August Event Log: Part I

[savmods]

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.

Comments

[otiosity]

[Hawke nods, this seems like a good plan to her. She gestures at him, making a gesture with her hands up to her face and circled around her eyes like goggles, and then to herself, thumbs intertwined and palms down to form a bird, and then out and around the room and a shrug.

Okay, Hawke is probably never gonna be charades champ but the message is clear "We met here, lived here, and it's weird to be back".]

[arcreact]

You just swore at me for all I know, but I'll take it.

[ He starts cutting an ambling path to the cluster of work tables and benches where the engineers spent so much of their time - and not just the engineers. He and Hawke spent countless hours in here, her pretending to look busy and him pretending to look innocent if anyone ever asked about it. It's a bit like returning to an old home, even if it's one you weren't particularly fond of at the time. ]

[otiosity]

[Hawke chases after him, following behind on his heels like a dog. She doesn't trust this place. And if something decides to attack her, she can't even scream to alert people. In stories like this, people tend to get picked off one by one and she's not keen to be a player.

Being here is like coming home. She never really fit in the engine room. It had been full of people who knew things she didn't and talked about things she could barely understand. But she'd liked it anyway. The countless hours spent shooting the shit with Tony and insisting to everyone that she was doing important work despite mostly just taking long naps. Despite being a shitty situation, they'd made it work and laughed more than she could have thought was possible.

It's funny how she still feels comfortable here despite there being no life in the room anymore. It's nothing but debris and dust that makes her nose itch and sneeze soundlessly. Not much to laugh at even if they tried. She watches Tony carefully trying to figure him out.]

[arcreact]

[ He stops when he reaches the workbench he might have called his once - he technically had no official claim to any piece of the engine room, but his shit was always spilled across it and people eventually learned better than to mess with anything Tony considered "his" (not to mention all the time Hawke spent draped across it) - so really, it was Tony Stark's work bench.

It tipped sometime during the crash, no surprise, and he bends down to flip it back upright - thought it lilts at an odd angle with the now-uneven floor. There are scorch marks where most of the welding took place, and a cluster of coffee rings on one end, and a gouge in the corner from a bout of what probably qualified as "rough housing."

Yup. Same old shitty workbench. ]

Y'know, this thing was always shitty. It was never even, no matter how much crap you shoved under the right leg.

[ He could probably fit the damn thing in his pacdisc. But he won't. ]

[otiosity]

[Hawke reaches out to touch the work bench. She wouldn't have thought she had any attachment to it. It was Tony's after all. She was just an interloper there to distract him and sometimes wrestle with (which helped explain the gauge on one side). And yet, she'd spent so much time here, even if it had just been watching Tony work, asking him nonsensical questions into the night before she'd fall asleep with her head on her arms. Then she'd wake up the next day with a mysterious blanket over her shoulders and they'd start the whole thing over again.

This had been his place. It had been their place. Without it, they'd be strangers.

She nods at his seemingly idle comment before dropping on the bench to look up at him with her arms crossed. It's a LOOK. A look that clearly says she can sense what he's feeling and there's a part of her that feels attached to this place too.]

[arcreact]

[ Tony looks away when he realizes he's being seen through. It's not uncomfortable, necessarily, because it's Hawke. But this isn't exactly a topic he wants to face head-on, either. The silence stretches out for a while, Tony unwilling to break it and Hawke unable to.

Everything here seems tainted by the circumstances of how they ended. Everything seems... heavier.

At some length, he turns his attention to the cold, towering engines. ]

Worst case scenario, there's enough here to salvage into... something useable.

[ Not the Moira. Never the Moira again, but something cobbled together from her corpse, maybe. A life boat salvaged from a once-grand, sunken vessel. ]