ph_logs | [OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

[OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

Who: CT (

liesdontfindyou) & you!
What: Catch-All for CT; work, investigation, and just hanging out
When: July
Where: Various places, in headers
Warnings: Cult discussion, death discussion, etc.

1. A place you'd find where you weren't all alone [around town, O&I]

CT is back to work immediately after her return to life. To sit idle would only invite her to dwell on it and that's not something she wants to do at all. Not that routine patrol shifts do much to occupy her mind, but just the act of working helps her to focus her mind on things besides cults and sacrifices and experiences thereof.

She's relatively easy to find around town whilst out on patrol, whether because you just want a chat or because you're having some kind of issue that she might be able to help with.

Most days, after she's done with work, she stops by the O&I for a drink and a meal that she doesn't have to make herself. That and maybe the bustle of real living people is good for her in controlled doses. She's generally sitting alone, with plenty of space to join her if asked, or may occasionally have to ask if a seat is free herself.

2. But now you look around at what you've learned and face the truth [library, enforcers office, other]

When she's not working on actual assigned duties, CT's still working on her own investigative angles. Following some initial discussions with other attendees of the cult gathering, she has multiple little bits and pieces she plans to follow-up on with or without help. These include: verifying the reported deaths of each cult member via official records at the office; cross referencing missing persons reports to see if it's possible to find out who they replaced in the past; searching through old newspapers and photos and the like among library records to narrow down the year it took place; and so on.

Those who attended the cult gathering may find themselves invited or sought out for further discussion or to help her with what she's doing. Other Enforcers may also find her seeking them out for discussion or to get properly acquainted for the sake of future endeavours.

3. That you may never find a home [northwest hollow residental]

Even in CT's downtime, it's hard to say she's relaxing. Pieces of her old routine adapt well enough to the town and that old routine was built around keeping herself as busy as possible during long days travelling or holed up in bases. So, for example, she can be found going on a daily jog to keep herself fit, weaving through the streets of Northwest Hollow on a route she figured out for herself.

Around her home at 517 Meadowlark Lane, she can also be heard or seen practising knife throwing with a makeshift target attached to a tree in her yard. Her gate is cracked open, because she prefers the easy exit and is very aware of her surroundings—anyone who peeks in will soon find her looking back at them, holding a throwing knife between her fingers. "You can watch. Promise I'm only aiming at the tree."

Sometimes she's even sat on the porch, appreciating once again living under real sunlight whilst she reads through a book checked out from the library—all, invariably, some kind of non-fiction about the town or world as a whole. Research.

4. Wildcard

Hit me or find me in the discord to plot. Happy to write custom starters and the like.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Now he has to stop and think about that too. "You know what? I don't think I have, either. Huh." He feels like he's missing out somehow. He was on a ship with all kinds of people, how did he never run into a ninja?

Crichton takes one look at that bench and decides that maybe flopping down with all of his weight wouldn't be the best idea this time. So, he lowers the dump truck attached to his backside slowly, for once. The bench stays upright.

"Reprimand? From who?" Who does he have to look out for?

She does watch as he joins her and carefully sits down. Hard to say from her face alone if she deliberately takes a gander at the dump truck in the process but it really can't be ruled out.

"Cerrit," is the answer, elaborated on immediately with: "It was less telling me I shouldn't have done it and more telling me I should've told someone before I did it. As much for the sake of myself having the support waiting as for the risk of blowback."

She hadn't even considered calling for back-up, not even in the form of making sure they knew so that she'd have immediate support on her return. And Cerrit wasn't wrong in assuming that was because she wasn't used to being able to rely on anyone that way, anymore.

"He also said the same thing you did when I told him that Chloe immediately clocked me, so." Nice to know she's not as subtle as she'd like to be, even if it's only a few people calling her on it.

Part of him is hoping she's looking and the other part wants to slap himself for it. Both sides have yet to reconcile.

"Ah, the old bird I'm supposed to get in touch with, right?" He'll get to it, it's fine. Just a couple more days as a free man before he goes back to long work hours.

