Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

The Wolf needs to go with you. This is an important part of your day, especially when you need...an Outside perspective. So as usual you take it from its hiding place and conceal it between your breasts. It's not the most comfortable sensation, what with the little toy gun sewn into the Wolf's hand, but there's plenty of breast to hide the toy with and even more jumpsuit to hide your breasts with, so there's that. Today's mission curiosity is the Chaplain. It isn't like the guards; it's a bit more like the Warden, possessed of individuality, which makes both of them like the Inmates mostly, but distinct from either. You itch to find out why.

Speaking of the Warden...

"Prisoners, LINE UP! Head count!"

You pinch your cellmate's foot, waking it up sharply; it groans and rolls out of bed, dunking its head beneath the sink to wake up fast enough to get to the cell bars. You place your arms through the bars and wait; soon enough your cellmate follows, hair plastered to its face and neck, still sore from last night's beating.

"Didja have to do me that hard?" your cellmate murmurs.

"You don't touch my Wolf," you answer back, without looking at it. "Never. Ever."

And then you both stop talking, because the Warden is here. It, too, is a creature of shadow puppets, simultaneously the police officer, a warden and a chief and a detective and SWAT and snitch all in one, but it is also simply a middle-aged person with a glassy handlebar mustache and an ugly scar that winds from its scalp to its chin, passing through a blinded eye. In the Panopticon, the Warden's 'uniform' is not a thing one sees with eyes, but is instead a cloak of absolute, lawful authority that makes your eyes water; in the other prison, it is an ill-fitting, grey thing with body armor badly worn over it, its pockets gradually depleting in their ammunition counts.

Both are the Warden. Neither is. Your head hurts.

The Warden and the guards make a count of every prisoner on your cell block, and then they stop across and three down from yours. "Prisoner 17141, you have made parole," the Warden intones. "Congratulations on your new placement in our great Empire and the mercy of the courts."

"Nononono," 17141 pleads. "No please, there's been a mistake, I'm - I'm a criminal, I can prove it - no don't open the door -"

But they do open the door. Truncheons impact 17141's stomach, knocking the wind out of it, and the guards seize it by the hair and drag it away screaming. It locks eyes with you, screams for help, and as it gets further and further down the hall, the screams for help become pleas for death.

Just another day Inside.

It's just after breakfast that the Wolf stirs, muttering wordless noises into your mind. As usual, you quickly finish off what's left of your awful prison food, cleaning the metal tray entirely, before you flip it over. You spit into your sleeve and rub the back of the tray to a mirror shine, and then you look at it, and let your eyes unfocus. When the mirror speaks, the reflection lies...

* * * *

Three days after the Station 104 rescue

You haven't even had time to meet the people you helped haul out of the water. Nattie's 'no pressure, no rush' offer had weighed on your mind, chewing and eating at you, until finally you could get everyone together. The power is still off. Nattie has made it clear, as has the Captain, that there is a willingness to restore power, especially if you're willing to "work your stupid wizard bullshit" and reshape some glass poles. They'll be fragile, sure, but there's a lot of glass, and even a damn window factory out near the docks that Project Throwback is eager to scale down and get operational again. It doesn't need all of those machines, and cannibalizing the others for parts could be very useful indeed.

But for right now, you have your closest friends/advisors/officers/people you think you might wanna make out with on hand, and they are chewing over Nattie's offer.

"I'll level with ya," Sasha begins. "Fuck 'em? Let's be super generous, say that Threshold really was on the up and up and the old guy was this heroic sociopath or whatever. They're still post-corporate soldiers right now who uh, are real willing to kill people for being in the way."

Nettleson makes a hrm sort of noise. "They've been saving lives. I'm not certain they're soldiers either - that young lady, Nattie...I don't know. I think they were handing citizens guns, not making an army. Not as such."

"Is that meant to be a comfort, dear?" Andrea asks softly. "One thing I learned in the armed forces was escalation of force. I am not cheered to believe this Project Throwback might not have, nor by dissent within their own house."

Jill leans in, hands under her chin. "All the more reason to get that seat at the table. We can't stay here forever, especially not if we keep growin', and especially-especially as Threshold kinda owns the fuckin' power plant. They like us now, but I'd rather negotiate that relationship up close as part of a community. If they take us serious, then it'll be easier to sell it when it's time to tell 'em, hey, stop bein' Threshold, we're all just folks now."

"...Is that a goal?" Jack asks, thoughtfully. "They've got some pretty high-minded objectives..."

There is contemplative frowning all around. Doctor Wheelwright's argument is pretty straightforward: she needs better supplies to do her job, and dead people don't get a seat at the table. She's all for joining up and considers it useless chin-wagging to pretend this is even a choice. And that argument, it gets a lot of traction around your little gathering, especially as people sneak looks over at the former Asset Protection and also, well, you. You rub new scars self-consciously.

