thisavrou_log | ( september event log )

( september event log )

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!

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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. )

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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.

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."

Edited 2016-09-28 22:25 (UTC)

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?"

"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."

"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.

"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.

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.

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 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."

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.

Edited 2016-09-29 02:50 (UTC)

"I don't understand how a ship could have black holes on it," she says. "That's wild."

She pauses, then scoots her hips forward a little to place her leg between his legs, like how they laid that first time they cuddled together.

"Do you remember when we went to the ship from my world and you told me the murals on the walls were from there? You looked really...disturbed. I've never seen you like that, otherwise." That's the best word she has for how he acted. It's strange to her, as he's very obviously a person who doesn't let things get to him normally. He's very measured about things, and he had been rolling with the punches quite well during that excursion—until the murals had showed up.

He slips his shoes off whenever he can, and this had been no exception: he'd taken them off before crawling into bed beside her. When her leg goes between his, he responds by rubbing his foot against hers a little teasingly.

Then she mentions the murals. He doesn't stiffen -- they're too deep into the conversation and the subject for that -- but his foot does go limp against hers, and his face takes on a thoughtful, dismayed expression.

"There's a reason for that... I suppose the story of how I got stabbed in the stomach is part of it.

"There were murals all over the place in the corridors of the ship I was on... the corridors that changed... and the murals themselves changed sometimes if you turned your back on them. They depicted things that had a significance to past events there... for example, if you remember the figure of the man presenting elemental symbols, I believe it was intended to represent the reason the ship itself was built. The people who built it were from a system that was rapidly running out of natural resources. But the murals came later. I believe they were created by the entity himself.

"Primarily, I was disturbed to see them here, or anywhere aside from that ship. The fact that we were in the alter-Ingress explained their appearance, but it also made me wonder, just for a moment, if I'd been sent back to the center of the other ship... if I was returning to the situation where I'd been injured, or if everyone on the Moira was about to be subjected to the things that happened there.

"Neither would be very desirable."

"No, it wouldn't." She utters the words quietly; he's clearly hoping to move on from that topic. At least, he was happier before she addressed it more directly. She rubs her foot against his, where it's gone limp. There's no words she can offer about how there's no chance of that—who knows, with the Ingress still on board and malfunctioning on a regular basis?—so instead of speaking any further about that, she moves her hand back to his face, fingers at the corner of his lips and at his jaw line, then leans in to kiss him again. She's all for comforting him physically, all for forgetting the horrible things they've seen in their time on the ship, and just enjoying one another now.

He isn't sure whether she's trying to console him or merely to move away from a topic of conversation that he clearly finds difficult. What she's not fully aware of is how rare a difficult topic is for him.

He finds that he wouldn't want to see her subjected to the Tranquility -- and yet, she already has been. Some version of her, of Shepard, of Stark, of Steve Rogers, of Skye. It's probably better that he hadn't been involved with her when they'd gone through the alter-Ingress together: if he had been, he suspects that his nightmares (infrequent by that point, but briefly reinvigorated by the experience) would have begun to extensively feature her. And the fact that he had capitulated so thoroughly to :) in the end doesn't make things any better. It really just makes him think that her opinion of the strength of his resolve -- whatever that opinion is -- would suffer greatly. He hadn't even managed to get the answers he'd wanted, although the way his questions had been brushed aside had been an answer in itself.

He returns her kiss, then pulls back two inches and says in a more ironic tone, "So you can see why I'm happy to be here now."

"Well, clearly it's all the sex," she says. "Isn't it? You can tell me."

Now she's outright teasing him, and she rubs his hand where it's held in hers with her thumb, ticking his palm with her thumbnail.

He responds with a surprised little chuckle.

"Yes. All the sex." All the sex that they haven't been having in the last few weeks, but that's all right. He wonders how he'll react if and when it starts again, now that he's entirely himself: one of the smaller goals of visiting her and spending time with her has been to maintain a sense of intimacy, so that times like lying here with her won't feel bizarre. "Apart from that, I'm especially fond of Medbay. I'm going to have to find a way to end up there soon."

