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August Event Log: Part I

Who: Everyone
When: August 9 and onward
Where: An unexpected destination
What: The newcomers go on a trip and end up far from where they expected
Warnings: Potential violence. Please label your content!

NOTE: PLEASE READ THIS OOC POST FIRST.

When the time comes for the travelers to go on the off-world trip that will help restore Thisavrou, they are not alone. Others who have settled on the planets longer and come to call them home are also prepared to travel; through the Ingress and do their part. Yet when the newcomers step through, whether they stepped through the Ingress seconds or hours apart, they will find that they have arrived at the same time, and only newcomers are in sight.

What awaits them is not a land of plenty. The land is barren, and dark storms in the sky resemble those held at bay by the Ingress complex—but much, much closer. Those who traveled on the Moira may recognize the landscape; though they have come through at a different point from the crash, they are on the Midway Hub. And there is no portal back. They are trapped.

hitting the road

Though some have been here before, the Midway Hub is not as they remember it. The storms fill the sky, leaving it dark and ominous even when they are not sweeping across the landscape—but they have clearly done so in recent times, and often. While never a lush land, large patches of ground an acre or more wide looking nothing more than utterly dead; the thistle that naturally grows is brittle, black and unable to be consumed even with the usual preparations to make it edible, and here and there animal corpses are found twisted into unnatural poses, but seemingly uninjured. These places are particularly concentrated near the broken Ingresses litter the landscape. While Midway Hub as a whole may seem naturally arid, these dead spots leave no hope that anything can possibly live there again.

The travelers have two options: stay where they are, or move on. While it might seem that they've been tricked into coming here and been left abandoned, those with the technological ability to do so may detect a sign of hope: a familiar energy source, far in the distance. Although none of the Ingresses they pass will ever work again, the faint energy shows that one still-functioning Ingress lies far in the distance, days away.

Although technological scanning or impressive memory of the landscape indicates that they are not separated from their destination by one of the gates that divide the land, they are also far from the shelter of the facility at the center of the Hub. Any attempt to travel in a direction other than that of the energy signal will result in a strange disorientation after several hours, bringing individuals back to their original path as though they've gone in circles. Meanwhile, though travelers will feel the need to slake their hunger and thirst through any natural water sources they discover, wildlife they can hunt for food and any supplies they have on them, if they don't find sustenance, they'll find that they will never pass out or reach the point of starvation. Instead, they'll be left alive and awake but feeling utterly hollow.

storm front

At regular intervals, the energy storms above descend onto the land, bringing not rain but violent clashes of negative energy and thunder so loud that nothing can be heard above it. The passing of the storms leaves some strange effects. The ground is warped and rotted by their touch, even solid stone degrading to a spongy surface. The air is tepid and oddly charged. Prolonged contact with air or ground will not supply energy, however — it drains it from organic and synthetic life alike.

Those who remember their last trip to the Hub, or simply explore in the right direction, may come across the cave complexes with their glowing surfaces and streams. The light is dimmer now, a sickly green, but drinking from the streams will still restore the energy lost, for a time. This time, however, the lethargy that inevitably follows is much more severe, and the drinkers are left with a raw, empty feeling leeching in from the wasteland around.

Those who are exposed to the storms, either by finding themselves in very close proximity or even closely observing them for too long as they approach, may lose their sight, or hearing, even much of the ability to feel touch — whatever sense they used in observation. What lingers in its place is a numbness. A hunger. And as time passes, the time between storms decreases; what seemed like hours between the storms becomes scarcely one, and their intensity grows.

wild life

Sentient beings are not the only ones affected by the storms; these creatures, attracted to sound and able to track by scent, and these panthers, which once looked normal but have been twisted by the storms into more monstrous forms, are numerous enough that travelers must be constantly alert for their presence. Though natural predators, the threat the creatures represent is not itself natural. They are also more aggressive. Some strange instinct drives them, not a need for food. While the panthers themselves can be caught and their meat cooked, it has little taste, offering nutrition but not satisfaction.

old familiar places

Although it's difficult to track the passage of time without day-night cycles, after what seems like more than a week of the travelers' unexpected trip, the storms abruptly come rushing in at the group of travelers, as if they're herding the group to move faster toward their destination and the Ingress energy that awaits them. The true nature of that destination becomes clear when debris appears on the horizon; the energy comes from the wreckage of the Moira, the interstellar ship that crashed here months ago.

Despite the trauma of impact, large sections of the ship remain surprisingly intact, though few of them are properly vertically oriented. If travelers are able to make their way inside the damaged sections of the ship, they'll find familiar territory, if they are one of those who traveled on the Moira, as well as shelter—something that's increasingly necessary as the storms seem to center over the ship, leaving little hope for survival outside. Useful items may be scavenged from the ship if they are willing to explore, but no personal items of any kind remain.

