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karuuhnia · 5 months ago

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TF2 Chapter 7 - Karuuhnia's analysis

Christmas came early for the TF2 fandom this year, didn't it? (Well, it really came 7 years LATE if we're completely honest lol)

It was an emotional rollercoaster and had a happy, wholesome ending and conclusion for both the mercs and for us. Several mysteries from the past comics were resolved.

And you know me: I love to overthink and overanalyze every bit of lore and story that I can get my fingers on lmao

So here's my essay:

A) Solved mysteries

1. What the Administrator was planning

It turns out: There WAS no evil plan of world domination or whatever. Just pure hatred for a man who ruined her life - apparently. It's been so long she doesn't even remember the reason. But the thought of revenge was enough to fuel her every life choice.

And to think, it all could have ended in the 1850s already - if it weren't for smart-ass Gray Mann and his narcissistic tendencies to brag about his knowledge and plans. (How he himself figured this out is never explained.)

He was the one who introduced the Administrator to Australium in the first place, around 1850ish. If he hadn't told her that it could bring people back from the dead and prolong life, the senseless Gravel War would have ended with Blutarch's and Redmond's natural deaths.

Well, on the other hand we must be glad that the conflict didn't go on even longer.

Since Dell stated that none of his family members ever went into the room where Zepheniah was kept, the Administrator must have build all of that herself, right? That would certainly explain why it looks so crude and consumes so much Australium. I mean, look at this construction and then compare it to the one Dell built:

The Mark 5 machine gave her ~6 months of life for just a tiny flask of Australium. Imagine what would have happened if one of the Conaghers had improved Zeph's machine as well! She could have kept the zombiefied corpse in a living nightmare for many centuries more instead of burning through tons and tons of Australium so quickly. Good thing it didn't come to that.

2. Who helped the Administrator

Well, we didn't get a clear answer, but I think it's safe to conclude now that it was the Administrator's elite merc teams A-E that obtained all the Australium during the 6 months Miss Pauling and the TF2 team went off the grid. Which only further proves that the Administrator did not really care for Pauling at all and only came to her and her "team of rejects" as a last resort, after everything else had failed.

It's really heartbreaking how much Pauling admired her and wanted to be her trusted second-in-command while the Admin apparently never even invited her to the secret HQ. Nobody there even KNEW of Team Fortress after all. It was such a relief to see Pauling let go in the end and choose a free life instead.

3. Scout's second chance

Well, not really a mystery here, but I really like how Scout had an epiphany that there were other girls out there that would like him as he was and moved on from Miss Pauling. There was no heartbreak, no animosity, no rejection. They are still friends and support each other! I love it!

And then Scout even saved all of humanity by having sex with several women so that God wouldn't have to destroy the world! What a great, selfless guy he is!

I really love Spy and Scout after the time skip. No more bickering, no more annoyance, no more mean comments, just kindness. Spy is also so sweet to his grandchildren! ADSGFSDAF

I hope they all remain in contact and on good terms. Because let's not forget: Scout's health isn't good and he even has a confirmed death date. Which is only 8 years into the future of 1979.

All of his orphaned children would still be minors at that point. When it comes to that I hope Spy and Scout's Ma can take care of their grandchildren.

4. What Charles Darling and Maggie were planning

Darling stated he wanted to obtain Australium in order to make his rare animals immortal and in return he would get Saxton's company back.

The way Maggie always reacted to Saxton led me to believe she knew Darling was planning something ELSE and she felt bad for not telling Saxton and having to betray him in the end:

But turns out, I probably just misinterpreted Maggie's facial expressions. She looked so sad because she loved going on adventures with Saxton again and just hated the thought that he'd go back to Mann Co. afterwards.

I'm very happy that in the end Saxton let go of the company and spent the rest of his days punching wild animals with his true love! (Although he might have started a war again, now between Reddy and Bidwell lol)

B) Unsolved and new mysteries

However, as much as I loved the last chapter, I feel there are still a lot of things that were never cleared up or adequately explained.

So after re-reading every single comic and update page these are some other things I still find inconclusive:

1. Olivia Mann's mother

Not really that important to be fair, but still: Is she really the biological daughter of the 150 old mummy Gray Mann? If so, who is the poor woman who… mated with him and where is she now?

Or was Olivia adopted, abducted or grown in a lab? Well, at least she gets to live a happy and free life now and is provided for by the dad who stepped up. Good on you, Saxton!

2. Darling's knowledge

Back to Darling real quick: Why DID Maggie start working for her nemesis?

HOW did Charles Darling learn about Australium's properties and the Administrator's history?

There is also the fact that the Mann triplets' mother was a Darling!

These things were never brought up again! Whyyyyyyyy?????

3. What was all the set-up with the TFC mercs about?

The TFC mercs made several ominous remarks that made us believe there was more to them:

Both Virgil and Greg were trying to say something interesting, but then got cut off before the revelation. And especially TFC Heavy talked about dying as if it was an immediate danger to all of them. Sure, they were old, but they were still going strong, being able to kill all of the Admin's elite teams after all.

4. Fred's destiny (and identity?)

In Chapter 6 Spy disguised as Fred, trying to trick Virgil. After being found out, the two had this conversation:

Spy managed to impersonate Fred really well apparently. That means he must have studied Fred's personality, mannerisms and way of speaking before he went to Virgil. That also means he must have spent quite a while talking to and studying Fred. Did he and Sniper capture and interrogate him? But more importantly: What happened afterwards? Tbh, they probably just killed him off-screen after learning what they needed.

Because I no longer believe that Fred was Dell's father, as much as that sucks. It would have made for a great plot point and possible conflict within the team.

But Fred obviously had no idea about anything related to Australium or the immortality machines.

Since later on in Chapter 7 Dell says that neither his grandfather, his father nor he himself ever set foot in that basement, we can conclude that they all knew that the Administrator was hiding something nefarious down there. Which also means they WORKED for her and thus must have also worked on her immortality machine. So it makes no sense that Fred would not know anything about that if he really were Dell's father.

That still leaves us with the question: Why was young Fred in the photo with child Dell? Or WAS this guy even Fred?

I mean, a lot can happen in 40ish years between those two pictures:

But my new headcanon now is: These two are not the same person. TFC Medic had to replaced by our beloved Dr. Herbert Ludwig (still not over that name btw lmao), so who says the original TFC Engie wasn't replaced too at one point? TFC Heavy was very obviously worried about his friends dying one after the other.

Virgil said he knew Fred since before the war. So maybe after Dell's father died/left the team, Virgil told TFC Heavy about his old comrade Fred who also happened to be an Engineer. And only then Fred became part of TFC.

But as I said, that's just my headcanon. In reality it's probably just an inconsistency over the many years of convoluted lore. lol

5. Soldier's cave, covered in Australium

In A Cold Day in Hell Soldier and Zhanna have the following conversation:

First it's a stink-barn, then he claims to be homeless. But in Chapter 7 Heavy suddenly says that Soldier lives in a cave.

And it turns out there is tons of Australium in that cave! Now of course I wonder: When did Soldier move into that cave and where is it located? We were always told that Australium only exists in Australia. But I highly doubt this American patriot owns a cave in Australia. Also, how is it possible that the Admin and the elite mercs never managed to find this cave? Did they just not bother to look in America because all known Australium is in Australia?

So in return, does that mean that Australium is NOT exclusive to Australia after all? If so, there could still be hidden caches of the stuff anywhere on Earth. At least the Admin and Gray Mann are no longer around to collect it and Miss Pauling does not look for it anymore either. The only one who still has an interest in it is Charles Darling. Him again...

6. Soldier with the photo of the Mann family

Quick reminder: This is the only version of the family photo we'd seen up until this point:

But when Soldier and Merasmus are held by the mafia and the wizard asks him why he needed so much money, Soldier pulls out an intact, unteared photograph of the Mann family!!!

His thumb conveniently covers up the still unknown person standing in the middle. How did Soldier obtain this photo? How does he even know who everyone is, considering he's, well, Soldier?

Could he have any relations to the unknown person in the middle? And why DOES he need so much money (granted, it was only like 20 $ in the end, but still lol)?

Am I just overthinking this? Has anyone an explanation??? Is he and if yes, HOW is Soldier connected to the frigging Mann family??????

*cough* Anyway. This concludes my analysis of the TF2 lore. For now. If I come up with more things or if Valve ever decides to continue the story (That was a joke, haha, fat chance), I will come back to this. In the meantime, thank you for reading this and please feel free to share your own ideas and opinions! I'd love to read all of it! ❤️

#tf2 #team fortress 2 #tf2 chapter 7 #tf2 comic spoilers #karuuhnia writes

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dat-physics-gal · 2 years ago

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A leap of faith and physics

We thought for a civilization to form, one needed liquid water, a stable planet with a hot core, and tardium crystals. Apparently, this is not so.

Because we just received a vibromessage over the tachyon network from an unknown source.

Which in itself would not be too unusual. Plenty of newly realized civilizations figure out how to configure tardium to send tachyon messages across isospace. Hoping someone will answer. We always do. It always takes some time to go from simple repeating messages to understanding one another. Most civilizations don't come up with the galactic standard modulation on their own. Nor do we know their form of communication all that well, language, culture, all of that.

First contact is always a lengthy affair, until the new species is integrated into the intergalactic community. Then follows the exchange of knowledge and culture, the setting up of historical archives and sharing of starcharts. Since light travels only at luxionic speed, the charts provide a valuable look at the past. Once the new civilization has been caught up to date, things tend to settle. Updates are fewer and far in between, and culture tends to somewhat homogenize. Not completely, of course, as everyone has different living circumstances, but with all the exchange between us, some settling is bound to happen.

But we know where tardium reserves are, have felt the reverb of our scans, we know where civilizations could potentially pop up. The message we received was unusual not because its source was unknown, but because it came from a sector without any sufficient tardium deposits.

That... shouldn't even be possible!

The signal is also a bit noisy. Strange. Usually, the bigger the tardium array, the more self-stabilization should occurr. And for interstellar communication, you tend to need quite large arrays. So then why was there so much noise?

It was clearly a signal, and according to the triangulators, it came from the outer third of a dark spiral galaxy. We call them that, since they were never really observed, at least not with any isocartography. We only know they're there due to shared star charts. No idea what's going on with them at the current isotime. We can't know, without any tardium resonance to pick up.

Anyway, of course we answered. Their signal had been prime numbers, if we demodulated it correctly, followed by things we couldn't really make sense of. It was standard practice to begin communications with mathematics, and fundamental harmonics. It's strange that they did that right away, but not unheard of. We sent back primes, and then a couple of playful harmonics. Music. What we received back was weird, because we thought it was music, but it wasn't.

It turned out to be a starchart, and not just any kind. Pulsars. We sent back a chart of their galaxy, as reconstructed from several older starcharts. Then, we waited for their answer. And waited. And waited. An entire solar cycle (of our species) later, we finally got another answer.

And it just would not stop. We recognized it was a series of images, or rather, rapid successions of images, together with harmonics on a different band as well. This was video! The footage depicted a bipedal species, with symbolics next to different features. The images cycled through different body parts, with different descryptions. We had a really hard time catching and saving all the data, a task which had to be offloaded to the communal computation grid, as our own planet simply did not have the capacity to do it alone. This should have tipped us off to what we were going to be dealing with, but it didn't.

We continued, almost business as usual, just a fair bit faster. Then objects were being shown, often together with the bipedals, and their corresponding glyphics were depicted right next to them. Also, each image was accompanied by a sound file. They really made learning their language easy for us. We learned that they called themselves Humans, and their home was Earth, a planet orbiting a yellow star. They were a surface dwelling species! Those are pretty rare, as most can not survive the exposure to open space for some reason. We then sent back images and glyphics of our own, matching them in their intent. We sent images of life forms, images of our own body parts, images of objects and always accompanied by isostandard glyphics.

Usually, once communication has come to a basic understanding, the exchange of culture would begin.

But the Humans had started out with primes and starcharts, so of course, their next communication wasn't about culture. We... honestly didn't know what exactly it was, for a while. Until some of the mathematicians from across the network found patterns. They were sharing mathematics with us!

Eager to help, we sent back entire databases full of insights. They requested more soon. So we sent more. And more. And more. We wondered how they could even store all that we sent them. We asked. They sent back something we didn't understand. We hoped the mathematicians could figure it out, but nope.

Eventually, we sent steam engine configurations, as well as the corresponding heating and shunting tardion-arrays used to power them. They sent back their own designs for steam engines. And other engines that seemed similar, but shoudn't work with steam. The machine configurations, piston layouts and such, were fairly primitive. As was to be expected from a new species. But they never sent us schematics of their heating or shunting arrays. When we asked how they kept things cool without shunting arrays, they sent back another steam engine. But, when we called it that, they corrected us. What they had shown us was a heat pump. They used the opposite effect, instead of creating movement from a temperature difference, they created a temperature difference from movement. We asked them why they wouldn't just use shunting arrays. They asked what those were.

And this is how we found out why they were in dark space. Why their signal was so noisy. And why they had never depicted heating or shunting arrays in their schematics.

They had practically no tardium. They simply did not have enough of it to make arrays, as we thought all civilizations do. The largest piece of tardium they had was the centerpiece of a gigantic machine. It was about the size of a human "nail", which is a vestigial claw originally used for superior grip on one of the native plant species of their planet.

We did not know how to respond. We could not comprehend how a civilization could form without tardium crystals. They asked us if we knew where more could be found, preferably near them. We didn't understand what they meant. Then they asked us how to locate reserves. We gave them the modulations that we use to scan for the crystals' tachyon resonance.

They thanked us, and ceased their questions. Then, communication became choppy. Only occasionally would we receive an exchange of culture. Their questions about mathematics and tardium crystals ceased.

---------------------

When we first received back an answer from the deep space tachyon dish, we were extatic. And shocked. And kind of in disbelief. Nobody had really known if it would work. Still, everyone in the control room agreed that we should make sure it was really a signal, before we dropped that bombshell to the public.

We focused a couple more dyson collectors onto the dish, and changed the signal. Instead of primes and harmonics, this time, we encoded the pulsar chart, multiple times, in every encoding we could think of, and sent them all.

Only a few hours later, we received another signal from the previous location. The encoding was our own, easily recognized. With shaky hands, i pressed the 'open image file' button.

When i was greeted by a picture of the Milky Way, everyone in the room lost their collective shit.

"Holy Fuck!" "Oh my god." Someone fainted. Multiple people cried. Nobody minded any of that.

~~~

The prime administrator creased her brow. The direct line was ringing. This better be important. "Hello? Prime administrator here." From the other end, she could hear someone suppressing tears, and whimpering: "Tachyon dish project operator here. We... we."

"Everything ok over there?", she asked. What could possibly have happened that had the scientist crying? Was there an accident with the dyson swarm or something? Did people die? No, she trusted the operator of that experiment to not call unless it mattered to the entire human race.

A wet chuckle. "Better than ok. Maam? We... We're not alone."

Not alone? What does that...? Oh. OH! oh

"Are.. you sure?" Dammit. Now even her own voice was shaking.

"We sent a pulsar chart and got a beautiful image of the Milky Way back, in the same image file type. Pretty sure at this point."

~~~

The following year was downright insane. The mere confirmation that we weren't alone in the universe spurred us all on. Artists did their best to show all sides of us, scientists got together to determine what questions we should ask, even the long obsolete military awakened from its slumber, churning out tactical analyses of possible tachyon based weaponry, and how to defend against it.

