SILENT HORIZON - [Part 1: The In-Between] [modplot]

[letsgolegion]

Who| Everyone who signed up
What| 2 spoopy
Where| In The In-Between, the pocket dimension inside the Silent Horizon
When| After Valor's Day. Mission starts shortly before "No Sanity Clause" and runs simultaneously in game time
Warnings/Notes| Potential warnings for EVERYTHING. This is a horror plot that may tread a lot of ground. Please keep in mind that you can stumble on disturbing stuff in almost any thread. We advise all players to put warnings in the subjects of threads when they lean towards cut-worthy stuff.


The mission was simple. The team had to board the derelict Silent Horizon, a ship with an experimental stardrive, after it finally reappeared in UP space, many hours after it was supposed to reappear, during its first field test. No life signs were aboard, but the presence of several Roboticans on the crew -- who were undetectable by bioscan -- meant that the ship had to be boarded to make sure the Robotican crewmen were gone, too.

The United Planets government, concerned about the loss of the crew members, asked the Legion to step in, in case the threat on board was of a metapowered nature. Due to the massive danger implied by an entire starship crew going missing, the response team sent on the mission was relatively large, more than enough to handle any hostiles. None of this "we'll just send one tiny team to go alone into a giant starship against an unknown threat" business. No, if there was a hostile force on the ship, the plan was "let's drop 25+ Legionnaires on its head." Safety in numbers.

It was a good idea. In theory. In most cases, it would've given them the edge that would've let them face something very nasty without succumbing to it themselves. But in practice, it just meant that it was a much larger team that suddenly went missing after watching the last video log of the previous crew on the command deck.

Screams poured out of the screen the moment it started to play -- automatically -- when they entered the command deck. Onscreen, they saw the original crew murdering each other, tearing each other apart in a blood-soaked rampage.

"Wait, stop! What's wrong with everyone? Why are you --?" cried out one of the Robotican crew members, clearly immune from whatever was causing the madness, but his cries went unheeded as one of his Coluan crew-mates bashed his head clean off with a chair.

After the video played, the darkness swept in, wrapping around the whole team of Legionnaires, making them feel frozen all the way down to their bones and stealing consciousness away from them. When they woke again, they all found themselves separated, waking up in a realm of nightmares.

The halls breathe here -- at least in the places that have walls. They flex in and out, like the passageways inside the lungs. Sometimes the walls give way to open nightmare-scapes, remote and foggy, or bright and alien and exposed. The landscape bends and shifts around them, reacting to their thoughts and fears. And every so often, far off, there is the pitter-pat of something strange moving through this place. Like the sound of many feet -- or hands -- slapping against the ground or flesh-walls.

At some point, there is always a voice that each of them hears, tinny and robotic and distant, warning them of a being called the Faceless, that rules this realm. They're told not to feed from his blood, that if they do they'll be made a part of this place. If they accept his offer, and change forms, they'll eventually bleed to death, and if the Faceless isn't stopped before they die, those that die in their mutated forms will belong to him forever.

It's not the only voice they'll hear, though. This is a land filled with whispers. And screams. And the sounds of begging sometimes, too.

And for some of the Legionnaires, the In-Between speaks to them, touches something deep and dark inside them -- and it's calling them home.

Comments

Locus

[agnominal]

I.

It should have been a mission like any other. The setting at least had been somewhat familiar until the video started to play. Until the darkness swept in and left him alone, weapon in hand, with a chill deep in his bones. Dread crept under his skin and crawled like a living thing, and though initially he meant to search for the other Legionnaires -- safety in numbers, that had been the idea -- he swiftly found himself distracted by all too familiar scenes.

The smoldering remains of an UNSC base. Twisted corpses lying about the place, some in armor, some not. All seemed to stare up accusingly at him as he moved cautiously through their midst, and no matter how far he passed their eyes always seemed to be fixed on him.

Soldiers die. That's what they do.

He'd thought that once, hadn't he? The voice, wherever it's coming from, it isn't wrong. They were expendable, all of them. Whatever was on the ship was going to pick them off, all of them. Wait. Them. There had been others. There had been a ship, hadn't there?

Details were becoming hazier. The Legionnaires. He had to find them, he had to rejoin them. But he finds himself staring down at those familiar, bloodied faces. One of them was sickeningly familiar, the armor crushed and limbs splayed at strange angles, as though it had landed after falling from a great height. The scout helmet visor was cracked and broken, and what part of the face he could see...

This is what you bring wherever you go. Even your allies aren't immune. You are a weapon. A beast of war to be unleashed. A tool. The only thing that's changed is who now holds your leash.

