pineslog | Are you alright?

Entry tags:

Are you alright?

Who: Aloy, Lantar, birds and anyone!
Where: Forest and behind Weavers
When: May 13th, May 16th
What: Bird watching and poor coping.
Warnings: Psychological problems galore!
[Open and Closed prompts within]

Dissociate - May 16 - OTA

It starts with a quiet flinch.

Early evening leaves pools of deep orange light spilling from the windows, reflecting off of the dark wood of each table, mixing in with the cooler artificial lighting. Lantar stops in the middle of wiping a table down, gaze lost in the shadowy, blurry outline of himself reflecting back from polished wood, unseeing. The sound of drinking and talking fades into a formless din around him.

The moment passes as quickly as it comes.

A few hours past his shift and Lantar is out back near the trash bins, surrounded by broken glass. He doesn’t remember how long he’s been there, only that he’d come down to load some empty bottles into his truck for recycling. Any passersby will see him just standing there, harshly lit by fluorescent light, the shards around him glittering black against the tarmac.

Any passerby will see him yanking another unbroken bottle out from a crate and throwing it into the wall. Into the ground. Against the truck. Over and over, again and again. He doesn’t yell. Doesn’t curse. It’s an eerily silent mania broken only by the crash of shattering glass.

Bird Watching Birds - May 13th - Closed to Aloy

As a general rule, Lantar almost never left his house unless it was for work. He did his grocery shopping while topping up the snacks for the bar. He sometimes dropped in to check up on things after his shift was over. He was usually on call in case customers after wanted to give any of his employees trouble.

His existence outside of the bar was mostly just sleeping. Forcing down food he can’t taste when he can manage it. Drinking if he’s ever up long enough to contemplate his existence, staring out the window into the scraggly, suburban wilderness his yard was becoming. The inside of the house is a mess, but it’s a mess only he has to see, so he lives with it.

But one day, late in the afternoon, he drops by the library after his shift.

And then he sort of... disappears.

Near the edge of a small clearing next to the river, somewhere in the forest, Lantar flicks his omni-tool off after doing a quick scan to make sure there weren’t any cameras in the area. He then pulls out a little green book. Written on it in bold white text was ‘Birds of Idaho: Field Guide’.

Wrapping the dark green tarp tighter around his shoulders, he settles down against the base of a cheerfully budding birch tree and waits.

Wildcard - OTA

((OOC: You can ping me at

zapperkat or PM me if you’d like to do a thing!))

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The sound of breaking bottles is almost harsh to Sissel's cat ears but it brings him closer all the same. Being a small kitten, he deftly steps between the broken shards, coming under the same fluorescent lights with Lantar. He mews a high-pitched mew meant to grab attention and peers up at him.

The voice that rings out in Lantar's head is one of a friendly young man's, one that probably doesn't seem like it fits the age of the young black kitten sitting before him.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

She's still sorting out memories, of Pines and of her previous life, but she knows she doesn't like the cameras, and she knows she often feels more at home in the woods than she does in the house that's apparently hers. Of course Aloy is likely to wander out among the trees and see if it triggers any more memories. She moves quietly, because that's at least a thing she remembers to do, periodically checking her Focus for cameras.

It's the Focus that alerts her to someone huddled in a tarp, in fact, highlighting him with a purple glow. She drops to a crouch in automatic muscle memory, sneaking closer in a burst of muscle memory that is almost a surprise, though not completely at this point. When she's close enough to see who it is, though, Aloy stands, and steps into full view.

"Lantar." It's a greeting and an acknowledgement, and she's even a little glad to see him. He was straight with her, after all, or at least as straight as anyone's been able to be with her. "I didn't expect to find you out here."

The little meow stops Lantar before he could throw another bottle, head snapping around- and down. For a moment he doesn't answer, just watching the little intruder, slowly lowering his arm.

Are cats supposed to talk? According to Pines, that's a solid 'no'. According to Omega, he's never seen a cat before in his life. He inhales and runs drags his claws over his crest before sighing and letting it drop back down to his sides.

"No."

There's a defeated finality to the words. Idly spinning the bottle in his hand between thumb and forefinger, Lantar takes in the mess he'd made, glimmering around them.

"Don't get any closer," he warns quietly. "You're gonna cut your feet up."

