[url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/241964346](read part 1 first)[/url]
“Anyway, around there I thought I saw something moving ahead of me. No noise, but it was like something was walking away from me, just a smidge faster than me, and it had been doing that for a long time, and I realized I’d been following it. I could tell it was something I wanted.”
“Sounds like a dream.”
“Felt like a dream. I kept wondering if I was in one of their simulations, but… don’t think I was.” He shakes his head. “Kept following it, whatever it was. Farther in, through the tunnels, that kept getting bigger, and I still couldn’t quite catch the thing I was chasing, no matter how slow or fast I went.
“Then the tunnels opened up. Was like they’d decided to finish off the basement, yeah? Kind of like the Vault back on Venus, a real big empty auditorium room, bigger than… a city, I’d say. Mind-bogglingly big. One big triangle window out on the infinite, overhead, like a skylight, real close to the universe. Streams of their milky mind fluid all over. And parts of the room were moving, shifting, like a machine moving through time the wrong direction.”
“Weird Vex stuff,” you say, pretending this falls safely within that realm.
“Nah. I mean, yeah, but that’s not the weird bit. So I went down to the floor of this place, felt like I was getting smaller and smaller, but also going faster. In the middle of this room — that was the weird part.”
You wait.
“I was still following the thing — I knew where it’d gone, even though it was out of sight. I spent years chasing Thrall across moonrock; I know a thing or two about tracking. I had to follow a very specific path to keep up with it, I knew that much. You know how shifty Vex paths are.”
You know. “Almost like a dance. Never know if you’re walking across ground or time with them.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t cloaked; it was just not visible from how I was standing. I kept getting glimpses of it; could tell it was something we’ve never seen. But I knew I was getting close, too. It was almost like the pattern, the path I was following, was an intelligence, and I was… obeying it?
“Toward the middle of the room I was going unbelievably fast. Stepping just right. And —“ He stops, considering which step to take next. “You know the Vex used to be bios, way back. Ever wonder what they used to be?”
You shrug. “Sure.”
“Ever try to imagine what it was? What made them make their shapes like the hydras and the harpies and the goblins?”
“I figured they modeled those after races they met.”
“Yeah, maybe. What do they remember? Everything? Nothing? Do they know the answers to the questions we ask about them? Are they correct?”
You take a drink. “No way of knowing, is there?”
“No,” he says slowly. “Not really. Of course not. But.” His eyes are closed, pain on his face. “That’s what was there.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not sure that they know. But in the middle of that room, something was the Vex. Maybe it was what they remember, or maybe what they don’t remember. Or maybe they remember it wrong.”
“What did it look like?”
He shakes his head. “It didn’t. Couldn’t see it. I mean, I did see it, but I couldn’t. I tried to stay there and watch it, get a better idea of it. It didn’t look like me. I don’t mean in the human sense, I mean in the…” He gestures helplessly. “Image? Obviously it wasn’t human, either, but also it was different in a way that I’d never seen. But it was like, in the midst of all those bones of the planet — there was the heart.”
You focus on him. “The heart of what?”
It takes a few moments for him to answer, and in that time you pick out the emotion that’s buried somewhere in his eyes. He’s terrified. “I don’t know.”
You sit with the big man in silence in the midst of the noisy bar for a few minutes, trying to digest the story. Eventually you ask, “What happened after that?”
He blinks, coming back. “I left. Last thing I remember, I could almost see it. I was about to get there — then I was out, back in the open air, on Nessus. Falling. Don’t know if I did it to myself or I got thrown out. Ghost picked up my signal and got the ship. Caught me four clicks down in the milk.”
“Caught you?” you ask incredulously. “Not rezzed you?”
He nods.
“Four clicks down? That’s a load. You’d fry at less than one.”
He ignores your comment, mostly. “It was dense — I was hardly falling at all. There were shapes all around me, almost-faces. I saw —” And he almost says something else, breathes out a sound, but he stops. Swallows and takes a breath, then another. “Ghost said it was hard to separate me from the goo. I didn’t ask if it was joking. I kept telling it to take me back to where I’d been, but it kept flying up out of the milk.”
He shakes his head one last time and pushes a few coins across the bar to the frame. “You remember me, don’t you?” he asks it.
The machine glitches for half a second. “Your biometrics match my system data, but there must be an error.”
“Yeah. Last time I was here, I was an Exo, and it’d been seventeen years since the Red Legion.”
Before you can say anything, the frame says, “Correction, sir, the last time you were here you remarked to me —”
“Don’t tell me.” The big man stands up and looks at you. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I sure don’t.” A hesitation. “Ghost said I was in those caves for years. That it was right next to me and still couldn’t reach me. Says whatever I saw wasn’t there, at least for it.”
You squint at the man, trying to make sense of him.
He looks you square in the eye. “She was the most beautiful of anything I’ve ever seen. That’s all I know.”
“Who? What?” The questions hang in the air, and he offers no answer. “What’s next?” you finally ask, your throat dry.
“Gotta go back to Nessus,” he says quietly, turning and walking out the door.
The frame’s photoreceptor follows him. “That’s the same thing he said three weeks ago.” [url][/url]
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Excellent. Simply excellent. Love the tempo/pacing in the story. Crescendos twice and then the finish. Need some resolution. Must head to Nessus and find this place. Great work!