Vorpal Chandelier
Junior Member
Orson felt nervous as he stared down the unconscious woman. Not so much because he thought he might still be followed, since he had gone out of his way to shoot the shit out of all of her belongings, but because he’d never been this close to getting the information he needed. It didn’t help that she was practically naked either, especially given that both the “chair” and “chains” used to restrain her were attached to his own body.
He could feel her against him, which, although uncomfortable, was the only way he could think to maintain control should she try any of her tricks. Tricks that Hurricane had mentioned consistently during those few times he talked about his captivity.
I wish she’d wake up. He thought. The sooner I get what I need, the sooner I can let her go.
He had first considered getting her something different to wear, but he figured he couldn’t risk sneaking into public again. Not after the fiasco with the phone girl, and he certainly didn’t want her to feel any more humiliated than she already might, so a trash “tunic” was out of the question.
No, he would just sit there, feeling her soft, warm skin, and endure the discomfort.
He had first thought not to destroy her suit and glasses, but Hurricane said they had a method of making harmless looking objects much worse than they appeared.
He also said they had used his body in an effort to experiment with their own technology, so if the suit Orson wore could imitate clothing, it was safer this way. Besides, he’d left her undergarments alone, so it really wasn’t all that bad.
Then again, if her undergarments were secretly dangerous as well, he may as well left the suit alone while he was at it. Orson had to admit here that even his caution had its limits. He’d rather risk fighting his way through a clever internet trap than to cross that boundary.
She then began to wake.
Currently disguise less, wearing only pants, he stared at her, trying to decide what to ask first. Maybe he should allow her to ask questions? Make her feel safer or less threatened. Maybe she’d cooperate better this way.
Then again maybe he shouldn’t be so nice. After all, they weren’t nice to Hurricane.
No, he had bigger problems. Besides, he never mentioned her, maybe she wasn’t directly involved in that side of things.
He tightened his grip ever so slightly, drawing the access suit back along the tendril-like appendage reaching from his stump of a right shoulder to her captivity wrap, just tight enough to where now that she was awake, she would notice where she was, and also that she would be less able to wiggle free if tempted.
Special Agent Denise Jones coughed a few times before speaking.
“Well, that is going to hurt your chances later, dude. I really was going to help you.”
She was likely referring to his choice to suffocate her into unconsciousness by using his suit to invade her mouth and nose, as a means to keep her from leaking information to his pursuers. Apparently her voice was still suffering from it as she spoke with a rasp, and couldn’t do so without coughing first.
“Still can. Don’t like to take risks though. I know what you do to Hurricane and I can’t say I want the same thing to happen to me.”
He eyed her up suspiciously as he spoke.
“Then you shouldn’t fight us. We’re the scrappiest S.O.B.s in the galaxy. But I suppose I’m not in a position to make threats. What do you want from me?”
Orson thought for a moment before responding. He’d been careful up until now, but was there really any use in secrecy? He was safe, and even if she told the internet facility what was going on, that wouldn’t aid them in capturing him would it?
“I need to know where it is so I can kill them. Hurricane’s ship.”
He sat up a little straighter, as if to assert his control over the situation.
“Is my phone or glasses still around? I’d need one or the other to tell you. Oor you could let me take you to base and we can get you all kinds of info.”
Orson shook his head.
“Destroyed them. Don’t want to be taken to your base, you’d torture me like you do Hurricane. I might be willing to work with your people if certain things can be guaranteed, but that would be it, otherwise I just want help getting what I want without getting interference from your ‘scrappy friends’.”
Orson wasn’t really concerned with a fight. The worst thing Hurricane had mentioned was some kind of energy displacing device, and according to him that hadn’t really done much to the suit. He was more concerned with being snuck up on and disabled before he could fight. The weapons they seemed to be using, at least so far didn’t seem to have an effect on him, but if the suit wasn’t encompassing him then he was vulnerable.
“Hmm, that complicates things. And it isn’t us that has “the hurricane”, I can just find out who does and where. By the way, you will want to keep me awake and happy for the next few minutes. I call in strong backup when you grabbed me and I can’t call them off without the phone. But we will get to that later… I guess. So, what would we need to do to get your cooperation?”
Keep her happy? What did she mean? He couldn’t help but glance at her nearly nude figure before shaking his head to stay focused on the task. Besides, surely that’s not what she meant.
