revivalproject | One Guardian & Ghost in Not-Temba

Entry tags:

One Guardian & Ghost in Not-Temba

WHO: Ikora Rey & OTA
WHERE: Not-Temba
WHAT: Exploring the City
WHEN: During the event
WARNINGS: None yet. Will update if necessary.

I. The Library

It was very disappointing to walk among the empty shelves and empty buildings of the library. Ophiuchus floated a few feet ahead of her, scanning things here and there but it didn't even seem like there were electronic records hidden away to resurrect with power.

But that left a mystery and Ikora did enjoy a mystery. Why have a library and what appeared to be a university with no written material? There appeared to be nothing to study which did lead to some interesting questions.

What did they teach? How did they teach it? She had suggested the idea of psychic communication to Jon on the train but the more she and Ophiuchus wander the more it seemed possible. Of course, there was no evidence of that either.

There was emptiness and ruin.

Ikora stopped in a well preserved lecture hall, hands folded behind her back as she studied the room. If only walls could talk perhaps then she could get some answers to how they taught.

II. The Quarry

Ikora stood on the edge of the quarry and considered the long, winding path down to the bottom. It would take hours to walk down there.

"Ikora..." Ophiuchus said with a note of warning. "Don't."

"It'll be quicker," she said with a little smile and a glance over to her ghost floating by her shoulder. "And I will go down in stages. Not at once."

She liked adventure and exploring but was well past her days of dying on purpose to see what was beyond the veil of death. There might be answers to how and why everything here was carved stone at the bottom as Earth quarries kept machines and tools where they were mining out. It might also have some sort of deadly threat at the bottom but she felt stronger with the Light after practicing and meditating regularly.

"Well, at least you've thought this through," he said dryly. Then he sighed, resigned to his Guardian's choice of getting down.

Ikora walked a few steps back, took a deep breath, and then ran forward for a flying leap off the edge. And she started to fall, faster and faster until she started to near the first winding path down. She called on the light and slowed. She kept slowing and slowing, gliding through the air until her foot touched down and she landed with just a slight puff of dust.

III. Wildcard

Want something else? Simply jump in!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ikora still didn't know quite what to make of Tony Stark. He was clearly brilliant and yet deeply troubled. He would make a good Warlock with those qualifications.

"Can you?" she asked as she turned to face him. "I was contemplating the lack of any writing in this place. No books. No data pads. No grafitti as students are prone to leave. Nothing. But this place isn't Agrii. We expect a lack of writing on their part."

She looked around the lecture hall. "Two races on the same planet with no writing left behind feels improbable. So I wonder... did the Atroma take away the writing? Is it hidden in a form we have yet to find?"

Ikora shrugged. "Simple musings, really."

While Ikora didn't seem keen on his game, this did not stop Tony from glancing around the hall like he expected someone else to offer an answer to the professor's prompting. When he did raise his hand, he didn't actually make her play by waiting to be called on, offering with his hand still lazily in the air where it could gesture easily, "Here's my thinking, while we're working through it out loud. Both this place and the one back in Temba, pretty weird, really similar, empty shelves, yes, whatever, that's not what I mean. What I mean is, who was doing the 'teaching'?" He framed that concept in air quotes, then pointed to where Ikora stood, where he felt it pretty safe to assume none of the Graq like he knew them would be leading some discussion on theory. "Two races being molded by a third. That much control over the space, easy to wipe it clean when they're done."

"I was talking with Cayde," she said as she descended the steps and approached where Tony sat. "About what might be going on here and how the Agrii could not be aware of a whole city."

Ikora took a seat in the row below Tony's and shifted to look at him, one arm across the back. "We've all been taken and we're given these challenges and these Atroma watch us. This feels very much like a zoo. Control over the space, enrichment, and studying behavior. Wiped clean when no one's here. Though that theory doesn't explain the storms."

Still, it's an interesting theory.

