Name: Vasily Cheransky

Profession: Mook

Class: Nemesis

Race: Metahuman

Age: 26 (reset)

Faction: Earth (E5)

Rank: 16 (25)

Advancement: 26%

Use Name: PowerDox

Nationality: Indeterminate

Local Power Rating: S

Hybridization: 34%

Strength: Superb

Empathy: Good

Durability: Extreme

Intellect: Good

Endurance: Extreme

Energy: Extreme

Fitness: Superb

Cleverness: Great

Fatigue: 450

Power: 600+

Health: 450

Invention: 400

Physical: 10

Imbue:3

Redirection: 6

Temporal:8

Throwing

Enhance Speed

Chaos Immunity

Flexible Mind*

Tools & Firearms

Enhance Strength

Entropy Immunity

Entropic Reset

Enhanced durability

Enhance Durability

Energy Absorption

Suspended Life

Enhanced Resistance (all)

Nemesis Analysis

Manifestation pool

Rapid Healing

Instant Mastery

Absorption Balancing

Energy Drain

Umm… okay. Yeah. It looked a lot like the screens that popped up inside of the dungeon, only a little more subdued. It wasn’t actually visible, I could see just fine through it, but the whole concept was a little creepy. Was something installed in my head or my eyes while I slept?

I was familiar with the concept from some books I had read, but seeing it all laid out like that was… weird. I noticed that under imbue it said ‘enhance’ not ‘enhanced’, as opposed to ‘enhanced’ durability under physical. Most of the stuff was pretty clear, though.

I didn’t know what ‘instant mastery’ meant, but it was probably part of my nemesis class. Also, I had no idea what most of the numbers actually meant. Rank 16? The dungeon screen had meant something about that. What did the 25 next to it mean? And what was local power rating S? Did it stand for simple? Severe?

I noticed that the kind of light surrounding Caelo was flickering, so I slipped my arms under her. The room was lit, dimly, by a sort of glowing orb, but the surroundings itself looked similar to the stonework from the castle here previously, albeit with a steel door that had a ‘closed’ sign, one of those ones like you see in old mom and pop shops, hanging from a brass hook set into the riveted iron in the middle of the door. It had become a sort of small room while we were immersed in whatever the game had us in.

In front of me was another door, this one closed as well, but with no sign.

The light faded, and Caelo was wriggling in my arms. After a moment, she stopped and looked up at me. “ Hello. ”

“Hello.” I replied, “Are you going to be okay with standing? I don’t know what was done to heal you.”

She smiled a little and curled into my chest a little, and lifted her hands to say,“ No, actually, I mean, I could probably stand, but right now I am pretty comfortable right where I am. ”

I chuckled and leaned forward to kiss her forehead, and caught her mouth instead. Okay, I won’t say I was completely surprised, I could have dodged if I wanted, but she proved that she wasn’t entirely as innocent as she acted, if her mouth’s movement against mine and the tentative flicks of her tongue were any indication. It was… very interesting, and I really wanted to continue doing it, she tasted slightly of cinnamon, the actual spice, not the candy, and I remembered breakfast… had it really been that short of a time?

“Ahem.” I heard from behind me and turned to look, regretfully leaving Caelo’s mouth behind.

There was a woman standing there, translucent, much like the dungeon screen had been. I hadn’t heard her before she cleared her throat pointedly, which might be because I was pretty sure she wasn’t really standing there. I couldn’t tell much about her, since she seemed to be just a whispy set of shades of gray, but I suppose if she’d been flesh she might have been attractive.

“You are the guiding intelligence that wanted to talk to us?” I asked. I really wanted to talk to Caelo instead and find out what she’d chosen, or maybe kiss her some more, or find something else that’s fun to do with a partner when the two of you are alone.

The ghostly woman nodded, “Yes. I wanted to thank you for giving me a barely used Class 3 dungeon to take care of.”

I nodded, “Sure. It’s nice to know that it will be uhh… taken care of well, I guess. You are welcome.” I looked at her for a moment, “Was that it?”

She nodded and vanished. Huh. I was actually hoping for an information dump or something. Maybe a little bit about how my attributes worked. Or something. But I guess saying thank you was important to her.

