The Revolution

**Vanil** · 09/07/2007 13:11:58

"It isn't here, Mistress."

Ookami's lips tightened visibly as she heard the same news she had been hearing ever since the last of the humans had been rounded up and killed. It wasn't here. It wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere.

The loading bay lay in utter ruin. The bodies of dozens of dead humans and Exiles alike littered the pockmarked concrete in great bleeding heaps that the surviving Dire Lupines had taken it upon themselves to attempt to burn to digital ash, with only varying degrees of success. It was as if they didn't want to burn; as if they were merely content to sit hunched and mocking, their glassy, lifeless eyes watching the Lupine-Mistress receive this same report from her warriors over and over again.

It wasn't here.

Ookami flexed her long, still-wet claws irritably, a long, slow growl quietly escaping her feminine throat. "Hrrrrrrrr, then you are not looking hard enough, fool. We know it to be here. We have been told it would be here, with these humans." The Exile spat the last word with thinly-veiled contempt as she jabbed a black-garbed body that lay prone to the messy floor adjacent to her with her long, vicious heel. "Vanil said that..."

Vanil had said it would be here, hadn't he.

Her yellow, canine eyes narrowing with sudden, rabid suspicion, Ookami whirled about to face the Dire Lupine that had come to deliver her the news, his matted black fur caked with gore. "Where is Vanil, warrior? Why is he not here with the pack, as we had agreed upon?"

The younger Exile shifted uneasily, his urge to drop onto all fours readily apparent. "I do not know, Den-Mistress. He and his Masquerade have not yet made contact with our auguries."

Ookami's lips curled back from her fangs in slow, rippling rage, her desire to cleave her fellow program in two obvious. "Then find him, or I will tear your eyes from your skull and make certain you look where I wish you to."

---

His run complete, Phrack dove into the shadows that the Masques had been using as a shroud from whence to kill his soldiers and reloaded his heavy chrome pistols with a practiced, subroutine-driven snap-click. Only two of the crusaders that had driven out with him into the Merovingian's oncoming fire were still alive with him, and he could tell that they both knew that their likelihood of surviving for much longer while within the cold steel jaws of Vanil's subway trap was a very small one at this point.

His fingers tightened around the carved grips of his pistols. They were to be commended greatly for having fought so far, Phrack knew with that which could most closely be equated to pride in his atypical, Machiavellian mind.

With a nod to his operatives, Phrack glanced out from behind his new pillar and saw Vanil. The Blood Drinker was flanked by two of his Masques; one male and one female. The first eyed the shadows that wrapped their way about the train station as if they were about to jump at him, his face concealed by a black cloth bandanna, while the second had wild, black hair that hung about her pale, made up features in wild, unkempt locks, and her slightly off-kilter eyes shifted constantly, and Phrack couldn't help but wonder what sort of creative horror Vanil had shown to her in her service to him as he noticed the way her fighting dress of black leather and silver clasps draped from her slightly emaciated-looking Residual Self-Image. Both held matching pairs of Beretta handguns that glittered in the hanging darkness, and the Captan of the Scarlet Hotei had no doubt that the both of them would take a bullet meant for their master in a heartbeat.

There were not many things Phrack and Vanil had in common. But there were some things.

A sudden, deafening flash of gunfire broke Phrack from his reverie. Darminian had fired at the three Masques now that they had emerged from their shroud of darkness and concrete. Throwing his gloves up to shield his pale face from the sudden shower of stone that sprayed his way as the submachine gun round tore past him, Vanil spun to face the origin of the audacious attack in time to see the Neonate disappear behind another pillar that held the ceiling of the station aloft in the black. With a small, dismissive frown, the Exile gestured to his guards.

"LinksLife. Ekizeba. Kill him." His black leathers furling about his slender body, Vanil turned to face Phrack and those two Neonates that still stood with him.

"I will deal with Phrack myself."

Their only visible acknowledgement was that of the joint clicking of the rounds of their weapons being chambered, the two Masques stepped away from their Captain and towards the cover Darminian had taken, and all Phrack could do was have faith in his old comrade's ability to hold his own against two fully-armed and dangerous Merovingian operatives as Vanil spun his own handguns once in his hands and strode forth to address him.

"I told you that no one could oppose me, human," Vanil called out, that distinct, just-off accent of his echoing against the spurts of gunfire that still wracked the subway platform behind him. The eyes that those shades of his hid settled on the Neonates that flanked Phrack, and a slow, cruel smile split the black veins of viral decay that writhed beneath the pale flesh of his Residual Self-Image.

"Not even you."

