Prologue: First Step

Sequel to "Two Corpses." In which humanity receives a history lesson and the Parallel Spartans team up with the Infected to kick some buttocks

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"Good morning, Doctor. Coffee?"

A cup of vanilla hazelnut - some milk and a few pinches of sugar, just the way she liked it - materialized beneath her nose, and she accepted it gratefully with a murmured "Good morning" to her mysterious benefactor as she changed course from the mess to her office on base. The human took a sip - delicious, and not too cold, nor too hot. She inhaled deeply, and the calming smell of the coffee loosened the tension in her shoulders - right before she recognized the voice, realized who had spoken, and dropped the cup, the china shattering on the icy concrete beneath her feet.

"I brought a spare." Another cup of coffee materialized beneath her nose, and now she could see that it was being held up over the palm of a strong hand by equally strong fingers, armored with talon tips. Halsey followed the hand to a wrist, where it joined with a forearm that had an immediately recognizable plate wrapped around it. It was connected to an elbow that looked like it could be used to break her in two if it hit the right spot, which was attached to a rather powerful-looking upper arm, despite the plate that covered most of it. Now that she was really looking, she could see subtle differences between this man's armor and the other Spartans', most notably the color. Her gaze slid up the shoulder and over one of the main joints on the chest plate , running over the Spartan's trapezius muscles, before slipping up a strong neck to a pair of intense eyes - blue, not green like she'd expected, though they flashed a deep hunter green for just an instant as she watched.

He smirked at her and proffered the cup again, which she accepted. "You're back," she observed as she took a sip, keeping her gaze locked with his as if she was afraid he would disappear.

"What, worried that I wouldn't, and then you'd never be able to study me?" he asked, clear amusement coloring his tone and dancing in his eyes as he quirked an eyebrow at her.

"Maybe." She snickered softly. "Any chance I could convince you to let me dissect you?"

"Oh God, I thought you were going to try there in Crow's Nest."

"I won't deny that I was tempted," she said loftily right before an alarm rang in the building next to them, followed by the sound of the clock producing the noise being slammed into submission with a single hit.

He glanced at her, a kind of "Really? You thought that would work?" expression on his face before he entered the barracks where the Spartans had simply rolled over and went back to sleep. John walked right up to Kelly's bed and goosed her side, making her jerk awake instantly, giving an undignified feminine squeal before she fell off her bed in an attempt to escape the tickling.

John just chuckled quietly as he watched her struggle to collect herself, the other Spartans sleepily sitting up in their beds to see what all of the commotion was about. "Oh," the fastest Spartan said, noticing him at last, "It's you. John, right?"

"Quite. John-117."

Halsey poked her head around the armored Spartan. "Good morning, Kelly. It's nice to see that you're up." She pointedly glared at Fred, who was responsible for the alarm clock's untimely demise.

"It was annoying," he grunted by way of a response, climbing out of bed and reaching for his fatigues, the others doing the same now that they were awake, though there was a brief moment where Jose-010 was forced to do a comical one-legged flamingo dance in order to get one of his legs into his pants. In groups of two and three, they all trickled out, John patiently waiting for them to go through their morning workout routine (having done the same thing himself two hours prior), and then they showered and met up at the mess hall, where he appeared to be discussing Forerunner physics with Doctor Halsey.

"... but teleportation of individual cells is so much easier than moving the whole organism at once. If you break the bonds of the cells, that provides the initial energy boost required to start the process, to begin the transportation, and then it's a simple matter of reassembling the cells in the proper order and streaming some extra energy to reattach them."

"Haven't you ever switched cells or something?"

"Me personally? No. We worked out that bug a long time ago because you see, cells have a property similar to inertia in that once they are attached, they want to stay attached. Even after they split, they want to get back together, so we simply increase the attractive force between them with the help of a special frequency generated by the teleporter, and voila! The organism virtually rebuilds itself."

"...that's amazing."

"Not really," John said, turning an apple over in his hands as he spoke, "There are other, more impressive things throughout the Empire, and not necessarily artificial, too. The Element Cascades of Corasetii IX, for example. Falls of not just water or ice, but lightning, fire and earth, too." His eyes became distant as he remembered one of the few times that he had been permitted to walk the surface of the volatile planet.

"How is that possible?" Halsey asked.

"Well, the liquid fire is like very runny lava, about the consistency of oil, and the lightning isn't so much lightning as it is nanoparticles bursting with static electricity so that it looks like lightning. The earth is just mud that is about as thick as maple syrup."

"Ice?"

"Glaciers."

"Ah. Is this planet safe?"

"Not by any means. Because of their rather... shall we say, unique states, the elements are prone to combining in numerous and unexpected ways. The only continuous outposts on the planet are at the poles; everything else - all of the research facilities, resorts, etcetera - are on its moon, Hr'Graan."

The Spartans sat down around the scientist-types, listening to the conversation as they ate their breakfasts; they had been to numerous planets, seen many wondrous things, but it sounded like their alien brother topped them all.

"Living species?"

