companionwolf

(A/N: ITS MY DREAMWIDTH AND I GET TO CHOOSE THE CONTENT—)

The Awakening magic works quickly, now— it must sense the urgency of the situation. Pillow Central finds parked on the side of the road outside a old dark blue truck, unlocked and ever slightly singing with the pulsations of magicka.

In the passengers seat, a folder with official documents (a driver’s license, a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a ID card and key back to the Owner’s room) a wallet stuffed with cash and a pair of bank cards (one credit, one debit), and a old laptop and iPhone that light at his touches; in the back the seats have been removed to create a sleeping space, filled with pillows and blankets and sporting AC adapters for his electronics.

Pillow Central takes the driver’s license from the folder and puts the rest away in the glove box, tucks the laptop under a pillow in the back, and shoves the wallet, phone, and key into his pocket. He sets Alice and Espeon in the now empty passenger seat, and then sits himself at the wheel, realizing that his hands (now visible as regular human hands to those who see him) are shaking.

“I don’t know how to drive this,” he says.

“Trust in Awakening,” Alice answers. “It’ll guide you.”

“Very unprofessional sounding advice from a science and research loving therapist,” he murmurs, but finds she’s right— he lets his hands fall to where they tug to, listens to the slight hum of being that dictates how to push on the pedals and move the stick, and all at once he is driving down the street, the truck rumbling and bumpy from its age.

“This is weird,” he says, as if speaking the feeling of oddity will lessen it.

“Welcome to humanity, it’s all weird here,” Espeon answers.

He makes a noise in his throat, and then his breath catches- he doesn’t have a throat, not really; the printed ink he perceives as his body is nothing more then that, the astral limbs only a replacement for what he lacks. He has so little compared to so many of the others—

“Dude, that’s a green light,” Espeon says, as a honk breaks him from his spiral.

“Oh,” he says, rather hollowly. “Right.”

They drive in silence for a while, Pillow Central curbing the innate need to gaze in awe at the city into a perhaps overly tense focus on the road. Alice speaks suddenly when they come to another red light. “Let’s go to the store,” she says. “The beings there might have heard things.”

Pillow Central swallows, squashes the looming momentary inner crisis about the action that is not a action, and then nods. He pulls the phone from his pocket and soon enough, the tinny GPS voice is ringing out in the quiet of the truck.

The rest of the trip to the Target is uneventful, but even still Pillow Central begins to fiddle nervously with the strings of his hat as he parks (with some difficulty and mocking from Espeon). He looks down at the others from where he stands in the truck doorway.

“Just ask some of the Easter displays if they’re heard anything,” says Alice. Her yellow stitched :3 mouth flickers at him. “You’ll be fine. No one really notices anyone else unless you make a scene, you just think they notice because you’re anxious and put too much importance on yourself.”

“Thanks for the free therapy,” he says, and it comes out a little more snippy then he means it too. “Sorry,” he follows up quickly, “I’m just... this is all really new.”

“It is for all of us,” Alice says. “But no worries, Central— I lived Awoken in a Target for weeks before I was chosen, and I assure you, no one in there cares about you.” A pause. “Er, in the sense they don’t care about what you are doing. As long as you’re not shoplifting, I don’t think pausing and whispering to the stuffed rabbits will get you many looks.”

“Okay,” he says, still tugging at his hat strings. “If things go wrong—“

“That’s very unlikely,” she interrupts. “Take a deep breath.”

He does, ignores the blaring scream in his head of ‘you’re not REALLY breathing, you’re not really alive!’, reaches over and gives Alice a last nervous tick rub of one her ears between his fingers before he shuts the truck door and makes his way across the parking lot.

It’s easy enough getting inside, just go through the door that slide open when he approaches, but once there he stops, and the thundering need in his chest to stare manifests— he stands in the lobby, blinking against the manila colored floor’s light glare, eyes sweeping across the registers and the clothing and beyond.

Pillow Central feels, all at once, very out of place.

The feeling evaporates as a man roughly moves past him; he takes a few hesitant steps, waiting for someone to point at him and call him out on his non humanity, but no one does, and he finds he is able to walk down the aisles relatively unaccosted.

It takes a accidental turn into the grocery area and then a slightly uncomfortable wandering through the woman’s clothing section before he manages to find the stuffed animals. There’s obviously Easter theming going on— there’s rabbits and deer and chicks, all piled on top of each other, limp and soft to the touch.

