[HATCH LOG] IS ANYONE THERE?

[onemind]

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 )

Comments

[polyphonos]

"That's to be expected. It isn't here."

Whatever it is; she can feel the loss in him, make out the buzzing electric gap in its wake, but the link is too frenetic, too young, too small to be sure of the particulars. Still, that much she's sure of: whatever it is he's lost won't be found in this place. Not in the same shape or texture, not from any equivalent source. She is frank about that much. Does it cut to hear it?

"Come now, there is more to see if you have the attention for it."

There's a point in that, the smallest barb. She applies it like setting a sharp tool to the thin sheet of glass and tapping gently at the grip with a hammer to see if he shatters from it and along which lines.

Fascinating.

[narcissithstic]

That goes over well

It hits him squarely in his chest, boring deeper than the bolt fired from Chewbacca's crossbow; if her aim was not to puncture his heart then luck plays too well in her favor for how much it cripples him. Loss. Always the undercurrent threaded throughout his life, and here, now, where so much should have changed it only equates to gouging out his own eyes just to see. Backwards and senseless, the folly of an imbecile writing the final chapter of a story no one will remember. Ren buckles, face flushed, eyes hot and damp at the corners where she is thankfully incapable of seeing through that reinforced visor.

He should have perished on Starkiller, at least then his would be a legacy remembered. A martyr for the glory of a fallen empire.

It takes less than a single instant-- the first, shaking exhale of exposed, vivid torment-- for hatred to flood his senses. Ren's saber lies half a ship away, more than that, perhaps (he hadn't charted the ship as neatly as he otherwise should) still stowed where it first sat waiting for him, but he doesn't need it. He doesn't need it.

"Then I will -bring it here-." Ren snaps, brimming with livid determination. As if he could wrap his fingers around more than just her slim throat - will the stars to shrink down and compress, to undo what's been done. Fingers raised and coiled from across the room, air thick and heavy and spilling over with contempt: the pain that bores into his skull from strain is negligible, pressed past to find the flow of the only comfort he's ever known, cinching tight across her neck.

The Force.

rude

[polyphonos]

In the long line of fledgling hosts she has seen, and trained, and been a part of, Cathaway has known moments of violence. It's a narrow probability, but a likelihood nonetheless: a possibility folded by necessity between fear and anger and anguish that sometimes the newness of the bond facilities. With the right host, the right mind, brittleness is inevitable - danger guaranteed. It isn't the preferable outcome. She would say as much if asked, though admittedly she always does her best to be honest and forthright even when the answers are unwieldy.

In summary: this is now wholly unexpected. He asks nothing. He demands everything. Like a feral animal, the grip of his unseen hand finds her. Cathaway's pacing stops abruptly as her throat closes, as the air to this body is strangled. It has been a long time since the last brood hatched, longer still since this body found itself in any physical danger; but elsewhere there are other minds, other bodies. Some of them know the ways to counter death, to buck pain.

Touch is preferable when it comes to sharing the bond, to shredding open the link between him and them. Preferable, but not necessary. Her throat closes. The mind blooms. The choking desperation sizzles back up the line to him, screaming hot and choking. His grip clamps down on her throat. His grip clamps down on his own throat.

think of it this way: he's treating you like his real mom

[narcissithstic]

It should, in any true, sane amount, rattle him. Reduce him to instinctive drive rather than the pulsing, venemous beat of his own heart beneath woven armor that does nothing to stifle the way his throat constricts-- and in a way, it does: never before has anyone dared to lay their hands upon his throat, with the Force or desperate, clawed fingers. The Jedi employed toothless tactics; the Resistance's agents too feeble to ever find the proximity for it save for when they were bound and screaming in tormented captivity. So he does sober in part, wet eyes widened by careful degrees under the weight of his own, crushing grip coupled with something too vast to even begin to comprehend.

But it takes a few lengthy seconds longer for his own lack of air-- for the pain and dig of it to tear loose his commitment to a cause he cannot maintain-- to set him stumbling only briefly against the doorway at his back, modulator rasping out a horrid tangle of digital noise as Ren struggles to find his own breath.

As his mind still strains against the charged current that yet lingers, flinching.

Time out though

[regalled]

Somewhere else there is a man. A distance away, almost far enough to be insulated from the cacophony of the new Hosts.

But it is no distance at all when it comes to the sudden onset of pain, the closing of Cathaway's windpipe. Prince, buried deep in the logistics of more than a dozen new minds and bodies that would require care and teaching regardless of their feelings, freezes instantly. His gaze trains forward, unseeing and distant and unlike him.

