goneawayworld | Your Friendly Neighborhood Shadowrunner

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Shadowrunner

Who: Saturday… and you?
What: Open prompts
Where: Locations noted in title
When: in the period between the intro and the next big event
Warnings/Notes: Second prompt may lead to discussing disturbing events in Saturday’s past. No sexual assault, but warnings for violence, child abuse, and eldritch horrors.

1. Free Tickets to the Gun Show [location: communal bathrooms]

Saturday looks at herself in the mirror and nods, satisfied. Even Maggie couldn’t argue the rightness of this; these uniforms were hideous, and too long, and she didn’t like them. Therefore…

She picks a thread out of her newly-created sleeveless jumper. It won’t stop unraveling, so she yanks and breaks it. Her former sleeves lie limply on the sink before her as she admires herself. The room is empty (to the best of her knowledge); her dignity is safe. She starts striking poses.

In her defense, those muscles are pretty impressive.

2. Let Sleeping Adepts Lie? [location: gardens]

The gardens aren’t really gardens, except for the patch that Bunny and Gadget have taken over, but they’re green and they’re quiet and it’s easy to avoid people. These qualities are why Saturday is kneeling in a remote corner of them, hands cupped open in her lap the way her father taught her. Holding emptiness. Control is an illusion. Go with the flow.

Keep your distance, and she looks peaceful. Come closer, and you can see her jaw is tight and trembling, and tears are trickling out from under her closed eyes.

3. Come Fly Away (Or Dream You Can) [location: rig exterior]

The rain never actually stops, but sometimes it lessens into a misty drizzle, the kind of thing a true Seattleite scoffs at. Saturday, being one of those, is out on the deck. It’s evening, going on full dark; the western horizon in orange fading into pink, and the sky above is clouded velvet. She’s tied cloth around her hands and feet for grip, and is running the pipes. Her shoes are sitting neatly at the base of a large beam. She has no destination in mind, no particular purpose; she isn’t in the training area because she wants to be outside, unrecorded, unmeasured, moving for the sheer glory of it. It almost feels like freedom.

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"A bit too late for that. Why?"

He doesn't seem to realize he's prying, as such. Loken doesn't have a great grasp of the subtleties of mortal behavior, a lot of their motivations being fairly mysterious to him.

"Ah - sorting out some things that happened lately," she says awkwardly. What is her life. "And then all this - needed to process. Sometimes you gotta cry."

"It's not a big deal," she adds hurriedly. Her hands are still cupped loosely in her lap.

"oh." Now he understands, and realizes his error. "Do you wish to be left alone?" He assumes it is either grief or loneliness, and understands some humans prefer those things to be dealt with without a whole lot of people watching.

"Well, christ, now I don't know." Saturday is still teary-eyed, but now also irritated, mostly at herself. "I mean - shit. I don't. Fuck." Her voice, and throat, are scratchy.

She wants company. She doesn't know this guy. She fought murderous furniture with him That doesn't mean he need to get her emotions dumped on him. She's done that, ill-advisedly, already.

"What good do you think you'd do?" Oh, that came out way meaner than intended.

"Mostly just listen, I suppose. Offer advice, if you want it." He shrugs, not so much dismissing the idea of his company as being unsure if she would find it useful. The silent wolf is an apt sobriquet applied to him, most of the time, anyway.

She snorts. "Not sure how good your advice would be, unless you've fought fucked up things from outside reality that like to hollow people out and wear them as skin suits."

Loken freezes, as if in shock, then goes silent for a moment, as if uncertain how to express himself well in this moment. He decides unvarnished, non complex truth is best. "Yes, I have. That has been the hardest war of the many I have fought, in fact, and the one that has threatened the Imperium of Man." He just leaves out the fact that he's seen his best friend, the only woman he ever loved, and the very beginning of the fall all described as exactly that, at varying points in his battles.

"...oh." Saturday blinks. "Oh! You're from where Cain is from - then you know." Something like relief crosses her still waterstained features. "We call them the horrors, you call them chaos, I think. And yeah they're - how I got stuck here. Because of - "

She sniffs a little, and swipes at her nose.

"God, it's a long story."

"Cain? The name is unfamiliar to me."

He nods, "But you should tell your story. If you know of Chaos, you know some of mine, and the rest will come out in time."

"Yeah, he's a commissar or something in the Imperial Guard? Poor guy's kinda overwhelmed, it'll be nice that he has someone from home."