Glass crunching under his boots, he opens Weaver's back exit and snatches the broom up from its spot beside the door.

Lantar nearly jumps out of his carapace when Aloy pops into view. The field guide goes flying and he yelps, trying to snatch it out of the air before it hit the damp soil- without tearing it up with his claws.

It's a good few seconds of overdramatic juggling before he manages to catch it between forearm and elbow. Puffing a sharp little breath of relief, he swivels his head around to peer at her, eyes wide, tarp scattered around him in a heap.

"Oh," he utters. "Heyyy."

Okay, it's been a while since he's had a human sneak up on him. How hell had she been so damn quiet?

Carefully placing the guide book down on his lap, he clamps his mandibles against his jaw, watching her quietly for a moment.

"We're, uh. Not really supposed to be out here."

And yet, here he was. And here she was. In the woods where a lot of screaming happens and no one wants to talk about it.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

There's honest apology there, though she wouldn't really have done anything else, either. From a distance, she wasn't sure who he was, or what he was, for that matter. The wilds might be a place she feels at home in, but she also expects danger to be behind the next tree. She has too many memories of machines, many of which would attack on sight. And, let's face it, Lantar is a little metallic-looking.

Aloy crouches down near him, picking up the tarp in an attempt to help clean up from her arrival.

"Of course they don't want us out here," she says, darkly. "They can't see us here. That's all the more reason to be here."

"If you weren't looking to startle, you shouldn't've been sneaking," Lantar gripes- and then immediately regrets it, but he does his best to cover that up.

The less Aloy likes him, the better things were in the long-run, really. It's just generally easier to avoid people than being a caustic asshole all the damn time. Less energy and fuck knows he doesn't have a lot of that these days.

Pushing up onto his feet, he sighs and dusts off.

"If they're looking, they'd know we're here," he says eventually, subvocals muted and flat. "They've got trackers tuned to our biometrics."

"I didn't know who you were," Aloy says with a shrug. She's not going to apologise for being stealthy in the first place, only for the accidental surprise. Some things are important, and no one got hurt, which is the important part. Let him gripe. "You could have been anyone."

And honestly, the idea that they're being tracked beyond the cameras is not... entirely unexpected. If it's in their power, then of course they would do that. Aloy looks up at him with her jaw set stubbornly. "If they're tracking us, then they know where we are wherever we do," she says, her voice low. "Here, there's at least some privacy. I'll take what I can get, right now."

Sissel stops in his tracks obligingly, tail flicking as he watches Lantar work.

"Thank you," for worrying. The glass won't be able to cut me though. He thinks, which would still be audible to Lantar. "Bad day?"

He knows that she had good reasons for sneaking, but he's not about to apologize, dammit. Instead, Lantar's going to fold his arms and sulk, book clutched to his chest, radiating an air of general peevishness.

"I'm just here for to see some fucking birds." Nope. Not bothered by the 24/7 invasion of his privacy at all. "If any asshole officer pops up, that's your story too. Don't implicate me in your sneaking, you get me?"

Mostly, he's just glad she didn't ask how he found out about the tracker.

"Birds?"

She doesn't think he's hunting birds, and truthfully she hasn't seen much in the way of huntable sorts of birds anyway, but then, Aloy certainly understands watching things for general interest's sake.

"Is there something about the birds that's unusual?" Better to get that thought out there, rule it out. She looks at him with her head tilted to one side. "Or is that a hobby?"

"It's- I-"

Well, the thing is, he's never seen birds before in his life until... here. Or something.

It's strange because he remembers birds in Pines. He remembers seeing them all his life, growing up here, learning about them, reading about them. A strange, constant background noise, a weird dinge on a glossy that'd been there for decades only to just be noticed.

But all remembers from Omega was a distant memory of a hologram display, a flock of white birds around a white winged human with a halo glimmering around their head.

"... I dunno. I just started watching them from my porch one morning and got kinda curious. So I checked this out?"

Holding up the guide, he shrugs before hesitating and... holding the book out to Aloy.

"If there is anything weird about 'em, I wouldn't have the first clue, really."

"They can be interesting to watch, if you have the time," she agrees. "Or listen to."

