station72 | [hatch log] the sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye

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[hatch log] the sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye

CHARACTERS: New Hosts & EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72; Hyrypia - The Far Shore
WHEN: DAY :041 - DAY :042
SUMMARY: A hatch; an arrival; a homecoming. The Hosts part ways.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. Need a warning added? PM this account please!

STATION 72
DAY :041

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.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS
BARELY AFTER YOU STEP OUT OF YOUR POD someone pokes their head around the corner and says, “Oh good, you’re awake. D’you have any idea how boring it is to watch people sleeping in tubes? Mind-numbing.”

This...person looks more or less like a normal human, as far as you can tell, and they’re gesturing for you to follow. “I’m Ty, nice to meet you, I’ll be your conductor this--” they pause, squint, count on their fingers, then give up trying to figure out what time it actually is. “--Mevening? Aftermorn? Whatever. I wasn’t supposed to be on orientation duty more than once but here I am, fresh with instructions to answer questions better.”

Ty’s dark eyes appraise you as if judging your outfit, then xe raises xyr eyebrow. “First up, the bathroom’s over there. Second, don’t mind the noise in your head. You get used to it. Third, are you going on the field trip or not?”

THE STATION
WITH A LITTLE UNDER 24 HOURS before the ship makes its way to Hyrypia, now might be a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with Station 72-- either before you leave it or in preparation of finding yourself sharing it with a gaggle of strangers. Better claim your bed early.

The savviest eyes will note that a number of rooms in the Living Quarters show clear signs of having been inhabited at some point; however, there's a fine patina of stillness or stasis in those places. If this place was one where dust might gather, there might be a layer of it here. Exactly how long has it been since this last group of Hosts left for their Mission again?

Come the simulated morning, a strange slate colored craft resembling folded origami more than a ship waits in the Hangar. A small, bird-like woman attends to it and when the time is right she climbs into the cockpit, cheerfully inviting anyone who wants to go to the planet to ride along with her. Then it too leaves the Station and for a time the quiet left in its wake is very dense indeed.

HYRYPIA - THE FAR SHORE
DAY :042

A SHIP TO SHORE
THE SUN IS HIGH IN THE SKY before the first calls of the sailors can be heard heralding the shore in the distance. It isn’t long after that they get close enough that the passengers - the remaining members of the Envoy and their Hyrypian hosts (a thinning herd, it seems) - are encouraged to begin preparing themselves to disembark. It’s a messy process. Unlike the docks they boarded on, this place has no permanent mooring. Instead temporary docks are brought out from the ship itself, anchored in place by small vessels that swarm around it in the water as small fish around a shark. By the time the maneuver is complete and the passengers are packed, the afternoon is threatening to turn into evening. Still, there's enough light to see by as they are led down the ramps and the docks and out onto the loose, grey stones that make up the shore.

Where the Red Coast had been tall cliffs and sand, the Far Shore is formed of pebbles and small stones dotted with driftwood. It’s grey and bleak, a single path heading up the nearby low hills, covered in short greyish yellow scrub and lichen. This place is draped with an overcast sky, the clouds churning and wind gusting, the air cool and dry. In the distance a chain of mountains scrapes the sky, but there’s a quite a bit of distance between here and there. For now, the immediate task at hand is getting the caravan rolling along the rocky, pitted path through the lonely, hushed landscape. Wind hums through the hills, a mournful crying sound.

SHIFTING ODDS
WHEN CAMP IS FINALLY MADE each Envoy is encouraged to quickly pitch their tents and then summarily herded into them. The Morran apparently want to avoid any more murders in the dark. In what is almost certainly a rarity, this means the Hosts all find themselves sharing each other's company around a single brazier in their largest tents - raw meats, vegetables, a hearty broth and a large copper bowl have been provided by the Morran, but it's up to each envoy to prepare and cook their own meals tonight.

Maybe it's a dour evening - after all bonds will be broken once the ship arrives and some of your number make their way back to the Station; however, it certainly takes a turn for the positively grim when a large number of Hosts suddenly fall comatose at the exact moment Cathaway's ship pierces into the universe.

