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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Her name, huh? Snake wouldn't have thought that a droid would have a gender one way or another, but he figures that's something that's decided by its owner.

Seeing how the droid seems to be looking at him in some way (how good is its AI? how much can it understand?), he nods to it (or her, rather) and then glances back to Rey.

"Astromech?"

Once BB-9's presence is acknowledged, she rolls back behind Rey, towards the cave's entrance, and beeps softly again. The scavenger nods. "She's going to keep watch, and let us know when the storm lets up." Rey turns her attention back to Snake. "Yeah. They're basically automated mechanics for starships. They can also plot navigation courses and hyperspace jumps."

For all that Snake might be initially wary of any sort of AI system, he has to admit that BB-9 here sounds pretty useful. A mechanic, GPS, and capable of hyperspace jumps on top of it all? He could see why Rey had bothered to bring the droid along for what they'd thought would be a run-of-the-mill assignment.

"Can she make sense of what direction we should be heading, here?" He turns his head to watch the droid as he speaks. "I know we're following some sort of energy signal."

If that's the case, it seems that he's, purely by chance, run into someone worth sticking around for the rest of this journey.

Honestly, it hadn't been an easy decision for Rey to bring the droid with her. She usually preferred to leave her at the shop so she could watch over ongoing projects. But something had told her that it would be useful to bring BB-9 with her. Maybe it was the Force, or just her gut. Either way, she's glad she listened.

"She has an electromagnetic transceiver. I tweaked it when we were still on the Moira to track the Ingress' energy signature." Probably one of the most useful things she'd ever done. "Unfortunately, the interference from the storm is... interfering with the signal. But we've been going in pretty much the right direction so far."

The right direction. Well, that's some kind of good news, though Snake can't imagine that the end of this journey will lead to anything positive for them. It's all they have to go on, though, at least up until the point where they run out of food and starve to death on this hunk of rock.

Better not to get too doom and gloom, so he keeps those thoughts to himself.

"Sounds like you're pretty handy with machines, then," he says after a pause as he leans back onto his hands. That's way outside of his wheelhouse, but he's befriended a few tech-savvy people over the years. He can appreciate how smart they are, even if he can't wrap his head around the sort of work that they do. "What's your name?"

Rey can't help but give a self-satisfied smirk. She doesn't consider herself a proud person (she is), but her natural ability with machines is never something she minces words on. The scavenger tilts her head back, almost preening. "Handy is one way to put it." So what if starships are more her area than droids? She'd still done the base programming for BB-9. That has to count for something. Having help with the personality subprograms didn't lessen her accomplishment.

"I'm Rey." No last name offered, or known. Just the single name she's always gone by.

It's difficult to tell if she's trying to be modest or not, but Snake figures that either way she's got to know a lot more about this sort of stuff than he would. It's something to keep in mind for the future, assuming that they even have one. Things aren't looking so great for them right now.

"I'm Snake," he says with a nod. He's got another name, but it's not one that he shares easily. "I know you've been around for a while." Stuck in this mess, same as him.

Rey stills for a moment, inspecting him. She knows she's seen him as well, knows he's been in this dimension longer than her. "A while, yeah." Well over two years, including the one they lost on that fracking planet. "I worked on the Ingress in the Moira." She'd thought about joining the crew of the one on Thisavrou, but had decided that she'd had enough of world-travelling for a while. Besides, she'd never really trusted the Savrii, and it seems as if her suspicion had been well-founded.

One of the Ingress crew, right. Snake mainly only knows Tony Stark, and even then they're more acquaintances than anything else. Still, it explains why Rey has stuck out in his mind in some way, why there had been a mental tab marking her as useful.

"How much did you learn about it then?" he asks as he spreads out his legs, allowing himself to take a load off now that they don't seem to be facing any immediate threats. The storm is still raging out there, but they're well protected in here. "Seems like even now, we still barely understand how it all works."

August Event Log: Part I

hitting the road

storm front

wild life

old familiar places

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