thisavrou_log | February Event Log I: Breathing Space

February Event Log I: Breathing Space

Who: Anyone and Everyone
When: February 10-19
Where: Avagi
What: Life support fails, and a team sets out. Check out this ooc post for more.
Warnings: Label your content.

Synce their arrival, Avagi's residents have been plagued by minor system failures. Faulty taskbots and infested crawlspaces, supply shortages and the floods last month. For the most part, they've coped admirably, and quality of life aboard the station is substantially improved from what it was. But even as the damage in the lived-in space is scrubbed away, more dangerous poisons have been building underneath.

On February 10, the groaning from the walls will escalate to a harsh scraping, audible station-wide. Then silence falls as the filtration systems die completely: leaving all vents to begin spewing thick, black smoke.

	System Failures
	(February 10-19)

Acrid and hazardous, the cocktail of gases emerging from the vents are the result of three centuries' toxin storage spilling over. A shallow breath can cause a coughing fit, but individuals who draw in too much of the toxic air will find themselves becoming dizzy, passing out, or worse. While effects may vary based on individual biology, all beings who require breath will find their lungs burning and their vision blurred. An hour after the initial failure, the lighting goes out too. With it, all station power: to computers, doors, and any system not hooked up to its own supply.

Investigation:

The electrical failures can be sourced to an automated safety shutoff, override-able from Life Support's main controls. But the mechanism isn't in place without a reason. Generating station power produces more of the dark fumes, and without working filters, they will pump straight into the air.

Wait in the dark (and growing cold), or suffocate more quickly? Either way, your air troubles won't be resolved quickly. Over the next couple days, groups searching Sanitation can track down the vapors to their source. A small mob of taskbots run sad circles in the filtration hub: between the air processing units and a row of shelves along one wall. The label reads Purification Crystals, and a single empty container remains.

Survival (Home Team):

Without the crystals, there is no effective way of restoring the entire living space. It may, however, be possible to section off small areas. Able bodies will be required to seal off the fumes and guide those suffering from their effects to safety. Many may need medical assistance, and technical skills will be in even more desperate need: to equip these regions with oxygen and power, and insulate them against the cold that leeches in from the outside.

Some amount of work has already been done, and a few safe rooms are prepped across the station. As days progress toward weeks, however, their air and power reserves will run thin, and some larger sectors may warrant securing regardless. The Greenery contains young plants that are susceptible to the fumes, and those invested in the library's book collection may also want to take measures. The gas has acidic qualities in higher concentrations, enough to eat through paper... for a start.

Contain it? Remove it? Or just try to protect yourselves? One way or another, you'll need to hold out for a while.

	Travel (Away Team)
	(February 12-19)

When Avagi's current population first got here, it was clear that others had inhabited the space before. Recent developments have even proven that these others—or, perhaps, their descendants—might still exist elsewhere on the station now. With the crystals that might repair your home missing, diplomacy is no longer an optional consideration. It's time to meet the neighbors, and hope they come in peace.

Navigation:

Those volunteering to undertake this mission will be provided with a patchwork set of maps. However, these contain little to no information on the current state of the station—including which parts still exist. The explosion that tore apart the former Ingress Complex left wide gaps in the structure, many of which have been invaded by the storms outside.

Scanning tech will be required to assess what lies behind the sealed walls, and physical labor to cut through them. As no contiguous paths across the station remain, this process will need to be repeated numerous times. Where no adjoining regions can be verified intact, smaller scouting tools (or group members!) may be required to traverse crawlspaces for a view of nearby rooms.

Survival:

Behind the first wall lies a pressurized room with normal gravity—and contaminated air. This will not persist as the travelers continue. Some regions have power, but no gravity. Others contain pockets of unaffected, still-clean air. Few spaces will be fully online before the travelers get there, but local generators can be found that might allow for a night or two of "comfortable" camping. At least one juncture can only be crossed by floating through an empty docking bay. The area contains no power, air, or gravity, but spacesuits can be procured... inside the sealed vacuum of the bay. Creative thinking may be required.

Enveloping the station's outside, the roiling shadows of Avagi's storms have crept invasively into all unsealed regions of the interior. While the Observation Station may have accustomed some Avagians to the view, there's something much more immediate about the shadows pressing at the other side of these windows. The faint patterns of light that ripple through the clouds prompt a sense of malice and exhaustion, one that lingers even when you've turned away. Those who attempt more intense scrutiny may suffer more severe effects.

Certainly, it feels like something is watching back.

