NationStates Jolt Archive

Ponte Vedra City, Ponte Vedra

It was a beautiful day in Ponte Vedra. Lao Ren pondered the deep blue sky over the city, it's magnicient skyline, the caleidoscope of the colours on it's beachers. Deep down below, small children were playing ball in the water, lovers were kissing... and oppressed workers were toiling away at two dollars per hour at the behest of their capitalist masters. But not for long. Very soon, it was going to end. He, Lao Ren, Corrheian Communist Party ticket 344550, was going to end it. He had fake papers, and was about to land in Ponte Vedra in a passenger jet, there to meet his contacts. He was the Chosen One - chosen personally by the General Secretary of the Party to strike a blow against capitalism. He knew he would succeed. He was the chosen one. He could not fail.

The Ponte Vedran Sea

"Row! Row, you scum!" screamed out Ding Rad. "Keep rowing!". He has disembarked from the Corrheian Avenger boat, further from the shore than planned, and he started suspecting he would not make it to the shore on time.
"It must be done," he thought. "I must not fail. The Chosen One must get the cargo on time". And the six Corrheians rowed for the life of them, propelling their deadly cargo towards Ponte Vedra City, slowly but surely.
One the shore, a truck waited. A lonely Ponte Vedran stood by its side. "Good day, gentlement. I am Comrade Jones, Vedran Socalist Party. Let's get going." Two hours later, the boat came back, carrying Comrade Jones, but no cargo.

A suburb of Ponte Vedra City

Jones ushered Lao Ren, the Chosen one, into the room. "This is the Weapon. I have given this house to the Cause - for the short while it still exist. I myself will depart with the boat that brought the Weapon.". The Weapon was a large metal box with a single black button, a screen, and a keyhole. Lao Ren took out a small key he was wearing on his neck. It fit. He turned the key and the screen lit on. It showed six digits: 04:00:00. He pressed the black button. He knew, in theory, what he was going to see, but he was still relieved to see it. Lao Ren, the Chosen one, Corrheian Communist Party Ticket 344550, smiled as the saw the number tick down to zero

03:59:59
03:59:58
03:59:57

Now he could relax and make himself some coffee.

It would be the best coffee he ever drank.

*Tag*

Post will come later. Thank you for helping.

<<TAG>>

Nothing, cuz he fixed it.

Ignore this please. I'll have a post by the end of the week. It'll be long, I apologise, but this is important.

Mmmm... good point. Allanea and I were chatting and I got carried away. My apologies. That was meant to be a tag anyway...

*tag*

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Ponte Vedra, Ponte Vedra
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Alex had just gotten back from work. His menial job in the city working for a tech company provided enough pay to maintain an earnest lifestyle in a suburb outside the city. The city, with only a few major skyscrapers and one or two, was mostly quiet at this point. Only the beachside was a major apartment and condominium sector, the rest lived either on the canals or in the suburb. He sat down on the couch while he waited for his wife to finish her home-cooked meal, and turned on the sports channel. Instantly seeing his favorite local baseball team lost, he cursed and changed the channel without interest in seeing the score.

The next channel he stopped at was an international news organization, it talked about the peace talks in Allanea, which of course was a major topic in Ponte Vedra. Currently, the Vedran Army was deployed in almost half of its full strength for some reason or another, it wasn’t in his best interest as much other than the fact his nephew was serving in the Airborne Cavalry in the region. Peace was his best hope for his return. He paid attention for a short while before the headline switched to more foreign problems and issues elsewhere. Another click of the channel changer…

National news, perfect, he said as he settled into his couch. The current feed was of Congress dismissing after the majority conservatives successfully defeated a philabuster. That was good, he hated it when the minority decided that they didn’t like what was going on, especially because the majority of conservatives in the country spawned mainly socialistic, Marxist, or Fourierist liberals. The important part was that the liberals holding the minority in congress (approximately thirty to thirty-five percent), were only representatives from mainly smaller sectors of the country. This made it easy for conservatives to win the major offices in the executive branch and the judicial branch. Things were easy going in country.

00:00:15

Alex flipped the channel as his five year old son and three year old daughter ran—well the daughter awkwardly walked—into the room and crawled up on his lap. “Hi, kids. What’s goin’ on?” he laughed as they tried their best to wrestle him playfully.

“Dinner will be done in about fifteen minutes!” his wife called while walking from the kitchen into the television room. The kids took their position on the couch as Alex adjusted to allow for room.

00:00:03
00:00:02
00:00:01

The flash was extraordinary, it lit up the room even though the curtains were mostly down. They all looked to their left as the shockwave tore through the city and into the suburbs, everything shut off before the explosion hit the house. The blast knocked everything to the right and into things, the couch flipped and Alex struggled to protect his children from being crushed. It was no use though…they were already dead. The impact of the couch onto the wall was enough to kill them both. The father cried before finally losing the energy he had and collapsing.

The President’s House was in the blast radius and incinerated. Congress suffered also, the shockwave ripped open the old ceiling and part of it collapsed into the House of Representatives. Buildings fell, computers were shut down. Planes flying at low altitude crashed due to loss of electronics. The city lay in ruins as the mushroom cloud rose above the house that no one suspected.

