sixthiterationlogs | i'm done being a pawn

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i'm done being a pawn

WHO: Desmond Miles
WHERE: Fountain; around the village,
WHEN: 12/3
OPEN TO: Anyone!
WARNINGS: Swearing for sure

Fountain arrival; ota

His hand was going in slow motion as it reached for the key to saving humanity and releasing Juno. Despite knowing it was right, despite saying goodbye to the remaining people in his life, he was afraid as he took a deep breath and prepared for the end. His eyes closed ... and then suddenly he was opening his eyes surrounded by water. Desmond flailed, shocked and horrified, this was not the way he expected Juno to take him, and was he supposed to just wait until he drowned? No, this can't be right. His feet kicked and he broke the water into air, gasping and scrambling for the side of ... what the hell was this? His eyes hurt from the water and he dragged himself out, immediately shocked by the cold of the air around him. It hadn't been cold before, why was it cold?

Desmond shakily tried to stand but collapsed hard onto his knees, his hands catching his weight. He should be dead. Maybe he was dead. Or maybe this was something else. He sat back on his haunches, breathing unsteadily, and dropping this strange pack from his back to toss it aside. Who put that on him? Juno's face hazily appeared in his mind's eye, and his confusion turned into rage. Maybe he failed. Maybe this was Minerva, furious that he disobeyed. Frustrated, he did something very stupid and dove right back into the water, going as far as he could. He had to finish this. He couldn't thwart fate. He reached around of any sign of what to do, but it was dark and he sprang out of the water again, colder and more exhausted than before.

"Juno!" He yelled, searching the sky. "Minerva! Which one of you bitches did this?" Desmond spit out water, shaking from cold or shock. "Juno! Goddamnit."

Around the village the next few days, OTA

Desmond was unnerved by everything so far and deeply suspicious. It was an elaborate lie, it had to be. A trick. He went to the inn just because there was no where else to stop freezing and not starve as far as he could tell. He sat by himself in the furthest corner away from others, making certain nothing was at his back but the wall in case of stabbing. Occasionally he ventured up to the records there, reading it but skeptical.

Later on he can be seen in the bunker trying to make sense of what was down there and if his hacking had any use. He was wandering around the village, admittedly being a little creepy as he glanced at the houses and cased the joints. Eventually he claimed House 46 and sat outside, staring off into the distance, scowling.

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"If they could get us out, people would've probably already tried." That was if this place was real and not fake, which is probably was. Some percentage of him was sure of that. But why would he come up with some random boathouse? Was it to mentally move himself down the river and back to consciousness? Desmond could almost hear Subject 16 tell him to get his shit together. Whatever this was, he might as well roll with it. Unless he wanted to hole himself up in the house forever. Which wasn't a terrible option. Get your shit together, Des.

He narrowed his eyes slightly at the kid, who didn't really look like much of a threat, and his curiosity was in play. Seeing more of this place might give him clues, or at let him know where he was so he could move around the village easily. He was going to wear himself out on paranoid thoughts alone. "Okay." He knew that she sounded a little flat, and tried to remind himself how to people. "Thanks. I'm Desmond." He walked down to the pathway.

"And, of course, this requires us to run the assumption that we're on an island. Which, from everything I've read, we can't fully justify saying. But there is the lake, and the boats are useful on the river and for getting to the lake to fish."

Though abandoning paranoid thoughts might not be the best idea right now. Just because you're paranoid didn't mean people weren't out to get you. And from all Nida had read so far in the records in the inn, there was a good chance something or someone was out for them. Not that he could be sure. Not enough time to gather intel.

"Nida," he offered right back when a name was given. He smiled and then tilted his head up the road to let the guy know he was going to start moving again, so catch up. Getting a few paces ahead also had the added advantage of getting his back to Desmond. Most people, even if only unconsciously, felt a bit better when you were willing to turn your back on them. There was an implication of trust in that sort of action. And the idea of doing it right now made every trained reflex and instinct cringe, because you weren't supposed to do that.

Paranoia was not a neighborly thing. Or so Nida has to remind himself. It's at least true in polite society.

"It's a bit further up. Still on this side of the river from what I understand. Could be wrong. Haven't been there myself yet."

Edited 2018-12-12 14:33 (UTC)

"Oh, right. No idea where we are. Anyone make some maps and see where the borders end or keep going into infinity?" Desmond's honestly not sure if he cares. He has no where to go. If he tried to walk away from this place, it'd just be going to another place stuck wherever they were and staying there instead. No way of knowing if that was better than what they were already dealing with. Also he was tired and didn't plan on walking across any long patch of land. He was done exploring.

