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Beyond the End
An oh nos it's the apocalypse meme.

Congratulations.

...what, why? Because the world's ended, is in the process of ending, or will start to end shortly. I'm talkin' fireballs, earthquakes, the dead rising, various foreboding entities from myth and legend showing up as foretold in the last pretty epic battle, floods and famine and disease, everything. Despite this, you? You are a survivor. You have overcome all the odds and are making the best of what's going down.

Well.

Maybe. I mean, I don't know. You might be a cynic who's not really making the best outta anything and you're still existing. I shouldn't assume.

If you need it, pick up your dice and roll for your disaster.

1. Floods. Rather self-explanatory. Pretty passe, but you gotta respect the classics.

2. Global Armageddon through something, probably war, gone horribly wrong. Like a nuclear apocalypse. You know, one second everything's awesome, the next you know you're suddenly in Fallout.

3. Some sort of slower decay of the world through possibly natural forces. It's like the world turned ever so slightly on its axis and everything started to decay. Crops died. The climate shifted. The ice caps started to melt and the world slowly started to become an oven...or maybe the opposite and everything began to slowly freeze.

4. The world exploded. (Or is exploding or is going to explode.) You're channeling your inner Kal-El, basically. On the bright side this could lead to space adventures and those are fun.

5. Zombies. Again, self-explanatory, but you gotta respect the classics.

6. Some sort of war, again, but this one involves what passes for canonical spiritual influences doing some epic last stand in a battle for all of humanity's souls. You know that one myth you thought was just that - a myth - involving...I don't know, King Arthur returning in the hour of Britain's greatest need? Yup. Got a canonical bad guy who was just believed to be a myth told to scare small children but was actually sealed somewhere or another? Yup.

7. Aliens invaded. Kind of similar in theme to some of these other things but I'm trying to cover all the basic angles. Space, spiritual, explosions, zombies....

And yeah, if you want to do something else go do something else! The world's ending, nobody's gonna care how it ends.

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Lia was not, by nature, a suspicious person, she was also generally the first person anywhere for anything. These two attributes were, on the odd occasion, extremely unhelpful to her career as a superhero, but they were not usually dangerous. Lia, like a handful of other superheros, was what most people would call 'nigh indestructible'. This meant that she didn't usually have to bother with things like self-preservation, and she didn't need to worry about rushing in, poking that, or being spotted, because--tch--what were they gonna do about it, I mean really?

Well, this one time, of all the times she'd gotten somewhere first and just had a look around, was the time where that backfired. Actually, 'backfired' was totally not a strong enough word. This situation came back in her face, yeah, but it was more like an explosion. It sort of back-bombed on itself. It went so bad so fast that it really should have been in slow motion for dramatic effect.

It was super, duper, uberlame.

Lia Nelson, for a great many reasons, had never been asked to sit down and study the old League files. Since she was something of a free spirit, she had also never felt the need to, like, volunteer to study old League files. So, even though there were a great many, excruciatingly detailed files on the subject, Lia had never once glanced a picture of a Starro Spore and thus, when presented with a recently crashed meteor sporting tons of wacky looking purple starfish, hadn't hesitated before she jabbed one with a finger.

And that was how this particular apocalypse got started.

It went downhill so fast that the word plummet wasn't quite up to the task. One instant she was poking it, the next she was on the ground with one attached to her face. Then, almost immediately, she wasn't on the ground anymore. Then it got bad.

The Starro couldn't quite get Lia to top-speed, or even top more than a hundredth of what she usually ran, but that was still about eighteen hundred miles a second, give or take, so it really came out in the wash. Within a minute, just about every superhero who wasn't fast enough to get out the way had a purple starfish on their face. In under a half an hour and she'd run out of supervillains, politicians, medical professionals, scientists, and tall people within a hundred mile radius of the crash site. After that, it was Starro-zombie tag-team to get the little buggers on everybody and everything with opposable thumbs.

At the end of an hour it was obvious they there totally weren't enough spores. Without anything to do, and with minimal need for protection given how far the Starro influence stretched, everyone unnecessary just sort of dropped stone-cold unconscious.

