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Description
Temperance
Chapter One

As Earth approached 2012, people were becoming increasingly paranoid and superstitious. When the fated day arrived, it turned out that the world's populace was wrong. The world did not end in 2012. There were no cataclysms, no rains of fire, and no tidal waves that washed away cities. However, that was not to say that nothing important happened. Something extremely significant DID happen; it just didn't do so visibly. A link between our world and the nearest alternate reality came into existence. It was frail at first, nothing more than a tube spewing tiny bubbles of alternate reality in between the threads of our reality. While this might be cause for alarm, it had no visible long term effect. It caused some minor earthquakes and a couple of tropical depressions that didn't quite become hurricanes, but nothing major. The actual impact was much worse. After a few days, the link strengthened. It solidified and turned into a two way bridge between our reality and the next one.

There were many disturbing things about the bubbles of alternate reality. For one, they did not usually interfere with our reality, but slid alongside. Another disturbing thing was that the bubbles had a tendency of attaching themselves to individuals, seemingly at random. I was one such individual. The moment of attachment was excruciatingly painful, and it happened when I was asleep. I woke up screaming in pain. It felt like I was bound in burning chains. After a while the feeling eased, and I was able to get back to sleep. To my knowledge, I am the only one who figured out how to use the bubble. It was extremely tiring for me to open the bubble up and to put stuff in it, but I found a way. In my youth, I used it to store things that I did not want found. When World War Three broke out and I was pressed into service, I used it to store extra weapons and ammunition that I accumulated. This came in really handy during a particularly intense engagement when my entire unit ran out of ammunition. I opened the bubble and handed out my spare ammo. It turned the tide of the engagement. We ended up winning and coming home victorious instead of losing and coming home in body bags. That caught the attention of the higher-ups. They re-assigned me to a special taskforce and equipped me with several sets of gear. The fact that I was geared for ANY fight and any position earned me the call sign "O.M.A", which stands for "One Man Army". It also got me into the mess I was currently in.

I ejected an empty clip from my assault rifle and slapped in a fresh one as bullets smashed into the ground all around me. I was safe, for the moment, hiding behind a tall and narrow fragment of a ruined stone wall. My back was to the wall, and I could feel its cool, hard, and irregular surface pressing through my heavy armor. Men were screaming and dying all around me, the pain and suffering expelled with their last breaths making a horrifying background to the sounds of death flying all around me. The rest of my squad was dead, leaving my tac-com unit quiet and lifeless. I was on my own. I felt the heavy solidity of my BFAR-H, and was reassured. My assault rifle was a heavy, large caliber burst fire rifle. It fired bursts of three .45 rounds each time I squeezed the trigger, providing accurately dispensed death with a minimum of effort. I was SpecOps, and had a custom built rifle. Mine had recoil dampeners, a combat scope, and a 12 gauge under mount shotgun attached to it. My rifle was also loaded with full metal jacket rounds, which were extremely necessary in my field. From the sound of the gunfire, there were 30 squads of the enemy left. They were inexperienced militia, but that won't matter to the bullets. One squad was holding me pinned down, while the other squads were shooting it out. Intel really dropped the ball on this one.

My name is Sergeant Nathaniel "O.M.A." Archer, and until today I was part of the most lethal and efficient task force on the face of the earth. My unit was undefeated. There was nothing we couldn't handle. We were the unsung heroes of the war, ever victorious. At least until Intel sent us into the middle of a fucking civil war. 300 squads of militia from one side of the country faced off with 310 squads of militia from the other side of the country. This wouldn't have mattered to us much, except that they decided to throw down right on top of my squad's camp site in some abandoned ruins. My squad fought our way towards the safety of the last building standing, a large stone temple of some kind. We were going to hold out there until the cavalry came charging in. We lost two men on our way there to a fragmentation grenade, and the third at the outer wall of the compound the temple was in. It was just me and Martin, our communications officer left. We held out for several hours, until there was a momentary lull in the fighting. Martin took a peek out to see what was happening and was promptly shot in the head by a sniper. I was the only one left.

I shook myself out of my reverie and started thinking. If I was to survive, I needed to get inside that temple. To do so, I would have to travel quite a large distance of open ground. I grimaced and pulled my will together. There was no other way. I focused my will and opened the bubble in the space-time continuum that I where I kept my spare gear, reached in, took out a belt of smoke grenades, and closed the bubble. I then unhooked the smoke grenades, pulled the pins, and then started throwing them all around me. When the smoke screen became thick enough, I sprinted to the entrance to the temple and dove inside.

