thisavrou_log | ( march intro log )

Entry tags:

( march intro log )

Who: Everyone
When: March 1st and on
Where: The Moira + Ceta
What: The crew finds themselves on the planet of Ceta
Warnings: Potential sci-fi creature death. Please label your content!

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by the inquest
"Arguments on their nature are refuted by those who return to shore, wide-eyed with tales of their savagery."

All Moirans are woken to the sounds of the ship coming to a rather grating halt some time in the early morning cycle. It’s no faster or slower than any other stop, but it is unexpected as the captains didn’t mention an upcoming disembarkment. Shortly after, a message is sent to every MID:
Navigation has informed us that we’re approaching bad traveling conditions: an overactive star. Instead of stopping on Liant El, we’ll be docking here on Ceta. Please exercise caution while gathering supplies and during excursions. Follow their safety guidelines. If the chance allows, we’ll also be signing new crew on the planet. Please greet them first and show them to the ship. Thank you.
The Ingress has pulled you in. Your body experiences several sensations at once: being pushed forward as if a hand is resting on your back, momentary and startling blindness, a gentle ringing in your head. You have difficulty discerning whether it is hot or cold, but where you have been prodded is noticeably warmer than the rest of you. Some may suffer from dizziness while others are perfectly fine. Once equilibrium has been reestablished, you will notice you are standing on a long platform and that the room is filled with a soft cerulean light. It's slightly humid and dark despite the glow around you, and nothing is familiar.

For those few who come through Ceta's Ingress, there will be crew of the Moira there to greet you. They tell you of the Ingress, how it is broken, even on this planet, and that the ship is headed back to the origin of this technology. This planet’s Ingress is set precariously atop a floating rock formation, the only way from one area to the next is on small air-propelled boats. Crew members will guide everyone back to the Moira and take them to the Medbay; contracts will be signed posthaste.

WELCOME TO CETA

At first glance, Ceta seems mostly inhabitable, and that's because it is. The atmosphere around the planet is surprisingly thick in most places, sometimes thin in others, and without some way to filter the air, it is mostly unbreathable; it's a giant gas planet, its core made of various molten metals and the atmosphere a mix of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrous. Ceta's gravity is also uneven, meaning that some areas will have stronger focal points than others. The terrain, when it is visible, appears rather rocky—hardly the best conditions for life and stable living. What's more unusual, however, is that despite this fact, there is, indeed, a small populace "living" among the mist and clouds, but it's clear they do not live here year-round. It's hunting season, and they are there for the bounty.

These visitors have built small platforms that are hooked together by ropes and swinging bridges, which they call "temporaries". Unstable buildings are rare, dangerous, and spread out over these temporaries to prevent damage or accidents. The temporaries float along, swaying and shifting with the planet’s atmosphere, and posted at every point of entry and all open surfaces are a particular set of rules that everyone must abide by. They are written in dark ink and large block letters so that all passing by will stop and read them:
NO FIRE. Flammables, ignition sources, matches, lighters, and anything that creates a spark is prohibited. The atmosphere has higher levels of hydrogen, and the smallest spark will create a problem.
AIR BREATHABILITY. Monitor your vitals. Wear masks or re-breathers if needed.
WATCH THE EDGE. All walkways are the only thing from you and falling. Be cautious and watch your step.
These signs should be given their due attention. The edge is just that: the end of where it is safe to walk. If a wooden plank gives way beneath your feet, you will plummet through hundred of miles of atmosphere before hitting the planet’s thin surface. The captains reiterate that crew should be careful and stick to the main temporaries, gather supplies, visit at their leisure, and then go back to the ship.

☄ IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE!

The organisms that have evolved on this planet are unintelligent—a fact that is told to you by the other visitors. As there is no solid materials or ways for them to interact with their environments, these giants float along within the atmosphere, though it appears that they are flying when they are merely navigating through. They travel in groups of three or more and sometimes come close to the outskirts of the temporaries. Because there is an invisible filtration dome around the temporaries, this allows the creatures to pass through without harm and return again into the mist as they please. They are difficult to see at night and are rather skittish in the presence of sudden light.

