station72 | [hatch log] i had a dream which was not all a dream

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

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 )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ The trouble with being a rebel without a cause and stone-kicking beach vagabond, young grasshopper, is that — beyond the simple aesthetic faux pas of skipping out on a wannabe leather coat — you might accidentally scatter someone's neatly stored collection of exactly five half-decent shells.

Look at them. Bask in their mostly unscratched middle-school brilliance. And know that you have just dispersed someone's hopes and dreams and otherworldly ambitions of a cheap apology token. Shinji, a fair distance away, witnesses this vile connection of foot-meets-arcane-treasure — watches as his beautiful findings disperse in the air, cringing when they land in various mounds of sand, for where they'll once more need an exorbitant three minutes of unearthing.

His soul breaks just so: in fragments, in molecules, in dust specks of black-hole scale teenage angst. It is a terrible and most distressing sight. You asshole.

And it gets worse. There is a second tiny string of three shells just a few steps away, and the young gentlethug's next advance is about to hit those too —

And that is when Ikari Shinji, by exception, borrows a spine to raise his hand and urge quietly: ]

Please don't move.

[ The delicate clatter of something fragile and carefully-stacked reaches him, caught like a refrain on the wind. A wind chime in the distant corner of his house, where the rice cooker steams and whistles and his father hums and thumbs through the newspaper. Crinkling page after crinkling page. Adjusts his glasses, sighs through the way he can never keep them from smearing ( it's because, like his son, his eyelashes are just too long -- ). He can remember these sounds, from being up close and alongside them.

Which is why hearing the shattering of a shell, when he's not really near to any, is startling enough to give him pause. To look around, and take notice of the raised hand, the familiar robes. Another one of them, then. ]

What? What the hell do you want? This isn't a classroom, I'm not a teacher. Put your hand down!

[ At least he's stopped his wind up, the smooth stone cradled in his palm, instead of at the ready. ]

[ His hand, honoring the tired punchline of every erectile dysfunction supplement ad, doesn't go down.

It will not be descending for a very long time. One might say it's almost stuck there, in need of moral and medical attention, while Shinji carries on perfecting the art of the soulless, blank-eyed stare. A stroke of worn-out indifference here, a dash of practised misery there. Voila: the teenage masterpiece.

His shells are still in danger. Global warming and alien apocalypse have nothing on this crisis. ]

Look down. Please don't move around until you do.

[ And bask in the sight of those three-five opalescent slivers of beach-side nothing. One of the shells, if Shinji is particularly honest with himself, is already cracked — but beggars can't be choosers, and champions of the realm can't shy away from the cause just because their side is fundamentally unworthy. Fairy tales and stubbornness don't work so logically. ]

I just... I have some things there. Gifts. So...

Who the hell would want a bunch of shells as a gift?

[ Either some loser has actually asked for them, or this kid's just collecting them on the off-chance that someone would actually accept a gift that only happens in cheesy daytime soaps - and really, he's not concerned with either result. He's more concerned with the fact that he's been called upon to stop by someone who looks more like a caffeine-jazzed chihuahua than anyone he ought to give a second glance to.

The stubbornly raised hand, though - that's what's likely inspiring the antagonistic heat to rise in his chest. Battering at his ribs, demanding he knock this daring-do down a notch or eleven. Stay in your lane, idiot, don't talk to him. He barely recognizes the sensation for what it is, but it's there, brazen and looming. The way he looms over Shinji and his precious shells.

And just barely hides that he's now being careful with his feet -- just barely. ]

Thank you.

[ So this starts as it should, with the blessing of middle-school manners. Then comes the slow-motion excavation, Shinji approaching the horror site as if at any minute this dashing young human disaster might be startled into inflicting himself on the environment.

He crouches by the boy's feet, gently lifting each shell, one by harrowing one, and depositing them in the black hole of his robe's pockets — makeshift details he himself painfully added by layering and pinning the folds of his material in an exercise of Cinderella ingenuity.

This is a mission only the brave can undertake, and Ikari Shinji is the not-man for the job. ]

No one wants anything here. But it's the most I can give. So...

[ It's the thought that counts. ]

[ Down. He descends, until the green-copper robes he wears pool across the sand, and his heavily-decorated arms drape over his knees. Crouched there, with such a precise sense of balance, he's better able to see the fragile alien shells. The cracked one, the whole ones, as this kid keeps on piling them into his pockets. ]

Ah, stack them first.

[ The words are -- sullen, as if he's loathe to offer such valuable guidance. ]

Stack them, and bind them up if you can. They'll rattle around less, and you won't end up with chips or breaks.

[ The thought that counts; oh yes, and thoughts are what he offers. No, more than thoughts, they're experiences masquerading as advice. Some childhood memory of his own, plucking sand dollars and oysters from the seashore, placing them into a glass jar - only to dig out the jar after a particularly bouncy ride back home, to find that a majority of them had split and shattered. Heartbreaking, even if he had thrown the entire thing out afterwards. What sort of dumb gift was one that was broken? ]

Who're they for?

