The Myrmidon (WIP) (Minor update 03/10/2017)

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Hmm… That’s actually given me an interesting thought that I’ll have to work into the plot later. Nicely hypothesised.

I will hold off on the Myrmidon assassins for the time being, death of the author and all that.

I opened the blep.

Super edgy. Still though… That’s a good casting.

See, I don’t know what could have convinced you of my Machiavellian intentions, but I assure you that Dot-Tech amalgams are your friends, and would never intentionally harm you.

The very notion!

No fair enough you’ve got me there…

Challenge accepted.

True. I should probably start working on that as soon as the first Noble chapter closes off.

I’ll see if I can draft up a couple and see how it all works for me. Her character is going to be difficult to really get into because of her overall disjointedness, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. Maybe a teaser will help me get my head around it.

Ooh, interesting choices. Its nice to see the new options being taken advantage of to make some unusual combinations and faces. Nice to see how that will play out.

Holy crap on a cracker. I have three separate people who have drawn my characters (or animals). This is truly the sign that I’ve made it, and no mistake.

Actually I really like this style, the eyes are especially expressive.

You have won the official Moreau Seal of Approval.

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Hi all,

Just a little apology for the lack of content updates over the last two weeks. In all honesty I’ve had something of a poor few weeks from a mental health perspective, so my energy has been sapped by that. To thank you for your patience, I’ll post a couple of odds and ends that I’m currently working on and you can see what you think.

First off is a little bit of the very next scene to be entered, which isn’t in any fit state to post yet, but acts as a sort of proof of life that the story is still being worked on:

You close your eye again and will yourself further into the bedsheets, quite determined to ignore the world until you are good and ready.

Unfortunately after a long few moments, the subtle click of Mr Gray’s shoes begin. Instead of retreating into the distance they actually appear to be getting closer to you.

Presently you feel the faint aura of his presence at the side of the bed near your face. Somehow you just know he’s still standing there with his hands clasped behind his back.

“Oh dear, it seems that you have suffered some sort of debilitating hearing loss in the events of last night. I shall have to summon doctors from all across the Southern Territories in order to assess your delicate condition.”

He pauses for a moment, allowing you to picture being poked and prodded by some leech-botherer or quack for your non-existent disfunction.

When he speaks again, his tone is darker still.

“Dozens of them.”

*page_break

You remain silent for a solid ten seconds, desperately hoping that he’ll get the message in short order. When his stolid aura remains in place, you know you’ve been cornered…

“I was hoping you would cease to exist if I wasn’t looking at you…”

You murmer meakly but refuse to open your eyes just yet. Mr Gray absorbs your comment without any obvious irritation or dismay and simply replies:

“Well aren’t you going to fit right in… Nevertheless some other force compels me to remain, and as I am here we are obliged to ready you for the day’s appointments, which are naturally many and varied.”

You petulantly sit up and fix him with a look of grim stubbornness, but you do have to admit that you feel so much better for a night’s sleep.

Mr Gray’s pale face is unmoved by your act, giving not so much as a twitch.

You blink first and he considers the matter resolved to his satisfaction.

“Now, I have taken the liberty of preparing some clothes, but first I think you may require some assistance from Mesrine, don’t you agree?”

You blink confusedly and with not a hint of indignity, which prompts Mr Gray to step back to your dressing table. He picks up an exquisitely detailed hand mirror and holds it to his chest, walking back to you with no visible emotion.

“I don’t think that the Lady would approve of your current fashion choices.”

He turns the mirror and you appraise yourself.

Just a little bit from this scene that determines whether or not you took a bath the night before, which in turn influences how quickly you can begin the day’s appointments (mostly tailor-based).

The second bit is a codex lump for the city of Strom, as my next addition was sort of an overview on all the major cities of the Three Rings, and how they fit together politically and economically.

Strom: The Grey Jewel

Formerly the site of several loosely connected towns and villages all centred around farming and animal husbandry, the city of Strom was officially founded in the year 2832 by the order of King Jevol IV of the Southern Dominion.

Taking it for his capital city, Jevol set about consolidating all of the surrounding settlements into one large population centre where he could take advantage of the area’s extensive iron and tin deposits, as well as the plentiful sources of marble.

Traditionally the Southern Territories were known as something of a wasteland, bereft of any true culture because of its lack of precursor technology. While the Eastern Peninsula built its cities and farms around the mysterious Sunstone towers, and the Northern deserts yielded new artefacts with alarming regularity, the Southern Territories offered no tangible benefits other than plenty of space and lots of hard stone.

Jevol saw the value in this, opening dozens of new mines, pits and quarries in order to ensure that even the great cities of the other provinces would require his ‘nation of beggars’ in order to keep their cities in order.

While there were precious few jewels or precious metals in the dirt of the South (which had deterred earlier prospectors) there was iron and marble, something that was needed much more consistently by the burgeoning population of the Three Rings.

Over the centuries the city built its own wealth by providing those vital things that the more prosperous nations were unable to provide cheaply and effectively themselves. Over time Strom developed a prosperous and socially mobile merchants’ class who could be found all over the world.

Strom was an extensive mining town that blossomed into one of the most important industrial centres in all the Rings.

Across dozens of mines, pits and quarries flowed the basic day-to-day necessities of true civilisation.

*page_break Strom: The Rise of House Calinas

While Strom was never the wealthiest city in the Rings, its fortunes were much more consistent than those of its neighbours. While the price of silks, exotic foodstuffs and pre-Fall technology waxed and waned with each passing year, the world was always in need of stone, iron and staple crops.

As the Empire grew out of the Royal City of Kadana and gradually pushed aside all the old kingdoms and city-states, Strom found itself at a crossroads. The South was considered a vital if uninspiring region that would be needed for any true world power to exert control over the other regions.

At the time there was a great unification process underway, masterminded by Queen Talia V of Kadana, who was essentially working to tie all the disparate provinces together through a combination of economic measures and political marriages to her many many children.

So Sovereign Esche til Calinas II decided that they would extract favourable terms from Kadana by offering to throw their considerable lot in with Talia. Esche would marry Talia’s 8th Son and take control of more than a dozen plantations and farming hamlets in the exceptionally fertile First Ring. In exchange they would renounce their royal title and establish consistent trade contracts between Strom and Kadana.

Historians speculate that this movement was crucial to Talia’s efforts, as Esche’s territory was larger and more populated than every other individual kingdom or duchy by dint of being ignored by other leaders. The fresh influx of cheap metal and stone precipitated a rush of new architectural projects, which in turn greatly impressed upon the other nations how prosperous and ascendant Kadana was.

*page_break Strom: The Modern City

In its own way Strom continues to serve as the invisible epicentre of the Empire, with advances in technology only cementing their position as the blue-collar capital of the Three Rings.

The modern House Calinas is relatively wealthy but is still recovering from a few decades of poor management by a previous Lord. Athelion til Calinas was known as something of an ‘eccentric’, far more interested in gambling and whoring than statecraft.

His only (legitimate) child Stallvious inherited his father’s penchant for decadence but had the good sense to wed himself to a prominent daughter of the merchant class. With the financial connection to this girl’s family Stallvious could have drunk and partied for decades at least, but the young girl thrown into the bargain possessed an exceptional mind and an eye for talent.

By the time Stallvious died of ‘ill-humours’ a scant five years later, Strom was halfway towards being repaired. The Calinas family was poised to rise again, all it needed was an heir. Unfortunately this was yet another thing Stallvious was unequal to the task of producing, and so the current Lady Calinas must turn to more unique options.

As I say, more of a proof-of-life than anything, hopefully it offers some small comfort, as I know I’m hardly the most consistent of updaters.

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After that rather disastrous party, I would have assumed (apparently quite unfairly) the current Lady Calinas was driving her noble House into bankruptcy. I suppose that must mean such extravagances are more rare for her than for others in comparable positions, and plotted with terribly great care to ensure the greatest possible gains in status for the least possible costs.

‘Ill-humours’ speak of ill intents to me. Am I asking for spoilers when I ask if Stallvious’ death was assisted or entirely natural?

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Quite the opposite. Most of her parties don’t end with catastrophic property damage though, so I can see why you might have an unfair impression of her. One of the key features of the revival of the Southern Territories is the economic genius Lord Rhys of Mornhald, who has used Lady Calinas’ extensive contacts to weave a powerful conglomerate of vital merchant families pooling their political and financial clout to amass enormous sums of money and trade deals that were incredibly advantageous for Southern brokers.

Winner-winner chicken-dinner.

As to the fate of poor Stallvious, I’m sure that will become apparent in due course.

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Thanks for the updates. I own I had your knack for worldbuilding, haha. :slight_smile:

But take care of yourself first and foremost okay? There’s no amount of progress more important than your health.

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Thank you for saying so, I’ll be sure to do just that.

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Take your time to get well first.

