Saffireprowler

Location: Landing Pad, Nova Polarisia. Hours later. There was a gathering of Size Devils and the island's soldiers from the two nations that had amassed on the landing site as Jodak and Kyrax made their landing in the chopper. "The eagle has landed." Jodak announced over her radio headset. Kyrax looked at her wondering what was next for her. When Jodak proceeded to shut down the equipment, and just as Kyrax was taking off her harness and helmet, the door on her side opened and Nila greeted her like a leader should, along with Fim and her twin sister, Morning Star. "Welcome home, Kyrax." The words that Kyrax had longed to hear her entire life were finally said to her, marking a somewhat emotional beginning to her new life. She finally showed Nila a smile and was searching for the proper words of gratitude until Nila waved her hand in front of her and put an end to the mental test. "Forget the exchange of pleasantries, there will be time for that later. You know Master Fim, and this is our other training senior instructor, Master Morning Star." Morning Star showed Kyrax that famous Giant grin she brought to the island from Jakabar. "Hello, Lynxie. I shall look forward to completing your training." "There are many things you must learn before you may bear the white suit. I have no doubt that you will surpass expectations." Fim paid Kyrax a compliment. "Err, Sergeant!" Nila then called over a female Tinerian soldier who was wearing the green uniforms of the Army and had a falchion on her hip. Like the others, this woman was golden blonde, had a short ponytail, blue eyes, and had a stern look on her face, glancing up at Kyrax who remained seated in the chopper. "Yes, Commandant?" The Tinerian Sergeant acknowledged her leader. "Sergeant, this is Kyrax of Evaland. She will be training to become a Size Devil. I want you to escort her to the island hospital to have her wounds treated on the double, Fim and Morning Star shall follow to answer any questions that Kyrax may have. I'm having you act as her assistant for the time, and when she is released from the hospital, she is to be shown to her quarters." Nila ordered the Sergeant who bowed and stepped aside for Kyrax to exit the aircraft. Kyrax no sooner exited the craft when Fim embraced her, held her close and reminded her that they were not like the butcher of Evaland. "This is where soldiers go to live and die when they have no home to return to." She spoke into Kyrax's ear. "I am grateful." Kyrax acknowledged. "Follow me, please." The Tinerian Sergeant, a girl who was blown up to Human size to guard the facilities, urged the three to follow her. Nila observed Kyrax being escorted inside, stopping at the entrance to be greeted by Lynka and Wessi who wished to welcome home their new comrade as well, and for Lynka to finally embrace Kyrax as a friend, not a foe. As soon as she saw Lynka's arms wrap around Kyrax, Nila knew that the personal distrust was gone and acknowledged the others who had come around the side to see her, including Jodak who was handing a tiny and nearly-deceased Tarten to Human-sized Sheri. "Here you go, love!" Izzy told Sheri. "Aww.... She's still there." Sheri murmured. "I administered the shock treatment when I picked them up." Jodak said. "In that case she's doing as we expected. Let's get her to the hospital and begin administering her drugs." Sheri said with Jodak and a few Tinerian Human-sized nurses following them inside, leaving Nila with Shamid, Saffron, Ellie, and Neya. "The family is getting bigger." Said Neya. "Indeed it is, Princess." Nila agreed, brandishing a long cigar from a pocket on her gray jacket, which Ellie proceeded to light for her before she removed a cigar to smoke. "What about Theodora?" Neya asked her. "Hmph..." Nila grumbled as she had no idea what to say. "We have looked everywhere. None of the Islanders have seen her." Said Ellie. "What about Ktan?" Nila inquired. "Nobody on the giantess intervention team has been informed yet, last I knew." Said Saffron. "Commander Jennings, I want you to get with Ramaduka and see what she can do for Ktan. She's her best friend, and Rammy will know how to beat approach it with Ktan. I don't need a thirty foot tall Zanzhi girl with an emotional rage." Nila said. "Got it." Saffron acknowledged while Nila took her first puffs from the cigar. "That poor girl. Losing her papa and her mother disappearing." Neya said of Ktan. "Hmph..." Again Nila quietly huffed as she thought about her next move. "Do you think Theodora is dead?" Asked