HERE, HAVE SOME SPIRIT

[piper90npcs]

Who: Three Ghosts and the little New Hires
What: Sharing the Christmas Spirit
Where: Good question
When: Post-Rose Tattoo
Warnings/Notes: Possible violence, angst, likely visions of death.

Are you sleeping?

Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to tell. This could be another ARE, after all. What you can tell is that the halls are filled with mist, the smell of pine, and the sound of jingling bells off in the distance.

And then comes the wailing.

Tearing past you, screaming like a damned soul, skeletal figures flood through the halls. Some of them wear business suits, weighed down by chains crafted from ledgers and money boxes. Some of them are soldiers, bound by their own twisted weapons. Police, politicians, no one seems spared. Someone whispers, warning you, begging you to pay heed. For you will be visited by three ghosts who are on an errand of great import.

And then something charges with a howl and all goes white. Slowly, the light dims, and the mass of spectral entities is gone. Instead there stands a figure, or maybe two or three of them. For each person, it's different, as they'll have different messages and purposes for each.

One is neither male nor female, the only certain features being a well-muscled, well proportioned body, wearing a white tunic and a beautiful belt of pearl. Its hair is long, white, as if ancient, but no matter how its face changes, there's no sign of age upon it. There seems to be an aura of white flame around its head and, in a voice that belies nothing but charitable warmth, introduces itself as the Ghost of Christmas Past. It will show scenes of someone's past, offering enlightening details with little judgment.

The middle one is a large man on a veritable throne of food, tantalizing and delicious, wearing a fur-lined red robe and a crown of holly upon his head. The Ghost of Christmas Present is a big man, with brown hair, and a booming, jovial voice that can turn blisteringly harsh and back in a single sentence. He'll show what the character was doing immediately prior to their arrival upon the rig. Perhaps what they're doing right now. But he'll also be content to walk either the character's home world or this Gone Away World, viewing the sights and people enjoying Christmas with the character.

And the final one, a phantom in a dark, green robe, green smoke billowing around it. Its skin is pale, pulled gauntly around whatever body part it exposes. The gaze underneath the hood is as cold as the grave, and it would be wise not to try to match that for too long. It remains utterly silent, simply guiding its guest through the Christmases Yet To Come with a pointed finger. It will show how a character dies and how they'll be remembered by others after. It acts cold and merciless, but this very visit is a mission of mercy, one it silently prays will succeed.

The surprise, though, is that they aren't showing the character that history. Instead, they'll be guiding their guest through someone else's life. Maybe just a fraction of it, maybe a full span. But when it's all over, it's as if no time has passed. In fact, no. The characters are returned to an hour before the ghosts visited them.

[[Remember, this isn't your typical memshare. The ghosts are NPCs, but they'll be controlled by the players. They will not show characters their own histories, presents, or futures, only those of different people. They can show the same scenes to different people or different scenes to different people. One person might not even see all three of the Ghosts.]]

Comments

[takenalive]

<How terrible is 'not very pleasant'?> Alloran asks, largely rhetorically. He doesn't trust the spirit's judgement and, having a low opinion of human medicine, assumes it involves cutting into the body in question.

Alloran closes his own hands together at the answer. He's been trying not to think too much about kissing Breq. She'd certainly seemed to enjoy it more than he'd expect given how clumsy and insensitive he finds human hands. It's made sense that tailless humans touch each other rather freely with their hands and humans that don't are a strange thought.

<Nudity taboos are difficult subjects. This element seems impractical. Perhaps that is the point.>

[breq]

"There's quite a bit of distress and the medic doing the operation didn't much care about making it easy..." The spirit replies, "Not all that gory, fortunately, but... you know."

They waggle a hand. Anyway, on to more pleasant thoughts.

"I'm not sure why they do it. I just know that they do and although Breq has been away from them for quite a while, she still has some of those sensibilities. She did spent over two thousand years essentially living with them, after all."

[takenalive]

Alloran doesn't have really any response to bloodshed these days - how could he, it sometimes seems like his whole adult life has been spent hock-deep, like his tail should be indelibly stained - and he's seen so many obscene medical experiments and involuntary infestations that he doesn't really feel the normal response to those, either. The parts of him that felt horror and outrage for other people have been abraded away to vestiges, he thinks, to the point where he more than half wants to ask anyway. Then he could try to evaluate whether these hosts really have suffered psychic death and aren't caught as he was caught, aware but powerless, on a level yet worse than he was. Without even the parasite's voice for company.

Esplin had headed a lot of efforts to render human hosts more pliable by damaging their brains and thus their 'free will', only to find that just like with every other host, Yeerks in damaged brains struggled to perform anything like as well as Yeerks in intact ones, and a comatose host made for a Controller who could twitch slightly. Alloran's seen some shit.

In any case, now he finally pauses to consider the nature of the entity that brought him here. <Why have you shown me this?>

[breq]

"Perhaps to give you a glimmer of understanding. A glimpse at what used to be," the spirit shrugs. It doesn't have a good answer, necessarily. Or at least not one that might make him happy.

"I don't always completely know myself."

