Fifth ☂ Voice

[thirdreturned]

Hadriel.

[His address begins in a straightforward tone. The issues of the past few months are behind them, and they've eked out survival for awhile longer. Sorrow isn't optimistic, but he's not inclined to give up, either. He makes plans, he executes them, he lets things fall into place.

Which is the reason for this.]

Now that most of you know the truth, and now that it has been shown that these creatures will truly follow us to the ends of creation, I have decided to send two of us to scout the location we left behind and intercept with the forces of the machines there. Their purpose would be to gather information- how these inorganics continue to find us, how we might be able to thwart their technology in an attempt to escape for good.

Of the eight of us, there are four pairs which work better together than others. Hope has asked me to let you decide who is to go, but I warn you to consider your options carefully. The gods who leave will not have any events until they return, so we'll throw a large one for their departure.

[Sorrow takes a deep breath. Onto the selection.]

Hope and myself could go. This would leave you without replenishing food and water, as well as limited methods of revival... Hope is valuable, and I would do everything in my power to protect him, and I can also ensure that we're not discovered.

Your second option would be Confusion and Tranquility. The two of them are our builders, and without them, the city will not be repaired and their various contributions will not be functional. Confusion would be adept at avoiding capture, though detection is another story.

Thirdly are Fear and Love. Fear... [He sighs.] Fear operates best in the shadows, though he's still weakened- however, if he leaves, it will mean that we'd be left vulnerable if attacked again, as none of the rest of us can move the city. Love themself is... well, perhaps they can be used as a distraction if Fear needs to escape.

[Sorry, Love.]

Finally, you have Delight and Rage. Since Delight is no longer maintaining the bar, your only significant losses with both of them would be the ongoing deals any of you may have with each of them. The two of them are our most accomplished fighters and would be able to wrestle themselves out of an unfavorable situation, given the power they'd take on from their final event.

[So that's that.]

I welcome any questions you may have.

Poll #18323

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53

View Respondents

Who should go?

View Answers

Sorrow and Hope
4 (7.5%)

Confusion and Tranquility
22 (41.5%)

Fear and Love
5 (9.4%)

Rage and Delight
22 (41.5%)

Comments

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

He can- it would take much longer than usual, as the pieces would be a great distance away.

[To the next question, he shakes his head.]

No. Which is why Hope is valuable, and why I would be going with him over anyone else.

[audio]

[synthedick]

Just what beef is it that these 'inorganics' have with you, anyway?

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

[There's a pause. Sorrow knows who he's talking to- and a creature like Nick honestly unnerves all of them, even the eldest and the strongest. He considers his next words carefully, before sighing.]

...do you feel it? It's been long enough by now. Your proximity to us influences you, as it does other machines. We can't change that fact, but the chaos caused by our... side-effects is too much for such a brutally logical species to bear.

[audio]

[synthedick]

[There's a pause, a quiet sigh, and then:]

Yeah. I feel it.

[Given what he is and how the other synths he met back in the Commonwealth are, he has no illusions about how he's supposed to be. The later-model synths might be near-perfect copies of people, right down to their personalities, but some folks find it unsettling for a guy as mechanical as he is to have any sort of feeling, any kind of vague grasp on the humanity he's been given. It's no wonder organizations like the Brotherhood of Steel call his kind an abomination of nature, the work of scientists playing God.

And hell, they were, but where does that leave something like him? Is he supposed to ignore how he feels because those feelings might not be his own? How much is his, and how much belongs to the personality embedded in him, the real Nick Valentine?

He's never been comfortable with questions like that.]

Do you know where these machines came from? Who made them?

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

I don't know- not for sure.

[Which is frustrating for someone who usually knows the most about any given situation. Sorrow frowns, before continuing.]

It happened before our species interacted. I've heard a variety of things: that they killed their creators, that they are their own creators, that they are not true machines, but merely pretend to be because it suits their purposes.

[audio]

[synthedick]

[It's always odd when Sorrow doesn't know something, given that he does seem to be the most knowledgeable of the bunch.]

And where'd you hear such rumors? Your fellow gods? Or someone else?

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

The gods before us. The ones who knew them- the ones who fought them.

[He sighs.]

Without our elders, our information is limited. My species does not have a written language- our knowledge is passed down through genetics, emotions, sometimes even spoken word... without them, the information is lost to me.

[A pause.]

To all of us.

[audio]

[synthedick]

[Genetics does bring up the question of how people like this so-called 'gods' reproduce, given they aren't exactly human, but that's a question for another time.]

That's a real shame. I can't say I don't know what that's like, as a lot of the knowledge back in my world was wiped out with the bombs.

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

Unfortunate.

[He can sympathize.]

You don't think of information as fragile- but it's the most fragile thing of all. There's no way to recover it once its gone... like it was never known in the first place.

I find that thought haunting.

[audio]

[synthedick]

That's one reason some of us here are trying to keep records, notes of things we've read on the network or seen happen to the city. A lot of us have good memories, but when folks come and go as often as they do, you can't depend on that sort of thing.

[audio]

[thirdreturned]

Hm.

[It's not something that he's normally sympathetic to, but Sorrow frowns anyway, understanding maybe for a moment, how that must feel.]

What would you need? For greater record keeping.