[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]

[It unsettles him, a little, that warmth. Or rather it feels persuasively calming, which unsettles him. Like he's being wrapped in a blanket and made to sit down somewhere, when everything in him scratches against that. Nerves and restless impatience. A muscle jumps in his jaw.]

Sirius Black.

[He answers anyways. Broodmate flickers the thought of Kavinsky in his head, but as he's out there, somewhere, stray and relatively safe and tugging at the line of connection, Sirius can safely put him away for now.]

Who's we, then. You and your-- brood mate?

[polyphonos]

[Good. She likes when new hosts are considerate enough to answer her questions. It's usually a good way to ground someone, to smooth over that twitch, twitch, twitching of the mental link that she can feel jerking between them now. Be calm, she thinks - she feels. This place is safe. It's sure. She's been here for decades and never once has anyone trespassed here.

She's very proud of that fact.]

He's part of it, yes. But this body is one of many that our collected conscience touches. It feels incorrect to say 'I'. A...misrepresentation, when we would rather be honest with you.

[doggo]

[Restless, he flinches first at that calm before he settles, cagily, like a dog lowering itself into a crouch. Wary enough that he could bolt, even if he doesn't want to, if the persuasive quiet feels like a pat on the head.

Calm.

It's nearly enough to make him forget how strange it is, what she's saying. It doesn't matter; he should prioritise.]

How many?

[polyphonos]

[Ah. She pauses, something preternaturally still in her expression as she seriously evaluates the question.]

It's difficult the give an accurate number. Some of the consciousnesses are remnants and parsing one from the next is a needless reduction. [Simply put: it doesn't really work that way. He's asking her to sort half remembered childhood memories, or to count every hair on her head (including ones she's broken).] But for the sake of an answer, lets say two hundred, give or take thirty.

[She smiles at him. It's pleasant.]

That doesn't include you, of course.

[doggo]

[Merlin, is what he thinks at that number. Two hundred, perhaps more or perhaps a bit less but all the same, still two hundred. Not unfathomable if you're counting stones in a wall, more difficult if you're tallying up plimpies in a tank. Nearly unimaginable if you're thinking of other people--and that's if you've been a free man for the last twelve years; a man in isolation finds two hundred people to be a bloody lot--and that's if you can wrap your head around what she means, properly, because it's not two hundred other people stood next to you on a train platform or at a quidditch match or in a park, but two hundred other people, consciousness, two hundred lines of connection snapping at your attention. Remnants. The dead? The sleeping? The obsolete? It hardly matters. It's still part of that two hundred.

Merlin. And, then, No wonder she's mental, by which he means eerily serene. Dim glimmer of humour.

To cope, he looks past her. But there's nothing and no one to look at, and his attention snaps back on her a moment later.]

So out there, somewhere--there's a hundred and ninety-eight for us. Give or take.

[polyphonos]

Take is likely the operative word, but yes. There were at least at one point that many individuals paired with a symbiote who grew close enough to the Nest that they're part of this consciousness. [Whether they exist now as anything but fragments, as some piece of a conglomerate whole as opposed to possessing their own physical shells is the question. But a large one; it's too big for even her to know, so perhaps it's best not to dwell on it. Not now, anyway. Not on his very first day.

So instead, Cathaway sets aside the datapad she'd been reading through uncurls her legs, stretching them out before her. There's a small, very human pop to her ankle joints when she does but either she's used to the discomfort or simply doesn't perceive it.]

Now. What other questions should we answer for you?

[He must have some. The statistical average is three.]

[doggo]

[Sirius' mouth curls at the left corner. Intimidated, maybe, yeah, and thrown off in no small part by her calm and the assured we, not to mention the scope of what she's said. But never scared, and never quite out of his depth. Just because he's been whittled down doesn't mean he's been very much changed, not in ways that matter.

Which is why, after a second to review the impossible, he goes for a dry joke.]

If this is meant to be some sort of reunion for us-- [And maybe reunion is the wrong word, more like a meeting--but if he's meant to get hooked in to nearly two hundred the way he's been hooked in to Kavinsky--] --then I'd say you could work on your hospitality.

[Also maybe the wrong word. Should be something that gets at how bloody serene she is, sat there, with a bit of plastic in her hand, saying all of this. Self possessed enough to be a we, in a way that suggests how true a pronoun it is, and not just a poncy turn of phrase in a film.]

And if that's not it, then what exactly d'you want out of us? We're here to help. Help you?

[polyphonos]

[His criticism is met with a braced smile - a murmur of something like patience or maybe boredom leaking along the link that binds their minds. Yes, she probably could; but would that really make it any better? Better not to pretend. Let The Prince convince the young hosts there was something normal to be found here in the Station or in the life; she prefers honesty. This is a strange place, a strange series of circumstances. The new average, perhaps, but not hospitable.

She prefers not to lie when she can avoid it. It breeds trouble down the line.]

Mostly, we would like for you to survive and to help extend the longevity of the nest and its hosts. We - hosts and symbiotes, including yourself - are something of an endangered species. Anything we can do to stop from being eradicated is preferable; unfortunately, that often means subjecting ourselves to dangerous situations for the greater good. If we're supposed to hunt down the thing responsible for killing us, we have to occasionally face them - or follow the sabotaged trail they've left behind them.