goneawayworld | 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.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There comes a miserable sounding mutter from the darkness of the alleyway. Mackenzie doesn't want to see this. She doesn't want others to see this. Yet there's no choice, is there?

"Yes."

"Is this somethin' I should watch or...?" Saturday can kinda guess the answer to that. "If you focus, you might be able to change it. Sorry. I still can't figure out how t' get out of this once it happens. Pretty sure the Stuff is doing it, though."

It does everything else, right?

"I don't want to watch it. I sure as fuck don't want anyone else watching it," Mackenzie growls unhappily. She feels itchy and hot under hers kin. Like she wants to claw her way out of her own head.

"This isn't for you. This isn't for anyone except me." She hates this. She hates being vulnerable and she hates being forced to relive the worst night of her life like this. It claws at her, dragging at her mind and holding her down like a weight hauling her to the bottom of the sea.

"I want out."

"Then focus." Saturday blows out a hard breath. "I get it. I got shit I don't want people seeing, either. But I can't leave the memory, and you can't kick me out, I've tried both on one end t'other. So try to focus on something else, anything else, and you might be able to shift it. I can try, it might work, but it's your head we're stuck in."

Saturday's keeping her head down, carefully not examining the scene or trying to understand what it means. Just once she'd like to end up in someone's nice, happy memory of a sparkly sunshine day, with like hot dogs and swimming and stuff.

Kenzie closes her eyes, as if she can shut out the sound of the memory around her just by trying. It's not working. Slowly, things proceed. They're in the dead time as the pack waits in the warehouse and Kenzie desperately wants to not be here when things go wrong. She grits her teeth--let this end, already! Let her be somewhere else. Anywhere else. She wants to remember something pleasant and yet every attempt seems to draw her back towards the macabre and melancholy.

"I'm trying," she growls half to herself.

It doesn't seem to be working. Saturday sighs, at the situation more than Mackenzie. Saturday attempts to help, which mostly is just her thinking supportively in the other woman's direction, very hard. That seems to be how Scylla manages this astral stuff.

"...if it helps, I can basically - this was your crew, right? You were on a run, an' things went sideways, an' someone died. Maybe more then one. Am I right? An' you're carryin' that."

She says it simply, with sympathy and without pity. She does has a little experience in letting people down.

"All of them." Kenzie drops down into a crouch, staring at the ground between her toes as if it might offer an answer, healing, something.

"They all fuckin' died, okay?" Kenzie presses her hands up against her ears, the side of her head, as if trying to contain a pressure coming from within her own head. She might well be.

"I should've been the first one that got it but the rest of them did and I don't--" She bites back a curse. She doesn't need to talk about this with someone or something. She's got this handled.

"--don't see how it's your fucking business, though."

Saturday rubs the back of her neck, elaborately cool and calm in the face of the rage beating off Mackenzie like heat from a furnace. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

"That's a hard fucking thing. And it ain't my business, but we do seem to be stuck here, so like - this memory, I'm sayin', it's not something I'm unfamiliar with."

Something does flicker between them, then. Maggie and herself, two months and about five lifetimes ago, facing off - arguing, instead of having their minds of job - but Saturday's mind shies away from it, and it's gone.

"Goddamit."

"Too many people know what this feels like. Shit's fucked," Kenzie opines in a quiet voice. She continues to stare at the ground, desperate to ignore everything happening around them. The worst night of her life, played out in graphic detail for all the people who care to wander through.

If she were in her real body and not just her head, she might just vomit at the thought.

"Yeah, it kinda is. I mean - I guess I chose this life, so I shouldn't regret it, but like - does everything gotta be so goddamned hard? Can't the bastards let you get a win, for once, without losin' so much it stops bein' worthwhile?"

Caim in his coffin, Maggie on the autopsy table. Saturday shivers, wrenching herself away from it.

"First time this happened, everyone got to see my greatest fuckups, too. All the shit that'd been hurting the most when I hit the rig, you know? Great way to break the ice, I guess."

"Yeah, great. A bunch of assholes get to stare at the worst night of my life and watch my family fucking die--fuck this bullshit." She slams a fist into a memory-dumpster. It doesn't change anything, but it does kind of make her feel better to hit something.

"I don't even want to remember this but fuck if it isn't on fucking repeat in my head."

"That's usually the way it goes, yeah." Family dying - the connection is made against Saturday's will, and her own nightmare flickers to life in the alley, bleeding into the scene. A cold lab, strewn with dead medical staff. Blood and scorch marks on the wall. An orc woman's vivisected body lies on a slab; a different Saturday is clutching it, screaming.

" - oh, come the fuck on!"

Kenzie freezes as the memory shifts--and now it is someone else's pain on display. Raw grief and anger. She stares for a moment, feeling suddenly and intensely awkward. She didn't like her feelings being on display and there is an acute feeling of understanding and embarrassed unhappiness that Saturday, too, must undergo this.

"...I'm sorry," she says after a long silence. Her voice is husky, scratched raw by her grief.

"This is bullshit."

Saturday looks away, sharing her embarrassment and trying to save face for them both. They'd sent the video of it over the comms, made them all watch -

"...she did come back. It meant another fucking deal with something an' - well, she came back."

Saturday focuses on that, on the memory of Scylla awake in the airship again; the two of them curled together like cats on her hospital bed.

"That's the important part. Most don't."

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

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

Re: Mackenzie; cw for blood, death, gore, suicidal depression, ptsd and all sorts of other related s

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