abraxaslogs | Per Aspera ★ October catch-all ★ Open

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Per Aspera ★ October catch-all ★ Open

Who: Shepard and various + Open
When: October
Where: Around Cadens and Shepard's Horizon
What: Shooting Range practice & lessons, social mingle, and some planned threads
Warnings: guns, cursing, likely discussion of violence

I. Range at the Horizon
The Normandy loomed over the shooting range, all two-hundred sixteen meters of sleek faster-than-light spacecraft. It was parked, ignominiously, on the dirt itself in very much the way that the real Normandy would only have been if it were trapped in dry-dock for repairs.

Today's occasion is nothing so necessary.

Instead, on the ground-space aft of the cargo hold there's been set up a shooting range. It looks a little makeshift, but it's serviceable enough. The Horizon's ubiquitous wish-fulfillment makes set-up and tidying simple enough, for a start.

Off to the left, there stand a few weapons racks, featuring a variety of firearms ranging from the types of firearms that might be familiar to any member of the Cadens military to a row of oddly-shaped rectangular devices representing weaponry native to Shepard's own home-universe, each gun neatly folded-down and in its place.

There are half-a-dozen shooting lanes with targets of varying distance and sophistication, ranging from holographic figures posed in attitudes of threat, paper cut-outs with zones of deadliness printed on them, vaguely humanoid outlines in plywood, aluminum, and sand-backed paper. There's even a line of bottles perched on a metal crate off to one side: the labels are printed in an alien script, and not all of them are completely empty. The lanes themselves are nothing more glamorous than strips of soil and grass, with an odd mix of gravel, beachsand, and whatever else had come in from the bordering Domains. Shepard had chosen this spot specifically for its position at the crux of several, unclaimed, and unlikely to be contested; all the better for a meeting-place.

In any case, Shepard is on-hand to assist. There's even a sign:

PRACTICE RANGE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
help yourself if you know what you're doing
assistance available upon request

II. Rager at the Horizon
The cargo bay of the Normandy stands open, the wide bay door slid down to form a sturdy ramp, and up in the belly of the ship itself, amongst the crates and spare machinery is... a wet bar? Well, it's a table surface, and there are a variety of options, which may or may not be familiar. Serrice Ice Brandy, Batarian Fire-whiskey... Ryncol? Maybe you just want to stick with a nice beer, or seltzer-water, or maybe someone here should reconsider the combination of guns and alcohol.

Or maybe you should just go home, if you're going to be a coward about it.

In any case, Shepard is there, standing behind the bar, sitting around in the shade having a drink, or just messing around with the equipment. Step on up, and have a go, why don't you? It's hardly a wild party, but it's not as if anyone has anything better to do.

III. October Event
[ TBA ]

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She's vaguely aware of someone in her periphery, but when they don't outright interrupt her, she sees no reason to stop. Aloy empties her quiver, but despite knowing full well she can instantaneously fill it again in order to continue, she hangs up her bow momentarily, nodding in greeting.

"Less bored than usual." But not in a good way--Thorne's attack on the Free Cities and the retaliation in kind has thrown everything into a state of flux. Unfortunately, conflict is what she knows, and in some ways she'll take it over sitting idle, doing farm work. Whether or not the war will come to Solvunn itself has yet to be seen.

"Is all this yours?"

"Yep. This is Normandy," And she's proud of that, too, "You couldn't do much terraforming from in there, but it's got its advantages."

Shepard glances around. It's pretty small, as Domains seem to go; Normandy was a large enough ship, larger than some people's safe-places, and it certainly looked impressive, perched over them like a great silver bird, but... Well, it was no mountainside, or italian beach idyll, or any of the other half-dozen sprawling constructions she'd seen.

Still. It was home.

"Yeah, it's going around. Compared to my usual workload, it isn't much, but... I've been keeping busy. Set this up to help a few people learn to deal with the technology angle," She considers Aloy for a moment, and then scoffs, conceding a point that has not yet been made. The kid might look like she fell out of a bush and into a scrapheap, but Shepard's not stupid enough to forget what little she does know about Aloy, "—Though I think that's not a problem you have."

Aloy is fairly impressed--it's smaller than the Zenith base, certainly, but easier to imagine it making its way through the stars. All of that is still a lot to wrap her head around, but it helps that she's naturally curious. Maybe, once she works her way through some space-related trauma, she might want to see inside.

