[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

[polyphonos]

[The doubt slips through his fingers like water, but what persists - what remains in accessible edge of her mind - is a low, growling and residual pain. Like a burn, stinging under cold water. She doesn't have the energy to limit that any further than she already is; if he really cares to pick, he's welcome to that.

Maybe it links nicely with his heartache, with the void of his loneliness. Or maybe it's too obtuse, too clinical a cut. It doesn't feel like the Darkling at all. --Does it?

Does it?]

We don't want to say yes, of course because the results are too irregular to confirm any theory of pattern and we hesitate to make anyone feel like this [a finger twitch toward the sleeping Hosts] is their fault. But we have seen very strong brood bonds sometimes seem to help.

Our minds aren't a perfect environment for The symbiote. We suspect it's original host species wasn't burdened with a particularly strong sense of individualism. It could be the symbiote finds that difficult to adapt to, which triggers a reaction in the host's mind.

[deployed]

[ The Darkling had parceled out his pain piece by piece, and always while Bellamy had been sick or exhausted. Bellamy had soaked it in like a sponge then, and he does the same now. Cathaway's pain feels different but he still hooks into it as if he could lift it away from her. It's in his nature to try to share and shoulder other people's burdens. He can guide the Darkling down the hall and he can let the splinters of Cathaway's pain settle in alongside his own grief but neither feels like enough now. ]

So we might have been able to avoid this.

[ Bellamy had resolved to clutch onto his identity. He'd been taken fresh from a world full of people who had lost theirs willingly. The idea of accepting that fate had been a step too far then. It still feels a step too far now. But with the Darkling lying silent on a slab, Bellamy can feel his resolve shake.

Cathaway's pain settles as if Bellamy were coiling it around his finger, reeling it in towards him breath by breath. ]

Is that what happened to your brood?

[ It's a reckless question. Maybe he shouldn't ask. But the question's out before he can stop himself as he gropes for some way he could have circumvented this loss. ]

[polyphonos]

[She'll allow him it - the fragmented glass pieces of her physical weariness alongside the flash of something thinner and sharper and more intimately dangerous that flickers in response to his question. It's a sun viewed through a pinhole. Remote. Bright enough to leave brief spots on the vision.]

Some of them, yes.

[There's no effort to shield what his question draws out of her. Maybe if she weren't tired from the effort of dredging the Station back into the void there might be no penetrating that serene, clinical quality of her mind. But she is and he asked, so why bother pretending otherwise? Truth matters, she says to the Prince, however bitter. Let him know it.]

Some of them were comatose, then died. Some of them died while on missions. [There are no names in the shape of the thought, but there are traces of flowers blooming in still pools - of books and a pen scratching - of spice and honey - of soft fingertips - of the feeling of a brush pulling through hair for the six hundredth time, every long strand sliding like silk through the instrument's teeth.] Now just us and The Prince remain.

[deployed]

[ It comes at first in a flicker. It reminds Bellamy of stepping off the dropship and being immediately overcome by sunlight for the first time in his life. It feels appropriate for Cathaway, who has always given him that impression: something beautiful but annihilating, something best not absorbed head-on.

He still wants it. What little she'll allow him feels important to hold onto, for Bellamy. He wants to tug at her mind until something spills over. She offers him an answer, accompanied by fragments that hook into parts of Bellamy that he's kept tucked away for years. His mother's face presents itself so strongly that Bellamy can't ignore it. Cathway's shared impressions fold into Bellamy's memories of the Ark, the warmth of their cabin, his mother's fingers in his hair while he held a book open in his lap. He holds onto that memory tightly. It's precious to him. But it's hard to experience, even with the taste of honey in the back of his throat and the unfamiliar scent of flowers intruding. Bellamy forces himself to look down at the Darkling's prone body to jolt himself back, and stem the confused longing for both the Ark and for things he can't quite put a name to that barely even belong to him. They're Cathway's, and too vague to take proper shape. ]

I didn't think they could die in the coma.

[ His voice has gone thick. He focuses on the insistent pinpricks of pain and the sense of...not quite danger, but caution that jangles each time he reaches out for Cathaway. ]

Do you miss them?

[ He thinks she does. But her emotions aren't as sharp as his own. Cathway isn't easy to read. Bellamy doesn't think she wants to be, but it might boil down to the simple truth that he's never known anyone like her. He doesn't know how to decipher her because of that. ]

[polyphonos]

Yes.

[There's a magnetism to the texture of the space between them. She feels it like the tug of a body in space, a gravitational pull clutching after her. Or it's wool passing being spun: the fiber of him and her on the verge of being twisted together if someone might just begin to pedal and guide the length of resultant thread.

But he checks himself. And that's fine too.]

It's... the specificity of it doesn't always register itself, but we do. We miss lots of things [lots of people, lots of brood twins] but when we're more present here, we're more aware of it. It's why we sometimes find focusing here difficult. Also--

[She pauses. The uncertainty in her pings as clearly as a struck bell.]

Some of them were close to the Nest before their bodies died. When we're more broad, it's possible for us to be familiar with those parts of them again.

[deployed]

[ Bellamy had regarded Cathway and Prince both as having all the explanations about this place. Her uncertainty is unexpected. It vibrates between them. Bellamy resists it for a long moment before classifying and accepting it. ]

I don't think he was close to the Nest.

