MISSION: WAYPOINT SHRIL, PT. I

Entry tags:

MISSION: WAYPOINT SHRIL, PT. I

CHARACTERS: All
WHERE: WAYPOINT SHRIL
WHEN: Day :025 - :029
SUMMARY: Welcome to Waypoint Shril, the soon-to-be home to the galaxy's most incredible competition!
WARNINGS: N/A, will update as necessary.

SOMETHING IS WRONG. Strange, how a moment ago everything seemed perfectly fine - as normal as things get on Station 72 - and then the next the entire void shifts by a degree. There's a crackling, anticipatory feel in the air. Dwelled on too long and it might become nauseating, triggering some hindbrain impulse the nervous system under the skin or--

Something is coming.

Something is coming undone.

In the heart of the Station in a small, featureless circular room, The Prince and Cathaway dredge the Station from its mooring. There's a rush of shared adrenaline, then an massive sensation like an inhale. A gulp of breath. Relief floods through the body like something palpable as the massive beehive structure of the Station snaps into real space above the deep space space station known as Waypoint Shril.

( ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬...Please meet us in the hangar. We have your next assignment....▬▬▬. )

Once they've arrived at the hangar, the Hosts will be briefed by Cathaway and Prince on their new objective. They'll be given their mission kits, along with a written brief on their databanks. The usual warnings apply. Try not to kill anyone. Do not get killed yourself. And accomplish your mission. From there, pack yourself onto the transport shuttle and make your way to the Waypoint. --One of you knows how to drive, right?

Once ejected from the Station, you'll find yourself on one of literally thousands of ships. The black space above Waypoint Shril is full to bursting with air traffic from the smallest pod-shaped one being ship to the most gargantuan floating planet cruisers. Some of them rival even the Station which now lurks, a mottled white and grey latticework structure that's no more bizarre to look at than any of its neighbors.

VROOM. A ship shaped like a sword with a naked multi-limbed alien painted in lascivious, technicolor detail along the blade slices directly across the path of the shuttle transport. It blares a proximity alarm and a holographic message full of swearing and threats pops up even as the ship blasts down toward the traffic choked landing platform in the distance. A school of insectoid fighters go swarming after it. In the distance, the flash of ships dropping out of hyperspace through the gate rings gleams like a strobe light and on around the landing platform itself buzz two dozen security vessels desperately trying to keep order.

Welcome to Waypoint Shril. Don't crash into anyone on the way in.

     I. PLATFORM ALFA
When the ship finally docks on Waypoint Shril - after a lot, lot longer than you may have liked -, the scene that greets you is more hectic than even the busiest rush-hour on Concordia. There are simply too many people in too small and too hastily prepared of a space. The platform itself was clearly designed for utility, not for comfort and not for style. The walls- towering sheets of welded metal from a countless number of sources, flecked with old paint and the occasional slash of grafitti - offer nothing in the realm of sound dampening, and the electro-cloth banners that hang from the ceiling, advertising the Aurora Blue Arena! in dozens of different languages do little to help. As a result, the entire platform echoes with thousands of voices trying to talk over each other and the newly enhanced intercom system struggling to be heard over the din as it works to provide simple directions and instructions for the teeming mass of tourists.

In the press of flesh and the constant motion, it’s easy to get swept away from your party. It’s easy to find that the items you just had on you are suddenly missing, expertly palmed away by slippery fingers as you try to push your way towards the series of pneumatic tubes leading to the Waypoint proper. Ship's hydraulics hiss, lights flash, and the smell of greasy stall food spreads out from the edges of the platform. There are a few bright-eyed, clever locals - or what count for locals on Waypoint Shril - who don’t hesitate to reach out and grab your arm, offering to be your guide. Asking if you’re here as a spectator or a participant. Asking if you need information. Company. Everything has a price.

Get your bearings - if you can. It’s going to be a long couple of weeks.

