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Entry tags:
Stayin' Alive | Open
CHARACTERS: EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Anytime
SUMMARY: Shepard Open Catch-All + Space Training
WARNINGS: Slight body horror, alcoholic content, Shepard
I. RSVP
( It’s come to my attention, that we’re in space )
[Her tone, such as mental voices have them, is dry, clearly joking.]
( We’ve got a few spacers here, ) [A slight mental nod in the direction of those, you know who you are.] ( But I’m thinking, maybe it’s smarter if we don’t just lean on the symbiotes to tell us how to zip up our pants, in an emergency. The consequences for screwing up a hardsuit seal aren’t anybody’s idea of fun-- trust me, I know.)
[How does she know? Aside from the obvious, it’s hard to say. Something about Shepard’s mental presence, her ‘voice’ wanes and dims, just for a moment, as if tamping down on some unruly impulse-- or memory. Presently she continues.]
( I’ve got a little training scenario set up, if anybody wants to come find me. Just focus, you’ll know how to get there. Bring snacks, if you do, but don’t eat ahead of time. I’m not vacuuming your breakfast out of the vents. )
II: I’m a walkin’ man no time to talk
Shepard was, she knew, not the only spacer on the station. Something about that made sense, as much as anything about the Nest’s choice of conscious hosts made anything, except for migraine headaches; if you were going to dump a bunch of people into space, and give them jobs that required they interact peaceably with aliens, best if at least a few of them knew what they were doing. Maybe that was the intention: seed the group with competence, and hope the symbiote bond would propagate enough expertise that you could avoid unnecessary interaction between the punishing vacuum of space and all these delicate, unshielded organic bits.
Not that Shepard considered that an adequate excuse. One could know any manner of things, transferred through a mysterious psychic brain fungus, but in a panic? In an emergency? People forgot such basic knowledge as how to breathe, let alone how to operate the seals on an unfamiliar hardsuit.
So, she loaded a few onto a dolly and dragged them from their charging stations all the way through the station and set up camp outside the enormous gravity-controlled chamber Cathaway had shown her. Then she sent out her message, and waited.
III. And so, we drink.
Today, Shepard has hauled out of her personal quarters a twenty-gallon fishtank. It’s a big, heavy-looking thing, and she’s got it tipped on one side while she scrubs with a toothbrush at one of the interior corners. Next to it, in a large plastic bag and a larger metal bowl, sits a very disgruntled-looking crab, ineffectually trying to climb the interior of its plastic bubble.
And next to that? The extremely large brown-black colored…. Something…. In the condensation-frosted glass that Shepard keeps sipping from?
“It’s a cocktail,” Shepard says, echoing from inside her tank, “What you do is, you find all the alcohol you can. And then dump it in a big glass. With ice. I’m thinking about calling it… The Shepard.”
IV. The sleep of Reason
Shepard’s nightmares rarely repeat.
There are motifs, of course, the death of loved ones. Cold. Dark. Pain. She’s been shot enough times that pain is a common one. The heat and shock of being shot, the ache of pushing overused muscles through one last mile, one last fight. That strange, trembling unsteadiness, agony at a remove, when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re swimming in too much medigel to really hurt, but you know you’re losing blood faster than any sane person would. She had felt that kind of pain a hundred thousand times, enough that it became another mundane feature of life, and passed through nightmares and daytime flashes without any strong remark from the parts of Shepard she prefered to think of more as herself.
This, was not like that. This was… gut deep. A stretch where one should not exist, displaned in her gut, like stretched stitches in an unstable wound-- surgery, and the painkillers wearing off too soon. A face, dim and blurry above her, panicked, angry voices, restraining hands. Terrible, wrong pain, hot and cold and nauseous by turns, too far back, too far in. Shepard came back to herself with a start, and found that, far from being in bed, she had already stumbled out, past her door, and into the hall.
“Shit,” She muttered, head down, breathing hard. There was no way that had been quiet. “Shit.”
