Buy a Little Mercy [Open; Potentially Graphic Material]

[cityship]

Less than an hour after the ship leaves Agrestic's orbit, an announcement is broadcast throughout Stacy.

|| Attention, crew. Your crewmates, Howard Bassem and Charles Merriman, have been apprehended attempting to desert. They will now be given Punishment. According to established guidelines, you are all requested to report to the Observation to witness the Punishment. Attendance is not mandatory, but highly suggested. This will serve as a reminder of the consequences of treason and desertion. ||

On the observation deck, Archon Yavek, Archite Rekkti, two other Daligig and a handful of Kessek soldiers stand outside a spherical force field. Inside the bubble, Orc and Howard are suspended by tentacles looping around their wrists. Orc's ceased thrashing around and struggling against his restraints; rust-colored fissures have developed around his shoulders and forearms from the strain, but now he simply hangs there, looking defeated. Howard's nose is bleeding, and every time a drop falls to the bottom of the forcefield there's a small sizzle. He's weeping and begging the Daligig with every plea possible, but they act as if they aren't listening. Instead, they wait for an audience.

Comments

[morphitudinous]

"It's worse than that," Billy added from a place nearby, trying his best not to shudder. That last incident had been firmly cemented in his memory. "It's done piece by piece, muscle and blood and bone extracted, all slowly enough for them to savor it. And they forced her to be conscious for the entire process."

He was going to be sick again, wasn't he.

[not_the_philistine]

"What?"

Such sadism is almost too outrageous to be believed - and absolutely too cruel to be tolerated.

Goliath immediately closes in on the Daligig and Kessek.

"You cannot possibly justify this decision!"

[meat_mooks]

"You would justify defending traitors who would sell out trillions of people for their own illusion of safety?" Yavek steps behind a Kessek.

[not_the_philistine]

"These are children and one is not a warrior." The other looks like he might have it in him, but that isn't the point and looks can be deceiving. Goliath attempts to sidestep the Kessek to continue confronting Yavek eye-to-eye.

"If they wish to leave the war, I do not wish to have them fighting by my side. OR by the sides of my fellow warriors. That trillions of people suffer for our loss of two soldiers who were not soldiers to begin with does not follow."

Just like that dubious metaphor about piecing their universe back together does not follow.

[meat_mooks]

"That does not protect them in a war. We did not choose them for this purpose. The Tapestry and other like artifacts that predict fate did. Believe us, had we the power to choose any of this, we would not have chosen such weak-willed and treacherous people for our crew," Rekkti says. "I understand your concern, but fate dictates that no one may leave. To do so threatens the balance of the fate of the multiverse entirely."

[not_the_philistine]

"Then release them. You have already caused them to suffer in excess."

[meat_mooks]

"The crew as a whole has grown much too soft if they think a bit of fear is enough to reward treason."

[not_the_philistine]

"You are too at home with tyranny if you think this is anything less than torture." Goliath gestures angrily at Orc and Howard, silently wondering exactly how long they have been held in their positions to show the wounds they are showing. "This display of force will not serve your purpose."

Unless their purpose, he considers, is only to enjoy the power they wield over the crew. It's enough to make his eyes flash white with rage barely kept in check.

"You confuse mercy with softness. Do not to confuse our anger with fear."

[meat_mooks]

"It is torture. That is the intent of Punishment." Yavek uses his 'talking to idiots' voice. "Mercy to these sorts will only encourage further desertion and selfishness. If they can get away with it once, they'll try it again. And other who see us let them do so will attempt it as well."

[not_the_philistine]

Goliath uses his 'talking to tyrants' roar.

"It is wrong, and I intend to hinder you."

He growls at Yavek once, then looks his Kessek bodyguard in the eye. "I gather your master is not a warrior. To what lengths will you go to defend his tyranny?"

[meat_mooks]

"You intend to?" Yavek smirks then nods at the Kessek. The Kessek looks for Goliath to Yavek and back, and then throws his fist at Goliath's face.