Both Ikora and Jon had independently offered zoo as their allegory to Tony now, making it sound that much more convincing, so for a moment he pouted back at Ikora with his chin propped in one hand as he considered what that made this facility. If the populations were here to be studied and prompted into extreme reactions, the kind of training Tony thought this place might have been for felt out of place.

For the time being, he muttered, less pointedly disruptive now that Ikora was closer and in a tone that suggested he was about to say something relevantly cerebral, "I was talking with Cayde, too. He said you kicked his ass regularly." He started to smirk then, tilting his head in his hand flirtatiously. Only after he had that out of his system, Tony continued abruptly, his expression dropping just as quickly, "That would make us a disruption of the pattern, though. They didn't build a city for us, we're not one population with the same culture or whatever, so what changed?"

"For a time I was champion of the Crucible. Guardians test their strength and skill against each other," Ikora explained with a small smile. "It was a long time ago."

Hundreds of years at this point. Shaxx kept trying to coax her back to Crucible but Ikora had nothing to prove now. She was considered one of the best and always would be.

"When I was talking to Cayde I also found out Kaz has a bit of information I don't believe he's shared with others." And Ikora felt no guilt over sharing it now. No one should keep information to themselves in this situation. They all needed to know the variables, all of them, to understand this place. "According to Cayde he has a recording from a woman Jedi explaining that the Atroma were committing a genocide against the Agrii. And that she and others had been taken to Agra-10 but had to evacuate."

Ikora's answer didn't directly address how much of Cayde's ass in particular she might have kicked, and Tony thought that spoke enough for itself to make him start to grin and almost drew him up out of his drape across the seats, clearly eager to find out what it would actually take to best the Exo, never mind what other marvels were among the ranks of the Guardians. The glimmer of delight faded and Tony tensed, though, as Ikora continued, leaving him tucking his chin back into his hand as he considered this account, giving a shake of his head.

"He found it when we went to Coruscant," he elaborated for her. "I thought it might have been--I didn't trust it. The last time we went off world, it was a big prank to try to get us to blow up the Graq--the people who might have lived here before, we'll cycle back," he hurried through, twirling a finger in the air to keep that plate spinning, "or blow up the Agrii, or each other. It was a production to get us to react, is my point, so this thing Kaz found, it seemed like it was there to get us to react. We never found out where it came from so--so, it could go either way." That said, Tony weighed his hand side to side, because he had seen the recording himself and he wasn't sure if 'genocide' was the proper way to put what he had heard. "The Jedi gal, it sounded like she was part of that show some of the others were, from before, who knew the Atroma. She was being ferried around and abused for entertainment. The show ended up on Agra-10, where--she seemed really broken up about it, but she made it sound like the Atroma were just treating this whole population as an offshoot of their show, you know, 'Emotional Torture Porn Live: Temba'. And the Jedi was sent back." Tony snapped his fingers, just like that. "Back to exactly where she was taken from, just like everyone who leaves here and comes back says happens, only she remembered the whole thing."

There was another time and place to talk about how many times Cayde and Ikora had gone head to head. Perhaps in Cayde's bar when he could defend himself.

"Nothing says we're not entertainment now. We're trying to help the Agrii, yes, but we know the Atroma are still manipulating us. The incident with the Graq you've mention and others I've spoke with it sounds very much like a show to watch." Ikora brought out her communicator and tapped a finger against the screen.

"Devices like these can easily track people and listen in. An empty school. An empty city. A zoo or a movie set, either is entertainment, I imagine we're being watched and have been since the beginning." She was not going to pretend that they had privacy in this world. There wasn't a chance of that.

"I am... skeptical about the holocron being a fake. The storms are the key, as we all know. The Agrii cannot be on this planet because of them. And who doesn't love heroes struggling against impossible odds?" She shrugged. "But as I said to Cayde, we have a puzzle with many pieces missing and no box to know the whole picture. I can make a million theories sitting here with you."