[takenalive]

<'All that was is the roots of all that is',> the Andalite says, and might have sighed if he was human. <Yes, yes. I probably don't have the right to ask and I don't believe you have permission to tell me. Walking in someone's memories without their willingness is not something I like to be party to. It's a violation. I know this.>

There is a 'but' there.

<I cannot associate with this person without knowing if the person - a woman, wasn't it? - whose body it first was is still aware and separate from her. That is not something I can learn to overlook or move past.>

[breq]

"I can walk you through that memory, if you'd like me to," the spirit replies thoughtfully, "It is... unpleasant. Not one I like to visit. But..."

The spirit shrugs, "I'm here to help, aren't I?"

[takenalive]

<I would ask if you simply knew, but I don't know that I would trust that.> Dry voiced, Alloran crooks fingers in a gesture he only halfway remembers. Obviously it is in doubt whether anything the spirit cares to show him is truly accurate, but if he travels too far along that trail he'll be lost in stinging thorns for a long time.

He closes all of his eyes for a moment and draws his tail through a slow arc, plants his hooves so that his weight is evenly distributed on all four, and sings a note of displeasure and resignation. It's a shivery, unpleasant feeling, with a chaser very reminiscent of a human rolling up their sleeves.

<If you would, then. I am prepared.>

excuse me while i try to remember this scene

[breq]

"I can tell you," the spirit replies, "But like you said - you may want to see it for yourself."

There's a pause while the spirit contemplates this for a moment and then sighs, "Well, here we go-"

The scene shifts and changes and now they're in some sort of medical bay. Clean, white, sterile. A place of healing. In theory. There's a pod of some sort - roughly human sized - and there's a human bending over it, fiddling with the controls. There's a hiss of escaping air and it opens and a chill as cool air escapes into the room. Then the medic - for she's a medic - drags the inhabitant out with as much care as one might expect one would take with a slab of meat. The young woman is Breq. Or Breq as Alloran knows her, twenty years younger, looking dazed and confused and frightened.

She tries to say something, but the medic doesn't seem to care. She gives her an injection of something and then quite calmly and matter of factly begins working on her skull. It's surgery, of course, and she does it quickly and without much apparent thought and Breq or Breq-to-be is left gasping for air on the surgical table as her brain is cut into. Glinting pieces of metal go in; implants under the skin and the bone and the muscle. Implants to make her faster, stronger, to give her armor, to give her the ability to receive the thoughts from the ship.

To make her Breq.

To make her Justice of Toren.

Something dies behind her eyes for a flickering moment and then it's replaced by something else. There's still anxiety, fear, a sense of disorientation, but it's not quite the same. She tries to stand up, swaying and disoriented, just as the lieutenant from before - looking a year or two older - comes through the door and reaches over to steady her, shooting a glare at the medic as she does.

"It's alright," she says to Breq, "...it's alright."

[takenalive]

Alloran pulls his tail in to curl tight over his body and walks on stiff legs. He leans in, careless of intersecting with the medic on the way. They are not tangible to each other. He isn't really here.

He watches in hard-eyed silence, expressionless, sparing one stalk eye for the disinterested medic. There are a lot of things he doesn't know about brains, particularly human ones. They are complex systems that interlock in many different ways, much moreso than the computers they are so often compared to. He can admit that there is a lot of skill in the operation. The Yeerks are more clumsy about their attempts in this direction, and incorporate more chemicals.

And his own people? The Andalites would just kill someone. Maybe take their DNA first. Probably kill everyone around them, too. If virtually any other of his people saw this, Alloran knows, they would want the human species exterminated, regardless of context. Humans are Andalites and Yeerks to each other, and Hork-Bajir to each other too.

He flinches at the appearance of this other person - is that the lieutenant from before? it's the same sort of skin and hair and clothing, but if that last is a uniform that doesn't mean much - since he hadn't been watching out, and draws back. The Andalite's voice is very quiet, his hands and tail very still.

<This is evil.>

[breq]

The spirit is silent, even as the lieutenant comforts the new ancillary and tries to get her to calm her breathing. He's arguing with the medic, something about how she shouldn't be so careless. But that's not the point anymore, is it?

"It is," they finally reply, "They kill someone and put something - someone - else in their place. They use their bodies as disposable tools. Although... in her case, she's become something else. A ship and not a ship."

[takenalive]

Alloran keeps his main eyes on that anyway, though he has an almost absurd sense that this, of all things, is something he shouldn't be privy to.

Humans are often terrible to one another, which he'd vaguely known. Andalites have fought Andalite, especially in the long-distant past, and to be sure it wasn't as sanitary as some people would sing it, where the murder of a child could unite everyone in horror and condemnation. Still.

<That's the lieutenant who gets killed, isn't it? Too invested. Someone like this in such a position has to either die or allow this investment to perish.> He did. A pause. <Or leave, I suppose that is possible sometimes.>

[breq]

"She is," the spirit confirms, "And it's Justice of Toren who will follow the order to kill her. And that is what makes things different - that and another incident in Ors which you haven't seen. That is what pushes Justice of Toren over the edge."