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[Errationatus]

Pacifien wrote...

It's interesting Jake. At first I thought it would be about Jack finding the cult, but it's good to see someone else write about Teltin. Was also thinking Jack was getting a bit more philosophical than I would have pictured her, but she did join a cult trying to give her life meaning. Long hours in the dark with only her thoughts.

Thanks, Pacifien.  I like to think that Jack is a bit more intelligent than she might at first appear.  You don't live her life and not learn a sh!tload in a short time.  In a way, it's almost a kind of ...poem to her, so the language is probably a little more formal than one might expect.  I certainly don't speak the way I write (although it probably wouldn't kill me if I did .), and Jack doesn't necessarily need to think the way she speaks. 

Thanks for reading it, I appreciate your thoughts.  

My bad luck to drop it in the middle of DLC discussion, I guess.   Crap timing, thy name is me.  <_<

[Andaius20]

oh you should have seen the scenarios the Tali thread has come up with.



*Nods* Greetings all how is Jacqueline doing this fine afternoon?

[Pacifien]

Well, the only way for Jack to pass the time between torturous experiments at Teltin was probably reading and writing, so I think she does have an intelligence that she prefers to keep locked away from other people.

[Pacifien]

Andaius20 wrote...
oh you should have seen the scenarios the Tali thread has come up with.

*Nods* Greetings all how is Jacqueline doing this fine afternoon?

I saw those scenarios. Bias against the thread or I have a very narrow sense of humor, I suppose. Probably the former.

Today, Jack is sad. Still think her name isn't actually Jacqueline.

[Mondo47]

Liked that too, Jake. I've always thought Jack is probably a lot smarter than she either acts towards others or others would expect of her... mixing with so many influences over a short time, she's bound to have picked up all kinds of lifeskills, philosophies, etc. I think there's a lot of fertile ground in Jack's past for writing, but it takes a particular mindset to approach issues like that. I know a lot of people would gladly avoid them, because that really is the dark end of the street down there. Would like to see where this story goes.

I'll be having a dabble down there myself soon :innocent:

[Mondo47]

JohnnyDollar wrote...

I may have to upload my Liara motivator, just for funzies.

Anything like this?

[adriano_c]

Pacifien wrote...

Well, the only way for Jack to pass the time between torturous experiments at Teltin was probably reading and writing, so I think she does have an intelligence that she prefers to keep locked away from other people.

So, let's say Cerberus staff was feeling especially benevolent one day and decided to give Jack free reign in the library (stocked with whatever you can dream up).

What's Jack taking out?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

[Pacifien]

Catcher in the Rye.

[Mondo47]

The Anarchist's Cookbook - and laughing at how she did all this before she was even 16

[Pacifien]

Oh, okay, she reads the Twilight series. She's gotta fuel the rage somehow.

[Mondo47]

Christ, Johnny, that is a smile that promises humiliation and pain if I ever saw one...

I'm assuming that Feron will come up in this DLC, so maybe we should remind everyone



Ok, I'll stop picking on Liara now, promise!

[Errationatus]

Pacifien wrote...

Well, the only way for Jack to pass the time between torturous experiments at Teltin was probably reading and writing, so I think she does have an intelligence that she prefers to keep locked away from other people.

*Nod, nod*  Such had been my thinking.  Stupid people do not survive the things Jack has survived.  They sure as hell don't steal military craft or crash space stations. 

Luck 'n' looks'll only take you so far. 

[Errationatus]

Mondo47 wrote...

Liked that too, Jake.

High praise, Mondo.  Thank you.

I've always thought Jack is probably a lot smarter than she either acts towards others or others would expect of her... mixing with so many influences over a short time, she's bound to have picked up all kinds of lifeskills, philosophies, etc.

That is utterly inevitable.   Imagine Jack discovering Zen.  Or biotically-fueled Tantric Sex!  ("Do you think limbs grow on trees!?!" Dr. Chakwas shrieked at him as they wheeled Shepard in - again. )

I think there's a lot of fertile ground in Jack's past for writing, but it takes a particular mindset to approach issues like that. 

What do you call it when what you suffer goes so far past "trauma", that words like "horror" or "abomination" just seem like lip service?  You're either strong beyond understanding or you're so much compost.

Or you're Jack.

I know a lot of people would gladly avoid them, because that really is the dark end of the street down there.

Personally, I'd like to think I don't tend to because, well, hell, I'm not really qualified, not being a woman or quite as ravaged by my life as Jack has been.  Still, I am human, and suffering and redemption are universal.

Would like to see where this story goes.

Then you are in luck.  Because I'm about to post some more. 

I'll be having a dabble down there myself soon :innocent:

Looking forward to it.

[Errationatus]

Continued....

