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.]]
one long memory lane
But, no matter how short he wishes the time was, fate has it that he ends up spending the hours in Saturday's memory, watching her do her rounds to Mr. Pham and the clinic, observing the person he knows in the context that made her. For as different as the technology and decor is, there's something so recognizable about the struggles in this small community, something very universal. People are people. The problems remain the same, the systems separating people the same, the way people slip in between the cracks remains the same, just dressed up in different time periods, different planets.
Dan doesn't make a sound as they wait for the motorbikes to pass, even though it's a memory, even though he doubts the gang would be able to hear him even if he started shouting and screaming. Saturday gets up and starts to walk her motorbike, and Dan gets up, looking around for the "real" Saturday. When he doesn't see her, he walks next to the one walking the bicycle.
“Can you hear me?”
Re: one long memory lane
"Aw, fuck." She sighs. The bike melts from her hands, never having really been there. "Not this shit again - sorry, Dan, nothing against you personally."
At least these aren't memories she's ashamed of, or any of the more recent hurts.
no subject
By all measures of how memories like this go, this was relatively painless, at least for Dan. Heavy and uncomfortable, with the quiet of the evening seeming to ache with the echos of the screaming person victimized by the bikers. But this memory wasn't bloody. Dan could be wrong, but no one looked like someone whose mere mention would break Saturday's heart with longing.
"Is it strange your world reminds me of mine a little? I didn't reckon it would."
no subject
Geography gets a bit challenging when you're four metaplanes away from where you started and also in a memory-sharing dream bubble... thing.
"We're technically in Seattle now - or would be if we actually were - which is technically still UCAS, but it's like, if UCAS troops actually rolled up here to do whatever without running it by the powers that be, good luck to 'em. It was mostly NAN and the Tir not wanting to fight five triple-a megas at once, you know?"
Possibly he does not.
no subject
But until the Rig, never crossed an ocean.
"Usually when I'm in Washington, it's out in the woods, looking for the wildlife."
And somehow, the world seems to shift as he says that, and Saturday's smoke and chopshops dissolve into the shadows of massive redwoods, morning fog, the rising sun battling its way through wet leaves along a clearing. Dan's world takes over, and he winces as it does, because he doesn't want anything to do with his memories, but this one seems tranquil at the moment. He vaguely remembers it from a few years ago, going to Washington to clear out a pack of waterhounds that had started ripping hikers to shreds. In the memory, the Dan Saturday's talking to is still standing there, but another Dan's voice comes through the woods, laughing: "you magicians are all about showmanship and you don't know how to ride a horse? I saddled you and everything...here, Jesus Christ, you're bad at this, let me..."
Dan pointedly ignores the sound of his memory self so nearby and keeps talking to Saturday, instead, as if nothing's changed about their surroundings. "I don't know what any of that means none, kiddo. But I reckon it means y'all act like sovereign citizens because the forces that be ain't invested the blood in telling you you ain't yet."
no subject
"Never heard of a sovereign citizen but if you're talking about getting stomped by the cops, yeah, that happens." A cigarette appears in her hand, and she takes a drag. "Every once in a blue moon a tourist gets jumped over on the Strip, or some bright spark decides they're gonna clean up Redmond once and for all, so out comes KE's finest. Never lasts long, but it makes a godawful mess."
She was enjoying the landscape, so she curses mildly when it shifts. Redmond again - not the outskirts they were in, somewhere deeper, cluttered and rusting and neon. A mass of metahumanity - the memory of a mob - surges around and away from a tank rolling very slowly down the narrow street, not caring about the street stalls and carts crushed under its treads. Mostly people are running from it. In a moment Dan will see why.
A molotov flies out from a crumbling upper window. The tank's gun swivels, locks on, shoots. Smoke pours out. Inside, they can see dark figures running, panicking. One of them makes it to the fire escape, sliding down the stuck ladder. The tank fires again. The round takes him in the head: he spins and falls, unconscious. There's blood on his face.
"That was technically non-lethal ordinance, or supposed to be," Saturday observes mildly, watching the unconscious ork's friends as they watch a squad five Knight Errant guards - so heavily armored that they no longer appear human - pick up their friend and drag him away. "They're never gonna see him again, so who knows if it really was."
She exhales, the cigarette's smoke mingling with the steam of her breath. The air in this memory is cold, though Saturday doesn't really remember what time of the year it was. Maybe it was just that she'd felt cold, watching.
"We are still UCAS, technically. It's just that Seattle metroplex proper is mostly corps, yeah? Extraterritoriality - so it's not really UCAS in practice, you follow? Though maybe they don't have that shit where you are. Which is why the NAN didn't take it, after the Ghost Dance War - that's a few too many corps for comfort, especially when a country's just getting started."
She shifts.
"Sorry these memories are kinda shitty. My 'plane's got some great people in it, things are just... sorta messed up."
no subject
Thank God, at least, that he's with another smoker, to look down at policing and violence with the same sort of disdain and frustration. That's all so much easier to put together an opinion on than the buffet of new words she's serving him, extraterritoriality, NAN, metroplex.
