There are times to keep a stiff upper lip

[soulinherfists]

Who: Allenby and open
Where: Pod caverns
Summary: Allenby is pissed at being abruptly short a best friend.
Warnings: Some cursing.


If someone were to venture down to the pod caverns today, they would hear the sound of screaming. Not the sounds of pain or terror--in fact, it was rather articulate and purposeful screaming at a specific individual, although very little of it was the kind of thing that ought to be repeated.

"Damn you, Stacy," Allenby snarled, stalking from pod to pod, wiping at the surfaces with her gloved hand--her left arm was still in its sling--and glaring inside, even though she knew that there was no point in trying to identify the occupants. She'd given up trying to find Domon and the others that way a while ago and just settled for the yelling... but this had just happened. Just happened. Shouldn't a pod that had been refilled so recently have some kind of sign?

So far, it didn't look like it. And even if they did, there were millions to go through....

"STACY! YOU BITCH!" she screamed for about the fifth time, looking up at the ceiling. "You expect us to think you're on our side, huh? Just 'cause ooh, you let Howard and his friend off two seconds before you were gonna rip him apart, gosh, we're so fucking grateful you let the Daligig and the Kessek stomp all over us for an hour just for that!" She clenched her fist, not caring that there were tears running down her face again. "If you want to be nice to us WHY DON'T YOU GIVE ZOUICHI BACK, HUH?! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU POD HIM FOR!"

Not just Zouichi... Ildraniath too. Jr. That psychic kid, Raz. And she hadn't missed that councilor Tarrant vanishing, either. It wasn't a coincidence. "You stupid puppet of a ship, tryin' to tie everyone else to the same strings you got. You try and put me back into the pods and there's gonna be trouble--we both know there ain't one thing wrong with my soul and there wasn't anything with theirs either! So give 'em back!"

She moved to the next pod, peering inside at the indistinct blob that might have been a person.

Comments

[anwei]

The face and hair were familiar in passing. Unfortunate, that she couldn't put a face to the name. (For the thousandth time, her right eye shivered, looking for a videofeed for Horanckk.)

Anwei frowned slightly. "I heard that there had just been a lot of repoddings of department heads. There's more? People are still going in, right after podpop?"

Because if the medium they were traveling through was so dangerous for people's souls, why let anyone out now? Why not keep them where they were safe?

[soulinherfists]

"Yup." The word was said through gritted teeth. Although Allenby wasn't guessing at Anwei's train of thought, her own was on a very nearby line. "And it's no coincidence. Stacy--really, more like the Daligig are getting rid of anyone they think is gonna seriously threaten their authority. That's why they took away all those command guys."

It had a double effect, too, of spooking the hell out of whoever was left, but probably not as much as the Daligig expected or hoped. Rather than getting scared, people were just getting mad. At least Allenby was, and so were all her friends. "This here's probably more of the same."

[anwei]

Anwei clicked her own teeth. "Which makes sense - only if you're more concerned with proving that you're in command, rather than keeping the best people up front. This is a war we're supposed to be in, and somehow I doubt that the Daligig are going to be volunteering to stay and take the positions they've emptied."

The corners of her mouth slicked back for an instant. "If I didn't know better, I'd say they had an inferiority complex. That they were afraid of us."

[soulinherfists]

Allenby snorted. Yeah, that was an interesting way to put it. "They sure do have some messed-up priorities, don't they. Morons. Like they're gonna get any closer to winning this war they've put us in if they just keep recylin' us all the time."

Her mouth twitched in a smile--not a happy smile--at that other little thought. Afraid, huh? Well, that Daligig in the Sensorium record hadn't looked it, but the Daligig now... that was a whole different story. "Wouldn't surprise me. Heh. No wonder they put Zouichi back, after he shot their bigwig in the shoulder. Sore loser."

[anwei]

"We can't even tell if there's some purpose to the rotation or not. I mean, if we did a mission and failed, and then did a similar mission with different people and succeeded...But every mission's different, and sometimes we can't even tell if we won or lost."

Allenby's next words knocked the breath out of her.

"Zouichi? But he was just here - he was here when I came out of the pods again." She'd seen him at the Meet and Greet and given him a nod as she grabbed an omnicomm and moved on. She'd been hoping with more time that she'd be able to find some way to - to be his friend again.

"He can't be gone," she said, but her voice revealed that she knew she was lying.

