The Scavenger and the Forgotten 6: The Children of Io
Content warning: Minor character death, cult dynamics, bad caretaker
Continued from here.
--
"Look, ammo is what I've got," Clee insisted with a frustrated gesture. "Do you want it, or would you prefer to keep your stupid safe straw?"
The lean, sharp-eyed Girn on the other side of this negotiation scoffed. "Bullets for a KAM-5? The only guys using those right now would shoot me dead on sight. Meanwhile, it looks like Grampy here could use some stupid clean water from my stupid safe straw." She pointed to Radu, and smirked as the old genmod shrunk still further in on himself upon being noticed. "It's ten in coin or nothing."
"Coin?! Who the fuck carries coin anymore?"
"The two of you, from the looks of it," the other Girn said, sounding as calm as Clee did irritable. "Your friend's got some nice clothes. New ones, even. Can't buy those with bullets."
Clee groaned, tired of arguing with this smug bitch already. Up until a few minutes ago, this had been her first day in a week with no headaches. "Six," she conceded, all but tossing two pieces of metal currency at the woman.
She caught it easily, and inspected it closely before nodding with satisfaction. "Looks like the half-a-kriv can be halfway honest. Makes enough sense."
"Go to hell," Clee shot back.
The other woman smirked. "Which one?"
She was about to suggest Chemoghlu - the lady didn't seem like she'd hold up all that well being stuck swimming upstream through a river of scalding-hot shit in the midst of a stampede of angry deimels for all eternity - when Radu urgently tapped her on the shoulder.
"Yeah, fine, let's get going," she grumbled, managing not to snap at him even as her shoulders tensed. She snatched the water filtration straw from the other Girn's hand and turned around, her eyes settling on a group of five approached humans. Or humanoids, at least.
Clee felt a pit in her stomach seeing their hodgepodge armor, made up of lab protective gear patched together to fit people much bigger than its original owners. Of all the genmod factions she'd considered bringing Radu to, the fanatics calling themselves the Children of Io had been dead last on her list.
The guy in front, though… he wasn't from the labs, at not least as a subject. He barely looked genmod at all. He did look like he needed a good punch to the face, though.
Apparently the other woman agreed. "Shit, this guy again," she muttered, clamping her hand tightly over the coins she was holding.
He gave the group of them an unpleasant smirk as his four much more formidable friends raised weapons as varied as their armor at the group. "I thought we had this talk already… Izhekna, was it?" he said, eyes on the Girn vendor. "Just because you turned informant doesn't mean you can go back to selling us in our own territory." He gestured toward Radu.
"I-I wasn't -- the Hiukree here and her lab… her f-friend, they were robbing me!" Izhekna pleaded in thickly-accented Ganymedean, her eyes darting between Clee and the apparent leader of this squad.
"Nice try," the man said casually, ignoring Clee as she sputtered to defend herself against the accusation, right before one of the soldiers fired a shot directly into Izhekna's head. The older woman collapsed to the ground with hardly a sound, while Radu yelped and jumped back, his clothes now coated in blood.
Clee was equally blood spattered, but too stunned to react as two of the soldiers approached until their hands closed around her arms. She pulled and thrashed at her captors, jabbing one of them hard enough with the water filtration straw that they audibly hissed in pain. The same soldier pried the device out from between her fingers, not particularly gently, and threw it to the ground.
"Oh, are you fucking kidding me?!" Clee raged as this entire errand became worse than pointless.
As the straw hit the ground, though, Radu snapped to attention. "Clee!" he shouted. "Let go of Clee, she --"
"You don't have to worry about her anymore," one of the armored figures told him gently. "We won't let her hurt you."
"No, she helps me! I-I need her," Radu insisted.
"You know her?" The apparent leader groaned and squeezed the bridge of his nose. The arrogant bastard was unarmored, Clee now realized. "Well. this just turned into a giant mess," he said, sounding very put-upon by this situation. "Look, we're gonna take you both back to base and get things sorted out there, got it?"
"Doesn't look like we've got much of a choice," Clee pointed out. "Any way you can let me walk on my own here?"
He studied her for a minute without reply. There was a flash of something, maybe recognition, in his eyes, and he shook his head quickly. "Nah," he said, and started off back in the direction they'd come from.
The second pair of soldiers didn't put hands on Radu, but stood between him and Clee despite his attempts to push past them as they walked. The still-recovering older genmod was at a clear disadvantage against their much stronger, uninjured captors. At a certain point, he struggled to even minimally keep up with the group, and reluctantly accepted an offered hand from one of the two soldiers in front of him.
