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

So it's not just him. Some part of him takes solace in it, but it's mostly dread. More maniacs to deal with, not in their right mind, getting in their way. Well, when he puts it that way, it doesn't sound so difficult. It's the fact that he has no proper ammunition that puts a real damper on all of this.

While he's confident in his strength and abilities, he's not stupid enough to deny that some of the shit he'd gone through hasn't taken a mental toll on him. Nobody else had to be privy to that information, but he sure as hell knew and if he didn't want to lose a valuable partner, he'd be sure to act smart. The faint sound of shrieking metal gears ring in his ears.

He takes a brief moment to clear his throat, staring at the digital map.

"You've been seeing a lot of action."

A rhetorical statement. Taking a moment to look over his gear, mentally going over it for the umpteenth time already, he points to one of the markers.

"The next one."

"What can I say? I know how to get it." It comes with a smug, entirely childish roll of her shoulders, chin tilted high enough to get the punchline of the joke across. "No te pongas celoso, vato."

Horrible scenery or not, you can't expect her to pass up a setup like that.

Moments like these, he has to really give it to Sombra. Comments like that bring about the illusion of this being just another mission on any given day, even if only for a brief moment, simmering the white noise in his ears.

He makes that usual low hum or grumbling mutter under his breath whenever she makes a joke.

"Estoy nunca."

Then he's back to business, gesturing down the hall with a tilt of his head.

"Let's get moving."

Even if he's mercilessly shooting her down, the fact that he bothered to do it in Spanish— the fact that he's grumbling at all instead of tuning it out entirely— is a victory in and of itself. She's worked long enough at his side to know the difference.

"Affirmativo."

She pulls herself to her feet, widening the displayed map with a flick of her fingertips so that it's easily tracked, what direction they're headed.

Her hands are tucked in neatly against her spine, already considering queuing up a song to take the edge off that eerie silence as they travel along. Luckily for him, she settles on conversation instead. "You know I heard that some of the other Legionnaires get action figures."

Judging from the marker on her map, it won't take them more than a minute to reach their destination: better walk fast if you don't like this topic, Gabe.

He can only indulge her so much. Trying to keep that familiar air about them, to stave off the possibly inevitable change he may go through, he’d done just that. Let her have that little win. But then it gets to the point of distracting.

Inane thoughts about figurines and models creep into his head and he shakes it slowly with a muted growl. The pinching of his skin around the edge of the mask is alarming, and yet he’s not willing to reach up and touch it, to affirm that it’s doing what it’s doing. He knows he’s changing, There’s no stopping it. When the time comes, he’ll have to disappear, but until he can finish helping Sombra figure something concrete out of this entire mess? He’ll stick close.

So yes, his steps do have more urgency in them after he’d spared a glance at the map.

Not a fan, got it. After all, she can take a hint - shrugging off his stony silence by pressing ahead in a bid at keeping pace.

They're not far off now. Close enough that she slips ahead after a few beats, padded footsteps quietly pat pat patting as they go, echoing down that quickly narrowing corridor. Eventually she stops where slanted walls meet, cold metal sheeting only vaguely peppered with cancerous growths. Beneath the vent there's a short outcropping of wires, so thin they're barely noticeable before they wind back behind the wall.

"Oye mijo, aquí." Her claws tap against metal, marking the panels she'll likely need dislodged in order to see if these cables could at all line up with the others, were real-world logic in play.

"It's a little...fleshy in there. Might have to do some digging once we pry these up."

He focuses on the sound of her footsteps, the flat of her weird toe-shoes slapping against the floor in a rhythmic pulse, only finding that it makes him way more distracted than the earlier conversation about figurines. Seems it doesn't matter what it is, something always manages to throw him off of his game.

"Hn—," he responds verbally, gaze lifting up off of his feet without remembering how he got to staring at them in the first place. "I'll handle it."

Standing beside her, he pauses briefly to scan the panels she taps out. With a growl (a little loud, he thinks in hindsight), he thrusts his arms forward and latches onto an edge. The tips of his claws dig into the seams, getting them loose before he slices them in and prying it back. He lets the two panels clatter to the ground, then whips his arm out to fling off the flecks of soft tissue.

Sombra darts off a step to the side to avoid catching a spattering of gore, eyes following it as it lands wetly on the ground. Charming.

"Thanks." Sans sarcasm, she gets to work: ducks low and starts mapping out the path and distance of those wires while her collected data updates in time with it. A slower process than before, these seem to go on for a distance in both directions, so she picks the left to start with, inching along as she goes, leaving him to keep watch in the silence.

