Reality Storm: Prologue
by K.Huntsman
released 25th March 2000
Duo was just enough of a sadist to be effective at interrogation. Quatre was too gentle to get stuck with the job, Heero and Trowa both too quiet, and Wufei too honorable. Duo, while proud of what honor he did have, was not above a little healthy torture to get the information he and his fellow pilots needed out of the spy who had been planting false information in their network.
Thus it was that Saturday night, a night devoid of a mission and hence technically the free time when he should have been out having the blast of his young life, found him in an empty room. Empty, that was, except for the man strapped to the examination table and the various implements Duo had had much fun finding and hauling through the door.
There was a lovely selection of blades, ranging from the ever-practical medical scalpel to one of the huge kitchen knives of Quatre's chef, borrowed for the evening. A similar range of guns lay on the table and included an old-fashioned crossbow he'd seen in a shop once and nicked. (What could he say, it was black. Duo had a thing about black.) Then there were the various vials of corrosive substances, a nice array of whips and a few cat'o'nine'tails. There was also a scythe leaning against one wall and a container of regular old table salt, plainly labeled and placed where the poor sap (one James Gohann, according to his records) couldn't help but see it.
And, of course, there was The Thing.
Duo didn't actually know what The Thing did. In fact, what he did know for sure was that it did precisely nothing. It had taken him one science class experiment with plenty of hangers, wires, and tinfoil to invent The Thing. It worked perfectly on the theory that an overly bright student should not be given an excess of time on his hands.
The victim, of course, knew none of this. All he knew was that it looked very menacing, dangerous, and painful. Duo didn't enlighten him on the subject.
As a combination of all these sights and Duo's unholy grin, he didn't even have to lay a finger on the man. Poor J.G. gibbered out his pathetic guts immediately, telling him everything he needed to know and then some. Duo considered for a moment, then left the room.
Trowa was already checking out the new information as Duo closed the door behind himself.
"It all on the level?" Duo Maxwell questioned.
The young man who called himself Trowa Barton nodded.
Duo grinned and pounded one fist into the other. "Right, then! Let's go kick some OZ butt!" He went back into the room to retrieve the kitchen knife, the crossbow, and The Thing.
The explosion that Heero set off behind them as the trio left the building was rather pretty against the night sky.
The five pilots looked intently at the map which Quatre had spread for them on the table.
"I think we can take it," Duo judged.
Quatre circled first one point, then another. "There are reserves here and here. Additionally the number of mobile suits on the base has doubled in the past month."
"As if they're expecting an attack," Wufei murmured.
Trowa raised an eyebrow. "What's there that they'd be so worried about?"
"That data is encrypted."
Four pairs of eyes turned to stare at the pilot of Wing. "You mean you haven't cracked it yet?!" Duo demanded.
"Yet," Heero replied in a monotone which held the faintest underlay of... annoyance? Or perhaps respect for the unknown person who had encoded the data so well that even he was having problems getting at it.
"Should we wait to find out?" Quatre asked, not liking this. What could be so important that OZ had encoded the disk that heavily?
Heero's voice was flat. "We have our orders."
"SHIT!!" Duo yelped over the radio. Shinigami shook off the first two of the Aries that had jumped him and sliced the third into shreds. Trowa sighed and wished he had more armaments to be able to help out his fellow pilots.
Was this, he wondered, OZ's newest trap for them?
The number of suits against them was far beyond what even they had believed the base had. It took a lot to bother a Gundam, much less five... but it seemed that perhaps OZ had finally stopped underestimating them.
If anything, this was overkill.
"Should we retreat?" Quatre asked.
"We won't get another chance," Wufei answered.
"I hate to blow your party, Wufei, but if we DIE here we won't get another chance anyway!" Duo yelled.
"Retreat," Heero ordered, and Trowa could already hear the whine of Wing's jets as the Gundam lifted off.
"Where are we going?" Trowa inquired mildly.
"North," Heero responded.
