[mission: hyrypia] i am not there; i do not sleep

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72; Hyrypia - The Graze
WHEN: DAY :019 - DAY :020
SUMMARY: Somewhere deep in the void between multiverses, a fresh clutch of Hosts hatches; down on the planet Hyrypia, a Host is laid to rest.
WARNINGS: Mentions of character death, funerary services. Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

STATION 72
DAY :019

NEW HATCHES
YOU WAKE UP and the universe with you in it is suddenly different. --No. That's not right. You're you, the universe is as it's always been, 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 coming up from the darkness of some wine dark sea. Nothing is different and yet everything is.

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. There are a handful of you here, somehow intimately familiar to each other.

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

Eventually, a sensation manifests out of the black. It says:


PREPARE YOURSELF
THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD is sound and sensation: a warm shaft of sunlight through smoky glass - a gauzy curtain twitching in some summer breeze. It says or feels like:

( Come meet with me, won't you? )

Where exactly this meeting is supposed to occur isn't immediately clear, but head in the direction that seems correct and eventually Station 72 gets you where you're meant to be: a circular briefing room with tiered seating, empty now, before a woman with a sheet of graying hair and something focused in her expression. It's been some time since she's spoken with a young host - since she's done one of this briefings. Apparently she's feeling something like her usual self. She smiles and it's very warm.

"Welcome to Station 72. Unfortunately, you won't be here long but we'd like to answer as many of your questions as we're able before you leave this place."

[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 is the most proactive distraction, but if not? Well there's plenty of places to get lost...

In the simulated morning, a strange archaic ship has arrived on the Hangar. Its very alien pilots unload two heavy trunks, then dole out a series of kits to the new hosts. One of them - the pale female alien who her calls herself Rhan - cheerfully announces, "Get changes and buckle in. I'm afraid we've some grim business ahead of us today. Funerals, you know. But chin up, my darlings. One uncomfortable day and then we'll leave the matter behind us. --Oh, but do be gentle with the others. I suspect they might be tender for a few days yet."

You leave the Station. If you're lucky, you might one day make it back.

HYRYPIA - THE GRAZE
DAY :020

THE FUNERAL PROCESSION
A SHIP DESCENDS from the iron colored sky early in the morning on Day :020. Before it even pierces the planet's atmosphere, its cargo should be obvious to the other Carbauschians: a new batch of Hosts, freshly hatched and just in time for the grim festivities.

The idea is simple: that they are part of a mourning delegation, only here to briefly oversee Lavellan's funerary rites. Luckily (...) there's plenty of comatose Hosts lying in the tents to trade places with the newcomers.

Better get to know your new friends quickly - there's plenty to be brought up to speed on (such as, uh, the recent death of one of the elder Hosts), and likely enough work to be done that the new spare hands are welcome. Or maybe the state of nothing-like-faux mourning is a good excuse for some alone time on a strange new alien planet. You're all so very, very far from home.


BURIAL RITES
THE FUNERAL has been arranged to the Hosts' precise specifications. Each and every single request they've made has been met, carried out by two soft-spoken, contrite Hyrypian servants who had come to them not long after their return from the hunt. Perhaps because the members of the other envoys are unsure whether it's permitted or welcome to attend, the site of the funerary pyre is hardly full to bursting with onlookers. Or maybe the burning of corpses goes against some obscure tradition. Or maybe some of the minor envoys simply don't care much and think the Carbasuchians are best left to their grief alone. Still, while it's hardly the entire encampment in attendance a notable selection of diplomats and their respective entourages and several of their Hyrypian hosts have turned out for the ceremony. It seems the Descendants in particular have turned out in some force, including the very hunter saved by Lavellan's quick thinking.

When the time comes for the rites to proceed, it's left to the Hosts to light the fire and say their farewells to their fallen comrade - the first and hopefully last to be lost in this strange land.


A SOMBER CELEBRATION
ASH SCENT HANGS HEAVY STILL over the encampment. Or maybe that's simply the perception - after all, the breeze still blows in from over the Great Flat. Surely it's just a memory of the smell which lingers, as circumstantial as the mournful note the wind sighs as it cuts across the Graze and into the tangled Finger Maze.

However, matters of the universe don't pause for the tragedy of the loss of an envoy - and there is so much riding on this Pilgrimage. To their credit, the Hyrypians have done all they can to provide for the Carbauschians in their time of grief (including a visit from the Matron Bassita herself, pale and full of sympathy and apologies), and as evening falls what clearly was meant to be a carousing party to celebrate a successful hunt and completion of the Pilgrimage's first stage has been considerably tempered.

The drinks still flow; the food is still plentiful, rich and lavishly spiced - but the music being played is soft and careful and of the hundreds of small technomanced insect lights the drift over the encampment tonight, a considerably portion of them are dedicated to lingering around the charred skeleton of the funeral pyre as a sober acknowledgement of what has come to pass.

