remembered Living Weapon (Shale) must’ve been used at some point, so here’s a prompt clip about that:
“I’ve—the Weapon has killed people,” telepathic (canine) Living Weapon says. Doesn’t look at Caretaker. “The Weapon has tortured people. The Weapon knows exactly what someone’s mind looks like when it’s about to break, the Weapon knows how to make a death painful, and the Weapon knows how to track down escapees.”
Caretaker sits on the floor with their back against their bed, facing its nest of pillows and fluffy star blankets. Facing it.
They sigh. “I read your file, kid. I know.”
“No. If you knew, you wouldn’t—”
“Doctor has watched the tapes. Every last one. Even the ones they think I shouldn’t watch.”
Weapon stares at them. Doctor has been nothing but gentle with it since it got there. They’ve only gotten gentler. If they watched everything, they should know how much it can handle. How much it takes for it to listen—
“Kid?”
It clamps its mouth shut. Stops whining.
“C’mere, kid.” Caretaker reaches a hand out, petting it when it comes into range. Letting it curl up on their lap. “Look at me. The tapes I haven’t watched aren’t the ones where you torture people.
whumpee becoming afraid of whumper by merely sensing their intentions
whumpee tormented by other’s fear and pain, unable not to feel their suffering
whumpee being so overwhelmed by all the thoughts and feelings around them that their mind simply can’t bear it (bonus points for whumpee passing out eventually)
whumpee’s being rescued, and they relax before caretaker(s) even enter
whumpee breaking down when they feel caretaker’s affection and realise someone actually cares about them
whumpee waking up to a gentle melody in their mind; it’s not their thought, but caretaker really likes this song
a bit Edgar-focused, for a Shale episode, but I’ve been digging up lore while writing in this setting. and I wanted to link the two time periods better. also I decided he’s fine with either name for reasons you will find out when I finish writing that one
contains: young living weapon, nonhuman (canine) whumpee, found family, and references to slavery being both legal and encouraged in this setting
•••
The floor of the new training room is a different metal, with a trail of mats the Captain hops awkwardly across to get to the back of the room. To his armour. “Rowan, are you serious?”
The centaur, the very tall centaur who looks like the stars outside Shale’s wind—outside Captain Edgar’s window, shrugs. “Gold conducts mana, and you told me I was going to give Shale a magic lesson while you painted, Yan.”
The Captain sits down, organizes his armour, and puts the colourful metal buckets in order. Keeps them on the big mat. “Sure, and you were so distracted by me willingly asking about magic that you forgot how I stack my armour.”
Magic lesson. The Weapon broke a trainer, and its new one is a centaur bigger than any it’s ever dealt with. All the centaurs on this ship are big.
“Heavies are bigger than standards,” it says. “More expensive, too, so we’re only really found on agricultural planets and astral mining ships. And I’ll be fine, seedling.”
“Look—” he touches the floor with his bare hand, and it feels nothing. No thoughts, no magic, just the nothing of being in an empty room. The blank, empty sense of the Captain spreading to it. “If something happens, you’ll be okay.”
“I—” it doesn’t lick its muzzle. Nods. Keeps its shoulders straight. “The Weapon will defer to your judgement, Captain. Sir.”
“I get what you mean, Captain Astrum, that is definitely uncanny, sir.” It thacks its hoof on the floor. “Fuck, now you’ve got me doing it.”
It looks at the Captain. Steps up to him when he gestures for it to.
A hand lands on top of its head, and the calm silence settles in. “Kid, take a breath. What’s he feeling?”
Pulling away, stepping back onto the floor, it says, “Anger, frustration.”
“And who’s that pointed at?” Rowan asks. “Find the line between you and me, Shale. Tell me five things you can see.”
The Captain is wearing loose, white pants stained with blue and yellow and red and black. It can see purple stripes all the way down his arms and on his chest, not just the ones on his face.
Five things. Five things. Captain Edgar is one thing, but he’s important.
“Kid,” he says. “Five things is to get you remembering who you are, not a summarized report.”
Oh.
It looks at Rowan’s thoughts while he explains what it’s actually meant to do.
