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goneawayworld2021-04-22 08:47 pm
piper90npcs) wrote in goneawayworld2021-04-22 08:47 pm
Entry tags:
It's Honestly a Terrible Plan
Who: Almost everyone
What: Dan uses his stripper powers for good, Stacia teaches everyone a brainhack, just about everyone throws a riot. Operation Honeyplank is a go.
Where: All around the Rig
When: After some network plotting.
Warnings/Notes: Attempted seduction, brain hacking, violence, likelihood of swearing.
The Rig is large and city-like enough that it never truly sleeps, and that is all the more true now that it's disgustingly humid all the time. It's the last dinner shift and even the workaholic execs are starting to call it a night, but the ambient noise keeps everyone aware that there's still life all around them, that the Rig is something of an organism as much as a vehicle.
In the mess hall, people are starting to clear off their plates and the hires on bus duty are wiping down tables. Some are lingering around the tables chit-chatting, mostly speculating about just how cruel and dangerous Planker's new obstacle test, which he boasted about to them at the end of their last session, is going to be tomorrow. Some are on chore duty and doing dishes. Some are starting to head back to their rooms.
And others are setting up to, as Madonna says, start causing a commotion.
What: Dan uses his stripper powers for good, Stacia teaches everyone a brainhack, just about everyone throws a riot. Operation Honeyplank is a go.
Where: All around the Rig
When: After some network plotting.
Warnings/Notes: Attempted seduction, brain hacking, violence, likelihood of swearing.
The Rig is large and city-like enough that it never truly sleeps, and that is all the more true now that it's disgustingly humid all the time. It's the last dinner shift and even the workaholic execs are starting to call it a night, but the ambient noise keeps everyone aware that there's still life all around them, that the Rig is something of an organism as much as a vehicle.
In the mess hall, people are starting to clear off their plates and the hires on bus duty are wiping down tables. Some are lingering around the tables chit-chatting, mostly speculating about just how cruel and dangerous Planker's new obstacle test, which he boasted about to them at the end of their last session, is going to be tomorrow. Some are on chore duty and doing dishes. Some are starting to head back to their rooms.
And others are setting up to, as Madonna says, start causing a commotion.
BRAIN QUEST
The way out can only be found again by going deeper.
The door to Planker's mind opens to a space that looks like the inside of an army base.
Minus the people. Just rooms and rooms of empty barracks and offices.
An every room is minutely off-kilter, the different parts and objects inside it subtly disproportionate.
Kerrigan and Stacia
The end of the tent has a circular area carved out of it, one that's carved partly into the ground. Chairs and tables have collapsed from being chopped apart.
This scenario has odd, unnatural things in it, like food trays floating above tables, gently rotating around.
Re: Kerrigan and Stacia
She considers prodding at one of the floating trays, but restrains herself for the moment. It looks like digging through Planker's brain is going to require a little more gymnastic thinking. Fortunately, Stacia has a psychic handy.
"Kerrigan, is this anything like what you're used to?"
no subject
"This is too...metaphorical?" she says, shaking her head, her tone rising with uncertainty as she tries to come up with a way to explain telepathic sensations. "It should be more, I don't know, visceral? The same as calling up your own memories feels, just...not yours."
This is weird and she doesn't like it.
no subject
Beyond the opening in the curtain is a place where shimmering waves of Stuff have changed the landscape, waives of Unreality sweeping over what was once an army camp that was far away from the front.
To be inside "war" as a concept is different than to be in a war, and yet in terms of the way it smells, the way it sounds, the horror piled upon horror, it’s a distinction without difference. You usually don’t know where your enemy is coming from in the middle of combat anyway; this time, the enemy is just everywhere and anywhere all at once.
It’s a battlefield, and a battalion of soldiers is pinned down under rains of bullet fire. They hunker behind tanks and supply trucks and dikes. An officer tries to yell commands at his soldiers, and is thrown to the ground dead as a half his body is torn to shreds by a grenade.
It’s hard to breathe. Chemical gas rams up against the acid stink of gunpowder and body odor and then gets steamrolled by the overwhelming, unique and impossible-to-mistake stench of death. Flecks of ash flit around in the air, riding plumes of smoke that would look majestic if they could just be mistaken for clouds instead of vehicles burning with shrieking people trapped inside. It’s hard to hear, too, with the cries of the wounded and the terrified, with radio reporter chatter and shouted orders and explosion and gunshot after gunshot, periodic rains of clumped earth and worse down.
The soldiers are wearing a confusing blend of uniforms. A good portion of them look like they're wearing the fatigues of soldiers from the early 21st century. But others wear uniforms from a variety of countries and time periods. Phantom soldiers wearing red coats clash with World War I doughboys in gas masks, pouring out of trenches in numbers that should be impossible. Members of a RAF regiment leans out from behind the wreckage of several downed Spitfires as they fire at Grande Armée chasseurs with muskets.
Soldiers drop as if hit by sniper-fire, but the bullets have simply appeared inside them. Limbs vanish, blown off by invisible grenades. Body parts stick up out of the ground in all stages of decay, from the freshly amputated to the remnants of unearthed mass graves. Puddles of blood soak into the soil more slowly than they can be filled by new deaths. A tank tips over sideways, but it’s no longer a tank but a tank-shaped mass of bodies melded together and melded with weapons, rifles where arms should be and landmines for heads.
