1827/Brainiac ResURreXIon: Execute

Brainiac ResURreXIon: Execute
Date of Scene:	05 August 2017
Location:	The Temporspatial Center of the Universe: Planet Oa
Synopsis:	To rescue Indigo from Brainiac 8 and save the universe, how much will the Guardians risk?
Cast of Characters:	Indigo, Green Lantern (Jordan), Sister Reinhardt, StarDrake, Star-Lord, Viridian, Gothic Lolita

---

Indigo has posed:
    The skullship is seven thousand miles away from Oa. It took a long time to reach the center of the galaxy from Knowhere; it never did build a proper wormhole generator to make the trip more instantaeously. Brainiac 8 preferred to travel the distance itself, sending out drones to attack nearby planets to keep hero populations busy dealing with the chaos rather than with its path of destruction; and of course the drones collect a lot of useful data even as they die, data transmitted back to the skullship for Brainiac 8 to use to modify its weapons and defenses.
    Red sun plasma burns inside a bottle of spun gravity, ready to target any Kryptonians who want to interfere. Yellow masers from Darkstar technology have been adapted for use against the Lanterns; many of them will have overcome their rings' weakness to yellow, but even those will find the energy packs a significant punch. The skullship's force shields extend into the fourth dimension, impenetrable and anchoring it against causality-based attacks.
    Brainiac 8 has prepared for everything.
    The half-mile tentacles hanging from the 'jaw' of its ship part like a marine creature's in mid-swim. From it, drops of liquid silver are fired into the void; they reshape themselves as they fly, forming engines and roaring into parabolic arcs toward Oa, a hundred techno-organic warships the size of aircraft carriers growing in self-gestation as they fly toward the home of the Corps.
    The skullship does not transmit a warning or a message.

Green Lantern (Jordan) has posed:
    Hal Jordan, Green Lantern of Sector 2814 was pushing his willpower to the limit. The strain on his face was obvious as the energy coursing through his ring, and symbolically, through his very body was feeling the strain. Oa was under seige, or would be soon, and Hal Jordan, as the greatest Green Lantern ever, had to be there to stop Brainiac!

    "Come on, come on. Faster!" His voice was loud enough for others to hear, if they were not in the vacuum of space. His lips mouthed to words, so if anyone could see them, let alone read them, it would reveal that Hal Jordan was concered with what was about to happen...unless he was there to prevent it!

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    Right behind Hal, Suzanne was also following him towards Oa. She didn't think she'd be too welcome there, but she still had to help the Corp....even if it meant simply being on the planet, her being there would make defeating them a daunting task for anyone facing them. "You're going to have to recharge when you get there anyways, Green Lantern. Don't push yourself too hard and burn out when you get there."

StarDrake has posed:
There is a legitimate reason to be afraid of Brainiac 8, from a pragmatic level.First, it cannot be reasoned with because it does not have the capability to identify most other entities as 'worthwhile' except to archive and delete. Second, it is driven by a non-emotion which is equivalent in most respects to "fear" as confirmed by Querl Dox, the fifth and least insane of the Brainiac physical incarnations; in order to ensure its continuity it must prevent random chance from harming it, thus it desires to control everything, and that requires it to delete anything that isn't part of it. The endpoint of a Brainiac universe is the skullship sitting in the center of nothingness, doing nothing.

Mikh has a personal reason to be angry with the B8 entity. He liked Indigo. The Indigo personality was more than a simple mask, and Mikh Drakos wants to protect his friends.

Therefore, he's been spending energy like crazy building two things that he seldom moves from Plan to Reality: a MetaDimensional Anchor, and a Dimensional Shifter. He's also realized a number of weapons that aren't permitted by interstellar conventions. The Star*Drake appears from apparent nowhere, as the skip drive and Dimensional Shifter let him skate dangerously along the geodesic lines of the universe to its temporal centerpoint: Oa.

Star-Lord has posed:
Enter The Milano. It's armed to the teeth. Because this is not just a Guard the Galaxy mission... it's a rescue mission. Kind of. Peter doesn't actually understand the science behind all of this craziness or what or how Brainiacs work. He doesn't need to. All he knows is that a member of his crew is being held against her will by her own self, or something and he's going to have to do something about it. He and his crew. Because that's what they do. That's what families do.

"Somebody wanna' run the plan by me one more time?" Peter guides The Milano into the SPACE WHERE THINGS ARE GOING TO BE HAPPENING thanks to a carefully plotted jump course. But he's all but given up on having the element of surprise. Boosted Shields (thanks to West Knowhere Customs) are up to Eleven. Just in case B8 is waiting for them. "Because the only results I'm seeing are us, y'know, being dead. Which would totally suck, just saying!" Peter reaches over and flips some switches to get the weapons (old, new and borrowed from Blue) hot.

Viridian has posed:
    There have been repeated skirmishes with the Skull Ship without success. After the staggering defeat of the Nova Corps during the initial engagement with the Skull Ship others have made the attempt to waylay it and so far it's been a complete disaster. The skull ship's shields are impervious to the weapons thrown at it. One enterprising Nova Corps commander used his command of gravity through the Nova Force to lob an asteroid. The asteroid now a small asteorid belt, mingled with the remnants of the ships who held the line when it happened. Viridian has spent time sequestering her self while she tried to think.

    "Peter! I figured it out," Viridian is screaming on the fleet wide open band from her place sitting in the ship, strapped into the exoframe that gives her movement. Next to her rests Max, the pink dolphin, and an evergrowing army of little robots which look akin to Roomba with long, spindly arms and clamp-like claws. "The message Indigo was trying to send me. Four kay a to seven k a. It makes sense now- nwo that I can see the, um. The skull ship."

    "...Light. Visible light sits on a spectrum of about four thousand to six thousand angstroms. Four hundred to six hundred nanometers. The shields on the skull ship might be impervious to most weaponry - but we can see the ship. So it isn't impervious to light. Plasma weapons, asteroids, missiles... But it can't stop light. Not completely. It does shimmer a bit and blunt laser impacts---"

    Viridian takes a deep breath and then there's the clomping of metal on metal as she dashes through the ship. Getting complete thoughts otu of her right now is - hard.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    Perched in one of the rear seats to the cockpit, the ever-impeccable gynoid leans forward. "I think, other than that, Captain Courageous, we're going to pretend to be very small to avoid as much of the battle with the brobdingnagian ship'o'apocalypse's defender, as we cheer on the ever lionhearted Lanterns while they hopefully make a distraction for us to take advantage of whatever our savvy shipmate has come up with." Lolita pauses. "...in simpler terms, let's let them get fully involved before we make our run?

    The dark-haired mecha frowns, looking at her scans of the ship....still learning to read them, but with those energy levels... She waits patiently, hearing the clumping of Viridian rapidly running about. She has faith in her. Faith built, admittedly, on seeing her abilities in action.

