thebastion | Day 248 ♈ Closed

Entry tags:

Day 248 ♈ Closed

Who: the Emissary, the Disciple, the Helmsman
Open: Closed
When: Day 248
Where: Skyway
What: So three aliens walk into a bar, only instead it's a crashed spaceship on a ruined planet, and there's no booze. Actually, wait, this joke sucks.
Format: starting with log, but will match.
Warnings: well, Psii's gonna be a bit messed up.

[0. Skippable wakeup scene]

In retrospect, she wasn't really sure what she'd expected a Scratch to feel like. Amazingly, the written record is kind of sparse on what it's like to be retroactively wiped out of existence. She'd known it was coming, of course. She had plenty of time to prepare herself. It was time to wipe the slate of the universe clean and start over.

The last thing Aradia had expected was to survive.

The Battlefield hadn't been so lucky. It had been torn to shreds, and now great chunks of the little planet's checkered surface floated in midair all around her, cracked and littered with debris. A few spots were surprisingly intact, though, including the one where she'd woken up. Her breath caught, and she whirled to check on her companions. "Tav-"

Oh. Oh, no. No, no, no.

Tavros and Sollux hadn't moved from where she'd last seen them. They stood together, tall and still, gazing up at the shattered sky with blind, ashen eyes.

The Emissary was no stranger to death. She'd grown up steeped in it, with spirits for her playmates. She'd seen wars, and the aftermath of wars. She'd lost friends. But... "Not like this," she whispered. "Not like this." There was a gap between them, where a moment ago she'd been standing. Their flaking hands still grasped the empty space where hers had been. Her boys had been incinerated where they stood, and she'd escaped without a scratch. Why? Why only me?

... After a long moment, she finished getting to her feet. What now? She had to... to go somewhere, do something, but what? She'd thought she would be dead for this, she hadn't exactly made any plans. But she couldn't stay here. They were dead. And if the dead hadn't lingered, then the living had no excuse.

"Well," she said, forcing herself to smile. "Looks like I missed the train again, huh? Sorry about that. I'll have to catch up with you later. Don't cause too much trouble on the other side, all right?"

She leaned forward, took their hands one last time - and jerked away as their fingers fell apart beneath her own. Followed by their arms, and their torsos. "Oh, shit." Tavros's head fell backwards from his collapsing shoulders, and without thinking she moved to catch it, but when it landed in her hands it disintegrated into a cloud of black dust that made her cough and set her eyes watering.

Eeeeyup, those two were well and truly not coming back.

[I. Hours in the future, but not many (Disciple)]

She wandered the fragments for probably hours - maybe less, it was hard to say. The black-and-white chessboard of the Battlefield gave way to greener pastures, quite literally, but she hadn't passed out of sight of it by the time she spotted the light in the distance. At first she took it for a reflection, but on the second look it was too steady, and not at all as far away as it had seemed.

Without any better options, she made her way toward that for a while, until something else caught her eye. Something bright red, pointy, and large, with a column of smoke rising from it. She squinted at it. Some kind of spaceship? It couldn't be carapacian, theirs only came in gold and purple.

Well, that was a much better lead than a light. Curiosity and something like hope took hold of her, and she bounded down the crumbling pathway toward the ship, unaware that anyone else might be around to see it...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The smoke had been her first hint that something was out there. She had been wandering the area around Bastion in an ever widening circle, like she had been for days, and had almost missed it. Now closer, there was a red spot on the horizon and the smoke clearer.

She has little hope it's anyone she knows, the sheer amount of those 'humans' had made it painfully clear she was one of a kind and the likelihood of her whole planet spitting back out someone she personally knew was rare. Which is why she's a shocked but not stunned to silence by the unfamiliar troll she spots a few floating rocks away.

"H--Hey?" Her hand raises to wave, then pulls back uncertainly. She has more enemies than friends in the world.

Aradia was about to make another hop when she heard the voice, and stopped short. For a split second she thought it was her imagination, but a quick glance around confirmed that yes, there really was somebody there. And what's more, somebody with a familiar face and a familiar sign.

Which was... almost as odd as finding another survivor at all. She'd never met Meulin face to face, but she knew of Nepeta's descendant, and this person seemed too old to be her. Plus, the clothes were downright anachronistic. Practically antebellum, if she had to guess.

Let not the Emissary be called impolite, though. She hesitated only a moment before raising her still-dusty hand to wave back. "Oh, uh, hey there!"

Her shoulder practically sag with relief. There was almost recognition there, almost. Maybe she was one of their followers who had been unable to meet them. At least this troll seemed unlikely to attack her. Of course, if she had had the chance to meet the Demoness in her lifetime, she probably would have noticed the striking similarities. As it is, she doesn't, so she makes her way a bit closer.

