[hatch log] it reaches to the fence it wraps it rail by rail

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: The Station
WHEN: DAY :046
SUMMARY: New hatches . ..-and the promise of another.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

NEW HATCHES
YOU WAKE UP you are suddenly changed. No. That's not right. You're you and there's no suddenly about it. It's been a while, hasn't it? It feels like waking up from a very deep, extended sleep or like surfacing up from the darkness of the ocean. Right there in your own head there's something both familiar and strange and you know intuitively that you've been unconscious for more than just a blink of the eye.

But here you are, a small miracle of the multiverse: lying in a small faintly hexagonal chamber, a gentle white light emanating from the surrounding walls. If you were injured during your escape, those injuries have been healed. If you were anxious or frightened or distraught, those feelings have been briefly calmed. There's something strangely peaceful about waking up here. That feeling persists even as you find the tube running from the base of your neck to the compartment's rear wall.

But once the tube's disconnected? Things get loud. A wave of emotion fills that peaceful void - fear, uncertainty, relief, a sense of purpose or loneliness or anxiety. A matching dread. An easy comfort. Maybe some of these emotions are yours, but they can't all be. After the initial sensory overload, the mental buzz elongates: stretches out into a murmur like the sound of a party happening behind a closed door.

You can sit up - barely -, and shift out of the pod. There’s a ladder at your feet and a little cubby just before it with anything you brought with you as well as a set of crisp, loose-fitting white clothes; while your injuries are healed, whatever you’re wearing is in the exact state it was before. Maybe it's time for a change? Drop down the ladder to the floor of the Nesting Deck and you’ll find you’re not alone. There's two of you and the closer you are to this stranger, the louder the sound in your head becomes. --Actually they're not quite strangers either, are they? Something is wound about and between the two of you. You know him and he knows you. He is as familiar as this place you've never been is.

Welcome to Station 72. The air buzzes with activity. Somewhere deep in the Station, other minds call to yours. They are bright, brilliantly celebratory spots in your subconscious. They are sun-warm gentle, or they are fire and the taste of ash, or they are a tangled garden, or they are a shadowed black wood, or they are the feeling of flight through dense cirrus clouds. No two links are exactly the same, but you know for certain that you are connected to all of them in at least some small way.

Maybe that's why the sensation of one of those links blooming into the shape of a thought in your head doesn't startle you:


AN ASSIGNMENT
THE VOICE UNFOLDING isn't really a voice at all. It's a series of shapes, an image of a path curving through the slate and white interior of the Station, of a warm stone and the steady ka-thud ka- thud
of something living. It's mottled light. The sensation of easy momentum, of walking at the edge of a field in summer in a place where the adjacent wood casts a long, cool shadow. It says:

( We have a task for anyone who has time to spare. )

Then Cathaway's mind folds up like a letter and slides back into the white noise murmur of the Station. However, anyone who goes looking to find her won't have a hard time. The Station seems to bend itself to make doing so quickly; familiar paths lead somewhere strange: Cathaway stands in a quiet chamber whose only feature is a case at the center. Inside the case is a large egg with a beetle shell iridescence - one of the many prizes stolen from the ABA!.

"It seems to do best when in the company of something alive. We'd like it if you and the others would spend some time with it." She withdraws her hand from the case and smiles cheerfully. "Think of it as an experiment."

---

((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for all new hosts as well as the catch-all for an optional mini-event. If your character wants to babysit an egg, please make a quick note of it over HERE for...reasons. Feel free to make your own logs and posts additional to this if you care to. You can find a more detailed overview of the host hatching process HERE. You can find additional setting information about the Station HERE. If you have any questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

( splashes like the trouble child )

[unfavoured]

[ There's a wet slosh slosh and an irritating squeak squeak of boots that need a retirement plan for yesterday on clean floors near the docks. Drenched like a wet dog, Parker is heading back to the last place she remembers placing her stuff. Not that she has a lot of stuff, never been one for it, but after that terrible decision to flop face-down and getting "rescued" by Steve, she needs a change. She doesn't find it in the shelf she once overturned and kicked like a petulant child not getting to have cookies for dinner, and she's immediately too tired to give a shit. That's the constant state of mind she seems to be in. Tired all the time.

Parker sloshes further down. She goes by the shelves of equipment and alien items she doesn't care to recognize. She stops when she spots him, broad, tall, striking quite a picture with his little pad. She stares at him, drip drip, and frowns. ]

There's a pool.

[ Is it a question? Is she informing him? Who knows! ]

[regalled]

[There's a high scent on the air that arrives with footsteps that aren't yet familiar- but are close. She has been here for some while, and she did tend to wander. It's chemical but clean, and it cuts through even the seemingly lifeless air of the lower levels.

Still, he is somewhat surprised. She is certainly- in a state.]

Yes, there is. [The edge of caution would be notable, even for someone who wasn't so tonally reserved as he was.]

[unfavoured]

[ Dripping like a wet dog, Parker keeps her eyes on him until the Prince finally gives his answer. Not that she was waiting for one, or at least she doesn't even know what kind of answer she was expecting, but it's still one and she ends up shrugging in return like the socially-awkward woman she is. Then her eyes move, no longer interested in him, as she tries to see if there is any rucksack there. No, nothing. Hmm. ]

I don't remember where I left my stuff.