There were some holdout heroes and villains, of course, and Lia didn't explicitly know where a good number of them were so she couldn't starfish-face them, but between two and three o'clock EST, it had gone from a perfectly cheerful afternoon to full-on alien invasion with about three million people sporting starfish on their faces. In about twelve hours, when the big granddaddy one hopped to it and spat out a bunch more spores, it would start all over again, but until then, like 98% of the Gotham and the adjacent seaboard was taking a totally creepy siesta.

Edited (So, apparently I lose the ability to remember scale and how to use commas when it gets late. Apologies.) 2013-10-22 20:31 (UTC)

The fact of the matter was, an alien invasion would cramp Gabriel's style. With everyone in a weird hive mind, most of the things that he found fun were just pointless. That was his thought on the matter, anyway, since he was hardly an expert in whatever the hell these pink starfish creatures were. One moment he was in a bar, enjoying himself with a pretty blonde — and in the next, the blonde had a thing on her face and was trying to fix one to his.

Unfortunately for her, and for the blur that he calculated was his favorite superhero, Gabriel just wasn't in a hive-mindy sort of mood. His little brothers, uniformly, were bad enough in the individual department; he had always been bright, different, and spontaneous, in a way that had driven his older brothers crazy. Well, two of them, at least.

Plus, with an archangel under pink-grabby-tentacles, those things would be the opposite of limited. Once he knew what they were, he could just snap his fingers and make more. And nope, that just wasn't kosher. Fortunately for all involved, it was incredibly unlikely given the nature of what Gabriel was. Maybe, eventually, he had to get off his ass and do something about this (just the thought made him sigh), and that meant tracking down the missing element — Lia, unfortunately.

He really hoped these things weren't in Facehugger territory.

Lia was fast, of course, but Gabriel was one of the oldest things in the universe. A very old, powerful thing that liked to cheat and tell physics to take a walk. So he used a little strategy to figure out where she was going to be, and then worked an intercept. Maybe he could squeegee it off her face before it... did whatever creepy thing it was planning. Hopefully not laying any eggs in her stomach or anything. Gabriel's actual grasp on aliens wasn't too strong, outside of Sigourney Weaver movies. But the good thing was, in addition to being willing to cheat, it was hard to put something on a guy's face when he actually had multiple heads and was made of fire.

Grabbing his vessel was just the first step in a giant list of problems for whatever these things were. Of course, first, Gabriel had to motivate himself. And that meant a couple more drinks while he prodded the unconscious form of the bartender and made terrible jokes at the guy's expense. In fact, it was almost twelve hours before he finally got up to track Lia down.

What could he say? Archangels had a different view on time.

Weirdly, being fashionably late to this particular party was possibly the best plan ever.

Since Lia was totally the best patient-zero score in the history of ever, she was one of the people who didn't quite make the 'unnecessary' cut off. Given how catastrophically bad it would be if she was still up and about when big granddaddy Starro got around to replenishing the spores, every other hero had decided that they had to get this dealt with before that twelve hour clock ran out. This all in, ultra tight deadline plan was not working out super hot for them.

So, when it started getting close to twelve hours, there was this crazy giant hub-bub around ground zero and Lia, along with a stack of other inconveniently skilled superfolks, were really kicking a lot of ass and--well, they weren't so much taking names as just kicking a lot of ass. It wasn't looking great for the good-guys-and-temporarily-aligned-bag-guys-team. When that timer was up and the end was nigh or whatever, they all pitched a bitch and doubled down, but Lia immediately got hive-reassigned to distribution.

Hey, it worked out last time and why knock a good thing, right?

She was up and out before literally anybody noticed. Unfortunately, the odds on this one were stacked against her and somebody was waiting to intercept. Lia was usually pretty fly at evading the ramifications of physics, but the Starro hadn't quite caught up yet, so anything more substantial than a pebble in it's path and it was totally going down. It would be a crash and burn for the history books.

Fortunately, the real Lia, who was not at the helm, was blissfully unaware of these shenanigans. At the moment, she was totally enjoying her requisite wacked out evil-space-starfish-mind-control-dream. So, while her body enslaved like all of mankind and stuff, she was totally rocking Sixflags.

Grace was a funny thing. Technically it was pure energy, or creation if you wanted to get poetic, but the Grace of an archangel was so much more versatile than the garden-variety. It could be whatever it wanted to be — move whatever it needed to — and be as impenetrable and strong as the will that controlled it.

