COLLAB W @Amber Franklin (THEA) & @Apothecary Bruce (SONIC/NOLAN)
"Ah fuck," Pip groaned, shoving aside a few of the immediate 'scattered' that'd been helping her set up a buffet table. The panic on Sonic's face mirrored her own after recognizing the uncouth mannerism of the enemy AI. She apologized to the 'scattered' as they took off, shattering a few of the plates she already conjured as the pair made their way back to the command room. Pip didn't so much run as slide — the hedgehog's speed far,
far superior to her own. As the room came into view Pip transformed, her charcoal colored collar disappearing from Sonic's grasp. She was a small rose-gold blur of light atop his shoulder when they came rushing in.
Pip heard Alec's cry of warning and shouted back once she was transformed, "Doesn't look like it's on purpose though!" Instinct overrode everything else and she dismissed her sword and shield and retrieved her backpack— a small leather rucksack that was way heavier and way larger on the inside than it had any right to be — and tossed it to Sonic.
"I can cloak the station, but it's not going to be easy and I'm going to need help but first—"
She looked over at Thea, cringing slightly, "This might hurt."
Pip reached out, lightning fast, her gauntleted palm engulfing Thea's face completely. Those who were magically gifted, however, could see something else; a ghostly duplicate of Pip's hand reaching
inside of Thea's forehead, roving for the seed of sentience within. If she could find it, she could keep it safe while she conjured her a duplicate body, one with minute runes and spells running along the circuitry and wires to prevent further subjugation.
"H-hey, wait! What do you want me to do with this?" Sonic asked Pip, somewhat panicked as he looked inside the leather bag.
"TERMINATE ME!" Thea yells as loud as she can, hands clasping around her own head as she attempts first to shut herself down, but Passchendaele prevents her. An attempt to self-terminate by crushing her own head fails. A follow-up attempt to slam her head into the floor for the same end also fails as she stops an inch from said floor. The cybernetic woman can only keep herself prone. Looking into Pip's eyes she would see an expression of shock; the most emotion Thea has displayed in her functioning history.
"Do it! Do it now! Terminate me!" Thea demands of Pip, or anyone, and expects Pip would do exactly that. What she experiences instead, causes her body to act on automatic process as her sentience is effectively isolated by magic. Thea reaches out to Pip, to destroy what her base program has deemed a threat, to crush Pip's arm and tear it from the socket.
"You're strong," Pip said through clenched teeth. Her armor had rarely failed her before and yet betwixt Thea's mechanical grasp the rose-gold metal crushed easily. Something in her forearm shattered as it did. Pip took a deep breath, setting aside the pain and concentrating with all her might. She refused to relent. "You're strong and we need you! I will
not kill you!" She shoved hard, both physically and magically, forcing Thea's head back as she searched for the genesis.
In a burst of light Pip ameliorated, her six-foot stature increasing to something over eight-feet tall. Pip let out a sweet sigh of release, thankful for the swell of magical and physical strength. It did nothing to block or remove the pain, it simply granted her the capacity to withstand more.
"Somewhere inside," Pip breathed between ragged breaths, "Is a wallet. Inside
that are some crystal tears. When I pull her consciousness free, I'll need it, immediately."
"Threat detected. Threat elevated." Thea says in a voice devoid of what little personality she had acquired. Her hands stop trying to crush Pips arm, and tears away the armor to get at her bare skin and claw into it. The hand that had been stripped of flesh is more effective at this. Her legs raise Thea up, and she attempts to leap up to wrap her entire body around the arm, to leverage weight to keep trying to break or destroy the arm.
Clearly, these fools were losing control of the situation. This 'grail warden' had some threat to her, but her compassion was going to get her killed. While letting Pip perish due to her idiocy would be satisfying, Nolan wanted to make that robot pay for the power he had stripped from him, and thus screwing with Passchendaele's plans in any way would do.
