#so if i knew someone had implanted a tracking device in my actual fucking body?? you bet i'd cut that thing out

[hood-ex]

Was Titans Dick dramatic for cutting open his arm to pull out the tracker Bruce had implanted inside it without him knowing? Absolutely not, I would've done the same thing.

[kunoichi-ume]

May Drabbles, Day 22

Prompt: “Running seems to be all you’re good at”

Characters: (future) Republic Trooper Jurr Jiin and a brief cameo by Jedi Master Vukosh

Word Count: 1987

Jurr scrolled through the list of requirements for enlistment in the Republic Army and forced herself not to frown. She had been trying to get better at schooling her emotions, mostly to hide her almost constant state of fear and confusion, because she needed to be able to hide her condition, but the further down this list she got the more she felt her heart sinking.

It wasn’t the physical requirements that concerned her as much as it was the mental skills test. She had started physical training not long after she had realized that elisting was the only way for her to escape the medical facility that felt more like a prison than a home. Not that she had any idea what home meant, it was just one of those words she heard from time to time. It was where the other patients all went when they left, something she had only recently been able to retain.

Her memory had stabilized in the last few years, less mid day resets and total losses, but she was still missing large swaths of time. Like those developmental years of growing up, when she should have been learning and growing as a person. Doing all those things people do to become successful adults.

Those were a complete blank instead of the springboard into life they should have been.

Instead she was, well, she had no idea how old she actually was just a rough estimate that she was about sixteen, and couldn’t even tell someone how to tie a knot. She could do it, muscle memory seemed to be the only thing she could count on in her fucked up life, but if someone asked her to describe the process from memory along she wouldn’t be able to.

Jurr could run, jump, do push ups and pull ups and every other physical requirement the military had but there was two major hiccups.

They required a general education certificate. If Jurr had ever attended school, she didn’t know it and certainly had not finished or earned any proof of such. Then there was the test, one that covered what they claimed was “general knowledge” but might as well be a very obscure dialect of, well, any language other than Basic.

Dropping the datapad on her bed, Jurr let her head fall heavily against the wall behind her. “Face it Jurr,” she muttered to herself, “running seems to be all you’re good at.”

It was like all the air had gone out of her, she felt so defeated. This was her one and only chance to get out of these endless halls, to see the outside world. The facility had an indoor garden but the planet was buried in snow and ice. In theory Jurr knew she had been outside the hospital, it wasn’t where her injury happened after all, but since her arrival she hadn’t stepped foot outside that she could remember.

The white walls and endless hallways, exam rooms and surgery theaters - as far as Jurr knew that was the extent of the whole galaxy. All she would ever know, for however much her broken mind would be able to hold on to.

With a frustrated growl she pushed herself out of the bed. It was like something snapped inside her as she looked around the small room, walls covered in posters and reminders about her condition and daily routines. She couldn’t do this. Not anymore. This wasn’t a life, being a living experiment for the researchers, being alone all the time, and she couldn’t face another day of it.

Shoving the few things she couldn’t leave behind into a bag didn’t take long, there was little she thought of as being ‘hers’. Really anything she had belonged to the facility, but they wouldn’t miss a few sets of patient pants and shirts or even the datapad that she relied so much on. Not as much as they would miss fiddling with her brain.

Jurr slung the bag over her shoulder and left her room. It was a testament to how much no one noticed her or cared that no one stopped or questioned her on the way. She tried to ignore how much that hurt, it was an old familiar pain even when she couldn’t really remember having felt it before.

Despite having never been outside the hospital, Jurr managed to find the way out easier than she expected. It was like the bright, glowing signs directing her toward the exit were calling her, urging her to continue. When she could see the final door, Jurr grinned and laughed as she started to run down the hall.

This was it. Finally. She was taking her own life into her hands and was going to make something of it. Even if she failed it would be better than staying here. She hit the door at a run, crashing through it before slipping and falling hard.

Jurr gasped as she pushed herself out of the cold material she had fallen into. It was wet as well as cold, soaking her thin clothing through to the bone. Shivering she sat up and looked around. As quick as the snow, what she assumed to be snow, sapped the warmth from her body all the hope she had felt at the idea of leaving was gone.

There was nothing out here. Just ice and snow for as far as she could see.

“It’s not fair,” she said, voice carried away by the frigid breeze, “I can’t even run away.”

Defeated, Jurr sat down against the door and pulled her knees to her chest. Distantly she knew if she stayed out there too long she’d get sick, which would mean more procedures and medications, but couldn’t bring herself to care.

Jurr lost track of time as the cold seeped into her, chilling her inside and out. It was until her datapad started chiming that she was shaken from her stupor. Hands trembling from the chill, she pulled out the device and turned the screen on before frowning at the notification.

