Prometheus looked up and around, the sky was filled with the distinctive constellations visible from Earth, but as he watched, the stars began to rearrange themselves. When at last they settle into their new patterns, the sun began to rise again behind him, and as the faint light spread towards him, Prometheus realized his little wooden boat had been replaced by a vessel made of aluminum and a material he knew the denizens of this world would one day call ‘plastic’. The sail was gone, but a turbine at the back of the little boat sucked water in and jetted it out back like a squid or an octopus fleeing a predator.
As the sun rose higher, he was able to make out more ships – they varied in size, but they were all clad in metal or ceramic armor and furnished with a variety of gadgets and weapons. The biggest ones fired blasts of blue energy that arced through the air and pummeled the shore. The smaller ones raced ahead, carrying men and women in some sort of green armor that reminded Prometheus of a beetle’s carapace.
Prometheus barely had time to wonder about their destination before a sharp whistling sound announced a violent explosion just off his port bow. Prometheus dove to the floor of the boat as more whistling and more explosions followed. In their natural, resting form, Titans were far more resilient to damage than humans, and being immune to iron and extreme heat, Prometheus was likely the most resilient of them all. But this wasn’t reality, this was a nightmare, and in nightmares all bets were off.
He heard one of the ships filled with soldiers get hit, a deeper boom that was followed by screams of pain and terror. His ship continued towards the unseen shore; Prometheus dared raise his head to look over the bow, but was prompted to duck again when a hail of metal beat the boat like a snare drum. Most people might have dived from the boat and taken their chances swimming to shore, but - unlike most of his kin - Prometheus couldn't swim.
After what felt like an eternity, he felt the little boat run aground. Prometheus waited in the craft, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat of the weapons on the beach. They didn’t fire continuously, they followed a sort of rhythm, and when they reached one of their pauses Prometheus leaped from the boat and rushed forward.
The sand under his feet was soaked with blood and filled with shrapnel and meat. He dove to the ground next to a rudimentary barrier of interlocking metal rods just before the weapons resumed firing. The air was thick with the smell of burning chemicals and spilled bowels. Despite the stench, he took a deep breath to calm himself and studied a corpse he’d landed next to. It was a man, roughly six feet tall and clad from head to toe in shiny green armor layered over a brown, leather-like undergarment. Prometheus pulled the man’s helmet off to get a better look at him. Mauve skin with black hair and light blue eyes. He looked around at the other corpses – they varied wildly in color and size. Some were men, some were women. Some had facial hair while others had tentacles
Prometheus peaked up over his cover to watch what was happening further inland. A squad of the colorful, green-armored soldiers was closing in on a fortification housing one of the smaller guns. While four of the soldiers fired their weapons, raining down blue bolts of light on the pillbox, one of the soldiers held out his hand, and with a sparkle of light he created an unrecognizable device. Another one of the soldiers shifted his form into some sort of creature that Prometheus didn’t recognize, took the device, and rushed at the weapon emplacement with it. The defenders' guns ripped the creature apart, but with its dying spasms it flung the device through the same window the bunker’s inhabitants were firing their weapons. An instant later there was a loud whompf and green flames burst from the window, silencing the soldiers inside.
Between their shapeshifting, the object creation, and the wild diversity in appearance, it was clear that the men and women fighting and dying around him were Titans.
Prometheus jumped up and ran to another piece of cover, closer to the fighting. A small metal projectile nailed him in the arm and – though the impact of the blow staggered him for a moment – it bounced off. Prometheus picked up the flattened bullet – it was lead covered in a steel jacket. The steel’s iron content explained why the enemy’s weapons were so effective at dropping the soldiers attacking the beach. Fortunately, steel evidently wasn’t any more a concern for Prometheus here than in the real world. Emboldened by that discovery Prometheus pulled a weapon from the rigid grip of one of the corpses nearby, felt its weight and balance in his hands, found the controls, and began to march forward.
