Shit... been a while. Writing slumps suck huh? Well not really a slump. Just been writing a lot of katair I can't share yet oops

Also food for thought: FM and 17th chapter 50 marked the start of the final chapters of that part of the story. OTT is at chapter 50 and we've still got a good third of the story to go yet!


Desmond watched his men disapprovingly. Getting humans and proeathans to work together wasn't as bad as teaching cats to play fetch but it was pretty close. Even though these proeathans were about as open minded as Od could find and Desmond had approved they still looked down on the humans and the humans hated the proeathans for destroying their world. A verbal fight broke out at least once a day. After a week Desmond had had quite enough of the entire thing.

He was sitting in front of his men, looking pensive. They waited at parade rest for him to tell them to be at ease or give instruction. He'd just showed up today and they'd done this, as they did every day now. He'd sat down and let them stew.

"You're all useless," he said after a while. "Even the ones I like. You're all fucking useless."

"Desmond, don't be so mean," Artemis said.

Desmond grunted as he got to his feet. "Rodriguez," he said to one of the humans, a big Mexican with black eyes and a charming smile when he felt like smiling. "Why are you so so fucking useless?" he meant it in reference to the entire platoon, not just him. It was partially rhetorical but he also wanted to see what the man would say. Rodriguez wasn't a good talker though and didn't have an answer for him. "Johnson," he turned his attention to the problematic dick in his platoon who always had a smart comment. "I can see you wanting to answer. Get it over with and spit it out."

"Because humans and proeathans don't work together," he sneered.

"Partial points. Fel," he turned to one of the Ilythians. "Why the hell do you all suck so much?"

"Humans have difficulty keeping up with us-

"Wrong answer. Sabbr," he asked Baldur.

"Because we don't want to," she said.

"Wow. A smart answer at last. Amazing. Only took you all four shots," he rolled his eyes at them. "Fact is. You all suck because you want to suck. And if you suck then you're worthless to me. I'm honestly about to just throw in the towel and start with new volunteers. Johnson, you say humans can't work with proeathans; Fel, that humans can't keep up. Both wrong as fuck answers. I trained with etjiað master Magni and learned and kept up with him and even kicked his ass once or twice. For the humans in the group, imagine I got personally trained by Jet Lee and then had the honor of beating him once.

"You all suck because you want to suck. And right now you're doing no one a favor, especially your own species. I don't want to hear this bullshit of 'humans aren't as good', 'we can't work together', 'proeathans are shitty', 'humans can't keep up.' Its an excuse. A shitty excuse and I'm tired of it. We're running out of time. The growing and harvest season for the Adjatevs is going to be over soon and we have until then to make something out of you.

"Instead you're all here fighting with each other. Bullshit. Get the fuck over yourselves. All of you. Right now you're all fucking useless and hurting our cause and might be the reason the Adjatevs win in the end.

"You're all dismissed. I don't want to see another fucking one of you until you've decided you can not be worthless to me. Cause right now you're all worthless and weak." He ran his hand through his short hair and stepped back and away. "Go think about it. I'll be here tomorrow," and he walked off. He heard them talking in hushed voices as he did so but Desmond didn't have time for them today. He had his own plans now. He was basically their baby sitter and he couldn't do that. He needed soldiers who'd act like it. He couldn't hold their hands till they got over their prejudices.

He left the grass garden and headed for Venus. "Was that necessary? You were so mean," Artemis said.

"I don't have the luxury of kindness," Desmond said. "I have a war to win and a limited time table. They're slowing us down."

"You could have been nicer," she said.

"I thought it was a good speech," Pluto put in as he got to the lift. He got in one on his own and turned to see people leaving the garden. "Reminds me of myself."

"I don't know if that's a good or bad thing."

"I was the greatest general in a hundred generations," Pluto said. "And led the Unified Army of proeathans against the human rebellion."

"And yet you lost," Desmond said.

"I didn't lose. I was murdered and forced here."

"Don't say it like that," Artemis whined.

"I say it like it is. We were all murdered. I just have the misfortune of knowing who and what I was. I know everything except my own name."

"You don't know Artemis?" Desmond asked.

"Some of us prefer not to know when we learned of the nature of our fate," she admitted. "I don't want to know what I lost. I'm not unhappy now and knowledge is a burden."

"Cain says the same thing."

"Cain can be wise," Pluto said.

"When he wants to be," Mercury cut in. "He's still a stupid hybrid who only understands proeathans on a base level and acts like he knows fucking everything. Not to mention he's one of those fucking Drell," he growled.

"You don't like Drell?" Desmond asked.