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30 Miles Away
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The Secretary of Education crawled out of the window of the national limousine after it flipped over. She looked to the city, the tall sky scrapers were no longer just over the horizon, they were replaced by a mushroom cloud and fire. The capitol laid in ruins. She called from the nearest payphone a secret number to check in on the situation with the rest of the administration and waited to see where she sat in line of succession. Soon the voice came back on, and announced that she was now the president, and following her was the Chief of Staff, who was away on vacation.

She walked back to the Limo where the body guards were now securing the area and trying to flip the vehicle. “Ma’am, are you OK?” one of the nameless secret service agents asked.

She managed to get a few words out, “Ye—ye—yes, I am fine.” She looked down and shook her head, instantly blaming Ponte Vedra’s military for storing nuclear weapons and assuming it was them who was responsible. “I am now President of Ponte Vedra. Please, take me to the National Control Center.” She stepped in the limousine as one of the secret service agent’s phone rang. He spoke for a few seconds, and then hung up.

“Mrs. President,” he called, “there has been a change in plans.” The guard in the passenger seat turned around and held a pistol, “this is for the good of the nation.” He fired a single shot into the center of her head. Blood sprayed on the rear windshield as they rolled up the privacy glass and shield.

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NCC – Camp Princeton
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The Chief of Staff was sworn in on the helicopter while on his way to the command center. This underground building was capable of withstanding a nuclear explosion and assumed command of the entire nation in times of need. Chief of Staff Walker Turner—now President Turner—ordered the disposal of the known socialist Secretary of Education, there was no good reason for her to be in power and ultimately bring the demise of the country. Instead, Turner authorized everything needed, the emergency response teams, containment areas, power-reroutes, activation of the military, and an investigation on where this weapon came from. In a little while, he’d know which country to give some harsh words to…harsh words in the form of bullets.

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Field Investigation
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Dr. Reilly collected a few samples in about thirty minutes and tried to escape the epicenter of the blast. The radiation was unlike anything he had ever seen. After about two hours of inspection of different samples, his nearby lab at the national university concluded the blast came from Corrheia, a nation bordering Allanea with incredibly hostile communistic policies. The socialists organized this, those bastards! I’ve got to get this to the command center, he thought as he ran to get hold of the Air Force for an immediate pick up.

Bump :)

Colonel Amarillo had been expecting some rest. After the whole incident with the terrorists who had infiltrated the government of Nilt, he had earned a slack assignment for once in his career. A nice, easy posting to the government of Falastur with his staff, attend some military classes, train the Falastur folks on how to handle the new Dominion of LeberMac Aibo "HuntWolf" model cybercanines, simple.

This was his second day of R&R in nearby Ponte Vedra; after a long night of carousing with some of his men, taking in the local color, he had finally hit the sack at around 1 in the afternoon. He awoke with a churning in his gut that wasn't caused by the local tequila, it was more like raw adrenaline. He knew what it was - his daylight slumber had been interrupted by that sixth sense that combat veterans have, the sense that gets you out of the foxhole before the shell lands in the middle of it. He had learned over his years to trust his gut instincts, if not necessarily to like them. He rolled off the couch, scattering gnawed lime peels and discarded bottles as he made his way to the window. Damn, he thought to himself, Why's it so BRIGHT outside?

"Ahhhh.. Crap." Amarillo muttered as he saw the nuclear blast wave approaching.

The span of the next few seconds seemed like 10 minutes. With more instinct than concious thought, Amarillo coiled into a crouch and launched himself across the room to the stairs that led down to the lower story of the bi-level villa he had been renting with his men. He hit the stairs awkwardly but managed to roll into a ball as he slid off the last stair. The windows of the old masonry villa glowed with an unearthly light as Amarillo slammed himself against the half-underground wall nearest the approaching blast wave.

Lieutenant Pressley, whose sleeping arrangements from the long night before apparently consisted of this section of the floor, looked up at his Colonel with one eye and managed to form a question while he wiped the carpet fibers from the floor out of his cheek:
"Heeeey boss. Uuunnnfhhh. Whaaat time is it?"

As if in answer, the blast wave hit the villa with a force greater than the two special forces officers had ever experienced. Their two other compatriots at the other side of the room were instantly crushed by compression forces, brick and mortar flying at supersonic velocity over Amarillo and Pressley's heads as they tensed for the blow that would surely end their lives.

Instead, their world lost all sound as the blast and noise deafened them. The collapsing villa fell in a shambles of bent steel, concrete and brick. Half-covered in debris, the two men lay silent, barely alive after being stunned by the nuclear blast.

In their destroyed military truck outside, a hardened black container hummed to life, prompted by the shock of the blast wave. The internal monitoring devices planted inside the container activated, and it sprang open to reveal the Aibo cybercanine that Colonel Amarillo had been demonstrating to Falastur. The largest model Aibo produced by the Dominion of LeberMac, the military-grade "HuntWolf" model was as large as a horse, programmed for self-preservation and search & rescue as well as warfighting.

The metal mutt homed in on the signals of its masters, while taking readings on the strangely ever-increasing radiation and formulating a plan of action based on its fractal fuzzy logic branching scenarios. It was not an intelligent machine per se, but its programming told it that these men needed to get out of the blast radius by any means possible.

It made its way to the unconcious Amarillo and Pressley and began to dig.