The Cube (Scene - Completed!)

[Karl Jak]

The Last Emperor found himself staring at the Cube.

Then, in an instant, he was standing inside the Cube.

Before he could organize his thoughts, he was falling up and the air was filled with the skittering hiss of cosmic monsters.

***​

Characters Involved: The Last Emperor (@King Ghidorah)

Enemies: The cube, much larger on the inside than it may have seemed from the outside, is an environment that is constantly shifting and moving, where up becomes down and left becomes right at a moment’s whim. As you move around, the environment may also shift, but sometimes what you see is real and at other points, it’s nothing. The cube is filled with a litany of nightmare beasts, but there’s not distinct ‘head monster’ here. You must simply survive the onslaught and the constantly shifting environment.

Length of Scene: This Scene will last for 72 hours
Post Count/Size: 2 posts / 2000 words maximum (for each participant)
Other Stuff: Others MAY join this scene if they move along this path.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Rory had rarely thought of himself as bottom-heavy, but even if he had possessed the kind of all-consuming ass-vanity that is usually only found in pop-stars and internet pseudo-celebrities, he would never have been as thankful for his thiccness as he was in this moment.

By simple dint of physics, the rats-nest mass of tentacles that constituted his bottom-half hit the ground first. It still hurt, but at lest it meant he was right-ways up when the horrors came for him.

The featureless plane onto which he’d fallen rippled, as though he had struck the surface of a still pound, and from out of the ripples rose monsters.

They all looked like him.

Not like his current form, not the Last Emperor, but rather a phalanx of fifteen-story-high Rorys, towering King Penguins with brown leather satchels strapped around their waists.

As one, they looked at him. As one their faces unfolded along lines of trifold symmetry transforming their heads into nightmare gullets lined with teeth and eyes. As one, they hissed and chittered in an eldritch chorus that tugged at his very nature, at the foundations of his personal real-ness.

His own voice said “Get wrecked, d00d” in a hideous stuttering echo, and as one, they charged, waving crowbars the size of industrial smoke-stacks, broken bottles like chemical storage-silos, and knives that could have been melted down to forge naval patrol-boats.

WAIT, AM I HALLUCINATING AGAIN OR WHAAAAAAAASHITBURGERS

The Last Emperor’s tentacles lashed, whip-cracked, grabbed and constricted. The hideous penguin-reflections hacked and stabbed and bludgeoned. Rory managed to wrap two of them in his tentacular grip, using them as giant penguin shields against their onrushing fellows, attempted to snatch a crowbar from another – only to have his flipper pass right through it. His hideous dopplegangers redoubled their efforts, but it was like the harder they tried the less real they became. Rory could barely feel the blows.

The horde froze – then vanished. The ambient light dimmed.

The world rotated ninety degrees, and Rory scrabbled at the wall, formerly the floor, failing to prevent himself from bouncing off it as he plunged.

Then it rotated back, and, suddenly tobogganing along a wooded country lane, he skidded face-first into a miniature forest, plowing up trees and boulders with his beak before colliding with cliff-face.

His head rang. It hadn’t bothered him so much at the time, but that yellow snot-d00d had gotten him pretty good earlier, and his giant, misshapen avian skull was feeling a little tender.

Shifting and sliding on his cephalopod limbs, the Last Emperor righted himself – and beheld a Problem.

It was Rory’s old boss, now equal in stature to the Emperor, wearing a silver-and-red body-stocking with dynamically stylish gloves and matching wrestling-boots. He stood on top of the cliff – which, considering their relative sizes was really little more than a step-stools difference in elevation – and looked down at Rory, shaking his head, and still peeling that damn orange.

The fruit’s size had also increased. If you juiced it, you could probably flood a small apartment-block.

Rory pointed an accusing eldritch flipper.

AW MANG, NOT THIS AGAIN. YOU’RE NOT REALLY HERE, AND I DON’T WORK FOR YOU ANYMORE!

“Both of those things are probably true. On the other hand: Rolling Saibot,” said the boss, and leaped forward, rolling his hips, corkscrewing in the air.

WHA-

The heel-edge of a titanic wrestling-boot caught Rory square in the chest. The thunderous force of the blow drove the air out of his massive lungs, sent alien mucus flying from his bill, and brought toxically-salty tears to his giant bloodshot eyes.

HwEEHn?, he wheezed, and barely got his tentacles up to defend as a flurry of complicated spinning kicks drove him even further back.

