07-11-2021, 02:55:10 AM
an untitled Destiny story (working title: "shane, sparky + chaos reachin'")
I dunno if this 100% corresponds to canon but it should mostly fit the broad strokes of what the 'verse has goin' on
in terms of in-game chronology it's uhhhhh set after Taken King but before Rise of Iron and all of D2
also! an AI named Dreamily helped me write this :)
Shane stared at his hands. There was always a tiny bit of a twitch inside when he wasn't using them, a faint humming sound in his fingertips. Latent energy, charging, building, buzzing.
He was seated atop the windshield of his ship, a pointy and squarish vessel hovering in the hangar of the Tower. His Ghost, a palm-sized metal companion with a green shell that matched the shade of Shane's steel-plated face and a bright blue ocular sensor, rotated in the air near him, squinting along.
"You're moody today," Sparky said.
"It's a weird one," Shane went. He sighed and leaned against the window glass of the cockpit of his ship, resting his forehead on it with his arms crossed across the frame.
His fingers twitched again, this time with a metallic click. The noise sounded loud in the silence of the hangar, startling the both of them out of their trance.
Shane sat up quickly and furrowed his brow. "They've never done that before."
"Shifting of the extremities' joint connections, maybe? It's a natural thing for Exos," said Sparky.
"Come on, dude, I would hope that I'd be able to recognize if it was robo-arthritis," Shane replied. "I'm old, but I'm not THAT old. At least, with this whole deal," gesturing to his Ghost as he said it.
The Ghost floated over, frowning down at his partner. "If you have trouble keeping your joints working properly, don't push yourself too hard."
"Thanks, buddy," Shane said sarcastically.
Sparky shrugged. "Hey! We need you to get better at flying and fighting with those things."
A groan. "Remind me of my inferiority complex, why don't ya?"
"Better to be honest than to blow smoke up your ass."
Shane rolled his eyes and smiled. "Yeah, fair point." As he said it, a blue indicator light glowed from the dashboard of the cockpit. "We got a hot one. Vex incursion on Mars. A transmat into the ship, if you'd be so kind?"
"Say the magic word," Sparky said.
"Qwertyuiop."
"Eh, close enough," the Ghost went, porting himself and his Guardian into the helm of the ship.
Shane reached forward, tapping something on the display. "Alright, you ready, baby?" Sparky hummed, turning a dial here and there.
A beat passed, and then the vessel was on its way, zooming out of the Tower with a start, breaking the atmosphere within a minute as it left behind the Earth. The simple glow of the blue planet gave way to prismatic strands of every color as Shane's ship went into FTL mode.
The engines whirred loudly through the cockpit at first before settling into a calmer drone. Shane idly read through the holoscreen briefing he'd gotten from the Vanguard. A simple job -- hive mind robots in Freehold mucking about, clean 'em up and any space rhinos along the way, yada yada, Sparky probably had all the information they needed already.
"Peanut, set course for Meridian Bay and stop us immediately over that old monorail station in the buried city," Shane said with something of a half-conscious knowledge. The ship's AI responded to his request with an affirmative white glow along the windshield.
"Aren't there usually just Cabal out there, not Vex?" Sparky goes. "Something feels off about this one, Shane. We might need to be careful."
"Ah, we'll be fine. What's the worst they could bring out? A Minotaur? We've downed so many of those I've lost count."
"I've also picked you up after you've gotten slapped out of existence by those things," Sparky said. "And I know that number."
Shane made an indignant sound but knew there was no point in arguing with his Ghost, so instead, he looked around the cabin for something to do -- and saw a stack of cards.
"Ooh, what are those?" Sparky asked. "Can I play them?"
Shane shook his head. "No, I don't mess with these too much. They were on me when you rez'd me, the first time."
"Oh." The Ghost's voice went low, remorseful.
"We're not supposed to try to figure out, but I swear, these were a gift," he said, flipping through the stack and gazing at the names -- The Magician, The Fool, Death. "I don't know if I'd really call myself much of a mystic, unless I was Really Different back then, but they feel like they originally were from someone important who had more of a way of connecting with those things. A bit of secondhand divination, I guess."
"You might not have seen the last of them," Sparky said.
"Here's hoping."
Shane tucked the deck into his coat pocket, smiling faintly. He tapped the center console to change direction. "This is our stop, I think." He tapped the navigation panel, setting their destination, and then turned his gaze back to the window beside him. The sun was rising over a desert landscape; the break of day out here was surprisingly similar to back home, just more blue. Faint bits of light from the Vex and their radiolarian cores were visible against the sand and what little was left of the buildings in the heart of a city turned to dust.
