middleofsomewhere | The Will to Fight: Conclusion

The Will to Fight: Conclusion

The battles rage loud and ferocious at the gates of the city and off in the ruined wastelands of Erda, and on the walls a struggle of a different kind occurs. The team who stayed behind at the towers are small but determined as they move stoically across the walls to right the stones that have become misaligned, even as their friends battle not too far away.

The city begins to hum. It's a quiet hum, not loud enough to be heard out where the others are fighting but it vibrates even through stone. The recovering monks assure them that it is done, the wards are back up and no demon will be able to enter the city.

Eventually the battle is won, all three battles. The demons fought back and killed, a major blow to their gate system that will keep them back for hopefully a long time. Those waiting in the caverns return to the city and by the time they get there the illusions are gone. Everyone can see the world for what it really is.

But despite the ruins of their world the people are relieved, the adrenaline of the fight coursing through their veins and the mood is one of hope. They will build again, their people will survive.

All Voidtreckers please return to the Voidtrecker Express. Departure will be in a few hours

It has landed not too far from the city, cloaked to make it unnoticeable to the citizens, for all the good that does. No one has been particularly subtle this last week. People can begin regrouping, packing up the camp and getting any wounded not already healed to the train.

However roughly half an hour later another message appears on their SCA.

Passenger Persephone has requested we remain on system System #86525656412355 for an additional day to further assist the people of Erda. The Voidtrecker Express will depart on the morning of Day Fifteen of the month of Kazoo.

The train remains where it is, so the voidtreckers can use its facilities. There is definitely a lot that can be done to assist those of this world and the citizens will welcome any helping hands.

After an extra day they finally depart, returning to the void once more.

(OOC Note: Once the wards are up any characters who are demonic in nature will not be able to enter the city either!)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That sounds unpleasant. Sorry to hear that. What did you learn?"

She offers him a couple of pages with numbers scrawled in stacked and divided shapes, with one piece 'missing' that's meant to be figured out via pattern.

"The originals had images with items, you had to count the items to figure out the number. I didn't really have time to draw them, but the spirit is there."

Her question was the type of question Senku appreciated because it was how he thought. No matter how horrible the experience, he'd learned something. He wasn't going to lose sight of that, at least.

"I can tell you the SCA protects from more than physical ailments. I didn't take potential magic effects into account which was a detriment in this case because it was exactly that. Whatever magic that captivated the villagers took over both me and Gen before I knew it and I lost days of valuable time." He frowned.

"But, a data point is still a data point." He said with a hum. "Once under the illusion's spell, putting the SCA back on wasn't enough to shake it. The exact conditions for breaking the spell, I can't be sure." He'd been quite the burden, really.

He looked at the pages curiously, but he was more than engaged in his report for the moment.

"Ooooh so we were being less affected than most of the citizens! Interesting. I hadn't noticed the disparity but that would make sense."

Silly of her, but it is good to note.

"How is Gen?"

Because she remembers how well he'd spoken of his beloved idiot. Like he was his reason for to keep driving himself. She's not exceptionally good about caring about personal details, but that they both made it out is important.

She doesn't scold him for the expirement though, because he did learn something. And though it seems he's troubled, he is alive, and intact, and doesn't seem to be deeply handicapped in any other way. "For the record, I'm glad to know this."

"That would appear to be the case. They firmly believed the city was safe, there was no way to come to harm here and that the demons had already been vanquished." Senku explained. "I'm glad to know it, I'm just frustrated that it escaped my notice as a possibility, and also that I don't know how to counter it. I need time to think." He needed to research and understand it all too. He'd never taken 'I don't know' as an acceptable answer to anything, and he was too stubborn to start now.

"Gen is..." He sighed. "He followed me when I was trying to help get at the machines in battle and he got hurt, but he's been healed so he'll be fine. I would've been a little mad at him if he went and died on me." He grumbled lightly.

