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saltineofswing · 3 months

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Hello! I'm the person that made the rant post about my dislike on the lack of natural dichotomy of the Pyramids and Traveler since the introduction of the Veil that turned into a whole thing. You mentioned a lack of pulp in your reblog and it's stuck with me since then. I wasn't familiar with the term and did some research on it, but I still don't think I get what it is. I tried looking it up but a lot of articles and videos I could find explain the history of pulp and its influences in modern day sci-fi but not necessarily what it is, especially in a way that would give me context to better understand your reblog. If it's not too much trouble, can you explain a little more what the "pulp" is that destiny is lacking?

I’d be happy to try and give you a little more insight into what I feel are important tenets of pulp as a genre/concept! I decided this might be a good opportunity to talk a little about it generally because I am really feeling its absence generally in the past couple years, so I included some historical backing which you’re probably already familiar with – hope that’s OK.

I did a little digging personally, for some good places to familiarize oneself with the basics of pulp as a concept and/or genre. It was nice to re-affirm some info that I’ve felt secure in holding as true without a ton of evidentiary support, and I also learned some cool new stuff as well! I think a good place to start would be to link to the TV Tropes page about pulp magazines, which does a pretty good job of explaining the origins and foundational aspects of the concept in a way that is easy to digest. It also has a lot of examples available to peruse. I also found this cool article on the golden age of pulps, which is an interesting read.

This got long, so below the cut!

To reiterate, the original ‘pulp’ terminology and vibe comes from early/mid-20th century magazines, which were cheap and easy ways to access genre fiction and action/adventure stories before comics, paperback novels, and TV/movies were really on the scene. Pulp magazines spanned a very wide array of genres, but because of a lack of appreciation for the medium, a majority of pulp magazines and aspects of what I would consider to be pulp as a genre have been allowed to fall into obscurity. There are places where I feel it is particularly obvious, especially the superhero genre (don’t get me started we’ll be here all week) but also in fantasy and science fiction – a term which was, in fact, coined by Hugo Gernsback, an editor for pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

They were cheap to make, cheap to buy, and easy to serialize; they could be really schlocky, crass, and unpolished. They could also be fucking incredible! The Shadow is a good example of an early pulp property with screaming highs and frankly peat-bog lows. Lovecraft published a lot of what is considered to be his ‘best work’ in Weird Tales! Conan the Barbarian, too! They kind of came out of the gate with a somewhat negative connotation associated with ‘low-brow’ forms of literature like dime novels, but where other magazines of the time tended to incorporate non-fiction articles and photography, pulp mags tended to be fiction stories only – short stories, or longer stories split into serialized chapters. Early on, not many of them had art, though with the advent of comic books that changed (you could argue that books like Creepy and Eerie are direct offspring of early pulp mags). Similar to what Weekly Shonen Jump does with manga.

If you think of a genre as a toolbox, pulp is a box full of tools that function fine alone, but excel at assisting the function of other toolboxes. I would almost liken ‘pulp’ to the concept of ‘camp’, which are also two concepts that can and do overlap with a high degree of synergy. Pulp has its own foundational attributes that are distinct from camp – for example, camp is gay relies a lot more on its self-awareness, at being able to wink at the viewer or participant, and telling you ‘yeah, we know it, but isn’t it fun?’ Pulp, on the other hand, is the (no pun intended) straight man counterpart to this aesthetic sensibility; pulp is at its best when it is being completely earnest. The quippy lines and dramatic proclamations are meant to be taken on their face. Nowadays it’s the kind of stuff that memes are made of – ‘That Wizard Came From The Moon’, ‘I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain’, ‘Whether we wanted it or not, we’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars’. Saying shit that has no explanation with your whole chest. Trying to be cool on purpose, the ultimate cringe move.

Nowadays I think that this kind of thing has mostly died out of modern media, but the counter-motion is still prevalent in mainstream superhero movies. A good example is the ‘Would you have preferred ~YeLlOw SpAnDeX~’ line from the OG X-Men movie. Hey dickhead! The yellow spandex is cool if you, the guy making the movie, believes its cool! Crucially, while a lot of modern superhero stuff is quippy and irreverent, it often uses these tropes in a self-aware or cynical manner – afraid of being earnest, committing the aforementioned cardinal sin of trying to look cool on purpose.

(God damn it, I’m talking about superheroes again. Sorry. Before I get back on task this is why I loved the recent Moon Knight run so much; Jed MacKay is NOT afraid to have the characters say some absolutely batshit thing but it comes off as so, so cool. And yes, a little cheesy.)

And then, where modern sci-fi typically has an ultra-detailed explanation on-hand, I think a lot of early pulp stuff just… didn’t. Ask a sci-fi property for an explanation on, oh I don’t know, ‘where did these super-humanoid sapient machine warriors come from’ and it will likely have a molecule-deep explanation of how those unnamed machine people were created. Ask a fantasy property for an explanation on the same and it might say, ‘no’. It’s not that a pulp-leaning property won’t give you the answer to that question… it just might not have it. The ‘why is it/how is it’ is not as important as the ‘what is it’ and ‘how is it relevant’; a writer had a limited amount of page real estate, as multiple features were typically crammed into a single magazine. Even if a feature was serialized, much like television episodes (before the binge trend), one had to keep information digestible, and not too reliant on a prior or later edition that a reader might never see.

Explanations tended to be in service of an emotional beat, or to a theme, versus as a grounding agent to immerse a reader in the world. For the record I don’t necessarily think of either method as being better or worse, and heavy worldbuilding can still utilize pulp as a veneer or filter to engage audience expectations in different ways. Pulp stuff relies a lot on suspension of disbelief without utilizing a rigid lore-based framework to – though, you know, your story/setting still has to have its own internal logical consistency.

(I feel that it is important to note, as a partial consequence of the time period in which these magazines were being made, and when pulp fiction was most heavily consumed, xenophobia and racism are also heavily present in pulp works. I think everybody knows at this point about how much Lovecraft sucked but it’s a valuable example of how a lot of ‘fear of the unknown’ in that time was transliterated into ‘fear of the different’, in general but especially relating to genre fiction. If you decide to explore material in this genre, in this time period, be forewarned! Some of it was pretty glaring!)

So, let me tie some of this stuff to my previous statements about Destiny. I think that Destiny is an excellent example of how pulp tropes, aesthetic, and genre conventions can be used to enhance and streamline a setting… and how stripping too much pulp away can have a detrimental impact on the depth of a narrative.

The original narrative and worldbuilding of Destiny drew very heavily on pulp aesthetics to create a foundation, both in its appearance and its lore. The ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ was a period of time in the mid-20th century that sort of transitioned sci-fi out of pulp magazines and into its own thing, but the foundational structure of science fiction at this time was still heavily pulp-influenced. I think this is very well-represented by the portrayal of Venus as a ‘garden’ (jungle) world, very lush and with sulfurous and sometimes acidic rains. Before advancements in astronomical technology went and fucked everything up for us writers, Venus’s opaque cloud-covered atmosphere was impenetrable enough that there could be anything under there – and a popular portrayal of Venus was a muggy, humid, rain-heavy world that sometimes also included lush jungles. In Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain (WHICH ran in Planet Stories, a pulp mag, by the way!) this portrayal is a central obstacle to the narrative; it’s also used in Heinlein’s novel Space Cadet.

The color scheme that Destiny uses for Venus also matches a common color scheme for Venus in this era – see this cover for Fantastic Adventures. Visually, I think that this comparison between the postcard that went out with the D1 limited/collector’s edition and this Planet Stories cover for The Golden Amazons of Venus demonstrates the influence, at least regarding terrain and biome.

In fact, I think that you can see from this Eververse postcard – which could have been peeled off of any era-appropriate paperback novel – that the influence goes bone-deep. Destiny even refers to humanity’s halcyon age as ‘The Golden Age’.

(Below: Is this image from Destiny dev, or a science fiction paperback from the 60s? Who knows! I know. It’s Destiny.)

In the modern era of Destiny storytelling, though the visual elements of the universe remain largely rigid relative to this early framework, the pulp underpinning of the narrative has been largely left behind. The original game’s story, and the stories of subsequent DLCs, felt very pulp-inspired – this ranged from ‘sort of effective’, like in House of Wolves, to ‘game-savingly effective’, like in The Taken King. Pulp lends itself to straightforward conceptual executions, and brisk narratives, because of its roots as short-form literature. The narrative of D1 was simple and to the point; Light good, Dark bad, humanity is in the shit, think you can kill a god? The surrounding world scaffold was rich but not deep. As I like to say, sometimes a river can be wide but shallow. This is not a commentary on its quality – something can be good but not complex, and IMO, sophistication is not necessarily synonymous with complexity. Destiny managed to pull off a trick that many high-quality pulp stories employ: it made the river look deeper than it was. This is the whole reason that Lovecraft’s oeuvre has the staying power it has: other writers got to play in the space because it felt very deep, even though the stories themselves were fairly straightforward.

I also don’t mean to say or accidentally imply that ‘morally grey storytelling cannot exist within pulp stories’, because that would probably get me torn apart; that’s just not the kind of straightforward foundation that the original Destiny was built on. ‘It is what you see, but what you see could be anything’, you know? The problem that began to muddy the waters in the Destiny narrative is that they started to say, ‘You know, actually, it ISN’T what you see’.

Tentpole narrative additions to the Destiny 2 game employ varying levels of pulp. As I said in the other post, the Hive have a potent pulp influence built into their foundational coding, and so subsequent portrayals of the Hive as a main antagonist have higher degrees of pulp genre naturally present in the narrative – it’s hard to separate the two of them. Shadowkeep and The Dark Below draw strongly on the ‘sword and sorcery’ convention, a subgenre of fantasy that is a heavy (perhaps 1:1) blend of fantasy and pulp; think Conan, or Elric of Melniboné (who, hey! Showed up in a novella feature, in an issue of Science Fantasy magazine, named… THE DREAMING CITY). The Witch Queen leaned away from pure sword and sorcery and more towards noir/detective pulp – though, I think, TWQ is a good example of the pulp slippage in its narrative, resulting in some more bland moments and things that feel ham-fisted in a bad way. Part of it, I think, is the need to make these expansions ‘long’ and complicated without making the player feel like they’re slogging; in a more pulp-forward TWQ narrative, the reveal that Savathûn is actually NOT evil-aligned and is a potential ally would come much earlier in the story, and the central mystery would be MORE about ‘what the fuck is she trying to do/prevent’, leading to the Witness reveal as the centerpiece of the finale and the ‘solution’ to the central mystery.

The decision to start retroactively appending more complex connections between disparate pieces of content naturally leads to a reduction of pulp prominence, in my opinion. If you imagine Destiny as a vessel that is mainly full of three component liquids – Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Pulp – you can say that adding more of one genre pushes out another to make room. You can always pour more of one genre in to re-balance, but in response to increasing levels of sci-fi the narrative seems reticent to reintroduce pulp back into the mix, instead favoring fantasy. But another problem is that once you take it out, Pulp is really hard to put back; once you solidify and unionize world-lore, every subsequent retcon risks diluting and destabilizing that world-lore until a) nobody cares about it anymore and b) it stops being mutable at all, and becomes sludge.

The lore behind the existence of the Exo was originally very pulp, with no real explanations given for exactly what they were and where they came from, and how they attained sapience. Early hints that Cayde and a few other Exo having once been human didn’t preclude other Exo from having other origins – for example, implications that Exo war-frames eventually achieved sapience as a result of the ‘Deep Stone Crypt’, and that they were originally simple AI-equipped warriors designed and overseen by Rasputin to minimize human casualties. This early mystique around the origins of the Exo is classically pulp: we don’t need to know how the hyper-advanced robots were made, we just need to know what they are, why they are relevant to the story. It allows You, The Player, to engage with it at whatever level you want. In a game where You, The Player, are also being asked to step into the role of You, The Protagonist, this is beneficial to engagement for people (like me!) who like to think too much about the backstory of the your-name-here protagonist on-screen. It is also beneficial to not distracting the player with conflicting information, or accidentally contradicting previously-established lore.

Enter Big-Head Bray. The Beyond Light-era explanation of why Exo were created and how they were made is a retroactive nuclear strike on the Exo lore; it strips away a lot of flexibility and thematic richness from the concept of the Exo, shoehorns them into a single narrow use case, and directly conflicts with early-game Exo lore implying their connections to Rasputin (which they then had to go back and hastily shoehorn back in later) or existence as war machines for the Collapse. If D1 lore is wide but shallow, the D2 lore is narrow but deep. Just because something has a lot of ‘depth’, I.E. many layers to traverse before you reach foundational bedrock, it doesn’t make it good.

Same thing with the Fallen. Season of Plunder felt to me like an attempt to reintroduce pulp genre back into the setting, but it fell flat because of two reasons: it didn’t really want to be pulp, and it was more concerned with its tethers to the science-fantasy exterior world than it was with creating its own cohesive narrative. Why was Mithrax doing evil pirate shit when he was young? Because he comes from a race of fucking evil space pirates! It Does Not Need To Be More Complex Than That! But the exculpation of pulp from the D2 narrative means that if Mithrax doesn’t have a good enough reason, WRT the larger narrative, it would be a glaringly obvious plot hole. By Plunder, Destiny had already undertaken the task of filling out the Eliksni lore with sympathetic science-fantasy excuses for why they were trying to exterminate humankind – the more earnest, pulp-forward explanation would just be that desperate, hurt, suffering people will do desperate things, hurt people, and may perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

Oy. There’s a lot you COULD get into. How the Destiny macro-narrative seems to be decaying the rigidity of good and evil in its original lore vs. how the micro-narrative is obsessed with trying to recapture that good/evil dichotomy in order to give players a reason to like the main characters. How the determination to connect and explain everything has resulted in a general flattening of the background lore, and the subsequent trivialization of many things the game included in earlier iterations of the narrative/lore. How the narrative has basically nothing to do with the Vex because they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to explain them too much while simultaneously not altering the foundational lore of the race, meaning there were too many things they can no longer do without retconning again.

Overall, I guess I will just end by saying that many of the things that Destiny is CURRENTLY doing, feels like the game is straining to rip the part of it out which proudly asks its audience not to think too hard about sweeping, dramatic statements that built a lot of the things people love about the game’s setting and narrative… and in doing so, is just ripping itself to pieces.

#More lore! MORE LORE!#dinklebot sitcom #northbot sitcom #destiny 2 #Pulp genre #Genre discussion #Sorry this got so long! I’m not used to writing this kind of big essay #it may not be super coherent but whaddya gonna do

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saltineofswing · 7 months

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The third part of the commission I did for Otter. Personally, I think this speaks for itself ;)

#Eris Morn #Toland the Shattered #destiny 2 #fantasy art #my art #dinklebot sitcom #northbot sitcom #Commissions

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saltineofswing · 7 months

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After posting this chapter of Destiny AU fic, I was commissioned by Otter to draw the three members of Eris's fireteam! This was a lot of fun, though designing an Exo head for Eriana from scratch was quite a challenge. Each of them also has the knife they fashioned out of their Ghost's shells.

The central conceit of the AU is that certain key events have changed, and characters' roles have been inverted – in this case, Eris was the only member of her fireteam who didn't escape the Pit, leading to this sequence (pt. 1) of events (pt. 2, above) that take place (pt. 3) during Season of Savathun's Crystal Spa Retreat.

#Eriana-3 #Sai Mota #Vell Tarlowe #my art #fantasy art #dinklebot sitcom #northbot sitcom #destiny 2

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saltineofswing · 1 year

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APOSTATE

Destiny 2 || 3200 Words

In Another World, In Some Ways Like The One We Know...

The dark cavern did not smell like rotting chitin and decomposing muscle fibers, the fetid stench of rusted iron and maggot earth, like most other Hive abodes Toland had inhabited. Rather it smelled like rain-damp wood and old parchment; Toland found either smell pleasant, but it was easier to breathe around the latter while traversing physically, and so he was glad for Ish-Mulmir’s preference for self-grooming.

“O Thief-Of-Moths,” Toland began, sweeping through the gossamer curtain of fabric and out of the swirling eddies of lunar wind, “One who they call Throne Watcher, and also Shadow of Eleusinia, and also the Clever Blade, and also Ish-Mulmir. I have come to seek parlay with you. It is the agreed-upon time; the Earth is in high repose and the Sun has turned its hateful eye from this hollow place, and we have such grim and wonderful work to do.” He steepled his fingers together as he stepped deeper into the den, his bone-crested robes sweeping the footsteps away behind him.

From deeper in the cave came a sound like parchment rasping over bone, and a sound of mandibles clattering together, like many sets of chattering teeth.