Some people were panicking, others in denial, but most relished the opportunities that might open up.

Policies were made, on how to handle aliens that would come to the solar system. Tachyon mechanics, an until now unproven theory, made leaps and bounds, scientists working as hard as they could to understand it better.

The dyson collectors were turned to multiple new research projects, powering large machines that channeled vibrations into the tiny crystals we had found to pick up on tachyon vibrations. The largest one that we had discovered while asteroid mining was still in the communication dish, but the smaller shrapnel, a couple millimeters in size at the most, were being utilized.

Eventually, after a year was up, communications resumed. The linguists sent data, and worked closely with the astronomers that had made the initial transmissions. We also received back data, and the scientific community devoured every piece of information. We learned their language as fast as we could.

But our requests for the sharing of scientific knowledge appeared to fall on deaf ears. Whenever we sent natural constants, or physical laws, we got nothing back. Well, almost. Our prodding did yield one answer: How to locate the crystals. Which were apparently common? Though our scans painted a different picture. We did have some scattered about the asteroid belt, yes. But the largest one we detected was only 3cm in diameter. A little bigger than the one in the communication dish, sure, but not that much.

We came to accept this, figuring that maybe there was some kind of prime directive that forbade the sharing of further technology. Actually, perhaps we leaned a bit too far into our Star Trek analogy. Because most of us would not get it out of our heads to try to build a warp drive. Well, not really a spacetime bending drive, but something that could go faster than light. Because, obviously, thanks to our discovery, we now knew that while the speed of light may be finite, the speed of information was not.

-----------------------------

After ten cycles of cultural exchange, the humans sent a request for isocoordinates of the nearest known civilization to their own. This request kind of drowned in the noise, we didn't really think about it much, we just transmitted our coordinates. Turns out, the nearest ones were us, in what the Humans call the Andromeda Galaxy.

Shortly after the request, they went totally vibrosilent. We tried and tried to contact them, but to no avail. This, while tragic, was a reality of civilization, though. Extinction events could always happen. Sometimes the affected civilization would realize in advance and send a couple warnings, but nobody could help them from afar, of course. So that's what we figured happened to Humanity. Maybe their sun blew up, or they got knocked away from it by a passing object, anything could have happened.

Many cycles passed. I had aged, my once young and springy exoskeleton now wobbly and soft, though my mind was still sharp enough to crew a communications array.

None of us were prepared for the schockwave resonating through our sensor grids. Multiple arrays straight up shattered. Luckily, as big as they were, there was nobody close to them, so no deaths. What the rest of them picked up though made no sense. We could determine there was a pulse, but no normal communication had that level of power, nor resonance.

Then, half a planetary rotation later, there was a new luminance in the sky. We were about to renew our arrays and update our starchart, when the light source moved. Toward the planet.

What?

And then, my assigned communications array resonated.

"This is the Human vessel Enterprise, calling anyone on the planet. Can you read us?" the crystal sang in choppy English, the language of the Humans. The ones we thought were extinct.

I scuttled to my post at the resonator, tuning it to reply:

"This is communications, we read you, but i don't understand? We are recovering from an unprecedented resonance pulse that shattered multiple arrays, sorry if the modulation is a bit off."

The answer was swift: "Sorry about that, our engines are a bit out of tune at this point. That pulse might have been us. Glad to hear you all down there, is anyone injured?"

"Your engines? And uh. No, nobody injured."

"Yes our engines, again, we apologize for that. But glad to know everyone is alright.

Requesting permission to land on the surface."

This was a momentous occasion, which i didn't realize until later on. The entire tachyon network would eventually refer to this exact communication as a reference time. This exact moment would come to be known as 0:0 PFJ

0 Cycles and 0 rotations Past First Jump.

The only thing i remember is absently giving permission, not quite understanding what exactly they were requesting here. If i had, i would have convened with the councils beforehand.

