lifeaftr | August Intro: You Think...You Wink...You Do A Double Blink...

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August Intro: You Think...You Wink...You Do A Double Blink...

INTRO LOG: AUGUST

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr.
When: August 3rd
Where: Ensō
Warnings: Mark as needed!

Part I: Get Wrekt
You rouse to a splash of sea salt drying on your skin. A haze of glass-white sand glitters in your vision, dappled by lush palms and thick, curling foliage that disappears into a jungle of deep jade. From behind, crackling wood and sawing rope groan from a mangled life raft ran ashore. A petering wash of tide over pebbled sand fills your ears as you struggle to gain your bearings in a vast portrait of tropical color…

No...no, no, that’s not precisely how this story starts.

Why don't we start over?

You rouse to a splash of sea salt, spraying across yourself and the wooden floor beneath you as it breaks across the edge of the platform. The light as it dances across the sea is blinding, dappling white spots across your vision as you slowly come back to consciousness and realize that - this is not where you last remember being.

The middle of the ocean is likely not a place most recall being at all. As you struggle to fully comprehend the new scenario in which you have found yourself, three things become quickly apparent. The raft you find yourself upon barely constitutes as something that should float, never mind a boat. In the distance, perhaps a few hours away at most, a large island beckons to you, a wide strip of beach surrounded by cliffs making it very clear where the most fortuitous of directions shall be.

Lastly, of course, you’re not alone. Hopefully your new companion(s) are just as keen to get ashore before nightfall as you, or voyaging together will not be the most positive experience. At your side you will find a knapsack, one to every member of your raft party, and upon inspecting its contents, you will discover any rewards you may have accrued - as well as a few other items to give you a fighting chance.

A note to those who participated in the Test Drive Meme: those threads, if all parties involved would like, can be game canon in the form of dream-like memories involving a place very much like this one, though the layout is considerably different.

Part II: Choose Your Own Adventure

By fortune (or misfortune, as it were), you eventually find your feet meeting sand, blessed shore to stagger upon as you shake off your newly found sea-legs. There are those that may find this place familiar, as though it appeared in a dream, though the expanse of shore certainly seems larger. The beach stretches off into the distance on both sides, curving around sharp ridges and cliffs, mist obscuring the view the farther along it goes.

So here you are. You’ve found land. Company. Supplies. The sun is now beginning to trek rather low upon the horizon…spending the night outside in such an unfamiliar land is unappealing at best and outright dangerous at the worst.

There is one silver lining in the midst of this mess. Directly ahead, the beach curves up a gentle slope until it meets forest, some manner of building visible through the trees. Further exploration of this area will reveal a dilapidated building of sorts; the architecture is indiscernible to even the most skilled eye. Despite looking as if it has seen better days, there are areas that offer some form of shelter...and who knows what else. Just because it appears uninhabited doesn’t mean you won’t wind up pleasantly, or unpleasantly, surprised.

So what shall you do from here, traveller? There is land to be explored, strangers to meet, friends to reunite with. Supplies to inspect and plenty of questions in need of being said aloud. Choose your path, make haste, and above all else: survive. And whatever you will, take heart.

Your story is about to begin anew.

Feeling a tad adrift? Make sure to check the Locations Page, which has details regarding the starting areas and a handy map for those who feel better with a bird's eye view!

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A "guy" who does what besides space out, make decent compost, and not die all the time?

[ She's trying to be friendly here, but it's not easy when he's not giving her much to work with besides space-case compost king. ]

[She's not exactly wrong to be wary. HE IS A LIAR. He always has been. Untrustworthy on every level it is possible to be untrustworthy, with little room for exception. He shrugs. He's learned a little, in his time at Sol, and among that which he's come away the wiser for is knowing when it's safer and simpler to not explain yourself if you don't choose to.]

Guess I'm just talented.

It sounds like you're just being uncooperative.

[ Weiss doesn't quite understand his behavior. She'd learned not to trust anyone a long while ago in Atlas. It was at Beacon that she'd learned to trust again, then she had to fight the urge to withdraw into herself entirely again when she'd been forced back. Teamwork didn't happen with those who didn't share, and those who couldn't unite against a problem didn't succeed. That's what she'd learned.

And Tim was just being a pain in the you-know-what about this, and her expression said as much. ]

[That's another reaction he's come to anticipate. Not easy to work with, that Tim Wright - but paranoia as far as his reliability is concerned is a good thing. Sooner she learns not to trust a word he says, the better.]

Didn't realize we were doing team sign-ups.

[ Weiss rolls her eyes at him, but she'll at least bother explaining, gesturing as if she's handing him the answer to his problems while she does. ]

I may not be an expert and most of my knowledge regarding compost was obtained while telling classmates to play Compost King away from me while I was studying, but I at least know that compost takes a while to make. I have my doubts you're going to be able to trade it for some time. You must have gotten a sack filled with a tent, an unlimited amount of those fire beads, food for months, and a water filter if you're anticipating being able to survive without anyone else's assistance and apparently nothing to offer.

[He lifts his shoulders in an almost infinitesimal shrug, his gaze locking onto the warming fire. His clothes are starting to feel a little less damp, at least. Eventually, he'll be able to move on. Running from his problems, as he's best at.]

[There's a bristling plethora of appropriately caustic retorts he could dish out in turn. None of them appeal to him.]

Guess so.

[ Yeah, this guy is a lost cause. It almost disappoints Weiss that there's not a third person in this conversation to vocalize that to. Instead she'll stick with a dirty look in his direction. It's obvious that she's not happy about getting nothing. There aren't a ton of people here- they don't have much of a choice in who they have to work with. ]

Are you always this chatty?