Description
Temperance
Chapter One

As Earth approached 2012, people were becoming increasingly paranoid and superstitious. When the fated day arrived, it turned out that the world's populace was wrong. The world did not end in 2012. There were no cataclysms, no rains of fire, and no tidal waves that washed away cities. However, that was not to say that nothing important happened. Something extremely significant DID happen; it just didn't do so visibly. A link between our world and the nearest alternate reality came into existence. It was frail at first, nothing more than a tube spewing tiny bubbles of alternate reality in between the threads of our reality. While this might be cause for alarm, it had no visible long term effect. It caused some minor earthquakes and a couple of tropical depressions that didn't quite become hurricanes, but nothing major. The actual impact was much worse. After a few days, the link strengthened. It solidified and turned into a two way bridge between our reality and the next one.

There were many disturbing things about the bubbles of alternate reality. For one, they did not usually interfere with our reality, but slid alongside. Another disturbing thing was that the bubbles had a tendency of attaching themselves to individuals, seemingly at random. I was one such individual. The moment of attachment was excruciatingly painful, and it happened when I was asleep. I woke up screaming in pain. It felt like I was bound in burning chains. After a while the feeling eased, and I was able to get back to sleep. To my knowledge, I am the only one who figured out how to use the bubble. It was extremely tiring for me to open the bubble up and to put stuff in it, but I found a way. In my youth, I used it to store things that I did not want found. When World War Three broke out and I was pressed into service, I used it to store extra weapons and ammunition that I accumulated. This came in really handy during a particularly intense engagement when my entire unit ran out of ammunition. I opened the bubble and handed out my spare ammo. It turned the tide of the engagement. We ended up winning and coming home victorious instead of losing and coming home in body bags. That caught the attention of the higher-ups. They re-assigned me to a special taskforce and equipped me with several sets of gear. The fact that I was geared for ANY fight and any position earned me the call sign "O.M.A", which stands for "One Man Army". It also got me into the mess I was currently in.

I ejected an empty clip from my assault rifle and slapped in a fresh one as bullets smashed into the ground all around me. I was safe, for the moment, hiding behind a tall and narrow fragment of a ruined stone wall. My back was to the wall, and I could feel its cool, hard, and irregular surface pressing through my heavy armor. Men were screaming and dying all around me, the pain and suffering expelled with their last breaths making a horrifying background to the sounds of death flying all around me. The rest of my squad was dead, leaving my tac-com unit quiet and lifeless. I was on my own. I felt the heavy solidity of my BFAR-H, and was reassured. My assault rifle was a heavy, large caliber burst fire rifle. It fired bursts of three .45 rounds each time I squeezed the trigger, providing accurately dispensed death with a minimum of effort. I was SpecOps, and had a custom built rifle. Mine had recoil dampeners, a combat scope, and a 12 gauge under mount shotgun attached to it. My rifle was also loaded with full metal jacket rounds, which were extremely necessary in my field. From the sound of the gunfire, there were 30 squads of the enemy left. They were inexperienced militia, but that won't matter to the bullets. One squad was holding me pinned down, while the other squads were shooting it out. Intel really dropped the ball on this one.

My name is Sergeant Nathaniel "O.M.A." Archer, and until today I was part of the most lethal and efficient task force on the face of the earth. My unit was undefeated. There was nothing we couldn't handle. We were the unsung heroes of the war, ever victorious. At least until Intel sent us into the middle of a fucking civil war. 300 squads of militia from one side of the country faced off with 310 squads of militia from the other side of the country. This wouldn't have mattered to us much, except that they decided to throw down right on top of my squad's camp site in some abandoned ruins. My squad fought our way towards the safety of the last building standing, a large stone temple of some kind. We were going to hold out there until the cavalry came charging in. We lost two men on our way there to a fragmentation grenade, and the third at the outer wall of the compound the temple was in. It was just me and Martin, our communications officer left. We held out for several hours, until there was a momentary lull in the fighting. Martin took a peek out to see what was happening and was promptly shot in the head by a sniper. I was the only one left.

I shook myself out of my reverie and started thinking. If I was to survive, I needed to get inside that temple. To do so, I would have to travel quite a large distance of open ground. I grimaced and pulled my will together. There was no other way. I focused my will and opened the bubble in the space-time continuum that I where I kept my spare gear, reached in, took out a belt of smoke grenades, and closed the bubble. I then unhooked the smoke grenades, pulled the pins, and then started throwing them all around me. When the smoke screen became thick enough, I sprinted to the entrance to the temple and dove inside.