     She snapped open her eyes. Was I sleeping? Couldn't have been - forgotten how. There was yet that liquid blue on her skin. She watched it coil like electrified quicksilver.
     Perfect.  Jack loved the power she possessed, and she would never apologize for it.
    Yeoman Kelly brought her the data she'd requested, beat a hasty retreat.  Jack barely noticed her, as she began to read intently.
    He was clever, the monster-maker.  Respectable.   A paragon of scientific virtue, a teacher of children and a honer of thought. 
    Yeah, sure. 
    Keep quiet, they'd no doubt recommended, but he couldn't resist, and so she had found him. It was something simple.    So very different from what he'd told her so long ago that she almost laughed from the sheer ludicrous inanity of it.   
    Almost laughed.   But not yet.     
    She couldn't quite remember how yet.

    The madman sprang into their midst, and pierced them with his gaze.

    Distorted of course. Brilliant on the surface, but devoid of any real substance, any soul. Why be surprised? It was perfectly representative of the man himself. A short article on an academic board about the 'depth of the artistic soul', and what was permissible to bring up from those depths. What was required for 'your art to function'.   She read it with a sneer:

    "Don't be timid, I say! Art requires that you be willing to wade through your own viscera and love your own pain. To understand that God must pay the price for your creation, give it up and give it meaning, like so many gods before him, your art must castrate him and leave him impotent. Then, and only then, can your creation soar."

    What f*cking nonsense.  He loved pain - but not his own.   Didn't matter.  He'd learn, soon enough.

    Opening her eyes was not as easy as it should have been. Her eyelids refused to function, deadweight, broken. She worked them, and finally after days of effort, a crack of light sliced through the black/red of what had been her vision.   Her head lolled, she felt the vertigo.   The thump of her head against something hard freed her eyes and they snapped open. The room smote her, lights dazzled her, smells made stomach roil - that smell of burnt flesh, the slaughterhouse.   Her flesh shone under harsh light, naked and no longer flawless.   Needles pierced her skin, the pain singing a grand concert across her nerve endings. The hot sludge of sluggish blood trickled down her arms, her face, her thighs.   Her hands and feet were black and cold.
    The lightning of agony crackled across her vision. He sat before his computer and worked the controls as if he were performing a symphony, moving to music only he could hear.   The needles were hot.   Electricity from them jolted her awareness with each button press, each program run.   Her eyes could only see above his head, that remorseless motto there blazoned in a lurid red:  Deus mortuus est.

    He must be. He must have been.  He'd looked away and I'm alone with this...  If I'd have prayed,  it would have only hurt more.

    His antic motions stopped as if cut by a switch. He stared at a monitor for a moment, and turned to her.

    "Awake. But not aware. Not yet.  What a piece of work you are; you should see yourself.   My masterpiece!  Someday, you will remember and someday, you will agree."
    
     ...And then she looked down her torso, at the gaping inverted Y, and the machines and their probing slicers and pincers and she screamed a scream that made the other children glad they would die quickly...

    She wondered why she didn't hate him.   She supposed she should have.  He'd crippled her, raped her soul, scraped her raw for talents - for no reason she could readily understand.    She had fought very hard to keep what she had thought was hers - harder than she knew she had had strength for.   In the end, he took it all.  In the end he killed her.   A hot tear spilled from one brown eye and burned down her cheek.  She let it.

    She, at least, knew what hurt meant.

    "Where has God gone?" He cried. "I shall tell you - we have killed him - you and I - we are all his murderers!"
 
    She looked back to the pad, at the data, chewed on a full lip, read the litany of anguish he'd left - her fuel now.
    Fifty-one. Fifty-one hollowed out, stripped, emptied of soul and dumped like trash, gutted and violated and seared and flayed so that their monster would not die.   They had no names.  They no longer existed and no one but Subject Zero remembered them.
    She was a poor repository, and she knew it.   But she owed them.  She understood that now,  too. 
    She lived.
    She escaped. The only one.
    What was taken was gone, never to return.   But she had survived - and had discovered that he could not take everything.  He had ruled her with fear.  He had broken her with pain, but he had made a mistake.  He did not know what she knew.  He would not remember what she remembered.   Jack knew she was a monster, yes, she was rage and revenge and a thousand thousand screams and a red-smeared nightmare that never ended. 
    But she knew something he didn't.

    "God is dead. God has given over his creation to me, and in you and your ilk lies the remnants of God's power. You cannot control it, you are only a seed, one brick in the wall we must build between ourselves and the xenos.  We need God back on our side. The only way is for one to possess what they have - to steal that power for ourselves, for the benefit of humanity.  You, Subject Zero, and I - we will make it possible."

