fleetlogs | => PHERES: Abscond.

=> 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

Hinnom is too close, close enough that he can smell the cluckbeast they ate for breakfast, and he is entirely unhappy with this chain of events. The only thing that keeps him 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," he hisses at Hinnom. If he wasn't holding their hand, he'd clamp his fronds over their sponges, just in case. It's got to work, and if Riccin fucks this up, he'll bash in their stupid head before the drones take off his.

He doesn't feel any difference, yet, but maybe Hinnom isn't thinking hard enough - or maybe that's how psychics work. He didn't have a warning with Rmeros, either, and with that thoroughly unsettling thought in mind, he starts pushing on his powers.

Pheres doesn't know Capitol City, and his spatial awareness is entirely fucked: he can feel Riccin stepping forward behind him, and the empty space of the sewers below, but the buildings might as well be pencil thin for all the impression they're leaving. They'll likely end up in the river, or in front of a cart, or vivisected by an unexpected wall, but it'll still be better than just waiting to die.

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

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

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

"I can't focus," Hinnom whines.

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

Ze spends so much time at zir little table, working on zir toys. They're not the sort of things ze sees in the shop, but ze's proud of them: of little figurines, with their joints and pinions, of the tools ze made to make them, of the shelf cobbled together to hold them... it's always in the back of zir mind, and it's easy now to pull it to the forefront.

Hinnom sees, rather than feels, the moment that the picture clicks. Pheres's eyes widen, his eyebrows shoot up and he beams at them, 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 them.

The sound comes from deep in their thoracic cage, and rips free of their 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. They're not here to be fucking ignored.

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

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

Riccin doesn't notice when the sparks start increasing, but the flash of light, bright as lightning and the sun above, doesn't even make them falter: they've played that hoofbeastshit once already. When they reach out to snatch hold of a horn, or a limb, or a face, and find nothing, that's when they pause.

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

Riccin whirls on Marduk. She's the only person left, and so she's the unfortunate target of their shitfit: they stalk forward, looming over her like a scarecrow, resisting the twitching urge in their fingers to call up their hammer.

They can't be found with a weapon in their hand when the drones arrive, but right now, they really want to kill something.

"Where the fuck did they go?"

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

She removes her hands, clears her throat and makes a questioning sound, just to test the strength of her soundcords. The noise is strong enough: shaky, but audible.

(If children got culled for emotion, the entire cohort would be dead! But not actively crying always helps.)

"I don't know," she whispers, forcing out each word, "but I buh-believe we have other things to worry about, right now."

The drones don't cull them.

(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? Sure, in the same way that batteries once were. But one of the first things they 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 makes Riccin's horns ache. Maybe they notice their sweaty palms, or the way Marduk 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 not their faces.

Whatever. Some shitblood 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.

Smell comes back before zir vision does.

=> PHERES: Abscond.

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[this is why OA has no friends] [except for PC and HH] [the Terrible Trio]

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[OA has no idea what the fuck drones are in reality][they're running off academy rumours here]

=> THREAD SHIFT