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

"On my world, anyone who desecrates a corpse by consuming its flesh is sentenced to death, for that is one of the greatest crimes a person can commit."

She stares at him for a long, intense moment before making a sound of disgust and averting her gaze.

"But all of you are like that, all of you! I have not met a single person who can grasp such a fundamental concept. Is this what the humen are in other universes?"

That gaze sliding away from him again is a visceral relief, though it by no means takes away his urge to find a reason to leave as quickly as possible.

Still, even now, a kind of curiosity stays him from taking the most transparent exit and simply leaving without a word. No longer is it a marked interest in overtures of friendship -- which he's convinced will be summarily rejected -- much less anything like flirting. Rather, confusion has taken over, and not yet about the etymological oddness of the species indicator.

"I -- I mean, there are a few people on my world who object to any sort of raising of animals for food, but... but you sound like you're talking about cannibalism." He stares at her in askance.

Edited (-") 2016-06-20 08:12 (UTC)

She shoots him another disgusted, narrow look. "Because it is!" Fuck, she's had this argument too many times to sustain her anger. She groans and leans back in the water, exhausted already.

"Because it is. I told you of The Mercy and how it rises creatures up to sentience. So many of us have risen and so many more have the potential. Anything with a beating heart or breathing lungs holds that potential." She feels like she's educating a small child. She sighs, remembering he's a scholar who likes explanations. What sort of integrity could he have, she wonders, if he can justify slaughtering for his greed?

"We used to eat farmed animals long ago, but again and again people would cross the lines, they'd eat people hunted by the carnivores and traded all cut up and dried enough they could pretend they didn't know the real source. How could we tolerate it in the end? How could we when we ourselves fought to keep the carnivores from stealing our children too? There was no justification beyond liking the taste of meat and we did not grow weaker as the carnivores claimed we could by giving it up."

"First it began with the humen and the pigmen hired to protect the herbivore settlements. They gave unsentient animals up as part of their contracts and the idea spread from them. It has been six hundred years since the Omnivore alliance was formed of we who have the capacity but not the amorality required to devour flesh. It is a sickening act and we do not partake."

His eyes grow less round as he listens, though that comes from the intensity of his focus. He quiets, even chews the inside of his lip as her angry, accusatory words segue into something more even -- or at least something less combative. He still feels the urge to press his spine back against the lip of the spring, but his urge to bolt fades, waiting on the backburner pending the outcome of this conversation.

At least what she has to say begins to slot the pieces into place for him. Six hundred years and ongoing species conflict is a rationale well enough for a cultural disgust for meat-eaters, he supposes: he tries, for a moment, to imagine how he would feel if he heard of humans casually killing and eating weres. Or dragons, even. It doesn't parse in any sort of comfortable way and he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, too much a child of his culture to be that quick on the emotional uptake.

"I don't... I mean..." He stares at her, wary, wondering if defending his world will bring down her ire. "We don't eat sentients on my world, either. We wouldn't farm sentient creatures."

"This isn't your world." She points out as she raises herself up from the water again, her hair slicked down her cheeks and her chest. She stares at him intently, shifting closer in the water to watch his deflections and lies.

"How do you know that the flesh you consume isn't sentient? Have you met the animals that are put on the table here before they die?" Her gaze is unblinking. "I looked for them on that first day but couldn't find them. Where are they?"

The way he stares at her then is not a strong argument for his side of the debate. His brows have furrowed, crunched in. On Earth he could answer with surety, and though this isn't her world either, he slowly frowns.

"Well, I mean, that was all food from, from peoples' various home planets, wasn't it? I'm not clear on how the kitchen produces food, but... but it would stand they have to import it, right..." Again, doubt nibbles at him, doubt that she's planted, and suddenly he's very pleased he did very little sampling of exocuisine at the banquet. Absurdities of Soylent Green proportions flit through his imagination, to ill effect.

His frown snaps deeper. "I just don't believe ALASTAIR would feed us sentients, not with the technology they have. I mean, they can snatch people right out of their own universes, surely they can do their research to make sure the food didn't have a mind."

She hunkers in nearer and stares into his frowning face, focusing on his remaining eye.

"If you have not met your food and looked it in the eye then you do. Not. Know. Believe what you want about their skills and motives, but when I appeared here they told me that my arrival was a mistake."

She scoots back in the water and sinks back down again.

"But in the end you will believe what you wish to believe. Habit is easier than change."

That last little dismissive accusation cracks out like a whip as she backs off and turns away, and though he'd already been pressing himself back, he scowls and pulls back just that little bit more. He's on the defensive again, with that last comment and the way she writes him off. "Somehow I doubt staring something in the face is the most accurate litmus of sentience."

The discomfort has reached a peak that he no longer wants to cope with, not this late at night, not when all he'd wanted to do was relax after exhausting himself. Evan stands, dripping, but pauses before leaving.

"Look, on my world we don't even eat things that we suspect might be near sentient. Nobody eats the great apes, nobody eats dolphins, nobody eats corvids, even -- and however it is on your world, sentience doesn't just show up overnight on mine. You're right, I don't know where the food the kitchen comes from, and maybe there are a number of reasons why that's kind of a sketchy proposition."

