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meadowlarklogs2019-01-06 09:54 pm
- !arrival log,
- darker than black: hei,
- dc comics: dick grayson,
- dc comics: jason todd,
- detroit become human: markus,
- ffxiv: x'rhun tia,
- ffxv: noctis lucis caelum,
- marvel comics: thor,
- npc: gaby,
- re6: jake muller,
- starfighter: cain,
- the 100: clarke griffin,
- the silver case: sumio kodai,
- voltron: keith,
- westworld: maeve millay
ARRIVAL LOG 006
WHERE: New Amsterdam
WHEN: Night of September 3 to night of September 4
WHAT: The sixth arrival
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Coercion and loss of autonomy. Further notes at end of log.
Awareness comes to you in blurred snatches, cloudy fragments of sound and light, color, sensation. Hazy and difficult to grasp on to, but slowly aligning into focus. A series of regular, rhythmic beeps. A medicinal, astringent smell. The sensation of movement, a low hum and accompanying vibration under you. Your eyes are heavy, hard to keep open, but in the glimpses between slow, dark blinks you see four people in black body armor seated opposite you, as well as a man in dark gray scrubs.
You realize there are others next to you. All of you in white scrubs, hair recently cut but at various stages of growth, restrained by straps across your chests, arms, feet, holding you to the bench under you. To your left, an armored interior door, two more people visible, the movement of streets passing through a windshield. You try to open your mouth to speak, but it's as if your tongue is coated in tar, and you manage nothing more than an empty parting of lips.
The vehicle stops. The guard opposite you stands and comes to unbuckle you from the bench, helping you to your feet. Your limbs feel wooden and heavy, slow to move. One guard opens the back of the vehicle, and false, colored light, illuminating the streets in the distance will first alert your senses of being somewhere else, combined with warm air that's only cooled with the setting of the sun. The nurse moves to stand at the back, checking each passenger over one by one just before they're helped out of the vehicle, quick and methodical. He doesn't climb out after you, moving to sit as the last passenger is unloaded.
The guards keep their heads down. Their actions are quick, firm, but not entirely unkind. Once all the passengers are out, they climb back into the vehicle and close the doors. The engine powers up again, and then the bus is gone.
You're left alone in an alley, with no idea of where you are or why you've been brought here.
Around the corner of the alley, the streets are lined with bright orange, yellow, and red ball-shaped lights cluttered together overhead. Despite seeming rather tangible in nature, the balls themselves are merely well-designed projections. These lights illuminate the streets filled with people – some of which seem indifferent to the festivities, while others move in dense clusters toward a city square filled with countless trucks and tables. They disperse as they arrive – to trucks, to stations to have faces painted, to admire the wide array of sweet confections available. Numerous bits of signage announce various additional activities – but anyone new won't be able to interact, won't know what information is there.
◉ Though entirely capable of independent action and thought, new characters will find themselves completely, unquestioningly compliant to any verbal statement which could be taken as a command or request.
The message from El – no, wait. It's Gaby this time. Otherwise, it's the same as previous: insistent, not waiting for any active attempt to open it. Scrolling within your vision as if being written while you're reading it.
I'm on announcement duty this time. Bus #6, for anyone who's counting. The location? Well, the heart of the lantern festival. A short walk from the safehouse.
Like many of these festivities, the New Amsterdam Lantern Festival is an annual event, dating back decades as a means of celebrating the mish-mash of culture that influences New Amsterdam as it's seen today. Sponsored by Polarized – a known subsidiary of Pulsar – the lights go bright just as the sun begins to set late in the evening, spreading over the city, acting as a dense layer of luminescence for 24 hours. Even in the daytime hours, the lights remain, and the technology seems to make them seem just as bright – which acts as a sign that the lights themselves are not natural, projected outward by numerous devices set up throughout the city.
Most of the events are concentrated in a district square that was once known as the city's Chinatown. At the heart of this festival is a large gathering where numerous food trucks and restaurants come out to advertise their wares. Specializing in desserts and little else, these businesses flood the street every year in hopes of bolstering their business because they can't partake in the restaurant promotion throughout September. The festival concludes with a competition, with each chef revealing their unique lantern festival dessert. These are often rather impressive in nature: cake pops strung together like a dragon, ice creams that make people's mouths look like they're glowing, and large cakes, shaped and designed to celebrate New Amsterdam's arts and festival scene. Many of this year's offerings will both celebrate the year before and offer a somber reminder of the lives lost in the monster attack just months ago. Smaller, sample sizes of these desserts will be available for purchase, which also grants people access to one vote for their favorite dessert.
