Chapter Text
Lucy pulls herself into a sitting position, her legs dangling from the makeshift mattress. She tries to move her feet, and they work! Thank god, her body still works! Agwun and Agtu watch over her from the next room. They’ve apparently been watching over her since they pulled her out of the rubble months ago, when she was charred and broken and barely alive.
Lucy tries to get down from the cardboard-pile-turned-mattress.
“Not yet,” Agtu warns her. “Tomorrow you may try to stand. It isn’t safe to push yourself so far today”.
Lucy makes a frustrated noise, and says “We’re wasting time. I have things to do. I have someone I need to obliterate.”
She needs to dye her hair blonde, to try and remember how to use computers, and then, obliteration. That’s the plan.
“I know,” Agwun says kindly. “There will be time for all of that, I promise.”
Lilith presses her palm against the fire-resistant, corrosion-resistant, shock-resistant, slag-resistant wall. She thumps it a few times.
“Seems sturdy,” she tells the others. “This’ll do.”
“I still think we should have made it cryo-resistant,” Athena Springs says, leaning against a wall with her signature mix of barely-contained rage and debilitating social awkwardness.
“MAYA SALADS!” yells Krieg, who, having dated Maya for several months, tends to incorporate her name into his incoherent rants.
“I still think we could have kept our old headquarters,” Mordecai says from the rafters.
“There isn’t enough room for everyone at the old headquarters,” Lilith tells him, for the fifteenth time.
“Exactly!” Gaige says. “It broke my heart, having to keep Deathtrap packed away all the time.”
“Maybe we would have more room if someone brought fewer birds along to every meeting,” Maya adds, carefully.
“Don’t look at me,” Mordecai says. “I’ve only got the one. It’s not my fault Talon is so attractive to other birds.”
Lilith doesn’t respond. She likes it when Mordecai talks about Talon – no matter how inane the conversation – because in those brief moments, he doesn’t seem so terribly sad.
Lucy smacks her head against the console.
“Great,” she groans. “Just great. I can’t even interface remotely!”
Agwun crosses the room, his loader arms outstretched, placating.
“This is our fault,” he says, quietly. “You were brain-dead for a significant amount of time before we revived you. We—“
“Wait!” Lucy says, throwing up her hand in a panic, but it’s too late. Agwun gets too close, and his eye goes dead, his body seizes up, and he drops to the floor like a metal ragdoll.
“Oh no!” Lucy exclaims. Her instinct is to reach out to her friend and help him back to his feet, but she is poison to him at short distances. Instead she backs away, and lets Agtu carry his companion to a safe distance.
“It’s your lag,” Agtu tells her. “It engages our failsafe protocols. He will be back in a moment.”
Lucy twirls her newly-blonde hair around her finger.
“I know,” she says. She’s seen it too many times before, and she still hates it every time.
In this post-Hyperion era, some new rules are established:
Rule 1: nobody is called ‘Jack’ or ‘John’ anymore. Every Pandoran unlucky enough to be given one of those names has long since changed it to something more palatable. Like ‘snotfucker’.
Rule 2: computers don’t work as well as they used to. It’s hard to get parts, and it’s even harder to find coders who really know what they’re doing. Also someone, or something, keeps taking the cores out of Hyperion robots, and Lilith is really going to have to look into that.
Rule 3: some of the new Vaults are incredible, and some don’t make any sense at all. There’s one called Vault of the Resurrector, that will resurrect exactly one person, but ludicrously will only work if that person themselves opens the vault, without assistance. Another, called Vault of the Crawlers, apparently contains infinite earwigs.
Rule 4: no matter what, ignore the reported sightings of Handsome Jack. Someone is always going to see the bastard somewhere. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s dead, his AI clone is dead, he’s really definitely dead this time.
Sometimes Lucy just sits on her roof, and watches the mad gunwoman shoot at the empty marshland.
Ever since she nearly died, her siren powers have completely disappeared, and an aura of lag follows her everywhere, affecting every electronic thing within a few feet of her. It affects the loaders worse than anything else, though. They’re primed to shut down completely in the face of interference.
And now, what she needs to do, is build a computer. Out of parts of other computers. It’s going to be frustrating and slow and difficult and awful. Lucy will grin and bear it all, because this is obliteration, part one. This is her opus. This is her revenge.
The gunwoman – Eve – fires a shot. Lucy glances at the swamp, and fancies that she sees something faintly green shatter into nothingness. It would be nice, after all, if Eve weren’t crazy.
The radio at Lucy’s belt crackles to life. “We have scavenged a selection of AI cores for you,” Agwun tells her, pleasantly. “Constructors and loaders, with minimal damage. Just as you requested.”
