“Don’t worry about it.” Mario had said. “I’ll handle it after I rescue the Princess.” He said.
Luigi wished he had been more convincing. He also wished he wasn’t dodging green lightning being shot by metal skeletons. And he wished in general for the days when being a plumber involved more fixing pipes, and less adventure.
In short, Luigi Mario wished for a lot of things. None of them ever came true.
Luigi dove for the safety of a nearby pipe, praying that it didn’t contain a man-eating plant. It didn’t. Good luck so far.
With a soft thump he fell out of the bottom of the pipe, finding himself in the familiar blue brickwork of the underground levels of the Mushroom Kingdom. What he found there was anything but familiar.

A swirling whirlpool of green light stood upright in the middle of the chamber, arcs of similarly colored lightning lancing out at odd intervals to glance the surface of the nearby floor and walls. It didn’t seem to do any harm, but it certainly lent an aura of menace to the portal.
Luigi picked himself up and dusted off, checking his pockets to make sure he hadn’t lost anything. Nope, he still had a pair of mushrooms and fire flowers each, and a leaf as well. Good.
Before he could make his next move, however, there was a thunderous *CRACK*, as if something had hit a wall at very high speeds. Barely a moment later, the air filled with a low, shrill grinding noise, with the faint hint of an electronic warble in the background.
Between him and the portal, Luigi saw… Something fade into view. One moment he could see only the barest outline, the next it was as real as the ground he stood on. A large, wooden box, much more in touch with its blue brickwork surroundings than the swirling green that it obstructed. Luigi warily approached it and prodded it with his finger. It was real.

Luigi heard the creak of a wooden door and footsteps. “Again?” The voice was exasperated, and tinged with an accent that Luigi didn’t recognize.
Luigi peeked around the corner of the box. There was a tall, thin man wearing a large coat and what appeared to be bright red shoes. There was a faint whistling noise coming from somewhere, but Luigi couldn’t identify it. For someone who spent most of their days in the sewer levels, today was full of surprises.
The Man in the coat suddenly spun around and smiled. “Hello.” He said cheerfully. “Do you know where I am?”
Luigi nodded.
“Well, speak up then, we don’t have long. I may have missed whatever pocket dimension they are hiding themselves in, but I bet they felt that. I know I did.” What the man said next was garbled as he walked into the Blue box, his voice taking on an ominous echo.
Luigi moved to the front of the blue box. His jaw dropped. The door was open and what he saw was… impossible. It was bigger on the inside, and filled with things he couldn’t even find the words to describe.

The man in the coat walked back, a small tan cube in his hand. “Yeah, everyone tends to have that response.” He said. Luigi quickly closed his mouth. “Listen, can you take this and stand on the other side of that event horizon? I have-”
There was a crackle and flash of green light from behind Luigi. Wincing, he peeked over his shoulder.
There were eight of the metal skeletons behind him now.
“-notimeforplanA. Plan B!” The Man chucked the cube over the heads of the skeletal machines, which vanished with a crackle as it struck the green vortex.
The mechanical warriors raised the long, metal and glass contraptions they all carried and aimed. The world suddenly fell upwards and to the side as Luigi found himself pulled into the impossibly spacious interior of the blue box, and the door slammed shut. Luigi heard only the faintest whips as outside bolts of matter-destroying-lightning collided with the exterior of a vessel which, simply speaking, couldn’t care less.
The man in the coat quickly turned the deadbolt on the door and sighed in relief. “There we go, safe forever.” He pronounced the final ‘r’ with an enthusiastic ‘h’ sound.
Luigi crawled to his feet. “I’ma Luigi. Luigi Mario. Who are you?” He asked.

The man cracked a grin that he had grinned a hundred thousand times. “I’m the Doctor,” he said. “And with just a little bit of luck…” there was a beep from somewhere in the impossible room. The Doctor ran over to the round terminal that dominated the room. “Great! Grand! Off we go, then! Allons-y!”
The room was filled with that shrill grinding Luigi had heard before, as the column in the middle of the room appeared to move up and down. Like most of Luigi’s life, what was happening was unknown and vaguely threatening.
---
It felt like his body was on fire, but it was no worse then what he went through every time he wore his suit through cryo-stasis. He hit the ground on the other side of the alien portal and immediately rolled to the side, raising the plasma rifle in his hands and taking stock of the situation he now found himself in.
“Where are we?” If his helmet had been off, and someone had been close enough to hear him, it would be natural to assume he was talking to himself.
“I’m trying to figure that out now.” Normally having a voice in your head is a sign of insanity. For Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, it was a sign of something much less worrisome and rather more expensive: Cortana, a ‘smart’ AI construct.

John took in his surroundings. No hostiles were within his sight range, but his field of vision was hardly empty. Black, monolithic structures jutted from the ground. Largely angular and geometric in design, the repetition of the same forms was broken up by the occasional dominating pyramid-like structure.
John looked up. The word “dominating” ceased to apply to the pyramids, and was now solely reserved for the huge sphere above him. There was no horizon, the edges of the world simply bent upward and joined, the far reaches of it hidden by distance and haze. But the sky was not empty. A huge, perfect sphere filled it, hanging impossibly in place. Even the Halo stations, massive as they were, were dwarfed by the sheer size of it.
“Without a sky to analyze for star-chart comparison, I can’t tell you where we are. But I can tell you what we are in. Given the size of the construct, we appear to be in a Dyson Sphere.” The AI’s false-female voice explained.
John was interrupted before he could speak. “I know that you don’t know what that is. It doesn’t have a military application, so you wouldn’t have heard of it. Simply put, it’s a shell built around a star, made to capture all the energy it throws out and use it as a power source. The power supplied is more then you could ever imagine, but constructing a Dyson Sphere should be impossible. The material requirements alone would be more than could be harvested if you strip-mined most solar systems. The architecture doesn’t match that of the structures on Halo. We could be looking at-” Cortana paused. “Chief, we have to get moving. I am detecting a sudden energy spike not unlike the portal we just used. Something is coming.”

John leapt to his feet and made a break for the nearest building-sized structure to use as cover. Even with his superhuman speed, he didn’t have time to reach it before he heard a rasping fizzle behind him.
“One new contact. It’s human.”
John turned and dropped to one knee, aiming the looted Covenant weapon at the sudden arrival.
The man was on his hands and knees, most of his body covered with a suit unlike any that John had ever seen. It couldn’t have possibly been designed for combat. Only an idiot would paint armor such a vivid shade of orange. The arrival simply sat there for a few moments, still unaware or unconcerned with the Chief’s presence. Without warning he let out an angry, anguished roar and slammed his fist into the ground.
His frustration apparently vented, he stood and composed himself with a sigh, pushing his thick-rimmed glasses back up his face, which seemed to be set into a permanent frown. He looked in need of a shave, although the reddish-brown goatee looked as if it belonged there.
“Identify yourself.” John called. The goateed man seemed to notice him for the first time. The change in stance was subtle, but John noticed it. This man was a fighter. His form was sloppy, but that only meant he lacked formal training.

The goateed man reached behind him, and John readied himself for a fight. When the hand came back into view, it held a crowbar. John should have found such a weapon ridiculous. The look on the man’s face made the gesture anything but.
“Gordon. Freeman.” It was a statement. He was clearly expecting some sort of reaction. Whatever effect it was meant to have was lost on John, however.
Every nerve in John’s body screamed that this was going to turn ugly, but he refused to shoot before this Gordon Freeman made the first move. He could see Gordon tighten his grip on the crowbar slightly. This was it…
With a *pop* a metal cube came into being a few feet off the ground and fell with a satisfying clang.
The absurdity of it caught John off guard, and Freeman seemed to be distracted by it as well. Freeman looked up as if to ask ‘Do *you* know what that is?’
A shill grinding noise filled the air, and a tall, blue wooden box faded into view.
“Sorry for the lack of warning, Chief, but I’m still not detecting anything. As far as the data I’m getting is concerned, it’s not there.”
The grinding stopped.
“*Now* I can see it. Whatever that thing is, it is much more advanced than the technology that brought us here, and possibly more advanced than the Halo station’s themselves. Prepare yourself.”
There was the sound of a door unlocking and opening, and a cheerfully smiling man stepped out dressed in a large coat and blue suit, which clashed with his red shoes.
“Ah, there we are then!” The man bent over and picked up the metal cube. “You are *such* a good cube. You are a *useful* cube, you are. I should use you more often.”

A lanky, mustached man in green overalls stepped out of the box behind him. It occurred to John that it would have been rather cramped in there for two people.
“Oh hello now!” The man exclaimed, absent-mindedly tossing the cube over his shoulder into the box. “A Dyson Sphere. I bet somebody is proud of themselves.” He raised his voice and looked around, ignoring John and Gordon. “I hope you have a permit for this.”
“Identify yourself.” John called again. He couldn’t help but feel that the situation was rapidly falling out of his control.
The man in the coat looked him up and down. He pulled out a small wallet of some kind. “John Smith, I’m from Command.” Sure enough, the wallet displayed the identification of a USMC officer. It took every bone in his body for John to resist saluting. “Glad to see you’ve made it this far. What have you learned?”
“Chief, don’t tell him anything. I don’t know what just happened, but that paper is blank.”
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“Positive. The information I’m getting from your eyes does NOT match what I’m getting from the HUD recorder.”
“No tricks.” John called out. If anything, John Smith smiled even wider.
“Oh, you’re clever, aren’t you? No bit of paper’s going to win you over. I’m The Doctor. Just ‘The Doctor’.”

