OPEN RP.

[cryptofascist]

INBOX + OPEN POST

General Discovery content warnings: violence, death, grief, war, mass murder, genocide, internment, animal abuse, sexual assault (dubcon, noncon and grooming), brainwashing, torture (physical and psychological), PTSD, survivor's guilt, sci-fi racebending, subjugation, slavery, racism, quasi-cannibalism, xenophobia. And spoilers.

TEXT ACTION PROSE CONTINUATIONS

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[soji_asha]

The guilt and horror that wells up in Soji's chest is tight and painful. She reels back against the wall and is already shaking her head, as if refusing to believe the situation would reverse it. She's in full tilt denial in seconds.

This can't be happening--they'd grabbed her and grabbed him in the process--did they have the message from Dahj? Did they know what Dahj was trying to tell her? Who were they?

"Shit," she says softly, her tone teetering on despair. "I'm so sorry, Gabriel. I'm so sorry--I didn't know they would have rifles--I thought we were safe--I can't believe I dragged you into this."

She sounds like a toddler who just broke something expensive, repeating excuses and apologies like a panicky mantra, like if she says them enough they might be spared. She has no idea who they are, why they took her, or what happened to Dahj. She's been captured by some shadowy cabal and she doesn't even know why.

Wait--no--that she does know--

Soji sits upright again so fast that wall creaks behind her as her cuffs are suddenly pulled taut. Staring into the dark helps, but only insofar as it doesn't distract her. Soji concentrates and tries to remember it all, eyes darting across the middle-ground as she combs her memory--she does know why they want her.

Dahj told her. Dahj apologized for it.

The thing she'd been working on--an isolynium breeder reactor, some voice supplied against the back of her mind--it made fuel for...something? Damn it. Everything was hazy, almost like she'd been caught up in a dream. Dahj destroyed the prototype and the plans. But--there was something else, something desperately important that Soji couldn't quite put a name to.

They have got to get out of here--Soji isn't sure why, but she knows she has to. She has to get to--something. She has to get there now.

But she can't just abandon Gabriel, not after she got him into this mess. He'd sounded so relieved when he said her name.

What happened to him after they shot her?

"Gabriel," she asks quietly, "Are you hurt? I can't remember--it was so bright--did they shoot you too?"

[cryptofascist]

She's the girl in the bar again, bereft of guile. Helpless by all appearances. He is certain her panic reads as genuine to the sensors. If not for her incredible strength, he could chalk her up to a sleeper agent of some kind. There's nothing quite like her in Section 31's vast and thorough records. A creature like her intrigues Lorca and baffles Gabriel.

"Stunned me," he answers. Now that he has company, he straightens his back against the wall. "After..." He swallows, unsure what to tell her, and how. Planetary security doesn't see a sliver of the madness Starfleet regularly encounters. Klingons are the boogeyman to civilians. Vulcans rarely display their strength. Gabriel is doing his level best not to be afraid of her, but would she be afraid of herself? "You threw one of them against a wall."

[soji_asha]

Between Dahj's apartment and waking here Soji's disorientation has had time to clear, but hearing that account gives her pause. It's not a natural pause, conversational or disbelieving, but the hitch of a computer loading a drive. The nature of it is written clear as day in her biometrics. Her panic falls off instantly and is replaced with an eerily stable baseline reading. Soji, herself, doesn't notice the pause or how it absorbs a few seconds as she combs her memory, but she's still as stone for the duration.

Dahj's message had been more than a simple video. It had a truly enormous amount of data and was uploaded directly into her brain. She was still struggling to write it all out of her active memory. The message, Gabriel shaking her awake, the conflict afterward, are all a disjointed mash of packets. In the end, she can neither verify nor invalidate his account. As the process attempting to do so ends, Soji unfreezes and her biometrics pick right back up, reflecting all the panic of before.

"I did what?" Soji asks, alarmed and genuinely incredulous.

She couldn't remember anything solid; his account is more credible than her lack of one. The very last image she has in her mind is of the phaser rifles in her face--had she shoved one and tried to run? He said threw? She is barely 55 kilograms--she's a graduate student--how?

"I threw one of them?" Soji repeats and the program in her mind that tries to resolve her cognitive dissonance kicks in hard. "That can't be right--I--I can't lift anyone, much less throw them."