Temporal Rift RPG

[The Kingpin]

"Huh. Hell of a satire of earth, dont ya think?" commented Jacob with an amused grunt as the furious plant's tendrils pulled the machine under, disappearing into the depths beneath the city as clouds of dust, smoke and debris were kicked up around them, silhouettes of urban decay looming in the distance. As if marking the destruction of the final Tether, the markers on his HUD indicating a live feed to Atlas flickered, the word OFFLINE blinking in the peripheries of the man's vision. As of now...they were on their own...


...or so they thought...

[C S]

"Satire?" Kane asked, perplexed by the mercenary's wording. "As if to say, 'Earth is burning'?" he added, gazing down into the horrendous destruction that was sprawled out before him. As structures fell to pieces and melted in the violet pyre, he thought: "It's our mission to make sure that doesn't happen..."

He cocked his head at a musical tone that reached his ears, a sound that took him by surprise not because he did not know what it was, but because he did not expect to hear it. Not then. He raised a brow questioningly at it. He saw that there was a symbol blinking on his interface, an orange and black upside down triangle. His eyes widened, for he knew what it entailed. The triangle stopped blinking after a few seconds and split into three at the corners. The segments then started to pinwheel as a single line of text ran across his screen underneath them.

"Trans-warp connectivity severed."

Kane's shoulders slumped and he let out an exhausted sigh. How that one sentence was supposed to convey the monumentous result that had been achieved! That one sentence and icon meant the success of the perilous endeavor, the success in saving an entire planet from utter annihilation! In his head, he envisioned the events at Yellowstone. He could not be sure how it would play out exactly. With the time distortion between dimensions, the evaporation of the portal could have been well underway even though it had been only moments since the last tether's destruction. But he imagined the cheering of huddled masses in the exclusion zone as the temporal storm began to ebb and wane. He imagined somber farewells from people he used to call his friends, those who knew he was not coming back from his mission. He thought about his mother, and how she would never know the things he knew, understand the things he understood.

This simple message meant that the journey into the wild frontier ensured the continued survival of Earth as both teams knew it. This simple message also meant that Earth, their home, was cut off from them, leaving them stranded in the strange reality that was the Rift. And Kane knew that, wherever they were, the others were getting the same alert. Silently, he pondered whether or not they understood what this meant for them and their objectives. The alert had disappeared from sight by then, just like any other notification.

[The Kingpin]

"It won't....At least, not to the Rift. Wouldn't put it past mankind to do that themselves though. We do love our self-destructive habits" said Jacob calmly as he watched the aftermath of the clash in the city, as the Live Feed signal disappeared, fading out of sight as he began considering their current situation. "Now, what say we go see if we can't find out more about this place we're stranded in?" he asked...

[C S]

"It's all we can do now that we've got nothing but time on our hands. You, me and Felicity," said Kane. He stepped away from the threshold into the airlock proper. With the mechanical hum of their motors, the doors slid across the openings on either side of the ship. The purple flames outside disappeared from the chamber and their light was replaced by the dim glow of strips on the ceiling and floor.

"Decontamination sequence prepped. We get ourselves clean and then we get out of this place."

[Giratina93]

The warble that had come from the drone didn't go unnoticed, but by the time Rebin and Yukari had looked up to see what it had been, it was gone. However, the giant insect had now backed up into the shadows, no longer blocking the way. Oh well... it seemed not everything in this place was trying to kill them, which was a good thing. The two followed Dietrich, the eyes watching from the shadows observing them with caution. So long as they didn't do anything to disturb or harass the inhabitants, it seemed as though they would be okay... but neither of them wanted to press their luck.

[The Kingpin]

"Can't say I'll miss this **** hole" said Jacob with a grunt as he entered the Felicity, his weapon finally suitably cooled to be brought aboard. Setting the weapon down, the man straightened within the airlock, presenting himself for the automated decontamination system's scanners. Pulses of golden energy ran along grooves in the walls, fibre-optic emitters and receivers forming rib-like grooves in the walls of the glistening airlock...

