ph_logs | This is a Foul-Tasting Medicine

This is a Foul-Tasting Medicine | OTA

Who: Agent Carolina (

cyansoldier) & You.
What: Carolina adjusts poorly to Caboose's sudden absence. Among other things.
When: Early May.
Where: Around town.
Warning(s): Brief mention of dead deer, gun usage.

( Strike up the tinderbox / Why should I be good if you're not? )

I won't turn around or the penny drops.

She hasn't seen Caboose in days. Not since she'd squatted in his ramshackle porch on Crane's Ridge summit, shoulder to shoulder. When morning peeled through the trees, they walked together. Her, in silence. Him, remarking on whatever interesting thing he saw. Bugs, mostly.

She doesn't think twice about his absence—at first. Caboose, like a large and excitable dog, tracks what most interests him. Animals, people, machines if there are any. She'll find him. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

She searches for him at the Ranch. Said he'd wanted cows.

She searches for him in the woods. Plenty to distract him there.

She searches for him in town. Maybe someone's seen him. Big and tall, curly hair. Probably said something stupid.

As a last resort, Carolina stalks to Town Hall. She's on edge. She pushes through the door like it's just attacked her. Michael J. Caboose. I need to find him. Can you tell me his address? An odd look from the desk. I know him. It's important. Please.

He's gone. People come and go, ma'am.

She leaves angry and humiliated. Feels sick. It doesn't make any sense. Why would he leave? To-ge-ther, he said in his broken tones. What an idiot. She's an idiot for believing she could trust him— trust anyone to hold tender a shred of her feelings. Comfort like newly shattered glass stuck in her hands and face and chest.

She doesn't need him.

She should be training.

Won't stop now / Won't slack off. [OTA]

She moves like a shark. No moment of peace. No chance to rest.

Carolina picks through produce like a soldier in the midst of a deadly stealth mission, peering over her shoulder every fifth step for signs of danger and looks so suspicious that she's confronted about stealing.

She jogs at the outskirts of the residential areas (avoiding Connecticut while also keeping the possibility of seeing her squarely at the front of her brain). Slides in the dark nooks between buildings to catch her breath and spit. Sometimes she lingers with her arm and forehead butted up against the wall. Numb. Staring at nothing. Feeling her lungs swell and deflate with the effort she puts into moving, moving, moving.

Most days she can be found marching to the Oak & Iron with a deer slung around her shoulders, its horned head bobbing limply. She tries to feel good about it. She'll get a few pieces of Brass and the people will have venison to enjoy. She tries, and feels empty.

From her farmhouse are the usual sounds of gunshots and split wood. Maybe you find her cleaning her Colt Revolving Shotgun, perhaps the only thing she's really grown to care about in this place. Tread carefully. She's trained to shoot on sight.

This dance / Is like a weapon. [Wildcard]

_{( Have something else in mind? Shoot! )}

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

CT catches her adversary in the middle of a sporadic nap. She's sprawled out on the floor as per usual, her pillow wrangled into a choke-hold, her sheets unused. Teetering on the edge of consciousness. A half-dream. Sleep doesn't come easily these days. Nor has it for the last two or so decades.

And so when CT begins speaking through her sending stone, Carolina's eyelids zip open. She's up in an instant, pawing for her revolver and sending her own stone clattering under the bed.

Connie.

The voice again, muffled by a sort of magic static.

Oh. That thing.

Grunting, she tosses her gun onto her mattress. The stone is jagged in her hand where she snatches it from the ground. When she speaks, it's hoarse and residually irritated.

"When and where?"

"My yard, whenever you can get over here?"

Home territory and a friend nearby is still an advantage she can't pass up. Neutral ground isn't worth half as much as that and she has the leverage to insist, she thinks, even if Carolina would prefer otherwise.

"I'm leaving my gun. Don't make me regret it." Not in the mood today. A pause. CT hears a sigh on the other end of the line— and shuffling. The sound of rubber soles clattering against old wood in her effort to put her boots on. "I'll be there in twenty."

She dresses herself, slides on her coat and hesitates at the door. Her hunter's knife catches her eye where she's stuck it into the doorframe. She told Connecticut she was leaving her gun, but said nothing of knives. And after her ass-beating at the hands of Fever, well...

You never know when you'll need it.

Carolina grabs it, slides it into her boot and rushes through the door.

CT doesn't even dignify that with a response, much as the words no need for the dramatics, Carolina hang on her tongue for a moment. She just stuffs her stone back in her pocket and sits on the same rickety old bench that's been there since she got here.