Discoveries:

As harrowing as the journey may be, it's not entirely without its gains. A few tools can be salvaged from some of the decks visited along the way, and while food is in much shorter supply, there are a few signs that it might not have been, long ago. Wrappers and empty cans turn up in strange places. A few glyphs can be found scratched into one wall: ones that your ACE's translators roughly interpret as prayers.

One sealed room has a large "X" scrawled across the walls despite the detectable presence of power, air, and gravity. Opening it produces a strange sight: two skeletal corpses pressed up against the still-active force field that cuts this room off from the storms. Both bodies show extensive burns to hands and faces, but don't appear to have died from that effect.

[For questions, signups, or plotting, check out the ooc post. For the duration of this log, characters may travel between teams to whatever extent they are capable. The event will escalate with a second log on February 20.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Was there ever any doubt?

[Could they have truly chosen to remain, when there was nothing worth remaining for? When staying would have only yielded cruel reminders regarding the nature of empty rooms and broken promises, and wishes whispered to flowers that will never come to be?]

[We'll be together forever, won't we?]

Unspeakable danger, high risk of death - of course I'd be coming along.

Maybe I hoped you'd hang back.

[Hoped in vain, clearly. He really shouldn't be surprised. They're... always at the forefront of these things. They throw themselves into it more readily than even he does -- and that's saying something.]

[He looks at them for a long, quiet moment, before scooting over where he sits. Offering them a place to lean against the wall, too, should they want it.]

You know saying that just means I'm going to be watching your back more carefully now, right?

[True, it sounds like him. Hopeful. Sanguine. Out of phase with the rest, in their relative cynicism that they would have assumed would be making more of a pronoun divot on the landscape of his thoughts by now. They ought to find that more annoying than they do.]

[Maybe they’re simply too tired for that, as well.]

And I yours. You cannot claim self-preservation was a priority if you chose to attend as well.

[If nothing else, he understands being too tired for things. He's been there. Often. Part of him feels like it wants to be there now, though he fights it down.]

I guess that makes us teammates for this one, huh?

[He doesn't comment on the lack of self-preservation. They've had this conversation with each other before. And it may still be true.]

I suppose it would.

[Suppose being, in this case - yes. It does.]

Have you uncovered anything of note, or are you merely taking one of those infrequent things that I hear the well-rested call "a break"?

Just sealed doors and incomplete maps.

[He leans his head back against the wall, his hands dangling in the space between his knees.]

[And... normally, he wouldn't share this. But this is Chara. They're old beyond their years. Or at least, they seem so. It's not a good sign, either way.]

Someone carved prayers on the walls a few corridors back.

Prayers.

[They'd not taken the time to interpret them, or scan them, or...much of anything. They seem a hair distracted, of late. That's not terribly typical of them, now, is it?]

Of what sort?

I don't know. They weren't something we could translate. But if science fiction has taught me anything, it's prayers scrawled on empty space station hallways generally don't mean good things.

[He's going to be candid with them. They're always the same with him. Returning the favor. Even... if they don't seem as Gloom And Doom as always.]

Are you okay?

...

[He changes the subject. Of course he does. It'd be easier to pursue that than it would be to pursue the arcane, the abstruse, prayers and thoughts of an unknown and ancient people who are perhaps long-dead.]

Well enough. [They must seem out of sorts. Or perhaps he's simply being...himself.] I don't expect this mission to yield many results.

Is that what's on your mind?

[Prying gently. Because that's what he does. It's how he cares. He glances away for a moment, before offering up something out of the bag he's been carrying with him.]

Here. Water. [It looks like a capri sun.] Probably won't make the mission any more successful, but... can't hurt.

Nothing's on my mind.

[It does, indeed, resemble a capri sun. They accept it only after a moment of begrudging contemplation, but turn the strange, foil-like packet this way and that, examining it.]

[In some ways, this is better; being allowed focus on something other than the question he is asking, the asymptote he has steadily begun inching toward, whose inexorable creep they cannot wholly prevent.]

Nothing would be. How can one be bothered by the absence of something?

There's a straw on the back.

[Sad absently. Because his mind is elsewhere. Trying to track what they're saying here. Or, rather, not saying.]

[It's really not like them to be... this flat. Cryptic, sure. But flat?]

Then... did something happen? Before the mission? On the mission?

[A straw. Yes.]

[They extricate it, turning it over and over between their fingertips without sticking it into the package in earnest. Dwell idly, instead, on how efficient it might be as a weapon. Not very, they decide.]

Asriel's gone.

[Abruptly, and without preamble, and then they jab the straw into the packaging with an immediate change of subject.]

