Metroid Next: The Torch

by Moonraker One

CHAPTER ONE

"Just a little bit higher!"

An audibly powerful yet aged feminine voice cried out. The command came in response to the faltering physicality of a late teen young woman with long sandy-blonde hair. A metal bar came up and down in response to the anguished force applied from underneath. Young Veshna Aran pushed with as much velocity and pressure as her fragile body could muster. Her arm muscles burned from the overwhelming demand requested by the weight device. Sweat poured as she began to shake as the bar inched higher towards the beginning point. She'd already gritted her teeth and ignored the screaming pain in her legs, and she struggled still.

"Come on, dear!" This time, the yell of motivation came from a masculine voice. "I know you can manage!"

"I...I'm trying, now!" She groaned, demanding one final surge of her muscles, which regretfully seemed to want to decline. "I'm trying! Arrgh!" One final shout, and she got the necessary amount of pressure out of her frail muscles.

The mother, Samus, a famous figure in her own right, approached and patted the panting young girl on the shoulders. "Dear, you've done wonderfully! That's a better record than last time." Her hair showed very faint impressions of gray in her hair as she approached her mid-fifties. It had been a good ten years since she'd hung up her power suit. Good circumstances had lent their luck to her and her desire for peace. She didn't know conclusively if she'd wiped out the last of the space pirates, but if they still lived, they hadn't bugged her in years. Next to her, a man of similar age with brown hair and a dark goatee stood, his arm wrapped around his wife. He, Xanman Mukam, had been a soldier in the galactic military for quite a time, and had met his legendary wife during one of her later missions, during the Strife of R3-281. He had a scar on his left abdomen from where he'd taken a plasma shot for another of his men.

Veshna sighed. "No matter how much I try, I'm still too frail to beat any of your records, mom!" She sat down at a rest station and drank her controlled electrolyte beverage. "Didn't any of your modified Chozo DNA make it through to me? I'm eighteen. I should be stronger and more durable than I am." She'd had this problem for quite some time; she wanted so much more than her imbalance-ridden body would provide.

Samus shook her head and embraced her daughter. "Honey, don't try to be better than me. I've been to places you wouldn't want to have nightmares about. Besides, your body is a unique problem." She paused to contemplate how tactfully to say what needed to be explained. "You might've gotten the Chozo DNA that makes me more athletic than a human could achieve, you also have the Metroid DNA I have that was put there to keep me from succumbing to that problem I told you about. In response, you have a Metroid organ just below your stomach that causes your body to be weak." She hoped her daughter wouldn't take it to mean she was inferior somehow.

"But mom, the injections keep the organ from functioning—which would kill me—but they also make me easily prone to injuries. Isn't there anything that can make me, you know, stronger?" Tears started to come down. "I...I've always dreamed of wearing your power suit into combat one day! It's never going to happen as weak as I am!" She drew closer and tightly embraced her mother. To Samus, she'd felt stronger grips from cancer patients.

Oh dear, Samus thought. The resistance weight machine was only set to 45 pounds. That's only a two pound increase from last time. She avoided wearing her concern on her face. She returned the embrace, taking care not to hurt her daughter. "Oh, Veshna, don't dream like that. It's not that it's not a good dream to have, it's just that I had to wear the power suit to kill things. It's a weapon of war. In these times of peace, I don't have to wear it anymore because things are nice and peaceful. Just enjoy your life. Don't worry about proving anything to me. You're my daughter."

"But, how can I be an Aran if I'm not as good as you are? It's not fair!"

Xanman, who'd allowed a semi-private mother-daughter moment, spoke up. "Veshna, the Samus Aran your mother was during the conflicts, isn't the only Samus there is. She's much more than the weapon that brought an end to the space pirate era. She's much happier not having to worry about who's going to attack and when." He rubbed his daughter's head gently. Dear God, please let my daughter learn to love herself more. He wiped the beginnings of a tear away.