Your advisors are breaking on the side of accepting Nattie's offer
[ ] Agree with this ruling
[ ] Attempt to override them

For reasons you do not, and may never, understand, even as things bend towards agreement with the premise of joining forces with Project Throwback as an equal part of their community it takes another three hours and a snack break before everyone is happy. You, Andrea, and Sasha have somehow been assigned to make sure they know how to not shoot first and ask questions later, which sounds like it's going to be a whole annoying affair...

And then you think about the dirty person with its army of little kittens, and what could happen to it, and your resolve firms.

The decision means there's a frenzy of activity. Getting the news to Nattie is easy enough, and then you have to get everyone to transplant their entire new lives, as small as those lives might be. Clearing the freeway has to be the first project, and then getting the gardens moved, fast, and, and, urgh, you need to sleep for ninety years, and Nettleson's making you sit down with some kind of pie ("An ancient method of food storage," he not-explains, puckishly; it smells so enticing) and you can't say no but there's so much to do...

You wrench your eyes away from the mirrored surface of the tray, your head pounding. You don't like doing this, but the Wolf insists it needs to be done every day. Sometimes you see things from the past, and the Wolf is very insistent about them; they happened, they're real. Other times you see things that must be from the present, and the Wolf is less confident.

We miss him the Wolf murmurs, mournfully.

"I told you to stop with the 'we'," you mutter back. "...C'mon. Before someone -"

Too late. Someone grabs your jumpsuit at the chest and lifts you up. It's bigger than you but what else is new, everyone is bigger than you; you seize its hand, digging a thumb into the bone where their thumb attaches to the rest of their hand, and twist. They yelp and drop you, but it doesn't get them out of your grip - indeed, their arm twists with your pressure, and they fold over at the waist.

Directly into your knee.

Blood sprays from a nose that has just experienced its seventh break in a lifetime, and you let your victim go so its elbow doesn't snap from the wrist lock. It staggers back, hits the table bench hard, almost folds in half as it pratfalls onto its ass half-jammed between the table and the seat. But the thing about being Inside is it doesn't matter why this Inmate grabbed you, or what it wanted, it matters that it fucked with you and you need no one to fuck with you. So you stomp kick it in the solar plexus, a high, clean hit. You can feel bone flex and creak, just on the verge of breaking, see spit and blood fly out of the Inmate's mouth along with all the air from its lungs.

You bring your foot down on its toes and twist.

"Can I help you, 16090?" you mutter, in a low voice. The guards are looking, but this isn't your first time. You haven't killed anyone Inside. Not yet, anyway.

"...No..." it croaks.

"Cigarette," you order. It shakily finds one in the lining of its sleeve; contraband, but only of a particular kind. Cigarettes and matches are only against the rules if the guards say they are. You make eye contact with one, and get a subtle nod, so you accept a match from 16090, and light up. Take a deep puff. Bliss. "Don't do it again."

"Yes ma'am," 16090 croaks, you so twist your boot, snap three of its toes, smile at the greasy grinding of bone past its breaking point. When your attacker stops sobbing, you lift your foot, and lean in.

"Don't call me that either," you mutter, and then you walk off.

That's a bit much the Wolf chides, a guilty note in its voice. It's always guilty. Like it did something wrong.

"Quit being a pussy. C'mon, we've got a day to kill before the Chaplain. I'll find you a novel or something."

Access to the library is technically a privilege one needs money for, and for reasons unknown to you money stopped coming from Outside about...two months back? Maybe more? "When the prison changed" is what the Inmates from before say, with haunted looks in their eyes. But the internal economy is still going strong, and you have a chip to cash in that you never use. Some fast talking, a minimum of threatening violence, and trading away your phone privileges for the week gets you into the library a second time, where guards watch over uncomfortable leather chairs with rifles in their hands, stalking the tops of the stacks and making this one of the safest rooms in either version of the prison. The shelves offer no protection from the gaze of the Panopticon, which reads over your shoulder the entire time. The Wolf likes it when you read smutty romance novels, and you have to admit, you like it too. It makes you...

Choose 1
[ ] Curious; excited to try it for yourself
[ ] Remember your fumbling but oh-so-pleasant experiments with your cellmate

There's only so much time you can kill in here, but you just have to make it until 1 PM, when you'll be escorted to the Chapel. That's easy. Bunker down in here until lunch, eat lunch, disappear for a bit. The Wolf's voice is muttering along with a choice passage, wondering how the hell 'sensitive bud' means two different bits of the human anatomy in separate locations, when you look up and notice someone's watching you with the oddest expression on its face.

Who's watching? Choose 1
[ ] Prisoner 17059, the veteran/your cellmate
[ ] Prisoner 17065, the cripple
[ ] Prisoner 17087, the seditionist
[ ] Prisoner 17099, the kid

And do you...
[ ] Approach
[ ] Ignore it