Then, the cave began to shake. It wasn't coming from any of the arrays. It was coming from the surface.

~~~

They. They were here. The Humans were here. On the surface. Of. Of our planet. What? How?!

Most importantly, why?!

Then i remembered the stories about their exploration of the surface of their own planet. How they had sent people to their poles, despite their biology not being fit to survive there. And several did die! How they climed mountains. Made pressurized vessels to dive below the surface of their open ocean. We asked them why. They told us.

I realized at that moment, not how they were here. But why.

"Because we could, and no human had been there before," they had answered back then.

#humans are space orcs #haso #fanfic #long post #my writing

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kifkay · 11 months ago

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Jobs the Winx pick after they’re done adventuring [NewGen au]

the Winx, although still friends and partners, had officially disbanded! now they’re off to their solo adventures. this is an AU, where not all of the Winx-Specialists pairs ended up settling down together - because, let’s be honest, high school sweethearts rarely do.

Stella:

In her mid-to-late thirties, Rhodos abdicates and officially passes down the crown of Solaria to Stella.

Stella and Brandon are still dating and very much in love.

Before becoming Queen, Stella tries out a lot of occupations — she owns a fashion boutique, starts in a couple of (failed) movies, runs a couple of charities which help repatriate Domino survivors.

Once, she even directs a documentary about the Winx and the Specialists. It ends up having very… controversial reviews, but the Team thinks it’s fun.

As queen, Stella advocates for friendly relationships between Solaria and many of the other planets - including Domino, Andros, Zenith. Even Eraklyon, although her and Sky don’t get along much these years.

Her and Brandon foster a girl, Mara, whom Brandon had rescued from a branch of a weird cult that settled in Solaria. Despite previously agreeing to at least hold off on having children, they love Mara to bits and are very protective over her.

Bloom:

Previously: Travelling Architect. Her one true calling. Bloom vastly enjoys being able to travel planet to planet, and come up with breathtaking architectural designs. This also gives her an opportunity to visit her girls more often.

As of now: Domino Palace Archivist. Queen Daphne’s mysterious illness has re-surfaced. Furthermore — it is progressing alarmingly fast. The royal family must be prepared for the worst, and so the second-born princess is called back to the castle urgently. For the next five years, Bloom serves as the Archivist of Domino’s records and history, as well as being low-key groomed to take over the realm - at Daphne’s own insistence.

In that period, Bloom finally moves on from her decade long on-and-off again situationship with Sky. She marries a warlock curse-breaker Saffi, with whom she has a daughter — Vanessa Mari.

Bloom also inherits her mother’s seat in the Company of Light and holds quite an important position there. Helia, who inherited Saladin’s seat, becomes her close ally and friend. Their family spend many weekends together, vacationing on beaches and having picnics.

Flora:

Currently: Guardian Fairy of Linphea, focusing on protecting various eco-systems of her home-world.

She is more of an alchemist and a researcher these days, rather than an active combatant. Flora arrives in places that have been de-stabilised by either extreme bouts of magic or human intervention, and seeks to heal them.

On a mission to a particularly messed up place which reeks of dark magic corruption, Flora meets an old friend — Mirta, who has been commissioned as a dark magic consultant! They get dinner afterwards, and well… it just goes great after that.

Flora is loving being a step-mom to Mirta’s daughter <3

Musa:

She becomes a musician and a singer, like she always wanted. Musa doesn’t reach amassing success, but she has a loyal fan base who love her for her amazing lyricism and vocals.

Tecna serves as her manager for quite some time, until she resigns for… reasons.

Musa was so sure she would marry Riven one of those days - but then he starts acting weird. Distancing himself. Holding secrets. Eventually, the specialist makes a huge spectacle of publicly severing all contact with the Team - and her. They break up, because of course they do.

Then, Riven goes off the grid. Completely disappears.

Time goes by, Musa stops touring and becomes a music composer. Her clientage is huge and spans many planets.

She has two daughters, one son, one husband and one ex (not Riven), who succumbs to a horrible, magically corrupting illness which, seemingly, comes out of nowhere.

Aisha:

Her and Nabu are going strong. She is the crown princess to the throne of Andros and he is her consort.

Being back in the palace of Andros — constantly reminded of horrible treatment and stifling loneliness she has been subjected to as a child — is hard on Aisha.

She starts regressing, becoming more withdrawn from her friends and acquaintances. Aisha is still a rebel at her core, willing to stand up and fight for what she thinks is best — but. she is just. so tired.

Nabu is always at her side. They have happy times; times, when the darkness and the apathy retreat to let Aisha breathe.

Aisha acts as Andros’s ambassador. Her, Stella, Sky and Bloom & Helia (who had both inherited seats in the Company of Light from their parents/grandparent) often work together.

They have two children, Manar and Sagar.

In recent years, Nabu had gotten ill. loosing his energy, his strength, his magic. none of the healers can explain the sudden shift in a seemingly healthy man; they only theorise that he might be suffering previously-latent repercussions of his comma and entanglement with the Dark Circle.

Aisha spirals again and distances herself from everybody but her closest family.

Tecna:

like Stella, Tecna alternated many professions.

throughout their years at Alfea, Tecna - thanks to her well-rounded and all encompassing education in Zenith, which included music theory, - has helped Musa in her artistry. Giving feedback, searching for gigs, sharing artists she might learn from online.

when Musa officially starts her music careers, she asks Tecna to be her manager - to which the girl readily agrees.

Tecna also freelances on the side: developing flying software for the Red Fountaine, writing codes and whatever else she finds interesting. Zenith tries desperately to get her to work for them, but she is not really interested.

Tecna is not interested in any romantic relationships, but stays close with almost all of her friends. Even Riven!

After years of working together, Tecna resigns as Musa’s manager. It’s a clean break and neither is terribly upset: Tecna is Musa’s kids’ godmom, for Dragon’s sakes! They stay close, although Tecna is awfully tight-lipped about her “new project with Timmy”.

The project Timmy and her are working on is — well, neither Internet nor any planet has records on it.

Currently: Tecna is working her way up as a Zenithian lab researcher. She doesn’t seem to be making much headway, but Tecna doesn’t lose hope. Eventually, she’ll get where she needs to be…

The Specialists will be up next! hopefully, the text is coherent enough <3 trying out something new

#winx club #winx headcanons #winx #winx au #winx rewrite #winx newgen #winx bloom #winx brandon #winx flora #winx riven #winx sky #winx specialists #winx stella #winx aisha #winx musa #winx layla #winx tecna #winx timmy #winx helia

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peterbarnes · 2 years ago

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Maybe Season 2: Chapter 1

Summary: You work at the TVA as an analyst. Every day is the same- boring case after boring case- but your entire life changes one day when a new variant shows up.

Word Count: 1.5k

Catch up on season 1 of the series!

A/N: chapter 1 is here!! I'm gonna try to upload weekly. I'll try to stay somewhat canon-compliant but since I kind of diverged during the season 1 finale, not everything will be the exact same as the show (obv). Enjoy!

It’s hard being in a place outside of time.

Your life drags on, but there’s nothing to quantify it; no way to measure your loneliness or your work. But - if you had to guess - it would be somewhere close to eternity.

You hadn’t slept once since He Who Remains passed. It was peaceful, just like he’d hoped. And it was a stark reminder that despite everything, he was still just a human being.

“You must protect the timeline,” he whispered to you on his deathbed. “My variants…if they come -”

“I won’t let them,” you interrupted. “I’m not scared.”

“You should be,” he said, voice quivering. “The Conqueror. He has no hesitation, no restraint. He is a vessel of destruction. I am a vessel of destruction.”

You took his shaking hand, gripping it tightly. Your heart thumped in your chest, nearly blocking out all other sounds. It was like someone was squeezing your ribs, blocking any air from coming in.

“Everything will be okay,” you promised.

It was a lie.

- - -

“No, no, no, no,” you repeated to yourself.

You were running around the citadel, from TemPad to TemPad, document to document. It was a mess - books scattered across the floor and cracks breaking apart the marble walls.

“Miss Minutes!” You called.

“Yes?”

You shrieked at the sudden voice and whipped around to find the orange clock floating behind you.

“Why isn’t Renslayer answering my calls?” You questioned.

Miss Minutes wasn’t taking your succession of Time too well. She met every question or command you gave with an eye roll or a snarky comment.

“I already told you,” she said, exasperated. “I don’t know.”

“Your job is literally to know everything,” you snapped, slamming a document down onto your desk.

“Hey!” She retorted. “You watch your tone with me, missy. Judge Renslayer is completely off the grid. I can’t track her or her TemPad anywhere.”

“Can’t or won’t?” You asked.

Miss Minutes didn’t answer. She simply scoffed and crossed her orange arms.

“You see that?”

You pointed out the window - to the Sacred Timeline beyond the Citadel. Except, it didn’t look the same as when you arrived. Instead of a beautiful blend of neon hues in one direction, streaks were going in all different directions. Branches, and they were growing fast.

“If I can’t contact the TVA’s head judge, then we can’t create a plan to stop this branching!”

You were screaming at this point, more to yourself than Miss Minutes.

“This never happened under He Who Remains,” Miss Minutes argued, pointing her gloved finger at you. “This problem started as soon as you took over.”

You glared daggers at the AI, but she wasn’t wrong. You had promised to protect and uphold Time, to prevent a multiversal war. All you had accomplished since you took over was making it worse.

“It’s not just me,” you tried to reason. “The TVA is falling apart. Now that we - the employees - know they’re variants, they’re either going back to their place on the timeline or refusing to prune. It’s a disaster!”

You plopped onto your desk chair, burying your head in your hands. Your nails picked at your scalp, pulling hair and skin out of frustration.

“This is your responsibility now,” Miss Minutes told you coldly. “If the TVA isn’t working right, get down there and fix it yourself.”

And with that, she was gone. The only person - and you use ‘person’ loosely - you had to talk to.

You sniffled into your sleeve. It was a blue sweater, warm and soft. It might appear mundane, but it was the only piece of clothing you’d worn that wasn’t your TVA uniform. It wasn’t supposed to be defined by your job, but you. Yet here you were sniffling into it as you crumbled under the pressure of your choices.

“I can’t fix it. Why can’t I fix it?” You scolded yourself as tears cascaded down your cheeks.

Miss Minutes’s words echoed in your head.

Get down there and fix it yourself.

Your eyes narrowed at the TemPad that sat on the desk before you. You wiped your eyes on your sleeve before grabbing the device and activating a Time Door.

You walked toward it, prepared to enter when something caught your eye. Your old TVA jacket lay scattered on the floor in the corner, still caked in blood from when you fought Sylvie and Loki. The memories flashed through your mind, and you winced. You pictured an alternate timeline where everything worked out perfectly. You and Loki together in a beautiful house. You would get a high position at a tech company as he spends his days exploring human literature and making amends for his past. Sylvie peacefully traipsing the countryside, finally having that chip off her shoulder. Mobius visiting you and Loki, sharing stories about his jet ski rides.

If only reality were as perfect as dreams.

Before you could talk yourself out of it, you ran and grabbed the jacket from the floor. It slipped on easily, like habit. As much as you had tried to run away from it, there was comfort in the familiarity.

The Time Door stood before you, inviting you in. You inhaled a deep breath and closed your eyes.

And then you walked through.

When you opened your eyes, you saw two gold doors. You backed up, trying to figure out where you were, only to back into a wall. The tiny space you were in was an elevator, you quickly realized. No button was pressed, but it moved nonetheless like it was taking you where you needed to go.

You were about to slip the TemPad into your pocket when it started beeping furiously.

“I swear if this isn’t Renslayer -”

There was no message, no notification awaiting you. Instead, what you saw was utter destruction.

“Oh my God,” you whispered in horror.

Bomb after bomb was being dropped on branches. They snapped off the timeline like twigs as entire universes were completely eradicated. It wasn’t pruning - it was genocide.

If you had never let the branches grow this far, this never would have happened.

It’s your fault.

It’s all your fault.

Suddenly, the elevator dinged, and the doors opened. The control room of the TVA was packed. Analysts and Hunters crowded the room, staring at the screen in front of them. What was on your TemPad was now displayed much bigger. A broken timeline, a massacre.

“Those are lives,” you heard someone say.

Shock overcame your body. You had no control anymore of your actions - you didn’t even realize you had been walking until the elevator doors shut behind you and you were in the center of the control room.

The TVA workers parted as you walked by them. Gossip spread, and whispers were shared. They all knew - you could tell. They knew about your betrayal, how you sided with the man that had stolen their lives - your life.

As the last of them parted, one person stood firmly in your way. Raven hair messily fell past his cheeks, and his blue eyes bored into you. They widened as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Hi.”

It was all you could say.

“Hi,” he responded.

An awkward pause settled between you. Loki cleared his throat and turned to Mobius, who nodded at him encouragingly.

“He was wrong,” Loki said to you. “A replacement didn’t stop the branching.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” you told him softly. “I just wasn’t right.”

His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“What?”

“I tried,” you said, voice cracking. Tears slowly welled in your eyes. “I thought I could fix it. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. I was never enough. I failed.”

You tried to wipe your tears discreetly so no one would see.

“You have some nerve showing up here,” one of the workers shouted. Others sounded their agreement.

You stared at the floor in shame.

“Easy, X-10 or I’ll throw you in that cell with Brad,” Loki threatened, his tone pointed and glare blazing.

“I want to help,” you said to the hunter. “There’s a war coming. We need to be ready.”

Mutters broke out amongst the crowd.

“A war?”

“What war?”

“What do you mean?”

But amidst all the chaos, Loki’s eyes didn’t leave yours. You watched as he slowly walked toward you. The anger in his eyes faded immediately when he looked at you. Instead, they looked sad - the type of melancholy only heartbreak could cause. Misery, longing, and fear all in one. But he pushed it aside, approaching you and holding out his hand.

“Stay?” He asked softly.

“Always.”

Tag List:

@bethany2002 @jordynhouston @decadentwastelandtrash

@mrs-obrien @darlingyoureperfection @sadandabadbitch

@wizardcherryblossom @vampiregirl1797 @heelsh1re

@poubxlle @naturallyathief @burntchicken231

@imabadbiatchh @elisebuitron @senuritaawsome226

@jordynhouston @morganmofresh @themightypiggo

@itsybitchylittlewitchy @druellaavery

@mayemperess @shadowluna25

@essencess @a-laufeyson

@the-obelisk

#loki #loki x reader #loki fanfic #loki fanfiction #loki imagines #loki imagine #loki x oc #loki x y/n #loki x you #loki laufeyson #loki layfeyson x reader #loki season 2 #loki series #loki 2x02

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crazylittlejester · 1 year ago

Note

Daily brainrot and today I've got a load of headcanons I've been mulling over because they won't leave me alone.

I know we've all done a college AU at some point in our lives, but I was up at like 3 am last night debating over which academia aesthetic each Link embodies because I may have spent way too much time on the aesthetics wiki recently. Did I procrastinate for an hour to work on this? Yes. I have no regrets. YOLO and all that.

Sky -- Definitely has light academia vibes. The man does not own a single dark piece of clothing, and everything in his closet is very soft and cozy. He double majored in aviation and environmental science, but he's debating transferring over to the biology department to pursue grad studies in ornithology.

Time -- He is not in charge of his own wardrobe, okay? Malon picks out his outfits. They match. It's always something tasteful and neutral with a little bit of color, but nothing that marks him as belonging to academia. He's part of the philosophy department and a strict teacher, but the students all love him because he genuinely wants them to do well and lets them know. Most of his work is writing for philosophy journals when he isn't teaching.

Legend -- Has more of a general/miscellaneous aesthetic that leans hard into gender non-conformity. He takes his work with him everywhere and whenever someone asks about it, it goes completely over their heads because they have no idea what he's talking about. There's an ongoing bet about whether his dissertation is about linguistics, sociology, or both.

Hyrule -- I don't think there's a word for his aesthetic, he just gives off "outdoors creature" vibes so hard. He's a cryptid and rarely in the classroom because he's always out doing field work. The most human contact he has is outreach programs with the environmental science and biology departments. No one knows exactly what his grad work is supposed to be because it's incomprehensible combinations of wildlife photos half the time and the other half the time he's off the grid.

Twilight -- This is what happens when cowboys and gothic academia have a kid. It's really freaking weird, but somehow he makes it work, so nobody questions it. He technically works for the agricultural department doing research and outreach programs, but he also haunts the English department and occasionally teaches 100 level literature classes online. The freshmen like him because he rounds grades up.

Four -- An unholy combination of academia and his unique color coding system. You don't know what you're getting until he shows up. He generally wears neutral stuff, but his socks and ties are color coded, much to everyone's chagrin. He's got multiple projects going at any given time and helps out the other departments when they get stuck on details. He's really cagey about his dissertation, but he practically lives in the science & engineering building, so he can't exactly deny that he's doing something in STEM.

Wind -- He tried being fashionable, but as soon as he decided to major in oceanography he was swept away by ocean academia. The amount of blue clothing he has is frankly horrifying, and Warriors is trying to get him to branch out into less garish shades of gray and stop wearing almost exclusively rubber boots as footwear. It's a work in progress.

Warriors -- I think he'd fall under general or queer academia because he'd be fashionable in a mostly-normal-but-also-queer sort of way. Stylish, and fruity. Definitely prefers autumn/winter because that's peak scarf season. He's the kind of guy who manages to casually slip representation into any curriculum you hand him and makes it look natural. He got an assistantship with the history department because the professors love him.

Wild -- 100% chaotic academia and doesn't even have to try. Everything is a mess, but it's his mess, he knows exactly where everything is, and to be honest it's not a safety hazard, so it's fine. Besides, he dresses appropriately for department events, and he's the only grad student that Flora hasn't scared off. No one actually knows which department he belongs to, but he knows something about everything.