"Orbital drop," Shane said. Sparky knew there was no changing his Guardian's mind, so he obliged, with the Warlock teleporting from the confines of the ship into the sky above Freehold, his green longcoat billowing as he took the dive.
Shane watched the city below, taking a moment to orientate himself before landed. A tall, spirelike structure sat directly in front of the Warlock, gleaming white with lines folding in and over each other like intricately linked scaffolding.
“The briefing didn't say anything about a Conflux, did it?” Shane asked.
“It did,” Sparky said. Ghosts couldn't really roll their eyes, but the tone he adopted did it for him.
“Dang,” Shane went. “You got this hack covered?”
“Lemme see what I can find…” The Warlock opened his left palm and Sparky emerged from his virtual backpack, scanning the Conflux with an electronic hum — and attracting the attention of the Goblins patrolling the area. But before any of the brass Vex foot soldiers could do much as fire a single shot from their slap rifles at Sparky, Shane had taken down the whole group with his signature baby blue bullpup, the Zhalo Supercell.
“You thought I was just gonna make this an easy kill for ya?” he yelled, seemingly to the Conflux itself since the Goblins were little more than metal and spilled milk at that point. “Come on!”
A set of gray clouds with white pixel formations emerged near the duo, and Shane's helmet glowed with the reflections of a much larger group of Vex.
“That's more like it,” the Warlock said.
Who would win in a fight, twelve interlinked physical manifestations of a massive, system-spanning collective mind, or one zappy boy?
Hunters liked to rely on tricky solutions in fights, manifesting their Light powers to play with their prey. Titans were the ones that put raw power into action, using their connection to the Traveler as protectors, bulwarks, human-sized tanks.
But a Warlock's means of bringing Light onto the battlefield was the most poetic of the three. Utility and acuity at once, a flow and finesse all their own -- and in Shane's case, mastery of the art of the storm. He leapfrogged through the floating Harpy drones and struck the ground with streaks of electricity, blue and white sparks flowing from his hands and the rifle in them with equal measure and breakneck speed.
Sparks flew in all directions as the lightning hit the ground, sending up brilliant bursts of static. It was like watching fireworks, but it wasn't the sky they exploded off of. Instead, each Vex bot's white liquid radiolarian core crackled and went dark with strands of Arc energy flowing across the ground, the explosions brightening the arid Mars landscape. Shane kept in continuous motion as the enemy forces fell, his cascades through the air around the Conflux graceful but quick.
With one final takedown -- a Minotaur with an annoying Void shield that managed to graze his side, going down with a well-placed pulse grenade throw -- Shane landed lightly, dust swirling around his feet as he turned back to Sparky.
"How's the keysmashing?" Shane went.
The Ghost warbled, as if to groan. "Still looking for weaknesses," he replied. "But I think I've found somethin'. There's some kind of shield surrounding this place.”
"Shield?" Shane echoed. "Like, an invisible, impenetrable force field?” He fired a set of test shots from the Zhalo into the air, and rather than careening out into the distance, the blasts bounced against a barrier above them. At the same time, another gray cloud emerged, much larger and higher in the sky than the ones that had come before it.
“Shit,” Shane muttered. The Vex robot that emerged from the pixels had a chassis several shades darker than that of its fallen compatriots, closer to a black with a golden finish. It was a Minotaur that stood about as high as the Conflux, eclipsing Shane by about ten feet and gazing at him and Sparky with a single glowing red eye, aiming its railgun-esque weapon with malicious intent.
"They weren't supposed to send a Gate Lord!" Sparky went, and Shane made an effort to leap out of the way but he couldn't make it out in time. The Torch Hammer set the ground around the Conflux ablaze, and sent Shane flying backward into a neon Clovis Bray sign, which briefly lit to life before the Guardian fell to the ground, coughing a spot of synthetic blood into his helmet.
Shane put his arms and legs into a kneeling position in an attempt to stand. His suit started to glow with a sickly aura -- a warning indicator -- and the pain started. Shane clenched his teeth, fighting through the agony, and looked up toward the Conflux and his Ghost. "Sparky, get outta--"
A second shot from the Gate Lord. The Conflux rippled with a blast of Solar energy, and Sparky fell to the ground, his shell streaked with a hot line burning a bright orange.
The Warlock's jaw opened under his helmet, as if to yell, but he didn't make a sound. The idea of losing one's Ghost was one of a Guardian's most primal fears -- their connection to the Traveler, the source of their power, their second life (or forty-second) given a clear expiration point.
