[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

[whereabout]

[ He...doesn't disagree with any of that, honestly. Everything about this is creepy as hell, and it's really only the fact that his brain was compromised long before now that's keeping him so calm about it. It's crap, and it's...his lot in life, apparently. Being fucked with. ]

What else would you do, then?

[ There's no note of condescension in his tone (or the color of his thoughts) when he asks; just genuine curiosity. She doesn't seem like the type to sit still and try to be good, certainly, but what else...can they do? ]

[nastygram]

[I don't know is not an acceptable answer, but it's the one that twists, sick, like a knife in Darlene's stomach. A lack of direction does not suit her. Even when she wasn't hitched to fsociety, she could at least be angry, point that anger at the targets that deserved it most. The rich, the moguls, the one percent profiting off of everyone else. The ones who fucked her family.

Here, it's like, where does she point all that anger? The symbiote is already in her brain. Turn her rage there and she turns it on herself. She didn't ask for this shit. She didn't ask to be rescued: but she was. So now what.

All of this leaks out from the staunch barriers Darlene has already put up. Doubt, uncertainty, like an ooze. She twists her hands around the pack.]

I'll figure it out.

[Determination colors those words, blooms like a fire.]

All I know is I am not going to present my ass to get fucked. If I play along, there is a time limit on that shit. [She shoots him a glance, calculating.] What about you?

[whereabout]

[ In contrast, Joshua's always had trouble finding direction. Direction requires purpose. Purpose requires the kind of conviction that comes from knowing who you are and what you really want, and Joshua's spent so much of his life unsure of either.

And now, it's far too tempting to retreat back to thinking of himself as a tool instead of a person, so he doesn't have to feel all of that - anger? Frustration, certainly. Despair, maybe, at the thought of what he might never see again.

He's not hard to get a read on, and right now, his mind is churning like a ship in a storm, and he's the guy standing in the middle of the boat thinking: oh my God, I don't know anything about swimming. ]

I need to know more. About...all of this.

[ About the symbiote, about the station, about the world they're about to land on, about everyone else in the nest.

There are way too many feelings here and not enough logic. He needs some facts to latch onto and try to reason through, because that's the only thing he ever properly learned how to handle. ]

[nastygram]

Yeah.

[The way this guy telegraphs his shit makes it easy to be something approaching sympathetic. Darlene treats it as briskly as anything else--there is no time to linger in feeling sorry for anyone--but everything beaming back at her from his freaked-out brain meat is there for the digesting.

A little too there. Darlene puts a few more layers in her mental wall, like, okay, that is enough of that. She's getting better at it by the minute. The consummate survivor, self-preserving.]

Pro tip on that, do not stick with that chick Ilde on that quest, or anyone like her. What looks like secret intel is nothing more than the rambling of someone who swallowed the prescribed pills. People who are in on it are not to be trusted, dude. And I do not usually do the advice thing so you know you can trust it.

[And feel special. Darlene tightens one of the ties on the pack, resolute.]

And in the meantime there is a whole shitton of briefing materials you can read if you want to feel like you've got something real.

[whereabout]

...thanks.

[ He'll probably never feel special about anything, honestly, but he appreciates the vague stab at sympathy - and especially the fact that it's very low-key and undramatic. Despite the knots his thoughts keep tying themselves into, he really doesn't like dramatics. They make it really hard to pretend that you don't have feelings and keep on keepin' on.

(A coping mechanism that's looking less effective with every second he spends with this thing in his head, but old habits die hard.) ]

I've read it once. But a few more times are on the agenda.

[ Everything doesn't stick on the first time, especially when your mind is all over the place. So another run-through on the flight over, definitely, and probably another couple times on-site whenever it becomes convenient. Equipment check goes in between those first two looks at the briefing, though, according to the procedure he'd always worked under for Ouroboros - and reverting to that is practically instinct.

So he digs into his own pack (past the scarves that he was sorting through when they started talking) and starts taking inventory, checking the edges on the daggers. ]

[nastygram]

Cool.

[--Darlene surmises, and tugs on one of the straps of the pack to tighten it. This is a decisive motion. She has exhausted her compassion, no matter how present the press of his brain is against hers, no matter how much she actually gets it.

She swings the pack up over one shoulder and pushes herself to her feet.]

Tell me if you find anything good. [With a little smirk, like, what the fuck, as she thinks of this--] You can brainwave me or whatever.

[whereabout]

Sure.

[ No matter how much his brain is screaming inside, it's never inhibited his ability to keep a straight face and pretend nothing's up.

At least there's that. ]