MINI-EVENT: MIMICS

[returnjourney]

MINI-EVENT: MIMICS

May 28th – June 1st, 2022
The Peregrine recently stopped in Bhujerba and took on a whole bunch of new supplies, courtesy of the ship's crew. The transport bots are now positioning those massive pallets of supplies in the storage facility, and wardens (and sneaking inmates!) won't have trouble noticing them: unlike the smooth metal and glass cases that make up the bulk of the storage facility's freight, these were packaged in Bhujerba. They look like great black-and-gold amphoras with matching legs. Practical? Certainly not. Nicer to look at? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it sure breaks up all this minimalist shit.

And then one morning, the passengers will discover that some of the amphoras have been moved, and no one really seems to know by who (though Archimedes has ideas).

This event takes player submissions for what will be found in the amphoras, which you can find on the OOC post here. If you have any questions about the event, please ask here.

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Questions & Answers

1. Missing!

They're gone.

One day there were dozens of amphoras, lined up in neat rows on a metal pallet, and now their numbers are halved. The storage facility is supposed to be off-limits to inmates, but it doesn't stop them from walking in anyway to poke around. Thieves, perhaps? Stored goods don't just get up and walk away on their own.

2. Fighting the Mimics

The amphoras show up all on their own a few days later, tucked into corners in odd rooms, between rows of plants in the greenhouse, under a desk in the resource library... Anywhere a door wouldn't stop them and, even then, they occasionally sneak in. A sharp eye might notice the slightest variation in color, or question how they got in at all, but a curious cat will find the answer quickest.

When touched, the amphoras come to life, their stands unfolding into four spider-like legs, the body pivoting parallel to the ground. The lid becomes a terrible eye. It may look like a machine, but its thick carapace makes it an insectoid.

What it wants, unfortunately, is to feast on sentient brains.

Good luck!

3. Goodies

Destroying the mimics yields loot: a dropped cache of goods. The problem is there's no way to tell what belongs to who...and finding the intended owner means knowing what that person might want.

Please respond here if you'd like your character to find any items; just remember, it's their job to figure out who it rightfully belongs to! (There's a cheat sheet here with what items are intended for who, but it's always fun to consider who your character would think would want that item...if only to play keep-away.)

Comments

[rank1]

Travis looks up at her at a slight delay, his attention concentrated on the fingering –– look, a lot of hobbies have fallen by the wayside these past few years. It happens. It never came naturally, anyway, it was always something he had to work at. Never enough to go pro.

He cuts a strum short with the flat of his hand against the strings.

"I dunno, fifteen years or something," he replies. He knows the tattoo, but finders keepers. "You play?"

His gaze flicks to her truncated fingers, and then he looks her dead in the eyes.

[goty]

Does he intend that as a challenge? She certainly takes it like one, her chin going up a fraction, impetuous.

"Yeah," she says, "a little. I had a guitar like that."

She saw him look to her fingers. Let him look at her hand. She reaches out, letting the moth go on full display.

[rank1]

“What a coinkydink,” Travis replies, and he resumes strumming. It is a little bit of nothing that morphs into Golden Brown by the Stranglers. He glances at her fingers. “I play an ESP Sunburst Tiger. Japanese model. You only play acoustic?”

[goty]

Her fingers itch for that fucking guitar. Her hand stays outstretched. Is he doing this on purpose? Her gut says yes with such intensity she doesn't trust it; she always thought people were stealing her things in Boston, making fun of her, belittling her. Maybe this is just pressing on an old bruise.

"Yeah," she says, "acoustic's better. You can play anywhere."

You don't have to worry about wiring amps or wasting electricity, but she doesn't say it.

[rank1]

Travis adopts what he thinks is an expression of blithe innocence, but in reality, he’s always a bit too cocky for that. Something about the toothiness of his grin.

“Yeah, but you sound like a country hick or like you’re trying to impress moody teenage girls,” he says. “But maybe that’s your thing.”

[goty]

Travis has what Riley would have called a punchable face. Too bad for him. Ellie's fingers twitch-- no, but she thought they did. Just phantom pain.

"Maybe I'm just not trying to impress you." She keeps herself in check, keeping herself from spitting the word like an insult. It's not. She remembers fighting Amanda-- you're just being crazy again.

