goneawayworld | Invasion!

Entry tags:

Invasion!

Who: The New Hires
What: Sudden Memory Share
Where: Their Memory Palaces
When: After Intermission
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 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 cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can control any other memories they'd like to show people. Of course, there's always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up memories unbidden.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's not the first time that Sam's shared a dream with somebody. Or a memory, really. It IS the first time that he's walked in one completely unknown to him. The only other time he'd done this, it was Dean's memories and they were together in all of them.

(Sam's favorite memories, less so. At the time, at least.)

So he kinda realizes what's happening. More so when he recognizes the voice of one of the girls. He follows them toward the door, recoiling at the scent himself. "Damn. I suppose it's not that surprising you have good sense memory. But I kinda wish it was a little less good at the moment."

Stacia spins around at the sound of Sam's voice -- but no, the Stacia staring at him has brown hair done up in crown braids, the blond Stacia who belongs in this memory is digging through her messenger bag one-handed as she pinches her nose shut with the other.

"Uh, what the fuck?" she asks, planting her hands on her hips. "What are you doing here? I definitely didn't invite you to go digging around in my head."

"And it's not a thing that I've ever been able to do on my own." Which is entirely true. He's never been able to do this without extenuating circumstances and somebody else butting in to make it happen.

He glances past her to the blonde Stacia and her friend. "By the way. A bit of Vicks under your nose actually helps a lot with the smell." So that she'd know he's been through this sort of thing himself.

Stacia glowers at him for a moment, before heaving a dramatic sigh.

"FUCK," she announces, at significant volume, given her size. She shoots a guilty glance over her shoulder, but the two girls in the memory don't notice her either. "Fine, but try not to go poking around anywhere, I hate people waltzing into my head without asking first."

She glares into middle distance for a moment or two, before sighing again and reeling it all back in to merely a pout.

"Thanks for the tip, I guess. I'm not usually on body disposal duty; my stupid boyfriend had to call me in because he nearly got himself dead." She eyes Sam. "You're a regular-ish dude who fights monsters, how do I convince him to stop trying to stab things and pick up a gun like a sensible person who can't walk off disembowelment?"

"I promise you, I have no intention of looking anywhere that I don't have to in this." Because, really, it's not a good idea.

He moves up to her side and raises an eyebrow. "There's a lot of stuff out there that it's better to not have to close with if you can avoid it at all. If you're in range to stab them, you're also in range for them to stab YOU. Or worse." He takes a moment, looking around the inside of the warehouse from where they're stood. "Also, bullets are a lot easier and cheaper to replace than knives."

"Good, glad to hear it." It's a really good idea, honestly. For both of them.

The girl who isn't Stacia-in-the-past goes back to the car and returns with a gas can, which is promptly emptied over the dumpster's contents. Present-Stacia sighs.

"See, I've made those points already. He seriously almost died here, and the only concession he made is that now he texts me when he's hunting instead of me finding out when I text him to ask if I can come over and raid his fridge. I swear, that boy thinks he was born under a full moon."

...Whoops. Shouldn't have said that part out loud. Maybe Sam won't ask...?

"That's because boys are stupid." Sam is a boy. He's been around a lot of boys. He feels qualified to say this.

He does give her a side-eye, then looks back to the dumpster. "I looked it up once. I was born near a new moon. Not that I have any idea what that means. I only know I'm a Taurus because a girlfriend was into star signs."

An invitation to explain, but noting that he HAD heard what she said, even if he didn't understand it.

"You said it, not me," Stacia says. The two blonds in front of them set fire to the dumpster's contents, which doesn't do much to improve the smell.

"...I hope there wasn't anything cool in there," says the one with longer hair.

"Once it got covered in Fomori goo, it stopped being cool," past Stacia answers her.

"Rite of Cleansing," the other girl counters, and laughs at her friend's protesting "ewww".

"You know how crazy behavior is associated with the full moon?" Stacia asks rhetorically. Just dropping the topic might as well stick a giant blinky "secret werewolf information here" sign on it, and she hates doing that. So, explanation on the fly: "It's like that. You wanna punch someone you really shouldn't? Must be a full moon. Somebody who wants to tackle things head-on when they could be evaded or dealt with another way? Must think they were born under a full moon. Get it?"

It's not a lie, it just downplays the fact that the phase of the moon under which a Garou was born defines their role in Garou society. Those born under a full moon are Ahrouns, the warriors in an entire species of warriors. They are most in touch with their supernatural Rage, most prone to flying off the handle when aggravated, most likely to shrug off a fatal wound and keep fighting.

