I'm not saying that it's aliens - TAKE A LOAD OFF, LOG 2

[libraryassistants]

Who: Readers and Actors
What: Beta Story final log
When: November 28 - December 11
Where: Woodhurst (UK) and the SS Radiance (in space!), 2019
Content warnings: Please tag warnings in comment headers!

In Woodhurst:

There is quite a bit of confusion in the village as the weeks pass by- by now it is clear that some people are very much not themselves, and there are multiple theories as to why. Aliens, obviously- the really weird bit is that it’s not just certain edgy teens purporting this theory, but since there’s been some (alleged) activity previously, maybe they’ve come back! Some tourists (and perhaps some locals) have made signs of the ‘Take me with you!’ variety, mostly loitering in the town square or in the park, whenever they get chased out of one or the other.

Suffice it to say, those people aren’t being taken seriously by those in charge- though even they have to admit that something strange is going on. Prevailing theories amongst officials are ‘gas leakage’ and ‘water contamination,’ neither of which are suitable explanations but no one seems to want to think too hard on it. As a result, the friends and families of those acting out of sorts are in a strange position. Do they try to seek medical help? Wait and hope it sorts itself out? Or do they join the crowds bidding welcome to their potential alien guests, demanding their real loved ones return?

Visitors of all stripes might find themselves a bit more scrutinized, as a result. Didn’t a bunch of weird people show up just as people seemed to start changing? Readers and aliens alike had best be on their most normal behavior, or it’s possible they’ll get cornered by someone asking what’s happening, or… a fanatic who wants to be taken up into their spaceship. Some of whom have some weird questions about probes. Good luck figuring out what that’s about.

On the IMW Group Supply Ship: Radiance

Things are not all well further up in the atmosphere, either. The staff have had to deal with much more pushback than they were expecting, including some people who seemed to not enough understand the concept of mental health (which was not in the briefing- shouldn’t they have at least heard of it before?). A few cases also seem to be quite severe, involving a level of intervention that they weren’t really prepared for- but of course, they’re here, so they’re going to do the very best they can to get all the humans the help they need! Hopefully legally.

Most alarmingly, however, it seems there have been some kidnapping attempts! …Kidnapping attempts that didn’t involve them! Someone, or multiple someones, have managed to get the patients off the ship without first filling out their discharge paperwork, and that simply will not do. As a result, security is ramped up on the ship… sort of. There’s very little in the way of a security crew, after all, and it’s not like they can call in reinforcements. So mostly this means that there are some very tired counselors who have been put on hallway shifts, and everyone has been assigned a little name badge that they MUST wear at ALL TIMES.

(There are actual people guarding the shuttles now, but again… there’s only so much security. The real question is, do you really want to beat up the aliens who are just trying to help?)

To their credit, the various Group members are trying to listen to the concerns of the patients who are here… less than willingly, and are beginning to filter some cases back to the planet by request. But they are going to do it properly, which means the proper forms. A wrap up visit with their counselor, a form agreeing to be finished with treatment, a politely worded request to maybe not tell people about the aliens (it’s not an NDA, because the Group has never needed those, it’s really just a form asking if they’re going to talk about it so management can figure out how badly this is going to go). Oh, and would you mind filling out this survey about your experience?

Of course, not everyone is in a hurry to leave- or at least needs something to do while waiting for bits of paperwork to approve. All the regular classes and sessions are still going, and they even retrofitted one of the spas to have water instead of… whatever it was before. Now certified safe for humans!


[Information on what's available on the ship is in the first log; info post is here.]

Comments

[curzed]

One card is used to wave off who was and was not an aggressor. "This is a human colony under Imperial jurisdiction. In accordance with the Edict Perpetua Xenocidium, the presence of unbranded xenos within Imperial-claimed or Imperial-adjacent space shall be regarded as prima facie evidence of hostile intent. No declaration of war, warning or attempt at parley is required."

Every primarch is born with certain knowledge inscribed into their minds from the start. Languages, customs, expectations. His specialty is .. rather specific. "All servants of the Imperium, civil or military, are granted irrevocable authority to employ lethal force against xenos entities upon detection, observation, or credible report without need for further sanction. Mercy towards invading xenos forces is defined as negligence. Negligence towards xenos is dereliction of duty, and dereliction of duty constitutes treason." He folds his hands, card still held between two fingers, and rests his chin upon them.