For now, the firing range is a good conversation piece. She hasn't yet felt a need to reach for the more futuristic weapons, but she can appreciate the general setup.

"No, but it's good to get some practice in." The weapons she has in the real world, in Solvunn, are still somewhat lacking. Instructing other Summoned isn't a bad idea, not with the looming political situation. "Any takers?"

"There's been a little chatter, but you're the first to actually show up," Shepard admits, with some emphasis. If people are cowards, or neglectful, then at least it can't be said that she didn't do her due diligence. All the better for when, and if, she ended up having to look at them down the wrong end of a rifle, "Could be worse; you're at least interesting to talk with."

Badass gingers at the end of the world. Shepard could get to like Aloy.

"Y'know, it's a long walk, but you could come up by Free Cities for real, sometime. Work with the military proper, they got better equipment than anybody else on this dirtball. And, there's less bullshit," Ah, but she sees you eying up her tech, "Wanna give it a shot? I could bring out the big ones, seeing as you know what you're about."

She gestures with a jerk of her chin at the target, all studded with arrows in meaningful clusters.

"Really?"

She can understand a lack of interest in learning to fight, but surely others must see the value in the practice of self-defense, especially given the way things seem to be going. Disappointing, maybe, that there have been no takers.

Shepard's suggestion is, somehow, more surprising. Aloy has no doubts that she could make the trip from Solvun to Cadens, treacherous as it may be. Trying to work a way around being stopped at the border would likely be the most difficult part, given her survival skills. Still, it wouldn't be the first time she managed to talk her way into a city where she ostensibly wasn't welcome.

"I'm not sure I'm cut out to work with an army." She knows by now that she functions better alone, or with a small team. Aloy doesn't necessarily like taking orders, and she likes the idea of aligning herself with the politics of this place even less. "But yeah, I can give that a try. What do you have?"

Edited 2022-10-15 19:15 (UTC)

"Maybe, or maybe you've never had a good commander," Shepard temporizes, tilting her head this way and that, to exemplify the options, "I'm angling to get the Free Cities military to let me employ specialists under my authority, but with their backing. It's a whole... loyalty process, it's honestly a pain in the ass, but if I get the commission, you wouldn't be working with any army. You'd be working with me."

Hands spread, options on the table; there you go, Aloy. An offer, and a real one. Shepard gives her a minute to think about it, cracking open a crate. It's theater, really, she knows she could simply conjure whatever she wants right into her hands, but Shepard prefers the illusion of reality. This is where the heavy weapons would be stored, in reality, after all.

"Just something to think about— oh here we go," She hefts it out, a bulky, angular piece of equipment, requiring both hands and plenty of muscle to wield, "Arc projector. Takes a couple seconds to charge though, so it's a little fiddly in-action, but it's perfect for taking down synthetics. Try it."

Here you go, Aloy. Have a crack at it.

"Just watch the arc distance. It's a little grabby, you'll see what I mean."

Edited 2022-10-15 21:35 (UTC)

"I don't answer to commanders. Never have."

She's known to collaborate, on occasion, but Aloy is fairly infamous for not taking orders from anyone, unless their goals align. The thought of being part of a military outfit, even one lead by a fellow Summoned, doesn't quite sit right with her. Solvunn is boring, sure, but the longer she stays there, the more she feels that she needs to offer her protection.

The gun provides a good distraction, at least, to carrying on about the logistic difficulties of making her way to the Free Cities without being detained, and she hefts it in her grip before lining up the sight and getting a feel for the shape of it.

She chooses a target, aims, and--woah. Shepard isn't wrong about it. A weapon like this reminds her of something torn off a machine, and she's off by a little, not quite compensating for how unwieldy it is.

That's got a kick, huh?"

"Less than it should, more than you'd think," Shepard replies, the cadence lending the phrase the clear taste of a joke gone so stale and shared by so many that it's gone from humor into lesson, "Best use is against big mechs. It's too slow to keep you going, but cutting down their shields makes finishing the job a lot easier."

She doesn't bother to argue with never have. Nobody's ever done anything, until the day they do; but it's true enough to say, that Shepard doesn't know Aloy. Still, if she had to guess, and at the moment she does, she'd say that the kid has never met anyone outside of childhood that she really, truly needed to rely on for guidance. She's smart, driven, and seems either competent or over-confident. But then, that second one tended to kill you, one way or another.