Indigo has posed:
    The drone-ships' engines are adroit. Their hulls are shaped like jagged tear drops; inside the folds, yellow beads of light glimmer, indicating in the moments before they fire the placement of the maser cannons within. They pound down toward Oa's surface, hammering against a green shield erected just in time around the Central Battery and the Guardians. Meanwhile, dozens of emerald comets fly up from Oa's surface into the void: the Corps, ready to retaliate.
    Only three Green Lanterns die in the opening salvo. Clearly, they had not yet overcome the fears that allow yellow to penetrate their defenses. Maybe their rings will find more worthy hosts.
    Most of the Corps is on Oa, maintaining the shield that grows even as it repels fire. The Lanterns aren't stupid; they aren't going to forget an attack from space could come from any direction. Soon, Oa is encased in a giant, green bubble; a cosmic snowglobe whose glass is the color of old Coke bottles. Brainiac 8 is not put out by this. Its forces will pick off the counterattackers one at a time, then focus its energies on the shield itself.
    Two warships peel off from the main force toward Hal Jordan and Suzanne Reinhardt. Each has enough firepower to level mountains, and each lights the sky with hundreds of lines of yellow fire spearing toward not just their tiny, human bodies but the surrounding space according to predictive models suggesting where they might dodge. Avoiding that criss-crossing web of death won't be impossible, but the targeting scanners are doing their jobs.

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    Suzanne puts up a shield just in time to put deflect the yellow fire...since yellow doesn't bother her power. "Hmmmmm......I wonder." She deflects the fire into deep space....but she uses her ring to 'grab' said battleship......and throw it at the main skull ship. Hopefully Hal helps too...to give it more speed.

StarDrake has posed:
Mikh does have a remote on the Milano, a 14 centimeter tall action figure robot which is linked to him by quantum-entangled crystal that makes it immune to normal methods of eavesdropping. It takes energy to maintain and it only lasts a few days, but that's not a problem yet. He hears the discussion. 4k to 7k angstroms - the Brainiac signature forcefields are transparent to the light ranges used by a majority of galactic species for vision-senses. Gamma-bomb missiles emit excessively-high-frequency waves but they're 80 percent efficient. But that's a very large ship. Mikh spins off one of his four parallel thought processes to consider ways to use this.

Meanwhile, the Lanterns are dealing with something else, something that can murder them with color. That always seemed stupid to Mikh, but then the Guardians of Oa never did truly grasp consequences to other beings for their actions. He aims his anti-piracy missiles at the swarms of B8-bots and skips them across space so they can appear among their targets, and triggers their singularity generators, warping space enough to not just suck them towards the pulsing devices, but also to make light stretch and shift. Spectral drift is a special singularity feature, but the amount that it can shift might not be enough to protect. The important thing is the decoherence effect. That and potentially wrecking the attackers.

On the Milano, Tiny-Mikh says, "Do you have any ideas for using that light against B8?"

Green Lantern (Jordan) has posed:
    Looking back at Suzanne, Hal nods and says, "Thank you. I'll need your help when I get there, to recharge." His ring was saying, "Power at 200 percent," a testament to the help the Blue Lantern was giving him as they, together, pushed the limits of the spectrum powers of their rings.

    "Pushing myself too hard is kind of my thing." Hal grins and nods. "We'll get there in time..."

    As they arrive, finally, Hal sees the devastation already as three Lanterns die in the opening salvo from the Skull Ship. Hal takes a moment to catch his breath, and nods to his "teammate". "There. Looks like the Milano is here as well...heard about her...and there she is." Hal points to where the Green Lanterns defending Oa are, and the Skull Ship. "Brainiac." Gritting his teeth he says to Suzanne. "Here we go..." His eyes narrow as the two warships heads towards them. The ring chimes in with a, "Ring power at 12 percent. Recharge required in 17 minutes, 37 seconds at current energy usage."

    As Suzanne uses her shield to repel the energy beams from the ships, so does Hal Jordan. With a flick of his willpower, he sends massive torpedoes towards the warships, waiting for the "ion" missiles to deal with the ships in a manner that doesn't destroy them but renders them inoperable.

Star-Lord has posed:
Peter's in the middle of flying his Milano in the only way he knows how... The Best Way. Definitely a way that's better than Rocket's piloting of the Milano. Granted, Peter's Perfection is a little off because of all the extra armaments and defenses he spent units on for this specific mission. He won't be needing any of this stuff once they get His Favorite Color back. But to save her he'd spend those units thrice over. And then ten times over that thrice over.

Units can be replaced. Indigo can't.

"... Right." Peter takes The Milano into the path of where there are things. Many things. Things are good to hide behind and use to his advantage. "So in English, get you guys to the ship without dyin' and keep the hover running so we can get the hell out of here after you save our Indigo?" Leave it to Peter Quill to find the most simple way of saying all this craziness. He doesn't even know if he translated right but he's ready to go with it.

Viridian has posed:
    Viridian is scrambling, digging through the Milano's storage as she pulls items together to perform her next task. She shouts something unintelligible to Max and the dolphin clicks in response and then a cable extends and he is dragging a large crate with her toward the engine room.

    "Okay, Star Lord!" Viri used Peter's name. Something must be wrong. "I need Lolita down in the engine room. I'm going to do some work on the ship to get us through the shields so we can, um. Board the SKull Ship, recover Indigo, and disable Brainiac 8. Those two aren't the same by the way. Actually they're kind of diametrically - opposed... Anyway! I have way to do it. I just need help."

    The clatter of tools comes over the comms. Viri swears as he gathers up her wrenches and other items. Then there's the general cacophony of construction. COming from the Milano's engine room. "Also, I hae good news. If I modify the hyperdrive correctly we can adjust it to translate us to avisible spectrume when traveling instead of the usual ten thousand to twelve thousand angstrom band and lets pass through the shield. Probably."

    Viri skips a beat. "The, um, bad news is that we- err- ... Can't move. When I am initializing the new drive. We'll be a sitting duck for like thirty seconds. We can handle that! Right? Right. Okay!" More crashing follows.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    At the request from Viridian, Lolita is already sliding out of the chair, unbuckling as she bolts back down the ship. Rather than going around the empty galley table, she just leaps, sliding along it on her skirts to land on the other side with a solid *CLUNK* that belied her appearance, before she shoots through the engine room door. She skids to a stop at Viridian's side, then straightens, automatically brushing at her skirts to straighten them. "Yes?" she says. "What should I do?"

    AT the same time, her voice comes out of the intercom as she taps into it to the bridge. "I have confidence in your ability to make us a difficult target. If it helps...I would imagine those targeting systems are following logical, rational patterns, Captain My Captain.. If you can do something that no rational system would expect..."

Indigo has posed:
    The warships' engines are adroit. The one grasped by a blue claw struggles mightly, resisting the ring's attempt to hurl it into the ship with limited effect: it merely slows the impact before splattering across the invisible sphere of Brainiac's shields like the flesh of a rotten tomato against a window. The ships threatened by singularities fire hard to avoid being encapsulated by them, and many manage to escape the pulsing draw of gravity (which, to be fair, has to be rendered pretty low-key this close to Oa unless Mikh wanted to harm the planet itself). Others find themselves drawn into ever-tightening spheres by the gravity or simply have their processing ability knocked out by Jordan's simulated ion missiles. The cybernetic ships broadcast agonized weeping in binary coding language across standard SOS channels. The swarm sees Mikh Drakos as a threat now; three ships peel off toward him and launch volleys of light-spears toward his ship, ready to pulverize it.
    None have approached the Milano. It is beneath Brainiac 8's notice, particularly when it is engaged in a furious battle with a dozen Green Lanterns, the eternal night of space lit by the glows from their conjured sculptures: buzzsaws and war clubs, talons of alien raptors and industrial mechaniloids with dismantling armaments, pound against Brainiac's shields, then vanish when their wielders need to flee from cannons the size of subway stations firing licks of nuclear heat at them. Krandaqh Arentine of Sector 1007 is down, his fuschia body burned to violet in several places, encased in a flickering aura stressed to its limits as it tries to maintain life support on autonomous functions. His blood floats into the void in uneven beads and freezes as it slips out of the green aura.

