emptynesters | [MISSION: A KNOCK AT THE DOOR] - An xxx Years Later Meme

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[MISSION: A KNOCK AT THE DOOR] - An xxx Years Later Meme

CHARACTERS: EVERYONE
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: DAY :001
SUMMARY: The Hosts return from Research Vessel "Whaligoe".
WARNINGS: Disturbing imagery. Y'all know the drill. Please include any applicable warnings in your subjects lines as this one won't be maintained.

MISSION: A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

STATION 72
DAY :001

HOME SWEET HOME
AND JUST LIKE THAT, YOU'RE BACK. The tingling, half nauseated sensation of punching through the multiverse fades as the windowless stealth ship passes into the Station's landing channel. With a slow-motion jerk, forward motion ceases completely. After a few minutes - harnesses being unbuckled, kits roused from their racks -, the rear of the ship unfolds and there is the hangar deck. Everything is exactly as you left it days ago.

A voice bloom in your head. It says:

( You'll have to tell us everything soon. )
Not that there's much to tell. In the last - it's hard to say, but years? Surely it can't have been a decade - span of your life, you've been to a dozen worlds in a dozen universes. You've seen stars collapsing, you've watched empires crumble; you've seen peoples at war, the end of a dynasty, and the beginnings of new settlements in far flung places. The Whaligoe, a sprawling deep space research ship at the edge of a now distance universe from which you've just returned, is hardly the most exciting place you've ever come back from.

But maybe Cathaway's curiosity has something to do with your (easily won) cargo: sixteen large, heavy canisters carrying what the Whaligoe's crew had nicknamed 'Datafuel.' What they're needed for is a mystery. Why handling the canisters triggers some low sense of revulsion doesn't make much sense either.

( For now, rest. ) says that achingly familiar sensation of Cathaway - of warmth, of pleasure, of belonging somewhere that you never expected to but do. ( And welcome home. )

ALL GOOD THINGS...
THIS IS HOW IT IS: There are more Hosts on the Station now then there have been in a long time. It'll be years yet before until anyone could call Station 72 crowded (would that even be possible, with the way the Station adapts for its occupants?), but it's no longer the strange half-breathing entity it once was. There is life here. Sometimes it doesn't feel like being divided from everything that ever was or will be. Sometimes it feels like this matters. Sometimes it feels like this is the right thing. Sometimes it even feels like the moment before opening a door and that the things waiting on the other side are better. It feels like maybe this is ending. Maybe that's what hope is.

The Gardens have grown dense and beautiful. Life Support sprawls through a half dozen corridors. The hum of the Station is a cat's pleased purring. Sometimes, that feels good.

THE STATION
12 HOURS LATER

...MUST COME TO AN END
SOMETHING ARRIVES in the space between spaces. It's as a needle piercing flesh. It's the snap of a finger breaking. It's an animal scream.

It's a scream.

The Station screams.

Gravity twists. Sleeping hosts are dumped from their beds. Ships in the hangar slide against their moorings, tethers snapping. Corridors writhe. Walls become ceilings, ceilings floors. And then it all snaps back. A panic stricken moment of stillness is pursued by the rancid melting tang of go, go, GO--! in your bones.

The first strikes from Enemy ships against Station 72 feel like being set on fire. You know this more intimately than anything else you've known in your entire life: You need to escape the Station.
THE CAGE - Getting to the Hangar deck to the ships should be as easy as wanting to be there and turning a corner. But if the mental link alarm burning Hosts up isn't indication enough of something being wrong, the Station's interior makes that impossibly clear. Once recognizable corridors melt and twist into bizarre shapes; open doorways become collapsing tunnels; vast cavernous spaces appear with splintering pathways leading across them. Garden plants meld with walls to create unexpected jungles, gravity shifts, a swimming pool stands upright without emptying. Hosts will never find themselves faced with a dead end, but they will discover a veritable labyrinth before them. They are pursued by a constant certainty: move quickly, because all around them Station 72 is coming unravelled.

