(no subject)

Who: Everyone
When: July 1 and onward. See this post for info.
Where: Kauto + Chioni + Ingress Complex
Warnings: Potential violence. Please label warn-worthy content in your subject headers.

There's a burst of light in the sky when the Ingress breaks, a final flare followed by a shuddering that only those in the facility can feel. A flurry of panicked activity in the complex follows, ushering new arrivals to where they need to go in a hurry, with little time to give them the needed information, much less answer questions. The lights remain on, but dimmer now, life functions still operating but little else. On Kauto and Chioni below, the sky fades into an early twilight, followed by night, and day does not come again.

nerds save the world

Before the end of the day, all TABs receive an emergency broadcast notification outlining the situation. The speaker, a lead Savriite Ingress technician, does not invite panic but nor does he mince words. The Ingress is broken; their best efforts have failed to restore it. The time has come to turn to anyone who can help: scientists, engineers, those who have worked with advanced technology on any world. Formal qualifications don't matter when it could be the end of everything.

"Help us. Before it is too late."

Those who come will have the run of the complex and full access to the Ingress, as well as whatever tools are available and as much coffee as they can drink. People are encouraged to work in groups and share ideas, and a small number of young and nervous technical assistants will be on hand.

the land below

As Thisavrou is denied light and warmth, the weather becomes brisk and descends into bitter cold. Chioni is evacuated due to the effects on the already-harsh weather cycles there, although a skeleton crew of scientists remain behind. On Kauto, the arboreal Region Three and pastoral Region Two suffer the most from the temperatures and the snow that eventually begins to fall. Many crops are frozen over, and refugee citizens are driven from their homes to the Regions One and Five, where stored energy will keep dwellings warm. Save for those who choose to leave the underwater facilities, Region Four remains largely unchanged, but there are unverified accounts of strange aquatic animal behavior near the surface.

Overcrowding, limited supplies and a pervasive fear presents the opportunity for both heroism and foul deeds. Many come together to share resources, supplies and fellowship in what could be the end of worlds, while others take what they can from the unwilling or exploit the desperate. Sentient evacuees are followed by fauna from Region Three and unsettled lands beyond, in search of warmth or food or merely confused by the change in habitat. Some are unthreatening herbivores, while tanglesnakes and clownbees are more troublesome. Others are poisonous hunters, while still others are small, but dangerous when faced as a pack.

Just when all seems lost, light returns to the sky. The Ingress begins to function once more.

the coming days

As the temperatures rise, many demand answers, but most turn to the rebuilding of their lives first. Damage has been done that isn't so easily fixed, and even in the least-affected areas, remnants of the crisis show in the lack of fresh food, in the increased signs of criminal activity. Those who can help others through their own efforts of by organizing assistance are needed, but those with impure intentions are more likely to go unnoticed.

Eavesdropping on the streets may reveal a desire for vengeance. "Those intruders from last week. They're responsible for this, aren't they? What's being done?" But don't listen too closely, or a suspicious eye may be turned on you. "Aren't you one of the refugees from the Midway Hub? You should return to where you came from! All the trouble began when your people showed up!"

Life goes on. But life does not go on unchanged.

[quick ooc note: the Region 4 search & retrieval mission/RNG fight will be posted in a separate log.]

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"Me too," she agrees, voice soft. She watches the pair go, reminded of bullies of her past, always trying to tear down the smart girl, the girl in glasses, the slightly overweight girl. And the memories mean she can't resist sticking her tongue out at their retreating forms. Releasing a sigh, she squeezes his arm slightly before letting go, since it isn't her intent to hold him back, but to just be a presence at his side.

"I wish I could say it will get better, but some of our group don't make it easy, do they? I'm not saying I like sitting around waiting for the techs to figure out how to get us home, but messing with the Ingress so we have no light or heat sure doesn't help."

"No, it doesn't. And even if some of our guys fix it? There's not gonna be much improvement in their perceptions outside of 'they didn't make it worse'."

To be honest, he didn't think that most people here were like the Savrii's leadership. Not like the people that killed off the scientists working on the Ingress. They were just reactionary.

"Sorry, didn't mean to get you caught up in that." He genuinely didn't. But it was actually lucky that she happened along. He might be in worse trouble- he really didn't want to go get stuck in their mediation process. It reeked of something more sinister than just a vague psychiatric program. And no matter what they said, any sort of correctional program was a punishment.

"You don't have to apologize," she replies, giving him a searching look, like it might tell her why he thought he should. "It's not like you called me to come over here and get in a fight. I saw a friend in need, so I wanted to help. That's what friends do, right?" There's a slight lilt of hopefulness at the end of her question. Her friendly nature means she claims people as friends pretty quickly, but the same maybe isn't true for the other party.

