Things Done in the Dark IC; Chapter one: Signs and Symbols

Location: The Spire; Desbin City Ceyx district; Planet Desbin; Kepler-62 Star System. 0830 hours. Meria 33rd, 2120


The Lumien Department of Defense is located on the - floor of the Spire; the Lumien equivalent of the Capitol building. The spire itself is a 300-story 6,000 foot tall towering skyscraper of aluminum-titanium alloys and carbon nanotubes. The building twists as it goes up in a double helix-like format, making it seem endless and full of mystery from the ground. According to the majority of the population, though, the Lumien Department of Defense is not under the Spire. According to the Lumien government, the Lumien Department of Defense is on one of Desbin’s three moons, though they will not reveal which one. This anonymity makes the Department one of the safest places in the galaxy. The Department is buried under a mile of concrete and steel from every direction, and has enough armor to survive a 20 megaton nuke dropped directly above them onto the Spire. A single elevator shaft leads from the lobby of the Spire to the Department of Defense, and it can be collapsed at the push of a button.

The lobby of the Spire is pyramid-shaped, with steel support beams running from the apex of the ceiling to the ground shaping it like this. The building’s base is square, and is made of alternating pillars of concrete and rubber so as to protect the building from earthquakes. Nobody would know this however, as the floor of the lobby is made of a slightly blue-tinted tile material. The reception desk is about four and a half feet high, and is stainless steel topped with marble. It is shaped in a semicircle which intersects with the sturdy walls. A brown-furred female Lumien receptionist sits at the reception desk all day, taking phone calls and directing politicians and delegates to their floors. On either side of the desk is an elevator which lead to the floors above. However, on this particular day, neither of those two elevators would be used, as the Spire had seemingly been evacuated. The receptionist was still there, as well as a military skeleton crew billeted at every entrance, but both Lumien consuls, as well as their assistance and the Senate were all absent.

The lobby’s glass revolving door spun open, and Agent Myre stepped through, his black suit freshly pressed and his fedora sitting low on his head, just above his eyes. His blue fur turned purple in the light of the red siren which rotated in the center of the room. Immediately Myre was stopped by a group of Lumien soldiers in silver tactical riot gear. Rifles in hand,they formed a semicircle around the revolving doors as Myre was soon joined by the green froglike Exo, a rather eager-looking reptilian character wearing a black kimono, and a pale human woman wearing a black, hooded travelling cloak which covered her eyes. An assortment of other characters soon joined them in the soldiers’ semicircle, and after making sure that everyone was there, Myre stepped forward and addressed the captain.

“Morning, commander.” he began as he pulled out his IGIA badge “We’re here for a meeting with the military Consul.” He showed them the badge, and the commander made a series of hand signals. The soldiers responded by forming a square around the assortment of people which had now arrived in the lobby and began to march towards the reception desk, their guns at the ready.

“Isn’t this a little much?” Exo hissed, looking around at the private army of men which now surrounded them.

“That’s the LDD for ya.” Myre responded, looking around cautiously “They’re not gonna let anyone get in a mile of the consul”.

“Ugh, this government is way too easy to cripple.” Exo responded, uninterested “Just drop a few nuclear missiles on the Spire, kill the consul, and they’re done for.” The commander shot Exo a look, and whispered “Watch that guy closely” to one of his men.

“That’s why there are two of them operating from different planets in different solar systems, Exo.” Myre barked, now slightly annoyed “The other consul may or may not be on New Holos, on the other side of the galaxy”.

"And... if someone has a teleporter or the ability to hack and scan data transference satellites the whole setup is compromised. The end." It sighed moodily, eyeing the commander who probably thought it was some kind of spy.

“New plan,” Myre snapped “Let’s stop talking about this before we get shot!”

“Ugh fine, but that’s hardly a problem to anyone but you.” Exo sighed, crossing its arms like a child put in timeout. The reptile in the kimono finally spoke up, putting a hand on Exo’s shoulder.

