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Description
Never in her life had Alice felt that every motion, every breath and thought and deed was perfect: but she felt it here, in the abandoned little rust-smelling nightmare of a forgotten train station. The reason she had stayed a Ranger-- the reason she had taken up the call instead of Falling, or dying, or casting off from the rest of the world to ignore it-- was this moment, this right here. Was the smell of the acrid, turpentine stink of the creature as Sunny smashed its head in.

A cacophony of light began to push out of the monster's face, as they broke it down. Alice's staff, never the most accurate of weapons, had let her pepper the beast with bruises, a few bleeding holes where her aim had been true. Now the Staff of Stars burned hot in her hand as she clung to it, hanging from the support it offered. Her body was shaking, cold, her heart was racing. She stood back against the wall where Sunny had first found her, shivering, head down, and for one brilliant instant the room was flooded with blinding light.

The shadows oozed back in and Alice lifted her head, watching the softly glowing remains of the Fallen Star's brain dim and die away like banked embers, forgetting for a moment that Sunny was even there. She was startled when those kind, careful, callused hands lightly touched her shoulders, one finger tracing the long scar up her cheek to her missing eye.

"That's new, huh?"

Sunny stood back, her shoulders barely visible in the now dark hollow of the otherwise empty room. The poisonous seeming stink of the Fallen creature's blood was cloying and thick, their moment of triumph fleeting under its oppressive stench. Alice tried to push away from the wall, and found that her right leg dragged, her toes barely twitching in her bloodsoaked boot. She met Sunny's eyes, flinched away in fear, then relaxed when she saw that, since it was not truly the woman she'd fought beside through the years, there were no memories to lose.

Emboldened, Alice asked, "You said before that this is a memory. Are you real, then, or just another illusion?"

The growing darkness felt uncomfortably familiar, and Alice tried to chase it off by remembering stubbornly the long, hazy trek out of the abandoned tunnels that had followed their first fight. Sunny chewed on her lower lip, seeming to consider how best to answer Alice's question as they limped along together, Sunny's battered body and Alice's wounded leg keeping them at a snail's pace. They crawled through the stale stone tunnels, led by Sunny’s intuition and the occasional breath of moving air from outside. At least the smell of paint-thinner vanished, once they'd put the room far enough behind them.

"I'm as real as you might want me to be, right here and now." Sunny said at last, smiling and winking when Alice opened her mouth to ask another question. "Who's to say what's real, and what's illusion?"

Faltering, Alice stumbled, then tumbled shoulder-first into the wall at the side of the train tunnel, accidentally dragging Sunny with her. They started to right themselves, Alice leaning heavily against the wall and trying not to notice the heavy ache of her injured leg. She couldn't even wiggle her toes anymore; she couldn't help but worry that she might have gone too long without tending to it. What was it Christine had said before about tourniquets?

"The truth is," Sunny began, and then the wall Alice was leaning her shoulder into crumbled away into a deep, vast abyss, sparkling with the toothy outline of sharp crystals. Stone clattered and clacked and fell away, and Alice struggled to right herself, clinging to Sunny for balance. "Alice!" Sunny shouted.

A cold, skeletal hand snatched at Alice's left arm, while Sunny continued to pull on her right. Startled, she tried to reach back for Sunny, grabbing the other woman's hand and clutching desperately to her.

"Don't let go! I've got you, Alice!"

The abyss was a cold, black, empty looking thing, though the hellish flicker of the crystals far below lent to a strange sense of familiarity. Alice could almost imagine she'd seen such an enormous, empty cave before. She clung to Sunny with all the strength she could muster, gritting her teeth against the ache of her shoulders, as her body snapped between the pull of the skeletal hand and Sunny. The next sharp tug wrenched her arm from its socket and she howled in pain, losing her grip on Sunny's hand.

Sunny's voice trailed after her as she fell, growing paradoxically louder until it no longer seemed human. It reverberated back and forth across the infinitely expanding blackness through which Alice fell, until quite suddenly, the skeletal hand dragging Alice down simply disintegrated in a flutter of green sparks.