Twenty minutes later, they stopped just outside a single-story concrete building, miraculously all but completely intact. The plaque outside the gate was faded and rusted, and Clee could just barely make out some of the letters: R D OPM NT C NTE 8.
Before she could try to decipher it with her only tenuous grasp of written Ganymedean, though, she heard voices from above. A handful of sentries called out greetings, and the armed soldiers behind her waved.
"And look, he made it back," one of the watchers said in an amused voice, pointing to the unarmored man leading them. "'Ey Mira, you're taking over cleaning duty tonight, it looks like."
"Whatever," Clee could hear as they reached the gate. "You know I'm just gonna make him do it anyways."
One of the two soldiers pulling Clee along laughed along with the sentries. Meanwhile, their leader clenched his hands into fists with a low growl, his knuckles going nearly white.
No, not a leader, Clee realized. A human shield.
"So what's the Girn for?" Mira called down to her comrades, wrinkling her nose a bit.
The person to her left thumbed back at Radu. "Our new friend here wouldn't come without her."
"Huh," Mira said, raising an eyebrow. "Well, bring 'em in." With that, the group of them entered a walled-off sally port, which had traces of the same medical smell that had permeated Satellite Office 83.
"I'll search her," the apparent third captive of their group volunteered with a nod to Clee, a bit too eagerly, as the last of the four soldiers locked the door behind them.
One of her two escorts scoffed. "What, so you can take whatever she's got on her?"
"Can't be anything too valuable," the other said, raising an eyebrow at Clee. "'Sides. It's almost lunch. If we don't have to waste rations on this dipshit, so much the better." He turned to loom over the much smaller man in front of him. "Anything we find on you that hasn't made it into inventory, and the Commander'll be sending whatever bits of you are left to the GSH in a box."
He of the Punchable Face let out an undignified whimper and reflexively raised his hands. "Okay, I get the point!" he snapped with wounded pride, only earning himself a laugh.
The soldiers let go of Clee, finally, and headed for the door in front of them.
"Come on, let's get you cleaned up and fed," the soldier that Radu was now outright leaning on for support tried to coax him.
As they passed, though, Radu grasped Clee's hand tightly. "Clee, though," he said, he said almost pleadingly. "I need -- what are you going to do with her?!"
"She'll still be here when we're done," they replied, a bit exasperated. "We'll get this sorted out, and who knows, maybe she can join us."
Clee guessed that the chances of that were pretty low. She forced a crooked smile at Radu, though, and squeezed his hand briefly before pulling away. "Hey, see you soon, alright?"
The soldiers seemed to relax more at this display than Radu did. He nodded glumly, slumping and letting himself be escorted through the door into the base. He looked over his shoulder with a last worried glance back at her before one of the soldiers closed and locked the door behind them.
"What did you to get him so attached?" the remaining human asked after a beat, echoing her own thoughts. "And what kind of a name is Clee, anyways?"
"It's my name," she snapped. "What's yours, anyways? Or should I just call you Dipshit like they do?"
The man scowled. Up close, his gritted teeth only were only slightly better than Radu's, and his narrowed eyes were mismatched, one brown and one green. "'Sir' would be fine," he informed her, taking hold of her roughly as he started to rummage through her pockets.
"Pffft," Clee responded, leading him to tighten his grip, his uneven nails digging into her skin. "Not even your own guys like you that much."
"They're not 'my guys,'" he fumed. "They're just a bunch of…!" He stopped short, looking quickly back toward the door. "Anyways. What've you got on you? Let's see… bullets? Meh," he said, stuffing them into his pockets all the same. "Some coin, that's a bit better, and… hel-lo, what's this?" He slid the pack of lycadone vials out of her coat pocket just as she remembered they were there.
"Hey, give those --!" she demanded, struggling and grabbing for them, only to be cut off a grating laugh of triumph from Sir Dipshit as he read the label.
"Oh MAN," he said, holding them just out of her reach with a gleam in his eyes. "You really made my day, you know that? Do you even know what this is?"
"It was my ticket offworld," Clee snapped. "What's it to you, a pat on the head? You heard them, they're not gonna let you keep it."
He shot her a glare, which she met with a smirk of her own. "You should maybe stick to worrying about your own problems," he shot back. "Like what'll happen when they find out you were gonna ditch the old guy."
