outsiderslogs | welcome to omega, round two.

Entry tags:

welcome to omega, round two.

who. everyone!
what. in which the new arrivals join the outsiders.
where. landing pads for new arrivals, who then head through the markets to the residential area.
when. today!
warnings. n/a

This time, when the shuttles arrive, the landing pad isn't so empty. There was no saying these people wouldn't show up again, and though Aria isn't going to be happy that they appear to be coming on a schedule while the rest of the system is grounded, there doesn't appear that there's much to be done about it. A group of her batarian agents are there to escort incomers off the ship; some are taken aside for questioning, but when it's clear they know nothing of their origins, they're let go. Some new arrivals may notice that these shuttles don't simply depart -- a number of them are escorted off by other shuttles, deeper into the station.

After that, though, there's little the batarians can do about them. They're sent towards the residential district by way of the markets and financial sectors. The housing areas they arrive in aren't in the best of shape; while there are other outsiders to this galaxy already at work trying to repair the damage, others aren't bothering with it at all.

This is Omega. If you don't find some way to pull your weight, you'll be dead in no time.

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Well this had certainly been an enlightening day.

Especially when there were a lot of 'hows' to be asked, and unfortunately zero explanations Cortana can find while lying around some unknown shuttle like a discarded clip. To say this wasn't normally how anyone would want to treat a highly advanced AI would be a gross understatement. At least it did allow for some observation, and what she found was far from what she hoped to gather. There were aliens, but nothing she could remotely recognize. It was possible they were an unknown Covenant species, but unlike the others patrolling Requiem there weren't that many that came off as hostile.

At least the shuttle flight was a short and relatively peaceful one. The other passengers seemed much more concerned of their own problems that when they did land, Cortana was the one left behind. "Great." Cursing under her breath a bit, now she had to contend with trying to figure a way off the shuttle and find a platform that might give her some answers. Importantly where she was and where Chief managed to run off to without her.

And in an instant, it seemed like she got her wish. An alien, batarian from what she had managed to gather, found her chip and picked her up-so far so good-but before she could pipe up and ask some of her questions, the batarian was already off with his friend as they both failed in guessing what her data crystal chip was. It was embarrassing to watch.

"Boys, do you mind not waving me around for two seconds?" Finally getting a word in, Cortana's avatar flashed on, taking the batarians by surprise. "Much better."

And there was her hologram, both confirming the suspicion that the Chief had gotten when he saw the chip and subsequently presenting him with something impossible. While the two batarians stood in stunned silence at the hologram's appearance, the Chief did the exact opposite - it didn't matter that what he was seeing was impossible. He moved as much on extinct as anything else.

"Give me that chip." He had been standing a good several feet away a second ago and obviously his suddenly just being there threw the two batarians off for a couple seconds.

"And who's going to make us?" One of the batarians asked before the other grabbed his shoulder.
"It's not worth it." The first batarian let out a low growl but eventually seemed to agree, offering the chip to the Chief.
"Don't leave your junk lying around next time or you might regret it." Another time, the Chief might've dignified the thinly veiled threat with a response, but today, he wouldn't. He just took the chip from his hand and held it at arm's reach.

"...Cortana."

Funny. There was that feeling of not knowing what to say again.

Well on the plus side, the two weren't looking to sell her off right away. She gave them enough of a jump to reconsider that plan for the moment, but soon they would be on to bickering over what exactly her chip was.

That is, until they were interrupted by a familiar SPARTAN, a sight that instantly caused Cortana to brighten up. "Not a moment too soon." Of course, the batarians weren't exactly concerned about her input in this exchange. To them, she might as well had been a lost credit chit. Thankfully they didn't try to pick a fight with Chief and left them without too much grievance.

Flashing back on, Cortana gave the two a cursory glance before turning her direct attention to her SPARTAN. "Chief...I was starting to worry back there. I'm glad to see that you're okay."

"...yeah. Me too."

Understatement of the century.

The Chief looked around at their surroundings. He didn't know every space station in the UNSC, but he at least knew what UNSC architecture looked like, and this was definitely not that. Hell, it didn't look Covenant in design either, nor did any of the aliens he saw milling about, including the batarians that he'd seen after the shuttle had landed here. Put simple, he had no idea what was going on.

"Any idea where we are?"

In more ways than one.