Trowa raised eyebrows. North of the base was a forest. If they were quick enough, they could hide their suits there for a while at least. But he still found it hard to believe that Heero Yuy, of all people, was voting for a strategic retreat.
The Gundams flew, flightless Shenlong hitching a ride with Wing, much as Heavyarms had once done.
"Mission... accomplished." Heero said the familiar phrase in a cool voice.
The base suddenly exploded behind them and a shockwave, larger and stranger than it had any right to be, rippled, disintegrating the OZ mobile suits in the area and throwing the Gundams careening head over heels into the virgin forests below them.
Then there was only silence, broken by the snow of a data screen gone blank.
Reality Storm: Chapter 1
by K.Huntsman
released 25th March 2000
A pre-dawn explosion shook Nasuti's house. Ryou snapped awake and instinctively looked out the window, but his room was on the wrong side of the house. "Byakuen?" he asked, but the white tiger had already vanished out the door. He tumbled out of bed himself, grabbing the red crystal sphere that rested on the bedside table.
Seiji was already out in the hall, a sleepy-eyed Touma behind him. The blond nodded at Ryou, then raised a hand to knock on the door of Shin and Shuu's bedroom before entering.
Suiko and Kongo's wearers were already at their window, staring out into the darkness. The rest of them joined the two there, trying to peer through the black of night into the early morning. "A gas main explosion?" Shin asked.
Touma shook his head. "There'd be a fire."
"This feels different," Seiji murmured, one hand pressed against the cool glass. "Like... something that's not supposed to be here."
Shuu's eyes widened, then narrowed. They all trusted Seiji's intuition. "Another youja attack?"
Seiji concentrated, then shook his head. "I can't tell. I'm sorry."
"Let's get dressed and check it out," Shin suggested. The others nodded, agreeing with the suggestion, and vanished out the door.
It was a long dawn trek through dew-dampened woods before they reached the source of the explosion, and found that it hadn't been an explosion at all.
Wufei woke with an aching head and stifled a curse. Nataku's cockpit was dark save for a few snowing screens, and he had been harshly jolted around by whatever that last thing was that hit him. He was fairly certain the restraint straps had left deep bruises on him.
"Goddamn fucking--" a voice came over the comm.
"Shut up, Maxwell," he growled, keying Nataku's sensors back online.
As targeted, they had landed in the forests north of the base. Obviously OZ hadn't captured them yet. Wufei had a vague memory of seeing the mobile dolls pursuing them being destroyed by the blast Yuy had rigged.
He ran a diagnostic.
Wufei's knuckles whitened when his fist clenched. That much damage...! His Nataku was a sitting duck for OZ target practice.
He needed to have a word with Yuy about just what the hell it was they had blown up.
He worked the manual release for the cockpit hatch and undid his harness straps, stepping outside and dropping to the ground.
The source of the sound they had heard and the impact which had trembled Nasuti's house was a group of large robots, five of them, scattered across the forest just beyond the rise. There was a moment of silent disbelief before anyone spoke.
"Did we just step into a sci-fi flick?" Shuu wanted to know.
Touma's eyes narrowed. "There are people down there," he said.
"Where?"
"By the white one." He pointed them out.
"Think those belong to them?"
"Only one way to find out, Ryou," he answered and took a step forward. Little interested Tenkuu no Touma more than a mystery, and giant robots made for giant mysteries.
Heero dropped from the cockpit of Wing, worried. When his systems had reported a radical change in the chemical makeup of the air, he had curiously scanned the area near the base to see if it had been a result of something he had destroyed.
The base had not only been destroyed, it was gone as if it had never been.
There was no mobile suit debris anywhere in the area.
OZ's channels were silent.
The satellites he monitored were vanished.
And so were the colonies.
There was a chance that it was the result of damage to Wing, but that chance was miniscule and had become even smaller as he had gone methodically through the remaining working systems and checked them from the ground up.
Which left him with one conclusion.
"We're no longer where we were."
Quatre blinked. "What do you mean, Heero?"
"The base is gone."
Duo tilted his head to one side. "Of course it is. You blew it up, remember?"