Lilly, the girl who isn't Stacia, had been an Ahroun. It hadn't saved her.

The memory around them starts to ripple and warp, transforming into something else. Stacia's eyes go wild.

"Shit! Shit! Shit!"

He half grins at her, then his head whips back to the girls they're watching. "Fomori? The enemies of the Tuatha Dé Danann?"

Look, he makes his living knowing about the things that go bump in the night. And that includes supernatural bad guys from various cultures.

still, Sam blinks a few times at her reply, raising an eyebrow. "Impressive. A lot of people wouldn't even have spotted that as a half truth at best." But he'd been in the job way too long to take it at face value. It had the sound of something far more important than that.

When things to sideways, though, he reaches for the back of his belt, even though there's no gun there. It's just a reaction to things going weird. Hand closing on nothing, he turns his attention to Stacia. "That bad?"

The Fomori explanation and Sam seeing through her half-true answer about what she meant about the full moon is a little less important to Stacia at the moment than trying to keep the memory where it is instead of where she knows it's going. She can already hear the crying through the sound of flames and see the edges of what's to come pushing through what currently is.

She can't stop it though, whatever the trigger point was to kick this off, it's already passed.

Sam finds himself indoors this time, in a hand-constructed wooden hall; or if not hand-constructed, someone's gone to a great deal of expense making it look as though it was built by hand. The walls are lined with names and what are clearly memorials to the dead, none of them quite the same.

At one end of the hall, two wolves are lying in state. One is reddish, even in the dim light, and the other looks almost like a husky or a malamute other than it's size. Between them is a girl, her brown hair matted and tangled and half-fallen from its crown braids, wrapped in a blanket and weeping out a broken heart. Her body shakes with it, every sob torn from her center with an agonized convulsion.

Beside Sam, Stacia flinches, pulling in on herself as grief casts its shadow over her face.

Like the walls, the girl at the end of the hall has limbs made of unfinished wood, too.

It's automatic to move to protect her, even though there doesn't seem to be any fighting. But, then, he knows all too well that there doesn't need to be actual fighting for it to be bad.

And it definitely is. He doesn't know exactly what's going on, but he reaches over to place a supportive hand on the back of her shoulder. Just a light touch so she remembers she's not alone. "I'm sorry."

"Your condolences are appreciated," Stacia says dully. She doesn't look up at him, but she doesn't flinch at his touch either. "The people responsible are dead now, but that only makes it a little better."

She takes a shaky breath. "The gray one is Lilly," she says. "She was the other blonde you just saw. The red one is Bares-His-Fangs." She does finally look at Sam, muscle twitching in her jaw, eyes raw wounds in her grief. "They were good people. She liked hamburgers and making friends and protecting people. He liked teaching people and scaring the pants off of creeps and destroying drug labs in the woods."

She takes another breath and let's it out, more steady this time. "You're smart, I imagine you've noticed they're wolves. I'd appreciate it if you didn't let that get out. It's not that I don't trust the rest of the rig crew, but you know how secret underground societies are big on keeping their secrets."

He raises an eyebrow at her. "I already knew about you being a werewolf. It's not exactly a massive surprise to find out that there are others in your world."

He...hadn't quite twigged that she might be talking about the fact that they were dead and still wolves, but it might eventually.

Looking back to the bodies, Sam nods. "They sound like they were great people. The world needs more of that, not less."

Stacia rolls her eyes at him in the most teenage-girl manner possible.

"You know what, that's my bad," she says, perhaps with more sarcasm than strictly necessary -- she uses it to bleed off Rage sometimes. "We were just talking about how boys are dumb."

If he weren't over a foot taller than her, she'd flick him in the ear.

"They're dead and they're not human, Sam. That's what I'm talking about." A beat. "Which I probably shouldn't have been so bitchy about when I'm asking a favor from you, that's my bad too."

The eyebrow crawls a little further up, but Sam doesn't say anything to the sarcasm. He's been around Dean far too long for that to affect him that much.

Still, he does consider that as he looks back to the wolves. "So. More werehuman than wolf? I haven't heard about it before, but we've already established that our brands of werewolves are different."

Things waver a second as he thinks about his own world's werewolves. Not that he entirely notices, half lost in thought.

He does snap aware as the room changes from rough hewn wood to a modern apartment. Impossible to tell where, of course, but a woman and two men sit there, one of them obviously a much younger Sam, with a gentler, almost puppyish face.

The older Sam pales, sucking in a sharp breath. "Oh no. No, not this. You really don't need to see this."

