the Emperor of the Eighty Worlds

Rosethorn - a sturdy light microscope
Barbara - a sensory deprivation tank, red hair dye
Iris - several of her most elaborate Grand Fairy hats. a working/flying jeweled model of the Lost Weekend
Furiosa - a monofilament knife, with appropriate warnings and sheath. A flower crown of apple blossoms that won’t fade. A fleet of solar surveillance butterflies to help her map her new world
Max - an emergency first aid kit, at whatever level of technological sophistication he'd be most comfortable self-administering.
Sinjir - something he misses from his home planet, and something he’s forgotten
Sylvanas - An unbonded lazarus symbiote, in cryo, for Lirath when he needs it
Cold - a little carbon whisker

[Video, Private to Morgause, backdated to the first day of the port]

[He gives it a couple hours, after T'Pol returns Morgause's magic, spends the time fiddling with the hat, letting some of his nanites crawl over and through it. It's magic, of course - note really something they can parse. But energy is energy. He wonders if he could cook up a proper interface, if he had time. But c'est la vie. He sets it on his head and clicks on the comm.]

Enjoying your magic?

[Spam for Sylvanas]

[He knocks on her door until either Sylvanas or Lirath opens it.]

I didn't plan this. But I thought I should tell you first.

[He is dead and Risen again. (Again).]


[Spam for Babs - or anyone who wants to trip over him]

[She'll have to come find him, after requesting the resurrection. He hasn't answered his comm and he hasn't moved, just lies in the greenhouse among the flowers, precisely where Zane left his body, staring up at the black through the glass of the greenhouse roof.]

[Open spam in the library]

[He's sprawled on his stomach on the floor, one book propped open against a stack of eight more, one little white persian cat curled up in the small of his back, one fat marmalade tom gamboling about somewhere on the periphery. Careful, you might trip over him - either the Emperor or his (stupid, very friendly) cat.]


[Private to Cambridge]

I'm planning to do neural microsurgery on my warden.

I'll need access to some the restricted equipment. I suppose you may want to supervise.


[Private to Barbara]

I'm done with the prep stages. Ready when you are.


[Spam for Zane]

[This is something best brought up when they're both clothed, so he finds Zane when he's alone in the greenhouse, sits next to him and helps with the weeding. Even in space, little springs of hollyhock get everywhere.]

Do you remember how we were on that other ship?

[He asked about his other self, last time. But this is about them, the parallels and inversions. Love and blood.]


[Private to Sylvanas]

You've been wearing some interesting things since Christmas.


[Spam for Barbara, mark two, wibblytime whenever]

[Synthesthesia isn't instantaneous, especially for adult implantation. Neuroplasticity can work wonders, weaving neurons into the filaments of the synth grid and remodeling old connections, but smoothness comes with time.

Aslan is sending her a battery of test pings - images, which hover in a second sight that is complete and opaque and yet overlaid with her normal sight without any obscurity to either. Most of the images, at this stage, also have strong smells associated, since that's the part of his sensory cortex that is actually processing them. He's told her to focus on the image, and that the smells will fade. Some of the combinations make sense (tree, pine; ocean, salt) while others are more arcane, or downright bizarre (cat, leather; book, bacon; angel, gasoline).

...your concentration's off.

[And the picture and scent both flicker away, unless she calls them up again on her own.]

Tell me.

[But it's a caring tone, direct and simple because that is so much easier for people like them than are you alright or can I do anything to help.]

[Filtered to inmates]

Name one thing you're proud of.


[Filtered to graduates]

How many of you want to go back where you came from?


[Private to Zane]

[He's been thinking about - absolutes. He remembers being Risen in the arena, being so sure he could never graduate. Just like he always is. And yet: both of them are possible.]

What was it like, being here with him?

[The faintest emphasis. He's sure Zane will understand.]


[Private to Barbara]

Sometimes I regret being alive again.

[Confession, frustration, shame. He did promise her he'd try.]


[Private to Sylvanas]

What's your favorite musical instrument?


[Private to Iris]

[He wants to say tell me about a time you were trapped. He wants proof of - something, that creatures like them can survive it, because she would hate it as much as he does. He is bitter and coiled and mean; he thinks he is a little mad, in the way confinement makes any animal mad. But she is - she is hurting, so badly, he sees it in glimpses in passing, in the lab, in her fight with Dr. Cox. He isn't sure he forgives her, even now; he knows he doesn't want to trust her. But he doesn't want to hurt her either.]

