![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
[hatch log] a lonely, distant place
CHARACTERS: Closed to Misato, Beth, Seviilia, Shepard & NPCs
WHERE: The Station
WHEN: DAY :045
SUMMARY: Somewhere far away from Concordia, new minds gain awareness.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary.
YOU WAKE UP and the person you were a moment ago is gone. --No. Not a moment. It's been a while, hasn't it? Something feels off - a combination of the strange and familiar right there in your own head. You know intuitively that you've been unconscious for more than just a blink of the eye, but it’s impossible to tell exactly how long or how exactly you escaped the danger that had been breathing down your neck.
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 and that feeling persists even as you find the tube running from the base of your neck to the compartment's rear wall.
But when you disconnect the tube things get loud and a wave of emotion fills that peaceful 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. After the initial sensory overload, the mental buzz elongates: stretches out into a murmur like the sound of a party 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. Drop down the ladder to the floor of the Nesting Deck and you’ll find you’re not alone - and that those sounds in your head are louder. For two of you, the sense of familiarity runs so deep between you it might as well be cellular; one of you doesn’t share their connection, but you still feel like you know them somehow.
Welcome to Station 72. It’s quiet, still. Beyond the Nesting Deck in Life Support, there are a series of small personal rooms, all of them without doors. Some of them have personal belongings and a sense of life, but all of them are empty and it’s unclear how long they’ve sat that way. The only thing that’s obvious is that people are missing. For the time being, you’re alone with whatever (or whoever) has been left behind.
((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for the new hosts. You’re welcome to make your own logs separate to this for your time on the Station, but please be aware that until the current mission ends that you’ll be unable to play with older hosts currently away on Concordia.
Additionally, you can find a more detailed overview of the hatching process HERE. If you have any questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))
WHERE: The Station
WHEN: DAY :045
SUMMARY: Somewhere far away from Concordia, new minds gain awareness.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary.
YOU WAKE UP and the person you were a moment ago is gone. --No. Not a moment. It's been a while, hasn't it? Something feels off - a combination of the strange and familiar right there in your own head. You know intuitively that you've been unconscious for more than just a blink of the eye, but it’s impossible to tell exactly how long or how exactly you escaped the danger that had been breathing down your neck.
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 and that feeling persists even as you find the tube running from the base of your neck to the compartment's rear wall.
But when you disconnect the tube things get loud and a wave of emotion fills that peaceful 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. After the initial sensory overload, the mental buzz elongates: stretches out into a murmur like the sound of a party 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. Drop down the ladder to the floor of the Nesting Deck and you’ll find you’re not alone - and that those sounds in your head are louder. For two of you, the sense of familiarity runs so deep between you it might as well be cellular; one of you doesn’t share their connection, but you still feel like you know them somehow.
Welcome to Station 72. It’s quiet, still. Beyond the Nesting Deck in Life Support, there are a series of small personal rooms, all of them without doors. Some of them have personal belongings and a sense of life, but all of them are empty and it’s unclear how long they’ve sat that way. The only thing that’s obvious is that people are missing. For the time being, you’re alone with whatever (or whoever) has been left behind.
((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for the new hosts. You’re welcome to make your own logs separate to this for your time on the Station, but please be aware that until the current mission ends that you’ll be unable to play with older hosts currently away on Concordia.
Additionally, you can find a more detailed overview of the hatching process HERE. If you have any questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))
no subject
To kill Reapers, or whatever it was they were aside from what she knew.
Save the world, at any cost.
Complete the mission.
Die having made a difference, when the time came.
Try not to die at all, if possible.
"I've seen what they do to people," She said, after a silence pregnant with meaning. She was really hoping they hadn't pulled her hear on false pretenses, because killing this many people, having to blow a station this size, was going to be a real pain in the ass, "They get in your head, and they change you. Not necessarily in that order."
no subject
So: "It's possible our enemy was assuming the shape of some larger threat in your universe. Or maybe it's possible that there have been other symbiote-compatible people in your universe before you. We think it's rare, but can't believe it's impossible. In any case, the reason you're here is because you were had been tracked, hunted and were in immediate danger by the hands of our enemy. We can't guarantee they have anything to do with your Reapers, but it's fundamentally likely. They take many shapes."
But more importantly, and more immediately interesting to her (sad stories about losing wars are a dime a dozen), is this change her enemies cause. Something in the woman's too reflective grey eyes sharpens. "Were you changed by your Reapers? We'd love to see your brain."
no subject
She considered that, with a sanguine eye.
"You mean, physically, or just...?" Shepard gestured, a vague, formless circle near her left ear, indicating some unknown mental method that she had neither word nor concept for, "Wouldn't be the first time someone had a look."
Between Liara, Shiala, Sha'ira, Morinth, Legion, Javik, and fuck-all only knew how many Reapers... No, no, it wasn't the first time at all. And that was just what she knew, the risks she'd agreed to. Cerberus was nothing but question marks, like turtles, all the way down.
Fuck it.
"Yeah, sure. Why not?"
no subject
No sense in wasting time. The ship could wait. Shepard's brain would shift to accomodate the symbiote's growth - was doing so even now; imaging at this early stage might be vital to continued study.
She sweeps through the short gunship with a click of her boot heels, moving past Shepard with the clear expectation that she follow her off the ship.
sorry, I thought I'd tagged this ages ago
Apparantly so. Shepard hesitates a moment, frowns at the abandoned displays, and shrugs before turning to follow. Alright, fine, so she just got this damned hardsuit sealed up and now it's time to play doctor with the gestalt human. Why the fuck not?
