[Seamus Zelazny Harper likes to think of himself (incorrectly) as a lover, not so much a fighter. It's not that he can't hold his own; even before becoming part of the crew of the Maru, he'd been in more than a few scraps and vicious firefights with the Nietzscheans and other Earth gangs. Still, when it comes to the big battles, he's usually not the captain's absolute first choice to take into a fight. Instead, he takes Tyr, the massive former mercenary, and/or Rommie the ship's AI given powerful android form, and/or his old boss-lady, Beka, who's hypercompetent. They're the big guns.
[But him? He's the super smart, excessively good-looking guy who's way more helpful tooling around in the machine shop making a super weapon that'll save the day at the absolute last second. At 5'6" Harper isn't scary, he's tiny and cute, and the only person on the crew less intimidating than him is Trance, who's purple, sparkly, and also cute.]
[Being a fighter is a secondary thing that he only ever has to do because his life is suffering, and this is one hell of a fight to have to dig down for that side of himself.]
Oh crap!
[When Harper talks, his words have texture. The emphasis on the 'oh' almost turns it into a moan. The 'crap' is sharp and hard enough that it has all the weight of a dropped F bomb.]
[He's so busy staring at the battle that he doesn't realize at first that in the chaos he lost the kid. And so he looks for him. And tries to help because obviously, these people will need to fight their way out of this and regroup. Even though he knows literally no one here, it's easy to figure out sides because apparently evil people in this universe are color-coded. Creepy people in black robes and sometimes masks = bad. Everyone else that looks like probably normal, if nonhuman, people = good. Convenient.]
[So Harper does what Harper has always done best when caught in a chaotic fight where he's seriously under-powered. He picks up a rock and starts clubbing people from behind, like the underhanded, mean-spirited, rat fink Earther bastard he is.]
[That's how he chances upon some of the others. He cowers and hides in the ruins until he sees a Death Eater zeroing in on someone else and starting up with the evil "hahaha peasant I'll take you to my master yada yada" banter. Then there's a loud THOCK as he bashes them on the head with the rock from behind, knocking them the fuck out (and possibly even killing them, because he did not hold back). Somehow he manages to always do it when they're comically mid-sentence.]
I have no idea who these creeps are or what the hell is going on, but they're way too obviously evil and also too chatty for their own good. [It's like they think they're magically invincible or something. But rock beats magic if you try hard enough. Apparently.] Which, uh, isn't a combination that's complimentary with self-preservation.
[He's too chatty for his own good, too, but there's talking a lot to vent anxious energy and talking a lot to be a sadistic A-hole and they're two very different things.]
Have you seen a little kid with black hair and blue eyes? [He holds up a hand that doesn't have a bloody rock in it to show a relatively small height.] Yea high, very stubborn, ridiculously premature hero complex? I lost him in the chaos. I probably shouldn't care since he's not even mine to begin with, but we got entombed alive together so I still feel vaguely responsible.
II. Fainting Can Be a Superpower [OPEN]
[They're getting surrounded. Harper isn't sure what to do about that. His gauss gun is long gone, lost when he and the kid fought the ghost-thing on the way here, and wasn't working anymore anyway. But some instinct takes over and he knows what he has to do. He did it before. The prospect of doing it again is terrifying, but what's even more terrifying? Freakin' dying.]
Watch my body for a minute, will ya'?
[He says it the same way someone might ask someone else to watch their stuff while they go to a public restroom.]
[With that, Harper collapses like a puppet with its strings cut, only barely managing to do a sit that rolls into a more gentle fall instead of falling like a felled tree. An ephemeral shape rises out of him that vaguely looks humanoid at first but then it changes to look like a blue almost manta rayish creature, almost as big as Harper is. It's glowing and a little transparent and looks almost...gentle.]
[At first.]
[Then it starts ramming into the enemies surrounding them rather hard, trying to put dents in Death Eaters and Nazgul alike.]
[The way Harper moves on the ground makes it seem as if he's not entirely insensate; he seems to be trying to look around with unseeing eyes, and moving his arms vaguely as if trying to prepare to defend himself despite being as defenseless as a newborn kitten.]
