fleetlogs | THE EDITED PHERES LOG (third times a charm)

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> FLEETBOUND POST. [refiningSpacetime - FIN]
=> MARDUK: Call your guide. [FIN]
=> RICCIN: Retrieve the damsel in distress. [FIN]
=> HINNOM: Lead him home. [FIN]
=> FLEETBOUND POST. [activatingAggro- FIN]
=> SIPARA: Fetch your dumb moirail. [FIN]
=> PHERES: Wake up. [FIN]

SUMMARY: Taking drinks from strangers is generally a bad idea. Pheres needs to be picked up from a party, but life is hard when your moirail is out of town and all of your friends are terrible. Luckily, there's always Fleetbound!

WARNINGS: None! Except for Pheres being thoroughly depressing in Lead him home.

THIS HAS BEEN FINALLY EDITED. For like the third time. Due to POV-switching shenanigans, you may occasionally encounter weird shifts / incorrect verb pluralisation at points that I missed in switching from 3rd person to 2nd person POV. Sorry! :c

For the most part, though, typoes should be fixed and continuity is now more accurate!

ALSO: Follow the story through the links above to ensure you're reading the correct, edited threads, please and thank youu

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The air is heady with the sound of drone wings, and above that, you can hear the heavy stomp of grounded movement. They must be at the next street over, for all that they haven't heard any culling screams. Any minute, they'll be pressing into this street.

That thought stirs you out of your stupor. The little hoofbeast corrall show that Pheres and this kid have been putting on is a fucking absurdity, and you're wildly resentful that you've had to play audience to it. If you thought hitting them would make them stop crying, you would in a heartbeat.

"This is a fucking awful idea," you snap, stepping forward, directing your words at Pheres. If the kid is feral, then they're going to get culled, but there's no point in him throwing his lot in with them, no matter his stupid delusions about his Messiah damned eyes. "They've got battery sensors - if they catch you trying to bail, they'll gut you like a goddamned fish."

No one's listening. Your voice falters, then cracks, and you clamp a hand over your mouth to cover the way your breath is hitching.

Riccin isn't even looking at Hinnom. As far as they're concerned, ze's already dead, and that's what makes you realise ze wasn't joking.

Hinnom's feral. Ferals are culled. Ze's going to get culled, and it's all your fault: ze told you, and oh.

Oh, Empress, what are you going to do?

Hinnom is too close, close enough that you can smell the cluckbeast they ate for breakfast, and you are entirely unhappy with the way their forehead is pressed against yours. The only thing that keeps you from recoiling is the fact their eyes are baby gray and harmless, and the fact that this contact might be the difference between living and dying.

It's still terrible, though.

"Don't listen to her," you hiss at Hinnom. If you weren't holding their hand, you'd clamp your fronds over their sponges, just in case. It's got to work, and if Riccin fucks this up, you'll bash in their stupid head before the drones take off yours.

You don't feel any difference yet, but maybe Hinnom isn't thinking hard enough - or maybe that's how psychics work. You didn't have a warning with Rmeros, either, and with that thoroughly unsettling thought in mind, you start pushing on your psionics.

You don't know the city, and your spatial awareness is entirely fucked, for all that it's gotten better: you can feel Riccin stepping forward behind you, and the empty space of the sewers below, but the buildings might as well be pencil thin for all the impression they're leaving. If you jump now, you're likely to end up in the river, or in front of a cart, or vivisected by an unexpected wall, but even that would be better than just waiting to die.

You can't help the way your eyes keep flitting towards Riccin. They're stepping forward, ominous as a thundercloud, and the scratches on their face are bleeding three steady streams of gold.

There's no weapon in their mitts, but they're big enough they don't need a weapon!

"You need to focus." You can feel the tingle of your psionics on the back of your head as Castor pushes it down, gently. "Don't worry about them. Just think of hive."

"I can't focus," you whine, and Pheres is looking worried.

"Think of the thing you were making," Castor insists. "With the bones, and the hair, and the shells. And your collection. And your shelf. And.."