“Chief! Incoming contacts.” Cortana yelled into his brain.
The air began to glow ever so slightly. “Well that didn’t take long.” The Doctor said, whipping out what might have been a small flashlight or a large novelty pen.
With a crackle, four of the alien machines sprung out of space itself, forming a loose ring around the blue box. Across this suddenly cluttered battlefield, John saw a look in Gordon’s eyes that told him that whatever hostility they had shared before was officially shelved.
For better or for worse, they were working together on this one.
---
All at once, everything was in motion. The Doctor, unarmored as he was, leapt forward and ducked behind the nearest mechanical warrior skeleton, placing it between himself and the other assailants. His “cover” spun around, nearly clubbing him with its weapon.
“No fair! You’re supposed to be slower than that!” The Doctor exclaimed.
The mechanical warrior raised its weapon to bring it smashing down on the Doctor, but was interrupted by a white-gloved hand punching its head clean off and sending it flying several feet.
As the skeletal figure collapsed, Luigi flashed the Doctor a thumbs up and charged one of the remaining warriors.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Blue box, John’s shields went from full to nonexistent in seconds as he caught the brunt of two beams of green lightening. In one fluid motion, he grabbed a frag grenade from his belt and tossed it at the feet of one of the alien robots, and then strafed to the side, dodging another bolt of green lightning and letting the alien robot that shot it have a burst of rapid-fire plasma free of charge. The deep pocks it left in the creature’s chest certainly damaged it, but it was far from downed.
The other warrior John was fighting, however, found itself sent sprawling to the ground as its legs were wrenched in separate directions by the grenade at its feet. It was inconvenienced, but relatively undamaged.
There was a sound of a metal clatter, followed by a heavy crash. The Doctor spun around. The man in the orange suit had dropped his crowbar and now appeared to be *wrestling* the robot that had appeared in front of him. The robot was clearly the stronger of the two, and yet it was performing very poorly. It hadn’t been designed for such a frantic assault.
It did, however, mean that there was a hostile robot currently occupied. The Doctor ran over, his sonic screwdriver at the ready.

WHAT THE FUCK IN ALL FIELDS

A glancing shot told John that his armor would not protect him from a direct hit as he continued to burn holes in the alien machine he was facing. He could see the second machine begin to rise up off the ground, and soon he would be facing two of them again. As if in response to this thought a green and white blur crashed down from above, firmly planting two feet into the machine and sending it back to the ground considerably more cracked and broken then it used to be.
“That shouldn’t be possible.” Cortana remarked. “No one has that sort of vertical leap.”
Luigi, however, clearly felt this needed disproving. He leapt up into the air, surprisingly high up for someone of his size, and then popped something into his mouth. John missed what it was, but then the impossible happened. Something that couldn’t have possibly been Luigi slammed into the ground, shattering the machine beneath it to bits. It looked like Luigi in all respects, save size. Where Luigi had been a short man, this replacement dwarfed John, even in his armor.
“I… What? Where did he get the extra mass? What is going on here?” John had never heard Cortana sound so confused. It made him uncomfortable.
The nearby plasma-scarred machine turned to face this new, greater, threat. A bolt of green lighting lanced out and struck the giant Luigi in the arm, and his change in size reversed itself as suddenly as it had appeared.
John didn’t let the opportunity pass, and moved up behind the machine. He placed his plasma rifle to the back of the machine’s head and fired. It dropped to the ground.

Gordon moved his head just in time to avoid a heavy, metal elbow to the face. Restraining the machine was no easy task, and Gordon was already beginning to feel his muscles tire. He frantically searched for a new plan of attack that wouldn’t leave him vulnerable.
Before he could think of one, the machine he was grappling suddenly started to spark all over. Gordon grunted in surprise and leapt back. The man who had introduced himself as The Doctor was standing over him, a blue-tipped rod in his hand leveled at the machine. The rod stopped glowing, and the sparking on the mechanical warrior stopped.
“Sorry! So sorry about that.” The voice was altogether too casual for this battlefield. “Just a little experiment, don’t mind me. Duck!”
Gordon obliged, dodging the swipe of a metal claw.
“Let’s try… this!” The Doctor aimed his sonic screwdriver again, and the eyes of the machine lost their glow. The machine paused, and then began to stumble about erratically, clearly blinded.
“Ha! That should show you!” The Doctor depressed the button on his sonic screwdriver and twirled it about in his fingers expertly. The machines eyes lit back up immediately and it regained its composure.

“Oh. That didn’t last long.” Something moved behind him, and the Doctor spun around. The machine that Luigi had originally decapitated was rising back to its feet; the head now back in place. “How’d you get your head back? It was all the way over there.” The Doctor mused as he made a subtle step in between the two machines.
The recently reconstituted machine raised its weapon and aimed. The Doctor grinned, and took a quick step to the side just as the first flash leapt from the machines heavy weapon. The lighting passed through the space where his vital organs had so recently been, continued on, and struck the now un-blinded machine in the side, cleaving it in two.
In unison, the three downed machines and the still active one vanished in flares of green light. The fight was abruptly over.
“Owie, thata stung.” Luigi said, cradling his arm. Despite taking a full blast of green lightning and Luigi’s complaints, it seemed completely unharmed. Even his clothing was intact.
“How did you do that?” John asked, standing over Luigi.
“No time for that I’m afraid.” The Doctor called, and pointed off in the distance. “Look!”
John turned. What looked like a black cloud had risen in the distance and was moving toward them. John focused on them, and could make out tiny glittering lights as well.

“What is it?” He whispered to Cortana.
“A swarm of drones of some kind, exact purpose and capabilities unknown but I doubt it matters. It will be hostile and their numbers exceed the maximum amount of ammunition you can carry by a full order of magnitude. They are a long way off, but we don’t have time to waste.”
“All of you, in the TARDIS if you want to live!” The Doctor called.
Luigi obediently ran after him, and Gordon wasn’t arguing either. He retrieved his crowbar and rushed to the Blue box. John wasn’t far behind.
“I don’t know how many more of these surprises I can take.” Cortana mused. John silently agreed. What should have been an uncomfortable fit for two people was, in fact, much larger than it appeared. The door closed behind him and was locked with a simple deadbolt. “It’s some sort of extra-dimensional space. I’m not sure even the Forerunners had this sort of technology.”
As John looked around in wonder, Gordon simple followed behind the Doctor and examined the console, his face as stern as ever. “How does it work?”
“Weeeell…” The Doctor began. “It’s really rather complicated and we are in a bit of a hurry so let’s just say that it-” The lights in the column in the middle of the room flickered once, twice, and then died completely, “- doesn’t? Oh. Oh no.” The Doctor spun around and opened up the grate he was standing on, “No no no no NO!”
Gordon simply looked down at him. “No power?”

The Doctor buried his face in his hands. “I really should have seen this coming. My modifications to the TARDIS established a link to my universe and the TARDIS could draw power through that link, a bit like running a cord to the next house over. But this pocket dimension is *sealed*. That cords been cut and the plug I have with me doesn’t fit in this place’s socket.
“In short, we should be running! Allons-y!” His melancholy was suddenly thrown aside as he ditched his coat and dashed out of the room, stopping only to run back and retrieve his sonic screwdriver from the pocket.
The Doctor stepped back out into the monolithic alien plaza. “Alright, right. They come here, the portals come here. Why would the portals come here?” The Doctor pointed at Luigi. “Why would the portals come here? If you are bringing people through, why send them here?”
Luigi shrugged. The Doctor dismissed him with a wave of his hand and pointed as Gordon. “Same question.”
“To send them somewhere else. There’s nothing here.”
The Doctor lit up. “Nothing we can *see*. You don’t build a Dyson Sphere and leave all this empty space around. You put it to use. Like… for... a… TELEPORT ARRAY!”

Listen fucknuts. If people cared they'd bump your thread. So sage your fucking posts.

