lifeaftr | September Intro: The Fields Are Painted Gold

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September Intro: The Fields Are Painted Gold

INTRO LOG: SEPTEMBER

Who: New arrivals, and you!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: September 4th and onward
Where: Primarily Ensō, though Umui is also likely
Warnings: Mark as needed!

The Beach: And the Sun is Coming Through
When you arrive on the archipelago of LifeAftr, it is on the shores of Ensō - turquoise waves dragging through the pale sand of the beach. The breeze carries the tang of salt on the tropical sea spray. The sky overhead is a blue to rival the aquamarine surf. All told, the atmosphere is almost...pleasant. Not far from the cream-colored beach, the jungle beckons.

Above the treetops, however, something seems to be drifting overhead.

Bright spots of color drift on the wind like motes of dust. On further inspection, one might be able to discern what, exactly, is the cause of this lazily wafting, brilliantly colored confetti.

They are flower petals, being funneled up into the sky. Petals of every color and shape imaginable, thickening the air with golden currents of pollen, being lifted from one specific point. They are streaming freely from the Storyteller's Temple, as it happens, though this may not be clear to the newly arrived. The Temple has at last begun to shed the floral trappings that have ensnared it since the end of last month, and the breeze carries this out across the ocean skyline.

There's no mistaking it: it is very beautiful. Unless you have allergies.

Inland: The Trees Are Filled With Memories
This influx of flowers on the breeze, aside from being a potential source of unpleasant reminders to those who died choking on said flowers last month, have had additional consequences. The creatures rescued from Ziziphus flourish in such pollen-rich environments, which has led to a fresh budding of their young. Baby mosslings crawl like lumps of lichen over the trunks of trees, and the loud peeping of arboreali chicks can be heard in the branches above. Most of these creatures are not tameable, but some, such as flowccus, can be kept as livestock.

Just take care, when venturing into Ensō's verdant jungle. If Ziziphus's prey animals have begun to spring forth, then its predators have begun to reproduce as well. Young spindlanks and rootwyrms are not nearly as vicious as their adult counterparts, but you may have a bit of trouble getting rid of them without killing them - you did, after all, bring them here to preserve them.

Most notable, however, are the fresh litters of tigerlilies that have begun swarming all over Ensō.

Tigerlilies can be tamed and kept as pets, though despite their fearsome appearance, they not terribly vicious. They subsist in much the same way any other plant would; off of water and sunlight, primarily, though they might also graze like an herbivore from time to time.

If you're interested in keeping one for your own, bear LifeAftr's companion limit in mind - two per character, and no more. The process of trying to tame a tigerlily is not always successful, either. We recommend use of a d10, with the following guidelines:

Rolling a 10: Critical success! This tigerlily will follow you to the ends of the earth.
Rolling 6-9: Taming and training this tigerlily will be like educating a stubborn housecat, but will be nonetheless successful.
Rolling 2-5: Failure. You get sprayed with soporific pollen, which will affect you for several hours.
Rolling a 1: Critical failure. Not only do you get sprayed with soporific pollen, but the tigerlily in question decides that you're their new cat toy. Tigerlilies are not carnivorous, but their teeth and fangs are still very sharp, and not highly pleasant to contend with.

Bear in mind that these are only guidelines; you are free to predetermine successes or failures as you'd like, presuming your character can sustain the companion! Our discord channel has a room for dice-rolls, if that's your speed.

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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[ She shrugs, blissfully unaware of Wash's internal conflict, and turns back to watch the tigerlily, digging her fingers satisfyingly into its fur. ]

I'm...not sure. It didn't run off right away, and it didn't seem scared or like it was going to attack, so at first I was just trying to see how close I could get.

[ Which, in hindsight, could have been a Very Bad idea. But things seem to have worked out. ]

And then...it just seemed like it wanted to play. Like it was interested in me, too.

[He's grateful for the helmet, as usualy, because the smile is so uneven that it aches the sides of his mouth and it feels wrong on his face, displaced and...]

[And he's about to ruin the niceness of the moment but if he bites it back for any longer he's going to lose his resolve.]

...look. I...someone's showed up here. Someone we both know. I just wanted you to know before you saw him, so it's not as much of a...surprise as it was for me.

[ Someone we both know. Her heartrate shoots up in mingled hope and anxiety. Someone could be anyone. York. Maine. Wyoming. Alpha.

She looks up at Wash, her new pet forgotten in the face of this new information, and stares at him. ]

...Who is it?

[ Who would he be this...apprehensive about? Why's he so concerned about a surprise? Carolina had been a surprise. She's used to surprises by now. ]

Is it -

Is it Maine?

