Daycycle 7 [ Nov 26-30]

[computerized]

 

DAYCYCLE 7 

[ NOV 26-30 ]

 

 

 MORNING

 

The latest batch of soylent RED has been contaminated.  Breakfast this morning is a bowl of hot fun.  Enjoy!

Troubleshooter Team: Arty & Alec Hardison

Mission:  Death Leopard is mobilizing for some sort of activity.  They are identifying themselves to each other by wearing footwear of a lower clearance than their own.  If you see any such citizens, capture them alive, without alerting others, and bring them here.  

All other Troubleshooters:  You are to report to your Service Firm positions for the day, until called on for Troubleshooter duty.

Intel:  It’s been reported that an anti-Specials group is being formed.  Specials are to operate with extreme caution as these hate groups have been known to single out individuals as targets.

 AFTERNOON

 

At approximately 12:00 in the middle of the lunch rush the Commissary will mysteriously lock down.  All citizens in the Commissary at this time will be trapped as a cloudy gas begins filling the space.  The space will be completely filled with the inescapable gas within an hour.  Citizens who inhale the gas will slowly lose consciousness and eventually die.  No clearance level will open the doors.  

This is a test being administered by Nameless for Matt Farrell and Dick Grayson.  However, if your character is trapped within the commissary at this time and has an idea for escape that doesn’t involve the doors or windows, you are welcome to play it out.  If you have any questions about the commissary layout, you are welcome to ask in the debriefing comment or @thealphacoplex on plurk.

 

 EVENING

 

The Fighitng Bot Finals are this evening at 1900.  This is a heavily attended event where the entire Complex gathers to watch bots battle it out to the death!  You will probably hear people speak about it throughout the day.  This only happens once every yearcycle.  Sleep aid gas is expelled into the sleeping quarters at 2100.

Comments

IT'S TIME FOR SOME DRAMA

[a_man_out_of_time]

It was a good thing that Bucky kept the Corpore Metal logo hidden under his jumpsuit. Otherwise, Steve might not have been able to tell Bucky what he found out during this first week.

Roughly 30 minutes before their meeting time, Steve dunked his face into a sink full of cold water. The icy cold pierced his skin as oxygen bubbles escaped his lips. When he lifts his head again, he gasps for air. The sound, usually so quiet and unnoticeable, felt to Steve like it could be heard for miles. Anyone still up at this hour must also feel in their gut that the Wagon Wheel was eerily silent at night.

By the time he was back in his room, door propped open this time, his mind was clear again. Steve needed it to be.

When Bucky arrived, they resumed their previous routine quite naturally. Door locked and backs against the furthest bunk from the camera, the two of them spoke in a low whisper. But the first thing Steve noticed was how sleep-deprived Bucky looked — and was that a twitch in his arm?

"Are you all right?" He'd spent the first week paying so much attention to everything except for Bucky, and now, seeing his friend like this, the Captain was starting to question whether or not he'd made the right call.

[offtherail]

Unfortunately for Bucky, the only person who had actually noticed his growing drug problem had been Parker. And while they had exchanged confusing and emotional words over it, the interaction had done nothing to stop him from using them. Despite the increasing prevalence of withdrawal systems earlier and earlier between pills, it was hard for Bucky to see the medicine as a bad thing. It helped to calm his nerves and quiet the war, and while it fucked with his focus, he was still functional. He just had started needing to shell out extra credits to convince people to give him their own doses now.

"I'm good." It wasn't often Bucky lied to Steve, but at times he glossed over things to spare a lecture or the concerned look in Steve's eyes. He had never spoken about his concerns for both of them before he was shipped off to war because it would not have changed anything for the better. This seemed a similar situation. He was plagued with nightmares, phantom pains in the arm that wasn't even really his and moral fatigue over constantly weighing the options between killing or sending off to punishment 'traitors' whose crimes he barely understood or accepted.

"It's just been a long week." He leaned into the bunk and stared at the wall across from them, only glancing briefly over to Steve. They knew each other too well for him to lie to Steve's face right now, and his second statement had at least been true.

"I'm no closer to understanding who we're fighting for but the longer we're stuck here the less certain I am we're still the good guys."

[a_man_out_of_time]

Bucky can count on Steve monitoring him more closely, even during the course of this conversation, but for now the Captain acquiesces. He can tell when his friend doesn't want to talk about something, and giving Bucky a physical exam wasn't going to be the purpose of this meeting.

"Earlier this week, for a single day, I was somehow given another person's memories. They felt ... as if they were my own, even if they didn't fit into my life."

He'll go into which of Dick Grayson's memories he saw only briefly. The main point was, "It seems that memories here are transferrable. I don't know how they do it, but it's happened." Which logically means that there may be some truth to their memories being 'created.' But Steve isn't ready to make the entire jump. There's not enough evidence.

Unexpectedly, Steve let out a chuckle. "God," his eyes glanced away from Bucky for a moment, and then returned. He was smiling in disbelief. "I never thought there'd be a day in which I wished Stark was here."

But the memory swaps weren't the only thing he had to report.

"Bucky, you said earlier that you were less certain we're still the good guys. I thought perhaps the underground societies might be the answer. But that might not be the case either. Two days ago, I heard an explosion — small scale, like the sound of an amplified gunshot — so I ran towards it. In a side room, I found Arthur Ingridson, another soldier from the Very Special Forces, bleeding on the ground, clutching his legs. I dialed for emergency medical services and immediately went to inspect his wounds."

Steve leaned in closer to Bucky.

"But before I had the chance to inspect him, he grabbed ahold of my uniform. He told me he was part of a secret society named Corpore Metal." By the way Steve said the name, he'd obviously never heard of it before. "He said that Internal Security found out, and that they offered to let him live if he spied on Corpore Metal for the Computer, as a double agent, so he agreed."

Steve shook his head. Here's where it got complicated.

"His leg. The one I thought was wounded and bleeding, was a prosthetic. He told me that Corpore Metal had provided it to him, and that they'd just discovered that he was spying on them for IntSec. He said-" There's a two second pause before Steve continues, like he still isn't sure what to believe. "-He said that when they found out, Corpore Metal detonated his leg. There had been an explosive inside, from the moment they gave it to him. The shards from the explosion tore through the other parts of his body. When the paramedics arrived, he'd already stopped breathing."

[offtherail]

Bucky let's Steve do the talking for a while. He had had his own encounter with the memory transitions. The woman he had met on his second day, Natasha, he had been in her head and watched as someone her memories recognized as him came after her with a metal arm and an assortment of weapons to rival a Hydra base.

Before realizing it was her memories he had half thought the drugs had caused him to hallucinate an alternate personality to go along with his recent actions and his new arm. But that had been cleared up to fill him in with tiny slivers of information about the weapon he would become some day.

Another reason he had upped the dosage of the pills.

He listened to Steve's story, holding his own comments and watching his friend recount the tale with a steadily more furrowed brow. Corpore Metal. The soldiers who had welcomed him into their fold. The man who had given him a new arm and a new lease on his functional life. It must have been a mistake or a miscommunication, what Ingridson had said. Things were not always what they seemed to be on the surface in the complex.

He cleared his throat when Steve finished and tried to start at the beginning.

"Somehow I don't think Stark would be any more understanding of what is happening here than either of us. The man is a genius, but the technology here is beyond even his mechanical magic. And since when do you have anything against him?"

Stark had seemed like a good guy to Bucky, and he had provided them with better weapons and tools to fight Hydra. He never noticed any animosity between the genius and the soldier, but maybe he had missed something.

"Are you sure this Ingridson wasn't just a decoy. It could be someone in the Complex decided to take him out when they found out he was a member. It doesn't make sense they would give him a rigged prosthetic before he turned coat on them."

[a_man_out_of_time]

It took Steve a moment to understand Bucky's comments about Stark. At first, he thought that it may just be that he's never met Tony in-person. After all, it's not as if he and the Winter Soldier had Friday afternoon tea. But the comment about mechanical magic was what made it all click.

Bucky thought he was talking about Howard. Which meant. Well it could mean many, many things. That Bucky doesn't remember what happened after the fall. Or just that they were getting their Starks mixed up.

"No no. I have nothing against Howard Stark. It's his son Tony that I'm talking about." He'll wait to hear what Bucky has to say about that before diving into a potentially 75-year history lesson.

"And no, I'm not sure. He could have been a decoy. He could have been lying." A beat. "He also could have been telling the truth. Rigging a prosthetic like that — it sounds like one man making sure he has leverage over another."