"You don't think any of the old crew survived, do you?"

Well, half-silence.

He barely spares a glance towards her, stepping to the side to let her work. There's small blessings in all this, being the mostly silent type before only makes it a lot less suspicious now when he's doing all he can to just keep his shit together.

Though silence is good, he has to admit that conversation probably would help keep him from floating away.

"Unlikely, but I wouldn't rule it out completely."

He breathes in slowly, feeling the wheezing sensation draw tight in his lungs, crackling with fluid and dead tissue. Normal, and yet not. The material of the gloves squeak a little as he flexes his fingers.

"Maybe we've been seeing them all along. Just... different."

Maybe they were converted and controlled by whatever the fuck's commandeering this vessel, he thinks. Why they were in the shapes and sounds of his early nightmares is anyone's best guess, but he doesn't have the mind-power to mull over the little details.

"What, you mean like the monsters or whatever it is we've been running into?"

She sounds skeptical, but not because he's wrong: the footage they'd seen when they came aboard the ship didn't involve any obvious disfigurement. Or at least not any that she could tell - alien species are still a thing she's getting used to, after all. Poised and ready to turn around and scoff, she instead finds him still-standing a distance away, looking distracted as anything.

"Hey."

Like huffing out a sound to get a dog's attention, she calls to him. Waiting for a sign of life. Unlife. Whatever. "You feeling tired or something?"

He doesn't mean to tune her out, at least not completely. Even when keeping his focus on something productive, he manages to catch a little bit of whatever she wants to communicate with him, especially if it's important.

She has his attention now, the trick working, but he doesn't move to indicate that he's heard her. He just breathes again, rolling on shoulder to release a satisfying crack.

"No. Find anything yet?"

The crackling of fire reaches his ears, but he can't tell where it's coming from. It's close, maybe too close, like it's right under his nose but hidden somewhere. Maybe beneath all those wires. Or right below their feet, like a volcano waiting to erupt. It doesn't help that he also gets the nagging feeling that the creatures he's been running into lately are nearby, what with the clanging footsteps and grinding gears.

"Something's coming."

"Getting there. It looks like if I combine this point with the others, they'd intersect—"

Her pawing at the display in front of her stops, snapping up to attention on her heels like a meerkat on alert at his warning. Altered as he is (and well-trained besides) there's little he's wrong about when it comes to either initiating or detecting an attack.

But everything she hears seems...constant. Unsettling, yes, only not anything distinct.

Still, she trusts him, fingers hovering over the SMG clipped to her hip as a precaution, Sombra slips back to stand at his side. "You know where it's coming from?"

Ever since he'd heard the familiar sounds of omnics rushing in droves, he can't help but hear only that. Everything else either sounds muted or is filtered out, as if his brain is trying to focus only on the most dire threat at hand.

He curls a claw around the trigger of his shotgun, before forcing himself to lay the finger flat against the side of it instead.

"No," he answers truthfully. As much as he can hear them, perhaps he hears too much. They sound like they're coming from all over the place, which he wouldn't be surprised if they were. "But they're coming in fast. Keep working, I'll cover you."

This way, he'll cover all his bases. She can continue finding more information, while he thins out the herd at a safe enough distance so that when he has to leave her, he can do it while knowing she won't be in too deep of shit. This should be fine, he thinks. It's not very convincing, even to himself, but it's starting to look like the only viable option.

"Got it."

They're out of their element, not out of their depth: if they stick to the routine— their strengths— regardless of what they're up against, they'll nail it down. If Sombra's sure of anything, it's that.

In a flash of blue she's darted back towards the paneling a distance away, no smug humor, no hesitation. There are times (few and far between) when she shows her hand, lets it slip that beneath everything else she's a professional at what she does. This is one of them. And if she can help it, another won't happen again for a long, long time.

Claws tugging at loose wires and she can hear it now, those twisted mechanical noises. Echoing.

But in spite of how loud they are, Sombra doesn't waste time on being either anxious or afraid. Gabe will take care of it. He always does.

It's just an unfortunate twist of using his greatest past trauma against him at the most (in)opportune time. He honestly could've gotten away without this much damage... were he a stronger person. He knows his strengths, he knows his weaknesses, and unfortunately the human brain could only handle so much no matter how tough you know you are.