The tangled mess of thorns isn’t a wall, or a snare. It’s a tangle, closing in on the things underneath. What’s hiding?
The vines weave tighter—
Silence.
Silence.
The Captain takes his hand off the floor.
“Yep,” Rowan says stiffly, “that’s some concentrated mana. Now, can I show you how to ask for information, or do you want to try something else?”
“Ask?”
He taps at its shields, curious and open. Wanting to know if it’s watching what he’s doing.
All it is is reaching out, offering a thought, carefully watching the edges of someone’s… someoneness and wandering under the cover of the first trees. The first few landmarks of another’s mind.
But some are water, and some are metal, and some are echoed sound. How does it know how far to wander?
‘Who is Captain Astrum? Why did Rowan talk to Edgar the way The Weapon does?’
“Captain Astrum the Sixteenth,” Rowan says quietly, “was the man who owned this ship before him. Captain Astrum the Seventeenth is Ianuarius.”
Yan, he calls Edgar.
Names can be collected. Why does Captain Edgar have so many names?
He doesn’t have to manually scrape off the paint, but stripping red and black and gold off the purplish grey metal is more satisfying. Like the weeks he spent recycling almost all his grandfather’s sets of armour. Stripping swirling, starry patterns away.
Ianuarius sighs. Dips his brush into the right shade of blue.
They serve a better purpose now. The pain they bring is temporary: a gateway to freedom instead of a preview of what’s to come.
And he took a break.
His pirate phase was spraypainted armour and the freedom to kill slavers. Painted like a snake and pretending to be someone else for a change. The next time he sees Picea, he’s buying them a—
Oh. They have a bank account. Fae are legally sapient, now. There’s six? Eight? He keeps forgetting the number. It’s been five most his life.
They still don’t trust the law, but to be fair, they’re a freeborn pirate whose prey is slaver ships, and he doesn’t trust the law much either.
“Captain!” Shale squints at a cup, and it launches into the ceiling. Chattering its teeth at the thing, it tries again, and again, and again, until Rowan tells it to take a breath.
“Magic’s tricky, kid,” Ianuarius says. “Throwing it’s better than what I can do.”
“But I’m—” it looks down at the floor, staring through its paws. “But The Weapon is better than this, sir. It’s supposed to be competent, and—” its voice cracks— “failure is not competence.”
“Not knowing your own strength isn’t failure,” Rowan says gently. “That’s normal enough, and maybe the way I do things isn’t the way that works for you. That’s okay, seedling. We can figure it out. Do you want to try gardening? I heard you like the gardens.”
“Or we can paint,” he says, when it stares blankly. “You can paint with me.” It’s not like he’s doing much more than waiting for paint to dry, doodling blue flowers on the wall.
It paints in blue. The same blue, trying to copy him.
Rowan sits down next to Shale, and picks green. Not the pre-mixed green, but a carefully chosen shade that reminds him of the gardens. “What’s your favourite colour, Shale?”
It tips its head. “Why would a weapon need a favourite colour?”
“Same reason an asteroid miner does,” he sighs. “To remember the world has good things in it, too. To get to the next day.
“The first time I saw green,” he says softly, “real, living green, I was with the Captain.”
Ianuarius closes his eyes.
“I was almost sixty, then, around his age, when he was sick of—” trying to fix the centaur ration issue but the website was still broken and he just wanted to give up and cry but they needed him— “just dealing with the most frustrating thing,” he says softly. It’s such an understatement.
“So I marched right up to him and gave him a solution he didn’t want to hear.”
Shale takes in a sharp breath, claws scraping on the floor. He doesn’t open his eyes to look at it. He doesn’t want to see it scared of him.
He can’t see it scared of him.
“It was the only option—” it was a thing they’d been doing in secret for decades— “and he hated it. So he went to the gardens, and brought me with him.”
“And I agreed with you,” he whispers. “I lied down in the grass, staring up at a rowan tree, and I told you you were right.”
“He listened,” Rowan says. “I thought he’d kill me for it, but he listened. Lying in the green, kid, and there was so much green.”
“Purple,” it says.
“Hm?”
“Captain Edgar has purple stripes,” it says, tapping its nose to his cheek. The paint on his armour is dry enough to cover in white flowers, now.