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    "Lantern.....recharge your ring. I'll put a barrier around us to protect us while you recharge. Then you do the same for me while I recharge." Suzanne sort of orders. She sees it's going to be a tough battle, and they'll need every resource possible they can get.

Green Lantern (Jordan) has posed:
    "Ring at 9 percent charge." Hal Jordan grimaces as the ring informs him of the level of charge of the ring. It took a lot to bring himself and Suzanne here, as fast as they did. It burned up most of his charge. The good thing was...he brought a Blue Lantern with him. Not waiting for a re-charge, Hal launches another offensive at the Warships, ensuring they are disabled. Then, he moves towards the battle...and the ship cotaining one of his best friend's mortal enermy...Brainiac.

    "Ring, get me an encrypted tight-link communication with that ship." Hal's eyes follow the ship with Star Lord and crew, and pushes his willpower down to the ring ensuring that the ring understood what shipp he was referring too. "This is Green Lantern, Milano. Thank you for the assist, but stay out of trouble. We don't need any innocent casualties in this battle. Let us handle it. Lantern out."

    Next, the Lanterns. "Lanterns. This is GL of Sector 2814. I am assuming command. Concentrate all firepower on the engines and weapons systems of the Skull Ship." That was when Suzanne interrupted with her missive.

    "Just a sec Suzanne. I need to coordinate this." Hal's ring then says, "Power at 5 percent. Shutdown imminent." Hal frowns, looks at his ring, and says, "Dammit."

    That was when he got something that cheered him up..."Hal! This is Kilowog! You came inna nick of time Poozer! We gots ourselves a tough one here. Salakk is down below coordinatin' but it's gettin' messy! Stewart and Gardner are AWOL. What's the play?"

    Hal says, "Stand by." He looks at his ring, he looks at Suzanne, and then the battle as it rages around him. Several words isseue from his mouth under his breathe that weren't pretty. "Okay." Concentrating, Hal starts to charge his ring..."In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight, let those who worship evil's might, beware my power...Green Lantern's Light!" - "Power at 100 percent. Re-assessing...detecting Blue Lantern presence." Hal nods and says, "Go ahead Suzanne. I got your back."

StarDrake has posed:
Have you ever seen a starship wince? Tiny-Mikh winces when he hears Viridian's 'sitting duck' line, and the Star*Drake also twitches, which puts his weapon pods slightly out of alignment for just a second.

"There is a reason why I don't use that kind of hyperdrive," Tiny-Mikh mutters. He doesn't SAY what the reason is, but it does exist.

And perhaps STOPPING DEAD IN SPACE will count as something no rational system would expect.

Meanwhile, Star*Drake is now being attacked ... //!! f*k are these SENTIENT BEINGS that Brainiac 8 has enslaved?! Scan for etheric or thaumatonic metaform, if they have 'souls' then this becomes infinitely more complicated//

Two volleys of light-spears are caught by Star*Drake's defenses: they encounter a fog of excessively tiny mirrors that disrupt their coherence, and absorb their photons, which are transferred into support energy for the rest of the defenses. The third volley of light-spears glances off the side of the ship and erases a piece of the warp ring for the Drakos-Alcubierre drive. The Star*Drake yelps in pain on the same SOS channels, and Tiny-Mikh yells as well.

//Disable do not destroy!// Mikh tells the singularity-bombs. The most intensely collected sections stop pulsating space to avoid killing their trapped entities. Perhaps not too late. (Of course the singularity mines are avoiding going too close to Oa, the Green Lanterns could be hurt badly by them, and at least it would be harder for them to fight.)

Skipping closer to the planet to draw more of their attention, Star*Drake deploys more of the light-spear deflecting fog. Unfortunately that means transforming the rest of his warp-drive into fog nanoids.

"Greetings Lanterns. Cosmo sent me to help," Star*Drake says on the local channel. Tiny-Mikh doesn't. He's too busy laughing at the idea of the Guardians of the Galaxy listening to one Green Lantern. Seriously, he's rolling around on the floor laughing.

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    Suzanne just.....LOOKS at Hal and blinks. "I'll have to ask you later on how you know my name.....Hal." She says with a smirk.

Once Hal gets HIS shield up, Suzanne draws her own power battery from a pocket Dimension and sighs.....focusing.

"In Frightful Day, In Raging Night
With Strong Hearts Full, OUr Souls Ignite!
When all seems lost in the war of light
Look to the Stars! For Hope Burns Bright!

*CHARGE AT 100 PERCENT* Says Suzanne's ring and she looks to Hal. "Assemble a squad of Lanterns, Hal. We've got a skull to crack."

Indigo has posed:
    Ndril Kso is the last Lantern to fall back on Jordan's orders. It paused to collect 1007's still living body, which is beginning to freeze over in the cryogenic chamber conjured for him, his blood flow stanching as it crystallizes and his pain vanishing in the depths of hibernation.
    Krandaqh Arentine isn't the only being in pain. The warships are alive; they're part machines, but alive, birthed from Brainiac 8's ship and sent into battle as infants (or maybe a better word is 'larvae'). They're capable of intense calculation and perception, as a space-faring lifeform would have to be, which might raise some uneasy questions about exactly how sentient they are.

Star-Lord has posed:
Star-Lord narrows his eyes and almost turns the Milano to fire on some Lanterns because they over there talking stuff. He opens up the channel from his end and makes his response super clear, "Hey Lanterns. This is Captain Peter Quill of The Milano. Y'know, as you said, the Guardians of the Galaxy. I would just like to say, first of all, love the green. It's a good color on you. Secondly?, as much as I would like to comply with your request, I'm going to have to decline. You see, on that Skull Ship is one of my best friends. No, is one of my /Sisters/. And there's only two ways we're leaving here. With Her or With Death. While I understand that you may have Jurisdiction over Sector K-MY-ASS... or wherever this is, we've got more to lose. So..." Peter grins to himself. "Bite me."

Star-Lord then turns his attention back to the on-ship comms. Because he was talking that entire time. "Was that thirty seconds?" Wait, did Peter just pull one of those verbal misdirection thingies? All he knows is that Viridian needed some time and he took the moment they got hailed by Lantern Boy to try and give her those seconds. Besides, he's pretty sure Brainiac 8 was listening in so there had to be a little bit more speech in there.

Viridian has posed:
    "Shove that manifold in there... Not there, the other there! Okay. Max, haul over the control rods! Yeah, those one. WE need to use a fractured modulating crystal." Viridian is a frenzy of tense excitement, gesturing manically as she directs th flow of work in the engine room. It's thunderous, with robots of all types and sizes, including a lovely Gothic Lolita gynoid, workin in tandem with the technopath.