On one wrist, pearls and charms. On the other, the silver cuff that lets her mimic her holograms. In her boots, her usual array of knives.

Adequately prepared.

Twenty minutes tick by and she rests her eyes on the gate.

Her walk from the Farmlands to the city's residential area is arduous, however necessary. She has her space between fields and cow pastures; a place she can be alone. CT has their's at the heart of town, around people she trusts. It's unlikely their paths will cross— not unless they orchestrate it. If that's what she wants, so be it.

(And like a predator after prey, she chases Crichton's jovial voice out of her head).

Carolina knocks once on the large wooden gate flanking CT's home. Frankly, she looks like shit. Gut still aching where she's been struck repeatedly by a quarterstaff. Synapses fried from magical lightning. Never has she looked quite so on edge.

"It's open. Just come in."

She studies her, as the gate eases open to reveal the worn down woman on approach. Jesus, what the hell has she been up to? It's like watching her come back from a drop that went wrong but had just long enough a flight back that she could pretend to put herself together on the way.

Not important right now. Not compared to the rest.

"Calm down. I'm not looking for a fight now anymore than I was before."

"Neither am I," She puffs, exacerbated. Standing in front of CT under any circumstances means inflicting yourself to a slow peeling. An exposure more dread-inducing than a Covenant Dropship breaking through storm clouds.

Few people are able to make her feel truly ridiculous. York, maybe. Texas. The Director, certainly.

Standing in front of CT now, she feels ridiculous. A quarter of the Officer she used to be. Let's make this quick.

"You have questions, ask them."

"I wasn't the one making quips about guns."

She sighs, sits forward in her seat and rolls the bracelet up into her hand. What to ask first... so many questions, such limited time in the grand scheme of things. How many can Carolina even answer? What could she even see, from wherever she hid? Maybe that's the place to start.

CT touches the charm, a motion that means nothing to anyone who doesn't know it's magical. When she speaks again, she's carefully neutral. "Where did you go, after you were presumed dead?"

"It wasn't a quip. It was a concession."

Carolina, like her companion, sighs. Self-decompression, or the closest thing to it. You're fine. It's just Connecticut. Still, she makes no move to sit down and instead stands like a stone statue with arms knotted across her chest.

"After the crash, I thought maybe they'd come looking for me, so I kept my head low. Hid out in the forest. Turns out they didn't care, so I moved on. Found a base, forged papers. Enlisted with the UNSC. I couldn't do nothing, not with the war still going on."

The fact her own father didn't even look for her... it's not so much a surprise as a grim confirmation of what they both know: that her being his daughter meant nothing to him in comparison to his own ambitions. In comparison to his old, stale grief.

"You never were very good at sitting still," CT muses. Makes sense. The UNSC never did care for forged papers so long as you were willing to fight and die for them. "How much were you able to listen in on from there? That should have given you at least some communications access to exploit."

"No, I guess I'm not." She mutters, a little more melancholy than she means for it to be. Another reminder of how stuck she is, in this place. Even now, she feels a dire need to walk. To move electrified muscles someway, somewhere. And so she paces, slowly.

"I, ah. I found a transmitter and with some luck picked up the PFL broadcast channel. It was quiet, for a while. I assume everyone was trying to find their footing." A long, tense quiet. She rolls a stone under her shoe. "They started dropping like flies."

"Maine. Or... whatever the AI turned him into." That's not a question, but it's not a hard leap to make. Maine tried to kill Carolina, he must have tried and succeeded to kill others. None of them stood much of a chance against Maine in a contest of pure might. "He was after other AI, wasn't he? Sigma always was... a little bit unsettling."

Sometimes it felt like he talked over Maine, rather than for him. How many times did she see him project in front of Maine's face, even as Maine waved him out of the way?

She always thought he just had something to prove. That he was just determined to be useful.

She expects Maine's name to come up— he's the biggest mystery of this whole mess, after all— and still Carolina grimaces. Feels a shock of faux-pain where metal sits idle at her nape. Her fault. Her AI. Sigma was designed for her.

"South led Maine— The Meta—" not his name, "To North, and it killed him. Don't ask me why, I can't make sense of it either. It may have killed others. Agents from the lower squads— it's hard to know exactly. But... Yeah. Yeah, he wanted any AI he could get his hands on. I knew Sigma had... personality, but I didn't realize anything was wrong until—"

She shakes her head, scowling.