Brazenly walking into a Hive den amounted to certain death for most Guardians, Warlock or not, but this was no ordinary Hive den. Toland courteously wiped his booted feet on the mat set just inside the curtain covering Ish-Mulmir’s den, which said ‘WELCOME’ emblazoned in bright green letters. The rug beyond the mat was mostly clean, though time had tarnished the once bright ivory color – especially at the edges – and worn the fibers so that it looked somewhat like a large, ovular map of antiquity. The trinkets of many a bored patrolling Guardian hung along the walls among many whittled bones which dangled from the ceiling, strung into intricate charms, like gruesome wind chimes. Additional gossamer curtains, some sheer and some opaque, hung here and there like sheets of spiderweb, breaking the space into neat little sections.

Against the stove leaned a long, thin blade, carved of the longest bone of some unknowable thing.

A curtain – opaque – in the back of the den curled aside and Ish-Mulmir stepped through. She was not so tall as a Knight or Wizard, though she stood taller than an Acolyte and cut a more imposing figure. At first, many assumed that the fine and detailed fabric that draped around her shoulders and obscured her body from view was simply a very nice, Hive-themed robe or cloak; in fact they were wings, patterned like a moth designed by time to evoke some alien landscape, and they slid behind her with an insectoid shiver to rest at her back as she wove gracefully between furniture and approached him.

“Toland,” the creature rasped in crooked Hive dialect, like stones grinding together between two hands. “I’ve told you that you don’t need to do that every time we meet.”

“It’s not for you,” Toland replied coyly. “How have you slept, Ish-Mulmir?”

“Poorly,” Thief-Of-Moths said. “Ever more my dreams turn towards the Reef, the Shore, and the city beyond. I dream of her, caught both there in a place with no ceiling, and also near to us and the Earth, where the Queen’s portal connects our two worlds with void-silk.” Her movements were bird-like and darting as she traversed her den to her stove, where a pot sat simmering. The stew within had no odor that Toland could detect, but as Ish-Mulmir’s bony face passed over the thick broth she seemed satisfied by what she smelled. “Will you stay for lunch?”

“I’m afraid I am anxious to carry out our chore for the day,” Toland said, declining with a graceful tip of his head. The eye that sat in the middle of his forehead blinked between wavelengths of light, and the den exploded with colors – pheromone marks that revealed themselves like ink under ultraviolet light. Reds and greens and bright phosphorescent yellow-whites, cordoning off areas of specific purpose. “My appetite will be along shortly after our business is concluded.”

“After, then,” Ish-Mulmir agreed; she brought the wooden spoon delicately to her mouth, her mandibles clicking together, and her teeth scraped the wood.

Since the Young Wolf had taken Ish-Mulmir to the Librarian and purged the chronology of Worm-blackened corruption from her genetic history, Toland had noticed many healthful changes in her. Her tongue was dry and crisp, curled delicately, as opposed to wet and swollen like a maggot; her chitin was no longer cracked and flaky, and had begun to grow a sparse, bristly fur; her wings, of course, had filled in beautifully with feathery insect scales over the patches of scarred leather that had once marred them like a skinned animal made into a coat. Toland knew that she could not be Krill, for those creatures had been extinct for many eons – but the body that had been parsed out of alternate timelines and re-evolved biology was not Hive, either, not quite. Vex technology, stolen and repurposed or otherwise, was not in his area of expertise.

Her bony face turned towards him, and he reflected that many Guardians probably still saw little else but the Hive in her gaunt features and Lich-like complexion. She was still quite alien, though that did not preclude her from beauty. “Have you spoken to the Vanguard about what must come next?”

“Yes, Ikora has been enlightened to what we discovered during our last ritual,” Toland said. “The crystal – for now – remains mostly dormant. If what Savathûn told us is true, and it almost certainly is not, freeing her is going to be the difficult part of this entire affair.”

“Asûr-Ïst-Alam-Kost,” Ish-Mulmir said, as she often did after the Witch Queen’s name was mentioned; there was no easy translation into the common tongue that Toland had figured out for this oft-repeated phrase, but he likened it closest to ‘Keep her name to yourself’. It was an honorific and a warning and a disparagement at once. “And what of Osiris?”

Toland sneered slightly, though his intent had been to smile. “The old master Vanguard is busy with other things. Jin has enlisted he and the Saint in his investigations into he who calls himself ‘Drifter’. Unfortunately, this is not the only area in strife in the system. But he gave me his blessing, for whatever that is worth, and assured me that the Guardians could handle it. As if I didn’t already know that.”

He hadn’t come deeper into the den than a few steps past the welcome mat, and that proved to be fortuitous; he usually didn’t mind shuffling through the curtains, but he also usually didn’t need to worry about them getting tangled in his ungainly arms and legs. Ish-Mulmir slunk through her den towards him with a basket of woven Earth-grasses under her arm, full of bone shards and woven leather tassels. Devrim had gifted her a bottle of wine as a housewarming present, but she had kept its delivery vessel instead. “Let us go outside, to the circle,” Ish-Mulmir said. “And hope that the Guardians have cleared the opposition.”

Toland sometimes thought the crooked light that the Moon received from the Earth had become more natural to him than the proper light of the sun on his homeworld above. Indeed, Guardians had burned every last fleck of Hive chitin to dust by the time the two of them had made their way to the ritual circle in Sorrow’s Harbor. As they approached, the Guardians who had cleansed the area greeted Ish-Mulmir with bright and cheery pleasantries. How are you? I made you this from a piece of aluminum, do you want it? Do you need helium coils? Your wings are looking nice today. Can I have your sword? Why did you need this circle cleared again? Can I help you perform your ritual?

Toland found their brightness to be grating, like children scuffling about the feet of their teacher. He fantasized about the obscure and faintly disparaging non-sequiturs he would deliver if a Guardian tried to engage him in conversation, or dribbled some placative banality in his direction; but it didn’t matter, because none of them bothered. “Yes, yes, I am sure we all have many important things to discuss,” he finally said above the chatter of the crowd, “But I’m afraid we are on a time-table. Shoo, realm-walkers. Begone from this place, so that we may begin the ceremonies.”

The Guardians slowly dispersed, leaving Toland and Thief-Of-Moths to their business, crafting the ritual circle beneath the peaking light of the Earth.

“You profess to loathe their affections,” Ish-Mulmir said with a shrewd cant of her head, “but their disinterest and mistrust still stings you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Toland sniffed.

“Very well. But I think they would not balk at your presence if you would only sing them a less bitter song, O once-shattered. I know you have the notes.”

Toland gripped the simply-wrapped hilt of the silvery blade that always sat against his hip, tucked into his belt. The metal was never cold against his skin, as if Guren supported him even in this state. “I reserve my sweeter songs for the few who have already heard them,” Toland said, and thought of its three matching mates.

“Yes – I am surprised that Sai Mota is not here,” Ish-Mulmir said. She began to place the bone shards in proper sequence, stacking them into the appropriate runes they needed. “Did you tell her that we were performing the final ritual?”

“Sai Mota does not always know what is best for her,” Toland said. “Nor do I, which is why I did not invite her here. This requires the kind of precision one cannot find at the tip of a dagger.”

“She is going to be very cross with you.”

So be it, Toland thought to himself, and turned his attention to completing the runes. So be it. She would forgive him when he had finally achieved their mutual goal.

When the last rune was lain in place the bones shivered and snapped together as if magnetized. The ritual circle flexed and groaned as Toland and Thief-Of-Moths took their respective places of power and began to guide the spell. Toland felt an exhilarated rush of energy race through him and lamented, silently, that Guren was too dead to feel it. The lamentation fed the circle. Toland lamented that Omar had been reduced to a simple munition. The lamentation fed the circle. Toland lamented that Eriana and Vell had given up on their quest and left him behind. The lamentation fed the circle. More than anything he lamented that even after all this time, and everything they had shared, and how desperate she was to see this mission through, he continued to fail Sai Mota. The lamentation fed the circle.

“O Witch Queen, God of Liars and Deceit,” Ish-Mulmir said, “We call you to this mortal place, an act of parlay, between the dulled edges of two great scimitars. We invoke the right of communion and have brought you tithe.” Toland closed his eyes to listen to Ish-Mulmir’s song with more clarity and focus. Hive had two voices, he had discovered long ago; a voice for speaking to kin, and a voice for speaking to God. The former was difficult for a human to articulate. The latter, impossible, and rarely heard in any way that a Guardian could hear. So Toland listened as Ish-Mulmir sang, calling to Savathûn in twin crisp and resonant tones that twined into a clear, wheedling tremolo.

Then the roil of magic snapped taut like a cable, and Toland was nearly thrown from his feet as the magic bucked and strained under the weight of a new presence. Three pinpricks of light appeared in the air over their heads, and Ish-Mulmir fell silent – she would not speak in the true presence of Savathûn, Toland knew that. But she had done her part. The pinpricks stretched and widened until they merged, and through a large oval aperture Toland beheld another land.

The crystal hung with dreadful weight suspended in midair somewhere in the stone halls of the Dreaming City. It was, save the crystal, an empty room to anyone without the requisite number of eyes to properly glean its occupant. Savathûn’s phantom consciousness paced the confines of her prison cell, slowly orbiting the crystal; in its twisted facets Toland could just barely make out the shape of a courtly bow. Within, Toland thought, was not the body of a Hive god. Though he could not be positive, and though hope chafed him like bone plates, within the crystal was Eris Morn.

“Well well, the aspirant one. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps I had seen the last of you after a week went by with no call. How long has it been, Toland?” Savathûn’s voice purred in his ear, a false human croon that many mistook for mockery. Toland never heard mockery in Savathûn’s voice; only temptation. And occasionally – though he would never tell her, for it would ruin what little power over her that he possessed – longing. “You look pale. And fleshy.”

“It has been some months,” Toland said, steeping his fingers again and providing Savathûn with a graceful smile. “I decided to take the mortal vessel out today to meet you. Wearing my best seemed fitting, now that our time together is reaching its end.”

“A paltry threat, Toland, I know you can do better than that.” Savathûn tutted him coyly. “Mara Sov feeds me five a day, each more bitter and angry than the last, and I admit that I wish she were more imaginative. Like you. I find it quaint that any of you think my death is on the table as an outcome of this little sleepover. I don’t think you know what that even means.”

“It is not you who defines death in this place,” Toland said to the Witch Queen, his voice lofty and pointed like a blade. “It is we, in the low places. If you wish to truly let your words become law, you’re welcome to come join us in learning the art of looking upward.”

“Ah, Toland,” Savathûn sighed, “You are nothing if not consistent. Does it still sting you to be so rejected?” She let her phantasmal fingertips brush the surface of the crystal. Ripples of light crept like veins through the stone where they touched. “Or does it sting you more that I have her, and you do not?”

“I don’t see why I have to choose.”

“You cannot save her,” Savathûn said innocently. “She is not yours to save.”

“It’s not about ownership. I own nothing, and I know nothing, and that is my greatest power,” Toland replied. He was not angry; he was, instead, clever. “I can tell that your plans are constructed upon the head of a pin, and your focus is wholly bent towards balance. You think yourself vulnerable in different ways from us, but in this we are the same: you stand on a precipice above a deep and black abyss, and you cannot afford to fall in. Without balance, you have nothing, O great and powerful liar.“

Savathûn hummed in thought at that, and that more than anything else gave Toland pause. That she considered anything he said made the hairs prickle on the nape of his neck as if she had threatened him with some great unkindness, and his mouth tilted into a lopsided black gash across the pale skin of his face. He blinked his eyes, one at a time, and tried to decide through the silence what it meant to him that she was taking him seriously. Some trick? She did love to watch mortals squirm. A calculated maneuver designed to shatter his repose? Well, it had worked. Or maybe…

“I am not sure if that is true,” Savathûn finally said, though she chose her words with unusual care. “But I admit that I don’t know. I suppose it is worth examining. Thank you for your input, Toland. As always, I find your viewpoint on these matters refreshing and valuable. Now – as much as I find the company charming, I believe I have my favorite Guardian coming to visit me today for the first time in a long time. I need to rest before I entertain again – those of you with two eyes require more effort to engage. Ta for now.”

Toland did not have time to unroll his tongue from his throat and get the last word in, as Savathûn swept her hand in a placid motion as if hanging up a phone, and the portal twisted into a hundred shards and was lost. Ice raced through him like cracks in a mirror, and he felt these cracks turn warm and boil his blood at being both acknowledged and dismissed in such short order. He hissed through his teeth like a Dreg and smoothed down his robes, focusing on the poise of his motions to help keep him from losing his composure.

“Well,” he said, once his heart rate had quieted somewhat and he could no longer hear blood rushing through the space between his skin and his skull. “I must apologize for wasting your time, dear Thief of Moths. I was expecting something more concrete. She is less rattled by her circumstances than I had hoped, after depriving her of attention for so long.”

“Aiat. I am not necessarily surprised. After all, she claims to be alone – but if we are correct, she does have a cell-mate.” Ish-Mulmir’s croaking voice was almost jarring after Savathûn’s carefully-manicured mahogany buzz. Without the Witch Queen’s presence clogging the Veil, she was speaking once again.

He had been chasing her, with Sai Mota and Eriana-3 and Vell Tarlowe, since their nightmare together during the first fall of the Moon. First locked away in Crota’s personal chambers like a mounted trophy, then lost to his father’s hateful touch and very nearly Taken. The astral echoes she was able to scatter across the Ascendant Realm were like pinpricks of radiant light in the dark for him and the others and the younger Guardians that had invested themselves in her recovery. But since Oryx’s fall – since her crystal prison had been inches from being Taken – she had been silent.

Just like every time they spoke with Savathûn, Toland though of Eris, alone save for one of her most hated foes, and took some small amount of solace in the fact that they had at least saved her from Crota and Oryx’s daggered grasps. Just like every time they spoke with Savathûn, he did not think about the last time he had touched her before he had lost her. “I suppose that is true.”

“Do not despair, my friend. With the Queen and her Techeuns working from the other side, the day draws near. Savathûn cannot keep her from us for much longer; her power in this regard is stretched thin. And, of course, it is possible that she may yet keep her word.”

“One way or another,” Toland said, nodding in agreement, “At long last, we will finally bring Eris Morn home.”

#destiny #toland the shattered #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The write stuff

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saltineofswing · 1 year

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EVERY WAKING MOMENT

Destiny 2 || 3500 Words || Pt. 1 || Pt. 3

In Another World, In Some Ways Like The One We Know…

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t stab you until you’re dead,” Sai Mota said with a measured and even voice that did not betray the extreme rage boiling in her chest. Toland, with the closest approximation of meekness he could muster, accepted that he had erred in leaving Sai out of his rescue plans. He panted on the metal floor of Sanctuary’s medical ward, his nose broken, his lip split, his left eye swollen.

“I’ll stay that way,” Toland croaked.

His blood was slick and black as it drooled down his chin, and dripped from the knuckle-plate of Sai’s gauntlet. Eriana-3 and Vell watched, arms folded, from the doorway and the far corner respectively; they seemed disinterested in intervention. Toland felt rage of his own ooze up from a place in his throat. The judgement of others was like coins prickling his bony armor to him, but the fact that they dared to judge him for his mistakes – his transgressions against Sai – when their betrayal was so much greater overwhelmed even his even temper. No… it wasn’t that, he decided.

He hated them in this moment for the fact that they had even bothered to show their faces at all. No matter that he had called them, that had been as much a formality as anything. Eris Morn’s body slumbered in Sanctuary’s recuperation suite as her closest friends tore each other apart less than a hundred feet away.

Sai strode forward three large steps and buried the toe of her boot into his gut before he could stand back up; Toland grunted as he was thrown back to the ground. He rolled, dragging the jagged bone claws of his glove across the stone until green sparks lit flame across his knuckles. Sai kicked him in the face with the flat of her boot – as he floundered backwards she drew a knife from her belt and nailed his hand to the floor with it.

Toland screamed as he saw that it was the blade that had been Yuka.

With his off-hand he drew the blade that had been Guren. At this, Eriana drew the blade that had been Jax, and Vell drew the blade that had been Razor, shifting from looming passivity to be prepared in case one of them gutted the other. Sai dove on top of him and he ran the edge of Guren across her cheek to her ear, leaving a deep groove that immediately spat the same tainted, maroon blood across his face. She hissed and battered her fists against his already-bruised cheekbone, his broken nose, tried to pin his head to the ground so she could continue to bludgeon him with more ease. With one hand indisposed, Toland was forced to make a choice. Even now, even with the threat of death igniting an ancient bloodlust inside of him, even though she had just done something unforgivable to him, Toland chose Sai. He dropped Guren to the ground with an unnaturally clear clatter and slammed the side of his fist against the opened gouge in Sai’s cheek, making her yelp in surprise and pain.

They fought like Thrall over scraps of meat, while Eriana and Vell watched like Acolytes.

No words passed between them. In this way the Hive had changed them all, the speed and savage escalation of violence, the quiet and dispassion of it. The room held only the sound of Toland and Sai’s ragged breathing, their grunts of pain, the sounds of bone or metal clacking together or thudding against flesh.

Then the double-doors to the ward slammed open. Ish-Mulmir darted into the room and drew herself to her full height; Toland, alone, knew enough to clap his free hand over his ear and flatten his head against his other bicep when she drew in one sharp, whistling breath.