You spend so much time at your little table, working on your toys. They're not the sort of things you see in the shops, when Mardie takes you strolling through the aboveground city, but you're proud of them: of the little figurines with their joints and pinions, of the tools you use to make them, of the shelf cobbled together to hold them... it's always in the back of your mind, and it's easy now to pull it to the forefront.

You see, rather than feel, the moment that the picture clicks. Pheres's eyes widen, his eyebrows shoot up and he beams at you, hard enough that his eyes go all squinty. "You did it," he says, marvelling, and then: "Hold on tight."

The world goes white.

He's fucking ignoring you.

The sound comes from deep in your gut and rips free of your throat with a vengeance. Pheres is all horns and bones: all it would take to get his attention is one good swing, and right now, it seems like a great idea. You've done nothing but help his chump ass all goddamn morning and you're not going to be fucking ignored.

He's sparking up a storm, but you ignore it. He can scorch you all he fucking wants: embers and lights didn't fucking work the first time, so you don't know what shit he's trying, and you do not care.

Maybe you'll clout him in his fool head. Maybe you'll cull him, and save the drones the trouble. You're not sure yet, but there's only a few steps left: you'll figure out when you get there.

You don't notice when the sparks start increasing, but the flash of light, bright as lightning and the sun above, doesn't even make you falter: you've played that hoofbeastshit once already. When you reach out to snatch hold of a horn, or a limb, or a face, though, and find nothing, that's enough to snap you out of your spiral of rage and make you actually pause.

It takes a moment to clear away the white spots crowding your vision, and.. holy shit. They're gone.

How the fuck are they gone?

With a snarl, you whirl on Marduk. She's the only person left, and so she's the unfortunate target of your shitfit: you stalk forward, looming over her like a scarecrow, and this time, you don't resist the flick of your fingers that calls up your hammer from your sylladex. The weight of the rope is comforting as fuck.

You can't be found with a weapon in your hand when the drones arrive, but that's alright: it takes seconds to recaptcha it, and it's not like you need to have it out for long.

"Where the fuck did they go?"

You have your hands over your mouth and a buzzing in your ears. Looming over you, rumbling so hard they sound like an engine, Riccin still can't compare to the drones finally visible in the air behind them.

You remove your hands, clear your throat and make a questioning sound, just to test the strength of your soundcords. The noise is strong enough: shaky, but audible.

(If children got culled for emotion, the entire cohort would be dead! But you've found not actively crying always helps you to stay calm, and you'd rather not face drones in a tizzy.)

"I don't know," you say, forcing out each word, "but I buh-believe we have other things to worry about, right now. Please put away the weapon. There's drones behind you."

The drones don't cull you.

(Of course they fucking don't, and if Pheres had listened, then they wouldn't cull him, either.)

The thing about drones is that they're fucking unreadable. Were they trolls once? Maybe, in the same way that batteries once were. But one of the first things you learned in the Education Program was that, once you'd stripped the pan from a troll and stuck it in a jar, it wasn't a troll any longer - and the same thing still applied, after you stuck a computer in someone's pan and made them more biotech than shell.

So maybe they notice the way the air is still crackling with psionic aura, heavy enough that it's making your horns ache. Maybe they notice the way your palms are sweating even through the leather of your gloves, or the way the little jade is trying not to cry, and maybe they wonder - or maybe they don't. Underneath the masks and screens, their faces are lax and unreadable. Their big, blank red eyes move, but their faces don't change as they line all of the kids collected in one, nice, neat line.

Whatever. Some shitblood in the line gets culled for a blood abnormality, but if there's even an inkling that Hinnom and Pheres just absconded, they don't show it. When the culling is over, the drone wipes the blood off with something that might've been distaste in a real person, and they leave without saying a fucking word.

NEXT THREAD LINK.

this post will be edited when i get time to sit down and change it to 2nd person POV. (haha fat chance)

THE EDITED PHERES LOG (third times a charm)

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[and the most passive child award goes TO]

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[mardie may be passive] [but she has NERVES OF STEEL] [/paps]

[much like pheres] [and the mun] [riccin has NO IDEA what drones are in reality]

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