“Great,” Lucy replies. “I’m coming down.”
Obliteration, part one, can finally begin.
The Sleets cut off all communications passing through Thousand Cuts long ago. Lilith hasn’t heard from Brick or his Slabs in months.
“He’ll be okay, sugar,” Moxxi says, gently.
“For how long?” Lilith asks, without emotion.
Is there an amount of eridium that could fix all of this?
Is there a number of liquefied bandits that would push the Sanctuary citizens out of ‘just surviving’ and into ‘actually living’?
Can the Firehawk actually give people hope and happiness? Or just keep handing them back the same pitiful lives, over and over?
Lilith is so tired.
“Long enough,” Moxxi tells her, leaning both elbows and both boobs on the bar. “I heard we killed fifteen Sleets since this morning.”
“But no prisoners,” Lilith says, irritably. “Nobody to question!”
“Hey!” Moxxi says, defensively, and Lilith forces herself to deflate.
“I know, I know,” she says. “They’re doing a good job. You should be proud.”
The Sleet-killers used to be just Axton and Ellie, mowing through bad guys with turrets and guns and car-crushers and sheer, well, moxie. It was cute. They were a little murdercouple, just like Lilith and Roland had once been.
But then, one day, Tina had joined them. She’d just upped stumps and moved out to Axton and Ellie’s with muttered explanations about ‘new ideas for explosives’ and ‘needing a change of scene’. And that…that still hurt the most.
Lilith scrubs her face with her hand and rams a few notes into the tip jar.
“Please excuse me,” she says, getting to her feet. “I need to go hold my nephew, before he leaves me too.”
Things that aren’t affected by the lag: keyboards, old monitors, and extension cords. Lucy uses all three to set herself up as a semi-remote coder. Agwun and Agtu plug in the AI cores one-by-one, a safe distance away in the other room.
Most of the cores are dead, with just residual code remaining. They find nothing useful in the first batch.
Agtu goes out to scavenge more cores. Agwun asks Lucy if she even knows what she’s looking for. He sounds palpably concerned. The loaders are the best caregivers Lucy has ever had, which is saying… okay, that’s not saying anything at all. But they are good.
“There’s something hidden,” Lucy tells him. “Deep in the code, shattered into a hundred thousand pieces and disseminated randomly. I’m going to find all of it, and put it back together again.”
Agwun tilts his head. “Are you trying to remake a robot army?” he asks.
Lucy smiles, all teeth.
“I’m trying to do the exact opposite of that,” she replies.
Talon sits on Lilith’s lap, chewing on the remains of her leather vest happily. He’s lost most of his baby fluff, no longer a fledgling, nearly an adult. But Lilith still wraps her arms around him and holds him close, like a baby. And like a baby, he snuggles against her chest.
“You’re so cute,” Lilith tells him, as emphatically as she can manage.
“He is literally a killing machine,” Mordecai reminds her. “If he wanted to, he could rip your entire—“
“I know, I know,” Lilith says, testily.
The two of them sit in silence for a while, legs dangling over the unfenced edge of Sanctuary, staring down at the distant highlands below. They both know that Lilith has a chunk of eridium the size of her fist in her pocket. They both know that the flask at Mordecai’s hip is half-full of rakk ale. There’s an unspoken agreement between the two of them: I won’t if you don’t.
But they both know how fragile that agreement is.
Three Pandoran pigeons alight next to Lilith, their sharp tusks clicking and clacking as they land. They stare at Talon with beady eyes, and an uncharacteristic air of loyalty.
“He’s a natural leader,” Mordecai says, proudly.
“I want a pet,” Lilith blurts out. Everything is so lonely and sad. Maybe if she had a bird – or a dog – of her own, she’d feel better.
“Sure,” Mordecai says, bitterly. “Lily, you’re already getting crushed under the weight of leadership responsibilities. You sure you want to add additional responsibility to your personal life?”
Lilith sighs and pats her pocket.
“No,” she says. “I guess not.”
Constructor 1290 is unconscious, but alive. On reflex, he tries to rend the loaders with non-existent turrets and laser beams. He screams death and damnation. And he whispers the word ‘help’.
“Into the trash?” Agwun asks. “With the others?”
Lucy shakes her head. For the next week, she stays awake, stripping 1290’s code into tiny fragments, and collecting the pieces that whispered.
This is the easy part. For obliteration stage two, she will need to open a vault.
Intel is a precious, fragile thing. It is a sealed note, carefully delivered to the right recipient. It is a whisper in an ear, every word perfectly selected, efficient, and effective. It is endangered and frightening, especially intel about Hyperion robots. It should not, Lilith thought, sound like this.
