[hatch log] into the garbage chute, flyboy(s)

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: All
WHERE: The Station + Concordia
WHEN: DAY :43 - :44
SUMMARY: New hosts hatch on the Station; their arrival on Concordia is bumpier and smellier than usual.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary.

YOU WAKE UP and nothing will ever be the same again. A moment ago you were somewhere familiar - or familiar enough; now you're lying in a small faintly hexagonal chamber lit by a gentle white light emanating from the surrounding walls. You can't shake the sensation that you've been asleep for a long, long time.

The sluggishness of coming out of a deep, dreamless sleep persists all the way until you disconnect the tube running from the compartment's rear wall to the base of your neck. Then things get loud. A wave of emotion fills the void. Fear, uncertainty, relief, a sense of purpose or loneliness or anxiety; maybe some of these emotions are yours, but they can't all be. Somewhere, someone else is feeding their thoughts and emotions into your mind. On the plus side, it's easy to follow that digging, familiar sensation to each other. After all, you're part of the same brood. You belong together.

Welcome to Station 72. Sirius and Kavinsky will have one day aboard the Station to acclimate to their new reality before they're whisked away to Concordia to join the rest of the young hosts. Get to know one another, ask some burning questions; in a day's time you'll be boarding a shuttle and going somewhere far, far away.

MEANWHILE IN CONCORDIA, the host's espionage efforts are coming to a head. Preparations for infiltrating Public Security HQ are in full swing, a handful of hosts are planning to get in close with Representative Goram Saffit himself and there's currently a semi-functional android taking up one of the beds of the Bearings apartment block. Honestly, there's more than enough on everyone's plate without piling new hosts on top of it all. But that doesn't stop Nirad from disappearing when he's called to return to the Station. Presumably, this means everyone better get ready to debrief some new arrivals soon...

     ON THE STATION, there's a hum in the air - or the mind, rather. Follow the buzz and it'll lead to the Hangar Deck where a slick brick-shaped black transport is waiting. The source of the mental hum seems to be a young man: Nirad has come to collect you. He'll answer any questions; in fact, he seems happy to talk and length about absolutely anything. The boy's apparently the rambling type with little to no filter between his brain and his mouth. The combination of talking and mental hum can be disorienting. Once safely aboard the transport, the ship’s landing platform descends through the floor of the hangar. It snaps into place in the airlock. For a moment there’s a beat of perfect stillness, a shiver of anticipation. Then the transport is flung through the shaft and ejected into the wild black of space. There’s a nauseating lurch in your belly as it bursts through the delicate shell of the multiverse and snaps into real space above the blue and yellow marble of the planet Opia. Somewhere, thousands of miles below in the city of Concordia, the rest of your brood is waiting for you.

     A BUMPY LANDING
The stealth ship slices down toward the planet until it fills the entire viewscreen. "All right, everyone out," Nirad announces, unbuckling his harness and jumping to his feet. Uh. What?

He leads to the port side of the transport ship where there's a small series of circular ports. They're roughly shoulder width. At a touch of a button, the ports open out to a series of escape pods. There's only enough room for one and it looks like you'll be lying on your back the whole trip. "Hop in. I'll launch you and then follow you down in my own. The pod's stealth tech should keep you invisible to the locals until someone comes to find it, but don't forget to scrap the pod when you're out of it. We can't risk someone finding it laying around." A pause. "Sorry, by the way. Usually we'd just land the ship but it's getting kind of obvious."

Hopefully you weren't expecting a nice, easy trip down to the planet because this is dark and joyless. The escape pod has no windows. It launches from the transport ship and rockets downward at the behest of the planet's gravity. Everything shakes. It's desperately cold, then violently hot and then-- something gives. The sound of something whistling. A jerk. The escape pod trembles as the anti-grav jets at the base deploy. It's a last attempt to soften the landing, then the pod drives down into a mountain of debris like a tent stake into muddy earth.

Congratulations, you've landed more or less safely in Concordia's only open air landfill.

     SEARCH & RESCUE
It's three in the morning and maybe you're asleep in Bearings or maybe you're burning the midnight oil; either way, Carata is in your mind telling you to get up and get ready. "The new hosts have landed. Let's go pick them up, shall we? If I were were, I'd wear some clothes you don't really care for."