Guess what he's been up to since arriving?

What an odd conversation to be eavesdropping on, between an ordinary man and some creepy homeless dude. "Hm, combined with your.. yellow fruit of some sort, perhaps it would be enough to redress the immediate wrongdoing. Unless you have something else to offer."

[unsheathedfromreality]

Accustomed to legal justification for his own actions as he is, Illarion follows all of that tolerably well -- and wrinkles up a lip in a fang-baring grimace as the primarch completes his explication of the applicable law. "Are the local authorities aware you just annexed them?" he retorts. "And are they de facto servants of the Imperium, as rulers of one of your colonies?"

Because that's going to be an awful lot of executions to get sorted out, to his thinking, if failure to remove the aliens from their own midst was treason.

Though, regardless -- the matter of the stolen meal. He's going to settle that first, and not by offering up his own heart. "Yes. Two things. Wait."

He'll repay the rest of the food in kind; he's got enough pocket change he can stroll over to the counter there and pick out a plastic box full of ... more fruit, and boiled eggs, and nuts. A "protein plate" -- where was the MEAT? -- that he pays for and returns to drop before the aggrieved primarch.

"I also have an offer for you," he continues, picking up from where he left off.

[curzed]

"If they aren't yet they will be made aware when the Crusade arrives in the local system," the Night Haunter says serenely. "All human colonies, planets and holdings are part of the Imperium."

Whether they like it or not is the distinct implication. Chances were very good, based on the attitude of the local populace, that the Night Lords would not be assigned this specific task. The IIIrd perhaps.

Now that it's been denied him twice he does rather want that undead heart, sliced thin with a bit of sauce. But he waits, with all semblance of patience, as Illarion heads for the counter and not the exit, returning with ... things he recognized by vague association more than experience.

None of it smells particularly objectionable. One egg is nudged around on the bottom of the box. "What offer would that be?"

[unsheathedfromreality]

"There is no point in us trying to kill each other for however long we're detained here. Or back in the Library, if we ever return." Or perhaps not no point, but he's going to ignore -- for now -- the idea that they don't know whether or not a death away from the Library was permanent.

Having said this, he pulls the chair out -- glances over at one of their nosy neighbors with a pointed, quelling look -- and sits down across from the primarch.

"You can use information on my world. I want the current Monarch dead -- and if your Imperium really is somewhere out among our stars, you might be able to kill him."

-- And then because he's been chewing on it since walking off to buy more food, he adds, "What do you do if the Crusade never arrives? They'll lock you up or kill you as a lunatic."

[curzed]

"Mm. Disagree." It's always worth a try, and he rather enjoyed the attempt sometime. His visions didn't give him a hint one way or another, much like Charles, Illarion is already dead, has met his ultimate fate and thus any future fate is ... impossible to grasp.

The egg is picked up, and he continues to toy with it instead of do anything else with it, for all the world seeming like it's simply to give his hands something to do.

Maybe it is. The quiet chuckle at if the Imperium is out there is the only reaction he has for a little while. Illarion surely knows it isn't only the Monarch that would be excoriated. "Then this will not be the first planet I have subjugated for its own betterment. This colony has neither the technology nor the sorcery to keep me at bay for long."

Conquest is written into every Primarch. "I know enough of building ships and warp travel to find out way out of this system and reunite with the Imperium through that clumsy fashion. If they cannot reach me, then we will reach them."

[unsheathedfromreality]

The flat disagreement gets an actual cough of a laugh out of the shrike. "Fine. We might both enjoy it." Technically, that is a lie: Illarion doesn't conventionally enjoy anything. (Though he is beginning to realize -- legible emotions or no -- that novelty and danger can keep him engaged when nothing else would. Being chased through the woods by a bigger predator had fulfilled both criteria.) "But it isn't the most productive use of time."

The notion this isn't the first planet the primarch's subjugated -- all on his own? -- is ... something, for Illarion to wrap his mind around. He's no reason or evidence to believe it's not possible, but it's so far beyond the scale of his understanding he sits and contemplates it for a solid minute.

But can you overestimate yourself? he thinks, but does not ask, once he's done with that rumination. "Suppose if right of future conquest is grounds for judicial authority, then you have it." There's not much to his tone, but what there is implies that he doesn't think much of the idea of "right of future conquest".

