PmWiki | XcomAcademy / EpilogueK

The party is loud. Anybody who knows Kite expects that loud that doesn't involve bloodshed involves her finding the darkest corner she can to cover her ears. Nobody who might've known Ms Wong is in this part of the proceedings, so there's no need to pretend. Not that the cat was ever in the bag. The security people had listened not because they'd thought she was Wong, but because the first rule of dealing with psychic bullshit, is if your boss has been brain-drained, don't volunteer to be next.

Kip is dancing with... someone. Funny. Wong didn't need glasses, but Kite in Wong's body apparently does, and Kite's glasses are an infinitessimal fraction of the elerium-rich flotsam currently in high-earth orbit and starting to accrete around L1. Along with the meat that comprised Kite, but that was morbid. Across the room she can see the halo of energy and recognize Kip by the taste of his power, but his dance partner? Just a blur. With a certain frame of mind, one might call it some kind of dramatic irony, a separation of humanity and 'no longer seeing the faceless masses'. Or, one could -not- be a wanker, and call it 'To do: Get new glasses.'

That can come after 'To do: sleep.' The party didn't hold much appeal beyond being surrounded by the haze coming off people being exhilirated and relieved and happy. A decent tranquilizer, if one is both psychic and inclined to treat it as such. The Work could wait a little while, while the world held its breath. Sure there were risks, but if she couldn't sleep in a stolen body without vacating it, then there was no point in the plan.

Kite woke up. No Dante. Still in Wong's skin. Good enough. Nobody's going to question someone staggering a bit on the way out of a pub where both a fair amount of Xcom and a fair amount of Toronto just attempted to drink enough alcohol that swimming in it could've been an option. So where is Kay?

Maybe it was fear of Bradford or the council trying to disappear people that made 'find loved ones. derive vector,' the first thing she pushed for learning to do with the psychic powers bestowed by alien technology (well, after 'summon tea' but that didn't count). Even if that hadn't worked, the alien cargo ship still parked on stage would have been her second guess (the first being the nearest machine shop to start spreading classified schematics around Toronto's maker scene).

Kay's talking to the ex-mayor some more. Kite gives him a brief glare. "Terribly sorry to interrupt, but I need a word with the Headmaster alone." It's not Wong's actual voice, but relatively close, and filled with the harmonics of 'bad things happen to good people and I like it.'

He leaves. The look Kay gives Kite almost makes her feel ashamed of it. "It's still me. But world domination should be plotted in private."

[9:51:54 AM] M K B: "Uh... X-ALT wanted ascend without the the aliens' stuff. The Traders wanted the aliens' stuff without ascending. What do we want?" Parties are things to hide from, generally. Or be brilliant and friendly for ten minutes, then leave before getting peopled out and starting to be rude, at best. While everyone is thinking about the "after", I'm thinking about whether I should have a long rest or just check myself into a rest home. Pretty sure Kite can stimulate her hair into growing new pigtails anyway. "The Italian parliament is debating giving me a medal and making me financially responsible for the damage incurred from UFO incursions. At the same time. I know this because thirty people called me to offer pro bono lawyer service for the latter and metal appraisal for the former, two of which at the same time."

[9:57:01 AM] Kite Winters: "What I want is a nice quiet place in a decent sized city with access to lots of good food and a better SEP field like the one in Kip's armour to keep people from noticing who's living there. What I'm going to get, is that I get to start finding and training up more psychics before the Liches left in the glow-box do." Kite shrugs, smiling ruefully. "If we don't shoot the glow-box into the sun, we're gonna end up with a Thoguht Police. I wouldn't trust anyone other than me, or maybe Kip to run it. If we do shoot the glow-box into the sun, well, we know there's aliens out there now. And that some of them can come here, and advanced technology is no guarantee of enlightenment."

[9:58:57 AM] M K B: "Yeah.... about that. Shooting the glow-box into the sun would mean the effective death of the remaining lich population minus about a half dozen who managed to trade bodies, plus the death of a number of elderly important figures of the financial world.... wait, I was arguing AGAINST it, wasn't I?"