I'd like you to tell me about a place I can't imagine. Please.

[She couldn't save him, can't save him, not from the mirror barge and not from himself. But there are worlds beyond him even if he can't rely on them; it's a thing he could stand to be reminded of, and a thing she might be heartened by telling.]

[Public video, backdated to September 23]

[The video is from the lab. Barbara and Iris can be seen a few feet behind, scrutinizing a monitor; Mal is visible, prone, on an examination chair, looks a little haggard, maybe dozing. The Emperor looks a wreck. A very composed wreck, clothes clean and hair passable, reclining in his own exam chair, but a wreck nonetheless. He has deep shadows under his eyes, his gaze loses focus, trails about, then jitters and darts, his jaw clenching as he tries to get his attention on track. The camera frame actually shakes slightly, hand trembling as he holds it. He flicks his eyes back to Iris and Babs once, as though to confirm they're occupied, but doesn't bother whispering. His voice is raspy, physiologically strained.]

Listen. Listen. There's going -

[A fit of coughing; brief but violent.]

There's going to be a door. Don't go through it. Don't go near it. Don't - don't be arrogant contrarian divas for once in your lives, and take my word for it. All of our -

[He jerks his head to indicate Babs and Iris, a little wildly.]

They did the work. Rigorous. It was falling apart, but now it's not, the other - the hell barge. It ate us. It killed us, and ate us, and put us back together from its - ichor, and the door is the maw. I'm not - mad. I am appropriately mad. I'm unraveling, but I'm right.

[The camera is shaking a little harder now, and Babs comes over, gently pries it from him. He makes a soft wounded noise, looks lost, before she turns the camera away from him and onto herself.]

He is right. Everyone who went through the door, or was seized by it, has displayed similar symptoms each time we approached the other barge, and everyone who let us analyze them shows evidence of the mirror barge itself woven into them. Normally it lies dormant, but right now it is using that connection to drag us back.

You don't want this to happen to you, and you don't want to strengthen that place. The door is usually found on deck, and very obvious. Stay clear.


[Spam for Sylvanas]

[After he's released from the lab - or before? Was he in the lab for something? He can't breathe, and he can't stop breathing. His vision swims and he stumbles, sags against a wall. No, a door. Something about -

- he jolts back to his feet, fear spiking, a jumble of adrenaline and invisible thorns. He wants to run, doesn't, walks with all the dizzy dignity he can manage, mouth dry, glancing behind him. The butcherman - no. He rubs the hem of his shirt between his fingers. There's a scar - belly, not lungs. So the butcher hasn't got him yet. No, it's something else.

He knows where to go. Not why, not what he's running from or whether he's alive or dead - neither seems quite right - but he knows where to go. The door is - the right door, not - wood, not steel, heavy and warm, handcarved, worn smooth but without chemical varnish. He traces the old mechanism of the latch, thinks of Çatalhöyük, the city built before doors. Intermediate history.

He thumps against the wood, whole-bodied, weary. He's safe here.]


[Private to Morgana]

[Raw, urgent, choking the words out before he forgets, scrawling make morgana leave on his arm so he can repeat it, if he has to.]

You're a warden. You can escape, you can - the planet I gave you for Christmas. Go. You should go there, if you can't go home yet. Tell the admiral to send you there. A month. A month should be enough?

[His room is a ruin. Ash in heaps and brittle twigs, all char, ready to collapse at a breath. Scorched flagstones, exposed circuitry glinting like bone, lazy fish wriggling in ignorant unconcern in the silty pond. His lab, wreck though it was, is gone. His equipment is gone. His samples are gone. He shuts the door and walks away.]



[Public, Video, backdated to near the beginning of the flood.]

[Doctor K - he won't give any other name, not even Gravesend, not even Queens - doesn't look much like a zombie apocalypse survivor. He's grateful for the showers, dresses neatly and always wears a clean white lab coat and surgical gloves whether he's on duty in the infirmary or not. He's thin but not gaunt. His warden hasn't given him any of his guns and he hasn't asked for them. He doesn't gulp down his food or horde it. And yet. He never quite lost the haunted look, never stopped glancing sharp-quick at anyone passing by in the halls, applying more scrutiny to a humanoid shape in his space than most people would find necessary, gaze dropping away with the confirmation of life.]