As the lantern festival comes to a close almost a full day later, the lights clear a path to the river, where countless people will be stretched out and looking skyward for this year's fireworks. Loud, symphonic music featuring some of New Amsterdam's most popular composers will play throughout the area, synced up with the bombastic explosions themselves.
Most of the six newcomers will have hopefully been gathered long before the fireworks go off – but anyone else is free to enjoy them and the festivities leading up to that final conclusion. The festivities vary in nature, from a place for someone to claim a lantern of their own with a wish, to using UV paint to legally cover the ground in unique symbols and lights, to joining competitions where people place chess and checkers for a wider audience. Each of these activities is monetized, so don't expect anything to be for free.
There will be several new and persistent additions along the most likely path to the festival from the safehouse: small, man-made shrines that have appeared just hours before the dense layer of lights settled over the city. Depending upon their makeup, these shrines vary in structure, size, and design, but have several unique, persistent similarities between them.
Some of the shrines are fully formed, with candles lying underneath them, and cloth blankets acting as an overhang for the art within. At the heart of each of these shrines is an image of a person, with a large, upside down triangle projecting from their chest – blue and noticeable – with their arms spread wide. Some of these triangles project from the chest as if a piece of a 3D pop-up structure, while others are simply a part of the image itself, a flat, smooth surface. Beneath them, there will be a scene from a familiar event for anyone who's been here for a while: a car flying into a monster's mouth, a person healing someone else, bright blue eyes and fingertips, showing the artist's personal interpretation in motion. Any of the cloth is covered in geometric symbols, intersecting circles and triangles, many of them in specific and particular patterns.
Other shrines are two dimensional in nature – painted, to be more specific, on the walls themselves – both hidden bits of scenery meant to blend in with the surroundings, or large and spread out, splashing wide arrays of colors and symbols. Whoever set up many of these artistic displays had a special paint and familiarity with the lantern festival lighting, as it draws special attention to the blue light that pours out of the people featured, whether it comes from their eyes, mouths, or the traditional chests. Silver and gold geometric symbols stretch around these images, framing the scene portrayed.
These additions aren't only located near the safehouse, but that's where they're concentrated for now. Within days, they'll be elsewhere: on walls in oft-frequented public restrooms, behind popular nightclubs and bars, and just about anywhere else – popping up and coming down as people tire of their presence – or are simply bothered that they're there at all.
Access to the safehouse is a hatch hidden behind stacks of empty storage shelves in the back of an abandoned supermarket in an outer district of the city. The immediate area is similarly abandoned, empty stores, flanked by several blocks of dive bars and clubs which cater to more niche tastes. A place where people can come and go unseen, or, if seen, not spoken of. A dark haired woman called Gaby is ready to greet the new arrivals and get them settled in, brusque and no-nonsense – she'll be open for in depth questions later, but will advise everyone to ask the people who brought them in for the beginning bits of information.
◉ The safe house is a large open space, filled with rows of basic cots set up to sleep a large amount of people. Basic, but outfitted with everything necessary for daily life. A few doors lead to back rooms for storage, medical care and a large communal bathroom, and past the long rows of cots there is a communal kitchen, fully stocked, and an eating area. Privacy is at a minimum.
◉ New characters will be asked to pick their beds, and provided with a change of (second-hand, mismatched and somewhat threadbare) clothes and basic toiletries.
◉ While there were previously also NPC occupants of the safehouse, natives to New Amsterdam, these people have now been moved on to somewhere safer. A few of their belongings remain, discarded or accidentally abandoned.
◉ Gaby will make it clear to all new arrivals that if they have any requests or queries, they should contact her or El.
◉ The drugs making new characters compliant will remain in their systems for a few hours after their arrival at the safehouse before finally beginning to fade. They will be gone entirely after a night's rest. In the meantime, they may want to be careful of what others say to them.
◉ New characters will be given rudimentary access to the network on arrival in the safehouse, but will not have their ID set up yet. They will be able to make posts and replies, but their messages will be anonymous and they do not have inboxes yet.
◉ New characters will not be allowed to leave the safehouse until SEPTEMBER 7. These 4 days are for them to adjust, learn about the world they've arrived in from their fellows, and for El to speak with them and work on setting up their IDs.
