2022-08-05: Heavy In Your Arms
- Log: Heavy In Your Arms
- Cast: Loren Voss, Lan Lilac, Azoth
- Where: Somewhere near Lake Macalania
- Date: August 05, 2022
- Summary: An hour or so after Shiva awakens, Lan finds Loren. Azoth, unable to stop, finds them both.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
An explosion had been imminent.
Loren had of course known about Leah's insurance. The temple had been rigged to blow if their position were threatened. Of course he knew that. But there was a large difference between knowing that it might, potentially, be used and thinking that she'd actually do it.
The Leah he'd known when he was a child wouldn't have...
Or maybe rather than her having changed, he'd failed to understand her even then.
How far would be far enough? What was the strength of the explosives she'd used? In the panic of the moment, he couldn't remember.
And then it didn't matter at all what he remembered.
The glacier had risen up to meet them all.
This was quite literal, as the glacier, in this case, had taken the form of a woman. Not that he'd had terribly long to appreciate this fact. The glacier had risen up -- the Fayth's Aeon had risen up -- and he'd found he'd no longer had ground to stand on. Caught up in the storm, the rolling roar of ice and snow and frost, he'd simply been swept aside by the Aeon's might.
Fortunately for him, he isn't knocked insensate by this event. Instead he's left merely stunned, swept under an overhang that shelters him from the rest of the Aeon's fury. He's saved from being buried by ice and snow, saved from catapulting into the lake, saved from being left out here to lie vulnerable and unconscious at winter's embrace.
He takes the matter gingerly when he does at last move, unsure of what's yet to come or his precise position. A wrong move could see him taking a nasty fall if something is unstable or fragile.
But eventually he retreats from his shelter and ascends a rise to try to get his bearings.
It's what he doesn't see as he reaches the top that takes his breath away. ...The outpost is gone. There's only the temple ruins, in the distance.
"This is Voss. Do you copy? ...Damn!"
The destruction had been thorough. Communications are irrevocably down. If he can get to the hangar -- well what's left of it -- perhaps he can find a way out of here through the portal connections. But if not...
It's going to be a long way back to Filgaia.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
To be Yuna's ally is to be blessed. To be safe, somehow, wondrously, from the snow and the storm and the mountain. Lan had stood there on the new bridge leading to the ruins of Macalania Temple, shivering in the cold, with tears in her eyes.
The human mind really isn't meant to see such things. Eventually the sight of the mountains standing up will blur until the details are lost. Maybe it will feel like it happened to a different Lan. But today Lan was once again utterly and unquestionably humbled by another planet's goddess.
A swarm of crystal shards, warmer by shades but shimmering just like snow crystals, skims across the altered landscape. At its center is Lan, floating at the heart of her own personal starfield. Every few moments she calls out for one of them.
"Lydiaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Azooooooooth!!"
Her throat is starting to hurt from yelling at the top of her lungs and the chill air. She doesn't know if she's going to be able to carry anybody... there's no 'back' to take them to, the outpost is completely gone. Just as they'd planned, but...
Ahead, finally, she sees a familiar figure instead of endless drifts of snow. "--Loren!!" She alights next to him, her warm shawl less than pristine and her nose a little bloody. "Are you okay? Is there anybody else?"
<Pose Tracker> Azoth has posed.
BOOTING SYSTEM AZ-0012 . . .
ERROR: DATABASE CORRUPTED
ANALYZING FILES . . .
ATTEMPTING DATA RECOVERY . . .
CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR
SYSTEM RESTORE IN PROGRESS . . .
OVERRIDE: EMERGENCY BOOT SEQUENCE
Red light pulses through Azoth's circuits. His core flares within the bundles of cords and wires that make up his chest, the glow of synthetic light pumping through every connection. It softens the snow around him, and he explodes from a mound of it.
Azoth darts across the mountain, barely touching the surface except when he moves too fast, colliding with a wall via his claws to spring off to another and continue relentlessly.
The battle is over. Prioritize retrieving personnel. Find Lydia, Loren, Rachiel, Leah --
Lan.
Targeted sighted. The battle is not over. Dozens of logical data points are punched out of his output by the overrides, Azoth's core aching with each one. A machine does what it's told, and this one's been told to fight.
Azoth comes to a brutal stop, his presence announced by a dangerous wave of heat. He wavers place with a claw tearing lines down his own visor, inner mechanics choking out grinding screeches.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Lan?!"
She's soon at ground level again. The bloody nose is his fault.
But she's otherwise looking okay. It must not have targetted her at all, he thinks, looking her over. In fact, if it weren't for the absence of any of his personnel or anyone else from the outpost, he'd almost be given to think the sub total of the damage had been focused on the buildings themselves. Wait, hadn't Leah detonated...
He doesn't answer Lan at first, having turned his attention back towards the temple ruins. They look... like they always did. "It didn't go off, did it?" he asks, without looking at her.
