03-25-2024, 04:05 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-27-2024, 08:51 AM by lemonoppy. Edited 1 time in total.)
Ranks upon ranks of skeleton soldiers march through the streets of a burning Chicago, playing brass instruments and dancing merrily while carrying out the grim work of conquering what remains of a city. Oily black smoke pollutes the sky, turning an orange sunset into a hellish landscape of war and rot. From our vantage point on top of a mostly standing office building we can see the grim beauty of a world going through its death throes. Even as global war threatens to rip reality apart at the seams, the vistas of Chicago are still majestic to behold.
The skeleton band, a second line of soldiers behind the leading mechanized fighters, cavort around the rubble, playing out a grim counterpoint to the screams of the wounded and dying. Someone from the window of an apartment building opens up with an automatic weapon, but a bolt of green lightning rips through the night air and tears the façade off the building until it collapses on the person who had been shooting. The lightning seems to have come from the tip of a baton wielded by one of the skeleton musicians, stylized in the shape of a drum major's but with a sickly green light coming from it.
"I'm told that Passarelli found an ancient ritual to summon an undead army when he besieged New Orleans with a fleet of Seawolf class nuclear submarines. They act as the follow up troops to his mechanized legions that have started taking the world over. People call them the Second Line, or so I'm told." The Doctor watches all of this chaos unfolding with a grim look on his face. He has seen wars more ferocious and devastating than this, fought on grander scales, but the horrors and suffering somehow stay the same. From the time of the first humans killing each other with stone and spear to when we hurl stars at each other, death stays the same.
A whistling sound precedes a series of explosions as a barrage of missiles come from a submarine apparently based in Lake Michigan, though how Thomas managed to sneak that into a proper lake is beyond my knowledge. "Why are they fighting over Chicago? If he is trying to take over the planet, certainly there must be more important places than this. Especially if his grand plan is to destroy it."
Rather than answer, the Time Lord simply points in the direction Passarelli's troops are moving, and I have to blink my eyes several times to make sure I'm not hallucinating. I can feel my draw drop and my eyebrows go up but in this moment I do not care about how I might look to others.
Hundreds of people in what look to be butcher's whites are fighting off the mechanized army with cleavers, with the kind of ferocity that only comes from the truly desperate. In the middle of the line of regular people fighting to defend their home is a human sized penguin with a cape and crown, squawking out orders that people are evidently able to understand. The flightless bird's face is painted on one side with what could just as easily be blood as paint, but the red is incredibly vibrant even from where we stand.
"The Chicago Butchers? The football team? Being led by an honest to God penguin in an open field of battle? Right here, localized entirely in the city of Chicago itself?" It is difficult to wrap my head around what I'm looking at here, the fans and employees of a football team defending the city that has been my home with the rage of someone screaming into a hurricane.
Walking to the edge of the rooftop, the Doctor stares into the war unfolding around them all. The chaos of it all seems to weigh on the man as he takes it all in. "In a way, the football teams have been the ones staging the most tenacious defenses. People put a lot of their hearts and souls into their sports teams, and they're fighting hard to protect what they see as important."
"I suppose that sports teams are a symbols, in a manner of speaking. It's not just fanatical devotion to the players on the field, but also devotion to what they represent in abstract. Not the city's brick and mortar, but the people and memories that those bricks have witnessed through the passing of time. We may just be standing on an apartment building, but it has housed thousands of people in the time it has been standing. People have been born here, died here, lived and laughed and loved without hesitation." I kneel down and brush my fingers across the dust and soot settling on the roof beneath our feet.
"They aren't defending their teams, Doctor, they are defending what those teams represent." I look up to see the Galifreyan giving me a knowing look, as though I were a student finally grasping a hard fought lesson. A burst of outrage begins to bloom in my chest and I have to stifle it before I say something that might lead the time traveler to leave me in this seemingly cursed timeline. "And that is why you brought me here, in truth. To show me the truth of what teams mean to people."
The Doctor nods soberly in agreement, looking from me to the burning skyline around us. "It is the most wonderful trait of humanity, at least so far as I have found. Their capacity to love not only people, but ideals. Come along, Triceracop. We have many more people to see and things to do." As he turns, his sneakers kicking up some of the ash and dust, a low tone begins to blare from the streets below.