All her words seem to catch in her throat, unsure of the troll and unsure of herself. Instincts are still screaming at her to run and hide.

"Do you know what that is?" She settles on the obvious, pointing ahead.

Whoever she was, the poor girl looked petrified. Aradia stayed where she was and let her approach, doing her best to be nonthreatening. Oh, damn, and here she was trying to make a good first impression with corpse dust all over her dress... She made a mental note to change clothes as soon as it was convenient, but in the meantime nobody had to know what kind of dust it was. Ha ha, what dust, don't be silly!

She glanced back at the wreck as the other troll indicated it, a worried frown playing at the corners of her mouth. "Some kind of starship, dollars to crullers," she said. "At least, what's left of it. I was just on the way to look for survivors."

It is an odd look but people who just arrived don't have much control over their appearance. Her own wild hair still hasn't been tamed in her days here. At least she'd washed her outfit. She approaches cautiously, finally on the same rock at least. She wants to trust, she aches to trust, but her hands stay in loosely curled fists at her side.

"One of ours?" She tries to get a better look. The red makes her think of their ships, the imperial in particular, but maybe other species had similiar ships. It's hard to say.

"I'm not sure," said Aradia. The answer to that would depend heavily on who 'us' referred to. "But I don't think it's supposed to be here." A lot of things weren't supposed to be here, in actual fact.

Discontented with waiting, she started navigating the path again, motioning to her new friend to follow. Though she wouldn't know the cause, the going should be easier now, thanks to the proximity of the Disciple's amulet.

"You know," she added, over her shoulder, "I feel like I've seen your sign before. What are you called?"

Well that much was obvious to her, considering the blank stares she had gotten at the mention of flying ships to her rescuers. She curls her hands up tighter. If a high ranking officer was on there or the Empress herself, she had to prepared. She had to get some shards. Being weaponless was unacceptable.

The change in subject startles her and she almost misses the next step on their path.

"What? I'm the Disciple?" Either this girl wanted confirmation or honestly didn't know who she was. In which case, the kindness was strange. But where else would she know her sign from.

The title rang zero bells, unfortunately. It'd help to have her hatch name, but you don't just ask someone for their hatch name. At least where Aradia's from, those are reserved for friends.

Oh well, it was worth a shot. Ultimately, the Mystery of the Leijon Lookalike was a little less urgent than the Case of the Busted Battleship. Aradia put the matter to the back of her think pan for now, and smiled. "Ah - never mind, then, my mistake! Pleased to meet you, Miss Disciple, I'm called the Emissary."

A bit of mystery herself, this Emissary, but Disciple doesn't have time for such mysteries. She's acting pleasant enough and no weapons have made an appearance so she's going to press on.

"Nice to meet you Emissary--Ah that's got to be ours." The closer they get, the easier it is to see.

Funny, Aradia was just coming to the opposite conclusion. The closer they came to the ship, the more foreign it looked, all sharp points and harsh edges, bristling like a pissed-off sea urchin. And it was bigger than it had appeared at first glance, too - when it was all in one piece, it must have been enormous. It wasn't just a warship, it was overkill.

And the Disciple had said it was "ours." That was a little bit worrying right there.

"If you say so," she said, but she picked up the pace slightly. Not enough to be running per se, certainly not fleeing, but noticeably quicker nonetheless.

She should be more worried about this. A person must be in there, well more than likely. She was under that sort of impression. She shouldn't dare to hope that it might be someone equally as friendly, given the Emissary was and you hardly ever find two in one spot.

"Don't you think it is? The right shape and color to the hull. Maybe Imperial..."

Aradia shook her head. "Mm, not if we're thinking of the same empire, dear." Even on her fighting ships, Her Conscientious Majesty had preferred a more organic style. Besides, how would something like that have snuck into the Medium unnoticed?

"Of course, there's only one way to know for sure," she added, suddenly cheery. "Let's scoot on down there and crack open the porkbeast hollow, eh?"

And scoot they did. Luckily, the crash seemed to have scared away most of the local fauna, so nothing much got in their way en route. Before long, they were there, dwarfed beside the broken hull...

Oh, organic style, huh? Don't worry- Her Imperious Condescension had a taste for an organic style too.

That much becomes apparent some... five minutes after they get past the glaring metal hull. The Calamity hit this ship hard. There's no finer ship in the entire Alternian fleet than the Empress' own, so it says something chillingly horrible that even it couldn't stand the force of Caelondia's greatest weapon. The damage shows in how its been torn through like scrap metal in some places, shiny floor and walls cracked apart to show something wet and deeply pink behind it. Tentacles and biowires, laced all throughout the ship, slithering and squelching against one another slowly. What's behind the scenes of the wrecked ship slowly starts to overtake it the further into the depths they go.

