Marco looks pretty frazzled when he gets to the Nexus. He's walked rather than morph, given how incredibly unpleasant the last morph was. He's nearly out of breath when he gets there
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"Personally, I'd just give the world a 'slag you' and leave," says a goldenrod and purple robot, "Of course, I'm not really in the saving business. Mostly." He then considers the next question for a moment, then adds, "Being paralyzed and cut up for spare parts."
""Slag you" is robot for "shove it", right? Because I can't exactly do that, because the people I'll be quitting to are my friends." He shrugs.
"That sounds pretty awful. They put you back together, right?" A pause. "I mean, duh, you got put back together or else you wouldn't be talking to me."
"That does put a kink in things, and yes, it's pretty much shove it.." Swindle says, then frowns lightly, "Not exactly. I was offline for about a sola...year. About a year. A LOL returned me to life."
"I.. I'm not sure you can," says Rock. "Just that sometimes they decide they don't need you any more. And... having to fight someone who'd been driven insane by a virus and had already beaten most of the guys I'd been fighting for years like they were nothing."
Oddly enough, it brings Marco some comfort to see another child soldier. At least his world isn't the only one that's messed up. "Well, there must be some way to do it. A resignation letter? Call in sick too many days in a row? Cake with "Goodbye" written on it in icing?"
"Yeah, I can see how that might fuel a few nightmares. Did you win?"
"I wouldn't have been allowed to resign, even if I would have tried. And they never would have believed 'sick days'. Robots don't get sick, except for computer viruses like Omega." There's a shiver at the mention of that. "I was replaced, eventually, and then had to move here. But it's still not really over..."
Rock nods. "We did, but we knew from this place that there were a lot of other universes - other futures - where we didn't."
Robot? So much for the fellow child soldier, then, maybe. "Is this Nexus like a safe place, then? You said it's not over, so has whatever weirdness there is on your world moved here?"
Marco nods. "I've already learned about another future on my world where reality broke and everyone just blinked out. Nothing makes you paranoid like half-expecting to just stop existing."
Animorphs = total 90's flashback! :)cuteandsomodestAugust 12 2010, 04:29:44 UTC
"Yeah? I'll take not dying and abandoning my dad over duty any day, thanks. I've done more than enough. I've risked my life too many times for this stuff."
He looks simultaneously skeptical and full of disdain. "You were threatened...by shadows."
I KNOW. <3steadfastaimAugust 12 2010, 05:10:36 UTC
And you have no care for your comrades? Or your goal? This is not something you can just quit.
[Long silence.]
Where I come from, there are people who are essentially immortal. They will not die when you kill them, they simply get back up. Bullets do nothing against them. There was a child, one of them. Each one of them has an ability. This child could control shadows and make them solid, into a weapon that could pierce anything. Or else hide himself in any shadow, anywhere. Unless he chose to materialize himself, he was everywhere at once. Within my home. Behind every corner, all the time.
[She realizes how foolish she sounds trying to describe this and decides to shut up while she's ahead.]
If I so much as breathed the wrong way, the person closest to me would suffer. They wouldn't have killed him, but I didn't know that at the time.
"This is very much something I can just quit. Of course I care about my friends and, oh, planet Earth, but I have priorities, and it's not like we're doing anything but getting our butts kicked and risking our lives."
There isn't pity in his face, but he does soften just a little at that. "Sorry. I got dismembered by ants today. It sounds more scary than shadows."
"Golly." It's an out-of-costume Victor, now, messy hair smushed under a bowler cap, in a loose, untucked blue suit-shirt in August and jeans that need to be held up by rope, looped like suspenders, crossed behind her back and tied around her beltloops. She's pale, with the start of a scar visible on her neck, and a pretty big scar on her right palm, scootching across her fingers. "I think there's gotta be a box for that, somewhere. And... I probably shouldn't say, for that second bit. I could tell stories."
She would be so distressed if she knew she was recognized that easily! She works quite hard at being distinctly different, even down to body-language. Her fingers twitch. "That's zero fun. Less than zero fun. Negative fun. Uh. But. On the funny side of almost bein' ingested, I once got picked up by a monster, and I explained carefully that I'd be unpleasant to digest because I have an endoskeleton. It, uh. Said something back. That sounded like: 'Afiiiiguuurgggleaaarrrrg'."
He'd recognized her voice. Marco's an exceptionally perceptive - and paranoid - kid, and so much time spent in recognizing his teammates from thought-speak alone has made him very good with voices.