Edited 2025-05-09 17:25 (UTC)

South. God how she wishes that surprised her more. The program broke her down more keenly than almost anyone but Carolina, she thinks. Twisted all of her issues into weapons that Command didn't know how to control half as well as they thought they did.

"...she was here briefly, you know. Not like us. One of the demons brought in figure from our pasts to tell tales to our friends. She spent a long time finding new, creative ways to curse me for being a traitor, apparently."

Not important. Don't waste time on that. She clears her throat.

"If the Director had any intention of that happening, there were no records of it in the files I pulled." Not that it means much, when she left months before everything finally fell apart. "They predicted a lot, him and the Counselor, but they couldn't predict everything. Did he convince you that you chose to take those two AI of entirely your own volition?"

Another logical leap. Carolina never did say she ended up with two in as many words, but the pieces were all there. A 'them' where it could have been an 'it'. (The two states in one. The two units.)

Her scowl morphs into a frown, then. Discretely sympathetic, therefore digestible to someone like Connecticut. She knows the taste herself. "I thought you two were close. She always did take things personally, didn't she."

Enough to kill her own brother. Animals.

"What?" Carolina knits her brows, newly defensive. Her pacing stops abruptly. "I did choose to have them both. It was my decision."

All the top Agents have an AI.

Well, except you, Agent Carolina. You chose not to.

"Agent Texas— she had Omega. And if Omega was the strongest, that means I needed—"

Two AI.

"I made the choice. It didn't matter anyway. I lost them practically the same day."

We were. But I betrayed her by leaving, CT thinks, refusing to dwell on it aloud. She understands, even if it hurts. South never was a big picture kind of a gal. Took things personally—that's certainly one way to put it. Never looking far beyond what was right in front of her.

Carolina's anger is understandable, too. CT may as well have just pushed a thumb into her bruised pride but well, she never has been all that good at holding her tongue when she thinks something has to be said.

"You think he'd have let you disrupt his plans if you doing so wasn't part of them? Everything he did was an experiment, Carolina. He'd been setting you up to be something different from the rest of us from the start. After Texas happened, he just— changed what that was."

From the prodigal daughter to the test subject.

"You said she turned on him." Pivot, back to questions. Keep the subtle leading going. "You said she found my message. How? When? What did she actually do?"

She's right, chides an inner voice. You didn't mean anything to him. Not unless you were playing a part in his game. It stings. To know a Father's love has been so long gone. She'd like to think it did exist, for a time. It doesn't matter. She's going to see him to his grave and he'll regret what he's done. Worthless old man.

Fuck, it stings.

She says nothing. CT moves on. Good.

"She just— left and came back. The alarm sounded. I was called to meet the Director and he sent me after her. They thought she was trying to steal the other Agents AI— I don't know. I just followed. That's when everyone broke off into sides. York tried to stop me and it didn't work so I moved on. Found Texas. We fought while the ship was coming down. I don't know when she found your message but it was obvious that she had."

She kicks the stone across the yard. It pings off CT's tree target.

"She said I couldn't win, but I could come with her. And obviously I wasn't going to do that."

God, it still doesn't make sense. Though she can take a stab at one thing— "Something tells me that wasn't her stealing AI. Given what happened after."

Easy to blame the rogue agent until the real perpetrator showed himself. Even if Texas being a rogue agent doesn't make any sense in the first place. But hearing it now, the charm still doing its magic, it must be the truth—at least so far as Carolina understands it.

"...I left her the message before I even left the ship, and she charged down into that bunker and killed me anyway. It doesn't..." It doesn't make sense. Something else must have made her turn on him. "Why was York helping her?"

Carolina hums a muted agreement. "It wouldn't make sense. Wyoming survived. He was fine. If she wanted his AI then, she would have taken it." An obvious lie on the part of their Director. Create danger and panic to inspire action. Results. Wyoming always was a loyal dog. She isn't one to talk.

"Couldn't she have found it late? I mean, she isn't the type to mull things over like that. If she knew you had valuable information during the time she killed you, she wouldn't have gone through with it. Maybe she didn't know where to look."

York. Her face sours. If she had another stone at her disposal she would have kicked it even harder.

She misses him, that idiot.

"He was sympathetic. He never liked the way things worked, even if he didn't make it obvious."

Couldn't she have found it late.

Stupidly obvious a thought, in hindsight. Surprising from Carolina, in a way, in how much lenience it gives the shadow of a woman that hangs over them both, but reasonable truth can cut through a lot of noise. No matter how much you hate someone, sometimes you still understand how they work.