Aloy gives him a long look, considering him. It's hard to parse Lantar, sometimes; he's too strange a person. Neither set of memories includes turians, after all. If people look so different where turians are from (and she's sure he's from somewhere else, just like she's from somewhere else, just like everyone has to be from somewhere else), what do the birds look like there?

A field guide to birds, though. She doesn't take it, isn't sure if she's supposed to, but she gives a nod. "That looks useful, though. What have you seen?"

When she doesn't take the proffered book, Lantar stiffly retracts his arm, putting the guide up almost as a shield between them. Actually answering the woman doesn't go much better, the words rolling out in awkward, nervous starts and stops.

"There's. Uh. There's these. Doves? Mourning doves." He flips the page to said dove, showing her the pictures. "And song sparrows. And- a fuckload of starlings."

SO many starlings.

"Apparently starlings are invasive or something. I dunno what that means. They're like, from somewhere else, I guess? Invaded the place or something. They're pretty neat looking for invaders though."

Yeah, he doesn't exactly have a formal education either. Not in Pines and definitely not on Omega.

Considering only one set of Aloy's memories has a formal education, and it's not the one she thinks is real, she's not about to judge.

"I suppose you could put any animal where it doesn't belong, and it would cause problems," she says, her mouth thinning. "Doesn't matter how pretty they are. It's almost too bad."

Still, it's interesting, and almost automatically she brings her hand up to her ear as she uses her Focus to scan the pages he's showing her. Just in case, you know, she wants to look at them later. You never know.

"That sounds like a metaphor for living in this shit hole if I ever heard one." There's a cynical dryness between the layers of his voice. "They're looking good and handling the weather here better than I am, either way."

Lantar says, still wearing two ponchos in +18c.

He watches her as she touches the strange little triangle on the side of her head and blinks, tilting his head.

"That some kinda wearable?"

"I would have thought you'd be too warm dressed like that, honestly." She wasn't going to say anything, but he brought it up first. It's a really nice day, after all, not too warm, not too chilly.

As far as her Focus goes, Aloy hesitates a little, glancing at Lantar with a bit of a frown. "Not sure what you mean by 'wearable,'" she says. "It's my Focus. I was scanning the pages, in case I wanted to read them later."

"Look, my species comes from the second most irradiated dirtball this side of the galaxy. Anything under thirty c is freezing."

Not that he's ever seen homeworld, but the point still stands. Omega was a sweltering hell for humans and a lot of other species, but Turians handled the place easy as snack meat. Politics aside, anyways.

"Oh, uh." Shifting slightly, head dipping in something vaguely like apology, Lantar shrugs stiffly before continuing. "Wearable's just any kind of smart gadget that you wear on you. Like, uh..."

Propping the book up between his chin and the front of his cowl, the Turian holds the pages open with his mandibles as he rolls the sleeve up on his right arm. Under the cloth is what looks to be a thin, flat bracelet of sorts made of some kind of flexible material.

"This Omni-tool's a wearable for example. It's got a full onboard system alongside a suite of sensors and standard fabrication abilities." An orange glow wraps around his forearm as he boots the system up.

"Whereas a tablet can probably do all of that too, but you don't, well. Wear it."

"So that's why I've never seen a turian before. You're from another world entirely."
Which is mind-blowing, honestly. She had a vague sense of worlds around other stars, too distant to reach, gleaned from old recordings in ruins and watching the stars growing up. That Earth was round she could work out on her own, but much of the rest was mere speculation. The word 'alien' comes to mind, but that's a word from her Pines memories. "There are similarities between humans and animals, and you never fit into any category I could think of." Like a naked bird with the armor and mouthparts of an insect, which honestly look fairly useful just at the moment. "But you wouldn't, would you?"

Aloy settles herself nearby. It's probably not nice to examine him like an experimental specimen. It's definitely not nice, come to think of it, and he really hasn't done anything to deserve being treated like that. He's a person. She has so many questions, though.

And honestly, the Omni-tool is nearly as fascinating; she leans over to look at it better.

"It's... yes, okay, my Focus is a wearable by that definition." Aloy looks back to Lantar's face, a faint smile on her face. It's her own variety of grave delight, subdued but there nonetheless. "I'd say my Focus is probably fairly similar. Are they common where you're from? What sort of fabrication? That's not something my Focus can do."

"I- well. no."

