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

Me, too. [ She rubs her temple. ] I can't, um, do that. Gonna guess you can't, either. Unless one of us just... started? So. Just know if you get any of mine they're going to be way more boring.

[ She smiles at the explanation. ]

A space shuttle? Are you like, an astronaut?

[ A hint of girlish wonder creeps into Kelly Ann's normally deadpan tone. Sure, they were all in space now. And almost everybody she knew had superpowers or straight-up wasn't even human. But a real-life astronaut? That was cool. ]

I welcome boring, at this point.

[With no trace of irony there. He really, really would welcome a normal memory after... well. Literally everything.]

Something like that. I was a pilot.

[And now something else entirely. Something he's still not totally sure he was made for. But flight? That, he can talk about.]

[ She laughs a little. ] Well, hey, if we figure out how to do this, I can try to give you the time the bus broke down and Bill and I just looked at a dead bird on the side of the road for a while. That was nice and boring.

You guys must spend a lot of time in space. Even civilians who fly stuff in space are still called astronauts, heh.

That's... that's okay. I'd rather not... see a dead bird.

[Or anything dead, thanks.]

Hey, let's just say this isn't the first time we've been living in space.

[ She glances down, her face flushing. ]

Right so. Boring but not gross.

[ Not like it matters, it's not like she can do it anyway. ]

Who's "we"? Because this is definitely the first time I've been off the planet. Didn't quite rate the space leg Taylor Swift's tour.

[ Stupid Phil. ]

My teammates and I. The... Yellow and Green Lion pilots.

[They'd been in the flashback too. The two who pulled up, rather than crash into the sand dune like Lance and Keith had.]

It's not our first random alien interaction.

Green Lion... [ She repeats to herself. ] That's kind of a weird like, name, callsign, thing for a pilot, isn't it? Lions don't fly. [ Wow that was rude what the fuck. ] I mean I bet there's a story behind that. [ She laughs awkwardly. ]

Ok. Maybe you'll be able to answer this thing that's been bothering me. So like. Are we the aliens, here? Because you're human, right?

That's what they pilot. What we pilot. [If she'd seen the vision, she probably saw the cockpit, after all. Right?] They're Lions. Ships, robots... whatever you want to call them. Shaped like lions.

[Yeah even the guy who built them didn't realize what was happening, until it did. So he has no answer to that part.]

I guess we could be. From a certain perspective.

[you're human right? He glances down. His right arm is hidden under his armor, but his gaze lands there, regardless.]

Mostly.

[ His explanation is surprising. She's not exactly some kind of aerospace engineer, but. ]

Why lions? They don't seem very aerodynamic.

[ She totally misses the significance of the glance. ]

Are you like... bispecial or something?

They're not... entirely just technology. There's more to them than that.

[He grimaces, with an apologetic shrug. Alfor hadn't really known either, and he built them.]

Er, no. No, it's -- nothing, don't worry about it.

[ Kelly Ann doesn't really know what to say about either thing. He doesn't seem to want to talk about it, and she starts to get the distinct feeling that she's prying. It is interesting, but not enough to keep making him more and more uncomfortable.

She's not the best at reading people's moods but the grimaces and brushing off are pretty obvious. ]

Well. Um. I should... get back to what I was doing.

[ She laughs awkwardly. What was she doing? Library. That's right. ]

See you around?

Are you going to be all right?

[She hadn't seemed upset or anything. But it's worth asking, right? Worth checking on. Just in case she really had seen something ... unfortunate.]

[ Kelly Ann shrugs and gives something of a smile. That's a big question, and not something she's going to be completely honest about to this guy she just met. A guy who has like, real problems and shit. ]

Sure. It was cool to see that whole flying thing, sorry I just sort of barged in.

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

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