[ Maine. Or the Meta. Him showing up would be less than ideal, but...Wash could talk to him. Right? They could figure it out. ]

No. Not...not Maine.

[He grimaces, and...fuck, they'd just talked about Church showing up here, and hey! Look at that! A Church showed up! It just wasn't the one that either of them wanted to see - that any of them wanted to see again, most likely.]

The Director's here, C.T.

He just arrived.

What?

[ She stares, and for a moment it's like her brain's stopped working entirely. It's incomprehensible. It's impossible. Maine, she could deal with. Even the Counselor, dumped here just as unceremoniously as CT, with all his actions and betrayal during Airlocked to answer for.

But the Director?

She shakes her head, eyes wide with shock. ]

No.

He's...he's dead.

[ It doesn't mean anything. It means less than nothing, and she of all people should know. Death won't stop him from reappearing, any more than it had stopped her.

But it's the only thing she can think of to say. ]

You were dead, too.

[He should be dead. If C.T. gets a second chance - fuck, but why does he get one too? When he's done worse, worse than any of them, when he's facilitated the worst things that they've done, and the thought alone is enough to uncoil an electrostatic pulse of heat in his guts, working up to the back of his throat and burning behind his eyes.]

I think he still thinks he's dead. That this is some sort of afterlife.

[He laughs.]

[It's not much of a laugh. It's a short huff of humorless sound, and he unclamps two objects from the mag-strips at his thigh: a multi-tool and a pistol.]

Took these off him. At least he's not armed.

[ She looks at the weapons, her eyes widening, and then her gaze snaps back up to Wash. ]

You talked to him?

[ She doesn't care where the Director thinks he is. She doesn't care. ]

Where is he?

[ If Wash hadn't outright killed him, surely he'd taken him into custody. Probably left him tied up somewhere to sweat. ]

For a loose definition of "talked."

[Already the slow creep of guilt is swelling up behind his tongue, the bitter taste of why didn't you stop this burning into his blood.]

He thought he was dead, and I was just trying to make sure he couldn't take an easy way out again. [Why didn't you do something?] He was...somewhere in the jungle when I...

[ The bottom drops out of her stomach, and she feels her blood go cold.

He can't be saying this. He can't possibly be saying what it sounds like he's saying. ]

You left him there?

He's just...Out there? Wandering around somewhere and now we don't even know where?

I didn't know what else to do with him. It's not like we've got a jail, or a justice system, or...

[Carolina is still here, and she didn't kill him - Carolina, who had every right to look him square in the eye and put a bullet in his skull - so what possible right does he have? What right does he have to decide something like that for her?]

[What right did he have, anyway, breaking back into everyone's lives, as if he deserves a second chance, as if he's not the reason none of them got one.]

We have rope, don't we? Or -

[ She drops her gaze to the pistol in his hand, then looks away. No. She can't ask Wash to do that. Not even to the Director. Not after everything she'd said to him, about how he isn't as tough and heartless as he thinks he is, about how the old Wash is still in there somewhere. ]

We have to do something.

LIke what? How long can we keep him? What would we do with him? People who die here just come back.

[That's not the reason, Agent. And you know it. Too many excuses all at once, and Wash - aggressive, paranoid, and a little melodramatic. Cryptic to a fault. Nothing like C.T., in the end, who can cut to the chase like so few can.]

Carolina. She doesn't know.

[ She shakes her head wordlessly. She doesn't know. She doesn't know, but there's got to be something better than just...letting him walk free. ]

Maybe he'd disappear again. Go back to wherever he came from.

[ That happens sometimes. Maybe they'd get lucky, and they wouldn't need to keep him locked up indefinitely. For now, though, he's here. They need to deal with that.

She looks up, eyes widening. Carolina. Shit. ]

We have to tell her.

That's if she hasn't found him already.

[But her brand of justice had been different, separate, from his own - in part because what the Director did to them had been, inherently, different. It was enough for him to bring Freelancer down on his own terms, let the whole system go to justice for what it did.]

[What the Director did to her was more personal, and Carolina was more than willing to return the favor.]

She...found him before I ever could.

[ It's not impossible. It's not as if the islands are huge, and if Wash had had time to find him, then leave him and come find CT...

She sucks in a quiet breath, meeting his eyes. ]

What did she do?

When she found him before.

She gave him this.

[He holds up his old sidearm. Then, indicatively, shucks the mag to toss it to her. It's only got five shots. One's missing.]

[As if he wouldn't have guessed, the way Epsilon tore fragments of himself apart, shot adrenaline in through his veins and arched his back until every inch of him throbbed and his own screams pooled in his lungs.]

