william tsang (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dogbane) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ataraxionlogs2014-05-11 04:30 am
dogbane) wrote in ataraxionlogs2014-05-11 04:30 am
Entry tags:
03. All the remains of a cadaver of days. [open/closed]
CHARACTERS: William Tsang, and various, possibly including you!
LOCATION: Medbay, Rec rooms, places you can drink.
WARNINGS: PG-13/R for bad words, recollections of body horror
SUMMARY: Everything is terrible nothing is good.
NOTES: Everything in the entry is open! Closed thread starters available upon request, will be in the comments.
Like something out of the old stories, William was corrupted. Corrupted is such a lovely word. It draws from the Latin cor- which is "altogether," and rumpere, which is to "break."
William does not feel particularly broken, which is both comparatively unjust and preferable. It brings him no small measure of relief, that few if any of the Tranquility passengers recognize him for the grotesquery that he was or the atrocities he committed. He goes to work and checks in with Dr. Tam. He runs laps and checks in with Sargent Colbert and Commander Shepard. Inconveniently, his hands take to episodes of shaking, but episodes by definition pass, and he is neither a surgeon nor a marksman. In the medbay, he is efficient, keeps a running tally of what to do. Blood prep for the vampires, close-down procedure, on-call protocol.
It's abstractly horrifying when he hears, belatedly, that the Potter boy went into the Morgoth's chambers and that's the day he
Gardens
ends up talking to his demon, out loud, under the trees, shaking so badly he almost drops his joint on the grass and sets the whole damn garden on fire maybe but he stomps it out. Waste of weed, and he doesn't have a lot left.
"Where the fuck were you," he says, furiously. It isn't a question. "Cunting bastard. They wasn't more than fucking children, some of them."
Beers delicious beers Lounge
When William wakes up, there is a wedge of pain in his neck like somebody had unscrewed a crucial bolt in his vertebrates and a sensation like sand under his eyelids. This turns out considerably more mundane than mystical, as he had fallen asleep facedown on a chromed bar counter. "Bleh," he says. The hangover is somewhat diminished by the preternatural rejuvenation of his abilities, but he is fairly certain that his peculiar gift for spontaneous neurological rehydration has to run out in absence of actually consuming any water.
He leans all the way over to reach for the nearest drink. He forgets to check who it belongs to, but company registers foggily the next moment, through the indistinct slime residue of whatever sleep had coated his corneas with. "對唔住," he says. "唔該."
CHARACTERS: Raven 'Mystique' Darkholme, and various, possibly including you!
LOCATION: Media library, Charles' room and various others.
WARNINGS: Sentimentality, possibly.
SUMMARY: Everything is awesome and everything is cool when you're part of a team. Everything is awesome when we're living our dream.
NOTES: Everything in the entry is open! Closed thread starters available upon request, will be in the comments.
When they had visited Anchorage with Mrs. Xavier, the woman had discovered ice wine, which turned out to be a largely indoor activity. According to Charles, however, Alaska received the highest number of hours of sunshine in all of the United States, and Raven had been delighted by the timeless daylight, made much of being outside, practicing shifting her tan while Charles capitalized on the complete absence of age restrictions in small boat piloting and broke up droves of gulls and puffins with the nose of their rental bowrider. They had long since disproven the theory that she was cold-blooded by any stretch of the word but she had felt the experience transformative, almost disorienting. She had forgotten to sleep.
The Tranquility is a little like that. Except, you know, the permeating feeling is not of comfort and happiness but indistinct dread that she can sometimes almost convince herself is only the shockwaves of Cuba. The truth is, the day she spends sitting Charles in his room isn't entirely for him.
Media Library
The blue girl's presence in the library is as much personal interest as secondhand habit, of accompanying certain family to similar institutions int he world she came from. Space-age soap operas aren't exactly her thing and some of the prosthetics and recasts are inconsistent, but she makes close study of the human characters, every detail of clothing, terminology. Yet she does like this one-- the war story that blows up her datapad for two hours. It has colossal silver hunting ships that find people with awful precision, one prison scene, and a broken family, though even Raven with all of her archaic knowledge can tell it's fictionalized. Both sides lose bodies, even the one that wins. That story is almost true.