There was a new message for her but Jurr never got messages. She didn’t know anyone who would write to her.

Curious and half-sure it would be an automated spam message, she opened the file. A video autoplayed before she could stop it.

“What’s new JJ?”

The boy in the video said those words and the oddest thing happened. The anxiety in her chest relaxed and she felt warm despite the cold around her. Moving the pad closer to her face, she studied the boy intently with her eye. He was the strangest person she had ever seen. Purple hair and more facial implants than even she had, at least visible ones but his eyes were kind. So was his smile.

Jurr didn’t know who this was, but she liked him

“I don’t have long so I hope you don’t mind a video instead of a letter,” he continued as she settled back against the wall to listen. “I just wanted to check in with you, make sure you’re okay. I… I miss you and I know you’d hit me for it but I worry.”

Whoever he was, he was right. Jurr did want to smack him for that but she also kind of wanted to hug him. It was like somehow he had known she wasn’t okay. That was insane of course, there was no way this random guy could know how she felt. No one did.

Didn’t stop it from feeling like it.

Something from behind the boy caught his attention and he looked over his shoulder before frowning at the camera. “Sorry it’s short but I gotta run JJ. I’ll visit as soon as I can. Take care of yourself sis!”

Jurr stared at the datapad in shock as he winked out of existance. He called her sis but that couldn’t be right? Could it? Frantically Jurr accessed her inbox properly, not just the pop up that showed the new message. There were letters and videos there, all from the same address. Checking another video confirmed it was all from the same strange person who called her “JJ” and “sis” but no where was his name revealed to her. Hoping that somewhere he would have said his name, she started reading and watching each message in her inbox starting from the newest one.

It wasn’t until the datapad was warning her about it’s low battery that she realized her fingers were starting to turn blue and she needed to go back inside, whether she wanted to or not.

Sighing Jurr pushed to her feet, wincing at the numb feeling in her limbs. She stumbled when she tried to take a step, barely catching herself on the door before it swung open and she spilled inside and onto the floor. This time when she tried to push to her feet, she couldn’t. Her limbs had decided not to respond to her any longer but she was oddly okay with that. She was tired, more than she had noticed before trying to get up, and now was as good a place as any to nap.

She was on the verge of sleep when she heard someone shouting from down the hall. Jurr tried to tell them to be quiet but everything went dark before she could.

Warmth was the first thing Jurr noticed as she started to wake up. That and the beeping of a heart monitor that sped up as she realized she didn’t know where she was. Forcing her eye open she lifted a hand to touch the left side of her face, panicking when she realized she could only see out of one eye. Instead of the blinded eye she expected to find there was a metal plate.

Tracing the piece of metal, she tried to pull it off of her face. Her breathing had started coming in short, quick gasps as the heart monitor sang shrilly.

Suddenly hands on on her, forcing her to stop praying at the plate from her blind spot.

“No!” Jurr cried, “it’s covering my eye, get it off! Get it off me!”

“Jurr stop it!” A firm voice commanded, cutting through her panic as she froze. Turning she saw a large man looking at her with a sad expression. She wasn’t sure what he was, but with the large horn like growths on his head he couldn’t be human. “You need to relax child.”

Jurr frowned, and whispered, “but I can’t see.”

Returning her frown, he approached slowly and stopped at the side of her bed. “You only have one eye Jurr,” he said, his voice careful like he was speaking to a frightened animal.

Swallowing hard, Jurr dropped her hands and tried to process what he had told her. It didn’t seem possible but when she tried to search her memory for an image of her face she couldn’t recall anything prior to waking up.

Looking back up, intent on asking the man if he could explain how she got here, Jurr noticed him holding a datapad out to her.

“I took the liberty of getting this charged while you slept, take some time to read the notes and it should help you understand what is going on.” The man smiled kindly, inclining his head slightly before leaving the room.

Still confused, Jurr settled back against the curtains and turned the pad on. The first screen it displayed was a infographic of some sort “Uncle Zam Wants YOU For The Republic Military!” It proclaimed boldly across the a picture of a man more strange looking than the one that left, with a ring of small horns circling his head like a crown.

Curious she scrolled down the graphic to read the details on it before smiling. “The Military huh? That could be fun,” she said, thinking outloud. “Wonder what it takes to get in?”

[silencedtechnophile]

==> Do something about it

The ship hummed around him in the darkness. Something, somewhere, was beeping near the meat puppet hung in the rigging that limited his abilities with a biological bottle neck. His head was so fuzzy. Which is what they wanted. He was too smart, they knew what kind of damage he could do if he werent forcefully throttled. 

He worked slowly. The plan had come to him in an instant, as he'd gotten encouragement from the helm chat. He could do something. He could affect his situation. He was not fucking helpless, he refused to be.