    She wanted revenge, but perhaps surprisingly, she didn't want him dead, or even physically hurt.   She wanted him to understand.  Everything she understood - now.   It was the only way for her to keep what little she had left.  The only way to keep this new thing she'd found.  Out the observation window, a flash in orbit.  An announcement shipwide informed them that the Kodiak was returning.  EDI called her name, followed by Grunt, and Tali'Zorah.  She nodded to herself, walked out.

    It was the first time she had given voice to the intrusion. She shrieked, a long wailing, keening thing that rose in pitch and kept rising to crystalline heights, until she felt that she should shatter with it's power.  It was more than a sound, it was a vibratory, sensory overload, every cell screaming in unison.  Eezo coursed through her blood, burned through her veins.  It soaked into layers of herself, seeped into her bones. Through her senses it sliced, through her feelings, to the deeps.  It ravished her, compelled her to lay open and inert, a thing to be drained and refilled.  Arcing through and around and under it sought the pathways into her.   She sensed, not n any conscious sense - that it carried power - far down in that small place they could not reach - and with that sense came a realization that would not manifest itself until one fateful day.

    Power meant freedom.  For what that was worth...

    With all the patience of a spider he goaded it on, pushed it to succeed, to give him what he wanted, to achieve his goal.  Her keening was nothing.  The hot blood that splashed him like red rain was nothing.  That a girl should be vivisected for this purpose was nothing - indeed, he had done it twenty times already.  He would do it a thousand more, if necessary.  They had all cried out - some had lasted a day, some had taken longer to hollow.  All gave him what he required.  This purpose could not fail.
    Her body shrieked, her cells howled, but her mind became cold.  She found it locking her into logic, into hoops of steel of cold precise thinking.  Intuition would kill her here.  Cold, satanic reasoning.  Survival reared its head and snarled. Naked life roared its defiance in her soul and it was a lesson she would never ever forget, and one she would never ever forgive.

    She hoped she would die, but in her mind, Survival smiled.

    Jack stepped into the hanger, doing a spot-check of her weapons.  She slid her Carnifex into its place, saw the silver glimmer of scars on the backs of her hands.     
     Precise, razor-sharp.  There were similar scars over the rest of her, mute testimony to machine rape. Nevermind.  They were the emblems of survival, her badges of honor.
    Shepard stepped from the shuttle, and he smiled when he saw her.  Jack recognized that smile, and it felt like a hand on her, soft and firm, welcome and comforting and utterly wonderfully terrifying. 
    He smiled that smile only when he looked at her.  At her.   A day to Omega 4.  Maybe a little more.
    It would cost him.  She'd warned him, but he'd paid no heed.   An involuntary smile curled across her lips, matching his, saying everything and nothing at all.
    Damn him anyway.
    "You ready?"  She could hear the heavy clomp of the krogan and the flutter of the quarian.  They went past and he only had eyes for her.
    "You're okay with this?"  She no longer bothered to ask him why.  Shepard wasn't here to save her, she got that now.   He was simply pointing the way, offering a hand and a light.  The choice would always be hers.  Murtoch hadn`t realized that, although she no longer blamed him for it.
    He stepped close, and she welcomed that closeness, wanted it.  Not that she'd tell him.  Not yet, maybe not ever.  She'd see how it went.  He smelled male,  a masculine smell she liked, not of menace and sweat and the need of violent possessing, but of ceramic and steel and strength and his light-blue eyes were open and frank, and she forced herself not to stare, not to touch him.  The quarian was watching.
    "I buried mine a long time ago, Jack," he told her in a low voice.  "It never heals, but it does make a kind of sense.  Eventually."
    She felt a sudden urge to laugh/cry, supressed it.  A sharp desire to kiss him spiked behind her lips, but she didn't. 
    The krogan was watching.
    "Will you come with me?"  She asked, and hoped he'd say no.
    To her relief, he said,
    "Yes."
    They went.
       
    Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition?


To be continued....

[Jackal904]

Mondo47 wrote...

Ok, tweaked a little and it's back in there. Timing's still a little ambiguous, but I didn't want to risk making it any longer.

That was a lot better. The whole thing with the gun seemed more like Jack just calling Tali's bluff about her hating Jack, and at the same time expressing how she feels about the whole situation. Great job . I'm really glad you revised it and didn't simply trash it.

[adriano_c]

JohnnyDollar wrote...

You guys are spitting out this fanfic like crazy. I'm too lazy to read all of it. ;-)

I've never actually read one of these...

[Andaius20]

Pacifien wrote...

Andaius20 wrote...
oh you should have seen the scenarios the Tali thread has come up with.

*Nods* Greetings all how is Jacqueline doing this fine afternoon?

I saw those scenarios. Bias against the thread or I have a very narrow sense of humor, I suppose. Probably the former.

Today, Jack is sad. Still think her name isn't actually Jacqueline.

oh it's just some Shepjerk humor mixed with sitcom.