Who Said Home Was Safe? [Antecedent]

[Chiasa Kritivaas]

Antecedent.

At one time, and considered by some to still be, a pinnacle of society. A world, an Ecumenopolis, that focuses on individual advancement through cerebral pursuits. The intellectuals ruled the planet.

Or they used to.

Until the Red Ravens came. Until they built their casino, and established their crime rings. Until they pulled in the scum of the galaxy and forged them into an uneasy family. A family currently overseen by two women who cannot look at each other without wanting to claw each others eyes out. But that is neither here nor there.

Even before the Ravens, things were not as ideal on Antecedent as they appeared. Outside of the capital regions, there were not nearly enough police officers organic or droid to control crime. To help combat this a rather unusual punishment was instituted even for minor crimes.. Invisibility.

The perpetrators forehead is marked with a tattoo, to immediately identify them to anyone who sees them. Or doesn't see them, as the case may be. Their voice box and hearing are both altered so they are rendered mute and dumb. They walk among society unseen and unheard, acknowledging them is a crime in and of itself. Only the droid law enforcement interact with them if they commit further crimes. After long enough they often commit crimes just to be acknowledged, even if its only by droids. Those who make it through their term without ending their own lives are often immensely psychologically damaged.

With the growing population of Antecedent, it is estimated there are roughly 4.7 million invisibles at any time.

4.7 million people who cannot work. Who are not acknowledge. Made into non entities. For crimes as petty as shop-lifting.

4.7 million beings stripped of basic humanity, isolated, despairing and angry while the Ravens do as they please in their grand casino and the intellectual elite laze about in their glass skyscrapers.

What happens when they do not accept their isolation? When they decide to strike back against those who didn't even bother to oppress them?

-----------------

Chiasa rubbed a temple distractedly. Manipulating the politicians on Antecedent had stopped being fun and started to be a headache. Unfortunately it was a headache that she'd yet to find anyone else to take over. One potential political/diplomatic Raven hopeful had surfaced and a brief conversation had revealed him to be an idiot and utterly unsuited to being trusted with any degree of power or responsibility. Which meant it came down to her dealing with it while Patricia flounced about trying to replace all the security with sub-par staff loyal to her, shooting people occasionally and then going home to her family at night. Wouldn't it be nice if that was all running a criminal syndicate required and the Twi'lek could afford the personal time as well. And yet somehow she was the leader who didn't do anything. Bah.

It had been much easier when she was just chasing power, before she was handed it, she reflected, watching the neon lights flash by the speeders windows. But she'd been damned if she gave it up now that she finally had it.

"I probably will be too.."

She commented almost inaudibly with a weary smile.

"What the f-!"

Was all the driver managed to get out before the speeder was thrown off course, crashing into and tumbling down the side of a building, before it hit the dirty streets below.

Darkness.

Fighting her way back up, nostrils assaulted by the scent of smoke and blood, the Twi'lek, dragged herself along the filthy ground, some vague instinct telling her that staying near a burning speeder was not a good idea. She wasn't thinking rationally yet, hadn't processed anything beyond winning distance between herself and the current potential threat.

Am I hurt?

This question surfaced in her psyche. For a moment a bubble of panic rose, before it was pushed down. A quick mental inventory said that while she was banged up, and would likely have some truly impressive bruises, she didn't think there were any broken bones.

Legs clad in rough fabric that had seen better days blocked her way. Looking up, eyes still not cooperating, not focusing quite right, she got the impression of a face twisted into a silent snarl three dark eyes glaring down at her and something raised in it's hands, before those hands were brought down and the darkness returned.

[member="Trenchcoat Man"] [member="Jemmila Kyrgen"]

 

[Zola]

Did silence ever make a sound?

If silence had a voice, would it sing?

If silence could speak, would it sound like god?