His shoulders have come up as he's spoken; he's feeling stung, now, and solidly convinced that Serene will look for further reasons to dislike him now. He's speaking quickly and unhappily. "But you seem determined to consider me a monster no matter what I say, I think, and I'm tired, and it's late, and I'm inclined to leave you to it."

He turns then, climbing out of the spring, dripping and taut.

She listened to his little snaps in silence, not having the energy to argue him down as he rattled on in his huff, but when he heaves himself out of the water she sighs.

"...Wait. You haven't finished your bath, don't go."

She's too weak; she should prefer being alone to being alone with a carnivore. She lifts her head to look at him through the darkness as she offers a grudging olive branch.

"You're the first person I've broached this subject with who hasn't shrugged in utter apathy or declared his joy at being a superior being. You aren't a monster." Sinking back again she groaned. "It would be easier if you were a monster. Why did you have to a kind person?"

That she then turns around and tries to get him to stay pretty much floors Evan. He stops, having crouched to retrieve his towel, and turns enough that he can stare at her incredulously. But it's incredulity liberally spiced with confusion.

But he does stop, because true anger is not a state of mind native to Evan. He turns the rest of the way, and sits on the edge of the boardwalk without immediately slipping back into the spring. His shorts, wet as they are, cling, but it doesn't make him as self-conscious in the dark as it otherwise would.

He's silent for long moments before he can find anything to say that isn't knee-jerk defensiveness. "...well, that's the most backhanded complement I think I've ever received." It's about a third of the way to being a joke, and he's watching her warily.

"Please, if I gave you a proper backhanded compliment you'd be in tears." She half regretted asking him to stay for his presence is like a hair caught between her teeth, unable let her relax as he niggled at the edge of her awareness.

Yet... She doesn't trust herself to be alone right now, not after he's stirred her up again. The urge to just let her distress go up in smoke hasn't even been this strong when she'd marched out of the palace a week ago with her ambitions is tatters.

"I don't want to go home," she admits to the darkness, "but I don't want to stay."

Her matches are in her purse. She can have a little outlet, just a quick spark and a relax. She arches her back, pulling her hair behind her before sitting up. Her undergarment is clinging translucently but she cares little for what he can see. She wades to the shore so she can get into her purse.

"If I go to another world how do I know they won't be like y... the seemingly common culture?" She had to choke on not coming out with something else to drive him away. She dries her hands on her towel and pulls out her cigarette case. Its heaviness is reassuring, a solid golden mark of her wealth, as is the cigarette holder she sticks between her teeth. She delicately inserts a cigarette before pulling out her matchbook.

It's not that her shapely form doesn't register, and he'll doubtless find that out later when it comes to mind unbidden, but just now he has more pressing matters to which his mind is attending. He watches her carefully, definitely feeling more like prey than predator as she stalks with high-strung grace to her pile of belongings and begins setting up for a smoke.

"You won't. They might be." The interaction thus far hasn't led him to want to soften that fact. "The Nalawi, who we were with last, hunted sharks for sport. I find that more abhorrent than hunting for sustenance, but we weren't put there to take stances on how they're to execute their own culture's traditions."

He looks away from her and frowns. He's still feeling deeply, deeply guarded, more so than he's had for feel for some time among ALASTAIR's equitable ranks. At the same time, though... "Honestly, I'm surprised that this is the first really contentious cultural difference someone's had, I mean, that I know of. I suppose it was bound to happen. We're all so different."

Her voice is muffled as she has to speak through clenched teeth. "Really? That makes me sad. I don't want everyone else to be so different."

She strikes a match and suddenly everything stills as she stares at the little flame. The world fades around her as for a moment she's caught.

And then the broken matches burns her fingers and she drops it quickly, hissing. She grabs another one and strikes it but she's agitated now that she slipped in front of a stranger. The matches snaps and drops and she hisses out a vehement set of curses as she realises she's gone and frazzled her last one.

"Fuck." This isn't what she needs at all. "Fuck, do you have a match?" She doubts he does and she's ready to spit out her cigarette and scream at this forsaken reality.

He watches her, brows still furrowed, as she seems to fall into her little task and then so quickly fall back out of it. Her agitation is plain and his teeth are set right back on edge, even if this time it's not directed at him. It so easily could be. Hell, it probably still is to some degree.

When she asks for a match he snorts softly and then bites his lip to silence himself. Does he want to come clean about who he is to this woman? Hell, does he care? Can she think he's any more of a monster than she already does? Rather more pettily, does he want to share the hot springs with a smoker?

Turning his head a little, he feels the breeze on his cheek, blowing out towards the lake, as it's wont to do at night. It'd be at his back, at least. Without a word, his face rather set, he holds his hand out for the cigarette and its elegant little holder.

Her eyes narrow a little and then lower as he offers to take her cigarette. He doesn't want to do her this favour, obviously.

"Thank you." She murmurs lowly, watching just in case he decides to hurl her expensive holder into the hotspring.

