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 Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 3:32 pm
Ashanite lay against the wall, eyes closed, still trying to shake off the wretched pounding in his head and aches elsewhere. He was also trying to ignore the cold feeling settling in his stomach, the abject fear that he would not live long enough to be rescued because his own mouth was going to get his neck snapped.
(Or that rescue wouldn't come for him - Shale would know he was gone, but knowing he was gone did not necessarily equate to caring he was gone.)
But if he wasn't alone here, maybe that would be enough - they would come for someone else, someone less useless, and he would get rescued mostly by accident.
And if there were other people here...
He knocked, as best he could with bound hands, on the wall behind him, hoping against hope that there was someone in the next cell. Losing his mind from panic and loneliness was a theoretical possibility; he wanted to stave it off.
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Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 7:12 pm
How long?
That was the question pounding in Zircon's mind, over and over again like it might have been a heartbeat. How long had she been there? How long until someone noticed she was missing? How long before rescue came? How long to the moment they give up the search? It was so hard to measure time without meals or clocks or daylight, when sleep came and went, disrupted only by small meetings with her ragtag band of captors. But she still had no idea what they'd taken her for, or why, or why her.
Something rapped lightly on the wall behind her, and she shifted from where she lay, nearly half asleep. She paused, staring at the empty surface, and then, tentatively, she reached out her bound legs and knocked back, three times in even meter.
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Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 10:23 pm
Ashanite had never been so glad to hear knocking in his life. There was someone on the other side of the wall - he had already inferred that there were multiple prisoners, but he was glad to have someone nearby.
"Hello?" He hoped his voice reached, though he couldn't be sure. Knocking had made it through, but he was definitely not fluent in Morse code or anything of the like, so it was down to hopefully-workable verbal communication. If they were going to communicate.
He wasn't sure that was wise, since he couldn't tell if there were guards or not, but...frankly, what was the worst that could happen? He was doomed anyway.
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Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2016 10:03 pm
There was a voice from the opposite wall, a lone, scared voice. After all the hopelessness and loneliness Zircon felt, the only response she could make was a single peal of laughter, low and desperate and whimpering. She had no spare hands to wipe the tears from her eyes, so she blinked until they ebbed away, curling around to face the wall. She'd spent all this time alone, it hadn't even occurred to her that there might be others.
She took a moment to compose herself, to breathe, and then she nodded, ready to respond. "I'm here," she said coolly, curling her body towards the wall to listen more closely. "I'm Captain Zircon. What's your name, agent?"
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Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2016 11:52 pm
A response was a response, even if it was just very unmirthful-sounding laughter at first. Not that he was going to judge hysterical giggles - he'd felt on the edge of it himself.
"Captain Ashanite," he said, and he let his relief show in his voice. There was someone else here, another Captain, and likely not one who had stumbled into it on luck alone. "Are you..." He wanted to say "alright," but they were locked in dank jail cells with no food and captors who were more than willing to hurt them. The answer to "are you alright", to any sane person, was "no."
"Are you injured?" He corrected for, instead. Because that was slightly better.
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 12:14 pm
Ashanite was not a name Zircon had heard of before, but that wasn't surprising--their ranks grew daily, and dozens of officers had been transferred from other outposts to help against the resistance found in Destiny City. Still, he was there, he sounded relatively healthy, and Zircon was ready to cling to just about anything to offset her fears.
"No, I'm fine," she called back, ignoring the pangs of pain in her wrists where she'd rubbed her skin raw. "These people aren't total zealots, they're just...I'm not sure what their motives are, really, other than to look for information that is pretty commonly known." The silence had been the worst part of it, stark and oppressive and choking down on the threads of sanity that Zircon held onto.
And now there was someone speaking to her from the other side of the wall, breaking the quiet. Kidnappers, checkmate.
"What about you? Are you hurt?" she asked, touching a bound hand to the cold wall in a move of solidarity. It seemed only polite to ask, after all.
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:12 pm
Ashanite node,d idly. Her assessment was fairly consistent with his - no one here seemed all that interested in actually torturing them. So far. Maybe it would get worse as time went on, who knew.
"I can't guess, either." He exhaled. "It seems so pointless. Were we targeted? Picked at random?" He didn't want to venture too much of a guess. That Knight hadn't seemed to know much about him, so maybe there wasn't proper information sharing going on.
He wasn't sure.
A slow exhale. "I was injured while being taken in, but so far, nothing serious." So far being the key phrasing. He groaned and laid his head against the wall, glad for the cold stone. "This whole thing is bloody ridiculous."
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 6:45 pm
"They grabbed me from behind, I couldn't say," she admitted, leaning against the wall. "No one I've talked to so far has known who I was, so I can't say I was particularly targeted."
"Leave it to the White Moon to have a horribly organized operation," she said with a bitter huff, nudging the dusty floor with her idle bootheels. She watched the motes of dirt and fluff resettle with a thin frown on her face, and then with an idea coming to mind, she softly smiled. "They didn't even think to properly separate us, it's ridiculous. They'd have no shot of success if not for...whatever is keeping us here."
Again came the pondering frown. "Have you tried to teleport? Nothing seems to work right here. I think they must be...jamming Chaos signals, somehow."
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Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2016 9:13 pm
Ashanite sighed heavily and squeezed his eyes shut.
"I thought the one upside of being Chaos was that this s**t would stop happening to me," he lamented, briefly. "But really, this is a disaster. We shouldn't be in adjacent cells."
He grit his teeth, briefly. "Unless that's the game, I suppose." Because f they ever actually stepped up, he and Zircon would be able to hear what was done to each other. That was an unpleasant thought.
"I hadn't -- I was't sure if I'd be able to focus well enough." He closed his eyes and inhaled, tried to teleport, and then to summon his weapon --
"Nothing."
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Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2016 9:08 pm
"Figures," Zircon spat darkly, glancing down at the chains at her heels. The first day of capture, she had tried and tried to teleport, succeeding only in exhausting any energy she might have had following the fog of waking up in a strange, hostile place.
But she couldn't give up hope just yet. The Negaverse was powerful, better organized, and by now they had to have noticed the disappearance of multiple officers of rank. Rescue was on the way. She just needed to keep up officer morale so they could fight if need be.
"...Never mind that, then," she began again, her words stilted as she thought to herself how to pass the time. "Tell me about yourself, Ashanite. What brought you to the Negaverse?"
It was a question she herself had trouble answering, but at the very least she knew they would have their service in common to talk about.
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2016 8:45 pm
Ashanite let himself think, turn over their situation. Less dizzy and with someone else to talk to, he could accept that it was likely someone would be coming for them - surely Order hadn't been so lucky as to scoop up entirely useless idiots like him.
Her asking him how he joined the Negaverse shouldn't have been funny, but it was, right then, and so he started to laugh, slightly hysterically.
"Oh, that's the grand ******** irony of all this, isn't it. I was forcibly corrupted. Made a good go at not being in the bloody Negaverse at all, got dragged in kicking and screaming." That was his story and he was sticking to it until he was completely sure it was pointless.
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 11:56 am
A...forced corruption? Well, that at least explained why she hadn't seen the Captain before. Perhaps she wasn't as out of the loop as she'd thought.
"Some people are more easily persuaded to see reason than others. It's not your fault that the White Moon got to you first." Zircon looked down at herself as she frowned. Was he actually...openly not satisfied with being on this side? She didn't think that sort of sentiment was allowed.
She struggled with herself for a moment, and then curiosity got the better of her. "...What was it like? Being on their side?" There was nothing like the confines of prison to encourage comradery in the form of sharing darkest secrets, after all.
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