He laughs. "Is that monster for "waiter, there's an endoskeleton in my meal"?"
"I don't think you can just step back from the hero type of role," Clark says, a little regretfully. "I've tried it myself and it doesn't really work. Running away just makes the guilt worse."
He's faced a lot of creepy shit over the years, but one incident stands out the most. "I'd say the most nightmarish thing that ever happened to me was when my dad was in the hospital for a triple bypass, and the brother of another patient strapped a bomb to his own chest and demanded that I let them transplant my dad's liver into his brother to save his life or else he'd blow up the hospital."
"Sure you can. You quit. You stop answering the phone and going to meetings to attack the enemy. Sounds pretty simple. I'm mostly just asking about breaking it nicely to people."
Marco's eyes get wide. If there's one thing he's grateful for, it's that so far he's had no reason to believe that his dad's been in immediate danger. "Well, that sounds cheerful. What happened?"
"Well the last time I tried 'retiring,' I dosed up on red kryptonite and rode off on my dad's old motorcycle and disappeared for three months, so I'm not really the best person to ask if you want considerate. Or subtle."
"Well, I tried to track down a vial of this stuff that brought his brother back from the dead in the first place, and found out that it was made with my blood as a base, which rendered it completely useless once it got near the refined meteor rock in the bomb. One of the police snipers took him out and he dropped the deadman's switch, but I managed to pitch the bomb out into a field before it exploded. Barely."
"Skipping town's a bit out of my range, but that doesn't sound like such a horrible idea. Maybe the Yeerks haven't gotten to South America yet."
"That's insane," Marco says softly. What is it with his comic books and videogames and movies always pretending superheroing is full of striking poses and booking the bad guys? Every story he hears from a superhero - at least, he's pretty sure that's what Clark is, but he doesn't want to out and go "are you Superman?" - gets worse and worse
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"That sounds pretty awful. They put you back together, right?" A pause. "I mean, duh, you got put back together or else you wouldn't be talking to me."
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"Yeah, I can see how that might fuel a few nightmares. Did you win?"
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Rock nods. "We did, but we knew from this place that there were a lot of other universes - other futures - where we didn't."
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Marco nods. "I've already learned about another future on my world where reality broke and everyone just blinked out. Nothing makes you paranoid like half-expecting to just stop existing."
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Stevenkingish? [And her voice gets quiet, not wanting to share, and really wishing she was allowed to reply in text.]
...I was threatened by shadows.
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He looks simultaneously skeptical and full of disdain. "You were threatened...by shadows."
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[Long silence.]
Where I come from, there are people who are essentially immortal. They will not die when you kill them, they simply get back up. Bullets do nothing against them. There was a child, one of them. Each one of them has an ability. This child could control shadows and make them solid, into a weapon that could pierce anything. Or else hide himself in any shadow, anywhere. Unless he chose to materialize himself, he was everywhere at once. Within my home. Behind every corner, all the time.
[She realizes how foolish she sounds trying to describe this and decides to shut up while she's ahead.]
If I so much as breathed the wrong way, the person closest to me would suffer. They wouldn't have killed him, but I didn't know that at the time.
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There isn't pity in his face, but he does soften just a little at that. "Sorry. I got dismembered by ants today. It sounds more scary than shadows."
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He laughs. "Is that monster for "waiter, there's an endoskeleton in my meal"?"
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He's faced a lot of creepy shit over the years, but one incident stands out the most. "I'd say the most nightmarish thing that ever happened to me was when my dad was in the hospital for a triple bypass, and the brother of another patient strapped a bomb to his own chest and demanded that I let them transplant my dad's liver into his brother to save his life or else he'd blow up the hospital."
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Marco's eyes get wide. If there's one thing he's grateful for, it's that so far he's had no reason to believe that his dad's been in immediate danger. "Well, that sounds cheerful. What happened?"
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"Well, I tried to track down a vial of this stuff that brought his brother back from the dead in the first place, and found out that it was made with my blood as a base, which rendered it completely useless once it got near the refined meteor rock in the bomb. One of the police snipers took him out and he dropped the deadman's switch, but I managed to pitch the bomb out into a field before it exploded. Barely."
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"That's insane," Marco says softly. What is it with his comic books and videogames and movies always pretending superheroing is full of striking poses and booking the bad guys? Every story he hears from a superhero - at least, he's pretty sure that's what Clark is, but he doesn't want to out and go "are you Superman?" - gets worse and worse
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