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

Not to point out the obvious... But are you certain they're actually dead?

[... people may or may not have been buried alive in the past.]

Yes. I am a medic and was the de facto coroner in the place I was with Church in. I know dead-dead. But I know there's strange shit in the universe, and have witnessed dead people coming to life through the use of nanites after confirming myself that there was no way they would ever draw a breath again. Except here's it's divine intervention.

If you want to believe that.

[Now... she's just starting to question it all.

Vitals can be messed with. Healing packs? Dead are dead. She knows that. Every day of her life, she knows that.]

I don't waste time believing. I would rather prove it and know, and after the dudes and dudettes here killed a god... kinda hard to disprove that they don't exist. I've tried. I am an atheist, but this place is definitely run by "higher" beings who seem keen on keeping us alive as pawns in some kind of messed up game of Don't Starve or something.

[It's annoying, but at the same time, really exciting.]

Higher beings could just be a race that has different abilities than we do.

[She has run across aliens. They... okay, they wouldn't be mistaken for higher ups, but the possibility exists.]

See, that's what I though, since me ex-girlfriend could have easily been labeled a "higher being" with some of the shit she pulled, but it's not so with these guys. She was a straight up alien. These guys feel.......... vastly different. Like. Looking at them you can tell you''ll never be able to fully understand what they are.

[And for someone who wants to understand everything, it's very, very frustrating.]

You've met them, I mean, aside from that whole experience when you first arrive?

[A sharper look on her features then as her helmet's visor remains steady on her.]

Yup. There's one that comes around once a month or so called the Storyteller. You give him or her a story about what you've done, and I guess it gets you things? I ain't tried it yet, but he or she is a good listener if you need to vent about someone pissing you off during the past month.

[It's pretty therapeutic.]

That sounds a little more like a shrink.

[Except maybe that they'd give no advice.

Not that she would take advice from some stranger who is coming to hear stories. As for pissing her off... Well, she might have issues with some individuals now and then, but she has been less angry since leaving her father in the facility to himself. It's not that other things hadn't enraged her, but a weight had been lifted.]

... man, he'd be a better shrink than the ones I had before. At least this one doesn't ask the "How does that make you feel?" questions.

[Not that therapy had been bad. It was useful when she needed it, but that was years ago. Now? Unless one knew how to erase memories, they wouldn't be wanted.]

Anyways, that's the only god we deal with on a regular basis. The other ones pop up when they feel like it and make a right mess of things, so nothing to worry much about. That's about all I can tell ya of the island since I've been here only a little while myself.

[Just how many of these so called gods have popped up so far? Three, five, ten...? She'd have to look further in to that. She likes to be in the know, to understand the situation. The soldier in her needs to know the terrain.]

How long you been here?

[Maybe finding someone who actually keeps track of this stuff instead of doing their own thing and only paying attention to what they want to is advisable. There's plenty of those around.]

Since May. So just a few months. There's people who have been here longer than that, like my best friend. She's having memory problems at the moment, so she can't really tell me.

I take it you know that she was here longer because she was already here when you arrived?

[Otherwise, if she has memory problems, how would she know?]

Yup. And quite established. She's been a busy little bee, so if you hear of a girl named Mira, that's her. She's good at a lot of things and has a much better memory than I do.

[Also grows food.]

Haven't yet, but I'll keep that in mind.

[Considering there doesn't appear to be millions of people here, let alone thousands, Carolina can't imagine there being too many Miras in this place. Possibly just the one.]

She's hard to miss even though she's short.

[Just one Mira here, thankfully.]

She's hard to miss because she is short?

[Or is there some other defining feature that would catch her attention?]

Yes. She's got green eyes, dark hair, looks like a little French doll. Or to me at least.

[That is the worst way to describe someone, but okay, go on.]

... but she's not doll height, is she?

[Or... is she?]

[.........]

Depends on the kind of doll you're talking about. There's human sized dolls... but no, she's like five three and nothing much.

[She moves her hands to more or less make a typical doll size. Nothing too big, around the size of what a Barbie would be. Not that she really had played with toys for too long. The death of her mother had changed many things.]

So not under a foot tall.

[Still petite, but Carolina isn't one to talk. She's on the taller side.]

Edited 2018-09-15 01:23 (UTC)

Nope. If she was that tiny... man, even I wouldn't be that good at finding her. Still, despite being a short stack, she stands out.

[Carolina certainly is tall. Tall ladies are always appreciated."

Thanks for the information.

[Not that she is entirely certain what she is going to do with it yet, but every little piece gathered about this place can help. While she hates not being in the know and understanding exactly what is going on, every bit helps. Eventually there will be a clearer picture.]

No prob. [Hmm...] Though exploring for yourself might be the easiest way to get what you need. These places ain't that big, so have fun with that.

I'll keep that in mind.

[A nod of her head, before Carolina moves out.

No time like the present, right? Patience has never really been her virtue, and that's not likely to change today.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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