( mental link ) day :041

[iuno]

[ some number of hours after the announcement about the decision they have to make — return to the Station or stay on Hyrypia — there's a restless feeling that hums along the Nest connection for a good few minutes before Juno actually speaks. a sensation like drumming your fingers along a surface; starting to speak and changing your mind. starting— ]

( So. ) [ a pause. nearly vibrating with that strange, jittery impatience. ] ( Who's going where? )

[ he plainly doesn't care, and it's not a social question. but he thinks it would be good to know who to expect to be around on one side or the other. ]

Comments

[iuno]

( It can't be that hard, right? Pick a time and place, get some people who know what they're doing to show off. I should at least be able to teach someone to hit a target with a phaser. )

[ it's pretty obvious that Juno has never been much of anything but a detective with single-minded obsession. ]

[earthborn]

( I'll show you where the shooting range is, once we're up there. )

[Shepard can appreciate a certain focus on the important things. She is, after all, the kind of person who joined the military the moment, was quickly shunted into black ops, and fully intends to stay there for the rest of her life if not forcibly discharged for one reason or another.]

( You'll have to catch me up on what a 'phaser' is. Different worlds, different tech, right? )

[iuno]

[ there's a grateful acknowledgement of her offer. if there's one thing he can tolerate about the whole hivemind thing, it's that it makes it way easier to get away without niceties. ]

( True enough, yeah. It's just a standard laser pistol. ) [ he's familiar enough with it that he doesn't even have to deliberately try to communicate the impression of it to her; it's already on his mind. ] ( Stun and kill settings, rechargeable ammo. Nothing special. )

[earthborn]

( See that's what's wild to me. Lasers small enough to fit in a pistol and powerful enough to actually do damage. I think the closest I ever got was when got this particle beam once, but it was a beast. )

[Shepard's mental associations with the gun are visceral and readily available, easy as skimming a fingerful of icing from a cake, if Juno were of a curious mind. The gun itself is a generous double-armful, organic in design, covered in a metallic chitin with rounded beetle-shell edges and almost-living heat. The energy required, at least in Shepard's universe, to create the focused radiation of a combat-capable laser is orders of magnitude higher than what it takes to fire a physical projectile.

But oh, how those bugs do fry on beams of red light!]

( Now you got me looking forward to it. )