Once he had stretched out with all of his senses to find Lia, or more specifically the thing taking her for a ride, all he had to use was his imagination to build a "box" that she couldn't escape from. Cartoon physics — they were a bitch. And not really physics, but that was beside the point. He'd apologize to Lia for trapping her later, or never, but for the moment he was more concerned with severing her connection to the funny little creature.

What was he supposed to do, just grab it and tear it off her face?

It was pretty much the best plan he had, assuming he didn't have to keep making boxes until one stuck.

Fortunately, one of the big lynchpins in being super fast was that you had to be super intangible. The biggest drawback, however, was that it required, yanno, intangibility. The starro, for as good at mind control as it was, was 100% utterly solid, run-of-the-mill matter. It was hearty enough to pull of some really ripping general speed, but it couldn't make Lia intangible anymore than it could make itself intangible.

Long story short, one invisible box ~~and a slide-whistle sound effect~~ later, and Lia "Zombie" Nelson was stuck. Super inconvenient for aliens, not so inconvenient for mankind.

The trapped Lia was having none of it though and the little tentacled alien jerk dug in--or, well, it would have dug in if she had anything to dig in to. Instead of actually latching on harder, since that wasn't a super helpful option in this instance, it turned it's attention to trying to escape. First up was firefly in a jar style banging into things--super ineffective--and then it went for the less popular shooting energy blasts at the walls thing.

Tutting, though it was inaudible in the interior of the cage he'd constructed, Gabriel reinforced things a little more. This was strictly impervious metal that could only be defeated by the classic drawn going-through-a-black-hole trick. Bugs Bunny would have been proud. Gabriel spent his spare time rigging up convincing soap opera sets and making them real people — an indestructible box was small fry.

He set it down on the ground neatly before, with a shrug, materializing inside of the container

"Hey, hey. None of that. It's not going to work," he chided Not-Lia.

Fun fact, when you don't technically have vocal chords, it's possible to sound however you want. Lia had picked a voice ages ago and stuck to it out of habit. Since the bodysnatcher hadn't quite gotten full on control of her rig, it sounded...well...not even a little bit like the real Lia. In fact, it sounded exactly like a pissed off alien starfish would...if they spoke English and could project.

"Release us."

This totally polite request was followed up by the requisite threatening stance and charging of the lasers. Unfortunately alien starfish didn't have a penchant for things like narrative or warning shots because it immediately decided it would be a great idea to try to barbeque its spontaneous captor.

Didn't really solve that whole being stuck in an impenetrable box thing, but it did make it feel better.

Well, it probably did.

It was kinda hard to tell given that it had one big eye in the middle and exactly no other features.

"Nope."

He said it as though it was the most casual thing in the world. Which was a little strange when you also considered that he was being peppered with energy blasts, but all it did was singe his clothing. Then again, when had he ever bothered for the comfort of creatures who were clearly douchebags about consent? He certainly didn't care about demons.

Gabriel shrugged.

"Release the girl and I'll think about letting you out of here."

The Starro were a lot of things. They were angry, power hungry, face-huggers, super creepy, telepathic, and a total pain in the neck, but they were not stupid. It took a lot of juice to literally shoot energy at things and Lia, while also being a creature of many aspects and talents, was so not a battery. It only took a handful of really good shots before she was borderline regular-hologram territory.

So, when the creepy alien parasite noted a considerable lack of dead humanoid following its enthusiastic attacking, and the fact that its host was about at the end of being solid enough to grab on to, it decided that plan was best dropped. (Or, at least, it was best put off until she'd recharged a bit and it could try a really crazy shot.)

"No."

Which was, quite probably, the most predictable and least helpful answer ever uttered, but that was hardly news. At least it wasn't going to start monologuing...probably. It was definitely flipping through Lia's rolodex of names and faces as it tried to figure out how to eviscerate him, though. Unfortunately, Lia didn't really devote a lot of effort in figuring out how to kill her friends, so all it got was a name, a wide array of puns, and the fact that he wasn't ticklish.

Not helpful. In lieu of something more specific, it went with an old classic:

"Surrender. Join the collective."

"Blah, blah, blah, resistance is futile. Blah, blah, blah, become one with us." Gabriel's tone had about as much enthusiasm as his face. Not much. "Save it, I've heard the speech from a dozen more threatening critters than you. Never gonna happen, Littlest Starfish That Could."

