EVENT ★ RECOLLECTION DAY

[futurologists]

RECOLLECTION DAY On the recruits' return to Oska, they will find some dreary weather, plus the entire castle and town decorated in purple and silver. Ribbons, streamers, and lights in ALASTAIR's colors fill every populated space, and there are more people milling about than before: humanoids and others in equal measure, all of them dressed in ALASTAIR uniforms of some degree. Dagny, Uruz, Cherenkov, and Crowley can be found among the others, as can recent recruit Pomarr, the undead Dakal from the last mission. The weather seems to be due to Pomarr. It's generally overcast around Oska, but the in area nearest to their newest recruit it will always be softly raining to some degree. THE FEAST Inside the castle, one of the many studies is decorated lavishly in the same purple-and-silver scheme as the rest of Oska. Today the kitchen is porting food directly into this room, where it's set out along long tables at the edges of the room. You can find anything here, food to suit any kind of diet from any kind of planet at all. There are no promises that all food will suit all diets, though. But still, if you want to try the bubbling pot of orange with the little worms that keep trying to struggle out of it, no one's going to stop you. A well-dressed, gently green lady stands at the center of the room, nursing a wineglass full of something silvery and addressing the room at large. She seems to be going over the history of Oska, to anyone who will listen. The gist of it is that Oska was once an entire world, densely populated and well known for its music and carefully bred hunting companion animals. However, its energy was severely unbalanced, and the world was swiftly coming undone. ALASTAIR recruits of the time realized it was the very animals the natives so loved that were the focus of all of the planet's energy, but by the time they had finally figured it out and began to cull the animals, it was too late. This little scrap is all they managed to save. What locals remained eventually died out, being too few to repopulate by themselves, and ALASTAIR opted to move in and reclaim the space, so as not to let this world go entirely forgotten. With their very base of operations as a reminder of what can happen to any world at any time, ALASTAIR of today is not likely to forget the necessity of their mission any time soon. Come for the food, stay for the slightly depressing story, and leave again fuller and maybe a little more somber than you were before. THE OBSERVATORY This room is usually home to a large telescope, a ceiling that slides open, and a lot of gauzy, ethereal decoration. Today it's been cleared out for what seems to be a room-wide, three dimensional documentary, playing on repeat throughout the festival. Images of a vast star system are projected into this room from no identifiable source, floating holograms the viewer can walk between and admire from any angle. A deep, soothing, presumably male voice speaks over the moving images, describing the action as it unfolds. In the beginning, there was one universe. It was vast and eternal, and most importantly, self-sustaining. There was no reason to doubt it would go on forever. The images at this point are on a cosmic scale, an impossible number of tiny stars swirling in silent patterns. We don't know what shattered the harmony, we only know that shatter it, it did. We call this the Cataclysm. This part is clearly an artist's interpretation. Slivers of light snake across the universe like the cracks in a broken window, shaking apart the entire scene. Some of the broken sections implode onto themselves in beautiful colors; some of them spread out and consume their neighbors. It's beautiful in a way, and probably completely visually inaccurate to whatever the real event looked like. The voice continues: The Universe became the Multiverse. The harmony is broken, and the energy no longer balances out. Worlds are thrown into disarray and chaos, some burning out immediately while others struggle on as they are able. There are even dozens of iterations of the same reality existing in some places, just barely splintered from one another and overlapping in impossible ways. The shards of our formerly united reality are nearly limitless. There are flashes of worlds as the narrator's voice continues. Each one lasts no longer than five seconds, filling the room and then flashing into the next scene. These are flashes of real worlds, broadcast up from the mysterious Viewing Hall and all of its mirrors down in the dungeons. Recruits watching diligently enough may even catch sight of familiar scenes. This is ALASTAIR's duty. We travel from reality to reality, doing what we must to equalize the energy. The necessary tasks can vary wildly, as