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

HI THERE DIRTY PUPPO

[unsea]

[ The flames are dying, scavenged tinder and materials collapsing with sharp pops and snaps. His hands are heavy with soot by now, from tossing the smoldering bits and pieces of the pyre back into the airlock's boundaries. Clean up would be easy, and the mere thought of jettisoning the cremated remains of someone who had been so dear to him once upon a time was laughable. Mad, and laughable.

( Gone. She was gone. )

And he hides the dull laugh behind the curves of his fingers, brushing ash across the bridge of his nose as he leans back along the wall opposite the airlock he's been observing for -- it feels like hours right now.

( He laughs, because despite himself, he cannot be alone in this grief -- someone else hovers on the peripherals of their mutual connection. Someone who seems so very, wonderfully, intensely familiar with fires and pain. ) ]

Can you hear me? ( You don't feel far. )

[ His laughter dies slowly, muted behind his words as he tips his head in the direction of the other Host. ]

Do you know how this - [ a gesture to the airlock's controls on the wall before him. ] - works?

ello woof woof

[doggo]

[Sirius flinches back from the touch of acknowledgement, aloud and--not aloud. Not a flinch out of fear, but discomfort, fur rubbed wrongways. He hates that instinct; the moment he's recognised it, he pushes past it, digs in against it. Looks at the square that the man gestures to. Narrows his eyes.]

No.

[The word comes out rough, brusque. He looks back at the man. The other Host. Soot and ash. That same feeling of grief, a deep undertow.]

Who was she?

[Not a polite question but really, even at his best, Sirius wasn't always ready with impeccable manners. Sensitivity, at times. Discretion. Azkaban has weakened certain facets. If he pressed, could he pick out the answer on his own? Maybe. He waits anyways.]

[unsea]

[ The grief within him turns malicious, for a fraction of a moment. He wants to press his mind into this man and hurt him. He wants to hurt any soul who ventures close enough to connect, to remind himself of what he is and how he has been seen, for years and years. The grief, he realizes, is what is doing the talking, and he is nothing but a creature of control. Self-discipline. ]

My mentor. She made me what I am.

[ Not a Host. She is devoid of the sense of lacking that comes with the sleeping and the dead. ]

You're the one from the garbage. There was a fight - you and another. We have drinks, from time to time.

[ Now, he's viciously curious. ]

[doggo]

[He's distracted first by mentor. Not a Host. Then what? And how is it possible to have been brought here and not embed deep with others around you? What favor do you have to beg for that, and what is it that killed her? She couldn't have come here dead. And is it only mad, or selfish, to think of James anyways? Not a mentor, certainly, but someone Sirius would save, if he could, bring him here for even a moment--so long as he wasn't lost, again, because this grief he feels the echo of is too familiar, even the way it is cut with so many other feelings, anger and bitterness and emptiness.

Another snags at him then instead and Sirius looks around, keen and wary at once. Tries to really see the other man, get some stock of him beyond what is bleeding off of him in waves.]

Yeah?

[--And already he's trying to pick out the threads, suss out this another.. He only fought with Remus. It was barely a fight. He tries to fit Remus in to some scene with this man, the clear clean lines of him.]

No real point in any of us fighting, is there. Not when we're all-- fused together.

[unsea]

[ Not a Host. A woman from his world, dead long before he agreed to live on and came to the Station. ]

Yes.

[ Plain and concise, as he shifts his attention - flickering and fractal, over to the man with the rough edges. He looks to be as bone-weary as the Darkling feels in this moment. Even in the heat pouring off of the pyre, his hands are cold, and he slips them into the heavy folds of his kefta, leaning forwards curiously. ]

Does that matter? We are all bound up in one another, mind to mind, but some hunger for individuality and self-control more than others.