This Broken Earth: Chapter Three by Alex Mastroianni

The 'event' in Los Angeles (This is what it would be called) did draw most of CEM's attention. However, an entity like CEM is hydra-headed, and while the board of directors and research and development were trying to understand and control the event, a whole other organ of Combat Eye Media was bent on capitalizing on it.

Ultra Giga and Rad Lad, the two dueling metas that were killed by the event, were being autopsied already. Surgical implements did exist for the unique problem of invulnerable skin. Observing the autopsy of Rad Lad, from behind leaded glass, was the CEM chief intelligence officer,

James 'Hollow' Point. Point headed the Metahuman Apprehension Corps, the MAC. If someone asked him, and no one would, he would have said that he wasn't enjoying the autopsy. But he wasn't a big fan of Rad Lad's either. Just as the medical examiner was ascertaining that the lead corpse emitted no radiation, Point's earbud screeched to life. "I'm coming" was all he said as he left the operating theater.

The MAC had a most wanted list, and at the top of the list was the maverick meta organization known as the Sick Sick Six. Three members were in custody and one was effectively neutralized. Now Point had a lead on the last two: Ephemera and Meninx.

The event had done more than kill two metahumans; it also nearly killed every meta within a twenty mile radius. At that moment, in a high-end jeweler in Beverly Hills, Ephemera and Meninx were knocked almost comatose by the event pulse. Ephemera is a bodiless intelligence. He makes short lived bodies from organic waste. Dead leaves, skin cells, bugs, dried blood. Meninx used to be an Olympic class gymnast until she broke her neck in a fall from the uneven bars. An experimental therapy, meant to regenerate nerve tissue, turned her entire body into neurons. She is a telepath and prescient of no small measure. Ephemera had slipped through the ventilation of an adjacent shop as a cloud of dandruff. Once inside he admitted Meninx who promptly read the safe codes from the manager’s mind and erased the surveillance tape via psychokinesis. Then she made them all sleep. They were gathering the stones when the event pulse struck. Ephemera was blown to dust, his consciousness barely intact. Meninx, being a telepath, had some defenses against the pulse. Still, it reduced even her to a quivering epileptic. Her last cogent thought was: Why didn't I foresee it?

Point had assembled a rapid react unit and took off in a hoverchopp CEM pound in the Utah desert. Curbing its acceleration to allow for frail human occupants, the craft could over Beverly Hills in eleven minutes. "I want thought armor and a continuous prescience baffling field!" Point hollered to his unit leader, Carlo Venti. CEM was technically not a paramilitary organization, so they dispensed with rank. Rank was there though, it always was. "Ready the tailored containment apparatus for Ephemera, if the event weakened them the way the intelligence suggested it would, we might have the jump on them."

"ETA two minutes, sir."

Point pulled a mask of thick synthetic material over his head. The hood was matte black and had no eye or mouth holes. Shiny black circuitry marbled its exterior. Mind armor.

"Hard hats on, team!" the men under Point's command pulled there own 'hard hats' down over their faces.

The pilot announced they were over the target. The team all checked their gear and hooked onto the drop cables. The floor of the chopp slid away and they slid down weighted cords to the roof of the jewelry store.

Meninx stirred. She wiped the froth from her mouth and swallowed metallic salty blood. Did I have a seizure? Her head was full of cotton and her vision was cracked like a migraine. groggy, she looked around for Ephemera. A small tornado of dust in the corner of the display window bleated psychically. Something had taken both of them out. Hit them where it counted. Just then, Meninx sensed six...nothings on the roof. Some idiots were wearing hard hats. Didn't they know the mind armor made them conspicuous by their absence?

