[open/closed] Captured Creatures and Planned Threads

[sorrycharles]

CHARACTERS: Erik Lehnsherr, Flint Deckard, Gavroche, Johanna Mason, Moon Moon, keening alien ponies, you.
LOCATION: Creature Paddock, Base Camp, etc.
WARNINGS: Potential violence, language, animal suffering.
SUMMARY: Erik has captured a pair of newly identified creatures and is holding them on site for two days for people to interact with and study.
NOTES: Below are broad sets for you to use for creature-engaging purposes. See this OOC POST for more information. If you'd like to engage with Erik directly or break stuff, please drop me a line. Otherwise assume he is around but minding his own business.

I'll also be using this post for general planned threads in October and November.




Creature Paddock: Day 1

[ After a few hours, the keening starts. It’s a piercing sound, designed to carry.

Metal stakes form the frame of a wire fence that spans fifty by fifty feet squared in the clearing left behind by Tranquility. There is no gate.

A pair of juvenile creatures huddle together at the far side, black with mud up to their bellies, a froggy green most everywhere else. Bands of blue and yellow stand out bold on the haunches, accentuating the contours of ridges raised into alien fins. Their faces are a confusing mass of backswept horn and bone.

Every so often they spook and break when approached, or at a sudden movement, kicking up mud in thick clods. At other times they appear almost catatonic.

Erik is a stony presence around the perimeter, keeping watch at a distance that dissuades conversation. He haunts the fence alone at night and yields -- for the most part -- to the more science-minded during the day. ]



Creature Paddock: Day 2

[ ‘Scientific’ conversations take on shades of aggression around day two, once the creatures’ vibrance has begun to fade. Their hides wither and grey. Their panicked pronking stiffens into more sluggish and withdrawn resistance.

They continue to keen.

As the day marches on and their condition declines, Erik occupies himself with tearing salvaged equipment down into wire and scrap.

He makes the decision to cut the pair of them loose before nightfall -- one with a tracking beacon fixed to the ridge on its back -- and follows for a ways on foot to test the rudimentary skeleton of the receiver.

Afterwards he turns it over to the PhDs and begins work on a more compact model. ]

Comments

Gavroche >> Creature Paddock >> Afternoon of Day 2

[sorrycharles]

[ In the enclosure nearby, a pair of young creatures with spindly legs and humped shoulders are huddled together against the wind. They’re in a state of decline, their hides withering from green to grey against the black mud that fills the paddock.

Erik is at a broad slab of scrap suspended at table height, shoulders stooped, scruffy head bowed. He cuts a distinct figure, bathed and changed since the initial announcement, eye patch and tattered ear familiar to users of the old network.

Currently, he’s soldering wires to a small circuit board, his levitating table littered with gutted scraps of technology salvaged from the wreckage. Occupied.

There’s space available on the bench next to him.

So far no one seems eager to take advantage of it. ]

[lafautedevoltaire]

[Since remembering the last few days on Tranquility, Gavroche has been on the lookout for one person in particular. He had seen the other around camp in the early days, before he knew he was looking for him. But he had vanished like so many others.

And that left only one person who had stayed behind with his friends. The tinkering alone could have attracted his attention, but he has something else in mind.]

M'sieur?

[sorrycharles]

[ The fact that Erik replies in French is lost to the nanites between them. He’s too tense in the small of his back for it to be a courtesy, more something extra for his brain to occupy itself with while the creatures penned into the enclosure nearby are withering.

He doesn’t look up, still working, resignation clamped at the back of his jaw for Gavroche’s child-sized voice. ]

What is it?

[lafautedevoltaire]

[He climbs up, since there's space and it's a better position to ask from]

You were with Jehan and Ambrose and Guillaume. When they stayed behind, on the ship.

[He'd wondered what had happened to them. And then the missing memories came back and he... still didn't know, not really. Other than that they stayed behind. He needed to be sure.]

You're the only one left.

[sorrycharles]

[ There’s a stall in the angle of Erik’s soldering iron; a drift in the tip that takes it off target. He sets it aside after an unsteady beat, and Gavroche has the full of his attention, for better or for worse.

He’s older than Gavroche’s friends, hard in the nose and lean with hunger. His whiskers are nicked through with scars.

Even his eye patch has seen better days. ]

How do you know that. [ He makes a cursory effort not to growl.

The answer doesn’t matter. Messages were sent. Memories have been shared.

Gavroche doesn’t look especially sinister. ]

[lafautedevoltaire]

They were my friends. We fought together, back in Paris.

[Died with them, but never mind that. That wasn't what they were talking about now.]

They told me they probably wouldn't make it back but... I want to know what happened.

[sorrycharles]

[ Erik’s expression is inscrutable, closed off -- faintly constipated at best. His eye has more life to it, clear blue tracking Gavroche’s explanation too closely, warding off guilt with more comfortable suspicion.

In the end there isn’t much to suspect. They were young and French. Gavroche is young and French. ]

We were exposed to the jump. It was very hot, [ he says. His search for tactful language to whittle down for twelve year old ears is a struggle. ] Violent. They didn’t survive.

I’m sorry.

[lafautedevoltaire]

[He gives a solemn nod. That's twice they've died for a cause now. He'd been pretty sure they must have died, but he'd needed to hear it for sure.]

They would be glad it worked. That they saved the rest of us.

But it must have been frightening.

[sorrycharles]

They were very brave.

[ Agreement on autopilot sounds exactly like what it is, platitude delivered at a remove that feels like dread. After a beat, Erik continues on all the same.

He said he wanted to know. ]

We passed through a place between worlds. Where the shadow in the ship is from.