First he carefully hacked into the mediboard that controlled his blood chemistry. He fiddled around with it so its output would remain steady, but it would cease giving him the brain fogging drugs.

That took a while to make it out of his system, every moment of it afraid someone would draw a random blood draw to double check the mediboard, though that was passingly rare. They trusted their equipment.

As his head cleared his body began to hurt, he had a sudden more complete awareness of the agony of the living wires burrowed under his skin, and the way his shoulders were wreched and taking all his weight.

He had to adjust the output again to smooth out his heart beat so they wouldn't be alerted.

Pain was fine. He could deal with pain, he could think and that was what mattered right now in this moment. Blessed clear thoughts. Every moment he delayed was a moment his gamble might be discovered so he worked quickly, spoofing his address from outside the ship while he expanded his own permissions. HE could open and close doors, he could even open and close airlocks, but he wasn't trusted with them.

He wormed his way into the controls, granting himself admin powers at the root level.

Then he just had to wait.

This was the part he had the least control over. Her movements.

Now that he'd given himself root acess and no longer needed the clarity to hack the ships permissions he left the door he'd created open, and went back in to fix his medications and outputs back the way they had been, by the time he had his opertunity he would be fully drugged again, they wouldn't be able to tell it was him. ------------------ Being the Empress had its perks. No waiting in lines, getting to take par in destruction and culling without consequences, running fleets of ships, not having to tolerate any mischief, being feared and respected by everyone at default. But most importantly? Not having to do shit unless you want to. This is one thing Meenah took advantage of as much as possible. If she didn’t have to get up and go somewhere to get something done, why would she?

In her younger years, the idea of taking the throne had caused her nothing but annoyance and disgust. Being taken care of like a wriggler, being responsible for a planet full of easily influenced and hasty trolls. Taking care of her lusus indefinitely, and having to personally feed her each night. Making a quick and not very discreet exit from her original planet had been a great decision. She’s stood by it since it happened, all those sweeps ago in an universe that never quite fit to her tastes. Being born there had felt like a cruel joke once she knew what she had missed out on.

So when she had spawned here some number of sweeps ago, she had been horrified. Devastated. They won and she, as always, got absolutely shafted by the universe. That is... until she took a good look around and evaluated her situation. Beforus had been a little pond, full of toothless guppies. And she had been a shark, unable to even turn around in the limited space. But Alternia? Alternia was a vast sea, with plenty of prey to sink her teeth into and depths to claim as her own. It was as if this gift universe was molded for her, a refined combination of two planets and the two lives she had lived through. The best part was that she had gotten to float over the hard parts, the initial rise to power and the conquering and culling of her personified roadblocks. The endless cycle of teaching her throneworld to submit.

There’s no shame in admitting she’s fully enjoyed the spoils of her new life, entirely content with trading a few sweeps for her position. Hell, she was a tyrian. There were plenty of sweeps to spare, she would do it again.

Which led to this, a three night streak of kicking up her feet in her own block on the flagship. The Battleship Condescention.

Okay, fine, maybe she should have been doing something more important than catching up on dramatic cinema when there was a rebellion to stomp out with her boot. But things were fine. They were starting to close in on the short, mouthy, ship thief. Her biggest potential problem was nice and cozy some number of floors below her, tucked into his ports and wires like a wriggler to coon. And no one else was stepping up to oppose her. Even the most powerful and feared leaders of societies had to take a break, let the tide ease them out.

Of course, all good things come to an end. This time, it’s the portable communications device implanted into her tiaratop. Already missing her makeshift getaway, she flicked a claw against the gold and her features were illuminated by the live footage of one of her on hand advisors. She scowled at him, lip jutted out and pierced brows raised to put emphasis on her annoyance. “We got a, y’know, a problem.” He grunted, the last word coming out like pr-ah-bl-im. “Sum’thin’ funny, ‘kay. Minor. We’re handling it, swear it ma’am. Got someone on the f’rewalls, set that right. But...”

When the purple hued troll went on to explain, she was furious. Someone had managed to nudge at their security systems and give them a test and it took them a few nights to tell her? Her pan whirled to the worst and most paranoid conclusion. Someone from their session, probably that infuriating time wench or the pirate enthusiast, maybe a turnaround from her own Makara if he’d been fully awakened in their new planet.

She stormed about to get ready, pan immediately set to force her commandeered pissblood battery to help her track down and eliminate the source. If her goons couldn’t get the job done, he was going to do it for them.

“Soon as I grill this guppy, you’re gettin’ sautéed. Fried.” Meenah, better known as the Condesce, set her focus entirely on a stomping beeline for the exit and her threatening tangent. “Pike it or not, best get ya’ affairs in order. Boat t’ sea what the pointy end a’ my golden prod ‘eels like embedded in ya’ b’ass. No shrimp-athy for the in-conch-petent, set a bet’a example for the school.”