"What do you --"
"'My ticket offworld,' wasn't that what you just said?" he said mockingly, with another unpleasant buck-toothed smile. "I'll let them figure that part out for themselves, though. I owe you one." He nodded to the vials in his hand, still frustratingly out of reach.
"Look," Clee said sharply in a low voice. "You don't want to be here any more than I do. We split the stuff, and we both get out of here." She regretted the words as she spoke them at the thought of spending any more time under the insufferable human, but she figured she could steal the already twice-over ill-gotten gains back soon enough. "And Radu… he'll be safer here. They'll know what to do for him."
The expression on her captor's face made her even less certain than she'd already felt. He shook his head and went on with his search, finding no further treasure to his obvious disappointment. "Let's go," he growled and edged her forward, driving a sharp foot driven down into the back of her heel. She let out a squeal of discomfort, and looked back indignantly at the human, who flashed her a nasty smile in response.
He pushed her through the door into the repurposed compound. She nearly gagged at the smell of what could be only described as that of death itself. She heard her escort swallow behind her, apparently no more inured to it than she was. He recovered enough to pull her collection of coins and bullets out of his pocket and hold them out for inspection, as well as inevitable confiscation. "And she would've had more if we hadn't caught her when we did," he said. "She was about to sell the other one off in exchange for passage to Earth."
"Not what we heard from him, Fletcher," a man lounging in a chair behind a long bolted-down metal table said in a bored tone, disregarding Clee's loud objections.
She immediately stopped short in her protests upon hearing his voice, one that she and every other resident of Ganymede had heard countless times over the vids throughout the dome. It took only a quick look to confirm it. He had light brown skin framed by pitch-black hair that seemed at odds with his strikingly pale grey eyes. Even sitting down he was a slight man, but had an aura of power about him that more than made up for it.
"'Oh, but we killed all the body doubles!'" the clone of Governor Jas Knossos said mockingly, echoing Clee's thoughts, before giving a casual shrug. "Is it really so surprising that they missed a few?" He gave her a smile that was not at all reassuring when coupled with his piercing stare. "So, Clee, if I remember right. Maybe you could help me figure out where things stand. Both of my sources at this point are hardly reliable." His gaze shifted over toward the human, taking on a look of contempt.
Clee swallowed. Double or not, speaking to someone with this voice, and worse still this face, was not something she'd ever expected to happen. "I-I was planning to bring Radu here anyways," she lied. The clone's eyes narrowed ever so slightly, suggesting that he saw through this, but she pushed forward into safer territory. "I had another way offworld anyways. Too bad this guy stole it." She thumbed at Fletcher.
"It'd have to be more than a few coins, then," the clone said, raising his eyebrows in interest but then pinning Fletcher with a sharp gaze.
"Try twenty four sealed vials of lycadone," Clee responded. "I can imagine that'd be pretty useful to you all."
Fletcher only laughed. "Search me, then," he said, arms spread out. "Just take me to a private room first if you're going to be thorough with it, will you?"
"That won't be necessary," the clone said. "Search their route here," he ordered the people behind him with only the slightest tilt of his head in their direction. Two of them nodded and passed by Clee and Fletcher, with one giving the latter an abrupt shove to the shoulder. He hissed in pain and tensed as if he'd been hit there before none too far back.
"Okay, I'm curious," Clee said after a long awkward silence that was making Fletcher visibly uncomfortable. "How'd you get this bunch, of all people, to follow the same guy who put them in the labs?"
Her captor chortled. "I'm not exactly 'the same guy' as the Lunan Exile. I grew up in the labs like everyone else here did."
The last person standing behind him, a woman with a distant expression who could have easily been his twin, spoke up. "Commander Alexei led us out of that place, and he leads us on to Io. He'll leave not a single genmod behind."
Clee tried not to grimace at the monotone recitation of the apparent party line. "And what about the rest of us?" she ventured.
"It depends," Alexei responded. "When it comes to you personally, what were you really about to do with your captive?"
"His name's Radu, and he's not my captive," Clee couldn't help but snap despite Alexei's narrowed eyes. "If it hadn't been for me, he'd be back in --"
"We found it," called out one of Alexei's guards as they returned. "Turns out he'd gotten his hands on a whole number of things." The guard spilled out the contents of a small box onto the bolted-down table. Coins, the lycadone, and worse still for Fletcher, a IET-12 plasma arc weapon.