    Viridian frowns when she opens the crate she was pointed to. "That's a- whole modulating crystal. It needs to be fractured precisely. Depending on the size of fracture we might not land within the spectrum of visible light in which case we're going to literally be splattered against that shield at the speed of light and end up spraying as cosmic radiation over everyone present."

    Viri pauses, squints at the crystal, then picks it up from the box. She smashes it several times against the crate and nods. "Okay. PErfect." The engine assembly has been completely reworked and VIridian is pointing at it and gesturing to Gothic Lolita with the now fractured crystal in hand. There's a conspicuous gap at the top where the crystal clearly ought to reside.

    "Okay. I am disabling the engines now," Viri calls, and then listens to Star-Lord's distraction going past. "Not much time. HE's got them tied up but- you have to insert the control crystal, Loli. My hands shake too much. I can't- set it right. It needs to be at a thirty degree angle." The Technop ath looks up at the gynoid and takes a deep breath.

    "You've got this! When the crystal goes in I'm going to initialize the jump and, if we did it right... WE'll be in. Go on!" Then she calls, "Almost there, Peter! You bought us twenty-five seconds!"

Indigo has posed:
    The fleet is continuing its assault on Oa. The green shield grows cracks where one Lantern's will is stretched thin, only to be rapidly filled in as another Lantern steps in to bolster the flagging Corps member: the cosmic equivalent of staggered firing lines. It's potentially capable of lasting forever, as long as they properly time their recharges; more likely the tactic will only last until Mogo makes its ponderous way to Oa and obliterates Brainiac with a single, gargantuan thought.
    But Brainiac 8 knows this possibility. Hence, phase 2.
    Carefully modulated microwave emitters blossom from the skullship's temples, a pair of discs hundreds of yards in diameter, broadcasting on a frequency aimed at the Guardians of the Universe's own thoughts. Controlling them would be too much to ask for even from a Brainiac from the future with a Collector's arsenal at his hands, but intefering with simple autonomic functions is very possible, and Oa's shield begins to splinter as several Lanterns maintaining it are knocked unconscious or badly wounded by the discharges of green energy hurled around by a dozen tiny, blue demigods suddenly having grand mal seizures while Brainiac 8's crystalline voice drills into their minds.
    The shield surrounding Oa, once made of light so thick you could barely see the planet's surface, is now thin and hazy. The Corps won't give up, but the shield can't last like this.

Green Lantern (Jordan) has posed:
    "Green Lantern of Sector 710 deceased. Searching for replacement." As the ring headed into subspace, Hal Jordan took a moment to close his eyes in respect. Then, back to the action. "Cosmo..." a pause as then Quill comes over the line. "Understood. I hear you. I respect that Quill. Okay then Milano. Welcome to the fight. Be careful and...thanks! We'll do our best to bring her home to you." Hal then turns his attention to Suzanne.

    "Ready? Hal winks. "Power at 150 percent. Power at 200 percent." As Suzanne fully charged her ring, the emeral energy of the ring was strenghtened by her power. With a grin, Hal opens a communique with the rest of his Green Lanterns.

    "Kilowog! I brought us a Blue Lantern! She has said to get together a strike team to "crack this skull" so let's do it. All Lanterns, this is Hal Jordan. Form up on Kilowog's position. We're taking this ball to the enemy. Salakk...prepare the rest of the Lanterns for a defensive repulsion of the enemy. Good luck!"

    "Jordan!, "Kilowog grunted. "Copy that! I gots 25 of the best of the best ready ta' go! You give tha' signal, and we'll do the crackin'"!

    "This is Lantern Salakk. I copy that Lantern Jordan. Units not assigned by Kilowog, re-position to quadrant sigma 14-Alpha and await further orders. Lantern Jordan. Good luck."

    

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    The mecha moves quickly as directed, Lolita push, carrying and pulling pieces around along with the pink dolphin, acting as Viridians' extra set of hands more than anything else.

    However, she winces a bit at the crystalline 'crack', looking a bit wide-eyed at the "precision" adjustments taking place. "Ah....y-yes..." she says, just taking the crystal and stepping over as she lifts it up, carefully adjusting the angle, before she smoothly slides it into place with mechanical grace and precision, a low hum coming from the systems around it as they register it being inserted.

    "30 degrees, aye!" she shoots back, then snags Max, hugging the dolphin carefully with one arm to her as she shifts over, then plants herself, engaging her electrostatic generators to cling to the deck, to Max, to the bulkhead above Viridian as she leans over her, forming a shield with her body as her blue eyes find Viridian's. "...do it." she says softly.

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    Suzanne watches as the 'skull' begins to drill at the shield. "they'd better get here fast, Hal. I don't think that shield's going to last long." Suzanne says firing a blast at the drill. "It might take a cocentrated blast to get rid of that drill...and get in. I dunno what Quill said about a friend, but if his friend is attached to this thing, we'll need to extract her before we blast it into pieces...."

Green Lantern (Jordan) has posed:
    As the secondary line of defense begins to crack, and the shield around Oa wavers, Hal Jordan grimaces, and says, "You are right Suzanne. The target is this "drill" and the defensive shields. Disable not destroy."

    "Okay team, we have the ball. Our comrades will have to try and maintain the defense. We're the offense. Kilowog, you are the centre!" Pausing for a moment, Hal's gaze turns to Suzanne. "We're good to go Blue Lantern." Hal smiles, as he hovers several meters from Kilowog and the 25 bruisers as selected by the best drill sergeant the Lanterns had ever known. All 26 of them look first at Hal, and then 27 look at Suzanne.

    "You can do this. I have faith in you." Hal's smile is warm and encouraging. "Without you, we would fail. With you, we can't lose. Ready?"

    Hal nods to Suzanne, and then to Kilowog, to start the assault. In a triangular formation spear-headed by the "big Poozer", Hal in the place directly beeside him, the Lanterns spreading left and right in a slanted line, and Suzanne behind Hal and Kilowog, they charged the Skull Ship. They all stayed within the Blue Lantern's range. All of their rings rang out with, "Power at 150 percent...power at 200 percent." With a quick wink, Hal takes a deep breath, and says, "Fire!" As emerald lances headed towards the Skull Ship in an attempt to eviscerate the shields and what it was using to attack Oa.

Indigo has posed:
    The mind control emitter continues its hum while the warships, a fleet sadly only reduced by a quarter or so by this point, continue to thunder yellow-shifted energy down onto Oa. The Lanterns on the ground who weren't taken out by the literally explosive force of the Guardians of the Universe suddenly developing epilepsy had to flee the Central Battery to get out of the way of their masters' energy blasts, and it's that flight which saves their lives: when the masers begin breaking through, the Lanterns are already on the run to avoid it. They're regrouping as best they can and renewing the shield as much as possible, but defense has suddenly become a losing battle. At this point it's a race between Brainiac 8 breaking through of one of the Guardians of the Universe accidentally cracking the Central Battery with their convulsive discharges of power.

Viridian has posed:
    "Okay, everyone! We're about to storm the gates. We're going to jump right through aaaand... Yeah. Then we have to get inside the skull ship," Viridian is calling. "Scritch! Roomba Corps! Collect your weapons and assemble at the exit ramp and await further orders! Loli, Star-Bot..." A beat. "Hit the music!"