Either way, Solvunn was a long ways away; technically Aloy was none of Shepard's business, and not her problem.

"Not that it matters. You won't meet a lot of mechs on this planet, even if we had that kind of tech to put up against 'em," It's still fun to imagine, watching Aloy squaring up against the target, "Let me know when you get bored, and wanna try something a little more practical. Or just take your pick, you're a big girl."

"Yeah, I can see that."

She's couching it in what she knows about machine hunting--ripping the heavy weapon off of something and then unleashing that power in turn. Useful, situationally. Fun to play around with, in a place like this. It's possible that she's purposefully neglecting to further address Shepard's plans, and the weapons are a good distraction.

For now, she'll set the current firearm aside and start to peruse everything else on offer, but she doesn't make a choice just yet.

"Do you fight a lot of mechs?"

"I do indeed," Shepard replies, content to leave the rest where it lies, "Geth, mostly. Sometimes Reapers, or other machines. It's more usually just people; you might be surprised how often a steady payday is enough incentive for someone to go out and get dead."

Because that's what happens when they come up against her, almost universally; there's risk-reward calculus and then there's stupidity. Sometimes, it's time to quit your job while you're still ahead. On impulse, Shepard steps up beside Aloy and with a moment's focus one of the holographic targets shimmers and shifts— until it is a very faithful, if harmless, recreation of a Geth Hunter, standing head and shoulders over them both, sleek and imposing with its white armor and seeking eye.

"There's a Geth for you, one of the little ones. What do you fight?"

It certainly sounds like they have a lot in common, provided “Geth” and “Reapers” are just other words for different types of machines. The comment about people, too, resonates with Aloy—for as much as she’s out in the wilds fighting whatever Hephaestus throws at her, more often than not it’s just people. She wishes it weren’t.

“Not surprised at all, actually.”

The appearance of a human-shaped machine is a little surprising. She’s so used to Gaia’s proclivity for animals and megafauna that the thought of a bipedal machine hasn’t really occurred to her.

“I hunt machines. They’re not really human-shaped, though.”

Well, she doesn't lack for confidence.

Actually, it's a little much; is this what people feel like when they're talking to Shepard? It could easily be mistaken for arrogance; Shepard finds herself trying to find something vicious to say, or something impressive.

It oughtn't to be so satisfying when it's the Geth, of all things, that does seem to surprise her. Still, that spark of curiosity is it's own source of intrigue.

Interesting kid, this Aloy.

"Hunt machines?" Shepard wouldn't put it that way, for all the ra ra good hunting rhetoric of Alliance Marines, they don't usually need to go out and hunt anything. Humanity's last few wars have all been defensive in nature, to no little frustration, "Usually it's the other way around; believe it or not, Geth aren't actually shaped like humans. Quarians built 'em, not us, but they got out of hand and now the Geth have made themselves everybody's problem."

"Sure."

The choice of words was, of course, intentional. Sometimes the machines want to kill her. Sometimes Aloy needs a mount, or parts for ammo, or shards. She'd rather hunt them than fight them, though of course all too often those words are entirely interchangeable.

"Sounds familiar," she says--it's not exactly the same, but the cauldrons churning out machines, and the ongoing issue of the Derangement is everyone's problem. The only question is whether the Quarians are artificial intelligence, or something else. "Everybody's problem."

"Yeah?" Shepard holds out her hands. Give her the arc projector, Aloy, she's gonna try you on something a little more refined, "I guess that makes sense."

Given the piles of crap in her base, and the general... getup. Handy, the way everybody seems to look like they're at home, in the Horizon; it could be misleading, too.

"The Geth," She indicates the hologram with a tip of her head, "Took the Quarian's whole planet. Kicked them out into space, and kept it for themselves, and the Quarians had to spend their lives wandering around in a migrant fleet, just to survive. Pretty good example of why you don't make robots smart enough to have opinions, and if you're gonna do it anyways, you don't let them self-replicate. You wouldn't think people would need that one spelled out, but..."

A shrug. Here, try a rifle. She wants to see if you know how to hold it right, without being told.

"...If that sounds familiar to you... Gotta say, your world is in bigger trouble than I thought."

Edited 2022-11-12 07:15 (UTC)

Aloy doesn't object to the weapon swap, and is quick to inspect the rifle when it's handed to her. Certainly beyond anything she's ever used (the more advanced weapons she tears off machines are generally much heavier), but it's easy enough to figure out how it works.

