SPACE STATIONS > TRIM

Rolling in the Deep [Marjorie]

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GIR:
It was rare, some mind deep within her comparatively small sea, a lost and nearly forgotten fragment that was, at the time, the only one awake, that enough of the High Priestess's fragments were inactive for her to actually, properly sleep. Dreams were a rarity, and, when they did happen, were an amalgamation of tens of thousands of dreamers, those she'd taken into her being with their consent, who were as devoted to her master and savior as she was. Well, what was left, anyway. There were modern soldiers fighting hordes of beasts the like of which had died out thousands of years ago. There were fish in the sky being chased by birds in clouds of water and magma, while half-mechanical abominations clashed with the majestic dragons that had been their forebears. Ancient temples to long-forgotten gods and modern pillars wrought by greed and vanity shared sometimes-fields, sometimes forests, sometimes wastelands, sometimes all of the above as the air was filled with the scents of plants that were as much amalgamations as the woman whose body slept.

But, regardless of the dream, one place was always at the heart of the madness. Somewhere around 10,000 years, she, a foolish thief of 21, had gone to that place in search of yet another treasure. A bauble like the countless others she had hoped would fill the emptiness she felt. The old temple had been rumored to contain a weapon that could end the world. She knew of no fewer than three tribes that would hail the one who brought it to them as a hero, so she had sought it out. The search had been dangerous, strenuous, and had very nearly cost her her mind. In the end, there was no weapon, as such. The temple had not been a vault for some sacred treasure. Rather, it had been a cage for a beast the ancients (and, even at that time, they'd been ancients) had feared to the point of madness, but lacked the power to destroy. It... They... Had called itself "Red Tide" in the language it had learned when it devoured all but a piece of her. An image of the toxic algae that would accumulate in the waters near her home village had sprung to mind when it had...

She still had no words for how she communicated with Red Tide. She still wasn't suire she needed to. All she cared was that Red Tide had given her the thing she had sought in her treasures: Meaning. She'd never had friends. Her parents had groomed her brother to be the next Chieftain and had no grander plans for her than to be married off to some tribe or another they sought favor with. Her village saw her and her brother the same way one might see a ring or a skirt on a person: An accessory. A bauble. Something to highlight his greatness. But Red Tide saw her as something else. A companion. A confidante. Someone who *understood*. And it was the place she'd met it, joined it, become someone and not something, that sat at the center of her dreamscape, no matter how many minds added their dreams to the amalgamation.

It was this small fragment, the one awake and mulling over the oddity of the dream, that noticed  that the High Priestess was not alone. One by one, the other fragments awoke until her mind rang with the cacophony of minds. Unlike the puppets both she and Red Tide were able to control, to attempt to read her mind even at a glance when she was awake was as trying to stare directly at the sun. To look more closely, then, was as to stare from a mere foot away, the desires, hungers, feelings, thoughts, emotions, ambitions, and more of the minds not being filtered through a single fragment's empty body, but, rather, being viewed at the source. "You have come with questions, I presume?", she asked when she noticed the other occupant was clearly a scientist. The High Priestess spoke not with the voice of a single woman, but with a collection of voices, the sum of all the minds she had devoured over the years in service to her master. "If you have brought me sustenance, I shall speak freely. If you have brought none, then you shall only have answers if you pay me in kind. A question for a question. An answer for an answer.". The humans who had captured her had, over the time she'd been here, worn down her patience and any good will she may have felt at some point. She was no longer free with her aid or a willing participant in their experiments.

Each act of defiance was a scouting mission, every detail of her interactions noted and compiled for when it was time to leave, should that time ever come.

Marjorie:
Setiae has been sitting there for a while, just watching, monitoring her mentally. The voices and thoughts ebbed and flowed. It was overwhelming, but endlessly fascinating. She made a gesture when the elf-looking woman spoke her terms. A door opened and someone stumbled in after being shoved. He was some criminal picked up out of a prison somewhere. Serial didn’t know from where or who he was, and she had no desire to.

“Subject 00102,” she said, “or do you prefer being called something else?” As she spoke, Setiae moved closer to the woman, a peace of equipment in hand. It was actually five small pieces, and the doctor stuck them to her head around the height of her temple, and evenly spaced apart. They would do a continual scan of the subjects brain threw-out the session. She would glean information about blood flow, hormone shifts, neurotransmitter activity, electrical activity, and anything else physically going on with the brain.

“How old are you?” 

GIR:
"You are familiar with what I am.", the High Priestess noted, as she devoured the criminal's mind before he had a chance to notice her, "Though not entirely. I do eat, after all. However, this is sufficient for now.". Many of the fragments within her were angered at this statement. There were minds among her that felt that someone who had chosen to become part of her of their own free will should have been offered instead of a criminal who'd had no choice. They knew she became more useful to her master the more minds she took into her, and that, while passing minds to Red Tide, as she'd done with the criminal, was good, it would be better still to find more converts willing to serve it. Others felt that the scientist was acting in good faith, that she had done nothing to deserve to be treated as if she had been negligent. Still others were unwilling to accept that the offering had been anything other than another means of gathering information. Everything the criminal was, what he'd done, who he'd been, his past, his prison, was also debated at length as her minds argued over the quality of what had been offered, though the consensus was that it had been offered, and that cooperation, for now, was acceptable.

