Conversations With Head People [Narrative, Ali, Hans]
Samus padded quietly down the steps, uncertain. She couldn't recall how she'd gotten here, and something about her surroundings didn't seem quite real. Nothing seemed to cast a shadow, and textures seemed oddly muted under her hand.
Somewhere below, she could hear music: an audio feed quietly crooning a melancholy tune she didn't recognize, and someone humming. At first, it seemed they were humming quite badly, but no, it seemed more like a different song entirely. There was also a sizzling Samus couldn't place right away, and an occasional scrape or clank.
At the foot of the stairs, she peered out into a scene of unfamiliar domesticity. A woman she didn't recognize stood in a smallish kitchen, presiding over several pots and pans on a stove, the source of the unrecognized sounds.
She was no one Samus could immediately place; tall and graceful, patient certainty in every movement. Tattooed glyphs climbed her arms to disappear under a loose robe and a mane of carefully cultivated chaos. Her natural hair color was difficult to determine, as it was standing up and swept back, a riot of color, and with feathers and small ornaments woven in as well. Without turning, the woman speaks, her voice tantalizingly familiar; "ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you'd never wake."
Samus starts, surprised, her foot halfway between the last step and the kitchen floor. "Uh?" Not her most articulate moment, is it? After a moment, she puts her foot down, gathering her thoughts enough for questions. "Where am I? What happened? Who are you?"
"You," the woman replies, gesturing toward a table with a spatula, "are between the stairs and the kitchen, when you should be at the table. Breakfast will be up in a moment." She glances over her shoulder for a moment, giving Samus a glimpse of blue eyes, a tattooed cheek, and a motherly smile, before turning her attention back to the stove. "As for what happened, you took a nasty knock on the head. For a moment, I wasn't certain you'd pull through, but here you are."
Still a little confused, but willing to go along with the pleasant company long enough to get a meal and a better idea of the situation, Samus takes a seat at the table. "That still leaves the question of who."
"Does it?" She gives Samus another amused, sidelong smile. "Don't worry, it'll come to you soon." From the side, Samus could add another tidbit to her scant intelligence of her benefactor; the woman was apparently well into a pregnancy, her belly unmistakably gravid. "Besides, breakfast is almost ready, now that you're both here."
"Both?"
"Both." The voice was a low, wet growl, forced unwilling through a throat made for things other than speech. Samus glanced to the speaker, seated at the table beside her, and had a bare instant to take it in: raw, sickly-looking muscles bulge and twitch, protesting the absence of skin and the too-tight network of lambent blue veins crisscrossing its body. It lunged at her, most of its body opening in a slavering, fang-lined maw.
Her arm snapped up on reflex, leveling her arm-cannon at the beast (had she been wearing her armor a moment ago?). Their hostess merely gave it a stern look. "None of that, you. You're just a construct of her subconscious, and this isn't the time for your tantrums." She raps the construct smartly on what passes for its forehead with a wooden spoon, before setting a bowl of oatmeal before it. "Behave."
"Am I dreaming?" Samus asks, slowly relaxing as the nightmare takes a few sulky pokes at its bowl.
"Perhaps," the woman muses, "Or you may have stepped from the Nexus into some odd Facet without realizing it. Or those few studies of the Shaman path you made may have finally resulted in a vision. It's even possible that you came here fully aware, but have some brief retrograde amnesia--I'd blame the head injury."
"Somehow, that fails to reassure me." Samus' expression is as dour as her tone. "Or answer anything." On the audio, the previous song ended, segueing into an Optherian vocalist's rendition of "Am I Blue?"
"Good. I'm not here for reassurance. I'm here for something more important." As she speaks, she places a steaming bowl before the Hunter. "Here. Eat up."
"Choke on it," the nightmare at the table suggests. Eying her dark companion warily, Samus prods at her bowl but can't identify the contents; they seem to change from moment to moment.
"While you're eating, we really need to have a word about your relationships." That statement brings Samus up short, spoon halfway to her mouth, and elicits a wet chortle from the creature.
Leaning toward her, the thing jeers at Samus out of a dozen tiny, fang-lined mouths. "Oh, this should be good. We never told dear Justin how we'd started to feel, did we? Did we send Tak away for her own good, or to spare ourself the guilt of what was coming, hmm? Lis and her mate are too wrapped up in each other to care about you. We've burned every conceivable connection with Ali, and as for Hans, well, at least he won't notice we're gone--we were barely there to begin with!" A cruel laugh rocks it back in its chair, where it receives a dour look from the target of its derision.
"Hardly the way I would have phrased it, but she does have a point. Your surgical strike on their history was enough, but even you can see that your efforts to justify it were unsupportable." She pauses, eying Samus reproachfully. "You're not eating."
