[hatch log] everything happens so much

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: The Station
WHEN: DAY :039
SUMMARY: New faces and old losses - a hatch occurs and a number of older hosts go comatose. Coma'd hosts include all auto-piloted dropped characters to date.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

NEW HATCHES
YOU WAKE UP and suddenly you're a different person. No. That's not right. You're you and there's no suddenly about it. It's been a while, hasn't it? It feels like waking up from a very deep, extended sleep or like surfacing up from the darkness of the ocean and right there in your own head there's something both familiar and strange. You know intuitively that you've been unconscious for more than just a blink of the eye. While it’s impossible to tell exactly how long ago or how exactly you escaped the danger that had been breathing down your neck, you're certain it was more than a moment ago.

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. That feeling persists even as you find the tube running from the base of your neck to the compartment's rear wall.

But once the tube's disconnected? Things get loud. 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 happening 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. Maybe it's time for a change? Drop down the ladder to the floor of the Nesting Deck and you’ll find you’re not alone. The closer you are to these stranger, the louder the sound in your head becomes. --Actually they're not quite strangers either, are they? Something is wound about and between you and these people, whoever they are, are as familiar as this place you've never been is.

Welcome to Station 72. The air buzzes with activity. Somewhere deep in the Station, other minds call to yours. They are bright, brilliantly celebratory spots in your subconscious. They are sun-warm gentle, or they are fire and the taste of ash, or they are a vibrant frenetic whirl, or they are a tangled garden, or they are the feeling of flight through dense cirrus clouds. No two links are exactly the same, but you know for certain that you are connected to all of them in at least some small way.

Which is why it's easy to tell when something goes terribly wrong:


OLD HOSTS
THE ENDORPHIN RUSH of making it back to Station 72 (relatively) unharmed, having successfully acquired exactly what you'd set out to get your hands on can't be denied. Even if you're not necessarily the type to celebrate, there's no ignoring the thrumming celebratory sensation from those Hosts who are.

After a few hours of being back in the void, something else stirs in the air: the clear, prickling sensation of new hosts hatching on the Nesting Deck. They're a rush of mental information - as if someone's turned the volume on the radio all the way up -, a cacophony of sensation and emotional feedback for anyone unprepared to shield against it.

The swell of feeling might make it easy to miss what follows immediately after: the dull, gut-deep quiet as The Darkling, Chuuya Nakahara, and Nasu Rei go suddenly comatose.

---

((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for all new hosts. Feel free to make your own logs and posts additional to this if you care do. You can find a more detailed overview of the hatching process HERE. You can find additional setting information about the Station 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

[miscreant]

Because of such concentration, she finds Aloy's offhanded thought about her state of being rather easily. It would be polite to leave it alone, she imagines. None of the breathers seemed to like when she plucked unfiltered information from them.

"You are not mistaken," she says, calmly. Calm in a way that only death knows. "My life was taken from me several years ago, in a march on the capitol of my people. And I was returned to fight my enemy's war for them, along with thousands of others."

There's no sorrow in how she delivers the story. Its a sort of cold detachment, like she is reading from a script.

[huntsmachines]

Oh, of course. If she can feel Seviilia's emotions and pick up her thoughts, it stands to reason that it also works the other way around. There's a quick burst of embarrassment and then Aloy leans forward a little, natural curiosity egging her onwards as Seviilia answers her unspoken question.

"That... that must be hard." It's not exactly pity. More sympathy and wonderment.

"I don't understand how anyone could be brought back from the dead, though."

[miscreant]

As to whether or not living as the dead was hard, she chooses not to reply. There is no real way to sympathize with her existence without experiencing it, and she has learned not to make any more noise about it than she has to.

"Magic."

To demonstrate, Seviilia reaches down and presses a fingertip to her plate greave, which immediately begins to freeze over in a spiderweb from where she has touched. Its a brief display, to which straightens back to her position against the wall. She is not the first who has never encountered it before.

"Specifically, a form of magic called necromancy. I am capable of it as well."

[huntsmachines]

"Magic." Aloy repeats the word. She's used to magic as a concept. Prayers and incantations in a world of machines and metal. But that magic had just been the technology of the Old Ones, not... magic. She swallows, eyes widening as she watches the spread of cold ice. It reminds her of the machines and their abilities.

