epidemiology | EVENT ★ RECOLLECTION DAY

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 jonathan kuo

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
jason parker

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ coupled with the underlying agitation he feels about his entire current situation, this stranger's jump to arms is about as annoying as it can get. ]

Keep quiet... [ without looking at her, hanbei busies himself with reins he seems all too prepared to use on the mentioned creatures. ] Do you honestly believe that what they "want" should be considered?

[She shoots him a look of absolute disgust for that attitude]

Yes, you slack-brained idiot, I do, otherwise I wouldn't have asked you that. Why do think their feelings shouldn't be taken into account?

[ he laughs under his breath. "idiot", hm? ] My... I'm sorry, were you not paying attention?

[ his sharp eyes watch her from the corner of his vision, a small, easy smile finding his lips. ]

If you'd like to release them, then I urge that you do so. [ with a slide of his hand, he straightens the reins he means to tie. ] And when they die by way of being unadapted to this environment, starved or hunting for us, ALASTAIR will surely be indebted to you.

[She sneers at him]

A convenient excuse for slavery. If this is meant to help them, then why make a spectacle and a competition of their distress? Why strip them of their dignity by displaying them like bread in a shop window when they clearly do not want us to surround them? You demean them to convince yourself and others that they are less than us.

[ that earns a roll of his eyes. ]

This set up is meant to inspire productivity, nothing more. Would you propose we waste our resources meticulously caring for each one? You realize they are all that's left of their worlds, don't you?

[ in other words, absolutely not worth the effort. once again, he directs his gaze elsewhere. ]

They exist now to be mounts.

[She bares her teeth at him]

If they are the last parts of their world? Then yes, you self-centred cretin, it's the least we can do. Tell me, when someone is crippled on a mission here are they cared for, or are we caged to inspire productivity too?

You love your name-calling, don't you? [ tiredly. ] Irrational... something tells me you've never led a day in your life. [ he lays out plainly, as though obligated to return the favor. ]

If you feel you have it so figured out, however, I'd like to see how easy it is for you to "befriend" one. [ there's a pause as he smiles, prodding. ] Is that the word you'd prefer to use?

[She sneers at him for that]

I have led, but something tells me that if you've tried to lead you've never led well.

[She turns her stare back to the animals for the moment ]

Of course I'm not going to go and 'befriend' them. Look at them, they don't want to be friends with us because we have put them in this position. But I would clear this square of these noisy, intrusive people and ensure they had food and water before sitting down to plan where they could be held.

[She shoots him another sneer]

A true leader knows not to jump to a hasty action if there is time to plan properly.

[ he glances down, smile widening, laced with secrets in everything he could say to that. he knows everything about leading with little time. ]

Ah, but that's the point, isn't it? What time do we have? [ admittedly, he is posturing a little, if only in the fact that he's not been here more than half a day and can't hope to understand the inner workings of ALAISTAR and their reasonings for any of this as much as he hopes to. but he was a leader (no, still is) and he can make an educated guess. ]

These creatures will never take precedence over recruits. [ a beat. ] Or be treated with the same standing.

[ and an uncaring shrug. ] Certainly, they should be treated well enough so they last. But this is their place, now.

[She sets her fists on her hips and glares at him, not willing to take a rhetorical question lying down]

What time do we have, then? How many days or weeks will we be here until we have to set off for a mission? Who tends to the tamed creatures and why can't they feed the wild ones too? I don't believe that we have time for a feast and no time for anything else but to pack for the next mission. You just prefer the convenience of accepting the situation as it is.

No, I just don't particularly care to waste my energy on something so trivial.

[ well, she may be naive beyond all hope, in his opinion, but some part of him hopes she's not just all talk. ]

Perhaps you can get into contact with ALASTAIR, then. I certainly won't stop you from trying to [ some vague wave of his hand ] seek whatever solution it is you've come up with.

[He's pointless to talk to. She turns from him, spitting over her shoulder]

I shall. May the creature you choose to torment trample you.

EVENT ★ RECOLLECTION DAY

the pens

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