Fletcher went pale.
"I'd ask what you were thinking of doing with these," Alexei said, not even looking up at him, "But I can't see you actually coming up with a plan." He turned his gaze in the vague direction of his guards. "I'm sure the GSH would be interested in having this one," he said. "And her… she can help around here until we can find out who'll pay a ransom for her."
Good luck with that, Clee thought bitterly. "Help out how?" she demanded as one of the guards took hold of her.
"Like I said. That'll depend on what we can find out about you and Radu," Alexei said.
The woman standing behind them stared blankly at the group of them as the guards turned Clee and Fletcher roughly away and marched them off further into the complex.
--
For his part, Radu wouldn't have noticed any of this even if he'd been able to hear it. He leaned into the wrinkled hand of someone he thought he'd never see again as she slowly ran a comb through his mess of hair with the other. Her appearance was different from what he remembered - red hair, she was supposed to have red hair - but he would've recognized that touch anywhere.
"Now let's look at the rest of you," the woman said in a reassuring voice, reaching around him to lift a hand covered in scabs that suddenly stiffened in fear. "Radu...! How did this happen? It looks like we'll have to relearn how to handle that, then, won't we?"
Content: Lab whump, spy whump, whumper to whumpee, multiple whumpers, reluctant whumper, poison gas, manhandling, lady whump
--
Director David Richardson's hand had pressed heavily down on Barclay's tense shoulder that afternoon as they'd watched the footage of his last interaction with a lab subject.
"NO, NO, STOP!" the young woman on the screen howled through sobs, frantically pounding on the reinforced glass of the chamber she'd been locked in. She was new, or at least she had been. No burns, or implants or anything. For all Barclay knew, she might've been one of the subjects he'd picked up the previous week. "What did I ever do to you?!"
"I'd save my breath if I were you," he heard his past self say in a curt tone. He wondered if his voice always sounded that annoying, or if it was just the quality of the recording. "You're going to need it."
She didn't listen. They rarely did. With begging having failed, next came the insults. Nothing that really landed anymore. Some of them he even had to agree with.
"Someone get this started already," he'd said to a junior lab technician, trying to sound bored rather than on edge. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
The kid had hesitated, his gazed fixed on the screaming subject.
"Quit stalling, would you?" his past self demanded. "Or do I have to come over there and press the button myself?"
Even sitting there watching this play out hours later, Barclay still felt relieved when the tech muttered a quick, "Yes, sir," and tapped a few things on the screen in front of him. Several years into this job and he still hated having to do it himself.
A second later, pixelated clouds of gas flooded the chamber. It was supposed to be some new form of crowd control they were testing, like tear gas on steroids. The subject's screaming reached a crescendo as the stuff made contact with her flesh, only to be replaced by hacking coughs as she inevitably inhaled it.
"Keep it going," he heard himself say half a minute in, a tinge of uncertainty having crept into his voice.
The Director gripped him tighter at this change in tone, fingers drumming against his shoulder with barely contained irritation. He went rigid and bit down on his lower lip with oversized front teeth, knowing what was coming next on screen.
Still, he flinched at the loud thunk from the chamber... or rather the memory of what he'd seen when he'd looked. A hand reaching out through the sickly yellow gas, blistered all to hell, leaving a trail of blood as it slowly slid down the glass until it disappeared back into the cloud.
"Okay, we can switch it off," the Barclay onscreen said shakily.
After a long moment of tense silence, he heard the young lab tech speak up. "It's on a timer, sir... we've still got 35 seconds left."
"Forget about the timer, just, just, just turn it off," Barclay's past self snapped in reply. "We have what we need. We're done. Experiment over, okay?!" With that, he strode over and shoved the lab tech aside, frantically tapping the screen in front of him to stop the flow of gas and have clean air pumped in to replace what remained.
The Director reached over to pause the footage before he had to see the girl's burnt, crumpled, and trembling form for a second time. Barclay had the sinking feeling that was the extent of the mercy he was going to get during this meeting.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence before he forced himself to look over to his boss, fidgeting nervously as he spoke. "Sir, I can explain --"
Without warning, the Director cut him off by backhanding him across the face, knocking him out of his chair. He hit the floor with a surprised yelp, and flinched again, expecting that his reaction would earn him another blow.
"Get off the floor," the Director snapped.
Barclay obediently pushed himself to his feet and forced himself to meet his mentor's flinty eyes with his own mismatched pair.
