end of line

The digital readout in Ash's helmet focused on the squadron of Recognizers hovering in the distance.

"Twenty. Closing quickly." He turned to face the exhausted warriors behind him. "Resistors! Rezz your cycles! This shall be our last..."

The column of light that pierced the sky and bore into the unformatted, broken ground interrupted them.

"The aperture! The Founder has heard us!"

The Resistors activated their batons, and the components of their vehicles formed around them, save for one.

Ash approached the sole User in their midst. His power suit gleamed with emerald circuitry and his breastplate was emblazoned with a symbol foreign to the Grid.

"Ryder. Please join us."

He shook his head.

"Your world isn't mine, Ash. I belong in the 21st century, not the 19th. Besides..."

Ryder lifted his hand and clenched his fist. His ring began to flicker.

"...if there's still even one ISO hiding somewhere in the Grid, I need to keep CLU-less from finding them. Also, someone needs to keep those Recognizers back before the aperture closes. You don't want a new digital menace in your quaint steampowered world would you?" He smirked.

"You have no battery to recharge your ring."

"I found a workaround. Now go."

"Ryder. I..."

He nodded slowly. "I know." He gestured towards the aperture.

Ash looked back once more as he stood at the head of the formation. With a flick of his wrist he powered up his baton, and crouched into the vehicle that now encased him.

"Resistors! To the Steamlands! Your second life awaits!"

Ribbons of color flashed like lighting towards the column, gradually fading behind them.

Ryder knelt and pressed his ring to the ground. Emerald cracks opened in the jagged surface in the shape of the symbol of his Corps as he drew raw power from the Grid itself.

"Through photon pulse of static night

defense against corrupted might

I purge now Evil's viral blight

by the power- GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT!"

pardon the interruption

I'd been asked to keep my distance on this one. So there I was watching Qli and Koen through binoculars from the safety of a sandskimmer. They seemed to have the situation well in hand...

"Are you a real Scientist?"

By the Founder! I was so busy watching watching my children build the portal I hadn't noticed the half-naked, tattooed savage from the Mainland who just plopped himself down in the seat next to me!

"Do you always climb into other people's vehicles without asking?"

"There's no ban lines, Dude."

It took an extraordinary amount of will to keep my proper composure. We're supposed to set the example for these primitive folk, are we not? We were all Mainlanders once, weren't we?

"My name is Dr. Darien Mason. And you are?"

"Bishop-Three" is as close as I could pronounce it. He couldn't be "the third" of anything. He certainly didn't dress like a bishop.

"Do you play chess?'

"Yeah, how'd you guess?"

All right, perhaps he has some potential.

"Doc, what are those two doing in the next sim with all those GUTS?"

"How...how can you see that from here?"

"I cammed over. It's a trick on the new Viewer..."

I interrupted him before his vulgar dialect made my head spin even further.

"They're..." Oh how do I explain this?

"They're arranging my demonic ancestor Bloodwing's still living components around the blast site so my neko son Koen...the one with the red fur there.. can use his Void Alchemy to establish an anti-aether conduit to the Digital Grid from the coordinates embedded in Bloodwing's quantum signature...thereby permitting my android daughter Qlippothic..."

"Dude! She's..."

"Ahem."

"Oh she's your daughter? Never mind, keep going."

"Certainly. So Qli will energize the conduit with a galvanic tesseraction burst, creating a dimensional aperture to allow my other son Ash to make his way back to the Steamlands, apparently with a collection of refugees."

After an extended pause, he spoke up again.

"So this is some kind of art project? Are you using Machinima for this?"

I felt a migraine coming on.

"If I give you a card with the location of free merchandise, will you vanish abruptly as your kind are so fond of doing?"