"Hate to say it, but I agree with him. You gotta have back-up. I'd be deader than dead if I didn't have back-up." This sweet, sweet dump truck ass has been saved so many times by so many people.

"Hey, don't take it too hard. I clocked you because I knew someone just like you. I couldn't miss it."

"That's the one. Neither of you are wrong, of course, but— it wasn't my first instinct." The reasons why are left unsaid, but Crichton's got more of the context behind that hang-up than anyone else thus far.

Relying on others is a tricky thing, these days.

The 'I knew someone just like you' gets tucked into her growing mental dossiers as she chews at the inside of her cheek and sighs. "I wasn't actually lying, when I said that wasn't a job title I've ever held. I was a hacker, an intelligence specialist and an infiltrator, but I was never officially a spy."

"Yeah, I got that. Just because it wasn't official doesn't mean you weren't one in all but name. Sounds like one to me, but I get it. I wasn't ever active military, you know, but I know how to fly a fighter jet and I'm a better shot than most civilians. I'm still planning to show up for the next veterans card game with or without my passport." She'll back him up for it, right?

"Something tells me the self-reliance instinct is related to you not being an official spy. Am I getting warm?"

"You won't need any proof, you fit the spirit of the idea well enough. I think Gaeta will be glad to see another person with space experience, actually. It's just the two of us right now."

Crichton may be half Earther, but he's still Spacer enough and it's good to be have people around who understand it when the place is so dominated by people who've never set foot off their home planets.

"...more like scorching." She sighs again, twisting her wrist a couple times to make the pearl-like beaded bracelet on it rotate around. "It's like I told you before. I made some very powerful people very angry at me. But I only went on the run after I realised I couldn't hide what I was doing anymore."

His posture perks up when she mentions a third in their little handful of space cadets. "Gaeta? I'll have to say hello. Nice to not be the only member of the club." If Gaeta is a pilot too? He's going to be in heaven; he's already decided.

Crichton settles his chin on the heels of his hands and sighs in a manner that can only be described as commiserating. "You and me need ta' stop having so much in common. It's a long story and I'll tell you if you want to hear it, but the main point is I know what being on the run is like. You never really stop looking over your shoulder. Still, you gotta trust someone some time. Flying solo never works out long."

The movement of her wrist caught his attention for a moment, but he was a little too distracted to look harder until now. "If you don't mind me asking, does that bracelet mean something special?"

"He works at the library if you want to find him before another meet-up. He helped with what research I have managed to do."

She lifts her wrist a little, pulling at one of the beads, "Oh— this thing? Not really. I got it here. It's more... I need something to fiddle with to keep my thoughts straight. I used to have a string of beads my mothers gave me, but I had to leave that behind long before we even lost our belongings to arriving here. This is just... the next best substitute."

It does the job, even if it's not quite the same as having that old sentimental option. She had to leave a lot of things behind, both when she first left Resol and then when she left the program.

For a moment she's quiet again, then she says: "Story for a story, maybe?"

"Thanks, I'll try and catch him there." If he goes into the library and shouts 'Is there a Gaeta in the house?' don't be too shocked.

"Are we sure you an' me didn't come from alternate versions of the same life? I can't show it to you now, obviously, but I had this nifty puzzle ring I used to wear on a chain around my neck. My dad gave it to me. Was his before mine. I lost it my first year out in space but... damn, I miss having it to fidget with."

He nods at her proffered deal of story for story. Seems they've fallen into that pattern almost naturally already.

"All right. Ladies first?"

"I have always said I don't believe in coincidences..." she jokes. She rolls the bead she tugged at between her fingers for a moment before letting go. "I'm sorry you lost it. It was at least a decision I made to leave most things behind the last time."

Not that she had much choice, when she only had the limited space in her armour's equipment compartments to take things with her.

