Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goneawaymod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
goneawayworld2021-04-10 09:37 pm
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2021-04-10 09:37 pm
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.]]
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.]]
JAIME REYES
Memshare#1, cw: nuclear horror, though nothing graphic
Memshare#2, cw: very subtle implication of child abuse
no subject
Cammie watches the memory with a wide-eyed horror.
She’s heard stories, ‘course. Similar ones, from back home. Places living under Union control have their own enforcers on the streets, their own unique horrors; but like Cammie told Jaime, the UK has always been a Polity stronghold. As an island, they’re still harder to invade than those on contiguous landmasses, and so her only experience with the day-to-day horrors of totalitarian control are second hand. She’s never even picked up a memory from mindshare of it.
So this is new. Watching people her age running through the streets, desperate to get home safe. She finds herself breathing a sigh of relief when they make it back. It’s not hard to guess what might have happened to them if they didn’t, or if Jaime hadn’t had that suit to help them.
“...ach, now I wish I could give Valentina and Yaz a hug,” she mumbles to herself, as she watches the relieved embrace, her ears flat against her hair. Hearing stories has never come with as much distance as seeing newsfeeds, but it comes with enough. “I cannae believe you had to live like that. Or, well, I can, but... y’know.”
She isn’t actually sure how this whole memory sharing dealio works yet—it’s not like the type she’s used to—but she speaks in case Jaime can hear her, anyway.
no subject
"We got lucky. Or at least the fact I had the suit was lucky. We were more careful after that. Made sure we left every place earlier if it was getting near curfew. Sometimes didn't go out at all if the ojos rojos were out in force."
He shrugs one shoulder.
"It was only, like, five years. I'm pretty grateful for that. I feel bad for my baby sister. Five years is a lot more of her life. It'll be a few years more before she has more time living in a time that's free than a time like that."
no subject
“You’re around my age, aye? We’re not even twenty yet, five years is still like, a quarter of our lives so far. Sure, it’ll get less as ye age, but...” Cammie says, with her own little shrug, frowning slightly. It’s been four years back home, coming up on the fifth, but it’s all been so distant for her. Until it wasn’t. “But yeah, I definitely cannae imagine what it must be like for a wee kid...”
She shifts on her feet, holds her elbows.
“Ma friends told me bits and pieces about what it’s like, but it’s a lot different seein’ it like this. The fact your life can rely on luck, just ‘cuz you stayed out too late...” She shakes her head. “Ye shouldn’t have to be careful. This shite shouldn’t happen. I know I’m preachin’ to the choir, but...”
It’s fucked up. She already knew she was pretty damn lucky, living in a safe zone that had minimal risk of attack, but it really drives it home.
no subject
He looks at the illusion of his family. His father picks up his sister and takes her away for a little bit during the lecture portion, to protect her from hearing his mother lay out the consequences of 'you could've been killed!'
He, Paco, and Brenda can be seen sinking into their chairs.
He looks grateful to just be able to see them. It's not like he came in with a picture of his family or best friends.
"It also helped having the powers. If something bad went down with my family I at least had a chance to get there and intervene. My mom had the car and has this special curfew pass because she was a nurse. I'd usually walk my dad home from work, even if he didn't like me taking on the risk. They didn't know I had the powers. I only told them recently because I got temporarily kidnapped to space and had to explain where I went."
It was a more controllable situation than death clouds of nanites attacking his home.
no subject
Cammie makes an ‘ohh’ face for a second and nods, she can’t argue with that point. “There’s places back home that’ve been livin’ under Union control for a lot longer than the four years, some in places like that, others that just got unlucky, had a lot of Union sympathisers in the area and...”
She trails off, but the implication is clear enough. She watches the scene in front of them continue, shifting on her feet again.
“Ma one teammate, Valentina, she lived in a place where they blotted out the sun with nano. The sun. I cannae begin to guess how much nano that took.”
She shudders at the thought, and tries not to dwell on it. Being trapped under a dome of nano for a couple minutes was scary enough.
“Guess bein’ kidnapped to space is pretty hard to explain without a good excuse, huh? ...it’s good you could protect ‘em,” she says, instead, focusing again on the people in the memory. “My Mam died early on in the war; she wasn’t a soldier or anythin’, just an engineer decommissionin’ old oil rigs. Sometimes I wonder if, if g:L had been up and runnin’ sooner...”
She shakes her head. It’s not a thought that holds up to scrutiny and she knows it.
no subject
He shakes his head.
"The scary part is how people don't need to be soldiers to die when the world's like that."
no subject
“Ye just gotta be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she agrees grimly, her ears flattening against her head again. “Dad was a wreck after we found out. Think it didn’t help his odds when his old injury came back to bite him, he went not long after.”
She’s an orphan, not that she’d call herself it; it feels strange, that word. She still had her Gran, she didn’t go to some orphanage or anything like that.
Her nose crinkles a little. She forces her ears up into a more confident position.
