[hatch log] a lonely, distant place

[onemind]

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!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[polyphonos]

An unmistakable sensation of amusement punctuates the air between them. It's the tang of something both sour and sweet, the pleasure of a good hand of cards or being right. Cathaway doesn't laugh, but she might as well. "Of course."

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."

[earthborn]

In a strange enough way, this is more comfortable. The Normandy was a human ship now, but its design was influenced by Turian sensibilities that made everything a little odd. The Citadel was the same, and Illium, and anywhere else that wasn't human-oriented. Having something purely formed for humanity could be comforting, in the way that a chair built exclusively for your leg configuration could be, but it wasn't what Shepard was used to.

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?"

[polyphonos]

"Yes and no."

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."

[earthborn]

Shepard, busy making herself comfortable, regards the needle with unveiled distaste. Raw, as-yet untrained to filter, her own memories rise to the foreground: steel chairs in abandoned places, mingling freely with the memory of surgical pain, of a time when anesthetics had worn off too soon. When the medics hadn't cared.

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."

[polyphonos]

Somewhere - maybe here, or maybe in another room all together, or maybe just in a time very far removed from this one either backward or forward - there's a sensation of a warm hand at the back of someone's neck. The fingers are calloused, but gentle. It feels like care. Or sympathy. Or pity.

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.

[earthborn]

There's another moment, much like the first, rising panic matched by rising violence. It's easy to see in her mind's eye, the biotic mnemonic, the precise arc and torque it would take to stroke gravity like a cat and break Cathaway's spine. Stupid, stupid, some part of her screeches, you don't know what she injected you with. You don't know what any of this shit is. That could've been anything. Anything. Anything. Why are you even here. What the fuck are you doing?

"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.

[polyphonos]

"Fair enough."

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."

[earthborn]

It's not that she's unwilling to share, Cathaway, it's that all this speaks too clearly to the idea that questions, and answering them, aren't a choice. It's too sterile, too strange, too much like the familiar confines of an interrogation room. Inhale, in-in-in through the nose. Make a place inside your head to go away into, a safe room, where you can put all the panic, all the screaming, animal terror, and be calm. Later, is for that experience.

Now. Be calm.

Deep breath, in through the nose. Shepard holds still.

[polyphonos]

Sometimes when Cathaway holds her breath, she can feel the thud of her heartbeat more clearly in her ears - in her chest. The sensation of that echoes somewhere in the link between them, too broad to be obscured. It's willpower of a kind. She can appreciate that, even as her attention is focused on the holographic display as its series of lines shift to align with the dye coloring the shape of Shepard's symbiote and define the shapes of her mind's matter.

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.