"Mercury had a Lesh'va'rin mother. They and the Drell were at war constantly even while we fought against the humans," Pluto said.

"So I take it he remembers?" Desmond asked.

"Mhm."

"I thought the Adjatevs only took from their own people," Desmond said.

"Yeah well when they had someone like me in the world they couldn't help themselves," Mercury said and he could imagine his child-like visage sneering. "I used to be a great psychic you know. One of the best! Then they kidnapped me, killed me, and made me into… this."

"And yet you decide to look like your younger self," Morpheus said in his echoey tone. "And not the 'great' psychic you used to be."

"Fuck off star boy. You weren't even useful. Still aren't."

"Stop," Desmond said and they all fell silent. "Do not fight amid each other. Bad enough my men fight between each other."

"They're just bitter," Venus said in Altair's voice. The lift door opened and Desmond went to his seldom used room.

"No shit I am. What they did to us- Its disgusting."

"Humiliating," Demeter agreed in her lofty voice.

Desmond opened the door of his room. The AI partaking in the conversation all took a visual form at once. He liked to look at them when they spoke but talking to them in the hallway could get awkward since he was supposed to be no one in the ark. No ones didn't have face to face conversations with the ark holograms. Half of them wore battle armor, their hair pushed back or 'cut' short, the other half in their version of a uniform, though none of them wore shoes. Venus wore Altair's face of the first time Desmond had seen him die and it tingled his brain in a way he didn't like. She was doing it on purpose and he didn't appreciate it. He didn't comment on it though. He'd scold her later in private for it.

"Humiliating?" Desmond asked and sat on the comfortable chair, taking off his boots. He'd had another restless night and Rebecca had taken apart part of the Animus to upgrade it. No sleeping there and the meditation was a poor substitute for real sleep when you had such an active mind as Desmond's.

"Oh yes. Turning us into AI. Disgraceful," Demeter said and none of the AI would meet his eyes.

"I thought it was an honor," Desmond said.

"So we were assured," Pluto said.

"But they did to us what they did to-

"Did to who?" Desmond asked but had a sneaking suspicion about what Mercury was about to say.

"The angels of long ago," Venus said. "Its the same idea. Rip the mind and the soul out of a body and put it within a vessel."

"You didn't notice that our cores looked similar to Apples?" Morpheus asked, materializing beside him wearing a cloak of stars and space.

"I mean… no? I was kinda busy trying not to die most of that trek," he reminded them. "And dealing with the Ilythians."

"The AI cores are larger, more advanced, versions of the vessels they would use to contain the soul of an angel," Demeter said.

Desmond blinked, "Why would they do that? I'm pretty sure you've told me putting a proeathan into a vessel was like… fifty types of illegal."

"The species was dying. Who would care if sixteen of us just disappeared," Hera finally joined the conversation and she was as spooky looking as always with her faceless mask and her deep red robes. She stood right in front of Desmond. "They committed heresy and wiped our memories so we wouldn't remember. Before us our AI were just that, artificial."

"You look at us as machines," Demeter said.

"But we are not," Mercury said.

"We are the captured souls of the dead," Hera said.

Desmond looked up at them. "I'm sorry," he said. "But I also don't have a lot of sympathy." They shrunk away from him somewhat. "There were a thousand Apples in Venus alone. A thousand. That doesn't include the other vessels. It sucks they did this to you but, can't say I'm that surprised it happened either. Your people had been locking up human souls for… how long?" It wasn't a rhetorical question.

There was an uncomfortable silence. "Since we discovered a way to separate the soul from the body," Morpheus admitted. "A few thousand years after humans made themselves known."

"And how many did you do this to?" Again, not a rhetorical question.

"We only did it with particularly powerful angels at first-

"That wasn't the question," Desmond snapped at Pluto. "How. Many."

"Only a few hundred a proeathan lifetime. We told them they could live forever," Hera was practically whispering. "Early on, when we could control them, they embraced it. It was an honor to become a vessel. Then the Swell came and destroyed that notion for them. Showed them that it was death and imprisonment. It dropped off after that some."

"Its more difficult to separate those who resist and struggle," Morpheus said.

"During the initial part of the Decline it was possibly thousands," Hera said softly. "Official records were destroyed when we went underground. During the Rise of Saturn it could have numbered in the tens of thousands. Most of all of the vessels in the world were destroyed during that war and in the war with Eve. The only ones that remain are the few scattered across the globe and those located within Venus."