"You were saying," the Director said in a chilling tone, "that you had an explanation for wasting time and resources by tainting the results of our experiments?"
Barclay swallowed. "Continuing the experiment would've been a waste, sir. She... I mean, the subject," he quickly corrected himself, "would've had to be replaced after --"
"So you find a replacement," the Director cut him off. "God knows the city hasn't run out of homeless people. Or have you gotten squeamish about that part of your job too?"
Barclay looked down and shook his head. "N-no sir," he said in a low tone.
The Director looked unconvinced, and gestured to the lab tech on the screen in front of them. "As of this afternoon, your assistant there will be taking over for you as Lead Technician."
"WHAT?!" Barclay shouted in dismay before he could think himself, then reflexively cringed, bracing for the Director's response to this disrespect.
But the Director only looked at him coldly. "Until you can handle the kind of work we do here in the labs, I'll be giving you other assignments. Who knows, they might even be a better fit for you."
"What do you need me to do, sir?" Barclay asked quickly, doing his best to ignore the contemptuous edge to his mentor's voice.
The Director handed him a bag in answer.
Barclay opened it to find a collection of electronics, small, simple-looking, and discreet. "Listening devices...?" he ventured.
The Director nodded. "You're not the only one who's lost his stomach for experimentation recently. My co-director has gone soft as well. He falls for one of the subjects - my subject - and all of a sudden he's become a reformer." He rolled his eyes. "He could make a lot of problems for us if he keeps on like this. Anything you could dig up to prevent that would be appreciated."
"So what, do you want me to put these in his office or something?" Barclay asked.
"His mansion," the Director corrected. "Get in quickly, find some good spots to place them, and get the hell out of there. You can manage that much, can't you, Clay?"
--
The answer, as it turned out, was no. No, he could not. He'd made it into the mansion without anyone noticing, but that was about the best that could be said.
"OW, FUCK, OW. Let me --" he let out an indignant sound of pain and frustration as he struggled uselessly against two taller and much stronger private security guards as they dragged him to the mansion's study.
"Let you go?" one of the men said with a chuckle. "Sure." He and his colleague abruptly let go of Barclay, only to roughly push him toward their boss's desk. Unprepared for his sudden release, the scrawny young man stumbled and fell forward onto the floor with a grunt. He looked back at the two men with a resentful glare that only got him a couple of smirks in return.
"We found these on him, sir," the other security guard said, tossing the listening devices they'd dug out of his pocket clear over his head onto the desk.
John Thornton said nothing for a long moment, and Barclay didn't dare look up to meet his eyes. Still, he could easily picture the look of icy contempt on the face of his mentor's rival. This was far from the first time he'd been on the receiving end of it.
"Looks like your boss is getting desperate, Fletcher," he finally commented, sounding more amused than anything as he reached over to pick up and inspect one of the bugs Barclay had been sent to install.. "And like he'll be needing to find himself a new... assistant." His tone suggested this was far too generous a description for the burglar still on the floor in front of him.
Barclay stared sullenly at the ground, stubbornly refusing to talk, but he felt his chest tighten with anxiety. Losing his job was the best he could hope for.
His blood ran cold, though, when Thornton added, "I'm thinking I might do my old friend the favor of handling the hard part myself. He's always had a soft spot for you for whatever reason."
"Wait, what?!" Barclay abruptly scrambled to his feet with a shaky breath, looking for any way out with wide eyes full of panic. The windows behind the desk were shut and locked, though, and the only door out of the study was the one he'd just come through. He made a desperate rush back for the hallway, but one of the two security guards easily grabbed him, wrenching his arm back. He let out a yelp of surprise and tried to pull away, kicking at the other guard's shin and trying to stomp down on his foot as he approached, but this only earned him a rough knee to the tailbone. He did his best to bite back a screech, but in doing so he lost focus on trying to escape. By the time he could focus on anything else but pain, both men had a firm hold on him.
"You can't just...! Look, if I go missing, the Director's going to come looking for me," he sputtered, continuing to try to slip out of his captors' grasps. "A-and if he finds my body, or. Or if someone here rats you out... you wouldn't be the first director to become a subject!"
"Take him to the lake," Thornton ordered his staff in a casual tone, smirking at Barclay's threats but otherwise ignoring them. "Oh, and don't bother wasting a perfectly good duffel bag on this one."
--
This is the first half of what @skinofafish and I submitted for the Hurt and Comfort whump anthology. Directors Thornton and Richardson are @skinofafish's OCs.
