Her rushed steps echoed throughout the entirety of the hallway, where flickering lights built up the already present tension like something out of a horror movie. All of the doors that led inside were locked, and though the power failure was clearly effective in fucking up her precious, precious network, Lilac had also been quick in her employment of alternative Power Generation methods.
Her dark black hair danced to the winds behind her as she moved, slightly ragged lab coat singed with dust. She didn't look a day over 18.
— She barged into her private laboratory, and with a flick of her hand, pointed at the door.
" < Arcane Lock > ," she announced clearly, a hint of desperation to her voice. " < Arcane Gate > , < Antilife Shell > , < Antimagic Field > , < Guarded Grove> !"
Ding!
[Commands accepted! Please select the center of your Skills.]
"I — Current Location!"
Though some were named 'Arcane', Lilac was no Mage, and therefore her Skills were somewhat arbitrarily named thusly. What she was, however, was someone very competent with a very defensive [ System ] — her Warding System Calls, as she referred to it. Though limited in application, it oftentimes proved invaluable considering she was defending a position more often than not..
< Arcane Lock > would add a magical lock atop the technological lock that kept the door shut, and < Arcane Gate > would create a Portal to a predetermined location just in front of the door itself — in this case, her house, which had been long since compromised. Thankfully, this was a one-way journey.
Meanwhile, < Antilife Shell > would create an area to keep living creatures around herself, and < Antimagic Field > would prevent others from using Magic within the boundaries of her laboratory. Finally, < Guarded Grove > would magically mark this place as an extension of her being, thus blocking all but the foulest of magical attacks.
[You have expended 3585 Runes in this Skill Chain.]
"Yes," she muttered, eyes drifting across her wards. "I know."
The System Messages were usually useful — but they could be unbearably irritating.
Lilac Greenfield was, without question, a genius of almost unprecedented levels. She was also one of the most paranoid people alive, a fact some of her co-workers didn't hesitate to point out. It took a special type of person, after all, to have their [ System ] — the very essence of their soul given form — centered around the idea of limiting access and protecting oneself.
Well, clearly, the joke was on them — she had been right all along. Right to suspect, to prepare and, most importantly, right to fear.
— "Carla, what is the situation outside?"
Her personal AI had been designed with pop culture in mind — she'd be the first to admit her enjoyment of the campy, fancy early 2000s and 2010s Superhero Movies. Plus, with AI assistants becoming increasingly common amidst the higher-status population, it wasn't hard to integrate one of her own into her Computer and then feed it into a home network.
The main screen of her computer flashed to life, and she saw the chaos that devoured the streets outside. Lilac couldn't help but grimace slightly at the sight — rifles blazed to life and tore holes into walls and people both, with frequent explosions littering the landscape. The attackers — a group simply named The Specters — had all but completely demolished local defenses in Berlin, and it was likely the city would be officially declared to have fallen soon, with an exclusion zone soon following.
Once that happened, the Specters would have control of around 35% of Germany, including the country's most important City both in terms of trade and culture, and access to a lot of technology the government really, really didn't want to see in the hand of religious extremists with a penchant for terrorism and murder sprees.
"God fucking damn it," she cursed softly, and then resisted the urge to chuckle as she recalled — God had already damned them. He had already damned them all.
Right.
This wasn't the time to curse existence; she had to make sure her Laboratory was kept safe and out of here.
"Carla, call the leaders. Athena, Ignotus, Soichiro, all of them."
— the immediate sound of the Video Conference ringing followed suit. It was kind of surreal, to try and Skype someone while Terrorists attacked the world outside, but she'd make due with what she had.
While it rang, however, she rushedly opened her files. With the Generator now in place and nearing peak functioning, she'd soon be able to deploy what few technological defense mechanisms they had allowed her to build in.
"Hello?"
Came a voice from her other screen, and she whipped her head to stare at its source. Athena — God, the woman was gorgeous — stared at her with her usual impassive gaze, twin pools of molten gold staring into her soul. The woman had all of the characteristics she'd imagined her with as a child, complete with the bronze helm and the owl perched on her shoulders.
With perfect curls of light-brown hair cascading down both sides of her face, while the rest was kept tied with a ribbon, the woman managed to perfectly frame her face of sharp and attractive features while making it look effortless. Though she knew for a fact not even Athena could barge into her domain, she couldn't help but feel a little envious — truly, the Gods have it all.
For now, though, she put those thoughts aside.
"The Specters attacked Berlin. I expect it to fall within the day."
The woman's eyes widened minutely. Had she not known the goddess well, she wouldn't have caught it — but Lilac did, and thus she knew how to recognize a show of surprise.
"I see," Athena uttered. "I assume that means you are locked inside your Lab… and any invaders will be locked outside with some unpleasant surprises."
Lilac grinned, and it was a ferocious thing.
"You know me way too well." A pause. "No sign of the others?"
"They're not coming," Athena said promptly. "Soichiro and Lin Xián have both found themselves forced to engage Kim Il-Hwan after his advance on South Korea. The odds are in their favour, but the enemy-controlled territory will make it a hard-fought battle. Ignotus has just taken Bulgaria."
She blinked slowly.
"I'm sorry. He has what?"
"He's taken Bulgaria. As far as I can tell, he plans to actualise that study on power dynamics — building a city made to be dystopian and structuring it solely around power. As the Goddess of Knowledge, it pains me to say this, but perhaps we were better when there were things we could not study."
Lilac grimaced, silently agreeing with Athena's words. She had heard Ignotus' theories about a power-structured society — and, in many ways, had helped him develop it. While she was a numenologist, she'd studied sociology enough to engage in his wild theories on the nature of man and developmental differences caused by shifts in the power dynamic. More often than not, it was something of a guilty pleasure — discussing something fascinating but morally dubious with the comforting thought that it would remain theoretical.
Well.
Apparently not, because Ignotus had taken Bulgaria.
"I see," she replied, eyes drifting towards the screen that showed the events outside. Two men were locked in a harsh fight — one wore the traditional police uniform, a boy in blue in every sense of the word, and the other was dressed in the traditionally weird attire the Specters chose for themselves, an odd balance of Christian ritualistic clothing and body armour decorated with crosses and spirals. "Well, that doesn't matter. You'll have to do — I need a favor, Athena."
"Yes," She agreed. "You most certainly do. And I would certainly gain quite a lot from your being within my grasp… very well. What is it you wish?"
Wonderful.
Lilac pulled her keyboard.
"I'll send you the data for a Spell Scroll program. Just input it and run it, and it'll let me use Gate to step into your turf." She was already violently writing as she spoke, with lines of code being birthed with all the expertise of a woman who had been in the area for over 50 years…Which she was. "Don't fuck it up."
"I will not," Athena muttered, and fell silent.
Spell Scrolls were an idea ripped straight from Fantasy Books — and then adapted into reality. You couldn't really store a Spell in paper, at least not without a [ System ] built around it, but what you could do was store it in Data. Technology.
Thus — Spell Scrolls. Little cubic mechanical wonders that had the coding for a Skill within them. As long as you provided it with the Spark necessary to run the program, it would flawlessly execute each line of code into the energy, shaping and converting it into the necessary parameters for the Spell to function properly.
— She hit send.
"It's here," Athena confirmed a moment later, and said something else. She couldn't hear it, however, for an even louder explosion rang outside, and her ears were left ringing from the boomburst.
"God fucking damn it," she repeated, even if she couldn't quite hear what she had said.