etrayalogs | Mission 013 Log

Mission 013 Log

Mission Summary

Genre: Survival / Exploration / Spooky

Premise: Mesa is a wild, lawless land of megafauna, from feathered dinosaurs to redwoods soaring stories high. Etrayans must document what remains of a world on its way out and then get out alive, surviving in the wilderness for two weeks while fighting off a hostile environment. Most importantly of all: beware the dark.

Tone: Dark and philosophical. Is this a world worth saving?

Objectives: Take samples and record for posterity what happened on Mesa. Demonstrate appreciation of what is lost and the capacity to preserve it.

❬ all that men presume ❭

While Mesa is full of life even now, with large creatures roaming the continents and making themselves comfortable, there are traces indicating that at one point this wilderness was constructed. The Citadel, a galaxy-spanning empire, had wanted to collect creatures from the numerous inhabited planets they could reach, and selected Mesa as the location for their conservatory given its lack of sentient residents. Once a carefully maintained vacation destination for Citadel elite, landscapes were meticulously groomed and animal husbandry was rigorously planned to create fascinating creatures across generations.

A good idea, in theory. Perhaps even in practice, given that whilst the rest of this galaxy has collapsed and died, this particular planet is still standing, along with all the creatures that had been transplanted onto it to call it their home.

Now abandoned by the Citadel, Mesa returns slowly to its original state: a deserted planet much like Etraya was before Aurora and Borealis's cities had been developed on it. Which is why Aurora has sent the Etrayans abroad: gather data on those who still live amongst Mesa's population, so that these creatures will not be forgotten as their predecessors have been.

Aurora's portal brings characters to a bare base camp, previously visited by a spare few of her bots in order to outfit it with just enough to allow them to survive. Simply called the Lux, their base camp takes the form of a massive spire with a built-in high-powered lamp at the peak, which bathes the entire outside of the building in light at all times. Some rooms hidden within the facility provide darkened spots to allow Etrayans to rest safely.

Aurora had told them that they must make sure to not be out in the dark -- hopefully the spire's eternal light as well as how carefully the entire outside of the structure is lit up offers them enough of a reminder to listen.

Possible Hooks
• Taking stock of your assigned team that you've just met, sharing supplies, and getting ready to leave on your assignment.
• Building up the base to serve as a safe respite for the time on Mesa.
• Returning to camp between assignments for a breather or because you've spent a little too long out in the dark.

❬ a conservatory left behind ❭

Mesa's ecosystems are dominated by megafauna: creatures of immense size and stature, often with lengthy lifespans and narrow biome niches. Most are locked to their environments, adapted precisely to the area they reside in, with little chance of surviving outside of their specific ecosystem. A swamp titan would not survive the cold tundra that the ice leopards call home, and the ice leopards cannot survive in the ashy, hot environment that let horned beetles thrive. Smaller animals may exist amongst them, but they are significantly less common. Many rely on the larger creatures for survival: feeding off of the parasites that attach themselves to their massive bodies, or nesting within their fur.

Much of the wildlife exhibits ancient evolutionary traits, behaviors and patters long-since established with no signs of further development. They no longer evolve with time and generations but instead have settled into their place on their planet.

The megafauna are not the only living beings on Mesa. Scattered across the planet are traces of civilization: abandoned ranger stations, research laboratories, and observation outposts. While these locations appear as if the technology within them was at one time advanced, it has now become nonfunctional, left to rot without maintenance over the generations.

Yet some of these structures still contain life, the descendants of the humanoid beings that established Mesa long ago. One may consider trying to extend a hand out toward them to offer what assistance they can give - but none of them will be friendly.

Long abandoned by those who had once brought them here, these people have become opportunistic predators, fiercely defending what facilities they were able to keep partially functional. The darkness that plagues the Etrayans also appears to plague them, and without light, the same ill fate would be their demise.

They do not travel far, choosing to maintain their own livestock and supplies to ensure they are never far from the light. After all, they know the greatest threat on Mesa is not the wildlife, but the dark.

