( september event log )

[hownkai]

Who: Everyone
When: September 19th and on
Where: The Fixed Moons of the Runoff and the Moira.
What: Everything comes to a head.
Warnings: Nothing for now. Please label your content!

E V E N T L O G

the lucid disparity revisited "Never be the first to arrive or the last to go, and never, ever be both." By now, time has passed, and most of the crew have found some sort of comfortable groove with the natives of the unnamed island they crashed near. Partying, gambling and drinking, and more… Even the mysterious pool has given people who could answer its riddle insight in this confusing time. However, as the nights and days continue to progress and the parties begin to blur together, things are… odd. The hosts are still as kind as ever, offering anything and everything those at the temple-like building could ask for, but every so often, the world around them appears different. Clear, as if a fog had been lifted. Yet, it’s only a blink, and then, it’s gone, returning everyone to their regularly scheduled eternal party. Down on the beach, the Captains are still as busy as ever working with those capable to restore function to the Moira. On the morning of the 20th, Navigator Manasseh’s vitals begin to slowly return to normal, her status on the Directory reverting to GREEN, and with it, life is brought back to the Moira. This, of course, means everyone is able to board the ship and leave, but most of the crew who traveled through the jungle and stayed at the party aren’t exactly willing to go just yet. Prior to this, a few of the crew who suddenly realized things were strange and that the people around them were acting strange - themselves included - approached Thán with this particular revelation, upon which Nathan Drake planned to bring back things from the temple to be tested for irregularities. Each sample returned to Cúrre does not alert her to anything abnormal, comprised of similar compounds—except for the water brought to her from the pool. Acting quickly, she reaches the same conclusion as a few of the other crewmembers do: that the water neutralizes the mysterious intoxication caused by everything on this unknown planet. ☄ FROM UNDER THE VEIL The combined efforts of the crew and Curre have resulted in an “antidote” being made from the pool water; crew members pass it around to those down on the ship and beach, then utilize caution while administering it to those at the party. The change happens slowly for most. A drink that was perfect only a little while ago is suddenly sickeningly sweet and no longer enjoyable. The food tastes wrong. The music no longer urges you to dance but instead reminds you that your feet are aching. The magic is fading, and as it does, the cracks in the facade begin to reveal themselves. The elegant city built into the rocks is faded and cracking at the edges. Nothing is as it seems, especially the hosts. Their eagerness to please now has an edge to it. They try and ply their guests with new food, drink and distractions, but they know when the game is up. Do you try and slip away when they’re distracted, or do you demand to know why they’ve done this? Do you dare to find out? ☄ AS TIME GOES BY Crew have begun to filter to the beach, and as the ship reboots, its systems expelling water and allowing it to float on the surface, all Moira-connected technology refreshes. MID devices, to those who check, will show that a year has passed since they crash landed on this strange planet. Those that did not join the party would not have been aware that so much time had passed as the planet seems to be under the influence of a blurring of time, probably due to the fact it is so close to the Luminous Sea. Crew would have gone through the motions and not realized that supplies were dwindling, and anyone who has themselves looked over in the Medbay will discover that they are, in fact, physically one year older. With the Moira finally functioning and with everyone on board, the ship finally begins to ascend and leave the planet behind. The Captains are all working together to get the crew settled back on board and help those who might need some adjusting to this particular news. Since it has been such a long time, fresh supplies are badly needed, and the ship is directed towards the closest known place: the Mini Colony. ( ooc; For questions, go here. )

Comments

[ryuuzaki]

One day, maybe he'll confess to her that he's afraid to die, in spite of the fact that people can apparently be brought back -- not afraid to risk his life if the reason is good enough, but afraid to die, after living an entire life on the premise that you only get one and that death is final. But not today, and not here.

"Was that different from this? I can't imagine that they'd bring you back deconditioned, if they could help it."

[a_shadow]

"I weakened and died three times," she said. "I don't know why. But at the lowest point of that I was better than this." She closes her eyes briefly, continuing to plod along—her expression is one of misery, for that moment. Clearly she despises this whole process.