"It's mine," she says, even though it feels like a concession. "The guitar."

[rank1]

“You don’t say.”

Travis lets the guitar rest on his thighs, hands falling from the strings entirely.

“I got it by shanking this motherfucker,” he says, gesturing at the insectoid carcass beneath him. “You want it, maybe you should brush up on your Monster Hunter skills. Find something cool to trade for it.”

[goty]

She's in a bad position for bargaining-- if she tries to take it, he'll break it.

"What do you want for it?" She folds her arms, pretending she's coming from a position of strength.

[rank1]

He's curious now, peering up at Ellie like she's some sort of puzzle. It's not that he doesn't get the appeal of fighting for his shit: he does. But it does strike him that a girl down two fingers cares that much about a thing she can't even use. There's gotta be something there, right? Otherwise she'd be playing Mimic Roulette with the rest of them.

"Whaddya got?" Travis replies.

Helpful, I know.

[goty]

She can think of a few things-- but she's not giving up that dumb picture of Aki. She refuses to give him one of the mattress springs. There's the pair of scissors she still hasn't used, but can she trust him?

Of course she can't.

Ellie isn't eager to screw up so quick after her most recent fight, but the thought of him keeping, much less damaging, that guitar makes her want to scream. He has the advantage. She knows what she'll do, and it's more than she'd like.

"I got something," she says. "Depends on what you'd do with something you're not fucking allowed to have."

Pretend you care what they'd do. Joel was never good at that.

[rank1]

"Whatever I fucking want," Travis replies, like this is the most obvious thing on the planet. He shrugs, and then lifts the guitar off his lap just enough to reveal the hilt of a katana, the wrapped handle nestled between his hip and the hem of his jacket. "You looking to stir up shit, or are you trying out for Jr. Warden?"

[goty]

Well, that sure fucking narrows it down. She puts her hands on her hips. "Looks like you don't need a thing," she says. "Looks like you need fuckin' accomplices."

She won't answer the question about Junior Wardens. She doesn't have to prove to anybody she's not a stooge or a suck-up. (Fuck, this place reminds her of military school so much sometimes it hurts.)

[rank1]

He lets out a huff.

"Hey, things are great, I'm a collector at heart," he replies. There's a little quirk to his mouth, though, and the grin fades out. Man. A younger gal as an accomplice? Even Shinobu isn't that young, and for a beat he has to contemplate where the line was with her. "So what's the story? This thing's got a pretty high price for you."

[goty]

Does that mean he agrees? She doesn't know, and he has the upper hand, so she isn't going to until he wants her to. If he wants her to.

This sucks.

A sigh, her shoulders sag, and her hands fall to her sides. "It was a gift." She expects this next part to be hard, is prepared not to say it, but it falls from her mouth without any apparent effort. "From someone who's gone."

They've all lost someone, here. And Travis didn't know Joel, and Joel wouldn't fucking care, and she knows that, but it hurt so much to talk about him in Jackson. Was it because everybody knew him, there? Was it because everybody knew how he died, what he'd meant, that they'd fought, that she'd fucked it all up and failed to save him too?

Or does it just hurt less because it's hurt for so long? That's how wounds heal, don't they? She doesn't know, but she keeps that matchstick of hope close to the quiet fire in her heart.

[rank1]

Travis looks at her, long and hard. He thinks: so why don't you cut the negotiations and just fight me for it? She's scrawny, and he's fought scrawny before, but scrawny and sad is a whole other beast than someone with the thirst for vengeance. He decides, both impulsively and in a way that immediately sparks disgust in him, that if they fight one day, she's gonna have to be over it.

"There's no replacing sentimental, huh," he says, with a little note of a sigh. "Having stuff like this can feel like you're gonna re-invent the good days."

He picks up the guitar again, strums a couple notes. Something sadder. Set the mood. He looks down at the strings as he fingers them.

"You think you'd get anything back with it? Your innocence, your time with them?"

[goty]

The question provokes such a visceral feeling of antipathy, she rolls her eyes without even thinking of it. "Oh, fuck off. This isn't some- fucking anime."