No. No that can't be.

Guilt curls around his throat, quietly choking off air. He forgets to move.





II.

There's a noise following you. A soft, brittle clicking, like a gear turning, and the sound of chains moving against one another in rhythmic movement. The thing is, there's nothing there. Nothing you can see, at least.

There is the smell of blood in the air, and the noise, and nothing else. No clue of what waits there, but there is unmistakably something there in this space with you.

Seconds pass, and in another few moments the mystery will undoubtedly end, one way or another. The question is, are you sticking around to find out what is lurking there, watching you? Or do you dare to turn your back on it and hope that you are faster than it is?

stealth fite stealth fite

[vata]

She's been working for the better part of an hour trying to follow a series of wires where they've sunk beneath a mess of organic and inorganic mass - all of it fused together (like everything else here) into a misshapen shadow of what it was originally intended to be. The disturbing equivalent of a cardboard cutout. A backdrop in a film. There's a niggling suspicion that it isn't real in spite of physical proof: everything she's seen and heard since the blackout is too bizarre to be real, but she can see it, can't she? Touch it and feel out how solid or yielding every surface is.

Logically, that makes it valid.

Illogically...

Well, it's all illogical. Which means it's all she has to work with, and it's what she's committed to in spite of the whispers and twitching groans that like to creep in while she and Cortana have both gone quiet, focused on joined efforts. It isn't until those sounds get closer that Sombra pauses, her palm still pressed flat against the wall and its rotted paneling.

A test.

Activating her thermoptic camo dissolves the contours of her silhouette, erasing every scrap of visual evidence that there is to take in. Beyond that, she doesn't move. Anything creeping around the dark (if there is anything casually tailing her) should lose interest with nothing to see, nothing to hear. And if it's all in her head? She figures she'll even out with a few alert seconds spent willing away the noise.

Can't hurt to take a break every now and then, even in a nightmare hellscape.

[agnominal]

The noises stop as well. Everything goes still and quiet, save the rasp of what could be breath, and could be her surroundings. There's no real way to tell. But it appears the two of them are locked in a stalemate, waiting to see who comes into the light first.

Finally, something seems to morph out of the shadows. It's bent double, but still of a ridiculously larger size than the young woman, muscles straining under tearing skin tissue, and thick chains anchoring his limbs like some macabre marionette.

It's clear, under the long, stringy black hair that drapes about its shoulders, that there are no eyes where eyes should almost certainly be. There are almost no features at all, save a mouth split far too wide. Yet it seems to be searching the air, sniffing, looking for any sign of her that might give her away.

The rusted -- bloody -- gear on the creature's back clicks, and he jerks forward. A step closer to her hiding spot.

[vata]

She doesn't recognize him. Not like this. Later that fact will bother her, but for now, it's just a pinprick sharpness him her chest— staring up at that distorted parody of humanity, twisted under its own obvious pain and purpose. No eyes. A feature too easily noted as the curtain of its hair parts, and if not for the fact that Sombra's too close to holding her breath, she'd be cursing for it; it means her camouflage is useless, and that—

Her shoulders tense as he lurches closer.

—that it's sound he's attuned to. That if she moves, he's likely to notice, and if she opts not to move, it won't take more than another step or two to reach the physical point of no return.

The air feels too warm for those rasping breaths, as heavy as rusted chain and punctuated by the scrape of them where they rest against metal. Counted out like the sound of her own heartbeat (one second, two—) before she rushes to take hold of her own translocator, throwing it as far down the hallway at his back as she can manage, metal clanging noisily in what might hopefully be enough of a distraction to draw his immediate attention.

And leave him exposed.

[agnominal]

He wrenches around at the noise, following the movement before letting out an inhuman rumble and moving towards it. That gear turned, twitched, tugging his body into movement (and under skin, it looked as if the gears actually ran even deeper than a first glance might betray.

But he knows he's been tricked, after a moment. There's no warmth, no breath, and he turns back in the direction he'd come, teeth bared.

Come out, come out, Sombra. You can't hide forever.

[vata]

Checkmate.

The second he turns— spins on his heel to double back in knowing realization— is when she makes the nauseating jump through time and space to her translocator, SMG already raised and leveled at the machinery fixed along his spine. Less than half a beat later, she pulls the trigger. A quick series of pulsed shots designed to counteract the kick, or how difficult it might otherwise be to land more than a handful of bullets out of the scatter at such a substantial range.

If he took her for easy prey, he couldn't have been more wrong.

[agnominal]

They strike against his skin and spatter blood across the floor in a spray, as he lets out a wordless howl of pain and rage. Everything in him appears be to coiling in on itself, preparing to spin back and bear down on her with surprising speed.

