6.e
- Location
- Wherever
6.e
???
At first, it's easy. Hunt the thing that existed to be hunted. There's a number of non-trivial obstacles to the process, such as pursuing the huntable thing even as it flees through small holes and over high barriers, but the hunter is already suited to handle some of these, and for others it's changed as the problems arise. The hunter spreads, grows, devours, all very smoothly and easily. There's countless things other than the huntable thing that try to interfere, but they're almost beneath notice compared to the huntable thing.
As time goes on, things get a little harder. The huntable thing cottons on to the fact that it is being hunted, and shifts and changes. Some sections of the huntable thing change their patterns, attempting to convince the hunter that they're one of the trivial things. Sometimes they even succeed, though only ever temporarily as the hunter finds itself abruptly changing to understand that these too are the huntable thing. Other sections of the huntable thing become smaller or more careful, attempting to escape the hunter's notice by going places the hunter has difficulty pursuing, but the hunter is flexible enough to recognize these tactics and specialize pieces of itself into following into these hidey-holes. Still other sections of the huntable thing grow vicious, aggressive, hooking themselves into the hunter in an attempt to destroy it or hijack it, but change from outside invariable washes over the mass and denatures the huntable thing until it is simply a part of the hunter.
In response, the huntable thing gets creative, attacking from afar and combining attacking action with hiding away to create ambushes, a concept the hunter is not initially built to understand. Change washes over it, and it becomes wilier, aware that sometimes a retreat is a retreat, but sometimes it's bait to lure away parts of the hunter to where they can be destroyed without the omnipresent external force washing away the huntable thing's aggressors. The huntable thing also begins to aggressively recruit the things previously beneath the hunter's notice, altering them into things that can hamper or harm the hunter, sometimes so subtly that the external force misses them when making changes favorable to the hunter.
The hunter grows to meet this task, spreading into crevices and developing specialized parts for studying and understanding what the rest of the hunter knows. Ambushes are sprung deliberately, but in a way that favors the hunter, the things previously beneath its notice are destroyed, altered, or incorporated to serve its own ends, and sundry other changes occur.
Events continue in this general vein for a period of time external observers might characterize as 'a while'. The hunter itself has something of a sense of time, but not impatience or an awareness of exactly how long it's been at this. All it knows is that eventually it meets the things that are the real goal of the huntable thing, large and complicated things. The hunter has encountered large and complicated things like this before, but had no reason to delve into the mass, as the huntable thing never went inside them. This particular class of large and complicated thing, for whatever reason, is routinely targeted by the huntable thing, its processes hijacked and altered to produce results the hunter can't really comprehend. Change washes over the hunter, and now it's task becomes difficult: it is to undo the changes the huntable thing makes to these large and complicated things. In cases where the hunter arrives shortly after the huntable thing, this is reasonably straightforward: the hunter knows what things looked like before the huntable thing arrived, and can work to set them back to that state.
In cases where the hunter finds the huntable thing infiltrating a large and complicated thing long after the huntable thing has gotten its many hooks into the large and complicated thing, the hunter... well, it removes the huntable thing. After a change washes over it, it also looks for mechanics that produce more of the huntable thing and alters them so they don't anymore. After it builds up a general idea of what these large and complicated things are like when the huntable thing doesn't get at them, it also develops a series of categories of things that do not belong in these large and complicated things, and removes or alters them as encountered.
This still leaves enormous amounts of changes that the huntable thing has made, or possibly not made and they were a natural part of the large and complicated thing. The hunter doesn't know how to address those differences.
Initially, it elects to ignore these differences. As time passes, a notable fraction of the altered-and-ignored large and complicated things suffer cascading failures, until virtually every component of them ceases to function. A change washes over the hunter, which in human terms could be thought of as the hunter being told 'use your best judgment, but fix them'.
And so the hunter alters the altered in earnest.
Meanwhile, Panacea has it slowly dawn on her that she's made a mistake, and she's not sure whether her cure is worse than the problem or not.
Emma Barnes
A week ago, Emma had felt under the weather. A little fever, a lingering drowsiness, a realization that she couldn't quite remember emptying her plate, though there it sat bereft of more than crumbs.
She'd shrugged it off. She wasn't a weakling who would be kept from school by a cold.
Besides, she didn't want to miss Taylor coming back.
Two days passed, and Emma didn't feel better. If anything, she was ravenous, pulling down what must've been five solid meals a day and snacking in between, only occasionally pausing when she remembered she was supposed to avoid gaining weight if she wanted to do more modeling. Where normally that thought was enough to stay her hand, in the throes of this illness that didn't know when to quit it felt unimportant. She ended every meal still hungry, after all, and some dim memory insisted it was normal to eat more when battling sickness.
She'd probably puke it right back up given the way she felt, anyway.
Or so she thought.
