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

[bachido]

There were. So many questions that every word Roland spoke inspired.

The question was which ones, and how many, Kubo would ask before the hand on the pommel of Roland's guns shifted towards more aggression.

Kubo shifted gently as he held his silence, only the corner of his eye on Roland's own movements. He lifted his shamisen strap over his head as lazily as he could, trying so hard to embody only the child pulling a beloved instrument into his hands for entertainment and comfort, and not to embody the young man drawing his own weapon. His pulse thudded in his ear.

"Um -" he kept his eye on the blackness beyond the gunslinger. "What's out there? In the darkness, beyond you? You keep looking."

[ka_sera_sera]

Roland's hand does tighten on the grip of his gun, twitches in an aborted slide down to grip it and pull it out- but no. No. The threat being prepared here is anything but, the hand preparing it is a child's hand, and Roland breathes out slow, and slides his hand down and off his weapon altogether. That hand, without prompting, curls immediately up into a fist. That, at least, there's no point in fighting. He lets his fist curl tight enough that his nails, even short as they are, might bite into his skin were that skin not so rough and calloused. The child's asking a question. Focus on that.

"What-"

Oh. Yes.

"Cry pardon. Should have mentioned. Sensible to fear the darkness, but here's nothing for you to worry over. It's no monster. I think once I leave this cave it'll-"

He shudders.

"-go from here, anyway. Then we can finish. You and I. Once he-"

"-once this is done I'll be able to move on to where it is I need to go. So will you. Dangerous for a boy on his own, if that's what you are. Or maybe-"

"-safer, after all. Depends, I guess, on where you're headed. Never did tell me. You're not here because you're meant to be. There was only one here, that time." It's not an outright question, just what it is the child's here for, but neither is Roland trying to hide his suspicion. After all, he knows it: this talk, this postponing of the inevitable, that is not how this was meant to be. The inevitable, after all, is called that for a reason. Silly, isn't it, to want to keep it waiting.

[bachido]

"You said something was going to play out," Kubo said, running through a few quick scales on his shamisen. Quiet notes, warming up his fingers. His paper rustled in his pack.

"What is it?"

What story was he in?

[ka_sera_sera]

He frowns at the movement but then his gaze turns again to his feet, thinking how to answer the question first. "Ah. Cry pardon. If you could see better, you might've guessed. And if you won't leave, you might as well see."

At one end of the cavern a pinprick of light appears, grows. Once it's large enough to look like an exit, to cast its light on everything behind Roland, it stops, the humid air gives one of its gusts and the end of the railing near Roland's feet swings wildly, sways out at an angle where Kubo can see: a small body, perhaps smaller than his. Blonde. Calm and quiet.

"I'll ask you to keep that silent, though. I'll have to listen to hear the way Jake's stopped calling out for me. At a time like this, do you really think music is appropriate?"

[bachido]

He kept his fingers on the strings, but stopped playing. He would have paused anyway once he'd seen the boy dangling over the abyss.

"Who is he?"

His name is Jake, Kubo recognized, but who was he to Roland?

And what was he? A surviving crewmember, a Legionnaire Kubo didn't recognize, a memory made flesh? Could that place do this? Make terrible memories real?

Kubo's heart chilled at that thought.

"We - we could reach him, together - we can pull him up."

It might not have been what Roland wanted to hear. Maybe not even what he needed to hear. But it burst out of Kubo, the only thing he could think to do, seeing another person dangling over the edge.

[ka_sera_sera]

Pain pulls up at the scattered pieces left of Roland's face. It isn't the words that pain him so much as the tone, that impulsive, maybe desperate tone. As if it has to be true, as if surely there's some way to find the happy ending at the end of this particular tale. Surely.

"I believe I do remember you," he says, after a moment. "A little. On the way- somewhere. The Legion was going somewhere. You and your mother. She must be your mother. You reminded me-"

Again, he gazes down. The child down there is still silent. Of course he is silent.

