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Twisted jags of metal, scorched, stretched upwards like forlorn, broken fingers on a buried palm.
The metal was from the android's chassis; the android had no name. It had no name because it couldn't remember what its name had been (though it was certain it had had one). It couldn't remember much else, either, and it was distressing.
It could not remember its gender, or if it had even had one.
It could not remember a concept of self which it could associate with its self.
It remembered nothing but the basics of human communication and survival which it had been taught.
It remembered no art or philosophy, it remembered no emotion except several which it rediscovered in that moment, grief and fear.
All it remembered were methods of murder and self-defense, a few languages, advanced mathematics, engineering, physics, et cetera.
None of the things it remembered could answer its questions; such as; who it was, where it was, what had happened, who that man there, shot dead on the ground was, and why his dead body was distressing to it when all the others weren't, and why it couldn't cry, even though it wanted to. Why it even wanted to cry in the first place.
It could scream though; so it screamed. It screamed, hollered, howled like a mourning banshee until it no longer felt like screaming was a necessity, and when it came to the conclusion screaming was a necessity, it carefully brought its seven-foot tall chassis off the ground so as not to damage anything worse than it was damaged already, because something is certainly damaged — as it tries to move more than just to scream, time moves in fits and starts; like a scratched DVD.
Instinctually, it repairs itself.
Hanging onto the sides of the Port City Trams, or "jumping the trams," is dangerous and illegal. Dangerous because of the whipping, pulling currents of gravity that the high-power, precisely programmed and engineered AntiGravs beneath the trams create, and illegal because you're supposed to pay to use the things.
Unfortunately for the governmental wallet, the "neo-euclidean design" of the trams make footholds pretty easy to come by. Even so, it's still dangerous as hell, tricky to keep a grip, so it's mostly poor people who do it.
The fact that about half of Port City's citizens routinely jump the trams says several things, none very positive, about the city.
Anyway, since it's nearly impossible to stop this sort of thing without spending a whole lot of money to either normalize the trams' geometry or buy new ones, the city government passive-aggressively had "MEMENTO MORI" painted on the sides of the trams in big block letters. Additionally, in an effort to make the warning of the danger of tram jumping even more clear, the first O, third M, and second O were painted to look like the eyes and nose of a skull. All that's done is turn "memento mori" into a sort of slogan for the city's impoverished, criminals, and impoverished criminals.
If you stand on the banks of the Mississippi in Jackson Square, wait until nighttime, and look over to the horizon you can see luminescent spacescrapers stretch to the stars like a forest of Babel, neon white fingers seeking to drag the heavens down to Earth. That is Port City.
Port City doesn't give passage to oceans of fish and water, but to ones of stars and vacuum, and its towers don't challenge any god. Instead, it stands in testament to the holy thing that lives in our greatest minds, the first and last god of mankind, Curiosity.
My pawpaw always said
Frisson, Part 1 (intro)
Alarms are blaring in Site-54, but all D-0148 can think about is the sound of da police.
At least, it is until the door to her cell swings open, washing her with the unmistakable smell of alcohol-based disinfectants. They’re the same odors that had always pervaded the places these people in lab coats and that strange, black BDU've been shuffling her between.
The lack of guards makes her uneasy rather than excited, for some reason. Peeking her head out, she sees there’s nothing visibly wrong, it’s clear. She steps out.
Almost surprisingly, no one shoots her. Perhaps more surprising, there’s no guard present to holler at her to get back in the goddamn cell, and lock it again.
Her eyebrows rise as she steps out further, realizing it’s real. Not like the dreams she'd been having since that test… maybe a month ago? Time flies, or something. She walks out of the cell and down the hall and as she goes a few of the other D-class notice her passing. They furrow their eyebrows, sit up in their cots, and although a few mutter questions at her, she doesn’t answer. They don’t expect her to. It doesn't take long in a place like Site-54 for a person to realize there will always be more questions than answers.
After walking for a time, she reaches a service elevator and presses the button. The doors open immediately but there’s no carriage, just this overwhelming stench, it slams into her like a thrown sack of potatoes. It’s unlike anything she’s ever smelled, all at once like blood, rotten eggs, sulfur, and corpses left to rot. She also (nearly immediately) vomits on herself and down the shaft, which really doesn’t help the smell.
Looking down the shaft as her vomit falls, she sees why there’s no carriage; the wire snapped and the safety mechanisms failed, leaving it lying on its side in a pool of blood and cracked concrete.
Once she stops retching for long enough to close her nose with her fingers she looks around the shaft. It takes a while – even if she plugs her nose she can’t stop her eyes’ watering – but she sees a pipe bolted to the wall, and above it, other hand and footholds; a precarious climb, but she's had to climb worse. The only thing that gives her pause is how far away the pipe is, and that except in the middle, (where the metal on both halves fans out to allow room for boltholes), the surface is slick, purchaseless.
