[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

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ There's a sense of something like a chuckle when he feels the brush of another mind against his, "knocking" - it's kind of what Sam tends to do, too. Under normal circumstances, Sam'd open up his mind a little bit, let him in if he wanted, but, well.

These aren't normal circumstances. ]

I'm guessing that's my cue not to ask about Moscow. [ Or at least, not until they've had a little bit more to drink. ]

Appreciate you asking, man. [ He does, genuinely - whether this guy's asking just to be polite or he really wants to know - there's a curl of gratitude like a brush of feathered wings. ] Let's just say my head ain't all that pretty of a place to be right now - gimme a couple of days and I'll get it sorted back out.

[justttkidding]

I have to be at least five drinks deep for that. [ As though he's reading Sam's mind. He's not. But great minds, yadda yadda. ]

Considering the circumstances, it seems hardly anyone is in a pretty place. [ November lets a little curl of sympathy reach out between them, however muted. It's tinged a bit cold through the connection, like it's been learned. ] I will, I'm afraid, have to hold you to your word.

[ About giving him time and trying this again. When people are grieving. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Five drinks, huh? I’ll remember that.

[ He’s teasing, mostly. Getting five drinks in doesn’t sound bad to him right about now, but he’s not really one to push someone he’s only just met for things they don’t want to talk about. ]

It’s the second death on a mission here since I’ve started, but for some people, it’s their first. [ But Sam is a soldier, and he’s no stranger to death - not even the death of someone he was close to. He reminds himself of that as he doesn’t think about the autopsy the night before, or about what Sam himself turned the funeral into in the search for more information. Instead he takes another drink, a quiet sense of regretful detachment settling over him. ] Not everyone here’s got experience with that.

[justttkidding]

I've the utmost faith in your memory, Sam.

[ And he returns the tease, of course. It's more fun when there's two players. He's quietly glad that Sam is willing to play along, giving as good as he gets. ]

Civilians, then? [ It's a query, but more of a confirmation. From the sense he's getting from Sam, this isn't his first rodeo with death. And it certainly won't be their last, if he understands the stakes well enough. There's a shard of something like pity that forms; normal people shouldn't be dragged into things like this. Or at the very least, they need more preparation for what would come down the line.

Before he became a contractor, he'd already done basic training for MI6. Death hadn't been a new concept– that didn't stop him from throwing up in the immediate aftermath. That feels so far and away from here, but he can't imagine some of the people here faring any better. ]

Is there really any way to prepare for it?

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ He can’t smile through the disguise, so he lets that feeling out across their mental connection, the flash of amusement and acknowledgement that he’ll commit it to memory. ]

Civilians and kids. [ There’s an echo of the feeling that he gets off November, quiet and not-quite bitter - they shouldn’t be dragged into this. They shouldn’t be thrown on missions with no training, minimal explanations, no time to adjust, and it sure as hell shouldn’t happen in the middle of a mission.

Maybe it’s not fair, but Sam can’t help but feel something like relief, that November isn’t one of them. He doesn’t know his story, sure, but Sam kind of thinks he’d like to, and he’s always felt more comfortable around -

Well. Not around civilians. ]

Nah. Even basic didn’t do the trick, but it was better than nothing.

[justttkidding]

[ The information Sam divulges is– well, it's sobering. Even for someone as cold and near heartless as himself, it goes against logic to include civilians and kids in warfare.

Adults can adjust, but only just. Kids or teenagers shouldn't have to. It doesn't stop it from happening of course. He thinks of July and how much violence he's seen. Of the mysterious girl in South America, no older than sixteen, standing surrounded by people she'd killed. Or any number of contractors since then; recruited for MI6, SIS, China, Russian Intel, CIA. The list goes on and on.

But contractors aren't normal people (they're monsters, himself included). ]

Basic can only prepare you in theory. Reality is rather different. [ Understatement of the century. ]

Although, they're going to have to learn. If this is what's expected.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ It goes against logic is Sam's main point of contention. Oh, he objects based on his feelings, too, it's just that he's not dumb enough to believe that his caring about it would hold any sway over that kind of decision making. But apparently logic and what's best for the mission doesn't, either.

He huffs out a laugh at that, tipping his drink in agreement. There's a reason they call it basic, after all. ]

Learning on the fly, huh? [ He shakes his head a little. ] They're setting people up for failure, dropping them in the middle of a mission like this with no training, nothing but a brief rundown of what the hell this is. But I'm just a soldier, what do I know?

[justttkidding]

Trial by fire. [ Agreement, because they know. They see eye to eye in this, despite the many differences they have (or might not have– Sam is still a stranger). Seeing death and causing it is a shared experience that none forget. ]

In other organizations, there’d be a process to drag the higher ups through, but this doesn’t seem like the place to have such a thing. [ Incompetent leadership was aggravating but sometimes it could be solved. ] My only guess is they want someone to step up, though I haven’t the faintest why they’d place that expectation.

[ He shakes his head, as if clearing the theory. ]

You sell yourself short and you know it. [ November tilts his head, gaze a little sharper. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Don't feel like doing it themselves. [ Which is unfair, Sam knows, but he still feels like it sometimes. ] Or maybe they know none of us would trust them right off the bat and too many wouldn't follow any orders.

[ It doesn't feel like there's an easy solution here, not really. Many have tried to step up, with some modicum of success and a hell of a lot of arguing and accusations.

Sam wishes he didn't care so much, sometimes. But November's words catch him by surprise, and there's a moment where Sam looks back at him, focused and contemplative though his mind stays distant.

Then he laughs. ]

Yeah, yeah. [ There's appreciation in his tone, mingled in with the amusement. ] Five minutes in and you're already calling me on my shit, man, I like it. Might have to keep you around.

[justttkidding]

[ At Sam's comments, he nods and then spreads his hands. It's something close to a shrug. ]

Hard to say.

[ He's not content with that answer, not really. It leaves too many questions unanswered, all of them related to how well they're all going to be able to survive. If there's one thing that will get him to step up to the plate, it's survival and ensuring he gets to. November isn't sure how far poking his nose into things will get him, but he'll try anyway. ]

Well, we are rather stuck with each other, aren't we? [ There's the amusement again. Because they are. Minds all connected, whether they asked for it or not. ] Besides, forgive me if this is forward, I like you Sam. Can't have you steep in self-loathing for too long.