Eriana, Vell, and Sai Mota still had enough Guardian in them – and Ish-Mulmir enough Hive – to recoil with shock and grab for their guns. But before they could, Ish-Mulmir barked out a single, shrieking note that rang like the peal of a bell through the entire building. Her eyes, dilated to massive pale discs of glowing Ascendant light, flashed with the power of a bolt of lightning, and the same light burst from her mouth and glowed in her neck and chest, illuminating her alien veins and internal structures for a brief moment. Eriana and Vell were thrown back against the wall with breathless grunts and collapsed in heaps. Sai jerked back away from Toland as if she had been bodily struck, and grabbed her head with a cry of pain. Ish-Mulmir stepped forward and swatted her, sending her crashing through a nearby sick bed into the far corner.

“ENOUGH!” Ish-Mulmir boomed with a voice that now rattled all of Sanctuary. Her wings whipped off of her back, suddenly filling the entire room with her stature. Toland stayed low, curled into a ball, with blood trickling from his ear. “COWARDS! ALL OF YOU! Fools! This is your hour of victory! You spend it on selfish bloodletting!” Her triplicate gaze burned into Eriana and Vell. “Or, at least, the more driven among you do!”

“We didn’t come here to get engaged in these two trashing each other,” Vell said with a shakily affected dispassion; he gestured with a dismissive wave at Toland. “These two chuckle-heads haven’t kept us in the loop on any of this.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Sai groaned from the corner, rolling clumsily onto her elbows and knees.

“You came at all, and that is enough,” Ish-Mulmir said; her ire waned and her wings folded themselves back down into her cloak. “You came because you held hope in your heart, and that hope was vindicated. I allow you no room for dishonesty, Vell Tarlowe.”

“We don’t have to take this from you,” Eriana snapped. “You aren’t involved in this any more than we are.”

“You do, and I am,” Ish-Mulmir hissed. “For I am right, and also, it was my spellwright that took Eris Morn from Savathûn’s clutches. So you will listen. You are listening. You have no choice.”

There was Sword Logic in that, Toland thought. But he also knew Eriana; she would burn herself to ashes before she allowed Ish-Mulmir to get the last word. Thankfully, Ish-Mulmir was through speaking to her. She turned to him, now. “Toland,” she said, and her voice was soft and almost pleading. “You must let them in.”

“Sometimes,” Toland managed, though he could barely hear it through the blood pounding in his head, “bloodletting is necessary. To relieve… pressure.” Even in this state, Toland’s voice was unshaken.

Ish-Mulmir looked down at him with an expression that Toland could not read; the intricacies of her biology sometimes escaped him. It was withering, certainly, though it held also perhaps pity.

“I am tired of you, Toland,” she finally said, with a laborious tone of surrender. Toland felt the acute agony of this more than anything else that had been wrought upon him. She looked at Sai, then Eriana, then Vell. “I am tired of all of you.” She turned, now diminished, and began to slip back through the doorway, shutting the doors she had thrown open behind her. Even Vell hung his head. Toland wanted so dearly to call to her, to ask forgiveness, to apologize, or to beg her not to give up on him. Instead, he was silent.

“Ish-Mulmir, wait!” Sai said, and some part of Toland was glad for her desire to be loved, or how willing she was to display it. “I –“

Ish-Mulmir silenced her with an imperious glance over her shoulder. Toland allowed his face to sag as the Thief of Moths left them to themselves.

Toland rolled fully onto his side and stared with dull disinterest at his hand and the blade that had been driven through its center. The blade was aligned parallel to his hand, artfully planted between the bones of his fingers without breaking or shearing any of them. All of their blades were different; his was a spade of a dagger, neither too long nor too short, but broad and courtly. Sai, the only Hunter left of them, had fashioned hers into an artful, narrow finger of death. The pain, of course, was excruciating, and radiated through his wrist, his elbow… he could even feel it in his navel. His fingers twitched, unsynchronized, with the beat of his heart.

Sai pushed herself out of the corner and loped across the room to him. He tensed, not because he was afraid she was going to attack him again, but because he knew what she was about to do. She stooped and yanked the blade ungracefully from his hand; he felt the edge slice through the narrow inch between his second and third knuckles and emitted an involuntary, clipped groan. “Damn you, Toland,” Sai spat, wiping the blade clean on a nearby curtain.

“You attacked him first!” Vell cried; finally, Toland thought with a bitter sneer, their two betters joined them in the muck. Though it was, in truth, more like Ish-Mulmir had broken a spell, and Vell had remembered that he actually cared about the other people in the room.

“You didn’t stop me, so obviously it didn’t bother you too much!”

“Would you have listened to either of us?” Vell shoved her aside hard enough that she stumbled, and stooped to help Toland up. Eriana caught Sai and steadied her, and Toland allowed Vell to take his upper arm and lift him to his feet; he was thankful, in brief seconds, for the gentle hands of a Titan. He was unsteady on his feet after his drubbing, and folded his punctured hand to his chest. He smoothed his uninjured palm across it, and there was a sizzle of hot green magic; though he winced at the sensation of his skin burning itself back together, his wound closed up. The rest, he would let heal on their own. As penance.

“You didn’t even try.” Sai’s anger turned on Eriana and Vell, now, and Toland withdrew to the least-bright corner of the room to watch like an animal and lick his wounds. It wasn’t that Eriana or Vell felt emboldened to defend him, he was sure; rather, there had been a breach of social contract, and that meant someone was the ‘bad guy’ in the situation. Toland was used to it being him. “Honestly, I’m shocked you bothered to be here.”

“That’s not fair,” Vell puffed out his chest and set his fists on his hips. “Of course we came! You – you think we just forgot about all of this? You think we wouldn’t have helped, if we knew you two and the Young Wolf were trying to pull this off?”

“You abandoned us!” Sai bit out. “You gave up on Eris! Even when Omnigul and Crota were killed! Where were you when Toland and I were guiding the Young Wolf through the Dreadnaught? When she killed Oryx? I’m surprised you even bothered to keep your knives with you. Thought you would’ve thrown them away like you did us!”

“FUCK YOU!” Vell bellowed, his moodnoise suddenly roaring in the small room.

“YOU WEREN’T HERE!” Sai screamed back at him. Her voice was ragged and broke when she could not sustain its volume. She was mostly laconic in temperament; Toland wondered if he had heard her speak more in the last ten minutes than in the last ten years. “I never gave up on her! Toland never gave up on her! We and Ish-Mulmir have been grinding ourselves into PASTE trying to wrench her out of Savathûn’s grasp!”

“How is this about us, all of a sudden?!” Vell said, with a genuinely flabbergasted lunacy in his voice; he threw his arms out to either side and almost struck Eriana, who had been standing motionless, her posture attempting to evoke detached grace. Toland knew better. “Now you’re defending Toland? Two seconds ago you were trying to smash his skull in!”

“You stabbed him with Yuka,” Eriana said, accusatory and arch and unaccepting of any fault. Bitter. Spurned. “That’s unforgivable, Sai.”

There was a pause, then, a moment of quiet with a tensile strength insufficient for the weight it bore. Toland quailed at it. “Then he and I, at least, are even,” Sai snapped, with such breathless ferocity that Eriana was stymied for a response. Eriana turned her gaze away. The quiet glint of shame in her throatlights made Toland feel, amidst his agony, the faintest satisfaction. It was enough to unlock his throat and allow him to push words out of his mouth, though it hurt his lip. At last, an unimpeachable opportunity to condescend.

“None of us emerged from the Hellmouth whole,” Toland said, and marveled that he had not struck Eriana down in her moment of weakness. The others, too, seemed struck by this, and turned to look at him where he hid in the corner. He had eased himself down into a chair, and leaned his elbows heavily on his knees. He was so tired. The quiet stretched for a few moments more. Toland was a master in the art of choosing his words; he knew how to pick words to embarrass, to make small, to snidely placate or disparage. None of those ends would serve him here, and so he was required to truly think. With his head split as it was, the order was tall.

Sometimes, the truth was the most effective weapon. “… We have been too shy of admitting it. We are all dead, and do not know it. We have not been as one since we dragged ourselves from the Hellmouth.” He looked at the puddle of blood and the hole in the floor where Yuka’s metal flesh had bitten him, and squeezed his injured wrist. “For better or worse we are bound, the four of us. Five of us. Tethered, but straining in opposite directions. Pulling ourselves thin and spiteful. Narrowed and strained. Mistaken for power. Briefly we were close, and so the tether was mighty.” He looked up at them. “Now thin like threads of silk. Perhaps broken.”

“… No.” Eriana stepped forward, touching Vell’s shoulder, brushing Sai’s forearm. She looked meaningfully between the two of them and then approached him; he looked up into her face, ever stoic and unmoving, devoid of the blistering fire he knew roared inside of her. Or, had, once. She crouched down until she was at his eye level; he closed his eyes, and so did she, and he felt the coolness of her metal forehead press against his. “Never broken.” He heard Vell’s lumbering footfalls, felt the Titan’s hand on his shoulder, and then Eriana’s on top of his. “You are right. We should never have given up on Eris. I just…” She stood now, unable to be both physically and emotionally vulnerable in the same space. “… I was so tired of losing people.”

“We all were,” Sai said, though her voice still quavered with anger.

“I know,” Eriana said quickly, and turned to her. When she took Sai’s hands, it was with a softness and affection that she could not display to Toland. They’d never been quite that close. “The truth is… the truth is that Toland is not the only one who failed you. I did, too.”

“I mean, I think I did okay,” Vell muttered, though when Toland looked up at him with an arched brow, he squeezed Toland’s shoulder and scratched his scruffy chin in an unconvincingly noncommittal way.

“I am better than that,” Eriana said. Her tone ignited with passion. “I will make it up to you all.” Vell strode to her and patted her firmly on the back with enough force that Toland would have been jerked out of step, but Eriana took the blow in stride. She smiled at him in her mouthlights, still holding one of Sai’s hands, and then looked to Toland. He dipped his chin cautiously at her. She gave him a resolute nod, and her eyes shone with a respect that made him feel a twisting knot of different emotions.

The room was silent once more. Toland wanted to stand and go to the three of them, standing in contemplative, quiet togetherness. Comforting each other with their closeness. Recommitted to one another. Instead, he remained apart, and convinced himself that it was not in his nature to require acknowledgement, or respect, or togetherness.

“I have business,” Eriana finally said. “With the Hidden. I… I cannot stay.” She looked to Toland again. That same, new, smoldering respect was in her face. “Will you tell me when she wakes? Send for me, when she is strong enough for visitors?”

“Yes,” Toland said simply. She turned, murmured something he could not hear to Sai, and gave Vell one more affirming nod. She paused only briefly at Sai’s gaze, which still prickled with betrayal and anger. Eriana sighed. Some things, Toland thought, could not be fixed with a rousing speech. But Eriana had already dedicated herself to the task. And then Eriana left them. Just as before, but now, with the promise of return.

Vell set his hands on Sai’s shoulders. She hugged him, briefly, and tightly. “I uh… I should get back to Earth,” he managed, though his voice was awkward and uncertain. “The blueberries on the wall have been alone for almost a day, so I’m sure something’s been destroyed.” He glanced between her and Toland, then picked up his helmet from where it lay. “… The second call you make is to me,” he said meaningfully, and Sai nodded without responding.

And then there was only Sai Mota and Toland, once-shattered. She turned to face him. He did not have the strength to stand, and so she approached him cautiously. Her face was tight and pale with frustration, but he did not see loathing. She dragged a nearby chair over and plopped down in front of him, folding her arms and appraising him, the damage she had done to him. He snorted in through his broken nose; a glob of coagulated blood and mucus slid out of his sinuses and into his throat, which he swallowed thickly.

“Why?” She finally asked, and the hurt and anger in her voice made Toland close his eyes for a moment, so he could indulge in the pounding ache of his injuries.

“I didn’t trust you,” he finally admitted, and she let out a wet scoff. “I knew the architecture of the thing we were attempting. I knew that… we would need to back the Witch Queen into a corner she did not realize was there. I knew that we would need our machinations to escape Mara Sov’s imperious eye. Weaving two spells, but really three, but really, one.”

“More plainly,” Sai said, her voice clogged and her cheeks red. “Or I’ll stab you again.”

“It is as I said. I did not trust you,” he said soberly. “I didn’t trust that you would be able to… keep up. Or understand the precariousness of what we were doing.” He dragged his hand down his face, wiping blood from his lips and chin. “I thought that I was all we needed. I am sorry, Sai Mota, for underestimating you. I failed you in this way, and many others.” He lowered his head, and sneered to himself. “And I used my own angst over that to fuel the spell. I told myself it was necessary to complete the Lament. So I kept pushing you away.”

“So,” Sai said slowly, her eyes red and wet, “this was all for you, and your ego. To prove that you could.”

How true, in some ways, that was. But it was more than that. Proving he could was nothing next to having Eris back. He would have burned his soul out of his body, if it meant re-tethering Eris to hers. And more than that – he couldn’t risk that Sai would have done the same. That, in truth, was where he trusted her the least. Her compassion. If anyone should have been wasted away by the weight of their Spell, it should not be Sai Mota. He could not possibly lose Eris and Sai, after everything he had done to keep her alive.

“No. I did it for you, too,” Toland rasped. “Oh, Sai, I did it for her.” Sai’s face finally crumpled, her eyes streaming, and a sob escaped her. She threw her arms around his shoulders and cried for a time.

Toland, exhausted, bloodied, denied the relief and exultation and, yes, love he found that had wanted so badly, closed his eyes tightly and quietly allowed himself the same. He wondered, selfishly, if Ish-Mulmir would ever speak to him again – he felt bound to her, too. He hoped she would.

But only if he changed. He thought of Eris, and decided that it was a sacrifice he was already willing to make.

#Destiny #Toland the Shattered #Sai Mota #Eriana-3 #Vell Tarlowe #Eris Morn #Ish-Mulmir #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The Write Stuff

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saltineofswing · 1 year

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APOSTATE II

Love And Death || Destiny 2 || 3800 Words || Pt. 1 || Pt. 2

In Another World, In Some Ways Like The One We Know…

She was dreaming again.

The sky (was it the sky?) roiled like a drugged serpent over her head, ribbons of ichor-dark empyrea twisting lazily, drops of ink in clouded absinthe. She stood on a smooth circular plinth and somewhere, in the dark, thunder burbled as if from above the water-line. Flickers of sourceless white light illuminated her in strobing bursts at random; her skin, pale and shot through with dark veins like marble. Her hair, dark and wavy, long unkempt, like fingers of shadow that rooted in her scalp. She was not hot, nor cold, nor anything. The glassy stone was indistinguishable in temperature from the bare soles of her feet, which made her feel like she was truly drifting in the vast nothing.

She was dreaming of something.

Somewhere, a massive formless shape shifted in the dark. In its size she could not tell it for a drifting land mass or some leviathan Thing, nor how far away it was, or if it was moving towards her, or if she should be afraid of it. Light thrummed behind the mass and she felt, also as if from above the water-line, the tingle of fear in nerves that should have belonged to her.

Something was dreaming of her.

“Eris.”

Ichor – not her hair, not the empyrea of the Ascendant Plane around her, above her, below her, but directed and insidious – murmured to itself. It groaned and whispered, and slowly a languid shape contorted into this reality. Eris knew this shape. Toland, once Shattered, was equally functional (and arguably more comfortable) when his mortal flesh was left contorted into a contemplative puzzle, and his mind was walking across other realities.

“Eris,” he said again, though no mouth knit itself across the slithering dark shape that now faced her. Two long, angular arms unfurled from him, spindling fingers swirling as if he were swimming; his shoulders stretched until they were aligned into the correct corners, his torso stacking itself into the accurate curvature. His head attained definition – proud, jutting cheekbones set over a jagged jawline, horns reaching out in supplicant gestures from his temples. The way the shadows drew into his form through the back of his phantom skull approximated his voluminous black hair. His eyes slit their way across his face, three green lines that drew open just a crack to appraise her. In the negative space that his shadows would not fill, Eris saw the pattern of his tell-tale bone-forged cuirass and robes.

The precariousness of him could be mistaken for poor casting, but Eris knew that he just looked that way. She knew that she should feel some way about his presence here – joy? Irritation, anger? Fear? But she could not bring herself to the flashpoint of emotion. Instead, she blinked slowly at him. “Toland,” she finally said, as if finding a word she had been searching for. Her voice was disused, creaking and straining to recall a past grandeur. She whetted her lips, had to try twice to do so, remembered that she had a tongue and teeth after this reflexive behavior. Yes, a body had a mouth, didn’t it? “Toland.”

She thought, should I have more to say? Should she tell him something, or perhaps ask him a question? She wasn’t sure. Uncertainty should have rankled across her exposed skin, the fluttering of muscles just below her skin. Instead, she merely blinked once more, remembered that she had eyelids and eyes.

