THE AMAZING BASE.

[agogemod]

WHO? Everybody!
WHAT? Welcome home, nerds.
WHEN? Outside time and space, in the aether between dimensions.
ANYTHING ELSE? There is also a fish. Please warn in subject lines for anything beyond physical violence and move to a personal journal if things go beyond PG-13.

MYSTERY FISH;

question the mystery fish

DEPARTING GALLIPOLI

The order comes the day after the Marie Antoinette sets sail:

PACK UP AND GET READY TO MOVE OUT. WE'VE DONE ALL WE CAN HERE.

DEPLOYMENT: BASE.

WE NEED TO RESTOCK. BE PREPARED FOR MORE TRANSFERS ON ARRIVAL.

STAY SAFE. TIME-STEP EXPECTED TO BEGIN WITHIN THE HOUR.

FOR THOSE OF YOU NEW TO COST: FIND A SECLUDED SPOT AND TRY NOT TO EAT ANYTHING BEFORE THE JUMP.

The Time-Step

The transfer begins like a vibrating heat on the collar bone, just a hum of sensation.

But the vibration spreads. Veteran COST soldiers often refer to this phenomenon as "the buzz". The feeling builds, not unlike standing near a great engine or the wind-rattled branches of a massive tree. There is a long moment of motion sickness and you can't be sure if the world is shaking you from the inside out or the outside in. It may be better to close your eyes against the growing nausea, as the world blurs out of focus.

A star shines in the distance. You may hear the faint rustling of leaves. Some swear they hear voices in this moment, indistinct words echoing off nothingness. Others say they feel a touch of the divine, that the eyes of the eternal look down upon you. Ancient bones rattle just out of earshot, cold and brittle and nothing more than the suggestion of sound. Or maybe it's only an illusion, brought on by the powerful technology grafted into your skin.

One thing is for sure: One moment you are here and the next you are not.

The shift takes you from whatever solitude you could find aboard the Marie Antoinette to the temperature-regulated hallway of what looks like a very poorly put together space station. Droids rush up and down the long hallway, fixing broken bits of machinery or just chattering with each other. A few crows sit on high ledges, looking down and watching. Someone mutters something about a centaur around the corner.

And you might just notice, provided you were in Gallipoli long enough to acquire stowaways, that the parasites lurking on your skin are mercifully gone.

For new arrivals who didn't experience Gallipoli: You, too, will appear in this long hallway, filled with droids and crows and humans (still filthy and clad in ANZAC uniforms, carrying battered equipment from the first World War). And you'll be wearing the minimal COST-issued athletic underwear and holding whatever one item you were allowed to bring. Surprise!

READ THE BASE INFOPAGE.

home away from home

Those who have been to BASE before may find a strangeness to it all: BASE seems...still. The windows show a verdant world instead of the usual aether (though with the typical paranoia), and the halls are bereft of all but a few crows. A man stands at the end of the long hallway you arrived in, waiting for you to get your bearings before he speaks.

Except, you know, he's not a man. He's a centaur.

"It's been barely a week since you left, by my reckoning. But for you, I'm sure, it's been much longer. Still, much has changed. You may have noticed we are...becalmed. This is due, it seems, to an error in our ways. We kept something that does not belong to us, several wild creatures that are meant to be free. They seem to have psychically called out to their home, and their home responded; we are now somewhat stranded.

"But let me explain—the Aether is the nexus between worlds and times, but it is not a dead thing. Creatures live in it. We have crashed onto the back of one such creature, a mighty beast, as large as a small country and entirely undiscovered. We have found why the creature has intercepted us: we have accidentally taken captive some of its children. Shapers, the wild creatures I mentioned, it seems they form a symbiotic bond with the creature, and live happily within its stomach."

He frowns, considering this.

