[Masks IC] Resurrection Roundabout: Drawing Individuals

[Thanqol]

Some secrets you can never share. Ever. Some secrets would make everyone walk away from you if they knew. And some secrets are the reason you are such a bad person, Sara Jimenez.

“...so cut the crap and give me an actual answer.”

"Here's what I think," said Locker, tapping his fingers quietly. "I think you're feeling guilty about something and want me to give you permission to hate yourself. If I tell you that you're a good person without knowing what it is that's eating you it'll glance right off."

He cracks a beer himself. Downs it. Slides another one across to you. It's just like fighting him, he's always where you don't want him to be.

"Maybe I'm just projecting," he said. "I mean, nothing hurt me worse than people telling me I was a good person when I knew they were wrong. Not only did it not help, it made me respect them less because they were either too stupid to see the truth or too weak to judge me harshly. If I wasn't a bad person before, I definitely became one after a while of asking that question. Anyway. You like Ethiopian, right?"

"Oh my god, I forgot they did that! Is this really what it feels like? Hahaha, oh man!"

The shadow-bindings finish their work and gag her like a proper princess, and as she falls backwards onto the ground the only mote of sadness that spoils her fun is the realization that she's not going to get to look quite as super cool in front of her heroes as she'd planned on. But this? Being tied up? With nobody hijacking her limbs and shutting down all of their functions? Wild. Give her a minute, and she'll break out and finish the job somewhere in the middle of the big gloat speech. But give her the minute, ok? She's having fun.

[Directly Engage: 8. Errant chooses to Impress, Surprise, or Frighten her foes]

"How DARE!?" said Princess Spite, shaking in her nightgown. She'd long ago figured out that the best way to deal with fear was to convert it into anger and then channel the anger into whipping. And she had a lot of fear right now. Almost all of her soldiers had been wiped out like they were nothing!? Was this a betrayal? Had Ninan put them up to this, to lose in front of this strange princess to make her look bad!?!? Well it hadn't worked! Another day, another betrayal, and another triumph for Princess Asteria Spite! Crack! Crack!

Her hands are shaking. Her aim is off. While she gets one or two good whip hits in a lot of blows are falling on cybernetics. It could definitely be worse!

"Who sent you!? What did they pay you!? How dare you!?!" Princess Spite was so off her game she was demanding answers of a gagged prisoner. But in the background, Princess Alina had started to move.

It was some Houdini moves that Princess Alina was doing; some mind-bending displays of flexibility and grace. She kicked off her shoes and gracefully bent over backwards to untie the knots on her wrists with her toes. Sometimes in Princess Champions Alina gets tied up and mysteriously gets out of it in between scenes but you get to see the full practiced experience of a career escape artist at work. Princess Spite doesn't notice, as tilted as she is by your continued defiance in refusing to answer her questions. Alina gets to her feet, brushes herself down, puts her shoes back on, and with perfectly graceful timing lasers Princess Spite through a wall.

The remaining two Riders weigh up their odds, then break and run.

"Thank you," said Princess Alina, kneeling down to gracefully remove the ball gag. "My hero."

Brainstorm shudders, and does his level best not to ruin the past five minutes by retching onto the newly-earned power armor.

"At a guess, I'd say it's probably some kind of combat-enhancing psych-you-up juice," he quavers. "Bulldog here is the control, and the skinny nerd is the experimental group. The question is, can you turn them off?"

"Yeah, I don't know," the guy said. "These guys were breathing it while doing a security patrol. You don't dose people up on metachemistry when they're watching crowds full of phone cameras - and they didn't flip out and charge us when you were strangling them..."

He looked at the kit uncertainly. "The dispenser is hooked up to all sorts of tracking sensors too. I can suppress it, but if the armour gets reset it'll start pumping again. Best I can manage on this sort of timetable."

It's the start of her life. Like, you know, most people she's talked to have "this is the earliest memory I can remember" and it's usually something cute or occasionally terrible, because they're kids. Her first memory is staring up at Sara and Viktor during a Martian invasion. She, on a whim, comes back up to the egg, lost in thought. She has lots of feelings about it, all tied up tight in a bow. She's angry, she's elated, she knows she did good, she's confused... She nods hi to a younger sister of hers (the roomba cleaning the floor). She looks up at it. What does that mean for her as a person? That, and Dr. Gear's comment about how she wasn't meant to wake up unless somebody was about to figure out how to turn people into Rx. Which implies, if nobody figured that out... she'd never wake up.

She was shaping up to question a lot of Dr. Gear's decisions lately.

She absently sits next to the pod, eyes closed, and looks Adjacent. Just a touch, a fraction of a different reality. What's there? Is it someplace important? Is it nowhere?

There's a lot of Adjacent here.

There are a lot of trails that end here. A lot of shrines. A lot of graves. A lot of names. A lot of family photographs. Simple memorials left on dusty shelves in some, outright tomb pyramids in others. A place of mourning. Centred around the egg - the coffin. The tomb.

A lot of words are on that tomb. A lot of names. Short inscriptions or long, memorials to boys, girls, squidcreatures, other. Religious, pagan, a splash of rum poured out on a ship's wooden floor. A face that looks familiar but isn't quite.

Your grave. The grave for all the Ferras that went into you. Built for you by a mourning father. Layered on top of each other, one after another. The one in this reality is no less mournful for all it's clean lines.