[Turns out being on the run from a faceless monster for years doesn't do wonders for your social skills. Not that he was particularly gifted in that area to start with. Never got much of what doctors would call developmental socialization.]

[He hums his acknowledgment of that sour remark, apparently unperturbed.]

Yeah. I'm the real life of the party.

Do you like to read?

[ Maybe if she asks more pointed yes-or-no questions he'll start answering. At this point his answers are just making her want to get more out of him. ]

[A shrug, noncommittal. If he's picked up on what she's trying to do, he's resolved not to show it. He's not what you'd call a particularly fast or skilled reader - he was slow to pick up what he could, and never finished college - but it's one of those things he'd sure like to do more of someday.]

[Not that she's going to get that sort of answer. Instead, what Weiss gets is:]

Got nothing against it personally.

Alright, do you have nothing against fiction or non-fiction more?

[ She's going to crack his code!! Mostly out of sheer stubbornness at this point, she isn't even sure she wants to know. ]

[No more codes. Please.]

[At this point, he's pretty sure she's clinging on out of pure stubbornness, which is a feat in and of itself. Jay would be proud.]

[He stops thinking about Jay.]

...I dunno. Never had a preference, I guess.

Do you like to learn or escape reality?

[ The same question, rephrased for cause rather than function. She's obviously starting to get huffy about it if the impatient tone of her voice is anything to go by. ]

No.

[That is to say, neither. Escape reality - as if he could. He's done both too little and too much of that in his life, and it's not served him well.]

[As for learning, that's a pipe dream. And nothing more.]

Why are you interested?

We're stuck on an island together for potentially a very long time.

[ And part of her wants to remind herself not to close herself off, to trust others, and Tim's making it very hard. ]

So whether you're a pest or not, we're going to be seeing each other.

And I'm still not really sure why you think learning my reading preferences of all things - [He drags the words out, slow and heavy and skeptical, coupled with a meaningful lift of the eyebrows.]

- is gonna do anything for you in the long run.

If you're a learner, you're going to grow and develop your skills which makes you more useful than someone who's just going to pretend this isn't happening and focus on something else. But!

[ She punctuates it by pointing at his head accusingly. This is clearly where the problem is. ] I also thought it might be easier for you to process if I gave you what should've been an easy question.

[Oh, okay. So they've moved on to oblique insults as to his intelligence - insults he can't and won't contradict. He's not and never will be quantifiable as a gifted and talented youth. Why pretend otherwise?]

I dunno what to tell you. Never did a lot of reading growing up.

[Hospitals aren't child-friendly environments that foster a healthy development of that sense. Who knew?]

You couldn't start once you were? As soon as I had the opportunity to do new things they were typically some of the first things I tried. [ She didn't always succeed, but that was one thing Weiss always did: try. Reading quite luckily wasn't one of the things she hadn't been allowed to do, and some things it certainly took some warming up to, but there were all kinds of experiences that helped her find who she wanted to be. She doesn't know what Tim's circumstances are but she can't imagine not wanting to read when she had the chance. ]

Kinda hard to find time to do something like that when you're working just to pay rent.

[No butlers and no free textbooks in Alabama, unfortunately. Just a long list of people who wouldn't hire him for how flaky he could be, and a medical file that could probably pass as a textbook in some respects.]

[ She looks like she's considering what to say to that. She's not going to argue- she knows she hasn't had that experience yet. She was right on her way to finding out if she couldn't find her sister, and she had no doubt that her sister would tell her to stand on her own two feet, just like she encouraged her to do the last time she had no money. But she's never been in a circumstance without anything yet. ]

I suppose that's fair. [ There's a beat, before she shares: ] My bank account was frozen some time ago, but my school still provided housing and food as long as we were students. I'm afraid I've only actually been on my own for a few days, so I don't have an argument.

[ She shifts uncomfortably, the suitcase she's seated on glinting in the fire when she moves. She's not sharing much more than that, but it isn't hard to put two and two together. ]

[Huh.]

[That raises his eyebrows in apparent surprise. He'd halfway been expecting her to stubbornly push the point just because she could, and her cession of the argument was an unexpected novelty.]

[Unfortunately, it also means she's brand new at this. With, he's pretty sure, not nearly as low a threshold for weird shit as Tim's achieved over the years.]

On your own for the first time?

In a manner of speaking. I've been away from Father and Klein before, but it was with professors and friends.

[ And her mother barely counted as a presence. ]

Suffice to say I have everything I own with me that wasn't lost to the ocean floor upon arrival.

[ Which is probably pretty strange considering she's wearing sapphires and silver. She's not exactly the standard runaway. ]

[No clue who Klein is, but based on the offhand way she mentions them, he's guessing a friend or guardian of some sort. Not so surprising; she seems like she's probably more well-off than anyone else he's met.]

Hold onto it as long as you can, then. Might be all you get for a while.

[ She wasn't sure if he meant back home or here, but Weiss considered that it may apply in both situations. She already had been nervous being cut off when she was still at school. There was a knot in her stomach that kept telling her that she wouldn't be able to do this on her own, deep-seated from being told for years that everything she was worth was because of her father-- often directly from him, whenever she had tried to push the boundaries beyond his predictions, then eventually broke free entirely. ]

There's nothing more like a fresh start than some place no one knows anything about you.

[ She hadn't wanted a fresh start- she'd wanted to repair her name, to overcome her father's "legacy" and make things right. She'd wanted to do the right thing, to protect people and become the type of person people wouldn't speak about with loathing in their voice. But a fresh start would have to do- it was the only option at this point, and Weiss was nothing if not adaptable. She could build her name into something positive instead of change it. She could still make a difference, she just.. needed to figure out how.

So this is square one. ]

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