QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]

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The color scheme's like christmas up in this bitch

Nerds chatting and fuckall happening, no fucks given

"Hey, neat!" Anila bounced in before Rachel had a chance to answer. "I didn't know you were into wizardly things like iouns."

Rachel gave Anila a perpelexed look, before half-shrugging and figuring Robin would be less of a headache to engage. "Yeah. Astute of you. Don't touch it."

"Wasn't planning to. Sonora, though. If you were an inchoate custodian of the voices of the dead-"

"A what?"

"-where would you hide yourself?"

The sunlight fluttered, tricking Robin for a moment into thinking Rachel had tapped the lights. They were still extinguished and crumbling, like old sores on dead walls. "Why are you so obsessed with it?"

"I'm just curious," the necrologist tried not to bristle. "Good science, after all is limited by how much of existence we can perceive, and all of a sudden I've got a lot more to observe."

"Is that why all of Visindi's guys had twelve eyes?"

"Uh, I'd call that more... Science!" Robin jazz-handsed, conservatively. "Big S, exclamation point."

"S!" echoed Anila, jazz-hands and all. The two waited for Anila to finish, but the hiss continued on a while with little drop in enthusiasm.

"Anyway, you said Sonora spits out voices of the dead. Now, this could be because it's an animalistic predator with a good aural memory that lets it regurgitates sounds its heard-"

"Why are you phrasing that like a hypothetical."

"It's a hypothesis! Sort of. Loosely. Not a great one. A 'theory', of the non-scientific parlance? Persuasion? I'm getting off-track, here. To wit, I think there's more to Sonora than we've been led to believe. For one thing, animals don't try to sing at people."

Anila frowned. "I knew a noddy who ran a postal service in my hometown, he'd probably have words with you."

"Ok, ok. Animals don't talk, at least not in my world."

"Stern words," clarified the adventurer.

"Point is, people talk. Non-humans, too! Sure! Either way, this means either-" -Robin raised a finger here- "Sonora is a being, a person, an omnivore just like us humans, trying to communicate-" -Robin raised her other hand, half pointing, half cutting off argument- "-or! It's a repository of souls, a coherent component in the world from which it was taken, and there's a whole bunch of incorporeal people trying to communicate."

"Isn't that the other guy? Lady? Ghost-girl?"

"Florica? That's a completely different thing, why are you even-"

Robin closed her eyes, counted to five. Opened them just as soon as she quit thinking this was a waste of her time.

"Okay. Florica may not be entirely dissimilar to Sonora. Either way, I'm working on that. Her."

The shadows in the room shied from Rachel; were her planet inhabited there would've been a mass extinction as she tilted her head and its orbit, questioning. "What do you mean, working on-"

"Please. Let me finish." Robin still had both index fingers in the air; she brought them together. "Sonora may or may not be sentient. Its voices may or may not be extensions, as opposed to regurgitated fragments, of souls. People. I prefer not to discriminate."

"And you want to extract them? Rescue them? Why?"

"Not necessarily! The voices, which may or may not be whole people, may or may not be there willingly. Ugh, I had a good graphic on my laptop I could explain with, but I should save the battery until I find a power point-"

"What's a laptop?"

"What does your plug look like?"

"It's like a- oh, uh, I guess it's regular? North American? I don't know if that's a thing-"

"Just show me," Rachel sighed. She extended a hand, revealing up her arm all manner of plugs and ports and sockets. Robin's eyes widened, some of them were positively industrial, savage intrusions upon what should've been the organic outlines of an arm. She couldn't possibly flex it with that, where was the bicep-

Someone must've said something, because the necrologist stopped staring. "Crap, sorry, hang on-"

---

"Ok, so let me get this straight. It's like a book, but written too small to read, so you tell it what you want to read and it pulls it out for you onto that flat bit?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Weird! Can I try it?"

"Later. Maybe." Robin was more focussed on Rachel, or at least focussed on trying to look at her somewhere other than her arms. The adapter cable kinked in places where Robin had let it squash in her pack, linking the two in zero gravity.

They'd hooked spare limbs against railings and shelves, batting the air clear of capsules dislodged from rest. Anila had cracked one open before Robin had yelled at her not to; all that was left of the original contents was black residue that hung in the air like a smudge.

"Ok, so," Robin began. "Do you guys have life after biological death? Beyond, uh, niche cases?" Robin gestured at the pair, who managed a full shrug between the both. "Prooooobably asking the wrong crowd. Never mind. Do you at least have souls, some persistence of the self beyond your brain and your senses?"

Rachel looked doubtful, but Anila nodded vigorously. The necrologist, meanwhile, had opened the laptop, pulling up a charmingly-illustrated presentation titled "Soul You Want To Be A Wicked Sick Death Wizard."

"I use it for high schoolers," Robin mumbled, fast-tracking through a bunch of slides, until some kind of looping diagram, like a food web or water cycle, popped up.

"Right. So there's something other than the meat and circuitry, the kind of thing that makes a ghost when the chassis breaks down. It's got enough energy to make its presence known, in particular situations, but not much else. Now, in my world, estimated dead people a hundred billion, you don't see nearly enough ghosts for that many deceased." A click, and the graphic brought up two question marks - the input and output on what Robin had helpfully labelled "the soul cycle".

"Now, what little necrological research was underway in my world mostly dealt with this- the output. A contemporary of mine was trying to figure out more of the input side of things, but he was also a pretty religious guy. The going theory is souls are generated by particular confluences of biomatter, and-"

"You're getting off track," said Rachel.

"Right right. So! Where I come from, you can use magic to get in touch with ghosts, but they're less... here, for lack of a better word, the longer-ago they died. Most of them don't mention afterlives or knocking elbows with ancestors or creator-type gods, but that's never stopped people from subscribing to concepts like heaven, hell, purgatory, whatever. It only conflates things that we're using arcanics to make contact, seeing as that often does what you ask of it a little too well, and-"

"Robin."

"Afterlives. Super-popular in fantasy works, especially when there's a god or gods involved with creating the world. Sonora could well be one."

"A god, or an afterlife?"

Robin tried not to make her look at Anila withering, in part because she conceded the woman had a point. "Annnnnnn afterlife. 'god' isn't even that useful a designator; it's just anything with a handful of brain cells and enough raw power to hold great sway over your life if it feels like getting up in your business."

"So Sonora is an afterlife," Rachel groaned, because all she was getting out of this was that Robin was just as foolhardy as Anila, just with a bunch of fancy words to make it seem ok. "You win Nobel peace prize for incredible advancement in making people too dead to fight, and Sonora gets to eat your fellow laureates. How does any of this help us?"

"Depends what, exactly, Sonora is. Maybe we use it to destroy our physical selves, freeing us from the obligation of the battle. That Outsider creature doesn't seem to have a great grip on what counts as 'alive', after all." Robin almost made it sound appealing. "We'd have nothing to distract us from tackling the big problems, like how to neutralise that guy or traverse the cosmos of our own free will." The necrologist closed her laptop; Rachel figured the lecture was over and unplugged it on her end. "Thanks. Yeah, either way, before I can possibly do any of that, I need to know what Sonora's deal is."

Anila made grabby hands toward the laptop, but relented as Robin folded away the cable and stashed it all in her pack again. "Ok, but, like, what if it is just spitting out voices it heard to mess with people?"

"Then it's a mockery of everything I stand for, and I'll kill it dead and eradicate its kind if I ever stop by its neck of the multiverse."

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Cooooooool," said Anila.