The tone increases in pitch rapidly over the course of less than a second and I only have time to leap towards the Doctor and knock him to the ground before the sonic weapon hits the side of the apartment building we're standing on top of. A flash of blue light means the TARDIS is protected by some kind of shielding, but that protection does not extend outwards towards us or the building as a whole. When a full third of its structure is evaporated by sound waves the rest of it begins to collapse and drag us towards the ground in an avalanche of debris.
For such a noisy and destructive affair it is over surprisingly quickly and for a moment the battlefield itself seems to hold its breath. The dust settles across the temporary cease fire as the Doctor and I managed to claw our ways out of the collapsed apartment building. In the sky we can see the TARDIS still lazily floating in the air, evidently unbothered by the recent turn of events.
We emerge from the mass of debris covered in dust that lends a certain spectral aspect to our appearance as we stand as two non-combatants in the middle of what amounts to one of the most ferocious active war zones that I have ever seen in either timeline that I have lived my life in. From the war ravaged streets of 3Cago to the beginning stages of the Third Great Emu War.
That conflict had resulted in a battle that had raged across the continent for over two years before a peace was brokered. The use of United Federated States rail guns and orbital weaponry had ripped a huge gout of the middle of the Australian continent exposing the great rivers of lava that ran beneath before they were eventually harnessed to provide geothermal energy to the entirety of the pacific rim. Millions had died in that war on both sides, but the scale of it cowers in comparison to the war brought forth into being by a man I once considered a brother.
The silence holds in the air for far longer than I would've considered. My blood thunders in my ears, making even the quiet deafening, though I can hear as well as feel the trembling of the rubble beneath our feet. Layer upon layer of brick, plaster, and rebar shift and displace in order to try and settle along the wide street that had once been home to a vibrant neighborhood.
Alas no amount of blind optimism can postpone a war forever, and it pains me to no end that the sound that broke that tenuous peace was from a genuinely terrible song from my youth. DJ Wet Willeh, one of the greatest musicians 3Cago ever produced, collaborated with one of the most hated, a Tyler Higbee, to create a track entitled "RAPture."
The track details the biblical apocalypse from the book of Revelations, but with God and the Devil each being rappers in their own right. It is a twenty five minute rap ballad with several beat changes and over a dozen features on that track. Before I had been transported back in time to this age, 3Cago University was getting ready to start a series of literature classes on exploring the themes and analytical worth related to the song, its writing, and also the production. How such a course could even begin to be formatted or offer any worth was a hotly debated topic around the precinct before I made the trip back in time.
That day in the middle of a Chicago street, the first notes of the track ring out from a trumpet being played in some arcane way by a skeleton. Not having lips, it genuinely boggles the mind at how it managed to play at all. Of course, most of Passarelli's Second Line play brass instruments in the New Orleans tradition whose name they bear. But dark magics very rarely give any observation to such mundane things as the natural order.
With one pure brassy note, the temporary peace becomes bedlam once more. A salvo of meat cleavers go flipping through the air fast enough sound like a choir of whistlers from some kind of novelty record produced in the middle of the nineteenth century. The broad blades of the weapons flash with reflecting light from the sun and burning fires, making the line of knives look similar to a wall of solid fire moving down the street and smashing into the android forces of Thomas Passarelli.
Ceasefire broken by butchers' blades, the automaton forces of the commander of the Seawolves and the Secondline begin to open fire. Red beams of light rip through the air with a crack and sizzle as they super heat the air around each bolt. "Doctor! We need to move!" I shout but the Time Lord is already moving.
The time traveler's running stride could best be described as highly effective as he takes off at a dead sprint towards the ad hoc defensive line put in place by the citizens of Chicago. Using the burned out frames of half a dozen cars as well as a few shipping containers, the human resistance has managed to assemble quite the effective barricade against the withering onslaught of fire.
Though it may not be able to withstand a sonic assault like the one that leveled the apartment building we had been standing on, it is more than adequate for defending against the more traditional fire from the automatons. As well, the Second Line seem to be far more interested in playing a series of their favorite songs than actually trying to win the fight. Not that I can blame them, they're actually quite good musicians.
White coat clad men and women continue to hurl volley after volley of cleavers towards the automatons, a withering hail of sharpened steel propelled by strength of arm and the pure rage at the soulless forces doing their damnedest to burn their city to the ground.