Possible Hooks
• Encounter various wildlife while out on assignment, and perhaps run into another team.
• Build an observation blind shelter with your teammates and hole up there for a few days, hoping to document your species of interest.
• Discover and explore an abandoned structure.
• Come under threat from the residents... or try to reach out to them.

❬ hatchlings ❭

The chelonians, one of the species in one of Mesa's warmer climates, has struggled to maintain their numbers over their centuries on the planet due to their inability to change their ways.

Hatchlings are born several kilometers away from the beach shores, burrowed deep into soil to protect them from predators that may seek out their eggs during high tide. These creatures are massive, large shells encasing a significant portion of their bodies with only their heads and limbs visible from under it.

These creatures are rare and difficult to spot on Mesa: they breed slowly, live for centuries, and their offspring very rarely make it passed their first few hours of life. They often hatch in the dark of the night, making them extremely susceptible to predators that lurk in the dark, waiting for prey too small and too fragile to protect themselves. Large winged beasts swoop down from the skies, picking up the newborn chelonians to enjoy a fresh meal.

Without them, their ecosystem begins to collapse: kelp beds and forests fail, and entire food chains unravel.

Etrayans with interest could assign themselves a simple, unofficial mission to find the burrows and protect the younglings as they manage to break through their shells, then help them into the ocean so that their kind may survive to see the sun again. They must set up light sources and wait beside the burrows to make sure these massive creatures not only escape their eggs but do not become lost on their journey to the water. Following them to the water is critical, as their eyesight, even with a light source, is quite poor -- and they have a tendency to lose their way.

No one's asked them to do this -- the whole planet is slated for destruction, so maybe this entire venture is pointless -- but maybe this is something worth doing anyway.

Possible Hooks
• Idealistic types see the chelonian hatchlings struggling to make it to a beach and step in to help. Considering how large they are, this might be a struggle for them, too.
• Cynical types question what the point is.

❬ night falls ❭

Mesa's darkness is not merely the conventional absence of direct light.

The planet itself has no moon, and when darkness comes, it is absolute.

Remaining in the darkness has several consequences, and the effects accumulate over time, progressing along a spectrum rather than in tidy stages. This only seems to effect those from Etraya and the humanoids living within their bases, not the animals brought to reside on planet. Remaining within light sources suppresses the effects, but the moment the planet's rotation angles them away from this galaxy's star, any Etrayans caught outside of the light will find themselves succumbing to the effects.

Characters were warned not to stay out in the dark, but they were not told why they should not.

If any of them prefer not to find out and remain at base during one unfortunate night, they'll find out why anyway: the power cuts. The surrounding terrain, once held at bay by artificial light at the Lux, is swallowed whole. The air feels heavier and the atmosphere itself feels weighted.

Blithe apathy sinks in. The ability to listen to reason slowly leaves those left in the darkness. If they do not find a light source quickly, they will be able to feel the physical effects of the darkness set into their skin, potentially ending with permanent changes.

Those remaining on base may work together in order to bring the power back on, utilizing any personal abilities in addition to fixing the damaged circuits in order to bring everything back online. But they had better react quickly -- the longer the darkness remains, the worse the effects become, and maybe someone who was once trying to help is now trying to hurt...

Possible Hooks
• Help restore power after it cuts at the Lux.
• Underestimate the darkness effects, assume your light source is enough, and slowly fall prey to the pleasant apathy. You'll need rescue.
• Stumble onto another party's camp and need their help to be coaxed back to sanity.

❬ MISSION NOTES ❭

📌 — Please make sure to use the major events comment thread specifically to announce character actions that have a significant impact on the mission outcome or other characters.

📌 — For all questions relating to this mission, please refer to the mission queries comment on the plotting post. Other questions can be directed to the FAQ.

🔵FULL NAVIGATION🔵

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1. Lux: Work

There’s much to do, for once! Sciel has not minded at all living a life where she rolls out of bed at whatever time she pleases and stays up late to carouse, but it’s been more than six months since she felt so uniquely useful. There’s a spring in her step whenever she moves around base camp, and despite the misery of the incoming end of this world, she has a smile on her face.

