![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
telepathicignorance(A note of warning: Nothing in here is necessary reading to play with Sidestep. Even when threads where the farm, hearbreak, and other traumas come up I'm likely to be fairly vague on details unless more has been discussed/planned.
It is hard to give a truly exhaustive list of the content warnings needed for this, but I'll try: violence, torture, human experimentation, slavery, sexual assault and rape, abuse, death, murder, self harm, suicide and suicidal ideation, body horror, gore, mental illness, drugs and drug use, mind control, and other extreme trauma.
If these things bother you you should probably just skip this.)
It is not publicly known in Sidestep's canon what Hearbreak was: coverup stories have suggested there was some kind of plague or terrorist weapon that caused people hit by the effect to behave the way that they did (spontaneous suicide) and the site itself is completely blocked off. This hasn't stopped people from breaking in—in fact, something almost seems to be luring in the more psychically sensitive members of the population—but the site has become infamous for hauntings and those who enter have an alarming tendency to disappear.
Exact details on what happened with Sidestep and Heartbreak are up in the air. There's a general sequence of events that is consistent, however: Heartbreak initially manifested as a slowly moving phenomena of spontaneous suicide that carved a path to Los Diablos (the city where Fallen Hero takes place) and settled on an apartment building, at which point the Rangers were called in to help. Sidestep wasn't an official Ranger, but there was some concern that Heartbreak might be telepathic in nature and so Ortega asked them to come along. The Rangers grouped together into pairs of two: Ortega/Charge and Marshall Steel leading the charge and Sidestep and Anathema following behind. Things differ slightly depending on playthrough, but every version of Sidestep falls behind due to a headache induced by Marshall Steel's anti-telepath protection and Anathema falls out of range of those protections staying next to them. Sidestep remembers Anathama melting their face off down to the skull with their own acid powers, but there's reason to believe that this memory may be false in some way despite Anathema being dead in the present. Shortly after witnessing that death Sidestep finds themself telepathically compelled to find and enter and enter an apartment where they find the real cause of Heartbreak: a young human who had been subjected to brutal experimentation. At this point, the options branch wildly for what can happen during the encounter: In Chris' case Heartbreak successfully invades their mind and tries to force them to shoot themself. Ortega intervenes and wrestles the gun away, at which point Chris throws themself out the window, four stories up in the air.
They should have died. Instead, a bunch of Directive Agents disguised as emergency workers whisked them away in an ambulance and claimed they died on the way to the hospital.
It's likely that they weren't aware Sidestep was a missing Re-Gene—Heartbreak was also the result of the Directive's human experimentation and the scientists involved would have wanted to see how an encounter would affect a living body—but once this was discovered they were taken back to the facility where Re-Genes are manufactured and trained (and in some cases, kept), known as the Farm, where they were subjected to absolutely brutal experimentation and torture and if you have any sensitivity to this kind of thing at all I strongly suggest you brace yourself or maybe just don't read the rest of this.
Before anything else, the scientists and doctors at the Farm performed lifesaving surgery on Sidestep to save them from injuries sustained during the fall. While not in and of itself a bad thing concerns that anesthesia or painkillers would taint the results of their experiments meant that this operation was performed with only paralytics to keep them from moving or fighting back, and Sidestep was conscious through at least part of it. Their pain gate was nonfunctional due to having been broken during their fall and was removed during this operation. Once they were stabilized, the scientists at the farm opened them up the rest of the way to examine the effects Heartbreak had on the body and probed their mind to find out how it had effected them telepathically; a process that, according to Sidestep's own words, left them more broken than the fall itself had. Assuming that they would either die or go catatonic so they could "reprogram" them for redeployment, the scientists stitched Sidestep back up and dumped them in a cell to "recover".
Except Sidestep didn't die. And when they tried to scrub Sidestep's mind for reprogramming, they resisted. And so, things got worse.
There are various motivations given for the torments inflicted upon them over the next several years (somewhere between 3 and 5 depending on source/how you interpret certain parts of the timeline). Considered unfit to be returned to service as a Cuckoo, farm scientists decided to use them in experiments testing the limits of the boost drug, the traumatic boost response, and their telepathic powers in general. The guards and other staff tortured them in an attempt to break them so they could be successfully wiped. And both groups hurt them for personal enjoyment, curiosity, and a desire to see just how far things could go.
The list is far from exhaustive, and Sidestep struggles to even fully remember everything that happened during their imprisonment, but here is a list of things that are known to have happened:
As Sidestep's friends were convinced they had died, no one came to rescue them. Desperation and the traumatic boost response led them to discover their possession capabilities and their powers eventually grew beyond the capacity of the dampeners to suppress them. They began practicing controlling staff members until they were capable of coordinating an escape.
Yes, I'm saying that they were literally tortured to the point their powers grew too strong for their captors to handle.
It is hard to give a truly exhaustive list of the content warnings needed for this, but I'll try: violence, torture, human experimentation, slavery, sexual assault and rape, abuse, death, murder, self harm, suicide and suicidal ideation, body horror, gore, mental illness, drugs and drug use, mind control, and other extreme trauma.
If these things bother you you should probably just skip this.)
