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 )

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Easier, and harder.

[A bit of a catch 22... Because it really was a bit of both. They could do things that just made Carolina wonder what the heck they were even thinking, like taking on gravity, but they could also get things done. Sometimes.]

Caboose made friends. Dinosaurs.

[If people thought Freckles was bad... She'll wait until he is clear before following suit up to the surface.]

He...

[The incredulity only arrests him for half a second before that familiar rinse of fond exasperation tides over. It's aching in its abruptness, and it takes him a moment to fully recognize that it's because he's missed it.]

[God, he's missed it.]

Of course he did. I won't even ask how that's possible, because it's Caboose.

[Oh, the stories that Carolina can tell Wash to bide him over. Anyone else likely would have thought that she was lying. Wash would know that she was telling the truth, for all of it.

She might leave out the beard though.]

Because it's Caboose. We should really put that on a cup.

If we're lucky, he'll figure out how to make friends of all of them.

[She probably doesn't have to. Guess who doesn't have access to a razor here?]

There's a mainland we can get back to. A kind of...short-form teleportation. It's safer than here. Or...less likely to get us all sick.

[Assuming they're not already, but he's got no clue that ARUM-25 has been going on about that for hours now.]

[He would to, that's the scary part. How he does it, Carolina has no idea. She's given up trying to explain things some time ago and just goes with the flow, as much as she can, anyway. She'd likely drive herself in circles if she tried to make sense of it.

Glancing around, Carolina brushes the dirt off of her.]

And what's the mainland like?

More diverse in terms of terrain. Buildings, mountains, jungle...it's better for cover.

[Wash more or less categorizes things based on how serviceable they are in a fight. That's probably more than a little fucked up, but what part of his life isn't these days?]

Housing, just off the coast.

Any threats to be concerned about there?

[Animals, maybe, areas of the island. Not that Carolina is going to go walking off ledges, get caught in quick sand or anything like that. Still, she wants to know as much as she can.]

A few. There's a...black hole in one of the areas that no one seems to know how to get rid of.

[That's the sound of Wash grimacing beneath his helmet as he starts picking his way through the scrubby woodland. Mana pool isn't hard to find, once he gets on track.]

It's small, so it's not like it's going anywhere.

And by black hole, you mean black hole, and not just some deep hole.

[Somehow she is thinking that he does mean the former, which... Right. Black hole. Completely normal... Why not? Talking rabbits. Waking up underground. Why not just keep adding the strange on to it?

Her head turns slightly, side to side, noting the landscape around them as they continue to trek to who knows where. Lollipop house? Upside down land...? Who knows what else is here, so why not just go outlandish. Does this place even play by any rules that she knows?]

I suppose that's some form of comforting. It just appeared, or was it always there?

I think someone found it. It's just...kinda there. Tries to pull in anyone who gets close, but it's not destabilizing the actual island, so I don't know how the hell it works.

[That's not getting into the fusterclucks. Wash is...not going to get into those just now. He never wants to think about the fusterclucks, or about Upsy the horrific flying elevator that was spitting people out all over Ensō.]

This place is...Umui, I think it's called. Mainland is called Ensō. [Which is where they're hopefully headed.]

[Just kinda there.

It's not exactly an every day thing. Black holes aren't usually just there. Or rather, not just there in the kind of sense that they're talking about.

Yet she makes note of what Wash tells her, storing it away. Like heck she's going to go the way of a black hole.]

So people tend to remain on the mainland most of the time.

Until another island pops up. They've always got these...quirks. This one was relatively tame, until we started finding the dead robots and evidence that some kind of disease killed an entire civilization.

[He's only been to a handful of others - Ziziphus, which no longer matters as he's pretty sure it's been utterly desecrated at this point, and Monsun, which exemplified his worst traits very briefly until he decided it wasn't worth the goddamn risk.]

[Does it somehow make sense? After the (relative) peace of retirement, to come to a place like this... As if it is the universe's way of saying, did you really think it was that easy?

Look that gift horse in the mouth, otherwise you'll fail to notice the horrible teeth that belie its age...]

So never trust any place we set foot on, basically.

[It is a sentiment that she can understand. Trust is something that she's come to value again, but it's not something that always comes easily. She still tries to keep on her toes, even if she's semi-learned from the master of laziness how to relax. She takes his words to heart, trusting that whatever Wash says, it's true.]