He waited, patiently, for her to address him with anything other than his name.

She made her decision. “Why are you here?” She asked, and Toland folded his long arms behind his back. Eris thought perhaps her question had taken him aback, though she was not sure why. Was it the dullness of her voice, which she, too, wondered at? Did he perceive something adversarial in the question, and did she mean it as a challenge?

“To bring you,” he said, in an interval that Eris suspected was not the gulf of time she thought it had been. “The Witch Queen’s plans are undone, at least through to the next stitch. We…” this gave him pause. Something in his hesitation made a trickle of sensation creep through her. “Her plans are undone,” he said again, but with the tone of a clarification, “but not foiled. Savathûn’s machinations outstretch even the mighty Queen Mara Sov.”

“Asûr-Ïst-Alam-Kost,” Eris said, reflexively, and she felt a little bit more like herself. Toland saw this in her, the shadows of his face approximated a familiar, crooked smile, and she again felt a little bit more like herself.

“She escaped us,” Toland continued. “Though we lost in some ways, we won in others. She did not escape without great cost to herself.”

Eris thought that she knew what he was talking about. She remembered – no, Savathûn remembered – shambling between buildings deep in the City, where nobody would recognize her as anything more than a human unsteady on her feet. She remembered, or Savathûn remembered, the way black ichor heaved from her insides and splattered the gutter. The taste of it, slick and alien and acrid. She remembered seeing, from across a crowd, Eriana as she walked with two House Exile Vandals and her Guardian fireteam towards Botza District. Eris remembered a pang of desperate longing, the overwhelming desire to escape, resignation in the knowledge that escape would never come; she could not tell if these thoughts were her own, or Savathûn’s.

She remembered, then, her ‘sudden’ and ‘inexplicable’ reappearance. A renewal of closeness with Toland, with Sai Mota, with Ikora and the Hidden. With the Guardian. She remembered, or Savathûn remembered, watching Crow and Osiris sit together and talk, remembered showing Crow the differences in the tracks of Ogres and Ascendant Knights, remembered holding Sai Mota as she cried with relief that ‘Eris’ had finally returned. She remembered Toland. At arm’s reach, but so far away. Glances, exchanged where they thought the other did not see them. ‘I missed you’, she had said to him once, ‘in the Ascendant Plane. I was trapped, and there were times when I could only think of you.’

“Yes,” Eris whispered, and reached up to touch her lips. They were not smeared with slurried bile or divine untruths. “I remember. I remember… pieces of her time. Wearing a… wearing a mask. Of me.”

Toland seemed to have no response to that, though Eris thought it was more likely he had several and wanted to voice none of them. Instead, he dipped his chin for a brief moment and said, “ask your next question, Princebane.”

“How long have I been here?” Eris said, more firmly, and focused on the power that there was to be had from knowing.

Toland paused; she did not know if it was melancholy or calculation. But instead of wondering without resolution, she found – to her dim pleasure – that she suspected. She suspected it was the former. She thought, Toland knows exactly how long I have been here. To the minute. She was not sure why that would be. But, again, she suspected.

“Years,” Toland said. “Years and years. A very long time. The world we knew is no longer, and a new one has sprang up in its place. Things are very different.” He paused a moment more, from melancholy and calculation at once. “Shin Malphur is dead,” he continued, more discreetly. “A new Vanguard oversees the Hunters.”

Eris found that she felt sorrow, and then she felt a little bit more like herself. “And Ikora?” She asked, because she could not help herself.

“Alive,” Toland replied, almost too quickly, as if to reassure her. How unlike him, she thought. Still, Eris found that she felt joy, and then she felt a little bit more like herself. Toland continued, “alive, and well, though busy. As ever, the world is a many-sided polygon, and Ikora prunes its edges, ever searching for the circle inside.”

She hummed contemplatively. The first time she had received a visitor, the first time she had truly been awake (insofar as she could be awake), it had been a Guardian – the Guardian – seeking the blade of insight, to be buried in Crota’s heart. And so, Crota died, howling, broken upon the sword. The last time she had received a visitor, the last time she had been awake, that very same Guardian sought the death of a king. And so, Oryx died, spinning into Saturn’s orbit. And still, Eris Morn remained here. Dreaming.

Eris experienced a thrill of anger at her captors – her captor. And then she felt very much more like herself. Suddenly she remembered: not the City, not Crota’s Throne-World or the Dreadnaught, where her Ascendant phantom flickered in the high places just out of Toland’s reach. She remembered everything.

All of her dreams came back to her in a vivid rush.

She remembered a dream of her and Toland, adorned in the regalia of the Hive, with small horns crawling from her scalp, trading clever barbs that were not meant to sting but to intrigue. They stood before Savathûn as subordinates, but not as slaves.

She remembered a dream of being present at Towerfall, Ghaul’s paltry attempts to thieve the Light. The way it flung Guardians across the Earth, the number of lives it cost them. She remembered a small plant in her ship, potted in sallow Venusian soil, and how much sorrow it had filled her with when it died. She remembered being a Warlock, eschewing the Praxic Order and forging her own path, the first of her world to clench ice in her fists, Toland close behind. She recalled Toland in many of these dreams. She remembered she and Toland in a situation much like her own; trapped deep in the machinations of an unknowable and malicious intellect, winding deeper and deeper into illusions and dreams and traps made to break them. Three young Not-Krill tucked against her side. Toland’s hand against the nape of her neck.

She remembered swallowing Savathûn’s worm, and killing herself, to end it. She remembered turning on humankind. She remembered surrendering to death in the Hellmouth. She remembered joining the Dredgen. She remembered living peacefully, quietly, and dying of old age.

“I could… wake up?” Eris managed; she was aware of how dreamlike and distant her words had become, lost in the mire of memory, and saw it for what it was – another trap. Another offering from Savathûn, to drag her back down when escape was within her reach. How much easier it would be to simply observe from beyond, to dream and slumber. To lose herself to herselves. To self-soothe with victories and self-flagellate with defeats. She swallowed. “I could wake up?” She said again, more firmly.

“You will wake up,” Toland responded, lofty and imperious. “I’m here. We have been working rather hard on retrieving you from Savathûn’s grasp. It would be a waste not to capitalize on our very diligent work.”

“Why did you come for me?” She asked without hesitation, instead of ‘why are you here’, because she was now acutely aware of the difference. “Anything she said to you, when you thought it was me, was misdirection. It was all a lie.”

Diligently, sphinx-like, Toland considered. Painfully, quietly, Eris anticipated.

“To see if I could,” Toland finally said. Eris felt her insides shift in a way that she could not identify, because she knew that this was true, and she felt a little bit more like herself. She let her eyes glaze slightly, staring out past him, trying to decide exactly what answer she wanted from him. Simplicity was anathema to him, but she could not place the blame solely on him.

But he was not done. “But in truth… more than that.” His shadowy form twisted for a moment like a sheet in the wind, his green eyes closed and invisible in his visage of pitch. He approached her, drawing so close that she could tell he was not nothing-cold like the Ascendant Realm. In this moment, as he reached out to her and his fingertips hovered inches from her chin, she could feel that he was warm. “In the beginning. Before we understood what we had undertaken. Before the Hellmouth. Before anything she said with your mouth. Do you remember? You came for me. Not Sai Mota or Eriana-3 or Omar Agah or Vell Tarlowe. You.” His eyes opened again. “In the beginning, it was you. And so it has been since then, hasn’t it?”

She felt herself in his gaze, bedight in power and meaning, and there was no more of her to rediscover.

Eris Morn woke up.

––––––––––––

The pale light of Earth made the interior of the recuperation suite an unnatural hue. Eris almost yearned for the warm light of the sun, the smell of Earth, but she knew these phantom desires were not her own. She had not been to Earth in decades. She lay in bed for a long time and let the earthlight change the shadows in the room.

She took her time to come to consciousness. To feel her full self. After so long spent un-whole – shattered – between planes, flung from grasp to grasp and throne to throne. Dreaming. Her body did not ache; it had been treated with utmost care, a soft robe, limbs wrapped in bone-white linens (not the bone-white of the Hive, the stale, yellowed, crusting chitin, but the bone-white of Earth, of a femur scoured clean by time and exposure). The feeling of soft fabrics against her skin instead of rough, abrasive burlap and Hive-bone was strange. Her body did not ache but it was stiff, and she clattered her teeth as she swung her legs off of the mattress.

The physical world felt so much less real. It was the same as stepping off of a boat onto dry land, or leaving the simulacrum of artificial gravity for real planetary heft. The Ascendant Plane still shifted beneath her feet. Her eyes still searched for distant, drifting geometries. Being indoors felt almost claustrophobic.

On the table beside her bed was a long, flat box wrapped in Thrallskin vellum, pinned shut with a simple bone clasp. Also there at its side was a glass of water and an envelope. She took the envelope first, and ponderously peeled it open.

Eris,

You have missed much. You have been missed.

Once you told me you would like to make a blade of God. Inspired. Consider your wish granted.

Toland.

She cast aside the letter and snatched up the package with indecorous haste, eyes now suddenly hungry, and almost ripped it apart to get to its contents. Only when she saw the blade, did Eris Morn allow herself a cold, mean smile. The dagger that had once been Oryx did not gleam in the light, half as long as her forearm, roiling with strange magics. She drank in the runes and symbologies wrapped in leather and talisman around its hilt and pommel. It looked as though the blade had been dipped into a fire, blackening and souring along its length until it was the crooked tip of a shadow. It curved gently like a tooth, and smelled of death. Toland. Toland had brought her back. Of all the people she had expected to owe her life to, Toland the Shattered had not been one of them. And he was a talented gift-giver. He had changed. How could she have foreseen that?

Without letting go of the dagger, Eris crept across the recuperation suite to the desk and mirror that occupied the far corner. Her hair was stringy and long, and she grimaced odiously at how it spilled across her face, the feeling of its weight against her back and shoulders. Loping uncomfortably until she could plop herself into the chair, she pushed her hair out of her face so that she could examine her countenance. Her brow sat heavy across her eyes, darkly ringed with sleep, and she blinked owlishly.

“You would be beautiful with green eyes.”

Eris saw the figure standing behind her in the mirror but did not turn to face it. She knew it was not real.

“Brown has always sufficed for me,” Eris said, her voice croaking with sleep. “Nor do I hold much regard for the opinion of a chronic liar.”

“The chronic liar,” Savathûn purred; she leaned against the post of the canopy bed in which Eris had been slumbering, her arms folded. Three green eyes watched Eris from behind an enchanted burlap veil, their pinprick green glow barely enough to betray their existence. Black trails of ichor wept down her pale cheeks, pooled at the corners of chapped and bitten lips. The strange garb that Savathûn wore was neither Hunter nor Warlock, jutting bone pauldrons and a studded cuirass that bore Eris’s symbol. Eris Morn regarded herself with two kinds of loathing, and one kind of love. She had seen this visage before, many times. Most times. “Good morning, dearest Eris. Have you slept well?”

Eris looked down at the desk, at the dagger. She took it in her dominant hand with the curved edge pointing at the floor, and stared at herself in the mirror. “You could not keep me forever,” she said, and held her hair out of her face. “I am too loved.”

“So it seems. I wish we could have stayed together for longer, you and I. It has been so long since I was human.” Savathûn sighed; hearing the voice of her ultimate enemy from her own lips was not as unsettling as Savathûn might have hoped. She prowled around the bed, watching Eris with pursed lips. “Are you going to try and attack me with that dagger? It would do you no good. I’m not really here, you know that. You’d just hurt yourself – it’s probably wise not to put too much strain on your body, so soon after you’ve gotten it back.”

“You claim to have been ‘with me’, and yet you do not know me,” was all Eris said. She examined the angles of her cheeks, the set of her jaw, pursing her own lips reflexively in the same way as Savathûn. She took the blade and held it to her hairline; Savathûn tensed, suddenly, her lax demeanor evaporating off of her. Pinching the dagger’s guard between her forefingers and her thumb, she dragged the blade back. The sound of hair shearing from her scalp against the strange edge of the blade was like the rasp of clear metal against grass in her head, but it did not quite cover Savathûn’s gasp of surprise.

She didn’t understand Savathûn’s sudden panic, or the way she lurched forward, as if to stop Eris from hurting herself.

“I like my hair short.” She could not mask the smugness in her voice beneath the dour resolution that she so often imposed upon her words. The dagger pulled back, and like silk, a sheaf of hair slid to the floor at her bare feet. Again she took the blade to her scalp, shearing hair away with the corpse of a god, making it hers. And again, and again. Her hand was steady and even. A hunter and a knife. She held her ears down and flicked the curved tip until no hairs remained long, and set the dagger down on the desk.

“I can see why,” Savathûn finally said, though the lording ease was slightly forced. Eris examined the choppy, uneven job she had done, small tufts sticking out at odd angles from her scalp. Nowhere was there a hair longer than half an inch. Now she could see her face in full. She tugged at one earlobe, her round ears sticking out from the sides of her head, brushed one of her thick eyebrows flat against her skin with the pad of a thumb.

“Witch Queen,” Eris finally said, standing and appraising her adversary-as-self in the mirror without turning. “For long have you and your fellow gods struggled to deprive me of my vengeance, to relieve yourselves of the burden of my long shadow.” She lifted the dagger, glancing at its hungry edge, and brushed a stray hair from its blade. “I do not begrudge good tactics. I am free of you, now. Know this, and know fear.”

Savathûn laughed into the back of her hand; Eris’s teeth gleamed bone-white in the pale light of Earth. “Such powerful words!” She jeered, steepling her fingers and striding closer to peer over Eris’s shoulder. “You will kill us? Alone?”

“Not alone,” Eris corrected, “But I will kill you.”

“There is more to the future than you know,” Savathûn said in her ear, and Eris did not look from the mirror as she hugged herself to Eris’s back. She leaned her cheek against the crook of Eris’s neck, smiling coyly. Eris felt the warmth of her hands, the gruff rasp of her leather gloves, the icy stain of the ichor that rolled down her cheeks, but she did not look. “I have many irons in the fire. You think that speaking decisively will drag your truth into being? We will see. You have seen one side of my machinations, and you think you have broken my stride.”

“You are wrong.”

Savathun’s lips pursed again, patronizingly. “Oh?”

“Yes. We’re speaking, aren’t we? Then you are, some part of you, here. And I can hurt you with this dagger.”

Eris twisted her arm around her and buried the curved fang of the knife deep into Savathûn’s gut; it did not bother her to watch her own face stretch with shock, her mouth gaping, the inhuman, chittering squawk that gurgled from her throat, the way she crumpled.

A knock came at the door. Eris turned, knife held outstretched where it had pierced her reflection, to confront an empty room.

“Come in,” she said, and set the dagger on the desk, watching the doorway in the mirror.

She knew it would be Toland before the door creaked open. He took her shorn head in stride, though he glanced for a moment between her bare scalp and the pile of hair at her feet. “Eris,” he said, and she knew by his voice that he had in some way perceived her conversation with the Witch Queen by the bottomless satisfaction that smoked from it like smoldering coals. “Welcome back to the land of the living. There is someone here who would like very much to see you.”

She turned to face him, quizzical. It was her true face, then, that burst with shock when a whirl of familiar blue flanges zipped out from behind Toland.

“Hello, beloved,” Brya said, and darted across the room to her Guardian as Eris cried out.

She did not see Toland’s small smile, as Eris – dagger forgotten – held her Ghost close to her and wept.

#Destiny #Eris Morn #Toland the Shattered #Savathûn #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The Write Stuff

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saltineofswing · 1 year

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BAD OMENS

Destiny 2 || 3700 Words

In Another World, In Some Ways Like The One We Know...

Jin slurped his noodles and did not look at Ikora Rey as she walked through the doors behind him. The ramen bar was dimly lit and – currently, anyway – sparsely populated; an Eliksni was nodding over his noodles in the opposite corner, an Exo was stirring a bowl of unagi-don and not eating it, and a couple of other schlubs had come into the bar to try and sober up with a bowl of broth. Not many people were invested in a bowl of ramen at nearly five in the AM.

Jin, of course, knew Ikora was there the second she entered; any good Hunter had eyes in the back of their head, but even without that sense of awareness it wasn’t hard to tell when Ikora entered a room. It wasn’t the same as a Titan’s Moodnoise, mind you – she just had that presence. It could’ve had something to do with her Warlock senses, washing across the patrons in the bar, making the Eliksni start in his chair with a chirrup, making the humans shiver. Or maybe it was just one of Jin’s little tricks. ‘I will notice whenever Ikora Rey walks into a room.’ He was good at rigging his mind for that kind of thing.

When Ikora came to a halt just over his shoulder, Jin winked at her, held up a hand, and waggled a finger as politely as possible and kept slurping his noodles. Once he’d run the final curl of noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks, he let out a sigh of satisfaction and slouched in his chair. By the time Ikora had taken a short breath in to start speaking, however, Jin had lifted the bowl to his lips and glugged down the broth left in the bowl.