Time to go digging through the city's biggest dumpster transfer facility!

The escape pods will have to be unearthed and opened from the outside to rescue their inhabitants. Once free, be sure to dismantle pods and scatter them through the piles of debris. Eventually all of this will be recycled, but we don't want anyone finding mysterious alien technology in one piece now do we?

---

((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for all new and recently returning hosts; any threads on the Station should be closed to newly awakened hosts or Station-based NPCs. Any threads on Concordia can be open to both new and old hosts!

If you have questions about the mission specifically, direct them to the most recent calendar post HERE. You can find a more detailed overview of the hatching process HERE; you might also want to take a glance at the MISSION CONCORDIA BRIEFING. For all other questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages.))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[doggo]

[If anyone's going to see Harry again, it will be Sirius. Determination seeps in, that same old forceful defiance that shoves back against any hard line. His laugh scrapes low in his register, too short to be properly amused.]

You don't know-- [Through his teeth, which he bares in a maniac sort of grin--] What I've done--

[--What he did to get out, to save Harry, to kill Peter--a gesture toward setting right what he could never undo.

The ropes slip up against his ankles, the spell a familiar wrinkle at the edge of his awareness. And Sirius burns madly past all of it, sad chilly calm, vindictiveness, regret--comes right up against Remus with the deep intensity of his will.

Even without the telegraph of connection, that same hint toward magic, intent jumps clearly into his face, too thin to disguise it--eyes narrowed, teeth savagely bared. Sirius goes for the familiar, levicorpus, forceful enough that even wandless, wordless, it will work against Remus, buy Sirius the moment to scrabble with the bonds, get himself free--get the wand back--]

[cur]

[ Even without the hiss of a spell in the connection, the intent's plain on Sirius' face. Remus braces against it on instinct, but his mind is distracted, caught on that one odd, stray thought, Peter, searing and new and out of place. Peter's long dead, past tense; Sirius' words match, that admission of guilt, but the flood of purpose behind it doesn't.

Confusion cracks his focus, and the spell hits — starts to. He feels the sharp tug at his ankles just before instinct pushes back with the counter-curse, barely keeping his balance as the invisible hooks give, the aim of his wand briefly faltering. The retaliation's more vindictive than strategic. Petrificus Totalus, visceral and harsh enough to ring out clear in the connection, anger seeping through the cracks of his control. ]

Enough.

[ There's a plea in that single word, somewhere beneath the tight anger. Because if this isn't enough, he'll have to do worse; stronger spells, more violent. Nothing Sirius doesn't deserve, surely, but also nothing he's resorted to himself. The thought's incongruous, frustrating in a way he can't focus on just yet. ]

[doggo]

[First year stuff, full-body binds and dangling one another by the ankles. The curse doesn't hurt when it jams through him; what hurts is the shunt of Remus' intent and conviction, a bitter flood that Sirius doesn't know how to manage.

There's a violence in the way his limbs snap tight under paralysis. With his jaw winched tight, there's no counter-curse that he can growl out, there is nothing he can do but stare up at Remus, dark and wide-eyed and mad.

If he were thinking more clearly, perhaps he would have just said, straight off, begged Remus to listen--but he has never been much for begging, and everything feels-- off, there's not much sense to the pattern of his thoughts, and seeing Remus had only confused it all more, he hadn't reckoned on that, too possessed with the same single-minded thought that still sears at him from inside out, he's at Hogwarts.

And looking at Remus now, from the floor, only reminds him of everything, the war, James, Peter, standing in the garden at the cottage smoking a cigarette, with the late summer sky obscured behind a cotton mass of clouds, pulled over the stars and the moon and everything--a heap of rubble, splinters from a door--the clear night sky out the narrow window in Azkaban, cut high on the wall--and taste of the air, and the sea, and Peter, again--Remus will not kill him, he would have done it already if he wanted to kill him, he can't kill him, Sirius is kept perfectly still by the curse but he's throwing himself against it anyways, and if he can only make Remus understand--careening from one image to the next, to the next, like falling down the stairs. The fissures of panic bleed into anger, deepens like bruising in with Remus' emotion and floods up raw through the threading of connection.]