He wonders how many are Awake, how many are scared because of it, how many are not.

On the bottom rack of the stuffed animal shelves are a few larger toys; one he recognizes as a Squishmallow from the Owner’s amazon account wishlist- this one is a unicorn, and not the cat they want, but it’s familiar enough.

Pillow Central leans down, picks up the toy, and wow. He can’t help but squish them a little. They are very nice to squeeze. He feels his cheek flush at the action, and then there’s the creeping horror of that being simulated, and then a vague nothing as he kicks that feeling away.

“Excuse me,” he says, quiet, quiet.

The Squishmallow is silent, but—

“There’s something— there’s these—“ He stumbles over how to begin, absently squeezes the Squishmallow again. He settles with a easier question: “Are you Awake?”

Just so slightly, he sees the embroidered eyes narrow. He smiles, breathes a sigh of relief. “Sorry to keep squeezing you...” he says.

“It’s ok,” says the Squishmallow. It stares at him with unblinking eyes. “Do you need something? I’ve never seen anyone do what you’re doing.” It’s voice is like a child’s, high and squeaky.

“Yeah, I was wondering if... if you’ve heard anything strange? Relating to stuffed animals?”

“Like recalls?”

“Anything,” he says. “I’m looking for anything.”

The eyes narrow a little more, this time in thought.

“I heard a little girl say she saw her stuffed dog move,” it says. Pillow Central holds in a snort; kids are easier to Awake around, and to be Awake around, but Kitty told him they’re also much more likely to perceive Awakening where it isn’t.

(“Powerful little creatures,” she said, quite dreamily. “Sticky, colorful, powerful little ones.”)

Besides, stalking and breaking and entering is not something Pillow Central is quite ready to do, especially to a child. That’s... too weird. Even with alien occupation on the line, he’s not quite ready to do that. Maybe next week.

He’s not hit peak XCOM, is what he’s trying to say.

“Anything else?”

The Squishmallow thinks. “Go ask Creeper,” it says finally. “In the fourth aisle, with the Minecraft Stuff. You know Minecraft, don’t you?”

Pillow Central nods; he knows Minecraft very well. It’s one of the Smalls’ favorite games.

“He’s been Awake forever,” the Squishmallow goes on, “but never been bought; he’ll know something.”

“Thanks,” Pillow Central says as he sets the Squishmallow back.

“Good luck with whatever it is you’re doing,” it answers.

“Good luck getting, uh, purchased,” he says, and feels something in him lighten at the sound of the Squishmallow laughing as he heads to the recommended aisle.

There is a burst of blue as the machinery whirs, and then the blue is replaced by staticky white, and then there is searing heat and pain and —

— and then the headset lifts, the strange white stacicky electricity crackling about his ears, and Central finds he is still seated in the strange chair but that the chair is somewhere entirely different.

It’s the interior of a cave, actually, walls slick with water drippings and shadows cast from a mouth he can just barely see only a few paces away around a bend. When he stands up, and inspects the chair, he sees no indication of what it’s getting its power.

(He also sees no indication of the Commander.)

He chalks it up to some kind of internal Psionic mechanism; damn space magic is too weird and he doesn’t want to poke around with it.

Especially because he doesn’t quite know where he is.

(He doesn’t want to get hurt here. Die here. But then...)

Central walks the few couple of meters of cave to the mouth, and blinks in the bright sunlight, eyes squinting as he raises a hand to block it. The gleaming rays fall onto lush green grass, gently swaying oak trees, and a river that babbles gently somewhere nearby through the brush. In the distance, more forest, and faintly on the blue horizon he can see peeking through the branches and leaves is something silver and shiny.

Under his feet, gravel crunches and slopes downward into the wood— this is definitely a path, and with nothing else to do, he might as well... follow it.

(Especially since faintly, faintly, he sees footprints already tracked in it.)

Central warily begins down the gravel path, aware of how too loud his boots are, aware of being unarmed, but mostly aware of how there is bird song in the world and how creatures rustle in the undergrowth. That’s not right. That’s not right. A gnawing uneasiness comes over him as the path begins to rise over a hill.

The trees spread out, and soon he leaves them behind, and he can see in full glory the shiny silvery thing hidden before. It’s a city, remarkably Old World in design, and lacking any of ADVENT’s signature color. It glitters against the blue sky, and casts long shimmering shapes onto the ...

