Snippets

[Omega]

I'm spring cleaning, mainly because I simply have too much shit, and came across a few snippets that I'll now write down here. I can't toss them out, because I might actually like them, but I'm NOT putting them on my hard drive, because then I'll actually write them. They're unbeta-ed and unproofed.

 

--

 

First up we have Traveler: Traveller is a part of the Angels AU verse.

 

Anna called the child Faith.

There was nothing unusual about Faith's birth. She entered the world just before midday on the 16th, an entirely unremarkable date, and a less remarkable time. She was of average weight and length for a newborn, and was not an exceptionally good looking, nor ugly baby. In fact, the only thing that could be remarked upon at all was the head of fine, downy blonde hair she had, almost the exact shade as her mother's, who the child otherwise did not much resemble.

Faith was not a fussy child, and slept through the night from an early age, but was not spectacularly well behaved (like most children), and had the disconcerting habit of crying when given to her mother's sisters to hold.

She was lucky in life, fed well and cared for religiously by her mother and legion of aunts. At least, this was so for the first two-years-and-a-half of her life, until her mother bled out in her bed and was followed into death in short order by the newborn boy  she'd struggled to deliver. Still, she was fed and cared for by the Mulligan clan, for they took care of their own, and so she grew up with her cousins.

Of these events, of course, I did not know until much, much later.

The small blonde baby grew into a fine boned, blonde toddler, who presented to a colleague of mine with an abnormal rash on her back, centered on her shoulderblades, as well as a worrying squint. Dr. Townsend, knowing of my history with Anna Mulligan, and suspecting (as I did not yet) the child's parentage, passed the case on to me.

Faith Mulligan was four years old, a little ahead of her peers in height and weight, and strides ahead in intelligence, for her eyes keenly looked around the room, and she read aloud the words of the hand-drawn posters that littered my walls. Her vocabulary, it is to be said, was certainly Mulligan-ish in origin, and was not limited to, but certainly included the word, persistently, "why". The woman accompanying the girl, who I then presumed was the girl's mother wore a long suffering and resigned expression that spoke volumes as to this being the usual state of affairs.

The girl's heart rate and blood pressure were as expected, but the next tests of sight and hearing suggested her acuities were off the charts. But it was the examination of the rash on the child's back that proved to be the real surprise, for this was something that I had seen before. Something I'd seen thousands of miles away, the same thing, on the backs of ever one of my sister's children.

At this, I began, too, to suspect.

I delicately enquired after the child's paternity, and the woman explained that her sister was the child's mother, and that no one was aware of the identity of the father. I raised an eyebrow, for this was not a common state of affairs among the many Mulligans. The woman shrugged. "Our Annie took tha' thar wee truth to 'er grave, might she res' in peace."

"Ah." I said, struck almost speechless. As it turned out, I did not need to say anything more, for the aunt was a smart woman, and something extremely interesting had to be going on for a small child's rash to be referred through another doctor.

"Chile be yers then?" The woman enquired.

"I..." and here I paused. Thoughts whirled through my mind. "I believe she may be, yes."

"Oh?" The woman prodded for more information. It, no doubt, would be all over town by sunset.

"I've seen this... condition before... or something similar," I had to hastily add. I did not want this to be true. "My sister's children. They have something like this. Hereditary it is..." I did not elaborate. After all, it was not an easy state of affairs to explain to anyone, let alone a Mulligan, that the child was growing out her wings, without it being all over town.

 

 

[Omega]

Next up is another one that's AU.  Sorta similar to Nathan's one with the interdimensional thing going on, sorta similar to The Island. I'd find the title, but I'm lazy. Set after the mindfuckery bit in the actual series.

 

The five stages of grief.

 

--

Max awoke slowly, which was about the most obvious sign that she'd been drugged, because Maximum Ride did not wake up slowly when she was in danger. Jeb had taught her to be ready instantly, be ready to face any threat. Of course, Jeb was a lying scumbag, and potential nominee for Worst-Father-Of-The-Year award, but he'd done a pretty good job of teaching "be ready-ness".

As if it wasn't obvious enough, the drug-induced headache kicked in, and Max was pretty sure that at some point during her unconciousness, something had crawled into her mouth and rotted, 'cuz nothing else could produce that foul of a taste.

There weren't many sounds filtering through her gummed up ears and making it into her foggy brain. Jamming a finger in one and wiggling it didn't seem to achieve anything other than covering it in grainy earwaxy stuff. Eww. She could hear breathing - her own - and, there, someone else... no, several someone elses, on the other side of the mirrored glass wall she could just, fuzzily, make out on the other side of the small room. No duh, guys. Make it obvious you're watching, why don'tcha.