“You know she wants us to git, right?” I said to the woman in my arms, who nodded. “Are you ready?”

She looked down at her clothes, which were not at all appropriate for Siberian Winter, and looked at me.

I sighed. “Yeah, do you still have your phone?” When she shook her head, I fished mine out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Lauren should still be in Seattle, I cannot get any signal here, but I know there’s a tower nearby for coordinating the defenses. We need to go into the cold, but I will hold you and you can try to get in touch with her and put her on the loudspeaker thing.”

Caelo was very light, so it took little rearranging before I could fish the door open and regretfully step into the cold darkness.

I stepped out of the door. Yes, an actual door. The same iron door I mentioned before. The area was lit with floodlights, and I could hear a generator chugging away. Where before there had been a flat, nearly featureless and scarred terrain, Now there was a structure that looked like it belonged in the entrance to some kind of a city. The door led into a tall tower, which looked right out of some kind of fantasy movie, all giant granite blocks going up maybe a hundred feet before being topped by crenelations, a tall spire, and even the walls of the tower had large flowing banners with some kind of stylized heraldic dragon in red on white.

We were standing on a covered lintel, thick stone stairs stretching down at least 30 steps, the whole covered by a wooden roof with square stone reinforcements that had the same heraldic figures picked out in carved gold.

In between the pillars, heavy furs were hung, that looked like bear hides. I expected the cold, but between the heavy hides blocking the wind, and wide iron braziers filled with burning wood set against the inside of each of the pillars, lighting and warming it, the cold was not that severe. It had a certain barbaric splendor and was a bit of a surprise. Max wasn’t kidding when he said that the door would need a physical representation, and whoever the ‘guiding intelligence’ was, she’d really had some kind of plan in mind.

There were floodlights on stands, facing up at the door. It took me a moment to adjust to the glaring light, and in that same moment, one of the several dozen people milling around and setting up tents noticed pointed at me, and yelled “People!”.

I carefully set Caelo down, but I might need both hands for this. She seemed almost as regretful as I was, but was frantically poking at the phone.

“Yes, People!” I said, holding up my hands. “Human, English-speaking people that come in peace.”

After a moment I noticed that the air around Caelo and I had begun to seem to have texture, almost like...a starry waviness in the air. “Aww shit,” I said.

“If you put handcuffs on me or Caelo, or don’t give me back my phone, I am going to start breaking things. It’s cold. Caelo’s just wearing a blanket and ship clothes. I am hungry, and I am tired of sitting here waiting for these assholes to figure out who to send in to talk to me.”

We were both sitting in a tent, in collapsible chairs. I wasn’t really wanting a fight until I had figured out a little more about my character UI thing, so We had cooperated to the extent of getting Caelo a blanket. The tent was cold, though, and two Russian soldiers had taken away my phone.

Lindsay… Excuse me, Galactica was leaning against the tent pole. I guess keeping watch on me.

“Hey, Umm… Galactica. Don’t you have more important things to do? Like your job? I wasn’t committing any powered crimes, so you cannot really hold me as a super-criminal.”

She glared at me through her small mask. “This IS my job. My primary job is to monitor and respond to Rift activity, and that thing out there qualifies as a hell of a rift activity. I also help control and contain incursions. Right now, you two came out of… whatever that is, so the closest thing we can figure is that it's a really weird kind of incursion. And if you start breaking things, I will lock you up so tight you can barely breathe.”

I grinned, “Promises, promises. Seriously, though, I know you know it’s me. Caelo comes up as a class C, I come up as an abysmal nothing, right?”

She shook her head, “No, you are coming up as something that should not exist. Which is why we are staying right here until someone smarter than both of us can figure this out.” She sighed, “You are lucky we don’t have the power, or someone would have already shipped in the biggest nullifier we could possibly find.”

I had been locking down my absorption pretty hard because Lindsay might notice if I suddenly sucked up her force field. Had I given the game away? “What do you mean?”