Both hands lift into the air, wrenching back with rolling clicks as the gear whirls, releasing to let them swing down in a forceful blow that, even if it misses her, resonates through the flooring.

for York

[agnominal]

It's been following him for some time. Something, in the back of his mind, knows this man. He is a soldier. He belongs with his own, mired here in death and decay, and he will not be left behind.

He will not be left alone.

Though unseen, the noises are there. They could just be any of the other noises, imagined or real, that York has been hearing all this time. The raking of chains across one another and the clicking of a gear slowly spinning. The scenery around them seems to shift the further they move, delving into York's mind and plucking away details. But that's all they are. Details.

Locus pays them no mind, intent only on following his prey.

[goddamngrenades]

Dazed and wound tight- Delta's too silent to fill him in on what's on his blind side so York is forced to use the old standby of keeping his left close to the nearest wall that goes from overgrown hull plating to fucking bleached tile, cracked and covered with more of this pustulent snarled mass of... tissue. Lockers embedded in the far wall.

A rubber duck, decapitated. A nameplate snapped in two. A poster with a model torn and burnt- whether the photo or the modle he can't tell and he tries to shove it all back and keep moving forward.

chose the wrong bodybag-

Bloody prints from longfingered, steady hands, scraps of red hair torn from the scalp- a familiar helmet with a golden dome caved in and seeping red, reeking of rot-

The clicking, the images become too much for a moment after he trips over a fucking robotic limb, fingers clenched tight around an eyeball with a familiar green iris. York bends double, leaning against the massive wall, and wretches violently. The stinging pain at the base of his skull sure isn't helping.

[agnominal]

There's a rattling breath just behind him. The only warning he receives before a massive hand swings down to clamp hold of the back of his neck, in order to wrench him off his feet.

And then suddenly the thing following him has a form, blood-streaked and broken, muscle and bone protruding from under dark skin, and a nearly-featureless face staring at him from under scraggly, long dark hair, its too-wide gash of a mouth opening in wordless noise.

[goddamngrenades]

Delta should've said something.

Delta should've given him some kind of heads up but- York's yanked off his feet as he tries to twist and see what has him, how fucked he is and all the details clash and crackle till he puts together it's got familiar colors and hair but not form. "Fuck-"

Struggling to twist free he palms a marble, charging it up with one hand in panicked desperation.

[agnominal]

A second later and he's slamming York back into the floor like a ragdoll, bellowing in pain and rage. He's not changing, not them, not yet, but he needs to be. All become one, that's the idea, to belong. The pain and the horror are part of it, a price to be paid.

And York has yet to pay his.

Locus will help.

Those massive limbs wrench back, preparing to bear down in a two-fisted slam, intent on breaking bones.

[goddamngrenades]

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck- he shoves away, rolls, scrambles- and only then does the plating start to register. The shape of the thing's head and-

Oh. Christ. "Locus?"

What- "Look I know I didn't get back to you but-" Running. Running needs to happen, holy shit.

Re: Locus

[legionnpcs]

"The part that makes no sense is that you let yourself suffer."

The voice comes from behind him and there he is, with no face of his own, yet made up of other faces that look as if they don't belong to him. A tentacle curls and flicks lazily, like the tail of a contented cat.

"You try and try to redeem yourself, but that will never lead anywhere. There are other ways to escape your guilt."

[agnominal]

Locus turns, he sees the monstrous form lurking there, but there is no horror. How can there be? The true horror is behind him, within him, and he cannot escape it. It sticks in his craw and chokes him even now, and he stares back at the Faceless.

Suffering is justified. He deserves this. But it's overwhelming. There's too much blood on his hands to ever come clean, surely. If they knew, if any of them knew the truth, they would leave as York had done.

He is a monster. It is inescapable. Yet this creature claims to know a way, and though he knows he should not trust it--

"...How?"

[legionnpcs]

"Self-acceptance. That's what I offer to others. Self-acceptance of an extreme and particular nature."

The creature says this with a flourish of a hand and offers a little bow.

"But more than that, I offer restraint. And new purpose. What if I were to tell you that I can take you away from the worlds you would do harm to? If you're removed, the threat is removed, yes?"

He gestures around.

"You'd have a place where you could belong, and it'd be away from all the people that don't deserve to be submitted to the damage you'd cause. Think of all the pain that would be spared in the universe if you weren't in it."

[agnominal]

It's not untrue. The damage he's done is...there will never be enough he can do to even those scales. The dead in his wake, the innocent blood on his hands, not even the Legion can outstrip this. Every corner turned bears a reminder, as he sees the lifeless eyes of those he has wronged staring accusingly back at him.

