Re: Borderlands: Kara & Rhys
"'Temporary allies,'" Rhys corrected the both of them, himself and Kara, his voice flatlining into mockery. It was recitation, regurgitation of reiteration from Scooter's garage as Fiona had looked at him in bauble green, and he almost sounded sad about that too. Almost. He didn't have very many friends. Vaughn and Yvette, basically. Jack, maybe, if your definition of friendship included A.I.-possession and a lot of derision, bad jokes, and condescension. Rhys was okay with bad jokes. He was really okay with them. (Full disclosure: he loved them. But, he thought they were just called 'jokes.') But the rest didn't really make him feel warm and fuzzy inside, which was, he figured, the true test of friendship, right? Or close enough. So, that almost-sadness, it made sense. It was logical, but thinking that made Rhys even sadder—or confused...er. His mind went to the man, Eddie N, and the... the probing questions about Rhys' morality, about his choices (Fiona vs. Jack, Good vs. Evil, Logic vs. Emotion), like that was all it came down to. The--the flippant comments about how it was all black-and-white, easy, about how Rhys was clearly ruled by logic, like it was wrong, instead of his... heart or something, which was clearly the Way of the Hero, and a Way he had Failed Miserably.—But, in reality, he wasn't some character on a screen, reacting to input from someone else's thumbs. (There had to be a better way to say that too.) It... it was all more complicated than that, wasn't it? Okay, yes, Pandora wasn't one for nuance, but, even still, there were shades It was more complex—free will and everything, it was more gray than it was pure black or pure white with some obvious division between them drawn in the iron-red blood of (two-and-a-half) friends/temporary allies or (so, so many) enemies.
Not... that that was the point right now. Or something Rhys was really trying to think about, the desert racing below new rubber tires, sand scouring up behind them, scrubbing at the sky like some bristles at some gigantic toilet seat (which was pretty accurate an image, really.) No. He was focused on understanding how the sun could impart powers—a yellow star, the midpoint between red and blue, nuclear fusion relatively--relatively mild as far as nuclear fusion went. Fusion released particle-bonding energy = awesome powers? Rhys glanced in that amber and blue at the girl next to him, at her skin—freckled (solid seven!), but otherwise normal, and he wondered how she absorbed the energy. If she had to be above ground, then it had to be—
All thoughts stopped there. All thoughts outside of: WHAT? AHHHHH!
Because the door opened. There was this flash of impish smile, speared beneath sunspot-freckles, and then the door opened, and the girl was gone. She literally fell out. Now, okay, working for years at Hyperion meant Rhys could keep his head under stress pretty well. But just then? He made a choking sound as he slammed skag-boot heel down on the brake as hard as he physically could, hands on the wheel overcorrecting for the drag of inertia. The caravan rolled. Up, over, rolled in orange-blasted sand, and not for the first time, it took Rhys with it.—When it came to a stop, momentum played out under sun and sky, it was on its side, glass all miraculously intact (thanks, Scooter?), and the man was sprawled among the cupboards. In severe pain. With chromatic blue blinking behind his eyelids and a voice crackling in his ear.
Wakey, wakey, sunshine!
"Nooo, oh, ugh, ow, why? Why did that happen?" He sucked dust down his throat and Rhys coughed. His chest ached. As did the rest of him. And ironically, the door Kara had tumbled from like a ragdoll, was clamped closed a few feet away. (Someone teach kiddo here the definition of irony, 'cause it's definitely not—)