But damn…I did like that teaser, mainly because it seems we get lots of fun interactions with our dear butler again. :grin:

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I love it (which isn’t news but O.K)! With regards to the new codex entries, I found them pretty interesting but they’re also fairly large blocks of text tht I think could benefit frm some division. TBH, I think a timeline would be immensely useful, too! It’s a lot easier to understand than having a lot of information presented to you all @ once.

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No apologies necessary. Take all the time you need and focus on feeling better.

Sending well-wishes your way!

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He is more or less a rolling artillery barrage of quiet put-downs and condescension.

Thanks, how do you think the text should be broken up? At the moment I have two methods in play, the one in this snippet is quite simply the use of page-breaks to chop the text into three pieces. The other one is in the Codex proper and it is the way the timeline is broken into five separate choices that you can read or ignore at your leisure.

How could I better divide this up?

Well wishes received and stored for transit.

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I prefer the second method, because then you get a better idea of the timeframe as it stands.

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Will It be possible to actually have a true mother-child relationship with Lady Calinas, or we will always be a pawn in her game?

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Ok, something to think about going forward, I’ll see about maybe re-structuring the existing codex to see if it can be chopped up into smaller sub-choice sections.

Hmm… I suppose that depends on your interpretation. You can have a good relationship with her, but irrespective of what you think of her, she sees you as a tool.

Don’t necessarily be offended by that, she sees everyone as either a tool or an enemy, so you’re still on the better side of the equation.

You can get along, you can even like her, and she can feel something approximating kinship towards you as well, but she’s pathologically incapable of love, so I would reach too hard on that point.

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Well uh, it’s actually an anime/game character from Angel of Slaughter, it reminded me of Zack, probably because of “burned man”.

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A fairly strange question here- the machine that recreated the MC still has access to Flashes memories, yes? Would, at any point, the story be able to lead to MC attempting to get Flashes memories back from the machine?

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Here we go, the first part out of…four, I took a while with works and everything. Hope things are becoming better for you, Moreau.

1. it's always strange

Flash stares down at the palm of their hands again, mind lost to wonders of whether everything is really worth it in the long hauls. It’s already more than bad that they stepped into the cliché area of crushing on their childhood friend, all the blame falls on this stupid growth spurt and the even stupider human body’s hormonal reaction in front of an attractive person.

Then comes in the worst of it all - they aren’t the only one who noticed Radjack’s changes: it came crashing down one summer day when he shone under the godforsaken sun and everything around them froze like it was the harshest day of winter. It has been weeks since they saw him under that foolishly idealistic image of affection and admiration. Weeks of suffering and torture they put up with to convince their own mind that they do not want him in any way more than a close friend.

That and how they do not see him, or anyone, under the light of attraction.

They convinced themselves every night, tossing and turning before eventually succumbing to sleep, that they don’t see him as good-looking in any other but a completely platonic way, and that he’s the same old Radjack whose face and that sinfully beautiful boyish smile, smudged with soot. Not how recently his smile has turned roguish, or how it doesn’t look as stupid as they always used to think or how their heart skipped a beat when it’s aimed at them.

And especially not how they always froze for a split second, not long enough for him to notice, before hastily turning away, grumbling to themselves, mostly words to chastise their own reactions. It irritates them to no end that there’s a possibility that they might let something slip and he would notice. They have been doing so well so far and maybe, just maybe, if it goes on for long enough, it would stop, they would stop. Their friendship would be secure again – it will return to the previous status quo that they always preferred, or preferred much more than this, whatever this is.

“Hey, Flash! Get down already, it’s time for school!”

The wake-up call arrives when Radjack’s voice rings up from below.

They curse to themselves at how their first reaction is yearning and excitement, and replace it quickly with irritation but a small ounce of uncertainty also worms its way into their heart before they get up and prepare to brave one more the day.

Their usual brisk paces are replaced with much more hesitant and rigid steps as they trail down the stairs of their apartment building. They try to distract themselves with anything, anything possible, from the old, slightly chipped and peeling off in places, wall paint, to the torn, faded poster of some rock star or perhaps it was one of a missing cat, they can’t really tell anymore – it was barely clinging on the wall, threatening to fall at any moment, and peel some paint off with it… It hits the down low when they begin to focus on the rusty handrail while trying to break down the formula that caused the steel to oxidise.

And then it hits their ears, no longer the clanking of steel but the muffled footfalls. Flash doesn’t realise they have hit the bottom floor and come into their friends’ vision until the changes of sound becomes obvious. There’s no going back now.