He aimed his sonic screwdriver at his arm and activated it. In addition to its familiar blue light and shrill noise, the Doctor’s arm suddenly lit up which a crackling green sparkle. “Nanomachines! The fighting machines are covered with them, and that’s how they use their local-area teleport, like when they disappeared at the end of the fight. You see, a Dyson Sphere is *huge*. But you can see that, just look up. Anyway, if you want to get anywhere you can’t afford to walk it, it would take weeks just to get over there.” The Doctor pointed in a random direction out of his field of vision. “And you can’t afford to have teleportation arrays every ten feet, that’s just silly and ineffective. No, you make one *big* array, and use the nanomachines as markers.”
“So everyone gather round.” The Doctor waved his hands in an exaggerated ‘hurry up’ gesture. “And let’s see where they send their visitors.”
Before anyone could object, the sonic screwdriver lit blue and everything went green, then white.
The Doctor swayed, his head swimming from the teleport. It was hardly surprising that it wasn’t designed to be gentle to living creatures, but that truth didn’t make it any less nauseating.
And it was dark. Very dark. Probably underground somewhere. The Doctor adjusted his sonic screwdriver to the ‘electric torch’ setting as he idly pondered whether the corridors of a Dyson Sphere could really be considered ‘under ground’.
The need for his electric torch vanished as he was blinded by a sudden light. The Doctor blinked and his eyes adjusted. Freeman’s suit seemed to have a built in flashlight. Handy.

The Doctor took stock of his surroundings. Definitely an enclosed corridor of some kind, the entire thing was apparently seamless and made of the same hard black material as the structures surrounding the plaza they were in before.
For John, the darkness was barely even noticeable. One of the many advantages of the severe augmentation he had undergone during his training as a Spartan.
As such, he was the only one that saw Luigi take a brightly colored flower from his pocket and eat it. This, while strange, was absolutely mundane compared with the fact that it was immediately followed by Luigi’s clothing suddenly changing colors to a garish red and white combination.
“I… there are no words for this. Excuse me a moment, there is something I need to do.” Cortana said. And then, she was gone. John knew she couldn’t have left the electronics of his suit, but it didn’t feel as if she was there. He didn’t like it.
“Where are we?” John asked aloud.
“That is an excellent question.” The Doctor replied. “I think we are, technically speaking, lost.” He looked around the corridor. “There doesn’t seem to be anything here.”

Gordon looked around and cleared his throat. “If the teleportation array didn’t recognize the coordinates you were giving it, then it would have probably defaulted to dumping us at the nearest relay point, or possibly a processing node being used by the relay depending on the sophistication of their system.” He coughed. “That’s assuming that it’s a reconstructive teleport, rather than a dimensional rift method. Otherwise we could be anywhere that happens to have a sufficiently weak planar boundary. They have inter-dimensional gate technology, but that seems to be a separate system from their individual teleport, otherwise there would be no need to teleport us after arrival. The reconstructive method is much more likely.” Gordon coughed again. Talking seemed to irritate his throat, as if he didn’t do it very often.
“What’s your name again?” The Doctor asked.
“Dr. Gordon Freeman.” Even now, he was frowning.
“I like you, Gordon Freeman. You’re clever.” The Doctor spun around to face the rest of the group, choosing to ignore Luigi’s apparent costume change. “Now then, off we go.” He walked past them and continued down the hallway.
“Where are you’a going?” Luigi asked.

“No idea!” The Doctor called back. “But if we are defaulting to the nearest relay, our best bet is to move on until the nearest relay is somewhere else, and hope that place is more interesting.”
John and the others, lacking alternatives, followed closely behind. Not long after, John felt Cortana’s familiar presence return. He allowed himself to feel some small amount of relief. “I ran several self diagnostics. None of them reported any code degradation that I wasn’t already aware of. I was almost hoping that I was malfunctioning, but it seems that what we are seeing is real. No matter what laws of physics he seems to violate.
“Speaking of which, I am detecting an electromagnetic anomaly. Make that two. They are moving towards us from 7 O’clock below.”
John spun around and raised his plasma rifle. “Incoming.” He called out. He checked the charge on the rifle. 64. Not bad, but he doubted a replacement could be found in this universe. He doubted even more that his Shotgun would be of much use against enemies this heavily armored. He would have to make do.

“Really?” The Doctor asked, surprised. “How can you tell?” He idly fidgeted with his Sonic Screwdriver. No sense getting all worked up about this sort of thing.
Gordon pulled out a compact black rifle, which the Doctor didn’t recognize. Guns. Always humans with their guns. Normally he would discourage that sort of thing in his companions, but in this case he felt he could let it slide. The skeletal robots didn’t seem to be a problem he could talk his way out of.
Luigi, still garishly dressed, simply readied himself to do… the Doctor admitted to himself that he had no idea what Luigi was about to do. However, he was sure it would be as blatantly impossible yet effective as his previously displayed fighting talents.
They waited.
“Cortana?” John asked.
“The anomalies have split up and are moving into flanking positions.” The AI replied. “Distance seems to contradict the projected minimum thickness of the material around us. I think whatever we are fighting can move through walls. Don’t ask me how.
“The anomalies are now both above and below us.”
John called back to the others, “Watch the ceiling, and the floor.”

Luigi looked around nervously, and yelped like a struck dog when a metallic blur burst out of the ground beneath Gordon, passing through the goateed man as it drew back behind him.
Gordon spun around and opened fire, spraying pellets of force at the enemy. It passed right through the blur without effect and pitted the wall behind it.
The blur resolved itself into a shape. A metal skeleton, but lacking legs. Instead, it’s metallic ‘spine’ continued on into a wicked looking tail of some kind, which in no way assisted in supporting it as it hovered there. It also lacked the bizarre green lightning weapon that the others had carried, instead armed with two very sharp looking clawed hands.
John turned to aid Gordon when the second anomaly came at him from above. Instead of passing through him it became solid just before contact, raking John’s shields with both claws.
The shields flared silver, but held up surprisingly well to the attack. Gordon’s armor proved to be less resilient. A single claw sliced through the orange armor with ease, missing the occupant as Gordon leapt back, but leaving deep scars in the suit.

The metallic torso advanced on Gordon, intent on its prey. Luigi flailed his arms at the creature with a gesture that the Doctor would normally have called both panicked and ineffective, but was at most panicked.
With each swift jerk of his arms, Luigi sent out a ball of fire at the enemy, catching it in both the face and the chest as the salvo continued. The Doctor struggled to recall what sort of technology could summon fire like this, before seeing a blast of fire miss the metallic torso, hit the wall, and *bounce* down the corridor. He promptly threw up his hands in defeat and decided to make better use of his time.
As his shields began to dwindle, John went on the offensive. With a single devastating thrown elbow, the hovering torso became an upwards-flying torso. With a rapidly engaged blur it faded into the ceiling and vanished.
John regained his balance. “It’s changing targets.” Cortana announced.
John took stock of the battle. Freeman was continuing his barrage to little effect on the now solid opponent, which was rapidly retreating from Luigi’s fire. John didn’t stop to ask why or how Luigi had fire.

>>5434316
people arent bumping because they are reading "fucknuts"

gordon speaks? hmm......

A blurred metal tail swished out of the wall. It was moving up again. John could already see what would happen. The Doctor’s back was exposed, and he seemed to simply be fiddling with his little light again. Those metal claws would rip him in two, and there was nothing John could do to stop it. Not this quickly or from this distance.
The blur dove from the ceiling. John opened fire, his bolts of plasma passing through the blur in a hope to discourage it. It continued on, not yet solid and still partially in the wall.
And then, with a crack, one of those things ceased to be true.
The metal torso thrashed and scraped at the Doctor, its reach short by just a few crucial inches. The air around it blurred and shook and flashed green, but the machine itself was very clearly solid. And its tail was still in the wall. The Doctor had rooted it in place.
“Dimensional extrapolation based planar phasing. Elegant and very effective, defensively speaking, but just about anyone can collapse that waveform with the proper equipment and half a brain.” The Doctor deigned to turn around and look the furious machine in the face, brandishing the lit Sonic Screwdriver in his hand. “And I’m brilliant.”
The other mechanical torso dove at the wall to escape the constant stream of fire coming from Luigi, and hit the wall hard as it failed to blur. Melted and confused, it abandoned hit and run tactics as it made a mad dash at Luigi himself. Its charge forward was abruptly halted by a concussive blast of orange lightning which sent it flying back. Freeman was now holding an odd, orange, claw-tipped contraption that he held like a gun.

refresh button refresh button refresh button refresh button

Unable to flee and unable to attack, the alien machine was quickly dispatched and fell to the floor with a heavy crash.
Gordon turned and examined the trapped alien machine. “What now?” he asked.
The Doctor sighed. “I hadn’t thought quite that far ahead, actually.”
The machine thrashed ineffectively.
“But I think…” The Doctor continued, “It’s time we got some answers.” The Doctor gestured at John. “Think you could do something about those arms?”
With a few carefully aimed bursts of plasma, both arms fell to the ground. The metallic torso looked almost pathetic now. That is, until tiny sparks of green leapt from the damaged sockets and the arms began to rise up into the air toward the rest of the torso.
Freeman took aim with the orange thing in his hands. With a vibrant hum, both arms were plucked out of the air and hurled down the length of the corridor. That seemed to be sufficiently out of range of even this machine’s impressive repair ability.
“What is that, if you don’t mind my asking?” The Doctor inquired.
“Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator. Al…” Gordon’s face darkened a little bit. “A friend of mine called it the Gravity Gun.”
“Brilliant.” The Doctor replied. He pointed at John again. “I don’t suppose I can borrow your helmet for a bit?”
“Not a chance.” John replied.
“Then I’m going to need to use you as a medium. Hold on…” The sonic screwdriver dimmed and reignited. Momentarily freed, the alien machine lunged forward and then collapsed to the ground, it’s eyes dark.
“It thinks it’s in stasis. I don’t know how long that will last.” The Doctor explained.

