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fireteam-dauntless · 4 years

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A Tale of Two Guardians XXII

Chapter 22 : Lost to Light Part 1 of the Destined Series masterlist

word count : 2.7k tag list : @mail-me-a-snail @basically-nacl @shins-wife @speed-boop

We returned to the Tower later that night. I had invited Maverick to my place for a cup of coffee. He declined, saying he wanted to check on Skinner. I nodded and let him go, and went home to my apartment to crash for a couple hours. Zavala wanted to meet with us for our next mission. The next morning, Skinner, Maverick, and I stood before Zavala, Cayde-6, Ikora, and Eris.

“So Guardians, I would like to speak to you before you leave for the Hellmouth. To retrieve a shard of Crota’s soul crystal.” Eris said.

“Sure, Eris, what is it?” Maverick asked.

“This is more for the Warlock as she doesn’t know who Crota is. It began with Crota. But Crota was only a servant of his father, sent to extinguish the last of the Light. The great battle fought for the soul of our world ended in slaughter. The son was dead. And we invited the wrath of Oryx, destroyer of light. Taker of will. Only Ascendent Hive move between Ruptures. To reach Oryx, you must walk in the dying footsteps of his son. You must become Ascendent.”

What did she mean that Crota was dead?

“Alright if you're done Eris we should get going.” Maverick said.

She nodded and walked away. We left the Hall of Guardians and walked toward our ships.

“Alright so I hate that place so let’s get in and get out as soon as possible,” Maverick grunted once we got into orbit.

“I agree Mav, that place unsettles me.” Skinner added.

“But it’s not like we’re going down into the Pit right?” I asked.

“Yes, but still, I just hate the Hive and the Taken don’t help. Now fall into slip space formation you two.”

It was a very short jump from Earth to the Moon. Maverick decided to have us transmat onto a ledge, a little bit down inside the Hellmouth. As we dropped in, Eris’s voice came quietly over comms.

“Hold fast to Toland’s journal. It saw me through my time in the Dark.”

“Hold fast to your gun, Guardians.” Cayde interjected. “You’re headed back to the chamber where they held Crota’s soul.”

‘Back to his chamber?’ Maverick and Skinner have been here before?

“What does he mean by ‘back to his chamber’ Mav?” I asked.

“Well, you see, we got sent to destroy his crystal. Which was his physical form in our world,” Maverick replied.

“Oh, okay…” Something… something isn’t adding up.

The Hive seemed to know immediately that they had intruders. Mostly Thrall and Acolytes, so we cut through them with ease. Cayde came back over comms before I could ask any more questions when the fighting was done..

“Alright. Here’s what needs to happen. We have to steal a Hive crystal that still has a trace of Crota’s soul so you can pass through a dimensional portal on the Dreadnaught and kill Oryx. I leave anything out Eris?”

“It must be done before Oryx turns his scrying eye to this realm.”

“Good luck fireteam.”

We fight through some Hive and reach the door leading deeper into the dark halls. Deep down in my gut, this unsettling sense of dread started grip my stomach.

“Come on this way,” Mav said, pointing down the hall, deeper into the dark.

“It’s a little dark, let me light the way,” Skinner’s Ghost suggested before illuminating the dark hall.

“Toland’s journal contains an impressive amount of data,” My Ghost said. “I should probably read it… Done. Some of this stuff is fascinating!” She exclaimed before playing an excerpt from the journal.

“A Dreadnaught shields the Hive from the Traveler’s Light. Were we to pass through its deepest layers, our Light would be as a dying sun.”

“I don’t think Toland was much fun at parties,” Skinner groaned.

As we started to leave the darkened hallway, we saw a lot of Thrall feeding. Skinner began to raise his weapon and I followed suit, but Mav stopped us. The two of us looked at him accusingly.

“Don’t shoot,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be chased by Thrall right now.”

“Ugh fine Mav,” Skinner whispered back.

“If the Thrall still feed, Crota’s essence must endure,” Eris said.

We reached the crystal without incident, but the moment we approached it an Ogre climbed out of a cave and began to engage.

“Shit, I knew this was too easy,” Maverick cursed.

“It’s just an Ogre Mav. Let’s kill the damn thing, get the shard and get out of here,” Skinner butt in, already clearing his holster.

We began to fight the Ogre, but it was constantly charging at us and it’s Eye Blast it was tough to dodge it at times. As the battle raged on, I lost count of the amount of bullets we shot at it. It seemed to go on forever. The Ogre began to fumble and trip on itself, but before we could land a killing blow on it, a Taken rift formed above and sucked in the Ogre.

“It’s gone!” Maverick exclaimed. “I think Oryx just took an Ogre…”

Eris responded over the Vanguard Channel. “Not even Oryx can control an Ogre. Unless it’s Taken. Now quickly, I need a shard of that crystal.”

“Skinner, cut a chunk out of that crystal.” Mav said. It was an order, and the edge in his voice unsettled me. I get that he didn’t like being down here, but I’d never seen him so on alert before.

“You got it, Metal Man,” After a bit of cutting with a heated blade, he held up the shard triumphantly.

“We’ve got it.” Maverick said to Eris.

“I knew it could be done. And does it still hold the whisper of Crota’s soul?”

“According to my Ghost’s analysis it’s empty.”

“No matter. Return to me, Guardians, and we will destroy—” Static started to flood the feed from some kind of interference. I opened my palm and pulled out my Ghost to examine the feed. Something was trying to completely cut us off from the Vanguard.

“Maverick, this interference…”

“[static] Fireteam? We’re losing you. Fireteam can you hear…?” [static] As the channel cut out, an Echo of Oryx appeared. We all backed away from the crystal and held fast to our weapons. I felt Maverick’s hand placed on my arm as he dragged me behind himself and Skinner.

“Was killing Crota not enough for you?!” The Echo bellowed. “Your Light dies here!”

I felt my heart sink and my blood run cold. They… they killed Crota? They lied to me? Before I could question Maverick, Taken began to appear from blights left and right. And then the Ogre came out of the central blight. In five seconds, we were overwhelmed.

“There’s too many of them! Run!” Maverick shouted. We all turned on our heels and ran fast out of the chamber, Taken thrall on our heels and the Taken Ogre was shooting at our backs. Simultaneously, the three of us tossed our grenades behind us to slow them down.

We began to run out of the room dodging weapons fire the best we could as we ran. We returned to the darkened hallway in which we came. We all tried calling out to Eris and Cayde but got no response. That Echo must have been what was interfering with the signal. I held up my hand for them to stop now that the Taken weren't chasing us. I need answers. I grabbed Maverick’s arm and made him look at me.

"Maverick, what did he mean by ‘was killing Crota not enough for you’? What did you do? What are you hiding from me!" I could feel my hands shaking with the combination of anger and betrayal.

"Storm now's not the time to…" He began to try and end this conversation, but I wasn’t having it. I cut him off before he could continue.

"I think now's the perfect time, seeing that Oryx just said what I've been thinking. Tell me the truth for once, damn it. Did. You. Kill. Crota." I demanded.

"I don't know Storm!" He began to raise his voice at me, "All Skinner, Vision, and I did was destroy his crystal. Like I said before it was his physical form in our world."

“You expect me to believe that?!” My voice cracked as it raised in anger. “What happened in the Pit, Maverick, tell me!”

“Storm, I can’t tell you more than I already have! I don’t have the answers you want!”

I wanted to challenge him again, but Skinner knocked us both upside the head and cut me off before I could even open my mouth. “Guys, now is not the time!" He pointed behind us and the Taken Thrall that were closing in again.

"Great, let’s work on getting out of here." Maverick sounded relieved. He was quick to change the subject and we headed back to the room to get out of there. But I saw Skinner give Maverick a look, one I couldn’t quite read, but it resembled something like frustration.

When we came into the next room after gunning down the Thrall behind us, the Taken were there ready to make us fight to escape. We ran in to quickly take down the Taken in the room, I still had the creeping feeling that the Taken from the grave were behind us. Even though we were fighting among ourselves, we still worked as an effective team. Slaughtering any Taken that dared to oppose us. Maverick went back to the door we came in but it was shut, then I found the other door sealed with some kind of lock.

“The Taken locked us in with this… Lock? I guess it's what this is. Peu de lumière, can you see if Toland's journal has anything on this?” I asked.

“Yeah, give me a second,” she said before playing an excerpt from the journal.

“It's long been my belief that the binds which hold the greatest Hive terror could be lifted by releasing the energy stored within their tomb husks.”

"What the hell does it look like?" Maverick muttered in bewilderment.

"I think it looks like this," Skinner said from behind us, holding some sort of Hive relic.

"Ok,” Maverick said, “shove into that lock I guess."

"No shit," He spat back to Mav as he pushed into the lock.

It glowed for a second before the lock broke and faded away.

"Remind me to make copies of this journal when we get back," My Ghost said.

We began to fight through the Taken that appeared after we opened the door, and we began to follow the stream of Taken to the next open room. This time there were more of them but they didn't stand much of a chance against a pissed off fireteam that was angry with their leader. We approached the next door.

“Really?! Two locks!” Mav groaned in frustration.

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Mav, the husks should be around somewhere.”

“Yeah I see one,” Skinner said before running off to go get it.

“I'll go look for the second one,” Mav said. “Storm, guard the door. Make sure nothing gets close.” Then he walked away from me, and I shot down anything that tried to get close. Skinner came back to me first and pushed his relic into the lock.

“What took so long, Titan?” Skinner taunted once Maverick got over to us.

“Well if you must know I got ambushed by a Knight but don't worry I killed it, now let's go.” Mav said as he shoved the second husk into the other lock.

The Vanguard's channel came through, but only for enough time for Eris to say, "[static] we're going to lose them, just like Eriana!"

“Come on guys! The connection’s getting stronger!” Maverick yelled back to us. I rolled my eyes, that much was obvious. The clock was ticking, but the further we advanced, the more likely we were to get out alive.

“Yeah like my connection to throw knives at your head again,” Skinner muttered.

We followed the path to another room. Bigger than the last two. And there were a small number of Taken here. Considering the size of the room it was surprising that there weren't more of them. The two of them started to rush inside, but I caught sight of a tomb husk and picked it up.

“You dumbasses almost ran by this husk,” I said and held it up when I caught up to them.

“Well I guess it's better to have a tomb husk then not need it than to need a tomb husk and not have it,” Maverick stated as we advanced in the room. We made short work of the small Taken defence force.

“Three locks,” I said and pushed my husk into the lock. “Well you can't say they’re not trying.”

As the lock faded, blights began to form and produce Taken and Thrall started to fall out of the walls. We stood in a triangle, and readied our weapons.

"Kill the Taken first. Then search for the other husks." Mav commanded.

We cut down the second wave of Taken defenders and started searching for the husks. Maverick found one close but behind a wall and grabbed it, then made his way back to me at the door. Skinner ran back holding the other husk and they put them in at the same time. The door began to open and Taken began to appear behind us as we ran out the door.

“[Static] fireteam? Get out of that Pit! We need that crystal or we'll never reach Oryx!” Eris said in a moment the Vanguard channel came in and out again.

"We're close guys. Just follow me!" Maverick said to Skinner and I, we both nodded and followed in tight formation behind him.

We ran past most of the Taken and reached the room before the outside being guarded by a Taken Wizard. Maverick didn’t hesitate and he pulled out his Gjallarhorn, taking down the Wizard in two shots. With it's death the doors opened to the outside and we rushed towards it as more Taken blights began to form behind us.

The Vanguard channel began to come in clear as day with Cayde on the other end beginning to speak.

“[Fading static] Fireteam, is that you?”

“Yeah, we made it out Cayde,” Maverick replied as we stood outside the Temple of Crota.

“Then the Taken King will fall, now bring me his dead son's crystal,” Eris said.

“That's how Eris says she appreciates your sacrifice. Glad you guys are safe,” Cayde said before cutting the channel.

We all got into our ships and returned to the Tower. Our trip back home was mostly in silence. When we landed in the Hanger, I tried to get Maverick’s attention, but he was gone and away from me before I could ask any more questions. I watched his back and clenched my hands in fists. I punched the side of my ship, leaving a Scorch mark on the paint.

“Storm…” I looked up at Skinner as he approached me, his hands in his pockets. He looked around, as if checking that no one was watching us. He pulled a thin card made out of Glimmer and handed it to me. “That… has the code to our Fireteam’s mission reports and archives. There’s a lot of sensitive information in there, but it should have the answers you’re looking for.”

I looked up at Skinner with wide eyes. “Skinner…”

“Don’t. I’ve wanted to tell you the truth, but there��s a reason why our records are locked. Only the original fireteam and the Vanguard knows what really happened.” He turned and started to walk away from me, but paused and looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, yeah, and don’t tell Maverick. He doesn’t want me to do this, but… you deserve to know.”

I watched him leave and looked down at the card in my hands. I tapped it thoughtfully against my opposite hand and chewed on the inside of my cheek.

“What are you going to do?” My Ghost asked.

“Get ready to copy a lot of information, Ghost,” I uttered coldly, and started walking out of the Hanger and towards the Hall of Guardians. “I’ve got answers to find.”

#a tale of two guardians fic #destined pt 1 #destiny #destiny fic #destiny fanfiction #destiny the taken king

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lillianabluejeans · 4 years

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Reclaimer!Lilliana AU

aka: Lilliana spends a year rolling the best goddamn deception checks she can muster

This got...long

Here There Be Gerblins

So through some magical shenanigans while she’s adventuring, Lilliana gets sent back in time to the htbg-era

She’s in a tavern and sees Magnus, Taako, and Merle talking to another dwarf (Gundren)

Gundren catches her staring and is like “the fuck are you looking at?”

Lilliana panics and is like “I uh... wanted to inquire about the job?”