"Shapers, I should mention, are creatures that briefly infested our fair BASE. The issue was dealt with, though we kept some for experimentation. The coelacanth took issue with this, it seems. It can speak, of course; we are stranded very near its head, and if you wish to ask it a question, I implore you to do so. The creature is older than creation—older than me—and only speaks once to any creature it encounters. It's said its wisdom brings kings to their knees."

His eyes crinkle in humor.

"My name is Chiron and I am the caretaker of this place, for those of you whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting. More importantly, I am a trainer and a teacher of some experience; if you wish training or schooling of any sort, do summon me. I will be happy to assist."

He's easy to contact, often found in the library, the training area, his capsule, or elsewhere in the station, attempting to fix what he understands and arguing with crows.

"We intended to spend this time exploring, for this is a rare opportunity to discover more of an entirely uncharted world. I hasten you to see if anything on the coelacanth can be of use, but be careful. Take only what you need, not what you may want. I intend to learn my lessons well; these creatures are not pets. Takes food, water, and any materials of use to us for our survival and perseverance, but no more. We task you with this: explore the coelacanth, and see what of it can be understood. Bring us back samples, but do try to interrupt the natural habitat as little as possible. We are guests here."

He bows and the action shows a slight limp in one of his back legs.

"I would join you, but I am far too old for such activities. Still, do pepper me with any questions you should encounter. I am always available on the network, or in person, within this hulking mass we call home."

And then he leaves you to find your capsules and rest.

CAPSULE ASSIGNMENTS

Once you've found your room and settled in—perhaps taken a shower, collected clothes, and eaten—a droid will approach you with camping equipment and give you a brief explanation of how to access and use the database. It's time to get your gear and go.

Of course, you can decline. You can stay and tend to the fort, maybe try and clean up this patchwork jumble of metal and machinery. But seeing the sights on the back of a giant fish flying through non-space? Who can say no to that?


the undiscovered country.

BASE's airlocks open into a lush valley, vibrant with color and rustling with life that has thrived on the coelacanth's back for millennia. It's a striking shift from the rot and gunfire of Gallipoli, unmarked by shrapnel, bombshells, and never-fresh air.

No, the air here is clean in a way that can leave you breathless, untouched by pollutants and stirred into a gentle breeze. It's a marked departure for anyone used to a more modern Earth or rough equivalent; letting the air sit on your tongue leaves a crisp, unsullied taste behind. And the whole forest feels alive, in a way that reminds you of how small you really are.

A white crow perches in a tree near BASE's exit, too high up to properly engage but a stark contrast to the bright leaves around her. She merely watches recruits come and go with a shrewd eye, feathers fluffed against the light chill. There are other crows scattered throughout the wilderness, some easier to find than others as they flit through the trees, sit on camping equipment, or hitch rides on the hoverbikes.

Besides those brief flashes of black feathers, however, you're left unsupervised.

Try not to fuck up anything too badly.

EXPLORE:INFOPAGE|DATABASE
talk to a fish | destruction report

NAV. NETWORK LOGS OOC MEMES PLURK

Comments

[prizeneck]

anything in particular ya want to know about

[garbagepilot]

[Jeyne reminds her of Finn in that moment, in the way his face would light up when she'd accept his kindness rather than reject him. She misses him terribly, and looking at Jeyne now she's sure the two of them would hit it off immediately.]

Come here and I'll show you how to put it back together. Then we can do a little exploring.

[millimeter]

What's your condition?

[And then a second too late, his expression shifts to embarrassed.]

I mean—sorry! That was pretty rude. It kind of looks like something a friend of mine can do, though!

I almost don't want to look but I hate myself so I know I will

[garbagepilot]

[She follows along, falling in step beside him as they had back in. It's a shame to leave all the green behind, but if there's one thing that she's willing to do it for it's a whole room devoted to mechanics.]

You're a slicer, then? [But that's a very specific term, one she isn't sure exists for him when most people seem to be from earth, so she corrects herself quickly enough.] You hack into things?