The defenders rallied a counterattack in a desperate attempt to hold their position, and poured out of the bunker, firing their ballistic weapons madly. Prometheus felled a few of them with his looted energy weapon, the blasts of blue fire melting through the soldiers it struck, but eventually enough of the enemy soldiers trained their fire on him to slow him to a stop and destroy the blaster in his hands. A few of the defenders got close enough that Prometheus could see them through the smoke – they were smaller than most of the beachhead’s attacker, all blonde haired and blue-eyed, with fairly generic faces and fair skin beneath their dark grey body armor and light grey under-suits.
“Bullets don’t kill him!” One of the men shouted, his voice edged with fear.
“Maybe he’s not a Titan?” Another suggested.
“No, look at his skin and hair – only Titans are that ugly,” the third said.
“But the bullets don’t hurt him!” The first one repeated.
“Must be alpha-class,” the third man said, “You know you always have to expect the unexpected with them.”
Prometheus, hands on the ground, channeled his power through the sandy soil. He heated the ground beneath their feet, liquefying the sand. The third man, the sharpest of the group, jumped back the instant he felt the ground heating up under his feet. The other two were an instant too late, and when they tried to jump, they simply stumbled and fell into the pool of molten glass. They burst into flames, but their screams were muffled by the thick glowing ooze of super-hot silicate they thrashed in.
Prometheus reached into the pool bare handed, grabbed a glob of the glass, and pulled it out, cooling it and using his powers to subtly shape it into a sword. Prometheus lunged at the remaining man, but he threw his useless gun at him and pulled out a sword that heated up in his hands until the blade glowed. He attacked Prometheus, but Prometheus simply grabbed the hot metal blade.
“Did you really think, based on what you just saw me do, that a hot poker would hurt me?” Prometheus stabbed the man in the thigh, hoping to take a prisoner, but as the man fell he spat in Prometheus’s face and pulled out a silver ball.
“Let’s see how well you do with electricity you meta bastard!” he shouted as he pressed a button on the ball. Prometheus raised his arm and used his matter-creation powers to create a simply carbon fiber shield. In a flash, the ball exploded in a small storm of lightning that obliterated its user and knocked Prometheus several feet back through the air.
Prometheus gasped for air. Electricity hurt, a lot. It couldn’t burn him, but it could wreak havoc on his nervous system and heart. Without the non-conductive shield, the blast might have killed him.
A man’s voice came from behind him, “You dead, soldier?”
“What?” Prometheus turned to find a huge, heavily armored man chewing on some sort of inhalant device and brandishing a massive, multibarreled weapon.
The man looked him over, “Why, you’re not a soldier at all, are you?” he said, “Are you… you’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, I’m from… wait, do you know where you are?”
“Beachhead Theta,” the man said, “three weeks before we lost the civil war.”
“The civil war?” Prometheus wasn’t sure he was hearing him right over the roaring explosions and humming energy weapons.
“Yeah, the one that ended with alphas like you and me locked up on a dinky little ship and chucked into the stars because the Fates decided we were all ‘too dangerous’ to keep around.”
“So… you do know you’re in a simulation?”
The man laughed, “Well, yeah. I remember the day they put me in here, and the day my old commander came in and set this up for us.”
“This?” Prometheus asked, “The battle?”
“Yeah. When they first stuck us in here they surrounded us with all these nambi-pambi, cute and fluffy little scenarios. Saccharin shit; everything had a goddamned moral. Everyone was either smilin’ or cryin’, all the time. But then General Morgania erased all of that crap, and created this – a looping reenactment of the war.”
“This is what you’ve been doing for thousands of years?”
“I’m not sure how long it’s been,” the man said, “The war was only fifty years long in real time, the simulator probably runs a lot slower than that, and we’ve run through the entire war at least six hundred times.”
“Who is we?”
“Me and the Mrs.,” the man said, “Tiamat usually runs the other side of the war. The Union of Equal Peoples. I think she likes the irony.”
“You’re Kasios, then?”
The man nodded, “And you?”