She sits back, crosses one leg over the other and taps her foot against the air. "Well. For certain definitions of ladies..." it's the closest she's come to broaching the intricacies of everything gender, but she still chooses to phrase it in such a way you could take it as a comment about how ladylike she isn't. "...all of this comes back to the war I've talked about. Twenty-five years ago, humanity's expansion across the galaxy finally pushed us into contact with a coalition of alien species called the Covenant. The details don't really matter, except that we tried to come to an agreement with them and they attacked us instead out of some... zealous religious fervour.

"I was four years old, when it started. So I don't really remember life before wartime. As far back as I can remember, other Outer Colonies were dropping like flies and we never knew if we'd be next. Trade routes were being lost, communications were hit and miss... and the UNSC never did do much for us, so we started learning to rely on ourselves long before they pulled most of their real soldiers out. I signed up to the local garrison so they'd pay for my college tuition, and by that point we were all new recruits. People with degrees to finish or who couldn't do spaceflight or so on. They'd still probably have sent most of the others to the front lines if they didn't need us fighting the local rebel faction."

The bitterness she has towards authority can't quite be hidden, even as someone who never could buy into the Insurrection with her whole heart thanks to the war.

He nods, grateful that she understands. On the list of regrets he carries, losing his father's ring ranks lower than some, but it still hurts. For every big sacrifice people like them make, there are one hundred small ones they never get the time to really mourn.

Now, a few years ago, hearing a deflection like that would have been easy for him to gloss over. But he's met a lot of new people since then. Learned a lot. One of his former best friends, Klaus, comes to mind. So, he feels compelled to ask, "Just to set the record straight? If you don't want me calling you a lady all you gotta do is say so." CT can take that as an invitation to explain or not, but he's got his listening ears open.

And the more he hears about the state of her home through childhood, the more his belly clenches tight. "I can't even pretend to imagine the hell that must have been growing up." He gestures openly with his hand for her to continue.

That catches her by (pleasant) surprise. She wouldn't have made so much as the deflective overture if she didn't think Crichton was decent, but it really is hard to place people on the timeline of tolerance when it's such distant history. "...I generally prefer avoiding outright gendered nouns, yeah."

That's the short version. He might get the longer version later.

"I'd say it screwed up an entire generation of humanity." More than one, if you get technical about it. Twenty-five years is a long time. "When you're facing down extinction, people get... desperate. It's like I said, I don't think there's a single branch of the military that's not doing something unethical. Everyone is trying to find the magic bullet that'll end this war. The most successful has been the Spartans. They're physiological enhanced supersoldiers wearing power armour as dense as a tank. Highly effective, but expensive. The experimental program that picked me up, Project Freelancer, was something of... a cheaper alternative. Lighter power armour, unique technological enhancements, and focused on partnering agents with an AI.

"In hindsight, I really should've known. They only recruited agents who they could offer an out of a criminal conviction. Nothing too heinous. One guy knocked out his CO so he could take over and prevent a team wipe. I leaked documents on a UNSC supplier's shoddy equipment. Stuff like that. But they wanted us loyal, they wanted us to think they owed us everything because if we quit? We'd be right back where we started. In jail or worse. And it worked. Even I ignored the signs for a long time, but... it all just kept adding up. Psychological experiments. Agents dying off in suspicious circumstances. Our targets stopped making sense. I did some digging and our Director was experimenting on the AI he'd been given. Torturing it. Making it split into pieces."

She sounds disgusted by it, she does. What he was doing to that AI was horrific. What he was doing to his agents was hardly better. But...

"Doing that? Damaging a military AI and sending it out into the field where the Covenant could attack at any time and get their hands on it, on all its information about the Core worlds? About Earth? He was practically inviting our extinction."

"Had a friend who felt similar and went by 'they' but Klaus was pretty vocal about it. When I'm talkin' about ya to others, what should I use?" He's not here to accidentally out CT to anyone. As far as he's concerned, that's the only question he really needs answered.

"Yeah, that sounds about right. Generations have been screwed up by less." And Crichton doesn't even know the half of it. The America he left was in peace times.