She stared up at where she’d come from, a distant, pale shadow on a black plane, puzzled, and whispered, fearfully, "Hans?"

He did not answer, but another voice did, loud and close in her ear: "LOOK OUT!"

The muzzle of a Walther P38 pressed to her nose, and Alice ducked away just in time to watch the bullet blast free overhead, trailing the crackling pink energy of a Ranger's magic as it etched a wild path through the space between them and the thing behind them. The bullet struck home, but the demon chasing them only screamed, her voice the voice of a thousand furious eagles, of a planet exploding, of the evacuating shuttles taking off, screaming through the airlock, blasting apart some of the glass walls through the sheer concussive force of their first jump out of Mars's gravity well. Alice jerked back reflexively, as much out of a bizarre sense of deja vu as anything else, trying to protect her face subconsciously from another sliver of glass through her damaged eye.

Gradually, she realized that-- just as before-- this was not Mars, and the woman beside whom Alice was falling was Francine. All around them, Hans was manifest, a wave of black and green with fading hands to guide them. At the center of the mass was Hans's true body, dessicated from the fight, his face almost skeletal, riding the crest of some universal tide that only he could control.

Alice craned her head about, watching in horror as Jonathon leapt in the path of one of the monster's claws and took a deep wound through his stomach. Just as quickly, a red figure-- familiar, but not-- leapt past, breaking off the monster's arm at the wrist and carrying Jonathon back to the wave of energy where Hans rode. He ripped the lance-like point from Jonathon's body and cradled him close. They stood together for a moment, breathing heavily, and Jonathon slowly straightened, the bloody streaks down his sides thinning as the bleeding stopped.

He leapt back into the face of the beast, howling a challenge, and the red figure-- Alice supposed it must be Felix, for she recognized his healing touch-- swayed, staggering once before turning back to rejoin the battle at Jonathon's side.

Standing cautiously, Alice realized that, like Hans and Francine, she could ride the waves of Hans's rapidly fading energy, so long as she braced her weight properly. Her right leg was dead beneath her, so she crawled along the roiling waves, wondering where her helmet had gone. The Staff of Stars was still clutched tightly in her hand, and Francine-- now able to make a clear shot with Alice out of the way-- continued summoning her weapons and emptying them into the demonic thing that chased them.

"Thanks," Francine called, over the roar and howl of the many-splendored dimensions slipping and sliding all about them. "I don't think we've met, but I'm Francine."

Alice started to answer and couldn't help a bitter laugh, shaking her head. They had only fought in battle twice, but the second time, Alice had been careless. Francine had kindly been tending to a head wound that Alice had acquired while trying to help Christine reach an enemy perched high atop a skyscraper. Alice’s lack of comfort with her powers had led to the injury; her lack of thought had made certain that Francine and just about every other ranger present forgot that Alice had even been there. Business, she thought tiredly, as usual. "Why am I here?" She shouted back, crushing away the urge to try to cajole Francine into remembering. It wouldn't have worked, in any case. She, of all people, knew that.

The answer came a little late, as the inhuman figure following them swung again, smacking aside Jonathon and Felix alike, and striking the tail end of Hans's pool of energy. Alice felt her footing slip, slightly, as the energy seemed to dissipate, the waves on which they rode noticeably shrinking. Several of the hands extended from the nebulous cloud, clawing, desperate, skinless things, shed the muscle that still covered them and began to disappear just as the first had, fading away from skeleton into nothing. Francine summoned another weapon and picked up firing, while Felix and Jonathon tumbled together through the nothing, struggling back up towards their pursuer only to be blasted back, again and again, by her vicious claws.

"Because you're the one, damn it!" Francine spared a split second to give Alice an incredulous, annoyed look before turning back to her duty and firing another round of shots into the face of the terrifying thing that followed them.

"I what?"