“THERE’S SOME GIRL LIVING OUT NEAR THE SWAMP AND SHE’S GOT A METRIC F**KTONNE OF OLD ROBOT PARTS OR SOMETHING AND I THINK IT’S HIGHLY F**KING SUSPICIOUS”
“Thank you,” Lilith says, holding her echo away from her ears. “I’ll send someone to go check it out.”
“I TOOK SOME PHOTOS BUT THEY’RE KINDA BLURRY SINCE I WAS GOING REALLY SH*TTING FAST!!,” Mr Torgue adds. “I’M SENDING THEM TO YOU NOW!”
“Oh,” Gaige says, from the other end of the room, “Do we have a new place to nuke? I’ve just given DT the ability to use grenades, and I can’t wait to test it out in the field!”
Lilith glances at Torgue’s photographs, squinting at the blonde-haired girl and the two loader bots. An odd feeling of hope – or maybe just relief – wells up inside her chest. Did you survive, after all?
“Not this time,” she says aloud. “I’m going in on my own.”
“We haven’t blown anything up in days,” Salvador complains.
It’s the same process, over and over. Scan an AI core, strip the code, collect the pieces that remember. Rinse and repeat. Every couple of weeks Lucy finds some new scrap of code to add to the empty Claptrap shell in the corner. But mostly, she just finds disappointment.
One night, Agtu tosses a hard drive at her through the doorway. “A copy,” he says, “of me.”
“And I,” Agwun adds. “We loved you from the very beginning. Maybe there’s something in us that can help.”
Lucy doesn’t argue with them. Privately, she knows that nobody loved anyone when Handsome Jack was in charge. These loaders have evolved, that’s all. And they deserve a better, softer, brighter world, and if Lucy is lucky she might just be able to give it to them.
The climate is changing again. Torgue’s intel leads to a small area of plains, bordered by a thick, putrid marshland, shrouded in humidity and haunted with infantile ghost stories.
At the centre of the wreckage Lilith finds a cluster of small homes, some inhabited and some not. This tiny town is populated by bandits and the banished. Nobody talks to her – or, apparently, to each other. A woman named Eve – who is wrapped in so much fabric that she makes Mordecai look underdressed – glares at Lilith through tiny eyeholes and raises a shotgun.
“Keep moving,” she growls. “I only shoot ghosts.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” Lilith tells her, amicably
Eve snorts. “Tell that to my spent buckshot,” she replies.
Lilith keeps moving. She finds the house surrounded by the corpses of Hyperion robots. She finds two functional loaders – Angelic Guardians, by the looks of them – one blocking the doorway, the other raising some kind of weapon. And then Lilith sees the girl, blonde and slight, most of her face hidden behind thick goggles.
“No,” the girl tells the loaders. “This woman was my fri… is someone I trust. Let her in.”
Lilith watches the loaders back away, and reluctantly extinguishes the flame in her own hand before walking inside.
This could be a trap. This probably isn’t really her. You’re too credulous, you’ve always been too credulous.
“If you’ve come to kill me,” the girl says softly, “I won’t resist.”
But no. There it is, the same voice that Lilith knows so well, has known for so many years. There’s no mistaking it.
“I’m not planning on killing you, unless you give me a reason,” Lilith says, waving one hand in the air. “What did you say your name was?”
“Lucy. Short for Lucifer.”
Lilith considers this for a moment, and then almost laughs. “Good,” she says. “I like that name for you. Lucifer, the angel who defied his god.”
She glances at the empty claptrap on the floor. It has an unusual, striped paint job
“What’s this for?”
“A project I’m working on,” Lucy says. And then, more carefully, “You already know who I am, don’t you?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Lilith answers. “What’s the project? You’re not bringing back an AI version of a certain dead man, are you? You know I have to ask.”
“I’m trying to bring back an AI version of an AI,” Lucy replies. “If successful, it should be one more nail in Jack’s coffin.”
Lilith is silent for a moment, weighing up the options.
“Alright,” she says, finally. “I’m glad you’re alive, you know.”
“You too.”
“Any chance I can convince you to come work for me in Sanctuary?”
Lucy raises her eyebrows.
“Do you really think your friends would approve of that?”
“Fair enough,” Lilith says. “Then I’ll see myself out.”
Lucy peers out of the window. “Lilith was nice to me,” she says, softly. “I’m not so completely alone.”
“I am upset that you didn’t let us defend you,” Agtu says, angrily.
“I am similarly peturbed,” Agwun agrees.
Over the radio, Lucy’s third, usually-silent guardian chimes in.
“That was the Firehawk, kiddo,” Eve says gruffly. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Lucy tells all of them, smiling. “Everything is fine. Really. I trust her.”