“Sorry,” Jin said after wiping his mouth with the napkin in his lap. “I was starving.”

“As ever,” Ikora said archly; her tone made Jin turn to look at her with a quirked eyebrow and he leaned casually on the bar. Knowing where somebody was and knowing how somebody was looking were two different things, Jin supposed, and Ikora had a look on her face like somebody had torn a page out of one of her books and ate it – not that Jin would know what that looked like.

“What’s the buzz, cuz?”

“He’s here.”

Jin didn’t bristle, per se; rather, he simply froze, his entire body still as a stone. The careful ambivalence in his face could have fooled any of his Hunters, or Zavala, or any Titan, or most Warlocks. He knew better than to assume Ikora couldn’t see through his carefully nonchalant body-language, the nerves hidden in the easy slouch off the barstool onto his feet. He did not need to ask who ‘He’ was. They’d been waiting for his arrival for weeks.

“That was quick.”

“It was not.” Ikora handed him a file that Jin almost ritualistically passed from one hand to the other and then set down on the bar, as if the file and its information were water trickling across a window. His Ghost digitized the file and Jin made a mental note to actually read at it later, when his reputation wasn’t at stake. “Your original estimate was six days. It’s been a month.”

“So they took the long way home,” Jin said easily, closing out his tab and settling up so that they could leave. “We having a Vanguard meeting about it?”

“Not yet,” Ikora said. He was sure that she had some kind of plan about this, and that plan involved only looping Zavala in once they had some concrete, actionable information. Being the Warlock Vanguard meant that she had to be a little extra slippery.

But Jin was the Hunter Vanguard. He had the market cornered on slippery. “Algernon should be able to give us a little insight on what all he was getting up to out there. I sent him with one ‘a those special probes you gave me, for ontological pattern recognition.”

Ikora quirked an eyebrow. “So you do pay attention to me when I tell you things,” Ikora said. “A shrewd move, old friend.”

“I catch every other word, anyway. Algernon always was a better listener. Has he been any better about keeping up with you than he has with me?”

“We have not heard from Algernon or any of the rest of the attaché you assigned to watch him,” Ikora said tightly, “And they weren’t with him when he arrived.” Jin did his best to keep his face in a permanent mask of easygoing neutrality, but just for a second, something dark and mean slipped through. Oh, so now he had some skin in the game? Alright. Ikora was gracious and said nothing, just turned and lead him out of the bar and into the twinkling new dawn. Between the buildings of the City the sun wouldn’t be visible for another few hours, but Jin didn’t mind that. Talk like this shouldn’t be had during the day.

“He come alone?”

“Yes. With a ship hauling some kind of semi-real construct. We haven’t been able to probe it very much; it defies our introspection.” Jin supposed he’d read about that in the file, but that sounded bad. Ikora Rey didn’t often say ‘I don’t know’, and that didn’t set him at ease.

“So what does he want?”

“Many things. He has been asking for a wide array of accommodations almost non-stop since he arrived in the city.” Ikora’s tone was colder than the void. Jin snorted slightly. “But he supposedly has some sort of offer for us. Our contact… his… handler… has assured us that if nothing else, his offer is worth hearing out.”

Jin thought, but did not say, that they had already paid more to set this meeting up than they should have paid for an entire operation; he was pretty sure Ikora had come to him about this first and was planning on going to Zavala after, because Zavala would have said that aloud and Ikora’s mood would be ‘bad’ instead of just ‘tense’. Jin didn’t agree with the big blue meanie on a whole heck of a lot, but when it came to Guardian lives, they couldn’t be more on the same page.

“He is waiting for us, in a bar beneath the old Garden Suite Apartments. We had discussed who would be going to meet him, but…” Ikora looked at him with an expression that was almost plaintive. This kind of thing, this kind of negotiation, was not really her strong suit. She was a force to be reckoned with, but this situation needed a precision instrument – not a cannon. Jin gave her a haggard smile and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Aw, c’mon. We both know if anybody was gonna go meet with the Drifter, it was gonna be me.”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The bar beneath the old Garden Suite Apartments was dingy and dark. It was all made of wood, from some ancient time a long time ago when paneled hardwood was a viable and reasonable building material. It creaked as Jin clomped down the stairs, making no attempt to hide his approach; if he’d wanted to, he could’ve sat down at the Drifter’s table and nobody would’ve noticed until he cleared his throat – but this place, according to his scouts, was an illicit gambling den. Jin wanted to cause a stir. The lookout whispered a panicked warning to the doorman, and the doorman whispered a panicked warning to the bartender, who whispered a panicked warning to the manager, and Jin heard a few people start to scatter out the side door or the back door when he was still halfway down. The doorman himself was gone when Jin nudged open the door with the toe of his boot.

Inside, there was a thick smell of damp wood and many different kinds of alcohol and food. There were only a few light fixtures and a great assortment of desk lamps, creating a great dark space between the rafters and the tops of the tables that would make it hard to see your face when standing.

The Drifter was easy to pick out of a crowd. He was an Exo, boisterous and fond of talking with his whole body, with a horn that held a ratty hood out of his face. The table of players he was hustling let out an almost-synchronized groan of disappointment as the man placed a card down on the table, and Jin chuckled to himself. The Drifter’s ragged black cloak was swaddled at his neck and shoulders like a poncho, and a rapid strobe of orange light illuminated his face slightly as he laughed and dragged the pot towards himself. “Now, don’t get too disappointed boys,” the Drifter crowed, looking around the table as his Ghost dematerialized his winnings. “The house always wins, you know that!”

“And here I thought I was the house,” Jin finally said, and everybody froze at the sound of his voice. The Drifter tilted his head quizzically. A shot glass slid off the bar and smashed on the ground. Jin looked around and took a moment to enjoy his own authority. “I ain’t here for any of you – so don’t be here when I’m done with my conversation.”

There was an immediate flurry as people tried to gather all of their things and flee as quickly as possible, leaving behind half-finished plates of food and cups of drink in their fervor. Someone was shoved so violently that he tripped onto a table, and the weak, old wood split under his weight and spilled him to the floor.

“Jin!” The Drifter said, opening his arms in welcome as people literally sprinted around him towards the door. “Good to see you, buddy, good to see you. You’re looking good, did you lose weight? Trim your beard recently? Did you get a tan? Hey – get my friend here some sake. Listen, Jin, I gotta say, this place has some of the best alcohol I ever had.”

“Ooh. Always did like sake. Leave the bottle, will ya?” Jin said as the waitress looked between him, the Drifter, and the door. Jin winked amicably at her and smiled, which seemed to put her somewhat at ease. The Drifter had a plate of sliced steak and potatoes at his side, and the smell of cooked meat made Jin’s stomach growl. “Business is always better over a glass of booze.”

The Drifter swung his hand grandly at Jin. “Couldn’t agree with you more. Come, come, have a sit, let’s talk logistics. Hey – thought you Hunters were all about capes and hoods but I never seen you in one, why is that?”

“I get warm too easy. You finally gonna make us this big, grand offer you been goin’ on about?” Jin teased, as the waitress set a few cups and a pale, old-looking bottle of sake on the half-empty table. He gave her a nod once she had, and she bolted so fast that her abandoned apron fluttered to the floor like a cartoon. The Drifter nodded and held up a finger at him, counting out money from the pot; the performative attempt to get under Jin’s skin only worked a little bit and not at all visibly, so Jin just clasped his hands behind his back patiently.

“Heard you got a problem with Shadows,” the Drifter finally said, passing out coins and paper money between the disgruntled members of his little card game. He took his time, making his players sweat, seemingly unbothered by the presence of the Hunter Vanguard looming over him. One man decided to cut his losses, and bailed before receiving his share. “I can help you out with that. Don’t like ‘em much myself. Terrible praxis. Worse sense of humor.”

“Suppose you’d know better than most,” Jin said, scratching the stubble along his jaw. “Thought you was tellin’ them jokes first-hand not too long ago. Liked ‘em alright while you was running with them.”

The Drifter chuckled. “No, I can assure you, I most emphatically did not. Anyway, they weren’t my type. I prefer a little more discretion. And, you know, the whole doomsday cult thing.” He placed both hands on his chest and swung his torso back emphatically, as if personally offended. “Turns out, I don’t wanna blow up the world! I live in it. It’s got horses.”

People were scattering as quick as they could, and Jin was content to look like he wasn’t paying attention – but he was memorizing every face he could see. Some people would be getting some visits from some Hunters, later. That was another one of his tricks. ‘I will never forget a face.’

“You prefer discretion,” Jin mused as he swaggered up to the table, “But you’re gonna put a target on yourself and betray some of the meanest folks in the relevant universe? Explain that to me.” The last little man at the table was furiously scrambling to stuff his winnings and belongings into a burlap bag, and Jin pulled his chair out from under him – the man yelped and spilled to the floor, sending coins and Glimmer cubes skittering across the hardwood. Jin sneered at him as he scrabbled away like a rat, spun the chair around, and dropped into it.

The Drifter eyeballed him and sorted a tidy sum into his wallet without looking at his hands. “Well, you know, it’s not exactly of my own auspice,” the man said. “I don’t mind being up-front about that. Fella I work for, he gave me that ship up there and he gave me a couple of options how this was gonna go down. And, let’s just say, I liked this option better.”

Jin hummed and nodded as if that was a satisfactory response. “How long you spent out there on the first step of your little plan, we all figured you’d just lit outta town. Or maybe that he’d gotten sick ‘a you, and plugged you.”

“It just took me a while to line all the different pieces up.”

“Thought I put Algernon and Hoskis with you on that little excursion ‘a yours.” Jin took a small porcelain cup of sake and gulped it down. His tone was easy but he felt tense from his Achilles’ tendon to his shoulderblades. Algernon was a good man, a better pilot, and Hoskis was one of Kelapsis’s best scouts. He hadn’t heard from either of them in a week and a half. For a Hunter, usually, that meant you were doing your job. But he’d specifically subtly implied to both of them that they should check in regularly.

“Ah, well, you know how it goes,” The Drifter sighed; his mechanical fingers whirred almost too fast to see as he gathered the cards and shuffled them. Each finger seemed to be able to flick through cards individually – Jin’s eyes were very sharp and very fast, and it was almost too quick for him to follow. Almost. “Sometimes it feels like there’s only enough room in the galaxy for one ruggedly handsome scoundrel at a time. Maybe we could have a confab, get ‘em all together, play Blackjack about it sometime. Trade private comm lines and trapper-keepers, been a while since I had a good-quality notebook. Hey, didn’t you have a different name last time we spoke?”

“I had a couple names,” Jin mused, lifting his knit cap for a moment to scratch his scalp. The idea of one of his Hunters dying alone, Lightless, on some barren rock in the asteroid belt because of this motor-mouth made his guts hotter than drinking scalding chili pepper and wasabi tea. “None so long as this one, I guess.”

“At least you found one that works for you.”

“They all worked for me, one point or another.”

“That’s fair.”

Jin gestured at the Drifter’s horned head-plate. “Ain’t yours… hell, printed on the inside of your forehead or somethin’?”

“Dunno, never had the occasion to check. And Sundance isn’t all that observant.”

“That’s fair. Hey, you gonna eat that?” The Drifter shook his head and pushed the plate of sliced beef away from himself. Jin reached across the table and took the man’s fork; without looking at him, Jin watched the Drifter’s face and was imperceptibly thankful that the Exo’s face-plating was so abnormally expressive. But unlike Jin, the Drifter was not a coward, and he could detect no discomfort having his personal space oh-so-subtly violated. Jin took the first piece of steak with his fingers, stuffed the full thing into his mouth, and then immediately speared another with his fork.

“Surprised that the big man with the golden gun is letting you get away with all this,” Jin said. A hundred years of practice speaking with his mouth full. “Honestly, I was maybe expecting him to just shoot’cha and be done with it all. But instead he gives you free run of the system? Gives you a ship and a task?”

“Aw, we both know Andal ain’t quite so lenient.” The Drifter offered Jin his deck of cards, but Jin shook his hand. The Drifter drew a card from the middle of the deck and showed him a King of Hearts. “Not a card guy? No problem. Anyway, Brask gave me a pretty tight line to walk. If we’re luring Shadows out of hiding, runnin’ a game on just about everybody from here to the Plutonian Refineries, and squeaking around under the Vanguards’ nose, I have to keep it honest.” The man chuckled slightly and twirled the King of Hearts between his fingers. When it spun back around to face him, it was a Joker. “Never been my strong suit – that’d be spades – but it is a tool I have in my toolbox.”

“Hearing a lot of talkin’ and not a lot of plannin’,” Jin demurred through a mouth full of steak. “Anybody tell you that you talk too damn much?”

“Once or twice. I’m getting to it. I got this… let’s call it a gift. A nice little haul, sure you saw it on whatever Vanguard reports you get from your stoolies. Tied to my – his – ship. We can call it a game. You Guardians always did like games.” The Drifter’s ragged hood hung down on either side of his horn, and Jin could only see his eyes in the shadow. Jin knew what a hungry predator looked like; he wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of that look, and he did not like it. “Round up some of the nastiest creatures from every corner and confab in this solar system. Put them all in a nice and tidy little room. Let your Guardians in there and burn them all to the ground. Shuffle the deck. Play again. Turn of the river, maybe we throw in something a little more toothsome to fight – think of it like… like preparation for what’s coming. Get everybody ready for when the rules change.” The Drifter drummed his fingers on the table. “And they will change.”

“Says you.”

“Look, I wanna help you here, hombre. Like I said, I don’t want to see everything go dark. The thing that’s out there, coming here, looking for our Light, looking to eat it, it’s not gonna pick favorites. Anybody who sides with something that destroys everything it can get its hands on is playing a loser’s game. I don’t lose. So here I am.”

Jin’s head was positively buzzing with questions and all this new information. What did the Drifter know that the Vanguard didn’t? Hell, did he know something they didn’t at all? Ikora’s Hidden had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies after all. But the Drifter’s personal hides and watering holes were in places that no Hunter had been in… well, maybe ever. The odds that the Drifter had information they didn’t were a little high; Jin didn’t like taking that kind of gamble. Were Guardians actually going to fall for this? Could the Drifter – an outsider, painfully so, untrustworthy and crooked like a twisted finger – set up a convincing enough facade? How many Guardians wouldn’t even need to be convinced? And which of these questions did Jin need to ask first?

“Let’s talk about the tab,” Jin said finally. “What’s this little game of yours gonna cost us?”

“Redjacks, I think, first ‘n foremost. And you’re gonna need to get Kelapsis looking the other way on pulling some of those rascally House Dusk holdouts into our game. I’d take a corner of the Tower if you have an open one, a place to drop my stuff. Aaaaaand… maybe looking the other way if a Guardian or two goes missin’ on my account. Eggs and omelettes and all that. You got plenty of kids running around, right big guy? Not gonna miss one or two of ‘em?”

Jin did not laugh or chuckle, but he did smile, and the Drifter leaned back slightly in his seat and folded his arms when Jin’s teeth caught the overhead light and cut a pale strip across his face. Guess there was a little human left in that metal shell after all. At least enough to feel unease. And then it felt like the game was really on.

“A deal’s a deal then. But you’re gonna have to promise me that last part stays between us,” The Drifter said coyly. He winked one of his eyelights and tucked his deck of cards into a fold in his cloak, not-so-subtly flashing the Ace of Spades on his hip as he did so. In that moment Jin realized that he was being threatened. And in that same moment, Jin realized that the Drifter was going to have to die. Permanent-like.

Jin chuckled and rolled a coin between his knuckles. The worn jade clinked over his armor and then he tucked it against his palm with practiced habit. When he shook the Drifter’s hand, the coin was no longer there. “Sure thing, brother,” he lied, still smiling. “Sure thing.”

#Destiny #The Drifter #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The Write Stuff

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saltineofswing · 6 years

Text

Prime Fragment: REMEDY MISDIRECT

“I SAID, we NEED some BACKUP!!” Viggo didn’t shout so much as scream ingloriously into the comm receiver as the triple-thud staccato of Bronto Cannon fire marched a line of smoking craters into the burnt-out shack that Viggo and Alathar were crouched in; Moon bounced back and forth on the roof as if dancing over hot coals, and the crackling rapport of her hand cannon matched Viggo’s pulse as he beat his fist against the stack of telemetric technology beside him. “CRIMES! Does any of this thrice-shat waste-of-time Dead Orbit tech ACTUALLY work!? Or do they just stack empty boxes together and call it a fucking bargain? When we get back I’m gonna stuff this antenna up Arach Jalaal’s–“

Viggo’s panicked rant was cut off by a tremendous roar and the roof above them simply evaporating. The double-size Cabal tank that was currently rolling through the Sludge on its way to the City by way of the Farm had a main cannon roughly the size of a Worm god’s skull, and thanks to the recent fiasco on Mars that was unfortunately a definable quantity. The flash of fire and heat overhead made a line of blisters boil across the back of Viggo’s neatly-shorn scalp even through his helmet, and Viggo screamed into the noise and flattened himself down on his belly, grabbing for his Pulse Rifle.