When she hears other patrons come in, she hiccups a grab at the volume bar, dials it down. Library etiquette, long since ingrained.
Lounges, Gardens
Like many young persons introduced to their first smart phone, Raven takes her comm device everywhere. Even when fresh air and tall trees preside, though researching while her blue feet dangle off a tree is a welcome break from visits to the creepy bars that Erik seems to favor.
Raven does not watch the video and audio logs very closely, but she does look at a lot of them. She practices Resnik's voice, wonders a little at the Raven Darkholme from before. She rewatches the one where the carnivorous swarm of manticores close in those poor kids over and over until she has to switch out, shuddering. Alex had told her that the war they fought in their own world still matters, but it's hard to know how. Non-mutants drew the line in the sands off the coast of Cuba, but they are all shut up behind the same windowless walls here.
Eventually, though, she puts the comm away. Sometimes she looks for the others who she met in Arima, unable to deny a certain sense of responsibility for them. Other times, she merely climbs higher, expecting to find herself alone.
LOCATION: Medbay, Rec rooms, places you can drink.
WARNINGS: PG-13/R for bad words, recollections of body horror
SUMMARY: Everything is terrible nothing is good.
NOTES: Everything in the entry is open! Closed thread starters available upon request, will be in the comments.
Like something out of the old stories, William was corrupted. Corrupted is such a lovely word. It draws from the Latin cor- which is "altogether," and rumpere, which is to "break."
William does not feel particularly broken, which is both comparatively unjust and preferable. It brings him no small measure of relief, that few if any of the Tranquility passengers recognize him for the grotesquery that he was or the atrocities he committed. He goes to work and checks in with Dr. Tam. He runs laps and checks in with Sargent Colbert and Commander Shepard. Inconveniently, his hands take to episodes of shaking, but episodes by definition pass, and he is neither a surgeon nor a marksman. In the medbay, he is efficient, keeps a running tally of what to do. Blood prep for the vampires, close-down procedure, on-call protocol.
It's abstractly horrifying when he hears, belatedly, that the Potter boy went into the Morgoth's chambers and that's the day he
Gardens
ends up talking to his demon, out loud, under the trees, shaking so badly he almost drops his joint on the grass and sets the whole damn garden on fire maybe but he stomps it out. Waste of weed, and he doesn't have a lot left.
"Where the fuck were you," he says, furiously. It isn't a question. "Cunting bastard. They wasn't more than fucking children, some of them."
You are all children. That is your condition."And you're the arsehole finks a TP-lined bathtub smeared wif infant shit is a pretty crib. You can take your supernal bullshit and find some other martyr to feed it to," he yells, stupidly, before a sound in the wood startles him into shutting the Hell up and nicking his knee on a bramble. The cut heals too fast to suggest he had been abandoned.
When William wakes up, there is a wedge of pain in his neck like somebody had unscrewed a crucial bolt in his vertebrates and a sensation like sand under his eyelids. This turns out considerably more mundane than mystical, as he had fallen asleep facedown on a chromed bar counter. "Bleh," he says. The hangover is somewhat diminished by the preternatural rejuvenation of his abilities, but he is fairly certain that his peculiar gift for spontaneous neurological rehydration has to run out in absence of actually consuming any water.
He leans all the way over to reach for the nearest drink. He forgets to check who it belongs to, but company registers foggily the next moment, through the indistinct slime residue of whatever sleep had coated his corneas with. "對唔住," he says. "唔該."
CHARACTERS: Raven 'Mystique' Darkholme, and various, possibly including you!
LOCATION: Media library, Charles' room and various others.
WARNINGS: Sentimentality, possibly.
SUMMARY: Everything is awesome and everything is cool when you're part of a team. Everything is awesome when we're living our dream.
NOTES: Everything in the entry is open! Closed thread starters available upon request, will be in the comments.
When they had visited Anchorage with Mrs. Xavier, the woman had discovered ice wine, which turned out to be a largely indoor activity. According to Charles, however, Alaska received the highest number of hours of sunshine in all of the United States, and Raven had been delighted by the timeless daylight, made much of being outside, practicing shifting her tan while Charles capitalized on the complete absence of age restrictions in small boat piloting and broke up droves of gulls and puffins with the nose of their rental bowrider. They had long since disproven the theory that she was cold-blooded by any stretch of the word but she had felt the experience transformative, almost disorienting. She had forgotten to sleep.
