![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseOff to BC for a week as of tomorrow night. Not sure what Internet connectivity will be like in the meantime (Not that I've exactly been taking advantage now while I have it, as much as I ought) so i don't know how much I'll post. I'm still holding out hope to be reviewing or at least commenting on Goblin War, Bone Dance, and The Mirador sometime soon, if only when I return. (I come back five days before my husband)
IN the meantime, I just posted this for my SF gaming group, as I wanted them to know what happened when my character (the group's Captain and a pilot/knife-fighter) fled upstairs after an especially traumatic revelation. I think it's mostly comprehensible without the big picture plot, and it's a bit purple and only moderately edited, but what the hell. I welcome comments, including criticism (Especially critique if it's useful):
Captain Magda Kerren
She has a handful of coherent thoughts left in her when she enters her apartment. The first is to lock the door; Bart, and possibly Alex, will follow her.
Something very much like hysteria is burning inside her; she isn't sure if she opened her mouth, if she'd let out a primal scream or some idiot little-girl sobbing. Neither would be forgiveable. So she will not speak.
Not that it changes the feeling inside her, the way it seems to sear away logic and reason and usefulness, the things that matter. It's loathsome. Not soldierly. And more, not Oriflamman. One of the things that made her embarrassing to her family, however much they cared, even before her string of failures as a Captain.
But this is where her sharp and well-trained mind is her enemy, and her body - agile, but too weak, too easily worn out - is her best ally.
Her mind does do her one last favour; it marks out limits. The furniture is sparse, and not hers. The walls are battered enough. When they are gone, some poor person will need to live here. Better they find it liveable.
So she won't pull out the knives.
Some part of her is aware there's an even better reason not to pull the knives. She lets that thought blur.
She considers stripping the billowing caftan, but she can't count on always being put into a fight in convenient moments. So instead she plants her feet in first position, loosens her knees, and begins to sweep into a martial sequence.
Magda is fully aware the formal footwork, the strikes and jabs meant for a pell or a knife-tree, bear no resemblance to a real knife fight. The one time she was in a real knife fight, she survived by throwing a trash can lid at her opponent, and stabbing him, without any technique whatsoever, in the first fleshy bit she could reach.
She'd expected Jamison to have something to say about that, some remark about how her wrist had been out of line or how she should thrust, not flail. He hadn't, of course. He'd posed for her and had her show him again how she'd stabbed, as best she could recreate it, without the blade. Since her memory was her curse, she'd managed it pretty exactly. His bruise had been purple for a week.
So he'd shown her what an amateur would have done with the same thrust, how her unrealistic practice had in fact let her spot the opening and exploit it, even in the real world, where fights were a second or two of panic.
That memory - not the fight, but Jamison's calm demonstration, always comes to her at the beginning of a routine. It had grown into part of the mantra, part of the action that cooled anger and shame, brought the calm she needed to push on to the next mission in spite of catastrophe.
The footwork is easier, more monotonous than that of kickboxers or kung-fu stylists. She hears a knock, hears someone try the door, and Bart's voice, but they are far away; in her mind, the furniture turn to other shapes of obstacles; equipment in a damaged engine room, the much crueler tables and chairs of an interrogation chamber. But mostly, she keeps seeing them as people, bystanders in the public square, turning to stare as she pulls the only viable weapon she has, and shrieking in her mind, struggles to get to the front to strike down the monsters who would hack a man's ribcage open in public.
So she sweeps through the movements, lashing out at imaginary opponents who are always more numerous, more vicious, more skilled than she. They kill her fifteen times in the first hour. She's taken out twenty-seven of them; unusually good, even imagining herself with two knives.
Not good enough.
Never good enough.
But how could she be good enough, when she didn't even recognize his face until it was far too late?
She'd been looking at his hands, at the way they were tipped not with neat fingernails but with blood and scab and ruin. At his feet, toes all but broken in the process of pulling the nails. At the fact that she could see the ruin of his feet at all, that they dragged him barefoot across a square that was far from clean or safe.
Not excuse enough. She'd even said, frustrated but firm, that stopping that public torture-murder wasn't their mission.
It was their mission. And she'd stood by and done nothing. She'd thought it horrible, her stomach had twisted, trying to avoid remembering similar atrocity at much closer quarters.
She hadn't noted his features, only the bruises and lacerations that hid them.
She'd been trying to avoid seeing his features, this person she'd assumed was an anonymous stranger on an alien planet. Even so, she only recognized his picture, so very belatedly, because she was so used to pictures that hid the damage the real people endured.
Magda didn't keep souvenirs. She didn't have to. She could call up any of them in her mind, crystal clear pictures of their faces. Scotty, his petallish alien limbs splayed in a way she knew was all wrong, huge holes pitted through his skin and flesh, pulp spurting across the room. Suzy, bruised, still stunned, her lips working uncontrollably, but only shaking her head and shrinking back when they tried to find out if and where she was hurt.
The precise pattern of burns on Lukas's ribs. The expression on Jimmy's face on finding Ori dead, and on learning the crew would be separated. Locked in solitude, unable even to see each other's hurt.