[It doesn't feel like betrayal at this point anymore. Nothing does. It just feels like going through the motions. Another shitshow. Out of the frying pan - ]

[Think of Four-Seven. He doesn't think about her consciously, just like how he doesn't think about the rest of the Project consciously; they just kind of crop up in the texture of his brain matter, apropos of nothing, ghosts hovering in the column of his spine.]

That's what I've gathered.

[The shallow lumps of buildings, silhouetted against the hills, crop up in disturbingly regular spots: two rows of five, every single time, most of them as overgrown as the rest of the island.]

[It's as good a time as any to bring it back up, despite the uncertainty that shifts his grip on his weapon and tips his visored head to one side.]

You and C.T. You guys are gonna be...okay, right?

[The question does bring her own helmet face towards him. It is a blink, one he cannot see anyway, that is the only sign that she gives, keeping her steps going, one foot in front of the other.]

I- honestly don't know Wash.

[CT is one of the many wrongs that she had wanted revenge on, to stop the Director to stop it from ever happening again. Looking back, she isn't certain he would have ever been the man she had known, as a father or a superior, as it was only a shell that was left with all those failed attempts at capturing something that was gone.]

I've nothing against her. Didn't like how thing went down either, but it doesn't change the fact that they did go down like that. I can't- and won't- blame her if she doesn't want anything to do with me.

[Or even if she wants to punch her in the face.]

We're all on the same side here. We...didn't know what she knew.

[But C.T. had the benefit, where Wash was concerned, of knowing that he was slotted for Epsilon's implantation. Of the context Alpha allowed her. Of not having to look him in the face when she was fucking murdered.]

I was just as guilty as you were. [Of that kind of blind faith in the Director - someone who would give him a second chance after he was bound for court martial, a door into something better.]

[No, they hadn't known. York had tried, and even if he had gotten a word in before they fought, chances were that Carolina wouldn't have listened. She'd been too focused on Texas, on trying to regain what she had lost, to believe a word out of York.

Against the Director. Against her father.

Yet it is a burden that Carolina puts on her own back. She should have known better, should have realized sooner, and if she had... She'd been a leader, someone others had looked up to, and yet she had gotten lost in it all, and when the foundation had started to crack and crumble, she'd done nothing. He'd never been the same after the death of his wife.]

They all deserved better.

You don't think...

[How does he phrase this in a way that doesn't sound pathetically hopeful, like he's the kind of sick optimist he was years ago? If C.T. can show up, can't anyone else? Can't - can't North, or South, or Maine? Maine, who should have killed him several times over when Sigma seized his mind and didn't, and he'd never stopped to examine it because there was never time to and by the time there was it was simply too painful to consider what Maine might or might not have done consciously and - ]

If C.T. can show up...who else can?

[Whereas his mind might go to something hopeful, Carolina is finding hers going the other way. All the enemies from Project Freelancer, all the ones after... Half the asses that she's kicked she didn't bother taking names. How many times has it already come back to bite her in the ass? Nor does she think that they'll just ride in to the sunset and never have any problems again. She's no desire to start a war, but Sharkface, Felix? Would they just let things slide?]

... by that logic, anyone.

[He thinks of Alpha - of Church, who made friends with people like C.T. in half a universe away, and didn't mention the fact that Washington walked him straight into his death. Remembers Epsilon, the one thing in this world or any other that still completely and wholly paralyzes him with terror at the thought of him ever sliding back into the ports of his armor.]

I guess we should be prepared for that possibility.

[Ya. That's... Ya.

She could get bogged down in that, in preparing for each and every likely scenario, and even those that might not be. Watch their backs, twenty four seven, be on high alert.

And yet...]

Everyone arrives the same, right? All together, in some place, or do they ever just trickle in here and there?

They show up in waves. Right now it's the beginning of August - couple days in. There's a calendar on the mainland.

[He's been keeping better track of the days here than he has anywhere else in recent memory. He's had to.]

Beginning of every month, we get a new...wave, I guess you could say. And they never show up in the same way or same place twice.

Then we've something of a schedule.

[A time when they can scope things out and see, not be caught off guard. Or rather, caught less off guard. It's not perfect, she knows, as given what she's seen today, it can be hectic.]

A starting point.

[Starting point.]

[Beneath his visor, he smiles faintly.]

I guess you could say that, yeah. [Fresh starts don't exist for people like them. They haven't earned that. But starting points?]

[That's about the best they can do.]

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August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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