driftfleet | video.

Who: Thor and you
Broadcast: fleetwide
Action: on the Blue Fish if you want him
When: today

[Thor has obviously stuck his communicator on the desk in his room, because the video opens with him in profile, sitting on his bed. For a few moments all he does is toss a small rubber ball out of the frame, then catch it when it rebounds off the opposite wall with a thud back towards him. He does this a couple of times before he speaks.]

When I arrived in the Fleet, I was told a lot of things and given several warnings. All of them with good purpose. What I remember most though is being told not to try and take out the augment. More than one person told me this.

[A sidelong glance at the communicator, before he throws the ball into the wall again. Thud. Catch.]

No one said why exactly, other than the obvious part where it's stuck in our heads. Still, I would ask what exactly we know about these augments. What's been tried to get them out, what happens when you do? And have they been known to do anything else besides give us information about our ship roles.

If I had heard more about it earlier, I probably wouldn't have-- [Hold that thought: Thor misses the next rebound on the ball and it smacks him in the head, making him jump and drop out of frame for a moment.] --shit.

[Okay, he’s back up, with the offending ball tossed away into a corner. He rubs at his face before continuing, faintly annoyed. Everything is out to spite him today.]

Anyway. If you know something about them, I'd like to hear it. Or even if you have an opinion on them. Those are good too.

[One day he'll make a network post when he's in a cheerful mood. Maybe.]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Nothing good about them. I think they have some sort of defense mechanism to keep us from removing them.

[ There's a hesitant pause before Carl looks at the camera again. ]

A friend of mine tried to remove hers quite a while ago. She lost a lot of blood. Almost died. She might have if she'd managed to get it out.

Edited 2018-03-04 00:49 (UTC)

Odd. [ look, this is gonna be a very helpful interjection... ] I would have expected better reflexes.

That part I know of. A sort of terrible feeling that you get if you try it.

[He knows from experience. Poorly judged experience.]

Sounds unpleasant. That's the trouble with them being so deeply embedded. How was she trying to do it?

[Wow, Peggy. Thor just raises his eyebrows and says without a hint of irony:]

It's the quality of the ball that caused it.

[It's absolutely not, but that's the story he's going with.]

[ He shakes his head. ] I dunno, I wasn't there at the time. Somebody else was, and he reached out. I think she had a knife.

But it can make you do all kinds of things. Has anyone you know fallen asleep for a week or more, yet? Or have things change about them?

[ Buckle up, chuckles, this is not going to be a fun conversation. He has Opinions. ]

Those fucking things cause more trouble than the planets do.

It's a piss poor craftsman who blames his tools.

[ or, in this instance, a player who blames his balls. but peggy's not going to be the one to say that out loud. ]

[At least they're opinions Thor can relate to. Sounds like Bucky has a bigger axe to grind though.]

Just by their nature, or do you mean something more specific?

It's a good thing I don't craft anything then.

[Ha ha ha.]

But point taken.

Both, honestly. They have a one-way ticket into your head. Access to things that should stay in the dark, and they can manipulate it however they fucking want, with little regard to you or the people around you.

They think they're doing you a fucking favor.

A knife? I wonder how she was able to get through the defense mechanism that far.

[Thor certainly hadn't pushed his luck too far with the knife he'd tried with. He hadn't been desperate enough to do that. At Carl's question though, he grimaces.]

Yes, I can count myself as one of them. I was in a coma for a week and two years passed for me. It has happened to people I know as well.

Messing with them can end up with a lot of pain. Even meddling with them to get a better idea what's going off can end up hurting.

[Seriously.]

Could end up in a glitch, and we're better off with fewer of those.

[A pause, then.]

This might not be the best conversation for the network, though.

I can tell them where they can put their favours.

[Somewhere really painful.]

That is my problem with it as well. I've had things like this put on me before, but never one so invasive and hard to remove. The last one was external and had a controller that could be switched off, once I got my hands on it. But with these there's no way of knowing where the controls really are.

She was... seeing things. Seeing someone from home that had died. She didn't take it well. [ If it had been him and he'd been seeing images of his dead mother? He'd probably have reacted the same way, too. ]

Yeah, it happened to me, too. It happens to everyone at some point or another, and there's no way to tell how long they'll be asleep or if they'll be different when they wake up.

A lot of people remember more things from home, even if you don't really leave this place.

Same goes double for me. You get your hands on the Atroma, you better call me. I have a bone or two to pick with them.

Things might be a little less insulting if it were some sort of external control.

I have gotten that impression, yes.

[Part of the problem with not having been told about that pain in the beginning is that he wasn't deterred from messing with it when his frustration got high enough. Now he knows better.]

Maybe not. [A small smile.] If you'd rather talk in person though, I'd be happy to.

[That's even worse. He can easily imagine someone being driven to desperation by something that upsetting.]

Understandably. If that was the Atroma's doing as well, they have no right to use such things against us.

[He lets out a sigh. He hadn't thought about the comas, but it makes sense to consider the augments responsible for that as well.]

It would make the augments powerful indeed. It's why I wondered about what else they could be responsible for.

I imagine there will be a line.

[A line for ass-kicking.]

Oh, I would still take offense, but there would be a clearer path to getting rid of it.

They don't really have the right to do any of the shit they do to us, but here we are. But I think they're responsible for a lot of the stuff. Maybe it's why we don't see the Atroma a lot- because we don't have to for them to do things to us.

If it were external, there are plenty of engineers and scientists that would probably be able to get a better grasp on it. Hence why it's not.

Anyone who has succeeded getting it out has died and come back as if it never happened.

Could be more secure. [Though that's a pretty big could be. There's no way of knowing for sure they're not still being monitored.]

You okay?

I have not ever seen or heard them in my whole time here. It's frustrating. I would rather set eyes on our captors.

[And fists, but one step at a time.]

And it seems likely that's true. They have no need to show themselves if their systems are working as intended.

Wait, so someone has gotten it out before?

I've seen the hosts once over video.. It was.. [ Definitely not great, and he grimaces. ]

The old hosts-- I think their names were Beau and Diamond. They were executed while we listened to it. That's when the new hosts showed up.

I'm annoyed.

[From clocking himself in the head to other reasons that might have prompted this whole broadcast in the first place.]

Let's go to the Iskaulit.

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