Sto-STOP IT! THIS IS STUPID, MANG! WHY DOES EVERYBODY WANT TO FUCK WITH MY HEAD!?

His prism-nodes blazed, and twin vectors of coherent aurora traced lines across his opponents chest. The boss staggered back, footsteps shaking the ground, and fell to one knee, clutching at his scorched pecs. He raised the orange to his mouth and took a bite. Juice dripped down his chin as he chewed and swallowed.

YOU… DIDN’T EVEN BREAK IT INTO SECTIONS, d00d! NOW I KNOW YOU’RE NOT REAL. THE REAL OVERLORD WAS TERRIFYING BUT AT LEAST HE HAD CLASS!

The man smiled, a lopsided knowing smirk that entirely undermined Rory’s confidence - then turned into orange-juice and collapsed into a puddle, engulfing the miniature landscape in a deluge of sticky citrus. The landscape rotated 360 degrees around Rory’s position, and the light shifted from a pleasant ambient yellow to a deep red. The forest-landscape was gone. Now everything was cold, pristine crystal surfaces.

This time the onslaught wasn’t subtle. Tentacles, much like his own, but covered in three-lobed eyes and toothy barbs, erupted from the floor, agglomerating into vaguely humanoid masses almost as tall as Rory. They squelched as they moved, dripping with sweet-smelling orange fluid.

The Last Emperor didn’t wait. His tentacles writhed, and his aurora-prisms blazed. Beams of eldritch laser-light flashed in the crimson dreamscape, raising arcs of orange-juice ichor as they carved into the formless denizens of the Cube, their numbers seemingly endless as they shambled towards a penguin monolith who had very nearly completely forgotten that he was on television.

 

[Karl Jak]

Update:

Krampus (@Tails), Sam (@Nico Cinder), and Deadpool (@Deadpool) have joined the encounter (I'll tack on an additional 24 hours, if appreciated, for these new arrivals to post)

 

[Christopher Chaos]

Meanwhile, back at Jasonzilla’s cabin…

“By the way,” Deadpool crooned, jumping up onto the kitchen countertop, “both of y’all picked some fucked up, ugly-ass Bonds. You couldn’t have cobbled together stat blocks for giant robots or something?”

Victor blinked. “The Krampus is loyal to my command.”

“And Sam’s fucking awesome,” Nico agreed.

“Yeah, yeah, but everyone knows giant robots have waaaaay better TEC, which you’re gonna need for the next island,” the red spandex-clad superhero scoffed. “Besides, I was really excited to see what you motherfuckers came up with. I mean, come on, Jacob?! Mickey Mouse piloting Optimus Prime was right there. Two iconic heroes. One iconic murder tournament! Well, I guess there’s always Aaron’s event.”

“Wait,” Victor interrupted, “what do you know about the next island?”

Deadpool slid off the counter, puffing up his chest and sauntering toward the icy doctor, ending up much closer to him than Victor would, well, ever be comfortable with.

“I know that we’re already there,” the merc-with-a-mouth shrugged. He lifted a hand.

“Wait, what—”

“Hold on to your dessert, doc,” he smirked, snapping his fingers.

It took only milliseconds for the walls of the cabin to melt away. Victor launched from the floor into the air, the Krampus materializing below him as if it had always been there — he felt the chill of the air inside the Cube as he soared. He and his monster flipped over themselves as they flew before finally crashing into the ground. The doctor blinked, and looked up, but saw nothing — everything was dark.

The Krampus steadied itself as Victor tried his best to get his bearings and ward off the powerful headache invading his senses. As it turned out, fighting off a giant, hockey mask-wearing dinosaur had been hell for the pair of cold-hearted fighters. The Krampus groaned a bit, feeling its broken rib for the first time as it stood up. Victor had figured the monster wouldn’t have escaped the encounter with Jasonzilla unscathed, but it had moved so well in the moments after the battle he’d gotten his hopes a bit high. Adrenaline, he supposed, which made sense; even mythical creatures, he supposed, still worked mostly on the same biological terms as other living things.

The darkness enveloped them, and he felt quite sure that the game was only, truly, just beginning; Victor couldn’t imagine what had led those in power on Opealon to agree to hosting this — though, he supposed he could relate to having the thing you loved most and were charged with protecting ravaged unthinkably.

“Victor,” a voice rang out in his head — not Krampus’, though.

“Nora?” he mumbled quietly.

