Links:
- CDC Site11a - Old primary sandbox.
- DrCaduceus1 - Pilot Khamael.
- DrCaduceus2 - Art & Photos.
- DrCaduceus3 - Traitor's notes.
- DrCaduceus4 - Mind Your Business ;;
- DrCaduceus5 - Redacted
- DrCaduceus6 - Concussion
- DrCaduceus7 - Pre-Edit Articles
- DrCaduceus8 - Spooktober Test Page
- DrCaduceus9 - "Cad's Codeholder"
His friends only ever called him Doctor Halsey. Not that they tried to give him another name, a callsign of sorts among comrades. He insisted he was just "Doctor Halsey." He didn't mean to seem distant, in fact, he was probably one of the nicer colleagues you could meet in Item Retrieval - one among the rare breed of field researchers who did stupidly funny shit like hiding cardboard cutouts of dangerous anomalies where people would least expect them. It got him into serious trouble a handful of times, although his corpus of research on temporo-spatial displacement earned him the patience of his Alpha-level superiors. Enough time to be promoted to Gamma-level himself and handle projects on his own.
That was the extent to which anyone at Base Six knew him. A jovial prankster, a workaholic scientist. Work and play. Test and jest. There was little else to define him as a human being, for whenever his buddies would even begin to delve into their personal lives, Doctor Halsey simply smiled, shut up and sipped on his helping of Mountain Dew. Even those closest to him - like Victor Strate with his infectious grin and comically shiny, bald head - had learned little over the years. He almost certainly worked for the Foundation at one point - he knew quite a few of their anomalies, and the most perceptive could see him tense up whenever they were involved. But Doctor Halsey wouldn't confirm or deny anything about his past.
"Just the assurance of a bright, shining future," Halsey completed the phrase as he inspected the shell in his hand. It was a glossy brown spiral that seemed to glisten with the light of faded galaxies. The Snail Sentry hadn't so much as poked an eyestalk out of its shell ever since he took it with him from his office, likely sensing the threats nearby, for inside the massive testing chamber, echoes still rang from the firefights raging elsewhere in Base Six.
Halsey couldn't deny that he'd grown fond of the mollusc; over the years, he noticed several colleagues becoming attached to their early Items as well. There was Strate and his creepy Terrorbite pets, Bray and his Polapup sanctuary, and Caduceus attempting to elope with a goddamned satellite. It just seemed that, one day, a snail on his office desk decided to stand guard over the room and Halsey forever, displacing anyone who tried to remove it backwards in time; in effect, creating multiverses that branched off from his reality… as far as he understood it. The anomaly sent you further back in time the more aggressively you tried to take it from its rightful spot. Halsey spent the last two years alone working out the exact relationships between the force of removal and the level of displacement. When he found the data he was looking for, it was merely a matter of obtaining an Item powerful enough to test his hypothesis.
The Crystalline Incinerator was restricted to ALPHA-level research. However, by a stroke of luck, a fragment of it had been shipped off to Base Six, and its storage chamber was accessible to a few researchers with BETA clearance. It would take far too long to get himself promoted, but the Falchion Resurgence provided the perfect opportunity. In the turmoil, he called in a favor from one of his colleagues with BETA clearance and had them change his designation to Administration and Command. Within minutes, he had reached the fragment's testing chamber and locked himself in with the Snail Sentry.
The Crystalline Incinerator fragment had already been affixed on a massive emplacement, poised to amplify any light that passes through it into an immensely-concentrated beam of energy. The turret was aimed at the platform at the center of the chamber. Doctor Halsey placed the Snail Sentry atop the platform. He stroked its shell one final time, then turned to run calculations on the console. The machine whirred to life. The room filled with a deep, golden luminance as the beam struck and the fragment lit up like a second sun. The Snail Sentry's eyestalks poked out just in time to meet the death ray coming directly towards it. That was when Halsey realized: it took the miniaturized wrath of a supernova to dry his tears in the rain. It would be his last thought.
