[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

[wille]

[ Her face cycles through a handful of expressions, like a deck of cards being shuffled, a slot machine flipping through the pictures, games of chances. In the span of a few seconds she goes from astonishment at the realization that someone as somber (sober, didn't she call someone else that once?) could let out a laughter so bright, before reverting behind the cover of offense at being laughed at, isn't that so? No, he's laughing at the entire human race and as such the insult is thinly distributed, and she loosens her grip on anger to turn thoughtful, eyebrows knitted to make sense of his perspective.

Misato has no desire that doesn't directly correlate with her self-imposed duty owed to her late father. It's personal, yes, very much so but that makes the burden no less light, the responsibility no less serious. But no, no, that's an easy lie to tell herself. All she has ever chased after are desires, the promise of absolution, that is no noble duty no matter how much she would like to believe it. Denial of desire is also a want.

She feels rather ashamed all of a sudden, bowing her head slightly and turning aside to find something else to pick up and fiddle with in hopes of hiding her face. Even then she can't resist looking back at him, her gaze as pointed as ever. ]

What do you mean by your responsibility?

[ He called himself a guardian, didn't he? ]

[regalled]

I mean my responsibility to this place, and to the Hosts who rely upon it for their survival. The Station requires care. The new Hosts require guidance and protection and training, when they will take it. The agents require their help, when it can be provided. There are very few left who can do these things, and fewer still who want to.

[Being an agent was dangerous. Traveling in the multiverse, you could be killed, by the Enemy, or simply by bad luck. But it was often beautiful. Exciting. There was so much, so many things to see. He could still smell the salt on the air, the window opened through Cathaway's mind. How much more that was than waiting here for hosts to arrive, knowing that many of them would at best be ambivalent, at worst hateful. But someone had to do it.]

So it is our responsibility. Duty, and dedication to that duty. Those things are important.

[He makes a noise, soft, and adds after a moment-]

I do not think this will provide you whatever answer it is that you need, Misato.

[wille]

[ Misato rarely thinks of herself as particularly intelligent, a side effect of spending most of her adult life caught in the middle of a lauded scientific genius and a sleuthing prodigy, but she has her intuition, her own way of finding the signal among the noise even if she can't quite explain how she got there. Like now, she intuits that the idea Prince wishes to impart is that this, this life, is something permanent and so she should align herself with it, wants and responsibilities and all.

It's foolish to dream of home, to busy herself with a world so far removed from here, to deceive herself into thinking she could have any more hand in its salvation. A hard pill to swallow.

She draws in a breath, too sharp, too tense, then lets out a huff. Her expression still stern. ]

No. No, there's the answer I want, then there's the one that I need to hear.

[ Better to face the facts and act accordingly, didn't someone wise say that? She rouses herself with a smile first, then by squaring her shoulders, a brightness willed into being. ]

Well! Enough chitchat. These things aren't gonna move themselves.