voidtreckerexpress | A New Platform [Intro Post October]

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A New Platform [Intro Post October]

On the Train

The train continues its journey

"Good morning Voidtreckers, it is day sixteen of the month of Nebula. Points have been updated on the system."

With points updated, everyone can spend the morning shopping. Most people will be expecting the second announcement that comes a few hours later.

"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 doors open. As usual, those who leave first notice nothing, walking silently, rucksacks on their backs, towards the barriers. Asch, Ayumi Uoshida, Cleopatra Selene, Della Duck, Ghost, Hanuel Min, Jaisyn Solo, Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood, Nie Huaisang, Vermouth; all pass across the platform, not looking back. And then they're gone, disappeared through the barriers and into the fog beyond.

But on the platform itself there are four new faces. Wearing hoodies, three in purple one orange, 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 find themselves on a platform. The platform is relatively small, a brick wall behind them and cracked flagstones on the floor. It is cold, icy cold but the wall at least shelters them a little.

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 on the foggy, freezing platform; then the fog begins to fade and they realise they aren’t alone.

The platform isn't large, but it is enough to hold the four figures scattered around, all facing the tracks, all dressed in cargo trousers and hoodies. Then there is 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 pours a strange assortment of people, over a hundred at least. 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.

Behind them, the doors close, and the train is cloaked in the same fog that hides the world beyond the platform.

The Train

After a short time, perhaps ten minutes or so, the fog clears and 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 yadon tail, as well as all sundries.

For passengers that have bought items, these are also scattered around the luggage carriage in various suitcases and bags.

New passengers will find their ticket allows them into their cabins. In most rooms, the occupied beds are obvious, leaving the spotless, empty spaces for the newcomers. 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 taking advantage of the fresh air, and 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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"Huh? Oh, yeah, it's fine. I have excellent low-light vision."

He blinks his eyes slowly like that says anything about being light sensitive, stepping inside to navigate to a clear portion of the table as if that were permission enough. His ribbons become their own small pile, and he sits, tail sprawling off to the side of the bench.

"What're you working on?" He asks, opening his mending kit to pull out the needles and some of the embroidery thread. There's less obvious differences in the colours in this general lack of light, but he doesn't need much when they're on a relatively limited pallet anyway.

More people have low-light vision than he thought. With how bright everything is, all the lights and sunshine, Thanatos is much more used to that not being the case. Darkness hides things from view.

"I'm working on some Keepsakes and a Chthonic Companion. I've held off making them for too long," Thanatos says as he clears some more room on the table for Jingyi's use. The extra materials are placed on the bench with him. "What are you doing?"

"Haven't heard of Chthonic Companions before." He settled in, letting his handful of ribbons pool on the table's surface while he pulled needle and already strung embroidery thread forward. "What kind of keepsakes?"

The feather pile gives him inspiration, but he's not sure if he has the right idea or if Thanatos has a particularly inspired pillow in mind.

His colour sense at this kind of light isn't great, but it really didn't need to be. The darkest ribbon is tugged free of the pile, and Jingyi searches out its middle, thinking of what he'll try to embroider. Poorly.

"Embroidering ribbons."

Mort squeaks and twitches an ear. He's still not moving a lot, but the little wiggles and twitches are more movement than he had done before. "Little Mort here is my Chthonic Companion. My mother made him for me," Thanatos says, and Mort squeaks yet again. There's nothing to suggest that Thanatos manipulated Mort to cause him to squeak and move. He did it on his own.

Yes, Death Incarnate carries around a plushie mouse with him everywhere.

"Wouldn't embroidering them make the ribbons harder to use?"

He blinks at the source of the squeak, noting the twitch of an ear. He breathes in, scenting for anything actually mouse, but the lack of it confirms: that's really a... he's not sure. Plush, he guesses, because Aquafir dumped that concept on top of his shoulders and ran away with it.

More important, at least to him within a whole cultural context that placed great emphasis on filial piety and the structure of such things, it's a gift from a parent.

"He's cute," Jingyi says after a considered moment, needle and thread still in his hand. Then he shakes himself, sighing out a half-laugh as he continues his careful forming of an animal in the centre of the ribbon.

"You're asking someone who wears an embroidered ribbon around his forehead if ribbons with embroidery are harder to use. I think that counts as asking a biased audience." To him, it was not harder, per say. "The benefit to embroidery, even when you're barely passable at it, is what wards or charms you can embroider into your piece. So sure, maybe it's not going to be entirely as smooth as an untouched ribbon, but I can work a clean charm or a protection charm in, and that's something. Or an energy storing one..."

