voidtreckerexpress | A New Platform [Intro Post April]

A New Platform [Intro Post April]

On the Train

Once again passengers are awoken by the morning announcement.

"Good morning passengers, it is day Sixteen of the month of Kazoo. Points have been updated on the system."

They have indeed, and everyone can spend the morning shopping. Those who have been on the train for a while will also be expecting the second announcement that comes after lunch. A lunch that may be a bit sparse: between the big eaters and the stress bakers, the stores have been stretched thin the last two weeks.

"Shortly arriving into a designated void platform. Exit from void in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one." A lurch and a jolt and the windows fill with the fog that means they are at a platform. The steam is thin, with blue skies seen above. The sun shines brightly down, warm light pooling on the platform.

As usual the first to leave the train notice nothing as they walk silently, rucksacks on their backs, towards the barriers: Cassie Lang, Glorfindel, Jessie Custer, Olivia, Paddra Nsu-Yeul, S’reee, Thea Queen, Wei Wuxian.

But on the platform itself there are new faces. Wearing hoodies in all four colours, in various states of confusion.

For New Passengers

At first all they can see is steam, billowing around them as they come to their senses. As their eyes adjust, they will see they are on a platform, open, with a vine-covered wall stretching high either side of the barrier. In front of them is a single track extending both ways into thick fog.

They are standing, in clothes that are not their own and a style they might not even recognise. They are carrying a rucksack on their back. For a moment it seems to just be them, alone in the white haze; then the steam begins to fade and they realise they aren’t alone.

The platform is not large, and seems smaller with eighteen figures scattered around. All facing the tracks, all dressed in cargo trousers and hoodies. To both the left and right, tracks disappear into the mist.

A roaring sound, and out of the fog arrives a train. Jet black with gold writing on the side. The Voidtrecker Express. There is a hiss as the doors slide open and out step a strange assortment of people. Some are human, some are less so. Most are wearing the same hoodie in one of the four colours, red, orange, blue and purple, though some are sporting different clothes in a variety of styles. The doors close behind them.

The Train

After a short time, the doors hiss open again. Those from the train may encourage those on the platform to board. It’s not like there's anywhere else to go, and even if there was, you feel a pull. A need to board, a feeling that staying on the platform would lead to something terrible. If that is not enough, there are plenty of people on the platform now, to encourage them onto the train.

Each ICP shows the same message and next to the screens there are stacks of leaflets written by those on the train, with further information (see
'Publications'). The store rooms have been restocked with fresh ingredients, including plenty more tomatoes.

For passengers that have bought items, these are also scattered around the luggage carriage in various suitcases and bags. There is a suitcase stocked with spare wash kit items, for those who are running low as well as a box labelled Do Not Use Yet that is full of small bags.

New passengers will find their ticket allows them into their cabins. They may need to negotiate for beds, especially if they want a top bunk! Room is tight but there are storage cubbies at the head of each bed, beds fold up and the bottom bunks double as benches for the small table. There is storage under those benches full of spare blankets and pillows.

Departure

A second horn sounds to encourage any stragglers who are making the most of the sunshine. The doors slide shut. Veteran passengers know what will happen next, but they may wish to brief their new companions.

The train sets off, the fog obscuring the view again as it picks up speed.

"Welcome aboard, passengers of the Voidtrecker Express." A female-coded artificial sounding voice echoes throughout the train. "Please take the time to read the passenger information displayed on the Information and Communication points and familiarise yourself with the layout and emergency exits."

The train begins to tilt, leaving the ground and rising up into the fog-filled sky.

"Entrance into Voidspace imminent. New passengers are advised to remain seated. Entry into Voidspace in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one."

A shudder, a jolt, a lurch to the left. A flash of light, colourful and blinding. As quick as it happens it is done. The train seems to steady itself. The fog from the windows is gone now, replaced with a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colours.

Welcome to the Void!

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Ghost regards him for a moment, and then snorts. "Physical power isn't everything, and I think we're both smart enough to know that," he says. "You're established and respected in the community here - your word is going to carry a lot more weight than that of a weird guy who just got here. You could do a hell of a lot of damage to someone with your words alone, if you wanted to."

Alex never needed anything more than words and a position of authority to do terrible things. It would take being willfully ignorant for Ghost to ignore that.

Senku tilted his head curiously, looking as though that hadn't even occurred to him.