IM SO FUCKING OBSESSED WITH THIS YOU HAVE NO IDEA

THESE ARE SO PERFECT AND YOU’RE SO RIGHT ABOUT THEM ALL I LOVE THESE SO MUCH IM SHAKIN EM AROUND LIKE A JAR OF MARBLES

#jes talks #jes ask #linked universe #lu warriors #DAILY BRAINROT #!!!!!!!

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winterpinetrees · 3 months ago

Text

Dont Tread On Me (The Gap Years 2x8)

September 27th

Maze, NE

Navigation Guide

Marin and his sidekicks seek allies in an elven town that might as well be a libertarian commune, but what's a group of radicalized people without a bit of infighting? Sierra ignores the politics and makes friends instead.

..............................

They drive through the Great Plains like sailors adrift. They drive down two-lane roads in perfect grids with seas of corn on either side. Occasionally a combine harvester thunders by. Sierra watches the cloudy sky as if a tornado will materialize between blinks. Every fifteen minutes they pass another village with a hundred buildings or less. Each island in the archipelago is invisible to the others. They drive.

With only one elf left in the car, they’ve had to choose between a full battery and decent illusions. There are charging ports out here, but only the ones with the symbol of Sierra’s father’s company are strong enough to help. All dozen of those are built along the straight line of the interstate highway, and hugging a single road would be beside the point. Luckily, with nothing but farmland stretching to the flat horizon, they don’t have many cameras to dodge.

Their emissary did warn that they should expect an attack over the next few days, but didn’t know the details. The high council itself is back on the hunt, though they seem to have a lot on their agenda. Conquering the world isn’t one task. It’s not something the apex can cross off her to-do list after shattering a few skulls. It’s messy and complex in a way that reminds the group of their college admissions. Sure, there’s certain things that have to happen. The elves have to capture or kill the heirs, for example, but there’s a thousand ways to destabilise human society, each with their own pros and cons, and it seems like the biggest con is that a good amount of the elves living in the human realm absolutely hate the concept. That’s why they’re driving through a region so sparsely populated that the two-lane highways are like a snare. They’ve gotten in contact with an elven enclave that could offer shelter. The new apex was too idealistic to kill her opponents. She won’t attack a civilian town.

“Oh my god,” Brian nearly presses his face against the windshield. He’s not driving at the moment. They insisted he take a few days off after waking up with Zerada’s amber eyes, and never truly switched back. “Clay, Clay, look. This is an elven town? An elf owns that building?”

“No wonder these elves are down with treason”.

Marin says that there must be some humans here as well, even if this settlement is far more isolated than most, but he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t recognize the yellow flag hanging by the door of a dome-shaped building. He probably thinks the coiled snake is a noble symbol.

They’ve reached the outskirts of a village that doesn’t exist. Some elven enclaves are part of human towns complete with public schools and unknowing citizens. Some are built on the ruins of ghost towns. The village of Maze, Nebraska, is neither of these things. Its name is a pun on its hidden nature as much as a description of the corn around it, and Clay drove past the dirt path twice before they saw the illusion and made their way in. Brian was a bit antsy over the distracting charm effect.

“This makes up for the whole place not being hidden in a corn maze,” Sierra adds.

“I don’t know what either of you are talking about,” Marin replies.

“A corn maze is a maze grown out of corn. They’re in movies”.

Brian and Clay both begin to explain the flag, then defer to each other. Brian has more transparent glee on his face and keeps going.

“That flag? Yellow with the snake and ‘dont tread on me’ underneath? That’s a human political symbol. It’s from the American Revolution. It might be the symbol of people wanting the government to stay out of their business. I didn’t expect to see an elf owning one, but I guess we are meeting with rebels”.

Marin nods in understanding. “Maybe my mother would have recognized it. Either way, elves who isolate like this are outcasts. Most of us go to the human world to interact with humans. Anyone this far afield is avoiding their taxes, or Betrayed. Tax fraud is more likely”.

Sierra turns. “Didn’t you say commoners are barely affected by nobility?”

“As long as they pay taxes, yes”.

They drive their dust-covered electric car down the street and hope no one shoots. The technology here is advanced beyond belief, but on the surface the Audacity looks like the science-fiction artifact. The clustered buildings are domes of earth and elven concrete. Drying wildflowers grow from beside the road. The people they pass all dress like commoners, which is to say the clothes look handmade and unique in a way that fades back to a blur of woven patterns and visible embroidery.

Only Clay even remotely fits the aesthetic. His jeans have enough patches to look deliberate, but his style is too dark and technical. The others are worse. Sierra’s printed NASA shirt isn’t anything an elf might make, and Brian can’t begin to explain how the bulletproof vest under his shirt was made. Marin, well, he dresses like a nobleman. Do these elves know that the humans are from their own sort of nobility? That Brian’s father is the governor of the richest state, and that Sierra’s father has a net worth that on some level makes him richer? Where’s the elven political compass when you need one?

A good amount of elves in the human realm hate the idea of conquest, but others have spent sixty years under the threat of nuclear annihilation and want wild society shattered. It’s like middle school out there. Constant infighting and constant stress. Should they advance into space? Should they start over with a plague? Do humans deserve an equitable place in the new society, or should elvenkind just use them for labor? And then there’s the question of the Betrayed. The curse isn’t genetic and has no meaningful patterns of occurrence, so everyone knows someone who knows someone who woke up one day in pain that never stopped until they went into exile. Now, those sanctuaries have been raided in search of labor.

“Do these guys even use the same charging ports as we do?” Sierra says. There are solar panels on the roofs, so they clearly have power.

“No clue,” Brian replies, and she rolls down the window. The nearest elf is an ageless two hundred year old with beads in their long hair and muddy overalls. “We’re here to see Urey. What’s the highest voltage charging port we can hook this thing up to?”

They look at the dirt-covered vanity project of a billionaire and then to the short human with the audacity to enter this village that has been sealed against her kind. They offer directions to the workshop and Sierra pumps her fist.

“Finally! I mean, thank you,”

The elf moves their ears like a human might raise their eyebrows, but turns and walks away. Hopefully they’re leaving to tell Urey they’re here, and not to get friends to kick them out.

The workshop is on the edge of town, close to where the grassland begins. They plug the Audacity in beside a normal-looking human tractor and look in. If the rest of Maze has been like something Clay’s friends might dream up while trespassing in a millionaire's third home, the workshop is more down-to-earth. Inside, an elf with a welding mask as blue as the flame of their blowtorch bends over the frame of a truck. Shadows flicker against the machinery on the walls. Sierra recognizes most of it. Power tools, standing saws, a shining milling machine that runs in the background while the engineers work. There are also things that she can’t recognize, but whether they’re elven or just old, she can’t be sure.

Sierra smiles. “You three should handle the negotiations without me,” she says.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Brian replies.

“You know that they only want to talk to Marin anyway”

“Still, we’re supposed to be a group. We all planned this together,”

The handful of engineers in the workshop have turned to listen. They’re all different ages, but none of them look native to these plains. They were colonizers not too long ago, but resistors now.

Marin straightens his shoulders and looks around. “Surprised? Could one of you tell Urey that Prince Marin Sondaica is here to speak with her?”

“She already knows. You’re early though,” a grim green-haired elf replies from the door.

Marin’s heart rate triples. His hands feel stiff like he's been in the cold. Surely if this Betrayed man had any real power, he'd have been drafted months ago? He reaches for an illusion, just to prove that he still can. The effect of their anti-magic isn't like a smothering blanket or hitting a wall or anything else. It just isn't. It's the absence of uncertainty. They have reduced a wizard to a pile of meat. Despite how he feels, Marin is still capable of speech. “ We prioritize staying ahead of the Mercurali, not meeting your schedules”.

The Betrayed elf barely acknowledges him but offers to lead the group toward the meeting place. It's not an offer they can refuse. Marin and the rest of them are all turning to walk towards the largest dome in town when the elf with the blue welding mask flips the faceplate up. She has the pointed ears of an elf, but her face looks sixteen. How quickly do commoners age? Faster than the nobility. Marin is a high noble and like eighteen at eighty-six, so she’s probably in her fifties.

“You’re the girl who hacked the noble prison?”

Sierra was also the girl who couldn’t manage to get out, even after Jezero’s best friend died in the control room to clear the door for the rest of them.

“I wouldn’t call it hacking. I crawled through the air vents and stole a keycard,” she says as casually as she can.

“That’s still system design and security. Hacking didn’t always mean computers”.

Sierra smiles. “You do seem to like doing things yourself here,”

“Well, I didn’t leave the lakeshore for nothing,”

The green-haired elf glares and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Robin. They have a negotiation to get to. Don’t waste the prince’s time”.

Behind them, Clay, who is his sort of old-style hacker, rolls his eyes. “No, no, it’s fine. Urey probably only wants to speak with Marin anyway. Get some intel, okay?”

Sierra gives him a thumbs up and drags over a stool, completely unaware of the horror in the doorway.

The green-haired elf rolls their shoulders. "The name's Cress. Urey's an old friend. If you're uncomfortable, walk in the back. It'll help. I wasn't much more than a spark, before". They say nothing else personal, leaving the humans to slowly piece together what Cress is now, as opposed to then. They stall by giving a tour of the village. Grain silo to the left, a cluster of solar energy batteries to the right. The entire town is off-grid and unknown to human governments. They sell corn and do maintenance on radio towers to get money for repairs. Eventually their pager (hooked onto a leaf-like belt holding a gunpowder pistol) buzzes and they lead the party to the meeting place, which seems to be someone’s house.

“I’m going to need you two to hand over your weapons”. Brian passes over his gun. Clay swings his rifle off his shoulder, it’s too large to fire indoors anyway, but doesn’t mention his own pistol. He distracts instead. “Not Marin?”

“He's already dealing with me”. Clay wonders if he should take his shoes off. Instead, he kicks off the loose dirt and walks into an informal dining room with wide windows and a striped tablecloth over the table. Cress stands like a sentry by the door. There is no fancy table inlaid with screens like in the palace. They recognize it as homey but do not feel reminded of home. An older elf with a knit shawl sits on the far side of the room. She’s tall and seems carved from stone. Urey.

“Welcome to Maze. I’m glad to see you made it past our perimeter”.

“We’ve made our way into virology labs and noble prisons. A distractor spell is nothing we can’t handle”. Marin sits with his back to the door, mostly to try and forget why everything feels wrong.

“So the rumors are true? Genus Mercuralis is making a plague? I wouldn’t have expected anything else from the so-called Plaguekeeper, but I’d like details”.

“It’s smallpox,” Clay says.

“Oh dear”.

“What’s the problem?,” the prince continues. “You’re self-sufficient and basically all elves”.

It must be about to rain, because the light coming through the windows darkens slightly. “It’s the secrecy of it all. Other enclaves have been displaced to keep anyone from spilling secrets, secrets that, mind you, we haven’t even been told. Maze is only still here because there’s hardly any humans in town”.

Urey does not radiate confidence. She simply is confident. She stands with her shoulders back and her thumbs hooked in her thick belt. It makes Marin’s posturing childish by comparison. He leans forward in his chair.

“So why are you here?”

“The nobility can’t decide on anything except killing kids, but bother us either way. We don’t want to deal with you. But when a little girl wakes up one morning with radiation burns, we’re not talking about freedom from governance anymore. That’s about saving lives”.

Sierra has her shame about the prison break, and they have theirs. Another mention of the Betrayed reminds them of what they left behind under that glacier. A hopeful, tortured, child, and a lot of dead guards.

“When we win, all of that is over,” Marin declares. “The Mercurali want too much growth too quickly. They took kids to build ports and factories that we don’t need. We don’t need to outproduce the human realm, I mean, all of their manufacturing will be ours soon enough”.

Without a third human at the table, Brian and Clay both feel far more helpless than usual. Luckily Urey doesn’t notice the nudge towards conquest.

“And when does one of the Betrayed stop being a kid and start being a resource? The new Apex dragged adults away too. Cress is one of the few they left. You’re fine with that? ”

“No. I’m not". Lazarus help him, how does anyone negotiate with Betrayed around? "You’ve been here for a long time. If I tried lying to you, you’d know. I can promise protection for the kids, put things back the way they were. I can’t guarantee more until I’m in power”.

“You’re dodging the question. The nobility already whisk our ‘most fit’ off to die a decade before they come of age. When does it become acceptable to press a child into service?”

He takes a breath. “The students you’re talking about all choose to try and become nobles. No one hides how many Conservatory students don’t come back”. Clay makes a gesture. Answer the damn question. “Fine. Commoners set off on apprenticeships during their gap years, right? That’s when we’ll accept volunteers, and if it’s needed for the war, there will be volunteers. Commoners love duty and hard work, don’t you?”

Urey scowls. “I don't think you understand those words. The only thing waiting for a Betrayed elf employed by the nobility is suffering. No one hides that either”.

Before this quest, Marin would’ve said that the Betrayed have power and prestige too. They serve as judges, guards, arbiters of noble behavior. They do have prestige, but not anything else. Instead he thinks of exhaustion and death and the sore spot where his upper arm shattered and replies, “It’s not an easy job, but elvenkind needs them. They all know it. Either they carry the burden or they live out here, on stolen, polluted land, where magic is coming whether they like it or not”.

Urey breaks eye contact and looks past them to the green-haired militia man. Despite the insult, Cress looks back past her at the storm-dark windows. Brian really shouldn’t talk. He certainly shouldn’t contradict Marin. The elves think of him like a bodyguard, after all.

“Elven conquest will make the human world unstable for decades. It might damn well kick off a nuclear war where only magic can help survive the fallout. A conquering empire can offer mercy, but the only way that any Betrayed will be healthy in the long run is to let the human realm be. You’ll have the freedom to exist without being bothered, and they’ll be able to live”. Urey looks straight into his eyes. “We keep things the way they are”.

“The way they were”. Cress was grim before, but their voice now is a rough and broken thing. Not on the verge of tears, but teetering on the edge of something else. “We’re all waiting for death the way things are,”

The windows shatter. Armored boots thunder against the floor and Brian can't see anything through a flash of magenta-red. Never has his human warning for nearby magic been so desperate. His body rejects what his mind once accepted. Clay probably can't see either, but he reaches for the hidden gun.

On the other side of the village, Sierra and her new friend weld metal joints by the open garage door.

“Did you hear that?” Robin asks

“Yeah? My headphones are around my neck, not my ears”.

“Sorry. I thought humans had worse hearing…”

A flash of lightning could have been covered by their blowtorches, but it isn’t even raining. The not-too-distant crash can only be a gunshot. Then it happens again, and she’s running.

……………..

The Betrayed have a very cool power that also sucks! Apparently Warhammer 40k has a similar idea but who knows. not me. I can't stand grimdark.

Diversity win! The militiaman with a rare ability who’s fiercely-held convictions have been abandoned in their desperate fear and grief uses they/them pronouns!

@lokiwaffles @reggie246 @wishndreamer

#by me #the gap years #my oc stuff #writing that *is*

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sirowsky-stories · 2 years ago

Text

Collision

Part 6

Description: Niki learns the story behind Pero and William. Meanwhile, Pero is trying to keep the government from discovering their location, something made increasingly difficult by the ever-tightening noose around the safehouse.

Warnings: Pero Tovar x OFC, no reader insert, conspiracy, cursing, angst, mentions of graphic violence, mention of wild animals being kept as pets, friends to lovers, hurt/comfort, secret identity, AU fic. Rating: Mature/Explicit 18+ONLY Word Count: 6800 Series Masterlist

Author's Note: Again, lots of conversation here, and most of the chapter is from Niki's point of view. I do wonder if I'll ever be able to write a series with short chapters...

-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-

He’s been gone for three weeks, and it’s been twelve days since the Chinese private security team had found them, which is why there’s been no communication since then.

Pero had checked in daily before that, making sure they were all okay and reassuring them that he was making progress on keeping the US government off their trail. But when Will’s tracking system had come online and he’d seen that their other enemy was way too close for comfort, he’d activated a digital kill-switch, disabling all possibility of contact with the outside world, but also making the house undetectable electronically.

Unfortunately, that hadn’t been enough to hide them. The team had already narrowed down their search grid enough that they could visibly scout the remaining wilderness, until they’d found the house, masquerading as a clifftop, complete with trees growing on the roof. And since the tracking system had also been taken offline, the hunted had been unable to see the hunters coming.

Nikita hadn’t known about the toxic gas, so when the nurse and the man she’d never seen before at that point, had come running into the bedroom and fumbled through a closet by the door, she’d been utterly confused. But she knows the sound of a hermetic seal locking in place, and she could guess what the loud hissing throughout the rest of the house might’ve been about. Especially when it had been quickly followed by strangled screams and then thumps of bodies hitting the floor.

Gillian had been distraught for most of the six hours that they’d all been trapped in that room while the house had ventilated itself clear of all toxins, and once the door had opened, it had only gotten worse. The gas must’ve been something corrosive to biological materials, because the smell of the bodies had been a blend of melted plastic, burnt skin, and the strangely sweet but utterly disgusting smell of decaying human remains.

Niki had still been too weak to help clean up, but she’d gotten well enough to be able to stand on her own two feet by then, and had seen one of the intruders, the semi-liquefied remains of which had been partly responsible for creating that smell. The combination of the sight and odor had made her vomit, which had prompted the nurse to order her back to bed. She was, and still is, too vulnerable to be able to afford losing meals.

