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]

[ She tilts her head slightly, letting him take her hand and do as he likes with it. She recognizes the tremor inside of him, the empty cavern where a feeling has been scrubbed away year after year after year. Almost empty, but there are always a few tender membranes lingering in the crevices. She knows, all too well. She had cried into Steve's shoulder for the first time in what must have been fifteen years, a feeling, a reaction, she had been so certain she had purged herself of.

She wonders if this will be it, if with this burned body he will be free. Fire had such a way. Her eyes flicker towards the pyre, wondering when her own final cleansing flame will come. Her destiny is different now, and she no longer knows what to expect from the world. ]

I'm sorry you had to wait so long.

[ How long had this body been here in the Station, waiting. He had joined them so early on Concordia... ]

[unsea]

She was well-kept, by Cathaway and this Station.

[ A neutral comment, as his fingers curl around her wrist. Remembering now, how close the two of them came to igniting in the prison. Their connection had been rife with her madness and his empowerment. He remembers bleeding, quietly, afterwards. Wiping at his nose until orange cloth had been heavy with red, long before the tide had stemmed and he'd rejoined their ragged band - ready to leave that terrible, advanced place. ]

Baghra, [ he says, to Ilde and to Ilde alone. A small truth, shared between the two of them. ] Her name. Baghra, my mentor and my mother.

[erbier]

[ She shifts close to him, reaches out a hand to touch his collar lightly, completing the circle of thought between them, keeping his little truth encapsulated: just them. In this moment, she is more locket than confidante, a place to keep a name or face, but she has never had mother nor mentor. She does not truly know what he feels, cannot feed it back to him. Can merely absorb.

Baghra.

Mother and mentor, carried between worlds, burned in the depths of the Station. ]

What was she like?

[ Settles closer to his frame so that the words cannot escape anywhere they are not meant to, a convocation of whispers. ]

[unsea]

[ Like this, he is wound around this dangerous young woman. He remembers her mind spilling over with monsters and fears, swallowing the prison block around them in her nightmares, utilizing the things that had haunted her to hunt and harry them. He remembers feeding himself into her, the way that her hand had siphoned from him. What it had felt like, to amplifying a means of creation to a new realm of terror and horror.

It had hurt. Though he'd made the choice, he remembers her mind fracturing against his. His body bleeding and aching, like illness had taken hold of him.

He holds her to him now, and tries to forget that, as he rests his temple against the top of her head and speaks privately to her. ]

Powerful. Shrewd. She raised me alone, in a time where we and those like us were hunted down and burned. Torn into. Enslaved. I credit her with much, in my long lifespan - the simple truth, that we were alone. There were no others like her and I.

[erbier]

[ She realizes, quietly to herself, that Baghra was a witch. Possessed with dark magics, hiding herself from those who would rip that power from her. And her son is a shadow, aspiring to monstrosity. She closes her eyes, imagining mother and son in her desolate land, could Baghra have kept herself and her son alive under Dreus's burning gaze?

She wonders what things might have been like if she'd had the chance to know of them: would she think differently of so many things now. Might she have been a pretty witch too, if she'd had mother, mentor. ]

You are alike to us now.

[ Most importantly: to her. She too had been alone, one of a kind. Now they are all bound together in a glimmering web of belonging. She turns her head up to him, her light kiss is more a seal to a promise than particularly intimate. ]

[unsea]

[ He had known witches and legends in his youth, grown up among people who had been committed to annals and Grisha lore in his adult years. Saints, many of them. Monstrous myth, many more. His mother had been a Grisha of immense power, unique unto herself until the birth of her son and he had grown in her shade. Had he ever had a child of his own, they may have been like him as well. So, he had taken great care to never have a true child, and fashioned himself as his own progenitor throughout his years: endless, timeless.

Ilde calls him alike to her, to the nest. The Darkling stifles a laugh, and it comes out a choked, tired noise. Something perceiving itself as more knowledgeable. ]

You are of me.

[ His arrogance precedes him, at all times. The nest is of him, and he holds himself above. Always, forever.

Ilde's kiss is a small thing, and he mirrors her. A vow, made of contact where there needs be none, because their minds are shared and the two of them have something abyssal brewing between them, something built of madness and spilled blood. ]

[erbier]

[ There is a distant temptation to take his arrogance and bleed it dry, pierce it with all that she has of him now. The little boy protected from the world by his mother. But he is fragile for her at the moment, and so she refrains from her burst of cruelty, instead looks into his face with her somber blue eyes. ]

You have been alone too long, Shadow.