The door to her block opened with quiet ‘swish!’ as she took her first step out. And then another. Somewhere, a number of clicks below stationed near the central engines, a troll was probably filled with justifiable anger and excitement. With the Empress there was nothing but the light, sharp sound of her heeled boots in the metal corridor paired with the rough undertone to her flurry of words. The advisor on the other end of her video chat cowered, sputtering excuses as she glared down her defined cartilage nub at him. “And if you e’fin conch-sea-der tryin’ to catch a wave trout’a here, I ain’t mako-in it snappy.” She continued her tirade, satisfied by the way the other troll’s eyes went wide and his jaw slid open. “Yeah, that’s moray p’ike it. Best get ya-shelf practicin’ on a look a’ ray-morse.”

“Actually,” he started, gaze averted to the light over the airlock behind her. It blinked red once, yellow twice, and began to shift to green. “I think -“

“Clam it, small fry!” She stopped her determined march to point a claw at him, as if he were really a few feet ahead of her. “Can’t bay-lieve ya’ got the swimmers to gab at me, blowin’ bubbles slap full a’ bullshark.”

Just behind her, the light held steady at green. The advisor stumbled in his warning, horrified and relieved and stalled by his shock as her hair whipped away from her face and her words trailed off. There’s a second where the familiar sound of the airlock opening seemed to halt time. Meenah looked over her shoulder, and then to the projected feed of the lower blooded troll. For the first time in sweeps, she barked a laugh. And then? “Son of a’ eldritch pailin’ bitch.” She bared her impressive chompers, fins flared backwards in her surprise, disbelief, and pure offense that someone has made an attempt on her life. The tyrian scrambled to dig her claws into the metal wall beside her, a cringe worthy noise produced when they drag through the reinforced metal. “You gotta be krillin’ -“

“Maybe if -“

In what might be the most anticlimactic turntables of a story ever, the airlock smoothly opens the rest of the way. Sweeps in the past, there is a time traveling maroon blooded, grudge obsessed troll glancing through the ages and chortling at a joke no one will understand much less believe. The seadweller’s yellow painted claws dig and clip away in a desperate swing at survival. The hatches to the other blocks through the stem are sealed shut, and whatever artificial air was being released dissipated the minute the immediate area was exposed to space. Meenah had a moment, maybe two, to reflect on the mistakes that led her here. Putting an airlock directly outside the door to her block, entirely for the purpose of disposing of any unwanted visitors. Not once considering that someone might turn this around on her, or capitalize on her desire for the dramatic. Leaving her block using her balancing prongs at all, when a transportalizer would have been safer and faster - but would ultimately have lacked in the build-up of intensity and hostility that a chance to strut and lament and publicly humiliate and shortly thereafter kill her most recent workplace pest. If she had more time, she might have thought of a few more excuses to shift the blame a bit.

Including, but not limited to: This Must Entirely Be Megido’s Fault And Here Is Why, the three part series of essays assembled by Meenah Peixes. Or the potential ways Aranea could have somehow subverted death and the fate of their session altogether to somehow ruin the one fun thing she has EVER had the chance to do, seriously, what a Jealous Jude. Or maybe this is the fault of the younger Vantas, who mysteriously fell into her lap around a sweep ago and... well, he was disappointing as a whole until he managed to actually do a backflip off of the handle and body his way out of holding.The diversion of resources from the facility had been an oversight, and the cause of it was promptly replaced and reassigned to dinner duty. A more appealing way to refer to the main course.

Any of those things could have led to this, but none of them did. All the time in the world, and she likely never would have thought her laziness would play a part in her downfall.

It did, though. The metal peeled away from the support column, and the lurching movement broke her grip. It was inevitable. Meenah tried to yelp out a curse, perhaps one last bit of defamation for her last words, but nothing actually came from her throat. Her lips twisted and her expression caught somewhere between anger and fear. The last thought to coherently hit her ends with ‘- and this bucket of chum is the last thing I get my peepers on, really?’ as she wS forcibly removed from the flagship and sent careening into space.

A few blocks and a couple lifts away, the flabbergasted advisor had already dispatched armed forces. Not that it mattered, he decided. The connection to the tiratop flickers more and more as she departs, but the image of his frozen taskmaster tells him there’s no rescuing from that.

Her skin was flaking with ice, fins back and shining tyrian as they stretched, thin eyes obscured by the ice on her lashes, teeth exposed from where she tried to get the last word. The sight of her being quickly and surprisingly easily dispatched hadn’t left him hopeful for saving her, and the last glimpses of her expression deterred him from even attempting to recover her corpse.

The Empress was dead.