“Then we don’t have much time.”
The Doctor, Luigi and Gordon all stopped.
“What was that?” Luigi asked.
“Cortana?” John whispered.
“It’s time I made myself known. Sorry about hijacking your external speakers.”
Again, the female voice came seemingly out of thin air. “My name is Cortana, a USMC integrated Smart AI. I am currently housed in the cybernetic relays of the Master Chief’s armor.”
“Oh, now that is just brilliant.” The Doctor grinned. “An onboard AI. Well, that makes this so much easier. Tell me Cortana, how good are you at… information retrieval?”
“Good enough.” The AI seemed almost insulted by the question.
“Oh, an AI with spunk. That’s…” The Doctor visibly winced. “…well actually that’s usually a bad sign. Never seem to turn out good for me, spunky AI’s.”
The Doctor crouched down and went to work on the back of the head of the disabled machine. “But if I can get you a hard line connection, and you are as good as you say you are, then we might just find out what’s going on here.”

“I thought you were the man with all the answers.” Gordon said. It was hard to tell, but he seemed less serious, if only slightly.
“Who, me? No.” The Doctor replied, stretching out that final ‘o’. He rapped a knuckle on the case of the machine. “I don’t even know who these guys are. Not really. I know they aren’t from my universe, and I know they are collecting people. People from all over, multiple universes. I even know that most of those people are related, and that everyone and everything they aren’t interested in collecting they kill. But-” He held up one finger for emphasis. “I don’t know why. It doesn’t much matter, though. I’d get involved in this mess just to keep the universes from breaking down. Which they are. Travel between universes should be impossible, these days all I have to do it step on the gas and let me tell you that is *not* a good sign.” There was a light crackle, and the metal shell of the downed torso began to spark blue.
“Molto Bene!” The Doctor cried triumphantly. “Nanomachines are so *useful*. It’s long and complex, but with just a little bit of work, you should be able to get a connection using the nanomachines crawling around all over your… er… the Chief’s armor. Just touch it and give the nanomachines time to spread.”
“Go on chief, I’m ready.” Cortana said.
John reached out and placed a hand on the side of the damaged machine. Slowly, the blue sparks began to travel up his arm, quickly covering his whole body.
“This is… this is a lot of information to take in at once. Give me a moment.” Cortana sounded as if she was in awe. There was a pause. “It’s systems are incredibly advanced, but it surprisingly doesn’t seem to have much in the way of actual system protection. It’s practically an open book.”

“They teleport away when defeated.” Gordon noted. “I doubt that they ever needed to worry about someone even trying this before.”
“That’s likely. In fact, the nanomachines themselves seem to have their own risk assessment algorithm that recalls nearby forces when the fighting machines have been reduced to 25% of their original number dedicated to that engagement. That’s why they teleported away at the end of the last encounter even though there was still one left.”
“What can you find about these machines themselves? Who made them?” The Doctor asked.
“Already working on that. There is a truly astounding amount of data in here. These things are *ancient*. ”
“It seems that these machines were built by a race called itself Necrontyr. Except that these machines themselves are also called Necrontyr. I think they made themselves? No, that can’t be right… hold on.”
Minutes passed.
“Got it. The Necrontyr were a race that built these machines and then downloaded themselves into them so they could live forever and defeat some other, more powerful race. There is also reference to some sort of electromagnetic star vampire creature. It doesn’t translate into words well, but it was somehow important.”
“What about the people they keep kidnapping? What do they want with them?” The Doctor asked.
“No idea” Cortana replied. “Though this unit seems to have some sort of scanner for detecting specific gene markers that classify an organism as ‘pure’ or ‘untouched’ or ‘null’. Again, this doesn’t translate well, but those words add up to an approximate definition. I can only assume these gene markers define if a person is worth capturing. As for why…”

“Unfortunately, while I can access some of this unit’s programming, most of the actual data I have access to is restricted to the memories of this specific Necrontyr before it was downloaded into this shell. Like the memories of most living creatures, I can’t promise 100% reliability.”
“However, I think I can tweak the recall algorithm to make it think that we are Necrontyr in need of repair, which should take us right to the nearest major relay. There will be more complex systems to interface with there, but I should warn you that this will likely put us in close proximity to thousands, if not millions, of dormant Necrontyr.”
“Nothing’s ever easy.” The Doctor replied.
“If they have that many to spare, why are they sending such small forces at us?” John asked.
“Simply put, they don’t think we are a threat.” Cortana replied. “And they are probably right. The Dyson Sphere is so massive that even a thermonuclear detonation would scarcely affect it. Four people are not a threat; they hardly even notice us. All we are seeing is an automatic process’s assessment of the minimum number of resources needed to eliminate a minor problem.”
“Good to know. Then we just need to stay under the radar for as long as we can. How soon can you have those nanomachines ready and reprogrammed?” The Doctor asked.
“Already done.” Cortana replied smugly.
“Molto Bene. Allons-y!” The sonic screwdriver flared blue. Everything went green and then white again.

Gordon was the first to recover. He had been through more teleportations than anyone really had a right to and few of them had been pleasant. He looked around.
He was in a small, closet sized box, the walls studded with a green crystalline circuitry and relays. A repair bay of some sort? Probably. Gordon didn’t wait to find out what would happen if it turned on with him inside. He aimed the Gravity Gun at the door and pushed forward with a blast of orange lightning. The door buckled out, giving Gordon the gap he needed to pry the door open with his crowbar.
Outside of the repair bay was a hallway, the walls lined with similar doors. Almost immediately, one door opened and the Doctor walked out.
“Good to see you freed yourself.” The Doctor eyed the damaged door behind Gordon. “Let’s hope that they didn’t notice that.”
Further down the length of the passageway, another door was vaporized in a flash of blue. The Master Chief stepped out; ducking through the hole his plasma grenade had created.
The Doctor threw up his arms in exasperation. “Sure, why not. Let’s pull the fire alarm while we’re at it.”
A low, muffled knocking could be heard. “Hello? Is anyone out there? It’sa me, Luigi!”
The Doctor opened the door with ease using the screwdriver, and then changed the setting on his handy little device. He leveled it outward and began to pace, seemingly using the screwdriver as some sort of divining rod.
He walked in one direction, stopped, turned, and walked back the way he came before turning back to the first direction. “Something interesting over here.” He called.
“What is it?” Gordon asked.
“Don’t know, find out when we get there.”
They walked down the corridor, wary of the doors on either side, each presumably housing a Necrontyr death machine.

The corridor opened up into a massive chamber, a metal walkway continuing forward as an extension of the corridor before meeting up with three other walkways at some sort of platform that formed a crossroads in the center of the chamber. A green, crystalline pillar pierced the center of the platform, joining it to similar platforms both above and below.
The walls of the massive chamber were lined with row upon row of tiny blinking green lights. Each one a stasis field. In each one a metal Necrontyr Warrior.
“Thatsa lotta Necrons.” Luigi mused aloud.
“Don’t worry, they’re still in stasis. Hardly any threat at all.” The Doctor replied. “And I think that pillar looks just impressive and central enough to be important. Let’s go check it out.”
The Doctor walked boldly up to the pillar and began to examine it in greater detail as Gordon and the Chief took up defensive positions. Luigi walked around the pillar and then looked over the edge of the walkway in boredom.
His face went almost as white as his improbable coveralls. “Uh-Oh.”
The entire group turned as one to see what was the matter when it rose into view from below. An enormous metal crab, it’s heady blocky and covered with green lights. Three pairs of what resembled legs hung down from the central mass, even though this flying machine clearly had no use for such things. From each side sprouted an arm tipped with a three-pronged metal claw large enough to pick up and crush a man with ease.
It tilted its head slightly, almost quizzically.
John was the first to react, and with incredible accuracy flung a small blue orb at the huge machine’s head, adhering itself to the ‘face’. A moment later it exploded in a flash of blue and white.
The crablike machine reared back in a motion that was disturbingly silent, and then righted itself. The head was damaged, but clearly not damaged enough.

Luigi, poorly situated at the front, let loose with a volley of fireballs that the robotic enemy scarcely noticed as it plucked the small plumber from the platform in one hand, squeezed, and flung him carelessly to the side.
Luigi was sent sprawling through the air and hit one of the walkways at high speed, the impact inexplicably causing his clothing to revert to its original green as he bounced and fell over the side. Luigi frantically grabbed for any purchase he could, reaching for the edge of the platform to stop his fall.
He missed.
John opened fire with his plasma rifle, leaving scars but little else in the armor of the machine. His shields flared white as a giant metal claw slammed him into the floor like a hammer from above.
The Doctor tried to find where Luigi had landed before spotting the terrified falling plumber.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He whispered. He spun around a yelled “Run!”
Freeman pulled out his pulse rifle and threw himself to the ground, aiming at the machine’s underbelly. The gun whirred, and flung a glowing orb of energy that caught the machine on the inside of one of its ‘legs’. The material it struck flashed white, then turned a very unhealthy shade of black and boiled away into nothingness.
The machine faltered and dropped several meters before beginning to rise again, this time slower than before.
John stumbled to his feet and fell back to a more defensible position.
“This way!” The Doctor called, making his way down one of the walkways. John and Gordon followed, spraying force and plasma at the pursuing machine as it cleared the platform.
The Plasma rifle dimmed in John’s hands. He flung it aside and pulled out his shotgun. This had quickly become a very bad situation.