☄ @ THE MUSEUM

Every evening when work is done, artificial light sources illuminate the streets of the temporaries. There is one bar, if you can actually call it that, but the main attraction is a museum. The support structure appears to be made out of the skeletal system of the giants that "swim" and live on Ceta, and though the outside seems rather unassuming, the inside is not for the faint of heart. As it's considered informative, there are displays of the internal structures and functions of the very creatures that seem harmless and as unintelligent as the visitors claim. There are sections of the museum dedicated to their anatomy and what makes them so valuable: inside their air sacs, which is what gives the illusion to flying through the atmosphere, is a mineral that, when harvested, attunes and sharpens the senses so that brain capacity and function excel over one-hundred percent efficiency. Likewise, aside from these informative areas, there is also a history of how and when the visitors began to hunt them for this valuable, unnamed resource.

☄ HARVEST SEASON

Are you looking for work? Or perhaps you're bored with your duties aboard the Moira and prefer to see just what it is these visitors do during the day? Hunters will often pay for menial labor to help with the killing and retrieval of the giants of Ceta. It is by day, not by hour, and once aboard one of the many ships, you will be put to work handling equipment or being on the lookout for "signs" of the creatures. Once they've been spotted, the real work isn't in capturing them or even trying to subdue them—though they give a good fight. It's in the harvest, done below deck once they have been safely brought into the ship's cargo areas by the tethers, that can get quite gruesome. As a defense mechanism, cutting into the skin creates a rather noxious emission that can cause disorientation, hallucinations, or unconsciousness. Worst case scenarios can often result in death.

☄ WORD LIMITS

As things are beginning to wind up (or down), something seems to have gotten into the MID systems and caused a malfunction. On the morning of 03.13, it suddenly becomes clear that communicating with others who are not from the same universe or similar timelines seems very difficult. Understanding each other becomes rather hopeless as the day continues, and these repercussions can be felt across the entire ship. The Captains send out another MID message that appears as a jumble of unusual letters and symbols. However, there is one word that can be read by everyone and (hopefully) understood: RATCHET. Figuring out this problem shouldn't take long if everyone can leap the language barriers and work together.

( ooc; All New Arrivals: you have the choice of coming through the Moira's Ingress OR Ceta's Ingress. For questions, go here. Please comment to activity check to receive new ranks (if applicable)! )

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The momentary topic change comes as a relief. There was no way to avoid the discussion surrounding the circumstances of his death, but for now, Nihlus grasps at the opportunity to talk about something else.

"I lost mine when I was pulled through the Ingress," he explains with an awkward laugh. "And I don't have any backup pairs either. You wouldn't happen to know a solution to this dilemma, would you?"

Turian underwear was never something she wanted to so much as think about, let alone try to solve a lack thereof. She makes a face, considering.

"Uh, I have a turian friend who was on the Moira before I got here," she manages to come up with. "His stuff might still be around somewhere, if it hasn't been traded for supplies on some other planet."

She'd never bothered to check, being too grateful for his absence. The fewer members of Shepard's squad around, the better.

"That would explain why the medical staff seemed to have some familiarity with my species," Nihlus murmurs with a thoughtful hum.

"I can't imagine alien underwear being particularly useful for trading, but the universe has never ceased to surprised me in that department either." Spirits knows people collect some strange things out there. "Are leftover items stored somewhere in particular? Any forms I need to fill out? I can probably retrieve them myself."

He can see some of Shep's discomfort there.

"And where did your friend go, if you don't mind me asking?" Because the contract didn't seem to have much room for leaving ship. Did he run away?

"I don't know," she says honestly. "Where his things are or where he is. Garrus was gone before I arrived. Sometimes you stop seeing people around, and they drop off the MID directory. But I haven't been able to find any answers."

If she looks a touch frustrated, it's because she's being asked at all, not because she's tried and failed to find answers. She hasn't bothered to think about these things; she doesn't even want to know about the latter, given some of the talk about what going home would mean if you're dead.