She raises it and looks down the sight, testing the weight, widening her stance a little to adjust for assumptive kickback.

"Yeah, it's not quite that." Not yet, anyway. In fact, she'd just put down an outside attempt to conquer Earth, albeit not one begun by machines. There's still more work to do, but she'd bought everyone more time than they'd have otherwise. Her eyebrows furrow in a way that indicates she's thinking about what to say next. "You've been to other planets? What's that like?"

Edited 2022-11-14 17:56 (UTC)

She watches Aloy hold it, and then adjust the hold, sighting along it. She clearly has some idea, but is she deriving it from seeing pictures, or being told, or just figuring it from the shape of the thing? It's not experience, not directly, of that Shepard is sure.

Shepard steps in, after a minute, and puts a hand on Aloy's shoulder, automatic, thoughtless warning; I'm gonna touch you, don't startle. Then she reaches forward and pulls the gun a little higher, more snug, against the cup of muscle in her shoulder.

"Don't brace against the bone like that. Horizon might be fake, but it'll still hurt if you break your shoulder," Or at least it would if she did it inside the domain of someone who knew better, Shepard assumes. Always better not to learn bad habits in the first place, "Other planets are, uh..."

She stops to think, using the half-step back for a thinking pause. It feels strangely awkward, almost intimate. Shake it off, soldier.

"I love Earth, but if I had to live my whole life there I think I'd have lost my mind. Getting out there, seeing new places, meeting people who can't even imagine life the way I saw it... It's the best part of the job. New horizon every week. New problems to go with 'em, of course, but it's not boring. It's good. Did you wanna ask anything specific?"

Though it certainly hasn't happened in many years, Aloy is not a stranger to someone sidling up behind her to correct her stance. She takes the instruction, adjusting as Shepard nudges her around, then waits for her to step back and out of the way before she aims again.

"Not really," she says, because this is already a lot of information to chew on. It all still seems so impossible to her, but she's coming around to it. "I met some...spacefarers, once." There's definitely a story here, but she seems reluctant to say more than that. "Let's just say they weren't exactly friendly."

"Now that sounds like a story," Shepard observes in open invitation. She folds her arms and waits for Aloy to take her shot, staring placidly downrange, watching the target, "In your bunker, the walls looked like something I'd have seen in an Alliance pre-fab. A little more, uh... robust than most pre-fabs, whatever else the decor was doing."

It had been an intriguing contrast; Shepard's not immune to curiosity just because she doesn't usually have time for it. She is still human, after all.

"How does all that and the uh— bow and arrows, square with there being spacers?"

It sure is a story, one Aloy isn't sure she wants to tell yet, but she guesses if anyone's going to understand, it's someone who has spent a good deal of their career in space.

Luckily, she has a moment with which to stall, which she does by firing the gun. Not quite on target, just yet--there are adjustments to be made as she gets used to the weight of it in her hands and the way it moves when she fires.

"Our Earth had to start over." She thinks that will explain the advanced, yet somehow ancient technology in her domain, alongside more primitive elements. "The spacefarers, they left a thousand years ago, after things got bad. When they came back, they didn't exactly like what they saw."

Edited 2023-01-14 17:45 (UTC)

"That's a long time to be in cryo," It's a thoughtless remark, almost dismissive; she's still looking at the target as if Aloy's marksmanship held some deeper secret, "I knew a guy who was in for longer, once, but..."

She trails off, chewing on it, and then seems to remember herself; Shepard turns to face Aloy almost abruptly. She'd seemed grim about it earlier, when the conversation had briefly touched on the Geth, but without detail. Shepard wanted those particulars.

"Tell me what you mean by 'start over'. I can figure a certain level of destruction, but what I saw looks like you got put right back to the stone age."

"They spent it in simulations. Data channels. Doing and making whatever they wanted. Not so different from the Horizon, I guess."

There's some distaste in her voice. Despite the fact that she certainly understands the value of a place like this, she's not sure she'll ever be entirely comfortable with it. Seeing Shepard turn all her attention towards her, and not the target, she lowers the rifle and lets it rest idly at her side.

"Total destruction and then reconstitution of the biosphere." Aloy says as a statement of fact, though it's difficult not to hear the twinge of pain in her voice--Zero Dawn was able to bring life back to Earth, but that doesn't change how much was lost. "Everything you saw in that bunker was ancient technology."