"The colonies are gone too."
"WHAT?!" Deathscythe and Sandrock's pilots demanded in unison. Wufei's eyes grew wide. Even Trowa couldn't conceal a start.
"The base isn't destroyed. It never existed."
Duo whirled, running to Deathscythe and scrambling into its cockpit. Heero watched him calmly, knowing the braided pilot would find no different results than he had. Quatre was trembling. Wufei seemed to have shut down entirely. Only Trowa met Heero's gaze, and his jade eyes were clouded with doubt and worry.
When Duo returned to their group, he too was obviously starting to enter shock. "Then where are we?" was all he asked, cobalt eyes lost.
"You're on private property, trespassing," a voice with a deep Osaka accent answered him.
Heero whirled, aiming his handgun at the enemy who had snuck up behind the Gundam pilots and caught them unaware.
Reality Storm: Chapter 2
by K.Huntsman
released 16th April 2000
Seiji was not impressed by the gun so coldly leveled at them. It would be a fairly easy thing (though the stranger did not know that) for any of them to dodge a bullet.
What did impress him was the competence and ease with which the young man held the weapon.
"Who might you be, and what are you doing on Nasuti's land?" Touma drawled from behind Seiji. "And would we be wrong to assume that these belong to you?" His tone, though Seiji was not at an angle to see Touma's presumably accompanying gesture, clearly indicated the robots.
"Hey, hey, Heero, put the gun down!" the one with long braided hair chided, addressing the boy who held the weapon. "They're not with OZ, y'know?"
"I don't know that," the other replied flatly. His eyes were just as hard as his tone.
"What's OZ?" Ryou asked.
"The Wizard of Oz?" Shuu hazarded in reply.
"Somehow I don't think that's what they're talking about," said Shin.
The braided one was blinking at them. "You don't know who OZ is? You guys been living in some kind of hole or something?"
"Wait..." said the blond one, seeming to snap out of a fugue. "If the base is gone... maybe something in that explosion?"
"We don't know what they were experimenting on," agreed another, his long bangs obscuring one cool eye.
Seiji shrugged off a feeling of deja vu.
The braided boy, dressed all in black, blinked, then spoke again. "Then... where are we?"
"The Yagiyu residence in Odawara," Ryou said. "Kanagawa Prefecture," he added seemingly as an afterthought.
The Chinese boy inquired, very softly, "When are we?"
Seiji blinked, something falling into place.
"What is the date?" the young man repeated.
"June fourth, 1989," Seiji answered, understanding perfectly now what his intuition had told him about these others not belonging here. They didn't.
Quatre watched as Duo blanched. "That's IMPOSSIBLE! How the HELL could--"
"Shut up, Duo," Heero said, lowering his gun.
"But HOW--"
"Shut up, Duo." Heero's voice was soft and dangerous.
Duo opened his mouth to protest some more, but the look Heero gave him promised violence and he wisely (so Quatre thought) shut it again.
"That's almost five hundred years," Trowa murmured thoughtfully.
Heero frowned. "Why was OZ was working on a time-shift experiment?" he asked.
"Who knows why they do anything?" Duo asked a bit shakily. "But... are we stuck here? We can't be stuck here! We have a war to fight! If we're not there, then OZ...."
"OZ will control the colonies," Wufei said, his black eyes narrowed.
"Touma, did I just hear what I think I did?" the auburn-haired young man in the group of strangers asked the blue-haired one.
"You hail from the future?" the one called Touma asked.
There was a second's silence, then Trowa replied, "It appears so."
The five others exchanged glances with one another. Quatre almost thought he could hear whispered voices between them, but that must have been all in his mind; their lips didn't move. Then, almost as one, they shrugged. "Stranger things have happened," said the blond.
"Another day, another sob story," the stout Chinese boy chimed in agreement.
Duo blinked as Heero turned and walked back to Wing. "Hey, Heero, whatcha up to?"
"Seeing if I have any data on how we got here," the other pilot replied, vanishing into his Gundam's cockpit. Which left Duo and the three other pilots alone with the five strangers native to the twentieth century.