I think he asked her to, but I never checked.

Oh.

[ What does she say to that? What does she say? She'd never mourned the Director for a second. Knowing how he'd gone out shouldn't change that. Doesn't change that.

Still, a part of her wishes she didn't know. She catches the magazine easily and just holds it, staring. ]

...I keep thinking...

I keep thinking it's over.

[ But it never is.

The Counselor. Church. Wash. Carolina. Now this. Every time she thinks she's finally put her past behind her, something shows up and just drags it right back up again. ]

It's never really over.

[And he never really learned. That was the takeaway. He kept trying to get her right. He never really stopped. Never took a failure as a sign that maybe he was doing something wrong, fracturing his digital soul to revive a shadow of a dead woman. Never allowed that memory to stop haunting him.]

[In a way, memory ate him alive as well.]

[Wash would be the wrong person to bother with remorse over that.]

No one here knows who he is, or what he's done. What's he even capable of doing anymore?

[There it is again: that euphoric high, that final fuck you that comes with the rush of realization. He's invincible. The Director can't touch him anymore. Not with his words, not with his threats, not with any tortured, fragmented A.I. He has nothing here but the power of a restart.]

[As if that's liable to get him anywhere.]

[ No. Apparently, it's not. If even being transported thousands of years into the future, if even traveling to entirely different worlds, if even dying isn't enough to escape the ghost of Freelancer, then maybe nothing is.

Her heart sinks at the realization. And then she looks up at Wash, disbelieving. Is he even listening to himself? One minute he's saying it's never really over, and the next... ]

What was he capable of doing with one AI?

He was a nobody back there, too, Wash. People not knowing what he's done - how does that do anything but help him? Put them off their guard?

Edited 2018-09-13 05:41 (UTC)

He's got nothing. No status. No name. No tech. No A.I. to break, and the only people here who know him are just as capable of breaking him. He can't call down M.A.C. fire. He can't reallocate personnel. He can't even shoot anyone.

[Ride that dopamine high, Agent. Ride it and don't ever look down, because looking down will slide you right back into the person you were: gritted teeth and a rifle stock against your shoulder and the drumroll rat-a-tat of bullets lodged in Donut's chest, cutting him down like a bowling pin.]

He knows that I'm here, but he doesn't know who else is. We have every advantage over him.

And he has nowhere to go.

People ask for things all the time.

[ She hasn't, partly because she still doesn't quite trust the Storyteller enough to go spilling all her secrets. Partly because she can't think of anything to request that would really change anything. She turns away, sulking. ]

He's got plenty of stories to tell.

[ And then she glares back up at Wash. Why is he being so obtuse about this? ]

We don't have any advantage if we don't know where he is, Wash!

Then we'll - we'll find him again. It's not a big place, and -

[Don't allow yourself to forget: she died for this. He was lucky that he didn't. If he had - ]

[If he had, he's not honestly sure how he'd react to it. It had been one bullet point on a list of three objectives, and he was ready to have all of them ticked off by the end. He hadn't expected, hadn't planned, hadn't wanted to come out alive on the other side of it.]

[Forgets that the same couldn't be said for everyone.]

I was done with him. I was done thinking about him.

So was I.

[ The Director is dead, Price had told her. The Project is over. She'd been done. She'd moved on. She'd escaped and now it's all back again. He's back.

She stares down at her hands, down at the ground. ]

Do you really think he's not a threat here?

[ She wants to believe it, she does, but -

Right up until the end, she'd been terrified of him. Convinced that he knew exactly what she was doing, every step she was taking to undermine him, and that he was simply biding his time, waiting to catch her red-handed and bring his wrath down upon her. ]

He'd given up by the time we found him.

[The shift he has to generate in himself - the dissonance of the Director being here, being somehow deserving of a place that's been nothing but fresh starts, that's almost a violence in and of itself - is like trying to jumpstart his heart with an electric cable jacked into the valve.]

[He shut down the facility and wiped every file, save for one.]

I don't think he understands that he's not even really dead here.

[ Given up. It's hard to imagine the Director giving up, even knowing everything she does. Even knowing that his beloved Project is gone, that his agents had betrayed him, that his experiments had come to nothing. The last time she'd seen him, after all, was before everything had fallen apart. He'd been at the top of his game. He'd seemed unstoppable, unbeatable.

And he'd put a bullet from Wash's gun in his own brain. There's a certain grim satisfaction in that, one she doesn't want to examine too closely. ]

What happens when he realizes he's not?

September Intro: The Fields Are Painted Gold

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