psychoshenanigans | GRATIA // PSL

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GRATIA // PSL

So, here's what Irahl knows.

He's alone in a dark, cold cave. He has most, if not all, of his gear. No one is guarding his location. As he heads away from the spot where he came to consciousness, no one tries to stop him, and no one gets in his way. The few people he finds down there seem human, and not about to approach the nearly-seven-foot man that comes stalking out of the lower tunnels. Honestly, everyone here seems a surprised and a little astonished about his... Entire scene.

There is a way up. It's a maze of twisting corridors and confusing passageways, half of which feel too small for him. It's bigger and bigger groups of people, some of which scatter like schools of fish, and some of which have to be pushed through to get anywhere. It's climbing up into streets lit with dingy lights, graffiti-covered hallways, warehouses, weird holes in stone walls that may or may not be windows. It's alarm bells, it's people yelling at each other down the street. It's just an absurd number of stairs. A couple of people make an attempt to stop him somewhere, and it goes poorly for them.

Elsewhere, events are being set in motion where Irahl cannot see. But he's on his way out.

Eventually, more people try to stop him. At the end of another long stretch of Underground city, a group of official-looking folks are putting a real effort into blocking off the obvious exit, and some of them have weapons.

Down a side alley, into another tunnel, and then the space opens up into a... Plaza, of some sort? The floor is made of stone. The buildings surrounding it are made of stone and are hard to distinguish from one another. At at least the ceiling (also made of stone) is a lot higher than before. Cavernous. There's some kind of sculpture in the middle of it, some impressive feat of geometric stonework that gives the illusion of defying gravity despite weighing literal tons.

This is where someone finally catches him. Sounds have been echoing unhelpfully down every passageway, making it hard to tell if people are coming or going - but this series of quick footsteps comes from an upward direction before someone hits the ground about five feet in front of Irahl.

His clothes are different. His hair is better-kept. Maybe if the situation wasn't quite so tense, there'd be time to see the ways in which his face is different, the way his eyes don't have quite as vicious and sharp a gleam as they used to. But whatever Irahl can take in of him, there is Robin, having hopped down from a rooftop to put himself between him and the exit again.

"...Holy shit."

Kind of weird that he looks absolutely shocked to see the person in front of him, though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Found two bars."

Forget the pinball machines, they essentially found an entire abandoned town with every almost every amenity they could hope for... except for that one simple joy.

And there's no getting around the solid confirmation that Robin has truly been in space now. Hearing him recognize exactly what they're talking about is chilling. It had been weird enough to have his own memories validated by finding Vincent again, but it's downright unsettling to not be able to tell himself anymore that maybe Robin was either mistaken or simply lying.

No, Robin knows the receipt paper.

"And the only game we played with those was Crumple Your Cards Less Than Your Opponent Does."

Miracles do happen, Irahl gets another laugh out of Robin.

"A terrible game where no one wins, I see." He shrugs a little, seeming to relax another iota or two. This is almost beginning to feel like a natural conversation to him, and even though the proof of the others having been in the Drift Fleet is strange and unsettling, he's had to accept inter-dimensional bullshit like this for a few years now.

"Explains why Vince here's so excited about a deck." He gestures to both of them, "And he said it was basically just you two, right? In the ships?"

Irahl has said something nonconfrontational, Robin received it well, asked something in return, and Irahl doesn't immediately attempt to offload the conversation on Vincent.

It's official: Robin has been integrated into an actual back-and-forth conversation. At least the first rounds of one.

"Saw other people once. They tried to kill us."

He sounds pretty dire about it, which is actually an appropriate tone for the subject matter this time. It doesn't change when he continues, though.

"Wasn't great for poker nights with the boys."

Even if it doesn't last for very long, having any sort of a back-and-forth is novel enough for Robin. He remembers that he and Irahl had a few conversations, but they were very rare and easy to ruin.

Vincent has himself a dark chuckle at Irahl's joke, "Yeah. They played too rough."

That gets Robin to glance over and address him directly, "Is that where you got shot?"

"Yeah, that's the one..." Which prompts him to stretch, maybe remembering a time when he could barely move. His mobility has fully returned and you'd never guess his life was severely threatened, aside from the scars he's still got.