Gundren buys it, asks her what she can do, she tells him she’s a ranger, he puts her with the boys

The boys are like hey what the fuck

But Gundren is like ...you three look like the type to need a competent woman on your side

The boys are like ok fair.

Taako, looking closely at Lilliana: do i know you? Lilliana: ahaha....no...

The next day comes and the four of them set out

They don’t talk much, and Lilliana’s super weirded out by this whole thing, because this isn’t them, this isn’t how they interact with each other.

This isn’t how they interact with her

They come across Barry and Gundren’s horses, beat the gerblins lurking there, go to the cave, blah blah blah this is all pretty much the same with the addition of Lilli just hanging in the background losing her mind.

Taako: *asks the three of them if they know who Barry Bluejeans is, or care* Lilliana: *dying*

Anyway they save Barry, go back to phandolyn, leave Barry there, and the four of them go to Wave Echo Cave

Lilliana wants to tell Barry to come with them, but she also doesn’t want to fuck up the timeline super bad, and she doesn’t know how to tell him that it doesn’t matter if he dies because he’s a lich, so she goes with thb and doesn’t say anything about it

Blah blah blah everything with wave echo cave and killian and magic brian is the same

Killian asks them if they’re there for the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet and Lilliana pretends very good that she hears static

They find the umbrella and Lilliana 1) laughs at her mom fucking launching merle across the room and 2) resists the urge to snatch it from taako and break it open then and there because, again, timeline

Gundren takes the gauntlet, they race back to Phandolyn, everything happens the same

They’re sitting at the bottom of the well, the boys are joking and laughing, but Lilliana is... shaking. Her eyes are teary, and she looks like she’s going to cry

Sure, she knows her dad is a lich and he’ll be fine, but seeing him get obliterated into nothingness is still shocking and upsetting

Taako notices first.

“Hey kid, you good?”

But it’s not Taako. Not her Taako. The way he asks, there’s this degree of separation that shouldn’t be there, and it’s almost worse than if he never asked her at all.

Moonlighting

So they climb out of the well, taako grabs the gauntlet, Killian wakes up, tells them what she can (though, again, Lilliana can hear the parts that are static to the boys, but she pretends very good that she can’t)

Killian offers them jobs, and now Lilliana has a decision to make

Does she go up to the moon, to Lucretia? Does she stay planetside and find her dad? Does she stay planetside and just hide out until she figures out a way home?

Well. This wouldn’t be much of a reclaimer!au if she didn’t go to the moon.

Lilliana’s reasoning: she can’t find her dad. He’s going to be a lich, and already kind of a mess, she can’t just roll up like hey i’m your daughter from the future, that wouldn’t be good. Also, if all else fails, if she’s on the Starblaster when the boys and Lucretia fly up to cut off the Hunger, she can talk to Jeffandrew after and get him to send her back. He’s the god of gods, he’s gotta be able to fix this.

So she goes up to the moon with them.

Killian, to Lucretia: so I have four new recruits. They were able to resist the thrall Lucretia: ah, yes, wonder- wait did you say four? Killian: yeah. A human fighter named Magnus, an elf wizard named Taako, a dwarf cleric named Merle- Lucretia: okay... Killian: and a half-elf ranger named Lilliana. Lucretia: ...........and all four of them could resist the thrall? Killian: yeah Lucretia: are you absolutely sure Killian: yes Lucretia: Lucretia: OKAY SEND THEM IN I GUESS

Lucretia is... very confused, to say the least. This is the beginning of a very long year for her

As Lucretia is giving them the spiel about the red robes, Lilliana has to fight the urge to roll her eyes

Lucretia only had the three beds open with Pringles for the boys (because she was only EXPECTING the THREE of THEM, who the FUCK is this girl??????) so Lilliana bunks with carey, killian, and boyland

They’re reclaimers now!

Murder on The Rockport Limited

So here’s the thing about Lilli being in this situation.

She knows the order they find the relics in, she knows generally what happened on the mission to find them, and she knows the general timeframe, but she doesn’t know the teeny tiny details

So she is rudely awoken at fuck-all hours of the morning when they get summoned to talk with Lucretia

But she realizes like oh. this is Relic Time

and she shows up last, but she’s actually dressed (unlike thb, who showed up in their pjs)

So they get to Rockport and get on the train, and it’s as Lilliana is looking around the passenger car that she remembers a very crucial detail about this mission

That detail is Angus Mcdonald

Who, for Lilli, is like... 30-something.

He’s like 13 years older than her.

But here............

He’s TEN

“I need to leave right now immediately,” Lilliana says. “?????” the boys say

Lilliana does not leave, but she hangs at the back of any conversations with Angus as much as she can, because this whole situation was weird before, but now it’s weird-weird

They solve the mystery, which Lilliana already knew the answer for, and Taako figures out the port wand

Taako also throws Angus off the train. ............ Lilliana didn’t think he’d actually done that all these years, despite how many times it came up in stories and such. But he sure did throw Angus off the train.

Oculus: Acquired

Lunar Interlude I

Lilliana doesn’t wear a costume so much as she just dresses up real pretty

She wrestles with her hair for ages, wanting to do some nice elven braids her mom would always do for her, but she’s garbage at doing them herself, and she’s too nervous to go ask Taako to do it for her

She caves, eventually, and goes to the boys’s room, clutching the ribbons she wants braided into her hair, and nervously asks Taako if he’ll please do her hair for her.

She expects him to say no

He says yes

Well, he moreso just shrugs and says “sure, why not. C’mere.”

Anyway they go to the midsummer thing. Magnus eats some unicorn dick. Lilliana laughs along with them.

(She pretends not to notice Lucretia’s eyes following her carefully)

The eclipse happens, as does the Hunger’s scouts showing up

I don’t think Lilliana gets fully knocked out by it like everyone else, but she definitely falls to her knees, at least.

So that’s fun

Magnus, to Lucretia: Has that happened before? Lucretia: No- Lilliana, internally: sure, luce

Petals to The Metal

Sure, it sucked for Taako and Magnus to have to hear Merle dirty talk the vines, but think about Lilliana having to witness this

That’s her grandpa

HER GRANDFATHER

SHE DOESN’T WANT TO EXPERIENCE THIS

IF NOTHING ELSE, THIS IS WHAT’S GOING TO TRAUMATIZE HER

Anyway they get in and through the bank, fight Sloane, almost fucking die, etc etc etc.

It’s odd, seeing Hurley and Sloane not as dryads

The race is kinda fun, Lilli’s definitely done a few with them, but she’s used to the uh.....less deadly version

Also she didn’t know that Taako getting taken over by the cricket dude and jumping off the wagon without his safety harness happened in the normal timeline too, so when it happens, she screams

Then Klaarg is there and catches him and it’s all good, but Lilli was really freaked for a minute there

uhhhhhhhh yeah so they win the race, go and fight Sloane, when the umbrella does a BIG fire spell, Lilli is like hell YEAH that’s my fucking MOM

(She doesn’t actually say that. but she thinks it)

then Hurley and Sloane turn into a tree

Lilliana just kinda smiles

She knows they’ll be back

Then they go talk to Bane, and Lilliana remembers, as he’s pouring them drinks, what comes next

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeee’s BARRY!!!!!!

Lilliana is just staring at him as he does his scary speech.

Once he’s done, he looks at her, stares at her for a moment, then disappears

Lunar Interlude II

Lucretia questions them about the interaction in Bane’s office, Lilliana still stays quiet

Lucretia is maybe a little too concerned about “The Red Robe” to notice how quiet Lilli’s being about all of this, how she’s just letting the boys talk

Then once that is out of the way, Lucretia takes their stones of farspeech, does a Thing to them, then Angus’s voice comes through and he walks into the office

Lilliana, interally: fuck my life fuck my life fuck my LIFE I should’ve known this was coming

Also the four of them get moved into their fancy new Reclaimer’s dorm

Oh they also meet Lucas as they bring Bane’s info down to the voidfish

Lilli is just rolling her eyes because god, they weren’t kidding when they said he was super irritating

Crystal Kingdom

Now this one Lilliana knows is coming, because she knows it’s on the day of the Candlenights party

This is also the first mission Lilli really has fun with

Gerblins was stressful, because she was just trying to figure out wtf was going on, the train was weird because tiny Angus, petals was also stressful, even if she knew it’d be fine in the end

But this one.... the “crystal golums” that attack them... she knows they’re Kravitz. She also knows that when Leigon happens, they just need to break the mirror.

This is the mission that the boys talk about the most in her proper time, she knows what’s coming

(It’s also just like... SUPER entertaining to stand back and watch crystal golum Kravitz play his games)

She also knows her dad is going to show up and give them a powerpoint on the planes and allude vaguely to the Hunger

(RIP Boyland tho, he was chill as hell in the few months she knew him)

At the end of everything, she’s ready to step in to bargain away the boys’s bounties, as the only one of them without a bounty, and also as someone who knows all of Kravitz’s tricks, but Magnus does his own card game thing and it works out

Afterwards, Lucretia pulls the four of them into her office and calls them out for talking to the red robe again, and she gives them her own dramatic speech

The boys assure her that they’re just dummies and they forgot. Lucretia looks to Lilli.

“Lilliana,” she says, “do I have your trust?” “Of course,” Lilliana says, knowing all of Lucretia’s secrets, “you’ve given me no reason not to trust you.”

Lunar Interlude III

This is the one where Magnus does his rogue training, Merle goes to the spa with Luce, Taako teaches Angus magic, and we get the LUP incident

I think Lilli’s “activity” is just... scouring the B.O.B. library for information on time/planar travel

Because, at this point, this is definitely a different timeline and probably a different universe, so getting home is definitely more complicated than just getting brought back to the future

Seeing her mom’s name burned into the cafeteria wall definitely hurts. She doesn’t want her mom to be stuck, but still. She wants to keep things as much the same as possible.

It’s rough for this baby blup :((

Eleventh Hour

So, like I said, Lilliana doesn’t know every single tiny detail about the missions. She knows this one is a big purple worm, and they gotta get down to the mines, and they need Istus’s help, and also they’re going to die a bunch on this one.

Lilliana, waking up from her first ever death: Wow! That Sucked!

Lilliana, who has a deep respect for death and the natural progression of life: I Sure Hate This! Would Love To Not Be Doing This Right Now!

They eventually figure it all out

Don’t ask me what her gift from Istus is, I have no idea and am welcome to suggestions

The chalice sees her predicament, but can’t actually fix that, so it offers her the chance to not take the Gundren job. She wouldn’t have to see Phandolyn burn, she wouldn’t have to be around the family that doesn’t know her, she could just hang out until she’s able to get home

Lilliana refuses. At this point, she’s pretty damn sure Jeffandrew is her ticket home, and she needs to be part of the Bureau to get to him.

They then beat the worm and get out of the bubble

Whoops! Here’s Barry Again!

Barry: Do you trust me? Thb: No! Lilliana, internally: Yes. Always.

Barry: Lup... I can’t do it anymore, Lup, I’m sorry Lilliana: hnnnnnnnnnnngngngggggggggggggngngngngnggn

It’s a sad time for baby blue :((((

Lunar Interlude IV

ohohohoho this is the chug n’ squeeze date :3c

Taako: *gets back to the dorm* Lilli: So? How was it? Taako, defensive: How was what? Lilli: Your date :3c Taako: Taako: How did you know- Lilli: I know a lot of things.

Taako: It was fine. Until my umbrella tried to blast him Lilli, faking surprise: oh? Taako: yeah it just did it on it’s own. It was weird. Lilli: oh, most definitely. Very peculiar. Taako: Taako, walking away: you’re weird, kid.

Suffering Game

So Eleventh hour kinda sucked for everyone, but Suffering game sucked

Lucretia ups their training, and Lilliana knows what’s coming. She’s scared, but she thinks she’s ready.

They get down there and through the forest, to the tent.

It’s as they’re standing in front of it that Lilli is like nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnNOPE

“No thank you. No way. I thought I was ready, but... I can’t do it.”

Magnus grabs Taako and Lilli, and pulls both of them inside, Merle following behind.

Lilliana feels sick as Taako applauds Edward and Lydia’s entrance

I don’t have specific sacrifices in mind for her, I’m open to suggestions

She knows Barry’s with them, and that offers her some comfort. And she knows she could snap the umbrella if they got really stuck, have both her parents on their side

She freaks when Taako gets crushed with the machinery, when they find out they can’t heal in here and Taako’s almost dead.

They don’t talk about this adventure much, so she doesn’t know what did or didn’t happen when this happened without her.

When they’re doing the Boss Rush, and Barry’s trying to make the door at the other end of the room, Lilliana can’t help but grin. Because he’s here, and there’s the proof.

When Taako turns into Dupree, Lilliana laughs

This is a scary as hell situation, but god damn, Taako just turned into a T-Rex. Of course he did.

They fight the wonder twins, and the umbrella swallows edward, spits him out, and he turns to dust, and Lilliana feels a rush of satisfaction

Don’t fuck with my mom if you can’t handle the consequences, she thinks.

Then Lydia screams and disintegrates Magnus’s body and Magnus is stuck as a mannequin now

oh yeah, lilliana thinks, i forgot about that part

The tent disappears, and Magnus is assaulting Barry with his own detached mannequin arm and demanding answers

Lilliana doesn’t hesitate at all when Barry asks for their stones of farspeech

Homestretch, she thinks to herself.

They make their way to Barry’s lich cave hideout, Lilliana’s kind of tuning out whatever he’s say because she already knows all of this.

As he lowers into the body cloning thing, Lilli is looking at the maps and notes he’s got on the desk thing he’s got, because she knows he’ll be stark naked when he comes out of the pod and, as his daughter, she does not need to be a witness to that

(She hears Merle start laughing as he pulls the jeans out of the chest. She smiles to herself.)

As Barry’s getting dressed, the four of them convene, and they’re debating over if they should trust him or not.

