A CURRENT FLOWING

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: Everyone (really)
WHERE: Outside of the Memory Bank, On the Lam, The Stealth Ship, and Station 72
WHEN: DAY :052/DAY :001
SUMMARY: Things don’t go exactly as planned. When do they ever?
WARNINGS: Violence, death, allusions to weaponized suicide. Will update further if necessary.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE:
Erastos Loke & Friends
When you finally catch up to Erastos Loke - his paper, his pens, his elegant furniture and his heavily-lidded eyes - it doesn’t take long to get him to talk. All he needs is a little persuasion or a lot of torture? Or, wait. Maybe we got those two mixed up. Either way, he starts to give the strike team intel once the screws are turned on him.

You’ve already begun to suspect most the information Loke gives over. H+H1 has stayed hidden by avoiding any strong organization and by staying extremely low-tech. Additionally, the most powerful members have been quietly manipulating Concordia’s politics and security to keep the actions of the organization obscured. They’ve tipped off Gorram Saffit, they’ve mislead and blackmailed the police. When you begin to press Loke about who gave them the devices that have allowed their bombs to become so deadly, he tells you frankly that he doesn’t understand them. They were given to him by a man - or someone who looked like a man, he clarifies, when Carata asks - who he had assumed to be some wealthy foreigner until he realized he couldn’t find any evidence of the gentleman’s existence. The mysterious stranger had given Loke the devices which consisted of two dozen small parts that could easily retrofit almost any bomb and allowed them to bypass Concordian security systems looking for highly modernizes tech. Prior to the stranger’s involvement, Loke had already been working with a number of his H+H1 associates - the stranger had sympathized and supported them, and the devices provided the power they needed. Who else has access to these devices? No one. Only Loke.

Unfortunately, when the hosts ask further probing questions about the mysterious stranger’s identity - Did he say who he was? Where he came from? - something goes very, very wrong. Erastos looks briefly stricken, then dabs at his nose. It’s bleeding? Quite a lot, actually. He barely has time to cry out before he begins bleeding from his eyes, his nose and his ears. Then Loke drops to the lush carpet beneath his feed, dead. Oops.

Before the hosts have time to react, an alarm starts to blare through the townhouse. Apparently Loke has a second security system tied to his vital signs. Suffice to say, your cover probably won’t survive this long. It might be a good idea to get the heck out of dodge and make your way to the rendezvous point for extraction.

IN THE GAP WHERE IT SPARKS:
The Memory Bank & H+H1’s Bomb Squad
Thanks to the Batman + Prep Time and the Jr. Technophile, the bomb planted by H+H1 deep in the depths of the Omega Memory Bank is successfully located and disarmed although not without cutting it dangerously close to the wire.

Unfortunately nobody gets the chance to wipe the sweat from their brow. The H+H1 bomb squad knows the exact moment the bomb was supposed to go off, and they know exactly when they’ve failed. So even though Sirius and Company seemed like they could handle three average everyday people, they don’t get the chance. The lead Bomber makes the subtlest move towards her pocket - and triggers a secondary, smaller explosive on her person. The three members of the bomb squad are eliminated (hope you were standing a safe distance away, Sirius n’ Co), and while the collateral damage isn’t anything to sneeze at, it’s far from destructive enough to destroy the bank. Further, the explosion isn’t laced with any EMP blasts. While the hosts may not even be injured, the explosion definitely trips the Memory Bank’s fire suppression system as well as its local alarms. Soon (very soon), Concordian Public Security and Fire Teams will be on the scene. The hosts won’t want to be there when they arrive.

SHEPHERDS AND YOUR CROWNS OF STARS:
Escaping Concordia & Returning to the Station
With Loke dead and the secret of the Enemy’s retrofit tech gone with him, and H+H1’s plot to blow the Memory Bank hamstrung by the efforts of the hosts, it’s time to get off planet. Lets be honest: your cover identities were never going to survive this. Luckily, between the minor explosion and a jail break causing riots under the city, Public Security can’t exactly rally their forces to come chasing after the hosts. They have much bigger fish to fry. Carata and Nirad made sure that all the hosts - Loke’s infiltration squad, the bomb disarmament group and the prison breakers - knew where to meet up after their respective assignments: a concrete channel for runoff where a familiar bus is waiting to sweep you all away to the outskirts of the city. It’s less pressing to be invisible now. No one will be left on the planet to suffer the consequences; any comatose members of the Nest have been carefully packed into the bus too. Isn’t that nice?