When he opened his eyes again, it was already dark. He was indoors. By the familiar feel of the cushions and how easily his arms settled on the armrests, he deduced that he was seated on his favorite chair. It was his room. Just then, he caught the sound of a creature coming from the hallway. He hadn't heard barking that coarse or lovable in years. Kappa leaped into Doctor Halsey's lap and excitedly licked his face. Without a thought, Halsey simply held the dog tightly in his arms. Then, he heard two sets of footsteps.
Henry. He wore his favorite blue cap. He spun as he entered the room, "Happy 6th Birthday, Tommy!" lovingly hand-stitched on his cape. Thomas, in pursuit of the cape thief, followed inside and commandeered one of the doctor's armrests.
"Oh, so there you've been! The boys just couldn't stop talking about those great white sharks, right? I think we'll be having a couple of marine biologists in our hands in a few years." The voice, the perfume. The concern. The roar of juvenile arguments filling the space with life. As his wife came into the room, Halsey did everything to hold back his tears. He couldn't even pull himself to speak when Thomas asked why Dad suddenly had so many wrinkles. He simply took a deep breath and smiled at what he saw. His family. Then, he closed his eyes.
Horrific sounds reverberated throughout the base from all sides as the Falchion's forces and anomalies continued to wreak havoc. It was over, so clearly over. Most of the loyalists had already surrendered, yet many of them still hid inside Base Four's labyrinthine complex, desperately clinging to the hope that Creed, Mark, or even Kahler could turn the tide.
Agent Hockenberry—a long-shafted, golden weapon in hand—led his squad into the deepest levels of the mountain base. Even then, they could still hear the carnage coming from their beast-soldiers and clock-tipedes; the shrieking, both human and inhuman; the pleading, the automatic weapon fire, and the eerie bouts of silence thereafter. So much talk of Base Four being the weapons capital of the North American cells. In the end, the loyalists failed to use that strength when they needed it the most. That was pretty much representative of the whole, bloody ordeal, really.
Hockenberry's team breached through the doors of the Inner Sanctum—the thick, blast-proof material absorbed into the Supermassive Spear in bright, horrific ribbons of light—finally emerging into view of a frightened throng of Alpha Command remnants and their security personnel. Several bursts of fire followed. The guards died where they stood. He recognized a few of the assholes. Blackout, Fatum, Hailstorm, Rowan. The men who approved careless operations, banned projects, and treated their Teal allies like trash, he'd happily kill. However, as he circled the room, he couldn't help but notice the grand trophy was absent.
"Where is Creed?" He asked one of the researchers.
"I don't have a bloody cl-" The Alpha felt his sternum began to crack, so he changed his mind.
"NO! STOP! I'LL TELL YOU!" The agent took his boot off from the man's chest. "The Director… He's at the lowest level of the facility. Absolute Sanctum. Been there since the attack began. You'll need my credentials to access the elevator." Hockenberry took the man's keycard. He turned to one of his sergeants.
"I'm going after the Director. Take these Alphas to the surface. We don't want them to miss the grand send-off ceremony we're throwing at the hangar."
"Good hunting down there, Captain." The sergeant said. Hockenberry smiled back at the inside gag as he ran down the hallway to the Absolute Sanctum elevator. As he entered, his eyes met garish symbols on the walls—no doubt written in Creed's own blood—that he recognized as warding runes. Superstitions that were sadly doing nothing to keep his hands from finding and wringing the Director's neck.
"I warned you Creed. It's Agent, always Agent. Only God and my dear, old Mama can call me Kenneth Hockenberry." He muttered, then adding more thoughtfully, "Long live the Falchion."
Nouva was just beginning to shake away the drowsiness of his nap. He had laid down on the soft, wind-swept grass, his hands under his head like a pillow. The quickness of his pulse and the numbness of his skin meant that the antitoxins that relaxed his Hunter-Tracker glands were still running their course through his system. Even now, he could feel his hirsute arms becoming smooth again, the hair being shed to the ground.