Eve says “if you say so” and abruptly ends the conversation. The loaders glance at each other in silence for a moment, processing.
“You did not tell her about the lag,” Agwun says. “If the Firehawk, the leader of Sanctuary, can be trusted, surely she could help fix you.”
“Even Sanctuary doesn’t have the resources for that,” Lucy tells him. “Anyway, I’m going to fix me. I just need more time.”
Lilith wanders along the edge of the marsh, hands on her face, thinking.
She’s alive, and she’s free. That’s already a nail in Jack’s coffin. Not that he needs any more coffin-nails, since he’s very very dead.
Does that change anything? About running Sanctuary? About which Vault to go after next? About how very tired Lilith is getting?
Splish splash splish splash splish splash
She’ll tell Mordecai about Lucy, of course. And Brick too, eventually, when Lilith next speaks with him. Maya won’t keep secrets from her own team, so not Maya. Nobody else needs to know just yet.
Splish splash splish
Lilith frowns and glances at the noise, expecting to see some kind of oversized scythid. Instead, twenty feet away, she sees…an apparition. A translucent and luminous thing, slowly walking towards Lucy’s tiny town. Lilith blinks hard, and then there’s a loud bang and Lilith realises Eve is standing on the roof of her house, smoking gun in hand. The ghost…the hallucination…whatever it was, is gone.
“What did I tell you?” Eve yells as if, somehow, she’d been expecting it.
Lucy has two rules about friendly computers. The first rule is to always treat them with as much kindness as possible. The second rule is to always, always make a back-up copy, because once you’ve deleted an AI, there’s no recovering it. It’s like looking for a needle in a needle-free haystack.
Unless, like Gladstone Katoa, you happen to make an incomplete AI deletion in a vessel that created hundreds of other AIs, scattering its fractured personality to the seven winds. Then it’s just like looking for a needle in a single-needle haystack. Frustrating and slow, but possible.
“I estimate we’re over halfway there,” Lucy announces happily, leaning back in her chair to stretch. Halfway through Operation Obliterate Jack, part 1: restore happiness.
“And then the Claptrap unit will come to life?” Agtu asks.
“The unit is just a body,” Lucy says. “If I’m right – and if I’m lucky – the salvaged AI will come back to life.”
“Understood.”
The loaders pause for a moment, and Lucy claps her hands.
“Come on, load up the next core,” she says. “I’m on a roll!”
More pausing.
“You have not slept in thirty-six hours,” Agwun says. “We should take a break.”
“Soon,” Lucy says, impatiently. “But not yet.”
Agtu makes a sighing noise, and retrieves another AI core from the pile. Before Lucy can start to examine it, her radio crackles to life.
“Hey, kiddo,” Eve says. “Someone else has just arrived in our town.”
“What?” Lucy says. “Who? Are you sure it’s not just one of your ghosts?”
Eve sees ghosts. Of Jack. It’s an entire thing and Lucy very much does not like to talk about it.
“No, it’s a human,” Eve tells her. “Thin. Goggles. Spiky ponytail.”
Gaige? Lucy wonders.
“Do they have a robot?” she asks Eve aloud. “Or a bird?”
“I don’t know, I don’t understand pets.”
Lucy pinches the bridge of her nose.
“Red hair, or black?”
“Black,” Eve says. “I want to say his name is… Matt… de Cow?”
“That is not even slightly correct.” Lucy answers. “But thanks for the heads-up.”
She turns back to her loaders.
“One of Lilith’s friends is here,” she says, excitedly. “Let’s take that break, and go say hi.”
“Back again?” Moxxi asks. “People will start to talk.” She presses an intricately-decorated fingernail against her lips, thoughtfully. “Maybe we should make out again, and give them something to talk about.”
Lilith shrugs. Moxxi is gorgeous, clever and fun. In another world – a world where Lilith didn’t miss Roland quite so much, a world where Moxxi had hurt Mordecai a little less – maybe the two of them could have been together.
“You said you had intel that could be important,” Lilith says, briskly. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Of course,” Moxxi says, smoothly. “You’re here for intel. This has nothing to do with the fact that you just sent your one remaining best friend away from the city.”
Lilith finds an empty shot-glass, and slams it against the bar.
“He was needed elsewhere,” she says, with every ounce of authority she can muster.
“Naturally,” Moxxi says. “And since he’s been gone, you’ve spent, what? Fifteen? Sixteen hours in my bar. He only left yesterday.”
“None of your business. I’m a paying customer.”
“You haven’t bought a damn thing,” Moxxi says. “You’re lonely.”
Lilith smiles nastily.
