Re: Inexorable Altercation [Round III - Vorlon Complex]
05-14-2011, 06:31 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.
Will was doing his usual scans before he'd even had a chance to get a proper idea of where it was he was. Only after he'd started gathering data on the gravity (normal), air (stale), and structure (worn) did he actually look around with his eyes instead of his instruments.
One wall of the cramped, low-ceilinged chamber immediately drew his attention. Partially, this was because the ancient, tube-style displays were, while blank, still illuminating the room to some extent. It wasn't much, but when there was nothing else, the eye tended to be drawn to whatever there was, however dim.
The terminals' controls were covered in a thick layer of dust, but underneath, Will recognized what could only be an alien keyboard. The arrangement was probably designed for hands very different from his own, and he couldn't tell what the various symbols meant, but the big, flat button along the bottom was too reminiscent of a space-bar to be a coincidence. Hesitating only long enough to train his data reader on the screen, he tapped it once.
The displays brightened, all showing a logo rendered in the local equivalent of ASCII. A series of squarish markings slowly made their way across the screens, and when they reached the far side, the logo and progress bar were replaced by what could only be a command prompt. A few other self-evident keypresses later, and he was using the up-arrow key to scroll back through the command log. He tried executing a few, but he got back the same message each time, presumably an error.
A few shots in the dark later, he found a command that actually did something- a panel in the wall behind him slid open, and a pair of handles slid out of recesses. Curious now, Will went over to them, examined them for a moment, then grabbed them and tried to move them around.
All he got in exchange for his efforts was unconsciousness.
It didn't last long, though- after a moment, he became aware of a field of black in front of him. He seemed completely divorced from his body- he felt no sensations, no handles in his hands- no hands at all, in fact.
When the logo appeared in front of him, he felt like something should've dropped into his gut, had he been able to feel his gut at the time.
He could read the name now: Domain Maketta. The progress bar came a moment later, and he now knew that it was, itself, a sort of pun; the single, repeated symbol actually translated to the world "load."
When the command prompt came up this time, everything made sense to him, and it didn't take long before he'd managed to open up a video feed from the room he'd just been in. What he saw made him wish he could currently feel his heart, for if he could have, it would've sunk.
There he was, still standing, his hands wrapped around the two handles. Above them, a bit of text he'd ignored earlier as being "just more alien words I can't read" identified them as the "mental interface handles."
Experimentally, he entered a command to disconnect from the system. Another progress bar later (this one retreating in the other direction), and he found himself standing in front of the handles again, once more in possession of his body. Unfortunately, the words had reverted to being meaningless scribbles; it seemed that, while the text was translated for him while using the mental interface, it didn't last.
He grabbed the handles once more. He'd have to see if he could learn some more about this place before he went wandering around it.
After a few minutes of looking through files and making little headway, a message interrupted his search. "Unknown origin," the system told him, and something in the translation made him think that this was an extreme abnormality. Intrigued, he opened the transmission.
"My name is Eric T. Packston," it read, "and I was born aboard Cosmand City in the year 2417..." It went on to describe this person's experiences in a battle of their own, as well as describing the "all-stars battle" they were apparently going to be entered in. He also railed against someone named Vandrel Reinhardt, apparently a primitive barbarian.
Before Will could think too much about the message, though, something registered in his peripheral... somewhere. Focusing on it, it somehow conveyed the feeling that someone else was accessing the same system he was in. Mentally frowning, he brought up the feed from the room he'd been in.
He was still there, he saw, but no longer standing at the terminals. Now, he was frowning, poking experimentally at one of the keyboards.
After a moment's mental scramble, the problem of communication solved itself, and in a crude, ASCII-like representation, he wrote a single word on the display his body was poking at.
STOP
His body pulled back a bit, frown deepening, but then kept going. With a bit more effort, Will put up another message.
STOP, WILL
That time, he actually stopped. Thoughts were clearly running through his head, and he muttered something under his breath.
Will would've grinned, had he had a mouth, and he put up a third message.
SPEAK UP
"Oh, so you can hear me! Great, that makes things easier."
YES
"What, exactly, are you?"
YOU
"You're me?"
YES
"Can you, uh... explain that a bit more?"
HANG ON
"Alright." He waited, and after two minutes or so, he started, "So-"
There. This message wasn't in crude ASCII-esque. Will had apparently put together an English font, and while it wasn't the most aesthetically appealing, it worked better than before.
"Okay, that's great. Now, what do you mean, you're me?"
It's very simple. I'm Will Haven, as I assume you are. I was interfacing with this computer system via the mental interface handles behind you- don't touch them, we don't want this to get worse. I was looking at a message from someone in another one of these battles, and then I check the video feeds and find my body (you) wandering around and poking at things.
