trans_9 | [open] ☥ the world is just illusion trying to change you

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[open] ☥ the world is just illusion trying to change you

Mulder was pretty certain that no matter how long he stayed here, there was going to be no getting acclimated to the fact that he was living out his wildest fantasies, even when those fantasies were sobered by the conditions that had led to his being on this ship in the first place. If there was one thing that defined him, it was his will to believe in the impossible, and so he'd hardened his resolve already towards accepting that Scully, along with others from his world, were encased in one of those pods below. Still alive. Once he'd accepted that, it'd been easier to functionally react to his situation.

And his first reaction had been to explore every inch of the ship open to him. Of course, that ended up being more than he could have imagined. The ship was huge and trying to wrap his head around the dimensions of the thing carrying them proved mind-boggling. It hit him most fully when he made his way down to Level 4 to explore the rumored 'City', and found himself blinking up into the 'sun' set there in a sky that looked distinctly like the one back on Earth. His jaw dropped for a moment, but he reasoned, it couldn't be real.

And if the Daligig were able to manufacture technological illusions on that scale, he had no doubt that there were other things on this ship that weren't what they appeared to be.

[ooc; So very open, for any kind of interaction. Mulder can be wherever in the City you want, as he's exploring, so just specify in the subject line or tag, please! Open to multiple threads, or even threads with multiple muses - jack away. AIM > thegreatmuldini if you want to chat about it.]

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"You shouldn't be here," said a voice behind him, and when he'd turn, he'd find a teenaged monk, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, wearing saffron robes, and leaning against a metal staff.

Blue arrow tattoos sprawled over his body, on his arms and forehead, although on the left arm, it looked like it had been re-tattooed over the burns all over said arm.

His expression was dark and he had the kind of face that looked like it wasn't a good fit for dark expressions, like it was made more for mirth and laughter.

"It's not a very nice place."

'You shouldn't be here' was a line Mulder was more than used to. It'd never seemed to pierce his skull on any of those instances, however. His eyes drifted across the tattoos, trying to draw up any mental comparisons on tribal symbols he knew of, before realizing he couldn't count on his own cultural knowledge in a place that was a melting pot of dimensions.

"Something happened here," he said, insistently, taking a step in the boy's direction. "Do you know what it was?"

His gaze was distant. He hadn't been back here since he'd been released.

"Yes. But it doesn't matter anymore. The fight that happened here is long since over."

Of course, the implications of what happened were something that weighed on his mind. Why the Nightmare King had even been on the ship, why he'd woken up early. There were a lot of unanswered whys.

The problem was Aang rarely asked the question, but he was slowly starting to.

"Sometimes the only way we can solve the problems of the future is to look to and understand the past," Mulder countered immediately, undeterred by that kind of argument. He took another step closer, now that he knew this boy really did have answers of some kind.

"What do you know?"

The look on Aang's face after Mulder said that was equal parts furtive and considering. With a sigh, he walked all the way into the room, staff clutched in his hand.

Pointing with his staff at the burnt spot on the floor, he said, "That used to be where a great, big stone was. It was the prison of the Nightmare King."

It was a rather grandiose and evil-sounding name, but the Nightmare King had been a rather huge threat to the crew.

"He was a spirit, a very powerful and very evil spirit that wanted to drive the crew insane. The Daligig, the aliens that saved us all, brought the stone here to study it, thinking they could control what was inside."

Twirling his staff around again to lean on it once more, he said simply, "They were wrong. Really, really wrong."

The implications of that, of them trying to weaponize something that evil were not something to be ignored.

Mulder's gaze followed him, sweeping between his expression and the room, takin in every detail.

"How'd that spirit get here in the first place? You say they brought the stone here, but do you also mean they brought the spirit on board?"

Something cold gripped him inside as he thought through the implications of this. It was one thing for the Daligig to have honest intentions of trying to salvage people from across the universe. It was another thing to be seeking powerful weapons, regardless of what those weapons were, or what dangers they could pose to those around it.

"The spirit was already trapped in the stone. In the world they found it in, something powerful had trapped it by using the sarcophagus, but only after it'd destroyed an entire world. They wanted that power for themselves. The old Daligig captain of the ship--he was obsessed with finding ways to fight the Ohm."

He spoke like he had experience with the old crew.

That was because he did.

"To destroy the enemy at any cost," Mulder said slowly, considering the implications of that. It sent a shiver up his spine as he looked around at this site, and felt that twinge of wrongness about it again.

His eyes swept back towards the boys'.

"Where's the Daligig Captain now?"

"Dead. The entire Daligig crew died when space pirates took over the ship. What they did to Stacy was what made her start waking people up in the first place to replace the crew. It's why you're standing here. Only a few survived when they were trapped studying the stone, but they--they died, too, thanks to the Nightmare King's growing power. When all that happened, there were only two places safe on the entire ship. Godhead Row--that's where Cargn was kept, if you ever meet him, and...and inside here."

He reached out a hand and gently pressed it against the sarcophagus, looking as if he was lost in some unpleasant reminisce. "The space pirates couldn't get into this room because of the Nightmare King, and the Nightmare King couldn't hurt who was inside the sarcophagus as long as their will was strong."

He knew an awful lot about all this, when supposedly only two of the people who were awake survived a mass slaughter.

It made a disturbing amount of sense, but seemed so much more dreary of a picture than the idea of these kindly aliens trying to help them, and waking them up to assist.

They'd been rescued, and their rescuers had been killed by pirates. It didn't say a lot for their strength in the first place.