“And who spent the sixteen hours talking crap with me instead of running her bar?” she asks. “You’re lonely too.”
Moxxi tosses her perfectly-coiffed head and flounces off. She re-positions herself at the other side of her bar, scrubbing at the countertop as if she’s trying to dig a hole in it. Lilith fumes. She thinks about smashing every glass she can see. She thinks about burning a new hole into the wall. She thinks about the raw eridium in her pocket.
She thinks about what it means to be a leader and a role model, to have scared and broken people look up to her.
Lilith stays at her barstool and waits.
“Hi,” Lucy says, trying and failing not to sound like a hyperactive preschooler. “I’m Lucy, and these are my loaders. Don’t worry, they’re friendly.”
Mordecai just stares impassively through his opaque goggles.
“I’m a friend of Lilith’s,” Lucy continues, more nervously. “Or maybe friend is too strong a word, but I know her and we’re not enemies.”
Mordecai has two small bags dangling from his shoulders, and a rifle in his hand. Above him, a bird soars effortlessly, riding the thermals.
“It’s Mordecai, right?” Lucy asks, desperately. She can feel Agtu getting edgy behind her.
“Are we pretending like we don’t know each other?” Mordecai asks. “Like the whole you-talking-to-me-for-months-when-I-was-a-vault-hunter thing didn’t happen? Or are we pretending that it happened, but you’re someone else?”
Lucy exhales at length.
“No, we’re not pretending that,” she says. “I’ve lost my powers, changed my name, and for the first time ever I’m free to live my life. But I’m still the same person. I’m still Angel.”
Minutes pass. A flock of pigeons land near the bar entrance. A couple of them stare at Lilith balefully. One of them spits acid in her general direction.
“It’s not my fault Talon’s gone,” Lilith tells them, irritably. “And you’re just dumb birds, you have no way of knowing that anyway.”
“If you’re done yelling at the wildlife,” Moxxi says. “We do need to talk. Er, not because I need to, but because information needs to be shared.”
“Right,” Lilith agrees. “Share away.”
Moxxi adjusts her hat, leans in close, and then says “a lot of my customers have been talking about seeing ghosts recently.”
Despite herself, Lilith laughs aloud.
“That’s not intel,” she says. “That’s rumour. It’s an urban myth; a literal ghost story.”
“People said the same thing about the vault,” Moxxi reminds her, quietly.
“This is nothing like the vault,” Lilith says. “People are always hallucinating apparitions. It doesn’t mean anything – except that Pandorans are all half-mad.”
Moxxi brushes a few crumbs off her shoulder, and ploughs on.
“Every report is the same,” she tells Lilith. “The ghosts are always sighted on wet terrain – marshland and swamp, mostly – and they’re always translucent, green-ish, glowing and slow-moving. They don’t interact with people, they just walk around making wet noises and looking ominous.”
Lilith thinks of the vision she saw near Lucy’s home, and frowns.
“And where are these ghosts supposed to be?” she asks. “Geographically?”
“There have been multiple sightings from the Highlands,” Moxxi answers, “and the Caustic Caverns, as well as half a dozen locations in Aegrus, another half a dozen from the tundra, and a few from the coast.”
“Okay, so I’m supposed to believe that these ghosts can appear literally anywhere on the planet?” Lilith asks, incredulously.
“They seem to have quite a range, anyway,” Moxxi says.
Lilith is exhausted. She wonders what it would be like to go to sleep and not wake up for a month. But she can’t do that, she has people she needs to protect. A lot of people.
Maybe Moxxi feels the same way.
“I’ll look into it,” Lilith tells her. “See if any of your bar patrons have a photograph or something. I’ll call Karima. We’ll figure this out.”
“Got it,” Moxxi says, sounding almost – but not quite – relieved. “But Lilith, there’s something else you need to know.”
Lilith props her chin on the bar.
“Hit me,” she says.
“Everyone who has gotten close enough to make out the features of one of these ghosts has said…the ghosts themselves all look identical to each other...”
Moxxi chews on her lower lip, hard enough to remove a layer of her industrial-strength-waterproof lipstick. She looks worried enough that Lilith already knows what she’s going to say before she finishes the sentence.
“And they all look like Handsome Jack.”
Lilith laughs again, this time humourlessly, bitterly.
“Of course they do,” she says.
“A lot of bad things happened during the fight against Hyperion,” Mordecai says. “Lilith doesn’t hold you responsible for any of it, and I trust her judgement.”
“Thank you,” Lucy says.
“But I still don’t want to be around you more than I have to,” Mordecai continues, and Lucy’s mood deflates like a balloon.