A place, a purpose. Somewhere he could no longer be accountable. The urge to surrender to it and let this nightmare simply end is overwhelming. But doing so blindly was how he committed those sins in the first place.

It says something, still, that he is even willing to converse with the creature. Just give him an answer he can bear. That's all he's wanted.

"...and what purpose is that?"

[legionnpcs]

"There are holdouts in the many realms of existence. Against It. The one who would destroy us all."

He gestures to the realm around them.

"These universes and pocket dimensions act as barriers. They make it harder for Chronoblivion to squeeze Its way into the material universes each time It feeds."

He tilts his head.

"I won't lie and tell you that this universe is the only hurdle it will take to stop him, but its existence still causes him difficulty, delays his intrusion into other worlds -- into the universe you were just in before entering my dimension."

It's all lies, but Locus has no way of knowing that.

"This realm is a living thing, and without the addition of new life, it will die. You could exist here as you are, no longer pretending you're not a monster. But there would be no more missions, no more terrible choices."

[agnominal]

And they would stand against Chronoblivion in the process. The choice seems almost reasonable under the circumstances: surrender to the Faceless, and fight the war untethered by this pain, this weight that he's carried for so long. Stop pretending he can be anything other than what he is.

A monster. Not a weapon, not a soldier, but a being only capable of destruction and ruin.

Resignation creeps upwards to choke off the welling despair. When the Legion offered a place in its ranks, it seemed the natural course to take. Hadn't he been trying to undo what he had done, to clean the slate after committing so many atrocities? How foolishly optimistic of him. He could never tip those scales, no matter what he did or how hard he tried. There was far too much blood on his hands, as proven by the bodies piled high no matter where he looked, the accusatory stares.

So why trouble himself further, carrying on in futile, meaningless gestures?

They would be better off without him.

Locus says nothing in response, though his head hands forward. There are no more questions to be had, no more answers that will satisfy. This creature, whatever it is, is right.

Just let it be done, at last.

2

[short_changed]

To say Connie's shaken after her run in with York and Delta is an understatement. Even though she's far from his distress beacon the memory of the wires trapping her, invading her sends a chill down her spine and makes her gag. Fumbling with the snaps of her helmet she yanks it off in time to cough up the blood she could still taste on her tongue. It's noise enough to draw unwanted attention but the memory of the attack makes her sick.

When she can breathe past the shaking in her core, the abrupt silence is enough to raise the hairs on the back of her neck. Gripping her helmet she holds her breath as she turns to look behind her.

[agnominal]

Click. Click. Click.

It's slow, like the tick of a clock, and here in the halls it seems to come from every direction and none. It doesn't help that the walls too seem to twitch and breathe, like organic beings themselves, despite appearing to be made of metal and wires.

Then comes the rasp of metal dragging against itself, the click of metal links. Is it overhead? Or right behind her? Regardless of what direction it's come from, Connie is definitely not alone anymore.

[short_changed]

That's not a good sign at all. With an effort of will, four duplicates appear around her, each of them putting putting their helmets on and fastening them as she stands. Motion trackers- she needed hers up and running; a heat signature, anything would help to find out what's stalking her nearby.

As soon as the visor flickers to life she draws her pistol and her gun, aim low for now as she turns her head this way and that to try and find out where the source of the shambling sounds were coming from.

[agnominal]

For a second, the clicking stops. There's no movement at all, the air strangely thick and still.

When Locus springs, it's when her back is turned. Suddenly, there's a mass of heat moving, a form that towers over her crashing forward, both fists raised and aimed to slam down into the midst of those four duplicates.

Eliminate each of them, if that's what it takes. Feed the Faceless, feed the In-Between.

He has his orders, after all, and that's all that's ever mattered.

[short_changed]

Of course it's when her back is turned- Connie and her doubles turn just in time to spot the leaping heat signature and scramble to try and get away. The slam is still enough to disperse two of the doubles instantly as the remaining CTs are split.

One backsteps on the left of the invisible figure, drawing her pistol as she does, another has been thrown to the floor and is scrambling to get up, and the last one on the right is making to run past the figure and down the hallway it came from.

Which will you go for, Locus?

[agnominal]

There is no instinct for self-preservation anymore. If he dies, he remains a part of this world, and the goal is served either way. So the CT wielding the pistol to his left is paid little mind.

He will deal with her eventually.

Instead, he takes advantage of the duplicate scrambling to get off of the floor, reaching to grasp for the back of her neck and haul her upwards.