Quote:No character had quite as profound an effect on me ever since, actually.
Yeah, exactly like Ifurita.
Quote:As in, Dune. Specifically, Children of and later books, and Leto the Second's Golden Path. It was the first thing that popped into my mind upon hearing the mention of the Golden Millenium.
*blank* Herbert?
Hmm ... I shall provoke away, then.
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The first time I'd actually experienced Limbo and been conscious of it, my body had unravelled and gone rushing along a path that would have brought me 'back' to where I'd wanted to be, reforming after crossing back out of it.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I didn't hit quite on target. Actually, I didn't even hit the target at all.
The second time, I'd not really experienced it as much as I had travelled through it, like a speck of moss riding a stone that's been skipped over the surface of a body of water.
Of course, if you consider for a moment that the stone in this particular equation had been bloody huge ...
On the grander scale, this hadn't really mattered. For some reason, souls seemed to be able to travel through Limbo just fine. Or mine did, at least.
And ever since I'd learned how to grasp a bit of the potential that the human soul represented, I'd been able to do more than just let myself be carried by the currents of this chaotic 'sea'. I'd not had a chance to test how much more, though, since the second time I'd been aware of Limbo in my passing through it was also the first time I was doing so without being deconstructed into base spiritual particles or whatnot.
To this end, the 'stone' had been effective. It was less a question of it being as huge as it was, and more one of it having both structural and projective gravitic shielding arrays. Ones which, when jacked into my mind via Direct Link System, actually managed to simulate an AT Field's waveform pattern ...
... for all of five minutes.
Enough time to get a positional bearing and an idea of the direction I'd want to travel in. Not nearly enough to actually _do_ something about it.
At least, not before the fusion furnaces had redlined, and the wild flux of failing shielding arrays had my skipping stone unbalance, wobble, and fall back into the pond called Reality.
Which it did none too gracefully.
***
What had been my second voluntary attempt at navigating the 'sea of chaos' - and no, as far as I knew, there was no L-sama involved - and my first attempt to do so with vehicular assistence, ended in a less than stellar manner.
Also, it made me realize the bad thing about not being discorporate while doing so.
The sensory overload is far worse when doing it this way.
I found awareness returning after what felt like a few minutes, but may just as well have been a few days. Or weeks. Or ... well, the general idea should be clear.
That, and I woke to color. And sound.
Neither of the two paricularly soothing.
The faint stirrings of a half-remembered dream lingered at the forefront of my mind, for some reason. Something that involved some sort of bad Colonel Sanders ripoff arguing with a guy who looked like he'd never quite grasped the fact that too much hair-gel was never a good thing. There was a lot of glaring involved, especially from 'greasy hair' guy.
Maybe my subconsciouss was trying to tell me to lay off fast food.
I shook it off, discarded the apparently broken DLS headset and visor, before being confronted by more red lights than I'd care to count lighting up the computer core chamber revealed to my eyes.
Vey.
***
"Well, no cinnamon smell, no giant worms ... that's one less worry right there. Sadly, unfamiliar constellations make one more worry." I said to myself, leaning back against the rock wall beside the cavern entrance.
Exploration had taken a backseat for the past three weeks. Those had been spent on either attempting to get automated maintenanace back online, or - in the latter part of that timeframe - on making sure the structural integrity fields could keep the millions of tons of rock from crushing the Foundation's hull. Odyssey had, after all, been built with space in mind. Suddenly finding itself buried underground ... it was a testament to how well it had been built that the Foundation was still intact, not to mention functioning, with conditions being as they were.
Unfortunately, keeping itself intact was about the extent of what it could do at the moment.
Maybe with all the fusion furnaces fully functional ... then again, the Foundations, for all their robustness, had been built for orbital and deep space operations. I wasn't exactly keen on having it try to haul itself out from under that much rock and out of a gravity well. Wouldn't have been, even if it were at a hundred percent. With only half the furnaces at anything resembling operational output level?
Not bloody likely.
Besides, it wasn't like I could actually _do_ anything towards the goal of getting back 'home' - which this was most definitely not - as things stood now.
From prior experience, I'd found that even initiating a crossing requires obscene amounts of power. Maybe ... and it was a big maybe ... the furnaces at maximum output could have delivered enough to rip open a small rift for a few seconds. Even then, it would have only been enough to allow my discorporate form passage.
The Odyssey had managed because there had already been a ready made rift present, and it didn't need to actually rip through Reality and into Limbo on its own.
Of course, there could have been another way to do it. Hell, there probably was. Sadly, I knew of no such way.
Meaning I was stuck here for the duration, at least until I figured out a way to move on.
Again.
With desert left, desert right, and a bunch of rocks in the middle, under an unfamiliar sky.
And why did looking at that one star give me feelings of foreboding? And cravings for some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Must have been the Col. Sanders dream.
***
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-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm