midpointsaloon | Big City Living (Midpoint Mingle)

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Big City Living (Midpoint Mingle)

The town of Midpoint: called thus because it is at the exact center of the game arena, a busy little Western town full of strange people, many of whom don’t look remotely human, because this is where all the players gather and live. Midpoint Saloon: called thus because it is the only bar in Midpoint. It’s also the biggest building in town, four stories high, dotted with windows, painted a jaunty yellow and decorated with red and green flowers in all the window boxes.

This is where your veteran teammate points you. Or just stomps off to and hopes you follow.

Downstairs is a bar and tavern, Old West style, right down to the upright piano in one corner and a raucous crowd of locals - largely locals, but with a healthy smattering of unusual or downright alien faces that clearly indicate the presence of other Players - eating, drinking, gambling, and getting into trouble. There’s a broad, bearded man behind the bar, waving cheerfully at you as you enter.

The rest of the night and the next day is yours to do with what you see fit. Explore the town, take a long nap in your new room, try to get to know people... everyone is here for the next twenty-four hours before travel to the mission site, so it’s a good chance to scope out the competition, at the very least.

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"Me neither, " Inara agrees. She can't help but imagine whoever is watching this looking like the people who had gathered around for Mal’s stupid duel with Atherton. Hungry for blood. "It's barbaric."

"I would like to say I'm not afraid to die." But she can't anymore, not after Priscilla. "But the idea of dying for something so meaningless is... galling."

"I am. Afraid of it." Inara looks down at her food, then back up to Irene. "Even when it was for a good cause, I was, and this definitely isn't."

She's been fighting for her life so hard that even a temporary death is galling.

"It is... not wrong to be afraid of death, I think." Irene certainly is, for all that that shames her given what she'd been created and trained for. "I would say that what you do or do not do in the face of that fear is the more important thing."

"I agree, but I'm not sure we'll find a worthwhile reason here." If it's all a show and some people are robots then even protecting the townspeople isn't all that noble.

Irene sighs. "It seems unlikely at best," she agrees.

"I've -" Inara clears her throat. "I've died once before, but I didn't know that's what it was until after the fact, so I think it's going to be different here."

...Ah. "I've... come close before, but I was ultimately spared the fate the rest of my team suffered, because our assailant didn't bother to make sure her strike was fatal when she cut me down. But that's not the same thing, and I'm sorry you were forced to endure it."

"That sounds terrible." At least what had happened to Inara had been relatively quick. "I was poisoned but restored to life by an artificial intelligence which had designated itself our protector. I thought I'd merely fallen unconscious until later I met the people investigating my murder." That had definitely been a disconcerting situation.

"I was careless. The girl was under my command, and I neglected to take her mental state into account. She lost control of her power, killed the warrior we'd been assigned to take down, and then Awakened fully and turned on us as well. As far as I know, she's still out there, preying on humans and slaughtering anyone who gets in her way."

(It's not quite that simple, but Irene has no way of knowing that.)

As for Inara's story... "That sounds... traumatic. Upsetting at the very least."

That likely explains a few things about yoma energy. It also brings to mind what might have happened to River in the bar on Beaumonde if her brother hadn't been there to stop her. Inara shivers. "I'm sorry. For both of you."

As for her own situation, "It was all very strange. I didn't know her at all, the girl who did it. She’d stolen my things but gave them back without a fight. We found out months later that she’d been under a mind-control compulsion and then things made more sense."

"Thank you."

She sighs, taking a drink from her tankard before continuing. "Priscilla was young and traumatized and utterly convinced that being Good and Just and Fair would inevitably allow her to prevail. It didn't occur to her - or to any of the rest of us, to our sorrow - that Teresa could still be that much stronger than any of us. She couldn't accept that Teresa, who'd killed humans and was thus Bad, could still win. So defeating Teresa became all she could see, and she tapped too deeply into her power trying to do so. In the end, she ended up tricking Teresa into lowering her guard, because whatever the woman's faults, she couldn't let another warrior suffer. And in that moment, Priscilla struck her down and lost herself for good." Irene shakes her head. "She never should have been fielded. But the Organization was blinded by her power."