"Hardly unsupportable," Samus protests. "Her future is my past. She changes things simply by moving between the two!"
"She doesn't spend weeks studying history and then make a deliberate change. For all we know, your history always had that happening. It's entirely different from what you did."
"Well, she said--"
"She hurt your feelings," the dark one taunts.
"Yes, she did, and you quite misinterpreted it. Didn't you?"
Samus compresses her lips in frustration, not finding much better fortune in this argument than the last. Her spoon still in her left hand, she picks up the bowl in her right (hadn't she been wearing her armor?). "I suppose you have a point, somewhere in all this?"
"Only this: your coming days are marked on the stone, but not yet etched. If you don't like the pattern, there may still be time to change it. Now go on, eat up. I'm anxious to hear what you think of it."
Vexed by the riddle, Samus raises her spoon to her lips, emptying it, and trying to place the taste. She's not certain she can taste anything, although something about it seems... oddly comfortable. "It's... good. I think," she mumbles through a full mouth.
"Mm, yes, we do like the taste of our pride, don't we? Be sure to swallow."
That, Samus found, was more difficult. As she tried, she found herself fighting one reflex after another, rampant instinct pushing her away from her goal. The dark thing jeered, while the other woman, her face so familiar, rose and moved to perch on the edge of the table beside Samus' bowl.
"Go on, you can do it," she encouraged, with almost a mother's care. A mother's--was that it? Samus peered at her, mentally stripping away the facial tattoos, smoothing down the bird's nest of hair. No, it wasn't her mother's face, she was sure--it was her own. Perhaps that surprise helped her overcome the last of her resistance and swallow.
"Well, I'll be cracked."
"That was well done, and past time. You're almost ready. You know what you have to do?"
Samus nodded, immediately regretting it. "Ugh... that doesn't taste so good, going down. And I think I'm getting dizzy. You... poisoned me?"
The tattooed woman shakes her head, resting a comforting hand on Samus' shoulder. "No, but you've been out for nearly thirty seconds. The stims should be kicking in by now." Samus tried to follow her words, but the world was starting to swim around her. Her vertigo wasn't helped by the hand on her shoulder shoving, sending her teetering backward in her chair. "Do what you need to, and may the spirits favor you. Oh, and your daughter isn't eating enough; look into that." And with a slam, she landed flat on her back, in darkness.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ha! Lieutenant, did you see that?
I saw, I saw.
*The two armored figures cautiously stepped out from behind cover, picking their way through the debris of battle and their fallen comrades, toward where the Hunter lay sprawled. Both wore the markings of a Sagawa Industries security unit, and the one with an officer stripe hung back a few steps from his exuberant subordinate.*
We did it! We did it! My paychit this term is gonna be huge!
Command, this is Jelvrex on P-deck. We have the Hunter down. Send a containment team, and tell R&D they finally built something that can take down the Hunter.
I wish you bluebirds in the spring
To give your heart a song to sing
And then a kiss, but more than this
I wish you love.
*Samus' eyes opened, blinked twice as she tried to focus. The shapes and glyphs of her HUD glowed in front of an unfamiliar ceiling. And she heard music? Oh. She'd had an audio feed of Terran blues going, and it hadn't stopped when... whatever happened, happened. She lay a moment longer, not moving, simply letting her body remember how it was supposed to work.*
Keep back. The containment team will be here soon. We won't want to be in the way when they get here.
Come on, sir, that thing shut her down. And I've never seen the Hunter up close. Something to tell my kids. Hell, something to tell a girl so I can have kids.
And in July, a lemonade
To cool you in some leafy glade
I wish you health, and more than wealth
I wish you love.
*Someone was leaning over her. Someone in gray armor... Sagawa security? Oh. Oh, yes. She knew where she was now, and why, and how. Her suit's sensors identified another one nearby.*
Can you hurry it up, Command? My shift's almost up, and the fan club is getting old.
I can see my reflection!
My breaking heart and I agree
That you and I could never be
So with my best, my very best
I set you--
Off.
Urk!
*She was glad to have some sense of clarity, and set part of her mind to sorting out the vision, dream, or whatever it had been, while the rest of her clears some space.*
~~~~~~~~~~
*Some time later, a message was sent to Hans and Ali's PINpoints, with several sets of coordinates.*
Ali, Hans,
I've broken your trust, and my actions have been unjustifiable. Any opinion you hold of me at this point would be justified, and if you preferred to cut your losses, I couldn't fault you. That said, realizing I have no right to it, I'd like to ask you both for another chance.
The ship is finished, and receives its dedication tonight. If you'd like to be there for the whole ceremony, come here. If you just want to be there to throw bottles at the hull, come here. If you'd prefer to skip the festivities entirely, here is the coordinate you'll need.