“I trust him,” Lilliana says. “He could’ve killed us at any point, and he hasn’t. I think we should trust him.”

They decide to trust him.

Reunion Tour

They get up to the moon with Barry in the bag

“Magnus is dead y’all :((((”

Shit goes the same, they find the Magnus body in Fantasy Costco, they start debating over whether or not Magnus should take the body or not.

Lilliana walks up to Magnus as she, Taako, and Merle go to leave. She takes his wooden hands in her own. “It’s going to be okay, Magnus,” she says. “This is all going to work out.” She gives his hands a squeeze, though he can’t feel it, and smiles. As Magnus looks at her smile, he feels a sense of familiarity, a face that isn’t Lilli’s flashes in his mind, too quickly for him to be able to hold on to it.

Taako, Merle, and Lilli leave to go see the director and leave Magnus behind

So the three of them get into Lucretia’s office, go into the hall to her private quarters, get caught by her trap, but Angus stops them from getting caught, he Zone of Truths them, Barry climbs out of the bag, they get into Lucretia’s private area

They all drink from Junior’s tank (though it doesn’t do anything to Lilli, who already knows all of this)

She kind of sticks by Angus because she can see him starting to get Freaked by the shit happening (still weird that he’s 11 though!!!!!)

As the five of them get brought out in front of Lucretia, Lilli fades into the background of the interaction along with Angus, just watching this confrontation happen

Lucretia: I can build a barrier to keep the Hunger at bay. I can build a home that all of us can be safe in, together. Save for Lup. I'm so sorry, Taako, Barry, there was nothing I could do Lilliana, internally: seriously, Luce? How on EARTH can you still not know? Like... come on now.

Lucretia does her speech, and then it’s the end of the world... again.

Stolen Century

That’s a whole different au that we’ll get to at another time

Story & Song

Taako’s doing his whole thing being mad at Lucretia and not caring that the world is ending, and Lilli is off to the side, kind of whispering to herself, “come on, Taako. Come on, just think about it. You can figure it out. Just think.”

They’re bickering about whether they should stay or go, then the Hunger bursts into the room, the fight happens, and Taako finally, finally sets his sister free.

Lilliana is grinning as the familiar warmth of her mother’s magic weaves around her expertly and the monsters in the room are consumed. She cackles at “You’re dating the Grim Reaper?!”. Rolls her eyes at her father says he’s going to blow himself up to hold her.

Davenport gives them all orders, sends Lilli to go with Carey, Killian, and Noelle to secure the base.

But she sees Lup, Barry, and Taako totally disregard their order to find the ship and instead jump off the moon down to Phandolyn, so Lilli runs off to do that instead

Things happen like they do in canon

The story and song go out, and they all regroup (sans Lilli, not that they notice), Lucas says he knows where the ship is, and as he’s about to do the Thing to bring it up, the quad splits and opens up on its own, and up rises the Starblaster

Lilliana stands on the deck, leaning on the railing. “Found your ship,” she says casually, grinning.

Davenport says they gotta go, Lucretia reappears and begs them not to, they all start bickering again about what they should do, and Taako gives his “There’s a third option” speech

So they decide to try and cut the Hunger off, and as they’re boarding, one of the birds (I’m thinking Davenport) looks at Lilliana, still hanging out on the deck of the ship, and is like “hey, kid, you should stay down here.”

Lilli’s like fuck no. I’ve gotten this far in this whole thing, I’m going with you.

Thb back her up like. yeah cap’nport, she’s actually super rad, she’s gone through all the relic missions with us. She can handle herself.

So Lilli gets to stay on the Starblaster as they shoot up into the Hunger. She’s scared shitless, but this is her shot at getting home.

They fight the Hunger, shit’s wild, Lucretia puts up her barrier and they end up in the Nothingness as they’re talking to Jeffandrew.

Jeffandrew gives them his little speech and then lilli’s like Lilli: Hey uhh... jeffandrew? If you’re the god of gods, then you must know that I’m like... very not supposed to be here? Can you send me home? Jeffandrew: oh, shit. Oh, geez. I don’t know how this went unchecked for so long. For sure I can send you home. Lucretia, who’s been tearing her hair out over Lilli for the last year: for fuck’s sake, who ARE you?! Lilliana:

Baby gets home!!

She gets home and for her family, it’s been a year since she’s been gone and they’ve all been very sad about it, doing anything they can to try and get her back, so when she reappears in the blupjeans-taakitz conjoined backyard, and Lup and Taako see her through the kitchen window, they barrel outside towards her and she gets wrapped up in their arms.

Barry and Kravitz are also home and see the twins just bolt outside, and so they naturally follow after them, and they join the hug because BABY’S HOME!!!!!!!

They’re all like what happened?!!?!? Where were you?!?!?!? We’ve been trying everything!!!!!

So she tells them the short version, pulling her sleeve back to show her bracer and saying “I got sent back in time and ended up a reclaimer!!! Shit was wild!!!”

Then they go inside and she gives them the more detailed version.

They call everyone else and it’s a wonderful family reunion for all of them (everyone cries. They were so worried about the baby.)

Lilliana gets her bracer taken off. She’s had ENOUGH of that thing.

The Raven Queen pardons her death count (everyone is Very Distressed about her having a death count in the first place)

Everyone lives happily every after!!

#taz balance #taz balance au #taako #merle highchurch #magnus burnsides #lilliana bluejeans #reclaimer lilli au #favourite uncle taako #disaster uncle Magnus #grandpa merle #aunt lucretia #aunt lucy #grandpa davenport #papa barry #mama lup #my writing

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sophisticated-butt · 6 years

Text

For @selkie-elf ‘s birthday! Somethin sort and super sweet. Hope you enjoy!

---

“I’m Taako. We’re here for Gundren. You can do whatever you want to...”

“Oh, your voice is like a song. And so familiar too. Taako...” Taako... where had he heard that before? There was something, something on the edge of his memory. But it just wasn’t coming. So he kept digging.

Taako... Taako... Something about sizzling... and, there was another dark elf. Someone he took to the show... That was it!

All of a sudden, everything felt so much clearer. “Oh Taako! I saw you in ze underdark- took my sister to your show!”

“Oh well ain’t that something.”

“Brian...” He blinked kn surprise, turning to see Killian webbed to the wall beside him. Wait, Killian was here? What had happened?

“Oh! Oh dear... what did... are you alright?” He reached out, burning away the webbing. “So sorry... I didn’t... what happened?”

He received no answer. As soon as she was free Brian was falling backwards, blacking out from the likely well-deserved left hook she planted on his cheek.

When he woke up again, Brian was almost too warm- bodies pressed against him on either side and weight on his stomach. He forced his eyes open, still groggy, but at least his head was finally clear. To his left, Avi was stretched out, to his right was Johann. His jumping spider, Spot, was curled up on his belly. As Brian shifted, the others began to stir as well. Avi was the first to wake, (well, second if you counted Spot) with Johann joining soon after.

“You’re awake!” He could see the tears in Avi’s eyes as his entire body relaxed. Whatever happened... he must have been in bad shape. Johann stayed laying beside him, simply leaning up to give him a soft kiss on the cheek.

“Don’t scare us like that again.”

With that a third face came into view- Brad. He must have been settled in a chair with all the bed space taken up already.

“Hey. How’re you feeling?”

Brian shifted, smiling a bit. “Better, I think. I can’t remember what happened... I... did I hurt anyone?”

“You... yeah. But it’s alright. After Phandalin we weren’t sure any of you would come back.” Brad moved closer to the head of the bed, leaning over and kissing the other softly on the forehead.

“Loves... I’m so sorry.”

“Hey,” Johann said, “it wasn’t your fault. But now the gauntlet’s gone. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

Brian nodded, shaking a bit. He was under the gauntlet’s thrall. He had hurt people. But... he couldn’t remember any of it. But what he did know, what he could count on, was the fact his three fiancés would be there with him. And for that he was ever so thankful. He could feel his eyes getting heavy again, and let himself sink back towards sleep. There was a bit of faint whispering, but his fiancés soon settled back in as well. It was a good warmth. And he had never felt safer.

After he recovered, he found himself bouncing from fiancé to fiancé, helping them with their work for something to do. Killian still seemed to be his friend, Carey too. So things were good. Perhaps even better than good, just so long as he didn’t have to be so near the relics again.

#magic brian #johann taz #avi taz #brad bradson #the adventure zone #selkie-elf

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secretlystephaniebrown · 6 years

Text

Letters To No One: 5/6

Summary: Lucretia writes letters that she can never send over the years.

Beginning

Also on Ao3

Lucretia pulls the Bulwark Staff out of the sea.

It whispers in her ear—promises of invincibility, of protection. It’s full of the magic of abjuration—it is the subtlest of the schools, lacking in flash and glamour in the way the others have.

She would never say it was harmless—none of the Relics could be called that. But she does think it’s… gentler, than the others. But in some ways, that makes it more insidious. It does not offer raw power, or wealth, or an army. In many ways, it speaks to the kindest of souls, or the timidest. It offers them defense, it offers them protection. And then, like all the Relics, it brings destruction.

She wraps her fingers around it, shoving aside her creation’s attempt to enthrall her. “None of that,” she says. She raises it into the air, and tries to call up the shield.

But it’s not strong enough, despite the power flowing through her veins. It only carries one-seventh of the light. It needs the full thing to do what she needs to do.

Abjuration is the school of protection—Magnus, she thinks, would have chosen it, had he taken to wizardry. In the past, she’d used her powers to protect her family.

Now, she will protect the entire plane.

She wraps mage armor around herself, bolstered by the staff. She closes her eyes and breathes.

She can do this.

Magnus,

Fisher misses you. They sing every day, playing with the wooden ducks. One of my recruits, a bard named Johann, is the only one who can calm them down, by playing music for them.

I don’t think Fisher understands why you haven’t come back. Or why Davenport is different. Their mind is so different than ours… I’ve tried to explain, I have. I’ve told him you’re happy. You’ve got a shop now, I hear. The Hammer and Tongs. It’s odd to hear you referred to as an apprentice, but I suppose you must re-learn all those years of skills.

-L

Every breath she takes hurts. The last game broke her ribs, and she has no spells that could heal her. Barry had, one cycle, followed Merle around, ad then joined a local temple, becoming a cleric, to help Merle with healing. Lucretia should have done the same; even though a life of faith is not for her. But healing spells would certainly be useful, right now.

She leans against a tree, wiping blood away from the corner of her mouth. She needs to get out of the Wilds, to a cleric or a temple or… something. She has to make it out of here, otherwise she’d have abandoned Cam for nothing. She will need to set up contingencies, when she gets back. Tie her wards to her death, so Barry can find Fisher. Leave a letter for Maureen to find, explaining, listing her friends’ locations, because only Lucretia can cast the barrier spell, so her plan goes to ashes if she dies.

She can’t do this again. At least not until she’s stronger. She’ll need to be more careful. Hire people to hunt the relics for her. And save Wonderland until last, because she can’t send anyone in there until they’re ready.

Magnus,

A rebellion? Really?

I don’t know why I’m surprised; I’ve seen you rail against injustice in far too many worlds. But I suppose I had hoped I’d managed to find you a place where you wouldn’t need to protect people.

Good luck Magnus. Fight well.

-L

Lucretia carves sigils and wards into the foundations of the base which will one day become the Moon Base. She is still an arcanist, despite her own wariness of those skills. She protects them from scrying, sets down powerful wards against teleportation, and everything else she can think of.

It takes weeks, expending her spellslots, until she’s satisfied. She crafts glass spheres to travel in and bracers. She makes a grand tank for Fisher and puts a glamour over the portrait of her family, which she hangs in her office.

When Maureen visits, she whistles, looking at the work that Lucretia has done.

“You’re a lot more powerful than you let on, aren’t you?”

Lucretia smooths down the elaborate folds of her robes. She wasn’t that powerful, not really; she had nothing on Lup or Barry or Taako or Davenport. She was good at what she did, but she was just an abjuration specialist. She was simply making a base that was meant to survive, to protect its inhabitants. She thinks that Magnus would have approved. “I survived this long, haven’t I?”

Maureen doesn’t quite realize how impressive that is. She could know—she’s the only person who could, inoculated as she is.

But Lucretia fears what Maureen would think of her—she disliked Lucretia leaving Cam in Wonderland already. Surely, she would leave if she knew what Lucretia did to her own family.

So Lucretia says nothing and listens to Maureen speaking about her plans for anti-gravity.

Magnus,

I sent one of my agents through Raven’s Roost. I promise, I don’t spy on you too often, but there was a rumor of the Oculus in the area.

I wonder what poor Robbie thought of me dropping my cup when he mentioned the marriage of one Magnus Burnsides to a woman named Julia.

A wife. I honestly don’t know what to say. Congratulations, I suppose. I wish I could have been there. But then again, I suppose you might wonder who that old lady was, standing on the edge of the crowd.

I wonder what kind of woman your Julia is; surely, she is wonderful, and I hope she makes you happy. I hope she makes you so, so happy. You’ve earned this, Magnus. Your happy ending.

-L

For Magnus’ wedding, she arranges for a beautiful rosewood tree to grow and then collapse near Raven’s Roost—a good tree for him to carve, she thinks. She’s seen the way that Magnus has gone out of his way to collect good wood for his work, in the past. And now, he is a carpenter. Not a wandering star-traveler, not a man who throws himself recklessly into the path of danger, knowing he’ll be back a year later.

He’s a carpenter and a husband, nothing more.

And he’s so, so happy.

Magnus,

I heard about Raven’s Roost

I heard about Julia

I heard

I’m sorry

Magnus,

I went to the grave today.

It was foolish and sentimental, maybe. Certainly, Maureen has been giving me strange looks all day. You were already gone, of course. I’ve heard you’re in Neverwinter, finding work as a sell-sword.

