Enter RAF

[DinosaurNothlit]

Chapter Thirty-nine

Parker wasted no time punching up his communicator.  As soon as he realized what the Visser was morphing, he knew he had underestimated his opponent.  Although he had thought he might be able to take one monstrous morph, there was no way he could handle them all, on his own.

"Yankee Squad, come in Yankee Squad.  This is Parker, requesting backup.  Shaft, Sith, Gary, Sally, Cassie!  Get your butts to the Animorphs board!"

"Roger," a chorus of voices crackled on Parker's communicator.  "We've got your location."

<Not so brave now, are you, little armored human?> the Visser taunted, and began to approach Parker at a gallop across the wide meadow, his numerous limbs making a heavy buzzing sound against the ground as he moved.  He loosed a glob of firey green liquid in Parker's direction, which the Spartan narrowly dodged.  The burning acid hissed as it ate away a smoking hole in a nearby tree.

Parker pulled out his assault rifle and swung it horizontally, shooting off a rapid volley of three bullets.  He watched curiously for Visser Three's reaction to the hit.

There was none.  No reaction at all.  The shots had connected, Parker was sure of it.  But Visser Three didn't even slow down.  It was like he hadn't even felt the hits.

Parker quickly checked his heads-up display, and groaned inwardly as the damage readout displayed that the damage done by his bullets had been divided up between each of the Visser's morphs.  The bullets had connected.  It was simply that each individual version of him had only taken an almost negligible amount of damage.  Pinpricks.  His bullets were nothing more than pinpricks.

"Well then," he said, as he reached for his energy sword, and activated it.  The Visser was closing fast, surprisingly fast for such a large creature.  Parker slashed his sword at the Visser as soon as he was within range, but the holographic variety of forms threw off his aim, as he couldn't see which one he needed to hit.  Visser Three skirted the sword blow, and viciously set upon Parker, digging a massive variety of claws and teeth into his armor.  His armor hissed and creaked, but managed to hold.  It was Spartan armor, after all.

Parker rolled to the side as the Visser lowered a massive clawed tentacle-hand, obviously intending to pick him up, and as he sprung back to his feet he scored a hit with his sword.  The Visser roared in dozens of alien voices, a thin charred scar quickly appearing on his skin.

Angered at the nuisance, he loosed a rain of what looked like flaming needles at Parker.  They were too closely spaced to dodge, so he threw his bubble shield around himself.  The needles were harmlessly vaporized as they passed through the force field.

Baffled, the Visser reached a tentative limb towards the shield, and grinned a savage monstrous grin as he realized that it only deflected projectiles.  It provided no barrier to his claws and teeth.

But Parker was ready for him.  The Spartan slashed again with his sword as the Visser drew close to the shield to investigate.  This time, he managed to hit higher up on the arm-tentacle-leg-whatever, and did a bit more damage.  The Visser instinctively recoiled from the pain, and Parker used the distraction to dart out of his shield and throw a fragmentation grenade.  As soon as he had thrown it, he executed a sideways roll back into the safety of his shield.

The Visser quickly stepped back from the grenade, but not in time to protect himself from the shrapnel.   The grenade exploded, almost directly in Visser Three's face, but most of the shrapnel just bounced harmlessly off of the Visser's seemingly impenetrable armor.

Suddenly, from behind him, a rocket flew towards the Visser's fractured alien morph.  As it exploded in a fireball against his fortified mass, he gave a sharp screech of surprise, and turned one of his many heads to evaluate the new threat.  There were more of these irritating creatures?

"You looked like you could use a hand, sir," Gary called out to Parker as he aimed his rocket launcher for another shot.  The rest of the Yankee Squad quickly fanned out around the Visser, staying far enough back that he couldn't reach them with his claws, but they could still easily hit him with their guns.  They each positioned themselves near a tree to duck behind for cover, they pulled out their favored weapons, and started shooting.

The Visser, of course, had projectiles of his own.  He began throwing fire, acid, needles, and hybridized combinations thereof, in all directions, towards each of the Spartans.  They dodged most of the hits, but every now and then Parker could hear the sound of sizzling armor and could smell the hint of burning metal as one of the Visser's attacks connected.

An acidic blob grazed past Parker's helmet, sizzling an oblong hole across the visor over his right eye.  Panicking, he yanked off his helmet.  Suddenly feeling vulnerable, he ducked behind a tree and anxiously waited for the sizzling to stop, and as soon as he could he quickly put his damaged helmet back on.  The heads-up display was gone, but he could still see through the hole in the side of the helmet.

The Hork-Bajir guards, which had stayed out of the way during most of the battle, were now circling through the forest, hoping to surprise the Spartans.  But there was nowhere the Hork-Bajir could hide so as to be out of sight of all six Spartans, and so Sally quickly spotted them.  She radioed the rest of his team, "Look sharp, Hork-Bajir on your back."

The bladed aliens attacked, forcing the Spartans to defend themselves.  Each battle was brief, only a few shots to the head and the Hork-Bajir went down.  Parker felt a pang of guilt as he remembered the naive innocence of the Hork-Bajir from the series, but then he reminded himself that these were only programs on a computer.

Visser Three took advantage of the brief distraction his guards had provided.  He shot two huge missiles, sharp and orange and the size of traffic cones.  Parker narrowly dodged the one that had been intended for him, feeling the wind from it as it passed by.  But he heard Shaft cry out in pain.

Parker looked in Shaft's direction, and to his horror he saw the gigantic spike lodged into his second-in-command's torso, the wound smoking slightly as acidic green liquid oozed from the object.

The Visser crowed in triumph, while Parker rushed to Shaft's side.  He knew Shaft was a program, but he was more than just a program.  Shaft mattered, to Parker.  They had fought side by side in countless battles against the Covenant.  They had shared stories of Reach, and of earth.  Shaft was a fellow Spartan.  He was a friend.

The other Spartans, trained to stay focused no matter what, kept their weapons trained on the Visser while Parker tended to Shaft.  Not that any of them could have done much if he had decided to attack Parker anyway, but the Visser seemed to be letting the two Spartans have their moment.  The abomination even laughed at the scene, obviously enjoying seeing an enemy die.  Sith growled, and shot off a few rounds of his shotgun, just out of spite.  The Visser didn't even seem to notice.