He has also noticed that none of this is a yea or nay to his initial offer, but he'll let that simmer a little longer instead of pursuing it straightaway. Instead, indicating the cards, "Is that a deck of Triumphs? For divination?"

It surely goes by another name, elsewhere, but the notion of using cards for both playing and foreseeing is ... common, he'd hope.

[curzed]

He's still mulling it over. It would get him what he wants, ideally - a stable location he can take his fleet to. He would inevitably agree, if he didn't like the terms then he simply wouldn't abide by them. Honor was something others luxuriated in, he had no such compunctions. "Oh, and what better things would you suggest could be done? In this place, in that tedious library. Take your pick."

The egg is, finally, eaten. Shell and all. It's how he's always eaten an egg before, and that this one is cooked inside is a novel change from the raw he would find in scattered nests up along blackened buildings in Nostramo when he was younger. Crows never much liked his raids but they also couldn't actually stop him. And the added calcium was always a bonus. "It's a human world, it's under human jurisdiction. I need to know little else at this juncture." Either it already was part of the Imperium or it would be whether it wanted to or not.

Either way, killing aliens is his duty. "...The lesser arcanoi, or some local variant." 'Triumphs', a different name but perhaps the same idea. "Some do believe it can tell the future, if you know how to read it. I don't know all of these cards, but most are the same. These cups, I think, are intended to be the suit of eagles. Page, knight, queen and king analogize well enough to the proper servant, champion, lord and master. But overall.."

[unsheathedfromreality]

It's a little odd to watch a grown man eat an egg with the shell on -- among elves, it's more a habit of growing children or gravid women. Or, Illarion supposes, the starved, or those who couldn't bother to care much about what they were eating so long as it kept them moving.

The shrike wonders if the primarch will eat the banana with the peel on, too.

He spends longer than is proper just ... watching the other fellow eat and following that line of thought, before rousing himself to answer the question of what else they could do in the Library besides try to kill each other: "Take it over. De jure or de facto, whichever can be arranged. You're the conqueror." And Illarion is the warlord, and an architect of cultures, besides. The Editors -- what he'd seen of them, when he bothered paying attention -- were a motley group with no central purpose, and the Librarian and the Assistants seemed more like the Library's shepherds than its rulers.

If the Editors had a job to do, surely it could be accomplished better with a unified purpose and culture.

(Likely, he should be horrified by his own suggestion -- if he had a sense of horror left. Not the gist of building a real unified organization out of the Editors, but that this creature should be the one to do it.)

Then he dismisses the idea -- and the unproductive non-argument about jurisdiction over human colonies -- and leans a little over the table to peer at the cards. It's old instinct to not speak of what he can see of the deck that's still held in a stack, restricting his comments to what would be visible to an ordinary elf. "Knight, courtier, prince, Monarch, for us," he remarks. "Cups might be shells. Swords for fangs...

"Do you believe?" Or had he practiced at it long enough it wasn't belief but simply true, the way (don't think of her) Esfir had become a diviner.

[curzed]

The second egg disappears much as the first did, crunchily. He's never really recovered from most of his life needing to eat what he could find, and any nutrition being good nutrition. It had driven the cooks hired to attend him while he was king absolutely nuts. If it was on his table and remotely edible generally it would be assumed to be part of the meal. "I have a brother who's more the sort to conquer libraries. I wouldn't want to step into his arena." Which implies it does happen, and one of the twenty did in fact specialize in rogue libraries. "But if it becomes necessary.. then I will do what I must." His reasons for interference were narrow. He was a creature of order and law, and so far the library didn't rankle that beyond being unable to leave.

But they were free now, and sooner or later he'd find a way to acquire the attention of the Imperium. "Courtiers outrank knights?" Why would some fancy noise-maker-- eh. Different cultures. It's meaningless, noise. Let others worry about the details of alien ways. "..Yes and no. I do not use them for such a purpose, but they can be. They are a research tool, to unravel what I already know but haven't understood." A card is turned over, likely already seen by elf not-eyes: the ace of wands. "Discordia, especially this card, is a warning. Unforseen consequences. Things are not what they seem. It keeps reappearing."

Another. Nine of wands. "Confusion, madness. Something unseen." A third,three of wands. "Danger from within. Hidden threat." He keeps flipping several more, and they're all the same suit, except for a lone eight of cups. "The warning is clear. What it's warning of, less so."