“I need you to believe what I have to say, and work with me, my way, to take care of the problem. Right now I’m content to start with just you but if you can’t get your people to comply with that it’s going to end badly for you all. Understand that isn’t a threat, it’s a warning.”
He was a little surprised at her reaction.
“Ha ha ha haaah! People to believe you? Buddy, you have found the right person. Tell me, I can’t promise we can work with you, but I can promise you will have an advocate in me,” she said leaning forward, sharpness creeping into her eyes as a crooked grin splits her face.
Happy? Check.
“I come from your future. All of you are going to die unless we kill the things that destroy you.” He said simply.
Denise looked up for a moment. “What year did you come from?” she asked.
“I don’t know, we don’t keep track when I’m from,” he admitted. “And Hurricane didn’t age the way we do.”
“Naturally. What is the threat and how do you plan to stop it?”
“They’re parasites. In our ancient history, even your ancient history as far back as we are, Hurricane’s people got attacked and overrun. Their ship got lost and crashed here, and ended up buried somewhere deep in the planet, and he ended up escaping and sealing them inside.
“They have a cure in their ship, but Hurricane could only grab the prototype cure on the way out. That’s what this is.”
Orson nodded to the exposed suit as he mentioned this.
“But this one doesn’t work right and he couldn’t use it by the time he got free so we found a way to come back here before things got bad.”
“So, you don’t have an actual cure, you don’t know where it is, you don’t know where the person who might know where it is is, you don’t know when it happens, and you think you have leverage to get help by kidnapping and threatening to kill the people who want to help you? Do I have that right? –Not that I don’t believe you, this is exactly the kind of thing I expected, but if I do have that right then you need to reverse course before you make an enemy you can’t—that none of us could afford you making.”
Orson was taken off guard a little by her boldness. In her situation he felt she should have been less mouthy and more meek about her phrasing, but she did have many good points, even if he knew more than what he had said so far.
“There are two ways we know how to stop it, my arm and the real cure.
“My arm kills things that try to remove it, and I’m not entirely sure how it moved from Hurricane to myself so I don’t fully understand what to do. Maybe let the queen parasite eat me? I’m unsure.
“Hurricane believed that the people who live in this time would have ignored the threat and use my arm for something else. Something about being small minded or only seeing things in front of them. I think Hurricane can find the ship, but even if he can’t I can find it if I go into the holes. I just don’t know how long it will take.
“My arm makes me immune to the parasite but it’s eating me alive. I have to feed it electricity to keep it from feeding on my life force instead. You can see why I’d like to find a way to get closer to the ship.
“As far as when it happens, Hurricane said it started when the holes started swallowing cities. That’s happening now. Your time is short. I like to think of myself as slightly less hot headed than Hurricane, but I also don’t trust easily. Where I’m from we all have to fight each other to survive. I think the only reason Hurricane cared about me enough to stick with me as long as he did was because I have his weapon. If we can find the ship, and use the perfected cure, I don’t really care what kind of weapons you make. I just don’t want anyone to have to live like I did.
“My biggest fear is trusting you people, and being a prisoner like Hurricane is because of it. He said your soldiers thought they could solve the problems themselves, but if they could I wouldn’t have grown up in that life. So please, understand.”
Unsure if it was a show of good faith, or just raw emotion from re-living his childhood, Orson retracted the suit into his body, freeing her from restraint as well as the non-existent chair. He then used it to ‘clothe’ himself once more in his original trench coated “hobo attire”, using some of the remaining parts of the suit to re-create his robotic arm underneath.
The girl sat down on the floor, now having no chair to sit on.
“Hmm, there is the possibility of timeline splits. Do you know if you traveled back in your original time? Before you had actually done it?”
Orson sighed in response to the technobabble. He knew future tech, he could use some of Hurricane’s tech, but only in the scope of what he was taught. He really didn’t even know the name of most of the things he could use.
“I don’t know what you’re saying. The only thing I know about it is that Hurricane said if I did certain things to the terminal then it would take me back in time. He didn’t say how else it worked. In fact, he seemed to specifically not know if it would work. Also, I should have mentioned that we did reach his ship in my time, we just couldn’t get past the soldiers. Because things were so overrun it was impossible for us to fight our way through to the cure or the queen.”
“Oh, did it look like the ship could move?” She inquired. “If it was immobile it might be in the same place in this time too.”