"Okay, um..." He stared off into the distance, going over the last few minutes in his mind. "Well, after that standoff with Greyve and Twight, we were moved to somewhere else in what I'm assuming is the same facility. It was a sort of entrance hall, looking out over a desert, and while I'm sure the place must've been grand at one point, it was all worn, cracked and broken. I was just making my way down the stairs to get deeper down when, out of nowhere, I ended up here. I- oh, sorry."
He'd been ignoring the screen, which now read Wait. WAIT. Dammit, you're not even looking. If you're going to be talking to someone who's just capable of talking through text, do you think you could at least do them the courtesy of looking at them when you're talking?
Thank you, it added. Now, you say there was a standoff between Greyve and Twight.
"Right."
I don't remember anything of the sort. My last round ended with Atrum- Yes, you see where I'm going.
The Will with a body had reached down to grab his data reader, and after a moment's examination, he nodded. "Another little glitch in the time-variance. I'm Nineteen. You?"
Eighteen. Damn.
The curse, both knew, wasn't because of the numbers themselves. They didn't know why, but it was obvious that whatever was causing their little time-skips had just left Will 18 trapped in the computer and sent his mindless body one timeline over. If that was the case, then it seemed likely that when the round ended, he'd be left behind, trapped alone in an abandoned facility until the place fell to rubble eons later. Damn was an understatement.
After a few moments of silence for both to consider the consequences, Will 18 said, Well, as long as you're here, I might as well be of some use. He fell silent, and Will 19 waited awkwardly for a minute or two. Then, his compatriot returned. Out the doors, two levels down. The stairs should be fairly straightforward. There's been a power spike in the systems down there since our arrival.
"Can you look inside, see who's there?"
There are no cameras there, and if I want to actually enter the system, I need to transfer myself into them. Just head on down, I'll meet you in there.
"Okay, will do. See you there."
The only response he got was a dimming of the screen as the system went back into standby. Sighing out of sympathy, he headed to the door.
It was locked.
Sighing out of exasperation, he pulled out his Blastec.
-
Annaliese was still trying to process the bizarre-looking creature before her, stalling its question with, "Uh"s, "Ah"s, and "Erm"s, when a second creature, much like the first, flickered into existence in the far corner of the room.
"Ah, excellent, Miss Nibbs! I, uh..." The creature stopped at the look on its face, then looked down at itself. "Oh, of course I do." It sighed, a clicking sort of noise, then continued. "This is probably going to take some explaining."
Will was doing his usual scans before he'd even had a chance to get a proper idea of where it was he was. Only after he'd started gathering data on the gravity (normal), air (stale), and structure (worn) did he actually look around with his eyes instead of his instruments.
One wall of the cramped, low-ceilinged chamber immediately drew his attention. Partially, this was because the ancient, tube-style displays were, while blank, still illuminating the room to some extent. It wasn't much, but when there was nothing else, the eye tended to be drawn to whatever there was, however dim.
The terminals' controls were covered in a thick layer of dust, but underneath, Will recognized what could only be an alien keyboard. The arrangement was probably designed for hands very different from his own, and he couldn't tell what the various symbols meant, but the big, flat button along the bottom was too reminiscent of a space-bar to be a coincidence. Hesitating only long enough to train his data reader on the screen, he tapped it once.
The displays brightened, all showing a logo rendered in the local equivalent of ASCII. A series of squarish markings slowly made their way across the screens, and when they reached the far side, the logo and progress bar were replaced by what could only be a command prompt. A few other self-evident keypresses later, and he was using the up-arrow key to scroll back through the command log. He tried executing a few, but he got back the same message each time, presumably an error.
A few shots in the dark later, he found a command that actually did something- a panel in the wall behind him slid open, and a pair of handles slid out of recesses. Curious now, Will went over to them, examined them for a moment, then grabbed them and tried to move them around.
All he got in exchange for his efforts was unconsciousness.
It didn't last long, though- after a moment, he became aware of a field of black in front of him. He seemed completely divorced from his body- he felt no sensations, no handles in his hands- no hands at all, in fact.
When the logo appeared in front of him, he felt like something should've dropped into his gut, had he been able to feel his gut at the time.
He could read the name now: Domain Maketta. The progress bar came a moment later, and he now knew that it was, itself, a sort of pun; the single, repeated symbol actually translated to the world "load."
When the command prompt came up this time, everything made sense to him, and it didn't take long before he'd managed to open up a video feed from the room he'd just been in. What he saw made him wish he could currently feel his heart, for if he could have, it would've sunk.
There he was, still standing, his hands wrapped around the two handles. Above them, a bit of text he'd ignored earlier as being "just more alien words I can't read" identified them as the "mental interface handles."
