[hatch log] i had a dream which was not all a dream

[onemind]

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72; Hyrypia - The Red Coast
WHEN: DAY :025 - DAY :026
SUMMARY: Somewhere deep in the void between multiverses, a fresh clutch of Hosts hatches; getting them down to Hyrypia proves to be more complicated than usual.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

STATION 72
DAY :025

NEW HATCHES
YOU WAKE UP and the universe and you in it are 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. But 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. Some of these emotions might be 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 others very like you here, all of them somehow intimately familiar.

Welcome to Station 72. Beyond this room, the vast Station is quiet and still. It feels for all the world like a shell for some vast dark thing.

Eventually, a sensation manifests out of the hollowness:


PREPARE YOURSELF
THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD is sound and sensation: a brilliantly warm shaft of sunlight through smoky glass - a gauzy curtain twitching in some summer breeze - the blooming pleasure of a familiar face after a very long time away. 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 small grassy lawn in the center of the lush, circular gardens where an aging woman waits on a stone bench. The pin straight sheet of her hair hangs like a graying curtain and the sensation from her is lovely and golden, real delight pouring through her like light through a pinhole camera. She smiles and sets aside the book in her lap.

"There you are. 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."


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 other than the people you woke up with there's a distinct lack of company 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? Otherwise-- well there's plenty of places to get lost...

By the simulated morning, a strange archaic ship has arrived on the Hangar. Its very alien pilots are in the process of unloading-- bodies. No, scratch that, they're clearly still alive, though in some kind of comatose state. One of the pilots - a pale female alien who calls herself Rhan - says, "Well, this is awkward. We were supposed to be done with this already. Uh don't mind us, darling. We'll finish up here and get on our way. In the meantime, why don't you go through your packs and get changed?"

She nods toward two trunks on the hangar deck where assortment of pre-prepared packs are waiting for each new Host. In each pack is a series of items, including a set of beautiful and very all-encompassing robes. Better get comfortable. Not hot on the fabrics or patterns in your pack? Mixing and matching with your new best friends is totally acceptable.

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

HYRYPIA - THE RED COAST
LATE DAY :026

A PURPOSEFULLY SUBTLE WELCOME
UNDER THE COVER OF DARKNESS, Collector and Lyr make their way through the barracks where the Hosts on Hyrypia are meant to be sleeping. It's nearing whatever the Hyrypian equivalent of midnight is; if you're awake, all the better. If not? Expect to be roused (gently and silently by Collector, rudely and abruptly by Lyr).

"Get dressed. We're going for a walk."

There's nothing quite so suspicious as bringing a bunch of reinforcements to the planet in the aftermath of a rather public murder, which means a highly ritualized midnight procession of Carbasuchians into the highlands. It's easier to secret a handful of newbies in an anonymous group, right?

That meeting in the dead of night in the rocky wilderness above the Red Coast bears even a passing resemblance to the strange occurrence on DAY :010 is probably just a coincidence. Besides, there aren't any mystery circles burned into the stone and grass here: just a stealth ship materializing out of the black night and touching down in a stony outcropping where it disgorges the freshly hatched (or newly reawakened) Hosts.

---

((OOC Notes: This log covers the hatch on Day :025 as well as the arrival of new Hosts on Hyrypia late on Day :026. Feel free to make your own logs and posts additional to this if you care to. You can find additional information pertaining to the Red Coast on the previous mission log (located here); newbies are welcome to utilize that log as well as it occurs within the same time period as the hatch.

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

[polyphonos]

[She waits. The shape of her there on the bench seems rooted there, the easy lines of her shoulders and wrists and the drape of her clothes spilling over stone and pouring into the off colored grass underfoot. But there's something direct and attentive to her gaze on him: the shape of a some anonymous point pressing against skin through a cloth. It could be the first finger on a hand ready to settle gently there, or it could turn and be some sharper and more dangerous thing.

After a moment, Cathaway smiles. It seems genuine, though the faint afterimage of tension standing behind her isn't quite swallowed. Still, she laughs: low and lovely.]

If we said yes, would it make a difference? But not to worry-- [she taps the corner of her eye in sympathy] --your other eye is perfectly safe, detective.

[She rises then with a sweep of layered fabric and the chime of a hundred little charms threaded onto fine golden chains. The tablet is folded back into its card shape and stowed unceremoniously back in some interior pocket.]

Come along. Walking while we talk might settle you.