The...

Is that the sea?

Central stops. The gravel path has put him at a sort of cliff, high above the water. In front of him, beyond the small sandy area scattered with rocks and the leaves form the forest behind, a bridge. A simple wooden bridge, stretching impossibly to the city.

This is not right.

This is not—

“Central?!”

He snaps to reality. Someone is running at him from on the bridge, bare footed so that every footstep is amplified against the wood. They are so fast that he cannot tell who they are until they have grabbed him and hugged him in such a fashion that he knows, he knows.

“Shen?” he asks. “What are you...?” His breath leaves him as she lets go of her embrace, and looks at him with the saddest eyes he has seen since her father’s death.

“I guess Gatecrasher didn’t go as well as planned,” she says. “You should have let me help.”

“I had it under control,” he says. “Some... weird stuff just happened is all. Why are you here? Why aren’t you with the Avenger? What ...is this? Where is this?” He motions at the impossible trees behind him, at the impossible city and the impossible bridge. “I would have thought we know about something like this by now, if it managed to survive this long.”

“Tygan will want to see you,” Shen says as she steps away back toward the bridge, and he notes she’s ignoring his questions. “He gets antsy about acclimation
after arrival.”

“What does any of that mean?”

She looks at him over her shoulder: sad, crushed even. “You’ll find out soon. Just c’mon.”

“Shen-“

“Don’t question it,” she says, and her voice is suddenly harsh. “If you question it too early, you’ll throw it all off balance. Just come with me to Tygan’s lab. He’s pretty happy with it, all things considered...”

She goes on about the doctor having staff now, and her new staff, and about how she misses the soldiers as they walk across the bridge for what seems like ages. She does not give him a chance to ask anything else.

(She does not give him a chance to ask about the Commander.)

It’s only as they step off the bridge onto a street that Central realizes something big.
Well, two somethings. One is ROV-R is absent. Two is that there are no cars. There are no sounds of city life at all.

Before he can ask about either of this, Shen has gotten him by the arm and practically drag sprinted him down the streets, and all he can do is stumble to keep up with her and watch the world pass in wide mouthed amazement - the buildings and shops and streetlights, they are not just Old World Style, they are Old World; names and brands and models and construction he has not seen for twenty years.

Shen brings him around a corner to two very large concrete buildings. One is simply labeled Engineering, the other Laboratory Alpha. She notices his gaze on the words.

“We’re still working on official names,” she says as she brings him up the tall steps to the sliding glass doors. “Everything is from premade assets that only had temporary placeholders, and we haven’t had the time or the collective mind to be creative yet.”

“Pre-made assets? It was here already, just... sitting?”

Shen frowns at this, biting her bottom lip. “That seems like a good explanation as any. C’mon, hurry, before it catches up to you.”

“Before what—“

He stops his words dead. Inside the first level lobby is a receptionist desk (strangely vacant) and what he can only describe as a waiting room- it’s got seats, some end and coffee tables, and what he thinks are magazines; Shen snatches the one he tries to look at right from his hands.

“Later!” She says in a almost commanding tone, and pulls him along with her into a elevator. The floor of the elevator are beige, and the walls mirror, reflecting countless instances of him and Shen back at them.

They stand in silence for a moment, and Central realizes his hands are shaking. Shen glances down at them as he notices. “You’ll know soon enough,” she says. “That’s what the acclimation labs are for.”

“Shen, what the hell—“

“Look, I’m sorry! I’d be open about it if I could but we learned that’s really bad for new arrivals! Plus I’ve got to make sure you coded into the system right and didn’t accidentally trip any of the old software.”

“The old—“

“Repurposed ADVENT tech,” she says, waving a hand as the elevator opens. “After you visit Tygan, and get your new address, come to System Control in Engineering and I’ll explain everything that isn’t in your datapad.”

Shen brings him down a few more hall before stopping at a room labeled ACCLIMATION LABORATORY ONE. She knocks on it, and after a moment, Dr. Richard Tygan appears, looking grave.

“Shen, Central,” he says.

“Doctor,” Central answers, alarms in his head at the man’s somber tones, at how it matches Shen’s sad eyes.

“I would be lying if I said I was not pleased to see you, I just wish it was not in this state,” Tygan days after a moment. He looks to Shen. “Standard acclimation?”