Keep your wits about you, master, the Krampus’ voice interrupted his wandering thoughts of his wife. This place is not what it seems.

“I heard her,” Victor protested, desperation creeping into his voice. He hadn’t heard Nora’s voice in… well, at this point, he almost couldn’t remember how long. She’d been frozen in a cryogenic state for years now while he infiltrated the criminal underworld of the Hub — not alive, but not dead, either. Surviving.

As he now had to do.

Something flew past he and his Bond, a whoosh of cold air almost knocking them off balance. A screech echoed behind them, and the Krampus spun on its heels; pain shot through its torso from its broken rib, but it still managed to lift its cloak in time to block its master from the swipe of a claw as a humongous, gray-furred bat tumbled past them, rolling onto the ground and landing in a crouched position. Upon further inspection, the creature was somehow both bat and man — wings of a bat and two pointy ears, but legged like a human.

It slowly lifted itself out of its crouch, unfolding its wings until they spread out fully, looking almost like a cape of dark gray fur.

Fries scoffed. “Kill it,” he ordered the Krampus, “kill the bat man.”

As you wish, the monster growled.

The Krampus lunged forth, the bat man baring its sharp, shiny teeth as the monster sprinted toward it. It launched into the air as Fries’ bond swiped at its human legs with its birch staff, flapping its wings and diving towards Fries and the Krampus. They dodged as best they could, one of the bat man’s claws catching the Krampus’ heel and eliciting a loud squeal from the monster.

It stumbled forward, trying to regain its footing and turn back toward the bat. Fries snarled, yanking the chains of his monster forcefully. “Don’t make a mistake like that again, or it’ll be both of our doom.”

You’d do well to watch your tone, master, the Krampus roared telepathically.

Fries yanked the chain again. “Watch your mouth.”

The Krampus lifted its head into the air, sending out a loud, thundering cry of fury — its patience with its master was growing thin. The chains around its neck glowed red as its demonic contract re-established dominance, burning marks into the monster’s neck as it heeled once again into submission to Victor.

“We do not have time for your insolence, Krampus,” Victor shouted.

This proved true almost immediately, as the bat man took the moment of distraction as an opportunity, leaping forward and colliding with the Krampus’ abdomen. The two monsters flew backwards, Fries holding on with all his might as the Krampus slammed into the ground of the deep black void. The pair of abominations slid across the floor, the bat clambering up Krampus’ body towards the good doctor holding precariously onto the wintery monster’s neck.

Victor watched in horror as the bat man’s head came into view, drool dripping out from its toothy mouth as it finally caught the doctor in its sights.

“...what are you?!” he screamed in what he was sure would be his last moments.

The bat grinned. “Vengeance.”

It opened its maw and came down upon Fries, but just before it could snap him up in its jaws, the floor gave out beneath them, and the monster itself turned to dust. Fries and the Krampus fell into the void, spinning through dimensions and getting dizzy on the way. Victor leaned back, catching a glimpse at something behind them as they fell. Through the haze of the ‘side’ of the chasm, Victor almost could see… another creature. A penguin-shaped thing, but with a mass of tentacles coming from its torso instead of legs.

He steeled himself.

Someone new, the Krampus observed, feeling Fries’ thoughts.

“Time to break the ice?” Victor offered.

The Krampus considered. As you wish, it affirmed, spinning where it fell and using all its might to push itself into the wall. The side of the chasm shattered, leaving Victor and Krampus tumbling into somewhere altogether new and altogether… not so cool.

Oh, yes — this game was only just beginning, indeed. This was the tip of the iceberg.

 

[King Ghidorah]

The squelching, skittering masses of undulating sinew and teeth jerked and weaved drunkenly as they advanced. Most of them fell to the blazing arc or Rory’s one-bird eldritch laser-show, but only his four largest tentacles ended in prisms, and his rate of fire was limited. One shambled in range, a knot of toothy worm-like bodies contorting into a funnel of serrated edges as it attempted to engulf him. The Last Emperor’s own tentacles speared into the undulating mass, undercutting the physical push-and-pull coordination of its squirming components. The thing didn’t have a face, but Rory still smacked it with a flipper – and cut it in half with a screaming burst of aurora, catching a splash of citrus to the face for his trouble.

The landscape began to rotate around him again, and it was all he could to keep track of his opponents in the flickering red gloom. Another closed the distance, and he dragged the mass of slug-like entities that constituted its legs out from under it. He attempted to flail the component worms into paste against the floor, constricting and crushing, whip-crack pounding them with his own manifold serpentine limbs.

