epidemiology | EVENT ★ ZETA-12 FINAL WEEK

EVENT ★ ZETA-12 FINAL WEEK

ZETA-12: FINAL WEEK

After team Audentes makes it out of the desert in more or less one piece, they'll begin to notice the environment changing once again. After the sparseness of the sands and canyons, vegetation and water once again become more common; eventually, they've found a lush jungle with plants and rivers both plentiful. And like the changing environment, the squidges once again begin to transform.

Please select an evolution according to your choice. Please note, you must have submitted your choice to the thread in the previous logs in order for your squidge to evolve.

For those who encountered the cave:

If they went into the cave, their squidge has taken on one of the following features: a fox-like tail, an armadillo snout (with tongue!), or enhanced sense of smell.

However, if they stayed above, their squidge has one of these: a beak, a prehensile tail, or enhanced sense of hearing.

THE JUNGLE (WEEK 6)

The jungle air is thick with humidity, light barely filtering down past the dense canopy of leaves overhead. Unlike the forest back at the beginning of the journey here, the climate in the jungle is almost stifling, so recruits may want to look for refreshing Rainbow Berries to snack on and keep their energy up -- but keep an eye out for the Lucifer's Poppy, as its effects can cause the journey to reach an abrupt end.

Rivers wind through the jungle, with waterfalls ending in relaxing pools where recruits can try to beat the heat and spend some extra time with their squidges as the journey's end approaches. Like the other biomes, there are no creatures here -- no birds, no bugs, no jungle cats -- but that doesn't mean that recruits can leave their guard down entirely. Apart from various poison plants (such as the Beezlebulb and the Malboro) other hazards to look out for include slippery, moss-covered ground cover that may cause a hapless recruit to lose their footing, and the dangers of heat exhaustion.

Unlike the previous biomes, there is no major choice for recruits to make here. Instead, they must bathe their squidge in the Wellspring, a bubbling, faintly glowing pool of water in the depths of the jungle. The Wellspring is responsible for triggering the squidges' final transformation and allowing them to grow into adulthood.

In order for squidges to evolve into an adult, squidge parents must have completed a certain amount of tasks during the Zeta-12 mission. If these tasks were not completed, the squidge will not evolve and will remain in its larval stage. The evolution form can be found on this post.

Squidges who successfully evolve into adults will grow in size, anywhere between 122-183cm (4-6'). They will loosely retain their rounded shapes, their limbs and torsos elongating, and any physical transformations will also grow with their size. In adulthood, squidges are less needy and frightened than in their larval stage, and generally have a calm demeanor (with exceptions made if they happened to pick up an aggressive trait along the journey, of course). Their language remains a wordless burbling, but they can communicate with their caregivers through gestures.

After bathing their squidges in the Wellspring, regardless of the success of evolutions, recruits should prepare to depart Zeta-12 with the knowledge that their alien children are better, stronger, and smarter for the time they spent together.

Fyletto

OOC NOTES

This log lasts ICly for one week, and OOCly for 1.5 weeks. Once the mission is completed and the squidges are bathed in the Wellspring, recruits will have until August 20th to say goodbye and let their alien wards leave the metaphorical nest.

Direct questions about the Zeta-12 mission here.

And don't forget about the bounty board! After August 20th, Zeta-12 bounties will no longer be completable.

Please remember to fill out your squidge success form! Participation is required to pass AC this month. If you have any questions about the form, please direct them here. Forms must be completed by August 31th, 23:59 UTC.

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He almost glances at her, almost forgets himself and looks over his shoulder at the woman in the water. As he does manage to stop himself, the gesture merely becomes a stiffening of the spine, a straighter sit.

That's a hell of an admission and he's glad when she goes on and he has a moment to consider it. Any angle he looks at it, though, it makes his brow furrow, makes no sense to him.

"That's absurd," he protests, "I mean, what the -- what do they think you did, that they feel justified rejecting you out of hand?" The rest, he'll address later, but her tale sticks in his craw like sand, imagining the way universities back home would likely do the same with his applications, were he to come out as nonhuman.

And this is the part where he might have a reason to hate her. She hesitates, the words sticking in her throat, for she's come to value his quiet and competent friendship.

"When I didn't manifest, I was taken out of the magical program. I was... not useless, for I could still have carried Cinder's children once my frame stopped growing, and maybe we'd make pyromancers together." The thought still makes her cringe even now. Lowly, she adds "I sobbed the day I realised my breasts were coming in."