The Tranquility is a little like that. Except, you know, the permeating feeling is not of comfort and happiness but indistinct dread that she can sometimes almost convince herself is only the shockwaves of Cuba. The truth is, the day she spends sitting Charles in his room isn't entirely for him.
Media Library
The blue girl's presence in the library is as much personal interest as secondhand habit, of accompanying certain family to similar institutions int he world she came from. Space-age soap operas aren't exactly her thing and some of the prosthetics and recasts are inconsistent, but she makes close study of the human characters, every detail of clothing, terminology. Yet she does like this one-- the war story that blows up her datapad for two hours. It has colossal silver hunting ships that find people with awful precision, one prison scene, and a broken family, though even Raven with all of her archaic knowledge can tell it's fictionalized. Both sides lose bodies, even the one that wins. That story is almost true.
When she hears other patrons come in, she hiccups a grab at the volume bar, dials it down. Library etiquette, long since ingrained.
Lounges, Gardens
Like many young persons introduced to their first smart phone, Raven takes her comm device everywhere. Even when fresh air and tall trees preside, though researching while her blue feet dangle off a tree is a welcome break from visits to the creepy bars that Erik seems to favor.
Raven does not watch the video and audio logs very closely, but she does look at a lot of them. She practices Resnik's voice, wonders a little at the Raven Darkholme from before. She rewatches the one where the carnivorous swarm of manticores close in those poor kids over and over until she has to switch out, shuddering. Alex had told her that the war they fought in their own world still matters, but it's hard to know how. Non-mutants drew the line in the sands off the coast of Cuba, but they are all shut up behind the same windowless walls here.
Eventually, though, she puts the comm away. Sometimes she looks for the others who she met in Arima, unable to deny a certain sense of responsibility for them. Other times, she merely climbs higher, expecting to find herself alone.
no subject
They float on.
The Tranquility is enormous. Space is impossibly bigger, vaster than any sky she had ever seen over Earth, even in the generous spaces of upstate New York. She twists her head around, but can not get enough of it into her frame of view. If they didn't know better from Ms. Fry's excellent training, they might be concerned that all her contorting about would unscrew some crucial component of her lifesuit and result in some terrible fatal decompression.
As is, she doesn't forget anything important, least of all herself. Erik can see it when she taps into the private frequency using the panel on her forearm, even before the tiny popup appears in the interface domed around his head. "Not that we'd ditch Charles."
A beat.
"This time."
no subject
“What option would we have,” Erik manages to keep his voice silken smooth despite his pulse, despite the cosmos, and despite the way he’s watching her, “should he refuse to embrace reason.”
Again.
Ditch is such a strong word.
Meanwhile he seems to be having trouble remembering to close his mouth, while he’s trying to remember so many other things all at once. Particularly that lesser denizens of the Tranquility do this sort of thing all the time without dying.
no subject
Another little puff from her propulsion unit changes direction by less than ten degrees, enough to map them closer to the curvature of the ship's side, wallowing in space. Incidentally, it cuts their speed further.
She doesn't know if that's more helpful than going faster, but going faster would be fun for her; she tentatively predicts that the opposite of her fun may be generally accepted as relevant for Erik right now. This is kind of cool, anyway. She can put her boots on the ship now. Boop. Buh-boop. Despite the illusory distinction of footing under her boots, the stars go on limitless, figure indistinguishable from ground. She started it already, but she supposes that now doesn't really have to be the time.
Ditch is just a regular word.
She tugs on their interlocked gloves, bringing him down like a balloon. "Hey," she says, peering up into his visor. She looks unambiguously concerned, but it resolves to a small smile when she gets a square look at his face. At least he doesn't look cyanotic or anything.
no subject
Relief combats catatonia -- he locks onto her at range, eyes snapped out of an increasingly glassy remove. Through his boots, and through the Tranquility, magnetism anchors him to architecture meters deep.
Gradually, he remembers how to breathe through his nose.