@whumpsday gave me the words Please, Thank, Hardly, and Softly.
@soheavyaburden gave me the words Burn, Damn, Wince, and Silent.
So, here goes!
Please (Kohat RP with @soheavyaburden):
"The first day that Zail been able to walk without stumbling, even while still leaning against the wall in order to do so, the guards had come to his cell and hauled him, quite easily, by the elbow into the bolted-down chair in the corner of the room without explanation. Before he even could ask what was happening, he heard a snip, and felt the sudden cold of the room against the back of his neck as the hair covering it fell to the floor. He’d broken down completely the first time he'd felt a cut directly to the side of one of his antennae, thrashing wildly even as he realized the danger in doing so. "NO! No! STOP! Please! I'll - I'll tell you anything," he'd promised. 'I'll do anything! Whatever you want, let me -'
The guards paused briefly, as if considering, as he lost the ability to continue speaking, but in the end pulled him back against the chair as he sobbed mutely."
--
Thank (Enclave RP with @skinofafish):
"Topher nods, still looking uncomfortable at the way Richardson describes subjects. However, he figures that, unlike Fletcher (hopefully), the director is too set in his ways to be convinced on this. 'Thank you. I’ll take good care of… of Clay. That’s what he prefers to be called, right?' It would take some adjusting. Alaric and the others generally referred to him by spitting his last name out like an epithet."
--
Hardly (The Scavenger & the Forgotten, Part 6):
"'Nice try,' the man said casually, ignoring Clee as she sputtered to defend herself against the accusation, right before one of the soldiers fired a shot directly into the other woman's head. She collapsed to the ground with hardly a sound, while Radu yelped and jumped back, his clothes now coated in blood."
--
Softly (Kohat RP):
"Lenavee went to Sid’s cell. After a brief look toward her own cell, confirming Erukah wasn't there, she knocked softly on the door."
--
Burn (Enclave RP):
“Barclay stared at Zail warily, half-expecting that this stranger was part of another of Katie’s sick games. When Zail briefly met his eyes, he looked away, his face burning."
--
Damn (Enclave RP):
"'DON’T!' Harlowe yelled. She knew how this ended, when they didn’t play by the rules set by the guards. Seeing her warning was pointless, though, and seeing Koutoujian raising her gun, Harlowe charged the senior guard, bracing for the worst. She took one shot, two shots, three shots, and felt none of them. Not yet. She jumped over the low partition separating the guards from the Scrap Heap and flung herself at Koutoujian, head butting her, taking her to the floor, and then sinking her teeth into Koutoujian’s shoulder.
Koutoujian already had her at point-blank range, though, and shot her to the chest. Damn. Less precise than she’d like, but the labby would bleed out fast enough, even if she hadn’t hit anything vital."
—
Wince (Kohat RP):
"Harlowe abruptly tore off toward Wes Madaus’s apartment building. She could get into the building easily enough. That was a bad sign.
A better sign, though not for her, was that when she picked the lock, she promptly got a fist to the face.
Rather than stopping there, Fiona Madaus kneed her hard to the gut. 'YOU COULD’VE FUCKING KNOCKED,' Fiona fumed.
Harlowe shook her head with a wince. 'Needed to check.'"
--
Silent (Kohat RP):
"'Now let's see,' Kageki said, moving slowly and deliberately through the crowd of stunned and panicked onlookers. 'I can only spend so long here. Lots of things to see, lots of things to do before my time's up. So, apologies, but I can only spend my time on the people important enough to be worth killing.' He pulled a gun out of his coat with his offhand and pointed it at the head of the other barista. 'How about you,' he said, just loud enough to cut through the sound of screaming. 'How many people will miss you when you're gone?'
The crowd went nearly silent, and people looked to one another, whispering, trying to figure out what to do. The barista whimpered and looked around for support, and her fearful expression intensified into a look of betrayal. She wailed."
Not sure if any of you have already done this one (in the recent past...), but if you have time, spoons and interest, here are four words for you to find!
15 for Barclay, 28 for Sarah, and 69 for Usalmy? For your whumper asks. :)
-verkja
Thanks so much for the asks!
TW: Family separation/child removal, ableism, victim blaming, bad caretaker
15. Barclay: What is wrong with you?
Barclay visibly bristles. “Well, let’s see… not being one of those superkids from the labs. That’s a big one, seems like.”
