unfinishedlibrary | I'm not saying that it's aliens

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

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.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I disagree." Respectfully, and meekly. "If there is no free will, then courage is a lie, and sacrifice has no meaning, and we're merely automatons acting out programming. I refuse to accept that." Maybe because of the situation he's in right now, where his courage is very much being put to the test.

"And how can you sin if you have no free will?" Tsang's no religious expert but it did take several seminars in it! Sin requires choosing evil consciously. Free will denied choice. Please make good choices, stranger?

Especially as the stranger's hands are now on the sides of Tsang's throat, where he can probably feel the hammering pulse, of prey caught in a trap, staring into the eyes of a predator.

"Your disagreement is meaningless, but noted." One shoulder is patted, with that same faux-gentleness. "And there's the crux of it, isn't it? Courage is a lie. Sacrifice too has no meaning."

He knew what was coming at Cheraut. The beginning of the end. "The choice is an illusion. The sin is real. The blood, the torment. Every life thrown into our skinning pits. Blood for blood, as some will say. Justice must be done, and I will endure until my assassin comes for me."

"It does have meaning!" Everything has meaning. Without it, there could be nothing in life worth doing, just a mechanical, robotic repetition of orders given. But someone had to give the orders, right? Someone had to decide.

Part of Tsang feels very sad for the stranger, and its eyes almost well with tears, because it's just so sad to contemplate. Because Tsang is sure it could help this stranger, but there was free will, after all, and the stranger did not want help.

That was abundantly clear. "I am very sad for you." Tsang bites its lip and then nods, deciding, because free will WAS a thing and its choice would have meaning. "If my death makes you happy, then I accept it. Just leave my friends alone."

Without it, there is nothing in life worth doing. Everything he worked for, everything he wanted was pointless, and would be destroyed in time. Unfortunate that he would still be clearheaded enough to know it for some centuries yet.

A pity. Perhaps someone will have the power to defy fate and will kill him early. "Maintain that belief as long as you can, for what little good it will do you."

The melancholy is shaken off only by degrees. "Acceptance or not, you will not see another sunrise on this planet." There's a peculiar certainty to that too, beyond a murderer's conviction about seeing things through to their bloody end. "I will keep you company until that time. A terrible thing, to face the final breath alone." They have a card game to finish!

"What matters is that it does me good. I am sorry you don't see it." It really is. But it will cling to its little beliefs about choice and things mattering for as long as it could. Because trying meant something! It had to!

Well, that was a deadline. All Tsang had to do was endure less than a day. It could hold out that long. It accepts it. "I had thought to make more of my life." At least to survive its first deployment. But the longer it distracts the stranger, the fewer innocent people might die. Maybe that was good enough.

Innocents aren't really the goal, just leverage. The alien doesn't know that, and so it works to Curze's advantage. How many would still be in town? How many might be lured by the sound of their companion in distress?

It's easier to think about that, than other things. "Ah, and here the crop of inextinguishable regrets. That finality always stirs what might have been. Places unseen, experiences unfelt, never again to touch all the little irritating mundanities of existence suddenly made precious by their inevitable loss."

A light pat on one alien shoulder in mock commiseration, and Curze regains his own seat. "What would you have done differently, if you knew from childhood's hour, where this would end?"

Edited 2025-12-16 00:07 (UTC)

The innocents are a goal to Tsang, one that will keep it focused, it hopes. "One day you, too, will die, and I hope it treats you more kindly than you are treating me."

It means that sincerely. Maybe then, the stranger would begin, if late, to heal. Meanwhile, though, tears were welling up in its doe-brown eyes. "I would have tried to stop you the first time." Somehow, but if they're in fantasy speculation land, maybe something might have come to it. "...and I would have kissed Min'a." She was so pretty, and so kind, and Tsang would never see her again.

"I will die, yes. And the when and where of it ... is no mystery." It made him melancholy to think about, but he'd had decades upon decades to come to terms with it. "The only kindness will be my cessation." What will he have to do, to cause the Emperor to send an assassin to deal with him?

If all the things he'd done til now we're not sufficient..

The melancholia doesn't lift. Half the undealt deck is lifted and shuffled idly, the motion almost singularly to give his hands something to do. "Not avoid coming here at all? Not advising your allies to avoid this world?"

Min'a. Another name, now. Another target.

He's seen too many regretful tears to be moved by them anymore. Instead he turns the top card, frowning. Discorda again. He's missing something.