In the state he was in, Meninx doubted ephemera could even communicate telepathically. She stared at the small dust devil of dry skin, its hue becoming a swirl of yellow and pink. behind her, the stones she dropped were putting themselves into her attaché case of their own accord. Actually she was moving the diamonds around to save time. One part of her bagged up the stones, while another tried to assist Ephemera in becoming solid. the pinkish yellow swirls in his forming body were somehow disconcerting, she turned around and one of the jewelers was stirring, her face and neck stripped of fat and skin. Ephemera was utilizing live tissue. She knew this was very difficult and painful to do. Although Meninx was what CEM would label a 'supercriminal', she did not want anyone harmed by anything she did. Part of the reason she broke her contract and went rogue was the colossal loss of life she incurred when engaging other metas.

He's killing her She thought as she watched Ephemera peel the skin from the jewelers face, cell by cell. Hastily, she went behind the counter looking for something in particular and she found it. She tossed the bagged lunch near the dust devil with the psychic message Use this.

Ephemera was working his way through the turkey sandwich when the roof exploded. A high pitched keening filled the room and the almost solid Ephemera exploded into a vapor of organic bits. Meninx was screaming mental commands at the mind armored men, to no avail. One of them used a strange gun. it looked like a flame thrower, with a backpack attached to the gun itself. but the canister on the soldiers back was clear polycarbonate. Meninx levitated a three karat stone and launched it at the canister. It barely scratched it. Ephemera was becoming a meat colored stick figure when the man with the strange gun pulled the trigger. A strange diaphanous energy came out of the barrel and whirled into a parabolic funnel. For a second Ephemera could move, then piece by piece, the thing sucked him into the tank. She could see him whirling around inside the clear canister. More importantly she could feel his absolute fear.

At this, diamonds began whirling around the room. Meninx's eyes welling up with milky spinal fluid tears. One man's hard hat was torn and his cheek lacerated to the bone. Deftly, Meninx's mind crept in through the hole and unplugged the man. he would be okay, in a week or so. Still, the diamond sirocco raged. Misty spatters of blood shot up from every direction. Point watched it all from the roof and, cursing under his breath, knew what he had to do.

Meninx was lost even to herself now. The diamonds becoming a razor tornado,cutting even her. The MAC team huddled behind display cases, all of them bloodied. The whole shop was spattered red. Point,watching from the hole in the roof, reached for a clunky device on his belt--the prescience baffler. he unlocked the safety of a small red button on the device. He didn't understand how, but this switch 'inverted' the field, making the field a ray.He set his jaw and flipped the red switch. It was like a horizontal waterspout was coming out of the baffler.Point jumped down into the shop. The 'ray' was more like a wild snake, the sickly blue whip of light writhed about the shop uncontrollably, every unshielded mind it touched reduced to vegetation, even Meninx. He would lose all the men whose hard hats were breached. They were not telepaths and would be permanently damaged. But he would gain Meninx. The skin monster was a liability, but a telepath they could use, when she woke up in five or six days

This Broken Earth: Chapter Two by Alex Mastroianni

"Did you feel that?" These were not words. Words, spoken ones at least, were useless in deep vacuum. These beings had more subtle means of 'talking'.

How could I not have felt that? Neutronium thought to herself, in the compartmentalized private part of her mind. She responded "I did feel that, Spin. i wasn't paying attention, though. Can you pinpoint its origin." Whatever they just felt, it pulled Oneiroman right out of a dream. Few things can do that. He floated,uneasy. His hand cupped around his chin. The dream powered meta was silent, he felt something he hadn't felt in a lifetime. Fear? Exhilaration?

"I think I can Nute. Like trajectories and rifle reports, no?" Spinstate was arguably the most human and maybe the most powerful of the three. Formerly a young meta from Earth called Qid Quark, he had the ability to observe quantum particles without affecting them as an observer. Where are you? Where did you come from? The pulse they felt was not unlike the psychic paroxysm unleashed by a metahuman upon their power's dawning. This was different, though. It was much more than just another meta. The three of them would not admit it to one another, but all of them were unnerved by the pulse.

Neutronium zoned out again, back to the private world of her pulsar heart. This was here real life. In a cushioned pupa of maximum gravity. My world, my time.