That confident grin of his crawling onto his own lips, Phrack slid his fedora from his bald head and let it fall to his right, his thumbs clicking the safeties on his guns back and forth in anticipation. "They say that seeing is believing, Vanil."

The Exile's painted lips curved back, the fangs of his existence baring themselves brazenly to his human foe. "We'll see, Neonate."

An age passed in a moment then. The debris that had been loosed during the fierce duel between the Pluribus Neo operatives and the Masquerade drifted in faint clouds of hanging dust past the two opposing figures. Phrack cracked his knuckles against the handles of his Desert Eagles, while Vanil relaxed his own against the grips of their darker brethren. For that moment, the only sound was the distant crack of weapons fire and the breaths that the both of them took.

The two crusaders that had flanked him were dead before they could react. As their RSIs fell to the concrete of the subway platform, a bleeding wound in each of their foreheads, Phrack leapt and kicked himself forwards off a pillar and into the air just in time to replicate Vanil's own maneuver.

Time froze to a near standstill and human and Exile lay suspended in space, their faces inches from each other and their hands and wrists grappling as their handguns emptied their magazines past the two operatives' ears.

~V

**MatrixRefugee**

((In the immortal words (word?) of Smith in Reloaded: "Mooorrre..." ))

Iovai

((What she said.

In conclusion, some of you should go Machine (OR CYPHERITE) so the orgs can be somewhat balanced, and everyone can have more fun!))

**MatrixRefugee**

Iovai wrote:

((What she said.

In conclusion, some of you should go Machine (OR CYPHERITE) so the orgs can be somewhat balanced, and everyone can have more fun!))

((Owch. We barely have enough good Mervs as it is right now....))

Chemuel · 09/07/2007 20:53:08

MatrixRefugee wrote:

Iovai wrote:
((What she said.

In conclusion, some of you should go Machine (OR CYPHERITE) so the orgs can be somewhat balanced, and everyone can have more fun!))
((Owch. We barely have enough good Mervs as it is right now....))

((I blame Dezreki.))

**MatrixRefugee**

Chemuel wrote:

MatrixRefugee wrote:
Iovai wrote:
((What she said.

In conclusion, some of you should go Machine (OR CYPHERITE) so the orgs can be somewhat balanced, and everyone can have more fun!))
((Owch. We barely have enough good Mervs as it is right now....))
((I blame Dezreki.))

(( Channelling the Oracle, Chem? You just read me mind. :: laughs:: ))

Iovai

MatrixRefugee wrote:

Chemuel wrote:
MatrixRefugee wrote:
Iovai wrote:
((What she said.

In conclusion, some of you should go Machine (OR CYPHERITE) so the orgs can be somewhat balanced, and everyone can have more fun!))
((Owch. We barely have enough good Mervs as it is right now....))
((I blame Dezreki.))
(( Channelling the Oracle, Chem? You just read me mind. :: laughs:: ))

((Well you don't 'all' have to go Machine. We could use some Mervs.))

**Vanil**

Darminian saw the two Masques coming and held his sub machineguns to his front, his lips tight as he saw the blur that was the Prince of Darkness and the leader of the Pluribus Neo fleet. Darminian and Phrack had been through countless scrapes of this nature, but never before could Darminian recall a time when the scrape had been quite this sudden or deep. Vanil had anticipated everything and had managed to trap them within their own snare. It seemed an impossibility, but Darminian had been an operative long enough to know well that the impossible was often nothing short of the inevitable in this place.

And so Darminian would do what he always did; what he always had to do. He would fight.

With a grimace, Darminian threw himself out into plain sight and pulled his triggers. The blinding muzzle flares in his shades, the Neonate could only just make out LinksLife and Ekizeba as each dived to one side to avoid the storm of digital lead, massive showers of chipped mortar and concrete thrown up behind them as Darminian crisscrossed his guns in an attempt to follow their fleeing forms with a suitable measure of ballistic lethality.

But the Masques were fast.

As if rebounding from the walls of the platform itself, LinksLife and Ekizeba both dove back together, raised their pistols; a line of four shimmering tips of dark metal, and returned fire. The brass bullet casings shone sharply against the looming black of their apparel coding, and time seemed to crawl as Darminian willed himself to perceive the bullets that were too fast for any one person to perceive. Weaving expertly, the Neonate angled himself around the corkscrew-contrails of the oncoming projectiles, dodging them with uncanny precision. Spinning in place as might a dancer, Darminian brought himself onto one knee and let loose with his automatic weapons again, raking the field of fire with burning projectiles and sprays of debris.

Though they had obviously seen it coming, it was still no less of a challenge for the pair of Merovingian operatives to dive to the floor as the hot hailstorm passed above them, their figures prone to the concrete and their own guns extended as they fired back again and again, trying to force their enemy back into cover.