Saturday swallows, still uncertain. "I guess - god. Best place would be. Me and my crew, okay, there was this nest of those things. We didn't, um. Really understand what they were. That they were bad and using people, killing them, yeah, but - that these things exist, it's a big secret on my world. So we didn't know what we were walking into. And things went bad. It was blow the hive, in the end, with us inside, or let them get out and spread, so we..."

She shrugs.

"We blew the hive. And we should have died, but someone intervened and we didn't. Instead we got - sucked into another world, a bunch of them, actually, like in a row. And then a couple days ago, I went to sleep where we were all staying and... woke up here."

She rubs her forehead. Faced with an audience who only wants to hear - who doesn't have an explanation they're demanding, or an ego to be soothed, or fears to assuage, or doubts to be convinced out of - she finds she barely knows how to tell it.

"There was a lot of in between there I just glossed over. Long story short, we got tied mystically to the queen of the hive we were fighting, and either we take her out or she takes us out and also maybe gets to destroy the world. We've been chasing her around the metaplanes trying to put an end to it. It's been - a real lousy time."

Loken nods, and says, "Given what you have told me, you made the right call. You chose the world over yourselves. It was admirable, and correct."

He looks away for a moment, and half-whispers. "My own story is... not so different, truly. Only imagine the person is you are hunting down is your own father, and you will understand my tale."

"Knowing that doesn't make it less - we ended up having to make that call because I was stupid and proud and I didn't check all my boxes. And then I kept doing it, and made more mistakes. We had to - "

She looks away.

"Some real bad shit had to happen before I admitted to myself I ain't cut out to be the leadin' type."

Then she actually hears the rest of what he said. "Fuck. That sounds awful."

"Leaders make mistakes quite often. Even the best of them. Knowing that you made them and working to correct them is the responsible course." That being said, she is right in that not everyone is cut out to be a leader. He shrugs. "It was a betrayal in a galaxy full of them." Nevermind that Horus' betrayal was the most cruel one of all. She doesn't need to know that bit.

People have told her that before, many times. It doesn't actually help. She shouldn't be making these mistakes, full stop.

"Still. You gave me a fair listen, I should do the same for you."

This, she's good at. Not telling her story, hearing others tell theirs. Telling them what they need to hear.

"It would take a long time to relate the 7 years of war that I faced when my gene-sire betrayed his own Father, the Emperor of Mankind, so I shall give you a shortened version. I hope you forgive the telling, I am not a word smith or poet."

He takes a deep breath and begins, "I was part of the greatest undertaking mankind had ever known, the Great Crusade which brought the enlightenment of the Imperium of man out into the darkest reaches of the galaxy." He looks wistful, remembering that century of glory and hope.
"I rose to command, I suppose by my own merits. I was taken into the confidence of my gene-sire Horus Lupercal. Myself and 3 other battle brothers made up his mournival. We were his advisors and companions, and often acted to express opinions he could not, for reasons of politics." He smiles a little, remembering the brotherhood as it was, then continues. "But Horus betrayed the Emperor, and in doing so betrayed me as well, trying to engineer the death of his loyal sons in a massacre disguised as a compliance action on a rebellious planet. He had brought some of his brothers, the other Primarchs on as his allies, and they rampaged across the galaxy, tearing the Imperium apart. I fought against him, for he did not manage to have me slain, and confronted him again a few years later. He tried to recruit me to his side, and I denied him. The traitor forces have pushed us back to Terra, the very palace itself set high in the Himalasyan mountains and I fought two of my traitorous mournival brothers at the Saturnine gate. I slew them both. And then..."

He lowers his head. "I ended up here, my oath to fight to the death broken, or at least delayed."

Saturday frowns. There's a lot going on there, but one thing in particular catches her attention.

"Compliance action? Rebellious planet? What do you mean by all that? And what's the Great Crusade? And - why did this Horus guy betray it all? Because of the enemy?"

She doesn't say it with capitals, but with a certain inflection that leaves no doubt as to which enemy she means. It's the one with tentacles and soul-eating.

"That's a lot of history all at once, but I'll do my best."

He raises a single finger, "Compliance actions are our term for bringing worlds back into the Imperium after the scattering of Old Night. Humanity was united until at some point we lost the ability to travel between star systems, likely because of a phenomenon called warp storms but that is a lot to explain. Sometimes this involves a fight, because a fair amount of human cultures fell to superstition and worship of... the Darkness when night fell over the first empire of humanity."

"The planet which had 'rebelled' was Istvaan III. It truly had risen against the Imperium but it was influenced, we think, by Chaos. Which was ironic as our brothers were also thralls to Chaos already, and used our deployment on planet to bombard us with Virus bombs and orbital lances, killing off the loyal members of the Luna Wolves, the World Eaters, The Emperor's children, and the Death guard."