"What the hell do you think we're doing, here? You're the Omega Ranger! So quit gawking and help, would you?"

The beast swelled as if it might burst, its semi-human face flickering with black and purple flames, and it struck again, this time with all six of its wicked arms. They sank into the mass of energy that wreathed Hans like a corona, one after the next, until the sixth struck his shoulder. A sickening crack ripped through the howling cacophony, and the rest of the energy wave dispersed into the ether, dropping them into the red soil of a nightmarish hellscape. Francine tumbled, managing to land on her feet, and Jonathon caught Felix, dragging him out of harm's way just as their pursuer touched foot to the ground and nearly crushed him.

Hans fell to the ground, tried immediately to stand, and struck a strange glass boundary, pale green where its outlines could be seen. From his toes and fingers towards his core, he was rapidly disintegrating, and though he struggled against the confining walls his fading power created, entrapping him, he could not seem to break through. For her part, Alice hit the dusty red ground shoulder first and skidded along the ground a good nine meters before her momentum faded and let her battered body fall still. She lay where she'd fallen, coughing, and began to catalogue each bone she'd broken, each bruise that was probably more than just a bruise.

In the distance, she could see the unfamiliar skyline of a city from a world not nearly so technologically minded as the one from which she'd come. Fallen Stars and Starlight Rangers alike seemed to be fighting, off in the distance, and she could smell fire, very close. Smoke hung hazily on the horizon of the red sky, and she could hear people screaming and struggling as they fought. She caught sight of a blast of golden orange energy lancing into the sky like a fireball, and couldn't help a bloody smile, hoping that it had come from Sunny. Spitting out a tooth, Alice started to pick herself up, only to be grabbed by the front of her shirt, and dragged up under the calculating eye of a half-familiar woman with lavendar hair and dead eyes. She wore a heavy metal brace about her neck and jaw, and chuckled as she looked Alice over, seeming to decide that this particular Ranger was not worth her time, after all.

"You're hardly much of anything, are you?" Said the woman, her melodious voice slightly muffled by the heavy brace she wore. She let go, and Alice dropped listlessly back into the sand with a groan for her agitated bruises and broken bones. "You're not strong; you're not powerful."

Unable to shake the feeling that she knew this woman, Alice tried to summon the memory of her. She bit her tongue against the desire to ask who the woman was, and watched with a sick kind of dread as the woman finally took solid form, her strange cloak of shadows seeming to part as she stepped out of it, and planted one foot solidly on Alice's chest.

"Why should you be loved when I am not?" The woman laughed, smiling with her eyes, and pushed down with her booted foot, until Alice began to gasp for breath. Where Alice's uniform was all but ruined, torn and ripped and burned away from their crash-landing in this desolate world (was it Earth? Could it be?), the woman stood in full armor, her arms in banded plate, ending with the same long, wicked claws Alice had watched her use to skewer Jonathon, minutes earlier. Flat black armor, as sharp and shining as obsidian, adorned the rest of her body, cut in smooth, sharp sheets.

She lifted her foot very delicately, and stomped down, hard enough to snap a rib and force Alice to yield a gargled sound of pain, despite her best efforts to stay silent.

"Why should you get all the glory, Ranger? Why you, and not me? They chose you for the Omega Star, but I'm the one who's going to take it. Do you know why?"

Alice, not trusting her voice to stay steady, only shook her head. The woman ground her heel into Alice's injured rib, forcing another bark of pain. It was hard to read her, but she didn't seem to revel in Alice's pain, or enjoy it. She was so somber that Alice almost felt sorry for her.

"I'm going to take it because I belong with everyone else. I'm a Ranger, too. You can’t exclude me." She articulated her sentence with another grind of her heel, and Alice coughed, groaning in feeble protest. "Not anymore."

She knelt down, so close that Alice could feel the soft gust of cool air from the heavy brace upon the woman's neck. This close, she could see the mark of the Fallen etched on the underside of the brace, where it was snugly built into the woman's throat with metal hooks.

"D’you understand?"