He pauses.
"No," Loren answers, shaking his head. "My communicator's shot. Or-- probably the signal unit was totaled." Without a relay system it's just electrical junk. "I haven't seen anyone else. If they got to the hangar..." But there's no sign of that, now.
He shivers, involuntarily. "Isn't it cold? Among those crystals," he clarifies, looking over at her.
That something else lands abruptly then may well leave his question unanswered.
"--Azoth?" He starts, taken aback by his appearance. "What happened to you?"
Wait, something isn't right--
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
This is far from the worst bloody nose Lan has ever gotten. Sometimes friends fight - though it seems to be mostly Drifters that continue to do it into adulthood!
Hadn't it gone off? "She froze it. Shiva, that is." Lan's feet crunch softly in the snow as she takes a step closer to him. "--Hm? Cold? A little. It doesn't really hold on to any of my body heat." When she walks up beside him, he'll see her face - and his - reflected in some of the larger shards, along with what might be information readouts. They look a little like the symbols of her paku-paku.
Right there in front of him, some of them change to skulls. It's the only warning Lan gets before the almost-unrecognizable form of Azoth barrels towards them, coming to a screeching halt. "Wha-- that's Azoth?!" Lan utters, horrified.
They've got to help him.
Lan doesn't know how to help him.
"Are you hurt? Here, let me--" She lifts her hands, a mote of starlight flaring between them. "It's okay. You're gonna be okay--"
<Pose Tracker> Azoth has posed.
Azoth's visor flashes bright red at the first sight of starlight. Lan's a powerful enemy. So was Tidus. So are all the Drifters he faces, every logical reason to go softer, to avoid the assurance of overkill for long term efficiency finally reaching a failure rate too high to be sustainable.
'The battle is over' is just another lie to the overrides. There's been too much new code. New data. New memories. Interference with his objectives. Threats to the purpose he's been forcibly given. Unintended interactions. Glitches and errors.
Everything about Azoth is an error.
He screeches an inhuman sound -- like a beast being torn in half from a distant reality -- and lunges. Snow turns to slush behind him, refrozen by the frigid air in his wake, with crimson overtaking his bladed claws.
With calculated precision, he slashes for Lan in one claw, following up to thrust through her center with the other, wrist spinning like a drill.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Huh," is his response to that. He should be annoyed about it, but despite being worried about his people and not certain what he's going to do now, and frustrated at the loss and the scale of the 'trick'... but he's not upset about the bomb failing to go off.
The crystal shards are strange. Maybe he has to ask her about them, sometime.
As it happens, he manages to get his answer. "Probably a good idea to find shelter," he tells her. Schiehallion was just finishing repairs off-site so it's not like he's going to find it buried out there when he goes to check the hangar, except, wait, he shouldn't do that if Lan's here--
And then there are other things to think about.
"He's seen some damage. I'm not sure how much I can do," he says, hesitating as she starts for him. Something's not right here, pulses the thought again. The rest of the world may as well have blurred out of focus. His attention is only on Azoth. His chest feels tight. He can feel his pulse pounding in his neck. --But this isn't a good time to have a fit, bubbles the thought.
Azoth screams.
Loren's blood turns to ice in his veins.
He's frozen himself those crucial seconds.
This can't be happening it can't be happening it can't be it's happening
His voice comes back to him first.
"--STOP IT! STAND DOWN, AZOTH--"
As if the chains that had bound him had been suddenly loosed he lunges for Azoth, eyes wide and blade bared. In this moment there is little dividing him from Azoth save for their respective organic and inorganic natures and likewise the nature of their respective targets: after all, right now they have the same intent.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
That thing... can it really be Azoth? At his most tortured, she'd never seen him move like this. If she were to have to fight him now--
The sparkle cupped in her hands scatters into the frozen air as she stumbles backwards, the shards of crystal surrounding her rushing towards the front. "AZO--"
She gives half a thought to taking off, but that would leave Loren alone - that would leave Azoth alone with him.
But Azoth is faster than he was the last time they fought, and Lan didn't come here to fight.
"th..." Lan rocks on her feet from the force of it, the breath punched from her lungs - torn from one of them.
Oh. She knows this. This happened before, a long, long time ago. The Stranger had put his blade through her middle, and the nightmare had begun.
She is very still, aside from the twitch of her fingertips. Aside from her body swayed gently at first by Azoth moving. Lan's eyes are wide, and her mouth opens, a small sound somewhere between 'ah' and 'oh' falling from it.
One by one the crystals fall into the snow. Most disappear silently, the larger ones falling with quiet 'paff' noises.
Lan half-stands, half-hangs there. As if finally frozen by Macalania, as if kissed by Shiva. Her white shawl blooms a red, red rose.