At the distance, an oily, black smoke was rising steadily, punctuated by random flashes of light and whitish streaks of machine gun fire. He could still hear magazines' worth of bullets being emptied into their targets by automatic rifles. Targets that have been corpses for a good solid hour now. And he could hear the screams and the pleads. He should still be there, on-site, contributing to the carnage.
The remains of Base One were just a five or ten minutes' sprint away.
"Feh." The agent sighed. "Looks like this new regime is going to be as needlessly cruel and vengeful as the last."
The wind itched his nose. "I'd be perfectly fine with that, though." He said aloud. Quaesitor's position in orbit was still fixed to the campaigns in the region, and she was most likely near enough to track a wayward agent's monologue. Nouva didn't want to risk it.
Despite his peaceful surroundings, Nouva's mind was quite active, thoughts coming and going with the periodic peals of thunder from the Base.
"One blast." He said aloud, his mind coming to the first memory.
Concealing one's anomalous abilities as an operative of the Chaos Insurgency was a fairly common practice. In his first assignment alone, at that accursed outpost in Montana, about six of his twenty colleagues harbored some odd mutation. Most of them were clearly meant to maim and kill. They kept quiet, however, preferring to be researchers than field agents. It invited less danger in the mortal sense. If you were exposed, you weren't actually tortured or killed, but you'd usually be treated as pathetic for refusing to help the CI with your anomalies. Nouva's own hyper-enhanced senses made it futile to hide such traits from him, though.
"Another blast." The Hunter Tracker project had been in a precarious position throughout its life. It was, perhaps, Nouva's first sign of the imminent change in the organization - an initiative to train special reconnaissance agents from non-combat personnel with physiodynamic abilities. Nouva, naively, volunteered immediately. As the first generation of HT's, his team frequently faced their demise during assignments. There were no HT-specific combat stimulants back then, before Cad and Strate went to work on them. But the big wigs of Alpha Command still used them to retrieve intel for situations too risky to deploy expensive drones and too difficult for baseline humans. Of his team, only Nouva remained alive now.
"And another blast." The Falchions. He felt embarassed. He defected to their side so quickly, it made him look disingenuous. Cad, Hock, and the rest of the 55th Field Observations Unit - even Strate - joined him. But he had seen the way its commanders treated the Hunter Trackers, actually sending them into missions that suited their skills. The rebel HT's revealed hidden sites and hunted down fleeing high-value targets. They were given support crews, specialized medical bays, a squad of transport ships, and more. For him, it was a sold deal.
And yet, the carnage that the Falchion was inflicting to their former brethren reminded him that their project's loyalty had simply been bought for the time being. The Falchion and their leader - this eccentric Haos - were still vicious and impenitent. They would do terrible things to projects that become useless. Nouva hoped he wouldn't let the Hunter Trackers fall into such a state.
But for now, the battle was won. The HT's fought on the winning side. That would give Nouva time to prepare and make the right connections. Perhaps, one day, the Hunter Trackers would even rise as rivals to Teal Division.
Before the freight truck even came to a full stop, Doctor Strate's limp body fell from its cockpit like a disgraced ragdoll, collapsing like mush on the sizzlingly hot asphalt of the desert road.
The burning of his left cheek restored some semblance of consciousness in him, and he cursed an inappropriate amount as he stood and regained his bearings. It must have been a day since he drove off from Base Four's extension facility, glad that the place saw far less violence than what he heard went down at the actual Base. Upon Hockenberry's request, he gave the assault force two colonies of his hungering Terrorbites. Hock really had a bone to pick with the Alphas.
Victor fell into a panic there as he rummaged the inside of his lab coat. The panic quickly subsided and gave way to elation as he took out the handheld glass case that contained Terry, his personal Terrorbite pet.
"Six times as strong, nine times as durable. You will be the undisputed king of the Terrorbites, my little arachnid ally. As soon as we find a good place to stay, I'll find you seventy-two house spiders to mate with. Your babies and grandbabies will be our minions, and we'll use our personal army of enhanced spiders to rule the Insurgency!" Victor said, cackling giddily. "I just hope nobody else beats me to that plan."