[ She doesn't sound too concerned though, if mildly annoyed for the loss of her papers and notebooks, but restarting hard work is something she is unfortunately deeply familiar with. No, she doesn't sound as annoyed as she sounds tired - to the bone. She feels like that too, though her presence is diminished as she constantly forces it to be. It only slips through the cracks of a tired mind and a body in constant effort. With it, the phantom of her mind, comes something that she has been able to push down until now, after so long of trying to pretend she could deal with, a crescendo day by day. The thin thread of wires and needles and discomfort, how it's too palpable now in her flesh and skin and bones and tendons and every little nerve, how acutely aware of that constant pulse and pain in her back, pressing down on that all she is made of, growing in the space where she doesn't let anyone touch her to make it a little better, like she allowed home. It is too big of a vulnerability and one she has hidden ever since she has carried it. Digging into her with no sign of diminishing, but better than when she woke, after floating about in the pool. Maybe that's why there isn't that much of a sneer on her wet face. ]

Do you know where it is?

[ Might as well ask, even if everything she asks never really gets an answer. Well, she figures this much earns one but she doesn't know. ]

[regalled]

[If he were younger- or perhaps older- less certain in his reality, he might question if this was simply some sort of surreal dream. It was strange enough. Unlike Parker and unlike most hosts. But it was reality, and there is a simplicity presented in the question. A thing which could be done, where so little could for someone like her.]

No, but I can find out.

[It's a simple enough offer, in a way, but something he may not have done if he were not- in a better mood, as of late. Or if she were being as intolerable as she so often was. He sets the pad down on the nearest flat surface, reaching his hand out to set beside it, pressing into the dingy white of the station. A furrow appears on his brow, and he can feel the pat pat pat of water dripping off of her as he- checks the inventory.]

[unfavoured]

[ To be fair, she is still relatively out of it, slugging from the induced sleep, tired from the pull on every muscle and tendon, on every tendon. So while far from being amicable - but when is she ever? - Parker keeps her distance without the usual stare and glare, the bite to her words and her aggressive defensiveness.

As he turns to the pad, Parker lowers her face and frowns, feeling the painful jolts of her spine, the needle-piercing pain through bone and marrow of where the synthetic hairline-nerves hang from.

There's a moment of quiet and pause, and then she caves in, crouching in place as if there is no comfortable position to exist in, covering her face with her hands, dipping her head into them. It's becoming intolerable to carry on like this. She talks through her fingers, her voice stable but tight as if it burns her tongue to speak the words she does, like some admission of weakness she does not want to give into but has been cornered to do anyway. ]

Can you find some painkillers while you're at it?

[regalled]

[He is silent- focused. The station is a million layers, a billion, paper thing, flaking away. He cards though them, feels the texture under his hands, the flow of the thing through his own, the size and scale, the warmth of it, deep within. There were many hidden spaces, some opened and closed as needed, some seemed to- go, perhaps forever. He was looking for one, with something out of place, perhaps tinged by a presence comparatively new-

By the time he is pulling his hand back and stepping away to turn back to Parker, she is already crouched, low and small, echoing pain and the threat of a chill. Another surprise. The words come at a distance- remembering the shape of them as he comes back to himself.]

They would be in the medical wing.

[That, at least, was reliable.]

I know where your things are. [Then-] The symbiote is capable of easing that.

[unfavoured]

[ For as long he is silent, she is too, focusing on pressing her fingers against her forehead, the temples, trying to find any relief from pushing pain in other parts of her body but not quite successful. Instead, she just tries to will it out, to focus it out. Breathe in, breathe out. The threads and nerves combined under skin and flesh feel like twisting and turning, ripples of jolts up and down it. Breathe in, breathe out. She wants to rip it off.

She look up when he speaks, hands sliding off her face to cross behind her neck. Her eyes narrow again to a less lost and dazed look. As you would expect her to. ]

You don't need my answer to that. [ She says with a low voice. Relief from painkillers is only temporary, but she won't budge. She takes a pause to breathe in, breathe out. Then with effort that she tries not to show, she straightens up back to her feet. ] My stuff?

[regalled]

[He is quiet, very quiet, for a long moment. There is a clear and easy answer to her words, as stubborn as she is. It didn't matter if she had an answer for it. The symbiote would ease that. All it needed was time, and unless she did something- foolish- it would have that.

Still, it would only end where it always had, and arguing with her now as the equivalent of kicking something small and helpless while it could not fight back.]

Yes. [He raises his eyebrows, gestures towards the entrance of the space. Unspoken- she would need to stand to find it.]

[unfavoured]

[ Doing foolish things seems to be a pattern for Parker, but insofar she has steered clear from it. Mostly because she has been passed out in coma. Her state, her pain, she hates when it gets so much that she has to show it, especially because it seems to make others-- well, pity her. See part of her that she doesn't want to show. But she has to admit that she rather has them see that pain than the actual thing that keeps eating away at her, the guilt she is too familiar with and spiraling depression she has yet to admit.

Regardless, all she does at his answer is give him a mirrored eyebrow raise. She's up with her hands on her knees, keeping the small shakes of pain at bay with that annoying stubbornness of her. ]

Okay? Just-- go. I'll follow.

[ The way she speaks is sparse, subdued and economizing words and breath to keep her focus in pushing the pain into a quiet ripple, as far away as possible from others with her barriers and walls. ]