LogBrink-Jason-3

Game log for the 2014/10/19 session of Brink, as taken by Jason

Absinthe is hanging out in her apartment when Honey knocks on the door. She's acting weird, not talking, staring at the wall. Absinthe comes out into the hall. Absinthe takes her out for coffee at Fusty's but still can't get her to communicate, and she refuses to stay focused even on the occasions when Absinthe can get her attention. There's no obvious sign that someone did something to her. Absinthe calls Cipher to come and consult. Cipher looks at Honey, waving his hand at her and asking what's going on, and she leaps at him and tries to bite him in the neck, sticking her thumb in his eye, and generally mangling his flesh. Absinthe grabs Honey to get her off Cipher, and a table full of guys in heavy construction vac suits get up from their table and start walking over.

Cipher gets to his feet and takes a deep breath. One of the construction workers seems to have a bit of a beef with him, because he's insistently asking what Cipher did to her. The construction worries explain that they don't like men who do bad stuff to women. Cipher tries to put the whammy a wrench-carrying worker, fails, and gets smacked upside the head with a wrench. Absinthe tries smacking Honey to knock her out, hoping that will quiet the situation. This confuses the workers quite a bit. They don't pursue the fight anymore, but they do tell Cipher not to show his face there anymore. All but one walk out; the one who stays, Booboo, helps Absinthe take Honey to someplace a little quieter. They take her to a doc in ring 12 sickbay D. The doc, Fletch, assumes that Cipher must have done something to her that left her this way.

Fletch straps Honey down and does some stuff to her, then comes back to Cipher to negotiate a price for treatment. They settle on one barter and he ower her a favor.

We find Swan and Torch explaining to Raskol that nobody welches on Swan. Swan eventually has to yell right in Torch's face to make the violence stop. Torch stops but realizes that a real 'neer would solve the problem, not just leave it flopping around. Torch therefore hangs Raskol from a chunk of wall panelling and neatly writes "Payment must be made on time" in blood under the gory new decoration.

Chauncey suggests that maybe Torch is ready for the airlock, but Swan points out that you can't really do that to Torch and get away with it. Swan had sold Raskol some hydrochloric acid; now he reposseses the remnants.

Swan calls a fellow operator named Test and offers him a discount on a future deal to help keep Raskol off the slab. Then they return to ring 35, docking bay C. Swan reviews footage of the Woots from the tap we placed for Cutter, and sees a lot of weird Woot behavior, including a weird sort of parade. Torch suggests that the best way to lure Cutter to Woot territory is to start placing those weird Woot dolls around his quarters, which will make it seem like a threat from the Woots. Swan approves. Torch zones out a little has he consults the local telepathic noise and uses it for inspiration to "personalize" the doll he makes. As we work, Eyeball notices that there are three rings (Woot symbols) painted on her monitor. She accuses the other members of the crew, all deny it, and she consults her records only to find a progressive blackout that covers the time the paint was applied in darkness. That reads like a warning.

Back in ring 12 sickbay D, Cipher's all stitched up now. He suggests that someone must have done something mental to Honey. Fletch peels her eyelid open, shines a light in, and leaps back like she got an electric shock. Fletch immediately orders all of them out of her office. Absinthe asks where they should take Honey now, and Fletch directs her to the nearest airlock. Cipher tries to figure out what's going on but Fletch just tells him to keep everything on offer, just get the hell out of her office.

They take Honey out of the office and into the airlock. Cipher tries to put the whammy on her but gets sucked into Honey's brain instead. Normally he sees the world's psychic maelstrom as a palace full of halls, doors, and windows; in her case he sees a dark mirror that, when touched one time too many, turns into a sort of trap door that he falls into. He hears a voice saying, "look into my eyes," over and over, but sees only blackness. Eventually he comes too but he's feeling pretty weird. To Absinthe's eyes, it looked like Cipher want absolutely rigid and then started convulsing, and at the same time, Honey's eyes snapped open. Her eyes are completely black. Absinthe yanks Honey away from Cipher, hits the inner door close button and the outer door open button, and watches Honey stare at her through the window with her black eyes until she floats away into space.

Absinthe, Cipher, and Booboo compare notes but nobody can figure out what the heck is going on. They try to retreat to the Waxing Gibbous, but it's closed, so they wash up on the shores of Lefty's Bar.

Swan's in his bunk, reviewing Woot footage, and opens his brain to the psychic maelstrom. In his mind, he sees the station through a sort of black and red maximum contrast filter. He calls it "calling the red." Watching Woot parades through this altered vision, he sees two more people in the Woot parade. They aren't wearing masks, either, they just have weird-looking faces. In the real world, the space they appear to occupy is occupied by someone carrying a Woot doll. Maybe their idea that the dolls are somehow tied to the lives of the departed isn't as insane as Swan thought. Swan then asks Abner to work out how to get the dolls to Cutter's place without being seen. Swan, too, ends up drinking in Lefty's, and begins comparing notes about bad days.

After hearing about the bad stuff that happened to Honey, Swan asks Torch if that sounded like 'neer work (no), Torch suggests Honey's boss would know where she'd been, and Swan skips over that conversation and asks Eyeball to scan her feeds. After a while, Test comes in and asks what Swan's trying to pull. Seems Raskol didn't make it. Swan assures him the deal's still good, Test confirms he dealt with the body, but there's a little bad blood there now. Test then looks over at Cipher, who's acting a little weird, and says, "What's your problem?" Cipher tells Booboo that they have another one and then puts the whammy on Test, who (to him) has the same black eyes that Honey did. Test stops and backs away, saying "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Swan takes Test over to the bar and calms him down. Meanwhile, Torch tells Cipher that if he tries that same crap and it causes a problem for Swan, then Torch will have to take a hand.

When Eyeball returns, Swan cuts Test loose and gets a report. Seems that someone wiped the logs of what Honey was up to. No footage logged during that time for the entire sector, 1/6 of the ring. As Eyeballs walks away from the bar after reporting, Cipher sees her give him a really weird look, but he decides not to get into it. We agree to go down to where Honey lived (which is where Absinthe lives) and see what's what. Even Booboo wants to come along.

On ring 10 sector B, Swan tries to build a remote tap that will let Eyeball remote in. It malfunctions, fries itself, and kills the lights. Absinthe opens her mind to figure out what's going on in the dark. She feels like someone is watching her, turns around, and sees that it's Cipher. Meanwhile, in Cipher's mind, he imagines Honey coming out of the darkness and going for his throat. He begins freaking out. Absinthe tries to calm him down, but she's connected with him enough that she also perceives someone coming at him out of a doorway, and opens fire. Torch jumps in front of Absinthe's magnum and Swan grabs Cipher's risk. The poor innocent woman who'd come out the door screams and ducks back indoors. At that point, Cooze yells, "Nobody move!" Once they realize who it is, things quiet down a little bit. Cooze reminds Absinthe that there's always a spot for her on her crew, but Mite points out that they don't need people who suffer accidental discharges. Torch, who has a puppy dog thing for Absinthe, takes exception, but Absinthe defuses the situation by making eye contact. Mite wilts under her gaze, but Torch pretends it was his own looming presence that scared her.

Meanwhile, Swan makes a botched attempt to seduce Cooze, and gets a shot in the 'nads and a couple swift kicks for his pains. Torch is about to intervene and paint the walls with Cooze's people when Swan tells him that it's cool and things settle down again.

We end up back in Absinthe's place. Swan ducks into the head to call on the red some more, but it doesn't work out too well. When he looks into the mirror, he sees a black-eyed woman, who says, "Look into my eyes." Swan punches the mirror. Torch goes running in there, ripping the door off its hinges. Absinthe curses. Torch sees that Swan's all alone in there. When Swan tells everyone else what he saw, they all say that it sounds like Honey. We decide to go to sector C, where Honey lived.

In sector C, things are back to normal. We see a few folks Absinthe knows from her sector. Once we're at Honey's, Swan asks Eyeball to check feeds in the area, but that means she'll have to come down. Now we're all parked there waiting for Eyeball. We decide to search the place while we wait for her. Absinthe gets through the door by tricking the lock, Torch goes in first, and then we all look around. In all the crap, Torch finds a little snow globe-looking thing, which he shakes. He sees it go black, and hears a man's voice say "look into my eyes." For everyone else, it looks like Torch picked the thing up, shook it, and froze. Cipher tries to knock it ou of his hand, but inadvertently touches the snow globe with his violation glove. Swan kicks the globe away from both of them, at which point it immediately turns back into a normal glittery thing. Cipher immediately falls to the ground, dazed, confused, and bleeding from the eyes. Torch finds the globe and is about to smash it when Absinthe tells him to stop. He agrees to do so for her, and then clears space around it instead. Swan moves Cipher to the bed and examines him. Cipher's symptoms look like long exposure to hard vacuum. We go back to Fletch's office and get Cipher treated.

Fletch narcostabs Torch into unconsciousness and then begins examining Cipher. It's just his eyes that show signs of vac damage. His other soft tissues look fine, but to let the soft tissue to heal nicely, he needs a couple days in an induced coma. Swan's fine with that and convinces her to treat it all as something that never happened.