He shakes his head somberly, "It always comes to super soldiers. I've seen that before, too. Former love of my life used to be one. She's who you remind me of." But Aeryn was born and raised into it. She never got a choice. Freedom for her was escaping that life, not joining it.

When CT gets to that part about the AI, though, he finds his feelings on the whole situation... complicated. Boy is he glad Harvey isn't here to laugh at him about it. Rest in piss.

"That's... one hell of a pet project he had. I'd ask what the hell he was thinking but I think that might be giving a mad scientists too much credit."

"With people we both already know, 'she' is still fine—though 'they' wouldn't be wrong either. But if you're talking to anyone I probably don't know... then I generally prefer just 'they'. It creates less assumptions, if that makes sense."

If she meets those people later, then they don't come in assuming woman (uncomplicated). Broadly speaking.

'Love of his life' gets filed away into that mental dossier alongside the person and comparison in and of themselves, though she makes a point of trying not to assign much weight to the latter as she does so.

"He was thinking a lot of egotistical things. That he knew better than the protocols keeping us safe. That if the AI was based on his own mind then it didn't actually count as torturing another thinking being. That this new process he'd figured out could and had brought his wife back from the dead, if he did it just right." She sighs. "He was playing god. With the AI, with his agents... once I saw the worst of it I knew I couldn't just sit back and let it happen. I couldn't tell anyone on my team because... well, most of them wouldn't have believed me, and those who might've would have been split between telling me to stop or getting themselves hurt. So I worked alone except for contact with members of another program that the Director had been stealing from."

"Sure thing. I can do that." He doesn't fully understand it all yet, but he doesn't need to completely get it to not be an ass either.

"Damn...dude skipped right over several lines of ethics in there didn't he?" Crichton sympathizes with the pain of losing a wife but that's not a good enough excuse for any of this. (Wow, a part of him says, sarcastic to the end, this is going to be really awkward when he starts telling his side and Harvey comes up.)

"How long were you going it mostly alone knowing what you knew?"

"Couple years, give or take. It's hard to pin down the exact moment the switch flipped. I'd always noticed things the others didn't, but..." it wasn't until certain things fell into place that she dived in without reservation.

"About eight months of that was the time on the run—again, give or take. We never stayed anywhere longer than two weeks and eventually my contact tried to... consolidate our resources in one place, ahead of actually passing my intel onto someone who could do something with it. That's when the program caught up to us. And... now I'm here."

"Damn, that's a long time. Must have been hell for you." He's impressed. He's not sure he could have made it alone that long without cracking in half like a coconut, all the milk and meat sloshing out...

It's a shame she got caught in the end, anyway. "I'm sorry it went down like that. But, hey, if we manage to figure out what's going on here, you'll have a second shot at it. There's always hope. That's what keeps me going."

It's probably a bad sign that she doesn't even seem to be able to acknowledge aloud that it was, in fact, hell, instead breezing by that detail.

"Yeah, once this is all said and done... I can go back, shake Needles for being an idiot, and then actually finish what I started." Maybe. Needles was still being so cagey about his boss and... no, she's not going to think about that, right now. "Alright, well... that's me. Your turn."

He noticed that dodge, don't think he didn't. Thing is, if he presses on her now, she'll be within her rights to press on him when he gets done with his side and, well, there might be some things he's not ready to acknowledge yet, either. Reciprocity and all that.

"All right. Hang on tight, this is one heck of a story. I'll try and keep it short." Try being the operative word.

"I worked for an international space organization called IASA. I was the project commander for the Farscape-One test flight. I designed that module myself and helped build it. The idea was that I'd go up in a shuttle, take the module out on her maiden voyage, and use it to prove a theory of propulsion I wrote. I theorized that I could use the gravitational pull of a planet to accelerate without fuel if I broke away from that orbit at just the right angle. I was right, by the way. I'll get to that. My theory was going to be the next step toward deep space exploration. Funny, that's what all the newspapers were saying before the launch. They were right, they just didn't know how much."