Strangely, the deeper travelers go into the crashed ship, the less familiar their surroundings will seem, regardless of their orientation. The inward-leading paths into the ship become generic metal, and as with the travel on the surface of the planet, they may find themselves back where they started. And no matter how far they go or how hard they try, they will find themselves unable to make it to the Ingress chamber itself...for now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The pistol gets pointed right back at Rinzler's head.

Behind his visor, Nihlus' mandibles clamp grimly against his jaw. Had he missed something? But no, the body language still matches up. It's the body language he knows, not the swaggering smugness of the program's shadow.

So why was he talking all of a sudden, then?

"... Rinzler," he starts, then stops, wary beyond all words, slowly backing up. If this is the start of another shadow infestation, then bullets are useless.

Not the response he'd been expecting.

The pistol rises, and Rinzler shifts back to a crouch. It levels, and disks split, humming in each fist. The enforcer is fast enough to outpace most users with a gun, but Nihlus isn't one to underestimate. Nihlus is, as demonstrated repeatedly, a worthwhile challenge even with more limited weapons.

He doesn't shoot, though.

He doesn't shoot. Rinzler doesn't throw. The user starts and stops and starts retreating, cautious steps that match up readily to fear. It's enough to stall projections of infection or new glitches, the fractured spiral twisting toward betrayal. Nihlus is afraid of him. Weapons stay up, noise grating out staccato-sharp. The black helmet slants sideways.

Why?

Body language is still matching up. The reaction was definitely the Rinzler he knows better. Nihlus slowly, nervously exhales, almost soundless asides from the bare whisper of electronic distortion from his helmet.

After a moment of internal struggle, he slowly points the gun ground-wards.

Another moment. Silence. Then-

"The last time you talked, you were oozing black."

...

Oh.

The disks lower. Their edges dim. The tense coil to Rinzler's frame doesn't completely fade, but that headtilt does slant a little further to one side.

"Shot it too?"

Past the enforcer's rumbling, the distortion, and the cutting quality of Rinzler's voice? That question sounds hopeful.

"I didn't-" A breath, trying to press down the little flashback. "Didn't have my gun on me."

Not that he'd have tried shooting at Rinzler, even then. Bullets wouldn't have had any affect on it to begin with, but...

At the time?

It'd still been Rinzler.

"I just," Nihlus shrugs, trying to lighten his tones. "Tried to throw it down some stairs. Didn't really work out."

Didn't work out. Rinzler's stare lingers a long moment before ducking in a nod. That phrase could mean a wealth of possible interpretations, some bad and some distinctly worse. He's not sure how to ask which Nihlus means. He's not sure, with the catch of breath and forced tone-shift, if he should.

Not that Rinzler is entirely eager to put his own disk back. Sound rattles quietly for a few beats before the enforcer slants his mask a little to one side.

Status?

"I'm alright," he whispers, running his claws over his neck with a shallow exhale. "I got off pretty. Well. I didn't die. Again."

He just flinches whenever Shepard moves too quickly sometimes and pulls guns on his friends, apparently.

"How about you?" It's soft and tentative and worried. "How are you doing?"

Because he'd be blind not to see the tension in Rinzler's form right now.

Another unspecific qualifier. Fingers curl slightly at Rinzler's side—for the gesture, for the implication, for the question in return. Still, two deflections means he probably should stop asking.

Right?

Shoulders twitch in a shrug, frame drawing in as he forces back the coiled readiness to move. This is Nihlus. Didn't die is an accurate return, but feels wrong—not least of all when it hadn't been by his own merit. Rinzler opts for "Not damaged" instead, and in the present tense, it's even true.

A reach back, and his disk clicks into dock. The opaque mask ducks towards his indicator, and a second verbal string chases the first.

"Permissions edit."

Explanation. Apology. He hadn't meant to startle.

"That's- Amazing."

And it is. It's the truth, a muted amazement in his tones.

"I shouldn't have reacted... I'm sorry."

But that'd make it three times, wouldn't it?

Three edits since the Monolith. Three edits since he'd failed to keep his promise.

It's strangely distant looking on it all now, like everything had been incorporated, homogenized. Another scrawl on the long, long list of things he'd failed at, like the ink set into the fibers in one of his sketchbooks.

The Key had granted him a new perspective, some stability, some logic and, on a certain level, Nihlus understood that the circumstances were beyond his control, but.