But she’d felt bad about not being able to help them drag the barely cohesive bodies to the furnace in the basement, or even to help scrub the blood and half melted remnants of skin and flesh from the floors. She’s quite sure that Gillian will never fully recover from having had to do that. The poor girl clings to her professional persona to cope, using the fact that Niki still needs her help to go to the bathroom and get dressed, to keep the darkness away from her conscious thoughts. But there’s no escaping them at night, which is why the nurse has barely slept since that day.

The man, William, doesn’t either, but that seems to be part of his normal routine. He hasn’t spoken much since Pero left, despite Gillian’s attempts to get him to talk about how the two men know each other. And Niki suspects that it’s because he’s ashamed. His behavior makes her think ex-military, and probably not the kind that sits behind screens. More likely, he’s been on the ground and seen truly horrific things, evident by how measured and controlled his reactions to the almost melted bodies had been. But Tovar has never been in the military, so that can’t be where they met.

Without his computers, he seems so lost. Like he has no use or purpose in life unless he’s tapping at keys and looking stuff up. So, he probably doesn’t do much besides those kinds of things these days, and that makes her think he suffers from PTSS. Although, she can’t possibly know how severe his problems might be.

Today though, twelve days after the intrusion, it isn’t the potentially frail former military man that’s responsible for the latest drama. Instead, it’s Gillian who finally reaches her breaking point. She has just helped Niki to have a shower and get dressed when she suddenly announces that she can’t stay in this house for another minute, and heads for the front door. Both of the other houseguests let her leave, despite knowing that she could actually end up getting lost and dying out there on her own. But they know how much she’s been suffering, and that maybe this is what it’ll take to keep her from going insane here.

While they wait for her to hopefully find her way back, Niki and William stay together in awkward silence, sitting in the amazingly comfortable living room sofas and playing cards to try and pass the time. But the silence leaves her fighting to stay awake, so after about half an hour, Niki starts trying to get a conversation going.

“Which branch of the service were you in?” she asks, hoping that the question isn’t intrusive enough to trigger any bad reactions in him.

He doesn’t seem surprised at her assessment of him as former military, but he also doesn’t look happy about it.

“Army,” is all he replies, so she doesn’t push the subject.

His tone isn’t harsh, but it’s clipped enough that she knows to steer clear of any follow-up inquiries on the subject.

“And now you do research?” she leaps into the present instead, to see if he might be more comfortable talking about that.

“I have my own company. Kinda like a private investigator, just specialized on digital analysis. Most of the time I do background checks for corporate hires.”

“Oh, so you make sure that people aren’t hiding things from their resume that might come back to bite the rich company executives in the ass?”

“Basically,” he agrees.

“That sounds kinda boring,” she carefully admits, hoping he won’t take offense.

“Sure,” he shrugs. “But I’ve also been hired by city councils and courts, police departments and fire rescue services, to ensure that the people hired to keep us safe, are actually good people. And it pays the bills and lets me stay in my house. I’m not good with… the outside world. I stay away from it as much as I can.”

“Nothing wrong with that. The world isn’t that nice of a place for people with any kind of trauma.”

He offers no objection to her words, so he apparently agrees. Still, she decides not to carry on with that line of inquiry. She wants to ask him about Pero, about how their paths could’ve crossed when their lives seem so far removed from one another, but she doesn’t know how to phrase it so that he might feel okay with talking about it, when it’s clearly a subject that bothers him. So, she remains quiet instead. But then…

“You wanna know about him, don’t you?” Will asks unexpectedly, after a couple of minutes of silence.

It’s his turn to deal and he’s gathered up the cards, but he’s just shuffling them slowly between his hands, without any sign that he intends to start up a new game. His head is bowed, watching his own hands, probably too uncomfortable to meet her gaze as she observes him. Trying to figure out how much she can ask for, how triggering this might be for him, she looks for signs of agitation in his features. But he seems calm. For now.

“Yes,” she admits, and he squirms, only just enough that she can see it.

“Even if you won’t like anything you hear?” he posits, clearly ill at ease with the subject, but somehow still willing to endure that if she asks him, which seems odd.

It’s not like he owes her anything.

“Yes,” she repeats.

He takes a deep breath then, before slowly putting the deck of cards on the table and then clasping his hands together, as if trying to prevent them from doing something else.

“Ten years ago, I had the world at my feet,” he starts, speaking low and sounding unfathomably sad now. “I worked on Wall Street, and I was good. I was rich, powerful among my peers, respected and admired.”

He pauses and makes a little disgusted sound in the back of his throat, shaking his head almost imperceptibly before he continues.

“And I had a gorgeous young fiancé. A trophy. Someone I told myself that I loved because of the status it afforded me to have her on my arm. The envy that it sparked in every man I met, but especially in my rivals. I felt like such a king,” he says, and then scoffs. “I was so stupid.”

He’s wringing his hands now, rocking himself back and forth where he sits a few times, as if trying to chase away something unsettling from his frame.

“Tovar found me because of the people that I’d hurt to get to where I was. The lives I’d destroyed. He’s really fucking brilliant at that. Seeing people’s shadows, no matter how well hidden they might be. It’s like he doesn’t even needs to look for them, he just sees them, as plainly as other people see what you’re wearing or what car you drive. He just knows.”

She’s aware of that side of Pero too, although he’s never turned that skill on her, so far as she knows. But she’s seen him at work. Watched him a few times when he’s been introduced to new coworkers. Sometimes he’d looked at them with utter indifference, as though they couldn’t have been less interesting to him, while other times… one glance had been enough to turn his gaze hard and his eyes dark.

“His thing was that whenever he found someone who was cruel, who disregarded other people and their pains, he would punish them by robbing them of something they cared about. Money or possessions mostly. And he took on anyone. He was relentless. He created this character, Mr. Hood, who would be the only one that his victims ever interacted with, and never in person, always over the phone. That was how he protected himself, and that was how I first encountered him,” Will explains, but then falls silent, seemingly lost in memories.

“He targeted you?” she asks, to encourage him to continue.

“Yeah. One day I get a phone call from an unregistered number, and the voice on the other end says ‘Hello, Mr. Garin. My name is Mr. Hood, and this is a robbery.’ I made the mistake of laughing at him, assuming that it was a joke, because I was a king. No one could touch me. He gave me five seconds to let me pretend that I had any sliver of control left over the situation, and then he took over. And once he did, I had already lost. But of course, I refused to realize that, right up until the bitter end.”

“But if he was just a voice on the phone, how’d you end up meeting him?” she wonders, and he lets out a deep sigh.

The kind of sigh that’s a lot more than just an exhale. The kind that she can feel in her own chest, even though the weight it carries isn’t hers to shoulder.

“My arrogance knew no bounds, so when he demanded a hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet about the twenty people which he’d found out that I’d scammed out of their life’s savings in order to further my own career, rather than accept my punishment and move on, I took it as an offensive insult to my character. And I couldn’t possibly let that slide. That kind of money was pocket-change for me at that time, so you’d think that I would’ve just happily paid and hoped that he kept his word. But no. Out of sheer spite, I had to put him in his place.”

He closes his eyes for a few beats, and he somehow looks a decade older. As though the pain of his own past is eating away at him so mercilessly that his body can’t keep up. Clearly, he wasn’t always a good person, but she didn’t know him then, so she can’t judge his past decisions. For now, she feels only sad for him.

“I knew people,” he continues while slowly opening his eyes, although his hands are restlessly traveling from his thighs to his neck and back again, over and over. “People who could locate most anyone, for a price. The local cartel had a network of spies within the homeless community, keeping an eye on the movements of law enforcement to give them a heads up on raids and such. So, I hired this kid, Billy, to stake out the money drop. Mr. Hood had instructed me to leave the money at a specific location and then walk away, and told me that if I did that, I’d never hear from him again.”

“Let me guess; something went horribly wrong?” she infers, but he shakes his head.

“No. I dropped off the money and left, trusting Billy to check out who would come to collect it. What I hadn’t anticipated, was just how determined Tovar was to keep his identity a secret.”

“He sent someone else to retrieve it?”

“I’m afraid it was even more complicated than that,” he tiredly grumbles, clearly uncomfortable speaking about this, but he doesn’t stop. “The guy that Billy saw retrieve the money was actually a runner for the local mob, but the kid obviously didn’t know that. So, he gave me a cell phone pic of this guy and I used my computer skills to track him down. I was able to catch up to him when he was walking into a rundown old house which I now know was a drop-point for money heading to their launderer. But back then, I just thought it was where this asshole lived, so I came at him like a raging bull. Obviously, he tried to defend himself and it turned into a fight, ending with me killing this guy with a fucking steak knife.”

She refrains from commenting on this unexpected development, but she has to bite her own tongue hard, because Will looks absolutely horrified at the memory.

“It took a while to calm down after that. I’d never killed anyone before, although Tovar would disagree, since one of the people whose money I’d stolen had ended up dying because they couldn’t afford medical treatment. But I’d certainly never deliberately taken a life before that night, and not with my own hands. Once I got my adrenaline under control, I started looking through the house and found a duffel bag full of money on the bed, so I grabbed that and left. And I was actually kinda proud of myself when I got back to my car. That I’d beaten this asshole, that I hadn’t let him hound me around, that I’d taken back control. But then… my phone rang. An unknown number. I answered it, and that same deep voice said: ‘I really wish you hadn’t done that.’ Then he hung up.”

Impossibly, he seems to turn greyer before her eyes now. His entire body looks like it’s shrinking with each breath, and his skin is losing color. All of which tells her that whatever happened next, this is the part he’s ashamed of. The part he regrets, probably more than anything else in his life.

“Turns out that the mob has real-time surveillance on these places nowadays, to discourage stealing among their employees, so by the time I was getting back in my car, they’d already identified me. And since they’ve got their enforcers strategically placed all over the areas where they operate, they got to my apartment a full hour before I did,” he has to stop and clear his throat, but his voice is still broken and weak when he speaks again. “Christine… was still warm when I found her on our bed… They’d taken their time with her. To send me a clear message.”

“Oh, god,” she whispers, feeling her own throat go dry and a lump form in her stomach at the mere thought of what they might’ve done to that poor woman.

“At first, I blamed Mr. Hood for everything. But I couldn’t prove that he even existed, so naturally no one believed me,” Will picks up the thread after a minute, and it sounds as though he needs to keep talking to not have a total breakdown, so she sits quietly and listens. “Still, in my own head, I wasn’t to blame for any of it. It wasn’t my fault that I’d been blackmailed, it wasn’t my fault that the money drop had been another layer of deception, and how the hell was I supposed to know he’d set me up to get caught by the fucking mafia… I had an excuse for all of it. Refusing to accept that if I’d just been willing to part with one percent of my wealth, everything would’ve been fine.”

By the time he stops to breathe, trying to hold the tears back, he does sound calmer, and she wonders if this might be the first time that he’s ever talked about this. He seems spent, though, and there’s still a lot she doesn’t understand, so she tries to give him a nudge to keep talking.

“Okay, that all makes some kinda sense, but one thing I don’t get is, if Pero set this up so that the mob would get involved if you tried to investigate, how was he supposed to get his money in the end?”

“He had a system. To protect himself, the money he extorted from people never actually passed through his own hands. I never managed to figure out that system in its entirety, but I know that he would’ve siphoned his money out of the pot that went to the launderer, somewhere in transit, and probably through someone else’s hands, even then. He really is a god damned genius. If he hadn’t decided to quit, he could’ve ruled the world,” he explains, and his tone has traces of admiration now.

“Do you know why he quit?” she asks, wanting to uncover as much as she can about the man that she’s grown to love, even though she knows almost nothing about his life.

“No. I never asked,” Will replies, deflating her hopes a bit.

He’s been talking for a while now, but throughout this entire story, the only thing she’s learned about Pero is that he was a career criminal for a while. That he was plagued by the injustices of the world and felt compelled to do something about it. That’s it. For a man who’s clearly had a profound influence on William’s life, the veteran seems to know no more about him than Niki does.

“You still haven’t told me how you came to know the man behind Mr. Hood,” she prompts, still hoping that there might be more to the story.

“Uh… Well, after Christine, and everything that followed with the legal investigation, my life fell apart. Whether I was able to admit it or not, I was drowning in guilt. So, I enlisted in the army and went to war in Afghanistan, thinking that putting my own life on the line would somehow make up for it. Predictably, however, killing more people did nothing to lighten the crushing weight on my soul. And when I came back, I was even more fucked up. But by then, I’d at least figured out that I couldn’t run from my demons and that I just had to learn to live with them. I started my company and got to do some real work, actually help people in a visible and tangible way for a change. It made me a hermit, but I didn’t much care since there was no one in my life that would miss not seeing me. Then one day, I get a text from an unknown number, asking if I can find someone. And not just anyone. This person wanted me to find one of the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals, which at first thought seemed ridiculous, so I declined and that was that. But the next day, the phone rings.”

“Unknown number?” she guesses, and he fixes her with a peculiar look in his eyes.

“I’ll never forget the chill that went through me when I heard that voice again after four years,” he says, shivering at the memory before shaking his shoulders, as if trying to shed the feeling. “He wanted me to find this criminal and he was willing to pay for it, but I was freaking out just hearing from him again, so I just hung up on him. And what do you know, the next morning there’s a knock on my door, and there he is. The ghost that destroyed me without even trying. All he said was my name and I had a full-fledged panic attack right there in my own front hall. But the bastard just waited me out. Standing there in the doorway like some fucking vampire waiting for an invitation. Once I’d calmed down, he crouched beside me and said: ‘If you wanna make up for your past, help me serve some misery to some real assholes.’ Then he got up and left, closing the door behind him. I had no intention of helping him do anything, he was the last person in the world that I was ever gonna trust. And if I’d simply ignored him, he might’ve left me alone eventually.”

“But you saw your chance to learn more…” she deduces, and he half-smiles in a nervous sort of way.

“Yeah. I made the same mistake all over again, thinking I could best him. That if I could work out his real identity, I’d be able to expose him and get some retribution. Which was, of course, exactly what he was expecting me to do. So, the next day, there was a package waiting for me on my kitchen table. It was an envelope containing every scrap of information that could be found about him, and even with a copy of his birth certificate and driver’s license, it all fit onto one single piece of paper. He had no credit cards, no social media accounts, he’d never owned a phone or Bluetooth device that could be tracked, never been arrested, never had his prints taken. Nothing but a home address, a few hospital visits, and a barely used bank account to his name.”

“Hm. That tracks with the man I know today too. And I guess he wouldn’t have deposited any stolen money into a bank account, eventually someone would question where it all came from.”

“Absolutely, it all made perfect sense with what little I knew about him, but I was still determined to get back at him, now that I’d gotten it into my head that I might have a chance to accomplish it. And it wasn’t like I was gonna take that information at face value, I still checked everything out myself before I believed that it really was all that could be learned about him from afar. Then, I made my next major mistake, by trying to expose him online, sending out a spam email with his picture and real name, along with a red label warning saying that this man is a dangerous criminal.”

“Why do I get the feeling that he didn’t take that very well?” she asks, cringing involuntarily at the mental image of the perpetually private Pero finding out about something like that.

“I learned two hard lessons that day,” Will admits, and the look in his eyes has already told her that she's correct in her assumption. “Firstly, that I wasn’t the only computer expert he had access to, because the email was sucked up into a virtual vortex the moment that it was sent, never reaching a single inbox. Which has to mean that he had anticipated something like that and had digital safeguards put in place in advance, triggered by anything that directly uses his name or picture.”

“That sounds like something more or less impossible to pull off. Or is that just my ignorance on all computer matters, talking?”

“It’s not the simplest coding in the world, no. But it’s not impossible. The second thing I learned, is that when you piss this man off, he doesn’t settle for threats, he makes you feel his anger, even though you can’t see him. For two full weeks after I’d tried to expose him like that, I got emails, phone calls, and letters, all telling me things like my payments weren’t going through, or my house was up for sale, or my bank had gotten reports about supposed illegal activities that I was engaged in, and was closing my accounts. The police showed up on my front steps three times in those two weeks, and my house was searched from top to bottom twice. It was constant, relentless stressors and anxiety triggers, culminating in a final call where I was informed that my house had been condemned due to asbestos having been found in the basement, and that it was being scheduled for demolition. And it was all legit. Then it suddenly just stopped.”

“His way of telling you that he was still the one in control,” she summarizes, and he nods.

It does occur to Niki, as she’s listening to all this, that perhaps she should be worried about potentially having a child with a man who clearly knows how to terrorize people. But she isn’t. Whether because she understands his reasoning, or because she just doesn’t care what those reasons might’ve been, she can’t tell right now. What she does know, is that hearing all this is giving her more comfort than one would expect. Because it’s reassuring her that Pero really might be able to keep her safe from everything that hunts her.

“Exactly, and that he could crush me without even breaking a sweat,” Will answers, and then continues, apparently hellbent on sharing everything he can about this, no matter how much it tortures him to say it. “He showed up again after that, sat me down in my kitchen and explained to me that if I didn’t wanna help him all I had to do was say no. And that if I kept insisting on trying to hurt him, he was gonna use the power that he’d accumulated over a decade of digging out people’s dirtiest secrets, to make every second of my life one endless panic attack.”

“A threat which he’d just proven that he absolutely can make good on.”

“Yeah. So, I stopped fighting him. And that’s where this story takes an unexpected turn. At least, it was entirely unexpected to me. But when I started working with him, even with how rarely he needed my help with something, that’s when I started to heal. That’s when the guilt stopped being so absolute and began to become manageable. That’s when I started feeling like a worthwhile person again, even if it was just for those little increments of time.”

He pauses, taking a few deeper breaths, and finally seems to stop shrinking, finding strength in the unexpected positivity that this story apparently ends with.

“It’s like he knew… Like he sought me out specifically because he knew that it would help me,” he ponders, looking puzzled. “Why, I don’t know. Maybe he feels guilty too, on some level. But I know that he already had good computer people working with or for him before he came to me, and I can’t think of any other reason why he would replace them with me, when they were clearly doing a good enough job. Honestly, I’m not sure if he even knows this himself. I get the feeling that he’s always frustrated around me, and I know that he always expects nothing but hatred from me. But I don’t hate him anymore. I’m not even sure that I ever did. I just don’t know how to tell him that in a way that he might understand… or believe.”

He ends on a tone of sadness, which clicks something into place for Niki, regarding who this man is at heart, and what drives him.

“That’s why you came here, isn’t it? Because you need him to be safe. Because despite everything he’s put you through… you think of him as a brother.”

She says it softly, and watches his gaze drop to the floor in silent agreement.

“The only thing that he put me through was the loss of that tiny amount of money. Everything else was my own doing. And do you wanna know the most pathetic part?” he asks before looking up to see her nod once, so he answers. “I still have millions. Millions of dollars just sitting there, collecting interest, untouched, unused. I could live anywhere I want. I could buy almost anything I might fancy, but at most, I spend a few hundred dollars on new computer parts each year. Hell, I don’t even have anyone to leave the shit to when I die.”

“Why not give it away? There’s plenty of people in need all around us,” she suggests, already certain that he’s considered that, but curious to hear why he’s holding on to his fortune.

“Yeah, I know. But I just…” he cuts himself off, and it sounds like he was about to say something he might regret. But then he seems to change his mind and continues anyway. “I want Tovar to have it, but I know that he’ll never take it.”

Ah. Of course, that’s what halts him in his tracks. But Niki knows something that William doesn’t, which might come to change both men’s perspectives on this matter.

“Don’t be so sure,” she cautions with a small smile. “Given that we make it through this crap, he might be about to become a father, and that could very well make him rethink a gift like that.”

“You’re pregnant?” he asks with raised brows, but they soon fall again when his eyes trace the pattern of visible injuries on her body.

“I don’t know. I was before the attack and they thought that it was still alive after my surgery, but there’s no telling if it still is,” she explains, and his expression turns sorrowful.

“I hope it is. What’s happening to you is atrocious. If it costs you your unborn child too…”

He doesn’t have the words to finish that sentence, and neither does she, so they just sit there in silence for a while, thinking to themselves. And then there’s a knock on the door, making them both jump. There’s a hidden camera on the left side of it which doesn’t work right now, since all non-essential electronics are still being kept off, but the camera has a clever feature specifically for situations like this. There’s a peephole directly behind the lens. Ordinarily, the casing behind the lens prevents it from being see-through, but if the kill-switch is activated, that casing slips down and the lens becomes a tiny window.

Since Niki is still slow to move, Will gets up and reaches the door before she’s even managed to turn in her seat. He beckons for her to slide down a bit, where she’s less visible, while he sneaks up to the peephole. It sits at chest height, so he has to bend down to look through it, and once he does, his shoulders drop in relief, and he unlocks the door.

“Welcome back,” he greets as Gillian comes through the opening, hugging herself and shivering slightly, and then he quickly closes it behind her.

“Thanks,” she quietly responds before making a beeline for the bathroom, where Niki hopes that she’ll be taking a hot shower.

Given how long they’ve been trapped here together, she hasn’t learned much about the sweet nurse either. Their conversations have mainly revolved around Niki’s recovery, or the problems that they’ve all been facing on a daily basis. She wonders how long it’ll be like this. How long they’ll have to endure this isolation and perpetual disconnection from the outside world.

She’s never been one to lament being disconnected. It’s usually been something she’s sought after voluntarily. But now, when she has no choice, the lack of information and ability to assimilate to the rest of humanity, feels strangely similar to a wall being built around her.

-=<>=-=<>=-=<>=-

He hasn’t heard from them in twelve days, and it eats away at the back of his mind like sharks on a whale carcass. He knows that the kill-switch has been activated because when he tried to make his daily call to Will, the number was suddenly invalid. Not just offline, but the actual phone number has been scrubbed, so that even if the phone is turned back on, it’s no longer connected to any network and can’t reveal the safehouse’s location.

There’s only one reason why that switch would’ve been activated, and Pero has to fight himself every second of every day, not to race back there and find out if everyone made it through what he can only assume was the Chinese discovering their location. Whoever that private radical is, they’ve clearly got pockets deep enough to utilize only the very best technology that money can buy. Most likely, they’ve managed to trace the truck part of the way and then extrapolated, or they got lucky and caught sight of Will, unwittingly guiding them the rest of the way.

The only thing he knows for sure is that it couldn’t have been his own government that attacked, because he’s got enough eyes and ears among them now to have at least a basic grasp of how their search for Nikita is going. Mr. Hood has been working hard upon his return to the world, but he knows that the voice on the phone won’t be enough to persuade some of the more seasoned professionals, which is why he’s looking them up in person.

The Qwerty brothers had been easy enough to find, thanks to Huang’s list, but after a day of observing them, Pero had realized that they weren’t an immediate threat right then. They are clearly on standby, either waiting for new orders or a new job to come their way. After their failure at the hospital, which they both unfortunately survived, their contract may have been revoked. The professional assassin business is surprisingly competitive, so someone else could’ve already been hired to replace them.

He hopes not, because that would mean new faces for him to track down. But in any case, he remains close to the brothers while he works on establishing an information network around project Amazon and everyone who’s currently taking an interest in it. For almost three weeks he’s been watching them, studying their behavior to learn their secrets, so when the time finally comes to confront them, he’s well prepared.

Going at them one by one will only waste time, so he approaches them when they’re on their way home from their most frequented bar, in the small hours of the morning. Earlier that evening, he’d seen one of them receive a message and then instantly show it to the other one, which had made both men shift behavior. From casual drinks and playfulness among the local regulars, to suddenly keeping to themselves and quietly boosting each other’s confidence in clear preparation for a mission.

They might not be going after Niki again, but he can’t take that risk. He has to know either way. They’re both sure on their feet despite the alcohol, when he steps out in front of them, blocking their way to their car.

“Good evening, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Bloom,” he greets, nodding to the men as he addresses them each.

They stop in their tracks at first, but there’s no question that they recognize him from the hospital, and they’re not happy to see him.

“You,” the Tom Cruise wannabe growls, and then both men come towards him.

“You can call me Mr. Hood,” Pero calmly answers, not moving an inch as he sees the realization hit them both at the same time.

There aren’t many people among the rich, famous or corrupt that haven’t heard of him, and among the larger criminal elements in the country he’s almost legendary already. He takes one measured step closer to them, and the brothers almost reflexively step back.

“I have a proposition for you,” he continues, standing still now to make sure that they’re paying attention to his words. “Work for me as double agents against your employer, and I won’t tell the lovely Miss Grenoble about the cat.”

Both men flinch and then quickly glance at each other. They know exactly which cat he’s talking about, they just can’t understand how the hell he knows about it. If they had any doubts that he might be bluffing about being the real Mr. Hood, it vanishes with the understanding that he knows even their most closely guarded secrets. And that’s all it takes to flip their loyalties. Most assassins are, at their core, primarily concerned with their own lives first.

“It was general Hayword who hired us,” the Mark Wahlberg guy says.

“And what was the message he sent you tonight?” Pero questions, to which the other man picks up his phone and reads the message out loud.

It’s a set of coordinates only about thirty miles from the safehouse, along with a sternly worded order to search the entire area, even if they have to trudge through marshlands and cross rivers on foot. This is bad news. It means that the government is closing in on them, probably aided by whoever it is that’s already attacked. And at this point, that means it’s only a matter of time before they’re found and that all he can do is delay the inevitable.

“Alright, here’s what you’re gonna do,” he firmly declares, staring the brothers down with a hard glare. “You’re gonna go to those coordinates and you’re gonna look around. Only one of you is going to remember to bring a phone or other trackable device and it’s gonna end up lost in a puddle of mud or at the bottom of a river within the first hour. And then the two of you are gonna park your asses on a rock somewhere, for at least two days. Now, I don’t care if that rock is an actual rock, or if it’s a hotel room a hundred miles away, the point is that you’re gonna let the general think that you did search that area and came up with nothing. Understood?”

“And when we call from a payphone miles away from the search area and Hayword orders us back out there because we’re apparently idiots who don’t know how to close a fucking pocket?” the Wahlberg guy counters, but Pero just throws him a snide smile.

“He’ll believe that you really are that stupid, because you somehow managed to mess up a simple hospital kill, turning it into a public spectacle, and then completely failed to reacquire your target, forcing the general to do the legwork himself. He’ll be angry, for sure, but he will buy it. Hook, line and sinker. So, you’re gonna say ‘yes, sir’ and keep pretending to search until I say otherwise.”

He leaves without waiting for them to confirm their compliance. He knows that they’ll do as they’re told, the threat of Miss Grenoble is much more sinister than it sounds. She may be the epitome of a crazy cat-lady, except that her cats are of the wild, three to six-hundred pounds range, and she adores them more than her own children. She has and will feed live humans to them if she gets angry.

But he also leaves because there’s a crawling under his skin now. An urgency. He needs to get back to the house as quickly as possible, to work out a plan with the others for how, when and where they’re gonna go to avoid the efforts of general Hayword. Unwanted images of blood staining the polished, soft brown of the wooden walls, floods his mind. Walking in to discover bodies, tortured and mutilated… His head has a tremendous capacity for conjuring up dark scenarios and displaying them to him.

He just hopes that he hasn’t somehow developed clairvoyance in the past three weeks.

-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-=¤=-

Part 7

Thank you for reading, and remember: I have no taglist anymore. Follow @sirowsky-stories and turn on notifications for updates on my writing :)

#pero tovar fanfiction #pero tovar x original female character #pero tovar x ofc #modern!pero #modern!au #the great wall fanfiction #the great wall au #pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal character fanfiction #sirowsky stories

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art-of-manliness · 1 year ago

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Nature’s Prescription: The 20-5-3 Rule for Spending Time Outdoors

We’re big proponents of getting outdoors here at AoM. Spending regular time in nature comes with a whole host of benefits. It reduces stress, fights depression, improves focus, and can even speed up recovery from injuries and illness. Spending time outdoors is also just good for a man’s soul. The wild can induce awe and wonder, which keeps us humble and grounded. So, how much time in nature do you need to get these benefits? In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter (check out our podcast interview with him about the book) highlighted research from Dr. Rachel Hopman, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, that provides a prescription for spending time in nature to improve our health and well-being. Hopman based her prescription on the idea of a “nature pyramid,” first developed by Tanya Denckla Cobb at the University of Virginia. Hopman simplified the nature pyramid idea into an easy-to-remember rule: 20-5-3. The 20-5-3 Rule for Spending Time in Nature The 20-5-3 Rule translates into the following guidelines for spending sufficient time in nature: * 20 minutes in green space, three times a week * 5 hours in a semi-wild environment, once a month * 3 days completely off-grid, annually Let’s delve further into how to fulfill each segment of this formula and the benefits of doing so: Your Weekly Dose: 20 Minutes X 3 According to Hopman’s research, you can start to get the health-boosting benefits of nature by spending 20 minutes in a green space at least three times a week. These short outdoor jaunts can lower cortisol levels, boost cognition, and improve mental health. Here’s the good news about this component of the 20-5-3 Rule: your thrice-weekly jaunts in green space don’t have to take place in a wilderness area to reap the benefits. You can spend your 20-minute allotments in any natural environment nearby — a pocket park, a community garden, or even a tree-lined street. So, even if you live in a city, getting in an every-other-day dose of nature is very doable. That being said, the more leafy and bucolic and the less cement-covered and civilized the setting of your outdoor interludes, the better they’ll make you feel. Regardless of where you take your thrice-weekly dips into nature, put your smartphone away when you engage in them; Hopman found “that people who used their cell phone on the walk saw none of [the] benefits.” Use your lunch break for a walk through a local park or stroll around your neighborhood after dinner (the benefits of an after-dinner walk extend beyond the nature exposure!). Make it a daily part of your routine, and start reaping the benefits of vitamin N. Monthly Immersion: 5 Hours in Semi-Wild Nature Think of your thrice-weekly 20-minute green space doses as the bottom of the nature pyramid. To start ratcheting up the benefits of nature, Hopman’s research suggests that we should aim to get 5 hours a month in semi-wild nature — a place with minimal urban intrusions. As mentioned above, the wilder the space you spend time in, the greater the effect it has on your health and psyche, so the aim as you move up the nature pyramid is to get a progressively deeper connection with the great outdoors. The higher the level of nature exposure, the happier and less stressed people feel. To get your more immersive monthly dose of nature, take a hike in a state or national park, spend the day at the beach, or go fishing at a local lake. Annual Reset: 3 Days Off the Grid This is the top of the nature pyramid. Once a year, go somewhere off-grid — with few signs of human civilization and hardly any human contact — and spend three solid days there. Research has shown that spending three days off the grid can relax the brain and boost creativity. Military vets with PTSD who spent four days in the wilds saw a 29% reduction in symptoms. Spending this much time in the wild is like rebooting your brain to its factory settings. An annual backpacking trip can get you your yearly three-day nature reset. You can also… http://dlvr.it/T3zHMY

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crazycatsiren · 2 years ago

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Magic, witchcraft, spiritualism... like everything else in life, involve actions and reactions, consequences, impacts.

Unless you live in a cave all by yourself completely off the grid having no contact with human civilization whatsoever, every action you take, every decision you make, spiritual or secular, magical or mundane, will affect your surroundings at some point, somehow.

Give and take, ebb and flow, back and forth, yin and yang, as above so below, however you put it, the universe requires balance, and it balances itself out somehow. There is no day without night, without darkness there is no light.

#mother witch ramblings #witchblr #witch community #magic #witchcraft #witches of the world #spirituality #mind your own craft

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jaidethalagorra · 11 months ago

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Things They Don't Tell You, Character Intro: Jessica

Unfortunately, the nearest exit from the mall was through a Starbucks. I slid open its door and slipped in, trying my best to stay quiet. The Starbucks seemed oddly clean as I walked past the front counter. All the pastries were gone. I turned the corner towards the front door, and stopped dead. Sitting in a chair in front of me, eating a pastry, was an indistinct human figure. Zombie. I quickly raised my gun to kill it when it noticed me. Shit. Faster than expected, it raised its arms and as I took aim it dropped the pastry and stayed in place. "Oh my god, please don't shoot me!" I hesitated, and it took the opportunity. "I'm not a zombie! I promise!" It stepped backwards into the light. It- She, looked to be about my age. Slim figure, impractically long brown hair with the tips still bleached blonde. I stared at her for a minute, before noticing her outfit and stopping, trying to wrap my head around who the hell would wear booty shorts and a crop top in the zombie apocalypse. There were crumbs on her shirt from where she dropped the pastry. "Count to 10 on your fingers." I instructed, not lowering my gun. She stared at me for a minute quizzically, before obliging. Finally, I lowered my gun. "Are you a scavenger? What camp are you from?" "Camp?" She stared at me, seeming to not understand. I stared back, and I mentally revised that description of her. She didn't appear to be slim at all, she looked malnourished. That would track though, if her source of nutrition had been the Starbucks pastries that were missing from the counter. After a moment of awkward silence I decided to switch angles. "What's your name?" She gave me a radiant smile. "Jessica." "Well, Jessica," I responded. "How long have you been here?"

Character Intro: Jessica. Skills: Driving, Persuasion, Not Succumbing To Malnutrition Weaknesses: Practicality, Survival, Stealth Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Bisexual Weapon(s) of Choice: Baseball Bat