Again Darminian saw the counterattack coming. Exhaling deeply, the E Pluribus Neo operative denied the gravity that was not gravity and sprung from his crouch, the passage of time a figment of perception as his legs did the splits in midair, allowing the Masques' bullets to pass beneath him harmlessly and perforate the neon ad-laden wall that lay behind where he had perched with sprays of sparks and shattered plastic-glass.

As Ekizeba and LinksLife leapt from the floor with a swirl of black fabric and leather, Darminian sprayed a few bursts of fire in their general direction as he dove back behind the nearest pillar.

He could only hope Phrack was faring this well.

---

The passage of time was as nothing for the two of them. Both knew it to be so, and so it was for them and them alone in this realm of perception relative to one's own belief in the nature of ‘Reality.' In such a way, the two combatants were frozen and yet not frozen in digital space, their weapons held beside each other, side-by-side, in a subtle, ballistic mimicry of the nature of the two; human and Exile alike. It was more than a duel or battle. It was a work of art. The two powerful operatives were but painters; their guns their brushes, and their canvass the Matrix itself.

Phrack felt his surroundings warp back into what was by the Machines to be considered acceptable human focus as he and his opponent landed with their stomachs to the floor of the train station, the still barrel of his Desert Eagle against Vanil's pale, black-veined temple.

"You're empty," the Blood Drinker snarled softly.

Phrack could feel the cold black metal of Vanil's own handgun to the side of his own head and said that which he knew with that small, sure grin of his.

"So are you."

~V

**MatrixRefugee**

Two weeks earlier....

A late summer night on the roof of Camon Central Church; Sieges sits there cleaning her guns and watching a group of EPN and Machinists rough-housing below. Watching the futility of it all leaves her so distracted, she almost does not sense the odd feeling that someone watched her from behind, until Morraeon rouses herself and sets off an alarm in her brain

Behind her stands a figure completely encased in the shadows of the late evening. All that is clearly visible of him is the glittering leather hem of his black leather coat, but the voice was unmistakable. "I have something to tell you," Vanil said.

She keeps herself from gathering her body defensively, the better to keep him at bay with a sense of false security. "Something like... what?" Her voice is guarded and suspicious, but strangely free from anger, which startled her deep in her heart."

A gentle breeze catches his leathers, sending curling out before him like wings. "I'm sorry." he says, almost as if the words took a supreme act of the will to enunciate.

A momentary pregnant silence passes as she stares at him. "Say that again?" she asks, incredulous, finding the words far too good to be true.

"Hmph. You heard me," he grunts, almost impatient, and starts to turn away.

She catches herself. "I'm sorry... I'm just a little in shock here," she says, as if she's finding it too good to be true. "I just..." she fumbled for the right words to say before opting to take the line of simplicity. "Thanks... that's all I needed to hear from you..." Something ticks in the part of her brain she can still claim as solely her own. "But on that footing, I have to confess, I've been plotting my revenge on you all this time..." she says, with definate remorse, and despite a momentary protest from the Exile sharing her head. "I can forgive you now, but... can you forgive me?"

"I can..." He inclines his head, and his face comes partially into view. His normally beautiful pale flesh is cross-crossed with wicked black veins that run up the side of his neck below his ears, then after a moment's consideration, he adds, " ...do that."

Seeing his face so distorted and disfigured, she cannot help emitting a small sound of pity, even empathy. Much as she hates him for his crimes against her, she cannot help appreciating the beauty of his face and form. Then she reaches out and closing the gap between them, gently touches the side of his face with her right hand.

His skin feels colder than death, even through the leather of her gloves. His fangs hang over his open lips. "I know how it feels. To suffer such a thing."

"It's all right... all debts are cancelled," she says, even though the words cause Morraeon to roil with indignation in her head. "What... what's happened to you?" she asks in something close to concern.

"The Exilic sequencing that they bound to my Residual Self-Image is rotting at it faster than it ever has. I haven't a great deal of time, unless I take that which I seek," he says, not telling her much, but at least giving her the roughest idea of just what is happening to cause such an effect in his appearance.

She feels herself wince with more than empathy: the effects had a certain consonence with her. She swears she feels the dull burn of the sentient toxin at the points of entry on her back and thighs, a pain memory she had hoped time had filed the edges from. "That's dreadful..." she says, with genuine empathy. "I'm not saying this lightly, but I have an idea how you feel." Shs gazed toward the skyline and the dim outlines of the aquaduct between Richland and International. "You know what tomorrow is?"