Shane was still out of sorts and he knew it, but he mustered enough strength to lift himself into a hobbling walk, then a run, and a sprint. By the time he'd closed the gap to the Conflux, he had taken to the air again, readying himself with thunderous calm and tranquil fury.
An inhale.
Warlocks: the bookish, unfeeling type of Guardian, one would think on the surface. Except that wasn't quite the case at all -- far from it, when the Stormcallers in particular were concerned. For them, channeling Arc energy meant being in tune with one's emotions and the happenings around them to a hypersensitive point.
Shane didn't have much. He didn't know anyone at the Tower, and most of his excursions for the Vanguard were solo affairs rather than Fireteam joints. But Sparky was always there for him, ready to pick him up when he needed, buzzing about the ship and giving Peanut false objectives to chase. The cynical might have called him a mere drone of the big magic ball that floated over the Last City, a simple tool. But he was more than that.
The Gate Lord seemed to realize the danger it was in and fired its railgun once more, but its aim was poor, and as it stumbled, Shane pointed an outstretched hand at it and closed his fingers inward, like a bird of prey clutching its quarry.
An exhale.
The area around seemed to darken and a loud crunch shook the Conflux as a beam of blue energy emerged from Shane into the Gate Lord's center of mass, the point of impact leaking with a stream of radiolaria.
Once his energy was tapped out, Shane fell backward toward the floor, managing to break the momentum from the drop with one outward push of his legs before landing next to his Ghost.
Sparky's light diode brightened as the Guardian joined him. "Wow," he said.
"Never done that before," they both said together. The Ghost took back to the air above, mostly intact but surrounded by Arc particles and streaks of electricity emitted from his wound.
"We'll have to get that fixed when we get back to the Tower," Shane went, his helmet retracting to show a metallic face filled with concern.
"You know," Sparky went, rotating the bits of his shell in a cloud around his core, "I think I actually kinda like it like this. Fits our aesthetic."
A smile from the Warlock. "Fair enough."
They both looked up to watch the Gate Lord fall to the ground, its core exploding into hundreds of bright bursts as pieces of metal and circuitry flew everywhere and melted on contact with the sandy terrain, releasing an intense, putrid stench.
The Ghost turned to his Guardian and blinked. "Let's go home."
I dunno if this 100% corresponds to canon but it should mostly fit the broad strokes of what the 'verse has goin' on
in terms of in-game chronology it's uhhhhh set after Taken King but before Rise of Iron and all of D2
also! an AI named Dreamily helped me write this :)
Shane stared at his hands. There was always a tiny bit of a twitch inside when he wasn't using them, a faint humming sound in his fingertips. Latent energy, charging, building, buzzing.
He was seated atop the windshield of his ship, a pointy and squarish vessel hovering in the hangar of the Tower. His Ghost, a palm-sized metal companion with a green shell that matched the shade of Shane's steel-plated face and a bright blue ocular sensor, rotated in the air near him, squinting along.
"You're moody today," Sparky said.
"It's a weird one," Shane went. He sighed and leaned against the window glass of the cockpit of his ship, resting his forehead on it with his arms crossed across the frame.
His fingers twitched again, this time with a metallic click. The noise sounded loud in the silence of the hangar, startling the both of them out of their trance.
Shane sat up quickly and furrowed his brow. "They've never done that before."
"Shifting of the extremities' joint connections, maybe? It's a natural thing for Exos," said Sparky.
"Come on, dude, I would hope that I'd be able to recognize if it was robo-arthritis," Shane replied. "I'm old, but I'm not THAT old. At least, with this whole deal," gesturing to his Ghost as he said it.
The Ghost floated over, frowning down at his partner. "If you have trouble keeping your joints working properly, don't push yourself too hard."
"Thanks, buddy," Shane said sarcastically.
Sparky shrugged. "Hey! We need you to get better at flying and fighting with those things."
A groan. "Remind me of my inferiority complex, why don't ya?"
"Better to be honest than to blow smoke up your ass."
Shane rolled his eyes and smiled. "Yeah, fair point." As he said it, a blue indicator light glowed from the dashboard of the cockpit. "We got a hot one. Vex incursion on Mars. A transmat into the ship, if you'd be so kind?"
"Say the magic word," Sparky said.
"Qwertyuiop."
"Eh, close enough," the Ghost went, porting himself and his Guardian into the helm of the ship.
Shane reached forward, tapping something on the display. "Alright, you ready, baby?" Sparky hummed, turning a dial here and there.
