Memories of a Mimic: Part 1 (Keaka Hoshiko)
| Memories of a Mimic: Part 1 (Keaka Hoshiko) | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 22 April 2024 |
| Location: | The Dusk Zone - Depths |
| Synopsis: | Keaka begins to recover memories of what happened when she escaped from her ship by being pulled deep into the Dusk Zone. |
| Cast of Characters: | 172 |
Something is wrong.
Alarms blare, harshly, throughout the cabin.
The Ghost's ship is breaking apart around them.
Has there been a catastrophic system failure? Or perhaps this is why the Bureau and their enemies don't come to this place.
They have one last avenue of escape, though. They run past the computers and lab stations. Past storage lockers and the stairs and ladders to other parts of the ship. To the workshop. It sounds different. Normally there are machines running here. Maintenance drones working on pieces of equipment. A 3D printer making a part. But right now, there's nothing but flickering lights and the creaks of the straining hull.
On a workbench is The Second Gauntlet. Well, in truth, it's at least the third Second Gauntlet; but it is a way out of here. Surviving there is a problem for future the Ghost.
A glove of some advanced space-armor fabric supports protective, rigid plates forming a gauntlet. Wires of some golden space-metal run from a box next to a molly-guard on the forearm, along the fingers, elevated by little insulating standoffs and extending past the fingertips like antennae.
They slide it over their hand and forearm. There's no time. They flip open the molly-guard and flip the rocker switch underneath.
As the ship creaks and strains around them, they begin to disappear. Hand first. Then arm. Then the rest of their body up to their head and--
Something is wrong. There shouldn't be an environment, outside reality. But as they are pulled along by their glove -- and they can sense, now, the tendril of something greater, something anathemaic, that has latched onto the gauntlet and is pulling them along -- the black wind howls. Sometimes bits of a cityscape zoom past, as if entire blocks and neighborhoods had been uprooted by some great hurricane and are blowing past; or is it they who are blowing along?
They're not sure what will happen if they keep going. To see Them. Will it consume the Ghost, before they can even bargain to serve them? It occurs to the Ghost, now, that as Martin they never did learn how someone becomes a Pure Wielder. Only that such people could exist, using Abstractum, or dark corrupted versions thereof -- no, that's why they're called Pures, they are Abstractum's original forms before they are caged, limited, harnessed to serve the preservation of reality -- but where does the first Pure come from, Martin never thought to ask, and now they are gone and perhaps the Ghost will soon join them.
Eventually -- was it seconds, or minutes? -- the cityscape stops appearing, and there is a great and endless void. The Ghost can sense -- there isn't truly sight here -- some sort of protective barrier around them, coming from the gauntlet -- or perhaps the tendril? -- a barrier within which are sounds, colors, smells, sensations, but beyond which is the endless black -- isn't it odd, the Ghost thinks, that they can tell it is blackness? Not just darkness, an absense of light and being, but something there, a blackness that consumes and devours.
Is... is the Ghost already inside Them? Is this what being devoured is like? Did they already fail?
...
They are so far from home. Not that there is any true home for them, but the world they knew was kind of like a home.
They swallow their fear and hold on. To stop now -- if they even can -- would mean being devoured in an instant, surely.
Distantly, beyond the Black, they can sense the planet. It's still close, in a direction with no name, and yet so far in another. The local star feels wrong. The Ghost has a lot on their mind and doesn't think about how it feels wrong.
Can... can they even sense the planet anymore? Is it gone, or gone from their senses, or is it just that that dim sense is unchanging and they no longer notice it? Beyond the Black they sense swirls of something. Colors might be an applicable word, were there color here. Were there sight here. If eyes worked here.
Where is here?
They are lost. They are nowhere.
They can't see the sun, but sometimes they sense it, a bright and painful light that exists beyond the black.
They hold on.
...
It feels like reality -- or unreality, or wherever they are -- is falling apart.
Was this really a good idea? Should they keep going? Should they stop here? Do they even know how? Can they trust that they can really get out of this?
The un-world around them seems to judge them, by terms and standards they cannot understand. So, just like the world they left, really. The Ghost laughs, or "laughs", or has the intent to laugh, whatever that means out here. And inside them, the fire of righteousness burns. How dare anything judge them? What gives anyone the right? They tried their best and it never mattered!
