outliers-au - Tumblr blog

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^ I’ll have a URL once I’m done backing up shit.

I guess I’ll be (parallel) posting my stuff to wordpress or something from now on, since tumblr seems quite intent on killing itself. Supposedly the explicit content rule doesn’t apply to text, but I don’t trust tumblr to do anything whatsoever correctly.

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Problems:

I want this story to be written

I don’t want this story to be written by anyone but me

I don’t want to write this story

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All old posts are up now, have to start working on the ones I haven’t written yet now :v

[outliers-au]

Prologue (part 5)

[Previous] [Index] [Next]

The Grineer shuttle passed through the colony’s atmospheric lock, descended at an alarming rate, and slammed, bouncing once, into the receiving deck with a spray of sparks, more crashing than landing. Moor stood unflinchingly between the stubby vessel and the rest of the yard. Even when its cargo ramp lowered to reveal a score of heavily armored troops inside, he didn’t allow himself even a twitch of the eye.

“Gentlemen.” His tone was polite but stiff, just shy of defiant; on the inside, he silently thanked every power in the universe that the soldiers hadn’t shown up before the yard crew went home. More than a few, he knew, would have panicked at the sight of them. “I believe I’ve paid you in full for the cycle already. Can I help you with something?”

One marine shouldered his way through the rest of the squad to the front.

“Ah.” Moor’s expression softened as he recognized the clone soldier’s features. “Your pilot could do with a refresher on landing techniques, Lieutenant Gorra.”

Gorra laughed, a guttural, unpleasant sound. “Major Gorra now.” His one visible eye twinkled malevolently in its sunken pit of a socket. “Bad accident last week. Dag Ralta didn’t make it. I took his place.”

“That’s a shame,” Moor commented cautiously, though he surmised that the newly-minted major had a hand in his former superior’s demise. “But congratulations to you. And I doubt you came here just to celebrate your promotion with me, hm? What kind of parts are you looking for today? Might be that I’ve got something you could use for your pet projects.”

Gorra waved a mechanical hand dismissively. “No parts today. Official business only.” He stepped forward. Moor was large for a human, but if he were a giant, then Gorra was a titan, taller than him by a head and with a broadness to match. “Looking for a ship. Tenno scum in our area,” he spat. “Took damage. Still got away. Maybe it came here for help. Maybe it passed by. Maybe you saw it.”

“The only ship that’s come in here in the last few days has been that one,” Moor said flatly, nodding toward the hauler still resting on its platform. “And you know I’m too smart to dabble in that kind of business. I keep away from Tenno like they’re the Infestation.”

The two stared each other down for a short eternity, eyes locked in a battle of wills. They were not quite friends, and not quite enemies; each commanded a sort of grudging respect from the other – for Moor’s tenacity and courage, from Gorra; and for Gorra’s surprising civility toward Wulock’s inhabitants, from Moor. The rest of the Grineer were unshakably xenophobic, a fact emphasized by the scowling faces of the other soldiers as they watched the exchange that, to them, was futile insolence against their Empire’s inexorable might.

A low, rumbling laugh worked its way up from Gorra’s throat, and the trance was broken. “I know,” the major said, breaking into a deformed smile. “I know. But. I have orders. I have to search. You understand.”

“Of course,” Moor replied cooperatively. “I’ll wait here.”

“Good idea.” Gorra signaled to his men and watched them file out of the shuttle and disperse, rifles raised, to the rest of the yard. “So. Dag Ralta raised your fees?”

“Aye.” Moor took a few slow, meandering steps toward the troop transport, eyeing the dents the ship’s impact had made in the deck. “It’s made things hard for us lately.”

“Heh. Greedy idiot. But. I am the major now. I lower your fees,” Gorra offered. The broad, deformed smile again. “Back to normal.”