"It escaped mine as well. I think because my experiences with mind control weren't gradated in any fashion. They were control chips implanted in people- at one point we had to destroy the transmitter because they'd become so integrator. I feel like the same principle happened here.

"There are a lot of loose ends but... I will leave it to the city to deal with. Give their council whatever information I've accumulated."

She moves from her 'chair', trotting down from her rubble pile. "How bad were the injuries? Will he have long-term damage?" She doesn't think to ask about psychological damage. She wants to know if he's been reliably physically repaired. But if he's not, she's willing to help where she can. Senku's her friend, and by default what's important to Senku deserves her help.

"This was my first and hopefully only brush with mind control." Senku said, rubbing the back of his neck idly as he was wont to do since a few years ago.

"It's not a thing that exists in my world. Magic, illusions...all of that is fantasy to me." Senku sound a little pained, actually, because he desperately wanted to understand. He was trying.

"I'm...honestly not attuned enough into the mission to know what this city needs, so I was just...helping. No matter how inept I may be at moving rubble."

Senku shook his head. "It was pretty serious...gashes down his back. He bled a lot. Both Casper and Willow healed him so I think he's okay. I just think he's needing to recover from the blood loss. I don't even think he got a scar out of it." He chuckled lightly. "Not that he needs another one. It's not his first brush with serious injury, although it is since we came here." He exhaled. It had terrified him for the moment. "Clearly all the medicine I know is rather inept against these magical types."

"I don't know, in my experience it happens pretty often in mixed environments. Luckily I've not encountered a situation where it's permenant. One of my friends used to keep trying to mind-control her former best friend and then the former best friend would turn murderous and start attacking people. She stopped doing that and now they're dating. Kind of strange."

At least she thinks they're dating? Who is Entrapta to question unorthodox relaitonships? Not the best person by a long shot.

"One day there'll be a situation where conventional healing methods will be essential because powers will be nullified. That's an even bigger risk than mind control. Your skills are still essential."

Which might be meant as a comfort and might be meant as a warning that she's concerned about being too reliant herself. But you know what? It's good to be prepared for everything. That's just facts.

"A few days was enough. I forgot everything while I was under the illusion." Senku breathed. "Not...not the stuff on the train, I thought we'd just come here, to stay here after our mission concluded. I forgot my home. My life." He murmured. "My goals. My responsibilities."

It annoyed him to no end. It was the most annoying thing about it.

He let out a weak chuckle. That actually was reassuring. No matter his bluster, he was actually feeling a little bit inept. He had a lot of skills, he was also a man who knew an extraordinary amount, but that didn't mean much in this situation.

Entrapta was right. If for some reason they couldn't do their magic, Senku could handle it. "Ah, that's true. Fortunately, you can stick me in the wild with nothing, not even the clothes on my back and I'll make you a civilization." He grinned.

"I would like to think that if I had to stick you in the wilderness I'd allow you to keep your clothes, but I'll keep that in mind."

The last time she was abandoned somewhere there was robots, so it was alright. There was also a powerful illusion, though, so that part wasn't terribly convenient. She can't imagine she would have faired much better than Senku.

"To be honest, I'm not really good with illusions. Even with a reduced effect this one nearly got me. If my roommate and Kaiba and Jack hadn't helped me, I might have not been able to break its effects."

She worries that it has something to do with how she thinks. How when presented with data her brain wants to interpret literally rather than figuratively. She can find anomalies, sure, but for some reason her mind wants to accept things at face value and if missions keep having illusions...

"Yep, that sure would've been nice the first time, unfortunately over 3700 years there's no clothing that can survive in the elements that long." Senku joked lightly. Oh, he can joke about that now? That was good to know.

Maybe talking to her was getting him to realize just how exhausted he was and he happened to sit on some of the debris. It was an accomplishment sometimes to get him to sit down.

