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!

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alpha?

[She doesn't mean to mimic what she's just said, but Alpha has been gone since before Carolina came back in to the picture. She knows that he would be able to fill in some of the blanks, especially before her arrival, and before Wash's arrival too.

Her mouth opens to question that, but no. Okay. Work on the premise that anything she knew has flown out the window.]

... he remembered? I mean, he's gone.

He -

[ She can't blame Carolina for being confused. Honestly, she's just grateful that she's accepting this much without question. ]

He came back. Like me. Not here, though, I - [ She closes her eyes, takes a breath. ] After I died, I woke up somewhere else. A ship, thousands of years in the future. The Counselor was there...I didn't remember what had happened, at first. I thought it was a...a mission. Or that I had fucked up one too many times, that I was out of the Project, that I was being punished. But it wasn't that at all. It was - people, from all over, all different worlds. Different universes. And Alpha - it had happened to him, too. I didn't meet him for a while, but...he was there. He told me what had happened. As much as he knew.

[Confused is putting it lightly. It's akin to being dropped in to the middle of a strange territory and having to figure out not only what the mission objective is, but how to accomplish it and how not to get caught. It's all... Arguably, it makes no sense. None of it. CT is gone. Alpha is gone. They're all gone...

Not all of them, she chides herself. Wash and Tucker and Caboose and Sarge and Grif and Simmons, and even Donut and his stupid candles that keep burning shit down. The simulation troopers. Is it bad that after spending so much time with them, she only bats half an eye at this?

Her hand comes to scrub at her face. Older, new scars, still determined but not to the point of being a hound on a scent and unable to let it go.]

And from that ship, you ended up here? Did others?

[She is trying to make sense of it, to piece together some sort of a picture, but it's not working.]

A few of us did. Not - not them, though. [ Not Church. Not the Counselor. ] And not...right away. We - after everything, we got to choose...where we went. When we went. I was on another world. Not just a planet, it was a different world. A different reality, maybe, I...I was there for months.

[ And she'd been happy. For once in her life. ]

And then one day I woke up here.

[It is quite the tale, and those green eyes remain steady on her, trying to gauge. Yet Carolina can't say that she has any reason to think that CT is yanking her chain. It hadn't been her style before, and even if it is now, what would she gain from it? Not like Carolina taking her words at face value is going to offer anything negative in turn.]

Seems like you've been on quite the journey.

[ CT snorts, shaking her head. ]

You don't know the half of it.

[ The Network. The murders. Varric. Where does she begin?

Maybe at the beginning. Or rather, the ending. ]

Carolina...

I heard what you said to Tex.

[ And what Tex had said in reply.

She's not a teammate. She's a traitor. ]

Thank you.

[She doesn't, and she likely can't even guess at it. While all of this is hard to wrap her head around, doing it some place else? That would be difficult enough.

Yet her gaze turns, freezes, before she blinks.]

I should have done more.

[Pressed harder for them not to go after CT's armor. Pressed harder not to make it a kill mission. She recalls how pissed Texas had been when CT had gotten away with the armor, yet it had just left that hollow space in Carolina's stomach.]

No.

[ It'd be easy to agree with that, to put the onus on Carolina for taking action, for doing something, but it wouldn't be fair. CT shakes her head. ]

You were doing what you were told to do. What you thought you had to do.

[ Just following orders - but Carolina had had no reason to question those orders. Or to think that Tex would go as far as she had. ]

It's the same thing that all of us did.

Not all of us though.

[Carolina had been focused on that leader board, on beating Texas. She hadn't stopped to look, to see, to think about what was going on around them. She knows that beating herself up over it won't get her anywhere, that she's trying to do better now to make up for everything that she had done. Yet it is hard.]

It... It is good to see you again.

All of us.

[ Every one of them, at one point or another. CT had been just as obsessed with the leaderboard as Carolina had been, once. She just hadn't been good enough for it to matter.

She actually looks a little surprised at Carolina's confession, and then her lips turn up in a tiny smile. ]

It's...good to see you too.

[At one point or another, perhaps, yet others had woken up faster, realized, learned, understood that something wasn't right. They had paid the price.

She'd lost them once, lost them again in the temple scenario, and it was just as bad the first time. It is a regret. One of many. One that had driven her to hunt down the Director in the first place.]

I guess we'll likely be seeing a lot more of each other.

[Which... Isn't a bad thing. No, it certainly isn't about this place.]

I guess so.

[ She glances around, then glances back at Carolina with a small smile. ]

It's not so bad here, usually. Sometimes...sometimes some fucked up things happen.

But it always passes.

Edited 2018-09-15 04:30 (UTC)

Sounds a little like home then.

[Plenty of fucked up things happening, and then they pass.

Only to go on to the next.]

I guess so.

[ The fucked up things back home had never passed, for her. She hadn't lived to see the end of them. But maybe it's true, from Carolina's perspective. ]

If you do have any questions... At any time. Just- you can contact me.

[Not that she seems to be that much at a loss, but maybe Carolina could fill in some things.]

[ She blinks, surprised, and then nods. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but there may be something someday. ]

...You, too.

I mean. About living here, or...anything.

[That curt nod, glancing off.]

I'll keep it in mind, CT.

August Intro: All Will Fade and Petrify

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