Ori, slack and unconscious, just before the pillow pressed down. The knotted muscles in her own arms, because even comatose, he fought for oxygen. If he hadn't been so far gone, her weak arms wouldn't have been enough to hold him.
And sometimes she sees photos or vids of them as they were. It usually makes her catch a breath, surprised, at how whole and healthy they are. How unlikely that seems.
She can't remember them that way yet.
So she hasn't been remembering.
Even though she still expects, any moment, for someone to condemn her for a murderer. Not much different from the men in the square, cutting a man's heart out for all to see.
Barbaric.
Her steps turn staggering; she regathers herself, forces muscle to move correctly, in spite of wear, in spite of her limits.
Finally, the emotions drain away; the shame and the rage and all the tangle of horror. She doesn't stop for having reached that state; it makes her push harder, because it makes one truth crystal clear.
One of her brothers had once told her that love wasn't an emotion, because emotions were temporary. Even emotions like grief, that could take years, were still temporary, transitory. Love was not, and neither was its opposite.
She drove her body until she was numb, no longer angry, and found him all too right.
When all feeling was fled, hatred remained.
And so there is nothing for it but to turn and thrust again, and drive herself past numbness, past muscle-burn and shin-splint, past shaking hand, into complete blankness. Nothing less than oblivion will do.
Second wind comes, and dies fast, and third and fourth winds faster. She staggers now and cannot recover. She keeps moving.
Her lungs ache, the old Oriflamman wheeze grows in her breath. The edges of her throat begin to feel as raw, cracked and peeling, as if burned.
Eventually she finds oblivion; she topples.
She rouses again, far too soon after. And all the pictures she'd been avoiding come back over her at once, murder and murder and murder, and one sob forces its way out her ruined throat. After the first, the rest flood out. Not just for the man she'd come to rescue and utterly failed to recognize, but for all the rest of the dead.
She remains that way well into the night; well into the very dark hours. And it's in the last of the utter dark that it comes to her; weeping is even more of a waste of time. There had been twelve people in the crew. One confirmed dead, and there is no doubt others were slaughtered before him, through the last several months. She can't waste any more hours.
She needs to collect her crew, and put together a plan. They're up against a government and a religious order. And if anyone is alive, they will be found.
Magda knows, viscerally, that "Everyone comes home" is a polite lie. Neither Scotty nor Ori came home. And at least one, probably several, of Apollo's crew will not.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.
By the time the others might be awake and ready, so was she; precisely clean, crisp and ready in her flight leathers, the sweat-soaked clothes left behind in a puddle.
She's ready to take on the world once more; which is good, because she'll have to.
IN the meantime, I just posted this for my SF gaming group, as I wanted them to know what happened when my character (the group's Captain and a pilot/knife-fighter) fled upstairs after an especially traumatic revelation. I think it's mostly comprehensible without the big picture plot, and it's a bit purple and only moderately edited, but what the hell. I welcome comments, including criticism (Especially critique if it's useful):
Captain Magda Kerren
She has a handful of coherent thoughts left in her when she enters her apartment. The first is to lock the door; Bart, and possibly Alex, will follow her.
Something very much like hysteria is burning inside her; she isn't sure if she opened her mouth, if she'd let out a primal scream or some idiot little-girl sobbing. Neither would be forgiveable. So she will not speak.
Not that it changes the feeling inside her, the way it seems to sear away logic and reason and usefulness, the things that matter. It's loathsome. Not soldierly. And more, not Oriflamman. One of the things that made her embarrassing to her family, however much they cared, even before her string of failures as a Captain.
But this is where her sharp and well-trained mind is her enemy, and her body - agile, but too weak, too easily worn out - is her best ally.
Her mind does do her one last favour; it marks out limits. The furniture is sparse, and not hers. The walls are battered enough. When they are gone, some poor person will need to live here. Better they find it liveable.
So she won't pull out the knives.
Some part of her is aware there's an even better reason not to pull the knives. She lets that thought blur.
She considers stripping the billowing caftan, but she can't count on always being put into a fight in convenient moments. So instead she plants her feet in first position, loosens her knees, and begins to sweep into a martial sequence.
Magda is fully aware the formal footwork, the strikes and jabs meant for a pell or a knife-tree, bear no resemblance to a real knife fight. The one time she was in a real knife fight, she survived by throwing a trash can lid at her opponent, and stabbing him, without any technique whatsoever, in the first fleshy bit she could reach.
She'd expected Jamison to have something to say about that, some remark about how her wrist had been out of line or how she should thrust, not flail. He hadn't, of course. He'd posed for her and had her show him again how she'd stabbed, as best she could recreate it, without the blade. Since her memory was her curse, she'd managed it pretty exactly. His bruise had been purple for a week.
So he'd shown her what an amateur would have done with the same thrust, how her unrealistic practice had in fact let her spot the opening and exploit it, even in the real world, where fights were a second or two of panic.
