Riana Maren
Joyan Joyride
Here we are again, talking about yet another person who had been deployed to the Joya theatre of operations for the multitude of guilds that were taking part in the combat operations surrounding the Isghar Symposium. These events were becoming incredibly commonplace and, with so many agents operating in the area, there was not only a high likelihood that not only would they encounter each other, but their stories would also overlap. Like every other time this had happened, it would absolutely be an exercise in futility, for as all things, those who were deployed to this zone were about to be witnesses– or, worse, victims– to a horror so unspeakable that its like had not been seen in recent history.
But it hasn’t happened yet. These are the stories leading to that cataclysm. And so desperate are we for new content that we are sinking deeper and deeper into the pits of necessity in order to make it happen.
Today, this is a story about a woman who cared not for the politics of the world. She cared not for the pathetic ants that infested this city, nor would she mourn a single death that she would inevitably witness. She would not care that the world teetered closer to the brink of war. She would only care that she got what she wished - especially if war profiteering could be the result of this exercise. Riana Maren was one such woman. Selling arms and technology to the highest bidder was something she enjoyed - but first, we must explore the events that lead up to that point.
Errings Rising was not typically a guild one would have expected to be deploying operatives to an area where the Magic Council had requested assistance for a task. However, there was certainly an advantage to being able to have eyes and ears where the enemy was currently active, especially someone who could not be detected by traditional means. Stealth field technology was an incredible boon to be able to deploy at will, especially when one was an operative with high-speed flight and mobility capabilities. Combined with a number of other high-tech additions to the field, this essentially meant that the guild could send one or more agents into the field who could perform reconnaissance tasks, gather as much information as required, then send all that data back to the castle where it could be analysed for weaknesses in the preparations of the other guilds of Fiore. Perhaps, if all went according to plan, then they could interpret and project some potential strength levels of the other guilds - particularly the three legal guilds, if they ever decided to wise up and make strategic moves against the dark guild waiting in the wings to do something. Riana was particularly interested in the deployment patterns and strategies of the Rune Knights in the field, given that they were the premiere police force of the nation. Being able to have an idea how they deployed on a wide scale would make deciding how to approach future operations much easier, particularly when they involved skirting the law just a little bit to ensure that an operative wasn’t captured in the field.
In this particular instance, Riana was putting herself on the line in order to gather intelligence. She’d done plenty of preparation work in order to ensure her success. First and foremost, before she’d even left the castle at Mount Hakobe, she had ensured that data links could be established to her already considerable mainframe computer system. All of this information, thanks to her use of magiparticle technology, could be sent back to base in real time, recorded and captured, so that the highers-up of the guild could use it as necessary. Second, she had ensured that all of her small drones had been equipped with cameras; the sensor drone had some built in by necessity, but the others were now temporarily retrofitted with the ability to record similar data. Finally, and most importantly, she was going to perform this operation from a distance from the city centre. If she was required to move by the necessities of the situation she would do so, but the fact remained that with her vast arrays of technologies available she at no point needed to put herself in harm’s way in order to complete her objective. Perhaps she would, if further data was required. However, with an operation and a setup such as this, miss Maren felt no compulsion to place her life on the line for a simple recon operation.
Simple. Hah. What a joke. This was going to be simple by no means. The whole thing was an oddity, truth told; she had been told by Nadaline and Bertrand, the assistants to the Queen of Errings Rising, that this operation was to happen. It was entirely likely that the Queen had not wished for this operation to commence on her own volition. It was incredibly true that Saraphina did not engage in the activities of the guild that she had built, for she was a little too airheaded to ensure that. This guild’s functionality was operated by her team of assistants, and her aces; she, the White Queen, was only in her position for her own egotism and for displays of power. In truth, that suited Riana just fine. It meant that not only was she less likely to want to interfere in the scientist’s own operations, but that she could also be easily manipulated. Bribed, perhaps, or spoken to with a silver tongue in order to get one’s way.
It was nice to be away from the castle, where she could finally think the thoughts that she had been holding back from so long. Riana herself understood the deep and unabiding power of the mind, as well as how much damage it could do. She knew that the technology to modify the mind absolutely could exist– it was within her reach, after all– and that if put in the wrong hands it would be a deadly weapon.
…maybe she needed to make that technology after all.