Orson shook his head.
“No it couldn’t move, but everything looks different than it does in my time. None of your giant houses are standing and there’s plants and monsters everywhere. That’s why I want to look underground. Maybe the tunnels look the same, but, there’s so many tunnels that I could easily enter one that I don’t know and end up lost.
“If I can get close to where Hurricane and I found it, I think I’ll end up in familiar territory. Plus, hurricane was doing the navigating.”
“Mmm. You said you can go in the holes because you have the suit? So, the parasites are coming from them?”
“Yes. Maybe I could follow them backward since they’re supposed to be trapped on the ship before they escaped, but I don’t know how long they’ve been digging before the holes opened up.”
“They dig, the parasites? So they are opening the holes?”
"I don’t know. They’re different sizes but the biggest I’ve seen one without a host was about this big,"
Orson held his hands apart at a distance of about one and a half feet.
“and they're really small around. i don't know how they make the holes open up the way they do but they might be using Hurc’s people as hosts for the soldiers, so they might be big enough to have done it. Hurc said they stay by the queen though and the holes aren't all close to the ship.
“To be honest, I don’t understand that much about them from this time. I only know what I know from fighting and running from them.
“There’s some stuff about them that should be true from any time though.”
"That sounds like...Ha ha ha... no way. Worm-holes. Literal worm-holes dug by xeno-worms." She sighed. "I really wish you hadn't destroyed my phone."
"Well we did call them worms. Do you believe me?"
"Yeah, but we are in deep shit if I can't get in contact with my people and get some intel fast. Tell me, do you believe in destiny?"
"I don't know. If I can change time I don’t see much point in destiny. I'll let you go, and you can try to convince them. If they will help me as I asked I will work with them and I will try to be flexible as long as I can remain free and you get me what I want when and if I say I need it. That means if I need Hurricane you free Hurricane.
“If they can't comply with this, or if they try to ambush me instead of letting you meet me to confirm or decline my offer then I’ll kill as many of them as I can until they kill me, and your world can go to hell. Maybe you're time's me will be smarter.
“That also means nobody does anything to or against the worms or the holes unless I ok it, because you could really fuck it up if you don’t know what to do"
"You might be too late on the last one if some of the things I've read are true. Either way, I want to work with you. I don't have a way to contact you, do you have a radio or phone or something?"
"No, but I know a place you can meet me."
He could feel her against him, which, although uncomfortable, was the only way he could think to maintain control should she try any of her tricks. Tricks that Hurricane had mentioned consistently during those few times he talked about his captivity.
I wish she’d wake up. He thought. The sooner I get what I need, the sooner I can let her go.
He had first considered getting her something different to wear, but he figured he couldn’t risk sneaking into public again. Not after the fiasco with the phone girl, and he certainly didn’t want her to feel any more humiliated than she already might, so a trash “tunic” was out of the question.
No, he would just sit there, feeling her soft, warm skin, and endure the discomfort.
He had first thought not to destroy her suit and glasses, but Hurricane said they had a method of making harmless looking objects much worse than they appeared.
He also said they had used his body in an effort to experiment with their own technology, so if the suit Orson wore could imitate clothing, it was safer this way. Besides, he’d left her undergarments alone, so it really wasn’t all that bad.
Then again, if her undergarments were secretly dangerous as well, he may as well left the suit alone while he was at it. Orson had to admit here that even his caution had its limits. He’d rather risk fighting his way through a clever internet trap than to cross that boundary.
She then began to wake.
Currently disguise less, wearing only pants, he stared at her, trying to decide what to ask first. Maybe he should allow her to ask questions? Make her feel safer or less threatened. Maybe she’d cooperate better this way.
Then again maybe he shouldn’t be so nice. After all, they weren’t nice to Hurricane.
No, he had bigger problems. Besides, he never mentioned her, maybe she wasn’t directly involved in that side of things.
He tightened his grip ever so slightly, drawing the access suit back along the tendril-like appendage reaching from his stump of a right shoulder to her captivity wrap, just tight enough to where now that she was awake, she would notice where she was, and also that she would be less able to wiggle free if tempted.
Special Agent Denise Jones coughed a few times before speaking.
“Well, that is going to hurt your chances later, dude. I really was going to help you.”
