station72 | A CURRENT FLOWING

CHARACTERS: Everyone (really)
WHERE: Outside of the Memory Bank, On the Lam, The Stealth Ship, and Station 72
WHEN: DAY :052/DAY :001
SUMMARY: Things don’t go exactly as planned. When do they ever?
WARNINGS: Violence, death, allusions to weaponized suicide. Will update further if necessary.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE:
Erastos Loke & Friends
When you finally catch up to Erastos Loke - his paper, his pens, his elegant furniture and his heavily-lidded eyes - it doesn’t take long to get him to talk. All he needs is a little persuasion or a lot of torture? Or, wait. Maybe we got those two mixed up. Either way, he starts to give the strike team intel once the screws are turned on him.

You’ve already begun to suspect most the information Loke gives over. H+H1 has stayed hidden by avoiding any strong organization and by staying extremely low-tech. Additionally, the most powerful members have been quietly manipulating Concordia’s politics and security to keep the actions of the organization obscured. They’ve tipped off Gorram Saffit, they’ve mislead and blackmailed the police. When you begin to press Loke about who gave them the devices that have allowed their bombs to become so deadly, he tells you frankly that he doesn’t understand them. They were given to him by a man - or someone who looked like a man, he clarifies, when Carata asks - who he had assumed to be some wealthy foreigner until he realized he couldn’t find any evidence of the gentleman’s existence. The mysterious stranger had given Loke the devices which consisted of two dozen small parts that could easily retrofit almost any bomb and allowed them to bypass Concordian security systems looking for highly modernizes tech. Prior to the stranger’s involvement, Loke had already been working with a number of his H+H1 associates - the stranger had sympathized and supported them, and the devices provided the power they needed. Who else has access to these devices? No one. Only Loke.

Unfortunately, when the hosts ask further probing questions about the mysterious stranger’s identity - Did he say who he was? Where he came from? - something goes very, very wrong. Erastos looks briefly stricken, then dabs at his nose. It’s bleeding? Quite a lot, actually. He barely has time to cry out before he begins bleeding from his eyes, his nose and his ears. Then Loke drops to the lush carpet beneath his feed, dead. Oops.

Before the hosts have time to react, an alarm starts to blare through the townhouse. Apparently Loke has a second security system tied to his vital signs. Suffice to say, your cover probably won’t survive this long. It might be a good idea to get the heck out of dodge and make your way to the rendezvous point for extraction.

IN THE GAP WHERE IT SPARKS:
The Memory Bank & H+H1’s Bomb Squad
Thanks to the Batman + Prep Time and the Jr. Technophile, the bomb planted by H+H1 deep in the depths of the Omega Memory Bank is successfully located and disarmed although not without cutting it dangerously close to the wire.

Unfortunately nobody gets the chance to wipe the sweat from their brow. The H+H1 bomb squad knows the exact moment the bomb was supposed to go off, and they know exactly when they’ve failed. So even though Sirius and Company seemed like they could handle three average everyday people, they don’t get the chance. The lead Bomber makes the subtlest move towards her pocket - and triggers a secondary, smaller explosive on her person. The three members of the bomb squad are eliminated (hope you were standing a safe distance away, Sirius n’ Co), and while the collateral damage isn’t anything to sneeze at, it’s far from destructive enough to destroy the bank. Further, the explosion isn’t laced with any EMP blasts. While the hosts may not even be injured, the explosion definitely trips the Memory Bank’s fire suppression system as well as its local alarms. Soon (very soon), Concordian Public Security and Fire Teams will be on the scene. The hosts won’t want to be there when they arrive.

SHEPHERDS AND YOUR CROWNS OF STARS:
Escaping Concordia & Returning to the Station
With Loke dead and the secret of the Enemy’s retrofit tech gone with him, and H+H1’s plot to blow the Memory Bank hamstrung by the efforts of the hosts, it’s time to get off planet. Lets be honest: your cover identities were never going to survive this. Luckily, between the minor explosion and a jail break causing riots under the city, Public Security can’t exactly rally their forces to come chasing after the hosts. They have much bigger fish to fry. Carata and Nirad made sure that all the hosts - Loke’s infiltration squad, the bomb disarmament group and the prison breakers - knew where to meet up after their respective assignments: a concrete channel for runoff where a familiar bus is waiting to sweep you all away to the outskirts of the city. It’s less pressing to be invisible now. No one will be left on the planet to suffer the consequences; any comatose members of the Nest have been carefully packed into the bus too. Isn’t that nice?

Once they arrive at the outskirts of the sprawling diamond-glittering city, a point of black in the sky elongates and expands as the stealth tech strips back from the ship that once brought them all here. With straggles wrangled and comatose friends carefully stowed, everyone boards the ship and rockets off from Opia’s surface. Concordia with its high rises and neon, its holographic advertisements and its press of humanity, its ever present buzz of synthetic paired with organic, falls rapidly away below the ship until it’s merely one bright point of many on a densely populated planet. And then Opia too drops away, becoming a dark marble in a deeper, blacker space. When the stealth ship jumps away, it does so with a nauseating jerk.

It’s a short trip back to the Station, the closest thing any of you have to home. Cathaway and Prince are waiting there to collect their equipment (though any additional souvenirs are yours to keep) and to welcome them back.

It’s been a long time and there are new faces to greet you. Time to get caught up. Set your clocks to DAY: 001.