Unprepared: If Allie is completely prepared for the zombie apocalypse, Jessica is her polar opposite. Jessica grew up in the upper-class gated neighborhood that eventually became the Gates until it fell in 5 AF. Since the fall of the Gates, she's done her best to scavenge in the ruins of a small strip mall near the Gates. Through sheer luck, she's managed to find everything she would need, mostly untouched. Her whole upbringing of being upper-class, surviving in the Gates, and her finding everything she's needed has caused her to not fully understand the predicament that the world has been in since Haven fell. As mentioned, Jessica also somehow managed to survive for several months off the food she found in a Starbucks, which although impressive highlights her sentiment towards the apocalypse. She simply decided that she could totally survive outside a camp on her own, and somehow, impossibly, she did.

Impractical: A side effect of Jessica's unpreparedness and lack of understanding surrounding what the zombie apocalypse actually entails, she wears ridiculous and impractical outfits like the one described earlier. When it's mentioned that this is impractical, she adds a bandolier of ammo to the outfit, totally ignoring that she doesn't have a gun. Eventually, she picks up her own weapon, a baseball bat. While this seems like a good choice, it's important to remember how the virus transmits. The virus transmits through contact of body fluids, and so even initially having a melee weapon seems like a bad idea. Additionally, it's a blunt object, meaning it's hard to kill something with it and when you do, its body fluids will fly everywhere. And as a cherry on top, it's large and unwieldy, which is exactly the opposite of what you want when trying to go anywhere.

The Safe House: The biggest thing that makes Jessica important is her knowledge of, and connection to, a totally off the grid and independently sustainable house in the middle of nowhere. Supposedly, this house has solar power, its own well, and a large garden and would be one of the only safe places to live for, potentially, forever. This house is owned by one of her uncles who moved away, and if she could get to it she (and probably anyone else she brings) could stay there safely. The objective of the story once this is revealed is to get to this fabled safe house, and Jessica becomes instrumental in that as she can drive and Allie can't.

So, that's the overview of Jessica! I feel like I've summed up her character pretty well, so I hope you guys like her!

#things they don't tell you about the zombie apocalypse #zombie apocalypse #oc jessica

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digitalmore · 10 days ago

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#IFTTT #Digital More

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certificateivelectricalinstru · 2 years ago

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Instrumentation and Control Engineering – Industry Trends

Without contemporary process control engineering systems and business procedures, end users facing globalisation drive plant performance to unthinkable levels.

In Australia, there is a growing need for instrumentation and control (IC) technicians. The process control system receives information from the field sensors, which measure physical parameters like level, temperature, flow pressure, etc. The field instruments are extensively utilised in automation and process control.

The PLC/SCADA/DCS control system database stores the real-time data collected by field sensors. They are analysed and adjusted to control the process variables to the required set points.

Applications of Instrumentation and Control Engineering include:

1) Critical infrastructure monitoring and safety through remote monitoring

The field sensor data is recorded and analysed in PLC/SCADA/DCS control systems in oil and gas facilities, the mineral processing, food, and chemical processing industries, and offers real-time:

Monitoring the state of the process and the equipment.

Process optimisation involves examining past procedures and trends in equipment performance.

Keeping track of process deviations from planned process conditions.

Before any failure, perform an equipment, process health assessment, and schedule an overhaul or repair.

Shutting down and setting off process alarms to operate the facility safely.

2. Grid-connected solar feed-in: control of power grid quality

When the weather changes from a clear sky day to an overcast day, the stability of the electricity grid is compromised:

Overloading of the power grid, resulting in partial/complete grid trip.

Bringing in a spinning reserve supply from gas-fired synchronous generators takes time.

Installing smart digitally controlled equipment that can cut off PV Solar feed remotely is now being addressed to resolve this issue.

Installing clever digitally controlled machinery that can remotely cut off feed in PV Solar is now being done to address this issue. The signal to stop feed-in power from rooftop solar is sent when the network operator notices a decrease in PV solar generation. This also starts the spinning reserve generator, which reduces the time lag that would have been observed otherwise.

3. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Human Machine Interface (HMI)

In order to fulfil business objectives for increased facility utilisation, productivity, product quality, availability, protection, flexibility, and speed, HMI and SCADA technologies for process control automation are used.

For individuals pursuing a career in industrial automation, the training provides a range of Instrumentation and Control Engineering Training courses.

You will have the opportunity to work on a real PLC in our purpose-built skid, just like in the workplace, since the training is a hybrid delivery of 70% hands-on practical instruction and 30% theory.

The courses are:

UEE40420 Certificate IV in Electrical Instrumentation

UEE31211 Certificate III in Instrumentation and Control

UEE51020 Diploma of Instrumentation and Control Engineering

UEE61521 Advanced Diploma of Instrumentation and Control Engineering  

For further course information or to book in, contact the office.

To Know more visit our website-

Phone-1800 768 768

Email- [email protected]

Address- Ground Floor, 102 James Street, Northbridge, Western Australia – 6003

#cert iv instrumentation

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lady-wildflower · 2 years ago

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We’re Not Gonna Live With Fear - Star Trek: Picard season 3 episode 10 The Last Generation

So I wasn’t entirely satisfied with some of the ending of Star Trek: Picard, season 3 episode 10, just because it didn’t feel like it got quite enough time (which is weird, ‘cos it’s almost half of an hour long episode, but hey), and I felt like writing a supplementary fic to do with the deassimilation of Jack - it’s a similar complaint to what I had with Voyager and the ending of Unimatrix Zero, being assimilated isn’t something that you get away from scot-free. I mean, in First Contact there were full-fledged fully implanted drones within an hour, whatever mechanism handled Jack’s assimilation would have had plenty of time to get all fiddly with Võx. So here’s a fanfiction, crossposted from AO3.

Jack Crusher deals with his initial recovery from the Borg Queen after being assimilated in 2402. Word count: 6,255.

Note: I also changed the initial bit a little so he didn’t remove the thing on his face with… what, his hands??? On the way from the transporter room? I think it may have been a production decision to make him look more human but I don’t have to worry about that and I have different priorities so I ain’t doing that. And I don’t imagine the shit on his hands would have just been gloves mate.

“Welcome to the Enterprise,” his father said warmly, smiling at him as he waved a hand at the brightly lit yesteryear not-quite-retro-but-nearly-there, classic really, Bridge of the Galaxy class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Jack still didn’t know quite how his parents had dug a blown-up crashed ship out of the mothballs of what he had been sure had been the complete totalling of the Enterprise D, but there they were, standing on her bridge. Worf, the very model of a modern major Klingon, was snoring like a puppy in the counselor’s chair beside Sydney and Alandra’s Dad, and his weirdly elderly robot chum Data. Riker and Troi were embracing in the relief that death had not done them part, and the viewscreen showed a prolonged hail from the U.S.S. Titan A, depicting Seven of Nine, Sydney, Alandra, and Raffi. And there, up in the raised aft of the bridge behind the broad tactical station, Jack’s Mum and father stood on either side of him, holding him as he held his armored arms around them right back, with pride. Of course, it wasn’t that idyllic. Because Jack was still reeling from the disconnection of his consciousness from the Borg Collective. And that had been a comparatively tiny Collective. His body? Implants perforated his form, he was covered from toe to neck in armor with tubule sockets and piping all over him, the skin of his visible face was almost entirely mottled with black circuited veins and gray, some of his hair had fallen out - much to his consternation, as a vain young man dreading the imposition of early-onset baldness thanks to his father’s genetics - and the right side of his face was dominated by the black cranial implant that clawed up toward his nose under his eye and its red laser, and that also happened to be why his vision was green-tinged and filled with grids and analyses in Borg codes he could inexplicably understand, telling him all about how the systems of the Bridge worked and connected to the rest of the ship.

“So. This is where I was cooked up,” Jack said amusedly, glancing over at Riker. “She’s in good shape for getting blown up and wrapped around a planet,” he noted, and his father chuckled slightly under his breath.

“Oh, that is thanks to Mister LaForge. Sneaky fellow spirited away the saucer section off Veridian III twenty years ago and has been refurbishing the old lady in secret ever since,” Picard told him, and Geordi smiled smugly back at them. “And a good thing he did too. Who knows what would still be happening if he hadn’t,” he said, his tone getting a little morose as he turned back to Jack and his eyebrows did that weird scrunchy thing they did when he was emotional. His Mum’s hand patted his shoulderblade plating gently.

“You have no idea how glad I am that you’re back,” Beverly told him. “And you are so very thoroughly grounded, Jack Edward Crusher! Running off like that, getting yourself assimilated! Gave me the worst heart attack any mother’s ever had!” she exclaimed, a touch of sarcasm in her voice as she slapped his arm, but probably hurt her own hand more than his arm. Jack scoffed self-consciously. Yeah, he had done that hadn’t he?

“In my defense, I did sort of have the Borg yelling at me my whole life. It was bound to happen eventually,” he quipped. His mother’s expression immediately softened and she pursed her lips, raising her hand to his cheek.

“Ohh… well, it’s a good thing you’re a doctor’s son. Let’s see how bad the damage is,” Beverly said softly, fetching the sleek tricorder she’d discarded and flipping it open. “As soon as we can rendezvous with the Titan I’ll ask their chief medical officer to stock us up and we’ll get started getting all of this crap off of you then. For now, a good scan and a screwdriver will have to do,” she said, and Jack frowned with his one good eyebrow.

“Here? Why not head over to the Titan?” Jack asked. His Mum raised her eyebrow.

“No no. I de-assimilated your father in this ship’s sickbay, and so help me like father like son I will do the same for you young man,” Beverly replied, and Jack couldn’t help but smile a little at that. He was beginning to accept Picard as his father, not quite his Dad yet, but his father, and he supposed the connection was sweet. The tricorder started twittering methodically as his mother began scanning him, and almost immediately her eyebrows were knitted together in concern. He knew why - as soon as he’d even thought about it, his ocular overlay had spewed up a green whole-body diagram of his implants into his peripheral vision, and boy were there a lot of them splayed through him. It almost made him vomit; it was bad enough just keeping away from looking at the black exo-plating that covered his body, arms, and hands, but to imagine - no, remember - all the bits and servos and mechanisms inside of him? It was with a shiver of revulsion that Jack tried to will the image away, and to his relief it did go away.

It had been a traumatic day. And now that the smothering influence of the Borg Queen was gone, his mind was free to gape in horror at what had been done to him - it just hadn’t had much time to take it all in yet. The mutilated, half-cannibalized faces of the drones who’d been tasked with the first phase of his secondary assimilation would haunt his nightmares for a long time.

“Well, Beverly?” Picard asked concernedly, looking to her. As he moved, Jack’s ocular overlay saw fit to give him a complete rundown of the alloys that made up his fanciful Admiral’s combadge.

“Well, it’s not good, I’ll say that. It never is, with the Borg,” Beverly said wryly, making a face. “But I suppose it’s better than it could have been. There’s a lot that’s typical of Borg that they don’t seem to have gotten around to, I don’t even want to speculate what was meant to go there,” she told them, pointing to the socket on Jack’s right pectoral. Some pulmonary junction meant to facilitate another future implant that would have allowed him to function in a vacuum, Jack believed. “The cortical array is going to be a nightmare to remove, I’m afraid,” his Mum told them, this time pointing to the mass of tubules and wires implanted into the base attached to the right of his skull. “It makes sense that the Borg would have designed your complement for the purpose of amplifying your transmissions before all else, everything else is either standard or missing. Which, don’t worry son, I’m already thinking of ways to get that particular segment out of your DNA, and out of the DNA of everyone in Starfleet who was affected,” she assured him, and he nodded gratefully. Picard beamed at her affectionately.

“Trust me Jack, your mother knows all about unplugging all of this,” Picard agreed. “She’ll have it out of you in no time.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say no time. Locutus pre-dated some things, the spinal clamps for one. Those aren’t coming out any time soon, not if you want to be walking in the next few months,” his mother disagreed. “It’ll be a little while until you’re a hundred percent de-Borg’d, son,” she said apologetically.

“I can live with that,” Jack surmised, before he sniffed amusedly. “Hey, Mum, can I keep this?” he asked jauntily, pointing a gauntleted finger at his eye. His Mum frowned at him bewilderedly and lowered the tricorder as Picard’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You know, on somethings the Borg had some good ideas. It’s good this, it’s like I’ve got the Memory Alpha article for everything I look at and I don’t even need to find a padd for it,” he said with a shrug, trying to ignore the way servos in his biradial clamp whirred with the motion. Picard scoffed.

“You want to keep it?” Picard asked incredulously.

“I can see all sorts of things with it, it’ll come in right handy. Like LaForge’s eyes,” Jack replied, glancing over to Commodore LaForge to verify with his own eyepiece that he was remembering right; indeed, LaForge was the blind one with synthetic eyes that could see all manner of spectra - and the ocular implants Jack had been fitted with were even better. “Wonder if I could run that old Doom game on it. But if you could just fit an off-switch into the thing? It’s gonna be bloody distracting when I try to go to sleep,” he asked wryly, and it was his Mum’s turn to scoff.

“Speaking of, Data, would you mind scanning the wreckage for a preferably intact regeneration alcove? Even if Jack comes to his senses and has us get rid of the damn eye implant it’s going to be a while before it’s all gone, so we’ll be needing one and they’re not exactly in good supply,” Beverly asked, leaning over the tactical console as Data turned about to her with his funny yellow eyes. A partial analysis of Data’s complex positronic android-synthetic hybrid frame flashed up in Jack’s eye. Jack wondered if Data still technically held the Starfleet rank of Lieutenant Commander if he’d been legally dead for twenty-five years, even as he snickered at his Mum’s description of his lunacy at thinking the eye implant at least practical. It was going to be a long recovery, he knew, so Jack thought he might as well make the most of it and get something cool out of it. Namely, the most unobtrusive yet helpful implant of the lot. In a way he was deflecting from the pain, but that little bit of joviality was serious-ish.

“Of course Doctor,” Data replied politely, getting up from the first officer’s chair to go back to his forward station. The LCARS panel chirped and beeped as he tapped buttons in quick succession. “Scanning for one now… I have one. It doesn’t look like it’s got a dead drone in it,” he said wryly, before he tapped another few buttons. “It’s in Cargo Bay One, but I’ve put it in a containment field just in case. I may be twenty years short on news, but I do know that Borg technology isn’t known for its safety,” he told them.

“Thank you Mister Data,” Picard said gratefully. “Will, if you would take the con while Geordi, Beverly, and I head down to Sickbay and get started? Plot a rendezvous with the Titan,” he asked politely, pointing at each of them in turn as he began to step toward the turbolift.

“Sure thing, Jean-Luc. Good luck kid, I know it’s not easy,” Riker replied, parting briefly from Troi. “We’re all glad to have you back with us,” he said with a smile, and Jack nodded back to him. He wasn’t quite sure how to react to it; all his life he’d kept people out, but now that he’d bared so much… he didn’t quite know how to be open without their minds swimming in his own, he had to admit.

“We are. As we said to your father before we came here, you’re as much our family as Kes or Alandra or Sidney. And if you need anyone to talk to about this, my door’s always open to you Jack,” Deanna agreed, smiling warmly at him.

“Thanks. I’ll um, I’ll think about it,” Jack replied, giving them a black-armored thumbs up. Well, he supposed he’d learn how to be open in time. Nevertheless, he slowly and uncomfortably stepped after his father, followed by his Mum and LaForge who’d come up and around from the lower portion of the Bridge.

“Sickbay,” his Mum said as the doors closed behind the four of them, before she reeled back slightly as Jack accidentally got her in the eye with the laser on the side of his head. Could he turn that off? Well, the red dot on the turbolift wall didn’t go away, so he supposed not. “How do you feel?” Beverly asked him softly, reaching up to his cheek. Jack paused.

“Honestly, it fucking hurts,” Jack replied, so quietly he almost hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t wanted to appear weak, but now he was realizing how enormously stupid that was. “Everywhere. The Borg don’t exactly believe in painkillers,” he winced, noting how his father nodded commiseratingly. Every implant was burning agony in his skin and under it, the edge of the armor around his neck was like a vise rooted into him, burrowing in. Nanoprobes still scraped through his veins, filling him with a terrible ache, and so much of him felt rigid, constrained like every joint in his body needed to be cracked. And his head was pounding like a drum, as the turbolift doors whooshed open to reveal a softly lit corridor in the same classic style as the Bridge.

“It’s all right, we’ll put you under while we take as much as we can out son,” Beverly assured him softly as she took the lead in slowly making their way from the turbolift, stepping backwards. Jack nodded thankfully; he’d already been semi-awake to fully experience the implants being put in, he didn’t want to be awake when they were taken out. Jack glanced to the side, at the shiny black panels on the walls that his ocular overlay informed him were old general-purpose monitors for things like directions, only to freeze in horror at his reflection. He blinked, and Võx blinked back at him, the stoic image of the Borg terror. An image not unlike the historical images he’d seen of Locutus of Borg. A zombified, twisted, dissonant reflection that did not, could not, belong to him. Nausea grew in his gut before his father touched his back plates.

“I know,” Picard said simply, and Jack heard thirty years of trauma in his father’s soft-spoken voice. Was it their shared destiny to be forever scarred, violated, by the Borg? There were tears in Jack’s eyes as Picard offered him a hug, and the only reason he didn’t fall into it like a pile of bricks was because he wasn’t entirely sure how much he weighed just then and he didn’t want to hurt his father. But he did lean into the embrace, squeezing his eyes shut over Picard’s shoulder so he could not see the monster the Borg had made of him. Spacedock, and everyone else who had died at the hands of those Võx had controlled, their blood was on Jack’s hands. Because he’d been weak, and submitted to the voice in his head. Become the instrument of the Borg’s vengeance. Jack was weeping, sobbing his guilt into his father’s arms as his mother gently caressed the back of his neck and his hair affectionately, before a tiny pricking feeling barely caught his notice; a hypospray. Mercifully, darkness took him as his mother sedated him.