Regardless. As the sun began to reach its meridian, the operation was now considered to be in full swing. Riana had departed earlier that morning using Ebon Fury as her mode of transportation, and at full speed upon its infinite energy banks she had cruised fully towards Felidae City at high speed. For the vast majority of the trip she had simply relaxed, allowed SOFI to perform autopilot features and had quite frankly slept through the vast majority of the way to Joya. There was simply no point to Riana being awake and suffering through multiple hours of travel just to get across the ocean when she didn’t need to be.
So, instead, SOFI had awoken Riana when she had reached the outskirts of Felidae City. Aerial patrols were currently happening, and the scientist had engaged her stealth field to approach the city; with barely any noise and nothing that could spot her visually, Riana began her approach to the tallest building that she could find with decent visibility across the city centre, whilst being far enough away that nothing could interfere with her work.
Two metallic feet touched down on the building, and the shell immediately vanished into nothingness; as the last strands of steel faded into the aether, the red-headed scientist took a moment to stretch and survey the lands around her with her own two eyes. The mark one eyeball just couldn’t be replaced, some days. Besides, after being so long cooped up in a metal shell, it was nice to be able to stretch her limbs and get some movement back into her body. Besides, being able to breathe fresh air was a welcome change of pace - air scrubbers just didn’t quite hit the same as actual oxygen. Well, not that most places had proper oxygen, anyway. Not with all the processing and factories around the world.
Regardless. Riana was not here to wax poetic about the air quality, even if part of her sort of wanted to take an air sample and analyse it for how well an airborne chemical weapon would be a good addition to all of this. She was here on a mission, and that mission would now be executed to the absolute best of her ability. It was time to deploy the operation.
First, she would need to ensure that she had sufficient resources to engage in this operation. Under normal circumstances she would have deployed her four M-Dolls, however, they would have been far too conspicuous for this particular occasion. There was no need to place herself in harm’s way by showing the enemy what her full combat capabilities were; it was far simpler to be able to deploy her four M-Drones and allow them to serve as mobile camera units that could be made to survey the city as they flew simple patrol routes. As such, Riana could then observe the density of her enemy’s patrols, select targets, and then act appropriately in response to whatever happened from there.
To that end, four red-and-white drones appeared; they appeared, in general, to have what could be an antennae-laden pancake for their top half, a secondary joining section, and then whatever equipment that they had attached to them as an underside attachment. Four drones materialised in that instant; one spined and domed droid, one that bore a three-tube missile launcher, one with a large and similarly-sized pancake for its underside and one with a series of chunky boxes underneath. These four metallic monstrosities, barely a metre in diameter, were designed specifically to be support units that could report back to Riana as they required.
”Go, my pretties. Find the enemy’s weaknesses. Take pictures. Come back safe.”
The order, issued to them all, was followed with a series of trilling electronic beeps; the four drones began to follow automated patrol routes, at an altitude high enough that they could be seen as little more than dots in the sky. As they began to hover upwards and away from the human form of the mad scientist, Riana tracked them with her emerald eyes before they became too distant for her to observe. They would be able to take sufficient imagery of the area, and transmit it back to not only her but to the command post back in the castle. That would more than sate the needs of the mission objectives, which meant that she would be able to focus on her primary objective.
Once her drones were away, Riana finally conjured back her suit of armour and immediately engaged the cloaking protocols once again. She’d have to ensure that she was in a good position to keep her eyes out - and from here she could use her four drones as her eyes in the sky, where they fed a constant stream of telemetry back to her such that she could pinpoint her targets, and her greater objectives, with far more precision than most mages of her station ever could. As a scouting platform, this was an absolutely perfect device, but it was a capability she was loath to speak about. She did not need pesky people prying where they did not belong.
Such being the case, Riana summoned one more piece of equipment to her hands that she did not speak about very often. The magitech railgun - a weapon that fired a single round at incredible speeds, propelled by electromagnetism, designed to penetrate even the strongest defences - was effectively Riana’s version of a sniper rifle. She had yet to demonstrate this to any member of her guild and, as far as she was concerned, that was fine by her. She was always loath to reveal her hand earlier than necessary, which kept all of her combat tricks a surprise when it came time to use them. With this, she could eliminate any target at extreme range, without sacrificing her position due to the weapon not firing a shell with primer and powder as most rifles, such as Killua’s, used. This was going to be the best way for her to act stealthily and secretly. If she had to assassinate a Rune Knight or two, so be it, but Riana Maren sincerely doubted that it would come to that. Her objective was data gathering, not murder. Today, anyway.