"Necromancy." That word she repeats more slowly, feeling the strange word on her tongue. Death magic. It gives her a strange feeling that shivers down her spine. She is so used to life and warmth and this woman seems so distant from it. She seems more like a machine. Maybe thinking of her as an intelligent machine would be easier.

I can't imagine coming back from the dead. It seems so horrifying."

[miscreant]

"It is." Also, stated frankly. She senses Aloy's curiosity, and as such gives into it. What she recites is a thoughtful list, one that she seems to be building as her experiences allow. From mimicry, observation, no real attachment to any of the behaviors she describes.

"Food and drink tastes of ash. You crave blood. You are drowning, the air you breathe hurts to take, but you take it out of habit until the habit dies alongside you. You cannot sleep because your mind has forgotten everything but how to stop life, and how to make life miserable to live. Your life, the lives of other's. And though you don't sleep, shadows plague idle thoughts. You start to crave suffering -- and the suffering of others is all that soothes your own."

And that -- that was a free existence. She does not bother to mention the bondage under the Lich King. No one had really asked her about it (any of it) before -- no one but The Darkling, and Ilde. She finds her fury at his slumber all over again. "It is not a fate I would wish on many."

[huntsmachines]

Aloy is almost physically rocked back on her heels. As Seviilia describes each sensation, a flicker of them ekes through the mental blocks. Not a full experience of even a memory. More of a brief flash of sensation or experience. She is reminded of Nil, his desire to kill and kill and to keep on killing. She takes a breath, a flood of compassion and sorrow at the condition Seviilia has found herself in mingling with Seviilia's muted fury.

"I wouldn't either. I thought..." She frowns.

"I thought you like a machine, but a machine doesn't suffer in the same way."

[miscreant]

Aloy's comparison makes her chuckle. For all of the horrible things she faces daily, retelling them doesn't seem to bother her. But it couldn't -- or she would likely be driven insane, if she was not so already.

"I would encourage you to keep that perception." Death Knights were, after all, machines of war. Their suffering was a tool to keep the machine oiled and moving. There was no real cure for it, and so Aloy's sympathy is wasted on her.

Perhaps she will learn to curb such curiosity in the future, so as not to be burdened with such plague of the mind.

[huntsmachines]

"If that's what you want me to do. I've just never... met a person who was also a machine." Well. One. the name GAIA passes through her mind briefly. A motherly presence. An aching feeling of longing and wistfulness. The sense of rot and decay around Saviilia makes her twitch. She adores life and living, the sensation of creeping death is distinctly uncomfortable.

[miscreant]

"I suspect it will be easier for you," Seviilia offers in kind. The feelings that come from Aloy are foreign to her, a sort of kinship she doesn't understand -- motherhood. The closest she knows is the suffocating blanket of the Lich King's control. That is familiar, makes her chest ache more out of habit than any real desire.

She has to physically shake her head to pull herself from it. What it leaves behind is a pit in her stomach.

"If it brings you comfort, you will not find others here like me. I am the only undead creature that walks these halls."

[huntsmachines]

"I don't know if that's comforting or not." Aloy tilts her head to study Seviilia a bit closer. What does this all mean?

"It must be lonely, being the only one of your kind." Assigning that sort of emotion is probably a little foolish, but Aloy is doing it all the same.

[miscreant]

"It is a bit misanthropic," she admits with a minor shrug. "But for a construct born from magic, our existence is hardly natural to begin with. The connection we all share with the Nest is not unlike that which I experienced with my brethren. Just on a larger scale."

Aloy will be ok with that, or she won't be. The worst part about it wasn't what came with the connection to her -- but that was a conversation for another day.

[huntsmachines]

"Ah..." If she's honest, the woman reminds her a little of Nil, except even Nil didn't give her the same sort of chills down her spine for all his strangeness.

"That's. Interesting. I might come ask you about that later. I think I'm going to go... uh. See if I can find something to eat. Feels like my stomach is attached to my spine." A convenient excuse to get away from the Death Knight. She's left with a strange, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. What if Saviilia sees through the white lie?

[miscreant]

Seviilia sees easily through her lie, but finds no purpose in calling her on it. After all, discomfort around her was normal and to be expected. To take offense would be childish, among other things. Though Aloy is not as young as some of the other humans she has acquainted herself with on the station, they were all practically children to her.

So, she gives a small nod and turns her back on Aloy. "Shorel'aran, little one." The Thalassian translates between them easy, without effort on either of their parts. A simple farewell.