driftfleet | (no subject)

[She nods.] My part went easily enough. I managed to phase through the device and it did a lot of nothing. Either they did something to my powers or the augments work in some way I can't disrupt that easily.

Laura moved on to trying to cut it out of him. That's when things got messy. The panic it sets off is in the person with the augment and the one trying to tamper with it. We had Logan chained up just in case, but it wasn't enough. Laura passed out before she could remove it and Logan went into a rage. A chain snapped and the next thing I knew he was stabbing Leia before I could get to him.

[So it affects the assailant as much as the target. Clever, really. Horrifically clever. Other than Logan he doesn't know the people involved, not personally. He's seen some of them on the network by now. Still, he grimaces a bit at the mention of stabbing.]

I can see why she might not have wanted that in a public report. Was he subdued?

Yeah, Laura and I took care of that. She wasn't out long. Then Logan was out and when he came to he was back to his senses. Meanwhile, Leia summoned a healer for herself and it all worked out more or less. [Except they didn't achieve their goals and everyone got hurt at some point except Kitty.]

[He nods, lost in thought for a moment. What would have happened, if one of them had died in this process? It's something he still wonders about. No one had responded in the positive when that other girl asked if anyone had died in the Fleet. It's something he wants to know. Much easier to get the measure of a place like this, if you know the permanence of death.]

Even so, I imagine none of you would try that particular method again.

You're right. It was a good deterrent. Which is probably the point. I didn't have much hope for the cutting. I assumed something anyone could do had been tried before even though I didn't have any details on it. That's another thing, with people always coming and going it's easy to lose any kind of history about the place. People end up just repeating the same patterns.

[She wonders about the death bit too. That actually shifted in MarinaNova once the virtual reality nature of the place was exposed. People would simply return the next day with some...glitches. Before that if you died you stayed dead.]

It's always an issue, with places like this. I know that I was the only person to witness some things in Kyriakos, and once I was gone there was only my word for it.

[Well, that and a few grisly bits of proof. He pulls out his communicator and flips it open.]

However, having it recorded goes some way to preventing a total loss.

[She nods.] Leia was smart in documenting things and offering them up, but how long before those get forgotten and lost too?

We housed information with the Defense Force in the prison. But it's not like we had the time to sit down and update every new arrival. We'd never make any progress moving forward either.

We had... meetings, sometimes. [From his tone, it's clear he doesn't think much of them. They always were shambolic and mostly devoid of consensus.]

There's no way of knowing. All you can do is hold on to what you know.

That's probably why these things don't get defeated. [At least not in her experience.] They stoke our personal dramas and keep us distracted. People come and go. Some people have no reason to want to leave at all. Some are just ill-equipped.

That's the name of the game.

[It's not always easy, he knows, to see the forest for the trees.]

Yeah, I say this like you don't know. You're one up on me when it comes to these places. [One of the things she likes about him actually. Not that she'd wish it on anyone.]

Maybe so. But you would have known from the beginning of the prison that something had to be done. [He'd had no such luck in the library. Nor had he been instrumental in toppling the Portraits. It had been hard enough living day to day, without a concept that there was anything else to go back to.]

[She nods.] When they messed with our heads it was usually only for a day at a time and in different ways. Okay, we can tie for at being awesome. [How any of this made them awesome she wasn't sure, but it's what she's rolling with as she gives him a smile.]

I can deal with a tie. [In a contest with no clear winners, that is pretty acceptable.]

Good. I was afraid we'd have to arm wrestle to declare a victor. That would have been so embarrassing for you. [We've reached the teasing portion of Kitty's friendship.]

We can't have that, can we. I have a certain image to maintain.

Understandable. So, want the tour? We even have some kale bacon which I'm assured is a treat and not a punishment.

Yes... only, what is kale bacon? [He'd have to assume it's made out of something other than the usual bacon, but kale is unfamiliar to him.]

[It's probably kelp. Either way it sounds about the same to her.]

Bacon made out of vegetables basically. I don't know if you noticed it [Since someone forgot to point it out earlier in the thread] but Vision has a garden hanging up in the upper portion of the cargo bay. So, he grows things. Mostly food and medicine I think. I'm not exactly the gardening type.

I did see it, briefly. I don't think I'd know how to grow things in space.

[He gets to his feet.]

[She'll slide past to get the door and lead him to the hall.] I guess we can star with the cargo bay. [She heads back that way and when they reach the room she starts airwalking up to where the garden hangs.] The Iskaulit has more. Have you been over there?

[After a pause, he lifts off the ground himself and follows her up, in a straight line.]

I have, though not as much as I could have been. The gardens, though, I have seen.

[It held some interest for him. He had started a garden, in his last days in Kyriakos, part of his never-ending determination to ensure there would be an independent food supply for his team. He can only hope it was tended after he had passed the duty along when he left.]

There seems to be a lot of usable space on that ship.

I go over there to train most days. [And she's done a sweep of everything else, but the training room is definitely where she spends the bulk of her time.]

There is a lot of space. [She glances over at him.] Was that just an off-hand comment or was it more of a "and I have plans for it" comment?

Off-hand. Though in an emergency, it's a decent source of metal. [He doesn't particularly want to gut a spaceship for material, especially since they're in space and that could go badly. Regardless of whether he can reach the hulls or not, he's not about to start blowing holes in things and find out the hard way that he can breach them anyway.]

Suuuure as long as no one is on it. Tends to be kind of popular. And here I thought maybe you'd want to put a knitting room in it or something. [Okay, maybe not specifically that. She takes a few backward steps back down toward the floor to continue the tour.]