The combined words of father and mother seemed to cheer her up, if only slightly and temporarily. "Thanks, dad, mom, I'm better now." She stood up and walked slowly towards the exam room to get her weekly checkup. She would get scanned to see how her internal chemistry functioned, and then get another injection to keep chemicals from causing problems.

Samus turned to her husband. She looked over her shoulder to make sure her daughter had left hearing range. "Xenman, I'm concerned. Every time she comes in, her injections get slightly stronger, and yet, the energy organ of the Metroid DNA keeps wanting to pump out more and more of that damned chemical." She grabbed the bar her daughter had struggled to get raised ten times, and lifted it effortlessly. "The energy-sucking chemicals that come out of the extra organ deteriorate her tissue...if this keeps up, it'll get too much to suppress!"

He hugged her like a supportive husband should. "Don't worry, Samus. We'll figure something out. She might be weak physically, but she's got your strong will." He only hoped his words rang true.

The doctor finished administering to Veshna her weekly injection. "There. You should be good for another seven days. Your enzyme ratios and balances are unusually normal this week, but I'm still not taking any chances. You might have an attack again; I'm going to prevent that." He had seldom seen such a strange series of imbalances from an organ a girl had been born with. Still, her mother hadn't actually expressed the full range of Metroid DNA, while the daughter actually had a whole organ, slightly below the stomach.

Veshna pulled her shirt sleeve over her arm again. "So, how's the Metroid organ doing?"

The doctor looked at the scan readings. "It seems to pump out chemicals when you get stressed or anxious, and you've been in relatively calm situations lately. The chemical is a standard emulsion that Metroids apparently use to allow them to absorb energy directly through the tissues of the victim. When the organ pumps it out into your bloodstream, it pulls energy from tissues it comes near, weakening your body. This injection, which suppresses the release of the chemical, keeps this problem from happening, but even it isn't perfect."

She stood up. "I hope there's a solution soon." She left the office. Her mother and father were waiting, and Samus draped a coat around the arms of her daughter.

"We'll find a way to take care of the situation, dear. Just remember that tomorrow is your class trip to system planet VS-012 for Geology class!" She saw the smile come to her daughter's previously sullen face, and it made her feel better. She felt bad that her only child had the unrealistic and unnecessary goal of proving herself worthy of some imaginary title. Xenman leaned next to his wife. He didn't understand why anyone would want to compete with his wife for an idea of war, much less his own daughter.

As the hover vehicle landed on the platform, Veshna thought of her mother's words. She felt moderately stupid for wanting to live up to an unreachable goal, especially since Samus had done most of her missions out of necessity to survive. At the same time, however, she wanted to see that look. She wanted that look she'd imagined so often, where her mother had a smile symbolic of her acceptance of her own individual strengths. The main thing she desired was to be more than "good enough." Greatness rested in her name; she desired it to be her own.

"Get some sleep, Veshna," Xenman pleaded, "you've got a busy day ahead of you." He headed off to catch the last of some programming on the hologram projector before heading out the next day for his scouting missions. Samus herself knew she would have to do some more bodyguard missions for the ambassadors heading to the Ventrox system. She would have to wear her power suit again, and that made her a bit nervous. On one hand, her power suit had become synonymous with greatness. On the other hand, it meant people looking at her as if to expect something. None of this concerned Veshna, who merely wanted to shower and get sleep. She'd hoped to become a bounty hunter one day, like her mother, taking missions for money and from the Galactic Federation; instead, the most she could hope for was a normal job.

"Veshna Aran," she spoke, and the voice receiver on the bathroom opened. She took off her clothing and stepped into the hot water. Gently she washed the sweat from her body. She had a trim body that had a bit of a stomach poking out, but she couldn't really be considered heavy. Also, she could be considered abnormally buxom for the senior class. This caught the jealousy of her classmates, who didn't realize that a chemical imbalance threatened to end her life if she didn't receive weekly medicine. All they saw was a skinny young girl with bigger breasts than normal, who lazed around too much to exercise, and thus was physically unfit. "I'm finished." The water ceased and hot air currents from vents dried her off.

