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Barrayar ⚔ Cetaganda ⚔ The Invasion

Have you read the FAQ?

The Village ⚔ The Barrayaran Camp ⚔ The Cetagandan Base ⚔ The Fight

You've been on Barrayar for a while now, and you're finally starting to adjust. Or maybe you're not. Maybe this is all still too much for you – the attacks, the constant raids, living in the middle of a war zone by no choice of your own. But if you want to live long enough to make it back home one day, you might as well do what you can to help the war effort. Besides, where else are you going to go?

The fierce Barrayaran winter rages even to the southern end of the continent, and it's been none too kind to Vorkosigan's District. Temperatures at sea level are well below freezing, and up in the mountains, it's even colder. Several inches of snow already blanket most of the mountains all the way down to the Cetagandan base, and the storm that's just started up is only bringing more down. Visibility is low in the flurries, wind swirling snow everywhere, and God help you if you get lost on your own out in the storm. Nights are cold, these days.

A recent attack on the Cetagandan base has left half their facilities damaged and in disarray. Raid parties snuck in by night, planting bombs in previously scouted locations for maximum effect. Damage to the base's water treatment plant and organic grow labs have considerably impacted the Cetagandans' food and water supply, and in the chaos caused by the explosions, the Barrayaran guerrillas raided their medbay and made off with a considerable bounty of medical supplies. One man's bane is another man's boon, and while the Cetagandans have reserve supplies to sustain them for now, some of the damage is extensive and the repairs will take time. But in the meantime, the Barrayarans have scored a precious victory as well as equally precious resources.

the village
The Riverfall villagers are used to the harsh winters of the Dendarii mountains, and though they don't have much themselves, they are happy to offer what they can in terms of cold-weather clothing and extra blankets to those allied with the guerrillas. Despite the cold, the hill children are going wild in the snow, and they may try to lure you into their play by sneakily pelting you with snowballs.

Cetagandan allies, however, may not be met so warmly, and at the first sight of ghem soldiers, any children out playing in the snow will be immediately ushered into their homes. Unaccompanied outsiders from the Cetagandan base might have an easier time talking to the hillfolk, but any attempt at digging information about the guerrillas out of them will get you stonewalled fast. A sneaky hill child or two may steal away from their home to approach one of the "bad guy" outsiders to sate their curiosity.

the barrayaran camp
Morale is higher than it has been in a while after their recent victory, and the guerrillas are in high spirits. And do they ever love their spirits – as night falls, most of the Barrayarans gathered around the campfires are enjoying the deceptively named, dangerously alcoholic moonshine they call maple mead. It might start out sweet, but it burns all the way down, and a few glasses of that stuff will tank even the heaviest Barrayaran soldier.

But the storm rages on despite their celebration, and preparations must be made. Clearing as much snow off the tents as possible will help ensure that no tents collapse overnight, the horses need to be tended to, and the officers are always running training drills. Food is in real supply now, but the guerrillas need help foraging and hunting nonetheless. And when night falls, you'll have to find a way to keep yourself warm – it's a good thing there are a cozy ten of you to a tent.

the cetagandan base
The Cetagandans outnumber their guerrilla enemies almost seventy-to-one, so their base has not been completely devastated, but it hardly looks to be the work of a few raiding parties. Nothing is beyond repair, but the water treatment plant has been taken offline, which means that all water is now locally sourced and must be treated by hand with purification tablets. No one in the base will starve, but fresh food is mostly unavailable until they get the grow labs back online, which means that meals are mostly comprised of ration bars and MREs. Morale isn't exactly at an all-time low, but none of the ghem officers seem to be in a good mood.