“I like his purple. Because it’s his,” it says. Hesitates. “Do you like purple, sir?”
He shakes his head, mouth dry. His hands are steady while he paints, though, and that’s what matters.
“The blanket you gave me is purple, and the bracelet beads, and—” it keeps talking.
Purple is a genemod burned into his bloodline. Purple is a history he only learned about because his grandfather died, forcing him to end his studies and meet horrors he was only vaguely aware of.
It is the hair he dyes black and the stripes that still make the old crew flinch, if they’re tired. The main colour in Captain Astrum XVI’s armour, and the old enforcer uniforms.
But it’s good, to the kid. Purple is safety and comfort.
Imagining how it would be for a telepathic whumpee in captivity with a sadistic whumper. Not only is there the regular suffering of being held captive and tortured, but there is also the horrible experience of experiencing what it’s like to be in whumper’s head.
Whumpee could hear all the dark thoughts and terrible urges, see all the gruesome images. They could view memories of what whumper did to others as well as what whumper plans to do to them.
I imagine it could be extremely taxing for a telepath to be in constant close contact with a mind like that.
Hi Anon! I’d love to! Thanks for requesting this, here you go! (P.S. sorry that it's short!)
“It’s all too loud,” Whumpee cried, “Caretaker, it’s all too loud!”
Caretaker was crouched down in front of the kneeling Whumpee, who had their hands over their ears and was shaking terribly. Trickles of blood made their way out of Whumpee’s nose and down their face.
“I know, Whumpee,” Caretaker said softly, “your telepathy and psychic powers are out of control, just try to calm down. Focus on my voice and my voice only.”
That seemed to help for a moment, but after half a minute Whumpee cried out and curled further in on themselves.
“I can hear the entire city,” Whumpee sobbed, “it’s too much, I- GAH!”
Objects in the room began to levitate as Whumpee’s eyes glowed with their power. The items swirled around the room in a wide circle, going faster and faster until a steady wind kicked up. Caretaker’s eyes widened and they grabbed Whumpee by the shoulders.
“Whumpee, listen to me,” Caretaker said, “only you can stop this, try to focus, you can do it.”
Whumpee nodded and screwed their eyes shut. Slowly but surely, the objects in the room slowed down and returned to their rightful places. Whumpee swayed to the side; Caretaker caught them before they could hit the ground.
“Whumpee?” Caretaker asked.
Whumpee didn’t respond. They had passed out trying to control their power.
“Oh, Whumpee…”
Caretaker lifted Whumpee into a bridal carry and made their way to Whumpee’s bedroom. They tucked Whumpee under the covers and wiped away the blood with a tissue. They sat down by Whumpee’s bedside and squeezed their hand.
“You did so good, Whumpee,” Caretaker said softly, “you’re gonna be okay.”
Prev: One, two. This is fanfic for the book Ocean's Echo, containing my own OCs.
It had only been training manoeuvres, but Davi’s first flight drawing on Saelin’s powers was something else. For the first time, he fully understood why this was considered to make an pilot architect’s career.
Davi pulled his headset off and turned to Saelin with a grin as the shuttle hovered.
“Oh, well done, Saelin!” he exclaimed, his heart still thundering with the excitement of the chase, the triumph of pulling them through it. The sense of being two-as-one lingered, an awareness of Saelin’s limbs and heart and mind in the chair beside him, the whisper of chaotic space beyond the metal walls of the shuttle. “You’re a natural! That was incredible! I knew you’d be good at this - we are going to be unstoppable.”
Saelin tipped his face up, the same adrenaline rush visible in his quick breathing and bright eyes for all of one second. Then - so fast Davi barely had time to register it - he was retreating from the sync. Davi was closed out of the lingering echo of reader senses with a snap.
“Excuse me,” Saelin said, sounding strangled. He dragged his own headset off and turned his face away, one hand shielding his eyes. “Can - I - Sir, permission to leave?”
“Leave?” Davi repeated, baffled. He quested out along the sync-bond and found nothing but a cornered-animal panic that made him pull back. “We’re in a shuttle, Sae- Agent Thirty-two. What do you mean, leave?”