Once they arrive at the outskirts of the sprawling diamond-glittering city, a point of black in the sky elongates and expands as the stealth tech strips back from the ship that once brought them all here. With straggles wrangled and comatose friends carefully stowed, everyone boards the ship and rockets off from Opia’s surface. Concordia with its high rises and neon, its holographic advertisements and its press of humanity, its ever present buzz of synthetic paired with organic, falls rapidly away below the ship until it’s merely one bright point of many on a densely populated planet. And then Opia too drops away, becoming a dark marble in a deeper, blacker space. When the stealth ship jumps away, it does so with a nauseating jerk.

It’s a short trip back to the Station, the closest thing any of you have to home. Cathaway and Prince are waiting there to collect their equipment (though any additional souvenirs are yours to keep) and to welcome them back.

It’s been a long time and there are new faces to greet you. Time to get caught up. Set your clocks to DAY: 001.

---

((OOC Notes: Feel free to play any of these events out. We’ll dip in with NPCs and so forth if it seems necessary/y’all ask, but feel free to take control of anyone if it lends to your threads. Backtagging and backdating is, as always welcome.

As of this log, all hosts have (more or less) safely arrived back on Station 72; all hosts - newly hatched and old hats - may now interact. YAY!

If you have any general questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[batmotif]

Bruce is too much of a lone wolf to trust that teams can simply "work themselves out", as she says. As far as he was concerned, they were hardly the very definition of solidarity. There were many who were eager to help, and some who were apathetic. And yet he believes that either end of the spectrum was dangerous, that finding a reasonable, cautious middle ground was the best course of action.

When it comes down to it, trust is Bruce's issue. It always has been.

"My concerns might not mean anything to someone so fresh to the station. That's why I was asking you first," he clarifies. And yet it clearly isn't a rebuttal, because he continues without pause. "But I don't have anything against sharing, and so I'll tell you this: I don't trust much about anything that's been thrown at us. I don't like the idea of a symbiote in my head, I don't like the idea of a faceless enemy, I don't like the idea of devolving into a brainless member of an ever-growing hivemind."

Another sip of his coffee, and yet his gaze doesn't falter over the brim of his mug.

"What I'm really trying to do, is figure out exactly where to place my trust. People might tell you that I don't have much of it to spare."

Well, people that are not necessarily here, but that was hardly important.

[earthborn]

She snorts aloud at his demurring. She'd been here less than a week or two, and he'd been there-- what, a month? If that. Neither was enough time to fully comprehend the structure of a system so benign and well-understood as an ordinary space station, let alone this monstrosity. He had a leg up, sure, but she wasn't all that far behind; didn't take long to form an opinion, after all. That's why everyone has one.

"What did they look like to you?" Shepard was watching him, over the rim of her mug, and then she set it down, hands folded, elbows propped on her knees, "You have seen 'em. When they came for you."

[batmotif]

His gaze is steady, though through their link, she may be able to feel him unfolding his memories, his goal to reach a specific one. Like pulling a file out of a cabinet.

And when he settles on it, his corners of his lips threaten to tug downwards. "I have. They came out of nowhere; black shadows. They didn't have a form, they were faceless and twisted themselves into something different each second. They screeched like bats."

Or perhaps it was only the noise of the bats swarming around the cave when it happened. It was hard to tell -- it all happened too fast, and the memory itself was blurred at the edges. Bruce hates that it is, but what fragments remain sharp, he makes certain that they stay that way.

[earthborn]

"Yeah, it's like that."

There is nothing blurry about Shepard's reply. She can't help the mental half, vivid with the indelible ink of trauma inflicted, another scar on her psyche. The shuttles lifting over a vancouver skyline, shot down. The first view of Soveriegn, dark, alien, wrong in its ease. The way that they were so big, so enormous, that you could stare and stare and never quite be able to comprehend the size of them, looming over you.

"I think they look different, for everybody. Your worst fears made real. Cathaway thinks it's plausible that they were after more than just me, in my case," An army doesn't invade for the sake of one soldier. Or, if they do, it better be a real plum of a prize, "I have a healthy ego, but it's a bit much, even for me. So, maybe I didn't know exactly what I was signing up for, when I agreed to this..."

Which was true. Shepard got the feeling that a lot of people weren't given the time to read the small print on this one. There was something a little too strategic about the timing of the offer, for one thing. Maybe there was a reason for it; the whole situation was insane, who'd believe it if the deal came through a polite vidmail? Brutal calculus, and the math checked out, but that didn't make it go down any smoother.

"...But I knew enough. And, I know what it looks like for people if this fight goes the wrong way. Not so faceless, in that case."

