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ataraxionlogs2015-10-08 08:43 pm
ataraxites) wrote in ataraxionlogs2015-10-08 08:43 pm
ARRIVAL ▒ 002
CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Basecamp, Medical and beyond.
WARNINGS: Implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: The Tranquility jumps again.
NOTES: Can be found at the bottom of the post.
LOCATION: Basecamp, Medical and beyond.
WARNINGS: Implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: The Tranquility jumps again.
NOTES: Can be found at the bottom of the post.
| T H E C A M P ( C U R R E N T C H A R A C T E R S ) Clouds have rolled in, obscuring the high noon in grey shadow when the alarms start. Wailing through the air, not as keenly as it had when base camp still huddled in its shadow, but still loud enough to turn heads and give people pause. It sends a shiver of nervous energy throughout camp. They were out of range the last time, and there is no sudden scrambling attempt at retreat, but the crowd does begin to thin. Some pick up and go, just to put distance between themselves and the inevitable, because you never know. Others stay behind, for whatever that reason might be. Those who were closer towards the ship emerge from the treeline in a hurry. It's ten hours later when it happens. A tremble in the earth, shaking up through the trees, sending the jungle's wildlife into distressed flocks of movement and alarmed cries. Under the shrouded sun the wreck of the Tranquility begins to cord with lines of white light, threading across the hull like veins, some patches remaining dark, standing out against the vision like splotches burnt to the back of the eyelids. There's no great sound. In an instant, the ship is gone, a soft whomp, a feeling of air rushing past, the trees bending towards the site as if blown by a fierce wind. It's only a second. With a crack, the wreck returns, a rumble rolling through the air like thunder. The earth shakes. The trees tremble. The ship groans, the sound echoing out like the cry of a wounded beast. The jump has passed. Before search and rescue can gather and see for themselves if anyone new was dragged from their homes, something strange happens. A gas mask, old fashioned and heavy, round-eyed, with a filter like a muzzle at the mouth, lands in the packed earth at someone's feet. With a clatter of plastic and metal, something that was once a radio receiver apparently plummets from the air, shattering on impact when it strikes the metal framework of a communal tent, and another lands in softer earth, intact. Tin cans of food, earthenware bottles of water, candles wrapped in paper and tied in string, a box of matches, a set of well-used playing cards with roughed up corners, a rough woollen blanket, a pillow, a gas lamp all hit the ground throughout camp, or are discovered in the jungle beyond. This unusual rain of items ceases, hardly a minute after it has begun. M E D I C A L ( N E W A R R I V A L S ) You wake up, alone in the dark. There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Through the fog you can see shadows of movement, the muted sound of alarms crying. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're suddenly dropped several feet onto the opposite wall. The impact is painful, winds you, and it takes several seconds to overcome and persuade uncooperative limbs to move. All around you is chaos: the sirens of alarms are shrieking in your ears, close and claustrophic in the wreckage of the medical bay you've awoken in, lit dim and red. Around you, others are waking up, falling from other gravcouches, stumbling to their feet. Light catches your eye, and you look up to see a huge rend in the outer wall high above you, overhung by broken structural beams and damaged cabling. Climbing up takes all the strength you have. You emerge in bleak, grey sunlight, surrounded by an immense, vast jungle. As your vision clears, you realize you stand on the hull of a colossal spaceship, crashed on an unknown world, two moons hanging heavy in the sky above. In the distance, far out on a great swathe of torn up earth through the jungle are a clustered crowd of figures, moving towards the wreck. Your welcome party, but are they friend or foe? N O T E S |
no subject
Flint's still chewing, in fact, when the sound of canvas flapping open bites stiff into the knobble of his spine. He freezes, jar in hand, lid unscrewed, metal held to glass only by the grasp of his hand curled over the top.
His face is long in the morning light, eyes pinned wild in the hollows of his skull, all rough-hewn angles and battered edges. His ears jut. Bruising clouds dark around a scrape over his brow.
On the far side of him, her mat of desiccated ferns looks like it's been slept in.
