Sitting in the dark. [OPEN]
who ; Commander Jane Shepard
what ; Slowly losing her mind and trying, desperately, to figure out a way to destroy the marker. It's going much slower than she'd hoped...you know, because of the losing her mind part.
where ; Zone 08, on the sixth floor of a building a good distance from the Marker.
when ; After Garrus's suicide.
warning(s) ; Gore, crazy, the general warning associated with Dead Space. No swearing, though, oddly enough.
notes ; This is totally open. If you want to be a hallucination of Shepard's (people who know her, I'm good with anyone), or if you are in Zone 08 (looking for her or otherwise) and spot the light in the window, or if you just want to call her over the Normandy radio, which is still in the suit, this is a good time.
...and serious damage to the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes. Entorhinal cortex is in tact but malformed....
...recommended procedural alterations: removal of fused implants and stem-cell patching too risky, overlaying preferable. Damage to laterial orbitofrontal caused by post mortem jarring...removal from...
Shepard ground her teeth together and moved her fingers across her omnitool controls again. The orange structure of the device jumped, briefly faded out, and then re-energized. With her shields running constant, the interference was cut down just enough for it to function. It made a sound and jumped back to the beginning of the surveillance composite she'd put together.
Shepard tapped the controls again and it started playing. The digital windows closed only to re-open as it began. Again. The sun had set--or rather, the station had passed into its night cycle. The screens were much brighter, much easier to see, and Shepard blinked heavily as she peered at them.
This eventuality is one of many that was anticipated.
Complete muscular atrophy is expected before circulatory reconstruction is at an acceptable level. Safety guidelines are irrelevant. Can't get any deader...
Every image that had been captured, every clip of static warped video, every bit of audio from their investigations, all of them played in loop on Shepard's omnitool. The screens ran simultaneously, flooded information at her. Telemetry, wave-feedback, electrical pulses, and an endless flurry of numbers and charts ran alongside and behind the solid data.
She'd seen this composite footage at least fifty times. She watched it again, through half-lidded eyes. Her face felt drawn, it probably was. She hadn't moved in a few hours, even though her arms and legs were screaming for it. Everything in her wanted her to move, wanted to get up. The back of her mind was burning with information, urges to act, but she kept perfectly still. She kept perfectly still and watched.
...to stop it you must understand...or you will make the same mistakes we did...subject experienced massive osteonecrosis, subsequent muscular damage to torso is extensive, removal and replacement of enhanced, secondary parts will begin immediately...
She could hear the voices more clearly than she could hear the audio off her omnitool. They had been indistinct, just the pretense of a voice, soft enough to be imagined, to put her on edge...but the longer she sat here, the longer she tried to understand, the more clear they'd become. They were hallucinations, all of them. She could feel the difference, she wasn't sure why...maybe she was fooling herself.
No, no they weren't real. She knew it.
The display to her one-o-clock read out telemetry on the pulse itself. Data about the frequency, the wavelengths, the interference. It didn't mean much to her, she wasn't a doctor, a scientist, but she knew what frequency fried humanoid neural tissue and it was hovering. All hallucinations. Only facts were real.
...skin is uneven. Reflexive nature of the organism is hampered by the inherent radioactivity of the element zero. Solution is manual sculpting; we just don't have time for this. Neural firing sequence keeps jumping into consciousness...
She was imagining things; she knew she was. The composite ended and Shepard drew a deep, metered breath. Her heart-rate was up, her breathing was quick and shallow. She had to get a handle on herself. She rolled her neck and closed her eyes.
She could still feel them there, past her eyelids. Twenty dead batarians. Shepard knew how they were draped across the room, embedded in the organic sludge that had taken root and started to grow. One of them was jabbering in the corner, she could hear his begging, his apologies, but she didn't listen to them. She couldn't make them out; it was like she couldn't remember them, and that was probably why. With her eyes closed, his jabbering turned into symbols she didn't understand, couldn't read, and those bled into prothean and back again.
"Extensive defensive mechanisms," Shepard said aloud to herself. Her throat was practically coated in the air, here. Swallowing was a slick, oily affair and she avoided it. It only exacerbated the headache anyway. "If it's an immobile life-form...." Her train of thought abandoned her and Shepard took another deep breath. It was getting harder and harder to think.
"If it's an immobile life form--detonation, fire, or...space should kill it," Shepard continued slowly. She opened her eyes to find one of the dead batarians seated in front of her, the gaping holes in his skull weeping as his jaw-less mouth managed to form words. He sounded like that asshole who worked for Miranda, and Shepard just stared at him in the darkness.
"Detonation should kill it," Shepard repeated and the rest of the batarians sat up. They were all talking now, half of them in French, all about convergence, and the one in the corner was screaming as an invisible version of her dismembered him for the seventy-sixth time, so far. Shepard looked back down and her omnitool skipped as she started the composite again. She felt oddly irritated with herself for destroying her wearable.
...to stop it you must understand...or you will make the same mistakes we did.This why we sent our warning through the beacons.
