Miss Megajoule/Ozymandias
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Miss Megajoule endured Portal Corp's decontamination protocol stoically, shivering in the cold spray and baking under the UV lamps. She answered the techs' questions with nods and short sentences; other than that, she said nothing. The operator on duty recognized the signs of a mission gone bad and decided to let her give her report to his superior, the man who'd given her this task: security chief Unai Kemen.
Kemen was in his office on the second floor of Building 110, doing paperwork, when she opened the door without knocking. He looked up and smiled. "Miss Megajoule, hello. Come in. How was Tau Delta 8-7?"
"Do you really want to know?" she answered bleakly. Kemen's expression shifted to one of concern as she stepped up to the desk but didn't take a seat. "It's dead. They're all dead. The whole world."
Kemen sat back in his chair, eyebrows going up. "How is that possible? Our initial probe scans didn't detect any radiation or pathogens in the air; we check that sort of thing before we let anyone go through. Was there some kind of natural disaster?"
"Not natural," Miss Megajoule answered, shaking her head with equal parts anger and sadness. "This disaster was entirely man-made."
The first thing she noticed, as her senses cleared from the disorientation of dimensional travel, was how quiet and empty the streets were. A cold wind blew through the canyons of stone and steel, moaning like a lost soul, making her shiver and wrap her arms tightly around herself as she stepped out onto the broad avenue. The decaying facades of empty buildings loomed over her, a few showing signs of fires long extinguished.
"Should have worn the thermal tights," she murmured, then raised her voice. "Hello? Is anyone here?" Only the wind answered.
The second thing she noticed, as she walked along the cracked sidewalk, was the age and style of things: the parked cars, their tires rotted away; the signs and billboards, yellowed and faded; the clothing behind the intact window of a department store. It all looked to be about forty or fifty years old.
Just when she began to doubt she'd find anyone alive in this city of ghosts, she spotted movement up ahead. A group of three, two women and a man, were making their way along the street. Their tattered clothes were of the same mid-20th-century fashion as those she'd already seen. One of the women had a slight limp, but managed to keep up with the other two.
She launched herself into the air, covering the distance to the others in a short arc. As her boots touched down on the pavement again, she cleared her throat politely. "Can you tell me--"
Their heads swiveled around, their mouths opened, and all three emitted an utterly inhuman shriek. As she backpedaled, covering her ears instinctively, the man reached into his coat and drew forth a familiar-looking carbine. The explosive projectile ricocheted harmlessly off of a hastily-raised force field, and her return blast knocked him off his feet. He began to rise, his movements precise and face utterly impassive, as the women charged.
A minute later, their broken forms were sprawled across the old asphalt. Steam rose from the bodies. A severed arm, still twitching and leaking fluid, lay yards from its former owner. Synthetic skin had scorched and peeled away to reveal intricate inner workings.
Miss Megajoule stood over the wreckage, panting just a little, her breath showing in the chill air. Finally she lifted her eyes from the shattered mechanisms to the looming, silent towers and spoke a single word.
"Nemesis."
"I see. So Nemesis was in charge there?"
Miss Megajoule's lips quirked and pursed as if she'd tasted something sour. "Not exactly."
She found the obelisk in what had once been a park. The grass was gone, leaving bare dry dirt, and the few trees still standing were blackened skeletons. No birds, no squirrels, no life of any kind: just the monument, and the mortal remains of the one whom it had been raised to honor.
The decades hadn't left much. Even with a glass coffin to protect it from the elements, the body's own microscopic passengers had done their work of decay. The form inside the discolored glass reminded her of a Banished Pantheon husk, but with enough cybernetic implants - all of them showing the careful Old World craftsmanship of Nemesis' own work - to build a member of the Freakshow. Between his reputation and his giant brass battle-armors, she'd gotten used to thinking of him as large, but the body in the coffin seemed almost pathetically small... much too small to occupy the soiled field marshall's uniform. She forced herself to look at it for almost a minute before turning her attention to the obelisk.
Again, it seemed rather modest for a man of such immense ego and ambition - a mere fifty or sixty feet tall - but as she read the text engraved on each of its four sides, she began to understand. It described his origins, rise to power and infamy, greatest (if short-lived) conquest, and final undoing: not at the hands of any hero, but from a rare disease from which even his genius and technology could not save him.
She found herself murmuring a line from the War of the Worlds: "... by the humblest creatures that God in his wisdom placed upon the earth." But that was not the end of the story, and she felt her blood grow colder than the mournful wind could account for as she read the final lines of the inscription:
"One thought alone consoles me: my creations will not allow a single thing to survive me. They will rule this world forever, alone, in the name of Nemesis."
She read it over again, horrified at the implications. Then, without another word, she took to the skies. She'd learned everything about Tau Delta 8-7 that she needed to know.
Miss Megajoule wiped a sniffly nose on the sleeve of her costume. "He thought big. Right up to the end. He made the whole world his tomb. Took them all with him. God damn him to hell."
Kemen was stunned. He searched for words. "There might be survivors, hidden pockets... we've found them in other dimensions that have been taken over by..."
A gloved fist slammed down on the top of the security chief's desk. "You weren't there!" she grated. "I'm telling you, there was nothing alive on that planet! Nothing but me and those robots. They killed everyone and everything." Her flash of anger cooled; she drew back her hand shakily, took a sobbing breath.
"It was hard to breathe. I didn't think about it at first, when I fought that patrol, but it took me a minute to recover. No trees. I bet they went and killed all the plankton in the oceans too. They had time, and they had their orders. Machines are literal that way." Now she was almost talking to herself, rubbing her arms against a chill she could still feel in the comfortable office. "How long for all the oxygen to get bound up in rocks, or burned by them to make steam? Someday it'll all be gone, and they'll finally stop..."
Kemen got to his feet and walked around his desk to put a comforting arm around the hero's shoulders. "Look, Miss Megajoule... this was a rough one. I'm sorry. I should have prepared you better. Some of the dimensions we come across are like a slice of hell. Believe it or not, I've seen things worse than this."
"Anyway, this is my problem now, not yours." He took a step back, setting his voice for Maximum Confidence. "I'll send some other heroes to Tau Delta 8-7. Even if there aren't any survivors to be found, we should do something about those robots. I don't like leaving unexploded bombs around. They'll have to have refuelling sites, repair depots; we can disable some of those. It'll take a while, especially with the limited resources I have to work with, but I bet we can make a dent..."
"Whatever." Miss Megajoule sighed wearily. "Do what you like. Jibril would say it's too late to matter, though." She turned to leave, pausing on the threshold to look over her shoulder. "Oh, I finally thought of a name for you. You said I get to give it a name, right?"
Kemen nodded. "That's the tradition."
"Call it... Ozymandias."
