"What if...th...that's not a star?" "Indeed, what if it wasn't." Liquid crimson, hot and slick, trickled down the curves of her lips to trace a path down her chin. An iron tang spreads through her mouth. Her eyelids opened wide, brown pupils starting at the object. Luminescent amid the black. A single point amidst the darkness. With the throttle down, it continued to grow in her vision. As if it were coming to her. Growing in size. Filling her vision. Flooding her eyes with intensifying lumens. A pressure building behind her eyes. A thrumming ringing in her ears. "What it could be, if it isn't?"
Dimly aware of how her body slumps as the flightseat catches her form, yet the sight beforeher remained. Expanding, catching fire, throwing out jets of superheated plasma into the void. Bearing down, Thallia no longer stares. The star before her is the one staring. Boring deep within her soul, her mind, searching. Burning. Her fingers. Her toes. Spreading from her extremities through her body. Like claws her hands clutch and dig into the armrests beneath her wrists. The soles of her boots shift and press into the metallic frame of the cockpit beneath the flightstick. "How did they g...go about it... I ca...can't...what did they use..." "I've always admired their manipulation of matter itself, like a woven blanket, threads finely tugged."
Her head throws back into the headrest, forehead pushing into the synth-leather material. An ear-piercing scream fills the cockpit, the crunch of the hull around her imploding in a sudden decompression. "Thallia, are you alright?" Darkness.
Serenity. The tickle of a westerly breeze upon her forehead. The crunch of fresh snow beneath her hands and knees as she picks herself up. The crest of mountains rising and falling. Clouds sailing through the open blue, their edges elusive and curled in unnatural arcs. 'Phffffhnnnnmmmmmmmmm' The demanding sound of a bellows from behind. Thallia turns. A sharp gasp from her lips. Eyes wide. Before her stood a myth. A lie. A figment of fancy... yet, impossibly, there it stood. Snow crunched beneath her footsteps as she strode towards the structure.
Mag-lock boots clicked against a marble floor, white and polished, as the dark red door closes behind her. Before Thallia a stairward leading down to a circular foyer. With a gloved hand on the banister she descends into the middle of the room where, on an elegantly plain black stand stood the upright form of a bass guitar. It's bodywork auburn and black. The strings glinting as their silver coil reflects the sunlight from outside.
Focus on your breathing.
She strokes the neck of the guitar, taking a firm if gentle grip as she lifts the body up to cradle against her chest. tilting her head forward as she loops it's strap over her head. Running her gloved hand down the frets, she feels the wire against the skin of her fingers. Closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, Thallia's head tilts a little to the side. The top of her mag-boot begins to tap a beat into the floor as she feels a rhythm fill her. With her fingers moving to press notes against the fingerboard, the sounds of other instruments fill the foyer as she begins to play the bassline to 'Have you Heard?'.
Aren't.. "objects" like zis in Earhart have something in zem? Looked similar, from afar
As her eyes open, she sees Thallia playing a keyboard along with her. She beams a bright smile at herself, as she begins to sings. "Have you heard the good news? You can do as you choose..." Thallia glances to her left, turning to see Thallia walking down from where she had just descended. "...just as long as it's what they tell you to do..." Thallia's voice carries from underneath an adjoining corridor, stepping out to greet herself with hands opened out. "When you're here you can leave anytime that you please. Only if we allow you..." She places a hand on Thallia's shoulder, giving a little squeeze as she leans in to quietly say "and after all why would you ever want to?"
Coming to stand in a circle, Thallia steps to the left and to the right, keeping the rhythm of the song as they share warm smiles. One of them simply claps along as they stride over to a closed door on the farside of the room. Another has a muted trumpet with it's end on her lips, blowing air from ballooned cheeks.
"Have you heard the good news? We speak only in truths..." Thallia walks up to the herselves with at the keyboard, leaning forward and bobbing her head as she lets the bassline take her. "...just as long as it's what we choose to believe. When you're here you can be anyone that you please..." The crisp notes of an electric guitar ring out from a balcony above, as Thallia puts on a quick dose of action on the whammy bar. "...only if it's one of us. After all who else would you want to be?"
Thallia looks around as she surrounds herself, forming a circle around the centre of the room. They discard their instruments, continuing to play their parts as they share excited, gleeful looks. They throw their arms out to their sides, looking up to the ceiling as Thallia looks down at them spin around her.