He looked at Nida's back and frowned, because that was a dangerous choice to make. He didn't know Desmond. He could be a serial killer. But he was also paranoid and used to being hunted, and he knew that not everyone was so unlucky, so it must be nice. Desmond was never as good as the other Assassins at reading other people. It could be a lack of skill, or that he didn't care enough to get better at it. Without Eagle Sight, he had to just guess like everyone else again. So that was awesome.

"Do you know how to sail a boat?" Desmond kept pace with him now. He didn't like watching his back, it made him unnecessarily worried for the guy. "I ... do I guess. Old ships though. Probably not whatever's here." And knowing rationally parts of it from Connor was not the same as being able to physically do it himself.

The thing about putting your back to someone is that you have to accept the risk that came with it. Nida wasn't even armed. Instead he just... well, he had to trust even if he didn't want to.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and his starting point with this guy was going to be showing he wasn't a threat. Which was absolute bullshit, but Nida knew how to sell it. How to act younger than he was, more like a kid than he'd ever been. But seeing the guy walking up to move next to him was interesting. So Nida turned so he was walking more or less sideways. Feet forward, full attention on Desmond to the side.

"I do. Learned a lot about vehicles at school. Not sure I have the arm strength for sustained rowing, but the other stuff? I have that down."

Desmond was more directly walking, only occasionally looking askance at Nida. His eyes were moving fast as they scoped out the area with sharp focus. He was a reasonably built guy but there was nothing that screamed threat about him, except for how he seemed to absorb the area with the swiftness of someone trained for it. It wasn't a casual 'oh what's that' look. It was 'how many places can I hide if I need to stab someone' look.

At least when he glanced at Nida his eyes softened. He was less Assassin and more Desmond when interacting directly with people. As unpracticed as he felt like he was at the moment.

"Fine, I can do the rowing, you can do the pointing, if it becomes a thing." It seemed like a fair trade. Rowing he could do. "This lack of computer thing is going to kill me, but it's not like I can Google where the fuck we are." Desmond had only a few skills of his own, including computers, so unless he could get the ingredients for a Sex on the Beach, he wasn't going to be much help.

They are the sorts of furtive looks that Nida could appreciate, provided he wasn't the one being stabbed. But looking intently enough at Desmond to pick up on that would be looking too close for so soon, and he didn't want to make the man uncomfortable.

"You got it," Nida laughed, shaking his head as he finally turned fully forward to consider the path.

The rest he took a bit longer to parse. Computers he got, but 'google' seemed like a verb.

"What's that mean, 'google'?"

Desmond was not like being looked at too long, this was true, at least not sideways. He was in a half-paranoid state at the moment and he never was very comfortable with a large amount of attention. The funny thing was, he was a fairly extroverted guy in the right situations. He used to like being a bartender and meeting a lot of people. He had the small talk amiable conversation down pat once. Maybe he could get there again, once he stopped freaking out.

Nida's laugh actually startled him, but he smiled at it. His friends used to roll their eyes when he tried to make jokes. So it was cool. "Uhhh. Right. Not the same worlds, which isn't at all suspicious as hell that this is either a delusion or the afterlife." He was 85% sure it was one of those things. "Google is a search engine on the internet, on our online network. You can use it to look up pretty much anything you want information on, such as where the fuck are we Google and how do we get out."

"Oh, Garden had an internal search tool for our localized online network. I guess we didn't bother naming it. Though we didn't have 'anything we want' available on it. Just access to whatever was on the network. Though maps of major metro areas would have been there I guess."

Because Nida wasn't capable of understanding the scale of Google. At all. Sure, his world had gotten to fiberoptic cables and digital service far earlier in their timeline than Desmond's world had, but that had been a practical thing, because of the fact that radio signals hadn't worked for 17 years. There had been a drive to achieve something, and they'd managed it.

"No, this is an online tool that's available to everyone in the world. There are some internal things you can do for groups and all, but anyone can Google anything. And they do." Desmond doesn't think this is necessarily a great thing, but he does think it's a useful tool. And okay, sometimes he liked to google random shit too. He does get slightly more animated when talking about something he knows, relaxing off his tension slightly.