She shrugged, “Normally I can judge, based on their energy, about what category a metahuman fits into. USUALLY, you are actually draining energy, as I said before, a big, black hole. A negative. Healthy humans with no powers usually weigh in at about class G. You would have weighed in at class J if it existed. Right now, your friend is measuring at about a class B with no secondary bleed at all, and every sense is screaming at me that you are something higher than a class A… like a class S, and those don’t exist.

Oh, right. Power Category S. But those guys, if they existed, were supposed to be powerful enough to sterilize the planet. Not it.

“Can your sense thing be wrong?” I asked. “Because last time I checked, I wasn’t exactly a walking nuke.”

Caelo was hiding her hands slightly from Galactica, and was asking, “ Should I make her want to go away? ”

I shook my head and signed, “ No. I won’t do that to her.” After a few seconds of her worried expression, I added, “ She’s my granddaughter.”

Yeah, a secret I really didn’t want to let slide, but if Caelo and I spent any time at all around each other, with her gift, she was probably already picking up some weird emotions from Lindsay.

“Can you put a snooper bubble around this tent?” I asked her.

She nodded and lifted a hand. “Why, do you want to make a confession?”

I shook my head, “No, I want to tell you what’s going on, but I don’t want it spread around.” I looked at her, “Have you ever been in the rift?”

She shook her head, “No one is supposed to be able to survive in the rifts but Commander Freedom, But it doesn’t surprise me that you survived, since you are almost unkillable. I almost tapped you for that very reason, because the Commander got… sick, for a while, but then he got better and was back to close them again.”

I nodded slowly, “Well, that was bullshit. Anyone could go into the rifts. And I am betting it wouldn’t even take a class C to close them. A well-armed group of marines could probably have fixed it. I went in, because a Proteus operative kidnapped Caelo, and dragged her in. Apparently, the rifts are a really low-level occurrence, unless some asshole drags a class C or better in and kills her. That causes an overload, and before you know it, monsters are pouring out.”

She shook her head, “That doesn’t make any sense. Killing metahumans? Overloads? I mean, I don’t like Proteus much, but why in the hell would they try to destroy the world or fill it with monsters?”

“What happens when a rift forms and overloads, and monsters spill out that could kill everyone?” I asked.

“Teams are mobilized, Metahumans from all over the world. Not all of them, of course, but even the cowls will usually show up in force to… oh.”

I could see her working it over in her mind. “It kind of gets hard to kill people you fight back-to-back with. And the real blood and piss types tend to get stupid and get themselves killed soloing or trying to get revenge off the books. Because we WILL kill any metahuman that tries to use it as an excuse to get revenge.”

She looked at me, “But you, though… why are you registering literally off the charts now? How did you survive? How did SHE survive?” she nodded at Caelo, “And why won’t you talk?”

I shook my head, “She doesn’t talk. She uses sign language.”

Caelo croaked, “I can talk.”

I gawped at her, “What?”

She turned a little and signed to me. “ I can talk. Everyone thought I had this giant psychological block against talking, but the system said I actually had a damaged connection between my Broca’s area and my motor cortex. I have always known HOW to speak, but after the accident, I didn’t want to. By the time I was willing to talk again, My mouth couldn’t figure out how, so I learned LSF instead. It wasn’t until I had a dream where I had to use my mouth that I figured out what was wrong, but I wasn’t going to let them cut my head open to figure out what it was, and Louis’ regeneration potion couldn’t help a long-healed wound like that.”

She shrugged, “In the healing stasis, they asked me if I wanted some things fixed or improved. Yes, I did. They kind of had to rebuild me like the six-million-dollar man. I got some other improvements, but they are a surprise you don’t get to find out about until we,” she looked at Galactica, “ Get out of here and I can show you. ”

Lindsay looked at me, “I sort of picked a little of it up, something about a motor and six million.”

I nodded, “She speaks LSF, not ASL. French. She understands English just fine, but she’s never spoken before, so I doubt she will do much of it now.” I was surprisingly eager to get out of here now. She had given me a little wink when she had signed surprise, and I was eager to find out what she had in mind.

“So what’s happening to the portal now?” she asked, “Is it going to get bigger? Spawn more?”

I shook my head, “Uhh… no. this is going to be kind of hard to understand. Do you know who Alchemyst is?”

“I may have heard of him,” she remarked, almost too casually.

