[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

cw: attempted suicide

[wrackful]

[Murphy had held a gun under his chin, once. Pressed the barrel there hard, finger on the trigger. The memory rises at the prospect of starvation, because that's what he'd been facing, what had driven him to consider it. He'd already lost half his mind being trapped alone for three months; he hadn't wanted to lose the rest, dying slowly. He couldn't wish the same on her, even as his mind scrabbles, still trying to pull pieces where they should be, his self in this room, not in the bunker, not on that mountain.]

( You weren't always like this. )

[Her kind, she says, but the dead don't grow. She had to have been alive, once. Had she still served this king, then? Or had she been someone else, someone who would've hated this existence?]

( There has to be something. )

[They're stuck together. Chained together, making her curse his. Her slaughter still presses vivid in his mind, his own darkness winding thin through it, and he wants to stop it coming again. It isn't revulsion, or nobility. Crystallising slowly, quieter, bitter. Exhaustion. He's just tired of death.]

[miscreant]

( You still don't understand. )

[Her natural anger pools, swimming amidst her hungry, thrashing against what little restraint she has. The suggestion that she'd ever been anything but an undead construct has her grabbing for his throat, like a triggered defense mechanism that seems to surprise some part of her.

The squeeze is brief, but it is enough to bring her back to her senses and drop him almost as soon as she has grabbed him. Instantly, she puts some distance between them, tugs on one of her ears until she has wrestled control of the pit in her stomach.

Her mind pulls, reaches for something that isn't there. A memory to show him, something to say, anything that might get her point across. But it always comes back to the same thing -- the death of an elven woman, hair red like fire, eyes soft with arcane rather than frigid with coldfire. Nothing before --

There is a blank space, where she clearly seems to be repressing the following memory of that woman's death for her broodmate's sake. She can sense how exhausted he is, the bitterness forming in his chest. If she is to continue functioning at capacity, she must spare him as much of her pain as possible.]

( Whatever I came from, there is nothing of her left. )

[wrackful]

[She moves so fast he wouldn't have had time to dodge, or fight back, even if he was more lucid. It's only a moment, her hand squeezing at his throat, his feet lifted from the floor, but his mind is still split and the past floods through. The red belt-made-noose cinched around his neck, the mob of his peers around him, the sick desperation as he looks at Bellamy, shakes his head, begs and pleads past the gag in his mouth. The jolt and drop as Bellamy kicks the crate out from under his feet.

The jolt comes again as Seviilia drops him. It's enough, finally, to break clarity into his mind. Hunching forward, one hand lifted to his throat, he watches her move with both caution and some small amount of hate. He'd offered to help, he'd taken her hand, but he hadn't signed up to be hurt.]

( How do you know? ) [Sharper than before. Crueller, lashing out a reaction he's rarely able to curb.] ( You can't even remember her, can you? )

[miscreant]

[Her muscles tighten, a reflexive reaction of anger, and there's a brief moment in their shared mindspace where she snaps and lunges at him -- but her physical self stays still, through great discipline and a desire not to harm herself further.

She can tell now, what are her memories and what are his. The Lich King, the burns, the slaughter, the thirst for vengeance -- her's. The red belt, the hanging, Bellamy's face -- those don't belong to her. Hatred swims between them. Weren't they comrades? Was this where Murphy's anger came from?

She tries to pull them back, to analyze, to understand -- but they don't belong to her. Just like every other memory that doesn't belong to her, it slips through the sieve of her borrowed mind.

You can't even remember her, can you? At least he has the sense to separate them. Seviilia, and the woman who doesn't exist.]

( You should go. )

[He doesn't need her confirmation -- there was nothing to remember.]

[wrackful]

[He flinches. There's no hiding that. Too used to being attacked, beaten, not to have that instinct to try and evade. But she hadn't really come for him.

Another time, he would've taken it as more evidence of being in the right. She'd gone for his throat, she'd wanted to lunge at him again. But there wasn't any right in it. She was angry. Still hurting and hungry, the things he'd come down here to try and help. There's a flux of regret, and he nods, gaze dropping. Self-hate is a small, sharp blade tucked under the ribs.]

( Yeah. )

[He should go. He isn't going to argue that. But he'd come here because he was concerned, and he still is.]

( What are you going to do? )

[miscreant]

( Someone else will come. The Nest will not allow it to kill me. Or you. )

[Or they won't, and she will comatose, as she had when she had gone too far with The Darkling. That part, she doesn't voice -- but it was the inevitable cycle. Maybe he would come to realize it one day.

It isn't a perfect solution, but there were no other alternatives present. Maybe she could at least offer some sense of understanding.]

( I am sorry, John. I know it is tiresome. )

[wrackful]

[His mouth tugs, mirthless, bitter. She says sorry, but he wonders if that should be his line. He can't help. They're all that's left of their brood, a part of him that feels strangled already by the prospect of her dropping away like the others have, but her ice bites into his bones and he can't do anything to alleviate her hunger.

But then, the fault didn't really lie with either of them.]

( Hey, not like you can help it, right? None of us can. )

[No choice in being what she was, and no choice in being tied to him. It's straying into ground of old complaints, the ones Seviilia didn't like to hear, but she won't have to any further than this. He's already moving to leave.]

[miscreant]

( We are one another's greatest weakness. Yes. )

[She watches him go, and the distance feels oddly painful in its own way -- but its better. She knows it, he must know it also. Whatever weakness it was now would evolve into a strength, once they conditioned themselves to cope.

It doesn't stop it now -- some of his bitterness mixes with her own. Seviilia could hardly remember the last time she felt physical pain from being torn away from another, a different sort of pain than the hollow screaming of the curse in her blood.

She recalls his memory -- the one with Bellamy. A fire burns away the bitterness, and replaces it with hardened steel.]

( But if anyone attempts to come for you as they did before, I will rend them clean. )