Re: The Wretched Rite - Round Two - Inferno Alpha
02-27-2012, 05:07 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.
They pulled. Olivia screamed.
She didn't much care why they were pulling. All she wanted was for the blackness to sweep over her, for the plant to do whatever it was it always did, for it to carry her away to wake up cowering in some corner of the Amazon again, safe in some semblance of sanity.
Nothing made any sense. Reality was coming in bits and pieces, and the bits didn't have any connection to one another. There was an office, a street, a cottage, and some whirling mass that kept showing up.
And now there were demons trying to pull the plant out of her body and failing. All they got for their efforts were Olivia's screams, but they kept at it for what seemed, to her, like an eternity.
-
The office was a cold, impersonal sort of white, the kind of white you'd find in the waiting room of a hospital. It wasn't the comforting, generic semi-off-white that seems to be the default wall colour for an office or government building; it was that very distinct hospital-white that only ever appears there.
The office was also rather cramped, and when Olivia was escorted in five minutes after arriving on the Hell World, she found herself standing behind the robot sitting at the desk. It turned around, giving her an expectant look, then rolled its eyes and pointed to the chair on the opposite side of the tiny room. There wasn't much room to get by, but Olivia squeezed through, her burlap cloak catching on one corner of the desk and tearing a bit.
As soon as she sat down, the robot started talking, quick and impatient. "You shouldn't be here," it said, glaring at her. "We have reports of multiple anomalous entities across the station, and we're having to process them all ourselves."
Olivia mumbled something, and her host leaned forward.
"What was that?"
"I was just-"
The robot cut her off. "Stop talking. Let me finish." It paused to glare at her for a few seconds to make sure she was done, then continued. "We're having to process all of the anomalous entities ourselves, and that means making determinations about sins that we really don't have the resources to be making all of the time. This is quite inconvenient for us."
Olivia said nothing, but the robot eyed her as though it expected she would. After a moment, it continued.
"You, unfortunately, are making this even more difficult than some of the others." Sliding open a drawer, the robot produced several pieces of paper and a pair of glasses. "You see, you belong quite solidly in C.7-1, as demonstrated by this form here." It gestured with one of the pieces of paper but didn't offer to actually show it to her. "On the other hand, the scans show that your host ought to be in C.7-3, and as you may have noticed, our efforts to detach you haven't exactly been successful."
The robot gave another pause, and Olivia started to open her mouth to speak, but the robot just interrupted her again.
"For the moment, protocol dictates that we attempt to find a solution, but it's going to leave you as an exception case for the duration of your stay."
Again, the insincere comment-inviting pause.
"This means you'll likely get a less typical sentence, which usually means a lighter one. To accommodate that, you're being assigned tier two inconveniences and impoliteness on top of whatever you're assigned. Do you understand?"
"I-"
"Sign here." The robot slid one of the pages toward her.
Glancing around, Olivia couldn't see a pen anywhere. She gave the robot a questioning look, and it just raised a metal eyebrow at her.
"Can I have a pen?"
The robot rolled its eyes again and pointed to the corner of the desk. When Olivia just responded with a blank look, it mimed pricking its finger and writing on the page with that.
Olivia's blood smeared a bit as she signed the page. She hadn't signed anything in a long time, and signing in blood stung.
The robot snatched the page away from her as soon as she was done. "Now," it said, its voice a bit slower, calmer, "do you have any questions?"
Olivia wasn't sure if it was actually going to let her speak, but it didn't start talking again after a few seconds, so she started, "You said, uh..."
The robot just kept looking at her.
"You, uh... you said my 'host' couldn't be detached? What did you mean there?"
"Oh, that." The robot opened another drawer and pulled out another piece of paper. "Her mind's down to twenty to twenty-five percent stability, which is still above the margin for being considered sentient, so we need to consider her as well." Again, the robot gestured with the page but didn't let her see it. "Until she goes below ten percent, she's technically still a person, so her sins are also taken into account. You can ask for a re-test later; until she drops below that line, though, you're stuck with the exception case punishments."
"But I'm-"
"You signed the form, reindanis, no buts. Your warden is waiting outside, he'll assign you your first job. Goodbye."
With a sudden pair of loud clacking noises, the robot froze in place, and Olivia got the feeling that the robot had shut down, leaving her alone in the office with nothing but her oddly-inert plant parasite.