Another shambled up behind him, toothy spines vibrating and humming in odd harmony with the whispers in the back of Rory’s mind. Green-blue radiance flared, and he cut the creature down.

Speakng of The Whispers , they were rising again , so rapid and insistent that Rory couldn’t make out the words. There were accusations, suggestions, inquiries and insults – an abominable chaotic din of cajoling and contempt.

The part of Rory that was still mostly Rory was feeling increasingly out of control of the situation. This didn’t feel like television, didn’t feel like a competitive death-match or an elaborate set-piece contest. He wasn’t even sure if he was in DA anymore, or if he’d somehow fallen ass-backwards into the kind of higher-dimensional psychic nightmare bullshit that he used to listen to other d00ds dealing with from the safety of his personal spy-bunker. He’d kind of suspected that was a risk when he read the Austromundia Obscuricon, but this didn’t feel like prophecy or persuasion or the corrupting allure of the void.

It was just chaos. And you couldn’t bamboozle chaos, you couldn’t fast talk it, or it hit it in the back of the head with a bottle of raspberry schnapps while it was ordering a fresh basket of chips and then run off with its wallet and its girlfriend and half its crew.

…well, probably not. Rory generally tried not to rule anything out.

He wrapped a tentacle around an apartment-block-sized crystal protrusion and ripped it out of the ground, used it to bludgeon a mass of toothy liver-fluke-type things that looked like they were growing out of the business end of a 4-dimensional lawn-mower. The he threw it at a rapidly advancing cyclone made out of screaming shards of black volcanic glass, the facets of which were simultaneously reflecting all of his most embarrassing, shameful moments.

The penguin titan’s attention was already being drawn by another orange-scented horror at the moment of impact – a which point the entire scene burst apart around him, a cloud of broken-mirror- reality-shards that hung in the air, vibrating in time to his anxieties as they rotated around him in an indescribable void which hurt to contemplate in even the vaguest detail. Rory felt like he was falling again, but there was truly no point of reference, no way to tell.

Then the shards reversed, reassembling themselves in a hissing cascade, forming a completely different version of reality.

The Last Emperor towered over a gothic cityscape. Gargoyles brooded upon the corners of brick-and-mortar high-rises twice again his height, and brownstone tenements squatted ‘round his writhing tentacular bottom. Searchlights criss-crossed a blackened, overcast night-sky, occasionally crossing the face of a truly impressive central skyscraper with an enormous, ornate letter ‘W’ emblazoned across the upper floors.

There was a man-goat on the four-lane street in front of him, as tall as the surrounding tenements, the size of an old-timey ship-of-the-line, but a mere fraction of Rory’s own ludicrous bulk. It was wearing a tattered, patchwork cloak, and carrying an enormous staff of woven birch. There was a chain wrapped around its left arm, and it looked as uncertain as the penguin felt.

There was a tiny bald d00d in a bubble-helmet environment-suit clinging to the scruff of its neck.

Bemused, Rory raised a flipper and waved.

‘SUP MANG.

The tiny man yelled something. The difference in scale was so dramatic that Rory had to lean in to hear it, and even then was only able to catch a single word.

‘A familiar theme… Oswald, are you responsible for this latest grotesquery?’

WHO’S OSWALD? NAH, D00D. I DON’T DEAL WITH OSWALDS, NO MATTER WHAT THE OSWALDS SAY.

At which point a giant humanoid robot wearing a cape, with a bat emblazoned across its armored chest and a stylized headpiece suggestive of two little pointed ears charged silently down a cross-street and shoulder-checked Rory through a skyscraper, managing to step directly on his radiation-tenderized tentacle along the way.

Aurora beams blazed haphazardly into the sky as an avalanche of steel and stone came down on the two grappling combatants, ghostly laser-light carving chunks off the skyline. Somewhere, an air-raid siren began to wail.

 

[Nico Cinder]

The cube is not friendly to visitors, tourists. The room they found themselves in was eternally disorientating and unending, one of those infinite hallways you see in optical illusions and gameplay gimmicks. Except that, naturally, this one was full of things to kill. Sam picked up a weird squiggly looking monster the size of his hand, and ripped it in half. Whipping around, Nico willed Sam's left arm into a massive shotgun and sent pellets the size of people down range randomly into a crowd of squirming meat, a veritable tidal wave of limbs and teeth. The R3V3N63's right arm dripped into the form of a blade and Nico waved it blindly around behind them, cleaving a couple of sneaking unmade cyclopi in half.