Give it a few hours and maybe the mood will lighten slightly. On the other hand, there's nothing like an uncomfortably close tragedy to bring people together - and as Rhan suggests, maybe now's exactly the right time to ask a few pointed questions. Or to get hammered with new friends. Or to take a nice long walk while everyone else is consumed by the muted festivities.

---

((OOC Notes: This log covers the hatch, the arrival of new Hosts on Hyrypia, the funeral of Lavellan and the supremely awkward dinner party meant to wrap the first stage of the Pilgrimage. 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're brand new to the game. If you have any questions, please hit up either the mission's question thread, the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages!))

NAVIGATION • GAME CALENDAR • MISSION: HYRYPIA • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[sistershoggoth]

"Eh, we'll need you eventually," she answers with such total certainty. "You computer fucks always come in handy at some point."

Growing up, one of her teammates had been a technopath, working with computers, and probably about as socially capable as Elliot, if not actively much much ruder. Annie had loved Helka like a sister, and tried not to think about her whenever possible to do so. Hanging out of the technomancy planet talking to the hacker boy don't help. Luckily, she's drunk enough not to care. That is the state she aims for these days. Not so drunk she gets loud and incautious, but just drunk enough that her grief is kept at bay, and her mind is kept carefully behind a veil of muck, too sluggish and dumb to reach out and touch anyone else with her sprawling, wretched madness.

[raw]

"Maybe." Non-committal, with a side-serving of how out of his depth he feels. Elliot watches her, fascinated by proximate drunkness through the mental connection — by the mental connection itself, however flimsy without the bonds of broodhood.

( I guess even on a different planet, people are plagued by daemons. You can travel so far across the galaxy that you find new life and still want to get drunk after a funeral. )

He isn't even really looking at her, just talking to his imaginary friend with no particular awareness that he's projecting it out for anyone to hear. Or even if he did know, he probably wouldn't be able to make himself stop.

[sistershoggoth]

She laughs, lazy and slow, which is much how her mind is. Some cold-blooded thing circling in dirty water, watching with too many eyes, laughing with too many teeth.

( Personally, I've been drunk since before that fuckin' elf died, but that's not the point. People are always looking for a good excuse not to feel what they fuckin' feel. They yap like the booze makes it easier to get the grief out, but they're still putting up a nice numbing coat before they do it because they don't want to have to remember what it really felt like in the morning. This group's got a lot of problems and they're quick to drink about them. )

The snickering hypocrite, the bitter relapsed alcoholic now so quick and so unkind in her assessments of the exact same behavior she's partaking in. It's like she hates herself, or something.

[raw]

Oh shit.

( Oh shit. )

It still startles him, the mind-chat business. This is probably only the second or third time, and—

"Sorry, I forgot you could —"

( She can hear us. They can hear us now. )

"Hear that."

— it makes him nervous, a little awkward, not sure how to collate and curtail his mind so that it's fit for public consumption. (Is anyone's? From what she's saying: no.

"Where do you even get a drink around here, anyway."

[sistershoggoth]

She lifts her eyebrows at him, listening to all that noise ringing around in his skull. She knows about that filling: how to curtail herself. She'd chosen for a long time not to do so, it was only recently after her sprawling rattling monstrous bullshit got out of hand and she hurt a few people. Nothing too dire, not yet, but it had put the fear into her, and now here she is with her booze, keeping it at bay. Does she want to encourage him to do that same as her? She's so much happier with do what I say, not what I do.

"It's what they keep in the jugs, grassy smell shit but it gets the job done," she shrugs, unwilling to get into the discussion of whether or not it was a good idea for any of them to be indulging. She already knows for a fact that Gil is laid up in his tent suffer. Her fellow alcholic, she knows all too well how much it fucking sucks when you're trying to be sober and every asshole in your head is drunk.

"Have at, kiddo, you look old enough to drink."

So who is she to judge?

[raw]

There's something fucking hilarious about getting kiddo from this sprawled out girl instead of, you know, the aggressive anarchist version of his dad who lives inside his head (and probably loves Annie already uh-oh.)

"Thanks," he says with deep sarcasm (he's thirty!) but he does also help himself. Kaji had recommended a drink, but hadn't had any to offer. Elliot isn't sure it's a good idea to loosen wavering boundaries any further but he just wants something to make him care less about — everything. Everything that is happening.

So he drinks. Tries not to gag-choke on the taste, wrinkles his nose after. "Kinda prefer sweeter stuff," he admits — an appletini man at heart.

[sistershoggoth]

They're of similar age, and they were both probably stupid broken children on the inside, masquerading as function creatures. Annie knows all about it, about the facade of managed madness. She waits for him to come back, watching with an amused look as he gags over the green taste of the liquor.