"You might be able to ask the captains about leftover items, at least," she adds. "Cúrre was helpful when I asked her if we could use some medi-gel I got - you could frame it as a medical concern."

"That sounds ominous."

People just... disappear? Why erase them off the digital directory instead of putting up a missing persons notice?

There are a lot of questions there, but Nihlus didn't really want to ask them with a potential surveillance device attached to his wrist. He's going to have find some way to sound insulate the MID without being too inconspicuous.

"I will contact Cúrre in regards to that, then. It will also be a chance to get my hands on replacement medigel," he says instead. He had lost his medkit in the Ingress, after all.

Casting Shepard a curious sideways glance, Nihlus pauses before asking, "So. Is this Garrus Vakarian we're talking about?"

Garrus wasn't an awful common name.

She gives a wry nod to that assessment, then cautions him, "I only had levo medi-gel. I don't know if Doctor Yewll's made a dextro version yet."

With only two dextro amino people she knows of on the Moira, she hasn't bothered asking about it when checking the doctor's progress. Her priority's the human and otherwise levo amino majority.

As they approach the mess, she raises an eyebrow in genuine surprise. "It is. I didn't know you knew him." According to her dossiers, Nihlus was dead long before Garrus joined the Normandy.

"I can make-do with available medical supplies if that's the case. Thank you for the heads-up."

At the raised brow, Nihlus casts Shepard a curious look in return as they step into the mess. The woman should already have a general knowledge of Turian politics at the very least. Even if his replacement hadn't been Turian, she should have been given a Turian political aide. The Alliance and Hierarchy were very clear on this being part of the reparation efforts.

"The Vakarians are a controversial family in Turian politics," he begins, picking his way through the throngs of people towards a free table. "His father is a high ranking officer who married a bare-faced woman. He is also friends with the Primarch of Palaven and has a degree of influence over planetary politics as such. It's hard not to have heard of Garrus Vakarian."

He pulls a chair back for Shepard as he speaks, waiting for her to seat herself.

"Additionally, I've also seen him around C-Sec." The Spectre's inflection takes on and almost playfully lilting note then. "He's rather cute."

Very persistent, too. Nihlus was always hunted down for questions on Saren the last few times he'd been docked on the Citadel.

Nonplussed by the gesture, she sits, only to choke on nothing when Nihlus calls Garrus cute.

"Not my type," she manages, after a cough. Not that she knows what her type is beyond 'human', or if she even has one; she's never felt a physical need, and emotional connections are a weakness she can't afford. Recovering, she adds, "He's mentioned his father, but I didn't realize that fame would extend to him."

Actually, he'd never mentioned his father to her, for understandable reasons, but the more concerning part is that there'd been no mention in her dossiers, either. Perhaps Brooks thought she wouldn't need to know once Garrus was out of the way?

She makes herself comfortable and waits for Nihlus to do the same before saying, "But we're not here to talk about Garrus."

The reaction earns her an expression of amusement, but Nihlus deigns not to comment on the fact, even as he notes it away in the back of his mind. All that over him calling Garrus 'cute'?

"No, we're not," he agrees quietly as he settles down in the seat opposite of Shepard, flipping his omni-tool on and bringing up a recording software and an additional note-taking program.

"Start from the beginning. Everything you can remember." He leans forwards and takes a quiet breath, preparing himself for the undoubtedly long report. "If you have any related files, send them to my omni-tool as well."

She shakes her head. "No files. I had to replace my omni-tool, and I guess they wipe your account in the cloud when -" She makes a face. She's a long way from explaining Shepard's death. "I'll get to that."

Leaning back, she considers. Going in completely chronological order would mean leaving him in the dark about the Reapers for a while before Shepard discovered the truth behind them - she should give him that context.

"There's a race of sentient machines called the Reapers that lived in dark space, emerging millions of years apart to wipe out organic life," she says. "It happened to the Protheans, and they're trying to do it to us. They're enormous, pack a lot of firepower, and they can control people without them knowing. Sovereign was their vanguard, and used Saren and the geth to search for the other end of the Conduit, a mass relay that links directly onto the Citadel, so the Reapers could come through. They tried to get its location from Prothean beacons like the one on Eden Prime."