It was determined. He'd give it that much.

"One last time. Release her. Or I'm going to do something you're not going to like very much."

He didn't break out the ice cold smiles very often, but this seemed like a good occasion. It didn't matter what this little creature was made of — he doubted it had a smiting fetish. Being burned out of existence, so to speak, wasn't pleasant.

As previously stated the starro weren't stupid, so it gave that ultimatum some long, hard, memory-combing thought. On the odd occasion, the starro had been faced with someone they couldn't take out who gave them creepy ultimatums and it had totally suffered because it didn't listen. This didn't happen often, but it had happened enough that it had developed a feeling about this sort of thing. According to Lia's knowledge of Loki, here, he probably couldn't take her in a fight...but she didn't know how his powers worked, and there were just enough gaps in her knowledge to make the starro pretty nervous.

Unfortunately, when it came right down to it, Lia was the jackpot of accidental brain-slaves and this particular starro was, ultimately, expendable. Losing her would be both inconvenient and time consuming. Sure, they had a lot of other super fast jerks, but she was faster and that was pretty rad for invasion. If they couldn't keep her, though, it was probably best if nobody else got her either. If nothing else, she would really put a hitch in things if she was up-and-at'em.

It was sort of a good thing and a bad thing that the starro on her face wasn't the Starro (with a capital S). If it were, this would have dragged on so hard. Since it wasn't, it gave the starro collective some extra options. Unfortunately they were extra nasty and instead of answering him, it went with the first one it thought of.

Lia suddenly went from normal looking person wearing a totally eye-searing costume to just plain, regular old eye searing. The starro hadn't gotten a hang on how to do most of Lia's cool tricks, but it had learned how she held herself together. She was a little low on power but a detonation was a detonation all the same and starfish for brains was really hoping it would take out the both of them. This was so not even close to accurate, in both cases, but it could dream...until it fried itself.

He was almost disappointed. You give a scumbag an ultimatum, you get kind of attached to carrying it out. Or Gabriel did, at least, since this was the sort of dickish thing that he'd come to specialize in. Hive mind creatures were a serious pain in the ass, though, when it came to individual sacrifice. It was harshing his smug buzz.

Not that it didn't deserve to be fried by the person it was treating like a vehicle. It was, in a way, similar to being smited. However, Gabriel was opposed to his friend being detonated. He liked Lia, and he was pretty sure she enjoyed his company, too. Gabriel didn't exactly have a lot of that. Most people he interacted with, he never saw again. So even though he didn't think Lia had enough juice to take herself out, it was going to be a problem. One way or another.

The good thing was, even if Lia wasn't your typical lady — and she really wasn't, in the molecule department — she weighed heavily in the energy department. And, if you boiled Gabriel down, that was what he was. Pure energy. Pure creation, life, whatever you wanted to wax about. So when the starro had her let go, Gabriel just calmly enveloped her in the energy equivalent of a hug. He just stood there and waited for her to find herself again, clothes suspicious un-singed.

And sure, it really blew the whole Loki cover out of the books, but there were other things to worry about at the moment.

One seriously compressed fireworks show later and Lia went from sparkly aura to sparkly cloud and finally sparkly generally human shaped person. When freed from the starro influence, most people tended to be a little groggy and found themselves missing time. Lia's exit was a bit more dramatic, so she found herself feeling...for lack of a closer term, mega hungover. As far as she knew, she'd just been on the job, then jumped into a really rocking dream, and woke up with a rager in the cage.

She wasn't missing a really serious amount of energy, so coalescing didn't take long once she put her mind to it, but she could have used about a thousand asprin and an ice-pack. Once she was more herself, the first thing she realized was that she was someplace wonky--Were those little birds circling her head or just her imagination?--and numero dos on the list of new and unusual was that she recognized the person she was with.

There was something about feeling super hungover and waking up in an unusual place that just seemed to go with Loki. Like, really, she wouldn't have been shocked to find a tiger or a guy dressed like Elvis nearby. Thankfully, there were neither. Lia greeted him with a slightly miserable groan.