Ellie. "No." Nila confidently spoke knowing that Theo was one of the more capable survivalists in the outfit. "In any case, I'm putting Rammy in charge of the Rammysian Nation as their representative to our executive council. Neya, I want you to head the Tinerian and Rammysian armies now, answerable to Ellie and I." "Honored." Neya agreed, feeling that her extensive training in both the Shiqaw Army and Zanzhi Scouts would benefit the tiny nations. "Shamid, I'm putting you in charge of Kyrax, we'll begin a new unit assigned to take care of certain types of individuals." Nila continued. "Fuck yeah!!!! Yes!!!!!!" Shamid jumped with joy, much to the chagrin of the others. "Are you mad? Shamid in charge of our killers?" Ellie questioned Nila. Full of excitement, Shamid pointed to Ellie and even wagged her finger at her, speaking slowly and with a deep, perhaps dooming voice. "Yes... Yes..." "How the hell does Shams get so lucky? She breaks all the new toys and still gets all the new toys." Said Saffron. "Relax, the compensation is peanuts." Joked Nila, a rare thing for her to do. "Yes..." Shamid agreed. At that moment, the bosses noticed Ramaduka and Nat stepping out from the entrance in their white suits. They appeared to be talking about a matter, even keeping eyes on one another, until Ramaduka's mother called to her. "Rammy!" Saffron yelled. At her size, Saffron was very loud at any vocal stage, and made Rammy jump when she called her. "Jeez! Bust my ears, will you, mother!" Rammy shouted back as she broke away from Nat and ran up to the bosses. "Have you seen Ktan yet?" Asked Saffron while Rammy came up to them and Nat followed in a normal walk. "Yeah, she's right behind Nat and I." Rammy responded. "Does she know yet?" Saffron asked her. "No, I ordered her to follow Nat and I out here so that we could speak with her in private about the incident. Why?" Rammy said. The bosses spotted Ktan ducking her head significantly as she stepped out from the entrance, already outfitted for a twenty foot-tall giantess, which was now below Ktan after her series of growth spurts. From outward appearances, Ktan appeared to have grown almost a half meter larger. Seeing the increase in size and understanding how much Ktan prized her increasing mass, the bosses each gave one another a worried look, knowing they would rain on her parade. "That's what we were going to request of you." Saffron said to her daughter. "Way ahead of you, mom." Said Rammy, whose dark hair blew in front of her face constantly from the wind. "Hey everyone." Nat greeted the bosses and stepped over to Rammy's left. Little did they know how happy Ktan truly was, and how much Rammy dreaded delivering the awful news of her father's death and her mother's disappearance. Before Ktan could reach them, Rammy looked to Shamid who she admitted greatly, and Neya, who she admired just as much as Shamid, and revealed her thoughts quietly to them. "I'm scared to tell her." Even Shamid's face drooped when they heard the fearless little Ramaduka admit she was afraid to tell Ktan about what had happened. "Tchah!" Ktan saluted the bosses who couldn't hide their distraught faces. Rammy knew her friend would be devastated. As Ktan stood behind her and over her bearing a huge smile after completing her first giantess mission, all Rammy wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die, rather than have to tell Ktan how her father died. A second prior to Rammy turning to face her giantess friend, some of the bosses observed a sparkling tear pouring out of her left eye, no doubt soon to be followed on the right side. After all, to Rammy, Tom was her tribal uncle, and Theo was like another mother to her after four years in the shared unit. The emotional toll it would take on them hit Rammy so suddenly, and yet when she turned to look up at giantess Ktan, she wore the bravest little face that she could, placed her little hands gently onto Ktan's left thigh, and tried her hardest to calmly explain to Ktan what happened to Theo and Tom. "Hey big, girl." She began. "Ktan we have some very unfortunate news for you. We had to cut your team off from the rest of the network because we didn't want to distract you, in fact, to our knowledge, Commander Minami and Lieutenant Yeo still do not know this." Said Nila. "What is it?" Ktan's smile disappeared, as she understood the gravity in the conversation had changed. "Ktan....... We had a terrible accident in the residential wing last night." Began Saffron, gently placing her hand on Ktan's