Jemmila Kyrgen, the melancholy Hapan Sith Acolyte was having trouble with time. Or the absence of time, rather. You see, the Hapan couldn’t explain exactly where she was for a good eight hours between the time she escaped the Lucrehulk-class battleship known as the Machinator (again!) and found herself enveloped in pitch blackness. The last things she remembered were a gentle kiss on the cheek of a shuttle pilot, the brush of her hand on his back, and a whisper in his ear as his fingers caressed the navicomputer, plotting a course to Antecedent. She could not remember which one of them chose the planet. Who names a planet Antecedent anyway? Did someone close his eyes and pick that planet name out of a thesaurus?

Still, the name of the planet couldn’t be more fitting for her excursion. Stifled by the droll tasks and interminable lectures of Darth Adekos onboard the Machinator, Jemmila desperately craved an escape to her past, to the freedom she enjoyed before she met the silver haired enigma of a man and current Master. To a time when she had a cure for depression, anxiety, ennui, insert-various-psychological-disorder-here. She had always been a restless child.

Restless like a black sea. One that swallowed sailors whole.

Now about that blackness...

Jemmila stood in pitch blackness with her arms outstretched, fingers searching. A stifling, claustrophobic feeling grabbed her with panicky claws. To quell the discomfort, she began to walk in total darkness, boots squelching in wetness below. How ironic to be trapped in an endless night on a planet where the seizure-inducing neon bathed the entire planet in light no matter the time of day.

The young Hapan woman continued to splash through shallow liquid, until the darkness revealed a shape looming directly ahead of her. There was something standing there in the blackness, silent as a statue. Suddenly the darkness no longer stifled her or made it difficult to breathe. The darkness was a safe and comforting friend. It was the figure before her she feared. And most of all, the unearthly silence of it.

[member="Chiasa Kritivaas"] [member="Trenchcoat Man"]

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

Being of the worldly, parasite-lousy sort I am, it never quite jived wiff me the reasoning behind isolationism. Be it a royal bloodline, a religious cult, or a fascist regime, it always just seemed like somebody weren’t bloody paying attention in class, yeah?

You can do this experiment alone in your basement, if you fink me dishonest. No worries, luv – You ain’t alone. First, take two petri dishes of identical bacteria – Colony A and Colony B, like. From there, introduce a small sample of a viral parasite to Colony B, while leaving Colony A pure, simple; full of that ol’ time religion.

The new actor will mix fings up good and proper, right– In a flash, Colony B won’t look so much like Colony A anymore; and, in turn, the virus’ll be changed, too. Mutations, alternatives…Not just a complexity, but a robustness to a system that, while unrecognizable to itself in the mirror, ruddy well survives. Colony A, on the other hand, remains frozen in time.

Until that one fateful morning, some group B teenager hops the gate to pass chlamydia on to the cheersquad…

Apocalypse.

If you haven’t guessed already, the “A” in Colony A stands for the Antecedent. And the chlamydia --?

Well, that’s the bloody Red Ravens.

Antecedent. Ground Zero. Club District.

Benedict stood at the bathroom mirror, the hollow glow of the fluorescent tube casting his skin in a blueish pallor. Naked as a jaybird, he leaned upon the sink, drawing on his forehead in Sharpie. Periodically, he would dilute the ink with a wet paper towel, smudging it to look worn, faded, yet permanent. The task was by no means a simple one, but he had been counterfeiting these symbols of power since he was in High School…

Fancy a magick trick, petal? Watch as I make the most handsome bloke in the galaxy disappear.

…and his bullchit was unparalleled. As if branded by the Architect himself, Benedict was now, for all intents and purposes, among the Invisible.

At least until his next shower, anyway.

I don’t reckon it’s a surprise to much anyone the Red Raven virus spread as it did. On a planet where the media is edited, packaged, child-proofed, vetted for intellectual content and sanitized for your own protection, these baby promethean bastards are prone to all sorts of mischief just to feel like they’re karking adults again. Reactance theory, mate. Us primate types don’t have a choice, right yeah.

Was this even his flat, this place in which he wandered thoughtlessly around in the buff? He couldn’t be sure anymore. The cities, Babel, the Sprawl – They manufactured these squathouses for him, perhaps on a whim, sometimes from the ether, other times out of places with vacationing renters. The metatropolis grew with him in mind, inviting him, beckoning him to stay, to clean it up – he the bottom-feeding suckerfish to their sharkish underbelly.