[10:06:41 AM] Kite Winters: "Well, i'm no 'Trader', thank fuck, but i'm trying to arrange some deals. Even if they're mostly of the 'that's a wonderful virtual house, it'd be such a shame if something were to happen to it' variety to keep things off balance. It won't work for very long, though. They are scared. They've followed one goal for so long, the idea that some race could take everything they do, do it better, and NOT want to follow thier religion never occurred to them. We could use that. Bitch with no concept of how to creatively violate someone's psyche or no, Wong had a point. We go to the stars, or we wait for the stars to come to us. If we don't rebuild their tech and make it our own, we're an open target for anybody else out there who's less dogma-blind."

[10:14:51 AM] M K B: "Wong all but told me that I'm the reason why mankind don't have FTL travel. Blowing up the carrier ship was not something they expected. They had only the one engine on the big ship, which is why they had a big ship with docking bays in the first place. And knowing how to make one isn't the same as having something to crib from. It'll take years. And societes. Also, what do we do with the giant psychic squid?"

[10:23:09 AM] Kite Winters: "Wong lied. She wasn't there. You weren't there. You didn't push the self-destruct, their high priest did. You're the reason why yesterday mankind greeted the possibility of a new era, instead of the certainty of a new dictator. Sure, they're gonna fuck it up like always, but it's a chance. And as to the squid, we can find out what it was supposed to be for in order to see if we want to salvage it instead of having a shitload of fish'n'chips."

[10:29:51 AM] M K B: "Best as we figured out, it's a terraforming device. Imagine a brain the size of a skyscraper, with fully developed psionic potential. All it knows when it's fully born and out of sedation is that it's alone and it wants to go home. Then it wishes for that to happen, and dies in the effort. X-ALT worked it out when they got some hints from the Traders, their plan B or C was to claim that they had to stay around to protect the earth from that." I look around. Things are calming down a little - someone is actually using the big projector screen, stuck to white, as a whiteboard. Apparntly to propose decriminalizing weed in Toronto again. Could be worse, really. "Right now what we have is about half the people who signed up for XCOM, a bunch of small plasma tanks, and two UFOs. I'm considering pretending to scuttle them before the Americans decide that in the interest of fairness they should keep them."

[10:32:48 AM] M K B: ".... I did my bit, but this is beyond me."

[10:41:30 AM] Kite Winters: "Sounds like someone should kill it and sponsor a competition that whichever potato growing region produces the best chips gets the giant space fish to fry up with them."

Kite sighs, fidgeting and shifting. Wong's body is a pain to get used to. "We also have a ball containing several of the world's most influencial bankers, who have no idea how i got out of their painbox or what i did to the person supposed to keep me there. If we want to keep going, oh, we'll have our funding."

"We did what we came do to. We did it well. But there is no prize to go home with, for anyone. There's just what happens next, and who makes it happen. We could try to reform the remaining etherials. I'm pretty sure that between Me, Kip, and Gabi, we can dictate whatever doctrine we like to the priests that're left. We could shoot the glowbox into the sun and all the uplift humanity gets is Shen and Vahlen's notes, and the machinations of the new X-ALT born from the bodyswaps that get out before the balls touch. Or we could fuck off somewhere and let whatever happens without us happen without us."

"This is me, here, as your friend, more than as super psychic superweapon, asking you, what you want to do. And promising that whereever you want to take this, I'm happy to follow."

[10:44:46 AM] M K B: Watch the world burn. Rather than spend the rest of my life working once to get stuff done and twice to make sure i get to keep at least some of it, watch the world burn. "I never got to go into space. Maybe we should start colonizing Mars or an asteroid. You know, beat the iron while it's hot." It's not exactly a lie.

[10:45:48 AM] M K B: Besides, maybe there's room for me up there. Not enough society yet. I look around. I spend two seconds wondering what it would feel like to experience this with a whole brain. All I can think of is all the times I've been disappointed.