"Such a short list."

Well, Tsang has only had minutes to contemplate its demise, so allow it to be a little droopy about it. It doesn't have the luxury of time. "I am sorry that all you know of life is suffering." It truly is.

"No, because some good may yet be done here. If one person makes a better choice than they would have, it would be enough." Tsang's a big fan of the butterfly effect. A small positive choice here could change the whole world for the better. "No one would listen even if I advised, though." It was just a poor grad student on its first grant funded mission.

"Short but enough. I have few regrets for what I have done." Only for what it did not get to do, but the future is unraveling, losing focus. "Can you say the same?"

"And you can conceive of not having simply advised, but taken matters further into your hands? A little sabotage goes a long way into preventing a ship from leaving a spaceport."

There should, perhaps, be some angry denial here that all he knows is suffering, but there's no point in bothering. It's true. That's all there would ever be. He'd never know the easy peace of a true family the way Roboute did, he wouldn't have the comfortable camaraderie Horus forged with nearly everyone. He'd never experience the elation and illusion of freedom of true powered flight. Never see anything he creates draw wonder and awe from others. Even if he knew it wasn't his place, never would be his place, who didn't allow themselves to dream it might have been otherwise?

But that's all it would ever be. Dreams. "Enough to fill several mortal lifetimes." The card is set back into the deck, forgotten as soon as it's out of sight. "Sometimes even I might wonder whether there might be some other place, far away from here, that I should have been. What might have been different, if I'd had ... what others did. If there had been other ways than the horror of inevitability."

It's shaken off with a sigh. Bit by bit, it's compartmentalized, boxed, and put away. "But then, how much harder would my tasks be if I had learned such flaws? What use is there in compassion to an executioner? So ... perhaps I don't regret that so much after all."

"S-sabotage?" Is the stranger unwell? "That would be a crime. That could endanger others!" Because sabotage done by a rank newbie at sabotage would have equal chances of failing or causing collateral damage. But also it's WRONG!

"It's never too late to explore other options, to become other than what we have allowed trauma to shape us into. Even a small step is an improvement." Even though Tsang has no hope that any of those small steps would involve it surviving the night, it still beLIEVEd in its work, and perhaps it could plant the seed of hope in the other.

"And there's more to you than some...duty. Compassion is not a flaw. It is what makes a society. It is what makes bonds of friendship and brotherhood possible." Don't you want those things?

His smile is brief and terribly unpleasant. "But it would save dozens. Or however many are onboard your craft. Their lives would continue on, mildly inconvenienced but otherwise blissfully ignorant of their intended fates." Acceptable risk, for most.

The rest is dismissed out of hand. It's much too late to 'explore other options', especially as there'd never been other options to begin with. "There is not more to me than what is required of me. Don't presume otherwise." And compassion when bringing worlds into compliance is counterproductive. "What need have I of such things when I know it is nothing more than dust and broken promises? Speak to me not of friendship and brotherhood. Where will my brothers be, in the final night of my existence? What friend will stand with me? None. As it should be."

"You will NOT harm my friends." Tsang is trying to sound bold, but the closest thing to a weapon around here is the plastic spoon by the cup of by now cold soup near the stranger, and even if it could grab it in time, Tsang has all the physical strength of a noodle. But it's as serious as it's ever been in its life. "I have offered my life in exchange for theirs. You would not dishonor that promise."

"I would hope your brothers would be by your side, holding vigil. That's what everyone should have. You can get that, if you wanted." Despite the fact Tsang will clearly NOT be getting that tonight, it still holds out that ideal. "No one should die alone and unmourned." Even the stranger.

"I never promised to spare them," is the soft response, as gentle as nightfall. "I seem to remember something of the opposite, given my spoken intention to use your agony to call them to me."

This is an easy topic to deal with, unlike the other, which might be why he puts it aside entirely. His inevitable doom was irrelevant. That his death would be celebrated and not mourned, also irrelevant. They all had a place in the Emperor's grand plan, and his ... "Assumptions are terrible things, aren't they? You've bought no freedom." He still doesn't raise his voice from that almost pleasant murmur. In any other situation it would sound kind. "Saved no lives. Won nothing with your death but the certainty that others will die with you. Will you run now? It'll achieve nothing, but will make it more interesting for me. Flee while you can, little alien. I will come for you before the dawn."