“I’m Prometheus, bearer of the Legacy of Mbomxolodur. “Are these people around us… like us?”
“No, no. Almost everyone in here is a nonplayer character, randomly generated based on the demographic strata and alignments at the end of the war. The other prisoners are fighting in here too as lower ranking officers, but given the relative number of NPCs in this simulation – you could set off a tac-nuke and not hit anybody real.”
“Out of curiosity, what does happen if you die in this simulation?”
“Oh, you get a few weeks of excruciating pain in a cold void, and then you wake up in one of our bases with a gun in your hand, respawned and ready to go. So, tell me – what the hell are you doing in here? Not exactly the sort of place one can find themselves by accident.”
Prometheus had already been thinking about how to answer that question, “Morgania said I should talk to Tiamat about how our people’s powers work…”
“Ohh… I see,” the man nodded, “Well, if you want to talk to Tiamat, we’ll need to pause the simulation. Unfortunately, can’t just do that with a simple voice command – that’d make it too easy to cheat. We need to make it to that fortification over there,” he pointed to a larger bunker beyond the weapon emplacement Prometheus had watched the soldiers destroy. “We clear the soldiers out of that command post, hold off any attackers for sixty seconds, and we’ll get a check point. Then we can pause the simulation. You can handle yourself?”
“I’m immune to iron, and I can manipulate the heat energy in matter,” Prometheus said, “Works better if there’s some geothermal energy to tap into.”
“Unfortunately, the simulation only goes down about a hundred feet, so I doubt you’re going to find a magma pocket to play with. But being bullet proof is nice – Tiamat uses every scrap of iron she can mine on bullets. Aside from Mbomxolodur, you’re the only alpha I’ve ever met that wasn’t a problem for. Just make sure to watch out for their grenades in the future. The plasma grenades and shrapnel grenades won’t hurt you, but their disruptor grenades use the same tech as our blasters. Those’ll melt you into green goo.” Kasios stretched out a hand and created a chrome-silver rifle that glowed with red details, “Class IV disintegrator. Simple UI – just point and click,” he smiled.
Prometheus took it, “I’ve never seen anyone use their powers to create anything like this…”
“Took me a few millennia to manage the computer systems,” Kasios said, “They always needed to be formatted and booted. But, end of the day, recreating a tri-core quantum processor isn’t too much more complicated than creating a tuawi.”
“Tuawi?”
“You never had a tuawi? It’s a sort of sweet and sour fruit? Shit, we really screwed the shutai when we lost this war.”
The enormous man tromped out into the open and raised one of his heavily armored arms. A shield of blue light appeared in the air in front of him, projected by an emitter on his gauntlet. The tall shield shrugged off the fire raining down on them from the bunker ahead as they advanced. Prometheus used Kasios as moving cover, and picked-off any soldiers that strafed around them. The disintegrator’s red blasts caused pieces of its targets to simply dissipate into thin air like sparks from a fire – it was a terrifying weapon.
The second the heavy guns in the bunker went quiet, Kasios waved away the shield and raised his massive weapon. There was a brief whine as the barrels began to spin, and then they unleashed a storm of glowing violet projectiles that tore into bunker. Some of the green armored men – the NPCs – cheered as the front of the bunker caved in, crushing the weapon emplacement.
Kasios’s men charged at the bunker, but more enemy troops rushed out to meet them. They traded shots until they reached grappling distance, and then they summoned forth a variety of melee weapons to butcher one another with. A few of them came after Kasios, but he easily dispatched them, bashing them to death with his huge weapon. One nearly got the drop on them, circling around in the confusion, but Prometheus focused his powers on the man’s metal armor, transforming it into a small furnace and incinerating the body inside.
Kasios watched the carnage for a while but growled in annoyance, “Killing these asshats by hand is gonna take a long time, and I’m not really feeling it today.” He raised his weapon again and fired, strafing back and forth across the battle line, shredding both enemies and allies alike. Attacked from behind, none of their allies survived Kasios’s indiscriminate assault, but eventually the defenders panicked and ran back to the relative safety of their bunker.