[ryuuzaki]

He watches her for a long moment, taking in her unhappy expression as he walks alongside her.

Then he puts his hand on her shoulder. It rests there lightly.

"The difference in your condition compared to two weeks ago is remarkable. Believe me -- I don't want to patronize you, but I've watched you every day. You've gone from not being able to turn a page to being able to fire a .22." He pauses, then exhales through his nose as if he's sighing. "It won't be long."

He leaves the indefinite pause in their physical relationship out of it.

[a_shadow]

"It's not patronizing," she says. "It's good to be reminded, I think." She's not normally big on PDA but this is nice. Something about his touch grounds her. Inexplicably her mind goes to what would happen if Church was the one comforting her—he'd frame his encouragement in sarcasm and she'd answer back sharply. They'd get into an argument about it despite being on the same side of the argument. Daniel's a far different man from Church. She can't help appreciating those differences when it comes to something like this.

It's some time before they reach her room and she has to take a couple of rests along the way, but they make it, and she unlocks the room and opens the door. "Come in," she says, leaving no doubt as to the fact that she doesn't wish their visit to come to an end yet.

[ryuuzaki]

He follows her into the room.

He's seen rooms on this deck before, but the difference between his own assigned room and rooms on Mero is always startling: there are fewer, larger, more private beds, and the room itself doesn't have the borderline-nautical masculine sensibility that his own seems to.

It's not really hard to tell which bed is hers. Her roommates are Matt Murdock -- L doesn't know much about him, but he knows he's blind -- and a child. One of the beds has sheets that are both extravagantly feminine and feature skulls, the sort of harder edge and mixture of moods that he'd expect from her.

"This one?" He indicates the bed with a tilt of his head, a significant expression on his face.

[a_shadow]

"Yeah. Hard to tell, huh?" She pads over to the opening in the cover and sits down. She looks up at him, edging her walker away with her foot. "You want to come sit with me?" She sat down sightly to the left side, so there should be room for him to sit to her right.

[ryuuzaki]

He does, so he settles in next to her, then leans against the edge of the opening. It digs into his spine in an extraordinarily uncomfortable way, so he sits back up.

"I have to admit, I've always been jealous of these. Have you ever seen the beds on Nomo? They're like a cross between summer camp and a cabin on a pirate ship. Single, built into the wall. I'll invite you when you're feeling better, but I'll warn you ahead of time that you won't be comfortable."

[a_shadow]

"I had occasion to," she says. "I think I'll pass. There's room enough for the two of us here, hm?"

She smirks a little, shifting a bit to face him better. It's their first occasion to be truly alone together since returning to the ship. She's not good at being coy, and though it's true what she told him about being less affectionate than their time on the planet would make it appear, she is a bit starved for a tender touch. So she sets her hand on his chest and leans in to kiss him.

[ryuuzaki]

"Oh, I don't know," he says, airily. "Wouldn't that depend on what we were up to?"

He wasn't sure whether or not she had this sort of thing in mind, particularly after what happened in the shooting range. It had been on his mind while he was putting the guns away, but only because of her explicit invitation to catch up with her, and he realized at the time that it would be possible to misinterpret it... she might only have wanted company, and since the ship had become operational again, the kind of company she'd been getting from him had been strictly platonic. It couldn't continue that way forever, though, and maybe she wants some kind of consolation... or maybe she just wants him. It's hard to say.

Either way, he leans in to return her kiss, his hand going up to cup the back of her head. It's strange how he feels like he's kissing the same girl, even though she looks nothing like she had when it started.

[a_shadow]

She keeps the press of her lips firm, no tongue, just to ease back into this with him. There's no telling what might develop, considering what they now know about their time together on the planet, and she wants to keep it respectful as well as signal her willingness to learn what he's really like in this situation.

His hand on her head is nice, and she moves her hand from his chest to his shoulder, pulling away just slightly—she already needs to catch her breath. That was an unforeseen development, but it affords her the chance to pepper his jaw with lighter kisses while she works to do so. Here, he's returned to dressing the way he typically does, rather than wearing the finery the natives of the planet had provided, and it's funny how the bagginess of his clothes hides his physique, how they make him look sloppy. Funny, because he doesn't strike her as being a sloppy person in the least. She wonders why he chooses to present himself that way.