“There you are, what took you so long?” The first image that hits their eyes is the sight of Radjack flashing his signature smile at them. It’s what they would usually call a sight for sore eyes, but in recent weeks, it becomes the main reason why they risk having their brain short-circuit.

Their heart falls to the ground. Twice. First, because of the feeling of relief that all of their friends are there, waiting, and the second time is because of the sinking feeling that all of their friends are there, waiting. That means Radjack is also there and they kept people waiting. “Of course,” they scowl to themselves, “he was the one to call me in the first place.”

Their muttering is only for their ears, but the persistent thought that they can hear them loud and clear made its home at the back of their head and showed no sign of disappearing any time soon. One of your best friends, you dolt, now stop acting weird.

They approach their group of friends, as nonchalant as possible given the circumstances. All while trying their best to ignore Radjack, also known as the elephant in the room. Well, on the street. But that’s proven to be impossible to do, from the fact he’s standing in the middle of them. They have refused to acknowledge of it under every circumstances. But, it’s difficult to run away forever when there are eyes and ears everywhere, specifically; the ones belong to their friends.

They know things they shouldn’t know, and Flash is more than annoyed that they have to endure their friends’ mischievous chuckles and meaningful glances every time they are within Radjack’s hand reach. On multiple occasions, Flash has to bail from hanging out with the group simply to avoid further teasing from their friends.

And, they note, it has become more frequent lately with Nira whispering something down the line of ‘you two look cute together’, a source of extreme frustration for them and more the reason for them to stay away, as far as possible from the group.

But it hurts to stay away, as much as they want to deny it by burying themselves under layers of books and keep themselves busy with school work. Their friends are their source of comfort and Radjack is an inseparable part of them, both Flash and their group. This isn’t easy for them but they must endure, because if they let themselves falter, they don’t know how long it will take before they collapse completely to the ground.

Radjack comes into their field of vision with his trademark smile and the tilt of his head that helps very little with squashing down their feelings. They take courage by turning their head away for a moment to catch their breath before facing the enemy - Radjack.

“Mornin’ Flash.” Momo waves sleepily at their approach. There’s a hint of a smile on her face that is different from her usual ones but they cannot pinpoint the exact reason.

“Hey Flash!” Nira smiles at them with amusement lingering in her eyes, something different from her usual friendly smiles. It puzzles them to the point where they almost miss Atacama’s nod of acknowledgement, which is an incredibly strange thing for the fact that one does not simply ignore a giant in periwinkle blue.

Engel and Navi greet them with the same strange attitude, trying to suppress their chuckle and amusement, much to Flash’s confusion. They squint their eyes in thought, trying to figure out what’s the source of their weird demeanours until Radjack speaks up.

“Did you oversleep again?” He grins, gesturing at their hair, which they now noticed is more or less dishevelled and probably resembles a puffy hairy cat after it was thrown out of a moving plane straight into a hurricane. They do remember brushing it, sometime ago. But with their thrashing and rolling around while thinking in bed last night, and their recent lack of hair care, it’s probably back to the original chicken feather duster style.

“That only happened once.” They groan, reaching up to pat their hair down to their normal style but their hair budge little, making them look more like they’re petting themselves rather than styling their hair.

“It’s okay, Flash, I think it’s a good look on you.” Engel comments good-heartedly, earning a grimace from Flash, which is probably something between scrunching their nose and puffing their cheeks.

“Here, let me help.” Momo reaches out to help them pat down their hair, but not even the finest of hair gel can help them now with how their hair has apparently made gravity into their nemesis.

After a few frustrated tries, threats of shaving it and a few attempts of taming it with hair clips, they make a mental note to grow out their hair so that they won’t have to deal with kind of embarrassment ever again. They eventually throw their hands up in defeat. “Forget it.”

They make a show of marching out of the circle and toward the direction of their school, hearing a few chuckles follow them. The others catch up to them quick enough and no sooner, Radjack matches their stride with ease.

“It does look pretty cute.” He comments, before ruffling Flash’s hair, making it into an even bigger mess than it was before (which they didn’t think was even possible), earning a light shove from them.

“Stop.” They huff, jabbing at his side. Radjack looks at them with genuine surprise in his eyes.

“What? No cheeky comeback? No snide remark?” He leans closer to inspect their expression, causing them to go stiff in an instant. “You’re losing your edge, Flash.”