Brooks usually paused to let her ask questions, so she'll do the same for these years of missed galactic history.

No files? There weren't a lot of circumstances where a Spectre's files would be wiped. He lets Shepard speak before trying to draw any conclusions though. If she's stopping to explain that later, then he can wait.

As Nihlus listens, his mandibles set themselves flat against his jaw, green eyes narrowed in a thoughtful frown. Now and again, his claws light up the type-pad.

It's almost too fantastical to believe. Would have been too fantastical to believe. Except he's just been teleported to Spirits knows where with a teleportation tech that didn't exist, onto a massive ship whose specs didn't match anything from any of the known race's fleets.

And Saren... He remembers the cold glow of his mentor's eyes, how the cybernetic implants had seemed more and more integrated with each meeting and then-

The burn marks start to itch again.

"The ship we saw on Eden Prime. Was that Sovereign then?" he asks when she pauses. Then he presses his mouth plates against the side of his hand and quietly adds, "And what do you mean by control people?"

Was Saren being controlled?

"That's right," she says, nodding. "Sovereign's not even the biggest, just the first. As for control..."

She folds her hands together. Brooks had told her about the research on indoctrination's effects, about how the man who had ordered both her creation and destruction had been indoctrinated.

"It's called indoctrination. Reapers can create energy fields around them to get into people's heads. Enough neural stimulation, and they can whisper in your head and make you do things. Eventually, you just become a mindless slave. Hardly anyone can resist it.

"But I do mean mindless," she adds. "The mental damage becomes too much to handle, and then they're useless to the Reapers. And Sovereign needed Saren to use the beacons."

How much should he believe? What reason would Shepard have to lie about something this vast?

And if she wasn't lying then how long has it been going on?

There'd been whispers on his network after all, ever since Saren had lost his arm. Small strands of information, sightings of his mentor's ship on odd worlds and stations on the edges of the Terminus System. The Geth had begun stirring from the Perseus Veil at that time, but he hadn't think to see a link between them then.

"Did they find the Conduit?"

"They did. But so did I," she says, with a flash of her teeth. "Had to chase Saren across the galaxy for clues, found out he was trying to build a rachni army and a krogan army too, but I followed him through the Conduit and managed to stop him from tranferring control of the Citadel to Sovereign. The Citadel itself is a dormant mass relay to dark space, and the control system for the relay network, so that ruined the Reapers' usual invasion plans."

She pauses, and then adds, "The Council made me a Spectre so I'd have the authority to go after Saren, by the way." Shepard's would-have-been mentor would probably want to know that.

The more he hears the more surreal it feels. Saren working with an ancient synthetic life-form bent on destroying everyone. Saren using the Geth as troops. Saren trying to build Rachni and Krogan armies.

None of this sounded real. He's known Saren for ten years, how- how was he supposed to accept any of this?

"Appointed Spectre?" he asks numbly, plucking the question out of the chaotic whirlwind of thoughts. "The Council should have given you a replacement mentor, not appointed you to- they sent a rookie Spectre after Saren Arterius?"

For a moment, she looks at him in bewilderment at these suggestions, and then she scoffs.

"Why would they waste time finding a new mentor for the human Spectre they didn't really want, or bother assigning someone more experienced?" she asks. "The Council didn't believe in the Reapers until it was too late; they thought Saren was just building a geth army to go after human colonies - they don't care about us enough to send one of their own!"

It's a rare conclusion that she's come to mostly on her own. Brooks had given her the facts of Shepard's appointment as the first human Spectre, of the Council's refusal to help with the Collectors or, initially, on Earth. But she'd also taught her to read between the lines.

Nihlus takes in a deep breath and calms himself with the mental image of Sparatus getting strangled.

It occurs briefly to him that this could, in theory, be a ploy to turn him against Saren. But he remembers the Geth, remembers the alien dreadnought in the sky, the feeling of pure evil that it radiated. He remembers the rapport of a Spectre grade heavy pistol, deafening in its proximity.