It's still there. Every time he sees Rinzler, a dull pressure in the back of his mind, the weight of this guilt. Now it came neatly wrapped up with a hard, pale smirk and the memory of flickering lights.

"I never thought I'd hear your voice."

Such a strange paradox of emotions.

The apology draws a humorless breath, sound quickening with static as Rinzler's helmet twitches to the side. "Threat." He'd have pointed a weapon at himself. Or used it. If Nihlus had managed to harm the malware, Rinzler would have taken damage now to be an entirely worthwhile trade.

Still, it is amazing. It isn't anything Rinzler thought would happen—anything he would have been capable of thinking, once. Rinzler nods... but Rinzler lags. Nihlus isn't the only one with mismatched sentiments. Especially not here.

"Would—"

Check your words. Parse out syntax. Words matter more when spoken aloud and aren't nearly so easy to adjust. The string stutters, a moment's care before Rinzler retries.

"...Clu. Would have wiped me.

"Before."

Why didn't he this time?

He doesn't ask that though. Rolling the question over on his tongue, Nihlus lets the little web of links and potentials spread out before him.

Clu's face the first time in the Moira's garden, peering at the snarl of code floating above Rinzler's disk. Clu's face pulling Rinzler out of the coffin back on Earth 91-c, the strange tangle of grief and guilt and fury.

This wasn't the Grid and Clu had so little power. Rinzler wasn't the Rinzler he'd known and the code wasn't the code he'd remade from Tron. This much at least, Nihlus has figured out. There's still so much he didn't know.

But that wasn't the priority at the moment.

"Are you safe now?"

Because knowing Clu, there'd have been some form of payment for this, even if it wasn't a wipe.

There's a faint crackling of static, but Rinzler doesn't hesitate in nodding. Yes. Not what he'd meant... but if Clu still planned to reset him, he could have. Whatever other cost he might have levied, Rinzler hasn't come across it yet.

"Said he wouldn't." Shoulders lift and resettle, acknowledging the... imperfection of the guarantee. Still, it's more safety than Rinzler's ever known before. More everything. And...

"Stopped him long enough. For that."

The words jolt out a little quickly. A little uneven. Rinzler realizes after the fact which part he left out, and his helmet jerks forward. Nihlus had. By guarding Rinzler's disk. By safeguarding Rinzler's repair.

He's trying to say thank you.

It takes-

A moment.

And when that moment passes, Nihlus still doesn't answer. Nothing beyond a bewildered, wide-eyed stare. The words that eventually do spill out of his mouth are stilted, stiff, subvocal wrecked with shock and guilt.

"But I-"

Failed you.

...he what?

Rinzler isn't good at words. Not at speaking or acknowledging. Not at gratitude, at being someone who was helped with any grace. It's uncomfortable. Wrong. Not what he's for—not anything Clu's weapon ever should have needed.

But Rinzler is used to listening. And that look, that's not... what he'd expected. The black helmet stills, watchful and uncertain, as the uneasy feeling lodges in his core.

"Long enough." Repetition. Probably not right. He cuts off further looping with a "Wouldn't—", sound ticking out in low frustration as he searches for more useful terms. He needed help. Nihlus gave it. That's the only reason he's still here.

"I owe you."

That doesn't feel like the right phrase either. But it's true.

The stale air is suddenly entirely too stifling.

Why now?

You know why.

What changed?

You know what.

Stop. Stop it.

What did my shadow say to you?

Nihlus stares at Rinzler, his mouth moving but nothing comes out. He withdraws altogether after a moment, pressing his back flat against the wall, expression closing off. Trying to distance himself from the sudden tidal crash of emotions, trying to push it back enough for air, but the weight of it was suffocating.

The sound of wind rushing through the cavern is too familiar now and it drags him back. The distant echo of liquid dripping, the scent of wet dirt and stone. Darkness that his eyes can't cut through, sleepless white-noise exhaustion so thick he could barely move but the terror of being pulled under into nightmare-filled sleep keeps him awake and he was-

"You don't."

Don't?

"You don't owe me," Nihlus pushes on with a gasp. "You don't owe me anything. I promise that you don't."

He closes his eyes, taking in a slow breath, shoulders sloped, head dipped low.

"Not after everything that's happened."

-since you put me back where I belonged.

Error.

There's no internal flag, no burst of mismatch or correction. Still, the feedback is anything but subtle. Nihlus lags—retreats—stutters, and Rinzler freezes in place, caught between an impulse to step after and the relative certainty that would make everything worse.

And a quieter appreciation: for any distance at all. There's a branch of processing still tracking that arm—still calculating vectors for response. But that isn't fair. Not to act on; not to set first. Nihlus isn't the enemy.