"Keep...
...moving," Sam and Nico said to each other.

And they do. Sam's massive frame waded through the meat and space with a comfortable swiftness, showering blood over any area they appeared in. Every second came with a body - or four or more. Sam loosed another salvo with an earsplitting roar, blood dripping down his maw.

"HEY!" Deadpool's tinny voice came, projected loudly from the Deadmech. The speakers on that thing must've been sick. "You got a little something uh...All over you."

Nico popped his head out Sam's chest, and wished he wouldn't have. There were a bunch of little bug demons clambering all over his bond, and one of them was screaming weird bug demon noises in his face.

"Gah!" Nico ducked back into the goop right as Sam's hand started swatting at the little cretins.

"Oh for the love of-" Deadpool groaned, and immediately opened fire on Sam and Nico. "Here, let me get that for ya."

 

[Christopher Chaos]

“Oswald!” Victor cried out as the humongous Bat-Mech slammed his newfound compatriot into a nearby skyscraper. Krampus leapt into action, sprinting towards the crumbling building. It lifted its birch staff, preparing to swat any bat-shaped thing that emerged from the rubble, but found it wasn’t needed — a single, huge tentacle burst from the rubble, wrapped around the neck of the Bat-mech and lifting it up into the air. Slowly, monstrously, the gigantic penguin emerged after it, its chest heaving up and down with heavy breaths.

MY NAME… IS NOT… OSWALD, D00D. IT’S RORY, MANG.

Victor blinked as he took the creature’s magnificently hideous appearance in, truly, for the first time. It looked absolutely glorious, if a tad monstrous, standing victorious amongst the rubble of the building, Bat-Mech in its clutches. For all intents and purposes, its top half was that of a penguin — albeit fucking giant, and with some, uh, imperfections scattered across its torso — and its bottom half was a veritable mess of squid-like tentacles squirming this way and that. It stared at Fries and the Krampus with its beady little eyes, giving them a quick once over before deciding that, ostensibly, they were allies, and tossing the Bat-Mech over its shoulder.

The huge, gray-and-black robot slid across the ice of what Victor could only describe as a slightly mangled replica of a river from his hometown. He blinked again, glancing up at the gargoyle-laden, slightly steampunky architecture of the undoubtedly unreal constructs around them, coming to the conclusion that… yes, this was supposed to be Gotham.

He was thankful that tears were nigh impossible inside his cryo-mask. He hadn’t seen these strangely ornate, art deco-style buildings since the city had plunged into the darkness of Govermorne. He and Nora had barely gotten off the planet alive before it had been completely unmade, and in the process of creating a new life outside of Gotham… well, he’d almost completely lost the picture of it. Strange to find it so lovingly recreated here, inside one of Karl Jak’s most devious creations.

“I… am… the… night,” the Bat-mech droned, picking itself up off the ice of the frozen Gotham River. It lifted an arm, the end transforming into a huge-looking cannon, and blasted out a laser beam. The giant penguin dodged as quickly as it could, but as it did, the beam slammed into the Krampus’ chest, knocking it and its master back into a building on the other side of the street.

AW, COME ON, MANG. THEY’RE SO TINY! UNFAIR.

Rory slithered out onto the ice, swerving past another quick fire of the laser beam before whipping a tentacle toward the Bat-Mech. The opposing bot had seemed to regain its athleticism, flipping down the river and sliding several hundred meters out of range of the eldritch abomination’s physical attacks.

LITTLE D00D, WHERE YOU AT? COULD USE SOME HELP HERE!!

The penguin turned towards the building where the Krampus had been, but saw only rubble. The monster and its master had disappeared somewhere, leaving only the remains of the building in their wake; Rory quirked his head a bit. Con-fucking-fuzzling.

Then, a clicking sound, and Rory turned further to see that the Krampus had, in fact, made it onto the ice. Sitting before it was a huge piece of what had formerly been a gargoyle, slowly cracking the ice beneath it.

“You ever seen a curling match, penguin?” Victor smirked.

WHAT’S THAT, MANG? CAN’T HEAR YOU, TINY D00D.

(Somewhere, the echo of Deadpool’s voice drifted on the Gotham wind: “Jacob, just using ‘mang’ and ‘d00d’ over and over again doesn’t mean you’re writing this penguin well. Try harder!”)