“Much appreciate it.” Moor nodded at the officer, but his attention was subtly focused on the damage to the deck plating and his thoughts on what lay beneath it. His techs had ultimately been unable to get the Mantis back in working order – something about the onboard computer rejecting the new cells they installed – but in hindsight, with Gorra’s impromptu visit, that was for the better; few things were as utterly damning as visual confirmation of a Tenno ship leaving their colony’s space. Instead, his crew had manned the yard’s heavy equipment to hide it from prying eyes: The receiving deck was not a true deck, but a door covering a secret storage cavity disguised as one. Though it typically held exceptionally rare materials that Moor was unwilling to sell openly, it was large enough to accommodate the disabled craft once its original contents had been cleared out. Plus, Moor had reasoned, it was a good enough hiding place – any unwanted visitors would hardly think to look beneath their own ship.

But the shuttle’s rough landing was something Moor hadn’t anticipated, and it had knocked the doors slightly out of alignment, creating a gap – small enough that it was reasonable to hope it would go unnoticed, but large enough that anyone with a light could peer through it and see the contraband underneath. With the same slow, aimless pace, he maneuvered himself to block the gap from Gorra’s line of sight.

Within a few minutes, the soldiers had mostly finished their inspection of the yard and, having found nothing suspect, begun congregating at the foot of the shuttle’s ramp, conversing among themselves in their coarse tongue. Gorra motioned four of them over, barking orders at them in the same grating manner; the common soldiers, Moor speculated, preferred to speak Grineer, and perhaps had little knowledge of other languages. Even Gorra’s English, though not as broken as Dag Ralta’s had been, consisted only of simple sentences and fragments thereof.

“They will search living quarters,” Gorra explained almost apologetically as he watched the task force stride briskly toward the domestic quarter. “Then we go. No more trouble.”

[Next]

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Prologue (part 4)

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K'vaz’s meal, an unappetizing slurry of puréed synthetic nutrient loaf, sat cold and unfinished on the bench that ran along the length of his housing unit’s lounge. Weran had long since finished his own food and retired to his bunk, but K'vaz could scarcely stomach another mouthful of the paste that, despite having been thoroughly salted, stubbornly remained as bland as ever.

His thoughts wandered back to the time he had impulsively (and foolishly, he decided in retrospect) forked over nearly half a year’s earnings to a trader from the inner System for a small box of natural foods – such luxuries as vegetables and meats and even rare spices that had to be grown and raised near the sun, and so were virtually unheard of in human colonies past the asteroid belt – and sighed glumly. They were long gone now, but if he closed his eyes, the memories were still vivid enough that he could almost taste in his mind the rich flavors of… He scrunched up his brow, trying to remember. What was the word for cow meat, again? But he gave up after a few seconds. The colony’s rations never tasted right to him again after his palate had sampled far more delectable things.

“Hey. You’re one of the guys that brought that Mantis in, right?”

K'vaz jerked out of his daydream to see the upper half of a young woman leaning into the room. A mane of hair, silver despite her youth, fluttered behind her in the tumultuous wind of the common room’s many fans. Black grease smudged the neck of her work uniform and across her face, accentuating her coy smile and the rich brown of her eyes – so rich that they seemed more a fiery, orange-red glow than a true brown.

“I– Kinda, yeah,” he muttered awkwardly. He racked his brain wildly, trying to recall who she was; not many women chose to work in Moor’s yard, and he wasn’t certain he’d even seen her before. Surely he would have taken note of someone with such a strikingly unusual appearance?

“Nice work.” She winked at him and slid back out the door. “I owe you one.”

“Huh?”

But she was already gone.

He sighed again and leaned back against the wall, too worn out to bother following her. What a weird day, he thought resignedly.

Something thumped dully against the inside of Weran’s door, followed by a faint shuffling reminiscent of someone feeling around in the dark for something dropped. A moment later, the door slid open and Weran staggered out. The swelling on his face had subsided, but he looked more a wreck than ever. His eyes were red and puffy, his dust-brown hair disheveled and sweat-soaked. It was frightfully clear that he hadn’t slept a wink in the last hour.

K'vaz stared, alarmed. “H…Hey… you all right?”

Weran flopped morosely onto the bench beside him. “I fucked up,” he said hoarsely. “I fucked up… We’re all going to die and it’s all my fault. God, I’m a fucking idiot.”