     II. THE MOST FABULOUS PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE (Please Excuse Our Dust!)
Waypoint Shril's main thoroughfares and twisting platforms may have made sense to someone, but now absolutely no one knows how to navigate them as the ABA! has swept through Waypoint, bulldozing and building up anything and everything in its path. Oh, did you like that tentacle sandwich shop you stopped in five minutes ago? Too bad! We decided two minutes ago we're tearing it down to make way for a spa-slash-beer-garden! Stand back please, there are explosives detonating in this area in 3, 2, 1…--!

Everywhere you look, Waypoint Shril is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Maybe there are places on the outskirts, far from the Arena Zone that aren't literally being paved over or built on top of, but they seem to be the exception to the rule. Don't get lost as the neighborhood quite literally changes shape around you!

     III. MEET THE COMPETITION
Between the fabulous prizes and the fabulous fame - every single still-living winner of the previous competitions became household names before they stepped out of the Arena, then went on to live lavish lives of excess where they're paid exorbitant fees just to be seen and heard, known for canoodling and cavorting with the best, the brightest, the most privileged the Galaxy has to offer- it’s no surprise that the ABA! draws competitors like a magnet. And while not everyone advertises their status, plenty do - hoping to exchange the slimmest possibility of their victory for favors or drinks or just plain old attention. They’re loud, they’re visible, and plenty of them are very, very drunk, or whatever counts for drunk for their species.

If you want to size up the competition, now’s the time - in the middle of Blunt Force, with scores of other competitors lined up. The club itself is home to a deep, thrumming beat that vibrates through your chest, the industrial concrete walls covered in splashes of electro-paint that pulses in time with the beat. The floor is dark and smooth, the bar is long and there isn’t a single seat to be found at it, just an endless slab of some ancient black stone that drinks slide back and forth across. Every bartender wears a half of a mask in clear plastic run through with simple circuitry in complex patterns and they’ll keep you hydrated for a modest price. Above the floor on a catwalk composed of corrugated metal and transparasteel there are low couches and cushions in rich fabrics of a hundred different patterns of velvet and neon, two dozen tables, and another small bar that will hand out drinks and powders and oils and smoke. The patrons are as varied as anything else in this place, as hodge-podge. Slender, slick looking people with hunched backs and long necks. Short, broad aliens with four legs and four arms. Something heavily shrouded, the only part of them visible a proboscis. Some are here to dance, some to drink, some to talk and more than a few to fight - maybe for keeps. Hell, you might be one of them.

     IV. WILDCARD
There's plenty to see, do and explore. You've got a few days before the competition kicks off - might as well make the most of it.

((OOC NOTES: Welcome to Waypoint Shril! This log covers the arrival on the Waypoint and can be used for anything prior to the start of the Aurora Blue Arena! on Day :029. However, feel free to make your own logs if you choose! You can find a complete mission overview and a place to ask any mission-specific questions over at the OOC post.

Thanks everyone!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

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"Good, I like trouble," She replies in the same way, her accent strange-- a Spacer's understanding of a language born on the ground. Shepard is watching the crowd close up behind the fleeing pickpocket, each person briefly inconvenienced before going back to their business. The ripples subside, even as she does, "I'm here to compete, not to creep around, nor to let pickpockets have my food money."

Besides, very few people will care about the loss of a single life. For all the life and living going on here, do you see any police? She considers Bucky with a certain confusion-- there's a blind spot, here.

"Since when do you speak Russian?"

Strange accents do little to distract Bucky. He's heard dozens of languages spoken my natives and foreigners alike. Eventually, all the words start to sound the same. Yet, for all her desire to stand out, to compete, Bucky wants to hide. He's not here to make a splash or even pick a fight over losing his lunch. Violence on the Station, on Concordia, has ended with the Soldier emerging. He promised Sam to try and keep that from happening, same as Sam promised to end him if it happened again.

As for her question, he half-shrugs his good shoulder--- the one without the pinned sleeve--- and replies, "A long time."

Shepard reminds herself that I'm not afraid to shoot you is a poor way to respond to ambiguous answers, when those answers come from friends. She doesn't do a particularly good job masking that thought from anyone curious enough to have a look, but then she's not a saint. Anything but that, really.

"You're sassy in Russian," She says, dry commentary as she turns back from the people and refocuses on Bucky himself. James Barnes, huh? "Should I start calling you Yasha, or are you just following me because my ass looks good in this?"