-
Once Olivia had squirmed her way past the desk again and figured out how to open the door, she found herself face-to-face with another robot, this one one that looked like a stainless-steel life-sized gorilla action figure.
"I'm to be your warden," it said, waiting about as long as the other robot had and providing just as much of a name. "The others that showed up with you are to be your first assignment." Clumsily, it passed her a tiny computer-like device. "Here's a map of the station. The blacked-out parts are places you can't go, the red dots are the places your rude friends were first located. Get them contained and into their appropriate circles and get back to me. If you fail, you'll spend a few months out in vacuum before we put you to work again. We clear?"
Olivia began to mumble something affirmative in response, but the gorilla-like robot had already turned and started stomping away.
For a moment, she just stood there with the map in her hand, waiting for the next wave of whatever insanity was going on to wash over her. When it didn't come, her brain started to kick into gear.
So. She was in some sort of space station with some assortment of strange beings, everything was hell-styled, and even though the staff of the place seemed to think it was the one worth addressing, the ivy that had made her life a different sort of hell for the past two years was as dormant as it had ever been. With one hand, she reached up to check, and to her disappointment (though she was more than a little disturbed to feel a bit of relief as well), it was still there. She just... couldn't hear it whispering to her. For the moment, her head was completely, 100% hers... assuming she was still even all there. What had that robot said, twenty to twenty-five percent stability? Could she really be that close to losing it?
It didn't matter, she decided, pushing it from her mind. She wasn't going to let some scientifically-baseless number some robot had cited get to her. She was as sane as she'd ever been- well, okay, maybe a bit worse for wear considering her time in the jungle. That wouldn't bring her down to twenty percent, though. She was fine, of course. She wasn't going to let the thought worry her. Not at all.
Sighing, she started off down one hall, glancing at the map in her hand and wondering if there was much in the way of transportation on the massive, planet-sized station. The dots were scattered around, after all, and she'd apparently been enlisted to corral them all.
-
Back in the very white office, the robot was straightening its things up and putting papers back in drawers. They never check, it mused. I keep the papers in my hand when I freeze, and yet they never bother to check. It glanced one last time at the relevant sheet ("Olivia Reindana," it read, "Cognitive Stability: 85-90%") before sliding it away into a drawer and standing up. It had a report to deliver, after all.
They pulled. Olivia screamed.
She didn't much care why they were pulling. All she wanted was for the blackness to sweep over her, for the plant to do whatever it was it always did, for it to carry her away to wake up cowering in some corner of the Amazon again, safe in some semblance of sanity.
Nothing made any sense. Reality was coming in bits and pieces, and the bits didn't have any connection to one another. There was an office, a street, a cottage, and some whirling mass that kept showing up.
And now there were demons trying to pull the plant out of her body and failing. All they got for their efforts were Olivia's screams, but they kept at it for what seemed, to her, like an eternity.
-
The office was a cold, impersonal sort of white, the kind of white you'd find in the waiting room of a hospital. It wasn't the comforting, generic semi-off-white that seems to be the default wall colour for an office or government building; it was that very distinct hospital-white that only ever appears there.
The office was also rather cramped, and when Olivia was escorted in five minutes after arriving on the Hell World, she found herself standing behind the robot sitting at the desk. It turned around, giving her an expectant look, then rolled its eyes and pointed to the chair on the opposite side of the tiny room. There wasn't much room to get by, but Olivia squeezed through, her burlap cloak catching on one corner of the desk and tearing a bit.
As soon as she sat down, the robot started talking, quick and impatient. "You shouldn't be here," it said, glaring at her. "We have reports of multiple anomalous entities across the station, and we're having to process them all ourselves."
Olivia mumbled something, and her host leaned forward.
"What was that?"
"I was just-"
The robot cut her off. "Stop talking. Let me finish." It paused to glare at her for a few seconds to make sure she was done, then continued. "We're having to process all of the anomalous entities ourselves, and that means making determinations about sins that we really don't have the resources to be making all of the time. This is quite inconvenient for us."
Olivia said nothing, but the robot eyed her as though it expected she would. After a moment, it continued.
"You, unfortunately, are making this even more difficult than some of the others." Sliding open a drawer, the robot produced several pieces of paper and a pair of glasses. "You see, you belong quite solidly in C.7-1, as demonstrated by this form here." It gestured with one of the pieces of paper but didn't offer to actually show it to her. "On the other hand, the scans show that your host ought to be in C.7-3, and as you may have noticed, our efforts to detach you haven't exactly been successful."