There’s more to it than that, but no one has ever bothered or even been able to explain it to him. Just this sense he’s gotten over the years, even from most adults when he was growing up, that he’s “off” somehow, unwanted and fundamentally undesirable. Sure, people have come up with ways to justify it later… he’s angry, he’s rude, he’s arrogant, whatever. But they’d been the same way even when he tried his best to get people to like him.
At least when the Director gets mad at him, it’s because the Director knows he can be better if he tries harder.
28. Sarah: Do you ever feel guilty?
“I’ve tried to imagine what it’s like,” Sarah says breezily. “Having something inside your own head eating you alive. Making you destroy yourself like it would do anything to change what’s already happened. Can’t say I’m too disappointed to have missed out on that.”
69. Usalmy: Have you ever considered stopping?
“Believe me, every single day,” Usalmy says with exasperation in her voice. “I have what, thirty clients, and every single one of them expects me to just drop everything as soon as something comes up. Like I’m not running a whole program out of my house on top of it.
“Oh, poor little Havika’s feeling weepy yet again about giving up her baby to a family ready to take care of a child, now I have to spend thirty minutes going over this with her for what, the fifth time now? And over here, Princess Lita is throwing another tantrum because she doesn’t feel like following house rules, and soon enough she’s going to come whining to me about how mean Sarah is for enforcing them.
“Meanwhile, Morton is completely dependent on me for everything. Reminding him to clean himself. Helping him to keep a healthy diet. Explaining to everyone why a 56-year old attorney is having a public meltdown and hiding under a table just because a waiter touched him on the shoulder. It’s been 30 years now of excuses and apologies, with absolutely no change in his behavior.“
She throws her hands up. “But, I can’t exactly leave them to fend for themselves, now, can I?”
Bard for Clee and Ranger for Barclay, from the D&D asks?
-verkja
Thanks so much for the asks!
Clee: What is your character’s form of art? What is their favorite piece of art in that form? Why?
When she was a teenager in Ganymede's alien quarter, Clee's captors forced her to make and sell cheap souvenirs for tourists. Specifically, icons of the aspects of the Shattered Goddess of the Hiukree religion. Sure, this was sacrilegious as fuck, and highly ironic given that the same occupation that had given rise to the trafficking of young Hiukree children offworld also involves systemic repression of their religious practices and institutions, but Clee was like twelve or so at the time and just trying to survive, so she got pretty good at it. At least by the standards of tourist kitsch.
The examples she would've seen of actual religious iconography of the style she was imitating would've been from before she was taken off to Ganymede. She would've had the most positive associations with the icon of the patron avatar of the Sacrifice at the home of one of the few priestesses who still were able to bribe her way into doing things according to custom. And while it really does deserve to be called a work of art (the priestess spent over a decade perfecting it... which is NOT typical), Clee's fondness for it has more to do with association than anything.
--
Barclay: What is a small thing your character really appreciates?
Barclay appreciates low-stakes chances to show that he's competent, trustworthy, and capable of doing good things with neither threats, backhanded comments, gushing or reassurances, and then getting proportionally good feedback when he succeeds. Being responsible for looking after his caretakers' fish as part of living with them later on, for instance, will be way more fulfilling for him than said caretakers would have expected.
Usalmy: witch’s broom - Do you ever wish you could be a child again? Why?
She thinks she would enjoy going back to childhood. First, because she wouldn’t have so many responsibilities. Second, because she’d get to go back to a time where she wasn’t a disappointment or a laughingstock to pretty much her entire family and class.
BUT. She forgets how little control she had as a child. It wasn’t the extreme lack of autonomy that people like Harlowe and Clee dealt with, but it was still something she chafed under when she felt certain adults or older children were beneath her. She also remembers herself being much more well-liked by her peers than she actually was. She didn’t have a terrible social life as a kid, but it wasn’t quite as enjoyable as she remembers it.
Barclay: wonderland - What are you looking for in a friend?
He wants someone who has his back no matter how hard it gets. If not someone who will actually stick up for and protect him (which he would 100% never admit to wanting), then someone who will keep his secrets and cover for him. He does end up with someone in that role, thankfully.
Clee: rose petal - A few small things that make you happy?
She’s currently got twenty four small things tucked away in her coat pockets that have made her very happy so far… let’s see if she can keep them. 😈
Less literally, though, her favorite small joys are:
Numkarge (pronounced numb-CAR-yeh), a delicious, sweet blasphemy against multiple Girnic cuisines common in throughout the Sol system.
Telling tourists in the alien district of the wildest shit she can come up with about Girn culture and history, using the worst possible imitation of a boglander accent, and seeing how much she can get them to believe… and how much they’ll pay her as a “tour guide” to spin such bullshit.
Watching laughably bad dubs of cheesy Sarverni soap operas. Ironically. It’s not like she’s heavily invested in the relationship between two secondary characters in that one show or anything. And she definitely did not cry even a little at the major character death in the most recent season finale of another.
Me: roses - What fictional universe would you like to live in?
To continue with the Owl House brainrot, the Boiling Isles could be fun. Having magic is the default, you get a magical critter friend that also turns into a staff you can fly on, being queer is seemingly widely accepted, there’s a lot of weird-looking people so I wouldn’t feel too out there… of course, living under a despot who wants to destroy the world is a major con here.
Babylon 5 would also be a good choice, especially being on the eponymous space station. It seems like an interesting place even without all the events of the show, what with being amongst all types of aliens, and just… the experience of being in space. Plus, because relatively small setting, there’s a bigger chance I’d run into and be able to interact with blorbo from this particular show. Geeking out with Vir about Earth history would be awesome.
And in both these settings -one because healing magic, one because futuristic technology - I wouldn’t have to factor in not having my medical needs met.
Me: glow - What do you value most in people?
Staying kind and trying to do well by people even/especially after facing terrible things. Depending on the person, it makes me want to follow them, protect them, or both.
🌅 (sunrise) - What does your oc look forward to every day? Do they have something to look forward to in the first place? What makes them wake up in the morning? Why do they want to be alive?
Thanks for the ask! I’ll give a few characters here who show up a lot. Mind you, these answers are sometimes specific to certain times in their lives, as a couple of the continuities they’re in span 20 years or more.
Topher
He’s pretty much a workaholic, so he gets up to do whatever medical work (being a lab technician who smuggles subjects out, being a field medic in a civil war, being a medic on a space ship, and working at a health clinic for refugees, depending on the continuity and time within it) he’s doing at the time. There’s definitely been times where that’s the only thing keeping him going, especially when he isolates himself from his friends.
Harlowe
In general, pure spite keeps her getting up. She wasn’t built to last, so every new day is a “fuck you” to the people who created - and badly abused - her. She also always has people to protect (one of her best friend’s kids, among others, in one continuity) or rescue (finding her partner who was disappeared, in another). It’s not exactly looking forward to something as much as knowing she’s needed.
Lenavee
Primarily it’s looking forward to seeing her loved ones. In one continuity, it’s primarily her partner, his kids, and their two housemates later on in the story. In the other, this is especially true for the person she’s in love with while they’re working together. She also looks forward to playing and performing music, which eventually becomes her career in one form or other in both stories. Finally, she knows she needs to keep getting up because the people around her need someone to be supportive of them - especially those who otherwise have few if any positive connections.
Barclay
He keeps getting up to prove himself, first to his abusive boss, and much later to his found family who rescues him from captivity. The second one is much more fulfilling - even if a lot of the time it’s just feeding and caring for their many animals - though he struggles more with doing it because he’s extremely traumatized and depressed at the time. During the period of time he was in captivity, though, he had nothing to look forward to, and often had no sense of time so he wouldn’t have even known it was morning.
Thanks for the asks! Barclay has multiple whumpers and whumpees both, so I’ll only pick a couple here.
3) What do you think of whumper?
If you were to ask him about Director Richardson, Barclay would say that the Director was like a second father to him, and had done everything he could to help Barclay be successful. How convincing this is depends on how well he’s been able to meet the Director’s expectations recently. And how many injuries he has at the moment.
If you’re talking about Thornton, though… he shudders. Thinking of the bag, of nearly drowning that night. About being thrown in a cell with the Director’s remains. About the … creatures, you could barely call them dogs anymore, that Thornton had sicced on him. About so many other things. He doesn’t answer the question, but his expression and posture tells you everything you need to know.
14) Be honest… Did they deserve it?
Pre-captivity Barclay would shout that he didn’t care and storm off. Post-captivity Barclay would withdraw and quietly admit that they didn’t. In any case, he knows that most of them didn’t. Especially Varin and Tony (two of @skinofafish‘s characters).
In the continuity you and I have, though, he definitely thinks Kane deserves what he does to him. He hates vampires. For Reasons.