She was likely referring to his choice to suffocate her into unconsciousness by using his suit to invade her mouth and nose, as a means to keep her from leaking information to his pursuers. Apparently her voice was still suffering from it as she spoke with a rasp, and couldn’t do so without coughing first.
“Still can. Don’t like to take risks though. I know what you do to Hurricane and I can’t say I want the same thing to happen to me.”
He eyed her up suspiciously as he spoke.
“Then you shouldn’t fight us. We’re the scrappiest S.O.B.s in the galaxy. But I suppose I’m not in a position to make threats. What do you want from me?”
Orson thought for a moment before responding. He’d been careful up until now, but was there really any use in secrecy? He was safe, and even if she told the internet facility what was going on, that wouldn’t aid them in capturing him would it?
“I need to know where it is so I can kill them. Hurricane’s ship.”
He sat up a little straighter, as if to assert his control over the situation.
“Is my phone or glasses still around? I’d need one or the other to tell you. Oor you could let me take you to base and we can get you all kinds of info.”
Orson shook his head.
“Destroyed them. Don’t want to be taken to your base, you’d torture me like you do Hurricane. I might be willing to work with your people if certain things can be guaranteed, but that would be it, otherwise I just want help getting what I want without getting interference from your ‘scrappy friends’.”
Orson wasn’t really concerned with a fight. The worst thing Hurricane had mentioned was some kind of energy displacing device, and according to him that hadn’t really done much to the suit. He was more concerned with being snuck up on and disabled before he could fight. The weapons they seemed to be using, at least so far didn’t seem to have an effect on him, but if the suit wasn’t encompassing him then he was vulnerable.
“Hmm, that complicates things. And it isn’t us that has “the hurricane”, I can just find out who does and where. By the way, you will want to keep me awake and happy for the next few minutes. I call in strong backup when you grabbed me and I can’t call them off without the phone. But we will get to that later… I guess. So, what would we need to do to get your cooperation?”
Keep her happy? What did she mean? He couldn’t help but glance at her nearly nude figure before shaking his head to stay focused on the task. Besides, surely that’s not what she meant.
“I need you to believe what I have to say, and work with me, my way, to take care of the problem. Right now I’m content to start with just you but if you can’t get your people to comply with that it’s going to end badly for you all. Understand that isn’t a threat, it’s a warning.”
He was a little surprised at her reaction.
“Ha ha ha haaah! People to believe you? Buddy, you have found the right person. Tell me, I can’t promise we can work with you, but I can promise you will have an advocate in me,” she said leaning forward, sharpness creeping into her eyes as a crooked grin splits her face.
Happy? Check.
“I come from your future. All of you are going to die unless we kill the things that destroy you.” He said simply.
Denise looked up for a moment. “What year did you come from?” she asked.
“I don’t know, we don’t keep track when I’m from,” he admitted. “And Hurricane didn’t age the way we do.”
“Naturally. What is the threat and how do you plan to stop it?”
“They’re parasites. In our ancient history, even your ancient history as far back as we are, Hurricane’s people got attacked and overrun. Their ship got lost and crashed here, and ended up buried somewhere deep in the planet, and he ended up escaping and sealing them inside.
“They have a cure in their ship, but Hurricane could only grab the prototype cure on the way out. That’s what this is.”
Orson nodded to the exposed suit as he mentioned this.
“But this one doesn’t work right and he couldn’t use it by the time he got free so we found a way to come back here before things got bad.”
“So, you don’t have an actual cure, you don’t know where it is, you don’t know where the person who might know where it is is, you don’t know when it happens, and you think you have leverage to get help by kidnapping and threatening to kill the people who want to help you? Do I have that right? –Not that I don’t believe you, this is exactly the kind of thing I expected, but if I do have that right then you need to reverse course before you make an enemy you can’t—that none of us could afford you making.”
Orson was taken off guard a little by her boldness. In her situation he felt she should have been less mouthy and more meek about her phrasing, but she did have many good points, even if he knew more than what he had said so far.
“There are two ways we know how to stop it, my arm and the real cure.
“My arm kills things that try to remove it, and I’m not entirely sure how it moved from Hurricane to myself so I don’t fully understand what to do. Maybe let the queen parasite eat me? I’m unsure.
“Hurricane believed that the people who live in this time would have ignored the threat and use my arm for something else. Something about being small minded or only seeing things in front of them. I think Hurricane can find the ship, but even if he can’t I can find it if I go into the holes. I just don’t know how long it will take.