"Bizarre," Robin admits quietly, before returning his attention to Irahl, "I was telling Vincent, when I was there, there were a lot more people. And they didn't..."

He stops, looks up briefly, remembering a few very distinct contradictions of what he was about to say.

"Well, they mostly didn't go around trying to kill people. But they were all folks brought in from other spots like I was. Like you were. Maybe a couple hundred of them, at some point."

Now that he can no longer avoid the reality of space being real and that all three of them have actually been there, Irahl finds himself feeling distinctly haunted by what Robin is claiming. In the scant moments that he'd allowed himself to think about it before, he'd assumed that Robin's experience had been similar to his own, or that there had maybe been a handful of others scraping an existence out of the wreckage of those ships.

Only now is he realizing that there is a possibility that they could maybe be the ones who had left the wreckage behind in the first place. Time nonsense still irritates him to his core to even consider, but he forces himself to try and believe it as being possible.

"...What was it like when you were there?"

There's a slightly stilted tension to the question, as he manages to make himself angry by asking it.

Edited (it's 6am and my birthday. i'm sleepy.) 2024-08-24 14:02 (UTC)

Vincent and Robin had spoken a little about the differences between their two versions of the bizarre prison they had been trapped in, but they hadn't gone very in-depth on anything. Vincent had been too anxious to talk about it, really, and Robin didn't want to overburden the guy back when he thought Vincent's trip might have been a singular experience.

So now, Vincent contributes, but it's because he'd also kind of like to hear how things were. He leans forward and props his big chin up on a hand, looking a little more serious.

"You were sayin' it wasn't all busted, right...?"

Robin, meanwhile, hears the frustration in Irahl's voice and knows it very well. He has a feeling that anything he'll say will be annoying to have to fold into his worldview, so he tries to keep it brief.

"Yes, working ships. Whole crews being shuttled from planet to planet. There were two 'hosts'," and he goes bring up his hands to put air quotes around that one, frowning at the memory of their captors, "Who seemed to be running things, but I still don't know who they were or if they were even real people."

As opposed to a computer program or an android or something. His frown remains.

"It was like that when I left, before I showed up back here."

Irahl is quieter than his usual happenstance pauses, and the silence continues for a few beats longer. Yeah, he's working on trying to wedge things into a worldview that is actively resistant to the change.

The difficulty mostly comes from the fact that the ghosts in the fleet had haunted him while he'd been trapped there, and now it's upsetting to try and imagine that one of them is sitting here.

"All those files..."

The names in the sealed-off room with the lab, all of the glitched-out files on the network, all those artifacts those people had left behind--Robin was with them?

"You don't know what destroyed it all?"

Robin looks a little concerned at the mention of "files", mostly because it doesn't immediately ring any bells. Sure, it's a vague term, it could be anything, but...

"I don't," he confirms, "It was in good shape when I left. The situation itself was insane, but at least everything was working and someone was running the show."

He runs his hand through his hair. It got a little messed up with all the splashing around in the lake, so he can pretend it's to fix it and not just to have something to occupy the weird energy that builds in him as he remembers the Fleet.

"I mean, I'm glad to hear something destroyed it, but... Not glad to hear it's still pulling people in, somehow. Does that mean you guys never got the explanation of what it was supposed to be about?"

At least with the sheer distress of remembering the fleet, certain other discomforts are being overshadowed. There's a similar quiet agitation to Irahl as there had been the few times he'd talked about his own upsetting history.

He can't help but glance briefly in Vincent's direction during all of it. Either checking in on him, waiting for affirmation, or uselessly hoping the blind man could share a glance as a source of comfort.

It's just a quick instant, though. Then he's reaching up to tap a place at the base of his skull.

"Knew some things. Found some readable files. Otherwise, just got screaming."

Vincent has been pretty quiet. He's in a strange place himself, now that the distant and mysterious history of their months-long prison is actually becoming accessible and not-so-distant through Robin's recollections. While it is very surreal and kind of upsetting, feeling his two friends getting agitated helps keep him level. Even subconsciously, he doesn't really want to add fuel to the fire if he doesn't need to.

"Yeah," Vincent corroborates, "Not a lot of info one way or another."