"This, you won't believe" Oneiroman already knew, but still he did not believe. " It came from Earth." The man of dreams was visibly stirred "Which one?" he asked Spinstate, though he knew the answer already too. It came from our earth

"It came from our Earth." The three converged from the dozens of light years away they were from each other. They had not physically been together in a while. Appearances changed.

Spinstate wore a cobalt suit with a white circle over his heart. His hair was longer, almost shaggy. he was unshaven. For a man who could cleave the electrons off of atoms, he did not shave often.
Neutronium had forsaken human appearance for something else. She was like a polished platinum statue. A careful exercise in self- control kept the gravity of her stellar heart from killing her comrades.
Oneiroman-who never liked his name and usually went by 'O'. Was entirely non-humanoid. Apparently he had fallen back to sleep, hatching this proxy self through the veil as it were. He never considered that his friends found this rude. The thing was a ovoid lump of iron as big as a man's torso. Around its thickest point it had several circular slots. At the narrow top was an obsidian black 'eye'. The shell of the egg became a wrinkle of skin around the oil black eye.it even blinked. Below that, was a small cricle of steel mesh. A microphone? O must be working out something complex and many layered to send from Dreamplace such a poorly formed, utilitarian proxy.

"What should we do? Ideas?" Spinstate shurgged as he asked his comrades for their opinions on what could be the birth of a being on their order. neutronium just hovered with her arms crossed. Spinstates own face warped and reflected in her platinum tricep. he stared at here for a good long while and thought Apart from myself, this is the most human thing I've looked at in years.

Oneiro, who was attuned to the emotional and intellectual frequencies of his associates in ways beyond plain telepathy, sensed the longing in Spinstate, and their course of action became clear. The proxy spoke: "We go home. Now."

Spin just closed his eyes. How does he think of everything? Neutronium shook her chrome head gently. "No. I've no interest in returning to Earth." This was not a suprising opinion. The others had long suspected that Nute left something painful back home. What they didn't understand was that in addition to this, her pulsar heart felt and aversion to any large singularity. It posed no threat to a creature of will like her, but the rival gravity provoked an instinctual bristling. nute even avoided other planets, opting to stay in orbit while the other two descended.

"Then don't come with us." O's directness often uneased the others. Spinstate saw the arguement coming. Nute and the man of dreams clashed about everything. presently the dream proxy folded in onitself. fast as thought Oneiro was there. A man, incongruously pale and dark haired. he whore poorly defined black clothing and his hair was closely cropped. Gunmetal eyes that could unnerve Jovian worlds regarded Spin and Nute.

"You would do this, O?" Spinstate remembered once they agreed to never consciously decide to split up. But there was years between then and now. The dynamic of their relationships had changed.

Nute , a little offended, spoke now, the others detected a flux in the local gravity, which was dilute. "I will not countenance a return to Earth. I will follow you two the Sol system, where I will tarry in Pluto's orbit. Pluto was a small thing and did not rile the gravity aversion in Neutronium's very being.
Spinstate nodded, accepting the situation. They could not expect much more from Nute. "Okay. is there anything you guys need to do before we set out?" The both assured him there wasn't. "How long do you think it'll take us to get home, O?" Spinstate smiled inside. Ask a being like Oneiroman for a 'guess' and you'll get a very precise, calculated answer. "Fourteen days, six hours and twenty-one minutes." No doubt he knows down to the picosecond, thought Spin. You would figure a being that derives his power from dreams wouldn't be so logic bound. But there was code and equations under every seemingly magic thing Oneiroman could do. Spin caught himself when he noticed O was casually staring at him. He long suspected he had more telepathic ability than he let on.

The three joined hands in a circle. They had a tried and true method for interstellar travel. A way to cut their traveling time exponentially. Oneiroman folded into himself, and took Neutronium and Spinstate with him, into Dreamplace.
the now, stood on a grassy knoll, which looked down on a large copse with a path leading into it. Nute and Spin looked at Oneiro quizzically. "I love nature walks." said the man of dreams, and the three enterd the woods.