~~"Oooooooh, our time is coming baby. It's time to break, time to break free."~~ ~~"Oooooooh, our time is coming baby. It's time to break, time to break free."~~ ~~"Oooooooh, our time is coming baby. It's time to break, time to break free."~~ Focus... Center upon yourself. ~~"Oooooooh, our time is coming baby. It's time to break, time to break free."~~ ~~"Oooooooh, our time is coming baby. It's time to break, time to break free."~~
Arranged in a square, Thallia dances in union with herself. Shuffling forward in staccato movements, bending her knees before throwing her shoulders back and forth. "Have you heard the good news? As a Friend of the Blues, you don't need anything else ever again..." With a devilish grin spreading out on her lips, Thallia hears the sound of an creaking door behind her as a frown curls the corners of her lips. "When you're here, you can see, everything that she sees, only if you surrender..." Turning around, Thallia's mouth falls open. Her eyes, wide and full of surprise, stares at the woman led through that opening door.
A flash of silver. A splash of crimson. A scream that echoes in those marble halls.
The knife's handle protruded from Thallia's lower stomach, electric pain radiating in short sharp bursts. Anna's hand lets go of the blade, falling away only to come to rest on Thallia's shoulder. A little squeeze. A melancholy smile as she falls onto her knees, clutching the wound on the right of her torso tightly.
"Wake up, Spectre." "...Search for feelings, sensation. Smell, ideas, emotions. Relish in it, connect with it..."
Grains of sand betweeen her fingers. The roar of a crowd falling to hushed silence as Anna steps past her. A subtle nod. The scraping of metal as Thallia feels herself pull out their knives behind her. The soft tread of boots striding towards her.
"...Calm yourself, let yourself flow, feel the universe around you swim gently, as it also slumbers in silence..." "...Music... tones... do you feel patterns?..." "We need to leave." "...Then let's leave now..." "You will not forsake me again, TT-F10."
Thallia stops striding towards herself as she picks herself up from the ground. Behind them, a door on the far side of Riviera. Bringing her hands up, headphones in hand, she places them snuggly over her ears. In the moment she turns them on, pressing play, they stride towards her with renewed purpose. Delusion begins playing as Thallia steps forward to meet them, unsheathing the blade from her stomach with a thunderous snarl growing on her face.
Steam rises in front of her face as Thallia's laboured breathes in ragged, raspy gasps. Clutching the left hand side of her stomach where her blood dyes the strips of bandage wrapped fast around her waist crimson. In her other hand, her grip remains tight on the handle of a combat knife. It's edge crusty with coagulated vitae. She ignores the drip drop trail behind her. They would find her regardless. She had to keep moving. She did not want to remember. Not anymore. There had to be an exit somewhere. There! At the end of a long marble corridor, a bright light pierces from beyond. Daylight? The outside?
"I don't want you to be overwhelmed by the ghosts here."
With a blink of her bloodshot eyes, Thallia's standing at the archway at the corridor's end. She felt her heart sink as she pulls herself up to stand tall. Eyes growing wide as she takes in the source of that guiding light from beyond the threshold. A momentary pause. A furrowed brow. The gasp of realisation. The cracking of concrete as a dam breaks, releasing a cascade of fluid memory. Raising her hands to see her palms slick with blood as she curls around the cold steel railing in front of her as she gazes out the observation deck window at the Pulsar beyond. Watching the twin ejections cast out into the void was something Thallia found soothing. Mesmerising. To the left of the bewitching view, the faint zig-zag of energetic beams cast from devices utterly unknown to her. To the right, the shadow of a rounded triangle shrouded from clear view. Behind her, the sounds of her colleagues bickering frantically in Rheinlandish. She'd come to learn enough of their language to get by, but when they were in the throes of such passionate debate, Thallia admits she struggles to keep up. Instead, she turns her thoughts to the pulsar. The Nachwirkungen.
A hand curls over the rise of her shoulder. A reassuring squeeze. A firm grasp. "Do you remember, TT-F10?"
Without moving her gaze away, Thallia raises her spare hand up her torso to caress her fingertips along pale skin. Coming to gently rest her palm over those gripping hand."I do, now. It's all unravelling Anna. We need to fix it."
The grasping hand guides TT-F10 to turn to face her compatriot. F8. Anna. "Come home. You are needed here."
Thallia gently resting hand suddenly grips in a claw like fashion, driving her thumb into Anna's wrist and twisting. Her blood stained left-hand arcing to administer a wet slap across the woman's face before darting to her hips. Catching the button fastening of her Daumann-made holster. A familiar sensation of a grip in the curl of her hand. The press of metal to her own chin as she brings the firearm up. The sharp sting as her index finger takes executive command of the trigger and pulls.
She wakes up with a start in the flight seat of her Plover. Frantically breathing, her limbs felt exhausted whilst her nerves cried out with an electrical burning sensation. The rythmic pulsing of a buzzing in the back of her neck and head as she feels the trickle of a nosebleed running across her lips. The taste of iron oddly grounding. Through the cockpit viewport, two vessels. A Bastet. A Hawfinch. The looming chunk of rock where their exit lay, as if some shard of a planet had been cut from the crust and placed into empty void. "Y...yes, l...lets..."
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