station72 | [HATCH LOG] IS ANYONE THERE?

Entry tags:

[HATCH LOG] IS ANYONE THERE?

CHARACTERS: All
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Day :150
SUMMARY: Today is the day you wake up.
WARNINGS: None; will edit if necessary.

A MOMENT AGO it seemed like you willingly took the hand of someone beckoning to safety.

NOW YOU WAKE UP in one of many chambers of Station 72’s nesting deck. If you had wounds, they’re (mostly) gone; if you had doubts they are - for the split second between dreaming and waking - gently reassured. This is correct. This is right. You’re safe here. The only question is what here is exactly.

The compartment you find yourself in is small, though gently padded for comfort with enough elbow and head -room to not be wholly claustrophobic. Still, it’s difficult to re-orient yourself; the best way to get to the chamber’s built in ladder and down to the smooth, polished white floor of the nesting is to simply roll over onto your belly and go out feet first.

First thing’s first though: get rid of that tube running from the rear wall of the chamber to the base of your skull. The moment you’ve done that, there’s the sensation like a rubber band popping - a string in your hand being jerked. The headache that punches in falls like the heavy end of a hammer - not serious, but surprisingly abrupt - as a of combination confusion, resolve, anxiety, certainty, delight, and fear and expectation finds you. In fades after a moment, churning to a low dull pressure and a faint hum. It’s feels like standing outside the door of a small party, sounds muffled and incomprehensible. Some pieces rise and swell above the others then fall again. Strain your ears and realize you’re hearing nothing at all.

On the plus side, you’re not hooked into the compartment anymore. Slide out and onto the ladder, though not too fast or you’ll miss the small cubicle built into the wall near the mouth of the chamber. In the cubicle are all the things you brought with you, every small piece you own of the home you left behind. There’s a neatly folded pair of something like white pajamas there as well. They’re definitely in your size, though you have the option not to wear them since you’re still in the clothes you left home in. Granted, for some of you that might not exactly be a blessing. Your clothes haven’t exactly been laundered or repaired, so best hope you didn’t bleed or sweat on them too much during your escape.

Sliding free from the chamber pod and stepping out onto the ladder, you’ll find yourself in an open space. The room is broad and pale and clean, its sloping walls featuring dozens and dozens of holes like the one you just wiggled out of. There are more ladders and a few other people climbing down, or stareing, or already down on the nesting deck’s floor but the sixteen - seventeen, including yourself - people present would hardly fill even a sixth of the room’s available accommodations.

The noise is louder when you near any of the others. It’s as if you've entered the party yourself. Identifiable now is the low wash of feelings, a hum of emotions that only serves to make the slight headache worsen. They feel genuine. They feel like they could belong to you. Still, that pressure in your head doesn't worry you --Shouldn't it worry you? Does worrying - about the headache, about the world and people you left behind, or the strange place you’re in now, the odd collection of people you’re with and the fact that you feel strangely drawn to five or six of them - make the headache better? Or worse?

If you manage to push the sound aside and listen with your true ears, you'd notice you can't hear anything besides this small group of fellow hosts: their footsteps, their oddly sharp breathing. There’s no sound of traffic, no wind in the trees, no birds, no hum of a ship. Only circulating air and silence.

You may not know what a brood is, but finding yours is easy. There are minds among these strangers that call to yours, their voices louder than the rest, their feelings sharper. The nearer to you they are, the more comfortable you feel. Is that strange? You don't know them, but you do. There are few answers to be found on the nesting deck.

Eventually you will have no choice but to head out of the room. There’s only one way out that you can see: up through a spiraling hallway that arches overhead. When it opens again the space seems slightly less alien. There are doorways of a kind lining the walls and each one opens to a small, nearly normal room. There are no doors, so it's easy to see all the rooms are vacant. In seventeen of them there are items neatly stacked on the bed. Most are hygiene supplies. Some of them - a toothbrush, comb, razor - may be familiar to you. Others less so. There's a flat horizontal ledge beside the bed with a small light and a single drawer. Another table, apparently built into the wall, sits across the room with a chair. A mirror is on the desk; it’s slightly mundane and not quite to the Station’s style.

