rickitikitarr | 1. video

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1. video

[Ricki Tarr, latest inmate arrival, is still getting his feet under him. He's been on board for a little while now, but let's face it, he's a field agent from the 1970s, getting used to graphical user interfaces of his messenger has put up a bit of a roadblock in terms of his making contact.

By the time he's confident enough with the flimsy, cheeping little device to make a video post, his stomach is growling, so the very first message is a simple video shot.

It's poorly framed, he has no real idea of how to centre himself in the lens, and the light in his room is dark and low and terrible for any sort of filming. But from the dark, what's visible of his half-in-the-frame expression is still and steady;]

The first living creature to orbit the earth was a little Russian mongrel named Laika. She was a pretty thing, with a clever cast to her eyes and pricked up, pointed ears. On the fourtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution they flung the little thing into the sky.

In fact, the Russians had been launching dogs into suborbital flights for a few years before, but none attained the notoriety or captured the imaginations of the world like little Laika. I was rather young when she was sent to space, but recall thinking the entire proceedings terribly inhumane.

The Soviets say that she was euthanized before her oxygen ran out. The British and Americans question whether that is true. The Russians question whether that questioning is deliberately spread propaganda meant to make them seem monstrous. In the time since, I think both sides have lost track of the original truth of the matter. But the question of her ultimate cause of death aside, I wondered whether she might be hungry, thirsty or afraid, uncomprehending of how it was possible to see stars all around her... I actually can't recall reading whether Sputnik 2 was like this ship, with windows or not. Laika may not have seen stars spinning in the sky, but I'm sure the sounds and sudden lack of gravity must have been rather frightening for such a little dog.

[His voice is low and steady, the pictures his paints are matter-of-fact and vivid. He accent is an odd, old one, London tempered by a childhood racing through Penang streets and other colonial holds. He takes his time with the story before concluding;]

Which is all to say, given the apparent flexibility of space and time on this vessel, if we see her while we're out here, I must simply insist that we make a stop.

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Thanks. Ricki Tarr, by the way-

[And, because she's so normal otherwise, and people definitely didn't have bone crowns in his day and age, he gestures at his forehead, an approximation of where hers are.]

Can I ask-?

[She winces faintly. Uhg, right, that thing.]

...yeah, uh. That's new. I got stuck on a human chessboard during a recent detour through Escape from Ghost Castle, and apparently this is my reward. I'm hoping it goes away soon.

I'm pretty human, normally. Anya Lensherr, former inmate, current warden and head of maintenance.

...this sort of thing happen often?

[Sorry, yes, he will get to the rest of it, but he is not liking the sounds of this right now, damn it. People had mentioned that strange things went on, but that's a little more... violating of ones' structural integrity than he had imagined.]

[No, it's cool. She's been here long enough that it's hard to remember exactly how weird it is, even though this, in particular, is still succeeding in creeping her out.]

It does, I'm afraid.

Getting stranded in fucking terrible tourist destinations happens, oh, every couple of months. Something bizarre goes down every few weeks, but sometimes they're harmless or even kind of fun. Getting...changed is a running theme, but it doesn't last.

I'm sorry for staring.

[He decides is the simplest thing to say.]

It's quite far from anything I've come across at home, and I used to believe I'd seen my fair slice of the world.

It's okay. You'll want to be polite to the green lady in the garden, though. And the one with glowing eyes.

[Just as a tip.]

I don't think anyone is really prepared for the barge. I certainly wasn't. It - expands you and strips you down at the same time. There's a lot of horror and a lot of plain strange but a lot of wonder, too.

[A soft smile. She does love it, in spite of everything.]

Wait- you're one of the ones who actually made the jump they want from us. You were a prisoner here, and then you chose to stay.

[Putting together from this philosophical observation now, and what she'd said before. It makes him lean forward ever so slightly, peering closer at her, like she's some unimaginable specimen. In a way, she is.

Ricki has been quiet as a churchmouse about the whole thing, but privately feels that this place can go fuck itself if it intends to redeem him, that he'll burn it all to the ground first. He's certainly not the first and likely won't be the last. Meeting someone who's been through it- and sadly the first thing he thinks when he hears her is 'swallowed the dogma,' is far more curious than any crown of bones.]

Yes.