wildly as the realities themselves do. In some worlds we find great success, snatching them from the brink of destruction and allowing them to continue on, rebalanced. Some worlds cannot be saved. The images shift, this time replaying old, completed missions. The variety is huge here, too. One team of blue humanoids dressed in ALASTAIR purple struggles to pull a mammoth out of a tar pit. Two small, doglike recruits dash through a dark alleyway, dodging laser fire. A team of something human-shaped but bundled up in spacesuits climb carefully through the weightlessness of space along the outside edge of an enormous spaceship. The narrator has just one more line to add: Ours is no easy task, but if not us. . . who? The informational recording fades out, and five minutes later, plays again from the beginning. THE COURTYARD Down in the courtyard, the festivities continue, this time led by Dagny and Uruz. They have a great number of temporary pens set up in the middle of the area, each one holding a strange, fantastical animal, which doesn't seem at all happy to be there. These are new mounts, Uruz will explain. Each one of them was personally rescued from a dying world by Dagny and herself. They're not quite tame yet, though, and so they've made a competition of it: anyone who can convince a creature to let them sit astride its back and then guide it into a pen in the stables proper will win a prize. Dagny would like to request that you be really careful, please! Those tusks and spikes can get really sharp. The prize given to any winning recruit will be a small, silvery musicbox. Opening it plays a soothing tune that will calm anything within the area for about 30 minutes. It can only be used once. Feel free to make up what kind of creature your character runs into. The stables of ALASTAIR are well known for their variety! LOST ORBS Have you ever wondered how Oska is powered? Well, obviously it's plasma orbs, how else? Oska's resident cats have been hard at work creating more of these, to the point that those not yet in use need somewhere to be contained. The problem is, these things are mobile. They'll float anywhere they please with some kind of debatable mind of their own, and lately it's not been uncommon to see two or three of them floating idly down the hallway together. Crowley and Cherenkov have requested recruit assistance in corralling these things and bringing them to a room set up to keep them in on the third floor. They're a bit like slowly deflating helium balloons, and can be guided with gentle taps to get them floating along in the right direction. Touching one of them is a strange experience that tends to leave hair standing on end. Touching more than one of them at the same time, however, is not recommended. Simultaneous contact with two or more plasma orbs has been known to have strange effects on people, including but not limited to developing the power to fly, sudden weightlessness, animal shapeshifting, ice breath, teleportation, and creating a protective and impenetrable bubble around oneself. None of these effects lasts longer than two minutes, and in each case, the following magitek hangover will make any orb-toucher feel awful for at least half an hour. HOTSPRINGS There's a new addition to Oska, down by the lake. It seems another team recently extracted an enormous, very hot core from a sentient and murderous AI. The core's power source isn't expected to run out for at least another thousand years, and unsure what else to do with it, the team dug it a pit not far from the lake. They failed to realize that this would accidentally have a very, very pleasant outcome. There are now hotsprings by the lake, nestled into the small grove of trees that grow around it. The water bubbles softly up from the ground in a new (technically man-made) pool, and some enterprising recruits have built wooden decks and stairs around and through the whole affair. It's a little bit of a hike to get there from the castle, but anyone who has visited can agree: it's worth it. OOC INFO Welcome to the festival! This will ICly last for 3 days (and OOCly for 2 weeks), at the end of which the other teams visiting the party will ship out to other missions and leave the PC team to unwind with Oska all to themselves. Through the duration of the festival, recruits will find themselves asked one question repeatedly: do you new guys have a team name yet? It seems everyone else has a team name! Really, it's just sort of sad that a team this big doesn't have a name, isn't it? We'll be including a section for characters to ICly suggest team names, and later on will be hosting an IC vote to pick a team name. Characters who signed up to remain in Nalawi for three months will arrive late to the party, but how late is up to players.