The pain he feel from her almost as if it is his own doesn't come with panic. The sharp spike of anxiety is entirely from him, the sudden unexpected threat to the last of his brood, where the rest were gaping holes that never closed. It didn't matter that Cathaway could protect herself, that she was stronger than him in most ways, which is clear enough when he feels the shift of her mind and the way the pressure fades seconds later, the pain a dull echo fading quickly as her symbiote repaired the damage done.

It still does not sooth him, and he reaches out for her as he rarely does.

Are you well?

It is something he did not need to ask to know, if he would only look, but as usual he prefers the comfort of words, even from the distance, even as his control fades and his emotions bleed across the connection between them, tight through his chest, something edging towards anger as an alternative to fear.

ah my prince

[polyphonos]

The give of it, the moment before breath finds her again, is the sweeter one. Still, the moment he slips, she sucks down a full breath and staggers forward. She is, after all, nothing more than a collection of fine bones - worn skin - wiry, but ageing muscle. A hand rises to her throat with a jingle of chain and gold, fingers splayed across the gentle flesh of her neck; the Prince flickers in her mind like the solid touch of a hand at her shoulder, as reassuring, and for a split second gratitude swells in her. It expands along the line between them, burning out the threat of the younger host on the bridge and reaching across the breadth of the station to touch the last of her brood in return.

( We're fine. ) She has little use for words, but forces them anyway. He prefers it and she has the luxury of focus, however desperate, as both she and the newly hatched host struggle to right themselves, to catch their breath. ( Don't worry. )

An impossible thing to ask of him, she's sure. But she puts it out of her mind - forces her hand down and her back straighter.

"Are you finished?"

[narcissithstic]

Huddled against the glossy-slick paneling behind him, his once-broad figure cuts a thin, shaken silhouette. As if the black of his robes could sink away between the cracks into nothingness were she to shine a light directly upon him.

Snoke had chosen him.

Snoke had wanted him even in the face of his failure to complete the final, long-awaited stages of his training. What would he think of him now? What would any of them think, left waiting in the rubble of a fallen Empire for a legacy that would never come. He barely registers the damp heat staining his cheeks, tearing the helmet from his head in an instant, ignoring the way its contours grind against his skin in protest for the fact that he refuses to wait for the locking mechanisms to release.

"Why--"

Spat through clenched teeth, expression raw and hateful and hopeless. "Why did you do this to me!?"

[regalled]

For the shortest moment he allows the connection, the wash of her gratitude and the comfort of the bond to rise up on him like an ocean's tide. Just as disarming, just as likely to pull you with it. Her surprise had been his, he was far more likely to face the temperamental wrath of young hosts than she, but his worry was not productive, it would serve no purpose. And so he pulls away, with less ease than he might have once, not entirely convinced but stepping back and gathering himself together again, knitting his frayed edges and leaving the connection nearly, nearly closed.

Very well. Take care with him.

Unspoken and obvious, if she required his assistance he would come. There was little question of that.

[polyphonos]

The broodbond narrows to a pinprick. The Prince's attention like the touch of a single fingertip gentle against bare skin. She feeds a reflexive thread of certainty to that touch (like turning her wrist under his finger so he can feel the gentle rhythm of this body's pulse), but otherwise lets the line between them slacken as the one presently before her blooms in time to the boy's distress.

The helmet comes away. The bond shreds open and she lets it - encourages it - pierces forward through the gap without moving from where her feet have planted. She brings the taste of ash and breaking with her: a dark shape like a cloak or the box of the sky through a viewport. A hundred pinpricks of stars and distant worlds. It's cold. She takes the fire in him to make up for it, drawing it in as surely as she does his mind.

It's rude to force the connection, but she feels no guilt for it.

( BE SILENT. )

It's a loud voice, restraining. Stitched through it is all he needs to know, dumped unceremoniously into the broken cup of his mind: the nesting deck, the symbiote growing in his mind, the specter of death that had chased him here, the hand that had pulled him to this place for the sake of correcting a multiverse being taken to pieces by an unseen, unknown hand. He will make himself useful. He will have purpose. He will do these things for his own good, as he always has.

[narcissithstic]

Thirty years he has lived with the Force (with its dual demands and limitless depths, time little more than an illusion in its grasp) and yet no part of it has ever carried the frigid, oppressive weight that comes when her consciousness floods his mind. A voice that would bring Snoke to his knees, knowledge without half-truths or clouded prophecies, power beyond the cold, disappointing reality that threatened to overtake his life.

He cannot be silent-- at least not in thought.

The redness of raw, glassy eyes blinks away, breathing shallow through his nose. If he could kneel before her, he would - prostrate himself and bare his willingness to serve, but his knees are buckled, his grip on the wall beside him too tight: only the sound of air filters in through ventilation systems, only the rise and fall of his chest as he watches, focused and committed in spite of the endless din that clings to his every waking moment.

