lifeaftr | June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

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June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

INTRO LOG: JUNE

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr as the island of Ziziphus begins to crumble
When: June 4th and onward
Where: Ziziphus and Ensō...and Monsun
Warnings: Mark as needed!

Ziziphus: At The Start Of The End Of The World
Since Bliss's destruction, the extensive root network they've threaded throughout every inch of the island of Ziziphus has begun to crumble. June 4th marks the beginning of the inevitable collapse of the island as it starts to sink into the sea...coincidentally coinciding with the arrival of LifeAftr's newest adventurers. Between the dead trees surrounding Bliss's empty husk, great cracks in the earth start to widen, the dead god's absent root system leaving vast gaps underground which simply cannot support the life above.

It almost sounds like thunder rupturing from the ground itself, wild tremors preceding each vicious boom until gaping chasms lay between venturing parties and the safety of the mana pool - only water waits below, for those unlucky enough to lose their footing.

And if the immense pull of mile wide chunks of landmass sinking beneath the waves isn't enough to suck you down, the heavy rain of debris from Ziziphus's rapidly destabilizing edges will certainly help. Want to avoid a watery grave? What you need to do is simple:

Escape.

Sorry, newbies. If you showed up on Ziziphus, you're in for a very athletic entrance to LifeAftr.

Monsun: Just Like Every Other Morning Before
Adventurers aren't the only creatures on Ziziphus attempting to outrun its collapse. Creatures great and small, from the largest spindlank to the smallest tigerlily will be heading south in an attempt to escape the worst of the quakes. Unlike offshore adventurers, however, these poor creatures don't have a mana pool waiting for them to escape through. Their extinction, it seems, is imminent.

Unless you have something to say about it.

Already exhausted from their attempts to get through to and then actively dispose of their fellow god, the Storyteller will break their traditional manner of communication to announce a potential solution to this problem with a single broadcast to the Stones of Far Speech in a strained, weary tone:

"The mana pools on Monsun are now open. If you are willing, save what you can."

True to their word, characters will discover that the island of Monsun will be accessible once more for a short period of time. From prey to predator, obstruction to catastrophe - multiple species of flora and fauna can still be preserved, should you choose to do so.

Be wary of the psychological effects of both sides of the island. Those who are new to our setting and wish to explore, the island of Monsun has a peculiar side effect to its stark divide: the eastern half is rich in resources, but brings out the very worst of you, while the western half is a tumultuous wasteland that accentuates your best qualities. More information on said island can be found on its entry on the Locations page, or its introductory info post.

Due to these efforts, the Storyteller will not be available for contact from the 4th to the 18th of June. Item Requests will also be unavailable at this time. They will, however, make a rather strained announcement to ensure all are aware that access to both Ziziphus and Monsun will cease on June 10th.

Ensō: I Wonder What It Means If It's Gone
The native fauna of Ziziphus aren't the only ones on the move, it seems. Those who wander the shores of Ensō will be delighted to witness the appearance of creatures akin to both turtles and dugongs drifting through the waters, gravitating around the island's eastern coast, rapidly gaining in numbers over the following days.

Kaleidoshells have been unlocked in the bestiary!

With spring close to ending in the archipelago, these peaceful creatures are looking to make good use of their natural nesting areas; hope you're open to sharing the beach for a little while. While a few braver individuals will make their way to the shores between C4 and D1 to begin digging nests, the vast majority won't be coming to shore quite yet.

They do, however, make a very fine sight around the waters of Ensō, especially in the evening. Luminescent, their rainbow patterns glow underwater, drifting mood lights for the increasingly warmer evening breeze.

All new arrivals will awake with knapsacks, their names stitched to the front. The contents of said knapsacks can all be found in your acceptance notices!

As a final note to those who participated in the Test Drive Meme, bear in mind that 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.

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 )

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[Cheers, he'll drink to that, bro. Or he would, if they had any liquor. Metaphorical toast in solidarity.]

[Wash huffs a noise out behind his visor. It's not quite a laugh, not quite a snort, but more a hum of bitter agreement. Fuck Freelancer. Fuck every part and parcel of it, and every shattered remnant it left behind. Himself included.]

Would you believe it's still making trouble for us, years after the fact?

I wish I could say no.

[ But she can't. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to believe. ]

I went over a thousand years into the future and still couldn't escape it.

[ Not with the Counselor there. Not with her fear of failure, of not measuring up, still hanging over her head. ]

And I wish I could say that surprised me.

[The Counselor. Fuck. He always managed to weasel his way out of consequences. Disappeared off the face of the fucking planet. And when he finally pops up again, it's to slip between the cracks.]

I guess that's the reason we've managed to stick around. [It's one of the great principles upon which their universe is fucking founded: nothing is certain but death and Project Freelancer.]

[ She snorts, raising an eyebrow. Really, Wash? ]

Speak for yourself. Freelancer killed me, remember?

[He spoke out of turn. He knows it. Still the rookie who makes things worse every time he opens his mouth.]

[She knew him when he was best. When he did dumb things like drink out of curly straws and ride the curves of the MoI hallways on the back of a skateboard. Before the bunched mass of keloid at the base of his skull became the central fucking tenet of his existence.]