"There's this thing they do called auto complete, it's kind of hilarious. So Google opens and you start typing in what you're looking for. So if you were like 'where the hell are we' it offers ideas like 'where the hell is the remote,' 'where the hell is Carmen Santiago,' 'where the hell is my life going.' All based on the most popular search options." This was a normal not crazy subject from his world, so that was nice. "You can find anything on there."

"That sounds a bit weird, having that sort of connection to people far away like that," Nida frowned. Optic cables didn't really connect a network of things where he was. It was primarily phones and television.

His world was isolated in ways that really didn't strike Nida as weird.

"There is a kind of disconnect, sometimes. When you can get everything on the internet, and talk to everyone on the internet, and date on the internet, yadda yadda, there's not a whole lot of actual people-ing going on." Desmond loved computers and the internet, and he thought it was seductive, constantly having everyone at an arm's length but still getting interaction. "I love computers, I'm a hacker, sort of." Not the best one; he thought he was doing pretty damn well at Abstergo but it was a tick. "But yeah, there's downfalls too. Like any tech."

This was already more that he'd spoken with a stranger in a long while, and ... so far not that bad. "I guess we don't have phones either, these pass as some version of text/voice, right?" He tapped his wrist band.

“We don’t have anything like this internet you are talking about,” Nida shrugged. “At least where I am from. Radio signal interference.”

Where else could the internet possibly be? Strange how he didn’t know. But dating online?

“How do you dare someone online?”

How do you even date someone.

"I guess it depends on how you go about it. You can sign up for these websites and answer some questions about yourself and who you want to meet, and they match you through an algorithm of sorts. You talk online for awhile and decide to meet up in person for a date." Desmond shrugged. "Or you meet people there to hook up and don't bother with dating." He may have tried both at one point or another, to no real end.

"I worked at a bar so I saw people meeting up on dates for the first time a lot. Break ups and marriage proposals too." Desmond smiled a little. These were easier things to talk about, and he was starting to relax more. "There's a kind of safety in dating on the internet, because you can get to know someone before you meet them. Instead of just taking a chance with a stranger you see across a bar."

None of that makes sense. Which means Nida is paying more attention to Desmond than he is to the road and trips. Tumbles. Rolls immediately up to his feet with a spring and ease that says there is some serious training in the kid. Which he'd maybe been hiding. Whoops.

"Can you really get to know someone without seeing them? What if they lie?" Nida asked, clearly intrigued.

Desmond's startled that he trips and almost tries to reach out to catch him, but the kid managed a pretty good roll. It's noted, of course, and stowed away. "Bro, I know I'm fascinating, but don't break something." It was said in jest. He was kind of fascinating, but not in any of the ways that he was comfortable showing to a stranger.

"They do lie, a lot of the time. Mostly about their looks, which makes sense. You think maybe someone will like you enough for your personality that they'll let some things slide." Desmond was pretty easy going about that himself. He got why people did things sometimes. "Sometimes the anonymity is freeing though. It's possible you might never meet this person, so you could say things to them you wouldn't normally." He snapped his fingers. "Oh and there's a lot of cheating."

"Yeah, I get that," Nida said. The anonymity, not the cheating. Can't cheat if you've never been in a relationship. But now he's interested.

"Seriously, don't things on the net tend to last? That's literally asking for trouble."

And look, they're almost at the bridge and before that the large structure of the boathouse. Soon Desmond will be free of prying young Nida.

"It is. It's now a part of a lot of divorce proceedings, I guess. I had a few drunken bar conversations about this. From people who were cheated on or did the cheating or was the other person in the cheating." Desmond smiles wryly. "That's being a bartender for you. People talk and talk." As someone who never had much of a normal life, he found it was great to listen and learn more about it. It was shallow and foolish, yeah, but sort of nice, if that was the worst part about your life and not death and murder.

"If only this place had a bar. I make so many great cocktails, you have no idea."

"There is a bar in the inn, just... no alcohol to get there," Nida shrugged. As for talking to bartenders, well, Nida had never been in a bar so he didn't really have an opinion there.

What a thought, people whose lives were ruined by the whole 'internet' thing. Subtly was an art that seemed to have been lost in Desmond's world. Or, perhaps, had never been there. Then again, it wasn't as present in his own, so he accepted it as a sad fact of life.

"Alright, well, there's the boathouse up there. What say we go explore?"

Desmond glanced at him and was surprised that ... yeah he actually wanted to go. "Alright. Let's go."

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i'm done being a pawn

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May be able to tie this off.

Perfect!