There's a hallway, an entire length of it, that seems to be made more of some hard material similar to the pink tentacles, and there's a pulse beneath it if either of them press their hand to it. On the bright side, it seems the deeper into what's left of this sip, the more it's not as broken.

There's a monitor, in fact, at the junction between that hallway and another more metallic one. The screen is cracked, but at their approach it lights up obediently. There's some sort of lens peering at them from the ceiling... and judging by the soft hum coming from it, it's on too.

The wet strange biological element to the ship is barely noticed by Disciple. She touches the metal walls, peering the biotech behind it with only vague curiousity. It's new, in that she's never been in one before, but biotech was universal to Alternia. She's just never seen it to this extent.

"Wow. Something happened to this ship." She whispers, trailing on ahead and blinking up at the lens above her. It's still alive, still on. There must be a helms--

Her brain stops in its tracks and presses on in denial. She looks back at Aradia and then back to the screen. Curiously, she taps it.

"Which way should we go?"

Aradia found the biotech more intriguing, and paused every so often for a few seconds to examine some exposed tendril or broken circuitry. That marked it as a troll ship, and no mistake; of the several spacefaring peoples she'd run into over the sweeps, only her own had been capable of growing their starships. But this... they'd never grown one this large, and the technology was impossibly advanced. Maybe, given another few centuries, they could have reached this level, but she knew very well that they never got another few centuries. Skaia had seen to that.

She caught up to the Disciple at the monitor, rubbing her chin with one hand as she thought. "No kidding... and where's the crew? No ship this size could fly solo." They should have found something by now, even if only corpses.

Approaching the camera, she stood on tiptoe to peer into the lens, as if that'd somehow reveal what was on the other side. That's when Di asked her question, and the Emissary stepped back to consider their options.

"That looks like it might take us back outside," she said, indicating the metallic path. And that was all the more information she needed, apparently, because she promptly started for the organic one instead. "This ship isn't dead, not yet. Maybe she can still tell us what she saw."

And for that, they'd need to go deeper.

Edited 2014-11-12 01:08 (UTC)

Going so soon, Aradia? That's a shame, because the tap and the running commentary make the screen flare up with words. Bold and most blatant against deep fuschia is W3l0m3 t0 H3R 1mp3r10u22 C0nd32c2n210n'2 64ttl32h1p. Pr0v1d3 pr0p3r 1d3nt1f1c4t10n 0r 63 cull3d f0r tr322p4221ng.

...But there's just a bit of static, a glitch in the words, and if Disciple still has her eyes on it, she might see for the briefest of moments in bright aggressive yellow-

w0w 1 c0uld fly th12 69r1ng f12ht4nk wh1l3 g3tt1ng a 6ulg3j0b wh0 th3 fuck d0 y0u th1nk y0u 4re

...But it's gone in a flash.

She's still looking, curious to see if a map shows up or something useful. Hardly. Her eyes narrow as she follows the words. The quirk is a little harder to parse but she gets the message.

"Her imperious--fuck." Her hands curl up into fists and her breath catches in the back of her throat. She wants to tear her eyes out, but she's weaponless. Take her out or die trying, she supposes. She starts to turn to speak when a flash of yellowred catches her eye, draws her back.

"...Wait what? What was that--come back!" She taps the screen again, frantically trying to call back up the words. 69.

Naturally, Aradia thought the Disciple was talking to her, and she did indeed come back. "What? What's wrong?" Of course, by then the yellow part was gone, but the original message remained.

H3R 1mp3r10u22 C0nd32c2n210n? That was a new one. Also, whoever wrote this program had a hell of a typing quirk. "Identification? Half the ship's missing and she's got her shorts in a knot about identification?"

The screen lights up with more words, although perhaps not necessarily what the Disciple is looking for. There's just a correction that needs to be made, you see.

2h1p 12 m1221ng 80%. 6l0ck2 th4t r3m41n:

- Su6m41nt3n4nc3 r00m2
- 1nf0rm4t10n 2t0r4g3
- H3lm26l0ck

H3lm26l0ck 12 4t 10% d4m4g3. R3d1r3ct r3p41r 3ff0rt2 h3r3 und3r 0rd3r2 0f H3R 1mp3r10u22 C0nd32c2n210n. 42 p3r 3m3rg3ncy pr0t0c0l2, H3lm2m4n m4y b3 r3m0v3d 6y pr0p3r 3ng1n33r2 0f 4ppr0pr14t3 6l00d c0l0r.

(But down in the corner of the screen, flickering for just a second or even two, a flash of yellow again. 1f 1 d0 th4t qu1rk 3 t1me2 w1ll y0u 4ctu4lly b3c0m3 th3 r34l d34l h4 h4 1 w12h 2p01l3r 1 pa223d 3 u232 4 l0ng t1m3 4g0. A lot to read in a short time span, however, especially with that mangled quirk.)