“I - I know,” the reader said, still sounding odd. “I can’t - I can’t - permission to step away - please - ”
Davi had been opening his mouth to say no, to demand an explanation, but that last word got to him. “If you’re unwell, I can bring us in to dock without you,” he said curtly.
“Thank you, sir,” Saelin said, as if through gritted teeth. He fumbled with the seat restraints, threw himself out of the chair, and crossed behind Davi heading for the back of the shuttle.
Davi brought the shuttle back in to dock, easy enough it didn’t require much thinking. What was the problem? Things had gone well.
Saelin had been consuming the navigation training materials with a dogged and single-minded focus that Davi had thought boded well. The navigation officer who’d been training him had said he was ready, and hadn’t had anything negative to report about his attitude. Davi had even seen the reader’s careful blankness give way to a smile once or twice, voice lifting as he grasped one of the concepts.
This was the first time they’d actually put all of it into action, and Davi would understand if the reader was nervous - Davi himself had been nervous - but everything had gone as well as it could possibly have gone.
So what was the problem?
“All right,” he said, putting the headset aside again, taking a moment to straighten the one that his reader had thrown haphazardly onto the navigation panel. “I’m going to need an explanation for that, Agent Thirty-two.”
To Davi’s confusion, his reader had found a corner to cram himself into, on the brushed-metal floor beside one of the seats, with his knees drawn up to his chest.
“Sorry,” he muttered, seeming embarrassed as he uncurled himself and got to his feet. “I - I apologise, sir.”
“What’s the problem?” Davi asked.
Saelin didn’t meet his eyes, fixing his gaze on the division pin on his shoulder instead. “No problem, sir,” he said, voice strained. “Is that - do you want to do another run on the course?”
“No,” Davi said. “There isn’t time.”
Saelin’s shoulders dropped in what Davi instantly knew was relief. Then why did you suggest it?
“I want,” Davi continued, “To know what’s wrong. Why you dropped everything and ran.”
“Nothing is wrong,” Saelin told Davi’s division pin. “Then, are we finished with this training block?”
“… yes, but…”
“May I return to quarters? I’m not hungry.”
Later, in their quarters, Davi alternatively stood and paced. Saelin just stood.
“I want to know what’s wrong with you, is what!” Davi said.
“Today, or in general?” Saelin said, a short-lived quirk in his face rapidly smoothed away. “I understand reading is genetic. I’d like to go to bed now, sir.”
Davi ran a hand through his hair. He realised that he was standing in the doorway to the tiny shared bathroom, and that Saelin probably wanted him to move aside so he could get ready for bed. He planted his feet instead.
“Look, I don’t know what you were expecting, from today,” Davi began. “You’ve not seen chaotic space before, I know. Things were… fast-paced. But the training course was a breeze, especially with you along. Today was a big success, no matter what it felt like to you. You did great. You should be proud.”
If anything, the reader’s face went more blank. “Thank you, sir.”
Apparently realising Davi wasn’t going to move, Saelin turned away, and sank down to sit on his bunk instead. He checked the schedule on his wristband, then laid it calmly in his lap and stared at the wall.
“Does it not seem like a success to you?” Davi asked.
“It does. I’m glad it went well.”
“So that’s why you ran away, then?” Davi pressed. “You’re just so glad it went well you had to go off into the corner for a cry or something? Come off it.”
Saeling said nothing. His gaze remained on the wall. The sync bond was as closed off as he could make it - as if there was a wide corridor, running between their minds, and Saelin was pressing himself against the wall at the far end.
It would be easy to cross that distance. Davi was only being polite in not doing so.
Does he think I’m stupid? Davi wondered. Does he think I’m negligent enough that if he just sits there like a grey rock I’m going to get bored and go away? Does he think if you ignore a problem for long enough it will cease existing?
“If there is a problem,” Davi said, trying to be patient. “If you are unwell, or there was something wrong with the sync that I haven’t noticed - ”
“There isn’t.”
Davi gritted his teeth. “If there is a problem,” he repeated. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to fix it, if you won’t tell me what it is. We need to communicate.”
“Nothing is wrong with me, sir,” Saelin said, staring straight ahead.
