thisavrou_log | A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

Who: Anyone and Everyone
When: December 19 onwards
Where: Avagi... and beyond?
What: Your past, someone's present, and potential futures.
Warnings: Body horror and an associated image in the second part. Otherwise, label your content.

While the Ingress may have been destroyed, the energy powering it remains alive and well. The residents of Avagi know this intimately: from their own arrivals, from the portals that have appeared, and the short-lived changes (as well as longer-lived possessions) that have cluttered the station over the last few months. Recently, whatever force is manipulating this has even gone so far as to revive the dead—demonstrating, perhaps, an unwillingness to relinquish those it has brought to this place.

To say this entity is seasonal would probably be a mistake. In the heart of Avagi's storms, there are no stars to mark the seasons, much less connect them to a certain planet's holidays—or the literature thereon. Still, from luck or from intention, the current fluctuations comes with a certain theme...

Past

It starts at the turn of the station clock's midnight. Flickers at the edge of one's vision. Indistinct whispers, ghosting through walls and down corridors. Those who are sleeping will be untroubled, but the wakeful and wary can watch the light build: from flickers to pulses, from pulses to pools. Over several hours, silver mist fills rooms and corridors, varying from a thin veil to dense, obscuring fog. If you step into the mist, you'll feel a sense of displacement; of sound and color, energy and a shift of life. Ingress travel.

Except... not quite.

Shortly after entering the mist, you'll find yourself free of disorientation and apparently free of physical form, unable to interact with your surroundings. As a quasi-ghost, you've been transported to somewhere and somewhen—a location from the past, back on a world of someone’s origin or from any place you've been since first arriving through the Ingress. While these experiences can vary wildly, some things remain consistent:

The past matters: These visits to the past are not repeats of idle afternoons—each has emotional significance to someone currently on Avagi.
The past cannot be changed: As real as any given scenario seems, you're fundamentally incapable of altering it. The past event will play out as it did in real life and dissipate when it reaches an ending.
Trying has consequences: Attempting too hard to interfere increases the emotional significance, and will consequently draw onlookers further into the scene. You may find yourself anchored to any participant in the scene: first physically (experiencing the scene through their eyes) and then emotionally (experiencing their emotions and thoughts). If drawn in too deeply, you may lose track of your own nature during the experience, drowning in the sense of being someone else..
You are not alone: While immersed in a scene, you'll see nothing but the history playing out. However, at the its conclusion, the fog will once again displace the world around. As it melts away, you'll find themselves back in Avagi's halls—and face to face with whoever else was also viewing that piece of the past.

Present

Whether through one memory or several, eventually, the fog disperses. Only a faint mist remains, gathered in corners of the station's halls. It's simple enough to avoid, and nothing obstructs efforts to return to your rooms, your friends, or any other destination. Nothing, that is, except finding them.

The layout of the halls has shifted. The clutter you so painstakingly cleared is back. The GPS on your ACE mistakenly reports that you are floating off in space far outside the station, and any efforts to locate or call your companions results in glitchy static. Something is interfering with your calls—more effectively than the distance between worlds.

Inference and intuition are all you have to put together the pieces. The layout has changed, but the construction stayed the same. You're still on the former Ingress station. But not the same area that you called home. This is a different section of Avagi.

An inhabited one.

Dank, warm air pulses in and out of the vents in odd rhythms. Water damage stains the walls, and some seep dark liquid. There's an odd symphony in the distance: four notes, hummed to a pattern that buzzes in the back of your head. It's possible to wait it out. But if you do explore, you might come across your friends. And together, you might find the source.

Further in, a wall of flesh fills the pathways, rising and falling with intermittent, massive draws of air. A fluid wash of features glues it to the bulkheads. Claws and eyes, hands and faces: half-made bodies shifting in and out of recognition with each pulse of breath. And always with the same gold glow beneath the skin. It's a familiar shade, to those who witnessed Thisavrou's destruction.

It's the being who destroyed it.

Those who flee will escape her notice. Those who wait may watch in secret for a time. Mother's focus seems to be elsewhere...or, perhaps, something else is hiding your presence here from her.

Any attack on Mother's flesh shape, or any overt effort to draw her attention, will meet violent, immediate reprisal. You'll experience an immobilizing psychic force before the flesh consumes you. But whether you hide or fight or run, your time on this section of the station will end in the same way: a burst of brilliant, clear light providing transport back home.

Future

You flash back to reality amidst a burst of light—but this time, you recognize your surroundings. You have returned to the Avagi you know, and the silver mist that filled the halls has cleared.

Over the next few days, most of Avagi will settle back into a state of normalcy. The ACEs are working properly, and station residents will have all the time they need to compare notes on their experiences—and, perhaps, on any plans to act on what they've learned.

Avagi is not as empty as it seemed. And one place in particular will remain changed in the wake of the event. The Ingress Memorial, once inactive, has come to life, emitting a swirl of silver light that shifts and flickers, like the light of the portal it once contained. For the next five days, it will offer a vision to anyone approaching it: a single, brief scene from their potential future.

Players have the following options:

Canon future: Your character catches a glimpse of their future if they were to return from Avagi to their own world. This consists of a canon event.
Avagi future: Your character catches a glimpse of their own future on Avagi. This can be a short-term future (i.e. an actual vision of a future scene you plan to play out), or a potential longer-term one in which they stayed on Avagi for months or years.
Storm future: Your character catches a glimpse of themselves as a Mirtos—a desiccated husk and incarnation of the storm's hunger. As seen in Thisavrou's destruction, these creatures are carried by the storms and destroy all they come across.