THE MENAGERIE - ...which is made more complicated by fact that as the Station falls to pieces, the shared mental link of the Hosts begins to go haywire. Symbiote abilities merge and mutate. Memories and feelings and shared hallucinations disgorge themselves across the station. The texture and intensity is so extreme that it would be easy for a Host to get lost in them. Maybe they're familiar memories; maybe they're completely alien; maybe they're a dangerous distraction or maybe - just maybe - they're the Station's last desperate bid to pass something important along before it's too late.

Only a handful of Hosts converge on the Hangar Deck, but it's clear from the straining sensation of every air molecule that there's no time to wait around. As the Hosts board back onto the stealth ship, portions of the very surroundings begin to melt as quicksilver: the floor, the exterior walls, neighboring ships. Through these pools pass a cacophony of shapes both strange and familiar. The Enemy comes in many forms.

--Which are rocked by an explosion, a host evaporating in a shocked impact that seems to destabilize one of the primary quicksilver portals. Standing in the doorway leading to the armory, The Prince reloads the Albark rocket thrower. "Leave!" he barks, aims again.

Three things happen at once: ( Open it! ), says a voice you know and the Prince fires; the quicksilver portal bursts around the second explosion like a wound and the void it opens to isn't the dark of the In Between at all and from it the Dark looks back like a wolf in the dark with eyes like rasping scissors snapping wide which with every star in the universe says

I SEE YOU.

and the Hangar Deck collapses beneath the shuttle as the boarding ramp screams closed. The ship falls like a stone. It falls forever.

A PLACE WITH NO NAME
DAY :003

SYMBIOSIS
THERE'S NOTHING on the stealth ship's long range sensors. The universe you've fallen into is as empty as-- twin narratives exist in the mental link. One is bone still, the outline of a place that used to be. The other is the too loud mish-mash of information that leaked through the symbotic link during Station 72's collapse. It's confused and unfiltered. It's how to fly a ship; and it's a girl's face that isn't your species and you've never seen her, but you miss her anyway; and it's an ocean you know; and it's exactly how many dry rations are packed into the shuttle's cargo; and it's the echo of an animal screaming and it's--

Quiet. It's mostly very, very quiet. There's no dread, no fear, no burning ache of the world ending. It's empty.

Open it, someone said. So someone does: a canister of Datafuel is cracked open and from it spills something wet and horrible. It's run through with ropy white filament threads.

Someone opened a Host's head once, you know (you do know, even if you weren't there). It looked something like that.

Anyone who touches the 'Datafuel' falls immediately into a comatose state. It lasts for twenty hours. When they wake up, they know where to go.

IN A MIRROR, DARKLY
THERE ARE NO WINDOWS in the stealth ship, so when it jumps to the logged coordinates it's impossible to tell where or what it's jumped to. It's quiet. With a slow-motion jerk, forward motion ceases completely. After a few agonizing minutes - does anyone move? does anyone do anything? -, the rear of the ship unfolds and there is a hangar deck.

It isn't the one you left. It isn't attached to corridors you know. This place is quiet like a shed insect skin.

In the cold low standby light of the shuttle's interior, one of the previously comatose Hosts (maybe it's you) says:

"Welcome to Station 144."

((OOC Notes: Welcome back! For ~~one night only~~ however long you yahoos want to keep a meme alive for, your sybmiotic home away from home is...well, some version of it is around anyway. Did you play in the game, but don't want to play the same character? Go for it. Want to play the same character, but say they're a different version than the one you played in game? Have a party! Didn't ever play in S72 but want to noodle around? Have at it! Just want to pick up more or less right where you left off? I ain't gonna stop you (although I might gently recommend that Some Time Has Passed since we left Hyrypia).

For anyone who needs a reminder on how the game works, info links are in the navigation below. No, this isn't any kind of game canon. It's a meme, Jan. Don't overthink it.