"I'm not nearly so diplomatic as that. I don't engage in those kinds of exchanges." He admitted. "I have the mentalist for that."

"I'm not the least bit inclined to entertain an exchange of concerns to see who would be more likely to be believed." His interpersonal skills weren't terribly nuanced, nor developed.

"Whether or not it's something you'd do as a person, it's still something that's within the range of possibilities." Ghost nods at the folder. "Plenty of people would call me an idealist and an idiot for giving you that much information."

His expression goes less aggressive, more thoughtful, almost somber. "But someone took a leap of faith on me, once, and I'd like to believe that there's other people like that in the world, with some basic human decency." The words come out with a distinctly Southern accent at odds with the rest of the synthesized voice. "If there's anything worth believing in, then I think it's that."

"I can't argue with that, it certainly is in the realm of possibility, it's just not something I would've considered. Even in a disagreement, I fight my own battles. Persuading people isn't what I go to, I'm terrible at it. Takes me ages to get someone to actually agree with me." He didn't look like that bothered him. "If I want to play politics, I'll go home...figuratively, of course."

Senku chuckled lightly at himself and nodded. "I agree with that. I want nothing else but basic human decency anywhere, really. I desire peaceful solutions over warfare, and problem solving on a global scale if there's such a problem that can't be solved by a few alone."

"Those are the tenets of the Kingdom of Science. I'm on a race at home to save 7.8 billion people."

"If everyone thought that way, it would be a lot simpler," Ghost says with a slight sigh. "7.8 billion... Assuming we're talking about Earth, that's the twenty-teens or early twenties, right?"

It's tangential, just a bit of context before he moves on. (There's enough information in the folder that Senku will be able to put together that Ghost's world had a very different kind of apocalypse, circa 2035.) "I wish you all the luck I've got. It's too late for at least that many, for me."

"Correct. 2019, in fact." Senku explained, but then again he found the whole thing fascinating. "A device was used to petrify every human on the planet, and within the atmosphere leaving civilization to crumble. There will be a number we can't save, if their statues broke and weathered, there would be nothing I could do for them."

He sighed. "I broke free roughly four years ago, and 3719 years had passed." He was much much older than he looked. "I know, because I kept count."

"... Well, that doesn't have terrifying implications for your cognitive development or anything." Yes, that's the first thing he thinks of, hearing that last sentence. It's hard to expect anything else out of himself, with all the neuroscience worked down into the most basic layers of his personality.

Explains a lot, though. Of course someone who experienced that kind of isolation wouldn't be able to adjust back to existing within a social community again normally. Still, there's definitely a new sort of respect in Ghost's posture as he regards Senku. To come out of that coherent in any way isn't a small thing, and speaks a great to mental resilience. Maybe in a way that someone with a different background wouldn't understand.

Humans just aren't meant to be alone for that long. Humans aren't meant to live for that long.

"I have a theory about that!" Senku said brightly because of course he did. "What's most fascinating about the petrification is its ability to repair damage to cells. It can reverse fatal wounds, and also affects neurological conditions...the only thing it can't fix is anything congenital." He explained.

"So I suspect that whatever damage was caused by the total sensory deprivation with nothing but my brain firing thoughts and constant counting, was repaired by my revival." He understood the implications. "Because that period of time wasn't the worst. By far, what was the worst, was the six months I spent alone ambulatory after that."

That was what gave him panic attacks and lived in his nightmares. "My friend woke up after that, so I was able to engage in social interaction at that point."

He'd been talking to animals. It was bad.

This is the point where the metaphorical computer encounters an error in processing, skips that instruction, and moves on. Some things are too inexplicable, but perhaps unusually for someone with that kind of analytical, scientific thought pattern, Ghost just accepts that the explanation for that is severely not his wheelhouse and moves on.

You have to do that a lot in cutting-edge psychic sciences, and he is that cutting edge, after all.

"But if that was the case, you shouldn't be able to remember it at all," Ghost says, because that is his wheelhouse. Almost too intimately so. "If it reset you back to the time of petrification, then that should have also included the neurons involved in your episodic memory. So it clearly isn't a perfect process if you can remember it at all."

A pause, and he cracks a faint grin. "So what was that about not needing a neural specialist?"

"It's not a reset specifically, it's that whatever damage is done, the process of undoing the petrification causes the cells to knit back together. It's truly fascinating. I know it works neurologically because we have a young girl we woke up who was functionally braindead in the modern world." Senku explained.