[The projection is powerful and might be able to help break up the crowd around them, but as long as the manta ray thing is active, he can't see or move enough to defend his body. Somebody else might want to get on that if they want the manta ray to have a chance to do its work. It can't fight them all at once, so an attack might break through.]
III. Its Hour Come Round At Last [OPEN]
cw: implications of cannibalism
[The dementors are closing in and Harper is utterly useless. He's not a very unhappy person because he learned a long time ago that focusing too much on despair was not a survival trait. But he's also not a happy person and when close to 70% of your life was various flavors of misery, the other 29% was ambivalent hard work for the sake of pure survival, and maybe 1% was genuinely idyllic, that's not a lot to work with.]
[They crack open his head (metaphorically) and suck out all the happiness with a straw, and there's no buffer. There's no "well at least a lot of the rest of my life was neither happy or nor sad, just a lot of days at the office." When the happiness is gone, all that's left is the boring salvage work and pure misery and lots of absolutely mind-numbing horror.]
[His brain almost 404s and doesn't flashback to anything because it can't figure out what nightmare to flash back to. Sure there's stuff like his parents' murder but when it comes to personal tragedies, he's an overachiever. (Batman, eat your heart out.) Still, one of the worst and most recent is right there on the surface so it finally settles on that. He falls to the ground on his knees like someone who's had the life suddenly drained out of their body. The world has gone cold and dark and miserable, and to him it seems like he's once again on the Andromeda, but during the time its corridors were filled with the acrid smells of fried circuits and burning plastics, when everything was dark or only dimly lit with emergency lighting.]
[There are some who suffer hardship quietly, but Harper doesn't do anything quietly. So when the flashbacks start, he starts screaming bloody murder. If someone shakes him hard enough to snap out of it, he might even be helpful, given he's done a Patronus Charm and has the shaky knowledge of how to do it again, but for right now, everyone just gets treated to shrill screaming.]
[If any of them didn't know what kind of screams someone makes when they're being eaten alive, they do now.]
no subject
Oh crap.
[Seamus Zelazny Harper likes to think of himself (incorrectly) as a lover, not so much a fighter. It's not that he can't hold his own; even before becoming part of the crew of the Maru, he'd been in more than a few scraps and vicious firefights with the Nietzscheans and other Earth gangs. Still, when it comes to the big battles, he's usually not the captain's absolute first choice to take into a fight. Instead, he takes Tyr, the massive former mercenary, and/or Rommie the ship's AI given powerful android form, and/or his old boss-lady, Beka, who's hypercompetent. They're the big guns.
[But him? He's the super smart, excessively good-looking guy who's way more helpful tooling around in the machine shop making a super weapon that'll save the day at the absolute last second. At 5'6" Harper isn't scary, he's tiny and cute, and the only person on the crew less intimidating than him is Trance, who's purple, sparkly, and also cute.]
[Being a fighter is a secondary thing that he only ever has to do because his life is suffering, and this is one hell of a fight to have to dig down for that side of himself.]
Oh crap!
[When Harper talks, his words have texture. The emphasis on the 'oh' almost turns it into a moan. The 'crap' is sharp and hard enough that it has all the weight of a dropped F bomb.]
[He's so busy staring at the battle that he doesn't realize at first that in the chaos he lost the kid. And so he looks for him. And tries to help because obviously, these people will need to fight their way out of this and regroup. Even though he knows literally no one here, it's easy to figure out sides because apparently evil people in this universe are color-coded. Creepy people in black robes and sometimes masks = bad. Everyone else that looks like probably normal, if nonhuman, people = good. Convenient.]
[So Harper does what Harper has always done best when caught in a chaotic fight where he's seriously under-powered. He picks up a rock and starts clubbing people from behind, like the underhanded, mean-spirited, rat fink Earther bastard he is.]
[That's how he chances upon some of the others. He cowers and hides in the ruins until he sees a Death Eater zeroing in on someone else and starting up with the evil "hahaha peasant I'll take you to my master yada yada" banter. Then there's a loud THOCK as he bashes them on the head with the rock from behind, knocking them the fuck out (and possibly even killing them, because he did not hold back). Somehow he manages to always do it when they're comically mid-sentence.]