"What kind of scans are we talking?" She asks, coming abreast of Cathaway. One thing about being short, you get used to walking fast.
s'all good!
What else do you have to do, Shepard? Explore the labyrinth? Sulk? Ask six thousand questions, of which only a handful will likely have satisfying answers? These are the statistical likelihoods of the young host's day; what harm is there in interrupting a pattern?
"We'd like to start with imaging your brain. We'd like to keep a record on file and see if your mind interacts with the symbiote differently than other hosts somehow. If your brain is already used to some form of re-writing, it might respond differently." She shrugs. It's a theory, no more. Most things here are. "We promise not to be invasive, if that bothers you."
no subject
She's a collector of souvenirs and as it happens all of hers, morbid or otherwise, are back on the Normandy. Shepard's jovial grin fades a little-- on the Normandy, a ship she won't be seeing again soon. Shit, you just have to keep bringing it down, don't you? Buck up, Soldier, this is a job, not a foster-home.
"Deal?"
How's that for a useless question, you sassy bitch?
no subject
She sweeps from hangar, a kind of musicality in the clack boot heels and the soft tinkle of charms and fine chains. Initially, the path seems sensible: this corridor looks very much like a space station's corridor ought to, and so does the next. Then she turns through a strange doorway and leads Shepard into spaces that are unarguably more alien. The walls aren't quite at right angles, or the texture of the building material is strangely mottled, or the light permeates from some unknown source instead of from a fixture.
"Stay close, my dear. Losing you would be inconvenient."
no subject
Having to adapt, having to adjust, that felt more normal. Safer. Less like she was being pandered to, or being fed a lie. Subtle distinction, not fully conscious; but she relaxed, regardless.
"Well, I wouldn't wanna inconvenience anybody," She replied, with only the quietest sense of irony, "We goin' far?"
no subject
Helpful. But in only a few more turns and a short selection of strangely shaped corridors, the Station opens up into a plain circular chamber. There's no furniture, but the segmented walls of the chamber must be compartments of some kind. Cathaway makes her way to one and draws it back by the handle, pulling a long slab-like bed from its slot on the wall.
"Take a seat as we prepare the equipment."
All the compartments and cabinets are unmarked, but Cathaway seems to know exactly which ones to open and what to draw out of them. It takes her only a few minutes to assemble what she requires and bring her tools back to the bedside by way of a small hovering tray. There's a stimgun, a dose of some kind of liquid in a canister clearly meant to fit the gun, and a two glittering white bars roughly ten inches in length. She loads the canister into the injection gun and primes it.
"No biopsy, we promise. But we need to stimulate the symbiote so it reads on our equipment. This will temporarily dye it. We can distract you with a pleasant memory if you'd like us to."
no subject
They train you, to withstand interrogation. You learn techniques, methods of lying, mental discipline to guard yourself, and physical techniques to minimize damage. But you never think you'll have to use it to protect yourself, from your own side.
"No," Shepard says, after a moment's consideration, or the fascimile of it. She presses down the trauma with a brutal, painful ruthlessness, "I can take it. Go ahead, let's get on with this."
no subject
Cathaway doesn't touch Shepard's neck. She merely makes her way around, braces Shepard's shoulder with her spare hand, sets the muzzle of the instrument to the scar from the Nesting Deck's chamber at the nape of her neck and depresses the trigger with a plastic click and a brief sting.
"How would you describe yourself? What species are you?" She sets the stimgun aside on the tray, dusting her hands as she comes back around to Shepard's front. "How would you describe the universe you came from, and what's the name of your home world?"
The dye needs a minute to take affect. It's better to fill that minute with something other than silence.
no subject
"I'm gonna have to pass on the idle questions, if it's all the same to you."
It's the asking that sets it off. Shepard doesn't answer, even if the answers float over the surface of her mind, unbidden, meaning an reiteration overlapping; human, terran, earthborn, ruthless, hard-ass, warrior, siha, vanguard. Shepard closes her eyes and lets the imagined version act as catharsis. Her control is absolute, not even a flicker of blue glow, despite her frustration.
What is she? Angry. What she is, is angry.
no subject
They aren't idle, not really, but why bother debating the semantics if she gets the answers either through Shepard's mouth or her brain - pieces of it bubbling up along their link for as long as Cathaway keeps her attention focused there. It's rude to spy, to look at the unintentional information young hosts leak into the link, but if she's discrete it's as if it hardly happened at all.
Somewhere, the Prince is probably a little disappointed in her.
"Then we'll just sit here and say nothing as the dye spreads." She punctuates it with a mild smile, then busies herself with ejecting the spent cartridge from the stimgun and recapping it, ejecting the used needle from the gun and swapping the head where it fits.
After perhaps thirty seconds, Cathaway takes the featureless metal rods from the tray and separates them. A thin film stretches between the two, some kind of holographic display glinting across it as she holds it up to view Shepard's head through. "Hold still, please."
no subject
Now. Be calm.
Deep breath, in through the nose. Shepard holds still.
no subject
It takes eight inhale-exhales for the image to solidify. She snaps the two rods together to store the file, then draws them apart once more and moves to Shepard's other side. "One more time, if you please."
Thud, thud, thud, goes someone's pulse against the ribcage around it.