Legend of the Water Seeker: the Blade of Apollo, ARCHIMEDES 0

Let us explore a possibility unwritten, a road untravelled, dear reader.

During her raid of the Ft. Lanai, the Water Seeker would find a weapon: the Archimedes IV, a man-portable solar powered plasma rifle. In the fight against the drowned, this gun would prove invaluable. Though the heavy rad-clouds blanketing the sky meant its output was limited, the AIV was so long as it was daylight infinite in ammunition.

When the first Abyssal Titan rose from the depths to fight her upon that storm, the Water Seeker unleashed a righteous solar flame against the leviathan, until the sun went down and she was forced to resort to her more limited stocks. However, though the shape of the battle had changed, with its beginning consisting of the water seeker using the Rifle and her PipBattler to locate and destroy numerous vital organs belonging to the beast to get around the lack of immediate firepower the AIV possessed, the end result was the same.

The duel between woman and monster would end with only one walking away, and for all it’s might and mass, the giant mutant was no match for the arsenal the young woman possessed, perishing and falling into the wave, dissolving into a great mass of decaying muck.

This weapon would serve the Seeker well in the coming days as a side-arm, used whenever the warrior wished to conserve ammunition, though she would not know its origin until, in her travels, she stumbled upon HELIOS Seven.

A sunken palace, HELIOS Seven had built by the DoP to serve as a source of energy for the region in the event of apocalypse. During the Great War, it had submerged itself, activating its anchors and dragging the facility to the bottom of the black, lifeless abyss in the deep sea. She had found herself on it’s trail when, after saving what was left of Deep Canyon, Ventropolis found itself under attack. A mixture of project Ogata forces and mysterious raiders from far north who traveled in heavy bathyspheres. They stormed the Vault City, attempting to take it under their control: as she fought her way to the city to the commanders, she found herself, to her dismay, fighting foes with their own Archimedes rifles.

As she breached the vessel Ogata was using to conduct the invasion, she would come across the leader of the strange mercenary raiders, one clad in heavy insulated diving armor that had been modified to utilize cryotechnology offensively, being able to create barriers and weapons of ice and launching freezing volleys of hypothermic water. There, the Water Seeker would briefly have a dialogue, learning that these mercenaries belonged to another ACME City, one located far to the frozen north. One that was under mysterious peril: Ogata had secured the assistance of the ACME Alaskans by promising them aid saving their city.

Fruitlessly, the Water Seeker tried to convince the man, Expedition Leader Paulson, to stand down, to end this without bloodshed. But it was no use: he had his people to take care of, and she had hers. The two fought: a duel between a juggernaut of abyssal ice and cryotech aqua-power armor and a goddess of dancing bullets, and in the end, once more, only one would walk away.

With his death, the invading forces retreated. Summoned by the leaders of Ventropolis, the Water Seeker was asked to look into where they had acquired the Archimedes weapons. To reward her for her help saving them, Ventropolis would modify her own rifle, altering it to take solar core power cells in order to increase (if temporarily) the guns firepower.

Their primarily lead was to the HELIOS structure, supposedly where the AIV had been developed. It was a detour, yes, but if Ogata was building up for a war, they needed to be stopped. And so the Waterseeker set out, venturing through the sea to the lost solar plant.

There, she found Ogata. They were working on repairing the facility, intending to reactivate it and use the solar technology within to conquer the region, using the ACME Alaskans as a workforce. The location was fortified to the gills: realizing she couldn’t take it out directly, even as deadly as she was, the Water Seeker would have to rely on a strange ally: the Children of the Sun, a tribe of sentient fishmen who had inhabited HELIOS for generations that had found themselves ran out by the inhabitants of the facility, who had butchered many among the Children. Locating their underwater home, formed from loose detritus from the wreckage of ships, the Water Seeker negotiated with the leader of the Fishmen, the Fishwoman Priestest Xia Chen, descended from chinese sailors who had succumbed to Fishmandom in the wake of the great war.

On her own, the Water Seeker might not be able to take HELIOS, but she wasn’t on her own: she had an army behind her. Assaulting the facility, the Waterseeker and the Children of the Sun blasted their way through their opposition, both ACME Alaskan and Ogata Trooper both, until she reached the main control room. There she met three figures. The first was Commander Harley, the subordinate to the Expedition Leader of the ACME Alaskans, clad in the same cryocombat armor as his predecessor, with the additional upgrade in the form of a backpack mounted multifusion battery and faraday mesh to dramatically improve performance. The second was General Loyd, one of the leaders of Ogata. The last among them a mysterious figure who seemed to be helping the organization with their research and development, one who simply called themselves the Redemptionist.