"Sheesh, that guy has no manners!" Duo lamented, then turned back to the others, his fingers laced behind his head. "So, what do we do now?"
"Guys, we can't just leave them alone!" one of the strangers argued to his friends. "They may need help...."
"Sometimes that virtue of yours goes to excess, Ryou," the blond retorted, though with no special malice that Duo could sense. In fact, he gave the other a small, reserved smile.
"Well, since that's decided...." The black-haired boy took a step forward. "I'm Ryou Sanada from Nagano."
Not letting them know everything about us, Rekka? Touma teased Ryou.
I'm not completely stupid, Tenkuu! Ryou shot back in a similarly teasing tone. I'm not letting them know about the armors until and unless it becomes necessary.
Touma's silent reply held a smirk. In any case, I suppose we have to keep them from contaminating the present with knowledge of the future. The difficulty will be keeping Nasuti from asking them too many questions about future history. "Touma Hashiba," he introduced himself, "from Osaka."
Seiji was next. "Seiji Date of Sendai," he replied with a semi-formal bow. Five teenagers with giant robots and five with magic armors, he commented drily. Why does this read like a script for a bad sci-fi movie?
Ah, loosen up, Goldenrod! Shuu told him. "Shuu Rei Fan, from Yokohama."
Star Wars, Shuu? Shin asked, amused. "I'm Shin Mouri of Yamaguchi." He, like Seiji, sketched a quick bow. "Pleased to meet you."
The long-haired boy from the future raised and eyebrow, then gave a short laugh. "Well, I'm Duo Maxwell from L2. That," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of one of the mechas, "was our very own indestructible psycho spandex boy, Heero Yuy. And these are...."
"Quatre Raberba Winner of the L4 colonies," the blond boy said, stepping forward to shake Ryou's hand. His grasp was firm and his smile friendly. "It's good to know we're welcome here."
Ryou couldn't help smiling back at him.
"I'm called Trowa Barton," the green-eyed boy volunteered quietly. His cool gaze on Ryou was obviously a result of Ryou's contact with Quatre. Ryou raised an internal eyebrow.
"Wufei Chang," the last introduced himself, "of colony area L5."
Wufei looked at the red glass ball which Ryou had laid on the table between the two beds. The character carved into it, "benevolance," seemed to glow; a trick of the lamplight.
"What's that?" he asked.
Ryou looked up at him from where he sat cross-legged on the floor, petting Byakuen. His blue eyes gleamed. "Magic."
Wufei snorted, showing his opinion of that.
"Don't you believe in magic?" Ryou's voice held his smile, mysterious and amused. It disturbed Wufei more than he cared to let on.
Reality Storm: Chapter 3
by K.Huntsman
released 25th April 2000
Shin hummed contentedly as he flipped the small pancakes out of the pan and onto the platter. He'd gotten up even earlier than usual to start breakfast since the number of people he was cooking for had doubled. They'd need to make a run to town soon. Eleven people was going to be heavy on the contents of the refrigerator, and the quintet from the future were going to need things like spare clothes and basic necessities... not to mention probably parts for those huge machines of theirs.
If appropriate parts even existed in the twentieth century.
Shin looked up as the screen door banged open and Ryou wandered into the kitchen, followed by Seiji and Wufei. "How was practice?" the Trooper of Water asked with a smile, taking in the glistening forms of all three as he ladled batter into the pan.
"Fun." Ryou grinned.
"Satisfying." Wufei's smile was half a smirk.
"Intriguing," Seiji said, the merest hint of a curve gracing his lips.
"Go get washed up and see who you can round up for breakfast," Shin said, encouraging them with the shooing motions of his ladle.
The blade-wielding triad obeyed, Ryou snatching a hot pancake from the top of the platter on his way out. Shin turned back to his stove and waited for the elephant herd (the loudest of whom was usually Shuu) to start their morning stampede to the feeding grounds.