“You aren’t,” K'vaz said quickly. Seeing Weran – confident, casual, slick-as-ice Weran – in the throes of a nervous breakdown sent him into a cold sweat. “You just wanted to help, both of us did.”

The older man took a few deep breaths to collect himself and wiped his eyes. “I guess I did,” he conceded with a shaky laugh. “I thought… I thought it was a great idea, you know.”

“Well, yeah. That’s why you brought that ship back.”

Weran shook his head. “No, I meant… Well. Vozzy… That ain’t the first Tenno ship I picked up, you know that, right?”

K'vaz shrugged. “There were a few signs here and there. I kinda suspected, yeah.”

“Heh.” He wiped snot from his nose. “Smart kid.”

“I’m twenty-two,” K'vaz grumbled. “I’m not a kid anymore.” Haven’t been since before Ma died.

“Right,” Weran said after a long pause. “Sorry ‘bout that. Look, ah…” He itched at the stubble covering his chin and cleared his throat. “You deserve to know what’s been going on. Like I said, I’ve brought in Tenno ships before – well, usually it was just pieces of ‘em. Moor’s got a contact out past Neptune who buys 'em off us on the sly. Pays a small fortune. That’s been the real thing keepin’ us afloat for the last year, ever since the local 'Neer started charging us extra to be left alone. Can’t exactly say no to those brutes…”

“Hold on, what? Moor was in on it?” K'vaz was incredulous. “He practically broke your jaw back there!”

“Aye. Real convincing actor, ain’t he?” Weran allowed himself a light chuckle. “Does a good job of convincing the rest not to try pulling the same stunt. We figured the chances of getting caught were plenty small if it was only me doing it every once in a while.” He sighed and swirled a finger in what remained of K'vaz’s food. “Guess they weren’t small enough.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself. We aren’t dead yet, you know,” K'vaz pointed out hopefully. “For all we know, nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe the Mantis won’t get traced here, or maybe Moor’s guy will pick it up before anyone else sees. Maybe the Grineer stopped chasing it after they disabled it.”

“Maybe. God, I hope so.” Weran stuck his finger in his mouth and made a face. “Ech. Your chow’s too damn salty. No wonder you never finish it.”

K'vaz sat up straight at the remark. “That reminds me. This woman stopped by earlier–”

“Oooh?” Weran waggled his eyebrows.

“–and asked about the Mantis,” K'vaz said, pointedly ignoring the reaction, though he was thankful to see his friend back to his usual self. “She seemed happy about it.”

Weran’s smile dissipated. “There… shouldn’t be anyone out there that’s glad to see it right now… But, a woman, you say?”

“Yeah. White hair, weird orange eyes? Had a yard uniform on. Looked like she just got off her shift.” He paused, then mumbled, “Kinda cute, I guess.”

“Ain’t nobody workin’ for Moor who looks like that, Vozzy.” Weran’s dead serious tone sent goosebumps prickling along K'vaz’s neck. “Lady or otherwise.”

“Then…”

“That’s someone who’s seen something they weren’t supposed to.” Weran sucked in a breath. “Which means we may have a problem.”

[Next]

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Prologue (part 3)

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“WERAN!!”

Every worker in the loading bay cowered as the yard boss stormed toward the salvage ship that had just touched down.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” he growled as Weran hopped out with K'vaz close behind, “bringing a goddamn Tenno ship into my yard again?!”

“Good to see you too, Moor. Just bringing you something better than the odds and ends that we usually dump at your feet,” Weran replied cheerily. “You like it?”

In response, Moor slammed a meaty fist squarely into the side of Weran’s jaw.

K'vaz cringed and took a step back as his mentor toppled to the floor from the blow, but Weran simply massaged the side of his face and chuckled. “No?” He sat up, still wearing a cock-sure grin. “For all your cryin’ about how we ain’t gonna make it this cycle, you’re awfully unhappy about finally getting something that might actually sell, ya ungrateful lump.”