First the Water Seeker dueled Harley, learning that the threat ACME Alaska faced was nothing less than the destruction of their city. Built into an iceberg, the floating metropolis was being slowly destroyed by the warming weather melting their city. They had agreed to work for Ogata in exchange for the organization aiding the city with developing the means to preserve their home from the ravages of climate change. Throughout the duel, the Water Seeker constantly tried to reason with the man, eventually convincing him a better route existed: after all, there were other groups he could ask for help, ones that would pay dearly for ACME Alaska’s cryotechnology. Surely they weren’t so desperate as to make this the best course of action?

Reticently conceding, Harley conceded, standing down and retreating, leaving just the Redemptionist between the Water Seeker and her target. At first, she had thought the strange, ambiguously gendered figure a mere research technician, and when the distant priest stepped between her and the General, she thought she could cut through them with plasma.

It wasn’t until the figure dodged the weapons fire with near preternatural reflexes that the Water Seeker realized she was faced with someone more formidable than a mere holyspeaker. And so the two dueled, foreign born mystic against the great queen of bullets, and for once, the Water Seeker knew defeat. Using their bare hands, the Redemptionist dispatched them, avoiding every shot, landing every blow, and guessing every feint.

The Redemptionist explained that they were psychic: granted mental powers that allowed them to see the flow and eddies of time, and the training given by their order to draw on this power in combat. For all her guns, for all her bullets, for all her ferocious killing power, it did not matter if she could not hit the Redemptionist.

Falling to her knees, coughing blood from the many blows the wanderer had taken, the Water Seeker prepared to die. And yet, death did not come. Instead, at the last minute the Water Seeker found herself saved by Xia Chen, the Fishwoman intervening at the last moment to use her own psychic powers to drive the Redemptionist off and save the Seekers life.

Injecting herself with a stimmpack, the Water Seeker then faced the General, who informed the Seeker that they were on the same side. They both wanted to fight the Drowned: the General was just more proactive about it. The General explained that his branch of Ogata had been formed in Ventropolis, the cell having been created decades ago by dissatisfied members of the security division who had been recruited by infiltrators from the main organization. They had first become alarmed at the spread of the fishman virus, realizing that every year that passed produced more and more contaminated waters and wildlife. Then they had noticed among the Wrecker Clans another mutagenic pathogen: the Biological Optimizer Virus, a mutagenic retrovirus created by the Department of Preservation before the war that had somehow had broken free of containment. From below the earth there were creatures that carried with them a terrible plague: the Scorch Virus, carried by Scorchbite Queens, mutated sharks, that caused the bodies of the infected to break down into ultracite, itself highly mutagenic. And from California, there had been reports of another phage: the Forced Evolutionary Virus, which was as they spoke being used by some sort of posthuman creature that called itself the Master to help wipe out mankind by turning people into sterile, if immortal supermutants.

And worse, like the Water Seeker, they had discovered the Abyssal Virus. The prognosis was clear: the Pacific had become a toxic soup of radiation and pathogens, a bubbling cauldron of horrors. It was ultimately a matter of when, not if some sort of world ending horror crawled from the sea and destroyed humanity. And the only ones capable of stopping, that had the resources, information, numbers, and frankly sheer willpower to fight this conflict.

The general, old, decrepit, leaned forward and made the Water Seeker and offer: join Ogata. Help them save the planet. After all, they were ultimately on the same side. All the Water Seeker did by fighting Ogata was endanger their chances of stopping not just the Abyssals, but every other sub-human horror crawling it’s way from the depths.

The Water Seeker responded the only appropriate way, the only way she could have.

She put a bullet between the old fucks eyes. With that, HELIOS was retaken. Activating the central computer, the sunken palace rose, surfacing above the waves and unfurling, solar chargers floating in the surf. The Children of the Sun thanked the Water Seeker, and promised to aid her however they could, augmenting her AIV by adding a BattlePip Combat Computer and Electro-Capacitators that allowed it to fire a burst of lightning instead, allowing the weapon to be used underwater.

And Xia Chen informed her of another, even more potent weapon: the Blade of Archimedes, a series of installations created that could reign down from the skies fiery vengeance, one that might potentially give a means to destroy the Abyssal City and its leviathans. However, two parts were required. The first was the Rangefinder, a component that was used for targeting the satellites. The second were the data codes used to activate the satellite array.

To find the first, she would have to fight her way through an Ogata research laboratory to retake the prototype for the Rangefinder. Then, she would have to venture aboard a long abandoned military platform from before the Great War.