It's still so weird talking to humans who've just... never seen anything but other humans. That little time span at the start of the month after a slew 'accidents' where people just didn't know what a Turian was.

Lantar had grown up in a galactic nexus and, sure, it was a shitty nexus, but Omega was still home to nearly every known (and probably some unknown) species in the galaxy. Millions of them all crammed into one place, everything from Volus to Vorcha. In some ways, it was a lot more diverse than even the Citadel.

He... can't imagine what it's like to not know that.

Folding the field guide with his mandibles, he tucks the book into the bowl of his cowl, just staring at Aloy for a long moment.

"Omni-tools are pretty much standard issue on a lot of colonies." There's something about the way she smiles that has him dipping his head awkwardly, eyes falling to the glowing tool on his forearm. "They're like, well, phones around here. The main mode of communication. I think the Asari standardized it or something. The Asari kind of did everything."

There's a brief pause as Lantar brings up the rendering platform. Glowing letters float above it but, to Aloy, it will just like alien gibberish without a tool of her own to translate Turian Standard.

"Fabrication is just, uh. You can print stuff, basically. A lot of Omni-tools come with minifacturing capabilities, mine included. It can break some stuff down into Omni-gel or use Omni-gel to make things. Like machine parts for example."

Another little stop here, the alien text blinking between them. Then an awkward little shrug.

"... I'd show you, but I don't really have any gel on hand."

Aloy frowns a little, trying to work this out. This is partly a new concept "So if you had some omnigel, you could put it into your Omni-tool, and it will make whatever you need. Do I understand you right?" That's... incredible, and her awe shows. "I wonder if the old ones had machines that would do that. I've never heard of anything exactly like that, but maybe similar enough."

She touches her Focus again, running a finger over the tiny triangle. It can't make sense of the alien alphabet, which is annoying, but she has to guess that the people who made it weren't thinking about situations like this. It tackles human languages well enough, though. Possibly it could be taught, with time. If Lantar were willing to teach her.

"I found my Focus in a ruin when I was a child," Aloy says. "I think in the world of the old ones they were very common, as common as your Omni-tool is. But you're actually living in a world like that."

"Pretty much," he shrugs. "Plastics, glass, ceramics, metals. Common stuff. I can probably melt something down for it."

And he has, it's just- mostly small stuff, like repairing a chipped glass or fixing the TV.

Of course, Aloy kind of loses him at 'old ones' and he offers her a blank look for the duration of her speculation on that front. 'Old ones' isn't really a term he's familiar with in this context.

"What do you mean?" he prompts her after a few seconds. "Like, what, the tech just got wiped out something?"

"Basically, yes." Aloy's expression is grim; there's no other way to be with this sort of discussion, really. "It was almost a thousand years ago. The people of that time made machines, and some of those machines destroyed everything."

Her mouth twists. "I don't know everything, though I know more about it than most people. It was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, after all. A lot of knowledge was lost. Most people have no idea what a Focus is. A lot of people think I have second sight, because of what it can show me." She shrugs. "I try not to encourage that, but people will believe what they want, I've found."

"..."

Lantar's staring at her, eyes as big as dishes, mandibles spread slightly in an expression of baffled surprise. Eventually, he manages to gather himself up and he eases back, shifting his weight, bafflement replaced by something a bit more thoughtful.

"Okay. According to my rudimentary understanding of human history, I've- yeah, I've never heard of you guys getting your own Geth takeover."

Running his hand along his fringe, he mentally turns the new pieces of information over before taking a slow breath.

This isn't the first time he's spoken with a human whose knowledge of history was different from what he knew.

"... You wanna go for a walk?" he asks suddenly. "I think it might be a good time to go for a walk."

It's easier to think and walk anyways.

Aloy looks at him for a moment, her head tilted to one side. Is this is a distraction? She hopes not. For one, she's not so easily distracted. "All right," she says. "That's what I came out here for in the first place."

She stretches a little, waiting for him. "What is a Geth?" she asks. "Is it a type of Machine?"

Context suggests it is. "Has that sort of thing happened where you're from, too? What happened?"

"Not to my species, but to the Quarians."

As they start walking, he pulls up an image of a Quarian from his Omni-tool's databanks.