With no other words, he flattens himself to the floor in a flurry of smoke to try and track down the noise. Where it's coming from. A brief recon tells him they're coming down two of the connecting tunnels, assuming they'd followed the noise they made after lifting the panels. Like the slow and clunky march of the Bastions, they come jogging down the corridor, machine guns at the ready.

He presses up against a wall, staying out of sight for the moment. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tries to shake out the smell of dirt and blood, debris flying through the air in the darkness of a long-forgotten field and he's twenty-five again. Then he's thirty-five.

A shot rings out and his eyes snap open.

"—Grngh!"

Pain blooms in his arm as a bright red bullet, heated from the fires of the monster's gun cuts across his triceps. It's the trigger he needs as his brain suddenly gets ripped back into the present and he's blasting the stun ammo at the front line before going in with his bare hands. He hates that he has no real ammo, it's really grinding his gears.

She hears it. Hears him even over the sound of gunfire. Maybe it's just an illusion— part of the way this place works in transmitting anything to the senses: he could be a mile away and Sombra's certain she'd still hear it, noise digging into the metal of her spine like shrapnel.

But she sticks to her work. Finds the end of the cables and they—

—trail off. Into flesh. Only this time when she sets a hand to them there's the telltale feeling of a pulsebeat, like a heart, or the flow of blood beneath an inorganic surface. Like veins.

She snaps her hand back in disgust, lip curling sharply. Logs the data as she turns on her heel, fading off into non-existence once her thermoptic camo takes hold. It doesn't take her long to flicker back into reality a few feet at his back, careful when she opens fire to keep it to a series of short, well-aimed bursts so he isn't hit in the process.

"We're done here, Reaper - vámonos!"

A call to retreat. Save themselves the ammunition, the energy.

The fiery metallic machines screech at the hail of bullets, giving him the opening to pull back and take down the weaker bunch. He barely hears her, the pounding of blood in his ears, his breathing as the mask feels even tighter against his skin. Whatever is calling his name, it's seeping into the cracks of his skin and settling around his ears, cushioned by the mask now nestled firmly against his skin.

He claws at it finally, digging the sharp tips of his gauntlets into the crack and trying to dissolve himself to see if it'll change the integrity of the mask in any way. In the meanwhile, more fiery omnics march towards him, filtering in from other corridors now as they're attracted to the noise.

For the mean time, he escapes. He disappears in a hasty rush of smoke towards her, to avoid the most immediate danger for the mean time.

"Split up," he growls out, unable to stop touching at his jaw and neckline. "There's more coming in, they're attuned to me."

"I can cover you. I know the corridors— " Provided they don't change in the interim, that is. A technicality she's not exactly keen to mention in the moment, particularly when it can't be predicted (or maybe she just hasn't learned how to, yet). Reloads with a few sharp clicks as she tries to peer around his shoulder for a beat.

"If you keep to short-range transmissions, I should be able to stay in communication."

It's an agreement to split up, with the unspoken addition of making it tactical: drawing their enemies out into a single file and then mowing them down when they lack the ability to utilize their numbers.

It should be easy. Routine.

"¿Está bien?"

That's the idea, he thinks. He knows that would be the most easy way to deal with large numbers while they're less. It's also a great way to disappear and create some space between them, so once she realizes he's not within transmission distance he'll be long gone. It's stupid to just leave her with the horde that he brought on, but he gets the nagging feeling that he'll be way more trouble for her than the tinny monsters ever will be.

"Yeah."

There's probably more he could've said, or added on, but he's more clipped with his words than usual. Without adding much else to that, he starts to branch off from her path down a different corridor.

It doesn't take long. Less than a minute divided, and she knows— with the innate help of her omnicom— that he's drifting out of range. Lost, maybe.

(Oye, you're heading the wrong way. I'm going to lose your signal if you keep this up.)

Another beat. Two. Has he lost his mind? What is he doing?

(Gabriel, turn around— can you hear me? Turn—

—abri— don't— )

And then, with a dull hiss, the line goes dead.

He hears her voice, feels the sharp sound of her syllables clicking in and out of his ear, but the words start to mean little to him. Soon, the sound of words doesn't register as anything but noise, a buzzing nuisance that he can't pinpoint. Where is it coming from?

Despite his brain slowly turning to mush, he somehow manages to squash a few fire omnics, creating a dent in the pile. Not out of any sort of lingering obligation towards the partner he'd just parted ways with, but just out of a desperate attempt to regain control of his limbs. To try and stay conscious.

It's only when he finds himself staring hard into the ground, fallen on his knees and struggling to stand that he feels an oppressive presence standing right in front of him...

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

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