"Well... I probably would have tried harder not to get in a fight if-" If someone wasn't watching? Well, he'd been trying to hide his anger as best he could.

"But yeah, that's what friends do."

It really was nice to know that he wasn't in this alone. He'd felt pretty stranded for a long time, and actually having friends (even two years after showing up on the Moira technically) felt like a novelty. His friends respected him in a way that soldiers didn't back home.

They were done with his anger and hurt.

He rested his hand on her shoulder. "Come on, let's go find something warm to drink since I closed up shop for today."

"I bet you would have given them black eyes," she says, in that supportive, but slightly joking way that suggests she really wouldn't prefer he beat people up. But if they had hit first... well, then it would have been okay.

At the suggestion, her face lights up and she nods. "Sure! What did you have in mind? I know a lot of places aren't open right now."

"There's a cafe I like to go to. It's not that far from where I live. Usually a short trip, anyway. They have a section of outdoor tables where I can sit with my dogs."

Surprisingly quaint for a self-proclaimed military man.

"It was still open last time I checked. Maybe because there was still enough energy for hot water. And the temperature isn't as low as it was." Still, things weren't perfect. He considered himself lucky that it's a place that would still serve Ingress refugees.

"The cold doesn't bother me anyway," Mei says with a slight shrug in her parka. It's just the nature of the job that she'll be enduring harsh temperatures out in the field. She's used to them by now. But for others, any reprieve from the extreme cold is probably welcome.

"How are they dealing with this? I know dogs go crazy during a solar eclipse because the light disappears so fast. Have they gotten used to the darkness?"

"They've already seen so much they didn't care." He gestured around them. "Some wild animal wandered up to them and laid down with them, though. Guess they're taking it pretty hard when the native wildlife starts cavorting with alien dogs."

He'd been keeping a close eye on his huskies to make sure there wasn't a case of dingos.

"Did you live on one of the poles back on Earth?"

"Oh, that's strange!" Though what isn't strange about this situation they've all found themselves stuck in? Wildlife coming in is just one more thing to add to the list.

His question is asked so simply and out of the blue that Mei finds her steps faltering a moment. Not enough to cause her to trip, but it's definitely noticeable. The color drains from her face and her voice is weak as she says, "I was stationed in Antarctica. For awhile." Breathe, Mei. Of course it makes sense that he'd wonder this. She brought it up by saying she didn't mind the cold. But talking about what happened in Antarctica is something she doesn't do. She can't. Because Mei always tries to remain positive and move forward instead of remembering the horrible situation she awoke to. The only person she's discussed this at length with is 76 -- Jack, as he said she could call him -- because he felt guilty over her team being left there.

Her mouth is dry as she tries to think up something else she could say. A change in topic to keep him from asking follow up questions. But nothing is coming. Her mind has gone blank, with only the work malfunction flashing across.

Miller genuinely didn't understand how he made her upset, but he understood that he did make her upset. So he held his hand over her shoulder in that way of someone who's not sure how to comfort, even though he has comforted people. Many times.

He's just not sure what he said wrong.

"Doesn't sound like Antarctica was the best time for you." Maybe he'd react that way if he had to start talking about the Carribean. "It's alright, I won't bring it up again if you don't want me to." Since, so far, she's been ironclad in about everything.

"N-No, I--" Mei hesitates, looks over, and sees him doing this weird hover hand thing. She stops walking and briefly shuts her eyes, swallowing the lump in her throat.

"You didn't say anything wrong. I can understand why you'd ask." She blows out a breath and glances up at him, feeling pretty vulnerable at the moment. "Sorry. I'm not usually like this." Which is probably why he was at a loss on what to do with his hand.

"Sorry." Fun fact about Mei: she over apologizes for everything. She apologizes for apologizing too much. And there is a part of her that right now, wants to sit down with him in this cafe they're heading towards and tell him everything. Tell him about her team's dwindling supplies and the damaged signal tower. How they knew Overwatch would come for them so they all went into cryosleep to await that day. How no one ever came and Mei woke up alone, to see MALFUNCTION flashing across every other cryo tube and the heart rate monitor reading zero. How she was so alone. Feeling her eyes start to sting, she quickly turns away and sniffs.

"So, how do you like your coffee?" she asks, voice still wobbly.

Finally that arm settled by going around her shoulders and he started urging her forward. He was going to keep walking. There was no reason for them to try and order when one of them was openly hurting; he did too, on occasion. He couldn't fault her for her own brand of it when he was so susceptible.

It was better to be back on this end of things, anyway.

"It's fine. Sometimes things remind you. It happens to me all the time." Even now with the prosthetics, he still has phantom limb syndrome. The reminders of what's lost more literal. But sometimes, for him, it's the smell of smoke. Not incense or tobacco, but the smoke that comes with fire so hot it could melt metal.

