Some Important Follow-Up

[photonicfighter]

Excuse me. If everyone who went to Santa Carlita has a moment?

[Dakki pauses briefly to give people a chance to pay attention. That's how this is done, right?]

I've followed up with Tachibana, and it turns out that he put a tracking device on something that belonged to me. It's gone now, but apparently, the agents are now on the lookout for interdimensional aliens, not just ones from other planets.

I should have been more cautious. I'm sorry. Could the other agents confirm if they've planted anything, too, before I go and get everyone shaking themselves down for bugs?

...and that said, now that we're all back to ourselves, I'm very curious... did the 'aliens' pose any actual threat? What was that all even about? I'm not impressed with a government whose first reaction to extraterrestrial life is to panic and try to lock it up. That can't be the entire story, can it?

Comments

[loyalrebel]

You all did passably better than I've come to expect at being subtle, for whatever that is worth.

The aliens are utterly real in that world, my overlay was knowingly intimately involved with one before getting kidnapped and recruited.

[There's a mental sigh.]

I know that the people they first encountered were only minimally threatening, but there are also far stranger and more dangerous non-earth life forms in existence. I would not be entierly surprised if something terrible had happened previously and they were simply being hypervigilant following it.

[photonicfighter]

...thank you?

I have no doubt that they're real. I just wish that I'd been able to get more information on them while I was there. I'm grateful to be hearing more now, at any rate.

It seems like the reactions of a government that had a bad first contact experience. Still... were any of the aliens that your overlay knew any sort of a threat?

[loyalrebel]

I've been here for.... two and a half years or so at this point. Anything after the Grid, I've been around for so I am not sure you should really be thanking me for it considering other instances.

I am not sure if the aliens were necessarily integral to the jaunt outcome as themselves so much as the theft and nonsense with their technology was.

I already said that my overlay only knew one alien, and his knowledge was mostly about how ah... compatible they were in a romantic relationship.

[photonicfighter]

I'll take compliments where I can get them.

They might have been. I've got very solid reason to believe that Justice was the other Arcana in play, and that she wanted the truth to come out. Some sort of truth, anyway.

[And wait, compatible in a romantic... ohhhhh.]

...you don't have to share that information. That's quite alright.

[loyalrebel]

Mn, considering Ziggy was not revealed to be an alien or recaptured.... it didn't stop her from winning anyway.

So long as it is not Devil, I do not care which of the Arcana wins anything at this point.

[photonicfighter]

I wanted to try and reveal him, but I couldn't manage a way. It seems that getting Ken back on stage in time to get rid of his disguise might have been enough truth to tip the scales.

I can definitely agree with you that Devil has no business winning anything.

[loyalrebel]

Why? If you knew what the government people did to the aliens, why would you subject someone to that for a second time?

[photonicfighter]

Because I didn't want things to continue along the way they were. Because all of this secrecy was getting random concert-goers hauled away for interrogation, and who knows what other worse things elsewhere. If he was their real goal, I wanted to, at minimum understand why he was the goal and convince him that something had to be done.

Both sides seemed afraid of each other, and I was hopeful that there could be some way to make them stop with that.

[loyalrebel]

You are... painfully naive and optimistic if you truly think it would have been so easy.

Bringing innocent people back to their captors only puts a situation back to what it was before we were dragged in to meddle.

[photonicfighter]

I had no intention of bring him back to his captors. I'll admit that my plan was a little flimsy, being that I was human and operating on very little sleep and far too much adrenaline, but that wasn't part of it.

[loyalrebel]

Then what was your plan?

There is no magic wand to wave around and just get rid of fear and mistrust.

Blaming being human and tired on not having a good plan is a poor excuse, especially with me. A simple admittance of a mistake or lack of knowledge is enough.

[photonicfighter]

My plan wasn't finalized. I had to actually make proper contact with him first, which I failed at. Thinking on it now, I'd have tried to convince him that aliens, as a whole, should stop outright hiding when they visit Earth and make a proper formal contact, so that things like this no longer happen.

There's a huge difference in how lucid an exhausted human is versus a CAST that's been operating for the same amount of time under the same amount of duress. I might have done a better job, if I was processing things properly. I'll admit that how I did it was dumb, but I stand by my goal.