Welcome to Meadowlark, newbies! You're now free to post to the network and logs comms. To reiterate, your characters will have no IDs or inboxes, nor be allowed out of the safehouse until September 7 (January 14). At that point it's expected they'll have gotten a good idea of their new situation from their fellow characters, and will have discussed their background and job potentials with El in order for their false IDs to be set up.
If you have any questions or ideas about how you'd like to get your character involved in the world, or if they'd like to join Morningstar, please head over to the plot engagement post and drop us a comment! For questions specific to this log, there is a thread below.
Please check out our January calendar rundown for a look at things happening this month.
As a reminder, AC for new characters accepted in December and January will be 10 comments across 2-4 threads, while current characters will need to provide the full AC of 20 comments across 2-4 threads. AC will be posted on January 20 and close on January 27. If you do not reply to AC, you will be considered idled and dropped from the game. We will not post a warning list.
maeve millay | westworld | ota
001;
So, upon waking, she's understandably groggy, bewildered, and on high alert. Some fool's left a pair of medkit scissors beside her cot, and, in instinctive self-defense, she seizes the makeshift weapon and rears up when greeted, prepared to run, or attack, or whatever else might happen in the next few moments.]
They told me the drugs wore off. Who the fuck are you?
002;
[Thankfully, the scenario's explained to her one way or another. She's no happier about it, of course, but she's at least got some measure of context. It's no different from last time, and barely different from home, is it? She's still as trapped as she was before, simply resting within the bars of a slightly different cage. At least there were the native children around to pass the time babysitting her first go around. So she remains quiet, silently analyzing her situation and assessing the state of the safehouse. Maeve paces the area, back and forth, drifting through all the common areas and sitting alone on her cot with a hawk-like gaze. Until, of course, she's greeted.]
Quaint little place they've got here, don't they?
[She smiles coyly. The charm's on like the flip of a switch.]
Tell me about the outside some, will you? I'd like to know what I'm getting into.
003;
[Of course, no matter what she's told, she's going out there herself the moment the drugs wear off lmao.
Maeve does what any self-respecting, slightly out-of-depth gentlewoman would do at a situation like this: she's wooing rich people out of their money for free drinks and food on top of the intel, natch. Fortunately, she's willing to share the wealth (that isn't hers) with anyone she recognizes from the safehouse.]
My, my-- you haven't had a sweet yet, have you? [Yes, you. Even if you haven't met yet.] Darling, [she says, tapping the shoulder of the tall, finely-dressed woman whose arm she's hanging off of,] we've got to let them try that smoky one. Would you buy another?
[The wealthy woman hesitates. Maeve shoots her a coquettish look, and she cracks.
Congrats, Maeve's new bestie, you now have a stranger shoving a cup of gently smoking, fruit-flavored crackers into your hands.]
wildcard;
[hmu for whatever :* pms or pp to
001
Not that Markus always expects kind faces and minds without a mote of suspicion — he remembers what his arrival was like, the experience ingrained in memory. Unpleasant, to say the least, wracked with disorientation and very human sensations that ran too deep against nerve endings. A mind abuzz with more questions than he could queue up in any proper kind of order.
Still. He had a bit more patience than to go waving scissors at anyone drawing near.]
My name’s Markus. [Hands raising up in the universally placating gesture of “hey please don’t stab me”.] And I’m just here to see if you needed anything.
[A new face, one that he doesn’t recognize, having just jolted awake. He must have missed her arrival to the safehouse.]
no subject
Markus. [She's not setting the scissors down-- she doesn't much care for being lied to, much less carted around in an unfamiliar van full of strangers twice now-- but she's leveling, a little, meeting the man's eyes and seeing none of the little tics and twitches of dishonesty.
She can't trust him. Yet. All men lie, at one point or another. But he's greeting her in earnest, and that's enough for the moment.]
Maeve. And answers would be lovely. First off-- did you arrive on the buses or not?
no subject
He lowers his hands, but makes no movement to step forward. Her makeshift weapon would still be a painfully applied thing when sheared against skin, or straight into his gut, so. No thanks, as they say. Markus knows when he has to earn some small semblance of trust, and he doesn't even have to school his voice to be calm and even; it ranges that way by default.
Her query is a relevant one, but still not quite expected. At least it's simple enough to answer.]
