when you knew that i was always on your side
To: Dexter Grif <...>
From: Elizabeth Weir <...>
Subject: Checking In
Message:
Grif-
I saw your post while I was checking my email; it sounds like you're fine, but please catch me up?
-Elizabeth
(Yes, I'm relaxing.)
To: Elizabeth Weir
Subject: re: Checking In
Oh, heh, you may also have an older message in which I say that Something Horrible's probably happened to me, but you can ignore that, since yeah, I'm fine now.
Anyway, from the top: Last month, cryptic still-life art posters with 7/7 date on them! MysteeEEeeEerious. I decide I'm going to avoid the Nexus entirely that day if at all possible... ONI has their own ideas, especially after I... uh... that's a separate long story, but for the moment, suffice it to say that I did something bad for a good reason and ended up owing ONI for bailing me out of it. So they told me to go check it out anyway. Fortunately, I planned for "If I Must Go There That Day," and pretty much packed like if I knew I was going to relive Black Mesa.
What everyone found, in a section of the Nexus that day, was a party. Yay, party. Yay not so much, when this purple-skinned cockbite by the name of Killgrave showed up and basically sealed the party area off from the rest of the Nexus. What we got after that was a week-long (for us; apparently twice that long on the outside) trip through a rainbow-colored tour of the Seven Deadly Sins. Preparation paid off for me, and I did what I could to help others out, get people through, but there was still only so much to be done.
Unsurprisingly, if you died in there, you showed back up in the Nexus, which is good, because the group I was with got as far as a final confrontation with Killgrave... when someone elsewhere managed to blow the whole thing up. Cue my crash-landing in the middle of the Sanctuary, after which I had a beer and came back to Base for some sleep that didn't involve half an eye on the motion tracker.
So, yeah, that's been my fun and exciting week-or-two.
--Grif
(Good. I'm glad to hear it.)
Reply
From: Elizabeth Weir:
Subject: re: Checking In
I just saw it. Why does anyone wonder why I worry about you all so much? I remember the posters, though, I came across one or two before I left.
You crash-landed. Of course you did. Do you know anything about 'Killgrave' otherwise? (That's a really unfortunate name.)
Say hello to anyone I should be saying hello to, please.
-Elizabeth
(The automatae showed up at the airport.)
Reply
To: Elizabeth Weir
Subject: re: Checking In
They wonder because we tend to prepare to end up in a shitload of trouble, so we can get ourselves out again, most of the time?
Yeah, that wasn't exactly according to plan. But when you've just been killed by having the tower you're standing in the top room of blown out from under you and being crushed by rocks, you don't exactly get a whole lot of option on just where and how you... I don't know, resurrect or whatever.
Uh, let's see. Zebediah Killgrave. Purple skin, hair, eyes, clothes. Accent... somewhere eastern Europe, I guess. Gave off some sort of biological agent that could apparently make people do stuff, which is how he kept most folks from leaving while he did the sealing off. (I could've bailed, since my armor detected and filtered the bio-agent, but stuck around since this was the sort of thing I was there for.) (Dude. It is a pretty bad name, but according to a post by a friend who was investigating from the outside, the Purple Man is some sort of crazy-ass supervillain type, so maybe that's just how that works, I don't know.)
Will do.
--Grif
(Ha. Weird, but awesome. Hope that didn't make things awkward for you and Nathan, although I also kind of wish someone had been there with a camera. :-)
Reply
From: Elizabeth Weir
Subject: re: Checking In
There's such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
'Supervillain'. Wonderful. Are you worried about this down the track and/or should I be worried when I get home? (Which is not for at least another month.)
--and what did you do that you owed ONI for? Dexter.
Thank you.
-Elizabeth
(No, it's been fine. They beat me to Spain, so he had more warning than I did. I'll give you the holiday snapshots when I'm in back at the apartment.)
Reply
To: Elizabeth Weir
Subject: re: Checking In
Yeah, uh, I'm pretty much used to the concept. (Someone I know back home got knocked backwards in time during the same thing that kicked me forward. He tried to use it to keep all sorts of bad shit from having happened... but kept causing them by mistake. He eventually gave up and joined the rest of us in The Future.)
I don't... think so. He seemed pretty resigned to having bitten off more than he could chew, by the time we got to the final showdown. (From the sound of things, others had already managed to get to him first.) If he decides to start anything again, he's apparently a flashy enough bastard that he'll make sure we know it's him. All the same, you know me and how I always recommend keeping a gas mask handy just in case, where the Nexus is concerned.
Oh. heh. Um. I took a crowbar to large chunks of the upper UNSC ranks in a quest for answers about whether my sister might still be alive. (I'd met an alternate version of an old squadmate, in the Nexus. In his universe, my sister had enlisted, gotten assigned to Blood Gulch, but some weirdness with the ship caused her to not actually arrive for 800 years.) I got cranky that my version might've enlisted, and crankier that if she had, Command mightn't have ever told me. One phone call later, I found out that she had, but when I asked why I was never told... they hung up on me. That's pretty much when I snapped, right there.
A few days' rampage later, they managed to shut me down, after which I spent a few days cooling my heels in a stockade while ONI smoothed things over and started up the search that they admitted they should've done back when her ship first went missing (which, combined with my having managed to not actually permanently injure anyone, covers why I'm not rotting in a deep dark hole, deal with ONI or no deal with ONI). On the whole, I think it was worth it.
No problem.
--Grif
(Excellent. I look forward to them.)
Reply
Leave a comment