[hatch log / mission: hyrypia] the winds that will be howling at all hours

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72; Hyrypia - Naerstone House
WHEN: DAY :002 - :003
SUMMARY: New hosts hatch on the Station, are briefed, then make their way to Hyrypia to join the rest of the hosts… while they attend a very important history lesson.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

STATION 72
DAY :002

NEW HATCHES
YOU WAKE UP are are suddenly changed. --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 surfacing up from the darkness of some wine dark sea. Nothing is different and everything is because 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.

But here you are, a small miracle of the multiverse: lying in a small, faintly hexagonal chamber with 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 calmed. There's something peaceful about waking up here - like you belong. 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. A matching dread. An easy comfort. 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 nearby 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.In fact there are lots of you and none of them are the strangers they should be. Some even seems like people you've known for a very long time.They are as familiar as this place you've never been is.

Welcome to Station 72. Beyond this room it's quiet and still, feeling for all the world like a hollow shell.

--Or it does until a voice separates itself from the white noise in your head:


BRIEFING
THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD isn't really a voice at all. It's the warm tang of camaraderie, tinged with a flash of impatience like ticking hands on a clock face and a flicker of wonder: a falling star. It says:

( My, you're all very fresh aren't you? Unfortunately, the multiverse waits for no spring chicken. Once you've figured out which way's up, won't you all join us? )
Join 'us' where is the question. And yet, once you're ready to meet the owner of the voice in your mind, your footsteps simply lead you there naturally. Two strangers sit in a small circular briefing room - a tall being covered in short brown fur with a rigid demeanor, and a pale alien with yellow washed frills at her jaw and throat who is smiling cheerfully.

"Hey there, sunshine," says Rhan, her frills humming as she speaks. "Why don't you take a seat so we can get started?"

[ooc note: please see here for the catch-all briefing thread]


THE STATION
WITH A LITTLE UNDER 24 HOURS before it's time to make the trip to Hyrypia, this is as good an opportunity as you're going to get to familiarize yourself with Station 72 before you leave it. There's plenty to see, but a distinct lack of people to make conversation with. It's lonely and quiet and there's a sensation of dust gathering even where there is none. Maybe studying the briefing files on your databank and going over your mission kit is the most proactive distraction, but if not? Well there's plenty of places to get lost...

HYRYPIA - NAERSTONE HOUSE
DAY :003

MEETING
A SINGLE SHIP LANDS in a field the color of burnished gold, returning to the place it had until late the night before occupied. It's carefully inserted beside dozens of other spacecraft bearing more than faint similarities, though each has its own unique aesthetic. When the gangplank drops, the loud engines powering down, it reveals--

New hosts. Seven fresh faces - obscured as they are in layers of intricate fabric - are led down the gangplank by Rhan There to greet them is a number of other hosts - any who answered to the sweet crystalline ring of Collector’s voice in their heads hardly a half hour earlier, speaking with certainty born of truth:

( Rhan and Siva’co are returning. Shall we see what stories they have to tell? )

Despite the solidarity that both combined groups provide, there's a feeling of eyes here. A number of guards along the edge of the shuttle field are watching the reunion like hawks. Better perhaps to return to the apartments where they'll be able to speak in private and teach the new hosts what it is that has been learned since their arrival. --Or explore, for those who prefer not to rest. Naerstone House's grounds are vast and they are almost entirely open to the parties of the pilgrims to explore.

THE PERFORMANCE
AS THE SINGLE RED SUN of Hyrypia dips low on the horizon there is a long, low, mournful sound. A deep bell-- or a horn? Or maybe it's something else entirely, but the call is heard and answered as any nearby servants inform the guests of the house:

“There will be a performance of the First Journey in a quarter turn. All guests are invited to attend.”

There's no mystery as to where the event is occurring. A steady trail of guests and servants lead out past the Veranda into the central garden where a number of pillars have been mounted and a large tiered platform festooned with with numerous draped curtains and abstract representations of trees and mountains - a great stage - now sits. The stage is surrounded by numerous low settees and tables, piles of thick cushions and richly colored rugs around which guests can be found clustered, lounging while sipping thick, syrupy drinks.

Each table is illuminated only by a single glowing orb at its center. Otherwise, as the sun sets it pitches the garden into darkness as even the castle itself has been left unlit. There are no lights in distant windows or on Naerstone House's high walls; these small orbs and the glitter of stars in the black sky might very well be the only points of light in the whole universe.

The allotted time passes and the performance begins. A sun rises over the stage. It's a much larger, more intricate glowing orb and reveals a number of players dressed far more simply than the Hyrypians the hosts have met. They wear complex machine masks upon their faces that shutter into different expressions as their hands flitter across their faces: dramatic caricatures to accompany the droning sound of their singing voices as they unfold the tale at the center of the performance - the one which drives this pilgrimage and for the Nest's very presence in the universe at all. It's the story of lost Rabadoceans coming to a planet near barren intent on brutalizing them - about loss and hardship until finally a single player separates from the rest. The orb of the sun over the stage turns, it's mechanical face shifting and resetting to indicate the passage of time as the very central platform of the stage begins to turn so that this lone player might walk. And walk. And walk through deserts and scrub land, through dark woods and dark caves, against the wind and with it. Through it all, the orb over the stage slowly lowers until at last this lone player can take it in their hands.

