Where were You When the Sky Fell Down?

[MASH-1]

"...reports coming from the field describe strange rock-like beings wreaking havoc on Galaxy City..." The news caster reported into the camera, behind her flames and smoke filling the background, "The Freedom Phalanx has arrived as well as sightings Arachnos forces, though that has yet to be substantiated. Currently a call is being put out to all heroes to assist with the protection of Galaxy and evacuating her residents."

* * *

The sounds of combat rang out, picked up easily by MASH-1s audiotory sensors. Using various visual UIs, he was able to keep track of the action happening in the heart of the devestated neighborhood. Every part of him wanted to be out there, fighting alongside the heroes and making a difference but Donovan had been ordered to stay back with the medic crew and stand watch in case the Shivans managed to break through. It didn't seem fair to Donovan. He could make a real difference in the field instead of babysitting the docs.

Instead, he stood motionless on the outskirts of the mobile medical unit setup in northern Kings Row, just on the other side of the war wall. One of the things that irritated Donovan the most about his powers was his inability to be restless. Even though his mind grew bored, the robotic body didn't mirror it. Restlessness didn't exist in a machine. So, instead of fidgeting or pacing or doing anything else, the body simply stood there leaving Donovan's mind to grow more and more bored as time went on. Eventually his thoughts went back to how this had all began.

What had started as potentially another boring day in class changed in a heartbeat as the whole school was rocked by massive tremors. Chaos was quickled qwelled by faculty as information began rolling in. Galaxy City was destroyed. Alien monsters invading. Statesman was dead. Disco was reborn. No one knew what was true and what was rumor as students were hustled into the Bunker.

Professor Argust himself had actually shown up at the school moments after the lockdown started to pick Donovan up, telling him that he was needed on the MASH unit. Requested personally by Dr. Philip Harmon, the consultant on the MASH project and one of the few people outside of Taffer Industries and Westbrook that knew MASH was piloted by a 16 year old kid, Donovan felt a combination of dread and thrill at the idea that he was being called on for something of this magnitude. However, when he'd arrived as MASH-1, Donovan discovered his objective.

As the battle raged on, Donovan did another scan of the area. Nobody needed him. The heroes were battling back the Shivans with ease, despite the massive numbers. It was a fight that would go on for a while, but it didn't look like it would be getting out of control anytime soon. It almost seemed like a waste of time for Donovan to be out here. That changed moments later as the first of the evacuees and wounded came in.

Suddenly, Donovan found himself going from bored to overwhelmed as he attempted to direct people to where they could be treated best, making sure people remained calm and still maintain a presence on the outskirts, just in case. It wasn't until this moment that he realized just how many people lived in Galaxy City. How many homes were destroyed and how many lives uprooted by this attack. How many lives lost...

Most people were shellshocked while others crying out for loved ones they couldn't find. Eventually, Donovan was moved from sentry to medic, using his medical technology to heal wounds and soothe minds. Even though Donovan didn't feel emotion while connected to machines, he knew that the sights of so many suffering would stay with him for a lifetime. This made him more determined in his duty. While some people were a little hesitant to taking directions from what amounted to an over-sized action figure, most people obliged easily enough. Donovan figured they were too stunned to really argue with him. The flow of refugees would thin but never really stopped. The uninjured were transported out by bus while those seriously hurt were taken by helicopter or mediport if they could survive the trip. Working for what seemed like days but was really only seven hours or so, finally word was received that Longbow had gotten out everyone they could. The tide trickled down as stragglers and injured Longbow began making their way out of the neighbourhood.

Dr. Harmon pulled Donovan to the side and knelt down in front of the machine, speaking to him privately, "How you holding up, son?" He asked, clearly concerned.

There were two voice options that Donovan utilized. One was a monotone synthesized voice he used when talking to the public and the other was a recording of his real voice that he was able to manipulate to talk like he would in his own body. Lowering his volume, Donovan switched to the latter option. "Alright, I suppose. I had no idea it would get this frantic."

The doctor, an old friend of Max Taffer who had watched Donovan grow up from a baby curious with the world into a teenager determined to save it, gave Donovan a fatherly smile as he rested a hand on the drones shoulder. "Battles aren't just fought on the battlefield, Donovan. What happens behind the scene is just as important. Out there, it's a struggle between kill or be killed. Here, it's live or die."

Donovan nodded, absorbing the lesson. "I think I understand. Thank you, sir."

"I think we can handle it from here, Donovan. If you want, you can head home." Dr. Harmon said. "Thank you for your assistance. You were a great help."

