[From "Send me ⚓️ for our muses to be shipwrecked together"
...Not sure who should approach who, and this got really long, so leaving it at this...
Ultimately, how Ed ended up on the Grid was trivial. An anomaly he noticed, and couldn't stop thinking about, and, on a whim, went to go investigate.
It didn't take him long to find Flynn's creepy basement lab. It took him less time to find the digital world (he was without a doubt inside the computer, because that was most certainly the digitization laser he shot himself with).
It took them even less time to find him.
All he knew was that one moment he was standing in a dusty arcade, the next... he was still standing in the arcade, except as if it existed in a different dimension. In a different world.
And then two... programs? in glowing orange suits approached him, arrested him (for what, he wasn't certain), and put him on one of those ships from Flynn's game that he was never allowed to play as a kid. Space Paranoids, if he remembered correctly.
In any case, they put him on the ship, with several other programs. He'd already had a stressful day (thanks, Mackey), and was barely keeping it together when one of the other programs mentioned that they were all going to 'derezz.' Ed wasn't certain what that word meant, but from the context, he was convinced the guards were taking them to their deaths.
He was claustrophobic from the number of people programs on the ship, and he may have shot himself with a high-powered laser, but he certainly didn't want to die.
He couldn't breathe, he could barely form a thought from how his mind was reeling.
And then suddenly Ed could feel the lines code that made up the ship, and their restraints that held his feet in place. He had no idea what he did, but the next moment, their restraints were gone.
The woman next to him instantly attacked the guards with a staff he had no idea where she got it from. The ship descended into chaos as the other programs joined in the melee, and then in altitude when one of the programs destroyed the ship's pilot with the disc on their back.
Ed didn't have a disc, or a staff, and he certainly didn't know anything about piloting... anything, really, but nobody had yet realized that their ship was about to crash. So he carefully skirted the edge of their cabin to the controls.
A joystick. Really Flynn? Murder on his wrist. Joy of joys.
Ed... tried to keep them flying, but he had never been good at video games, and he really didn't have time to do much but pull up and lessen the impact when they crashed into the mountainside.
The next thing he knew, he was face down in the snowy, barren wasteland outside the city. When he rolled over to see his surroundings, the recognizer was a fair distance away (he see it clearly: blessedly, his glasses weren't broken in the crash). He must have been thrown out one of the broken windows in the crash. His ears rang, and Ed was certain he was both bleeding and concussed.
There was someone else lying in the snow, thankfully a distance away, but Ed had no idea what happened to the rest of the programs on the ship.
He knew he should get moving, in case any of the guards survived, but Ed needed a moment to recover before he attempted anything else.
((Ooooh, awesome, thank you so very much!))
Living on the Grid was hazardous nowadays, especially for a Renegade. Ark specialized in causing trouble for the Occupation, but knew that it was going to catch up with her one of these cycles.
She had been pulling another one of her self-assigned missions, when the sky had lit up in a way she hadn't seen in countless cycles.
A User was rezzing into the Grid.
Unfortunately, the beam of light distracted her long enough for the Occupation to catch up to her.
Badly outnumbered, Ark decided to save her strength for better odds.
She was loaded into a Recognizer, along with quite a few other programs.
A short time later, someone was loaded in next to her, someone with strange clothes she had never seen before. Was he the User? Or just a program with a quirky style? Was odd fashion a good enough reason for him to be arrested?
As she analyzed him, all of a sudden, him, her, and everyone else was free.
She took advantage of the surprise and chaos, and immediately leapt into action. Fortunately, they hadn't searched her too well in the confusion over the beacon, so her staff had remained with her.
Bolstered by the knowledge that there was likely a User among them, she fought hard, joined in by all the other prisoners on the ship.
The battle didn't last long before everything exploded.
Ark was flung out of the Recognizer and away from it, falling into the snow.
She wasn't out long, the cold stinging and bringing her back conscious, her circuits coming back online.
Using her staff to help, she pulled herself up and started looking around for any survivors.
She saw someone in the snow and started making her way towards them, using her staff as a walking stick while she still got her bearings.