It cracks like an egg and brilliance streams from it. Braziers catch fire in the darkness. The garden illuminates itself. Every light in Naerstone House comes to life.

With that, the silence of the crowd breaks. There is applause -- each culture in its own unique fashion -- and then there is a rise of chattering conversation as the guests are served several small dishes and talk about the show they’ve just seen - and whatever possible clues it might give to the pilgrimage they themselves would soon be undertaking.

---

((OOC Notes: This is the hatch log for all new hosts as well as the evening's performance. Feel free to make your own logs and posts additional to this if you care to. You can find a more detailed overview of the host hatching process HERE and additional setting information about the Station HERE. Please be sure to review the MISSION: HYRYPIA ooc information. If you have any questions, please hit up either the mission's question thread, the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[polyphonos]

It's more complicated than you're capable of right now. [The woman hasn't looked up from her book. On the contrary, she turns a page and appears to continue reading. Her mind is quiet: a black stretch where nothing sits.]

But when you arrive on planet, speak to Lexa or Misato. They'll be able to assist you in the practice of such a technique and by then your mind will have acclimated to the connection enough to grasp some of it.

[Apparently she's not in the teaching mood today.]

[shri]

[ It sets her teeth flatly against each other, her fingers drumming. She hasn't settled once she arrived. How could she? With what she is connected too. ]

Then how do I kill her?

[ Because surely, surely this woman sees the danger of such a creature, being attached to them? ( Not personal - never personal - beyond personal when she knows their destruction first hand ). ]

[polyphonos]

[The sensation of a pause. The texture of a moment unwinding from its spool.]

We would prefer you didn't.

[It's as if some measure of of this place has come into sharper focus, though the words are spoken flat and dry and the silver sheet of her hair swaying forward across her shoulder as she turns to the next page in her book. Still: the weight of her in the room is palpable.]

[shri]

[ She flinches away from it, that pressure turning back at her. That attention against her mind, her own senses that sucks all the breath out of her body. Steels herself, that pressure she pushes down with against every limb. Her heels set into her boots, her fingernails into her palm. ]

Why? She is a monster.

[ It's not a belief, nothing so forgivable, she says it in the full pressure of the screams in her mind she cannot separate. ]

[polyphonos]

[Cathaway sighs. She closes the book and raises her face to Lakshmi.]

She is exactly as you are - a Host of the Nest. What any of us were before this place is merely context and perspective to leverage your new goal: to survive, then to thrive. To kill her without cause would be more than pointless. It would be self sabotage.

[She speaks flat and plain, no trace of anything but some tired impatience in the shape of her voice. But the weight of her mind is cold as a coal fallen to ash. Not today. Let's not speak of killing today.]

[shri]

[ There are a hundred things she could say to that - but as she sets her jaw and turns her face to meet hers flatly - they would all be superfluous. She will not accept that - she is nothing like them. Even if her mind and body betrayed her - she would never, never betray her people's suffering. Their misery. Their deaths. Her fingers curl in hard against themselves, biting to bleed. ]

[polyphonos]

[Are they content to say nothing then? To speak no words and to simply let the mind feed into the space between them? Good. Because this place is nothing like the one she came from. Mind and body and blood and suffering and death don't touch this place in the way it does elsewhere. The deaths of people are as candles being extinguished, and the death of hosts is as losing a limb.

What does she expect to happen when she puts the blade to her own brood? (A metal taste: copper and steel, so much wet blood behind the teeth that it pours out between the lips.)]

[shri]

[ She is too new, too open, too clawed open to have a barrier, to know how to separate that feeling flooding her from herself. She gasps, as the pain washes up her whole system. Misremembered, not her own, and yet encompassing her. Has to grit her teeth - not a refusal of Cathaway's presence inside of her but in habit of holding pain back.

Refuses, rejects, has no other instincts to pain other than to fight. So she pushes back. Not with her mind - a battlefield she cannot win on - but with her body. Doesn't know how touch will only strengthen the feeling. So she has not hesitation in shoving forward into Cathaway where she's sat. Shoving a knee between her legs to pin her, her forearm and held to brace as she shoves the rest of herself forward. The heavy leather braces she wears better than her own skin used to broaden the width of her arm to make sure it stay that way. ]

Stop it.

