goneawayworld | 3..2...1...CONTACT!

Entry tags:

3..2...1...CONTACT!

Who: The New Hires
What: Sudden Memory Share
Where: Their Memory Palaces
When: After "Don't Touch That Dial"
Warnings/Notes: Possible in every memory, warn in subject lines.

Contact.

It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking across the Top Deck. Taking a slow breath between reps in the training room.

The New Hires are connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can help the violation.

To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?

And if they were there, who was in theirs?

[[So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or the guest can be experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self. They can talk about the memory with the "guest" that's visiting.

They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can control any other memories they'd like to show people after. Of course, there's also always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up other memories unbidden.]]

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"I think we are not telepathically connected as you tend to do it. This is a result of Stuff."

He sighs. "Much like a few other unfortunate incidents."

"This happens often?" Reflexively, Kerrigan slings the rifle, even though it doesn't actually exist. It feels real enough. "Dammit, nobody wants to be inside my head."

As awful as New Gettysburg was, she has worse memories, ones that she'd prefer to keep from both friends and enemies, albeit for different reasons.

"Likewise. I cannot imagine the civilians that are often brought here are much pleased by what they see in mine."

He shrugs. "It is not so unfamiliar to me. But I think from our conversations I had more friends than you ever did."

"Loken, everyone had more friends than I did." Kerrigan snorts, turning away from him to look at the fuzzy freeze frame of her memory, out past the rushing zerg to the edge of the orbital platform where the naval portion of the battle is occurring in impressionistic flashes of light. She'd known the ships were there, but understandably hadn't paid attention to enough for it to imprint itself on her mind in any detail.

"Whether the protoss managed to punch through or not, Mengsk got what he wanted. Dammit."

"And what was that?" He knows only a little of her story, and thinks that if he lets her tell it here,now, he can help her carry that weight a bit.

"That's Tarsonis." Kerrigan nods at the planet below. "It's the capital of the Confederacy, and Mengsk didn't want it. He just wanted to take down the government." Which she also wanted, but not enough to condemn the civilian population of Tarsonis along with the Old Families.

"With the Sons of Korhal tying up the system fleet, there would have been no one to keep the zerg from infesting the world, or the protoss from 'sterilizing' it, then Mengsk could move into the power vacuum. He's probably already declared himself Emperor."

Kerrigan sighs, her shoulders slumping. "And I helped. I'm a telepath who didn't see through the most self-serving man in the sector." Maybe she didn't want to. Without Mengsk and his rebels, she would have had nothing, and no one to keep the Confederacy from reclaiming her. They wouldn't have repeated the mistake that had let her slip from their grasp in the first place.

Loken thinks about his own unwitting complicity with Horus' treachery, and his inability to see Erebus' poison until it was too late. He considers for a moment, and asks, "What will you do, now that you know you have been betrayed?"

For a moment, the scene shifts to a dark, cramped rockcrete corridor. Loken, bigger and in similarly-painted armor to his accustomed combat complement here corners and butchers a bald-headed man who seems quite similar, though his armor is sea-green and with a glaring red and gold eye on the breastplate.

Then, it returns to Kerrigan's memory, the sudden, brutal scene fading.

Horus Aximund. Kerrigan remembers the name, never outright stated, from their last telepathic conversation, and the roiling mass of emotions tied to it. A man Loken considered a brother and killed anyway. She admires the resolve that took, or that she imagines it took. With no family of her own, she has nothing to compare it to.

For a moment, the tableau flickers to a sickly-looking man lying glassy-eyed on a gurney, watched a uniformed military officer standing next to a redheaded little girl in utilitarian clothing, but Kerrigan regains control almost instantly, and the scene returns to New Gettysburg.

No family of her own. Not anymore.

"Probably about what you did." If Kerrigan acts like nothing happened, maybe Loken won't pry. "If there's one thing a ghost is good for, it's assassinations. But you're talking like any of us will ever see our homeworl—universes again."

"We have been to enough strange places I am certain there is a way back. It is a question of finding it, and enduring until we do. Though some..." He pauses for a moment.

"I do not believe all our companions desire to return." He's not sure that Kerrigan does, but he lets the question sit in the air, rather than speak it outright.

"Who'd want to stay here? The world's falling apart." Kerrigan scoffs at the possibility. "I'd go home if I had a choice. Mengsk needs to die...and there are at least a few people who'd want to know I'm alive." She clamps down hard on her emotions so that whatever this bizarre phenomenon is doesn't treat Loken to a replay of her last conversation with Jim. That still hurts, and she's not sure whether she's doing it to spare him, or herself.

"I bet you've got some unfinished business yourself."

Yeah, it's transparently redirecting the conversation, but she really is curious what happened between the betrayal at Istvaan III and Loken's arrival.

"I am glad you have comrades to return to." The implication is he really doesn't, except for maybe Garro. The luna wolves are dead, and he is the last, taking revenge bit by bit.

