voidtreckerexpress | A New Platform [Intro Post June]

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A New Platform [Intro Post June]

On the Train

The days following the mission are relatively uneventful as people once more get used to the rhythm of life on the train. "Good morning passengers, it is day sixteen of the month of Fiddlesticks. Points have been updated on the system."

They have indeed and everyone can spend the morning shopping. Those who have been on the train a while 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 they are soon surrounded by the fog that means they are at a platform. It is a cool day, clouds gathering threateningly though it stays dry luckily.

As usual the first to leave the train notice nothing as they walk silently, rucksacks on their backs, towards the barriers. Leviathan, Atsushi Nakajima, Spinel, Peggy Carter, Evie Grimhilde, Cal Kestiss, Gwen Stacey, Renee Corbin, Lan Jingyi, Waver Velvet, Aoko Nakamori, Namine, Jak and Marcus Wright all reach the barriers, show their tickets and disappear through, vanishing into the fog.

But on the platform itself there are many new faces. Wearing hoodies, 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. They are standing, in clothes that are not their own, styles 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 but then the steam begins to fade and they realise they aren’t alone.

The platform is not large and it holds twenty six figures all facing the tracks, all dressed in cargo trousers and hoodies. The air is cool with a slight breeze. Both left and right the tracks disappear into the mist. 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 into the cold step a selection 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 Train

The doors hiss open. Those from the train may encourage those on the platform to board. It’s not like there is 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 not be a good thing. 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. The store rooms have been restocked with plenty more bacon as well as other staples.

Passengers who are not brand new will notice a new carriage. A second gym. This one is outfitted for training with mats, fighting pads, balance beams and even climbing apparatus to help get everyone ready for the missions ahead.

New passengers will find their tickets allow 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 and you will hopefully find a pillow for your bed if it has not been nabbed by a roommate, there are also spare blankets for if it gets cold.

Departure

A second horn sounds to encourage any stragglers and the doors slide shut. Veteran passengers know what will happen next, they may wish to brief their new companions.

The train sets off, the fog obscuring the view 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. The fog from the windows is gone now, replaced with a kaleidoscope of ever changing colours.

Welcome to the Void!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Platform (OTA)

Suddenly: light.

Elena lifts her hand to shield her dark-accustomed eyes and has to bite back her gasp of pain, suddenly remembering her broken wrist and fractured ribs. Vincent Valentine had done a relatively competent job of bandaging up their wounds, but without any Potions or painkillers handy, there was only so much he could do.

She blinks, trying to clear the spots from her vision, and realizes that she isn’t where she thought was. Panic rises. Is Kadaj back? Is this another of his mind games? But…no, she doesn’t know this place. It isn’t anywhere she’s ever been. Why would he make her see a train platform?

The Turk takes a cautious step forward, wincing as the motion sends another stab of pain shooting through her ribs. She’s acutely aware of every cut and bruise Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz had inflicted on her during—how long had it been? Hours? Days?—the torture. She and Tseng…

…Tseng. Where is he? The last she had seen of him, he’d been prone on a cot in a dirty room while Valentine bent over him with a first aid kit. Elena looks around for him, but recognizes none of the faces she sees in the fog. Where is this place? Why is she here?

What is she wearing?

Sleeper 3, Cabin B (closed to Wen Ning)

No one is in the sleeper car when Elena arrives to deposit her stuff, which is probably a good thing. It’s tiny--do they really expect four adults to live here? Long term? Seeing it strengthens Elena’s resolve to take Reno and escape as soon as possible. They need to get back home.

But, for now, she needs a place to sleep.

There are two beds that don’t appear to belong to anyone: one top bunk, and one bottom. With her broken ribs Elena knows that she has no chance of climbing a ladder, so she opts to drop the backpack on the lower bench. After a moment, she begins to undress. She still doesn’t know the full extent of what those three silver haired psychopaths had actually done to her, but she wants to do what she hadn’t had an opportunity to do before and carefully examine her injuries. What she does know is that they really goddamn hurt.

Slowly, painfully, she starts inching her purple hooded sweatshirt off her body centimeter by centimeter until it’s lying in a crumpled ball on the bench seat and she’s biting down on her lip to avoid screaming.

The purple polo shirt is easier, and she makes better time with it. It’s nearly over her head, exposing a tasteful black bra and horrific bruising along her left side, when Wen Ning enters the carriage.

Wild Card!

[ooc: Need Elena for something? Go for it!]