In any case, she takes a couple more deeper breaths and then presses her mouth back to his, this time swiping her tongue along his lower lip. She doesn't start nibbling or anything though, not yet, not until she sees how he responds.

[ryuuzaki]

They like him to wear the uniform, but he gets out of it whenever he can: whenever it's viable and practical. Since they've returned to the ship, she's mostly been seeing him in his off hours, which means she's been seeing him in his own clothes.

He follows her lead as she kisses him, although he tries to remain conscious of the curve of the bed's upper shell, a little worried that one or the other of them will bump their head on it. When she kisses down his jaw, he tilts his head to give her easier access, and when she opens her mouth, he returns her kiss in the same way, his tongue against hers, his fingers in her soft hair. He rests his other hand on her thigh.

Maybe she just wants to kiss, or maybe she wants to see how far she can manage to go, or maybe she simply wants to feel good again to whatever degree is feasible after a few weeks of dull, determined misery. He can't say yet, but he doesn't want to suggest to her that she may not be up for what she has in mind: she'll come to that conclusion on her own if it turns out to be the case.

If not... well, she can probably have her way with him, for now.

[a_shadow]

She has to pause to breathe again after less than a minute, and this time she pulls back a bit. She likes the way he's touching her. She moves her hand from his shoulder to cup it under his chin. "I know I said I'm not much for cuddling, but do you want to lie down here with me for a while?"

[ryuuzaki]

That gets a subtle smile: not the sort of grin that could light up the room, but a brighter expression than she's probably used to seeing from him on the ship itself.

"Yes."

It doesn't really seem like she should continue to try to sit up, not if she appears to be winded after a minute of kissing.

"You should probably get into bed first." The big oval opening seems totally negotiable for someone in normal condition, but increasingly complicated for two people, especially if either or both of them is having any kind of physical difficulty. And she's said "for a while," which confirms that he's likely to leave before she is.

[a_shadow]

She tosses the pillows to the back of the space, then lies down and scoots back, which is a laborious process in a way, and takes a minute, but eventually she's back against the pillows. She rolls on her side to face the spot where he will be lying when he joins her. This whole process was tricky and she's left catching her breath, even more winded than when they'd been kissing.

"Normally I just lie down on the edge there," she says, watching him now that he has the space to come over and lie down with her.

[ryuuzaki]

It's much easier for him to crawl in alongside her, but it occurs to him that, on the whole, the lower bunks on Nomo might be friendlier to her condition. Then again, those beds are narrower and easier to fall out of than this is.

"I don't blame you."

Now he's lying next to her, facing her, not really sure of what to do next. She likes initiative, he remembers, but her condition makes him reluctant to take it. Nonetheless, he rests his long hand on her waist and leans in to kiss her, watching for signals about what kind of kiss she wants.

[a_shadow]

She rests her hand on his arm in return, gripping his bicep, letting her head fall back against the pillow and accepting his kiss. She's interested in something more intense than it appears she's capable of receiving, so once again she doesn't nibble at his lips, simply keeps the pressure firm, with gentle swipes from her tongue. Eventually she can't resist, though, and she nips lightly at his lower lip. She's short on breath again, but that signals her desire to up the intensity of things, and she presses her tongue into his mouth.

The thing with these two weeks or so of celibacy is that her physical condition dictated it—she hasn't been feeling her libido at all in this time. When she decided to ensure he follow her to her room this evening, she mainly wanted to spend more time together, more time to get to know each other as they have been doing over the past two weeks, to get the chance to actually spend time in private for once for discussion and yes, for kissing. That's really all. It's just that knowing they could go further than that is exciting to her. She knows it's not likely to happen, being stuck in this condition, but at least there's this—kissing and touching and being close.

Not long after that she pulls back and sets her hand on her chest, working to catch her breath. Lying down was supposed to make this easier, but she'd gotten too eager.