Right now, she’s up late again, her current project spread out across a work table. Just about every inch of it laden with plant samples, freshly picked and bagged and ready for processing. One by one, she picks up leaves and roots and petals and buds and packs them into containers full of clear crystals, which she seals and labels and stacks. She has music on, a stereo playing alien pop tunes, but the lyrics are predictable enough that she’s mouthing along before the end of every song. She takes pauses between sloppy, scrawled notes to take a swig of a beer, she puts her hair back up in a slightly different bun every time it starts falling out of its tie from too much bobbing around the table.

“What a time to be alive,” she hums under her breath, as she tops up another bin with silica.

2. Lux: Night

Good moods can’t last forever, but they can temper, at least, and grant one some level of resistance in harder times. It feels that way when the sun goes down. Looking out the window really makes her wonder if someone’s going around covering all the glass with oil paint, blacking it out to absolute nothing. Like the Fog, but maybe worse. How can anyone see even the tip of their own nose?

Still, there’s light inside the Lux as night falls, and Sciel isn’t ready yet to crawl down into the protected rooms inside to sleep. Instead, she walks out across the yard, as far as the spire’s light falls, to the edge of where the land slips away into an inky blackness.

She stands there on the edge, hands in her pockets, goosebumps running all along her shoulders and midriff, staring into the dark… and then she takes a few steps out into it.

Sciel will find herself joined by someone as non-human as the denizens of the place they'd so recently vacated: short with large, bat-like ears, faintly glowing eyes, and a pronounced fanged underbite, Riz's monstrous appearance is off-set by the tidy suit he wears and, perhaps more importantly, by the firearm tucked neatly into an underarm holster. Riz has always been at home in the dark, and a part of him resents being told to stay away from his old friend for reasons undisclosed, though he has yet to dare step foot into that inky blackness.

Not for his own sake, really. Or rather, for his own sake, but not his physical well-being; he knows he'll get an earful from Fabian if he decides to be reckless. So instead he's been lingering just on the edge of it all, silently debating what's in it, and if answers would be worth the risk. He's not expecting someone else to suddenly plunge inside, though, and he scurries forward. "Hey, are you really going out there?"

Sciel pauses. She hadn't noticed someone in the vicinity to watch her, and she takes little more than a half-step back and turns to look back. After a second she spots him –– surprising creature that he is –– and she leans back into the light, her expression calm.

"I'm testing something," she says, and she puts out a hand in his direction, palm up and open. Take it, if you want. Her arm is stacked with a couple dozen colourful bracelets made of braided cord. She promises: "I won't go far."

Riz grasps at the end of one of her bracelets in one clawed fist, frowning down at it. It doesn't sit right with him, watching someone go out without at least one person to accompany them, but it's probably just as valuable to have a line leading her back home. All the same, it feels foolish for an Adventurer like himself - Adventurer-in-training or not - to be sitting by the sidelines.

"Okay. If you run into trouble, or need anything, just give it a yank and I'll come running. I could even go with you, if you want." He pats his side, where there's a firearm holster underneath his armpit, and a sword hanging by his side. "I'm armed. In case there's something bad out there."

Something bad he can shoot or stab, that is. Those are his specialties.

“That’s very kind of you,” she says, genuinely, with a little curve of a smile. “I couldn’t ask you to put yourself at risk for my silly experiment, but if you want to come, I won’t say no, either.”

It’s his prerogative just as much as hers.

The darkness feels cool, markedly so, like stepping out the door on the coldest day of the year, but she’s not sure if that’s her imagination or reality. Goosebumps run down her arms, her bared midriff. The contrast between warm hub bustling with people and the darkness at her back feels right.

“I’m glad to have your protection either way.”

She eases her weight back a little, into the dark, tethered by his grip on her bracelet. He’s welcome to follow.

If he goes, Fabian's going to be really mad at him.

It's just the two of them now. No Adaine, no Gorgug, with so much of their support system having long since disappeared or distanced from them in one way or another. If something happens to him out there and he winds up ditching Fabian to need to be scraped out of some horrible ditch or another, he's going to be pissed. For a moment, he just fiddles with the bracelet, circulating possibilities in his mind. His own safety isn't really a factor; while nobody could ever call him fearless, his fear of danger and death is little to none, especially when compared to his fear of the much greater evils most high school students are consumed by.

