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.]

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And that I've not yet returned home to die, the way my brother did?

[Note the phraseology, if you will: yet.]

[It is, after all, inevitable, as far as they're concerned. As far as anyone is. Their story is long over, long past, and their sins lay the playing field into position, for other children to traverse and fail and die upon.]

[For other children to suffer.]

Yes, Chara.

[The calm snaps. For a minute. For two words, there's something sharper. Not anger, no -- urgency. Of course he's glad they're alive. They should know that, by now.]

[Haven't their conversations up to now proved as much?]

I'm glad you're alive. That you're here. Of course I am.

I won't always be.

[Perhaps he ought to prepare himself to be allowed to be upset, when that comes to pass - as it inevitably will, because that seems to be the only fate with any permanence, here. Returning home; in their case, to the grave.]

Chara...

I'm going to do everything I can. So you don't have to go back.

[He doesn't know if there's anything he could actually do. Doesn't know if there's a way to help. A way to stop either of them from losing anyone else.]

[But he's going to try.]

[He has to try.]

How very realistic of you.

[They'd commend him for that, if they thought it was worth commending. Truly.]

[Okay, so maybe they wouldn't. It's not as if seeing them as something worth saving is in any way commendable. Only saviors and martyrs with hero complexes presume them to be something salvageable, and even then, not for very long.]

[Not for very long at all.]

I didn't say it was. I... just don't want to see you have to go.

[He knows it's futile. It really is. If there was no way to keep Lance and Keith from vanishing, or Lucio, Angela... North or Maine... then... how could he keep Chara from following.]

Maybe it won't help.

But I have to try. I can't do nothing, Chara.

[They'd know that.]

That is all you can do. There will be times, believe it or not, where all the determination in the universe cannot alter one's fate.

[For all the determination infused in a scarlet-tinted SOUL, for all the resolve to spin the world back to its starting point, it could never ERASE the sins of the past, nor could it reclaim the lives of those who perished long before the story even began.]

Learn to accept it now, before you tear yourself apart over that which is already set in stone.

I can't do nothing.

I won't.

[They can be absolutely right. Their every word can be correct. But he'll still fight against it. He'll still try. Because he has to. He can't accept just giving in.]

[Just accepting things are useless.]

If I just accepted nothing could change, I wouldn't be talking to you.

Then pour yourself into the things you can change, Shiro, and leave the dead to rot.

[Leave those who will die to die, and fight on the behalf of the living.]

[Ghosts cannot appreciate all you do for them, and the sooner one recognizes that, the better it will be for everyone - himself included.]

Neither of us know this can't change.

No one knows it for sure.

[And he will fight this fight. He'll fight this, and any other he has to, in order to keep someone safe.]

[Even if they don't think they're worth saving.]

So I have to try.

...

[They fold their arms patiently behind their back, and step away.]

I see.

[It doesn't matter. Respect for the living, respect for the wishes of the dead - clearly that's secondary to his desire to feel useful, to feel like he can effect some sort of change in a world that does not concern him.]

I suppose I ought to thank you, Shiro.

For proving what I should never have allowed myself to forget, where humans are concerned. That their desires must always come first. That the wishes of a child should never be respected.

That the word "no" never really means "no".

[That they really are all the same.]

[You know that feeling when you're stumbling in the dark, when you're absolutely sure you've stepped through the doorway, only to smash into a wall? That feeling of sudden pain and confusion?]

[That's abruptly all over his face. Speechless. Staring at them like they've pulled the floor out from under him, shut off the lights and air all in one go.]

... did you want me to leave you alone, Chara?

[It's all he can think to say. To ask. He's asked them that before, and they didn't answer. They turned it around and away and never... told him what they wanted.]

[He'd just kept on.]

[He'd just thought it was the right thing to do.]

I can't -- I can't read your mind. I don't know these things, unless you tell me what you want.

[I can't change anything unless I know what I'm doing wrong.]

I'll ask you again. Do you want me to leave you alone?

I want you to stop pretending that I can be saved.

[It bites out, hard and intent, unlike the drape of calm they'd been aspiring, aspiring, to cast over their expression like a pall, like a sheet of ice.]

It does not matter how truly you believe it or how badly you wish it or how much you might fight for it.

Creatures like me cannot be saved, Shiro.

And maybe they would simply prefer not to be.

... Do you prefer that?

[He can't honestly believe it. Or maybe, he doesn't really want to. They're a child. They're... someone he's come to care about, for reasons he can't really explain.]

[Or maybe it's that echo in the back of his head. The voice whispering of how much of a monster he was. Faded, after so long. But holding on and waiting to dig its claws back in again.]

[... monster and creature are awfully close. Aren't they?]

Chara, I can't... I'm not pretending anything. It's what I really believe.

But if you tell me -- if you tell me that's what you want... [And he hates these words. He hates every syllable of them. But if it's what they want...] I won't. Bring it up.