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Anytime
SUMMARY: Shepard Open Catch-All + Space Training
WARNINGS: Slight body horror, alcoholic content, Shepard
I. RSVP
( It’s come to my attention, that we’re in space )
[Her tone, such as mental voices have them, is dry, clearly joking.]
( We’ve got a few spacers here, ) [A slight mental nod in the direction of those, you know who you are.] ( But I’m thinking, maybe it’s smarter if we don’t just lean on the symbiotes to tell us how to zip up our pants, in an emergency. The consequences for screwing up a hardsuit seal aren’t anybody’s idea of fun-- trust me, I know.)
[How does she know? Aside from the obvious, it’s hard to say. Something about Shepard’s mental presence, her ‘voice’ wanes and dims, just for a moment, as if tamping down on some unruly impulse-- or memory. Presently she continues.]
( I’ve got a little training scenario set up, if anybody wants to come find me. Just focus, you’ll know how to get there. Bring snacks, if you do, but don’t eat ahead of time. I’m not vacuuming your breakfast out of the vents. )
II: I’m a walkin’ man no time to talk
Shepard was, she knew, not the only spacer on the station. Something about that made sense, as much as anything about the Nest’s choice of conscious hosts made anything, except for migraine headaches; if you were going to dump a bunch of people into space, and give them jobs that required they interact peaceably with aliens, best if at least a few of them knew what they were doing. Maybe that was the intention: seed the group with competence, and hope the symbiote bond would propagate enough expertise that you could avoid unnecessary interaction between the punishing vacuum of space and all these delicate, unshielded organic bits.
Not that Shepard considered that an adequate excuse. One could know any manner of things, transferred through a mysterious psychic brain fungus, but in a panic? In an emergency? People forgot such basic knowledge as how to breathe, let alone how to operate the seals on an unfamiliar hardsuit.
So, she loaded a few onto a dolly and dragged them from their charging stations all the way through the station and set up camp outside the enormous gravity-controlled chamber Cathaway had shown her. Then she sent out her message, and waited.
III. And so, we drink.
Today, Shepard has hauled out of her personal quarters a twenty-gallon fishtank. It’s a big, heavy-looking thing, and she’s got it tipped on one side while she scrubs with a toothbrush at one of the interior corners. Next to it, in a large plastic bag and a larger metal bowl, sits a very disgruntled-looking crab, ineffectually trying to climb the interior of its plastic bubble.
And next to that? The extremely large brown-black colored…. Something…. In the condensation-frosted glass that Shepard keeps sipping from?
“It’s a cocktail,” Shepard says, echoing from inside her tank, “What you do is, you find all the alcohol you can. And then dump it in a big glass. With ice. I’m thinking about calling it… The Shepard.”
IV. The sleep of Reason
Shepard’s nightmares rarely repeat.
There are motifs, of course, the death of loved ones. Cold. Dark. Pain. She’s been shot enough times that pain is a common one. The heat and shock of being shot, the ache of pushing overused muscles through one last mile, one last fight. That strange, trembling unsteadiness, agony at a remove, when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re swimming in too much medigel to really hurt, but you know you’re losing blood faster than any sane person would. She had felt that kind of pain a hundred thousand times, enough that it became another mundane feature of life, and passed through nightmares and daytime flashes without any strong remark from the parts of Shepard she prefered to think of more as herself.
This, was not like that. This was… gut deep. A stretch where one should not exist, displaned in her gut, like stretched stitches in an unstable wound-- surgery, and the painkillers wearing off too soon. A face, dim and blurry above her, panicked, angry voices, restraining hands. Terrible, wrong pain, hot and cold and nauseous by turns, too far back, too far in. Shepard came back to herself with a start, and found that, far from being in bed, she had already stumbled out, past her door, and into the hall.
“Shit,” She muttered, head down, breathing hard. There was no way that had been quiet. “Shit.”