A young dying man, missing both legs below the knee, looks at Kerrigan and Stacia and opens his mouth to scream, but all that comes out is the chak-chak-chak of artillery fire and a glob of blood and motor oil.
no subject
Well, not quite this nightmare, there hadn't been waves of unreality washing over everything, and she hadn't needed to breathe the smoke and chemicals because it had all been inside her head. But she'd dreamed of war washing over itself in waves, mish-mashed and mixed up, twisting together in a boiling mass of horror. The only path through had been soaked in blood.
It's different when she's awake.
She recoils at first, as is only natural. War is horror, even if you're not inside the very concept of it. But she's also Garou. As horrible as it is, she's meant for war. Not this one, not fought in this way, but meant for it regardless.
"He's trying to keep us from going that way!" she shouts to Kerrigan over the noise. "So that's where we want to go!"
no subject
"I should have just done this the normal way." Kerrigan sighs, puffing annoyance up through her bangs. This is stupid. "Did your instruction manual tell you if any of these things can hurt us?" she asks as she takes Stacia's advice and starts jogging towards the thick of the surreal combat.
no subject
There is a man who runs in front of them, a man who looks so much like Lubitsch he must be a brother or cousin. He runs into a comms tent, but is still in view through a pinned up flap as he gets on a radio and records a message.
"All units, General Copsen has ordered a full evacuation!"
This is where things get uncanny. Even though he has a different face, even though he's stronger, brawnier, more ruggedly handsome...
His voice is absolutely identical to their trainer Lubitsch. Not similar like a sibling. Identical.
"Break off alone or in groups. Make for high ground and cover, radio each other if you find a safe place. Above all else, you are ordered to live."
The message is broadcast over the base's speakers on repeat, and the man starts to make his way out of the carnage, moving from cover to cover. A soldier in similar fatigues approaches.
"Lubitsch, where the hell are we falling back to - gckt," the soldier that asked never finishes his question, falling down with spurt of blood from his throat.
With a look of grim regret, Lubitsch launches himself over the man's body, weapon raised. And then he starts to rally some of the men, trying to move them along in a more organized retreat. Others launch themselves into the fray - and there is Planker among them, face baptized in mud and blood. He is almost feral, killing and killing and killing, a human bulldozer.
"Planker! Planker, we need suppressive fire!" Lubitsch calls out.
But the man cannot, will not stop, stabbing a Wehrmacht soldier over and over with a combat knife.
"Planker!" finally impatient with him Lubitsch - this new Lubitsch - just up and decks him, and when Planker responds by automatically plunging the knife in the direction of his throat, he automatically catches it.
Only then does Planker freeze.
"Suppressive. Fucking. Fire!"
The two beam pure hate at each other, but Planker finally breaks off and does what he's told.
The group retreats, in the direction Stacia and Kerrigan are meant to go, a place that glints with the promise of importance, so at the very least they'll have some covering fire and a group leading them from cover to cover.
If they try, they will also find that they can use their powers here, like the outside. The will it requires is monumental due to the crushing weight of Planker's mind, but it's possible. There are also various guns to potentially use, even if they may have to pry them from dead hands. In the distance, in the direction the group is moving there is, strangely, a random door, just looming there in the muck and chaos.
no subject
"Let's avoid finding out how much damage we can take here!" she calls to Kerrigan. She wrenches a gun free of the hands of a downed soldier, just in case they can affect things other than Planker, and follows after the rag-tag group. The sight of the freestanding door makes her laugh under her breath. "It's déjà vu all over again."
She very much doubts that this one is going to lead to an idyllic garden with the archangel Raphael and a tea set, though.
no subject
"So this isn't just some bad dream crap?" Kerrigan asks, only half rhetorically. "This is what really happened when the Stuff went wild?"
They pass what remains of a Confederate platoon—the original Confederates, single-shot rifles clutched in dead hands, bayonets fixed for the last charge that had killed them, their gray uniforms soaked in blood, their eyes glassy and staring. Their battle flag hangs from its pole, cockeyed but basically vertical where it's planted in the mud amidst the corpses, the only thing still standing. Kerrigan tears the familiar standard down with a growl, throwing the flag down into the blood and dirt where it belongs.
no subject
The closer they get to the door, the thicker the bulletfire, the more gruesome the explosions, the more twisted the combinations of soldier and weapon. It makes more sense to leave Lubitsch and his soldiers behind than linger even under cover. The door is, mercifully, unlocked-
-and is surprisingly close to what Stacia was balking at hoping for, in tone if not in imagery. The door leads to a much more tranquil space in Planker's mind, like the eye of a hurricane, somehow all the more calm for the contrast of the carnage around it. It's just a room. Furnitureless, windowless. The walls are insufficient to block out the sounds from outside, but the reprieve from the sights is something, at least.
no subject
They get to the door and (unlike the last time she'd encountered a free-standing door), Stacia doesn't spend five to ten minutes examining it for traps. She shoves it open and steps inside with it, moving to the side so Kerrigan can follow. She's not completely reckless though, so she keeps a hand on it and doesn't let it close behind them completely.
"...Huh," she says, looking around the room. " 'No thoughts, head empty'?"
Bunny and Wash
Though no people are visible, there are shadows on the walls of the tent, of soldiers being strangled by those blankets.
Re: Bunny and Wash
Perfectly normal. Shadows of people being strangled.
He definitely doesn't like the fact he has no access to a gun in here.
No armor, either.
no subject
"Think this is something that actually happened, or just what he likes to think about?"
He's looking around for Stacia, in the meanwhile, dismayed that they've all been separated. At least, he can't hear any trace of her or Kerrigan or anyone outside of Planker's mind still.