It would be easy for them to dismiss their strange behaviour, but it would be what it is - strange. And if they are strange, their friends would notice. Knowing that throwing a witty remark back would only be futile and put them in a vulnerable position, they turn away and keep to their silence. They can’t use Radjack’s Flash to deal with him right now, so the only solution is to give him the normal, quiet Flash.

Usually it means looking down at the road in front of them and walking in silence, trying to distract themselves with various little trivial facts about everything and anything that they picked up throughout the years. But it also means earning a strange look from Radjack, not noticing how he raises his eyebrow and looking back at others for an answer and earning indifferent shrugs or avoided eye contacts from them.

finger guns my way out because i have an extreme urge to hate my writing already

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Well that’s good to know but I can say that having looked the character up I can confirm that any resemblance is merely cosmetic.

Radjack has been deemed adorable by the community at large, and would not murder people for kicks or otherwise.

I think there was a big-long discussion about a thousand posts ago about this very topic, and I believe the consensus was that even if you could put the memories back in, you’d be effectively erasing the personality of the person who came to be the Myrmidon, trading one life for another. I’m not sure the Rebels could bring themselves to do such a thing if they knew the consequences of doing so.

It’s a somewhat unique variant of the Trolley Problem in a way.

I liked this a lot. It actually cheered me up enough to actually write something, so thank you for that.

This is obviously completely OOC (I believe AU is the correct nomenclature, but feel free to correct me) but if you can’t spend an hour desperately trying to remember a scene from a movie you love and word-for-word transcribing it with your own characters in place of the actors, well that’s a world I don’t want to live in, thank you very much.

The battered brown elevator crawled up the intestines of the building, scraping and thunking against any piece of detritus it passed on its way up.

Farah shrugged, her heavy oiled overcoat laden down with a few pints of the perpetual heavy rain that seemed to be washing Strom away.

She stared at nothing as the last of her faculties started shutting down after a long night. The photographs at Nex’s apartment were still swirling around in her mind, the discarded scales in the bathtub crawling around the edges of her thoughts waiting to find a way to slot into place…

What would a Myrmidon need family pictures for? They didn’t have families…

The elevator shuddered one final time, some ancient hydraulic mechanism preparing to raise itself from the dead as the doors scraped lazily to either side of the entrance.

Some half-dead impulse that had yet to be drowned by alcohol sluggishly perceived something that should not be there.

Long before her conscious brain was made aware of this fact, her arm tore into the brown flesh of her overcoat, wrenching out the gun within to point at the dark corner of the elevator, now lit up by the glare of the tube lights in the corridor.

A face that was already scared now had a weapon designed to bring down Myrmidons pointed at it. Farah noted that the addition of the gun didn’t cause the target to waver or falter. They didn’t seem to react to it at all, honestly.

Poor bugger doesn’t know to be afraid of this… she thought to herself before lowering her threat response and the gun with a relieved sigh. Not prepared to deal with Calinas’ favourite toy right now, Farah stormed silently out of the elevator, hoping to get to her apartment and seal herself inside before it had a chance to speak.

She made it about two-thirds of the way before Flash stepped into the corridor and gently called out to her.

“I wanted to see you.”

Nope… Farah tried to ignore it and fumbled inside her coat for the keycard.

“So I waited…”

Her shaking hands located the chunky keycard and then immediately dropped the damn thing onto the floor.

Seeing an opportunity, Flash darted out to collect it.

“Let me help.”

Grabbing the keycard, it fumbled with the door-reader while Farah failed to bite back a withering response.

“What do I need help for?”

The door slid open and Farah muscled past, irritably relieving Flash of the keycard. She was halfway to having the door shut before it spoke again.

“I don’t know why she told you what she did.”

The note of desperation, the sense that it was re-categorizing everything it knew in the hopes of finding a way to make everything normal again.

They shouldn’t act like that… Farah felt the bile rise in her throat and turned back to the thing in the hallway.

“Talk to her.”

In the scant second before slamming the door Farah took in the eyes, still haunting and beautiful but scared and pinched at the corners, the perfect skin of its forehead wrinkled in confusion.

It only added to the anger, she shut the door a little harder than she needed to. The door was too damn thin to keep that voice out though, and almost as the lock engaged she heard it again.

“She wouldn’t see me…”

Something in Farah caused her to freeze up, as if something inside of her mind burst and let all of the anger drain out. She turned back, opened the door and sighed dejectedly.

God he really was something, wasn’t he? Farah had never seen anyone look natural in clothes that fine. Flash should’ve looked like one of those preening peacocks in the bazaars, but he just looked correct. She slumped away from the door, but intentionally left it open for him to follow.