"You don't got to apologize to me. I know how it is. My world ain't in crisis like this where I am, but I follow enough news to know that that's just my fortune of geography." And as if to prove it to her, his memory starts to take over, an unbidden one of a dirt-cheap motel room where the television's on and reporting a refugee crisis at the southern US border. Dan, a similar age to what he is now, is cleaning his gun while watching the news anchor talk about the economic conditions spurring such a mass migration, and about how immigration officials in the United States can't - won't - adjust to the influx.
A young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, comes out of the motel bathroom. She has grey-ish eyes and long, black hair in braids and the same skintone as the refugees on television. She has a toothbrush in her mouth as she talks. "The Agency call you up for another hunt?"
"Nah. Handling it off-the-record." Dan in the memory starts to reassemble his weapon. "Mundane showed up in Marbleton with his blood sucked out and I ain't letting a soucouyant take out the whole town just because no one with a license wants to do a work trip in Wyoming and no one cares about Mundanes."
"You going to make me stay here in this shitty motel doing research like some kind of child slave?"
The memory of Dan looks at the young girl with an exasperated, affronted expression, gesturing to the weeping, starving children on the television as if to say you're going to invoke childhood slavery over being asked to stay home and read a book?. She gives him an offended shrug right back.
no subject
"South America, huh? I guess at least they don't got Aztech waiting in the wings. Or maybe you got worse. Who's the kid?" She's shown up twice now, and Saturday's curious. She doesn't act like a proper child - too sarcastic, too knowing - but people have said the same about Saturday.
She doesn't mean to overwhelm Dan with vocabulary, but she's figured the best way to handle things in this multiversal crew is to plow forward with the explanation you have and hope people ask questions if they can't work it out from context.
no subject
"That's, ah. That's El. Eliora. My kid." Finding words for that is like having a tupperware full of hornets and trying to let out just one or two, like if he isn't very, very, careful, the whole swarm might bust out. In this case, the swarm would be actually having to think of how he lost her, and he can feel his chest tighten and see how she died flash across his mind, so he takes a moment to breathe in deep, close his eyes, and remember where he is, who he's with, that it's been over a year. "She could be a little melodramatic. She's a ghost, that's why her eyes are all pale like that. It's complicated."
In the memory, Ellie rolls her eyes and, pouting, flops down on the bed. "I am way more equipped than you to go hunt monsters. You're so unfair."
"Sure am," the memory of Dan says. "And it ain't just for your protection. It's for everyone else's, too."
She scowls at him. "I hate you."
"That's a real strong word, El," the memory of Dan says, looking clearly both used to this kind of adolescent lashing-out and also genuinely hurt. "I don't think you mean it."
no subject
She snorts at Ellora's sulk and Dan's response. In a familiar, amused way, recognizing it;for a moment the memory of her father shimmers between them, his face lined and grave.
Do not make threats in idleness, Makoto, and especially not in the shadows. Braggadocio there will get you killed.
"Huh. You know, ghosts is something I don't think we got where I'm from? People can leave like, astral echoes of themselves, but can't actually become spirits unless some real weird stuff happens to 'em on purpose, kinda thing. What they leave behind isn't really them."
At least, that was how Maggie had explained it.
no subject
It's easier to just not look at Ellie and instead remember that Saturday's here with him, and that she wasn't there for any of those awful things he's trying to forget, and that his chest hurting and his hands going numb are just his body trying to remind him that he's here, in this form, place and time.
"Ghosts can be all kinds of ways in my world. Some of them don't even realize they're dead. That's part of my job back home, hunting monsters and ghosts. You got some that are nothing more than vapor spots in old houses and then folks like El that are so undead they're basically still alive." Dan bites his knuckle, as if that could bring feeling back into it. "A lot of what I do is laying to rest the ones that have been alone so long they've gone violent. I reckon I'm half hunter and half minister to the dead."
no subject
"You'd have some stuff to talk about with my friend Scylla, then," she says. "She's a sort of a paladin of a - ain't exactly a god. They're called Passions? They're like - they express things that are universal to like, the experience of being a person in the world. Victory, freedom, commerce, art, that kinda thing. Scylla knows Death, like personally, it was a whole thing - anyway, part of the job Death gave her is like... makin' sure people don't get like... stuck. Being alive, that is. Like if they're not supposed to be - like some blood mage draining people to keep themselves going. Maintain the balance, sort of thing."
Saturday waves her free hand side-to-side as she sucks on the memory of a cigarette, illustrating her own uncertainty.
"Or somethin' like that? Spirits are really not my thing and Scylla is sort of new at the job - lots she's still learning."
no subject
Dan's soft touch saves a lot of lives and ends a lot of cases peacefully. It's also made him slower to act, sometimes with a high cost, which he can't ignore when he's just seen the ghost of the kid he left in harm's way because he was too slow and irresponsible to handle a crisis properly.