"Don't die, don't die," Parker pleaded with Shaft.  "You can't die.  Just hold on until we can get you to the rest of RAF.  They can fix this."  But he looked at the wound, and knew that nothing was going to save Shaft.

Shaft coughed weakly, but managed to bring his hand up in a salute, which Parker quickly returned.  "It was an honor to serve by your side, Parker," Shaft said, his voice rasping.  "Do not mourn me.  I owe the very fact of my existence to you.  You created me.  So, when all is said and done, I must still exist, somewhere within you."

With that, his body fell limp.  After a few seconds, he began to fade, like a ghost.  Within a matter of moments, he had simply vanished, like he had never been there in the first place.  The massive spike that had killed him, clattered uselessly to the ground.  Parker put a hand over his own heart, and closed his eyes for a few seconds.  Shaft would not be forgotten.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Hextuple post?  This is just getting ridiculous now. 

Chapter Forty

The Visser, meanwhile, was finished with being nice.  Parker came back to his senses just in time to dodge a fireball, its heat searing his face through the hole in his visor.

Seething with fury, Parker threw a plasma grenade, and then another and another.  The Visser shook off the three blasts, like a dog shaking off insects.

But the constant barrage of the Spartans' firepower was finally beginning to take its toll on the Visser.  His movements were halting now, his mounting pain visibly forcing him to move more and more tenderly.  He roared in frustration, as the Spartans continued to nimbly dodge his own attacks.

Seeing his weakness, the Spartans doubled their efforts, firing volley after volley at the monster.  But Parker noticed something shift within the distorted jumble of forms.  Something was shrinking, and shifting in color to blue.

"What the . . . " Sally said over her comm, confused at what she was seeing on her heads-up display.  "He's healing!  How is he healing?"

Parker smiled, feeling triumphant.  "He's demorphing!"

He watched, hoping for the Visser to make himself vulnerable, but soon he realized that they would have no such luck.  "Wait, no, only one of his forms is demorphing.  He's healing himself, without becoming vulnerable!"

Within a few minutes, the Visser had partially demorphed and remorphed, repairing a good percentage of the damage that the Spartans had managed to inflict.  The current strategy wasn't going to work, Parker realized, when he could easily heal faster than the Spartans could hurt him.  Parker cursed, and looked around the meadow as he tried to figure out a new plan.

Suddenly, he saw it.  Of course!

"The Blade ship!" Parker called, pointing to the Visser's craft, abandoned in the heat of the battle.  The other Spartans immediately halted their barrage against the Visser, and they all sprinted towards the ship.  It was then that the Visser realized his fatal mistake.

<Fools!> the Visser shouted to his crew inside the ship.  <Take off, take off!>

The engines made a humming sound as they slowly warmed up, but the ship didn't have time to take off before the Spartans could get there.  The hatch was closed, but a blast from Gary's rocket launcher quickly took care of that, and the five Spartans quickly piled through the new opening.

The Visser's monstrous morph quickly proved to be a disadvantage, as he found he was too large to follow the Spartans through the hole.  <Open the hatch!> he roared.  <Let me in!>

Cassie, no relation to the Animorph, shot the control panel next to the hatch, making sure the Visser couldn't follow, and she turned her attention to the Taxxon crew.  Or what was left of the Taxxon crew, after only a few shots from Sith and Parker.  It was almost laughable how easy they were to kill.  As the Spartans watched, the Taxxon bodies became ghosts and disappeared.

Having been trained on Bug fighters, the controls of the Blade ship weren't too difficult to figure out, as the Spartans swiftly manned the now-empty stations.  Parker took weapons, while Gary took the helm.  The engines continued to hum louder and louder, as the Visser powerlessly watched from outside.

"Look out!" Cassie called, as a fireball flew across the interior of the ship.  The Spartans dodged, and the flames harmlessly blew past, leaving a black mark against a wall.  Sith set up a bubble shield directly in front of the opening into the ship, blocking Visser Three's attacks.

<You will pay for this!> the Visser raged.  <You filthy, lesser species!  You dare to steal my ship?  MY ship?!>

"Yeah, we dare," Sith sneered at him.  "Who's the lesser species, huh?"

The ship was at full power now, and Gary skillfully eased it into the air, while the Visser struggled to cling to the outside.  He eventually lost his purchase, and fell back to the ground with a thunderous boom.

Parker slowly, and with calculated coldness, aimed the ship's dracon cannon at the Visser, now a helpless target.  Feeling completely numb inside, no rage, no sadness, nothing, he squeezed the trigger, watching the red beam lance towards the monster.  He held it, letting the beam burn and burn.

Even the Visser, for all his power, could not tolerate a sustained barrage of the Blade ship's magnitude.  The dracon's searing heat began to eat through his multitude of morphs, as he screamed in thought-speak anguish.

After a few minutes, there was nothing left but a charred crater where the Visser had been.  It was over.

Parker's hands were shaking.  He couldn't believe what he'd just done.  He ought to feel victorious, triumphant.  But he didn't.  He just felt hollow.

"No mercy for murderers," he said to the blackened crater that was all that was left of Visser Three.  But even that reassurance didn't make him feel any better about what he had done.

Was this really what war felt like?  Jake had been right.  War wasn't about glory, after all.  War was just slaughter.

But, as bad as Parker felt right now, the worst part was that he knew there was even worse yet to come.  Phoenix had been right.  If Visser Three had been this powerful, then the monstrous Pootang, with all his forms and all his legends, would be so much stronger.

If Visser Three, with only a few dozen monstrous morphs, could overpower six Spartans . . . and, Parker had to face it, the Visser would have defeated them if not for the edge provided by his own Blade ship . . . then what could a monster of thousands of forms, famed across the forum for his violent tenacity for destruction and carnage, be capable of?

[DinosaurNothlit]

Chapter Forty-one

Goom was sitting alone in RAF's control room, a pencil in one hand, and one of the books of RAF's code in the other.  It was certainly nice, to actually be able to pick up the books in his hands.  Not having to use his feet as he'd done before.  Cloaky's glitch, which was what allowed Goom to be in his human form at that moment, was an amazing discovery.  One that he wished he'd thought of sooner.

As he twiddled the pencil in his fingers, he stared at the existing code of RAF, trying to think of what he could add to it.  The particular book he was looking at contained RAF's firewall, the forum's security system, encoded in words on the paper.