“We need to be quiet now, Exo.” he said “We’re here for a very important meeting with the consul; we’re not sitting around a table at a coffee shop discussing politics. We must focus ourselves and be prepared for anything”.

“Thank you Sakayrus.” Myre said, patting his intern on the back.

The only difference between here and the coffee shop is the explicit lack of coffee... Exo thought snarkily. The woman by Exo’s side still said nothing, and adjusted the bow which was slung across her back with her left hand. She looked around cautiously, and then up at the siren on the ceiling, which she stared daggers at for several moments, as if it were insulting her mother with every whirr and screech. She eventually just rolled her eyes and looked down at the ground shyly, still saying nothing.

The group soon arrived at the reception desk, where the soldiers moved to form a semicircle once more around the group of geniuses. Myre showed his badged to the receptionist, and she nodded fondly at him. One of her long, bony fingers tapped a button next to her computer, and a panel in the wall slid away, revealing an elevator shaft. Myre, Exo, Sakayrus, the silent girl, and two soldiers got on the elevator.

“You guys will have to take the next one.” Myre said to the rest of the group “Sorry about that. We’ll regroup before we go into the briefing room.” Then, the doors closed, the panel slid back, and the elevator began its mile-long trip to the Lumien Department of Defense.

As the elevator door was closing, Τρελός was already running across the room to the other wall for no particular reason. "Hey, what about me? I wanna go too!" He banged on the empty wall with his fists. "You can't keep me here! I am Trelòc, one of the leading weapon engineers of the NER! I won't put up with this!" A couple of soldiers looked over to each other, then began walking over to Τρελός. "Hey, you two," Τρελός yelled, "help me open this elevator door!" He was talking about the wall. The soldiers pointed their rifles at Τρελός's head. "Sir, please leave the wall alone and come with us to the elevator."

"I'll do what I want! And I want to take this elevator!"

"Sir, that is a wall. Please stop yelling and get some common sense."

"You stop yelling!"

"I am not yelling, I am trying to reason with you."

The soldiers grabbed Τρελός's arms and started to drag him over to the rest of the group. Τρελός just kicked about as they took him over, then e unexpectedly slumped to the ground. Then he stood up again. He spoke to them in a more calmer and formal voice. "Look, I am dreadfully sorry… you see this just happens to me some times, and I simply cannot control myself when it does. I just need some time to get over it… it is completely normal and everything, for I am a Paráfron." A few mumbled "oh right"s and "that explain's it"s could be heard. Τρελός walked back over to the others. "I'm terribly sorry for the way I acted. It shouldn't happen again for a while."

Hexen looked over at Τρελός, shifting from foot to foot, his claws causing a metallic clicking sound as he did so. "You know, Τρελός," Hexen said in a australian accent, "if you were to wear a neural manipulation hat of some kind, you could in affect, override your outbursts of insanity. I have a couple of friends who use such devices to combat the effects of PTSD syndrome."

He looked around at the buildings security, his feathers poofed out as he thought of doing a flyover of the interior of the building, however he figured that the guards wouldn't appreciate it. Hell, they probably think I have my wings clipped or something equally ridiculous.

Hexen looked at one of the guards incredulously, taking in every detail of the guards body language and copying into his own demeanor perfectly. Then, based on how the guard was behaving, Hexen subconsciously reverse engineered what was going on inside the guards head till there was more of the guards personality in Hexen then there was his own.

Hexen walked up to Τρελός, now copying the guards behavior perfectly and said in perfect imitation of the guards voice, "Just try and make sure it doesn't happen during the meeting. We don't want any complications to an already complicated situation."

At that moment, Reparosa Entami burst through the revolving door. He walked across the floor with a great pride in his step, and the guards soon surrounded him. He looked down at the guards, who looked very tiny below him, and laughed in a loud, haughty way.

"Step aside, my friends!" Reparosa said, flashing his NER badge "I have immediate business with the consul!" His booming voice echoed around the room. The soldiers led him to where the rest of the people were, just as Τρελός was being hauled away from the guards and Hexen offered him advice on how to be less insane.