[And really, what's he going to do? Refuse her?]

[iuno]

[ turning her down just to be difficult does cross his mind, and it wouldn't be the first time he pissed off someone in the best position to hurt him — wouldn't even be close to the first time. but he's a restless thing, the urge to pace and pick his surroundings apart simmering under his skin, so walking actually sounds better. if she wants to take it as him being cooperative, then all the better for him. ]

Sure. Let's take a walk. [ settling him is debatable. ] You got a name? I'm guessing you already know mine.

[ he looks her over while she stands there, narrow-eyed, trying to place her. she's calm, but there's two kinds of calm that come to mind: Sasha, sharp and professional, steering a ship with a firm hand; and Miasma, insidious and cold, touching her mind like looking for purchase on a pool of smooth, black glass. Cathaway's mind may not feel the same as Miasma's did, lacks her icy claws and the mantra that still features in Juno's nightmares sometimes, I will get what I want — but he's leaning more towards Miasma's brand of calm here. inhuman. unfathomable as deep dark waters. ]

[polyphonos]

We do, but we've been told it's rude not to pretend otherwise. [She offers her hand - long fingers, delicate bones, skin goes thin around age-sharpened joints; but there are callouses there at her fingertips and the pad of her thumb, across the base of her fingers. She getting old, not incapable. (Not yet anyway).] Our name is Cathaway. Technically speaking, it's the name for this specific body, but we're aware that's sometimes troubling to very young Hosts.

[Her sedate smile transforms briefly into a grin - undeniably shit eating -, then she moves to lead the way through the overgrown pathways of the vast circular garden. Upright, there's very little to her: she's quite short, narrow through shoulder and wrist. But beyond the most basic shape of her sits something... else. The youngest Hosts on the Station are loud, the buzzing of their minds pressing and pressing. But she is warm and pleasant and removed, the bright outline of her presence defined by some deeper, darker silhouette.

It's not quiet. It feels like the keyhole on a lovely, well-familiar door and behind it some unknown creature has its eye pressed close to spy.]

[iuno]

[ oh — christ. maybe he should be relieved by a glimpse of personality from her; it should make her easier to grasp, this fragment of individuality, but it's just creepy instead. especially next to the imposing shape of her he can vaguely identify, like he's woken up with a new sense. he supposes he has, in a way.

but it's one he's used before, and for a moment, he presses forward with his mind, moving in the confidence of familiarity. and then he hesitates. pauses at the threshold, hovering just shy of reaching out, because — she says it won't backfire on him, but Miasma's tomb is only a matter of weeks behind him and he remembers the violation of submerging himself in her head, the impossibility of touching her. agony erupting in his skull; so desperate to pin her down that he just cracked under the strain.

Juno doesn't often think before he follows through on an idea. he's a few days fresh from surgery for his cybernetic replacement eye, though, and maybe that helps. he only just stopped being useless. his body language reflects the almost-push he made, caught somewhere between squaring to stand his ground and curling defensively away, even as he walks with her. he doesn't miss a beat, because if there's one thing he's good at it's running his mouth: ]

Yeah, we like our trivial human comforts — names, identities. Just makes things easier. [ bitter, bitter. but he's been that way for so long he doesn't taste it anymore. ] So, do I get an elevator pitch?

[polyphonos]

[What does the very edge of a consciousness look like? Feel like? It's caramelized sugar to be snapped under the side of a spoon's tap; it's a thin layer of ice over dark water; it's a gauzy veil over the face of an unknown bride. There, in the circular garden with its faint warmth and the perfume of alien flowers, the shape of her mind under his tentative reach flexes toward him like an affectionate cat arches at touch, like a flower turning by some snall degree toward the sun, like the curve of some lover's spine. It's a warm breath very near or a predatory animal: intimate and steady.

Cathaway hums. She raises an eyebrow in his direction.] If you insist. The short version is that your brain is an acceptable environment for a creature we call the symbiote which presently binds your mind to every other host as part of an elaborate telepathic network. Unfortunately, your acceptability as a host puts you in direct opposition with the force that wants to eradicate the symbiote. This Enemy has wide reaching plans to somehow alter the shape of the multivers; as we seem to be the only beings capable of interfering, we are a liability to them.

And so, given that the alternative to resistance is the extinction of a species and the extermination of beings like us-- [With every step the metal charms and small strands of fine jewelry chain rattles. She is so incredibly sly as she says:] --Well, we prefer to put up a fight.