She steels herself to make the jump. (Pun intended.)
She jumps—lands it, but not as well as she could have; she feels her face slam against the boltholes in between the connected pipes. Pain explodes through her head as it fractures her nose, the pain forces her to scream, but she's cut off when the smell hits again and she starts dry heaving. She starts to fall, but she almost immediately wraps her arms and legs around the pipe, mostly on reflex, and stops. She can feel the blood trickling down her face, onto her jumpsuit. There's not much bleeding, which gives her time, but she still feels adrenaline, blood and pain roaring through her body as she starts climbing.
To distract from the pain, she looks around as she climbs, wondering for the umpteenth time how they built this place underground in New Orleans. Hell, even building an actual basement here, where the ground is so wet your grandma's coffin has to be interred aboveground, is a (very expensive) feat of engineering.
After about five minutes and five floors worth of climbing, she reaches a pair of elevator doors that're open. An air-conditioned breeze drifts through it, and dusty rays of fluorescent light cascade. In any other setting, it's not a welcome sight so much as a normal one, but to her, it's heaven. There's even a ledge just large enough to stand on and rest, find a solution to the bleeding. She pants, and it comes out through her nose. It makes her wince, so she breaths through her mouth. She turns her head to look for a way into the hall, and blinks, surprised.
Calmly standing between the doors is a short, very compactly muscled man in a straitjacket and a muzzle, like what the FBI put on Hannibal Lecter, however, it's been broken into several pieces, so it hangs loosely around his neck.
He smiles, speaks with a New Orleansian accent, as you might hear in-around the Bywater and Lower Ninth Ward. Or Brooklyn. (Accents are odd.)
He says; "Hello, there! Yeh mind givin' me a hand wit dis? I can help with that nose."
She blinks, surprised. "Who are ya?" Her accent is more Black in cadence than the tall man's Yat.
The man's smile falters. "Aw, hell, my manners! Ah'm sorry, very sorry. S'not proper." He gives her a short bow. "Ah'm Yves Yvon, considered by some to be among the finest players of the trumpet still living." He looks at her expectantly.
She blinks again. "I'm Morrow."
His smile returns, he attempts to clap (and fails). "Morrow! What an excellent name, sir, fantastic name! On par with some the best names I've heard, really, and that's a dog's honest truth!"
She raises her eyebrows, and gives him a smile. "Thank you, although it's ma'am at the moment. But why should I help ya?"
Yves starts rubbing his back against the concrete. "I'll remember that! And, you know, hard a time as I've got remembering it, my good friend Turney is a sir, uh, man that is, and it is such a good thing that he does for himself — ah'm off topic. Well, let me tell you, I've myself so many itches right now. All up my body, and by hell it's getting to be torture. Help me scratch them, I be in yah debt! What with the escaping, and all." He smiles again, having said the entire thing without stopping to breath.
Again, Morrow blinks. "Excusez-moi?"
"If you assist my escape from this dog-forsaken putain-jacket, I will assist both us in escaping this putain-prison!" He smiles and bounces back and forth on his feet.
She gives a grin. "Ya a strange one, Mr. Yves."
"I'm the tip the iceberg, ami. Wanna see how strange it can get?" He gives her a wild grin. It's not a creepy kind of grin, like the kind Morrow gets from middle-aged white men when she presents as a woman, but the type that gives its wearer a mischievous sparkle in the eye.
Morrow works her tongue over in her mouth, slow, like she's moving something around in there.
"Sure. Lemme set my nose back, first."
After about five minutes and five floors worth of climbing, she reaches a pair of elevator doors that're open. An air-conditioned breeze drifts through it, and dusty rays of fluorescent light cascade. In any other setting, it's not a welcome sight so much as a normal one, but to her, it's heaven. There's even a ledge just large enough to stand on and rest, find a solution to the bleeding. She pants, and it comes out through her nose. It makes her wince, so she breaths through her mouth. She turns her head to look for a way into the hall, and starts shuffling to the edge.
Once she's out of the elevator, she leans against
(this option only has Morrow in it, Yves and/or Vital will be introduced later. need to figure out how she learns about LRM)
Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, Part 1 (verse 1)
Introduces Ahrend Johann Schmidt, an eccentric immortal (posing as a Dominican friar?). He wants to get to LRM because he's being chased by some evil force, and he needs help to fight it.
He's the last living member of the The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. (Knight's Templar.)
He's a
Introduces Yves Yvon, an enthusiastically strange loup-garou street performer with a magic trumpet. He's making for LRM because the Bayou Boys think he ate someone a cousin of his ate.
Frisson, Part 2 (pre-chorus)
Yves Yvon |
Morrow |
Vital and Morrow |