Davi wanted to yell at him - to grab him by front of his uniform and shake him - to tell him Davi wasn’t a moron and he didn’t appreciate being treated like one. Anything to get Saelin to do something that wasn’t sit there and tell transparent lies with a blank face.
Instead, frustrated and angry, he did something that he was not proud of - but it was so easy, much easier than doing any of those other things. As easy as thinking about it.
“Saelin, tell me why you’re upset.”
Saelin took one deep breath, eyelids fluttering as the command took.
“I hated going deep into the sync,” he said, the strangest combination of flatness and turmoil, words spilling out of him uncontrolled. “Not during, but after. While we were in the sync and working, it felt good, and that’s what I hate. I’m upset that it went well. I was good at navigating and I don’t want to be good at navigating, I want to go home. You said ‘well done’ and touched my mind like… like… fucking smug and affectionate and possessive, your reader, I don’t want to be your reader, I don’t want your approval or your affection. You’re revolting. We were one, I was you, I know you. Arrogant asshole, you think this is just great, you think we can be fucking friends. Friends when you practically own me. We were together and it worked and I’m good at it and the sync felt right and I hate it, hate the sync, hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you - ”
“Stop,” Davi said. The bulkhead, the wall of their quarters, bumped into his waist and he realised he’d stepped back. His hand out as if to hit the off switch on that vicious litany of misery.
Saelin shivered, arms wrapping around himself as the command faded. He licked his lips, obviously deciding on something to say of his own choice. Davi didn’t want him to; he wanted him to shut up, but this time he managed to restrain the reflexive movement to write him.
“So,” Saelin said. “Happy? Sir?”
“No, I -” Davi opened his mouth, but couldn’t find any words. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“What did you make, a month?” Saelin asked, and he was looking at Davi now, why the fuck had Davi wanted him to look at him, the blank stare at the wall had been much better than this. “Not unless it’s necessary for work, isn’t that what you said?”
“I’m sorry,” Davi said, automatic, guilt like a stone in his stomach. He tried to mask the shock on his face. What were you expecting him to say? Why the hell would you give him such an open-ended command? “I - I didn’t - ”
“Oh, you don’t have to apologise to me, sir,” Saelin said, his voice light and deferential and barbed. “I’m a conscripted reader. You’re allowed - nay, encouraged - to write me as much as you like.”
Davi sat down on his bunk with a thump and put his head in his hands. “I said that I’d - It’s not supposed to be… I shouldn’t have…”
What were you expecting? You had to have an idea. You couldn’t have expected him to like you, after seeing how miserable he was initially?
Davi was used to being likable. People did like him. Maybe somehow he’d thought that would… carry over. He’d gone out of his way to try and put the reader at ease, hadn’t he?
“Am I in some sort of trouble, now?” Saelin asked. He shook the wristband to indicate his schedule. “Do I get a punishment work detail, or something? There’s not a lot of room. Sir.”
“No.” Davi squeezed his eyes shut, counted to five, then sat upright. “That wasn’t fair of me, and I’m sorry. Perhaps it’s best if we just… forget this happened.”
Saelin was looking at him again, and Davi badly wanted him to stop. The sync bond was back to being empty and tidy, but now Davi could see the currents swirling underneath the smooth surface. “All right,” he said. “In that case. May I go to the deck two rec room and read for a while? Sir.”
“Sure,” Davi said, relieved. He lifted a hand in a wave, and reached for some sort of equillibrium; to get back into the rhythm they’d had for the last few weeks. “Sure, go on. Don’t… don’t stay out too late. We have… more training tomorrow.”
You don’t need him to like you, Davi told himself. You just need him to obey you.
Well, fucking great news, I have that covered. That’s the one part of this job that is given to me as a freebie!
Saelin gathered a couple of book cubes in silence, opened the door to the hallway with a hiss. He hung back in the doorway for a moment. “Davi?”
Davi looked up. “Yes?”
Saelin met his eyes, and they were hard and cold as glass, and in them Davi read the echoes of hate you, hate you, hate you.
“A word of advice from a reader,” Saelin said. “You should be careful what answers you go looking for, because if you don’t like what you find, there isn’t any putting them back in the box afterwards.”