They ran into the safety of another corridor, thankfully too small for the crablike machine. It hovered in front of the entrance, battered and scarred, before floating away to attend to some other business.
“Luigi?” John asked.
The Doctor shook his head.
John sighed. Yet another comrade lost. “We should keep moving.”
They continued down the corridor, this one lacking the doors that the other had been defined by. Ever so slowly, it began to slope down.
---
Luigi frantically grabbed for any purchase he could, reaching for the edge of the platform to stop his fall.
He missed.
Luigi panicked. Not after all this. Not a death this clumsy. Anything but this.
The air whipped by him as he fell. The chamber was massive, but surely he didn’t have long.
It struck him through the fear. The leaf!
He scrambled in his pocket. He had mere seconds to spare, if not less.
He pulled out something. The leaf? No. His second fire flower. A waste of something so precious, but he had no more time left.
Luigi popped the flower into his mouth and swallowed as he hit the ground.
---

The Dyson Sphere was deathly silent but for their own footsteps. It had been since their arrival. This made the cries and screams that came echoing up the corridor seem a hellish relief from the quite.
They slowed to a crawl, a mutual understanding that stealth was key.
The room they found was filled with people, crammed into cells that were blocked by green fizzing fields rather than bars of metal. In the center of the room were four pits with wicked looking robotic appendages handing from the ceiling above them, some caked with gore. As they watched a trio of small, robotic scarabs flew out of one of the pits. They passed through the nearest green field with ease and latched on to one of its occupants, an aging man wearing tattered and filthy rags. He kicked and screamed in fear, his cries turning to those of pain as he passed through the field. They dragged him still, pulling him into one of the pits. The machines above descended and went to their gruesome work.
“No.” The Doctor hissed, his eyes alight with rage. “This can’t be. Anything but this.”
“What is it? What are they doing?” John asked.
Cortana replied, but only John could hear her. “The inside of those pits bears a remarkable similarity to the Necrontyr repair chambers we were in before.”

In another pit, the machines hanging from the roof rose and went dormant. A form rose out of the pit and steadied itself. Still metal and vaguely skeletal, but entirely unlike the Necrontyr Warriors they had seen before. It seemed fuller bodied somehow and brandished a pole weapon that could only be described as a glaive of some kind.
“Cybermen.” The Doctor hissed. “The Necrontyr are making Cybermen. A new shape, a new weapon, a new master… but Cybermen nonetheless.”
“But why?” He continued. “Why go through the trouble of breaching into other universes just to turn people into Cybermen? You can do that to just about anyone.” The Doctor smacked his forehead. “No! Stop thinking like you know them! Specific families. Something genetic, something that makes them compatible. Something so rare that they need to travel across the infinite multiverse in order to find them en mass.”
Gordon turned to the Doctor. “An infinite multiverse means an infinite supply, no matter now rare they are.”
“An infinite army.” The Doctor mused. “Even now, they could probably dominate an entire galaxy with ease. But with truly unrivaled numbers… This has to stop. Now.”
The Doctor rushed forward, but Gordon caught him by the arm and held him. “We can’t save them.”

>>5434316
Can't bump, reading.
This is awesome.

The Doctor whipped around in a fury. “I’m The Doctor. I’m a Timelord. I have fought Gods and armies to a standstill with nothing but my wits and I will not leave these people to die.”
Gordon simply returned the Doctor’s gaze. “If we rescue them here and now, we lose. We will have meddled directly in their affairs, and proven ourselves a threat. The next fight will be more than an automated response. We will be killed, and the Necrontyr will not be stopped.”
“I came here to save them.” The Doctor said. It was an excuse.
“And we will. But not like this.” Gordon replied. The Doctor made as if to speak again, but there was a sternness to Gordon that told him that for all of his influence, this was an argument that the Doctor had lost.
The air around the recently ‘born’ Necrontyr grew green and it disappeared in a flash, teleported to parts unknown. The room was now seemingly empty of threats.
“There is a door on the other side of that room.” Cortana whispered to John. “Now is our chance.”
“Follow me. Now.” The Chief whispered to his two companions. He ran forward in a crouched position, moving around the pits in the center.

As he came into view, the occupants of the cells went momentarily silent and then erupted into cheers. Their celebration quickly dimmed as he moved past them, turning to confusion and pleas for help. John moved on.
The pleas turned to desperate screams. In several cells, people rushed forward only to be reduced to agonized spasms as they made contact with the green fields that restrained them.
Gordon ushered the Doctor ahead of him, making sure that the Timelord wouldn’t try any sudden heroics. He didn’t. Instead, he did his best to avoid eye contact with those in the cells, simply whispering “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” as he passed.
Out of the pit where the Necrontyr had recently emerged, three robotic scarabs flew up and swarmed around Gordon. He aimed his weapon, but the scarabs didn’t latch on. They simply buzzed around him like hornets before moving on to another, more compatible, target in one of the cells.
They ducked into the corridor on the other side of the room and continued on until the blissful silence replaced the cries for help behind them.

---
Luigi opened his eyes and stared up. He hurt. Boy, did he hurt.
But he was alive. That had to count for something. He guessed he had swallowed that flower just in time. The rules of magic seemed strange to Luigi, but where before it had been an annoyance to him that even a weak blow negated the magic of the mushrooms and flowers while leaving him unharmed, he was thankful that larger amounts of damage were similarly treated.
He crawled to his feet. He had landed on one of the metal walkways below the one he fell from.
There was no sign of his comrades. They must have gone on without him.
Strictly speaking, this all should have been Mario’s problem.
Suddenly remembering the source of his deadly flight through the air, Luigi searched the massive chamber for his enemy. There, far up above him, something vaguely crablike was attending to something on one of the walls of the chamber.
Luigi noticed something lying on the ground on the walkway on the other side of the platform from his. He walked over to investigate, cracking his back as he went.
It was the Master Chief’s plasma rifle, dim and broken by the fall. Luigi looked up. That meant they went in this direction. If they survived.
Luigi found the idea that he could be the only survivor more than a little depressing. Like much of his life.
Luigi continued forward, leaving the wreckage of the gun behind him. If Luigi was the only one left, than that meant it was up to him to save the day.
Maybe there would even be a princess at the end of it.

Luigi continued down the corridor, which soon ended in a wide vertical shaft. It looked just big enough for something the size of the crab-thing. Luigi tried not to think about that.
It looked like Luigi would be using that leaf after all. He popped the leaf into his mouth, swallowed, and stepped out into thin air. He floated up a few feet before looking down. His curiosity got the better of him and he descended. The shortcuts are always down…
Much to his horror, the chamber at the bottom of the shaft was littered with bodies mixed with miscellaneous junk. Some clearly aliens or monsters that Luigi had never heard of, as well as humans in uniforms and armor at least as foreign as the aliens. This was in addition to ruined vehicles, machines and pieces of buildings. No two were alike.
Luigi began to depart the gruesome refuse pile when he spotted a large, green pipe the size of a man. Such pipes were a common sight in the Mushroom Kingdom. There were things from his world here!

He flew back down under the power of the leaf, and examined the ruins more closely. He almost was ready to give up in his search when he found it. It was an unassuming section of common red brickwork, the like which could be found just about anywhere on the surface of the Mushroom Kingdom. However, the trip here had not been kind, and there were cracks in the brick. From these cracks spilled forth a soft yellow light, flickering. Something glowing was moving around inside the brick block.
Luigi had just found everything he could have ever wanted in this literal pile of junk.
He carefully punched away the extraneous brickwork until only a single brick box was left, light leaking from the cracks and edges. It was heavy, but Luigi latched on and refused to leave it behind, lifting it into the air with him. He flew upward, slowly. He didn’t know what he would find at the top of the shaft, but for the first time since this whole crazy adventure had started, Luigi wasn’t afraid of *anything*.
---

.

“We need a plan.” John said. As they continued through the labyrinthine corridors of the Dyson Sphere, John had naturally taken point. The Doctor, their former de facto leader, had lost much of his momentum after leaving the Necrontyr conversion chamber.
“Agreed.” Gordon replied. “Doctor, your thoughts?”
The Doctor sighed. “We can’t fight them, and this Dyson Sphere is too big to destroy. There isn’t any way to turn them on each other that I can think off, and we can’t call for help. Even if we-” The Doctor stopped, both in speech and motion. “Oh.” He said. He grinned, his former depression thrown to the wind. “Oh!”
Gordon was so taken aback by the change in disposition that he almost smiled. Almost.
“What is it?” He asked.
The Doctor pointed at Gordon. “You were going on about reconstructive versus dimensional teleportation before. You sounded like you knew what you were talking about.”
“I *am* a theoretical physicist.” Gordon replied.
“But do you know what you’re talking about?” the Doctor asked.
“Yes.” Gordon replied sternly.
“Good. I might need your help.” The Doctor was becoming more energetic by the moment.

