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

[onemind]

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 )

Comments

[duskmeadow]

[ Are you?

There's some part of Vax that wants to tangle Percy so thoroughly between him and Vex, loop red thread and soft blue feathers over and around his mind and ground him here. The loss of the Station looms over them, but it opens in Percy like a wound. Percy had learned to love places more than the twins ever had. Vax wields his affection like a balm, like a poultice meant to dull pain.

He's learned very well how to settle into Percy's mind. They've all three made space for each other, grown somehow more familiar than they had been before. And so Vax knows how to crowd, to project a different sensation to block out the blinding ache of having the Station ripped from them. ]

We have a ship. We'll find ourselves somewhere, [ Vax murmurs, though some aspect of this feels like telling a fairy tale. Vex's mind vibrates with worry in the back of his head, and Vax is keeping it carefully to himself. ] Somewhere we can make you another workroom to keep these hands busy.

[ Fingers lacing together, Vax's thumb stroking across Percy's knuckles. ]

Maybe that planet we were on a few months back. [ What Vax thinks was a few months, still uncertain about the passage of time. ] With the forests and the ocean.

[ And they'd been successful there. It would be safe, at least from their Enemy. At least for the moment.

Though Vax knows this is a pipe dream. He spins it for Percy's benefit, but he doesn't think the destruction of the Station means they have been eliminated from this fight. ]

[decisions]

[ it does feel like some children's story, something meant to lull him to sleep despite the agreement that they'd wait for vex, that they would sleep together, that they would dream together very quietly in the aftermath of the station's great wildfire.

there's an echo of the memory there — lush woods and the sea, a place they'd wanted to linger on, a place they couldn't spend more time than absolutely necessary at. he knows that now it is an unlikely sort of ending for the three of them, but he lets vax tell it anyways, wistful and quiet, holding his hand, winding him up steady and slow in the sensation of he and his sister in a way you might weave a cradle for a child.

fever licks bright and hot at the edges of his mind, but the further they drift away from the station, the softer the sensation gets, the more strained it becomes. he's loathe to let go. it's difficult. a phantom limb pain of something that felt like it always was because percy has always wanted to lay claim to a home, has at one point, had it ripped from him, reclaimed, was torn from it, grew roots, was cast out with the enemy nipping at all their heels.

his fingers curl into vax's back, trip along his spine as he adjusts, settles in full, calms in a way that winter blankets everything in a muffled silence.

he's stubborn a moment. no more dreams like that.

(perhaps adrift is all he's supposed to be anymore.)

his face finds vax's shoulder and he remains there a long moment before his voice finds itself, rough and tired. ] No more.

[ tighter fingers. ] Enough — [ and very soft, private ] Please.

[duskmeadow]

[ This is more of a severing than they'd anticipated. Vax has a sense of something within Percy fracturing, tearing away and dissipating in the feverish burn the Station left in it's wake. It's not something he can soothe away with divine light, so Vax tries something else.

Percy draws him in, molds their bodies together. The sensation of his fingers sear like brands at the small of Vax's back. He puts a hand into Percy's hair, turns his head to press his mouth to Percy's temple. The dream doesn't hold. The twins are what's left, woven around Percy like scaffolding. Vex'ahlia's presence filters through Vax like music, the soft melody of her weaving through as Vax lays a soft, sweet kiss to Percy's temple and stays there, bracketing his body. ]

I can promise you...

[ Vax's voice trails off. The concept is too big. It's better illustrated than spoken, and he draws Percy's mind towards him, diverts from the dull scorch of the Station and what's been lost.

Instead it's them. The three of them, a jumble of impression and sensation, quiet moments the stretch beyond the confines of the Station. It's home as Vax understands it: the three of them knit together, red thread looping over and over in a secure netting to bind them there.

It is what Vax can promise. The twins can be home. They have been that to each other for so long. There is a stable foundation and room for another; it's what has been for a long time. ]

[decisions]

[ this.

this.

oh this is home. this feels far better, less empty vow and more here and now as it were. the bleeding fingers of percy's mind reach out for it, torn from the station with dug in nails and grasping around tightly over what they have left. the station is gone, perhaps, but what its left behind isn't, how it's tied them all up into one another to the point where they've stopped trying to pick out the knots, where they've accepted the strange gifts.

the three of them.

