#and alph becomes a cyborg

[pikkish-moved]

A screenshot of the ask, in hopes that this time, it’ll let me put in a read more:

The problem is, most of the characters seem like quite stable people, mentally, including Olimar and kind of maybe Louie, so I don’t see any of them going insane easily. And Olimar and Louie, for both AUs, happen to be in extreme and supernatural situations, which is kind of an exception to a resistance to an effect on sanity.

But, regardless, I did my best here with what I was able to come up with!

(A warning in advance for deaths, some body horror, more deaths, a lot of delusional thinking, more deaths, and oh, can’t forget, more deaths.)

(EVEYONE dies here.)

(Except for, funnily enough, the president.)

In which slacking is not permitted

Where were they?

The president swatted aside a large leaf, forging on in his search for his two absent employees.

A heavy impact, shattering a spray of dark red, a choked gurgle.

Negligent! Irresponsible! That’s what this was. Leaving him unprotected in this forsaken wilderness. And that might be excusable, were the two of them searching for treasure, but he knew they weren’t. No, he was certain they were just loading off somewhere, laughing behind his back.

A thousand small voices, crying out in unison,

He would tan their hides when he found them! Slacking like this, didn’t they know there was a debt to pay off? He’d teach them to work for their money, he’d fire them! Then see how much they like sitting around doing nothing!

Crying out in agony as one of their own, their leader from the sky,

Grumbling, the president paused, leaning against the trunk of one of the enormous trees. There couldn’t have been something he was forgetting, was there? Something Olimar had told him, some plan or something…

fell to the ground, gasping for air, finding only poison, and his own blood.

Or…?

The president’s own shuddering breaths, eyes wide, staring, staring, unable to look away.

No, no, they were around here somewhere. He knew it!

Meeting the eyes of the beast, it’s bloody jaw.

He just had to find them.

He just had to run.

In which the war hero faces old problems

(Gotta admit, idk if Charlie’s really going insane, here. I headcanon that, having been in some wars before, he’s got an incredibly strong resolve. But I did all that I could think of!)

Charlie was not smart. Not comparatively, anyway. He couldn’t fix a ship’s stabilizers with only a screwdriver and a handful of zip ties. He couldn’t take a plant and know how to make it grow, know how to make it flourish. And maybe he knew what a fruit was, or what the cosmic drive key was, but he sure as heck couldn’t say which fruit was higher in piktamin U or why the ship wouldn’t run without the key.

No, Charlie was not smart, and his scientific intelligence was not why he was made captain of this mission.

It was because he was a survivor, a fighter. Because he could get only a glance of a battlefield before charging in, and still come out alive. He wasn’t scientific smart, but he was street smart, and that skill is why he was chosen for this.

It was his only mission, here. Keep alive. Keep all of them alive.

His only mission, and he, Captain Charlie, decorated war hero, had failed it. He was here to protect them, that was all, and he had failed to do so.

He had dealt with loss before, of course. He had seen friends die, sat beside squad mates as their breathing had gotten shallower. But this- this was different. It was one thing to stand in uniform, saluting the departed beside five, ten, twenty of your teammates, all going through the same struggle.

It was another thing entirely to stand alone, in the silent bowels of a ship a million, billion miles away from home, staring blankly at the two occupied medical cryostasis pods, because that was the only place you could think of to put the bodies so they wouldn’t rot.

Because he had recovered the bodies. He had to. He couldn’t just leave them. He had fought tooth and nail to get them back. He couldn’t just leave them there to be eaten. He had to take them back to their families.

...And that was it, then. The end. This mission was over. He was going to go home.

He was going to go home alone.

And so it was, with a sigh, that he eased himself into the Drake- oh, stars, he’d have to tell Drake that Alph was dead- into the Drake’s cockpit, letting his hands rest on the navigational controls. He just had to set a course back to Koppai.

He just had to-...

Charlie had never been great at piloting ships, or navigating. And the Drake, with all its complex technology meant for the expedition, had been even more confusing. He had been given instructions, of course, and at the time they had seemed so clear. But now, he looked at the buttons, the switches, the dials and gauges.

He could hear Alph’s voice, explaining it all. So excited, telling Charlie what each thing did and how it worked, thrilled to be talking about something he loved. Yes, Charlie could still hear Alph’s voice. But he couldn’t hear the words. None of the instructions, nothing. He had no idea how to navigate back to Koppai.

...It was okay, though. He could figure it out. He had to. He had to get them back home safely. He had to get them back to their families.

He had already failed this once. He couldn’t do so again.

So he managed. He plotted a course. Set the Drake on it. Took off.

And then he sat there, as the ship flew. He just sat there, in the seat. He had nothing to do. Nothing he could do. Nothing he could’ve done, his sole point in being on this mission, and he couldn’t do it.

He sat there until his stomach ached, growling, empty. So he got up, and made his way, stiff, oh so stiff, to the juice storage fridge. There wasn’t much juice, there. They hadn’t been able to get much. But that was okay. He was a soldier; he’d lived on slim rations before. He could do it again.

His hands shook as he poured himself a glass of juice. Brittany had always been the one to divide it up. She had always been so careful, measuring things to the last drop. She would’ve made sure the jar Charlie was holding wouldn’t have emptied so quickly. She would’ve made sure-...