>Gordon coughed again. Talking seemed to irritate his throat, as if he didn’t do it very often.
"Man of few words, huh, Gordon?"

“Then you have a plan.” John asked.
“Oh yes!” The Doctor practically roared. He began to talk at nearly breakneck speeds. “This entire Dyson Sphere is built to power their interdimensional gateways. Somewhere, there is a central hub to that system. From that hub, we have complete control over the interdimensional bridges. If we were going to call for help, we could bring reinforcements in. Instead, we are going to bring things out.”
“What things?” Gordon asked.
“Everything, starting with those poor people. I don’t know where I’ll send them, though there is a nice peaceful planet I know of that is currently vacant where they shouldn’t bother anyone. They’ll still be covered in nanites from when they were teleported into the cells. We can use those same nanite markers to teleport them to the gateways, and then send them away. Their individual homes would take more time than we could hope to have, so they better be grateful for simple safety in my universe.
“And then, we end this Necontyr threat for good.” The Doctor continued.
“I thought you said we couldn’t destroy the Sphere.” John said.
“We can’t. But we *can* make the Sphere destroy itself. By opening up multiple gateways to the same location: the heart of a galaxy.” The Doctor beamed.

So where can I see the first part? This seems pretty hilarious and awesome.

“A supermassive black hole.” Gordon whispered.
“Correctamundo!” The Doctor realized what he said. “I hate that word. Moving on!”
“Each gateway to the black hole should act as a miniature black hole within the Dyson Sphere, any one of which would be capable of pulling the Dyson Sphere apart. With any luck, we should have a bunch of them. The Dyson Sphere, and everything in it, will be destroyed.”
“Won’t we be in the Dyson Sphere?” John asked.
“I’m working on a solution to that.” The Doctor said, brushing the issue aside. He started to fiddle with his Sonic Screwdriver again.
“What are you doing?” Gordon asked.
“You remember that green pillar we saw before?”
“Yes, why?”
The world flashed green, then white.
Gordon stumbled. They were back on the platform in the middle of the chamber. Or, one of the platforms, at any rate. The Doctor shook off the disorientation fast this time.
“It’s a major relay in the teleportation network.” The Doctor gasped out. He quickly stumbled over to the pillar. “We don’t have much time. I need to lock in the hub’s location before that crab thing comes back.”

>>5434533

(Quick aside: the first part i posted here. It starts with Luigi.)

John looked up. “Then you better get done in the next few seconds.”
The Doctor glanced up. The Crablike machine was descending toward them rapidly.
“Oh… bugger. Keep it occupied!” The Doctor yelled. He went to work on the pillar with his sonic screwdriver.
The Master Chief armed a frag grenade, and waited. As the machine came down, the grenade went up. It first looked like it might overshoot before reaching the peak of its arc, landing on top of the machine, and exploding. The machine shook and swerved in the air before regaining control; it seemed like the grenade had caused little more than a loud noise.

---
Meanwhile, Luigi heard a loud noise. An explosion.
In the freakishly silent Dyson Sphere, it could only mean one thing. Someone was stirring up trouble.
Luigi ducked into a nearby corridor sprouting off of the shaft, picking up speed. The brick box felt like it was growing heavier by the minute, and Luigi wasn’t sure how long he could keep holding onto it before his arms gave out.
As he entered the massive main chamber, this quickly ceased to be a problem.
---

Gordon fired a full clip into the side of the crablike machine before he was forced to stop and reload. The machine, unfazed, reached out and grabbed for him. He dropped the spent rifle and tried to run, but the claw was faster.
With an easy, careless gesture Gordon was tossed behind the enormous machine like a ragdoll. Gordon was surprisingly calm about this as he reached for the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator. He aimed at the back of the creature and engaged.
Normally, whatever he aimed at would have been pulled towards him. But a target object of such size and mass, combined with Gordon’s unstable position and Newtonian Physics, instead resulted in Gordon changing direction in mid air and being pulled toward the machine, landing on its back.
John continued his own barrage at the creature, his shotgun doing little to no damage despite the close range. The machine was simply too heavily armored.
“Oh no.” The Doctor said.
“What?” John called.
“I think I tripped an alarm.” The Doctor replied.
Along the wall, several green stasis fields faded as the metal warriors inside were brought online.

Gordon, now on the back of the metal beast, found himself at a loss for a plan of action, resorting to slamming into the carapace with his crowbar ineffectively.
The air around the platform crackled green as a squad of eight of the Necrontyr Warriors teleported the relatively short distance to the platform.
“I need more time!” The Doctor called.
John armed a plasma grenade and threw, catching one warrior in the chest and reducing it to rubble quickly. He brought his shotgun to bear on another, to little effect. The same could not be said for the green lighting that depleted his shields just before the crablike machine swiped at him with an enormous claw. John leapt into the air in an attempt to avoid it, but the claws still caught his legs, sending him end over end to the ground with a heavy crash.
Gordon, gravity gun in one hand and crowbar in the other, ran forward and jumped. From his position and with the full weight of his body he managed to send one warrior stumbling to the side, a follow-up blast of force from the gravity gun sending it over the edge of the platform to its demise. He charged at another with his crowbar before taking a blast of green lightning to the chest, resulting in an explosion of yellow sparks as his HEV suit used up much of its power in an attempt to diminish the blast.
And then, like a gift from above, a something vaguely red and heavy looking plummeted down and smashed into the back of the crab machine, fracturing it’s armor with an audible crack and sending brick fragments flying in all directions.

Much more curious was the star that bounced away from the impact. John, climbing to his feet, was taken aback by the abject silliness of it. It was a glowing bouncing star. And not the kind of star that might have planets revolving around it, but a star like that from a child’s drawing. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought it even had two dark spots that might have been eyes.
And then, to complete the picture of total impossibility, the deceased Luigi came down like a comet and slammed into the star. There was an explosion of vibrant light and sound that seemed to catch even the Necrontyr by surprise as they all stopped and turned to observe this sudden release of energy.
There was Luigi, flying in mid air. And more impossible yet, he had become a living maelstrom of flashing color. And he grinned beneath his heavy mustache.
A full salvo of green lighting shot out from multiple Necrontyr, many striking him full in the chest. There was no effect.
Luigi flew down like a swooping eagle and punched the nearest warrior in the shoulder. For no adequately explained reason, this caused it to violently explode.
The Necrontyr quickly determined which enemy was the biggest threat and continued to fire on Luigi, even as the Chief mowed down the nearest one with several blasts from his shotgun.
Luigi continued on, a shining god of war. With a kick, another warrior exploded. A nearby warrior changed tactics and swung its weapon as a club to smash Luigi out of the air. As the gun made contact, it shattered in a wave of concussive force that sent the warrior flying over the edge of the platform, even as it left Luigi unharmed.

Only two out of the eight Warriors remained, and a very specific risk assessment algorithm recalled the forces immediately, leaving crackling green auras in their wake.
Luigi rounded the pillar in the center of the platform in a graceful arc, and charged the crab machine. It swung out an arm to catch him in a metal claw. Instead, the claw exploded on contact, an irregularity that the machine was unable to fully process before a single solid punch met its face.
The resulting explosion sent the machines ‘legs’ flying in all directions like a ring of cannonballs.
The Doctor was standing now. “What?”
Luigi flew back to the group, smiling and flashing like an epileptic’s worst nightmare.
“It’sa me, Luigi!” He said.
“What?” The Doctor was clearly still trying to wrap his head around what he was seeing. He stamped his foot for emphasis. “What?!”
“I found a star.” Luigi replied. Clearly this was supposed to explain everything.
“Where did you find it? Can you get another?” John asked. In all his years of fighting against the Covenant, never had he seen a weapon like what he had just witnessed.
“I don’t think so.” Luigi replied. The flashing began to flicker back to his normal green coveralls more and more frequently, before finally he was himself again, although still flying. “I can check.”
“Why don’t you,” Gordon said, reclaiming his fallen pulse rifle. He finished reloading. His last clip, not that this weapon had done him much good.
“Wait here.” Luigi said, as he began to fly away. There was something whimsical about seeing him flying around like Peter Pan.