Watching the expression on the boy's face, realization dawned across Mulder's.

"... It was you," he said, no room for doubt in his tone. "Wasn't it?"

Aang stayed frozen there, hand on the sarcophagus.

"I'm the Avatar, the spirit of my world given human form. I have lifetime after lifetime of strength to draw from, thanks to my past lives."

Thanks to the very vastness of what he was.

"The sarcophagus let me walk among the crew's dreams and nightmares. They woke up from stasis, and when they slept, I protected them from his influence over their dreams. For as long as I could. A year and a half, maybe two. I lost count after a while."

All that time locked away, unable to move.

"In the end, my will broke, and the stone cracked, but by then the crew was prepared to fight him. They bound him again in his stone prison, then cast it into a black hole. They rescued me so I was finally free again."

Aang finally turned back to Mulder.

"You're here because you ask questions, aren't you."

There had been something almost hungry in the way he'd asked what Aang knew.

"People need to ask more questions. I used to trust the Daligig, but the more I think about what happened to me, about the things they've hidden away on the ship..."

The more he was quietly starting to wonder if that trust was misplaced.

Mulder watched the boy - the spirit? - with a sense of awe, as he tried to comprehend who exactly he was speaking to, and what they had experienced. To spend two years with only dreams and nightmares for company, fighting that kind of dark menace, only to finally be able to walk among the waking again.

That seed of doubt he heard in Aang's tone reflected his own darkest misgivings about what was going on here. It was the first time anyone had directly spoken about not trusting them entirely to him, however, and given that Aang actually had experiences with them...

"I just want to know the truth," he admitted freely. "About who they are, what they want from us. I don't think it can be as simple as people have made it out to be. Even if the Daligig were a race of highly benevolent creatures, there are still too many unanswered questions. And given what you've told me about this Nightmare King..." Mulder's eyes moved from the face on the sarcophagus back to the boy's. "I'm not sure I can believe their sense of morality is anymore highly evolved than humanity's."

What if they were bad, like people like Steve made them out to be? Was he wrong to be sad they were gone? He knew the commanding officers had done terrible things--sometimes to him.

He liked to think those were the actions of just a few misguided individuals. He hoped it wasn't all of Daligig Command.

"I'm Aang. Who are you?" Aang asked, deciding that first he wanted to know who he was talking to.

"Agent Fox Mulder," he offered easily, "Mulder's fine." It was easier to get that out of the way before people jumped on calling him 'Fox'. "Can I ask what your dimension was like? Before you were taken?"

It was good he told him what to call him, because otherwise, Aang might have called him "Agent" by mistake.

The question he asked was one that Aang didn't mind answering.

"I lived in a world with Four Nations. Originally, at least. Each of them had benders--people that could manipulate the elements. Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Each Nation was very distinct in its identity, and sometimes that meant they clashed. It was my job, as Avatar, master of all four elements, to maintain the balance between the Four Nations--to help everyone live in peace."

Still better than 'Fox'.

"So I take it this level of tech was something you weren't used to dealing with." At least that was what he was going to assume from that kind of tribalistic description, so focused on natural elements.

Aang shook his head.

"This entire ship and everything on it is beyond even the most advanced machines in my world."

They were still cookin' with steam, Mulder, or everything was powered by Benders.

"But this--" He gestured to the sarcophagus. "I think it was beyond even them. I'm not sure the Daligig really understood everything about it themselves. Just like they didn't understand the stone and how dangerous and uncontrollable the Nightmare King was."

"What you're talking about with this Nightmare King seems to go beyond the realm of technology," Mulder couldn't help point out. "Some kind of more... supernatural being, or at least that's how people in my world would label it." They'd also be quick to disbelieve it, but Mulder had no reason to doubt Aang's word on this.

"He was a spirit. A very evil spirit. His real name was Nyarlathotep."

"Do you think he was the only one? The only... spirit the Daligig thought to weaponize?"

"I know he wasn't."

Maybe the Nightmare King had been the first, studied in his stone prison ever since they found the stone and the sarcophagus on the dead and decaying world they'd been discovered on. But the Nightmare King certainly hadn't been the only spirit they tried to make into a weapon.

"They tried to do it with me. At least until some of the Daligig crew that worked closely with me protested to make it stop."

Aang summed up his general opinion of the Daligig as best as he could, "I met some of them that were good people. Some were very kind. Some were very brave. But some of the others...either they were very cruel, or just...very, very desperate."

He went on, "And that kind of desperation can be dangerous."

Edited 2011-09-06 08:59 (UTC)

"So in other words, they're only human," he said, letting the irony linger. "Some of them might have the best intentions in mind for us, but if even a small group of them have decided that defeating the Ohm is worth paying any price, then they've become a threat to the freedom of the rest."

Boy did this all sound familiar.

Aang nodded solemnly, leaning against his staff again.

"The hard part is figuring out how good or bad they really are when Stacy's always watching and listening."

And, of course, in Aang's case, there was almost a part of him that didn't want to find out what they were truly like, a part of him that wanted to assume the best of people. In the last few years, during his ordeal on the ship, that part of him had gotten quieter and quieter, however.

"Do you think Stacy works with them to monitor information?" It only made sense really, and it was pretty foolproof. "Reporting back to them any suspicions we might have, working to keep us from discovering some things?"

Aang shrugged. "All I know is she can see and hear practically everything, and if you call out to her, she'll answer. That means she's always listening."

[open] ☥ the world is just illusion trying to change you

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Sorry for the long delay. Helping run plot ate me alive

No worries at all!

Re: No worries at all!

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