Stars dusted around them phase out of focus; he reaches with his free glove to flatten it around the side of her helmet once his pulse has begun to cycle down.
Yes. Good.
“I’m here,” he says. What were they talking about. What were they supposed to be doing. He cranes a look down between them at the hull.
no subject
He looks much better now. Even without the feed inside her own HUD, she knows he's feeling much better now. Nonetheless, Raven is being somewhat slow to remove her eyes from his face beneath the visor. "The access point isn't too far away," she tells him. "I think we're making good progress." It isn't a race, Raven, but Gravity hasn't come out in 1962 to promote cautionary tales about dicking around with your propulsion cannisters and she's being facetious anyway. Her toes waft inches from the surface of the ship.
no subject
Eventually, he pivots at the waist to peer far to port.
“Right,” he says.
Progress.
He pulls his hand away to feel over the toggles to his own propulsion system instead, everything in its place. After a beat wherein he flips none of them, he realizes Raven’s toes aren’t even touching the ship.
“Have you done this before?”
His brows tilt -- casually charming.
Casually procrastinating.
no subject
"No," Raven says. Laughs. Jogs her feet once, mid-air, before letting them drift again. Reflected stars spangle her visor and she looks pretty happy underneath, albeit in an increasingly-- wry sort of way. "Not walking in space.
"Asking you tough questions, maybe."
One of her little space boots taps down on the flat of Erik's chest plate, gently as you like. He feels the faintest pressure leak down to the magnetized stance of his own shoes on the surface of the ship, and then she's suddenly somersaulting away from him, her bubble-shaped helmet tucked down, spine curled tighter than anybody clamped up in a big insulated person-shaped shell has any right to be able to, and her arms spanned out like wings. She tumbles away, slow-motion.
no subject
The whites of his eyes show at a glance on the fierce side of unappreciative, with his knees bent over his boots and his hands open away from his sides. He breathes out after a moment, stands up straight, watches her tumble away at a resigned remove. None of which she will see, of course, past a feeble flicker of yellow in her visor while she’s busy turning end over end.
It’s fine. Probably.
She’s headed in the right direction.
He’ll just walk, thank you, plodding along the Tranquility’s surface in his space suit as if hiking to school through the snow. About that enthusiastic.
no subject
She pulls the hatch. A screen crawls into view. She doesn't see any bad numbers or colors on it, which is mostly good.
But also a little unfortunate, because that would have been more distracting. Tap tap. She thinks about what to say for a long couple seconds, and then decides, thrillingly, to open with, "I was pissed off neither of you told me, and I was sleeping in that bed. But I think you guys are good for each other, so I got over it." Pragmatically, she decides that if she condenses it into few enough sentences, he can't interrupt it with handsome teeth and vague accents and cute questions and things like that.
no subject
But he understands most of it, remembers how to orient the overlay across the paneling itself -- thinks to wind the brightness down with a touch.
When he looks up again it’s because Raven is talking to him about his torrid affair with Charles. Caught in space with his head in a fishbowl, the blank of his expression is echoed by his overlay after an uncertain beat. ?? Raven is not a hatch, Raven is 030 >> 075, biological. Please redirect your attention eight-four degrees this direction to the assigned task, and so on.
“It was one time,” he says, rational to his core.
Eighty-four degrees blinks with a helpful compass-esque indicator at the base of his visor. Boop. Boop. Boop.
“...One point two five.”
no subject
One point two five?
She looks down at the hatch again. The bars and numbers and things seem to be within normal limits, but the diagnostic is still running. "So I should stay mad until three," she asks, "or withhold my blessing for y--" --oh all right Raven. Raven Ravens at herself internally a few more times as if a solid intrapsychic scolding is going to resolve this to anyone's satisfaction. Her HUD still isn't bothered, or at least, it thinks that the slight rise in cortisol levels and skin tension constitute an acceptable level of gay drama without threat to task or suit integrity.
"I don't want you guys to stop on my account." She watches the progress dial spin. Diagnose diagnose. If there are any operational problems at this access point, they appear to be as insidious and gradual to manifest as the various psychological symptoms are among the passengers; flashy, urgent emergencies remain conspicuously absent. "Not that I was gonna assume."