epidemiology | EVENT ★ RECOLLECTION DAY

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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

[ hey, getting a chance to scope out an incredibly compact energy source is gain enough for some people, rhys. people like tony, at least, who are into that kind of thing. so really a pretty... small sample size of people. whatever.

either way, he reaches up to very pointedly tap one of the orbs to test out its reaction upon running into his first one, and that's how he finds out that they can float with a burst of unexpected speed when given a little boost.

rhys picks a really bad time to turn around.

tony's eyebrows go up a bit, however, when he raises an arm to shove the orb aside, momentarily distracted from the task at hand by something else that plays to his interests. ] ... Nice arm. Linked right up to your nervous system? [ he's tempted to bat it at you again, rhys, just to observe your reaction now.

in fact, that's exactly what he does. ]

Oh. Hah, yeah, it's—

[ His immediate reaction to anything flying at his face is to yelp and throw his hands up to protect himself, so that's exactly what he does. He realizes just in time that his robotic arm should not be up there and yanks it away, his regular arm the only thing between him and the orb instead. ]

Oh, my god.

[ He presses his lips together tightly, holding his hands out in front of him like he's strangling someone and shakes them a couple times before he closes them into fists and lowers them. Rhys isn't much of a strangler, admittedly, but the guy who lives in his head is. ]

Could you not.

[ he's an engineer, ok. he has to poke the thing. he'll relent for now, at least. ]

What kind of plating is that? Is that a battery pack?

Oh, yeah, hi, it's so nice to meet you, thanks for introducing yourself, my name's Rhys!

[ Get some manners, pal. Even though Rhys doesn't have manners either. ]

Yes, it's a battery pack, it isn't running on hopes and dreams.

That's cute. [ we can't all run on fusion reactors, i suppose ] Tony Stark. New guy.

[ He recalls Stiles saying he dug Rhys's "Tony Stark slash supernatural hunter" vibe. It was possibly the most wrong impression anyone has ever gotten of him, but still. He remembers it. ]

"Cute". [ So insulting. ] It's Hyperion-made. Top manufacturer in all the galaxies. It's not cute, it's... [ Struggling for words: ] Bad— it's badass.

[ this is not the face of a man who is very convinced ] Does this Hyperion specialize in cyber-prosthetics? [ because that's a uh. area of interest. ]

Weaponry. And... killing people in general? [ A shrug. ] Mostly guns, but loader bots and stuff, too. And we do some Eridium mining. Used to, anyway.

[ it's like the ghost of christmas his-own-past. lovely. ] Iridium? [ no, that's not what he said, but he's not familiar with your nonsense elements, ok. ] Isn't that a little brittle for weapon manufacturing?

What? No. It's a fuel source.

[ JUDGING LOOK, how do you not know this bruh ]

You might want to go back to chemistry class.

Okay, well, maybe you should. ...Go back to class, to chemistry class, I mean. [ He winces a little. ] Or maybe history class, the Eridians are rolling in their ancient alien graves right now.

Aliens?

You're talking about an alien fuel source? [ he doesn't sound skeptical at least. he is well aware - painfully, ptsd-laden levels of aware - that aliens are real, after all. ] Where I come from we haven't met any... Eridians yet.

Uh, yeah. it's er-i-di-um, like Er-i-di-an.

[ A look that says duh, everybody knows this. Tony's still leagues above all the people who don't know what a computer is, but come on. ]

I haven't met any, either. Pretty sure they're all in the aforementioned ancient alien graves.

Right. Hence the mining. [ the concept still makes him uncomfortable, but he's not about to show that, so he'll deftly change the subject ]

Have you been a part of this outfit long?

Depends on your definition of 'long'.

[ There's an almost imperceptible upwards twitch of the corner of his mouth. That's what she said. Did he just say that because it would be funny? Possibly. In all seriousness, though, he doesn't know how long a regular person stays with the organization. ]

Apparently, this thing has been around for, like, thousands of years. I've been with it a few months, though.

And as employers, how would you rate them? One through ten.

Are you trying to make me do a review? I don't know, they haven't tried to kill me, that's a step up from my old job. Eight point five, I don't know.

You know, you hear a lot about employees plotting to kill your bosses, but very little going the other way.

[ Popping the 'P': ] Yep. It goes both ways, actually. Or— it doesn't really go any sort of way, it's more of a general clusterfuck of people trying to kill each other.

Must have had one hell of a benefits package.

Something like that. But since this job involves way less assholes— [ Well. ] Mildly less assholes. Since this job involves mildly less assholes, I've gotta say I prefer this one. Except for the whole... fighting monsters, saving worlds thing.

[ That's the entire thing. ]

Which leaves... what? The designer uniforms? [ he's really stuck on those ]

What, you... don't like them? I think they're kind of coo— I mean, they're okay. I guess.

I'm not really a company polo kind of guy. [ at least fury never tried to put them in matching spandex. ]

iii)

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