To be completely fair: it's very flattering armor.

Bucky's not afraid of the not-so-veiled threat hanging in her mind. It's part of what he likes about her: she doesn't sugarcoat anything and he wholeheartedly believes her when she says she'll kill him. He raises an eyebrow at the comment to his sassiness. Maybe he talks more in other languages. He never thought about that.

As for the nickname, though, "Bucky."

He didn't mean to follow her in all honesty and most certainly was not chasing tail so the mention of her armor goes completely over his head for a long moment or two.

"Got lost."

He used to be good at this, according to the smattering of memories in his vaults and the glimpses he catches from Steve's mind. He used to be smooth and polished, but now he's anything but.

"Little lost Varren," She calls him, in English, then rolls her eyes on a sigh. Looking at her like that, with his hair loose around his ears, he really did look like a lost dog, all floppy and sad and a little bit of that hangdog wariness that came from not having a home for too long.

Can't stay mad at a face like this. Besides, it's been a long time since she got to use the language conversationally. It feels good.

"C'mon then, Bucky, you followed me this far; there's a all-you-can-eat place down the road," Why break tradition, after all? Begin as you mean to continue, "If they haven't bulldozed it for some reason, I'll buy you lunch."

Bucky doesn't mind being called a dog, he's heard worse over the decades. And, if he's honest, he does look a little bit like an old dog when he hasn't had Sam braid his hair for a while. A stray dog fits his image even better. He's wandered and huddled in squalor for a little over two years trying to figure out who he is after HYDRA.

The offer of food is not something he'll easily turn down. He's not much for food he doesn't recognize, but he'll give it his best go. That and a chance to get out of the bustle of bodies is more than welcome.

He offers a nod and moves to stand beside her.

"When did you learn Russian?" he asks.

"Part of the N-7," She replies easy gait as she walks, and taps the insignia on her chest to indicate the designation, "It's one of the big Spacer languages, next to English and Chinese. Everybody who doesn't wash out or die by N-2 gets formal linguistics training."

She's mostly being hyperbolic. While the chance of death in training is very real, it's neither usual nor common-- but it has happened. The ICP is very serious about what they do, and it takes a lot to make the famously competitive Alliance Marines back down from a challenge. Nobody gets laughed at for bowing out of N-school.

"Russian and English, those are the common languages, for human Spacers. Chinese too, sometimes. Depends on where you go-- everybody picks up enough of the big three to have a conversation, if you work in the Alliance for long."

The N7. There's a brief flutter of images of the stars, not quite like those in Katie's mind, but he gets the impression that Shepard is used to space in a way that Bucky never will be. He listens to her talk with a touch of interest. It's similar to the program he came from, with the exception that he was forced to learn, languages shoved into his head because he couldn't say no.

He switches over to Mandarin, though his intonation has a slavic edge, his vowels a little too collapsed to be considered native.

"Still speaking them in space?" he asks, which would surprise him. Having a trilingual crew would certainly be a benefit, but there are so many different dialects. Cantonese and Mandarin, mainland versus Hong Kong. He wonders if those differences still exist where she's from.

"Why not? The first manned ships to pass beyond the Heliopause were a joint project," She barely misses a beat, settling into the linguistic shift after only the briefest pause. Shepard spent time on Earth, but her idea of a dialect is shaped by colonial influences well beyond Hong Kong, "What else would humans speak? We're our own species."

English dominates the human-alien interface, of course. Most species are like that; they pick a dominant language, form a council to manage their international influences as a unified species if they cant unify in truth. Even if that's not fully possible, always there is a unified military presence. The lone exception had been the Batarians, who's influence had by that coin fractured, and fallen away into nothing.

Shepard isn't like Sam, empathetic and smoothly practiced, but on a moment's inspiration, she tries to give Bucky the mental image, an impression of the view from Luna, as she'd seen it when she was twenty-two and still working her way through the ranks.