[deem]

[Well, that's the closest guess he's gotten. Not quite there, but this guy seems to get the general idea]

Close? Sort of? [It feel strange to say, because he's nothing close to such noble beings as humans. Yes, androids of his era believe this nonsense] I'm an android, so nothing in me is organic.

[Never was, surely never will be]

Where I'm from, you'd run into guys like me a lot, so being possibly the only one here's a little weird.

[millimeter]

But then I don't remember why I was undercover. That sounds like...like something.

[Alas, all his cinematic and tropey knowledge is just outside his grasp.]

But yeah, I think so. I mostly feel fine? I just can't remember anything.

[deem]

[9S thinks it surely would be lonesome. The creatures he had come across were, at best, capable of parroting speech. For a being with greater intelligence and potentially eons of life, that surely was insufficient. It seems like a yawning, lonely sort of existence]

He'll answer if you talk to him, but just one time. I don't know what makes that so, but...

[That, too, seems terribly isolating to a unit who has always craved companionship, for whom being alone was worse than being dead]

I observed a few others talking to him from a distance, and I got to thinking, maybe it's been a long time since someone last asked what he's called, or said his name.

[He knows how that is, too. Bob may be a giant ancient fish creature drifting through the void, but he's sentient, and he must have feelings too]

I hope he's not lonely either.

I know this to be true because you played a painful game to the end

[deem]

Scanner's my word for it, but yeah, that's what my unit type does. That and scouting for intel, but hacking helps with that.

[Sure enough, 9S' strides come with the confidence of one who knows precisely where he's going. The structure of this place brings to mind something that could have been the Bunker's predecessor some time in the distant past, and he'd invested some time mapping areas out.

There's still more, he knows, that remains to be seen]

Units like me are "slicers" where you're from?

[lonelywar]

[The kitchen is a lost cause to him, he feels. Even if he could operate it, none of the food BASE made was anything like he was used to back home. Sure, the droids could make something similar, but at that point why not just eat what they were given normally...]

The... machine that washes clothes.

I have tried it a few times but something always seems to go wrong.

[His last roommate got pretty fed up with that pretty quick... He'd just started using the sink...]

[millimeter]

Oh, wow.

[Welp, time to reframe their whole conversation.]

Where are you from? I'm from Eos, but not too many people here have heard of it before.

[millimeter]

But you do meet dogs named things like Skippy. Or Spot. Maybe BASE has a book...

[He grins at the dog, even despite her disapproval.]

You're gonna be such a special snowflake with your name. The good kind of special snowflake. The best kind, even!

[lonelywar]

[Ashitaka swings down from Yakul's back, giving the elk another fond pat as he did so. He's looking around in one of the satchels he's tied to his saddle when Kruger addresses him with the question. He looks over to him quizzically.]

Apart from what we were given, I brought food, my weapons, and this equipment for Yakul. [The reins and saddle and bags, apparently.

He has a hard time believing that from Kruger, though.]

It seems to me as though you are carrying a great deal more than that.

[Just what are you up to...]

[deem]

I don't have an Eos in my records, either.

[But that's not surprising, since plenty of things about the Old World have been lost. Why not a place or two?

Because clearly humans come from Earth and Prompto here must be human]

But I guess when I'm from is more the point, and that's...way after everyone else.

[lonelywar]

[Surely there are many among them similar to 76, who would not find much to keep themselves sufficiently engaged while exploring on the back of the coelacanth. There were some like Ashitaka who would find perfect contentedness in this, but... even he would grow restless eventually. Not for something more; he did not yearn for the conflict and war they left behind. What would eventually worry him was everything that he had been taken from back home, of the war of men and gods, of San and Eboshi and how everything seemed to be on the cusp of breaking. But it's not within his ability to return, and COST doesn't seem interested in doing so, not when he was being such a sufficient soldier. So it would be onto the next mission, all with the hope of going home at some point.