"No," he says, the monosyllable touched with an air of "how could I?"

She pushes back an all-too-familiar pain memory. "One year ago tomorrow was when I got hit with that poison... I still don't know who did it and why, but in someways, it put me where you are now."

Smirking just a little, he adds, "Did you choose your poison?"

She shakes her head. "No... but apparantly I chose to put myself in its path... and I chose the antidote for it, though that sometimes feels as bad as the disease." Morraeon, objecting to this remark, roils in her head for a moment, then sinks back into her post-prandial half-slumber.

"I see." he says, and adjusts his footing, his coat shifting again. "You were always the naieve one," he observes. "But perhaps not so naieve as those of us who deceive and manipulate and position. I don't know."

She smiles a little at this near-complimenting comment. "I like to think of myself as the innocent one... I haven't lost my innocence, but in other ways, I've grown much more wise through experience."

"Mm." He turns to leave, but stops himself and looks back at her. " My name is Dante Nihilson. I became aware of the Simulation at the age of twenty-one through Self-Substantiation, and was indoctrinated into the Merovingian syndicat four years hence. There wasn't any going back. There still isn't."

She takes this in silently, with her usual quiet, childlike attentiveness. Then a compassionate impulse rises in her heart and she approaches him, reaching out and laying a hand on his arm. "Come here a moment..." she said, her voice soft.

He flinches, as if terrified of physical contact, but does as she says. Almost as nervous as he, in case he should try attacking her again, she leans in closer and gently kisses his cheek. Finding it isn't dry, she reaches into her dark red silk blouse and takes out a red silk handkerchief, using it to blot his cheek gently. "Maybe our past hasn't always been the most peaceful, and the future is always gonna be uncertain..." she says, gazing past him as if into the shadows of the past, "But we've got the present, and at least for now, there's no debts between us." She couldn't say for certain if the pain memories would return and upset her present equilibrium. "You're lucky my worse half is asleep tonight, she'd be snarking up a storm..." she said, half-trying to jest.

She wonders if she only thinks she sees a smirk in one corner of this mouth. "I may die. Someone should know." His shades hide his eyes, but something tells her that they're utterly impassive behind those lenses. "You have to; do you understand? Once you do something so unforgivable and terrible, you have no choice but to continue. There is no escaping causality...no escaping what you do and what that makes you."

She wags her head, not dismissively, but weighing his statement against her knowledge. "No... you can always choose to change. You just have to let yourself be more than the ones and zeros that make up your code, or the chemical reactions in your body... That's why I've been able to keep Morraeon out of the worst trouble."

His lips tighten. He's obviously in pain, both physically and otherwise. "If you killed a child, could you wake up the next night? Could you bring yourself to accept that death as being entirely your responsibility and keep walking?" he asks

She opens her mouth to ask him what he meant, then decided it was better that she did not find out the particulars. "I haven't killed a child... but I'm partly responsible for killing an Exile who had children, leaving them without a father... The best I can tell myself is that at least he was an old program and his time had come," she says thoughtfully, thinking of one of Morraeon's early hunting expeditions.

"Have you never wondered why the Machines don't try harder to remove me? The human collateral is too much for them." He smiles coldly, as if half-pleased with himself.

She senses Morraeon rousing herself for a moment, and she knew a hint of crimson flickered in her left eye. Her left hand starts to curl itself into a claw-like shape, threatening to wipe that smile off his face, but that soon fades away as the Exile settles down, too contented and sated to disturb her own slumbers over the bore. "All I can say is, we've all got the potential to be more than that, we just have to find that way. Even you do, if you let yourself."

He weighs that. "I suppose. It's not as if my induction into the Merovingian syndicat was entirely voluntary... ...but perhaps it was. I can't say anymore."

She smiles at him sadly. "You don't have to. I'm the one who's the open book," she says, laughing gently at herseld

He smiles and tilts his head one way, the rivulets of pseudo-black standing out of his pale neck. "True. Betrayal, torture, and violation hardly makes for a lovely subject. And I feel as if time is running more quickly now...so much more quickly."

She looks away, trying to hide the ambiguous look that crossed her face, the right side of it saddened and empathetic, the left betraying a nasty smirk in the corner of her mouth.

"I was once 'fascinated' with my regenerative capacities. I enjoyed seeing how hard I could push them myself...hmph. She asked me to stop, though," he says. She knows instinctively he refers to Mataru, their mutual friend. "No; pleaded."

She eyes the black rivulets under his pale skin, wondering just what had caused them. "I guess I don't have to ask if you've tried to regenerate..." she said.