But I went to the grave.

It’s beautiful, Magnus. The flowers you carved are beautiful. I used a few spell slots to enchant them, to protect them against wear and weathering.

I’d promised myself not to interfere in your lives. But I don’t want you to be alone. Merle is also in Neverwinter now, preaching the word of Pan on the streets, and adventuring on the side. I should be able to arrange a job for the two of you.

It won’t be much, but it will be something.

-L

Magnus’ skill as a carpenter has only grown. The flowers he’s carved for his Julia’s grave are breathtaking. She touches the petals and appreciates the polish, the grain. She sketches them twice, once for her journal, once more for her letter to Magnus.

She sinks spells into the grave, into the flowers, into the headstone. No grave robber will disturb Julia Waxmen-Burnside’s grave. The weather will not wear down the stone or the flowers.

Magnus will blame himself for not being able to protect Julia. The least Lucretia can do is to protect the grave.

Maureen pours her a glass of wine when she gets back. “How many spellslots did you use?” She asks, her mouth a disapproving line. She knows better than to ask what Lucretia had been doing. She’d seen the look on Lucretia’s face when she’d left.

Lucretia sighs. “One of my old allies from the Relic Wars needed my help.”

“You erased yourself. They wouldn’t know who you are,” Maureen points out.

“That didn’t matter,” Lucretia drinks her wine, and watches as Davenport sits in a window, staring up at the stars with wonder in his eyes.

Magnus,

Somehow, you two found Taako. Of course you did. You always manage to amaze me.

Do be careful out there.

-L

Lucas tells her that Maureen is dead over the sending stone and Lucretia feels herself go cold.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Lucas,” she says automatically, bottling up her own grief. What does her grief matter, in the face of his loss? Never mind that she wants to demand how this could have happened, never mind that she wants to crack right down the middle like a stone. Could she have saved Maureen, if she’d been there?

She’s just lost the oldest friend she still has. The person who’s known her the longest.

She turns to Davenport, who looks sad at the loss. She hangs up the sending

Lucretia hugs him tightly, even though she knows it’s not him, not really, and she weeps.

Magnus,

I wish you could have been here to see this.

Fisher had a baby.

It’s beautiful, Magnus, they’re so beautiful.

And it might just be the solution to the dilemma that I’ve been facing.

Maybe I’ll see you soon.

-L

Lucretia watches Fisher and the baby swim in their tank.

“They’re beautiful,” Johann says.

Lucretia thinks about the cave full of Voidfish, and about Magnus leading her into that cave, and the pure joy he’d carried with him.

The baby is smaller than Junior had been, even then.

She touches the tank, and they both sing.

An ancient carved wooden duck sits at the bottom of the tank, waiting to be played with.

“They are,” she agrees.

Magnus,

I don’t know how to do this.

Did I make a mistake?

One of my people got their hands on the Philosopher’s Stone yesterday. They turned an entire forest to diamond. Boyland, Carey, and Killian put him down, but in the process, the stone was lost. One of my best Reclaimers, dead.

No one can resist the thrall of the Relics, it seems.

I’m running out of options. Barry hasn’t been seen in far too long, Lup is still in the wind, and Davenport is unable to go on missions. I need you. All of you.

I… I’m afraid I might have made a mistake.

If I inoculate you… you wouldn’t help me. You’d all made that clear. You won’t listen to me.

But I might not have a choice.

I miss you. All of you. I think Fisher misses you too—they’ve been throwing their ducks around the tank in a fit for a week now, singing loudly. Johann has no idea what to make of it.

I need to do this, Magnus. The Gaia Sash resurfaced last week, and a dozen people died in the resulting hurricane. It was lost at sea, but it will wash ashore somewhere. Our relics have caused nothing but death and destruction.

We once promised we wouldn’t sacrifice lives for a cheap victory, but look at the damage we have unleashed on this world! One of my projects for the Bureau has been to compile a list of those who have died either fighting for the artifacts or were killed by them. It’s… a very long list, Magnus. It’s less now that the wars have stopped, but every now and then, one of them comes back to haunt us. The Sash, the Stone, and the Oculus are the most common: The Bell is safely in Wonderland, you hid your Chalice well, the Gauntlet vanished with Lup, and well… my Staff remains with me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m enthralled by the staff I am determined to stop this. The shield will work. It must.

-L

Lucretia stands in front of her friends. Magnus looks so old, she thinks: he’s covered in scars, and he looks battered and aged. He’s no longer the fresh-faced boy with a black eye that she’s seen a thousand times.

Somehow, she realizes, staring at him in wonder, he’s aged in a way that goes beyond what a hundred years had managed to do.

He’s changed and that terrifies her.

She welcomes them to the Bureau of Balance, pretending it isn’t breaking her heart.

Magnus,

Seeing you in front of Fisher again…

I’m so sorry

Fisher won’t sing when I’m in the room anymore.

It is so good to have you here. You fight… differently. It’s like looking back in time, watching you all fight. I hadn’t quite realized how much of your skills you’d have lost. I’ll have to put off sending you to Wonderland, even if it is the only Relic that we know the exact location of.

Davenport has been in a strange mood lately. I wonder if he knows that something is about to happen…

-L

Lucretia hates their blank looks. She hates the way that she’s a stranger to them. It’s her own fault, she knows, but she hates it She wants to fall to her knees and weep.

They’re here, and they don’t know her, and the gaping hole in her heart screams in pain anew, all the worse for ten years of festering in isolation and their suffering.

She sets her expression to serene and dignified and shoves down her hurt. One last grand lie, one last great wrong to inflict upon her family, all in the name of saving the world.

Magnus,

You realize the dogs will literally run off the moon, right? Please stop trying to smuggle chihuahuas in your armor.

-L

She watches as they flourish, here at the Bureau. They torment Leon, they befriend Carey and Killian, they get drunk with Avi, and it makes her smile, in a way she can never let them see.

Magnus,

Carey showed me the duck you carved for Killian today. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe it.

No one else remembers the ducks, now. I gave those memories to Junior; I was afraid that Johann might make a connection. Fisher was furious at me for taking their ducks, but I gave them to Junior and told them this, which seemed to calm them down a little.

-L

Lucretia loves them all, she really does.

However, it seems that absence makes the heart forget the absolute scale of the chaos that her friends are capable of causing.

When Lucretia walks out of her office one morning to see that Magnus has set up a picket line with the demand of “dogs on the moon,” she nearly breaks down laughing.

Magnus,

No dogs on the moon.

-L

Lucretia learns that Magnus has taken a level in rogue.

She has to stop to think about that.

The end result has her burying her face in her desk as she realizes that Magnus Burnsides now knows how to pick locks.

If he ever remembers who she is, she will lose every prank war for the rest of her life.

Magnus,

Why are the three of you so determined to be mean to Angus? Honestly, he’s a bright, brilliant boy, and he looks up to all of you. I know you’re goofing, but he’s a child, no matter how brilliant he is. He looks up to you.

-L

Angus McDonald is an unexpected gift. He can fill in the holes in the narrative, put it all together and find locations and details that none of her seekers ever have put together.

He found them while being inoculated. His is a mind that Lucretia has never seen the likes of.

Lucretia smiles at him, and thanks him for the work he’s done.

Magnus,

I found a duck in Fisher’s tank today.

It took everything I had not to cry in front of Johann.

I’m glad the two of you are becoming close again—I should have known that you wouldn’t let that stop you. You never would. Your family is your family, no matter where you find them.

Maybe that’s why the three of you didn’t run when you met Barry in the lab. Maybe some part of you knew him, and even all my warnings couldn’t dissuade your instincts, honed over that century, to trust Barry Bluejeans.

Fisher is happier, now that you’re visiting more often. They’re playing with the duck like they used to. Johann says they’re singing more lately as well. I’m glad.

-L

Lucretia thinks that they’re ready.

Or, at least, as ready as they can ever be.

They’re running out of time: the Hunger’s been scouting and she’s been counting the days. The Animus Bell is the last one left, and she needs it to complete her spell, she needs it to solve all of this.

She thinks about Wonderland and goes cold.

She just hopes she’s prepared them enough for what’s next.

Magnus,

I take everything back, I should never have sent you to Wonderland

I should have gone myself

What have I done?

I shouldn’t even be writing this. The Bell is here. I can finish this.

But I owe you this much, Magnus.

Farewell old friend. I hope you find happiness on the Astral Plane.

-Lucretia

Magnus tells her about Cam, and it’s like something Lucretia hadn’t even realized was intact shatters.

She cries. She knew what she had done, but she had been sure he was long dead. It’s been ten years. Lich magic was clearly more powerful than she had realized, if they could keep him alive as a head. She puts her head in her hands and feels the tears fall down her face, hot and heavy and itchy and exhausting. She’d barely been able to manage a few short rests since the Hunger, and exhaustion is warring at her.

“I’m leaving,” Magnus tells her, once she’s done crying for a man she has no right to mourn.

Lucretia’s fingers tighten in her robes. She doesn’t let her hurt show on her face. Magnus is the only one of the IPRE crew still on the moon. She’s known he wouldn’t stay, not forever, but it still hurts.

“Where to?” She asks. “Raven’s Roost?”

“Yeah,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m... it’s time to go home. Put new flowers on Julia’s grave. I’m sure the ones I carved for her are gone by now.”

“They should be fine,” Lucretia says, before realizing her slip.

Magnus stares at her.

Lucretia shifts in her seat, carefully unclenching her fingers from her robe so she can fold them on her desk. “After I… heard, I went down to Raven’s Roost to investigate. I saw them and… I enchanted them.” Lucretia hates speaking out loud sometimes. Writing is so much simpler—she’s better than she used to be at speaking, after ten years running the Bureau, but she still isn’t comfortable with people the way Magnus is.

She keeps her letters to Magnus in a little wooden box, along with a handful of strange carvings she’s collected over the years. She takes them out of her desk and hands it to him. “I… I explain better in these.”

He leaves after that, but he comes back the next morning, enveloping her in a hug that smells of leather and wood polish.

“Thank you. For Julia.”

#Letters To No One #Lucretia #Magnus Burnsides #TAZ Fic #Steph Writes #TAZ: Balance #The Adventure Zone

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thatgirlonstage · 7 years

Text

The Things She Forgot

This is a sort-of companion piece to my other TAZ fic, The Things They Remembered, but it totally works as a stand-alone, you don’t have to read one to read the other. They’re just similar in style.

Spoilers for all of the Balance Arc.

Memories are fragile. They fade and warp and crumble away at the edges, even when they are not eaten by static.

When they first walk in the door, she thinks her heart might burst out of her chest. She had observed them from afar, of course, but always from a distance, through reports and spies and magic. She didn’t dare get too close. Seeing them in person again, it was all she could do to stop herself rushing forward to hug them. She could only drink in the sight of them, reminding herself of every detail she had lost in the years away.

Magnus has changed the most out of any of them, a whole decade making itself known on his human body in a way that has not affected Taako or Merle. There’s a new scar that splits his face, right across his eye, presumably from his battle in Raven’s Roost. His shoulders are broader and rounder than they had been at twenty-one, and his muscles sit differently on his bones. Still, her heart thuds at the sight of little things she had forgotten. His sideburns are cut the same way he had kept them for an entire century. He still has that woodworking callus on his thumb. Then he asks her name and she stumbles over her own tongue because she suddenly remembers, clear as day, the sound of a wooden duck hitting the floor, and Magnus’s voice saying Who are you, and she remembers the betrayal that had lingered in his eyes even as his legs went out from under him.

Merle is almost the same, stumpy and inappropriate and waddling after his friends. He’s braided flowers into his beard in a style she hasn’t seen since the sixty-fourth cycle. She didn’t know he’d started doing that again. He absent-mindedly rubs the edge of his hand-axe, and she’d forgotten he used to do that when he was thinking, that it always helped him concentrate.

There’s something wrong with Taako, something she can’t quite put her finger on at first. He seems the same— his hair falling out in voluminous waves from under his green pointed hat, his nails perfectly manicured, his mischievous quirk of a smile when he makes a dirty joke at Magnus’ expense. Then he says, “I’m but a simple idiot wizard” and she almost blows her cover then and there as she is startled into correcting him. But Magnus agrees with him, and he insists, and then she sees it: it’s his eyes. They are unfocused somehow. There is fire missing from inside them.

Memories are splinters. They break apart and drift away, out of context.

“Elderflower macarooooons,” Taako says, waving a plate under her nose. It’s the first time in a decade she’s been offered Taako’s cooking, because she never dared to attend Sizzle It Up. She can’t say no to this, so she picks one up and takes a bite.

“Hot diggity shit,” she says, repressing an outpouring of swears because she’s just been transported back twenty-odd years to a day aboard the Starblaster when Taako and Lup made almost two hundred macaroons. She doesn’t remember why – although in all likelihood the reason was why the fuck not – but she does remember Taako chasing her down the hall with levitating trays of macaroons, and the distant sound of Lup shouting Try the lavender ones as Barry tried to escape the kitchen. She doesn’t remember what cycle this was, or how they even got their hands on the ingredients, but she remembers the taste of seemingly infinite macaroons, and realizes she hasn’t thought about that day since they made the relics.

Memories are whisper games, stories retold and drawings retraced until they are nearly unrecognizable.

Merle is lounging beside her in a mud bath. She has to stop herself from staring at the stump of his arm. Not because she hasn’t seen him missing limbs before – they all lost an arm or a leg during at least one cycle – but because she’s responsible, and because, if her plan works, there is no reset this time. They told her about Kravitz, bursting into laughter at the absurd notion that they had died eight, nineteen, fifty-seven times, and Lucretia bit her tongue, thinking of her own six deaths. What kind of bounty did that reaper have on her? What would have happened if Kravitz had managed to collect the entire crew’s souls? Would they have been safer if they knew about their past? Could she have saved Merle’s arm?