But that's a digression. She braces herself and continues.

"I was trained to be a soldier when I was eleven because the war was heating up and everyone had to be ready to fight. I volunteered to be on the kidnapping crew, because I wanted to prove myself while finding someone who'd take that fall for me. Cinder and the other failures followed me and we went to steal the children the Trustworthy wanted."

She's staring at his back hard, waiting for the moment when he whips around or walks away. Mercy, this is difficult to choke out.

"They died, and I led King Richard to the research grounds after I turned myself in. I was the hero who saved the noble heirs of half a dozen Gallian families for all of ten minutes before they named who'd taken them in the first place."

She has fed him the story of her youth in bits and pieces, at first with breezy, dismissive nostalgia, and then with an increasingly naked wariness that has crept up so slowly as to catch him by surprise. He settles in with pricked ears to listen to another installment.

It's more than he expected. His scrubbing slows as she speaks, stops entirely around the time she admits to the private horror of puberty. It's hard to comprehend, all of what she's saying, so far outside of his experience that he shudders to the very core to try and imagine it. Volunteering to kidnap children, to avoid being used as breeding stock? Kidnapping children at all?

He's already been told an inkling about how much the death of her compatriots had hurt her, the nature of what they'd been to her, and so he quakes again for the context around that loss.

"But you couldn't have been much more than a child yourself," he blurts, the first thought out of his mind as it eddies back over her words, "when you... did that work. If your, if you'd just hit puberty, you couldn't have..." He's staring hard at the washing in his hands. In one sense he's glad he's given the excuse not to look at her just now, as he doesn't have to try and figure out if his expression is too flat, if it's sympathetic enough. "They had to have acknowledged that, at least, that you were being used, that you were just a kid."

"I was acquitted of all of my crimes for that reason." She sounds dull. "But forgiveness is not forgetfulness and I was watched closely to make sure I wasn't going to slip back into my Xalian ways."

She wades towards him and stares down at him for a moment, tempted to wrap her arms about him for the comfort of holding someone. But no, she knows that would be wildly inappropriate, so she turns as she sits down so that they're back to back, drawing what comfort she can from their proximity.

"But I can't stand it. I don't want to be the quailing victim, I want to live, I want to be useful and vital and respected. I want to push myself to the limits, be they physical or intellectual, to become all that I have the potential to be. But that is seen as a Xalian trait, never mind that my brother is the same and he's seen as a respectable man. They are no less my captors than the Xalians were, for they want me to live in a golden-barred cage where I amuse myself by singing and playing the harp, showing off how sweet I can be. If I have any say in my fate then I will never return to Callierhoe."

Her speech, her fervour for claiming her rightful place among the best at whatever she chooses to do, lights a fire of empathy in him. He's eschewed so much in his life to be the best in his field, to finish top of his class, to get into and ace the program he's aiming for -- and while here, even, that drive has pushed him to be the best... well, the best that he can be at the things he's no good at.

He hears her move and does not look, but listens hard, marking her place and wondering if she's going to try and touch him. When she doesn't, he's a little surprised, even. He slowly begins to scrub the wrap again, gathering some more soap as he remembers the task.

"You wouldn't be the first," he tells her plainly. "I can't imagine your family wouldn't miss you, but if you decided to stay... there's certainly a precedent. And no one here is going to hold you back from being the best you can be." He believes that as he says it. For all ALASTAIR's mediocre management, they have supported their people at best, and at worst, left them to their own devices. "And it's good work, isn't it? Even the parts that are frustrating."

She winces and draws up her knees to her chest, hugging them tight.

"That is my only source of guilt. I am trying my best not to think of what my mother would go through if I do not return, for my disappearance the first time broke her. If I could send a letter back to the moment I vanished..."

But that's too hard to think about right now. She draws a deep breath and deliberately straightens up again, ripping her focus back to him.

"Do you want to go home?" She turns in the water to peer at the back of his neck. "You were, ahh, a second year computer scientist. How many years more must you study?"

He's accrued even more of an intermittent tan on this wild world than he had managed to lose since they had come back from Nalawi. The back of his neck is dark, toasted by the sun, but his back is still pale: it's easy to see where he's been shy about getting entirely unclothed, even after the desert. The area that the uniform's tank top overshirt covers is only a little darker than his natural skin tone; his forearms, his neck, his hands, are all deeply tanned.