He is quiet for a moment, then continues, "The Great Crusade was the Emperor's attempt to bring humanity back together, and stop the predatory alien races which had enslaved or slaughtered humanity on so many worlds, like the Eldar, strangely graceful but capricious xeno-breeds that would enslave humans, or slaughter them wholesale at times, and at others leave us alone. Or the Orks, large, brutish fungal creatures that viewed humanity only as food, or something to fight. I think their religion, such as it was, was based entirely around warfare. We broke their Empire at Ullanor, and it was there the Emperor himself stepped away from the Crusade, to return to terra, leaving Horus Lupercal as his warmaster and chosen heir."

As for the last question, Loken is quiet a long time, "I don't know why Horus chose to rise against his father, beloved by all. He was already his heir, his warmaster, his chosen son. He was the most popular man in the Imperium, and was invincible in battle. I suspect when he was wounded by a sorcerous blade on the moon of Davin something had... tainted him, but I don't know for sure. All I know is the gene-sire I had known for a century, and who I had followed into battle changed, his heart turned against the good of all, and he started the greatest war the galaxy had ever known."

There are a lot of red flags in that explanation; a whole sea of them, really, merrily dancing to a tune that sends a shiver down Saturday's spine, especially combined with the things Cain had mentioned previously, before the whole thing got real awkward.

"Well. In any world where the enemy's coming through, they're generally somewhere at the bottom of any given conspiracy." No need to talk politics, not in her current mood. She'd just start yelling, and she's fought alongside this man. It would be rude. "I'd give good odds they had their talons in him, or someone close to him."

She picks at a leaf. "Maybe he'd decided the rebelling planets had a point, but more warfare isn't necessarily how you solve that problem. Not if you're the favorite son, which it sounds like he was."

Saturday's being kind. She can think of a lot of circumstances where a polite word to daddy wouldn't be enough - but there's no reason not to be kind. She's in a state and so is everyone else on this godforsaken rig; no need to make more tension.

"That was the strange thing, though. Istvaan was the only rebellious planet. Once compliance was effected on a planet, they generally quite swiftly saw the point of the Imperium, and were happy to be a part of it. It wasn't until after Horus raised his banner of treachery that things began to come apart. Knowing him, though, he planted the seeds of rebellion far before the final act of betrayal."

He nods at her words about solving the problem. "I don't understand why he didn't ask the Emperor for whatever changes in policy he wanted. He certainly had the capacity, and as Warmaster he easily had all the political power necessary to do so. THe senselessness of it all is what wounded me the most, I think. I have no idea why he decided to truck with these things from beyond. They are anathema to humanity." He is a bit more pale than usual as he speaks about this. The emotional wounds of such a betrayal have never really healed, only scarred over and been replaced by rage and vengeance.

Edited 2020-05-05 06:47 (UTC)

She'd be curious to hear what the happily compliant planets would say when there weren't big fuckoff men with guns standing over them, but - well.

"No one with noble goals would be working with those things," she agrees. "Even if they started out that way, they'd - twist it, make it horrible. Nothing good comes of them. Just - nasty little viruses, but worse, because viruses are at least supposed to be here. They're part of nature."

"Yes. Well, I think you understand the majority of it now, if not the details."

He looks pensive, "And now here we are, fighting for humanity in another way."

"I'd say fighting for Jorg's bottom line, more than that." Saturday stretches now, glad of the distraction for all she'll still have to finish her internal grooming later. "I'll bet you half a dollar the people behind this operation are the same people who caused this mess. Jorg might be the only option, but I wonder if that's not because they arranged it that way."

A corp would absolutely destroy the world to get a monopoly - or just exploit the destruction of it. Saturday has no doubts about this.

"It strikes me with time and organization, we may then be able to provide our own option."

Not that he'll say more than that, but leading a guerilla action is something he's done before so successfully that they gave up fighting him entirely and just bombed the planet from orbit to deal with him.

"Been thinking along the same lines." This is good. This is something Saturday can focus on. It's business: planning, logistics. Movement. "What have you been ruminating?"

"We must first know our enemies, and our allies. Gather information, act obedient, see who else chafes under the rules here, and who can be trusted with operational security. Once we have a who can help, who to avoid, we can make a plan to act."

He looks marginally more comfortable planning a military action than he did in all that talk about feelings and failure. This is something he knows well.

Edited 2020-05-07 05:46 (UTC)

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