“Yes,” Davi said, letting his head fall back into his hands. “Thanks for that.”
alien puppy!! (a Shale POV version that continues to bedtime)
contains: living weapon whumpee, rescued whumpee, nonhuman (canine) whumpee, young whumpee, telepathic whumpee, fear, (referenced) shock collar, human caretaker, and caretaker new master
•••
The alien in the weapon’s quarters is scary. New. They feel… empty, like if it looked away, it’d forget they ever existed at all.
Might be a mind-wall, but mind-walls usually let something out, and it’s never seen a mind-wall it couldn’t crack. It’s good enough to scare some of the testers (and handlers) into punishing it.
“Orders?” it asks, when the inspection seems to run too long. Flinches.
Yesterday, it was shocked for speaking out of turn.
Its new handler (Empty-handler) doesn’t seem to care, just orders it to eat and gives it a new command. “Heel?” it asks, because it sounds like what heel is. They accept it.
They get it cleaned up—its fur is soft, now, didn’t know its fur could be that soft—and tested by Gabriel, who is not a sir but a Dr.
Named by Gabriel, who doesn’t ask Empty-handler for permission, but is granted it anyway. She barely tests it, but it can’t say that to a tester. Maybe it’s a behaviour test. Maybe it has something to do with the ‘blood sample’ she takes. But, either way, it gets to know it passed with a sticker on its new sticker-chart.
There’s probably a file too, but it isn’t allowed to read those.
“Heel,” they say. “Now, we don’t have a free room for you, and I’m not keeping you in the brig, so you’re staying in my room. The Captain’s quarters. It’s too big for me—big enough to fit Atlanteans for accessibility reasons, but we’ll need to see the quartermaster for supplies.”
The ‘quartermaster’ is a familiar alien. One of the tentacle ones. Large and purple-black, with one eye in the centre of her face, and the tentacles dangling from her head have gold undersides. Like Empty-handler’s fur, only… not.
“Captain Edgar.” She telepaths surprised-pleased. And— ‘Stay out of my mind, little dog. It’s rude to pry.’
No shock?
No shock. It presses a hand to its neck when no one is looking, hoping there isn’t a camera. No collar, Captain Edgar still has it in his pocket, so hopefully he’ll forget about it.
The weapon is shown a room with stuff. Pillows and blankets and clothes that are too big for it, but it doesn’t matter.
Weapons don’t need clothes. The scaly ones that walk like it don’t need clothes either.
It puts on multiple clothes that don’t have enough arm-holes and are too big. The Quartermaster promises to ‘tailor’ the clothes to fit it.
“Pick what you need, and put it in here,” Captain Edgar says, pointing at a cart. “Then, we’ll bring it to the room and get you settled.”
It picks a basic cushion and blanket. He sighs, putting two extra blankets—one heavy, and one fluffy—and a couple extra pillows in the cart.
“Sir, with all due respect, the weapon doesn’t need—”
He ignores it, adding eight things it doesn’t recognise and a piece of rope to the cart.
“Anything you don’t claim is getting sold, Shale. And it’s good to have extras.”
Slowly, reluctantly, it adds an interesting blanket to the cart when he isn’t looking. Puts a similar, less interesting (but softer) blanket in too. If he takes one away, it’ll still have good blankets.
They go up to his room.
The bed is a large pillow. There’s even a smaller pillow on the floor. “Dandelion, my dog, used to sleep there, or curled up at the foot of my bed.
“You’re welcome to sleep in either spot, and we can set up a nest if that’s more comfortable.”
Either spot. Either spot, and one of those spots is on a handler’s bed. It’s never even seen a handler’s bed. It looks….
Its new bed isn’t a vaguely fluff-stuffed sack with a thin blanket on top. It’s a real pillow, rectangular, with a nice soft border around it. With its new blankets…. The weapon suppresses a buzz, keeping itself as still and calm as possible.
Letting its new handler know it likes the bed will make him use it as leverage.
Across from the beds, there’s a fabric hanging over the wall. Covering it completely. It doesn’t know why.
“Your dog, sir?”
He shows it a picture. “Non-sapient companion from my ancestral planet, Earth. Er… non-thinking. Less intelligent.”
