IS MORON![/b]
Okay, I'll give you the jist of the fic so far...
It's the year 11999, not
exactly one year after the events of Trigger, as you've gotta figure in the time of those events, but along those lines. We see Magus as the central, and really the only (so far), character. He is struggling with some voice that tries to get him to stop and it tells him there's no hope, and that he'll never find his sister (much less that she probably doesn't care about/has forgot about him).
He searches the ruins of the Black Omen, which now lie in the frozen ocean in the Zeal timeline where he is. He finds that there are no bodies in the main hall where he last saw his sister. This gives him hope. He thusly goes to his mother's grave (i say he buried her, wrapped in his cape), straddles, pokes, and then comes out with her heart and a single rib.
Then he goes to the mountain that once held (but of course no longer) the time gate after Lavos ruined the landscape. He uses the heart and rib, & some magic words of course, to create a time portal. The heart drains his power and leaves his left arm inoperable in doing so. The voice taunts him some more, but he confronts it, and then his mothers voice (now that i think about it, it could also be the earth's voice if i wanted it to) and she/it tells him to go find his sister.
He comes out of the portal in a land as-of-yet described nature, passes out due to the draining (arm still useless), and bumps his head on the ground.
NOW...What I need is the next chapter. No no no, I don't want you to write it for me (me so sallay)...What I need is a timeline. When do you think Magus should pop up in? And although I downplayed it in the story, equally important, WHERE should he be? Then I think I'll need a character, either from CT, RD, or CC to play with. I don't want any of the major players in CT though, either Robo or Lucca only really...Glenn might pop up, but this is highly doubtful, and if he does, he aint goin with my man Magus.
Although if you think a certain timeline would be nice, I can always do a new character/modified character, or whatever. We can always discuss things through the thread.
Also, I'm probably going to put in one of my own characters, as almost all of mine delve into parallel universes of some kind. Here's a quick low-down of some of the characters I might add, who sounds good?
Vengeance - Ghost-type Traveler (dimensional) whos universe was entire destroyed. He's driven like most of my characters (and like Magus) by revenge (which makes me kinda not want to use him).
Fire - He can create/control fire in varying degrees. Very "leader" oriented. He's fairly average as a hero character.
Tiger - He can transform into a tiger-guy (man, do my characters sound stupid like this...) who normally fights big polutant causing corperations and anything working against the greater good of the earth.
Victorious 1000 - Robotic-type. He can change various parts of his body into anything he's ever touched (mainly weapons). He's driven by his own heroic testimate to do good and such.
V Translanka - vampire-type. He does things on whims now-a-days, or for girls...Man, my characters suck ass...I
think I could work him in fairly easy...but i don't like his similarities to Magus...
Max Meta/Squire - He's a dimensional traveler as well. He has the power to create portals through space and dimension.
Nomadic Jester - dimensional traveler. He has the power to create energy fields of various kinds. He searches for his dimensions equivelent of King Arthur (only he's super evil). I think he would fit easiest as he has a dimensionally traveling villain.
Pieman - Superman, but instead of Super, it's pie...He's mainly comic relief, and I actually don't think he'd work right unless I did it super-off-the-wall...
Nova - he's like Fire powers-wise, only he's a chared & flamming skeleton whos driven by religious beliefs. He also might work.
Amadeus - He has whakky sonic-based (not like the Hedgehog...er, actually, kinda...) powers and is driven by his hatred for the aliens that forced him to kill his sister.
One Shot With a Thousand Bullets - Actually TWO people. They're modern day assassins...They're not that fleshed out yet really...MIGHT work...but probably not...
Captain Mason Galory - He's from another planet, he has either one, or a couple swords that give him super-de-duper power like enhanced speed, strength, etc...Probably won't work...but I dunno...i think almost anything's possible with how i'm doing this story really...
Mech - another alien who can use a crazy mecha that he can conjure up from within...he REALLY would be a stretch...
actually...I'll probably just stick with new characters or something...I dunno...wadda yas think?