"Oh, don't worry about it, my friend!" he said, patting Τρελός on the back with a very large claw "Crazy is the new cool!" He laughed some, and then sat down on a nearby bench which creaked ominously. He stood up excitedly and looked down to see that he had crushed it with his weight.

"You there, guard!" he yelled to one of the soldiers "What kind of joke is this?! What do you make these chairs out of ?!"

"Steel, sir." the soldier said, obviously forcing himself not to laugh. Reparosa made a loud clicking noise with his claw, and sat down on the floor like a child, with his arms crossed.

Hexen reverted back to his normal personality and his favored australian accent as soon as Reparosa flattened the chair like a pancake. He cocked his head to the side and pushed himself up off the floor and into the air, gliding in lazy circles around Rearosa, only a foot above the ground.

"Lovely, I wish I had someone like you as a accomplice back during the Poultry Revolution, you could have flattened most of our enimies with your usightly crustacean arse. What other kinds of devastating offensive weapons do you have besides your abhorrent weight factor?"

Of course this jibe was purely to probe Reparosa's personality, which was easiest to do when Hexen could see the emotional extremes of the person first hand. It made the reverse engineering of their personality much simpler once he knew what its limits were.

Set the parameters and let 'em fill in the rest

Maxx Toron wrote:

"Oh, don't worry about it, my friend!" he said, patting Τρελός on the back with a very large claw "Crazy is the new cool!"

Τρελός felt like his back would break when Reparosa pat his back. He forced as smile and shrugged, simply replying "eheh".

God-mod wrote:

Lovely, I wish I had someone like you as a accomplice back during the Poultry Revolution, you could have flattened most of our enimies with your usightly crustacean arse. What other kinds of devastating offensive weapons do you have besided your abhorrent weight factor?"

Τρελός thought for a second. The Poultry Revolution… it sounded like some bird war. It also sounded interesting. Τρελός would have to look it up when he got back to his office. Unless, of course, he would be assigned something once this meeting started. He turned back to Hexen, who seemed to b humored by the crushed chair. Τρελός destroyed stuff all the time, but he got paid for it. "The Poultry Revolution?" Τρελός asked, "I can't say I've ever heared of it. I'm guessing you were in it?"

"You could say that. The current governmental system did a good job of covering the whole eyesore up, so your going to have a heck of a time trying to look it up on the internet, or finding any of the victims of it anywhere outside our home planet."

Hexen dropped out of the air suddenly skidding across the metallic reinforced floor like he was trying to ice-skate. He spun around in what looked sort of like a sloppy pirouette and somehow wound up directly in front of Τρελός.

He leaned forward in a extremely vulture like fashion and said in an over dramatic voice that sounded almost exactly like David Tennant from Doctor Who,

"Think mass meat industry, but much, much, bigger. Now, forget that, because it wasn't like the meat industry, it was like a Nazi Concentration Camp, and only because the 'poultry' was sentient."

Reparosa looked down at the unsightly chicken with disdain, and rose his large, blue claw high into the air with pride.

"I don't need a weapon, you overgrown turkey." he said in a thick, gruff voice "I can kill anything and everything with this claw!" He opened the claw as if to demo his abilities, but the soldiers began to all stare at him, so he lowered his weapon, and scowled at Hexen.

"Aye, lassie!" he growled "You'll not be trying to do any of your voodoo bullsh*t mind-reading witchcraft around me or I'll turn you and your sorry arse into a bucket of fried chicken!" he laughed a moment at his own joke, and looked up at the apex of the ceiling with wonder, as if he were looking at the eyes of God.

"Neat ceiling, isn't it?" he muttered "I wonder how they make that?"

Lyra was leaning against a wall, watching the others with mild amusement. Tarloc. Is he schizophrenic, or something? One moment he thinks a wall is an elevator, and the next he's fine. Hmm... And what about that chicken guy, Hexen? I could tell he made a personality switch. Then again, we're geniuses. I guess in a way we're all schizophrenics, whether we know it or not. Lyra looked over at Reparosa. And what about him? He's heavy enough to break a steal bench just by sitting in it. I'm surprised the floor is supporting him. She glanced back at the closed elevator doors. Let's hope we can get in there soon. The longer we wait, the less patient we become, and no one wants to be around an impatient psychopathic super genius.