“Looks something like this,” Fries yanked the chain back, and the Krampus spun its birch staff down so it was pressed against one side of the piece of stone. It pushed forward, skating on its hooves down the ice of the Gotham River towards the Bat-Mech, until it pulled its staff back. It slammed it, hard, into the stone, sending it sliding across the ice toward the Bat-Mech’s legs. The opposing mech leapt into the air, acrobatically flipping over the penguin and the doctor and landing near where Fries and the Krampus had originally started… curling.

“You missed,” the mech chuckled.

“Not quite,” Fries smiled, his eye still on the sliding stone. Within seconds, it smashed into the edge of this chamber of the cube, which had previously seemed just like more river; the air itself seemed to splinter and crack into shards of crystallized wall until they broke apart, revealing a rift between the different dimensional rooms. On the other side, a giant red mech shot a familiar-looking symbiote in the gut, knocking the RA1M1’S R3V3NG3 back onto the ice.

MORE D00DZ?!

“Psh,” the Bat-Mech sneered, “Bring your friends. I’m still here.”

A crackling noise reached Fries’ ears, and his grin grew wider. “Three… two… one.”

The ice where the stone had originally landed finally shattered beneath the Bat-Mech, sending the mechanized giant plunging into the chilly water below. It screamed as it splashed down into the depths of the Gotham River.

 

[Karl Jak]

Update:

All of you receive +3 Points

Please pick one of you to write a resolution post (which will end with you being dumped into the ocean outside the cube).

 

[King Ghidorah]

Rory ruffled his scorched, patchy plumage and shook it back down, his gargantuan form quivering in avian satisfaction. His tentacles writhed in smug contentment: after the cavalcade of bizarre fever-dream fuckery to which he’d been subjected, it was nice to see someone else getting the slapstick treatment for a change.

The little d00d on the back of the man-goat with the sicknasty acrobatic skills was saying something again, but Rory still couldn’t hear him – in fact, he was quickly finding he couldn’t hear anything over the rising hiss, crescendo to a roar, of the collapsing ice.

The hole through which the bat-mech had fallen was widening – and the collapse was accelerating with every passing moment. A similar instability was spreading from the breach in the chamber wall, but with an added special dimension, cracks radiating out in an expanding spherical distortion-front.

Rory turned to flee, witnessed the strange biomechanical mass of black tentacles, teeth and metal depart as quickly as it had arrived, plunging into the abyss beneath the vanishing ice. It wasn’t water down there anymore, if it ever had been - just black.

An annoyingly chirpy voice rang out as the mysterious red mech was consumed by the spreading unreality.

“Did I accidentally The Universe? Sorry guys. My ba-

The Last Emperor could put on an impressive turn of speed when he needed to. The unstoppable grinding mass of tentacles upon which he rode had already dragged his monstrous mass back to the shores of the city, but even so, the man-goat and its miniscule passenger rapidly outpaced him – but there was nowhere to run. The towers of Gotham silently collapsed as the ground beneath them gave way, falling into the cosmic sinkhole which suddenly seemed to be lurking behind everything.

Rory threw his flippers in the air as he found himself squatting atop a pile of rubble in a rapidly shrinking island of existence.


OH WHAT THE FUCK, MANG! HACKS! I CALL HACKS!


This place is rejecting you

As do all places

As do all things

It is in your nature



His monstrous bill gaped in affronted dignity and an outraged sense of timing as the eldritch whispers made themselves known.

AGAIN: NOW? ALSO, AGAIN: HURTFUL.

The distortion-front washed over him as the ground collapsed. Rory had been expecting an unravelling, like a teleport gone wrong maybe, or the feeling you got inside when you realized that you weren’t getting your money back on this one and all of your investors were in the other room with shiny briefcases and large, humourless associates.

Instead it felt like being squeezed through a giant toothpaste tube at the speed of sound, like being sucked up by an industrial vacuum and fired out of a tennis-ball thrower through a membrane made of cellophane.

Phoont!

Phoont!

Phoont!

Phoont!

Open ocean stretched below, populated by elements of the syntech naval fleet moving in formation. The three smaller monstrosities fell beside him as they were ejected from apparently thin-air into the sky. Rory just had time to wonder if they were still in the cube or not before his spiralling tumble sent him belly-flopping cross-wise across the amidship-superstructure of a syntech battleship.