Christmas Gate

[Chaos Mage]

   Lacey stands at the helm of the star cruiser, Medusa, dressed in her cybernetic exoskeleton.  She had spent most of the afternoon preparing the sensor equipment and readying the bombs that were to be placed.
   "Ok people, attention up.  What I want you to do is follow the protocol exactly.  Each of you has your specific tasks, and I want you to follow them to perfect order.  NOBODY SCREW UP!!"  and she sits down in her chair.
   Assuming the Master Control Gauntlet for the craft, she hooks into it with her exoskeleton, and the systems adjust and integrate the control functions.  Her mind was a rapid chaos of information, multiple thought trains moving at near infinite speed.  With a delicate push, she sends the commands to the thrusters, and the craft begins to propel itself by gravitational drag.
   "Ok."  she says to herself.  "Allright."  and they begin to work their way out from the Station location.  "Good.  Good!"  The craft had already been tested thouroughly, she knew every manuever that it had.  Moving slowly, for a stellar craft, at about twenty thousand kilometers a minute, she takes them away from the planet.
   As the minutes passed, she started to get into the non linear gravitational waveform, and their vergance on hyper space speeds was coming closer.  Powering up their hyper space shield, an integrity system that would allow the ship's structure to remain intact whilst in hyper space, she guns for the darkness of space. 
   Suddenly, just as she is about to nail hyper speed, "Captain?  We've got a scanner anomally due point in line from symeterical system AB1, and it seems to relate to a point in line from symeterical system AB2."
   She activates the integrity charge field, the circuitry of the ship gravitates the correct internal pressure and cycles of kinetic energy.  Then, as the field stabilizes, she brings the ship to a dead halt.  "What is it?"
   "It's a distraction, I'm sure..."  her manager of communications piped up.
   "Follow protocol.  This isn't a picnic party.  Azeraze, what is the anomally?"
   Azeraze, a young man with a cybernetic ear and cropped short black hair, said to Lacey, "It looks like a portal."  and he added to it, "But there is something wrong with it, perhaps a worm hole forming between these two points?"
   Lacey brought up the scanner display and a telescopic visual for the so called 'worm hole'.  She looked at it.  "It's a Christmas Gate."  She said bluntly, yet there was a tinge of suprise, and, hostility.  "Azeraze, you follow through with our mission, I'm taking my mecha into that gate!"
   And she disconnected the MCG with haste, and ran to the telepad and put in the location of Garage.  She appeared in the Garage's telepad, and stood there for a moment, searching for where she had her mecha put.  And then she seen it, and raced to it at maximum speed for the confined environment.
   The mecha was silver and black, with two strong arms and legs that also had treads running along it's ankles.  She hopped into it, and hooked in her exoskeleton.  Powering it up, she ran the diagnostics, did a systems check for her battery, then sealed it shut and pressurized.
   "Azeraze... you have the authorization codes.  Open the Hanger!"  she said as she used the treads to move the surface of the mecha garage.  Moving through a large hallway, she came into the hanger, and the door was already open.  Fizzling through the force field, she drifted in space away from the ship, then, waited until Azeraze had dragged away from the location.  After he was gone, she ran her scanners, searching for the anomally.
   Certainly, it was there, and just beginning to form.  "Which one?  AB1 or AB2?  This makes all the difference...."  And she chose the larger and more developed of the anomallies, the one located at AB1.
   Starting and gunning her thrusters in one beat, she bolted for the worm hole at maximum speed.  "Come onn!!"  she couldn't get there fast enough.  In the depth of space, this far from any planet, she was almost invisible except for the light of her propulsion system.  Then, she came upon the worm hole, which was larger than she expected.
   It's surface was shimmering with liquidic golden light, yet in the midst of it, there were images of red squares and yellow pyramids.  These squares and pyramids were shifting into each other, and at the center of the some five hundred foot large gate, there was a glowing sphere, of perfect size yet not able to be distinguished in color from the rest of the worm hole.
   Lacey edges towards it.  It had no gravitational pull whatsoever.  "Ok, my first worm hole, Christmas Gate.  Christmas Gates are worm holes that link two locations that are almost at the same location.  It's like some kind of redundant level of miraculous random energy.  It is said that they contain passage to an alternate reality where you have a chance to recieve some kind of reward for completing a task.  Let's hope the theorists back home are right!"
   And she edges slowly into the worm hole.  But as she does, her sensors go berserk and her mecha loses power rapidly, it's battery being drained.  "Shi...!! Oh no!!"  she noticed that she was being drained of energy as well.  It could be... a trap!
   Suddenly, she fell into a deep trance, but was fully aware of the cybernetic exoskeleton used for stellar work.  The exoskeleton kept her consciousness from being completely knocked out.
   "This is the one!! This is what He's talking about!"  a voice said, and a strange young man with short red hair spoke enthusiastically, yet with grave tones of malice towards "He".  "Ok, that's all we needed to know.  Now... what should we do?"
   A woman who was completely black, except for her glowing violet eyes, came up and touched Lacey's prone body.  "We give her the seed of faith.  It's the only way she will learn, we are not to be denied our own son."  and she put something into Lacey's body, Lacey couldn't feel anything or tell what it was.  "She will learn of our ways, and lead 'Him' to usss...!!"
   Suddenly, Lacey was in symeterical system AB2 and her mecha was rapidly regaining power with her own consciousness.  She had a bombardment of images, devil horns and satanic symbols, it was like the times she'd done acid and seen beyond the viel.  "Quit it, quit it!!"  she screamed, writhing in the hub of her mecha.  Suddenly, in this sick, disoriented state, she realized this was her own mind recalibrating itself to normal reality.  "Oh my god is that what powers my psi!!"  she seen the truth of it, and as the images continued to flicker faster and faster, she felt sick to her soul.
   Hours passed as the images turned into solid forms within her mind, deranged looking satyr sucking themselves, floating disks and strange, ultra hypnotic techno music.  She began to recover slowly, and hardly remembered anything that had just happened.  One thing she did remember, was the violet eyes of the woman.  She had been clinging to that image, and she even believed that it was who she was in her own Shadow Of Reality.  "It can't be..."  she said, lifting her controls.  "I'm not that... beautiful."  After running her scans, and locating Planet Prime on the map, she arced towards it and began to realign herself.
   What had just happened?  Who were these people?  Lacey knew, it had something involving Talok, Talok was the same kind of entity that this woman was.  "A Jehovah?  A God?"  she thought to herself.  Within a few hours at good speed, she reached the Station in perpetual location above Reaza.
   "I've got to find Talok, and tell him, there are more of him, there is one that he could breed with."  all the while, after all that had just happened, she still felt sick to her stomach and really needed to just rest.  The drain on her body was too much, and she already knew, whatever had happened in those moments, something was missing, "They must have cloned my signatures."  she knew.
   So it began, the beginning, of another Shadow Quest.