Catibrations

[quintet]

WHO: Quintet and YOU
WHERE: Quintet's Calibrations Room
WHAT: xenofiction Furry Nonsense™
WHEN: Calibrations Time
WARNINGS: tba


Entering Quintet's room, is like exiting a dark tunnel. At first the scene is too bright to discern more than vague shapes, outlines and shadows, the sun washing out all detail into white. Then you adjust.

Dirt floor— no, it's just dirt. Packed flat and cleared of plants and all debris, it's a wide, open clearing, surrounded by tall grass. Taller than you are, even, grass that towers twice your height or more, and giant trees and all around are a series of enormous cavern entrances. Or perhaps, they're other doors?

Animals filter in and out of them, walking in twos or threes, sometimes riding on one another's back, chatting amicably, with a relaxed air despite the strange combinations. Why are rabbits riding on lions? How can wolves be laughing alongside a hopping pair of robins. What's with the anteater, so obviously lecturing an entire group of rats and mice as he walks along, like a professor conducting a walking tour?

And Quintet is there, sitting at the edge of it all, just near the door, watching people come and go, hunched in on herself, tail coiled tight. Just watching.

Come to think of it, for a cat, she's exceptionally large, wouldn't you say?

Perhaps this is the moment when you realize: whatever you were, you aren't anymore. Like everyone else in this society of animals, you also have paws, or wings, or talons, or claws. You also walk low to the ground, and have a snout of some description. In this Society, there are no humans, and precious few apes or other hominids.

And, that means you, too.

Comments

[out_of_order]

"I see," Cal nods as he looks on. "Kind of sounds like the Order back home. The Jedi weren't supposed to act as law enforcement or even generals and commanders as we came to be, but upholding peace in the galaxy was always our main objective."

Unfortunately he couldn't disagree that there was always someone doing something wrong.

He tilts his head as he notes the strange burrow-like structures. "Where do those go?"

[quintet]

If it were possible to hunch any lower, she would. As it is, Quintet takes a good deal longer than she probably ought to, to answer.

"I don't know. The layout is different from what it was in the real thing. The shapes of the doors are off too. I think... I don't know."

Because she doesn't. Sometimes, knowing something is only a way to cause yourself pain. Or maybe, it's that she already knows, and is trying not to. Denial, at its most fundamental form.

Quintet tilts her head at him, "Do you want to look?"

[out_of_order]

The Jedi fox looks pensively at the strange little doorways.

"...not if you'd rather I don't," he says.

"I'm not sure how much you might have come to understand how these places work, but... they tend to take on a familiar place that's meaningful to you somehow. Ultimately it's intended to reveal memories, past experience that you may or may not be willing to share. Sometimes they trigger by accident. Sometimes the room's owner's well aware of what some things may hold. So..." He looks back at Quintet again. "...I try to respect those memories, this space."

[quintet]

She looks up at him, surprised. It legitimately hadn't occurred to her that he'd have less curiosity than honor— or that he'd not simply barrel ahead.

"Huh."

Shades of old humor, bulling past persistent grief. All dogs were the same: idiots, and all the more beautiful for it. She could almost hear Meander's voice in this.

"I've been too cowardly to actually look into it," she admits. Actually, come to think of it, she really can hear Meander's voice. Abruptly, Quintet bolts upright, fur standing on end. There he is.

Maned wolf, enormously tall compared to the two of them, loping past. It stops, tosses them both a doggy grin over one shoulder, and barks a laugh. Before you kill someone... ask! rings out, and then he bounds off into one of the doorways.

"Oh, this is so messed up. I know you're here because this creepy place is doing it, but what does that, is this my subconscious halo-mind, or what?"

[out_of_order]

Reading the memories of others, experiencing the fragments of someone else's life through the Force, that is Cal's specialty and a rare ability among Jedi. Perhaps that's why he understands how these dreams work even more acutely, but at least they tend to be more obvious. He can't stop himself from seeing things if there's something to see once he comes into contact with a given object, back in the waking world.

His ears perk, more so at Quintet's reaction before the source of it makes an appearance. The leggy wolf's demeanor keeps him from going on his guard, a confused look crossing his features at the words imparted. Cal looks to Quintet.

"It might be... Maybe that's an embodiment of a memory, one of the trigger points. Usually they're pretty obvious, most of the time they're inanimate objects." He frowns thoughtfully as he looks off to where the maned wolf had gone.

"This is still your space though, no matter who else may venture within it. You have some control over it."

