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

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

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

His distraction (and her current isolation) means she doesn't take his frustration personally. It's a lot to take in— to tolerate or shrug off— expecting anyone to keep a level head when they've been literally held captive is a steep order, even by her standards.

"If you say so."

So instead she lifts her gun, leveling it at those grasping limbs and tilting her head off to one side, as though she's making offhanded calculations as to whether or not it'll pan out cleanly. "Try not to move, vaquero. I'm not in it to hurt you."

Which is all the warning he gets before she's fired: a quick set of scattered bursts aimed far enough away to graze the flesh of his distorted, humanoid chains. A means to make it easier to pry him loose. She isn't so careless as to get herself equally as stuck by jumping in with her own bare hands right off the bat. Better to have an edge first.

A test to see if damage alone might get the job done.

The mass holding Roland down shudders. He shudders. It doesn't effect the aim of the gun he's pointed at her. That stays steady. As he holds it there he realizes he's freer, a little. Aiming at her means he has to look at her. Looking at her, somehow, makes things like that easier to notice. His gun was free enough to be drawn; his friends, ever so slightly, have begun to retreat. Another shudder runs through him, ripples through the ground.

"What are you doing?" His voice, like his look, is sharp again. His mind processes what she'd said before she shot. "What are you in this for? Just here to threaten me, waste bullets?"

Why else would she be shooting like that? Nothing around here save him, after all, to shoot.

"What? No—" The accusation's like a needle to sensitive skin (she's worked hard to maintain her cover, to be anything but threatening) and it spurs her to instinctively yank her own wrist back, gun angled harmlessly towards the sky rather than at him. A second later, she adds, brow pinched up in sharpened concern: "Can't you see them?"

Because if not— if he hasn't even registered what's been weighing him down like an anchor— the question becomes not how to get him loose, but which one of them is going crazy.

"Them?" There is only one them in the direction she shot. The tip of his gun dips - a very rare thing, and it rises again almost immediately, but not so much of his attention is on aiming this time because his old friends are pulling at him again. Not physically, not yet, but pulling at him nonetheless.

"Them?" he says again. There is only one them here and Roland has never been in the habit of repeating himself, but the urge to be certain is strong. The disbelief when he says it is thick in his voice, thick even through the layers of distance and quiet that come over it when he looks down at this particular sight in this particular place. "Lady-sai, these men are dead."

Fingers rise up from the mass beneath him, grasp, begin tugging insistently at his inseam. He stares toward them, face dispassionate. "Perhaps I should be the one asking what it is you're seeing, lady. Be a shame for you to waste any more bullets."

Edited 2017-01-06 04:19 (UTC)

For a moment she doesn't really know what to say.

Confronting the disconnect between what they're seeing might be pulling the rug out from underneath them both; he's the first person she's found coherent enough (not to mention human enough) to actually talk to her. And between the shadows that have been haunting her— skittering just beyond the focus of her vision— and the obvious distortion of their surroundings, maybe it isn't just him that's slipping under the current of this place.

"It's not important." Is what she settles on, holstering her gun and chancing a few steps towards him without hesitation. "Ni modo, amigo. You're not hurt, are you?"

"No." The tip of his own gun follows her as she approaches and then, abruptly, he holsters it, just looks up at her. If it's an awkward position, looking so far up, speaking casually while sunk thigh deep into a mass of melted, pulling flesh, he doesn't seem to notice.

What he does notice is her words. He spends a moment considering them and then adds, "Amiga. And neither are you. Are you? I know you didn't fight here. There never was a woman who fought on this field. Certainly not one who handled her weapon so comfortably. You don't know me - or I, at least, don't know you - yet you want to know if I'm well. What is it you're looking for?"

"A friend." Is the response she gives, plainly. Honestly.

It's been hours— maybe more— since she was able to ground herself in tangible reality beyond mapping out every physical details of the landscapes she's been stuck wandering through. This one is different; this one has him, and there's a relief (albeit a small one) in actually sharing conversation with another human being.