She changed into her evening attire and lay flat, with her feet dangling partially off the bed. It only took her a few minutes of thought before she grew bored of thinking and fell asleep. She would doze another 8 hours and imagine herself in all manner of battles wearing her mother's Power Suit. She didn't stray more than an inch from her mother's height, and only her weight was lower, so she'd certainly fit well in it, but her frail body would not survive the motion required. Still, in her mind, she would find a way to make her mother proud of her.

The gentle pulsating of her alarm clock's pulse timer woke her up, and she quickly changed into her form-fitting body suit, ate breakfast, and headed out to get to class. The planet on which the day's rock excavation would take place wasn't more than 40 minutes' travel from the system home planet. The public transport station was about a hundred and twenty-five yards from her house, so she managed the walk in a short period of time. She climbed aboard the hoverbus, and it took her on the 7 minute ride to the public educational building. She would only be in public education for another 5 months, and then she would be off to a college to begin formal work education. She didn't look forward to it at all; if there existed anyway that she could have joined the service force for bounty hunting, she would. The bus arrived and everyone disembarked.

"Hey, Veshna!" a green-haired girl cheerfully popped up with, strolling up. "Are you going on the excavation today?" She had her hologram reader in her hand, and the data disc for all of her classes in the slot. The pages currently projected words from the physics files.

Veshna nodded. "Yeah, I know you think rocks are boring, Corza, but it's better than sitting around doing math all day." She pulled out her hologram reader and selected geology on the data disc.

Corza rolled her eyes. "You just love being out in the field. Me? I couldn't stand all the moving about. I gotta sit in one spot. You know? And hey, I like math."

"Hey," Veshna replied, "whatever flies your ship." They parted after Corza gave her information on a get-together everyone planned at twenty hours, standard twenty-four hour Base Earth time. "Yeah, I hope I can attend. I might just be doing homework." She spotted a look. "Hey, don't give me that 'oh-you're-such-a-bookworm' look. I like getting good grades all the time. Bye."

"Bye."

Veshna approached her group, gathered just outside the classroom. The instructor, a slightly overweight man with a rather abnormal point to the front of his hair, smiled his usual field-trip smile as the student with the second best grades arrived on time. "Good to see that nobody is absent today. Everyone, we're going to be studying geological features of a small section of a planet near the edge of this system. Since this is an interplanetary jump, we're going to have to be on our best behavior and make sure we don't clog up the jumpway, so that means when it comes time to jump, we jump as a group. Ok? It might seem like a long time to get there but remember; it beats going the old-fashioned way, which might take a whole afternoon." He checked his watch. "Ok. It's time to go to our jumpship. Everyone, head out. And don't make a ruckus. I don't want to have to write anyone up, but I will if it comes down to it." He walked towards the bay for the jumpships, and the students followed him in a predictable style. The collection of people loaded into a oval-shaped jumpship and waited for the guideways—giant circular tube generators floating in the sky—to form the correct energy tubes. "Now class, here's the deal. I'm going to give you two pieces of equipment when we get there. One, is a vibro-chisel. I've shown you how to make it vibrate to more easily punch through rock mass. I expect you to be mature enough not to mess around with it; it isn't a toy. The other, is a mineral data scanner. You've also seen how to use it. Again, don't use it as a toy. I expect four samples from each student, understand?" The class gave a collective answer.

The ship began its trip to the planet. Veshna sat and talked with a male classmate about the types of minerals most often seen in rocks on certain types of planets. The material didn't really strike her as the most interesting, but she certainly enjoyed going out into the field to work and study. She took the time to read up on some of the other types of minerals, and their applications once extracted. It impressed her how many uses there were for simple minerals from rocks. Soon enough, the ship arrived within the airspace of VS-012. The surface, while a beautiful array of colors from space, looked largely homogeneous from the ground level. The one-kilometer area they had been given to study looked mostly grayish-white with only the small dabble of color here and there. She took in the scenery, which was a stark contrast to the huge cities on homeplanet, right before getting her equipment from the instructor. Her chisel, scanner, and a small pack that wrapped around her shoulder and hung by her hips, and she set out apart from everyone else.