[not_the_philistine]

The exchange gives Goliath enough time to block.

The kessek is stronger than he expected, though, and grabbing the oncoming fist leaves him off balance as he throws a retaliating blow.

[meat_mooks]

The Kessek grabs Goliath's fist in one hand and then his wrist in the other, and in a display of brute, grotesque power, rips them apart and tosses the hand to the ground.

[not_the_philistine]

Pain and horror hits Goliath at the same time and he stumbles, almost falling to his knees, gripping the stump where his good hand used to be, stemming the blood flow from the open wound, too shocked to even roar.

A brief moment passes, in which it looks like he will succumb to the clear defeat.

The moment ends when he lashes out with another blow, kicking the Kessek's armored chest with talons that can tear through reinforced steel. His roar is shot through with fury and pain.

[night_shift]

Like the majority of the crew, Elisa had hurried to the observation deck as soon as she'd heard the ominous announcement. Now that she was there, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. She recognised Howard. She'd apprehended him stealing from the medical bay only a few weeks earlier. But she didn't need to recognise the person suspended from the tentacles to be horrified by the sight.

The worst thing was the fact that this was only the beginning.

Before she could demand some sort of explanation, before she could even start to thinking of a way to stop what was happening, she was distracted by a familiar roar. It was full of anger, and, more worryingly, fear and pain as well. Drawing her gun, Elisa ran in the direction of the sound without any way of knowing what she would find when she got there.

What she found was the sort of scene she’d dreaded since waking up from the pods and finding herself in the middle of this battle.

Goliath stumbled, one hand trying to stem the flow of blood from the stump of other. She didn’t scream; there wasn’t time. She raised her gun at the Kessek instead.

[meat_mooks]

The Kessek goes flying back and skids across the floor. It gets up, seemingly unharmed, and runs to tackle Goliath to the floor.

Stacy, sensing the bullet in the barrel of Elisa's gun, whips a tentacle down and tosses the gun to the side. She won't stop the fight, but she will stop anything that looks like an attempt to murder. And Goliath's injury, though horrible, is not an immediate threat if he can be kept from bleeding out.

[not_the_philistine]

And there is definitely bleeding. Still, aside from gripping the bleeding stump while the Kessek charges, Goliath is ignoring it about as much as he can, his eyes still white with rage.

He braces himself as the Kessek charges, attempting a complicated maneuver as it reaches him, one meant to loop his bleeding arm around the Kessek's throat. For once, his strength is not his advantage in his fight, and he has to bank on his agility outmatching the armored Kessek. His wings and tail lash out as he grapples with the Daligig's bodyguard, attempting to throw his opponent off-balance.

It is most definitely a losing fight that he's waging, but he shows no signs of slowing down any further than his injury already demands. Though at the rate he is bleeding out, it won't be long before the demands of his injury will be more than his anger can power through.

[night_shift]

Before Elisa had a chance to fire and find out if her bullets would have any effect on the Kessek, her gun was snatched from her hand. She didn't bother to protest. The ship was unlikely to listen to reason. However, there was a chance that Goliath would.

"Goliath!"

She ran forward, almost slipping on the blood on the floor of their makeshift battlefield. She kept her balance, somehow, and tried not to look at it. (She'd seen her fair share of wounds on the beat in New York, but there was a lot she didn't know about gargoyle physiology. An amputation didn't have to be fatal, but how much blood could he afford to lose?)

"Goliath, stop! This isn't a fight you can win!"

There was no way for her to get between him and the Kessek, so she rounded on Yavek instead.

"You've proved your point!" They'd proved beyond any doubt that they were the ones in control. "Unless you want to let one of your own soldiers throw away their lives, stop this."

Throwing their lives away in a battle against the Ohm was one thing, but this was something else.

[meat_mooks]

"Kessek, restrain him! Don't injure him further!" one of the Kessek captains yells. Yavek remains silent.

Another Kessek joins the fight and between the two of them, they overpower Goliath. And yet they are true to their code - in restraining him, they do as gently as they can.

