Red Tide | Glowfic Constellation

Her first conscious experience is a weightless feeling, the muffled sound of wind, and the gnawing feeling that she's forgotten something terribly important. It's like waking up from deep sleep with all the world around her ablaze, except worse. Was she asleep? She feels like she'd been dreaming, but that's not right. It's sort of right, but it isn't, and she can't put any words to why. There's no before the not-dreaming, she doesn't know her name or who she is or what she even looks like. This... does not seem normal. Wait, that doesn't make sense, either. How does she have any idea what normal is when she doesn't remember anything at all? She doesn't understand. What is this thing she's in, why is there the sound of wind, why does her weight seem weird, why does she have a concept of what weight is and isn't weird, isn't that more strange than anything else?

And then the protective cocoon around her tears, and is ripped away, and many of her questions are answered. The ones that aren't are tabled for later, because she has bigger problems right now. Like falling out of the sky. Like that. Quite reasonably, her second conscious experience is panic. This does not seem like a problem she is equipped to solve. Knowledge from... somewhere... notes that this fall is not from the kind of height people survive, especially not someone completely unprepared. A confused amnesiac is probably even less equipped to handle it than the average person. This is so incredibly unfair.

She has enough practicality to flatten herself out to catch the wind. This buys her enough time to figure out that she has no kind of device, some parachute or propulsion system or something, to slow her own fall or catch enough wind to slow herself down enough. And then also to curse, or at least try to, because the ground is very close and she is out of time.

"Oh, fuc—" she begins, and then is cut off by crashing (painfully) into some kind of large glass dome. Ha, she thinks, through the pain and the confusion as she crashes through it, at least I beat the dome in resilience! This is an outrageously petty victory, but it's all she has.

Then she crashes into something else, and all she knows is pain and darkness.

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kaleido_gogi

Maybe she can figure out how to project.

fallen_star

She hums thoughtfully as she eats.

"... maybe. I'd want to have a better understanding of what kind of psychic nonsense I've got going on before I poke too much at it, though. It's not like sire-dearest was likely to care very much about accidentally turning other people into vegetables, you know?"

kaleido_gogi

That would be just like them.

fallen_star

“See! I have to treat myself like I’m a strange bit of potentially hostile tech! It’s very irritating, I wish I just knew the totality of my own specs instead of just weird minutiae about my own reproductive organs, so I could make informed decisions about things.” Pout. … nutrient sludge nom while pouting.

kaleido_gogi

Weird minutiae about her reproductive organs. Amazing.

fallen_star

"What else would you call knowing that you're missing all of the bits that could actually make a kid! Though to be fair my knowledge there is sort of - structural understanding of my sire's procedures and goals over actually knowing what precisely is going on inside this body of mine. I guess I don't know specifically that they just didn't bother putting in a uterus or ovaries, that's just what they usually do with female bodies, and I don't know why they'd do something different with this one."

kaleido_gogi

If she knew the intricacies of her own body that little pet project of hers of giving her three siblings new ones would probably go way more quickly.

fallen_star

"Yeah. Though one of them was a Varjellen, so. It would not be an easy project even with full understanding of what's going on in my body. This is why I left them a deck of cards and some board games."

kaleido_gogi

Very thoughtful of her! Does time even pass the same in there?

fallen_star

"I have no idea. I want to figure out some way to check on them today and find that out, in fact!"

kaleido_gogi

Makes sense.

And he is done with his nutritional sludge for the moment.

fallen_star

She is too! She gives him an affectionate congratulatory kiss over it, and then goes to retrieve and put on clothes.

"So I'm still hesitant to go hunt down my hermit sister," she says thoughtfully, as she does this, "On the general principle that she doesn't seem like she wants to socialize, and that I like having all of my inside bits where they should be. So... I guess I want to figure out what kind of psychic nonsense I've got going on, and how to return to the mindscape to check on various siblings. It is probably helpful to ask their opinions about where I should go, anyway, they apparently worked with sire-dearest for a while."

kaleido_gogi

Wasn't that a very long time ago? But well, those seem like reasonable plans to Aleks, to the extent his opinion matters.

fallen_star

"It was, yeah, but it's better than my zilch that I've got now. And yes, your opinion matters."

kaleido_gogi

That's probably a big part of why he's been following her around like a duckling.

"Quack quack."

fallen_star

She giggles.

"Any idea where I can find experts in psychic nonsense?"

kaleido_gogi

...actually, yeah. There's this one weird bar where psychics are said to hang out. He's never been but he knows where it is.

fallen_star

"Oh! Convenient, all right. I... wonder why all of the psychics hang out in a bar together. I guess it must be nice, having a designated psychic bar? I suppose I would sometimes want to hang out with other mind readers too, especially if I didn't have you."

kaleido_gogi

"Quack."

fallen_star

"My very favorite duckling." Kiss!

Okay, out into the wide open world!

kaleido_gogi

The wide open world! Just walking this time, they don't need to teleport everywhere.

...though they might wish they had. As Aleks leads the way to the bar he mentioned, something draws his eyes, and he veers a bit off-course.

Tahir

soul_of_adventure

A golden man, looking almost serious and somber, talking to a definitely serious and somber and most of all unamused person.

"I can help! It's what I do. But to properly investigate I need to study the murder scene."

too bad we didn't witness the murder THEN WE WOULD BE ABLE TO SOLVE IT that too

kaleido_gogi

And yes that is a murder scene. Either that or someone decided it would be fun to drop bucketfuls of human blood in a puddle, leave a severed hand in it, and draw a sinister symbol on the wall with said blood.

"That's Fulsome," says Aleks. The man who runs things down here in the Underbelly. In a certain sense.

Fulsome, local crime lord, is so unamused with this person. This irritating golden person. He hasn't told his goons to throw this guy off a cliff, yet, but he's definitely considering it.

"Do you have literally anything concrete to offer to the investigation. Besides enthusiasm."

fallen_star