[ryuuzaki]

He follows her lead, kissing her the way she's kissing him, sometimes slightly intensifying it to see how far she wants to go. Nothing in the information she's giving him suggests that she wants to stop, but nothing suggests that she wants to take things too much further, either.

When she breaks away, he just watches her, interested without seeming worried. His hand is still on her waist, and he gives her a reassuring little rub there.

"It's all right. I'll be here."

His experience is that anyone can disappear at any time, even more so than in his old life on Earth: not just traffic accidents and heart failure, but literal disappearance from the ship, here one day and gone the next. Aside from that, he has the patience for something like this.

"We were talking earlier about when I was injured. It wasn't here on the Moira. It wouldn't help you now to be heavily medicated the way I was, but I have to admit that it did help pass the time... that, and the fact that part of my recovery was spent in suspension."

[a_shadow]

He seems to have misinterpreted why she's so eager, but she appreciates that he's willing to reassure her. She moves her hand from his chest to touch his lips, smiling just slightly. No one can promise they'll always be there, not here, but at least the sentiment is there.

And then he changes the subject, talking about his recovery. "Technically, so was mine," she replies. She shrugs a little. "At least I didn't have to worry about doing this while recovering from the fall." She has memorized the location of his scars and she moves her hand to finger at one of them through his shirt. "What happened?"

[ryuuzaki]

"True." She might have spent six months in traction, and then they'd never have been together like this at all.

When she asks what happened, he sighs. The question doesn't bother him, but few memories of the ship itself will ever make him happy, and it's difficult to explain, particularly when he still doesn't quite understand what happened to Gallagher, and hasn't had any way of confirming whether or not his hypothesis that :) had been Gallagher to begin with is accurate.

"It's a long story. The short version is that I was almost impaled on some debris.

"The long version... there were a variety of anomalies on the ship I was on before this. The ship itself was very large, but even taking that into account, a number of things happened which were physically impossible. It had a faster-than-light travel mechanism that was activated about once a month, which was when everyone had to go into suspension. The majority of the ship's corridors would rearrange themselves during the jump -- no map was any good for long. And you remember the red writing, and the murals, and the creature... you saw them when we were together on your ship.

"To be honest, I'd be extremely concerned if I ever saw any of those things outside of the alter-Ingress."

[a_shadow]

"I remember," she says quietly. At the time, she'd had no reason for alarm—it was just something strange and interesting to explore and discover. But now...

She doesn't feel she's falling for him, or at least not in a way that makes her especially anxious to think of something happening to him back there. Being told of his injury, it's unfortunate, but she's not upset about it. But the idea of something happening here, something that would remind him of that other ship, makes her feel that she would do everything she could to protect him from the consequences of it. And yes, she knows he's capable of handling something like that. Yet, it doesn't lessen the protectiveness she feels toward him now. It's kind of similar to the way she insisted that Omega carry out his plans back in Blood Gulch in a way that would avoid the simulation troopers there getting hurt.

But it's more than that. There's a sort of regret that she hadn't realized these things when they'd hopped into the alter-Ingress, how personal those things were to him, and how blasé she'd been about it. She knew the Mother of Invention and she knew those things that appeared there didn't belong there, but there hadn't been that personal connection that made her care about how much those things must have affected him.

She touches his lips again with her fingers, rubbing at his jaw line with her thumb. "Were you exploring?" she asks. It seems to follow, from his comment about the maps.

[ryuuzaki]

"I was. Well... not exactly. I was a communications liaison for several teams that were exploring in spite of the fact that they'd been warned that their efforts would be moot after the next jump. The logic was something like -- if the arrangement of the corridors tended to reconfigure every so often, maybe they were hiding something, or maybe a pattern would emerge where there were only six configurations, or ten. No specific number, just something we might be able to discover if we studied it. In any case, the teams went missing, so the majority of us went in after them. The trouble is that the entity that left the red writing and the murals encouraged it, and... that was never... well.

"What we found..."

He pauses, then sighs again, more heavily. It's not difficult to go on, but the situation was tiresome then and doesn't seem any less so in retrospect. Talking about :) is a little harder, but because of what had happened later, not because of the current narrative.