For now, he's happy in this moment, in restructuring the dying fire into something that would last for a few more hours at the very least, in welcoming the older soldier to join him. He smiles at him, pleased for the company. The older man bristles, he finds, not bad company but sometimes a bit standoffish. He feels he has inklings of understanding for why that is, but he leaves them be.]

I am very pleased for it, after what we have left behind.

[Mud, smoke, ash, gunpowder, trenches torn into the earth like gouges through flesh. He would do almost anything to forget everything that had happened, if that wouldn't be disingenuous to who they had lost, all that they had experienced.]

They will send us on into another war in time. This is guaranteed. So, yes, I think that it is good for all of us to do what we can to appreciate time for fresh air, for peace.

[The fire is crackling and healthy again, and Ashitaka settles next to Yakul once more. The elk has lifted his head, studying 76. It's not their first meeting, of course, but it's his type of greeting.]

Is a place and situation like this stranger to you? In comparison to where we have just come from?

[millimeter]

[That gets a head tilt out of Prompto.]

Like...relative to Earth?

[He's just guessing, based on how many people he's met from Earth. But, while Earth uses a calendar nigh identical to Eos, the years mean absolutely nothing to him. He hasn't really thought about it before, but he suddenly realizes he has no idea what qualifies as archaic or futuristic by most recruits' standards.]

Guess it's never really occurred to me to ask when people are from... Like how far are we talking?

[lonelywar]

[It was an entirely natural thing to fear the unknown - it was this type of thing that was encoded into their instincts down to a molecular level, over hundreds of thousands of years of the most cautious of a certain species being the ones who survived when the foolhardy perished. But it was one thing to avoid something potentially dangerous and still another to arm oneself to the point where they could entirely destroy it if given the slightest provocation. That had been the greatest shift, when mankind had realized that what they could forge and build with their hands could do something so monumental. He has relatively little understanding of how it worked so far into the future, but he has seen the very advent of it. When humanity, holding weapons that could breathe fire and kill with impunity from a great distance, turned them on the gods themselves, poisoning and killing them.

He is quiet for a moment, considering the question. He wishes the answer he could give was better than it was.]

No. Many do not.

[It was one of the reasons they were here, after all. It wasn't the shapers that were killed in their original infestation that brought them here, apparently. No, it had been the ones kept as "pets" that had called out to the coelacanth. But Ashitaka himself had gotten into an altercation with someone who took it into his own hands to destroy them, without the go-ahead from anyone else, and that confrontation had put him quite close to death's door (not that he was any stranger to such a place). He is certain many COST agents didn't care even a fraction of what they did.

He is careful with the weight of his gaze, not wanting Ryo to feel as though he were being put on the spot or otherwise scrutinized. He gives him time, though he can tell that this is no easy question for him - it wasn't an easy question in general, though Ashitaka is clearly the type of person that doesn't avoid such things in lieu of easy, largely useless conversation.

What he ends up saying pierces through Ashitaka's expectations, creating in Ryo someone he felt he could understand and even sympathize with to a surprising degree. He's certain it is presumptuous to assume too much similarity, for Ryo's world probably looked very different from the one Ashitaka left behind, and it could be any number of things behind the meaning of his cryptic final statement.

But, still...]

The world I left behind is beautiful as well. [He looks out over the boreal forest, the mountains, the group of rivers that cut a pattern into the land.] Much of it is like this place. Untouched by man, still the territory of great beasts and gods. These are the most beautiful places; they feel sacred to a point where you feel cautious to tread upon them.

[He remembers the heart of the forest, trees so massive they could be pillars holding up the sky, all surrounded by ponds and streams flowing around dozens of islands. He remembers first seeing the great forest spirit through a gap in some of those trees. Everyone remembers their first brush with divinity.

He finally looks back to Ryo. His expression has lost some of its wistfulness, drug painfully back down to reality.]

Do you bear a curse?

[He might as well come out and say it. It is his only frame of reference for feeling so short on time, at such an age, with so much reason to stay.]