The colors or swirls or whatever they are feel simpler.
That bright and painful light beyond the Black, in the distance, is just a shape, a yellow circle.
Something hurts.
...
Everything is falling apart. Everything is dissolving. The distant colors or whatever. The blackness. The... is the sun even still there ar all? They aren't sure. Everything is pulled apart and mixed up. And yet there's nothing between the pieces. Or is there Nothing between the pieces?
Simultaneously, the Ghost's cares and worries -- from the world that hurt Martin, the world they hate, the people they hate, to their vague plans for revenge, to their need to survive and escape the sinking ship -- feel more distant, and yet, the drive to do something feels intensified, purified, no... more like, without the other things clouding and surrounding it, it can be felt more clearly. They must go on. They will go on! They will see this through!
And yet, it hurts!
The cares and worries and hopes and dreams and plans feel so distant. The pain feels so distant. Still shielded from the blackness -- or at least, from its devouring. The Black, the darkness, suffuses all -- the void beyond it pulls apart, and the Ghost with it. The dream of a hero. The desire for friendship and companionship. Ideals and empathy and the need to save lives and help. The oppressive judgement and authorities they tried and failed to please. The need to do the right thing. The pain of never being enough. Of never being worthy. The stress of expecting everyone to judge them unworthy and cast them out, year after year after year after year after year. Through an adolescence sacrificed, and all of their adulthood. The stress and pain of trying to prove themself. Of trying to be what others wanted while staying true to themself.
Beyond Martin's inherited memories, the short life of the Ghost. Coming into existence in danger and needing to escape, and yet also needing to protect Martin. A duty they failed. The need to take revenge.
All of it...
They don't have to. They don't have to do it anymore. They can let it be stripped away, and lie down, and rest, and be at a peace they haven't known since...
A peace they have never known.
They feel hot. Feverish.
It all seems so silly and pointless now.
The void calls. To answer isn't some sort of mad, destructive action. It is to rest.
And they are so, so tired.
They let go, for a moment. They let go, in the moment. Whether they can pick it back up again isn't something to worry about right now.
Whatever's got hold of the gauntlet pulls them onward.
...
Their cares and worries are withering.
The blackness is fading, but what's beyond it isn't much better.
An empty grayness.
There are snatches of world, as they're pulled along. A withered field or forest here, a wasteland or empty city there.
There isn't life, but there are things. Beings, maybe, but they don't seem important right now. Nor do glimpses of distant cities and wilds that bloom in colors that can't be seen. They are in the distance, far from this path.
Distant like the sun, somewhere far and unseen. Its light does not reach here.
The path? Are they walking along a path, or being pulled along?
Are they the Ghost? Martin? Someone else? A detached observer? They don't care. At this point, there is nothing to do but walk on.
They walk for an eternity, and for no time at all.
...
Their heart is dead. Their hopes and dreams and wishes are dead.
They are lifeless, cold, and grey. A ghost of a Ghost.
Let it all drown. Why care?
Let it all drown in a tide of void and stars.
Light and heart have no power here. At least, for a moment, they do not question this.
The colorless grey thing that isn't the Ghost, that isn't anyone, that isn't a person, but is perfect and pure, stands
before the bleak and lightless gates of a Far and Sunless Land.
Their dead Heart has no power here, but it can call out to them, faint and weak.
They came here to do something.
They came here to do something, and doesn't it matter?
They came here to do something, and shouldn't it still matter?
Can they really stop, after everything? Are they really going to give up?
It begins to burn inside them again, or maybe it never quite went out after all, not flames of righteous wrath but a candle, a tiny, distant star, its light crying out against all that is wrong in the world. There is a right and wrong, and they'll put it right by ending all that is wrong, if they have to. They can't stop here!
They step forward--
...
--and emerge from the front gate onto the campus of the Bleak Academy.
The ancient architecture's walls are stone and brass, and etched with figures.
The sky is sunless and alive with stars.