[not_the_philistine]

It occurs to Goliath, as he's forced to the ground, how fundamentally flawed it was of him to expect honorable combat from a race that thinks torture is an appropriate way to quell disobedience.

He hangs onto his consciousness as he kneels in his own blood, growling at Yavek. Elisa hovers on the edge of his field of vision, and only her presence keeps him from voicing his thoughts - that he will die without accepting the Daligig's rule - lest they make his declaration true in front of her.

[boobhat]

Hiccup could only stare in slack-jawed, abject horror when Goliath's hand had been ripped off of his body. While they hadn't talked in a while, he liked Goliath, and more than that, the sight of someone else losing a limb had a much more personal impact for him than it might have had for some other people.

After the Kessek forced Goliath to the ground, Hiccup's horrified expression faded to one of single-minded resolve and he darted forward. To some, it might have looked like he was trying to make a possibly ill-advised attempt to attack the Kessek.

What he was really doing was making a beeline for Goliath's severed hand. The ship could probably reattach it, right? He wanted to try to see if he could keep it from getting even more damaged and get it to Medbay to be preserved long enough that they might have a chance of fixing it.

[meat_mooks]

One of the Kessek reacts on instinct, smacking a heavy, armored hand down onto Hiccup and slamming him into the floor. She brings a foot down on Hiccup's chest to keep him there.

[boobhat]

His head was bleeding now and he was probably concussed. Again. Panting and having trouble getting the air into his lungs because of the foot pinning him down, Hiccup looked up at the Kessek with wide-eyed terror, and then he closed his eyes for a second, his expression relaxing back into the resolve of moments before.

Opening his eyes and looking over at the Daligig, his voice strained from the weight on his chest and slightly slurred, but very calm, he said, "I was just trying to get his hand. To get it to Medbay. So they could hopefully reattach it."

Blood trickled down his face and he had to work very hard to string all the words together.

"I have no powers and I didn't have a weapon in my hands. And as far as I know I didn't break any rules like trying to desert. And I didn't throw any punches."

Which meant they basically looked even more like tools, hitting an unpowered, unarmed, non-hostile, one-legged teenager that looked like a couple of rubber bands tied together--before he even threw a punch.

"I sure hope it doesn't get out to your allies that you're okay with knocking around unarmed noncombatants--who are, by the way, former elected officials--when they were just trying to help someone who was injured. That would be a pretty inconvenient tidbit of information to wind up released publicly on, say, those interdimensional GIA news networks."

Punishment for desertion they could explain away as inciting a necessary response for the sake of discipline. Giant Kessek slamming down tiny disabled people for trying to help someone who was hurt was a little more difficult to pass off.

Even if it wasn't, it probably didn't hurt to remind the Daligig that everything that was happening here wasn't private, wasn't something they could keep a dirty little secret from the rest of the GIA, an alliance comprised of countless member worlds that likely didn't all have the exact same opinion on how the war was to be handled. If they wanted to torture two teenagers that broke a rule they didn't know was even there, beat down on people trying to save them, rip people's limbs off, and knock down the little guy, they needed a little reminder that everyone else they were allied with could find out about it.

[meat_mooks]

"Stand down!" Yavek orders. The Kessek captain repeats the same order a moment later.

The Kessek standing on Hiccup's chest back away. Yavek approaches Hiccup - and extends a hand to help him up.

"I apologize for the Kessek's impulsive reaction."

[boobhat]

Hiccup didn't take it, trying instead to sit up and finding that he was far too dizzy to. The room was spinning and he felt a wave of nausea rising up in his gut.

Between the fight with the Green Death back home and the many times he'd been concussed in fights on the ship and on missions, he'd taken a few too many hard knocks to the head at this point.

So he stayed there on the floor, staring up at Yavek.

"Goliath needs to go to Medbay."

Someone else was going to have to grab the gargoyle's hand because Hiccup wasn't going anywhere for a while.