The word zombie, originally, comes from Vodoun legends. A bokor, a sorcerer, revives a corpse with no will of its own, to use as a servant. Very few legends come from nowhere.

An ethnobotanist traveled to Haiti in 1982 to investigate. Not magic, of course, but something. He claimed a living person could be transformed into a zombie via a combination of drugs delivered directly into the bloodstream, usually through a wound. A near-lethal dose of tetrodotoxin - the poison found in pufferfish - to induce a deathlike state that leaves the victim conscious, and one of the datura species to induce profound dissociation, depersonalization, the lack of will and self so associated with zombies, the heart of the horror.

His story was difficult to corroborate. I suppose we'll never know. It didn't come from Haiti when it came. It came from the damn cows.

[He smiles, crooked and toothy and a little hollow.]

Prion diseases are like the nukes of the epidemiological world. There's no defending against them, because they aren't foreign agents, they aren't even autoimmune, with the body's systems triggered on the wrong targets. They're not alive, they're not even faking it like viruses, they're just proteins. The fundamental building blocks of every biological process. And something about them is invasively, evangelically wrong. They spread like fallout, and they never go away.

[He's not smiling any more. He's grim, cold, terse. He looks away, looks back up, sorrowful but subdued, resigned and a little bit mean with resentment.]

I wonder how many of you could do it. If the person you loved most in the world was a ravenous shell. Could you put them down?

[The thing is. The quiet unspoken lie. The guilt isn't for shooting his sister. It's because he didn't.]



[spam, throughout the flood]

[He spends a lot of time in the infirmary. He sleeps on a spare cot, startles awake at sudden noises, holes up in corners sometimes, scribbling furious in a very battered notebook. Sometimes he slips out to grab fruit, bread, cheese, anything simple and fresh and portable. No meat. Sometimes he picks a common room and sits, silently, just watching people, watching the living rhythms of them.]



[Spam for Riddick, near the end of the flood]

[A needle in an artery, quick and sure. If the tranquilizer doesn't suit his physiology, if K's miscalculated the dose, he'll probably have his neck snapped in a minute. He does really care.]

[Prologue]

He - realigns. Synesthesia at full bandwidth, a multitude of criss-crossing scrolling information in three layers of sight, pending legislation and supplicant requests and the buzz of Home's local industries, pending reports from the Navy, the frontier, the coreward coalition. One alert, military glyph, blazes priority blue, fractal curlicues of the highest encryptions. With a clutch of worry -

(Home, crush in the gravity well, crash on the rocks, interlocking realms and bright currents of interdimensional forces, Home, drive, strain, will, Home Home Home)

- he lets it fill his sight. A tiny Rix strikeship has dropped out of sublight, inexplicably, impossibly inside Home's orbit. To close to use any of the most devastating ship-to-ship weapons without risking damage to the planet. He seethes. How dare they, how dare the monster-worshipping mechanical abominations come to his doorstep, his Home, how dare they.

(you brought this)

The strikeship's fuel is nearly expended, and the Navy, even hobbled, even stunned, engages with alacrity; the battle unfolds from detection to pincer to devastation in minutes. The ship is gone. But several shuttles escaped the wreckage, have already vanished in the vast noise of Home's continental megalopolis and the accompanying datastructure. Scale works in their favor, as long as they stay concealed, needles in a great grass plain. A handful. But a handful of Rix, on Home.

They will be hunted down, he allows, like the rats they are, and approves the move toward quiet but rapid mobilization, every branch of military and enforcement agency notified that enemies of the state may be activating. Some (few) are told that it's the Rix they are hunting, may be facing. Not all - now is not the time to spark more chaos for the Rix to hide in.

[OOC: Just some scene-setting for Rix and Imperials: PC Rix may assume they made it onto the planet more-or-less unscathed and have lost pursuit for now. Imperials of any combat stripe can make their own judgements about how much intel they want to have, and whether they'll go robot-hunting or just go about their duties on heightend alert and/or encounter them by chance. Even secularists will regard the Rix as a very serious enemy - the last Rix Incursion took a heavy toll.]

( Private for Bush, Bruce, Iris, Zane, Morgana, Sylvanas, possibly others? If you think your character could have personal access to the Emperor, talk to me, we'll hash it out. )