That memory - not the fight, but Jamison's calm demonstration, always comes to her at the beginning of a routine. It had grown into part of the mantra, part of the action that cooled anger and shame, brought the calm she needed to push on to the next mission in spite of catastrophe.
The footwork is easier, more monotonous than that of kickboxers or kung-fu stylists. She hears a knock, hears someone try the door, and Bart's voice, but they are far away; in her mind, the furniture turn to other shapes of obstacles; equipment in a damaged engine room, the much crueler tables and chairs of an interrogation chamber. But mostly, she keeps seeing them as people, bystanders in the public square, turning to stare as she pulls the only viable weapon she has, and shrieking in her mind, struggles to get to the front to strike down the monsters who would hack a man's ribcage open in public.
So she sweeps through the movements, lashing out at imaginary opponents who are always more numerous, more vicious, more skilled than she. They kill her fifteen times in the first hour. She's taken out twenty-seven of them; unusually good, even imagining herself with two knives.
Not good enough.
Never good enough.
But how could she be good enough, when she didn't even recognize his face until it was far too late?
She'd been looking at his hands, at the way they were tipped not with neat fingernails but with blood and scab and ruin. At his feet, toes all but broken in the process of pulling the nails. At the fact that she could see the ruin of his feet at all, that they dragged him barefoot across a square that was far from clean or safe.
Not excuse enough. She'd even said, frustrated but firm, that stopping that public torture-murder wasn't their mission.
It was their mission. And she'd stood by and done nothing. She'd thought it horrible, her stomach had twisted, trying to avoid remembering similar atrocity at much closer quarters.
She hadn't noted his features, only the bruises and lacerations that hid them.
She'd been trying to avoid seeing his features, this person she'd assumed was an anonymous stranger on an alien planet. Even so, she only recognized his picture, so very belatedly, because she was so used to pictures that hid the damage the real people endured.
Magda didn't keep souvenirs. She didn't have to. She could call up any of them in her mind, crystal clear pictures of their faces. Scotty, his petallish alien limbs splayed in a way she knew was all wrong, huge holes pitted through his skin and flesh, pulp spurting across the room. Suzy, bruised, still stunned, her lips working uncontrollably, but only shaking her head and shrinking back when they tried to find out if and where she was hurt.
The precise pattern of burns on Lukas's ribs. The expression on Jimmy's face on finding Ori dead, and on learning the crew would be separated. Locked in solitude, unable even to see each other's hurt.
Ori, slack and unconscious, just before the pillow pressed down. The knotted muscles in her own arms, because even comatose, he fought for oxygen. If he hadn't been so far gone, her weak arms wouldn't have been enough to hold him.
And sometimes she sees photos or vids of them as they were. It usually makes her catch a breath, surprised, at how whole and healthy they are. How unlikely that seems.
She can't remember them that way yet.
So she hasn't been remembering.
Even though she still expects, any moment, for someone to condemn her for a murderer. Not much different from the men in the square, cutting a man's heart out for all to see.
Barbaric.
Her steps turn staggering; she regathers herself, forces muscle to move correctly, in spite of wear, in spite of her limits.
Finally, the emotions drain away; the shame and the rage and all the tangle of horror. She doesn't stop for having reached that state; it makes her push harder, because it makes one truth crystal clear.
One of her brothers had once told her that love wasn't an emotion, because emotions were temporary. Even emotions like grief, that could take years, were still temporary, transitory. Love was not, and neither was its opposite.
She drove her body until she was numb, no longer angry, and found him all too right.
When all feeling was fled, hatred remained.
And so there is nothing for it but to turn and thrust again, and drive herself past numbness, past muscle-burn and shin-splint, past shaking hand, into complete blankness. Nothing less than oblivion will do.
Second wind comes, and dies fast, and third and fourth winds faster. She staggers now and cannot recover. She keeps moving.
Her lungs ache, the old Oriflamman wheeze grows in her breath. The edges of her throat begin to feel as raw, cracked and peeling, as if burned.
Eventually she finds oblivion; she topples.
She rouses again, far too soon after. And all the pictures she'd been avoiding come back over her at once, murder and murder and murder, and one sob forces its way out her ruined throat. After the first, the rest flood out. Not just for the man she'd come to rescue and utterly failed to recognize, but for all the rest of the dead.
She remains that way well into the night; well into the very dark hours. And it's in the last of the utter dark that it comes to her; weeping is even more of a waste of time. There had been twelve people in the crew. One confirmed dead, and there is no doubt others were slaughtered before him, through the last several months. She can't waste any more hours.
She needs to collect her crew, and put together a plan. They're up against a government and a religious order. And if anyone is alive, they will be found.
Magda knows, viscerally, that "Everyone comes home" is a polite lie. Neither Scotty nor Ori came home. And at least one, probably several, of Apollo's crew will not.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.
By the time the others might be awake and ready, so was she; precisely clean, crisp and ready in her flight leathers, the sweat-soaked clothes left behind in a puddle.
She's ready to take on the world once more; which is good, because she'll have to.
