lifeaftr | August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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!

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[It's a feeling that's mirrored in herself. For the longest time she didn't allow herself to have friends or family, and now that she's got them again? She'd go through hell or high water for them and rue anyone who stood between her and them, because they wouldn't be standing for long.]

Care to give me a rundown of what you know?

[And she could do the same, although it's lacking and limited.]

[Right. Sitrep. It's an easy instinct, and, thank god, achingly familiar.]

There's a little less than a hundred of us, and we all ended up at this archipelago. From what I hear, people come and go, and different islands come and go. There's no reliable way off that anyone can find and the basic tech level is pretty abysmal, so almost everyone is just working to survive.

[...and then context. The worrisome part of it.]

People come from different...universes, I think you could say.

[Her focus does remain on him, with some of her attention on their surroundings, listening as he speaks.

Anyone else but Wash saying that... She'd have likely dismissed them outright. After all, it sounds like the plot of some book or show, but she knows that Wash isn't one to mess around in a situation like this.

This whole different universes bit- she's going to take a moment to digest that before going back to it.]

I'm getting the impression that you didn't just arrive today.

No. I didn't.

[He can beat around the bush for as long as he likes; if it were him, he'd appreciate things being direct. More direct than Freelancer ever was with either of them.]

I showed up here a couple months ago with...[ o h b o y ] ...C.T. And I do mean the one we knew.

You do realize CT is...

[Dead. She doesn't need to finish that sentence though. They'd found her armor. Her dog tag.

But she gives a shake of her head.]

You weren't- aren't- missing, Wash. I just saw you- before waking up here.

I know. I know, I'm -

[I'm not crazy.]

[It nearly bites, that insinuation. She doesn't say it, she doesn't even imply it, because it's phrased more like a reminder, just in case he got lost in the routes of someone else's memories again, in case he's lost it again. He's not Epsilon. He's not Church.]

[The only Church here is her.]

I don't know how time works here, but everyone says that at home, it's like everything goes on pause. It's not this linear thing.

[It isn't something that she would suggest, that she would say. Yet none of this does make any sense. That odd dream, waking up. She'd almost think that this is still some unconscious part of her mind, but her dreams are more nightmares, nothing at all like this.

But she can't rule out that she is here, and that it seems real. It's not like anything out of the ordinary had been happening, at least as far as she can remember. Just another day of their retirement.

There are scenarios that she can rule out, and that she does, which leaves her with fewer possibilities of what this really is.]

What is the last thing that you remember before coming here?

We'd just gotten to that island. Retirement. It was over, all of it.

[Hopefully that makes a fair amount of sense to her. If C.T. can be nabbed from straight after her death, displaced into some kind of...murder-based television series, and then show up here right around the same time he does? Then it's fair to say that linearity isn't exactly a priority here.]

[The important thing is that Wash hasn't grown his beard yet. Scandalous.]

Just gotten there?

[Which yes, it is what he says, but she is just confirming. It isn't as if decades have passed by her point of view, but they had gotten in to some things since arriving there. Like dinosaurs, scented candle fires, and a water park. Fighting gravity and mushrooms.

And yes, his beard...]

We've been living there for some time now. That's what I remember.

C.T. remembers dying last.

[In case either of them needed that, uh. Reminder. In case either of them had forgotten how it felt to sit in the sluice of their guilt and failure to prevent the inevitable. In case they hadn't marinated in that nearly fucking long enough.]

So time isn't...necessarily on our side here.

[She doesn't. Carolina can recall that day easily enough, their mission, their failure all around. She hadn't had any desire to see CT hurt, and yet she couldn't say the same about Texas. For a time she had hoped that the tomahawk hadn't finished the job, but she knows now that it had.]

Is she alright?

[Or does the strangeness extend further to some... what? Ghost? ... zombie?]

She's as all right as any of us ever get.

[So...not very, no. That's not getting into the fact that she was murdered, again, on her little spatiotemporal detour through a murder-television show, and ended up getting engaged in the interim, but you know what? You know what. That's not Washington's story to tell. He is not going to be the one to drop that bombshell.]

[C.T. can do that bit herself.]