As they both walked into the dingy half rotten apartment, halogen tubes recessed into the walls flickered and sputtered into life. Somehow they lit up the room without seeming to provide any light.

Farah went straight for the kitchen counter as she did every night, knowing that the bottle was there even in the dark.

“You want a drink? Huh? No?”

Flash strode in with that same poise and confidence he remembered from Calinas’ office, an outsider would guess that he was the owner and she some malefactor hiding in the shadows. Farah ignored it and poured herself a generous amount of bourbon.

“You think I’m a Myrmidon, don’t you?”

His voice is still small and timorous, but also with just a hint of indignant accusation. Somehow Farah found that amusing, even as she braced for the unpleasantness she knew was coming.

“Hah…” was all she could manage, taking a slug of the bourbon.

Flash dug into the lining of his coat with none of the shaking or fumbling that Farah would have, effortlessly pulling out a photograph that he held in front of him like a talisman. He looked to her with pleading in his eyes.

“Look… it’s me with my mother.”

Farah tried to be disinterested, to pretend that the photograph didn’t make her feel sick and scared at the same time. She busied herself tossing a couple of plates into the sink before turning back to look at him.

“Yeah?”

She sighed again, there was no more hiding from it…

“Remember when you were six? You and your sister snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were gonna play doctor. She showed you hers, but when it got to be your turn you chickened out and ran. Remember that?”

She paused for a beat, feeling the handle of the metaphorical knife turning in her hand as she discarded her coat.

“You ever tell anybody that? Your mother? Calinas? anybody, huh?”

Another beat as she slumped into a chair, drink in hand.

“You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched-”

Flash’s almost silent voice interrupted, his own brain catching up to everything Farah was laying out for him.

“The egg hatched…”

Farah teased the last of it out. She didn’t need to tell this story anymore.

“And?”

Flash’s voice quavered, seeming as small and frail as a child’s.

“And a hundred baby spiders came out… and they ate her…”

Farah rubbed the bridge of her nose with tiredness, the chipped glass cold in her other hand.

“Implants. Those aren’t your memories, they’re somebody else’s. They’re Calinas’ niece’s…”

Farah knew she had gone too far when she looked Flash in the eye to emphasise this. Those perfect unnatural eyes were swimming in water, and suddenly this modern Prometheus made of all the alloys and artificial muscles modern science could conjure was as fragile as a child. He was on the very edge of tears, and only remained there by a seemingly herculean feat of personal control.

They shouldn’t make them like this… They shouldn’t be able to feel emotions like this…

What kind of inhuman monster would design a machine that could cry?

Farah found herself succumbing to some forgotten synapse that was making her feel pity of all things for the Myrmidon. It had been so long she had forgotten the feeling, and the pit of shame in her gut made her realise she didn’t want to remember it…

“Ok… bad joke.”

She put the glass down on the table.

“I made a bad joke. You’re not a Myrmidon… Go home, okay?”

She pulled herself out of the chair and pretended it was all a farce. She was a shitty actress though, mostly she just sounded tired. It was too late to take back what she’d told him anyway…

“No really, I’m sorry. Go home.”

Flash was still holding the photograph in front of him, its yellowing edges gripped by those flawless fingers that probably hadn’t existed long enough to get their own fingerprints…

“Want a drink? I’ll get you a drink. I’ll get a glass…”

Farah wandered lethargically over to the kitchenette, digging through the cupboard for a glass that wasn’t too dirty.

Flash spent a long moment looking at the photograph, his eyes roaming over it as it was turned every which way in those flawless hands. Before a glass could be found he tossed it to the ground and retreated, his shadow rushing out of the door was the only indication Farah had that anything had happened.

She watched him go.

She didn’t move to stop him.

Fun fact, I wrote a couple of essays at University about the depiction of cities in science fiction, and I had to watch Blade Runner so many times that basically every single line of dialogue is forever burned into my brain.

I defy you to find a misquote anywhere in that scene.

At least they let me use the Director’s Cut…

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Yes, the consensus was that adding Flash’s memories would erase the myrmidon insteading of creating an integration.

That being said, imagine the lovely drama if the Myrmidon stated that they wish to sacrifice themselves to return Flash to them.

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Ah, they’d be against it? Even if it meant essentially bringing their one true love back from the dead?

**drama music

DUM DUM DUMMMMM

Yesss. I want this to happen now.

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But could such a thing even really be called Flash? Or just a convincing simulacrum?

Flash is dead. Uploading their memories into an android wouldn’t change that.

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