Beautiful desolation, every rock and shadow cut so sharp as to seem fake. Dust like talc, so fine and soft that it sifted through your fingers and clung to everything with a grey-white tinge. And the sky so black that blackness was put to shame, speckled with billions of stars, untwinkling, set too close to one another, because so many mroe were visible. The horizon, too close, and beyond it the rising half-circle of Earth, shining blue-white and beautiful. There was a flag planted in the valley below, bleached white from solar exposure, oddly innocent and pristine next to a gold-foil rover, naive in its antique fragility.

"That's enough for most people."

Bucky supposes it makes sense that humans continued speaking their own languages beyond the reaches of their solar system. There's something inherently selfish about human beings to want other intelligent life to learn their customs rather than the other way around. He's not surprised, though. He's lived the effects of such since the fall. With a nod, he continues alongside her until he feels the distinct taste of another mind pressing against his own.

She's right about not being Sam and for a moment the image fills his eyes, a wallpaper forced into his vision before be blinks and shakes his head to clear it. It's a nice view, sure, but not something he can entirely comprehend or want to see again if it means someone pushing into his head.

He can't tell her to get out, though. To do so would be to go against the programming itching underneath his skin.

"Alien, maybe," he mutters in reply, his gait slowed and a bit unbalanced.

She only meant to offer him that one image, like handing over a single-frame snapshot. The moment he seems unsettled, Shepard pulls herself back as if burned.

"So you're saying, maybe we're arrogant?" She replies, after walking in silence for a few yards, not sure if she's tense over the mental contact, or the implication.

Then she says something fluid and croaking, no human language. Then another phrase in a liquid language, vowel-rich with a clicking tongue. The third language is guttural, almost unintelligible as a language, sharp-edged k-sounds and growled consonants.

"Salarian, Asari, and Batarian, and they each have just as many side-languages as we do. I'd give it to you in Turian, but they have two larynx's, and it's not really possible for humans to pronounce. Hanar language is mostly bio-luminescence, and Elcor use pheromone signaling," She was fed up with his attitude, and if he didn't want to acknowledge the fucking view from the moon as a point for the lack of boundaries, then shepard wasn't going to push for it. Peace was a fool's game, anyways, "Don't you dare give me shit because we expect people to either use a language we know or figure out how to operate a translator. It's a big fucking galaxy, and that's what the damn thing was invented for."

Bucky almost breathes a sigh of relief at the withdrawal. Instead, his shoulders relax and he forces himself to calm. Be good, be pliant. He listens to her speak the other languages and then as her frustration builds, Bucky instinctively steps his mental defenses back. The Soldier doesn't fight superiors, the Soldier doesn't ask questions. The programming is buzzing against his teeth, tasting like rubber.

He glances down and puts himself a step or two behind Shepard. Weapons are not equal.

It seems his opinions would be better kept to himself and the programming snaps a mental muzzle on him.

Shepard is not... good, in the usual mode of the word. She tries to be a force for good, but she is not nice, not kind by nature, not gentle. She is not known for shame or guilt; quite the opposite.

Something about that, that kicked-puppy reaction, that stern self-denial that pulls itself around him like a clamshell still leaves her sour. They walk in

"You should tell me to shut the fuck up, if I'm wrong," Shepard hesitates for a moment, wondering if, yet again, this isn't somehow too far. She's really not cut out for this shit, "Think of it as operational intel, if it helps-- can't get it right, without the information."

If there is a god, please let them get to this fucking buffet soon, and let it still be standing.

The only problem with that is Bucky can't tell Shepard to shut up or no in general. A part of the programming is denying his ability to overtly disagree, from the smallest things to whether or not he remembers what happened five minutes ago. He sucks in a breath, feeling that frustration brushing against the link. While pieces of him understand the need to provide information to others, the rest of him finds the advice puzzling. He's not allowed to have wants or desires, despite months of Sam telling him otherwise; the programming is not easily defeated.

Just as he's about to open his mouth, a sign reading 'ALL-U-CAN-EAT' comes into view, stacked above some symbols he doesn't recognize and below a dozen other neon lights.

"There." He motions with his chin.

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MISSION: WAYPOINT SHRIL, PT. I

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sorry this got lost in my inbox :(