A beat passed, and then the vessel was on its way, zooming out of the Tower with a start, breaking the atmosphere within a minute as it left behind the Earth. The simple glow of the blue planet gave way to prismatic strands of every color as Shane's ship went into FTL mode.
The engines whirred loudly through the cockpit at first before settling into a calmer drone. Shane idly read through the holoscreen briefing he'd gotten from the Vanguard. A simple job -- hive mind robots in Freehold mucking about, clean 'em up and any space rhinos along the way, yada yada, Sparky probably had all the information they needed already.
"Peanut, set course for Meridian Bay and stop us immediately over that old monorail station in the buried city," Shane said with something of a half-conscious knowledge. The ship's AI responded to his request with an affirmative white glow along the windshield.
"Aren't there usually just Cabal out there, not Vex?" Sparky goes. "Something feels off about this one, Shane. We might need to be careful."
"Ah, we'll be fine. What's the worst they could bring out? A Minotaur? We've downed so many of those I've lost count."
"I've also picked you up after you've gotten slapped out of existence by those things," Sparky said. "And I know that number."
Shane made an indignant sound but knew there was no point in arguing with his Ghost, so instead, he looked around the cabin for something to do -- and saw a stack of cards.
"Ooh, what are those?" Sparky asked. "Can I play them?"
Shane shook his head. "No, I don't mess with these too much. They were on me when you rez'd me, the first time."
"Oh." The Ghost's voice went low, remorseful.
"We're not supposed to try to figure out, but I swear, these were a gift," he said, flipping through the stack and gazing at the names -- The Magician, The Fool, Death. "I don't know if I'd really call myself much of a mystic, unless I was Really Different back then, but they feel like they originally were from someone important who had more of a way of connecting with those things. A bit of secondhand divination, I guess."
"You might not have seen the last of them," Sparky said.
"Here's hoping."
Shane tucked the deck into his coat pocket, smiling faintly. He tapped the center console to change direction. "This is our stop, I think." He tapped the navigation panel, setting their destination, and then turned his gaze back to the window beside him. The sun was rising over a desert landscape; the break of day out here was surprisingly similar to back home, just more blue. Faint bits of light from the Vex and their radiolarian cores were visible against the sand and what little was left of the buildings in the heart of a city turned to dust.
"Orbital drop," Shane said. Sparky knew there was no changing his Guardian's mind, so he obliged, with the Warlock teleporting from the confines of the ship into the sky above Freehold, his green longcoat billowing as he took the dive.
Shane watched the city below, taking a moment to orientate himself before landed. A tall, spirelike structure sat directly in front of the Warlock, gleaming white with lines folding in and over each other like intricately linked scaffolding.
“The briefing didn't say anything about a Conflux, did it?” Shane asked.
“It did,” Sparky said. Ghosts couldn't really roll their eyes, but the tone he adopted did it for him.
“Dang,” Shane went. “You got this hack covered?”
“Lemme see what I can find…” The Warlock opened his left palm and Sparky emerged from his virtual backpack, scanning the Conflux with an electronic hum — and attracting the attention of the Goblins patrolling the area. But before any of the brass Vex foot soldiers could do much as fire a single shot from their slap rifles at Sparky, Shane had taken down the whole group with his signature baby blue bullpup, the Zhalo Supercell.
“You thought I was just gonna make this an easy kill for ya?” he yelled, seemingly to the Conflux itself since the Goblins were little more than metal and spilled milk at that point. “Come on!”
A set of gray clouds with white pixel formations emerged near the duo, and Shane's helmet glowed with the reflections of a much larger group of Vex.
“That's more like it,” the Warlock said.
Who would win in a fight, twelve interlinked physical manifestations of a massive, system-spanning collective mind, or one zappy boy?
Hunters liked to rely on tricky solutions in fights, manifesting their Light powers to play with their prey. Titans were the ones that put raw power into action, using their connection to the Traveler as protectors, bulwarks, human-sized tanks.
But a Warlock's means of bringing Light onto the battlefield was the most poetic of the three. Utility and acuity at once, a flow and finesse all their own -- and in Shane's case, mastery of the art of the storm. He leapfrogged through the floating Harpy drones and struck the ground with streaks of electricity, blue and white sparks flowing from his hands and the rifle in them with equal measure and breakneck speed.
Sparks flew in all directions as the lightning hit the ground, sending up brilliant bursts of static. It was like watching fireworks, but it wasn't the sky they exploded off of. Instead, each Vex bot's white liquid radiolarian core crackled and went dark with strands of Arc energy flowing across the ground, the explosions brightening the arid Mars landscape. Shane kept in continuous motion as the enemy forces fell, his cascades through the air around the Conflux graceful but quick.