And then he reaches out to give Irahl's leg a little nudge with the backs of his knuckles. A reminder that he's there, perhaps. Or a reminder that neither of them had gone through the experience alone.

Robin's expression, meanwhile, goes a little flat. "Do I want to ask what you mean by screaming?"

Vincent will take this one off of Irahl's plate by responding first, frowning. "...Nah. Don't think so."

"...Okay," the demigod responds, accepting it for now. He can always ask later, "Well, the short story is that they claimed we were there to... Perform for some sort of entertainment broadcast. We were occasionally encouraged to do things to get 'good ratings'. I doubt that was the whole reason, and I can't say for certain whether or not it was actually true, but that's what we were told."

When Vincent nudges him, the increment of tension that unwinds from his shoulders is too subtle to see, but Robin can feel the strains of his distress level out a little. Even if Irahl himself doesn't notice it, a physical gesture has just happened that actually helped his mental state instead of making it worse.

It's like glimpsing a unicorn.

And with that slightly less unstable mindset, he can ask about one of the things that he had found most unsettling about their stint in space.

"That big ship, like a small town... You all set that up?"

Robin would never have imagined that working in a thousand years. He didn't exactly set up a great foundation of touch-based communication, but Irahl always seemed so completely uncomfortable and unwelcome with the idea. And yet, here it is.

He's almost distracted from the conversation as he notices; he just doesn't know how Vincent does it. It may as well be magic.

"Big ship..." Another pause as he works to remember which one Irahl is talking about, "Oh! You mean that... Organic-looking ship, right? People were starting to set up some rooms there when I left. Didn't know it got turned into a whole town."

"Garden growing out of control. Obstacle course. Even had a museum."

He mentions the museum because it's notable, of course, but also because its discovery had been stupid and funny, and he knows that Vincent will remember that incident when he mentions the place, and him thinking about Vincent thinking about that debacle makes the whole thing feel a little more absurd and less unsettling.

"A whole ghost town."

"Man..." Robin says, trailing off.

So the Fleet must have been going for some time after he left. Again, not surprising from a logical standpoint, just chilling to think that somewhere, the experiments continued until something very nearly put a stop to them. At least, that's what it sounds like.

Vincent isn't quite as lost in thought. He remembers the museum. He chuckles a little and adds a distant, "Heh, yeah..." to Irahl's description of the place.

"Okay, you guys..." Robin starts, watching Vincent react to what seems like another inside joke he isn't a part of, "It was really just you two and some... Raiders, you said? And no one else?"

"And a couple of robots." For a minute, anyway. "Ships and stations were junked and empty. Only broadcast we picked up was a couple voices--then screaming."

Hey, he asked.

If Robin wants the full picture of these two improbable people being dragged to space and caged in a wrecked, empty fleet, Irahl will paint the picture for him, and he will use the fewest possible words to do so.

Robin has suddenly become interested in their life in what remains of the fleet, but it's not really because of the fleet itself. At this point, he's becoming morbidly curious about how these two became best friends and whether or not they did more than be best friends.

Because he knows how he would be, but Irahl is weird and Vincent's always given him absolutely no indication of interest in guys, but...

Anyway, that path gets a little lost with Irahl's color commentary. Robin's eyebrows go up.

"Oh, that was the screaming." He says.

"Told ya' you didn't wanna ask," says Vincent.

"Grim," says Robin.

"Yep," says Vincent.

Edited (damn early morning commas) 2024-08-25 14:31 (UTC)

"Mhmm," Irahl adds to the discussion.

And his gaze wanders a little off to the side then, as his impulse is to take a drink after an exchange like that--drinking had been mandatory on the Eclipse if even a semi-serious conversation was going to take place--but he doesn't have that, or any other thing to occupy his attention and punctuate his sentences with.

So, there's a waiting pause where nothing happens, and the conversational ball quietly rolls back to someone else's court.

Unfortunately, Vincent can't think of anything particularly entertaining to say on the subject. Robin thinks much faster. Again, as much as he'd love to revisit the psychological challenges of the Drift Fleet (he wouldn't), he's got something else on his mind.

"...So, okay, if there weren't other people around, what did you guys do while you were up there? Surely, you had to find some way to entertain yourselves aside from playing 'Don't Crumple the Paper'."