Experimentally, he entered a command to disconnect from the system. Another progress bar later (this one retreating in the other direction), and he found himself standing in front of the handles again, once more in possession of his body. Unfortunately, the words had reverted to being meaningless scribbles; it seemed that, while the text was translated for him while using the mental interface, it didn't last.
He grabbed the handles once more. He'd have to see if he could learn some more about this place before he went wandering around it.
After a few minutes of looking through files and making little headway, a message interrupted his search. "Unknown origin," the system told him, and something in the translation made him think that this was an extreme abnormality. Intrigued, he opened the transmission.
"My name is Eric T. Packston," it read, "and I was born aboard Cosmand City in the year 2417..." It went on to describe this person's experiences in a battle of their own, as well as describing the "all-stars battle" they were apparently going to be entered in. He also railed against someone named Vandrel Reinhardt, apparently a primitive barbarian.
Before Will could think too much about the message, though, something registered in his peripheral... somewhere. Focusing on it, it somehow conveyed the feeling that someone else was accessing the same system he was in. Mentally frowning, he brought up the feed from the room he'd been in.
He was still there, he saw, but no longer standing at the terminals. Now, he was frowning, poking experimentally at one of the keyboards.
After a moment's mental scramble, the problem of communication solved itself, and in a crude, ASCII-like representation, he wrote a single word on the display his body was poking at.
STOP
His body pulled back a bit, frown deepening, but then kept going. With a bit more effort, Will put up another message.
STOP, WILL
That time, he actually stopped. Thoughts were clearly running through his head, and he muttered something under his breath.
Will would've grinned, had he had a mouth, and he put up a third message.
SPEAK UP
"Oh, so you can hear me! Great, that makes things easier."
YES
"What, exactly, are you?"
YOU
"You're me?"
YES
"Can you, uh... explain that a bit more?"
HANG ON
"Alright." He waited, and after two minutes or so, he started, "So-"
There. This message wasn't in crude ASCII-esque. Will had apparently put together an English font, and while it wasn't the most aesthetically appealing, it worked better than before.
"Okay, that's great. Now, what do you mean, you're me?"
It's very simple. I'm Will Haven, as I assume you are. I was interfacing with this computer system via the mental interface handles behind you- don't touch them, we don't want this to get worse. I was looking at a message from someone in another one of these battles, and then I check the video feeds and find my body (you) wandering around and poking at things.
"Okay, um..." He stared off into the distance, going over the last few minutes in his mind. "Well, after that standoff with Greyve and Twight, we were moved to somewhere else in what I'm assuming is the same facility. It was a sort of entrance hall, looking out over a desert, and while I'm sure the place must've been grand at one point, it was all worn, cracked and broken. I was just making my way down the stairs to get deeper down when, out of nowhere, I ended up here. I- oh, sorry."
He'd been ignoring the screen, which now read Wait. WAIT. Dammit, you're not even looking. If you're going to be talking to someone who's just capable of talking through text, do you think you could at least do them the courtesy of looking at them when you're talking?
Thank you, it added. Now, you say there was a standoff between Greyve and Twight.
"Right."
I don't remember anything of the sort. My last round ended with Atrum- Yes, you see where I'm going.
The Will with a body had reached down to grab his data reader, and after a moment's examination, he nodded. "Another little glitch in the time-variance. I'm Nineteen. You?"
Eighteen. Damn.
The curse, both knew, wasn't because of the numbers themselves. They didn't know why, but it was obvious that whatever was causing their little time-skips had just left Will 18 trapped in the computer and sent his mindless body one timeline over. If that was the case, then it seemed likely that when the round ended, he'd be left behind, trapped alone in an abandoned facility until the place fell to rubble eons later. Damn was an understatement.
After a few moments of silence for both to consider the consequences, Will 18 said, Well, as long as you're here, I might as well be of some use. He fell silent, and Will 19 waited awkwardly for a minute or two. Then, his compatriot returned. Out the doors, two levels down. The stairs should be fairly straightforward. There's been a power spike in the systems down there since our arrival.
"Can you look inside, see who's there?"
There are no cameras there, and if I want to actually enter the system, I need to transfer myself into them. Just head on down, I'll meet you in there.
"Okay, will do. See you there."
The only response he got was a dimming of the screen as the system went back into standby. Sighing out of sympathy, he headed to the door.
It was locked.
Sighing out of exasperation, he pulled out his Blastec.
-
Annaliese was still trying to process the bizarre-looking creature before her, stalling its question with, "Uh"s, "Ah"s, and "Erm"s, when a second creature, much like the first, flickered into existence in the far corner of the room.
"Ah, excellent, Miss Nibbs! I, uh..." The creature stopped at the look on its face, then looked down at itself. "Oh, of course I do." It sighed, a clicking sort of noise, then continued. "This is probably going to take some explaining."