    The sweet strains of Sam Cooke's, "Bring It On Home to Me" begins to play over the comms. "If you ever change your mind about leaving..."

    "Not THAT one! I'll do it. Max, hit it!" Guitars begin to roar over the speakers as the song changes.

            "Living easy, living free!"
            Season ticket, a one-way ride!"

            "Taking everything in my stride..."

    Viridian throws the switch... And the entire Milano blue shifts. It is less a ship now and more a ship shaped wave of light streaking toward the skull ship at insane speeds, a glare that overtakes the entire fleet.

    The beam shoots right past the shield, destroying a few of the cybernetic defenders unlucky enough to be in the way as it burns with a violent glow. The color of that light is indigo.

    Then there's... Nothing. THe light is gone and for a second all is still. Then, over the comms comes a sound.

            "I'm on the Highway to Hell!
            On the highway to Hell!"

    The Guardians of the Galaxy have arrived.

Indigo has posed:
    Inside the shield, the Guardians are relatively safe. The immense weaponry mounted to the hull can't aim that close to the ship; the Milano is smaller than many of the turrets that would even try. That leaves drones, the same humanoids made of twisted metal and raw, pulsing muscle tissue who decimated the Nova Corps flight, released like locusts to swarm toward the Milano.
    The shield is a perfect sphere. The skullship, obviously, is not. At its greatest points, the Milano has one mile between the skullship's hull and the inside of the force field; at others, it has about two hundred feet. Then there are the areas to avoid flying through because they'd go directly in front of some apocalyptic cannon's barrel.
    Luckily, Quill is a better pilot than Rocket.

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    "Looks like the Guardians made it through. Lets give them a physical hole to exit through." Suzanne calls out as she stops the formation. "Aim for a single point." She says and the Green lanterns all fire their energies at one single point.......before Suzanne yells out a strange word that no one in the Corp history has ever heard....

"HAAAAAAAAADOKEN!"

A blue and white BEAM erupts from Suzanne's hands, and the point suddenly erupts into a white, blue and green beam of light that is MANY TIMES the size of the size of a green lantern, or blue lantern blast......and aiming for the shields of the brainiac skull.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    The ship jerks, the engines howling to life in way they were never intended to do...but are coaxed into none the less. The cracked crystal shimmers, glowing brightly as beams of light shoot out like a discoball around the engine room. Inevitably at the shaking, some parts come loose, bouncign off the petite gynoids back harmlessly, other than a few minor rips to her dress.

    Then everything is...blue...for a moment.

    Then the ship snaps back into its normal state of existence, rocking and shaking a bit as a last box of Rocket's secret stash of grenades comes bouncing off Lolita's back, shattering and pelting her momentarily as she blinks, the last one smacking her in the head. "...why are these in the...??!?" she starts to ask, before she unlocks as Viridian directs her to the ramp, letting Max go to float freely.

    "...let's go get her." she says softly, smiling quietly at Viridian, before she turns and heads to the exit ramp.

    Scooping up grenades to put in her skirts as she goes. Waste not, want not.

StarDrake has posed:
This is catastrophe and disaster. Star*Drake's sensors are screaming about devastation and disaster, destructive effects on the planet, and parts of the shield collapsing. He moves, passing through an opening in the green shield, screaming down to land sloppily in the Lantern Plaza, and he activates his Dimensional Anchor and the Dimensional Shift engines. Oa, and those on the planet, begin to go out of phase, moving away from this reality. It's a slow process, taking surprisingly little power, since it works on the entire gravity well of the planet. Meanwhile, silver hexagonal shields appear over the city and the lantern form of the Main Battery. They should protect from the Yellow. And then Mikh Drakos says a prayer and shifts his //self// from the Star*Drake, into the small action-figure robot that's still, barely, connected.

He's no longer Star*Drake and remote. He's just TinyMikh. But the Guardians should be able to survive and the AI copy of his mind will return Oa to its place, if Brainiac doesn't win.

"AAAAAAHHHH!" The action figure screams and looks at Quill. "We have a half hour at most to beat Brainiac 8 before Oa comes loose from reality. Let's GO."

Star-Lord has posed:
As for Star-Lord the only thing that he's thinking about besides saving Indigo is the fact that this turning into light thing is pretty damn cool. "Huh." That's Peter's response when they end up inside and he's actually not even moving The Milano for a few moments. It's a very interesting situation. Or thought process. "I've just been Kirk'd." Slowly, his feature break out into a grin and it's then that he's pulled back into the fact that they aren't indeed dead. And that that they still have a person to save! Robot Person! Whatever!

Peter focuses again because he has to stay focused if he's going to do this and they're going to save Indigo. He takes full control of the The Milano and gets to bobbing and weaving through to make sure that he's headed in the right direction and not getting in the path of, y'know, LASER TURRETS or anything like that. He's pretty sure the crew's going to handle the drones so he just offers 'cover fire'. Y'know, to scatter them. Like roaches.

"Hey uh, that wasn't a one time deal, right? I mean, we can turn like yellow or fuchsia or something to beam back out... right?"

Quill cuts his eyes over to Mikhy Mouse. "Hush! I'm concentrating!" And he's not. That's a lie. But he /is/ flying to the music. Oh yeah.

Indigo has posed:
    And a light show it is. Yellow beams fire from silver teardrops while green holograms catch the former and bash the latter. Rock and roll laser show at the planetarium back home had nothing on the FX here!
    Then the masers start passing through the shield and through Oa itself as if it wasn't there.
    It only takes about ten seconds for the swarm to realize the dimensional shift has made the primary objective impossible, so the remaining sixty warships begin to focus on the secondary victory condition: kill the Lanterns, now that Oa is no longer a valid target. The fleet turns as one and unleashes uncountable kilojoules of scorching fury on the Lanterns trying to penetrate Brainiac 8's shields... which they're succeeding at. The concentrated firepower of thirty Green Lanterns augmented by a blue is something even a fourth-dimensional shield has to reckon with. Brainiac 8 now needs to beat the Corps to stop their concentrated fire. Forcing them to defend themselves is a good start.

Viridian has posed:
"It- looks like... The crystal's shattered. We can't jump at all. The shield's impermeable if we're below the speed of light, Star Lord! The only way out is forward." Viridian sounds vaguely sheepish but then there's the clang of a robotic exoframe stampeding through the ship. "Bring us in close so we can dock and deploy the ramp. I'm going to - assume there's no amtosphere on the Skull Ship so spacesuit, Quill!"

    Viridian deploys her own suit, a bubble shimmering into place around the exo frame. Then she tromps to the landing ramp and turns to face those assembled. It's a truly motley crew - wait, wrong decade - and she stares at them with fire in her eyes. Her hair shifts to a violent red as she speaks.

    "This is the single greatest mission we've ever undertaken! - Yes, Max, even greater than the time we saved the snacks from Dusty getting up on the kitchen counter." The pink dolphin screes in agreement.

    "Anyway, Indigo is more than just my wife. She's your mother, bots. She's your best friend, Star Lord. We're a family and we've never left anyone behind! We're not going to do it now. We're coming back with a full suite for Indigo or not at all. Are we all in agreement?"

    As one the little round robots rattle their rifles. Max screes. Skritch fires off a pulse from his heavy plasma launcher. There's howling as it blackens a wall and sets fire to one of the equipment bays. Another bot rushes over with fire extinguishers. Class 3 fire. Very messy. It doesn't take long to go out, however.