Look, he's even throwing in a reference to Irahl's earlier joke... As a smokescreen to cover up what he's really asking about.

Unfortunately, the smokescreen works. Irahl is too busy buying the joke and being distracted with the ordeal of remembering the fever dream of life in space to realize Robin's ulterior motive.

There are small pauses between each item on the list, saying each one as they come to mind while dodging around a couple of others.

"Lot of scavenging. Keeping the ship from blowing up. On the weekends, relax by being shot by raiders."

Vincent can hear his voice turn in his direction at the very end, either waiting for him to elaborate on the list or just pointedly aiming the last item at him.

Vincent hears the metaphorical ball being passed off to him. He turns his face more in Irahl's direction, glass eyes gazing neutrally forward.

"Never gonna live that one down, am I?" he asks, smiling ruefully and reaching over to playfully shove his friend a little, "You take on one life-threatening injury and suddenly you're the 'gets shot on the weekends' guy..."

Vincent does take the slight change in momentum to also reach over and grab a blanket from a pile Robin had pointed out. It's getting chillier with the sun down and no fire to keep him warm.

Robin, meanwhile, was listening for clues, and... Didn't find anything he was looking for. He doesn't know if he's relieved or... Disappointed? Complicated. But Robin also spent enough time as a ship engineer that something else Irahl says catches his attention.

"Keep the ship from blowing up?" He asks, looking between both of them.

"Yeah, there was, uh..." Vincent searches for words that used to be provided to him automatically by his augment. Nothing comes to him, "...You know, the engine was fucked up."

"...How fucked up?" Robin dares to ask, eyes narrowing in a way that suggests he may soon regret asking.

Irahl has no problems elaborating on this one, as he wasn't the one who broke the ship in the first place. He can certainly describe how embarrassing the piece of junk was. He also has enough experience with traditional engine-maintenance to help him out in the conversation, even he has forgotten the specifics.

"All the ships were wrecked. Ours was at least in one piece, but the coolant was bad... so we shut it off. Couldn't do much more than coast without overheating."

They were just flying a time-bomb. It was fine.

"...You shut off the coolant," Robin repeats, just to make sure he heard that right.

As Vincent nods and grumbles a confirmation, Robin's expression becomes increasingly incredulous, bordering on a frown. He may not remember the in-and-outs of ship maintenance anymore, but...

"...But you had life support on?" He asks, hesitant.

"Yeah. An' the other stuff," Vincent specifies, "We just couldn't fly much."

"How did you..." Gods, help him, "How did you deal with the heat load...?"

"Mostly turned the heat down," Vincent shrugs, "Seemed fine."

Robin, now fully comprehending just how little these guys understand they could have burst into flame at any second, especially if they ran the engine to fly, fully puts his head in his hands and sighs in deep, deep disappointment.

"It's not fine..." He says, weakly. "How are you idiots still alive..."

Irahl snorts under his breath, but it's hard to tell if he is actually offended or if he finds their near-demise kind of funny. It's probably both.

"There was some coolant circulating. Kept the system patched up." Possibly with space-tape. "Lucky we had a star pilot who quickly figured out how aim-and-coast. Got where we needed to go. Just took a minute."

He returns Vincent's shove with a sardonic shoulder-pat. It has not escaped him that they really shouldn't have survived the ordeal, and only part of it had been due to raiders.

"He was the--" Robin asks into his hands, exasperated, before abruptly cutting himself off. He the lowers his hands to look flatly at the both of them. "Gods, of course he was. Of course it's still tacky enough to make the blind man the pilot."

"Hey, I did okay," Vincent defends himself, briefly batting at Irahl's fingers just to see if he needs to grab something, "We're fine an' here now, so don't worry 'bout it."

Robin sighs, begrudgingly, and gestures to Irahl. "And what were you, a ship counselor?"

You know, if he had to guess based on the pattern he's observed so far.

Edited (wow an unfortunate typo) 2024-08-26 23:12 (UTC)

Irahl's brow lowers briefly as he can't tell if that's a real thing, or if Robin is just taking a dig at him.

"Security. And emergency repairman."

Because of course the powers-that-be wouldn't have given them something they really'd needed, like an engineer or even a medic. Just a guy with guns who could paste the ship back together enough to limp along through space.

GRATIA // PSL

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