arm. Ktan seemed to know that the news would affect her more than anyone else. Her usual starry eyes faded into a look of disappointment before the news came out. Then it happened, Ramaduka let out the story. "Sister Ktan, I'm afraid that an explosive charge was detonated last night. Commander Wessi and her students are still examining the ruins, but we believe it was the Ingolians who planted the device." Said Rammy, giving Ktan a moment to process the incident. But Ktan already knew from the tone that she had lost someone. Her head fell as low as it could and she started to cry quietly. "I'm afraid your dad didn't make it, and we have no trace of your mom.... I'm sorry, Ktan." Rammy tried to speak very delicately to the giantess. Ktan never looked up. Her said, bloodshot watery yellow eyes stared at the ground as tears as large as confections fell onto the ground with large splashes, one landing on Rammy, showing to be as big as her thumbnails as it ran down her hand and arm. For her part, Rammy tried to gently rub Ktan's thigh, and she embraced it, rubbing her cheek against it, mourning for Ktan too. Ktan desperately struggled to not cry so loudly. Her lips quivered, her muscles jittered in her arms and stomach area, the tears flowed heavily from her eyes, and she clenched her teeth as the pain of her loss almost sweat her off of her feet. What slipped past her lips were grunts, groans, and noises that displayed great agony. However, she never burst into a fit, and she couldn't move from her spot. "It's okay, big sis. I'm here. I'm here for you." Rammy told her in their shared language. "We'll leave you two alone for now." Ellie spoke to Ktan and Rammy, pointing at Nat and then to the door so that she understood to give the two space. As the bosses and Nat exited the landing site, which they noted as Ktan being bigger than the helicopter after her growth spurts, they looked back to see two friends who lost someone in their family, possibly two. The desire for revenge was stronger than ever before, except that the Ingolians were notoriously difficult to track down and were invisible to all intelligence circles, including to the Polarisian intelligence. For now it left Ktan a broken girl with a broken heart, but there was little doubt in anyone who witnessed Ktan at that moment, that she would pull herself together and join the fight more determined than ever.

Location: Rural Human Territory. Few detested the Micronauts as much as agent Sofia Barbaros had. Owing much to her forever scars and disfigured face behind the gas mask, for almost eighteen years she practically spent every waking hour imagining their demise and scheming to rid the world of such heretics, as she thought of them. "Heretics, women who play with shrink rays and make fools of themselves in front of the world's cameras whenever a colossal foe appears." She thought to herself as she stood in front of a drafty old window in the front room of an abandoned house that her agency, the Human High Bureau of Investigation, observing three of her agents dragging a blindfolded and handcuffed man across the yard of tall weeds toward the front door.  Another agent, one Herman Sumrall, a junior agent who was attached to her operation, stood at the front door with a pump shotgun in one hand and the other on the doorknob. "Sixteen hours." He said to Barbaros who hadn't bothered to look away from the window in over an hour. "Seventeen and twenty." Barbaros corrected him.  "You count from the time they received orders to meet with you?" Asked Herman. "It doesn't matter. Open the door." Barbaros ordered him in her stern and unfriendly voice. It seemed Barbaros hated everybody those days. She was just as unpleasant to work with as she was to look at, and nobody she ever worked with had ever seen her under the mask and the suit that was permanently grafted onto her body. "Oka-aaayyyyy..." He said, opening the door.  "In you go!" The blindfolded man was ordered into the house by one of the agents who gave him a shove on the back.  "Right, there's a door!" Herman warned him.  The quiet man was forced into the kitchen where Herman had been waiting, and the three agents who had brought him in forced him to sit at a broken down table, upon a chair that was likely to collapse under a person's weight. Lucky for the capture man, he was very thin and lightweight. "Sit." He was told multiple times even as he complied.  