Victor rounded the truck, puckering his lips as he realized the left-side tires were flat. He inspected the back side next, catching sight of the white tarpaulin with the words, "So Long, Suckers!" that swayed lazily in the breeze. He cut the message out. It was funny for the first three hours but was now blatantly a security risk.
"That reminds me! The Items!" He said to Terry as he opened the back of the truck. "I got to scram with a ton of them in their shipping crates. I don't know exactly which Items I managed to take with me since we were in a rush back there, but hopefully we've spirited away some helpful ones. Help me bring that one down, please." He released Terry from his case. The cybernetic insect lifted the crate to which Victor pointed and placed it on the dry, cracked ground.
"Oh man, I sure hope we get the Staff of Hermes in here!" Victor said as he took a crowbar from the truck and began prying off one side of the crate, only for it to come off and reveal the Candle Wax Child curled inside like a malnourished ghoul.
The NVC Anomalocaris emerged onto the stormy waters of the Pacific Ocean, its huge form momentarily breaking apart the sea like a surfacing whale. The waves around the submarine were turning a grisly red as its drain ports regurgitated the remains of its loyalist crew members. Already, their ruined blood and guts were becoming chum to some fish on their migratory paths.
Falchion-aligned agents climbed out of the submarine's escape hatch. Despite themselves, some of the rebels had elected to revel in their act of betrayal by enjoying the raging storm outside, the torrential rains washing away all the blood from their uniforms. Even Dr. Kojcewska came to see the view, still clad in a stolen suit of tactical armor. She hugged a jar to her chest, the bubbling flesh of the colorful jellyfish, Mitokondria, floating within.
She undid the seals of her helmet, uncovering her head to feel the force of the raindrops on her face. After hours spent coordinating the takeover, moving through hot, claustrophobic hallways to reach one safe area after another, and personally executing tens of her colleagues, it was quite a refreshing feeling.
Storms at sea were typically regarded as perilous and bleak, but for Steffie, the dance of lightning and the rage of the rain symbolized the new fervor which the Resurgence imbued into the flagging Chaos Insurgency. It seemed like the
[The submarine Anomalocaris surfaces. Dr. Steffie, her pet Mitokondria in tow, emerges top-side with the surviving Falchion crew as Charybdis swims past.]
[Agent E awaits his new assignment, following his being reprogrammed by Dr. Deny and his Scythe of Lethe.]
Agent Hugh decided to let the waters lap at his feet for a little while longer. He heard the Ecstatic's horn blast from far off into the horizon.
[Dr. Creed unsuccessfully tries to summon Cthulhu and drowns in his own blood.]
[Edison Denhai escapes from solitary confinement.]
[Dr. Heaton makes a few deals with Shades Technologies, grinning as he plans the future as the new Spanish Branch director.]
[Dr. Caduceus reunites with Director Cavendish and his old squad as a bloodied Base Six welcomes the sunset.]
Recording starts..
Our work is just beginning - the realization of a billion dreams since the age of Man dawned over the world. The liberation from the corrupt and ineffectual Foundation brought upon a change to us all - a strengthening of our spirit and our resolve, and the hope for a bright, new era of scientific discovery.
Dr. Fillius likened our journey to Moses, how he led the slaves to freedom from their Egyptian masters. He had a sense for the Biblical that I'm afraid I would never fully appreciate, like when he referred to the act of killing an Overseer as "the hurried blow of a bare-fisted angel".
But I suppose it is an apt metaphor. The Insurgency has cast aside many chains to bring our race to the "Promised Land;" ethics and containment no longer lord over our work, and our anomalies are now loyal because they are free. By embracing the world's chaos, we are on the way to accomplishing Moses' work a second time.
By that, I mean—and I hope you lend me your Old Testament gravitas, Emerson—this Insurgency will be able to "Shepherd the Chosen unto Paradise."
- from "The Recorded Memoirs of Dr. Angus Remidi"
After Aleph | Eleven | Last Steps of the Tango
[The new leaders use the Item Arsenal to rescue the beleaguered Insurgency from their rivals' attacks across the world.]
[Haos unveils the Insurgency's new frontiers.]