The Doctor and I have to dodge left and right, sometimes even diving to the ground to avoid getting struck by the projectiles. Somehow the time traveler is much more nimble, able to prance and shift through the narrowest gaps between thrown knives but I have to move significantly more mass to protect a much larger target. Though it must be said that the oncoming cleavers are much easier to dodge than the laser fire coming from behind us. Passarelli's forces take an approach to fire power that could best be described as "If we fire enough shots, we will eventually hit something." It reminds me of a Star Wars film in a way, though with none of the charm and a distressingly large possibility of actually getting shot in the back.
"Throw the ladder down!" A voice from the makeshift parapet calls out and a rope ladder gets thrown down to us. The Doctor scrambles up nimbly, for all the world looking to be excited at the prospect of an adventure. I start making my way up, though it proves much more difficult considering the size differences between the Time Lord and I. A few shouts of organization between different men and women and there's a sudden heave on the ladder in an effort to pull me up.
Between my own efforts and that of the brave Chicagoans manning the defenses I get pulled over and land directly on top of The Doctor. A dozen or so freedom fighters stand around us in butchers' whites with knives in their belts. The crowned penguin stands directly across from us in the middle of a semi-circle that we stand in the middle of. "Get off of me would you, you ungainly damn dinosaur."
"Whoops." I roll off of my fellow time traveler and we both stand up to face the defenders of Chicago. "Thank you for saving us, I suppose that introductions are in order. I'm Triceracop, private investigator. This is The Doctor." I notice a few meaningful glances between some members of the welcoming party but the political thing to do is not address those.
Being rude to people wielding weapons is probably not the smartest move in the world.
"Squwak." The penguin speaks in a tone with a kind of gravitas that is genuinely surprising considering that it is coming from a literal bird wearing a crown and a cape. What would normally feel quite humorous is instead given all the seriousness of a hearing before a proper monarch. Similar to when I had to meet with the Baron of Baltimore back in my original timeline.
The Doctor steps forward, raising his hands with splayed fingers. "Sorry, friends, I'm afraid neither are fluent in that particular avian dialect. Could one of you fine fashionable folk help us out with a spot of translation?" For how frustrating the man can be at times, he has a disarming demeanor that helps in situations just like this. These people have been fighting for their lives but they chuckle a bit at the man's words.
A man with thinning hair and Franz Josef moustache steps forward, blood staining the shoulder of his otherwise pristine coat. "My name's Rico, Rico Savage. This here is the Painted Penguin, leader of the resistance against the bastard tyrant Thomas Passarelli." Savage faces us once more, hands resting on butcher's knives at his belt. "Now do you mind telling us how the hell you ended up in our war zone?"
"Squawk." The penguin says, before giving a solemn nod.
The skeleton band, a second line of soldiers behind the leading mechanized fighters, cavort around the rubble, playing out a grim counterpoint to the screams of the wounded and dying. Someone from the window of an apartment building opens up with an automatic weapon, but a bolt of green lightning rips through the night air and tears the façade off the building until it collapses on the person who had been shooting. The lightning seems to have come from the tip of a baton wielded by one of the skeleton musicians, stylized in the shape of a drum major's but with a sickly green light coming from it.
"I'm told that Passarelli found an ancient ritual to summon an undead army when he besieged New Orleans with a fleet of Seawolf class nuclear submarines. They act as the follow up troops to his mechanized legions that have started taking the world over. People call them the Second Line, or so I'm told." The Doctor watches all of this chaos unfolding with a grim look on his face. He has seen wars more ferocious and devastating than this, fought on grander scales, but the horrors and suffering somehow stay the same. From the time of the first humans killing each other with stone and spear to when we hurl stars at each other, death stays the same.
A whistling sound precedes a series of explosions as a barrage of missiles come from a submarine apparently based in Lake Michigan, though how Thomas managed to sneak that into a proper lake is beyond my knowledge. "Why are they fighting over Chicago? If he is trying to take over the planet, certainly there must be more important places than this. Especially if his grand plan is to destroy it."
Rather than answer, the Time Lord simply points in the direction Passarelli's troops are moving, and I have to blink my eyes several times to make sure I'm not hallucinating. I can feel my draw drop and my eyebrows go up but in this moment I do not care about how I might look to others.
Hundreds of people in what look to be butcher's whites are fighting off the mechanized army with cleavers, with the kind of ferocity that only comes from the truly desperate. In the middle of the line of regular people fighting to defend their home is a human sized penguin with a cape and crown, squawking out orders that people are evidently able to understand. The flightless bird's face is painted on one side with what could just as easily be blood as paint, but the red is incredibly vibrant even from where we stand.