[ It's gasped out, panted desperately. ]

[polyphonos]

[Press, press, press - smashing something living between two heavy stones, the squelch of tissue in the moment that Lakshmi presses forward into her space physically. Cathaway's thin frame gives under the weight of her aggression, but her mind doesn't - it's just as heavy, just as jagged. She stares at the woman, her grey eyes too reflective in the low light of the dusky colored garden. There's no trace of bared teeth in the shape of her mouth, but it feels like there could be.

So many things could be.]

Why? Because it would be simpler?

[shri]

[ It takes every bit of her, too new, too exposed, a little girl fumbling with her weapons, to keep her knuckles from being sliced open, but worse - she shudders, a miserable sensation, that hunches her shoulders up. Tenses every muscle, held fast, won't crumble, won't relinquish her hold.

Holds herself so hard, she can feel her nails bite to blood through her hold on Cathaway's clothes, into her own palm. ]

Because I will never be coerced by force. Of my mind or my body. My will is my own to dictate.

[polyphonos]

[She stares at her, bright eyes in a paper thin face. She comes in the shape of a frail, thin woman but the sensation of her in Lakshmi's grip is an animal - a snake beginning to uncoil. A heavy banded body turning over to wrap at the woman's wrist.]

Is it? [As if she's genuinely asking. Unblinking.] Are you certain?

[Has it ever been just hers? Or has she always been bound by the responsibility she has to something else - someone else - a nation and a world which needs her to be coerced by the force applied in her direction? In what way does anyone not bend to meet the world they find themselves in and against? There's no fight is the enemy isn't acknowledged and clearly, clearly, this woman desires to set her teeth to that which stands to threaten her.

Is this really so different from that?]

[shri]

[ What is she?

The contact is so much. That bond of fingers around her wrist, as delicate as a shackle. Held tightly and feather light. The way it doesn't have to be more to be a threat. It is already everything it has to be, and is so much more than that. Twice as damning. ]

If I did - [ a world, a nation, a home, her whole body cut up and sewn into the ground. Her blood is not holy because she is queen, it is because she is jhansi ki rani and she had laid herself into that earth, that dirt, so it may be all the more fertile. ] - it was never by a creature such as you.

[ And the wise thing to do would to not be to put her hand into a lion's mouth, but she didn't get so far by ever being wise, so much as determined. She turns her wrist inside that shackle, testing it. ] Do not think I will not burn myself for the effort of setting you to flames.

[polyphonos]

[She doesn't doubt it.]

We would prefer it if you didn't. There are creatures here that don't deserve that kind of harm.

[Her hand at Lakshmi's wrist is very light indeed-- so light that there, the vice like sensation of it might pass, ceding once more to just an old woman's long fingers and the soft scrape of her callouses.]

Surely you understand our urge to see them secure.

[Cathaway unpeels her hand from Lakshmi's wrist a finger at a time. She tips her face back by a degree - fixes the woman with a look that's both more direct and infinitely less penetrating - and raises an eyebrow: Are you finished?]

[shri]

[ She pushes back, slowly, she does not have this woman's mental strength, she is raging and burning and unable to stop against this woman's hard walls, and she can at least, appreciate that. But to her own end, she maintains her push, careful strength, that draws her back. ]

If your concern is so true, you know what you have to do. They are a disease, and you will pay for it.

[polyphonos]

[Her body is ambivalent, lax there under the threat of Lakshmi's presence over her. She is patient. She is easy. Let the woman best herself against a stone - it will do Cathaway no longterm harm to let Lakshmi brutalize herself.]

Be confident that we will deal with threats as they show themselves and do so without hesitation. Our priority is the longevity of this place and its people.

[Only one of them has attacked her when she is supposedly alone and vulnerable and it isn't the vampires.]

[shri]

[ The force of pulling herself up when she is still so new, so open, a cracked open statue, all empty creatures inside of it: makes her shake. But under her own strength she will do it, no matter how this impossible infinity feels like a pressure, heaves down upon her. Pushing up slowly onto her knees. ]

Then you will kill her. Now. Before my horrors become yours.

[polyphonos]

We will kill her if it becomes necessary. [As simple as that - as if she knows infinitely better what is required in this place.] When she is more active threat than a possible one. If we killed everyone who might harm another Host...

[Well that would put them in an awkward predicament at this very moment, wouldn't it? Cathaway fixes her with a grim smile.]

You may remove your hands from us now.

[shri]

[ She makes a noise - something like disgusted. Oh - threats, is it? ]

I am sorry - I respond one way when people like to press me. But if we are exchanging threats?

[ It's a too fast second, before the knife is drawn, the slide back into the black-water that comes as smooth, like oil over polish metal, trickling down. To stab, directly by Cathaway's leg. Deliberately missing of skin, of that singular body of Cathaway that is anything but, and perhaps that is the only thing that allows it to happen - not that she understands so well, right now, what the Symbiote will and won't do.

Uses it as fulcrum to push herself back up and away completely. Hands removed from her, up onto the balls of her feet and pulling the blade free. ] Clearer now? I do not like doing things by half.