… ]
Now's not really a good time,
[ he tries, after a silence, with just enough of an English drawl to draw it out into contrition. Contrition for her poor timing, and his subsequent unavailability for questioning. He watches her very closely to see how this is going to go over, jar held in close. ]
no subject
What her auracular vision tells her is not much more than simple context reveals; one doesn't need a mystical metaphor to recognize a scavenger's desperation. You don't gnaw bones without being in a state of some extremity, don't risk theft if you have much in the way of alteratives. But there is something interesting there. Something else. Something uncommon.
And wait… sweet Charity- is he about to dig into her beetle jar?
Ieza's lips purse, and then she stoops, moving into the not-terribly spacious interior of the ficus and taking a kneel just within the drape of the tarp. It's the only way out, short of climbing straight up through the chaos of branch-thick tendrils and hoping there is some point of egress before the tree tapers into canopy. ]
Go ahead, [ she says, gesturing towards the jar between his gripes. She was waiting until she was herself desperate, until she was once more approaching death, to experiment with the native insect life - it seems she now has a willing experimental subject. ]
Help yourself.
no subject
He watches her all the way in, brow hooded, skull on a bar stool swivel. She comes in. He stares at her. She kneels. He stares at her. She's vacated the tarp but not the path to freedom, hemming him into the shadows of her dread ficus, and her eyes will tell her that there's conibear tension twisting in his core beneath the klein blue of his hoodie. His grip tightens on the jar.
Go ahead.
Help himself. Like he's going to eat them.
With deliberate care, he pries off the cap and turns the jar over, spilling her beetle collection slowly out onto the floor of her ficus. ]
no subject
And much as she might like to, Ieza is unable to command her arthropod prisoners to mob the man, unable to make Flint rue his petulant little gesture. She's not a mummy right now, and even if she were, she's not that kind of mummy. More's the pity.
But there's no point crying over spilt beetles. At most Flint earns a brief look of surprise tinged with dismay. She's not an etymologist, though - not even some fantasy equivalent - and if there's one certainty in a rainforest outside of rain, it's that its positively seething with bugs.
And really, she's far more interested in life forms of greater size and complexity. ]
You're new, aren't you?
[ She doesn't have to plunder his memories to figure that out. To know that no one would miss him. Why didn't you come along earlier? she might ask. But doesn't. Instead- ]
Has no one taken it upon themselves to feed you? To show you what is safe to eat and drink?
[ Theft is not necessarily a desperate act. She knows that some cultures have far less rigid notions of personal property. Sahaahk are infamous for believing that you can't really own anything you can't effectively protect; theft is impossible, short of brigandry.
Still- ]
You needn't steal, you know. You are not much of a thief. And secrets are hard to keep here. [ What with people's memories and emotions leaking out every which-where.
Ieza smooths her robe under her knees as the first of the insect vanguard reaches her, threatening to transgress her personal space. Otherwise, she doesn't seem terribly concerned. Her pale-eyed attention is on Flint. ]
You may sleep here at night, if you'd like. As you've noticed, I'm a touch nocturnal.
no subject
It lands on its back again. ]
The hell do you care, [ he says, upon deciding to pretend he doesn't see that one anymore. He moves onto a beetle who's trying a little harder. ]
It's raining tuna. [ Was. Raining tuna. Cans that he found himself, and cans that he took from other people. Not long after saying so, he gets bored of ineffectual beetles and drops the jar aside, clonk, to watch the leader of the pack crabbing for Ieza instead. The movement slacks some of the tension out of his shoulders.
Not all of it. ]
I think I might be dead.
no subject
Which is fine. Their attentions form a perfect triangle, that most sublime of geometries: he looks at the insect, that scales the woman, who peers at the man with something more than polite concern. ]
I received guidance and aid when I first arrived- [ and then she cites the exact number but Diocen knows she's been keeping track ] -days ago. My helping you is simply my contribution to the common good in which I partook.
[ Which is the say, she is a good person. And like all good people, she has a ready explanation for how and why she is good. ]
You aren't dead here. Perhaps in the Elsewhere from whence you came, but here you are alive.
[ This is an important point she's making, so to try and insure he's paying attention, Ieza reaches down and, after some minor logistical adjustments, manages to maneuver the Bravest of Beetles onto her hand. It scuttles up her fingers, hesitating when her knuckles run out, giving way to a smooth, flat palm- antennae twitching suspiciously.
