mental link | day :034

[ophidia]

[The mental impression that comes with the connection is clean, precise. Confident in reaching like this, touching so many minds at once. If anything there's a desire, simmering beneath, to press and push even further than one simple stated request.]

( I need everything we have on the Carpathans. )

[And he sounds like he expects to get it.]

Comments

[erbier]

( So there are none of among them who have alerted your curiosity, and have begun this inquiry at random. I see. )

[ophidia]

( I thought breaking it down by faction would make the research go quicker. Turns out this crew's more interested in power trips and looking for ulterior motives than getting the job done. )

[erbier]

( Yes, that has been our behavior for several missions. It is not my preference. )

[ophidia]

[That's more surprising than it should be. Of course there have been past missions. But somehow the basic of that knowledge hadn't quite made it through into imagining the actuality of it, that they'd been fumbling through as dysfunctional as they were now. Maybe he'd assumed there'd been more organisation before. More professionals around who'd since fallen asleep. Maybe he hadn't thought about it at all.]

( But somehow you got through them. )

[erbier]

( Messily, and not without cost. )

[ophidia]

[That makes it sound a hell of a lot like they've all been being run like this one. As in: not actually being run at all. One job that was this much of a clusterfuck was one thing, but a crew not bothering to learn from that?]

( How many? )

[Just how long had this been going on for?]

[erbier]

( This is my fourth assignment. )

[ Though to be fair, it was she and her brood who had made Avera such a mess. ]

( My name is Ilde. I am one of your most senior young hosts; Lexa and I. )

[ Three broods had awoken together: Adara, Castor, Shaula. Of eighteen hosts there is now only Lexa and Ilde. And Ilde's absolute and total disdain for the other woman is not absent from her message. ]

[ophidia]

[If there's supposed to be some respect elicited from her being senior, she won't find it here. All the bleed of feeling about the other name tells him is that this fractured disorganisation has been rooted in from the very start.]

( Four of these missions, and no one's straightened this clusterfuck out. )

[This has gone beyond irritating and into insulting. That he's been dropped here, having to work with this. A twisted game of intentional sabotage; a total joke.]

( This is sounding like someone wants you all to blow your own faces off. )

[erbier]

[ Such a sour man... She observes his fierce irritability from beyond her veil of cool water and snow. ]

( Very few of us move from mission to mission. Each set of new hosts comes with the same beliefs: that they will not bend to the Nest, that they know best, and that they will do as they have always done. )

[ A pause there, to let that sink in. ]

( You don't seem much different, from that description. )

[ophidia]

[His irritation at the situation doesn't cool, but her attempts to insult him are only met with a smooth arrogance, unyielding self-certainty. She's wrong. So wrong he doesn't even bother putting up any personal defence - he simply doesn't need to.]

( That's what you get for recruiting amateurs and dropping them down shit creek without a paddle. )

[Because he wasn't limiting this mess to the new hosts, the ones down on the planet. This thing was a mess from the top down.]