Before Donovan could reply, however, the earth seemed to lurch, knocking Dr. Harmon to the ground and causing Donovan to wobble as he stuggled to stay upright. There was a scream, followed by others as shots were fired just outside the post. Instantly, Donovan was gone as the drone teleported itself along the city's mediport system to arrive outside. Scrambling to get to safety, the last of the refugees were being persued by one of the Shivans, which had burrowed its way past the patrol lines and was attacking the unit.

With a roar, it barreled forward towards a man trying to escape while holding onto a young girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old. Reacting without thinking, Donovan teleported again, putting himself between the monster and it's intended target. Hands outstretched out, energy welled up and was unleashed as he directed it towards the 'head' of the creature. Power cleaved clean through the body and the force knocked it backwards, falling back into the hole it tore itself from. The drone stood ready, fists glowing as it waited to see if more creatures had followed it but none came.

The man continued his way in to the post without a second look. Donovan was used to it after all. To them, he was just a piece of equipment like a police drone. Whoever heard of someone thanking a police drone? The little girl, however, waved back cheerfully at the short drone as she called back, "Thank you, Mr. Robot!" This caused Donovan to pause. If he was able to, he probably would have grinned. Maybe laughed. He mentally marked that on his To-Do list later.

The brief fight, if one could even call it that, was the deciding point for Donovan. Dr. Harmon was right. It didn't matter where he was in the fight, as long as he was somewhere helping out. He decided he would stay with the post as long as he needed to to make sure that they were able to do their job. After all, in a time of crisis, everyone was a hero to someone.

[Wyatt Wyborn]

It was a hum. Or maybe it was a whistle. Or a buzz.

Wyatt heard the sound just before the world went white then black. Lauren’s hand was torn from his and a wall of dust and ash rushed at him and sent him flying. The wall of dust was followed by a torrent of burning debris that pummeled him, held him down, buried him. He spit the taste of concrete out of his mouth and pushed against the mound that was on top of him.

“Lauren!”

A mass of twisted rebar and concrete upended and fell on its side as Lauren emerged from beneath it. “Over here!” she shouted.

Wyatt rushed to her and said, “Are you all right?”

“I – I think so,” she said.

He helped her to her feet, both of them shaking. He looked her over, and she did seem to be okay, even though she was covered in a grayish coating of dirt. What scared him was the look on her face. It took a second for him to realize that the flames reflecting in her eyes had nothing to do with her powers. He followed her gaze to see great balls of fire falling from the sky. Galaxy City was burning. All of it. Burning.

Another fireball hit the tower above them and another shower of debris came raining down on them.

Lauren said in a shout that sounded like a whisper, “Wyatt... What's going on?”

“I don’t know!” Wyatt shouted back, his voice nearly drowned by the cacophony of explosions and sirens all around.

Wyatt and Lauren clung to each other while the reality of the situation sank in: this could be the End of the World.

“This is... Oh, no...”

What is happening? Wyatt wondered. Only seconds before he and Lauren had been walking to catch the tram to get back to school. He and Lauren had been having troubles but when he asked her to spend the afternoon with him while he worked at Galaxy Hardware and Supply, she had agreed.
As they worked together, Lauren greeting customers and running the checkout, and Wyatt pulling orders and loading out customers, he realized how much he had missed just being with her and realized that – one way or the other – he wanted her in his life, and he wanted to be a part of hers. When the Hundleys came into the store to do the tally and close for the evening, Wyatt and Lauren hung around for a while and chatted with the older couple.

Mr. Hundley was able to walk with a cane now, albeit slowly and with great effort. Mrs. Hundley didn’t dote over him, but she always hovered close by. She let him be strong, but she also was there to steady him when he needed help. They were as affectionate with each other as ever – maybe more so. One hand held onto the cane but with the other he would touch her hand, or stroke her hair, or simply slip his arm around her waist; and she would smile at him just as she used to smile at him when he would emerge from the back of the store with a one-hundred pound bag of concrete mix balanced on his shoulder. He was as strong in dealing with his stroke as he had always been when he worked, and her adoration acknowledged that.

Being around the Hundleys; seeing how much in love they were; watching Mrs. Hundley share the pain and effort of each step her husband worked so hard to take; Wyatt realized that love – true love that lasts a lifetime – was as much about the hard times and heartaches as much as it was about kissing and having fun together. Being around the couple must have affected Lauren too, because when they left the store together, she took his hand and held it as they walked. It had been a great day.

How quickly that had changed. They had traveled maybe five blocks when the first meteor hit. In the blink of an eye the pleasant neighborhood was gone and it was replaced by a nightmare of destruction. People crawled over the rubble, stunned and frightened, some of them covered in blood, all of them covered in dust. Adding to the horror, gelatinous creatures had appeared and were swarming over the rubble like slow-moving cockroaches.

“Oh my god... the store!” Wyatt shouted.

