Entry tags:

August Event Log: Part I

Who: Everyone
When: August 9 and onward
Where: An unexpected destination
What: The newcomers go on a trip and end up far from where they expected
Warnings: Potential violence. Please label your content!

NOTE: PLEASE READ THIS OOC POST FIRST.

When the time comes for the travelers to go on the off-world trip that will help restore Thisavrou, they are not alone. Others who have settled on the planets longer and come to call them home are also prepared to travel; through the Ingress and do their part. Yet when the newcomers step through, whether they stepped through the Ingress seconds or hours apart, they will find that they have arrived at the same time, and only newcomers are in sight.

What awaits them is not a land of plenty. The land is barren, and dark storms in the sky resemble those held at bay by the Ingress complex—but much, much closer. Those who traveled on the Moira may recognize the landscape; though they have come through at a different point from the crash, they are on the Midway Hub. And there is no portal back. They are trapped.

hitting the road

Though some have been here before, the Midway Hub is not as they remember it. The storms fill the sky, leaving it dark and ominous even when they are not sweeping across the landscape—but they have clearly done so in recent times, and often. While never a lush land, large patches of ground an acre or more wide looking nothing more than utterly dead; the thistle that naturally grows is brittle, black and unable to be consumed even with the usual preparations to make it edible, and here and there animal corpses are found twisted into unnatural poses, but seemingly uninjured. These places are particularly concentrated near the broken Ingresses litter the landscape. While Midway Hub as a whole may seem naturally arid, these dead spots leave no hope that anything can possibly live there again.

The travelers have two options: stay where they are, or move on. While it might seem that they've been tricked into coming here and been left abandoned, those with the technological ability to do so may detect a sign of hope: a familiar energy source, far in the distance. Although none of the Ingresses they pass will ever work again, the faint energy shows that one still-functioning Ingress lies far in the distance, days away.

Although technological scanning or impressive memory of the landscape indicates that they are not separated from their destination by one of the gates that divide the land, they are also far from the shelter of the facility at the center of the Hub. Any attempt to travel in a direction other than that of the energy signal will result in a strange disorientation after several hours, bringing individuals back to their original path as though they've gone in circles. Meanwhile, though travelers will feel the need to slake their hunger and thirst through any natural water sources they discover, wildlife they can hunt for food and any supplies they have on them, if they don't find sustenance, they'll find that they will never pass out or reach the point of starvation. Instead, they'll be left alive and awake but feeling utterly hollow.

storm front

At regular intervals, the energy storms above descend onto the land, bringing not rain but violent clashes of negative energy and thunder so loud that nothing can be heard above it. The passing of the storms leaves some strange effects. The ground is warped and rotted by their touch, even solid stone degrading to a spongy surface. The air is tepid and oddly charged. Prolonged contact with air or ground will not supply energy, however — it drains it from organic and synthetic life alike.

Those who remember their last trip to the Hub, or simply explore in the right direction, may come across the cave complexes with their glowing surfaces and streams. The light is dimmer now, a sickly green, but drinking from the streams will still restore the energy lost, for a time. This time, however, the lethargy that inevitably follows is much more severe, and the drinkers are left with a raw, empty feeling leeching in from the wasteland around.

Those who are exposed to the storms, either by finding themselves in very close proximity or even closely observing them for too long as they approach, may lose their sight, or hearing, even much of the ability to feel touch — whatever sense they used in observation. What lingers in its place is a numbness. A hunger. And as time passes, the time between storms decreases; what seemed like hours between the storms becomes scarcely one, and their intensity grows.

wild life

Sentient beings are not the only ones affected by the storms; these creatures, attracted to sound and able to track by scent, and these panthers, which once looked normal but have been twisted by the storms into more monstrous forms, are numerous enough that travelers must be constantly alert for their presence. Though natural predators, the threat the creatures represent is not itself natural. They are also more aggressive. Some strange instinct drives them, not a need for food. While the panthers themselves can be caught and their meat cooked, it has little taste, offering nutrition but not satisfaction.

old familiar places

Although it's difficult to track the passage of time without day-night cycles, after what seems like more than a week of the travelers' unexpected trip, the storms abruptly come rushing in at the group of travelers, as if they're herding the group to move faster toward their destination and the Ingress energy that awaits them. The true nature of that destination becomes clear when debris appears on the horizon; the energy comes from the wreckage of the Moira, the interstellar ship that crashed here months ago.

Despite the trauma of impact, large sections of the ship remain surprisingly intact, though few of them are properly vertically oriented. If travelers are able to make their way inside the damaged sections of the ship, they'll find familiar territory, if they are one of those who traveled on the Moira, as well as shelter—something that's increasingly necessary as the storms seem to center over the ship, leaving little hope for survival outside. Useful items may be scavenged from the ship if they are willing to explore, but no personal items of any kind remain.

Strangely, the deeper travelers go into the crashed ship, the less familiar their surroundings will seem, regardless of their orientation. The inward-leading paths into the ship become generic metal, and as with the travel on the surface of the planet, they may find themselves back where they started. And no matter how far they go or how hard they try, they will find themselves unable to make it to the Ingress chamber itself...for now.

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She continues her approach without hesitation or wavering. "I've snapped people's necks for less," she says. Whether she's referring to someone sneaking up on her, or what Adrien's doing now, is unclear.

Maybe she means both.

Her blank faceplate betrays no emotion, of course, but Tex is tired. By now, it's become clear their only way out of this situation is to hope that the Ingress in the husk of what was once the Moira still works. She's been expending most of her emotional energy guarding and feeding everyone else, and it's kind of a welcome distraction, this tantrum Adrien is throwing. At least it's something different from what's been going on.