This room is yours for the moment. It doesn't mean someone won't want to trade - or take. Beyond this life support deck stretches the rest of Station 72. It is quiet and and twisting and perfectly inert.

At its most familiar, the Station is merely a still, empty ship with broad chambers and gently mottled light. At its worst, it’s an Escher painting of strange angles and bizarre platforms that seems grown as much as built. There are many ways to many places and while it seems all doors and passages open to you, there’s an unshakeable feeling that the space doesn’t quite match up - that there’s even more to the Station which you can’t yet see. Don’t get lost!

For now, you reach the floor of the nesting deck. When you do, something blooms in your mind. A voice, disturbingly lacking any identifying traits but warm and comfortable like sweetened milk, says:

( ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬...There you are...▬▬▬..Welcome to Station 72 ▬▬. )

If you follow the thread of that voice, you’ll eventually find your way either to Cathaway on the bridge or The Prince in the training wing.

((OOC Notes: Welcome to Station 72! Feel free to check out the SETTINGS page for more information about the Station. If you have any questions about the setting itself, feel free to ask them there; otherwise, please direct all questions to either the FAQ or MOD CONTACT pages.

~~Prince’s top level should be live in the evening! Keep an eye out for it if you want him to give your character the introduction spiel instead of Cathaway.~~

Happy hatchday, everyone! :) ))

NAVIGATION • SETTING • FAQ • MOD CONTACT • GLOSSARY

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

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Focusing too much is something he's trying not to do, but he can't block it all out. He's too new to this to manage it, hasn't really adjusted yet. The faint call is a thing he follows because he'd like it to stop being distracting, and if he can't make himself stop noticing it... he'll just have to find where it's coming from.

And finally, it brings him here. Ares lingers in the doorway, slouching against the side of it with his arms folded while his eye curiously traces her path-- there's not even anything in here. Is there a point to this place at all?

"Yeah, so what do you want?"

His voice, like his posture, is casual; nothing else matches it. He doesn't know what to expect, doesn't really feel threatened by any of this but almost wants to. Then he'd know what to do about it.

There's an ease to the question that she finds surprising, a pleasantness to the whole affair and his shape slouched in the doorway that has real delight bubbling up in her chest. She makes no effort to swallow it - laughs, a short bark of amusement - and changes her trajectory immediately to wind out from the center of the room toward him.

"To speak with you. We suspect you have questions that we can, and will happily, answer."

Her smile is warm, her expression belying a fondness that seems deep and genuine. There is a kindness in her as much as there is a fullness - a darker, larger shape behind the narrowness of her physical body here in the quiet of this bare chamber. She comes to a halt within arm's reach of him, but doesn't move to touch him.

"We?"

It's a well-timed distraction, quickly stifling his annoyance at apparently being laughed at-- Ares frowns slightly, leans a bit to the side to try to peer past her. Is it really empty? He can only assume so.

"I thought you were the only one in here."

He doesn't move, still just- watching, still deciding what to make of her.

"In a sense, we are. In another, we're not."

She knows it's a strange thing to say, that it does nothing to clarify the matter, but it's difficult to convey exactly what she means with just the clumsiness of words. A moment of hesitation, a flicker of something in her face as she reorders her thoughts, then-- "Your body and this one are the only ones present in this chamber, but the connection of the nest means we're never fully alone. In time, you might be as this one: here, and also elsewhere."

There's a genuine pleasure in that possibility. How small must he feel now? How subtracted?

Mostly, he just feels confused.

The 'connection' thing is settling in, bit by bit, as it has been since he first awoke to it; we're never fully alone, that provides some clarification, but there's a part of her answer that he's still hung up on.

