It's Honestly a Terrible Plan

[piper90npcs]

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.

Comments

[credit_not_blame]

Other-Lubitsch is spooky, but more in a poke Lubitsch about this later kind of way than anything else. Stuff does weird shit, they already knew that. Idly, Stacia wonders what would happen to the Planker outside if they killed this Planker in here. But no, it's not worth the experimentation, not yet.

"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.

[zerg_rush]

Not wanting to detour, Kerrigan telekinetically rips a rifle out of the hands of an imaginary soldier, hissing through her teeth as it proves much harder than it should to lift something as light as small arms. The man she's robbed tries to jump her, so she breaks his wrist and "kills" him with his own combat knife, far more efficiently than Planker had been doing earlier. It's not like he's real, and it's not like they're not planning on having her kill Planker himself in a few minutes.

"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.

[piper90npcs]

Getting to the door is tricky, given that the Stuff still roils with war around them. Bullets continue zipping through the air, and the group moves more slowly than Stacia and Kerrigan are capable of simply by the virtue of more bodies, more people to keep together. Occasionally, things explode, but just as often craters suddenly carve themselves into the ground as if some massive, invisible force has just taken a bite out of things.

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.

[credit_not_blame]

"Probably about as accurate as our own memories are, when we end up in each other's heads," Stacia says. Whether it's accurate-to-life is up in the air because, well, it's not like they have any way to check.

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'?"