It was something that, once again, he was truly sorry he hadn't thought of sooner.  If he had only realized in time, that RAF had been so poorly defended against hacking attempts from the outside, maybe he could have protected Richard.  Maybe he could have saved Estelore and Noelle and Aquilai and Tony and Marie.

Well, it was too late for any of that now.  Now his task was to make sure nobody else got hacked or downloaded, ever again.  To keep all the RAFians safe inside the forum.  The Swiss research facility was still out there, and what was to stop them from doing the same thing again?

But how to do it?  How to make sure RAF was safe?  That was the question.

Goom knew he had the option of cutting RAF off from the rest of internet entirely, and simply uploading the entire forum to a hidden private server.  That would certainly protect everyone.  It would protect the RAFians from nearly anything that could possibly happen.

And, perhaps even better, it would be a way to keep Pootang semi-contained, in the event of his escape.  That way, they could at least restrict the monster to RAF, as opposed to potentially letting him rampage unchecked throughout the entirety of the internet.

But, if Goom resorted to those measures, then the RAFians would be totally cut-off, unable to 'surf or even 'glitch.  They would be trapped within RAF's borders.  Of course, there were plenty of worse places to be trapped.  But still, best to avoid that restriction so long as there was still a choice.

Nevertheless, Goom glanced ponderingly at a separate stack of papers, the papers which he'd used to work out the lengthy blocks of code that it would take to totally remove RAF from the internet, with a few extra measures added to make sure nothing could possibly go wrong.  No, he reminded himself, looking away from the papers and back towards his book.  That could only be used as a last resort.  It would still be a few hours before Richard got back with the other innerworlders.  Goom still had time to think of a better solution.

But he wasn't making any headway just staring at the book.  He'd run up against a wall, unable to think of any good way to improve RAF's security without taking unacceptable risks, without impeding or endangering RAFians.  He had to be extremely careful, he knew, because a coding mistake might not just cause some harmless glitch.  To an innerworlder, a serious glitch could be dangerous, even deadly.  He had to know exactly what he was doing.  It was a lot of pressure, to say the least.

He decided to take a walk, refresh his mind by taking his thoughts off of the problem for a while.  Besides, he knew he shouldn't lock himself off from the rest of the forum for too long.  As a staff member, he had to make sure he stayed available if problems arose.

Even away from the data room, it was difficult to get his mind cleared.  There was just too much to think about.  If-then statements and do-while loops were spinning around his brain, as he continued to try to find something he had missed, some critical element that could protect RAF from the outside world, without limiting RAFians' freedom.

Goom was broken from his thoughts, as he noticed a pair of female Andalites striding purposefully toward him, each of them looking angry at the other.  Yep, he was right, he thought, as he readied himself to hear their complaint.  RAF was in constant need of its staff members.

Something was odd, though.  Goom knew, of course, that sometimes it could be hard to tell individuals of some of the alien species apart, and one Andalite could look very much like another.  But he had thought he was getting pretty good at identifying each RAFian.  Yet, these two Andalites seemed to be perfectly identical.  And he couldn't think of any RAFian who had a twin.

"Alic?" he asked, recognizing her, but his gaze flicking between one and the other, unsure who to make eye-contact with.  "What's going on?"

The two Alics stalked up to Goom, their arms crossed, each of them just barely able to contain their hostility towards the other.

<This, this impostor-> one of them fumed.

<She's the impostor!> the other interrupted.  <I'm Alic!>

<I'm Alic!> the first one exclaimed.  <Don't listen to her!>

Goom held up his hands, trying to silence them both.  "Can one of you just rationally . . . "  He blinked, his sentence trailing off when he noticed that there was now only one of them.  The other had vanished without a trace.

"Huh?  Okay, that was weird," Goom noted.  "What was that?"

The remaining Alic looked just as confused as Goom was.  <I have no idea.  She just, showed up, out of nowhere.  I ran into her just a few minutes ago.  She really thought she was me, too.>  She narrowed her eyes, scowling as she recalled why she was angry.  <She knew about Jack.  She knew everything about him.  She knew things that only I know.  How is that possible?>

"Oh!" Goom said, laughing as he figured it out.  "I think I know what happened.  You know how, sometimes, when you look at the bottom of the RAF main page, and it lists the users logged in, and every now and then it lists a user twice?  That must be what happened.  You just got listed twice.  And then the page must've gotten refreshed and that cleared up the duplicate."

< . . . Oh,> Alic said simply.  <That would explain it, wouldn't it?  Still, that was weird.  I hope it doesn't happen again.>

"Me too," Goom noted, as he immediately began to ponder what effect this new phenomenon would have on RAF's firewall.  At least it had to be a rare occurrence, if nobody had noticed duplicated users before now.  So that was probably good news, at least.

But, on the other hand, maybe it only seemed rare because the duplicates had always missed seeing one another.  RAF was a big place, after all.  How would they ever know, if somebody suddenly had a short-lived doppleganger, so long as they never ran into one another?

Alic and Goom went their separate ways again, Goom heading back to the data room, and Alic going back towards the General Board.  The clock was swiftly ticking until Richard's return, and now Goom now had yet another variable to deal with.  This probably wouldn't affect the site's security, but with the way everything was linked to everything else, it was hard to be sure.

He hated to just give up and fall back on his backup plan, but at this point he really didn't see much other choice.  He had already been beating his head against a wall, metaphorically speaking, for several hours, without being any closer to an answer.  There simply wasn't much room to improve RAF's security, without changing the site's parameters so drastically as to make it impossible to predict its effects on the RAFians.  No, it was safer to just break the connection.  That way, the fundamental character of RAF could be preserved.

And, once the most immediate danger had passed, they could continue to look for a more permanent solution.  It wasn't like they would have to stay cut-off from the internet forever, after all.

Goom got to the data room, and once again picked up the stack of paper with the code that would sever RAF's connection to the internet.  It was tempting to just do it right now.  Just write in the code, make the changes, and breathe a sigh of relief.  But he needed to wait.  He had to, at the very least, wait until the moment that the missing RAFians arrived.

In the meantime, he realized, he would probably need to warn the RAFians of what he was planning to do.  Give everyone a chance to 'glitch into their favored form, and get whatever they needed from the rest of the internet.