"Lava crabs. A kind of mud snake that's a cousin to the water moccasin. Something like an arctic rabbit. You know, basic stuff." He shrugged. "If you're looking for exotic, Corasetii III is the place to go; it's got something like a monkey that breathes fire and has pincers for hands and a mane like a lion, and no, I'm not making this up," he said, looking over at Valerie-142, who had a disbelieving look on her face, "Strangely enough, it's called a jackalarf, and no, I don't know why. The planet's full of old Forerunner experiments that just happened to adapt to the planet and survive. The system used to belong to the Gultanr." This last bit was directed at Wolfgang, who was about to ask.

Robyn-009 chewed thoughtfully for a moment, swallowed, then asked, "How did you come to this universe? You yourself said that you aren't... native."

"Ah. So you want to hear my story, do you?"

The Spartans skillfully hid their anticipation and curiosity about their strange brother, but he sensed it anyway, the tiniest hints of a smirk tugging at his lips as he laced his fingers together and rested his chin on them, elbows supported by the table.

"Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

"Be serious, John."

"I am being serious! A hundred and ten thousand years ago and about eight hundred light years in..." He looked around before pointing out through one of the west windows and up about thirty degrees, "that direction..."

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The Precursors were once the greatest and most advanced life forms in the galaxy, with technological prowess that makes even the Forerunners look like children. They engineered orbital bridges between planets, ones that would never break, and traveled across galaxies in the blink of an eye. Yet, they sought to transcend the flesh for reasons we do not know, and seemed to believe that they would never return. So they made two races – either by creating them outright or simply accelerating their evolution we do not know, but they did. Us, humanity, and the Forerunners. And then when the time was right, they tested us both – and found the Forerunners wanting. The Precursor Mantle of Responsibility was to pass to us.

Rather than let it happen and see their race destroyed to make way for us, the Forerunners rebelled against their makers – our makers – and killed or caused the deaths of all but the Last, and so far as anyone is aware right now, the Last "True" Precursor was killed by the Iso-Didact with a Reverse Timelock, effectively aging it to death. The Forerunners built their Empire in the ashes of our ancestors', taking up the Mantle that the Precursors had created. It was a wondrous and vast and utterly hypocritical empire, the Mantle giving them the right to "guide" those they believed to be lesser life forms and relocating them to other worlds after decimating all who resisted the change, and for a time, humanity and the Forerunners stayed separate, but inevitably conflict arose.

Yes. It was then that the Flood arrived.

The Precursors had long been at peace amongst themselves, and so never believed that their creations would rise up against them. They went insane because of it, and though some fled and hid away in other parts of the galaxy, most condensed themselves into a kind of fine, desiccated powder, originally meant to bring them back as they had been before, when the Forerunner least expected it. They set it on deep-space ships and sent it off into the rest of the galaxy. But time twisted and corrupted it, and brought only death.

The spores were found and examined by both humans and San'Shyuum, allies at the time, and showed simple, inert, organic molecules, not alive nor capable of life. The Flood spores caused some mind-altering effects in lower animals, though not in humans or San'Shyuum, and made their pets, Pheru (some kind of dog ancestor, I assume), more friendly. No one saw the long-term effects in the powder attaching itself to key points of genes and began mutating them, much in the same way I was changed. However, our similarities diverged swiftly; the first Flood manifested itself as a kind of fur growth on the pets - which other Pheru began to eat, even consuming the other animals in the process. Other growths began to appear after that: flexible rods, which were also eaten and caused abortions and unnatural births. The Pheru were past the point of recovery by then, but that was not the worst of it; some of the humans had eaten the treated beasts and became infected as well, spreading the virus to everything they touched and touched them or anything that came from them.

The Flood virus spread swiftly, far more swiftly than happened in the Forerunner Empire, altering the behavior of the infected humans and San'Shyuum, and the consumed combined to make others become infected, usually by cannibalism. Hundreds of worlds in fifteen systems were beyond help by that point, and the first combat forms and carrier forms began to appear, escaping the quarantines set up and continuing to grow. Though no Gravemind formed - or, rather, there were no recorded encounters - the Flood grew still more intelligent, so the humans turned to the imprisoned Precursor, who gave them some sort of knowledge that was so terrible many committed suicide rather than live with the burden. After that, communication with the Precursor ceased, and it was then that humanity discovered what they believed to be a cure, a cure requiring yet another sacrifice. A third of the whole human population was altered, dumped in the path of the juggernaut, and infected the Flood itself with a set of programmed genes that they believed would destroy the majority of the parasite.

In reality, the remaining Precursors took control of it and found it "good." They still favored us, and caused it to withdraw from human space. Ships with the Parasite and the Precursors onboard left the galaxy and journeyed to parts unknown, from which the majority of it has not returned.

It was during this time after the Human-Flood War that we needed new worlds, uncorrupted planets on which to continue our lives - and took them. The Forerunners believed that their conquest was unreasonable, irrational and fought back, eradicating the already-weakened human forces. Our ancestors had destroyed any and all remnants of the Flood left behind, hoping that their brothers would face a similar infestation and be woefully unprepared, and because of that, many Forerunners were fooled into believing that it was just a story made up by the humans to instill fear-

-Except for the Didact and the Librarian, the latter of whom was already gathering specimens for genetic records and storage on the Ark. But then again, they and the Prometheans who followed them had a reason to believe, had proof that the Flood existed.

Yes.

That's where I came in.

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Works Cited: Halo: Cryptum (Bear, Greg) pages 268 - 273