Description
Never in her life had Alice felt that every motion, every breath and thought and deed was perfect: but she felt it here, in the abandoned little rust-smelling nightmare of a forgotten train station. The reason she had stayed a Ranger-- the reason she had taken up the call instead of Falling, or dying, or casting off from the rest of the world to ignore it-- was this moment, this right here. Was the smell of the acrid, turpentine stink of the creature as Sunny smashed its head in.

A cacophony of light began to push out of the monster's face, as they broke it down. Alice's staff, never the most accurate of weapons, had let her pepper the beast with bruises, a few bleeding holes where her aim had been true. Now the Staff of Stars burned hot in her hand as she clung to it, hanging from the support it offered. Her body was shaking, cold, her heart was racing. She stood back against the wall where Sunny had first found her, shivering, head down, and for one brilliant instant the room was flooded with blinding light.

The shadows oozed back in and Alice lifted her head, watching the softly glowing remains of the Fallen Star's brain dim and die away like banked embers, forgetting for a moment that Sunny was even there. She was startled when those kind, careful, callused hands lightly touched her shoulders, one finger tracing the long scar up her cheek to her missing eye.

"That's new, huh?"

Sunny stood back, her shoulders barely visible in the now dark hollow of the otherwise empty room. The poisonous seeming stink of the Fallen creature's blood was cloying and thick, their moment of triumph fleeting under its oppressive stench. Alice tried to push away from the wall, and found that her right leg dragged, her toes barely twitching in her bloodsoaked boot. She met Sunny's eyes, flinched away in fear, then relaxed when she saw that, since it was not truly the woman she'd fought beside through the years, there were no memories to lose.

Emboldened, Alice asked, "You said before that this is a memory. Are you real, then, or just another illusion?"

The growing darkness felt uncomfortably familiar, and Alice tried to chase it off by remembering stubbornly the long, hazy trek out of the abandoned tunnels that had followed their first fight. Sunny chewed on her lower lip, seeming to consider how best to answer Alice's question as they limped along together, Sunny's battered body and Alice's wounded leg keeping them at a snail's pace. They crawled through the stale stone tunnels, led by Sunny’s intuition and the occasional breath of moving air from outside. At least the smell of paint-thinner vanished, once they'd put the room far enough behind them.

"I'm as real as you might want me to be, right here and now." Sunny said at last, smiling and winking when Alice opened her mouth to ask another question. "Who's to say what's real, and what's illusion?"

Faltering, Alice stumbled, then tumbled shoulder-first into the wall at the side of the train tunnel, accidentally dragging Sunny with her. They started to right themselves, Alice leaning heavily against the wall and trying not to notice the heavy ache of her injured leg. She couldn't even wiggle her toes anymore; she couldn't help but worry that she might have gone too long without tending to it. What was it Christine had said before about tourniquets?

"The truth is," Sunny began, and then the wall Alice was leaning her shoulder into crumbled away into a deep, vast abyss, sparkling with the toothy outline of sharp crystals. Stone clattered and clacked and fell away, and Alice struggled to right herself, clinging to Sunny for balance. "Alice!" Sunny shouted.

A cold, skeletal hand snatched at Alice's left arm, while Sunny continued to pull on her right. Startled, she tried to reach back for Sunny, grabbing the other woman's hand and clutching desperately to her.

"Don't let go! I've got you, Alice!"

The abyss was a cold, black, empty looking thing, though the hellish flicker of the crystals far below lent to a strange sense of familiarity. Alice could almost imagine she'd seen such an enormous, empty cave before. She clung to Sunny with all the strength she could muster, gritting her teeth against the ache of her shoulders, as her body snapped between the pull of the skeletal hand and Sunny. The next sharp tug wrenched her arm from its socket and she howled in pain, losing her grip on Sunny's hand.

Sunny's voice trailed after her as she fell, growing paradoxically louder until it no longer seemed human. It reverberated back and forth across the infinitely expanding blackness through which Alice fell, until quite suddenly, the skeletal hand dragging Alice down simply disintegrated in a flutter of green sparks.