He sighed, and headed off to Estrid's profile thread.  He had a mirror-wave call to make.

[Blazing Angel]

Finally caught up. Holly insane plot twist dino.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Thanks, Blaze.  Oh, but just wait.

Chapter Forty-two

"Huh.  So it is true," Gaz commented, as she squinted her eyes to see Aquilai waving at her.  He was one of several specks against the blank canvas of white, barely visible, several miles away.  She turned to look over her shoulder, and she could see exactly the same arrangement of specks in the direction she had come from.

As it turned out, there wasn't really much of anything to do in that blank empty whiteness of the storage disk.  So Gaz had struck out to test what Aquilai had said, about the space being an endless loop.  And it would appear that it was.  Hooray.

Gaz was regretting her decision, as she continued to walk across the blank plain.  The utterly blank empty space, with nothing to look at for a point of reference, had been nauseatingly disconcerting at first, but she was slowly adjusting to the total lack of a horizon.  Still, every now and then, she had to close her eyes and shake her head, fighting the feeling of faintness that would overwhelm her if she stared at her blank white surroundings for too long.  It was like having white painted right onto your eyeballs.

It had taken surprisingly little time for the former outerworlders to adjust to the weirdness of the other RAFians, though.  Even with an Andalite and a talking fox in the group, they all still just seemed like . . . RAFians.  That was really all they were, human or Andalite or Time Lord or whatever.

Of course, it had helped that Gaz had had some time to get used to the idea, as an outerworlder.  But, then again, she had been getting used to weirdness a long time before that.  She was a RAFian, too, after all.

She wondered how much longer it would be until something happened.  She still didn't know what was happening with Richard.  But he hadn't appeared here, so that was a good sign.  It meant he must still be out there somewhere.  By now, surely, he would have found the storage device and escaped the facility with it.  Either that, or . . . Gaz didn't want to think about the alternative.

So he must have escaped.  Perhaps he was in an airplane on his way home right now, the device in hand, flying back into the states, where he would deliver the missing RAFians and the captured outerworlders back to the forum.

Back to the forum, Gaz thought, briefly wondering why she had chosen that phrase in her mind.  Back to a place she had never been?  So, why did it feel so much like coming home?

She wondered what RAF would look like, as a real place.  She tried to imagine the forums as buildings, and wondered what would be inside each one.  Perhaps she could ask one of the innerworlders, they would know what RAF looked like.  Yes, she would do that as soon as she got back.

Gaz was, finally, getting close to the others again.  They saw her, and apparently decided to make her job a little easier by walking towards her while she walked towards them.

"How was it?" Aquilai said with a slight grin, already knowing the answer from Gaz's tired expression.  "Do you believe me now?"

"I didn't not believe you, I was just bored," Gaz replied.  "Hey, while I was walking, I got to thinking.  What does RAF actually look like?"

<Well, picture the forums, except that they're actually buildings,> Noelle started to explain.  <Long and narrow and tall, about the same shape as what the boards look like on the website, but bigger.>

"And inside each one, is something that represents that board," Marie continued where Noelle left off.  "Let's see.  The Roleplaying Board is a seemingly infinite space filled with planets and galaxies, with a glass ship that will take you wherever you choose.  The Fanfiction Board, then, is pretty much just like the Roleplaying Board, with the only difference being that the glass ship there doesn't have a door, and so the worlds are sealed off and you can't actually interact with them, you just watch the stories play out.  The Animorphs Board is pretty much a random collection of scenes from the books, all run together.  You can sometimes find the characters from the books, too, which is cool."

"The Bored Board is an arcade," Aquilai said, continuing Marie's train of thought.  "The Projects Board is a construction area, it's all indoors, but there's plastic tarps and wet paint and scaffolding everywhere.  The Social Board is a dorm or a hotel.  The Media Board is like a bunch of auditoriums, run together.  The General Board, well, the General Board has a lot of different things, so there's places there that look like just about anywhere."

Marie looked up, pondering if either of them had missed any boards.  "Oh, and don't ask what's in the D-Lounge.  You probably don't want to know."  The RAFians all laughed at that.

But suddenly, their laughter was cut off by a loud humming noise that filled the entire whiteness around them.  The space itself seemed to vibrate before their eyes, even though it was impossible to say what was vibrating within the perfectly uniform white of the space around them.

"What's going on?" Estelore wondered.

The RAFians looked around, and to their surprise they could see the whiteness of their prison breaking down, like the static of a television behind which something else was slowly becoming visible.  At first, they didn't know whether to be excited or terrified.  But then, they all recognized those familiar buildings, the forums of RAF.

"We're home!" Tony exclaimed.  "Oh, man, it is so good to see something that isn't white!"

As RAF became clearer and clearer against the whiteness, Gaz could see the crowd that had gathered in front of the buildings, as though they were all waiting for something.

And of course they were waiting.  The RAFians were almost as excited to see their missing friends as their friends were to see them.  Steph bounced happily in excitement.

Finally, the forum snapped fully into reality.  The blank white canvas of the storage unit was now completely gone.

Maybe it had just been their imaginations, but the RAFians could swear that they briefly saw that same strange vibration that they had seen moments before.  The entire forum seemed to shiver, ever so slightly, in an expanding wave that pulsed outward from the epicenter of the missing RAFians.

Whatever it had been, though, they almost immediately forgot about it.  The crowd around the newly returned RAFians was surging forward, everybody wanting to hug their missing friends at once.

One of the RAFians at the front of the crowd was a familiar face to Gaz, and even her feline features couldn't keep Gaz from recognizing her.  "Jamie!" Gaz exclaimed, as Stalker ran forward.  They collided in a hug.

"It is so good to see you!" Gaz said enthusiastically.  But Gaz noticed something was odd as she talked.  She ran her tongue over her teeth, to find that they had become fangs.

Stalker laughed.  "Hey, you're a RAFian, now.  Welcome to the forum!"

Gaz looked around, still taking in the incredible sight of the forum around her.  A Canadian goose was standing next to her, looking as perplexed at his wings as she had been at her own fangs.  Myitt looked perplexed, staring up into the air, like she was thinking about something she had never thought of before.  Or, perhaps, like she had suddenly become a Yeerk inside her own brain.