"That depends on how far I want to go, and in what stream of education," he admits. He can almost feel the force of the focus leveraged on him. He begins to rinse the wrap. But he knows the answer she's asking for, and suspects it's more a diversion than anything else. "I could be in school for six or seven more years. Likely I will be; I want to get my Master's."

He looks down at the water he's wringing out of the fabric. "And yeah, you know, I do. I'm... I'm not in a rush, I'm learning as much here as I ever did in school, but..." But home is home. That seems indelicate to say to her, though, so he just sighs. "I'm a homebody, I suppose, at heart."

"Seven years!" She lets out a little laugh of surprise at that. "Will you be able to function outside academia at that point? I've never met an academic who's been researching for that long who hasn't long since crossed the point of no return."

It's fascinating, now that she thinks about it, that such different worlds as theirs could have similar systems of higher education. She peeks about his shoulder, looking to see if he's done with his rinsing yet.

"Would you start a family after you've graduated or would you look for a fellow scholar to settle with?" She knows full well he's not a Leon type to be flitting like a little butterfly looking to dip himself into every sweet flower that blossomed about him.

Her tonal diversion seems to have worked. He follows it, willing enough, though in the back of his mind he's still lingering on what he's learned of her, of her history. Serene is beginning to come into focus.

"A family?" She has, however, managed to surprise him with that question. He pauses in his rinsing, considering it seriously for a moment, but as with every other time he's tried that he's subject to mostly just a great internal shrug. "Lord, not right away, no. I'm interested in being the best in my field, and that probably doesn't leave a lot of time to devote to that sort of personal project." He wrings out the cloth once more, holding it up to consider. Too, he's turning over the latter half of the real answer to that question, the part that gets left unspoken when he's been asked in the past. But she's bared so much today; doesn't she deserve for him to try the same.

"Besides," he adds, lowering the cloth again, "There's a good chance I might live rather longer than usual, given, er, my mother's side of the family. I expect I'll have quite a few more years than average to... consider the idea." Without turning to look, he swishes the wrap cloth back through the water in her direction, holding it on the tips of his fingers for her to take.

"Oh..." She's quiet for a moment as she takes the garment from him, staring at the back of his neck once more. He's such a sincere person, she's coming to understand, the sort of person who would be wounded by loss.

"I am sorry." She places her hand on his shoulder briefly, giving him a squeeze before letting go. She fumbles with the sharp sympathy she feels for him, knowing that she could very well be mistepping badly.

"The first chronomancer, Vyctorius, wrote poetry as a way of coping with her life lasting so much longer than her peers. She had not considered what it would mean to have used her power to push time away from her body until she watched her children start to die. I first read "My Granddaughter Goes Before Me" a year ago and it was truly heartrending." She shrugs tightly and huffs a little laugh at herself.

"You probably don't want to hear such a maudlin pity. do you? I am sure you will use your extra time to work marvels."

The sympathy catches him sideways. By sheet dint of surprise it breezes past all of his diffident front and hits him in the pit of his belly where that private ache lives. He stills entirely for a moment.

When she touches him he straightens, abrupt and subtle. He's out of things to wash until he finds some discreet way to remove his shorts, and so when he moves again it's to rinse his hands, needing something to do with them. "I... I plan on it," he tells her, scrambling to regain that studied diffidence and not entirely succeeding.

How can she understand? But it does sound like she does, in a way, doesn't it? He swallows, and offers carefully, "but I have thought about it perhaps... less... than I should. I'm told that halfbreed lifespans are an inexact science, at best."

She's tempted to pat him again; she takes his shirt and starts wringing it out.

"Until a few years ago I never thought too much about the future either, for when I looked into the unformed distance, the only shapes I could make out led to pain." She sighs. "But perhaps it was better not to think of the future, for every plan I have made since then has fallen through."

But she doesn't want to be a drag, so she offers up a thought as she watches the tension in his frame.

"Is it a comfort to know that anybody's certainty is a false perception? For all that I have the capacity to live to a century I drown tomorrow or have a fit in my thirties or a cancer in my fifties."

That washes him bleakly and his shoulders sink a touch, enervated by the thought and by her own narrowly-dodged diversion into bleakness herself. But she has extended a hand of kindness, and he's not so comfortable just slapping that down.