They won't hesitate to put you to work, either. They need all the engineers and laborers they can get for the grow labs and the treatment plant, and the medbay's inventory needs to be thoroughly audited before they can send a request for more supplies. But if you need a break, it's not too hard to slip away for a little quiet downtime. Some of the lower-ranked ghem ladies might let you participate in some more artistic activities, or maybe some of the enlisted soldiers who are a little more used to you by now might invite you into one of their Cetagandan games of strategy. Or, since the treatment plant only affected potable water, you could appreciate your comfortable surroundings and take a nice hot soak in the bathroom while everyone else is working.

the fight
PVP
You're in the midst of a skirmish with the other side -- maybe you signed up for the battle, maybe you just got caught up in the fight -- but at least it's easy to tell who's on what side. Only one side is wielding swords, and the other guns.

But then you come across someone who doesn't look like they're either -- not one of the rugged Barrayarans or the face-painted Cetagandans, but an outsider, an exotic like you. They must be. So do you fight?

RECON
Maybe you're not on the front lines, but there's plenty more to winning the war than just fighting. You're partnered with another outsider on recon; the ground is cold, and you try not to let your shoes crunch too loudly on snow as you scout, scanning for patrols or supply lines.

Or maybe you're with the Cetagandans, hiking it thorugh the mountains with one of your fellow exotics in an attempt to locate the enemy camp. Except it's damned cold, and there's hidden ice everywhere, and everything is starting to really look the same.

--

Feel free to write prompts for your character on either side -- you don't have to choose just one for the TDM! Just label it clearly so folks know. GO WILD, MY FRIENDS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Miles slowly lowers his cup, his chest going a little tight as he doesn't like where this looks like it's going. It's not hard to imagine Mark doing that, even after the few months he'd been on the Moira with Miles. The forced proximity hadn't exactly done their relationship good.

"What? How? Don't we have security checks against that?"

At least Miles doesn't seem to be actively angry with Mark at this point. Because he isn't, of course. After both of their ordeals, well ... there wasn't much left to fight about. He drums his fingers lightly against the arm of his chair in a nervous gesture.

"Of course we do. But Bel Thorne helped him bypass them." Now a tinge of sorrow, betrayal. In some ways that had been the worst part of all this: having to remove Bel from their post at the end of everything. There'd been no choice. "They organized a raid on the creche. Nearly pulled it off. But Mark froze and it all went to hell. I had to lead a team myself."

Miles suddenly looks like he's been kicked in the stomach. He's not nearly drunk enough for this yet.

"Bel?" he manages, his voice strangled. Bel, of all people? A look of sick betrayal surfaces on his face, too, and he grips his cup, raising it again. "Why -- why the hell would they do that?"

Miles' own knuckles' have gone rather white. He still doesn't know where Bel ended up after all that. Mark he's since made up with, but Bel ... there's no resolution there.

He gives his double a faintly apologetic look, but - well, he'd asked for it. And Miles needs to impress upon him the absolute necessity of changing history if he gets a chance. "For the clone children," he says simply enough. "Remember Bel's reaction to Nicol?"

"Well -- yes, but..." Yes, he remembers Nicol, it'd be impossible not to. She was a memorable woman. He stalls by taking a long sip instead, his brain rattling. Since when did Bel's loathing for Jacksonian clone programs outstrip their loyalty to Miles? Especially after all they'd been through on the Moira -- and then it occurred to him that Bel, even his timeline's Bel might not remember anything about the Moira, and Miles sank back deeper into his chair.

"I didn't -- I don't think I've had seen that coming," he says, sounding rattled. He's already starting to hate this ride, but he knows he can't get off.

Welcome to your future life, Miles Vorkosigan. Your older self really fucking wants to get off this ride too.

Miles takes another grim sip of his mead, coughing a little as it burns his throat. "I didn't either. I'd assumed - I mean, I hadn't even planned for such a contingency. I knew that all my key officers would know me well enough." And Miles had trusted Bel utterly, dammit. His mistake apparently. Move on. He's not done with this story yet. "Anyway. I got them out somehow. Barely. But I was hit by a sniper at the end of the operation, and that was it."

Now he tugs at the collar of his shirt, pulling it back to reveal the spiderweb just below his collarbone. A very nasty mark even with the Duronas' good work.

