[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

[raw]

Touch can be volatile, for Elliot, but after the first initial shock of it, Peter presses their hands together firm and gentle and dry, more careful than a handshake. It's unexpected, and nice. It also feels like a power move, though one without the arrogant presumption of toxic masculinity behind it. Elliot is reminded strongly of whiter0se.

(Long red nails on masculine hands. Face blurred by a wreath of smoke, cigarette stubbed out onto the reflective underside of a data disc. Chinese characters on a library computer screen, green on black. The sound of a watch timer beeping.)

"Just us." Plurality. That's new for him, in a lot of ways. He sighs, lifts a hand — the other hand — and passes it from his forehead back over his short rough hair. Scratches the back of his head for a moment. "Listen, I don't wanna.... this is a weird question. But. You're real, right? You're really here?" (Followed by the stray dubiousness that the answer to that is gonna be true or verifiable/Elliot you're being paranoid/It's not paranoia if they're really—)

[stilettoes]

Us.

There's something both lonely and wholesome about the word. Peter might have used it in a different way maybe a few hours ago. For a beat he thinks about letting go, but the impression is what keeps him there out of curiosity. The sharp, barely there sound of a beep has him blinking just a bit behind his glasses however. awake. It stays, lingering, like the uncertainty that's flowing out and—

That is familiar. It's something Peter finds himself reaching out for to wrap around curiously because it isn't abstract and passive so much as it is abstract and almost tangible in a way that feels almost natural to touch now. He's soft about it, like a ghost, a touch that maybe you'd reserve for something precious that catches your eye, glimmering in the light.

He lets go at last and gives himself a brief pat down with both hands.

"Last time I checked I was incredibly real, so I'll have to say that yes. Very real. Here, present, and accounted for." He tips his head and keeps close. "Do you have a habit of making friends with people who are less than all there? I can't blame you for asking with all the... noise." Coming from somewhere. The overall ruffled feeling from it is still there, resting uncomfortably beneath Peter's eager warmth.

[raw]

"I wouldn't say, friends, exactly," Elliot answers dryly. But he doesn't pull away, however aware he is of the way his breath draws through his lungs when he's standing this close to someone, the shape of his hands, one still tingling psychosomaticly from that touch. His heartbeat. His tongue.

Shit, they probably look like such weirdos, standing like two kids at a high school dance who aren't sure where to put their hands. Peter at least has more physical ease, but this is so new and experimental for both of them, and they're too synapse-twined to be able to pretend otherwise. Elliot wonders if he's going to have to explain Mr Robot, though for now his other self is silent. "Sometimes I see stuff," he settles for, lamely. "People that aren't there. But you don't... I don't think I'd make you up." Even the brief touches of their interior worlds are enough to see that the sheer scope of another mind, an actual other mind, is beyond him. Hell, even his alternate personality wasn't a unique creation.

[stilettoes]

"Well trust me when I say that you couldn't. Not me."

A barely formed after-thought: Only I make myself up. Thankfully, Peter shifts his hand upwards a bit, a casual touch of the elbow if it's allowed, the way you might take someone's arm on a leisurely stroll. There's half a squeeze lingering there before he releases altogether, a smile as benign as it is sly lingering over his mouth, as he works through his own uncertainty of the situation--

(drawing cards off a deck like looking for all the right answers in all the wrong hands, discarding and drawing and shuffling and there are no answers here, just pointless hands, drawing, discarding, and shuffling)

--which only seems put to ease by a barely there touch, a graze of shoulder to shoulder. There's comfort here even in unfamiliar familiarity all the way down to his fingertips that he brings together in front of himself to clasp softly. "Where did they take you from?"

[raw]

The squeeze of a bicep, the knock of a shoulder. Elliot is at once monstrously desperate for more (yes, come closer, assuage a little of this lonliness with your sheer proximity) and wary of sustained close contact (waiting for the painhurtdisgust). Don't touch me, his anxiety screams, even as he drops his hand down and slots them palm to palm again, like it's ordinary.

"New York," he says. Then, because his favorite movie is Back to the Future 2: "2017. I don't know how long I was out for." Instinctually his hand drops to his abdomen, presses over where there was once a gunshot wound but isn't any longer. His t-shirt is torn there but not bloody. "Probably a while. You?"

[stilettoes]

It shouldn't feel this ordinary or right to have someone else so firmly latched onto you. He knows nothing but there's a craving to be close and Peter's known that maybe a handful of times in his life. It's invasive and he half wants to press against it, but the vise is like iron snapped shut and fast and -

"Then that makes you practically ancient history, at least to me... fascinating." there's a smile there, disbelief in his eyes because it isn't a lie that Peter is an admirer of history at the heart of it all, the sentiment genuine, like the pleasant click of a light bulb warming a room over with its glow. "We're a few thousand years apart, you and I. And as for the where: a planet on the Outer Rim. Very far from Earth and very miserable. So I left."