In this case, at least, it's less for the reasons she may think. He takes the cigarette, briefly admires the holder, and is given pause by a scent he doesn't associate with smoking, and therefore can't quite place, but it's pungent, spicy, and puts him to wondering if smoking is a different habit on her world, too. Is that even tobacco?

To do the deed itself, he actually turns away a little bit: not enough to really conceal what he's doing as he cups his hand around the end of the cigarette, but enough to indicate that he would prefer not to be stared at, as such. He sighs out a breath and a small flame leaps up around the end of the cigarette. When he's sure it's caught, he drops his hand and quickly holds the stick and its contents out for her to take again, before the ember fails.

His eyes are wary, almost fearful as he watches for her reaction. This is not one he wants to speak aloud.

She watches carefully to see how many matches he has in case she has to trade him in the future.

Her mouth is hanging when he turns back and she ignores her cigarette completely despite the temptation of pungent tobacco and cloves.

"You're a Pyromancer?" She's loud with shock. She stands quickly from the water and leans in, eyes bulging as she stares at him.

"What generation are you? How far are you from the source!?"

When she leans in so completely and immediately he leans back and away just as violently, his own eyes going round. All of his old instincts, the ones he's been trying to suppress that shriek terror whenever he reveals himself to someone new, come screaming back. Except her proximity has him frozen, so he can't even quite get himself to scramble back along the boardwalk.

"I don't even know what that is!" he blurts. Oh, this was a terrible idea, why would he even think after all that she'd already reamed him out for that he should go and do that--

He's frozen like a rabbitman under a shadow. She pulls panting, for her heart is suddenly hammering hard. The Pyromancers are dead on Callirhoe, but this is not her world...

"I'm a Charlord, a Pyromancer, but I'm the twentieth generation removed. The magic died away after the twelfth generation."

She sits down, grabbing her cigarette and taking a deep drag. The cloves crackle and she breathes out pungent, soothing smoke.

"A Pyromancer is one who can create and suppress combustions. Shimmer, the twelfth, was so weak she could only combust what she was directly touching, but Bylian, the first, could create flames as far as he could see in each generation. How far removed are you from the source?" For the first time that night she's as animated and bright as when they first met.

"A Charlord?" Something about the term strikes Evan as barbaric, or maybe simply as unnerving enough to set his teeth on edge. But she's claiming some sort of firey heritage? Round-eyed again and with his feet pulled out of the spring again, he repeats, "Pyromancer? No, I -- I seriously doubt I'm whatever you're thinking of, there's, I mean..."

But again, the doubt of healthy skepticism tickles at his mind and he narrows his eyes at her. Here she is talking about generations -- maybe, maybe this is an overlap like humans on multiple worlds...? "Where do, um, pyromancers come from? What's, what's the source?"

"The Mance stone, it's said, dug from the heart of a mountain and crumbled to dust in minutes. It bestowed magic upon the humans who discovered it."

She can see he's ready to run. She doesn't know how fast he'll be but from his body she's sure she's got more stamina if she has to chase him down. "And your magic? Where did it come from? Are you really like how I should have been?"

Something about the stance she's got is really getting all the hair up on the back of his neck: he's seen that stance in cats waiting to lunge. He's sure if the light was high enough to see as much, her pupils would be just as huge as any hunting cats, and suddenly it annoys him that he's feeling so very intimidated by this person. Never mind it's physically warranted, he feels terrorized and very judged and he does not like it one bit.

"I seriously doubt that I'm anything of the sort, we're not even close to from the same world, I don't know why you would even think that." His voice is fast with nerves but he stares at her, brows suddenly pulled together, his shoulders up but defiant. "Will you back off, please?!"

"I'm sorry." Her attitude is a complete swing from moments before. She back in the water, staring up at him with wide, wide eyes.

"I just... You have fire. My whole life was shaped by fire. I should have been born with it, I was raised to manifest it and here you are..."

She's actually choking up a little. She turns her head away quickly, wanting to hide her shame. "Mercy, if you turned up on my world you could point to the kingdom you wanted to rule and it would be yours."

When she pulls back it's a sudden, intense pressure off of his chest, like she'd been physically leaning on him. A gust of breath escapes him, though his shoulders do not properly come back down. He stares after her, and the sudden and dramatic plummet of her mood is as alarming as her extreme interest had been, if quite different in flavour. It's occurring to him that this woman he's so haplessly flirted with may be kind of a rollercoaster. He is not equipped for this, he thinks.

"Well then lucky for your world I have exactly zero interest in conquest," he blurts, rather urgently. He's always hated the idea of his powers as a way to intimidate, as a tool to use to get his way -- at least partially because, well, isn't that one of uses one expects of fire as a skill? "Good god."

She swallows hard and laughs breathlessly, trying to regain control. This is like a frustrating dream. She'd grab his hand to make him show his power again but he might skittle off.

"For the best, for I'd have been obliged to bear your children. The idea chills me, though it was all I was good for after I proved to be a dud."

She draws another deep lungful of smoke and coughs as a snuffle catches her at the wrong time.

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