The Doctor returned to his work, this time much more carefully. It wasn’t long before he had the information he needed. The location of the central teleportation hub was his; they just needed their final comrade.
Luigi returned not long after, lugging something bulky in his arms.
“No star.” He said. “But I did find this.”
He dropped the heavy looking gun at John’s feet.
“I saw your glow-gun before. It was’a broke, so I found you a new one!” Luigi said, childishly pleased with himself.
John picked up the weapon. It was surprisingly heavy, even for him. He would have to use both hands, even though it looked rather like one of the submachine guns he was used to wielding one handed. It was a very large gun, caliber unknown, but John suspected the recoil would be tremendous. On closer inspection, he noticed an embossed golden double-headed eagle on the side, as well as some chipped wax, as if there had been a seal of some sort on it.
“Thank you.” John replied. This looked like it would fare much better than his shotgun, although he was unsure how much ammunition it contained.
“Are we ready?” The Doctor asked.
The rest of the group nodded their assent.
“Then, once more into the breach!” The screwdriver whirred.
The world went green, then white.

The first thing the Doctor noticed was the heavy humming that filled the air.
The platform they found themselves on was remarkably similar to the once they had just left, though it was missing the green pillar in the center. The chamber was much smaller than the previous one, and the walls were noticeably bereft of rows of slumbering Necrontyr.
The Doctor looked over the edge. Below them, the entire floor of the chamber was made of the same green crystalline circuitry that seemed to define Necrontyr technology.
“We need to get down there!” The Doctor yelled over the hum. Luigi nodded, grabbed the Doctor under the shoulders, and lifted him into the air.
Luigi’s arms were still tired from carrying the bricks and the heavy gun, but he managed to get the Doctor to the ground safely.
“Luigi is visibly tired, and this armor is far from light.” Cortana whispered to John. “There is no way he can carry you down.”
John murmured an agreement, and walked over to the side of the platform. He took a few steps back and leapt forward, hitting the wall and sliding down it to slow his descent. The speed of his fall still could have broken a leg had it not been for the white flare of his shields as he hit the ground.
Luigi started to fly back up for Gordon when the hum in the room suddenly become higher pitched and the air flashed green. Two of the flying torsos were now in the room, circling around him and his comrades on the ground.
The air flashed again, and Gordon looked up from over the edge. He was no longer alone on the platform.

The four machines had him surrounded, and they were not Necrontyr Warriors. The glaive-like weapons in their hands and their unique construction identified them as things that had very recently been flesh and bone.
Gordon didn’t have time to think about that as a glaive came down at him faster than he could dodge, cutting through his armor like paper and leaving a deep gash in his shoulder.
Almost immediately, two green blasts of green lightning caught him in the back, the explosion of golden sparks signaling the last of his suits energy expending itself. Gordon doubted he could survive another hit.
Luigi flew upward in a desperate attempt to reach Gordon when a metal claw raked his back. The claw didn’t hurt, but the subsequent fall to the ground did. Luigi didn’t have another leaf. Gordon would have to find his own way down.
Gordon raised his pulse rifle and aimed it at the nearest Necrontyr, which was raising its glaive for a killing blow. He thumbed the alternate fire. At this close a range, it was a suicidal option.
With a whirr, the gun launched a high-energy pellet.

The yellow glowing orb flew out and caught the Necrontyr in the chest, vaporizing its armor and bouncing back toward Gordon. Gordon threw himself prone. The orb passed through the space he had very recently occupied, and caught one of the Necrontyr in the leg, boiling it away before bouncing to the side to hit the other Necrontyr behind Gordon and exploding. Necrontyr fragments were sent flying over both sides of the platform.
Gordon dropped the pulse rifle and leapt for the damaged Necrontyr that was his original target, critically wounded as it was. With all of his strength he drove it over the edge, himself with it, as he reached for the Gravity gun.
One of the torsos flew down at the Doctor, who was already crouched down and manipulating the crystalline machinery at his feet. John took aim with his heavy weapon and fired. With a loud crack of *Dakka*, a solid projectile flew out and slammed into the side of the torso, exploding on impact.
The torso was sent careening away, one clawed arm completely destroyed. It made a break for the safety of the wall as John fired again. Too late, this time, as it went out of phase, the explosive round hitting the wall instead.
Gordon, falling, aimed his gravity gun at the Necrontyr in his embrace, and fire just before he hit the ground. The blast sent the fighting machine into the ground with extra force, shattering it on impact. However, the recoil of the blast sent Gordon up ever so slightly before he fell the remaining feet to the ground. He landed badly, an audible pop coming from his left knee.
“Major fracture detected.” His suit informed him calmly. “Morphine administered.”

Gordon rolled around in pain as he waited for the morphine to flood his system. He didn’t have time to waste. He grabbed the pole weapon from the remains of the nearby Necrontyr, planted one end into the ground and pulled himself to his feet, albeit shakily.
As the Necrontyr torso followed him to the ground, Luigi grabbed the last of his items from his pocket and swallowed. The torso reared back from the sudden change in its prey, and tried to flee as the now giant Luigi lunged for it. Luigi caught it by the tail, and swung it into the wall with a heavy crack.
John, guarding the Doctor, kept an eye out for the remaining torso. It had to come out of hiding eventually.
Something flashed on his radar. “Above you!” Cortana yelled into his ear.
The Chief dove to the side, barely avoiding the metal form that slammed into the ground. The fourth Necontyr conversion stood up and leveled its glaive at John, releasing a blast of green lightning that nearly took John off his feet. John leveled the heavy gun at it and fired, unloading three or four explosive rounds into its chest.
The Necrontyr conversion was damaged, but not yet done. With a wicked swipe, it cut through John’s remaining shields and neatly sliced open John’s side as it passed through his armor.
John strafed to the side to dislodge himself and aimed to fire again when a huge, white gloved fist smashed the Necrontyr into the ground. It tried to raise itself on its broken legs when a second smash stopped it for good.

“Got it!” The Doctor yelled triumphantly. The humming in the air took on a whistling, warbling sound. The air flashed again, as ten Necrontyr Warriors immediately teleported into the room.
They raised their guns and all aimed directly at the Doctor.
Then they all immediately disappeared in flashed of green light.
“This is *my* teleport array now!” The Doctor called after them.
The light in the room dimmed, and the humming subsided.
“There, that should take the entire array offline for now. No more reinforcements.” The Doctor said. He rushed over to the heavily wounded Gordon. “Are you alright?”
“No.” Gordon replied matter-of-factly. “But I think I’ll live.”
“Good to hear.” The Doctor replied. “Now, I need your zero point energy Field Manipulator.”
Gordon raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because once things get started, we won’t have a lot of time. And I’m going to need your handy little helper there to get us all home.”
Gordon took this in and lent the Doctor the device. The Doctor mumbled to himself as he aimed his sonic screwdriver at various points on the device. “And…” The Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator flicked, and turned from orange to a greenish blue. “…there we go.”
Gordon’s eyes went wide, and then he scowled at the Doctor. “You could have done that the whole time?” He hissed through his teeth.

“Weeeell… I could have, but it doesn’t last long and I don’t know how often I can overcharge it like this without breaking it.” He handed the now enhanced gravity gun back to Gordon.
“Now, the rescuing. Chief, I’m going to need Cortana’s help for this.”
“I figured you might.” Cortana’s voice came out of the armor’s speakers again. The surface of John’s armor crackled with blue sparks, which quickly spread to the surface of the crystalline floor. “I need the destination coordinates” Cortana said.
The Doctor rattled off a string of numbers, which the drugged Gordon was unable to comprehend. Cortana didn’t seem the least bit phased.
“What are the final twelve digits for?” She asked.
“It’s location in time.” The Doctor replied. “I already have the dimensional breaches aligned for my universe, so we should be fine. Now, get ready to send those people home as soon as this hub is back online.”
The Doctor aimed his screwdriver at the floor and it flared blue. The entire room filled with buzzing and light.
“Rerouting power.” Cortana called out. “All twenty-four gates are active and aligned properly. Giving the markers at the gate locations queue priority. Send them now.”
“Done!” The Doctor replied. “That should have sent all of the available teleportation markers attached to a verifiable body temperature. Let’s hope nobody down there was cold blooded.”
“Incoming teleportation!” Cortana yelled.
“What?” The Doctor looked up. “That’s impossible, the array is…”

The air crackled and a lone figure appeared. At first glance it seemed of similar design as the Necrontyr warriors, but the shoulders were more heavily armored and it wore a tattered black cape. In its hands was a bladed staff, clearly outfitted with the same green lightning technology as the glaives. If there was ever a lord and commander of the Necrontyr forces, there was no mistaking who it was.
Luigi charged forward and swung a huge fist at the Necrontyr Lord, an attack that was instantly interrupted by a blast of green lightning that sent the now normal sized Luigi flying into the wall.
The Lord raised his staff to strike at the Doctor and suddenly found himself flying backward as he was covered in a crackling field of white lightning.
Gordon used the enhanced gravity gun to swing the Lord into the wall, and then with a blast of lightening pushed him away into the wall still deeper, leaving a crater in the side of the room.
The Lord, mostly unharmed, climbed out of the depression and outstretched a hand towards Gordon. The injured physicist found himself flying through the air toward his enemy only to stop a few feet away. Cold green lights stared back at him.
John raised his heavy gun and fired, explosive rounds chipping metal off of the Necrontyr Lord. The Lord cared not. He slammed Gordon into the ground, hard, and swung his bladed staff in a perfect blow to split Gordon’s head in two.