The fourth day, Emma felt better. Then she went to school, and it smelled. She looked everywhere, trying to find the damn repellent smell, but it was everywhere or maybe nowhere and less than an hour in she figured out nobody else could smell it. Something to do with her lingering cold or flu or whatever the hell it was, obviously, and Emma did her best to hide her revulsion from everyone else. Wouldn't do to be seen... something. The thought wouldn't complete, and then Shmidt shoved his greasy face into her private conversation, ugh, and she forgot.
Whatever the smell was, it went away when she went home. Which was a relief, she'd been driven up the wall by it, so disgusting.
Why the hell hadn't she puked yet? She wasn't even nauseous, in spite of being sick and haunted by a smell that made her think of the ugliest, nastiest clothes she'd ever seen, the ones her mother had only been half-joking when she said they might need to burn them. The smell just made her want to get the bleach and start scrubbing, though she wasn't sure what.
The fifth day came and went, and the only reason Emma knew she'd missed school was her cell phone was covered in text messages from Sophia, crawling all over its surface and accusing her of skipping class in a voice like the buzzing of Locust talking. (Emma had shrieked and stomped the phone, ruining it utterly, before a moment of lucidity had intruded, reminding her Locust was dead and would likely have punished her horrifically if the phone had been Locust in the first place)
It was halfway through the sixth day it occurred to her that her parents should have let her know about school, whether by telling her she was staying home or frowning angrily at her while disappointment dripped in condescending lines from their ears. She spent an indeterminate period trying to remember if any such thing had happened, failed, and went searching for them. Somehow, the house was larger than it had any right to be, and she got hopelessly lost in the canyons before taking shelter in the pantry. Absently, she stuffed two boxes of cereal down her throat and collapsed into sleep, vaguely recalling that she would be easier to find she held still.
Some picky, irritating part of her complained that cardboard wasn't made for eating, but given how delicious the meal was Emma was disinclined to listen to that part.
That came to today, the seventh day. Probably. Assuming time hadn't turned fluid on her. Emma wasn't really confident of that.
She was still trying to decide between moving and staying. Staying meant food on hand, a wall at her back, and a greater possibility of rescue. Moving meant being able to find that goddamn stink so she could scrub it to its goddamn bones. Three reasons against one, but the one spoke to her soul. Or at least her poor, assaulted nose. Why had the stink come into her home? What had she done to it?
"Oh fuck."
Emma twisted to look at the voice, a sluggish part of her brain desperately cataloging features. Female, it said. Worried, it inferred, though Emma couldn't quite imagine how it drew that conclusion. Familiar, it noted, and Emma frowned at that because who knew her that would worry about her? Then her eyes got in on the action, and after a tremendous effort some other part of Emma's brain spat out an unintuitive answer.
"Sophia?"
???
At first, it's easy. Hunt the thing that existed to be hunted. There's a number of non-trivial obstacles to the process, such as pursuing the huntable thing even as it flees through small holes and over high barriers, but the hunter is already suited to handle some of these, and for others it's changed as the problems arise. The hunter spreads, grows, devours, all very smoothly and easily. There's countless things other than the huntable thing that try to interfere, but they're almost beneath notice compared to the huntable thing.
As time goes on, things get a little harder. The huntable thing cottons on to the fact that it is being hunted, and shifts and changes. Some sections of the huntable thing change their patterns, attempting to convince the hunter that they're one of the trivial things. Sometimes they even succeed, though only ever temporarily as the hunter finds itself abruptly changing to understand that these too are the huntable thing. Other sections of the huntable thing become smaller or more careful, attempting to escape the hunter's notice by going places the hunter has difficulty pursuing, but the hunter is flexible enough to recognize these tactics and specialize pieces of itself into following into these hidey-holes. Still other sections of the huntable thing grow vicious, aggressive, hooking themselves into the hunter in an attempt to destroy it or hijack it, but change from outside invariable washes over the mass and denatures the huntable thing until it is simply a part of the hunter.
In response, the huntable thing gets creative, attacking from afar and combining attacking action with hiding away to create ambushes, a concept the hunter is not initially built to understand. Change washes over it, and it becomes wilier, aware that sometimes a retreat is a retreat, but sometimes it's bait to lure away parts of the hunter to where they can be destroyed without the omnipresent external force washing away the huntable thing's aggressors. The huntable thing also begins to aggressively recruit the things previously beneath the hunter's notice, altering them into things that can hamper or harm the hunter, sometimes so subtly that the external force misses them when making changes favorable to the hunter.
The hunter grows to meet this task, spreading into crevices and developing specialized parts for studying and understanding what the rest of the hunter knows. Ambushes are sprung deliberately, but in a way that favors the hunter, the things previously beneath its notice are destroyed, altered, or incorporated to serve its own ends, and sundry other changes occur.
Events continue in this general vein for a period of time external observers might characterize as 'a while'. The hunter itself has something of a sense of time, but not impatience or an awareness of exactly how long it's been at this. All it knows is that eventually it meets the things that are the real goal of the huntable thing, large and complicated things. The hunter has encountered large and complicated things like this before, but had no reason to delve into the mass, as the huntable thing never went inside them. This particular class of large and complicated thing, for whatever reason, is routinely targeted by the huntable thing, its processes hijacked and altered to produce results the hunter can't really comprehend. Change washes over the hunter, and now it's task becomes difficult: it is to undo the changes the huntable thing makes to these large and complicated things. In cases where the hunter arrives shortly after the huntable thing, this is reasonably straightforward: the hunter knows what things looked like before the huntable thing arrived, and can work to set them back to that state.