Images began to stream to her vision on her heads-up display. Glowing pictures of roving bands of Rune Knight soldiers, interspersed with obvious representatives from other guilds. On one of her four feeds, she spied a medical tent that was about ten blocks north from her position on the south side of the city; she could see a woman who was suddenly fleeing from the position at high speeds on pink wings, where she seemed to be heading in an entirely different direction. She flagged the drone to tag that particular target and follow it, in case it proved to be an interesting change of pace. There was another vision, where a man was running into an alley with a sword drawn as he chased down a pair of street delinquents, where he vanished away from the sight of the drone. Fine. There were plenty of other interesting sights, of course; a red-cloaked woman flanked by two other cat-men and a gigantic leonin, all of which conversed quietly away from prying eyes as they huddled behind a car. And, of course, the standard city-goers as they went about their lives, although there were plenty congregating in the streets to celebrate the potential of a peaceful end to the Bellum-Pergrande skirmishing, and the world retreating from the brink of war. It was really just all droll to Riana. There were plenty of people on the streets, sure, but she was more interested in finding out about her enemies’ disposition.
Curiously, Riana was seeing very little in terms of actual visible deployment. What she could see, primarily, were watcher agents. People positioned in buildings or at other vantage points so that they could keep eyes on potentially suspicious targets and act on them before a large-scale deployment. This made sense. So too could she see small handfuls of mages actually deploying barrier magic, presumably Rune Knights mages; these wards would mean that were something to go horrifically wrong, they were well-prepared to be able to mitigate the damage that was done across the city. If that was the case, then this meant that with sufficient time and preparation the Knights would have been able– if they had not done so– to conjure larger barriers to prevent damage to the civilian populace. That was good to know, for if that was the case, Riana would have eventually needed to employ large-scale siege weapons in order to ensure her victory over an enemy that could have annihilated her and whatever she did effortlessly. At this point in time, it would have been foolish to fight the Rune Knights.
To break away from that particular reverie, however, one of her four camera feeds began to flash as something interesting came her way; the camera drone had selected that whatever image it was displaying was of particular interest to its master. Riana maximised the view in her display and decided to watch carefully; this shot was obstructed by buildings and she would not have been able to put a round on it were she to wish to execute the person within its view. However, what she saw was most curious indeed; a black-cloaked figure carrying some sort of device, which she immediately recognised thanks to her particular background as expertise as a high-yield explosive device, had met up with two of their associates right after fleeing from the same alleyway the young man with a sword had just chased two hooligans into. Oh, the plot was thickening here, for sure; whatever was about to transpire here was certainly interesting.
The device, such as it was, became affixed to a neighbouring car. Planted carefully under its front, presumably where either its fuel tank or its engine block was, the device was left alone for a time where the three people began to depart and scatter in different directions. The technologist in her wondered if she could find whatever frequency that device received on, and either force it to detonate or make some use of it herself. However, that was wishful thinking; by the time she worked it out, the device would have already detonated.
Three seconds later, she witnessed its magnificent explosive bloom in high definition.
The car detonated, sending a flaming wreck skywards, where it tumbled back to the earth with an almighty crash. Debris scattered, with parts becoming shrapnel as if a grenade had popped off; moments later, a second mighty cacophony of destruction followed it, then a third and a fourth; all across the city dark plumes of smoke began to rise from the heavens. Whatever plot was unfolding here, it was now beginning to show its face; Riana had not contemplated that the enemy might have been one of the magic guilds, but rebellious elements in the populace themselves. A sigh left her lips. This was just going to make her job harder as elements of the legal guilds now had to battle pockets of resistance across the city. Which, in truth, was precisely what happened; there were fights that broke out between a number of different groups. Revolutionaries began to throw themselves upon the Rune Knights magical barricades, attempting to overpower the mages that powered them; blades began to clash and fighting was now breaking out all across Felidae City as the anti-treaty revolutionaries, or whatever this rabble fancied themselves, now began to attack the defence forces - and Riana hoped, very seriously, that this was going to turn into a lovely little blood bath that she could stay the hell away from. She had no desire to put herself in harm’s way unnecessarily if she did not need to. After all, she had no emotional investment in this operation whatsoever. She was here so that she could prepare for the future - and if this was an indication of the future, then it would likely be incredibly bloody indeed.
However, Riana spied with her little eye, a pair of targets with another bomb. This bomb, as far as she could tell, was running straight to the foot of the building that she was standing upon; whatever the targets there were doing, they clearly had some plans to blow a hole in the building that she was in. And were this building to become structurally compromised, it would make her operation infinitely more difficult. Riana had no qualms about executing someone just to save her own hide.