"I was seeing the illusion before I took my SCA off, but I didn't know that." Senku explained with a bit of a frown. "And coming out of it was rough. I was in and out, which means I knew I was being controlled while I was lucid, and I was getting more annoyed. Gen too. We did it together." It was only supposed to be five minutes.

"Oh, that's right. That's very inconvenient. But the sentiment still stands."

She tips her head.

"I know this might make some people mad, but next time you do something like this? Call me or someone to make sure we put your SCA back on you. Or at least don't perform the experiment simultaneously. Delegate someone an observer role."

She knows better than to ask someone to not try dangerous stuff. She does it constantly. She'd rather be there as a lifeline.

"I'm sure that people will be mad anyway." Senku said, with a bit of an exasperated sigh in his voice. "Usually we do. We couldn't agree who shouldn't and we made a poor decision." He exhaled. "I already know that."

A light chuckle escaped his lips. "There isn't any way Gen's going to not go first next time. I'm sure he will insist upon it." He still intended to continue. Something about the SCA bothered him. It was alright if people didn't follow his line of thinking.

He too often did impulsive and reckless things, it was part of his nature.

"Hubris." He said suddenly. "Nothing bad had happened before, I figured I could handle whatever this world threw at us and it was a serious miscalculation. Anything physiological...I could've dealt with that."

"It's okay... People get mad at me for doing dangerous stuff all the time. Not here, but at home. I've gotten better about it, but I used to mess up a lot of important missions by getting distracted with more interesting things than stuff like 'breaking and entering' or 'shooting bad guys'."

She scoffs. "What even is a bad guy? Except for those demons. I think they were kind of by default bad guys." But her point stands. Side against side combat didn't hold the same interest as the discoveries she could make exploring new places and the sheer power of her distractability worked against her.

"So if other people get mad at you, I won't... I think what you figured out is important to know. We'll need that."

"I'm fairly certain that Taiju was mad when I let Tsukasa kill me." Senku said with a bit of another wary huff of amusement. "Mind you, now I'm in charge so aside from spirited discussions, we tend to go with my plans in the end."

He leaned back a bit on his hands, looking up at the sky as he thought about that. "I usually have...well I guess my relationship with the village is different than here. It's strange that way, so I feel like they have my back." Senku admitted.

"I know some people do here, but I'm equally sure some don't." It was a little more candid than perhaps he should be. Gen would scold him.

He nodded at her assessment. "This thing." He held up his wrist with the SCA. "I think it does more than we know. It's definitely attuned to me on a molecular level. I'm not comfortable having something strapped to me I don't understand."

"Hey, you're talking to a Princess! Do you know how hard it is to care what other people think when you're learning something important and you make your own rules? Oh, it seems you do." She answers her own question with a flat, pleasant smile and sits near him. Not too close, though, keeping that comfortable distance.

"But yeah, people are going to scold you. Luckily Siebren likes you so he won't glue you to the ceiling for more than a minute."

See, she actually likes Jack? But she doesn't understand many of his choices. Like making Siebren mad. That was a worse choice than taking off the SCA in a mind-control scenario. Though the talk of the SCA makes her consider.

"I wonder where all of our regenerative data is stored..."

"Chieftain, technically." Senku smiled. "We call ourselves a kingdom, but no one would call me king. I won that title in battle of all things."

"So, I'm used to hearing when people are unhappy. It's not like I can hide from them or something. I don't really want to." Senku admitted with a bit of a half shrug. "Yeah, he'll scold me." He already knew.

"I don't know if you know how the alert system works, but what I can tell you is that it's attuned to your personal allergies of all things. Probably among other things. Tidus gave me an idea to switch with someone, probably Gen, and I'm going to get some lacquer and test it. Will mine on his wrist beep, or will his attune to me and beep instead?"

"Ooooh, that's not a bad idea, either."

She's curious now, too. "I would offer, too, but I'm not really allergic to anything. But it would be good to know if an emergency arose and we had to grab someone's SCA."

Because that could be pretty damn important if they needed to improvise. Say, if someone near them died and they needed their SCA to reach their unique team.

"Different experiment, same category." Senku agreed. "You can help me with it, but we'll do as Tidus said, on the train. There's a chance of skewing the results if I just do it with Gen because we're from the same world. I'm not sure if that's a variable or not."

He hummed. "The best part is that there is virtually no risk. I'm not going to touch the lacquer, no one else needs to either, it just needs to be close to our hands. I have a very severe allergy." That, however, never stopped him from using it.

"Sure! There's nothing that I'm allergic to that I know of. And my magical strength is very limited. It's all contained in my hair and has very little to do with the rest of my body."

She's down to help for observation's sake. Especially if they take turns documenting.

"Oh oh! I put a recorder in Sandra! She could help us take video."

"Did you? Fascinating." Senku hummed and considered that. Video footage would be great, they could study it repeatedly to see if it picked up something their eyes didn't.

"Well my magical strength is much more limited than yours. I can barely do anything yet." He was working on it. It was a current project. "I'm not sure how that would affect things, if at all. Interesting."

Senku chuckled. "Less allergies is good, I don't know why I react like that to urushiol but it's a pain. I usually just ignore it."

"Yeah! I mean, it was practically a requirement to build in monitoring equipment somehow if she needed to observe her environment. So I added a recording option so that I could make adjustments after reviewing the footage. But given that she's mobile, she could also follow for footage."

She's happy to help out, especially if understanding the SCAs helps them understand their situation a little bit more.

"So it's just something that requires mild treatment then? Good! I don't have to have an epi-pen ready or anything."

"There's not a lot of monitoring equipment around, aside from whatever the train is doing to watch us." He believed it was.

"Just an antihistamine. It looks terrible, my whole body swells, but epinephrine has never been needed. It's not anaphylactic." Senku wasn't sure that would stay that way forever considering his blatant disregard for his own safety, but that was a problem to be dealt with in the future.

"You know, I keep thinking that it's the ICPs doing it but that makes me wonder how they're doing it in the Quiet Car, unless the train really thinks we're being quiet in there. Honestly more of us use it for science than we use it for quiet, I think. Oh, by the way, I'll probably need that second crate of robot parts soon because I'm almost ready to finish up that project."

She's got the blueprint down and she was just reminded because she'd been doing so much of the work in there.

"Well, considering dying is inconvenient let's do our best to keep it that way. But don't tell anyone I said this? Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do... A lot of people like you, though, so you dying ends up being inconvenient for their productivity. They start worrying and then they get paranoid and they try to keep an eye on you rather than on mission goals so just... y'know... be careful."

The worst part is that it's not a veiled attempt to say she's worried. She genuinely means it as she says it. She's chased way too many aggressive robots out of delighted curiosity to intend otherwise.

"I'm not sure it's just the ICPs. If it's sentient it could just be everywhere in that kind of sense, like some deity." He sniffed a bit. "I don't know. I don't particularly care, it's not like I have much private business anyway." Not even with his fiancé.

Senku sighed a little bit. "That, surprisingly, has been made clear to me when I wanted to test the mechanic and I had people screaming at me a lot. I've agreed to avoid it, if no other reason because I don't know how it will affect the psychic bond I have with Eva." He hummed a little bit.

"I really did intend to assist with the mission." He admitted sheepishly. "I thought I'd be occupied for no more than five minutes." Senku groaned. "Anyway, Gen is..not going to let me do that again, he'd rather go first, because he figures I can do something about whatever happens, but I...this...I couldn't have. There would've been nothing I could do."

"Oh, yeah. Psychic bonds do complicate things." She hums uncertainly, hair bushing up like a cat's briefly as she tries to work something out in her head.

"What kind of bond is it?"

All kinds of strange connections are formed on the train. Psychic bonds hadn't even occurred to her, despite knowing they were a possibility. That really must complicate the issue for Senku.

The Will to Fight: Conclusion

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I lost the notif to this.

No worries

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