((OOC Notes: Feel free to play any of these events out. We’ll dip in with NPCs and so forth if it seems necessary/y’all ask, but feel free to take control of anyone if it lends to your threads. Backtagging and backdating is, as always welcome.

As of this log, all hosts have (more or less) safely arrived back on Station 72; all hosts - newly hatched and old hats - may now interact. YAY!

If you have any general questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ It's after their conversation with Shepard - and Sam uses the word conversation loosely - and after they've been on the station for a little bit that Sam reaches for where Pidge's presence always rests, somewhere at the back of his mind, and tugs a little on their mental connection. ]

( You busy? Got a couple of ideas to run by you, then I thought we might go on a treasure hunt. )

[ Pidge's attention jumps slightly at the tug. She still doesn't really like that, but she's sort of gotten used to it. ]

( Uh, no, not really. What'd you have in mind? )

[ Sam's gotten... too used to it, maybe. More than he expected. There's a faint note of apology for making her start like that. ]

( Meet me in the hangar? )

[ Pidge is not looking forward to the day that she becomes used to it. The idea scares her. ]

( Sure, I'll be down in a minute. )

[ And in a few minutes, she wanders into the hangar. Once she spots Sam, she beelines over to him. ]

Hey, what's up?

[ Honestly, it still unsettles him, too, when he catches himself doing it. But he's still trying to figure out what to do about that one.

He's leaning against one of the least insect-like ships - the one he and Clint have been sleeping in since their arrival on the station, because hell no to the communal wall pods in life support - but he straightens up when he sees her. ]

Thought you might want to take a look at the nav systems in the ships here, see if we can figure out where they've been and how they got back here.

[ And where they are now, but after the younger Sam's space flight, that one seems like it might be a little harder. ]

These things have actual computers?

[ She eyes the very weird looking ship. If it does and she can actually access it, it might come in handy. Nothing to lose. Right? ]

I've never actually been inside one of these. What do they use them for?

[ She's curious. ]

Missions, I'm guessing. Getting people to and from places the station can't go.

[ Where ever the hell the station is, it hadn't been able to get them to Concordia, after all. ]

The ones I can get into, yeah. Those- [ He gestures towards the few ships that obviously resemble the station more than anything else. ] -I can't seem to figure out. If you wanna figure out how the station works, I'd say those might be a place to start.

If they're made from the same stuff, definitely.

[ It's certainly a good place for her to start poking around. She eyes the hatchway and then starts to clamber up without much preamble. ]

I should've brought my computer along, but taking a look is still a good idea.

[ And there she goes. It doesn't surprise him at all that she scrambles on up into the ship mid conversation, and he follows up after her. There's a pair of bags on one of the seats in the ship, Sam's wing pack tucked neatly among them, and his fingers brush over it absently as he walks by it. ]

This is the one that I could make the most sense of. It looks like it's been retro-fitted with Nest stuff, but there's definitely a nav system. Clint was fiddling around with it earlier, but I figured I'd wait for you before really looking through it.

It's... definitely something.

[ Pidge frowns as she settles into the main control chair. Her feet barely scrape the floor as she leans over the control panel. The girl is short and she's still hoping for a growth spurt one of these days. She cautiously runs her fingers over the control panel and then tries to find the power button. ]

Let's take a look-

[ He drops into the chair to her side, leaning in to watch her work and ready to help if she needs it. ]

Whatever information we can get off these is better than nothing, there's gotta be something in their nav systems. And if we can figure out how the ships communicate with each other, maybe we can get them linked up to drones, send them out looking. Or put 'em every where we go, get them to scan and send the data back to us.

[ Sam's been thinking about this since they talked about it - but it wasn't just a half-assed promise for him, he meant it. He lets out a thoughtful hum as he watches her, considering. ]

I haven't asked, but I'm curious - why Pidge?

That's what I was thinking. Unless they scrub the nav computers every time they come back... And even then, there has to be something, right?

[ She's hunched over the controls, a frown of concentration on her face as she tries to navigate through menus and an unfamiliar interface. His question makes her start - just slightly - and she glances at him with a blink of surprise. ]

Uh - no particular reason, I guess.

Whatever there is, we'll find it.

[ The symbiote connection between them hums somewhere at the back of Sam's head, just underneath the surface - he's used to the way it never really goes away, but like this, with the two of them working together on something important, it almost seems to settle. ]

Do you prefer Pidge or Katie?

[ It's oddly comforting, which is in of itself slightly disturbing when Katie stops to think about it. She doesn't like thinking about the fact that the thing in her head might be affecting how she approaches people or thinks about them. Ugh. ]

Uh, either's fine, but... Katie.

[ Honestly, Sam doesn’t like to think about it, either. He’s settled into using it as a tool to enhance the things he already does, takes comfort in the fact that the relationships he’s forming would be significant ones even without it.

If he was being really honest with himself, he might acknowledge that the way he avoids Parker is just as much about proving to himself that the symbiote isn’t influencing who he associates with as it is about the fact that he doesn’t like her and she doesn’t want him near. But that much honesty, well. He ain’t ready for it. ]

Katie, then.

[ She's been at this for a while, it feels like. Even when she strengthens her mental barriers, it's still becoming easier to 'slip' into the talking with others via the mind-link. It feels more comfortable. Easier to just 'ping' someone instead of walk across the room.

She's still trying to grapple with that. ]

Sure.

[ She shoots him a grin. ]

A CURRENT FLOWING

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