She reaches down, offering her hand rather than the dead one that's been clinging to him. Like everything else here, she imagines.

"What is this place?"

He takes her hand. "Somewhere I'll need to come back to if I'm to leave here alive. But-" The tip of one holster disappears with a soft, meaty sound into the mass beneath him. He breathes. Continues speaking, after a moment. "Should be alright to skip it, shouldn't it. To help you away."

He pulls at her arm, pulls his own legs up, grits his teeth. He isn't trying to pull her in, and with luck, that isn't what will happen. With luck, in a moment or few he'll be standing.

"It used to be, ah-" He looks up and around, at the hill around them and the field sliding down beneath it, looks behind them at the cliffside drop to what, in another five hundred miles or so, would become the sea. Then he looks down again to give his legs another tug. "A place learned men would go, study all these statues you see planted around. My tutor used to say another culture built them, long before ours. The last place it should all have ended."

"What kind of friend is it you're seeking, sai?" In time Roland will realize the only equivalent term most of his teammates understand is mister or miss, and he'll use them instead. For now it's sai. "Seems like there're better places you could've looked."

"One that's a little lighter—" It's a joke, scoffed out as she pulls against the weight of gravity and something entirely more substantial, both hands now clasped around his own.

"But beggars can't be choosers, Vaquero, and you're the first human I've seen in a long, long time."

Roland kicks, and he kicks, and he pulls himself out with a wet pop, and doesn't look back. What he does do is look over his gunbelts and holsters, which are perfectly in place and more or less spotless. As if it never happened. "Then we'll have to see to each other. At least until I lead you out of here. Which way might that be, do you think?"

There's a sigh of relief for that, dusting off her hands for a few beats before she draws up a digital display of the land she's covered so far - the boundaries of his seemingly endless memory. "I came in from the south. Can't have been more than a few minutes of walking."

A thoughtful pause, and then, curiously: "Did you wake up here?"

Has he even seen the rest of the horrors this place holds, or has it (somewhat successfully) tried to effectively pen him in?

"No." The question might confuse him if he'd thought on it consciously. But the map floating in the air like that, especially to a mind which only partly remembers Legion World, is fascinating. While the top of his mind is involved in a close study of that and of the machine displaying it the deeper parts of him can answer more easily, without thought.

"I woke up somewhere else. Different, but still familiar. You're the first unfamiliar thing. I think I walked a while. Something I was looking for, but I don't remember what."

"I don't remember waking up, either," he adds, thinking again, leaning back from the map to look at her. "If that's important. You keep a map of everywhere you've been? Or just here?"

"When I wake up in someone else's nightmare?" There's a pause for what could pass for a mild chuckle there, fingers swiping away the hologram in an instant. "I think it's probably smart to know where I've been as much as where I'm going, yeah."

The rest, she leaves to his imagination— mostly because yes: not only does she map everything, but she works to know everything. Every vital scrap of intel, every thing relevant or interesting, or just plain curious.

And that's the kind of addiction you don't walk around telling everyone about.

"Believe me, it'll pay off once we're out of here."

"Smart," he agrees, because it is. It speaks to a thorough mind, he thinks, and probably a practical one too. "As long as the map's as accurate when you need it as it was when it was made."

And if he needed another thing reminding him of the Legion, where the people and their tools are so foreign to anything he's ever seen, here it is. A map would have been of only the vaguest use to him before - and he isn't convinced that isn't the case now.

Before he has time to think over that his head snaps around. Footsteps. Men walking in time, in mismatched uniforms, with mismatched weapons. They're dragging a wagon behind them, talking. Paying little attention, but maybe not for long.

Roland looks down at the place he'd been before, the most certain hiding spot. Then he catches sight of the woman from the corner of his eye. He shudders and then jerks his head at her, toward one of the statues, starts to creeping toward it.