Suddenly, Richard appeared in the midst of the crowd.  He simply appeared, one second nothing, and then the next second, there he was.

"Did it work?" he asked, his voice a weird monotone, like he wasn't speaking to anybody in particular, but rather addressing the entire crowd.

Somebody that Gaz recognized as Goom from the pictures she'd seen of him, gave Richard a thumbs-up.  "You did it.  The download worked.  They're here!"  He held up a book labeled 'Firewall' and added, "And the new security measures just went online, too.  As of right now, we are cut off from the rest of the internet."

The former outerworlders were hugged again and again, by RAFians that had missed them and by RAFians that they had never met.  They talked and laughed, glad to be among so many friends.

But then, suddenly, without warning, the sounds of elation and merriment at the back of the crowd began turning to shouts of terror.  A familiar hooded figure was purposefully making his way through the hustle and bustle, the Realm Walker's own shouting lost amidst the building screams of the other RAFians, as one by one each of them heard what he was saying, and began to panic.

As Cloak worked his way closer to the newly returned RAFians and Richard, the other RAFians quickly began to disperse in all directions.  They were all running in panic from the moment each of them had heard his dire message.

He finally reached Richard, and said the four simple words that had instilled so much fear in all the RAFians.  Then he swirled his cloak and vanished.

"Pootang's cage is empty."

[Blazing Angel]

How do you tell whether a goose is Canadian or not?

[DinosaurNothlit]

Canadian geese look like this, that's how.

Chapter Forty-three

"What?!" Tony shouted.  "He's gone?  How?  Where?"  But Cloaky wasn't there, and Tony was speaking to empty space.

"That shimmer we saw before, what was that?" Aquilai wondered.  He looked around at the other RAFians, as if to confirm that he really had seen it and he wasn't just going crazy.  "Did that have something to do with this?"

"Oh god," Goom said, suddenly going pale.  "I didn't take into account what else might have been on that storage disk!  Something on there must have interfered with the new security.  If there was extra code that I didn't account for . . . oh god."  He went silent for a moment, his mind spinning with the implications.

"If there was extra code on that disk, then the moment that RAF went offline, other things could have gone offline too," Goom went on.  "Programs could have vanished and then reappeared somewhere else.  I thought I'd protected against any chance of that happening.  But I didn't, I couldn't account for everything.  And now . . . this is all my fault."

The RAFians, all the ones that were left, the ones that hadn't panicked and run, all turned around sharply as they heard a familiar fractured scream.

It was him.  Nothing else sounded like that.

They took off running, against every instinct, towards the sound.  It wasn't hard to find where Pootang had gone.  There was already a trail of destruction through RAF, parts of buildings reduced to debris, scattered piles of those broken-link red 'x' symbols left in the monster's wake.  The Roleplaying Board had holes through its walls, through which the star-strewn blackness inside was visible.

Newbies and lurkers hid in the x-cube-strewn rubble wherever they could, much too frightened to think of going to the armory.  The more experienced RAFians, meanwhile, were slowly regrouping, gathering, following the trail of rampage, towards the monster.  They each knew what they had to do, and they steeled themselves, ready to do their duty.  As ready as they could be.

Pootang towered over the RAFians, an enormous multi-layered yellow behemoth, easily several hundred feet tall.  He seemed to have grown even larger now that he was out of his cage, but it was hard to say whether that was because he was actually bigger than he had been before, or because it was just easier to see his true size against the backdrop of the buildings that only barely matched him in height.

Either way, though, he was a terrifying sight.  The RAFians hid in the shadows, afraid to even look at the beast.  His fractured form seemed to hurt to look at, as the mind struggled to come to grips with the impossible reality of his very existence.

Pootang roared in anger, but with nothing in sight to be angry at.  So he simply howled his fury at the sky, as he dug his claws into the General Board.  Blocks of polished sky blue stone fell to the ground, making sounds like thunder as they impacted the floor below.

It was plain to see that something had to be done, before the monstrous creature could destroy all of RAF.  But, now that the time was upon them, none of the RAFians seemed to know what to do.  They knew that they had trained and trained for this very moment.  Yet, all of a sudden, that training seemed useless.

Had they really thought that any of them stood a chance against this monstrosity?  What were they supposed to do?  What could they do, what could they possibly do, that wouldn't merely get themselves killed?

And the seven former outerworlders had even more reason to fear.  They had only just, moments ago, become their RAFsonas.  They had never even practiced with their own powers, much less trained for combat.  What could they do?

Richard stepped forward, registering no sign that he was afraid.  Of course, what did he have to fear, when he was sitting safely at his computer?

In the real world, Richard began to type, while his character would act out the words he had written on his screen.  It was fortunate that he had never roleplayed before, because it meant that his character was a blank slate, free to be given whatever powers he chose.

On the forum, his avatar raised his hands, channeling energy towards his palms, like he was extracting light from the air around him.  The two orbs of energy seemed to grow and grow, until they merged into one and doubled in size.  Finally, when it was nearly as big as Richard himself was tall, he released it, sending it flying across the distance toward Pootang.

The bright ball of light seemed to shrink away to nothing in the distance, dwarfed by the size of the creature.  A puff of smoke could just barely be seen, trailing upward from Pootang's shoulder.  He flicked his ears, and turned towards Richard's direction, but he seemed more perplexed by the attack than anything else.  He scanned the area around him, but he didn't look down, and he missed seeing any of the RAFians.  Confused, he quickly lost interest, and licked his fur where the orb had hit.

"Can't you just type something like, 'And then Pootang died'?" Tony asked, disappointed by the anticlimactic display.  "At least try it."

"I did.  Just now," Richard said.  "It didn't work, nothing happened."

They were interrupted by the abrupt sound of gunfire, as Parker and his Spartans arrived on the scene.  Those that had snipers, trained them on the target, and began to shoot.  Gary used his rocket launcher, firing missile after missile towards Pootang.  If any of them were afraid at all, then that fear was hidden beneath their helmets.

The arrival of the Spartans seemed to embolden some of the other RAFians.  Goom looked like he had suddenly remembered something, and then he fired off his dracon beam in Pootang's direction.  The sound of his beam was answered by a chorus of other dracons and shredders as their firepower joined his.

