andyougoleft | |: 005. Voice/Spam : If You Can Survive the Rest :|

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     [It's been pretty obvious from the start that however bad the original Barge was, this one is much worse. It's Slevin's habit of doing surveillance before he does anything, drilled into him over the course of years, that saves him, perhaps. For now at least. He learns quickly that nothing is likely to save him. He's on the very bottom of the power struggle, here, and his warden actively works to keep him there.

     He has to be careful. He chooses the word carefully, just in case, hoping it's vague enough that he can lie his way out of any unwanted interest, and that he will be clever enough to tell the difference. He barricades the door to his cabin with everything he has in the room, trying to give himself a safe space to do more research as he had his first day on the Barge he's come to be familiar with.

    Eventually, he will wander out into the ship proper, wary and alone and all too painfully clear on that fact.]

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     [Late in the morning on the second day, with Slevin hidden somewhere other than his cabin on the Barge, his communicator clicks on and he says a single, clipped word to the network:]

     Unaffected.

     [And he waits.]

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[He doesn't look at Slevin at first. He takes in the differences in posture, the difference in speech apparent from the three words they've already exchanged. Slevin has relinquished his grip on futility, for better or for worse.]

Survival.

[Now he looks up. His eyes are the dark-glass placidity of the deepest lake in the world on a very still day.]

Now you.

[The distance is too great to make out the details, but Slevin doesn't need to; his stillness is absolute in his experience, but his chest still expands and contracts, his heart still beats, his eyes blink. Only once, cold as a reptile's behind, but they do blink.]

The same. D'Amico is insane, as are most of the people here in one way or another. I had few enough allies to begin with and now I have none.

You have one.

[Neutrally. If Slevin wants it - and with the understanding that the moment Slevin turns on him, should that moment come, he will be thrown overboard and ruthlessly.]

And what about escape?

[Slevin hears that very clearly, but he's not sure what to do with it yet, so he doesn't respond to it. The rules are implicit. They're the same as his.]

What about it? People more powerful and longer-lived than I am have tried and failed. I prefer to think realistically.

[This doesn't precisely align with both of his own goals, but it's close enough to one of them that he doesn't bother arguing. He'd rather be seen as purely practical than fanciful, at least to the majority of the population.]

Then, in the case of D'Amico. If you could have anything done. Realistically.

[He's been thinking about this. He knows what he would prefer to do, with the death toll unreliable and the ship powering down around them. It's a simple answer, and it would be laughably easy in any universe, including this one. Chris D'Amico is loud but not much else, and even less cunning in this timeline than the original one.

However:]

If he were to be killed, am I correct in my understanding that the other wardens would retaliate where before they might have just ignored his calls to action?

[Would killing a warden bring the rest of them down on his head with a reason to care about it, suddenly?]

|: 005. Voice/Spam : If You Can Survive the Rest :|

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