A CURRENT FLOWING

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: Everyone (really)
WHERE: Outside of the Memory Bank, On the Lam, The Stealth Ship, and Station 72
WHEN: DAY :052/DAY :001
SUMMARY: Things don’t go exactly as planned. When do they ever?
WARNINGS: Violence, death, allusions to weaponized suicide. Will update further if necessary.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE:
Erastos Loke & Friends
When you finally catch up to Erastos Loke - his paper, his pens, his elegant furniture and his heavily-lidded eyes - it doesn’t take long to get him to talk. All he needs is a little persuasion or a lot of torture? Or, wait. Maybe we got those two mixed up. Either way, he starts to give the strike team intel once the screws are turned on him.

You’ve already begun to suspect most the information Loke gives over. H+H1 has stayed hidden by avoiding any strong organization and by staying extremely low-tech. Additionally, the most powerful members have been quietly manipulating Concordia’s politics and security to keep the actions of the organization obscured. They’ve tipped off Gorram Saffit, they’ve mislead and blackmailed the police. When you begin to press Loke about who gave them the devices that have allowed their bombs to become so deadly, he tells you frankly that he doesn’t understand them. They were given to him by a man - or someone who looked like a man, he clarifies, when Carata asks - who he had assumed to be some wealthy foreigner until he realized he couldn’t find any evidence of the gentleman’s existence. The mysterious stranger had given Loke the devices which consisted of two dozen small parts that could easily retrofit almost any bomb and allowed them to bypass Concordian security systems looking for highly modernizes tech. Prior to the stranger’s involvement, Loke had already been working with a number of his H+H1 associates - the stranger had sympathized and supported them, and the devices provided the power they needed. Who else has access to these devices? No one. Only Loke.

Unfortunately, when the hosts ask further probing questions about the mysterious stranger’s identity - Did he say who he was? Where he came from? - something goes very, very wrong. Erastos looks briefly stricken, then dabs at his nose. It’s bleeding? Quite a lot, actually. He barely has time to cry out before he begins bleeding from his eyes, his nose and his ears. Then Loke drops to the lush carpet beneath his feed, dead. Oops.

Before the hosts have time to react, an alarm starts to blare through the townhouse. Apparently Loke has a second security system tied to his vital signs. Suffice to say, your cover probably won’t survive this long. It might be a good idea to get the heck out of dodge and make your way to the rendezvous point for extraction.

IN THE GAP WHERE IT SPARKS:
The Memory Bank & H+H1’s Bomb Squad
Thanks to the Batman + Prep Time and the Jr. Technophile, the bomb planted by H+H1 deep in the depths of the Omega Memory Bank is successfully located and disarmed although not without cutting it dangerously close to the wire.

Unfortunately nobody gets the chance to wipe the sweat from their brow. The H+H1 bomb squad knows the exact moment the bomb was supposed to go off, and they know exactly when they’ve failed. So even though Sirius and Company seemed like they could handle three average everyday people, they don’t get the chance. The lead Bomber makes the subtlest move towards her pocket - and triggers a secondary, smaller explosive on her person. The three members of the bomb squad are eliminated (hope you were standing a safe distance away, Sirius n’ Co), and while the collateral damage isn’t anything to sneeze at, it’s far from destructive enough to destroy the bank. Further, the explosion isn’t laced with any EMP blasts. While the hosts may not even be injured, the explosion definitely trips the Memory Bank’s fire suppression system as well as its local alarms. Soon (very soon), Concordian Public Security and Fire Teams will be on the scene. The hosts won’t want to be there when they arrive.

SHEPHERDS AND YOUR CROWNS OF STARS:
Escaping Concordia & Returning to the Station
With Loke dead and the secret of the Enemy’s retrofit tech gone with him, and H+H1’s plot to blow the Memory Bank hamstrung by the efforts of the hosts, it’s time to get off planet. Lets be honest: your cover identities were never going to survive this. Luckily, between the minor explosion and a jail break causing riots under the city, Public Security can’t exactly rally their forces to come chasing after the hosts. They have much bigger fish to fry. Carata and Nirad made sure that all the hosts - Loke’s infiltration squad, the bomb disarmament group and the prison breakers - knew where to meet up after their respective assignments: a concrete channel for runoff where a familiar bus is waiting to sweep you all away to the outskirts of the city. It’s less pressing to be invisible now. No one will be left on the planet to suffer the consequences; any comatose members of the Nest have been carefully packed into the bus too. Isn’t that nice?

Once they arrive at the outskirts of the sprawling diamond-glittering city, a point of black in the sky elongates and expands as the stealth tech strips back from the ship that once brought them all here. With straggles wrangled and comatose friends carefully stowed, everyone boards the ship and rockets off from Opia’s surface. Concordia with its high rises and neon, its holographic advertisements and its press of humanity, its ever present buzz of synthetic paired with organic, falls rapidly away below the ship until it’s merely one bright point of many on a densely populated planet. And then Opia too drops away, becoming a dark marble in a deeper, blacker space. When the stealth ship jumps away, it does so with a nauseating jerk.