The words that flash up are still in that strange quirk, one she's never see before, but she can read it. Well, well enough to get the gist. A helmsman is still intact, that should be their first order of business.

"We need to get the helmsman out, I can't imagine it's good for them, given the ship is dying and--"

'If I do that quirk 3 times will you actually become the real--'

And it was gone. She feels like she's going to cry, from hope and bitter knowledge that this can't actually be happening. It's another dream.

"3 times huh. Helms...yeah we need to go get the helmsman out."

Edited 2014-11-12 02:09 (UTC)

Focused as she was on the regular text, Aradia only noticed the yellow in time to catch the first few words of it. It confirmed what the computer had to say, though. There was someone aboard, and chances were good that person was trapped - which, given the overall damage, didn't come as much of a surprise. What was surprising was that the helmsman had a way to message the rescuers and was still being cagey about it.

She nodded to Di, then turned to the camera. "How do we reach the helmsman?" she asked it.

This time, helpfully, a map flases onto the screen- tyrian pink on black of course. Adjustments have been made to show which areas were sealed off for either the ship's own good or because of damage, but there's still a path apparently clear to the area labelled "Helmsblock". A few more images flash on the bottom half of the screen, showing different camera feeds of the path there. It's not as clear cut as the map would lead one to believe... But it's only a bit of crouching towards the beginning. The rest is fine.

She traces the path with her fingertip, memorizing it as quickly as she can. While she steps back to let Aradia have a better look, she glances up at the lens above.

"Are you ready?" She looks at Aradia, "It looks like it'll be difficult at times but not unpassable." And she orients herself on the map, pointing herself in the right direction.

Aradia committed the map to memory as well, and took note of the pictures. It was surprisingly self-explanatory. She'd almost been expecting to have to solve a rewiring puzzle or something - not that she would have objected to that, of course.

"It doesn't look bad at all," she said, nodding. "Keep a sharp eye, though, just in case." If the passage were to collapse, it wouldn't do to be caught by surprise; and there could always still be traps or weapons active. That'd spice the rescue up a bit, wouldn't it? Smiling up at the camera, she added, "Tell him to sit tight, help is on the way!"

Then she was off, starting along the designated route at a brisk pace. It felt good, being able to help out again. Coming to the rescue was a hobby she hadn't been able to indulge for quite some time. She'd almost forgotten how much fun it was.

No, no traps, no weapons. This ship has been taught and programmed not to get in the way of being appropriately fixed or salvaged by the suitable Alternian forces. Besides... Save for the Helmsblock, a lot of the ship isn't really in the condition to do any combat. There's no crew for it to direct, either.

So it's really just a straight path, ducking aside, to a set of large automatic doors. There's some sparks, just a few, red and blue, that react when it opens... But that's it.

Welcome to the Helmsblock.

It's a rather massive room, and teaming with those tentacles from before. They compromise the majority of the walls, fleshy and shifting just slightly now and then, shimmering in the dull light of the room. Screens peer out from them, almost a harsh match with their smooth surfaces in comparison to the writhing walls. It's on the floor too, although it might be hard to see considering there's water that reaches up a meter once one descends the stairs which come from the entranceway. Everything in here is moist and smells thickly of salt. The mass of biotech all congregates in the middle, rising out of the water to enclose itself around the one solitary figure there.

Her Imperious Condescension's Helmsman has seen better days. His face is sunken in, but that doesn't seem to matter to the biowire goggles which are attached to his face. Trolls are made for dim light, so it shouldn't be hard for either of the visitors to tell even from a distance that the goggles have, in certain places, slipped into his skin. They bulge out at the skin around his eyes, the same eyes which let red and blue energy crackle softly up the wires from his face and up into the mass of tentacles which keep his arms forced up above his head. Presumably there are still arms, anyway. It's hard to tell... The biowiring has crept down and is infringing on his shoulders, now. Thicker cords go from his spine to the ceiling, joining its brethren.

Regardless of how little there seems to be to his body... The Helmsman should be familiar to both trolls. There's only one lineage with a dual set of horns and opaque red-blue eyes like that, after all.

The Helmsman's physicaly body doesn't react to either troll. He could very well be dead, if not for the quiet sound of breathing. A screen does, however, light up near the doorway for them.

42 H3r hum6l2 h3lm2m4n, 1 l1v3 t0 23rv3 0ur 3mpr322' v4l14nt f0rc32 1n wh4t3v3r w4y th3y n33d m3. 422um1ng y0u 4r3n't h4lluc1n4t10n2.

Wh1ch y0u 4r3, l3t'2 63 h0n32t h3r3.

24m3 2h1t 42 4lw4y2!

I. which doesn't look as good down here

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body horror warning