“Well, he has some kind of potion called an upgrade. Well, it turns out that it was connected to the dungeon somehow, a.. mismatch.”

She looked at me closely, “So the Dungeons were an artifact of Version 3.11?”

I stopped talking and just stared at her.

Lindsay sighed, “Yes, I know what the upgrade is. I was the third person who tried it, right after Maggie and Lauren. So what did you mean by a mismatch?”

“You are upgraded?” I asked, a little shocked, “But you…”

She nodded, “Yes, and I have certain concerns about it, but only about the distribution, not the end result. When I saw you on the beach, I was terribly tempted to offer it to you… you seemed so… broken.”

Not the sort of thing you wanted your own granddaughter to say about you. “Well, the version mismatch meant that if a class C that was not part of 3.11 were to be killed directly over the core, all of the… advancement? I guess? That they earned and never spent would spill over into the rift, which was supposed to be a beginner’s training ground. The only one on Earth apparently, since no place else has enough magic to support one. That energy was meant for a bunch of different purposes, I guess including the ability to respawn from the dead, and it would immediately cause the core to overload, causing a world event and destroying the dungeon.”

“So...Proteus is intentionally causing the spawns. I mean, I guess, yes, it sort of keeps the whole vengeance thing under control, but that still seems a bit out of line.”

“Why does Proteus exist?” I asked.

“To keep Metahuman destruction to a minimum. To deal with those Metahumans too crazy to keep in prison, and to coordinate the defense against the rifts.” she nodded, “Right. So without the rifts, they lose probably half their power, maybe even more, because even nations have their own super teams. There are still the occasional global threats that have to be dealt with, but national and international teams that are not connected to Proteus could handle them.”

“Exactly. And this… tower, is what happens when the energy of a class C death is channeled correctly, which upgraded the dungeon instead of destroying it and causing a world event.”

“You killed a class C Metahuman?” She asked.

I nodded, “You bet your ass. He kidnapped Caelo and was going to kill her in the rift. And he said he worked for Proteus. Whether that is true or not, it seems likely, but I am certain that if you try and connect Sandman and Proteus you won’t find anything.”

“You killed him?” she sighed, “I didn’t think you were a killer.”

I glared at her. “What did you think I did during the third Russian Revolution, peeling potatoes and learning to march? I don’t consider myself a killer, since I don’t like it, but he was trying to MURDER the woman I… the girl I like and the sister of my girlfriend. I killed him, and I would do it again, right in front of you if I had to. Sorry, but true.”

She sighed again. “The DMA Proteus Liason is on her way right now. Some woman named Anchorage.”

“Karen Anchorage?” I asked. At her nod, I growled, “you know those subtle non-threats that spooks like to give, like the Mafia who wants to protect your business? Well, that bitch threatened you, and every one of your blood relations, to try and get me to spy on one of her enemies. You know, those ‘I will do whatever I have to do. I will kill or die for my principles, will you?’ speeches.”

She nodded, “I will make sure you are gone before she gets here. But what’s going on with the rifts?”

I chuckled, “It’s not a rift anymore. It’s a training ground for anyone from rank 1 to rank 20. But it only works for people who have upgraded. No one else can get in, and she...it, has a crap ton of power, I don’t think some metahumans are going to be able to crack it.”

“Is it safe now? No more rifts?”

I nodded, “Yes, as far as I know. It’s designed for training and has something to do with Chaos, and I know that Dungeons can overload, so people who are in the system might have to visit occasionally, but there will be another beginner rift forming… as far as I know, either in orbit, in something called a terminator? Or on the surface of the moon.”

“So, basically, my entire most important job, controlling the rift incursions, is...done?”

I nodded, “Yes, unless someone finds a new rift in space someplace and starts executing Class C metahumans in it… but I am betting that they will be more interested in getting a system without Proteus holding their leash.”

“So my job is done. I don’t have to work for Proteus anymore just to protect the planet?” She asked for like the fourth time. I wasn’t sure she believed me.

“Yes?” I said questioningly.

She grinned brightly at me. “Fuck Proteus.”

I laughed, “Fuck Proteus. And watch your language, young lady.”