Moor looked fit to pounce on Weran and beat him senseless. Instead, he grabbed him by the collar of his flightsuit and yanked him close. “Oh, I’ll be real grateful all right, all of us’ll be, when the goddamn Grineer come knocking! They give us enough trouble already when we don’t have things that scream ‘Tenno sympathizer’ lying around! Soon as those bastards lay eyes on that thing, they’ll shoot every last one of us for aidin’ and abettin’! They won’t give a shit what we were really doing!” He shook the other man angrily. “You know this, dammit! Do we have to go through this every time?!”

“I dunno.” Weran’s face had begun to swell. His smile, though now crooked, remained as broad as ever. “Do we?”

Livid, Moor shoved the salvager to his feet. “My office. Now.” He turned on his heel and stomped off.

K'vaz made to follow, but Weran mouthed at him to stay put and disappeared with a wink into the low building that served as the scrapyard’s admin quarters.

“Don’t worry about him,” one of the yard workers reassured him as the rest of the men in the bay descended upon the Mantis in apprehensive wonder. “If it were any of us, our asses would get roasted in a heartbeat, but Weran always somehow gets off the hook for all the crap he pulls. Perks of seniority, I guess.” He rubbed his hands together anxiously. “Besides, a ship like that’s gotta be worth a ton. The boss might be pissed, but he’ll get over it in a hurry.”

And, in a hurry, Moor was indeed over it. Mere minutes after the office door had slammed shut, it flew open again and Weran swaggered out, grinning the grin of a man who knew he was untouchable.

Almost untouchable, K'vaz thought, amused, as Moor appeared after him and flung a cold pack at him for his face.

“All right,” Moor grunted. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Got a breach here,” one of the workers called out from atop a catwalk. “Looks like from a foreign object. Might’ve taken out the power cells.”

“Open her up and confirm the damage,” Moor barked. Two workers promptly scrambled forward to pry off the torn hull panel, and another four preemptively dashed off to components storage for replacement cells.

K'vaz found it rather curious that the men seemed familiar with a ship that, only minutes ago, Moor had violently raged against as something whose mere presence would surely get them all killed.

Weran seemed to know what he was thinking. “You’d be surprised at how similar most ships are on the inside,” he told him, though his tone suggested he knew more than he was letting on. “You work on enough of ‘em, you get a feel for how they’re laid out. And these guys’ve stuck their heads into more than they care to remember. You ever decide to work in repairs, you’ll know what I mean.”

“Oh… Oh shit.” The technician fumbling around in the Mantis’ innards recoiled as he pulled out a fist-sized chunk of metal.

“What is it?” Moor stepped forward.

“Looks like flak, sir,” the tech replied, visibly shaken, and tossed the piece of twisted shrapnel that he had extricated from the cell array to his boss.

Moor turned it over carefully in his hands; remnants of an emblem, partially obliterated by impact forces, marked the deformed lump in a menacing shade of red paint. “Flak,” he affirmed grimly. “Grineer.”

An uneasy silence fell over the entire bay, then was swept away in a whirlwind of hushed fears. It was attacked, the men murmured among themselves. The Grineer were hunting this one and Weran brought it straight to us. What if they followed him? The whispers grew panicked. Moor was right. What if they come here? They’ll kill us all!

“Snap out of it, knuckleheads!” Moor roared. “All the more reason for us to get her spaceworthy again and out of here! Now let’s move!” He jerked a thumb at the two salvage pilots. “You two go get some grub and rest up. We’ve got this.”

“Told you we should have just left it alone,” K'vaz couldn’t help muttering.

“Ah, we’ll be fine.” Weran slapped him playfully on the back and they began trudging their way to the colony’s domestic quarter – but K'vaz thought, as they passed through the first of two blast doors separating the two districts, that his words rang as emptily as the poorly-lit corridor ahead of them.

[Next]

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Prologue (part 2)

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K'vaz was the very picture of reluctance as he pushed off from the hauler’s airlock door toward the Mantis’ underside. The craft was no longer tumbling; it seemed that Weran, who was already inside, had managed to stabilize it. He eyed the portable compressed-gas counterthrusters that had been attached to two of the ship’s limbs and marveled briefly at how quickly his companion had pulled off such a tricky and dangerous task.

“Glad you decided to join,” Weran’s voice chuckled in his helmet. “There’s ain’t a soul on board, just like I told ya. You know how to work the door, right?”

