Once more into the breach, dear friends

[hellonspectacles]

It is nighttime, or what passes for nighttime in space, and the ship Mount Ida is quiet.

It isn’t a particularly large vessel. There are berths for a dozen crew members and private rooms for the ship’s two officers, a mess hall, a med bay, an armory, a brig. Nothing about it is particularly luxurious—Blood of Eden doesn’t go in for luxury, and the members of Troia Cell are no different—but everything is functional and well maintained. The ship hums faintly with the sound of engines and life support and electric lights, a but most of the crew don’t notice it anymore.

Near the officer’s cabins is another berth, occupied (or so it seems) by a single person. It contains a bed, and a sink, and a table on which, strangely, sits the perfectly formed skeleton of a human hand. The door is locked from the outside and a crew member stands guard. Are these precautions to keep the person inside from escaping, or to protect them from coming to harm? No one is sure anymore.

The crew member, Sergeant Hot Coals of Vengeance, is bored. Their shift is almost over, they need a piss, and they’re not even sure what the point of this assignment is anyway. Sure, the room’s occupant might be a zombie lover, and she might be a little weird. And sure, she did dislocate Lieutenant Pash’s arm when they tried to take that gross little bag of bones from her, but that was months ago. These days, she’s polite, and she spends long hours in secret meetings with the Commander, and she always asks for an escort when she needs to leave the room.

Coals really needs to piss. They peek through the little window in the door.

Inside, Camilla Hect is curled up on a narrow bed, breathing steadily. She’s asleep, and anyway, the door is locked. What’s the worst that could happen if they stepped away for a few minutes?

Coals leaves their post, and Camilla sleeps on—or so it seems.

Comments

[ablativeholopleather]

"He always did strike me as a clever guy." He smiles faintly at that, looking from Cam back to his gloved hands resting in his lap. They come up and twist into a Gesture, one that would transfer status effects between the two of them, if there were anything to transfer. It comes with the sound of a slide guitar and a coiled cord of clay that fades into and then out of sight between them. "Like this. They're somatic abilities that involve the energy of the user and call on skills learned from the Monitor. A lot of mine are kinda limited because I don't have access to the signal anymore, but I'm pretty good at muddling through on my own too."

Of course, he knows by now that nobody knows what the Monitor is, what the signals are, what the active cabinets mean to his people. It doesn't help that he's just the low guy on the totem pole; he knows enough to function in the world, that's about it.

"At home, one of my closest friends was way more powerful than I've ever been. Used gauntlets and the wave artifice to take out whole swaths of dudes."

[hellonspectacles]

Camilla jerks slightly with surprise as the sudden, melodious sound fills the room, and then fades as quickly as it came. She watches transfixed at the coiled cord that is there, and then gone, fast enough that she doesn’t give into the instinct to reach out and touch it.

“I’d like to see that,” she says, and she could be referring to what more Wayne can do here, or what he could do at home, or even the ability of his friend. “Can he do more because he has more experience, or is it a matter of genetics?”

[ablativeholopleather]

Wayne's finger twists in the air, producing a last little note in the air.

"Yeah, Somsnosa's both got more experience and more power behind her. We're all pretty different in terms of ability. Even between Waynes it's variable. Somsnosa's really great at the area-of-effect and damage-over-time. Pongorma could hit harder than anyone I've ever met, as a Dread Knight. Decres could do physical damage, I'm support and damage-over-time. I'm not a great healer but I'm better at that than outright fighting. Pal says I'll make a pretty good distraction even without all that though so I'll defer to him."