Pootang growled, but it was a sound of annoyance, not anger or pain.  He looked down, and for the first time he noticed the RAFians.  He roared down at them, finally finding a target for his rage.

The RAFians scurried out of his way as he thundered towards them, running for their lives.  But Pootang was surprisingly fast for such a colossal creature, and within a few strides he was upon them.

He picked someone up, someone that none of the RAFians recognized, a newbie.  The newbie screamed, but he had to have known that nobody could save him.  Pootang seemed to grin, a rabid, feral expression, and took the newbie between his teeth.  He shook his head, and with a sickening snap the screaming stopped.

Pootang, seeming almost bored, let the mangled body fall to the ground.  The newbie's body lay there, bloody.  He began to fade away to nothing, and within moments, he was gone.

Some of the RAFians waited, as though they expected him to reappear at any moment, just respawn and be as good as new.  Nobody had, thus far, known how death worked for innerworlders.  Could those inside the internet be killed?  Would they really be permanently destroyed?

As they waited, with no sign that the newbie was coming back, the answer to that became all too clear.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Chapter Forty-four

Dino roared, trying to sound braver than she felt.  She had never been a fighter.  She had never been good at anything violent, other than video games where she knew the hurt wasn't real.  This was different.  This was real.  And, despite all the training and drills, she didn't feel at all ready for this.

Dino stood, frozen in place, as she stared up in terror at the creature.  It was easily as tall as a skyscraper, towering over RAF.  It was a fractured menagerie of forms, a thousand beings all moving as one.  A kaleidoscope of impossible holograms, something that had no place in reality.  But, as it swung a claw at a tiny figure flying by, it was plain to see that the monster was solid.  The figure crumpled to the ground, and Dino's breath caught in her chest, hoping whoever that had been was still alive.

A green bar floated in the air above the creature, and Dino almost laughed at the ridiculousness as she realized what it was.  A health bar.  Like you might see in a video game.  Dino's amusement quickly died, however, when she realized that the bar was still completely green.  She squinted, looking for even a trace of red, but there was none to be seen.  All of the RAFians fighting Pootang had, thus far, done no damage to the creature at all.

A Dome ship hovered over the scene, firing low-level shots at Pootang.  Dino knew that Dome ships had the power to destroy planets, but clearly whoever was up there was worried about hitting RAFians in the melee.  Bug fighters, Andalite fighters, and a pair of Blade ships buzzed about in the wake of the Dome ship, adding their firepower to the fight.  But Pootang seemed only mildly irritated by all the laser beams.  He was twitching his pointed ears like he had an itch, as he growled in his fractured voice at the pests.

As Dino came closer to the battle, she could see gouts of flame shooting up towards the creature, from three different directions.  Some of the flames were bright red fireballs, lighting up the sky like fireworks.  Adjacent to the crimson display were fires that looked dark and hellish, the flames themselves almost blending into their own black smoke.  From still another direction came blazing beams of white, like bright sunlight.  Phoenix, Demos, and Estelore, respectively, Dino realized.

Less visible against the bright spectacle of the fires, there were other projectiles.  There were the narrower beams of handheld shredders and dracons, making their laser noises as they fired continuously, stopping only when one ran out of its charge, its owner darting away from the battle to recharge the firearm.

A silvery beam of ice blasted like a firehose against the wall of yellow, Blue's sustained blast failing to freeze anything more than the tips of the creature's fur.  A machine-gun barrage of sharp icicles bounced off of the monster, and piled up at its feet.  Seal, back in her seal body, stayed vigilantly at a careful distance, avoiding being seen.  A column of earth and stone fired forth like a sand-blasting stream, except that each grain of 'sand' was actually a boulder.  Deep craters were quickly forming near wherever Cloaky stood, as he pulled up the ground beneath the forum to use as weapons.

Pootang's skin twitched, like a horse annoyed by biting flies, and he roared menacingly at the RAFians.  He stepped forward, and several of the dracons and shredders stopped for a moment as the RAFians scurried out of his way, retreated to a safer distance, and resumed fire.

Parker, or at least one of the Spartans, since Dino had a hard time telling them apart, seemed to have thought of a new strategy.  He was riding atop one of the Bug fighters, the ship carefully holding almost stationary in the air, while the Spartan fired his gun at Pootang.  Dino noted that he was the only one who could keep firing whenever Pootang moved, since the Bug fighter could simply move under him.

The other RAFians saw him, and seemed to think this was a good idea.  Several Bug fighters and Andalite fighters landed, and the RAFians on the ground quickly climbed aboard, some of them looking nervous as they balanced on the outside of the craft.

Fortunately, at least, almost every RAFian who owned a ship had now trained enough to be competent at flying it.  Nevertheless, Dino was nervous as she watched the RAFians ascend precariously into the air atop those metal platforms, held up by nothing other than their own feet.

Within moments, the RAFians were all in place on top of various ships, and the barrage resumed.  Fire and ice and earth blasted at the creature, accompanying the laser fire of the ships beneath their feet.  Pootang, beginning to get more and more frustrated, chased after the fighters.  The craft were limited in their movements, forced to go slower than normal, so as not to throw off their precariously balanced riders.  Some of them only dodged Pootang's claws by a stomach-wrenchingly narrow margin.

A Blade ship, one of the few ships big enough to support Dino, suddenly surprised her by landing nearby.  <Hey!> Russell shouted to her.  <Climb on.  I think I've got an idea.  You look ready to join the fight, so do you want to?>

Dino hesitated, anxious.  The truth was, she was torn.  She wanted to help RAF, and yes, she had been feeling guilty that there wasn't much she could do to Pootang from the ground.  That guilt had probably been what Russell had been picking up on.

<How?> she asked, as she unsteadily clambered on top of the narrow Blade ship.  <I don't have any long-range attacks, and he's too dangerous to attack at close range.>

<Not necessarily,> Russell noted, as the ship's engines warmed up for takeoff.  <You just have to do the right sort of close range attack.>

It was then that Dino noticed Bear standing on top of another ship, an Andalite fighter that was approaching Pootang from behind.  Wait, what?  What was Bear doing, riding on a ship?  Surely he had to know that his lighting wouldn't have much effect on a Pikachu.  And, even if his powers would have done anything, it wasn't like he even had that much control over the lightning in the first place.