It is not publicly known in Sidestep's canon what Hearbreak was: coverup stories have suggested there was some kind of plague or terrorist weapon that caused people hit by the effect to behave the way that they did (spontaneous suicide) and the site itself is completely blocked off. This hasn't stopped people from breaking in—in fact, something almost seems to be luring in the more psychically sensitive members of the population—but the site has become infamous for hauntings and those who enter have an alarming tendency to disappear.
Exact details on what happened with Sidestep and Heartbreak are up in the air. There's a general sequence of events that is consistent, however: Heartbreak initially manifested as a slowly moving phenomena of spontaneous suicide that carved a path to Los Diablos (the city where Fallen Hero takes place) and settled on an apartment building, at which point the Rangers were called in to help. Sidestep wasn't an official Ranger, but there was some concern that Heartbreak might be telepathic in nature and so Ortega asked them to come along. The Rangers grouped together into pairs of two: Ortega/Charge and Marshall Steel leading the charge and Sidestep and Anathema following behind. Things differ slightly depending on playthrough, but every version of Sidestep falls behind due to a headache induced by Marshall Steel's anti-telepath protection and Anathema falls out of range of those protections staying next to them. Sidestep remembers Anathama melting their face off down to the skull with their own acid powers, but there's reason to believe that this memory may be false in some way despite Anathema being dead in the present. Shortly after witnessing that death Sidestep finds themself telepathically compelled to find and enter and enter an apartment where they find the real cause of Heartbreak: a young human who had been subjected to brutal experimentation. At this point, the options branch wildly for what can happen during the encounter: In Chris' case Heartbreak successfully invades their mind and tries to force them to shoot themself. Ortega intervenes and wrestles the gun away, at which point Chris throws themself out the window, four stories up in the air.
They should have died. Instead, a bunch of Directive Agents disguised as emergency workers whisked them away in an ambulance and claimed they died on the way to the hospital.
It's likely that they weren't aware Sidestep was a missing Re-Gene—Heartbreak was also the result of the Directive's human experimentation and the scientists involved would have wanted to see how an encounter would affect a living body—but once this was discovered they were taken back to the facility where Re-Genes are manufactured and trained (and in some cases, kept), known as the Farm, where they were subjected to absolutely brutal experimentation and torture and if you have any sensitivity to this kind of thing at all I strongly suggest you brace yourself or maybe just don't read the rest of this.
Before anything else, the scientists and doctors at the Farm performed lifesaving surgery on Sidestep to save them from injuries sustained during the fall. While not in and of itself a bad thing concerns that anesthesia or painkillers would taint the results of their experiments meant that this operation was performed with only paralytics to keep them from moving or fighting back, and Sidestep was conscious through at least part of it. Their pain gate was nonfunctional due to having been broken during their fall and was removed during this operation. Once they were stabilized, the scientists at the farm opened them up the rest of the way to examine the effects Heartbreak had on the body and probed their mind to find out how it had effected them telepathically; a process that, according to Sidestep's own words, left them more broken than the fall itself had. Assuming that they would either die or go catatonic so they could "reprogram" them for redeployment, the scientists stitched Sidestep back up and dumped them in a cell to "recover".
Except Sidestep didn't die. And when they tried to scrub Sidestep's mind for reprogramming, they resisted. And so, things got worse.
There are various motivations given for the torments inflicted upon them over the next several years (somewhere between 3 and 5 depending on source/how you interpret certain parts of the timeline). Considered unfit to be returned to service as a Cuckoo, farm scientists decided to use them in experiments testing the limits of the boost drug, the traumatic boost response, and their telepathic powers in general. The guards and other staff tortured them in an attempt to break them so they could be successfully wiped. And both groups hurt them for personal enjoyment, curiosity, and a desire to see just how far things could go.
The list is far from exhaustive, and Sidestep struggles to even fully remember everything that happened during their imprisonment, but here is a list of things that are known to have happened:
- The guards would beat them until they were unresponsive.
- They were dosed with Talodine (a telepathy suppresant) until their body developed a partial resistance to it.
- They were put through similar experiments to the one that created Heartbreak. Somehow, they survived this.
- It's implied that in addition to trying to wipe them the scientists tried to install other personalities over theirs.
- They were raped a number of times by farm staff.
- They were gaslit by scientists, told that they did well and rewarded then later punished for the same thing, or the opposite, until they became unable to trust what other people were saying without verifying with their telepathy.
- There was a concentrated effort to convince them that their friends never cared about them and that no one would ever care for them, likely to reduce the chance that they would try and escape. They came to believe this.
- They were forced to undergo various invasive medical procedures.
- They were kept in isolation for so long they "started screaming at the walls". This was likely a fairly common occurrence, as every minute they weren't used for experiments was spent in their cell.
- They were tortured in a number of other ways. Basically, anything that didn't permanently maim or kill them was fair game.
- A number of other experiments were performed on them, potentially including exposure to strange "supernatural" things.
As Sidestep's friends were convinced they had died, no one came to rescue them. Desperation and the traumatic boost response led them to discover their possession capabilities and their powers eventually grew beyond the capacity of the dampeners to suppress them. They began practicing controlling staff members until they were capable of coordinating an escape.
Yes, I'm saying that they were literally tortured to the point their powers grew too strong for their captors to handle.