She feels... disappointed, which isn't new, but feeling disappointment in someone else is refreshingly fucking novel. Her arms fold again, a better vantage from which to render petty judgement. "Nobody has shit here, did you think of that? There's no place to stash it if we did. I want it because it's mine; it doesn't gotta be deeper than that."

[rank1]

"Anime is a medium," he replies, without a second thought. "But bunch of people from different walks of life, joined together on a spaceship for some grand fuckin' mission... that's practically its own genre."

There's something about pissing people off that makes him feel calmer. It's a prelude to something.

"Anyhoo."

He looks up at her again.

"You just said you wanted it because it came from someone you lost, so you don't want it just to have it. So c'mon! I'll trade you this for a good story."

[goty]

Like a feedback loop, his calm just pisses her off more. "I don't want you to fucking break it, asshole."

She drags a hand down her face, trying and failing to quiet something that isn't quite ego or nerves. Disgust? Offense? It all keeps coming back to when she was in Military School. She hated when people touched her stuff, and she'd thought she'd gotten over that, in Jackson, but maybe she just had enough stuff not to care as much.

"What kinda- story- fuck." Angry and impotent, she sits down in an angular heap of limbs. Sitting across from him, her back to the adjacent hallway, she pulls words out of her mind like a dentist pulls rotten teeth.

"So there was this- guy? Right? Everything's going to shit. I mean, the world's ending. I wasn't there. He has this daughter. I... shit." Deep breath. "You with me so far?"

[rank1]

Travis noodles away. Might as well score a story like this. His attention remains on her, though, his eyes intense behind his aviators.

“Yeah, I’m listening. What happened to his kid?”

[goty]

Her eyes slide off him, gaze pooling on the floor. It feels wrong to use Sarah like this, but not wrong enough to stop. Just wrong enough to feel bad about.

"She died."

In the fertile ground of her own self-pity, a truly stupid thought takes root: this part of the story, at least, is kind of like an anime.

"So the guy... he survives. He's... he lives. He keeps going." Now the hard part- she takes in a gulp of air to steel herself before the words slip out. Just like last time, it's easier than she thought. "He meets this kid. She's... she's the age his daughter was when she died."

[rank1]

He contemplates slipping on a note at the announcement of the girl’s death, but that would be a little cliche, wouldn’t it? So he keeps noodling on, Adam’s apple bobbing as he involuntarily swallows his breath. You win some, you lose some.

But there’s another kid.

“He replaces her with a new model?” he says, with a note of accusation. Fathers are more often shitty than not, after all.

[goty]

The thing is, there were times when she felt like that. Mostly in Salt Lake City, the second time, shaking with betrayal. That feeling has ebbed in the years since, become deafened since Joel's death, and now Ellie is just left with its echoes. It's strange, to hear it from someone else.

It makes her think of Joel, and she knows he'd hate being talked about by someone else, some stupid punk with ridiculous hair. But she also suspects he'd hate being lionized.

"Maybe," she says, "it doesn't matter. The world's still shit. But he teaches her to play guitar."

[rank1]

Maybe might as well be yes in Travis’s books, but he keeps that tidbit to himself, watching her as he wraps up a few notes and lets the sound fade out.

“This guitar,” he says. “She go anywhere with it? Become a country legend or something?”

[goty]

She's pretty sure he's making fun of her, which is something she hates, but can tolerate. What she can't stand is that she agrees. She's pretty fucking pathetic right now, begging for a guitar, bartering with heavily edited stories from a sensitive past. What would the people she left behind-- who left her behind-- think of her now?

She hopes to fuck she'll never know.

The weight of that thought makes her snap, makes her offer up a more keenly true answer than otherwise, in service of being cruel, or looking tough-- she isn't sure which one. Lately they feel the same.

"I took it with me," she says, pretense abandoned, "when I went after the people who-" No, she still can't say it- "when I got even."

[rank1]

There's a twitch of sympathy in the way he frowns, but not enough to hand over the guitar. Certainly not enough to apologize for dragging her through it; that doesn't even occur to him. He does think of Jeane, that Jeane, whose memory has been dragged up far too often lately. Humbling to think of all the silly shit he'd said to her at the tail end of his first run at vengeance.

"I've been there," he says. "What'd you play? I make a pretty mean mixtape for a road trips, but when it's after blood... you know those ones really gotta hit the mark."