But after sketching the symbol, he had felt a shift in Ground Zero, the bass from the proximal clubs coming in unevenly through his bare feet…as if the carpet and floortiles were squirming with discomfort; a cognitive dissonance between the fading world and the blooming one.

He laughed at her silliness.

In the living room, he had moved the holovision to the floor, a holocamera mounted on top of it, filming a ritual circle marked out on the carpet in masking tape like a corpse outline. A small tray of burning sage, oregano, and batchit, peppering the air with…God knows, right? Atmosphere? The whole ritual looking every bit like a scene in a Snuff Film as one might expect from the Guttermage.

As is usually the case, even in a planet under lockdown, an illegal underground culture exists, oppositional in attitude and vocabulary to the powers-that-be. Ravens swooped in with their drugs and casinos, selling sex and lifestyle under all those seedy neon lights the Antecedent had been memetically predisposed to fawn over. Just so happens, in this particular case, like, the overlords had already –given- them their rebellious leather jackets, so to speak.

Of course, most of the place don’t give two-tugs about what’s happening. It’s hard to get too vengeful when it’s your own bloody kids. It’s hard enough just trying to understand them, ennit?

He took his seat in the circle, folding his legs into the full-lotus, his eyes closing in meditation as his reflection on the holovision did much the same. There was no mantra, just silence; rhythmic breathing as the Trenchcoat Men synched up between worlds.
After about nearly thirty seconds, Benedict opened his right eye.

His doppelganger obliged. They closed it.

Benedict waved his left hand. His doppelganger reciprocated. They lowered it.

Benedict offered a shrug of his shoulders. The doppelganger reflected. They relaxed.

Opening his eyes, Benedict stood from his position, rewound the tape, and played it over. He took his seat back in the circle and resumed his breathing.

After about nearly thirty seconds, on the holovision, Benedict opened his right eye.

In the material world, his doppelganger obliged. Together, they closed it.

Benedict waved his left hand. The doppelganger reciprocated. Together, they lowered it.

There was a crackle of static as Benedict shrugged his shoulders, but still, his doppelganger reflected. They relaxed.

There’s something going on here, but you don’t know what it is…

On the holovision, Benedict opened his eyes, stood from his position, dressed, then left the room.

Do you, Mr. Jones?

[member="Chiasa Kritivaas"] | [member="Jemmila Kyrgen"]​

 

[Chiasa Kritivaas]

Up

Struggling up, fighting to surface, to claw her way, drag herself out of the darkness.

Beneath the diplomatic mask lay the beast, all the instincts, the ferocity and tenaciousness, that which loved and hated without care for politics. It rarely surfaced, suppressed, unneeded since the Twi'lek had walked out of the desert, but it was there all the same.

There was no slow groggy awakening. Yellow eyes snapped open and she surged to her feet, only to be brought back to her knees when head hit ceiling with great force. Though eyes were open no real difference was made, it was dark here. Pitch black. Snarling silently she assessed herself and her situation.

Head ached, repeatedly abused as it had been. Ribs had felt better, there was a slight hitch when she filled her. Beyond that she could feel individual spots complaining but nothing major. Chafed areas on her wrists suggested they'd been tied but she was unbound now.

Surroundings then. Dark, so sight wouldn't help. Low ceiling. An inch or so of liquid, and now that she was thinking about it a stench.

Crouching she rose again, and made her way forward. This continued for quite some time, with her going either straight or left when straight was not an option. Though she tried to keep the turns in her head she knew she was hopelessly lost. The ceiling opened up slightly so she could stand at least.

There was not even a sense of being watched, it seemed she was well and truly alone. This thought had a bubble of panic rising within her. The social Twi'lek would rather am enemy to face than this nothingness.

What if she died down here? Slowly? Lost? Alone? Forgotten?

[member="Trenchcoat Man"] [member="Jemmila Kyrgen"]