She stared up at where she’d come from, a distant, pale shadow on a black plane, puzzled, and whispered, fearfully, "Hans?"

He did not answer, but another voice did, loud and close in her ear: "LOOK OUT!"

The muzzle of a Walther P38 pressed to her nose, and Alice ducked away just in time to watch the bullet blast free overhead, trailing the crackling pink energy of a Ranger's magic as it etched a wild path through the space between them and the thing behind them. The bullet struck home, but the demon chasing them only screamed, her voice the voice of a thousand furious eagles, of a planet exploding, of the evacuating shuttles taking off, screaming through the airlock, blasting apart some of the glass walls through the sheer concussive force of their first jump out of Mars's gravity well. Alice jerked back reflexively, as much out of a bizarre sense of deja vu as anything else, trying to protect her face subconsciously from another sliver of glass through her damaged eye.

Gradually, she realized that-- just as before-- this was not Mars, and the woman beside whom Alice was falling was Francine. All around them, Hans was manifest, a wave of black and green with fading hands to guide them. At the center of the mass was Hans's true body, dessicated from the fight, his face almost skeletal, riding the crest of some universal tide that only he could control.

Alice craned her head about, watching in horror as Jonathon leapt in the path of one of the monster's claws and took a deep wound through his stomach. Just as quickly, a red figure-- familiar, but not-- leapt past, breaking off the monster's arm at the wrist and carrying Jonathon back to the wave of energy where Hans rode. He ripped the lance-like point from Jonathon's body and cradled him close. They stood together for a moment, breathing heavily, and Jonathon slowly straightened, the bloody streaks down his sides thinning as the bleeding stopped.

He leapt back into the face of the beast, howling a challenge, and the red figure-- Alice supposed it must be Felix, for she recognized his healing touch-- swayed, staggering once before turning back to rejoin the battle at Jonathon's side.

Standing cautiously, Alice realized that, like Hans and Francine, she could ride the waves of Hans's rapidly fading energy, so long as she braced her weight properly. Her right leg was dead beneath her, so she crawled along the roiling waves, wondering where her helmet had gone. The Staff of Stars was still clutched tightly in her hand, and Francine-- now able to make a clear shot with Alice out of the way-- continued summoning her weapons and emptying them into the demonic thing that chased them.

"Thanks," Francine called, over the roar and howl of the many-splendored dimensions slipping and sliding all about them. "I don't think we've met, but I'm Francine."

Alice started to answer and couldn't help a bitter laugh, shaking her head. They had only fought in battle twice, but the second time, Alice had been careless. Francine had kindly been tending to a head wound that Alice had acquired while trying to help Christine reach an enemy perched high atop a skyscraper. Alice’s lack of comfort with her powers had led to the injury; her lack of thought had made certain that Francine and just about every other ranger present forgot that Alice had even been there. Business, she thought tiredly, as usual. "Why am I here?" She shouted back, crushing away the urge to try to cajole Francine into remembering. It wouldn't have worked, in any case. She, of all people, knew that.

The answer came a little late, as the inhuman figure following them swung again, smacking aside Jonathon and Felix alike, and striking the tail end of Hans's pool of energy. Alice felt her footing slip, slightly, as the energy seemed to dissipate, the waves on which they rode noticeably shrinking. Several of the hands extended from the nebulous cloud, clawing, desperate, skinless things, shed the muscle that still covered them and began to disappear just as the first had, fading away from skeleton into nothing. Francine summoned another weapon and picked up firing, while Felix and Jonathon tumbled together through the nothing, struggling back up towards their pursuer only to be blasted back, again and again, by her vicious claws.

"Because you're the one, damn it!" Francine spared a split second to give Alice an incredulous, annoyed look before turning back to her duty and firing another round of shots into the face of the terrifying thing that followed them.

"I what?"