"I wondered what was in her mind when she brought you along. Did she know what was in store, sitting there with you? Must've known, at least a little. That she could have stayed back. Stayed where it was safe. Settled somewhere."

"May be cruel to ask a boy this of his own mother, but I suppose I'm asking anyway. Of course I'm asking anyway. Boy- Did you give your name? Don't quite recall. Mm. What was-"

He searches for the scattered edges of his thought, finds them.

"Ah. Yes. Child. Do you think she knew?"

[bachido]

"Yes!" Kubo cut in, relieved, as Roland remembered him. He had no idea how much the man had lost, or what would be best for him to remember, but - "We were on the ship together, you and I and Mother - I'm Kubo, I tell stories in the cafeteria every day -"

But he couldn't tell what he and his mother reminded Roland of. The first response that came to his mind was the truth - that settling somewhere safe had not saved his mother's life, or spared him any pain, that she was an ancient and terrible power whose stories he'd never hear the end of. That he'd looked at her face after the monitors had gone black and not seen fear, but readiness to go to war. That he was her son, and the son of a samurai, and he was not born to hide from horrible things. Even if he had tried, even if they had both tried to once.

He bit back on saying those things. This was not his story that Roland was in.

"Did you?"

He paused, wondering what he'd guessed already, what he was misguessing about the boy below them. If that was a figment, then this was all right, but if it were a Legionnaire he couldn't recognize, he could be wasting valuable time needed to save a teammate -

"With Jake? When this - first happened?"

He edged closer, fingers still on the strings, trying to get a closer look at the boy's face.

[ka_sera_sera]

Roland leans forward and looks down, this time not looking at the child down there so much as to figure out what it is the other child is trying to get a look at.

"Of course I didn't," he says absently, still focusing mostly on trying to follow the line of Kubo's gaze. Nothing down there but Jake. Jake. Fair of face, blue of eye, strange clothes rarely - if ever - seen on anyone in or around Legionworld. His expression is absent, patient. Very patient, looking up at Roland, not quite focusing on him. He doesn't seem to see Kubo at all. The skin of his hand, tight as the grip is, is not reddened, and his muscles do not tremble. He shows no sign of stress, awareness, or strain. "A single boy, even a lifetime with that single boy, in exchange for the whole of reality? Even before I knew of the great worm the Legion fights the stakes - my stakes - were the same. To abandon it all, that would have been-"

"Foolish," he finishes deliberately, decisively. His head snaps up again to look at Kubo. His eyes are set lower in his face than they were a moment ago. In the cavernous shadow where his chest used to be, something rustles. "As storytelling, now, is foolish. Is that why you've been asking all these questions? Looking to root out my story? The time for storytelling is over, you know. The fewer of our stories we remember, the better off we'll be. Why don't you understand that? The sooner you accept that, the less it's going to hurt."

[bachido]

"Forgetting doesn't take away the pain," he said, with sudden conviction.

He'd seen how forgetting hurt his mother, as she drifted away in their cave. He remembered that pain even on his cheerful father's voice, when they found him in a cave, too changed even for his mother to recognize him.

But they had beautiful lives to miss, Kubo remembered, suddenly, regretting his conviction of a moment ago.

Maybe Roland only had moments like these, of watching a child about to fall, in his past.

"Forgetting here isn't going to spare you any pain," he insisted, though, not ready to give up on that thread. He'd hesitated, he'd inquired, he'd unraveled as much of the story as he could and now he might be at the end of Roland's patience. Now he might be at the end of the Gunslinger's humanity. But he'd found ground to stand on.

This was not the place. This was not the way to fall out of your own life.

"That's not foolish. That's just true. Even if your life was full of hard decisions, giving it up here isn't a good one."