[10:47:33 AM] Kite Winters: "Sounds like a plan. Anyone you can think of that I might tap to help with arrangements and materials that you explicitly -don't- want to bring?"

[10:49:42 AM] Kite Winters: Kite smiles, open, genuine. "I mean it. If that's what you want to do, let's do it and go build a new world."

[10:51:02 AM] M K B: "Robert Zubrin from the Mars Society. His personal email is zubrin@aol.com if you can believe that. He's been planning a mission for twenty years, just nobody ever gave him a rocket." Burn. Burn, earth, burn. We got too comfortable. We were a step behind the liches and getting there quick. Maybe she can't read it in my head. "I... I think that's what I should want." You know, before I managed to make myself be about half a step from being a drooling idiot. It's true: your mind breaks down, everything gets more extreme. Even Riley said so.

[10:57:49 AM] Kite Winters: Kite nods, and briefly looks conflicted. After a few moments of silence, she sighs. "Morality is hard with psychic powers. No. I'm not poking into your head. No, I'm not going to. I am, however, reading your face." She steps close for a long, tight hug. "So let's go to Mars. We've got something better than rockets."

[11:00:16 AM] *** M K B returns the hug, gingerly. Hugs help. That's known. Hugs can stop knives and bullets. That's one of the things that I know but nobody would believe. "They'll call us thieves and want the ships back." ***

[11:02:07 AM] Kite Winters: "So we don't answer the phone."

[11:04:03 AM] Kite Winters: "At the moment, every psychic on earth with both combat experience and a body will answer to you. With how much they wanted to push you out of things? They'll just be glad we're gone. Until, y'know, they need us again and we're still not answering the phone."

[11:05:31 AM] M K B: That scares me. People not answering the phone or their email is terrifying. You get an offer in the mail, accept, do your bit... and there's silence on the other end until maybe three months later you learn that they took your thing and ran with it. I shudder. "That... makes sense." I try to imagine powerful people feeling the same fear. I like it. "They can stay here and be scared."

[11:12:34 AM] Kite Winters: "Right now, the closest there is to 'prize' is sitting on an island off the coast of Japan along with some of the people and equipment that probably have some of the best shot of building a new world. While i don't know orbital mechanics for shit, i can probably launch this thing the purple-haze way. We can make some calls to friends who're local, give a couple hours to see who comes. Who knows? Humanity might even not fuck it up. But we don't have to be here to find out."

[11:17:23 AM] M K B: "Straight up to ten kilometers, vector to fortyfive degrees elevation, azimuth towards where you would be going if the earth was flat, raise apoapsis until the UFO interception zone warningstarts blaring - heh, guess we don't have to worry about that anymore - keep it there for about five point five minutes, set everything to reentry." I recite that staring straight ahead. I have that memorized. The only thing that changes is the azimuth and timing. On reentry, Shen can steer you in. Not the most efficient trajectory, but who cares? We got enough fuel for fifteen hundred trips. "Are we going home?"

[11:19:49 AM] Kite Winters: "Yeah. We're going home."

[11:23:53 AM] M K B: "What's there to do home?" I'm not all there. I don't know if I'm ever going to be all there again. The only way I can think is by looking at the next crisis. Outside that... will I wake up if I fall asleep?

[11:27:49 AM] Kite Winters: "I'm going to get everyone who'll be part of the plan on board with the plan, and everyone who won't the hell off your island. We're probably going to want to scrounge firestorms and the like to build the colony ship. And then, since there's not much else i can contribute until launch time, I figure I'll hold some more classes. Any surviving Etherial who doesn't want to teach me everything they know about medicine and med-tech gets to learn everything I know about torture."

[11:32:41 AM] M K B: "Dr. Shen is going to kill both of us if we propose taking apart the base." I guess we don't need all the satellite dishes anymore. We can land by sight. The firestorms can be made to do a slow takeoff and pull a barge. Doesn't need to be pressurized, either, it just carries stuff. The power armors can double as spacesuits and aid in construction. "Do you want to build a snowman when we get there? There's water snow, you know. Do you think Riley will be disappointed at having to be in charge?"