Jack had never been so glad not to dream. To him, he had succumbed to darkness and only moments later consciousness had seeped back into him like gluggy soup, and his eyes slowly blurred open before he started at an electronic hissing that whirred up seemingly right behind him before something clunked and there was a tiny lurch in his back.

“Wh-er-” Jack groaned, trying to get up and see what it had been only to instantly be dizzy as he tried to sit up too quickly. “Ow…” he winced, squeezing his eyes back shut as that infernal headache bolted back through his brain and his whole body ached.

“Jack. Jack, take it easy,” a familiar voice said right beside him and he jumped, opening his eyes again to blearily see - without any green overlay, notably - the wavy blonde hair and silvery ocular implant of one Commander Seven of Nine, still wearing her red-shouldered Starfleet command uniform. Jack blinked a bit and his eyes finally focused, and he took in where he was. He was, curiously, not aboard the Enterprise D anymore, obviously his Mum had been convinced to at least eventually set her sentimentality aside and transfer him to the Titan’s better equipped sickbay, where he seemed to have a ward to himself. Seven’s hand, laced with the metallic tendons of her remaining Borg implants, took his shoulder gently as Jack sat up, looking around at his bed - well, he knew what they’d done with the regeneration alcove. Some of its components, most obviously the green flickering plasma conductor at its head, had been incorporated into the biobed, no doubt so he’d be more comfortable and yet also regenerate what remaining Borg components he had - and he did still have quite a few. Looking at himself, the exoplating had all been removed, which he was more than glad for. Reticular nodes, the little spidery implants on the skin, still marked a lot of his visible arms and legs, including twin ones on his feet, and probably were there under his hospital gown too. Some of his skin was still gray and mottled around them, but most of it looked like it had returned to a rosier complexion. His right arm almost seemed to match Seven’s - assimilation mechanisms were standard on Borg, though obviously the design had changed a little since Seven of Nine - with dark metallic augmentations embedded over his tendons, wrist, and fingers, which too were capped like Seven’s. “Does it hurt?” Seven asked him.

“Mhmm,” Jack grunted, trying not to nod too much because his head was killing him. It wasn’t the only thing though; for whatever reason, he was actually cognizant of the implants itching now, irritating the skin around them. Seven of Nine took up a hypospray from the bench and held it up, and he squeezed his eyes shut with a smiling grimace in lieu of nodding. With a hiss, Seven administered the analgesic within it, and Jack exhaled slowly as it began to work, dulling his headache. As she did, Jack frowned at her. “When’d you get promoted?” Jack asked, pointing at the four, not three, pips on her neck.

“Yesterday. Captain Shaw’s posthumous recommendation,” Captain Seven replied with a small smile. Catching Jack’s lopsided frown at that, she inhaled. “You’ve been out for three days. Your mother’s taking some well needed rest, she’s been up for the last three days working on you. While they’re gone, I’ve been assigned the job of being your ex-Borg nanny,” Seven told him, with a sardonic lilt to her voice. Jack snorted.

“Borg babysitting? It’ll never catch on,” Jack chuckled, and Seven shook her head amusedly. Jack frowned and raised his plated hand to his face, specifically around his right eye; surprisingly, he found that he still had the base of the ocular implant around his eye, a little like Seven’s but surrounding a bit more of the circumference of his eye and heading up his nose, so why did he not have the overlay? Thankfully, there was no annoying laser rangefinder on his head anymore, there wasn’t a red dot on his hand.

“The uh, robot installed the off-switch you asked for,” Seven told him helpfully. “Just on your temple, there,” she added, demonstrating on her own face. Jack pressed that point on the implant, finding a tiny button that hadn’t been there before, and the green overlay booted back up with a slight twinge of pain in his eye. Nodding, he turned it back off again, and again his eye twinged as it vanished.

“Brilliant, thanks Data,” Jack muttered. “I allowed to get up?” he asked Seven, though he of course had no intention of following a rule not to. Seven nodded.

“Yeah. Here, let me help you,” she replied, holding his arm and hauling him to his feet. Despite his silly desire to do it independently, it was probably a good thing Seven of Nine was helping; his legs were shaky and weak, and he realized just then that it was probably because he hadn’t eaten anything in three, nearly four, days, and the Borg implants responsible for taking over his metabolism had probably been taken out. The cold floor of the Titan’s sickbay chilled his toes, but he welcomed that touch as he shook and steadied himself on the ex-Borg Captain. “Good?” she asked.

“Yeah, better,” Jack replied hoarsely, looking around the sickbay ward. On a far bench were what appeared to be a number of the implants that had been removed from him as well as the exoplating unceremoniously dumped into a container, and on the bedside table was a little square mirror, so he shakily stepped over to it and picked it up. He’d have to get used to his altered reflection, he knew; reflective surfaces weren’t exactly rare, he couldn’t hide from it. Thankfully, as he raised the mirror, he did not see Võx, no. It was still disturbing, but at least it was a reflection that could belong to him. The gray skin had retreated to only be around the very edges of the base metallic ocular implant that partially circumnavigated his eye, and much of the assembly on the side of his head was gone. His hair was a little bit ruined, having been cut away in places, but the face in the mirror was Jack Crusher again. Just… a little wounded. Though, not all of the cranial implants were gone - there was still a lot of black metal behind his right ear. He frowned and touched it.

“We couldn’t remove the entire cranial assembly,” Seven explained. “Firstly, you asked to keep the eyepiece which means keeping the cortical array and the spinal clamps, because those are what the regeneration alcove we built into your bed links to, and secondly… your father explained to us the Borg’s purpose for you. Your cranial array was specially designed, it’s almost more akin to what a Borg Queen has,” she told him, and he listened dutifully. “We could take away most of it, but not all of it. In a way, you’re like a micro-Collective all to yourself. I’d say it saved your life,” Seven said, and Jack turned to her curiously. “Most Borg don’t just get to decide to leave,” she pointed out.

“Right,” Jack muttered, nodding. He couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for others, who had had to be excised from the Collective by force. And those Võx had assimilated, Jack had sort of just shoved them out a little unceremoniously. To be fair, he’d been in a hurry. “If I’d’a stayed in there much longer… might have lost myself,” he breathed, trying not to think about it too much. Seven didn’t reply, she just silently nodded understandingly. Jack took a deep breath, then looked a bit more at his reflection. He grimaced, touching the ocular implant again. “Am I never gonna get that eyebrow back?” he asked petulantly. Seven laughed.

“Welcome to the club, kid,” Seven chuckled. “I was able to neutralize your nanoprobes, so you know. Some of them are locked into a limited maintenance mode, we can’t get rid of all of them, and the rest… well, let’s just say I don’t envy you your next visit to the head,” she said wryly.

“What?” Jack asked worriedly, before he groaned.

“Easiest way to get rid of them all,” Seven shrugged. “Don’t ask me, I’m a Captain not a doctor; Raffi’s in command for the moment. Hungry?” she asked him and he nodded eagerly.

“Starving. Don’t think that regeneration bed does much for that,” Jack replied, and Seven shook her head.

“No, it doesn’t. I remember being pretty pissed off about that when I first started having to eat,” Seven of Nine said amusedly. “Here, put that on and we’ll go get you something to eat. I’m sure your father’s chomping at the bit to see you, and your Mom will be too once she wakes up,” she said, handing Jack his clothes off the bench.

One Year Later

“Jack! Jack Edward Crusher-Picard if you aren’t ready to go I swear to God!” the voice of his Mum called impatiently down the hall. Jack snorted to himself. Well, this was going to go well. Beverly Crusher, dressed in her best formalwear, appeared at his door, eyes blazing. “You are not even dressed. Come on, chop chop! Or do you want to be late to your own graduation?!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together to startle him into retracting his arm tubules from the padd in his hand, and he hurriedly turned off his eyepiece like a scolded child.

“We’ve got plenty of time!” Jack protested.

“Get. Dressed,” his mother insisted, shaking her head. “And would you stop doing that? Sticking those damn tubules in every padd in the house, you’re starting to wear holes in them! Don’t even know why you want to,” she huffed, pointing at the padd in the his hand.

“‘Cos I can have like fifty tabs open at once!” Jack laughed, even as he got up off the regeneration alcove-fitted bed and tossed the padd onto his desk. “Counselor Troi says it’s good that I can recontextualize and embrace what remains of a highly traumatic event in my life,” he added smugly, quoting the good counselor, and his Mum just scoffed at that.

“Is that what you call surfing the extranet all night when you were supposed to be studying for your exams?” Beverly asked him sardonically.

“Well-”

“Get ready to go, for crying out loud,” his Mum told him, before she went back down the hall muttering. Jack snickered to himself and closed his door to get dressed, though he briefly reconnected to the padd to apologize to Sidney for cutting their conversation short and tell her he’d see her later, and then closed the other tabs he’d had open, pausing only to watch the batting team of the cricket game he’d been watching bat a six before he turned his eyepiece off again - the Titan was in dock, so he and Sidney, whom he’d been tentatively seeing since the whole incident, had gone on a couple dates, much to the disapproval of Commodore LaForge, had some drinks together, and then she had promised to attend his graduation from Starfleet Academy. He’d been placed in an accelerated program due to his extensive prior experience - and thankfully pardoned for the pile of petty crimes he’d committed in the name of his and his mother’s medical work - but he’d spent the last year attending the school, and it was part of why he now lived not aboard the S.S. Eleos XII or any replacement for her, but in a very nice penthouse apartment afforded to his mother as an Admiral in Starfleet in San Francisco. His father didn’t live with them, the romance that had once blossomed between Jean-Luc and Beverly was one they both agreed was best left in the realms of bittersweet memory so as to not sour it further, but they were still fond of each other and Picard visited often. Jack thought his father’s Romulan partner Laris was quite a cool woman. Maybe one day, he supposed, he’d get a second half-brother, this one half-Romulan, one he’d actually be able to get to know for once.

Starfleet Academy hadn’t been half bad either; it had been a little awkward at first, since he was the person who’d remotely assimilated half his classmates a year ago, and boy had the guilt kicked him for months, but with time and work and a lot of counseling they’d moved past that and he’d made some quite good friends. But that day he supposed it was time for him to focus on graduation, so he reluctantly set aside his distractions and got dressed in his formal uniform, brushed his teeth and shaved, and applied a generous glob of dermal cream about his implants, particularly the assimilation manifold that ran along his whole right arm. The edges of the things itched a lot and tended to scab when he scratched them, and there were a few stubborn spots that had eventually scarred. Finally, he combed his hair tidily over what remained of the cranial implant that had thankfully been mostly excised since the initial round of surgeries, and smiled at his reflection. The implants weren’t quite so obtrusive anymore, and he’d come to appreciate the one around his eye which he’d actually painted with hypoallergenic silver plating to make it look a bit less ugly and more like Seven’s. The mottling of his skin was gone, his hair had grown back and the bright young man that looked back at him was exactly that; a young man, and human. Satisfied, he nodded at himself. By day’s end, there’d be a pip on his collar.

“There. Better?” Jack asked his Mum as he stepped into the living room.

“Much better,” Beverly said warmly, beaming at him. “All right then, let’s be off,” she said, before they walked arm in arm down to the transporter arch and beamed to the Academy, where Jack winced as the sun struck his eyes. Shame the implant didn’t come with a sunglasses function, the Borg really needed to learn a thing or two about beach holidays. But they both smiled gladly at the sight of who was waiting for them quietly under a tree, leaning on the wall trying not to attract too much attention despite wearing a suit; Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, who got up with a wide smile and walked across the concourse to them. “Jean-Luc,” Beverly said, offering him a hug.

“Beverly,” Jean-Luc replied, embracing her and kissing her cheeks politely. “Good to see you, and of course.. big day son,” he told them both, as he moved to Jack and hugged him too with a proud wrinkly old man smile.

“Yeah,” Jack said, smiling back at him. “But I reckon you’re feeling pretty foolish now for giving that whole the last Picard speech last year,” he snickered, having been sent the video by Sidney a few weeks before. Picard scoffed ruefully, closing his eyes and hanging his head. All that pontification about the decorated Picard line ending with Jean-Luc, and a year later the whole thing was ruined.

“In my defense, I was not aware that you existed at the time,” Picard grumbled softly, not without a glance at Beverly, who made an apologetic face. “But I have never been prouder to be wrong, Jack. The legacy you write will no doubt prove you far more than worthy of all those Picards who came before you,” he said softly, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “And part of the reason I am quite definitely not giving a speech this year is because I doubt I could live last year down if I spoke at the graduation of my own mysteriously apparated son,” he chuckled, and Jack smirked as he patted his father’s shoulder with his partially-encased hand. “Shall we?” the old man said, and with that the three of them joined the throngs of students and their families gathering in the great auditorium for the graduation of the class of 2402.

Jack was just glad that he wasn’t the first young ex-Borg cadet to graduate from the Academy, so that the speaker couldn’t have called him up as the first, as if it were some honor - though he suspected that even if he hadn’t been second to the late Icheb, they wouldn’t have wanted to point him out only a year after such a pivotal Borg threat, using Jack himself as its tool, had taken so many lives, destroyed so much. It weighed on him even then a year later, made him wonder if he even deserved the place he took at Starfleet Academy. The angry tirade of the fallen Captain Shaw, whose very life Jack - no, Jack urged himself to remember, Võx, not him - had taken, against his father, against what the Borg had made of Jean-Luc Picard, the only Borg so deadly they gave him a goddamn name! rambled through his mind as he only half listened to some Admiral whose name he hadn’t caught talk about the values of Starfleet. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought of how he was certain that Captain Shaw wouldn’t have forgiven him.

A glint of light caught his eye, and he looked up at the gallery from which it had come - and he recognized its source; it had reflected off of the eyepiece of Seven of Nine, who sat not looking at the speaker, but at him. She wasn’t the only one. Sidney sat there, newly a Lieutenant and beaming down at him, Picard and his Mum were with them, along with Musiker and the Romulan Elnor, Troi, and Riker, and their daughter Kestra, a few years from graduating herself, had come along too. And Seven of Nine was smiling just as proudly as his parents were at him. Jack smiled back up at them. If the old Enterprise senior staff were a big family, then Seven was like a cousin to that family, a big cousin who’d been there for Jack whenever she could be all year. Jack smiled back up at them, remembering what they themselves had told him in their own ways; that he deserved to be here. That he had been manipulated and used, and that what the Borg had engineered him to be did not define him.

The instant he had stepped up and received his commission as Ensign Jack Crusher-Picard and the silver pip had been pinned to his neckline had been decidedly more tense than that of his classmates, but it had been those friends whom he had made that had begun the applause that had rung out through the auditorium just as it had for everyone before him, applause echoed loudest by the gallery of his family and Sidney and Seven. Perhaps there were those who would see him as dangerous always, but he was not alone.

Of course, the better bit of the day was the dozens and dozens of parties that sprang up all over San Francisco afterward, and Jack found himself partying in a cocktail bar ringing with pop music alongside Sidney, a little tipsy as he and his friends laughed away the evening as new ensigns of Starfleet.

“Ayyyyyy!” Jack cried as his Andorian buddy Tr’ven won the beer pong game. “Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!” he chanted along with his friends as the loser, a Bajoran by the name of Jarian Dai groaned and reluctantly picked up the red cup. Bzz bzz. In Jack’s pocket, his miniature padd buzzed with a text notification. Huffing, Jack got out the little glass device, expecting it to be another text from his Mum asking when he’d be home, but he was curiously surprised to see the text hadn’t come from his Mum. No, it had come from Seven of Nine, simply abbreviated to 7/9 for her display name.

7/9: Check your Cadet account emails.

Jack frowned. That was a bit out of the blue, but he supposed not without plausible cause; some of the cadets, like Dai, had received their assignments - he was going to the U.S.S. Vanguard - so maybe that was what she meant. Putting the padd in his left hand, Jack turned on his eyepiece and then focused on his arm to shoot the two evil little tendrils that were the interfacing assimilation tubules into it.

“Oooh he’s getting the tubules out!” Leannia, an unjoined Trill, cajoled excitedly. She was drunker than he was, and Jack scoffed.

“Oh shut up Leannia,” Sidney chuckled, shaking her head as she smiled at him.

“I’m just checking my emails, it’s not that cool. Screen on this thing’s tiny,” Jack replied, shaking his head. Leannia laughed gleefully and took another long sip of whatever colorful cocktail she had, some disgusting thing with Denevian Mead in it, while Jack flipped out his emails into his peripheral vision with a thought. And indeed, among the unreads, was one from Starfleet Command, with the subject line Starship Assignment - Jack Crusher-Picard. “It’s my assignment,” he said softly, but clearly not softly enough, as half his friends heard and gasped.

“Oh! Tell us tell us!” Dai called, downing the red cup of booze he’d had to drink from the pong. “Let’s hear it Crusher!”

“Gimme a bloody second,” Jack laughed, opening the email in another tab to read it. Most of it was the usual official stuff, before his eyes widened incredulously as he read his assignment.

Starship: U.S.S. Enterprise - NCC-1701-G

Commanding Officer: Captain Seven of Nine

“Holy cow,” Jack muttered.

“Whizzit?” Dai asked, his voice so slurred it came out in one word.

“Enterprise G,” Jack replied, retracting his tubules and turning off his eyepiece as he blinked. Instantly, cheers erupted around him from his classmates. Sidney erupted, yelling with gladness that they were both to be serving together and kissing him.

“AYYYY! Bartender! Another round for the Enterprising xB!” Tr’ven yelled eagerly as his antennae shot up, clapping Jack’s shoulder triumphantly. “Hahahaa!” Jack couldn’t help but laugh and celebrate with them, beaming as the group congratulated him. Despite all the pain, despite the violations he had been through, Jack was not alone. It was not such a bad thing at all, to suffer the mortifying ordeal of being known.

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