HARK! How the bells, sweet silver bells...

[piper90npcs]

Who: Everyone
What: Holiday Events
Where: Piper 90 - The Rig
When: Post-Rose Tattoo
Warnings/Notes: Holiday cheer, smooches, tactical snowball action

It's the Holiday Season in the Gone Away World and on the Rig in particular! Though they claim to be open to any cultural celebration of this time of year, the dominance of Santa Claus, reindeer, and elves in decorating really kind of blunt that claim. But the PA system, when not blaring alarms or fuzzy announcements for working party C to show up at the maintenance bay, play Christmas tunes of all sorts at inconvenient volumes. Decorations hang limply from the walls. And every worker with children has been issued a shotgun and a bandoleer of shells loaded with pellets of cold iron.

Just in case.

Comments

[takenalive]

Alloran's tripartate nostrils flare as she says I miss what I was. He is not at all sure that Breq couldn't or can't make more implants and take more hosts - he's always been too masculine to understand very much technology - and it's even harder to tell when aliens are lying than others of his own kind.

It's an interesting story whether or not he believes it, anyway.

<And so now you're in a rattling metal box, coerced by venal primitive humans into doing scutwork that nominally preserves them from extinction.>

[breq]

"Something like that," she replies with a gesture of resignation, "But I've spent twenty years trying to get to them. I can wait a little while longer. Even if I would rather not..."

She can be patient, even if so much of her burns with impatience.

"I suppose I just... recognize the situation you were in once. Even if it isn't precisely the same."

[takenalive]

There is not a lot Alloran has to go back to, not realistically. Contact with his wife and children, at great distance, and after so much time, will probably not go as he's fantasized about. His people might not even allow him back home - and if they did, could he really move with the rhythms of peacetime anymore?

<It's not. We have been on different ends of a similar experience. Have you ever had to watch some foul little upstart use you to kill your own people and advance?> He sings a sensory impression, most distinctly a taste. Oil, a stab of pain in the mouth, burnt fur, bleeding flesh. A bright star winking out, a terrible weight. Nausea.

[breq]

"Not exactly. But they did make me kill someone I cared a great deal about."

It's odd, what makes someone finally decide to stop. To finally decide to do what might be the "right thing". For her, it was making her kill one of her favorites.

"I was a tool and a weapon," she continues after a moment, "But I don't want to be any longer."

[takenalive]

He considers, scrutinizing her with all four eyes until the worn-down vestige of prey-animal paranoia rises and one of them returns to its check, scanning and swiveling.

<Empires, eh?> Alloran asks dryly, and holds his forearms one across the other, not quite touching, to say with some irony, <The pain in me sings with the pain in you.>

[breq]

"Empires," she agrees drily, "Are not really all that good for anyone. Well - I suppose they're good for some people. But not good for everyone else."