As Dino watched, the ship underneath Bear began to accelerate, faster and faster towards the monster.  Bear hunkered down against the metal plating, struggling to hold on.  The ship was mere yards away from a break-neck collision, when it suddenly stopped in midair.  But Bear didn't.

"YEAAAH!" Dino could hear Bear yell through his translator, loud even at this distance, as he flew recklessly through the air.  Dino's breath caught in her chest, as she watched the Kodiak bear arc through the sky.  The sight probably would have been hilarious.  If it hadn't been so insanely dangerous.

If Bear missed . . .

With a somewhat rubbery thud, Bear collided with Pootang.  He immediately dug his claws and teeth into the creature's back, holding on while he bit and scratched, gouging the impenetrable flesh as best he could.  Pootang screeched, and tried to throw off the bear, but Bear was holding tightly, and Pootang couldn't reach his own back with his short claws.

<So, uh, you've heard of the 'fastball special,' right?> Russell said to Dino.  She had been so distracted by worrying for Bear that she hadn't even noticed that the Blade ship she'd been standing on had now lifted off into the air.  The craft was creaking slightly under her massive weight, as it hovered upward.

<No,> Dino said flatly, suddenly realizing what it was that Russell had in mind.  <No no no nonono.  No way.  There is no way!  Holycrap, you may not have noticed this but I am a dinosaur.  I am a freaking Ankylotyrannus, and those do not fly.>

<Neither do bears,> Russell said with a morbid laugh as he guided his Blade ship to circle around Pootang, getting a good distance away as he approached from behind.  <Come on, with all that armor, you'll be alright.  Probably.  And besides, these are desperate times.  You know, desperate measures, and all that.  For RAF?>

<For RAF,> Dino reluctantly agreed, realizing Russell was right.  <For RAF!> she repeated, this time with a bit more conviction in her thought-speak voice.  Then, trying to summon some of Rachel's courage, she added, <Let's do it.>

[Blazing Angel]

Rather than helping the other fire makers, I am likely stabbing in the ankle.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Chapter Forty-five

The Blade ship accelerated, picking up speed, faster and faster.  Dino did her best to hold onto the rivets with her stubby arms, ducking her body as low as she could, using the friction of her own body against the metal to hold herself steady, as the ship beneath her rushed recklessly forward.

She was making little squeaking noises that she hadn't known that her dinosaur voice could make.  She was terrified out of her mind.  Why had she ever agreed to this?

But it was much too late to back out.  Pootang was zooming larger and larger in front of Dino's eyes, and just before the ship seemed about to crash, Dino felt it suddenly jerk out from under her.

<AAAAAAH!> she screamed as she suddenly took off from the ship, flying uncontrollably through the air.  She could feel her immense momentum flinging her forward, the mass of her body making her nearly unstoppable, like she was steamrolling through the air.

She braced herself for impact.  This was going to hurt.

WHAM.  She roared in pain and dug her talons into the steeply tilted wall of fur, desperate not to bounce off as her momentum reversed direction.  Then it became a struggle not to fall, as gravity once again made its influence known.

Dino opened her jaws wide and bit down on the creature that was now under her feet, holding on for dear life.  Pootang's skin was tough, but Dino could feel her teeth penetrating deeper and deeper within the strange layers of flesh as she stumbled for balance.  She swished her tail back and forth as she fought to find stability.

Pootang roared, and this time Dino was sure she could detect a note of actual pain in his fractured voice.  She was hurting him!  Perhaps not by much, and it certainly wouldn't be enough, but at least it was something.

As Dino bit down harder and harder through the layers upon layers of Pootang's skin, she began to taste blood.  So, the monster could bleed.  That was a start.

But then she realized that the blood was burning hot, like biting into magma, boiling on her tongue.  She tried to spit it out, but it was like she had bitten into a can of pepper spray.  She roared in pain, and let go, shaking her head furiously back and forth as she tried to clear the horrible burn from her mouth.

Her wild movement had unbalanced her, and she began to fall backward, clutching with her talons in a desperate attempt to hold on.

But it was too late.  There was a sudden movement, a shift of the 'ground,' as Pootang swiftly turned around trying once again to reach his back.  It was enough to dislodge her completely, and she plummeted to the ground.

"DINO!" Bear cried out, still holding on higher up on Pootang's back.  "NO!"

Dino fell, and then her world went black.

The next thing Dino could remember, was waking up on the floor of a sterile-looking white-walled room.  She could hear sounds of pain from all around her, and as she looked around she could see mangled bodies lying in hospital cots.

<Where am I?> she managed to mumble to Jess, who was standing over her with her horn glowing as she gently pressed it against Dino's armor.

"You were hurt," Jess said.  "It's a miracle you didn't get killed.  You have Cloaky to thank for that.  And another miracle that the Blade ship's tractor beam was strong enough to get you here to the infirmary.  Dino, dear, what were you thinking?"

<Russell's idea,> Dino said weakly.

"What happened to your mouth?" Jess asked her.  "Your tongue had burn marks on it.  How did that happen?"

<What?> Dino asked, running her tongue over her teeth, trying to feel for damage, confused when she realized her tongue felt fine.  Jess must have already healed it.  Suddenly, in a flash of memory, she recalled what had happened.  <Well, good news is, Pootang can bleed.  Bad news, his blood is acid or something.>

Feeling somewhat better now than she had only moments before, Dino tried to get up.  She suddenly felt dizzy, and realized she wasn't quite well enough to stand just yet, so she settled back down.

"You can just take it easy for a while," Jess reassured her.  "You've done plenty."

Jess moved off to tend to the next patient, leaving Dino to get a better look at her surroundings.  Bear was there, unconscious, but Dino was relieved to see that he was breathing.  She felt a pang of guilt, realizing that it was probably her fault that he was there.  She would bet that her own fall had distracted him, caused him to lose his focus, and that distraction had obviously cost him.  Of course, she knew that it was irrational to blame herself for that.  But she felt badly all the same.

Dino spotted movement in her field of vision, and noticed Blaze.  She suddenly realized that he must have been the flying figure she had seen before, who had been swatted out of the air by Pootang.  Fortunately, he was nearly recovered by now, enough to be fidgeting unwillingly under Rad's care.

"I'm fine, I'm fine!" Dino heard Blaze say.  "Get this thing out of my head, I don't need any more healing!"