The manipulation was clear at this point to Tony, so he nodded along in agreement until Ikora produced her device. That wasn't exactly how Tony suspected the Atroma or whoever were watching them, but Ikora's observation made him shift finally with a restless cough, letting his feet drop from the seats to draw tighter inward and sit up straighter. "We have all of these reasons to be sure that the Agrii are victims, too, and the Atroma are out there, you know, but, listen, if we're trimming it down to watching us, the Agrii are getting their kicks the exact same way. I'm not saying I'm coming down hard either way, I saw what this storm weapon can do to them, so it's...But if we're assuming the watching is the foundation of this thing, they're the watchers. They've got the whole collector's edition series up there on their ship of shit that people were being put through before we arrived, and they're set up to watch us at all times themselves, send us to the ships, send us to that fucking--tunnel," he said, then took a deep breath that raised his shoulders in an overwhelmed shrug.

"It feels like the best we can do is wait for them to mess up, find the chink in the armor, but they're so in control--" he continued, and raised both hands flat then with the tension of that control enough to make them tremble, making him snap his fists tightly closed again and tuck them under his folded arms, disrupting his train of thought. At least he still had his sunglasses, so he could turn his focus down back to the front of the room as he found his way back, "We might have found one. A sundial, it has some writing on it, out back here. Everything else with writing they've made sure to keep from us. But I can't help but think it's deliberate."

Ikora didn't think the Agrii were as in control as Tony thought they were. She was reminded of the Psions being controlled by the Cabal. They were pawns in this game. She wouldn't yet fully call them victims because they were playing games but she could see them as manipulated.

"We don't have to wait for them to lose control. We have to wait for them to get complacent," she said, draping an arm across the back of her seat. "When they're comfortable in their control over us they'll make a mistake. That's always what happens."

It was a waiting game. Patience would be key here. Ikora didn't think patience was Tony's strongest character trait, however.

"A sundial is an interesting choice in such a shaded environment. I'd like to see that." She hadn't fully searched the outside of the buildings yet. "It's not a very good show if we solve everything too quickly. We have to be left with crumbs."

Patience was definitely the last way Tony was likely to solve a problem, and he had already been waiting for over a year. If it took much longer than that, he was more likely to blow this planet up himself, or that was what his dramatically rolling eyes and drooping shoulders suggested. Forcing an error felt much better than grinding them down.

It hadn't occurred to him that the foliage would obviously effect how something like a sundial worked yet, not considering that this place had been so densely forested even as it was populated, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise, quickly out of his sulk at the thought. "It just looks like a sundial, but you're right..." he mused, turning like he might look straight through the wall to consider the object. "Do you think that's it? They're trying to get a specific performance out of us?" he wondered, not sure how well getting them to solve the mystery fit with any of their other pieces. "That might explain why people go sometimes. They did what they were supposed to, plot's run its course."

The reason she enjoyed talking with Tony was because of their different ideas. Ikora never felt her thoughts or conclusion stagnate because of that. His mind worked so differently it made up for the constant flirting.

"Maybe. It's hard to say." She got to her feet and motioned for Tony to get up as well. "Why don't you show me this sundial?"

Whether he got up or not, Ikora would start to make her way through the aisles of seats towards the exit. She expected he would follow. "Perhaps they don't find a character interesting enough to keep. The ratings for them are too low. We can make a lot of assumptions about their reasoning but we cannot know it."

Tony gathered himself up to saunter after Ikora to the door, meandering casually as he considered the puzzle in this configuration and if he had inadvertently been playing along. He certainly wasn't ready to go home, he found with a jolt of panic, but by the time he caught up with the Guardian to take the lead through the hall, he was ready with a wry grin and a flourish of both hands to declare, "That's why I've been here so long. Unmissable TV."