TWO ROADS DIVERGED
RENDEZVOUSING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT has suddenly became more complicated. What was once an easy hike out of camp to meet with Cathaway's stealth ship now suddenly requires the movement of quite a few comatose Hosts (Rhan, for one, seems exceptionally distressed over the complication).

The comatose Hosts will have to be secreted away from camp to connect with the ship from the Station hidden in hills. Once there, it's time to make introductions, to say your goodbyes, and to wish others all the best. It may be some time before you see one another again.

((OOC Notes: This log covers the hatch on Day :041 and the arrival and/or retreat of Hosts on Day :042. As a reminder, please chime in on the OOC HEADCOUNT going on to indicate whether your character is staying on Hyrypia or on the Station. Please see THIS POST for breakdown on how recent drops are being handled.

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 )

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[There are other hosts coming up the ramp now - either of their own volition or carried. She shifts back under the eave of the black ship's twisted fuselage, a small pale shadow in the muted golden light of the craft's interior.]

Do you know that before you and your companions were hatched - before Shaula and Castor and Gacrux and all those names we plucked from your familiar sky to know you by - that the Nesting Deck had been a quiet place and our numbers had become very slight?

[She regards him for a moment, then her eye wanders to the blue-black night beyond the ship. The wind hums here, the lichen too short to sway from it, and cold settles firmly in the trough of the hill where they do their work tonight. Cathaway turns a small diamond shaped metal charm between her fingers. It seems as if it must belong with the multitude she wears on the fine chains at her wrists and elbows, strung through the folds of her wrapped dress, though this one is unconnected and has been for some time.]

The hosts you've met in places like this - Nirad and Carata; Siva'Co and The Collector - their ranks are thin by necessity. There have been so few of us and so many places that must be tended. But you see, we've been wondering if something had begun to change. If we had done something so correct that the multiverse and how its people are formed had shifted somehow in our advantage. Change of consequence demands numbers, doesn't it? [Says the woman so changed from what she was; says the woman who is some kind of multitude.] But maybe that thing has turned again. It's possible that our capacity for growth is simply... diminishing.

[She makes a small gesture, the overture of a shrug, and pockets the diamond shaped charm. Whatever use it might have had here seems to have passed away.]

Not so many, no. But it has been some time since we can remember there being this many to suffer it all at once.

[He goes quiet, while she explains. Part of him still trying to screen his thoughts, trying to keep the sense of alone - like drifting in space - like dulled senses - isolation from leaking through, every time his gaze drops toward Bellamy's body. The flickers of green lightning on the edges of those sensations, the flickers that never really left.]

[If it's even possible to screen anything from her.]

No, I didn't. History wasn't covered when I woke up.

[There's a wry note in the words, despite himself. A vague attempt at humor. The slight motions of her hands bring him from looking at the comatose faces of friends to the crystal. His head tilting a little as he watches her. How had he not noticed that before?]

[This feels like something he should have asked before. Someone should have asked before. And spread out amongst the others. But that's something to deal with for another time.]

Do you think it's turning in our favor... or against?

[Needing smaller numbers might mean they don't need as many able bodies. Right? On the other hand, it could also mean their enemy has gotten strong enough to interfere somehow. Couldn't it?]

Could something have... could something have done this to them?

It's difficult to be certain - though we are in some sense removed from the universes arround us, there can be no denying that they still have great affect on us even as we live in the place between places. It's possible that somewhere out there, our Enemy has perfected some tool or has caused some catastrophic event that has triggered the symbiote to react so violently. It's possible too that this is merely a hibernation to avoid detection - that the symbiote looks to reduce our numbers to avoid some disaster in a future we can't yet see. Maybe this is the equivalent of putting seeds into storage through a winter. Maybe we all will go and later these will wake up again to find themselves whole and protected, having survived a thing that destroyed those of us left behind.

