lifeaftr | August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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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( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dude, there's nothing but bones down here! Why do you think I want to get out?

[ Nothing but dark and dank and bones and oh man.

Hunk gives his hair one last swipe to make sure there's no bone dust, resets his headband, then climbs back into the hole to go back to using his bayard as a shovel to get out of here ]

We haven't found any remains since we got here.

[This wouldn't be unheard of, considering they're in a grave of some kind, maybe - but atypical? Definitely. And this kind of deviation doesn't, he suspect, bode well.]

[He's right, one way or another. They need to get them out.]

All right, we're working on it. Just hold on.

Well, I know where they are!

[ Here, with him, with their creepy little bone hands and their eternally staring eye sockets-

Hunk shudders and keeps shoveling, working as fast as is possible while using a gun as a shovel.

Which isn't very, but it's better than just sitting there and waiting ]

Yeah, just hurry!

[Wash is probably rolling his eyes under his helmet. Like, ugh, he can't believe some people here don't want to be trapped underground with a bunch of old bones for company. How very fucking unreasonable.]

All right, all right, just give me a -

[There's a loud crunch overhead when Wash locates a weak point in the metal, rusted and decayed just enough to break underfoot. And then there's a louder noise of the metal giving utterly beneath his weight and pouring him straight through the ceiling and into the gravesite, raining dead flowers and clods of earth.]

[Meet Agent Washington: ex-Freelancer, once a highly trained elite military operative.]

[Now gracelessly faceplanted into the floor.]

...nice.

[ It almost sounds appreciative as Hunk sidles over, nudging the man with his foot.

Their armor almost looks the same- different colors and details, sure, but there's only so many ways armor can look, and this guy looks like his is almost as high tech as Hunk's own. ]

You okay? Didn't stab yourself with a femur?

I'm fine.

[Maybe a bit more brusque than it needs to be, but he's an incredibly badass military agent and he just made a great fucking first impression. Namely, a first impression on the floor, in the shape of his helmet and chest piece. Great start.]

[But he gets up quickly.]

At least we know the ceiling is weak.

Yeah, uh- the fact I could shoot through it was kinda proof enough?

[ Hunk sidles towards the hole that Wash had kindly punched his way through, with his body, like a gentleman ]

I'm just gonna-

[ He jerks his thumb towards the hole, then immediately turns and starts scrambling up towards the light. ]

Edited 2018-09-04 05:01 (UTC)

[Wash sighs, rolls his shoulders. Tilts his head back to watch Hunk clamber his way upward, and steadies himself to do the same.]

[It's not necessarily easy, but he makes it. Claws himself back out of the hole he made for himself, catches himself thinking - it's not a car, it's a cliff - and bites his cheek against the flood of memory. Focuses instead on the important thing:]

You okay?

Other than waking up in a underground chamber full of bones and scared people? Just peachy, you?

[ In Hunk's defense- it was kinda a dumb question.

Once he reaches the top, Hunk wastes no time scrambling away from the hole and rolling on the ground to stare up at the sky, just breathing in the clean, fresh air. ]

So you're not hurt. Which is the important thing.

[More along the lines of what he was actually asking.]

Who else was down there?

August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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