“Do you think this is happening there too?” Lauren asked.

Wyatt looked around them. The sky was lit with clouds of flame.

“Jesus... It looks like the whole city...” He tried his comm, but all he got from it was static.

“We've got to... to... What do we do?” There was a panic in Lauren’s voice.

“We've got to help.” Wyatt heard the same panic in his own voice.

“Help how? I mean... The whole city?”

He understood. All of this... death... carnage... catastrophe... it was overwhelming. But they had to do something. They had to get moving. It was why there were there.

“We've gotta get to the store and make sure Mr. and Mrs. H. are all right.”

Lauren seemed to change into a different mode. The fear in her face was replaced by determination and she said, “OK. Alright. I'm with you.”

The city was hardly recognizable, but the streets were largely intact and enough landmarks still stood for Wyatt to figure out which way they should go to get back to the hardware store. He and Lauren took off running. Sometimes the streets were split by wide chasms or blocked by fallen buildings. They navigated the dangerous patch together; moving always moving while hellfire and brimstone continued to rain all around them. The gelatinous creatures were attacking any living thing they saw. When a swarm of them converged on the them, Wyatt and Lauren fought their way through them and pressed on.

They turned a corner and climbed over an overturned fire truck. Ahead, some of the city’s celebrity heroes, usually seen looking powerful and glamorous on internet newsfeeds, were joined with Arachnos and Longbow troops, pulling people from the rubble and fighting the invading horde. All of them – celebrities, soldiers, mercenaries – were so covered with the same layer of grit and dust that Wyatt had to look hard to distinguish one from the other.

After another two blocks and a seemingly endless army of what Wyatt now knew to be Shivans he and Lauren came to a clear zone. Statesman was there with Manticore and other members of the Freedom Phalanx looking at maps and blueprints of the city. Nearby, Lady Grey was holding a conference with what Wyatt took to be a group of mages. An evacuation area was set up and a Longbow helicopter was being loaded with casualties. Above, flying heroes did their best to keep the fiery meteors from hitting this clear zone, and when the helicopter took off, another group of flying heroes went with it to help it navigate through an impassible sky.

The irony of the situation – that the evacuation zone was set up only a block from their friends’ store – did not escape Lauren and Wyatt. So much devastation – it was hard not to lose hope. They passed through the area quickly and pushed on.

Finally, Wyatt said, “It should be right here...”

Where the store had been now looked like a crumbled rock pile with barely a corner of the foundation still standing. An abandoned quarry. The taller buildings on either side had fallen one against the other, meeting over the former Galaxy Hardware and Supply in such a way that they actually held each other up instead of further burying they Hundleys’ store.

Wyatt grabbed what looked like part of a wall and tried to move it from in front of the store-rubble. The material crumbled under his fingertips, but the slab would not move.

“Let me help,” Lauren said.

Together they moved it and flipped it out of the way.

“I hear voices!”

“Do you think they’re okay?”

Behind the slab Wyatt could see an opening. The rows of steel shelving actually seemed to have held up a part of the roof, but the ceiling was crumbling and the situation was deadly dangerous, even for him. Still, he had heard voices…

Without answering Lauren’s question, Wyatt stepped into the darkness and she followed him.

Feeling his way along, Wyatt realized that the floor had sunken and that they were descending as they went. Now and then they paused and held their breaths, listening for their friends’ voices or the sound of breathing.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Wyatt could make out that the opening was getting narrow and looked like it ended just ahead, but then he noticed an i-beam across the floor, and beneath it, a hole that he might be able to fit through.

He squeezed his way down into the pitch black.

Above him Lauren screamed and he very nearly went back to check, afraid that maybe the steel shelves had finally given up and caved in on her, but if that was the case, he would have heard it. He listened, not breathing, and then he heard Lauren call out, “I found Mrs. Hundley! I think she’s okay!”


He kept going, crawling on his belly and feeling out with his hands, and hoped that Lauren was all right. Nine or ten feet into the hole, Wyatt touched flesh. He said, “I’m here to help,” and a voice answered back, “Wyatt…?”

He called out, “I found Mr. Hundley -- he's alive!”

Wyatt couldn’t tell if Mr. Hundley was injured or not, but he wasn’t pinned by debris, so Wyatt grabbed him by the wrist and began crawling backward out of the hole. He carried Mr. Hundley out of the store’s ruins, out to the broken street where Lauren and Mrs. Hundley were waiting. Soon, all four of them were back at the evacuation zone waiting their turn to fly out.

[Faige Harrison]

Faige was sitting at one of her frequented spots, the pier off of Spanky's boardwalk on Talos island alone eating a snow cone and watching the soft waves lap against the wooden supports. She was thankful for the lazy afternoon after the stress of last week. There was a part of her, though, that was always keeping an ear out for people that needed assistance. Total girl scout.