"I'm not sure," he admits, mitigating his response. "I think... I think it's still hard to avoid the comparison that you can be reasonably sure you won't be the last of the people you care about still alive. Though," he admits, not quite a happy thought, but a grimly interested little one, "I think my mother will still outlive me, at least."

"I am a woman," she reminds him gently, "so I will outlive the men in my life by a decade. But I know that is nothing to what you are facing."

No, there's little she can offer from her own experience, so she draws upon the wisdom of the Mancers once more.

"Vyctorius ended her book of poems with words of advice to her descendants: do not cut yourself off from the young. It maybe have felt like yesterday that they were babes, but they will shock you with how quickly they are able to look you eye to eye and utter insights that pierce through your decades of wisdom. Love again and again, for each new generation will support you with the loss of the ones who are withered by time. The wounds on a human's soul can only be healed through gentle companionship."

She dishes out those morsels at the same time with wisdom and with ignorance, and it's the oddest juxaposition. She can't know, and she knows that she can't know, but here's someone on her world who can and does... or who could and did. And at the same time, isn't it true enough that Evan doesn't even know yet? Not really?

He groans, laughs in the midst of the noise, brings both wet hands up to rub his eyes and shove hair out of his face. "How is it that I'm getting more... more pertinent advice about this here than I ever did at home?" There's exasperation in his tone, and hurt. "I, I can't even... imagine.... it all seems so unlikely."

In a way this is easier while he can't look at her. His expression gnarls into a grimace, and then smooths again. "It's so easy at home to half forget I'm not human."

"Our perceptions are shaped by the way we are raised. It is difficult to shape a habit of thought off." Ahhh, but she feels like she's just spouting platitudes. She shifts back so she continue her wringing task.

"I am going to hang this up now, if you wish to avoid looking at me." She warns him as she stands, having sufficiently wrung out his top. "But you can look if you desire!"

Her little tease doesn't fall well: he's too deeply mired in the thick of his own discomfort, too caught by thoughts he doesn't want to be having. It takes a second to sink in, and then he reflexively shrugs. "Um, let me know when it's safe again, I guess."

He looks down at his pants; really, the only part of his outfit he hasn't cleaned that still needs it are his shorts, and... and. If he wasn't comfortable shucking them around her before, he certainly isn't now. Suddenly he sees an out for himself, from that and from this conversation.

"Serene," he calls, "do you mind if I borrow the soap for a few minutes? I want to wash the rest of my stuff... um, around the bend." There's a more secluded bit of water he'd been considering initially, one that should shield him from her eyes, and give him a little bit of distance from her implacably discomfiting words.

She looks back over her shoulder at him, unsurprised that he'd want privacy.

"Of course... Wait, no!"

She sits in the water and pats her hair down over her breasts, for it's curling away from her body as it dries.

"It's safe to move now." She calls back once she's made sure she won't flash anything to inviting at him.

He starts, and then stops again when she rescinds permission, feeling the strange hitch of abbreviated motion. He pauses, takes a breath as she arranges herself, and then when she finally offers that last, he picks the soap up from care from the rock he'd stowed it on and clutches it carefully as he begins to wade away. There's a malaise lingering that he wants to wash away, as much as he wants to wash his clothes.

As he wades by he glances at the squidges, who are still eddying about one another and squalling and splashing like children. Imber squeaks and makes to paddle after him, but Evan shoos the squidge back to his friend, which Imber at least seems to understand. He's lucky, for once, that the young alien seems to prefer the company of its clutchmates, even to his keeper.

Privacy, even brief, is a huge relief. He finds himself shaky; how odd, and how odd to have talked to Serene about those particular worries. The only other person he'd done so with had been Mel, when the elf had implacably pursued the subject, and then when Evan had explained Mel had offered, of all things, comfort. What, had he expected the same kind of comfort from Serene? Certainly not; he would have had a whole different set of problems if she'd tried to hug him while as bare as she was. No, Serene seemed more a fixer -- and it had been strange, so strange, to be faced with sympathy and of all things advice.

By the time he's stripped down and is soaping up his shorts, he's resolved that it had been nothing more than nerves that had sent him so shaky and into such retreat. Nerves, at sharing secrets he's too accustomed to keeping close to his chest.

The rest, he decides, there's no need to grapple with now.