"Yes. I have a father to fight, and brothers yet to slay."

For a moment it flashes to the iron-clad bridge and Throne of Horus on the vengeful spirit.

‘Garviel,’ said Horus, and he turned to see the Warmaster holding out his gauntlet. ‘Don’t hate me for
what’s happened.’
‘Why shouldn’t I hate you?’ said Loken. ‘You did the worst thing that anyone can do to another person.
You let us believe we were loved and valued, then showed us it was all a lie.’
Horus shook his head, but his hand remained outstretched. Behind him, a crenellated warship passed
over the face of the moon. The Eye of Horus adorned its prow, but it was a crude thing, painted on like
graffiti.
‘Come back to me, my son. We can rebuild what was lost between us, renew our bonds of fellowship. I
want you at my side as I reforge the Imperium anew.’
Loken looked back at the warriors on their knees behind him. Men he’d fought and bled with. Men he’d
called brother in the darkest of times. He looked into their eyes, seeing their defiance and more. Rubio’s
fists were clenched and the tension in Voitek’s neck was like a straining machine about to throw a gear.
He saw the cold eyes of Bror Tyrfingr upon him and remembered the words he had spoken at their first
meeting.
If I think your roots are weak, I’ll kill you myself.
He gave an almost imperceptible nod to his fellows and took a step away from the Warmaster, feeling
the threads of loyalty and brotherhood that bound him to this moment pull tight.
Horus rose to his feet as the passing warship completed its transit of the cathedral window.
Dazzling moonlight poured into Lupercal’s Court once more.
It haloed Lupercal, limned him in silver to cast the darkest shadow across the deck. The flared back of
the Warmaster’s throne gave that shadow wings, like the faceless daemons from the lurid books Kyril
Sindermann had loaned him.
‘Part of me wishes I could, sir,’ said Loken. ‘Believe me, I want the warmth that being part of
something greater brings. I want to belong. I had that with the Legion, but you took that away from me
when you stabbed us all in the back.’
‘No,’ said Horus. ‘Garviel, no. That’s not–’
But Loken wasn’t about to stop now. ‘Turning my back on everything I knew, being cut off from the
Legion that made me who I am? That was the worst moment of my life. It drove me insane. More than
Tarik’s death or being buried alive on Isstvan, it was the heartbreak and yawning emptiness that finally
broke me.’
‘Then come back to me, Garviel,’ said Horus. ‘Feel that warmth again, don’t you want to be part of the
greatest endeavour the galaxy has ever seen?’
‘I already was,’ said Loken, turning his back on Horus. ‘It was called the Great Crusade.’

Loken bows his head at the memory. Horus is so large, but already ignoble somehow. Swollen by the ruinous powers, if only slightly, not yet the monster he would become by the siege, but somehow, notably dark and tainted.

"That is what I fight against, Kerrigan. That is all that awaits me."

Kerrigan can't miss what she never had. She can wonder, she can envy...and she can sense the echoes of Loken's pain, kept under control by his iron discipline.

She can feel Horus's presence. Even remembered, even blunted by Chaos's taint and whatever contempt Loken's long familiarity had bred, he radiates a charisma of which Mengsk could only dream. Loken had regarded the man as a father, and Horus had not only been willing to see him die, but had personally engineered the attack that almost managed it.

Mengsk's treachery seems mild by comparison, and she feels childish and petty for fixating on her own situation when Loken has suffered so much and still, somehow, manages to be the gentlest person she's ever met.

Somo could have turned into that, she realizes suddenly, a soldier yet still not a killer at heart, and the pang of the loss, a wound she'd thought long scarred over takes her, triggering a flash of memory—

Sunset in a bar overlooking an ocean. A young man, likely still a teenager, in nondescript clothes. He's of Asian extraction (though one's exact Terran ancestors matter little in their sector and Kerrigan likely couldn't point out the continent if shown a map) and not unattractive. He has an untouched drink. He's wearing a delighted yet incredulous expression, like he's just found out Santa is real and doesn't quite believe it yet.

—Kerrigan doesn't notice, because she's focused on Loken. You don't have to go back, she doesn't say. Neither does she say Revenge won't solve anything or Living well is the best revenge or any of the empty things people say to fill this sort of silence. She understands that he has to go, that revenge can put to rest so many specters that need exorcism, that living isn't everything.

"Loken—" No. Too formal. "Garviel." Sarah switches to his first name, dropping the bit of social armor that the businesslike use of surnames gives her. "How do you stay so...decent?" She has to fish for the word she means. "How do you keep it all from just turning you into a monster?"

How do I keep it all from turning me into a monster?

"I cling to that which remains. The dream, even if it is ashes. A better humanity, the few brothers I still have. Garro..." He pauses, and blinks a few times. "Only Nathaniel, now, in truth. All the others I served with have stepped beyond the present war, preparing for something worse. A battle I refused."

