thisavrou_log | January Intro Log

January Intro Log

Who: New arrivals and old residents
When: January 5 and beyond
Where: Avagi
What: Hello, nice to meet you
Warnings: Label where applicable.

Arrival

A shiver of light, a sense of falling, and Avagi's portals have claimed another traveller. For those first stepping out of the Ingress Memorial, Avagi may be rather disorienting, but some areas are quite lively, and there are plenty of places to explore. As newcomers make their way into their new home, they'll encounter new acquaintances and a few pitfalls.

Last month's time distortions have settled... for the most part. The strange flickering light atop the Ingress Memorial's central fragment lingers, though, pulsing and shifting in strange, hypnotic patterns. Left to their own devices, a character may stand in place for over a day, entirely unaware of their surroundings or the passage of time. They can be snapped out of the daze... with effort. And in most cases, touch.
Over the last few months, Avagi's sudden population has done a good job breaking in old living spaces. Unfortunately, after a century of disrepair, some of those systems have been quietly breaking down. Today? It's the plumbing. The Bar, Bartering Block, and several of the Labs are rapidly imitating a swamp. The Gym has acquired a new pool, and Sanitation is mostly underwater. Residents of the Chemistry and 🙀 housing sectors may need to start putting up sandbags—or bailing their rooms dry.

Whether to lend a hand or loot their neighbors, someone's going to need to (dive) get to the bottom of all this. The water spillage is mostly clean, but if conditions persist, that won't last long.
While a few (aquatic) species of the local mini-dinos are enjoying the new swimming space just fine, their more feathery compatriots have rapidly gone from bedraggled to soaked... and heading towards hypothermic. The recent spate of exterminations has them warier than usual of humanoid life, but less hostile (or more oblivious) station-dwellers may find a small flock trying to get dry in front of their space heaters—or any sources of potential warmth.

[Welcome to Thisavrou! If you haven't already, we encourage you to check out the OOC intro and calendar for January. Oldbies, please also make sure you've glanced through the activity check. A mod update will be going up soon with information on what's coming up, but if there are any questions in the interim, feel free to use the activity check comment.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It was the Savrii who built the station, as far as Yori knows, Users themselves from the alien worlds tied to the Ingress. It's hard to explain in a way a program would understand, especially straight from a place as isolated as Flynn's Grid.

The planets were swallowed by the storm, a memory that still makes Yori wince, but the reason for the station remains, as proven by the new program's presence.

"I suppose they built it because people keep showing up here," she muses. "Most of us did, without warning, like you did. Some kind of pull from the glow they call the Ingress."

Recognizable, Yori doubts. The robots and the AI and the aliens she's met are far from a simple pattern. Not one she can discuss in detail quite yet.

"..What happened when people showed up here and there was no space station?"

Capella's going to go looking for windows now, to see if maybe there's annoyed people floating about outside, trying to find a way in. She has no idea how long Avagi's been there or what happens to people in space, but it SOUNDS funny.

That's actually a good question, given the way that the Ingress seems to move around and the planets it had to choose from. "I wasn't there," is all Yori can say for certain. "It was hundreds of years ago." By any count, even the strange one involving time travel.

She shakes her head, dismissing the unknowable. "Can you tell me a little about the Grid?" The new arrival looks entirely too normal to have worked for Clu like Rinzler or fought him, either one.

"..Years in our time or years in their time?" 'Their time' being meat space time, she was aware that there was a discrepancy between the digital world and the human world, though exactly what it was eluded her. It wouldn't really change the end result any, but curiosity was eternal and persistent.

She taps her chin when the Grid is asked after. Where to even begin?? "I can try." She's willing to give it a go! "But you have to tell me about your system too."

That's just fair! "Well let's see. There's five major cities we and our User made that I know of and have been to, Tron City is the largest and where everyone who's anyone goes to rub elbows and have a good time. Arjia City, where most ISOs live, you go there if you want art and music; Argon City is the place to go if you ever need amazing transportation, Gallium, which is the bare end of nowhere that everyone who wants to prove they're tough go, and my own home of Bostrum! .. It's mostly ISOs and other programs who want to see if we can get by on our own. So far so good!"

Nothing in her words suggest coups, or unrest, or violence or anything of the sort.

"Years in User time, so longer than that if we were inside a system." How long? Hard to say with any precision. Time travel complicates everything.

Yori smiles at the bargain. Encom deserves to be remembered, and she certainly doesn't object to sharing a few stories with a program of the future. "I'd love to."

Five cities at minimum, presumably borrowing a certain amount of User style from Flynn. Quorra had mentioned Arjia, brief and pained. This doesn't explain why Clu had targeted the Isos, but it does give Yori a better idea of how busy Tron must have been to protect any of that vibrant culture. Before. How much Flynn and Quorra lost.

To give herself a moment to recover, she responds with a quick depiction of Encom's better features. "Encom's computer network, where I'm from, grew as part of a User business, instead of developing on its own like the Grid. There are all kinds of connections to other places, other systems and other businesses. Hundreds of Users sent requests through the system all the time." Before the MCP began intercepting them all; after, too, she hopes.