"I was hoping you had the answer to that one." Now time for her own understatement. Landing on unidentified planets and stations wasn't all too uncommon, but the nature of their arrival definitely called more into question. "From what I've seen, the architecture and vehicle design are an unknown. Definitely not Forerunner or Covenant. Closest resemblance I can make is human, but even that's stretching it. Unless standards have fallen dramatically, it can't be UNSC controlled."

"Then we get to our welcoming committee." Rather not dwell on that too long actually but there is a point to be made. "There's a sizable alien population, heterogeneous in nature. A few humans, but nothing else I can identify. Obviously don't recognize UNSC hardware."

She takes a moment to dwell on her report. It's not that easy to stump her completely, but what information she had gathered, it was impossible to draw any conclusions. "Wherever we are, it's far from Earth. If we can find a terminal, we might get a better idea."

The Chief nodded and wordlessly plugged Cortana's chip back into his helmet.

"They mentioned entertainment, financial and residential districts. We can start with those." He mentally ran over his supplies, a hand eventually tapping a holster at his side - nothing but his combat knife and a handgun. If he got into a fight, he could work with those, but the place seemed peaceful - especially if there were human civilians here, he wanted to keep it that way. As he started to leave the shuttle bay, something occurred to him.

"Cortana," he started. "Do you remember anything before winding up on the shuttle?" For him, there wasn't much. He was on the Infinity above Earth, then...this. But maybe Cortana could fill in the gaps somehow.

Once plugged back into the suit she was so intimately familiar with, Cortana instantly noticed something was...off. Chief's bioreadings were the first and hardest to miss. They weren't fatal, and he seemed completely fine. "In the meantime, I'll run some scans, see if I can pick up any frequencies I can actually identify." And perhaps figure out what this reading meant. She would have piped up to ask about them, but Chief was able to get his question in first.

"There's a gap in my memory, I can't make out what exactly happened. One minute we were on Requiem boarding with Gypsy Company, the next you and the company were gone and I was lying around in a completely different shuttle. Is it any different for you?"

Boarding with Gypsy Company... ...when they were getting ready to attack the gravity well. Well, that explained a bit. He had been...taken by whatever force had put him on that shuttle after fighting the Didact. Cortana had been taken earlier, while they had still been on Requiem. It just raised further questions, though. He'd dealt with Forerunner artifacts causing time travel before, but nothing like this.

...whatever had caused it, he decided to keep his questions to himself for the moment.

"A bit," he answered. "The last thing I remember is being aboard the Infinity, near Earth."

"Earth?" For a moment, there was some static on the HUD. No, no that can't be right. Cortana went back over her memory, and except for that aforementioned gap, everything lined up. That gap couldn't have been that long, could it? "Is your helmet on too tight? Because last I checked, Requiem isn't what I'd call near Earth."

Chief wasn't exactly known for joking around, he was being serious. But then, that made the situation all the more difficult. "This doesn't make sense. Is this why the bioreadings I'm getting are so drastically different?"

The Chief's head twitched as the static hit again and he realized he was going to have to get used to that again. And then, unfortunately, came a couple questions he was hoping he'd have a little bit more time to think of an answer for.

He didn't want to tell her...everything that had happened on Requiem and Ivanoff Station. Or, more accurately, he wasn't sure how to yet. He could at least answer her other question straight.

"While we were moving to attack the Gravity Well...I met another Forerunner. The Librarian." He'd heardher called an 'echo', but for how much she'd helped, that seemed...disparaging. "She told me about the Didact. Then she made it so I could fight him."

"And you were there."

There was a hard silence in the suit. When Cortana finally spoke up, she tried to hide the crack in her voice. "Chief, I don't remember any of this."

Which, for an AI that was already falling apart, didn't bode well for her mental state. There was some explanation, but she almost didn't want to have to admit it.

"It's possible something got corrupted and I lost the time between Requiem and the shuttle. That would explain the gap." Of course that plausibility was far from an ideal situation. If that was the case, then either she was more unstable than she had anticipated, or there was an outside force powerful enough to delete that much memory.

"I don't think that's it." Rather, he felt reasonably sure that he knew it wasn't. He'd seen every gruesome effect that Cortana's rampancy had had on her (and he doubted he'd forget any of it any time soon) and memory loss wasn't anywhere on the list. However, the idea that some kind of outside force had tampered with her was a bit harder to discount, since both of them were already well and tampered with just by being here.

"...we should focus on finding out where we are," he eventually said. "And how we got here. If we find that out, it could explain the rest." Like the discrepancy between both of their memories.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

welcome to omega, round two.

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