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 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."

[goty]

"I don't sing about that." Though she's thought about it, but words never quite capture the feeling. She'd know; she's tried.

"I just sing... whatever. Whatever I can find."

[rank1]

"I knew a chick who did," he says, and though there's a twinge of regret at even bringing it up, he continues shamelessly: "She was real full of herself, her ability to kill... so she sang lullabies for hell."

Travis holds out the guitar by the neck.

"Play something you found for me," he says, relenting. "Then you can have it."

[goty]

"Sounds fucked up," Ellie says, but she's more concerned with taking the guitar back. Immediately, she begins tuning it, faintly surprised to find it's not horribly out of tune. It's just instinctual, a calming ritual.

She looks up with something like a grimace when Travis asks for a song, but fair enough. It isn't like she hasn't been thinking about this forever. What would she play, if she could again? What would she be able to play?

She picks one of the songs she learned on, something simple enough you can play it with two fingers. She doesn't have the energy to whistle that much, though, so she hums instead.

[rank1]

"Sure was," he replies, and he shifts off the mimic to sit on the floor proper to listen, using the ugly thing's carcass as a recliner back. He's quiet while she plays, bobbing his head periodically.

Not bad, for someone down a few fingers. He'd almost expected her to just switch hands.

And then, suddenly baffled:

"Where the fuck are you 'finding' Paul McCartney?"

[goty]

Ellie shrugs; it's not really clear why this is a big deal. "I dunno, he had a bunch of books in a music store I found."

And reckords, and CDs, and she found it with Joel, and... whatever.