Was this how they had lost Lup?

It’s too late, anyway, and she’s come too far to backtrack now. But she can’t remember the last time she and Merle really talked. There was so little time, in most of those later cycles. There were so many years of broken worlds and the Hunger snapping at their heels, not to mention all the years when Merle went to parlay with John and vaporized in a curl of smoke. So she sits and talks, because this man is like the strange, globetrotting uncle she never had, with stories she’s never sure whether to believe.

“You gotta stand for something, or you’re gonna fall for anything. So listen! You have got faith; it’s faith in you.”

She has to resist throwing her arms around him and burying her face into his shoulder. She’d forgotten so much. She remembered him leaving for parlay with John, and starting the First Church of Fungston, and walking away at the sight of a town drowned by the Gaia Sash, the corpse of a small child floating gently by. But she’d forgotten the real Merle, irreverent, wild-haired, joyous Merle. She’d forgotten the wisdom that spilled from his lips, wrapped in impossibly unconquered optimism. She’d forgotten how much his irreverence was part and parcel of his faith. She’d forgotten how this contradictory bundle of a dwarf could help them all take a step back and remember the joy in their lives. She hadn’t realized how sorely she’d needed his advice these past ten years.

Memories are photographs, snapshots of important moments. But there is an infinity of moments left behind, abandoned to fade into nothing.

The moment the Animus Bell has been taken care of, she orders everyone out. Taako and Merle are waiting in her office, and she needs to go to them, and the Hunger is coming – she’s been seeing the signs for a while now – so she needs to start casting her spell as soon as she can. But first she collapses to the ground. Her legs simply give out from under her, breath shuddering through her body.

She should have known Magnus might not make it out of Wonderland.

That first year, the first world, they’d had a screaming match as Davenport piloted the Starblaster into the next plane, because they couldn’t just leave Magnus behind but have you seen what’s happening down there, he’s dead, they’re all dead. And then suddenly Magnus had materialized beside them, looking just as surprised as all the rest of them. She could remember with aching precision the swooping feeling of relief in her gut. She didn’t know Magnus all that well at the time, despite spending some time on the ship with him that year, but he was still one of only six people left from her home world, and she didn’t want to lose him.

Now he was gone for good, and it feels like a piece of her soul has been ripped out. With the Animus Bell right there, she’d felt the thrall of one of the relics for the first time in her life. How easy it would be, to reach out and just take it, just call up one soul, one soul who already had over twenty resurrections on its conscience anyway…

She wishes to every god in every plane that she were Lup, or Taako, or Barry. She wants to hurl fireballs and tear down the walls around her. She wants to rip the entire Bureau up stone by stone. She wants to barrel towards Wonderland in a whirl of pure destruction. She would trade away her time, her eyes, her luck, the hands that had lovingly written each journal, every single memory she had, to bring Magnus back.

She can’t pinpoint the moment the crew of the Starblaster had transitioned from crewmates to friends to family. She remembers one year when Magnus, Taako, Lup, and Barry had all died. Merle had survived the year, but he’d spent the last few months lost deep in a jungle after a failed attempt to recover the Light of Creation. Those months with no one there but Davenport and Lucretia had been painfully quiet. The Starblaster had gotten damaged in their search – which was why they had to abandon Merle – so they had poured all their time into repairing it, finishing with little time to spare before the Hunger came.

As soon as the reset happened, the whole team had gathered into the Starblaster’s living room. Somehow they managed to fit all seven of them onto a couch meant at most for four people. Lup curled onto Barry’s lap, arms wrapped tight around his neck, their faces close enough to feel each other’s breath. Magnus picked up Davenport and set him, protesting, on his own lap. Merle tried to crawl onto Taako, who had a brief shoving match with him until Merle finished sitting on the edge of the armrest. Lucretia found herself in the middle. She pulled out a journal and began to read.

At some point, she reached the part where Lup and Taako had been separated from the rest of them, and Lup jumped in eagerly to fill in the blanks. Lucretia wrote at lightning speed, recording everything she had missed. Taako and Lup traded off explaining how they had been killed by a mudslide that buried them too quickly for either of them to fire off a spell. Barry, Magnus, and Merle all spoke up to recount their own adventures and deaths. By the end, they had all traded their stories for the year, and Lucretia’s journals were complete.

She can remember that day with the warm glow of a treasured moment. But she can’t remember when she had become comfortable enough with all her crewmates to crowd onto a couch with all of them at once. She can’t remember when she stopped recording their lives because it was her job and started recording them because they were her family. She can’t remember when she started peppering her journals with additions like, “Lup and Taako had to subsist on food they could catch and gather for themselves – of course, Taako’s biggest complaint about this entire arrangement was the lack of spices.”

How many things has she forgotten about Magnus? How many jokes will she never hear again? How much did he learn in their century of travel that she will never know? How long will it take her memory of him to blur at the edges, until she can picture only a vague outline of his face, remember only that his voice was low and gruff, but not the exact sound as he offered her comfort, or jumped out from behind a rock shouting “MAGNUS!”?

There’s no Animus Bell pulling her into its thrall, but for a moment, she is tempted. There’s a way to fix it, after all. She knows where the Starblaster is. She’s rusty, but she’s sure she could pilot it away.

She could save her family. She could fix Merle’s hand and eye. She could summon Lup from wherever she has disappeared to. She could bring Magnus back, so that she never has to forget the kindness in his eyes.

All it would cost is a world.

Memories are empty. They are shadows of the past.

She bursts into the room with her guards and doesn’t know how to catalogue the feelings that swell in her chest at the sight of Barry Bluejeans. His eyes are clear and she knows that he remembers. He knows exactly who she is and what she’s done.

He looks almost exactly the same. Unlike her and Magnus, Barry has not aged. She’d thought, she’d hoped, that when she’d lost track of him as a lich after the first time, that he had made himself a body, lost his memory, and was living a normal life somewhere. But ever since Magnus, Merle, and Taako told her about the Red Robe in Captain Bane’s office, she realized she’d been wrong. Barry had been hiding from her all this time, probably dropping in and out of bodies constantly. He looks, physically, exactly the same as he did the first day on the Starblaster. The same blue jeans, the same round cheeks and square glasses, the same mole on his jaw. The only thing she doesn’t recognize is the cold fury in his eyes when he sees at her.

If Barry – sweet, nerdy, shy Barry – ever looked at her like that before, she can’t remember it.

Memories are lonely. They are reminders of other times, other people, other places, but in the end they are nothing but ghosts.

“Lucretia… why?”

The words make every muscle in her body still. Davenport’s voice is different. It’s not just that he’s saying words other than his name. He’s speaking with purpose. He’s speaking with clarity.

Lucretia… why?

Ten years, and even on his best day, he could never say her name.

Lucretia… why?

She remembers, abruptly, the first day she ever met Davenport. It was a briefing for the Starblaster mission. They hadn’t even finalized the decision on the crew yet. There were still thirty candidates in the pool. The IPRE only knew that Davenport was definitely the captain. He’d been giving a presentation on the bond engine and the potential risks and rewards of the mission. Starry-eyed, she had stayed back to introduce herself afterward, catching him as he was packing up.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep you, I just wanted to say— well, I’m one of the youngest people here, so I don’t imagine you’ll probably pick me for the Starblaster, but I think everything the IPRE is doing is so fascinating and— I just wanted to say, even if it’s not for this mission, it would be an honor to work with you in the future, sir.” Davenport had turned, smiling his gentle smile.

“Age is not necessarily a determining factor. We’re most interested in exactly the kind of passion you’re talking about.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lucretia had said. She was shaking with nervousness, but elation inflated her heart.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Oh— um. Lucretia. From the Chronicler department.” Davenport had stuck out his hand to shake hers.

“Lucretia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She realizes with a hammer to her heart that she must have met her entire family that day. Magnus, Merle, Taako, Lup, and Barry must all have been in that room with her. They must have all said their names in the brief little ice-breaker. She wonders if they remember seeing her, meeting her, for the first time. Except for Davenport, she doesn’t know when she first talked to any of them. She can’t remember the first words she said, or the first time she met their eyes.

Lucretia… why?

Memories are a comfort. They wrap you in borrowed warmth and safety, and hide you from an unforgiving present.

“You’re DATING THE GRIM REAPER?”

She’s had her world rocked so many times today already that the sight of Lup almost breaks her. The protection spell flickers for an imperceptible instant before she returns to channeling it. Nothing, not even Lup’s return, can distract her now. But still, it knocks the breath out of her to hear Lup’s voice again. The vestiges of her flames are vanishing into the room, their heat dissipating. She’s forgotten how powerful Lup is, how she can swoop in and set the entire world on fire, both literally and figuratively.

She had looked. She had never stopped looking, not really. When Taako had appeared with Lup’s umbra staff, she hadn’t known what to think. When she’d heard about Kravitz, she thought she’d found her answer, as much as it pained her. But still, even as she gathered the relics and started to see the Hunger’s scouts appear, she still quietly asked all her seekers to keep an eye out for a certain elvish woman. Just in case.

She had hoped she had been doing Taako and Barry a favor, trying to let them forget Lup. But the sheer rage and despair in their eyes told her differently. There had been nights when she closed her eyes and let herself pretend she was still on the Starblaster. She had drifted back to memories of happier times and lived in them for a little while.

Taako and Barry had had nothing in their past but static.

Memories are persistent. Even in the darkness of everything forgotten, a certain smell, or a taste, or a sound brings them welling to the present, no matter how ill-defined. But they are still nothing but shadows dancing on a wall. They are not now.

Magnus catches her in a hug, and she sags against him. And then Merle has joined him, Magnus lifting him one-armed to let him reach around her shoulders. And then Lup is there, and Lup is forgiving her, her incorporeal hand brushing along Lucretia’s back. She can’t feel it, but where Lup is, she raises goosebumps on her skin.

It’s not everyone. Davenport stands by the ship, conflict clear in his face. Magnus is motioning to Taako, but he’s planted himself away from her. His eyes still go hard when he looks at her. Where they were once missing fire, it has been replaced with crystal, hard and unforgiving. Barry comes over and stands close, next to Lup, but he doesn’t quite reach out to Lucretia. His too-young face stays still, betraying nothing.

But it’s enough. Her family is here, reunited, and for the first time in over a decade, they are truly working together again. And she realizes, as her heart strains inside her chest, that she had forgotten what it feels like not to be alone.

#taz #taz: balance #lucretia #ipre crew #the adventure zone #my writing #A N G S T #i feel like i had something else to say at the start there but now i forget what it was

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lxtent · 7 years

Text

Character Thesis Q&A:

To him:

Be whatever you wish. Haunt me, taint me. I was never allowed to keep something so fragile by my said. You existed and then you did not. Only death is quicker.

Fragile, but not so breakable. You were breakable only by my hands. My image of you. The desire I felt to keep you safe. Both of those shattered in my grasp.

You survived.

And you survived still. Do you still think of me? I suppose it would be hard not to if the scar I gave you is as prominent as my own. Those of us with scars cannot help but inflict new wounds upon others. We wish to transfer our scars in the hopes of sharing them and feeling piece.

You did not deserve to be scarred. I was scared. You were fearless.

You left anyway.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...

About names, possession and everything I have ever admitted to anyone:

The first thing you left me with. The first you gave me, my first possession. I would not know it until I could speak my name, but it was a precious relic to have left someone.

Your house is now haunted. I am afraid I have done most of the haunting. Was it me that filled it with ghosts, or the other way around. Did your ghosts follow me, cling to the unravelling threads I left in my wake, to find me here? You knew I would come here when you left. It would not be mine now if you had never have known.

She is not a ghost, but I still possess her. To keep her safe. Or perhaps she possesses me. The hold she has over more has grown ever weaker since I realised I wanted to live again.

That is the great truth; I wish to live again. At their side.

I wish to live though life has forsaken mine. I wish to live, having forsaken life, and taken it like it was my own.

It was never my own. You gave me life. You gave me my name.

I cannot take it.

To angels:

To think you may watch over me is quite laughable. The forsaken are no longer under the thrall of heaven.

All that is left to me is the opposite. I cannot think of anything else.

Even so, I feel in love with one of you. My life is a bitter parody of itself. I held one of you. I listen to your voice and light seems easier to breath in. I am not so suffocated any longer.

So do you wish to punish me for my sins? Or is it guidance you offer?

Do not lose your wings for my sake.

Questions to death:

I am left behind.

It’s cold and dark. I cannot hear their breaths anymore. The last sound was my name. You leave me to wake to this silent infinity. It is black. It is void. It is burning, acrid fumes, pain in my lungs, my chest, everywhere. You leave me and take them.

Could you have not taken me also? You take, take take take, take all from me. I am nothing without them.

Did you take her too?

She made the choice and left and it was like your hands had wrapped around her throat until she begged for mercy. She escaped me.

The next did not. I took so that you could not. I took, waited, watched.

When I meet them again, it shall be to their cries of sorrow.

You were not what we wanted. You were Left Behind.

To her:

Please leave me.

Leave whilst I cannot ruin you. Leave me behind like Death once did. Find a way to erase me from your memories.

I remember the day you fell into my mind. Cut across darkness. A voice across a room, too sweet for my ears to bear. You sang with sorrow and I replied without a voice. I like to believe that it was unavoidable. That I did not make the choice to be close to you, to watch you suffer even more.

I will not help you. I will only break you. I am no better than him. I am worse. I masquerade under masks that you tear away and leave me raw. My wounds open at your touch. Have you studied them enough? Have you understood what I cannot tell you yet? Whenever you stitch me back together, the gentle desperation tells me you have.

Please run. Be safe.

Do not let me keep you safe. I will destroy you as I have myself.

Questions to the body:

I lost myself to my mind and you did not stop it. My hands still bear the marks, invisible as they are. My heart does not know its own boundaries. My fingers are deft and skilled in both life and death.