[She can't read his mind, but she's friends with inmates who feel similarly about the barge. She can even sympathize quite a bit - given how she felt when it was her father imprisoning her - but the barge has given her more than she can easily express. The truth of the matter is that Anya is practically serving the Kool-Aid; she's one of very few wardens who mostly believes in the system as it is, even the awful parts, though she usually keeps it to herself.]

Not everyone does. But there's a handful of us.

I'd do a great deal to hear that story, one day.

[He admits, still watching her avidly, searching for the usual signs of the indoctrinated.]

[A small smile; because she likes curiosity, as a general principle, and because she likes also to be known.]

It's a long story, told properly. But we have time.

Has anyone shown you the pub?

Yes, a lovely woman named Iris bought me a drink. I'm not sure I'd be able to get in again, though-

[Still trying to get a grasp on where he is and isn't allowed to be.]

It's just that door only opens for wardens. There's not a hard limit unless someone demonstrates addiction problems.

But - which floor are you on? There should be a common room somewhere down the hall with couches and things, I'll meet you there.

Eight.

[Getting to his feet.]

Which end, either end?

[She grins, a bit wolfishly.]

Follow the cabin numbers going up until you see it. That one has a tree.

[Grown out of an oak coffee table when someone's temporary green powers got turbocharged, and uncannily symmetrical.]

A tree.

[Well... this place wasn't going to be normal, was it?

He'll be there in just a few minutes.]

[It is weird-looking, dappled here and there with chintzy Christmas ornaments to break up the otherwise absolute geometrical perfection of it, but otherwise it is small and sturdy, oak, clearly alive. She joins him on a couch next to, half-shaded, offers an open tupperware of chocolate chip cookies.]

Disconcerting, isn't it? But it doesn't hurt anyone.

[Well, at least with the crown he has no trouble recognizing her. He takes a cookie with a little nod of thanks, and settles down, still glancing curiously up at the branches.]

This is just part of the tapestry of everyday life here.

There was a bit of a fuss when it first grew. But now...yeah, it is.

[She takes one herself, breaks it into morsels, nibbles one. It's not that she's nervous, exactly - but she's made honesty something of an art, here, and something of a calling, deliberately baring her history and her turmoil, piece by piece. It's - an endeavor, to start again cold.]

When I was four years old, a mob set fire to the inn where my family was staying. I was trapped inside, and almost died.

My father saved me. And discovered, in doing so, that he had - abilities beyond human. Considerably beyond. He could manipulate metals with his mind, among other things. He slaughtered the mob with their own pokers and pitchforks, and took us to live in a fortress in the Alps.

[This story is nearly as strange to him as the Barge itself. Ricki's world is decidedly actual, no magic, no powers, no one even particularly special in it, just many men and women as cogs in complex systems.

Still, he listens, if with a little shock.]

He was angry - I mean, obviously. But he was an angry person. And paranoid, and damaged. He was a holocaust survivor. My mother, too. He protected her in the camps, but they'd both lost everyone else.

I was their new start. And the world almost took me too.

He was obsessed. Anyone, everyone was a threat to us. To him, and my little brother and sister, who soon showed powers of their own, and to others he found. To his building dreams of a new world, controlled by mutant power, which would obviously be so much better than what had come before -

I didn't, though. Get powers, I mean, and he - he acted like I'd betrayed him. Mama, too. We were human, and that meant that if we were not precisely the enemy, we were still - weak, worthless, untrustworthy.

So I grew up like that. Surrounded by people who came to his cause. Who would keep me in my place if they noticed me at all. Who only didn't kill me because my Father wouldn't let them, even though he treated me with bitterness and contempt. Trying to control the twins - because Mama gave up and he was too busy planning his war to be a parent - and never allowed the slightest bit of contact with the outside world, except what I could glean building radios out of sight and then disassembling them again before he could sense the components. I was lonely and angry and terrified all the time and couldn't show any of it.

Once I gave on being like him, being special enough and powerful enough, once I was too angry to admit I wanted his love back anymore - all I wanted was to escape.

Not a bad thing to want. I did very terrible things to make it happen.

My brother did run away, and my father - let him. And commanded me, at the same time, to find him, because he was my responsibility. And I still wasn't allowed to leave.

Of course it doesn't make sense. He didn't even think about it long enough to care that it didn't, do you understand? The important thing was that it was my fault, my failure, easy to blame, easy to dispense threats and return to his real concerns.