Her first find came about six hundred steps from her starting location. The scanner indicated a certain type of mineral only found on several hundred planets throughout this arm of the galaxy. She set the chisel to the moderate setting of vibration, and started pounding away gently at the hard rock, eventually breaking through to the dark crystal-laden rock below. It looked almost black and had organic crystals growing in it. Her scanner, upon close inspection, displayed the list of important minerals found, so she placed it in her pack. She hated using her chisel above the mild setting of vibration, but had to because of her lack of physical strength. She found another sample another thirty steps from there, chiseling away the common rock for the sample slightly below. This one sat a bit lower than the previous one. She had to walk almost another two hundred steps before she found her third sample. This one looked greenish and had dark formations in the middle of it. By this point, she walked another thirty steps then came across a ravine, about fourteen feet deep with edges worn away enough to allow someone light to climb down into. Braving the rock—which she did not entirely trust—she descended.

She saw the grayish rock ended around what looked like a dark brown quarter-sphere. It curved, and she could assume most of it sat beneath the surrounding rock. It looked vastly different from the rock, and her scanner could not tell what minerals were in it. She tapped it, and it gave back a very full sound. This told her it was not hollow, and that its composition contained no metal. The sound almost reminded her of hitting living tissue. She stood on the crest of the sphere and moved her scanner about in random directions hoping to pick up some unique samples. When she pointed it up and to the left of her current facing direction, she noticed something unusual; polished silvery metal sticking out of the rock. Almost immediately she recognized the problem; polished, refined metal did not occur naturally. When metallic aspects are discovered in rock, it is almost always as ore, which must be separated from rock and then refined. Polished metal had to have been put there. Huh, I wonder who was here and why their metal is buried in the rock.

She scaled the rock sticking out, and stood on what she assumed to be a safe platform, and slowly chiseled away at the rock. The metallic shaft, upon more of it being freed from encasing, turned out to be shaped like a handle instead. This further piqued her curiosity, and she struck more of the surrounding layers away. It took her almost fifteen whole minutes to remove the entire object, but when she did, it turned out to be a case. It was a solid metallic briefcase-shaped object, entirely made of some polished metal. Urrgh! It's heavy! She climbed down carrying the case down, and stood on top of the crest of the sphere, slowly releasing the clamps holding the case shut. It creaked open on its own.

Oh wow! I don't know what this is, but it looks incredible! She had never seen this before. Inside the case, in a holster, sat a most peculiar object. In the very center, a silvery dome-shaped medallion-like object, roughly three inches in diamater, with a line separating the two halves of the tiny dome. The line went in a circle, and clearly separated the upper half of the dome from the lower half, and the line itself was not actually merely drawn, but was a small crevice, in which very tiny organic crystals sat. Coiled around the center, was a purplish coil of what looked like living tentacles wrapped like extension cord. The coil looked to be roughly sixteen and two-thirds inches in diamater, and about six and a quarter inches thick. Three thin metal straps, extending from the center medallion in three different directions, connected to the center point on the other end, securing the tentacles in place. Also, three large straps not attached directly to the center medallion sat in between those metal straps. The parts of the clamps touching the top and bottom were shaped hexagonally, with an ordinary rectangle shaped in between piece. This has to be some kind of technology used by some race long ago; I can't imagine this being anything else. She wiped some dirt off of the shiny medallion in the center, and it shined brighter without the obscuring brown dust. However, the moment her hand grazed the lower half of the medallion, the organic crystals in the crevice separating the two halves began to glow.

