The Mark Has Been Made

The Mark Has Been Made - NIN (Instrumental)
​Ruiner begins to laugh, somewhere between desperate, frantic hysteria and mocking victory. In the darkened interrogation room, he is fastened by magnetic lock to the chair he sits in, arms behind his back in an inhibitor claw. Even his tires have been removed to prevent any possible escape in altmode, should he some how get free.
A bright light is shining down over the table in front of him, which now has some claw marks and is splatted with flecks of his own energon. He's got a gunshot wound in his right shoulder, and his face has been raked with what looks like claws or blades. His visor is cracked and broken on one side, letting natural pale blue optics shine behind it.
Arcee is not currently in the interrogation room; she is very rapidly walking down the hallway away from it, toward the gravlift. She got what she came for...
"I tried to keep him in one piece," it's hard to tell just what the sixchanger is feeling, only that he IS feeling, deep and many emotions warring within him at the same time. The laughter from Ruiner rakes him as surely as his claws raked the destroyer. He exits the interrogation room and the door closes behind him.
Exiting the gravlift, Trepan steps to the side to clear the way for the exiting pair. He gives Arcee and then Quickswitch each an easy smile. It's all bright, slick gloss against the pale of his face. "You did well," he compliments them both. He is carrying nothing more dangerous than a datapad in his hands. He stands slim and light-armored, not particularly impressive, with goggles that catch at the light. He looks off-puttingly innocuous and out of place. He moves to stand before the door to the interrogation room and simply watches as he waits for the other two to clear the area. His smile settles.
Arcee smiles slightly, nodding to Trepan with polite deference. Oh, she did well, alright, no doubt about it. She had nothing to do with Ruiner's 'questioning' and the prisoner's fate was out of her hands, now. But she got what she came here to get. "Thank you, sir," she says as she heads on her way.
Ruiner lets his head tilt back. He leans to let the leaking from his injuries slow. He won't leak out, the damage only mesh-deep -- he can tell on these sort of things -- but he won't have much use of his right arm without hydraulic pressure or power from those fuel lines, annd his speech won't be the same with the Glasgow smile spreading over one side of his face. Damage messages scream at his sensors. The old familiar sting.
Trepan crosses the threshold and the door closes at his back. Once inside, he pauses. He tilts his head and glances up and to the side. He stands in poised, still silence -- listening, listening -- until the lock secures. Then he looks at Ruiner, and the slight smile on his features becomes a broad grin. "Well! That looks uncomfortable." He crosses to the table and sets down his datapad. The clear, crisp click of it hitting the table's surface echoes louder than it seems it should be.
There is a faint flicker of recognition - and fear - in Ruiner's visible optic as Trepan comes into view.
It shouldn't be there.
They've never met.
"-You-!" Ruiner hoarsely whispers, tipping his hand in a fear response generated by memories not his own.
Trepan braces one hand on the table's surface and leans toward Ruiner. A single finger slides forward, scratching over the metal, while the others curl into his palm. A pair of muted clicks from his hands suggest an eagerness checked only with will. He laughs in delight. "/Interesting/."
Pushing away from the table, Trepan circles around behind Ruiner. "Yes, me. I'm glad he left you conscious. It makes things -- easier." He finishes circling to stand at Ruiner's shoulder, just barely in his peripheral vision.
Ruiner -- Gauge -- feels small and cold right right now, his wounds still raw and stinging. He offers up the only resistance someone in his position can.
"Are you sure you want to stare into the abyss?"
"Ah." Something shivers through Trepan's voice not far from anticipation. It settles just slightly askew from desire, the visceral thrill of which warms his smile to something deeply uneasy. "Yes, yes I am."
There's another gentle click from Trepan's right hand. This time, he allows the needles to slide from their housing. He presses his left hand to the back of Ruiner's neck. His touch is soft and sure. Trepan forces Ruiner to bow his head with firm, inexorable pressure. The needles of his right hand flash in the light as he lifts his hand. He just slightly adjusts the angle of Ruiner's head. "Now, I say this a lot, but I hope you're one of the few who listens: it will be better for you if you don't resist."