And the more he thinks about it now, the more it's beginning to make sense that Saren would have offed him.

"I'm sorry that this happened," he says trying not to give into the urge to rub his face, but it's been too much of a day and he compromises, pressing the heel of his hand between his brow plates to stem the oncoming headache. "They should never have left you to fight Saren without the resources of a mentor to draw from. Your first trial should not have been going up against someone with thirty years of experience behind them. Their blatant disregard for the safety of human colonies by refusing you proper assistance is horrific."

It really was. Even from a purely political standpoint, the Council's choices were borderline idiotic. The Geth army alone should have signaled a threat to all of Council space, not just humanity.

"I was promised resources by both the Hierarchy and the Council once I'd chosen you as my candidate. It was supposed to be a sign of goodwill between our species and furthering reparations," the Spectre explains quietly. "The fact that it wasn't honored after my death is... disconcerting."

What strings did Saren pull to get this? Worse yet, did he have to pull any strings at all?

"Well, I got the job done, so I obviously didn't need a mentor anyway," she snaps. "Even got humanity a Council seat after the Alliance lost a third of three separate fleets saving the Destiny Ascension from the geth."

Still scowling, she leans back, partially to cool down and partially to let the rest of what he said catch up to her. One: Strange but nice for an alien to agree that the Council did humanity wrong. Two...

"You chose me?" She'd known the Alliance had been putting Shepard up for consideration, but not that her would-be mentor had personally chosen her. All she knew about Nihlus was that he was supposed to be Shepard's mentor but he'd died at the hands of Saren.

What's it like to be Shepard, to be chosen for something special and not have the person who chose you deliberately abandon you once it became inconvenient? What's so different about them?

"Well, yes. A Spectre candidate will be shadowed for at least a year before the decision is made on whether or not to appoint them." Outside of some 'special' circumstances, apparently. "I was one of the few Spectres open for mentorship who was willing to take on a human. Considering how long we were going to work together and the kinds of missions we'd be going on, I was the one who set the parameters for what qualities the Alliance and Council would look for while they built a list of potential candidates."

Spectres, after all, knew what qualities would best make a Spectre. Shepard had been a candidate they'd been watching for a long while, but it was potentially disastrous just dropping a random candidate onto an unsuitable mentor. The entire fiasco with Anderson and Saren was a shining example of everything that could go wrong and one of the reasons why the older Spectre hadn't taken on another candidate until Nihlus.

... Spirits, Saren...

It all comes crashing down on him all of a sudden. It's barely been an hour since his arrival. He hadn't harbored a single thought about his mentor being a traitor until he'd stumbled out of the Ingress, stunned and helplessly terrified in a way he hadn't been in years.

"... What happened after the Conduit?" he manages quietly. There's an odd, sickly grayness to the skin on his neck all of a sudden.

It's more than she ever thought she'd learn about the process of becoming a Spectre. Shepard was already one; Brooks hadn't bothered with more than what had happened to her, and they'd assumed that Brooks would be with her if she was ever in a position to end up mentoring a new (human) Spectre.

She'd assumed Brooks would stay.

The question gives her something to focus on, old knowledge instead of new or painful.

"I killed Saren," she says, and moves on before Nihlus can dwell on his old mentor. "The Alliance and Citadel fleets destroyed Sovereign. The Council offered humanity the chance to become a Council race and said we'd
unite against the Reapers, I wanted to look for a way to defeat them... But the Council backed down. They didn't want to panic anyone, announced Sovereign was just Saren's ship and the geth were under Saren's sway, and hell if the Alliance would rock the boat. I was assigned to mop up remaining geth outposts instead."

The Council was blind. If they'd gone after a way to stop the Reapers as soon as Shepard had told them, the Reaper War wouldn't have been nearly as bad, and Shepard probably wouldn't have been killed on a routine mission. She wouldn't have been made.