She listens to Inara's story, her expression thoughtful. "So she'd been mentally coerced into killing you and stealing your possessions?"

The story sounds dreadful, not just for the poor girl but for everyone else involved, even their enemy. It sounds like a worse version of the stories she's heard about Independents who couldn't accept that their side had lost and kept on fighting after the Unification War had ended.

"The Organization?" Nothing good comes from a name like that.

Inara nods, fully aware of how ridiculous it sounds. "The man behind it... one touch and you'd do anything he wanted. I assume that he’d simply intended for her to cause chaos, make it so we couldn't trust each other, since he’d given me a mission as well and I was unable to complete it. It had worn off by the time the AI revived me." Another thing she hadn't known about until much later, when the strange nightmares had started.

"The men who... created us, I suppose you could say, although it's more like they converted us. Girls who are orphaned, or enslaved, or otherwise outcasts, are sent to them, and they implant us with the flesh of the yoma we're intended to hunt. It allows us to detect them, which a normal human can't do, and gives us the necessary strength and power to do so, after a lengthy period of training. Those of us who survive that are given a rank and assigned a territory, or occasionally sent on special missions. However, as you've heard, there are... risks inherent in that process."

She thinks about that. It sounds far-fetched, certainly, but so too are techniques like the Quicksword. "So you'd been coerced as well... were you aware of that at the time?"

It really is always girls, isn't it? River, taken to that terrible academy at fourteen to be remade into a weapon; herself, so foolishly proud of her status while the people she’d trusted to take care of her were poisoning her blood for reasons she still doesn't understand; and now these girls.

"That's how you knew right away that I was human, isn't it? Since you can detect them. I'm sorry that was done to you." Likely it isn't something that can be undone now, and even if it were, how do you learn to live without those skills and strengths available to you anymore?

Inara shakes her head. "I wasn't. I'd wanted to kill someone, which is unusual for me, but I'd only been on that world for a couple of hours and I’d been so frightened of everything. Afterward, I suppose I just assumed that I’d overreacted. Later on, something happened exclusively to those of us who had been affected and that's how I discovered that it had happened to me."

In fairness, the first generation was male. It went... poorly, which is why the subsequent 150 or so generations were all female.

"Yes. And... thank you." Though honestly, she's not quite sure how to take the sympathy. After the disaster with Priscilla, any sympathy feels strange and wrong.

"The realization must have felt terrible." She doubts she herself would have reacted well to it, and Irene's worked hard to cultivate the ability to stay calm at all times.

Irene can take the sympathy any way she’d like, but it is sincere. Sometimes it's valuable to hear that what was done to you was wrong, especially when the perpetrators will never admit it.

"I was lucky in that I hadn't harmed anyone." Some of the others had definitely had worse regrets. "But it was... difficult, not being able to trust my own perceptions. We didn't know whether he could still control us."

Oh, she can believe that it's sincere; she just doesn't know what to do with it.

"Losing the ability to trust even yourself is a considerable blow. It takes time to recover from that." If one ever does.

"I had... an apprentice of sorts there, and he’d been affected as well. I think that might have been the worst part - I wanted to reassure him, but we knew so little about it." Not to mention that with just the two of them living above the shop there wasn't really a way for them to keep an eye on each other. Poor Neville had certainly had an interesting time after she had come to work for him.

"Was the one who did this to all of you ultimately stopped?"

"I don't know. I hope so." Not the most satisfying ending to the story. "I had put together a plan to capture him, but they haven't had a chance to put it into practice yet."

Luckily, despite her efforts in the planning stages, she isn't required to be around to carry it out. Hopefully she's right about him and it works.

"You were brought here before it could be implemented? Or taken somewhere else?"

"I was brought here." She laughs quietly. "At first I thought he must have found out about it and had me thrown in jail somewhere. I'm afraid I wasn't very friendly with my team leader when he came to let me out."

"Depending on how long he's been here, he may be used to that." Her expression turns faintly wry. "The man who came to get us got into a fight with the other prisoner."

"Oh my, " Inara says, laughing despite the fact that she might have tried the same if these game makers hadn't taken her knife. "I suppose that's why we're disarmed at the beginning."

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