[There's a rythmic quality to her voice, a drumming beat that says inevitble, inevitable, inevitable while at the same time it's clear she's thinking aloud. Giving voice to the collated suspicions of a hundred unseen hosts who might speak with this shared tongue. For a moment, she regards the face of Bellamy as he sleeps on the rack of the impossible alien ship. She absently touches her lower lip, short nail meditatively there. There is the sensation of branching paths - a diagram of the nervous system, of the universe, of the galaxy and its relation to a million others, many paths through a wood, a crossroads they have walked so many times.

At length, she raises her eyes back to Shiro beside her.]

Regardless, we sense there is still a way forward through this. We just don't understand the shape of it.

[Yet, seems to be the implication there.]

[He hears, and gets the sense all these words are like looking into deep space. Into a sector no one has yet touched. To where everything and anything is possible, the pathways of her words like little collections of stars. Only possible to navigate, if you had the right chart. But there's nothing in his hands to guide him with.]

[And from the intonations she's giving, somewhere down the road, they're all going to have to navigate through. Blind or not. There are just too many possibilities out there.]

[For some reason, hearing her lack the answers to the questions is more unsettling than if it had been anyone else.]

We just have to keep going forward, right? Finish the mission?

[Since that seems like it's really the only choice available.]

[She makes a small, soft noise. Beyond the low golden glow of the ship's interior lighting, Hyrypia stretches into dark shadows around them. A cool wind hums in this place. Cathaway draws her thin shawl closer about her shoulders.]

We can think of no alternative. If anything is to change, we must make some effort to live beyond the safety of the Station.

[A thing that does not grow will waste away. A thing that lives in a closed space will eventually be smothered by it. There is a low, thrumming certainty in her and it is this: change demands action, even if that action is blindly grasping at the darkness. Surely that means something. Surely that requires something of them in places like this one.

There's a moment of quiet. She's answered his questions as best she can, hasn't she? She could turn her attention elsewhere: to the other comatose Hosts, to those shuffling onto the shuttle, to the sensation of the landscape and that dark knot of fear that lives somewhere out there in the night. Instead, she says:]

We know it's difficult to be happy here. We understand the people who come here are leaving things they love behind them and that it's natural to think of those things and to... be loyal to them. Of course that's true. We feel pieces of that too. We just wish we knew how to make belonging here less frightening.

[He almost offers her part of the robes hanging off his shoulders. Almost. A quick, aborted movement before realizing it might leave him more exposed -- less disguised. He nods, instead, the thought fleeting and getting out before he can do anything to restrain it.]

Okay. Then...

[Then he doesn't know what to say. Except something like "goodbye" to people who won't even hear it anymore.]

Then you should probably get out of the cold.

[It's directed to Cathaway, that nagging bit of concern not leaving any time soon. She's strange and ethereal and a little beyond their understanding, but he can't not be concerned. No more than he can breathe underwater. His eyes are still on his comatose broodmate when she speaks again, and he looks up in surprise.]

The people who stay... the ones we have left. They help. When we let them in.

But that's on us.

[She pauses, something measured in the breath of hesitation. When she smiles, it's complicated: sad and wanting and genuinely lovely and tired and pleased and comforting and none of these things.]

Yes, that's probably really the only thing that can be done.

[The way she says it and how she draws herself up after seems like the end of whatever this shared moment has been. The level of her shoulder squares and she is at once less strange - just a thin old woman taking charge:]

See that the others are secured here, then be on your way. We shouldn't linger here longer than necessary.

[It takes him a moment. The sudden change between how he's always seen her, and this one is surprising. Like a glimpse of something strange and unknown under the surface of ice.]

Sorry there isn't more.

[He doesn't know why he tells her that. Why he's apologizing to her. Neither of them can control this. Neither of them have any real power over this sort of thing. But... maybe it was that little bit of humanity he'd seen there leaving him to reach out, one more time.]

[Before the ice forms once more.]

Yes, ma'am.

[Ice over her features, the Black Paladin back in his shoulders.]

We'll see you when this is over.

[She nods and it's a curt motion, though her hand when she reaches to touch his shoulder is delicate enough. Kind enough. Brief enough as to be at least attempting toward non-invasive (she can, occasionally, be quite polite about these things).]

Stay safe.

[Then she withdraws into the strange folded paper ship, moving to the controls to begin spooling up the engines.]

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