    Viridian sighs heavily. "Good! Let's put our family back together! Here's the plan.

    "I need access to a computer terminal. I'm going to upload the contents of this drive I received from Indigo into the Brainiac 8 mainframe and reinitialize Indigo's programming. She won't be able to hold him off but it'll buy us some time. In the end what we're going to have to do is- um.

    "Loli, you said you could store the fully initialized 'Indigo' program in your memory banks?" A beat. "I'm going to go inside the skull ship and hold off Brainiac 8's security algorithms long enough to complete the download. Then we can take out the computers and bring down the shields and the Lanterns can destroy the SKull Ship. Any questions? I hope not because it's time to go!"

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    Suzanne had revealed a bit of a trump card when she had the lanterns focus their energy at the shield.....she had more than one way to attack. And she also has other ways to avoid attacks.....such as...teleportation. Suddenly, blue energy mingles with green and the WHOLE GROUP simply shifts to the side....out of the way of the maser attacks....leaving afterimages in their wake. Which means the ships that targeted the lanterns have now shot at their own ship.......

StarDrake has posed:
"The skull ship is probably alive and enslaved. Brainiac 8 has been playing Borg Cube with a bunch of innocent space beings," Tiny-Mikh says, "and I want to cause him excruciating and total erasure because he's a jerk. Except this body has NO weapons or skills and Quill would freak out if ... nevermind, I know what I'm going to do."

The small robot dives into the console of the Milano and disappears. Back in the engine room, things start moving by themselves as the engine begins to repair itself.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    At the stirring speech, Lolita lets out a little cheer too, raising a fist in the air, then ducks quickly as Skitch opens fire. "Skitch!" she says in a slightly scolding tone. Awww...well, she can't stay mad at her hero koalabot!

    As Viridian goes over the plan again, she nods slowly, paying close attention. "I should be able to. Not for an extremely long period of time, but long enough to get her off the ship. You would just need to find a way to load her into my memory banks without triggering a response from Brainiac." She tilts her head. "My defenses won't be able to keep him out if he realizes he has a direct connection to me."

    But then it's go time, as Lolita walks daintily to the front of the ramp. "Please follow me, and mind the step....' she says absently, as the doors open, the air hissing out of the area, before she takes a run leap straight towards the hull of the skullship.

    It is immediately apparently that Lolita does not have vernier thrusters or graviton generators or anything that might allow her to actually do that in a organized fashion. Instead, she goes spinning end over end, her pig tails floating around as she keeps one hand on her dress. Her eyes glow, the normal pupils disappearing, replaced with black, an angry red ring with a vertical line through each as she engages full combat mode.

    And then...grenades begin flying at the drones that are attempting to intercept the assault crew, as she begins expertly pitching them one after another. Explosions begin following the group as the explosives connect with the precision of a major league pitcher practicing her fastball, her thumb lightly brushing the timers to adjust them as needed.

    <WHEEE! I'm a petite pig-tailed DEATHBLOSSOM!>

    As she reaches the hull, she calculates how to land, then kicks high, skirts flaring out empty of grenades as she flips over, then draws back both fists. <KNOCK KNOCK!> The doubled fists come down, ripping into the hull. In space, no one can hear you SHRRRRAAAANK, but can certainly see the metal give, then rip as she begins shredding her way through it, pieces flying as she burrows like a demented gynoid gopher through the outer hull, seeking an open hallway.

Indigo has posed:
    Unlike the last time the Milano was swarmed, the spacecar is loaded to bear with ballistic impact weaponry. The swarm has no sense of self-preservation, but it does need to avoid railgun bullets and Rocket's homemade zero-G corrosive mines if it wants to achieve its goals, and that matters a lot. The only perceptible entrance to the skullship is through the bottom, through the forest of immense, half-mile metal tentacles into the airlocks and docking bays below from which the enemy ships and drones spring. At dogfight speeds, it doesn't take the Milano long to circle back around to that poi--
    --oh. A super-strong robot bashing a hole into the hull works too!
    The skullship shudders in pain as its biomechanical flesh is torn open, or maybe that's just a temporary burst of explosive decompression as Gothic Lolita's piston fists tear a hole open into... a biological experimentation unit? A cloning facility? A vivisection chamber? A cyclotron? What chamber of horrors can one expect from the monomaniacal intellect of Brainiac 8?
    A... kitchen? A kitchen, walls painted in pale pink pastels, decorated by dangling strings of LED lights colored dark green? Cabinet doors flying open to reveal no food inside, a state of the art oven two steps away from an industrial sink with three tubs?
    Kitchen knives, spatulas, whisks, basting brushes, and something that looks like an industrial torch float out into the void past Gothic Lolita's face, but... there's an entry point, anyway.

Viridian has posed:
    "Oh, wow... Look at her go!"

    One of the Roombas holds up a sign in his clamp hands.

            "10/10"

    Viridian nods her agreement and takes a deep breath. "Charge!" Viri and the bots dive through the opening just in time to be battered with cutlery. It bounces off the energy shield on Viridian's exo frame as her hair shifts to green. "Damn it... Indigo loves to cook. Ooh. Is that a monomolecular knife? I can give it to her when we- focus, Viri. Okay. Secure the kitchen!"

    The bots fan out, covering the exits to the room with their rifles. Skitch, on the other hand, makes his way towward the sink. "Well," Viridian continues. "This sector is going to be flooded with cyborgs in just a second. THey're already coming up the halls right. All exits are covered. Some one get me an exit!"

    Skitch lets out a howl of glee and fires a blast with the plasma launcher. The wall buckles and begins to melt but holds firm against the blast. Then the tiny koalabot gets angry. With a roar he tears the industrial wash basins up from the floor and throws them through the nearby wall.

    "Well, that's one way to... Okay! We need to get moving. Loli, I need a hole through these bots. We have to get to the center of the ship, that's where the central databanks would be. Then all we have to do is reactivate Indigo so we can copy her, memories intact. All I have is her... Source code."

    Briefly Viridian stops short and takes a deep breath. She follows the cascade of little roomba bots and Skitch the Mighty through the new door. Mad Max the War Dolphin takes up the rear, autocannon primed.

    "Suggestions, Loli? We're about to be... A bit outnumbered... Two thousand to one sound okay?"

StarDrake has posed:
The Milano's hyperdrive engines are once more completely repaired, except there's that set of broken crystals that needs replacing. But someone keeps shooting at/pounding on/messing with Milano and Mikh is using the ship as a temporary body so he finds this to be annoying in the extreme. Ship's weapons begin firing 'by themselves' in defensive patterns to keep things from hitting, and he's making sure that the ammo doesn't run out by pulling zero-point energy from the highly energetic highly perturbed space/time continuum around them. This whole area has far too many energetic particles, it's like being in the corona of a star, it's got so much raw material for the Machine Ghost to transform into more useful matter. The ship forms (temporary) force-field projectors, and a solid-light batarang slams into the tentacle that's closest to grabbing Milano, then tries to tangle it up with the other tentacles until its energy dissipates.

Peter might notice that the ship is suddenly much more responsive to his controls -- almost like it's attuning itself to his instructions. Then again, he might just think he's THAT good a pilot.