the three of them are home and percival buries himself into it deeply, a muted, shuddering noise passing through him. he's run through the woods and floated downstream, sailed as far south as his heart could bear, found something in vox machina, in the warm hands of vex'ahlia and her brother vax'ildan that no amount of fever will ever burn from him. he thinks of a quiet place for all of them, tucked away safe and sound in an arrangement of limbs and breath, hair and fingertips, pale thumb running over the curve of a face, seated in a corner braiding two heads of hair quietly.

home is... it is vax and vex, and percy tries not to walk like he's a stranger, not now, not when vax opens the idea of the both of them up with warmth enough he has to strangle the noises inside of him. ]

[duskmeadow]

[ In the span of time between Vax making this proposal, weaving stability and comfort around the edges of Percy's mind like an offering, and the moment when Percy yields to it, it occurs to Vax that Percy may die. His mind might simply go quiet, consumed by the darkness of space around them along with the Station like some terrible fairy tale.

Then—

Percy sinks into his head. They've done this before (drunk, lonely, before Vex'ahlia) but Percy hadn't been an entirely raw wound, burning and bleeding by turns. Vax hauls him in. He makes room. Percy's face is sticky with blood when Vax cradles it, soothing his fingers across Percy's forehead as his thoughts warp into nothing but promises, promises, a tangle of togetherness that is less about the physical shape and more about the way Vax's mind opens up to invite Percy in.

Vax makes himself a safe harbor. He knows how to be one; Vex and he had taught each other how a long time ago. ]

We have you.

[ They've always had him. They took him for themselves and even at his worst and most angry, Vax had never quite been able to open up his fingers to let him go. ]

Stay here, Freddie. [ there is a whispered undercurrent, settled directly into Percy's mind. ] Forget the rest.

[decisions]

[ he hates promises. but he'll take them here and now if it's a promise for just the three of them. his head rests in vax's hands, throbbing and warm with blood, warm with the symbiote keening softly in its place coiled around his brain so thoroughly. trust percival to take something strange and powerful and let it use his body as a home. he closes his eyes as vax's fingertips touch his temple, sighs softly in what could maybe be relief as he leans into it, lays his head down finally against the crook of vax's arm. ]

I don't want to forget.

[ to forget the rest. to forget anything. ]

But I wish to remain.

[ he says softly, fingers dragging along the line of vax's clothing, dipping under to press skin to skin. the contact is enough, the feeling of him breathing is enough, every vessel full of blood running in time is enough. the anchor of vax's voice keeps him afloat as he thumbs the line of his ribs, counts over and over again. the stability of numbers, a soft rush. how many heartbeats before he falls asleep? one, two, three... thumb skimming over where it feels the strongest, where it keeps him rooted. ]

It's gone. Truly.

[ softer, like an echo. a memory, looking keyleth in her brilliant eyes and the ache of missing her is so ferocious: this is what we have built with our tiny moments, he tells her. to lose a place like this, we don't feel it immediately, but it would ruin everyone in small ways. ]

[duskmeadow]

[ It doesn't feel like a promise. It feels like acknowledging something inevitable. Vax sets it out for Percy, quietly reverent, begging favor. He has bled for Percy. Is that not enough? Is this not how people swear themselves to something greater than themselves? Vax descended into blood to seal his allegiance to his Lady. He has come before to Percy stained red, and wedged himself into the warmth of his arms.

The moment when Percy yields, relaxes into his arms, knocks the breath out of Vax. I have you, reverberates between them again, soothing, as Percy begins to speak. It's still distracting to have Percy's hands tripping across his skin. In spite of everything, Percy's fingertips spark small flares of pleasure as they skim across old scars and settle delicately into place.

Which makes for a strange, dissonant sensation when Percy invokes Keyleth. Vax feels that memory like a knife, as if Percy had slipped a dagger into his ribs. His head tips forward, turning to press his mouth to Percy's temple and taste blood. Thinking of Keyleth feels like splitting his heart open; he misses her almost too much to bear. ]

I know.

[ The loss of it is happily dulled by the immediate threat to Percy, to his sister. Even now, lost in space and drifting without destination, Vax is satisfied to give all of his attention to what he has left. ]

I know, Freddie.

[ Knows that the loss is staggering for him. Knows the meaning behind what he invoked so long ago, even if Vax will never understand what it is to make his home in a place rather than a person. He'd give Percy shelter in the bones of his ribs, the scaffolding of his veins as the Station passes into darkness. ]

You'll build something better for us.

[ When their keep was consumed by dragons, Percy had given them safe harbor in Whitestone. Vax murmurs this faith into Percy's hair; Percy is always a safe bet. Vax knows this. ]