Lan tilts forward, hands coming up to grasp weakly at the arm piercing through her. Azoth's arm. Her mouth works silently--
The black blood inside of her bursts from the wound in great gouts that become geysers that become ropes that become the black ribbons, slicing mindlessly at the robot's chassis, grasping at and ensnaring his limbs, wrapping his head and seeking to flayengulfinvade
It lasts seconds. It lasts a lifetime.
And it ends with Lan falling when her legs and blood give out, the ribbons melting like a bad dream at daybreak.
<Pose Tracker> Azoth has posed.
Flesh is so fragile, when you get down to it. When a hit finally lands, a perfect calculation against a target's defenses finding its success, sending signals of positive feedback as blood soaks through. It's not like being possessed -- every action feels like his own, executed because something demanded he think up the most effective action and run it.
The overrides reinforce what a good job Azoth's done over top a waterfall of screaming red errors, Lan's unique identification signature repeated over and over and over until he's printing it too fast to calculate, crashing into incoherent symbols.
Her fingers brush his arm. Azoth's other claw rattles against itself, trembling as it touches her face, too gentle to break the skin, with the other claw inside her holding her up.
Black blood erupts.
Azoth tries to shove Loren's lunging body away from him -- not in defense of himself, but to push him from the violent ribbons. He mercilessly rips his claw free from Lan as more of his cords and wires sever, as blackness ravages his chassis and easily snakes to his insides. Sparks fly and fluids burst free, spilling useless coolant into the snow.
Lan falls, and so does Azoth, sinking to a kneel beside her with sparks dancing across his arms. All goes still and quiet.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
If he had moved -- had shouted -- in those first crucial seconds, would it have changed anything?
He'll never know.
She's fast, he knows that. He's fought with Lan enough to know it. She doesn't get out of the way. Not enough time? Something else?
They aren't thoughts he thinks now. They'll come later, when he replays the incident in his mind's eye, over and over again without ceasing.
All he knows is it took seconds for him to understand the enormity of what was happening before him.
That scream. The descent of her crystals, one after the other. The little sounds that escape her throat.
Red, blooming against white.
He doesn't think anything in the moment. His mind is clear and blank, possessed of a particular purity when he falls upon Azoth.
"STOP IT! I SAID, STOP IT!!" he screams again, not even aware of the moment in which Lan collapses. He'll destroy it he'll break it to pieces and scatter them far and wide he'll
Black blood. Black ribbons. Loren turns his head by degrees towards the spectacle.
Azoth's arm catches him, bowls him over. Sliding in the drift a distance, Loren lunges to his feet, fury not the least abated for Azoth's sudden sparking quiescence.
She lies still in the snow. Against such stark white, how could someone miss such red?
"I'll kill you," he hisses out, staggering towards Azoth's fallen form. "I'll kill you, I'll kill you--"
He repeats it as if it were a mantra. Chest heaving and arms shaking, he raises his blade overhead as if for the killing stroke.
It's cold out here, on the rise. A sudden gust of wind sends a spray of ice crystals for his cheek. He blinks once, twice, still gulping for breath after breath.
Inch by inch, his gaze pivots towards Lan's fallen form.
What in the world am I...
He lowers the blade. It then simply slips from his grasp, abandoned in the snow. With all haste, he rushes for Lan's side. Is she-- is there still time to--
He has to find somewhere warm, somewhere sheltered. It can't be here.
'Don't move the wounded if you can avoid it'. Yes, yes, he thinks, gathering her form into his arms once he's checked her pulse, confirmed her wounds. Don't move the wounded.
But she can't be here. Not in the cold.
Not near... that.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
She's breathing, if shallowly. It's a quiet, wet sound. A punctured... no, a ravaged lung. For now, she's still warm.
She wouldn't want him to murder Azoth. Not even now. Loren has to know that.
Lan gives a low sound of pain when she's gathered into his arms, though she can't really be called conscious anymore. She's always been an inch taller than him. Limp and still, she's heavy in his arms.
<Pose Tracker> Azoth has posed.
Azoth does not stop, no matter Loren's cries. Behavior calculated. Behavior executed. It's all too late after that. It's always too late. The overrides want him to destroy everything he's calculated should be protected.
Running Lan through is as easy as running Falk through. Nothing stops Azoth. Not Loren. Not Azoth's own calculations. Not the code screaming Lan's identification over and over, unable to output it as anything but a glitched creak.
He's not a real thing. Not with real emotions that mean anything. If they did, if he loved, if he cared, if he felt... wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't the data matter?
Azoth's head tilts up, his dim visor gaining a fraction more light. Loren's sword reflects within it, as Loren makes that sweet promise over and over and over.
Then Loren remembers his objective. The one that matters. The data that matters. And it stops him.
It stops Loren, and it leads him the right way, and the target is no longer Azoth's concern.
He does not move to pursue them.