Dammit, he said he'd keep this short. "Anyhow, I went up. I was in the middle of that test flight when, BAM, wormhole opened up and swallowed me down. I'm damn lucky I survived the ride. When I came out the other side there were spaceships in front of me. It looked like a battle, something out of the movies. Before I had any time to get my bearings, I collided with one of the single-flyers. It ricocheted into a passing asteroid. I didn't mean for it to happen but... the pilot died on impact. That's when things really went wrong..."

CT winces sympathetically. She's never seen a real space battle in-person, but the occasional vid hits the newsfeeds and being thrown into one without preparation is a nightmare scenario. "When you said you had a messy first contact... well, unintentionally causing the death of one of their pilots is certainly up there, yeah. I'm assuming they didn't take kindly to the intrusion."

"Oh hoho you have no idea." Oh no, the manic grin is back. "It wasn't just any soldier I collided with. That poor son of a bitch was the one and only brother of Captain Crais, the man in charge of half of that battle. He swore vengeance on me and he did everything including abandoning his own orders to chase me and the crew I hooked up with across all of Kingdom Come. He went insane over trying to catch me. But let me back up a minute." Because, of course, there's more.

"I call it a battle but it was actually a prison escape. My crew were those prisoners. They were being transported on an enslaved sentient Leviathan ship named Moya. She grabbed me in her tractor beam and pulled me onboard. That was my first face-to-face with other alien life forms. They injected me with translator microbes so I could speak their language but most of what they had to say was 'help us escape or perish.' So I did. Moya was dead in the water and she couldn't outrun that gunship after so I used the slingshot maneuver I'd gone up in space to test and it worked. We got out of there and I became one of the escaped convicts on the run."

"They really must have been desperate. No offence, but that seems like it would've felt like a hail mary of insane proportions." A manoeuvrer that had only ever been performed once, in an entirely different ship... it's lucky it worked out, for all of them.

"Crais's carrier was charging the laser cannons so it was do or die. None of them had a better idea. It's a good thing I'd done the math in my head so many times that morning I could calculate it in my sleep or, in this case.... in sharpie on the floor of the bridge." Yes. It really was that desperate.

"I didn't even know how to pilot Moya yet. I had to let Aeryn do the guidance while I directed. Believe me, I was crapping myself the whole time." Not literally, but pretty damn close.

"I uh... may have neglected to mention in the heat of the moment that the theory was still, until that moment, untested." But they lived so it was fine!

"You didn't even—" CT makes a noise that starts as a groan and turns into a laugh, "Crichton. Oh, my god. I can't decide if you're the unluckiest or the luckiest person in the world in this story."

"I ask myself that question every damn day. I've lived through things I had no right surviving. I mean, right now all I've told you about is the first hour or so." Yeah, it all happened that fast.

"Crais chased me for the better part of a year. We had some close calls but always managed to give him the slip. Then Aeryn got wounded. Now, Aeryn was part of Crais's squadron, but she got stranded on Moya during our escape attempts. Because she'd spent time with me and had the nerve to try and suggest to Crais that I wasn't some cold-blooded killer, she ended up being declared 'irreversibly contaminated.' They were going to kill her, just for sticking up for me. So she ran with us. But when she got injured, we realized we couldn't save her without a compatible tissue donor from her own race, the Peacekeepers. Don't let the name fool ya, they were anything but peaceful."

He shakes his head and works to reorder his thoughts. Damn, this never gets easier to explain. "We found a secret Gammak base with Peacekeepers on it. Since humans look identical to Peacekeepers outwardly, I decided to go under cover as one to get on the base and find her a compatible sample. Just my luck, Nosferatu's uglier cousin, Scorpius, happened to be the guy in charge. He saw through my disguise and put me in his mind-reading torture chair." He's not being hyperbolic, that's actually what it was.

"He gave me enough spins in that chair to get it out of me that I'm the guy Crais has been chasing. So he called his dog home. Bastard..."

[OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

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cw: torture

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cw: drug addiction

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good place to start wrapping?

yes!

End~