"The Chicago Butchers? The football team? Being led by an honest to God penguin in an open field of battle? Right here, localized entirely in the city of Chicago itself?" It is difficult to wrap my head around what I'm looking at here, the fans and employees of a football team defending the city that has been my home with the rage of someone screaming into a hurricane.
Walking to the edge of the rooftop, the Doctor stares into the war unfolding around them all. The chaos of it all seems to weigh on the man as he takes it all in. "In a way, the football teams have been the ones staging the most tenacious defenses. People put a lot of their hearts and souls into their sports teams, and they're fighting hard to protect what they see as important."
"I suppose that sports teams are a symbols, in a manner of speaking. It's not just fanatical devotion to the players on the field, but also devotion to what they represent in abstract. Not the city's brick and mortar, but the people and memories that those bricks have witnessed through the passing of time. We may just be standing on an apartment building, but it has housed thousands of people in the time it has been standing. People have been born here, died here, lived and laughed and loved without hesitation." I kneel down and brush my fingers across the dust and soot settling on the roof beneath our feet.
"They aren't defending their teams, Doctor, they are defending what those teams represent." I look up to see the Galifreyan giving me a knowing look, as though I were a student finally grasping a hard fought lesson. A burst of outrage begins to bloom in my chest and I have to stifle it before I say something that might lead the time traveler to leave me in this seemingly cursed timeline. "And that is why you brought me here, in truth. To show me the truth of what teams mean to people."
The Doctor nods soberly in agreement, looking from me to the burning skyline around us. "It is the most wonderful trait of humanity, at least so far as I have found. Their capacity to love not only people, but ideals. Come along, Triceracop. We have many more people to see and things to do." As he turns, his sneakers kicking up some of the ash and dust, a low tone begins to blare from the streets below.
The tone increases in pitch rapidly over the course of less than a second and I only have time to leap towards the Doctor and knock him to the ground before the sonic weapon hits the side of the apartment building we're standing on top of. A flash of blue light means the TARDIS is protected by some kind of shielding, but that protection does not extend outwards towards us or the building as a whole. When a full third of its structure is evaporated by sound waves the rest of it begins to collapse and drag us towards the ground in an avalanche of debris.
For such a noisy and destructive affair it is over surprisingly quickly and for a moment the battlefield itself seems to hold its breath. The dust settles across the temporary cease fire as the Doctor and I managed to claw our ways out of the collapsed apartment building. In the sky we can see the TARDIS still lazily floating in the air, evidently unbothered by the recent turn of events.
We emerge from the mass of debris covered in dust that lends a certain spectral aspect to our appearance as we stand as two non-combatants in the middle of what amounts to one of the most ferocious active war zones that I have ever seen in either timeline that I have lived my life in. From the war ravaged streets of 3Cago to the beginning stages of the Third Great Emu War.
That conflict had resulted in a battle that had raged across the continent for over two years before a peace was brokered. The use of United Federated States rail guns and orbital weaponry had ripped a huge gout of the middle of the Australian continent exposing the great rivers of lava that ran beneath before they were eventually harnessed to provide geothermal energy to the entirety of the pacific rim. Millions had died in that war on both sides, but the scale of it cowers in comparison to the war brought forth into being by a man I once considered a brother.
The silence holds in the air for far longer than I would've considered. My blood thunders in my ears, making even the quiet deafening, though I can hear as well as feel the trembling of the rubble beneath our feet. Layer upon layer of brick, plaster, and rebar shift and displace in order to try and settle along the wide street that had once been home to a vibrant neighborhood.
Alas no amount of blind optimism can postpone a war forever, and it pains me to no end that the sound that broke that tenuous peace was from a genuinely terrible song from my youth. DJ Wet Willeh, one of the greatest musicians 3Cago ever produced, collaborated with one of the most hated, a Tyler Higbee, to create a track entitled "RAPture."
The track details the biblical apocalypse from the book of Revelations, but with God and the Devil each being rappers in their own right. It is a twenty five minute rap ballad with several beat changes and over a dozen features on that track. Before I had been transported back in time to this age, 3Cago University was getting ready to start a series of literature classes on exploring the themes and analytical worth related to the song, its writing, and also the production. How such a course could even begin to be formatted or offer any worth was a hotly debated topic around the precinct before I made the trip back in time.