[C S]

Decontamination went as per procedure, first with a strobing light that ran down Kane and Jacob's forms that was then followed by the hissing chemical bath sprayed onto them from all directions. The glowing grooves in the walls disappeared behind the thick fog inside the airlock chamber. One decontamination cycle later, the airlock was ventilated and dried. There was the electronic chime that signaled that the scanners did not detect any maladies on them and that they were free to enter the ship proper. Kane docked his suit into the wall unit, the door slid shut and the internal platform rotated. The door on the other side opened and he got out of the armor, stepping into the cockpit.

"Shithole is right," he murmured to himself. Through the view screen, he was watching as more and more buildings were consumed in the baneful fire. He wondered if this place would ever extinguish itself, or if it was destined to continue burning for however long an eternity was within the Rift.

Some time later, the Felicity touched back down onto solid, unburned ground a fair distance from the Dead City's outer limits. The sky was darkening abruptly by then and a breeze was blowing in. The ship was surrounded by a meadow that stretched out across wide tracts of land, tall blades of grass leaning with the breeze. For a place of such peril, the scene was almost tranquil. Tranquility did not stop the ship from deploying its perimeter defenses, however. Just as the energy barrier materialized in between the ship's pylons, buzzing and casting a red light into the dark, Kane was strapping himself into the cockpit's health diagnostic station.

He had bands wrapped around each wrist, wires attached to them which ran into the instrumentation panel. He had a strange helmet on, one that had a bulky mechanical connection to the cockpit ceiling with a bunch of thick cables running along it and disappearing into the machinery. Holograms and monitors around him displayed graphs and other data readouts pertaining to his vital signs. One 3D hologram in particular showed an advanced scan of his brain in real time, different sections highlighted different colors depending on the intensity of activity. He had to make sure his exposure to the presence did not have any lasting effects on him physically or mentally...

... or worse, implied unforeseen complications that were now making themselves known.

[The Kingpin]

Jacob meanwhile, headed to his personal quarters, opening up the armoury and removing a weapons maintenance case, before heading over to his desk and setting his weapons to the side. Placing the PEC on the desk, he proceeded to check for potential flaws and damages. In the background, his APC/R armour began an internal diagnostics check, checking both his body and the armour itself for damages as he worked. While he could always have done as Kane had and entered one of the health diagnostics stations within the ship, it would waste time. He hadn't been here long, but if there's one thing that had made itself instantly apparent, it was the need to be as time efficient as possible...

[C S]

It had given him quite a fright, Kane had to admit that. The possibility that something had latched onto him, that something had embedded itself in his mind, it was something he only recently considered. Recently, in this case, meaning as he was bringing the Felicity in for a landing. He laid the thoughts about the tether to rest, only to be confronted with his own gripping fear.

"Saved the Earth, lost my mind doing it." He had corrected himself seconds after the thought. "Not lose. Had it invaded. Hijacked."

But sitting in his chair, strapped into the machines and looking at the data presented on his screens, Kane had no evidence to support his suspicions. There was no abnormality, no unchecked mental activity that couldn't be accounted for. His bio-readings were all nominal. Either the entity had engrained itself into his body to the point his instruments couldn't discern a difference or it wasn't with him at all.

Kane undid the bands on his wrists and he stowed them back in their storage units. He undid the straps that passed over his temples and came together under his jaw. The straps had strips of silvery light inlaid within them that went dark when Kane took them off. The glowing nodes running along the brim of the scanning device followed suit, the live display turning into a static representation. Kane took the helmet off and its harness began to retract into the ceiling, disappearing behind paneling within a moment.

He sat back in his seat and let out a heavy sigh. It was not every day he experienced an entirely alien consciousness in his own body. Despite the NT-SB armor protecting him, something had been able to interact with him on a deeply interpersonal level, an intelligence communicating with sights and not words. Acknowledging an intelligence as being responsible for it was almost as discomforting for Kane as acknowledging that, in some way, it was in his mind. Almost, but just not quite. He lived his entire life with the notion that the mind was the only place where one could truly be alone.

That was not so in the Rift. Kane suspected that this surreal feeling of disorientation would only worsen as he discovered more and more unfortunate truths about this realm. He suspected it would be a long time before he adapted to the point where he could shrug off its effects and simply carry on. With another sigh, he pressed a key and sent the gathered data to the ship's medical logs. He got out of his pilot seat and started to make his way for his chambers, deciding he needed to rest his mind.