It’s a short trip back to the Station, the closest thing any of you have to home. Cathaway and Prince are waiting there to collect their equipment (though any additional souvenirs are yours to keep) and to welcome them back.

It’s been a long time and there are new faces to greet you. Time to get caught up. Set your clocks to DAY: 001.

---

((OOC Notes: Feel free to play any of these events out. We’ll dip in with NPCs and so forth if it seems necessary/y’all ask, but feel free to take control of anyone if it lends to your threads. Backtagging and backdating is, as always welcome.

As of this log, all hosts have (more or less) safely arrived back on Station 72; all hosts - newly hatched and old hats - may now interact. YAY!

If you have any general questions, please hit up either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[erbier]

This is where I am.

[ It was not a matter of preference, and she has had to struggle with that. The desire to return to his side, to die with him and their world, as she was destined to do. She had spent her entire life waiting for the flames, never expecting anything more. She had been valued there, mythologized into an angel, a saint, a martyr for all that was good in mankind that would also be washed away in the flames. Here... here she does not have such a grand role, and the responsibility to choose for herself is daunting.

But she cannot deny it to be worthwhile. ]

What kind of creature are you? Where have you come from?

[miscreant]

That was not what I asked.

[Seviilia has the distinct sense that she knows as much, and opts not to press further than that. Even if it were the case, she also knows better than to seek any sort of kinship in the living. That had backfired on her more than enough times.

Her question is one she's been asked already, and so she goes for the most basic of explanations -- as if she'd never had contact with anything like her before.]

I am a Death Knight -- Queldorei [High Elf, a mental translation], should you require specifics. I hail from a necropolis currently stationed over a war zone on a planet you've likely never heard of, and oversee a legion of warriors like myself on the battlefield below.

[erbier]

[ While some of that means noting to Ilde at all, she is a fellow Fantasy Lander, and she at least follows the concept. Honestly, the idea her mind conjures of what a Death Knight is and what they stand for isn't even that terribly far off from what Sevilia actually is. ]

What do you war for? Or whom, I suppose.

[miscreant]

Wherever my army's blades are required. Presently, against the demon armies of the Burning Legion that threatens to consume the realm.

[Who can say what will happen to them afterward? Their future had been uncertain after the fall of the Scourge, and she imagines it will be no different once Gul'dan and his army were cut away from Azeroth. They would be met with more scrutiny, after raising the world's champions to serve in undeath.

But she's used to being unpopular.]

[erbier]

How does your campaign fare?

[ There had been no one to truly challenge Dreus, it had never come down to armies. He had swiftly and efficiently killed any other mage who might have attempted to impede him. Ilde wonders what it might have been like, had there been strength enough elsewhere to withstand him. Her curiosity for it all is unhidden. ]

[miscreant]

[Not well is her instinctive reply, but that isn't entirely true. The odds had been stacked against them from the very beginning. In truth, they were doing quite well for what they were being made to fight against.]

It could be worse. But it could also be better. Fel magic is unlike any other beast, and it corrupts all it comes in contact with. Even if their armies had an end, there are always those who fall prey to its lure.

[erbier]

[ She doesn't quite understand that word 'Fel' and she tilts her head, as if listening to someone whispering in her ear. It is quite a specific term, the Consensus does not define it well, but she gets a general sense, feels enough that she understands are responds with a sort of shrug: ]

'Tis the infernal.

[ She herself is tainted with something not dissimilar. She had spent too long in Dreus's presence, breathing his undiluted magic, breathing in the toxic fumes of the burning thing that had possessed him so long ago. It sought to destroy. To burn. To corrupt. A fire seeking to consume all life. ]

[miscreant]

[The word she chooses is one she knows, though the ideas themselves do not necessarily line up. That she's familiar with is more than she can say for most of the Nest.]

It does not belong on Azeroth.

[erbier]

[ She can't wish the elf well in her fight, that time in her... 'life' was done, so instead Ilde asks, ]

What shall I call you, Death Knight?

[miscreant]

Seviilia.

[The fanfare of offering her name had already been lost. Some of her still marvels that others don't simply take the information they require from the link forced upon them -- but perhaps it was still beyond the "younger Hosts" as Cathaway called them all.]

And you?

[erbier]

[ Ilde finds that other hosts, especially newer ones, dislike it when she reaches into their minds. She tries to be polite, even though she is perhaps the most practiced at such things at this point, the most likely to follow after Cathaway thus far. ]

Ilde. It has been a pleasure to meet you, Sevilia.

[ An empty pleasantry, utterly. ]