maskormenace | five wild roars ✪ video

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five wild roars ✪ video

['SUP IMPORTS, did you miss this guy? He's giving the communicator a particularly sour expression as he sits out on the front porch of his residence, #14.]

...Well, this sucks.

[He didn't even get to be home an hour, man. At least his injuries are healed again, but jeez........]

Soooo, do I even wanna know what all I missed?

[His tone rather suggests he doesn't; Kotetsu expects something or another has managed to go horribly awry in the month he's been gone--things have been one disaster after another since May.]

Oi Bunny, Judge Petrov, you guys still around? I'm back in #14 if you wanna talk in person or anything.

[......sorry, Ryan, he's only just had five months of memories crammed back into his head and is kind of freaked out about it tbh, he's kind of forgotten about you as the Dude From His Future.]

Uhhh...right. I'm Kotetsu, by the way. If you didn't, ah, know me before. Not that it...doesn't say that on the thing, anyway, but. Y'know. Introductions, n'all...yeah.

[Aaand one awkward silence later:]

...See ya. [Click.]

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It's not a question of whether or not it can be destroyed, only whether or not it can be before it destroys everything. It's not slow. It deploys and people die. Ships fall out of the sky, killing thousands, who mutate within seconds, transports crash, killing more, power plant safeguards fail, resulting in explosions that kill hundreds of thousands of people, who then turn.

See? Worldwide catastrophe in a matter of minutes. I'm not talking about a localized EMP that knocks out a city's power grid, Kotetsu. I'm talking about everything, everywhere, all at once, killing satellites that fall out of orbit.

But it needs something to start up, right? We can crush it before that if we know what it looks like. And they've got that nullifier tech and all, you don't know that that couldn't give us a chance.

Yeah. Someone touching it's enough. [He heaves a sigh.] And you don't know that it would.

[Punching it is out of the question, then. Good to know.]

Maybe not, but it's better than just accepting massive worldwide casualties as inevitable.

You have to, Kotetsu, because it is.

It's not. Nothing's guaranteed, here. I mean, c'mon, we got kidnapped outta our universes, time's all weird and doesn't move back home, the Porter can bring back the dead, and all sorts'a regular people have powers when they didn't before. What the hell makes you so sure this is somehow some kinda absolute certainty?

Why can't you just tell me what it looks like?

I...hate even thinking about them. [The Marker had implanted blueprints in his head. He could tell Kotetsu, show him, even, exactly what it looked like, but he tended to get trapped there, obsessing over it. It wasn't good, and he really didn't want to do it if he didn't have to.] It's...massive, the size of the tallest skyscraper you can think of. It's shiny, black, with glowing runic scribbles all over it. It...looks like two towering branches, twisting around each other...like a DNA helix.

I, uh, could draw it for you. I...know exactly how the structure is composed.

[Please don't say yes, Kotetsu. Please.]

[There's just. Several blinks.]

...You do?

[That sounds like the sort of information that would be very helpful to have. Kotetsu just intended to pass on a physical description to the military like 'if something that looks like this shows up don't touch it and have imPorts destroy it immediately' but in that case....]

There's not a lot I could do with that kinda information, but you oughta pass it on to some of the tech people. Like, that Tony Stark guy.

[He doesn't like Tony, but being a technopath with a lot of resources could only help right?]

And the military should probably have a copy on hand in case one does show, so they know not to touch it under any circumstances.

NO! [okay, maybe this could have been more subtle.]

Trust me, the last thing the military needs is blueprints for this thing. They...could build one. It's tempting. It makes energy, limitlessly. That's...why they made them where I come from.

[What even]

[Kotetsu feels like each new piece of information about these things is more and more confusing.]

...Ooookay. Maybe just the picture for them, then. Still think talking to the techy people about it might be useful, though. Different worlds, right? Maybe some world out there planned ahead for this sorta thing.

You really don't get it, Kotetsu. It's not just some piece of technology that could destroy everything if it fell into the wrong hands. It's something that seemed completely harmless because it wanted us to think that. It was researched, and then it...started doing stuff to people. It made people worship it, and 200 years do, the religion that was created is the most widespread religion across all of Earth and the colonies. Do you really think something with that much control over the mind can just be prepared for?

Your world didn't have psychics or people who could control technology with their minds. Don't give up before anything's even happened, yeah? If it wanted people to think that where you were from, we know better here 'cause you can tell us otherwise. We've got a chance to be prepared that your people didn't.

...Anyway, I thought you said it wasn't alive.

[Because if it is alive, and sapient, he's kinda uncomfortable with the idea of killing it. Buuuut at the same time if the only "thoughts" it's capable of are about destroying all life on wherever it lands, then that's different from killing a serial murderer or something, right?]

Yeah, touching a Marker with your mind sounds like a great idea. After you.

...are you even listening to yourself? How sure you are you can control it is exactly why you don't need to know about it. No one does.

...it's...not. Not like you or I know life.

I'm not sure about anything, except that I'm not ready to give up without a fight. People's lives are too important to just condemn them to death if one of those things shows up. Even if the worst happens and we fail, we'll have at least done everything we possibly could to save everyone instead of just assuming it's impossible.

I'm not saying we have to, Kotetsu. I'm just saying as soon as one shows up, thousands of people will die. That's it. There's no stopping it.

That's exactly what you're doing! You won't even give this place a chance not to go that way!

You're not getting it, but don't lose that hope. You'll need it.

You don't get it! You're so caught up in how badly everything went in your world you won't even consider the possibility of things being different here! Like it's the most powerful thing in any universe when you've only lived in one, just like most of the rest of us.

[Actually there's plenty of dimension travleHe exhales sharply in frustration.]

Dammit, you're the only one who knows about any of this stuff or I'd just ask someone else.

[2 bad u don't know Ellie is from the same world, Kotetsu, huh.]

Look. I may not have had super powers back home, and neither did any human for that matter, but let me put this into perspective for you, Kotetsu:

We're all that's left. I don't mean me and Ellie, but humanity. We've found ruins of lost civilizations possessing technology we can't even fathom, and they've all fallen, all of them, to the Markers. Every. Single. Goddamned one of them.

Because none of 'em saw them coming, right? They didn't know what could happen. You said people where you're from built it 'cause it was some sorta energy source, right? So they couldn'ta known that it was dangerous. But you know, so we wouldn't fall into the same trap. And if you let people who have powers that, like you said, didn't exist where you were from know, they can maybe plan ahead.

I get that they screwed up your universe, but this one plays by different rules, and you know what you're up against. Most of us are pretty invested in staying alive, and keeping this world's people alive too. They're not just going to build one of those things if you tell 'em what they're capable of. But they can try to think of a way to stop 'em. Maybe it wouldn't work, but it's better than just crossing our fingers that one never shows up.

You think being able to fly or read minds is going to save the world? People call me stupidly optimistic.

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five wild roars ✪ video

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( audio ) i'm so amused at how bitterly they've been arguing over a complete hypothetical lmfaooo

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( audio ) whoops i sure did mess up those brackets

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