"A lot of it is irrelevant to my injuries. Some people might describe some of the things we saw early on, distressed versions of the former crew of the ship, as "ghosts"; to me it seems very likely that it was a space-time issue, a different universe overlapping with the one we were in. The further we went, the more significant the phenomena became. It isolated us, eventually... I'd gone in with a dozen people but found myself with only one girl.

"We were subjected -- everyone was subjected -- to a series of scenes from everyone's memories. The site of my parents' death, with the intrusion of one of those creatures you saw, the manticores. Then Central Park in New York City with harpies." The last word turns into a disbelieving, mirthless chuckle. "Other places, too. In any case, the girl had been present for the destruction of a small town in New Mexico by some kind of very large robot, that scenario was repeated, we were separated on the way out, and an explosion knocked me into some glass.

"Eventually, someone else came along and pulled me out. I don't think I would be alive today if he hadn't... I would have bled out trying to find my way back, or been killed in one of the other scenes."

There's something about the way he's telling this story that indicates that he finds it both traumatic and vaguely ridiculous.

[a_shadow]

This summed-up version of events makes it clear there's more he's leaving out, and Tex can do nothing but run her hand along his arm and listen. There's one detail she tucks away for later—'my parents' death'—but she mainly just stays quiet, listening.

When he finishes she moves her hand to his waist. It would be trite to say she's glad he survived. "These ships, they seem to be nexuses for this kind of stuff, don't they?" she says instead. "It's kind of interesting that where I come from, people mess around with holes in space-time all the time in order to travel faster than light, yet I never heard of that sort of thing happening." Maybe it did, and she just didn't know about it.

[ryuuzaki]

He nods, and a vaguely disgruntled expression passes over his face before fading into nothing.

"They do... at least the two ships in question. But I think it might be a coincidence... when I've heard of other places like this, towns seem to be more common. The problem on the other ship explicitly involved the jump drive. How does that sort of thing work where you come from?"

He's seen a little of her universe, and he's lately been interested to learn more, but she's been so fatigued that peppering her with questions seemed like a bad idea.

He moves the hand that had been resting on her waist up between them, to find her free hand and attempt to hold it.

[a_shadow]

"A slipspace drive makes a small wormhole to allow a ship to travel through slipspace. It's faster than light travel, but it still does take time. Part of the crew will typically go into cryosleep while in-between destinations—whoever isn't in the essential crew."

She spreads her fingers when she realizes he's reaching for her hand, allowing their fingers to interlace. It's so weird, being affectionate with him when they barely know one another. Nice, though. She wouldn't normally allow this, not with anyone else, but with the way they drew together, she finds it worth investing in a closer relationship.

"I've never heard of anything like what happens here or on that other ship, though, not on any ships and not on any planets. On the other hand, I wasn't really in a position where I would have heard of those things, I don't think. For part of my existence, a lot of information was being deliberately withheld from me, and later on I was concentrating on my objectives in a very...focused way."

[ryuuzaki]

He shrugs the shoulder that isn't against the mattress. "The basic function of the drive and the need to go into stasis while it was operational sounds the same, but we didn't have to go into cryo, just into a stasis fluid. Everyone had to do it, or the g-forces would have killed them. I saw that happen a few times, and it was always messy."

But did everyone? He's relatively certain that Resnik was still alive when he left the Tranquility, but he's never been sure of where she and Ward went during jumps. The assumption that they used gravity couches somewhere else in the ship was undercut by the discovery of the nanite sabotage... yet he'd known that there were more in the genetics lab, probably with their own source of stasis fluid. That didn't rule out further locations on the ship.

These mysteries are irrelevant to him now, but the fact that he hadn't solved them still eats at him from time to time.

"It didn't happen in the place I originally came from, either, but I've heard of it happening in other places. Often it seems to be a town, rather than a ship... it isn't always caused by creating wormholes. And the jump drive was malfunctional in more ways than just bringing us in... there were black holes all over that ship. It shouldn't even have been possible for the ship to remain intact."

He tucks the mention of "information deliberately withheld from her" away until later.