"I prefer what I am, High Priestess.", she answered. She permitted the adherence of the devices to her head, the consensus being that, while they were not desirable, neither were they harmful, "I discarded my given name in ancient times. In truth, I no longer recall it. ", she stated, "Subject 00102 is a designation your tribe has given me. It is as calling an apple a rose because one knows not to what one refers.", she continued. Anger was the predominant emotion at that statement, though there was also hatred, disgust, and, oddly enough, shame in a few of the minds.

In response to the question of age, "I do not recall precisely how old I am. Time loses significance when the tribe you grew up in is but an ancient memory, and this was true when Adela was the nation all associated with dragon riders. By my nearest estimate, at least ten thousand years has passed between my birth and now.". As the High Priestess spoke, the criminal was made to wait by the door, his eyes blank, like any other puppet. It had always been fascinating to her how puppets, her own of which she referred to as acolytes, never seemed to change once their minds were consumed. They never grew older, they never died of age or disease, but could be killed by the same weapons as they could before being consumed. She had asked, once, before she'd learned to know Red Tide as it knew her, if they were alive or dead. The response she had gotten was one that, even now, as she answered the scientist's questions, many of the minds mulled over. It had been confusing, the answer, and some weren't sure even Red Tide knew what happened to the puppets that made that so, though the fact that it had to do with the greater wyrm's wellbeing and power was abundantly clear. The puppets it had had before they'd met had all ceased functioning and rotted to uselessness when it had been trapped in the temple. After the Collapse, when the oceans became toxic and Red Tide's power had grown, they had become more durable, able to withstand, for a limited time, blows that would kill others of their kind. "I have my own questions. My cooperation, for now, does not depend on answers to them, but I will ask all the same. Your own name and age, if you please?".


The neurotransmitters in her brain responded primarily to the state of mind of her core personality, on the physical plane. The blood flow, hormone shifts, electrical activity, and all else would be heightened, as if she was under extreme stress, but otherwise within the parameters of a normal human. It was on the magical plane that most of the activity happened, though that activity could be picked up in the same way a normal human's thoughts would by a psychic.

Marjorie:
Setaie was a scientist, to gather and analyze data to turn it into knowledge that could be applied to technology or a problem to find a solution or a use, was basically the goal of her entire life. She watched in fascination, as the criminal’s mind was consumed- watched with her mind and her eyes. She knew the neural data would be limited but she could watch the recording in concert with the video recording of this session later - it might give her more. Somewhere nearby, out of the room, but close at hand, more powerful psychics than she were “listening in” on the goings on in her, it, their? mind(s).

Setiae nodded. She was somewhat familiar with what the High Priestess was. “Priestess usually refers to a religious figure - Do you consider yourself the head of a religion, High Priestess?” She was curious. “Do you have goals beyond just consuming minds?”

She watched, for a moment, as the hollowed our man stood by the door. He’d never be allowed to leave this place - same as subject 00102, but for now he was let to live. They had discovered threw experimentation that those empty bodies could still be killed.

Setiae wondered if theirs woman really cared about her at all. Still, telling her her age was of little consequence. “Sixty.”

GIR:
"I am, in a sense. I am the bridge between my people, the ones I chose, and their god. They, the god, are known to me as Kata'a Ma'rala. In your language, they are Red Tide. A fitting name for a deadly and many-minded ruler of the oceans.", High Priestess answered. Her gaze, briefly, rested on the puppet. As she was observed and studied, so, too, were her captors. What weapons they preferred. What tactics they used. What their chain of command was. What they hoped to learn about her that was not meant for her ears, discussed, on occasion, by those who hauled the criminals they offered to her from time to time away to be destroyed, or studied, or around those already consumed before they ever arrived at the station. At present, Red Tide was not paying more than cursory attention to the criminal, as it knew its Priestess would share all she knew, but to see the differences in the way its puppets and her acolytes stood, how they moved when no attempt was being made to hide that the minds that had once inhabited them were in those bodies no longer was something that fascinated many of her minds. Red Tide's puppets moved in ways that would be uncomfortable to humans, but got the most speed and power from the least amount of energy spent. Her own acolytes, to a one, moved much as she did, with the practiced grace and smoothness of years spent robbing tombs and evading traps and angry tribesmen. Theirs stood ready to strike, defend, or run at a moment's notice. Hers were more apparently relaxed and at peace.

"I have one goal alone. To serve my god. To consume, for them and those of their kind, is to grow, so I consume so that they may grow. There are those, however, who share my desire to serve. Those, I take into myself as my acolytes. In doing so, my devotion and my usefulness grow, and my acolytes are  able to experience their god through me.", she stated when asked about her goals. In truth, she had one other, related goal: To escape this place. She was not permitted to proselytize to the other subjects here. She wished to gather more to serve alongside and within her, something she could not openly do here. But Red Tide wished her to remain, for now, so remain, she would. "To consume is a means to my goal, not a goal in itself. I am no mere beast.". Disgust, indignance, anger, hatred. These flowed freely through her as she spoke the last sentence. This human, too, would try her patience, it seemed.

"Sixty. Your age, I presume? It is not a name, and you do not strike me as one who has need to put purpose before identity. You are young, but you are old, as well.", High Priestess observed. There were flashes of what one of Red Tide's puppets was doing as she spoke. The impossibly loud sounds that passed for music in this modern era, a Pilot being tracked, the shower of water from the sprinklers of some building's fire suppression system. Anger at having been outmaneuvered, however briefly. She knew her god sought to find her, and hoped to consume a Pilot in the bargain.  "My mother died twenty years younger than you. What is your calling? Do you have a god at all?", she asked.

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