Miles suddenly wishes himself back on the Moira, back where he could talk to Bel about this, ask fervently about stupid frigging hypotheticals because this is just a hard pillow to swallow. Unwisely and knowingly, Miles drains the rest of his cup in one go and immediately lets out a wheezing cough, burying it in the crook of his arm.

He goes even paler at the sight of the extensive scarring under the other Miles's shirt, far beyond the cryo prep scars. He hadn't noticed that in his reflection on Caducus Primary. He feels cold despite the warmth of the fire.

"Shit," Miles mutters, rubbing his face. "What the hell did that to you?" And then he takes a closer look, and an old memory of Bothari springs unbidden to mind, that frozen moment that Elena Visconti had fired on him and left a gaping hole where his chest had been. Miles breathes in sharply. "Was that needler fire?"

Miles probably should tell his other self to lay off the mead a bit. Eh ... he's going to need it. Hell, older Miles is going to need it. He drains most of his own cup as well just to keep up.

"Killed me," he says bluntly. "Painfully. With needler fire, yes." He too is picturing Bothari dead on the floor thirteen years ago. "Karmic justice, probably." Those last few words come out as a murmur. Now, the next step is surely obvious enough; his younger self has seen and recognized the cryorevival scars. But he stops anyway, giving it a moment to sink in.

Miles winces visibly at that evaluation, as if the guilt wasn't already weighing heavily enough in his chest. He reaches for a refill, letting out a slow breath. Funny, he's got just as much experience with dying as his older self, but hearing about it is still chilling. It wasn't quite the same, the way it happened.

He's quiet for a moment. He looks at his older self with a slightly haunted look. "Was it slow?"

Miles pours his younger self another glass. "No," he says, staring down at his own scar for a moment. Trying to remember the exact moment of his death is ... difficult, between the shock and the cryoamnesia and everything else. But he has a few fragments that will haunt him well enough. "I looked down and my chest had a hole in it. Then, nothing."

That had been the part that was truly terrifying: the suddenness of it all. He'd not even had a moment to choke out any last words or a warning. He was just dead, done. Everything burned up in an instant. Now he needs more mead, dammit. He tops off his own glass and takes a long, burning sip.

He'll be drunk by the time he gets to telling his story, Miles realizes, but maybe that's for the better. His older self seems to be having a hard time with this, understandably. He looks oddly relieved.

"Good." He takes another sip. God, the stuff doesn't get any better when you drink more of it. He gives the other Miles a sardonic little smile. "You look pretty good for a dead man."

Miles just looks back at himself, that exhaustion from before creeping back into his face. It makes him look haggard and gray. He feels haggard and gray. Someone had died permanently in that rescue. He just hadn't realized it until much, much later.

"Do I?" His eyes are like stone in his face. "The Duronas put me back together fairly well, I admit. All my bones are synthetic now." A pause. How to approach this next part ... As bluntly as the rest? Would he want it like that? Hell. Twenty-five was a lifetime ago. "Now I'm prone to seizures instead. Had one on a Naismith mission."

Again, he'll pause to see what his double figures out on his own.

"Seizures?" Now that's a curveball. Miles tries to swim through the deluge of information, even delivered in surprisingly few words from someone like himself. Instead -- of what, the brittle bones? Supposes that'd have made for a convenient opportunity to do all his bone replacement surgery at once while they were already putting the rest of him together. But that's not what makes the lead sink deeper into his stomach. He prays the maple mead will hit him soon.

"What happened?" The question comes out flatter than he intends. His mind is already dizzy, spinning out a thousand possible answers before the other Miles can say a word. Just tell me, dammit.

You know it's a shitty topic when Miles Fucking Vorkosigan doesn't want to use more words than he has to. Does he hope to avoid the inevitable conclusion of this by not telling his double? Like not actually going through with the whole explanation will make it not real somehow? (But it's not real for this version. Not yet. Ironically, all the more reason to press on.)