It's the way that the words all rush out of her that makes it so believable; like she just wants to push it out, and have done. Like it's painful, and she'd rather not give a damn; better to be harder, stronger, to move on than to linger in it. Aloy is either a much more talented liar than she seems, or it's the absolute truth.

Shepard blinks at her, and simply digests for a moment.

Ancient technology isn't exactly a foreign concept, that's easily squared away. Less neat is the concept of that tech being human in origin. Ancient has always meant alien, something beyond normal comprehension.

total destruction of the biosphere

"Fucking hell," Shepard says. It's appalling, the whole concept. They'd lost the damn homeworld, and not even to some outside threat— was she hearing this right? Synthetics had, had what, risen up and killed them all? It was worse than Reapers; the Reapers you could at least blame on someone else.

Somewhere in the distance, a tremor strikes the earth, a subtle but present rumble of the Horizon itself responding to Shepard's disquiet. Her face is still impassive; Shepard has always had good reason to take pride in her poker-face.

"How?"

It’s hard not to be affected by this—the whole reason she even exists is an unfortunate chain of events stemming directly from Zero Dawn. She knows more about that, now, but there would be no escaping it even if she wanted to. Aloy holds the key to the terraforming system, and it's her responsibility to safeguard Elizabet's dream, and make sure that life on Earth continues. Still, she tilts her head to the side a bit at Shepard's reaction--it's a sympathetic kind of thing that indicates she's seen destruction, but perhaps hasn't conceived of it on this scale.

"Humans got used to fighting wars with machines instead of soldiers. Self-sustaining armies that could turn biomass into fuel in emergency situations. I guess that worked well for a while, but then there was a glitch, in one of the units. Made the whole swarm go out of control. They spread it to others."

She figures Shepard can probably fill in the blanks from there.

"No backdoor." That's the part that gets her, every time. The hubris of it. Faro, thinking he could control that kind of monster, that he'd never need an emergency shutdown. "So, they reproduced. Corrupted other machines. By the time someone found the glitch, it was already too late."

"Who the hell would— No, let me guess. Some big faceless corporation trying to play merchant of death," She waves a hand with dismissive anger. Exogeni, Cerberus— Hell, all of Noveria, Shepard's heard this refrain before, "Unbelievable."

No backdoor, no backup plan, no contingency worth caring about, and why would you? No profit in giving a damn about people, after all. The most careless, high-handed, egotistical shit you could imagine— The worst evil in the world is so common and banal that you barely have to name it, always. As common as dirt and twice as filthy.

"We Gethed ourselves, with military mechs, without even getting to the next star-cluster first. That's just sad. Pisses me off."

It was enough to make you want to punch something. Someone. The Horizon shifts again, like an uneasy cat, and Shepard has to exert real effort into not simply stalking over to the gun-rack in search of a less appropriate way to vent her agitation. Shepard folds her arms again instead; control yourself, breathe, you are better than this. You are.

"So business as usual," If you're hearing anger in her voice, it's because she's angry. It's not even her world, but then... since when did it have to be? Shepard didn't have to live somewhere to despise the waste of it all, "How'd this finally circle back around to you, and your kind of people? You don't strike me as the kind of person who goes on ice and lets the chips lay where they fall, and nobody survived that kind of apocalypse, not for long."

"Yeah, that's him." Not nameless or faceless, thankfully--being able to pin her rage squarely on one person, even if he was part of a larger, exploitative system, has been somewhat productive for her. "He had a company, but that decision was...one person."

Shepard seems all at once shocked and not. Maybe more outraged, that something like this was even allowed to happen. The shift in the Horizon has Aloy looking over her shoulder, until things settle again. When she continues, it's with slight trepidation, not only because she hasn't told this story in detail yet, but also because Shepard appears to be taking this slightly personally.

Or, at least, she feels the same anger at how unnecessary all of it was. How avoidable, if not for one man's ego.

"There was a group of scientists. When they figured out what went wrong, they did the only thing they could--a failsafe, for after everyone was gone."

Because everyone was gone. Shepard puts that much together. "GAIA, the AI they developed, spent hundreds of years brute-forcing the shutdown code for the swarm. Then, she started to rebuild. Automated terraforming."

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Per Aspera ★ October catch-all ★ Open

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I left this go for just so so long, I am so sorry

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