Edited 2017-01-09 16:33 (UTC)

She doesn't wait before engaging her own digital camouflage at his instruction, slipping entirely from sight with a pale flickering of violet code. Her voice comes from his side as he slinks, a slight, quiet whisper.

"You sure you don't want to take them out?"

Whoever they are (aside from not being his friends), she's fairly certain they could bring them down together. Possibly entirely unscathed.

Possibly.

His whole body twitches when she disappears and his frown when her voice speaks in his ear is annoyed, almost offended. But there's no time for that. No time for anything but the question, which he quickly switches his focus to.

The memory comes over him before he's aware it's happening. Waking up under- underneath, hearing them come, feeling the awareness come over him that even now, even after everyone, everything, for him - and him only, of course - that it would be that easy. That easy to simply kill, survive. To go on.

He hadn't thought much on it, then. He'd closed his eyes. He opens them. Realizes he's closed them, and that the patrol has come closer. He gives his head a quick shake, a negative directed at his companion while he's still unwilling to risk the noise of words, and darts toward shelter.

He reaches it, leans back against the statue's mouth. And falls inside.

Fittingly enough, what he falls into looks like a throat. A corridor, but a throat, too, a wet, reddened stretch of hallway with wet air moving along it. Roland takes it in, listens around him, and of the things he hears footsteps are not among them. Safe enough to talk, probably. "Lady-sai. If you're real and still with me I'd like your body here, if you please, rather than only your voice."

Edited (clarity) 2017-01-10 00:40 (UTC)

"Lo siento."

It might be entirely intentional (it is) that when she dismisses her camouflage that she's behind him, rather than in front of him - entirely amused by the fact that he seems to dislike her ability to disappear. Most people that aren't fighting against her are actively impressed by it, or at least think of it as useful. That he doesn't is...curious. Amusing. Enough that she's smiling as she meets his stare.

"I was just trying to make sure I wasn't too easily spotted." Said with a gentle flick of her claws towards all the glowing circuitry patterned across her body, her armor— even her hair.

"After all, I'm a little difficult to hide without it."

Still, apology given (in a different language, god damn it, Sombra), she turns on her heel to survey their dark, entirely grim surroundings: more cancerous flesh from the looks of it, more claustrophobic as well, made worse by hanging tendrils that are coiled like vines at the end of that narrow hallway.

"How?" That's the most interesting question, at the moment. The environment, until it becomes dangerous, does not seem unusual to him. He's noted the architecture, what should be metal or wood or stone, looking alive, alive and somehow diseased, but he's also quickly accepted it. More quickly than is quite healthy, maybe, or quite sane - but he's beyond noting that, beyond worrying about it. Probably for the best. As he stands he presses his hand against the wall for balance and does not mind the softness of the floor under his boots, does not mind whatever it is that goes dripping off his fingers afterward.

What interests him, instead, is what seems the only notable thing in the room. Her, that ability, whatever it is. "Been a long time since I've seen something like that. Is it done with some kind of machine, too? Something on you, or in you?"

"Both, actually." Narcissistic as she is, her footsteps slow for a beat when he asks, turning on her heel. "Most of the implants are just meant to make it easier for me to work: manage databases, store information, interface with foreign technology just by touching it. The rest of it is more....utility-based."

Which, considering the implications in holding valuable data and walking around with instant camouflage in her pocket, it might be easy to assume none of the above happens in broad daylight through welcome, open doors. "Thermoptic camouflage can project a seamless reflection of the world around me so that I can disappear."

A statement that trails off to the sound of guttural chittering in the dark— off in the distance. It might be nothing, but knowing this place, Sombra's not going to take that at face value.

She flicks a hologram into existence, a flat little cube of bright blue light, to help illuminate the tunnel from where it's hovering just above her palm.

Absently she adds, in a bid at keeping conversation casual in spite of the rest of this:

"You know, amigo, I just realized I never got your name."