Did you ever once think you were meant to fight against me?

To the heart:

I lost you. I will lose you again.You were never mine. You are fragile and resilient, brilliant and bold. You give everything because you are there to be taken. You have survived longer than me. Give yourself away and tell her to keep it.

Keeping the heart does not keep a person.

tagged by: @haebxtna [ thank you so much~! ] tagging: @iceprincesssooyeon , @dcmnation [ for any muse~ ], @ambitiousxmonsoon [ for Luna~ ], @noxwrites [ for Daesung~ ], @aniimvs [ for Gabe~ ], @numberxix [ for Minha~ ], @instantlyiconic, @thosewhowearmasks [ for Seonhwa~ ]

#( about. )#[ If I've tagged you and you're already done this/don't want to do it please ignore me!#I really enjoyed this though #even if it's a load of incoherent rambling.#That represents Leo's state of mind pretty well:#conflicted and contradictory #constantly jumping through thoughts. ]

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drmaelstrom · 8 years

Text

YA’LL THOUGHT I WAS JOKING

Nadja had been born from dead things, lifted from the ruined cavity of her mother’s body by her father’s immortal hands, not wailing as a newborn would but watching instead, too stunned by her rude extraction into existence to do much else.

She had been born, not made, but she had had little choice in becoming what she was.

Mircalla could never understand that, not really.

They had met at the feet of the Carpathians when Nadja was still quite young, only newly permitted to hunt without Father’s supervision, and Mircalla’s generous, affectionate nature had won Nadja completely. Mircalla was older by half a century, a bitter and beautiful woman grown rosy on the blood of peasant girls; she had offered Nadja her protection, for a young strigoli alone was vulnerable, no matter who her father was.

Nadja had said yes, of course.

Centuries later, Nadja would think of how foolish that younger self had been and hate her a little.

But in the moment of the yes, Nadja had first known something like happiness. Love that was not shackled to fear or resentment was foreign to her, and Mircalla had been very giving of her love.

They wandered through forest and over mountain together, twin slices of moonlight, two shadows creeping. Nadja learned much from Mircalla in their travels, things Father had not thought useful and Edgar had been too foolish to teach. Prudence, to balance the countess’ recklessness. How kindness could win a peasant girl’s trust more surely than cruelty, and sweetened her blood. Hungers that had nothing to do with blood but everything to do with the smooth stretch of Mircalla’s skin under Nadja’s hands and the sound of her laughter.

The pleasure of simply being held, and liked for herself.

Of course Nadja had loved her.

They had eighty years of laughter and feasting, of dancing over shattered flagstones and speaking quietly together in bed. Mircalla’s mind was the first to touch Nadja’s psyche without pain, leaving nothing but a sense that the world, perhaps, could be enjoyed in the right company.

Eighty years of companionship, however, could wear the strongest bond thin. Nadja began to grow irritated with Mircalla’s avoidance of introspection, and Mircalla began to accuse Nadja of sulking endlessly. They snapped and snarled like she-wolves, needling one another over tiny, stupid things. Nadja began to wonder, gradually, if Mircalla resented her for being born into this existence, knowing nothing else and mourning no human remnant in herself. Certainly Mircalla hated the strigoli who had made her, and lamented the loss of her humanity.

Once, when fighting, Mircalla had demanded to know why Nadja had not chosen to be something other than what she was, as though being born from a mortal woman should have given her or Edgar any choice in what they could grow to be. Father had taken that path from them long ago.

They had almost killed each other that night, and Nadja had made her slow way out of Mircalla’s territory the very next day, creeping from shadow to shadow and trying fiercely not to cry.

Nadja’s existence was very lonely from that point on, occasionally brightened by visits from Edgar or the acquisition of a new human, but she embraced the solitude for the most part. She could think better without Mircalla’s chatter, and at any rate no one would imply at her monstrosity.

In many ways, the Enlightenment helped her kind out a great deal in the Old World. Science had no place for the strigoi or the vârcolac, and so the people of the world gradually forgot them, forgot why their grandfathers kept holy relics and stakes of ash wood about them. It made dining incredibly easy.

But even so, there were some graybeards who knew what to look for, and what to do with what they found.

It was the summer of 1872 when Nadja felt pain flare into violent life in her breast, white-hot and searing. It crippled her, laid her out on the floor of her fashionable sitting room, and in that moment she could feel her go, slow enough for Nadja to feel her presence blaze bright inside her, slow enough for her to feel the fear and bewilderment of her dear one, and then gone, gone, gone before Nadja could reach back into Mircalla and be there with her as she died.

Nadja learned a new shade of grief that day, surprising herself with the violence of her own pain. The idea of reconciliation had always been tucked into one of the quiet dark corners of Nadja’s mind, a seed stored in hope of a kinder season. To lose that, the possibility of returning to Mircalla and being loved again, was more than she was prepared to bear.

It led to one of her first great acts of cruelty, in time.

She left her pretty house in Paris and went back homeward, finding in Austria the fair little feast that Mircalla had doomed herself over. Laura, the girl was called. Soft and lovely, with golden hair and innocent eyes.

Nadja hovered at the edges of Laura’s life for a month, two months, determining who came and went from the schloss, where the girl spent her worthless time and how she spent it. The humans had become complacent in the wake of Mircalla’s destruction, so certain that they had eliminated their enemy that they did not consider that another might come.

The servants died relatively quickly, and Nadja left them where they fell; they were beside the point. She found the father, the murderer of Mircalla, and he did not die quickly. Father had showed her and Edgar, when they were very small, ways of giving pain without taking life, a death of many days and nights, and this lesson she applied to the killer of her love.

His screaming brought the girl, pale and reeking of fear, and only then did Nadja stop. She left the old man gurgling on the floor, stepped over his twitching limbs and steaming insides to take the girl’s throat in her hand and squeeze.

It was easy to mesmerize Laura. The girl was weak-willed, simple, even, and had been enthralled by Mircalla once already. She stopped struggling very quickly and followed in Nadja’s wake as she left the schloss, their skirts filthy with blood and other things.

Nadja had thought that enslaving Laura would ease the rage inside her, sate the need to avenge her dear one, but she could get no satisfaction from the degradations she visited on the human. She had done her work too well; Laura submitted to everything done to her with the same look of dim adoration on her face, eyes dull and fixed ever on Nadja. Whatever Nadja did, the girl was glad to endure and rise again for more.

She had always been better at enthralling helpmeets than Mircalla.

Nadja abandoned the human in the twisting back streets of Paris in disgust, no longer able to hope for vengeance or peace or even base amusement. She retreated from the world, shut herself away in her fine house and sent out her thralls to find her meals.

It was Edgar who coaxed her out again, years later. He brought her rabbits to pet and devour, combed her neglected hair, helped her order her house again, and all the while he talked. Of new inventions, of the happenings during his travels in the New World, of a pretty woman he had seen.

Nadja found herself smiling, once or twice, and she let herself lean her head against her brother’s shoulder.

In him, at least, she could place her trust.

#Carmilla #Nadja #fic #pretentious vampire lesbians #haven't seen Nadja in full #been years since I read Carmilla #BYE #not sorry #sorry's on the other side of the damn state #lowkey gonna hate on Edgar for being a lil bitch towards his sister

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 6 years

Text

The Young and the Reckless

I. The Bumper

The trip to Delaware was only supposed to last a day. David Pokora, a bespectacled University of Toronto senior with scraggly blond hair down to his shoulders, needed to travel south to fetch a bumper that he’d bought for his souped-up Volkswagen Golf R.

The American seller had balked at shipping to Canada, so Pokora arranged to have the part sent to a buddy, Justin May, who lived in Wilmington. The young men, both ardent gamers, shared a fascination with the inner workings of the Xbox; though they’d been chatting and collaborating for years, they’d never met in person. Pokora planned to make the eight-hour drive on a Friday, grab a leisurely dinner with May, then haul the metallic-blue bumper back home to Mississauga, Ontario, that night or early the next morning. His father offered to tag along so they could take turns behind the wheel of the family’s Jetta.

An hour into their journey on March 28, 2014, the Pokoras crossed the Lewiston–Queenston Bridge and hit the border checkpoint on the eastern side of the Niagara Gorge. An American customs agent gently quizzed them about their itinerary as he scanned their passports in his booth. He seemed ready to wave the Jetta through when something on his monitor caught his eye.

“What’s … Xenon?” the agent asked, stumbling over the pronunciation of the word.

David, who was in the passenger seat, was startled by the question. Xenon was one of his online aliases, a pseudonym he often used—along with Xenomega and DeToX—when playing Halo or discussing his Xbox hacking projects with fellow programmers. Why would that nickname, familiar to only a handful of gaming fanatics, pop up when his passport was checked?

Pokora’s puzzlement lasted a few moments before he remembered that he’d named his one-man corporation Xenon Development Studios; the business processed payments for the Xbox service he operated that gave monthly subscribers the ability to unlock achievements or skip levels in more than 100 different games. He mentioned the company to the customs agent, making sure to emphasize that it was legally registered. The agent instructed the Pokoras to sit tight for just a minute longer.

May 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Zohar Lazar

As he and his father waited for permission to enter western New York, David detected a flutter of motion behind the idling Jetta. He glanced back and saw two men in dark uniforms approaching the car, one on either side. “Something’s wrong,” his father said, an instant before a figure appeared outside the passenger-side window. As a voice barked at him to step out of the vehicle, Pokora realized he’d walked into a trap.

In the detention area of the adjoining US Customs and Border Protection building, an antiseptic room with a lone metal bench, Pokora pondered all the foolish risks he’d taken while in thrall to his Xbox obsession. When he’d started picking apart the console’s software a decade earlier, it had seemed like harmless fun—a way for him and his friends to match wits with the corporate engineers whose ranks they yearned to join. But the Xbox hacking scene had turned sordid over time, its ethical norms corroded by the allure of money, thrills, and status. And Pokora had gradually become enmeshed in a series of schemes that would have alarmed his younger self: infiltrating game developers’ networks, counterfeiting an Xbox prototype, even abetting a burglary on Microsoft’s main campus.

Pokora had long been aware that his misdeeds had angered some powerful interests, and not just within the gaming industry; in the course of seeking out all things Xbox, he and his associates had wormed into American military networks too. But in those early hours after his arrest, Pokora had no clue just how much legal wrath he’d brought upon his head: For eight months he’d been under sealed indictment for conspiring to steal as much as $1 billion worth of intellectual property, and federal prosecutors were intent on making him the first foreign hacker to be convicted for the theft of American trade secrets. Several of his friends and colleagues would end up being pulled into the vortex of trouble he’d helped create; one would become an informant, one would become a fugitive, and one would end up dead.

Pokora could see his father sitting in a room outside the holding cell, on the other side of a thick glass partition. He watched as a federal agent leaned down to inform the elder Pokora, a Polish-born construction worker, that his only son wouldn’t be returning to Canada for a very long time; his father responded by burying his head in his calloused hands.

Gutted to have caused the usually stoic man such anguish, David wished he could offer some words of comfort. “It’s going to be OK, dad,” he said in a soft voice, gesturing to get his attention. “It’s going to be OK.” But his father couldn’t hear him through the glass.

II. Kindergarten Security Mistakes

Well before he could read or write, David Pokora mastered the intricacies of first-person shooters. There is a grainy video of him playing Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold in 1995, his 3-year-old fingers nimbly dancing around the keyboard of his parents’ off-brand PC. What captivated him about the game was not its violence but rather the seeming magic of its controls; he wondered how a boxy beige machine could convert his physical actions into onscreen motion. The kid was a born programmer.

Pokora dabbled in coding throughout elementary school, building tools like basic web browsers. But he became wholly enamored with the craft as a preteen on a family trip to Poland. He had lugged his bulky laptop to the sleepy town where his parents’ relatives lived. There was little else to do, so as chickens roamed the yards he passed the time by teaching himself the Visual Basic .NET programming language. The house where he stayed had no internet access, so Pokora couldn’t Google for help when his programs spit out errors. But he kept chipping away at his code until it was immaculate, a labor-intensive process that filled him with unexpected joy. By the time he got back home, he was hooked on the psychological rewards of bending machines to his will.

As Pokora began to immerse himself in programming, his family bought its first Xbox. With its ability to connect to multiplayer sessions on the Xbox Live service and its familiar Windows-derived architecture, the machine made Pokora’s Super Nintendo seem like a relic. Whenever he wasn’t splattering aliens in Halo, Pokora scoured the internet for technical information about his new favorite plaything. His wanderings brought him into contact with a community of hackers who were redefining what the Xbox could do.

To divine its secrets, these hackers had cracked open the console’s case and eavesdropped on the data that zipped between the motherboard’s various components—the CPU, the RAM, the Flash chip. This led to the discovery of what the cryptography expert Bruce Schneier termed “lots of kindergarten security mistakes.” For example, Microsoft had left the decryption key for the machine’s boot code lying around in an accessible area of the machine’s memory. When an MIT graduate student named Bunnie Huang located that key in 2002, he gave his hacker compatriots the power to trick the Xbox into booting up homebrew programs that could stream music, run Linux, or emulate Segas and Nintendos. All they had to do first was tweak their consoles’ firmware, either by soldering a so-called modchip onto the motherboard or loading a hacked game-save file from a USB drive.

Once Pokora hacked his family’s Xbox, he got heavy into tinkering with his cherished Halo. He haunted IRC channels and web forums where the best Halo programmers hung out, poring over tutorials on how to alter the physics of the game. He was soon making a name for himself by writing Halo 2 utilities that allowed players to fill any of the game’s landscapes with digitized water or change blue skies into rain.