"And to think I was willing to do this mission by myself..."

[The Kingpin]

As the Mercenary finished his maintenance of the PEC, he deactivated the Integrated Life Support System, choosing to preserve resources and use the ship's supply instead. Mere moments were all it took for him to begin feeling the pain of a couple of fractured bones and bruised tissue where the Tether's most violent blows had struck. Despite the injuries, Jacob was nothing if not impressed. A normal man would've had his skeleton smashed to bits by blows like that, even assuming he survived being torn to shreds by the sheer ferocity of the more focused attacks. Atlas had once again excelled in his work.


Standing up from his desk, the man gritted his teeth as the pain of his numerous injuries screamed for attention. He walked towards the Medical bay, fighting the body's urge to limp only through the willpower of centuries of battlefield experience, holding his body in a natural form to avoid shifting anything out of position. The last thing he wanted was to make the Med Bay's work harder. As he entered the room, he paced towards one of several small, narrow beds, designed to fit the natural curve of a human spine. Climbing onto it, he lay down, a glass cover arcing out of the wall and closing around him, a hiss escaping the machine as the glass turned opaque. The anaesthetic only took a couple of seconds to kick in, the man drifting out of consciousness as he surrendered himself to the mercy of technology...

[C S]

Second Stage: Terminal Annex

The droning coming from the Bridge was a loud, low pitched sound as the machinery charged up. Cold white lights shone down on the Receiving Platform before the large cylindrical construction. It laid on the gray floor of the building horizontally with a housing supporting its underside, many large cables running along the floor from it in many directions to other machines, mainly generators at the far sides of the room. Other sizable machines were near it, all having displays that flashed different colors with blocks of text running across the screens. There was a huge metallic silver ring standing vertically at the front of the Bridge, where temporal energies began to churn. The rippling colors swirled and formed patterns that would dissipate quickly, replaced by new shapes and arrangements for those looking upon it to perceive at the mouth of the metal "tunnel". The ring was a yard away from this, the bottom portion of which ran below the room's floor. The ring started to spin clockwise with a motorized hum when the power within the Bridge reached a sufficient level; electricity began to leap forth from the mouth of the machine, crackling and popping. The lances of light would come close to the ring, but never did they touch it. They yielded to the containment field and moved in the direction of the ring's spin, creating a strobing lightshow of white, blues, purples and so on.

The exotic energy in the Bridge burst forth next, a plume of purple that shot through beneath the archway of lightning and stopped right at the center of the ring, the eruption being spread across the diameter of it. There, the energy became refined, a strangely smooth translucent covering that allowed one to see the chaotic spiral just behind it. The surface distorted and warbled as ripples of space and time were created, signs of what was to come. A bright outline formed around the shapes that came through the portal, vehicles with dark green and brown exteriors driving through the Bridge and into the expansive chamber of Terminal Annex. This convoy was comprised of vehicles ranging in size from small jeeps to mobile command posts, all of which fit inside the Receiving Platform. Personnel in white coats stood overhead on catwalks running across the bay, their hands holding onto portable readouts that had their eyes' full attention. People on the bottom level rushed onto the Receiving Platform to greet the new arrivals. They wore uniforms that one would expect find on an airport runway, color coded helmets and loosely fitting clothes.

"Another successful shipment sent off into space between spaces," Jacob Calhoun relayed to a team on the other end of the transporter. Like the personnel in the Terminal, he and the others were in white coats instead of black and orange, standing before the machinery that made interdimensional travel a reality. The machinery in the complex was not the same as that inside Terminal Annex. There was a gigantic circular platform that rose more than five feet off the ground, ringed with black and yellow danger strips. Ramps allowed ground vehicles to drive up onto it, while massive industrial robotic claws on the ceiling lifted anything else that couldn't get on top on their own. A similar feature was to be added to the Terminal. The Earth-end of the Bridge was a series of pylons that were now beginning to descend back into their compartments beneath the Delivery Platform. During the transport sequence they would have been fully extended, serving the purpose of antennae, a point of focus for the exotic temporal energy. When the connection to the other side was made, the Bridge began the process of amplifying the pull until a portal could be sustained, and when the transport was completed it gradually powered down, weakening the connection until it vanished.

