Bradward Boimler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
boldboimler) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
anaplasia2025-03-17 05:39 pm
boldboimler) wrote in anaplasia2025-03-17 05:39 pm
Entry tags:
roll call
[The man that's on screen doesn't look as uncomfortable as he could be. After all, the showers in the Cerritos are communal. But he sure is feeling vulnerable chilling here in only a sheet, in an area where only a short time ago there were monsters.]
[Every so often he arches his back slightly in discomfort at the itching, crawling sensation there. (This is worse than the Borg parts. Worse than even the implants on his face.)]
Okay, we should probably do a role call? Who's still here? What's your name?
Also, what skills do you have that could be useful here? We need to figure out what we need to survive. Delegate tasks. The supplies around here definitely seem to be thin on the ground. They're not going to last forever.
We should also probably share intel about anything useful we find as we look around. Or anything the AI shares with us.
[Every so often he arches his back slightly in discomfort at the itching, crawling sensation there. (This is worse than the Borg parts. Worse than even the implants on his face.)]
Okay, we should probably do a role call? Who's still here? What's your name?
Also, what skills do you have that could be useful here? We need to figure out what we need to survive. Delegate tasks. The supplies around here definitely seem to be thin on the ground. They're not going to last forever.
We should also probably share intel about anything useful we find as we look around. Or anything the AI shares with us.
no subject
[Mira's not having a nervous breakdown, and she thinks that's very cool and sexy of her, thank you very much. She (and everyone else, frankly) is lucky she's too horrible with technology to have figured out how to view any of the messages besides Boimler's original post, because then she really might have that breakdown.]
Second Lieutenant ["LEF-tenant"] Mir- [There's an almost imperceptible hitch as she manages not to introduce herself by her nickname this time.] -anda Nero, 203rd Cadian. We're an infantry regiment.
[And that's it, as though it explains everything. As far as she's concerned, it does.]
no subject
I don't know if it will help, Ma'am, but I've also served in an infantry. My memories of aren't completely...intact? But maybe we should pool our experience anyway.
no subject
Also, the "ma'am" helps his case. A lot.]
Not the Imperial Guard, I assume?
[There are literally billions of people in the Guard, so who knows, he could be from a world that's a little too tight with the weirder parts of the Mechanicus.]
no subject
[Now he gets to run headlong into something he'd been able to press to the back of his mind with all the much more immediate concerns of this new world. But now he has to think about the fact that this place is absolutely filled with humans. Not entirely human, but mostly human, and he just hasn't let it freak him out. Humans were fossils, clearing the way for sea creatures and now existing only as fossils in their museums.
How is this possible? How does he even say what he thinks is possible? How is she going to take it?]
...Until now I...believed that human beings were an extinct species.
no subject
Mira's eyes narrow, but there's as much puzzlement in the expression as there is suspicion, which is about as good as it'll get at this point.]
You're not human?
[mira look at him]
no subject
N-no?
[He expects this from the Inklings who couldn't tell he was an Octoling for years. Squids are a lot of thing but observant? Absolutely not. But also Inklings and Octolings both have tentacles. And beaks. And black marks around their eyes. It's possible to mistake one for the other when you aren't paying attention.
Are humans even less aware than that? It might explain why they've reacted to him with such calm.
He reaches his hand up to the large tentacle resting atop his head. When he touches it, it reflexively wraps around his palm until he pulls it out straight for her to see.]
I'm an Octoling.
no subject
Yeah, so, there's enough variation among humans in the Imperium that she could lie to herself about 8's obvious physical differences...until he removed the plausible deniability.]
What in the Emperor's name is an Octoling?
[Spacism circuits activated.]
no subject
"Not an Inkling" is not going to make much sense here. And also is kind of reductive: there are a lot of people in the world that aren't Inkfish after all. What's the core of an Octoling, the immutable properties that make up Octolings? Is it the eight limbs, the two fanged beak, the weapons proficiency, the freshness?
He's taking just a little too long to respond. He needs to say something.]
I am.
[...That's probably not enough.]
Inkfish like myself evolved from octopus and squids after the Old World of humanity was destroyed by a massive flood. Other sea creatures evolved too, but Inkfish are the dominant life form.
[How is she going to take this? How is anyone going to take this? Still, he braces himself.]
no subject
"The Old World of humanity..."
[That's a lot calmer than her previous comment would have led someone to predict. 8 said the magic words...or close enough to them, anyway.]
You're from Terra?
[That might or might not translate to Earth for the listener, but Mira is only ever going to hear "Terra," because no one has called humanity's homeworld Earth in tens of thousands of years.
no subject
[Oh, from terra firma. Is that what humans called the world?]
You mean Earth? Yes, I am. Are you?
[He guesses it might be possible that some humans survived. Two cats and a bear did. It'd still be shocking though, after 12,000 years.]
no subject
She snorts, amused at someone thinking she might be from Terra.]
No, I'm from Cadia.
[Hence the name of her regiment.]
no subject
[It's very much not hard to transplant his old curiosity about life on the surface to life beyond the stars.]
What's it like?
no subject
Yes, another planet. Far from Terra, I'm afraid, at the gate to the Eye of Terror. After Terra herself, we're the most heavily garrisoned place in the galaxy. I think we'd be indistinguishable from many other Civilised Worlds in the Imperium, if not for that.
[Mira has enough perspective to realize that ecologically speaking, Cadia's nice enough, but unremarkable. It just has the misfortune of the metaphorical next town over being non-metaphorical Hell.]
no subject
[It sounds...a few degrees removed from the Seven Rings. He's never been sure he believes in any kind of end-of-the-world prophecy, but...he's also seen pictures of those weird lights during the Big Runs in the Splatlands and it's hard to discount anything considering their current situation.]
no subject
[You really shoulda seen this coming, Mira.
She purses her lips, considering how to explain the Eye. They're far beyond any sort of secrecy at this point, official policy be damned, but she's not certain how you convey the horrors of the Warp to someone who, she's pretty sure, predates the Age of Strife.]
It's a tear in the fabric of reality. Beyond it lies the Warp...the realm of Chaos. Time and space cease to have any real meaning, and any horror you can imagine makes its home there.
[Quite literally, given that the Warp reflects the contents of living beings' minds, not that Mira really understands that part.]
After the Emperor and His [yeah you can hear the capital letter] loyal sons broke the back of the rebel Legions at Terra, the surviving traitors fled through the Eye, where their Dark Gods could protect them from the Emperor's justice.
[Emperor good, Chaos bad, apparently.]
A hundred centuries later, they're still there. They're constantly launching nuisance raids [what a Cadian considers a "nuisance raid" would be considered more of a "crime against humanity" in a sane society], and perhaps once a millennium or so, they manage to get past their squabbling to attack en masse and be defeated like they were before.
[This summary might contain some bias?]
no subject
[That summary contains...a lot of things. A whole shell of a lot of things that Eight isn't even sure he understands completely.]
Wait, how can they live in a place without time or space...?
[It's OK if she can't answer, it was kind of a placeholder question for him to work through everything he heard.]
no subject
[Mira doesn't truly get it either, but growing up next door to Hell, you're forced to hear their shitty music when they throw a loud party, as it were, so she has more experience with the insanity involved than most people.]
It will drive a mortal mad. Even looking at the Eye is a bad idea.
[You know, like staring into the sun, if the sun told you to kill your parents as a sacrifice to the gods of Chaos.]