They had to make their way through the halls and into the partially caved in library, where the shelves stood relentlessly empty, a clear declaration that they were missing information. No one had been hiding that they were being messed with all along, Tony had realized, they just didn't know how to interpret what had happened to the library in Temba. At the back of the room stood the door that would lead them out into the lush garden, so humid that Tony could feel it gathering at the back of his neck the moment they stepped outside, but by then Jon had worn a reliable path to the stone object splayed in the weeds. It had been a semi-spherical bowl sitting atop an intricately carved column, tipped over into the soil at some point so the heavy pieces sat apart from each other. The bowl had clearly been moved and an attempt to clean the moss and vines overtaking it had been made recently, but both of the pieces were dense and not likely to go much further under Tony's power. It had long hash marks along the curve of it, with alien symbols carved underneath them in what had to be some kind of written declaration.

"You are a character, Tony."

Ikora held out her hand, Ophiuchus appeared and then glided over to the bowl which indeed did look like some sort of sundial. He started to scan the object, slowly circling it.

"He'll record a 3D image of it so that we can study it anywhere," Ikora explained as she ignored the dial and went to study the column. "Did you look at this at all?"

She gestured to the fallen pice of stone. It might not seem important outside of holding the bowl up but Ikora was curious about everything.

"Not really," Tony admitted, hanging back where he could slouch with a hand on cocked hip like he was already impatient with this exercise and the slightly marshy garden. With the other hand, he flapped vaguely to explain, "Jon's been out here looking at them. He can read it, kind of--he knows what the letters are..." To explain this, Tony twirled a finger near his temple, which could have meant he thought Jon was crazy and making it up, brilliant enough to puzzle it out, or using the unique powers in his head. All three might have been true. "It sounds like Graq language when he speaks it, so I can help him translate it if he's figured anything else out, but so far we've just got that big one on the other piece-- 'big light', it sounds like."

"And we've seen a big light, haven't we?" Ikora cocked her head to the side and looked to the distance, like she could see through the trees. "You, Jon, and Cayde have mentioned a big light in the distance that blinked. Part of a radio tower, correct?"

She looked back to Tony waiting for him to confirm she had her information correct. Ikora was confident she did but she wanted to let Tony contribute his memories. He had lived through that adventure to the tower and the light.

"When you've got a better translation of the symbols, I'd like to hear the whole thing."

This prompt sounded like a trick question to Tony, who narrowed his eyes and tried very slowly, "The...sun...?" in what it turned out he hoped was a quiet enough voice for Ikora not to have actually heard under her explanation. The suggestion surprised him, and he turned to look in consideration as well in the direction that tower would be relative to the library back in Temba. He wasn't sure he would have called that, or the new, phantom one in the sky a big light, but he had told Jon that the translation wasn't precise. Grand was the other word he had for it.

"Yeah it--it looked a lot like that one that no one can reach now," he offered, still sounding skeptical that the words on the stone were the best way to describe the phenomena, with his hands up to suggest he thought they both were a bit small. "But it did have a countdown clock with it, like it was on some kind of schedule," he allowed, looking back to the stone and the hash marks on it, then to Ikora with a curious pout. "We should get up high," he said.

Ikora looked around as well, studying the buildings around them. Then she held out a hand to Tony. "I can get us up high but this will feel... strange."

She could Blink with other people and had done so before but there was no real way to explain the sensations of disappearing from this dimension to a pocket of subspace and then reappearing in this dimension again.

It required a bit of trust and Ikora wasn't sure he would trust her.

He absolutely did not. However, Tony did respond impulsively to her gesture before she said anything, happy enough to hold hands before Ikora had to give him a reason, so he was already holding on before he went, "Uh..." and realized, "Oh." 'Strange' was the way people liked to explain magic, because there was no explanation suitable. He still didn't draw his hand back, only raised the other to caution as he started to ask, "Can you fly like Cayde? I thought that was an Exo thing and, honestly, if you tell me it isn't you might break my heart a little bit..."

"It's a Guardian thing, not an Exo thing," she said without guilt. "We all have different ways of moving. As a Hunter, Cayde is able to jump very high and very fast. Warlocks are different."

Ikora took a few running steps, pulling Tony along with her, and Blinked. The pair vanished leaving on a whisper of Void energy behind. For barely a blink of an eye there was nothing and then they reappeared on the low roof of a nearby building.