Barbaros entered the kitchen to meet with the man herself. Herman had lit a cigarette the moment before she entered, and as Barbaros was disgusted by the habit and because fire and smoke triggered her badly anymore she snatched the lit cigarette from his hand, crushed it in her hand without feeling the burn thanks to her suit, and tossed it's sorry remains on the old wooden floor. "No smoking." She earned him.  "Bitch." Herman let himself quietly groan under his breath so that his boss wouldn't hear him.  The other three agents looked to Barbaros who nodded once to them, causing them to step away as she approached the table, grabbed a chair and put it in front of the table. "You men could have been faster." Barbaros scolded them first before taking her seat.  The blindfolded man was remarkably quite and held himself up with considerably constitution. Herman approached and untied the blindfold and revealed the rest of his face to Barbaros. He was Avyran Rahyld, a special courier and messenger for the Light government who often reported in secret to the Parliament and its top ministers on the successes of the Micronauts. Rather average in his build other than being thin a rail, his blonde hair and red green eyes were hardly worth noting, and this was perhaps desirable to Barbaros, for she sent three agents to track down and kidnap the man in his own home country late the day before. Its easier to miss a more memorable face. And now Avyran sat across the table from the most treacherous Human in the Otherworld. He cringed upon seeing Barbaros for the first time. "You know who I am?" she asked Avyran.  Avyran thought that the description of Barbaros appeared vaguely familiar. He had read reports of a Human woman who was constantly harassing the Micronauts, her name escaped him, however. "You are..." "Sofia Barbaros. You are a dead man." She cut him off in a bored and assured voice. "A dead man? What do you mean by that?" Repeated Avyran.  Just then one of the three agents who brought him in approached the boss with a sealed envelope he kept in the vest underneath his suit. "I found this one his belonging when we picked him up." He quietly told Barbaros. Barbaros accepted the envelop while Avyran protested his capture. "I don't understand. Where are we? Who are all of you?" "Silence him." Barbaros, tired of him already, quietly told the others. Herman stuffed the blindfold into Avyran's mouth and gagged him with the very piece of cheesecloth that he had sweat on for hours as he was forcefully kidnapped and smuggled out of his Kingdom. Barbaros tore open his envelop and read the letter quietly. It was Avyran Rahyld's private report to the ministers in Light Parliament, outlining recent successes of the Micronaut unit and personally advocating for their continued operation. It was a confidential report meant to quell the fears that the program was a waste.  "A very dead man." Barbaros finally told him at the conclusion of reading his correspondence to Parliament. Barbaros wasn't to let there be anymore debate or discussion. Avyran started to argue, and she tuned it out when she drew her revolver and shot him in the face from a few feet away with her .38. Blood spilled everywhere and she had to remove a rag from her suit pocket to wipe off the splatter from the end of her gun. She didn't look at the others, she let them do their job as needed after giving further instructions.  "Agent Smythe, agent Williams." She began. "Yes, madame." The two she spoke to answered. "Has the decoy been written in waterproof medium, like I asked for it to be?" Barbaros questioned.  "Yes, we matched everything as you said, as well." Agent Smythe said to her, retrieving an envelope identical to the one they had taken from Avyran from his pocket. "Very well." Barbaros said. "Let's make sure his body washes up on the northern shore of the Light Kingdom. We need to make it look believable."  "Yes, madame." The two agreed. Barbaros's plan took many months to out, and while it was complicated to pull off, it was simple in its nature. By kidnapping the messenger who personally wrote glowing reports on the Micronauts, killing him, and destroying the letter of merit, she let the nervous Lights wonder about his whereabouts for just long enough to keep the story fresh on their minds. Then his corpse would wash up on the coast of the Light Kingdom somewhere, days later, and on him, authority woukd find his report- a fake and very nasty report alleging possible corruption, bribery, extortion, theft, and embezzlement. Every agent would be painted black in the report, and it would only be a sidenote to the official account. For it would seem he was shot and murdered and all of his money taken from him.  