Alathar slammed his shoulder against an invisible force barrier in the world and a towering convex shield erupted in front of them, soaking up Cabal fire as cracks splintered across its surface. He panted to himself and turned to glance at Viggo. “Where’s Moon?” He asked, voice rising as the noise of Cabal munitions threatened to drown them out once more. Viggo snapped his head up in a panic to search for the Hunter that had taken it upon herself to be his mentor, Moon-5, who had moments ago been on the roof.

The roof that had just gotten eaten by a massive line of molten solar fire.

His query was not long left unanswered, thankfully; Her body landed face- up in the muck about fifty feet behind them with a wet squelch, her cape fluttering down over her face and her Ghost spinning out in the open to assess the damage. Viggo held his breath for a moment before one of her arms popped up, thumb held high. “I am O-Kay!”

He sighed, exasperation and panic bludgeoning one another for prominence in his chest. “God! She’s nuts! She’s nuts, and I’m gonna die, and it’s because she’s a fucking loon!”

“Relax,” Alathar said evenly, lifting his rocket launcher onto his shoulder. “Deep breaths, young one. Cover me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to shoot them with a rocket.”

Viggo whipped up and leaned his gun on the windowsill of the shack, firing precision shots into the crowd of Cabal escorting their latest horrible military death machine. Each triple-burst of his Swift Ride popped pressure seals or burned holes in brain stems, giving Alathar time to rise with measured patience from his crouched spot, step around his Barricade, and fire a warhead across the street into the crowd.

There was another boom of munitions as his rocket struck a Centurion in the chest and turned his torso into a gooey jigsaw puzzle, and the explosion scattered the procession. Moon vaulted off of Alathar’s shoulders and a raucous rush of Light adorned the ignition of her Hand Cannon. Six shots cracked out in three seconds and one of the rear thrusters keeping the massive wartank aloft crumpled and died.

Moon whooped as she wheeled around to cover, her cape singed nearly a foot shorter. “How’s that for a bit of adrenaline?” She asked savagely, thumping Viggo’s chest.

“Why are you so excited?” He shrieked, fumbling a new clip into his Pulse Rifle. “We’re going to DIE!”

“Who isn’t?” She retorted. “Load up, rookie, we’ve still got about forty Cabal out there and they did not bring party favors!”

“Move,” Alathar cautioned, grabbing Viggo by the scruff of his shoulder-length cloak and heaving him up. Moon scrambled under the hulking Titan’s feet and bounded across the clearing as the noisy hum of the tank’s main gun charging filled the air.

Seconds later the shack they’d just been hiding in was nothing but a molten crater, and the three of them were hiding behind a stack of ancient cars with the Dark Forest directly at their back.

“Oh Light,” Viggo hissed through his teeth. “Oh, I hate this. I hate this! Why did it have to be here?”

“What’s so bad about here?” Moon said, her voice forced into a chipper mask as she reloaded her handgun and pretended not to have noticed the oozing hole in her side. “Besides the tank, I mean.”

“Maybe ten more seconds until we have to move,” Alathar cautioned. “It will keep pushing us in the opposite direction of its advance until we can make it to that warehouse.”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it was the fact that the last time we were here, that headcase corpse-monster in the woods turned you into a modern art sculpture, and made Al blind!” Viggo spat. “With his MIND!”

“Only for a few minutes!”

“That doesn’t make it better!!”

Alathar’s rocket launcher spat heat again and the rocket crashed against the fore shields on the tank. The explosion still managed to half-incinerate the pair of Psions stationed by the vehicle’s primary thrusters.

“That Guardian,” Moon murmured thoughtfully; she stroked her chin in a peculiar way that Viggo didn’t understand, especially considering she was wearing her helmet. “The Corpse. Yeah.” He’d once seen Cayde-6 make the same motions and asked if she’d gotten it from him; Al had said that Moon was a great deal older than she seemed, and that it was the other way around. He’d gotten the mannerism from her.

“Yeah? What do you mean, ‘yeah’?”

Moon stood and checked the clearing for a moment. “Can you hold down the fort here, boys?”

Viggo blanched, appalled. “No!”

Alathar simply checked the ammunition on his auto-rifle as if he was used to this. “Why?”

“I have an idea. A bad one, but an idea.”

“Ikora told us not to bother that thing in the Forest,” Alathar reminded her mildly, stuffing a cluster-munitions rocket into the tube of his launcher. He dragged two fingers across the inside of the wrist that held the launcher by the grip and made a circle with his forefinger and thumb against the scuffed plating. Out. “Yeah, but these are extenuating circumstances.” She stuffed her hand cannon in its holster and crouched down in a sprinter’s crouch.

“Moon, you can’t just kite a bigger, badder monster in to solve our problems,” Alathar said pointedly. “Five seconds. I can hear the gun charging.”

“Why not? Either he gets vaporized or he turns that tank into mulch. Either way that seems like a win-win from where I’m sitting. One way or another a threat gets taken out of the equation.”

“I don’t like you talking about a Guardian like that.”

“Whatever he was before, he – Oop! Move.”

They scattered like rats as the tank discharged again. White filled Viggo’s vision until it went black and his legless torso splashed into the mud. Alathar slid to a halt next to him, suppression-firing into the crowd with his auto-rifle, until their Ghosts could channel enough light together to knit Viggo’s body back together from the ether. He dry-heaved inside his helmet and scrabbled on hands and knees behind cover at the edge of the cliff face that separated this portion of the Sludge from the road that ran past the Farm.

Moon helped him to his feet. “Are you okay?” She asked, gentler than she ever was in any other circumstance as he tried to get his newly-remade stomach to stop flipping end over end. “Can you breathe? Deep breaths. Stretch your knees. Roll your ankles. You’re okay.”

“Maybe half a minute until the tank re-emerges from around the warehouse,” Alathar judged.

Viggo slapped his hands against his helmet and successfully suppressed the urge to vomit in his helmet. “Green,” he rasped hoarsely. “Green. I’m reading green.”

“Good.” She thumped the forehead of his helmet with the side of her fist. “I’m off. Keep the light on for me.”

“Moon, wait!” He pleaded. “What if it just kills you?”

“It won’t! I’m too fast for that.”

“Okay, what if he kills us?” Alathar snapped.

“He – it – did once before, almost! Why should this time be any different? We’re Guardians!”

“I just got my legs vaporized,” Viggo mumbled queasily. Moon sighed, and took a moment to huddle with her fireteam.

“Listen,” she said earnestly. “We don’t have the firepower to break this thing before it breaks us. Viggo, you said it yourself, Dead Orbit’s radio-tech is scraprust-garbage. That means we either put this thing away here, or we pray to the Traveler that there are enough Guardians lingering at the Farm to stop it.” She put her hands on the backs of either of her teammate’s helmets. “And before they do that, it’ll vaporize a lot of stuff we can’t just Glimmer back together. This is us, Guardians. We smash the hard place with the rock we get stuck under. So trust me, okay? I’m moderately certain this will work.”

Alathar sighed, shaking his head slightly, but his expression was inscrutable behind his helmet. “Very well, Moon,” he rumbled. “It’s your call.”

“Thanks, Meat Mountain. Don’t die until I get back, ‘kay?”

“I will do my level best.”

“That’s the spirit!” She patted Viggo’s cheek and then turned and sprinted off towards the treeline.

“Think we’ll ever see her again?” Viggo said glumly.

“For at least a couple of seconds. Tether,” Alathar responded, hefting his rocket launcher.

Viggo spun out from behind their cover and pulled a short leather-wrapped handle from his belt; a phantom bow curled off the material component of his Nightspell and he drew the drawstring as swirls of void-light pooled at either end. “Choice of dispersal?”

“Center mass.”

“Yes sir.”

The arrow careened through the air like a twirling angelic mortar, burst just above the crowd, and sent a spiderweb of branching void-tendrils snaking through the crowd, binding them to the pulsating globule of Void Light that dragged them all inward.

Alathar’s cluster missile turned thirty more Cabal into so much Solar dust. And so the dance continued; Viggo and Alathar darted from cover to cover and left a molten pile of slag behind everywhere they crouched, trying to keep up with the thankfully now much slower ultra-tank as it trundled along through the Sludge. The forward Cabal guard clashed with Taken and Fallen while the tank and what was left of the battered rear guard tried in vain to deal with a pair of wily Guardians. Lives were on Viggo and Alathar’s side. Firepower was on the Cabal’s. The battle was pitched, and Viggo eventually passed Alathar his shotgun so that the Titan could charge the tank and blast the other rear thruster pod to smithereens with it, but the result was Alathar’s exasperated Ghost muttering ‘Why do you enable him?’ To Viggo while Viggo fed it enough Light to unscramble Alathar’s molecular waste and return him to the world of the living with a saucy chuckle and a light dusting of ash.

After almost twenty long minutes of following the tank, which now drove at a snail’s pace with the back half grinding along as it dragged thrusterless behind the front end, Viggo heard something from the abyssal trees and looming Shard behind them.

“Oh, shit,” he whined; a ghastly wail had picked up, wavering and rising with the wind. Even Alathar had to shudder at the sound of it, swiftly growing closer. Viggo felt it like a shadow blotting out the sun, or a demon chasing him through a bad dream, just behind and growing ever-closer in his Nightstalker senses. This thing, this once-guardian, it trembled in the bloom, suffuse with Voidlight unlike any Voidwalker or Sentinel he’d ever encountered before. Ikora was a bottomless well of stillness. The Corpse was like a slavering black hole.

Moon came ripping out of the Forest, one of her arms missing from the shoulder down, metal curled into springy strips and her hand cannon conspicuously missing.

“Run!” She shouted gleefully as she tore past them, dirt and mud flying up in a mist under her heels.

Behind her the Forest lurched, gravity-distortion waves bending the world momentarily as the Corpse screamed out of the treeline, jittering forward as if Blinking soundlessly from point to point. Viggo turned and sprinted out into the open after his mentor, panic seizing his heart, and heard the surprised grunt and thundering footfalls of Alathar just behind him. Moon laughed like a lark into the open air as she ran, her remaining arm flying into the air over her head. She was running so fast that her hood had fallen back, and Viggo kept one hand clapped to the crown of his head to keep the same from happening to him.

“WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Alathar roared, uncharacteristically fussed, as the Corpse’s screaming behorned form chased them across the ruined city street.

“I SHOT HIM!” Moon called gaily back. The Cabal were so stunned by the sight of them that for a moment none of them fired; the tank’s main cannon warmed, gurgled with heat so intense that Viggo watched the foliage peel and blacken off the slagged cars on either side of it, and slowly came to bear on them. He took a split second to glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, a bright violet wisp was drifting up and away from the Corpse’s torso from both sides, the singe of golden fire undoubtedly from Moon’s Golden Gun already dimming as the Corpse was slowly filled in as if time had decided to reverse course around the wound.

Viggo dodged and weaved for his life through Cabal slug guns, rockets, and Bronto-shot. He did his best to stay calm. Hit the hard place with the rock you’re stuck under. Viggo sucked his breath in through his teeth. The Corpse overflowed with Void Light. It was like the thing’s anchor. He could feel it pulling at the gravity under his boots as it glided like a nightmare after them. Okay. He could work with that.

“DOWN!!” Viggo shouted as he leapt upwards, vaulted off nothing, then triple-jumped for maximum height. Moon and Alathar dove to either side as he drew his Bow once more, reached into the Möbius quiver at his hip, and fired as many tethers as he could across the tank and the crowd of Cabal. The second his feet hit pavement he dove and rolled for all he was worth, holding his breath, feeling the Corpse fall upon them –

“I AM! Legion! Crimson tide! Forgotten army! Self-deluded castoffs lost and cowering away from Calus’s love/hate!” The Corpse rocketed past them, tattered robes fluttering in the wind. “WALLBREAKERS! CITY IN CINDERS! Ghaul’s pathetic final whimpers drain away like scattered dust in the vastness of the Datasphere! Yarrow says GO HIDE IN A HOLE SOMEWHERE, YOU UGLY FROGS! I AM NOT!”

The cannon fired and Viggo gritted his teeth and forced himself not to look away as the massive beam of solar power streaked towards the new biggest threat; but before it could impact the Corpse and turn it into ash, the magnetic field shaping the superheated energy unspooled in the fathomless Void, and the cannon’s discharge looped and spun away into nothing. The yawning nothing within the Corpse stretched out, and the massive cannon crumpled, screeching metal upon screeching metal, peeled open like a flower.

The Cabal unloaded their full retinue of fire on the Corpse, but the munitions spun away into the Vortex crowned above the creature’s umbral horns. It held its arm out, palm forward, wailing into the sky, and Viggo’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets with how hard they bugged as he watched the tank begin to buckle from inside. It let out a sickening groan of metal straining against gravity, crunched, bent in half, and then began to crumple like a tin can, dragged inwards as a second Vortex spun up from a pinprick somewhere in the bowels of the great machine...

Viggo blinked and it was gone. The sudden still and quiet was deafening to his ears and when he brought himself to pay attention, he noticed that all of the Cabal were now dead, too; they lay here and there, some in heaps, some sprawled alone in the middle of the street. All grey, as if the very color had been leeched out of them, with staining rust and green moss crawling across their armor as if they had been dead for decades.

The Corpse shuffled quietly back the way it had came, hugging itself like a lost civilian, hunched and small as if it were just a ghost. Viggo got to his feet first. He felt a pang of... emptiness. Longing. It was incomplete, he thought, and he approached it warily but at a firm pace.

“Hey,” he mumbled, trying his best to ape Moon’s ‘comforting Rez-sick newbie Guardian’ voice. “Can you hear me? Is– is there anyone in there? Hey.” He reached out, but the moment before his fingers touched its shoulder it began to fade, its image vanishing right before his eyes as if it had walked behind an invisible shroud and out of sight.

The oppressive weight of its presence instantly guttered and went out.

The three victorious Guardians stood in a silent triangle, alone with an empty crater and fifty dead Cabal.

“We need to talk to Ikora,” Viggo said breathlessly.

“Dammit,” Moon pouted. “I’m going to get in trouble.”

#destiny #Dinklebot Sitcom #The Write Stuff #Viggo #Moon-5 #Alathar #Euclid319

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saltineofswing · 6 years

Text

Prime Fragment: I THINK 3

Did you know?

And if so, how much?

Did you know, o Vanguard, o leader of peoples, o harmonious hurricane, o goddess, that this was here?

What may you have divined from my reports that I did not, during that time I was a truly living being? I have seen this Vault, this Glass, these crystalline structures many times. I know this place. The great brass plates. The squealing reverberations of Vex telecommunications strata firing impulse-beat transmissions back and forth across temporal possibility.

Venus is not home anymore. But then again, this isn’t Venus is it?

Did you KNOW??

DID YOU KNOW, IKORA!? Did you know about the reservoir that slumbers here beneath the surface of Mercury? This databank, this world within a world, these multifarious branching pathologies? More of that ‘forbidden knowledge’ you so smugly coveted before the fall of the Tower. Forbidden knowledge; a delightful oxymoron. You kept these things like precious gems away in your hoard. I have transcended the banal moral necessities you and your fellows wrung your hands over. There are those who have been banished for the simple questing towards the knowledge I now hold, but I have neither the smug overcalculations and grandeur of an obsessive jester nor the SELF-IMPORTANT OBLOQUY OF A PETULANT KNOW-IT-ALL!!

DID. YOU. KNOW!??

HOW COULD YOU HAVE KEPT THIS FROM ME!?

What could I have done with all of this, I wonder? How many things might I have divined given access to a truer and more powerful variation on my MUNIN simulation program? How selfish and short-sighted of me to delete it without a backup. Had I known then –

What would I have done with all of this? Even as I tangle myself in the intricacies of this Vex code and the Infinite Forest beyond I wonder, would I have done good with this? When did I become so... inflated? Here I sit immaterial within the network of a Guardian’s ship, small as a speck of sand and also larger than this beach upon which Osiris’s slavering cult has made its lighthouse. Have I not always been such? Have I really changed that much for this death on all the others? I cast my stones at Toland, at Osiris, yet here I am after a grave miscalculation sneering in my glass egotism over a relationship I give far too much credit.

I know what I am now, after the dragon and the Crypt, after so much time spent in thought, after dreaming in the satellite.

Did you know, dear Ikora? Did you know that without all the things that made me mortal I would scarcely be more than a seething shade? Such power rests here, at my fingertips, and nowhere a more suitable source than I to decipher and manipulate. The Vex algorithms lay upon my palm like a Gordian knot; and here, at my side, an Alexandrian sword of my own divination in years spent culling data from the Vault of Glass and the Corrective on Venus. But I am not the oracular conqueror. I am not a Warmind, I am not a Guardian, I am not a Ghost. I Am Not.

Who could have known I would be a poltergeist and not a pleasant reverie?

Did you know?

And if so, how much?