[lonelywar]

[When you were a creature of such a magnitude, perhaps your perception of this was different. Perhaps you were content with being able to foster so much life. The shapers also had curious powers over dreams, able to communicate through them. Perhaps they kept the incredibly massive beast company, speaking to it through sleep, if the creature even did such a thing?]

I see.

[That was strange. Perhaps he is not so lonely after all, if he restricts himself so much with regards to how much he speaks to others.

He listens to 9S' reasoning, and Ashitaka for the first time remarks that it is ironic that, given one question he would ask, he asked for the coelacanth's name. It was a kind way of using such a limited ability, he thinks.]

I am sure he is grateful, in a way. It certainly does not seem he gets much of an opportunity to give others his name. [Even if it is... Bob.

He considers the last statement for a moment, watching a mysterious shape swoop between some trees in the distance. He couldn't quite make it out, what it was. Perhaps one of those enormous owl-like creatures Akira found.]

Perhaps the shapers keep him company. [9S hadn't had any personal interactions with them, but they were the reason they were here, after all.] Or perhaps he occasionally sweeps up ships like ours from the aether whenever he feels the need.

[Thinking such a thing made the coelacanth's existence seem a little less upsetting, at least.]

[widow_of_the_crag]

I am married.

[There's a pained expression in her eyes, not wanting to venture further into the subject of Robb or the hurt that radiated through her whenever he came to mind. There was still no word of him and he'd been missing since Gallipoli. Being put in a room with another man threatened the small hope that she still clung to.]

And my husband was here...is here somewhere.

[widow_of_the_crag]

Are you there early in the morning? I'm a bit used to early hours now, after that mission.

Have you taught anyone before?

I will try.

[neutronium]

"I suppose--though again, given we are from a different Galaxy, it is difficult to tell." It is interesting, how these sorts of things can cause difficulty. He thought it was going to be technology, not fauna that was going to be the issue.

Still, there is nothing for it. It is something that is better left aside; he could research it later. "Would you be interested in going into the caves with me? Or is it something that would be more difficult for you to do, given your current state?"

[widow_of_the_crag]

[Much like Finn, she also shared a feeling of being less than she was, being tainted by darkness, though she never felt personally touched by it. It was no small thing to have someone look at her as though she was worth knowing.]

There are so many parts. How do you keep it all straight in your head?

[garbagepilot]

The same way you learn anything, I guess. It's just a lot of repetition and failure until you get it right. [There's a pause, and then a rueful little grin.] I had a lot of free time before I left the place I grew up in, so it was easy to fill it with learning new things.

[And she'd just been trying to not die of boredom, you know how it goes.]

[deem]

Right. I was first activated in 11942, and it's been four years since. So that whole Gallipoli thing was...ancient. Beyond ancient.

[Like he'd stepped into another world entirely. And in a manner of speaking, he had, since androids look upon the era in which mankind populated the Earth as the Old World]

Met a guy earlier who's from about ten thousand years ago from my perspective.

[widow_of_the_crag]

If you get it wrong though, doesn't it end with it exploding? [She wouldn't know from experience, but it certainly seems like it would cause a lot of fire.] You did? What about your family?

[Not that she doesn't know about free time. It seemed that was all noble girls had.]

[bloodings]

[ Her eyebrows knit together as she listens. It's not that she's confused: surprised maybe, because she had no idea he was dealing with this. But her mother was a mage who specialized in curses. Mordred's own birth could be seen as one. So nothing he's saying intimidates her, or even causes her to miss a beat. ]

Yeah. [ She shrugs, but her voice is serious. ] If that happens, I'll kill you. The Knights of the Round Table fought all sorts of demonic creatures. Even if it's just me, I'm strong enough to handle it.

[ Even if it costs her dearly — she doesn't know if Ryuji's mana supply could stand up to using her Noble Phantasm. She'd have to cut their connection and destroy herself instead. ]