He stiffly moved back up to the cockpit and slumped down in the seat again. Eventually he dozed off, but his dreams were simply the same thing, shuffling through the silent ship, from the cockpit to the fridge and back again and back yet again. And when he woke, his stomach was growling again, so he went once more to the fridge, shuffling through the same refuse that had been left out from some night previous, not yet cleaned up.

Charlie set the rim of the jar to his mouth and tipped back his head, but his throat was still dry, and his stomach still growling, and his head still light, and his legs still weak. And then he collapsed to his knees, then curled up on his side amid the empty jars on the floor.

How, how?

He had only been here for a day or so- only a day or so. Only a day or so, he said to himself, running a hand through his uncut, full head of hair. Only a day or so, curled up on the floor, only a day or so, drifting in space, maybe towards Koppai, maybe not.

Only a day or so more.

In which Brittany is annoyed

(This one is… short. I didn’t know what else to do for Brittany aside from the usual “kills everyone and either becomes creepily okay with it or torn apart with guilt” storyline.)

Brittany had long since become convinced of Charlie’s incompetence. The man was a moron, not worth the juice he drank to stay alive. He spent more time flirting- trying to flirt- with her than he did doing actual work. He needed to stop messing around and actually pay attention for once, otherwise he might-...

Oh, now there was an idea. She could… trip him up a little. Throw him for a loop. Get him to realize he had more important thing to be doing- like self preservation- than hitting on her.

It didn’t have to be something big. Just something little. An unfortunately deaf ear to a call for help. A trip, a stumble, where her foot just happened to fly out in front of his, and on this uneven ground, who knows where he might end up?

Yes, just a little incident, just to get him to pay attention to something else.

Just a little incident.

Certainly not something big. Certainly not something really dangerous. Certainly not something that could get him killed, really killed. Brittany was not a murderer. No, she wasn’t. So certainly, not something like a misplaced bomb rock, knocking him back in the blast, into the sandbelching meerslug’s waiting mouth. No, no, nothing like that. Because Brittany wasn’t a murderer.

And here she was, walking alone, back to the ship, not a murderer. The bomb rock truly had been misplaced, pure coincidence that it had knocked Charlie back at that angle.

And when Alph asked where Charlie was, Brittany looked him dead in the eyes. “He didn’t make it. The slug got him.”

Alph gaped. “Wh-What? But- what will we do now? How- we can’t keep going without-“

“Alph. I’ll be leading this mission now.”

In which Alph is a little too eager a mechanic

An excerpt from Olimar’s notes on the Man-At-Legs:

"The Man-at-Legs has a gentle disposition, and as a member of the arachnorb species, it has no natural enemies. It is particularly difficult to understand why this species would develop such awesome offensive capabilities, leading to rumors among the scientific community that it was the machinery that approached the arachnorb and proposed the symbiotic relationship."

✿✿✿

“What a fascinating creature!”

Alph couldn’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of the thing before him, even as he hid behind a pile of rocks. Where it had come from, he didn’t know, it had simply scuttled out of the bushes and started firing on him and his pikmin. But despite the danger, he was awed by the creature. It seemed to be a perfect mix of a living being and a machine! And despite the danger, Alph wanted to see it closer.

Already, a plan was forming in the back of his head. When it reloaded, he would run forward, and weigh it down with a few rock pikmin. Then he’d climb up on top of it, where he could get at it with his screwdriver (because, of course, no self respecting mechanic would ever be caught without an omnitool equipped with a screwdriver). Because, despite the danger, knowledge like this was so incredibly valuable. A perfect combination of flesh and metal! He could hardly begin to imagine how such technology would benefit Koppai. He just had to get up there and see how it worked!

So between the bursts of fire, he charged forward, a rock pikmin already in hand.

All of the Koppaiates’ suits were equipped with biomonitors, and, in an instance of extreme danger, were capable of automatically transmitting an SOS signal to the others. And it was only shortly after Alph charged forward that both Charlie and Brittany got the notification. Something was wrong with Alph, horribly, horribly wrong. He wasn’t responding to calls. His suit was punctured all the way through in multiple places. He was losing blood and bleeding internally. He was going into cardiac arrest. He was dying, dying.

Brittany and Charlie took off sprinting for the location Alph’s signal had come from, but by the time they got there, it was too late.

He was still conscious, still aware. He could feel them, the wires that had suddenly ripped through his body, fusing to his muscles. He was well aware of the stuttering stop of his own heart, his sudden reliance on the power fed into him, directly from the cable that had punctured his gut. And he could feel the other minds, the computing power and the survival instinct, tapped to his own brain via a fine wire woven into the nerves in his spine. He could feel them sifting through his knowledge and memories even as he trudged through the seemingly endless data files of ceaselessly roaming the planet.

And as the figures approached him and his new symbiote hosts, he could feel the body move, the projectile weapon readying to fire on these potential threats. And he could feel the fear, the nervous fear, despite their power, we’ve got to stay safe.

And wasn’t that what Charlie always said? To stay safe, and watch each other’s backs?

So, voice hoarse and weak, coughing on his own bodily fluids, Alph agreed for the sake of his friends’ and hosts’ safety, and gave the command to fire.