"What the hell do you think we're doing, here? You're the Omega Ranger! So quit gawking and help, would you?"

The beast swelled as if it might burst, its semi-human face flickering with black and purple flames, and it struck again, this time with all six of its wicked arms. They sank into the mass of energy that wreathed Hans like a corona, one after the next, until the sixth struck his shoulder. A sickening crack ripped through the howling cacophony, and the rest of the energy wave dispersed into the ether, dropping them into the red soil of a nightmarish hellscape. Francine tumbled, managing to land on her feet, and Jonathon caught Felix, dragging him out of harm's way just as their pursuer touched foot to the ground and nearly crushed him.

Hans fell to the ground, tried immediately to stand, and struck a strange glass boundary, pale green where its outlines could be seen. From his toes and fingers towards his core, he was rapidly disintegrating, and though he struggled against the confining walls his fading power created, entrapping him, he could not seem to break through. For her part, Alice hit the dusty red ground shoulder first and skidded along the ground a good nine meters before her momentum faded and let her battered body fall still. She lay where she'd fallen, coughing, and began to catalogue each bone she'd broken, each bruise that was probably more than just a bruise.

In the distance, she could see the unfamiliar skyline of a city from a world not nearly so technologically minded as the one from which she'd come. Fallen Stars and Starlight Rangers alike seemed to be fighting, off in the distance, and she could smell fire, very close. Smoke hung hazily on the horizon of the red sky, and she could hear people screaming and struggling as they fought. She caught sight of a blast of golden orange energy lancing into the sky like a fireball, and couldn't help a bloody smile, hoping that it had come from Sunny. Spitting out a tooth, Alice started to pick herself up, only to be grabbed by the front of her shirt, and dragged up under the calculating eye of a half-familiar woman with lavendar hair and dead eyes. She wore a heavy metal brace about her neck and jaw, and chuckled as she looked Alice over, seeming to decide that this particular Ranger was not worth her time, after all.

"You're hardly much of anything, are you?" Said the woman, her melodious voice slightly muffled by the heavy brace she wore. She let go, and Alice dropped listlessly back into the sand with a groan for her agitated bruises and broken bones. "You're not strong; you're not powerful."

Unable to shake the feeling that she knew this woman, Alice tried to summon the memory of her. She bit her tongue against the desire to ask who the woman was, and watched with a sick kind of dread as the woman finally took solid form, her strange cloak of shadows seeming to part as she stepped out of it, and planted one foot solidly on Alice's chest.

"Why should you be loved when I am not?" The woman laughed, smiling with her eyes, and pushed down with her booted foot, until Alice began to gasp for breath. Where Alice's uniform was all but ruined, torn and ripped and burned away from their crash-landing in this desolate world (was it Earth? Could it be?), the woman stood in full armor, her arms in banded plate, ending with the same long, wicked claws Alice had watched her use to skewer Jonathon, minutes earlier. Flat black armor, as sharp and shining as obsidian, adorned the rest of her body, cut in smooth, sharp sheets.

She lifted her foot very delicately, and stomped down, hard enough to snap a rib and force Alice to yield a gargled sound of pain, despite her best efforts to stay silent.

"Why should you get all the glory, Ranger? Why you, and not me? They chose you for the Omega Star, but I'm the one who's going to take it. Do you know why?"

Alice, not trusting her voice to stay steady, only shook her head. The woman ground her heel into Alice's injured rib, forcing another bark of pain. It was hard to read her, but she didn't seem to revel in Alice's pain, or enjoy it. She was so somber that Alice almost felt sorry for her.

"I'm going to take it because I belong with everyone else. I'm a Ranger, too. You can’t exclude me." She articulated her sentence with another grind of her heel, and Alice coughed, groaning in feeble protest. "Not anymore."

She knelt down, so close that Alice could feel the soft gust of cool air from the heavy brace upon the woman's neck. This close, she could see the mark of the Fallen etched on the underside of the brace, where it was snugly built into the woman's throat with metal hooks.

"D’you understand?"