There isn't anything Ruiner can do but let the anxiety grow. He can't resist. He knows what this mech can do, it's vicariously seen it, and somehow, the delay only whips the fear into stiff peaks of pure terror. Half of the torment is simply spannungsbogen from other memory itself.
"Why shouldn't I? It's not like I'm going to make my way out of this place alive. /I have nothing left to lose/," he warns.
Trepan rubs his thumb down the side of Ruiner's neck to the nape where his grip firms to hold him in place. "There's always something left to lose."
With scarcely a bite of pain to register their passing, Trepan slides his needles through toward Ruiner's brain module. "Mmm, such fear. Where is all this coming from? It won't help you, you know. Some people enjoy it. How much /simpler/ it can be."
Fear turns into blind animalistic reaction - rage and fury, the panicked courage of a corned mouse that will leap at the face of a cat. Ruiner -- no, not Ruiner, /Gauge/, as his internal idenfication marks him, tries to fight in the only way he can; he begins to think of every dark and horrible thing he has done and suffered. He floods his mind with the tortured screaming of betrayed Intellectual classes who took him to their berth only to be cut apart with clinical precision - the looks on their faces, stalled from severed motor controls, as their sparks pulsed in the open air, their t-cogs turning and twisting in cries their mouths could no longer make.
The present irony is not lost on him.
Whether this does any good, he cannot know; Gauge is a medical engineer, not a psychometrist, and he knows nothing of the art of mnemonics other than what he has experienced in the mind of someone else. He resists as violently as possible in the only way he can consider might work.
"Oh, /Ruiner/." Trepan's voice thins in distraction. His gaze lifts, caught rapt by everything that pours into his mind. It's certainly a fair attempt. The sheer volume of memory forces him to reorient and gather himself. Far from being repulsed, he seems fascinated. "Gauge," he corrects. "That won't help. All this sickness inside of you. Let me help."
Trepan turns the memories to the side with a firm hand. The screaming mutes -- first quiet, then distant as the memories are cleared back to storage and out of active recall. "Resisting the inevitable is a sign of a disorder of the mind, you know." And he would know. He's an expert. He parses through the threads of memory, searching for far more recent memories of Gauge's time among the Decepticons.
Gauge wriggles like a fish in the talons of an osprey. He tries to throw out any other memories he can think of, to slip away from Trepan's searching, to throw out distractions. It hurts, but he's becoming increasingly desperate to keep Trepan away from certain things, -especially- those recent memories of being around the Decepticons.
He starts to leak.
"They never do listen." Trepan smiles. Widely. "Struggling won't help you." A satisfied sigh slips through his vents as his needles sink into Gauge's thoughts and seek out his memories.
Trepan passes lightly through memories that open to play before him. He changes nothing -- not yet, not now -- as he works his way back in broad overview. His intent -- to find the root of Gauge's loyalty, the moment he first pledged himself -- gets rather firmly distracted by more recent memories. "Now, what's /this/?" He pulls on memories of Megatron by the double-handful, greedy and acquisitive.
He tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it didn't really matter. Gauge can't keep Trepan out of his head because there is nothing he can do to 'push back'. Were this a direct neural interface of the more, shall we say, 'regular' type, what Gauge has been doing would be the equivalent of savagely beating a vulnerable partner. Mnemonics safely bypasses all feedback from the target. Gauge might as well be punching the wind for all the good his struggles do him. The only risk to the mnemnosurgeon is in seeing something in a patient's head that might haunt him. Or so it's believed, anyways.
There's no way to hide it now, and the scope of Gauge's relationship with Megatron unrolls like a scroll in front of Trepan, painted with a brush of love in every color of passion. There's more than just loyalty there (strong enough as -that- is), there's a duality and kindred connection of similar sparks and minds. There's the makings of a endurae.
Gauge whimpers, the secrets he tried to hide laid bare.
Trepan, on the other hand, laughs.
"Oh, this is almost as good." Work left long ago incomplete a lingering thorn in his side, Trepan considers the possibilities that now unfold. "You know," he says, his voice lowered to a tone of soft confession. "I was disappointed, at first. I mean, who are you? No one. Nothing. But this--." He thumbs through the memories set out before him like a glutton presented a feast. "Ohhh, I can work with this."