That day in the middle of a Chicago street, the first notes of the track ring out from a trumpet being played in some arcane way by a skeleton. Not having lips, it genuinely boggles the mind at how it managed to play at all. Of course, most of Passarelli's Second Line play brass instruments in the New Orleans tradition whose name they bear. But dark magics very rarely give any observation to such mundane things as the natural order.
With one pure brassy note, the temporary peace becomes bedlam once more. A salvo of meat cleavers go flipping through the air fast enough sound like a choir of whistlers from some kind of novelty record produced in the middle of the nineteenth century. The broad blades of the weapons flash with reflecting light from the sun and burning fires, making the line of knives look similar to a wall of solid fire moving down the street and smashing into the android forces of Thomas Passarelli.
Ceasefire broken by butchers' blades, the automaton forces of the commander of the Seawolves and the Secondline begin to open fire. Red beams of light rip through the air with a crack and sizzle as they super heat the air around each bolt. "Doctor! We need to move!" I shout but the Time Lord is already moving.
The time traveler's running stride could best be described as highly effective as he takes off at a dead sprint towards the ad hoc defensive line put in place by the citizens of Chicago. Using the burned out frames of half a dozen cars as well as a few shipping containers, the human resistance has managed to assemble quite the effective barricade against the withering onslaught of fire.
Though it may not be able to withstand a sonic assault like the one that leveled the apartment building we had been standing on, it is more than adequate for defending against the more traditional fire from the automatons. As well, the Second Line seem to be far more interested in playing a series of their favorite songs than actually trying to win the fight. Not that I can blame them, they're actually quite good musicians.
White coat clad men and women continue to hurl volley after volley of cleavers towards the automatons, a withering hail of sharpened steel propelled by strength of arm and the pure rage at the soulless forces doing their damnedest to burn their city to the ground.
The Doctor and I have to dodge left and right, sometimes even diving to the ground to avoid getting struck by the projectiles. Somehow the time traveler is much more nimble, able to prance and shift through the narrowest gaps between thrown knives but I have to move significantly more mass to protect a much larger target. Though it must be said that the oncoming cleavers are much easier to dodge than the laser fire coming from behind us. Passarelli's forces take an approach to fire power that could best be described as "If we fire enough shots, we will eventually hit something." It reminds me of a Star Wars film in a way, though with none of the charm and a distressingly large possibility of actually getting shot in the back.
"Throw the ladder down!" A voice from the makeshift parapet calls out and a rope ladder gets thrown down to us. The Doctor scrambles up nimbly, for all the world looking to be excited at the prospect of an adventure. I start making my way up, though it proves much more difficult considering the size differences between the Time Lord and I. A few shouts of organization between different men and women and there's a sudden heave on the ladder in an effort to pull me up.
Between my own efforts and that of the brave Chicagoans manning the defenses I get pulled over and land directly on top of The Doctor. A dozen or so freedom fighters stand around us in butchers' whites with knives in their belts. The crowned penguin stands directly across from us in the middle of a semi-circle that we stand in the middle of. "Get off of me would you, you ungainly damn dinosaur."
"Whoops." I roll off of my fellow time traveler and we both stand up to face the defenders of Chicago. "Thank you for saving us, I suppose that introductions are in order. I'm Triceracop, private investigator. This is The Doctor." I notice a few meaningful glances between some members of the welcoming party but the political thing to do is not address those.
Being rude to people wielding weapons is probably not the smartest move in the world.
"Squwak." The penguin speaks in a tone with a kind of gravitas that is genuinely surprising considering that it is coming from a literal bird wearing a crown and a cape. What would normally feel quite humorous is instead given all the seriousness of a hearing before a proper monarch. Similar to when I had to meet with the Baron of Baltimore back in my original timeline.
The Doctor steps forward, raising his hands with splayed fingers. "Sorry, friends, I'm afraid neither are fluent in that particular avian dialect. Could one of you fine fashionable folk help us out with a spot of translation?" For how frustrating the man can be at times, he has a disarming demeanor that helps in situations just like this. These people have been fighting for their lives but they chuckle a bit at the man's words.
A man with thinning hair and Franz Josef moustache steps forward, blood staining the shoulder of his otherwise pristine coat. "My name's Rico, Rico Savage. This here is the Painted Penguin, leader of the resistance against the bastard tyrant Thomas Passarelli." Savage faces us once more, hands resting on butcher's knives at his belt. "Now do you mind telling us how the hell you ended up in our war zone?"
"Squawk." The penguin says, before giving a solemn nod.