"...I left the tags in her locker. There wasn't anywhere else."

Tags abandoned in an unused locker. It had always been a longshot, but there had been no other option and when Texas came charging in, ready to shoot her dead, it was so easy to imagine that she had known but not cared.

...does it even make a difference?

When you can think for yourself, obeying orders is just as much a choice as disobeying them.

"I told her everything I could in that message. I figured if she realised what she was she'd act. Maybe I was right. Maybe I just had shitty timing."

Can't think about this. Can't dwell on it. Can't think about the words your friend, Connie falling on ears that had already heard her choking on her own blood.

What else does she need to know? Focus. Fuck's sake.

"Where did they go, after their stunt ended badly?"

"...She never used that locker, CT. When's the last time you remember her using the locker rooms for anything?" Never. She didn't need them. Had no items to call her own. No body to shower beneath her armor, maybe. The thought makes her sick. A woman— a real, human woman stolen from some base or having volunteered blindly to become entirely other. Or an armored puppet.

Another mystery she'd rather go unsolved.

"They scattered— all of them. It's hard to know where. Washington worked as Recovery for a time. Florida was killed first, by— Jesus," a sick laugh. "By aspirin."

She paces.

"York— ...York was shot by Wyoming. Wyoming died later. North got taken about by Mai— The Meta and South was killed by Washington. He didn't trust her. I don't blame him. After that things went quiet for a little."

Tore each other apart.

Animals.

"Washington killed The Meta later with his group of Sim soldiers. They're who helped us look for the Director."

She scoffs and slaps a hand to her head. "Help— they were all idiots. Useless in the end, practically dead weight. They did nothing. Epsilon and I did all the work and still it amounted to nothing."

Edited 2025-05-09 20:39 (UTC)

"I know—" she clenches her teeth and breathes through her nose. "I knew that. But there were no other options. It's not as if he let her just walk around. And I only had so much time."

A hail mary in the final hours of her time on the ship. A desperate play that didn't pay off. Stupid, so goddamned stupid and naive to ever think it would work. As if there had been even a lick of hope left for her in the end, as if leaving was ever going to do more than buy time.

Now it's her that wants to get up and pace, but she remains rooted to the spot in spite of the urge, fiddling anxiously.

Florida, dead—that's reassuring, in a sick sort of way, Wyoming too—their loyalty to the Director made them threats, if she ever made it home. The team tearing itself to pieces is the opposite. Everyone dead at the hand of another. And who knows how many of the others, the other squads.

Did you even think once about the rest of them? she wants to ask, but like so many times before, she has to pick and choose what questions that are worth the risk and time.

"And Tex? Do you think she was powering the versions that you fought, or did something else happen to her? Where did she go?"

"No. Those drones might have looked like Texas, but they weren't her. She was destroyed by an EMP. We have Washington to thank for that. As for the others... I don't know. They're probably still kicking around in the storage facility, waiting for Wash and his people to show up. If they make it that far."

If they even bother looking.

"We kind of left on a bad note."

EMP. That's smart. He always was resourceful, could always look at a situation and see the way through. Add that to all the lectures on making sure not to use his unit too close to AI-operating agents and you had the perfect recipe for that particular revenge plot to form.

"What kind of a bad note? And— where did you even get Epsilon? That was the name set aside for the memory fragment. Did they assign it? Who..." was left after the assignments already decided before she'd left?

North was always going to get Trust, Theta, sat pretty at number five on the board. That left Wash, Maine, and South, but Maine had already had his AI and South was never going to get one—the Director would have kept assigning them to Beta with the excuse of better compatibility before he ever gave South her due. Which meant after Carolina got her two, then...

"...Wash. That's why he finally turned on the program. Isn't it? He got the memories. He couldn't deny it anymore."

"Wash decided he wasn't up for the task anymore. I needed him on lock duty and he— along with the rest of his idiots— refused. Epsilon— Church, that's what his friends know him as— he tore into them. Well, it turned into an altercation and they all bailed. I shouldn't be surprised that he sided with them. I thought maybe, maybe he'd want to see this through just as much as I did. I was wrong."

Whatever. She doesn't need him, nor does she need his band of misfits to get the job done.

"We found him in storage. I thought if we had his memories, we might have a better chance at finding the Director. And I was right. We did find him, only Washington wasn't there to finish the job." Her frown morphs into a full-fledged glower. "So much for turning."

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