Omni-Man moved. He was fast enough to reach Thea and Pip before the machine broke Pip's arm, but he let Thea begin to break the warden's arm, to enforce her foolishness in her mind through pain. Then, with his arrival as her savior, as her
superior, Nolan levitated up, grabbed Thea's wrists, and pulled them out of the warden's flesh.
Nolan spun mid-air, before using all of his remaining flight powers to jettison Thea and himself into the station's flooring, pinning her to the ground with his superior strength. "Weak," he murmured, wrenching up the terminator's arms as Nolan kept his boot firmly planted on her back.
Then, he pulled - all that remained of his Viltrumite strength poured through his muscles, each sinew stronger than steel, than titanium, and stronger still as they tensed, and the robot's arms came free. Her false skin tore and ripped, open flesh and torn wiring flapping in the absence of the rest of their limbs.
"She's been taken care of," Omni-Man announced to Pip. "Do what you were going to."
Metal kissed flesh and Pip, in absolutely agony, let out a grunt of pain. Blood trickled down her arm and she could feel the sticky warmth pool deeper into her armor. It was unsettling, but still she refused to let go, even when a fellow 'scattered' in white and red showed up to help. Viciously, at that, but help was help and she was thankful nonetheless.
She didn't dare look at her wrist, where metal had shorn skin nearly to the bone, instead some instinct inside her spoke just as Nolan began to spin and the room lit up as a swarm of glistening light encapsulated Pip, protecting her from the onslaught. Like a ragdoll in the maw of a hound, Pip's small globe of light bounced and bobbed but never once did she release her grip from Thea's face —doing so would cause her to release the spell.
She groaned softly, half-seeing what was in front of her and what was within Thea. Her head spun and it took a moment to recognize it as dizziness, and then she froze. All of the pain in her arm vanished, for a moment at least, because deep inside the robotic mass of wire-sinew and bio-mechanical goop, Pip saw a spark of life.
THEA!
Pip shouted it, more with her heart than her magic... or perhaps it was one and the same as Pip's ephemeral hand closed around something precious.
I WANT YOU TO LIVE.
Sensors register catastrophic damage before they are severed from the network. In humans this would incite a scream of agony. For Thea, she is silent. She would thank Omni-Man later, if there was a later for her. Her dead eyes stare into Pips' as her legs kick, to no avail. At most she dents armor. The spell is successful, and a spark is extracted from within her CPU. To Pip and others able to perceive the ethereal, it appears as a prism of light that strobes between white and blue. The body she had inhabited since her creation falls limp atop Pip, as without that spark it lacks the ability to regulate its own power.
Speaking of the power issue; Omni-Man's foot on her back and the force of his blow has ruptured one of the hydrogen fuel cells and a different red-orange glow emits from her back.
The fuel cells were going critical. Omni-Man had turned the Terminator into a nuclear bomb.
There was a sigh of pure unadulterated emotion that escaped Pip as she held the tiny prism of light within her palm. It was a beautiful sight, awe-inspiring, catching a glimpse of
life so new and open to enlightenment. With her unmolested hand she reached towards Sonic, to the crystal tear that would be Thea's resting place for the time being. It was translucent, a product made entirely of magic, formed beneath the weight of the World Between. Tears formed in her eyes as she finalized the spell, a golden glow overtaking her eyes as Thea's consciousness melded into the magic-made-form.
"Thank you," Pip said to Nolan, wiping her eyes and smearing a bit of blood across her already-scarred nose. She smiled, wearily, knowing the situation would have been much worse without him. "Your strength is incredible."
Her transformation came undone almost immediately upon trying to stand and Piper Delaney shrunk from eight foot to five foot in a shower of rose-gold light, wobbling on her feet as she did. She still needed to cloak the Pathfinder and so she hobbled a few feet away, her good hand gently clutching the crystal tear that housed Thea. Pip would let those better fit for the job handle the disposal of the impromptu bomb; instead she used her own blood to start writing runes across the floor, eyes watery from such a powerful spell and witnessing something as pure as a soul yet to develop.