For just a moment, the hint of a moment, a sliver of time, she sees Loken refusing the Emperor's request to become a Grey Knight, to leave the Heresy war behind and hide and wait for the wars that will come in the future. The presence dwarfs even Horus', in a way, though there is a sadness to it. The Emperor, and his shadow Malcador already know what is lost, what will be lost. She sees him turn his back and choose the battle in front of him.

"I remember the friends I had, the friends I loved. Euphrati, Mersadie, Ignace, Kyril, Nero, Tarik..."

He shakes his head. So many are lost to him, like Euphrati and Kyril, or dead, like Nero, Tarik, Mersadie.

"I remember the promises I made, the promises that still mean something. I cling to that."

The Emperor, even as a momentary flicker, shines brightly enough physically and psychically in Garviel's memory that Sarah wonders how he ever managed not to know he had psychic talent. Maybe he thought everyone experienced the man's presence that way. And why hadn't the Emperor told him? There was no way any telepath that powerful could have missed the spark of Garviel's latent abilities. Really, though, her curiosity is only a flicker itself, and anyway, she can't take to task someone who isn't present. (Would Sarah Kerrigan tell off the Emperor of Mankind? She sure would.)

"I don't have anyone," she says quietly. "Not like that." She loves Jim, but not the way Garviel loved the people he mentions. Sarah loves Jim like a drowning man loves a life raft, like a ship adrift loves a nav beacon. It's real, she thinks, but it's desperate and wild in a way Garviel's feelings aren't.

And Jim? Jimmy wants someone to save, to succeed where he'd failed before, to stop seeing his family's ghosts in his dreams. His love is as real as hers, but at the same time as self-serving as hers. She just couldn't see it until she had something else to compare it to. Neither of them is in the wrong, she doesn't believe that for a moment, but maybe neither of them is in the right, either. "There are a few people who would miss me, but not the way you miss your friends."

The Emperor hadn't had to. A brief scene bleeds in where another Space marine, of patrician features and with a blade that has a U on the hilt, one which Garviel now carries in fact, the one with the slight hint of psychic energy about it suggests there is the hint of the psychic about him, and gives the blade to Loken as a gesture of friendship, and a way of saying farewell. Loken simply denied it though, obviously considering it a sort of taint.

"That can be enough, I would say. Anyone can. While I am inclined to make connections with comrades, as that is part of both our training and.. hard coded into us, I think, it has been my bonds with my comrades that gave the strength to make the right choice, the loyal one." He pauses and frowns. "You are a stealth operative, and function as an assassin." There's no accusation in his tone, but there is clearly a realization. "You... you never had the chance at such fraternity with others, have you? Even with that boy."

"Somo," she says quietly. "His name was Somo. He's the first person I ever remember being nice to me."

Sarah sighs, her shoulders slumping. She's never had to lay out to anyone just how bad the ghost program really is. Everyone in the sector already has some idea, if only from the rumors, and hardly anyone in the Sons of Korhal had wanted to be her friend, anyway. She's looking somewhere in the vicinity of Garviel's boots while she explains.

"It's standard procedure to mindwipe ghosts after every mission, for 'operational security'—and to keep us from breaking out of the program's control. The tech isn't that precise, and if you get wiped often enough, it starts to interfere with other memories, ones that have nothing to do with the mission. I remember almost nothing from before Arcturus—Mengsk—got me out...but the parts I do remember are bad, and I wasn't a volunteer. The Confederacy conscripted me when I was eight."

"That is vile. I am proud the Imperium doesn't do such a thing." Well, it doesn't yet. Though malcador will order the deaths of those who know too much about the daemonic, Garvi doesn't know about that yet. He considers for a moment the idea of being conscripted at 8. Even for him, joining the Astartes as a young teen, it seems harsh.

When he realizes she's looking down, and sad, he reaches out, and touches her shoulder gently, a comforting gesture.

Garviel had been so unfamiliar with the concept of a hug and is so reserved in general that a physical gesture of comfort is the last thing Sarah expects. She looks up at him in surprise that softens into a touch of a smile before she descends into solemnity again.

"It's not hard to be better than the Confederacy. Korhal can barely support life since their fleet bombarded it, and they've left entire colonies to the zerg so their scientists could watch an infestation happen." Sarah doesn't remember the bombing of Korhal personally, only secondhand from recordings watched years after the event, but she absolutely remembers the zerg experiments. She keeps control of her mind enough to spare Garviel the full-color replay of her stint as a guinea pig, but her voice drips with a very personal disgust, paired with a shudder that she doesn't manage to suppress entirely.

Loken's expression hardens into anger, but he nods. "You have a lot of scars... that is something I understand. I cannot offer you much but comfort and companionship here, but I do."

He keeps his hand on her shoulder, just firmly squeezing it, not hard enough to be painful, but trying to comfort her physically as best as his very not-knowledgeable about this sort of thing self is able to.

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3..2...1...CONTACT!

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cw: all that crap from the top

Re: cw: all that crap from the top

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