maskormenace

[ Annie manages to sound fairly calm through all of this, only allowing her irritation and amalgamation of unhappy emotions show through in the words she chooses to emphasize, smattered throughout her report-like announcement. ]

Loki, you can considering this a love letter for the information age, following up on when you were asking people here to deal in sharing and caring. United States Military, you're welcome to listen in, but all this information is on file with you already, so you may find it lackluster.

Any helpful technologically capable people out there might help me out and work on encrypting conversations below here for the sake of freedom of discussion.

I don't like talking on these, and I'm not good at it, so pay attention. I've included two attachments to this broadcast, and none of the dramatic bullshit we've seen on national television lately. This is all information I've been given by Lieutenant Ananke. Any questions in specific to those contents within should be directed to her, through her contact line programmed onto your device. Or stop by in person. I don't care.

The first is a list of imPorts and native heroes who went missing following events in 2008. Some are reported dead, others only as missing. These names should be familiar to anyone who attended the swearing in last month, where we were witnessing the opening of the memorial graveyard. Not all of these names are there. Not all families wanted a memorial. Not everyone thinks these people are truly gone, or truly dead.

The second is a series of video recordings of a handful of these people. I'm hoping that you can help me identify everyone in attendance - some recordings are labeled with names. They match up to descriptions on file. It also means we have a few more faces to put with names. I've guessed that the young blond man we see in the last two videos is Liam Lawson, a younger native hero. I believe the woman he isn't with, the one sitting down, may be Eleni Wang, who hasn't been heard from since going underground in 2008. I'm not positive, so here's the floor, open for discussion.

Further, myself and several others have been pursuing investigations into the Hornets, localized to the city of Nonah. It's not all swift moving, but I hope that each person will be sharing information on what they learn as they learn anything. I'm presently investigating one of the former students at Phillip North's gym, but if that provides information, I won't know for a while yet. Liam Lawson is also being investigated by another of those who expressed interest, and I'd recommend he share that information, even if it's a dead end, with the imPorts when he has a chance.

[ If there's anything to report, Wally. ]

I don't care how much or little you trust the government. I don't care how often you want to piss into the wind. There's too much shit going on for me to care about bickering over those details, between Russia sitting on ships staring down Alaska up North, to puzzles pointing toward concerns further South and outside this nation, to the fact that Lunatic, one of our own, has been murdering people, and tried to incinerate a seventeen year old civilian earlier today for having been involved in a drunk driving incident that ended another's life.

Cut to the chase. What else is happening that we should know about? Enlighten me.

[ Attachment A: HFILE1.PDF ]
[ Attachment B: Video Files ]

[ OOC Note: Any references within this post to Kara Strydottir should read as Kara Lindholm instead, as that is how her name appears on network. My apologies for any confusion! Please use Kara Lindholm for any references in this post and related comment threads. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ there's a pause for a beat or two. ]

We all have to make our own choices. Even if it's to follow the choices others have made for us... I suppose.

[ annie does not believe in fate. but she does believe in providence. she'd have to, by now.

it's not such a bad thing, this belief. ]

[ kanaya's relationship with fate is complicated. yes, you can do whatever you like, but if what you like isn't what's supposed to happen, you'll just turn up on a dead timeline. only the right choices, the choices that will eventually allow space and time to bear fruit, are accepted.

providence can be a cruel thing at times, but it is the best route to survival, and for more than just her. ]

Even when those choices have been made for us, yes. The decisions still need to be reached, acquiescence over defiance. Sometimes that choice will be easier than others.

[ where-as annie's is unfortunate. going along with the flow... following human nature, in it's most basic forms, and yet she both does and doesn't. hard to say when she did finally take hold of something for herself, with how too little too late it was, and what kind of selfishness it had been in the end. ]

Sometimes.

[ that's all she has to say. sometimes it's hard, even as you walk along, to see anything but the choices that lead to nothing. ]

[ that it's hard at others is the implied counterpoint, more often than not, one might say. ]

And that only makes those times more important, something to seek in the rare times they occur. Especially when the method to finding them is readily available.

[ it honestly makes annie sigh - out loud and audible, tired in more than one way. ]

It gives me a headache.

[ fate and providence and choices and rivers and flows and whole universes of information all around, all the time. ]

Funny, I would see it more as aspirin, like you've been stumbling through the darkness when suddenly, someone turns on the light.

[ though it isn't a problem kanaya's personally had in years, she's pretty sure rose would appreciate the metaphor. ]

Or a thread that's become tangled, until someone pulls just the right loop to straighten it all out. The headache comes from confusion, while direction is a drop of clarity in the midst of it.

If you're used to such things... it's less clear where I'm from where any of the ideas people with power have are heading.

[ No one is there to point out a sure way forward, because too many are too sure of their viewpoints on their ways forward. It's not a settled place, balanced so precariously as it is - and what lines are drawn are always drawn in sandstone. ]

So I suppose that kind of clarity would be welcome. It's outside of my own expectations. It's new.

I grew up with it, really, though in a different form. [ every night for over ten years, she always had the dreams to tell her what was coming. it had been her job to plan accordingly. ] I've always felt a little lost without, honestly.

How long has that been gone?

Four years, almost. That was a generally eventful day.

But I haven't dreamt in quite the same way since.

What do you mean?

Ever since I was very young, I used to dream of a bright place with golden halls, where the future could be seen in the clouds. But it didn't exist only in my dreams, it was...a psychic connection of some sort, so that when I slept in reality, my awareness would instead pass to there.

On that same day that my life ended and my unlife began, the day I met Rose, when everything in my life seemed to take a different direction from what I had anticipated from those same dreams, the first thing to happen was that golden place's destruction.

When I first came to the City, with nowhere for them to go, my dreams were simply empty. [ she kind of misses those days, unsettling as they had been at first. ]

Edited 2014-10-29 00:27 (UTC)

[ It's an interesting thing to imagine, and a concept Annie ends up being able to follow, regardless of experiencing no such thing herself. What Kanaya says in the end is curious to her. ]

"Were?"

"Were." Someone got into my head once, planted something there that's kept long since he left. Just a scar on my mind that never healed.

So, no, they aren't quite as empty as they had at first been.

[ motherfucking clowns. ]

[ motherfucking nightmares. (though funny to realize annie's never met a clown.) ]

Nightmares, hmm?

[ annie you are missing exactly nothing. do yourself a favor and never meet a clown. ]

Artificial nightmares, at that.

[ no, she really never needs to meet a clown. hisoka on the network is close enough. ]

... Not even your own nightmares. That's... insane.

If ever you cross a psychic, kill them quickly. A physical opponent can do no more than break your bones. Someone who can harm your mind however, it's not as easily guarded against, and the damage is lasting.

... We should talk, sometime. Not that your advice is going unheeded.

[ Annie just feels by now that maybe it's worth being forthright with Kanaya about the actual change the Porter wrought on her. ]

The scars we don't show can be some of the deepest.

[ by now she's gotten used to that phrase. it's a useful codeword for when they have something that should be discussed off the network. ]

I don't generally care to let any of my scars show. I suppose that says enough about them on their own.

But yes, we'll talk sometime.

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