“This is more like it,” Kasios said to Prometheus, “Watch this!” he dropped the heavy weapon, and with a glimmer of light and a horrific contortion he grew and changed. His metal armor disappeared, replaced by broad chitinous plates and shiny scales as he leaned forward and tripled in size. A stiff leathery tail whipped out and lashed over Prometheus’s head. A menacing roar – like a tornado inside a cave – unleashed from the creature’s three massive, toothy maws.
All of the Titans had the ability to transform themselves – that was the innate talent Hekate had exploited to manage her escape the day of the sacrifice – and all of the Legacy bearers could manage their shape shifts better than ordinary Titans. They could assume more challenging shapes more easily, and retain their shapes without eventually losing their minds. Never, however, had Prometheus seen such a transformation as this. Kasios rushed forward and tore the bunker apart with teeth and claws, and then proceeded to actually devour the men and women hiding inside. Prometheus had to remind himself it was all a simulation – the sound of terror and the smell of masticated bodies felt extremely real.
Prometheus cautiously followed; the battery on the weapon Kasios had given him was already spent, and he worried that his ally might turn on him next, lost in the aggressive instincts of whatever creature he had transformed into. Kasios simply ignored him, however. He placed one of his large, taloned feet on the last struggling soldier, bent over, and the middle of his three heads plucked the woman’s head off with its teeth, eating it like a grape. Satisfied with his carnage, he shrank back down to his original size and shape, picked up one of the enemy weapons and tossed it to Prometheus before claiming another two for himself.
“Sixty seconds,” Kasios said, bathed in the bunker’s red lights, “Try to beat my score.”
Enemies swarmed at them from either side, troops disgorging from the neighboring bunkers. Prometheus had no memory of the alien ballistic weapon he was holding, but he remembered some of his human successors having occasion to use them. While Kasios casually held one weapon in each hand, firing madly, Prometheus took cover behind a mass of broken concrete, braced the weapon against his shoulder, and began squeezing the trigger. Unlike the energy weapons their allies used, the enemy’s guns had a noticeable recoil, created by the release of compressed gas that launched the little metal projectiles. It took him a few shots to get the math and the rhythm right, but soon it felt like he was dropping enemies by the dozen.
The sixty seconds seemed to last forever; Prometheus – not knowing how to reload the weapon’s ammunition – had to drop it and find a new one. Eventually the enemy reinforcements tapered off and the red lights surrounding them changed to blue. A little electronic chime sounded.
“There we go!” Kasios said, “Tartarus, give us a local simulation pause.”
“Current load zone paused,” Tartarus’s voice answered. Prometheus thought it was interesting that Tartarus – who said he wasn’t aware of what was in the simulation, was still responsible for running it.
The paused simulation was bizarre – Prometheus found a stray bullet simply hanging in the air, and when he attempt to move it, his hand simply passed through it. The flames dotting the beach were the oddest though – a static fire was unlike anything Prometheus had ever seen.
Kasios waved a hand and a glowing panel appeared in thin air before him, covered in numbers. “Ha, I’m over 10,000!”
“Points?” Prometheus asked.
“No, kills. 10,000 kills in the past 25 hours. Including 343 player kills. Not bad.”
“Oh…” Prometheus said. Out of morbid curiosity he finally asked, “How about me?”
“Hm…” Kasios scrolled down the screen, “Dragonbro, Dwarfkiller, Mindslayer, Gnomecarver… What’s your handle? Oh, here, ‘New Player’. You got… seven. But, hey – fifteen assists. That’s not bad for your first time; you’ve got real promise, kid.”
Prometheus raised his gun again when he saw a massive creature slithering down the cliff face behind their captured bunker, but the weapon didn’t respond when Prometheus pulled the trigger. Kasios laughed, “Simulation’s paused kid, remember? Besides, this here’s the woman you wanted to talk to.”
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