The Rangefinder was located within the heart of ACME Blue. Taken over as a research facility by Ogata, in the past it had been used by the ACME Corporation to research products and technology for ACME Power. Solar, geothermal, fusion, and more: three miles of once vibrant reefs used to help develop environmentally friendly technology sponsored by the EPA, NOAA, and DoP, it was now a long dead tangle of underwater cables, razor wire netting, and brackish necrotic coral, atop which sat a smear of rusted, long corroded facilities.

The fighting was intense: the Water Seeker quickly realized that for once she was outgunned, forcing them to focus on a quick smash and grab rather than the intricate ballad of destruction they were used to. Indeed, the wanderer could only flee because, in the course of her fight, she accidentally activated something called project sunburst, causing Ogata to flee from the facility in a panic.

The Water Seeker fled just as from the facility emerged a blinding pillar of light, one that lasted five minutes. When it ended, the endless radioactive fog she had known for her entire life…dissipated.

For the first time in her life, the Water Seeker experienced a clear, sunny day. Sunburst, it seemed, was a device intended to use GECK technology to cleanse the sky of radfog, and bring back to the pacific the sun.

At this, the Water Seeker’s typical stoicism broke, and they gave one of their few smiles, before sailing on to her next target. The Rig. She had been expecting it to be dead, empty: supposedly, before the war it had been used as a secret bunker, and would likely be the only place to find the access codes for ARCHIMEDES 0. It wasn’t: there, the Water Seeker found herself fighting against a new foe, one that traded the monstrous numbers of the Drowned and the skill and combined arms of Ogata for technological sophistication, wearing power armor fashioned in the images of demons and riding forth on a fleet of Vertibirds.

The Water Seeker had met the Enclave. A remnant of the old US Government: just as Ogata had been the fruit of the DoP, it’s dark legacy upon the Pacific, so was the Enclave to the Executive Office.

But for all their technology, they found themselves no more able to stop her than her other foes. Rampaging through the facility like a wildfire, the Water Seeker eventually came to the chamber of the President of the United State, finding herself facing against a young secret service officer: Frank Horrigan.

They say the battle between the two was so destructive it threatened to tear the Rig apart: an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. And yet, as always, the Water Seeker would come out on top, though not without injury and exhaustion: she managed to collapse part of the rig atop the secret service agent, failing to kill the incredibly resilient young man, but at least disabling him.

And so she approached the President, who calmly capitulated, agreeing to give the Water Seeker the access codes if she just left. Tired, hurting from the plasma grazes and bullet wounds, the Water Seeker accepted, taking the codes and leaving. She had what she wanted: the Enclave was, frankly, not her project.

The next few days, she licked her wounds as she sailed to New Alcatraz, meeting with the collection of individuals who she had gathered into her quest as she wandered. The scientists of Deep Canyon and SPD 2-3. The Wreckerking. Ventropolis Security. Xia Chen.

Together, they began preparing what they could to prepare for the war. While this occured, the Water Seeker…slept. Rested. Her journey was not yet done: she had yet more locations to travel, more leads to seek, more Drowned to destroy. But for now, she had earned a respite.

Her dreams were fitful, and when she awoke, it was to the sound of gunfire. New Alcatraz was under attack. Leviathans. Rushing from the dockside tavern-room, the Water Seeker fought her way to her allies warcamp, where she was returned her AIV: upgraded with the access codes and the rangefinder.

Turning her gun upon the titans, from the skies came seven lances of light to pierce the creature, the beams of intense heat searing it. It lasted ten seconds. It didn’t kill the beast, but it cooked its outside, burning it to a crisp. Ten minutes later, the ARCHIMEDES Array fired again, aimed by the Water Seeker, further carbonizing the Leviathan. Then, ten minutes later, ten minutes of fighting her way through hordes and hordes of Drowned crawling their way from the surf, she fired ARCHIMEDES at the Leviathan again, and it fell.

With each firing of the orbital death rays, her rifle, powered by light, found itself overcharged, its shots reducing the Water Seekers targets to hot plasma with each blast. And so when the second and third Leviathan crawled its way from the depths, they would find themselves destroyed utterly, reduced to hot atoms by the Water Seeker.

And so when the sun set on the Pacific that evening, it sat in victory, for it’s champion had found her sword, the last weapon of the old gods. And with it, she would destroy every last Leviathan in the pacific.

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Commissioned by Chellewalker, who wanted to know what would happen in the Eve verse if you built a HELIOS in the Pacific. Since Eve is done for now, I figured I might as well merge it with a few other fun ideas I had for the pacific. The end result: the Water Seeker unlocks her version of the super shotgun and an ult. on top of it.