"But... that's other people, right? The rest of it." Ares' brow furrows a little, and he worries idly at his lower lip. "You're still just one person."

It's not a question the way he says it aloud-- but it's definitely a question in his mind. She is one person, isn't she?

A moment of silence hangs off her, another beat of real consideration. "It's a negligible distinction," is what she finally decides to say. "Think of it as two pieces of colored paper."

Here, she lifts both her hands to him, palms up and the curl of her fingers gentle. She tips her left-- "One mind begins yellow. This is a single new host, much like yourself," --then the right-- "The other red, another host. Over time, the link between them draws the minds closer." She tips her hands in my degrees. First, her forefingers touch. Then one slides over the other, slowly moving together until they overlap completely, palm to knuckles. "Together, the red and yellow becomes orange."

Cathaway wiggles her thumbs on either side of her overlapped hands. "But you see, there are places where the two don't quite overlap. We may share our mind, may in essence be a collection of people, but there are outliers which make certain elements distinct."

"So it's just- part of you."

It makes more sense, but it's not at all reassuring. He doesn't need his mind drawn closer to anyone else's, definitely doesn't want the part of it that's himself to be just an 'outlier'-- and that brings him to the next obvious question. Confusion shifts into something more like defensiveness, the way he looks at her becoming a little more wary.

"Is it like that for all of us? I mean, does it always happen like that?"

"There are stages of development, naturally. Some are overlapped at a slower rate than others. The Prince for example, has slowed his development significantly." At the mention of The Prince, there's a flutter of emotion through the mental link between Ares and Cathaway: a mingled bitterness, a sweet frustration, a warm undercurrent of attachment and fondness. He is the last of her brood; she wishes he were better, but has come to terms with the fact that he isn't.

"But yes. In time, it always happens."

Like the pull of the tide, the turning of planets, the ticking of a clock. There is no such thing as standing still. The heart beats, the blood cycles, the Nest grows.

He almost just accepts what he feels through their link-- wants to, for a moment-- and so the way he reflexively tries to pull back from it is slightly delayed, like trying to catch something you've already just missed. His arms remain folded, his grip on them a little harder now, and much as he tries to block himself off there's a mixed flicker in response: most of it is frustration at the link's existence, part of it is fear, and buried deeper underneath those is a hint of something that's almost yearning. (The warmth in what he felt was nice, but he's ignoring that very hard.)

The next question comes abruptly, changing tack a little.

"Were you from somewhere else too?"

Were, not are. It's deliberate; he's already drawn a line between who someone is as their own person and who they are after they start being a lot of people. He's not sure exactly where it is, just that it's somewhere between himself and Cathaway.

It's a distinction she can appreciate - not necessarily an incorrect one either. It's true that this body once had a system of origin, but it's gone beyond that. It would feel disingenuous not to acknowledge the change somehow.

"This one was, yes. As far as we know, there are no hosts native to the Station or to the Nest. But our experience is admittedly finite - there are things we don't know of the link or what surrounds it and where it comes from. It's possible there is something out there there that belongs naturally here, but we think it's unlikely. If that were the case, there'd be no reason for the symbiote to find hosts such as us."

Us, in this sense, meant in the simplest way: Ares and Cathaway. The hosts he'd hatched with. The Prince. Every other Agent she's ever known or seen.

While he's listening to her explanation, he's only half paying attention to it. He's not really interested in the information past the answer he wanted, just waiting for her to finish so he can ask the next thing he's thought of-- it comes quickly enough that it's probably clear he'd already had the question in mind.

"Did you ever wanna go back to where you came from?"

Is there a point where home doesn't matter anymore, or where the possibility stops existing? (He hasn't let himself consider whether it's possible at all. Everything that keeps him going is back there, so it has to be.)

Something in her expression stills. For the first time since they began speaking - for the first time in a long time, actually -, her features shed some fraction of that alien control. For a beat, she seems very small: a collection of narrow wrists, thin ankles, slim in the way that age finds an active body. The connection between them hums, a low hollow pitch, and she is aware of a feeling like a stone dropping in her belly.