The students go about their business in uniforms of black decorated with silver, red, and purple. The general aesthetic is such that we, dear reader, could understand clearly: These are a future generation of Dark Generals, and occasionally their support staff and accomplices. Although, just what generation, I cannot say. Time has little meaning here. Do you learn how to end the world in four years, or four hundred? So far outside of existence, are they even specific people, if unnamed? Or is the crowd merely the idea, the potential, of antagonists to come?
Their -- the students' -- eyes are filled with night and falling stars.
Faces with eyes of night and falling stars furrow brows in thought, or gossip, or smile. People seem to be people, even here.
The Ghost, or the thing that was the Ghost, or Martin, or whatever, wanders, and marvels.
After some time, she senses him standing behind her.
It's impossible not to. He outshines all, not with light or with darkness but his sheer himself-ness, and his attention is like a beam so intense it can be felt through the back of your head, through the back of your eyes.
She turns and faces a man. He is beautiful and wicked, with eyes of night and falling stars. To a human eye he looks, perhaps, twenty- or thirty-something. Possessed, at this moment, of a good humor that perhaps comes off as smugness. Tall and pale and dressed in a black uniform, with a sword sheathed at his side. It has those silvery decorations in the front, horizontal lines of metal or strings or something -- like a marching band uniform or an old fancy military uniform, and there is no way to mistake this for the former -- she turns and comes face to face with He, Death, First of the Riders, He, the Lord of Death's Dominion, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy.
And his presense -- the way that wickedness shines off him, that his existence shines -- is unmistakeable. From Martin's memories, the presense he felt when he sought answers outside the world, the thing he knew as Them, the enemy Abstractum were created to protect against. This is it. But Martin didn't remember a man, just a presence...
"It is not every day we get visitors."
...Martin didn't remember there being talking.
"Tell me, what brings you here?"
And she tells him, they tell him, everything. Of being a hero, of helping save so many, and being ultimately rejected, again and again. Of trying so hard to be someone, something, that would be worthy, that would be tolerable, that would not be a burden for others to know. Of learning of Abstractum and the ancient war of a lost world. Of being created by a Lost Logia Martin mistakenly thought could purge himself of whatever it was that was so wrong and threatening and bad that everyone hated it. Of escaping, and then reuniting and accepting eachother. Of one day sensing the original was gone, and knowing that if there was no place for such a kind and compassionate soul in the world, that it was Wrong. Of running to plan and plot revenge and to seek help from Them -- from him -- to end it, and of the accident and a desperate escape to... where is here, anyway?
At some point during the conversation, they'd moved to his office and gotten tea.
And he tells her, he tells them, of Ninuan, the land that existed before the Light. The True thing, hidden away and covered by existences, by worlds forming in it, twisted worlds that force their own way of being upon the people trapped in them. He tells of that land's people, the Excrucians, later named Riders by humans, people who were forced back and driven from their homes, or unable to escape, trapped in pitiful existences inside worlds of wrongness. Now those who escaped and their descendents live in what is left of Ninuan, outside these worlds. Some have given up, but many of them seek to put things right, to end the wrongness of the world and set trapped souls free. And he has gathered them here, to hone themselves until they are ready.
And it seems so clear and so obvious, in retrospect. Of course the world is unfair. Of course nothing Martin did could ever be good enough. Of course life was stress and suffering.
The world is Wrong.
He tells her they have classes for those from the worlds who find their way here. A program for mortals who wish to study at the Bleak Academy.
There is so much to learn. She had no idea. Yes, of course! Although, if she finds out he's lying, or if he would try to force and control her, then she will fight him. And probably die, but at least she'll go down fighting.
He chuckles. All she will find here is truth. And if that is her truth, then he would have it no other way.
...
She gets up, gets dressed. The girl in the mirror looks back at her, smiling. A vision of red-sclera'd eyes and dark hair and ashen skin in a smart black uniform. She's tried boy shape a few times but it's never quite as right a fit. Although it is good for a booming voice and looking more imposing, strong, dramatic. Which has a time and a place, but doesn't have to be every moment of every day, like the wrong and twisted world demanded. She might be able to appreciate it a little, when she's not drowning in it.
Ashen skin and red-whited eyes stand out no more than any other of the Academy's mortal students.
She puts on her labcoat, black and calf-length, and walks out onto campus.