i was gonna say sorry i'm so slow but u know me so. NO SURPRISE

[cur]

[ Sirius finally goes still, and there's the expectation of reprieve. A break in the tension, the sense of having won, of having gained some sliver of control. What should be relief is replaced by thoughts, one on top of the other, mundane glimpses of gardens and clouds and the moon — and there's a flinch of fear, quick as the image, feeding back into the noise — and it's all fractured by violence, by Peter. Even if he wanted to kill Sirius, he'd be hard pressed to manage it now. There's a headache knocking at the back of his skull, and his own thoughts are difficult to grasp amidst the white noise; harder still to resolve into action.

The wand in his off hand isn't Sirius'. It's foreign, obviously stolen. Remus pockets it after giving it a critical glance, keeps his own wand at the ready. And while this isn't relief, exactly, it is less than before: less immediate threat. Enough time for awareness to trickle back in, small details like the fact that they're in the common room, and he's just incapacitated Sirius, and someone could walk in at any moment.

When he reaches out, it's half by accident. It's the impulsive flash of regret, that hapless urge to pass the blame and let someone else clean up his mess. The connection answers before he can think to take it back, filling the gaps left by indecision and frustration — it finds Mara, tracking her down by the impressions of her authority and control. Once it's there, Remus doesn't shy away from it. His mind briefly strays from the flood of memory spilling from Sirius', but the first attempt to pull up his walls frays quickly. The second time's better, backed by irritation and anger, all of it seeping into the connection with Mara as he tries to divert his focus. ]

[snaphiss]

[Mara is always quick when summoned. She's spent years, decades of her life prepared to go into battle at a moment's notice, and it's not a habit that dies easy. She arrives quickly, silently, expression serious. There's a silver tube in her hand, and she brandishes it as confidently as any wand.]

[She sees Remus, feels the state he's in, and decides quickly to take control. Whatever this is, it's fatigued him. An urge within her, one she's slow to admit but slower to curb, rises up to protect her brood at all costs, protect everyone, keep them safe and never lose them. It drives her now.]

[She looks down at... is that the corpse from earlier? She toes his shoulder with her boot.] We have to stop meeting like this.

[She turns to Remus.] This is your Sith?

[doggo]

[The diversion of Remus' attention does not last long or happen easily thanks to the furious battery of image and impression and thought on Sirius' part. But it doesn't occur to him to qualify what it is that he feels, that standing away. Too frantic for supposition until Mara is stood over him.

The cavalcade of thought wavers, confused. The deadlock of Remus' spell has rendered Sirius immobile except for his eyes, which dart back and forth between the two of them, wide and hunted.

And there is a distinct lack of stillness in the way his thoughts ramp back up again, a quick assumption of that same frantic pitch, more frantic than suspicious. It occurs to him now that Remus has called her for help, and Sirius snaps his gaze back onto Remus instead. The raw force of his concentration is too furious to be any sort of calculated attack.]

[cur]

You've met?

[ That isn't the relevant question, but it's the first thought he has as he deliberately shifts his gaze from Sirius to Mara. There's nothing in the connection to imply she isn't taking this seriously, and that makes it easier not to bristle at the casual approach — easier to echo it, too. ]

He's a traitor. [ Hard to say that casually, admittedly. It's also hard to regain his composure when Sirius's fear and confusion is clawing at the connection, and it lends an irritable edge to his voice. ]

And they've brought him here. Are we expected to work together? Is that what they've asked of you and your Sith?

[snaphiss]

Briefly. [Not enough for her to trust or distrust him. Enough for her to be curious about him, though, to find it worthwhile to preserve his life and welfare beyond their shared duty to the Nest.]

I have an accord with... 'my Sith'. [She doubts Kylo Ren would appreciate the moniker, so of course she uses it.] We fought and I won, and made it clear what I would and wouldn't tolerate.

[She looks down at the body coiled on the floor. Strange, she thinks, he seemed annoyed, perhaps even disgusted by the concept of Sith before. But then, perhaps he hadn't understood her meaning. It doesn't matter. She looks back to Lupin.] I suggest you set your terms.