She kept a hold of Tony's hands so he could take a second to get his bearings and realize where they were now. "Would you like to go high?"

That was not in the least bit an explanation to prepare Tony for what was about to happen, and in the time they were suddenly standing on a roof it felt to him like he had physically left behind the part of his brain that was still mourning the possibility of figuring out Cayde's jumping for himself. Teleporting wasn't entirely novel to Tony, but Ikora's confidence in dragging him along after her without giving Tony the chance to resist and the running start left him feeling particularly off balance, clutching at Ikora's hold while he took a careful, sharp breath like he suspected his lungs hadn't actually travelled with them. It left his voice high and small as he responded with a very lost, "What?" until he remembered that they weren't just giving him a very complicated sexual fantasy, and he found his footing and his voice.

He swayed back away from Ikora slightly, dropping the panicked clinging to hold with one hand more naturally as he considered the height they had jumped, then the next likely surfaces and the path further upward they were likely to take if that leap was Ikora's limit. Much better prepared now, Tony said, "As fast as you can."

A Blink was not as easy here as it was at home. Ikora had been practicing though and she could stretch her limited Light to much further. She kept a hold of Tony as she Blink from place and place until they were high up and able to see most of the city and the trees beyond.

Ikora was a bit pale and breathing harder but besides that she had the same stoic expression. She let out a slow breath and centered herself.

"And here we are," she said dryly.

In his thrill at the absolute mystery of what was happening, it hadn't occurred to Tony that it would actually take effort from Ikora to perform this feat and expecting the cost of magic to be frogs' eyes and puppy tails, as needed. Having yet to see Ikora exert any effort that didn't appear entirely meditative, Tony swayed where he stood for his own unsteady moment at the top of the city until he could tear his gaze away from this unusual vantage point to turn a grin on Ikora that hardened briefly with concern. Instead of pressing, he chastised, "Is this the best you can do?," with a vague gesture around as though Ikora could have found a higher perch for them, and slid an arm around her back that wasn't quite a shoulder to lean on because he was just turning them toward where that blinking light should have been in the distance if the angle of the sun could be trusted.

It wasn't there, or over Tony's shoulder as he hunted around, not exactly hopeful but disappointed nonetheless. If there was another light here like the one that had been taunting them from the top of the tower for so long, it wasn't likely to be flashing without any power on in the city, and doubly so if it really was some kind of signal to cause mayhem like unleashing secret subterranean spiders.

"I'd rather not have you fall to your death after a misstep." Ikora would be fine in a minute once the Light in her had a moment to rebuild in her. She was also a bit worried he would fall in his enthusiasm to get a look at things. Tony was capable but he was not a Guardian.

She did not see another light either. It was frustrating but when she did extract herself from Tony she walked to the edge and looked down at the sundial device. She was more interested if the sun could reach it and what the shadows looked like.

"It would be easier if it was still on the stand," she mused. "But the view isn't bad."

Tony remained where Ikora had deposited him, only muttering, "I've had worse falls," as he considered the skyline with a thoughtful frown. There didn't seem to be anything like that mysterious tower back in Temba, at least nothing that stood tall enough over the trees for Tony to see. The only real break in the density of the treeline was over where he suspected the strange, elegant looking building was with its low grasses, which would have revealed that tower if the layout of this whole place was really that similar to Temba.

"Can't see the water from here," he noted idly. The trip on the train was long, but it was still a little unnerving to get that confirmation. It did kind of feel like they were on a different planet altogether.

"Yes, it's so different from the other city," Ikora mused as she continued to study the fallen sundial. "Different architecture, a different race of aliens, it's all very empty and neat."

Ikora tilted her head and summoned Ophiuchus to have him project his scan of what they'd left behind on the ground so she could study it while looking down at the same rubble.

"That's what strikes me as the oddest thing about this city and Temba itself they're clean." She looked over at Tony. "Even in the ruins of my world there are signs of the people left behind."

One Guardian & Ghost in Not-Temba

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)