Rise in Revolution (Chapter Eight)
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saladloveChapter list: https://tanadin.dreamwidth.org/650.html
World map: http://tanadin.deviantart.com/art/Kaldri
Chapter Eight
Where Spirits Gather
Lakeside, Sector IAL. January 10, 2272. Time instance 842N.
Cap sighed as a light breeze tugged at her hair and clothing as she stepped off of the stone pathway and onto the sparse grass around the lake. She walked by the lakeside for several minutes, silent, until finally sitting down on a rock and turning her gaze to the spirits following her.
At the moment, only two forms followed her, but that number would sometimes temporarily rise as spirits found her interesting enough to stick around for awhile before moving off to haunt whatever they considered their unfinished business. These two, however, hung around as their unfinished business hung with the fate of the Black Market.
One ghost, the owner of the first voice from before, was tall, almost six feet. He had spiked blonde hair and wore shades identical to Kyir’s, hiding his eyes. He wore a white t-shirt and black jeans. The second ghost was a few inches taller and had dark hair. He wore entirely gray. His eyes, unlike the other ghost’s, were visible, and they were the same blank white that all spirits had. They both floated about a foot off the ground instead of walking.
“Please refrain from making comments that you would like me to respond to when we have company.” Cap told them. “I’d rather not have my friends thinking I’ve lost my mind.”
“You don’t have to respond, you know.” The second ghost told her, crossing his arms. “We just like to make comments.”
“Yours are unnecessary.” The first ghost told him.
“Kyir is unnecessary.”
“Without Kyir, Fan would probably be dead.” He fired back. “Suck on that, Atar.”
The second ghost, Atar, grumbled quietly but didn’t respond.
Cap sighed at their foolishness. Normally ghosts were more quiet, more reflective, but these two were some of the strongest and most coherent she’d seen. Ghosts often were incoherent as their minds were not all there, and neither Atar nor Kyir’s mentor- who she had yet to learn the name of- were perfect, but they were better than most.
Or perhaps she was losing her mind, more than she had in the past few years. Cap quietly noted the observation but didn’t bring it up.
“Kyir seems...busy, always.” Mentor- she had always thought of him as Mentor, it was certainly better than Jerkface- mumbled, gazing back in the general direction of Kyir’s house. “Always focused on his work, never sleeping...needs someone to tell him to go to sleep, to take a break…” He shuddered, shaking his head as if to clear it. “But he has work to do. A cyborg to destroy. Or perhaps…” He trailed off, as ghosts often did.
“Perhaps?” Cap prompted.
He didn’t respond, and she sighed quietly, shoving her hands into her pockets. Infuriating, as always.
“Perhaps Fan can help him.” Atar suggested after a quiet minute.
“Fan is too foolish. She’s more likely to get herself caught in the machines than successfully control Kyir. Even I could never manage that...poor boy never knew how much I…” Mentor broke off his sentence again. He tended to be more coherent than Atar was, even in the worst of times, but he had a bad habit of trailing off into his own thoughts and not responding for great lengths of time.
Cap looked away from them as movement caught her attention. She raised an eyebrow as a third spirit hesitantly moved forward, circling Cap a few times before coming in to hover a ways away from the other two. Cap had seen this spirit once before, quite recently, but she had left within a few seconds of being spotted.
She had short blond hair and wore all gray, similarly to Atar, but her form was slightly mistier than either of Cap’s two regular followers. Her blank white eyes held an almost calculating expression, however, and Cap was suddenly aware that this was the most coherently thinking ghost of the three.
“Hello?” She asked, cautiously. The ghost blinked once, but then turned and drifted away, growing fainter in Cap’s sight until she reached the point where she vanished entirely.
“Odd one.” Atar remarked quietly. “She’s clear in some ways and fogged in others.”
“I noticed.” Cap mumbled, still looking in the direction that the ghost had gone. “I wonder what, or who, she’s haunting…”
“Kyir is about to act.” Cap looked up as Mentor spoke.
“How do you know?”
He didn’t answer, and Cap sighed in frustration as she got to her feet. She knew by now that they would never answer, but she always asked anyway.
“Behave yourselves.” She told them before setting off, back towards the Black Market.
As she walked down the various streets of IAL, she saw Kyir and Shawn go around a corner and immediately changed her path to catch up with them. She walked faster until she fell almost in step beside them. Kyir glanced over and nodded briefly and Shawn waved.
Cap listened as Mentor mumbled to her, quietly explaining what Kyir’s plan was.
She raised an eyebrow when she heard.
“Why, exactly, are you throwing a rock at 7007?” Shawn looked surprised at the question but Kyir didn’t seem to notice the odd way she had brought up the subject.
“I’m not. I’m throwing a rock- a chunk of kartzal, specifically- past him. If I threw it at him, he’d just dodge it like he would a normal projectile, probably. But if it goes past him...I want to see what happens. It’s important that we find this out.”
“Are you sure he won’t arrest you?”
Kyir snorted. “What for? Throwing a rock a little bit too close to him?”
Cap conceded the point.
It took a few minutes of walking around (and Cap asking random passerby) until they found the cyborg they were looking for. They crouched behind the wall of a building as 7007 walked past, and then Kyir took aim and tossed the rock.
The reaction was a lot stranger than any of them had expected.
As the rock sailed past 7007, he froze rigidly, and, faster than a normal human could manage it, leaped backwards. His robotic legs clearly were playing a part as he sailed much further back than any non-enhanced being that Cap knew of could. He landed easily, out of whatever danger zone he had perceived.
The rock hit the ground with a dull thud and the cyborg immediately blinked in confusion (although only with his right eye) and looking around for whatever it was that had set his sensors off. He looked at the rock for a moment, clearly confused. “What.” He glanced around once more before frowning slightly and reluctantly moving on.