Comments

Evan Friave-Goodlace | OTA

[evantuality]

[1] You got something there….
Festive purple cupcake in hand, Evan wanders over and discovers the Green Lady speaking. It’s odd, at first: she looks a little like one of the Nalawi writ large and it’s a jolt after having just left the world. But no; this creature is to the tiny deerfolk what the giant prehistoric ancestors of elk are to a dik-dik.

Soon enough though, he’s caught up in her tale, and caught up thoroughly. He eats his cupcake thoughtfully as he listens, in small bites, without looking. By the time the Green Lady is finished, he’s finished too and his head is whirling with new information.

He stands there, staring into space and meditatively licking purple icing off of his fingers. He’s managed to get some on his cheek.]

[2] Like baklava
[The observatory is just as exciting and mystifying to Evan, but in this case his consideration of the little presentation isn’t quite as passive.]

Now that’s entirely different than the multiverse theories back home. I wonder if they’d stack? Are there multiple universes that have been shattered in turn into their own multitudes?

[He frowns, deeply interested and just as deeply puzzled.]

And for that matter, how did ALASTAIR find out how its own universe began? Now there’s a juicy bit of information to have by any means.

[3] The difference between science and screwing around is recording results
[Evan has gotten clever with the orbs: he's left his room with a pillowcase filtched from his bed and has been using it to scoop orbs out of the air. When he has five, they begin to make a vaguely threatening humming noise. He decides to cut his efforts off, but as he ties up the bag his fingers brush a few of the orbs through the fabric.

A yelp, and a flash, and several exclamations of dismay later, Evan finally manages to get a handle on himself. Any recruit that passes by will see him, several feet up, grinning and upside down and walking on the roof, with his hands out as if for balance. He calls, and points towards the bag — which is still floating normally near the floor.]

Hey, will you grab that before it floats away? Don’t touch the orbs, even through the fabric, but there should be enough slack to grab on the tied end!

[4] The hot cold
[At Nalawi, he had developed a taste for swimming. Their arrival in the middle of that terrifying storm had spooked him badly about his own inability to swim, and then the heat had made the water all the more tempting, and before he knew it he’d been reprising the favoured old passtime regularly. It was no surprise that he had more meat on his shoulders now, more strength in his core — not much, but to the previously totally sedentary young man even the mildest definition was a point of pride.

It was the one major thing he was disappointed about, returning to Oska. His first day back he’d tested the lake — dismally cold, compared to that sweet warm ocean. When news had come to his ears of the hot springs he’d immediately seeked them out, and had been delighted to find them so very near the lake.

Tonight, he’s taking advantage. He’s left his eyepatch and his towel back by the hotsprings where they’re nearest the lake, and run into the chilly water before he can chicken out.

No one was at the hotsprings when he had first arrived, and after his exertions when he comes back, he will not be expecting anyone either. Dripping, flushed, covered in goosebumps and panting with exercise, he comes winding back through the woods, eager to soak in the warm. He’ll balk at another presence, just for a moment, and stop to retrieve his eyepatch and put it on with his back turned before he climbs up one of the sets of stairs and slips into the steaming tubs, feeling a little exposed.]

(or if you want to run into him while he’s out swimming or something, feel free)

[5] Wildcard
(whatever you’d like! Or hit me up at jkatkina and we’ll jam)

3;

[agrizzlysin]

[King himself is floating about a foot off the ground when he reaches for the drifting bag. He can't help but aim an off-kilter glance at Evan's upside-down grin. He'd been attracted by a flash and a whole lot of shouting, and what he sees now is a far cry from what he'd been expecting.]

Are you... [High?] okay?

[evantuality]

[Oh, hey, it's one of the Super-Competent Preteens club. Evan grins at King, who'd landed firmly in his good books after their last conversation, and then resumed his careful walk along the ceiling, picking his way over ridges and decorative fixtures.]

More okay than I thought I'd be. Honestly, with all those warnings about not touching more than one orb at once I expected something worse than this? It's kind of... fun, actually.

Although come to think of it, I see how this would be a real problem if someone did it outside.

[He shoots another look at King, who looks thoroughly upside down to him, and is tickled to see the young man is floating too.] You didn't get zapped too, did you?

[agrizzlysin]

[He quickly shakes his head.]

I've always been able to fly. It's just... [He trails off, trying to choose the best descriptor for this up-is-down madness.] strange to see a human doing it for once.

[Apparently having decided that Evan is, in fact, okay despite appearances, King rises just enough to hand the bag of orbs back its owner. He sighs.]

The plasma orbs caused this? After the coconut bombs, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

[evantuality]

I will say this is a much more welcome gimmick than exploding coconuts. I don't generally expect my potential food sources to cross-pollinate with my explosives, theoretically speaking.

[He reaches to take the bag, pleased as peaches to be able to get his hands on it again, and grins at King.]

I'd almost say you should try this but you've certainly got it covered already. I'm not--

[Stopping in his verbal tracks, he makes a small noise of surprise, one that quickly morphs into an expression of concern. He trots across the ceiling to one of the decorative arches that ridges the hallway, but with every step his feet are coming further off the ceiling's surface.]

Oh, uh -- oh dear. I think I'm -- ah!