Reno knew what the rumors said about stops but this was his first one and he wasn't sure what to expect exactly. He wouldn't say he wasn't disappointed when it was exactly what the other passengers said it was. Just another train station, as boring as the last, though arranged slightly differently but not enough to matter. He took his time wandering the platform since there wasn't much to see but the new recruits.

But a familiar face in the crowd stopped him short. On instinct his left hand went for the baton tucked at his back, throwing it open as he raced to her side. She looked beat to hell and back again. (Were those injuries strangely familiar? Was this deja vu for some reason?) There was a growl on his face as he looked around, automatically assessing the crowd, looking for danger. A part of him realized he probably wasn't going to find any here but the Turk in him didn't let his guard down.

Oh, and he was pissed. If anyone on this Lifestream forsaken platform had hurt one of his Turks? Oh, they were so fucking dead.

"Elena!" His eyes flicked to her and a hand reached out as he examined her a little more closely. "What the hell? Are you alright? What happened?"

“R-Reno!”

Why is Reno here? He and Rude should be far away, keeping the Jenova specimen out of Kadaj’s hands.

Still, Elena can’t help but feel a rush of relief to see her colleague here, again. “I don’t—where is this? Where’s the President? Have you seen Tseng?” She says all of this very fast, and sways a little bit when the effort makes her lightheaded. Did they give her a concussion too? Fuckers.

“Kadaj happened. And Yazoo, and Loz. What about you? Did you get away from the Crater all right?”

Reno stared at Elena with open surprise at her reply. Damn! She really though this was all from back then? That had been days ago--well, longer now that he had been on the train for a few weeks--and most of that business had been wrapped up. Then it clicked: those injuries really were shockingly familiar because he had seen those exact ones on her before!

Reno replaced the baton where he had gotten it from and straightened out his expression of surprise. He'd heard the stories, he should be better prepared for this already. He wasn't though, why should he be, it hadn't happened to him yet. He made a "tch!" sound between his teeth and looked away for a moment in disgust. This was nuts.

He turned his attention back to Elena to see how bad her injuries were now that he got to see them firsthand without the bandages covering them up. He talked while he prodded carefully. "Rude and I got out just fine." He wouldn't apologize for leaving her and Tseng there, that was just a part of the job. Didn't make him feel any better sometimes when he thought about it though. "The President is safe. Tseng, too. Kadaj and the other Remnants are gone. They were defeated. We got 'em."

And by 'we' he meant Cloud but why bother with the details. He and Rude had mostly taken out Yazoo and Loz anyway. They didn't crawl away too far before fading away like their ring leader.

Reno’s prodding upsets Elena’s broken wrist and she snaps at him: “That fucking hurts! Leave me alone.” She’s a lot less uptight now than she had been when she’d first joined the Turks two years ago, but she still doesn’t often swear around even Reno. But it’s obvious she’s in pain. Her face is pale, sweat beading her forehead. She’s only three or four hours removed from her rescue from Kadaj.

She feels her knees go weak with relief when she learns that everyone is safe. “That’s...that’s good. Wait—how? How did you defeat them? How long was I out? And Tseng...he was in worse shape than me. He helped?” How had all of this happened when she was asleep?

And that doesn’t even answer the most pressing question:

“Where...are we?”

Reno threw up his hands in surprise and defensively kept back while Elena yelled at him. That was definitely broken and needed more than a simple splint, but there wasn't anything he could do about it right this second. He made a small face at her but let it go.

Then she bombarded him with more questions. Fair enough, all of this was rather confusing as it was but combined with her ill-timing it had to be way worse. Reno sighed and scrubbed a hand down his face.

"Eh, well. It's a train station," the senior Turk began slowly, biding his time with the answers. They weren't going to be easy to swallow. Even he was having a hard time with the idea that was floating in his head. "And after that it gets a bit complicated. So, let's just say that everything back home is fine. What we gotta deal with now is this train and how it operates. It's some weird shit, yo."

Well, that sounds ominous. Elena falls silent, holding her broken wrist to her chest to prevent it from any more accidental upsets.

“Weirder than Kadaj and his friends?”

"Err, let's just call it weird on a different lateral level rather than more or less than those guys."

Reno shifted awkwardly from foot to foot and shook his head. When he stopped moving he threw up a hand to swipe at his hair in an old habitual gesture.

