A Matter Of National Impact [Full]

Time was a matter of intrigue. Longevity begat patience, but patience could in turn beget staleness, of not monitored accordingly. True temporal stability was in both knowing when to wait, and in knowing when to move forward - and when that latter time came, in doing it quickly and without hesitance.

It had not been long ago at all since the criminal Baba Yaga had risen up against her captors at one of New York's prisons. For whatever reason, response to her threat had been relatively minimal - even the Lotus, who she had been threatening to betray, had only sent a single contender.

Gawain of Gwyar had had his own few scant dealings with the Lotus - they could be useful, he thought, when they realized that they ought to bow their heads and be useful. For now they maintained delusions of superiority, and so he left them to their devices, to bloom for a time, to wither when that time came. They did not need to serve him directly for him to make use of them, after all.

The very lack of response to the prison event had made it all the more palatable to him - it had been the work of but a few carefully prepared moments to slip in, do as he chose, and remove himself again. Likely, there were few who had even known he was there at all - the Lotus the least of all.

One of those precious few sat across the table from him now, eyeing the repast before them with a caution, the same caution with which he eyed his host. Gawain remained patient, and waited for his guest to acclimate, watching him just as he was watched in turn.

The man was older - for a metahuman, anyway; even his years had nothing on Gawain - but there was gray at his temples, and almost the entire world would have forgotten him since he'd been summarily thrown into prison some thirty years hence. Briefly, he had made the news in doing so, back in the late '80s. Walter Staten was, Gawain thought, a man who had been born out of time - one of the very earliest true technopaths, with the power to meld with technology, to alter it, to control it at his will. In those days, there had been little for him to work with. A few computers, here and there.

He'd still managed to hack into Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the early nuclear research facilities. He'd held it for a good sixteen days, as well, before the army had arrived. That was the event that had put him on the run, and eventually put him in one of New York's prisons in a private wing with no access whatsoever to technology.

Staten would already have noted the same lack of technology in the dining hall at Mont Saint-Michel, but that was more of a fortunate coincidence than a preparation. Gawain preferred his historical abbey to remain as it had been. Even the new board in the table irked him, mended though it had been in the old ways - it was still not the same as the rest of the table, cut from a tree that had not even been a sprout when the rest of the logs for the table had been felled.

"You want me to help you attack a government facility."

The first words in a while, since Gawain had laid out the plan over appetizers, and he met the statement of the obvious with a nod, unspeaking.

"You realize that's what got me thrown in prison in the first place. What's to say I haven't changed?"

Gawain shrugged his shoulders, a broad, expansive gesture.


Silence fell, sudden and harsh, a shocked thing, as if surprised who would dare. The technopath stared at Gawain, and took refuge in another statement of the extremely obvious:

"I haven't got any legs."

Gawain raised an eyebrow, popped a grape in his mouth, and chewed it before answering.


He left the single word there, and ate another grape, fully acknowledging the situation before him - a man with only a single limb remaining: his left arm. He was seated in a chair, propped there and left alone with the lord of the abbey, and Gawain allowed the silence to be his enforcer, to let the implied threat sink in fully.

"You're a bastard." The statement came after the silence, and then was echoed by a laugh - loud and sharp, almost delighted by the straightforwardness of it all. Gawain merely nodded, accepting that he had read the situation correctly. Staten's grudge against the government ran deep, and he was tired of being mollycoddled by his prisoners. Times had changed since the '80s, after all, and in these days abusing a disabled man was generally frowned upon, even if the man in question was - or had been - a supervillain. "So is that it, then? You and me?"


"Kill her - a true reviver? Those are rare." Staten's interest was piqued, something of his old fire beginning to return as he began to envision his quest for vengeance.


"Used to be one of those running around when I was active - only one, mind you. Small time crime lord, down in St. Louis - although anyone who was anyone knew she wasn't as small-time as she pretended to be. The Flame, she called herself, something like that. "


"Yes, that was-" A break, a narrowing of Staten's eyes, as once again a singular statement and a silence allowed the information to sink in as Gawain did nothing more than take another grape from the plate before him.

He set it back down, however, as the doors were pushed open, a footstep echoing between them. Gawain rose with a bow towards the newcomer, though his other guest did not have the ability to do the same.








They dropped in from above, a rift torn through dimensions, appearing briefly in the sky above the facility some hundred feet up - only for an instant, long enough to disgorge three figures, and then the rift was gone, as if it had never been there at all. It was a carefully measured distance that had been chosen, and as soon as the rift tore open, one of the men was already in action - a subtle sort of action that coursed through new and exciting military technologies, warping them, twisting them, using them. Metal cabling and wire reached up to the skies, forming a ball around the one-limbed man as he fell from the sky.

The others had no such defense, of course, and the response from the patrols was almost instant as well, guns raised to the sky and bullets peppering the falling forms. The woman died, of course, and the spontaneous burst of fire that erupted was like a falling comet in the sky, a bright beacon.

Gawain merely absorbed all this, as was his nature - from the kinetic impacts of the bullets to the heat of the fire that engulfed them all, he took everything in - and when his body impacted the ground, knees bent in a crouch, the ground itself bowed before him, cracks in the asphalt rippling outward as small pieces of it were tossed up into the air.

The metal ball fell beside him a moment later, rolling, metallic limbs already beginning to extend beyond the stumps of the absent ones, touching the doorways and twisting, not tearing them off, but becoming one with them, technopathic impulses racing into security systems, scrambling them, rendering them inert or inconsequential, or outright adapting them into whatever it was that Walter Staten - Sadomechanism - was becoming.

Gawain left him to it, and walked through the wreckage of the doorway. Governments were always hiding things, and this one thought it was the most powerful in the world - it only followed that it would be hiding powerful things, and he intended to find out what they were, and whether or not he wanted them.