[raw]

"To come here?" Elliot asks, tone even but a kind of childlike curiosity to him. He's mistaken, of course, to think that anyone didn't find themselves on the stations of the Hive the exact same way he did, waking up from a bleary coma with the last thing he remembers being accepting Cathaway's proposal, so far from here. He's imagining Hadrian (Peter) in his neat little future-man space ship, just dropping on by.

[stilettoes]

"Oh, I wish," he explains. "I wanted to travel when I was younger, and travel I did. But as far as ending up here goes, it was more a matter of necessity and impulse than anything else. I was hoping for somewhere warmer, really. Like Venus." There's a weak smile there, something Peter hates showing because why that rather than bare all your teeth? But Elliot doesn't deserve those teeth, and a display like that isn't meant for people you're being (somewhat) honest with.

[raw]

Elliot nods, considering that. "Do you still have corporations in the future?" Elliot wonders aloud. "Money? Capitalism?" He wonders if there's a record of Earth's economic collapse in Hadrian's history books. If it mentions the five-nine attacks. If they printed his name. None of that should matter anymore, it's gone, a past stage of his life. BC: Before Coma. Before Cathaway. But he still carries it like a weight.

[stilettoes]

The question is a silly one, at least to Peter, the kind that makes his eyes crinkle a little bit at the edges behind his glasses.

"What a thing to ask, but yes," he says. "Bigger, badder, wealthier, at least on the more populous planets in any case. Brahma was one of them, though I've no clue the state of it now," In a way, that mention itself is more than he'd like to let on, but there's a strange comfort that seems to unravel the words from him slowly, cautiously but with a sense of intertwining trust that leaves him feeling bereft of any other choice. "Empires rise and fall of course, but I think that's one aspect of humanity that's rather unstoppable."

[raw]

"Not necessarily," Elliot tells him, and he's tired, he's so tired of believing that in the face of everything to the contrary so it's flat, but with it comes a surge of such pure furious conviction that it's probably at odds with his quietly neutral tone. The kind of rage that lights the fuse of revolution.

He squeezes Peter's hand, but it's as a precursor to letting go. "We should probably go find out more about what's going on here, though." Instead of places neither of them are anymore.

[stilettoes]

Oh. Now that's something that catches Peter's attention quickly, the way you pluck something out of midair with an effortless grace - a knife on the blade, feeling it biting in, that conviction parting something that seems so much larger than life and sinking its sharpness into it anyway.

He returns the squeeze with his own, smoothing a thumb along the outside of his hand, letting go in turn and nods. "A good start, though maybe before we're off, it's time to retire your shirt. There were spare clothes in the bed, unless you're particularly attached to the hole in your shirt." He eyes it briefly, perhaps a bit concerned, though doesn't see any sort of wound at its center or even along its side. "Were you hurt?"

[raw]

Elliot looks down again, thumbs into the little hole, brushing golden skin gone sallow with lack of sun. "Got shot," he explains, brow wrinkled as he considers once again the impossibility of his healing — and then those storm clouds pass, and he sighs. Doesn't seem inclined to explain further, though the memory of the pain of it is right there if Peter wants it. "Good call." He can double back, find something else to wear. Now that he knows there are going to be other people around.

When he leaves, though, to go find one of the provided Station tops, their hands may have separated but he doesn't try and untwine the way their minds merged. Like they stay clasped, despite the distance.

[stilettoes]

Elliot peels away and as for the memory that lingers along their connection, he hovers around it, feathering briefly against it. The impression of it is there, the start of pain that could be more if he wants to slip in deeper. Truth is, Peter's hands are prone to grabbing onto whatever it is he happens to pass by that catches his attention, but instead of snatching it up, he lets himself reflexively folding in the dark fabric of his jacket, still quite intact along with the rest of his clothing by contrast. He'll take a pass on the pain.

The grasp of their minds is firm, but small, just born and stubborn, and While Peter doesn't walk alongside him, he feels like he's being pulled along in a disembodied way. He tries to bat at it casually as if it were a physical thing like a fly or smoke - the same hand that still feels warm from the previous touch to his palm, as if to say Not now. Later, maybe. Again. When he's feeling just a bit less confused about the whole thing.

So for now he remains, waiting with a lax posture, a tall pillar dressed in black that seems rather loathe to just up and leave without him despite having just met. Whenever Elliot returns, he smiles, much wider this time and with a set of teeth. "Oh yes, that looks much better on you. Bullet holes can are a very unusual artistic choice, but don't always work out in the long run."