"I had one in combat. Cut off the legs of a courier we were escorting." And now, the very worst part. He's been over this so many times in his mind. Picking at the exact chain of events, every opportunity he had to change things. Skip over the details. Skip to the end. "Falsified my report to Simon, so he fired me." A medical discharge on paper - which is the explanation nearly anyone else would get. But Miles has had enough of lying to himself.

The nauseated look on Miles's face is immediately eclipsed by one of appalled shock, and he half-lurches out of his chair, biting the inside of his cheek hard when he puts unchecked pressure on his broken leg.

"You what?" Miles's voice very nearly cracks with the crescendo, but he manages to check himself there, at least. Exactly which part of that he's objecting to isn't clear -- well, all of it, dammit. No wonder the man looks so shelled out. But that doesn't drown out the kneejerk outrage, confused and shocked. Betrayal seems like it's closing in from all sides, now, even from his future. "What the hell -- "

Miles flinches back at that. It's - a very reasonable reaction, yes, and one he would be having if he were confronted with the same thing but - he is not prepared to defend himself from himself. Goddammit.

"I didn't say it was a good decision, all right?" he hisses back at his younger self. "But just - just try and think it through for a minute. I was having seizures. That's a medical discharge no matter what. Naismith was a dead man walking from the moment that needler hit my chest. I thought - I thought I could delay the inevitable." Find a cure on his own. Fix it before reporting the issue, continue on with his life. God, what a fucking idiot he'd been.

He flinches almost in unconscious imitation at Naismith was a dead man walking, because no, dammit, he's only just figured out how to keep all this straight in his head. His head hurts, his vision starting to curl around the edges. Oh, sweet freedom of the mind. The maple mead's finally doing its trick.

But he hadn't been willing to let Naismith go. He sure as hell doesn't feel ready to. But even so --

"By what -- by self-sabotage, you mean?" he demands, and he's trying to keep his voice down but his chest only feels tighter. He can't pretend he knows what he'd do in that case, as of right now, but he knows it wouldn't be that. "And Simon -- " God. Simon would be right to fire him for that kind of horseshit. "Why the fuck would you do that?"

He's already given his younger self the best explanation he could. Everything else is just an excuse. Lies he'd told himself in his then-pressing need to keep hold of this part of his identity. How can he describe how badly that need had spiked after his cryorevival? It had been bad enough before, but being forced to literally piece himself together again had made him that much more dependent on his alternate persona. He'd thought there was no other way.

More excuses. He won't subject his alternate self to them. Instead his expression melts into quiet despair. "I was an idiot," he says, finally. "A desperate idiot who had a million chances to take it back but didn't." He grips his cup too hard, his knuckles turning white. "There was nothing to me without Naismith."

Nothing to me but Naismith. Miles looks sick again, but at least this time, he feels the maple mead burning him up from the inside too. It hits too close to home, in a way, but fuck, this is home, this is him. If he'd been out in the field having seizures instead of rocketing around the Moira, would he have made the same decision? No. Hell, no. He can't bring himself to believe that.

He swallows thickly, watching himself hate himself, and Miles has never seen it reflected back at him like this, the most uncomfortable mirror. Suddenly he wishes he'd gone first.

"Nothing?" Miles's voice comes out soft, and he's clutching his cup just as tight. He struggles to meet his older self's eyes again, biting hard on the inside of his cheek. Somehow, that's not what he'd been expecting.

It's always been something roiling deep through them, this self-loathing. Residue from the poison dripped down their ears all their life, from Piotr's complex relationship with them, from Barrayar itself, and MIles' chosen escape from it. He'd so desperately needed an escape that he'd invented a whole persona to disappear into, and now? It's gone. Evaporated into the thin air from which it has sprung to begin with. That needler had been karmic justice in more ways than one.

"I went home," he starts to reply. "After all of it. After everything. Naismith was gone by then, and I knew it, but - " His turn to look away, towards the fireplace. "I realized that somewhere along the way I'd lost Lord Vorkosigan too."

