WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD - Mod Plot [Network Post | 1]

[letsgolegion]

[They get a transmission from the outpost orbiting the planet where new displacees appear, the battered remains of the planet Phelolu. It's a priority distress call, so the message is received by every Legionnaire and all major posts on Legion World.]

[The commanding officer of the response team is a Carggite, Dr. Trez. All three of her grey-haired selves look shaken. Behind her, the main viewscreen of the outpost is cracked and consoles are sparking. The outpost has clearly come under heavy attack.]

Mayday mayday, this is Legion Outpost Phelolu, we are under attack by a 10X10 threat! I repeat, it is a 10X10 threat. Do not send a response team. I repeat: do not send a response team! We'll leave monitoring equipment on for surveillance but all personnel is evacuating the outpost.

Over!

[And that is the only message they get. She quickly reforms into one self, and leaves the console, helping a crew member that's fallen. The entire command deck shakes once. Then again. Fortunately, all members of the team escape the command deck and the hatch to the threshold room closes.]

[By the time the hull rips open, it's plenty of time for them to have escaped through a threshold gate. It's hard to see what causes the breach. There is only a flash of silver and all of a sudden a chunk of it is gone. More of it gets ripped away, and there's a brief flash of something blue and sparkling. With another flash of silver, the whole deck explodes and the camera view is lost. The monitoring system shifts to an external camera as a default so that they can see the field of wreckage outside. There is only a small, barely functioning hunk of the outpost left. The rest is a debris field that's obscuring the view of the planet. Ice dust from the vaporization systems creates a huge cloud that the barely functioning lights reflect off in the void.]

[That's when they see it looming out through the debris field. It's an incomprehensible being, a force of nature, and each sentient's mind must try to make what sense of it that it can by assigning it some kind of image. To many humanoids, what they see is the face of an impossibly huge man.]







[Despite the fact that it should be impossible for any sound to vibrate through the void, they can hear him speak, his voice thundering impossibly loud. Everyone who hears it hears it in their native language, two simple words that spell out the doom of civilizations:]

"GALACTUS HUNGERS!"
[Silver and sparkling blue streak by again and they see now what the cause of the streaks are. One is a man that looks like he's made of liquid silver, riding a silver surfboard. The other is a ethereal and graceful-looking alien with a staff, who looks like she's made out of stardust. As they attack the last of the outpost with a wave of cosmic power, the feed cuts out.]

Comments

Useful IC Info Can be Found Here

[iamresponding]

[Rich's eyes go wide and he feels a familiar chill -- the one he's mercifully only had to feel three times during his life so far. All the other times people faced Galactus, it was usually other heroes taking point, but there were three times he'd had to face Galactus personally.]

[Rich rarely ever curses. Hence all the "blue blazes" and other weird little saying like that. No, he reserves it for times when it's right.]

[Now is one of those times.]

Oh, fuck me.

[relativityspeaking]

[Jazmin has seen a lot of crazy things as a Legionnaire. She's fallen through a hole in the universe and been to another galaxy and back. She's seen whole worlds strung together in a technological wonder. She fought against a being that may as well have been a god.]

[This...this is new. Even for the Legion.]

[Her mouth hangs open for a moment and then she taps some buttons on her comm.]

Brainy!

[She doesn't even say 'report!' He knows he's got to report. No way he doesn't know he has to report in on something like this.]

Brainstorming Time (Feel free to threadhop, it's time for them all to get creative!)

[relativityspeaking]

Alright, Legion, we're officially in crisis mode. The only good news is the outpost team successfully evacuated.

The bad news is Galactus and his heralds are already heading towards civilized worlds. Long-range sensors are showing that Galactus is moving straight towards the planet Braal, which, aside from the native Braalians, is packed with Xanthan refugees.

[Her expression pinches up a little when she says that, but, well. She is Xanthan.]

We need to start thinking up possible ways to stop him and we need them now.

[ringslinging]

Okay, so we don't have the level of power to trip up something like that, I guess it's been established.

But that doesn't mean nothing in this universe does.

Re: Brainstorming Time (Feel free to threadhop, it's time for them all to get creative!)

[the_fuzz]

Sweet cheese and crackers...

Maybe find something else for him to eat?

[kingtyrantranger]

He's big and scary. But big. Can we just, I don't know. Fight him with a giant robot or something?

[deafleppard]

So what exactly happens once he finds something to eat? Does he, like, just nap for few millennia? And come back again?

[fourstars]

I have a question.

Do we know if this is its full power?

[notwithoutafight]

We've established that he eats planets, but why? How does he even metabolize a planet? What is it about floating chunks of rock that keeps him alive? [ And there's still that question of 'is he alive?' that Rich so wonderfully answered earlier. ]

Re: Brainstorming Time (Feel free to threadhop, it's time for them all to get creative!)

[got_gud]

This being and its heralds are drawn towards worlds with large concentrations of life-force from intelligent creatures, yes?

Because if so, I carry within me the equivalent of millions of souls. I doubt I could satiate the beast with my sacrifice, so I won't be foolish enough to try that save as a last resort, but I could potentially distract one of them temporarily, should it be required.

