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

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)

[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]

no subject