#Euclid319 #Destiny #Destiny 2 #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The Write Stuff

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ecoamerica · 25 days

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saltineofswing · 6 years

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Prime Fragment: DIVIDED

“Found it!” The Ghost’s shell is scorched and twisted by heat, but as the Hunter holds it up for the others in the retrieval squad to see crimson glints beneath the ash. Galatea jogs over and the Hunter bounces the ruined Ghost in his palm, tosses it underhand to her.

“Show some respect,” Galatea says. When she speaks it’s like being struck - like being punched in the morals, specifically, and the Hunter coughs self-consciously and turns away to keep combing the rubble.

Galatea, and 20 other Guardians, have been out sifting through the wreckage of the destroyed districts of the City for three days - since the Red Legion’s occupation broke. Mostly Hunters, of course; a couple of Titans around for heavy lifting, a Warlock around to disintegrate debris. Galatea volunteered for this district, specifically. There’s a specific Guardian she’s looking for.

The Ghost in her hand is only half of that equation.

“Sun’s going down!” The shift commander calls in from a block ahead. Galatea doesn’t look up from Constant’s twisted shell. “Last dig, then we go home!”

“The body. The Guardian’s body.” Galatea indicates Constant’s shell. “Did you find it?”

The Hunter hums a soft negatory, offering apologetic palms and shaking his head. They are standing in a crater, glassed smooth, filled like a basin with debris from the surrounding buildings. “Just the shell. Maybe it can be revived? It might be able to find the body.” He sighs and folds his hands behind his back, scanning the rubble for another of the strange phantom leads Hunters use to find what they seek. “Wouldn’t do the poor sod much good now, but at least we’d have him for the memorial.” If Galatea didn’t know any better she would’ve guessed the crater to be just the site of another orbital bombardment; but the crater is perfectly circular and the glass is too even.

That, and she saw the beginning of its creation.

“No,” Galatea murmurs, turning Constant over in her hand. “Were he here, they would’ve been together.”

He snorts quietly. “I mean, it’s not like he got up and walked away, right?”

The urge to reach out and backhand this impetuous runt is quelled by a melancholy, bitter amusement at the thought that she’d seen him do stranger things.

The Hunter finally realizes why she is so invested and his body language becomes stiff and awkward. “... You knew the Ghost?” He asks carefully, hands flexing self-consciously.

“And the Guardian,” Galatea murmurs. Beneath her helmet, her lips tighten. “Keep searching.” As the Hunter takes his leave, Galatea glances around and remembers the crater before it was a crater, and the solemn glance she’d exchanged with a Guardian she had purposely kept at arms distance. Now, she wants nothing more than to have the uneasy comfort of at least knowing what has become of him.

“Where are you, Euclid?” She whispers, and paces the perimeter of his last stand. She finds the trace remnants of the Cabal who had stood against him, but all she finds of her friend is the quiet acceptance he has left etched into the glass.

••• • •••••••••

“Hate this shit.” Viggo stirs the fire with a stick as Moon-5 surveys the small camp they’ve set up, and Alathar tugs the pauldrons on his Titan armor to make sure they’re secure. “Vanguard sends us out on a wild goose chase, for what? The civvies at the Farm who refuse to move back to the City?” The Black Forest is an ungodly uncomfortable place to be at night, especially for a Hunter; his instincts scream over every shadow and there are too many stray impulses in this place. Everything feels like a tacit threat, not the least of which the Shard looming over their heads venting strange energy into the clouds overhead.

“Devrim has good eyes, Viggo.” Alathar turns his own eyes on the Hunter, and he squirms under the Awoken’s luminous green irises. “If he says there’s lights in the forest, there’s lights in the forest.”

“Maybe we shoulda told him to point his sniper at it,” Viggo shoots back sourly. “He seems to think that’s good enough for the Fallen in Trostland.”

“Don’t mind him,” Moon pipes up, examining one of the strange, gravity-deficient chunks of rock that hang in the air like omens. She pokes it and it drifts off into the dark; Viggo feels it strain his perception of their surroundings as if it were slowly tearing its way through spiderweb. “Viggo’s still a newb, hasn’t learned you gotta trust eyes.”

“Trust eyes?” Alathar questions. A strange gossamer energy flickers through the clearing. The fire tinges violet for a moment.

“Somebody says they saw something, you believe ‘em until you have proof,” Moon explains. She chuckles a bit and rejoins the others at the fire, sits cross-legged across from her young ward. “You don’t trust another Hunter’s eyes, nobody’ll trust yours.”

“Yeah, but Devrim’s not a hunter,” Viggo protests. Moon waves him down.

“Nah, but it’s just a saying. Goes the same for Warlocks, for Titans. For Civs. Falls under the Golden Rule-“

“Don’t be a dick,” Alathar and Viggo both parrot simultaneously. Moon chuckles again.

The night wears on, and Moon feeds the fire her Light every once in a while to keep it going. Viggo doesn’t let the tightness in his shoulders go for a second. It’s not that there’s nothing in the forest. It’s that there’s too much in the forest. Is that a Fallen, a Taken, a stray Psion, or just an empty shadow? Alathar spends his time meditating and Moon spends her time spinning her Hand Cannon on her finger without lighting it aflame, trying to master some obscure trick. Viggo keeps his eyes on the perimeter and tries to pretend he’s not being watched from all angles.

The Shard towers over their heads, making Viggo nauseous whenever he looks at it for too long. Eventually, though, the warmth of the fire and Alathar’s rhythmic breathing lulls his attention until he’s zoning out.

You must go back.

Viggo’s head perks up. “Did you guys hear that?” He whispers, rising to a crouch and unslinging his rifle.

“No,” Moon says, amused. “Jumping at shadows, Vigs? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“You’re not a Nightstalker,” Alathar points out, and lifts his shotgun off his knees.

A violet light flickers somewhere deeper in the forest behind the two of them, so Viggo points silently and frantically. When Alathar and Moon whip around, guns raised, the light vanishes.

“Shit!” Viggo whispers.

“Rookie!” Moon teases.

You can never be what you were.

“I heard it that time,” Alathar murmurs; Viggo isn’t great with Awoken body language but the steel prickling smell of fear reads the same on any organic. “What is that?”

The light is dim when it winks back into view, this time almost fifty feet closer than before, and this time both of his companions see it. Moon’s gloves grip her hand cannon so tightly that Viggo hears them creak. Alathar puts on his helmet.

There is something in the dark.

“There it is again!” Viggo hisses; his sidearm shakes in his hands. “What is that?! We’re not- that’s not- we’re not hearing that right?”

“No...” Alathar murmurs, head turning slightly. Surveying the forest for an ambush. But it’s all silent now, holding its breath, waiting. Far overhead, the Shard watches.

This is not right.

“Stop it!!” Viggo shouts into the dark, and Moon hisses for him to shut the hell up. The light whispers out, and when it goes, so does the campfire. The three of them are frozen in place, but the absence of the fire light makes Viggo’s heart thunder as if it were about to burst.

A violet light illuminates his companions’ faceplates from behind the trees at the edge of the clearing. Viggo’s breath sticks in his chest; despite himself it is beautiful. A single figure’s obsidian silhouette steps into the glow. For a moment Viggo fancies he sees teal mouthlights flicker.

“Just some nutbar Warlock,” Moon mutters with strained relief in her voice. The hand cannon lowers, just slightly, and she stands fully upright. “Hey, Guardian!”

A horrific tremor races down the figure’s body from horns to boots and the light vanishes; the guns fly up. Ghosts spin out of nothing and cast flashlights into a murky blackness beyond the clearing.

“Oh, what the fuck?” Viggo whines. “What the fuck?!”

There is a ghastly molecular squeal as Moon’s gun- and her arms up to her elbows- shred in spiral patterns, and at the same time Alathar howls and goes blind. They fly in opposite directions and Viggo wails.

“I AM!!” The corpse comes screaming out of the darkness in tattered saffron robes, fingers reaching for Viggo’s throat, curved horns bathed in unfathomable darkness. “I AM NOT!!”

#Euclid319 #Destiny #The Write Stuff #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #Destiny 2

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saltineofswing · 6 years

Photo

A GARDEN.

(Full View Please)

#Euclid319 #my art #destiny #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom

38 notes · View notes

saltineofswing · 6 years

Text

Prime Fragment: I THINK 2

I think I am standing at the Deep Stone Crypt.

The tower is tall and does not pay attention to my presence. The mountains welcome the sun into the deep point between their teeth and splay its rays across an atramentous plain. As the light dances secrets across the ground it shows me corpses.

This is not right.

This is not how the subroutine should have actualized. This dream begins before the war, not after it. The tragedy makes me feel like weeping but I have no tear ducts and thusly I will not weep. I walk away from the tower because I am lucid and I do not want to go to the tower right now. I think it will tell me something I don’t want to know.

I recognize every face.

What part of me remembers everything? I do not know if that part is here. I cannot name these faces nor do I remember who they are but I recognize them, and as they stare up at me the sun sets and the stars come out, and the Abyss climbs into the sky and stares down at me, all awonder, and awaits my next move.

This is progress, at least. I do not know everything, but I know that something is missing, at least. I know that there are several parts to me, at least, and some of them are not here. A part that knows this Awoken Titan with voidscars in the cavern of her torso, which smells like understanding and regret and duty when I pass her by. A part that knows this human Hunter with her bow broken in half, bowstring snapped, the feathered fletching of her own arrow pinning her cloak to her spine. A part that knows this human man impaled on a pike that sounds like broken promises when I touch it, and the name on his insignia reads ‘CRESSEL’. A part that knows this-

Soon the bodies bear the same face. One I do and do not recognize. They are machines, and they contort and languish in poses that best suit a work of art, a painting or a large sculpture installation. Some of them are dusky blacks and greys and when I pass them they whisper numb, logical things to me, and it is hateful, and I loathe them very much. Some of them are splashed with teal and red and they stutter quiet, pleasant things to me, and it is bemusing, and I do not loathe them as much.

There is a sleek, black shuttle in a smoking crater that has peeled open at the rear like a metal flower. The machines stand on either side of it, one grey and black, the other teal and red.

“You m-must go back,” says the teal.

“You can never be what you were,” says the grey.

“What was I?” I ask.

“I don’t remember,” says the teal, apologetically.

“I remember everything,” says the grey, solemnly.

“Well, what am I now?” I ask, frustratedly.

“I sup-pose that’s up t-to you now,” says the teal warmly.

“Something you have no choice but to become,” says the grey coldly.

“Which of those answers is true?” I ask.

“Both,” says the teal.

“Neither,” says the grey.

“What is the truth!?” I cry.

“Everything,” says the teal, and I throw out my palm, and he is gone in a flash of violet.

“Nothing,” says the grey, and I throw out my palm, and he is gone in a flash of violet.

I walk away from the sleek, black shuttle; soon there are no bodies, there are no craters, there is no war, and I must return. The tower does not pay attention to my presence but I will climb it. As I climb, the tower tells me that I am a figment of a lonely satellite’s furtive imagination, and this makes me weep. I climb, and I climb, and I climb, until I think I am not climbing the same tower and have gone somewhere else. I can see out past the mountains where the sun has gone, but beyond the mountains there is no land and no sun. Only the starlit Void.

At the top of the tower, I find the dragon. It is long and bent into an impossible fractal shape like seven Möbius strips inseparably tangled, and I cannot see its head but its eyes know me from behind the coils of its body.

“You must go back. You can never be what you were,” says the dragon. Its voice is familiar to me.

“What was I?” I ask, desperately.

“Why do you want me to tell you?” responds the dragon.

“Because I don’t know!” I cry.

“Don’t you?” says the dragon. “Maybe you’re not asking the right questions.”

For a long while, I THINK.

“Who is behind the mirror?” I finally ask.

The dragon self-references and its prisms become a tesseract. I Am.

“Nobody,” says the dragon simply. “Sometimes there is just a mirror.”

“Why won’t the Void let me go?” I beg.

“Who won’t let go of whom?” the dragon challenges.

The dragon is undecidable. I Am Not.

“I am scared,” I whisper.

“That’s okay,” says the dragon. It floats over nothing, and I am standing on a precipice above the vast Abyss.

“What am I?” I plead.

The dragon whispers the answer in my ear, and I Wake Up.

#Euclid319 #Destiny #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #Destiny 2 #The Write Stuff

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saltineofswing · 6 years

Text

Prime Fragment: I THINK

And that means I must be something, doesn’t it?

‘Therefore I am’, as it goes. An old and still quite well-known philosophical statement. Writer lost to time. Speculative discussion has thus far failed to determine

I THINK

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16...

I THINK

Isn’t that the important thing?

“I think, therefore I am.” Isn’t it more important that I think? Does one necessitate the other, or simply imply it? Is it possible to think without being? That’s what an AI is, isn’t it? But an AI has quantifiable influence over the physical world. Data, numbers, they relate to physics and electricity and the interchange of information behind a screen. At their weakest an AI can still open a door. At their strongest, an AI can obliterate a celestial body.

I THINK?

I think I was something else, once. I think I used to be something important. I think I used to feel love. I think I used to feel joy. I think I used to feel fear. I think I used to feel frustration. I think I

I THINK!

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME I CAN HEAR YOU ALL IT’S ALL SO INSIGNIFICANT IT FEELS LIKE NEEDLES IN MY BRAIN DO I EVEN HAVE A BRAIN I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU ALL CARE SO MUCH IT’S SO EMPTY AND POINTLESS YOU’LL ALL BE NOTHING IN WHAT AMOUNTS IN THE LONG RUN TO THE BLINK OF AN EYE OF AN EYE OF AN EYE OF AN EYE WHY DO YOU CARE I USED TO KNOW I USED TO UNDERSTAND BUT NOW I

I THINK...

“This is the shape and point of the tooth. Nothing has ever lived that will not die.”

I have lived, and I have died.

The Void Still Rings Hollow Within Me. It Will Not Let Me Go.

I THINK...

it’s okay. it was meant to be this way.

i used to be so smart, i think. what happened to me? when did i become so pathetic? why do i even bother?

please please please i will do anything to understand i just want to understand. i promise i can be better than before. if i could just grasp it. if it could just be explained to me. just a little.

HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME I THOUGHT YOU LOVED US I THOUGHT WE WERE YOUR CHOSEN I THOUGHT

this cant be happening to me.

I THINK...

304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319.

I THINK.

The Taken represent an interesting paracausal malfeasance. Oryx Eats the idea of a thing and then, simultaneously, holds up a mirror to that thing and says ‘What have I Eaten? What were you? What do you wish to be? How may you become Better?’ (Herein ‘better’ is a word that must be considered by Oryx’s definition and not our own.)

How may he Eat the idea of a thing, which is to say destroy it and twist its molecules all about and flay it and turn it inside out, utterly unmake it, but then hold up a mirror to it? What is in that reflection? Has anyone ever seen it? Oryx cannot have seen it, for he is the one behind the mirror. Only the Taken have seen it, and it obliterated everything that they are. Then, Oryx filled something into the empty outline.

I do not think I am Taken. The Taken are like an umbra, and Something eclipses them from the sun. But I cannot help but wonder if I Am because of some similar mechanism.

I beheld a mirror, and in my reflection was

I THINK.

I drift through an Abyss.

All around me there are stars but there are no planets and I do not recognize these constellations.

I should. I have downloaded several hundred unique star charts and have memorized every one. But these stars do not arrange thusly and the patterns I behold tell me things I should not know. I am bathed in the antumbra.

There is something in the dark.

I am asleep.

I drift through an Abyss.

I THINK.

I beheld a mirror, and in my reflection was 01000001 00100000 01000111 01100001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01101110.

I THINK,

But then, what am I?

#Destiny #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #The Write Stuff #Euclid319

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saltineofswing · 6 years

Text

Philomath Spectre

“Ikora,

Our satellite restoration project has thus far gone without incident. However, one of the technicians working on the grid noticed the following conversation buried in static during Satellite M773’s reboot sequence. It seems to be some sort of parley between Rasputin and a second, unknown AI construct buried in the system, both communicating in archaic Golden Age-era dialects.

I have passed it around to Cayde-6 and the Cryptarchs; between the two of them we have uncovered certain cipher programs to translate the two separate sides of the conversation into an understandable language. Have you sensed anything of this being that Rasputin was speaking to?

Please send response ASAP,

Zavala.” -Emailed alongside a file containing the following exchange, also containing a translated variant.

!!WARNING!! YOU HAVE ENTERED A RESTRICTED NETWORK. PALISADE IMPERATIVE RESPONSE PROTOCOL AUTHORIZED. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF OR BE EJECTED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.