"Look, so, the deal with this train is that whoever or whatever runs it is responsible for bringing us here. And where is here? Who the hell knows! This thing travels all over the place and none of it has looked familiar so far," Reno admitted the last bit with an almost growl-like tone. He shook his head again and continued. "Thing is I've only been here for two weeks but some of the others have been with the train for several months. It does this thing where it takes us to other worlds and gives us a mission. I've been on one mission, on a freakin' water world, and there was a whole ordeal to fix the problems there."

Elena just stares at him.

"...but I saw you yesterday," she says eventually, still refusing to totally believe him. Had it been yesterday? Or had it been longer? It's kind of hard to tell when you're being brutally tortured.

"How can you have been here two weeks? And what do you mean, 'other worlds?' This all sounds like bad science fiction."

"That about sums it up," Reno replied sourly. "'Like a bad science fiction' someone had the bad taste to come up with. But it's true."

He took a deep breath and a step back, leaning his weight on his back foot and throwing up his arms to the back of his head. He stared off into the sky as he continued. "When I saw you last, back in Healen, you were already mostly healed up. We'd already beat Kadaj and the others and some time had passed. Geostimga was cured, too, you know, so boss was doing fine."

He looked back down at her, dropped his arms, and shrugged. "I dunno what to tell you. It's just...it's like time doesn't matter, I guess. I can't believe you're from earlier but... I recognize your wounds from back then..."

Edited 2020-06-08 07:55 (UTC)

It isn't often that Reno can stun Elena into silence, but he has. When she finds her voice again, she asks: "Geostigma...cured? How?" For two years, they've watched the President slowly succumb to a disease with a 100% fatality rate. They'd sat with him through crippling, unfathomable pain, changed bandages, hunted down doctors and medicine (and those who wanted to steal the medicine from them), and tried to pretend that it was all just business as usual when it clearly wasn't. And for all that to just be gone?

"Shit, Reno," she swore, then grit her teeth at her own crippling pain.

"So I'm from the past and in the future everything's...okay? Just like that?" It's hard to believe. Especially given the fact that her last memories from before winding up on this platform are of three silvery monsters beating the life out of Tseng until she'd screamed at them, begged them to stop. Then they'd started in on her.

She looks a bit haunted.

"Just...get me onto the train, okay?" She's too injured to recognize the psychic pull towards the locomotive for what it is. She just knows that she'll collapse if she stands here much longer. "Lend me your shoulder. We can talk this through once I'm sitting down."

Reno scooped up Elena's arm and threw it over his shoulder without hesitance. He grabbed her wrist gently in one hand and threw the other arm around her back to help keep her steady. Then he worked on getting them inside the train.

He aimed for a carriage with seating in it and kept pace with whatever speed Elena set for them. He was surprisingly careful and focused while he helped his junior Turk with her injuries. It just went to show that even Reno had a serious side from time to time. And his loyalty to the Turks was one of the few things that brought it out from rare time to time.

Once they were inside Reno helped angle her into a seat.

He stood while he got back on track with the conversation. "It wasn't just 'like that,'" he informed her. "There was a lot of shit that went down between there and the end. We made it back to the President and started on a new plan. You two got out with help from an old operative," he decided to omit the fact that it was Valentine and not, say, someone like Veld or Emma, "and healed up enough to make it back in time for the final bout. Helped the President out at least. Me and Rude fought with the two lackeys while Cloud went after Kadaj. And there was the Summon before that. And... See? There was a lot."

Though he had to admit the part about curing the Geostigma was pretty miraculous. The healing rain had surprised a lot of people, Shinra employees included. An investigation afterward revealed it had been another save from the Lifestream for some reason, a nice gentle version of some sort of healing magic. They could guess where that came from but nobody really ever talked about it. (Too many old memories perhaps.) And just took it at face value that it meant Sephiroth had been defeated again and his influence on the energies of the Lifestream had come to an end. Hopefully for good, but no one wanted to jinx that either.

"Anyway, it happened. Will happen. Whatever. I know it's a lot to take in but I wouldn't lie about something like that." He really wouldn't. There would be no purpose to it and even Reno had lines he didn't like to cross.

He was silent for a moment. And then, "Why don't I just go get a doc to patch you up? Ain't got no materia on me and even if I did we'd still need to take care with the larger wounds anyway. Unless you just want me to patch you up myself."

He could. It just wouldn't be the least painful route. He knew field medic types of care, stuff one would do while on the move and with little to no supplies. Temporary stuff for the most part but he could cobble together some extra bit of techniques from all the times he'd been in the hospital. More or less.

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There is a Cait Sith on board, doubt they are at all the same, though.