When he's done scrubbing out the dark fabric of his shorts, he regards them for a moment. He's cleaned his pants, too, and they he'll carry back to drape on a sun-soaked rock too, but... no. He'll suffer through wet underwear until he can steam-dry them. He steps back into the small concessions to modesty and pulls the wet cotton up to settle around his hips again. It clings, but he hardly notices; preoccupied, he begins sloshing back through the water to round the bend to join her again, distractedly expecting that his wading noise will catch her attention before he arrives.

Once he's waded round the corner she considers the clothes she's draped out to dry. She's spread her belongings widely and if he decides to wash his blankets as well then there will be no room to drape them in the sunshine through the trees.

She'll be helpful, she decides, and dry some of her clothing to clear a space for him. She pulls on her still-wet uniform vest, thinking that she's disturbed him enough by being too bare, and sets about assembling a little fire to toast her undergarments to dryness. As much as she enjoys frolicking in the water it is perhaps time for her to put away playing in favour of continuing their mission.

Lilac and Imber's splashing masks his approach; her ears are cocked for him calling out to her, and so she's knelt down on the shore with her back to him, building a little circle of pebbled to contain the fire she plans to set.

He's lost in his own thoughts, which are eddying down far less dark paths but still demand attention. It's enough to keep him distracted as he slogs around the corner, as he gets far enough out from the safety of cover that he can't back off quickly when he looks up and spots her.

The small boon of the shirt she's put on is entirely wiped away by the way she's bending. Evan does not look away nearly in time to avoid seeing much more than he ever meant to of her backside -- more than just her backside.

He turns in the water quickly, straight-backed, and immediately feeling the heavy heat of a blush rise on his cheeks, fit to steam himself dry. Whether she'd strictly meant to or not, Serene has managed to entirely derail him from his heavy thoughts.

As addled with embarrassment as he is, all he can think to do is press out a tense, "er, I'm, uh, coming back around." As if she won't spot immediately that he's done more than that already.

She jerks up to a straight back kneel, for his voice is in completely the wrong spot. A glance over her shoulder confirms that he's far nearer than he ought to be, and she blushes as she realises what sight must have made him blush if he'd approached her from his direction.

"Did you just look at my flower?" She jumps back into the water, crouching to cover her lower half, her knees pressed tightly together. "That's your fault entirely for walking round without warning!"

"Your fl--" but as he's asking the metaphor clarifies and he feels the red on his cheeks deepening all the way through crimson. The fact that his back is turned to her is small consolation: he's sure even his back is red.

Oh, god, and she sounds mortified herself. "I thought you'd hear me coming," he justifies urgently. "I'm sorry!"

"As long as you know that wasn't deliberate." Her embarrassment pales in comparison to his. Mercy, she didn't know a human could turn that colour of scarlet so far along their skin. Frowning, she wades out to him and touches his shoulder, gentling her tone.

"I want to dry some of my clothes to make room for your blankets. Will you come and supervise my fire? I do not want to set my clothes alight." In truth, she's more worried about getting distracted and moved by her fire enough that she'll deliberately let go of control, but framing her fear as that of a new apprentice feels less provocative and more like an offer of forgiveness.

She lets go before he can answer and begins her wade back, letting him have a little space to recover. "It is safe to turn!" She calls over her shoulder, as she's keeping her knees bent to cover herself below her waist.

Her consoling touch sends further mortification crawling along his skin, startled as he is by it, and he ferociously tamps down that reaction. He grabs for the forgiveness in the offer she extends, taking deep breaths and allowing for the fact that she's not running him off, that she doesn't even sound truly angry.

"Alright," he offers, and then takes the moment he needs to continue cooling down as she wades away. By the time she's at the shore he's... well, he's still crimson, but he's cooling rather than heating up. He turns, looking chagrined, but approaches the shore with a willingness that true mortification wouldn't have allowed for.

"Yeah," he reiterates, looking at her with apology still in his eyes. Is she not wearing underwear still? Hell, though, he isn't going to look too hard. Wading from the water, he drips as he approaches the fire, glad in the heat of the jungle for once to only be clad in his soaked shorts.

He resolves, even, to do what he can to dry her clothes faster. It's the least he can do after causing the both of them such a terribly embarrassing moment, and violating her privacy in such a way. He huffs again, glancing at her as he hunkers down by the fire. "Uh... thanks."

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sereneflame - 2016-08-27 03:56 (UTC) - Expand

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