[ The Darkling was...difficult. And likely better at closing himself off than Bellamy will ever be. ]

I'm sorry.

[ The statement is abrupt, accompanied by a sudden pressure as Bellamy's mind opens up, curling towards her as if a conscious decision has been made to allow it. He can't replicate the feeling of a Nest. Bellamy suspects that connection, once lost, is gone forever. ]

I'm sorry they're gone.

[ Maybe she'd felt like him once before. Cathaway seems glacial at times. She's more serene than Carata had been, and Bellamy has the sense that anything he threw at her would glance off. But he's not trying to ruffle her now. He's hurting, and he's trying to ignore that by ministering to her in hi admittedly clumsy fashion. ]

[polyphonos]

[He gives and small pieces of her shift to fill the gaps. Or the knitted threads of her rearrange themselves and are rewoven to include the fringe of his raw hurt and desire for comfort and the aching emptiness alongside her own until there is nothing distinct about either. It isn't the same, of course. It's something which generalizes, where the broodlink is sharp specificity.

But maybe in this case there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's fine to feel broadly, to disseminate her physical ache of mental labor and his gut deep emotional cut between them.

Cathaway reaches across the narrow space between them and touches his shoulder. It isn't a necessary contact - not when he's let her drift so close - but it's a natural one.]

We are too. [But what would they think of they were obsessed with it? What would the point of it be?] But screw it. We'll live.

[She smiles and pats his cheek. They turn a corner and arrive abruptly on the Nesting Deck.]

[deployed]

[ Bellamy hadn't been expecting her to touch him. It felt like an added layer of intimacy; their minds were winding close, and the shock of her hand on his shoulder rattles through the connection. His eyes widen, but his expression relaxes into a smile when she speaks. It's such a painfully familiar sentiment. <>i>We'll live has been so often repeated among the Arkadians that hearing it from her can only provoke camaraderie and comfort.

Though some of that fades when they enter the Nesting Deck. He stalls, hesitating, but Cathaway keeps moving. It's all that draws Bellamy in. He can't hold onto the Darkling. He won't wake if he's kept from his pod, though sealing him in feels like acceptance of his current state. ]

What happens if we don't put them in?

[ The question has to be asked. Bellamy needs a moment to shore up his composure. ]

[polyphonos]

Maybe nothing. Sometimes they wake up after a short time. But sometimes we suspect reconnecting them with the Nest helps to stabilize the symbiote. Hosts in extended comas, in deeper sleeps, remain alive longer when in sync with the Station. Statistically.

[Nothing is assured. Everything is theory. But this is a good one. It makes some sense and she chooses to believe it. Besides, there are few good places to put quiet sleeping bodies. Let it at least be somewhere safe and still and comfortable. Somewhere kind. It wouldn't do to have them sleep in Life Support where they would be harder to ignore. --Not that it's bad to remember. But the proximity of that feels crippling.

At the behest of a small hand motion, the floating slabs break rank and move into waiting, empty hexagonal chambers. The slabs fit just inside them, lower, then seemingly melt away into the structure of the Nesting Deck. They leave each sleeping Host exactly where they ought to be. But--]

They'll need to be reconnected. [She touches the base of her neck.] Will you help us with that too?

[deployed]

[ Statistics might have soothed someone else. Raven or Monty, maybe, but they're not here and Bellamy clenches down hard on thoughts of them before those thoughts could become wishes. Trapping more people he loves here isn't something Bellamy can live with.

He presses a palm to the chamber the Darkling is sealed into. Despite Cathaway's assurance, Bellamy has a brief, terrified urge to claw him back out. It feels painfully final. The desperate hope that he'd wake before they got to this point dies thrashing in the back of Bellamy's mind. He doesn't reply to her immediately, but eventually his head lifts and he squares his shoulders ]

You'll have to tell me what to do. I don't know...I don't know how it work, but I want to help.

[ Murphy might. He'd focused on the symbiotes more intently than Bellamy had. Bellamy's worries had been more broad, and he'd shied away from digging at the thing in the back of his head. This kind of insight might be what Murphy had wanted from the beginning, but Bellamy can't appreciate it fully. ]

[polyphonos]

It's easy enough. Do you remember how you were connected when you woke up? [She steadies herself on the edge of one of the compartments, ducks under the mantle of it and reaches to the wall where a line can be drawn from the Station, terminating in a blunt end and a single shallow needle.]

There's a small scar at the base of the skull. It's just a matter of [she makes a small jabbing motion] putting things back at they were.

[It's a sensitive place on the body, but the connection isn't so deep as to risk damage.]

[deployed]

[ Bellamy pales slightly.

For all the blood he's spilled, there's something unsettling about the serene offering of the needle. Mount Weather is never far from his thoughts here, and it flickers in his mind, fear souring the connection between them. ]

What if the pain wakes them?

[ His own entry onto the Station has softened and blurred over time. The initial shock of it has been slowly overwritten by what had come after, and thinking of that now is painful. The raw clutch of his mind and the Darkling's had blotted out everything else. But the memory of something hooked into him is there if Bellamy concentrates.

But he lets it go quickly. It's another link that reminds him too much of Mount Weather, and he's having a difficult enough time as it is without conflating Cathaway and Prince with the hazmat-suited doctors who had jabbed at him. ]