As the agents stuffed the decoy letter into Avyran's pocket, she chuckled and crossed her arms. "Let's see those fools shrink their way out of this one."  A second after, agent Herman Sumrall's cellular phone began to ring. He answered it, and then handed it to Barbaros. "It's for you." Barbaros seemed surprised by the sudden phone call, and at the same time, knew to expect it. She accepted the phone call and removed herself from the kitchen to speak in private as she walked to a different end of the house. "It's me." "OWO is set." A woman in the other side of the conversation told her. "What do we know about the package?" Barbaros asked her. "Received by the Micronauts. They reportedly exited the body of an agent and are seeking to enter the body of the Queen now." Said the woman.  "Very well, does Nakenga know this?" Asked Barbaros. "No, not yet. I want to keep her in the dark about the package and about OWO. I'll be speaking with her within the hour." Said the woman. "The parcel is on its way to the Lights." Barbaros mentioned.  "Excellent... Yes, excellent. When this ends, I'll see to your reward, Sofia." The woman commended her. "I look forward to killing Peli myself with my own hands." Barbaros said. "It can be done, we just have to plant her with OWO."  "That's what you wish for?" "Yes". Barbaros gave a certain reply. "Consider it done."  "Thanks, Madame President." Barbaros responded and then ended the phone call.  The beginning of a massive Human-led conspiracy has begun, and it was being orchestrated entirely by Barbaros and the new President of the human-controlled Leylandic Dominion. When she handed the phone back to agent Sumrall, he noticed she was very quietly tittering like she was up to something very bad. the other two agents busily carried Avyran's bleeding corpse out of the house to stuff it into the back of an agency car. Then she stopped Herman short of leaving the house. "Where are you going now?" Herman stopped at the open front door, pointed at the others who left a trial of blood behind them. "Helping them." He answered. Barbaros still and her revolver in her hand, which she deposited into its holster once again. She removed fresh white leather gloves from a pocket, whipped them in the air a little to loosen them, and started putting them on. "Just wave them on. I'll discuss the next stage with you." Herman nervously accepted, because his new boss truly bothered him. So he turned and looked out at the other two agents who were beside the black car and had opened the truck to hide the corpse. He gave them a wave, which was their signal to continue one without them. Agent Williams saw it and nodded to acknowledge it. Barbaros came to the door and closed it quietly, and began the private talk. "Agent Sumrall, what do you know about OWO?" "One World Order...?" He joked to a cole reception from his bad-natured boss. Seeing she didn't find his quip funny, he straightened out a little for her. "Oh, Other Way Out, you mean?" Barbaros nodded once. "Programmable kill switch virus. Engineered by one of our own as a means to kill off her clones in the event they became unruly. As I understand it, OWO is being reengineered to mimic the effects of one of the Micronauts' genes, which causes scale change." Herman answered with what he knew, he paused and then he added one final tidbit of the story. "I believe Hamilton is designing a variant which can enter the body from absorption, a sort of hand sanitizer, if you will?" Barbaros was impressed with Herman Sumrall's limited knowledge of OWO. She briefly turned away and paced the floor somewhat during his recital. As he concluded what he knew, she nodded as if to approve. "Smythe and Williams know of it as well." Herman nodded, chuckled and smiled. "Yeah, well it's a huge bioengineering feat-" Barbaros all of a sudden reached over to Herman's face from beside him, then with everything she had, wrung his neck and killed him where he stood. She decided that he knew too much, and with him out of the picture, she looked at the closed front door as if she were seeing directly through it with some form of x-ray, glaring out at the other two agents, plotting their demise as well. Now that her gloves were proverbially dirty, she removed them, pocketed the otherwise-clean old ones into another pocket to exchange them for a cleaner identical pair. "The trumpet has sounded, and now I continue my hunt for the Sabretooth boys." She said to Herman's corpse.