Your Friendly Neighborhood Shadowrunner

[wheyoftheadept]

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.

Comments

[takenalive]

<Nearly enough. I greet you, Saturday.>

He's enjoyed flying, but this is impractical. Alloran finds a place to aim at, flaring all of his wings and his tail to kill his speed, stalling out and dropping to a patch of deck and folding up his wings. Some of the wings can serve some function as legs, but this morph is much clumsier and more awkward-looking out of the air.

<This is called a kafit bird. It's native to my homeworld. They are rapacious predators, but - yes, they also have their charms.>

[wheyoftheadept]

"Those feathers are gorgeous." She drops down next to him, easy as if she were taking the stairs. "Can I have a closer look?"

She doesn't reach out as she says it, but settles cross-legged nearby.

[takenalive]

Resigned, he says, <If you wish. Careful of my beak. It's quite sharp.>

He's still quite a large bird, maybe three feet tall, and sort of mouthless; that is, there's some articulation, and there are openings to breathe and vocalize through which are not the pink of Earth animal flesh, but there's no orifice for eating on that blade head.

Most of his outer feathers have the hard, almost plasticky aspect of streamlined flight feathers, though they have a metallic aspect too, reflecting the colors around them. This bird is more unlike an Earth one the longer it's studied.

[wheyoftheadept]

She doesn't have permission to touch, so she just leans over and examines. There's a genuinely happy, soft grin on her face as she does so.

"They're so pretty - I've never seen a real alien anything before. I guess that's something nice this clusterfuck brought me - wow, that's a killer beak." She glances towards his feet. "And claws. I see what you mean about a predator. What a beautiful animal, though."

She sits back. "Six wings - I have a friend who grows wings sometimes, and she had a hard enough time learning two. That's impressive."

[takenalive]

The metallic element of his feathers isn't so smooth as to be a mirror, but that side reflects the colors of her skin and hair and clothes with a blusih tint. From far enough away the kafit must blend somewhat into its surroundings.

<I am an alien, by that classification. You've seen me, even if we only spoke when I was in human morph. I imagine I'm difficult to miss.> Alloran projects an impression, just for a second, a flash of having four hooves, two arms, stalk eyes, a long and bladed tail.

People here sure do know a lot of different non-morphing transformations. <No doubt it's easier for me than many others. When my people developed this technology it was meant to be easy to use.<

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday admires herself in blue for a second longer, then pays proper attention. "Oh - yeah! That was you, huh, the blue centaur guy? You shapeshift, then?"

She sits back a little. "A real alien. Neat. You use tech for it? My friend uses magic, basically - she can go from her regular body to a dragon, and back again. How does yours work?"

[takenalive]

<Correct. It's rather complex and would take quite a long time to properly explain.> Not to mention being against the law, though honestly he doesn't care so much about that one. Alloran can be confident about this much, he doesn't understand the technology enough for anything he says or demonstrates to make it duplicable. <The short version is that I can make a copy of another creature's DNA. That is its genetic essence, a plan that tells its body how to be formed and function. I can then trigger my body to be tucked away and replaced by a new one, formed according to that plan.>

It could have more precise terminology involved, but eh. <'Magic' is rather outside my experience.>

[wheyoftheadept]

"Yeah, I know about genes," Saturday says confidently, coming from a world that's figured out that much science, at least. "Where does your original body go? How do you not get confused and end up with like, bits of other bodies combining?"

Then she stops herself.

"I mean, if it's not a trade secret, that is." And she clears her throat. "I honestly dunno how magic works either, really. No one seems to. It's got something to do with mana count, with is like - how inherently magical the world around you is, and that's something to do with essence, which is - not a soul, exact, its the latent magical energy that every living thing has because it's alive. And those two things work together somehow to make magic, or at least have for the last fifty years. But beyond that...." she shrugs. "Hey diddy ho diddy, no one knows. Just that it does, and how to use it."

[takenalive]

Alloran tilts his bird head. <It genuinely does take quite some time to explain in a meaningful way. There are some concepts that must be built up. Let's suffice for now to say my people are very advanced, and morphing was designed to be relatively simple to use if prepared for.>

He laughs, a soundless snap like a few bubbles of boiling water, or a sudden small arc of electricity. <All right then. I'm sure a scientist would have follow up questions, but I'm a military man.>

[wheyoftheadept]

"I'll buy that," Saturday laughs with him. "I mean, like I said, I don't really know how magic works either. I guess some people might, I wasn't totally accurate, but uh, the way my friend put it, it's like going up to a physicist and asking them to explain what gravity actually physically is. They can probably explain it, but you're not really gonna understand it without a ph.d For everyone who isn't a giant nerd magic just, you know, is."

She sighs with some envy. "Morphing sounds really cool, though. Magic lets you shapeshift if you have the right spell, but you can't do anything about mass so there's no getting bigger or smaller. Can anyone learn how to do it? Or just your species?"

[takenalive]

He lifts a folded wing and resettles it in a kind of alien bird shrug. It's getting darker, and the bird's instincts are to find somewhere to actually perch, but he can override them.

<As it happens anyone can,> he says, with a few layers of irony. Alloran's assumption for three years had been that anyone with the morphing power had to be an Andalite. <It takes being, you might say charged or seeded, with a particular device. It's a subcellular technology. We love that sort of thing. I have a linguistic analysis computer too, but it seems to have finally broken down.>

[wheyoftheadept]

"Like a universal translator?" Saturday's eyes widen in delight. "You guys have so many cool things! This is the sorta stuff I thought dimensional travel and all that would have me seeing, not - well, nevermind."

It's too depressing for a nice conversation with an interesting person. She looks terribly eager as she asks the next question - not in a predatory way, but a genuine, wondering expression. Like a curious kid at the planetarium who's found a very tolerant docent.

"Do you guys do space travel, too? Like to other solar systems? Is faster-than-light real? Are there other kinds of alien people or just you?"

[takenalive]

Alloran assumes she's talking about this situation and Jormugand. He makes an awkward nod.

<Not universal, but - useful. Perhaps all those years without patches caught up to it, or it was the electricity here.> He'd kind of like to stop, but it doesn't actually occur to Alloran that he has the option to refuse. He hasn't, not in many years. <We do, and it is and is not. It's not possible in real space, but z-space is a different story. There are... quite a few alien sentients besides humans and Andalites.>

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday thinks this is the coolest and most awesome, interesting thing she's ever heard. She has about a million questions, and she's opening her mouth to ask the dozen most currently urgent when something in the mental tone, or the shortness of the answers, or a shift in the bird's posture stops her short.

"...sorry if I'm asking too many questions. Like I said, where I'm from, we have a lot of magic and like, computers and robots, but we only like just started trying to colonize Mars, and - I dunno, I always thought the whole idea was just. Neat."