She smiles again, a correction that seems bittersweet. "Of course. We want to go back every day." She lifts her hands to overlap them again, to recall her earlier demonstration. "If your colored paper all has the same mark in a similar space, overlaying them doesn't make it disappear."

If ten minds all had people they loved, places they wished to be, versions of the universe they imagined in the dark when they tried to sleep, would folding them all on each other make that different?

It's more than he expected from her answer, both reassuring and not-- he effectively gets what he wanted to hear, but somehow it isn't as much comfort delivered like this. That shouldn't matter (it's what he wanted, he won't need to think about it, that should be good enough); he just needs to focus on what he has to get back to and every reason he has for it.

Still, he's silent for a moment, a little uncertain how to deal with that brief shift.

"So what do we have to do?" is what finally comes out, that moment of hesitance gone faster than it lasted. The most important thing is how to move forward from here-- he still doesn't like this, still isn't going to embrace the connection, but knowing that she isn't entirely alien helps take a bit of the edge off.

An admirable path to take, she thinks. Whether the question is rooted in selfishness or the desire to benefit every mind that mind long for home doesn't matter - the result is the same. Today he asks what he must do. It's a good start.

Cathaway unfolds her hands again, straightening the line of her back and shoulder by a fraction of a degree and so sheds that lingering sense of smallness in an instant. She squares herself to the task, to the one he will inevitably have to do the same, and nods. "We must undermine the work of our enemy. In our current position, we're best served by making sure they don't expand their territory. We travel to systems where what hunts us have left marks or changes, and we erase or correct them. In this way, we do good where others cannot. In time, it may lead to gaining a tactical advantage. Maybe then it can be finished and all of us can go wherever we would most prefer."

"It's that kind of war, huh." He frowns slightly, considers for a moment, his weight shifting a little restlessly. It's not like Ares hasn't had to use less direct tactics before; it's just that it takes longer, and it's really not his preference. But if they don't have a choice--

"I'd rather just kill them now, but as long as we get to fight them eventually I guess it's fine!"

That idea really shouldn't seem to make someone his age more at ease, comfortable in its familiarity-- but it's what he knows. It's just how you deal with threats, a fact of life where he comes from.

It's hardly a war, but the point doesn't merit refining at present. In time, he would come to understand the situation by experience but today war is a fine way of putting it especially if that's what enables a sense of familiarity. Better to nurture that, to see his roots firmly planted before coaxing the direction and velocity of his growth. His enthusiasm, his understanding for killing comes as nothing like a shock. She merely nods - easily and square enough.

"The day will come. In the mean time, you must hone your skills and your connection with your brood and the Nest. That way when you do find agents in the field, you'll be prepared to ruin them." She smiles - warm and vibrant and too cheerful for the conversation at hand. "Have you met The Prince yet? He will happily help you with your abilities."

'Happily' is, perhaps, a stretch. But the Prince will do it because it is necessary.

Her apparent cheer doesn't unnerve him, at least, considering how in line it is with his own attitude; Ares matches that smile, though it's perhaps a little lacking in warmth compared to hers. Not fake, exactly, but not genuine either.

"Don't worry, I'll definitely be ready." He already is, as far as he's concerned. "But nope, I haven't run into anyone like that yet... is he the guy in charge here?"

If he's the prince of this place, Ares assumes so- unless Cathaway's a queen? Is there a king somewhere too? He has no idea what the hierarchy's like.

"We hesitate to say he is in charge, but he is educated - experienced as we are. It would do you good to seek him out in the future should you have any questions we can't answer to your satisfaction. His perspective is different than our own; in some cases, that can be useful. And--" her good temper blooms further, a pulse of something like affection sprawling out from here. "We are fond of him. We would like it if you knew one another."

A simple enough summary, reasoning relatively straight forward.

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[HATCH LOG] IS ANYONE THERE?

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