“I understa—”
“So you just keep doing whatever you do,” he interrupts, “and I’ll do what I was sent here to do, and we won’t cross paths unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Lucy nods miserably. Of course. Mordecai has always been one to hold grudges. It’s a defence mechanism: his wounds heal slowly, or not at all.
“What were you sent here to do?” Agtu asks, from several feet away.
Mordecai lifts his free arm. The bird drops out of the sky and lands on his wrist with a happy-sounding screech. The two of them seem to be in perfect synergy.
“Keep an eye on you,” Mordecai tells her, “and keep an eye on whatever is going on out there,” he adds, tilting his head towards the marsh.
“Fine with me,” Lucy replies. “Drop me a line if you want the details of my current project. Otherwise, I guess I’ll see you around?”
“Try not to.”
Lucy turns to leave, and the loaders swing around to follow her at a safe distance. She realises that Eve has been watching her from several roofs away, and the two of them exchange a wave. Mordecai may not like her, but Lucy is not alone.
Neither, for that matter, is Mordecai.
“I really like your bird,” Lucy calls over her shoulder. “He’s beautiful.”
“Uh,” Mordecai says quietly. “Thanks?”
And with that, Lucy goes home.
“I can confirm there have b-been ghost-Jack sightings near the stream,” Karima, unofficial leader of the Highlands, tells Lilith. “We’ve set up some fire t-turrets to keep them at bay.”
“Yeah, okay,” Lilith says. “Have you, personally, seen a ghost?”
“Once,” Karima replies. “I got a good look at it. It was a d-dead ringer for Handsome Jack.”
Lilith tugs on a lock of her own hair, frustrated. This is the last thing that she needs, the last thing that Sanctuary needs, the last thing that Pandora needs.
“But I can also confirm,” Karima continues, possibly sensing her mood, “that these apparitions are absolutely weak to fire elemental damage. If you still have a functioning d-digistruct unit, I can send you the blueprints for our turrets.”
Lilith snorts quietly. Of course Karima has a plan. She always has a plan.
“Sounds good,” she says. “Stay safe out there.”
“You too.”
Time passes. Lucy scans cores, strips code, and rebuilds the AI, piece by tiny piece. She turns her radio into an echo mirror, and it makes her feel a little more connected to the world at large, even if there’s no-one she can call.
Mordecai stays hidden – the only real indicator of his presence is the occasional raptor shriek echoing around the town. Also, the local pigeons are acting strangely, but Lucy doesn’t think that’s related.
“I have something that may be of interest,” Hammerlock tells Lilith. “An old boyfriend of mine managed to snap a picture of the beastie.”
He slides a photograph across the bar.
“Why are your exes always so helpful and relevant?” Moxxi asks him.
“Hey,” Lilith protests. “Mordecai is helpful and relevant, you just don’t appreciate him!”
“Mordecai,” Moxxi says, explosively. “That man is a little bird who wants to mate for life and spend the rest of his days raising other, littler birds. He’s never going to be happy until he realises that.”
Lilith gets out of her chair loudly, and draws herself up to her not-all-that-impressive height. “You say one more word about my friend, and I’ll—”
“Shall I come back some other time?” Hammerlock asks, with an air of careful joviality. “I’m not much of a referee, I’m afraid.”
Lilith eyes Moxxi for a moment, and then sits back down.
“No,” she says. “Sorry. Let’s…let’s look at the picture.”
The ghost certainly looks like Jack. There’s no mistaking that mask, that poise, that…handsomeness.
“Oh dear,” Moxxi says. “I think I still hoped that somehow, it would be someone else.”
One day, quite unexpectedly, Lucy receives an echo message.
“Guardian Angel?” says a familiar voice. “I require your help.”
Jack always used to pride himself on how eloquent, well-spoken, and unflappable his daughter was.
“Uhh,” Lucy says. “Uh, how did you, you know, get this frequency?”
“Oh, I went through Lilith’s things,” says the voice, which unmistakeably belongs to Doctor Patricia Tannis. “She won’t mind, I’m sure. We’re roommates, you know.”
Agtu is staring at her. Lucy shrugs.
“So, what did you want?”
“I would like you to fix the quick-change station in Sanctuary,” Tannis tells her. “It has not worked in months, and I require a disguise for reasons of science.”
“I… see…” Lucy replies. “Can I just. I’m just going to. I have a thing I need to do, and then I’m going to call you right back.”
“I’ll be waiting right beside the phone,” Tannis says. “Or under the phone. Or maybe far away from the phone. It is a mystery.”
“Great,” Lucy says, and hangs up.
Then she contacts Mordecai.
“I need your help,” she tells him.
“Do you think it’s okay?” Maya asks, suddenly breaking the silence, “for someone like me to be with someone like Krieg?”