It killed itself, too. You were part of that.

I know.

[ That's one benefit to coming back to life years after your death. You get to see what your sacrifice actually accomplished. ]

It's just...not how I imagined things happening, I guess.

How were you imagining them?

[Turn in the evidence to the authorities, and wash your hands of it? He'd had a similar idea, once upon a time, but he hadn't been operating under the illusion that the authorities would be any more morally upstanding than the man he planned to condemn.]

[But then, that was a question of having the right context.]

I thought...

[ Well. She'd thought she'd live, for one thing. At least, she'd hoped she would. But she hadn't been naive enough to bet on that, even back then. ]

I thought if I couldn't get the message out, then he would. And if both of us failed...I left a copy behind. For Agent Texas.

[ Not for Wash, not because she didn't trust him, or believe he was strong enough to go up against Freelancer. But for Tex, because if any of them was going to believe her, if any of them had a reason to be angry about the truth behind the Program, angry enough to do something about it, it was her. ]

That was supposed to be enough.

[ The end of the Project, one way or another. Not this. Not the aftereffects dragging on for years, leaving Wash traumatized and most of the rest of them dead. ]

It almost was.

[If they hadn't already sheared off Epsilon - ahead of schedule - and found it a match - A long memory. Look at that, you've got me talking about repressed memories now. - maybe it would have worked as planned.]

She fought like hell to get him out of there. To bring it all down.

...'course, they told us she went rogue.

[ Almost. It's always almost, isn't it? Your plan almost worked. You almost survived that fight with Tex and Carolina. You almost sabotaged Dudely's equipment without being caught, almost made it to the end of the round with Varric and the rest of them...

Almost on the leaderboard.

Almost. ]

Of course they did.

[ And it was kind of true, wasn't it? ]

How long was it until you found out?

I was outta commission for a long time.

[Certified Article 12. He wakes up, and Freelancer is gone. He wakes up, and his best friends are off the grid. The Dakota twins, rogue. York? Also rogue, and a known affiliate to Agent Texas.]

[Agent Carolina declared K.I.A.]

[Agent Maine...unknown.]

[The fucked up thing: he can't actually remember if any of them came to find him once the shit hit the fan. The slightly less fucked up thing: that he can't tell if it would be worse if they hadn't bothered.]

[The most fucked up thing: he wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't.]

I got the story in pieces, and I'm still not sure how much of it is true.

[ It's not surprising to hear that he'd been out of it, and she nods.

CT would have come to find him. She would have gotten him out. Would have tried to help him, as best she could, even if she was terrified and lost and hopelessly underqualified to do so.

But of course, she'd been dead.

She's quiet, for a long, long moment. ]

...you were supposed to have Iota.

Iota.

[In another version of the same universe, maybe he would have gotten Iota. Maybe Carolina never lobbied for two A.I. fragments, or maybe she never had to give up Sigma, or maybe tiny incremental quantum shifts ensured that Carolina was never so consumed with competitive envy that she would relinquish her place on the leaderboard without fighting like hell to regain it.]

It's better that it was me, C.T. It's...

[A long memory. The ability to pull the shards of himself tight and knot them together and recontextualize and compartmentalize and think and lock himself into a holding pattern until such a time that he could splinter off with enough force to break Freelancer beneath the overwhelming gut-fuck pressure of it.]

[He smiles. It aches with the unevenness of it.]

Better me than anyone else.

[ She shakes her head, stepping closer, eyes bright with the hint of unshed tears and fixed on him as she does. Doesn't he get it? ]

It wouldn't have been 'anyone else,' Wash.

[ She knows. She'd studied the files, the plans, counted her way down the leaderboard, through the Director's unassigned fragments. The half-assembled implantation schedule.

Agent Washington. (Iota. Happiness, to counter Wash's anxiety, his occasional lack of confidence. To complement his naive, optimistic nature.)

Agent South Dakota. (Eta. Fear, to balance her aggressive, competitive nature. To curb her tendency to take unnecessary risks.)

Agent Connecticut.

The next Freelancer. Never ranked on the leaderboard, but a part of the core mission team, nonetheless. Never in the top eight, but always above the next forty.

And Epsilon. The next fragment. ]

If it was anyone...It would have been me, Wash.

I think...it was supposed to be me.

[The angle of his head-tilt, the abrupt and lateral force of his gaze, is so intent that it feels like a violence in and of itself. They paired the fragments based on their agents, partnered over a mesh of personality matrices.]

[It made sense that it would have been him. A long memory. An ability to annex and repress and adapt and loop around, against all fucking odds.]

[But C.T. - she asked questions. She ventured things that no one else dared to, even if she didn't always necessarily expect a straight answer. Competition was encouraged between Freelancers, sideways and brutal, because the last thing they needed was any of them talking to each other. The last thing they needed was anyone getting too curious about transmissions coming from inside the MoI.]

[If they meant to give her the tools of the Project's destruction...]

[Or maybe they simply meant to ravage her beyond repair, and do away with all her questions with it.]

How do you figure?

I was next in line, wasn't I?