How in the name of Anthropexel did this moron get into NER... how did they make the ceiling indeed... it only takes 1/3rd of a brain to figure that out, and quite obviously, 1/3rd that Reparosa doesn't have.

Hexen looked up at Reparosa and said sarcastically; "No, I won't use my perfectly scientifically explainable ability to reverse engineer your personality and mimic it perfectly, giving the illusion of mindreading. Because quite obviously, your personality is far to sophisticated for me to crack. It would take me about as long to do it as it would take a expert hacker to crack a 10 hash passcode."

Which means I've done it already.

With that, he turned to face Lyra, cocking his head to the side slightly, looking her over, observing her ticks and tells, then absorbing them like a personality sponge.

"Were not all psychopaths or schizophrenic, you know. Τρελός has something that's closer to Multiple Personality Disorder, I've got a wack-job form of PTSD, Reparosa's just a tad superfluous, and probably lead a sheltered life as a child, possibly in a bicultural home, explaining his lack of common courtesy and understanding of basic architecture and building techniques. Exo, the green frog person who went down the elevator before you, is borderline psychopathic, Myre, doesn't really have any disorders, although he is a bit too humanitarian. Zero, is, well, Zero, And you're... well, you worry a bit much."

Lyra looked back at Hexen with a look of surprise, but it only lasted a second before it shifted back. She knew he couldn't read minds, but that mimic ability of his was so accurate it could be scary at times. "I believe, in a way, you're wrong," she replied, "Perhaps not everyone is clinically insane, but we all have our different personalities within ourselves, genius or not. For some it is their conscience, or their Doppelganger. For others it is their imaginary friend."

There was another thing that Hexen said that bugged Lyra. "Well, you worry a bit much." She knew he was probably right. Though she wasn't sure why she was such a worry wart. She couldn't think of anyone who she cared deeply about. None of the people she worked with. Not even herself.

Hexen glanced back at Reparosa disdainfully and stated flatly "Ah, no, killing me in the elevator is not wise, as your Holos degree won't stop you from getting convicted of homicide in the 3rd degree."

He turned back to Lyra, looking her over again, this time focusing more on her face and hands, because now he was looking for stress signals. After a few seconds, he asked calmly;
 
"And, you don't think that might be your problem? Not caring? When you don't have something to care about, then your mind makes up things to worry about. Because when you don't care, you don't love and that's bad for your health. Find something to care about, then there's less to worry about, because you'll have better things to be thinking about."

Okay, now Hexen was really beginning to freak her out. She knew he was right of course, but it wasn't exactly pleasant to hear. It made her a bit more nervous, and her body language showed it, though it was very subtle. Only someone like Hexen would notice it. Of course he's gonna notice, he's staring right at me! She was not pleased with herself at all for reacting like this, but she just couldn't stop herself. It was only natural.

He's probably right, but who could I care about? In a world of double agents and backstabbers, someone like that would be hard to find. And besides, it's in my very nature to be cold-hearted, or at least act it. Though that's not always a good thing. Who could get past all that to care for me? And could I fell the same way back?

Hexen rolled his eyes, and here comes the second guessing... right. on. time.

"If I can see past your guise, others can too, it'll just take them a little longer. So ether stop worrying and be patient, or stop pretending, because worrying doesn't prevent you from getting hurt, it just changes who inflicts the injury."

Hexen thought about what he just said for a second, as if it wasn't exactly him that had said it. Hmm, that sounded proverbial. I should be a psychiatrist, not a spy, or a secret agent. Ah well, such is life.

This must be why I don't go to a psychiatrist. It's not because I'm not crazy. I most definitely am. It must be because I don't want to hear things like this.


