CT (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liesdontfindyou) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ph_logs2024-07-14 02:08 am
liesdontfindyou) wrote in ph_logs2024-07-14 02:08 am
[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.
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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!
no subject
"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."
cw: torture
"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..."
no subject
"Mm, yeah. In my experience the people that go around calling themselves something like 'peacekeepers' are almost always exactly the opposite." They usually have a very twisted idea of what peace means, at the very least.
It's always a little strange for her to think of worlds where some aliens actually do look like humans, like in all the old movies. There's not a single Covenant species that looks human enough for that trick to ever work for the UNSC.
She can see something going wrong with the plan even before says it, and she's quickly torn between a laugh at the description of Scorpius and a more concerned sound at the phrase mind-reading torture chair. "Well that's horrible."
no subject
"Oh, that was just the tip of the iceberg. We got deeper to go yet. See, Scorpius thought I was a spy sent to steal his research for what he was studying on the base. Obviously, he didn't believe me when I said I didn't know what they were doing on that damn rock in the first place and I didn't care. Then, when he put me in his chair, he found something even I didn't know was there."
He takes a moment in what seems like a pause for dramatic emphasis but is actually him gathering his strength to explain this next part.
"A race of aliens I'd encountered months before left a little present in my head for me without telling me about it. The Ancients knew how to traverse through wormholes. I tried to get them to tell me how but they said it was too dangerous for anyone to know. They told me that and then the bastards slipped it into my brain anyway. They put it under the equivalent of a mental firewall so I'd only ever be able to access it unconsciously. Wormhole technology, the ability not just to travel through them, but to sense them and maybe even make one if I got far enough. They gifted me that hoping it might help lead me home." In theory, was nice of them, but in actuality it cursed the rest of his life.
"But wouldn't you know it? The thing Scorpy was studying on his gammak base that whole time, the secret he was obsessed with cracking, it was wormholes. He was looking for a way to turn them into a weapon. And here I was, like an answer to his devil prayers. Crais wasn't my problem anymore after that. The moment this came out, I became Scorpius's new pet science project."
no subject
"Shit."
That's all she has for a solid few seconds, processing the information. The closest analogue to such dangerous information she has is, well, the coordinates to Earth and every other colony that the Cole Protocol was supposed to prevent. The very reason she turned on the Director directly in the first place. It's a good enough comparison for her to feel the weight of the risk.
"That sounds a lot worse than just being on the run."
no subject
"I managed to escape the base. An old friend came through for me when I least expected. She... paid the ultimate price for it, too. Scorpius shot her. Her name was Gilena and I don't think she knew what was at stake besides saving me, but she deserves to never be forgotten. I couldn't have saved Aeryn or myself without her help." After all this time, the bitter grief and guilt of her death is still as acrid on his tongue as ever.
"We blew that base to smithereens on our way out. But Scorpius is the closest thing to a cockroach in humanoid form there ever was. He got out, and he kept following me. Kept catching me, too, but I always managed to give him the slip. Until he changed his tactics. Aeryn got heat-sick again, and this time none of us had any way to help her. But he did."
Crichton leans forward and scrubs his face with both hands. "We let him on the ship. I became frelling roommates with the guy. Not even my own cabin was safe anymore. He was breathing down my damn neck night and day asking for wormholes over and over and over. I tried to tell him."
He looks back up at CT again and there's something painfully desperate in his eyes, "Wormholes aren't weapons. They're an apocalypse. I couldn't let him crack me. I had to do whatever it took to keep him out of my head."
no subject
There's an empathetic wince without elaboration, when he's talking about Gilena. She knows the odd grief and guilt of someone dying on your behalf, though what's always felt the worst about getting Mass killed is how they didn't even get on. She turned to zir out of a desperation for help from someone aboard and ze had the right skillset, but they'd always clashed. Ze helped not because ze trusted CT, but because ze knew it was the right thing to do. And then ze died, and CT used zir death as a smokescreen to stop herself being caught too.
She tries to shake the memory off and focus on the rest of what Crichton's saying, almost but not quite reaching out to set a hand on his shoulder. "Hey. I get it. You have to do what you have to do in these situations, even when it feels like hell the whole time—god only knows I know that well enough."
cw: drug addiction
"In my case, it was drugs," he admits. It never stops hurting to have to say it, but the more people he trusts with this, the more people there will be to keep him in line if he ever trips off the path.
"Something called Lakah, made from bug guts. Can't get it here, and I wouldn't want it even if I could. It numbed me to everything, good and the bad. I gave it up a year and some change ago. I don't even touch beer now."
no subject
Ah. That explains what he said before about not drinking. CT bites the inside of her cheek, but ultimately her hand settles on his shoulder and squeezes.
"...if you weren't feeling anything, he couldn't use anything you felt against you."
It should, perhaps, be concerning that she finds herself thinking that she would have been tempted to take advantage of the stuff had she had such a thing on hand during her time at the program. Even for all her best efforts, there was many a late night where her wall broke down more than she'd have liked.
"Well, I'm glad you managed to give it up."
no subject
In his defense, it did work as intended. Not that he'd recommend it to anyone.
"Thank you. It's one of the things I've done, recently, that I can be proud of. For the record, if you see me reaching for something I shouldn't, I give you permission to slap it out of my hand."
no subject
CT gives a little play-salute. "Permission noted. Luckily for you I've got good reflexes."
There will be no hesitation, should the need arise.
"Your life sounds like the definition of being unable to catch a break."
good place to start wrapping?
"Hah. Tell me about it. After that midnight party, I'm thinking that ain't about to change. We'll take it as it comes, won't we?"
yes!
"One insane thing after the next, yeah. Which reminds me I'm meant to be getting you up to date on what we've found out since, though maybe we should actually go inside for that."
Where she can show her notes whilst she explains.
End~