[quintet]

"So I could just tell you to get out, and you'd leave?" She asks. Right now, as he is, she has no fear that she couldn't take him— Quintet felt herself equal to a fox's muscle, anyday. But that wasn't what she was asking.

There's something... technological, about all this. Rules, and systems, and outside permissions. The sterile walls of the facility they're all being kept in. And this, the unspeakably personal lushness of the dreamscape, ugly and intimate and mundane all at once.

"Fuck it," she decides, "You're not the first person to get inside my head. Let's go see."

[out_of_order]

"Well...no, unfortunately it doesn't work that way. It'd be way too convenient for us and that's the last thing intended with all this, I think," Cal notes dryly, although at the same time apologetic.

Quintet's decision is surprising. The fox blinks, head tilting again to ask if she's certain, but he'll follow her lead.

[quintet]

It's a stupid decision, after all, but she's tired of being a coward. And what's more is— she's not going to be able to face any of this alone. She doesn't know Cal. Doesn't even know his name. But some things are easier with strangers, oddly enough.

And besides, like he'd said: none of this was for their convenience.

If this stupid place, these strange unconscious sojourns, wanted something from them badly enough to trap them all here and shove them into a metaphorical locked room together...Maybe the fastest way out was through. Maybe. Then again, she's not had stupider ideas in a while. They can't all be losers, right? Right?

Regardless, Quintet walks, with a speed born of pure, thoughtless bravado, towards the door Meander, or Meander's memory, had vanished into...

...The whole world melts around them. The quad is gone, replaced by a wide, rock-roofed cave. A natural gap in the ceiling lets rain through, and it's pooled into a large, deep puddle. The entire chamber is moist, and the difference in sound is abrupt, and intense; it is, save for the sound of the rain, almost silent. No more conversation. No more murmur of school-life.

At the far end of the puddle, two sodden lumps of fur lie, half-submerged, and then one surges to its feet, shakes vigorously, and looks around. It's a maned wolf, the same from before; but different, now. There are a series of long, criss-crossing wounds spanning his back, and his eyes are deep and black, uncomprehending. He sniffs the ground, and says nothing.

Quintet cannot move. She only stares.

"Oh." She says, "Oh my god."

[out_of_order]

The shift between spaces makes Cal step lighter, his ears flattening slightly at the silence, the atmosphere in general. Is this how this place is supposed to be? He hesitates from voicing the question.

The movement from beyond puts him on edge, and he tenses, uncertain. Something is wrong here. He blinks as Quintet speaks up, glancing at her then.

"...what happened to him...?" he asks softly.

[quintet]

"He's dead," She says, looking at nothing. Out amongst the water, the maned wolf shakes himself again, trying to dislodge the moisture in his ears, "They're both dead. The wolf, Rule. And Meander."

The body in the water, prone, belly-up, drowned. The body standing over him, dripping and breathing, but... no longer present, in the most fundamental way.

"He burned out Meander's halo-brain, in the fight," She says, almost mechanical, watching the mindless meanderings of the vapid animal that now lived in her friend's body. The ruins of a person, in that person's shape, like some hollow, hideous self-desecration, "There's nothing of him left in there. His whole... self. Just gone. He was like an animal. Vacuous. Gone."

[out_of_order]

It's a wrongness Cal can sense even in this furred form, a strange negative space still held in a defined shape.

"A fight did this to him?" Something involving some form of mental capacities, this Art Quintet had mentioned earlier, perhaps. He pieces together the clues she's left in the things she's said, but it's still frightening to think that something had basically wiped away a personality like an extreme lobotomization.

"I'm sorry..." he says quietly as he looks over at Quintet.

[quintet]

"Professor Rule did it," She repeats, "He... had some kind of technique. It turns a person into... that."

That being Meander, as he was; not terribly different from as she last saw him, if a bit more banged-up.

"Or maybe... he did it to himself, too. I don't know. Either way, he's dead. I don't want—" Quintet cuts off abruptly, turns, and leaves without another word; the memory melts away, back into the college quad, as cheerfully full of life as before. It's too much, too hard. The trial had been one thing, like facing down an enemy with the truth in her teeth, but this... "This was a mistake."

[out_of_order]

Cal frowns, going after her, coming to a halt when things change around them again, as though they hadn't gone into that little burrow. It's mildly disorienting.

"...we don't have to explore anything more, if it comes up." He's not sure how other memories will present themselves, but he pointedly sits himself where he hopes he won't accidentally trigger something else.