Post by Charlotte on Oct 14, 2017 8:18:54 GMT -5
In his dream, The Mechanic cut stairs over a pit that might have gone down forever.
With a lasercutter, he made human-sized steps from the gargantuan stone stair that had already been there. He couldn’t see the pit through the rock, but he knew it was down there, and not from scans or exploration. He just knew.
In the dream and out of it, this was not Batuus’ Suoheen, but Old Suoheen, visible from the dead Hutt’s circular landing pad as a pyramidal silhouette in the far distance, too regular to be another crag, too short to be a watchtower. Builders unknown.
Some of the steps he’d sliced out already bore words.
Shom au ti, read the lowermost. Shom au beht, on a step not five feet below him. The aurebesh lettering was sharp-edged and new.
The words mattered to him when he was awake. Here, The Mechanic was busy ignoring someone who whispered:
Imagine their dismay.
They might have whispered from the pit somewhere underneath his new stairs. When he’d realized it was down there, he had thought himself alone, and all he’d said was: “I smell water.”
But someone was there, and they were being tiresome.
Something about hiveminds, they kept hinting. But not just hiveminds. They were needling him, and he would not be needled.
Not outwardly, at any rate. He wanted them to shut up, but there was something to what they were saying, if he could just hear a little better. Above, at the top of the ziggurat, in the wide air, he thought the wind would have swallowed every word, but below the acoustics would have been perfect. Where he was, the stone muffled it all just enough to make the whole matter infuriating.
So he worked. In his dream.
Imagine their dismay.
With a lasercutter, he made human-sized steps from the gargantuan stone stair that had already been there. He couldn’t see the pit through the rock, but he knew it was down there, and not from scans or exploration. He just knew.
In the dream and out of it, this was not Batuus’ Suoheen, but Old Suoheen, visible from the dead Hutt’s circular landing pad as a pyramidal silhouette in the far distance, too regular to be another crag, too short to be a watchtower. Builders unknown.
Some of the steps he’d sliced out already bore words.
Shom au ti, read the lowermost. Shom au beht, on a step not five feet below him. The aurebesh lettering was sharp-edged and new.
The words mattered to him when he was awake. Here, The Mechanic was busy ignoring someone who whispered:
Imagine their dismay.
They might have whispered from the pit somewhere underneath his new stairs. When he’d realized it was down there, he had thought himself alone, and all he’d said was: “I smell water.”
But someone was there, and they were being tiresome.
Something about hiveminds, they kept hinting. But not just hiveminds. They were needling him, and he would not be needled.
Not outwardly, at any rate. He wanted them to shut up, but there was something to what they were saying, if he could just hear a little better. Above, at the top of the ziggurat, in the wide air, he thought the wind would have swallowed every word, but below the acoustics would have been perfect. Where he was, the stone muffled it all just enough to make the whole matter infuriating.
So he worked. In his dream.
Imagine their dismay.