The visions can observed by any present when the Memorial is approached. And while the past is fixed, the future is always capable of being altered. What will you do regarding yours?

[OOC: Check out the OOC post for more information!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1. The Good

[ The night club is loud, the lights overhead bathing people in a kaleidoscope of lights. She came alone but that hasn't kept her from diving into the press of bodies to dance for no reason except the sheer physical joy of it. She doesn't get to dance on duty, wouldn't do anything to make other others think she was frivolous. This isn't something she wants to share. In the morning, when shore leave ends and everyone reports back she go back to being a soldier, but for now this is all she needs.

She emerges from the dance floor to get a drink, leaning over the counter to order a drink. Except she can hear this noise-

Flick.

Snap.

Flick.

Snap.

The source of it is a few seats down from her. A man, not too bad looking, with a lighter that he keeps flicking off and on. He looks bored out of his mind and he keeps flicking that damn lighter the entire time she's waiting for her drink to arrive until it get so damned annoying she can't help walking over to him and grabbing that lighter out of his hand.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" She asks, the lighter held out of reach. He stares at her a moment before he breaks out his best smile and laughs.

"Well I certainly do now." ]

2. The Bad

[ She has to find shelter. Her shoulder is throbbing in pain, almost certainly dislocated from how fast she had been falling before she had been able to deploy her grappling hook. But that pain is nothing compared to the pounding, raw wound at the base of her neck and the horrible yawning silence in the back of her mind. Eta and Iota are gone. Maine ripped them out and all she can think of are the endless warnings about the dangers of a forced AI ejection.

"Forced ejection carries with it an increased likelihood of neurological damage" was the phrase the Counselor had used.

She can still feel the blood tricking from the port, freezing to her skin as the freezing wind hits her mercilessly. Carolina thinks of her helmet, at the top of the cliff. No comms, no way to call for help. And no one she'd trust to help her. They all turned on each other, on the program. And on her. That hurts worse than everything else, a raw wound that is already beginning to fester.

Shivering, she forces one foot in front of the other. She won't die here. She'll survive and figure out who's to blame. And then she'll kill them. ]

3. The Broken [cw: implied suicide]

[ The room is dark, the man at the table in front of her is illuminated by the screen in front of him playing an old video of a woman.

"Hello, Director."

"Hello Agent Carolina. Would you like to watch this file with me?"

"No."

The man plays it again, desperation in his voice as he insists he can do it this time. He can bring her back. This is what he's become; the person who had once meant the world to her reduced to a broken shell, unable to let go of the past. The man she hunted across the galaxy so she could put an end to him. She warns him that the authorities are coming for him, that if she can find him then others will follow. He doesn't care.

Epsilon rages, his anger a mirror to the fire that had burned in her for so many years. And for the first time in years... she isn't that angry anymore. She pulls off her helmet so she can look The Director in the eyes, tries to summon that righteous hatred as he looks back at her with those same eyes. Except she can't. All she feels for this broken man is pity. She kisses his forehead, not as absolution but because there's nothing she can do to him that's worse than what he's already done to himself. She tells Church to let go and turns to leave him when The Director grabs her arm.

"Agent Carolina? Would you be so kind as to leave me your pistol?"

She sets her weapon on the table.

"Goodbye, sir."

And then she walks away. ]

Edited 2017-12-24 07:43 (UTC)

[ Tex is just a bystander, which she realizes by now. She's seeing these events from the perspective of someone tucked away in the corner, and she has this feeling like she's seeing something she was never meant to see. A feeling like she's intruding. Yet these events do concern her, no matter how private the proceedings were.

Her focus at first is on the video. She's seen Allison's picture before, but she's never seen this video. The woman she sees there is poised, strong of character, and yet gentle in her own way. Tex is briefly fascinated by this, but then Carolina is speaking to him, and Tex's attention is drawn toward their interactions.

Tex had been told about the Director's demise, but being told the raw facts is different from experiencing it like this, from witnessing the words that were spoken and the way Carolina left him behind. When the vision clears and Tex is left facing Carolina in the corridor, she lets her eyes meet Carolina's for a moment before she dips her head slightly, looking away and to the side. How does a person respond to the death of another at his own hand, a death that was facilitated by the one who should love him the most? ]

It was for the best.

[ It hurts, though, somehow. Leonard had been her creator, and he'd been the one to repair her whenever things went wrong with her systems or her robot body—even though he'd obscured her memory processes so that she didn't remember what he'd done afterward. She had left his fate up to the aftermath of her actions, when she'd invaded the labs, seeking out Carolina and Alpha to rescue them. Whether the authorities caught up with him or he failed in some other capacity, she'd never intended to be the one who dealt out his punishment. She had told herself because it simply wasn't her first priority, but part of it was that she felt a certain tenderness toward the man. She couldn't deny that now, considering the way she's reacting to seeing this.

She looks at Carolina again, making a quick decision to button herself down and avoid showing how upset she could easily become by this if she let herself. She hardens the line of her jaw and juts her chin slightly, even as she feels a sharp dissonant . ]

That was a hard decision you were faced with. I'm not sure I could have done the same.

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

past

the broken