"Just keep drinking it until you don't taste it," the advice of a true fucking alcoholic. She repositions onto her stomach, balancing her chin in her hands, knees bent behind her, feet dangling.

"The space station we were at last mission had better shit, this whole planet just fuckin' blows."

[raw]

"It's true," Elliot agrees solemnly, crossing his legs properly now so that he can lean over them. Takes another sip of the drink, doing his best to keep it from touching his tongue. That's the secret, he thinks, to not tasting it, just pouring straight to the back of your throat. "I thought technomancy meant there'd be more than just grass and shit."

But no... no.

Still, he's curious: "Tell me about your last mission."

[sistershoggoth]

"Eh, they got us doing their super fuckin' traditional shit to prove we've got true respect for their fuckin' holy whatever," a long suffering sigh. She's studied this kind of thing, religions and rituals. It was part of the Cartazonos coursework because Sparrows wanted the girls to know how to use such behavior against their practitioners. In that regard, this entire mission was textbook: infiltrate, pretend to participate, wait for the right moment to strike. It just normally wouldn't have been Annie doing the infiltrating. She had a battle set of skills, there had been other girls with more delicate touches. Pheromone manipulators, shape changers, liars who could make their lies true, that sort of shit. But for some reason the Nest just couldn't get its shit together enough to find the right people for the right jobs, so here they all are.

"Uh last mission we were on Waypoint Shril, there was this like intergalactic talent contest and the prize was apparently super fuckin' important and we had to get our hands on it in any way necessary. It was a cool space port kind of place with lots of aliens to hang out with and we didn't have to wear disguises or even pretend we weren't hivemind fuckers."

That had been nice, having free roam, not having to hide. The contest had even been kind of fun, although that had been interrupted...

[raw]

"Talent contest..." Elliot gives something between a grin and a grimace, his nose wrinkling. But he's settling into the cadence of her curse-spattered stories, the disgusting liquor radiating a relaxing warmth out from his stomach. It's the first time he's been even a little at ease since he woke up here.

"It sounds good. Better than this." He hates the claustrophobia of the disguise; this was a guy who had struggled to make himself wear a shirt and tie to work because he prefers to just wear the same uniform of hoodie and jeans everywhere -- the one he's wearing now. Maybe he should be more grateful, to be exposed to the wonders of an alien planet, but mostly he just misses the city. "I haven't gone camping since I was a kid. Doesn't feel like I was missing anything."

[sistershoggoth]

She laughs at that, open and easy. There's something way too funny about bringing a city boy along on this stupid adventure, roughing it for the principle of the thing when they just as easy could have taken a fuckin' spaceship to whatever holy site they were tromping towards. It might've even made sense to only have a few of them with boots on the ground, leave the rest up top for support. Instead, there's this, and the promise of no saving this mission of they're exposed. That part, especially, is a noose around her neck, keeping her deeply and desperately restrained despite how much the others keep tutting their eyes over what a useless, noisy, drunken bitch she was-- Or maybe that's in her head, sometimes she can't tell the difference. It's loud in there, even without the other hosts.

"Not much at all, but don't tell that to the fuckin' Rabos, they might get offended that you're not head over heels for their fuckin' planet and its beautiful fuckin' traditions."

[raw]

"Believe me," Elliot deadpans. "I have no plans to talk to any of the aliens if I can help it." He's just not built for grifting. He can lie with a straight face but that doesn't exactly matter much when they're all hidden under those costumes. "Probably wouldn't talk to anyone if I could help it."

But he can't. They're in his head.

[sistershoggoth]

"Aw!" a gush of feigned affection. "Are you fuckin' shy?"

Cause she's gonna bite right in to that and have a field day.

[raw]

"Just not big on people," says Elliot, tone a verbal shrug. The alcohol has relaxed him slightly, made this encounter both less fraught and less abrasive. That and he appreciates people who are just openly awful — it assuages his paranoia significantly when he isn't waiting to find out exactly how shit they are. So: "You're okay," he adds, which probably doesn't sound effusive but it's more than most people get.

[sistershoggoth]

"You're in the minority on that one, shithead," she corrects, pleasantly. She is not bothered, even slightly, that there are plenty among the hosts who don't care for her brand of dysfunctional coping.

"But don't worry, I'll do you right, little buddy."

[raw]

Little buddy. Elliot makes a sort of helpless 'welp, what can you do' face up at the roof of the tent. "Thanks." It's dry. Then, even though he doesn't expect it to work: "Don't call me that."

"So what else can you tell me." About the mission, the Nest, any of it. Induct him. Elliot meanwhile is going to pull out a battered packet of cigarettes: "You smoke?"