"But that's it," Desmond said, cooling a furious ember in his chest that was so hot it felt like it was about to burn itself right out of his ribs. "Your people stole the souls of, possibly, hundreds of thousands of humans and put them into a ball to serve until the end of time. And you're going to complain that you're humiliated because the Adjatevs treated you the same way you probably all treated us."

"You say we deserved this?"

"I'm saying I think you need to suck it the fuck up," Desmond snapped. "Your society was out of control and you're the product of it running off the rails. I've seen the Adjatevs. They're proud of what they did. Even the ones that are just normal people in their nation. There's no guilt for them. But in the end, you were all so fucking proud of what you'd become. Such hubris comes before the fall."

"Would you say the same for your own kind?" Venus asked meanly.

"Fuck yeah," Desmond said and got to his feet, his previous desire to rest gone. Now he was angry and thinking and moving. "I've seen it all. Or most of it. A big part of it at least," he admitted. "And there are people older than me telling me shit I've missed, and you, and Od, and Mars in Apollo. And just… I think everything is happening for a reason. Like. When proeathans had too much hubris it sort of sounds like a stadalla shows up to wreck their shit. That sound about right?"

They all looked at Hera who seemed slightly uncomfortable. "That is not an unfair summation," she admitted.

"Well humans had a ton of hubris too. Then… a stadalla showed up and wrecked their shit." Artemis giggled. "Wow. Never saw that before," he admitted. "Point is. You did horrible things. You, as a species I mean. Like the worst things people can do to each other and you didn't care. You just… didn't care. And I'm what? Seventeen. You didn't care sixteen times before now and every time you've been reminded of your hubris until we got fed up with it and destroyed you.

"Modern humans are a lot like you, you know. Ton of arrogance and willful ignorance. They didn't want to look at what was going around them, what or who they were hurting by being absolute pieces of shit, and change it. They did horrible things to each other and our planet. Like before you guys came back we were literally choking the planet and ourselves.

"Then I came along," he frowned, feeling that ember like a sun. The bullshit and injustice of this nearly making his ears ring. "A stadalla bred to bring about the end of human hubris by literally the biggest egotistical pricks the world has ever known; the Adjatevs.

"And they made you guys. Which is super fucked up. Not as fucked up as nearly killing the human population twice and abandoning the world to fix itself once. But pretty fucked up. And you're here. Moping and whining about how disrespectful and humiliating it is that you were treated like nothing. When all you've ever done is treat humans like nothing. Its the whole feminist argument that guys don't want to be treated the way they treat women, which is to say; like absolute shit.

"But you guys are such massive fucking whiny, egomaniacs," and he got more than a few scowls. "Like your pain is so much more important than ours. News flash. Is isn't. Literally get over yourselves."

"You don't-

"Understand?" Desmond asked Pluto. "Don't understand what its like to be lied to? Used? Have no control over my body? Oh, I think I understand that perfectly. You guys are as bad as my proeathan soldiers. You listen when you want but you don't care about us."

"That's not true," Artemis said.

"It is," Desmond said. "None of you care about what happens in this ark, this army, the people here, the survival of the human race. All you care about is that you win. You're just like those that made you."

"Some of us still follow part of our coding," Venus said.

"Shut up," Desmond said. She scowled with Altair's face. "You do on your own free will and you know it. Most of you aren't helpful even. Demeter is like the only one of you who actually cares if any of us live or die and I think that's mostly because if we all died in here we'd make a mess of the place.

"You're all just… useless to me," he said. "You whine and complain and scheme but you're not doing shit."

"Me and Pluto are helping," Artemis said, but it was weak.

"Because I told you to," Desmond sighed and rubbed his buzzed head. "Why's everyone who wants to help me literally the most useless people in existence?" he asked both himself and them. This time the question was rhetorical. "I'm just your vehicle for revenge."

"You're also our master," Morpheus put in.

"I'm no one's master. You are here because you chose to be. Now you're all choosing to do fucking nothing. That's the real disgusting and humiliating parts about you all. You do fucking nothing." He wrinkled his nose at them. "Fuck, so tired of looking at all of you with your slack-jawed stares. Get out. Don't bother me unless you're useful." They all vanished.

After a moment Demeter said, very softly, like a whisper in his ear. "I recorded that in case you want to listen to is again and give a revised version of it to your troops. It was much better than the one you gave them earlier."

Desmond smiled helplessly and gave a little, quiet, laugh. "Thank you Demeter. Not right now. I'll review it later."

"Very well. After you've had some rest yes?" Desmond nodded and Demeter's presence dissipated.


Also forgive me if this doesn't make 100% sense. I'm tired and Desmond can go off on long tangental rants as it is and... idk. Seems like it works. The canon is right though. Aaaaaay