The corners of his eyes crease up a little more deeply, a suggestion of a smile. "Roland. Don't recall getting yours, either. We're well met, I think, even considering where we met up in. I'd shake your hand, but I think it's best our hands're kept free."

He gestures forward, toward those coiled tendrils. Forward is, of course, the only place there is to go. No point in trying to go back. "I don't know what all your machines can do yet - you do better from the front, or back?"

"Azúcar." She agrees with him on that front: soft hissing is a sign they should be wary, after all. Still, as far as she's concerned, she's been through worse.

Considering how calm he is, maybe he feels the same way.

There's a slight pause, light pooling in her open palm as she mulls over whether or not to give him the truth. " Back, if we're playing it safe. I can hold my own— wouldn't worry too much if we get into trouble— I just get to have more fun if no one pays attention to me."

But then again, if he's a distant gunslinger along the lines of someone else she knows, he might feel the same way; deferring to his preference is a courtesy she's more than willing to extend.

"Mhm. Just cover me when I reload."

Preference, to him, is not a consideration. Practicalities are what matter, and the practical thing is to play to each of their abilities. That'll also put his back to her light source, and that suits him well enough; the more at home his eyes are in the dark, the more at home he'll be in this place. The better off he'll be.

He does not think too long, or at all, on any of this. He only walks forward. He'll want to keep at least an arm's length between the two of them until they know there's no fighting to be done, but of course he can only do that as long as he can see her. If that changes he'll try to listen for her footsteps - hers, and those of whatever's making that hissing.

The floor makes wet noises under his own steps, gives under his weight but is reluctant to let go, adding an extra squelching tug to the sound of his walk. If that noise is his alone - maybe due to the shape of his shoes, or maybe this place just treats him differently - that'll be alright. It would draw attention toward him, which is probably the best strategy here.

Even without that extra pull at the end of every step his pace wouldn't be quick. It's more steady than it is quick. His manner is more alert than it is tense. Probably for the best, not to be tense in a place where relief from the horrors is not much more than a vague memory, or maybe a dream.

"You got it, mijo." She's not far behind; it doesn't take much to lose track of someone in a place like this, and the closer she is to his back, the more prepared they are in case of—

It's sudden, that shifting in the darkness. What looks like more cancerous flesh embedded deeply into the walls tears itself loose: a cluster of lurching bodies so deeply corrupted by the excess growths fused onto their skin they barely seem human anymore, aside from the fact that they're bipedal; tentacles writhe in place of arms, and it takes less than a handful of seconds for them to turn on Roland, snapping forward with livid force.

"Dios mio— !"

Another day he might've had to spend a moment controlling his shock, his disgust. Today he wonders vaguely why she's reacting that way, wonders how experienced she might be. She's seemed it so far, but before fighting with someone for the first time, you never can tell. The flailing masses ahead of them seem natural to him, in a way; natural extensions of an unnatural world. Dangerous, but nothing too odd.

That'll disturb him later. For now it works in his favor. He's clearheaded enough to remember he's swapped his own guns out for advanced and nonlethal ones and that, foolish as the idea of a nonlethal gun is, today it might prove helpful. The lefthand gun for this job, then, and it works about as well as he'd hoped. He fires once, then again, and strong cords shoot out and wrap themselves around first one creature, then another. The tentacles on those two are still dangerous but now cannot reach nearly as far and Roland moves to one side, making room for her move in past him, if she's a mind to.

"Azúcar. Finish 'em? I'll hold off the rest."

"No hay problema." Like a flipped switch she's at the ready, disappearing in a streak of blue code only to reappear behind the pair he's already netted, a short burst of controlled fire putting a quick end to them both.

Another monster lurches towards her from over her shoulder, tentacles already straining to latch on, but all it takes is a quick teleport back to the secure space behind Roland's shoulder where her translocator rests to ensure all it finds is air.

And entirely prone positioning. Perfect for a man with exceedingly good aim to take care of.

"All yours, vaquero."

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that gunslinger icon though A+++

thank, i love the dramatic shooting icons

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