[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

[bracchium]

[Bucky would argue that he doesn't need help, he doesn't need this girl or anyone else. He clenches his jaw tighter as he starts to lose control of the static crashing through his barbed wire shields and spilling into the link. Get out. Get out. follows in spades.]

( Help how. ) [Speaking so directly to someone makes him struggle, both frustrated with himself and the leash the programming makes him wear.]

[otrazhenie]

[ Elena takes a mental step back, feeling that static through the connection, that pressing urge to leave him be. Maybe she's stupid for not listening, but she's made far worse decisions in her life and come out the other side in one piece. Might as well stand her ground now too. ]

( However you'll let me. )

[bracchium]

[The mental step back doesn't feel far enough for Bucky as the static whips itself up into a storm, cascading even as Bucky tries to tie it all back behind his walls.]

( Get away from me. ) [At this point though, it's turning more towards concern over safety. At a certain point he might not be able to control himself and he hates that he can't trust himself to not lash out.]

[otrazhenie]

[ Whatever is bothering Bucky is... really bothering him. It's bad, an she doesn't quite know what-- ]

( Why don't we go for a walk, get away from all of this? )

[ It's her stubbornness at play that's keeping her from following that command to get away. She's not known for following orders, or doing what she really should -- Elena does what she thinks is right, and if that means putting herself in harm's way, then so be it. That's not the case here, at least she doesn't think so, but she's still trying to be careful nonetheless. ]

[bracchium]

[This is a bad idea. This is a very bad idea. Her words are phrased like a request, gives him just enough wiggle room to refuse if he wanted, but part of him wants to let his anger go. That part of him is deeply selfish, the part of him that's grown into a human, that has feelings and emotions now when there should be none.

The truth, though, is that he doesn't know her, doesn't trust her. For all his knowledge, she may have actively participated in the experimenting on the symbiote.]

( So you can cut into me like him? ) [Plumes of rage billow alongside the static.] ( I'm not going back. )

[He's running his mouth too much, letting too much out, but he's so furious, he's almost blind with it.]

[otrazhenie]

[ Elena is more than a little confused by his words, trying to put the pieces together and not at all liking the direction things seem to be pointing. It reminds her of what she knows of Damon's past, of what was done to him, and that... ]

( Of course you're not, we'll make sure of it. ) [ They'll do whatever it takes to keep him safe, because he's part of them, and he's a person. ] ( And why would anyone here 'cut into you' - you're alive, not dead. )

[ Lavellan had been dead, that was the only reason she'd gone along with the autopsy. Whatever had made him a person was gone. ]

[bracchium]

[Elena's response leaves a sour taste in Bucky's mouth. As if death removes personhood. As if death leaves a corpse up for grabs, a free for all.]

( He was still one of us. ) [Dead or alive, Lavellan was one of them. Nothing changed with his passing, not in Bucky's mind.]

[otrazhenie]

[ No, death doesn't remove personhood, that's why they hadn't desecrated the body. Maybe it was all the death in her life lately, but when a person stayed dead, she just didn't see a point in preserving a body when something could be learned from it. ]

( I didn't know him, so I can't say how he would have felt about all of this, but if it were me who'd died out there and I knew that the others could learn something about all of this, I would have told them to do it. )

[ She would have begged them to do it, and fought anyone who balked at the idea. When the soul is gone, or whatever makes them who they are, then all that's left is flesh and bone. It's just a body. ]

[bracchium]

[To Bucky, digging around in Lavellan's skull is already desecration, and worse. He didn't know Lavellan, didn't talk with him much, but his corpse was defiled, poked, and prodded like nothing more than a lab rat. The sounds of saws, the grind of metal against bone fills his ears for a moment and Bucky finds himself lost for a moment. Her words remind him of Pierce, all the talk of shoulds and should nots. Trying to ease the Soldier into doing what he wanted until Bucky grew selfish. Then came the machine, fixing the broken weapon.

When he dies, will that happen to him, too? Will pieces of him be taken away and preserved, be used to hurt others even after he hopes he won't do so anymore? Would they go for his blood? See what secrets to the serum are yet preserved there? Or maybe the remnants of his arm, the stub that reminds him of a life he might never escape.

Her words remind him to not be selfish- but I know him met with the low humming of the chair- and his instinct, the hair trigger already pulled too tight blows. He has to get out, get away, he has to run. He doesn't care how or where, but he's leaving now.]