Nihlus hadn't been before, either. Not by the time they'd made it here.

"Do," Rinzler growls instead, a half-turn to the side. Pacing is a frivolity Clu's enforcer wasn't written to indulge in, but the frustrated set to his hunched frame certainly bespeaks the urge. Noise rattles, fast and irritated, helmet jerking in negation. Not relevant. Not the point, at least. He's always owed this user more than he could ever repay, from the moment he first passed his disk over and received it back untouched. He hadn't been trying to make an accounting of all points.

"Last time. Here. I... didn't help."

Just one.

Here.

The voice, the voice, the echoes of it dying in his mind, over and over as the nightmares drag him under, wires in his lungs, wires in his throat, his skull. No matter how far he walks, he can't escape, there's no escape, there's no-

Nihlus just stares wordlessly, mouth open but no words come out. Slowly, he shakes his head. Denial? Confusion?

Up until he'd found those sedatives squirreled away in his pacdisk, the Midway Hub had been a directionless haze, dream and wakefulness melding together into a meaningless miasma of color and sound. He remembers half of a talk with Alan. He remembers Rinzler lit by bioluminescence, disgust and distrust written into every line of his frame. He remembers the way their encampments glittered in the gloom, the vast stretches of gray nothingness ahead and the voice telling him to go. Go, go, keep going and never return.

And he'd been-

Alone.

"Rinzler..."

Another breath, slower, steadier.

"I did something awful to you." There was no way to see the eyes under that helmet, but Nihlus peers into it anyways, into the black sheen of it. "And it might have been under the influence of an external force, but it was still my hands."

It happened for a reason. He'd been alone for a reason. He'd made sure he was alone for a reason.

"My hands. Mine. You had no obligation to help me. And no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again."

Nihlus stalls. Rinzler waits. He's almost convinced he's got it wrong again, but the words that do come out this time are... closer. Not agreement, but address. That's fine. He doesn't agree either.

He should have tried. He should have helped. He's been through worse—some at "this user's" hands, though Rinzler certainly has the sense not to tell him that. But Nihlus hadn't rewritten him. Nihlus had been recoded, and Rinzler knew ("more than anyone") exactly what that meant.

The black mask shakes—a little too quickly. At Nihlus' excuses, but also the sick hate welling in memory: voice and failure and too-close touch. Rinzler's still furious that he hadn't managed to delete that virus. He loathes worse the thought that in anything, at any point... it might have been correct.

"Wasn't—" afraid, confused. It wasn't the damage Nihlus did that made the difference. All true, and not. Peripheral. Fists curl, head bowed, shame stiffening down his spine and shoulders.

He'd wanted words. He has to use them.

"...I gave up."

Gave up...?

Nihlus waits for an expansion in detail, but Rinzler doesn't move or add anything else, silence stretching out before them.

Gave hiding his disk? Gave up fighting Clu?

But he already knew that and neither felt right, neither felt appropriate to ask. It's like he's lacking context for this, somehow, somewhere, and while it wasn't the first time he'd been confused by Rinzler's lack of explanation, it was certainly the most confused he's been yet.

Running his fingers over the side of his mechanical arm, Nihlus watches his friend for a moment before finally admitting:

"What... do you mean?"

The silence is expectant. Rinzler knows, well before Nihlus actually confirms it, that admitting the fault isn't enough. That doesn't make it easy to go further.

"Users—lie. Users betray you." Givens are as good a place as any to begin.

"Wasn't supposed to talk, or..." Fight, except he never could. Go past his bounds, except that's wrong. He was (he is), and Rinzler bows his head, waiting for the nausea of disloyalty to pass. "...hold things back."

Close enough. There's a lag, sound rattling louder. He has to find the words. He can't stop.

"I knew better." Better than to defy Clu. Better than to trust a user. "But I didn't want to be used against the system." Lie. Not false, but incomplete, and static hitches as he ducks his head a little further, admitting to the selfishness beneath. "Didn't want to forget."

Still, he'd told Nihlus that. Told him more—here, last time—and a tight shrug completes the phrase as Rinzler continues. "Expected..." To be edited. To be used. To be strung along, or reminded of his place. Or just disposed of, if his risk exceeded any use.

"Then I stopped.

"Then—"

The virus. Indoctrination. The system crash. All of it.

"I thought it was the same. Except—my fault, for trusting users. For disobeying. Shouldn't have tried—" Speaking. Fighting. Having allies. "—any of it."

So he'd stopped.

Gave up.

When Nihlus had been broken. When the ally who'd enabled him to have a mind was crashing from errors Rinzler knew were misapplied. He could have said something. He could have helped. But he hadn't.