---
Gordon stared up. The blade was a mere inch from his face. The Lord had stopped.
“No…” He hissed. He looked around. Time had stopped.
An all too familiar voice filled his head as the world faded to black.
“A productive day… don’t you think, Mister Freeman?” The voice was raspy and the pronunciation and emphasis were wrong. “Your,” the voice inhaled, wet and ragged, “participation in today’s events are now over. You deserve a rest.”
Gordon realized his hands were empty.
“Ah… yesss. Your participation is over, but that device has its own part to play. Do not worry, Mister Freeman. It will be returned to you. In time.”
Gordon Freeman fell into nothingness again.
---
John raised his heavy gun and fired, explosive rounds chipping metal off of the Necrontyr Lord. The Lord cared not. He slammed Gordon into the ground, hard, and swung his bladed staff in a perfect blow to split Gordon’s head in two.
With no warning or fanfare of any sort, Gordon was simply gone. There was nothing left of him save the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator lying on the ground.
The hairs on the back of the Doctor’s neck stood up instantly. He had felt something, then. A sense of wrongness that resonated with every inch of his being as a Timelord.
But there was no time for that, now. The Doctor, brandishing his sonic screwdriver, rushed forward.

John continued his barrage of explosive rounds, pausing only long enough to toss his last plasma grenade to Luigi haphazardly.
Luigi armed the grenade and wound up for the pitch, catching the Necrontyr Lord in the arm. The explosion of blue light scarred and melted the limb, but it was yet intact. The Necrontyr Lord waved his hand, sending both John and Luigi flying into the wall.
John regained his feet and opened fire again. Explosive ammunition left deep pits and scars in the Lord, but it continued on, firing a blast of green lightning that both depleted John’s shields and scarred his armor.
Luigi scrambled to his feet and frantically searched for a weapon. He saw one.
He ran forward, hitting the ground and tumbling past the Necrontyr Lord, safely avoiding a stab of the staff.
The Lord turned to pursue Luigi and found the Doctor waiting for him, sonic screwdriver leveled.
“I rather liked Freeman.” The Doctor said. The screwdriver flared blue, and the Necrontyr Lord’s eyes dimmed.
The Lord swung its staff wildly in its blindness as Luigi reached his prize. Luigi picked up the gravity gun.
John fired three final explosive rounds into the back of the Lord, the ammunition for his looted weapon now depleted. The Necrontyr Lord was heavily damaged now, and its blasts of green lightning were erratic and ill aimed.
Luigi aimed the gravity gun at one of the pieces of debris that had fallen from the platform when Gordon released the energy pellet. A Necrontyr conversion’s arm, glaive still in hand.

The glaive flew through the air and righted itself in front of Luigi. He aimed at the Necrontyr Lord and fired.
The absurdly sharp weapon was launched like a rocket, slamming into the chest of the Necontyr Lord with such speed that it cut a hole straight through him and embedded itself in the wall behind him.
The Lord collapsed to his knees, the damage already visibly beginning to repair itself, extreme though it may be.
John dropped the spent weapon in his hands and pulled the glaive out of the wall with ease. With a single, easy swing he chopped the head of the Necrontyr Lord in two.
The Lord collapsed completely; green lightning dancing across its surface before dying out.
The Doctor looked around. Luigi was battered and bruised. John was leaking blood from his side, and his armor looked like hell. Gordon… wasn’t even there anymore.
“Time to finish this.” The Doctor said. The screwdriver flared, and with a thunderous crack of green light a large blue box filled the room. The TARDIS.
“Everyone inside.” The Doctor ordered. “We don’t want to be out here when this begins.”
When everyone else was inside, the Doctor made a few final adjustments to the core of the hub. He double-checked his coordinates for the dimensional gate. It would be terribly embarrassing if he somehow managed to miss the middle of a galaxy.

The sonic screwdriver flared one last time. The room shook, and a loud metallic groaning could be heard as the Dyson sphere warped under the sudden strain being inflicted upon it. The Doctor stepped inside the TARDIS and closed the door.
“What now?” John asked. “I thought this thing had no power left.”
“That’s true.” The Doctor said solemnly. He walked over and picked the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator out of Luigi’s hands. “That is where this comes in.”
The Doctor opened up a grate in the floor and went to work. “Zero Point Energy. The energy of the universe itself. Near- infinite power for a small device.”
The central column of the TARDIS lit up.
“And with a little enhancement, enough power for a trip in the TARDIS.” The Doctor finished explaining.

The column in the center moved up and down with a shrill grinding noise. The Doctor ran over to one of the screens. “Home sweet home!” he called.
“Speaking of which…” John began.
“And look!” The Doctor pointed at the screen. There was a group of people in various forms of clothing milling about in a grassy field. “The survivors made it through okay. They’ll have to stay where they are, though. They aren’t supposed to even be in this universe, and it would make a real mess of things if we let them get caught up in events.”
“Can’t you send them home?” Luigi asked.
“No can do.” The Doctor began. “With the Dyson Sphere gone, there’s nothing keeping the universes joined. The walls have closed.”
“Doctor…” John growled. “Then how are *we* supposed to get home?”
The Doctor raised a finger and took a deep breath. “Ah.”
And many adventures were had.

--------------------------------------------------------

And that's it. I hope that you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed DMing/writing it.

And my apologies to the sagefag from >>5434316 .

And yes, I know, Luigi's Leaf shouldn't have worked that way. We didn't figure that out until after the session, and making it setting-accurate for this telling would have left major plot holes open. Whoops.

This was good.

i actually lold when g-man came
i love fanwanks

>>5434832

As if the G-Man would let Gordon die. He has too much time invested in him to let him go so easily...

I thought I wouldn't like this.

I am glad to have been proven wrong OP.

You're not the best writer, but that doesn't mean the story wasn't ::awesome::!

I want to know what happens next!

>>5434442

Luigi, Nooooooooooo!

FUCKYEAR!

Good god this was fun to read. Very well written. I liked it.

I don't know if it was OP or the players, but SOMEBODY involved actually knew two shits about the characters.

The 10th doctor is spot on, I read most of Cortana's lines in her voice, and Gordon Freeman didn;t feel phony even though he was talking.

Cool Story Bro, for reals.

Thanks for all the positive criticism! This is actually my first writefaggotry for 4chan, and it's nice to know I don't gargle balls.

>>5434960

Sadly, this is all there is. Don't let the "And many adventures were had" fool you, those are just the words I ended the session with and they seemed a fitting closing.

>>5435039
Fuck. That was awesome. I was skeptical about luigi but now i love the plucky lil sumbitch.

>Luigi continued on, a shining god of war
Thats seriously mind-blowing. There is blood coming out of my ears...

>>5435039
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! PLEASE DM ANOTHER SESSION OR MORE AND RECORD IT FOR OUR READING PLEASURE!

>>5435118

Your words move me, but I don't think I can make that promise. If it ever does happen, it certainly will not be this summer. Although I will certainly inform the rest of the group that you all enjoyed their adventures this much.

freeman here. bravi that is what I say Bravi

Bumpan for awesome.

Also, I've never seen a story this long posted on /tg/ before. Is this some sort of writefag record? Or do the Oldfags among us remember a story from the Golden Times that was as long as this?

>>5435397
There are long stories, for sure. But they're generally few and far between.

>>5435441

Stupid sexy Luigi...

>>5435485

sage on the principle of including halo

otherwise decent

>>5435441
look at that pale skin he's been living under his brother's shadow for too long

>>5435498

Ironically, the MC seems to have been the least awesome in the group:

Gordon Freeman wrestles a Necron, rides a Tomb Spyder, and takes out 3 Pariahs in 1-2 turns (it's unclear how long that took in game).

Luigi: BAD. ASS. No explanation needed.

The Doctor: Never does damage, never gets hit. Destroys a station bigger than a star using an alien swiss army knife.

Master Chief: Shoots people with plamsa and the big gun (bolter?). Great weapons, probably did a lot of damage. But he rarely did anything of actual note, other than landing the killing blow on the Necron lord at the end.
Cortana was pretty useful, though.

>>5435523
>>5435523

Screw Mario. Today, Luigi is the hero.

teh one free man here. If I remember correctly it took one round and damn near killed me if not for that reflex save.

>>5434990
I was hearing David Tennet's voice the entire time. Bravo good sir. Manly tears of awesomeness were cried for you

I betcha if ever Luigi were a psyker, he'd make all his Perils checks. Pic related.

OP, this is awesome and you should feel awesome.

TG, we can't let writefaggotry this epic fade into obscurity. Any chance this could be saved on 1d4chan somewhere?

>>5435751
You can start by putting it on sup/tg/, brosky.

>>5435616
Seriously.

If it wasn't worth it to watch Luigi open up a shelf's worth of kick-ass cans, it was worth it just to see the Doctor's reaction. I saw him with his mouth agape the whole time, personally. All of them, really.

THIS MUST BE SAVED

Excellent thread is excellent.

Archived for future awesomeness.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/5434203/

>>5435766

> Doctor's reaction. mouth agape

Picture related.