The hacking free-for-all ended with the release of the second-generation Xbox, the Xbox 360, in November 2005. The 360 had none of the glaring security flaws of its predecessor, to the chagrin of programmers like the 13-year-old Pokora who could no longer run code that hadn’t been approved by Microsoft. There was one potential workaround for frustrated hackers, but it required a rare piece of hardware: an Xbox 360 development kit.

Dev kits are the machines that Microsoft-approved developers use to write Xbox content. To the untrained eye they look like ordinary consoles, but the units contain most of the software integral to the game development process, including tools for line-by-line debugging. A hacker with a dev kit can manipulate Xbox software just like an authorized programmer.

Microsoft sends dev kits only to rigorously screened game-development companies. In the mid-2000s a few kits would occasionally become available when a bankrupt developer dumped its assets in haste, but for the most part the hardware was seldom spotted in the wild. There was one hacker, however, who lucked into a mother lode of 360 dev kits and whose eagerness to profit off his good fortune would help Pokora ascend to the top of the Xbox scene.

Meet the cast of characters behind the Xbox Underground.

Gifted Canadian hacker and the brains of the Xbox Underground.

Programmer who made millions by tricking FIFA Soccer into minting virtual coins.

Australian teenage hacker who turned reckless as the FBI closed in.

Pokora's friend in Delaware, arrested in 2010 for trying to steal a game's source code.

Abruptly vanished from the Xbox hacking scene, causing widespread paranoia.

Owner of a hacked modem that he used to help the Xbox Underground steal software.

III. The Only Education That Mattered

In 2006, while working as a Wells Fargo technology manager in Walnut Creek, California, 38-year-old Rowdy Van Cleave learned that a nearby recycling facility was selling Xbox DVD drives cheap. When he went to inspect the merchandise, the facility’s owners mentioned they received regular deliveries of surplus Microsoft hardware. Van Cleave, who’d been part of a revered Xbox-hacking crew called Team Avalaunch, volunteered to poke around the recyclers’ warehouse and point out any Xbox junk that might have resale value.

After sifting through mountains of Xbox flotsam and jetsam, Van Cleave talked the recyclers into letting him take home five motherboards. When he jacked one of them into his Xbox 360 and booted it up, the screen gave him the option to activate debugging mode. “Holy shit,” Van Cleave thought, “this is a frickin’ dev motherboard!”

Aware that he had stumbled on the Xbox scene’s equivalent of King Tut’s tomb, Van Cleave cut a deal with the recyclers that let him buy whatever discarded Xbox hardware came their way. Some of these treasures he kept for his own sizable collection or handed out to friends; he once gave another Team Avalaunch member a dev kit as a wedding present. But Van Cleave was always on the lookout for paying customers he could trust to be discreet.

The 16-year-old Pokora became one of those customers in 2008, shortly after meeting Van Cleave through an online friend and impressing him with his technical prowess. In addition to buying kits for himself, Pokora acted as a salesman for Van Cleave, peddling hardware at significant markup to other Halo hackers; he charged around $1,000 per kit, though desperate souls sometimes ponied up as much as $3,000. (Van Cleave denies that Pokora sold kits on his behalf.) He befriended several of his customers, including a guy named Justin May who lived in Wilmington, Delaware.

Now flush with dev kits, Pokora was able to start modifying the recently released Halo 3. He kept vampire hours as he hacked, coding in a trancelike state that he termed “hyperfocus” until he dropped from exhaustion at around 3 or 4 am. He was often late for school, but he shrugged off his slumping grades; he considered programming on his dev kit to be the only education that mattered.

Pokora posted snippets of his Halo 3 work on forums like Halomods.com, which is how he came to the attention of a hacker in Whittier, California, named Anthony Clark. The 18-year-old Clark had experience disassembling Xbox games—reverse-engineering their code from machine language into a programming language. He reached out to Pokora and proposed that they join forces on some projects.

Clark and Pokora grew close, talking nearly every day about programming as well as music, cars, and other adolescent fixations. Pokora sold Clark a dev kit so they could hack Halo 3 in tandem; Clark, in turn, gave Pokora tips on the art of the disassembly. They cowrote a Halo 3 tool that let them endow the protagonist, Master Chief, with special skills—like the ability to jump into the clouds or fire weird projectiles. And they logged countless hours playing their hacked creations on PartnerNet, a sandbox version of Xbox Live available only to dev kit owners.

As they released bits and pieces of their software online, Pokora and Clark began to hear from engineers at Microsoft and Bungie, the developer behind the Halo series. The professional programmers offered nothing but praise, despite knowing that Pokora and Clark were using ill-gotten dev kits. Cool, you did a good job of reverse-engineering this, they’d tell Pokora. The encouraging feedback convinced him that he was on an unorthodox path to a career in game development—perhaps the only path available to a construction worker’s son from Mississauga who was no classroom star.

But Pokora and Clark occasionally flirted with darker hijinks. By 2009 the pair was using PartnerNet not only to play their modded versions of Halo 3 but also to swipe unreleased software that was still being tested. There was one Halo 3 map that Pokora snapped a picture of and then shared too liberally with friends; the screenshot wound up getting passed around among Halo fans. When Pokora and Clark next returned to PartnerNet to play Halo 3, they encountered a message on the game’s main screen that Bungie engineers had expressly left for them: “Winners Don’t Break Into PartnerNet.”

The two hackers laughed off the warning. They considered their mischief all in good fun—they’d steal a beta here and there, but only because they loved the Xbox so much, not to enrich themselves. They saw no reason to stop playing cat and mouse with the Xbox pros, whom they hoped to call coworkers some day.

IV. I Mean, It's Just Videogames

The Xbox 360 remained largely invulnerable until late 2009, when security researchers finally identified a weakness: By affixing a modchip to an arcane set of motherboard pins used for quality-assurance testing, they managed to nullify the 360’s defenses. The hack came to be known as the JTAG, after the Joint Test Action Group, the industry body that had recommended adding the pins to all printed circuit boards in the mid-1980s.

When news of the vulnerability broke, Xbox 360 owners rushed to get their consoles JTAGed by services that materialized overnight. With 23 million subscribers now on Xbox Live, multiplayer gaming had become vastly more competitive, and a throng of gamers whom Pokora dubbed “spoiled kids with their parents’ credit cards” were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to humiliate their rivals.

For Pokora and Clark, it was an opportunity to cash in. They hacked the Call of Duty series of military-themed shooters to create so-called modded lobbies—places on Xbox Live where Call of Duty players could join games governed by reality-bending rules. For fees that ranged up to $100 per half-hour, players with JTAGed consoles could participate in death matches while wielding superpowers: They could fly, walk through walls, sprint with Flash-like speed, or shoot bullets that never missed their targets.

For an extra $50 to $150, Pokora and Clark also offered “infections”—powers that players’ characters would retain when they joined nonhacked games. Pokora was initially reluctant to sell infections: He knew his turbocharged clients would slaughter their hapless opponents, a situation that struck him as contrary to the spirit of gaming. But then the money started rolling in—as much as $8,000 on busy days. There were so many customers that he and Clark had to hire employees to deal with the madness. Swept up in the excitement of becoming an entrepreneur, Pokora forgot all about his commitment to fairness. It was one more step down a ladder he barely noticed he was descending.

Microsoft tried to squelch breaches like the Call of Duty cheats by launching an automated system that could detect JTAGed consoles and ban them. But Pokora reverse-engineered the system and devised a way to beat it: He wrote a program that hijacked Xbox Live’s security queries to an area of the console where they could be filled with false data, and thus be duped into certifying a hacked console.

Pokora reveled in the perks of his success. He still lived with his parents, but he paid his tuition as he entered the University of Toronto in the fall of 2010. He and his girlfriend dined at upscale restaurants every night and stayed at $400-a-night hotels as they traveled around Canada for metal shows. But he wasn’t really in it for the money or even the adulation of his peers; what he most coveted was the sense of glee and power he derived from making $60 million games behave however he wished.

Pokora knew there was a whiff of the illegal about his Call of Duty business, which violated numerous copyrights. But he interpreted the lack of meaningful pushback from either Microsoft or Activision, Call of Duty’s developer, as a sign that the companies would tolerate his enterprise, much as Bungie had put up with his Halo 3 shenanigans. Activision did send a series of cease-and-desist letters, but the company never followed through on its threats.

“I mean, it’s just videogames,” Pokora told himself whenever another Activision letter arrived. “It’s not like we’re hacking into a server or stealing anyone’s information.” That would come soon enough.

V. Tunnels

Dylan Wheeler, a hacker in Perth, Australia, whose alias was SuperDaE, knew that something juicy had fallen into his lap. An American friend of his who went by the name Gamerfreak had slipped him a password list for the public forums operated by Epic Games, a Cary, North Carolina, game developer known for its Unreal and Gears of War series. In 2010 Wheeler started poking around the forums’ accounts to see if any of them belonged to Epic employees. He eventually identified a member of the company’s IT department whose employee email address and password appeared on Gamerfreak’s list; rummaging through the man’s personal emails, Wheeler found a password for an internal EpicGames.com account.

Once he had a toehold at Epic, Wheeler wanted a talented partner to help him sally deeper into the network. “Who is big enough to be interested in something like this?” he wondered. Xenomega—David Pokora—whom he’d long admired from afar and was eager to befriend, was the first name that popped to mind. Wheeler cold-messaged the Canadian and offered him the chance to get inside one of the world’s preeminent game developers; he didn’t mention that he was only 14, fearing that his age would be a deal breaker.

What Wheeler was proposing was substantially shadier than anything Pokora had attempted before: It was one thing to download Halo maps from the semipublic PartnerNet and quite another to break into a fortified private network where a company stores its most sensitive data. But Pokora was overwhelmed by curiosity about what software he might unearth on Epic’s servers and titillated by the prospect of reverse-engineering a trove of top-secret games. And so he rationalized what he was about to do by setting ground rules—he wouldn’t take any credit card numbers, for example, nor peek at personal information about Epic’s customers.

Pokora and Wheeler combed through Epic’s network by masquerading as the IT worker whose login credentials Wheeler had compromised. They located a plugged-in USB drive that held all of the company’s passwords, including one that gave them root access to the entire network. Then they pried into the computers of Epic bigwigs such as design director Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski; the pair chortled when they opened a music folder that Bleszinski had made for his Lamborghini and saw that it contained lots of Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus tunes. (Bleszinski, who left Epic in 2012, confirms the hackers’ account, adding that he’s “always been public and forthright about my taste for bubblegum pop.”)

To exfiltrate Epic’s data, Wheeler enlisted the help of Sanadodeh “Sonic” Nesheiwat, a New Jersey gamer who possessed a hacked cable modem that could obfuscate its location. In June 2011 Nesheiwat downloaded a prerelease copy of Gears of War 3 from Epic, along with hundreds of gigabytes of other software. He burned Epic’s source code onto eight Blu-ray discs that he shipped to Pokora in a package marked wedding videos. Pokora shared the game with several friends, including his dev kit customer Justin May; within days a copy showed up on the Pirate Bay, a notorious BitTorrent site.

The Gears of War 3 leak triggered a federal investigation, and Epic began working with the FBI to determine how its security had been breached. Pokora and Wheeler found out about the nascent probe while reading Epic’s emails; they freaked out when one of those emails described a meeting between the company’s brain trust and FBI agents. “I need your help—I’m going to get arrested,” a panicked Pokora wrote to May that July. “I need to encrypt some hard drives.”

But the email chatter between Epic and the FBI quickly died down, and the company made no apparent effort to block the hackers’ root access to the network—a sign that it couldn’t pinpoint their means of entry. Having survived their first brush with the law, the hackers felt emboldened—the brazen Wheeler most of all. He kept trespassing on sensitive areas of Epic’s network, making few efforts to conceal his IP address as he spied on high-level corporate meetings through webcams he’d commandeered. “He knowingly logs into Epic knowing that the feds chill there,” Nesheiwat told Pokora about their Australian partner. “They were emailing FBI people, but he still manages to not care.”

Owning Epic’s network gave the hackers entrée to a slew of other organizations. Pokora and Wheeler came across login credentials for Scaleform, a so-called middleware company that provided technology for the engine at the heart of Epic’s games. Once they’d broken into Scaleform, they discovered that the company’s network was full of credentials for Silicon Valley titans, Hollywood entertainment conglomerates, and Zombie Studios, the developer of the Spec Ops series of games. On Zombie’s network they uncovered remote-access “tunnels” to its clients, including branches of the American military. Wriggling through those poorly secured tunnels was no great challenge, though Pokora was wary of leaving behind too many digital tracks. “If they notice any of this,” he told the group, “they’re going to come looking for me.”

As the scale of their enterprise increased, the hackers discussed what they should do if the FBI came knocking. High off the feeling of omnipotence that came from burrowing into supposedly impregnable networks, Pokora proposed releasing all of Epic’s proprietary data as an act of revenge: “If we ever go disappearing, just, you know, upload it to the internet and say fuck you Epic.”

The group also cracked jokes about what they should call their prison gang. Everyone dug Wheeler’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could strike fear into other inmates’ hearts by dubbing themselves the Xbox Underground.

VI. How Do We End It?

Pokora was becoming ever more infatuated with his forays into corporate networks, and his old friends from the Xbox scene feared for his future. Kevin Skitzo, a Team Avalaunch hacker, urged him to pull back from the abyss. “Dude, just stop this shit,” he implored Pokora. “Focus on school, because this shit? I mean, I get it—it’s a high. But as technology progresses and law enforcement gets more aware, you can only dodge that bullet for so long.”

But Pokora was too caught up in the thrill of stockpiling forbidden software to heed this advice. In September 2011 he stole a prerelease copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. “Let’s get arrested,” he quipped to his friends as he started the download.

Though he was turning cocky as he swung from network to network without consequence, Pokora still took pride in how little he cared about money. After seizing a database that contained “a fuckton of PayPals,” Pokora sang his own praises to his associates for resisting the temptation to profit off the accounts. “We could already have sold them for Bitcoins which would have been untraceable if we did it right. It could have already been easily an easy fifty grand.”

But with each passing week, Pokora became a little bit more mercenary. In November 2011, for example, he asked his friend May to broker a deal with a gamer who went by Xboxdevguy, who’d expressed an interest in buying prerelease games. Pokora was willing to deliver any titles Xboxdevguy desired for a few hundred dollars each.

Pokora’s close relationship with May made his hacker cohorts uneasy. They knew that May had been arrested at a Boston gaming convention in March 2010 for trying to download the source code for the first-person shooter Breach. A spokesperson for the game’s developer told the tech blog Engadget that, upon being caught after a brief foot chase, May had said he “could give us bigger and more important people and he could ‘name names.’” But Pokora trusted May because he’d watched him participate in many crooked endeavors; he couldn’t imagine that anyone in cahoots with law enforcement would be allowed to do so much dirt.

By the spring of 2012, Pokora and Wheeler were focused on pillaging the network of Zombie Studios. Their crew now included two new faces from the scene: Austin “AAmonkey” Alcala, an Indiana high school kid, and Nathan “animefre4k” Leroux, the homeschooled son of a diesel mechanic from Bowie, Maryland. Leroux, in particular, was an exceptional talent: He’d cowritten a program that could trick Electronic Arts’ soccer game FIFA 2012 into minting the virtual coins that players get for completing matches, and which are used to buy character upgrades.

While navigating through Zombie’s network, the group stumbled on a tunnel to a US Army server; it contained a simulator for the AH-64D Apache helicopter that Zombie was developing on a Pentagon contract. Ever the wild man, Wheeler downloaded the software and told his colleagues they should “sell the simulators to the Arabs.”

The hackers were also busy tormenting Microsoft, stealing documents that contained specs for an early version of the Durango, the codename for the next-generation Xbox—a machine that would come to be known as the Xbox One. Rather than sell the documents to a Microsoft competitor, the hackers opted for a more byzantine scheme: They would counterfeit and sell a Durango themselves, using off-the-shelf components. Leroux volunteered to do the assembly in exchange for a cut of the proceeds; he needed money to pay for online computer science classes at the University of Maryland.

The hackers put out feelers around the scene and found a buyer in the Seychelles who was willing to pay $5,000 for the counterfeit console. May picked up the completed machine from Leroux’s house and promised to ship it to the archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

But the Durango never arrived at its destination. When the buyer complained, paranoia set in: Had the FBI intercepted the shipment? Were they now all under surveillance?

Wheeler was especially unsettled: He’d thought the crew was untouchable after the Epic investigation appeared to stall, but now he felt certain that everyone was about to get hammered by a racketeering case. “How do we end this game?” he asked himself. The answer he came up with was to go down in a blaze of glory, to do things that would ensure his place in Xbox lore.

Wheeler launched his campaign for notoriety by posting a Durango for sale on eBay, using photographs of the one that Leroux had built. The bidding for the nonexistent machine reached $20,100 before eBay canceled the auction, declaring it fraudulent. Infuriated by the media attention the saga generated, Pokora cut off contact with Wheeler.

A few weeks later, Leroux vanished from the scene; rumors swirled that he’d been raided by the FBI. Americans close to Pokora began to tell him they were being tailed by black cars with tinted windows. The hackers suspected there might be an informant in their midst.

VII. Person A

The relationship between Pokora and Clark soured as Pokora got deeper into hacking developers. The two finally fell out over staffing issues at their Call of Duty business—for example, they hired some workers whom Pokora considered greedy, but Clark refused to call them out. Sick of dealing with such friction, both men drifted into other ventures. Pokora focused on Horizon, an Xbox cheating service that he built on the side with some friends; he liked that Horizon’s cheats couldn’t be used on Xbox Live, which meant fewer potential technical and legal headaches. Clark, meanwhile, refined Leroux’s FIFA coin-minting technology and started selling the virtual currency on the black market. Austin Alcala, who’d participated in the hack of Zombie Studios and the Xbox One counterfeiting caper, worked for Clark’s new venture.

As the now 20-year-old Pokora split his energies between helping to run Horizon and attending university, Wheeler continued his kamikaze quest for attention. In the wake of his eBay stunt, Microsoft sent a private investigator named Miles Hawkes to Perth to confront him. Wheeler posted on Twitter about meeting “Mr. Microsoft Man,” who pressed him for information about his collaborators over lunch at the Hyatt. According to Wheeler, Hawkes told him not to worry about any legal repercussions, as Microsoft was only interested in going after “real assholes.” (Microsoft denies that Hawkes said this.)

In December 2012 the FBI raided Sanadodeh Nesheiwat’s home in New Jersey. Nesheiwat posted an unredacted version of the search warrant online. Wheeler reacted by doxing the agents in a public forum and encouraging people to harass them; he also spoke openly about hiring a hitman to murder the federal judge who’d signed the warrant.

Wheeler’s bizarre compulsion to escalate every situation alarmed federal prosecutors, who’d been carefully building a case against the hackers since the Gears of War leak in June 2011. Edward McAndrew, the assistant US attorney who was leading the investigation, felt he needed to accelerate the pace of his team’s work before Wheeler sparked real violence.

On the morning of February 19, 2013, Wheeler was working in his family’s home in Perth when he noticed a commotion in the yard below his window. A phalanx of men in light tactical gear was approaching the house, Glocks holstered by their sides. Wheeler scrambled to shut down all of his computers, so that whoever would be dissecting his hardware would at least have to crack his passwords.

Over the next few hours, Australian police carted away what Wheeler estimated to be more than $20,000 worth of computer equipment; Wheeler was miffed that no one bothered to place his precious hard drives in antistatic bags. He wasn’t jailed that day, but his hard drives yielded a bounty of incriminating evidence: Wheeler had taken frequent screenshots of his hacking exploits, such as a chat in which he proposed running “some crazy program to fuck the fans up” on Zombie Studios’ servers.

That July, Pokora told Justin May he was about to attend Defcon, the annual hacker gathering in Las Vegas—his first trip across the border in years. On July 23, McAndrew and his colleagues filed a sealed 16-count indictment against Pokora, Nesheiwat, and Leroux, charging them with crimes including wire fraud, identify theft, and conspiracy to steal trade secrets; Wheeler and Gamerfreak, the original source of the Epic password list, were named as unindicted coconspirators. (Alcala would be added as a defendant four months later.) The document revealed that much of the government’s case was built on evidence supplied by an informant referred to as Person A. He was described as a Delaware resident who had picked up the counterfeit Durango from Leroux’s house, then handed it over to the FBI.

Prosecutors also characterized the defendants as members of the “Xbox Underground.” Wheeler’s prison-gang joke was a joke no longer.

The hackers cracked jokes about what they should call their prison gang. Everyone dug Wheeler's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could strike fear into the hearts of other inmates by dubbing themselves the Xbox Underground.

Though he knew nothing about the secret indictment, Pokora was too busy to go to Defcon and pulled out at the last minute. The FBI worried that arresting his American coconspirators would spur him to go on the lam, so the agency decided to wait for him to journey south before rolling up the crew.

Two months later, Pokora went to the Toronto Opera House for a show by the Swedish metal band Katatonia. His phone buzzed as a warm-up act was tearing through a song—it was Alcala, now a high school senior in Fishers, Indiana. He was tittering with excitement: He said he knew a guy who could get them both the latest Durango prototypes—real ones, not counterfeits like the machine they’d made the summer before. His connection was willing to break into a building on Microsoft’s Redmond campus to steal them. In exchange, the burglar was demanding login credentials for Microsoft’s game developer network plus a few thousand dollars. Pokora was baffled by the aspiring burglar’s audacity. “This guy’s stupid,” he thought. But after years of pushing his luck, Pokora was no longer in the habit of listening to his own common sense. He told Alcala to put them in touch.

The burglar was a recent high school graduate named Arman, known on the scene as ArmanTheCyber. (He agreed to share his story on the condition that his last name not be used.) A year earlier he’d cloned a Microsoft employee badge that belonged to his mother’s boyfriend; he’d been using the RFID card to explore the Redmond campus ever since, passing as an employee by dressing head to toe in Microsoft swag. (Microsoft claims he didn’t copy the badge but rather stole it.) The 18-year-old had already stolen one Durango for personal use; he was nervous about going back for more but also brimming with the recklessness of youth.

Around 9 pm on a late September night, Arman swiped himself into the building that housed the Durangos. A few engineers were still roaming the hallways; Arman dove into a cubicle and hid whenever he heard footsteps. He eventually climbed the stairs to the fifth floor, where he’d heard there was a cache of Durangos. As he started to make his way into the darkened floor, motion detectors sensed his presence and light flooded the room. Spooked, Arman bolted back downstairs.

He finally found what he was looking for in two third-floor cubicles. One of the Durangos had a pair of stiletto heels atop the case; Arman put the two consoles in his oversize backpack and left the fancy shoes on the carpet.

A week after he sent the stolen Durangos to Pokora and Alcala, Arman received some surprising news: A Microsoft vendor had finally reviewed an employment application he’d submitted that summer and hired him as a quality-assurance tester. He lasted only a couple weeks on the job before investigators identified him as the Durango thief; a stairwell camera had caught him leaving the building. To minimize the legal fallout, he begged Pokora and Alcala to send back the stolen consoles. He also returned the Durango he’d taken for himself, and not a moment too soon: Jealous hackers had been scoping out his house online, as a prelude to executing a robbery.

Pokora spent all winter hacking the Xbox 360’s games for Horizon. But as Toronto was beginning to thaw out in March 2014, he figured he could spare a weekend to drive down to Delaware and pick up the bumper he’d ordered for his Volkswagen Golf.

“Y’know, there’s a chance I could get arrested,” he told his dad as they prepared to leave. His father had no idea what he was talking about and cracked a thin smile at what was surely a bad joke.

VIII. "This Life Ain't For You"

After an initial appearance at the federal courthouse in Buffalo and a few days in a nearby county jail, Pokora was loaded into a van alongside another federal inmate, a gang member with a powerlifter’s arms and no discernible neck. They were being transported to a private prison in Ohio, where Pokora would be held until the court in Delaware was ready to start its proceedings against him. For kicks, he says, the guards tossed the prisoners’ sandwiches onto the floor of the van, knowing that the tightly shackled men couldn’t reach them.

During the three-hour journey, the gang member, who was serving time for beating a man with a hammer, counseled Pokora to do whatever was necessary to minimize his time behind bars. “This life ain’t for you,” he said. “This life ain’t for nobody, really.”

Pokora took those words to heart when he was finally brought to Delaware in early April 2014. He quickly accepted the plea deal that was offered, and he helped the victimized companies identify the vulnerabilities he’d exploited—for example, the lightly protected tunnels that let him hopscotch among networks. As he sat in rooms and listened to Pokora explain his hacks with professorial flair, McAndrew, the lead prosecutor, took a shine to the now 22-year-old Canadian. “He’s a very talented kid who started down a bad path,” he says. “A lot of times when you’re investigating these things, you have to have a certain level of admiration for the brilliance and creativity of the work. But then you kind of step back and say, ‘Here’s where it went wrong.’”

One day, on the way from jail to court, Pokora was placed in a marshal’s vehicle with someone who looked familiar—a pale 20-year-old guy with a wispy build and teeth marred by a Skittles habit. It was Nathan Leroux, whom Pokora had never met in person but recognized from a photo. He had been arrested on March 31 in Madison, Wisconsin, where he’d moved after the FBI raid that had scared him into dropping out of the Xbox scene. He’d been flourishing in his new life as a programmer at Human Head Studios, a small game developer, when the feds showed up to take him into custody.

As he and Leroux rode to court in shackles, Pokora tried to pass along the gang member’s advice. “Look, a lot of this was escalated because of DaE—DaE’s an asshole,” he said, using the shorthand of Wheeler’s nickname, SuperDaE. “You can rat on me or do whatever, because you don’t deserve this shit. Let’s just do what we got to do and get out of here.”

Unlike Pokora, Leroux was granted bail and was allowed to live with his parents as his case progressed. But as he lingered at his Maryland home, he grew convinced that, given his diminutive stature and shy nature, he was doomed to be raped or murdered if he went to prison. His fear became so overpowering that, on June 16, he clipped off his ankle monitor and fled.

He paid a friend to try to smuggle him into Canada, nearly 400 miles to the north. But their long drive ended in futility: The Canadians flagged the car at the border. Rather than accept that his escape had failed, Leroux pulled out a knife and tried to sprint across the bridge onto Canadian soil. When officers surrounded him, he decided he had just one option left: He stabbed himself multiple times. Doctors at an Ontario hospital managed to save his life. Once he was released from intensive care and transported back to Buffalo, his bail was revoked.

When it came time for Pokora’s sentencing, his attorney argued for leniency by contending that his client had lost the ability to differentiate play from crime. “David in the real world was something else entirely from David online,” he wrote in his sentencing memorandum. “But it was in this tenebrous world of anonymity, frontier rules, and private communication set at a remove from everyday life that David was incrementally desensitized to an online culture in which the line between playing a videogame and hacking into a computer network narrowed to the vanishing point.”

After pleading guilty, Pokora, Leroux, and Nesheiwat ultimately received similar punishments: 18 months in prison for Pokora and Nesheiwat, 24 months for Leroux. Pokora did the majority of his time at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where he made use of the computer room to send emails or listen to MP3s. Once, while waiting for a terminal to open up, a mentally unstable inmate got in his face, and Pokora defended himself so he wouldn’t appear weak; the brawl ended when a guard blasted him with pepper spray. After finishing his prison sentence, Pokora spent several more months awaiting deportation to Canada in an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. That jail had PCs in the law library, and Pokora got to use his hacker skills to find and play a hidden version of Microsoft Solitaire.