Chain 150: Babylon 5

Chain 150: Babylon 5

Location: Babylon 5, 2258
Age: 23
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+400] Herald of Order

[800/1400]  Telekinetic Telepath
[Free]      Iron Will
[Free]      Stone Cold
[Free]      Asceticism
[1050/1400] Pilot
[1400/1400] Hyperspace Awareness

Well, here's a place I never expected to be. Disembarking onto a diplomatic station in neutral space at what could be considered a momentous time. War will be coming, in fact several wars, and they will be surprisingly short, if extremely bloody. And so I decided I'd just throw a couple of monkey wrenches into the work, just to watch the hilarity. Though it's a shame the corridors weren't large enough for me to be my full height, so I kept myself to human size. At least I could continue to wear my armor

I registered as a diplomat, and brought a Harrow on board to use as a personal ship - Demona hung around as a member of the quote-unquote "diplomatic staff", and the Conspiracy ended up coming on board the station in various capacities (some of which included just hanging around to be annoying of course). It isn't as though another thousand people would put any particular amount of stress on things, after all, considering it already had a quarter million sophonts aboard. While I wasn't a member of the Free Worlds Alliance, I still represented a civilization that I named in a language no one would recognize. They didn't need to know that its proper name was the Terran Imperium, considering I'd loosely translated it to 'empire of dirt' in English. Commentary was made about that, before I poked fun back at the security officer who'd started it, pointing out with a chuckle that a surprisingly large number of species had homes whose named translated to 'dirt', 'ground', 'water', or simply 'our home'.

In any event... my presence did little to disrupt things at first, but as the Shadows started to go at it, their people assumed that my presence on the station (and the fact that Kosh and I actually enjoyed trading zen koans while we were on the clock) meant that I was an enemy sympathizer, and I'm sure no one is surprised by the number of assassination attempts that were made. That fellow Morden was pleasantly hostile toward me as well, especially after the Vorlons rubbed him the wrong way, but once I'd met him along I patted him on the shoulder and sympathized; "It's like working fast food, you can still put your best face forward and smile when the customer gripes at you, because when payday comes, those peons don't matter. Don't worry, an old man like me isn't going to take offense to the games being played."

That actually gave him pause long enough to drop the hostility to a tolerable level. "An interesting way to phrase it. One could be excused for thinking you were intimately familiar with human culture."

I rolled my shoulders in a shrug. "Same as it ever was with the talking heads. You may ask."

He seemed uncertain, before mustering a bit of courage. "Then... what do you want?"

I chuckled for a few seconds, before retracting the knight's helmet that normally hid my face, so that he could look me in my mismatched eyes. I wore a gargoyle's face, following Demona's example, and the Conspiracy had been doing likewise. "Quite honestly, Mr. Morden? Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground." I smiled beatifically at the expression shifting on his face from frustration to confusion as he processed it. "I do have a pressing appointment, but if I might say one thing?"

He scowled a bit. "You sound almost like one of... them."

I inclined my head towards him. "Well, you may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to? And you may ask yourself, am I right, or am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling a long-suffering sigh, before turning and walking away without further comment. I chuckled to myself before my helmet snapped back into place. (It's probably related that it was that very evening that the assassination attempts began, though, no matter how clumsy the first attempts were.)

The butterfly effect caused tightly-wound people to unfurl at times, and to break at others, but all in all I feel the differences made were positive. And some of the various things I had in the pipeline began moving toward fruition. Early meetings with Albert Bester threw him violently from his normal course - in the least of ways from me having procured a bit of Dust and altered it into a form that would remove the addictive qualities while amping up its benefits - and in the Vorlon-Shadow conflict, I began setting up my would-be civilization as a potential third option. While skeptical, he was able to pick up bits and pieces from me about the Terran Imperium and became convinced that I'd slipped in from a distant alternate future, with the fact that I shared psi-dampening drugs and devices that had no other psychological effects along with a bit of tech with him cementing it; what would have been his conspiracy suddenly included me, and I decided I'd be a bit more proactive in a few respects, even if the assassination plots against me had been stepped up.

By the time the next year rolled around, psychic awakenings amongst humans on most of their worlds and colonies had quadrupled, and the year after had stabilized about tenfold beyond the base rate from before. The Vorlons had a few pointed questions for me about that, but I gave them honest answers; it was nothing more than a bit of accelerating the timeline, putting pressure on their society in a way that would make any control by the Shadows more difficult, while still keeping it in such a position that it would not destabilize anything.

As the news of the death of President Santiago hit the air, a quartet of Shadow ships appeared near Babylon 5. This is all well and good normally, but I'm pretty certain no one expected a ship the size of Neptune to decloak a distance away, nor for the Shadow ships to be seized by some sort of beam and pulled away before being disintegrated. After that incident, even the Vorlons gave me a wider berth, but it was amusing. I kept myself largely uninvolved, though, with the whole burgeoning civil war. Sure was a pity when Clark died of an aneurysm, but his successor Susanna Luchenko did a bang-up job of keeping the Earth Alliance united, bringing their power to bear against the Shadows and their allies, and instituting the reorganization of the Psi Corps due to the massive swell of numbers it had been receiving.

At least the Shadows and Vorlons left the galaxy and the younger races took center stage, eventually. Mostly I sat and watched the fireworks.

Oh, and when Morden realized that every time I crossed paths with him I'd quoted various "zen koans" at him that had been nothing but twentieth-century music lyrics, he was livid. It was GREAT.