"Fuck," he mutters, more to himself than -- well, himself. Miles presses back against his chair, shutting his eyes. He tries to keep it from building in his chest, but he feels powerless to stop it. Lost himself completely...God. At least that hadn't happened to Miles, this Miles. No, it'd been more a problem with coexisting and existing without context all at once... He draws his legs up on the chair, sipping at the maple mead and hissing at the burn all the way down.

"How'd -- " he starts, then stops, shaking his head. He doesn't think he can ask his older self just how he'd lost himself so badly. He thinks he already knows. Miles's finger numbly traces the edge of his cup. He looks at the other Miles's face, looking away from him, and then he turns his gaze toward the fire, too.

"Have you found him yet?"

At least he doesn't have to explain. Small mercies, but then he already knew how acute that identity crisis was starting to become when he was 25. No surprise that this version of himself understands the feeling if not the full depths that Miles has plunged into.

"Him? Who? Lord Vorkosigan?" He tilts his head back again, one hand going to his face. The laugh that bubbles up from the bottom of him is not a particularly sane sound. "It doesn't matter. Lord Vorkosigan can't possibly exist here, and neither can Admiral Naismith. Perfect, isn't it? Like something out of a Barrarayan fairy tale."

Edited 2016-11-27 06:19 (UTC)

Oh, yes, that crisis was already in full swing by the time Miles departed from Earth, only accelerated madly by his time on the Moira. That sense of displacement was so jarring, so massive, that he couldn't seem to figure out how to keep himself together for months, months, until he finally buckled under the weight of it. Miles stares at his older self for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then he sets his cup down on the table. He goes slightly slack, elbows resting on his knees, and he rakes both hands back through his hair, like that'll massage his brain back into gear. He lets out a long, slow breath before he looks back up at the other Miles, something strange and distant in his gray eyes.

"So be someone else." He drops the words like dice, bones scattered on a table. Playing the little Admiral had always been a gamble, right from the start. "You're right. Lord Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith can't exist here. It isn't the right context. Find the Miles that exists in this context. Be him, whoever he is. It's the only way to keep yourself sane."

And boy, doesn't he know it.

"The Miles that exists in this context," he repeats, staring at his younger self. Who is that? A stranded galactic with no title, working desperately to prove that he belongs along Piotr's guerrillas and not dead in the bottom of a ditch somewhere. Mucking stables, translating for his fellow transplants, helping the hillfolk as best he can. Even helping himself as best he can, as evidenced by them being here. It's ... not much, compared to what he had before, but it's not nothing either. And all his sordid history with either identity is necessarily wiped clean.

It's ... enough to actually makes him pause. Because it's good advice. It's damn good advice, which means it's automatically suspect coming from himself. Most importantly, it's enough to jolt Miles out of the haze of despair that's descended in the wake of confessing all his mistakes. God, he wants to get up and pace. He makes an abortive gesture towards it, but he's instantly unsteady on his feet when he moves to get up. Too much mead already.

He's forced to sit back down again, limited to drumming his fingers on the chair. His thoughts are finally turning from the internal to the external, mostly because he doesn't quite want to stare into the void that is his life at the moment. "You have experience with that," he says abruptly. The realization hits him like a lightning bolt. It explains the weird comment about his age, about having died, and being able to give himself advice that he hadn't thought of already. He leans forward, gray eyes focused on his double in turn. "Going somewhere completely crazy and having to find yourself again. What the hell happened?"

Edited 2016-11-27 13:38 (UTC)

It's probably a good thing that Miles's broken leg automatically disqualifies him for pacing, because he'd probably have tried to stand up anyway and fallen. The maple mead is starting to dull the pain that's kicked up, though, which is convenient, seeing as he didn't arrive with any of his painkillers.

Miles smiles bleakly. "Bet you're going to think I'm even more insane." Because between two Miles Vorkosigans, it obviously has to be a contest. He picks up his cup again and takes another sip before leaning back in his chair, tipping his head back. He stares contemplatively at the ceiling.

"I've...done this before. Coming to a strange place with a crowd of equally strange people, all of them displaced from their own worlds, different worlds. Only last time, it wasn't on Barrayar."

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this thread is slowly killing me