voice; un: eliasainsworth

[thornydisposition]

I believe I have some information that might be of use, or at least to consider.

[The voice is low and very even, having only the barest hint of a conversational cadence.]

My companion, Shuyi, and I managed to locate and capture Miz Poppy. We captured her and two of her Deemer companions, and as we began to take them back to Perdition's Rest, she had some very interesting things to say.

She reaffirmed that there was no way to safely separate a Taraxa from its host without the destruction of the latter. What is more troubling, however, was that she insisted that hers and her compatriots' mission of destruction was something which the TIMELINE.EXE asked of them.

Before we could deliver her back here, one of the other captured Deemers sacrificed himself so that she may escape in the confusion.

It is not my intention to offer this information in order to incite mass confusion or doubt, as it is quite possible she was lying. But I do not think we can completely discount that she might be telling the truth—or that she and her fellows are somehow deluded enough to believe that they are. It is, as I originally said, something to at the very least keep in mind.

Comments

[dokyuu]

Not before we got here, but this is only the third outing I've been on. That ain't much info to judge from. Might be some others we can ask, or records back at Oska, though.

[thornydisposition]

It is frustrating that we are powerless to verify any of this until we are done with this mission.

[However that plays out.]

I do wonder why it's taken so long for this group to come across this secondary group, then. [Three missions was still nothing to turn one's nose up at.]

[dokyuu]

Yeah, it's a pain that we don't have a better way of getting that info... maybe that's something that can be worked on, though.

[It wasn't impossible to communicated back, after all, they just didn't seem to have the means of doing it whenever they liked.]

Don't know. Maybe they've been out there, just in places we weren't. There are other teams, maybe they've run into them and didn't know it. There's a lot of possibilities, I think.

[thornydisposition]

I certainly think it should be.

[He is aware some people have managed to get in contact with other ALASTAIR members back in Oska or otherwise, but that isn't necessarily his concern.]

Mm, you are correct. The universe is a large place, after all.

Or it could be merely that this is the first time their Timeline program has diverged in its calculations from our own, leading to a conflict like this.

[dokyuu]

Yeah, that could be, too. But they seem, uh... pretty hostile.

[If the amount he'd gotten shot at was any indication.]

So if this is the first time we've ever been on opposite sides of an objective, they're sure not taking it well.

[thornydisposition]

They view the importance of their mission just as highly as we do ours, if not more so. We should expect them to fight with fervor.

We will merely have to decide if we respond in kind or if we continue to try to capture them.

[dokyuu]

Maybe... though we don't usually go out an' start shooting at people with no warning, so I'd like to think we're a little better.

[Maybe. This all probably fell into a pretty morally grey zone, but he was usually okay with that.]