She heard some commotion over toward the stores and looked over her shoulder. Someone had run down from the tram and he looked to be in quite a panic. Faige stood, finishing the last of her snow cone and floating over to the small gathering of people that was forming. "Somebody turn on a radio!"

"What's going on? I have a radio.." she said, taking the small portable radio she carried with her from her backpack. Turning it on, she began to search for a station but it was on every channel, the same broadcast with different voices, all marred with shock, panic or disbelief. "Galaxy city?" she muttered, almost to herself. "I should go back to campus..."

Faige shook her head, handing her radio to one of the group on the boardwalk before flying off toward the monorail. "Go back to campus? What the heck am I training for if I'm just gonna hide in the bunker..." she said, almost to herself. Below her she could see the realization dawning on people. People were running out of buildings, turning on radios and televisions, running into and out of shops. The news casters had advised people to take shelter somewhere safe, but Faige was a hero... in training... she was going to help darn it.

In true hero fashion, she changed into her patrol uniform in the restroom of the tram station. The trams had stopped service by now and so she had to fly along the tracks to get to Galaxy City. What she saw as she approached stopped her dead, however, the total scene of devastation was one she had not expected. She couldn't discern where it had started, if there was any kind of epicenter, but she quickly deduced where the help was needed. There was a small gathering of police and military with a couple of heroes (they must be heroes, look at all that spandex...) on one of the roads. Faige dropped herself behind them and walked up.

"Hey... Uh... Fallout Girl here." She said to one of the soldiers as he approached her. "I'm a healer, I'm here to help."

He gave her a once over, her stature and voice obviously pegged her as a teenager but they needed all the help they could get. The soldier nodded, pointing off the road to a makeshift hospital. A few tents had been set up, a few more were in the process of being set up. "Over there." he simply said before falling back in line with his unit.

Faige nodded, heading toward the tents. There were nurses milling about, getting things ready. There would be casualties, that was for certain, and they needed to be prepared. Faige didn't ask anybody if she could help, she just helped. Together with a few nurses and field medics, she helped them erect two more tents and begin setting up cots. Then it was a waiting game. She sat on one of the folding chairs, paced, made sure that she was used whenever she could be.

The trickle of patients started slowly, just one or two at first. The walkers, the ones with minor injuries came first followed in short measure by more serious injuries. People carrying their friends, loved ones, children. Faige tried to turn off the side of her that was terrified and be "all business" as she'd practiced so many times on patrol but the longer this went on, the harder it was becoming. She helped all she could, holding instrument trays for a doctor, using her own abilities to mend a fractured bone or two, helping people find each other when they'd been separated.

"Mom... mom! Mooooom!?" A girl about her own age was darting about in an incoming throng of people.

"Hey! Kid!" Faige called to her, kid, she's probably older than me... Over here. Are you hurt?"

"No I... I don't think so..." she was clearly in shock and cradling one arm with the other against her chest.

Faige took her by the shoulders into the light triage tent. "Can I see your arm?"

"Huh? My arm?" she dropped her hand away from her arm. There was a deep gash running from the back of her hand to her elbow but it didn't seem to be bothering her. Faige winced, placing her gloved hands over it promptly.

"You're lookin' for your mom?" she said, trying to make conversation as the wound began to close under the steady stream of greenish white light from Faige's hands.

The girl nodded numbly. "Yeah, she's in her forties, short brown hair, kinda short with glasses. She has on a blue cardigan and jeans. We were in the park and..." she looked down at her arm for a moment, pausing before looking back at Faige. "We got separated."

"I think I saw a woman that looks like that, she's over in that tent." Faige pointed. The tent was for more critically injured people waiting for helicopter transport. Part of her hoped she was right so that the girl and her mother would be reunited, but that would mean she was critically injured... bitter sweet.

"Your arm is okay, you should head over there." she stood back, dropping her hands to her sides.

"Yeah okay, I'll go... thank you uh..."

"Fallout Girl."

"Thanks Fallout Girl."

The girl ran off toward the tent and Faige watched her. For a moment, time seemed to slow. This was too overwhelming. She wanted to go home. She wanted her own mother... the firm hand on her shoulder almost made her flinch.

"Doing okay kid?" came a gruff voice behind her. Faige turned, it was the soldier she had spoken to on the road what seemed like hours ago.

"Yeah... yeah I'm doing okay."

"Good, we really appreciate it. We can use all the hands we can get. Hold up long as you can, but if it's getting too much you need to go home okay?"

"Okay... home... Yeah I'll go home in a bit." She nodded, eyes moving back to the next wave of incoming injured. Home... wish I could go home.