Thank you.

[ Again, this time with feeling. He escalates the attention paid to collecting his shells in a neat stack with clean edges, tight rectangles that can come together naturally, even in the absence of a binder. Something like string or a hair tie would work better here, but this will have to do.

His pockets feel full, the signs of a greedy hand. In his enthusiasm, he must have grabbed more shells than he can handle. ]

They're for someone I offended. [ He stops for a moment, a rope walker hitting the critical step. ] I think.

[ And he laughs in short, blasphemous exhales, jots of relief against the long line of a weighty conscience. ]

I can't tell, with girls. With women.

[ Buddy, you're gonna' need a lot of shells to buy someone's forgiveness. Unless you make something really cute and/or badass out of them. ]

What do you mean "with girls"? They're no different than anyone else who's pissed off.

[ Girls, boys, the non-gendered -- there's really only one thing to do, when you think you've offended or hurt someone. And the answer is: "Don't Ask Bakugo, Because He's Usually The Source Of Everyone's Agony". As anti-self-reflective as he is, he knows what it means to want to cheer someone up. He thinks back on his own classmates, on the depth of their struggling, in the wake of his fuck-up. How down they were, how much he hated being the source of it.

In a way, he gets what the shells are for. They're the money he gave Kirishima, the laugh he'd given his classmates at the expensive of Denki's dignity. ]

What'd you do?

[ After a certain point, he's digging so hard in his pockets to arrange his stack of shells that he's just shy of hitting an opposite continent. And he murmurs, with adolescent helpfulness: ]

I don't know. Things.

[ Girls, boys, the non-gendered — there's really only one thing to do, when you think you've offended or hurt someone: run. Run hard, run fast, run without glancing behind or sideways. Unfortunately, when both the geographical cage and the circle of permissible acquaintances are drawn so tight and steep, you run out of steps to escape. Shinji isn't here to find that claustrophobia.

Altogether, he isn't here to fight anything at all. ]

Sometimes... [ He's slow to raise his eyes and right the down-turned set of his shoulders. ] Doesn't it feel as if everything you do is the wrong decision? It can't be helped.

Did you hit her? [ Bakugo. ] I shoved some girl, not too long ago. At least I think she was a girl.

[ There, have that.

The closest thing to fessing up and relating to someone else that he can muster. There's a blindspot inside of him, a thing he doesn't look at too closely, a thing that he passes over and ignores -- himself, his inner self. Even this is a glancing, skimming flick at those depths. Not even enough to disturb the surface, as he balances his elbows on his knees and feels the false heel-bits of the boots he's got to wear dig into the sand.

Off-balance. How does he answer that question? ] No. And yes. It's complicated -- I just have to stand by what I've decided to do, or how can I expect anyone to want to follow my lead? Own your shit, that's the adult thing to do.

...you're not supposed to shove girls.

[ You're not supposed to shove anyone, but any latent heat in his voice has taken the way of early retirement and a waiting grave. This is the afterthought of kindergarten courtesy: don't inflict violence on women, don't steal your colleagues' pencils, don't cross the street until the light's shifted green.

And this boy — man — thing who thinks he maybe hit a girl, or a creature of an approximate gender, speaks about it so casually. Shinji might as well have suffered the same shove for all he's staring now, mouth flatly agape, the frantic rush of electricity that had seized his hands now relaxing their hold in his pockets. He rights himself and huffs for good measure. ]

Honestly... what sort of person who's concerned about doing the adult thing would shove a girl? Did you apologise?

[ ...how did they get here? Why does young Ikari Shinji think shoving is the source of all evil? Will his shells ever survive the day? Mysteries of the world. ]

[ You're not supposed to shove girls, he's told, and it registers to him in a way. There's a newness, barely a year's worth of growth after fifteen or sixteen years of getting his way, by force of personality or just by force. Memories; the rush of his pulse in his throat, the deadset grimace of a young woman before him. Brunette, toned arms, roughed up and beaten to high hell, her gaze going unfocused. Her body sliding from a fighter's stance to a crumpled heap on the floor, fingers clawing -- reaching -- coming for him with her heart and soul, if only her body could comply.

( You're not supposed to shove girls, but isn't that being disingenuous? ) He can't hear the crowd, though he's told later how up in arms they were over his behavior. Toying with her, as if she wasn't standing on her own two feet, her fists raised, aiming for the top. When he thinks of girls, he thinks of her. Of Uraraka. ]

Why not.

[ Why aren't you supposed to shove a girl, Shinji? ]

I lost my temper. That's not the point - why not?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

hyrypia it up, homie

im ready for this wtf

r u rly

yes i rly rly am

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