“Hopefully the craziness stays far away, aye?” They clearly care about Jaime, and his friends, a lot; good people. She hopes for Jaime’s sake the craziness does stay away.
no subject
That moves him even more. Even if her father wasn't killed by the bad people, he can see see how a death like that could consume both. He can just imagine how his father would deal with losing his mother - especially if he was already sick.
It moves him much that he reaches out his hand (slowly, so she can pull away easily if she wants) to briefly take hers in his, giving it a slight squeeze.
"That must've been hard. Honestly, the fact you can even still fight against the people who did that - can even fight at all... I don't think I could. I think something like that would just wreck me."
It says a lot about her.
no subject
She doesn’t pull away, she lets him take the hand and accepts the comforting squeeze for what it is, though there’s a look of mild surprise in her eyes and her ears tilt to match.
“...I didn’t start out so noble,” she admits, with a little shrug. “Dropped outta school, did hacking for money, got caught... but when the Doc found me, or, y’know, when he got through to us how important what we could do is... well, it’s a chance to do something.”
She likes to think her parents would be proud of her work with g:L, if not the circumstances that led her there. She’s helped people, people like her Mam, and as out of her depth as she feels sometimes, that’s good.
She remembers saving people in the towns near De Soto base, when the flooding hit; carrying kids to safety, in her giant Holon hands. She made a difference there, she wasn’t powerless.
The memoryscape around them shifts, not to that flooded town, but to a kitchen somewhere in Glasgow, where the wind is rattling the windows, heavy rain beating against the glass.
Cammie jumps. “What the—”
no subject
Realizing it's just another memory, he peeks out the window.
"Well this one's yours, 'cause it's raining and there's green outside that isn't spiky."
She'd seen the climate where he grew up. In one of those yards the trio of teens had run through, Paco had only narrowly avoided barreling into a cactus.
no subject
She does snicker a little at that, “Aye, Glasgow’s like that. This uh— this is my Gran’s kitchen.”
As she says that, there’s the sound of feet coming down a staircase. One of her ears automatically rotates towards it. Bounding down the stairs comes a much younger Cammie, in her rabbit-print pajamas and a familiar pair of robotic rabbit ears—almost too big on her head, not quite the same design as they are in the present and lopsided, as if put on hastily.
There’s two people at the kitchen table. A grey haired older lady, and a blonde man in a wheelchair, who squashes down a holographic screen showing storm projections as tiny Cammie arrives.
"It's just a storm, Bun," the older woman says.
"It's loud," little Cammie whines, earning a wry smile off her father.
Present Cammie’s eyes are wide, settled on her dad’s face. She’d been thinking about this old memory pretty recently, back home, but remembering in your own head isn’t quite like this.
“...dad,” she says, quietly, before composing herself. She coughs. “I dinnae miss the days I could be woken up by somethin’ simple as a storm, I’d never get any sleep these days. Hearing loss hadn’t progressed so far back then.”
no subject
"I'd wondered if they were for more than aesthetic," he says, "Especially since it's a nice aesthetic."
no subject
“Why thank ye,” she says, smiling. “Aye, they’re aids; built ‘em myself, these ones’re an improved blueprint from the ones little me’s wearin’ that dad and gran there helped me make. They taught me a lot, wouldn’t be half as good an engineer or coder if not for them.”
The memory in front of them progresses; it’s a comforting memory that she has no desire to try and interrupt, despite the subtle ache in her chest at seeing her dad and hearing them talk about her Mam as if she’s still alive, because back then she was.
She jumps at the same moment little Cammie does at the lightning, then laughs at herself.
“I’d snatch a biscuit if this were real,” she says, as her Gran pours them out on a plate. “Those were the kind I only got on special occasions. Apparently bein’ awake, scared of a storm, counted.”
no subject
She sure knows what it's like to run for your life and stuff, but this specific situation is one she hadn't seen before. She's actually speechless during most of it, until they reached the house and got in through the window.
"Oh, good, they made it..." Shelley says aloud. Her heartbeat did get faster watching all this.
She actually is very relieved they all got into the house. That must have been terrifying! These memories aren't guaranteed to be harmless, after all, she hadn't taken for granted they'd all manage to get away. Right now she's so glad it didn't include them all getting captured by a drone or something.
no subject
A pause.
"Spoilers, I guess."
no subject
"That's great! Did it last long? Or was it a mercifully short-lived time?"
With some luck Jaime knew how things were like before the Regime made all this happen, but...something of this scale doesn't get pushed onto society in a short time, she thinks. Maybe even in the present things aren't all peach and cream.
no subject
It's not magically better.
Bad things still keep happening.
"But there are people trying to make things better."
no subject
Still, Shelley is certainly sympathetic to that plight, and that Jaime mentions there's people trying to make things better gets a nod from her.
"Sometimes that's all it takes to make a good first step! But that scale is...not really what I expected at all."
That makes rather worrying such a regime was set all over the world, but...
"But just like something that awful could take over the world, something good can do it as well. It's just matter of time"
...why is she trying to be encouraging? She frowns a little when she realizes she's doing that. If she had to guess, maybe it's because she could see how bad things were. Definitely wasn't the same as experiencing it, but it sure got a more genuine response from her than if she had been simply told about it.