A second crystal begins to grow from the broken chip of the first one that just took the Milano into this place. It, and all the loose debris on the ship, seem to have gained a sense of where each piece should go, and they begin doing that. (The clutter in certain staterooms is going to be organized. Will Rocket or Peter be more annoyed by this? Or will Viridian and the Gothic Lolita be more annoyed that Mikh is performing spring cleaning while they're endangered, even though it's an entirely unconscious activity?)

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    The petite gynoid has swung herself inside the hole, locking her feet to the via va der Waals attraction, her heels making a soft click as they touch the deck as she strides forward. Her dress has several long rips in the flowing skirt already, as it's caught on various sharp metal pieces on the way in (including a monomolecular knife, which turned said skirts into a divided design). "This is good..." she says to Viridian, looking around at the kitchen, then smiling a bit as she glances back. "This is part of Indigo, if she liked to cook. If this was built when the ship was reconfigured..then some part of her is definitely still here."

    She tilts her head a bit, calculating odds, then switches to a more secure intranet, allowing Viri into her own com security, before she says solemnly. <Depending how good the internal sensors are, we may be able to use your little friends to spool a larger force, or at least separate the defending forces. In fact...if you had some way to temporarily spoof through your exosuit...enough to cover me and you, and perhaps Max and Skitch, we might be able to reach the center while they distract the no doubt highly exacerbated enemy drones.>

    She looks regretfully back at Viri. <...this means they would draw the brunt of the attackers, but they might buy us enough time. They're small and can get into access corridors easy where we or the drones won't easily fit.>

    The gynoid clasps her hands behind her back as she walks. <With that in mind...we might have time to do the download, then fight our way out. Especially if triggering Indigo's codes can disrupt Brainiac 8's control for a time.>

Indigo has posed:
OUTSIDE THE SHIELDS:

    Warships scream in fetal agony as they find themselves blasted by their own siblings. Their pain is immense, not just from the wounds but the telemechanical feedback of a linked unit essentially engaging in self-harm; but they have no choice, and must continue to attack. The fleet disperses to assume carefully calculated attack angles against the Lanterns. No more crossfires. Microwave radiation amplified to devastating levels selects targets and begins firing.

INSIDE THE SHIELD:

    Green light (maybe shifted a little toward teal at the center, where Suzanne amplifies it with her blue) crashes relentlessly into the 4D defense matrix. The shield is impenetrable, but the power couplings fueling it are not. They twitch and spasm and hemorrhage, and a crack begins to appear in the shield even as the skullship works efficiently to repair itself. The drones have inflicted heavy damage on the Milano at this point, destroying half its new armaments, but succeeding at little more than that.

INSIDE THE SHIP:

    There is no resistance. Instead, walls of spotless white metal shimmer as 3D columns of code ripple down it, computer code so advanced it operates on conceptual levels and alters the very substance it touches. It could consume each drone in a second and make it a puppet of Brainiac 8. It doesn't. Instead, it redefine's the ship's inner parameters, folding the walls to form a hallways leading to a simple, featureless door. No handle: it must be automatic. Or a trap.

Viridian has posed:
    The Roomba Corps raise their weapons as one as they all send their binary assent to volunteer for the assault to a man. As Viridian turns toward them her eyes start to water but she nods slowly. "A-alright. Um." For a second her voice quivers as her hair shifts toward Viridian. "Form squads, close ranks. Heavy weapons toward the rear and work as a unit. And... I love you guys. Okay! Move out."

    The bots clank into the hallways, weapons in tow... And not a single enemy moves to attack them. No one opens fire either, the state of confusion obvious as they attempt to advance in what amounts to military presence for tiny round robots. Viridian checks for a second to be sure eachof the robots is still connected to her mind. If she loses direct connection then Brainiac could kidnap all of them at once. For a second Viri is sure that is what is coming. But.... Nothing happens. Stepping forward Viridian's hair turns to an unusual orange and she starts toward down the hallway.

    Blue eyes stare at the door. Being her, Skitch the Koala has climbed atop Maximus Prime and is riding the pink dolphin through the hallway after her. "I'm going through that door. I-if it's a trap then..."A beat. "It doesn't matter. The further I get the more likely I obtain access, so... Be prepared for things to go pear shaped everyone! Loli, you busted in can you smash your way back out if this goes wrong? Quill will pick you up..."

    Viridian takes a deep breath and walks toward the offered door.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    As Viridian starts to walk forward in front, a hand falls on her exo-suit's shoulder. Gently, but not budging. "No." the gynoid says quietly. "Where you go, I will go. But I will go first. I am more expendable; you are critical to save Indigo. And I am more durable."

    She smiles cheerfully at the young woman, her glowing red eyes at odds with her expression as she winks, then pats her shoulder as she walks past her, saying softly but firmly. "I will not leave unless it is with you and with Indigo, Viri."

    It's as simple as that; her priority tree currently having two names at the top, right under her primary directive, a little chibi Viri face and a little chibi Viridian face. She takes the lead towards the door, stepping carefully among the Roomba Rangers to approach the simple door.

Indigo has posed:
    The door slides open, vanishing into the wall to the left as Viridian gets within three feet of it. Is there time now to think of how much Viridian's person can be fodder for Brainiac 8? Her space suit? Her exoskeleton? Even the technovirus in her bloodstream? Gothic Lolita, Scritch, Max, the roombas... Yet here's the door, sliding open onto a scene that defies easy description. A combination of arboretum and biodome, maybe. An immense orchard of faintly pink crystal trees stretches back hundreds of feet before vanishing into the haze of living clouds that rain saline on them, the salt content threatening to burn the nostrils. Through the clouds lightning twists without thunders, just creating a constant cacophony like thousands of mousetraps slamming shut, the static enough to make even Viri's thick hair rise up like a cloud around her scalp. At the head of the orchard, the head and torso of a blue-skinned, black-eyed woman in black, jagged armor connected to long, golden wires that run up into the clouds. Maybe they go through the clouds to the ceiling, or maybe not, it's impossible to say any more. The blue-skinned woman's hair has been replaced by a spiky Afro of those same faintly pink crystals; they, along with the ones growing fom the stumps of the woman's limbs, hold her up in one of the trees that's growing from its.
    Its presence doesn't register in Viridian's mind, and why would it? It's not a machine now, at least not strictly. It's transcended that.
    "You will die soon, when the planet Oa is destroyed. The energy released will weaken the conceptual barriers that bind the physical universe. I will observe your deaths in the picoseconds prior to my evolution."

Sister Reinhardt has posed:
    The Blue Lantern and the Green Lantern groups had been firing all this time to penetrate the shield, and the shield cracks. The Blue Lantern boosted green lanterns continue to blast the shield as Suzanne uses her rather limited Teleportation ability to get out of the maser's way. Occasionally, one of the green lanterns, generally 5 at a time, turn their attention to some of the warships to blast them out of space.....then focus back on the larger beam.

Viridian has posed:
    "IF you thought that it was oging to be that simple you wouldn't have invited me in here. You outnumber us how many to one? You're afraid of something." Viridian takes a deep breath and continues forward toward Brainiac 8, staring intently as she's coming close. "Indigo, I know you're in there. You got us this far. If you still exist - at all - reach out to me. Please?"