"If I can see past your guise, others can too, it'll just take them a little longer. So ether stop worrying and be patient, or stop pretending." Guise? Lyra did not think she had a guise. Sure, she could be a bit secretive at times, but she had her reasons. She doesn't tell many people about her past because she thinks most people wouldn't be interested. There was nothing interesting about it. She could not think of what her guise was hiding. It's not like I have this sparkling inner personality that I'm suppressing. If it seems like I don't care, it's usually because I really don't.

So, maybe I do worry too much. But I'm not sure how caring deeply for someone would help. And why should I worry about stuff anyway? There really isn't too much to worry about for someone like me... Well, other than enemies I've made coming out to get revenge or something.

Waiting outside for the elevator doors to open so she could reach her final destination, Aldara was quickly losing her patience. While she knew some people actually needed artificial forms of transportation to get to where they needed to go, she was not one of those people. In fact, if there was a flight of stairs available, she would use those, and then beat the elevator on its way down in a fraction of the time. Plus, she was already reluctant to be stuck in a tiny descending room with a bunch of different people in her personal space. Was she better than most geniuses at talking to others? Yes, she was. Was she more likely to enjoy social encounters, and tolerate intrusions? Most definitely not. If anything, she was the least social of the entire bunch. Just because she could make eye contact, and have a long, in-depth conversation, did not mean that she liked doing so. Talking was exhausting, and why was it even that important? Well, now she had no choice, because once again, she was going to be stuck in a cramped elevator with a bunch of other people.

The elevator was about three-quarters of the way down the shaft, making relatively good time for a mile-long ride. Myre was leaning back in the corner relaxing, while Zero stood on the other side and Sakayrus sat on the ground with his legs crossed like a child, meditating. Myre looked up at Zero every moment or two, trying not to let her see that he was. She saw him look at her once and blushed a bit, hiding her face back in her black hood. He pretended to be studying his nails, and Zero went back to staring blankly at the wall. Exo was pacing across the room, unable to keep still for a five minute elevator ride. Myre at first said nothing, as Exo was always this jittery, but after a while it began to annoy him. 

"Will you please knock it off and stop acting like a fifth grader, Exo?" he yelped "You're giving me a migraine!"

Myre blushed purple, and Zero sneered at him, her hand slowly creeping up to grab the top of her bow. 

"Exo, the only crazy person in her is you!" Myre snapped "And my great aunt isn't nearly as annoying as that b*tch Millia that you always screw around with! Now give me the gun and stand still!" Myre grabbed Exo's left arm and snatched at the gun. The two soldiers exchanged glances, and Zero sank to the floor, depressed once more. Sakayrus stayed completely still, mediatating despite the chaos going on around him. It was the NER after all; chaos was the usual, and he had learned to ignore it.

"Oh, tell it to somebody else!" Myre yelled, grabbing Exo by the foot and pulling him down. "I'm not gonna let you kill us all because you're impatient!" The soldiers just stood at either side of the doors while Zero pulled her knees into her chest and began to rock back and forth. Sakayrus, of course, still did not move, much to one of the soldiers' amusement. Myre pulled Exo down and threw him face-first onto the cold metal floor. 

"Stop being a spaz or I'll put you down! Got it?" Myre yelled, thoroughly pinning Exo "Now when I let you go, you will stand still for the rest of this elevator ride, got it?"

Five minutes later, The elevator opened at the bottom of the shaft. The two soldiers walked out of the doors first, dragging an unconscious Exo by the arms, whose hands were restrained by handcuffs. Myre walked directly behind the two soldiers, followed by Sakayrus and a rather ragged-looking Zero. Myre was now wearing a pair of black sunglasses, as his right eye was now swollen. Sakayrus was staring at the back of Myre's head with an amused look on his face. Exo was dragged across the 20 x 20 steel-plated lobby and placed on a wooden bench, which they handcuffed him to. Myre sat down across from it, with zero at his left and Sakayrus at his right. For several moments, everyone stood around in a rather awkward silence, looking for something to say or do, until the elevator doors closed and began to go back up to the top floor. 

"So," Myre mumbled "how about that weather?"