She raises it to the level of her chin, with the aim of putting her mouth into his field of vision. ]
Why would you be hungry or tired if you weren't?
no subject
His windbreaker has shed the worst of the rest, morning dew caught in the creases around the hood. It's not just stylish.
The carefully choreographed concealment of her smile is lost on him.
But he can't not hear her, and his eyes work their way up at the same dumb rate as the beetle feeling its way up her robe one clumsy claw at a time. Her hand expedites the process, and he's easily led, attention channeled like water along the lowest path.
He makes the leap from her mouth to her eyes on his own, locking in from one focal point to two.
She's weird.
This is weird.
Tension that had eased off starts to creep back in, low in his spine, as he calculates for her position between himself and the door. ]
no subject
So just what is making Flint so nervous? His tension is something else you don't need to read auras to see.
Ieza lowers her hand and tries to urge the beetle off her hand, it's function served. Emboldened, however, the critter starts for her wrist, little claws too curious; she's forced to brush it off with her sleeve. ]
Were you expecting to be dead? Was this- [ she gestures vaguely around them and behind her, inclusive both of present situation and the broader context ] -the sort of thing you thought would come after death?
[ Though not a believer in afterlives herself, Ieza's heard of cultures - typically archaic, tribal ones - that cook up fantasies of postmortem paradises. ]
no subject
[ Choppy seas and iron chains seem like a recipe for that kind of thing. ]
I dunno, I’ve never died before. [ He reaches back as he says it, eyes forward, groping to recollect the split bag of her weird iridescent lima beans. Once he has them, he crams the bag into his pocket, spilling a few out along the way.]
This has been bizarre, [ he tells her, and now he’s shifting his weight, rising to a knee, building momentum for the door. Mounting pressure as a warning to get out of his way. ] Let’s do it again sometime.
no subject
Understandable, too, that he might want to leave now; it hasn't seemed like he was at any point expecting company, let alone conversation. Just a little plunder, something he has already managed to help himself to. ]
Is that a promise?
[ Ieza has never been the kind of person to restrain herself, particularly in the face of a fascination. Which may be overstating matters, but there is something - that uncommon something - which flickers within the mournful lunar lambence of his aura. She's not about to try and overpower the man; to what end, really, other than maybe to cocoon him in the upper reaches of the ficus until a more convenient time. More trouble than it would be worth, and she is not quite at that stage of predation, has not wandered so far off the path of the Docence.
She is, however, capable of hiding some of what she does even as she does it; it's one of the only kinds of dissembling she's ever had practice at. And since 'this' is already bizarre, certainly a little more bizarreness will not come as a shock. ]
Do take care of yourself, [ she says, finally knee-walking over a half foot or so, offering almost enough clearance for him to bolt without bumping into her. She lifts a hand to her forehead, half of a gesture which is indeed an actual legitimate hail, then reaches out to repeat the gesture on Flint, fingers making for his brow in a manner that is certainly no more intrusive than, say, a Continental cheek kiss. ]
Anamnēsteon [ she intones, in the sing-song of farewell. ]
no subject
Contact is brief, the memories that channel through out of order and indistinct.
Strange creatures with strange faces caged in a dark tent, the sweet smell of iron and rust over hay and animal filth. Sprinting downhill in driving rain, sliding, lungs burning, dogs barking. Torches on a tower wall, fires burning in the town below, different from the others. Older. Softer.
Saltwater scalding at scars around his wrists, choking, struggling with leaden limbs to keep chains looped onto floating debris in swells like liquid ice. Something inside twisting to get out, fought down against the shock and the panic and the beating cold.
And he’s gone, pelting for the jungle on his toes, pockets dribbling magic beans in a breadcrumb trail that ends at the treeline. ]
no subject
As the pale light of dawn begins to press through the ficus's innumerable perforations, Ieza examines these fragmented impressions, holding them before her mind's eye with an appraiser's fingers. Memory is the heart of her discipline, and while the cohesion of these particular memories leaves something to be desired, she is free to pour over what details she has gleaned at her leisure.
Of the first cluster, the sights and sounds and smells are not unfamiliar, not to an estate-born provincial girl. They are suggestive, but not particularly informative, not without context. The cold water, the chains, the wild terror of drowning- this is new, and she holds it at arm's length so as not to be overwhelmed. But it is in this cluster that she finds what interests her: that something, that something inside.
Something uncommon. But what? ]