[headinjuries]

[ Unlike Rich, Sam hasn't had the dubious pleasure of a Galactus encounter yet, but oh, you better believe he's heard things. ]

No way.

[ we're so dickeddddddddd ]

[thethinzooline]

[To Nick, Galactus doesn't look like a giant human. That'd be a touch too terrifying and his brain is trying to make sense of the thing. It still picks something terrifying, anyway. He looks like some giant purple shark...man...creature...thing.]

...Mm.

Nope.

[Just...nope.]

[the_fuzz]

[Judy's nose is twitching up a storm.]

...why did it have to be a shark?

[deafleppard]

I'm stuck between "nope" and "what" myself.

video, enjoy gohan being unable to comprehend this

[fourstars]

[ Gohan was actually... having a hard time processing this. Not because he's not used to intergalactic threats, but because he's never seen one to this scale. He'd been thoroughly convinced that nothing could really surprise him anymore, that he'd seen enough weirdness in his life for him to be able to cope with anything. After all, given everything that had happened in his life, what could really surprise him at this point?

Well... this. The answer was this. ]

I-I... that's... a pretty big problem...

[ He honestly had nothing. He was completely blanking out. This was... how were they supposed to fight that?! Even at his full power... could he handle something like that? ]

Re: video, enjoy gohan being unable to comprehend this

[captainbuzzkill]

Understatement. That was an understatement.

[He'll just be Understatement Alert Lad here.]

[It takes a moment for Dipper's brain to process. But then he...shrugs. He actually shrugs.]

[There was a part of his brain that would've gibbered incoherently in terror at something like this once. But things like Bill and the Time Baby broke it. Irreparably. In some ways, that's a bad thing. It means that he's almost come to expect the universe to be able to produce horrors. But in other ways it's a good thing, because it makes a lot easier to fight fear.]

But hey, we have a superteam full of people with superpowers and a couple of geniuses. I've seen something almost as powerful as this taken down by people in a world where that wasn't the case.

[All it means is it's time to get to work.]

[deafleppard]

I just want you to know, that I sighed extremely hard when I saw this. You could've probably heard it from the next room over.

I had plans for today. Plans!

[notwithoutafight]

[ Okay sure it looks big, but so do lots of other things that turn out not to be that scary in the end. Or maybe Videl just plain can't comprehend the scale of what's gong on here. ]

Well that's the understatement of the day. Got any pretty big ideas yet?

video

[deafleppard]

So much for that everything I was looking to get done today.

[iamresponding]

Yeah, he, uh, has a way of clearing your calendar.

[ video ]

[floraltranslator]

[ Here she thought that Dune was intimidating beyond belief. She could only gape in disbelief at the video feed. It was way too much to comprehend. But one thing was for certain-- she was terrified. She was trying not to let it show but this time she was in way over her head.

Tsubomi opened her mouth to speak but all that comes from it is a small squeak sound before her mouth closes. ]

[iamresponding]

Yeah, it kinda...does that to you.

[Poor kid. This is a hell of a first mission for some of these newbies.]

[whyarewehere]

[Grif is late to the party because his reaction was to look at his comm, shut off his comm, and bury his head under his pillow long enough to pull himself back together. His hair's a mess, but he's calm.]

Alright, I've prepared an official summary of the situation based on my research:

WE'RE. FUCKING. BONED.

[Panic is uncool. Defeatist wisecracks are much cooler.]

[iamresponding]

As the resident Galactus expert, I have to say this is an entirely inaccurate report.

We're super fucking boned. You didn't put enough emphasis on how boned we are.

[But at least he's almost laughing. Thanks, Grif.]

[kingtyrantranger]

So, when we say he eats planets, is it the entire thing? I've played the video again and he's huge, but he's not exactly planet-sized. Shouldn't he stay there for a few days, just eating?

[whyarewehere]

I think Rich said that when he eats a planet you've got a couple of months before he moves on. So I mean, we're still screwed but just more slowly.

[googledox]

[Brainy looks horrified as he reports in new information.]

To reach Braal's system, Galactus had to pass by the sun near Phelolu, the world where we rescued you all. Long-range sensors indicate that it's gone. He devoured Phelolu's sun. He's still on direct intercept course with the planet Braal.

Fortunately, we should still be able to rescue displacees on the planet -- instead of contending with the heat, they'll be facing temperatures below freezing. It won't change their survival prospects much, especially given how quickly we can threshold down.

Still, according to the newslinks, the entire UP is now in a panic.

[legionnpcs]

It's just like the Sun Eater!

[got_gud]

That...certainly is something.

[There wasn't any fear in Alexander's voice. Not in a confident, "Oh, I can take that guy" kind of way, but in a "I've already died a million times, so whatever man," kind of way. Even so, he was certainly awestruck by Galactus.]

[To him, the planet-eater appeared like an enormous version of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder. Which was unpleasant in its own right. But judging from the information being passed around on the comms, his centuries-past fight with the once Lord of Sunlight wouldn't even compare in scale.]