[batmotif]

Bruce listens until she finishes. If he receives flashes of beings tall, alien, and incomprehensible, well, he doesn't seem to react, not outwardly. Nor does he comment on the notion of fear; it made sense, of course, but there was little point in reiterating his agreement with her.

Instead, Bruce presses the conversation forward.

"I'm not questioning those who said 'yes' to the offer of being brought here, and to fight an enemy we know next to nothing about. That'd make me a hypocrite."

After all, he's here, too, isn't he? Away from home, out in space, just like the rest of the hosts. He had said yes as well, also given no time to really consider the consequences. It was either that or die, and the latter was far too close to giving up for Bruce's liking.

"I'm saying that we should always be questioning the machinations around us that we can't see. I don't know about you, Commander, but I don't like feeling blind."

[earthborn]

"Alright, here's a question, if they gave you intel, would you trust it?"

It's an honest question, and Shepard sits back, arms folded, to ask it.

"Not to put too fine a point on this, but you just got back from an engagement this thing," She gestures vaguely, one-handed, to indicate either some nebulous, unseen command structure, the Nest, or the station itself, "Sent you people on. You're already trusting it, even if you think you're holding back-- or you'd do something about it. We're not your people, you don't have a stake in us unless you choose to."

We don't talk about mutiny, but-- mutiny, it was always there, as an option. What held it back was what held people everywhere back. Rules were all well and good, but all the rules in the world wouldn't stop the starving from stealing bread, or the desperate from killing to survive. For most people, just the potential for profit was enough to push them over that line.

The game Bruce is talking, is more delicate.

"Look, I've been screwed over by deliberately witheld intel before. I know how it feels. The whole situation has every one of us over a barrel," This is the truth, but not one that leaves her as helpless as it might. Shepard shrugs, since the difference between trust and mistrust is merely academic, "To answer your original question, no, I'm not thrilled to have this thing in my brain, and no, I was not offered the option to give informed consent on that front. But it's kinda late for take-backs on that front, don't you think?"

[batmotif]

"Yes, it is," he agrees, and without hesitation. There was nothing they could do about being here, not at this exact moment in time. Yet they could still question the reasoning behind it, other than what they had been told. Bruce believes they're not being shown the whole truth, whether inadvertently or purposefully. The fact that their enemies' motivations are just one big question mark only illustrated this fact.

Of course, that's not exactly the reason why he asked.

"And as for your question, no. I wouldn't trust the intel given to us, not at face value." A part of it is simply because he's such a cautious man, distrustful of a situation that he cannot completely control. And this one was just never in his grasp to begin with. "And you're right -- we're already here, and I've already gone on one of the 'missions' they sent us out on. In that way, you could call me compliant."

He sets his jaw, meaning to make his next part as clear as possible. "But right now, it's a means to an end. As I understand it, the planets we visit are the only real battlefields we can fight against our faceless enemy. It isn't ideal, but it's a thread given to us, one we can tug at until this whole thing unravels. And maybe find out, once and for all, if there is a way back home."

[earthborn]

"You're just naturally a suspicious bastard, aren't you?"

Shepard likes that, for all the cynicism in her voice, there's little she can do to hide that fact from the nest. She trusts a suspicious bastard a lot farther than she does someone who accepts, and trusts, and is kind. Reality is not kind, nor does it accept, or promote trust; and it's reality that will kill you, every time. You can trust that, and she does.

Shit, she might even like Bruce himself. Who knew?

"Alright, you don't trust the intel, and you don't trust the system, but you're screwed without either of them. That's a fair assessment by my read, so..." Shepard gave him a little salute with her coffee mug on the way to a drink. It was lukewarm and disgusting, but she drank it without a grimace. You don't waste food, "...What's your proposal?"

[batmotif]

He doesn't respond to the bit about being naturally suspicious, though Shepard is far from incorrect. It's part of his character, something that Alfred used to call him out on all the time before the man merely accepted it as an unwavering pillar in Bruce's personality. Suspicion was essential, it always was and forever would be. Trust was far more dangerous.

And if he just happens to find like-minded people in his on-going trek of cynicism, then all the better.

"The proposal is easy enough, working out the details is the difficult part." Even Bruce Wayne will admit that much. A plan viewed in a wider scope is easy enough to idealize, but logistics is where things often fell apart. Still, he continues. "We play both sides. Continue on these 'missions' they send us to, but look for opportunities to reveal what secrets they're hiding from us, or are oblivious to."

Play the game, basically. Until the moment is right to flip the board over.