[polyphonos]

It's nauseating and crystalline, his dedicated bright and ashen. She snaps the mental link closed with a pop that stabs through her as viscerally as it must him and fights not to be staggered by the breathless hollowness left behind. Instead she forces her back straight, forces this body's limbs to function. Cathaway crosses the bare chamber of the bridge, the Station singing like a low full note in her mind's ear, and closes distance with him. It isn't rapid. There's something brittle and wounded in her stride, worn not by the connection between them but the necessary loss of intimacy when she'd narrowed it.

He's much taller than her, but buckled as he is they're almost eye to eye when she comes to stand before him.

"Let us see your face." She doesn't hesitate or ask permission before she reaches for him: touches her thumb to his chin and forces his face over by a scant degree so she can make a thorough examination of the ragged scar that running there.

"We did what was necessary to save your life. If you respect that, if you value it, then you will do what's necessary to save ours." She grips his chin tighter then, forces his face further over still. It's dangerous to be so close to him, she thinks, but physical proximity has nothing on the nearness of his mind. That's already a threat. "If you would do that, you will recognize that we have use for you, as we have use for your brood and all the others you hatched with. Do you understand us?"

[narcissithstic]

Dangerous, maybe, but there's nothing beneath her hands aside from patient, steady compliance: his head turns when she moves it, where she moves it, so pliant that it hardly seems the same person she'd confronted before. Only the narrowed, reddened eye at his right side, swollen from prior agitation, meets her gaze from where his head is tilted so far ahead peripheral vision is all that remains.

"Yes." Because even if he doesn't fully understand it all just yet, he will, Ren imagines - at least once the ebbing strain from their conflict fades. She is not Snoke, she's something greater than the Supreme Leader could possibly have imagined. Would envy if he knew, most likely, huddled in the confines of his own, hollow cloister.

After a moment, with her eyes still tracing out the ugliness of his brand, he adds, almost too eagerly, "It's nothing; I hardly feel it."

Be impressed, space mom. Look how badass he is.

[polyphonos]

His is an eager mind. She can feel the reach of it even through the narrow pinhole version of the link drawn purposefully thin between them, in the hum of him under her touch. It's a useful quality - or has potential to be, if properly directed. He'll need management, but with care and gentle oversight she suspects he can be encouraged to function in a way which they will all find beneficial.

"Of course you don't." There's a sterility to her tone that makes it difficult to tell if she believes him or not, but her hand at his chin gentles accordingly. If he wishes to straighten his face, she won't stop him.

There are facilities on the ship that might heal the lingering hurt and strip the scar from him, but she feels no desire to take it from him. There's a rawness to it, something hot and sparking behind his chest over the wound, that's appealing to her. Feels fractured in a way that's compelling. Better to let him keep it if he's so divided over it.

[narcissithstic]

The comment is so potent he can almost feel it blossoming under his skin, rising in his chest as it expands with every breath— praise. Beautiful, sincere praise. All the sterility in her tone lost in the face of what he needs to hear. Wants to hear.

It's been so long.

Ren waits, determined to be certain lifting his chin won't ruin her enthusiasm. A beast called to heel, he stays, still watching just out of the corner of his eye - twitching as if kinetic energy is in his blood, calling him to run. To hunt. To do whatever it takes to restore the galaxy to its rightful, uncorrupted state.

"How can I reach you? —what do I call you?"

She won't always be here. Not a hologram to call upon day or night, without hesitation. She'll need rest. More, maybe.

[polyphonos]

"This one is Cathaway. You may use that." The easier and simpler of the two questions he asks. Once answered, she draws her hand from his chin entirely with a rasp of the charms dangling from her wrist, her forearm, her elbow. "While on the Station, you can us by thinking clearly on it. It will be difficult at first, but diligent practice and time will make such things easier. Off the Station-- sometime we may be inaccessible to your mind. It depends entirely on the range between us."

She would likely be able to find him, to trace that fractured line leading to his mind, but it's unlikely he would be able to communicate back. Not that there wasn't use or value in such a thin connection, but she doubt it's important for him to know. In time, she tells herself, it will be apparent enough given the need. For now, better for him to think himself limited.

Cathaway doesn't step back from his immediate space, but she does fold her hands patiently in front of herself. She regards him coolly. "We would prefer it if you didn't try to hurt us again."

[narcissithstic]

"On my life, I swear it."

Fealty pledged in an instant, to the tune of her charms as they catch against one another. Slight, and soft, and worthy of her presence, he thinks absently. "Unless you will otherwise, my hands are stayed."