He considers that, pausing to run a finger over the stitchwork barely present on his ribbon at the moment.

"That could be a good one."

That is the correct answer. Mort is cute!

If the embroidered ribbon was harder to use for someone used to wearing them, then there has to be a reason for it. Which Jingyi then gives him.

"That's similar to what I'm doing with all this. I can't give people boons, but I can put a bit of my power into my Keepsakes." It's not easy for him. It takes time and dedication, and Thanatos has yet to learn if anyone has actually used one of them. Ryo actually has an energy storing one.

"You can do that with thread and your ribbons?"

"Mm, as long as I do it right... it's not like the one I wear, really, that's a different kind of... that's part of me, in a way. 'S why we Lans don't let anyone who isn't in our family or married to us touch them. They're intimate."

Carefully, he continued his fledgling embroidery. Needle in, then turned around for carefully pushing back up through.

"I'm using my spiritual energy the whole time, which is why it works. The script is worked into the stitches, and my energy feeds it, and then it works when it needs to work."

Another stitch, though not aligned to the rest. Jingyi was giving form to the seal-character for this one: silence charm. Tied up by the ribbon, one would be temporarily silenced. He thinks Shen Qingqiu would find that useful.

"How does a bit of your power function, once it's in your keepsakes?"

"That is understandable. Chthonic Companions can only keep their shape with those connected to them. Otherwise they fall apart." If Jingyi were to try to pick up Mort, he would find a bunch of pieces of fabric, thread, and the like in his hands. Although... as Mort begins to change, would that remain? Thanatos needs to figure out what exactly is going on with Mort. It could be important in that matter.

"I can sense it. That bit of power, and I feel when it when the keepsake or companion pulls it from me." That's the best way Thanatos can think to explain it. He senses it, feel it. One sensation that stands out among the many he senses constantly. "I don't think they would work in the hands of someone I didn't give it too."

The last statement makes Jingyi pause, ribbon temporarily forgotten in his equally temporarily still hands.

"That makes sense, it's linked directly to you. So is it part of your intent there, do you know? No one can steal what you didn't intend to be given, so your gifts stop being gifts in the wrong hands." He pauses, then laughs, a low, brief and somewhat surprised sound.

"In a way, isn't that saying you can't cheat death?"

It's funny. It's at least a little funny, okay.

"There's no escaping Death. Even on this train. There are two of us."

That was a joke too, or a poor attempt at one. Thanatos was never very good at those, and he hasn't been in the mood to be humorous. But he tried?

"Although, I didn't necessarily designed them to do that. It just... is." Perhaps his mother had designed Chthonic Companions that way, and in trying to make his own based on that, he unintentionally included that in their design.

Jingyi laughs regardless, because it's literally true, yes, but more darkly: one can't escape through death either. He doesn't mention that, when it was a dark sort of thought, and not one he personally held, but it was still true.

Die, and be resurrected by the train. Perhaps securing a tether ever tighter to your spirit, so the train has more and more of it, one way or another.

"Better be friends with both of you then. That way, at least you're always running into a Death you already know."

A bad joke on his part, too, but neither of them are operating at top humour, it seems. Jingyi hums speculatively over the statement on it being an inherent truth of their creation, and his being.

"Some things are like that, I guess. Working the way they do just because it's the way it works, not because anyone said it should work that way."

Working the way they do just because it's the way it works, not because anyone said it should work that way.

Putting it that way, Thanatos wishes he could the dismiss thought as he did just a moment ago. There are people who could say it worked that way. Mort gives a sour squeak, sensing Thanatos's churning thoughts.

"In my world, the Fates would be who wove things that way." Thanatos wonders if he keeps thinking bitterly about his sisters in hopes of invoking them and proving they still have some connection to him... for whatever good that will do.

"The fates?"

Jingyi looks over from his embroidery, cocking his head to the side.

"Why plural?"

Meanwhile, Thanatos picks up his work again. "There's three of them. They're my older sisters."

And that's why it's harder for him to discount the idea of fate and a reason for things. He's literally related to them even if he doesn't have the best (or any real) relationship with them.