[His two minutes are up. Evan, at first with a slowness and then a quickness, begins to fall as normal gravity reasserts itself on him. He scrambles to try and grab some of the decorative molding on the archway and succeeds only enough to break his momentum for a moment, but fall he does.]

[agrizzlysin]

[Fall he does... right into a floating green body pillow. It's much cushier than the floor, and King can't help but let loose a sigh of relief when he confirms that the pillow he's sent flying hasn't missed its target. His pointer finger lowers and so does the pillow, slowly dropping until it's no more than an inch above the floor before tilting its cargo to safety.

King is silent for several seconds, letting the situation sink in. Then, the sarcasm.]

Well... at least you didn't explode.

4!

[dokyuu]

[Motochika liked parties just fine, especially when he wasn't the one who had to worry about property damage, but all the underlying talk about ALASTAIR and what it was they were meant to be doing... he was a little tired of it. It wasn't there fault he was stuck here, but it only served to remind him of the things he'd left undone back home.

The hotsprings were a nice reprieve. They hadn't been here the last time he'd scouted out the lake, so someone'd been busy while they were away from Oska, and it quiet. He's not expecting anyone else, but he's also not surprised when someone else steps out of the woods. At least, not as surprised as that someone else seems to be.]

Sorry, hope I'm not intruding.

[Which might be a little ironic to anyone who knows his history of pirating, but hey, he still has manners. Although he does chuckle a little when Evan retrieves the eyepatch.]

You don't gotta do that on account of me.

[He gestures to his own face, a full quarter of it obscured by his own patch.]

[evantuality]

[Evan, who had been about to cough some platitude about the man not intruding at all, instead stops in his tracks at that odd second comment. Stops, and really looks at the other fellow -- and after a moment of being frozen, he grins a crooked grin.]

Oh. Ah.

[Still, he turns his head and settles his own patch back in place before climbing up on the platform surrounding the spring and carefully finding his own way in.]

It's alright. I'm trying to get into the habit of wearing it, anyways. I just thought I rather shouldn't while swimming.

[dokyuu]

Ha. Yeah, I've lost a few that way. Sometimes I forget.

[And sometimes he's too preoccupied with whatever else he's doing to bother.]

I'm Motochika, by the way.

[Because if you're going to sit around a hotspring with someone else, introductions were probably a good idea.]

[evantuality]

Evan. [He offers that back a little quietly; for all his exertions getting his blood pumping, thinking about his eye and the patch always puts him in a pensive mood. He does his best to shake it off, sinking into the warm water of the spring and sighing out a long, deep breath. The flush he gained swimming will not be helped by the heat, but he doesn't mind: the heat is divine after the cold of the lake.]

Good to, um, meet you. Are you one of the newer recruits or have we just not run into each other before?

[dokyuu]

Probably just haven't run into each other yet. I got here before we set out on that last mission, anyway.

[However long ago that was. It had gotten pretty impossible to keep track, after awhile.]

Things got a little messy, didn't have time to talk with everyone. You been around long?

wildcard, lmk if this doesn't work

[strictdiscipline]

[Day two finds Riza outdoors in the courtyard, away from all the Recollection Day celebrations ongoing. Important as it might be to pay homage to Oska's history, she finds her mind lingering still on Nalawi and how much of the latter half of the mission had hit too close to home. But they're unhappy thoughts, useless without action, and so she resolves to busy herself with better tasks.

Such as setting things on fire.

In retrospect, engaging in sch a volatile activity when one's mind is already distracted is probably not the best of ideas, but given that there's a bush - soon to be two bushes and a small sapling - on fire, there's not exactly time to look back and question past choices. And the water she's dumping from an unused watering can isn't doing much to put out the fire, only delay it.

On the bright side, she herself isn't on fire. Yet.]

pfahaha, icon == perfect

[evantuality]

[If there is one thing Evan is reasonably confident he's pretty alright at doing, it's setting fires. If there's a second thing on that very equivocated list, it's probably putting out fires.

As they had joked about briefly, there had been little time amongst all the building and the planning and the fretting and the slaying that had happened on Nalawi for them to have another conversation, but Evan had not failed to keep the thoughtful blonde in mind and had made note of her whenever he'd spotted her around. Riza had left an impression.

