The|MULTIVERSE

EPISODE 43: Demon Souls in the Shell

There was no love for the wastes, only the graves of what once was.

(Poetic).

The Virge. An abandoned world of bumpy ground. Of junk-laden hills that had no resale and depressing winds that howled a ghostly sorrow about its forsaken hollows. While that last bit was an unintentional rhyme, Zeta's irrecoverable danger zone wasn't always this desolate and lambasted.

The crew trekked on through Virge's outer wastes, their readings led them through the field of busted-ness and blight and they were encroaching upon a crater that Sentius warned was the origin behind his concerns. An unusually bright sun was having a summertime cookout along the black, scorched earth that looked like half-peeled scales of charred flesh before them. The wind wasn't kind, either, and the surrounding pockets were so stuffed with rubble and metallic trash that the jagged piles reached the arid skies, blotting the cooking sun here and there.

As if the shade could do a damn thing to cool them.

When the multiversers finally reached Virge's greatest crater, Deo got all squinty-eyed again to determine the super hole of scrap metal junking-up the core of the hollows where decades past some world-ravaging bomb—made by what could only be assumed to be some power-hungry idiot of a dictator who most likely was cursed with the smallest pecker on the planet and had to prove his dominance by nuking humanity—had busted open a cavity so broad and thick that the megacity of Aol'Metrelis could fit it (just to throw out there for the purpose of comparing holes to massive cities, and to mention the last act's setting for the hell of it).

When they crossed the crater's threshold, they were walled in by the sink-top's spires. Ringing the junky abyss was a crown of craggy, timeworn chips hardened by ages worth of wild wind storms. And the dangers of it all suited the insane readings driving the multiversers' scanners nuts. They just couldn't figure out what stirred silly in its deep.

Goofy analogies and redundant sentence structures aside, the me'ka bomb maniac goggled his eyes and all sorts of data welcomed his sights. "Me'ka!" Deo exclaimed. "This has to be one of the biggest depressions on this planet. The bomb had to have been HUGE with energy! Whatever sat here's positively done for!"

Baartimo shook his head at him. Wickels smirked and side-eyed his little brother. "There's nothing positive about a derelict wasteland riddled with war-holes, Deo."

"This great big bowl of ramshackles and doom is hundreds of feet deep and thousands of feet wide, abysmal at its finest and creepy at most," Deo continued, snubbing Wickels.

"Creepier," said Chip. The Envigilator peered over the crater's edge. "There shouldn't be anything here. But there is. And that's what confuses Sentius the most."

Hanakin glared. She wasn't wearing her chain-linked eye-patch this time. Cowl overhead, looking like a chick reaper, both of her eyes sweltered hot in the sockets. "There's something unnaturally wicked down there."

"As Sentius surmised. A strange disarray lies in the core of this crater. If Hanakin's able to gather a better read in this proximity then it means dat' something evil and not of dis' plane has taken up residency below."

"Isn't that always the case?" Baartimo said. It wasn't a real question to be answered. They all knew what was up. "Mysterious affairs, unnatural events, deadly circumstances, blind adventure."

"World shattering crisis turned hazardous adventures by thrill-seeking lunatics," Fae added.

"I prefer risk-taking crusaders of eternal legends and good fortune." Ricven kicked what resembled a futuristic Xbox One Thousand-looking gaming console into the crater. The ruined device bounced and broke down the way. "So who's gonna brave-up and take the first plunge?"