"Huh. Wait, does that make the thing you said about weaving literal? Must suck when they have to remake parts of whatever tapestry they're working on. And how do they feel, huh, if they know their own fates? Or not, I wonder if that'd drive them crazy," as if talking about this case of determinism versus free will has no personal weight, and in a sense, it doesn't. Fate can decree as much as it wants, there can be reason enough, but weavers make mistakes, tapestries are cut, and re-woven portions are inevitable, right?

Fate didn't mean only one path, to his eyes. Perhaps overarching tendencies, but going against fate, against the gods, on some level, that was cultivation.

"They design the tapestry. They don't remake parts." Thanatos doesn't know what Mother Nyx did to change their mind about Zagreus, but he's otherwise never heard of them changing their mind about anything before.

"No one truly understands them. Not even family."

"What, they never get anything wrong? Good for them I guess," he says, sounding a touch dubious, but more of that due to his lack of depth of knowledge on the task of tapestry weaving itself. Let alone it as part of a literal and metaphoric conceptualisation of fate in another world, so different to him as it must be.

"Is your family pretty good about understanding each other aside from understanding them?"

Head lowering again, he picked through another stitch, building out the animal in ribbon with his intent, protect, keep clean.

"No. My family is large. I only see my mother, my twin brother, and my eldest brother." Thanatos doesn't sound too torn up about the fact, however. He knows what some of his siblings are like. Never crossing paths with them seems like a small blessing. He's never met his elder sisters, and considering what he's gone through in his life, they've done him no favors.

"Saying that, however, we still get along better than other gods. We're not at each others' throats."

"..." He blinks, pausing again in his sewing at the comment about not being at each other's throats. "Are the other families of gods often like that?"

Large families aren't surprising, really, but the concept of a family tearing into itself in such a way that another can idly remark on it does come as somewhat surprising. Holding together enough to appear unified to the outside was a matter of course where he was from, but they weren't gods, and whatever gods or buddhas were looked to by the peoples of the realms had different sorts of stories. Perhaps they did. He might simply be lacking context even for his own world.

"The gods currently ruling killed their parents, tore them apart, and scattered them in the depths of Tartarus. They are constantly at opposite ends of mortal wars or bickering about some petty argument."

Thanatos picks up a Night Spindle, turning it in his fingers to see how much remained on this spool. He wouldn't ever think of going against his mother. Not only is it out of loyalty to her, but also because he knows that he couldn't stand against Night herself. He came solely from her, and he wishes there was more he could do to honor her, help her. Although, there are slivers of doubt cutting through that once solid view of his mother: questions about her involvement or lack of it with what happened with Sisyphus.

"..." He shakes his head, returning to his embroidery.

"That's much more than I can wrap my head around. I'm not sure what the different gods in different beliefs are like back home, but ones doing anything like that? I can't see them being tolerated. Not when family is as important to us as it is."

He pauses, needle and thread in hand, and plucks at a length of hair hanging over his shoulder.

"Though petty arguments, that sounds pretty mortal itself. Or mortals acting akin to gods."

A touch of amusement in his voice, because it is a jest, to an extent; even what he knew of gods in pantheons back home indicated that they were are argumentative as anyone else.

It's almost as if Jingyi is trying to suggest that they aren't gods, but if they are not gods, what else could they be? (What else could Thanatos be?) He doesn't comment on the importance of family. Family has become a complicated issue, even more so since Thanatos has spent time on the train.

"A god's arguments have lasting and far-reaching consequences on those uninvolved." Thanatos can't be as lighthearted as Jingyi about this. He often sees the aftermath. Mort gives a sympathetic squeak.

"Spanning centuries, and not just mortal decades." He presumes, at least, though there is no similar impact on his world. "The arguments of those in power are similar wherever you are. It's not as often they have to suffer under the consequences compared to those beneath them, related or not."

In that, at least, he thinks it's similar. Death reigns over those casualties, the horror that is not just war, but injustice, death that could be prevented, callousness and blindness that allowed life to slip so swiftly away.

"As you can see, my family's distance with one another is less of an issue." Thanatos would rather be distant with his other siblings than having to worry they will make more trouble for him.... Eris might have. Timelines are questionable. And the Fates have woven a number of difficulties into his existence. Mostly without issue. Mostly.

Thanatos shuffles for a bit to gather some golden beads to lay out on the table. "Do your ribbons work for anyone besides you?" This might have been answered earlier, but Thanatos is trying to change the topic away from himself and his family.

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A New Platform [Intro Post October]

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