You mean am I like you; stolen from one world and stranded in this one. The answer to that would be yes.
no subject
[Maeve studies his every move intently, too inhumanly steady and unwavering. After a long moment she finally blinks, setting the scissors down on her bedside table with a faint clatter. They're still within reach as she smooths the folds out of her hospital scrubs.
Her eyes have not once left Markus.]
Now tell me to pick up the scissors, please.
[She would trust her own body before she trusted his words.]
no subject
A seemingly permanent trait of his android heritage, that even a human body could not completely erase in its entirety.]
I would prefer not to.
[Maeve wants to test whether or not a drug still thrums through her veins? Sorry, but Markus has a thing about autonomy, and the idea of compliance and the state the newcomers are always found in is a thought that makes him sick.]
But if you’re wondering if you’re still compliant, I would say yes. The new faces are only just starting to filter in. [Unaware of her unusual circumstances, this is an easy assumption.] After a good night’s rest, you should have control again.
no subject
And his discomfort bodes well.] Right.
[Concessions such as these aren’t new to her. God knows how long she’d really spent asleep, walking the circular track of dreams over and over; taking just one more command wouldn’t have been enough to really bother her. She won’t forgrt that Markus spares her the moment’s submission anyway.]
Yes, well, you’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical. I’ve already been here for days and they all told me that same story. Why has it all started over again? I should have been free to go.
[Waking in her bed and looping through the same words and faces, walking the same main street day after day. Not this shit again.]
no subject
Her question, Why has it all started over again?, sends a shadow of confusion crawling across otherwise muted, calm features.]
What do you mean, you've already been here for days? [For a moment he wonders if his memory is failing him, or if he's been thrown into a fit of disorientation that he was unaware of until this very moment. It's very easy for him to toss the blame on a human mind, with all its faults and cracks that run through memory.
He pries further.] I've been here for months. I've never seen you before until now; weren't you dropped off from a transport vehicle with others like yourself just today?
002
Maeve strikes him as familiar, someone seen before (from the first bus, actually), but he can't place her, instead staring for seconds too long when she questions him. ]
Yeah, okay, yeah. [ he blinks, sort of recalibrating, unsure where to start, but her smile's a good sign, right... ]
I can go big picture, but it's — [ incoherent gesturing ] — it's a lot. [ he perches on the cot opposite her. ] Did anybody walk you through the basics when they led you here?
[ the walk through the city can be the best place to explain, with examples all around them. ]
no subject
You know what they say about size, don't you? [She cocks her head to the side. The smile twists coyly.] I don't care how long the story is, so long as you spin it well. But if you can't, the basics will have to do.
I woke up here to start, actually. I've always been a bit of a go-getter.
no subject
So you are. [ Drifting in and out of this reality before she was properly settled, huh. Fascinating. ] I'll do my best, then. [ Maeve is, ah, confident in a way that cuts through his hesitance and compels him to push onward. ]
Outside's New Amsterdam, [ he motions up and down as he speaks. ] a sprawling megacity with buildings as tall and as deep as you can imagine. One of 104 megacities left on Earth in the year 2511. [ his features lift as an idea occurs to him suddenly. ] Actually, visuals will help — [ a blink and flick of his hand, as he invites nearby neural devices (her own, anonymous though it is) to share his neural interface, which pops into her vision as:
@leo.fitz would like to initiate a shared display with you!
> ACCEPT
> DECLINE
If she accepts, some tourist-y photos of New Amsterdam will be viewable in the space between them, a holographic display generated by their implants: Aerial shots of the skyscrapers, snapshots of bustling food markets, a picture of the river that runs down the city centre and showcases a shoreline dotted with eerie, black obelisks (atmospheric stabilisers). ]
That's the clean version. [ dry. ] Not so glossy in reality. Rich live high, poor live low — at least as a general rule of thumb.
002
Her jaw flexes, shifting ever so slightly.]
Sorry, before we get to that—do I know you? I feel like I should.
001
like any self-respecting person who spends a majority of their time running away from problems, he shoots both hands up in the air to show that he's unarmed. ]
Loki. [ he looks down at the scissors. ] Don't cut me, please. I rather like everything attached.
no subject
[Sniper's radiant smile soothes away the rest of the kind patron's uncertainty. They try a few bites with evident pleasure, positioning close to the taller woman: A friendly distance. They recognize Maeve so that, at least, is not a surprise. But as much as they appreciate the free food, there could be a couple of different things going on here, so they send over a quick message.]
Is this for kicks or do you have an angle?