Huh, what's happening...AAHH! In the time it takes you to blink, the purple tentacles became animated after apparent millennia of inactivity. She almost managed to let out a scream mere moments before the tentacles uncoiled and extended, wrapping themselves completely around her entire body. She jostled back and forth as the tentacles ceased being separate limbs extending from the center medallion and became one goo-like cocoon. What's happening to me? Argh! I can't breathe! HELP! She clenched her fists and banged herself against the rock wall in a futile manner. It's merging with my tissue...becoming part of my skin and other stuff underneath! She felt strange mild-burning sensations everywhere as the covering integrated itself with every tissue in her body. The silver medallion appeared on her forehead as eye-like parts started to take shape out of the hardening goo. A pointy antenna-like crest projected from the top of where her forehead was, extending several inches high, curved slightly backwards. The purplish goo, as it hardened, began to change. The purple goo separated into slightly purplish-brown soft tissue with many small folds in it, and hard orange-colored plates on top.

The transformation nearly complete, the surfaces meant to be her eyes glowed red as she blacked out inside. Her body had taken on a dramatically new appearance. All of her former facial features were gone. The lower part of the antenna-like crest on the top of her forehead ended in a small hole in which the silver medallion sat, with a smaller hole where a tiny red dome, less than a centimeter across, slightly higher. On the top of her head, one on each side of the antenna-like crest, sat silvery orbs roughly the size of the medallion in the center of her forehead, except the hard plates around them were not solid all the way, so they could slide from the front of her forehead to the back of her head. Her mouth and nose did not exist anymore, replaced by two small silvery orbs, roughly one centimeter in diameter and one directly above the other, inside a small open space in the hard plates. On the left and right sides of the silver orbs where the mouth was, sat small vents. These vents projected about an inch or so out forward from the surface of the face. Two tubes ran from the location where her lower jaw jointed with the rest of the skull, and extended from there to a small bulb-like projection of hard plate on the upper chest, right below the base of the neck. Hard plates and soft tissue everywhere, two pointy projections on each forearm, pointing out and away from the body, rubbed past the rock as her new body moved back and forth. A plume of steam-like gas came out of the facial vents, lasting about a second.

Her eyes' glow ceased as she regained consciousness. "What's going on?" she thought out loud. "Wait, why does my voice sound all distorted?" Her voice sounded as though it were coming through speakers, and not through her mouth. Also, she couldn't feel her vocal cords moving. She looked at her reflection in the case's metal. What...what's that? Is that...ME?...! It...it looks like some kind of armor! But it's part of my body! I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON! Her thought seemed to cause the silvery medallion in the center of her head to glow along its line. She suddenly became aware of the quarter sphere she stood on, opening in a spot large enough to allow passage—despite not knowing how she suddenly knew that. When she looked behind her—and it seemed weird to look, because she saw clearer and sharper than she had ever seen with her eyes before—it truly was as she mysteriously knew. She came to the conclusion that the thing she'd discovered had bonded with her and told her, but didn't know how that was possible. Was it going to hurt her? Was she going to turn into a monster? These were thoughts that plagued her mind.

As she passed through the opening, it closed behind her. Fear gave way to amazement, as the quarter sphere had been the smaller section of a larger object, which she currently moved about inside. She descended slowly to the floor, the mysterious thing covering her hovering slowly downward. It amazed her that it could do so. She saw just how much bigger it must be underneath all the rock. She believed more than a hundred people could live inside here, and it had holes in which she surmised beings had crawled in to sleep, and it had lots of spaces that looked like people used. This looks less like a cave, and more like, call me crazy, a space ship! She moved around. As she came to the center of the room she currently sat in, a hole temporarily appeared. She descended once more to an even lower room. Wow! This looks like the control room! She walked around to the center, and saw that there was a center projection from the floor, which had three empty slots shaped like the device she'd found in the briefcase. Ok, this must be some kind of living armor! But what's that? She looked at the empty slot in the center. Maybe they had a device in there for something. Oh, it doesn't matter right now. She looked up and the medallion on her forehead glowed yet again, and in response, two large silvery hemispheres descended from the ceiling and hovered in a column of light. Bravely, she stepped into the column. The hemispheres immediately circled around her head.