The conversation that they're witness to isn't easy. Nor is the ending. Though Sam is at least able to wrench his mind away from it before the actual shot takes place. His jaw clenches, shoulders gone tight before he tilts his head to try to loosen them up. "Sorry. That...my mind wandered."

Edited (Added Sam's memory) 2020-08-16 20:41 (UTC)

"My parents are humans," Stacia says. "Theirs are -- or were -- wolves. We meet in the middle."

She tenses when the world changes around them, arm extending in Sam's direction out of protective reflex. She pauses when everything settles on something that definitely isn't one of her memories.

"...Huh," she says. Then, as Sam wrenches his mind away before he has to make the shot, "I'm sorry. That wasn't a fair thing for her to ask you to do."

"Fair or not, somebody had to do it." Dean would have, certainly. His brother would have done anything he could to save Sam pain, especially right then. "We'd..." A pause as Sam works through what he needs to say here. "We'd slept together. Somehow, she knew enough not to attack me, but went out and somebody else died. Basically, shit choices all around."

"Instinct will do that," Stacia says. "Maybe she could smell herself on you, and that was enough to classify you as neither threat nor prey. Still, I'm sorry she asked you to do that. It's hard finding out you're a monster, but asking someone else to carry the burden of making sure you don't hurt anyone isn't...well, that's not the point here, what's done is done. I can see why you'd prefer doing it rather than your brother, though."

If it had been her in Sam's shoes, she'd had preferred to take responsibility for it rather than risk resenting the person who took it in her stead.

Sam lets out a breath through his nose and nods. "Dean...he's been doing this longer than I have. Knew before I did about everything that's out there in my world. He's a better guy than he thinks he is. And I..."

Sam pauses a moment, doing his best to keep the world around them steady and blank. "Believe it or not, it was a more innocent time for both of us. Over the next few years, we'd learn a lot of stuff that made more sense of what had come before, even if it all really, really sucked."

"He sounds like he's a good older brother," Stacia says. "Mine would flip if he knew what I was dealing with on a regular basis."

Now that she's thinking about it, she can feel the memories stirring under the surface. She could probably pick one out and show it to Sam, something with Nick or Mila. Something normal.

"The early days are always like that, huh?" she asks rhetorically. "At first, all you've got to go on is what other people say. Then you start understanding it yourself and you start being able to follow the logic and pick up where things are going, even if they are going straight to Hell."

He really doesn't need to be thinking about Dean and Hell in the same instance, so Sam does his best to clamp down on any and all memories. Can't keep the effort of that off of his face, but he's pretty sure that Stacia would understand.

"I'm not sure that logic was ever part of the way our lives went," he admits after a moment, grimace fading a bit when things don't start wobbling around them. "Pretty sure that went out the window with the demons."

"Demons are the worst," Stacia agrees. "Fun fact, when my kind of werewolf encounters them, we get extra murder-y."

She glances around at the blank landscape. "Does this feel...unstable to you? Because I'm feeling like if we don't pick a memory to hang out in, we might end up in one we don't want."

He looks around and makes an indistinct sound before they find themselves both in the back of an 1967 Chevy Impala, driving down an unnamable back road on a summer evening. For once, the music is turned down, the two men in the front seat lost in their own thoughts.

The passenger is obviously Sam, though a much younger Sam, skinny with floppy hair, wearing a hoodie and slouched down in a way that couldn't be very comfortable, but looking out the windshield with a contented expression. The driver's hair is more closely shorn, a dark blond to Sam's brown, wearing a leather jacket and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel along with the beat.

The backseat could be scrunched, but it's memory so Sam is still comfortable here. "Anyway, yeah. Demons are definitely the worst. We've had to deal with them a lot over the years."

Stacia glances between the Sam riding shotgun and the Sam in the back seat with her and grins.

"It's amazing what a hairstyle will do, huh?" she says, not really expecting an answer. She settles in herself, half-turning in her seat.

"I was lucky enough to only have to deal with them a couple times before they all got sucked back out of our reality to where they belong," she said. "One of them tried to murder me, but then, so did an angel. Well, Nephilim, technically. Ramiel." She shakes her head. "Murder-y bastards. And that's me saying it."

"My brother makes fun of me all the time for my hair care regime." Which he's somehow managing to keep up even on the Rig. Don't think about it too much.

He sighs, leaning back. "Yeah, no. I absolutely agree with you about the angels being murder-y bastards. Though we should probably not go down that road too far. This is an easy enough memory for me to keep going, but it could get rocked."

Invasion!

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