[Carolina somehow doubts that CT would even want to speak to her... After all, the last time they had met hadn't been under good circumstances. She can't say that she blames her either after how everything had gone down. Carolina had been bitter and jealous, resentful and close minded. Even if she had been told the truth back then, Carolina wouldn't have believed it. York had tried.

One thing at a time though, and at the moment, being in a cave is the matter at hand.]

I didn't see anyone down here that I recognized, and I think it would be safe to say we'd have heard- or seen- something if any of them were here.

My radio's pretty much busted, anyway.

[It had worked for one brief, glorious moment upon arrival - and then promptly shorted out and never worked again or since. Which shouldn't be possible, given the fact that their armor is technically waterproof, but a lot of shit that's supposed to be impossible is, as it happens, completely possible.]

I haven't seen them either. Anyone else, I mean. [From home. Though he doesn't say it.]

[Arguably it is one less thing to worry about, even if Carolina doesn't find the situation all that good anyway. But it means that she doesn't need to be concerned about the rest of their team. They're... safe enough at the moment back home, as safe as they can be. They do seem to have a knack for surviving anything.

She gives a nod, huffing out a breath before looking back up the route that he'd come down.]

We'll make due.

Picked a hell of a time to show up.

[And he proceeds to not elaborate on that at all, instead settling for trying to clear away the debris from the...loosely defined "ceiling" to allow them both to clamber out with a minimal assault to their dignity.]

[With a minimal assault to her dignity. Wash doesn't think he has any left to speak of.]

What can I say. I like to make an entrance.

[Although she's not actually too flashy most of the time, but sure, she can't deny that in the past, she has made one. That wayward tip of her head, voice wry for a moment.]

As do you.

[That soft camaraderie to her voice as her visor turns back upwards. She trusts him with her side, and that's not going to change. They've been through enough together that it's not even a question.]

Worth my grappling hook?

[Although he is in luck today. No crotch shots. He knows the surface though.]

[It's unfamiliar in its familiarity, which is a little fucked up to think - the fact that falling back to this easy camaraderie is an instinct he has to think twice on, after the months he's spent here. Something like sixty days is enough to pretty sincerely fuck with your capacity to adapt, provided that those sixty days are being spent with someone who's been dead for years, and has undergone some subtle but nonetheless noticeable personality shifts in between then and now.]

Maybe. What'd you show up here with?

[Time to explain how tech here works. Fun.]

Pistol, rifle, grappling hook.

[The lighter's not really something that she thinks would be much use in this situation, so she doesn't mention York's. Turning her mind to when she woke up, she furthers.]

Found a sack with a knife and matches.

[Because the soap likely wouldn't be useful nor what she assumes to be some sort of jerkied meat.]

Ammo?

[How limited are they? He's limited his firepower significantly, more than he'd like, but the plus to that is that he's not in any danger of running out unless he ends up needing to chew through his supply real fast.]

[Hopefully it won't come to that.]

[If's he's asking after that... Sounds like she might need to conserve what she has. It wouldn't be the first time where she has had limited supplies, and it likely won't be the last either.

Perhaps it's a good thing she got a knife, as small as it is.]

Two magazines for each.

[Yikes.]

We're not very well outfitted if it comes to a firefight.

[He digs his foot into one of the crumpled-metal walls, watches it cave inward and rain dusty powder and flower rot. Weaken the walls enough, and they'll probably have enough leverage to haul themselves out of the hole Wash has made out of the ceiling, like the graceful creature he is.]

Everything here is limited.

Is that something that we're going to need to be worried about?

[Unless the other side has weapons... Carolina's good enough with her fists or even various other weapons that don't require the use of bullets. But, she tips her head back towards Wash.]

No outposts or supply depots?

Nothing. Not even the outer colonies are this bad.

[Chorus, at least, had its fair share of powerful if archaic tech. Here, the most they've got is a mixture of gods and magic, neither of which Wash is one to put a great deal of stock in.]

These people don't even have radios.

So winging it.

[Not the first time, but also not exactly an ideal situation either. But, they'll make due. They always had, to various degrees of success, and if nothing else, they are survivors.

The lack of technology is quite surprising though. She will admit she has become used to it, and expects it, to a certain degree. A town, a city, something... Most planets tend to have something.]

Sounds like... a normal day.

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