I hope to see you both there.
S
Somewhere below, she could hear music: an audio feed quietly crooning a melancholy tune she didn't recognize, and someone humming. At first, it seemed they were humming quite badly, but no, it seemed more like a different song entirely. There was also a sizzling Samus couldn't place right away, and an occasional scrape or clank.
At the foot of the stairs, she peered out into a scene of unfamiliar domesticity. A woman she didn't recognize stood in a smallish kitchen, presiding over several pots and pans on a stove, the source of the unrecognized sounds.
She was no one Samus could immediately place; tall and graceful, patient certainty in every movement. Tattooed glyphs climbed her arms to disappear under a loose robe and a mane of carefully cultivated chaos. Her natural hair color was difficult to determine, as it was standing up and swept back, a riot of color, and with feathers and small ornaments woven in as well. Without turning, the woman speaks, her voice tantalizingly familiar; "ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you'd never wake."
Samus starts, surprised, her foot halfway between the last step and the kitchen floor. "Uh?" Not her most articulate moment, is it? After a moment, she puts her foot down, gathering her thoughts enough for questions. "Where am I? What happened? Who are you?"
"You," the woman replies, gesturing toward a table with a spatula, "are between the stairs and the kitchen, when you should be at the table. Breakfast will be up in a moment." She glances over her shoulder for a moment, giving Samus a glimpse of blue eyes, a tattooed cheek, and a motherly smile, before turning her attention back to the stove. "As for what happened, you took a nasty knock on the head. For a moment, I wasn't certain you'd pull through, but here you are."
Still a little confused, but willing to go along with the pleasant company long enough to get a meal and a better idea of the situation, Samus takes a seat at the table. "That still leaves the question of who."
"Does it?" She gives Samus another amused, sidelong smile. "Don't worry, it'll come to you soon." From the side, Samus could add another tidbit to her scant intelligence of her benefactor; the woman was apparently well into a pregnancy, her belly unmistakably gravid. "Besides, breakfast is almost ready, now that you're both here."
"Both?"
"Both." The voice was a low, wet growl, forced unwilling through a throat made for things other than speech. Samus glanced to the speaker, seated at the table beside her, and had a bare instant to take it in: raw, sickly-looking muscles bulge and twitch, protesting the absence of skin and the too-tight network of lambent blue veins crisscrossing its body. It lunged at her, most of its body opening in a slavering, fang-lined maw.
Her arm snapped up on reflex, leveling her arm-cannon at the beast (had she been wearing her armor a moment ago?). Their hostess merely gave it a stern look. "None of that, you. You're just a construct of her subconscious, and this isn't the time for your tantrums." She raps the construct smartly on what passes for its forehead with a wooden spoon, before setting a bowl of oatmeal before it. "Behave."
"Am I dreaming?" Samus asks, slowly relaxing as the nightmare takes a few sulky pokes at its bowl.
"Perhaps," the woman muses, "Or you may have stepped from the Nexus into some odd Facet without realizing it. Or those few studies of the Shaman path you made may have finally resulted in a vision. It's even possible that you came here fully aware, but have some brief retrograde amnesia--I'd blame the head injury."
"Somehow, that fails to reassure me." Samus' expression is as dour as her tone. "Or answer anything." On the audio, the previous song ended, segueing into an Optherian vocalist's rendition of "Am I Blue?"
"Good. I'm not here for reassurance. I'm here for something more important." As she speaks, she places a steaming bowl before the Hunter. "Here. Eat up."
"Choke on it," the nightmare at the table suggests. Eying her dark companion warily, Samus prods at her bowl but can't identify the contents; they seem to change from moment to moment.
"While you're eating, we really need to have a word about your relationships." That statement brings Samus up short, spoon halfway to her mouth, and elicits a wet chortle from the creature.
Leaning toward her, the thing jeers at Samus out of a dozen tiny, fang-lined mouths. "Oh, this should be good. We never told dear Justin how we'd started to feel, did we? Did we send Tak away for her own good, or to spare ourself the guilt of what was coming, hmm? Lis and her mate are too wrapped up in each other to care about you. We've burned every conceivable connection with Ali, and as for Hans, well, at least he won't notice we're gone--we were barely there to begin with!" A cruel laugh rocks it back in its chair, where it receives a dour look from the target of its derision.
"Hardly the way I would have phrased it, but she does have a point. Your surgical strike on their history was enough, but even you can see that your efforts to justify it were unsupportable." She pauses, eying Samus reproachfully. "You're not eating."
"Hardly unsupportable," Samus protests. "Her future is my past. She changes things simply by moving between the two!"
