Handyman (WafflesMgee): 9ft-tall monster, arm summoning, dream-entering/manipulating/eating.
This round's condition involved switching powers.
The stories below are posted in the order that they were submitted and may not be the order in the title or of the character blurbs above. When giving feedback (and you should), please keep the authors of the respective stories anonymous even if you know which one it is.
Spoiler (Click to Show)
This story takes place twenty to thirty years in the future, during which Humanity decided that petty fighting would take us nowhere and, in order to make the human race reign forever, developed sciences to take us somewhere; the stars (or more specifically, the planets orbiting around them.)
Astraeus' main settlement is an above-water city named Hesperos, a city enclosed and shielded from the threats of the rough weathers of the world outside. Earth was covered in two-thirds water, but this planet is 100% ocean, the seas of its surface storming constantly, rain pelting down like the tears of a surpassed and forgotten god. Astraeus, though without land, was able to support life, and did. Numerous fish-like creatures swam underneath, some huge, some small, but humans killed them by the hundred with their intrusion into this world.
Around the outskirts of this town, attached to the side of one of the lesser-travelled skylit roads, was a cheap old hostel named "Waterlog Cabins," within which several characters of interest currently reside.
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A man clad in a large, filthy black coat slammed his fist down onto the main desk of the Hostel. His hood was that of someone who didn't wish to be seen, a black veil lining the inside making it a one-way window. A tag hung from the man's neck, "MINE WORKER #6201", indicating that he worked down in the underground mining village, the main income of Hesperos' materials.
The person slouched over the desk jolted awake, the loud thump of a heavy fist waking her up. Eyes half-open, the words "A room's twenty-six bucks a night" emitted from her chapped lips, the phrase said like it was recorded, like it has been said over and over again to the point where it was second nature. The man in the coat handed her the money, and she shoved a key over to him. He took it and turned to the stairs, righting the heavy sack hanging from his back, and started to make his way to his designated room. As he left, the only sound around was of the woman's clothes brushing the desk as she slid back into slumber, and the soft white noise of water hitting window.
The keys dangled from the man's grip, a yellow tag displaying "Room #14" hanging from the loop. The room was down the length of the corridor he was standing in, but the hallway was blocked by a behemoth of a machine. Its shoulders hit the ceiling, the head bent down so that the one red eye on its chrome face stared towards the floor, the area around it illuminated by lines of lit crimson luminescence flowing over its shell like a spider's web. The lower half of its face was decorated by a black mesh in the shape of a rectangle, only darkness visible through it.
As the man in the coat tried to edge his way past the machine, he could hear the slight whirring of servos emit from its joints and a sonar-like beep emanate from its head. He tried to shuffle past the thing without disturbing it; who knows what this thing was capable of? Modern-day machines are more powerful than ever, since his research was stolen. Besides, he's trying to be covert.
The sound of the door locking was followed by a sigh, distorted by a broken voice modulator. With a sound like velcro, the man removed the veil from his face and pulled the hood back. His head was clad in black metal, scrapes and dents decorating it; there was a lot of damage visible to the face, the eye in the centre being once lit a brilliant green and giving the user enhanced vision, but now is just dark and inert, hindering the man's sight from the cracks lining its glass.
The area underneath the eye is even more damaged, a large indent ruining a voice modulator, the only sound emanating from it anymore being static. The helmet was once able to be withdrawn to reveal the face inside, but over the years and all the damage the suit took, all it could do now was open up a small gap near the mouth where sustenance can be awkwardly inserted for consumption; the rest of the helmet was jammed. This man was Cooper Price, once known as Bl.An.C, a name from the suit he so meticulously designed.
The sound of a door opening shot through the hallway, dying down to the voices of two men talking loudly; one sounded young and proud, the other sounding slightly older, attempting to talk in more of a hushed tone whilst still managing to be the louder of the two. Cooper opened the door just a crack to gain a vantage point on the two men, attempting to see if they were people who could cause problems for him.