"It all comes back. It always has. ...until now." He turns away swiftly, his fangs clenched tightly as he retches as quietly as he can manage, a trickle of black, digital tar expelling itself from his thin lips. Clearing his throat, he turns back to her. " No matter. It won't matter for much longer. Phrack can't hide it forever, and I'll kill anyone who gets in the way."

Hide what...? she wonders. She adds, "I'll pray that you don't have to." She genuinely means it: with the Truce fallen, the last thing they needed was more pointless, senseless violence, and both halve of her were beginning to tire of his displays.

"I won't." He turns on his polished heel and strides back the way he came, the dusk swallowing him once more, as it always has.

She lets him go and lets the feeling of shock and relief return...

**Vanil**

For a brief moment, the two stared into each others' shades before, as one, they flipped themselves from the dark, bullet-ridden concrete, reloading their weapons as they spun. His heels hitting the floor with a cloud of dust, Phrack spun once in place and extended both of his pistols, his fingers tightening on their triggers as he felt them jump reassuringly in his hands, their magazines emptying themselves nearly as quickly as they had been filled.

Vanil laughed and, with an upward leap that seemed to defy what he should have capable of, his heeled boots took to the ceiling and stayed there.

"I will have it, human!" Vanil shouted arrogantly, upside down, as he extended his own weapons in a reversed mirror of Phrack's own attack. "Whether you are dead or alive, I will have it!" With a pair of deafening bangs, his own black Eagles let loose, their massive rounds blasting Phrack's world apart and forcing him behind the nearest undamaged pillar, of which there were by now very few.

"So you keep saying!" Phrack called back as he let his spent magazines fall to the concrete with a metallic clatter and slid a fresh pair into the grips of his pistols. "But seeing is believing...and all I see is an Exile with his shoes stuck to a ceiling!" With a toothy smirk, Phrack leapt out from behind his tower of mortar and dove to the side, his handguns extended and firing the whole time. Hissing, Vanil returned fire as best he could and cart wheeled the opposite direction of the soaring Neonate, his heels catching the darkness of the ceiling once more before he spun in place and spat a barrage of ballistic fury at his foe, blowing apart chunks of stone that lay only inches from Phrack RSI.

With a grunt, Phrack allowed time to weave around him as he flipped himself upright and dodged away from the oncoming mirrored streams that were the Blood Drinker's bullets, in time to see his foe shuffle along the ceiling to a more advantageous position, his black coat hanging down past his pale face like the fluttering wings of a bat. "Maybe you should be looking harder than you are, then, human!" Vanil retorted as he mimicked Phrack's earlier maneuver and reloaded with guns with practiced grace. Phrack could see the dim, glittering silhouettes of the empty, smoking magazines as they fell the distance between the shadowed ceiling and the debris-laden floor. "Your soldiers and dead, and you seem to have...missed your train!" the Exile continued with obvious relish. "Perhaps it's time you gave me the Fragment and ended this pointless charade!"

"Oh, I ‘don't' think so," Phrack whispered to himself as he lunged forwards along the floor suddenly and raised one of his handguns. Time was nothing once more as the human carefully chose his target and fired.

Not having anticipated his opponent's attack, Vanil was startled when one of his footholds gave way with an explosion of chipped concrete and coils of musty dust. With a frustrated, serpentine snarl, the Exile quickly adjusted his footing and latched his suddenly loose heel onto another acceptable grip in time to feel his other foot give way with another loud, mortar-ridden bang. Phrack was trying to force him from the ceiling.

"Impudent fool!" Vanil shouted angrily, his glistening fangs bared as he cart wheeled over himself along the ceiling, pulling the triggers of his weapons again and again, his muzzle flashes searing-bright to his sensitive eyes, even hidden as they were behind his pitch black lenses. "Do you honestly believe you can escape here alive!?"

Tossing his guns into the air, Phrack leapt forwards onto his hands to avoid the barrage of deadly incoming fire, his feet in the air before flipping himself forwards again to right himself in time to catch his falling weapons, raise them, and spin their shining barrels back upon the wild, upside down Merovingian executor.

"Absolutely and with all my being!" Phrack called back with a smile, his weapons ejaculating what was left in their magazines.

~V

**MatrixRefugee**

((Finding this newest post when I came home from work and went to check the boards made my whole day.))

Chemuel

((This is brilliant, but I really can't stop laughing every time someone's weapon ejaculates.))

**Darminian**

It's important to ejaculate your weapon on a regular basis less it should misfire when you need it most.

~Darminian

**Paige6**

**MatrixRefugee**

Chemuel wrote:

((This is brilliant, but I really can't stop laughing every time someone's weapon ejaculates.))

((No better pr0n than gun pr0n, non?))