"She doesn't spend weeks studying history and then make a deliberate change. For all we know, your history always had that happening. It's entirely different from what you did."
"Well, she said--"
"She hurt your feelings," the dark one taunts.
"Yes, she did, and you quite misinterpreted it. Didn't you?"
Samus compresses her lips in frustration, not finding much better fortune in this argument than the last. Her spoon still in her left hand, she picks up the bowl in her right (hadn't she been wearing her armor?). "I suppose you have a point, somewhere in all this?"
"Only this: your coming days are marked on the stone, but not yet etched. If you don't like the pattern, there may still be time to change it. Now go on, eat up. I'm anxious to hear what you think of it."
Vexed by the riddle, Samus raises her spoon to her lips, emptying it, and trying to place the taste. She's not certain she can taste anything, although something about it seems... oddly comfortable. "It's... good. I think," she mumbles through a full mouth.
"Mm, yes, we do like the taste of our pride, don't we? Be sure to swallow."
That, Samus found, was more difficult. As she tried, she found herself fighting one reflex after another, rampant instinct pushing her away from her goal. The dark thing jeered, while the other woman, her face so familiar, rose and moved to perch on the edge of the table beside Samus' bowl.
"Go on, you can do it," she encouraged, with almost a mother's care. A mother's--was that it? Samus peered at her, mentally stripping away the facial tattoos, smoothing down the bird's nest of hair. No, it wasn't her mother's face, she was sure--it was her own. Perhaps that surprise helped her overcome the last of her resistance and swallow.
"Well, I'll be cracked."
"That was well done, and past time. You're almost ready. You know what you have to do?"
Samus nodded, immediately regretting it. "Ugh... that doesn't taste so good, going down. And I think I'm getting dizzy. You... poisoned me?"
The tattooed woman shakes her head, resting a comforting hand on Samus' shoulder. "No, but you've been out for nearly thirty seconds. The stims should be kicking in by now." Samus tried to follow her words, but the world was starting to swim around her. Her vertigo wasn't helped by the hand on her shoulder shoving, sending her teetering backward in her chair. "Do what you need to, and may the spirits favor you. Oh, and your daughter isn't eating enough; look into that." And with a slam, she landed flat on her back, in darkness.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ha! Lieutenant, did you see that?
I saw, I saw.
*The two armored figures cautiously stepped out from behind cover, picking their way through the debris of battle and their fallen comrades, toward where the Hunter lay sprawled. Both wore the markings of a Sagawa Industries security unit, and the one with an officer stripe hung back a few steps from his exuberant subordinate.*
We did it! We did it! My paychit this term is gonna be huge!
Command, this is Jelvrex on P-deck. We have the Hunter down. Send a containment team, and tell R&D they finally built something that can take down the Hunter.
I wish you bluebirds in the spring
To give your heart a song to sing
And then a kiss, but more than this
I wish you love.
*Samus' eyes opened, blinked twice as she tried to focus. The shapes and glyphs of her HUD glowed in front of an unfamiliar ceiling. And she heard music? Oh. She'd had an audio feed of Terran blues going, and it hadn't stopped when... whatever happened, happened. She lay a moment longer, not moving, simply letting her body remember how it was supposed to work.*
Keep back. The containment team will be here soon. We won't want to be in the way when they get here.
Come on, sir, that thing shut her down. And I've never seen the Hunter up close. Something to tell my kids. Hell, something to tell a girl so I can have kids.
And in July, a lemonade
To cool you in some leafy glade
I wish you health, and more than wealth
I wish you love.
*Someone was leaning over her. Someone in gray armor... Sagawa security? Oh. Oh, yes. She knew where she was now, and why, and how. Her suit's sensors identified another one nearby.*
Can you hurry it up, Command? My shift's almost up, and the fan club is getting old.
I can see my reflection!
My breaking heart and I agree
That you and I could never be
So with my best, my very best
I set you--
Off.
Urk!
*She was glad to have some sense of clarity, and set part of her mind to sorting out the vision, dream, or whatever it had been, while the rest of her clears some space.*
~~~~~~~~~~
*Some time later, a message was sent to Hans and Ali's PINpoints, with several sets of coordinates.*
Ali, Hans,
I've broken your trust, and my actions have been unjustifiable. Any opinion you hold of me at this point would be justified, and if you preferred to cut your losses, I couldn't fault you. That said, realizing I have no right to it, I'd like to ask you both for another chance.
The ship is finished, and receives its dedication tonight. If you'd like to be there for the whole ceremony, come here. If you just want to be there to throw bottles at the hull, come here. If you'd prefer to skip the festivities entirely, here is the coordinate you'll need.
I hope to see you both there.
S