Lilith blinks.
“I think it’s none of my business,” she says. “Also, I’m not really sure what you’re asking.”
“I mean, he’s a psycho, and I’m not.”
“Very astute,” Lilith says, stamping her feet to ward off dampness and small varkids.
“He struggles with words sometimes,” Maya continues. “He seems happy with me, but what if he’s not? What if I hurt him someday because I don’t understand something he’s trying to say?”
Lilith laughs, a little crazily.
“Kid, why are you asking me?” she says. “In my entire life, I have had exactly one romantic relationship and it fell apart and then he died.” Lilith inhales sharply, suddenly keenly aware of Roland… of Roland’s… of what she lost. “Also I’ve had exactly two friends and I sent both of them away. You should talk to Moxxi about this stuff.”
Maya huffs.
“I did,” she says. “Moxxi said many salacious things, some of which I unfortunately understood, and then said ‘don’t worry Maya, psychos have their own power’. What does that even mean?”
Lilith glances around, hoping a ghost will manifest and save her from this conversation.
“I guess they kind of do,” she says. “Some of them, anyway. I mean, the badass ones seem to be able to manifest infinite buzz saws. That’s a pretty cool power, don’t you think?”
“But not particularly helpful!” Maya says. “If I wanted useless fairytale-esque rhetoric, I’d have asked Marcus!”
“Actually, that might not be such a bad—”
Lilith falls abruptly silent, and motions for Maya to do the same.
Splish splash splish splash splish splash
They move towards the noise, slowly and quietly. Lilith knows from previous attempts that ghosts are destroyed by her phasewalk, but this is their first time trying Maya’s phaselock.
The ghost appears immediately in front of Lilith, nose-to-nose and grinning through an ethereal copy of Jack’s mask. Lilith takes a step back, repulsed. The ghost gives a single, whispery laugh.
“Gotcha!” Maya says, and tries to put a bubble around it. The ghost reels, takes damage, and promptly dissolves.
“Wow, that was fast,” Lilith says. “These things are weak as shit.”
“And yet, it resisted being trapped by my phaselock,” Maya says, uneasily. “Either it has some sort of special powers, or that apparition is a lot bigger than it looked.”
“I’m guessing it’s the former,” Lilith tells her. “These things happen.”
“It laughed at us,” Maya adds. “At you. Has that ever happened before?”
“No,” Lilith says, breezily. “But I for one am glad they’re evolving a sense of humour.”
They travel back to Sanctuary in silence.
Mordecai crouches on top of Agwun, while Talon lazes on top of Agtu.
“I don’t know,” Mordecai says, shrugging. “I mean, it sounds like Tannis already knows about you. It’s not like I can make her not know.”
“Of course,” Lucy says, a little testily. “But should I, I don’t know, call Lilith?”
“No, no, no,” Mordecai replies. “Lilith has way too much to deal with as it is. We should handle this on our own.”
Lucy nods. She paces the width of the room, and back again.
“Look,” she says, because Mordecai may as well know. “I can’t do what Tannis wants me to do. I lost all my siren powers when I nearly died.”
Mordecai looks startled, and turns his goggles in her direction.
“No phaseshift?”
“No phaseshift, no digistructing, no acting like an AI,” Lucy says, counting the effects off on her fingers. “On top of that, I have this glitch that causes anything electronic to lag when it comes into contact with me.”
“Oh,” Mordecai says, quietly. “So, that’s why,” he gestures at the distance between where Lucy stands and the loaders, “…you do this?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why,” Mordecai says, gesturing at the Claptrap shell, “you’re making an AI?”
“I’m making her to spite my dad,” Lucy replies. “But she’ll be free to do whatever she wants when she’s finished.”
Two pigeons flutter through the window and land on Agtu’s arm, their knife-like claws clinking pleasantly against his chassis.
“We all lost a lot because of Handsome Jack,” Mordecai says, slowly. “I guess you lost a lot, too.”
But we’re alive, Lucy thinks. We won. He’d hate that.
It isn’t enough. But it will be.
“Look, you don’t have to feel sorry for me,” Lucy tells him. “Just help me figure out how to handle Tannis.”
The three birds are perched, side-by-side, across Agtu’s head. Like a family.
“Yeah, I can do that,” Mordecai replies.
Lilith examines her living room critically, trying to decide if she’s over- or under-decorated.
“I feel that I could be of more assistance in tracking down these swamp beasties,” Hammerlock says, over echo. “I may not be much to look at, but I know everything there is to know about Pandoran wildlife. And archaeology. And academia in general.”
Lilith hangs another corpse, right next to the door. With Brick and Mordecai gone, there’s nobody to discourage her creativity. And with Talon and the dogs gone, there’s nobody to eat her decorations.