I have no idea who these creeps are or what the hell is going on, but they're way too obviously evil and also too chatty for their own good. [It's like they think they're magically invincible or something. But rock beats magic if you try hard enough. Apparently.] Which, uh, isn't a combination that's complimentary with self-preservation.
[He's too chatty for his own good, too, but there's talking a lot to vent anxious energy and talking a lot to be a sadistic A-hole and they're two very different things.]
Have you seen a little kid with black hair and blue eyes? [He holds up a hand that doesn't have a bloody rock in it to show a relatively small height.] Yea high, very stubborn, ridiculously premature hero complex? I lost him in the chaos. I probably shouldn't care since he's not even mine to begin with, but we got entombed alive together so I still feel vaguely responsible.
II. Fainting Can Be a Superpower [OPEN]
[They're getting surrounded. Harper isn't sure what to do about that. His gauss gun is long gone, lost when he and the kid fought the ghost-thing on the way here, and wasn't working anymore anyway. But some instinct takes over and he knows what he has to do. He did it before. The prospect of doing it again is terrifying, but what's even more terrifying? Freakin' dying.]
Watch my body for a minute, will ya'?
[He says it the same way someone might ask someone else to watch their stuff while they go to a public restroom.]
[With that, Harper collapses like a puppet with its strings cut, only barely managing to do a sit that rolls into a more gentle fall instead of falling like a felled tree. An ephemeral shape rises out of him that vaguely looks humanoid at first but then it changes to look like a blue almost manta rayish creature, almost as big as Harper is. It's glowing and a little transparent and looks almost...gentle.]
[At first.]
[Then it starts ramming into the enemies surrounding them rather hard, trying to put dents in Death Eaters and Nazgul alike.]
[The way Harper moves on the ground makes it seem as if he's not entirely insensate; he seems to be trying to look around with unseeing eyes, and moving his arms vaguely as if trying to prepare to defend himself despite being as defenseless as a newborn kitten.]
[The projection is powerful and might be able to help break up the crowd around them, but as long as the manta ray thing is active, he can't see or move enough to defend his body. Somebody else might want to get on that if they want the manta ray to have a chance to do its work. It can't fight them all at once, so an attack might break through.]
III. Its Hour Come Round At Last [OPEN]
cw: implications of cannibalism
[The dementors are closing in and Harper is utterly useless. He's not a very unhappy person because he learned a long time ago that focusing too much on despair was not a survival trait. But he's also not a happy person and when close to 70% of your life was various flavors of misery, the other 29% was ambivalent hard work for the sake of pure survival, and maybe 1% was genuinely idyllic, that's not a lot to work with.]
[They crack open his head (metaphorically) and suck out all the happiness with a straw, and there's no buffer. There's no "well at least a lot of the rest of my life was neither happy or nor sad, just a lot of days at the office." When the happiness is gone, all that's left is the boring salvage work and pure misery and lots of absolutely mind-numbing horror.]
[His brain almost 404s and doesn't flashback to anything because it can't figure out what nightmare to flash back to. Sure there's stuff like his parents' murder but when it comes to personal tragedies, he's an overachiever. (Batman, eat your heart out.) Still, one of the worst and most recent is right there on the surface so it finally settles on that. He falls to the ground on his knees like someone who's had the life suddenly drained out of their body. The world has gone cold and dark and miserable, and to him it seems like he's once again on the Andromeda, but during the time its corridors were filled with the acrid smells of fried circuits and burning plastics, when everything was dark or only dimly lit with emergency lighting.]
[There are some who suffer hardship quietly, but Harper doesn't do anything quietly. So when the flashbacks start, he starts screaming bloody murder. If someone shakes him hard enough to snap out of it, he might even be helpful, given he's done a Patronus Charm and has the shaky knowledge of how to do it again, but for right now, everyone just gets treated to shrill screaming.]
[If any of them didn't know what kind of screams someone makes when they're being eaten alive, they do now.]
IV. Wild Card
[Surprise me!]