Seren, Star of Sirius
Maybe it's the unnatural perch of the stasis pod, but you feel taller than you're supposed to be. Uncomfortably long-limbed. Uncompacted into a new and nebulous world.
Elma doesn't speak as aloofly as you'd expect them too, either. It makes you, counterintuitively, far more likely to feint apologetic. Something has to bear the brunt of the disconnect here.
At the Lifepod, you frustratedly flail your arms. Your long, limbering, left-handed arms.
One survival sleeve, a flexible compression contour complete with digitized glove, covers half of you.
Two, then three. You waggle your wrists, waiting for something unspecified to unjam.
Everything isn't, here. There's a malaise of unreality.
A Young Grex follows you, puking belligerently, all the way back to the White Whale. You have to keep pumping your too-long legs forward, patellae shifting with grief, despite the nausea the sheer size of the structure (and infrastructure) before you conjures.
It's too much. It's too huge. And yet, it's all so mysteriously small, as if you've zoomed out to satellite level armed with the world's only scalpel small enough to pinch exactly one nerve on the back side of your head, the pinprick suggestion of a invisible cowlick.
Competent-looking fellows all wearing the same standard of survival gear, couched in kneepads and neoprene, say nothing to you as you ascend to the gateside elevator. They've got soft faces, scruffy hair.
What is a military industrial complex? What is a military industrial complex with soft-hearted, real-people macho men?
You've been wearing whatever it is you've found on the floor, after all. The spoils of wreckage. The pockets are littered, littering, with the wreckage of spoils. Vesper wings. Blatta secretions. Actual wild game.
Germs, slick and ooze, don't seem to make or get any real grips with you. You're machine-clean.
You don't pace, in the elevator. It's unclear who's looking away - whether the awkwardness is principally owned by Elma or by you, both of you let the other on with their chosen direction. It's raining too hard for unblinking, unsquinting eye contact. And then the recruits at the top of the climb look much less like recruits. Harder. Colder.
It's time to get out of the rain.
A clear sky stretching thinly (too thinly; like merely the osmose of surface tension keeps you in, and the universe out) over the artificial city doesn't help draw your eyes to the gleaming percentage on the central tower, but it doesn't need to.
A fortress of iron and seaglass, sectored by utility, full of more rivets, rebar and girders than anyone can possibly live their life around. You don't see anyone building anything; this is two months' worth of toil, and it feels so cold, still; empty by virtue of unsparse population with no wear, no grooves.
It's like this city can't decide its own narrative identity between dystopia and utopia.
Every last survivor counts. But who is it that's counting?
Vitiligo white as sparkling stars in a night sky much darker than your olive-toned skin makes your eyes, deep blue with a thin ring of seafoam green, appear perpetually wide and unblinking. The stars continue as pale, pale freckles trickling down your cheeks, pocked occasionally by the space dust of moles.
Your hair is just a shade (tint) brighter than your eyes, with that same true-blue tinging to sheen-green at the tips.
You're a pleasant enough person to look at, you suppose. But you're distinctive. No one else looks like this.
Why do you look like this?
Armor is either unimpressively feminine or deflatingly juvenile. Both, on the count of either.
You don't make an object of it, because you don't want anyone to know (being everybody's "she" who fell into Starfall Basin and "her" they got to join BLADE is enough to deal with silently), but you can't wait for something more low-profile to pair with those cargo shorts Lin has on. That strap with the polymerized buckles is calling to you.
Boots on the ground. Yeah, you can do this. Especially since it's all tailored and adjustable to your present size.
Reclaimers is an easy choice (not-choice, since Secretary Nagi is a born haggler - and now you're hungry for cheap, abundant street food that unbars all manner of human sensation), and it's convenient, too - there is something you want to reclaim, isn't there?
Not like you're special. But somehow, you feel that you are. The main character of not just your own story, but some distant star of Mira's, too. A prominent side, for many of the others gathered about the same barracks.
But after the battle with Volkampf, you change your mind. Interceptors, instead. A careful choice. A grounded choice.
It's not that you want to make your bones, should you even have any, on bounty hunting; you don't want to be a Harrier. You're not gung-ho. But, you admit that the way Lin and Elma seemed to cower about the tyrant was...well, irritating.
You won't let it show, though. You'll simply rise above. It seems the equanimous thing to do.
Clearing the field of hostiles...yeah, you can do that. Better than most, for sure. Especially once you can get rid of the assault rifle and pick up a raygun - Mastermind is just that, an analytical projection of that which makes so much sense to you, as if it's a physical and chemical property of you vis-à-vis the world.
As if the damage done by each carefully calculated on-the-fly Art call is the solution to a quadratic equation that folds neatly out and rises up before your eyes.
It's not easy. But it basically is, because it feels good.
You get to reclaim treasure in the field anyway with no extra clearances - everyone does -, so why not do something different?
It's not that you don't believe you could have been just any ordinary person, an age ago. It's actually that you don't know if you could even have done that. As if, somehow, that that is a higher existence that yet eludes you, that you could never go back to.
That you wouldn't want to go back to. That wouldn't serve you, to do so.
Like this world is one you once watched from afar. Like this planet is...just a planet.
This. That. This. That.
There's no choice, now, is there?
All life constellates, and it spreads unimaginably far, but Mira - well - it's what you've got.
But here's the thing: you are an ordinary person, now. That's what BLADEs are; it's civilians that are the odd ones.
Well. BLADE's got plenty of odd ones.
And in battle, which is what you've chosen as your calling card of aid to those helpless civilians, you find yourself liking yourself in a way that only an ordinary person could.
You're goofy. Loud, if not mouthy. Excitable, when you choose to be.
The dialogue choices available to you based on what your mimeosome decides to hand forward from its memory banks make you a careful individual, in conversation, but a spunky one.
You sparkle. When you hone your reputation as a serious operative, you shine.
Even if you don't belong, you will find your way to the quiet questions someday.
You will find your way back up there. You will find your answer, and your function.
He who knows love loves who they are.
2022-06-26 @ 02:55 UTC
gotta choose armor yada yada yada but i've decided that if we weren't playing Flora my Cross would be2022-06-26 @ 03:05 UTC
- Seren
- agender
- she/he/they
- aroace
- ambidextrous
- blue hair blue eyes
- 4'11"
- Mastermind
so stay tuned for that
little friend with the bigass raygun :sunglasses:2022-06-26 @ 03:36 UTC
OH YEAH
- Interceptors