Have fun. :)))

NAVIGATION • PREMISE • SETTING • FAQ

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

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i. _ home _
Coming home was the way it had always been. It's been a long time since home meant a shadowed corner or a barracks bunk or the ionizing beams of decontamination and a VI intoning XO Pressley stands relieved. The Station itself holds the stronger impression now, a path worn to dirt by time and familiarity's attrition.

Now home means, the settling in of Station's gravity, the looming purr of the Nest, and the shape, shadow-like in the many-minds reflected, of the hangar door. It has a particular proportion that has formed a symbol in their minds. This is the word that means: home.

Shepard cracks her neck around her armor as she watches the barrels being shifted. It's noisy and disgusting and satisfying as hell; she does it to annoy, but absentmindedly, thinking about hot meals and cold water, little fish behind the glass. It's good to be back.

"C'mon, people, let's get these secured!" She can't leave the hangar until the job's done. No one is stopping her, of course, but she's not hiding her sense of duty any more than she's hiding anything, "I don't know about you, but I need a drink and a steak. Not necessarily in that order."

ii. _ good things _
( For now, rest. And welcome home. )

Cathaway had said that, warmth and love ringing through the symbiote network like the peal of a bell. It resonated, true enough, and Shepard took it to heart. Her version of a rest? The shooting range.

There's just something... oddly soothing, about the rhythm of it. Fire, adjust, kickback, and the smell. She fell into it like a mantra, punctuated by the harsh, familiar hiss-chunk of the reload, thermal clips in a glowing, cherry-red pile to her left, haphazard and dangerous. The targets healed themselves, but she didn't mind. The point wasn't to shred paper, the point was to achieve that humming zen, half-divorced from herself, where nothing mattered much and she could simply be.

That is, until she gets hungry. It's only a matter of time.

iii. _ an end _
It's times like this that you really appreciate preparedness drills. Not that they help, in any specific way, but for Shepard it's all she can do to flare her biotics, and cling as gravity cuts and wavers, reverses and snaps back. She can anticipate the changes, only barely, but hasn't the mental wherewithal to do so. The world swims, mad Prothean screams, a cry of pain, for help, a warning, a desperate plea. She knows this horror, but that doesn't make coping with it any easier. It's good enough to just recognize it, and know she won't die.

Well. Not from the screaming, at least.

Shepard's one of the last to stumble into the hangar, helmet loose in one hand. When she sees the wolf, the thing in the dark, it's with Harbinger's voice that it speaks and it really is only the repeated commands to leave, get out of here that keep her from launching a fruitless suicidal attack. Still, the last thought, as the shuttle-hatch seals, and the Station is lost isn't even anything so sanguine as not again.

It's about the fucking fish. They hadn't done a damn thing to deserve it and... and the corpse of the Station is falling behind them, still living, still screaming, and somewhere aboard there's ten gallons cubed of saline live, and soon there won't be anything left at all.

"Son of a bitch," Shepard snarls. It's probably a bad thing, to punch the wall of the shuttle that hard. Maybe someone should stop her from doing it.

iv. _ symbiote _
The world is an open wound. And everything is falling out. Shepard curls in around herself, tightly-tightly-tightly, and this would be a misery even if everyone around her weren't wearing the same empty, shell-shocked expressions. There's nothing here but inventory and bodies, someone is piloting but at the moment she isn't sure who— could be any of them. Nobody knows where they're going.

Well, there is the one thing: the little cannisters, ugly and squat. Datafuel, they'd called it.

"Open it," She says, loud in the empty air. Something has to have come of this; it has to mean something, "Open it."

v. _ mirror _
The ship comes to rest like an elevator. There's a pregnant, expectant pause before the doors open, and everyone is staring at them in that same way. The long, pensive wait, certain only that there is a future and not what it's form will be...

The door opens and the light is. Painful. Familiar.