There was clapping and cheering, though mostly from the frivolous observers rather than the team itself. In the vast hangar turned lab, military officers of many ranks watched the scientists work, tools of discovery that allowed them to make their claim in the Rift. Once independents given the freedom needed to counteract the Portal Crisis, now they were obedient subjects to the will of the highest forms of government. They did not wear their old uniforms, for O.W.L was no more. America could not risk a worldwide developer leaking this new technology to competitors. With access to the Rift, America's dominance of Earth would be assured. Unlimited resources to wrap up the world's economy with, advanced weaponry to be found in order to defend its hold... the United States stood at the dawn of a new golden age to rule over the planet... a dawn that could not be allowed to turn into a waning dusk.

Specialized teams were dispatched to find the international members of O.W.L. They had to be dealt with... but they were expecting this to happen. They were ready. Names disappeared. Faces were in databanks that did not belong to any one person. The resistance had been created from the very first day that the portal appeared over Old Faithful...

Their goal is to get to the Rift on their own terms. Their goal is to lend aid to the teams on the other side being hunted by military task forces. Terminal Annex is America's staging ground for an occupational campaign and a clean up operation. If O.W.L succeeded, it would only be the first of Earth's bases in the Rift.

[C S]

Out There: Far Yonder


The wind was howling as it swept across this vast open. Powder took to the air in magnificent arcs when the air currents hit dunes of white. When the light of the tiny dot in the sky struck the dust just right, sparkles of color traced through the sky. Color that the ground cover reflected in their own crystals. Snow stretched out in all directions. Far away, tiny on the horizon, distant landmarks poked up over the white blanket. Places where the tundra gave way to other lands. Different lands. Sometimes there was a lake, or things bigger than lakes, but then there was more land. Always more land. Always different land. Where the snow remained, though, was a place of all kinds of history. Things laid half-buried in the snow, tilted at various angles, of various sizes.

The distinct noise of a growling engine traveled far over the snowbanks and mounds. From a distance, the thing making the sound was just a dark speck against the gleaming sheen of snow, a powdery tail swaying behind it as it tore across the icy surface. Up close, it was a powerful machine wearing beaten up dark blue panels. The chassis had stripped paint and the flaming colors of rust where silvery metal used to be. The front of the vehicle was broad, flat and sharply angled, looking like a wedge. Rectangular holes formed a line running towards the middle, serving the role of a grille. The windshield was a hemisphere, the fraction of a dome leading into the vehicle's bulky midsection, where wide poles of black metal came together at many angles to form a roll cage. The back of the machine ended in a downward slant, black vents running along it. The air rippled with heat around them, the mist of condensation that formed being lost in the shower of snow that came down as it roared across the frost.

Metal skis on mechanized joints on the side of the speeding transport skated over the snow, wheels mostly tucked beneath the car were a blur. A blur, until the sustained growl of the engine started to wane. That powerful growl was interrupted by pops and sputtering. Things started to jangle within the thing's internal workings. The car started to slow as the popping became more and more frequent before finally reaching a crawling speed. The treaded tires bit into the snow one last time before the whole thing came to an unceremonious stop amidst the buried monuments. The trail of powder had long since disbanded, blowing away in a sparkly cloud. Smoke spilled out of the rear vents.

A dull click followed by a hiss sounded off, and one of the car doors opened, swinging upwards and taking a section of the roll cage with it. A figure in a cloak hopped out of the vehicle and stretched out his limbs. The cloak wasn't anything especially eye-catching. It was made of black fabric and billowed in the cold breeze, the hood ruffling. Armored plating that looked to be in the same condition as the car save for the smoke covered his outer extremities, legs and arms, gloves for his hands and boots for his feet. He had half a chestplate on, the other half leaving his shoulder bare underneath the cloak. The armor covering his midsection was more complete, however, segmented plating that ended at his belt. The armor was light blue in color and the formfitting clothing that the man wore beneath it was white, retaining a gleaming luster to it despite the sorry state of the armor that covered it.

Upon his head, there was only the hood. His face, angular and rough, was visible underneath it, his short black hair tucked away underneath the pointed fabric. A coarse beard grew along his jawline and cheeks. Unremarkable brown eyes surveyed the area.

"Shucks. Looks like we'll need another ride."

[Turbo Tyrannophonic]

"What a place to crap out."

Something stirred in the vehicle. Grabbing the edge of the door frame, another of the occupants swung out and onto the vehicle itself in one smooth motion. This one was a stark contrast to the first - female, dressed in simple leather and cloth garb, with dark hair that almost reached her waist. A long, curved blue-black hilt hung from her side, swaying slightly in the chilling breeze. Despite her simple - and ill-suited - attire, the woman seemed unfazed by their arctic surroundings.

After a moment of silence, she spoke.

"God damn its cold."

[C S]

"It's gonna be cold for a while, I think," said the first one out. He reached into his cloak and rummaged around for a few seconds before pulling out a flat object with purple highlights and bluish coloring everywhere else. He pressed what appeared to be buttons on the side of the device, which flipped up a panel with an incredibly thin film on it. The film lit up like a computer screen, but the display was fuzzy and incomprehensible.

"What a useless GPS," the man commented to his agile blade-wielding companion. With a sigh visible as a puff of vapor, he put the device back where it was and went around the car, opening a secondary door and retrieving his travel bag. Like the clothing of the woman, the bag was fairly simple. It was a spacious leather backpack with a diagonal strap that slung over a shoulder and stayed there.

"Welp, time to start hoofing it I guess."

[Turbo Tyrannophonic]

"Off into the blizzard we go," the woman replied, surveying their surroundings from her perch as best she could. It wasn't clear whether or not her statement was sarcastic, however.

A few futile moments later, she landed in a crouch a few feet away from her companion. Strangely, her feet did not sink very far into the snow upon impact.

[C S]

The man's reply to the woman was a grunt. "I'm gonna miss this sledder," the man said. He put his backpack on and started walking across the frost. His heavier attire had him slogging through the snow, as opposed to the light-running woman. As it was for quite a while, passing all kinds of strange wrecks in the snow. There were things that looked like old buses, some with two decks and all, while others were things straight from space, long cylinders with all kinds of ridges and indentations.

None of them seemed like they were things that simply broke down, like the sledder. They all looked like they were dropped from heaven into the snowy wastes, which was not at all too surprising. These were what natives of the Rift had come to call Dumping Grounds, for when portal activity picked up, presents from some otherworldly plane were sure to follow.

Passing buried vehicle after buried vehicle, the two came to a point where there was something poking up above the frosty covering. Getting closer still, it became clear that they had happened upon a building. It wasn't too large a structure, just over a single story. It sat lopsided on elevated terrain and its walls were visibly affected by the stresses. It wasn't built that way, that was for sure, but its base was mostly filled in with snow.

Next to it was a bent pole, a billboard-looking sign held at the top. A faded poster of a burger with broken neon tubes surrounding it greeted the two travelers.

"Wanna check it out?" the man asked the woman. He paused, contemplating whether or not she had developed frostbite yet.

[Turbo Tyrannophonic]

The woman shrugged. "As long as we're clear that there's definitely something dangerous inside, I don't see why not."

[C S]

"Nah, I don't think it'll be a repeat of the taco place," the man said as he trudged towards the building. "That was in a place that was hot, right? Everything went rotten and came to life but this place is like, all fridge in all directions," he explained. He waved his hand as if to say there was nothing to worry about.

[Turbo Tyrannophonic]

"Yeah, sure," the woman responded as she followed close behind. "Just know that when we find out I'm right, you get one riiiight on the chin."

Her clenched fist pierced the snow in a lightning-quick jab to emphasize her point.

[C S]

"Crap. Well maybe you'll lay off a little this time, now that you saw what happened when you punched me in the shoulder." Without another word on the subject, the man came up to the burger joint's entrance. It used to be mostly glass, with the big double doors and the huge windows for advertisements to be plastered on them, but now the entrance was just a gaping hole into a cold and dark place.

He readjusted his footing to account for the unbalanced floor and stepped in. The chairs and tables were all bolted down to the red and yellow tiled floor. Snow had fallen inside from cracks in the wall and other broken windows. The counter had everything one would expect from a burger place, with the cash register unattended and the glass snack boxes cracked. Condiment packets were spilled onto the floor from their trays.