The stranger was right, of course, but Tsang didn't care. Its death would be awful but meaningful, maybe buying just enough time to have the others get away safely. Which means it had to buy more time. It could do that. Time was hope, or the closest thing to it Tsang could think. "Why do you mock everything I say?"

"I don't have much need for pretty lies. Nor do I see why I should allow them to linger in others." Well, with a few very specific exceptions.

Jonathan Harker had a few spectacular delusions Curze is reluctant to strip him of, but so far that's about it. The man was utterly peculiar, yes, but also utterly human. "I have spoken none myself." Not right now. He has before. "Truth is bitter, it is cold, and it is unpleasant. But it is fact. It amuses me to strip you of your illusions one by one."

Not so much. That doesn't seem like it's true. It's not really all that amusing, it's just sad. Like kicking a puppy, or killing a child.

"Just because you don't believe in something doesn't make it a lie. People can believe things!" Like about, uh, aliens? And the goodness in the world, and that everyone wants to be nice.

"You don't seem very amused. You seem sad, but also eager." Which is why perhaps the stranger was delaying this so much--as much as the lack of a private space for murdering.

The Night Haunter snorts. "If it were true it would be fact, not belief. Belief is fallible and inevitably fails." He leans back in his seat, stretching a little, as if it will somehow actually do anything about the discomfort of these plastek chairs, black eyes dropping back to the table top where cards lay waiting, half revealed and half not.

What was the point of even bothering with that? It wouldn't save the xenos. No information gleaned there would do any good. "Give it time." He'll find it amusing later. "Where were we?"

"But you don't see your thoughts as beliefs? Just the ones that are positive and nice?" That, sir, is a toxic thought loop. Tsang could help you with that.

Maybe you just hate optimism. Ever think of that? HUH? "Maybe your beliefs will also fail." There's a certain frenetic boldness because as Tsang has discovered, once you accept you're going to die, things you thought mattered...didn't so much. Because the 'what's the worst that could happen' was already happening.

"We are where you tell me about your childhood." See?

He hates optimism because good things never happen! "I form my thoughts and ideas by a lifetime of empirical evidence." If it can go badly it will, and usually he's at the root of it. "Little is there of 'positive and nice', and that often a mask for duplicity or manipulation."

Well. At least he beat Nostramo into submission, and for a while there had been nothing but serene silence and obedience. That had been nice. "I welcome my certainties failing. But they will not." Rare was the future he saw anything but wretchedly awful, and those glimpses of something brighter were fewer and fewer as the decades wore on and his power grew.

"Mm. Assumptions again. I did not have a childhood." What primarch did?

Ah HA. "Little of it may be nice in your world, but you can magnify the good, and perhaps create your own. You're not trapped by a cycle of negativity." Except of course he seems to be.

"You did, though. Everyone has. You did not...appear as an adult, as you are now." He might not be an expert, but that kind of...everything the stranger is is the result of trauma and that takes time!

"This grows to be another reason why your species deserves annihilation, if they are all as you are. I grow tired of repeating myself." Nothing changes. Nothing could change. Every moment of every step from now until the heat-death of the universe was already set in stone. All they could do was move along the path, helpless puppets in the puppet show.

He's simply unfortunate enough to be aware of it. "Very well. My earliest memory was my gestation capsule punching through the crust of my home world, finding myself within the mantle, and having to claw my way out through molten rock back to the surface. The fissure caused by the impact remains to this day."

That can't possibly be true. Can it? "A delightful 'childhood', wouldn't you say?"

Well, that's a way to feel like a failure on a cosmic level: to have one's entire people condemned to death simply by existing. Is Tsang the biggest loser in the known universe? It sure feels like it.

Still, it has a job to do and it's going to therapy for as long as it could distract the stranger. "That sounds terribly lonely." It truly did. "Who was your first caregiver?"

Tsang's species won't be the first to be erased. It won't be the last. "I have never had a caregiver." He does understand on some level that he should have. That every one of his brothers had something at least; even Russ had wolves. Lion eventually had the knighthood he joined. "Nostramo is not a planet that rewards taking on additional unwanted burdens, and you are imminently edible by those stronger than you."

...that pronoun use raises Tsang's poor little hackles. Was it edible? It did not want to find out. "Are...are you going to eat me?" Because the stranger absolutely was stronger than Tsang--its wrist was already coloring from the bruise of the other's tight grip.

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throwing in a little MELODRAMA for pizzazz.

As you do.

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