When he caught the sense of fire down in the courtyard and decided to stick his head in, he had not been expecting her of all people to be at the epicentre of the growing sense of a blaze. He exclaims, surprise and quickly dismay when the sight fully parses. She's looking to put out a fire that size with a watering can?!]

Oh good lord, that's never going to -- you might as well just -- oh dear.

[As he hurries over, the sapling catches fire. What a mess. He frets his way over to her and flaps his hands, sucking in a deep breath and letting it out although he does not manage any sort of meditative visage. On the other hand, as he flaps, the fire dies down and then it goes out, leaving smoke hissing from the spots she managed to water.

He huffs and turns only after he's eyeballed the smoking bush into submission with the one eye not covered by his leather eyepatch.]

What on earth happened? Where did that come from? Are you alright?

oh my gosh i lost this somehow, i'm so sorry

[strictdiscipline]

[Fortunately (for both Riza and the remainder of the residents currently in Castle Oska), help arrives sooner rather than later. Surprisingly not in the form of a giant wave of water, but a familiar figure, flapping his hands in a bizarre motion she can only assume stems from outright panic.

Surely such an action isn't going to help? And yet it does, the fire slowly dying as she watches in mild consternation. At his prompting, she has the good grace to look thoroughly apologetic for the now-charred consequences of her actions.]

Thank you. [A brief beat of silence passes before she continues.] I was the one who caused it, actually. Magic practice gone awry.

No worries! Welcome back~

[evantuality]

[That earns Riza an shocked stare from Evan, who over the course of his life has very rarely met anyone else who could use fire magically. Hell, it shouldn't be so surprising here, and he knows it... but then, the fact that she is secretly magical is only half of his shock.]

Magic practice? With fire? By yourself? With, with a watering can as your backup?

[She had struck him as so sensible. It throws him for a loop that she hadn't set up even the most basic safety precautions that he would have thought of -- but then, not everyone grows up with the benefit of a magical parent, he supposes. He frowns and reins himself in, pushing his hair, which has gotten long over the months in Nalawi, away from his face.]

You're alright, though? Good lord, that could have been bad.

thank you!

[strictdiscipline]

I've done it before.

[Replied with a hint of acerbity in her voice, though it's quick to fade, drowned out by a low sigh. Ultimately he's right, she wasn't thinking. In fact, she was trying a little hard not to think, which is precisely what landed her in this mess to begin with.

She runs a hand through her hair, dusting off a few stray flyaway pieces of ash.]

But as you can see, I'm not very well versed in using magic yet. [Largely because:] It's surprisingly difficult to find teachers for this.

[She's certainly asked around. Either they flat-out refuse her or they vanish within the next month.]

[4]

[sereneflame]

Serene was feeling far less full of wonder than she had the first day she'd run into Evan. Unknowingly he'd led her to the feast, where the banquet of murdered flesh had been cooked and artfully spice for the room full of Carnivores in attendance. She'd fled in horror and by the time she'd finally recovered her senses she had no desire to go and search for him again.

She'd sought out the baths in the night because she was tired of dealing with people so foreign to her and needed some time out of her cell of a room to unwind. She'd thought she had the baths to herself until she spotted the eyepatch and towel. That made her roll her eyes as that could have belonged any of a half a dozen men that she'd seen or spoken to in the last few days. What had they been up to? Fiercely she'd hoped that they'd ha them clawed out while trying to hunt for prey, disgusting bastards they were.

By the time Evan returns she's sitting in the water in her undergarments with her hair floating loose about her like a large mat of seaweed. She watches him, recognising him without too much cheer, and waits until he settles in the water before asking bluntly

"So how did you lose your eye?" She sounds far duller than she had the last time they spoke.

[evantuality]

When Serene had disappeared at the feast, Evan had suffered briefly anxiety over the reasons for her disappearance. In the hall, she had seemed to flirt back with the playful attempt he'd made, but had he gone too far? Or maybe it had so offended her when he'd started listening in to the speaker's story that she'd written him off? In either case, back home, it would have felled him; here, he shored up against it as best he could and found reasonable success. Flirting by itself meant nothing, and she could have disappeared for half a dozen reasons. He'd just be resolutely friendly the next time he saw her and hope he hadn't messed up the team dynamics too much.