“For example,” Hammerlock continues, “did you know that some of the earliest human civilizations on Pandora used to ritually perform mass burial? Hundreds of thousands of people, dozens of generations into a single grave. No, you don’t. Because nobody knows that kind of thing except me!”
“That sounds irreverent and disgusting enough to be true,” Lilith says. “But also not really applicable to our current ghost problem.”
“Well, what if we disturbed a mass grave—“
“Who all happened to look like Jack?” Lilith finishes for him.
“Perhaps they worshipped him?”
“Ancient civilizations? As in, people who died eons before Jack was even born?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Hammerlock says, flustered. “I’m trying to be helpful!”
One of the corpses falls to the floor with a dull squish. Lilith sighs, and tries to imagine what Roland would say in this situation.
“You are being helpful,” she tells Hammerlock. “You’re coming up with theories and we’re ruling them out, together. I need you to keep doing what you’re doing.”
“You need me to be wrong about things?” Hammerlock asks, dubiously.
“Yes,” Lilith tells him. “It’s the only way we’re going to get to the right answer.”
Lucy calls Tannis back, and asks her to describe the current state of the quick-change station. Tannis describes a machine in utter disrepair, with several key parts missing, that even phaseshift itself probably couldn’t fix.
“Okay,” Lucy says, gently moving a few sleeping pigeons so she can sit in her chair. “I can’t fix it. But I can tell you how to jury-rig the station so that it works for a few minutes. Would that help?”
“That would be splendid!”
Lucy walks Tannis through the unglamorous process of duct-taping broken machines back together, and awkwardly prodding and coaxing unrelated items into acting as temporary parts. At the same time, she scans through her current most promising AI core. Talon is preening on the windowsill. Mordecai is standing in her tiny kitchen, trying to make tea so weak it’s visually indistinguishable from water.
Today is a pretty good day.
“So, hi,” Lilith says, brightly. “How are you?”
“Fine. You?”
“Trying to get to the bottom of this weird ghost crap,” Lilith replies. “So, the usual. I miss you.”
Mordecai has exactly two responses to ‘I miss you’. Half the time he says ‘don’t be weird’. But the other half of the time, and today, he says:
“Miss you too.”
“The sooner we can deal with these ghosts, the better,” Lilith says. “How’s your investigation going?”
“Not as well as yours,” Mordecai says, grimly. “But I have noticed one thing. As far as I can tell, only one ghost appears at any time.”
“I noticed that, too.”
“Which means,” he continues, “that theoretically, we could be dealing with a single teleporting entity, rather than multiple different ghosts.”
“Huh,” Lilith muses. “That would mean if we can kill one ghost properly, this problem would disappear for good.”
“Nothing ever seems to be that easy on this planet, but yeah, maybe.”
“Huh. So how do we figure out whether the ghosts are—”
Their conversation is interrupted by loud screaming, coming from Lucy’s cottage. The screams are distorted by distance, but they sound like the words “NO, NO, NO, GET AWAY FROM ME, NO” being howled over and over.
“Whoa,” says Lilith.
“I have to go,” Mordecai tells her. “Something’s wrong.”
“DON’T TOUCH ME! NO! NO! LET ME OUT!”
For a moment, Lucy is frozen by surprise and disbelief. The loaders stare at the modified Claptrap unit nervously as it beats the wall with its tiny grip-claws.
We did it!
Lucy pulls open the door, then backs up against the far wall.
“Agtu, get out of the way,” she says, firmly. “Let her leave.”
“STOP IT! STOP IT!”
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” Lucy says, as gently as she can manage. “You can leave if you want.”
For a moment, the robot doesn’t comprehend. It smashes against the wall a few more times, then against a cupboard, then an old locker. And then finally, it seems to comprehend the open door, and sprints through it so quickly that sparks fly from its stair-climbing wheel.
Agwun looks at her quizzically.
“Is that what was supposed to happen?” he asks.
“Yes,” Lucy tells him. “We… we did it! We just destroyed a huge part of Jack’s legacy.”
“She just ran away screaming,” Agtu points out.
“Yes, she’s free to do whatever she wants,” Lucy replies. “That’s the point.” Her mouth hurts from grinning so hard.
Operation Obliterate Jack, part 1: restore happiness, is complete. Part two – opening the vault of the Resurrector, and convincing it to resurrect Lucy into the powerful siren she used to be – can finally begin.
Although maybe first she should explain the screaming to Mordecai and Eve, whose worried faces have appeared in opposite windows. Lucy grins even harder, and motions them both to come inside. It’s almost like she has friends.
to be continued in chapter 2