Beneath her was cold metal, and there were bands at her wrists, and ankles. And great, one across the chest. Strapped to a table. Even better, the familiar pinch-itch of an IV in one hand.

The door opened, and she turned to face it, face whatever torture-in-the-name-of-science was coming. People streamed in, trailing rattling trolleys.

 

... Time gappy bit

 

"Max, my dear, there is no need to brood!" No need? No need my ass. Max glared at the soft, fat idiot scientist who paced before her.

 

"What have you done to me!" She spat.

 

"You're a human-avian hybrid, of course. A bird person!"

 

"No, duh, dipshit!" she retorted. "The wings make it pretty obvious! I meant this!" and she raised her stick-thin pale arms, scars absent just like last time, no don't think of that. "And where's Angel!"

 

"Ah, the others. Yes, that will be explained, all explained, later on."

...

 

"Of course, we tested you with this scenario before. You might recall? That incidence after the microchip in your arm? However, you did not react favourably, so we were inclined not to release you until you were more capable of reasoning."

 

...

 

 

"Why do it? Why put us into this suspended animation shit, not that I believe it for one moment, at all! Why bother?"

 

The whitecoat had an answer for that too, like they had answers for everything. "We wanted you to love Earth-before as much as we did. We wanted you to know what it was like to be free to move places, like we can't anymore. We love you, and wanted to give you things we couldn't have ourselves."

 

"Earth-before," she stated flatly.

 

His face fell. "Things didn't quite work out as they were going to in your world-scape. There was a war, you know. Some nations resorted to nukes. The world outside is uninhabitable, and will be for another few years yet. We're only a small few pockets of isolated humanity, Max."

 

"So, why?!"

 

"Don't you see? You've been engineered to survive out there. You have an incredible resistance to other mutations, so radiation is less of a problem. You can travel huge distances for safe food and water. You can link what's left!"

 

...

 

Other bits and pieces on this story:

 

Angel doesn't exist: "We made her Gazzy's sibling of course, our construct. It's a form of legitimacy. You'd accept her because you all wanted family so badly. And she had to be the youngest - couldn't just show up with no history."

 

She's a construct to drive them through the tasks/challenges we see in the books. She's a group of people who are tasked to keep an eye on things, hence the MPD and awsum powahs

 

The rest of the flock are real, Max is just Max, but Fang is Nicholas, Iggy known as Sigmund, and Gazzy, Lucas.

 

What's up with "The School": "Well, you didn't actually come to conciousness until you were six. We didn't have the processing power for the world scape in the early days, so all you had was a few, mostly bare rooms. It wasn't good for your growth and develoment as a person, but it was what we had. You, Nicholas and Sigmund were put in first, we added Monique about a year later, and then finally Lucas. We did get some more processing power, enough to add Jeb some time after you, for small periods. Then when Electrical finally figured out how to make it more efficient, we got to give you more scope, so we moved you to the E-house. But you couldn't roam too much, so we had to use what few memories you had, and a few implanted things to make you not want to leave, or be seen..... Jeb, bless him, agreed to go in with you, teach you for two years give you some limits, hard for him poor man with two young children and another on the way..."

 

"Eventually we got the other server, and we could have you moving around in what we remembered of the old world, as good as we could get it although, we're sorry, things don't make sense sometimes."

 

The school is a construct of fear/panic/pain, a few loose memories all stitched up together, but not much in the way of detail. It works surprisingly well, because people suppress bad memories anyway.

Erasers are the bogeyman to keep the kids from wandering, and all the stuff from the books is designed to keep them busy, testing them and their decisionmaking, their personalities etc.

 

Jeb is father, and Val mother to Max, Ella, Ari, Gazzy/Lucas and OC's Micheal and Louanne. Val is the kid's mother. Jeb's a shrink, specialises in child psychology.

 

Anne Walker/The Director/Brigid/Lissa/Tess  - all one person with a facelift each time she's in the system "Oh yes, she's a botanist. Runs our greenhouses."

 

Same goes for Roland/Boxboy/Hans/Pruitt with some random lab tech, who goes by the name (both scape and world) of Reilly.

 

Ari and Gazzy are fraternal twins, but Gazzy had health problems due to varying reasons so was volunteered to go into the Gene Therapy project because it was his only chance of life as a child. The rest were engineered.

 

Dylan is a "normal" teenager who volunteered to go into stasis to interact with the flock, first as Mac guy, then as Sam, then as Dylan.