“My arm makes me immune to the parasite but it’s eating me alive. I have to feed it electricity to keep it from feeding on my life force instead. You can see why I’d like to find a way to get closer to the ship.
“As far as when it happens, Hurricane said it started when the holes started swallowing cities. That’s happening now. Your time is short. I like to think of myself as slightly less hot headed than Hurricane, but I also don’t trust easily. Where I’m from we all have to fight each other to survive. I think the only reason Hurricane cared about me enough to stick with me as long as he did was because I have his weapon. If we can find the ship, and use the perfected cure, I don’t really care what kind of weapons you make. I just don’t want anyone to have to live like I did.
“My biggest fear is trusting you people, and being a prisoner like Hurricane is because of it. He said your soldiers thought they could solve the problems themselves, but if they could I wouldn’t have grown up in that life. So please, understand.”
Unsure if it was a show of good faith, or just raw emotion from re-living his childhood, Orson retracted the suit into his body, freeing her from restraint as well as the non-existent chair. He then used it to ‘clothe’ himself once more in his original trench coated “hobo attire”, using some of the remaining parts of the suit to re-create his robotic arm underneath.
The girl sat down on the floor, now having no chair to sit on.
“Hmm, there is the possibility of timeline splits. Do you know if you traveled back in your original time? Before you had actually done it?”
Orson sighed in response to the technobabble. He knew future tech, he could use some of Hurricane’s tech, but only in the scope of what he was taught. He really didn’t even know the name of most of the things he could use.
“I don’t know what you’re saying. The only thing I know about it is that Hurricane said if I did certain things to the terminal then it would take me back in time. He didn’t say how else it worked. In fact, he seemed to specifically not know if it would work. Also, I should have mentioned that we did reach his ship in my time, we just couldn’t get past the soldiers. Because things were so overrun it was impossible for us to fight our way through to the cure or the queen.”
“Oh, did it look like the ship could move?” She inquired. “If it was immobile it might be in the same place in this time too.”
Orson shook his head.
“No it couldn’t move, but everything looks different than it does in my time. None of your giant houses are standing and there’s plants and monsters everywhere. That’s why I want to look underground. Maybe the tunnels look the same, but, there’s so many tunnels that I could easily enter one that I don’t know and end up lost.
“If I can get close to where Hurricane and I found it, I think I’ll end up in familiar territory. Plus, hurricane was doing the navigating.”
“Mmm. You said you can go in the holes because you have the suit? So, the parasites are coming from them?”
“Yes. Maybe I could follow them backward since they’re supposed to be trapped on the ship before they escaped, but I don’t know how long they’ve been digging before the holes opened up.”
“They dig, the parasites? So they are opening the holes?”
"I don’t know. They’re different sizes but the biggest I’ve seen one without a host was about this big,"
Orson held his hands apart at a distance of about one and a half feet.
“and they're really small around. i don't know how they make the holes open up the way they do but they might be using Hurc’s people as hosts for the soldiers, so they might be big enough to have done it. Hurc said they stay by the queen though and the holes aren't all close to the ship.
“To be honest, I don’t understand that much about them from this time. I only know what I know from fighting and running from them.
“There’s some stuff about them that should be true from any time though.”
"That sounds like...Ha ha ha... no way. Worm-holes. Literal worm-holes dug by xeno-worms." She sighed. "I really wish you hadn't destroyed my phone."
"Well we did call them worms. Do you believe me?"
"Yeah, but we are in deep shit if I can't get in contact with my people and get some intel fast. Tell me, do you believe in destiny?"
"I don't know. If I can change time I don’t see much point in destiny. I'll let you go, and you can try to convince them. If they will help me as I asked I will work with them and I will try to be flexible as long as I can remain free and you get me what I want when and if I say I need it. That means if I need Hurricane you free Hurricane.
“If they can't comply with this, or if they try to ambush me instead of letting you meet me to confirm or decline my offer then I’ll kill as many of them as I can until they kill me, and your world can go to hell. Maybe you're time's me will be smarter.
“That also means nobody does anything to or against the worms or the holes unless I ok it, because you could really fuck it up if you don’t know what to do"
"You might be too late on the last one if some of the things I've read are true. Either way, I want to work with you. I don't have a way to contact you, do you have a radio or phone or something?"
"No, but I know a place you can meet me."
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