"Couple of hundred years ago, the Quarians started creating these like, simple AI to do manual labor work. After that things get kinda vague: most of the data was destroyed. Far we know, the Geth basically meshed their intelligence and got self aware. After that, they started a rebellion that ended up with most of the Quarian population dead and the survivors now travelling around on the Migrant Fleet."

He brings up another image of a Geth after that, an image of the Migrant Fleet- then a map of the galaxy with various names labeled out in Turian Standard.

"The entire region of space is basically off-limits now. Full-on Geth territory and you only go there if you've got a deathwish of some sort." As he talks, Lantar highlights the system and then zooms in on Rannoch and its neighbors. "Every ship that's been sent there's pretty much never come back and we basically know nada about their current residents."

"Anyways, research into AI got banned in Council Space after that."

This is a lot to take in. For one, the image of the Geth is fascinating in its own right; it reminds her a little of a Watcher given arms and a humanoid body, but she can see its similarity to the Quarians, which are the second alien people she's seen. It's the image of the galaxy that has her eyes widen, with a small intake of breath. Abstractly, she knows stars are distant suns, and that worlds may (and evidently do) orbit them. She's never seen a map of the galaxy, however. That's a little aweing.

"That's what the galaxy looks like?"

Okay, at the very least, she needs to take a trip to the library to look into this.

"It sounds to me like the Quarians at least had good intentions, which is more than I can say for the Faro corporation." Aloy grimaces; there's anger in her voice. "The machines they made -- well, they called them Peacekeepers, but they were made for war. Some of them could turn other machines to their side, and some of them could make more of them. And they could fuel themselves by 'eating' biomatter. Plants, animals, people. Anything available." The stupidity of it is overwhelming to her, sometimes. "They got out of control, and they destroyed everything, poisoned the air and water. It took less than two years."

Images would help, but the Focus displays to her only. A file can be passed from Focus to Focus, she knows that. Perhaps she can send an image to Lantar's Omni-tool? It's at least worth a try. Aloy pulls up her display, and flicks her fingers through the air as she navigates the UI.

"There was one woman. Her name was Elisabet Sobeck. She started a project to make an AI called GAIA that would be able to shut down the Faro machines afterwards, and rebuild everything over again with her own terraforming machines. Most of the machines that are still around are GAIA's, though there were some people who were digging up the old machines and fixing them." Her disgust is obvious in her voice. "Here, I'm going to try something."

With that, she sends the files over. She doesn't see any reason for it not to work, unless his Omni-tool is far too different to make sense of her Focus's information. There's a Corruptor, a Deathbringer, a massive Horus Titan. Then, some of GAIA's machines, the ones Aloy knows so well: a Watcher, a Grazer,, a Tallneck,. Finally, there's an image of Elisabet herself, and the uncanny resemblance between her and Aloy is obvious, though Elisabet is obviously older, and long dead.

The wonder on Aloy's face at the sight of their home galaxy makes Lantar smile, despite himself. A slight slant of his eyes, there and gone in a blink and likely lost to interspecies barriers. It's still so weird that so many of the humans around here have just- never even been off-world.

As for her attempt at testing out the compatibility of their NFC tech, unfortunately, the two devices ran on very different systems and very different networks. The ping kind of just ricochets off into the void. Sorry, Aloy! You'll need to unlock the Alien Technology Modding Achievement first!

In the meantime, oblivious, the Turian mostly just watches her with a rather unreadable expression, a sidelong glance as he carefully matches his long strides to hers. It comes to him easier than he wants to think about, more familiar than he cares to admit, falling into step with a human again after so long.

"Wait, so like, completely destroyed everything in two years?"

Because that's what is sounds like but what it sounds like is pretty fucking unbelievable. Running his hand over his neck, he tries to imagine it, tries to imagine Pines just- gone. It's difficult though, oddly disconnected. He's used to the claustrophobic confines of Omega: even after his months here, it was still all so unsettlingly alien.

"I mean, there's more than one way to fuck up a planet, like the Krogans kind of just... nuked it." On the other hand, the Krogans didn't seem to care too much and kind of just kept living on it regardless. "But robots destroying everything is- yeah, that's new."

Although thinking about it now, he idly wonders if the Geth terraformed Rannoch after they'd kicked their creators out of the system. Whatever happened to the Quarian homeworld? Was it something like what she'd described?

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Are you alright?

May 16th

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