Who designed this? It's not terribly user-friendly.

[He doesn't think they'll respond, at first. Maybe he pried too much. Or maybe they really, really don't want to talk about it. He's prepared to apologize, to move on. But then they finally speak:]

[Asriel's gone.]

[Their sibling. The one they'd been trying to protect out there in that vicious jungle, so long ago. Their family... He wants to reach out to them. To offer them some kind of physical support. But holds back. His shoulders sag.]

When did it happen?

[There's sympathy in the question, because of course there is. How could there not be, when his own team is still mourning sets of empty armor?]

Aliens. Go figure.

Does it matter?

[They jab the straw into the little packet with a disproportionately vicious spike of plastic through foil, or whatever intergalactic equivalent comprises its mass instead. There's a hiss, a puckering of punctured edges, and they don't even drink out of it. They just stare at the pierced vessel without seeing it.]

He's gone.

[Must have been recently. Or maybe not. Losing someone like that never... quite feels like it can be anything but raw, does it? Look at the team. Look at Pidge's reaction to going on a mission separately.]

[He watches them stab the straw in, without comment. Debating what to say.]

I'm sorry, Chara.

[He's got to say it. He can't not voice his sympathy.]

Is ... there anything I can do for you?

There's nothing to be done but the mission at hand.

[That's a cop-out of an answer. But what other choice do they have? What option is available to them, aside from that which allows them to convert their grief into something tangible, into something they can do, something useful, something acceptable to the masses.]

[They don't stop. They don't stop, because if they do, they'll have to sit there and think, and there is nothing more unwanted, at the moment, than the tenor of their own contemplations.]

If we weren't on the mission. What would you need? Want?

[Even as he asks, he sort of thinks he knows what the answer is going to be. They've spoken with each other often enough for that. Just running the mission without trying to do something for them doesn't feel right.]

I know it's... probably not feasible now. Never seems like we get any time to process this.

It just keeps coming.

[And it don't stop coming and it don't stop coming and it ]

[The surreality of the thought, displaced and inappropriate and in poor taste, is almost enough to crack the flatness that irons the corners of their lips down into something even farther from their typical, false smile than usual.]

What point would there be in "processing" it? He was here. Now he isn't. It's really quite simple.

[And. Smile.]

[Smile, like it'll all fade away.]

Why should one dwell?

Because it hurts.

[Because it's never as simple as, they were here now they're not. There's always more to it.]

If you don't give yourself time to deal with it, it starts to eat at you. I don't want to see that happen.

[Not when he's been in that same boat for what feels like months now.]

[They can't help it. Really, they can't. They do their best, but in the end, their best is doomed to failure, as just about anyone could say.]

[They burst out laughing.]

You're about a hundred years too late on that one, I'm afraid!

I'm talking about this one. About Asriel here, on the station.

[He doesn't try to lecture them, here. They can laugh, if they have to. They can say what they want or need to.]

[He just wants to make it clear all he's talking about now is Asriel.]

You think I haven't lost him before?

[Like they said. Years too late. Years. They've not yet become aware of the fact that their fingers have begun to grind around the packet of water, screwing up the foil-like packaging into something that threatens to burst. Their smile is frozen, pale and painted and pained.]

You think this is new? I led him to his death, the first time! I felt it happen. Do you understand that? I felt his body crumble to dust as he held me, dying, refusing to FIGHT back until the very last.

[led him to his death - you were just gone]

I didn't know.

[Simply, calmly. Stay in control. Stay patient, collected. No wonder they're hurting. If they've already felt a loss that strong... In as much graphic detail as they're telling him...]

I'm sorry, Chara. [He could tell them maybe Asriel will come back, like Lucio had, briefly. Tell them maybe they'll be able to see him again, but those are just platitudes. Because you could stand outside the Ingress energy for days on end, hoping for a familiar voice, hoping for one more chance, and hear nothing but strangers.]

... I can't tell you how you should react. It wasn't how I meant things to come out.

But you've... got options. If you decide you want to take them, this time.

What options, Shiro?

[They're being loud. Too pitched, too shrill, too angry. He's only trying to help, and they're just pitching a big fat tantrum. Being a little horrorterror, as per usual!]

What right have I to mourn someone that never wanted me in the first place - who spent his last words in our world disowning me for my crimes?

[What right have they to pretend they didn't see this coming? That it wasn't earned? That it wasn't how it was always going to be? That - ]

[There's water running out between their fingers.]

[They've squeezed it so hard that it's burst.]

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