"I'll come," he decides, trotting out after her, gait at a comfortable two paces for every one of her strides. "Goblins are good in the dark anyway. My name's Riz, by the way."

It would just be an insult to his people not to go, right? Right.

“It’s nice to meet you, Riz. I’m Sciel,” she says. See-elle, French, or whatever passes for it a long, long way away from Earth. What matters is that it’s confident, at ease with what they’re going to do. She slows her pace a little, in part for him and in part because the darkness feels like a black hole, and the ambient light falls away quickly enough that knowing where to step may quickly become a problem.

It also quickly becomes colder, like sinking into cold water. Perhaps some intervention will be needed sooner than she thought, but that’s the point of this –– trying it out. She raises her free hand ahead of her and pulls chroma to it, a ball of shimmering, flickering magic at her fingertips. It’s not a light, not exactly, but it is something.

“What makes goblins good in the dark?”

"Sciel," he repeats. "Cool. Nice to meet you too."

Talking about himself - or at least about his species - is nice in that it gives him a distraction from what is becoming increasingly obvious: this is no normal darkness. It's thick, oppressive, altogether distant from the sense of safety and comfort he typically gets from the dark. When he turns to Sciel, the pupils of his glassy, reflective eyes have expanded to take up nearly his entire eye, only a faint gleaming yellow visible around the edges.

"Biologically speaking, we're nocturnal. And caves are our -- natural habitat, I guess you'd call it." He's learned to keep a diurnal schedule, both back home in Elmville and here in Etraya, mainly to fit in. Whether his difficulty in sticking to it is some sort of Goblin trait or just him being a little weirdo is something he has yet to figure out. He points at his eyes, then at his large, bat-like ears. "We can see in the dark, and we've got good hearing. Stuff usually can't get the jump on us."

He glances around them, expression darkening, ear twitching irritably. "Even I can't see through this stuff, though. It's unnatural." Magical, maybe. Infernal.

It's exhausting work, really, but there is a saying that idle hands make mischief. Or something akin to it, anyway. For Aerith, it might be more less to do with her hands and more what goes on in her head when she's left idle for too long. The best thing about staying busy is that she doesn't have enough time to think.

Overthink, as the case tends to be.

Sciel is a welcoming presence to see when she's stopping in Lux for a moment's breath. Her setup is impressive and she works so seamlessly that she looks like she's been doing observation and conversation for... Well. Years. It's a hard thing not to be impressed.

"Oh, wow," Aerith can't help expressing her awe. "All of this looks incredible. Did you do something like this back home, too?"

Sciel looks up and immediately smiles. Ah, the flower girl. She reaches over to turn the radio down slightly, just enough that it's no longer obnoxious to conversation.

"Thank you! I started in rescue –– getting endangered plant species thriving again, that sort of thing." She shakes the last few beads out of the silica bag and crunches up the packaging, shoving it in the one serving as her garbage bag. "And then for a few years I helped develop aquafarms. But none of the science business, mostly on 'thriving' duty."

So yes, then. Sciel knows exactly what she's doing.

"So... like conservation then," Aerith observes thoughtfully, giving Sciel's workspace another look over. Someone like that would be incredibly useful back home, though she gets the feeling Shinra's lack of consideration of conservation efforts has anything to do with not having the minds to research it, but rather less caring about the situation.

"That's what I wanted to do back home," she begins, "but I definitely don't have the background for it." Being an Ancient isn't exactly something she can put on any potential resume. Not that the Turks would want her to work, probably.

Gesturing, she continues, "You look like you have this in a process, but I can't help asking—is there anything I can do?"

“Something like that,” she says. “I would have liked to spend more time on conservation for conservation’s sake, but biggest priority was feeding people, and you have an easier time of it if you have more options.”

Rely too much on one thing, and if you have a single bad year or some sort of collapse, everyone’s done for or eating grass. Sciel had been a girl when Lumière’s populations had been at their highest, back when they had so many people that sending Expeditioners by the thousands was both an attempt to wrest their future back and a means of relieving the city of more mouths to feed. No one liked to say that part, though.

Sciel grins, picking up her beer for another swig, but she doesn’t take her eyes off Aerith for a moment.

“But I bet you could pick it up really fast, no background needed,” she says, cheerily, and she slides an empty bin along the table towards Aerith with a nudge of her knuckles. “You know plants! Here, I’ll show you how to pack ‘em.”

If plants could have grown in a way that was more available, it could have provided a greater food source to the people in the slums. But Aerith suspects that not having that as an option quite possibly was intentional. Sciel is right, however. It makes her think about home in ways she doesn't normally entertain. It'll be worth some late night contemplation.

As Sciel scoots the bin in her direction, Aerith takes a moment to peer inside. "Well, I know flowers." That's not exactly the same, but she can't really argue the rest. "I do like learning, though. Having the chance to look at the plants and flowers here has been really neat. And being able to save some of those things here to take back with us is a nice feeling too."

...So maybe in her own way, Aerith is getting a chance to be a part of that conservation. This may not be Midgar, but she still has the ability to make a different. It's hard not to feel warm and fuzzy about it.

It's so good to have like-minded, spirited company. Sciel beams.

"Oh, don't downplay yourself, if you know flowers, you know all the basics for other plants, too!" she says, a playful little edge to her voice. "You can save plenty."

She reaches over to give Aerith a gentle clap on the shoulder, and then she rounds the table to grab another can of beer from her bag. She leans across the table to set it in front of Aerith, prattling on: "Plenty of plants have their fussy little preferences, but it's not much different from digging up and replanting dahlia tubers so they survive the winter, or staking snapdragons so they don't get crooked. Have you ever done dahlias?"

Sciel is onto her. Aerith does downplay a lot about herself. Her skills. Who she is. What she is. Most of the time, it's either just habitual, like a muscle memory that she can't shake, but it has proven time and again to protect her. If she doesn't think much of herself, dangerous people aren't likely to think much of her either.

At least, that's how it's seemed to have worked back home.

"They do have their preferences," she agrees, offering Sciel a grateful look. It doesn't take her but a few moments to open the can set in her direction. A small sip and Aerith makes sure it's out of the way, so she doesn't accidentally knock it over as she helps begin to pack plants away with all of the care she can muster. "I don't think I've worked with dahlias, but I've seen pictures of them in books, I'm pretty sure. I haven't worked with snapdragons either. Back home, there are a lot of lilies. There are other ones too, of course, but I think lilies might be my favourite."

After a moment, she smiles, her gaze moving onto Sciel, "Do you have a favourite flower? Or maybe a favourite plant?"

“Oh, lilies are good. Easy to grow a million of them. We grow them a lot where I’m from –– it’s tradition to give them to your loved ones every May.”

Who can say why? It’s strange sometimes to have traditions but be so cut off from their origins, but her people have lost so much, more than even this planet.

As for her favourite… Sciel smiles, but it’s a touch more reserved, though no less warm.

“Genistas. I had them in my window boxes for so many years. They loved the sun. Why lilies, for you?”

Sciel is right. The lilies in the church and outside of her home are… in vast number. It’s like they grow so easily in those places. Well. More at Aerith’s home than the church aside from that particularly lovely place where the light shows right through. As she’s listening to Sciel, Aerith realises she misses them.

Maybe she misses them more realising she won’t be seeing them again.

“Your loved ones…” Aerith begins, thinking back to when she originally crossed paths with Cloud. The others, too. She’d like to give them all lilies. Maybe she can while she’s here. As Sciel makes mention of genistas, Aerith looks thoughtful. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a genista before.” Maybe outside of Midgar? But it’s not as if she’s had very much time to exactly wander and look.

Humming thoughtfully, she tips her head as she’s keeping her hands busy, “I just like lilies. Back home they’re given between lovers when they’re reunited. I like that symbolism.”

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Mission 013 Log

Sciel | Expedition 33

Night!

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Lux: Work!

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