>>5150572In your time with the Crucible, you’ve fought Amalgams, Daughters, and even one or two beings that defy either classification…but you’ve fought harder to make friends, forge bonds, and establish the relationships that have brought you to where you are today. In this world, as in the one before, there’s power in having a network of helping hands.
It’s with this in mind that you rise from your chair, striding with purpose over to a nearby cabinet and throwing it open to reveal a collection of wine bottles. Plucking up a pair of elegant goblets hanging from the wooden hooks above the assorted vintages, you hesitate a moment before selecting a Pinot Noir, taking both glasses and bottle back to your seat. The table’s intimate enough to where it’s a simple task to set one glass before you and the other near the opposite seat before swiftly uncorking the bottle with one dextrous talon. You pour the far glass, then yours, relishing the sound and color of the liquid garnet that fills both goblets before sitting the bottle squarely in the center of the table. You take your glass, swirling it for but a moment as you relish the sensation…and with the ritual concluded, you call out in a hushed whisper the name of the one who can help you.
You breathe in. Then out.
Then everything begins to break down.
Your cabin falls away. *You* fall away, your fingers dissolving to the bone. Muscle and veins reduced to black and white, ones and zeroes until there’s nothing of you but the knowledge that you are *you*, stuck without sensation in a lightless abyss. You speak, and there’s no sound, your words instead materializing before your eyes in the stygian dark. White text on a background of nothingness, existence distilled to little more than an MS-DOS overlay.
>>EverythingUnderTheSunshine: I said I wouldn’t reach out unless I had a challenge.You try to take a breath, forgetting where and what you are in this realm forged by another’s mind.
>>EverythingUnderTheSunshine: Well, I’ve got a good one for you, this time.A few seconds pass, your own static text burning holes into the back of your non-existent eyeballs until-
>>Baller_Oebalus69: does this have something to do with West?The other Skintalker’s text lances across the screen with all the urgency of an arrow.
>>EverythingUnderTheSunshine: I’m not sure. All I know is that someone escaped Arcadia while shit was going down, but all Skinternet records show is a void. >>Baller_Oebalus69: Prime Epsilon was looking into obfuscation tech before Alpha eliminated her and confiscated her research. Show me what you’ve got so far.(Continued)
