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

1

[sereneflame]

[Serene has never seen anyone like a troll before, but she comes from a world with enough different species that she doesn't gawp at Aradia]

Effective indeed. Even if we have doubts about the change we can really make to the universe the tale of this world is enough to make us fear what could happen if we do nothing.

[But that wasn't why she had come near enough to speak to. She points to Aradia's snack with great interest]

Are those grasshoppers? Where did you find them?

[timebender]

Or if nothing else, a very effective threat!

[ She doesn't sound too threatened, though, and easily moves on to the next question. It's hard to be threatened when your world is already destroyed, and she feels like Lord English is doing a good enough job of tearing the universe asunder without ALASTAIR's intervention... ]

Is that what they're called? They're right between a tier of cupcakes, and a bowl of something that looked a little bit like machine oil. They were sort of hidden, I think on accident though, because they are very good! You should try some!

[sereneflame]

I'm going to! Finally, something that looks familiar.

[She strides off to the table to collect a nice handful of the grasshoppers and comes back again crunching one happily]

These are so much better than mere cupcakes, I actually feel like I might get full if I snack on enough.

[timebender]

[ Well isn't that something. She's been around enough humans to pick up on their dietary habits, and insects in her experience didn't usually factor in. But she's already learned to expect nothing here. ]

I'm just glad I'm not the only one on our team enjoying them. You would be surprised what some people won't eat in a survival situation!

[sereneflame]

[Now that makes her raise her brows in surprise]

Really? More fools they! I know there are definitely foods I wouldn't put in my mouth but grasshoppers? I look forward to when they appear in the grasslands every season!

[She grins in bright interest at Aradia, her eyes darting to her horns and yellow eyes]

I'm Serene Charlord, a human from Callirhoe. I have never met anyone of your species before, I believe.

[timebender]

Aradia Megido, a troll formerly from Alternia!

[ Yes, she's used to it... but she's thankful for the directness, anyway. So many just try to dance around it, and it takes that much longer to get out of the way. ]

I'm not surprised, humans seem to be common across the multiverse, but not trolls for some reason! It's one of the things I'd like to look into someday, if ALASTAIR will give me the time.

[sereneflame]

[She snorts and giggles at that]

Humans? Not Humen? Is that what the rest of them call themselves? Do they call themselves mans and womans too?

[But grammatical amusements aside, Aradia brings up an important point. She glances about the gathering]

Perhaps ALASTAIR's rifts are simply biased towards forming where humen are? I don't quite believe that the universe can be so full of humen and so deprived of everyone else.

[timebender]

I've only ever heard them refer to themselves as humans.

[ She shrugs it off; she's not the one who named them, and she's not about to get too entrenched in quibbling over it. It's not really her place, anyway. ]

That's... possible. But most of ALASTAIR members we've met who aren't on our own team are not human, and our last mission was to a world populated entirely by small deer people, goddesses, and formerly cat people.

[ She stops, and seems to come to some kind of epiphany. ]

Ah. Maybe it's the other way around. Perhaps we're the misfit team, the minorities? Trolls and humans and humen alike.

[sereneflame]

[Now there's a possibility she hadn't considered. She looks about the room, considering the mix of people]

Mercy, I hope not! My ego couldn't bear the shame. [She shoots Aradia a grin] Better to think that we are both incredibly rare but so favoured that our kinds are targetted especially for this momentous task.

[timebender]

Just think though, the multiverse could be populated by primarily by felines! I think that would explain a lot, don't you?

[ ...do they have cats where she's from? She doesn't think to ask, Aradia is so used to talking to people who look like humans are if they're all from he same Earth. ]