[11:33:28 AM] M K B: It's a cop-out. I can go to Mars, spend the rest of my life building the next thing until my brain finishes fizzling itself into mush. Or I can stay here and... what?

[11:36:48 AM] Kite Winters: "Oh, he definitely will. But well, there won't be that many people, and so the incentive for honesty ought to cut a lot of the bullshit. A snowman sounds nice." Flying a spaceship by telekinesis with little to no idea how the bits work is hard. "We'll build things, and fix things. And Shen will like the Mars plan. Earth doesn't need the Xcom base anymore, why not take it apart?"

[11:43:58 AM | Edited 11:47:24 AM] M K B: "It's... I remember the first time I moved. We were running away. The Iraqi army was coming. I thought it was awesome because we were driving really fast and everybody seemed hyper. I remember when they tore down my elementary school. We went there and cheered. But it's always sad. "You make a home somewhere, you kinda think it'll stand forever. But it doesn't..." Are we needed anymore? no, if there's another invasion they'll call us again and make us work twelve hours a day for six hours a week for six months again and then send us home. "Riley said there's gotta be a parade. Do I have to set that up?" The first time I went to America, I learned about proms. About how not getting to go to prom is a big deal. Then I went back to Italy, we didn't really have the tradition. Then I explained it, and it looked like something you'd see on TV, and I was summarily put in charge of setting something like that up. I helped do that. It came out okay. I spent the whole party hovering near the fuse box to make sure the music didn't crap out.

[11:48:38 AM] Kite Winters: "Nah. If there needs to be a parade, I'll take care of it. Home... well, mind you this is just one semipsychotic ex-feral weapon of mass neurosis's opinion, but home is something you can carry with you. Home is built less in a place, and more in the presence. in the people you share it with." Kite tries to pretend she isn't seeing, isn't hearing more than words. Mostly for her own paranoia about landing right. Also because she doesn't want to know if a lapse of concentration with her own 'prom' memories brought to mind might share them with everyone in broadcast range. That would be bad.

[11:51:50 AM] M K B: Unsafe altitude alarm, tweet, tweet. No more UFOs in the sky, let it chirp. Well except us, let it chirp. "I broke Riley's SHIV... We need someone who can grow weed. Best hydroponics guys. Weed growers. I sound like an old man right now, eh?" Thin air even with pressurization. Kite can probably do some Dune-level stuff to her metabolism to not care. Me not so much. "What kinda lessons?"

[11:54:39 AM] Kite Winters: "Medicine and med tech. We're not bringing enough people to deal with minimum genepool the right way, so we'll have to fudge things. Plus we'll need to be able to fix things current science, even X-com science, can't." Like brain damage. Kite tried to silence the part of her mind that said it wa sjust an excuse to still be violent to someone with the war over, but no. No that wasn't it. She really wants to fix things.

[11:59:29 AM] M K B: "what'll happen to earth? there's Traders and liches on the loose. If they can body hop... Imagine winning a race and two seconds later you're in the loser's body." That kinda happened, but at least before, it couldn't happen literally.

[12:05:01 PM] Kite Winters: "Don't know. We could open-source the specs database before we leave so they've got nothing to trade anyone, set up a telescope when we get settled in on Mars. The meek sure as hell fucked up with the earth, see if the makers do any better." Once the ship is safely landed, Kite briefly collapses, panting from the exertion and shaking. Wong's body doesn't want to take the strain Kite wants to throw at it. That's not surprising. Kite's body didn't much like it either.

[12:06:48 PM] M K B: Person smaller than self exhausted. Pick up, carry to safety. Easy job. Look around. Hangar. Twenty drone tanks aiming at me. Hi guys. Nice to be home. Help wounded or fatigued troopers to medbay. I made myself memorize this bit, too. Can deal with the rest later.