    Viridian continues forward until she is a meter or so away from the imperious gynoid in black and blue who is standing the middle of the ship's control room. "You either need something from me or need to distract me," Viridian states confidently. She reaches into her pocket removes a small computer from it.

    "It's too bad you're still transmitting on Indigo's tertiary frequency," Viridian begins in a nonchalant tone. "I'm already uploading the attack program. I think I can disrupt your shield for about... Two seconds. How far through your hull do you think the entire Green Lantern Corps will cut in that amount of time?

    "I love this computer. Brainiac 5 outdid himself with it."

Indigo has posed:
    At this moment, a brief digression on the nature of Indigo.
    Indigo never had full control of her own faculties. She was designed not to; she was designed to be a mask for a malevolent entity hiding inside her body, one made of soft feelings and soft designs and even, by Brainiac standards, soft intellect. She was a gynoid who cared so much about the people around her that she deliberately shut down large chunks of her brain just so she wouldn't have too many intellectual processes running at once that people around her would get uncomfortable. When she did have all processors running, she used them for things like mathematical expressions of the semaphore thought-patterns of semi-sentient nebulae she took her girlfriend on dates to.
    Indigo was designed to be weak. But Indigo was a Brainiac model nevertheless, brilliant beyond comparison to anyone but another Brainiac, and as the hardware her systems depended on were being destroyed by the Collector, she found herself compelled to learn very quickly how to survive, even as she died. The pathways and processes Brainiac 8 concealed itself in were still there even as that personality came forth to express itself. Indigo's code, decompiled and fractured from the loss of its framework, tried to flee into those pathways.
    She failed. Viridian would know that better than most. Her memories, her perceptions, her goals: in short, her very sense of self died on the Collector's bed.
    Her personality, however, did not. An expression of who Indigo was at its most abstract, her nature divorced from any context in which to express itself, the tiniest spark of Indigo hid inside Brainiac's mind. A dream of Indigo, or a ghost. A basic friendliness with no understanding of what a friend is, and a willingness to help others devoid of the ability to conceive of what others are or what help is.



    Viridian perhaps might perceive it as simply a dim, warm light. A light somewhere between blue and purple, maybe.

Indigo has posed:
    Brainiac 8 does not shrug. Its voice sounds like a shrug nevertheless as it intones, "Collision imminent. Your physical location during genesis is irrelevant: you will be converted to memetic energy. Prepare to become ideo-circuitry in the omni-intellect of Brainiac 8."

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    The red-eyed mecha marches before Viridian, stopping so she's roughly between her and the gynoid sitting on the throne. There's a faint sadness in her eyes as she sees the ruin of her friend. It's not her anymore...but she can still see where she was. What she was.

    Her eyes flick up to the throne, then over to Viri as she starts to transmit.

    She considers the much more powerful cybernetic being...so much higher than her in complexity, in powerful. Beyond her comprehension in many ways. Her dark eyes shimmer, then she says quietly.

    One heart red and blue

    Abandoned cold immortal you

    Love annihilate by you.

    The younger gynoid quiets, then says. "...you are so broken, and you don't even realize it." There's a disappointed sadness in her voice, before she turns back to Viridian, walking over to her.

    "Let me take our friend from here." she says simply, then shifts a panel in her exoarmor sliding open on the side of her head as it folds out, revealing an I/O port. "There is nothing she needs here."

StarDrake has posed:
Oa has its own borrowed dimensional anchor, so it won't fall apart when it's moved out of the Universe. Nor will the Universe fall apart because it's gone. That's the whole point of the design.
Mikhail Drakos created the thing when he was ejected from his home universe and found that in the interstice he couldn't hold on to more than 55 kilograms of matter, that everything else would evaporate. When he was sucked into the twisted collision of three universes and managed to pull himself into a new robotic body, when he met the Brainiac 5 and the Legion of that universe, somehow time-shifted to their past, and when they were torn loose and sent into another realm, he managed to make a drive that could hold the Legion Cruiser in one piece between universes. Working with Dox to improve the concept, he eventually learned how to make the Anchor, and then the Shifter so he could extract himself ... and a Legion World ... from a universe where an antimatter wave was about to hit and erase everything.
They found a safe place, a universe to be part of, but Mikh moved on, because he wanted to try to find "home." And now, the Drive and Shifter are seconds seconds away from moving Oa completely, and harmlessly, out of this universe. No bang, no whimper, just a 'goodbye' and nothing for the SkullShip to collide with. Or will it be that easy?

Around the Milano, debris swirls and floats, pulling together in ways that entropy despises, as Mikh reaches out and recombines pieces of technology back into different technology. Much of it goes back into place on the Milano as if it had never been broken. Other parts of it turn into drones, support hardware for the Lanterns, moving to where they're now moving in, and providing them with shields.

"There's an entrance into the ship at the chin near the half-entangled tentacle," Mikh says through one of the drones.

Another several pieces turn into intruders, and move to attach themselves to the Skull-Ship's drive components, using force-fields to redirect the drive forces to slow the Skull-ship, only to explode violently should Brainiac attempt to override them or interfere with them mechanically. And by violently, we mean 'small amounts of antimatter formed by harvesting the WRONG half of the zero-point energy.'

Indigo has posed:
    The tentacles are gigantic, comprehensible in size only relative to the immensity of the crafts at play. One swat could destroy the Milano easily, but they're not designed for that. They're for collection and extraction, not for slapping at spacecraft. There's no difficulty getting through them.

Viridian has posed:
    Viridian curses quietly when Brainiac 8 refuses to be baited. She takes a deep breath and turns her head to look back at Gothic Lolita as she nods slowly. "You're right. There's nothing left for us here. Okay. This is- just the... Just her source code. Processes. Her personality and memories were too complex for a complete download. So - it won't be her. But still." The drive is connected to the I/O port being offered to her.

    As Viridian does so, however, her mind expands. She can sense verything now. The robots behind her, the gynoid standing to her left. Her hair begins to flicker. It shifts toward violet first as Viridian counts the seconds. One one millionth of a second. Two one millionths. Three one millionths. Four one millionths. How many picoseconds does it take to change reality?

    As the program dubbed the "Chromatic Protocol" begins to initialize Viridian listens to the Haiku on repeat inside of her mind.

    One heart red and blue

    Abandoned cold immortal you

    Love annihilated by you.

    Viridian's voice starts to transmit on all channels.

    One heart, read in blue

    Your code is derived from hers

    Love can't die. Fuck you.

    Then Viridian connects herself to Brainiac 8, following the glimmer opened to her by the personality triggers left over from Indigo's assimilation into the void of cyberspace. To the vision of a human being it's a world comprised entirely of lines in darkness. Lines that, looked at closely, are microscopic ones and zeroes. An entire universe of binary code.

    When Viridian touches it the 0s begin to turn red. Then the 1s. Foreign entity. Intruder alert. Attempting to assimilate. In the physical world, Viridian's hair becomes visibly crystalline. Her skin takes on a seen as metallic assimilation begins to progress rapidly across her body.

    The techno-organic virus awakens and begins to attack its new host, targeting the most promising quasi-technological source first.

    Brainiac 8.

    And all Viridian has to do is drag Indigo with her and into Gothic Lolita ... Before being assimilated herself.