Trepan considers Gauge with a smile. "Now, what was that you said about having nothing left to lose?"
"... Doesn't matter." Gauge's speech is slurred from injury and stress. He resents being categorized as a nothing - that's why he changed his name after all, to be SOMETHING instead of just a -tool- as his name suggests - but resentment means diddly right now. "Y'gonna kill me an'way." He believes it earnestly. This is just the humiliation before the end.
The interconnected memories span pit fights - including with one some kind of mechnical two-headed dragon Cybertronian the likes of which left even Gauge puzzled as to origins - and prison break outs. Members of high caste and low connected together under the Decepticon banner. Worse yet, the location of their base of operations in the Forge.
Trepan makes a low noise of satisfaction. "Yes, there." He lifts his left hand from Gauge's neck to pat his cheek. His right hand remains firmly buried, anchoring him in place to fish through memory. "That wasn't so hard, was it?" He has a very nice smile.
"Tell me more about these fights, about how you've been preparing," he asks -- no, he /insists/. As he turns over all he's discovered in the back of his mind, he searches out the information that Gauge has been so unwilling to share. What he does not give, Trepan takes.
It's probably worse than anything anticipated. The have weapons, they're training, they have resources, they have loyalists in every corner, from Senators to Disposables. Megatron is prominent among them - he's no frightened would-be intellectual miner. He's a force of nature. His speeches ring with the sound of war hammer against the soft white-hot metal of angry, disaffected lives. Megatron, the unfinished work, named it the forge for a reason. The pit fights are a breeding ground for a military force the likes of which Cybertron has not seen in millions of years. A Cybertron unprepared for it, thanks to dismantling of Primal Vanguard.
"... stop." Gauge is now begging for his mental freedom and life, his voice weak. The wheel of karma turns and begins to crush him under the weight of his own guilt.
"No." Vicious satisfaction drives Trepan's voice into Gauge's audials like a blade sliding past armor to bury itself spark-deep. He absorbs every last bit of memory. If the scale or the ferocity of what he finds is daunting at all, it does not show, but for in the thoroughness of his scrutiny. It's a threat taken quite seriously.
"All this could have been avoided, you know, if they had not stopped me before." Frustration breaks in his voice before resolving to the beginning quiver of anticipation. Trepan says, "But we'll fix that. You and me." The play of memories fades as he turns his attention elsewhere. It's not immediately clear what he is doing, then warnings flare to life before Gauge's eyes only to be killed by an outside hand. Foreign code begins to write itself deep in his systems, forced into place by Trepan's hand.
"... kill myself. Won' help you.' Gauge doesn't want to help Trepan do anything. He has never hated another mech so intensely in all his life. His thoughts immediately turn to suicidal plans. Just like before - only this time, with a greater purpose. The moment the opportunity presents himself, he'll WILL his spark to burn out if he must!
More gently now, Trepan says, "No." He snuffs the impulse with a delicate pinch of his fingers. As the last of the code curls around itself to form a deeply buried, smoothly camouflaged promise of nastiness, he relaxes. "No, you won't kill yourself. And you know what? You won't even remember this."
With a light touch, Trepan intercepts every memory from the moment he began unloading the code until now. He prevents it from going into deep recall, he prevents it from saving. It exists only in the moment, stored ephemeral in short-term memory.
"... y' gonna die... f'r this," Gauge protests, the last protest he makes. He won't remember any of this, after all -- he'll return to worrying about his fate in the cells, none the wiser. He'll never know that his freedom is coming. Sweet release. In every possible way.
A last lingering memory of Trepan's smile and a quiet laugh tangles with older memories Gauge received from Megatron. Once he has finished, his needles retract with a /slikt/, settling back in their housing. He brushes his fingers over the back of Ruiner's neck and then steps away. "Thank you for your cooperation." He exits to go make his report.
Dazed, Ruiner can only lie there, leaking, strapped down, head on the table. His eyes are simply blank - for now.
Category:Kaon Uprising