"- and see this remote here?" the young one bellowed, holding up a small rectangular device in his hand, "This lets me control the big guy." He pushed a button, and the monstrous machine burst into life, contorting itself into a crouch, which amused the two men. "Y'see," the young one continued, "the thing in there isn't so fond of light, and to make it move there's all these lights inside the helmet that let me push him around. Don't worry, it's not human or anything," he chortled.
The machine had its back to him now; a metal orb was behind each shoulder, a third being in the middle of the robot's thin back. Staring past it, he recognised the young man. His name was Clive Barkley, son of the mining village's CEO, the rich spoilt brat. The other man in the conversation seemed to be nobody of any importance, though from his get-up he appeared the type that lived in the slums yet earned more than most. Knowing that such a rich guy had a room in the Hostel, Cooper thought up a plan.
If Cooper managed to 'persuade' Barkley to transfer him some money, he could probably get the materials to fix his suit, the only working systems left in it being the enhanced strength and a makeshift sonar-system messily welded to the back of his head in the form of an ugly black box. Though, as he was thinking of this, an explosion rattled the building.
Price tried to curse, but all that came out was an intense burst of static. He looked to his room's window, water furiously pelting it, thinking that he could escape; but this was no longer Earth, the outside world of this planet held no refuge and had to be kept out, so of course the window was made of incredibly strong and thick glass and couldn't be opened. Contemplating his escape, he could hear an aggressive voice down the hallway.
"CLIVE, GEDDOUT HERE. PROMISE WE WON' HURT YA, JUST WANT T'BORROW YA FER A WHILE!"
The tone of the voice made the promise a rather untrustworthy one. Cooper turned to the door, throwing his coat off, revealing a black and ruined metal suit underneath. The green lights that once lined this intricate armour were long dead, though on the back of the armour was something rather new.
The perk of being a mine worker is that you were given a very special and powerful tool, known as the Versa-arms. Workers wore them like backpacks, the Versa-arms being held onto their bodies by a simple exoskeleton letting them safely handle heavy materials. Within the backpack were two tightly-coiled up metal tentacles, each ending in a three-claw grip, and when fully extended could reach three meters each. You couldn't leave the mines with them, but Cooper managed to conceal them under an empty backpack cleverly sewn on to the back of his coat. Due to his suit no longer being able to summon weapons, he had to have something to defend himself with, and what better than a pair of metal arms that could tear a car in half? With some quick thinking, Cooper managed to remove the pack from an exoskeleton and merge it with his suit, the suit itself being a better exoskeleton than what the engineers of Astraeus could ever invent.
He turned to the door, Versa-arms sliding out of two holes on either side of the pack, readying himself into a fighting stance. The shouts of doors being kicked down echoed from one end of the hallway, screams and yells being heard each time. Each door was getting closer.
"CLIVE, I KNOW YER IN 'ERE, BETTER COME OUT!"
Eventually, the man kicked down the wrong door. Not wrong because Clive wasn't behind it, but wrong because Cooper was.
Shrapnel from the door shredded the room, destroying the light bulb in the process, though the flying wooden pieces only bounced off Cooper's metal hide. Standing in the hallway was a man with a large blade, a Kukri knife if Price wasn't mistaken, and he was decorated in a strong-looking (and probably stolen) military exosuit.
"Who th'fuck are you?" said the man, looking at the multi-armed silhouette standing in darkness before him.
Cooper tried to reply "Expletive: The wrong man, motherfucker," but all that came was a yell of terrifying static, right before a metal tentacle darted out into the hallway, grabbing the man by a metal bar running across his collar bone, violently yanking him inside.
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"Shitshitshit" Clive rambled, taking his chance to dart down the hallway, his mechanical bodyguard lumbering after him.
Running down the stairs, trying to get to the front door (which was now a sizable hole), he saw that there was a man already there. Yet another guy in an exoskeleton, but this time he had a gun.
"STAY THERE, Y'LITTLE SHIT" he yelled, aiming his rifle at the brat.
Clive didn't stay still, he kept running but darted to the right, aiming to escape into the storage basement, an area that dove beneath the water level.
"C'mere y'fucker," said the gunman, starting after him.
With both of the men escaped down into the basement, a metal arm thundered out onto the floor, chrome fingers tearing deep into it with an immense grip.
-----
After tearing the Kukri guy in half using his now-crimson Versa-arms, Cooper made his way out. He noticed that Clive's room was empty, save for the slum guy cowering in the corner. Not minding him, he walked past the doorway and made his way to the reception.
"Expletive: Shit," he tried to say, "Observation: They must have got out." But, again, static crackled out of his face.
Standing there for a few seconds, he detected sounds coming from the stairway to the basement. There were trails tearing through the walls, like giant hands clawed through them. He hesitated, but he decided to head down there.
The basement was dark, save for a red-lit behemoth standing in front of an exoskeleton-fitted gunman, lit red by the machine's luminescence, and it was that gunman who was the only thing between the machine and Clive. That was a very, very bad place to be.
The machine crouched over, displaying the flat of his back to the man, before three red lights started flashing from the orbs on his shoulders and back. A large, metal cannon was slowly being constructed from vibrant pulses of red light, metal materialising out of nowhere, and when it was finally built it was quite visibly a giant metal cannon mounted onto the machine's back. The gunman was shooting at the robot during the construction of the cannon, but the only damage that occurred were to the walls, ricocheted bullets creating little holes were water started to leak in.
"Shit, what the fuck are you?" shouted the man, his gun running empty.
He tried to reload, but the fact that the metal cannon on the machine's back just shot out a powerful laser that blew off the man's right shoulder made that impossible to do. Clive, cowering in the corner, was now painted in blood, some entrails, and several metal shards entangled in his hair. Realising that the gunman couldn't do anything to him, Clive made a run for it, darting past a bewildered Cooper and up the stairs.
"COUGHM BACKEGH" the man yelled, mouth full of blood.
But before he could vomit out another word, a giant chrome hand picked him up and, with a squeeze, quickly crushed him into two pieces, his internals becoming externals. After doing so, it pointed its great red eye towards Cooper, discarding both parts of the ex-gunman onto the floor. Some metal had peeled off its hand, showing dark flesh underneath.
Both of them stared at one another for a time; the man-turned-monster and the monster-turned-servant, lens to lens.
Cooper readied his metal tentacles, feeling like they wouldn't do a thing against this monster, but then he saw something in it; he saw himself. He understood what it was like, being a slave of technology, the once-thought prosperous idea turning into something that corrupted and enslaved, separating the humanity from the human, and although this thing staring him down wasn't human, it certainly was natural.
Cooper lowered all of his arms and withdrew to the basement's corner, the darkness of his suit making him near-invisible in the shadows, though he knew the beast still saw him, feeling the sonar-like tones coming from the thing's red eye hitting off him. The creature relaxed itself, letting the cannon on its back slowly disintegrate into light before starting to trundle out of the basement, covering the crack in its shell with its other hand.
-----
Cooper returned to his room, slouching onto his bed. He still expected comfort as he did so, but his suit denied him any of that. He turned and shuffled until he laid down on his front, the Versa-arms slowly withdrawing into their home. He let off a static sigh and closed his eyes.
He usually dreamt of returning to the labs with all his old friends and fixing his suit, making it into a marvel once again, but this time he wanted to dream of living a life where the suit never existed. Instead of being stuck on a man-colonised planet where technology was the only thing between humanity and death, he wanted to dream of being on Earth, sitting on a park bench, enjoying the feel of the breeze and the smell of a freshly-plucked Lilly.
Yet Cooper didn't know that he was already in a dream, and by drifting into unconsciousness, started to hurtle into another.[/spoiler]
Spoiler (Click to Show)