All at once, images flashed into her mind, and she gained knowledge she hadn't before. She saw large ships—the one she stood in currently among them—shaped like short, fat missiles, flying through space and landing on the planet she stood on. Inside, were aliens she instantly learned were known as the "Advents." They each wore the armor she currently had been bonded with. The orbs taught her that all the Advents wore it, and it was known as the Standard Bio-booster Armor. It enabled them to live for billions of years while they genetically altered life on this current planet to create creatures they could mind-control with their psionic abilities called Zoanoids, and use in battle. After many millions of years of creating these creatures, one of their lesser creatures they created to serve as a lieutenant to the zoanoids, this being called a Zoalord, had obtained one of their Bio-booster armors and bonded with it, and it made him much more powerful than an Advent attached to it, and it also freed him from their mental control, causing them to destroy him in a very intense battle and flee, leaving some of their ships behind. They had a term they used for any time someone other than an Advent utilized the armor, because it would make that being much more powerful: the term was "out of control," or, in their language, "Guyver." The Guyver unit, as it came to be known, consisted of a parasite, and the silvery medallion, which was the center piece of the unit, called the "control medal." It was this small medallion on her forehead, which put the parasite completely under the will of the host. It changed her entire body physiology to make her more powerful.

Not only that, but the control medal directs the parasite to create weaponry from organic tissue. The control medal's organic crystals drew energy from a sub-space dimension known as the "boost dimension." This fueled all the energy requirements of the Guyver as well as the weapons. The head beam—the small red orb above the control medal—fired a compact infrared laser using excess body heat and boost dimension energy. The pointy projections on the forearms could extend outward into blades that vibrated at ultra-sonic frequencies to cut through the hardest objects as if they were paper. There was an orb on the abdomen, this drew energy from the boost dimension and altered gravity to allow the host to fly in their Guyver form, as well as to fire gravity distortions from the fingers known as the "pressure cannon." The physical strength greatly increased, over a hundred times, gave the host the capacity to punch through meters of concrete with a single blow, or press many tons over their head. The Guyver had incredible durability and could regenerate from the smallest piece of tissue still present on the unit. The vents on the face expelled poisons, toxins, and other products of metabolism that don't belong in the body. The small orbs on the face replaced the mouth, vibrating to serve as the voice of the host, and could also emit sonic waves that could fragment objects on a molecular scale, the "sonic buster." The orbs on the sides of the top of her head could sense magnetic fields and allowed the host to sense any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves all the way up to gamma radiation. However, the supreme weapon built in, was the "mega smasher." Below the hard chest plates, were two transparent, gelatin-like lenses that had taken the place of the fatty tissue in the chest. The hard chest plates would open up and the lenses would focus energy from the boost dimension into photons, which shot out from these lenses as a one hundred megawatt particle beam cannon, vaporizing anything in their path.

All of this, she learned instantly from the orb in the Advent ship. With a mental command, the armor separated itself from her tissues, revealing her exactly as she had been before the bonding, even her clothes exactly on her body where they were. It surrounded itself in light, and vanished into the boost dimension she'd just learned about. With a mental command, and a shout of "Guyver!" a sphere of light surrounded her, and the unit once more encased itself onto her, changing her tissues once again. This is great! I've got an armor that can't be blown off by an attack, and if the knowledge this ship just taught me is true, I won't have to worry about my strength anymore! She didn't know how true her words were. She ascended above and out of the ship. Oh, how she couldn't wait to tell her mother this.

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Author's note: A lot of this might seem like mumbo-jumbo if you aren't familiar with the anime Guyver. If you don't know what Guyver is, I've got a link to where you should go on my profile page. If you are only familiar with the crappy American live action movies, believe me, I'm not crossing it over with that interpretation of Guyver.