Seeing her in the spring ends up being doubly a startle, inclined as he is to want to assure himself that the air is clear between them. His own self-consciousness galls him, so he intentionally moves with care to enter the spring proper once his eyepatch is settled.

They are already not off to a good start. She looks less than pleased to see him; drat. His heart pattering even as he tries hard to ignore it, he looks sidelong at her -- till she asks that question and he outright stares.

"Hello to you too." The sass comes automatically, prompted by his surprise. No one's yet asked him so point-blank and he's startled by it. But then he grimaces, looks away. "A fire imp tore it out." The surprise, too, means he is not inclined to blunt the edges of that fact, although his tone is not sharp so much as subdued.

[sereneflame]

She stares at him through narrowed eyes, unimpressed with the sass.

"And what were you doing with the imp that it was near enough to tear your face?" She asks, voice low over the water. "You're another carnivore, aren't you? That's why you didn't mention the corpses being served at the feast."

It disgusts her then that she'd thought him kind enough to flirt with. She slinks lower into the water, her hair spreading out around her.

[evantuality]

If anything, she sounds like a predator, the way she's near growling at him. The sight of her is not unintimidating, either: he'd caught on that she was fit, but here in the water she was tall and broad and more muscled along her shoulders than he was. It shouldn't have made him skittish, and it didn't, properly, but some part of him was very aware of it.

That next question earns an even rounder-eyed stare from him. There's a lot to unpack there. "Carnivore? Corpses? What do you..." His brows furrow, pulling the scars over his eyepatch oddly on his forehead. "They were luring recruits into lava flows." It's a nonspecific half-dodge, but his tone is one of incredulity. "We were making sure no one ended up fried."

[sereneflame]

Her eyes remained narrowed for a long moment as she twisted those words about in her mind to look for the hidden wrongness within, the carnivore's deception. She couldn't see one for now so she filed those words of his away for later, just in case some other context illuminated his actions more fully.

"The corpses at the banquet." She repeated softly, turning the subject back to what really matters. "Did you know they would be served?"

[1]

[adlantisag]

[ Evan might feel a napkin wiping away the purple smear on his cheek. It's a surprisingly benign gesture, possibly alien to him given the one administering it, but Kida's expression is soft. Her uniform, once pristine white, is not several shades ranging from 'off-white' to 'mud brown', and stained in several places with grass.

She looks exhausted, but relieved, somehow. ]

An interesting display, for certain. Hello, Evan.

[ The napkin is pulled away with the same unhurried grace it arrived. ]

Is the cake good?

[evantuality]

[Evan goes still when the napkin catches him by surprise. In a manner rather more kittenish than he'd generally care to admit to, his reaction to a good startle is more often than not to go limp. In this case he stares with his one good eye round underneath an arced eyebrow, all the way up that hand and to its owner.

At which point he exclaims.]

Kida!

[He lowers the cupcake and stares at the woman. He's got such mixed feelings about her: immediately she evokes a split-second flash memory of the scent of burnt flesh, and for a moment the faint whiff of barbeque from the buffet table turns his stomach; but at the same time there's a respect that runs deep, sprung from the same incident. If she intimidates him a little, it's some alchemical mixture of those two reactions and he feels a touch sheepish for it.]

You look -- you look like you just got back. You were on a mission, right?

Uh. [Belatedly he catches the question, forgotten briefly in his startlement. He looks down at the cupcake and grins.] It's a nice treat after a diet of fish and seaweed, to be sure.

[adlantisag]

I was called away, yes.

[ Her mouth forms a thin, aching line at the words. ]

To a planet of endless rain and endless mud. We were asked to plant trees, slowly.

[ She grounds out the last word. The napkin is lowered completely, before being tossed in a nearby wastebasket with perhaps more force than should truly be necessary. ]

[evantuality]

[His grin widens a little and he does his best to fight it back down. Her frustration isn't funny, exactly -- okay so maybe it's a little funny considering the source, but he doesn't want to make it worse by making her feel laughed at. He inclines his head, sympathetic.]

Well, welcome back to the world of the quick and the fed, I suppose. Planting trees? I guess ALASTAIR's purview must extend to the mundane as much as the dramatic, that makes some sense. I suppose battling deforestation could count as a world-saving proposition.

[He's babbling a little with the good mood of the day and with how pleased he is to see a familiar face looking a lot less stressed out than she was.]