[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

[incinerates]

[ Physical contact is not something he seeks out; in fact, it's a thing he routinely does not even consider, outside of sparring, outside of putting his fists to someone's face. So why, he wonders, does the pressure of Black's hands on his feel perfectly right? Like puzzle pieces, slotting together as an image begins to take form. A deep satisfaction uncurling in his chest, that rings every alarm in his waking mind -- not right, not mine.

He jerks his hands back, flatting his hands to snap the ones holding him away. A practiced slip-hold, one that doesn't rely on him putting a boot to Black's narrow chest and shoving him across the room. There's no need for something that complex, when he can rely on his own strength instead. Bakugo retreats, a pace, then two, holding one wrist in the other, trying to parse the weird sense.

This guy is -- his. Or, he's "considered" his. It's why he put out the call, to warn off the deeper layering of "nest" that his brain was not up for grabs, not up to be split up among this weird alien hivemind and consumed. But, the contact... it was a mistake. He won't make that mistake again. ]

-- well, good! As long as you understand, there won't be any problems between us!

[ Something else tugs at him, some recognition. It bleeds between them; deja vu, as though he's heard Black's voice, through a recording that's playing in another room. ]

[stilettoes]

[ the contact is a feeling that peter had already experienced once, multiple times actually, and half of those times unconsciously reaching out to brush a write or fingertips faintly, to catch a shoulder with the heel of his hand in passing. they stand out brightly in peter's mind, hot irons of an unspoken communication of we instead of just you and i. the part of him that beats wings against a frustratingly iron clad cage hates it, heavy like an anchor in the pit of his stomach.

and the symbiote wars in his brain with that, tries to sooth hurried, hollowed bones to keep them from breaking, to ease him back into believing that this? all of this is absolutely necessary. so peter chooses to straddle the middle - to glance across the symbiote, but to never pitch or careen forward into it as much as it beckons.

dryly, sweetly: ]

Wonderful. Now that that's squared away --

[ his fingers feel white hot, but in that heat there's a song that sings volumes, and that sensation alone slithers free, wraps tightly around his brain as they untangle physically and peter slides a gloved hand down mussed robes slowly as the impression of him feels branded onto him. it makes his brain itch as it churns locomotive fast behind satiny curtains. yours, yours, yours, one of yours it says without words, purely sensation. ours. the familiarity is stomach-churning because he wants it and presses back against it all at once. ]

Do you have a name? Or do I have to pick one for you? Firecracker, perhaps. [ a low hum ] Now that does have a nice little zing to it, wouldn't you say?

[incinerates]

[ There is no we, there cannot be. There is only he, himself. A singular entity now caught up in some foreign sensation of unity, belonging, as though the things he valued before: the feelings he harbored for his not-far-off goals, the place he had carved out for himself in the world and continued to carve with each passing day - as though they were lesser, unimportant compared to the feeling that he was a part of this guy. The way he'd felt that he and that Joshua-guy were meant to be.

It was a disgusting feeling. Like his independence meant nothing, in the face of such a sweet song. Unluckily for whatever thing was making a home in his brain, feeding him such lies and pathetic dreams, he was a difficult young man to coerce into anything - whether good for him or not. So he rejected it, and rejected it again. Again and again, drawing deeper and deeper lines in the sand. Moats, to be filled later, with fire and brimstone and flammable oils. Anything to keep Hadrian Black and Joshua Bright and anyone else who was "part of him" from getting the wrong idea. ]

Katsuki, Bakugo. [ Bakugo is said with emphasis; this is what Black is allowed to call him. Last name, they're not friends. ] What do I call you?

[ Again, that shred of -- it's something, all right. Some recognition, tied up in a scent. It's not as distinct as the brood-shared sense of belonging, but it's a "something" all right. Muddled and mysterious, and not at all what he wants to chase. ]

I'm not yours. Let's get that straight. I don't care what this stupid thing in our heads says, I will never belong to any of you.

[ It hurts to say it. A sting, a burn, like a wound being carefully pried open by slow, deliberate, cruel hands. ]

What do you know so far, about what we're meant to accomplish here?

[stilettoes]

I rather like that. Much better than what I was going to whip up. Bakugo.

[ clipped along sharp teeth, a tongue that knows precisely what it's doing, how it's doing it, tone for tone, like it's a pleasure despite the way the symbiote bond gets torn through as many times as it tries to reconnect and stutter and reconnect. he's the prying kind that waits and waits, the patience a sweetly purring car motor waiting for the second passenger to shut the door and buckle up before taking off. ]

Hadrian Black.

[ the sensation of belonging is sharp against his words, but cut just as easily upon them, thumbed apart and flayed open like raw nerve endings flickering bit by bit. there are more of them here, and peter behind dark glass feels spread strangely outwards in directions that deviate from where his brain always intends his pathways to take their natural course of thought. elliot had been an easy adaptation, taken on in stride because he'd tasted familiar on his mouth, the loneliness easy to set himself into and pull close and then ward away. and there'd only been one of him. here, there are many, splitting off and stretching, pulling, testing in different wavelengths.

bakugo feels like being on the wrong side of an explosion, but that explosion is conscious of itself, building, waiting, a matter of time. he holds to it the way you pinch the end of a string. unafraid and observant. he doesn't cat's cradle it the way the symbiote demands, but rather, thumbs the end of it with care before letting go of the frayed, temporarily cauterized edge that thrums.

he keeps his voice low, but he's certain to keep it crisp between the both of them. the veil muffles words to begin with, but there's something not quite all there, a song being played from another room. ]

We're here to act as diplomatic envoys in order to deter one our Enemy from obtaining the rights to an incredibly valuable natural resource utilized here called Nectar. They're hiding here amongst the various groups we've been traveling with for a bit now, even longer if you ask the ones who've been here since the start. We're meant to identify who they are among the other groups and make sure to steer it very much out of their grasp. There's more in your data pad, but that's the very crux of our mission here.

[incinerates]

[ There is a spark ( don't take liberties that aren't yours-- ), words igniting along the threads between them. Like fire along spider silk, where neither gives and neither is able to take. His thoughts are spat out, free and unadulterated, in retaliation to the mere suggestion that someone might dare try to do something on his behalf.

Like name him. ]

Hm.

[ A faint grunt, shallow acknowledgement. He sees the way the veil flutters and drags across the shape of a mouth, suggesting that Hadrian Black has a lot to say, and he collects the pieces of it that are actually of importance. Things that line up with the information curated on his data pad, which he'd inevitably gone through -- back to front -- the way a studious soul might rip into a good text for the meat and gristle and delicate connective tissues. Under the brusque attitude and the shock of fire in his mind, there's something sharp. Observant, charting his surroundings with the attentiveness of someone who doesn't waste an opportunity, or fail to notice a strategy.

He looks for weaknesses and advantages, under that thuggish front. ] Is that it? You could have just said you read the briefing.

[ Bluntly, like a backhand that shoves aside the shit and goes right for the bull's horns. ]

So. What's that make you -- prime diplomat? You sure talk enough.