August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

[lifeaftr_mods]

INTRO LOG: AUGUST

Who: New arrivals, and you!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: August 4th and onward
Where: Primarily Umui, though Ensō is also likely
Warnings: Mark as needed!

New Arrivals: Bury Me Alive
When you wake, it's initially to darkness: musty, stuffy, and dense. Your eyes may take some time to adjust, but when they do, something will rapidly become apparent - namely, the fact that you're underground. Exploring your surroundings will reveal a few more unnerving discoveries. Take, for example, the fact that you're currently trapped in what appears to be a number of buried houses, walls and ceilings compressed against one another thanks to time and pressure. The walls may have held up the weight of the soil above your head for a time, but it'd likely be best not to hold out hope that they'll continue to last. Your supply of air down here is rather limited, after all.

Unfortunately for you, it's not merely earth that separates you from the surface. It's also flowers in rich abundance - an untold, innumerable weight of dead and decaying plant matter, twined around the ancient bones strewn underground along with your sweet self, pressing down from above, peeking through the cracks in the metallic folds of whatever material once comprised these buildings' ceilings, walls, and floors.

Whether it's a mass tomb or something more sinister, you'd better figure a way out, and quickly. If you didn't show up with a shovel or some means of teleporting yourself out, you may very well need to resign yourself to digging your way out or making a lot of noise to attract someone who can, before this becomes a more dedicated grave.

Everyone Else: All Will Change and Calcify
As for the rest of you, well...if you're anywhere near the regions of G5, you might hear the sounds of a not-insignificant number of people finding themselves displaced underground, and requiring your imminent assistance in getting out. Perhaps you'll recognize the place. It is, after all, very well marked. They'll probably be properly grateful if you mind offering the help, and hey - it's a welcome break from the eerie, ever-present silence that clouds almost the entirety of Umui. As long as you don't mind digging around that old cenotaph half-buried in the flowers and scraping through sheets of metal, a lot of flowers, and...oh, yes. The first bones you'd be finding since arriving here.

If you've been hanging around the laboratory near the island mana pool, on the other hand, you'll definitely be getting a break from the silence - namely in the form of ARUM-25, whom a number of you have been devoted to repairing since their discovery, learning that a great deal of their systems have come back online, right around the time that the newest arrivals are properly unearthed.

Including their diagnostic systems.

The warning, repeated shrills will undoubtedly be heard by anyone who passes:

ALERT: STAGE ONE DETECTED
ALERT: STAGE ONE DETECTED
ALERT: STAGE ONE DETECTED
ALERT: STAGE ONE DETECTED
ALERT: STAGE ONE DETECTED

And that's probably fine. Right?

---

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!

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LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

[yourattention]

[He stills. Being assigned a handler can only mean one thing and it's weird. It's weird how knowing he's going to die, but not immediately, is so different from just. Dying.]

What - what the fuck did you just say?

[aftrnpc]

[A soft ticking sound of processing judders in the center of their chest, and ARUM-25 grows still.]

I have not managed to turn off any automated subroutines. I apologize for the inconvenience.

[yourattention]

Can you just - [Connor makes an intensely frustrated noise. He's too stressed out for this.] What part of the island is that. If things were functioning as intended, where would Foli-55 land me?

[aftrnpc]

All new patients are issued guardian units upon arrival. That would have been yours.

[Would have been. The phrase is...grim.]

Physical organization of Overgrowth variants ceased after - after - a time. My memory circuits are incomplete.

[yourattention]

Okay. Great, of course. Nothing can ever just be - [Connor breathes in, and then out.] What variant is "Foli"? What kind of flowers?

[aftrnpc]

[Another sputtering hiss, and the snap back to something less personable, more defaulted, clipped and mechanical:]

Please indicate which of the following has been contracted:

ALSTROMERIACEAE
AMARYLLIDACEAE
APOCYNACAEA
AQUIFOLIACEAE
ARACEAE
ASPARAGACEAE
ASTERACEAE
ASTRAG-------

[A chime of ERROR cuts the list short.]

[yourattention]

Aquifoliaceae! Aquifoliaceae.

[Hanging out with Shion and Chara has brought (1) benefit and it's "heard so many fucking scientific plant names last month he barely even mangles this one when he says it.]

[aftrnpc]

AQUIFOLIACEAE. Holly family. Guardian designation FOLI. Currently in its 50th iteration.

cw: past suicide

[yourattention]

[Holly.

It was September when he'd walked to the park to die, but he remembered - he remembered they'd already put out Christmas decorations for sale in a few stores. He remembered putting that in the "pro" column, not having to see how far Christmas could creep up on him without warning. Holly Jolly Christmas his ass, honestly.]

Christmas just couldn't fucking wait this year, could it? What's the effect of Fluro on Aquifoliaceae?

[It's obviously not a specific medicine, otherwise it would have been marked more specifically, but he has like three jugs of it and he'll fucking drink them if it buys him more time. If that kills him more quickly, then so be it. At least he'll be in control of what's happening.]

[aftrnpc]

FLURO: Consumable herbicide. Can reduce secondary Stage One and Stage Two symptoms if consumed in moderation.

Increase in nausea likely.

[yourattention]

Define "in moderation."

[He is literally going to down a whole jug if the instructions here aren't specific enough.]

[aftrnpc]

[A hesitation. An attempt to access memories they no longer have, before they must at last fall to the same base programming as before. The same impersonal, automated tone that they have begun to resent for its lack of concern.]

Recommended dose is no more than eight ounces each day. Often less.

[yourattention]

Yeah, I'll take my chances. Dosage instructions? Like, am I supposed to take it all at once or just shots of it four times a day?

[He might ignore these instructions if he gets desperate enough but.]

[aftrnpc]

It is recommended that one consumes small amounts throughout the day, to minimize damage to internal organs and the risk of nausea.

[Isn't it nice that the means of slowing the illness down is just as likely to have the same effect as the illness itself?]

[yourattention]

[. . . This is literally like trying to treat your illness with cocaine, isn't it.]

Got it. What - no, you probably don't know that. [How to word this, how to word this.] How many research facilities exist on Umui and where are they located?

[aftrnpc]

Two of which I am currently aware. The Alpha Site, and the Beta laboratories.

Additional facilities for processing and refining floriocite are present on the island at [DATA CORRUPTED] coordinates.

[yourattention]

Okay, good. [Don't panic. Don't panic.] That's - not as great as it could be but whatever. I'm used to that.

Quick question, can you draw me a map?

[aftrnpc]

Motor faculties are improved but inexact.

[A moment. ARUM-25 looks away in a motion that seems almost reluctant, or perhaps guilty. Then - they look back.]

I can try.

[yourattention]

Trying is better than nothing.

[Connor rummages through his bag and pulls out his notebook, flipping through it until he's on a blank page and pulling a pen from his bun and holding both out.]</small Here.

[aftrnpc]

[ARUM-25 lowers to themself to the ground with the creaking of newly-repaired joints. Carefully, they take the pen in hand, and begin to sketch out a rough shape.]

[There are conspicuous blotches of blank page where they cannot recall the specifics; much of the lower part of the island is empty, but the silhouette is, for the most part, relatively exact.