I convinced myself that my sister was my enemy - she was the only one who ever even tried to stand up for me, and when she wouldn't tell me where my brother was - he wrote to her, for awhile - it felt like an even worse betrayal. I was. Not insane in any sort of - exculpatory way. But I was not at all rational, either.

I tortured her. My baby sister, who trusted me, who I'd raised, the closest thing to a friend - and when she still wouldn't tell me, I killed her.

[Her tone is quiet. Heartfelt, aching, but not overwrought.]

My father thought even more fanatical elements in his own organization had done it, as a message. He never considered me, of course. I was a nonentity, too weak to be a threat.

My brother returned home, grief-stricken, stunned, and I convinced him that our father had done it. Manipulated them both, used my brother's connections to outside news reporters and my father's paranoia to get everything I wanted. My brother shot my father on camera, fully expecting him to stop the bullet. And my father died rather than expose mutant abilities to the world before he was ready for their coup.

And then I walked away. And then one of his followers killed me, of course. Less than twenty-fours later.

And then I was here. And it's a prison, it is, some of the things it does to people without their consent are absolutely unconscionable, but it was away from him and his people, and it was so much more free than anything I could remember. I had people who were kind to me for the first time I could remember. Who treated me like a person, instead of - of an unfortunate pet, the kind you really ought to put down, save for sentimentality. I got to explore strange and amazing places and it felt like everything I'd ever wanted.

And it made me face what I'd done. And it hurt, fuck, it hurt so much, because I was a mess back then, and it was so much easier to blame everyone else and suspect everyone else and be a bright bitter little liar. But I did, eventually. I admitted that I loved my sister, that I'd done her enormously wrong, learned not to deal with every hurt by walling up and plotting deep-laid ruthless revenge at the expense of everything else in my life. I learned not to be my Father. I built a better family.

And then - I was free to go. But where else would I go? Everyone I loved was here. Everyone who'd taught me to love, again, rough and slow. And I had a debt to my sister to pay, and - I wanted to. I wanted to help someone else the way my warden helped me.

It's not the same for everyone, I know that. Not everyone needs it the way I needed it. Sometimes instead of a miracle it is brutal and ridiculous and entirely unfair. Sometimes it is farcical.

But for me it's - good. And I'm good at it, wardening. I can make this place a little better for the people who aren't as suited to it. I'll go someday - but there are other people here I won't leave, not until they're free to choose too. So for now, it's home.

Edited 2015-03-09 20:05 (UTC)

[He does her the courtesy of listening. Even when the part of him that grew up around preachers with quick fists and a mind to beat the sin out of him thinks that she sounds like she's found Jesus, and is thus inherently untrustworthy, he keeps good and quiet and does her the courtesy of a serious listen.

In the end he decides, at the very least, that he believes her, and believes that she is better off now, in some small ways at least, than she was.]

Glad you found your niche, darling.

[Is the most supportive thing he can muster to say.]

Thank you.

[She smiles, a little skewed, mouth quirked up more on one side.]

I can hear you being diplomatic, you know.

[But she appreciates it.]

Thank you for listening.

One of the most important things to understand, I think, is that wardens are not the admiral. They didn't build this place, and they don't have the final say. We can petition him, but ultimately the admiral does, and he is generally an inscrutable condescending ass who cannot drive straight to save his life. I'm grateful to him for a lot of things, but facts are facts.

And most of the wardens here resent him quite a bit more than I do. They're here to get paid, or because they earnestly want to help people, or both, but that doesn't mean they approve of the shit he pulls. Usually the opposite. You can waste a lot of time thinking it's one group against the other, but mostly it's all of us trying to survive whatever he's dragging us through lately.

Well. [A little smile.] Diplomatic, maybe, but I am capable of telling that you're being very kind.

[And because of that, he listens to this too and takes it into account. Not an 'us' vs 'them,' necessarily, but a much larger and more complex cluster. Sounds a little like home, actually, and he finds himself nodding along.]

The admiral sounds to me like a bit of a drinker.

[He doesn't mean to change the topic, or make light. He's just in no position to reciprocate just yet.]

[She doesn't expect him to reciprocate; she kept her secrets for a long time. The comment about the admiral does take her by surprise, though, a loud bark of laughter snapping out of her.]

Well, that's a theory. Certainly fits at least some of the evidence.

I'll investigate while I'm here.

[Deciding, with a knowing little grin.]

Do you manage to do this for all the newcomers?

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fridgetothefire - 2015-03-15 15:18 (UTC) - Expand

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