[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

[aluminumandash]

[ He watches the ember die out, the dark fill in the hole pricked in it. ] Information. [ Offhand, almost smooth. She wants to keep this transactional, that suits him fine—he's spent nights enough haggling over words, half-remembered faces, the price you wanted to hang on a high.

In the moments before she responds, his mind grazes hers—light but purposeful, a little bit of a charge like static electricity. ]

[nastygram]

On what,

[she prompts, impatiently--an impatience that is both briefly and (though she would not effing admit it) startlingly assuaged by the impression she gets off of his brain. There is something to it that suggests he is interested enough in this trade to, maybe, make good on it.

So she reaches into her pack without looking or unfastening the straps to expose her secret goods. Rummages, under the cover, and extracts a cigarette, held pinched between her knuckles. When she holds it up so he can see, she does it with a flair, like she's flipping him off. Because she is, kind of. Demonstrative.]

Start talking.

[aluminumandash]

The thing they put in our heads. [ He says, no hesitation. No inflection, either, but he trails his thoughts through memory: fingers closing around the tube at the base of his neck. The give of it, the corresponding disquiet.

He crosses to her, the sight of the cigarette wedged in her fingers stirring a sour amusement that'll have to pass for homesickness.

Rust plucks—provided she lets him—it from her. ] I've seen it up close. [ He turns away, throws his hood off one handed. He looks tired, face composed of long shadows. He's overpaying and knows it—but then they'd be talking about this anyway, if it was up to him. The surest way to take her measure. ] Got a light?

[nastygram]

[She lets him, fingers only tight enough to hold the cigarette in place, not to keep it trapped. A bitch, but not that kind of bitch. She's scanning anyways, too intent on picking out the strands of memory she's suddenly obliquely privy to, on the truth of them. Will lies stick out like errors or can they rewrite, cover over, disguise guile beneath layers? If they can, she'll learn how.

This time, there's a reality. Something that hums, a system that jives. Out from the same obscure guts of her bag, Darlene pulls out a zippo. Gold, faux rhinestones.]

Anyone told you that you look like shit?

[Blithe commentary. This is her own kind of guile, a way to disguise how she's picking at his story, mentally. Can't quite keep it under wraps, because she wants to know too bad--]

If it's in our head, how did you see it up close. Brained some poor asshole?

[aluminumandash]

[ With a nod, he takes the lighter. Picks at one of the rhinestones with a thumbnail before fitting the cigarette in his lips and lighting up. Twenty-four days since he last smoked: she'd be forgiven for thinking that's why he pulls on the cigarette like there'll be a blindfold and a firing squad along any minute.

It feels right, his mind aligning to that controlled rush. A modest uptick in mood, a sense of equilibrium restored. How many nights has he smoked through.

Rust shrugs off her remark in favor of another drag. The look he flicks her way is anything but incurious, his thoughts homing in on hers. The irresistible force that compels an eye across a page, the kind of awareness that laces together stars to form constellations.

Her scrutiny is gratifying. ] I would never. [ Dryly sarcastic, false, true—he lets her in on it, offers her a glimpse of honesty wound in on itself, a Mobius of memory, fact, self-knowledge.

The hollow sound of duct tape ripped from a roll. Responsibility, unshakable. Eye contact. A feeling like a feral laugh, a boot planted on a chest.

He tosses the lighter back to her. ] The guy who died—they tell you about that? We half-assed an autopsy. [ Less studied impressions: the scent of blood and puke. ]