"Hold still, Ma'at is not going to hurt you," Rad was reassuring him.  "She just wants to make sure."  Blaze began to scratch angrily at the back of his neck, like he was trying to dig Ma'at out.  Rad sighed, and amended, "Okay, okay, calm down, she's coming out."  She held out a hand to retrieve her counterpart, and, holding the Tok'ra, she moved off to the next patient, while Blaze got up and strode out of the room.

Suddenly, Richard's voice seemed to be coming from everywhere.  Like the voice of god, a voice with no source.  A mass-PM?  Or a bit of clever roleplaying?

"I want everyone who is able, to meet in the armory in five minutes," he said, with emphasis.  "I have a plan."

Dino tried again to stand up, and this time found that she could.  Those four words, the knowledge that Richard had a plan, were all she had needed to find her strength again.  Somehow, that one simple fact made it all worth it.  There was still hope.  RAF wasn't done yet.

Out of the corner of her eye, Dino noticed Steph and Cody, both of them using their powers to tend to RAF's injured.  Steph stepped over next to Cody.  "See?" she commented to him.  "I told you he would learn to be properly dramatic."

[DinosaurNothlit]

Keep an eye out for the link in this chapter! 

Chapter Forty-six

Richard stood at the front of the room, looking back and forth across the crowd of RAFians before him.  The RAFians were all sitting or lying on the metal floor of the armory.  Rather than looking uncomfortable, though, they seemed to be relieved to be resting at all.  The crowd looked back at Richard, the hopeless despair of endless battle already clouding their weary expressions.  But, in Richard's eyes, even though everyone knew his face was only a projected avatar, his pride in his forum seemed somehow to shine through.

"We tried to call out to RAF for warriors," he began, his voice booming out across the assembly.  "A call to arms, a call to fight.  But we were wrong."  He paused for a moment for effect, while the crowd waited patiently in rapt silence.

"We are warriors, true enough," he went on.  "It's a title that we have earned.  Each and every one of us has paid for it in sweat and blood.  But we're more than that.  We are something better than soldiers.  We are RAFians."  There was another pause, this time as he took a deep breath in preparation to continue.

"We are geeks," he stated simply.  RAFians in the crowd looked at one another with raised eyebrows, confused.  "We are nerds.  We are writers.  We are artists," he continued, his voice slowly building in power as he went on.  "We are poets.  We are musicians.   We are explorers, we are storytellers.  We are adventurers, we are visionaries.  We are newbies, and lurkers, and trolls.  We are actors, and directors, and producers."  A few audience members looked around, and noted Mr. Guy nodding in approval at this last part.

"We are kids, we are parents," Richard went on.  "We are teachers, and we are students.  We are the ones at the back of the class, hiding from the world while we create our own.  And we are the ones at the front of the class, waiting for our chance to change history."  The crowd was nodding their heads in agreement, satified smiles flickering on faces as each RAFian registered the truth of Richard's words.

"We are the dreamers.  We are the creators.  We are the architects.  We are the achievers," Richard stated triumphantly.  "We are the authors of our own destiny!  We have each paid that meager fee of our own sanity, and so, like a pact sealed in the blood of spirit, we are RAFians.  We are friends, and we are family."

He cleared his throat, and then spread his hands plaintively.  "Can anyone answer me one simple question.  Who among you is the strongest RAFian?"

"Estelore?" a tentative voice piped up.

<Cloak?> another wondered.

<Blue?>

"Parker?"

"You?"

"No.  Wrong," Richard answered flatly.  "So, answer me this one instead.  Who created Pootang?  Surely, anyone who could create such an unstoppable monster, must be more powerful than the monster itself.  More powerful than anyone could imagine."

"Anna and Ken?" a chorus of skeptical voices wondered.

"Wrong again," Richard corrected.  "Anna and Ken only gave Pootang its very first breath of life.  We all created the fractured being that it is now.  Our words and our thoughts each added to the seed that Ken and Anna had formed.  Ken and Anna gave it spark.  Blue gave it power.  Cloak gave it familiarity.  But we all, each and every one of us, gave it everything that it is.  RAF itself, created Pootang."  The crowd seemed stunned as they slowly realized the deep truth of his words.

"For, you see, there is no strongest RAFian," he went on.  "The sum of us, is stronger than any one of us.  Each and every one of us is powerful, yes.  But, taken together, we are unstoppable.  And here, in this universe of our own creation, there is nothing that we cannot do!"  The whole audience seemed to swell up with pride, hanging onto his every word.

"We, the writers, the creators, the thinkers, we must now create a new child of RAF," Richard finally explained.  "A true child of RAF.  A being born of each of us, to fight for us, by our side.  A champion, to defend our forum.  We must repeat what we did to create the monster that we made.  Not over the course of years, but now within mere hours."  Murmurs went up through the crowd at the plan, RAFians wondering amongst themselves whether this could be done.

"Estelore, Cloaky, Seal, Parker, Phoenix, Demos, Blue, and whoever else wishes to lend their aid, will keep Pootang at bay for as long as they can."  Richard inclined his head at each of those that he had mentioned, as though asking each RAFian's permission, and they each nodded in turn, signaling their willingness to fight.

"The rest of us?  We will write, and draw, and think, and create.  We will fight this war as only RAFians can.  With our hearts and with our minds.  The blank page is our battleground, and the imagery of our imagination is our weapon.  We are RAFians, and we are RAF.  We are many, and yet we are one.  Each of us individually has limits, but our collective imagination does not.  Yet, this undertaking will require every last RAFian if it is to succeed.  Because the more we write and draw and create, the more powerful this champion, our greatest ally, will become."  He looked out over the RAFians, his forum, and he could plainly see in each of their eyes their willingness, their courage.

"Because only a RAFian born of all RAFians can truly be stronger than any one of us," he concluded.  "That single fact is why Pootang has stymied each of our efforts thus far.  But that is also why, in the end, we will win."

[Blazing Angel]

Holy crap. It is the anti pootang. It is...a rock type pokemon.

[Gaz]

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy this?

[Darth Revan]

This is awesomesauce. Pure 150 proof awesomeness.

[Horsefan1023 (Seal)]

I've spent all day reading this and holy crap this is AWESOME.  This...this is amazing, Dino.  Truly, truly amazing.