"I'm sure I could arrange that," she says, snickering. "Just give me a chance to get better." Her eyes flicker to his mouth and she kisses him again, ending with a sharp nip. "Or I could try now."

After the kiss breaks apart, he eyes her mock-skeptically -- makes a show of it, even.

"I'm in the lair of an aggressive woman. You're welcome to try, but I think you're more likely to end up in medical now than I am."

It's tempting to roll her over, but he remembers what she said about being on her back... and if there's any more specific reason for it than dislike, then the confined space of the bed is likely to make that worse. Instead, he angles his head, then kisses her jaw and her neck.

She lets out a little hum of approval, moving her hand to his hip. She kneads lightly there with her hand, making sweeping circles with her thumb. She likes this and she wishes they could indulge in more than just kissing. She needs to be patient—and find an appropriate venue, considering she now shares her room with a teenage boy. She's not sure how putting a sock on the door would go over now.

He brings his face up to hers, then presses his forehead against hers, not joking anymore. He speaks to her softly.

"Just relax and don't try to exert yourself. We can worry about that another time. Tonight... whatever won't cause a strain, even if it's only this. What time do your roommates usually come back?"

He doesn't mention that his are rarely in his room, which is an entire deck away.

"Am I that obvious?" she mutters wryly. Mostly because she knows she is. "They come back at random times. At least lately—I think they both have social lives or something heinous like that."

"How good are you at pretending that nothing is going on?"

He doesn't bother to make this sound like a serious question. Yes, she's obvious: she's joked about putting him in the hospital when she can barely walk.

Less flippantly, more hushed, he adds, "I didn't expect to miss you like this. I think I was spoiled -- I didn't know how much time was passing, but I got used to you." He means her presence, right there -- increasingly close as the months had slipped by. Thinking about it too deeply is unsettling -- how many moments have been compressed into the ones he remembers? how many are completely lost? -- but it doesn't change the fact that he'd enjoyed almost every one of them.

Edited 2016-09-29 09:47 (UTC)

She looks into his eyes—she's come to adore his eyes—and says the first thing that comes to mind. "Stay, then," she says. "Stay tonight." It's so strange, comparing what's happened with him to what happened with Church—she didn't allow Church to stay with her until he got injured, and even when she invited him to stay in her room, they didn't share a bed. It was different with Church, though, wasn't it? She needed to keep some boundaries with him. It's not like that with Daniel. It's not like that at all.

She likes that.

To emphasize her words, she scoots in closer, releasing his hand and moving to lie on her back, pressing her arm to his chest. She takes his hand in her other and kisses his fingertips. She likes how he runs his fingers through her hair when they're close like this. She likes how gentle he is when they're just becoming intimate (which is strange, since that used to annoy her). She wants him to stay and act like that, though. Just like that.

They're not nothing to each other, but what they are is new and debatable, and not really at a point where it requires definition. Friends... better friends than they had been... who also have a physical relationship, getting to know each other in several ways at once. The little flip in his stomach when she asks him to stay surprises him, but it probably doesn't mean anything... does it? It means that a pretty woman is kissing his fingertips and asking him to stay the night after he's just told her that he enjoys her company.

Not worth thinking about at the moment, but he likes that she distracts him from other worries, other infatuations.

"Of course I'll stay with you."

He props himself up on his elbow, close to her, then presses the palm of his free hand to the side of her face and jaw and leans in to kiss her mouth, then trails his hand slowly down the side of her body to rest on her hip.

This is the first time he's done something like this sober. He remembers their more kinetic habits back on the planet, the things she likes, but there's little place for them right now. What there is room for is a quiet joke.

"-- But you'll have to promise to be very gentle with me." He smiles against her mouth.

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( september event log )

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