Private Log- The Other Aurora, Part II
06 Jun 2022Lily Flemmon
So, about Rory... she's a sleeper agent. I've heard a bit about the concept and there was a short lecture in a psychology course I took a couple years back, but that doesn't even constitute a decent understanding. So I'm in over my head, yet again.Mal, however- he's a gentle man in search of adventure, and he seems to have latched onto Rory almost as much as she's latched onto him, and the two are horribly perfect for each other as... whatever they want to be, really.
And now they're both living at Chilton Terminal. I know the risk I'm taking- that whoever Rory is a sleeper agent for- and she knows she's a sleeper agent, just not who's taking control of her. But the risk that she gets "activated" while in Chilton Terminal is very real. Especially because that's exactly what happened as she was literally moving in. Whoever had been activating her had some guts pulling this one.
So she got activated and ended up hacking her way into the tram system- except the car she chose was an experimental one built by Adrien "Adrienaline" Lewis, CTAC's best tram engineer by a good margin, and he is very much an adrenaline junkie, and the tram engineering leaders literally have his joyride tram under check to make sure he isn't using it when he's not supposed to, so suspicious activity was reported when someone other than Adrien managed to use that tram car- and the Garden Guardians were put on yellow alert- have an operator in every one of the trees.
The Garden Guardian program was Shandra's idea initially. She and Mirage collaborated on the design of trees that double as mechsuits, and that can connect to their root systems, and every part of the macrostructure is able to move- including the root systems, which can spring out of the dirt very suddenly and autonomously block the firing line of a weapon, given that the operator of the Garden Guardian Tree- or GGT- has locked that system onto the weapon. The trees can also move independently and are not locked to the roots, and they take on an almost humanoid form.
I was actually studying for my upcoming Imperial History exam when I got a call from Mal, Rory's co-pilot. Apparently Rory had disappeared, and I immediately put the GGTs on yellow alert, only to find that they already were.
Gonna skip some details here, but I gave the GGTs a briefing on Rory and what was probably going on- it sounded like she was going after a diplomatic guest in the admin area of the first ring- and Mal and I got in touch with Adrien, who prepped us a special tram- a lifeboat that can go directly between the rings through space.
Rory managed to stab the guest, Tyy'Sun Eson, in the knee, but the GGTs reacted fast enough to her drawing his pistol that all the shots were blocked by roots, and then they managed to restrain her long enough that Mal and I could help her snap out of the activation.
And I wanted to make sure that was the last time Rory was ever activated like that, and the best person to help with that?
Mirage.
Besides... I still gotta tell Mirage about how I, uh, dumped their finest work into a black hole.
----
Damn, private journals are nice. Makes me wonder how I even managed to collect my thoughts on the edge of a panic attack.. right. I didn't. If only when I wrote this one, I knew what Mirage would say about me dumping the Dryad in a remote black hole.