“Like me.”
“Your file says otherwise,” Captain Edgar says. It must, since it’s been corrected for thinking too much. “You can crack mental shielding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll get you set up with lessons from Hex about telepathing appropriately. Cracking shields is, according to what I’ve heard, painful, so you shouldn’t do it unless….”
According to what he’s heard, it thinks, with no small amount of horror. Not experienced, heard. It hasn’t experienced it either, but it’s strong. It can’t even see his mind-walls.
How much stronger than it is he?
How much stronger than it is he?
“Now, would you rather go to bed now, or after a proper tour of the ship?”
If the tour—can he hear it think? It can hear simple thoughts, even if they aren’t telepathed, but it’s strong. If it can’t hear that, he—
Is still waiting for an answer. “The ship.”
Wrong answer. If the tour takes too long, it might not get enough time to sleep.
But it’s too late to say no, so it just follows him. It likes the cafeteria the most, which has nothing to do with the non-ration food Captain Edgar gives it. The bone looks like one of the things it didn’t recognise before.
The gym is nice too. All the stars in the window……….
How long has it been since it’s seen the sky? It can’t remember if it’s ever seen it, struggled with the words until Captain Edgar….
“—Shale?”
It jumps. “Sorry, sir, I—”
“Hey, easy,” he murmurs, scratching its head. Running his hand through its fur. “Do you want to keep stargazing, or do you want to play for a bit now that the tour is over?”
“Play.” It’s the safe choice, even if it doesn’t know what it is. Choosing a punishment makes it hurt less. It—
Pulling at the rope with its teeth, it thrashes its head to get Captain Edgar to let go. Draws a touch-sight illusion of his hands dropping the rope—
He twists it out of its mouth while it’s distracted. While it’s expecting him to be confused.
And they do it again. And again. And again. And again, until it learns he isn’t distracted by illusions and starts winning the rope.
“I don’t think I can tire you out before the day-cycle,” he pants.
Its legs are sore. Its jaw hurts. But if its new handler isn’t done with training, it’ll work until it collapses. It says nothing.
“You win, Shale. Playtime’s over, we’re going to sleep.”
It manages to get halfway to the Captain’s quarters before tripping over itself. Before Captain Edgar picks it up and carries it, clearly fed up with its struggles.
Gently, he sets it down on the half-sized bed at the foot of his bed. Pushes aside the fabric to reveal a window filled with stars. “There you go,” he murmurs. “Today was a lot, wasn’t it? Now you should to sleep, and I’m going to check your file to see if there’s anything I missed about getting you to sleep—”
“The weapon has no sleep command,” it says. “Would you like to—”
“No. Not happening. There is nothing I want less than to have to give you permission to sleep every night, kid.” He drapes a soft blanket over it. “You like stars, don’t you?”
“I do, sir,” it says. It feels wrong to say, but he already knows, so it isn’t revealing anything this handler couldn’t already use against it.
The soft blanket, the one draped over it, is covered in stars.
Shale waits for Captain Edgar to fall asleep, and waits another couple minutes just to be sure. His mind is as silent asleep as it is awake.
Curling up, tucking its snout into its fur so its speech is muffled, pulling its mind-wall up as high as it goes, it chokes a tiny, quiet, “Thank you.”
Yeah it’s about Shale again: telepathic (living weapon) Whumpee + Caretaker who is immune to magic
Whumpee has never encountered a mental shield it couldn’t shatter. But Caretaker… Whumpee cannot sense Caretaker’s intentions. At all. It has to rely on words and body language.
Everyone has hidden feeling-words under their real words, but Caretaker…. Caretaker doesn’t seem to have them. Caretaker’s shields are invisible.
Whumpee doesn’t know what to do.
Bonus: Caretaker mentions they’ve heard mental shields hurt when they’re cracked, because Whumpee needs to learn how to telepath without hurting people, and Whumpee is horrified. They heard. Not experienced, heard. How powerful is Caretaker? Whumpee hasn’t had its shields crack, but it can’t even put a dent in Caretaker’s. Caretaker could probably shatter its shields without any effort at all. No wonder they’re its new handler