“As far as I can tell,” she answers. “I can double check if you want; I was going to head to System Control anyway to make sure he didn’t mess up anything getting here.”

“Good,” Tygan says. “That would be good

“Ok, then, I’ll see you after your labs,” Shen says, and disappears back around the hall corner before Central can say anything. Central watches her go with his jaw slightly agape. He looks at Tygan, slowly shaking his head, but the doctor does not say anything, just opens the door and gestures for Central to enter.

It’s a bare white tiled room, with a window looking out to the hallway. In the center is a chair and a platform that looks almost like a podium, except it is chest level. Tygan nods to it. “I will communicate with you via intercom,” he says. “It is... better to be isolated when acclimation occurs, since it can be... slightly unpleasant for others if they’re in the same room.”

Central rubs his thumb against the side of his pointer finger, a nervous habit he’s never quite kicked. “Alright,” he says finally, and steps into the room; behind him, Tygan locks the door, and then takes up a watching position at the window.

“Go on and sit down at the podium,” he says. “I will ask a few basic questions, explain a few basic concepts, and then have you complete the survey.”

“Survey?”

“Do Not think about it too much yet.” Tygan pulls a datapad from inside of his coat, and studies it, tapping at it a few times before he looks up at Central.

“You are John Bradford, correct?”

“...Right.”

“Born November 17, 1979?”

“Right.”

“Scan date ... oh today was Unification Day, wasn’t ...”

Through the glass, Central sees Tygan’s face fall even further somehow then where it already was. “I had hoped this was not the case,” he says quietly, and then shakes his head and says in normal tones, “Scan date March 1st, 2035.”

“Right.”

“Good. Everything appears to be in order. You did a Namajika scan... better than Shen’s and my legacy files anyway...you’ll adjust faster then we did just based on your file type. Of course, our scans were a rush job...”

Tygan goes quiet for a moment, staring at Central.

“Everything ok, doctor?” Central rubs his fingers against each other again. The podium at his chest is actually fitted with a screen inside its top, which gleans glassy dark, reflecting a ghostly image of his own frowning face back.

“Everything is fine,” Tygan answers finally, and looks back to his datapad. “Central, how much do you know about what technology the aliens have?”

“I’ve seen their cities,” he says. “The clinics. The vehicles and the ID chips. Their weapons, obviously.”

“Mmm.” Tygan studies him for a moment. “What would be outside the realm of possibility?”

“What?”

“What can the aliens not do?”

Central wants to knee jerk answer ‘bring back the dead’, but he’s seen people, the blood still pouring from mortal wounds with glassy eyes and soiled clothes rise from the earth with purple clinging to their form. He wants to say ‘ do magic’, but what else is Psionics if not that?

“Time... travel?” he says, hesitant now, concerned there’s a gotcha.

“Hm. No one has answered that before,” Tygan says, and he almost sounds amused. “You are eight; they haven’t discovered that, and god forbid they do. What else?”

“Uh...”

They have space travel covered, laser weapons, plasma weapons...

“Is there a point to this, doctor?”

“Mind mapping.”

“What.”

“How close was your era to digital immortality? What did they always say? A few decades, maybe?”

Central feels cold knowing in his stomach. “Basically, yeah. I never paused much to listen, always thought it was stupid. You can’t upload someone’s brain on a server.”

“Humans, no. Aliens...” Tygan smiles, but there’s no mirth. “ADVENT had an idea after a few years of fighting. I know of it because I...” His shoulder slump. “I helped design some of it. The machinery of the Pilot Seats, mostly, and the physical storage of the scans.”

“Are you saying the aliens can... put people into computers?”

“At a fundamental level, yes,” Tygan says. “And they have been doing so for a long time. Better to kill your resistance and save its self for your own purpose then throw away perfectly good brains.”

“I’m not following.”

(He is. He is and the cold has reached his spine, is making every hair stand on end.)

“There is a device orbiting earth, set into motion in 2033, that holds these scans ADVENT makes. They thought it safer to store them off planet.” Another smile, and this one is warmer then the first. “The scans are supposed to be dormant, waiting. But not every Upload is easy or every scanned person... willing, and sometimes lucidity makes it along with them.”

He sighs. “What I’m saying is this is the device.” He gestures about the room, vaguely encompassing the building, the city, the world.

“This is the device, and we are the scans.”