With one final takedown -- a Minotaur with an annoying Void shield that managed to graze his side, going down with a well-placed pulse grenade throw -- Shane landed lightly, dust swirling around his feet as he turned back to Sparky.
"How's the keysmashing?" Shane went.
The Ghost warbled, as if to groan. "Still looking for weaknesses," he replied. "But I think I've found somethin'. There's some kind of shield surrounding this place.”
"Shield?" Shane echoed. "Like, an invisible, impenetrable force field?” He fired a set of test shots from the Zhalo into the air, and rather than careening out into the distance, the blasts bounced against a barrier above them. At the same time, another gray cloud emerged, much larger and higher in the sky than the ones that had come before it.
“Shit,” Shane muttered. The Vex robot that emerged from the pixels had a chassis several shades darker than that of its fallen compatriots, closer to a black with a golden finish. It was a Minotaur that stood about as high as the Conflux, eclipsing Shane by about ten feet and gazing at him and Sparky with a single glowing red eye, aiming its railgun-esque weapon with malicious intent.
"They weren't supposed to send a Gate Lord!" Sparky went, and Shane made an effort to leap out of the way but he couldn't make it out in time. The Torch Hammer set the ground around the Conflux ablaze, and sent Shane flying backward into a neon Clovis Bray sign, which briefly lit to life before the Guardian fell to the ground, coughing a spot of synthetic blood into his helmet.
Shane put his arms and legs into a kneeling position in an attempt to stand. His suit started to glow with a sickly aura -- a warning indicator -- and the pain started. Shane clenched his teeth, fighting through the agony, and looked up toward the Conflux and his Ghost. "Sparky, get outta--"
A second shot from the Gate Lord. The Conflux rippled with a blast of Solar energy, and Sparky fell to the ground, his shell streaked with a hot line burning a bright orange.
The Warlock's jaw opened under his helmet, as if to yell, but he didn't make a sound. The idea of losing one's Ghost was one of a Guardian's most primal fears -- their connection to the Traveler, the source of their power, their second life (or forty-second) given a clear expiration point.
Shane was still out of sorts and he knew it, but he mustered enough strength to lift himself into a hobbling walk, then a run, and a sprint. By the time he'd closed the gap to the Conflux, he had taken to the air again, readying himself with thunderous calm and tranquil fury.
An inhale.
Warlocks: the bookish, unfeeling type of Guardian, one would think on the surface. Except that wasn't quite the case at all -- far from it, when the Stormcallers in particular were concerned. For them, channeling Arc energy meant being in tune with one's emotions and the happenings around them to a hypersensitive point.
Shane didn't have much. He didn't know anyone at the Tower, and most of his excursions for the Vanguard were solo affairs rather than Fireteam joints. But Sparky was always there for him, ready to pick him up when he needed, buzzing about the ship and giving Peanut false objectives to chase. The cynical might have called him a mere drone of the big magic ball that floated over the Last City, a simple tool. But he was more than that.
The Gate Lord seemed to realize the danger it was in and fired its railgun once more, but its aim was poor, and as it stumbled, Shane pointed an outstretched hand at it and closed his fingers inward, like a bird of prey clutching its quarry.
An exhale.
The area around seemed to darken and a loud crunch shook the Conflux as a beam of blue energy emerged from Shane into the Gate Lord's center of mass, the point of impact leaking with a stream of radiolaria.
Once his energy was tapped out, Shane fell backward toward the floor, managing to break the momentum from the drop with one outward push of his legs before landing next to his Ghost.
Sparky's light diode brightened as the Guardian joined him. "Wow," he said.
"Never done that before," they both said together. The Ghost took back to the air above, mostly intact but surrounded by Arc particles and streaks of electricity emitted from his wound.
"We'll have to get that fixed when we get back to the Tower," Shane went, his helmet retracting to show a metallic face filled with concern.
"You know," Sparky went, rotating the bits of his shell in a cloud around his core, "I think I actually kinda like it like this. Fits our aesthetic."
A smile from the Warlock. "Fair enough."
They both looked up to watch the Gate Lord fall to the ground, its core exploding into hundreds of bright bursts as pieces of metal and circuitry flew everywhere and melted on contact with the sandy terrain, releasing an intense, putrid stench.
The Ghost turned to his Guardian and blinked. "Let's go home."
I turn heads like a DJ, twist that dial ⌘