There was a breeze from the open window. It carried the stench off the marker and absolutely no sound. She didn't know if she could hallucinate silence. That might actually be a treat.
what ; Slowly losing her mind and trying, desperately, to figure out a way to destroy the marker. It's going much slower than she'd hoped...you know, because of the losing her mind part.
where ; Zone 08, on the sixth floor of a building a good distance from the Marker.
when ; After Garrus's suicide.
warning(s) ; Gore, crazy, the general warning associated with Dead Space. No swearing, though, oddly enough.
notes ; This is totally open. If you want to be a hallucination of Shepard's (people who know her, I'm good with anyone), or if you are in Zone 08 (looking for her or otherwise) and spot the light in the window, or if you just want to call her over the Normandy radio, which is still in the suit, this is a good time.
...and serious damage to the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes. Entorhinal cortex is in tact but malformed....
...recommended procedural alterations: removal of fused implants and stem-cell patching too risky, overlaying preferable. Damage to laterial orbitofrontal caused by post mortem jarring...removal from...
Shepard ground her teeth together and moved her fingers across her omnitool controls again. The orange structure of the device jumped, briefly faded out, and then re-energized. With her shields running constant, the interference was cut down just enough for it to function. It made a sound and jumped back to the beginning of the surveillance composite she'd put together.
Shepard tapped the controls again and it started playing. The digital windows closed only to re-open as it began. Again. The sun had set--or rather, the station had passed into its night cycle. The screens were much brighter, much easier to see, and Shepard blinked heavily as she peered at them.
This eventuality is one of many that was anticipated.
Complete muscular atrophy is expected before circulatory reconstruction is at an acceptable level. Safety guidelines are irrelevant. Can't get any deader...
Every image that had been captured, every clip of static warped video, every bit of audio from their investigations, all of them played in loop on Shepard's omnitool. The screens ran simultaneously, flooded information at her. Telemetry, wave-feedback, electrical pulses, and an endless flurry of numbers and charts ran alongside and behind the solid data.
She'd seen this composite footage at least fifty times. She watched it again, through half-lidded eyes. Her face felt drawn, it probably was. She hadn't moved in a few hours, even though her arms and legs were screaming for it. Everything in her wanted her to move, wanted to get up. The back of her mind was burning with information, urges to act, but she kept perfectly still. She kept perfectly still and watched.
...to stop it you must understand...or you will make the same mistakes we did...subject experienced massive osteonecrosis, subsequent muscular damage to torso is extensive, removal and replacement of enhanced, secondary parts will begin immediately...
She could hear the voices more clearly than she could hear the audio off her omnitool. They had been indistinct, just the pretense of a voice, soft enough to be imagined, to put her on edge...but the longer she sat here, the longer she tried to understand, the more clear they'd become. They were hallucinations, all of them. She could feel the difference, she wasn't sure why...maybe she was fooling herself.
No, no they weren't real. She knew it.
The display to her one-o-clock read out telemetry on the pulse itself. Data about the frequency, the wavelengths, the interference. It didn't mean much to her, she wasn't a doctor, a scientist, but she knew what frequency fried humanoid neural tissue and it was hovering. All hallucinations. Only facts were real.
...skin is uneven. Reflexive nature of the organism is hampered by the inherent radioactivity of the element zero. Solution is manual sculpting; we just don't have time for this. Neural firing sequence keeps jumping into consciousness...
She was imagining things; she knew she was. The composite ended and Shepard drew a deep, metered breath. Her heart-rate was up, her breathing was quick and shallow. She had to get a handle on herself. She rolled her neck and closed her eyes.
She could still feel them there, past her eyelids. Twenty dead batarians. Shepard knew how they were draped across the room, embedded in the organic sludge that had taken root and started to grow. One of them was jabbering in the corner, she could hear his begging, his apologies, but she didn't listen to them. She couldn't make them out; it was like she couldn't remember them, and that was probably why. With her eyes closed, his jabbering turned into symbols she didn't understand, couldn't read, and those bled into prothean and back again.
"Extensive defensive mechanisms," Shepard said aloud to herself. Her throat was practically coated in the air, here. Swallowing was a slick, oily affair and she avoided it. It only exacerbated the headache anyway. "If it's an immobile life-form...." Her train of thought abandoned her and Shepard took another deep breath. It was getting harder and harder to think.
"If it's an immobile life form--detonation, fire, or...space should kill it," Shepard continued slowly. She opened her eyes to find one of the dead batarians seated in front of her, the gaping holes in his skull weeping as his jaw-less mouth managed to form words. He sounded like that asshole who worked for Miranda, and Shepard just stared at him in the darkness.
"Detonation should kill it," Shepard repeated and the rest of the batarians sat up. They were all talking now, half of them in French, all about convergence, and the one in the corner was screaming as an invisible version of her dismembered him for the seventy-sixth time, so far. Shepard looked back down and her omnitool skipped as she started the composite again. She felt oddly irritated with herself for destroying her wearable.
...to stop it you must understand...or you will make the same mistakes we did.This why we sent our warning through the beacons.
There was a breeze from the open window. It carried the stench off the marker and absolutely no sound. She didn't know if she could hallucinate silence. That might actually be a treat.