I have seen the world rent asunder. I took a blade to the fabric of existence and cut it to shreds, ripped it apart, tore it to pieces until it was little more than a screaming void. I took every inch of the world that refused to let me go and I destroyed it. Did you glimpse your future, the way so many others did?

[They glimpsed an awful lot, in December. And others saw plenty else.]

That was mine. Nothing, nothing but complete and utter destruction of all that everyone has ever loved.

Because it was my last chance. Do you understand that?

It was my last chance to let it finally, finally be over.

Yes.

[Yes, he did. But it was nothing like Chara described. Not for him. There was hope, there. For himself, and for Pidge. Not something as dire as they're talking about.]

[He lets them talk. Ask their questions and say what they need to say. There isn't much else he really can do, here. Is there?]

Then.

You do want that. That's what you're telling me.

[A choking bubble of a laugh swells up in their throat and bursts, a horrid parody of mirth and grief wrapped up into one grotesque little package. What a truly loathsome little abomination they are! How like them, to warp even something as basic and untainted as simple emotion, into something so ugly.]

I have given up on attempting to force my death to mean something.

Do you know how many years I have spent, lingering? How many times I felt myself die?

[They're so tired.]

[They are so. incredibly. tired.]

[And it never seems to stop.]

[He should probably be repulsed. Or horrified or put off or something else by the noise they made. But he can't be. There's too much grief in it. It comes from someone who's hurting.]

[That's why he can't turn away. Why he hasn't.]

Maybe... that's why you're here now.

If that couldn't mean something -- maybe this is a chance for your life to.

[They'll laugh. Or refuse. But the words come out anyway. Offering a hand he can't physically give.]

... You mean something to one person. I can tell you that.

I mean something to the ideal you consistently hold yourself to. The one that blames itself when things go wrong, as things inevitably do, because so little of all of this is within the scope of your personal control.

[Buried in there somewhere is a lesson about accountability; when it is fitting to hold oneself to it, and when it is pointless. They're certainly far from the right party to draw that line, when every consequence and every cast stone has fallen squarely in their corner of the court.]

I mean something to every martyr with a hero complex on the station, I'm sure.

Edited 2018-02-21 07:38 (UTC)

... You really think that's the only reason you matter to me?

Because of my blame issue?

[That's. Not where he thought their answer would go. It's way off the mark. Not something he prepared for.]

[Is that really all they think they mean? The only reason he's here, trying to reason this through? The only reason he's never stopped trying -- to help them, to do right by them. If they didn't matter beyond his own problems, wouldn't he have stopped bothering them the day he told the others he'd try to be ... better?]

[Can't they see that?]

Edited (i hit enter too soon go me) 2018-02-21 07:42 (UTC)

That's the only reason I matter to anyone, until they see fit to achieve some measure of standards or self-worth.

[Asriel's selfless, all-encompassing love that rubbed away the intricacies of their flaws until all that was left was the perfect sibling on the pedestal, the one he disowned the moment someone better and nicer came along. Frisk's insatiable need to save other people at the expense of their own self-worth, no matter how despicable or disgusting those creatures proved to be.]

Whatever reasoning you might claim, whatever sweeping declarations you may hold to your heart - I've heard them before.

And I know how that story ends.

[With Chara, not being the greatest person.]

[Easily discarded. Easily forgotten.]

[Easily ERASED.]

You think I'm just going to abandon you? Or... throw you away?

[Is that what they're trying to say?]

Chara what part of anything we've ever done makes you think that's something I'd do? If you wanted to be alone so bad... you can just tell me.

Plain and simple.

[How could anyone just walk away from this kid? From anyone. There's something that needs help, somewhere in them. Something no one should just ignore or get tired of.]

[It feels like all he can do. Put that offer back on the table. They have to know he doesn't want to do it. Just like they have to know he will.]

Because I have heard this all before from those who are consistently kind, consistently unselfish, and consistently unswerving.

[They know what they are. What the world has taught them that they must be, at all times. The exception to every rule. The anomaly. The demon that comes when you call its name. The thing that must not be spoken of, except in derision, except to be heralded when one is in need of wanton destruction.]

Do not bother feeding me the same overemotional tripe I have endured without fail, only to witness the hypocrisy of those who spoke it.

Then answer me.

Yes or no, Chara. Do you want me to leave you alone?

[He will fight for this answer for as long as he has to. For a real answer. He has to know. One way or another.]

[If no answer comes, then, he's just going to have to keep fighting for them. Protecting them. Being at their side if they're in danger of drowning again. There's no other option.]

I could not care less if you leave me or not, Shiro.

[Why would it matter? In such a contained space with so many variables playing against them, such a thing would be nothing short of impossible.]

All I require is that you stop pretending that you can effect some manner of change on my fate.

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shiro2hero - 2018-02-22 06:54 (UTC) - Expand

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inconsequence - 2018-02-22 07:58 (UTC) - Expand

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