[unsheathedfromreality]

The notion flits through the back of Illarion's head to go buy more food. It's two parts morbid curiosity and one part parental instinct that -- it seems -- did not die with the rest of him. (Long-engrained patterns seemed to have survived the best of any of his soul; perhaps there's use in leaning into them when they rear their heads.)

He's got pocket change enough he could be something else, and no other use for it. He'll see what happens with these first offerings.

"That's more specialized than I'd thought your brothers would be." Though not bizarrely so. Control of information was the heart of any extended campaign, military or political; libraries were far from the only way to gather and maintain information, but a spymaster or rhetorician or propagandist would want control of them as much as he'd want any other store of it. "Be interesting to see if he shows up."

not that you'll learn anything about it, illarion; the eels will not permit it

"Technically two words for the same thing." The members of a Prince's Court could be called either, though "knights" held the more martial connotation. "Courtier above knight's a holdover from a mistranslation." The second-ranked face card had been something closer to duke in the elven tradition but someone had gotten crossed up somewhere along the line and leaned into the theme of Princes and their Courts rather than landed nobility. And that boring little bit of trivia is not one Illarion even wants to waste breath on sharing, which is why he is not Magnus.

He cocks his head as the primarch deals; if he were guessing, this might be the suit of feathers being dealt from, though from what little he remembers of Esfir's foretellings -- what little he's trying not to remember -- that one wasn't so ill-omened. Regardless, the draw mostly being in-suit is unusual enough, if one leaned into coincidence.

"Is that for you, or your victims?"

[curzed]

The eels are always waiting.

"It would be better to think of him as a keeper of knowledge, the obsession with libraries is merely a side effect of this." A little less specialized, when described that way! And doesn't even begin to get into the sheer amount of bullshit the Thousand Sons were capable of, if even half the rumors were true. The idea of that sibling showing up seems to sour his mood a little, and he picks through the other items in offering in a moment of sullen quiet.

It gives time for review. Courtiers and Knights are basically the same; who in Nostramo weren't used to mistranslations and things not quite sounding the way they should when rendered into Gothic?

The cards are picked back up one at a time and slid back into the deck, reshuffling beginning before he pauses, reconsiders, and sets the deck in front of Illarion. "Let's find out. Shuffle, pick seven. Quickly now, don't think too much about it."

[unsheathedfromreality]

The least indication of a sulk at the mention of this other -- so far absent -- brother is picked up. So, not surprisingly, there were rifts and tensions in this enormous family as well. Useful.

Perhaps he's offered his deal to the wrong member of them -- but one played the cards one had, as it were, and this is the primarch he was to work with. There might be value in appealing to another as a potential intermediary in the future...

But for now, speaking of cards. He accepts the deck as it's set down, picking it up and shuffling it himself -- deliberately focusing on a point just above his hands as he does so, with his eyes and ((eyes)) alike. It's perhaps just superstition that watching the shuffle affects it, when you can see the cards sliding past each other, but it's a clinging superstition all the same. One, two, three, four riffles -- then he turns cards off the top, one through seven, onto the table between them.

"Huh. So ... ?" They're the same. Which of them is it warning?

(Or is it both of them?)

[curzed]

The same cards in the same order, again. Only an idiot wouldn't listen, but he ... doesn't know what the warning is for. What is he missing?

They're studied through narrowed eyes, gaze little more than black slits, frowning. One of the pieces of fruit in the little box Illarion's brought over is picked up and much like the eggs had been earlier, bitten into whole. Probably not how oranges are meant to be eaten, but it doesn't seem to trouble him.

For a moment or two the flavor is distracting, though. Unfamiliar, sharp, and not at all unpleasant.

"I accept your terms," he concludes, half an orange still clasped in his hands, expression turning thoughtful. "Information on your planet, its defenses, what to expect of this Monarch, and it will be excised. If your people are sincere enough in throwing themselves at the mercy of the Emperor, perhaps he will grant you a measure of grace."

Perhaps they'll be allowed to live. "In return I will not kill you until your usefulness is ended."

That's not what all those warnings are for though. Repeated eight times, now.

He's missing something important. "Often when humanity speaks of fortelling the future they expect a series of events. You know the conclusion, therefore you know how to reach it. The warning is present, surely we know what causes it. And yet..."

That's just not how it works. "The road lies before us, and what is being missed lies waiting to be revealed."