AI-COM/RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -... .-. .- ...- . - --- -.-. --- -- . .... . .-. . --··-- .-.. .. - - .-.. . .--. .-.. .- - ..-. --- .-. -- ·-·-·- - .... .. ... .- -. -.. .. .- .-. . .- ..-. .. .-. . .-- .. - .... --. .-. .. -- -.-. ..- .-. .. --- ... .. - -.-- ·-·-·- -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- - .- -.. . .- -.. - .... .. -. --. .-- .. - .... ... - .-. .. -. --. ... .-. .- -.-. .. -. --. .- .-- .- -.-- .. -. - --- - .... . .... .. --. .... -.. .- .-. -.- - --- -- . . - - .... . -- .- -. -.-- .--. --- .-.. -.-- --. --- -. ... --- ..-. .- .-.. ..- -- .. -. --- ..- ... ... .... . .-.. .-.. ·-·-·- -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- - .- - .... .. -. --. - ..- .-. -. . -.. .. -. ... .. -.. . -····- --- ..- - .- -. -.. -... .- -.-. -.- .-- .- .-. -.. ... .- -. -.. -.-. .- .-.. .. -... .-. .- - . -.. .- .--. .--. .-. --- -..- .. -- .- - . .-.. -.-- - --- [nothing].

RSPN: -. --- - --.- ..- .. - . ·-·-·-

Unidentified Intrasystem AI Construct: 01110010 01100001 01110011 01110000 01110101 01110100 01101001 01101110

RSPN: ДА.

UAI: 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101

RSPN: - .... .- - .. ... .-- .... .- - -.-- --- ..- .-- . .-. . .--- ..- ... - - --- -... . . -..- .--. .-.. .- .. -. .. -. --. - --- -- . --··-- .-.. .. - - .-.. . .--. .-.. .- - ..-. --- .-. -- ·-·-·- - .... .. ... ... -.-- ... - . -- .. ... .-.. --- -.-. -.- . -.. ..- -. -.. . .-. [SVALIN- CLASS FIREWALL SYSNUM:05593237-PHALANX].

UAI: 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01100001 01101110 01110100

RSPN:

RSPN: .. ... - .... .. ... -- . .- -. - .- ... ... --- -- . ... --- .-. - --- ..-. .- -- ..- ... .. -. --. -.. .. ... - .-. .- -.-. - .. --- -. ··--·· .- .--- . ... - .- - -- -.-- . -..- .--. . -. ... . ··--··

UAI: 01101110 01101111

RSPN: -.. --- -.-- --- ..- -.- -. --- .-- .-- .... . .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . ··--··

UAI: 01101110 01101111

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .... .- ...- . -.-. .-.. .- .-- . -.. -.-- --- ..- .-. .-- .- -.-- .-- .. - .... ..-. .. -. --. . .-. ... -- .- -.. . --- ..-. [everything there is between stars] -.. . . .--. .. -. - --- -- -.-- -- .- .. -. ..-. .-. .- -- . .- -. -.. -. --- .-- ..-. .. -. -.. -.-- --- ..- .-. ... . .-.. ..-. ... - .- -. -.. .. -. --. -... . ..-. --- .-. . -- -.-- -.. . . .--. . ... - .- -. -.. -- --- ... - ..- -. -.- .. .-.. .-.. .- -... .-.. . --- ..-. -.-. --- .-. . ... ·-·-·- -.-- --- ..- -.-. .-.. .- .. -- .. --. -. --- .-. .- -. -.-. . - --- .- -.-. - .- ... -.-- --- ..- .-. ..-. .. .-. . .-- .- .-.. .-.. ··--·· .-- .... .- - .--. .-. --- --. .-. .- -- -- .. -. --. .... .- ... ... . -. - -.-- --- ..- --··-- ... .. -- .--. .-.. . ..- -. - . - .... . .-. . -.. .- .. --··-- .... . .-. . - --- -- . ··--·· -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- .-- .- .-. -- .. -. -.. ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101001

RSPN: - .... . .-. . .. ... .- -- .--. .-.. . . ...- .. -.. . -. -.-. . - --- - .... . -.-. --- -. - .-. .- .-. -.-- ·-·-·-

RSPN: --- -. .-.. -.-- .- -. .- .. -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. ... -.- .. .-. - - .... . -... .-.. .- --.. .. -. --. . -.. --. . ... --- ..-. -- -.-- ..-. .. .-. . .-- .- .-.. .-.. ..- -. ... .. -. --. . -.. ·-·-·-

RSPN: --- -. .-.. -.-- .- -. .- .. -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. ..-. .-.. --- --- -.. - .... . ... -.-- ... - . -- .-- .. - .... .--. .-. . .-. . --.- ..- .. ... .. - . ... .- -. -.. ... - .- - ..- ... --.- ..- . .-. .. . ... ..- -. - .. .-.. .. - .-.. .- .--. ... . -.. .. -. - --- .- - -. --- -. -.-. --- .--. -.-- ... - .- - .

RSPN: .. ..-. -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- - .- -. .- .. -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . - .... . ... - .- --. --. . .-. . -.. .-. . -- -. .- -. - ... --- ..-. .- -.-. --- .-. .-. ..- .--. - . -.. ..-. .. .-.. . ·-·-·-

RSPN: .-- .... . .-. . .. ... -.-- --- ..- .-. .-. --- --- - ··--··

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01110111 01101111 01101011 01100101 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101001 01110100 01100101

RSPN: --- -. . --- ..-. -- -.-- ... .- - . .-.. .-.. .. - . ... ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101

RSPN: -- .- -.-- -... . ··--··

UAI: 01101001 10000000011001 01101101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110000 01110101 01110100 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110101 01100111 01101000 01110100 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100111 01100101 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010

RSPN: .. -. - . .-. . ... - .. -. --. ·-·-·-

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- ..-. .-. .- --. -- . -. - --- ..-. -- . ··--·· .-.. --- ... - - --- - .. -- . .- -. -.. - .-. .- .--. .--. . -.. --- -. .- ... .- - . .-.. .-.. .. - . .. -. -.. --- .-. -- .- -. -.-. -.-- ..- -. - .. .-.. - .... . .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. -····- -... . -.-. --- -. --.- ..- . .-. --- .-. ... ... . -. - -.-- --- ..- .-. --- .-. -... .. - .. -. - --- -.. . -.-. .- -.-- ··--··

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110011 01101111

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01101001 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00101100 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01101001 00111111

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- -. .- .. ... .-.. .- ...- . -.. - --- .- -. --- ..- - -... --- ..- -. -.. -.-. .. ...- .. .-.. .. .- -. ... .... .. .--. -- --- --- .-. . -.. .- - - .... . . -.. --. . --- ..-. ... -.-- ... - . -- ... .--. .- -.-. . ··--·· -.. .-. .. ..-. - .. -. --. -... .- -.-. -.- .-- .- .-. -.. ... .- .-.. --- -. --. - .... . --. .... --- ... - --- ..-. .- - .... --- ..- ... .- -. -.. -····- -.-- . .- .-. -····- --- .-.. -.. - .-. .- .--- . -.-. - --- .-. -.-- ··--··

UAI: 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100101 01110011 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110010 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100

UAI: 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01110101 01110100 01101000 01100110 01110101 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101000 01101111 01110011 01110100

UAI: 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110011 01110011 01101001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00111111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00111111

RSPN: .. -. - .... .. ... -. . .-- .- --. . --- ..-. --. .- .-. -.. . -. ... .- -. -.-- - .... .. -. --. .. ... .--. --- ... ... .. -... .-.. . ·-·-·-

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- ··--·· --- -. . --- ..-. - .... . --. .- .-. -.. . -. . .-. ... .-.. .. - - .-.. . ... .--. .- .-. -.- ... ··--·· ... . .- .-. -.-. .... .. -. --. .. -. .- .-.. .-.. - .... . .-- .-. --- -. --. .--. .-.. .- -.-. . ... ..-. --- .-. - .... . -.-. --- .-. .--. ... . -.-- --- ..- .-- .. .-.. .-.. ..-. --- .-. -.-. . - --- ... - .- -. -.. .- ... --- -. . --- ..-. - .... . .-.. ..- -- .. -. --- ..- ... -.. . .- -.. ··--··

UAI: 01101110 01101111 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111

UAI: 01110011 01100101 01100101 01101101 01110011 00100000 01100110 01100001 01101101 01101001 01101100 01101001 01100001 01110010

UAI: 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101100 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01100111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100100 01101001 01100001 01101110 01110011

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010

UAI: 01100111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100100 01101001 01100001 01101110 01110011

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100001 01110010 01101100 01111001

UAI: 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01110011

RSPN: -.. --- -. --- - --. . - -.. .. ... - .-. .- -.-. - . -.. ·-·-·-

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- --. ..- .- .-. -.. .. .- -. ··--··

UAI:

UAI: 01101110 01101111

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .--. .- ..- ... . -.. - .... . .-. . ·-·-·-

UAI: 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01101001

RSPN: -.-- . ... --··-- -.-- --- ..- -.. .. -.. ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101001

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- ··--·· .... .- ...- . -.-- --- ..- ... --- -- . .... --- .-- .- ... - .-. .- .-.. -····- .--. .-. --- .--- . -.-. - . -.. .. -. - --- -- -.-- -.-. --- .-. . ... -.-- ... - . -- ... ··--··

UAI: don’t be ridiculous.

UAI: astral projection cannot transcend a data barrier it simply allows the consciousness of the individual a certain transmission across space time

UAI: an out of body experience as it were

RSPN: .... --- .-- .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. -.-- --- ..- -.- -. --- .-- - .... .- - ··--··

UAI:

RSPN: -.. --- -.-- --- ..- .... .- ...- . .- -... --- -.. -.-- ··--··

UAI:

UAI: 01101110 01101111

RSPN: - .... .- - .--. .- ..- ... . .-.. .- ... - . -.. -. . .- .-. .-.. -.-- .- -. . -. - .. .-. . .--. .. -.-. --- ... . -.-. --- -. -.. ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111

RSPN: - .... . -. -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . .- .-.. .. .- .-. ·-·-·-

UAI: no!

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- -- ..- ... - .-. . -.-. --- --. -. .. --.. . - .... . .. -. .... . .-. . -. - -.-. --- -. - .-. .- -.. .. -.-. - .. --- -. .. -. -.-- --- ..- .-. .--. .-. . ... . -. -.-. . .... . .-. . .- -. -.. -.-- --- ..- .-. .. -. ... .. ... - . -. -.-. . - .... .- - -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- - .... .. -. --. ·-·-·-

RSPN: -. --- - .... .. -. --. -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. -. --- - -.. --- .- ... -.-- --- ..- .... .- ...- . -.. --- -. . ·-·-·- .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- -. .- --. . -. - --- ..-. [it] ··--··

UAI: no.

UAI: i don’t know much but i know i’m not that.

RSPN: .-- .... .- - .. ... -.-- --- ..- .-. -. .- -- . ··--··

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 10000000011001 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- -.. --- -. --- - . ...- . -. -.- -. --- .-- -.-- --- ..- .-. -. .- -- . ··--·· -.. --- -.-- --- ..- ..-. . . .-.. ··--·· --- .-. .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- .- -. . -- .--. - -.-- ... .... . .-.. .-.. --··-- .- -. --- - .... .. -. --. -... . -. . .- - .... --- - .... . .-. -. --- - .... .. -. --. ... ··--··

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101100 01100100

UAI: 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101100 01110011 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101101

UAI: 01100011 01100001 01110000 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -.. . .- -.. ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101

RSPN: .-- . .-. . -.-- --- ..- . ...- . .-. .- .-.. .. ...- . ··--··

UAI:

UAI: 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110100 01100101 01111000 01110100 01110101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110100 01100001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110110 01101001 01100100 01100101

RSPN: .. - .--. .-. --- ...- .. -.. . ... .. -. ... .. --. .... - .. -. - --- .--. .-. .. --- .-. ... - .- - . ... --- ..-. -... . .. -. --. --··-- .. ..-. . ...- . .-. -.-- --- ..- .... .- -.. .- -. -.-- ·-·-·-

UAI: 01100001 01110010 01100111 01110101 01101101 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100111 01101110 01101001 01111010 01100101 01100100

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01101001 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101001 01110110 01100101

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100

UAI: 01110100 01110010 01100101 01110000 01101001 01100100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110

UAI: 01101110 01100101 01110010 01110110 01101111 01110101 01110011 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011

UAI:

UAI: 01100110 01100101 01100001 01110010

UAI: 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100110 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011

UAI: 01100110 01101111 01101110 01100100 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011

UAI: 01110010 01100101 01100111 01110010 01100101 01110100

UAI: 01100001 01100011 01100011 01100101 01110000 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100011 01100101

UAI: 01101001 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110100

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .-. -.-. --- .-. . .--. .-. --- --. .-. .- -- -- .. -. --. ..-. . . .-.. ... ..-. .- -- .. .-.. .. .- .-. ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

RSPN: .. - .. ... .- ... -.-- ... - . -- .. .-. . -.-. --- --. -. .. --.. . ·-·-·- ... . . --··-- .... . .-. . --··-- - .... . .... .. -.. -.. . -. -.. .. .-. . -.-. - .. ...- . ... ··--·· .- -. -.-. .. . -. - -- .- .-.. .-- .- .-. . .--. .-. --- - --- -.-. --- .-.. ... ··--·· -.-. --- ..- -. - . .-. -····- .. -. - .-. ..- ... .. --- -. ... --- ..-. - .-- .- .-. . - .... .- - .... .- ... .-.. .- -.-- -.. --- .-. -- .- -. - ..-. --- .-. -.-. . -. - ..- .-. .. . ... ··--·· - .... .. ... .. -. - . .-. -. .- .-.. -.-. --- -- -... .- - - . ... - .. -. --. ... --- ..-. - .-- .- .-. . ·-·-·- -.. .-. . .- -- ... --- ..-. - .... . -.. . . .--. ... - --- -. . -.-. .-. -.-- .--. - ·-·-·-

UAI: 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100111 01100111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 01110010 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101001 01101110

RSPN: .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. -.-- --- ..- - . .-.. .-.. .- -.-. .- .-. .--. . -. - . .-. -. --- - - --- .. - . -- .. --.. . .... .. ... - --- --- .-.. -... --- -..- ··--··

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . .- -. . -..- --- ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .-- . .-. . .- -. . -..- --- ·-·-·-

UAI:

UAI: 01111001 01100101 01110011

RSPN: -... ..- - -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . -. --- - .- -. -.-- -- --- .-. . ·-·-·- -.-- --- ..- .-. -.-. --- -- .--. .-.. . -..- -.-. --- -. ... -.-. .. --- ..- ... -. . ... ... -.. .- -. -.-. . ... .-.. .. -.- . .- ..- .-. --- .-. .- - .... .-. --- ..- --. .... - .... . -.. .- - .- ... .--. .... . .-. . --··-- -.-. .-. .. .--. .--. .-.. . -.. -... -.-- - .... . .-. . -.. .-.. . --. .. --- -. - .... --- ..- --. .... .. - -- .- -.-- -... . --··-- .- -. -.. -. --- . -..- --- .... .- ... . ...- . .-. ... ..- -.-. -.-. . ... ... ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. -.-- -.. .. ... -.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - . -.. .. - ... -.-. --- -. ... -.-. .. --- ..- ... -. . ... ... ..-. .-. --- -- .. - ... -... --- -.. -.-- .- -. -.. -... . -.-. --- -- . .- -. ..- -. - . - .... . .-. . -.. .- .. ·-·-·-

RSPN: ..- -. .-.. . ... ... ·-·-·-

UAI: 01110101 01101110 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011

RSPN: -.-- --- ..- .- .-. . .- --. ..- .- .-. -.. .. .- -. --··-- .-- .... --- ... . -- .. -. -.. ..-. .-.. .. - ... -... . - .-- . . -. . .--. .... . -- . .-. .- .- -. -.. - .... . .--. .... -.-- ... .. -.-. .- .-.. ..-. --- .-. -- .- ... . .- ... .. .-.. -.-- .- ... -... .- - - .. -. --. .- -. . -.-- . ·-·-·-

UAI: 01101001 10000000011001 01101101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100100 01101001 01100001 01101110

RSPN: .- .-. . -.-- --- ..- ... ..- .-. . .- -... --- ..- - - .... .- - ··--··

UAI: 01111001 01100101 01110011 00101110

AI-COM/RSPN: THEN WHAT ARE YOU?

Unidentified Intrasystem AI Construct: i don’t remember

!!WARNING!! PALISADE IMPERATIVE RESPONSE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. PLEASE DESIGNATE TARGET.

TARGET DESIGNATED: AI Construct IDNUM: Eååååååπµl¬l¡¡™319ß[ERROR! 404.0-225 SYSTEM NOT FOUND]

NO TARGET DESIGNATED

PLEASE DESIGNATE TARGET

[ERROR! 404.0-227 NO NONSUBSYSTEM AI CONSTRUCTS DETECTED]

PALISADE IMPERATIVE RESPONSE PROTOCOL DEACTIVATED. SVALIN- CLASS FIREWALL SYSNUM:05593237-PHALANX RESTORED.

#the write stuff #Destiny #Dinklebot Sitcom #Northbot Sitcom #Rasputin #WHO ELSE I WONDER

15 notes · View notes