That's .. practically forever, by her reckoning. So unlikely to ever really find out much about it except if there's security files somewhere, and she wouldn't have access to that anyway..

That's too bad. Not knowing was frustrating.

The idea of a system that's a business is hard to really get a grip on. Was it strictly professional? "How does anything remain stable with hundreds of Users messing with things?" Adding programs, removing programs, putting in new buildings, making whole new everything! How would anyone cope?? "It sounds like it'd be a big mess of confusion." Look how things got with just ONE. The idea of hundreds was ... boggling.

Confusion is a risk. "Isolation has its own risks," Yori has to point out.

Of course Capella seems not to have witnessed the terrible future Quorra spoke of...not yet.

"It's always been a very complex system. Chaotic." Both before and after the MCP started building an army to derez anyone who protested. "But the main problem recently has been a very bad choice of system administrator. If we didn't have connections to so many Users, I don't know how anyone would have known to shut down the unauthorized plans to murder innocent programs and invade other systems." Contact with Alan-One and Kevin Flynn, in particular.

"We seem to be doing okay."

For now. That's not going to last much longer. Not much longer at all. But the Grid is a closed system, she knew that. And she was pretty sure Flynn was the only User involved. Things ran smoothly, more or less.

Capella leans back a little, crossing her arms over her chest. Bad sysadmins killing innocent programs and planning invasions? That'd be terrible to deal with. "I'm sorry. That's too bad." It sounded worse than chaos. "I'm glad our Sysadmin's not like that. He's working hard to make the Grid a great place for all programs. I hope your replacement admin will be more like him, and get everything straightened out at least a little." And she sounds like she really means it. Capella's very sympathetic, truthfully. Organization is good! Taking over other systems, in spite of what's best for everyone.. not so much.

Yori can't imagine a replacement admin worse than Clu, unless it were the MCP all over again. She's not sure how to tackle any of that mess, though. Should she tell Capella that Clu's a mass murderer? Tell her that he's here and should be avoided?

If she approaches it wrong and Capella goes looking for Clu, how much damage could he do to her unsuspecting disk?

She bites her tongue in severe doubt. "Thank you." For the sentiment, if not exactly its details. "I met someone named Quorra once, from the Grid. Do you know her?"

Maybe Quorra's story would have more credibility than Yori, a complete stranger. More likely they've never heard of each other. Flynn's Grid had been so full of people before Clu happened.

The name draws a bit of quiet, Capella crossing her arms over her chest and looking really thoughtful. She didn't know even a fraction of programs, and that one ... doesn't sound familiar, as she gives it a thorough review.

"Sorry, no. There's a lot of programs around, and I've only met a handful in comparison. If she's from Tron City, I haven't been there much in a while." She preferred the amateur circuits of the other cities! Better chances of winning at the Games! "I know everyone in Bostrum and maybe a couple hundred in Argon and Gallium but.."

She makes a bit of a negligent gesture with one hand. There's a lot of programs out there! "Anyway, who is she?"

"A friend of Flynn." Those had apparently been rare, under Clu's reign, when Clu and those obedient to him had anything to say about it. "The only Iso I've met here."

She can't quite tell if Capella is an Iso or not. Maybe Yori should encourage that, if she can.

"Sometimes things go differently in different versions of the same system," she begins, an attempt to take this slow enough not to hurt Capella too much. "But the way Quorra described it, things went badly in her version of the Grid. If you see programs in red or yellow, you might not want to mention Isos to them."

(ooc: Hope that's okay. I don't want to break your timelines or CR chances, but Yori knows how violently Rinzler reacts, she wouldn't want to leave Capella completely unwarned...)

The convenient part about ISOs: it's impossible to tell them apart from normal programs without their disk when the mark on their arm is hidden. And Capella, well used to having to hide her nature from even her friends lest they suddenly start fearing and hating her, doesn't even blink. "Huh, well, if she turns up again it might be interesting to meet her. Flynn's got a lot of friends, near as I can tell!"

Not always with his much favored ISOs, though. Accusing them of terrorism hadn't sat well with many.

Red programs were .. new. Yellow too, as a primary color. Sure everyone wore them as accents, but primary? Her eyebrows rise slowly. "I can do that, thanks for the heads up. Some programs are really touchy, no need to set them off for the heck of it." Bostrumites altered their coloration as a point of pride, and she was one of them. What prevented some other city or colony from doing the same? ... Argon, perhaps. She could see them all in a bright pleasant yellow. "Yellow and red aren't colors I've seen programs wearing before, except as accessory." She gestures to the gold accent points she herself wore, alongside the green. "New colony, do you know? New faction?"

Things going 'badly' is pretty much exactly what things had been headed towards, she supposed. That must mean Flynn hadn't found a way to stop the grid's degradation and energy issues for a while. Why hadn't the administration done something about it then?

(OOC: It's fine! She's from a point in time where you don't tell people you're an ISO when in mixed company and uncertain locations, so this is pretty much par the course for her.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

January Intro Log

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject