Building a family [hella open]

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

 Slobo had been puttering around the ship for an hour, thinking and looking. He quickly found that if you looked hard enough, between W&P and the City itself, you could find anything. In the end, he was standing outside a Courtyard by Marriott hotel about a click outside of "Escherville" with spraypaint and a very large block of stone. At first he had thought about the Vatican, but it was too wrecked from the zombie fight. Plus, this place had an indoor pool. He spraypainted a large message on the wall next to the door, red with black outline.

"OUTSIDERS
COMMUNITY SERVICE
FIELD TRAINING

PEER COUNSELING" 

 

On the sandwich board tucked near the door, he wrote "12-21? Info and Tryouts inside" and left it out in front. Now, he took his large rock into the lobby and began carving. And waited.
 

 

 

Comments

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"I have my own organization to manage and it takes up almost all of my time. Nevertheless, if there is any way I can assist you...Actually, i've been meaning to talk to you. About the reaction to Luthor's arrival." Her tone of voice was compassionate, leaning down and forward so her chin rested in her hand. She did not trust Lex Luthor, but she had dealt with the manipulative before. Her universe was thick with plans within plans. She also had a real wish to hear Slobo's perspective on the situation.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

Slobo slumped a little.

"It was personal fer me. I let it get ta me. I get I was a jerk, I just ain't a fan of people bein' judged because o' who they look like or where they came from." He was looking down at the ground. "It ain't fair."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn." She quoted. "My mentor, the previous Mother Superior taught me that." She reached over to his chair to lay a hand on those slumped shoulders. "You may have been wrong, but you were wrong for the right reasons."

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, I do that a lot." He said, his tone becoming almost somber. He quickly snapped himself out of it. "Not that it seems important right now, what with our world bein' destroyed. Me and Kon're talkin' later ta iron things out, I think. At least get an explanation fer why he went psycho at the guy. I mean, our Luthor? Like, fifty. Easy. This guy's young enough ta be his son."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"They did too. Especially Brainiac Five...the living one." The boy's wish for acceptance was almost palpable to her. She restrained herself from taking full advantage of it. "I can tell the man is a manipulator, but I have dealt with more than enough of his kind in my time." She'd been one, in fact. "But the urge to exclude and do violence on the outsider can have disastrous effects on any culture."

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"I'm sure he ain't all whiskers on kittens, Bright Eyes, but still. I make it a point ta not hit guys without powers unless they got a weapon er backup. If that Brainy guy had superstrength, he coulda killed the guy. And I'm all fer breakin' the rules, but I usually wait fer a good reason to off a bastich."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Which was why I opposed it. It did not stop them from taking to his notes and liquor like the Vandals to Rome though." A finger pressed to the back of his neck, activating a pressure point that would make him relax, diffuse his stress in a wash.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

Slobo's muscles loosened, and he sighed.

"I don't really care about the stealin', just the hittin' the guy. I mean, my... the guy I come from... He's not exactly a good guy. Like, I ain't great, but he's a real psycho. And, bein' a clone, I kinda look just like him. When they went in on that Luthor kid... And then hittin' him... All because WE were the idiots who walked inta a trap..." He shook his head. "It's like they were lookin' for someone else ta blame so bad that they were willin' ta do anythin' about it."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"A reaction to make up for shame." A second point and a third. This revelation intrigued her and she leaned over with a curious look. Her voice was enough to ingratiate her with any man, and she had not yet begun to use Voice even. "You are a ghola?"

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"A whatta? I'm a Czarnian. Well, a clone o' one. Which makes me one, really. From the fuzzy details I remember, we're a messed up species." Slobo chuckled lightly. "A drop o' a normal Czarnian's blood can make a thousand clones o' the original with all their memories and skills. In Lobo's case, they all fought ta be him. 'Cept me, cause I'm defective."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"A ghola is a clone, grown from dead tissue, capable of recovering the memories of its source body with the right set of stimuli. My lust object good friend in my home dimension was one." With the implication: I could be your friend, too.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"... So... You knew a guy... like me?" This was actually very confusing, to an extent. Were there other Czarnian's in other dimensions, or did they just have access to superscience? But then another question entered his mind, one brought to the forefront by his recent dream...

"... Was he haunted? Like, by the guy that came before him?"

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana looked thoughtful. This was delicate ground to tread on. A false word and she could upset the fragile trust they'd just established. "He was that man. We awakened the old self that slept within him. But we were in sinking sands..." A Fremen expression, the equivalent of desperate straights. "There are ways to fight the process if you know how though. I can help you." A gamble, but she could see the glint of desperation in his solid yellow eyes.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"I don't think I can become him... I don't wanna, I AIN'T him... It's just... Somethin' happened ta me. At some point, all the memories an' stuff I ignored..." He looked back down at the ground. "It's like they became him, in my head. I don't really get it..."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

She scrambled out of her chair to look over him (not in an attempt to seduce, she thought, he would have fallen already to her if that was what she wanted, but being overwhelmed by a combination sympathy and urgency). "You must take this seriously! This could be the beggining of a far more urgent condition. Let me help you. Please." Her Fremen accent was starting to show through.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

Slobo looked at her, sniffing and listening a moment. Funny thing about people, they give off emotionally reflective pheremones just like anyone else. She was on the level.

"Alright, but only 'cause ya seem ta think it's such a bad thing. But I gotta finish my statue before we have the guy's funeral. So maybe we can start this another time?" He was calm on the outside, but inside, he was a little more freaked out than he had been by the initial appearance of Dream Lobo.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"I did not treat him kindly in life." She said, backing off and getting a distant look. "I regret that. I was a sculptor too, before I left Chapterhouse. Is that what that block outside is for?"

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"Yep. Makin' a statue o' that guy who got fried for us back at the bridge, the other Brainy guy...."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"That's who I was referring to. I told him he would never be more than a Thinking Machine..." This was progress for her.

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

Slobo looked at her.

"Yanno, a lotta robots are good company, Bright Eyes. They ain't so different, when ya think about it. Like we had this guy who used ta hang with Young Justice, Red Tornado..." He thought about it. " REAL stiff bastich. But all he wanted? Was ta be human. And he saved our butts a coupla times."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana tried to smile but the distant look remained. She was somewhere in distant battles that had ended long before she was born. "I know it now...Or I am realizing it. But I have memory-lives that go back to the time of the machine-tyrants. Though I was not born, I know what it is like to be hunted by machines, to see my loved ones torn in half by them, the buzzing and choking smoke of engines, the huddling in stinking hovels..."

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

Slobo looked at her, feeling that pesky pity emotion for the second time today.

"Yeah, but the memories of the past ain't there ta bind ya." He said, in what passed for a soothing tone with him. "I mean, it's good ta never forget, but ya can't let that color yer views on the guys here. None o' them are the ones from yer world, right?"

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"No, but you can understand why...I suspect it will take some time before I can adjust to their presence." She shook it off. The shock of her worm's 'death' had thrown her off kilter. Her BG control was leaking at the edges. "Have you ever made a sculpture before?"

[top-teen-38.livejournal.com]

"First one. But I can build a spaceship outta scrap, so I figure it can't be that hard. And I know Coluan, so I'm thinkin' I'll throw a nice plaque at the bottom in it."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"It was my hobby while I was in charge of the desertification project on Chapterhouse. Communicator, bring up The Void." And from her communicator came a small, slowly rotating hologram. Plastone was cut down in it in a way that had the feeling as if it were a shadow of some other sense, one we could not yet percieve. It was a sculpture that some found disturbing.