[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

[ophidia]

Or the maze is the monster.

[Cultures all across Earth had labyrinths in their mythology, but the victory was in solving it, making it back out. He'd know. He's walked one himself. Combine it with how many times he's heard hunt dropped since he got here, and it makes sense. The ritual of it slotting into place with what they're doing, following the trail of some ancient, sacred figure. Except:]

We're the only ones who lost anyone.

[There's a question in it, if only for the confirmation. Attention sweeping away from the pyre. Across the encampment, to the other envoys. None of them engaging in anything he could see as being funerary.]

cw: brainsssssss

[aluminumandash]

[ He says nothing, drawn back into memory. A whirring drill, his own head pounding. Other images more orderly: a girl tentatively nudging brain matter with a finger. A white clutch of something fibrous and alien at the brain stem. Its strands emanating like thought.

He looks at the newcomer and thinks of a black shell cracking. Mazes and monsters. ]

Yes. [ His drawl in full force, a feeling of remove. Almost of narration. ] We're objects of pity.

[ There's more to it, but fuck it. Let someone else insist Lavellan died brave. The sense of loss, the guilt and pain chewing through him, it's not tied up with any notion of who the dead man was. It just is. ]

[ophidia]

[Richard's gaze doesn't move from the other envoys. He nods.]

That's good. We can use that.

[Talking about the use of someone's death isn't what's done at funerals. Not that Richard's experience of them has been particularly normal, but neither is the macabre spill of imagery falling out of this guy's mind.]

Did you know him?

[Is what he settles on, instead of what the fuck.]

[aluminumandash]

Sure you can. [ Rust affirms, as though he has no particular stake in the matter. (Eager, notes a part of him he'll never succeed in drowning or silencing. Eager and already using that "we.")

He gestures vaguely at his hood. ] Won't even have to turn on the waterworks.

[ As for the question: ] No. [ The emotion underlying the word is subtle, likely overwhelmed by first- and secondhand grief. A vein of dread. ]

[ophidia]

[Under the hood, Richard's expression pinches at waterworks. Then he realises the point of confusion.]

Not the pity. [As if this was obvious. To Richard, it is.] We're the only ones. We can use that.

[A certainty and edge of frustration that this is an advantage, and yet again, he appears to be the only one seeing it.]

So what was it, feeling him go?

[That made him this damn gloomy.]

[aluminumandash]

Ain't my mission. [ Rust snaps, louder than advisable. So what if he's another one who's convinced this is about distinguishing themselves, about winning. So what if that's what got them into this mess. So fucking what.

His anger dissipates as he grapples with the question, assesses his emotions as he would a wound. That same remoteness. ] A part of me died. [ For all the melodrama inherent in the words, the depth of feeling they'd seem to suggest, his voice is flat. That part, maybe it was a fingernail.

And yet it feels like an evasion. ]

[ophidia]

[For a moment Richard actually wonders if this is how people felt, talking to him. But there was no way he was as bad as this guy. Melodramatic, miserable, and still somehow attempting to keep himself clinically detached from the whole thing. The alcohol has to be a factor, but it wasn't like Richard knew if it was exacerbating the whole shtick, or if this is what the guy was like with his screws loosened up.

And with the outburst and the fact he's gotten the slimmest of pickings resembling useful information out of him, he doesn't much care.]

Go easy on the sauce. [His attention's already lifting, turning to find a better target elsewhere in the gathering.] You and your dead part falling in the fire'd just make this more of a mess for the rest of us.

[Or be trimming dead weight. But even Richard knows he hasn't been here long enough to make a decision on that.]