"When you've been stone a long time and it cracks there's scarring." He gestured at the two marks down his forehead through his eyes. "I also know that petrification again, removes these. It's incredibly fascinating."

Senku chuckled at that. "Ah, you know I haven't exactly studied myself. I hadn't really considered it." He was considering it now.

"Gen, too, could probably study him. He's in the same situation only he was in a stasis, some kind of sleep for the 3700 years. The only person I know who had any sort of consciousness besides me is Taiju and he's not here. Everyone else had no idea time passed."

"Something that long term wouldn't cause damage in the sense of a wound," Ghost says. "The neural connections wouldn't be broken, they'd have developed incorrectly. Again, especially considering your age."

Senku would have been in his mid teens somewhere, four years ago. That's a period where there's a huge amount of brain development - even if developmental neurology isn't his specialty. Morgan, for all his focus on learning and memory, primarily worked with adults. (A bitter part observes that there aren't that many teenagers sent to Russian death camps.)

"I'd love to get a look at that," he comments regarding the girl, "but it's what it is. I'm no diagnostician, but I can at least take a look for anything glaringly wrong, if you want."

"I understand what you mean. Interesting. All the more reason to compare me and Gen, he was nineteen and I was only sixteen." Senku knew enough to know the differences, or at least to follow the differences in neurological development, even if he wasn't a neuroscientist specifically.

"I don't mind, for the sake of interest, but I'm not sure what exactly you'd see. I don't think there's anything wrong, at least I can't imagine there would be considering the restorative effects." Unless he was implying something going wrong after that.

"Better to look when there's nothing there than not look if there is. Ounce of prevention and all that."

A one-shoulder shrug, a little helpless. "It's not worth as much without your scans from before, either, but it's something. At the very least, I'm betting you haven't seen your own brain before."

"I, fortunately, haven't hit my head hard enough to get it scanned before." Senku confirmed. "I've had a concussion before...I've had a concussion here, but there were no long term symptoms back then beyond a killer headache until it passed, so they didn't do more than a CT scan."

"... Should probably get that checked, too. Concussions are nasty." He's seen shit, Senku, a friend of his came off the worse in a fight with a pool floor.

"We've got a bit better than a CT by my time, but I unfortunately don't have it with me. Someone told me you can get things from home each platform, so it'll probably have to wait until after that." Alas, the pursuit of science limited by the nature of void travel. "Try to avoid getting hit in the head any further in the meantime."

"Oh, I know." Senku agreed with a nod. "The concussion I sustained here was healed through magic. No lingering effects." He explained. "I was a bit disorented for a day or so afterwards, but after that I was fine.

"In my world I don't have the luxury of imaging anymore." He sighed. "But I've had to tend to a concussion or two. It's what happens when you give idiots a spear."

"Or a hard surface, a big enough stick..." Look. Some people just attract head injuries.

"I'm withholding any thoughts on the 'magic' thing until I know more about it." Which is a position a fellow science nerd can surely understand.

They really did. He knew enough people who got injured over the three years he'd been in the village.

"I can tell you that everyone's magic is completly different, there aren't any standard rules that apply, however if you want to borrow a book I got on a type of deep magic theory, you're welcome to. I enjoyed that one." Senku admitted.

"I have another that's allowing me to learn magic, which is a very rigid, rule-based system tied to mathematics."

"I'd definitely be interested in that, but I'm probably going to binge the psychology books in medical first." Because he's been here for eight hours and y'all? Y'ALL? "So, I'll probably hit you up in a couple weeks, depending on how much else there is to do."

(The answer, he'll shortly discover, is not much.)

"Feel free." Senku chuckled. "I also have science fiction novels and a whole bunch of physics textbooks if that's in your interest."

Senku didn't really consider many of his things not to be some form of communal property, he was open to lending just about anything anyone could want.

"Unfortunately, I think I could do most kinds of physics in my sleep. ... Even putting aside the whole, 'prone to lucid dreams' thing." No point in revisiting the old when there's new knowledge to be found. "I'll keep it in mind, though."

"Me too." Senku chuckled. "But I have to do something with my time, and reading some old favourites is quite the luxury since we don't have books in my world."

"Fair enough. We'll see how bored I am once I get through these." Hopefully by then he'll at least have put together something of a routine to keep from climbing the walls, literally or metaphorically.

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A New Platform [Intro Post April]

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probably winding down here