So he just kept her on the sidewalk and kept walking with her. "What happened?" Better just to ask outright, he figured, rather than make her feel self-conscious for getting sad in front of him.

Her lips part to ask if they aren't going inside, but it seems like he wants to help her; support her however he can, and the thought of being stared at right now in the cafe doesn't really appeal. So she keeps walking, her hand coming up to cover his where it rests against her.

"I don't like to remember it. But I can't help it sometimes." When she'd been infected on the asteroid and it gave her that overwhelming sense of being alone, she had thought of Antarctica. That place was different that her treks to the Himalayas or Alaska. She had chosen to work alone in those locations.

"When I worked for Overwatch, they sent a team of us to Ecopoint: Antarctica," she begins. Her voice is far from steady, but she'll get it out into the air between them. "Six of us. We were studying the climate there. But this really bad polar storm came in, and damaged our comm tower. It passed, we survived and got back to work. We were just out of contact with the outside world. We figured it was fine, because Overwatch would send supplies, or agents to retrieve us." She sniffles and tries to steady herself for the next bit. "But they didn't show up and we were running out of supplies. So we cryogenically froze ourselves to await rescue. It's a standard procedure. Two of the team were actually cyronics specialists. We went into cryo sleep... and then I woke up." Mei's told him once before that she'd been asleep for nearly nine years, but not the reason why. "There was barely any generator power left, but the computers were still running and I saw how long I'd been asleep. And I couldn't understand why. Then I looked at my team in their tubes. They-- they were all dead. Their tubes malfunctioned. It might have been the generator... I don't know. It would mean the tubes lost power one by one until mine was the only one left. I was alone. And Overwatch hadn't come. They'd been disbanded, and everyone forgot about us."

Tears spill from her eyes, but are stopped short at the lower frames of her glasses. She hates thinking about it; she hates remembering. And then she feels so guilty for not wanting to remember because her team deserves to be remembered. Her survivor's guilt is strong, made even worse by the fact that the generator didn't share power between tubes. It shut them down to provide power for a few, and then for just her. In a way, it's like she stole their lives from them to keep her own going.

She takes off her glasses to wipe at her face with the back of her gloved hand, mumbling out several sorrys in a row.

Waiting has always been the hardest part. But he never considered something before. Kaz had spent ten years waiting for the person that he cared about, dutifully preparing for Snake's return so that he could give him the world. But what would it have been like if no one had waited for him at all? What if he'd just been forgotten, found only by luck?

Mei hadn't had anyone waiting for her. At least, that's what he gathered from this part of the story. No one that didn't throw their back into it, anyway. And then she had to wake up and face the loss of the people that she'd come to rely on, and had seen every day in isolation for so long.

So he said the hardest thing a person who also had his own fair share of survivor's guilt had to say.

"It's not your fault that you lost people." A thing that he wished that someone other than Code Talker had told him. "And you're not abandoning them. You would never have if given the choice." Which was projecting, he knew, but it was something that he still felt every day. "Also it's okay... I've cried over losing people, too."

He didn't even know if he did a better job of hiding it. He knew at least one recording of the platform contagion had his voice shaking and stuttering, a pause and an attempt to gather himself. "I'm not going to judge. I'm going to keep you walking, though." Because sitting and thinking was always painful, and Kaz survived by moving damningly forward when things hurt.

He speaks like someone who knows what it's like, or otherwise can easily guess the thoughts in her head and the pain in her heart. Crying is one of those things where she knows it's okay to do, yet still get embarrassed over it. She'd rather put on a brave face than be lain bare, but it is what it is. Mei nods, still wiping at her face as new tears form.

"That's what everybody always says, but it feels different when it's coming from you." Maybe because he's not Jack or Winston; not in Overwatch, so not someone who has tried to take the blame while comforting her. He's a neutral party.

"I didn't mean to--" she begins, before stopping and rethinking her sentence. "When you asked about the poles, it brought up those memories. I think it'll hurt forever. But I hope someday I can talk about it without crying, or trying to change the subject."

"I know a lot about it." And then he touched his forehead to push some stray hair back, a guilty look crossing his face. "I don't listen to my own advice, either.

"That's why I keep saying I'm not all that nice a guy. I screwed up, and I lost a lot of people. I tried to track down the people behind it, but nothing I did to them brought them back. Nor did I feel better, so I don't think it stops hurting, no."

He didn't even know how to make it hurt less. He was just unwilling to die, too.

"I won't tell anyone you cried. I promise. I don't think you're any less for it, either." Even if he always felt weaker when he did.

Mei looks up at him as he speaks, a crease of worry appearing between her eyes. She replaces her glasses, though the bottom of the lenses are now wet, but it frees up her hand to wrap around his back at his waist.