Kyir waited until he was gone to start laughing.
“Did you see that? Did you see how great that was?I wonder what would happen if we shot a bunch at him… He’s probably completely freak out. Did you see how far he leaped back? If he didn’t have anywhere to go, that should make hitting him with something easier. Although…” Kyir trailed off, thinking. “Actually posing a direct threat might break the stun by overriding the nonexistent danger that’s registering on his sensors. We might need to do something to immobilize him while he’s stunned. Trap him somehow…” He drummed his fingers against the wall.
“How are we going to throw a bunch of rocks at him at once? Good timing?” Cap asked, frowning.
“I don’t know. We need some way to throw or shoot a ton of small projectiles at once.”
Shawn blinked. “Shotgun?” He suggested.
Kyir stared at him for a second before an almost evil-looking grin pulled across his features. “That’s excellent. That’s fucking fantastic. I can get to work on that- Adria left an old shotgun in the basement, it’s the only actual projectile weapon I have. Never did get around to fixing that, but hey, mistakes happen. Guess I have an excuse to now.” Kyir turned back towards home and started walking, mumbling about measurements.
“Weird guy.” Shawn mumbled as Kyir left.
“You have no idea.” Mentor assured, despite the fact that Shawn couldn’t hear him.
Shawn did shiver, however, and glanced around cautiously.
“What’s wrong?” Cap asked, frowning.
“I...don’t know. Nothing, I guess.” He shivered again, rubbing his arms. “Should have worn my coat.”
Cap nodded in agreement and they silently turned back to the Black Market, following behind Kyir.
~~~
“A rock shotgun?” Tanadin demanded as she listened to Shawn’s account of the kartzal rock experiment and Kyir’s idea. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I love it.”
Emma snorted with laughter. “Do you just love really stupid ideas?”
“No,” Tanadin admitted, “that’s actually a decent idea. Unlike this game we’re playing!” She glared across the board at Gali.
Gali, Emma, Tanadin, and Sub were all playing Monopoly. The game had been (ironically) banned in the Black Market due to Scott taking the game far too seriously and leading to escalations, oftentimes ending in someone flipping the board, shouting, and game money being set on fire (as well as, one time, Scott’s clothing.) Since Scott wasn’t there, they had figured it was safe to play.
“How wrong we were to think this would work out properly.” Emma mumbled grimly, looking across the table at Gali, who was thoroughly winning. She was cheating somehow, she knew it, but how wasn’t quite clear.
“Didn’t we ban Monopoly for a reason?” Shawn asked, amused.
“We thought it would be safe!” Tanadin protested. “This isn’t working! Gali’s cheating.”
“Do...do you have any proof?” Gali sat up straighter, but her guilt was rather clear.
“That face you’re making, for one.” Emma told her.
“Hf! That’s not proof. That’s- Hey! Give that back!” Gali took a swipe at Shawn as he removed the wad of Monopoly money from her back pocket and held it up for everyone to see.
Tanadin cheerfully shoved the board onto the floor and threw her playing piece at Gali. “Quit! You’re as bad as Scott!”
“At least he played by the rules.” Sub giggled. “Usually.”
Gali grinned innocently.
“You’re cleaning up.” Tanadin told her. “I need to talk to Kyir about his plan.”
“What? Noooo!” Gali complained.
Emma laughed. “I’ll help.”
“Woo! Victory!”
“You probably shouldn’t interrupt Kyir right now.” Cap advised. “He’s occupied trying to fix that shotgun, and you should be in your elemental form, resting and healing. You were stabbed earlier today. Shawn, you might want to go up there with him, though. You’re experienced with shotguns.”
Shawn blinked in surprise. “How did you know that?” How could she know that? That was before she transferred here! Unless someone told her…
Cap smiled slightly and shrugged. “One hears things.” With that, she turned and walked away, towards where Fan was sitting. As Shawn started to look away, movement caught his eye and his head whipped around to see-
Nothing. There was nothing. He shuddered. Once again, a dark shape had moved in the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look, it was gone.
It’s always around Cap. Why Cap? Why is it always Cap? Why does she have this...this darkness around her?
He shivered and turned away, stepping up the stairs and pausing long enough for Hawk to open the door before leaving.
He didn’t want to be near those forms any longer, and he might as well go make sure that Kyir wasn’t butchering the job on the shotgun.
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Date: 2016-03-30 01:37 am (UTC)And I thinks I know who spoopy, mysterious ghost numero 3 is
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Date: 2016-03-30 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 09:49 pm (UTC)which is why we've planned to play some kind of monopoly with as MANY P:M members as possible asap
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Date: 2016-03-31 02:09 am (UTC)Sounds cool.
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Date: 2016-03-31 02:44 am (UTC)He doesn't have a Chance
Or a community chest. But that doesn't sound as good.
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Date: 2016-03-31 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 06:41 am (UTC)Also, Monopoly is an evil demon game designed to destroy relationships. I used to play with my brother, and while money was never actually set on fire, we had multiple game board flips. Partly because I would cheat to make sure I got the best properties and extra money. (When you're seven and you're playing with a gullible five year old, stuff happens. :P) We don't play Monopoly much anymore.
-the lurkiest lurker
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Date: 2016-03-30 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 10:19 pm (UTC)Mario Kart
Mario Party
Mario the actual game
Curse you Nintendo
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Date: 2016-03-31 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 04:02 am (UTC)That one person.
selects
R A I N B O W R O A D
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Date: 2016-03-31 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 06:39 am (UTC)My younger siblings are fond of playing Super Mario Brothers, which I find boring, frustrating, and annoying. I don't play alongside them.
-the lurkiest lurker
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Date: 2016-03-30 09:50 pm (UTC)U N O
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Date: 2016-03-30 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 10:01 pm (UTC)