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!

---

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

[postictal]

Hate to be the guy to say this, but it's pretty much always like this.

[And boy, doesn't he sound stoked about that. Still, he finally offers the gun out properly again, this time with the flares.]

Here. You shoot the blue into the air if you need help, and the red if you think everyone should stay away for their own good. Or you just shoot someone who's bothering you to give them third degree burns. [My, that's a little blasé. But he says it so very dismissively.]

[shogis]

I hope it won't come to that....

[ she doesn't know how she'd feel about shooting someone? but..it's good to know, in any case. ]

Blue if I need assistance, red if people should stay away. Understood. Thank you, Tim-san.

[postictal]

[...again with the honorifics. At this point, he doesn't know how to explain that he doesn't think that he's necessarily earned those, and probably never will.]

[Man, he's just...not very good at this. Is he?]

You, uh...you okay?

[shogis]

I'm okay as I can be, all things considered.

[ aka not really, but we're going to do the best with what we have. probably. ]

There's a lot to take in. None of this feels real.

[postictal]

["That never really goes away," he almost says.]

[It's probably just him. Nothing about his life has felt real. Nothing about any of what he is feels...real. Just some fucking puppet, some thing that shouldn't - ]

[He lets it slide to the side. Forgotten.]

Yeah. I guess it's an adjustment. [So you lie about it until it sounds true.]

[shogis]

[ hifumi understands some of that sentiment. she knows what it's like to not know what's real, to question yourself and the life you've lead thus far. it may not be as extreme as his situation--not like she'd know that--but she's lived through lies and deceit for god knows how long. ]

It definitely will be. But...even so, I would like to help out however I can. If there's anything I can do...

[postictal]

You just got here.

[Just saying, usually it's the other way around.]

It's fine if you gotta take a minute.

[shogis]

I--alright. I got a little ahead of myself, there.

[ she frowns, placing the flare gun in her knapsack. ]

Can I at least ask where the best place to start is?

[postictal]

[Tim finally digs the lighter out of his pocket, sparking the tip of his cigarette to life with a slow, bracing drag. He's been going through the equivalent of a pack a day since this Umui shit's started. His lungs won't thank him for it.]

[He's had respiratory problems since he was a kid. A few more hardly make a difference.]

What do you know about this place so far?

[shogis]

[ she watches as he lights his cigarette, but doesn't protest or argue against it. smoking common--declining in recent years, but still common nevertheless. ]

I know about the Storyteller and the mana pools, mostly. And I've gotten caught up to speed with the discoveries you've all made about this island.

[postictal]

[He probably should've asked anyway. Whoops.]

Well, sounds like you've got the basics. There's houses on these islets off of the mainland - Ensō, which is where everyone stays when there aren't other islands popping up all over the map.

[shogis]

Ah. So there is some sort of housing...

[ she was under the impression they were all just straight up living in the wilderness or something ]

[postictal]

[Well, some of them certainly are.]

It's not perfect, but it's better than what we had our first month. Most of 'em are...habitable now, I guess.

[shogis]

That's alright. I'm just grateful that we have somewhere to stay.

[ honestly after waking up where she did, everything else sounds exponentially nicer ]

What was it like during your first month?

[postictal]

Most of us slept in the temple.

[It's offhand, like it's not really a big deal. Which, to him, it wasn't. It was still better than sleeping in his car.]

I'm pretty sure the Storyteller only bothered to get us houses to try and get us off their turf.

[shogis]

Well, it worked out in your favor in the end, didn't it?

[ she gives him a small smile. ]

Um... Tim-san, if I may ask... How long have you been here, exactly?

[postictal]

[He stops - has to think about it. That's the thing about him and time, see. It's got this infuriating fucking habit of not syncing up with him very well at all. He's lost time, he knows he has, but people have helpfully been keeping track of the time for him.]

[They arrived in August. Since then...]

[He sweeps his hair out of his face - getting long again, because cutting it is generally the last thing on his mind.]

I think today makes it a year.

[shogis]

[ her stomach drops. ]

A...a year?

[ her voice is quivering, her eyes are wide, and she just looks incredibly uneasy, now. ]

[postictal]

Not counting the time I spent somewhere else? Yeah.

[Not counting the time he spent dead, apparently, adrift in some empty, timeless void until such a time that he washed up on these shores.]

I guess longer than that, if you count the Castle.

[shogis]

This is...

[ god. she's metaphorically scrubbing her face. ]

Concerning, to say the least. I'm sorry that you've been stuck here for so long...

[postictal]

Don't be.

[It's better than where he was. Where he was happened to be Alabama, and no one really wants to live in Alabama.]

It's not always bad.

[shogis]

Is it...really?

[ life in the wilderness sounds pretty bad to her, but... ]

[postictal]

We all look out for each other. More or less.

[He says "more or less" because, yeah, not everyone does. Some people are a little too focused on their own shit to bother being productive.]

[shogis]

That's good. I'm happy to hear that there's a supportive community here. Still... I'd like to find a way home.

[ as horrible as it was. ]

[postictal]

Can't help you there. Sometimes people disappear, but we don't know if they actually go home.

[They're not exactly around to confirm it. Yeah, that's probably fucking terrifying to people who aren't Tim, who's just so emotionally deadened to all this shit that it feels like nothing really touches him anymore.]