[ CT starts to pace, staring at the ground. ]

I checked, Wash. Do you think I didn't check before I left? You were scheduled for Iota. South was supposed to have Eta. And then there was one more of us, one more of his little team that had never had an AI.

[ Unless he assigned Epsilon to Carolina, instead. But she thinks he'd liked seeing her without an AI, been interested in the experiment. How did his formerly number-one agent cope with having that extra edge and then losing it again? ]

Besides. It fit. Or he would have thought it did. Agent Connecticut asks too many questions? Well, we'll give her all the answers, more than she ever asked for, and see if we can shut her up for good.

[ She glances up at him again, her tone soft and somber. ]

See if they could break me.

[That was the plan. It just never really played out that way; plans never do.]

So when Carolina asked for two...it was a perfect opportunity to see what would happen.

[As Delta said; what would happen if an agent ran with two fragments. What would happen if one Dakota twin was railroaded into denial of a fragment of her own. She's right. It makes too much sense, the way Gamma synced up perfectly with Wyoming. The way Theta complimented North's personality far too easily.]

[The thought of her breaking down the way he did, screaming, synapses open-firing in a cascade of memory purging into him and purging him, it grits his teeth until the ache in the beds of his gums.]

If Epsilon was slotted for you, then I'm glad you left when you did. Jesus, Connie.

[It slips out.]

[It always slips out.]

[ The nickname doesn't even faze her. Not anymore. Among other things, she's grown up. She doesn't worry so much about measuring up, about something so inconsequential as a name making her sound too young and inexperienced.

She worries about other things now. ]

So that he could go to you, instead?

[ She isn't being fair, she knows. Even if she'd stayed, it wouldn't have changed anything. Carolina would still have claimed both AI. Wash would still have been next on the list.

But it had still hit her like a punch in the gut, to learn that Wash had gotten Epsilon and she hadn't even been there. Hadn't even known. ]

That was never supposed to happen to you, Wash. You were never supposed to -

[ Turn into this. ]

...I would never have left you there, if I'd known.

I'm not dead yet.

[A cocktail of paranoid and crazy and someone else's memories slurried all throughout in multicolored streaks, but hey, he's alive.]

Being slotted for Epsilon is one of the only reasons I'm still alive. [Not that I always wanted to be.] It's one of the only reasons that Freelancer got put into the fucking ground like it was always supposed to.

That was the cost.

[Better that it was him who paid it. Him, and not C.T., who already paid the last price in the form of Tex putting a hatchet through her.]

I know.

[ Maybe that's enough. Maybe she's making too big a deal out of it. Wash had survived, and so many of them...hadn't. Herself included.

But she remembers what Church had told her about what happened, remembers how Wash had been in that field with the flowers. Remembers how his first act here had been to demand proof that it was really her, and his second had been to hold her at gunpoint until she could prove it for good. The goofy, naive, optimistic Wash she knew is gone, and the jaded, paranoid, ex-Article Twelve soldier in his place is someone that, more often than not, she barely recognizes. ]

It shouldn't have been.

[ She shakes her head. ]

I never meant for anyone else to pay.

[ That's why she'd taken the risk in the first place. Committed a crime of her own - desertion, treason - and betrayed her trust in her friends, knowing she'd likely never win it back. To put a stop to it. So that no one else would have to. ]

That wasn't something you had control over.

[It's not pointed, or edged, or even remotely sharpened.]

Maybe you didn't get them, all of them, in one swing. But you were the start of it. You were the reason everything began to fall apart. [She didn't shatter Freelancer from its foundations, not in the moment, but she did throw a stone, and the ripples still haven't stopped shivering.]

[That's everything, Connie.]

[Maybe, now, it is.]

[ He keeps saying that, and she knows it's true. It had even seemed like enough, when the Counselor had first told her. Project Freelancer is over. The Director is dead. Her goal, seen to completion. Did the rest of it really matter?

She hadn't thought so, then. But that was before she had seen the aftermath for herself. Seen Wash, and what he'd been through. Years spent picking up the pieces, cleaning up after Freelancer in the worst way possible. Changed forever by Epsilon's implantation. ]

...I'm tired, Wash.

[ Tired in general, and tired of this. She scrubs her eyes with one hand. ]

I thought I was finally free of it all.

Out of the frying pan and into the shit.

[It occurs to him only after he's said it that he hasn't thought about Four-Seven-Niner in - a while. It also occurs to him that he doesn't recognize the association that coils in the base of his chest cavity, constricting like a fist around his heart.]

[It takes him a moment to recognize it as the absence of grief.]

[He's too certain of the fates of too many of his old teammates, and the lack of knowing what happened to Four-Seven aches. It aches in the way working an old muscle aches, after years of neglect.]

Yeah.

[ Her lips quirk up a little in somber recognition of the joke. One more lost friend.

She almost asks after Four-Seven-Niner, and then...doesn't. What good would it do, to hear if she'd died, too? ]

[He lets the unvoiced question linger and then peter out. Rouses himself, straightening. Like the friendly, affirming clap of Carolina's hand to his shoulder or the side of his face, the right-handed weariness in her reassurance: you're good.]

Come on.

Let's see if we can find your fiancé.

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June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

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