The robot gave another pause, and Olivia started to open her mouth to speak, but the robot just interrupted her again.
"For the moment, protocol dictates that we attempt to find a solution, but it's going to leave you as an exception case for the duration of your stay."
Again, the insincere comment-inviting pause.
"This means you'll likely get a less typical sentence, which usually means a lighter one. To accommodate that, you're being assigned tier two inconveniences and impoliteness on top of whatever you're assigned. Do you understand?"
"I-"
"Sign here." The robot slid one of the pages toward her.
Glancing around, Olivia couldn't see a pen anywhere. She gave the robot a questioning look, and it just raised a metal eyebrow at her.
"Can I have a pen?"
The robot rolled its eyes again and pointed to the corner of the desk. When Olivia just responded with a blank look, it mimed pricking its finger and writing on the page with that.
Olivia's blood smeared a bit as she signed the page. She hadn't signed anything in a long time, and signing in blood stung.
The robot snatched the page away from her as soon as she was done. "Now," it said, its voice a bit slower, calmer, "do you have any questions?"
Olivia wasn't sure if it was actually going to let her speak, but it didn't start talking again after a few seconds, so she started, "You said, uh..."
The robot just kept looking at her.
"You, uh... you said my 'host' couldn't be detached? What did you mean there?"
"Oh, that." The robot opened another drawer and pulled out another piece of paper. "Her mind's down to twenty to twenty-five percent stability, which is still above the margin for being considered sentient, so we need to consider her as well." Again, the robot gestured with the page but didn't let her see it. "Until she goes below ten percent, she's technically still a person, so her sins are also taken into account. You can ask for a re-test later; until she drops below that line, though, you're stuck with the exception case punishments."
"But I'm-"
"You signed the form, reindanis, no buts. Your warden is waiting outside, he'll assign you your first job. Goodbye."
With a sudden pair of loud clacking noises, the robot froze in place, and Olivia got the feeling that the robot had shut down, leaving her alone in the office with nothing but her oddly-inert plant parasite.
-
Once Olivia had squirmed her way past the desk again and figured out how to open the door, she found herself face-to-face with another robot, this one one that looked like a stainless-steel life-sized gorilla action figure.
"I'm to be your warden," it said, waiting about as long as the other robot had and providing just as much of a name. "The others that showed up with you are to be your first assignment." Clumsily, it passed her a tiny computer-like device. "Here's a map of the station. The blacked-out parts are places you can't go, the red dots are the places your rude friends were first located. Get them contained and into their appropriate circles and get back to me. If you fail, you'll spend a few months out in vacuum before we put you to work again. We clear?"
Olivia began to mumble something affirmative in response, but the gorilla-like robot had already turned and started stomping away.
For a moment, she just stood there with the map in her hand, waiting for the next wave of whatever insanity was going on to wash over her. When it didn't come, her brain started to kick into gear.
So. She was in some sort of space station with some assortment of strange beings, everything was hell-styled, and even though the staff of the place seemed to think it was the one worth addressing, the ivy that had made her life a different sort of hell for the past two years was as dormant as it had ever been. With one hand, she reached up to check, and to her disappointment (though she was more than a little disturbed to feel a bit of relief as well), it was still there. She just... couldn't hear it whispering to her. For the moment, her head was completely, 100% hers... assuming she was still even all there. What had that robot said, twenty to twenty-five percent stability? Could she really be that close to losing it?
It didn't matter, she decided, pushing it from her mind. She wasn't going to let some scientifically-baseless number some robot had cited get to her. She was as sane as she'd ever been- well, okay, maybe a bit worse for wear considering her time in the jungle. That wouldn't bring her down to twenty percent, though. She was fine, of course. She wasn't going to let the thought worry her. Not at all.
Sighing, she started off down one hall, glancing at the map in her hand and wondering if there was much in the way of transportation on the massive, planet-sized station. The dots were scattered around, after all, and she'd apparently been enlisted to corral them all.
-
Back in the very white office, the robot was straightening its things up and putting papers back in drawers. They never check, it mused. I keep the papers in my hand when I freeze, and yet they never bother to check. It glanced one last time at the relevant sheet ("Olivia Reindana," it read, "Cognitive Stability: 85-90%") before sliding it away into a drawer and standing up. It had a report to deliver, after all.