[ka_sera_sera]

The boy's right. Isn't he? Roland frowns, his humanity not quite run out, not yet, caught and held by a thread of what feels like truth in those statements. Statements which should be right, which sound like words in which he himself at one point believed. But they aren't. The words should be right but they're catching on a memory, his knees against soft, moving ground, a faceless horror tall and dark in front of him, promising- Promising. What expression can be pieced together from looking at Roland - briefly listening, briefly confused - doesn't quite disappear. Not completely. It fades.

"What good has remembering ever been? I do what needs to be done. That's all. That's all there needs to be. I see that now. That's the only part of me which has ever really moved forward. The rest I drag behind me, tie it around my neck and pull. If all that rest of me is somehow left behind - well, what price is that to pay, in exchange for becoming something which can put an end to all this? Something which can save our universes once and for all? Imagine it. Imagine winning through at last at last and setting all those worlds, all those homes, back into the light, healthy and alive for a little while, and for such a small price. My own universe might as well crumble now, I suppose, but yours, a billion others - that's the problem with you Legionnaires. You've walked so long in the light that you're the ones who've forgotten. Losing what you hold most dear - it won't kill you. Not so long as there's work to be done."

"You don't see that, truly? It may not be a good decision, boy - Kubo isn't it? Yes. Kubo. But it is the best one. It's a heavy decision to make so young, but- well, perhaps that's why you were brought here. So I can spare you. Can't spare you the life of one such as us, but I can spare you the terrible choice which comes with it. Wouldn't that be something?"

[bachido]

"I'm sorry," Kubo broke in. "I'm sorry remembering doesn't give you . . . peace."

Remembering . . . didn't seam to give his mother or father peace either, but it was the closest word he knew to how his father had smiled at him, when they both knew who he was.

"But how do you know this is right? This . . . this solution. It could be a lie. What proves it isn't? That it's hard?"

He wanted to step away. He wanted so much to step back. But wanting something . . . did that make it right?

He stepped forward. One foot.

"Maybe it's easier to walk in the light with us? But that doesn't mean it's wrong."

[ka_sera_sera]

"Right," he says thoughtfully, doubtfully. "Right and wrong."

He gives it a second, feeling the wind blow his hair over his shoulders, listening inward to hear any chords that concept might strike in him.

Finally he huffs, looks back up. "You're very brave. But fairly young yet, I think. You'll learn."

His hand is a blur. Headshot, he thinks, almost dispassionately. It'll be over quickly.

He registers the noise, a terrible crunch beneath his boot, in the split instant between drawing and firing. It's the first time in a very long time that the usually seamless process of killing has been interrupted. Roland hardly notices.

It's perhaps the last hesitation Kubo's going to get, this moment where Roland stares down, horror stretching over his face, at the small and broken fingers under his boot. It's the last best chance Kubo might get to run, that endless, seconds-long moment when the remaining small fingers curled around that railing begin to slip very quietly off from it.

[bachido]

The intensity of the danger had Kubo ready - ready, and not as fast as Roland, but ready to take advantage of his hesitation.

He'd tried, and he owed it to his mother not to die here.

The easiest song that came to his fingers was still the one by which he told his father's stories. He struck the strings as Roland's hand moved.

Paper flew at Roland's eyes, sharp folded darts opening to cover his eyes. More sheets flew from Kubo's pack, floating in a solid wall obscuring him from the gunslinger. On the other side of the paper, Kubo was already running, counting on his thin shields to give him time between pursuing shots to pick a direction.

[ka_sera_sera]

Pursuing shots never come. Roland raises one arm instinctively to cover his eyes and when he lowers it, looks down, he sees that Jake is falling.

The paper moves around him in a cloud of quiet rustling. The boy - the other boy - his footsteps move echoing across the cave walls. Something reminds Roland that those footsteps will be going further every second he fails to act. His own footsteps are silent; his boots stay where they are.

He knows without thinking about it that once those other footsteps quiet he'll still be here, still able to do nothing but listen to the boy who escaped him. Listen for the boy who didn't.

The silence settles around him, so thick and choking he forgets he ever meant to pursue at all.