"Stupid." He wants to move. He wants to hurt something. Unhappiness seethes through the program's shell, tense frustration with no outlet. Is this how users feel, spitting out prattle they know can't set things right? "Wrong."

"I—" The helmet jerks aside, static coiling behind the phrase. "Users leave."

Lie. Betray.

Leave.

Nihlus tries to face it, but his eyes fall to the floor, guilt pulling out the ground from under him.

It takes- a while. To sort through the speech, through the missing words, mental leaps between the gaps, trying to understand and fill in the skips and pauses. To try understanding through his own wall of self-loathing, the blinders it placed on him.

But the distance is hard to keep, slipping through his fingers like water.

Lie. Betray. Leave.

These weren't just oblivious acts of distant, wholesale destruction that a programmer might and could do to a system. This was personal, a link to the center of the web, a hole in the center of the picture.

Something important. Something big.

Someone.

He wants to tell Rinzler it wasn't his fault again- it's not, Spirits, it's not- but the outcome of that was likely another circle and the enforcer was already trying so hard, the frustration in his own communication skills clear as day. They needed another line to follow.

"Why?" Nihlus asks, desperate for more context. "Why do Users leave?"

Why? In this context, at this time, Rinzler almost wants to laugh. Something does escape, but it's curt and abbreviated, a bitter, wordless hash.

"Because we weren't worth it."

It outputs so easily. No static. No lag. Only bleak certainty... and a dim blue-white glow. Rinzler stiffens when he realizes the lapse, lights flickering back red with a growl. It's not wrong, but Tron is. Tron always was.

"Not—as threats. Worth fighting," he corrects. The user wouldn't face them. "Left allies too." The misguided. The corrupt. The user abandoned all his tools—to Rinzler, in the end. At least, for those Clu didn't decide were worth saving.

"Users don't care."

Rinzler has always known that, as long as he had his own name. But here, now... it hasn't always worked that way. The helmet ducks, a moment's ragged cycling of sound before he restates the admission.

"I should have."

"Rinzler, I..."

What does he say?

What can he say?

Controlled or not, he'd lived up to all of Rinzler's worst expectations of users and here Rinzler was trying to... apologize? For not helping him? It's enough to throw Nihlus off of trying to question further, just staring at his friend and shaking his head, partly in denial and partly in confusion.

It's so hard to try and reconcile.

Some of it clicks into place. A more distant part of him, a part of him created by the Key, understood. Could make the connection, could see what Rinzler was trying to do, what he was trying to say and why.

But there's another, larger part of him still kneeling in the Moira's dark, rotting hallway, in a spreading pool of blood, listening to the enforcer's footsteps as they faded into the gloom. Wishing, praying, fervently for nothingness- and stopped only by the threat of resurrection.

And then there's a smaller part of him. An angry part of him. A seething part of him. Molded into a dense sphere inside his soul, created in the years when he'd bored the full weight of the Hierarchy's distrust. Crushed further into a microscopic point as he'd stumbled out of the Ingress that first time, bearing burns from Saren's pistol. His betrayal.

You should have, it whispers back with void black eyes.

Nihlus swallows it down. Takes a moment before trying to make himself talk.

"... What changed?"

He can guess. He can make a very, very good guess. But he didn't know what else to ask, and it was open enough that Rinzler could avoid it if he desired to.

Rinzler stills. It's a slight shift, barely perceptible against the tension already coiled through the curve of neck and spine. Just a little more rigid. A little more hateful.

"...Clarify."

White noise thickens in the word, oscillates softly amidst the rise and fall of errors. Rinzler knows what Nihlus is asking.

He's just hoping that he's wrong.

It's worse than being Indoctrinated in some ways. He knows what he did then, at least. The memories burn him every time, but at least he knows.

But all Nihlus has seen were slivers of this. His face staring back from a screen, malevolent and unfamiliar. New ghosts haunting Shepard's eyes, Saren's wariness around him and now- Rinzler. The hatred rolling off of the enforcer a clearer answer than any possible words.

Sliding down the wall, armor clicking against stone, he sinks until his legs are tucked up against his chest, hand pressed against his mouth, his mind too tangled to try and give Rinzler any form of immediate answer.

What is the way forwards then? There's nothing he can ask that isn't going to be hideously insensitive. Nihlus had never thought he ever get Rinzler's forgiveness and yet-

And yet-

But why? What happened?

What... had his shadow said or done to make Rinzler change his mind like this?

August Event Log: Part I

hitting the road

storm front

wild life

old familiar places

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sorry about the lateness D:

Dude, your tags are fantastic whenever they happen.

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