In light of this new knowledge, about where and who she was with, the question about what had happened was superseded with another one:

"What did I drink?" Lia asked and tried to pull in as much stray energy as she could. It was weirdly easy--but also weirdly...Weird. Usually she could tell where she was pulling from, light or electricity or what, but this wasn't quite normal. It definitely wasn't sunlight, but she had way too much headache going on to really deal with this in a timely fashion.

"Uh, also, where are we?" Lia added as she tried to puzzle out just what she was sapping for power. It was cool, hey, don't get her wrong, but sort of bizarro.

"Drinking would have been a lot more fun," Gabriel had to note, watching her closely but trying to be on the casual side about it. Grace was a little on the potent side, as far as energy was concerned, and so he snapped his fingers and they were immediately sitting on a rooftop. Far, far from where all the starro were taking a nap, on the other side of the planet. But not so far that it was nighttime, so that Lia could get a healthier dose of sunlight.

"Just a little box I made. This is a little better, huh?" Gabriel stretched his feet out and shrugged. "Afraid we kinda got invaded by little pink starfish. And I wish I was making a metaphor, but I'm not. What do you remember?"

Lia was pretty out of it and when the sun came out, like literally, she would have been so jazzed to just flop down and soak it up. Unfortunately, the more light she had bouncing around in her head, the faster she remembered what had happened. At the moment, she was still operating at normal human thinking speed, and that was sort of lame because, as usual, her face was an open book.

Naw, that wasn't obvious enough. If she were being honest with herself, she was really more neon-sign-ish.

She recalled something about being at work, that totally earned the pensive-bored-working-frown for a minute, then there was this thing in a sector somewhere and she went out to check it out. Totes routine. It was a meteor or something, foreign body or whatever that alert stood for. Her look of contemplation was marred, momentarily, by a look of horror as she recalled the little aliens caked to the thing. That look increased in intensity and adopted a little disappointment as she remembered getting face-hugged by one.

If she had a trachea she totally would have been concerned about chest-bursters. For once, it was super sweet she didn't.

She shot him the apprehensive look of someone who had been punked and who had, in response to said prank, accidentally burned down the house. Lia had no idea what day it was, or like...when it was...or how long she'd been out, but she was used to calculating things in picoseconds so any amount of lost time was mega, ultra, uber worrisome.

"Oh man, I got whammied didn't I?" And she really didn't want to know but totally had to for like so many reasons, so she winced a little and asked: "How bad is it?"

He nodded. "Big time."

Lia was really the perfect delivery vehicle for the clumsy little pink badge collection that was this species' way of taking over. But maybe the two of them could reverse it, so long as she kept all the glory for herself. Gabriel still wanted to stay under the radar, away from the attention of curious heroes and villains. And the pagans who occasionally came into contact with them.

"It's not too bad right now. Couple cities are all decorated up with face-friends. But everyone's kind of having a nap, right now, so if we mobilize like in every sci-fi movie in existence, we should be okay."

Gabriel was casual about almost everything, the one exception being his family. An invasion really didn't get under his skin. And his little face-off with the starfish hadn't made him worry any more. So as he filled her in, he shrugged — like he was reading off game stats of the World Series.

"Are you okay?"

"A bit wiped," Lia admitted readily and paused about half a second. Fortunately, Loki was a pretty close friend, as close as she had anyway, so he merited the full, you're totes not judging me because we have to save the world and you want to know if I'm gonna snap, response. "And sorta super freaked out, but alien plus face? Pretty standard reaction, right?"

Lia shrugged and puffed up as she figured out where they were. It was a good distance back, but Loki was fast. Like even by her standards, so that was cool. She peered off in the general direction of the mayhem and frowned. This was gonna suck. Not too bad, she was sort of a hack so long as Supes wasn't under the starfishy influence, but one of them had just smacked into her and made things waaaay awful, so she took a moment to think about it.

"I got this, totally, but...if I get whammied again can you like, keep me from making this super bad?"

"I'd be worried if you weren't," Gabriel noted, shrugging. No one really liked being used as a puppet. Sure, angels had to ask, but sometimes the experience wasn't exactly the best. He and his vessel were just about as close to True as you could get, but less perfect situations ended in drooling and fried brains. And demons? That was just a whole 'nother party altogether.

He gave another little shrug at her question.

"Don't worry. You get another facial decoration and I'll use the same method again. Easy peesy."

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Insert Green Day lyrics here.

Gabriel } Supernatural } ota

7 :D

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