In cases where the hunter finds the huntable thing infiltrating a large and complicated thing long after the huntable thing has gotten its many hooks into the large and complicated thing, the hunter... well, it removes the huntable thing. After a change washes over it, it also looks for mechanics that produce more of the huntable thing and alters them so they don't anymore. After it builds up a general idea of what these large and complicated things are like when the huntable thing doesn't get at them, it also develops a series of categories of things that do not belong in these large and complicated things, and removes or alters them as encountered.
This still leaves enormous amounts of changes that the huntable thing has made, or possibly not made and they were a natural part of the large and complicated thing. The hunter doesn't know how to address those differences.
Initially, it elects to ignore these differences. As time passes, a notable fraction of the altered-and-ignored large and complicated things suffer cascading failures, until virtually every component of them ceases to function. A change washes over the hunter, which in human terms could be thought of as the hunter being told 'use your best judgment, but fix them'.
And so the hunter alters the altered in earnest.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, Panacea has it slowly dawn on her that she's made a mistake, and she's not sure whether her cure is worse than the problem or not.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emma Barnes
A week ago, Emma had felt under the weather. A little fever, a lingering drowsiness, a realization that she couldn't quite remember emptying her plate, though there it sat bereft of more than crumbs.
She'd shrugged it off. She wasn't a weakling who would be kept from school by a cold.
Besides, she didn't want to miss Taylor coming back.
Two days passed, and Emma didn't feel better. If anything, she was ravenous, pulling down what must've been five solid meals a day and snacking in between, only occasionally pausing when she remembered she was supposed to avoid gaining weight if she wanted to do more modeling. Where normally that thought was enough to stay her hand, in the throes of this illness that didn't know when to quit it felt unimportant. She ended every meal still hungry, after all, and some dim memory insisted it was normal to eat more when battling sickness.
She'd probably puke it right back up given the way she felt, anyway.
Or so she thought.
The fourth day, Emma felt better. Then she went to school, and it smelled. She looked everywhere, trying to find the damn repellent smell, but it was everywhere or maybe nowhere and less than an hour in she figured out nobody else could smell it. Something to do with her lingering cold or flu or whatever the hell it was, obviously, and Emma did her best to hide her revulsion from everyone else. Wouldn't do to be seen... something. The thought wouldn't complete, and then Shmidt shoved his greasy face into her private conversation, ugh, and she forgot.
Whatever the smell was, it went away when she went home. Which was a relief, she'd been driven up the wall by it, so disgusting.
Why the hell hadn't she puked yet? She wasn't even nauseous, in spite of being sick and haunted by a smell that made her think of the ugliest, nastiest clothes she'd ever seen, the ones her mother had only been half-joking when she said they might need to burn them. The smell just made her want to get the bleach and start scrubbing, though she wasn't sure what.
The fifth day came and went, and the only reason Emma knew she'd missed school was her cell phone was covered in text messages from Sophia, crawling all over its surface and accusing her of skipping class in a voice like the buzzing of Locust talking. (Emma had shrieked and stomped the phone, ruining it utterly, before a moment of lucidity had intruded, reminding her Locust was dead and would likely have punished her horrifically if the phone had been Locust in the first place)
It was halfway through the sixth day it occurred to her that her parents should have let her know about school, whether by telling her she was staying home or frowning angrily at her while disappointment dripped in condescending lines from their ears. She spent an indeterminate period trying to remember if any such thing had happened, failed, and went searching for them. Somehow, the house was larger than it had any right to be, and she got hopelessly lost in the canyons before taking shelter in the pantry. Absently, she stuffed two boxes of cereal down her throat and collapsed into sleep, vaguely recalling that she would be easier to find she held still.
Some picky, irritating part of her complained that cardboard wasn't made for eating, but given how delicious the meal was Emma was disinclined to listen to that part.
That came to today, the seventh day. Probably. Assuming time hadn't turned fluid on her. Emma wasn't really confident of that.
She was still trying to decide between moving and staying. Staying meant food on hand, a wall at her back, and a greater possibility of rescue. Moving meant being able to find that goddamn stink so she could scrub it to its goddamn bones. Three reasons against one, but the one spoke to her soul. Or at least her poor, assaulted nose. Why had the stink come into her home? What had she done to it?
"Oh fuck."
Emma twisted to look at the voice, a sluggish part of her brain desperately cataloging features. Female, it said. Worried, it inferred, though Emma couldn't quite imagine how it drew that conclusion. Familiar, it noted, and Emma frowned at that because who knew her that would worry about her? Then her eyes got in on the action, and after a tremendous effort some other part of Emma's brain spat out an unintuitive answer.
"Sophia?"
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