It turned out that Duo was not by any stretch of the imagination a morning person. He was practically dozing into his coffee.
"When did he get to sleep?" Nasuti inquired, looking at Heero, who had ended up as Duo's roommate.
"12:23am," was the concise reply as Heero addressed his breakfast with military precision.
Heero worried her, and she had known him for only one day.
"So what's on the schedule today?" Ryou asked the room in general.
"Meteor shower tonight," Touma offered, only half awake himself.
"We'll need to see more about what repairs we can affect on the Gundams," Quatre contributed.
Trowa calmly reached out and caught Duo's braid, keeping the boy from splashing nose-first into his coffee cup. "We'll also need to monitor that time rip. If it seals up and strands us here, then repairing the Gundams will be moot."
"We would offer aid," Seiji said after a quick glance at the other Troopers, "but we don't know anything about your technology."
"And we don't wanna," Shuu chimed in. "Contaminating even us with knowledge of future mechanics would be a bad thing."
Duo seemed to half wake up. "Yeah. Don't want our timeline to suddenly not exist 'coz we told you guys too much about the future." Then he fell asleep again.
Wufei blinked at Duo, then looked at Heero. "Yuy, how did you ever get him to class on time?"
Heero smirked. "Ice cubes."
Duo sat on the steps of the front porch, tall glass of iced tea in one hand, and watched as Shin laughed and charged at Shuu. About twelve feet away from the other guy, he sprang into the air, performed a series of twists that would've done Trowa proud, then landed neatly, palm to palm, on the upraised hand of the other boy. Shuu, for his part, seemed to think Shin weighed no more than a feather, and boosted him high into the air again.
"Man, that guy's good," Duo commented out loud, tugging at the neck of the gray tanktop he wore. He'd abandoned his clericals when the day had turned unbelievably hot for someone who'd grown up in a climate-controlled colony. It hadn't been nearly as hot the day before.
Ryou nodded, completely at ease with the heat. "He is. We keep telling him that he should go for the Olympics, but we haven't talked him into it yet."
"Shin would have an unfair advantage," Seiji commented from where he sat at the porch's table, looking as cool as ice.
"That doesn't mean he wouldn't deserve the medal," Ryou argued. "He's certainly earned it."
Duo shook his head. "How can you guys be so calm about this heat? Man, I'm dyin' here!" He flopped dramatically backwards onto the floor of the porch and stared upwards, willing the heat to go away.
The screen door opened. "Ryou likes the heat, and Seiji's an ice queen," Touma informed him, stepping outside.
"So says the space case," Seiji retorted cooly.
"Bite me," Touma returned, unruffled. "Anyhow, go jump in the lake if you want to cool off," he advised. "Shin keeps it clean enough, and there's nothing in there that'll eat you."
"Can't swim," Duo replied.
The three stared at him.
"There was barely enough water on my colony to cook with, let alone to waste filling a pool!" Duo defended himself.
The three exchanged looks.
"That's sad," Seiji said.
"Real sad," Ryou agreed.
"In addition to being our local gymnast, Shin's also an excellent swimmer," Touma said. "If you want lessons, he's the one to go to."
Wufei wiped the back of one hand across his brow. It was unbelievably hot for a young man of the colonies, and he understood why Maxwell had gone back earlier. All the repairs that could be done had been completed yesterday. Beyond further diagnostics of the Gundams and monitoring of the space-time gap three hundred feet overhead, there really wasn't much any of them could do until they were able to see what they was available in 1989 parts. But something in Wufei refused to give up so easily, saying surely there had to be something he could do....
"Wufei!"
He looked down from where he stood on the knee joint of Nataku.
"There's nothing more we can do here and now," Quatre called up to him. "We're going back to the house. Would you like to come with us?"
Wufei watched as even Yuy dropped from his cockpit. He sighed. If even Yuy was admitting defeat, surely it would not be dishonorable for him to do the same.
"Sure," he said, and slid down to the ground.
Heero stayed up very late that night, searching via Nasuti's computer for parts which might be adapted to A.C.195 Gundams.