K'vaz muttered a yes into his radio and maneuvered himself into the person-shaped recess in the ship’s deployment cylinder – an unusual means of exit-entry, he thought, but reminded himself as the unit rotated him into the ship’s interior that the Mantis was, after all, a one-person tactical vessel.

He noted with mild interest as he moved about in the dim emergency lighting that the ship’s internal gravity field seemed irregular and weak, even entirely nonexistent in some places. A quick glance at his suit’s readings indicated an absence of oxygen in his surroundings as well. He frowned again. “Life support not working?”

“Nah.” Weran was at the front of the ship, tinkering with the controls. “It’s got life support, just low on power and no air left inside to recycle.”

“No air… Nice. A hull compromise.” K'vaz sighed pessimistically. “Probably from debris. If it’s gone through the engine block and wrecked it, this’ll all be a waste of time–”

“Ah, quit yer whinin’. It ain’t every day that you find a beauty like this. It looks like it’s in pretty good shape, you know. Maybe there ain’t enough power left to turn the main systems on, but everything else seems all right and the steering armatures are all intact. There’re even some nice weapons that I ain’t never seen before down in storage.” Weran bobbed excitedly towards his partner and the two of them headed back to the lower compartment. “Best case scenario, it’s got a simple hull rupture. We patch that up, charge the cells, fill the tanks – and we’ve got ourselves a new ship, or a pretty pile of credits if someone’s willin’ to shell out for it.”

“And the worst case?” K'vaz prompted sullenly.

Weran shrugged. “Worst case, it’s completely inoperable, we haul it back and scrap it for parts, like we do with most everything else that we can’t use. What’s gotten into you, huh? You don’t usually gripe this much about stuff we find.”

“Yeah, because we usually don’t find stuff that belong to Tenno.”

“Belonged,” Weran corrected him, “to Tenno.”

K'vaz hardly believed that an outcome so benign was truly the worst that could happen, but didn’t bother voicing it; Weran was his senior and had already made up his mind, the stubborn bastard. The ship did appear to have been abandoned, but the myriad of tales that surrounded the enigmatic warrior race ranged from selflessly noble to heartless and sinister, and were as highly fantastic as they were inconsistent. It seemed as though no two people in the Origin System could settle on what exactly the Tenno or their intentions were, and K'vaz himself remained unconvinced that the ship, if its owner were indeed deceased, was not in some way haunted. He lowered himself into the deployment cradle, thankful to finally be getting off the ship and back into the relative comfort of their salvage hauler.

Weran took only about ten minutes to secure towing rods between the two vessels, an already delicate task made more difficult by the Tenno ship’s unusually narrow fuselage. K'vaz, not yet experienced enough at that particular job to be of any help, simply stared out the viewport at the starry expanse beyond and tried to ignore the butterflies in his stomach until his partner dropped back into the seat beside him. With the widest grin he’d had in months, Weran fired up the engines. “Let’s get this baby home.”

[Next]

[outliers-au]

Prologue

[Previous] [Index] [Next]

Saturn in the distance was a pale yellow pearl against a backdrop of stars, barely larger than a child’s fist. Its rings shimmered and scintillated magnificently as the planet spun lazily about its axis, extending a subtle invitation to the occupants of a small ship cruising past for a closer look with their innocuous twinkle.

Weran yawned and stretched in the pilot seat and paid the spectacle no mind. He’d passed Saturn countless times throughout his life, and the planet, despite its beauty, served only as confirmation that he was not wildly off course. And after eighty long hours of picking through debris fields for anything worth bringing home, both he and the trainee snoring into the crook of his arm beside him cared to see little more than the offloading platforms of Wulock Yards beneath their salvage hauler’s landing gear.

But that was still another hour’s worth of travel away, and Weran had run out of mental games to entertain himself with. He toyed with the idea of drawing something obscene on his charge’s face and, with a sly grin and an oil marker in hand, leaned over toward the copilot’s chair.