"I suppose it's human nature to beat ourselves up over the things we could have done differently. And I think if you didn't care, and if you didn't hurt, then you'd really be not a nice guy. But you do, so you are. At least to me." So for what that's worth, coming from her.

Smiling weakly, she adds, "Thank you," in a soft murmur.

"Well... You don't know to the extent I'd look out for people. But thank you, that's very nice of you to say."

Obviously whatever Kaz had in his head about himself was pretty set. He'd made mistakes and decided to make more mistakes to undo the old ones. He knew it.

"Maybe we can go somewhere else to talk. Somewhere away from people." So her eyes would have time to dry and lose their redness.

"I guess that's true," she murmurs, though she wants to believe he's not as bad as he's making himself out to be. It's natural to want to save people however you can. She thinks she'd do it too, though she's thinking more along the lines of making personal sacrifices to do it. Hopefully he's never cut a bloody path through a field of helpless puppies to reach his people.

"That's a good idea. Especially since there might be more people out here like the ones you were fighting with." There's a pause as she thinks where they could go, before she shyly suggests, "I have a treehouse in Region 3, if that's not too far. It's not too high up, either. Just a set of stairs to climb, not any ladders. But if you'd rather not, I'm open to suggestions."

Kaz had his limits. Cutting through a field of helpless puppies? Definitely not something he'd do. Cutting through a field of soldiers with guns? ...Well, he'd prefer not to. But if needs must, needs must. They chose to take up the guns. They knew the risks. And nonlethal was his preference for collateral but lethal was definitely preferable for those that broke him.

Problem was in Mei's case, it was an accident. A casualty of war. There was no enemy outside of the political and natural climate. Outside of the omnics that never specifically attacked her.

She'd never get that kind of release.

"It's fine. I'll go with you. Just gotta get back by tonight. Last month I had a bad injury and I don't want Ahab to worry something else happened to me."

Things of that nature were acceptable to Mei. She may seem like all innocence and light, but she has a gun of her own, though it does shoot icicles, not bullets. But as he knows, there is no target to take out her revenge on. Not really. She's faced Jack and forgiven him for what happened, because he had problems of his own and was just trying to stay alive. She couldn't blame him for what happened.

For a moment, she looks excited to show off her place to someone, but her face falls soon enough. "You got hurt? What happened?" She feels awful for not having known! This means she'll have to call him more often, or stop by the diner, or ask Nyx about him. Something so that she'll stay in the loop.

"It's fine. I was mugged and I made a bad choice. Tried to chase the guy down. Turned out he had a friend. Don't worry, I didn't tell anyone at the time for a reason."

He'd been worried that someone would find out and him to mediation for fighting, even if he got the worst of it. He'd grown afraid of this system, even if it was his own paranoia more than anything else.

"But sure. Let's go to your place. All the lines are running again so it shouldn't be a big deal." Or so he assumed.

Mei's frown stays fixed in place as she imagines what happened. Her mind doesn't immediately go to the Savrii's "mediation," and so she can't understand why he wouldn't tell anybody. Had he been embarrassed?

"I hope you had someone to turn to who took care of you," she says with worry. Even though the event is long over, she doesn't like the idea of one of her friends being hurt.

The EN-Line had been how she reached the Ingress Complex each day to try and work on this problem, so she nodded her confirmation to him and turned towards the nearest stop to get them picked up for Region 3.

"It was getting frustrating to always be threatened with evacuation on Chioni. Now with this happening, they want us to evacuate here too! I can certainly withstand a little cold in my treehouse."

He nodded as they waited for the EN-Line. "I see where the Savrii are coming from. It's pretty terrifying, especially if you've been used to consistent weather for your whole life. I just... I guess I still hate being blamed for something I didn't do, when I just want to wait it out."

He closed his eyes and then looked down, fussing with the gloves that hide mismatched hands (or perfectly matched, in a way, since the semi-transparent one was a mirror shape copy of the other). "Yeah, I had someone look out for me. I wouldn't pull out any lethal weapons and they happened to have some and I was in an unfortunate cornered position. Afterwards I called for help and Ahab came and got me.

"You know what they said? That I didn't belong here anyway. As if I didn't know that."

But then he sighed and straightened his collar. "Looking forward to the treehouse, though. I miss forests sometimes. Spent more time there than the city."

"They were jerks." As if that needed confirmed. "I wonder how they would like it if they were suddenly transported light years away without having a clear way back. Something tells me they wouldn't be so tough then."

The EN-Line pulls up and Mei knows better than to continue this sort of conversation where there will be natives sitting next to them. She nods and offers him a bright smile as the doors open and several people disembark first.

"Yeah, I'm used to the wilderness myself. It can be really peaceful. Not always, but when it is, it's perfect."

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