She comes closer, close enough that if she took another half-step, Adrien's gun would be nuzzled right up against her armor.

"I want to know when and whether you've been sleeping, Adrien," she says.

Adrien ran through a mental checklist of possible options as Tex continued to press into his space. His finger was on the trigger as he vacillated between pulling a "kill" shot off at her armor (he didn't expect the Glock would make much of a dent) as a warning, or putting the shot in the ground in front of her. However, as she kept coming, he realized an attack at her would be useless. So, just before she would come close enough to have reach to grab the Glock from him, he moved.

Dancing away from where she could reach him, he spun the Glock around and drove the muzzle up under his own chin. He had the angle right, he knew how to angle it the safety was off and he had pressure on the trigger.

"Back. Off." He said in a very calm and deliberate tone. He's seen how death works or doesn't work, however you'd like to term it, enough to know it was a temporary state.

It was a rather extreme solution, but he was pretty much done with being pushed around. It was a small, ultimately useless expression of independence, but he wasn't exactly in the most rational state of mind at the moment.

Might want to afford him some space.

Oh, Adrien. She doesn't know for sure what's causing him to act this way, but she has plenty of theories. But it doesn't matter—in any case, she angles her head to one side slightly, shows her palms, and steps back a pace.

No need to escalate the situation.

She doesn't intend to try to wrest the gun from him. Trying would be foolish, especially with the way he's behaving. The prospect of being able to convince him to rest dims with his response, though. But she doesn't move, just waits.

It was a good call on Tex's part.

As she raised her hands, showed her palms and took that requested step back, Adrien slowly moved his finger off the trigger and lay it along the guard. One breath, then the next and another after that and she didn't move towards him or try to talk to him, tell him to lower the gun or anything like that, he eventually lowered the weapon from where it was digging into his jaw.

The safety remained off and his finger could quickly move from the guard to the trigger if she tried to come close. But in acknowledgement of her giving him space his next words were an answer to her question.

"I don't sleep much when things aren't an end to end shitshow. Which is to say, I can't recall more than snatches here and there since we got booted back here. I must be out of practice, if I can't function better than this."

"Right."

She doesn't move then, other than to slowly lower her hands to her sides. This is a very touch-and-go situation, and just because he's no longer actively threatening violence doesn't mean it's off his mind. Her voice, when she speaks, is calm. She sounds like they're speaking of ordinary, day-to-day troubles, rather than him possibly hallucinating from lack of sleep.

"I was going to tell you that I have a tent, if you don't have a place to sleep properly. Ryuuzaki and I each brought one. People have been taking shifts in them."

She's not going to try to force him to join her—whether he takes her up on it is his own affair—but considering he's the sort of person who should be able to take the lead in this kind of situation, she thinks it's important that he try.

Adrien lifted his left hand and touched the top of his battered old messenger bag.

"I have my pacdiscs," he explained, suggesting that he still had the survival gear from their first trip through this nightmare. It might also suggest he had medical supplies, if at any point that became useful information.

For now ... probably not so much.

"But I ... appreciate the thought," he managed to grind out, giving her a quick look and then turning towards where the rag tag group was continuing to slowly move along.

If he could read minds, he would have been utterly horrified at the idea of taking any sort of lead. Especially not here, with the evidence of his last spectacular fuck up in regard.

Good thing he couldn't read minds.

Instead, he set the safety on his Glock and looked over at Courser. The bahari slowly levered himself to his feet and ambled up beside his companion, who began to walk in the same general direction that everybody else shambled in.

Tex lets him move on a bit before she draws up closer, falling into step beside him, leaving a bit of distance to avoid looking like she intends to lunge at him. As much as she thinks he should give in, she respects his autonomy as a thinking person too much to force him.

"If you needed a dose of tranqs out of there, then, I would hope you'd take it," she says. "Nobody benefits from anyone here pushing too hard, especially considering the circumstances."

She doesn't make too fine a point of it, obviously, but Adrien seems to have reached that point. It also makes her out to be a hypocrite, considering the fact that all her hunting kills are prepared into food for someone else, but that's not at all salient to the situation.

"Everybody has been pushing too hard," Adrien remarked. He wasn't even going to dignify the suggestion that he'd take tranquilizers. Not in this situation.

And despite the way she wasn't making any moves towards him, Adrien was keeping himself between her and his gun. That would have to be pried out of his cold, dead hand before he gave it up.

"I'm talking about you," she replies. The symptoms he's showing of being close to a mental break are unlike anything she's noting in anyone else. Even with the unusual circumstances. "And yes, how you feel matters, so don't tell me to ignore it."

Being close? He may be at least one step over that mental break line at the moment.

Hunching his shoulders, Adrien had his head turned downwards, grinding his teeth as he walked. When he spoke it was through clenched teeth.

"I won't endanger anyone else." Pause. "As long as they don't startle me."

Or ... breath in his direction.

"Someone's going to startle you," she says. "Do you understand what I'm saying? You're in a state where you're a danger to others without wanting or meaning to be. You're pushing too damn hard and you're breaking in pieces. Now, if you take some tranqs and get a good night's sleep I can guarantee your safety. I will stand guard right outside and keep everyone away. Here's the thing, though. I can also guarantee if you keep walking around like this, something bad is going to happen."

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August Event Log: Part I

hitting the road

storm front

wild life

old familiar places

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cw: mentions of suicidal intentions

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