In fact, she moved to do precisely that. The Ebon Fury began to float, its blanket of magiparticles concealed by Riana’s cloaking technology; as it floated over the edge of the building, she decided that it would be far easier to take the shot from her vantage point way up high. The barrel of the railgun protruded downwards, the sword of Damocles over the head of the two erstwhile terrorists. Riana’s justification for her decision was incredibly simple: she would execute her will, no matter the cost, and if it costs two lives to preserve her secret, then so be it.
The weapon sparked to life with a low hum, crackling with electricity as it did so, ten stories off the ground; Riana had already aimed the red dot over the head of the one with the bomb as he began to kneel down to place the explosive furtively against the corner of the building. Structurally, it was a reasonable idea; perhaps it would damage a main support beam and allow chaos to spread when the building could not support its own weight the way it had previously. However, the reaper’s scythe was now ready to claim its victim.
A single hypervelocity round left the long barrel of the railgun with little more than a fizzling noise - and a millisecond later it impacted the pavement.
On its way down, the hypersonic slug met human flesh. At that speed, the cavitation of air sucked in everything that was behind it; skeleton remained no threat as it cracked through the man’s skull, then sucked in all that followed as a trail behind it. It exited through his pelvis given that the shot was coming from straight above him, and his organs became a liquefied mess as they dissolved into little more than paste under the compressing force of highly agitated air. The shell met the concrete with a titanic thud and created an impact crater two feet wide, penetrating easily through the concrete and into the soil beneath it. By the time the shot was done, two milliseconds had passed, and the Joyan revolutionary was little more than a pancake on the floor, dressed in macabre sanguine. The untimely execution happened so quickly that the terrorist’s colleague barely had time to process it, and as she looked up from the half-primed explosive, she screamed in terror as she realised the futility of her friend’s death that had happened so quickly that there was insufficient time to process that it had happened.
Life came with many warnings about blink and you would miss it. Riana’s chosen tool of execution was so quick that blinking was an eternity.
As the woman who was now left alone with the bomb looked around in sheer panic to try and find the culprit of murder and saw nothing on the streets to indicate a killer, she screamed and ran away, fear gripping her heart. There was no reason to stay here while this was happening. Riana, sensing victory, dropped to the ground and cushioned her landing under a cloud of magiparticles to slow her descent at the last second. Her metallic feet touched the ground with little more than a feather’s tender kiss, before she plucked the explosive from the floor and ascended once more to the heights of the heavens, returning to her vantage point above. None had seen her, especially not with the cloaking field active, which was the result she wished. Riana did not need to deal with the perfidy of dealing with the repercussions of killing someone and explaining it away to the legal guilds. No, silence, stealth and destruction were the perfect method of handling this mission.
As she finally returned to the rooftop, Riana removed her helmet and surveyed the skyline around her. As she could see, there were plenty of sites that had been ravaged by the untold destruction of the city around them; she counted at least eleven plumes of smoke that rose up to the sky. No, twelve; another thunderous roar and another bomb’s reckoning added itself to the growing mix. This place was absolutely becoming a war zone now, with casualty rates rising quickly; it was clear to hear that the cacophony of screams below her had the general populace in a frenzy. Even through the skies now, air support was coming through. Meliora Vitae’s very distinct shuttles were flying through the air, moving their personnel through a variety of missions and locations that would allow them to execute the plans they had wrought to protect the populace. It seemed that, now that the battle had been executed in full, she had gathered data that she sorely required.
Conversely, however, Riana also knew that now that the guilds were at maximum alert, every second that she remained here in the warzone put her in more danger than was absolutely necessary. She was a scout here, not a fighter. She was not here to stir trouble with either side of the conflict, merely here to observe and report.
Nope. Riana was out.
Pulling her helmet back over her head, Riana waved her hand through the air to dismiss the four drones that she had conjured; the camera feeds went dead in the next instant as the particles that comprised their conjuration vanished into the aether. A moment later, she took a breath out, and then in a moment of pure acceleration shot upwards into the air on the propulsion of orange-red particles.
”SOFI, make course for home,” she instructed her onboard artificial intelligence. ”Maximum stealth. We can’t risk being seen here.”
--Affirmative. Engaging stealth protocols.--
With that, Ebon Fury, cocooning its master safely, took to the skies and departed Joyan airspace. There was no point remaining here where the threat was and putting herself potentially in the line of fire.
The Queen would be pleased with the data she’d gathered, regardless. It was far better than the nothing that was there before.
A shame she had to leave. The tragedy of Joya would have been a wondrous sight to behold.
MEL @ WW