[soulinherfists]

Allenby nodded in agreement; it was a dumb system. The longer they kept them out, the more they would learn and do better, right? And sure, maybe repod people who were useless or homicidal. But the Daligig obviously weren't interested in fairness or being sensible like that.

But she hadn't expected the woman's next reaction. She hadn't known--? Aw, crap, and what a rotten way for her to find out. Having 'your friend is gone' be dropped into an angry rant or a cocky remark had to... really suck. But Allenby had thought that she would have heard Zouichi's name among all the initial yelling.

"Yeah--sorry," she said, rubbing the back of her head. "It came outta the blue. You one of his friends?" Which was a rhetorical question, reallly. For such a taciturn guy, Zouichi seemed to know everyone.

[anwei]

"I - knew him. We went on some missions together. I wish we could have been friends." The fault was hers, she knew it. It always was. Even here, where no one knew her, it was her nature showing through.

"Well." She swallowed. "At least he isn't gone for good. He could come back. Or we could figure out exactly how Stacy chooses people to un-pod, and see if we can't tweak it a bit."

Difficult to do that with the Daligig watching. But they couldn't stay here forever. Could they?

[soulinherfists]

Oh... not as rhetorical as Allenby had thought. That was too bad.

"Yeah. It's not like... he's dead," she said, forcing the last two words out. That was something she didn't like to acknowledge as a possibility. Even if she did, she was sure it was an incredibly slim one. In fact, the possibility that this gal brought up sounded pretty good. "I think we oughta try that. I don't want to let the Daligig decide which one of my friends can and can't walk around just 'cause they don't like 'em."

Maybe it'd be more prudent to try that after throwing them out, though.

[anwei]

"Not dead. Just a hostage." She frowned, hugely. "A hostage who can't be freed until his soul gets restuck or however it works - and maybe not then. God rot it," she goes to strike at the pod near her in anger and redirects her fist to smack into her other palm, "this is the most unprofessional, slipshod mess of a crew-schedule I've ever seen! Stacy has to know when people are repodded, so why doesn't she just tell us, instead of sneaking them away like a thief!"

She made herself relax, letting her hangs hang slack at her sides. The frown remained.

"If the Daligig haven't made progress in repairing Stacy all this time, either they can't or they won't. We are a crew of geniuses and heroes or so they say, living within her very body; surely we can help her change her mind."

[soulinherfists]

Hostages. Allenby could feel her hackles rising at the very thought of Zouichi being used as leverage against her good behavior, however the Daligig chose to define that. She raised her fists automatically. "Well, I ain't letting them use that! Not with Zouichi--I know he wouldn't want us to buckle under because we were worried about him."

She was pretty confident of that, at least. He was a fighter, like her.

"Maybe." Allenby glared at the pods. "I don't think the Daligig care to do anything more than bare-bones. But I can't make myself trust Stacy. Never did buy her 'hi I want to be your mom' routine."

[anwei]

"I agree," Anwei said a little thickly, and the muscles of her neck visibly rippled and clenched, stretching the neck of her plantsuit. "He was - is - an honorable man. He would understand that we could not be swayed by a threat like that."

She privately thought that the humans who had created Zouichi had succeeded in making a person more honorable than themselves.

"There is something a little - one-dimensional, I suppose I would say? Something sort of imcomplete about her. I've been thinking - have you seen the video where she says that she was separated from her previous personality, the Warden - but not entirely?"

[soulinherfists]

Allenby nodded decisively. It'd be a disgrace anyway, to hold back and have Zouichi pop out of the pods a worse slave than they'd been before or with nobody at all, and it wasn't like any promises by the Daligig would ever be trustworthy.

But she lowered her fists as Anwei shifted the subject somewhat. One-dimensional? Yeah, sort of--or more like a lot of shallow facets. Stacy, Warden, SHODAN. And the mention of a video made Allenby's eyebrows shoot up. "No, I haven't. Don't think I ever heard of that one--what else does she say about it?"

[anwei]

"It happened right after Big Zero's punishment. She specifically stated that she was a part of the Warden, and that they can never be fully separated - and that she felt great grief and guilt over the Punishment."

Anwei's lips are tight. "What I think that means is that rather than install a new mind to control this ship, the Daligig just splintered the one currently here. Filtered all the motherly and kind parts into one personality, and all the domineering and cruel ones into the other. That's why Stacy doesn't ring quite true, I think. She isn't quite a whole person."