It's the hangar bay. At first it seems perfect mirror of The Station's. And Shepard stares at it for a long, ugly moment before the small differences register. Someone is standing too close behind her but she doesn't shrug them off, only turns her helmet in her hands and puts it on, seals hissing as they lock into place. Everything about the silence around them is death to her Spacer's sensibilities, and she's not the only one who's projecting that terrible unease.

"Alright, let's spread out. See what we've got— buddy system, people. Don't get stupid."

The Station is dead. Long live The Station.

vi. _ wildcard _

He doesn't always stay on the Station. Most of the time, yes, enough that he calls himself retired when he greats each new round of Hatchlings and he means it. But sometimes he goes on missions, when his particular skillset would be valuable and he's getting itchy from staying still for too long.

Sometimes he goes because Shepard asks him to, and he needs no other reason than that.

This mission hadn't been one of those. He'd stayed in touch, of course, a distant but steady hum, and feeling her step onto the Station again is simultaneously a sigh of relief and a rush of adrenaline.

Sam echoes Cathaway's welcome home, but not in words, not even mental ones - in the churn of the sea and the spark of electricity, the flow of wind and brush of feathers. A feeling too deep to call love, though they've said it before and they will again.

Sometimes he joins her physically on the shooting range, but tonight it's only his mental presence. It's no longer something he has to focus on stay with her, no concentrated attempted to keep part of his mind with her - it just is, always, because she has a piece of him in a way he's stopped trying to quantify.

Tonight he's cooking, because he knows he'll feel her hunger soon - and there's a flare of warmth when he does, a tug for her attention.

( Manipulative bastard. )

Shepard likes words more than feelings. They're harder to misinterpret, for one, and for another... Well,if she knew how to compromise, she wouldn't have gotten into this life in the first place. She's not wrong though, there's something very like cheating to the idea of projecting the food-smell of a kitchen at work.

Aren't you done, yet, Shepard? Haven't you had enough of firing weaponry, of killing, for one week, Shepard?

Seriously, you're going to make me watch you cook?

She loves it, really. And anyways, it's working; she is hungry. She's always hungry, and by now Sam knows her preferences and proportions. A body can indeed live on dry rations and purified water alone, but that's survival. What Sam Wilson is, is life.

Shepard realizes she's been looking down the sights for thirty seconds without actually aiming, without firing, and the sense of rhythm has died off in the lull. She sighs and bows to the inevitable, packing up and folding the gun, then turning towards the home-sense of the Nest, and the comforting familiarity of the Station walls. Time to eat. You win, Sam.

It's good to be home.

How many years has it been? It has been years, hasn't it? Decades, perhaps. Time passes so strangely out here in the in-between, when they are more part of the whole than individual. Tied together with strings she hopes will never break, even though she knows it's inevitable. Loss is felt forever in the Nest, pockets of emptiness where family once filled, but there is still so much to live for. So much to come home to.

Stepping up behind the fiery woman who has changed her entire being, Rogue rolls her eyes at the familiar gross sound. That's her Shepard.

"I absolutely need a drink," she agrees with am amused smile. "And a nap. This mission was boring."

Gross and satisfying, Rogue, get your priorities in order.

"And steak," Shepard backs up the irony in her thoughts with an equally sarcastic tone of voice, although she's deadly-serious. A combat biotic consumes calories at a prodigious rate, and she is always, always hungry, "But I won't say no to bed, right about now. We've all earned a rest while the intel team figures out what this stuff is good for."

Funny, how a rest now means shipside; used to be, you rested on shore leave, and did your best not to even think about space. How the Nest changes things. Shepard shrugs, one-shouldered, and gives Rogue an easy, lopsided return on her smile. Bed, and bed, meat and drink. They're turning into proper jarhead barbarians aren't they now? But whatever the mental link wants, one must eventually service the flesh.

"Damn, it's good be back. I do not like stealth missions."

or diplomatic missions

or any mission that isn't combat-oriented, really

Shepard's a person with a stated purpose.

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