"They sent me out one day to an area where a lot of ships had been disappearing, and the Normandy was attacked... I was spaced." She pauses for dramatic effect, and then says, "And that's why they wiped my files."

Nihlus doesn't let himself dwell on Saren's death. The chaotic surge of emotions gets shoved away into a tidy little box and stuffed into a dusty little corner of his mind.

He still looks a bit sick though. The Council throwing Saren under the transporter to keep the peace grays him just a little further but he doesn't interrupt her.

Leaning back in his chair, he exhales very, very quietly, taking in the information, sorting through it, looking for any cracks or inconsistencies. It's still very... fantastical. But it's not any less fantastical than his current situation and Shepard was the only link to the world he knows, suspicious behavior or not.

"... I get the strange impression that your story doesn't end there."

His slightly sickened look goes studiously ignored. She has no idea what a turian slowly turning another color means, doesn't care, and doesn't want to haul him back to the medbay.

"It should have," she says quietly, for a moment every bit as tired as the real Commander must be by now. If Shepard's story had ended there, hers would have never started. "But a human supremist terrorist group, Cerberus, acquired my body and brought me back to life. Some... miracle of credits and science over two years. They rebuilt the Normandy, too. There was a new threat abducting human colonies out in the Terminus Systems, and the Alliance wasn't doing anything about it: Cerberus saw my work during the Eden Prime War - what the media and the codexes called our mission in '83 - and decided I was the person to handle it."

She rests her chin on her hands, looking over him. Brooks had mentioned the Collectors had been working for a while before starting in on Shepard and on whole colonies. "Have you heard of the Collectors?" Someone evidently as well informed about the world as Nihlus certainly might have.

Trust a supremacy group to pull together the funding to bring back a very specific person from death. Interesting that they would choose that over spending it on gathering resources to deal with the problem themselves. Even more interesting that they would choose Shepard out of all of humanity, although considering her background... perhaps it was not too surprising.

At the question, Nihlus tilts his head slightly.

"Funny thing, that," he says with a shrug. "Where I grew up, the Collectors were the kinds of spooky stories some scarred up old Asari'd tell to any kids they could round up. I know a few merc groups tend to talk about them like they talk about winning some kind of messed up, people selling lottery."

"Sounds like them," she says with a nod. Though Brooks hadn't gone into people buying specifics (Shepard probably didn't know about it), it sounds pretty in character for those monsters. "The Collectors were the ones taking our colonies. Turns out they were Reaper-rewritten Protheans, probably taking an interest in humanity after we managed to defeat Sovereign."

Of course they'd look into the upstart species that had taken on a Reaper, the geth, and won, saving those who had been in space far longer.

She doesn't have to fake her resentment of the Alliance for not acting, her disgust with Cerberus for turning to aliens despite being an organization of and for humans. Shepard, from all accounts, hadn't wanted to work with Cerberus; her own feelings about the group serve this well enough.

"The Alliance wouldn't let me re-enlist or even give me aid to take them on. So I had to work with Cerberus. Put together a team from the dossiers they gave me, flew through the Omega-4 relay to the Collector homeworld, wiped out their base." She makes a face. "They were taking our colonies as raw materials for some kind of human Reaper."

Nihlus' eyes dart briefly to side, mandibles tilted at odd angles in utter bafflement. He looks back at Shepard to try and spot any kind of humor in her face but the dead serious expression carried no hint of it.

"Okay," he manages in a small voice. "Reaper-rewritten Protheans and evil human meat machine. Alright."

Very, very carefully pushing the pad of his thumb against the space between his brow plates to stem the ever-growing headache, Nihlus quietly debates what to say next. Everything was getting more and more surreal and every word that Shepard was saying.... This was bordering the kind of weird dream conversations he'd have sometimes.

A really, really vivid dream conversation in a nightmare that he's not waking up from for some reason.

Despite the obvious toll the sheer, awful bizarrity the situation was beginning to have on him however, the Spectre quietly looks up a moment later.

"... Alright," he repeats quietly, hand falling away from his face. "Was the mission successful?"

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petridish - 2016-08-15 08:16 (UTC) - Expand

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