He froze. Something glinted in the corner of the viewport for but a split second. A few seconds of nothing, and then three brief glimmers in quick succession. Weran’s heart skipped a beat as the pattern repeated, slightly displaced, suggesting something of polished metal spinning through space not too far away. “Well…” he murmured, sitting back down. “What’ve we got here? K'vaz!” He elbowed his partner sharply. “I need you to tell me if I’m seeing things again. What’s that there look like to ya?”

Roused from his nap, the younger man beside him squinted blearily out the viewport at the object in question. “…A ship, or something?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

“That’s what I thought too.” Weran broke from his course and expertly steered the hauler in for a closer look. Turning the floodlights on revealed a narrow, blocky vessel flipping erratically away from them; spindly, limb-like structures stabbed fore and aft from its sides and granted it the menacing appearance of a predatory insect poised to attack. For a moment, all he could do was stare. “Well, fuck me sideways,” he finally said. “That’s a Mantis. A fuckin’ Mantis, K'vaz.” He laughed. “Ohh, I can’t believe it. The boss is gonna be so pissed. This is one hell of a find!”

“A Mantis…” A frown creased the apprentice’s lips as the name registered in his mind. “Isn’t that a Tenno model? Maybe we shouldn’t mess with it…”

“Hah.” Weran put an arm around K'vaz’s shoulders, pulling him close, and gestured at the drifting craft with his other arm. “Quiz time, rookie. You see that any lights on that thing?”

K'vaz, wide awake now, watched as the ship tumbled in space; the only light it gave off was the twinkle of stars reflecting off its mirror-like hull plates. “No.”

“You think anyone that’d fly one of these delicate babies would just let it roll around like that instead of parking it all steady and proper?”

“No…”

“Hey, so far, so good. Now, you get this one right, you win the jackpot. Can you see it?”

K'vaz blinked, confused. “See what?”

“That.” Weran indicated the entirety of the vessel before them. “The Mantis. The ship. The whole thing.”

“I… Yes…?” The younger salvager glanced at his partner uncertainly. “It’s right there. You just pointed to it. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Weran chuckled and sat back. “Means it ain’t cloaked, Vozzy. Why do you reckon we only see Tenno ships in safe zones? There ain’t a Tenno worth his steel out here that leaves his ship on display in open space like that – unless he don’t want it no more.” He drew a line across his throat with a finger and grinned. “Or unless he’s croaked. Trust me, I got a couple more years than you on this kinda stuff.” He set the autopilot to maintain a safe distance from the Mantis and hopped out of his seat. “Suit up and we’ll take a look inside.”

[Next]

[outliers-au]

[Index] [Next]

I remember when we were many. Before the long slumber, before the solar system was left in ruins by slaves turned slavers in our absence. Before the Grineer forgot what we were, and began hunting us.

I yearn to make them remember.

[outliers-au]

Chapter List

About (1, 2)

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

[outliers-au]

Outliers is my alternate universe interpretation of Digital Extreme’s Warframe game and is essentially a more realistic/believable (as realistic and believable as a game with magical space ninjas can be, anyway) and less game-like universe.

Aside from recent lore (which I know nothing about), I’ve tried in the past to keep my AU as in line as possible with canon lore, with varying degrees of success. But now I’m just like, whatever, dude. It’s an alternate universe (specifically, mine), and I don’t have the time or energy to flip out about that stuff and retcon/rewrite anymore, so I’m doing whatever I originally wanted. It’s still going to be close to whatever the canon lore as of 2015 was, but eh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Enjoy the ride, feel free to get off whenever you want.

[About #1]

[outliers-au]

OH HEY THIS IS BACK

So uh, I have a Ph.D in overreacting and I kinda deleted the previous instance of this blog a few months ago as a result, but the posts were kind of archived so here we are again :V. Also, my brain wouldn’t shut up.

Fair warning though, I haven’t actually played Warframe in close to two years, so I know basically nothing of (and to be honest, probably don’t even care about) recent lore updates/reveals.

Anyway, this particular blog is going to have overarching story content and I’ll probably put my old non-sequitur brain vomits on a different blog, if I can stand to look at them again. Or I don’t know! Whatever works I guess.

[About #2]

[outliers-au]

a not-so-sneaky placeholder post

shit’s full of potential man