Memory Cave

[voidtreckermods]

After the passengers see a glimpse of a life that is not their own they appear in a cave. It is light, a strange moss glowing on the walls and ceiling illuminates the cave nicely and it is large enough for them to pace around in without trouble.

They are not alone. In the cave with them is another voidtrecker. Maybe someone they know well, maybe someone they have only seen in the aisles of the train. But they are together in this cave together.

The cave has no exit, at least not yet. They know that it will, eventually. When the time is right.

But for that time to come, they first must talk...

(OOC: For reference: memories!)

Comments

[enthunder]

Given what she'd just seen, she'd expected him to have seen something from her childhood. There was plenty to choose from, after all... but his comment brought her up short in the middle of trying to figure out a way of asking about it - or about what she'd seen - that wouldn't sound totally insane.

"Huh..?" The... what? She blinked over at him. "How'd you mean?"

[rieper]

47 shifted his position slightly as he tried to think of a response. It was hard to explain when he barely understood it.

"You were enjoying your time with Wen Qing. She made you feel...relaxed," he said as he looked over at her with his steely colored eyes.

[enthunder]

"Right, because that narrows it down," she grouched, without any real heat, and plenty of sarcasm. She guessed that said something in and of itself, that she was as much a constant of Light's life as, say, the man sitting across from her, trying to express something she'd started to suspect he couldn't even parse. She shifted, meeting his eyes properly. "... Must've felt pretty weird. Yours... You were just a kid, with nothing worth living for. How long have you been doing this?"

[rieper]

47 stared at Lighting silently for a moment as he considered. Was that how he had perceived it back then? When would that have been in his childhood exactly? There was a long gambit of time before 6 had convinced him there was at least one thing worth living for: revenge.

That wasn't the point though he was curious what all she had seen. He must have decided it didn't matter because when he spoke to her it was the most he had ever told anyone of his childhood.

"I was created in a lab and raised for the explicit purpose to hunt and kill. They raised me as an asset, trained me from early years to be ruthless, taught me what I needed to know in order to get the job done. And then--he made me the perfect assassin."

That last part--had he said it right? Perhaps he hadn't meant to quite say it that way.

[enthunder]

"Shit..."

She was silent for a moment longer after her sighing curse, almost tasting the explanation, a bitterness in her throat that made her teeth clench. Being forged into someone's tool, she knew what that felt like. But she'd been an adult, not a kid who hadn't known anything else. It put those emotions into a sharper perspective. The longing as her fingers had traced over warm fur, for freedom.

She looked around the cave again. Sighed a second time.

"Guess this isn't what you'd have thought of when you wanted to escape it all, huh?" And then, "Who's he?"

[rieper]

"I escaped that place a long time ago," he corrected her not to sound snotty or prideful but simply to inform her. But did he really escape from there or was he set free? And now he was on the hunt for more of them, the ones who had helped create him, so many years later. It all came back around again and again.

He was quiet for a moment but eventually he answered her question. "Father. The man who created me and my brothers. Dr. Ort-Meyer. He's no longer among the living either."

[enthunder]

Well. That was good, at least. Even if it had felt more like he'd just been loosed, like a bullet from a gun, to her sensibilities. But it was relative. She'd only seen a tiny part of his life.

The noise she made was indignant, but nearly non-verbal; more like an outraged cat than a human word. 'The man that created him' and 'his father'... she couldn't reconcile the two terms.

"Did you..."

Did he kill him? She didn't want to know out of concern for that guy. She wanted to know out of concern for 47.

[rieper]

She wasn't wrong in her thoughts. He basically had been turned loose on the world and only found his way by doing what he had been taught: to hunt and kill targets.

Perhaps then she would have felt less bad for him if she knew it was more a formal title than a feeling of emotional or familial attachment. The man had created him and his "siblings" but 47 did not feel anything towards the man. Even before his emotions had been taken from him the doctor had been more a prison ward than a father. The boy him might not have realized that yet but his teen self knew that his father and siblings were not real and made the disconnect along the way with the knowledge.

"What do you think?" he asked in response.

[enthunder]

She looked at him for a moment, then huffed. Who knew? Her opinion was fuelled by outrage that she wasn't even sure he felt, going on his reactions so far.

"I would have," she decided. "But I bet it was more complicated than that. It always is."

[rieper]

"Not particularly."

He had killed the man after uncovering Dr. Ort-Meyer's manipulations in the Agency's missions for him and having killed all the other people associated with his DNA contribution. It was a natural progression to kill the man that created him, too, when all was said and done.

"It was just an end of a long string of hits."

[enthunder]

"Sure." That was definitely complicated for anyone who hadn't been indoctrinated from birth, but she'd let him have it. The important thing was that he didn't seem bothered.

Then something occurred to her, and she blinked.

"Uh, when... exactly did you see? With Qing?"

[rieper]

He tilted his head slightly, eyes scanning her, mind trying to assess her state after she asked her question. Definitely a point of weakness.

"During the dance." Party...thing...whatever it was.

exit soon?

[enthunder]

She glanced back, and narrowed her eyes at the way his head was cocked, like some kind of raptor studying prey. But, during the dance. That was alright, safe.

"... Right. Yeah, I guess I enjoyed that more than I expected. Seems like wherever I end up, there's people worth fighting to the end with."

The look she gave him left no room for doubt that he was included among those people, as much as that had been a surprise to her perhaps a month or two ago.

sounds good o7

[rieper]

47 blinked. It worked. Her pointed look combined with the last statement distracted him from her memory and how he considered it a weakness. Of course, perhaps that meant he would end up a weak spot for her as well. That...was something new. No one really got attached to him. Not with the way he was.

"...if that's how you perceive it."